Better Offline - Better Offline CES 2025: Day 2

Episode Date: January 8, 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 second episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Health Physicist Phil Broughton, actual priest Gabriel Mosher, journalist Ed Ongweso Jr., and eventually Robert Evans and Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here, to talk about turning our health into an analytics nightmare, the amount of made-up stuff on the floor, how we beat the generative AI slop, and something called a "suicide helicopter."  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.socialGabriel Mosher: https://bsky.app/profile/eighthway.comPhil Broughton: https://bsky.app/profile/funranium.bsky.social Linda Yaccarino’s CES Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R9LtHiZ74wMeta ends fact-checking program: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-ends-fact-checking-program-community-notes-x-rcna186468 --- 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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You're listening to BetRof Lines. This is day one technically, but really day two of the Better Offline CES saga, the Consumer Electronics Show here from beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. My home, my Van Helsing, like curse, but also my job. I must be in Vegas, our beautiful slot machines must be filled with beautiful dollars. I am joined today by a remarkable co-tory of people. Edonguoso, Jr., of course, joins me for another episode. Ed, lovely to see you.

It's really great to be back. Thanks for having me again. So just before we go any further, as people think, why did I say that at the beginning other than the fact it's true? Where did you hear the phrase chosen by God perfected by science today? Well, it was on a giant, a giant banner above CES on the Venetian Expo floor. Nice. It was advertisement for germ pass, which is this automatic, ultra-violent light technology that automatically kills. 99.99% of germs on any high touch surface.

Oh, right. So, to my right, sits Philip Broughton, who is going to tell you what he does. So, hi, I'm Phil Broden. I am a health physicist, which means radiation safety, and laser safety officer, which means I deal with the entire electromagnetic spectrum from gamma rays all the way down to radio. And Phil is also the bartender for the suite. So if you somehow came to episode two of the CES saga, I don't know why you would do this. This isn't like a, there's not like a chronological, there's not a plot to follow.

I guess you could jump anywhere, but like you'd probably start episode one. Anyway, we are in the beautiful Venetian suite. We're in a recessed area, a separate room on the side. We are running a suite with booze for journalists all weeks, tons of places to sit down and me, which is why no one's toning up. But nevertheless, we are also recording a podcast. And Phil and I have been doing this eight. eight times now. This is the eighth time. Been doing it since 2015. And we love doing it. It's a good. Phil takes vacation time from his job elsewhere. And yeah, it's great. And also Phil's other

thing he likes to do is suffer torment. He likes to suffer pain at all times because Phil is a safety man and is well aware of like things like codes and laws and stuff and regulations. And so Phil, you may make a record this year. It's every year by Wednesday someone has brought you something that required you to call a fire marshal. Yeah. Why is that? Because sometimes people lie on their applications.

They lie when they're then... Applications for what, though? Oh, so everyone who has a booth at CES is required to submit how many square feet they're going to have, what utilities they're going to need. and any hazardous things they might bring to the floor to the people who run the show who then are required to tell the fire marshal and the fire marshal then comes back and goes,

oh, you've added rabid, flaming, radioactive gerbils to the show. That changes the occupancy we're allowed to have in this building. So please don't do that. And then they lie. And so what do you usually tell the fire marshal? So what comes to me is a journalist will say, hey, Phil, one, could I get to drink? Two, I saw a thing and I don't think it was okay, or that seemed dangerous and I'm worried. Okay. So what do you have? Where did you see this roughly?

Let me go ahead and pull up the CES map of all the vendors. Oh, you were on that corner of that aisle. cool let me go make a call so has anyone been like arrested for this if they've been like taken off the floor like what are the consequences of the farm removed from the floor yeah that's fun arrested no but you end up forfeiting your fees and you don't get to present anymore for the rest of that show

or they take the dangerous thing away I think that maybe based on what Ed will be telling us about in a little bit I think we should maybe remove all of the booths and see yes. Like, it sounds like that might be a good idea. But before we get to that, we're also joined by a man of the clergy. So for some reason, and I really mean this, I do not fucking know. We have a priest that joins us, Father Gabriel Mosher, who joins me on my left.

And weirdly connected with the tech media as well, but you just kind of show up in the robes, not complaining, just I really do not remember why. I have no idea how there's... all got started, but it was also 10 years ago. What was it 10 years ago? Fucking hell. Anyway, I age every day. But like, do you know how he got here? Yes, I paid for his

flight. I know where... Bloody hell. You know, I think part of it was I, especially back then, I was connected to quite a few sort of like tech people and whatnot. Right. Yeah. And we figured might as well. Yeah, so, and just to be

clear, you have no worldly possessions other other than those which are given to you, correct? Pretty much, yeah. That's great. Would you describe CS as sinful or not sinful? Depends on which party you go to. I'm not, no, I mean the convention. Oh, not the yo party again. No, I mean, that's right. Enough about yo. This is a scobeless zone.

No, I think it's great unless you think that, you know, technology is going to save you from everything. But yeah, no, it's interesting. I find, you know, the whole idea of these various people trying to develop innovations to make life a little bit better. or a little bit more convenient to be a good thing. I mean, that's just, that's just human nature. It's great, unless they're a bunch of liars, which they are half the time. And talking of liars, so there is an article in the New York Times at the moment about priests that using chat GPT to make sermons. How do you feel about that?

I think that's pretty lame. Do you think, is it sacrilegious? No, but... Why not? Well, it's just like if you're going to use chat GPT, for instance, to create sort of the line of a book or something like that, I think that's fine. But if you're, if you're using, if you're using chat GPT to like write your sermon as a whole, then you've failed. It's just like writing your term paper. Okay. So very specific question though. So if it hallucinated a verse of the

Bible, would that be like a false idol situation? Would that actually be a sin? No, I mean, I mean, not from the chatypte because it's not like, no, no, no, for the person publishing it. The person, yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, that would be, that would be pretty lame. I mean, you would, you would definitely be trying to like lead the people into like weird places and yeah this is how this is a saint i imagine that's also bad who knows i mean i don't know i mean this is where this is why the show's happening we need to yeah it's just the and that article was i don't know why it had to it's one of those things you read and you're like i've got to read this article it's not great uh it's weirdly well reported like it's the guy went out and like really reported the shit out of it but it was just like

okay, a bunch of people who believe in something that not everyone believes in, believe in another thing that even less people believe in. Lots of people spend more money on. But I can tell you, like, most preaching is pretty terrible, so this might actually be a notch up, so anyway. Yeah, you think... I mean, preaching is pretty bad these days.

Isn't that that whole fucking point that good at that? You would think. That's why I can't go into churches other than the burning thing. Terrible. Mr. Ron Grasso, Jr., tell us a little bit about what you've seen today on the floor. All right, well, you know, I scanned a bit for a while because I was trying to find something that spoke to me first. I went for these healthcare management devices for two reasons.

One, you know my co-s, Jathan. On this machine kills podcast? On this machine kills podcast. We did not introduce you. I'm so sorry. You're totally fine. You know, listen to the first episode, everybody. And then the second one.

And then the other podcast. Right. Yeah. You know, Jathan writes a lot about network devices and mythologies behind them. And that was one of the core subjects of his first book. And so I pulled into that for that reason. Also because my partner uses

medical devices to monitor glucose levels, sensor diabetics. I'm always interested. I've been increasingly interested in them because these devices don't really work. And so when I see innovative offerings, or well, you know, actual devices are qualified and

do work, but health management aids aren't real. Yeah. This is what I, or what I should say is that their devices work, but they malfunction regularly at a rate that surprises me, considering they're supposed to be and are necessary, you know, for staying within a healthy range for blood sugar. But the health management aids, you know, they offer,

they present themselves as more aggressive sounds, as preventative health care mechanisms, as ways to overhaul your entire, lifestyle. So I was on the lookout for a lot of these because I've been interested in them increasingly in writing about the ways in which people are encouraged to be healthier or to empower wellness or to reward it and the ways this data gets accumulated, sent back to insurance company. So the first one I went to was Biopop, which is this, sorry, it's this device that is interesting because ostensibly it is promising and that it's a promising and it's a

a non-invasive device, health care management device, that would allow you to get access to some biometric metabolic data. But it uses ultra, sorry, it uses NIR spectroscopy. Spectroscopy. Spectroc. I couldn't say it. I'd write it again. It's near infrared spectroscopy is what NIR.

Yes. Spectrum. Speculum, yes. It activates my old speak thing. Just going to be staring into the abyss the whole time trying to say. And so I came into the booth, you know, listening to them, you know, listening to them and talked to other people about it. One of the use cases that was offered was, you know, imagine you have a CGM. They're so expensive.

They're hard to maintain. You can use this to monitor your blood glucose because that's the only thing you can monitor right now. You know, implying it's a medical device. So I go in and I say, hey, this is this. medical device and she goes, ah, no. It's so cool that they have to do that. Actually, it's a healthcare management

device. That doesn't work if you have a lot of melanin in your skin because they've only tested it on Asians and light-skid people. And so it's not in market yet because they need to test it out on people from India and Africa. And so,

thankfully there's not that many people in either. Just a few billion. That's all. That's all. And it's like way less the Montana. So Biopopop is very interested in helping you improve your healthcare management and empowering you to be a healthier

person. They also want to reward you for doing so, so they are both on the blockchain and they will share your information. All right, what the fuckies? I don't even understand this. Which blockchain? This is crazy. They did not specify. I was listening the whole time, but my brain was just like this is the same shit you hear. Blockchain? Yeah. Didn't specify one? No.

to what end? This is the stuff I'll be screaming at them. They want to encourage users to meet certain goals and to stay within certain ranges. If you're on the blockchain, you might be able to get a reward. Great.

Maybe it's a coin in the ecosystem they might create. Maybe it's from some... Yeah, Octo to a token. Maybe it's a more established blockchain. They also, again, are sending the information to the... The insurers?

The insurers. because this is how they're going to be able to, you know, kind of, they're trying to avoid... FTA certification? No, sorry, step back. They're trying to achieve it, and they're trying to get insurance coverage, and they're also trying to figure out a way that they can work with

or, you know, participate in some of these wellness programs that are popping up where your insurance coverage is modulated based on your own personal behavior to kind of ensure or regulate or govern how you behave outside so that you just become a healthier person. I think it's fucking sick that everything is becoming metro mile now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything is just like, and what this kind of sounds like,

and I hate to go a little far, it does sound a little eugenics, adjacent. It is just like, if we all optimal, our health insurance will be cheaper if we have the right numbers. Yeah. We're the right kind of person. Yeah. And there's only one way all that stuff goes, and they'll claim that it's an efficiency thing. But I've yet, all of this, I have a fucking aura ring on.

I occasionally have an Apple Watch on. Sometimes it even reads my heart rate. I have all of this data and it's useless. And occasionally United Healthcare will be like, hey, can you, you want to connect your Apple Watch to us for some reason? Well, yeah, it's not useless. You're creating a profile that if, you know, they have, they got their hands on it, it would be rich.

You just rich for them. You want to connect that? Let me see. Let me see. Let me in. Give me your fucking watch. Let me see how much you love. Lyft. You'll lift enough.

We'll put you on the blockchain. So the real customer is the insurance company, not... Yeah, the real customers, whoever's interested in the data. I mean, and that's really also the thing that you'll see with a lot of... I saw a lot of healthcare ecosystems and apps and smart tech that were purportedly about rewarding you for getting better sleep, rewarding you for eating better, rewarding you for meeting certain goals. But then when you think about what the reward actually is or how it's being distributed,

What it is is that they are going to cut some sort of deal with someone who actually wants that data on you. We'll use that to extract a little bit more profit out of you. And then they're also going to give you a little bit of that, a crumbs of that value that's being created, right? Yeah, this is great. And there were lots of companies doing this. Yes. I would say almost every single health company I saw that was using artificial intelligence or was using some sort of reward system for empowering wellness,

seems to have a model that is premised on regulating and governing your behavior so that they can generate data about you that would generate profits about you and other people that then they could give you a small piece of. Or, you know, another company actually use the data to offer you discounts to other devices and other products that you could use. So it's group on. That's an AMWLW. This is an M-Way.

We give you an AI sleep mask and realize you're not sleeping properly because of your pillow. So we give you $30 off the pillow. Honestly, at this point, I'm like on my seventh pillow. I actually want the computer at the trunk, wet this one out for me. Don't you want a computer in your pillow? I want to know what this AI sleep mask is because I sleep with, I sleep in an insane way. I have like a skull cap on and I have a giant eye mask. I must sleep in complete darkness.

I also like I grab the covers and I like curl into a ball at the edge of the bed. My therapist says this is good. Yeah. Anyway, an AI sleep mask, what the fuck would that do?

Every time one of these things said AI, it's an app and an algorithm that collects the data, presents it to you on a colorful graph. Maybe Gleens or infers insights about other elements of how you're sleeping, eating. Did they explain anything? any of how this would work?

No, you know, for example, for example, they said they can offer a way for you to reduce mental stress. And I asked how they measure mental stress. And they say, well, if you get enough of our devices in the ecosystem, we can measure, we can measure physiological things like your heartbeat. We can, and how much you sweat, right? And we can say, oh, this is not in the usual range for you. What's going on?

You're being anxious, you know? Yeah, I also, I have, and, you know, You can see it, but also a person can do this. Is your reward booze to make that happen? I don't know how this works. Yeah, like these rewards, what are they? Other than discounts off of other members of the scam? Discounts on unnamed crypto payout.

See, you were right. This is so sick. I would love to dig into the history of these people. I would love to learn what their previous job was. I'm hurting over here. I cannot stress enough that not a single one of these things is an FDA certified product. If I'm going to fucking lose it. Listen, I would like to know too because I didn't think I was going to see crypto.

I think we talked about it the other day and you guys were like it's not here. And then what's the first thing I go, we're on the blockchain so that we could better reward you. This is the thing. It's insane. It feels like the one place you wouldn't. Well, they were kind of saying that by being on the blockchain, your data is secure. That's not entirely open Yes, I know. Unless they do a private

blockchain, those do exist. And at which point you can ask the question of why don't I use any number of other databases that would be more efficient? Oh, it's immutable. Who cares? No one gives a fuck. So the databases can be like that too. It's such a trendy word that they can use. It's not even

trendy anymore. But like 10 years ago, right? It's not the people still saying new phone who dis. Learn a new meme. And also do another thing. Why is the critical? I love that that's still legal. I'm scared.

It's going to be super legal. It's going to be super legal. And the FDIC is to dissolve. Super isn't like above legal. Yeah. It's above. It's encouraged. Sanctioned by the

Sanctioned by the Department of Governmental Efficiency. I'm so scared to check Kaiser when I get home to see if they're thinking about this. No, they, one new alert. Kaiser's private blockchain. That's a good question, though. Did any of these companies have any contracts with insurance companies? No, actually, almost every single one that would talk about this either didn't have the product that was offering out in the market yet, or didn't have a single insurer that was approval to even work with insurance. I just feel like insurance would build these things themselves.

You would think that and probably they will. Or they just, I mean, not with the blockchain bullshit. But they are already building like, you know, well, is statutes. data pipelines to get in insights. I mean, one example of this is like cars and car insurance, right? Your car is a computer, right? And car insurers have a relatively easy time of using your driving behavior to modulate, you know, what they're going to charge you on a basic level, of course, if you do accidents and such.

But, you know, getting to the point where it's like, you know, how are you breaking? How are you, how fast you're usually going, you know? But no, the thing is that this already exists for the insurance companies. MIB is a thing. What's MIB? It's the Medical Information Bureau. It's a housing for all of the medical data of everybody that is involved in any medical stuff in the United States. And it's all housed, University of Michigan, I think.

Okay, so who can access this? This is, it's effectively supposed to be like metadata for actuaries. And so this is why actuarial data for insurance companies is so precise and accurate because they can see all of this data and then use it to, to rate policies. So we created like a little surveillance state just so

that health insurance could continue. And this has existed since like the 70s, like 60s or 70s, I think, yeah. One of my people are pissed off about insurance companies.

Yeah. Could be anything. And have been for decades. It's like, this isn't new. It's just, now it's being monetized. I mean,

it was already being monetized but just in a different way. But now big thing. By a different way, by a different group of people who are trying, it's unclear if they're trying

to replicate the thing or build their own own infrastructure and products around it. But yeah. Yeah, because MIB is, the whole point of it is, and why it's at an academic institution, is that it's supposed to be, you know, outside of industry. Right. That's kind of the idea.

And available to everyone. Right. And so, whereas this is now, this is now something you can put a patent on. This is something that you can, yeah, this is shady. Yeah. Yeah. To say the least. To say the least.

So was there anything other than this kind of shit there? In the healthcare space, a lot of it was like, you know, what's called like, you know, luxury surveillance. We're just like, we are going to pay, you know, you're going to pay us for the privilege of giving us a continuous stream of your behavioral data so that we can figure out a way to give you more products or, you know, generate some money off of it. Right. It's amazing. It's beautiful. I love it. I think it's a, you know, it's a genuine value chain.

I wasn't sure where you were going with that. You had me for me. a second there. I was about to get concerned, honestly. Yeah, no, I'm actually a gap list. I had a stroke. So what else did you see out on the, on the hail floor? Oh, yeah, yeah. So, you know, what else we saw? We saw, I saw a lot. There's, there's an AI baby monitor. Okay, great. Yeah, this is this for my AI baby or? No. It's actually for your real baby. Okay. So the pamphlet that I had, I don't know if I actually still have it anymore, but it opens up with saying, did you know how many kids die from a sudden infant death syndrome?

That could be one of your kids. The way to prevent that is to use our devices so that you can monitor your child if they stop moving for... And these have existed for so long. Like, Nanit is like over a decade old. And there's the sleep. Like the ones for like the actual like the feet are very valuable. But that's also solved problem. Yes, it is a solved problem, right?

But they've found a new way to solve it. Because what they're trying to do here, it seems, is build. an ecosystem where... It's always an ecosystem. It's like, what are we on the Savannah? We have a catalog of products that your baby can have. My baby loves products. Babies love products.

Babies are consumers. Go for it. Well, they have eyeballs. I mean, so. You know, stuff for their eyes, for their nose, for the ears, for their breathing, for their toes. The fully online baby. These all separate products, I thought you were just... These are all separate products.

Replacement, toothpaste gel, skin care. Yeah, there's stuff for the ear. These all AI powered. Nails, trimmers. Oh, you found a slop company. Yeah. Does they have the spikes that goes in the base of the skull for the matrix?

Yeah, calipers. This is an important CES history thing. So there are some fascinating companies. The most honest part of CES is the crust on the outside. So you go to the very ends of CES, And it's just black, like black text on white background Chinese companies. And it's just like the something something electronic corporation. And they sell CCTV gear, battery packs, miscellaneous plugs, and dildos.

And it is just that. You can find these every CS. And they're the most fun to talk to. They don't give a shit. Yeah. But what Eddie's referring to is a slop company where the ones that are not honest enough to just be like, yeah, we sell everything. just we're here to Money Launder, I guess.

Not saying the people actually at the fine companies that I've kind of named Money Launded just for the legal purposes. But I feel like this one is like trying to pretend they're like doing good for the world versus being a wholesaler of sex toys. They're keeping your baby safe. Well, they opened with terror for your baby is going to die.

Exactly. They sell them fear. And also outlet exists. Like what the fuck is the AI part? What's that? So that one was literally just monitoring if your child is moving. And if it does move alerting you. Okay, that really has been.

Yeah, that's been solved for a long time, like you said, right? But what's... Well, that's a great question. What is the AI part of that? Well, I mean, there is actually very... Like, to be clear with everyone, artificial intelligence has been around for a while. Low turn.

It's actually been working. When they say AI, they're implying there is a novel thing that is artificial intelligence on top of this and obscuring the fact... Versus on top of the actual AI that has been around. for a while. Like some sort of generative AI?

What's going on? There's nothing new. They just hope that you'll think it's that. Is it generating a baby? This manual, if you look at the back, it says 2017 on the, no. All of a sudden you have a new baby. It's soothing your anxiety

so you can generate that new baby. Upgrades. That would be a really great way for one of these people to sell something just being like, you're anxious, you're not able to have sex? Yeah. Anyway, you need this baby monitoring.

You need a survey. and stayed in your house. Or of course, though, wonderful, the AI cat litter thing. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. 5G connected. Fuck yeah.

What the fuck does that mean? That means there's an app. Sure. Isn't 5G's whole point that it's like home broadband connection? But what are you streaming? So, most other than cat piss. Yeah, this is the thing. Almost all of these devices are like, hey, so we will give you an app.

And in the app, you can see when your cat gets on and off. how much it shits or pisses, and if there's any differences in it, and it will give you immediate alerts, right? Because it's... Your cat has shit. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, we were...

Why do you need that notification? Why do you need to know immediately? If you're more anxious than an anxious cat. My Apple Watch just like pops up. Like, your cat has pooped. You're on like a fucking... Like on a date. Yeah. Sorry, my cat's not shitting, right?

I have to go. The weird thing is my partner and I were looking at a new cat litter box, and of course they all do have that 5G... integration and the app associated with it. Why do you fucking have it? The answer why? And it's a niche case is every time we have taken the cats to the vet, they've asked, do you have a stool sample? How can I tell the difference to be the different turds?

Yeah. Oh, because I know a fresh one has just dropped. Let me go get that immediately. I hear, so this is, I'm describing this cat litter box. How would AI know which is? And apparently it has multi-cat facial recognition. This is a friend of the show, Tatea Hunter, Washington Post, brought this to me yesterday. It was this.

Apparently, it can tell the different cats so that if you have one sickly horrible cat and one beautiful sweet cat, you know which one to take to the vet for the last time. Yeah, right. Or like if it commits a crime, the FBI knows how to get him. So you're the cat. He's stealing all the fucking food outside. But my question as well is, this cat litter thing, which is $899. by the way, which fucking rocks. I assume it has proprietary litter

that goes in it as well. Because that's the consumable. I mean, why wouldn't you use that? All about consumables. I need a subscription. I assume there's a subscription fee. Yeah. I would be surprised that there was. If there's not, I will absolutely fucking lose it.

Like, why am I, if I can't pay an extra $5 a month to cat genie.biz. Yeah. Well, I don't trust them after that because I haven't thought through this process. For some time, I was looking at automatic

feeder because I had this I had a schedule on most of my roommates were out and friends weren't in town where I wasn't able to get someone to watch

the cat. I was like, okay, well, like I can get someone to watch them. Sometimes maybe I'll get an automatic feeder, automatic litter box.

And then every single one I tried to get, there's a fucking app. And then when you compare it to the ones that don't have the app, it's like a $300 addition to the price for nothing other than

like we've been talking about knowing what your cat has shit. congratulations. I'm just imagining being in court and you've silenced your phone and your judge is turning to me. He's about to sentence you. You're not meant to have your Apple watching. It's like, bing, cat shit. Just like, is it like nest where you get the alert, but it doesn't show you the video and you drag it down?

It's just like a big old. I don't want a video of cat shit. I'm sorry, Your Honor, but my cat just shit. You held up your hand. It's wild, dude. Mr. Tinkles is tinkling. You know? And it's also so funny because it's like the price jump also.

It's like a regular little box. Yeah, it's not special. $2. $3. I mean, it doesn't cost that much. It's a little box. Yeah, it's not. This thing is not like a new kind of litter box other than the stuff they've

stapled to it. It's like, hey, you're a sophisticated buyer. You love your cats, right? And you love your cat. Your cats must be fancy cats. Yeah, and I have to be. And they need 5G. Well, throw in $5 off.

Feast. Okay, wait, no, something just fucking occurred to me about this that's even weirder. They're talking about 5G. That's a cellular wireless standard. Yeah. It's Chinese, which means no. You have a cellular... The people of the cat leather company very unhappy.

It's... Put in dirty tech in our home's dirty tech. The sovereign citizens are going to come to your house and take your litter box. They're already very unhappy with me. But also, it's 5G. Before the end of the show, can you try and get there just to ask them if they mean 5G Wi-Fi,

because that is an egregious overstatement. Because there are people are just like, the guys here that don't know how anything works, go, oh, it's got 5G in it, which they think is like the cell phone standard. Yeah. Versus... This is the show, though.

This is CES. We're just describing... It's true. Casey Kagawa, friend of the show as well, was saying to me earlier, oh, Ed, the hardware stuff's really cool. It is. Faster computer.

Now, it's great. AI Stethoscope. Great. Actually cool? Is that actually... No? No, I was going to say, it's not a happy AI. Did it hallucinate heartbeats?

But you can go to like a legacy media outlet and hear about all the computer stuff that actually matters. Because that's not really the story of CES. That's the stuff that happens kind of outside. And what you have in there is people making a series of promises that have gone through a law firm to make sure they're not going to get them in actual. trouble, hopefully. Did you see any Wi-Fi grills, though? No. Oh, boy.

Oh, buddy. I saw a TV with a chat bot. Why? To help you choose channels? Yeah, you know, I saw sex toys that used video games for long-distance connection with group sinking for multiple orgasms. Oh, my gosh. They did not promise that.

No, this ties to the very first CES that I went to. If they? So I was, I'll never forget this. I was at the Indiegogo Party, the first CES, and I was talking to this folks, and they were telling me about their technology. Technology was about trying to have some sort of tactile response in a virtual environment. Keep in mind talking to a priest in full white Dominican rows. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right?

That's right. And so this is Chinese folks, right? And so we're Chinese company. And we're talking about it's like, man, that's really amazing technology. Like, that would be great for, for, like, the medical industry. Like, that would really revolutionize a lot of stuff for surgeries. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but we're going into porn because that's where all the money is.

I'm like, son of it. Just, yeah. Ten years later. Same, you know? But it's not taken off yet, though. I mean, it's not scaling. There are toys that allow you to have group player to see them. That's existed for a bit.

I was trying to figure out the AI element. The Metaverse part. Yeah, right. The extended reality part of fuel, you know. Wow. Of the super duper, you know, turbocharged flesh lights. Nice. The suction dildos of the, what else in that?

Prosite massagers. You said, oh, for the road. I thought you were going to Caribbean. No, yeah. This is where we need Father Belisar. Like, yeah. The other member of the clergy that for some reason shows up here. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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But so other than Dildos and other than health things, any other other than weird shit, anything loathsome, pig-like? Anything like, oh, there's an app. It's called an AI public transportation bell. and it rings a bell when you're about to get to your stop on the bus or train. Isn't that the bus train? Freaking a man. There was no one at that booth and I was like, this is what you're talking about the alleged section of the conference where it's just like, this is a front. Yeah, man, sorry, we're just, we're using this for that Serbian gentleman behind you.

One that smells of cigarettes. That man, that's who we're talking to him. That's our one meeting. We're here for four days to kind of just cover for this. He will kill you. Spurs of cigarettes and slivervitz. It's so strange that we have a show full of this. Because you kind of see articles about CES,

and it's like fast as computer. There's the $3,000 AI machine that I should have. Someone from Reuters coming in to talk about tomorrow. Oh, hell yeah. But, um, Invidia also, who knows what they're doing at some point. And the Eternal Hall of TVs. The Eternal Hall of televisions, which are fine. I don't, we love the big screens.

And, but really it's just so weird how much of this stuff is just like fake, fake. Or like, real, but customer base of like 100 people. Like the cat, how much do you think that cat thing cost to make? Because I bet it's accidentally really expensive. I mean, it depends because it's, is it also one of those ones? with the motor that rotates so that it automatically sifts. Yeah, then...

Those things break. Yeah, they break easily. One, because they're not... They are easy to install, but I feel like they're not... They don't tell you how to install it, and so you're probably going to break it in installation. The app is probably not going to work half the time.

So, I don't know. They're probably accidentally expensive because of how much they wear down and how much they end up getting returned versus, like... How do you really, like, load test, those things. You get a really big boy in there. Just overfeeding a cat.

Like you're making foie gras, fucking Garfield and lasagna, man. Say, all right, I just fed you some cheese. Get in there. Eat the milk! Do you think this is how they get the training data to find out about the turts? Yeah.

I mean, that, listen, chosen by God, perfected by science. To be fair, this is how I describe my cat Babu. Yeah, you know. And also myself. And I too use the litter box. But he just won't use these fancy ones.

We've tried fancy ones and he just will not go. Only one of my cats use is the fancy one. You've got a picky customer. Yeah, I do. I really fucking do. That's the most cat thing to do as well. It's not even like you can throw it away. Yeah, no.

Our cats will only use the robot litter box for pooping. We have two other little boxes. Those are the piss boxes. Only the robot gets turds. Which one do you use? Ah, I. I am a discerning individual. I prefer to go use an actual toilet.

Okay. Sorry. You're good for this show. Now, you did see a speech from the incredible Linda Yakorina. CEO of X, the Everything app, where I currently do my banking, my taxes, my dating, and my professional work. I have a DM I need to see to in a minute from a 14 words groper that's my doctor and the medical care on X as well

my credit card was just charged $11,000 from it everything's going great there but she's the CEO of this company and you said it was kind of bad it just wasn't that fine yeah it didn't really didn't move you could have been an email could have been a press release she talked a lot about the global collective unconscious unconscious oh god the fuck does that mean

That's X. The everything site, you know? Did she say unconscious? Yeah. The collective unconscious? I believe. I believe. I have it in my notes.

But the thing is, if she said conscious, it's still stupid. But if she said unconscious, I would believe that because that's like a Yakarino classic. Yeah. Just like a complete. Because the thing she says sound like the kind of thing you say immediately after walking out of a car wreck. Let's go to the notes and see. But it's also like what an undergrad like philosophy student would say. Right.

Right. She talks about how it's self-regulating. You know, the first... Oh, yeah. The first question was about comparing meta to X and talking about how it got rid of fact-checkers. And she was like, they're trying to copy community notes, basically. Yeah. They're realizing...

Our website sucks shit. Copying it. Like, buddy, I'm on community notes, so I see all this stuff. Yeah. And it is a shit show. It's a shit show. I mean, have you seen the fucking facts that people? people post on Facebook.

Yeah. You really want that community. Yes. Anyway. Yes. Now that great idea has been copied. And so the idea there is like, you know, she's trying to, you know, talk about how meta is going to emulate X's innovative system that inspires great behavior, which is that.

Noted posts are dramatically shared less. Like suicide bombs. Yeah. I want to die. Like I want to die. Like where do you think the cyber truck guy got his inspiration? That and chat GBT? apparently, which helped them build the explosives.

The police department recently reported. That didn't quite work? Yes. And that's JetGPT. As I described it, it's effectively just the anarchist cookbook, and you're going to get similar results. Yeah, you know? Don't try.

And so, you know, her rating of the meta-abandoning third-party fact-titing, great. Victory for Free Speech. Cool. She talked about how the greatest product innovation And talked about how there have been like 250 product innovations during your tenure at X or whatever the fuck. What? Yeah.

But the biggest one is trend genius. Uh-oh. Which is when a trend kicks up on X and it hits a certain altitude, advertises they have agreements with. They're able to take advantage of those trends and they get matched with them. And your ad campaign kicks into high drive when there's a trend connected to what you're looking to target goes into high drive. Almost some kind of like word you could advertise against. Yeah. Like an ad word.

Right. Right. You know? All the ads I get are Temu. I should Google that. Yeah. They're all Temu. Everything is Temu.

I get Temu. Indy sci-fi. Books about how Donald Trump is going to save America. Sick? Crypto. That doesn't. That's happening right now. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. Yeah. I only get Temu. What are you like looking at, man? I don't know. I got a lot of Temu though. I was blocking so many. ads at one point that I just started getting the

weirdest shit. Oh yeah. I got like the most expensive coat ever and it was like a $70 coat. I actually think is a great bit but it was the worst looking outfit. It looked like something that Baz Luhrman would have in his Romeo and Juliet movie. Do you

do you bite your thumb at me? Or do you bite your thumb at me? You bite your thumb at me, sir. And all your houses. Oh my God. So what you're telling me is they've created an automated system to guarantee that the advertisers won't miss an opportunity to be next to an incredibly popular racist post. Right. And are these...

Don't want to miss it. Right. Are these trends the ones that GROC comes up with? Oh, Lord. Yeah, they're torturing GROC in the center of the racism computer. They changed the image recently. Do you notice that? The logo for GROC is really bad.

It's super bad. It looks like a JPEG artifact. So bad. One of the examples I really also loved, she was kind of like, you know, talking about how access to everything plays. It's real time. So many trends. You're like, you know, sometimes me and my husband, we fight all the time. We fight all the time about what to watch on TV.

Oh, really? Oh, okay. I was he just meant in general? No, yeah. Can you imagine? My husband fucking sucks. A piece of shit, husband. That's right. And so we fight all the time about what to watch.

We're fighting over the remote. He thinks football is consequential. I want to know what's happening on the red carpet. We don't have to fight anymore. Because now, I have X on my phone and I get real-time update and he gets the TV to watch football. Was she talking about the Golden Globes? What football game is on? When Golden Globes happen?

Now, this is also garbage. I was trying to, I was trying to check news the other day on Twitter, X, whatever they call it nowadays. Okay, I guess you have to be watching the... And I was just like, this is a really bad place to get news. Yeah. Okay, it was really bad. P.M. PST. Was she really that attached? Was he really that attached to Monday night football? Maybe he does hate her. He might have been.

He's just like, uh, so, you know, that's the, that's like first 10 minutes or so, you know, she's talking, she's talking about safety, ad products, and how there's no surrogate for acts. This is the most important place, talks about the NFL portal, which, you know, is an example of how we are expanding the town square and building a model that will bring to other areas of society.

They want to make us a global sports league portal. And I don't even know what that means. Nobody knows what it means. It's provocative. It gets the people going, you know. 36 billion impressions, 4 billion views. That's for what?

For the NFL portal. That 36 billion... Impressions. Impressions, that's not even... I mean, like... That doesn't feel like as much as it should. Like, it feels like they had higher numbers like that in the past, but also the views numbers are completely cracked on there now.

What's you saying? These are the best numbers, yeah? going to get even better. They're going to go to global sports leagues. The interviewer tried to be like, do you want to do a news or journalism portal? She was very, you know, she's like, look, look, we're not, we're not, we're not, she didn't say we're not interested in that, but she basically was like, Legacy Media has their own thing.

We're post-Legacy Media. We're not interested in telling the truth or providing information. We want to distinguish ourselves from Legacy Media because that, Legacy Media, it's a one-way filter. That's a sci-op to control your mind and influence. As opposed to Twitter, which is global collective unconscious. Right. And free of influence campaigns, right?

Except for Temu. Yeah, exactly. Other than the influence campaigns. Yeah, right. That she just mentioned for Tristanis and also the one that her boss is doing. Yeah, and also the, wasn't there a Paris Hilton one? Paris Hilton one. Saundis.

I mean, we could list all the influence campaigns that are going on. Do people still care about Paris Hilton? I know. I don't think so. That's what's so good about it. You're like behind crypto on a trend. Yes. Yes.

Like, I think the last time anyone cared about her was when she was like eating hamburgers for Carl's Jr. Like that's... I'm not familiar with the canon. That's pretty bad. The canon. I haven't been following the Sarasin canon. I fell off after the JJ Abrams move.

Fair enough, fair enough. She also talked a bit about the power of X. And she got really excited about the fact that one time she was like, I was scrolling through my feed, leaned in, very excited, animated about Musk and Sundar talking about quantum computing. Oh, the brain genius. Yeah, this is the brain trust. The genius twins. Where else can you get to executives who don't really understand what that's talking about?

And it's definitely them. There's no, there's no... Literally every executive. Yeah, you know. Here's the thing. I still, to this day, refuse to use the term X. Like, I will dead name. I'm only using it here.

It doesn't sound right. It's terrible. It feels like petting a cat's hair the wrong way. Yeah. Oh, I'm on X. What the fuck are you talking about, man? The Everything app. It's a...

The Everything app that has an increasingly... X marks the spot, maybe. A lack of utility with almost every day. The racism generator. It's terrible. GROC is somehow the least racist racist racist racism generator on that?

I mean, like, look, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't join the full exodus when, you know, when things, so I stayed there, even though I joined all the other stuff. But it's just like, like, the level of narcissism. Yeah. I'm going to open up X, as we are talking.

I have not opened it today. Other than to send a thing. The world, a world ending event. Like, it's kind of, yeah, I wonder what's, what's on X everything at? We start the countdown clock. Or you. Oh, there's a thing about.

Sam Oatman's sister. Very, very bad for Mr. Orkman. Oh, I got some betting at. Oh, that's good. You got bad MDM. Do you guys want to get up to $250 back in bonus bets if your first wager loses?

I want that without having to do anything. That's why I want. Good. Online betting strikes again. Okay, so he is quote, it's a quote post that Elon Musk is posting where someone said Bill Gates has donated over three. This is just a conspiracy theory thing. Just the moment I started reading that.

And it's Elon Musk has quoted it, and he has used what appears to be an emoji of a pregnant man. What? Okay. What? So, this is the richest man in life. Yeah. He could do anything. And he's like, what if, what if Bill Gates was a pregnant man?

Yeah. Wouldn't that be funny? Wouldn't that be funny? Grimes, Grimes. Grimes. Grimes. It's just not been in the house for years. Grimes. Grimes. Grimes and Grimes. It's just talking to another person. Yeah. I love Elon Musk, don't you?

I mean, I open up the app, and the first thing I get is a nice little post from a friend of mine, who I know. And then a Temu ad is literally Temu all the way down. Post from Milang Mask, if protecting children makes one a fascist, then so be it. I think that really is everything. Oh, wow. That's, you know, perfect segue. Also, because the next thing that she talked about were the grooming gangs that he went on a week-long tirade about. And they were like, is this a red line? because now you've got diplomats saying

we're going to change the relationship with the U.S. And she was saying, if not for X, where would the conversation be about saving thousands of girls bringing people to justice who must be brought to justice? So I say more than less. Did that happen as a result of anything that happened on X?

No. Great. She said there's going to be an inquiry. Wow. Well, there's going to be an investigation. Well, I have now retracted my statement. I feel like as we approach the end here, I want to really talk about something that I read about today that I will be doing an episode on, you know, you know that I can't help myself doing content, but we'll talk about it today. So Mark Zuckerberg of Meta has now, basically, he's fired all the fact-checkers,

and he's moving the trust and safety people to Texas from California, some people saying, oh, it's because of some sort of, that one, they're like, oh, it's because of labor laws. Sure, but what that's actually about is the judges, from what I understand. But anyway, If you have not read the news, they have fired all the fact checkers and they're saying that they basically made a statement that was, oh yeah, we've done too much of that. And now, if anyone listening to this has opened up Facebook in the last year, they probably did not think this could use less work. And they definitely didn't think I am getting the good stuff here. But on top of that, this feels to me like the beginning of the end for meta. A lot of people are, and understandably, should be scared.

This is a fucking horrible thing to do. I think it's the end of meta. I think we're actually coming toward it. I kind of hope so. I hope so, too. But I think that this is, companies only do this when they're very upset. I mean, there's also, like, these moves also to try to placate Trump. I mean, do, there are a few questions, right?

Because other firms are doing them? Are they going to make the antitrust trials go away? I don't think this, I think, I don't think it's related, but I'm in, interested in that also as a knockdown effect, right? I think it, I think what people need to realize is, sure, there's some kissing up to Trump, sure. But Mehta has been helping conservatives for decades now. Yeah, you know, correct calculation on the airport. I mean, pandemic, the thing that talked about in the people killing Facebook episode.

It's, they were, Joe Kaplan, Jeff, no, it's not Jeff Kaplan, that's the Blizzard guy. Sorry, Jeff. Jeff Kaplan from a Blizzard, by the way, look up what the name. of his character was in Everquest. It was Teagold Bitties. That's the guy who runs... Sick. We wouldn't want to slander him.

Well, also, that is actually a truthful statement. Activision Blizzard, a lot of weird lawsuits around. Anyway, now back to Joel Kaplan, who is the former head of public policy, who is now like their chief policy officer, replaced Nick Clegg's scum. Oh, God. But Joel Kaplan is a former G.W. Bush guy who specifically intervened to make sure that the COVID conspiracy theory movie, Plandemic, was not removed by the health department, which I

now assume is just shut down. Yes. Just to be clear, when Meta was restrained, when they were restrained by the boundaries, the vagaries of such ugly things as morals and policies, they still fucking push this shit.

They're going to do anything now and it's going to turn it in to X, but worse, because Meta has already fucked Facebook for here and back. The question is what it does to Instagram. I think this kills Facebook. I know it's going to make Facebook even worse for a while,

but it's going to kill it. The content already fucking sucks. I mean, we already call it boomer book. So, you know, I work with students. I mean, I work with students, right? So I'm always in the midst of a bunch of young 20-year-olds. Same. And it's just, yeah, it's boomer book.

And no one goes there because it's the most toxic place that you can go. Like, it's worse than Twitter. Oh, you need to look for the toxicity. It's usually just confusing to me. But just to be clear, the current state of Facebook that everyone has been used to, this was the one with fact checkers.

Now it's going to be like lunatic, but it's going to be actually insane. But I think this might, this may be the poison in the veins. And I know a lot of people, understandably, are very scared of this because of the right wing side. And the fact that this is aiding the right wing.

The only thing I can say to calm you down is, they've already been doing that in great volumes. They already did this. And it's like, that was this plus that? Anyway. And it's frustrating because, because I wish that was being reported alongside this part of the story. They're like, oh, now Facebook's going to help all the right-wing people.

They took down crowd tangle, which was a data reporting service, that reported what the most popular pages were because, oh, sorry, most popular, I think, was Facebook page. And Kevin Ruse of the, was he at the Times? It's good work for Ruse. Yeah, he reported this, and then they responded by taking down crowd tangle. Now, the reason they did that was because, Because all of the top, like, eight out of ten were always conservatives.

Was this a story about him trying to analyze the political track of a neighbor? No, no, no. This was just what was most popular on Facebook. And it was like Ben Shapiro show, Dan Bongino, that shit. That's what was happening when they gave a shit-ish. They don't give a shit. They don't give a shit now. I mean, honestly, it's like if I were Facebook, it's in your interest to,

at minimum allow for or try to ensure that, you know, maybe right-wing stuff is pretty popular, you know, because they'll give you less trouble arbitrarily. And, you know, if I'm actually putting my foot on the pedal, you know, if I'm actually putting my hand on the, on the tilt here, trying to, you know, shift the balance, you know, to rev it up, right? Yeah. So it makes sense, right?

It's a payoff. You know, it's a payoff for them. And I think, you know, I think to come back to your earlier point, I think that's like a fair point to say, which is that like, yeah, you know, kissing up to Trump misses it, right? Yeah. As you're saying, that there's a deeper, there's a deeper symbiosis or deeper interest there that's being overlooked. David, David, he'd be, Dave Lee of Bloomberg did a great opinion piece that out, Lincoln, in the notes. He did a thing where he just says it gave Zuckerberg permission to give up on the thing that he didn't give a shit about.

I know somewhat paraphrasing his words there, obviously, because I don't think Bloomberg would report that. But it's a great piece because it basically says, look, Zuckerberg has never really liked keeping care of his garden. He's never really taken care of his shit. So now he doesn't have, now he can be like, oh yeah, it's a political thing. This is why I'm doing it, which is sure it doesn't hurt. It's cover.

It's cover for him just like knocking the toilet into the kitchen. He knows Facebook is effectively a monopoly on social media, so he can just fucking turn it into a rancid cesspool and thinks that people will stay. And I think that, I was talking to Ed about this last night, It feels connected with the AI profiles thing. A lot of people are understandably freaked out about, but I think it comes down to one word contempt.

It's just they don't fucking care. It's not about these people don't have a big strategy. They just, I want to say evil, but I don't even think they're that motivated. It's just growth at all cost thinking. One of the benefits for benefit relative to them is they don't have monopoly, but they do have a walled garden. So they can do whatever they want inside of their garden.

And if you want to bury toxic waste in your garden, well, there are regulations about that, but nothing to stop them from doing it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, I mean, if Facebook started as a place for Zuckerberg to, you know, get a date, you know, and so... Sorry. You don't like that?

I feel like that point misses the problem again. Because, yes, technically that was like the whole horny Harvard guy thing. The thing is, is that that wasn't where it... That was an evil thing that a college student did, where it became an evil thing that an adult started doing, was the idea of Facebook. Was the idea of growing Facebook and what growing Facebook men? If we start with that, if we reduce him to this horny, in-cell kid, we miss the thing that this guy is, like, Zuckerberg is something so much worse than that. He is someone who truly does not care. I'm not going to say sociopathic, because I actually really don't know the exact definition.

I think just describing it in blunt terms is, does something? someone who give a shit about anything, do this. Yeah. Because it doesn't even feel like a political move. He's just like, great. I don't have to, it feels like a regulation being removed. He doesn't think, because there really isn't regulations. Yeah, there wasn't one.

It's really good looking out of the window with the tech industry right now. I feel very positive. This is how it felt to be drinking the water downstream of the chip fabs. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Except it's perfectly well. That's fantastic.

Except that hurts. let's be, thanks for getting right back to ground water plumes. But no, there's a cynicism, right? There's a cynicism about the whole thing. And so it's like, you know, people just out there in the world

sort of use these things, you know, to stay connected to their families, you know, like, for instance, the only reason why I still have a Facebook, you know, account is, like my mom takes photos. Yeah. Right? And I see that. And I use Instagram because there are some people

who don't use anything else. Yeah, exactly. Same thing. And so that's, I think, that so many people, like that's, that's sort of their general sort of use case, that, that these more sort of problematic aspects, they have a hard time seeing what the problem is, but the problem really is just this, this cynicism, the lack of care, the, I think, I think you, I think you hit your right on the head.

You ain't seen nothing yet. I'm deadly serious. Like, Facebook, so shout out to Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal. It taught me a lot, a lot about what I know about Facebook. I have yet to hear from Jeff. If he was at CS, I'd be so happy. There's no one I'd want more on the chair. Just going fucking...

And the thing is, is that they've always been this bad. And as we write history right now, we're like, well, now Facebook became... This is the day that meta became evil. And it's like... It's always been that way. But if you do, if you failed to actually couch it in time, imagine what they'll do next.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hey, like, you know, what, where do you go from, you know, facilitating a genocide? You know, where do you go? You know? You, you, all things are justified in growth. A terrorist attack plan on Facebook. Yeah. Was justified in growth. I'm quoting Andrew Bosworth, who is in the ugly letter. He is now the CTO of Meta. Very cool. Yeah. Very good stuff. So, as we come towards the end of the end of the, this part, of the episode. We're shortly going to be updated

with Gair Davis and Robert Evans, of course, as a wrap up. Especially because I'm almost out of cocktail. He's almost out of cocktail. And I'm thinking about the Facebook leaks at the moment. But anyway, yes. Well, I think as we come to the end of this day, Ed, did you like anything on the floor? Was there

a single thing that you saw? And there is no wrong answer here. If you saw something you liked, what was it? And don't say the exit. The sex toys seemed neat. I think of course. I think every CES, this is what I've heard, and that's it. And I'm horrified by that.

You walk up, just crack your knuckles. All right. You know, the, I saw some screens that looked crazy. But, you know, I don't game like that. I don't goon like that. Like, I just, I couldn't use the... I thought we'd get through an episode without fucking saying, goon. So, you know, those aren't really for me.

every episode title you know I'm gonna watch I don't know I feel like maybe I would have liked the sphere you know whatever they're doing there

no well Lenny Kravitz is there tonight oh I forgot to mention an important part of the thing so found out a competing podcast called the Verge

I hear they are currently doing I haven't heard of them haven't either but I just the Verrege the French I thought you were doing

like a little German over there I had a hairball Elso Slorraine, so it's somewhere in between. Here we go. I try not to be a catty bitch other than every minute of this show. And I must say that I was seeing,

I definitely saw this, and there was a moment I was like, oh man, another podcast recording out of here, a big one too. I should go and check out what they're doing. Before the Verge podcast, and by the way, you can only see the Vergecast live if you have a Delta Sky Miles membership.

I did get invited. And it features a pre-podcast panel discussion about the future of travel between the Virgin Delta's Dwight James, SVP customer engagement, and loyalty and CEO Delta Vacations. Probably could have not fucked up the words there if I wanted to make fun of it. But I just want to say, I get a lot of shit on my ads for this show. I didn't do a single ad break as well, so you're going to be really pissed with me. I will never interview someone from Delta Airlines unless it's the CEO and I'm screaming at them. Yeah. And also, what the fuck does that have to do with tech?

But also, I understand we've got to get money, honey. But like, Jesus Christ, that's your big... The future of travel, unless it's no more Boeing planes, cigarettes on the plane, and bigger seats, I don't want to hear it. No, seriously. Because what is it going to be? We calibrated the formula for Sky Miles. Yeah, we changed the app. We have made it harder to get Sky Miles status.

Smart planes. smart place. On the blockchain. All the planes are on the blockchain. Anyway, I think you've had a much better experience with a health physicist and a priest. So I think that that's my choice. So more members of the clergy and more safety professionals, I think. That's what makes a podcast.

Generally, more safety professionals is not what anyone wants to see. Because we apparently ruined fun. I hear that as well sometimes, apparently. So as we close out of this. part of the episode and we'll of course be back shortly after this. Phil, where can people find you? You can find me at Blue Sky at Funranium and you can find my blog, funeraniumlabs.com. Yes, and he makes a special kind of coffee. And if you look on Blue Sky because I cannot advertise things on here, I will have a link for you at some point. That will do something. I'm not even

going to say what it is. Ed, on Grasso Jr. Now that I cut you off at the beginning without saying what you did, what do you do? I'm a tech writer, a finance. writer, a labor writer, an editor, a shit poster, a son. As the son of a mother. Yeah, I'm a son of a mother and the father of cats. Were you baby monitored? Yeah, yeah. You have yet to give a link.

That's true. I thought you were going to say to my cats, and I was like, they're on my profiles. Big Black Jacobin on Blue Sky and Twitter. X the everything at. That too. And this machine kills is the podcast where we yap about the political economy of tech. And the tech bubble is my newsletter where I yap about tech also. Where can they find that?

Techbubble.com. Roger that. And Father Gabriel Moshe. Moshe? Yeah, Mosher. Yeah. I mean, these days just on all the social medias in the same thing. Okay.

You do not. I fucking. none of these people know their links your name is like luke something they type in your name it doesn't come up sometimes L-U-K-E-I-655 that's on everything except for Blue Sky

on Blue Sky it's eighth way well thank God you specified that before I said anything yeah no or you can just put in like if you just search Gabriel Mosier just type Priest into Google then I'm there well we will be right back

after these amazing products you're going to hear about these products. They're so beautiful. I personally love them all. They're definitely not going to immediately embarrass me in a way that every week I get one email from one guy who's like, this does not match up with the things you were saying.

We're here to embarrass you, Ed. Don't worry about. Did you know that there's a commercial that came on that was not in line with your beliefs? What do you think? No. I got you, Mr. Rand.

And every time I respond with the same thing, which is, I bet you'd love it if I died. Yeah. And then I hit send. Anyway, the next thing that comes up, maybe buy it. 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.

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And we're back, and we've replaced some of the people. We've got Gair Davis and, of course, Robert Evans from it could happen here. And they are just glowing from their time on the floor. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I'm kind of concerned that the former panelists you took out and forced into a gulag outside of Novgorod. Like, that seems a little extreme,

but I don't want to question... That's your show. This is your show. That's your show. That's your show. I'm glad you made the cutout. Other ads. Listen, you know? Yeah.

We have to have two ads at least. One of the chosen. Always two there are, a learner and a master. One to crave the mind. Oh, God. And one. to destroy it. I'm going to be thinking about that all evening now. That's great. So, we were previously talking about the Linda Yakorino speech. Oh my God. And I did not know that Gare was

also that. Gare, what was your experience of the matriarch of social media? The first time there was applause was when she mentioned Doge. The second time was the rape gags. So, incredible vibes happening. Audiences love Doge and rape gangs. You know, But what's in, so what specifically was this rape gang thing? I should know about things that happened in England, but I've been running from England my whole life. Well, there was like a kind of a bit of a, bit of a pogrom earlier last year, over the idea that there were like, migrants were running rape gangs. And so people started like, we were like right-wing riots in several cities, including like a large, like, a large, like, this was the thing that actually fucking caused that? Well, this was, no, no, this didn't cause that.

but this is an extension. This is trying to keep it going. Yeah. Oh, sorry, I meant it. Yeah. That right-wing shit storm was what caused the riots. Okay, great. Because I knew the riots were happening and then got very upset with the amount of racism

that England had newly created, considering it's England and has quite a lot already. Yeah. Oh, God. Anyway, so that got applause. Yeah. Yeah, talking about that and how, and how important it is on X to protect children. and as a mother, it's especially important. So, what would we do without posting?

We need more, more posting to save the children. That I agree with, just the posting part, though. All things are possible for posting. I mean, one of the last times I was on X, the Everything app, I saw a deep fake porn of an 18-year-old. So, yeah, I really, I really do feel what she says. The X is deeply committed to protecting children. The last time I spent a decent amount of time on X,

it was after a teenager did a mass shooting and I had to talk to all of their other teen friend Nazis who are on X and they used everything app and they used X to communicate and that's where you find them a whole bunch of teenage Nazis who had all just like talk to each other and share phrenology memes

Oh, was this a... Yeah. What's that girl's name? There's like some Hitler. It's not naming them on the podcast. Radfem Hitler. Radfem Hitler. Please don't say the name on the podcast.

One of my favorite podcasts, to be honest. We're having her on the show very, very soon. To talk about the other Hitler. Yeah. I'm calling it the two Hitler's. When I seen that name, I was like, I can't believe this exists. Of course this exists. Well, I love talking about technology.

Yeah. So that was, but that, what was the context for the Doge thing as well? Was it just the idea of firing people? No, it was just talking about like how important X will be as Elon and, and Vivek Ramaswamy, focuses on Doge in the next year. For a government program. So you'd be like, well, it's a fake government. Yeah, it's not part of the government.

Just to be clear, like a consultancy service that pretends to be a government program. Yes, but like it was basically a question about like, how much will Elon be using like X to like, you know, get like people like, how much will he be getting like users to give suggestions for things to cut? Oh, God.

Open source government regulation. Sure. I mean, open source works. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, but yes. Look, think about Linux, right? Stable operating system,

run by a guy who's only committed a few sex crimes. We all love Linux. Why shouldn't the government be that way? It's already run by guys who commit sex crimes. Match made in heaven. And it was crazy. I'm not trying to shit on it. Oh, I am.

Much like Linux, it's way more complicated than they describe it as. Oh, yeah. And in the end, it only works for a few people, and they can barely explain why. Yeah, but their computers are unhackable because honestly, if you're hacking shit, nobody needs that kind of hassle. That's really good.

I'm glad you added that bit because we've now said several things that Linux fans are going to email me about. It's the most secure way to do things. It's the same way that inventing your own language and losing the ability to communicate with the rest of the world is the most efficient way to avoid getting spied on.

Kind of like trying to use another app on Linux. Yeah, exactly. I said something about Linux. I wrote this newsletter and turned into a script as well where I talked about and I talked about all sorts of things and the rot within tech.

I quote tweeted it a quote post on Blue Sky I should say and I said just to be clear, stop recommending me Linux. Normal people don't use Linux. And it was like 50% hardcore Linux people being like you're completely right man.

Like this shit's bonkers. And 50% being like I will fucking kill you. I will actually It is. There's no, Linux guys are exactly the same as like Norse pagans in the modern world where half of them are like the

chillest like and violently anti-racist will literally fucking die to like fight a Nazi and half of them are just the absolute fascist. The most evil battle like the violist scum on fire. It's so good we're also calling them that. Linux people

are either will let the drop of the hat like put down every in order to help you secure your phone to stop the FBI from getting in and half people whose primary goal in life is to reform the age of consent to be lower. Just to be close, this is Robert's saying

these things, Linux fans. Please, that was like two fucking weeks. I see all the people listening to this are the first kind of Linux. That's what I'm saying. They all are. Yeah, great. I'm still going to get 100 emails.

Yeah. So, but otherwise, so there was no applause at all during this otherwise. It was just for the mention of Doge and then for the rape gangs. Otherwise, she just kind of... They were just talking for 30 minutes. And like, the biggest point of this discussion was basically laying out how in tandem X and the new... The everything app. And the new Trump administration are going to function as, basically like trying to view

these things as like symbiotic tools. Yeah, it's kind of like a dare Sturmer type deal. right? The nice thing about it being a Der Sturmer deal is we all know what happened to the guy who ran Der Sturmer. I don't. Oh, he got hung by a drunk hangman that the U.S. appointed because we didn't care who did the job, who made extra sure that it took a long time. Julius Stryker was kicking up there for a minute.

So we got something to look forward to. That's all of the funniest things I heard all day. Thank you for sharing that anecdote. I put a big smile on my face. Oh, God. Did you talk about the Zuckerberg fact-checking thing? We can talk about it again, because as I was saying to Ed earlier, it is just Facebook slopping up.

Like, this is the shit they've always done. This is just them fucking, instead of flushing the toilet, just pushing it into the kitchen, like I said, everyone's like, oh, it's for Donald Trump. No, he just has an excuse now. He knows laws won't, or, like, morals will no longer be enforced. And Facebook already fucking sucked. I can't wait to see how much worse it gets. My Facebook feed right now is fully 30 and 40% of it is.

Yeah, there's like a number of people that I used to know that the only way I have of like checking in with them is Facebook. I don't use it regularly, but every time I log in, a full third of my feed is war reenactors who are dressed as always dressed as members of the Vof and SS. And AI generated pictures of the Vof and SS. And all of the comments are those brave boys, those poor boys, they were just trying to defend. hundreds of them hundreds of them hundreds of them it's bleak I get like pitching and lifting things and like boxing

yeah maybe this tells us more just about Robert like your own interest mine's just like all work out things I didn't read more than like seven or eight books about the imperial German army last year so like it's not like I'm that into the German military history Garrison this might just be the Facebook tracking is coming to bite you

all of it you have the reading habits that are like the only other people with my reading habits habits are very problematic. Magician versus slow-mo camera. Ooh, that one sounds good. Actually, this one's really good. It's kind of just free photo editing group, and it's just from December 31, 2021, 2024,

and it is like a week later, and it's just like a very grainy picture of a woman saying, is it possible to make this fuzzy photo sharp? It is now with the power of AI. Enhance. Yeah, let's see what... The legacy of nerd, Hulk Hogan returns to WWE. A crude AI cartoon of a soldier,

with both of his legs kind of melting off into a puddle that says, why don't pictures like this ever trend? I don't get any of the AI slope. There's a lot of it. Boomer slop, so much boomer slop. I don't get any of that. Only women can understand. Not married yet, and it's a picture of a tomato.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Then got married and it's a picture of a watermelon. A lot of pictures of, like, kids crying. Uh-huh. It's with, like, sad captions about how Kamala Harris is making kids cry. Like if you agree. And like literally every like fifth post is some sort of picture with why don't photos like this ever

trend. Oh, my other things I've subscribed to a lot of Joker related media. That makes kind of unsettling. But yeah. No, no, no, no. You are the smiling man. No, no, no. To explain the Joker meme thing, it's not because I believe in their views.

It's that I had a brief two year long anthropological thing I was working on where I found the most insane typos in Joker memes and found this entire part of the global south. that is guys who have clearly never watched a single thing with the Joker in it. Putting the most insane, and my favorite was a picture of Joaquin Phoenix, and it said, would you like to know which W-Y-T-C-H of them, weir liars? And to be clear, that is a Heath Ledger, Joker quote. Oh, okay. And that one was just like, I really didn't need much more.

I'd found I'd summited Olympus at that point. But nevertheless... Free Dan. Free Dan. Get him out. The thing that you get now on here, here is just apparently luxury hotels and now like some Google Maps group. What is this fucking experience? What is Facebook for anymore? What is this app? It's, it's all, I mean,

the everything app. Yeah. No, it actually is the everything app. This is actually, it actually does have everything now. Actually, this might really piss off Elon Musk. Yeah. If they can't matter the everything out. No, if Mark Zuckerberg just says, yeah, with the everything app, he should do that just to see what happens. If he gets banking working on Facebook before Twitter, that would be so funny. They already got payments. Yeah. No, I guess, yeah. Oh, yeah. Who would you rather trust with your money than Facebook?

I mean, Linda Yaccarino. I mean, I thought we all agreed. I went to so many panels today, and half of them sounded like the stand-up solutions comedy sketch. Tell me some of these wonderful things. You're going to have to explain that joke, too, Garris. Oh, no. Stand-up Solutions is just a comedy stand-up routine released, I think, earlier this year by a really good comedian who I cannot. Conradum.

Connor O'Malley. Okay, you should all watch it because it's very insane. And it's also exactly the vibe of about half of the CAS panels. Yeah, it's him. It's a PowerPoint presentation of completely made up insane shit by Connor O'Malley. It's how you can make an AI. It's how you can buy an AI that does stand-up comedy. Yes.

And this is what the things are like. And this is what everything is. I mean, the first panel I went to today, I heard the phrase like, augmentation, not replacement, probably about 10 times. I've heard that a lot. A lot about keeping... So yeah, that's what the plastic surgeon is telling. There was a lot of fear in the AI panels

from people scared of how much, like, backlash there is to AI tools. That's actually fascinating. I'm like trying to, like, find ways to, like, trick audiences into enjoying or, like, consuming AI slop. Like, a lot of it was about that. I don't know, like, like, a phrase one of the panelists used was trying to solve the AI ick problem there's like an ick around

AI so we have this problem it fucking sucks nobody wants to use yeah it looks bad and they hate it they had someone from meta at this panel

and they talked about how a few days ago Instagram announced they would be having like AI generated fake profiles that don't exist and there was so much

backlash based on this that they took it away but they explained it by saying actually the market just isn't ready yet Right. This isn't back to the future.

It's not that this is a terrible idea. It's that the market's not ready yet. There are certain issues where like, yeah, I do want to specifically hear from like a queer woman of color who's a mother in New York City, right? There's a number of issues. Yes, but an actual one. But a person. Yeah. I don't need an AI that admits it was coded by some white ladies in the bay pretending to be this person.

It's there like the pigs are yet, the pigs have not being suppressed enough. We've not sedated the pizza. We've got to buttered them up. Yeah. We've got to get the hoops ready for the slop. And it really is. Another phrase they use is like AI like improvements will all be based around consumer acceptance. It's like we have all the tech.

Yeah. But we have to trick people into actually liking it now. The word they're looking for is consent. There's a lot of attitude. There's a vibe from them that is very much like a like a dude who's trying to pressure someone into sex and is like a, I had a hard year. I can like massage this into like them being okay enough with it, right? I can get them to agree to this.

Yeah. It's this very, we're in a very interesting position with this fight where it's still recent enough. Every, like everyone who is trying to push the, the AI line remembers NFTs and the metaverse going down in flames and how unified and effective the backlash against them was. Now, neither of those ever had any actual technology underlying. Not no real. Like, yeah, there's some stuff you can call Metaverse. Any consumer adoption as well.

Yeah. There was no real technology that was in any way impressive, and there was no real user hunger. There's user hunger for some of the things AI does. Yeah, totally. And there's real technology there. But there's also a backlash that's very similar to the backlash for those two things. And they see that. And they're very, they're scared of it because they know it is a threat to, because of how much,

they have to keep up momentum. If momentum drops at any point, a lot of these companies, like obviously the tech won't go away, but a lot of these companies could. Well, then they'll get in, right? Yeah, exactly. And so they're scared of that. And that's a really interesting position to be in,

because it shows that, number one, the fight is still winnable. The fact that they're talking about it this way means that they can be beating. Like, the same way that we were able to beat NFTs and beat the metaverse to some degree. Like, this is going to be a longer battle than those, But it is having an impact. You can even look at like a, like, Chapel Roan posted something about, like,

AI generated images that received a lot of backlash. And, like, people and, like, ad agencies are, like, looking at this. And they're trying to figure out a few ways to kind of navigate it. A few of the other panels I went to specifically about, like, how to market stuff to Gen Z was, like, talking about, like, the importance of, like, authentic brands. Saying on fleek. Gen Z is so vested in, like, authenticity.

And if you're going to partner with info, Who you is AI, it has to have that authentic angle. So what's funny about the influencer thing that I don't think companies realize is they think every influencer is this pliant brain who will do anything for a vacation and there are an alarming amount of them that will. What they don't realize is that there are many of them that once they reach a certain scale go wait a fucking minute. I don't have to go to the LG pain maze. I don't have to ride a horse to the LG compound to see the secret fridge. Yeah. And then they're become angry and they crush them. Stephen from

Gamer's Nexus is my favorite. He's never done access. He does. Stephen, if you're listening to this, please come on my fucking show. I love you. I don't know who you are Stephen. Gamers Nexus is probably the single most YouTube important. The single most YouTube, Jesus. Single most important YouTube in

pretty much processes and chips. There are some others as well, but like Stephen's done a scriptal thing and it's mostly just him standing looking exhausted over a table just ripping these fucking companies to shreds or going to their offices and be like, hey, Hey, Steve from Gabe Zuck. Hey, what you doing? Like British politician style.

I don't think they realize that there are so many influences like that out there. Coffeezilla. He's a fucking beast. Yeah, especially considerate. What I think is so interesting about him is that he is into and speaking to this group of people who are profoundly anti-media and like kind of chuddy. Yeah. But he's also, he does very good journalism within that space. and really has done more than almost anyone to kill specific kinds of cons.

Did a podcast with me, rabbit reporting, no big deal. But it's funny as well because they're definitely thinking that, oh yeah, we'll get these stupid fucking Gen Z kids and these idiot influences. And Gen Z, as you are no gear. You're Gen C? Yes, I'm 38 years old and I sound 100. What's the age for Gen Z? At this point, it's like 15 to 20. 27 or 28?

No. It depends. I'm a cusp. 27 are cusps. They're cuspers. If you're born between 1997 and around 2012 is usually the Gen Z bracket. You are a young millennial, yeah.

If your knees make a sound when you stand up, you're a millennial. Every time I do. Yeah. Yeah, every time I do yoga, my knee makes a noise like a pimble machine breaking. That doctor said it's great. But it's funny. because what they don't realize is as legacy media dies, yeah, you're going to have a bunch of

insane influencers. Those insane influencers will be the ones that actually have a genuine animus with the LG fridge. The fridge guy is eventually going to turn on the fridge manufacturers, and the fridge will bring them great pain as he reviews the fridge with alarming accuracy. And I think that they don't realize that that is what will come to replace some of legacy media. It's going to be posters. It's going to be people who have no vested interest in the politeness. that they can expect from like legacy media, right? Yeah. There's no space in like YouTube review guys or TikTok guys for Walt Mossberg.

Nobody wants a dude like that. You want somebody who's snarky and got an angle and funny. And it's just easier to rip up a lot of these shitty AI products to like, than it is to fucking pump them up. And I will tell you something running a PR firm. Not a single fucking PR firm. person for the most part can prepare you for that. The only thing that can prepare you is, well, actually deposition training. You get a lawyer to train you that will do you far more good

with media training. Having, you know, growing up roasting people that might help you a little bit. A little bit, but you also have to realize that the truth is generally useful. And if you're trying to hide that, an influence or really get around that. And what I think is so important to get back on the topic of like, how do we win this fight against AI sloppification of everything beautiful in the human spirit. This is not a political fight.

And that's like you guys like coffee zilla on it, right? Like this is a lot of people when they look at the shit and when they consider like the art and the actors and musicians being replaced so that like some fucking Bay Area

assholes like can hoover up even more money and like destroy the ability of like the human mind to represent itself that's not a political issue and there is I think an immense amount of potential still to get a lot of people together

and to fucking strangle this thing in its cradle because we all we all have this kind of visceral feeling that it's wrong Yeah this revulsion That revulsion is what we need to lean into The AI ick

They simply don't have the thing that matters most which is its ability to make good compelling stuff And this is something that, this is something like they actually know. I'm going to read something about something one of the guys on the panel from Adobe was talking about. He was talking about how when you're making AI content specifically like targeted towards specific people, like a personalized content is always like the most like impactful. And there's three parts that are needed to create a personalized content pipeline.

You need data. You need like a journey to take the person on. and you need the content itself. And we need content at scale that is highly personalized. And he said that we're good at the first two parts, the data and the journeys.

And I would argue about the journeys part. But he said now we just have to improve the actual content. So like they know they know the content's bad. Like yeah, that's the thing we have to still actually figure out. It's like how to like turn data into like a good content.

And that's still the thing that they're really struggling to do. And it also looks the same as it did like a year ago. It does look the same as it did a year ago. There's so much talk and finally on what, because I listened to it in like the first two tech and AI and Hollywood panels I listened to, there were a lot of talk about like

we just need to be able to like if we can read people's brains while they're watching stuff, we can see how they're reacting and then we can alter like live the content that they're taking in. This is something that meta was talking about. You could change the ending or whatever to really make it more engaging and it was finally

somebody in the fourth panel when it was actually like people who write and stuff on it was like people don't want that people people what like we consistently see and if you look at the shit that went huge last year the most profitable movies last year was the result of two movies that were the result

of huge amounts of human effort the Barbie movie and the Oppenheimer movie say what you will about both of those movies wasn't despicable me for also I mean I'm sure that one made some money but still extremely hard work from 3D animators however you feel about those disgusting creatures, the minions. And more than anything, like the Barbenheimer thing was like certainly the most significant single movie trend last year.

And that was the result of people wanting a shared experience. And a very specific aesthetic in both cases. Not something that changes every frame. Not wanting to, yeah, not wanting to like go, hey, did you see that movie last night? Well, I saw the version that was made for me. What was yours? Yeah. People don't want personalized.

People don't actually want personalized content. I don't want AI music generating. did for me. I want music that I can share and that's in some kind of cultural conversation with other people who also enjoy music, who I can talk to that about. And like, compare it. Yeah, what do you think of that speech at the end of The Great Dictator?

Well, when I watch The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaffel just turned to the screen and said, everything's good. Keep doing what you're doing. Yeah, my one, Nick Fury walked out and I invited him to the Avengers. This is literally the future that these people want. Travis Kelsey and Mr. Beast and everything. Yeah. Mr. Beast told me I look like

Iron Man. Oh my God. You can be president too when you grow up. Someone from meta who works in like their hyper reality division was talking about

how like they can start using AI and the metaverse. What is the hyper reality? Let's say that you're watching an immersive live concert something that me and all my friends do by the way. Right.

All the time. Me too. Why would you want to go to a real? Using MR. Mixed reality. And the AI can sense your excitement and it can personalize your

experience based on your favorite song or artist. So an AI Taylor Swift near the end of the song can like come down from the stage and like dance with you. Oh, that would freak me the fuck out. Or like that would not, depending on what I'm on. Or they can change the song based on what your favorite songs are. So it's using AI and the metaverse to create ultra-personalized experiences. I have never done worse than we, but can you even imagine this while stone? That would be horrifying. It's following your emotions. That actually does sound like a good time. No, it sounds like The idea of like stoned brain being like, well, this is what I, no, this is what. Me and Atticus rocks are going to get down in the metaverse.

Yeah, we're going to candy flip in the main and the metaverse. You get it. I don't know what this is. I don't listen to. I would rather play a game of spectops the line with Taylor Swift. Oh my. See her contemplate like the necessity of war crimes. You're Taylor Swift the whole time.

Shoot that white phosphorus switch. Taylor Swift. I want to watch AI Taylor Swift. what you made me do, Nick Jonas. Willie peeped on a school in Northern Iraq. Travis Kelsey can't save you. You got to shoot those kids. You got to shoot those kids.

They're going to turn it to Swifties. This is a single, Taylor. Nobody else was in that fucking bunker with us. No one else can understand what we had to do. And then you light your AI cigarette. You get your little hit of AI nicotine. Well, thank fuck.

There's not a more crazed fan base than Linux people. I'm going to get killed. Doesn't everybody want to go to Metaverse Fallujah? I mean, come on. Oh, Metapalusia. That's... Metapalusia or Metapalusia. The Fallujahverse.

But no, it was great. The cinematic Fallujah universe. As I was sitting through all these AI panels, I get a text from both Ed and Robert about some breaking news regarding the Tesla truck bombing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that he used chat, JPT to Planet. Sick. First off, Green Beret training is not what it used to be.

Yeah, we should have to admit that one of him. They're taking us. a ride with whatever we're paying. If they have to use, this guy had to use chat GPT to make a bomb. My uncle was a green beret and I'll tell you one thing, he did not need CHAPGTPT to make an explosive device.

Every time I have you on, I'm just like texting my lawyer, just, I'm sorry. Well, what's interesting is he was specifically looking up as a detonator he was trying to use at some point Tannerite. And he must

of if he either got a detonator to detonate the tannerite, but he was looking at initially at trying to shoot the tannerite to detonate it, which would not have allowed him to kill himself. Well, that's the issue. That's why he went with something else. Chad GVT couldn't figure that one out. This might violate our terms and policies. I love doing a show on the podcast about the future, and every fucking conversation I've had without fail has been like everything I've seen is either fake or bad. And I don't even mean this.

We get the occasional, oh, you're a pessimist. Motherfucker, bring me some autism. Robert showed me one good thing today. Please, please, something. Oh, shit, what was it? That's so good. Oh, the suicide helicopter. Yeah, there's a helicopter that'll kill everybody.

Okay. Describe. Imagine if you had a helicopter, but it's two-thirds the size of a smart car. And it can drive on city streets, but it has no sight or rearview mirrors. All of that's a lot of kids. cameras. I'm already sold.

And then when you're ready to fly, it's a quadcopter. And you can fly up to 200 meters in the air. Great. Because if you're under

that, you don't need a pilot's license. Which she emphasized to me, under 10 grand. Wow. So little portable helicopters that you can fly for up to 20 minutes

before the battery dies. 20 minutes? 20 minutes in the air. That's what you get. Yeah. What happens if you run out of battery? Again,

let's say you, a former Green Beret, decide to rent the suicide helicopter. Then you just fill that motherfucker up with fuel. All you need is 10 minutes. As long as you like, you tow it up in your truck outside of whatever building you in 9-11. You can't see that. Look, this is never going to be a real product. This is, I do love they made like a kamikaze simulator. No, yeah, that is what it is, right?

Yeah. I swear you can be your own. I was like, I do genuinely awesome. the question of did you see something you like in good faith? No. Every time. And every time it's just someone being like, no. You don't want to dive home into the street?

I don't. I love committing no crimes. I'm the king of the hair. I'm the king of the highway. We're calling it the Torah, Torah, Torah. Oh, God. I'm going to wrap this up before I get in any more legal trouble. Okay.

Even the solar powered Peltors are not the... But I don't think they're the military. like gunshot safe ones. No, no, they are. I saw them. What is that? What are you talking about? I was two. Peltors are high grade like adaptive headphones.

So like the ones I saw had like a mic output too. They didn't have a mic. They looked just like my peltoes. They didn't have like the indent to wear under a helmet. I think these were like workplace peltoes because like Pelotors make a lot of different models of noise cancelling headphones

and only certain ones are used for like military or like, law enforcement or like gunshot suppressing. But it looked to me like they were actually the, the Peltors that you get where they're not attached to a band so that you can attach them directly to a helmet, and they had instead attached them to a solar band. Maybe I need to go check on it tomorrow. That's what they look like to me.

But those were promising. And I talked him specifically about using it for hunting. Okay, okay, okay. So we found one thing. It was pretty cool. Like headphones that can suppress loud noises but allow you to continue. you converse while shooting that charge themselves. So you never need to worry about batteries again.

How do they charge themselves? Votovoltaic band. That also can be charged by lights on the inside. That's very cool. Yeah, that's neat. We found one product, everyone. We can wrap this show up then. Okay, Robert Webb, can people find you?

People can find me at I Write Okay on Blue Sky and X the Everything app. And then we have a podcast called It Could Happen here. But we'll be talking more about CES and where the technology industry is going. A very good place. Gare, where can people find you? Also, on it could happen here with Robert Evans. And on Twitter, sorry, X and Blue Sky. Wow.

At Hungry Bowtie. And Ed, where can we find you? Big Black Jackabin on Twitter and on Blue Sky. And then this machine kills. And techbubble. Dot substack.com. And you can't find me at the gym, but you find me at the bank. I'm at Zetron.

You can find me an Ed Zipron and everything. Yeah. I am. I'm excited to get you on the show floor, Ed. I can't wait, but I really could. It's so crazy. I don't want to go. I have not been on.

It's downstairs. Yeah, you do. It's got to get a lot of things. I will go. I'm going to roll in the slot tomorrow. You want to love it. Okay, everyone, thank you for listening to the wonderful better offline.

Now you'll hear a really like jaunty theme, which Mattisowski, our producer did, and a bunch of stuff that you continued to fucking complain about. Me, not updating, which only makes me want to leave it. You should use an AI-generated music, like in that great heist video last night. Personalized.

Every listener gets a different outro song. Every listener gets a different outro song. They are all Billy Joel's uptown. Can you imagine? That's the only outro again. All right, we're going out now, but just to be clear, like, can you imagine the shit

that the people on the forum, on the Reddit, I'm 100 years old, on the fore. They're on the message boards about me again. They're emailing me. Anyways, thanks for listening, everyone. 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-T-O-S-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 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 Smygel and friends.

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