CES 2026: Part Eight (Friday)

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 Friday’s first episode, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, YouTuber and CEO of Clicks Michael Fisher, Cherlynn Low of Engadget, Edward Ongweso of the Tech Bubble Newsletter and Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here to talk about the Clicks Communicator, Amazon’s surveillance tech, the advances in tech in eyeglasses, engadget’s best tech of CES and why we’re worried about the future. 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 Cory Doctorow http://pluralistic.net/ https://www.eff.org/ Michael Fisher - https://www.clicks.tech/ Cherlynn Low - https://www.engadget.com/about/editors/cherlynn-low/ https://bsky.app/profile/cherlynn.bsky.social Garrison Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/bishonentype.bsky.social The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ https://bookmaniac.org/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/#so-many-chips Cyber Fidget: https://youtube.com/shorts/JEEmhcTscP8?si=7_1O-GARnnBeSGuK https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/ https://petewarden.com/2025/11/29/i-know-were-in-an-ai-bubble-because-nobody-wants-me-%f0%9f%98%ad/ --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I'm Bam. Thank you, ma'am. I'm Ed Zitron, and this is Better Offline's coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show 2026.

• 0:56Ed Zitron?

  We are now, as we have been all week, here in the Palazzo Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing you yet another episode covering CES with a crazy assortment of guests from the tech industry. We've got an open bar, we've got tacos, a place to sit down for members of the media and friends, whether they join us on the microphone or not. It's Friday, and we're on the first of our final two episode days. And I mean, that wasn't perfect, but you're just gonna like it. Then an epilogue tomorrow, and good lord, do we have a wonderful show for you all. We're beginning very strong. The first contestants on the Better Offline Challenge are the legendary activist, author, and journalist Cory Doctorow, who's joining me all today. You speak, say hello Cory. Oh, hello. I wasn't sure if I was meant to speak at this point. Hi, Ed. Natural, natural.

• 1:40Ed Zitron?

  And of course, returning champion, listener favorite, Shirlen Loa Vengager.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Listener favorite, that's a strong introduction. I'm not sure I deserve it.

• 1:50Ed Zitron?

  It's completely true. Actually, another listener favorite, Michael Fisher, the YouTuber and CEO of Clicks now.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  CEO.

• 1:56Ed Zitron?

  Not CEO.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Not CEO, co-founder.

• 1:59Ed Zitron?

  Co-founder, my bad, buddy.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  It doesn't matter, titles, we don't do titles.

• 2:02Ed Zitron?

  We don't.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  It's fine, who cares?

• 2:04Ed Zitron?

  Holacracy, like, like. Tony Shadd, Las Vegas favorite. I P brother.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  To be as Admiral.

• 2:11Ed Zitron?

  Admiral of Clicks.

• 2:12Speaker 05

  Rear Admiral?

• 2:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, well, well, well, Vice Admiral these days.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Stern Admiral.

• 2:18Ed Zitron?

  Court martialed by the Clicks. So, all right. I've had a lot of people email in. So just to be clear, Michael's my friend. He's been on the show a lot. Had him on in his capacity as a journalist, still here as well for that. But you are the, you are the co-founder of Clicks and you've got a little device with you.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  I do indeed. I have actually several devices. Oh, it's that thing. I like that thing. Thanks, man. I was so worried because I was like, oh, no, Corey. I'm a Canadian, so Blackberries are in my soul.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Right. This is a physical keyboard for the iPhone and for Android phones, which we debuted here two years ago. I have it on a Motorola Razr now, which is fun.

• 2:50Ed Zitron?

  Flips.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  But the, uh, look.

• 2:52Ed Zitron?

  I love the flip.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  I know. You and I agree on the foldables.

• 2:54Ed Zitron?

  I just want an i, like iMessage on them. I don't care.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  It's coming. It must be coming.

• 2:59Ed Zitron?

  Give me a foldable iPhone.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Everyone's saying the iPhone fold is this year.

• 3:02Ed Zitron?

  I'm a hog. Give me my foldable slog. No, um, so you've got this thing that connects the MagSafe or the what have you, the SIM charger.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  The thing is, we, we made custom molded cases with the keyboard attached for several iPhones, several Android. And everyone was like, this is great, but I don't carry that phone. And we were like, yeah, this is great, but it costs a lot of money to mold a custom case with a keyboard for every phone. So we broke out the keyboard into a little custom puck called Power Keys.

• 3:27Ed Zitron?

  My iPhone?

• 3:27Speaker 04

  And that makes.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. See, everyone's grabbing out their iPhones now. Corey's been removing his phone from the case.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  I'll try it. I'll try it. My iPhone, uh, just slap it right on the back there. And it, it, it bonds via Bluetooth and, uh, gives you that, so yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  I think my, my region is not.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Where's your target zone there?

• 3:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Wait, are you, is this?

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Why are you giving me your phone?

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. You do not have a MagSafe.

• 3:50Ed Zitron?

  Someone hand me a device for this audio podcast. Um, so go ahead. But you also have the Android device. That's where.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  It doesn't work for me.

• 3:59Ed Zitron?

  The actual Clicks device.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  It does work. So, uh, we're just gonna, we're just gonna move on from that.

• 4:05Ed Zitron?

  So, but you've done like a dedicated Android.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 4:08Ed Zitron?

  Thing.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Yes. It's called the Clicks Communicator. It is actually a phone.

• 4:11Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. Look at that.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Yes. It is a four inch screen with a big, full QWERTY keyboard underneath it. People are calling it the new BlackBerry, but that is not, of course.

• 4:19Ed Zitron?

  Almost sent one, one, uh, Jim, Jim, who was the co-

• 4:22Speaker 05

  Jim McSeal.

• 4:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I was just talking to him yesterday.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Yes. Uh, were, were you really?

• 4:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Well, certainly, really?

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. Literally we had a phone call up later this episode.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:31Ed Zitron?

  Alright, so the idea is it's optimized for communication, it's optimized for people who carry two phones already and want one of them to be more focused on communication than content.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  So you've got a nice big screen, just described it for the listeners. Nice big screen, it's decent way, I like you've got this raised bit of the bit at the back, it's quite nice, little stippled backplate.

• 4:48Ed Zitron?

  And I will say.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  It's thick too, which is what we like.

• 4:51Ed Zitron?

  You like it thick, with two Cs, yeah, all three, yeah. I will also say the keyboard feels better than the original clicks. Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Can I try?

• 5:00Speaker 04

  We've increased the key size by thirty percent, if you can believe that. You ready for all this, all the spectrum?

• 5:04Ed Zitron?

  And I will say this, like, I don't use the original clicks because, like, weirdly, like, the case didn't feel right. It's just a personal thing and I have, like, weird little thumbs, like, they're not long enough for most gloves, because I'm a monster.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  I understand.

• 5:16Ed Zitron?

  But this thing, I like this thing. Caleb from Kill the Computer, who was specifically asked about this, I like it, I think it's cool. So who's aimed that, though?

• 5:24Speaker 04

  People who carry two phones. So you ever see people walking around, like, me, Captain Two phones, right? But you see people walking around with a Pixel and iPhone or two iPhones, and neither one is optimized for the actual task that it's trying to do. So we're not trying to compete with a phone with a great camera and a big old display, we're trying to make a communications tool. So what I like about this, though, is it runs Android, but we've, you know, added a custom launcher on top with the folks at Niagara, you ever use that one?

• 5:46Ed Zitron?

  Can you send it on? I want to play around with it.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  I cannot, that's a touch and feel sample, that's how early this thing is, so we don't launch it until later in the year.

• 5:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  But Niagara has this beautiful aesthetic list, and it's not an icon-based OS, it is a distraction-free OS.

• 5:59Ed Zitron?

  That's a nice little scroller, too.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Isn't it?

• 6:01Ed Zitron?

  I like that. Because that's the thing, I'm a little hog with my devices, I love my keyboards and my doodads and the like.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:07Ed Zitron?

  And also, there are times when I will use, like, I have, like, old laptops that I'll use if I just want to focus on writing, or if I, and I would love something that was just for, like, my iPad has, like, very stripped-down notifications sometimes, so I can just focus on sitting on the couch from playing, like, Ball X Pit or Dead Zone Rogue, my two favorite games of last year, and I just want to chat shit with a friend.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:31Ed Zitron?

  Or, like, just send a silly name to Caleb.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  You want a single-purpose device. You want a purpose.

• 6:34Ed Zitron?

  And it's kind of a luxury thing, though, it's not for everyone.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  No, absolutely not, and neither was the first clicks, like, that's the thing, we've always made products for a small segment of the market, but as long as one in one thousand such users.

• 6:44Ed Zitron?

  Small batch hardware.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. But I'm pretty excited for Communicator, because I was terrified of it, you know, you work on something for so long and you're not sure if it's good anymore.

• 6:51Ed Zitron?

  When's it out?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  It is out later in the year, it's gonna be second half, but late second half.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  My wife gave me an Olivetti Valentino.

• 6:58Ed Zitron?

  What is that?

• 6:59Speaker 05

  Manual typewriter. Oh. Classic 1967 in MoMA. Bright cherry red, has an integrated case that it slides out of. There's, you know, photos of like Twiggy carrying it through the Pan Am.

• 7:11Ed Zitron?

  Twiggy.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  Terminal and at JFK and Idlewild. Beautiful machine and I've been rehearsing my manual typewriter.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Performance.

• 7:24Ed Zitron?

  Can I ask you a really stupid question?

• 7:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:26Ed Zitron?

  What happens if you typo on a typewriter?

• 7:28Speaker 05

  You can go backspace. You go backspace, you type an X. But over the typo character. I had the typewriters where they sort of eraser.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  So you just have like an X at random?

• 7:36Speaker 05

  That's right. Word processor. In the type and it has the most beautiful ding when you reach the end of the line. Oh, I never had the ding ones. It's got a red ribbon and a black ribbon. So it's got like a two side ribbon and you go up and down for it. And then you have to, you have to get the key with a snap. It's not how hard you hit it, it's how crisply. Comes back up. You hit it and then, then you get a nice clean impression with the, with the key stroke. So that is a genuinely single purpose device.

• 8:04Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  I'm really enjoying that and it's, and it's meant to be a luggable. You can just slap it around and.

• 8:09Ed Zitron?

  Michael, I need to ask though, doesn't, wasn't there a device called the Peak once?

• 8:13Speaker 04

  The, yes, the Peak, right? It was an email only, like BlackBerry-esque device.

• 8:17Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  You could also use it for Twitter. No, no, no, no, I actually have one, Avi Green, but Green Guard, let me borrow his. I have to cover it on Mr. Mobile and my windphones were fun.

• 8:24Ed Zitron?

  And here it is, it's, it.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:26Ed Zitron?

  No, it's like a little, little screen on it. I like this, I like this because like, look, you're not trying to pretend this is for everyone. You're not trying.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Not at all. And yeah, no, you're not going to replace your Pixel or iPhone with it. You're going to carry it alongside it or you're going to carry it instead of it on the weekends or the weekdays as the case may be.

• 8:40Ed Zitron?

  Could someone use it as their daily driver or is it kind of limited?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  No, it absolutely, it runs Android 16, it's 5G. It has, it even has micro SD and a headphone jack for all the people in my comments who are always like, who are going to bring back those old features? So yes, you could use it as your main and we've heard from people who are like, what if I wanted to have my primary phones? Like you can.

• 8:56Ed Zitron?

  I think it's lovely. I think it's lovely that, no, because you've, you are, you and I have had some of the deepest, like, I love the technology stuff. It's cool. I love the phone. Oh, I love tablets and all this shit. And you actually made something that you. Wanted to use.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  Well, and it's actually got, it's got two cameras. So you can scan a QR code.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely. That's the thing.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  You can take a picture and say this is how this is broken.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:17Speaker 05

  Am I allowed to throw this away? Are these leftovers good?

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Is this the final, final weight of it? Uh, it's close to final, probably within about 10 grams. Only criticism I have is what about the, the battery? What happens? Like what, what kind of warranty? What kind of battery stuff? The battery is 4,000 milliamp hours. I did push for silicon carbon. This is the last time I'll get super nerdy about this because I wanted more capacity.

• 9:36Ed Zitron?

  This is my show.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Uh, and I was like, no way we can get it, but it turns out we could afford it. It was great. Uh, the, in terms of the support, I mean, it's not, it's the only thing we couldn't do is a removable battery because it requires.

• 9:46Ed Zitron?

  That was kind of what I was getting at.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  What does it look like for a service depot to swap it?

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really good question.

• 9:52Speaker 05

  Can I take it to my guy on the corner?

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Probably not. I mean, I'm sure that the, well, actually, you know what? Just because of what I just said, that's probably not the case because silicon carbon is rare these days. Like I said, it's so new. So I don't actually know. That's one of the 50 million questions I should have been prepared for.

• 10:07Ed Zitron?

  What does this clicks button do?

• 10:08Speaker 04

  So that's a shortcut key. So on all of our products, you hit the clicks button and you hit a letter and you can do, you can call a friend, you can.

• 10:15Ed Zitron?

  I'm serious. Like this has so much more. I'm not just saying this because you might make, because you know me well enough that I'd be like, I don't like it.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  I do.

• 10:21Ed Zitron?

  It's got the weight you've given it actually gives the buttons the heft that the clicks case doesn't have.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  I think you mean gravitas.

• 10:27Ed Zitron?

  No, not the gravitas. I mean, like the physical, because the other one, I'd feel it bend back with my tiny little.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 10:33Ed Zitron?

  Nob end goblin fingers.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Well, when you design the whole entire thing yourself and you don't have to accommodate for a phone in a case you're building for another product, you can kind of control that fun. Also you'll, you'll like this. I think, uh, the keyboard is capacitive. So when you swipe your thumb over it, you can scroll through lists.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Like some of your cases, right?

• 10:49Ed Zitron?

  So you can do the swipe stuff over the physical keys?

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Fuck me. That's.

• 10:53Ed Zitron?

  That's actually very cool.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  The BlackBerry key one had that feature.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Is that right?

• 10:58Ed Zitron?

  I'm actually gonna send this to Jim right now.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  I believe, I, I believe we've talked to him about it because a lot of our alumni, a lot of our employees are, um, uh, BlackBerry alumni.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Are they Canadians though?

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yes. Don't trust Canadians.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  Speaking as a Canadian, don't trust Canadians.

• 11:12Ed Zitron?

  Wait, but you, y'all are so nice.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  No, it's just an act.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  It's like the South here.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  I have a question as a, as a longtime friend of Michael Fisher as well. So how rich are you now?

• 11:26Speaker 04

  Well, I stayed at Planet Hollywood, if that tells you.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Oh, that does tell me a lot. I stayed at the residence.

• 11:32Ed Zitron?

  Michael, professional question, are you here in capacity as the Clicks co-founder or are you covering for Mr. Marbot?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, is the answer to that.

• 11:41Ed Zitron?

  So both.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  So yeah, I have to split the time evenly.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  That's what the quiff is for. It's for a second hat.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  One here, one here.

• 11:48Ed Zitron?

  For being beautiful.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  You have to apply so much hairspray because you're gonna put, actually that's true. I was doing a John Deere spot because they're my sponsor on this one and I had to put on a John Deere hat.

• 11:57Ed Zitron?

  You gotta be on the big tractor.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  And I was, in fact, I went to visit the combine. Yes.

• 12:02Ed Zitron?

  Drive it away.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  But it's good. It satisfies my need for novelty. I think you can relate to this.

• 12:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you got some stuff.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  I've been doing one thing for 10 minutes. It's too long. I gotta go. Gotta go do something else.

• 12:11Ed Zitron?

  No, the only thing I can do consistently is podcast for two hours. That's the only thing. Anything else that I'm just like lost.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  You just, just give them throat, like you're a man who turns throat lozenges into podcasts.

• 12:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. What the, the skeleton meme. Yeah, the skeleton squat meme. But how have you felt about the show, Michael? What have you, you seen anything else other than your own thing that you like?

• 12:31Speaker 04

  I have to tell you, I, so I cannot stand everything about the Las Vegas Strip and CES is a very draining show, as we all know. However, this particular one was so worth coming to based on the, the stuff that was shown for me. I got a new foldable phone out of Motorola that was incredible. You know, I'm.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  When you say you got, you mean?

• 12:51Speaker 04

  No, they made it specifically for me.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Oh, I see. Mr. Fisher edition.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Um, we, like, there was a, the, the new Pebble or the, you know, the new old Pebble.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  See, that's what I was gonna talk about after this.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Oh my God, yes. And then as I was wandering between those two things, I found, you know, there's something called a fidget gadget. Have you all seen this? It's a little metal cube with like six buttons on it and like a Casio smartwatch or a Casio watch display.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  It's a, and it's a little fidget toy and you can run, you know, it's like Arkanoid is like little developer tools. It's open source. You can.

• 13:25Speaker 05

  Oh, no way.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  An open source fidget thing.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Fidget cubes, but all mechanical. So this is.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  This is new. This is by one guy making them in his garage in Ypsilanti. It's like exactly why I used to love coming to CES. You know, it's this little stuff. I know that. I hear that. I'm like, I wish I'd have seen that because that would have made my day.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Yes. So it's just for dicking around with.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  You know what? Toys are great. If it's a toy, it's a toy.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  And that's it, right? The guy's not saying it's like, well, this is gonna be, I hope to usher in a new era for, you know, intentional. It's like, no, I made a toy. It feels good. It's fun to click and I don't know what you can do with it, but find out.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, you could do all sorts of stuff. That's fun.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  It's awesome.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  Is it? So you have a good, and Shalyn as well, you have a good history with CES as well. Like you've been here a lot.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  This, this one feels weird to me. It's felt like a very peculiar show to me. Like it feels like it's missing something.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  What do you think is missing?

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't know. That's why I'm asking. Like, it's like, it feels like, like bits have been hollowed out.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  I think there's a reason for that. I feel like if people were planning for their CES in the first half of the year, they were probably gonna lean on AI all over again. And I feel like there's been a very visible retraction from that, especially in the show branding.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Other than the people who are here.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Well, no, I know, but even the show, like the CES branding, yeah, it's not themed.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  So your thesis is that there would have been twice as much dumb AI shit if it wasn't for the backlash. That it's just the people who are just so like balls out, clanker, slopper.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  I have a different theory as to why something feels missing. I mean, I think there's a lot missing. I think one thing that's really missing is the car side of things. We had the Fila, but then the, the, you know, the expiry or the doing away with the federal tax credit really dampened a lot of the mood around EVs this past year, so 2025. And so Honda was like, we're not coming to CES this year. And I think that's kind of set the tone leading into CES this year as well. I mean, like, there's a lot of things, not just cars. But that's probably like our transport sort of area. We were like assigning people to kind of pay attention to on our team. They were just like, there was nothing.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  That's so strange.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  It is.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  Do we think that there's exhibitors who are like, I don't want to get kidnapped by ICE?

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have to wonder if they're a tariff related. Well, tariff related is kind of a cop up, but like immigration.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  Lots of events that I'm involved with are saying our numbers are way down. And that's attendee numbers.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  Right? And they're just people don't want to come anymore. Events are now saying like, you know, a lot of New York City events are like, should we move to Toronto? Uh, New Yorkers won't find it that hard to get there and then blah, blah, blah. What's a Toronto? It's lovely. I quite like. As, as, as a Torontonian, New York run by the Swiss.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  It's also, it's also doesn't help that there's like a lot going on outside of CES.

• 16:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  At the same time. So like, anyone who had those fears were not wrong to be a little bit concerned. And as someone who's like herself an immigrant, like with very good legal visa status.

• 16:16Ed Zitron?

  Right there with you.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Um, I, I was so afraid to travel even domestically for a while there. Now it's like, I've, I've done a few international trips. I'm not as concerned.

• 16:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I went through, I had to go to Toronto last year and I was like straight up the whole.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Scared, right?

• 16:31Ed Zitron?

  No, every moment in the airport. And then I remembered you cleared immigration in Toronto, which is.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Right. Yes, exactly. I flew through Dublin. It's like, yeah.

• 16:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, it's grim and it's also like that, the stuff that has made it, it feels, and I say this as a CES veteran. And someone's going to say the stolen ballot, but uh,

• 16:50Ed Zitron?

  even by CES standards, this feels like a bullshit year. It feels like worse than the 2014, 2015 Indiegogo Kickstarter boom where it was like, it's a 3D printed kitchen. You just click the button and a burger come out. Those ones I almost found folksy because they were like, like a straight up snake oil salesman, just like, ah, come here, check my food. Now it's just like 97 different GPT rappers and it's sad. I want my doodads. I want my gizmos.

• 17:17Speaker 05

  It's funny because I've, I've seen more gizmos and doodads here this year than I have.

• 17:21Ed Zitron?

  Seriously.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Besides Fidget Gadget and, and Pebble, which I surely know.

• 17:24Ed Zitron?

  Oh, we've talked about Pebble.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Let's talk more. Oh, okay.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Besides those, we have this sort of evolved version of Fidget Gadget, which I checked out on a whim. Someone said to me, while I was demoing clicks to them, he's like, have you seen, have you seen Lego? Have you seen Smart?

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Oh, right, right. So it's Lego.

• 17:39Ed Zitron?

  I just, I, I feel.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  I think like, that's just going to be mountains of E waste. And also, isn't the whole point in Lego, it's the last toy.

• 17:47Ed Zitron?

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  That is a toy that you just.

• 17:48Ed Zitron?

  Oh, wow. A way to make, you need a Lego place.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  I'm going vroom, vroom. I have a machine that does the vrooming for me. Yes.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Okay. And but if I had not sat through the entire hour long demo, I would have felt exactly the. Same way. I went in, I'm like, listen, this will be filler for my video. I'll, I'll, I'll just get some footage. It'll be fun. It'll be a break between phones. It'll be great. And then they demonstrated literally every use case I've ever seen a, a person think about would, when in terms of like, how did, how do children play?

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  How did I used to play?

• 18:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  I used to remove the machines like this and then, then it reacts. And then you, you touch the bricks to the other thing and it knows what the color is. And it's like, it's, it's not only smart, but it's like smart in a way that a kid will instantly understand and instantly appreciate. The E waste thing is the only thing that I was like, ah, man, that's going to be annoying. But it, but in terms of, um, evolving the, the, the play experience.

• 18:37Ed Zitron?

  I actually got to push back.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Please.

• 18:38Ed Zitron?

  I don't think Lego needs to evolve the play experience. I think the whole point of Lego. Is imagination.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 18:44Ed Zitron?

  And I think playing with it and going now from from and building deranged things and having things in your head. I, but I under, to be clear, I understand what they're doing. I'm surprised they haven't done it quicker. I'm, I'm sure they haven't.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. I asked, I was like, guys, how long have you been evolving?

• 18:58Speaker 05

  It's like eight years.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Like from, from start to finish.

• 19:01Ed Zitron?

  Then I am.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  But it shows, it shows in the product. I'm telling you.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  And technologically, I think it is very interesting to have location aware blocks.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  I, so Bruce Sterling wrote an incredible novel called Distraction that everyone should read because it's about fucked up, um, uh, computer mediated elections.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  And it is one of the most prescient books you will read. And in it, there are these avant garde architects who, um, put a slap bracelet around a brick and it starts saying, uh, I am a cornerstone. Take me one step to the left. Put me down. I'm one degree off level. I am now level. Please add mortar. And a bunch of unskilled people can put up a building in a day. I, I ripped this off from my novel, Walk Away. And that kind of location awareness, super interesting and cool. And there are lots of times in my life where I would have loved to have had this. If, if you told me that IKEA has figured out a way to use low cost electronics to tell you when you've got the right two pieces. Right. How to build the furniture. Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Oh, you are describing a world I want to inhabit.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  But like as a, as a. Child playing imaginatively with construction toys. I I don't think my play experience would have been enhanced by having some of the things that happen in my imagination happen with electronics.

• 20:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I will.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  I'd rather get that person an Arduino.

• 20:12Ed Zitron?

  So the e-waste.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Fair enough. Yeah, I think it's a good idea.

• 20:15Ed Zitron?

  There is actually a solution, which is the good news is that the chip fits inside a regular like it is still a regular Lego brick. So you're still able to use it like a Lego brick.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  But is it but is the like, so when you throw this away, is it going to be a mortal e-waste or just a mortal plastic waste?

• 20:32Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing. I actually truly don't know.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  Is it going to be leaching, you know, heavy metals into the water table or just turning into microplastics?

• 20:39Speaker 04

  But I mean, do people throw away Legos? You know, I feel like Legos get passed down.

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Throw away broken robotic Lego.

• 20:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  But the thing is, but even then, yeah.

• 20:46Ed Zitron?

  But it's still a brick, right?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  You're right, though. I don't know.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  My take on the Lego thing is I used to be on the Ed side of it and I then read a lot of our coverage and was like, oh, OK, that's makes way more sense. So I came closer to the Fisher side of it. And I'm just like, look, if you don't like it, you you can still not buy it.

• 21:03Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  And you can still have the same Lego experience you were having before.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Sure, sure.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  So this is for the people who want it.

• 21:09Ed Zitron?

  I will also give Lego some real credit in that despite the fact that the entire Lego economy has been inflated by adult babies who buy children's toys. I'm not talking about, by the way, like the Taj Mahal. Those are obviously for adults. I'm talking about like, I don't know, as a father, the Spider-Man sets that are now inflated by 30% because you fucking losers can't leave them alone for actual fucking children. Jesus Christ. I will say Lego's app stuff is really good. You can just type in the Lego thing and you can sit there and kind of.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Their smartphone app, you're saying?

• 21:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you can type in the number of the set and you can rotate around it. And it's useful, though they still do this insane thing where they don't be able, they make it really difficult to tell between like black, dark gray and gray. Nevertheless, I give them real credit because it's like it's an app, but it's not an app for like selling me more Lego. It's, hey, the instructions are limited because they're paper. We found a way to get beyond that. So I'm I'm willing to give them a bit of the benefit of the doubt on this. One.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  What I will say is you just use it.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  You don't need an app for that. Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, buy, buy a set of them, use them and then judge them because that is.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  The smart.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  I was in the, again, I was in the exact same boat as you guys. And then, then I saw the demo and I was like, God, this, every part of this as well.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  I, I want to pop the stack one layer up because it occurs to me. I, there was a thing I wanted to say about the fidget toys.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  So, um, the fidget toy sounds amazing. If that is your thing, if, if you're excited by this, there's a sculptor called Chris Bathgate, who's a machinist, who makes beautiful kinetic fidget toys that fit in your pocket.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Really?

• 22:40Speaker 05

  Uh, and they are, um, they, they come in runs of like a hundred to 200. He hand machines each one of them. His sculptures are gorgeous, his static sculptures are amazing, but his kinetic sculptures, uh, the pocket sized ones are insanely good. So Chris Bathgate.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  That's, I'm gonna.

• 22:57Speaker 05

  And he's written.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  If only you had an AI ring to take a note with.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, if only I could press a button.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  So I. Published a book about them.

• 23:04Ed Zitron?

  I just sent a message to Corey to make sure that's in the episode notes.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 23:07Ed Zitron?

  And I'm about to send a text to Michael right now.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Sounds good.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  While you're doing that, I'm going to fidget with my.

• 23:12Ed Zitron?

  Send me the fidget.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  I love.

• 23:14Ed Zitron?

  No, I already typed it saying he's a wonderful broadcaster and I hope to have him on again, as well as sending me the link to that. This is, this is emotionally on this show, but you see anything, do you see anything else fun? Because I'm genuinely like, I wanted, uh, everyone's like, Ed, it's not, actually no one's being like, everyone's like, yeah, fuck CES. Okay, well.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Right, settle down.

• 23:32Ed Zitron?

  Settle down, everyone. That's my job. I'm the one who gets too angry.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  I don't like doing this because it is, I don't like to cross the streams between sponsored content and not, but I will say that something was genuinely cool that is like. Uh, it, in a, in a sea of, of technology that is conceptual or maybe never come to market or has no value, one of the John Deere things I was paid to promote was a, an automated road paver. I was like, I learned about paving for like, for like a half hour.

• 24:01Ed Zitron?

  And I will also say.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  This makes it possible for people to, for fewer people to do this job and for fewer skilled people to be required to do this job.

• 24:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but that's also less labor.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Oh, it's so scary though. I'm, look, here's the thing, the, um, the fact that the, that this solves a problem is my least favorite part of it. And the problem is no construction workers can find enough labor.

• 24:22Ed Zitron?

  I mean, you could also hire more people.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Well, no, I know this is what I was saying, but apparently that's, that like, that was the starting point. So I'm watching this robot thing do it, thinking like, you know, hot asphalt and pouring stuff. I'm like, yeah, this is what I want. I want to be, uh, dirty jobs. This is why I got into it.

• 24:36Ed Zitron?

  I honest.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Stuff. Go ahead.

• 24:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I mean, I talk to a microphone. So I see a job like that. I'm like, never take that job from those people.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Well, I agree, but I mean, that's the thing. There's not enough of those people. That's the, that's the, the thing.

• 24:46Ed Zitron?

  Train them. But no, I get your point. And I'll also be clear. Michael Fisher is one of the, uh, one of the fewer people who's more anxious than I am about any kind of thing like this. So Michael is like squirming here when it comes to like mentioning a sponsor. Do not think that he's doing this with joy. He had.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  Didn't even notice that. Yeah, you're right.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, my, my concern with John Deere, and I, I, I don't want to blow up your.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  No, I.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  My concern with John Deere is they're, uh, yeah, they're, they're a rapacious monopolist, uh, and they have led the war against repair. And they, they use the fact that it's illegal to bypass an access control. This is this law, section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and $500,000 fine for tampering with an access control to make it illegal for farmers to fix their tractors. And Ed, you know, you're, you're a, a Briton. Did you ever go to Beamish outside of, uh, uh, Norfolk, uh, outside of, uh, uh, Newcastle, rather? It's the largest, it's the largest open air museum in Europe. It's, we would call it Pioneer Village here, except it's not pioneers.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  It's oldie timey English people and they have transported, uh, Georgian, Coal Town with a colliery, uh, Victorian High Street. All kinds of weird old vehicles and there's a farmhouse on a Roman foundation. And, uh, on the Roman foundation, there is a forge because farmers have fixed their own. Farming implements since fucking Roman times.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  Enter John Deere saying, no, no, we have declared the end of history. Farmers no longer fix their farm implements.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  So sorry, Michael.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  That's our job.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  No, it's my fault. And you know, here's the thing, this, this entire debate played out in my comments. Every single time I covered John Deere organically and I got so fucking tired of it that I was like, I will never cover this brand again because I'm tired of getting in the middle of it. I'm tired of having this conversation and like go being the mediator between them and the things. You don't have to be the mediator. Now, and I don't cover them organically and now they, now they're my sponsor.

• 26:39Ed Zitron?

  I am gonna, I'm gonna aggressively segue away from this because I don't want.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  That's a good idea.

• 26:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but I want to get to the final thing, which is.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Can I make?

• 26:46Ed Zitron?

  No, please.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Can I, I, cause I want to build on one thing you said that I find fascinating. The, the, the, the Roman foundation, that, that's like the thing that's been unchanged forever. As we talk about yet another show where people are like, what's the next smartphone? What's the replacement for the smartphone? All this stuff. I had a wonderful moment at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Have you been here?

• 27:04Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  It has a lovely, you know, maritime history museum and you can wander and you can see all kinds of things in it. And there's a pocket watch case because of course there is.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  And I saw one that was really beautiful and I asked the curator, I'm like, how, what is this from? Perhaps 19, 1905? And he's like, 1789.

• 27:23Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  And I said, wait, what? And then I kind of looked at the history and like, this form factor did not change meaningfully for 200 years.

• 27:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  We figured something out. It was great. And then we kept it around until somebody figured out how to strap it onto a wrist.

• 27:34Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  That is how I feel about the smartphone these days. I'm like, look, there will be augmented things in the personal area network. There will be more accessories for them, but we are still going to carry these boxes in our pocket.

• 27:44Ed Zitron?

  This is the principal struggle of CES right now, though. It's all people trying to be like, what if you had a smart glasses and it could do this? And then you're like, well, as a human being, this is not how I experience life. And they're like, shit. You're right. Nobody actually uses, but what if you changed your entire existence? So you had a weird grainy green thing that could sometimes be correct, which requires an internet connection. And the smart glasses stuff is really the auto translation or

• 28:15Ed Zitron?

  write down what you're saying, translate your business trip and you just slot me as stick me gun to my head. But it's just, I'm almost really happy to hear about, oh, I got thinner and lighter laptops with longer batteries. Brilliant, brilliant. But it almost feels like we're reaching a point where everyone's just saying, fuck, we're out of interfaces. We don't have a new one to your point about that, what that pocket watch case.

• 28:38Speaker 05

  Right. Do you know what I would love would be this huge design trend? From now on, we're putting black text on white backgrounds or sometimes white text on black backgrounds. And we fired all the 22 year old designers who put 10% gray on white backgrounds. And, and we have, we've sent them north for re-education where they are forced to, uh, to endure, uh, you know, uh, long struggle sessions about the things they've done to people with poor low contrast vision.

• 29:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I just think liquid glass is one of the liquid glass, liquid ass is truly, and I am like an Apple pay pig at this point. I have tolerated many an insult from this company, including the Vision Pro. And I gotta be honest, there is one thing that bothers me the most about this, and it's for some reason on one of the windows, there's just like a blob in like one of the, there's just like a weird reflective thing that looks like, it's hard to see, but it looks like an error in the LED panel in my phone because of how You're talking about the app icon having that sort of reflective animation.

• 29:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's got this weird reflective thing in the If you worked on liquid glass, were you forced to? Were you forced to do this?

• 29:49Speaker 03

  They do talk about it as part of the UI. That's sort of the way you move your phone and then how it reflects light. It's supposed to be that way.

• 29:56Ed Zitron?

  Don't want that. Well, my phone will work. I liquid glass?

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Not all.

• 30:01Ed Zitron?

  I would love to. I would love to go back to iOS eight or something. Like, just give me the phone normal.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  I want the, I want the phone UI that actually like puts fake scratches on your screen. You're like, oh shit. Or like fake.

• 30:15Ed Zitron?

  No, I will say, and we can wrap this in a bow. It's why I kind of like the clicks communicator, because it's just a finger.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Nice callback.

• 30:22Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Flawless. No, and I say this as someone who like, if you don't like it, I don't give a shit if you buy it or not. Sorry, this is just, that's, that's not my job. But I like it because it's like, what do I want from a device that takes people thingy to, to, to use message app to place and look at website thingy? Like you do the thing on it.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  A handful of very important features, but just a handful of them. I didn't think that I'd ever got on board the, and this is not about.

• 30:46Ed Zitron?

  Is there a web browser on it?

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. I mean, it's Android 16. You can run whatever you want on it, but it's, it's a matter of intention.

• 30:52Ed Zitron?

  Oh, sorry.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  But I, I never thought I'd get on board the, the digital detox train or anything like that. And that's not what communicator is for, to be clear, but just personally, until I used the light phone for, for two weeks this past summer.

• 31:02Ed Zitron?

  And you are a real one, because when you did the light phone thing, you actually fucking did it. You turned off everything.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 31:09Ed Zitron?

  Amazing.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  And I, I wish I could have survived in that world because it turned out in order to live that way, to doing what we, what a lot of us do. I had to carry an iPad for the sessions that invariably required me to be online for a second or a laptop. And then I was like, damn it, I can't live this life. But what stuck with me were two or three lessons that lived past July. And I was like, every time I pull out my phone now, I'm like, am I doing this for a purpose? Or am I doing this because I'm bored?

• 31:37Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Every time I pull out my phone to check a notification, I'm able to better resist the, the like bypass of like the DoorDash. Like, isn't it time to order a pizza? It's 3pm. All the shitty notifications that you get all the time.

• 31:48Ed Zitron?

  You leave notifications on?

• 31:50Speaker 04

  No, I turn them off and then I miss my DoorDash deliveries.

• 31:53Ed Zitron?

  I agree.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  No, I aggressively.

• 31:54Ed Zitron?

  Horrible seesaw back and forth.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  I aggressively please those.

• 31:57Ed Zitron?

  But Michael. It's so good having you as we wrap up this half an hour. Thanks. I just want to say the listeners want you back and I will have you back. But also you have made me look at phones differently. And I put aside the clicks communicator. I think you have the right way of looking at it where it's like, why am I using this device? Thank you. And why am I doing this? What is this for? Now, I am built different in the sense that I am really like, I was mentioning yesterday, like the infinite feeds don't work on me. They give me anxiety. Like I get to the, I'm like, where's the end? Where's the end? I want to finish reading this. Oh, I can't finish this. No, but it's the opposite. Most people are like, oh, I'll keep looking. I'm like, no.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  You want to be done.

• 32:32Ed Zitron?

  And I'm just like, fine. You want to do, and the moment I feel anything being done to me. Uh huh. I like reject it angrily. Sure. I just watched this happen on the train. Trarian impulse, though. No, no, it's no, it's pure autism. It's just like, my brain just like, doesn't want to do anything other than what it insists on doing, which is Wikipedia. Or like a very long conversation about one specific thing, which is why we are here on Bear Offline. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. We will bring you back sooner than this. I would love that. And I'm looking forward to the clicks. I might actually pick one up, put a link to stuff that you can have a look at it. Judge your own judgment. That's not a phrase. We now move to an ad break for something that I either say you should buy or listen to.

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  Um, yeah, and iHeartRadio said, no, actually I can't say that. So we're just going to pretend I never said that.

• 33:29Speaker 06

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• 34:00Ed 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.

• 34:43Ed 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.

• 34:59Speaker 07

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• 35:31Speaker 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.

• 35:46Speaker 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.

• 35:57Speaker 08

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

• 36:02Speaker 10

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

• 36:08Speaker 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.

• 36:31Ed Zitron?

  And we're back in the room. We've got Shirlin Lowe from Engadget.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Yes, hi.

• 36:35Ed Zitron?

  And we've got Edongue So Junior of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello, hello. We've got author, activist and journalist, Cory Doctorow.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  This time I know I'm supposed to reply. Hello.

• 36:44Ed Zitron?

  Nailed it. Flaws. No, I'm, and I have had a few people say like email me like, why do you do this? I'm like, because I get to hang out with my friends and do cool shit for like an entire week. Why are we alive? But we're here at CES and I mean, there's also the question of why are we at CES? That is a reasonable one because it's a peculiar show. Cory, we had the best time at Amazon though. We need to talk about this Amazon experience because to be clear, we're walking into the show floor for the first time. Actually, CES customer service got his badge immediately. And then we walk in, I'm like, oh, there's Amazon. Why not? And last year, by the way, Amazon, I had the picture of the smiling man on my badge. And the, the woman outside grabbed it and went, wow. Which is, I don't think it was a good one. But anyway, walk in there with Cory.

• 37:26Ed Zitron?

  We immediately walk up to this $5,000 like truck pulled surveillance.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  Tower.

• 37:33Ed Zitron?

  Pole thing with like, it's like a big, big thingy with like a pole and like just a ring of cameras. And Cory just walks over and starts asking questions.

• 37:42Speaker 05

  Well, no, I mean, I didn't even ask any questions. The guy walked up and said, hi, I'm the product manager for this. Do you have any questions? I wasn't gonna, you know, bollock him out of the blue. I, I didn't go in there looking for, you know, a victim.

• 37:54Ed Zitron?

  And you were not that type.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  But I was like, since you ask, and I was like, well, so I know that there was, um, that the original ring camera, the doorbell camera, uh, you guys took the posture that, um, that footage was only available to the police in the event that the owner authorized the transfer to the police. And, but there had been this persistent rumor that there was warrantless access to this footage, even against the wishes of the, of the ring owner, uh, which you initially denied and later had to walk back. I know this because I got into a big fight with Amazon PR when I published the story. And then they said, it's not true. And then later on, it was proved to be true. What's the deal with this? Can the police access it?

• 38:37Speaker 05

  Because this is a thing that's been to go into like a parking lot at a job site or whatever. And it had some, as you pointed out, some racial overtones.

• 38:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the video behind it was, of course, two guys breaking in and would you be surprised to hear they were Hispanic?

• 38:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:50Ed Zitron?

  Just fucking put white guys in there. Fuck you.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  And the AI caption was like, two men removing things from trunk of red car. So, um, so I said, you know, so can the cops access this footage? Uh, you know, without the owner. And he was like, well, I'm not sure. And I'm like, okay, fine. Uh, who can access this footage? Is this footage end to end encrypted? Does, is it sitting as an encrypted blob that no one at Amazon can access on your servers? Uh, so only I can access it and as the owner of the device and, and so on. And, and he says, oh yes, that is the case, just like with the Ring doorbell. And I'm like, well, wait, that's not true of the Ring doorbell. So hang on a second. Like, it's just, it is just like an incontrovertible fact. You go into any court docket for petty theft or whatever, there's a ton of footage that cops have subpoenaed

• 39:37Speaker 05

  from Ring doorbells. Uh, and so if cops can subpoena, then Amazon has to be able to decrypt it.

• 39:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  So, and he's like, well, I'm not allowed to decrypt. I'm the project manager and our product manager. I can't decrypt it. I'm like, well, that's good. You have some access controls, but you're still escrowing the keys. And then I'm like, well, is it all controlled by an app or is there a desktop, uh, interface? And if so, can I download my footage? And he's like, no, it's desktop, just like with a, with a doorbell camera. Uh, and I'm like, so I can just like, um, grab all the MPEG files and keep them on my hard drive. And he's like, oh, I don't, I don't think you can. And I'm like, so what if I stop paying the subscription fee? Do I lose all the footage? And he's like, no, we'll let you download it. I'm like, so wait, can I download it or can I not? And then he eventually says, well, you're asking all these technical questions. I just don't know the answer. And I'm like, well, I, I was just standing here minding my own business.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  When you came up and introduced me, yourself to me as the product manager for this product. Like, is the product manager capable of answering what seems to me to be some pretty basic?

• 40:39Ed Zitron?

  Does a website do something?

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, like, can I, does, is the footage available to third parties? Is, I mean, because, you know, just from a straight up security perspective. Amazon's not immune to insider threats. If, if you've got. You know, 360 longitudinal video footage.

• 40:56Ed Zitron?

  And that's what this thing is. It can, it has a tube that goes into the sky with a bunch of cameras.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:01Ed Zitron?

  And it was advertised as they had this video behind with a picture of neighborhoods with all these blue blobs where these things would be.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  That's so good. I'm, I'm so happy you guys got to see one of the new Sauron towers.

• 41:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Here's, here's our palan here. Exactly.

• 41:14Speaker 11

  Maybe they'll give you a little ring that could be tied to your biometric.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's got this like telescoping mask, but you could imagine, right? If you've got, this is quite a honey pot, right? If you've got the internals of a whole bunch of job sites with a bunch of easily stolen things and there's an insider threat at Amazon. They've got a lot of employees and, and famously, Amazon went through a series of CISOs, Chief Security Officers, because they had this product first orientation where anyone who had a product team could download the entire Amazon database.

• 41:43Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  And they had no access controls and no logging. They did not know how many copies of the internal Amazon database were. And their CISOs would come in and say, okay, step one, we have to stop doing this.

• 41:53Speaker 11

  Did they ever figure out how many people?

• 41:55Speaker 05

  No, no, no. There's no census of how many copies, like multiple copies because they've got AWS, right?

• 42:01Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 42:01Speaker 05

  So copying the entire database of every SKU and every purchase on Amazon is like tractable within Amazon's own infrastructure. And so, you know, their CISO's first advice was always like, don't do this. And, and then, but the people who are in charge of like product nimbleness would say, well, we are able to spin up a product team and then figure out whether the product is any good by grabbing this giant data set, mining it for insights. So we, we're gonna override the security person. And eventually they hired, they promoted someone internal who was too junior and didn't know well enough. And then they had a gigantic breach, right?

• 42:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  I think this is all, Andy Greenberg at Wired did this report.

• 42:40Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 05

  Uh, and so, you know, like they're famously like vulnerable to insider threats.

• 42:44Ed Zitron?

  I will also say, if you were a listener who works at Amazon Web Services and you're able to click on that thing that says anthropic, why don't you sell me, send me more of their numbers? I wanna see, I wanna see their numbers. My favorite part of this conversation though, was right towards the end where he went, yeah, you, you could buy one for your backyard. You think he would? And just, you, you were like so. Much nicer than I would.

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Well, to be fair to him, I said, like, is this all being sold to business customers? Or are there people with McMansions who want it? And he said, well, do you want it for your mansion? And I was like, do you have a mansion? And I was like, I don't have a mansion. So he was kind of, I think you missed that.

• 43:18Ed Zitron?

  After 10 minutes of speed bagging, though, I would have just, I would have been like, I.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  This guy did not know what to.

• 43:24Ed Zitron?

  Sir, I'm dying. I need to leave.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 43:26Ed Zitron?

  But we walked, we had a good, we had a good toddle around today. You got to see some CES. We saw some fun stuff.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  We went to like the craft gadget room with all the international pavilions. And there was some good stuff. I'm trying to pull up my favorite. So from one of the universities around Tokyo, there was the, you know, they have these tech transfer offices where they're trying to like productize things being made in the labs. And there was a group called Integrated Electron Source, who had a graphene electron emitter, which was basically a consumer electronics style imaging system that could image down to four nanometers, designed for visual inspection of chips. And I've just come from Hamburg where I saw Bunny Wang, who's the greatest hardware hacker in the world, present on his work on building system on a chips that are open to visual inspection. Because Bunny is absolutely convinced that people are hiding bad shit in silicon.

• 44:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  Especially when we're talking about a system on a chip, which.

• 44:18Ed Zitron?

  When you say bad shit, what do you mean specifically?

• 44:20Speaker 05

  So like, you know, all, all hardware is, is software in etched in silicon, right? So any program, any malware you can imagine, you could hide.

• 44:30Ed Zitron?

  And so when you, when you use the chip in a hard, piece of hardware.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  It's doing something bad.

• 44:35Ed Zitron?

  It could backdoor it.

• 44:36Speaker 11

  Also, when he says, he's convinced that people are hiding bad shit in hardware is his belief that there's nothing stopping along the point of production.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  In the supply chain.

• 44:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, in the supply chain.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  So the thing to understand is that an SoC wafer is just a, it's a risk, like reduced instructions, a computing chip wafer. And the typical SoC is using like. 25, 30% of it. So most of that chip is dark matter.

• 45:03Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  And when you're taping out the die and getting ready to nano lithograph the chip, you could just tape out a whole bunch of other stuff. And Bunny's talk at CCC was about how he convinced a chipmaker to let him tape out some open source chips in the, in the dark matter. Cause it was like, oh, you know, you're going to run 10 million of these, do another 200,000. I'll pay for that part of it. Everyone gets them really cheap because the, the product gets cheaper, the more of these you run.

• 45:30Speaker 11

  Right.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  He was able to fit five more processors on a processor.

• 45:33Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 05

  Right? So it's super cool. It's called the Bow chip, all open source and all visually inspectable. So you can take the chip, take the file that describes the chip, take the chip and put it in a, an optical inspection unit. And then it will produce a file and you can lay the two on top of each other and see if there's any extra gates that shouldn't be there. Is this chip the chip it says it is?

• 45:54Speaker 11

  Right.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  Just like this incredibly important thing. You think about how much of our world is running on this uninspectable silicon and like how many people in the supply chain could do something to sabotage that silicon?

• 46:07Speaker 11

  Is there a place I could, I could, I could read more and look more at his stuff? I'm, this is fascinating to me.

• 46:12Speaker 05

  My, my, I, on Pluralistic yesterday, I wrote a blog post about it.

• 46:15Speaker 11

  I'll check that out.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Uh, he calls it piggybacking.

• 46:17Speaker 11

  This makes me curious about, you know, uh, Nvidia named their newest generation of chips, the CPU and the GPU collaboration, the Vera Rubin. And at first I thought it was just like a very vague gesture on a few superficial levels to Vera Rubin, who, uh, discovered that we probably have some, either we have dark matter, we have some fundamental uh, failure in our explanatory model for the universe. But also I'm curious, like, you know, is it just like a tongue in cheek also joke or reference to the fact that we?

• 46:47Speaker 05

  We don't know what's in the chip.

• 46:48Speaker 11

  Yeah. I, I don't, I don't know. No, they know exactly what's in the chip and it's getting more expensive. That's, well, oh God, are they doing like a deal with, um, I, I hate to do this, but Sherlin, just aggressive segue. What have you seen on the show?

• 47:01Speaker 05

  Just, no, just, just to put a button on it. One last thing I want to say.

• 47:04Speaker 11

  No, please.

• 47:04Speaker 05

  Four nanometers. That was the, that was the thing that just fucking blew my socks up.

• 47:08Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  Four nanometer imaging in commodity hardware. Holy shit. This is amazing.

• 47:13Speaker 11

  And I'm pretty sure that's like four nanometers what they built.

• 47:17Ed Zitron?

  The latest Nvidia Blackwell GPUs on, I'd have to check. Yeah. Two in our lifetime. They couldn't get, they couldn't get down to three nanometer and that was a whole thing with the process.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:26Ed Zitron?

  But Shalim, what have you seen on the floor? Cause you're, you're only with us for this group. So I want to hear more. What have you seen this year that you liked?

• 47:32Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm, I mean, hearing all of you talk is just reminds me like how diverse this show is. It's a huge show, covers such a broad scope. I mean, and I, I got lost in what you were talking about because it's fascinating, but it also makes me question the C and CES. Consumer.

• 47:45Ed Zitron?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  We were saying this yesterday. What is for the consumer if it's all robots and AI? I mean.

• 47:50Ed Zitron?

  It's downstream. It's like eventually, but it's like, this is the.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  So much of it is that.

• 47:54Ed Zitron?

  Consumer.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Where are the consumers? Where are they? What are, where's the thought for the consumers?

• 48:00Ed Zitron?

  Have you seen that in the, do you feel like the overall show has been less consumer?

• 48:04Speaker 03

  I think to the point we were making at the start of this episode, it's a physical manifestation of AI slop and, and all, a lot of the ones that were here this year, the ones that braved the immigration risk to come here and share their wares. There, that just means that their motivation was what? To find partners, to find someone to buy them? Yeah. It's, it, and that's the sense I'm getting of a lot of AI hardware out there because if you're still trying to make one at this point without a clear differentiator, then you are out here trying to get some kind of VC or a major company to buy you.

• 48:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, sure.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  And after Amazon bought B, it's just like, who's going to buy the next best one?

• 48:39Ed Zitron?

  And B was the one that records you.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  Wearable that Victoria.

• 48:42Ed Zitron?

  Victoria Song, cursed reporter in the world. Actually, Victoria Song, I champion.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I was, I was talking to the founder of B at the CES as well. And, um, you know, I'm not going to dwell too much on that just because I think B lucked out and, and getting a home so quickly.

• 48:58Ed Zitron?

  Fucking get that paper, especially from Amazon.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Go, go get that. But then the rest of them that are here, what is, what is the end game? What is the goal? And to your point about e-waste, that's going to be e-waste. The ones that they make, the ones that they sell in limited quantities, but still massive quantities.

• 49:11Ed Zitron?

  Only smartwatches that run on like AWS servers that will get taken down the moment the company stops paying for them, which will be quite quickly.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think it's, it was just like a lot of wading through this like existential dread of all of this is going to end up in Lenfils. All of these robots, all of these AI wearables, all of these AI native devices. So we, we tried very hard to see things that we were interested in. And I don't know if you've talked about this yet, but the, we made a video of this device that has taken off on, at least by our standards. It's got like millions of views at this point. It is called the Wheel Move. It is a wheelchair based, it's an assistive, it's an assistive device that you attach to the front of your wheelchair and it, it provides sort of a motorized rugged wheel that props up the front of your wheelchair and helps you over like rugged terrain, uneven surfaces.

• 49:59Ed Zitron?

  This fucking rocks.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  And then extra boost. Yeah.

• 50:01Ed Zitron?

  That rocks.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  It is, it's just so smart because it's simple, right? It's not a whole over engineered wheelchair. It's just an attachment to the front. And I was talking to um, someone about it this morning, who reminded me that not all wheelchair users are always in wheelchairs. Sometimes they're there temporarily and I forgot. Sometimes they're just recovering. Sometimes they're in rehab and they just need the assistance for a bit, but getting out there, going-

• 50:24Ed Zitron?

  It's called Wheel Move.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Wheel Move. Yeah. Going out on like a hike maybe or a walk and sometimes you encounter, you know, not the smoothest pavement or sometimes there's-

• 50:32Ed Zitron?

  Just showing everyone what it looks like. It's like a wheel on the front of it.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. That was fun.

• 50:36Ed Zitron?

  I, and you know what? It's like, we've seen a lot of exoskeletons while we were on the floor, we saw like a, like a kind of a skateboard.

• 50:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. So this is, I brought the brochure back. So we saw this thing called the Stern Board, which is the same thing, but it doesn't clip onto a wheelchair. It clips onto a motorized skateboard and turns it into an all terrain motorized skateboard. It was this French dude. Uh, Stern Board. S T E R N Board.

• 50:58Ed Zitron?

  Cool as shit. Like I, I love the mobility stuff because if you think about why technology exists, it's to make humans better and able to do more.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  To help, yeah.

• 51:06Ed Zitron?

  And what limitations we have can be surmounted with technology. The AI slop doesn't seem to be the, I, I mean-

• 51:13Speaker 03

  I, I can understand some of them, what they're saying and what they're trying to sell, but I, I sometimes you can see right through some of them. And I, I get there's a lot of cute robots and, and cute is fine.

• 51:23Ed Zitron?

  I'm so tired of the robots.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  But what is the frickin' point?

• 51:26Ed Zitron?

  Well, have you seen anything you liked? And I don't mean this sarcastic-

• 51:29Speaker 03

  The Wheel Move. Um, I, I-

• 51:31Ed Zitron?

  If the point is you haven't, that's totally fine.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  No, no. I, I did see something interesting and last year I came on this better offline of the CES edition as well and talking about a, an LED mask. Um, this year I've got another LED mask.

• 51:44Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that's fine. Like a beauty mask mask?

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of those like that puts a red light on your face. L'Oréal came through with like, um, the LED masks that are flexible. So like they're skin light in terms of texture. Instead of the rigid hard shells that you've seen their body, Omnilux or Dr. Dennis Gross make. So it wraps on your face much better and is transparent.

• 52:05Ed Zitron?

  Is it comfortable?

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's supposed to be more comfortable. Um, L'Oreal wasn't letting people put the full face version on on their own faces for various like sanitary and FDA related reasons. I saw the person put them on. I saw it on the mannequin's head. I may have seen other things. And um, I can tell you that the the proposition is interesting.

• 52:24Ed Zitron?

  Twin sun setting off this. Yeah.

• 52:28Ed Zitron?

  What the. Tears like vo. Yeah, tears and rain.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  I have, I can't say things, but um, I I can tell you that it seems like it would fit better on most heads, right? Like, I don't have the same nose another person might have, and I don't have the same eyes or eye socket shapes that another person might have. And I think that a more flexible shell for these LED masks would be a bit more inclusive. I think also much more comfortable because the button and where it turns on the power, um, running the LED lights is on the mask. So it sits on your forehead. So you press the power button there as opposed to like a cable dangling down the side of your face into a power like remote control thing. And then the fact that it's transparent is just wild. They've also made like under eye mask versions of it. And I am bringing like the health and wellness sort of like vibes here into this episode, but.

• 53:16Ed Zitron?

  That's good.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  I just, I just like that idea that um, L'Oreal also says it's very close to producing these for like, you know, actual sale. They're very close. So I think that and it's also another thing that's interesting because this is not vaporware. It's actually going to be made and I, that's what we also look out for, not just trash that's gonna sit in a landfill someday.

• 53:36Ed Zitron?

  You've been to a lot of CESs and it feels like this is one of the more vaporwarey ones. I'm really like, I don't want it to be.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  No, I know.

• 53:43Ed Zitron?

  I really don't.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  I know. I, I, well, there's also like a lot of things that will come out. I mean, so, so this year Engadget took a risk. We went, let's look at all our best of CES winners from last year.

• 53:55Ed Zitron?

  Ah.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  And check out where they are now. Surprisingly, pretty much like all of them are are like either on track or have already put their devices on sale. Or are like, oh, we will be at CES twenty twenty six to show you the updates. Um, one of them, we didn't manage to locate. So we're kind of like, what's going on there? So it is, it is like a, a kind of risky endeavor to do that story because you want to know that as a publication, we're only endorsing the right, the more legitimate types of businesses.

• 54:25Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  At the same time. It's like, we want to do the investigative work. We want to be very honest. If this company end up looking shady.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Then do we look?

• 54:33Speaker 05

  Would it be that they were shady or that they were outcompeted by worse companies?

• 54:37Speaker 03

  It could also be that, exactly.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  You know, they could still be the best when it.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Right. Thank you. That helps.

• 54:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, or sometimes, you know, they also, it's something that just ends up not working, you know? One thing that the last two years I've been really interested in is

• 54:51Speaker 11

  a technology that allows people who are deaf or who know sign language to communicate. My brother, my older brother is deaf. One of my greatest anxieties and fears is that he refuses to wear.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Hearing aids?

• 55:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, hearing aids and any sort of assistive tech. And, you know, there have been many times, you know, and thankfully, like, we've had this protocol established before, but there have been many times where he's been stopped by cops and he just like, you know, he's immediately when stopped by cop, reaching into the car to get a notepad and pen to write for them. So I've made him, you know, call me beforehand so that we can talk about it. So that, you know, there's no misunderstanding or any sort of escalation of things. But, you know, technology that allows for immediate communication would be nice. But then, you know, a lot of times when I go to these booths and I sit down and I ask, okay, what are the scenarios in which they're interested in offering this sort of assistive tech? They're almost exclusively in one very narrow scenario, which is in a workplace and in a business scenario,

• 55:49Speaker 11

  which I understand, but it's like, that is actually also not the space where I assume and from what I've seen from people I know who are deaf and from people and from, you know, my own brother, you know, are interested in, but nonetheless, you still have firms who maybe are, you know, they are created by people who are deaf or around people who are deaf, who know that that's not the use case.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 11

  But are not going to get funding, interest, or.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's very depressing.

• 56:19Ed Zitron?

  I will also say with like checking back up, you're all humans.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:25Ed Zitron?

  Like you can go here and this is the consumer electronics fraud show. Like I think, I think it's all about, there are people who come here with the intention of deceiving. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being like, yeah, we thought this was really.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Right, and that's where, that's where I was like.

• 56:38Ed Zitron?

  And I think about, I'm gonna say, push back if you want to. Having Red End Gadget since like the early, like the mid 2000s, what happened? It's what Engadget is now is really good. There's a reason I have a lot of Engadget people on is because it's just people who like tech and they go and look at stuff and they like it or they dislike it and you move on. And I say that as an honest reader. And it's like, yeah, if you go back and you say, yeah, we got fucking swindled by these people. I feel like anyone who gets mad at that is a moron. I just think if you're you're dope, if you're like, wow, a publication was like, yeah, we got something wrong. Oh, I don't like that. Deceive me more, daddy. It's just like, I feel like it every single publication should do that. It should not be something anyone is afraid of.

• 57:23Ed Zitron?

  And indeed, if you don't do that, it makes me deeply worried about the future. Because you know what? If you come here and you end up writing about something that is just a lie or never makes it, that's CES. And this particular CES, and in 2027, we need to do this because the AI bubble is likely to burst in the next year. And we're gonna need to dig through the ditches, so to speak, and see what fucking happens. Because there's so much AI rapper shit. I was hoping you'd love more stuff, but

• 57:55Speaker 03

  I did. I mean, I I loved some stuff. Well, I think part of it was the CES more than others. I was kind of chained to my laptop, running things rather than like going out there and seeing things. So I, okay, I saw something that I loved to hate on, if that helps. Have you heard about the lollipop star?

• 58:13Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. So we gave it a worst in show. I did worst in show this year with Consumer Union and the Repair Coalition.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Tell me why you gave it worst in show.

• 58:21Ed Zitron?

  Eways.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's exactly Eways. And then so

• 58:24Speaker 05

  Singing lollipops.

• 58:25Speaker 11

  Tell me more about this, because I did not see this.

• 58:27Ed Zitron?

  I have no idea what this is, I'm completely lost.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  I mean, it's just, it's a sound chip and a, you know, SoC in a lollipop handle. And you put the lollipop on top and through bone conduction, you hear a song while you eat a lollipop. It's just a lithium battery that goes in a landfill.

• 58:42Ed Zitron?

  You're a psycho.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you can't reuse it. You can't like, and the battery is not like rechargeable, which I guess makes sense, but it's it's kind of ridiculous.

• 58:51Speaker 11

  I saw this offered at a White Elephant that I was at two weeks before I came here. Wow. Just I'm like, and I was wondering, everyone was like, this seems like a horrible idea.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Was it what favorite flavor? Did you get Akon or White Elephant?

• 59:02Speaker 11

  No, I did not get it. I tried. I was really hard. I was honing in on the lottery tickets. There's a stack of 50 Lotto scratch offs and I really wanted them.

• 59:12Ed Zitron?

  Did you get them?

• 59:13Speaker 05

  No.

• 59:13Ed Zitron?

  So the thing about this.

• 59:14Speaker 05

  I got a books. I got a bunch of books. The thing with the singing lollipop is, so my last time at CES was 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, 2003. And before that, I came a few times in the 90s for Wired. And I have seen singing lollipops at CES before.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. They're not new.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  I also, speaking of which, though, on the floor today, me and Ed saw Smell-O-Vision. And a Smell-O-Vision is another thing I submit every single season.

• 59:37Ed Zitron?

  Tell me about it.

• 59:38Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  That's what we're saying this year on my team is that it's kind of the comeback CES, the comeback of all these older technologies that we've seen with like Pebbles coming back, clicks with the communicator Lego. It's not really a comeback, but it's adding tech.

• 59:51Ed Zitron?

  I saw something that said skateboard Penguin.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:54Ed Zitron?

  I'm your little sidekick company.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Oh, I saw that. I saw that too.

• 59:59Ed Zitron?

  Skateboard Penguin.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:01Ed Zitron?

  Then the new.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  There's just a lot of ridiculous.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  And to pop, let's pop the stack just briefly.

• 1:00:05Ed Zitron?

  But also to get.

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  Back to Cryptec.

• 1:00:06Ed Zitron?

  No, no, but also to get back to the thing you're talking about there. The reason I was looking was because they had the tagline, welcome to the era of pseudo-reality.

• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, that was the Smell-O-Vision people.

• 1:00:16Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes, yes. That's why.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  They had a Smell-O-Vision and then they had like an essential oil mister with that made smoke. So for steam. But on Cryptec, if anyone wants to follow a very good Cryptec influencer, Liz Henry used to be a build manager for Mozilla. Now is just doing Cryptec, I think, full time. Bookmaniac.org. And I'll send you the link.

• 1:00:38Ed Zitron?

  Thank you.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  And she is in command of a small fund that she disperses in $1,000 and below grants to people doing cool Cryptec adaptation.

• 1:00:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. What is Cryptec, though, for those?

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  Accessibility technology.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:00:51Speaker 05

  So wheelchairs.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  I thought crypto tech. I was like, I don't need that.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  No, no, no. Cryptec. So, yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  I get what it is. I know what you're saying.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  We saw an amazing four-line Braille reader on the floor that was.

• 1:01:01Ed Zitron?

  That was cool. It was like a Braille keyboard.

• 1:01:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it was standards defined. It plugged into your USB-C and showed up as a standard display. It just, just.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Excellent.

• 1:01:11Ed Zitron?

  And you know what I noticed about, I wish I remembered the company name because they actually deserve it. The guy was just like, every, like, people, people really try and do like a micro jobs, being like, imagine a world. And this guy was just like. Yeah, it connects regularly like a keyboard. You can see it here. That's not our software. That's that. He was very

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  These are all standards defined.

• 1:01:29Ed Zitron?

  And he was very clear to be like, this is not our software. This just plugs into anything that the people who need

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  You don't need friction, right?

• 1:01:36Ed Zitron?

  And like, that guy deserves the huge boots. Like every, every single blind person probably could, I'm not blind, so I truly don't, sorry, visually impaired, so I don't know what the experience is, but I don't know. Seems like it fucking worked and the guy was not trying to like hawk anything.

• 1:01:54Speaker 05

  It was well built. It was standards defined. It was chunky and rugged. And, and it was, um, it will outlive changes to the OS because it's built around open standards.

• 1:02:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it was just the USB connected.

• 1:02:05Speaker 05

  Nice. Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  I think when you said crypt tech, I was reminded of something that we didn't see in person, but we heard or read about. There's a water heater for your home that will crypto mine while you shower.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  Oh, I've heard about these.

• 1:02:17Ed Zitron?

  I think everyone who put that together is in prison.

• 1:02:19Speaker 05

  There's a room heater as well that does this. This is like a gimmick, right?

• 1:02:22Ed Zitron?

  It's a gimmick and also doesn't

• 1:02:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, there's a bath house in Williamsburg that does something like this.

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  Oh, fuck off.

• 1:02:26Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  That is the most Brooklyn thing ever.

• 1:02:28Speaker 11

  I know, listen.

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  Is that the same one where you could Wax wax district?

• 1:02:32Speaker 11

  Oh, no.

• 1:02:34Ed Zitron?

  Was that the same one where they all got Legionnaires?

• 1:02:36Speaker 11

  I listen. I got.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  I think I know that one.

• 1:02:39Ed Zitron?

  Thankfully.

• 1:02:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cheltenham's like, yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 11

  Oh, you know, I was, you know, I was landing them. Their, their name, it's, it's nothing too bad house, you know.

• 1:02:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the Legionnaires one.

• 1:02:49Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:50Ed Zitron?

  I hear.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Wait, so they do crypto mining?

• 1:02:52Speaker 11

  Yeah. So the guy who runs it, he loves crypto and so you can pay in crypto.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Classic Brooklyn.

• 1:02:59Speaker 11

  And he initially tried to market it as like, you know, like some of the heat generation is gonna go, is, is coming from crypto, but then he removed that silently. And I don't know if he removed it because it was like, it's not actually, or because he doesn't want people to

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  Also just, no, I think it's because it doesn't work. Yes.

• 1:03:16Ed Zitron?

  Also, just mining difficulty has reached a point where all of these little

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  Just doesn't work.

• 1:03:21Ed Zitron?

  Con artist dude.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  We go scuba diving on Roatan, which is the island where Prospera, the crypto city is in Honduras.

• 1:03:29Speaker 11

  The future capital of the world empire.

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  Beautiful little like dirt road island, Afro Caribbean island. The food's amazing. The diving's amazing. It's, it's.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  Just a lovely place. And then the former dictator of Honduras, who was just pardoned by Trump, who was an narcotrafficker, sold them the sovereign rights to a chunk of this island.

• 1:03:47Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

  And you walk down the dirt road in the Dive Town and every shop has got a sign in the window that says, "We accept Bitcoin." And you walk in, you say, "Do you accept Bitcoin?" And they're like, "Of course we don't accept Bitcoin." Are you fucking kidding me? We don't, we don't even have reliable electricity.

• 1:04:02Ed Zitron?

  I don't have 15 minutes to wait for this to get here or an internet connection.

• 1:04:05Speaker 11

  These reactionaries, they know how to pick a spot, you know?

• 1:04:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Speaker 11

  If I were gonna make a future network state. Here's the thing. That is one of the places I would do it.

• 1:04:15Ed Zitron?

  They don't have the actual stones to find a real place where there's truly no laws.

• 1:04:19Speaker 11

  Right. Well, yeah.

• 1:04:20Ed Zitron?

  Yes. And also, because all of the actual pirates and real criminals would kill them immediately.

• 1:04:27Speaker 11

  With the Pirate Enlightenment book of David Graeber. Yeah. You know, you give, you give fascists a lawless zone and you let other people come into the lawless zone and everyone else will go, "Why are there fascists here?"

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, do you know, do you know Libertarian walks into a bear, the story about that Libertarian exit town in New Hampshire where they all moved in and then they ran for city council and then they abolished the school district and they did, and they abolished all the rules. And then this one lady kept feeding bears and they were like, "Please stop feeding bears." And she was like, "I thought there were no rules." And then they were all being mauled by bears. But, but this Marxist, this Marxist gun nut weed grower moves in and he's like, "I'm gonna grow weed and collect guns and wait for the Marxist revolution." And they're like, "But we're a Libertarian in town." He's like, "Well, what are you gonna do?"

• 1:05:10Ed Zitron?

  Actually Libertarian means you're nothing.

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Ed Zitron?

  No, it's my favorite, one of my favorite old school internet videos is the Libertarian conference where it's like, "Well, I think the driver's licenses should exist." And everyone's like, "Boo, boo."

• 1:05:22Speaker 11

  And there's like, "I think there should be some competency in the driving."

• 1:05:26Ed Zitron?

  Boo. No, allow us to die in car crashes. Uh, we're approaching the break right now, but.

• 1:05:34Ed Zitron?

  I really have been trying all week, listeners. I swear to God, I've been trying to get people to talk to me about awesome stuff. The CES is weird. This is a broken CES. There's something

• 1:05:43Speaker 11

  I do think that one plus I would say for your CES is it is actually a really great spot for you to come through and think about the way in which technological products are offered as and the role they play in your life. You know, like, are you satisfied with tech products that are solely around convenience or solely around, you know, assistive tech or solely around health? Or, you know, like, what is it that you want? And do you think that the industry and the sectors are interested in developing? Yeah, I think this is a great place.

• 1:06:16Ed Zitron?

  Interested in building rather than what are your problems?

• 1:06:20Speaker 11

  I think there's a very good place for coming and talking to people and getting a sense of whether or not other people share those priorities with you.

• 1:06:25Speaker 05

  You and I saw something that we went away and bought, which was that Waco Coco espresso maker.

• 1:06:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 05

  Where you add hot water, pump it up, it gets to nine atmospheres, it ejects a shot of espresso. It has no batteries.

• 1:06:38Ed Zitron?

  It's like, yeah, another thing is like, do you like coffee?

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:06:41Ed Zitron?

  Imagine if you could have coffee on the go and it worked. The coffee was delicious.

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  As a guy who flies around with an Aeropress but whose wife prefers espresso to coffee concentrate, I'm I hundred, I just like literally walked off the trade floor and bought one because now I could, it's small enough, I could put both of them in my bag and my wife can have an espresso and I can have a coffee concentrate.

• 1:07:00Ed Zitron?

  If only all products were that good. Now, the upcoming advertisement, I assume, will be for a product that's even better than that and even more useful. If it's a podcast, you need to listen with complete attention. Put down your phone or else.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

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• 1:07:49Ed Zitron?

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• 1:08:32Ed Zitron?

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• 1:08:48Speaker 07

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• 1:09:20Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. 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.

• 1:09:35Speaker 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.

• 1:09:46Speaker 08

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

• 1:09:51Speaker 10

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

• 1:09:57Speaker 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.

• 1:10:20Ed Zitron?

  And we're back to the better offline CES experience and we've got author, activist and journalist Corey Doctorow.

• 1:10:26Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 1:10:27Ed Zitron?

  And Gadget Sherlin Low.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:10:30Ed Zitron?

  And Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here. How are you doing Garrison?

• 1:10:33Speaker 12

  Oh, it's another beautiful CES morning.

• 1:10:35Ed Zitron?

  In beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. What have you seen today?

• 1:10:39Speaker 12

  Today, I finally did Hall D. I've been neglecting Hall D.

• 1:10:43Ed Zitron?

  What did you see?

• 1:10:43Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  Hall D is fun.

• 1:10:47Ed Zitron?

  And that's CES.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Hall D is fun.

• 1:10:50Speaker 12

  I guess I also had fun in the Amazon booth.

• 1:10:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we've been punishing them.

• 1:10:56Speaker 12

  Yeah, I assumed. I assumed you've been punishing them.

• 1:10:58Ed Zitron?

  We went in there to punish them.

• 1:11:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, if you lose your dog, you can use all the Ring cameras in your neighborhood to find your pet.

• 1:11:07Ed Zitron?

  I have a $5,000 surveillance tower from a trailer that now will tell me if anyone walks near my house in any way so that I can dial 911 and claim there's a prowler.

• 1:11:18Speaker 05

  But will it measure their skull with calipers to tell you whether they are likely criminals?

• 1:11:25Ed Zitron?

  Only on Ring Plus.

• 1:11:26Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:11:27Speaker 12

  With their new LiDAR system.

• 1:11:28Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 1:11:29Speaker 12

  Maybe. No, there's also this Ring mesh network. I'm not sure if you saw that.

• 1:11:35Ed Zitron?

  Oh, they're doing this Nest bullshit.

• 1:11:36Speaker 12

  Ring Sidewalk, I think, is what it's called.

• 1:11:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's on by default, I think.

• 1:11:40Speaker 12

  If there is a Wi-Fi outage, they will act as a mesh to still be able to notify you if there is movement around your house. There's no live video because of how weak the bandwidth is. So it uses like 1% of a home's Wi-Fi system to communicate peer-to-peer messages.

• 1:12:05Ed Zitron?

  My experience of those is they don't work very well. Like the Nest one, if you ever try and install a Nest product and it tries to connect to another Nest product, it will break, in my experience.

• 1:12:15Speaker 12

  But the thing that I found interesting about the pet finder is that it's basically making a consumer product based on the capacity that police have been using Ring 4 already, right? To be able to find. Find people and have and have immediate merely immediate access to footage. And now they're just turning into a consumer, a consumer side product.

• 1:12:36Ed Zitron?

  So how does it work?

• 1:12:38Speaker 12

  You request that you're you, you send a message probably to like to some like Amazon app about your pet being missing. And then it searches through all the ring cameras in the neighborhood to see if it can find the pet.

• 1:12:47Ed Zitron?

  I think that is completely and utterly evil. I don't think regular.

• 1:12:51Speaker 05

  Well, it certainly answers the question. Can you, can you access people's footage?

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:56Speaker 12

  No, because they have it on, they immediately have it, right?

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Somewhere, yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 12

  They're talking about how how this footage is like secured and encrypted and no one can see it. Meanwhile, they're offering products based on.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:13:04Ed Zitron?

  Not us.

• 1:13:05Speaker 12

  Based on everybody having ring and that's other, other interesting thing is how all the new features are like useless. If you only have one ring camera, the features are built or based on total societal acceptance that everyone already has these things. And the fact that everyone has these things enables all these extra features to work. So the actual individual products of these things, not very useful, but as long as your whole neighborhood has it, then then it's like a really great product.

• 1:13:31Ed Zitron?

  The surveillance society taught at Labyrinth with university.

• 1:13:34Speaker 12

  I mean, it's really sacrificing privacy for for convenience. And that's the entire gamble with with the with this style of product.

• 1:13:42Ed Zitron?

  The last scene of the conversation, just like ripping up the sideboards on everyone's houses to try and find the ring cameras. Very horrible. So wait, but you were in Hall D. What'd you see in there?

• 1:13:52Speaker 12

  Hall D.

• 1:13:54Speaker 12

  Again, more, more, more L L M rapper robots, a lot of smaller, smaller like robots, not, not like the big, the big ones.

• 1:14:01Ed Zitron?

  What were the robots doing?

• 1:14:03Speaker 12

  We, I looked at a few robots for like, you know, like learning robots for kids. For it's like kind of a toy and it's also like supposed to be some kind of learning assistant.

• 1:14:14Ed Zitron?

  Kids see through that so quickly. I must be clear.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  Or they get tired of it in like two minutes.

• 1:14:18Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:14:18Speaker 12

  No, it definitely look the ones I, the ones that I saw, including from this, this company, their, their product was called Yanbo, Yanbo X one, which they, they thought.

• 1:14:29Ed Zitron?

  Rolls off the tongue.

• 1:14:30Speaker 12

  I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it's a.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  It looks like Chinese.

• 1:14:33Speaker 12

  It's a Chinese. It's Chinese for, it sounds similar to the word for hug. But this is.

• 1:14:40Speaker 03

  Yongbao?

• 1:14:41Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:14:43Ed Zitron?

  I don't speak any other language. Like.

• 1:14:45Speaker 12

  This is for natural language prompting. This is to help allegedly, according to them, will help will help kids learn another language. The US side product just is chat GPT. So if you're if you're if you're wanting to learn, learn another language through chat GPT, this is what it'll do. It was the Wi Fi and hold these kind of off, so it was hard to get good product. It's hard to go to good baseline for how for how good the product is, which everyone would assert to me is.

• 1:15:13Ed Zitron?

  What were you gonna say, Sheldon?

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  I was gonna say kind of off was the understatement of the Wi Fi situation that the Venetian this year was fricking terrible.

• 1:15:20Speaker 12

  It always is.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  And not all it's all it's worse this year because even the Wi Fi was down. It was always the signal is always bad. By the time you approach the Venetian, you have no more five G or LTE. But like in the expo, the own their own in house Wi Fi was that the irony of that was.

• 1:15:35Ed Zitron?

  I wonder if that's because everyone has these GPT.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  It's all AIs, yes.

• 1:15:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's because everyone's just pummeling AWS.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  It's worse than ever, yeah.

• 1:15:42Ed Zitron?

  Just beating the fuck out of it.

• 1:15:44Speaker 12

  But yeah, like we tried, you know, they tried to give a demonstration where we would teach us like a Chinese word. And so like, yeah, if you you can learn a word.

• 1:15:51Ed Zitron?

  Speak a little Chinese, yeah.

• 1:15:52Speaker 12

  But you can't, you can't actually, you can't like learn grammar and they can't like correct a child to actually improve language. And you can't actually actually learn to speak a language. You can learn individual words, but that's not that's not language learning, right? You can do that, you can do that in like Duolingo and that's not teaching you a language.

• 1:16:08Ed Zitron?

  If you were just looking for a word.

• 1:16:10Speaker 05

  And Duolingo is already something that people who teach languages are like, this is.

• 1:16:14Speaker 12

  It's not.

• 1:16:15Speaker 05

  All the all the features that make Duolingo Duolingo sticky.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Speaker 05

  Are cut against the pedagogical value of it as a language training tool.

• 1:16:23Speaker 12

  So there's a lot of stuff like that. I did ask them about like what their plans are if if the API for chat GPT gets more expensive. They said they do not expect that in the near future. But but they they have like five other L L Ms that they're that they work with. Specifically, their product is mostly in China right now and they.

• 1:16:44Ed Zitron?

  So cool and what have you.

• 1:16:45Speaker 12

  They can they can swap. They can talk to LLM whenever they want to.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Which like, doesn't that kind of impact the quality of the experience?

• 1:16:51Ed Zitron?

  Yes, because each LLM is prompted differently.

• 1:16:55Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:16:56Ed Zitron?

  I love that, though. It's like, what if something bad happens? What if it doesn't?

• 1:17:00Speaker 12

  But if it doesn't, and even if it does, we'll just use like Double C's DeepSeek or whatever.

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  I have a slightly different gloss on this, though, because we were saying before that all these products seem undifferentiated. And if they're all undifferentiated because they're just a wrapper on top of ChatGPT and they're vulnerable to changes, that's one thing. And it maybe speaks well for ChatGPT in that they'll have, whatever companies among these are successful, it'll have them over a barrel. And it can jack up the price on threat of bricking their products and making their customers angry at them. But if the case is that ChatGPT is a commodity backend, and there's 50 companies in China that can do the same thing at a 10th of the price. And ChatGPT's future plan is someday, there will be so many people so reliant on us that we can charge $200 for something we're charging $2 for.

• 1:17:45Speaker 05

  The answer is the minute they start charging $200, there will be 50 Chinese companies that will charge you $2.

• 1:17:51Ed Zitron?

  A brand Chesky of Airbnb even, who's like a disgusting booster, who was specifically involved in making sure Clammy Sam Altman managed to become CEO again. He literally has said, I'll use Chinese LLMs every day.

• 1:18:03Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Ed Zitron?

  Which is really funny. So really, it's one of the two. It's going to be either. But I also don't think, because their API sales are like a small part of their revenue, it's just, actually, here's a question, general question. Anyone hear about anyone using Anthropic's models, even once?

• 1:18:18Speaker 12

  I have not heard Anthropic mentioned.

• 1:18:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, specifically on the floor as powering. Do you know what?

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  Oh, Pebble. Pebble uses Claude.

• 1:18:26Speaker 05

  Oh, really? Interesting.

• 1:18:27Ed Zitron?

  But to just do the.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  For the ring AI, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:30Ed Zitron?

  But they said that was on-device. There is no on-device version of Claude.

• 1:18:36Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Pebble, I was so nice about you. Now I have to go and look into your innards.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  I can go, we should go ask the founder.

• 1:18:42Ed Zitron?

  I'm genuinely curious about that because there is no on-device version of ChatGPT or any of the.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Now you're making me question if I should like double check who I'm talking about.

• 1:18:51Ed Zitron?

  I think that that's worthwhile. Not because, but the thing is, I'm a horrible freak that looks at this stuff constantly. So my natural thought is like, what do you mean? And I will admit, the $75 Pebble ring, supposedly on-device as well, that did seem a little. Rich to me.

• 1:19:08Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  What do you mean by rich?

• 1:19:09Ed Zitron?

  As in like an on-device model and a tiny ring?

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  It's not on the ring.

• 1:19:13Ed Zitron?

  So it's on the phone?

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  It's on the phone, yes.

• 1:19:15Ed Zitron?

  But they're saying it's, if it needs to go through Claude, that's not, I don't know. There's, there's something weird there. And again, that's something that will increase in price.

• 1:19:23Speaker 12

  Another on-

• 1:19:24Ed Zitron?

  Woofy got there.

• 1:19:25Speaker 12

  Alleged on-device product is the Luna Pendant, which is

• 1:19:28Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:28Speaker 12

  real-time AI emotion tracking.

• 1:19:32Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:19:32Speaker 12

  Oh, well, because it's not doing anything real. You can put a random number- Well, it's not, actually it is. It is listening to every single thing you say and building emotional assessments based on Yeah. what you say, as well as, you know, whatever kind of biometrics it can connect from a pendant resting on your Right. like chest.

• 1:19:50Ed Zitron?

  Did they mention what the customer might be?

• 1:19:54Speaker 12

  No, not really.

• 1:19:55Ed Zitron?

  Because this always immediately goes to, yeah, people with autism. We already ran into someone with a dog, a dog toy today. It was like, it could help autistic children.

• 1:20:04Speaker 12

  This was not, this was, this was not marketed to that. This, the-

• 1:20:07Ed Zitron?

  What is this for then?

• 1:20:08Speaker 12

  This is, this is for, I wouldn't say women. That, that was what they-

• 1:20:14Ed Zitron?

  The classic doesn't understand emotion.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Women love to be told what are we feeling.

• 1:20:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. We finally found a device to be sexist without the need of a man.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  Without the man telling it.

• 1:20:24Speaker 12

  All of, all of, all of the design was, was, was, was going that way to me. Pretty fam-coded, yeah. Yes. Um, and it, it measures like six or seven. Oops, that was a mistake. I'm sorry.

• 1:20:35Ed Zitron?

  Oh, is that like a, the young people?

• 1:20:38Speaker 12

  It does like six or seven different emotions. But it's mostly done just through listening. On, on-device though, they do not upload to the, they do not upload the audio to the cloud.

• 1:20:48Ed Zitron?

  Nice, okay.

• 1:20:50Speaker 12

  It is on-device, but it's-

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  So no biometric data, just listening?

• 1:20:54Speaker 12

  That's unclear. It, it was mostly-

• 1:20:56Ed Zitron?

  And you know when it's unclear, it works.

• 1:20:57Speaker 12

  It was mostly listening, because again, I'm, I'm, it's some, some-

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  Do you mind if I look?

• 1:21:01Ed Zitron?

  I honestly, I honestly-

• 1:21:03Speaker 12

  Slight language barriers when trying to talk with some of these boots here.

• 1:21:06Ed Zitron?

  I would respect them so much if it was for guys. If it was just like, you guys never seem to know.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a sound tone, HR, how are you variability, breathing and movement.

• 1:21:16Speaker 12

  That's what it was. Yeah. So it's resting, because it's resting on your chest. So it can have some, some heart, some breathing. But mostly, it's just through listening to everything you say.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  The reason I ask is that's the only thing that differentiates it from like the halo tone wearable from ages go by Amazon. That's already doing the same thing. I'm, I'm very like, I have a good memory for all the devices that try to tell me what I'm feeling and tell me to chill, chill out, calm down. So like this, this is a sort of device that I remember. And there's another product that was at CES that was like, clearly men made this for women. It was like a bra insert to like, be wearable to detect your, detect your.

• 1:21:50Speaker 12

  Your boobs.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Well, no, your, your metrics are like, it's kind of for gym purposes when you're working out. And I was just like, if you've paid any attention to the women's sports bra industry discourse at all, it's that we've been asking for these bra inserts to be removed or sewn in. We don't want them to be removable fallout when they're drying. We just want them to remain in place or just be done with.

• 1:22:11Ed Zitron?

  One of those classic situations of, did you talk to a woman before or after you made this?

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  Or anything else, right? Like if you're designing a product for someone in a wheelchair, have you worked with someone who's actually using a wheelchair?

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  Well, the saying is nothing about us without us, which I discovered goes back to the Polish equivalent of the Magna Carta in the 16th century. And it was what the barons made the king agree was that nothing about them would be done without them. It didn't, didn't rhyme in Polish.

• 1:22:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And that's also definitely not how CES works. CES is like, without you, we will sell to you.

• 1:22:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's Henry Ford, right? If I ask people what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse, right? And so we're, we're here to tell you what you want. Yeah.

• 1:22:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but these people would sell you like horseshoes to make the horses faster rather than, it's like, these people don't connect to anything. I'm still sitting there trying to work out what that pendant is for. I'm going to be honest, like what alien?

• 1:23:03Speaker 12

  Well, sometimes it's too useful to know if you're, if, if, if you're calm or if you're angry.

• 1:23:08Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I know what I meant.

• 1:23:09Speaker 12

  It, it now, and now it can tell you.

• 1:23:11Speaker 05

  Your lips are moving.

• 1:23:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm breathing.

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  I recently started somatic therapy. And so I think I can understand the idea of the benefits of knowing when you're feeling something, identifying it. And kind of like staying with it. But I don't think a pendant is going to tell me in real time.

• 1:23:28Ed Zitron?

  And it's not built for that.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:23:30Ed Zitron?

  Or with any of that.

• 1:23:31Speaker 05

  I mean, what are you supposed to be doing? Like looking down and going, oh no, I'm angry.

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  When then wine and breathe.

• 1:23:37Speaker 12

  It does, it does, it does connect to an app where it has like,

• 1:23:39Ed Zitron?

  Oh, thank Christ.

• 1:23:40Speaker 12

  It has, it has like analysis of like how you're feeling, how often you're feeling, uh, you know, heart rate.

• 1:23:45Ed Zitron?

  Right. This, this reminds me of Victoria Song posting the Oura ring thing of just like stressed. Straight like collective bargaining, seven hours stressed.

• 1:23:54Speaker 12

  Yep.

• 1:23:54Ed Zitron?

  Right. Oh God. So what, you got a lot of paper there.

• 1:23:58Speaker 12

  I mean, I, I just, I just like collecting these.

• 1:24:00Ed Zitron?

  That's fine. Anything else you, you regarded?

• 1:24:03Speaker 12

  Oh, I guess I'll talk about the, the one that I feel the weirdest about.

• 1:24:09Ed Zitron?

  Awesome.

• 1:24:10Speaker 12

  This is another CES Innovation Award winner.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Oh dear.

• 1:24:14Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:24:14Speaker 12

  This is from South Korea. This is the self insight therapy Resolve XR.

• 1:24:21Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay. Well, I've got most of it from the name. Glad they've got up to the XR.

• 1:24:26Speaker 12

  This is a VR experience to give you a final goodbye to a deceased friend.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  So the Black Mirror episode.

• 1:24:34Speaker 12

  So we have seen stuff like this before. We have, we have seen these kind of like VR experiences that are either fully scripted, um, or done with like an AI. And I, I thought that's what this, that this was. I thought this was just another one of those. And I was surprised why it won an innovation award because we've seen this stuff years ago.

• 1:24:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 12

  This, the reason why it's different is that this is not an AI. This is not an AI system. This is not a pre-recorded movie either. This is a avatar puppeted by a therapist as a part of a, as a part of like a therapy program. Where you enter into it for a short amount of time, uh, to give this like, like visual, like therapeutic, like exercise to someone, uh, when they weren't able to say goodbye to a family member, usually after some kind of accident is, is what this was. And they, they talked about a few instances of like, uh, this really bad plane crash, uh, last year. And that, that's, that was like the, the main, the main use case that we've seen. It's right now just available in Korea. They're trying to expand to Japan and the United States, uh, where they would need

• 1:25:37Speaker 12

  to partner with, with therapists in those countries. So yeah, I feel really odd about about these types of products, obviously. Specifically like the digital avatar nature of it. Yeah. If you have a recording of your of your deceased loved one's voice, it can try to clone the voice. So it does use AI. So it does use AI for the voice, but the person, there's therapist. Puppeteer. Puppeting it who will who will do text to speech. So they will will will will text to speech. The in like, you know, whatever, whatever the the person will like say. It's text to speech as well? So no, it is text. That's what it is. It is text to speech. So the therapist that's puppeting it, the words coming out of the avatar are from a therapist

• 1:26:22Speaker 12

  who's typing out who's typing out the words as a part of this this therapeutic exercise that then will be that will come out is in a cloned voice of the deceased person.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  Are they also controlling like the gestures when you see puppeting?

• 1:26:34Speaker 12

  Yes, there is a pre recorded.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  Set of movements.

• 1:26:38Speaker 12

  Set of movements that they can that they can initiate. This sounds traumatizing.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Speaker 12

  They said that the people have used it have liked it. And there's a video of, of course, they're going to say that, obviously. Yeah, people. But that's, you know, and I saw I saw a footage of of someone using it. I think it is it is good that this isn't just an AI LLM who's just talking as your as your Your dead grandma. And it's not pretending to be that. It is a therapeutic experience and it is an exercise. Where you type in. Similar, similar, similar, well, the, you know, you're you're wearing VR goggles. So like you see the avatar in like a setting and you like said goodbye and get some kind of closure as a part of a therapeutic experience. And like there's versions that we already just do this in therapy. Like you already can do these sort of exercises with therapy. This is putting in kind of an avatar over it.

• 1:27:28Speaker 12

  I don't feel great about the avatar. But this is this is certainly better and more thoughtful than just talking to and just talking to an LLM. The fact that it's you are partnering with a therapist who you you've already been working with who already can knows you. Yeah. For people in like an extreme emotional grief. Yeah, I can see that. They did stress that, like, this isn't for everybody. Right. This is for people like dealing with. Extreme emotional grief and I, you know, asked like, you know, why did you choose, you know, why is this not just an AI? And they're like, well, I mean, these people are very traumatized and you actually need a skill.

• 1:28:00Ed Zitron?

  I give him, I give him some credit. If that's their, if that's their reaction to it.

• 1:28:04Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Ed Zitron?

  I'm less, I like, I'm not mad at it. Cause if they're very much like, this is very specific.

• 1:28:10Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Ed Zitron?

  I'm all right with that.

• 1:28:12Speaker 12

  This is my experience at the booth is I went in very hostile, hostile, because I was very hostile. And they didn't necessarily win me over, but I understood why the product exists over time more. And I was like, I, I, yeah, I, I, I, I feel very odd, not odd. I think digital, I think digital necromancy is bad.

• 1:28:32Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 12

  I've every, every CES I've been to, there's, I've done some report on digital necromancy. The fact that it's cloning the voice, I don't love, but the product's not for me, right? It's, I would not want to hear an AI voice of my dead friend. But that is me within I'm, you know, as a Gen Z Canadian American, I don't want this. For some people who are using, using this product, that might help them in certain settings. With an awareness that like you're, this is, you know, and this is an avatar, this is a replica, you're talking to a therapist.

• 1:29:05Ed Zitron?

  I'm not a therapist, but my view on that is like, there are certain things where it's leading you to get to conclusions. And I feel like adding a disembodied digital avatar controlled by a keyboard. I'm like, if this helps someone brilliant, but it's also just like, that's just, it's adding a layer of something. That probably will get in the way of feeling better. Cause it's like, like change comes from within, like.

• 1:29:25Speaker 12

  This is, this is, this is the Gestalt to empty chair technique. That's, that's the therapy technique.

• 1:29:30Speaker 05

  I, I want to raise another point. So Hagen Blix was on This Machine Kills talking about their chat or chat therapists.

• 1:29:39Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:29:39Speaker 05

  And how the, the, the temptation on the firms that are delivering therapy over chat is to pile more chat windows on a single therapist and to get them to multitask and then multi, multi task. And so I'm not saying this firm is doing it. I'm saying that this is a mode of therapy that is uniquely amenable to speed ups that are anti-patient and anti-therapist.

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  I have also a thought, right? Which is when I, I was mostly furious about this until you mentioned this was for extreme scenario, extreme cases of grief. And I was like, okay, can you imagine if someone is so deep in their grief that they wouldn't respond to anything but an avatar?

• 1:30:17Speaker 12

  You need anything.

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  You need anything, but then. I think about like even myself thinking about going through the process of anyone that I that has, you know, a friend died in a car accident two years ago. Like if they the thought of talking to an embodied version of him and hearing his voice just get me out of my grief is already dubious. But then you have to, I was like, oh, but all kinds of therapy, there's a little resistance to that sort of grief therapy anyway. So I was like, I was trying to make my peace with that. Then I remember this is XR. You're gonna have to convince the person who's in extreme grief to put on a headset.

• 1:30:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, just strap this brick to your face. Stop crying for five seconds and strap this brick to your face.

• 1:30:50Ed Zitron?

  Strap yourself in the thingy.

• 1:30:52Speaker 12

  Yeah, this is something that you're gonna, I don't think they're getting convinced into doing this. I think it's something that they will, you know, this is an option that they can choose from. And I think also specifically, this is not like an extended thing. This isn't something you like go to talk to your friend. It's it's it is a it is to give you like a closure. It's a one time like good like like closure exercise.

• 1:31:14Ed Zitron?

  I'm also just like.

• 1:31:16Speaker 12

  That you also have it for a pet. They also have a.

• 1:31:19Ed Zitron?

  Okay, that makes that now I'm now fully against this because now it's like closure isn't always clean. That's why.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  Are they gonna voice clean up the pet?

• 1:31:28Ed Zitron?

  Life is messy, but also you don't get closure on things. Therapy is about finding finding a way through when you don't.

• 1:31:35Speaker 05

  It's a gift you give yourself. It's not a thing you get from someone else.

• 1:31:37Speaker 12

  That's the more like larger like existential resistance that I have to this is.

• 1:31:41Ed Zitron?

  Hearing the pet thing really fills me with angry bile.

• 1:31:43Speaker 05

  Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.

• 1:31:46Ed Zitron?

  No, it's just also like you lost your pet. What the fuck they're seeing like a 3D cat or dog like, I mean.

• 1:31:52Speaker 05

  Canada, one of Canada's most beloved prime ministers, John Diefenbaker, used to go get advice for running the country from his dog's ghost.

• 1:32:01Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  That was dead air there.

• 1:32:03Speaker 05

  It's true.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  What's the, is the pet solution different from the human?

• 1:32:07Ed Zitron?

  Cleveland Browns drafted Johnny Van Seal based on a homeless person's idea. I love this. Tell me everything.

• 1:32:11Speaker 05

  That's all I know. I said, we learned it in history. I was 14 years old. That's all I remember. It's literally the only thing I know about John Diefenbaker.

• 1:32:19Ed Zitron?

  My dog's ghost.

• 1:32:20Speaker 05

  There's a lot of buildings named after him as well, but he did. Did you learn this? Would you grow up in Canada?

• 1:32:24Speaker 12

  I did grow up in Canada.

• 1:32:25Speaker 05

  Did you learn this in ninth grade?

• 1:32:26Speaker 12

  I did not. I know. By then I was already in the States.

• 1:32:29Speaker 05

  Okay, so you didn't get a full year about just the Canadian Pacific Railroad, World War I and John Diefenbaker's dead dog.

• 1:32:34Speaker 12

  We got a little bit of the railroad, but that's it.

• 1:32:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Ed Zitron?

  You missed the year of Canadian education around dog ghosts.

• 1:32:40Speaker 12

  I did, I did miss that one.

• 1:32:43Speaker 05

  We're gonna put them on the new 50, the dog ghost.

• 1:32:45Speaker 12

  That's good.

• 1:32:45Ed Zitron?

  Sado had a lot of them.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 12

  Supreme Leader Carney will get right on that.

• 1:32:52Ed Zitron?

  I just see this stuff and hearing the pet thing, I'm like, because my, my thought process with this was like, okay, extreme situations, but then I'm like.

• 1:33:01Speaker 12

  The pet thing, I don't, yeah.

• 1:33:02Ed Zitron?

  No, I hear pet and I'm like, so it's not extreme situation. Because my thought was, okay, if this is very specific, like deep in the box of tools, we've tried everything. Fuck yeah, okay.

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

  We'll help you with your pet.

• 1:33:14Speaker 12

  The other thing I.

• 1:33:14Speaker 05

  And also if your favorite flavor of ice cream is sold out at Baskin Robbins.

• 1:33:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:18Speaker 05

  We got a model for that.

• 1:33:19Ed Zitron?

  But it's also preparing you, I don't know, some of the most difficult things in therapy for me have been accepting there is no such thing as closure in some cases, you will never have that.

• 1:33:27Speaker 12

  The other thing I don't like about the pet thing is that it is, that is a reoccurring feature. You can visit the.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like you create a space.

• 1:33:33Speaker 12

  More than once.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  Can I, I, I will say now that I'm reading the brochure, um, it is not just about the grief. I think there's parts of this that sound like they make sense, so the Resolve XR part of it, that's talking about the Gestalt empty chair thing. It's also like, not just about grief, but it's about like confronting difficult, like conflict moments. That one I could learn to deal with because like, whenever I'm dealing with like a manipulative talker and I don't know how to like respond and I have these emotional reactions bubble up.

• 1:33:58Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  A bit of practice into dealing with, with, you know.

• 1:34:01Ed Zitron?

  Thing is, you are completely correct. I sound like an L L M there, but this, these are the soft edges where these people work their ways in.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:34:09Ed Zitron?

  It's like, well, there could be a situation where it makes sense. They're not preparing for a situation. If they have, I can revisit my dead dog. They're just like, fuck it, can I say enough of this?

• 1:34:20Speaker 05

  It's a structural problem with small back products, right?

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Also.

• 1:34:23Speaker 05

  You just want to expand the market.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  I'll also point out that on the brochure, this, you should have said it, yeah, but, um. They are calling the grief part of it, good morning with a U. And I'm just like, no.

• 1:34:34Ed Zitron?

  I love having good mornings.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  That's, that's very good.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  What? That, that tells me this is a shit.

• 1:34:40Speaker 05

  Hairdresser, hairdresser's, uh, uh, business name grade pun. Curl up and die. Good morning.

• 1:34:47Ed Zitron?

  Bike shop called Bike Curious. Like, Jesus fucking Christ. That's, that's the thing. I'm really trying here, folks. I'm trying to find some stuff. I'm trying to look not cynically about it.

• 1:34:59Speaker 12

  Well, there's a bajillion AI cooking products.

• 1:35:02Ed Zitron?

  I did see, I did see, we saw one which was just a giant box.

• 1:35:06Speaker 12

  No, they're all boxes and things. You have, you still have to do all the prep work yourself. You still have to assemble the, the ingredients in most cases. It's a, it's, it's, it's an oven. It's like, it's a, it's a quote unquote, smart oven, right? That's all these AI cooking products that like, that like, take the effort out of cooking. You're like, well, yeah, that's just putting something in the oven. Like, it's, you still have to do a lot of work.

• 1:35:25Speaker 05

  It's gonna have hoses that are just full of congealed schmutz.

• 1:35:27Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, at some point, like three days in, it's gonna just be congealed fat.

• 1:35:32Speaker 12

  Cleaning is gonna be a nightmare. It's, it's easier just to cook. Like, it's easy.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  It reminds me of those videos where like the, the influencer is going, these are my simple meals. No cook simple meals. Step one, cut some garlic. And it's just like, no, no, no, you're cooking.

• 1:35:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 12

  No, like this, like you put, put a piece of cardboard in the microwave. Like that's, that's gonna be more efficient if you really wanna live a lifestyle where you don't cook.

• 1:35:53Ed Zitron?

  Hey, enough about British cooking.

• 1:35:54Speaker 05

  I, I just, I just learned about, um, uh, from, from garbage Ryan about, uh, uh, kitchen cells, which is, uh, the Reddit forum for incels who cook elaborate meals and then feel bad about themselves.

• 1:36:07Speaker 12

  That's fun.

• 1:36:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Speaker 12

  Good for them.

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  That's a better name than good morning kitchen cells.

• 1:36:12Ed Zitron?

  Someone else. Uh, it, that's how that was, that was a bitch you think to say, but no, I, wait, so these people are like incels who are just like, I'm gonna make a.

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  So the two varieties are very elaborate meal I cooked with a caption that is just like, I want to die, or like someone who's literally microwaved a piece of cardboard and it's and the caption is I'm a piece of shit.

• 1:36:30Ed Zitron?

  That's funny.

• 1:36:31Speaker 12

  That's funny.

• 1:36:32Ed Zitron?

  That second one is really funny. I mean, it's. Actually, no, the idea of doing like a five course tasting me menu and doing that is actually really good. No, that's pretty. That's, that's, but are they serious or is this?

• 1:36:42Speaker 05

  So this was the thing garbage Ryan said is he wasn't sure to what extent it was a bit. He thinks for some of them it's a bit and for some of them it's not.

• 1:36:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. It's like R slash male living space.

• 1:36:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, like.

• 1:36:52Ed Zitron?

  I love those.

• 1:36:53Speaker 05

  Male living space.

• 1:36:54Ed Zitron?

  I love those where it's just like a TV, a, a, like a high sense TV on top of the box that the high sense TV came in and like an Apple TV and a PlayStation five with like bent cables because like like straight out the box plugs. I love that.

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  My favorite one was the guy who bought a church and he had a, he had a bed and a little table and in, in a church and his, um, his, uh, caption was any suggestions for what else to do with this room.

• 1:37:25Ed Zitron?

  Do an exorcism. I mean, the thing you're gonna do in six months involving a new, sorry, um, but they, it's, it's like, why did you buy a church? There is this guy.

• 1:37:34Speaker 05

  Josh Scully bought a church. They're, they're cheap. Religion is failing in America.

• 1:37:39Ed Zitron?

  I don't know if that's good or bad. Now I did see this guy on Instagram that I've been following for like a while where he bought like a house in a Eastern European country for 5,000 euro and he has put so much money into it, just making it. And he's actually got like walls now. He's like, day 5,000 and buy my 5,000 euro house. My friend could joke, came down and it's just like this Eastern European guy who you could shoot with a gun and it would just bounce the fuck off.

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  Forest the bullet catcher.

• 1:38:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, it's all of these guys who are just like actual work and stuff who are like, this is gonna get me promo because they all make money off of it, which is cool actually. Actually, in a weird way, likely helps the local economy, but it is funny watching just the American guys being like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, infrastructure doesn't work some places. Yeah, I, well, as we wrap up this half an hour section, I'm gonna advertise something now. It's called a stuff buyer. Go to stuff buyer dot biz and whatever you hear next, ignore that URL. That's not where it's stuff buyer dot biz is where you're gonna buy your next products. Thank you, please.

• 1:38:47Speaker 06

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• 1:39:17Ed 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. They 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 fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 1:40:01Ed 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.

• 1:40:17Speaker 07

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• 1:40:49Speaker 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.

• 1:41:04Speaker 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.

• 1:41:15Speaker 08

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

• 1:41:20Speaker 10

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

• 1:41:26Speaker 08

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

• 1:41:49Ed Zitron?

  I am being gang stalked. Welcome back to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron, and we have one of crap with us, of course, journalist, activist, and of course, I was-

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  Author?

• 1:41:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, author. We're keeping it, it's fine. Author Cory Doctorow.

• 1:42:01Speaker 12

  Hello.

• 1:42:02Ed Zitron?

  I'm so sorry.

• 1:42:03Speaker 12

  That's okay.

• 1:42:03Ed Zitron?

  Garrison Davis, if it could happen here.

• 1:42:05Speaker 12

  There's been a white van outside this hotel the entire time.

• 1:42:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and they're only looking for me. Sherrilyn Lowe of Engadget. And we're gonna actually start with some Engadget things. What are Engadget's best of CES? Like, what was the stuff that Engadget actually liked?

• 1:42:19Speaker 03

  I don't know if you'll hate us for this, because we talked earlier in the episode about this. We, as a team, awarded the Lego Smart Play Smart Break system-

• 1:42:27Ed Zitron?

  Totally fine.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  The best in show. It was a show of hands type of vote by the time we had gotten around to the last one. And like, we were doing ranked choice voting too, so like, we had to go around everyone.

• 1:42:36Ed Zitron?

  Very well.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  We were ready to stay. I know, thank you. We were, we've been progressive for a very long time. We- We were dedicated. We're like, however long this takes to find the best in show, we're gonna stay all through the night. And then we got through the first few candidates and we got to Lego and then like more than half, way more than half of hands went up. And we're like, oh, well, good thing we don't need to stay the rest of the night then. It's quite obvious.

• 1:42:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  Um, some quick math was done. So anyway, it, I think the best, Engadget's Best of CES Awards are gonna reflect Engadget's choice, Engadget's taste.

• 1:43:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but that's good.

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  Right. I'm glad. I, I think it, it shows that we're a bunch of childish kids, nerds, and, and that sort of thing. And I, I like that about my team. And also then we had other winners, like you, you'll see our list of winners include things like, um, TVs, laptops, concept devices.

• 1:43:24Ed Zitron?

  I gotta look at this throne toilet mounted health tracker.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  That's not an award, to be clear. That's the weirdest gadgets.

• 1:43:30Ed Zitron?

  That's the, all the coolest tech.

• 1:43:32Speaker 05

  When you said throne, I heard T H R O W N. And I'm like, is it a shuriken?

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  Ed, I love that. I love that you got confused because that's very good feedback for the team that I've been trying to fight with about the headlines.

• 1:43:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that completely confused me because the piss measure.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, put it, I'm just gonna show.

• 1:43:46Ed Zitron?

  You've only been drinking Diet Cokes for seven years.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  That, that will tell you. Uh, we did not give that thing an award.

• 1:43:52Ed Zitron?

  Okay, so your best of CES. I'll, I will stop trying to anticipate your denim on.

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  Ooh, okay. Um, our, I mean, I could, I do that too. Our best of CES includes like the LG wallpaper TV that was shown. There's a very classic CES type of product.

• 1:44:05Ed Zitron?

  What's good about it?

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very thin, very impressive. It just lost that soundbar base that used to be what it came out of. And then there's no cables except for the power cord because it's got the wireless control center that you use.

• 1:44:17Ed Zitron?

  Oh, is that the brick that is kind of?

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, the little, yeah, you could tuck it away out of sight.

• 1:44:20Ed Zitron?

  Low latency.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:22Ed Zitron?

  And I was kind of like, I love that. It's like where, it's like super expensive out of the range of most people, but it, it's cool tech and also, so wait, does the thing go on? It plugs in the wall still?

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  There's still a power cord for the TV itself.

• 1:44:35Ed Zitron?

  But HDMI and such comes out the little box.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  In the wireless and the community.

• 1:44:37Ed Zitron?

  Did you get the price on the wallpaper one or have they not said it yet?

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  I I have had so many numbers.

• 1:44:43Speaker 05

  That's okay, don't worry about it. And do they do the surveillance that is endemic to smart TVs? Or is it like a dumb TV when it comes to sending information about what you're watching back to LG?

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know that either. I had our TV experts cover it. I just know that.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  I mean, Consumer Union, every time they look at TVs, they're like, oh, every one of these is.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 12

  The stuff like the wallpaper TV and the transparent TV aren't even really marketed towards most like homes. Like they're they're kind of for like hotel lobbies or for like.

• 1:45:09Speaker 05

  But the wallpaper TV feels more like.

• 1:45:11Speaker 12

  Business.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  Could be one day.

• 1:45:12Speaker 05

  It feels like more like something.

• 1:45:13Speaker 12

  Eventually.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Speaker 05

  A person might buy rather than the transparent one, which you know what? Keep fucking that chicken. Like, bring that weird shit with you. I love that.

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  I love it. Speaking of weird shit, Lenovo, we this year were like, we really like this thing. We want to give it an award. Let's think about like how.

• 1:45:27Speaker 05

  Which Lenovo?

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  Um, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i rollable concept.

• 1:45:32Speaker 05

  Is that the one that kind of rolls out?

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  It's a gaming laptop, but its screen can expand by rolling out into like 23.8 inches of space. And so you can stop in between a 21.5 inches or so. So you get like different aspect ratios when you're gaming and you just want to like drill in or you want to have Discord show up on the right or whatever.

• 1:45:50Speaker 05

  That's pretty. And the OS knows what to what extent you've unrolled it.

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  And that has always been the trick, right? Not understanding how to place these items on the screen, but it's it's gotten there.

• 1:45:59Speaker 05

  That's cool.

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  So we're very interested in that.

• 1:46:00Speaker 05

  And that's just the concept though for now, right?

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just a concept, but.

• 1:46:02Speaker 05

  But they, last year, they had a concept with the Swivel, which ended up being real.

• 1:46:06Speaker 03

  Actually, the Autotwist they're calling it this year. Yeah.

• 1:46:09Speaker 05

  But it's a laptop?

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a gaming laptop.

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  So this is like butterfly keyboard, but butterfly screen. But it like slowly rolls out.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it rolls out. It's not like a fold out.

• 1:46:17Speaker 05

  Oh, you press a button and it goes.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:46:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, my God, I need to show you a video.

• 1:46:21Speaker 05

  You don't unroll it like.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  No, not by hand. No.

• 1:46:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's, I like that. I also think that we're approaching the point where we're limited by form factors. So that is cool.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:46:31Speaker 05

  I hope they're able to do it in anything approaching a.

• 1:46:34Ed Zitron?

  Affordability.

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. I know that's not.

• 1:46:36Ed Zitron?

  But at the same time, for what, like a decade, we've talked about like rollable screens, pendable screens. It's nice to see that in a consumer tech housing.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  And not janky.

• 1:46:45Ed Zitron?

  And not janky.

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:46:46Ed Zitron?

  It had a little wobble, like Robert Evans mentioned. It has a little bubble, but I'm kind of like, it's a concept.

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  It's a concept. For a concept. I've seen more.

• 1:46:53Ed Zitron?

  For a concept, you're not talking about selling it. I kind of like it. But what else you got on the list?

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  I want to shout out the IXI autofocus slash adaptive eyewear.

• 1:47:01Ed Zitron?

  What's that?

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  So they're not officially at CES. I think they appear should, they dropped in. They were like, let's take some meetings. These are, you know how multifocal slash bifocal glasses right now are very clunky.

• 1:47:11Ed Zitron?

  I don't know that. I don't know that.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  So some people might know, but they get very clunky and very chunky because you have, like, just the technology isn't there yet.

• 1:47:19Ed Zitron?

  I have a stupid question. Bifocal, what is, like, what is this?

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  So the top half, so some people have both nearsighted and farsighted as you age. And so you, one prescription doesn't cut it. You, you need one like, and sometimes they cut your lens so that the top half is for your long sighted. And the bottom half is for you to look at close by things.

• 1:47:36Speaker 05

  That's what I have in this lens.

• 1:47:37Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:47:38Speaker 05

  And it's, mine is progressive, so it's not a sharp line. It gets more magnified the further down it goes.

• 1:47:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  So those are like multifocal.

• 1:47:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:47:45Speaker 03

  So, so IXI has technology. I'm very curious what you think about this, Corey. Um, where it's using a mix of like LEDs around the lens to detect your gaze and where you're looking. And then a liquid crystal lens layer.

• 1:48:00Ed Zitron?

  Wow.

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  That changes the prescription of the lens. So you, whenever you're, wherever you're looking at something, it's just detecting the right prescription. And just working the way it should.

• 1:48:11Ed Zitron?

  Or was there no way to test it?

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  We did see a demo. Our Matt Smith took a demo and he was impressed. We've already interviewed IXI in September. We, we've known this tech was coming, but now they're at CES with a working demo.

• 1:48:22Ed Zitron?

  I love that.

• 1:48:23Speaker 05

  So what I would want to know is like, so this sounds amazing. I, I had cataract surgery last year.

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:48:27Speaker 05

  Uh, and I got what's called, um, oh God, I can't remember, monofocus. So this eye is focused at, uh, Mono vision, rather. This eye is focused at 23 inches. This eye is focused at 25 feet. My brain switches between them depending on what I'm looking at.

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:48:42Speaker 05

  And then this is the only corrective region in my glasses. It's on the distance eye. And it's a close up region so that if I'm reading on this side, I don't have to turn my head.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:48:50Speaker 05

  But I can get, like, I just went skiing without my glasses on for the first time in my life. It's fucking amazing.

• 1:48:54Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:55Speaker 05

  No fog, nothing, like, just so great.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 05

  Scuba diving, just terrific. Um, the thing I'd be worried about as a man who has dropped his glasses 14 million times

• 1:49:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 05

  is what happens when these things fall off your face?

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know yet. I think it has to depend on who they team up with on the like frames as well and how they build these into like retail ready products. I don't have all the details yet because it was a late entrant to our like CS Awards discussions.

• 1:49:21Speaker 05

  It's an amazing idea. But also, as far as That they made it work is incredible.

• 1:49:24Speaker 12

  And is there anything more consumer tech than that?

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Right, right, glasses. And also, one more thing. Spectacle technology, eyeglasses technology hasn't changed, has been stagnant since the 1950s. So for something like this to happen, it'd be cool. And also, imagine getting like one pair of lenses that you theoretically, hypothetically, don't need to keep changing as your eye worsens or changes. That could be sustainable, could be just for your cost, for your budget, that would be great too. So I just think there's so much potential. We're so excited about it.

• 1:49:55Speaker 12

  Really cool. Multiple people could wear the glasses, I guess.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  Could be. I, I can't say because I think for them, they, they can't say things.

• 1:50:02Speaker 05

  I'd love to.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  The FDA needs to

• 1:50:03Speaker 05

  I'd love to know, like, can you put it in, I'm painting D and D minis mode and have it ratchet up?

• 1:50:08Speaker 12

  Like a macro lens, yeah.

• 1:50:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  Hypothetically, why not?

• 1:50:11Speaker 05

  You know, my grandfather was a watchmaker and he wore a jeweler's loop his whole professional life. And he had a, you know, Popeye squint, right? Like, if you could just be like, no, I'm on the job now. I'm fixing a watch movement and it just suddenly zooms up, you know?

• 1:50:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 05

  That'd be pretty dope.

• 1:50:25Speaker 03

  That's so cool. That's just really cool technology. So we were very glad we were able to see it here. And then we, you know, we talked about the wheel move early in the episode. We gave the wheel move, um, an award. We just didn't see enough sustainable slash transport related technologies to have something for those categories.

• 1:50:42Speaker 12

  Well, you literally just

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  There were, there were things. They just weren't good.

• 1:50:46Speaker 12

  No, no, I mean, you didn't have anything you could give an award to. I mean, all those personal helicopters, I think, could serve a great public service. Are there personal helicopters here? Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Did you see Richter?

• 1:50:55Speaker 12

  No.

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  So Richter was from last year.

• 1:50:57Speaker 12

  I talked with Richter last year. There was, I saw two personal helicopters this year. One of them is Richter. Um, yeah, I think, I think we should be giving, giving those out to uh,

• 1:51:06Ed Zitron?

  Me?

• 1:51:07Speaker 12

  No, not to you. You're not, you're not rich enough. Um, I think we should be giving the personal helicopters to like maybe the, the top like point five percent of people. Everyone should have it.

• 1:51:17Speaker 05

  In a room with whirling blades on the ceiling.

• 1:51:19Speaker 12

  Free. No, I think everyone, they should all, we should all, as a, as a victory trophy for you won, you won, you won society.

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  Instead of the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 1:51:27Speaker 12

  Here, we're going to give you this personal helicopter. It's going to work great.

• 1:51:30Ed Zitron?

  It'll be fine. Just fly it as much as you want.

• 1:51:34Speaker 05

  That pairs very nicely with this thing we saw.

• 1:51:37Ed Zitron?

  Oh God.

• 1:51:37Speaker 05

  We saw, we saw a personal airbag for old people worried about breaking their hips.

• 1:51:41Ed Zitron?

  And it sounds like.

• 1:51:42Speaker 12

  Before you fall?

• 1:51:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:51:43Ed Zitron?

  It sounds like a good idea until you learn the details.

• 1:51:46Speaker 05

  Well, the business model.

• 1:51:47Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:51:48Speaker 05

  So the business model is, so if you fall over, they, they call, they call the emergency services.

• 1:51:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53Speaker 05

  That's a $40 a month subscription.

• 1:51:55Ed Zitron?

  Which is like, and I said to the guy, like, is Twilio that expensive? Because like, that's how, you're paying like, like tiny amounts of money for one tech.

• 1:52:03Speaker 12

  There's so many fall detection products here, like.

• 1:52:07Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, there's no fucking way in hell.

• 1:52:09Speaker 05

  And you can't repack the airbag after you use it. So it's, it's a single use.

• 1:52:14Ed Zitron?

  You get two.

• 1:52:15Speaker 05

  $800 for two airbags.

• 1:52:16Ed Zitron?

  What? And 40 bucks a month, otherwise all it does is the airbag thing.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  Then why are you paying?

• 1:52:21Speaker 12

  They're trying to scam money out of people.

• 1:52:23Ed Zitron?

  They're trying to scam it from Medicare.

• 1:52:25Speaker 05

  They were, yeah, they were trying to get Medicare approval. I have to say, as a man who's also had a hip replacement, uh, but two hip replacements, uh, and was the youngest person on the ward when I had it done, that like, you know, a $40 a month subscription from an 80 year old does not generate that much revenue over the entire.

• 1:52:42Ed Zitron?

  You're not gonna, how many months are you gonna be paying the subscription? 40 bucks. Fuck you, man. It's a Twilio thing. That's all. You're just paying Twilio.

• 1:52:51Speaker 03

  Also, then wouldn't you want to like make sure the airbag is repackable? Because then you have a longer subscription.

• 1:52:57Speaker 05

  We don't know if it's gonna work. If the old person with the arthritis repacks it, then we're worried that they'll break a hip.

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  Well, but then, then they stop paying the $40 a month once they deploy it.

• 1:53:06Speaker 05

  Well, their argument is if you get saved from breaking a hip twice in a row, you'll happily buy another set of airbags.

• 1:53:12Speaker 12

  That, that, that may be true.

• 1:53:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but it's just, I'm like, the more I think about it, it's like, oh yeah, it's 40 bucks a month for the texts, which costs like. A tenth of a cent.

• 1:53:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23Ed Zitron?

  Which will also only have happen ideally.

• 1:53:25Speaker 05

  Twice, twice in the life of the product, right?

• 1:53:27Ed Zitron?

  Like ideally never, but if you use them, this will cost them.

• 1:53:31Speaker 05

  So if you own it for 10 years, right?

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. What are you actually paying for?

• 1:53:35Speaker 05

  You've paid several thousand dollars.

• 1:53:37Ed Zitron?

  480 bucks.

• 1:53:38Speaker 05

  Most two taxes.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  And what was upfront cost again?

• 1:53:40Speaker 05

  Eight hundred bucks for two.

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  Eight hundred and then 40 a month?

• 1:53:43Ed Zitron?

  That's right. That's right. And he was like, we're working, there's no Medicare code for this yet. But we're working on it. I'm sure. I'm sure that's all they're working on.

• 1:53:51Speaker 05

  I could see the Medicare case for it, right? If you're starting to get inner ear problems, or if you're old and brittle, or whatever you balance.

• 1:53:58Ed Zitron?

  I can see the point.

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  I can see why Medicare would buy you a set of airbags.

• 1:54:02Ed Zitron?

  Just not the fucking subscription. Fuck you. Like, make the subscription five bucks a month. Like that, even then, you're like, you're still making insane margin.

• 1:54:09Speaker 05

  My guess, these things, they're manufacturing them in small runs. It's costing them more than 800 bucks that they're losing money on the 800 bucks. And they're like, this is how we will make a profit, is we'll sell a loss later and we'll.

• 1:54:21Ed Zitron?

  Sounds like a bad business to me.

• 1:54:23Speaker 05

  It does. Well, it sounds like a case for like, public investment in medical technology.

• 1:54:27Ed Zitron?

  Whoa, whoa.

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  What an awful idea.

• 1:54:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:30Ed Zitron?

  We need more knife drones.

• 1:54:33Speaker 05

  Very true.

• 1:54:33Ed Zitron?

  We need.

• 1:54:33Speaker 05

  Is that what we're calling the person a helicopter now?

• 1:54:35Ed Zitron?

  No, no. No, hey, ideally, in a perfect world. No, the personal helicopters are very safe and you're very rich and you need one.

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:54:44Ed Zitron?

  Hmm. Try them out. You don't need training. There's an app for that. No, you're smart. You're rich. Yeah.

• 1:54:50Speaker 03

  Just let AGI run it. Just.

• 1:54:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:53Speaker 05

  And we've built an obstacle course for it. You can fly it over like lava and acid and broken glass.

• 1:54:59Ed Zitron?

  And you'll be fine. You have the lathe of heaven. You'll be the mandate of heaven even. Sorry.

• 1:55:04Speaker 05

  I like the lathe of heaven.

• 1:55:05Ed Zitron?

  The lathe of heaven. My brain just like, what words do you need? I don't fucking know.

• 1:55:08Speaker 05

  We've just lathed that into existence. That's La Guin, the lathe of heaven.

• 1:55:11Ed Zitron?

  There we go. Yes, thank you. Look for too much farming in Earth, see? Yeah, it's, I'm actually a little sad you don't have more, I'm not saying this is a criticism. It's like, but it's like. Even last year.

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  In those categories, right?

• 1:55:24Ed Zitron?

  But even last year, it felt like there was more yucks.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  There was more stuff we could look at. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:55:30Speaker 12

  More square footage is taken up by the LLM rappers and by robotics.

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:55:35Speaker 12

  Sometimes combined. Sometimes it's a robot.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  Both.

• 1:55:38Ed Zitron?

  Why not both?

• 1:55:38Speaker 12

  That is an LLM rapper.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  Did you see the Project Ava thing by Razor?

• 1:55:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we've talked about the wife tube a lot.

• 1:55:44Speaker 12

  I haven't. I haven't. I haven't seen the Project Ava thing. I have not seen it yet.

• 1:55:47Ed Zitron?

  It's this tube with an LLM in it with a hentai wife.

• 1:55:50Speaker 12

  Okay.

• 1:55:50Ed Zitron?

  And you talk to the hentai wife.

• 1:55:52Speaker 12

  It's like Asuka in there or something.

• 1:55:54Speaker 03

  I don't know the name of the thing. Oh, Kira, I guess is the name of.

• 1:55:58Ed Zitron?

  Project Ava. Kira is apparently some anime thing. And then you can have a guy with tattoos or you can have a woman in a business suit.

• 1:56:07Speaker 12

  Got it.

• 1:56:08Ed Zitron?

  It's like.

• 1:56:08Speaker 12

  Herpes mommy.

• 1:56:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and it's just like, I feel like if you try and, not that they're selling it, it's concept. If you try and buy one, they should put you on a fucking list.

• 1:56:15Speaker 12

  No, I did. I did walk by that really gross sex robot in.

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  Oh, Lovence's Emily, right?

• 1:56:21Ed Zitron?

  I did not see this. Tell me everything.

• 1:56:24Speaker 12

  I had a hard time looking at it. Like, I walked up to the side and I tried looking at its hands. And it just looked like a corpse.

• 1:56:31Ed Zitron?

  Let's start simple. What is this?

• 1:56:33Speaker 12

  This is a robot that looks kind of like a woman.

• 1:56:37Ed Zitron?

  And you mean a, you mean a sexy.

• 1:56:39Speaker 12

  So we're talking real doll style. Yes, okay. And allegedly, this is something that you can have intercourse with.

• 1:56:46Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:56:47Speaker 12

  Um, and I walked up to the side and it has a very realistic looking skin texture. But its head moves like a, like an old Disney animatronic. Um, and it has like an LLM that's 69 nights trying to talk and move its mouth. And I stood there for about 10 seconds and I had to leave. I walked around the corner. And they had the little AI avatar section, which wasn't working because of the wifi.

• 1:57:11Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 1:57:12Speaker 12

  Um, but it's like the AI avatar that you can talk to, which is synced to the little like jackoff robot. So you can, you can, you can talk to talk to the AI and then it can jack you off. That is a hell of a goon cave accessory. Yeah, well, and also the jackoff robot, this company's been around since 2014.

• 1:57:27Ed Zitron?

  Well, handy.

• 1:57:28Speaker 12

  Well, no, this is, this is, this is still the Love Sense.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  Lovence, yeah.

• 1:57:31Speaker 12

  Lovence in both booths. And they've been around for a while. It did not look that good, but yes, but it connects to games as well. It connects to online gaming. So it really is.

• 1:57:43Ed Zitron?

  You ever wanna fuck Tetris?

• 1:57:45Speaker 12

  Well, you know, if they can connect that.

• 1:57:49Speaker 05

  They have been trying to find a way into making the Tetris movie for years.

• 1:57:54Ed Zitron?

  I thought you were gonna be like, they've been trying to fuck Tetris for years, but we never worked.

• 1:57:57Speaker 05

  This is the plot of the Tetris movie, finally.

• 1:58:00Speaker 12

  If they can connect it to like Final Fantasy VII remake and have and have Cloud, then maybe they could have a real product on their hands.

• 1:58:06Ed Zitron?

  Well, maybe they should do that because Cloud has a wonderful cross-dressing section and also Cloud completely autistic and no, not horny at all.

• 1:58:13Speaker 12

  No, I think.

• 1:58:14Ed Zitron?

  That whole game is him trying to avoid having sex.

• 1:58:16Speaker 12

  I think, I think you, I think you would be, would be a great addition.

• 1:58:19Ed Zitron?

  This is so like, but like, I'm not gonna judge him for the sex, but whatever. But it's also just like, the idea that you looked at it and immediately faced revulsion.

• 1:58:26Speaker 12

  It made me feel and not in like, not in just like a Christian moral.

• 1:58:30Ed Zitron?

  Not in a judgment way.

• 1:58:31Speaker 12

  More mostly, well, a little bit, but most mostly in like an uncanny valley way of like, if, if, if, if I was engaged in this thing, it would, it would feel kind of like necrophilia.

• 1:58:42Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God, unrealistic skin is not a phrase that I like saying out loud.

• 1:58:47Speaker 12

  Sex dolls have been a thing for a while.

• 1:58:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  It's just the AI side of it.

• 1:58:50Speaker 12

  It's just the AI thing.

• 1:58:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Speaker 12

  Which, which, but for me, that increases the uncanny valley. If it's just a limp object.

• 1:58:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:58:56Speaker 12

  Then it is a necrophilia thing, but it's simple.

• 1:58:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you're just.

• 1:58:59Speaker 12

  The fact that it's trying to kind of behave human, I think, makes, makes more, makes that reaction, that makes that negative uncanny valley reaction a bit stronger.

• 1:59:08Ed Zitron?

  Very strange. And also they put them in odd places. It sounds like they don't have a, do they have a sex pavilion here?

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  No, not at.

• 1:59:16Speaker 12

  It's in like the health tech sex.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called A to D.

• 1:59:19Speaker 05

  Notoriously, right? There was a bastin show that was rescinded for.

• 1:59:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, bustin' show.

• 1:59:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, for a woman sex toy.

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  That was like, not lioness, it was Laura DiCarlo.

• 1:59:29Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Speaker 05

  And, and so they've had this love hate relationship. I mean, when I was coming 20 some years ago, this was.

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my bot was always a thing.

• 1:59:37Speaker 05

  Well, and it was being held at the same time as the adult show.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  Well, AVN, yeah.

• 1:59:40Speaker 05

  And so people would, there would be this kind of crossover and you could go to the party sometimes at AVN and stuff. You had to see.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  I had to walk past some of the AVN like expo areas and the booths to get to a Lenovo briefing one time.

• 1:59:52Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:59:53Speaker 12

  That rules.

• 1:59:53Speaker 03

  It was fun.

• 1:59:54Speaker 12

  Better times. I'm so sad. I'm so sad I missed it.

• 1:59:57Ed Zitron?

  I, I like the idea that these all these staid kind of like tech executives having to walk past their ass blast the 5,000 or what have you.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  It was fun.

• 2:00:05Ed Zitron?

  Do with their bums is fine. No, it's just very strange to have it like sticking in the middle of like the various health tracking L L Ms. Was it L L M powered by any chance?

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  That was, it says A I powered, yeah.

• 2:00:15Speaker 12

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:00:15Ed Zitron?

  Was it A I or L L M powered? Because.

• 2:00:18Speaker 12

  It's, it's an L L, I mean, it's the, at least like the, the anime one was more interactable.

• 2:00:23Ed Zitron?

  Oh, so that Project Ava was, yeah, I meant the sex box.

• 2:00:26Speaker 12

  No, I'm, I'm talking about that, yeah.

• 2:00:27Ed Zitron?

  Oh, gosh.

• 2:00:28Speaker 12

  And like, it has, it has, it has, it has the A I avatar hooked up to the jacking off machine. Um, and yeah, it is, it is, it is.

• 2:00:35Ed Zitron?

  You got this.

• 2:00:36Speaker 05

  So this is like in the N E S where you had the robot that would pick up those spinning top and it would match the action on the screen. So you had a physical robot, you had a virtual robot. It's just like the original N E S.

• 2:00:46Speaker 12

  Yeah, but basically.

• 2:00:47Speaker 05

  With fucking.

• 2:00:48Ed Zitron?

  Cock hunt.

• 2:00:49Speaker 12

  And it's like, it's like, it's like right next to like three like smart watch booths.

• 2:00:53Ed Zitron?

  That was the thing I was saying. It's like, that's exactly, it's like you've got the Boner, Boner Max 5000.

• 2:00:58Speaker 05

  For the smart watch booth and showing up and it's like, guys, boss, I'm, I'm really sorry.

• 2:01:03Speaker 12

  They have to stare at this next doll the whole, the whole weekend.

• 2:01:06Ed Zitron?

  Uh, yeah, we're right by the Boner Max.

• 2:01:08Speaker 05

  The C M O really wants pictures of the booth frontage before we tear down. Can you make sure you get a picture of this? Try not to get the fuck bought.

• 2:01:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Speaker 05

  In the shot.

• 2:01:17Ed Zitron?

  But, oh.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  That's, but to your point, Corey, the C T A has struggled with what it wants to do with this sex technology because we know that with everything sex sells, right? And sex tech will like advance faster than any other kinds of tech. Forget about people with accessibility needs, right? And so the C T A knows it needs to carve out some space, but it won't give you a dedicated booth because it somehow wants to be family friendly?

• 2:01:38Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  It's so ridiculous.

• 2:01:40Speaker 12

  For all of the kids attending.

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Well, now we've turned into basically the like games fest or the toy fest that's in New York because of all the robots, all the toys.

• 2:01:48Ed Zitron?

  Push back.

• 2:01:50Speaker 03

  I agree with you, though.

• 2:01:51Ed Zitron?

  There's not enough. If you want to make this.

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  We need more fun.

• 2:01:53Ed Zitron?

  The goofy dipshit show.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  It should be.

• 2:01:55Ed Zitron?

  I would love to. I would love to see some useless crap that's just kind of funny.

• 2:01:59Speaker 05

  But that's the international pavilions because they are like the country of Turkey sponsors 20 entrepreneurs to show up. They're each weirder than the last. A lot of them are really delightful.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  Shout out, shout out to the Singapore one.

• 2:02:11Ed Zitron?

  To give them credit, were not toys. They were like, we made. Photonic cell. We made a solar panel thing. We made specific software for this, that and the other, which is awesome and those people rock. Not fun to talk about on a podcast, but very funny to look at and be like, oh, cool. Someone's useful here. And then the rest is just stuff.

• 2:02:29Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:02:30Ed Zitron?

  I, and the listeners are already like, oh, it's ours. You're just saying there's nothing here. Fuck, you fucking come to this and you do a podcast asshole, but it's just frustrating because I love a dude that like, having Michael on to show us the clicks was nice because it was a thingy.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  And it was so cool, actually.

• 2:02:46Ed Zitron?

  And also I really do like it and I love Michael and if it was bad, I would have been in a real, if it was like actually shit, I would have genuinely been sad because I would have had to find a way to trash it.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  I did avoid him for a year after trying the first clicks keyboard.

• 2:02:59Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:01Ed Zitron?

  Brutal.

• 2:03:01Speaker 12

  Clicks, clicks was that show, was that, we're showstoppers again this year.

• 2:03:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we, we just had Michael on and we like the clicks thing. Personally, the case not for me.

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:03:10Ed Zitron?

  But nevertheless, it's like, at least you fucking tried. And the other thing that pisses me off is clicks proves that other people could just, because Android can fit into all sorts of things. You could be trying all sorts of weird fucking smartphone shit.

• 2:03:23Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:03:24Ed Zitron?

  You could have weird, like a tube smartphone. We've got all kinds of tubes at this one. We have a smartphone tube. But no, it's like, how do we charge you for using the chat GPT API?

• 2:03:34Speaker 05

  I mean, there was a time where you go to like Guangzhou and you go to the big mall and there'd be the phone that was shaped like a Marlboro package.

• 2:03:40Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:03:41Speaker 03

  Or Sun Tzu, yeah.

• 2:03:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And that shit rocks. We should have more of that. But no, it's like, it's, it feels like the most nihilistic CES ever. It's just people being like.

• 2:03:50Speaker 03

  I fear it gets worse from here. I fear this is the beginning.

• 2:03:54Ed Zitron?

  So my theory is it actually gets better from here, but it gets, the apocalypse is so much worse. Because if you look at this and you realize how much L L M crap there is.

• 2:04:02Speaker 03

  Yes, then they'll realize.

• 2:04:03Speaker 12

  I think this is a, I think this is a dip here.

• 2:04:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like this will be because Corey, to your point, oh, the commodity of L L Ms. Just because the Chinese models are cheap, but doesn't mean that they're margin positive.

• 2:04:15Speaker 05

  That's also true.

• 2:04:16Ed Zitron?

  Zupi, Zujin, I forget which one went pop, went public and they like lost, they spent $300 million in or 200 and something million dollars in six months and made $27 million in revenue. Not great.

• 2:04:27Speaker 05

  I could do that.

• 2:04:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I mean, like I could, if you want me to lose $200 million, call me, I'm.

• 2:04:32Speaker 05

  Well, look, if you have $3 million and you're expecting a 20 some million dollar return, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a $28 million return.

• 2:04:39Ed Zitron?

  Nice. How would you do it?

• 2:04:40Speaker 05

  I will just keep all the 28 million.

• 2:04:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, right, right. Okay.

• 2:04:44Speaker 05

  28 million back to you.

• 2:04:45Ed Zitron?

  No, it's like investing in like vineyards.

• 2:04:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:04:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. No, it's, and it's like, all of these companies that rely on LLMs are going away because they're going to get more expensive. And it's going to be apocalyptic. I think 2027 could be like a really fucked up year for many reasons, but CES 2027.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  Might be really fun.

• 2:05:02Ed Zitron?

  Might be really, but.

• 2:05:03Speaker 05

  You just reminded me what I wanted to talk about before, uh, which is Pete Warden. We were talking about him yesterday. So Pete Warden is an old school hardware hacker specializing in machine learning. And, and finding cool, like one of the people who was like figuring out that you could use GPUs to do machine learning a million years ago. And he just demoed on his blog, uh, a local AI voice agent running on a system on a chip that costs less than $10. Uh, so he's got an SOC, it's like an $8 SOC.

• 2:05:32Ed Zitron?

  You could put in whatever.

• 2:05:33Speaker 05

  You, you, the demo he built was a button you that on your dishwasher and you smack the button and you say, my filter is clogged. And it goes through the manual and it finds the relevant.

• 2:05:42Ed Zitron?

  Which is just on the chip.

• 2:05:43Speaker 05

  And, and it's all on chip. And we are, again, total cost of goods under $10.

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  He built a whole model for this? Is his own model?

• 2:05:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:52Speaker 03

  And it, all it does is reference a manual?

• 2:05:53Speaker 05

  All, that is the kind, that is the scale of task it can do. So he can.

• 2:05:58Speaker 03

  That's why it's so light and small.

• 2:05:59Speaker 05

  Do other kinds of tasks, but he's like, I can build you an $8 SOC with a model running on it that will help you build your IKEA furniture, whatever. All this kind of, there's a lot of room at the bottom here is what I'm saying. And he has this other post, when I was looking for the post, I found another one, which the title says it all. I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me. emoji. So here's a guy who does real things that are absolutely sustainable. Like, could you be revenue positive shipping AI models that run on hardware that costs less than $10? I bet you fucking could.

• 2:06:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Speaker 05

  Right? And, and, and like, everyone's like, yeah, but the way we raise money is from punters who don't understand the technology and whose only way of assessing the upside is how much money we spend on it. This is the pile of shit big enough has a pony underneath it.

• 2:06:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 05

  And so we have to spend a lot of money to prove to them that we will make a lot of money if we show them a thing that is profitable because it's very cheap to make. They'll be like, well, there's no upside.

• 2:06:58Ed Zitron?

  I'm just really worried because even in the Indiegogo years, Indiegogo was not everything. This is like, AI has taken everything and people, anyone listening to this being like, AI is this or that and the other and like, AI is taking over. No.

• 2:07:12Speaker 03

  The thing I can remember that most closely mirrors this year was the year that was about the internet of things. Everything was internet of things. It was so freaking annoying. I was so annoyed. I was just like, stop saying fucking internet of things. I'm tired.

• 2:07:24Ed Zitron?

  What's the term?

• 2:07:25Speaker 05

  Internet of shit?

• 2:07:26Ed Zitron?

  No, the beacons. I think I had eye beacons one million times. Like, we'll put an eye beacon.

• 2:07:32Speaker 03

  That year, I wanted to vomit.

• 2:07:33Ed Zitron?

  Like fucking Howard, we'll put an eye beacon here. Like, it's fucking ridiculous.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  And where has it gone?

• 2:07:39Ed Zitron?

  Nowhere.

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  It's just our home now.

• 2:07:41Ed Zitron?

  No, it was just like Mad Libs, like 5G autonomous.

• 2:07:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:07:45Ed Zitron?

  IoT, Bluetooth.

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  But, but IoT is as, is similar in the sense that like, it's also wrappers for things. It's also like small little gadgets that don't do much and they're all E-waste now. It doesn't cost as much because of the like, none of the LLM side of it.

• 2:07:59Ed Zitron?

  Because there's not a GPU service running in the fucking cloud for it. It's just very unfortunate. I think next CES could be kind of barren because of this because it's very like, if there were other options, they'd be buying boots and I don't think there are.

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  Or maybe they were like priced out because there was so much AI stuff.

• 2:08:16Speaker 05

  That's very possible.

• 2:08:17Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, it didn't, it looked kind of sparse too. Like, there was a lot more walking room than ever. I, I feel like.

• 2:08:23Speaker 05

  2003 after the dot com crash was pretty good.

• 2:08:25Ed Zitron?

  This is actually, how was it?

• 2:08:27Speaker 05

  It was full of people doing weird and interesting things, none of which made a, a mark, I think. But it was a, it was a time in which if you came to CES, it was because you had. Done something very improbable in a time in which there was no tech money.

• 2:08:44Ed Zitron?

  That might be 2027 for real though, because even like LG with this Claude robot, it's like, hey, check this out. We're doing this thing. Well, we're not doing this thing. And you may be wondering if it does the thing we're talking about. It doesn't. But it's very slow at it. And why do you want this? Well, you can't have it.

• 2:09:03Speaker 03

  I have a question for you.

• 2:09:04Ed Zitron?

  By all means.

• 2:09:04Speaker 03

  When you say as far as do you mean specifically some halls, some booths or LVCC?

• 2:09:09Ed Zitron?

  The top of the expo center was fucking empty. And I don't just mean like it's the last day. It's, I mean, like, there were just less things. There was less density. The usual dildo battery, security camera area was really not present in the main hall in the same way. In fact, I found way more of those topside in a way that like I wouldn't usually. It's just very strange. And I think there's a strain on venture capital money and private equity money.

• 2:09:33Speaker 05

  Well, South by Southwest last year, the tray floor was a quarter of the size. And there was an entire row that was just massage guns.

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:09:41Ed Zitron?

  I saw a, I saw a area of the Palazzo where gambling would usually happen that was completely empty. That's more worrying to me than any.

• 2:09:50Speaker 05

  I saw that spot. Yeah. With the velvet ropes around it and they're like vacuuming.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  I, I, I wondered, the reason I asked you is, the reason I asked you is because the West Hall and the LVCC Central Hall got this whole facelift. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Yeah, the Central Hall, right, this year?

• 2:10:06Ed Zitron?

  Does it look different? It is kind of a slot to me.

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  Different from last year. It is still kind of a slot, but because Central Hall is where Samsung and LG used to have their gigantic booths.

• 2:10:14Ed Zitron?

  But Samsung isn't there.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  Right. Samsung isn't there. It's doing the win. So I think that contributes to feeling like there's not that much going on in the convention spaces. Especially since Central Hall now too, with the sort of remodel, looks much bigger. And so, you know, consequently it looks emptier and then has a lot more like glass windows letting in light, which I love.

• 2:10:32Speaker 05

  It's nice.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  It's nice, but then also makes you feel like you can see daylight and therefore it doesn't feel as packed and crowded and like.

• 2:10:39Ed Zitron?

  And on top of the fact that a lot of things are just like.

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  Gone, the LG wall display, you know, it's gone.

• 2:10:44Ed Zitron?

  LG was so muted this year. Usually there's like this, like last year, we had that giant transparent motherfucker.

• 2:10:50Speaker 12

  I like, I like the year with the big like curved screen.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  Yes, the camion of walls of, of screens.

• 2:10:55Ed Zitron?

  There's no spectacle unless you're a tractor.

• 2:10:57Speaker 03

  There's none, yeah.

• 2:10:58Ed Zitron?

  It's just, I feel like, I feel like we're years into just the hubris fest where it's just like, what if we didn't provide anything useful and jump to the latest trend? It's a shame. And as we come to the end of this first two hour block, I will just say, I want to find cool stuff. And when we're back next year, which we will be, I hope we find more of it. And if you are someone with the CEA, when you're someone putting stuff here, please think of actual people because it's getting a little sad. But final words, Sheldon, what, what, what is your takeaway from this CES in general? Big question.

• 2:11:31Speaker 03

  Huh. Yeah, I thought I had something to say and it's out of my brain now. So I think I've run out of RAM, which everyone will this year.

• 2:11:37Ed Zitron?

  Well, everyone's running out. DaVinci was just on talking about the RAM crisis. But thank you for joining us. Thank you for having so many Engadget people on. We've had, we had Chris.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  Thanks for having them on, yeah.

• 2:11:45Ed Zitron?

  And no, it's fucking great to like actually talk about consumer electronics. And we've of course had Garrison Davis from It Could Happen Here. Thank you, Garrison.

• 2:11:51Speaker 12

  Of course.

• 2:11:52Ed Zitron?

  And Cory Doctorow will be joining us for the next episode as well.

• 2:11:55Speaker 05

  Excellent. Looking forward to it.

• 2:11:56Ed Zitron?

  And I am Ed Zitron. You can please subscribe to my newsletter. Good lord, I'm not doing a premium this week, so I need the money. But more important than that, of course, our dearly departed Sean Paul Adams, who's a friend of the suite, friend of the show, passed last year. We're honoring him by getting you to donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. His son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate your donations. Thank you for listening. We'll be back for one more two hour episode today, but I guess it'll be towards the end of the day. Either way, thank you for listening. You've all been so wonderful. Send me your feedback. Go to the Reddit. I'm Ed Zitron. Goodbye.

• 2:12:35Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 2:13:08Speaker 13

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