Better Offline - Better Offline CES 2025: Day 1

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Venetian with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In the first episode, Ed introduces you to Better Offline’s coverage, bringing in writer Edward Ongweso Jr., as well as It Could Happen Here’s Robert Evans and Gare Davis. We’ll be here all week - two episodes a day, with a finale on Saturday. A talk show in the center of the Rot Economy.  Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.socialRobert Evans: https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.socialGare Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/hungrybowtie.bsky.social --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show.

This is a place for raw, unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. I'm Michelle McPhee. and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on, a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud.

But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the Aihar Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Better Offline live from beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host and most punished man ever to walk this earth, Edward Zittron. I live here, I live other places too, and I am joined by an incredible crew. This is going to be a week-long extravaganza, roughly 12 and a half hours of what I want to say is radio,

but I just mean the detritus of society and great reporters coming here and reporting live-ish from the largest consumer electronic show, I think in the world, and I just have an incredible crew tonight. I have Robert Evans, of course, the famous podcaster. Representing the detritus section of the team, yes. Yes. And Ger Davis, of course. Representing the lower southeast of the United States.

I am, of course, representing the perverts. And Ed Onguoso, Jr., one of my two wonderful reporters who are joining with me this entire week. Ed, thank you so much for coming here. Thanks for having me. Okay, so why are we doing this? And what are we doing? So I want to walk you through what the experience is like.

We are sat in a recessed level of the Venetian Hotel. In the other room is a full bar that we set up just for people to come in. Our guests, Robert, Gere, Ed, Mattiselski, our wonderful producer. And we're going to be doing this live to tape all week. This is going to be basically a tech radio show about a show that has no heart and no soul. a show that, as Gare correctly said earlier, is basically the same show as a year ago, except a year ago I was a terrified baby.

I had just got handed the sort of podcasting. I was afraid of the microphone. Now the microphone is afraid of me. And the important thing is that I brought everyone together, not just to talk to you about this show, but I want to give everyone a temperature check of this fucking hellhole. Because what happens is reporters come here

every year and they're kind of walking in like they have to visit their racist uncle, except their racist uncle doesn't say racism. He says artificial intelligence every fucking year. And generally, everyone here feels kind of miserable. I refuse to have that for my people. I refuse to have that for anyone in my orbit.

So I set up a week-long piss-up where we talk about technology with people who actually know what the hell they're talking about and care about it. So, yeah, welcome to the Consumer Electronics Show. Ger, Robert, you have actually seen things today, though. We are, Ed and I only just got in today. What have you seen? What horrors?

Today I did five hours of back-to-back panels on artificial intelligence at the ARIA. And it included a number of great moments, including an entire room full of people led by the folks on the panel, laughing about people losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence. So how did that happen? What were they laughing at? The MC came up and she was like, okay, I'm going to do some yes or no questions. And one of them was there's going to be a lot of job losses due to AI. and like the, I can actually pull up who they were from, but like, there was an initial attempt to be like, no, well, it'll just be like job, job, job, the changes in the way jobs are lost. And then someone was like, no, there's going to be a lot of job losses. And everybody started cackling in the entire room. It was like one of the most ghoulish experiences I've had I've had here.

I've got the audio queued up, so we'll listen to it. We can loop that in there. That's fucking disgusting. Yeah, it was pretty vile. And then there was a great moment where like the first panel I did today was about like using AI in Hollywood. And so the founder of that company's secret level that does like video game themed videos on Netflix and stuff. Amazon Prime Video. Amazon Prime, sorry.

Oh, very good. I got wrong. Jesus, Robert. But he was also one of the timbers behind that all-A-I Coca-Cola Christmas ad that everybody fucking hated. Which I did not realize until you made that connection for me that it's, it's those guys. So if you loved those visuals. Wait, wait, so the actual company did the Coke one? I mean, there were three companies, but his company was one of the companies.

Wait, it took three companies to make that piece of shit together. To make the greatest piece of art that's ever been made in human history. And I don't know what they were doing because he came up to show videos that he had just made by like inputting text into an automatic image generator like little movies that he'd made which also looked like shit but looked exactly as good as the fucking

Christmas ads. I'm like what were all those companies doing on that fucking Christmas ad? Lundering money I think of it. How much did it cost? Yeah this sounds yeah this cost 50 million dollars. No no no no we can't do accounting due to stuff I wonder how much fraud

there is like that in AI at this point like many just guys exist for like, yeah, I'll do your AI integration. And they just dick around for three months and then they connect chat GPT to something. I'm sure it was still cheaper than like the traditional Coke things. But I'm sure there's a lot of that. I'm not sure that's even true anymore. Like they don't get a real polar bear. Like, no, they certainly don't.

Like if they did that, maybe even then I don't think it would be as expensive. And it definitely wasn't, it was definitely not cheaper on the actual AI side because news came out a day or two ago that apparently the $200 a month chat GPT subscription loses them money and this is the thing this is where we are in the tech industry at this point we're in this world

where we're meant to get extremely erect over the idea of a Coca-Cola ad that looks like it was made by the same people as the Black Hole Sun video and then we're meant to also look at like the apps we're using they fucking suck and then we come here and they're like you know what's going to happen next year the exact same thing that we have nothing

it's we put there's AI in an oven oh I'm very excited And a grill. There's a grill that has an LLM integrated into it. Okay. The most exciting thing is that it only gets smarter. It's only going to get better. Well, that's what Jason from Secret Levels said.

He played a video of like a bank heist chase where the main character, every time it cut back to him, he was dressed differently. And his face was different. At one point, he's just driving down a normal city street, but there's randomly fires every 30 feet in the road because the AI just hallucinated them. At a certain point, he crashes and he's on the run from the cops. And every time it cuts back to the cops chasing him, there's more or less cops from scene to scene. That's the most realistic bit. That actually is very realistic. Union rules, I got a 15 minute break.

Listen, it took us $15 million, but we redid a six-star chase and grand theft all the fuck. No, someone said it wasn't overtime and they were like, oh, I got to do paperwork. No, when we were in Chicago running away from police, if you turned the wrong corner, there would be more or less cops than what you thought there were. That's true. That's true. So, hey, you know, you got to give them maybe, maybe the benefit of the doubt. What I want to see someone do. We have qualified immunity for that. Because he was, he was emphatic that, like, all I did was read a script into, it was like send a script to this thing.

They love this bullshit. Just put it out. They love it. So, like, this is unedited, you know, from that. And so what I really want to do is put the script to heat into one of these things. Oh, yeah. Just see what the big gunfight from heat looks like in this. Does it have that Michael man quality? Trying to think of what I've put into it.

The far, like the Boris Balkan scene from the end of the ninth gate where he's setting himself on fire. I would fuck, I would love to see what they're going to do with. Yeah. But they also lie about. How about Antichrist? I've never seen how they do that. The end of, um, kids. Okay, moving on.

Nymphomaniac. Let's just run that through it. See what Jesse PT makes of it? This is their favorite lie, though. They're like, oh, yeah, it's just as simple as a prompt. Even the COCAD, they're like, we have an editor. We have an editor, we have a separate colorist because it looks like shit, and also probably looks completely different.

This is the slop they want to give us. And they're absolutely hiring VFX's cleanup artists to, like, touch up all of those visuals to make them, like, in any way publishable. The colors were completely fucked on this. He complained because all of the comments on this. this video, which had, by the way, for this company, the big thing he was, everyone in the room clapped when they played these things. I looked on YouTube, the best of them had like 50,000 views. Like, like, someone were just like five or six thousand. And the color grading,

everyone in the comments is like, the colors on this look like shit, his clothing changes. And Jason, like, referenced that and is like, yeah, I know people had that complaint, but come on, guys, this is the worst it's ever going to look. Like, that line, I keep fucking hearing. That's a line I keep seeing also. This is the dumbest chat GPT has ever Take a shot. I love that that's also their defense. Yeah. They're like, hey, it sucks.

But it's all uphill from here. We've all lived through the last eight years. If there's one thing everyone knows, it's that things only get dumber. Yeah. Well, my shadow theory is because I got Open AI's a 01 model to do typos. I hope my, this is not really something I've proven in any way. And indeed, the academics have asked about it, have not returned my. emails due to woke. And it's that I saw typos. I'm hoping that model collapse is happening.

I hope they fed the synthetic data into it destroying these models because that would actually be the funniest and dumbest way that chat GPT just starts like going on the fritz. Because that's what model collapse just for listeners who don't know. You go back to March. You should have been listening to all the episodes you got him. Not my fault. Model collapses when you feed instead of real training data from real human being, synthetic stuff created by another model. The problem is that human. Human. beings are magnificent creatures. Very strange. Our fuck-ups are actually

quite hard to recreate. Those fuck-ups are important for informing things like how words and logic are created. So if you have a synthetic version, there is something that no one really understands that fucks the whole thing up. Anyway, they are currently feeding synthetic data into all of these models. So what I'm hoping is

it fucks them up big time because that would be the funniest thing because there's no fixing it. There was a comment like that in, I think it was let's see which one of these I just want to make sure I'm getting the AI

Cinematic Spatial and XR which was a XR is extended reality Right And there was a comment from I think it was Rebecca Barkin But I may be wrong about that

It was one of the people on the panel It might have been Katie Henson But like something on the lines of Hey we're still gonna need human beings to be making stuff because otherwise there won't be anything to feed into the models. Like they were...

Yeah, that's so cool. I forget exactly who it was. Like, that was... But not too many. Something I, like, underlined in my notes of the panel is like, okay, so you know what you're doing. It's also cool that, like, the point of humans is to have, is to, like, make things to feed into a model. That's... Yeah.

That's all that matters is that as long as we can feed the model, that's fine. Yeah, you're here. It's the only value we have. You're here for the market, and you're here for the model. Yeah. It's the most important thing. And what's important to know as well is anyone saying that is not thinking too hard about it because they need more training data than exists. Yes.

Like five to 15 times. They don't have it. We're in the stupidest fucking error ever. There's a panel like a panel where people are like, ha, wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of people lost their jobs? They should turn into that scene from Kingsman. Yeah. That's exactly what I thought. Oh, I can change.

And it's like this is one of the reasons that I really wanted to pull this together as well. because CES, I don't think, the way CES has been covered traditionally. And actually, Gair and Robert really opened my eyes the list last year because I've been avoiding panels for the 12 odd years I've been at CES. It's easily the best way to see what kind of brainworms are going around. Because people are up there just taught, and no one expects to be challenged or there to be anyone in the room who's not completely taking the Kool-Aid. But what's insane is, even on the floor, I hadn't looked at. looked at it properly. I'd always been like, I'm just here because I have client share. So to explain the history of this, I'm, I've got the bar, I've got the suite.

Previously, as Stu's with my dear friend Kevin Raposo, works at EZPR, otherwise not mentioning the agency again, we would have this suite to just kind of network with people with clients, journalists. And we stopped doing it after COVID just because it was a lot of fucking money for just a piss up, which is always fun. However, the way I used to look at the show was just like, this is all, I almost like took it in good faith. I was like, these people wouldn't spend $100,000 in a booth where they're lying? Well, wouldn't you know? And since I started doing better offline,

I was truthfully a bit scared when I met with you two last year. I was a bit freaked down. Now I'm not. I'm very excited. But also, I was just flat out wrong about big tech. I really at that point was just like, look, Facebook's evil, met as evil, but you know they have something that they get something. Like Google, same deal.

They'd never do something really fucking stupid again and again. And they would. And everyone here would. There are things that are at CES every year that never get made. Please, if anyone sees the laundry folding robot, if you see them. Vaporware stories. They are like, they have been here.

I have been coming to CES since 2011. And those motherfuckers have been promising to fold my laundry ever since. Yeah, 2010 was my first year. Nice. And I think what keyed me into like what was really going on here was the best product in show that year that won the award was the Motorola Droid, which was not a functional product

and did not exist on the show floor. All they had was just the plastic model that was working. It was basically just like a digital photo case that was just like running like still screen shots of what they thought the phone would look. Because Android was still new at this point

and it won best in show and there were functional phones at the show that year. And so I remember sending to one of the editors at TechCrunch, like an email being like, I'm new to this like tech reporting thing, but it's, like, do you not consider this a real problem? This seems like a serious issue. Like this isn't really journalism if like this is what's winning here because they didn't have a phone. If they did the same thing with E3.

What's wrong with you? But it's true though. There is a general sense of like, no, you just, why would you be mad at this? It doesn't exist. This is the future. Google has a slide at their booth. brought us the future. How dare you? Yeah. And what's crazy is that's 2010.

Today's tech media is slightly upgraded in that some of them don't do them. And actually a lot of them are here. A lot of the reporters here generally just feel tired when I talk to them. And when you ask them what their favorite bit at the show, they're like, oh, like the LG, I got this big monitor, big television, maybe. I'm excited to see another big TV. I'm excited to see what new big curved TV LG has. We're going to build the biggest. It's going to be the most beautiful. Okay.

With the most beautiful O-L-L-Ds. Some are going to get Q-L-L-L-D, but it's not... There's a TV, if not a wall. But to be clear, I love the big televisions.

I love seeing big stupid shit and I wish there was more of it. At least the big televisions are television. And that's, yeah, exactly. Like, you can't really... I guess you can lie about, like, the specs and the moments and all that,

all that's fine. No, that son of a bitch folds. I watch it. Oh. I love all that done shit. I don't know why you'd want your TV to do that. We have done. so good at TV.

We really have. It's the only promise of technology that's coming through 100%. It's going to watch you. It's going to give you targeted ads. It's going to give you a chat bot. It's going to be beautiful. My roommate just brought a replacement for our TV like an 85 inch. Oh, that's exciting because your TV has been six.

It's one of those like, what the fuck? How is this the only thing that came through? Yeah. Just for a second. How bad was Roberts television? It was not good. It was great. It was not good.

Was it like a CRT one? No. It was... It was... It's like a dinosaur with pictures that goes... It's a...

It was very... It was very large. And then I plugged it into my laptop. Then I used it to play my little games. It was very large. The frame rate

never quite worked properly. Nice. All of the blacks did not... Did not show correctly. Everything was really crunched. Very good. Very, very bad...

Very bad dynamic range. And it just slowly got worse over the years. It's something I'm still kind of confused by like what what happened to robert's tv. A little bit more. A little bit of, I swear, because every time, every time I try to watch a movie, looks like he's 30. I have never heard of a television that started to decay.

No, this is actually becoming more a thing. Although TVs have been getting better, the new TVs are breaking faster. Interesting. And this is something that I've noticed mostly do it in like my friend's consumer choices is like I I have a TV that my friend gave to me like maybe like 10 years ago and it's it's like a 10 at APLG it works great

movies look good it's not 4K but it's fine and he's gone through like three TV since then that have all like broken right they've all had like better specs they've all looked really good and then every once in a while something just goes like oddly wrong and this has just become like a new pattern

with Panasonic's, with LGs, with Sony TVs. And although we are getting quite good at making TVs, I feel like their lifespan is kind of shrinking. And maybe it's something that I want to talk to people at CES about. Honestly, it sounds like consumer electronics in general. I mean, my fucking iPhone's brand new, and even then it's fucking up already. Oh, yeah.

This is early schedule shit. We usually save this bad boy for April. That's usually when the obsolescence comes in. but now it's just my new favorite thing that my $1,500 fucking cell phone does is when I try and add a song to a playlist, I know it's an edge case,

no one does that. But I did that, and it just crashes Apple Music now. I can only add it by plane. Yeah, I know, why would... It's only got eight chords. Yeah, what do you... They only have a specialized piece of silicon in it

to make it work. Those are what, 16 gigs of RAM? You can't handle that on 16 gigs of RAM? No, I need my fucking MacBook Pro to do that. for my eight Chrome tabs I can have. Yeah. So, format change. Edron Grasso, Jr., please introduce yourself.

Tell everyone about your work. Okay. I am a tech writer. I write about tech. I write about finance or write about labor. Silicon Valley generally and anything that it's, you know, tentacles touch. Where'd you write? I started advice, freelance now, magazines,

news outlets, anywhere that will let me rant about Silicon Valley, basically. So I brought Ed here because he wrote, well, many great things, but one of my favorite things is is Kara Swisher piece. Oh, that's a beautiful piece of writing. The Burn Book Review, where you just really put the boots to her. But I think CES is probably the most swisher-coded event for a thing she's never been to. And I think it's jarring for the same reason, and that everyone's kind of just accepting a reality that isn't true but pretending to care.

And it's frustrating. And I'm glad you're here to see this. This is your only CES, right? Yeah, this is my first time. I'm very excited. Oh, I am too. All the fake tech that's out here. Linda Yakorino, you're going to listen to...

I'm going to listen to... Right, she's doing a speech. She has the ex-corporation keynote tomorrow. When tomorrow is that more? Oh, I... Don't worry, Robert. I already have it in your schedule. I'm so glad you make his schedule.

It's a good thing I don't bring guns to these things because I would just myself. Yeah. Like, I would just take care of that problem in my hotel room? Well, you don't look for half an hour of her going like, X is the place where it happens, and that's the tea. Right. Well, I can't wait for you to hear Yakorino talk because I'm just...

She's a real Yakorino. Yeah. Why don't call a yes arena? Sorry. But also, I'm looking forward to it because, well, you're African-American. Yeah. And I truly do not know how they're going to treat you on the floor. Yeah.

I don't know how they're going to act. Yeah. I mean, do we think the skull measures are going to be out in force for the X event? That'll be a guy like really excitedly calling you. I was like, no, we got AI to do this now. And you're like, oh. Yeah. I use my Raybans.

Oh, I see. It's going to be interesting. I'm very, I'm also going to be curious what the hell they're even talking about. I'm trying to go in with his little as info is possible. Just I can take it in objectively. Yeah. Without bias. It's like watching queer.

You really just kind of show up. Yes. Take it all it. You know, I'm here for the journey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's important as well, because that's exactly what I am here for. I want this to be a journey, and there are multiple reporters joining us.

We have Jesse Farah from your Kickstarter sucks, of course, and David Roth, of course, my second elf. That's what I was calling them in my head of the reporters that I hired. That's what I'm calling them now, the elves. David Roth of Defector, a sports journalist, will be joining us tomorrow and for the rest of the week, other than for our spa day on Saturday, which is very unfair, very nasty. And right now our bartender, Phil Broughton, Now, you're speaking to the microphone and say hello, Phil. Hello.

We will have a full rundown of Phil at some point later in the week, but Phil has been joining as the bartender here for years, and he just handed me some Sotul? So toll? So toll. So toll, parrejo. That's right. It's good.

Yeah, I nailed that. Is that a mess cow? It's kind of. But that's the thing. The whole point of this is, journalists come here. It really is delicious. In this oasis, this is the oasis in the middle of the bullshit, because CES, I was telling Ed earlier,

there is nowhere to sit down. No, they always want you moving. No, they want you to keep on, keep on traveling through. It's like a casino. It's like a casino. No, yeah. No, you can find plenty of places to sit down in casinos.

This horrible place is an insult to our beautiful slot machines and our beautiful tables that we have. And they'll get you a seat at the table. Don't worry, please come spend money. And Phil right now is gesturing, because Phil is our wonderful bartender is bringing us drinks as the show goes, probably not on the first half episodes,

definitely on the second. Can I get a Paloma? No, we have never ever produced. Okay, can I get something with tequila? Wow. I don't give a shit well. Thank you. That went flawlessly.

That was an example of the bar working, actually, that is actually the bar working well. No. So the point of this week, though, is we want to be the oasis within a tech industry gone wrong and a conference that's gone wrong. No one likes coming here to cover this. No one is excited. Everyone's depressed.

We will not be. we will be probably not in my case sloppy, just in case the lawyers ask, but everyone else can be. The reporters we bring here, and we're going to have two episodes each day, 90 episodes, Jesus Christ, 90 minutes, already doing great.

And it's going to be a lot. But I want to bring you diverse voices. I want to bring you the people that have been here forever and the people who are just being exposed to this. The reason we have Ed and David is we really don't want this to be a fucking tech. No offense to tech media.

We don't want this to be a tech report. important thing. We actually want this to be a temperature check of this industry. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the ice? idea that because you're from Harvard,

you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged,

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Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, Ed, I always, there's a lot to, like, roll my eyes at and be frustrated by it. I always really like CES. And when Gare first started coming to this, the way I explained your job at CES, as a good journalist is, you are here to be a terrorist. You're here to find the richest asshole you can. find and make their day worse. That is a joke. No.

Not in the legal sense, but in an emotional sense. You're supposed to terrorize them. Your job is to harass them over something over lies that they're telling us. Well, yeah, and like, the hive mind group think mentality here is like crazy

because you will walk into a panel and you will start hearing people say like insane shit and you look around to be like, ha ha ha ha, that's crazy right? And everyone's like, no. nodding along. Notting along enthusiastically. It slightly makes you question your own sanity.

Never once. There was a complete certainty. Someone posted on Twitter the other day, they're like, would you trust a clone of yourself? And everyone was like, I wouldn't. Absolutely not. Absolutely 100%. It's you.

We would fucking cook. Anyway, complete certainty. But it's so weird, though, you're right. And people walk around and like, damn, really. So the AI for my pet, how's that going to walk? No, it's crazy. And because everyone is so bought into it, if you make any objection during, like, any kind of,

any kind of Q&A panel, like, people, like, are so surprised. It's, it's like, it's like you're a heretic. It's insane. It's like you don't believe in, like, the project of humanity to these people. It's like you don't believe in Santa Claus. It's wild. When rugged, super rugged speakers were, like, a massive product that you can find, like half a dozen booth selling them,

I would just go there and I would ask, can I test them out? Can I, like, drop them and stuff? And then I would pick up the heaviest object. Because they usually had, like, logs or something to pose them on, and I would just break stuff on the show floor. And it worked every time. Did you actually break it?

Oh, a bunch of stuff. And I learned that from, we went to see a demo where they were, showing off, like, an indestructible smartphone, and they were doing it by, like, they pulled out all the journalists. I think we were in front of Caesar's Palace. and they were driving a limousine over the phone. And then they would do it,

and then the next group of journalists would come up, and they would let a journalist set it down. And I don't know who this was. I wish had gotten his name, because he taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned. They were laying the phones flat, and he just wedged it under the wheel on its side, and they just drove over and it popped in half.

The structure. That's being a journalist. Yeah. But actually, that's a very good metaphor for what's going on at the moment. Everyone's like, well, they say it works. we'll be fine. Why would they lie about it? Why would they possibly lie about

chat GPT becoming superintelligence? Do you hear that fucking Sam? That motherfucker, he's not here. He's not here? By comparison, this is pretty real stuff. Where's Sam Orman? He should be giving like a vacuous keynote about how this is going to replace doctors.

He's doing the real work. He's doing the real work. He's building super intelligence. By which he means trying to like leverage his startup capital. As I read today, we're just thousands of days away from that. AGI. Well, Robert, that is... That was set a few months ago, so we're actually about 970.

That was said a few thousand days ago. I love that. Honestly, I need to set a calendar invite for that. With the absence of days from now? Because I have Sam Orman's number, and he is yet to text me back. I am bummed that we haven't seen Palantir here in recent years, because... Oh, they've seen you, though. I did.

That is true. We showed up. I can say that. this now, we showed up with a flipper zero and we're just turning off all of the televisions at the Palantir booth while they were doing demos. Oh,

someone probably got fired about it. Actually, no, someone was probably like, oh, I'll fix this. No. Someone did that one CES and they got in a lot of trouble. Oh, yeah. Because they video themselves doing it,

which is the classic thing you do with crime. Yeah, I remember that, which is why I did not tweet about it from the show floor. Exactly. You put it on a podcast years later. Yeah, exactly. They never prove you, did it. Once I did try a bit three or four times before I started getting anxious, which was I would just pick up something and ask if I could have it. And just like, like, can I have this?

And they look at you and they're like, shut. No. You see it being like, wait. Sometimes they say yes, though, which is why you have to do it out of every booth. You can get a lot of free shit if you're really bold. surprisingly walk away with some really odd stuff. I bet eventually a security person looked at me in a kind of like,

should I memorize this guy's face way? Oh, that's good. And I thought, I don't want to be arrested at fucking CES. No. My lawyer will just be like, again, I'm not coming to your arraignment. Yeah, yeah. You're on your own bitch. I know you're paid up, but I'm not doing this.

You fucking work this out, smart guy. Yeah, well, you pick up, pick up the judge's gavel and ask if you can have this click. A fucking idiot. Well, speaking as a judge that's very offensive. Are you, you a judge? Yes. What?

No, this is not good. This is true. I'm a municipal judge for the state of New Mexico. I got sworn in. I'm good. What the fuck? Right next door. Right next door.

Very close. Why? You got to cross the border when you do it. A fan of mine is a judge and was like, did you know that judges can just make other judges? Like, you have to read a little thing. And then you do it. I got a, I got a, I got an idea. You can make all of us judges.

No, again, it's interview with a vampire rules. Okay. So the youngest vampire does not have the power to make other vampires. And it's kind of unclear to me. But your mate does. Yes. She's the Lestat of this situation. But I can't.

How do I become an older vampire, though? Because you realize that my goal here is not just to become a judge myself, but start making more judges. That I don't know. Because I have not looked up anything about what a judge is. This would be all I'd look up. We got to ask the Deloitte people this. They don't know.

have to know. I would get made a judge and then the first thing I would be Googling is how to make more judge and I would be making them. Who are your first five judges that you're making? I mean, all of you other than Robert obviously, I would know, it would be like the entirety of Coolzone media. You make everyone judges. Yeah. And then we can all go, we can all go to New Mexico and do a blood meridian. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Not anymore. Not anymore. Well, yeah. There was actually a lot of child abuse in that guy's background. So this is the format that you're going to have for the entire week with better offline. Because this is also something, because after a year of doing this, I'm just trying everything. And I do think that tech also kind of needs a talk show. And the reason

I say that is tech has got everything. It's got finance. It's got basically sports team shit. Do you like Anthropic? Do you like Open AI? And the thing is, that really is like a, let's think, Cowboys Jet situation. And that's going to hurt someone's feelings. I'm very happy about that. Anyway, moving on from that. You've also got a bunch of gossip and you've got a bunch of shitheads that you can be pissed off at and actual real events.

I just think that nails, this format nails it. And that's why I'm excited to start with all of you because at the end of the first day everyone feels a certain way. Dread for the rest of the week, sad about the horrible things they saw,

or just wondering why they're doing the fucking job they're doing. None of us in this room. It's just very, it's an interesting way when you talk to the tech media to see how they're doing. But also, people who work. I wish I could get more people off the floor, but I don't want fucking companies on here.

That would be so boring. How did you feel your first CES when you're going around on the floor? So I was just a child back then I was 2011. I can't do math. You all were. Yeah. I was a young boy. That one I have some stories I can't tell, but I was a young PR person and I loved it because it was like 2011. So before we realized tech had problems, we were just like ignoring them. Well, and this was back to when the porn industry trade show was at the same time. I didn't tell how I was terrified of women. I watched Steve Balmer get out of a fucking elevator with two porn stars that were even taller than him. And he is massive.

It was amazing. It was like watching Greek gods stride across the field. Yeah, the god of sweat. He did smell exactly like that. You know it smelled crazy. And I leaked that to another tech publisher. Very good. That's fucking journalist.

Right? But my first... But CES used to be fun when I was stupid. When I was just like, oh, this will happen. And also 2011, there were still new lands to conquer.

They still had new fun things to find. New things that they could make that they could actually make good on. I think it's been like, five or six years of them just being like, we don't have it. There's nothing.

We've got nothing else. I was so lucky that my first CES, the big thing was like crypto NFTs. And so like... So one of the last thing industry.

I knew going into that, I'm like, everything I hear here, everything I hear in this convention is complete bullshit. And then the next year I came, the big thing was the metaverse. So again, everything I hear here is bullshit. And you've just been able to like slowly watch the life drain from these people's eyes because they know like every,

every year there's like this new thing that's supposed to be like the new thing. Like this is what we have done as an industry. And it, and like it doesn't, it doesn't work. They're dry. And it's odd because this year is the first year where there hasn't really actually been anything new. It's the same as last year. It's just more AI stuff again.

I actually think 2024 was pretty ahead of the pack. I was going to say, this year I keep seeing places be like, this is the year of agents. They're going to show agents. They were talking about that a lot in panels today. The one thing I've seen in the panel list is like there's been a lot more integration for like content creators and like streamers. And you even saw this with the Golden Globes a few days ago. go how they let tons of streamers and influencers onto the carpet for like the first time. And there's way more panels this year that's about like, how do we like get this whole like streaming

ecosystem that's like separate from like legacy media and even like legacy like tech media. Like how do we how do we get that into our sphere? And that was a big thing they talked about in my third panel, AI, cinematic, spatial and XR, the next level of creativity. I am putting a gun in my way. They were specifically talking about how. you know nowadays like you know individual creators can be as big as studios and then someone on the panel is like well not really like not in any way that's actually meaning i am i'm excited to

see the new movie from destiny personally yeah yeah really excited to see that mr beast you know he is he is trying that he actually is trying i would love a destiny movie just the wikipedia brought to life there was uh there was a great moment in there speaking of like failed cES's past where they like, because the XR stands for extended reality, which is just metaverse. It's just the metaverse, but they can't say that anymore because they will get murdered. And they said that in the panel, they were like, you can't say metaverse at CES anymore.

They'll kick you out. But we all know it's a real thing. Did they say Web 3 at any point? Oh, oh, so much. Why is that okay, but not the metaverse? That's what we arrested, Pete. They are careful, though, NFT. They still do say, like, they still definitely say,

Web 3. Which is insane. That's the more embarrassing one. Yeah. Well, I'm just shocked they still say Metaverse with a straightfay. Even like talking about this nonsense. But also, XR is a great term because it's been around for a while and it usually just means I don't know if this is mixed reality or virtual reality.

I don't know what device I'm selling this on yet. The guy emceeing this panel was Charlie Fink who's a, he was like the oldest of the metaverse guys. He's like a Forbes writer. He was like an old school. He wrote a Metaverse book in 2017. Honestly, mad respect for actually like knowing stuff early. I don't know if I'd agree with all of the assumptions such as the Metaverse existing.

Yeah, that was my big disagreement with him. It's a thing. Because they were just saying the Metaverse is just, you know, attempts to extend the Internet into everyday life. And I was like, no, no, no, that's just. That's just the Internet. Right. That's just everything. That's called the tech industry.

It's not the metaverse that I can now order food to be delivered to my house. Are you sure? Yes. I'm fairly certain. I do miss that period in the media though when it was just like anything. They're like, yeah, they're going to have houses in there now and we're going to have families. We're all going to live in the metaverse. That was so funny.

People are not dead for like a year. Spend money on Nike's in the metaverse. Yeah. And you'd have banks in the metaverse. That would be better than our real banks. to centralize finance. Oh, sure. Oh, sure.

Absolutely. Yeah. Defi. I want to. We don't have our own federal reserve. Didn't they have like an Arbys in the Metaverse?

That's the only thing that we're right about. I want it is the only way I'm getting into an Arby's is if I know I cannot make physical contact with the food. Oh. Oh, laity da. Someone too good for the, for the Arby's. For the beefs? The meat's not for you.

But also what's important is I think we need to meet everyone who goes to the digital Arbys and then connect them with mental health personnel. because we'll put them on a list. Not necessarily for a list, but I think you've got like therapists could be met. This is real. Just do therapy in the metaverse. Yeah. Problem solved.

Yeah. Not doing it in the fucking real world if they're in a metaverse arbys. But it's so funny as well that everyone's like the metaverse is happening. And then they're like, oh, how'd you get in there? Well, it's very simple. We have this expensive and uncomfortable stuff. Does it make you sick sometimes? Yes.

Does it physically hurt? Yes. But when you get in there, it sucks Vision Pro dropped less than a year ago Did they discontinue it? No no They just

Can't have yet, did they? No, there was a Oh my God, I can't believe that review There was one of the Apple products No They discontinued Did they discontinue something That sounds like Apple eventually

Like they just give up We probably check that No no no no So the Vision Pro I know Again people are very upset with me No fake news Okay

People are very upset with me About my Vision Pro review Very unfair It was the second episode. Still learning. Oh, Gair's got something. There is, sorry, the most reputable outlet, game rant. Oh, yeah, I know, game rant.

Says that Apple has reportedly ceased production of the headset. Really? Wow. It is Game Rats. Well, and that's the New York Times of ranting about games. Ed, congratulations. You have won our first fact point. Apparently, fact point system.

I'm going to yield form it. Game Rant is. citing an article in another website called theinformation.com. Oh no, the information is more or less real. It's realish. It's realish. The information I would trust. You just have to climb up

that very high paywall, which they've improved crazy. I used to be able to get around every single one now. It's hard. It's hard. Yeah. I feel like it was kind of insane. That was more insane to me than crypto. Crypto is pretty insane. But it's like, oh, how I'm going to get in the Metaverse? This very shitty fucking headset

that sucks. Vision Pro was pretty good. I know my review. I know people are upset that I liked the product. There was potential there. They just did not access it. Apple has the money for there to be potential there, but I still maintain that Steve, and I'm not a guy, as you know, having said it over four hours, I'm not a guy who worshiped Steve Jobs. I don't think he would have let that product out yet.

No. No, it needs like two or three years, but it had potential. Even then though, this is the biggest company in tech, the really only company capable of making consumer electronics that are actually good anymore. Like everyone else is kind of like just mostly making it up and maybe putting shit together. Yes, there are companies like frame. There are others, but like the biggest. And they're like, here is our best go at it.

And when I tried to watch June on my vision pro on a flight back from London, I got the worst migraine of my life. And what was I was really enjoying the film. And actually the giant screen was super cool. But I was in so much pain. I took it off. And I was like sweating. Well, that was the extended reality of the vision.

Yeah. I was too. It was extending your reality. That is how it feels like, I say it. That is how it feels to read past the third book. Oh, no, no. We cannot slander the worst and best book. No, no, no, that's a compliment.

That's a compliment. That is true. Okay. But what's important was I really watched too much in that movie and I had like a migraine for like a day or two. Could you see the golden path? No, and Tim Cooker. That was your time of the pain box?

I watched like the beginning of the film. I do not know the plot. You didn't know that's going to be you. Robert, on the first episode of Better Offline called me the shy hooloot of content, I'm like, ha ha ha, yeah, great. Googling it as we go. That has been proven completely true, though.

Yes, yeah, absolutely. I came from a different era in which all of my friends in high school, none of us had sex, but we all had very strong opinions about it. Well, let me tell you, I too come from a rich line of not fuckers and not having sex in high school. at all.

Absolutely. But my thing was EverQuest. Oh, okay. One might say I was even cooler than you were. It was wow for me. Oh, no, I got into Wow later. It was like getting off of cocaine to do heroin. Yeah, yeah.

Barely worked on me. I just gave up after a while. Turn to drinking. Anyway, it's just great that this is the tech industry now. It's just the group hallucination where we all go, yeah, fuck it. This, as we sit here and talk, and I know I'm grinding this act quite hard, but we're hearing a lot about AI in this. fucking conference. Everyone's stapling, chat, GPT, and Anthropics clawed to everything. And it's

like, okay, great. But we are sitting here, and every major company is not making a single fucking dollar, actually losing money on this. And I feel a bit insane. I feel a bit crazy every day, because every day I look at the window in tech. And we're just like, our biggest thing is everyone burning money. I've now seen two stories in the last week from major publications going, what if AI is a bubble? Which is probably the most worrying soames, like the economy. It's like the economist had one that was like, what if a bubble bursting was good? What if it was good that the bubble burst? Which is insane because there is a David Leonard story in the New York Times saying that a housing bubble burst in the 0607 region would have been a good idea too. And let me tell you, I don't know history super well, but I don't think the housing bubble bursting went well for anyone. No. It didn't go well for some people.

You need to have the disruptor mindset, right? And the problem with the bubbles is that as they get bigger and bigger, it stifles innovation in other areas because we're all focusing on this bubble. Right. So as soon as it bursts, now, now you have so many more opportunities to really disrupt who knows how many other industries. Well, as a kid during the housing bubble, we had to innovate by like eating 99-cent burritos. and making $4 of those stretch three to four days.

And now we have Airbnbs taking over half of entire neighborhoods. Innovation. So much better. That's good. Innovates sleeping. And people were really, they were innovating ways to top themselves when I moved to New York in 2008. That was great. That's the thing.

You weren't really going to have people doing themselves in on this one. But I don't think people realize the bubble bursting is going to be very bad for two reasons. One, all the tech stocks are going to take a kind of a haircut. but also I think CES is kind of a bad omen. The fact that this is basically 2004 CES, that kind of speaks to the larger problem I've talked about before, which is they don't seem to have a new thing. AI isn't new, and that's not working.

And they're like, well, what if we put AI in a, in a, we can laugh at the kind of like AI in the oven thing, but really beneath the surface here, and I look forward to seeing the show floor myself for this, there is this undercurrent of, what the fuck do we do that? What are we doing that? What? What? How do we make money now? What? What money? Where please? I think Ed had a really good point, which is that obviously what they see is AI agents being the future. Oh my fucking God. And those kept getting brought up. And what's one of the things is interesting to me. It's interesting to me is that obviously there's a lot of potential value in being able to do something like say, hey, I want to plan a trip to this, this, this location and having a thing that can book it. That's not a multi-billion dollar industry, but there's utility. Theoretical utility. Or to being able to be able to be. This is a location. And to be able to. And, you know, or to be able to. And, you know, it's a lot. And to be able to be. And to be. And to be. Or to be. And to be. Or to be. Or to be being able to plan out like five or six different meals that you want to, you know,

repeat over the course of a week or two and then like plan out. There's some utility there. But the way people talk about AI agents isn't in that way. It's about another living thing that they like bounce ideas off of and invite socially into their lives. There was a lady at the first panel today, which was about like AI and entertainment, who was like, and my agent, obviously, she just is growing every year

or every day. And it was like talking about her like a person, like gendering her AI agent. I must be clear, what was she talking about? Her AI agent. Okay, but does this thing exist? No, no, no. Me and my rabbit have a very intimate relationship.

Sure, sure. We all fuck up at Spatman, believe. No, no. She didn't say which product she was using, but there are a couple of them out right now. Just to be clear. Character AI was when people talked about it. That's not an agent.

Agent, oh my fucking God, I have to do this. Okay. An AI agent. No, no, no, that's what if shit, she was referencing, because it might have been like her co-pilot or some shit. A co-pilot is also not an agent. An AI agent is meant to be an autonomous AI that goes out and does shit and can do things

and then respond to things based on how people act. What part of it's like what Rabbit was trying to sell with the R1 last? Rabbit wasn't even doing that. They were just doing like the very early stage agents, which is, okay, you're technically correct, which is the agents are meant to be. they take actions for you. That's the official definition.

But what everyone's talking about with agents, and this is driving me fucking insane, because no one really wants to talk about the reality here is they're talking about, I will staple a few fucking LLMs

to each other, and then enough LLMs will talk to each other that things will just start happening. Kind of like the incredible machine, if you ever play there. Just like a Rube Goldberg situation, he says, not really knowing that reference.

Peewee's Playhouse, I don't know. Nevertheless, these series of actions then allow theoretically this thing to do something at the end. The big common one right now is sales, sales agents. These things are insanely expensive and I have yet to hear of one that does more than send emails and answer emails and I've yet to really see anyone explain how anything else is fucking possible. And the thing is people will say agent about anything. Character.a.i is just an LLM company that like... They've got a kid to kill themselves. Yeah. Insane. But also just like has like a Denerius Targaryen bot

that will also be your therapist. It's fucking insane. Of course. But that's not an agent. Chat GPT, not an agent. They want to, Ed, I'm so glad you brought this up because it's like this eugenic thing is their next bullshit. But I cannot be clear enough. If you think regular LLMs are expensive, imagine a bunch of LLMs playing dipshit tennis with each other.

That is how agents work. You know, I think, you know, A16Z is really big on this. There's a manifesto, one of their many manifestos. Very cool. Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinite. compassionate, infinitely, knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.

Infinite. And then they say that every person will have an AI assistant, slash coach, slash mentor, slash trainer, slash advisor.

How can it be an mentor? It doesn't know how to do things. Slash therapist. That's good. That is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.

They want a friend without having to do any of the work that makes, like, having a friendship. Yeah. So, not only makes it happen.

Most of a work. None of these fucking people being to therapy But also, on top of that If everyone keeps talking about this idea And I think they've been doing it for years Of AI being your assistant, Why are there no AI assistants that work? Yes.

You can make your phone do reminders now. Yeah. We're on like the 16th, 17th iPhone And we can now make Siri most of the time understand sometimes. It's like half the time for me, but yeah. The British Siri actually understands me. unlike most people. I have mindset

to Scottish theory but so maybe why. I like the way the voice staff. One of the panels where they're like is voice the new

operating system? I am going to kill myself. Yes! I will kill it. On the panel was British and was like well usually they don't understand what I'm saying.

All of the Americans were like oh absolutely and the one person with an accent was like probably not. That makes me so angry because when fucking Alexa came out, we did this one already.

We've done this one already. I have already done pitching for clients about voice being. It wasn't. Guess what? It was not the future because it turns out that talking is annoying. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

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Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

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Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WMBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star, Layla Edwards.

If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs, Gabby Thomas, and Katie Ledecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone

and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win. more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal,

but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been seeing discussions about this. I saw someone online try to be like Scarlett-Johan. Fumbled the bag. I saw that too. Yes. And it's like, whoa.

What bag? They were saying that if she had simply let open AI use her voice, she would have been the future of AI voice forever. She would have achieved immortalities being like the AI voice for generations. I'm like, yeah, just like, you know what happened with Alexa, right? And the thing that happened with Siri. I know the voice actors. Yeah.

All of them. I know them personally. Grimble chambers, my favorite. What a bad like business decision for an actress. because now you'll have kids who grow up with like Alexa machines in their house

and then they'll watch a movie like oh wow the Alexa's in it's in the movie it's like you're being typecast as like a voice servant

it's Siri casting directors will be like well Scarlett Johansson no she's that she's that lady who everybody has to talk to to

get a dentist appointment nobody wants to see her in a movie like it's a terrible idea to be that you mean it lost in translation And that's the only film I've seen. They've watched her a little too many

times. That's really one of the factors that keeps coming in here. This idea that the voice is going to be the transcendent thing there. Yeah, and also that it can do more than it can because I don't think people realize, and I know this due to my accent, how fucking bad

voice is, even in the best case. It just does not. Sometimes the things it hears are truly insane, and the more data you have in your phone, the more numbers and names you have saved, the more insane the idea is. I don't need to text someone I know from North Carolina 11 years ago, and I certainly don't need to text them about the burger I'm ordering. Was I ordering a burger? No, I was trying to do a meeting related thing, but did this fucking thing hear me? But also,

it just angers me that I have to hear this. It's been like a decade. I thought we got away from this fucking angle. No. Very foul mouth to there. I apologize to the numerous. Well, at the very least, at least there's no crypto T. At least, there's no, uh, T. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm sure we'll hit some crypto. I haven't run into it yet. I'm sniffing it out. I did. I did.

Because one of the women on one of the panels worked for Republic, which is an app that allows you to, everyone to do in like venture capital investing with as little as $25. Sick. Great. And yeah, and also invest in crypto at the same time. Why not? And the one review of it said, like, it's a great service if you want to diversify, but it's extremely risky and everyone loses money.

That's not diversify. I guess people are still reeling from Hawk to a coin. So maybe that might be more on the down low. I hope Haley Welch is here. I really do. I love that she is probably in trouble with the SEC. That would be cool. I love that the SEC is going to have to sort of...

She should go somewhere with no extradition, tweet a bit, and then get extradited anyway. These people lack the moxie of the classic scam artist. Yeah. You do that rugpole while you're in Costa Rica. Yeah. You fucking... He was a real piece of shit, but I miss McAfee now. If McAfee had...

If he had just hung in there another year or two. My favorite John McAfee thing was if you looked at the champagne he was drinking. Oh, yeah. It's like the cheapest. It's always shit. He didn't have that much money. Like, it was a shitty yacht. They had terrible guns.

But he was eating like like Walgreens cheese. Oh, yeah. Like, hell yeah. He's drinking like Corbell. Real libertarian. But like, which is no one. The United States.

No one's so. No one's so. The Dominicans took his guns. Wait, did they really steal his guns? Yes, they did steal it. Well, they didn't steal his guns.

He sailed into a foreign port with a boat full of illegal rifles. Oh, wow. Any country would do. You can't do that. You're not allowed to do that. As usual, the fucking fun police. All right. The woke mafia.

Yeah, the globalist. Oh, I can't ride into another port with a bunch of, This is obviously just because the Dominican Republic's so corrupt. And it's like, man, any country would take your guns. You can't do that. But also, this is like one thing of a functioning democracy. If a very strange man on all sorts of substances, it turns. Clearly on drugs.

Possibly trafficking human beings. If a guy turns up just going, yeah, yeah. Sounds like Beavis, but looks like he's dying. It's like, yeah, you could do that on the boat, but no guns. And like, hey, I have all of these guns out of that, like just fucking lying around. You're taking your boat, John, man. Yeah, like you've killed a bunch of NPCs on there and they've dropped their loot.

And he did in fact. I mean, like, that's what the thing none of these modern day grifters can do. They don't live interesting, bold enough lives to have racked up the kind of body count. John Macon did. He was like a blacklist character. He sure was.

He was like, yeah. Like Raymond Reddington. A lot of people in Green and his nephew died. Because they were, his nephew died. His nephew died? Paracly. They had like, They had like a paragliding thing that they did in the desert.

They called themselves sky gypsies. And they traveled around like drifting from a little airport in the desert to little airport in the desert. And like a 70-year-old man and his nephew both crashed and died doing this. And then he fled the country for Costa Rica because his whole family got angry at him. John McCaffey, this is why he left? Yes, that's why he went to Costa Rica. Oh my God. My God, first of all, insane.

Yeah. Second of all, none of the tech people are this interesting. No, absolutely not. Sam Orton has never fled a country. No. Ever, he might, though. No, he won't. That's the thing.

The closest is like Zuckerberg dressing like Stan, you know, from the music video. I love that he dresses like Kevin Fedeline. Yeah, but even all of that's just a Peter Thiel's like bit. It wasn't even his idea. No, this is one of the many consultants. that have crawled up Mark Zuckerberg's asshole now being like, what you should do is you should dress like, like you've just done a Zen pic,

but you're also a 90s rapper, and he's like, oh. Huh? Yeah. Will we ever get him rapping? You know, there's pictures of him with rappers. I would love him to rap. He should try.

We really do need a Howard Hughes era and a crazy crone era of tech. I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg is going to be like when he's like 80. like an Al Davis style just wretch. An L director being. Yeah, just like a litch. Just floating.

He won't queer. I think he may Al Davis meta. And for the listeners who don't know the NFL, Al Davis was the owner of the Oakland Raiders, now the Las Vegas Raiders. And he held onto the team until he looked like he was physically dying. And I really do mean like bits were falling off of him on air.

Like it was fucking insane. This is actually what I hope for meta more than anything. I actually don't think meta lasts another 10 years. but if it has the last decades, I hope it's Mark Zuckerberg just crazy and all. Like, we're not putting photos on there anymore. Nothing but the entire website is nothing but

AIs of your dead grandparents and like elderly loved ones and Mark Zuckerberg running it alone. You can make your pop pop come back. You can bring your beautiful wives back. That's what he's going to run for president. Yeah, that is what he's finally. And you know what I'll vote for.

I can't vote, of course, as a resident. Just want to really put my government. You can't vote once, but you can vote twice. No. No. People need to stop saying things that make it sound like I am committing a crime. Now, don't joke about the title of our signal loop in here. No, we will not be saying that.

Nor will we be saying it's blowing up like a cyber truck either. I thought it was a pretty good post. Yeah, I'm sure it was a great post for you. sending it to my lawyer being like, it's a bit. Look, he's already dead. It's a bit. Yeah, I was...

I was planning a bit to bring my gray hoodie and my green jacket and my net gator and just walk around all of the CEO booths. That's the thing, though. The show's got big enough

now that people are responding to me with stuff like that. Like, yeah, Luigi Sunday. I'm like, shut the fuck up, man. People, People love posting about crimes on the internet. People love to tell me the crimes they wish I'd commit. Yeah.

Wouldn't be cool if you did? That's always true. Yeah. I am a coward. I'm not hitting anyone. I'm terrified of violence. Both happening to me and committing it. The only drugs I do are the ones I legally buy.

It stores on the strip. Yeah, like that weird mushroom gummy. We're like 40 minutes in two. What kind of mushroom is in the gummy? Yes. So we're on. That's another introduction to the consumer electronic show. And this beautiful show I'm putting.

on. My boss, Robert Evans, sat down at the table and then produced a mysterious bag, I think it's the fairest description, saying, these are mushrooms I bought at a corner store. I don't know what's in... There's a mushroom vape. There is also a mushroom

vape. Everyone has been letting me know about the mushroom vape as well. Hit the rig. Hit the rig. We do not know what is, what kind of mushrooms. None of them tell you what kind of mushrooms. I'm not doing them. Also, we would never vape in this hotel suite. Yes, thank you. be illegal.

$250 I will not get back. Anyway, this is my boss, the mushroom man, and this is what the week is going to be like because we refuse to be held by the norms of tech coverage in the sense that we actually want to have a good time. And I believe, and I've done a lot of things about the tech media recently,

and this is not the fault of the individual writers, but the outlets themselves. I believe we have all lost the fun in tech. I don't think people enjoy their gizmos anywhere near as much so I do. No. I want to enjoy my shit. I love my phone. It's got problems with it,

love technology. It's great. The funnest thing at this show can't be the LG giant screen. Exactly. And that's why I'm so thankful that you put this thing together because, yeah, usually covering this is kind of like brain-breaking. And I love having something to look forward to. That's not

just the big screen. And also drinking as many, like as many cocktails at Showstoppers as I can, which we will be doing tomorrow night. Every year. And the people of show stoppers have been very unfair to me, very nasty. They said that I'm public relations executive and they will not have me there.

Will they still not let you into showstop? No, they want to make me pay. And I'm not paying. They should pay me. Don't worry. I will. I will drink. I will drink for you.

Maybe it's Pepcom they didn't let me into. Either way, it was Pepcom, I think. Nevertheless, many mean people of Pepcom. If you don't let me in your show, I will find a way in there in spirit. This is a threat. Which is mostly through me drinking their... Are you going to blow down the door? No.

No. Someone is going to be there that will tell me what happened and then I will talk about it. I will not be doing any crimes. No crimes. Thank you. This is going to be the entire goddamn week, isn't it? This is going to be my entire week is Robert and Gare and Ed now. And Ed, Ed has joined in saying, Ed, why don't you do crime?

And I will be saying, I won't. I've never committed. Which is great. But this week is, I think it's going to be a special week, because I think over the course of the week, we're really going to realize how fuck the tech industry is. I think that there is some life in the hardware side, but I think there's a genuine fucking hole in the consumer electronics side

that is just bleeding. And I think people need to wake the fuck up about it. Maybe the reason CS is fucking miserable is because there's nothing here that's cool. Like maybe that was why I liked it in 2011. 2011 there was still, I don't remember very much from that truth. Google had a slide. Maybe there was the Mobile World Congress that year. Either way, there was a slide at one point.

But also there was stuff that actually got made that was interesting, that solved needs. And indeed, it might be they've solved a lot of the needs already, but it's like, fucking how. Not, like, tech was evolving so much back then. Like, there was, like, genuine, like, massive, massive changes and improvements on, like, the availability of having a supercomputer, like, in your hand at all times. And I've had the same iPhone for four years, and nothing's... But that's actually the problem. Nothing's better. Maybe we're at the end.

Maybe we're at the end of time. Have we considered this? Yeah, I mean, I have a buddy named Francis Fukiyama. Okay, explain the joke for those of us who get it, but need the audience to go. I mean, he wrote a paper that was largely misinterpreted about at the end of the Cold War, about the end of history. Right. It really wasn't saying what it sounds like he was saying. Sounds like a thing I should have read, but did not.

It's okay. No one actually read Francis Fukuyama. We all just joked about... Like a real Shoshana Zubov situation. I don't know who the fuck that is. The surveillance capitalism person. She wrote a 700 page book. If you read the first 100 page, you're like, God, damn.

I use it to keep my door open so my cats can get in my room. It is a very long... It's a very long book. And I say this is someone who does very long podcast. But the first 100 page, she's like, damn, you're really on something. And the next 600, you're like... Maybe an editor would have been helpful.

Oh, maybe. Definitely. But also the larger point is that capitalism is simply sick. that we must just fix the obvious problems because otherwise the tech companies would run well if capitalism worked well and the answer is shut the fuck. Anyway, I'm going to have Corey Dr. Oates

talk about that book at some point because he has some fucking views. Oh yeah, he wrote his own book about the books. Oh yeah. But it is interesting and I kind of want to I think I'm going to try and ask everyone what they were excited about at this because I need to find out first of all who's a liar

and then second of all I need to find out If someone truly believes that something is exciting here, why? I don't remember a single thing I've ever seen at CES. Other than one year, where I saw a sign for a semen analysis thing with AI. Oh, yeah, all the come products are great. I was heading out at the time because I was not in a great mood, because otherwise I would have gone in and be like, can I try it? What do you think?

Nah, you like what you see? The AI says it's bad, huh? I don't know, by you, I'm pretty excited about that folding laundry robot that you guys were talking. They're going to get it right this year. I'd be really funny to go over there and be like, where's my fucking shirt? I gave it to you two years ago. It was my fucking shirt, man.

I never give me that shit back. Like KG yelling, where's my money? I am a sicko laptop pervert, so I always look forward to like Lenovo's weird twisting folding laptops. I've got their folding 13-inch laptop now and I love it.

I like their sick little laptops. A weird little laptop. And I wish it was all that. Weird little fucking laptop. Yeah, give me a weird laptop. But four screens on the son of the bitch and have it fold down to the size of a napkin. That's what I want from CIS.

I don't mind if you don't make it. I just mind that it's fun. If it's like, hey, here's something that's plausible and we are not building it. That's so boring. I don't get angry at the folding 100-inch television. I would never buy one, but I am like, that is a TV that's folding.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. And I could see that would be delayed due to the fact that you're doing the thing unassociated. And no one wants them. Mostly associated with clothes. And also there is no market of any guy. But even then they still. make them. You still get like the $50,000

LG TV that can run on a battery. It's like that $3 million glasses free 3D television they used to bring around where it's like this fucker works. You got to stand in one specific area. But by God, it works in that area. This is basically a giant 3DS. It does work. Well, last year they had, I think their biggest TV thing was like a

transparent. Transparent TVs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. That was so stupid. I love that because they were like, even like the tech journalist just trying, they weren't trying, they were just reading off the fucking press to this like, I don't fucking know I don't fucking know. We have no more horizon.

No, there's no more lands to get the rock con bubble in July. I fucking said it. There's nothing left. We're at the end. And I will narrate it. Because, and that really, it does feel like I'm narrating the end of the world at times. And this show does not fucking help. It doesn't give me hope. I don't get, I don't see anything at CS where I'm like

finally. No, but I think it's so crucial because the whole thing about AI right now, the thing everyone says is like it's only going to get better, right? This is the worst it's going to get. And the thing that you've been so good on, like, specifically for your beat is showing how things don't actually like infinitely improve. Like Google search is such a good example that like, no, sometimes things actually can't get worse. Like we can't assume everything will just get better. Well, it hasn't though. I think that that's the real thing and this show kind of shows it in the

nothing has got better they don't show us stuff here I'm like other than TV stuff TVs are cool I love TVs whatever big computer, first computer, whatever but like of actual things

we've seen at CES I first of all cannot remember a single fucking thing that I've seen at CET I just I go in I look at them for hours and then my brain just leaves and I leave and my brain's like

oh okay that's going with where Spanish, French, German and Latin went so who are the winners it's gamers gooners investors the thing is I don't even

think those always right those are the three groups that always keep winning that's the guy fieri show gamers gooners and tech enthusiasts but there's not even stuff for gooners anymore oh no oh no oh no if you know a true they're always d tg as the kids don't say we have been reporting on i am the cum beat every c es okay well love to introduce my listeners to this especially the ones that came in through the very serious podcast and the Lena Khan interview. That's the ones, the people hearing this from the Lena Khan, come on, come on. Let's talk about the FCC. No. No. She said she'd come back on. There's a monotically. You know what you just said at. Market, yeah. Jesus Christ on a fucking, you know, you know, 20205 is the year that we are all, that we are all

going to have sex with robots. I'm excited for some kind of, you guys haven't sex with robots. No, there's no sexist. I'm waiting for the right one. It's like the champagne room of sexology. No, I, I, I, I'm waiting for some, like, some insane, like, AI power, like, masturbation tool. Because I, I know, I know there's going to be a new one on the floor. They happened last year. They did, but there's going to be a new one on the floor this year.

They only sent us the sheaths. They did send us the actual device. Like a fucking samurai. They're handing out home sheets and loo. You have to earn this. You have to forge this one yourself. Gooner Ronin. It's so good because it's like the most like sexaverse group of people walking the show floor.

And you have these like, you have these like PR people enthusiastically trying to like give people loom. And you're like, these people aren't. These people aren't similar from countries where you're not allowed to come. Yeah, there are ads that tell me I can't. Anyway, moving on. from that one. But no. I'm so sorry to like the respectable

like take I, we got like awards this year from like real business publication. There's some person who's like, I can't wait to hit what's out. This is like this is actually a pretty big part of CES. How the fuck do we get gooning into the first episode of this goddamn shit?

Because it's because it's CES. What else are going to do with all of those curved, all of those curved TVs? And the humanoid robots. What do you think they do with them after they don't fold the laundry? you know, they put them on the line. On the gun line. Maybe the show was a mistake.

I mean, this is also like one of the biggest uses of like all of all of these LLMs is just people using them as sex bots. And actually, you know what? I don't mind what people do with that. But I will say, I don't think that they've got anything else other than that. I don't think there's any other sticky. That's the thing. I could have chosen another word. You really walked into that fucking.

No, I actually can't come out. Sticky. I learned a lot socially by meeting other weird freaks on World of Warcraft and doing role play sex with them. That was a way you grew up as a 17-year-old when I was a kid. What race were they? I mean, usually night elves, obviously. Like, of course. It was 2007.

I mean, you could have been a noom. A noom. Sometimes they were noms. A noom. You just tried things on the internet back then. Love is love. You grew as a person. But nevertheless, it is funny that that appears to be the one use case of all that.

Because people are just like millions of people getting into erotica for the first time. Now, our bartender Phil just walked in and that was the first thing he had. So very good stuff, Phil. All the normals are happening here. We're talking about how AI is helping people come. I'm so sorry, by the way. There are people who listen to. this podcast ostensibly to learn about

the rotty economy and the tech industry's collapse and now everyone's talking about their willies and hoo-haz and such. This is a core part of the industry though. It is. This is why we have Blu-ray. This is always driven tech. Yeah. Actually, pornography has always driven tech, which is why

they pulled the Avien away because then they'd have something to aspire to. And also, that's a profitable industry. Right, yeah, you can't remind people there's no money being actually made. Yeah, like, oh my God. this is the thing. I really didn't think about how likely it would be that someone would bring up

gooning, let alone on the first episode. But I mean, this is still more fun I've had any C.E. Because you go into these shows and they are definitely sexless. And they're definitely guys in the tech industry are like, if they had like good sex, they'd be really happy Elon Musk being one of them.

But it's, it is also weird how just like joyless it is. Putting aside horniness deliberately it does just feel very fucking joyless. No one seems to, I think this is probably in the tech media as well. No one seems excited about anything. No one even is looking forward to it.

It's like a group burden that we all share every year. I just refuse to have it that way anymore. Yeah, it's, I think it's good. I'm excited for the rest of this. I think we probably should close things up. Oh, okay, don't worry. I was just planning to. I'm the MC, Robert.

Because I got to show you guys some weird AI videos after this. And I have to pee. So, as we do our outro now, I'm going to talk you through the rest of the week. Robert and Gare will be joining us again on Friday for one of our two slots. But the way this is going to work is you're going to get this episode. You're listening to this around 12 a.m. E.T., I assume that this is the one thing you do with your day. And then maybe about eight, 10 hours later, you're going to get the second episode. Then we're going to have David Roth of Defector. He's going to be joining us.

My two elves are going to be here to look on the floor. I will be going to the floor. Yes, I will, but not until Wednesday due to situations. We will have a gaggle of wonderful reporters. We will have Jesse Ferrar of your Kickstarter sucks. We will have a real-life priest, an actual Dominican monk. And we're going to have many more fun things in store. Robert Gere, where can people find you? You can find our daily show it could happen here.

We'll be talking about some of the great AI-generated movies that I watched today during my panels. I do not look forward to seeing it. Oh, you're going to be really unhappy, Ed. and yeah that's it you can listen to us on it could happen here

you got social profiles I am on the blue sky that I write okay I don't want to tell you my Twitter get off Twitter don't go on Twitter get welcome people

I am I'm not following you now you're not following me now you're not following me on blue sky Robert I've responded to a post asking but yes I am I am on blue sky at hungry bowtai

dot blue sky dot social on grace where can people find you on on Twitter and on blue sky. I am a big black jacobin. And then

I'm at the tech bubble at a substack. What's the address? Techbubble. Dot substack.com. Very good. And you can, of course, find me at Ed Zittron and Gab.

And otherwise not, no, I'm on, I am not on Gab. I am not on Gab. You don't need you anymore because it's just Twitter now. I am on Gab, but it's a secret account. I mean, I do see about it. At real Donald Trump.

Any of the people I'm following are about. to do a mass shooting or have just... No, I'm not going to tell you shit because you can see the episode links. And also Ed Citron is on. Who the fuck else is a dumb-ass name like this? This is, of course, the first episode of the Better Offline CES extravaganza saga, of course, mastered by the wonderful Mattisowski, who is here producing us in real time.

Thank you so much for listening. Very excited for this week. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.

Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. 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 podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

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