Better Offline CES 2025: Day 5 - Pt. 2

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 Part 2 of our 5th day covering CES, Ed Zitron is joined by Robert Evans of Cool Zone Media, Gare Davis of Cool Zone Media, Kyle Chouinard of Las Vegas, Nevada, to talk labor, the true vibe of CES, and how growth-at-all-costs thinking crowds out real solutions to problems. And, of course, how much Ed loves everybody. Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/ bigblackjacobin.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/%20bigblackjacobin.bsky.social The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ David Roth, Defector: https://bsky.app/profile/davidjroth.bsky.social Defector: Defector.com It’s Christmastown Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-christmastown/id1407429849 Kyle Chouinard, Las Vegas Sun https://lasvegassun.com/staff/kyle-chouinard/ Gare Davis https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv Robert Evans https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social Phil Broughton https://bsky.app/profile/funranium.bsky.social/post/3kmolcb3bmx2r Our wonderful producer: https://www.mattosowski.com/ --- 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  At Oppenheimer, we're proven because we're grounded in discipline. For 145 years, we've been building and protecting wealth through every market cycle. With precision, clarity, and the courage to think boldly beyond the moment. This is what market-tested legacy looks like, for this generation and the next. Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  We're still here. We're still in Las Vegas.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  I'm still at Zitron, and this is still Better Offline. This is the second episode of Day Five, our last two-parter. And I was trying to think of something like glib and kind of sardonic to say, but I'm just going to be honest, I've had one of the best weeks of my life. I've just been really enjoying myself. We've had so many really, really great guests. I've got David J. Roth, of course, from Defector. Hello. And Edward Onguoso Jr.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  And Kyle Chouinard of the Las Vegas Sun. And all week has just been awesome people. Kyle, I talked over you, I apologize.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  Just saying hello.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's enough. So Kyle, you're-

• 1:59Speaker 04

  It's Ed's show.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Okay, getting ahead of yourself. No, so you're a general assignment reporter.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  So what have you been covering at the show?

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Well, it's pretty unique for me, because, you know, a lot of the media that comes here is from, you know, across the country, across the world, looking at whatever new tech's coming. And I get to cover it from a local angle, and how it affects Vegas, and specifically, you know, what's shown here could be implemented in the city in the next couple of years.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  So can you talk a little bit about that? I'm a local.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I'm out in Green Valley.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  I own Henderson.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Well, then, no, it's still Las Vegas. No H away.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, yeah, I was, I was talking to a couple of different companies this week. One of them was Autonomous Hotel, which is, they, they call it the first AI-powered hotel.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Okay, can you define any of that?

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so a lot of what that means is collecting a lot of user data and then using that to personalize kind of the experience of, it's also, it's a hotel slash apartment. So there's gonna be some split between there, but for the hotel, it's, you know, like remembering your coffee order, what direction you like your windows, and then when you come.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Direction I like.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  No, like if you like it facing south or west or north.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry, for your, okay, that makes more sense. For a sec, you've been like brutalized by CES long enough that I'm just like, okay, man, they got moving windows now.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  No, the windows, I'm, I've been, I wasn't told this, but I'm pretty sure they're stationary.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Staying somewhere else.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  So, yeah, there's, there's a lot of pretty much just data scraping from the week. They were, I asked about, you know, data privacy and stuff like that, and they were all about, you know, whatever data they collect is the user giving it to them and.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Do they sell it?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  I imagine, no, they said they were.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Really more re-gifting in this scenario.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  No, they, they said, you know, they, they put a lot of emphasis on keeping that data very secure. You know, I was talking with the culinary union.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  No, no, but, sorry, I had to push back.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Secure is not the same as not sharing it, though.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Have they been remotely giving on?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I mean, if the answer is you don't know.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  No, no, but this is not a failing on you. This is them being like, thank God, thank God, we don't have to say the thing is, which is we are selling this to the points guy and airlines and hotels, because that's the thing, these hotels around here are like data warehouses.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  The amount of shit they collect on you is crazy, not just through the, I actually, this is a question, do you know anything about data collection practices here? And this is, I don't either, so.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not super familiar with it. I mean, surveillance is nothing new in Las Vegas. You know, it's not rare to find hotels working with the government. That, that's pretty normal.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  In what ways do they work together?

• 4:51Speaker 04

  You know, FBI, if they're looking for something, I'm not, I honestly don't know the specifics.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  If there's even, because I love living here, but I'm also a weird, greasy freak. And I understand what Vegas is, which is you walk in here, if you've not been to Vegas, so you haven't spent a lot of time here. There are cameras everywhere.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Everywhere you go, not in the rooms, I think.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  No.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  But in the hallways, in the casinos, and there are, you may think that the scariest place cameras can look at you is a bank.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  It's actually a casino. They are, they are watching.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  And you can make the glib, oh, the iron sky. No, for real, though. It's one of the safest places to be.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Because they are watching you, and they're watching you because you could do stuff with their money, which is not good. But anyway, continue. So you've seen this, this AI-powered hotel?

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's, it's opening next couple of months.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Which one? Is, where is it?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Uh, it's actually by Legion. Uh, it's like, I think like a mile away from Legion. Uh, it's not on the street.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Oh, so it's one of the closer places.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, walking to Legion's fun.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  I have season tickets, man. I wanna die. Can you walk it? You can walk from MGM.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, it's not Delano anymore, it's W. Um, but I usually would just park there and walk.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  It's, I, I went to the Syracuse game, so.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a, uh, like a question that I have always sort of struggled with here as a, and, you know, in Los Angeles as well, any of this sort of as a New York person. That like, I like the idea of being able to either take mass transit or walk to a thing, and yet like, Las Vegas isn't big enough, like theoretically, like your phone will tell you that's a 45-minute walk.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  And yet I feel like most of that is just fully impractical.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  It isn't that bad to get to, though.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  I was talking with, um, oh god, what's the CTA, uh, not CEO, the other guy.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I do not know. Don't worry.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  I was talking to him and he was like, uh, you know, asking for a bit of advice on CES, and he's like, every walk is longer than you think it is.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  That's actually great conference advice.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  So, but I'm still kind of confused. This AI hotel.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  What else does it do other than allegedly remember my preferences? Because I have an idea. You could have some sort of database of sort like a place for data, data. And you could put the data in that base and then you could simply remember which way my thing. Where does, what does AI do with this bit?

• 7:15Speaker 04

  So a lot of it's with their app. So they have this thing.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  It's key, it's called, it's K E E. Um, where they.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  What a great name.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  They described it as, I have it here, a 24 seven butler on the palm of your hand.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Um, sure.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  So it's just a lot of the requests that you'd be making, not really having to go through a human, just saying it into your phone and.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Right, but this doesn't add functionality to the hotel, surely, because a butler brings you things.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, so a lot of the functionality is just, I guess, having to avoid humans. I mean, I, I asked them about that, like, hey, how many humans are going to be working here? And it's around 30.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  In a hotel?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Which is not a lot.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I mean, there's.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  That's, that's what they told me. I, I, I want to.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  This isn't your company. Don't worry. I'm not mad at you.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Thirty full time and part time employees?

• 8:04Speaker 04

  That's what, that's what they said.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  At a big, like Las Vegas.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  300 rooms, it's not that big.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  That's still pretty big.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, like. That, that's 10 rooms.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  And a lot of it also is apartments and you don't need as many staff.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  It is funny that's like basically where the, the AI thing, it goes from being like, it's like a, you know, an application on your phone? It's like that, but it's AI because suddenly like you get to the, where the actual rubber meets the road on all of this stuff, which is fewer. I am going to stay there and I'm going to do an episode.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  And I'm going to have a piss fit.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  You're going to disappear.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  I am going, well, I will be disassociating like, but that's the, that's so. It's just frustrating because it's like theoretically an AI hotel could work in the sense that if there were defined user preferences, that they could just kind of move around them. I'm not talking about generative AI. I'm talking about theoretically algorithms that are capable of knowing a user's preference, but only in a much larger hotel system like, I don't know. Marriott.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Or.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Well, it's interesting you say that because I asked them about that. I asked, you know, is there any interest from hotels in the area? And they said, you know, currently we're trying to get everything up and running and ready to go. But that there was a lot of interest from other hotels in kind of the system we're making. And right after I got on my interview, I saw someone from a Vegas, a representative from a Vegas hotel come by and talk.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Because this isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility for thinking about Marriott, for example. They have, I don't know why I'm talking up like a publicly traded hotel phone, but like Marriott's pretty decent. Like you can put your shit into it. And the frustration I have with the AI part is that, yeah, I've specified what kind of hotel, pillow even, very different from a hotel, that I like in a hotel stay. I'm just not sure what else this does other than what Dave is suggesting, which is what if we just had less? Yeah. People? Well, it's the same thing as the stuff that we were talking about yesterday with the like smart homes. There's a lot of that with the AI related stuff. And it seems like some of it, it's like a degree of convenience that like doesn't just verge upon, but like

• 10:12Speaker 02

  goes fully into infantilization or just like. I mean, yeah. Which is a place where you get infant. Right. That's more of what you, in some ways, like it makes more sense with a hotel.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Isn't that what a hotel's for?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of, right? Like you're removing variables from the equation. But it also feels like there are very obvious AI things a hotel could do, such as making check in quicker. Making sure.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  You check in with their.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Making sure, no, but making sure the cleaning is done based on when, like, I don't know. I'm, I ain't no tech doer, but I don't know if I had an algorithm that would say, and I'm sure Vegas has these where it's like, okay, we have a hotel of X size and Y number of people come in on a Friday. So we can say that we need this much, but we have this one person.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, Vegas definitely has that.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this isn't that.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  No, this is about more the experience for the person. And I mean, to be fair, a lot of hotels, and I talked to Professor, I talked to a lot of people about this. A lot of hotels have just a billion different legacy systems running every single function.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Which feels like the things to upgrade rather than this.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Which is, and this is, that's kind of their point.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Trying to do?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  It's one completely integrated system for the entire hotel, you know, point of service, everything is connected.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  They're gonna have so much fucking trouble selling.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  So yeah, it's a

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Sorry, just, there's no way. It's why we have airlines on 90s computers. Like, you think the the Grozcy system of Venetian? Yeah, people know I I use the Venetian a lot. They, you think they're gonna upgrade an entire multifaceted system? It seems like an unrealistic proposition.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, when I was talking to a professor from UNLV, great guy.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  You're a real journalist also, very clear here, like, this guy's great.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  I'm trying to be very, very accurate in my wording. One thing he told me is that that's one of the main reasons, I mean, hospitality is, Vegas is kind of unique, but hospitality is industry is not known for being on the cutting edge.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Uh, it's it's known for kind of it, not that I swear, I'd say, being very stubborn and not really changing it. And one of the reasons they're kind of stubborn and don't really adapt to the times is quick is because of that, because there's a million systems interacting with each other. And when you change one, oh, God, that took down everything.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  It's an equilibrium thing. You can't just mess with one part of a hotel.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  And that's kind of why, like, for a new hotel, for them, it's like, okay, let's not make a billion systems and then have to integrate them all later. Let's just get it at the outset.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  They can't be the first windows of hotels, though. They cannot.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not sure if there there's other companies having that, but they they were emphasizing that quite a lot.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  I'm just imagining startups will do that. So what else have you seen moving off of hotels?

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most interesting things I saw was from this company, Sorenson, which I believe is based in Utah. They're at West. And so we were talking earlier about this being kind of like a decent use of AI. Like, there are still good uses of AI.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  No, I would love to hear.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  And so it's a real time translator that works for, specifically for like longer form presentations, you know, in a city like Las Vegas. That's obviously very important. We, you know, we have a convention authority.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  And the way it works is that once it's set up by the event, all you do is scan a QR code, and then you can have a real time translation of whoever's speaking at the front on your phone. I mean, I think it's 25 languages. And one of the cooler parts about it is that they also trained it with different dialects.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Okay, I was gonna say, so is this generative AI?

• 13:34Speaker 04

  It's a lot of training, uh, training data.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Sure, but i- is it a generative model? Is it a newer technology? Is it based off?

• 13:41Speaker 04

  I believe it's a generative model.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Right. So my one concern with that, and I'm glad that you mentioned dialects, is

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Everyone that I've talked to about, I can't speak any other languages. I can barely speak English. I thus have no experience with it, but everyone I talked to was like, there are these subtleties.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  And it sounds like, so how, with, with extra dialects?

• 14:04Speaker 04

  So it, it's, um, like all good things. It's a very human solution to that, where they just have a, a lot of really trained people that, you know, pretty consistently are, are checking the models to make sure that they're, they're working. Um, it's, it's not, they don't just set it to the side. They were really big on this. They don't just set it to the side and hope it works. That they are pretty consistently checking it with a, a group of, uh, trained professionals.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  One of the reasons I love having you here is being able to respond with this, which is Vegas is quite intolerant of bullshit. Weird for this place. It's the, you can bring whatever you want to CES, but it's like, oh, you want to sell to our beautiful casinos with our beautiful slot machines that bring us our taxes. We love it. Then you are fucking with our money and we can't have that. Thank you. You understand, we love our slot machines. That's why we don't spend, we don't have state income tax.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Our beautiful slot machines, we love them folks. But it's like Vegas is quite intolerant of just shit that don't work.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Because shit that don't work is extremely unprofitable.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. And a lot, uh, when you're working in the hospitality industry, your main job is to keep people happy.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  And when you run into-

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Vegas people are babies.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Um, and, and when you are running into tech issues, and this was, again, this professor, he's, he's giving me all my lines.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  What was the professor's name?

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Oh, let me get it up.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  No, no, don't worry about it. No, no, no, no. Look, this show can be quite cynical and shitty and I say words that people don't like and they get upset with me and they email me every day. And they say, Ed, I hope you die. Ed, I imagine the Cybertruck hitting you. Ed, I imagine the Ford F-150 hitting you. Ed, I thought of a Ford F-150 Raptor hitting you. You bounced and you, you went, ah, I'm in so much pain. What's the professor's name?

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Uh, his name is Mehmet Erdem. He is, uh, UNOV's Resorts, uh, sorry, the Chair of UNOV's Resorts Gaming and Golf Management Department.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Ed, I imagine the Prius hitting. Anyway, um-

• 15:54Speaker 02

  But that's the thing. I want these people on here because there is a thing I love about Vegas where there is a dishonest honesty. Where it's just, you can't just fling shit here because it's a very working class city. It's a very, it's a pragmatic city in many, many different ways. So it's kind of like, I'm more willing to humor the idea that they would have this translation thing.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Just because, putting aside all my feelings, Vegas would simply be like, nah, this fucking sucks. It's gonna get between the customer and the slot.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  But I mean, when you're running a, I mean, especially comments like CES, having real time translation when I, I think every panel's in English.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Very Anglopho, well Anglo.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Not Anglopho.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Anglocentric.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  When, you know, I'm talking to people and there's a billion languages here. And you, you mentioned working class. Another part, this is for a story I'm publishing later. I talked to the Culinary Union about their tech protections.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Cool. What did they say?

• 16:50Speaker 04

  So they have, they've been working since 2018, probably longer actually, but they've gotten protection since 2018. Specifically regarding tech replacing workers. With that, when tech gets introduced to, that would affect someone's job, they have to, and they've negotiated this, they get a six month notice.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  And part of that, there's, there's kind of two things that come out of that. One, that gives them time to kind of work out the kinks. One example, Ted Papa George, the Treasury Secretary, Treasury Secretary? Told me was, um, there was this new system for housekeepers that basically was sending them all across different zones, all across different floors. And they're like, hey, this is, you're gonna break the backs of the workers here.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Um, and so with that time, they were able to get a fix no problem. Uh, and what it also does that if a job gets eliminated, uh, or if a position is eliminated, that like Vegas has a, there's plenty of jobs.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  So, especially in the hospitality industry. So it gives people the time to find somewhere else within, uh, you know, the industry, stay with the union, you know, keep their pension.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  And there's also a pretty decent severance package if your job is eliminated from.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  That is so fucking cool. Working union, man. No, I simply accept no substitutes. That's the thing, like, I live here and people like Ed, you live in a vending machine. And that's why I like it. But also, there are actual really strong unions here who will fuck your ass up.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Strike I've been covering at Virgin.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  So, what's the strike? I care way more about that than the do desk.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they've been on strike for a little bit now regarding.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  And which, who is this?

• 18:33Speaker 04

  This is Virgin Hotels.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  With the Culinary Union. The latest proposal, and this was from a little bit ago, was, well, the original proposal, I believe, was no raise for the first couple of years of the contract.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  And this was from Virgin?

• 18:46Speaker 04

  From Virgin. And then the secondary proposal, at least the secondary proposal, all I heard about it as a journalist, was a consistent 30 cent per hour raise per year.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Wasn't the argument from Virgin, they couldn't afford anything?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  How true was that?

• 19:01Speaker 04

  So it's hard because the.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  They're a private company as well.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, kind of. So they used to have their casino run by Mohegan, which.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Who is that?

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Like, the tribe.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  So like, you can look at that data, and their casino, or I think it was the only one that was, I think, losing money.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  Which isn't great. So, again, they do have a point. Like, Virgin is not a super successful hotel when it comes to its casino. But what they, what the union keeps pointing at is all, you know, these giant corporations, a lot of them, there's a what? It's the Leuna Pension Fund, one of them in Canada, that owns the, owns the hotel, or is part of the ownership group. And then there's another company called Fenn Gate. So, you know, the company points to, you know, we're an off-street property, we can't give you strip pay. And the union's pointing at their management, saying, you definitely have the money. If you want to invest in Las Vegas, you have to invest in the workers. And they've consistently said, go back to Canada.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I just want to be clear, Kyle can't say this and is no way offering any opinion on what I'm gonna say, which is solidarity now, fuck you virgin. Now, moving on, what else have you seen at the Vegas related while you've been here?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the other major Vegas company I was looking at was a robotic company that's been here for a while, that's Rich Tech.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Okay, tell me about them.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  So, they work on a couple of different things, so you have like this Atom, it's called Atom, it's a bartender robot, and when I was at the booth for CES, it was kinda interesting because I didn't see demos of the robot making drinks, but it was-

• 20:49Speaker 02

  But it was a bartender?

• 20:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a bartender robot, so it has two arms, it can do everything. And the thing that surprised me was like, the main thing that brought people over to the booth was when the robot was dancing to "Apa Two" by Bruno Mars and I think Rosé.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  I'm not familiar, I haven't listened to a song since 2007.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Your view is-

• 21:08Speaker 02

  It is funny that they had the robot bartender not making drinks, but it was like-

• 21:13Speaker 04

  It might have been at some point when I was there, it wasn't-

• 21:14Speaker 02

  It was consoling another robot- Everyone was cut off.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  You are better than her.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Yes, the stripper loves you.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Oh god.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Go back to hustling.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  So, but the thing, it was interesting because it was drawing a crowd by its little dance with the music, and I was talking to someone with the company, and they were like, you know, the show of it, the spectacle, because I asked like, you know, at what point do we get past spectacle and into just being there?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  And he's like, spectacle's part of the cell.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  This is Vegas.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  Right, this is Vegas. Spectacle's part of the cell.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's also CES too, though, right? Like, it seems like all of this- Yeah, but Vegas is honest about it. Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  And then they had another system that was a lot more utilitarian, you also, by the way, can find some of their robots at all the Boyd Gaming, or not all of them, but-

• 22:07Speaker 02

  What are the Boyd Gaming? That's like the off strip, that Sam's Town and those ones, somebody was telling me about them the other day.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  It's at the Orleans, Aliante, I might be pronouncing that wrong, sorry, I'm new here, and Sun Coast.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  So, they'll have like delivery robots, like delivering food, and then this other robot Skylark, and that's more like- Getting a robot to clean floors and make deliveries and stuff like that. And so, I mean, you know, like all things, the main, one of the main things preventing it from mass adoption is price. What was it? They used to have, a lot of the robots used to be like you just, it's like, I think it was like a hundred eighty thousand dollars. But now they're working off more of like a subscription model.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, baby. Much of that. Many such cases. What can this robot do exactly?

• 22:57Speaker 04

  So you have the bartender robot, which is, I have the prices.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Can it tend bar?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Uh, like clean?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  I mean, like actually serve drinks reliably? How does it accept the drink order? Yeah, I'm aware of how drinks are made.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  I'm not sure. I, I, I know.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  He's doing like the drink.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Making a little hand motion.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  But you also probably, does it also come with like an inventory system?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, how does it know?

• 23:23Speaker 04

  I'm not sure exactly how its inventory system works, but I know for like Tipsy Robot, which is kind of like the other, that's actually at the Phineas.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's one downstairs.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  And that has like.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Fight it.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  That's like a point of, uh, a point of sale system where you just kind of like tap on a tablet and it gives you the drink. So I, I imagine it would be something similar to that. I'm not positive, but I imagine it's probably a similar system to Tipsy Robot.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Cause it feels like it probably, it's probably not too hard for them to be like, okay, as long as we catalog and keep every single drink in a certain place. And maybe if you like make a request that's outside the bounds of the inventory, then it says, do you mean?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Would you rather?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Right. I feel bad about these though, because of, there are two cities that have my heart, New York and Las Vegas, like.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Those are my favorite.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  I, I got here in a weird way and I will probably leave here in a weirder way, but the thing is the bartenders here are fascinating.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Fun to talk to.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I don't want a robot replacing them because first of all, I don't believe the robot will do as good a job. But also, that was not me coughing for any ironic reason. I really was just coughing. The bartenders here rock. But also, like, the accumulated experience of witnessing Vegas is what makes a bartender marvelous.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  It's all about people watching.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but also people experiencing.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  This kind of comes back to another one of the things that we kind of keep bumping up against with going down there is this idea that somehow the important thing, I understand it from a business perspective, but I, from any other perspective, the idea that you want to remove human interaction from every process and every transaction.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  The, the thing, I, I, I keep saying this, I asked them about that. Um, and both, um, this company and, uh, I think Atom is also said this, they, they don't want to replace humans. They want them to like work alongside them.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  They want to augment that.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  The, the phrase, the phrase I was told was COBA.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Hmm. Well, that is.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  What is? A little parallel play.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Right. It's COBOT. So instead of it being a robot replacing you, it's one you work with.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  That is loathsome.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Well.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  I don't like the idea of like, unless the robot is like doing annoying things.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  You don't want a robot understudy?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, what if, what if it just, what if it just sat on your arm and looked at you and blinked sometimes?

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Tell me stories, Papa.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  No. Was that the pet? Uh, yeah, yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  We've heard good things weirdly, like previous episodes.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Really?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're kind of like, look, I don't, I was not initially that into the idea, but it's very, it's very large eyes.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  Like, I have my cat and I love my cat.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. I was gonna say, a lot of people are willing to settle for living things. But yeah, that, the COBOT thing, I just, also, it sounds like something said by someone who has not worked a job in a while. It also sounds like the Hyperloop shit where it's basically, it takes two people to get two people into a car that then takes them someplace. Like, it's not.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  And then you had the ProPublica story that came out this week.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  About? Which was?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  About Elon.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  What about him? Did he do something bad? Don't tell me if he did something fucked up.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Did Elon do something against labor rights? No. Uh, let me, let me.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. I got to ride the hyperloop when I went over to the convention center yesterday and it was fully the dumbest shit I've ever done in my life. I really loved it. I thought it was amazing.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I need to give this a proper read, but ProPublica published a piece called Elon's, Elon Musk's foreign company is tunneling beneath Las Vegas with little oversight.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Oh, really? Well, I'm sure they're probably doing a good job. That's the weird thing, though. It's like this city seemed more resistant to that kind of stuff. Are they just letting him dig tunnels because it gave them money?

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's, I have not covered this enough to answer that.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  That's fine. No, sorry. I must be clear. I'm not holding you to account here. You didn't do the reporting, but it's just like, it feels like such an aberration because one of the things that destroys people about Vegas is that everything is convenient at all times.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Everything's 15 minutes.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. Thank, god damn, it's so good to have a real resident here.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  I've been here five months.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  I've been here three years, baby, and you know it better than anyone. And it's like, wow, I can have Diet Coke whenever I need to. The problem is there are people who have other kinds of Coke they can get in 15 minutes. And then they could, then there are other proclivities they can fuel in 15 minutes. Diet Coke. Is this what they mean by 15 minute cities when you hear that phrase? That's what it is, right? Yes. Except in Saudi Arabia, they'll kill you.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  It's not a play.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  It's a 15 minute city run by cars.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, that's.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  It's really weird.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  I'm so glad you're on the last episode. This is valuable information about Vegas. The thing is, the result of every proclivity, Jesus Christ, being available at all times is that Vegas is just like, nah, man, I understand you got this new tech and you're very horny and you raised all this money, like, very exciting. However, you're between the beautiful slot machines and our beautiful customers who are anyone who is here, and they ain't going to prim. So.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, Prim had a pretty bad, um, I believe they had a pretty bad gaming report come out recently.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  And by the way, if they ever find a way to get people quicker to Prim, hundred billion dollar industry. I'm just giving people ideas. What's Prim? Prim is a city that is far further than it looks. Oh, it's Nevada NEOM. You guys did one of those? That's cool. No, yes, in the sense that there is a strange authority with money that has created the city.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the prince from Qatar, you know.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  He's also a mistake. He's ambitious. It's a strange, but I don't have enough Prim EXP.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  We should do some shrooms and go into the city and find Prim like it's El Dorado. Let's find Silicon Valley's El Dorado. Let's go.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  But the larger point is that Vegas is intolerant of things, not because of good or bad, but because of efficiency.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, it's all about efficiency.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  And that's the weird thing. CES exists in this very inefficient way here. And it's just Vegas is like, I'll take a little.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it might be inefficient for the, the tech industry, but it's a great moneymaker for the city.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  I can only imagine.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Which is a great description of Vegas.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  This may destroy you, but.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  It may, you know, it might not be great for, you know, there's AI being put into everything, all that stuff. But, I mean, look, it's a very large conference that the city makes good money off of. And we just had a recent F1 report, or a recent November gaming revenue report. And F1 not performing the way people want it to. So, I mean, these conventions are in, I mean, they keep the city afloat, especially, I mean, when people couldn't travel here in 2020. I mean, I wasn't here, but I was reading about it. Yeah, then you know.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Strange.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  I mean, it was.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  But also the depression here was.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  It was terrible.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Like, this is a working class city. And when you think about CES, you think of a lot of engineers and such. Vegas is a place which is very working class and the effects of these conferences are quite pronounced.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's important. It's important for the city.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  So very, uh, meaningful ending for a third of the episode there. Mr. David Roth, where can people find you? Defector.com, the website. And I do the distraction podcast there. While you're on, okay, well, just move past that. You messed up the order there. Oh, I did. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, it's gone. I don't get any second shot at this. Caution out, where can people find you?

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, take it over.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  I'm doing it.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  I am still.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  I also do another podcast. Cut it.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  I'm still on X, believe it or not. I

• 30:53Speaker 02

  The Everything app?

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  I'm on there too, but I only for banking.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I don't really use it for social networking.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  I use it. I put my CAT scans in there.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  See what Grok tells me about it.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, oh, oh.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  You have disease. Your, your, your discs are very cheeky.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  You get the Elon butt head laugh when it uploads successfully. You're like, cool, it's processing.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Kyle, where can people actually find you? Kyle underscore Chouy N A R D. And then Las Vegas Sun dot com or just Las Vegas Sun dot com.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Edum Guesso, Jr.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  I am on Twitter and Blue Sky. The Foreign Agent Registry at Nick Black Jacobin. I won't say for which country, but you can guess. For my newsletter, it's the tech bubble dot sub stack dot com. And for my podcast, This Machine Kills.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  You can find me at where's your head dot at for my newsletter. And the podcast is called Better Offline. And you're thinking, this seems way too honest for it. What's he gonna do to me next? And the answer is nothing. This is a clean break. We're about to go to some advertisements and you're gonna listen to them intently or else you are committing crimes against me. And I know you love the crimes you do on this show. You love to fill up the Reddit, something that will be called Exhibit A through Z. And I regret the crime jokes, but I'm not gonna stop them. Anyway, the following ads, very legitimate companies or podcasts. You're gonna listen to them, download them, and I won't feel any pain.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Buy their products.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  Financial growth begins long before the first investment. It comes from understanding what you're building toward, what's at stake, and what success looks like for you. At Oppenheimer, we bring bold thinking guided by the full strength of our expertise to put capital to work building and protecting wealth that lasts generations. Put the power of Oppenheimer Thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  And we're back. So we have replaced David Roth using science with Gare Davis. You are here for me. It could happen here. I am. Cool Zone Media products. We're colleagues. How are you doing? I'm so tired. I've walked so many steps this week. I feel like I have new energy. That's the problem. I'm going into the last day with more energy than I have when I arrived. That's another CES miracle. It's beautiful. Carl Chouinard from Las Vegas Sun.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Hi there.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  And of course Edward Anguoso Jr. Hello. That's really bad. Gare, Kyle, you were at the same panel. Tell me about this panel. So it was this panel done by a number of tech companies. Adobe had a spokesperson there, as well as one of the DHS Science and Technology Representatives. It was ostensibly about like deep fakes, AI-generated like information and disinformation and misinformation. And I I've been to a lot of these panels over the years. I went to one last year at CES. Put on by Deloitte. That that was actually okay. And then I I went to a few at um. At the RNC earlier last year.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Right, and that's the Republican National Convention. Correct, correct. So, you know, it's good. Good, uh, good panel for journalists to go to, speaking of, speaking of disinformation.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  But yeah, I I uh, this was on Thursday that we were. We we walked into the LVCC, went to this panel, and it was uh. One person in front of me did fall asleep.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I thought it was.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  What was the panel about also?

• 35:28Speaker 04

  It was about misinformation, disinformation, and deep fakes. Uh, and I think if you didn't know much about it, it probably could be a little helpful. Um, but for, I think, a CES audience, maybe not as much.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was it was talking about, you know, various, various tools to identify. Uh, like AI-generated or or uh, or deep-faked like information or uh, or, you know, like, you know, pictures, videos. Um, and you know, how a whole bunch of the previous like visual tactics, right, a few years ago, it's pretty easy to spot an AI image. It's maybe slightly harder now, uh, you know, it it depends on the model. Um, but how, you know, how with with how fast that kind of that is developing, especially for stills. Um, it's it's it's going beyond like visual detection. You have to actually create tools to detect this. And those tools can also be prone to false positives. Um, and false negatives. And so there's this, uh, uh, another technology that a whole bunch of companies, like a Microsoft making a big push for it as well, as well as Adobe.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  It's kind of like a build-in systems for when you generate AI content that that like clearly identifies it as such in the metadata. Um, and that's something I heard a lot about last year, and they talked about it here. I think they called it Providence.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Providence, yeah, Providence was the the word of the day.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Yes, that was the, that was the word that they that they used was these uh, these.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Providence systems as opposed to like detection systems, which is like, you know, like, like post, post, post hoc, you know, we, we will use, we will use that against, you know, AI or suspected AI content that was, you know, maybe not generated with this built in information.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So how was the panel, though? Was it useful? Like, did it make profound statements? Or was this more CES slop?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  I mean, I wouldn't call it CES slop.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Because there's the, the ones where you just sit there for half an hour and go like, ah, well, that was half an hour, I could be doing something else.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it was good for, you know, learning the basics. And they talked about, you know, how, like you mentioned, it was a lot easier to detect things a while ago. One thing I wish they, and this is not your really question, but one thing I wish they did talk about was just how text based a lot of this AI misinformation is.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Like, it's a lot of the misinformation that gets published. I mean, if you go on X, the everything app.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  As I do for my banking.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Of course. I mean, I go into, I can't even read the comments anymore because I have to scroll through a billion blue checks. And so many of them are just like, obviously AI generated based off analyzing the image and then writing the most basic comment possible. So I wish there was a little more focus on that, if you want. No, sure. I mean, like, that is, that is a massive section of it. And this is something even I asked a question about at the Republican National Convention at Microsoft Panel being like, you have all these tools for like AI images, right? You know, images of politicians and in debaucherous acts, you know, all these sorts of things. But they also advertise like AI's ability to make specifically, like, like, specific.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Like a user, user-specific political like press releases. Basically, like, you know, like a campaign can send an email like based on like a voter's profile that can be tailored using AI to specific voters. And like, what could go wrong with that? You mean creating data to specifically push voters in one direction? Well, yeah, yes, but like, you know, like I'd never do that. If you're working for a campaign and you want to target specific voters, you can analyze their social media presence, you know, whatever kind of information about them is in certain data sets that can be bought and make, you know, an AI-written press release specifically for them. And this is something I also like asked a question about, like, you're talking about,

• 39:24Speaker 02

  you know, these like, these AI metadata watermarks for images, but what about for text? Like, how will I be able to know if an email I'm getting from a politician was written by a person or written by a robot? They're like, well, you can't. We simply aren't going to worry about that. And like, ah.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  I mean, I walked up to y'all afterwards and I was like, I guess the lesson is that we're all screwed?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are, we all are screwed.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  I mean, that was the main takeaway.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  That was what the DHS was saying.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Which I was like, maybe, oh, God. That was the main takeaway I had was everyone pretty much saying like, this is going to get worse. And it's an arms, and like all the stuff.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  It is an arms race. And it is, and like, you know, they, they gestured towards, you know, quote-unquote, bad guys or like, you know, foreign state actors, specifically Iran does, you know, a lot of work on this, Russia. But, and, you know, I think in some ways the focus on those two might be kind of lifted as the new, as the new administration focuses more on China. But specifically for like, for like disinformation using AI tools, Iran and Russia, like the past year, has been like the main players targeting US voters.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  It is so wild. We just, I'm, this is a real dumb guy statement. Do we just have other countries who are just fucking with the US citizen train? It's just like a thing that happens? Oh, yeah, it's a huge, it's like, it's a, it's a huge project. But it's not considered an act of war.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's an extension of like Cold War stuff, right? Like it's So we just have wars that are like, not really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, I'm also describing how colonial Britain worked by paying people not to like, teach people to write. So I realize I'm like the Bill Belichick of atrocities here. But it's just very frustrating to hear this stuff and not really know what to do about it. Because it could happen here. There's amazing work on disinformation.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Sure. Something to do about it.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  As like a person, okay. No, but no, no, you know, it is a huge problem and there really isn't much to do realistic. Like, we have tried to to make fact checking work the past few years. And I don't think Americans are that much better at identifying a false or genuine information. Um, like fact checking has kind of failed as a as like a large, it's a large project.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not a good.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  I almost feel like what they actually need is vibe checkers.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  They need someone to tell you. No, but it's, why do I feel bad looking at this? What I'm saying is everyone needs therapy. Jesus Christ.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  An astrologer, some psychiatrist.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  State mandated therapy is the solution here. Yeah, definitely. A state mandated vibe checker.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Chat, is this real?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  I I'm gonna apply to be Trump's vibe checker.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  What do you think about this?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  It's not giving me good vibes, boy.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  It's giving me the ick. It's a big ick.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  I don't like it.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Don't read the end of Jujutsu Kaisen. It's a very disappointing manga. Very unfair. The end of Demon Slayer, far better.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  My academia.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Seven.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Similar.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Terrible ending. They took out the US superhero.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Only JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is holding up.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  For me, it was normal. I didn't know both of you were weeb's. That's, this is interesting. Not a weeb.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  I am a. I just appreciate other cultures.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't give a shit. I'm a huge weeb. Do you know what I'm wearing? I was wondering if that was a reference. You look like you might hunt something. Explain this one, Gabe, because I actually don't know. No, I know. Good guess. No, no, it was like anti, anti, was it that one? No, there's. No. It's Chainsaw Man, right? No. Oh, I thought you were one of the agents. It's one of the club ones. Orin High School Host Club. Oh. It's one of the host club ones. Yes. Just to be clear, Gabe is the best dressed of any of us and also fucking rocking like an actual manga related outfit and nailing it. I spent a lot of money on this. As you should have, it looks great. I found a, I found a very nice blue blazer that I defaced by putting on the Orin patch.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  No, this is good, this is good. I've been admiring your fits. I feel like back home, I'm usually, I'm usually dressed the best dress. I'm about to say dressed best.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  You're dressed great.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Your pants are fantastic.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  I appreciate it, I appreciate it, but.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  No one's saying anything about me. Your leather jacket's good, the boots are good. Thank you.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Personally, I think you should have gone with the Aviator shades.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Personally, I think you should have gone with the shades.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  The AVS. But I'm here to interview you.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  I would love.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  I'm not Kara Swisher, but.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  I was talking about this with, with my boss, Robert Evans, last night. We should bring the menswear guy here one year and have him walk around CES. Oh my god. You have anticipated my dynamon.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Ed.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Oh, that's such a good. He is also not cheap. Oh no. No, he won't, no. Derek Guy is a legend. I love him. And he also knows what he's worth and should. He should. It's a pro labor podcast.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Oh, is that his name? Derek?

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Derek Guy. Which is so fucking funny to be like the menswear guy and your second name is Guy. Very cool, very cool. It works out.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  He nailed it, he nailed it.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  No, I would, I would love for him to walk around the show floor. I, I think it could do some real psychic damage.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  As long as he doesn't rate my fit. I'd never want him to put his Eye of Sauron on me.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  I'm terrified, terrified. I say this with my, not quite parasocial, but here's my Derek Guy story. So, I lost a lot of weight this year and this is not a me trying to actually conjure up people saying anything. I'm fine. What I'm saying is, I lost all the weight and I bought a bunch of clothes and I took a picture and I'm like, I. Still feel like shit. So I emailed Derek Guy as one normally does in tears. And I was like, why do I feel bad still? Because I was like, you know what? If he doesn't respond, he doesn't respond. Yeah, yeah. But if he does, he can help me deal with something like an emotional thing where I'm like, I feel better about my body, but I don't like what's on it. Yeah. And he was like, you have no aesthetic. And he explained the concept of aesthetics. He responded. Yeah, he, no, Derek's amazing.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  He's like the Chomsky of fashion.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  No, he's super cool. He's so chill. The thick Monfort for the, for the Rocky stan.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  I'm gonna shoot him an email, okay?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Chomsky still responds to emails. Well, the reason he does this is kind of what I was suggesting with Gare, which is he isn't there to eighty-six people. No. He's there to try and explain what looks and feels good. And he talks about clothing as social language. And he said, you have no aesthetic. You're wearing like trainers with like a thread belt. My shit was busted. I look terrible because of the clothes, not because of me. I would actually love him to do that, but also walk around being like, this shit looks fucking good. Because I feel like, and with this show especially, if you're just a hater while loving nothing, No. you're, you're just vacuous. Occasionally, you see a very well-dressed Asian businessman.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Fucking rocks and they. And then you see a lot of, a lot of Asian, a lot of Asian businessmen in very ill-fitting suits. But occasionally you'll see one guy who has that shit on.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Yes. I did see someone who had that shit on and they were like looking at other people's fits with disgust.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah. That's what I've been doing all week, baby. Fashion pedants.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  I really just, I should have gone up to him and talked to him.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have notes about the convention wrap. Right, I do. This is my actual job. Okay, yeah, I forgot why we're here.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  We're just, you know, yapping, man.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  We're just at a conference? The yap index is over five thousand right now.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, Japanese were killing it.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Please, bring us back to why we're actually meant to. Well, so I guess, one thing I was spending almost all of yesterday doing, as, as we've been inundated with these AI products, is, is learning about all of the AI products targeting your offspring. Your kids, who are being raised now with AI the same way my generation was raised with social media. Nice son of mine.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  This is like Cuckoo Melon shit where it's like, put this in front of your kid, or it's like device, like consumer products for the anxious parent.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  You know, both. These things kind of overlap. The first thing I did yesterday morning was I attended a panel called Raising AI Kids Responsibly. Great title, because this could either mean you're making an AI child that you get to raise, or it's about how do you raise kids in the world at AI. Now, it was the latter. I kind of wanted the former. I hate all of it. It was bad. It was, in some ways, it was bad and a little bit cringe. But there's also some interesting stuff said here. There was two products that were displayed. One of them was from this company called Readyland, who I believe partners with Amazon.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  It's basically like, it's an AI storybook that interacts with an Alexa machine. Now, one thing about them that I think is actually really good, they don't generate any new AI content. It's just using AI to stitch together, basically kind of a choose your own adventure book, but for kids to have a physical book that they read with the Alexa machine, that then can make them talk to characters, change the story in different directions. But all the content is pre-baked. It just gets assembled in different ways. Just one idea. As a father of a son, the son of a mother, the brother of a sister,

• 48:34Speaker 02

  you can do this thing when you're reading to your child, where you can think of something and talk. This is what my parents did to me. Imagination. This is what I was thinking about in the panel. Like, yes, this is cool. You know, it's safer than a whole bunch of the other stuff I'm seeing. But this kind of steals away the joy of reading to your kid. And also listening to their demented little minds come up with extra extension.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  When my little brother was growing up, you just don't realize how batshit a child is until they grow up.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  So I avoid talking about my son in general. I won't name him because I believe he should have his own destiny. But one of the most wonderful parts of being a father is having my son come and talk to me about something he just thought up. And it will be something Minecraft-related. And he will explain something I did not know about Minecraft. And he will like, he will explain something in such detail that I've never even considered in my life. And it's something quite simple, but it's because he's been allowed to go off in these directions with no prompting, with no. Yeah, no, totally. My, I mean, my. Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah, and it's like the idea of depriving children of this makes me so fucking angry.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Especially when it's targeting like five year olds, which is like where it gets more upsetting to me. Um. And taking the fucking parenting thing of having an imagination about what your child could be is so fucking sickening. I'm getting angry. This is, this is now unfortunately, like I actually felt relatively better about this product. So it's basically kind of just like. I'm not saying it's inherently. Uh, it's kind of, it's kind of just like a visual novel, uh, you know, like, like those, uh, like those visual novel games. But you have, but you have a physical book that you're reading now compared to the other product called Poe, the AI teddy bear, which I also saw. Edgar Allan Poe, the classic happy guy.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  It is so much worse. It is, it is what it sounds like. It's a teddy bear that comes with an app where you can put in certain like parameters for like, I want the story starring this character with this archetype as a villain in this setting. And it'll generate an AI story for your child, generating new content. So unlike, unlike Storyland or, or unlike, unlike Readyland, um, Poe, the AI bear is actually, is actually generating live content. Wow. Unr- unrevealed by, unrevealed by moderators, just straight to your child. It's fifty dollars on Amazon. You can order this thing right now and talk to it. Um, he. I'm putting my tongue in my cheek when I do what I'm pissed off about. So like, I'm like, yeah, where's this guy gonna hang out later? You're low key tweaking right now.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  I'm like, uh, names, places. Um, he did talk about, he said, you know, like chat GPT does, does have guardrails for content, but, but those guardrails. You know. Don't always reliably work, but they're better than nothing. And, and, and content moderation is an issue that we're working on. I'm like, yeah, but your product has hit the market. Like you are selling.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  I'm gonna work on the issue. Yeah, we're working on moderation.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  Isn't a great answer.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  No, not a good answer. Not a good answer. And this is something like even even the other guy with like the AI storybook mentioned, he's like, it's pretty easy to make like your AI kids toy not say swear words or even even even like talk about like sex or drugs. But one thing that's even harder to moderate is like, what if it, what if it says like inaccurate or or actually like like like uh, like dangerous information, you know, like what if it starts, what if it goes in a really weird direction and starts like and starts like talking about.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  You should stare at the sun so that you can.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. No, but generative AI models, they don't even understand how the training data truly interacts with the system. Totally. They don't know how this shit truly works. The only useful thing in quantum computing related to AI right now is the fact that they can actually have models that can discern what their training data does. So the idea of my child interacting with them these, I realize now like nothing actually makes me angry other than harms to my child, at which point I might actually go falling down mode. So. Such a good movie, too. It's such a great movie. Such a good movie. Um, now, the other, the last part about, last thing about this panel is that it was, it actually opened with this person

• 52:46Speaker 02

  from the company, uh, Ido, Ido Play Lab Partnerships, who was the first company to partner with Sesame Workshop to make, to make apps for kids. So I'm like, this is interesting. Like Sesame Workshop usually, I consider, I consider being like, pretty, pretty thoughtful in how they produce media for kids. And like, if they're choosing to partner with this company, maybe I'll listen to what they say. And they didn't have anything to sell. They just had data that they've been collecting on how Gen Z thinks about AI, this thing's becoming increasingly invasive in our lives. Like, how do we think about it? And what do we really want out of it? And some, some of the way this lady presented stuff was a little bit odd. She kind of presented all of, all of the data findings as like, shocking surprises, which I think may have been tailored for the CES audience.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Sure, but also, I feel like more attention to the details isn't bad. Sure, sure. And like, this is, this is what she said her, uh, her data like showed. And you can, you can, you can look this stuff up on their website. Um, the, the main question she asked is like, what if like the tech savvy gener- generation, Gen Z, isn't buying what we're selling anymore? Fucking hell, imagine a customer that doesn't want the thing you're building. She said, like, you know, Gen Z is typically seen as early, as like, early adopters, early users, and they usually are, but they also come with the most amount of informed opinions about how badly the tech feels, how cringey it is to use, and how it affects their sense of humanity.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  So, so the issue is that they know what's up?

• 54:12Speaker 02

  They know what's up, which was, you know- That's a vibe. If you're in businesses, is like, is either a hurdle to overcome, or some insights to help you, you know, maybe, maybe pivot or change in a completely different direction. She identified, like, the key areas of tension around AI for Gen Z is, one, creative expression, you know, it's its ability to, you know, have us feel proud of the art that we make, and how it affects human relationships. And she, she brought up a few questions, or like, examples of, of the types of stuff that she's, that she's like, you know, asking, asking people as a part of this, like, data collection. It's like, let's say you've, let's say, let's say you've had a friend break up. Would you rather, in the AI tool, kind of like, like, like counsel you through that

• 54:56Speaker 02

  process, you know, like, like, you know, like, the bouncing ideas off, and try to, try to like, move on or figure out, like, what happened? Or do you want, like, a temporary friend replacement? Do, do you want the AI to become a friend for you instead? Would you rather, would you rather that be your friend for, for the time being? And like, no, we, we actually don't want AI friends. That's, that's not what we want.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  Which is a lot of stuff at CES this year, it feels like.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  I do believe-

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Yes, so much of AI this year is like, is like about replacing human friendship. And it's so fucked up because-

• 55:28Speaker 03

  To preserve human friendship.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Right, sorry. It's fucked up because the idea of tech at least 10 years ago was they would bring us closer together and would allow for deeper connections. Now it's like, ugh, buddy, like, yeah, about that. You want to connect with the computer?

• 55:46Speaker 03

  I mean, this is what happens when, I mean, all these, you know, this is what happens when everyone starts reading Marcus Aurelius a little too closely.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  So true. I don't know that reference. I, I am an idiot. People need to stop quoting books.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  To me.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  I think it's good that you don't know this.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Is that the guy from Gladiator? Yes, yes, yes, Ed. He is in it, yeah. Yeah, actually, Russell Crowe did say that one of the funniest things on Twitter, which is he responded to um, one of the CNN reporters, I believe at the time, and he was just like, blocked blogger, which is one of the funniest things to say. Anyway, let's just ignore my willa-stine nature. This was the same thing that she was talking about. It's like, you know, this thing where the what we're all seeing is like these AI products designed to replace the role of human friendship.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  And a- a- another thing she presented as like this like surprising- Not solving the problem of meeting people. No, no, it's it's it's it's it's not actually helping you like overcome the fact that you like lost a friend. It's trying to be like, hey, it's okay if you lost a friend. This AI can be your friend instead.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, the solution, yeah, sorry. Uh, I mean, the solution to like this loneliness epidemic, especially young people are going through, I can't imagine, is more robots.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  You know, and

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  One thing I keep thinking about-

• 57:04Speaker 02

  That's driving alienation.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  One of these guys who did, who does like these companion bot, chatbot sites, and then character AI, you're like, oh, okay. Well, you know, you seem in interviews to be earnest about like people are lonely, maybe we can't replace, but we can offer a salve that helps people get back to the point where they have human friendships again. What does he believe about people? And it's just like, let's hang homeless people, you know, let's murder the poor, like this, like this sort of, it's not a coincidence that someone building that sort of firm has such deeply pathological views, I think.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  And it's so fucked up as well, because the idea of an AI you can bounce ideas off of is not inherently a terrible idea. We sit there, we think about shit, and the idea of having a log of it. I journal a great deal, and I think many people listening to this do. There's an idea of looking at this, but I like, yeah, what if your journal was a person? This, you know, it gets worse. Hell yeah. The next thing that she used as an example is like, what if there's an AI that's trained on your preferences? Trained on your dating preferences, what you like aesthetically? Yes. And what if that could instead go on your first dates for you? What?

• 58:13Speaker 03

  What?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  What? I fucked those up on my own. What if?

• 58:16Speaker 04

  This is literally a Black Mirror episode.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  What, uh, what if this could like handle like icebreaker questions and like, and like get over like hard life experiences? Oh my god. Easier for you?

• 58:24Speaker 03

  One of my favorite little perverse things was this, Slavoj Zizek once said, one time said he doesn't like sex. What he would like, he's this Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytic.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  He sniffs a lot.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  He's, you know? Oh, he means Zizek. Yeah, Zizek. Um, and he was talking about how the ideal sexual encounter for him is, uh, two people taking their sex toys and those sex toys playing with each other.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  And this is.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  This is exactly what he's talking about. Disgusting. The ideal.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  That's perverted.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  No, the ideal perversion, the pure perversion of that is two people using those sex toys together to get each other off.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  No, that's great.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  That's wonderful.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Good perversion.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  This is a pro-sex podcast, Jesus Christ.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  The, the, the one where you send an avatar that is not real.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  In a different room? Completely autonomous from, from like you as yourself.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Evil, mark of the beast.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  And it was odd, cause like, this is, this is why what she was saying was so odd, cause like, she presented this as like a surprising revelation that. Oh my god. That Gen Z would rather live life themselves than have an AI live your life for you.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  I can tell you that.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Um, and like, the, like, that was what she was trying to say, but it was so odd having it presented like some like surprising like exclusive fact that you could only get through like data research. Yeah. And, and, and she, and she talked about like, like, there is like, Gen Z sees value in having like bad dates. I fucking hate how they're discussing Gen Z. And actually like, and actually like overcoming like challenges in life and like, that's, that's actually a core part of being human. And we don't want that process like, uh, like, like smoothed over with, like, tech can't solve the hardship of life. The hardship is part of life. That's what makes life worth living. And like. Gare, how old are you? I'm in my early twenties. Sorry, I didn't want to get. No, you're fine. So you're Gen Z? Yeah, I am, yeah. How do you feel about these assumptions?

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  I mean, like, again, like, this is, these are questions that she's like, that she's posing to like, you know, focus groups of, of, of like Gen Z, but like- No, but I care more about your opinion than theirs. They're really pandering. They're, they're, they're- Is it accurate? Well, no, because they assume such a base level of stupidity that they're like, kind of offensively, like, even like framed the fact that I would be like, would you rather have an AI go on dates for you? Like, why, why would you ever ask me that? That's, that, that's fucking stupid. Some of the fun parts about romance, rom- wow, said the word correctly there. Romance. They're always saying this about me with how words go, is fucking up. Exactly. About revealing parts of yourself that get banged off someone you feel bad.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  And you, you learn about yourself that way.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that's, and that's what she was saying, is, is like, that's actually what people want. People don't, people don't actually want AI to live, to, to like, live your life for you.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  But it shouldn't take-

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  And, and, and she, she, she specifically provided a pushback against this like idea in, in the, in the tech industry, where like, the smoothest possible path is the best one. Right. You, you want- This is a good panel, kind of. You, you want, you want to like optimize every part of life. And like, what if that optimization actually isn't the point? What, what if this like idea in the, in the tech industry, that we have to optimize and smooth over every hardship, um, misses the entire point of living? Yeah. And you, you have all these tech bros being like, oh yeah, huh, I guess so, maybe, maybe we shouldn't smooth over all the problems.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  It's like, it's a very, maybe I'm getting this reference wrong, it's a very like Patrick Bateman, Bateman like thing of like, I am optimizing everything to the T and I will, you know, keep it, keep it going.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  I mean, no, specifically in his, in the book, you know, that is like the sort of train of thought he has is he's like, kind of empt- emptily engaging with life at the very superficial-

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  -level while being, um, empty and craving something else.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  So like, the final point she had is like, and again, this is all, it's all kind of pandering, so like, you're saying like, you're saying like Gen Z, but like, this is like across a lot of people, it's like, but she, she said like, Gen Z doesn't trust AI to understand the nuance of their lives. And I as a millennial, of course do.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's like, it was on a panel because on one hand you have these like, like AI toys for kids. And then you have this woman with this company that works at Sesame. And she's like, yeah, actually Gen Z doesn't want AI to run their lives. And you're like, yeah, who, who could have thought? So

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  After extensive testing.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  As we approach the final second of the thirds of Better Offline. Gare, where can people find you? Well, I am, I am on X, the, the everything app. Everything app, where did you learn banking? At Hungry Bowtie, as well as Blue Sky, at Hungry Bowtie, at HungryBowtie.social. And it could happen here. And, and the podcast with me, Robert Evans, and a few of our other colleagues, where we cover sometimes tech, but you know, politics, culture, disinformation, all that kind of fun stuff that greases the wheels of our society. Yummy. Kyle?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  I can be found on X, the everything app.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Hi, really?

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  At Kyle underscore Schannard, and then my, my writing's on Las Vegas on dot com.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and Edward Unguoso, Jr.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  You can, I, in the real world, I live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest in Washington DC, zip code 20500.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  That's a nice neighborhood.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  It's, it's kinda nice. It's got a great view of everything.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  Um, what else? I'm at Big Black Jacobin on Twitter and, and Blue Sky. And This Machine Kills is my podcast, and the techbubble.substack.com is my newsletter.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  You are approaching the final third of the final two-part episode of The Consumer Electronics Show, and I just want to say something to you, which I'll elongate at the end of this. I'm so grateful for you giving me your patience with this. I will say, I need you to listen to the ad. I don't know actually what happens after I'm done talking. I never do. Frankly, I barely understand what I'm doing when I am talking, because Matt Asowski over here heals me. Jesus Christ, I can't even say here's, we're keeping it. Matt Asowski hears me mess up my name, mess up the name of companies, or just mess up a word. But you know, I keep reading because podcasting is in my blood and that's who I am. And that's my identity. It's very normal and healthy.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Please listen to the ads. Please download the podcast. Please buy the product. If they don't give me another contract, it's going to be very bad. My therapist is going to be mad.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  We believe in starting with your financial goals, not a formula. At Oppenheimer, we put the full strength of our longstanding expertise to work, understanding your life and your ambitions, and designing the precise strategies that build and protect your wealth with confidence across this generation and the next. Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  So we enter the end of the truly unified end of the Better Offline Podcast this incredible week, and I'm not even going to do any like sardonic shit. I'm just so happy. I'm surrounded by people who are super game to make podcasts who like, I'm like genuinely like near tears of how happy I am with everyone being game for this. Everyone has been so amazing. All the journalists who have joined us. It's just been the best fucking week of a week that is generally quite depressing. Also feels like a good point to admit. Two things. One, I watched Neo Genesis Evangelion. Oh, great. And I was a teenager and I did not understand the subtext. Oh, yeah. So the whole time for most of my life was watching this show and being like, damn, these robots are fucking cool.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  And then like, some weird shit happened, I guess. I'm like, okay, but okay, the robot's back. Okay, there's like some stuff from space and there's a big head. Kind of fucking weird, I guess. Anyway, welcome to Better offline. I'm Ed Zitron. We are joined by everyone. We're joined by Robert Evans of Cool Zone Media.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  David J. Roth, who is gonna have to grab the mic. Hello. Of Defector. Edward Onguoso Jr., of course, will now have to turn another mic. What's up? Kyle Scharnade of the Las Vegas Sun. Hello. And Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here, Cool Zone Media and Associated Properties. Hello, hello, hello. We're at the end of CES. We have one more Positive Masculinity Day coming after this, but this is really the closeout as all of us just slop ourselves into the remaining quarters of this convention center. I could not have had more fun if I tried, but next year I'll try. Robert, how was the show been? How would you summarize the show?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  It was great. I mean, obviously, AI is here to stay. This is the worst it's ever gonna be. Everything's... Thank you. Only gonna get better. And thank God, you know, I, I, there's this little kid that I help take care of and it takes a lot of time. As you know, as a father, Ed, a lot of time and a lot of effort to raise a child. And I'm just excited that TCL has a solution to that problem. We can do, it's what I've always dreamed, which is that you keep like a hamster-like feeder in a water, like you just hook up a hose to the room and you lock the child in with a robot until they're 18 or 20. Like the room. Exactly. Yeah, it's perfect. You know, as long as you get like one of those lights that, that...

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Gives you some sun kind of effect, you know, they won't die probably like, and that's ideal. Have you introduced this product yet? I, I didn't. Not that I would. Introduce. Oh, wait, no, no, we have not. Oh, we're just into the disparagement part of the show then. No, I'll move on. No, I mean. This is in the, we had talked about how like cute little guys are part of the, like, that's been one of the things.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  Again, enough, enough about me. But that like this, the TCL is the most, I looked at this also, and they have like a whole little video of like a tau headed child interacting with this thing. Yes. And his parents, the kid's parents are kind of like standing off to the side being like, super, let's. I'm calling my lawyer.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  You want to like go to the movies or whatever, but it's the most, it's probably the cutest of the cute little guys, but then also easily the most sinister. The one company not. Yeah, it's the most sinister. Well, and you say toe headed. I, I had a disagreement with, with Garrison, so I'm wondering how you thought, because I felt like they cast that child because it looked like he had leukemia.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  It definitely, well, I don't want to say anything bad about the kid, right? The kid did that thing wrong. He was fine. Yes, he did. Well, what he looked like was honestly the scenario you described, which is basically like we're growing a child the way that people grow mushrooms in their house. Yes. They're like, he looks like that. Like a Bennett Locks to experiment.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Oh, my fucking god. Yeah, huge bags under his eyes, never seen the kiss of the sun or his mom. You do not know what vitamin C is, little boy, but don't worry, or D. D. Well, I'm British. First robot specifically for children that look the way the actor Brad Dourif looks right now. Designed for that. I don't know who that is. I am the host of this fucking thing. You need to, okay. So we've also got Phil, our bartender, we should talk in. Hello, thank you, Phil. Very good. That's enough. Um, thank you. I really don't know how to direct this at this point because I invited like seven people into this. You can. Okay, well. You're here with us.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Let's start on an easy point. We'll just go around. How's everyone feeling at this point of CES? We are at the end. Let's start with Gare because you are probably the like second least likely to say something legally actionable.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  And I realize that is now a challenge.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  You haven't had all the. Conversations I've had with gear.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  What am I doing? Um, I don't know. I feel fine. I guess I was able to find some cool stuff despite having to sort through lots of slop. There's, there's always one or two gems at CES that makes kind of all like, that makes all of the slop sorting worth it. So I was, I was happy to find a few of those in Eureka Park. I also had my, my fair share of fun. Uh, no, absolutely not. We're, we're not, we're not gonna do free publicity. Agreed. That's my job and it costs money. Anyway. Um, but no, I was, I was also able to have a little bit of fun. As, as soon as I realized that this show was just gonna be last year's show again. Right. I kind of relaxed myself to being like, I can just kind of do what, I, I can kind of just like fuck off. Um, so I, I talked to a flying car company. How real was that?

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  It was, it was real. Hell yeah. Real fake. I was waiting to interview someone and instead one of their like PR guys walked up to me and was like, hey, can we interview you about your thoughts on this flying car? I'm like, absolutely. I wish that happened to me.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Like I would just go, I will kill myself. Just every answer. The phrase CES miracle gets used a lot, but that, that really was what? Did you do it though? Oh, I did. Hell yeah. I, I, I talked a lot about like my concerns around safety for these flying cars. I, I predicted it has 20 minutes in the air. It was actually, it was a huge drone and I got exactly right. It was, it was a 20 minutes up in the air. It launches from something, something that looks like a cyber truck. It launches, it launches out of the The classic non-blow up thing. It launches out of like the trunk of the cyber truck. You can get 20 minutes in the air and then you're gonna crash or Which is my goal. You will have some kind of AI assisted landing and like I asked them like So I am crashing.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  What's your plan for that? Like, like what if you're in a populated area and you're like, and they said, no, we'll, we'll have guard rail software to make sure it doesn't land in populated areas of like We have some of the people from Night Capital. I'm launching this thing right in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. I'm gonna do hover for 20 minutes, which brings me to the, to the second thing that they asked me about. It was like, like What's, you know, what's maybe some, some, some of your concerns or like, what's the first thing you think of? I'm like, well, a few weeks ago, a few weeks ago, a Deloitte consultant drove a car into like, into 15 people in a, in a terrorist attack. Right. Like, same day, someone used a cyber truck to make a bomb.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  What if some rich guy loses his mind and flies this thing into a building? And they did not like that. Why?

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  I, I don't know what kind of PR training these guys had. I don't know if they were prepared for that. Obviously good enough PR training that they were like, this person seems nice. Let's ask them what they think. Turning to my, turn to my client, it's like, just kill you, kill, like just gun in your mouth. Just don't, don't answer diet, like it's the best way you could go about this. But you would get into commercial aviation and not have an answer to the 9/11 question is, is just.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  That's in the past. So I was able to relax and have fun, you know, with moments like that. You had fun. You know, once it became clear, it was just like, you know, AI, like AI software was like the king of this year. Once again, a whole bunch of things that used to be like, you know, actually kind of like all of the like university projects in Eureka Park, which sometimes has like a really cool new thing. Right. Now all of that creativity is being, is just being channeled into AI software. And that's in some ways disappointing to see some of the, some of the software is like good, like it works. It can solve problems, but it's also again, like it's, it's, it's part of the slop. There's also a lot of slop software. I feel like we're in the slop society. I feel like we're at this point where everyone here, I think, is experiencing some form of

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  mental damage from being here too long. Oh, yeah. But also the thing. Not me, baby. No. To be clear, this is the one commonality I have with Robert, which is Robert is the only person I've seen exhibit the same thing of like the Joker's feel, where you're just like, you're like, it gets worse and I get better.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  I'm just fucking suffer and like the more I suffer, the stronger I get and the more intrigued I get with the more pain I get. He's also the only person that I saw that I recognized on the, the floor of the South Hall of the convention center where it was just like. Cell phone cases, like not technology, but just like Chinese stuff designed to be sold on Amazon. That's where Robert does his best work. And he was, he was like locked in. I was like, hey, and he got like some of the way past me. He was like, do you fucking need something or whatever?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  It's like, oh man, it's from yesterday, same table that we were at. Oh my God, the. In my defense, there were really huge cell phones there, like massive, like it's literally an inch and a half thick rugged cell phones. Okay. I had to look at them. I had to touch them. We're not reporting on them. I have nothing to say about them. I had to feel them. Are we establishing that Robert Evans accidentally big times people? Is that what we're saying here? I did not feel big time. I was just like, damn, this guy is like on another level. I will give, I will give the most derisive view of, I did not know who Robert Evans was before August 2023. A fact I am regularly reminded of by everyone else I mention Robert Evans to. Like, oh my God, the behind the bastards guy.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  And I was like, eh, this is the fucking guy with the weird avatar. Oh, you want to do a podcast, but take. Fucking ass, what you gonna do about it, mate? I don't need money. Turns out I heart radio corporation. Thank you. No negative statements right now. All of you actually need this, but nevertheless. It is really fun being here with Robert because Robert, again, is one of the only people who experiences CES in the way I do, which is the Metallica song Frantic, where you're just like, it's not great, but you're here. Oh, yeah. And it kind of bangs, but not for the reasons everyone else feels. Totally. St. Anger fans line up, all three of us, but it's also really fun being here this time because last year

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  I was butter babe and very nervous. Now I'm just like, oh no, you, you weighed into it with like your pants off. Like you're just like, I will see everything. And speaking of Metallica, I heard a pretty good Master of Puppets cover at the MGM Grand in the top three covers of Master of Puppets. That I heard on that exact same stage at the MGM Grand. No longer interested in the text. So where was this? It was right near the. The the ski ball. Okay, well, I know where we're going. Dinner is cancelled, fellas. That's where I'm going. But it is interesting because talking to the various reporters here about CES and why we do this. And no one can answer that question, by the way. It's just like, aye, we're all fucking here every January.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  But it has been interesting getting wonderful reports like Kyle and getting It Could Happen Here, Robin Gare, getting Ed and Dave in, like, truly like, I don't want to say objective, but like, fresh looks. And then Robert and Gare, of course, who I'm very much used to. Robert is a separate creature. I mean that with more love than I can ever put into my voice. But it's interesting to get this view and then bring reporters in and talk. And they're like, yeah, well, we're here. And we saw stuff. But there's also an ephemera that is kind of hard to cover in objective journalism, Kyle.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  Totally. Yeah. It's, I, I, I thought that my, my main takeaway from the week was the politics of it. I mean, from, I was at Panasonic's keynote, and immediately you had people from the Consumer Tech Association talking about tariffs. I mean, I, I walked by people wearing Department of Government efficiency shirts.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which was really interesting.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Did you hit them?

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  No, I did not.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  My, I'll take care of it. No, no, don't. Primes are bad.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  But yeah, I mean, tariffs were just such a thing. I think a CNN article also wrote about it. They were just kind of looming over the entire event. And it seems like, I mean, Trump coming in pretty, pretty soon, is just kind of hanging over everyone's heads on top of all the tech. So, I mean, what? Who's, who's Donald Trump?

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  Trump? No, sorry. Keep, please continue. I'm doing a bit.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of what I was trying to say.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  The political feeling.

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a political feeling there, and at the same time CES is happening, you're seeing this shift from meta.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  That's just, I mean, especially on their new policies regarding comments about trans and just other queer people.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  The insane shit they're allowed.

• 1:19:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, what was it saying? Like, you're allowed to say?

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  Let's not repeat the actual.

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I'm not, yeah.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  But it's basically you can just insult trans people, you can insult gay people.

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  Without any issue.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Jewish people. You can refer to women as property, too.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  And I think actually.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  I, really? Like, I mean, at this point, I'm just like, you could say anything. I think it actually is worth mentioning, like specifically, like the types of insults around like mental illness that you're now allowed to call, like call queer people, but not call other types of people, actually is worth, actually is worth mentioning. Like, it's, it's like, it's a huge change. It's just an interesting show because it desperately wants to be apolitical, amoral.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Bereft of these feelings, but it still shows it in the things they show, the collection of data, the kind of surveillance aspect, and it sucks because it feels like this show could be better, because on the fringes of the conversations we've had of like, yeah, everyone's creating solutions for problems that they haven't even come up with yet, you get these things, the skincare product, the cane for blind people that can tell you what's coming up, really useful things.

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  The translation stuff we were talking about.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Exactly, like, yeah, like actual translation for a conference, so you could go to a conference in Taiwan and actually, fuck, like Computex is one of the most important conferences in the world. Really, some really impressive, like, tech to assist people who are disabled. Fuck, yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  I thought accessibility tech was like my main highlight.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Lot of good stuff this year. That's what Eureka was best at showing. Yeah, it's weird that Eureka, the Poisonville, actually had some good shit in it for that. And it had, I would say. Say the one like consistent like form factor for consumer tech that seems to be getting a lot better every year. And it reminds me of like how phones and tablets felt 10 years ago is glasses. Tell me more. They're getting smaller, they're getting more capable. I'm seeing like glasses that are designed for navigation, that are designed for recording. I did see to what you were saying about politics, a lot of glasses with that were specifically marketed based on their ability to aid TikTok. That I'm like, ooh, in a week, that might not be such a good business. Well, I had a full conversation with someone speaking Chinese. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's fucking cool. That is objectively very cool. It's great. And was it a conversation with nuance? Like it was? Yeah, yeah. More than I'd have been able to do, you know, on my own before. We talked about making specific, uh, specific dinner plans, what we do for work. See, this is the thing that tech can actually do. This is the thing that I, I, and I've said this many times in episodes. I'm not anti-tech. I wish tech was able to do the thing they promised, but I love technology. The only reason I know literally every person I'm looking at in this room is through posting. And I'm not even kidding. And this is the sickening thing that upsets my father. No, my dad's very proud.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  My therapist kind of, uh, like my multiple lawyers. Anyway, the idea that one can do that. But the internet and tech is fully capable of making these wonderful connections like genuine. I, I laugh about the Robert Evans thing. He found me through a podcast called Western Kabuki with my friend Caleb Wilson, June and other people who are wonderful. Alex as well, like great podcast. And these are all digital things. Tech is fully capable as much as I can be cynical and angry about this stuff. The reason I'm fucking angry is it's fully capable of helping people and we've all experienced that. And that was the bit that I sort of was struck by again, as like sort of somebody who hasn't covered this stuff as much and has had sort of, you know, the same sort of experience. Like a normal, middle aged person's experience of tech.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  I was blown away by the capacities of the things that were there. I mean, like, I didn't realize that it was like you could have a conversation with someone speaking another language. Like, I didn't see anything that, that cool. But the accessibility tech stuff for me too, like I found not just, uh, really impressive, but really like heartening to see that. The bit that was strange, and we obviously like, we have talked about this in, in previous episodes and stuff is the sort of. Contortions that are required in order to make that marketable in a way that like it's not like it's not a niche market to be like an old person or to be disabled like one way or another that's like most people will experience that at some point in their life. Yeah. And yet like the way that you have to sort of this was something that really struck me from yesterday that we talked about,

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  you know, enough that I probably shouldn't be bringing it back up again. That like you still have to come up with some sort of like industrial application to it, or you have to say AI, or you have to do this stuff that in order to get people to invest in this stuff, which is expensive to develop and expensive to produce. You have to say the words that the money people want to hear. The market. Which is also like another of the sort of political aspects here that you've got this like in some ways many, in many ways, like a sort of

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  tempted not to use this word, but I will say that it is like a a good hearted intention. It feels like especially with the disability tech that is like actually aimed at using this new human capability to make people's lives better. And yet you still have to fucking pitch it to sociopaths if you want to get the thing made. And I say this as someone who runs a fairly successful podcast. I have 51,000 subscribers. I have a successful PR firm. I have had emails about this. I have dyspraxia, which is a coordination disability. It limits my I'm wearing zip up boots, which look all banging, but I can't tie my shoes. And this is an embarrassing thing about my life. I fucking hate tying things. I physically can't do it. And you explain this to people and they laugh, which is a really good with something that you're very upset about.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  People love to be laughed at for that. I don't think people realize the capacity for technology to bridge the gap between your own bodies. I don't want to say failure, but inability to fully complete an action. And I think people are, myself included at times. Exactly. But technology is one of the greatest.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  What was that you said again? Jesus Christ.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  Assistive aid.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  Thank you. Assistive aids. And I nearly fucked it up again. Nevertheless, technology for me as a person has been something that's allowed me to bridge with so many of you. I will tear up on the fucking show. People I love, people that I've been able to experience through their own writing and the connections to them. But most of CS isn't fucking this. It's about bridging gaps between money people and money people to another money person so they can sell nothing to nobody.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that's disheartening is I was at like the Samsung booth, which is massive, you know, it's the size of a very large house, like a mansion. And every square foot is tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of both the cost to rent it and the cost to like these displays they've got are very advanced. A lot of effort is just going into making the presentation as advanced as possible. And what I'm seeing on display there is like, well, we've got a fridge that lets you know when your milk is off. And at the cost of you can never ever have a guy over to repair your fridge. Never, never again. And you compare that to, in Eureka Park today, we saw a company who had a small booth that was maybe like four feet wide, five feet wide called Naki, N-A-Q-I, that their attempt

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  was to develop like a way to allow people to control computers and interface with their machine, with their phone, in a way that is similar to how Neuralink works, but without any sort of surgery. So it's an earpiece you wear in your head.

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  We talked to them yesterday.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you talked to them yesterday. Does this look real? We kind of made fun of this, but if this is real, awesome. It seemed to like...

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  We like, we like the use case. Yeah. We like the use case for people who are not able-bodied, but what happened when we came up to the booth, the first pitch we got was for retail. And then the product guy came up and was like, no, that's not even like real. What's real is you can use this if you are someone who's not really able to use your arms or to move the rest of your body, you can slightly tilt it. And that makes more sense than like being able to do a sort of like a retail cashier, secondary labor productivity aim.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there was a, because like my mind was very much geared towards quadriplegics, but not just, but other, because it won't work if you have, as long as you have that muscular control, like above your neck, like it will work, because it reads micro gestures of your face.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  And the live demo they did, you could see the signal coming into the phone when he would make micro gestures and it would like, it would, you know, control the phone. So it's, it seems like... It works. I can also see, I can't see like a retail app for like, you've got your smart glasses while you're biking.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  Just a bit fucking works because what we talked about yesterday.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  It seemed to. But it's like, but it seemed.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't have the ability to like thoroughly vet that, but they did a demo.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  But it also sounded conceptual.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, so this is the thing, because I think also there were three or four of them, where it's like.

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were, there were variations. There was the one that was like, almost like a retainer that you put in and it gave you the same, it was a similar sort of idea. Yeah, you use your tongue, sorry. Sorry, yeah, you use your tongue for it. We were struck by that because it was a guy standing completely still with no expression on his face and a bunch of people standing around him, recording him on their phones. This is like, we've entered the da-da section of the Eureka Park, but. But all of those booths together were like a tenth of Samsung's booth, and all of them were people utilizing significant ingenuity to attempt to solve problems for real human beings who are suffering. As opposed to the Samsung booth, which was this massive edifice of capital, attempting to solve the problem of like, well, what if your milk goes bad?

• 1:29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, and that's the thing. I think also, you know, David, you talked about this a bunch too.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  I'll pick them.

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  Inventive stuff was the most interesting. I have a few friends with neurodegenerative diseases and like the, you know, some of the stuff that gets made and offered to be able to give finer control over tasks that you need to do. Especially when you have sudden jumps in what you're, you know, you're able to do or not do. Very impressive, but then like kind of similar to what you were just saying. Sometimes you actually, you literally can't get that made unless you have to conjure up some sort of secondary application. Which is a shame and a problem with how tech innovation proceeds, right?

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  And it's, you must show growth. You must be like, this is how this is going to turn into one billion.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  There should be no reason why you have to consider anything other than that immediate. And in urgent use case, which is like someone losing the ability to communicate with the outside world and move around.

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  The reason is regulatory avoidance.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  So from the earlier conversation we've had several times regarding regulatory power and authorized medical devices. So all of these products, I have, I've, I've sounded negative for you're trying to skirt and avoid these requirements. However, the agencies that. certify them to want to help people. They want people to go through this process. So these are the things that the FDA loves to see and it's hopeful. Yeah, I mean, the, I guess the, you can talk about capital. I mean, the main worry is that if there's no growth opportunity for a product,

• 1:30:56Speaker 04

  then there's no investment. And, and that's just, it just kills products that have a one, you know, use purpose. Uh, and there's, that's all there is to it, because that's all there needs to be to it. Uh, and I, I think that's one thing that struck me as well, is that everything needs to have bells and whistles that aren't usually necessary.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  So one of the themes I've discussed on this show is the rot economy, the idea that everything is growth at all costs. And some of you at the very beginning were very unfair. You're saying that he's just angry at nothing. I'm angry at everything. I love that when you do your Donald Trump voice, I can tell now. Yeah, I like turn my head, but it's,

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  I hope it's been obvious how pernicious this problem is, because there are companies doing really useful things. And I talk about my dyspraxia because I don't know, whatever platform I have, I want people to realize, if you fucking have this and someone makes fun of you, give me their email. I will personally make them regret being online. This is a personal thing. I was bullied, I will bully back. Very unfair to them. But the point is, there are real solutions to real problems. Real things being fixed today by companies that are actually raising money. And then you've got the Samsung milk simulator that uses generative AI to assume when your milk won't go bad, as opposed to looking at the fucking top.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  And then it'll bander you a little bit.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  And the Bailey Bot that walks in, your milk has expired. I, I did see a product that I would say was my best in show in terms of products that you see an ad for in the first three minutes of a zombie movie. And then it causes the outbreak and like, that's the end of the world scenario. And it was called Veridox. Oh, that's not good. It's Veridox too. It's a product that generates a mist. Oh, no. That sweeps over your fruits and vegetables to stop them from spoiling. What? Using plasma. Plasma? And here's the thing, they explained this to me. They said it extends the shelf life of like, you can put this little box up and it'll, it'll get the mist over groceries in your kitchen.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Or you can use it in like a, in, in, in a grocery store to get all of the gra- and it'll extend the shelf. shelf life by thirty-three percent. And if that's a real thing, that's massive, right? I have no ability to bet this based on what I know from C E. Like, I have absolutely no ability to bet. I'm gonna huff that mist. I'm gonna huff that mist. I did, buddy. Didn't get high. So it's useless as far as I'm concerned. So, quick question. It's like, if that's the shelf life of your vegetables, leaves you glowing, youthful. Yes! And then also, like, there's like a seventy percent chance you grow a tail. Hey, hey, hey, whoa! Sign me up for free. You're trying to not sell that. Some people are into that.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  It's also that that's like the most innocuous. Like, that actually sounds good. Like, it's similar to something you would see, and they just called it, like, like Doom Slayer. Like, but it's for your cucumbers. Like, we just came up. We thought it sounded cool. It's like Palantir. Why would you call it that? Doom Slayer has done some great work. But also, two things. Well, let's just focus on one, which is, what the fuck does the mist? What's it made of? The way they explained it is that it's a mist and it kills before you actually get, like, molds starting to form. It kills them. So it extends the period of time. No, the mold. It's so far just the mold. It said, because I asked if it was dangerous, and they said, no. Oh, no problem.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  I have no ability to bet the Viridox people at this moment. I'm not trying to shit on them. Maybe this will massively improve the world. Okay. It just seemed like a product that caused the apocalypse. Like, that was the, when somebody said, we make a mist called Viridox. This is like, oh, you're going to kill everyone I love. Okay, great. It's like in a wet market that spreads the virus from a bat. So many Nine Inch Nails fans here. Like, a Year Zero, I'm thinking of. This is the big hand from the Year Zero. Yeah, again, this scene right now could be the start of the apocalypse movie. Yeah, no, okay, contagion. And then the one of us who's alive in three weeks, like, is thinking back to this, as they're fighting off Viridox zombies. And I'll use this as a contagion.

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  Again, to complain about the end of Jujutsu Kaisen, the manga. I'm gonna just really put this in the... How did you want Jujutsu Kaisen to end? Okay, well, thank you for asking. Welcome to Jujutsu Kaisen. I'm gonna go take a break. Well, first of all, the people of the Jujutsu High School thing they do, very unfair to Mr. Ryan and Sukuna. Right. Second of all, they spend a lot of time building up abilities that do not manifest into an interesting plot. Are these real people or these? No, this is a manga and I'm being very fucking serious. You made this podcast happen. You suffer the consequences. It's serious, Robert. So, okay, the ending of Jujutsu Kaisen involves a bit where Ryan, Mr. Ryan and Sukuna,

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Mr. Satoru Gojo, is very unfairly treated. They show him winning a battle and then, at the end of the battle, he's dead. He's treated so unfairly. Because he lost. Treating unfairly. Got chopped in half. And then it's just a simple dream sequence, which is very unfair for the- Rigged. Rigged unfair for Mr. Ryan and Sukuna. See, now I'm thinking, and now I'm thinking the Veridox apocalypse has happened. There was a conspiracy against the- Trapped in a room at the beginning. With a guy- Five different Trump impersonators. With a belligerent, did not want the future. I'm so sorry to my listeners. I can see it in your eyes. I'm sorry. This is how David Roth feels about the Mets.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  So I'll move us back to the podcast as we wrap this bad boy up. I have no, I have no ability to vet it based on the conversation I had. You never will. I genuinely want to thank everyone else in this room because we're doing another episode tomorrow, but this show has been conceptually one of the more insane things I have done and I must give real credit to Sophie Lichterman, who is one of the hardest working and also most patient people in history. Oh, yeah. And Sophie's gonna- Oh, yeah. No comment. She is, uh, the only person who can more, really move Robert. Oh, yeah. Who is one of the- No comment. Single most talented people I have met in my fucking life and my boss. Comment. There we go.

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  And Robert turned to me a year ago and said, "You seem to be more pissed off at these people than anyone." And he was wrong, only because I was yet to get pissed off enough. Robert has been insanely supportive of me, in a creative means that no one else has. And honestly, everyone in this room has. Gabe turned to me and said, "You seem to just be a series of grievances."

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  And Gabe was completely correct. It has been so fun hearing you get progressively more angry over the course of a year. It's been a, it's been a real treasure and I mean it sincerely. I say this as someone who is a peer of yours. The work you make seems to get better every episode and you're incredible at it. Thank you so much. You're getting none of this, Robert. You're just very good at it. I say this as someone who is profiting off of you. Are you on a statin? Should we, should we make sure? I don't know what that is. It's just hard medication. I'm just, I'm just worried. No, dude, I am like the healthiest I've ever been. My, my VO2 max is like doing well. Like my doctor's really happy. They don't know what I did. Ever since I got a Veradox installed in my car.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  And that's another CES miracle. Which, which leads, which leads me to the, which leads me to the last thing that I'll say is the, the first thing we all said on, on, on episode one is this feels like the CES from last year. And we're not the only ones to think that. No, it's true. Last night I was at the chandelier in the Cosmo. That is the place. Now we can write off the drinks. Thank you, Gabe. There we go. And Robert, I, I was sitting at the bar and, and Robert was upstairs waiting for a table and we got a table. Hard, hard to do. Honestly challenging. And I said, it's another CES miracle. There's a, there was two people sitting next to me who turned and was like, what CES are?

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  There was two people sitting next to me who turned and said, what CES are you going to? This is, this has been terrible. I had, I had a great, if, if brief conversation with these people who were two exhibitors. Now I, I was a bad journalist. I was, I was too drunk. I, I, I. That makes you a good one. I did not learn which company they were from, but. No problem. There were two people who were exhibiting at CES and they're like, this feels just like last year's CES. I was like, yes, this is what me and all my friends have been saying. Like it is, it is, it has been so disappointing.

• 1:39:40Speaker 05

  And it's not just us, like, you know, somewhat tech-critical journalists. It's people who actually like go to CES to present, who are saying the exact same thing. Like, yeah, this is, this is last year's CES, but worse, because there's nothing new.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Speaker 05

  And, and, and this is like, I, I did not feed them this. They turned to me and said this like unprompted, and they're like, what kind of miracles are you seeing? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, that was sarcastic.

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  It's remarkable to see, and David, I'm gonna guess your knees are about as bad as mine. But starting out in 2010, like, right after kind of the iPad came out, there was so much excitement every year of like, I'd never seen a thing that could do this. Every year, I'd never seen a thing that could do, like, and I would, that would be every, like, room I walked into, every like 30 minutes, I would see a thing that was like, I didn't know technology could do that until this exact second. And that's just not CES anymore.

• 1:40:35Speaker 05

  So, I, oh, yeah, cool.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, even as like a soft touch, you can be impressed by like a cool new TV screen. It's not the first TV screen, you know, not to brag. But there is like, yeah, there's certainly that sense. It's interesting that like the people that are showing here were also kind of like, what am I doing? Like, I feel like-

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  What am I doing here? Yeah.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  I think the, and what Better Offline has tried to do with this entire show is CES is a combination of people who don't want to be here and do want to be here, and a lot of the people that want to be here are the people that already live here to sell services to those who are visiting. But the fundamental problem with CES is that the show itself doesn't seem to be serving the use case of making things happen in the future. It's like, how can we make the present continue for longer?

• 1:41:21Speaker 05

  Yes! Yeah!

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  And the thing is, something I've tried to do with this, and I should be clear about what this is. Everything you're hearing this week is something I came up with about five weeks ago. I wanted to do this, I booked this months ago, Robert then booked much later, but it could happen here, and Robert, please. I was hungover. He is actually-

• 1:41:43Speaker 05

  For a fall.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  He is actually, Sophie is so much stronger-willed and- That's very true. Willing to respond, but Robert has been an incredible mentor and I'm going to be sentimental and you're just gonna have to fucking suck it up, alright? We're an award nominated podcast. I can do whatever the hell I want. But what I think this show needs going forward is more independent voices and it means bringing in people like Kyle from Las Vegas Sun.

• 1:42:08Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  And allowing them to speak because it isn't so much the problem these journalists can't say what they want, it's that formats demand things in certain ways. And the way to talk about tech is no longer as flat as, "And the product exists," or "Tech company sucks." I can do both. But the thing is, having these different voices, having these people talk about their experience of CES is on some level an explanation of how the tech industry feels. They're in this thing where you have this dichotomy between this vast milieu of different things that are like, "Hey, what if this happened? You'd then give me money. What would that be like?" Well, I'd have the money and then you'd have the product.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  And, uh, did something good happen? Oh, I don't care. And then you have these people like, "I'm gonna fucking solve..." People with eye twitches, people with twitching in their eye, which turns out to be a huge industry of people who are genuinely fucking suffering. People with way bigger problems, like mobility problems, having their problems solved in real time. But the people that get talked about are, "I have the most massive television." And no, I actually take that back. It's not even the big TV. I want a larger TV. I want like a 250 inch fucker. I wanna watch the Raiders lose.

• 1:43:27Speaker 04

  Well, that was, so I, I had a moment at the Samsung booth when they were showing off one of those transparent TVs and there was a lady whose whole job-

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  Another one?

• 1:43:33Speaker 04

  Another one.

• 1:43:34Speaker 02

  Well, I'm still confused by those.

• 1:43:36Speaker 04

  Huh?

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  No, that was LG last year.

• 1:43:37Speaker 04

  LG, it was LG, yeah. I think it was LG, yeah, yeah. I, it, it all blurs together. There was a lady behind a transparent-

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  TV whose whole job was when the TV went transparent to wave her hand behind it. And I was like, that's, that's your job. Ah, the hand waver. And it was this recognition as they're like walking, as we, Garrison and I sat through a guy who played this AI-generated ska and tried to convince us that we did, we no longer needed What the fuck does that sound like? Human musicians. Even better. Great. I would, no, I, no, the, the next time someone played, no, yeah. That is a real falling down situation. It was, it is a very much a falling down situation, yes. But the, the, the realization that like, there is a chunk of guys running big tech who see holding your hand behind the transparent TV as a thing that human beings should do, but not making music. And like, that, that upsets me.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  It's just, it's frustrating because

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  entering into this and the format that I created in a Google Doc three weeks ago, and some of, some people even read it.

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  The goal was to try and pull out how the show affects people and indeed the implications of this show do. I'm now going to return to the sentimental bit I was diverted by. I want to thank every single fucking person who listened to this, but also joined me on this. Gare Davis, one of the single insanely young, and in a non-specific way, I realize, the single most talented person to come into anything associated with tech. Insanely young, but also is insanely prescient and aware of the social issues, but also the context of basically everything they look at. Robert Evans, the single most focused but disorganized person I've ever met.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  But also someone who cares so deeply and is, has such an innate talent at finding talent and empowering those voices. Without Robert Evans, I would not have done this. And I did try and like wave him off when he offered the podcast to me. I was like, yeah, mate, sure, you're a fucking budget, don't you, mate? And he's doing the actual jackoff gesture in front of the computer. Robert and Sophie Lichtman, who will never get enough compliments. And by the way, universal law with better offline, if you don't love Sophie, I will fucking kill you. Not literally, but I will think about it very fucking aggressively. Robert has actually have faith in me that most people haven't. And the result is a fucking successful tech podcast that does things more successfully than most of the tech podcasts out there.

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  Otherwise, Robert supports Gare, who has been so incredible and will do better work than I will ever do. But you know what? That's what doing good shit is, knowing the people who do things well. What I've been really excited about this year is getting to meet David and Edward and now getting to meet you. This is the first time we're in a room together.

• 1:46:32Speaker 04

  No, it's not. We talked yesterday.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  Oh shit, I was so drunk. I'm so sorry, Kyle.

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  During the panel?

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  Better offline, don't go on.

• 1:46:39Speaker 04

  During the panel?

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  The disinformation panel. Oh, no, no, I was, I was just, I was just high on mushrooms for a panel. Oh, okay, okay, okay. They're from a gas station. And I've got some kratom still in my pocket if you want.

• 1:46:49Speaker 04

  I'm okay, I'm okay.

• 1:46:50Speaker 02

  I was trying to do like a sincere moment and like. Kratom is like, actually content if it was like. Robert, Robert, no. He's taking the microphone. Now let Robert finish his fucking thing about mushrooms. No, I was just saying, like, it's been very exciting to get to meet these folks, some of whom I had been reading for a while, some of whom I'm excited to start reading and get to like make these connections. Cause in a CES that is so anti-human, it's nice to make connections to people. And I'm about to harpoon you with sincerity. Robert and Sophie have been the single, and Gare as well, have been the most single supportive creatives I've ever fucking worked with in my life. I have had issues with believing in myself and believing what I can do. I have talent, whatever, like who fucking cares? Email me, you're mad, you're listening to this, you little pig.

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  But the thing is, these people beyond when even a year ago, I didn't think I could fucking do this. And now look at me, I'm a fucking ultra ponts. And it rocks. And I believe what Cool Zone Media does is the future of fucking creativity. The idea that a big corporation can give someone multiple seasons to work out their audience, work out what they're building. You look at Behind the Bastards, it could happen here, Sixteenth Minute, Hood Politics, cool people who did cool stuff. There is so much cool shit that comes out of the idea of, damn, what if you gave people more time to build something than seven minutes? What if you didn't rush them to make something good?

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  Better offline at the beginning was fucking rough, but we worked it out and you people seem to like it. And the people in this room are fucking adore, but don't worry, we're not done. Phil Broughton over there. Phil Broughton, health physicist. He's picked me up two or three times and I've been like shit my pants. Not literally. I've never shit my pants around you. Let's not talk about that further. But the truth is, Phil has been here for multiple CESs, tending bar. Grab the mic, you motherfucker.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  Tending bar for people and ultimately doing the thing of asking them why they are here. I think that is the most valuable thing you can do in the Consumer Electronics Show. Asking people the reason they are there and finding out what it is they actually fucking cared about. And you do that so well while also serving various bourbons and I was even like, I don't like this one. He replaced it.

• 1:49:06Speaker 05

  And I

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  I like this one, by the way.

• 1:49:09Speaker 05

  One of my, oh, that would be Alberta Premium, uh, cast grain fry. That was a goddamn journey that made fury for weeks finding it.

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  Phil, I love you. I love all of you, seriously. Thank you.

• 1:49:23Speaker 05

  One of the things that made me happy is for everyone that I picked up at an elevator. By the time we'd hit the 28th floor, I knew what I was serving you.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, man. David Roth. David Roth is someone I brought here. It's alright. No, take the fucking mic. You grab the goddamn mic. I will shove it in your mouth. We all know how good I am, Ed.

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  Which is why it's necessary to remind people. David Roth is the, is actually my favorite writer. And he is one of the single most empathetic people who understands why people enjoy stuff. And his sports writing and cultural writing is genuinely influential over everything I've ever done. And I'm absolutely going self-indulgent. There's nothing a single fucking person in this room could do it. Matt Asowski is just sitting there being like, yep, vacuum it up. But David Roth being here is like watching the movies with Eben. And it's genuinely, I'm getting a little emotional, but thank you, David. Man, thanks for having me. For real. I feel the same. Edward Ngueye So Junior.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  You are an undiscovered talent and anyone fortunate enough to listen to this should now they should hire you immediately because when you finally take off, when you finally get big enough, you are the single most capable, grab the microphone, motherfucker.

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  Hello, I said when I get my gun.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  Okay, let's walk back the gun.

• 1:50:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's cut that out now.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  The words.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  When I get my, um.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  Matt, this is still keep it in, but just to be clear, the gun was a metaphor.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  Right. For my potential.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  I'm really trying.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  Sorry, no more, no more.

• 1:51:08Speaker 02

  I know you're not done. Ed, there are, there really isn't another writer that can do the kind of labor reporting you do and the understanding of the human experience that you can do. You are just at the beginning. And I can't wait to bring you back on this show and have you do more. I love all of you so much, but also your potential is barely, you are, your potential is barely getting started. It is some shit you'd see on a CES banner though. This is the worst it's ever gonna be.

• 1:51:38Speaker 03

  This is the worst I'll ever be.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right, brother. That's what I put on Hinge. It is very funny. Am I still that? I actually might put that on Hinge. Any, any singles wanna email me? Like, that's what's on. Look darling, I know I vomited in your car, but let me assure you, this is the worst I'm ever gonna be.

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:52:03Speaker 02

  Carl Shenard. You may think, I just met you, so. That's true. You came on this show completely, you were actually well-prepared, you had a laptop out, which fucking rocks. You actually like took this seriously. Much like I did with my laptop out that I don't have and the preparation I definitely did. Here's the thing.

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  On an instinctual level, when your first thought is labor, that says a lot about you as a person. It's incredible that you immediately jumped to the hospitality workers in this city that are befooled by the various conferences and you thought, how the fuck does this affect them? Cause when it comes to Better Offline and what this fucking show actually means, it's what the actual effects of technology are on people. So thank you for joining us. Of course. And please keep doing your shit. You're gonna be back on because we live in the same city. We do, we do. And I will be finding you. Oh god, oh god.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Any more actionable threats in these episodes than I'd expected? That's not a threat, it's a promise. Oh, thank you.

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  I wouldn't thank me.

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  And then, of course, to Matt Asowski. Matt Asowski is our producer, and he is the silent party who has been sitting here patiently the entire show, working through, texting me time signals. When I text him, I have burped. He edits that out, because it's happened three times, I believe. Matt, I, and I bring up Matt Hughes here, my word editor, who has been so patient with him. Megan Wenestrom over at Penguin, who's also been patient, reading the dross, I assume? She says it's good. But back to Matt Asowski. Matt has been here since the beginning, when I was really not fucking confident about this show, when I was genuinely experiencing, like, real anxiety and worry. Matt encouraged me, worked with me, and edited.

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  Matt, love you, man. Thank you so much for your hard work this entire week. Could you come over to the microphone and just say hello? Hello. Matt Asowski is a protective party. If you ever wrong Matt Asowski, I will destroy you. Actually, everyone in this room, but really, like, if you fuck with Matt Asowski, I will actually fucking peck out your eyes like a-

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

  Good podcast voice.

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  Like a big bird, if you played Final Fantasy XV, specifically the zoo bird, very big bird. You've been listening to the better offline CS experience. I am so grateful that you've been here, and tomorrow you'll get a final wrap-up episode, but this is really like the wrap night.

• 1:54:32Speaker 02

  I am actually really grateful for everyone who came in. Everyone has really fucking showed up and just done an incredible show, for a show that is so regularly so fucking miserable and so lifeless about people that people are imagining rather than real people. And everyone's been here and just shown a incredible fucking show. I'm so grateful to everyone for being here. Thank you. And I'm now going to pass the microphone around, starting with Zai, who's been here. Zai, please join us. Thank you for-

• 1:55:02Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 1:55:02Speaker 02

  You've been wonderful taking photos, thank you. And then we'll now go to Robert Evans. Thank you, Robert.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  Well, I just want everyone to know that, you know, as the Verinox miss takes your loved ones. Ed cares about you.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Phil?

• 1:55:18Speaker 04

  I want to thank everyone. It's been a pleasure to be here, and- And to serve, to serve and be of service.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  David Roth. Thanks very much. It was a good time and I feel like I learned a lot. Mr. Anguessa.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  I had a great time and I'm not gonna make any more legally actionable threats. Thanks.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can just say.

• 1:55:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, this was my first CES ever and I really enjoyed figuring out what was real and what wasn't and support local journalism.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and thank you, Ed, for putting this whole space together. This has been a fantastic escape away from the show floor. I spent five hours in the Venetian today. Coming up here was a wonderful reprieve. And you really, you really put this all together. So, thank you so much and your hard work over the last year on Better Offline has been, has been lovely, has been lovely to watch. Thank you so much and thank you so much for your listeners. If you've got to this point, I'm so sorry, but also thank you for your patience. I hope I've successfully encapsulated CES and given you the various juxtapositions of the show.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Tomorrow, you'll have a wonderful Positive Masculinity Day as the remaining crew, me, Matt Asowski, Phil Broughton and Ed Anguessa Jr. Kind of like smooth ourselves out, real smooth-like. But today's the last day of the show. Email me, EZ or EZ, if you're one of those people, at betteroffline.com. Please, let me know what you thought. A lot of you have emailed, like, we had, we didn't have enough women on this. We, next year, we're gonna fucking correct that. We luckily got Victoria Song, Carissa Bell, and of course, Sherilyn Lowe, who really balanced that out. We'll do a better job last, last time? Wow, the concept of time is fucked up.

• 1:57:14Speaker 02

  Nevertheless, we'll do a better job next year and I love your feedback and I actually read all the emails. Will I respond to them? It gets increasingly harder each, each week, which is a good sign, I guess. Either way, I'm very grateful for all of you. A lot of people have given, a lot of people have given me faith, given my, given their faith, Jesus Christ, in the show in the last year. It's only gonna get better, but next CES is gonna be weirder. Gear has ideas. I have ideas. And it's just gonna be sharper. It's just gonna be weirder. You have another episode.

• 1:57:52Speaker 04

  There's gonna be more Verinox, too.

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  Palpatine will be back.

• 1:57:55Speaker 04

  CES 2024, part three.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  I'm actually gonna like try and contact Ian McDermott, but anyway. Thank you so much for listening. I know it's a lot of audio and I am really grateful for everyone who contacts. I love everyone who listens. I genuinely am so grateful. I am not really good at hiding any of like the me in this and a lot of podcasts are very performative. Phil can speak to this more than anyone. I'm not really good at like pretending.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  There is no off switch. I genuinely love you all. Thank you for listening.

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:10Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:59:44Speaker 00

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, Analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client, paid or sponsored.

• 2:00:16Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.