Better Offline CES 2025: Day 3 - Pt. 1

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Venetian with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In the second episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Jesse Farrar and Michael Hale of Your Kickstarter Sucks, Henry Casey of CNN Underscored, Max Cherney of Reuters, Matt Binder of Mashable, Tom McKay of ITBrew and journalist Ed Ongweso Jr. to talk about trying to find something useful that AI does in a show where everybody uses AI so liberally that it's effectively stopped meaning anything. Your Kickstarter Sucks: https://www.patreon.com/yourkickstartersucks Jesse Farrar: https://bsky.app/profile/jessefarrar.com Michael Hale: https://x.com/dogboner Ed Ongweso Jr: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social Max Cherney: https://www.reuters.com/authors/max-a-cherney/ Matt Binder: https://bsky.app/profile/mattbinder.bsky.social Henry Casey: https://bsky.app/profile/henrytcasey.net Tom McKay: https://bsky.app/profile/catturd2.bsky.social --- 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 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 02

  Every small business owner has that one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three. Listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:20Ed Zitron?

  When I was a young boy, my father, he took me to the Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show and he left me here for days. Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitman.

• 1:43Ed Zitron?

  And we are back talking about the Consumer Electronics Show. I slept five hours yesterday, so I was a little low energy. Today, I am way higher energy. So this is what you have to expect today. But I'm joined by another dynamic coterie of guests. On my left here, I have Tom McKay, senior reporter at IT Brew. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  Awesome. It's great to be here.

• 2:04Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. And across from me, I have Jesse Farrar of Your Kickstarter Sucks. Hello. I I have loved YKS for years, but also tell people a little bit about what YKS is because it's so germane to the show.

• 2:17Speaker 06

  Well, thank you. Um, you know, it's, uh, I guess it has morphed into something that is a tech skeptic show, um, you know, which you're familiar with and it's, um, it wasn't supposed to be that. It was supposed to be about crowdfunding, but what happens when we get sucked into these worlds? You know, you often find, you know, maybe there's some more here than I really thought and such is the way of crowdfunding because now it's, um, it's mostly AI stuff or it's, um, you know, a little robot that spins around on a wheel and says, how you doing or whatever. So, uh, so most of the time, okay, that was a bad example because obviously that's awesome and we all want that. But so much of this, there's a big overlap, I guess, between, uh, bad tech and what's on our show.

• 2:59Ed Zitron?

  And you got a lot of your start as well was talking about just the shit that people were promising on crowdfunding campaigns.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's what that's like. It shares like a particular DNA with CES, which we were talking a little bit earlier before we got started, which is, um, hey, I remember the stuff from last year and then you show up and it's not here, right?

• 3:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  And also it's not anywhere and that's what Kickstarter is, right? There's somebody who says, what if we did this? And you go, well, I don't know, man. I mean, I guess try it. And they go, okay. And then nothing happens after that at all. And the only record of it sometimes is our stupid show saying how much it sucks. So.

• 3:32Ed Zitron?

  So really doing like pure journalism there.

• 3:34Speaker 06

  It's anthropology as well, Ed. I, you know, I don't want to sell it short, but yeah.

• 3:39Ed Zitron?

  All right. So on my right, I have Henry Casey, electronics writer at CNN underscore. Henry, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. So a lot of your stuff is just you, you have one of the more honest jobs, I would say of the people that we've had on so far, which is not meant to sound like an insult, though it does.

• 3:56Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 3:56Ed Zitron?

  In the sense that you're just like, I'm gonna look at stuff. Like, it's not like you're doing like a trend piece. It's like, I'm gonna look at some stuff that sounds or looks away.

• 4:04Speaker 07

  Is it something that is either gonna be released and has a price? Or likely to be likely to be released and has a price? But well, we're all afraid of tariffs, so we're not gonna give a price yet. Or is it really cool? And you're gonna wanna click on it? And I'm sorry that we're gonna say this is a concept. We're gonna tell you that upfront. Those are the three categories of what I do. But for mostly, I'm product reviews guy. I am, I, we have a customer, we have an audience. It's like, oh, I wanna get something that improves X, Y, or Z. And that's how I get to not cover stuff that isn't gonna help anybody or anything. And how I got to avoid talking about the rabbit last year because it didn't have any germane this to anybody.

• 4:44Ed Zitron?

  And you made a point before we got on as well. So the rabbit R1, for people that don't know, is this little box that promised to you could be like, oh, I need a McDonald's and I need a chicken nugget from McDonald's. And then you talked into it and the nugget would appear. Except, by the way, in the launch of the rabbit, when he tried to do this, it broke. Of all the shit to do like a live demo of your very broken thing. And it turned out that behind the scenes, all it was was triggering like these scripts. Nothing from rabbit this year, but also nothing like rabbit this year. No one has done a big quasi lie. No one's just come up with a fake thing that they're selling, which is very disappointing. I was looking for some dog shit.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, you normally, in these times, I find, you know, we look to the helpers. And so I looked for Will I Am and I found him. And I was able to take a creep shot of him from really far away. So if that helps anybody, I'd be happy to share. But it doesn't seem like even Will I Am had something. It was like a speaker thing or some kind of headphones, right?

• 5:40Speaker 07

  Like seven speakers and a little bit of headphones with LG. They had an event, I didn't get a code to it last night. But yeah, they're doing a whole partnership.

• 5:48Speaker 06

  That's great. I feel like maybe, I don't know, is, maybe this is too cynical. I almost feel like we're good on speakers. I think maybe I have enough ways to like play music in my house. And I probably don't need to iterate on that anymore. But these guys didn't get the message on that for sure.

• 6:03Ed Zitron?

  So Tom McKay, so IT bro, what are you doing here? What are you actually looking into? Because it seems like you might have a slightly different remit.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  So I mostly cover enterprise technology. So I'm here. Mostly to cover, you know, what there is of the B to B segment here.

• 6:18Ed Zitron?

  What have you seen?

• 6:19Speaker 05

  Cybersecurity stuff. Uh, I don't know. Uh, yesterday I interviewed, uh, a guy, uh, Brandon Lucha, who does this, uh, company called Efficient Computing or Efficient Computer. Uh, it, you know, dramatically lowers the power requirements of processing stuff.

• 6:35Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's actually useful.

• 6:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:37Ed Zitron?

  That doesn't feel like.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  I, I mean, uh, and I've spent a lot of time just wandering around the floor. Uh, the AI pavilion is baffling and horrifying.

• 6:45Ed Zitron?

  Is that in the LVCC?

• 6:47Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, that's the, that's a big LG one where they have, uh, I forget if it's LG's brand name, but there's like one that's like, they're rebranding it as affectionate intelligence. And it's just absolute dog shit.

• 6:58Ed Zitron?

  What does that mean?

• 6:59Speaker 05

  Uh, well, from what I can see, there's like a big board you go in there or a big TV when you go in there. And it's like playing CGI clips of like a family being like, it's cold today. What should I cook? And the fridge starts talking. It's like, wow, I suggest.

• 7:14Ed Zitron?

  The fuck?

• 7:15Speaker 05

  I know. And it's like, or like, there's another clip that plays on it where it's like a girl like tossing a baseball. And the dad's like, I need recommendations for TV. And low and behold, the TV recommends baseball clips.

• 7:27Ed Zitron?

  What I love about this as well is the assumption that, that there are assumptions being made by people that have not talked to a person in some time. They're just like, they're just like, what the fuck do dads do with their daughters? Do they throw a ball? I, I guess.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  But it's also like the AI is like baby talking adults. It's, it, it feels insane.

• 7:47Ed Zitron?

  I'm sure we all walk up to the fridge and go, well, there's one thing in there. It's a pack of ham. I don't know if it's 10 days or 10 weeks old. Maybe I could make dinner with that. But also I don't know who, who is walking up to fridge and going like, man, I wish someone would tell me what to make with all this fridge.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  See, I wish the fridge would tell me, don't eat that. It's been there for seven days, but none of this does that.

• 8:09Ed Zitron?

  No, because that's an actual problem.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:11Ed Zitron?

  Versus, there, there's no bachelor fridge. I did, however, see a bachelor dishwasher, a dish. So this is really funny.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  Wait, it's marketed as for bachelors?

• 8:20Ed Zitron?

  It should be. It's a five second dishwasher. So I walked up and this is, this is very me. I walked up and go, all right, how much is that? 400 bucks? I'm like, okay. I'm like, is it out here? He's like, only in China right now, coming next year. And I said, all right, can you show me? And he puts a plate in there. I'm like, can you put the dirty one? He's like, oh, I'm already doing this one. I'm like, well, it's pretty short. And he just like stares there and goes, okay, well, I'm going to put this one in. I'm like, okay, so the clean one. And he goes, so I'm like, how long? Five seconds. Like, great. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And the guy's just like, oh, God. Cause no one's walked up and timed it.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:56Ed Zitron?

  And, and he just like, looked at me like, ah, yes, just, it's a dish. I'm like, no, this is great. It's for like, like sad guys, right? And he just, he goes, I, sure. He's like, this, this guy's already out timed the machine.

• 9:08Speaker 06

  So it cleans a single plate at a time?

• 9:10Ed Zitron?

  No, you can do like a few, but it actually looked like genuinely, I was like, I could see using this, but the reason I choose the bachelor thing is who is cleaning like three plates? Like, it's like, but also absolutely.

• 9:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:22Ed Zitron?

  Like this is like when you're making one sad meal for one sad gentleman, talking about myself. And, uh, yeah. But that what's weird was that's arguably one of the most useful things I've seen.

• 9:32Speaker 06

  Appliances are useful. Like we've, we, yeah, we figured out, okay, it's good when you wash the dish or you make the food or whatever. So like, we're all on board with how to do that kind of stuff. So if they put a different screen on it, you're going to get me to stop. I'll look at the new screen on the fridge.

• 9:47Ed Zitron?

  I really do like all the AI screen stuff though. Like, but also it's just like, they haven't worked out why screens are useful either.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's also a problem.

• 9:55Speaker 07

  I do, in theory, like the idea of like, tell me what I could make with this because I make the same sheet pan dish a lot. And if I could have a thing that could tell me, hey, here's a new thing you could make with some of these ingredients, just get one new thing.

• 10:07Speaker 06

  But you're saying you already have the ingredients?

• 10:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. What, or like, it could suggest, hey, half these ingredients, get this other thing, make this other dish. Somebody that pushes you to be more creative with what you do.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 07

  These things are all taking over our imagination. Correct? That's what the whole gimmick is. AI is imagination that executives can buy and outsource human work to.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 10:27Speaker 07

  That's, that's the message that nobody's saying about AI.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 07

  Like, help me be a more adventurous cook.

• 10:34Speaker 06

  But it starts with telling you before you go to the store though, right? You can't, there's no world where you have, like, you don't have like leaks in your fridge and like, what am I going to do with all these leaks? Like you fucking bought the leaks, right?

• 10:45Speaker 07

  Oh, no, yeah. There are leaks in the sheet pan, I'll tell you.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, you know what? Leaks are good. So bad example by me.

• 10:51Ed Zitron?

  Well, I don't like them, so.

• 10:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 10:54Ed Zitron?

  It's all right. Well, I'll see you later then.

• 10:56Speaker 06

  The tension here is like palpable.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  Who doesn't like leaks?

• 11:00Speaker 06

  Feels like there's a team leak and like a team anti-leak.

• 11:04Ed Zitron?

  So I did see one thing I like, though. And I think it confused them because so I found, so you know those golf simulators where you knock the ball into a screen and it has like sensors, they had one for baseball.

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 11:16Ed Zitron?

  So it was all of these like Korean guys and I walk up like, how you doing? And they're like already just like British guy.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  This guy doesn't know anything about baseball.

• 11:25Ed Zitron?

  And I absolutely did. So I'm like, have you got partnerships with the KBO? And they're like, oh, uh, like, does this work? Is this like hit track? So to explain some baseball tech for you, it's actually fucking cool. If you go to like local batting cages, Z cages here in Vegas, just doing ads, they did not pay me. In fact, I pay them and they're very hard to schedule with sometimes. Anyway, what they have is this thing called hit track. So when you hit it, it sees the velocity of the ball and like where you hit it and such. And this stuff's fairly easily available. This thing, the thing is it requires an actual bat in case you build around. This one is kind of like the golfing thing. It's like 15 grand and they're like, hey, you could buy one. I'm like, no, no, no. But I, and I was like, this is the only thing I'd like to see. Yes. And they seemed so happy. They seemed genuinely happy.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:07Ed Zitron?

  And then they really wanted to sell me one. I was like, I can, and then they seemed less happy.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  Are they trying to sell it to people or to like bars?

• 12:13Ed Zitron?

  They're trying to sell it to teams and, and I assume like dying looking British men.

• 12:19Speaker 06

  Right.

• 12:19Ed Zitron?

  And sadly that's a very small market there, but that was really cool. And it's like, I did get this feeling walking around. I've spent the day in the Venetian expo hall. So the one right connected to the Venetian. I did get this weird feeling though. CES gets done dirty because most of CES is so fucking boring. It's, but not in a bad way. It's like more efficiency driving battery technology, mobility for this, like, and urine sensors and such. And I wanted to make, if I saw urine and naturally I'm just like, huh, photo. I'm like, oh, wait, this is useful.

• 12:51Speaker 06

  And it's good to look at pee. Yeah.

• 12:52Ed Zitron?

  I love to. I love looking at the piss.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:55Ed Zitron?

  But then you get.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  They gave me one of the pee test kits. I haven't used it yet.

• 12:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  I gotta see how my phosphates are, I guess.

• 13:00Ed Zitron?

  I was walking out of a CES once and I saw like an AI semen.

• 13:05Ed Zitron?

  It's like, and I really wanted to walk over like, hey, you wanna, can I have a go?

• 13:08Speaker 05

  There is actually, I saw a booth that's like selling like, I guess it's a machine that like measures your sperm motility or something. And you know, I, I don't think they were doing product on site, but who knows?

• 13:22Ed Zitron?

  Well.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  I didn't see if there's a little booth in the corner.

• 13:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, can I just, I got some with me. But also, I did see a few things that really bothered me. And there was one where they had this VR glasses thing and it said, "A new hope for autism and dyslexia." I'm gonna be talking about this a few times on this show, move a VR. And I walk over, I'm like, "Hey, um, so have you talked to the FDA about this?" And the woman goes, "What's that?" "What?" Which is a good start. And I'm like, "Okay, well, they're the ones you'd have to work with to make this legal in America." "Oh, we're not a medical device." I'm like, "Oh, okay." "So how is this good for autism?" "Well, it's great for autism and dyslexia." I just pause and I go, "So I have someone in my family with autism," so I started getting a little bit pissed off.

• 14:10Ed Zitron?

  And I was like, "Okay, do you think those are the same things?" And she said, "No, they're different." "How?" Pause again, I go, "What clinical trials have you done?" "I, well, we've done clinical trials." I'm like, "Where? Where? France." I'm like, "Oh, what are you talking about?" And just to be clear, the classic thing that autistic people love is putting new things on and new experiences. And this thing was, by the way, you put the glasses on and you had to move a character through letters to like, do something.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Okay, uh huh.

• 14:42Ed Zitron?

  And let me just be clear, this person who I talked to clearly had not been asked a single question in their life. Because they were very confused that I kept saying, "What do you, how does this help autistic people?" And they're like, "They do, they play the game." And I just wanna say, if you are on this floor and you have anything to do with autism and I find you, I'm putting you on this fucking show and I'm putting your arse on fucking blast. Because it's disgusting.

• 15:08Speaker 06

  I have noticed, um, not through Kickstarter, well, some through Kickstarter, but um, the impulse to take it easy on the devices or products or whatever that are ostensibly for people who need help in various areas is like, that's tempting, right? To say like, "Oh, cool, somebody's trying to figure something out." But a lot of times, they're so much worse than just the normal jack-off tech, uh, that it feels bad to evaluate them at all.

• 15:35Speaker 07

  Wasn't this the thing that Lena Condon, you were talking about, Ed, about how like, "Oh, we're in a new area of technology. We want, we want less criticism. We want, we want more protection, less scrutiny."

• 15:44Ed Zitron?

  And this one is just a bit, and you're right, Jesse, there is a lot of stuff here where it's just like, "Oh yeah, we're helping people, so give us a break, okay." Now, I talked with Ben Wolf, who's a friend of the show, and he, he sent a quote through about this company. He said, "Where I think they're utterly full of shit is the other testimonial on the website, MoveVR. The principles of the experience offered by MoveVR is to address the visual constraints found according to the TVPS4 manual. In diagnosed learning disorders such as dyslexia, ADHD, and DCD, this is frankly crap. Dyslexia is enormously variable and immersive environments are nonsensical, quote, 'treatment,' he's doing little air quotes around that. ADHD has no reason to be mechanicalistically vulnerable to this kind of intervention." The point is that none of these people talk to any fucking scientists, and the tech media

• 16:29Ed Zitron?

  needs to go and harass them, because you should not be able to come onto this floor and feel safe. Okay, I don't mean physically. Uh, from criticism, there we go, that covers that. Um, because it just really bothers me, and a lot of what's in the expo hall in the Venetian is this stuff. There's so much health stuff. It's, we were talking about yesterday. It's disgusting. Oh, you guys love health? Yeah, I love, no, I want to diet, like, just, "We will kill you, Inc."

• 16:56Speaker 07

  Like, you've been asked, like, "Yo, talk about something you're excited and happy about with tech." That, um-

• 17:00Ed Zitron?

  The baseball thing.

• 17:01Speaker 07

  And the workout, the, you've been-

• 17:03Ed Zitron?

  I haven't seen any workout shit.

• 17:05Speaker 07

  But you, but you post your, like-

• 17:06Ed Zitron?

  All the time, yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:08Ed Zitron?

  Get jacked.

• 17:08Speaker 07

  That stuff is the stuff, I'm like, I'm using the supernatural VR thing.

• 17:12Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 17:13Speaker 07

  That's actually getting my heart rate up, and I see the chart and whatever, and it's a suitable alternative to going to the gym. It's a, to avoid the weirdos. It's, there is good stuff out there to get healthy in tech, but it's, the Venetian floor is really condensed and too tight to make any sense of, unless you're a team of 25 people, and The Verge doesn't have a 25-person health team.

• 17:37Ed Zitron?

  They got Victoria Song, one of the best. She's great. She's one of the best.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  I love Victoria.

• 17:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, she's got one of the single best. She's like the remaining wearable reporter. She's so good. And now here's the thing, I'm just going to read you what this company, Wish Tales AI, had on that thing. Oh, no. Empowering creators and consumers with multimodal AI. The iPhone turned anyone into a photographer. Wish Tales empowers everyone to be a creator. I could not make heads or tails of what this company did. I do not know. They just did music, art, automations, create multimodal AI videos in Mins in 28 languages. And it just says ignite multimodal creativity. Imagine if they had any quality control here.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  I mean, this just sounds like stuff the iPhone already does.

• 18:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but also you create multimodal video. No, you don't. What model are you fucking talking, these people?

• 18:24Speaker 06

  The iPhone is mostly single modal, right? So that's like a huge, because if you do more of the modals, then won't that be like better and stuff?

• 18:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Not like a hundred modals going right now?

• 18:34Speaker 06

  That's insane. That's like really cool.

• 18:36Ed Zitron?

  I'm spinning them up.

• 18:37Speaker 05

  I don't believe that's possible.

• 18:38Ed Zitron?

  Anything is possible if you lie. Uh, so Tom, but you've been looking at enterprise stuff. Is there anything good? Is there any, any joys?

• 18:47Speaker 05

  I mean, uh, for the most, I mean, like, uh, this is mostly, you know, consumer electronics. I've been like going around, like, there's, uh, a lot of interesting drones that are intended for, I guess, like the B to B market.

• 18:58Ed Zitron?

  Interesting how?

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Like in industrial, um, scanning and stuff. That's interesting. I mean, the big themes this year are AI and robotics, I think. Uh, there's just a lot of.

• 19:08Ed Zitron?

  There's so many robots.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  I mean, it's funny that, so I, I, I forget what it's called, but I saw this one drone that's like, uh, I don't know, tetrahedron, I don't know, the big, uh.

• 19:17Ed Zitron?

  I don't know sphere.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  It's like a sphere with like, uh, I can't, I can't remember the name of the shape, but yeah, it's like a sphere and it rolls around and then it can also fly. But I was talking with the guys that made this and I was like, all right, so, you know, what's, what's the application of this? And he's like, actually, we're here to, you know, get ideas. It's what the potential applications are. And I'm like, you built this before, like coming up with a business plan?

• 19:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we're pre, we are pre reason.

• 19:44Ed Zitron?

  We just, we just.

• 19:45Speaker 05

  I mean, the, the only thing they had was like, they gave me a brochure where it was like a little diagram of a pile of rocks. And, uh, they like, it just said, search and rescue. And then it had a picture of a tube and it's like industrial inspection. And I'm like, okay, I guess if you have a really big tube that you need inspected, this is great.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  I love, I love rolling down large tubes. I hope there's not any corners.

• 20:10Ed Zitron?

  All the fellas.

• 20:11Speaker 07

  Tube guys are eating good this year, CES.

• 20:14Ed Zitron?

  All my tube issues. I'm glad my tube's gonna be sorted by the end of this trip. Ah, this is a bad location to be. Um, I also got this, every CES I do look up names, I have a lot of fun looking at names. I found one called Skipper. And the AI smart stethoscope. Um, and, uh, when I showed this to Phil, our resident safety expert, he made this noise. Um, edge AI technology application, primary screening by AI for heart and lung health abnormalities. So I'm gonna stop there before I get angry. What everyone is doing is they're just like, we had an algorithm before. And we are just saying AI.

• 20:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 20:53Ed Zitron?

  Because otherwise they will realize it's the same thing from four years ago. And in fact, I feel like the theme right now for CES is dang, we did this a year ago.

• 21:03Speaker 05

  And a lot of it is we had an algorithm and now we're slapping an additional layer on top. That's like chat GPT. So basically it does the exact same thing it did before, except you have an inaccurate robot relaying what's happening.

• 21:15Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, you couldn't find dumb guys to not understand stuff for free. You just, you get a bloke who's just like, I think, uh, what? Okay. All right. Yes.

• 21:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I, I ran into one that was like a, like AI enabled like scuba diver kit with like the dive watches and stuff. And it's like, yeah, I could just like, I could just like swim over in a panic to the other diver and point at the watch and be like, uh oh, what does this mean?

• 21:37Ed Zitron?

  And I, I missed, I was really upset that I didn't hit the floor yesterday because there was apparently a speech in the web three tokenization fintech section. Just called Metaverse and Quantum AI. Oh my God, I'm so mad I missed.

• 21:49Speaker 07

  Wow. We're still using the word Metaverse in 2025, really?

• 21:53Speaker 05

  I never understood why anyone fell for that shit in the first place, but it, the fact that some people are still chasing it is wild to me.

• 22:01Ed Zitron?

  I am also gonna give a shout out to the only good booth here. Uh, the Hangzhou Huiyoshi Lighting Co. Limited, just a big sign that said wooden lamp.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 22:13Ed Zitron?

  I just love that because it's like everyone else is just lying. Everyone's just making shit up. It's like, I've got a fucking laugh, I can't. You wanna laugh? Oh, no, sorry. I finally found it, the thing that I love the most. So I walked up to a booth where the sign said, "Bridging Massage and Purification for Your Pet." And I walked up, and I'm just showing everyone right now, it is an air purifier with what looks like a spike on the end.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, my dog would like that.

• 22:38Ed Zitron?

  That's what they told me.

• 22:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:40Ed Zitron?

  Because I walked up and said, "Hi, so I just was reading your sign. What does that mean?" She says, "Oh, of course." Very ready for the question, alarmingly so, and goes, "Well, you see, the pet will kind of massage themselves on like, on the spike." And they will just, so the dog just, just does this? And she's like, "Yeah, and we have a lower one for smaller dogs." I'm like, "Right." So the dog just shoves itself.

• 23:04Speaker 06

  Well, have you ever seen that with cows, that they have like the big brushes on the farms that the cows walk up to and scratch their back on?

• 23:10Ed Zitron?

  I have never seen a dog do this. I've never seen a dog massage themselves.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  Do you attach spikes to your walls?

• 23:15Ed Zitron?

  Yes, of course.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 23:18Ed Zitron?

  But I've never seen a dog, well, no, those are for their impaling, but it's a Prince of Persia situation, we'll get to it later, but it's, I've never seen a dog massage themselves against something. Anyone seen?

• 23:28Speaker 06

  Uh, my dog will come in and kind of rub his back on the couch, so.

• 23:32Ed Zitron?

  But not on the spike.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  If the couch had a spike, you know.

• 23:35Ed Zitron?

  But it's also the spike is coming down.

• 23:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:38Ed Zitron?

  I don't know. And this was a big booth as well. These people have spent tens of thousands of dollars being like, "Well, gotta get the dog spike air purifier."

• 23:45Speaker 06

  Is that, I don't, I don't know, have you, have you talked about that a lot? Like the actual economics of putting on a booth, like sponsoring something here?

• 23:51Ed Zitron?

  I probably should have looked that up, yes.

• 23:53Speaker 06

  What does it take to show up? I mean, obviously.

• 23:55Ed Zitron?

  Tens of thousands of dollars.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  I would guess like a hundred thousand dollars, honestly.

• 23:59Ed Zitron?

  For main hall, yes, absolutely.

• 24:01Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 24:01Ed Zitron?

  And it's crazy. It's like, there's so much stuff that's theoretical.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:06Ed Zitron?

  Or, or pre-Idea. Like, like, I don't know. And it's just so strange. But, so Tom, did you see anything you like yet? Did you see anything good?

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Uh, I like the massage chairs. I nearly fell asleep.

• 24:21Ed Zitron?

  They're every year, the massage chairs fucking rock. They go, they scam guys who are going to CES for the first time. Like, oh, yeah, it's $4,000, we'll do it for two. And it cost them $300.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  And yeah, it kind of like locked me into the chair. There was like panels that compressed me and I couldn't leave. I nearly fell asleep. That was great. Yeah.

• 24:36Ed Zitron?

  Anything else?

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Can we get back to me on that?

• 24:43Ed Zitron?

  No, but it's fine if you don't have an answer.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  I mean, I didn't, you know, I saw, you know, some robots that were cool. There's this one company, I think Beatbot, that was working on a robotic turtle for like environmental research.

• 24:55Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, folks, that sounds really good, sorry. I thought you meant a member of Entourage.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  And it actually looks like a turtle? I don't, I don't, I don't know why it needs to look like a turtle, but it, but it apparently swims and everything and you can launch it into the sea and it does, it somehow does environmental research. Don't ask me how.

• 25:12Ed Zitron?

  When we kill, when we kill all the turtles, due to global warming, we're just gonna replace them with robots?

• 25:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, just in some post-apocalyptic future, those will be like level one enemies. Just swarms of like little robot turtles, yeah.

• 25:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, right now I have to kill the rats in the Vegas, in the Vegas aqueducts to level up.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, the Vegas sewers?

• 25:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I go down there, I kill a few rats, then there's a giant one and I have to run out to the cops and they shoot me. Jesse, anything good?

• 25:42Speaker 06

  I, well, I was wondering, I was thinking maybe Tom would bring these guys up. I accidentally got sucked into the Seoul semiconductor booth.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  What? No, I didn't see that yet.

• 25:51Speaker 06

  Okay, so these guys basically make the most baller semiconductors you've ever seen in your life. I, I walked in, it's a pretty big booth, they did a cool thing where it was like, um, they had some really like, uh, uh, post-apocalyptic messaging almost on the walls, but I think in like a cool way, like an environmental type of way. The, the thing they had on the sign at the top was like, um, uh, like, "Birth does not guarantee success, opportunity must." Something like really, you saw that?

• 26:20Speaker 07

  Wow. It's like, it's almost a unit, like it's a people empowerment?

• 26:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 07

  And like, people are memeing the expletive out of it.

• 26:28Ed Zitron?

  I wanna meet the guy you can swear, like you can say fucking shit in bowls and all the other ones. I, I love that as well because I wanna meet the person who reads that and goes, "Fuck."

• 26:37Speaker 06

  I well.

• 26:38Ed Zitron?

  Damn. Other than Jesse.

• 26:40Speaker 06

  I thought it was great. So I walk immediately in and it's like a super serious guy. And he's like, hey, how's it going? And I was like, hey, what's up? You know? What are you guys doing? And like immediately looking around and realizing there's nothing here that I know what it is. So, but he was saying like, hey, we make all the LED backlights for like all of the TVs. I'm like, hey, I love TV.

• 27:00Ed Zitron?

  Actually useful.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  Great. You know, or they do like, um, you know, most, a lot of cars, new cars now especially have the, the LED headlights, taillights and all that kind of stuff. So clearly they do that stuff too. That's great. I can't really make a joke about LED headlights. So I kind of got stuck in a conversation with him for about 10 or 15 minutes, but if you're.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Just waiting to make a joke?

• 27:20Speaker 06

  I just truly trying to get out of there with, yeah, anything at all. Just trying to do some, I, I all, I didn't, I almost said like, oh, so you're the guy I should be mad at when I, you know, the lights are really bright on the road at night, but it looked like he wasn't even willing to like, that wasn't gonna go over at all.

• 27:37Ed Zitron?

  He would just be like, no.

• 27:38Speaker 06

  And then he scanned my badge.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  And he's gonna send you an email.

• 27:42Speaker 06

  I had to run away really fast from the badge.

• 27:45Ed Zitron?

  The good thing is, is that with me, especially today, like I'm fully energetic. So I'm just walking around with a black mask and my eyes just fucking bulging out of my head. And I walk really fast because I've done this show so many times that I just, I know exactly the route. So you just see this high speed British man in a Jensen Huang style leather jacket, just fucking making a beeline for you, taking three photos going, what's this? And it's, I actually apologize to anyone I've.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  That sounds like a $2 horror game on Steam.

• 28:15Ed Zitron?

  But it becomes a hentai one later. Henry, what is so, is there anything you've liked?

• 28:21Speaker 07

  As much as I can be the negative person in any conversation, actually I have three.

• 28:26Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah. Wow. That's three more than most.

• 28:29Speaker 07

  TCL is, they have these next paper devices. They've had matte screens and stuff. Now they're doing something really actually great with it. I think I expect Apple will have their own version of in two to three years. This thing is the next paper 11 plus tablet, which basically has a mode where it switches into basically an e Ink like screen mode. Which will A incredibly good battery life, probably.

• 28:50Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 07

  B, let your regular Android tablet become an e-reader looking thing.

• 28:55Ed Zitron?

  Cool.

• 28:55Speaker 07

  And it has a matte screen device.

• 28:57Ed Zitron?

  Sick.

• 28:57Speaker 07

  And you know how Apple's got the iMac and the iPad now with matte screens? Toss that technology onto an iPhone screen, put this mode on it, and they're going to have battery life better than they've ever had.

• 29:08Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  Then, I'm not a huge fan of suitcase turntables. There's good reason that I think Crosley's sort of ruined the idea of a suitcase turntable, but Victrola has one that has hilariously, I think it's, it has lighting in the front that you can sync up to the music at 75 bucks. It's called the Journey Glow, I believe, and it's like, if it's, Victrola is a trustable brand, I feel like, in sound, so it's like a suitcase turntable that doesn't ruin your records, and they play Daft Punk on it, it sounded pretty good. And then, I told you about this earlier, Lenovo's got a ThinkBook Plus Gen 16 laptop, mouthful of a name, but the laptop screen raises, it basically rolls up in size, so you give a more vertical, but in the same size as your normal laptop.

• 29:52Speaker 07

  I didn't get to actually demo it because I had to run, but like, that's the laptop changing in a great way, which we don't say that often in this tech reviewer industry that I get to play in.

• 30:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, hell, yeah. Feels kind of strange having someone who remembered stuff they liked, though.

• 30:10Speaker 05

  I mean, actually, I'd be remiss not to bring this up, but some of the stuff I liked here isn't even like electronics, it's like, well, half the stuff here isn't even electronics. It's like the consumer product show. But there was this one company, there were the most popular booth at this event last night that was selling like little metal strips that you, or advertising little metal strips that you put on your nose to like sleep better at night, and they work fantastically better than I, like, I've got sleep apnea, I assume 80% of people that go to the CDS have sleep apnea. So, I mean, it was wild, there's like 20 people lined up and this guy was like doing his like carny thing of like gluing these to people's noses.

• 30:46Ed Zitron?

  Well, this has been such a wonderful episode. We'll start with you, Tom. Tom, where can people find you?

• 30:52Speaker 05

  People can find me on X.com at the Tom Zone, or they can find me at Blue Sky at don't judge me cat turd two dot beast guy dot social.

• 31:03Ed Zitron?

  He is cat turd. Jesse, where can people find you?

• 31:06Speaker 06

  Your Kickstarter sucks is the podcast and Golf Kings is the Twitch stream.

• 31:12Speaker 06

  Jesse, I think it's Jesse Farrar dot com on Blue Sky. And yeah, all the links are from there.

• 31:17Ed Zitron?

  And Henry?

• 31:18Speaker 07

  I write primarily for CNN underscored, which you can open instantly just by typing in underscored dot com. I also have a newsletter and all sorts of stuff which is accessible from Henry T Casey dot net. That's Henry T C A S E Y dot net. And also that's my Blue Sky name too.

• 31:34Ed Zitron?

  And as we close off this block of the episode, I just want to say something really quick before we go to an ad break. Just want to say Henry brought up Daft Punk. Daft Punk have not made a good album since Discovery. Human After All is dog shit. It is repeated bits. And I thought the soundtrack of Tron was kind of boring. Come at me. I'm sick of hearing about Daft Punk being good anytime recently. Human After All pissed me off so much. Anyway, coming up after this ad break, we're gonna have even more wonderful people from CES. And if Daft Punk is listening, try not looping. Try doing something interesting with your electronic music. You and me, Daft Punk, I'm sick of it.

• 32:18Speaker 01

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• 32:51Speaker 06

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• 33:10Speaker 06

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• 33:23Ed Zitron?

  I just counted us back in for an episode and I went three, two, one, and I just want to be clear to the listeners that I did two, three, four, I did four fingers up. My brain is coming out of my goddamn ears. I am dying, but I'm joined by amazing people nevertheless. Ed Onguoso Jr. is to my right, of course.

• 33:42Speaker 06

  Hello, how's everyone doing?

• 33:45Ed Zitron?

  Jesse Farah, of course, from Your Kickstarter Sucks. Hello. And we have the other one, Mike Hale from What's up? YKS, who is fresh from a tech company called Kohl's.

• 33:58Ed Zitron?

  Tom McKay, of course, from IT Bro. And we're back talking about CES, but Ed Onguoso Jr., you've been on the main hall, the main floor. How was, how was that?

• 34:08Speaker 06

  I mean, are you, would you be surprised if I told you everything is powered by AI now?

• 34:12Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 34:13Speaker 06

  Every single thing.

• 34:14Ed Zitron?

  Please elaborate.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  You know, AI refrigerators.

• 34:19Ed Zitron?

  Okay, but to what end?

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Well, you know, you, you need something that recognizes what time of day you decide to have certain types of coffee and how much of that to keep and

• 34:33Ed Zitron?

  Morning, right? Morning?

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Right, morning.

• 34:35Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 34:36Speaker 06

  You know, but you might be a freaky chica and want to have it at lunch, you know, or

• 34:41Ed Zitron?

  Whoa.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  So I know.

• 34:43Ed Zitron?

  There was a legal tech.

• 34:43Speaker 06

  Right. But one, one that I was really interested in is this company that is saying, hey, look, the future of technology, it's minimalism. We want to reconnect you with human nature. And the way that we're going to do that, the way we're going to get you off your screen, we're going to give you a headset that you have to keep on for nine hours a day and it will have, give you uninterrupted access to your artificial intelligence suite of therapists, productivity assistants.

• 35:12Ed Zitron?

  So your connection with human is with AIs?

• 35:14Speaker 06

  Yes, but that's so that you can reconnect with human nature and it will give you notifications by calling you. It will forward you to therapists that you talk to, friends that you talk to, powered by Claude, almost exclusively.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  This sounds like something you pick up in the tutorial level of like Bioshock.

• 35:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is, this is the tutorial.

• 35:37Ed Zitron?

  Was this a big company or?

• 35:40Speaker 06

  They are connected with this other company. This is a, this is a side venture of another company.

• 35:47Ed Zitron?

  Because it was the main hall, so the LVCC is, it's remarkable because it's, it's so expensive to be there. Like we were talking about the economics earlier. You're talking a hundred grand through the door, I'm sure.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:00Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, so we're doing a hundred grand for this thing that is just barely conceptual.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's also the thing. Um, as they emphasize, most of these things do not exist yet. They have demos that, the demo did not work when I was there.

• 36:14Ed Zitron?

  What, what happened? What happened?

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Couldn't, just couldn't even hear me, couldn't connect to the internet, couldn't recognize any command whatsoever. They were like, well, you know, see, actually the thing that happened is one of our guys took the mic home. So it actually works really well.

• 36:27Ed Zitron?

  And did work with it.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  I have no idea.

• 36:31Ed Zitron?

  Chewing on it. He, he's, he gets nervous.

• 36:34Speaker 06

  You know, he's playing with it, you know?

• 36:37Speaker 06

  But yeah, so this idea here is uninterrupted access to an AI so that you can reconnect to your human nature, which is to talk to a bunch of assistants.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Did they explain why this reconnects?

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, who, why would?

• 36:51Speaker 06

  Cause you don't, you look at your screen.

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:53Ed Zitron?

  So you talk to your microphone though?

• 36:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:55Ed Zitron?

  And that's different.

• 36:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's very different.

• 36:57Ed Zitron?

  So you're not looking.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  No dopamine loop.

• 36:59Ed Zitron?

  Okay. So you're looking, you're, you're not looking at a screen.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 37:02Ed Zitron?

  But you are talking to the microphone.

• 37:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:04Ed Zitron?

  Are you just staring into the abyss during?

• 37:07Speaker 06

  No, you're just walking around daily life.

• 37:09Ed Zitron?

  Just like, just like doing something else you like.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  But then he was, you know, then they also, you know, admit that, oh yeah, also it'll ask you to get on your phone a lot, you know?

• 37:21Speaker 06

  Way ahead of you. That's already on my phone.

• 37:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  It's like that movie Her, except she's constantly reminding you to buy paper towels.

• 37:29Speaker 06

  No, it's like, hey, remember to go on this website to buy gifts. Hey, go, take a picture of this so I can analyze it and put it in a search engine. Hey, uh, go on this Discord channel. Hey, you know, talk to another, you know, always constant notifications will get back on your phone. It's about getting off your phone.

• 37:43Ed Zitron?

  Right. And that's the thing, Katie Notopoulos over at Business Insider said this last year, very good thing, it's like, I love my phone. It's where all my stuff is. Yeah. I like, I'm on my phone because I, I don't know, I don't have to look at the real world. Who wants to do that? The ultimate use case for the voice activated technology. Right. Has always been being in the car. Because we're in America, everyone drives a car. It's the most dangerous thing to do, except for to try to put your drink on a side table. Okay, Jesse, unblast on my fucking podcast. Jesus Christ, I just, I just party failed.

• 38:20Ed Zitron?

  And it went down like perfectly as well. So it's like a really like, it's a real splute.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Classic cartoon spill.

• 38:28Ed Zitron?

  Well, well, well. It's really not your fault because the side table has a slight rate, it's like a. There's a slight raised area in the middle of the side table. I mean. Yeah, I'm like, I like have a knife out and I'm just pointing. Really, when you think about it.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  It's the table's fault.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, the table did this.

• 38:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 38:46Speaker 06

  We're all mad at the table, obviously.

• 38:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's right. Okay.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  That's why you should have picked up a Seaman Smart table.

• 38:53Speaker 05

  What's a smart table do?

• 38:54Ed Zitron?

  I wish that was real. I wish. There was a smart table a few years ago. Table? It was just a ta- the vessel. Vessel and table, of course. Thank you, the bartender, beautiful bartender Phil brought in to clean up my mess. May I have another, please? I'm drinking something called the La Ha, which is Phil's black blood of the earth with some vodka. And Irish cream. Thank you, Phil. Anyway, what were we talking about? Ed, so.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. And the name of the thing is, it's Italian for human nature.

• 39:23Speaker 06

  I'm forgetting this.

• 39:23Ed Zitron?

  Human nat- natura.

• 39:25Speaker 06

  Natura. Umara.

• 39:27Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ. Do you see, Ed, what else? What else was it? I feel like finding out my, coming home and finding my kid is fucked up a bunch of shit. Like, like, what else did you see there?

• 39:37Speaker 06

  I mean, that was, that was the one that pulled me in because they had a giant banner that said, AI people underneath, uh, above it.

• 39:44Ed Zitron?

  Oh, good.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  Oh, okay. So, you know, I walked up and it's like, where are the AI people? And then it's like, you know, they have five or they have five phones on a table and then another five elsewhere, some iPads. And they're like, they're in here and you just put this on and they talk to you.

• 39:59Ed Zitron?

  But they don't.

• 40:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 05

  This is something I noticed that all the AI like this year seems to be marketed as like AI for people. Like, like they're like, because it's finally reaching a point where they're trying to create. It feels like they're trying to create the market for AI stuff by forcing it on people.

• 40:15Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  And in doing so, they kind of have to reassure them that this is not like as dog shit as you think it is.

• 40:22Ed Zitron?

  But it is.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. And it's like, some of it's really bad. Yeah.

• 40:26Ed Zitron?

  It's so funny as well, because I'm really like the pig that they would sell slop to. Like, I love my gizmos and doodads and apps and such. If there was anyone to sell shit to, it's me. And it's just not fun. It's boring. Like.

• 40:41Speaker 06

  There's no use case.

• 40:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 06

  There's still no use. It's like a fucking whole industry built around finding the use case for a technology. And it just doesn't exist.

• 40:49Ed Zitron?

  An entire show.

• 40:50Speaker 06

  I met with Kohl's and we're great.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  Use cases for AI, like if you, if you want, say, like, you know, a larger than normal type of hoodie sweater. And they might not have it, but you can speak to an AI agent and it'll tell you to breathe.

• 41:06Ed Zitron?

  I did walk over to a.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  Ethical.

• 41:09Ed Zitron?

  I walked over to a booth earlier that said AI agent. And this is kind of me being a dickhead, but I just went, what kind of agent? He goes, I, I'm like, oh, good. So what model? Chat GPT. I'm like, great. So how is this agentic? He goes, I, you talk to it. I'm like, that just sounds like Chat GPT. He goes, yeah, but it's an agent. I'm like, how? He just looks at me terrified.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  I don't understand how everybody's building these industries and businesses and stuff around chat GPT subscriptions.

• 41:38Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  It's like you're hooked into like the chat GPT API and you're building a business on top of that. How? I don't understand how. And then the magic of venture capital.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  I mean, I forget what economist I wrote about for, that said this, but it was like the idea that like AI is almost now like a tax on, on like the rest of the tech industry. Like, it's like a software tax where you need to pay to have it in your product because everybody else does. And all it really does is suck money out of, you know, everything else.

• 42:08Ed Zitron?

  And it's great, though. So Ed, I'm gonna assume you saw nothing useful like.

• 42:12Speaker 06

  It's actually really funny because I was walking towards something that's an AI agent, kind of like the promised land. When you hit me up and you said, come back.

• 42:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, fuck.

• 42:21Speaker 06

  Did you guys see the toaster where you can print photos of your loved ones on pieces of toast?

• 42:27Ed Zitron?

  That is actually real. Did you really see that?

• 42:29Speaker 06

  I did not see that.

• 42:32Ed Zitron?

  We've actually.

• 42:34Ed Zitron?

  Very unfair to toaster print.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, you got me too.

• 42:39Ed Zitron?

  It's in the menu. Well, those are tortillas. Remember that? We're gonna do a few.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  It's a miracle.

• 42:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we're building up to the final episode where I'm going to do something called the menu. Hope everyone joins me. We're gonna lock the doors.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  I think also the thing with this natura umana, whatever the hell, you know, the Italian name is.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  Similar to your point about making markets, I feel like this one is trying, because they are like, the end goal is to be able to make it connect to apps for you. So you could go to your mom's house. You could order movies or order in. And it's like, okay, so I feel like they're trying to pretend as if, or they're trying to train people into accepting the disappointment that comes with insisting agents are around the corner.

• 43:21Ed Zitron?

  But none of that is agents.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  Exactly. No, you're right.

• 43:23Ed Zitron?

  So AI agents are meant to be these autonomous things, and they never are.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  But that's what we talked about at that other episode. They're not, but they keep misnaming things or presenting bullshit. So then, you know, I think this is part of the training process where it's like, okay, get.

• 43:38Ed Zitron?

  But they're training customers.

• 43:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, it feels like they're basically just like prepping people to have Netflix scream at you.

• 43:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, this is, this is pedantic, but like, this is the thing that really drives me nuts is, is like you were saying, training people to expect certain things or to hear words and actually imagine something else. Like, algorithm is something that now means a bunch of different things where it's like, now, people like, people who I think for the most part share our mindset, sort of a skeptical mindset towards tech and all that kind of stuff. We hear the word algorithm, like, our back gets up immediately because we think, oh, that's bad. But it's like, algorithm's not even bad. It's just, it's like a thought process. And everything you do.

• 44:17Ed Zitron?

  It's like saying database.

• 44:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. Everything has an algorithm in it. You're using an algorithm when you make a decision. But now it's become, it's, it's got this tech stink grafted onto it. And now we have to turn away. So eventually we'll go away from AI, right? And it'll be like, there's no algorithms in this at all. And it's like, well, I don't even, how's that even, how's that possible? It's smart.

• 44:36Ed Zitron?

  Well, it's, I, what I like about that is it's also describing a bunch of things that are not problems.

• 44:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:42Ed Zitron?

  Like, no one is like, oh, I had to go over to my fucking mom's house and I had to order a movie. That took forever. He almost like, oh, fuck it. That took me several seconds. Like, that is a solved problem. I'm not, none of the things they just go, well, how are you gonna order dinner? I don't know. I've never done that before.

• 45:00Speaker 05

  Also, the idea that like, if you and your spouse, like, let's say you and your spouse, like, take a long time to settle on a movie, that a robot, like, interjecting in the middle of the conversation, it's gonna speed this up.

• 45:11Ed Zitron?

  It reminds me of one of my favorite Clickhole pieces. Which of my garbage sons are you? And they're like, yeah, we named one of our sons Lance and Blake. And the reason they did that was because they picked two names they didn't like. And named that for one son. Which I think is kind of indicative of the Consumer Electronics Show entirely. It's like, we can't come up with a good idea, so we chose five bad ones. So what, anything else you see over there?

• 45:35Speaker 06

  I saw something where they were scanning your face to present what your internal health looked like as an interactive city. Where organs.

• 45:45Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 45:47Ed Zitron?

  What the hell?

• 45:48Speaker 06

  Your organs, and they interact with each other, were depicted on the screen as if they were a city.

• 45:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm in the dick.

• 45:55Speaker 05

  Are there like little cells walking around as?

• 45:57Speaker 06

  No, it's literally just a city.

• 45:59Ed Zitron?

  My doctor has been wanting me to do this. He keeps telling me I have to do it.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  It's like, hey, that abandoned part of town, you gotta get that checked out.

• 46:06Ed Zitron?

  You're in a red, you're in a red state, just like, your legs just fucking falling off.

• 46:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 05

  It just loops in on the liver and it explodes.

• 46:14Ed Zitron?

  They, no, I'm just saying this.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  It's okay to live in a red state.

• 46:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm not saying that.

• 46:19Ed Zitron?

  I'm not saying it's a problem, other than the fact that the governance might not so be so big on the social services side.

• 46:25Speaker 06

  We actually get vouchers for those, so it's not a big deal.

• 46:27Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I get I get mine from.

• 46:29Speaker 07

  Every time she asked to scan my face, that's I just felt like I was being asked to put my skull up to a measuring device. It was.

• 46:38Ed Zitron?

  Can we get some of your blood?

• 46:39Speaker 07

  Get that shit away from me.

• 46:40Ed Zitron?

  I thought you were gonna say that it scanned and they just went, no.

• 46:43Speaker 07

  No, every time it's like, please, no, no, no.

• 46:45Ed Zitron?

  Just added a bunch of please to the city.

• 46:47Speaker 07

  Yeah. Oh, wow, you know, would you step to the side? You match the description.

• 46:52Ed Zitron?

  Wait here.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:54Ed Zitron?

  So, but what else? Come on, there must be a thing.

• 46:57Speaker 07

  Um, I, you know, I spent some time trying to look at, uh, there's a lot of virtual twin, digital twin, uh, stuff in manufacturing, in optimizing industrial operations. Um, and this health system was, uh, was a offshoot of this, uh, virtual twin thing where, you know, there were, there were two or three booths set up next to each other. Their idea was if we can scan you, we set up your virtual twin, you can tweak with it, you can experiment with it, we'll give you more insight into you. There were, um, AI medical assistants and AI caregivers, uh, kind of extending off what we were talking about the other day, where it's like, um, we are going to give you very

• 47:35Speaker 07

  colorful, uh, detailed and graphically designed data, um, and convince you to.

• 47:43Ed Zitron?

  What kind of data?

• 47:44Speaker 07

  Uh, you know, a lot of it is, it seemed to be basic metabolic stuff.

• 47:48Ed Zitron?

  So stuff you could get.

• 47:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:49Ed Zitron?

  Likely already have.

• 47:50Speaker 07

  Yes, right. Um, but if you buy into, you know, this product or this application, buy into the ecosystem again, then you'll be able to gain more insight into your, your stress or into, uh, concerning health.

• 48:05Ed Zitron?

  Next time you see one of these companies, can you just ask a very simple question? What am I meant to do with all this data? Be healthy.

• 48:12Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 48:12Speaker 05

  So wait, it, it, it, it, it tries to guess your metabolic health by scanning your face?

• 48:17Speaker 07

  No, these ones are different. These ones, yeah, that, no, not that one.

• 48:19Ed Zitron?

  That's insane. That would never happen.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 07

  No.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  That's actually the tagline of CES.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  Isn't that basically phrenology?

• 48:27Speaker 07

  Yes. In fact, I, I mean, you know, yesterday I saw.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  We invented digital calipers.

• 48:32Speaker 07

  That was like, oh, we are not a medical device. But if you let us scan your skin, not if you're black, because we don't have the technology for that. But if you let us scan your skin, we can tell what your blood sugar is. We can tell what a host of other, you know, metabolic indices are for you. And we can determine what your stress is, you know, whether you are eating correctly, what you need to do to rein it back in.

• 48:55Speaker 06

  Well, this is, that's so, sorry. That's what you said is a huge problem.

• 48:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 06

  That's like, that's, that's.

• 49:01Speaker 05

  Our product currently does not support black people.

• 49:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, yeah, insane.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:06Ed Zitron?

  Microsoft Connect, baby.

• 49:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. There was a Connect on the floor, which I don't know if you saw.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Why?

• 49:11Speaker 06

  Well, because.

• 49:13Speaker 07

  Why not?

• 49:13Speaker 06

  Uh, we demoed a, well, so this. A Wii snowboard game or something.

• 49:19Speaker 07

  Oh, is that the court one? The app, there was like an Abbott Court thing where you like could ball, ball up with some people on Wii Sports.

• 49:25Speaker 06

  It wasn't, it actually wasn't that good.

• 49:29Speaker 06

  I thought, as an outsider, I always thought, see.

• 49:32Ed Zitron?

  A snowboard game and it tests your depression levels.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  She said, we've never had readings this high before.

• 49:40Speaker 05

  Your score is wellness check.

• 49:44Ed Zitron?

  We are calling your mother.

• 49:48Speaker 06

  It was, so it, it's just a big TV or, well, it was a big gaming monitor. So already we're, we're, I thought CES was like, this is where the newest, biggest TVs are. And that's true. I don't know where they are, but they're probably somewhere. I see.

• 49:59Ed Zitron?

  I mean, they're in the Las Vegas convention center.

• 50:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, there were.

• 50:02Ed Zitron?

  Some big eyes.

• 50:03Speaker 06

  There's some big TVs. So this, instead of being a TV, this was an 85 inch gaming monitor.

• 50:08Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 50:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, like.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Crazy positive reaction to what I assumed was basically an impossible thing to use because even like a 40 inch TV in front of your face on the desk is like crazy.

• 50:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, this is not a desktop.

• 50:23Speaker 06

  This is like.

• 50:24Speaker 05

  I'm sorry, I use a 50 inch screen that's like. You are free. And a half in front of my face.

• 50:30Ed Zitron?

  You are crazed.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  I have to have windows at like 150% zoom.

• 50:35Ed Zitron?

  I got my Xvideos corner, I got my.

• 50:38Speaker 06

  Tom is laying down on the floor with the microphone dangling over him.

• 50:44Speaker 06

  So it's really huge for a monitor, but also if you want an 85 inch thing, just get a TV. If you're going to play console stuff on it, just get a TV. You don't need the super high refresh rate and it's 5K, it's not 8K. If you're going to do something stupid, make it 8K. It makes no sense. Anyways, they seem like perfectly nice people. But it's a 5K 85 inch monitor and they had to demo it. They had like these little skis on the ground that I stepped on too dutifully. And I played an Xbox Kinect game modded to run off of like a little Toshiba laptop that was plugged. It wasn't a fucking.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  My guy kept getting messed up because they put the wood on the, on the ski slopes, which is like. Why would there be wood on those downslope, dude?

• 51:24Ed Zitron?

  Really high on the depression score, but.

• 51:29Speaker 06

  But why would you have that?

• 51:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh God, can we talk about the thing though? So, so you, you were bad at the ski game, we've established this.

• 51:40Speaker 06

  I don't think that's like, that's what he said.

• 51:42Ed Zitron?

  Saying it's the worst.

• 51:44Speaker 06

  It's debated.

• 51:44Ed Zitron?

  Narrative.

• 51:45Speaker 06

  I don't know if I believe it. But it was, yeah, it was the demo of this gaming monitor, but using technology that's like 15 years old.

• 51:52Ed Zitron?

  Why didn't they just play an Xbox game?

• 51:53Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  In the same, uh, kind of area, there was like a, I tried on like an eyeglass thing or whatever. And it was like an Android app or something. And it was like, uh, nine by six.

• 52:03Speaker 06

  On like a display, it was very, it was cropped vertically and stuff. It looked very bad, but it was just like. That. What are we doing here? To Ed's point, why would you, okay, you're gonna spend a ton of money and it's a slush fund for the executives. Okay, that's fine. Have a good time or whatever. Why would it not be like, why wouldn't it not be like a finished product at any point in the thing? Yeah. I just don't, it feels like.

• 52:25Ed Zitron?

  But also if you're demoing your monitor, why not get something that looks good and is fun to play?

• 52:29Speaker 06

  I think one thing I've been realizing, and I didn't actually realize is the case. Most of these things do not seem to be finished and everyone's fine with that. I would have, I actually like would, I loved standing next to people and listening to them as they dealt with a fully unfinished product and be like, oh.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, it feels like a lot of this stuff is like ostensibly supposed to be a preview of what's coming, but the what's coming depends on whether anybody pays attention to their booth.

• 52:57Ed Zitron?

  So I, I just, pardon me for interrupting here on my podcast. I, I was looking through my pictures of things I'd taken pictures of today, otherwise known as the photos app on my phone. And I found this thing called Alize, your choice, your companion. And just showing everyone, it appears to be like some sort of horrifying metal face you put. You, and has some sort of AI companion, but I didn't read any of the highlighted characteristics, which by the way is what it says. And you go, it says speaks your way, instantly mimics and plays any voice you love, big promise. Expressive and natural syncs facial expressions perfectly with her speech. And based on this image, no, it does not.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  I want to fuck her.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  I was, I was just gonna say, I already predict the primary market.

• 53:39Ed Zitron?

  Well, Jesse, you're about to regret saying that. Behaves different personalities. And yes, behaves different personalities.

• 53:46Speaker 06

  There is a surprising lack of attention to detail on the stuff that's written, right?

• 53:50Ed Zitron?

  Well, there is some detail you wouldn't love. From a playful lolly to a confident boss lady.

• 53:56Speaker 06

  Confident boss lady, I could see myself doing.

• 53:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, well, the lolly part.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  How much?

• 54:01Ed Zitron?

  Smart with a memory, powered by advanced AI that remembers and adapts more customized service in replaceable silicon facial masks. He's just got like a.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  Oh, so it's a physical mask too?

• 54:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  Wait, is this just like a head that sits on your desk?

• 54:14Speaker 06

  We're bringing back Sophia. We're bringing back. Saudi uh.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  We're bringing back Bobby Hare.

• 54:20Ed Zitron?

  So for people who are at CES, I think you mentioned this before, the best shit you can find is on the fringes. You need to go to the back. You need to go to back and find the guy who's like wooden lamp. Like the the only honest guy at CES is the guy with. And there was one, there was one that just said Felix is hot.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 54:38Ed Zitron?

  It is true. And I also love the names that Power Cube Semi Ink Potential Convergence Smart.

• 54:45Speaker 06

  Oh, I need that. I need that shit.

• 54:46Ed Zitron?

  And there's a whole Ker- Kerzig Stan thing. Empower your innovations with like attractive polymers. Actually, that sounds real. Uh, manage your neck, shoulders and back through acupressure, massage and Moxie Bastion. I I fucking, every time I walk around the show, I just see shit. And I'm like, what do you?

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Did you, did you see the portable air conditioner you wear around your neck? It it just like.

• 55:07Ed Zitron?

  Otherwise known as a fan.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  It blasts air at your ears. Yeah.

• 55:11Ed Zitron?

  That's a fan. We have those.

• 55:13Speaker 05

  But can you wear a fan around your neck, huh?

• 55:15Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 55:16Speaker 06

  Hey, a fan is not going to give you ten and I just saw it on.

• 55:19Ed Zitron?

  I have that already. I have that. I've had that since I was a child. Every moment is pain for me. So that's why we're here though. So within this AI stuff, did you find the same thing as me where it's just no one really knows what they're talking about? And when you ask them questions, they go chat GPT. And if you ask them another question, they start having a panic attack?

• 55:40Speaker 06

  Or uh, it seems a little frustration with asking why, like the AI. And I'm like, well, it's because like I'm trying to figure out if you're generative bullshit or if it's an actual thing underneath.

• 55:50Speaker 05

  And when I'm talking to like industry experts, like analysts or like people that like were are like has like trade associations and stuff. Uh, I get this strong sense that it's frustrating for them too, because they're being asked to weigh in on this market that's so nebulous. And like, and like, it's impossible to tell whether any of this is actually going to pay off, like.

• 56:10Ed Zitron?

  And we're, it's just insane to me. We're like hours into this shit. Like my soul is being ripped away.

• 56:17Speaker 06

  There's something for that. If you go to the convention centers for, they put the soul back into you.

• 56:21Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 56:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, actually, you should, you should check out the demo for this uh, human nature thing I was talking about. You know, you can talk to Athena, which is like the um, the wellness uh, AI people.

• 56:32Ed Zitron?

  Her boons are terrible.

• 56:33Speaker 05

  I like this. I like the soul cube idea. The thing that CES hasn't really got it into yet is like crystals and crystal energies. We need to bring that in.

• 56:40Ed Zitron?

  I actually wonder how far you could go just making up shit. You should get credits for how clean your soul is.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  Social, social, yeah, soul-based social credit system.

• 56:51Ed Zitron?

  I just think that, I think that that's what pisses me off. There's obviously some quasi-fraudulent thing. Where is the real fraud? Where are the people who are just like, yep, it's the soul cube?

• 57:00Speaker 05

  Did you, you ever see those, um, guys who make those, uh, devices that are like, uh, like just measurers for like various, uh, body shit? It's like this, the pseudoscience.

• 57:10Ed Zitron?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  They sell like the E-meters or whatever the fuck.

• 57:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  That, why aren't they here?

• 57:16Ed Zitron?

  I actually.

• 57:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, Scientology booth. It fits.

• 57:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, ghost hunting technology. Like, you see a whole ghost thing?

• 57:22Speaker 05

  There's no people that are probably, uh, don't, don't insist that CES is haunted.

• 57:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Honestly, I want to do that one year.

• 57:29Speaker 05

  Actually, like when the product demo fails, they're like, actually, this is a good thing.

• 57:33Speaker 06

  Right. Yo, the ghost is telling me you should invest forty million dollars right now. It's never done that before.

• 57:39Speaker 05

  You're just like, Tom, a Tim, a Tam, a Tom.

• 57:45Speaker 06

  Tell me the, give me your phone right now.

• 57:46Ed Zitron?

  The ghost needs to see your ID.

• 57:49Speaker 06

  What's your, what's yours? What's your mother's maiden name?

• 57:51Speaker 05

  The ghost wants to scan your badge. Get your email address, maybe?

• 57:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, that's the thing. Like, I don't mind if someone's just obviously scamming, like, yeah, I'm a ghostbuster.

• 58:03Ed Zitron?

  I'm a ghostbuster. I'm here with the ghostbusters and that's what I do here at CES. We spend a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on ghost busting. And if it breaks, you just go, new kind of ghost, that's why you need us.

• 58:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the, in real, the real, the real answer, I think, maybe you know more about this than me. Maybe, maybe somebody knows more than I do about something, although it's hard to imagine. I feel like the, the reason that there's not like the, the level one gimmick grift guy on the floor is because like with everything else, there's so many levels of detachment. Like you have a problem and you want to call somebody and yell at them about it or get it fixed, I guess, if you want. But you can't because the person you talk to is not empowered to do anything for you and that's on purpose. And now there's an extra layer of AI stuck in between you and even that person. But the people who show up on the floor are just like, when you ask, what is this chat GPT? That's literally all they know because the guy who makes the decision is so far away.

• 58:53Ed Zitron?

  And also it does not work.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  It doesn't work either. Right. Yeah.

• 58:56Ed Zitron?

  But I think actually what I'm going to start doing is anytime I see AI now, I'm just going to replace the word with ghost.

• 59:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 59:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Ghost. Just like, oh, we have ghosts.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  There is a ghost of the machine.

• 59:09Ed Zitron?

  I might actually just stop asking people about it and I'll be like, oh, is chat.

• 59:12Speaker 05

  What's the ghost do?

• 59:13Ed Zitron?

  What's the ghost do? It's just like, that's chat GPT. Yeah, the ghost. The spirit. How you, how do you get the spirit out? What?

• 59:22Speaker 05

  Why would you want the spirit out? The spirit does all the thinking for you.

• 59:25Ed Zitron?

  Just walk over. I'm very haunted. How, how are you gonna help? I, I generally don't do bits with any of the people here because just to be clear, the reason that no one should, and some listeners have brought this up, oh, you should go and like yell at them. The poor fuckers who are on the floor, these are PR people, sometimes external PR people, or they're just like a marketing person who, to Jesse's point, is not empowered to answer a real question. And they have to deal with everyone at CES and 50% of the people at CES are trying to make partnerships with other people that can't tell you what their products do. And it's like, oh, these, and I admit with the person, the company that claimed to like be a new hope for autism and dyslexia, I got a little heated, which is why I walked away.

• 1:00:08Ed Zitron?

  And you won't hear for this, they claimed that their smart glasses would help both dyslexia and autism. And my experience with that is that's bullshit. Uh, but it's, yeah, there's a reason that you can't really put the boots to these people. And I actually think it's deliberate. They want to put a layer of abstraction between them and the responsibility for their thing actually doing anything. So they've got a fucking marketing person. And these people are there and they're working like 10 hour days doing like, just standing there. And if it's a bad show, you're just standing alone.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  Well, the marketers are the real heroes, aren't they? Don't you find?

• 1:00:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, they're basically troops.

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what I.

• 1:00:40Ed Zitron?

  Except their job's, their job's more dangerous.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  Right. Than the troops.

• 1:00:45Ed Zitron?

  Okay, as we trundle towards the end, Edward Ongreso Jr., where can people find you?

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  You can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky, Big Black Jacobin. You can find me, my newsletter, uh, thetechbubble.substack.com and my podcast, This Machine Kills, where we talk about tech.

• 1:01:00Ed Zitron?

  Jesse Verar, Michael Hale, where can people find you?

• 1:01:02Speaker 06

  Uh, Mike and myself host Your Kickstarter Sucks. And Mike, did we get the custom domain on Blue Sky, YourKickstarterSucks.com?

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  Uh, I believe we did, yeah. And you can also find me at coles.com slash about slash people.html.

• 1:01:16Speaker 06

  No, I think Coles took down the about page because of the stuff that's going on. So you're not gonna, they don't want people to find you.

• 1:01:21Ed Zitron?

  Just to be clear, Mi- Michael's name is commonly Dogbona?

• 1:01:27Ed Zitron?

  Tom, where can people find you?

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  You can find me at itbrew.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/theTOMZone or on Blue Sky at catcher2.bsky.social. That's an embarrassing name. He joined Blue Sky and was like posting about how there's a scammer about, like warning his people before immediately getting banned.

• 1:01:53Ed Zitron?

  And as the listeners know, I am your cult leader. And you can find me, if there's an Ed Zitron, it's probably me, unless it isn't. And if you choose the wrong one, well, that means you're not chosen. But if you need to spend your money from your hog slop job where you go out and you smash windows and you steal things from cars and you con people and you're walking around the street thinking, where's my next victim? How will I extract value from them? Well, when you get your ill-gotten gains, the next ads will probably be for something you can spend them on. Ideally, you want to operate in cash. If these are digital, you need a prepaid debit card. Email me at, what is it? Tom dot McKay at, no, sorry. Ed at, no, no, no. Just Google crime.

• 1:02:38Ed Zitron?

  And that's where you'll find my email.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

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• 1:03:23Speaker 05

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• 1:03:43Speaker 05

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• 1:03:48Ed Zitron?

  Investment Banking.

• 1:03:54Ed Zitron?

  And we're back and I assume you have bought or downloaded whatever it was they just said. If you didn't, that's a real personal insult to me and you know, you know how I feel about that. So we've had a slight rotation. To my right is Tom McKay of IT Brew, of course.

• 1:04:06Speaker 06

  Hey, how's it going?

• 1:04:07Ed Zitron?

  And actually over across from me is Max Cherny of Reuters.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  Hello, Internet.

• 1:04:12Ed Zitron?

  And thank you. Glad someone respects the computer. And Jesse Farrar of your Kickstarter sucks, of course, he's back.

• 1:04:19Speaker 06

  Well, now I'll be on the left.

• 1:04:20Ed Zitron?

  He's on the left as he has not been, no, okay.

• 1:04:23Speaker 06

  Come on now, hey, come on.

• 1:04:24Ed Zitron?

  Whoa. So Max, I'm actually really excited to have you here because we have spent like several hours just like dunking on this. They're just like making fun of stuff and being annoyed at stuff. But you, you are here covering chips and silicon and such. What have you seen? What has Nvidia done? Actually, that's a great point. What's Nvidia covered this trip?

• 1:04:45Speaker 05

  Sure, absolutely. I mean, they've unveiled a few new things in terms of silicon specifically. They launched a computer called Digits, which is essentially one of their supercomputers compressed in some, in something even smaller than a Mac Mini.

• 1:04:59Ed Zitron?

  And that's like a three, the $3,000 one, right?

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  That's the $3,000 one, yeah, exactly. Um, and so that, uh, that, that was kind of an interesting thing. There, there have been, uh, we've reported that they're going to make PC chips themselves. So this is potentially on the road to producing some kind of laptop or desktop PC chip themselves.

• 1:05:20Ed Zitron?

  So when you say, what, what is this machine for? This $3,000 Nvidia computer? Cause I've seen a ton of coverage, but no one will actually tell me what it's for.

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  Well, it looks like mostly it's for researchers and, and people that want to do experiments with AI or code with AI or.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  Um. Essentially just do things that require giant computers, um, sort of on a smaller, on a small scale.

• 1:05:47Ed Zitron?

  So is it generative AI focused or?

• 1:05:49Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, I, of course, you can run generative AI apps with it, um, but it, but they, they sort of pitched it as something that, that was geared for researchers and developers.

• 1:05:57Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Ed Zitron?

  Because the way it's being reported is by other people is that it's some sort of replacement for the large scale GPUs that are being used for like inference for. So inference being the thing when you make a request from chat GPT, for example, and it generates an answer. So it's not really for that. That's not the business use case?

• 1:06:16Speaker 05

  It didn't look like it to me. It looked like, I mean, maybe you can run, yeah, of course, I'm sure.

• 1:06:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you could probably run it on it, but.

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  Of course, but it, but it looks like it's set up the design for, you know, somebody who wants a computer in their office or, I don't know, at their university or whatever, just given the price point. Um, and it, you know, the setup it showed was with a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. And so it's, it's definitely like a, it's like a personal computer effectively.

• 1:06:40Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  It runs Linux. So that also means it's probably not a consumer machine.

• 1:06:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Because most consumers are not gonna, are not willing to learn how to use Linux or won't do it or whatever.

• 1:06:48Ed Zitron?

  So it should be able to run like 11 Chrome tabs on it.

• 1:06:52Ed Zitron?

  I, so also I hate to do this, Max, if you wouldn't mind turning your microphone just slightly. We've had a late entrant. We've had, we have the wonderful Matt Binder who made his way up here. Thank you, Matt.

• 1:07:02Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me, Ed. It's finally, I finally met you in person.

• 1:07:05Ed Zitron?

  No, Matt Binder and I have been on this podcast like three or four times, of course, Scam Economy.

• 1:07:09Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. And we've, uh, never met in person.

• 1:07:12Ed Zitron?

  We've never met in person, but now we have. He's on my podcast. So Max, back to, back to you for a question. So what else was announced in general with silicon on this, with the hardware in general?

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, the, as always with the big chip makers, they announce, um, new PC, usually gaming stuff. Nvidia announced a bunch of new, a new line of gaming chips, the, uh, RTX 50 series. Um, they're claiming the low.

• 1:07:37Speaker 07

  Low end on that series is able to deliver performance that's capable of what the high end of the current RTX series is. So yeah, they they use a technique called DLSS, which is just a fancy way of saying they use AI to predict what the next frame in the game is going to look like. At the moment, they're rendering two frames at once. This one can render four frames at once.

• 1:07:57Ed Zitron?

  But it's on the hardware side, not.

• 1:07:58Speaker 07

  On the hardware side. Yeah, yeah, it's all. This is all hardware.

• 1:08:01Ed Zitron?

  And this is differentiated from when we, when you say AI, AI, this is separate to generative AI.

• 1:08:05Speaker 07

  This, um, I, I don't, I don't know exactly how it works, just to be clear.

• 1:08:09Ed Zitron?

  DLSS has been around for longer than the current boom, though.

• 1:08:13Speaker 07

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. DLSS has been around for, I don't know, four or five years, I want to say, but don't quote me on that, on that particular.

• 1:08:19Ed Zitron?

  We don't know things here. Don't worry. But, okay, let's move you up to Matt Binder, of course. Matt, what have you seen so far? What have you been cursed with on this eternal trip?

• 1:08:28Speaker 07

  I've been covering a lot of like weird stuff and I had a lot of AR glasses and.

• 1:08:33Ed Zitron?

  How are those?

• 1:08:34Speaker 07

  You know, uh, I, I have yet to find one that I could actually, would actually use. Like, sure, you put them on and they're cool to like see because some of them have different ways of doing things. But like there was one, for example, that like, there's, there's no lens and usually the, the, it's the holiday glasses.

• 1:08:53Ed Zitron?

  What is a holiday glass?

• 1:08:54Speaker 07

  Holiday. So they're, uh, basically AR glasses where the.

• 1:08:59Ed Zitron?

  Oh, you mean holiday like a name?

• 1:09:00Speaker 07

  Holiday. Yes, that's what I'm.

• 1:09:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm just British. That's my problem.

• 1:09:03Speaker 07

  Yes. Uh, so basically the AR part isn't built into the lens. It's built into the rim.

• 1:09:09Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:09:09Speaker 07

  So it's a little like a circular screen where basically you put the glasses on and your eye is meant to look at the circular screen above the lens.

• 1:09:18Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that's where I generally look.

• 1:09:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, of course. And, um, I, I couldn't use it without going cross-eyed. I immediately was going.

• 1:09:26Ed Zitron?

  I love the experience of being hurt by things.

• 1:09:29Speaker 07

  Right, right. So, I mean, the idea is interesting, but, you know, I, I think for me, though, the thing at CES is always, what's not here anymore?

• 1:09:38Ed Zitron?

  How do you mean?

• 1:09:38Speaker 07

  Like, what, like, to, like, you can see where the tech industry thinks it's going based on what has just disappeared from the previous years. Like what buzzwords are companies staying away from that they used to proudly say they were back, you know, last year or the year before?

• 1:09:54Ed Zitron?

  Like what?

• 1:09:54Speaker 07

  Like, I came here two years ago for the first time and every company had to say they were doing something in the metaverse.

• 1:10:01Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:10:02Speaker 07

  Every company was a metaverse company and.

• 1:10:06Speaker 07

  This year, I don't think you could even find the word.

• 1:10:08Ed Zitron?

  Well, I did. I found a Metaverse and Quantum AI panel that I missed.

• 1:10:12Speaker 07

  A panel, though. Was there actually any Metaverse product?

• 1:10:14Ed Zitron?

  I don't know, because I missed it, which makes the trip a failure. So, did you see anything you enjoyed, or was it mostly pain?

• 1:10:22Speaker 07

  Uh, I mean, there's stuff that I've seen that worked, but again, I don't think I'd ever reuse it.

• 1:10:27Ed Zitron?

  I love that, that quality level with the show. It functioned.

• 1:10:31Speaker 07

  Like, the weirdest thing I saw is hands down that, uh, I don't know if you've seen it, the electric salt spoon?

• 1:10:38Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 1:10:38Speaker 07

  Okay, it's by this Japanese company named Kirin.

• 1:10:41Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:10:42Speaker 07

  And it's actually available in Japan, so that's already ticking off a rarity at CES.

• 1:10:47Ed Zitron?

  That exists.

• 1:10:48Speaker 07

  Something that's actually in stores and available. So basically, their goal is to let, have people eat less salt. And they want to make your low sodium foods taste saltier without actually adding salt. So how do they make it taste better? They send an electric current through the spoon to your tongue.

• 1:11:08Ed Zitron?

  So just so we're clear.

• 1:11:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Ed Zitron?

  Just, just so we're clear as I begin to disassociate live on air. It's a special spoon?

• 1:11:16Speaker 07

  It's a special spoon.

• 1:11:17Ed Zitron?

  Oh, good!

• 1:11:18Speaker 07

  And I mean, listen, it, it worked.

• 1:11:20Ed Zitron?

  Wow!

• 1:11:21Speaker 07

  Like, the food did taste a bit saltier, and I know because I thought, at first I thought it was like a placebo effect, like, oh, they told me it tastes saltier, so my brain now thinks it's saltier. But then I fucked up the usage of it.

• 1:11:32Ed Zitron?

  Some Maravangian shit.

• 1:11:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, but then I messed up while using it and it turned off mid sip of the soup they provided.

• 1:11:40Speaker 07

  And then, so.

• 1:11:41Ed Zitron?

  My spoon broke.

• 1:11:42Speaker 07

  Right, so the soup actually did taste less saltier as I'm drinking it when the machine shut off. So I was like, oh wow, it works! But also, I, I would never buy this $130 spoon.

• 1:11:52Ed Zitron?

  Waiter, my spoon's uncharged. But actually, yeah, so did it have a battery?

• 1:11:58Speaker 07

  Uh, it was like, yeah, it was a battery-powered spoon, yeah.

• 1:12:03Ed Zitron?

  So assuming you have multiple people eating in your house.

• 1:12:07Speaker 07

  Right, so the, the spoon handle and the, the actual ladle, or whatever you'd call it, they're separate parts, so you can replace.

• 1:12:15Ed Zitron?

  Oh, good, I love my spoon to be multi-part.

• 1:12:17Speaker 07

  Multiple parts, yes, yes. Thankfully, only two, though. They could have went really crazy with it.

• 1:12:22Ed Zitron?

  So you'd need, like, was it actually $130?

• 1:12:26Speaker 07

  I, I believe it was like a hundred.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  Japan, though. They're not selling it in the US yet.

• 1:12:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they got money there.

• 1:12:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  I mean, the, to me, it's like, the idea is noble.

• 1:12:35Ed Zitron?

  I find, I must find the spoon. Where is the spoon?

• 1:12:37Speaker 05

  It was, it was at, uh, the first night, the media night unveiled. I don't know where it was.

• 1:12:41Ed Zitron?

  They're gonna hide it from me. They don't want me to look at that spoon. So you need to buy multiple ones of these ostensibly.

• 1:12:47Speaker 05

  You're right, right.

• 1:12:48Ed Zitron?

  Some rich ass guy is like, yeah, now you, now you don't need much salt at all.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  I mean, you could, I guess, you know, eat your food one at a time and just wash the spoon after every use. Find a bunch of people over and pass.

• 1:13:00Ed Zitron?

  Combined with so lot. Does it work with not soup?

• 1:13:03Speaker 05

  Uh, they just had soup there to try. And I'm assuming it's got to work with things that are not soup.

• 1:13:09Ed Zitron?

  But otherwise, well, okay, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  I mean, what if you pick up the soup with a spoon by accident?

• 1:13:14Ed Zitron?

  What else are you eating where you would reduce the salt that wasn't soup?

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  Uh, a lot of, a lot of things.

• 1:13:22Ed Zitron?

  Like what, but, but what is the thing?

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  Fried rice, I don't know.

• 1:13:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but like, wait, are you, where are you adding the salt with fried rice?

• 1:13:31Speaker 05

  Okay, that's a good point. I don't know.

• 1:13:32Ed Zitron?

  And why are you eating with a spoon? Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 05

  You don't need fried rice with a spoon.

• 1:13:36Ed Zitron?

  That's fork coated.

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  Like, you don't need the, you don't need this one to eat ice cream. You know.

• 1:13:43Ed Zitron?

  So this is just a very expensive soup related technology.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  I mean, again, Japanese company, they ate a lot of soup over there.

• 1:13:50Ed Zitron?

  They do.

• 1:13:52Ed Zitron?

  I'm just thinking about this spoon and I really fit, there's always a point at CES where I begin to go insane when I begin to just like think of the special salt spoon. And then I call my therapist and I say, I'm thinking of the spoon. Anyway, um, did you see anything you like, though?

• 1:14:09Ed Zitron?

  Everyone has the same answer. It's a, it's a sigh and then a space of time.

• 1:14:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:14:14Ed Zitron?

  Well, hey, wait a second. I mean, the, some of the chips look pretty cool. Actually, yeah, Matt, you take this question before, so Matt can try and think of something he liked? I mean, I, you know, I, I don't, you know, chill for any of these companies, but they, you know, AMD. But if you like something, please tell us. Well, AMD, Intel and Nvidia did all announce new chips, uh, arguably, arguably, they all look pretty interesting for different, different reasons. AMB did something pretty unique. They added this technology called Unified Memory to their latest gaming processors. What does that do? Apple did it a few years ago. It basically just makes the chip faster. It means that the memory and the CPU can talk to each other much more quickly, which allows you know, more speedy graphics and more speedy, you know, computing power. But it is actually an interesting thing. I don't, I haven't tried it. I don't know. And how would?

• 1:14:59Ed Zitron?

  I don't have any benchmarks, so I have no earthly idea how it performs in the real world, but theoretically, the technology is pretty good. So as I'm speaking to the listeners that don't know stuff and myself, how does that manifest in something good? Is it just that the hardware and the software, the hardware parts talk to each other?

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  I think I can take this one. Basically, he's trying to say basically is it goes like, so the chip goes into

• 1:15:21Ed Zitron?

  More tabs.

• 1:15:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Ed Zitron?

  More browser tabs.

• 1:15:25Speaker 06

  And to be clear, this is for computers.

• 1:15:27Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. So if you just think about whenever you, you probably have a computer at home right now, right?

• 1:15:32Ed Zitron?

  I don't right now, but.

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  Well, a lot of people may have computers and these chips basically can go in them. So it's from there. It's just pretty cool stuff, actually.

• 1:15:39Ed Zitron?

  Damn, I love logging on. Okay, Matt, anything enjoyable?

• 1:15:42Speaker 07

  I mean, the TVs are cool.

• 1:15:44Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:15:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, how could you, and the gaming monitors, the really big curved monitors, like I would never buy these things because they cost like thousands of dollars.

• 1:15:53Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, you're in journalism.

• 1:15:55Speaker 07

  Right, right, right. I mean, one thing I like is that coming to CES, it is now clear that at least as a technology product, crypto is dead. There is no crypto currency.

• 1:16:08Speaker 05

  Bullshit.

• 1:16:08Speaker 07

  Nothing, absent completely. Now I mentioned Metaverse and like, you know, Metaverse is just like silly, but like it is actually a breath of fresh air to finally see that the tech industry, at least that represented by CES, has seemed to move on, moved on completely from crypto, blockchain. I remember two years ago, every company, whether it doesn't matter if they were like a, a special electronic dental floss company, whatever, they all wanted to give you a free NFT if you come to their booth. There is not a single, and I don't think the words NF or T are even here at CES.

• 1:16:43Ed Zitron?

  If you find them, please email me [email protected]. I wanna, I wanna find them and ask them some questions. I wanna know what they're doing here.

• 1:16:51Speaker 07

  Right. You know, I think people realize like this is, if anything, it's like, it's a financial day trading scam. It's not a tech product, but it's pretty cool though.

• 1:17:02Ed Zitron?

  It is really cool.

• 1:17:03Speaker 06

  Jesse, would you like to show for crypto?

• 1:17:05Ed Zitron?

  As a crypto guy, as the crypto expert for the show.

• 1:17:09Speaker 06

  I think it's just kind of cool because they're like little pitchers or something. So it's like, I don't know, I just think that's like, I hear what you're saying. It's like, okay, the tech companies have moved on from the little pitchers, but it's like, we're always going to have little pitchers.

• 1:17:20Ed Zitron?

  Deguerra types?

• 1:17:22Speaker 06

  You know what I'm saying? Like it's been forever. We've had these little pitchers. So I just think like, okay, maybe it's waned right now, but there's going to be a time where we come back to CES and we see the little pitchers again. And I think that's going to be really cool.

• 1:17:34Ed Zitron?

  I think it is funny as well that like Max is probably the only person who has been at CES who has found the real stuff because like it's just because you can't really fake silicon. No, you can't. You, I mean, you can fake it up to up until a certain point. You can, you can brag about how good it's going to be or whatever your, what your, what your startup's doing and you can claim performance. But if at a certain point you have to send a chip to the fab and make it. And if it doesn't do what you say it will, well, then that's that. And the thing is that's really important. It's actually good, like good education for the listeners as well is to give him back the microphone. Come on, Matt. Matthew Binder.

• 1:18:10Speaker 05

  No, go ahead.

• 1:18:11Ed Zitron?

  All right. But the important, it's actually important, like foundation people to know with a lot of these companies talking about the ASICs, so specialist chips and like, oh, OpenAI or whomever will simply build a chip. It is not that easy, right? It is not that easy. So what is the process of a chip getting done? And you know a lot more about this than I think you're letting on. I mean, and you know what an ASIC is? Yes, I just don't know what it stands for candidly. Application specific integrated circuit. Thank you. Woo. Hell yeah. Someone knows stuff. No, you're right, but you're really right. It's, it's, it's super complicated and expensive to make even a basic AI chip. And we're talking a couple of years from scratch, a couple of years minimum. Right. At least half a billion dollars. If you're, if you're lucky, another half a billion to build the hardware around it.

• 1:18:55Ed Zitron?

  Cause that's something people forget often. When you make a chip, you make the actual piece of silicon. If you look at any Nvidia product or many others, they've got a whole board around it with a bunch of other chips and other stuff. And that to make that is probably another half billion dollars. So this is, these are not inexpensive ideas. And then when it comes to the actual integration and putting these into service, you have to do a bunch more cooling and actual, and there's, there is a failure rate as well. Absolutely. And you have to write the software on top of it. I mean, these, the whole like, having the idea to make a chip is. Like it's a multi-year and if you only make one, you've just wasted your time and money. So you have to, as a company, you generally have to do multiples? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You want to, you want a roadmap. Uh, because that's the whole, I mean, if you, anybody that's buying AI chips for any reason, they're not buying the current generation.

• 1:19:40Ed Zitron?

  They're buying gen two, gen three, and maybe gen four. Interesting. So they're buying ahead. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So this, I'm glad, I'm really glad you're here for many reasons, but I like putting this stuff down because the reason that there is like the real and the fake parts of CES is, as I said, you can't really fake chips. You can be like, oh yeah, we're doing an AI stethoscope or we're going to claim to cure autism with VR or whatever. But you can't really be like, we're going to do a chip because the actual chips people will just be like, no, you're not. There is like very clear boundaries with what you can actually do, which is what's so interesting because you have this chunk of CES was just the no bullshit zone. Cause you really, you could not be making like Nvidia pumps themselves up and says all this stuff, but ultimately is what it, it does. It does have to deliver. It actually has to exist.

• 1:20:24Ed Zitron?

  At a certain point, I mean, people will buy them, put them in the field, try all the hardware, try the software and the claims have to a certain point live up to the, whatever they're, whatever they're, you know, saying. So forgive me for a very direct question, but how realistic is it for someone like Sam Altman to build out an AI chip? Like how, it's years ahead, right? It's years ahead. Uh, it, I mean, it's more of a talent question than a money question, I think. How so? There are only maybe a 10 to 12 teams of people around the world that can build cutting edge, world-class chips and all of the people that lead those teams have jobs that they probably like or enjoy.

• 1:21:03Ed Zitron?

  And so you have to find the right people in order to do that, find disgruntled people or whatever, whatever the reason why is why they're leaving. But you have to assemble the right group of, of people to be able to build a chip. And even if you get the right group of people with the amount of money that you need, there's still just risks with building a chip. Like what? Um, you could think the design works. You could, uh, for example, you could virtually verify that it works. You could test it. You could do all the computer simulations and simi, other simulations that you want. When you send it to the fab, to, to the factory to print, it might not come out exactly how you think it will. And that will mean it doesn't work as well. It doesn't cool as efficiently. It might not work at all. Oh. It might not. Yeah, there might be, it might. You can get like billions into this and like.

• 1:21:45Ed Zitron?

  And you might not, I mean, it, it, it does happen frequently with the first generation of chips. Most, most companies that tried, try them for the first time, the first version will not.

• 1:21:54Speaker 07

  Not be amazing. It'll do certain things effectively and well, but it probably won't be able to achieve. You know, Nvidia, just for example, Nvidia spent what 20 years, 30 years, whatever, whatever it is, you know, working on its designs. So to expect that a company can come in in two years, replicate the performance or whatever of, you know, somebody who's been doing it for a long time is kind of unrealistic. So it usually takes several generations to get right.

• 1:22:16Ed Zitron?

  Nvidia has their own software CUDA for making GPUs do stuff. It took quite a while for that to kind of scale, right?

• 1:22:24Speaker 07

  I mean, they started in 95, I want to say. Yeah, building CUDA and they've been working on it ever since. I mean, it used to be centered around their GeForce graphics cards. And now it's obviously

• 1:22:34Ed Zitron?

  A little bigger.

• 1:22:35Speaker 07

  A little bigger. Yeah. I mean, maybe not as big as the electric soup spoon, but you know, potentially one day, maybe they'll have that success. And they can do more than just soup. That's for sure.

• 1:22:47Ed Zitron?

  So Matt, bringing it back to you, but the chips you're talking about, you can't even taste. So I mean, come on.

• 1:22:53Speaker 07

  There are, there are, there are probably chips in the spoon though.

• 1:22:56Ed Zitron?

  And there are chips that are salty. So anything hurt? Anything on the, you just saw it and upset you?

• 1:23:03Speaker 07

  Oh, I thought you meant physically, like.

• 1:23:06Ed Zitron?

  I mean, just walking is pretty rough, mate. I'm not gonna lie, I'm in pain, but.

• 1:23:10Speaker 07

  Um, geez, I, I, I need a second. I'm trying to think.

• 1:23:14Ed Zitron?

  Or anything just upsetting or annoying?

• 1:23:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, it does, it does pain me to see the, the AI integration and everything. Like, I don't need AI to be like the most random things. Like, I was actually surprised that the spoon didn't say, claim AI integration or anything.

• 1:23:32Speaker 07

  You know, the smart glasses, I mean, I guess I could see with the glasses, like the AI integration for like translations is a, is a use case if you're someone who would wear AR glasses to begin with. But I mean, do you really need like generative AI and things like that? Like, no, like.

• 1:23:48Ed Zitron?

  I find the Ray-Bans disgust, pardon me, disgusting. I, I think if you're walking around looking at things and trying to work out using the computer, a pervert. Like, what are you, what are you doing?

• 1:23:58Speaker 07

  Right, right. Like I. Perverts buy stuff too, though.

• 1:24:00Ed Zitron?

  No, no, perverts are a huge addressable market.

• 1:24:03Speaker 07

  Perverts are a great market.

• 1:24:04Ed Zitron?

  Many of them, many of them listen to this show, right?

• 1:24:06Speaker 07

  Speaking of which, I think this might be the first CES where the sex toy industry is here. That's the thing.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Wait, they weren't here before?

• 1:24:14Speaker 07

  They were, there was a huge thing a year or two ago where some company applied for CES and they were told, we do not deal with this industry here. And.

• 1:24:24Speaker 06

  They smartly, I mean, used it to their advantage, like with press and they were like, uh, got tons of

• 1:24:29Ed Zitron?

  They're keeping the dildos out of CES.

• 1:24:31Speaker 06

  I think on top of this, this was like a sex positive woman owned business.

• 1:24:35Ed Zitron?

  There's nothing wrong with it.

• 1:24:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, nothing wrong at all. But like, that company used that to their advantage and said like, CES tells, you know, woman owned.

• 1:24:42Ed Zitron?

  A least perversion is honest.

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And so for the first time, I'm seeing these sex toy companies on the floor of CES. It's like, why not?

• 1:24:49Ed Zitron?

  I feel like Vegas is, something's, something's economically breaking. I haven't seen the guys with the flappy cards.

• 1:24:56Speaker 06

  I didn't see the flappy guys either.

• 1:24:57Ed Zitron?

  No, and they're back. No, they're back. They're back. So these guys who are, I think it's strip clubs. Personally, never.

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  Oh, the guys handing out like the uh.

• 1:25:05Ed Zitron?

  And I haven't seen them for years and now they're back clapping. They're back, they're flipping to the clap, clap, clap.

• 1:25:09Speaker 06

  They, I saw them, they put, um, they like took a fan, it was actually, it was actually kind of nice.

• 1:25:14Ed Zitron?

  Oh no, they're very industrious.

• 1:25:15Speaker 06

  They took all the nasty little cards and they put them like on a street sign and made like a little fan.

• 1:25:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 1:25:20Speaker 06

  Kind of cute.

• 1:25:21Ed Zitron?

  They have been gone for years. The fact they're back is probably not a great sign, but I must be clear, there's nothing wrong with being a pervert as long as you don't.

• 1:25:28Speaker 06

  I think there's something wrong with that industry particularly.

• 1:25:30Ed Zitron?

  No, that industry, I was, I was referring to.

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  Do these guys not know about QR codes? Like.

• 1:25:34Speaker 06

  Right. You're supposed to scan the porno.

• 1:25:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:25:40Ed Zitron?

  No, but that's the thing. Nothing wrong with being horny as long as it's not anyone else's problem.

• 1:25:43Speaker 06

  In fact, let's go around right now. Let's just say who's horny in the room. So Ed or you?

• 1:25:46Ed Zitron?

  Nope.

• 1:25:47Speaker 06

  Not horny. Uh, Tom?

• 1:25:49Speaker 05

  This is 10%.

• 1:25:50Ed Zitron?

  I love this. This is really good for the show.

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  Uh, Reuters declined to comment. Reuters is off on this one. Okay. Matt, when you walked in, I was like, no, here's, this is the guy who's horny.

• 1:25:59Ed Zitron?

  Can we quote that? Can I write this up and quote that? On the question of horniness, Reuters declined.

• 1:26:06Speaker 06

  No, stop it. I'm sorry.

• 1:26:09Ed Zitron?

  Why did Dave?

• 1:26:10Speaker 06

  I just didn't say anything for a minute, so I wanted to say something.

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  Well, we didn't get Matt on the record here, so.

• 1:26:15Speaker 06

  Okay, well, well, I can quote Mashable here. Mashable, very horny. Wow. That's so nice.

• 1:26:20Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, everyone.

• 1:26:23Ed Zitron?

  Every, I had Robert Evans listing all the crimes I commit, like, every, every episode.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  I thought your listeners were the criminals.

• 1:26:31Ed Zitron?

  I know.

• 1:26:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:26:32Ed Zitron?

  And I made a joke about stealing stuff once, and it's all that's in the Reddit, and even saying this, there's, there's, there's gonna be another thread, and they're gonna be like, "Oh, Ed did this crime."

• 1:26:42Speaker 06

  You're looking at your Reddit?

• 1:26:44Ed Zitron?

  I, I run the Reddit, baby.

• 1:26:45Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:26:46Ed Zitron?

  I'm on top of that shit.

• 1:26:47Speaker 06

  Isn't that kind of a conflict of interest?

• 1:26:49Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, well, yes, but, no, the Reddit was created by someone called Comic Con, and all it was for the first month was just like, "This show fucking sucks."

• 1:26:59Speaker 06

  That's a good Reddit.

• 1:27:00Ed Zitron?

  So I went in there and just argued with everyone.

• 1:27:03Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:03Ed Zitron?

  And now it's great. They love me because they know I'll fucking respond. Yeah, culture of fear, baby. So, Max, how long are you here for? How, how long are you, you suffering with this?

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  I'm leaving tonight.

• 1:27:14Ed Zitron?

  That's probably for the best, mate.

• 1:27:15Speaker 05

  Pretty short trip. Yeah, just enough time to, to see the silicon and get out.

• 1:27:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and with the horny levels there, we don't even know what kind of silicon. Um, I'm so sorry, Max, I'm, I'm sorry. But, so, do you like, is this your first? How many of you?

• 1:27:31Speaker 05

  Uh, I've been, uh, twice now.

• 1:27:33Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:27:33Speaker 05

  Uh, so.

• 1:27:34Ed Zitron?

  How's it feel? What's the vibe you're getting?

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  Vegas is, is a, is a city that I think you just have to accept.

• 1:27:40Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:27:40Speaker 05

  And when you do that, es- especially this part of, of Las Vegas, then, um, then I think it's a lot more enjoyable.

• 1:27:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:27:47Speaker 05

  Personally, because like, I don't visit Vegas very often, you know, so it's kind of a novelty for me. I get to go see the crazy casinos and walk around the room, see all the different people who are here, and.

• 1:27:56Ed Zitron?

  Various degenerates.

• 1:27:58Speaker 05

  I, okay, most, yeah, exactly, most, most of you.

• 1:28:02Ed Zitron?

  There you go.

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  I mean, and it is kind of cool to see, like, all this technology, you know, sort of stuck into, like, sixteen different convention centers or whatever the number is these days.

• 1:28:11Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:28:12Speaker 05

  You know, uh, but, you know, this is, this is number two, I'm staying for two days, so I don't have the, uh, you know, tenure to be able to, to talk about it, like, I'm a twenty-year veteran, and some people certainly have.

• 1:28:22Ed Zitron?

  I know, I find it fascinating when people haven't got much experience, how they feel. But you also deal with the real things, which is, which is fun, because everyone else is just going and being like, "Yeah, I saw an AI dildo, and I, I can't, they wouldn't let me use it."

• 1:28:37Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, you know, the, the PC chips and, and so on are, are pretty exciting, but a lot of the stuff that we report on is, is. Is the data center chips that

• 1:28:45Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:28:45Speaker 05

  Power most of AI.

• 1:28:47Ed Zitron?

  And are they here as well?

• 1:28:48Speaker 05

  No, this is this is all consumer stuff. The the most, I mean, the the biggest thing that tends to get talked about now, you know, we're talking about things that aren't discussed or weren't discussed before. Matt, where are the these AI PCs? This is like one of these things that the industry has been trying to make happen for a little over a year now, and, you know, supposed to start lifting PCA PC sales this year.

• 1:29:11Ed Zitron?

  And what what are these chips meant to do, just to be clear?

• 1:29:15Speaker 05

  I I wish I could have a good answer for you. I have a demo with HP later today. I'll let you know. It's unclear to me either. I I mean, I I think the I mean, I'm saying that because I think the answer is is that this is one of those situations where if you don't build the hardware to do the thing, then nobody can make the software to do the thing.

• 1:29:31Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:29:31Speaker 05

  Right? So if you if the capability doesn't exist, then nobody can code on top of it to make the cool application for for whatever AI thing.

• 1:29:38Ed Zitron?

  Okay, I'll I'll buy that.

• 1:29:39Speaker 05

  Right? Like, I mean, I mean, I have no idea if it'll succeed or not. I mean, I don't predict the future, but I think it is true with any generation of hardware. Like, for example, real time ray tracing that Nvidia made a few years ago when they launched it. And real time ray tracing just makes light look better, video game graphics look better. So for when they launched it, there was like one, yeah, I don't remember how many games, but it was like a small handful, you know, very, very few. And, you know, it was like cool, but not widely adopted. It took until, I think, the video game consoles, the Xbox Series X and the PS5, included the tech in their systems for it to become like very widely adopted by developers. You know, so this is, I think, with AI PC chips is like kind of similar.

• 1:30:18Ed Zitron?

  Except how long will this bubble last?

• 1:30:21Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, I think I would give it a few years. Like, I would give it two or three years for the software software ecosystem to like actually build out. But I mean, you know, at the moment, arguably, the the most interesting thing that Microsoft talked about when they launched their Copilot Plus program was the

• 1:30:36Ed Zitron?

  And what is that, just to be clear?

• 1:30:37Speaker 05

  It's their AI PC platform.

• 1:30:39Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:30:40Speaker 05

  That the PCs that are part of it have to have a certain spec in order to run the applications was this thing.

• 1:30:45Speaker 06

  recall which allowed you to look back.

• 1:30:46Ed Zitron?

  Oh, everyone loved that.

• 1:30:47Speaker 06

  Everybody loved that. They killed it. They're relaunching it now, but I mean, you know, so. Yeah, I just, I it's.

• 1:30:55Speaker 07

  But like you see, you see this blowback even from like regular consumers, not just the disgruntled people in the room right here, right now, like the five of us. But like regular consumers are not upgrading to like Windows 11, for example, they're choosing to stick with the non-AI operating system. And like, listen, I don't think they are aware that they're like, oh, I don't want AI for the most part. But also the AI has not been a draw for them to make, get them to upgrade. Like they don't care about it.

• 1:31:21Speaker 05

  And and when it comes to enterprise stuff, especially like what you're talking about, like trying to sell like business, like laptops with like integrated, you know. I think they call them NPU's, neural processing unit, is okay, all this stuff is already running in in the cloud. I I can't think of any other like, you know, sort of like function where they offloaded it from the cloud to like your local PC like. What's the business value in running chat GPT on on like your laptop instead of like?

• 1:31:47Ed Zitron?

  I can actually answer that one in the sense that it will kill chat GPT. Because when you realize what you can run on your laptop, you'll fuck around with it and be like, oh, this doesn't do that very.

• 1:31:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's, there's all these like software as a service companies that are like, speak and it'll text to voice right away for you. Well, there, there are models that you could just run off your computer. You don't have to pay a monthly fee to do that. You could just literally. Download the free like a language model and there you go, you're set. It's it. They they don't want people to know this for real.

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, but in a lot of cases, you can already run this stuff on a sufficiently powerful computer with that just has like a GPU.

• 1:32:22Speaker 07

  Oh, you, you, you could get right now, like a probably a two, $300 M1 Mac Mini. Because they're now M4 and even that's 500 bucks. And you're set. You could run all this stuff right off your your silicon.

• 1:32:36Ed Zitron?

  Uh, you know, the Mac chip set if you want.

• 1:32:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just haven't seen the use cases to like justify like these like, like buying a new generation of AI PCs. It doesn't like really stand out to me as to why you would do this.

• 1:32:48Speaker 06

  I mean, I think what's really going to drive people to buy new computers is the fact that Windows 10 is end of life.

• 1:32:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 06

  I mean, I

• 1:32:55Ed Zitron?

  No, my dad has to buy a new laptop because of it.

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  Or stops lessons.

• 1:32:59Ed Zitron?

  He loves his laptop. It's like he loves this weird surface thing.

• 1:33:02Speaker 06

  It's unfortunately not very funny or interesting, the fact that, you know, that's the reason why people are going to upgrade.

• 1:33:06Ed Zitron?

  Also, my dad, Jeff, hi dad, you sometimes listen to these.

• 1:33:10Speaker 06

  Hi Ed's dad.

• 1:33:11Ed Zitron?

  Hi Ed's dad. Everyone say, everyone say hi to my dad.

• 1:33:14Speaker 06

  And Jeff, let's get a horny check on you as well, if you don't mind.

• 1:33:16Ed Zitron?

  Do not. Now I am going to have to talk to my father about that.

• 1:33:22Speaker 05

  Uh, on a scale of Chase to Randy.

• 1:33:25Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna tell the group chat I have with my siblings that I am shortly going to have to find out how horny dad is.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  I could go down to AI powered dildo company and see if they can hook your dad up with one of you.

• 1:33:38Speaker 06

  I need you to send me the booth number on that.

• 1:33:40Speaker 05

  I'm gonna FaceTime your dad right now.

• 1:33:44Ed Zitron?

  It's 10:42 PM in GMT, just going for that. Okay, we've got to wrap up then. So, Tom McKay, where can people find you?

• 1:33:52Speaker 05

  Uh, you can find me at itbrew.com. You can also find me on Twitter at twitter.com/theTOMZone or X.com, whatever. And on Blue Sky as cat turd 2.bsky.social.

• 1:34:06Ed Zitron?

  So good. So I bet you're loving that you chose that name.

• 1:34:09Speaker 05

  I am not.

• 1:34:11Ed Zitron?

  It's, it's so good.

• 1:34:12Speaker 05

  I'm on a bunch of blacklist because everybody thinks that I'm the actual.

• 1:34:15Ed Zitron?

  I remember when you picked it being like, he is going to get blocked by people. It's so good. Max Churney, where can people find you?

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  Anywhere where there's a chip, uh, but at.

• 1:34:25Ed Zitron?

  Okay, well, that's not even factually true. And what's great, by the way, my brother just responded to the thing of, I am shortly, my other brother responded with, what the fuck? I can't wait to explain why my dad is going to have to do a horny check to my siblings. Max Cherney, where can people find you? Sorry.

• 1:34:40Speaker 06

  At churn and burn, uh, on X.

• 1:34:43Ed Zitron?

  And Blue Sky and then on LinkedIn if you want, just look, look up my name. Very good. Matt Binder, where can people find you?

• 1:34:48Speaker 06

  First of all, I'm sorry for bringing up the sex toys being at CES this year. But yeah, you could find me, well, my Mashable, my CES coverage will be at Mashable, mashable.com. And you can find me on, you know, all sorts of social media, Blue Sky X, the everything app, threads at Matt Binder.

• 1:35:05Ed Zitron?

  Very good, Jesse Farrar.

• 1:35:07Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, Your Kickstarter Sucks is the podcast, uh, Go Off Kings is my stream, yeah. And I'm not on the everything app, but yeah, I'm Blue Sky, jessefarrar.com.

• 1:35:16Ed Zitron?

  I probably need to change the episode links because I linked you on X. And I'm of course Ed Zitron. I am now going to have a very uncomfortable conversation with several of my siblings about this episode. Thank you for listening to the first part of the two-part day three Better Offline CES experience. We're so grateful for you. We love you all. I'm Ed Zitron. You can find me everywhere where it says Ed Zitron, other than the parts that make me look bad. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.

• 1:35:50Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

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

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