Better Offline - CES 2026: Part Eight (Friday)

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In Friday’s first episode, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, YouTuber and CEO of Clicks Michael Fisher, Cherlynn Low of Engadget, Edward Ongweso of the Tech Bubble Newsletter and Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here to talk about the Clicks Communicator, Amazon’s surveillance tech, the advances in tech in eyeglasses, engadget’s best tech of CES and why we’re worried about the future.EXCLUSIVE CES SALE! Get a *permanent* $10 off an annual subscription to my newsletter through January 13 2025: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/cue848p5sc Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social Cory Doctorow http://pluralistic.net/ https://www.eff.org/ Michael Fisher - https://www.clicks.tech/ Cherlynn Low - https://www.engadget.com/about/editors/cherlynn-low/https://bsky.app/profile/cherlynn.bsky.social Garrison Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/bishonentype.bsky.social The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ https://bookmaniac.org/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/#so-many-chips Cyber Fidget: https://youtube.com/shorts/JEEmhcTscP8?si=7_1O-GARnnBeSGuK https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/ https://petewarden.com/2025/11/29/i-know-were-in-an-ai-bubble-because-nobody-wants-me-%f0%9f%98%ad/ --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Oh, bam, thank you, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am. I'm Ed Zitron, and this is Better Off Lines, coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show, 2026. We are now, as we have been all week here in the Palazzo Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing you yet another episode covering

CES with a crazy assortment of guests from the tech industry. We've got an open bar, we've got tacos and places to sit down for members of the media and friends, whether they join us on the microphone or not. It's Friday, and we're on the first of our final two episode days, and I mean, that wasn't perfect, but you're just going to like it. Then an epilogue tomorrow, on, good Lord, do we have a wonderful show for you? Or we're beginning, very strong. The first contestants on the Better Offline Challenge are the legendary activist, author, and journalist,

Corey Doctoro, who's joining me all today. You speak, say hello, Corey. Oh, hello. I wasn't sure if I was meant to speak at this point. Hi, Ed. Natural, natural. And, of course, returning champion, listener favorite, Sherlin Loew Van Gogh. Listener favorite, that says a strong introduction.

I'm not sure I deserve it. It's completely changed. Actually, another listener favorite, Michael Fisher, the YouTuber and CEO of Clix. Now, not CEO, not CEO, co-founder, my bad buddy. It doesn't matter. Titles, we don't do titles. We don't do.

We don't. You're a holocracy, like, like. Tony Shad, Los Vegas favorite son. I be a member, you may refer to me as Admiral. Admiral Fisher. Rear Admiral. Yeah, well, well, Vice Admiral these days. Stern, Edel.

Court-martialed by the Clicks to So, all right. I've had a lot of people email in. So just to be clear, Michael's my friend. He's been on the show a lot. I've had him on in his capacity as a journalist. Still here as well for that.

But you are the co-founder of clicks. And you've got a little device with you. I do. Indeed. I have actually several devices. Oh, it's that thing. I like that thing. Thanks, man.

I was so worried because I was like, oh, no, Corey. I'm a Canadian. So blackberries are in my soul. Right. This is a physical keyboard for the iPhone and for Android phones, which we did get here two years ago. I have it on a Motorola razor now,

which is fun. Flips. But the, look, I love the flip. I know, you and I agree on the foldables. I just want an I, like, I message on them. I don't care anymore.

It's coming. I know. Is it? Give me a foldable iPhone. Everyone's saying the iPhone phone is this year. I'm a hog. Give me my foldable slow. No,

so you've got this thing that connects the Mac safe or the what have you. The thing is, we made custom molded cases with the keyboard attached for several iPhone, several Android,

and everyone was like, this is great, but I don't carry that phone. And we were like, yeah, this is great, but it costs a lot of money to mold a custom case with a keyboard for every phone.

So we broke out the keyboard into a little custom puck called power keys. My arm and that makes... Everyone's grabbing out their iPhones now. Corey's removing his phone from the case. I'll try it. Just slap it right on the back there.

And it bonds via Bluetooth and gives you that... I think my region is not... Can I try it? Here's your target zone there. Wait, are you... Is this... Why are you giving me your phone? Oh, sorry.

No, you do not have... I don't need a magsafe. Someone hand me a device for this audio podcast. So go ahead. But you also have the Android device. That's where the actual Clix device. It does work. Which is going to move on from that.

But you've done like a dedicated Android thing. Yes, it's called the Clicks communicator. It is actually a phone. Oh, yeah, look at that. Yes, it is a four-inch screen with a big full QWERTY keyboard underneath it. People are calling it the new Blackberry, but that is not, of course. I must send one to Jim. Jim, who was the coast.

Jim, the seal. Yeah, yeah, no, I was just talking to me yesterday. Yes. Were you really? Yes. Well, certainly, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally, we had a phone call after this latest episode.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So the idea is it's optimized for communication. It's optimized for people who carry two phones already and want one of them to be more focused on communication than content. So you've got a nice big screen, just describing it for the less of this. Nice big screen. It's a decent way.

I like you got this raised bit of the bit. At the back, it's quite nice. A little, little stippled a back plate here. And I will say... It's thick, too, which is what we like. We like... You're like a thick with two Cs. Yeah, let me go.

I'll go like... I will also say the keyboard feels better than the original clicks. Yeah. Can I try? We've increased the key size by 30% if you can believe that. You're ready for all those... Oh, the spectrum. No, and I will say this.

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

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

not. That's a touch and feel sample. That's how early this thing is. We don't launch until later in the year. But like Niagara has this beautiful aesthetic list and it's not a icon based OS. It is a distraction free OS. Isn't it? I like that. Because that's the thing I would, I'm a little hog with my devices. I love my

keyboards and my doodads and the like. Yes. And also there are times when I will use like a, like I have like old laptops that I'll use if I just want to focus on writing or if I, and I would love something that was just for like my iPad has like very stripped down notifications at times so I can just focus on sitting on the couch

from playing like Ball X-Pid or Rogue, um, Dead Zone Rogue, my two favorite games of last year. And I just want to chat shit with a friend. Yes. Or like just send a silly name to a single purpose device. You want a purpose and it's kind of a luxury thing though. It's not for everyone. No, absolutely not. And neither was the first click. Like that's the same. We've always made products for a small segment of the market, but as long as one in one thousand such users. Small batch hardware. Exactly. Yeah. But I'm pretty excited for communicator because I was terrified of it. You know, you work on something for so long and you're not sure if it's good anymore.

When's out? It is out later in the year. It's going to be second half, but late second half. My wife gave me an Olivetti Valentin. What is that? Manual typewriter. Oh, classic 1967 in MoMA. Bright cherry red has an integrated case that it slides out of.

There's, you know, photos of like Twigie carrying it through the Pan Am terminal at JFK at Idlewild. Beautiful machine. and I've been rehearsing my manual typewriter performance. Can I ask you a really stupid question? What happens to if you type on a typewriter? You can go backspace. You go back space,

so you type and type, you type, you type, where they sort of erasers. You just have like an X at random. That's right. In the type, and it has the most beautiful thing,

when you reach the end of the line. Oh, I never had the thing ones. It's got a red ribbon and a black. ribbon. So it's got like a two side ribbon and you go up and down for it. And then you have to, you have to get the key with a snap. It's not how hard you hit it. It's how crisply comes back up. And then you get a nice clean impression with the, with the keystroke. So that is a genuinely single purpose device. I'm really enjoying it. And it's, and it's meant to be a lugable. You can just slap it around and Michael, I need to ask though, doesn't, isn't there a device called the peak once?

Yes, the peak, right? It was an email only like Blackberry-esque device. I'm sorry. You could also use it for Twitter. No, no, no, no. I actually have one. Avi Greenguard, let me borrow his. I have to cover it on Mr. Mobile and my windphones for phones. And here it is.

Yeah. No, it's like a little screen on it. I like this. I like this because, like, look, you're not trying to pretend this is for everyone. You're not trying to. Not at all. Yeah. No, you're not going to replace your pixel or iPhone with it.

You're going to carry it alongside it or you're going to carry it instead of it on the weekends or the weekdays as the case may be. Could someone use it as their daily driver or is it kind of limited? No, absolutely. It runs Android 16. It's 5G. It even has micro SD and a headphone jack for all the people in my comments who are always like, who are going to bring back those old features.

So yes, you could use it as your main. And we've heard from people who are like, what if I wanted to submit my primary phones? Like you can? I think it's lovely. I think it's lovely that, no, because you are, you and I have had some of the deepest, like, I love the technology stuff. It's cool. I love the phone.

Oh, I love tablets and all this shit. And you actually made something that you wanted to use. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. It's actually got, it's got two cameras. So you can scan a QR code. Absolutely. That's the thing.

Take a picture and say this is how. the weight broken. Yes. Am I allowed to throw this away? Are these left others good? Is this the final? Final weight of it? It's close to final, probably within about 10 grams.

Only criticism I have is what about the battery? What happens? Like what kind of warranty? What kind of battery stuff? The battery is 4,000 milli-amp hours. I did push for silicon carbon. This is the last time I'll get super nerdy about this because I wanted more capacity. Get nerdy. This is my show.

And I was like, no way we can get it. But it turns out we could afford it. It was great. In terms of the support, I mean, it's not, it's the only thing we couldn't do is a removable battery. because it requires you. That was kind of why I was getting at. What does it look like for a service depot to swap it?

Yeah. That's a really good question. Can I take it to my guy on the corner? Probably not. I mean, I'm sure that the, actually, you know what? Just because of what I just said, that's probably not the case because Silicon Carbon is rare these days. It's so new.

So I don't actually know. That's one of the 50 million questions I should have been prepared for. What does this click's button? So that's a shortcut key. So on all of our products, you hit the clicks button and you hit a letter and you can do, you can call a friend. You can. That's a short cut.

I'm sorry. I'm serious that this has so much more. I'm not just saying this because you might make, because you know me well enough, that I'll be like, I don't like it. I do. It's got the weight you've given it actually gives the buttons,

the heft that the clicks case doesn't have. No, not the gravitas. I mean like the physical, because the other one, I'd feel it bent back with my tiny little knob end goblin and fingers. Well, when you design the whole entire thing yourself and you don't have to accommodate for a phone

in a case you're building for another product, you can kind of control that. That's fun. Also, you'll like this, I think. The keyboard is capacitive. So when you swipe your thumb over it, you can scroll your list. Like some of your cases, right? Wait, so you can do the swipe stuff over the physical case?

Correct. Fuck me. That's nice. That's actually very cool. The Blackberry Key one had that feature. Is that right? I'm actually going to send this to Jimson right now. I believe we've talked to him about it.

Because a lot of our alumni or a lot of our employees are BlackBerry alumni. Are they Canadians, though? Yes. Don't trust Canadian. Speaking as a Canadian. Don't trust Canadians. Wait, but y'all are so nice. No, it's just an act.

welcome out. It's like the south here. That's right. I have a question as a longtime friend of Michael Fisher as well. So how rich are you now? Well, I stayed at Planet Hollywood if that tells you. Oh, that does tell me a lot. I stayed at the residence in, so that tells you how we're doing.

Michael, professional question. Are you here in capacity as the Clicks co-founder or are you covering for Mr. Marbaugh? Yes, yes is the answer to that. So both. Yeah, I've to split the time evenly. Must be. That's what the quiff is for.

It's for a second hat. Absolutely. One here, one here. For being beautiful. You have to apply so much hairspray because you're going to put. Actually, that's true. I was doing a John Deere spot because they're my sponsor on this one and I had to put on a John Deer hat. You've got to be on the big tractor.

And I was, in fact. I went to visit the combine. Just drive it away. But it's good. It satisfies my need for novelty. I think you can relate to this. Yeah. You've got some stuff.

I've been doing one thing for 10 minutes. It's too long. I've got to go. Got to go do something else. No, the only thing I can do consistently is podcast. for two hours. That's the only thing. Anything else than just like lost. You just just give him throat. You're a man who turns throat lozenges into podcasts. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What the, the skeleton meme. Yeah, yeah, the skeleton squat meme. But how have you felt about the show, Michael?

What have you seen anything else other than your own thing that you like? I have to tell you. I, so I cannot stand everything about the Las Vegas strip and CES is a very draining show, as we all know. However, this particular one was so worth coming to. on the stuff that was shown for me. I got a new foldable phone out of Motorola that was incredible. When you say you got, you mean the news? No, they made it specifically for me. Oh, I see.

No. The Mr. Fisher edition. Yeah, exactly. There was the new pebble or the, you know, the old pebble from Eric. See, that's one I was going to talk about after this call. Oh, my God. It's so good. And then as I was wandering between those two things, I found, you know, there's something

called a fidget gadget. Have you all seen this? Yeah. It's a little metal cube with like six buttons on. and like a Cascio smartwatch or Cassio watch display. So a fidget. Whoa. What?

It's a little fidget toy. And you can run, you know, it's like Arconoid is like the developer tools. It's open source. You can do stuff. Oh, no way. An open source fidget. Fidget cubes, but all mechanical. So this is, this is new.

This is by one guy making him in his garage and Ipsilanti. It's like exactly why I used to love coming to CES, you know. It's this little stuff. I know that. I hear that. I'm like, I wish I'd have seen that because that would have made my day. Yes. So it's just for dicking around with.

Exactly. You know what? If it's a toy, it's a toy, it's a toy. And that's it, right? The guy's not saying, it's like, well, this is going to be, I hope to usher in a new era for, you know, intentional. It's like, no, I made a toy. It feels good. It's fun to click.

And I don't know what you can do with it, but find out. Yeah, you could do all sorts of stuff. That's fun. It's awesome. So you have a good, and Shirlin as well, you have a good history with CES as well. Like, you've been here a lot. Yeah. This one feels weird to me.

It's felt like a very peculiar show to me. Like, it feels like it's missing something. What do you think is missing? I don't know. That's why I'm asking. It's like it feels like bits of being hollowed out. I think there's a reason for that. I feel like if people were planning for their CES in the first half of the year,

they were probably going to lean on AI all over again. And I feel like there's been a very visible retraction from that, especially in the show. Other than the people who are here. Well, no, I know. But even the CES branding. Yeah, it's not themed. So your thesis is that there would have been twice as much dumb AI shit. if it wasn't for the backlash.

That it's just the people who are just so like balls out, clanker, slopper. Yep. I have a different theory as to why something feels missing. I mean, I think there's a lot missing. I think one thing that's really missing is the car side of things. We had the,

interesting. But then the, you know, the expiry or the doing away with the federal tax credit really dampen a lot of the mood around EVs this past years of 2025. And so Honda was like, we're not coming to see. E.S this year and I think that's kind of set the tone leading into CES this year as well. I mean, like, there's a lot of things, not just cars, but that's probably like our transport sort of area we were like assigning people to kind of pay attention to on our team. They were just like, there was nothing. That's so strange.

It is. Do we think that there's exhibitors who are like, I don't want to get kidnapped by ICE? Yeah, I have to wonder if they were tariff-for-late. Well, tariff-related is kind of a cop-up, but like immigration. Lots of events that I'm involved with are saying our numbers are way down. And then, that's attendee numbers. Right. And they're just people don't want to come anymore. Events are now saying like, you know, a lot of New York City events are like, should we move to Toronto? New Yorkers won't find it that hard to get there and then blah, blah, blah, blah.

So Toronto is lovely. Yeah. Quite like. As a Torontoian, New York run by the Swiss. It's also, it doesn't help that there's like a lot going on outside of CES. Yeah.

At the same time. So like anyone who had those fears were not wrong to be a little bit concerned. And as someone who's like, herself an immigrant, with very good legal visa status. Right there with you. Yeah, exactly. I was so afraid to travel even domestically for a while there.

And now it's like I've done a few international trips. I'm not as concerned. Oh, I went through, I had to go to Toronto last year. And I was like straight up the whole. Scared, right? No, every moment in the airport. And then I remembered you cleared immigration in Toronto, which is a little less scary. Yes, exactly.

I flew through Dublin. It's like, yeah. Oh, right. Yeah, it's grim. And it's also like that the stuff that has made it, it feels, and I say this is a CES veteran, and someone's going to say it's stolen ballot, but, um, even by CES standards, this feels like a bullshit year. It feels like worse than the 2014, 2015 Indiegogo Kickstarter boom where it's like, it's a 3D printed kitchen. You just click the button and a burger come out. Those ones I almost

found folksy, because they were like, like a straight up snake oil salesman just like, ah, come here, check my food. Now it's just like 97 different GPT rappers. And it's sad. I want my doodads. I want my gizmos. It's funny because I've seen more gizmos and doodads here this year than I have. Seriously.

Besides Fidget Gadget and Pell, which I surely know. Oh, we've talked about Pebble. Let's talk more. Oh, okay. Besides those, we have this sort of evolved version of Fidgett gadget, which I checked out on a whim. Someone said to me, well, I was demoing clicks to them. Have you seen, have you seen Lego? Have you seen Smart Play?

Oh, right. So is Lego. must go. I just, I feel, like, that's just going to be mountains of e-waste and also isn't the whole point of Lego. True. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, oh, wow. Well, wait to make, you need a Lego place. Instead of going vroom, Vroom, I have a machine that does the rooming for me. Yes. Okay. And if I had not sat through the entire hour-long demo, I would have felt exactly the same way. I went in, I'm like, listen, this will be filler for my video. I'll just get some footage. It'll be fun. It'll be a break between phones, it'll be great. And then they demonstrated literally every use case I've ever

seen a person think about in terms of like, how do children play? How did I use to play? I used to remove the machines like this and then it reacts and then you touch the break to the other thing and it knows what the color is. And it's like, it's not only smart, but it's like smart in a way that a kid will instantly understand and instantly appreciate. The EWaste thing is the only thing that I was like, oh, man, that's going to be annoying. But in terms of evolving the play experience, I actually got to push back. Please. I don't think Lego needs to evolve the play experience.

I think the whole point of Lego is imagination. And I think playing with it and going now, vrum, room, and building deranged things and having things in your head. But I understand what they're doing. I'm surprised they haven't done it quicker. I'm sure they haven't. I asked. I was like, guys, how long have you been evolving?

They're like eight years. Like from start to finish. But it shows. It shows in the product. I'm telling you. And technologically, I think it is very interesting to have location aware, block. So Bruce Sterling wrote an incredible novel called Distraction that everyone should read because it's about fucked up computer mediated elections. And it is one of the most prescient books you will read.

And in it there are these avant-garde architects who put a slap bracelet around a brick and it starts saying, I am a cornerstone, take me one step to the left, put me down. I'm one degree off level. I am now level. Please add mortar. And a bunch of unskilled people can put up a building in a day. I rip this off from my novel walk away. And that kind of location awareness, super interesting and cool. And there are lots of times in my life where I would have loved to have had this.

If you told me that IKEA has figured out a way to use low-cost electronics to tell you when you've got the right two pieces along. Right, how to build the furniture, yeah. Oh, you are describing a world I want to inhabit. But like as a child playing imaginatively with construction toys, I don't think my play experience would have been enhanced by, having some of the things that happen in my imagination happen with electronics instead. I'd rather get that person an Arduino. So the e-waste, I think it's a good art.

There is actually a solution, which is the good news is that the chip fits inside a regular, like it is still a regular Lego brick, so you're still able to use it like a Lego brick? But is it, but is the, like, so when you throw this away, is it going to be a mortal e-waste or just a mortal plastic waste? That's the thing.

I actually truly don't know. Is it going to be leaching, you know, heavy metals into the water table or just turning into microplastics. But I mean, do people throw away Legos? You know, I feel like Legos get past down.

That might throw away broken robotic Lego. Yeah. But the thing, but even then, yeah, but it's still a brick, right? You're right, though.

I don't know. My take on the Lego thing is I used to be on the Ed side of it and I then read a lot of our coverage and was like, oh, okay, that makes way more sense. So I came closer to the Fisher side of it.

And I'm just like, look, if you don't like it, you can still not buy it. Sure. And you can still have the same Lego experience. were having before. Sure. Sure. So this is for the people who want it. I will also give Lego some real credit in that despite the fact that the entire Lego economy has been inflated by adult babies who are children's toys. I'm not talking about by the way like the Taj Mahal. Those are obviously

for adults. I'm talking about like I don't know as a father the Spider-Man sets that are now inflated by 30% because you fucking losers can't leave them alone for actual fucking children. Jesus Christ. I will say Lego's app stuff is really good. You can just type in the Lego thing and you can sit there and kind of... Their smartphone app you're saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can type in the number of the set and you can rotate around it. And it's useful, though they still do this insane thing where they don't be able, they make it

really difficult to tell between like black, dark gray and gray. Nevertheless, I give them real credit because it's like, it's an app, but it's not an app for like selling me more Lego. It's, hey, the instructions are limited because they're paper. We found a way to get beyond that. So I'm willing to give them a bit of the... the benefit the doubt on this one? What I will say is you just use it.

You don't need an app for that. Yeah, exactly. Buy a set of them, use them, and then judge them because that is, I was in the, again, I was in the exact same boat as you guys. And then I saw the demo and I was like, God, this, every part of this is well thought. I want to pop the stack one layer up because it occurs to me. There was a thing I wanted to say about the fidget toys. Okay.

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

they come in runs of like 100 to 200. He hand machines, each one of them. His sculptures are gorgeous. His static sculptures are amazing, but his kinetic sculptures, the pocket-sized ones are insanely good.

So Chris Bathgate. And he's written a book. If only you had an AI ring to take a note with. Yeah, if only I could press a button. So I just published a book about them. I just sent a message to, Corey to make sure that's in the episode notes. And I'm about to send a text to my call right now to

say, while you're doing that, I'm going to fidget with my own. Send me the fidget. I love it. No, I already typed it saying he's a wonderful broadcaster and I hope to have him on again as well as sending me the link to that. This is, this is an emotionally on this show. But you see anything, do you see anything else fun? Because I'm genuinely like, I wanted, everyone's like, like, Ed, it's next. Actually, no one's being like, yeah, fuck CES. I'm like, okay. Well, all right. Settle down. Settle down, everyone. That's my job. I'm not. I'm the one who gets too angry. I don't like doing this because it is, I don't like to cross the streams between sponsored

content and not, but I will say that something was genuinely cool that is, go on. In a sea of technology that is conceptual or maybe never come to a market or has no value, one of the John Deere things I was paid to promote was an automated road paver. I learned about paving for like, for like a half hour. And I will also say, this makes it possible for people to, for fewer people to do this job and for fewer skilled people to be required to do this job. Yeah, but that's also less late. Oh, it's so scary, though.

I mean, look, here's the thing. The fact that this solves a problem is my least favorite part of it. The problem is no construction workers can find enough labor. I mean, you could also hire more people. Well, no, I know. This is what I was saying, but apparently that was the starting point. So I'm watching this robot thing to do it, thing like, you know, hot asphalt and pouring stuff. I'm like, yeah, this is what I want.

I want to be dirty jobs. This is why I got into it to go see some cool stuff. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I talk to a microphone, so I see a job like that. I'm like, never take that job from those people. Well, I agree, but I mean, that's the thing. There's not enough of those people. That's the, that's the thing.

You could train them. No, I get your point. And I also be clear, Michael Fisher is one of the fewer people who's more anxious than I am about any kind of thing like this. So Michael is like squirming here when it comes to like mentioning a sponsor. Do not think that he's doing this with joy. He didn't even notice that. Yeah, you're right. I mean, my concern with John Deere, and I, I, I,

I don't want to blow up your spouse or my concern with John Deere is there. Yeah, they're a rapacious monopolist. And they have led the war against repair. And they use the fact that it's illegal to bypass an access control. This is this law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for tampering with an access control to make it illegal for farmers to fix their tractors. And Ed, you know, you're a Britain.

Did you ever go to Beamish outside of Norfolk, outside of Newcastle, rather. No, it's the largest open-air museum in Europe. We would call it Pioneer Village here, except it's not pioneers. It's oldie, timey English people. And they have transported Georgian, Coal Town with a colliery, Victorian High Street, all kinds of weird old vehicles. And there's a farmhouse on a Roman foundation. And on the Roman foundation, there is a forge.

because farmers have fixed their own farming implements since fucking Roman times. Enter John Deere saying, no, no, we have declared the end of history. Farmers no longer fix their farm implements. That's our job. No, it's my fault. You know, here's the thing.

This entire debate played out in my comments every single time I covered John Deer organically. And I got so fucking tired of it that I was like, I will never cover this brand again because I'm tired of getting in the middle of tired of having this conversation. and like being the mediator between them and things. You don't have to be the media.

And I don't cover them organically. Now they're my sponsor. I'm going to aggressively segue away from this because I don't want. It's a good idea. Yeah, but I want to get to the final thing, which is. Can I make, no, please. Can I, because I want to build on one thing you said that I find fascinating. The Roman Foundation, the thing that's been unchanged forever.

As we talk about yet another show where people are like, what's the next smartphone? What's the replacement for the smartphone? and all this stuff. I had a wonderful moment at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Have you been here? No. It has a lovely, you know, maritime history museum, and you can wander, and you can see all

kinds of things in the, and there's a pocket watch case, because of course there is. And I saw one that was really beautiful, and I asked the curator, I'm like, how, what is this from? Perhaps 1905, and he's like 1789. Sure, Christ. Wait, what? And then I kind of looked at the history, I'm like, this form factor did not change meaningfully for 200 years.

We figured something out. It was great. And then we kept it around until somebody figured out how to strap it onto a wrist. That is how I feel about the smartphone these days. I'm like, look,

there will be augmented things in the personal area network. There will be more accessories for them. But we are still going to carry these boxes in our pocket. This is the principal struggle of CES right now, though. It's all people trying to be out,

what if you had a smart glasses and it could do this? And then you're like, well, as a human being, this is not how I experienced life. And they're like, shit. you're right

nobody actually uses but what if you changed your entire existence so you had a weird grainy green thing that could sometimes be correct which requires an internet connection and the smart glasses stuff is really the smart I'm auto translation or write down what you're saying

you translate your business trip and you just slot me stick me gun to my head but it's just I'm almost really happy to hear about oh I got thinner and lighter laptops with longer batteries. Brilliant, brilliant. But it almost feels like we're reaching a point

where everyone's just saying, fuck, we're out of interfaces. We don't have a new one. To your point about that pocket watch case. Do you know what I would love would be this huge design trend. From now on, we're putting black text on white backgrounds,

or sometimes white text on black backgrounds, and we fired all the 22-year-old designers who put 10% gray on white backgrounds, and we've sent them north for re-education where they are forced to, to endure, you know, long struggle sessions about the things they've done to people with poor low contrast vision. Yeah, I just think liquid glass is one of, Liquid glass is truly, and I am like an Apple pay pig at this point.

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

It's got this weird reflective thing in the drawing on it. If you worked on liquid glass, were you forced to? Will you force to do this? They do talk about it as part of the UI, that sort of the way you move your phone and then how it reflects light, It's supposed to be that way. I don't want that. I want my phone on.

I think you can turn it off. Liquid glass? Not all. I would love to. I would love to go back to iOS 8 or something. Give me the phone normal. I want the phone UI that actually like puts fake scratches on your screen. You're like, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. We're like fake. I think there's an app for that. No, I will say, and we can wrap this in a boat. It's why I kind of like the clicks communicate, because it's just a thing. Nice callback. Yeah.

Floorless. No, and I say this is someone who. like, if you don't like it, I don't give a shit if you buy it or not. Sorry, that's just, that's not my job. But I like it because it's like, what do I want from a device that takes people, thingy, to, to use message app, to place, look at website, thingy, like, you do the thing on it. A handful of very important features, but just a handful of them. I didn't think that I'd ever got on board the, and this is there, is there a web browser on it? Oh yeah. I mean, it's Android 16. You're going to run whatever you want on it, but it's a matter of intention.

But sorry, what you're saying. I never thought I'd get on board. the digital detox train or anything like that. And that's not what communicator is for, to be clear, but just personally, until I used the light phone for two weeks this past summer. And you were real one, because when you did the light phone thing, you actually fucking did it. You turned off everything. It's amazing.

And I wish I could have survived in that world because it turned out, in order to live that way, doing what a lot of us do, I had to carry an iPad for the sessions that invariably required me to be online for a second or a laptop. And then I was like, damn it, I can't live this life, but what stuck with me were two or three lessons that lived past July. And I was

like, every time I pull out my phone now, I'm like, am I doing this for a purpose or am I doing this because I'm boys? Every time I pull out my phone to check a notification, I'm able to better resist the bypass of like the door dash. Like, isn't it time to order a pizza? It's 3 p.m. All the shitty notifications that you get all the time. You leave notifications on? No, I turn them off and then I miss my door dash delivery. I agree. No, I agree. You have to do this horrible Cesar back and forward. I aggressively pleased those. But Michael, it's so good having you as we wrap up this half an hour.

I just want to say, the listeners want you back and I'll have you back, but also you have maybe look at phones differently. And I put aside the clicks communicator. I think you have the right way of looking at it where it's like, why am I using this device? Thank you. And why am I doing this? What is this for? Now, I am built different in the

sense that I am really, like, I was mentioning yesterday, like, the infinite feeds don't work on me. They give me anxiety. I get to the, I'm like, where's the end? Where's the end? I want to finish reading this. Oh, I can't finish it. Yeah, for sure. No, no, but it's the opposite.

Most people are like, oh, I'll keep looking. I'm like, no. You want to be done. You want to be like, and I'm just like, fine. You want to do it. And the moment I feel anything being done to me, I like reject it angrily. Sure.

I just watch this happen on the train. No, no, it's, no, it's pure autism. It's just like, my brain just like doesn't want to do anything other than what it insists on doing, which is a Wikipedia. Or like a very long conversation about one specific big thing, which is why we are here on better offline. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Ed. We will bring you back sooner than this. I would love that. And I'm looking

forward to the clicks. I might actually pick one out, put a link to stuff. You can have a look at it. Judge your own judgment. That's not a phrase. We now move to an ad break for something that I either say you should buy or listen to. Yeah, and IHot Radio has said, no, actually I can't say that. So we're just going to pretend I never said that. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

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And we're back in the room. We've got Sherlin Lowe from Engadget. Yes, hi. And we've got Edong Guaiso Jr. Of the Tech Bubble newsletter. Oh, hello. We've got author, activist, and journalist, Cory Doctor. And this time I know I'm supposed to reply.

Hello. Nailed it. Flaws. No, and I have had a few people say, like, email. We'd be like, why do you do this? I'm like, because I get to hang out with my friends and do cool shit for like an entire week. Why are we alive? But we're here at CES.

And I mean, there's also the question of why are we at CES. That is a reasonable one. Because it's a peculiar show. Corey, we had the best time in Amazon, though. We need to talk about this Amazon experience. To be clear, we're walking into the show floor for the first time. Actually, CIS customer service got his badge immediately. And then we walk in, I'm like, oh, there's Amazon.

Why not? And last year, by the way, Amazon, I had the picture of the smiling man on my badge. And the woman outside grabbed it and went, wow, which is, I don't think it was a good well. But anyway, walk in there with Corey, we immediately walk up to this $5,000, like, truck pooled surveillance tower pole thing with like it's like a big big thingy with like a pole and like just a ring of cameras and Corey just walks over and starts asking questions. Well no I mean I didn't even ask any questions. The guy walked up and said hi I'm the product manager for this. Do you have any

questions? I wasn't going to you know bollick him out of the blue. I didn't go in there looking for you know a victim. And you were not that type of but I was like since you ask and I was like well so I know that there is that the original ring camera, the doorbell camera, you guys took the posture that that footage was only available to the police in the event that the owner authorized the transfer to the police. And, but there had been this persistent rumor that there was warrantless access to this footage, even against the wishes of the ring owner, which you initially denied and later had to walk back. I know this because I got into a big fight. with Amazon PR when I published the story

and then they said it's not true and then later on it was proved to be true. What's the deal with this? Can the police access it? Because this is the thing that's been to go into like a parking lot at a job site or whatever. And it had some, as you pointed out, some racial overtones.

Yeah, the video behind it was of course two guys breaking in and would you be surprised to hear they were Hispanic? Yeah. Just fucking put white guys in there. Fuck you. And the AI caption was like two men removing things from trunk of red car. So I said, you know, so can the cops access this footage, you know, without the owner? And he was like, well, I'm not sure.

And I'm like, okay, fine. Who can access this footage? Is this footage intend encrypted? Does it sitting as an encrypted blob that no one at Amazon can access on your servers? So only I can access it and as the owner of the device and so on. And he says, oh, yes, that is the case just like with the ring doorbell. And I'm like, well, wait, that's not true of the ring doorbell. So hang on a second.

It's just, it is just like an incontrovertible fact. You go into any court docket for petty theft or whatever. There's a ton of footage that cops have subpoenaed from ring doorbells. And so if cops can subpoena it, then Amazon has to be able to decrypt it. Yeah. So, and he's like, well, I'm not allowed to decrypt. I'm the project manager. And I can't decrypt it.

I'm like, well, that's good. You have some access controls. But you're still escrowing the keys. And then I'm like, well, is it all controlled by an app or is there a desktop interface and if so can I download my footage? And he's like, no, it's desktop just like with the

doorbell camera. And I'm like, so I can just like grab all the MPEG files and keep them on my hard drive. And he's like, I don't think you can. And I'm like, so what if I stop paying the subscription fee, do I lose all the footage? And he's like, no, we'll let you download it.

I'm like, so wait, can I download it or can I not? And then he eventually says, well, you're asking all these technical questions. I just don't know the answer. And I'm like, well, I was just standing here, minding my own business. When you came up and introduced yourself to me as the product manager for this product, like, is the product manager capable of answering what seems to me to be some pretty basic product? Does a website do something?

Yeah, like, can I, does, is the footage available to third parties? I mean, because, you know, just from a straight up security perspective, Amazon's not immune to insider threats. if you've got, you know, 360 longitudinal video footage. And that's what this thing is. It has a tube that goes into the sky with a bunch of cameras.

And it was advertised as they had this video behind with a picture of neighborhoods with all these blue blobs where these things would be. That's so good. I'm so happy you guys got to see one of the new Soron Towers. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, here's our palantier. Exactly. Maybe they'll give you a little ring that could be tied to your biometrics. Yeah, it's got this like telescoping mass. But you could imagine, right, if you've got, this is quite a honey. pot, right? If you've got the internals of a whole bunch of job sites with a bunch of easily stolen

things and there's an insider threat at Amazon, they've got a lot of employees. And famously, Amazon went through a series of CISOs, chief security officers, because they had this product first orientation where anyone who had a product team could download the entire Amazon database. Jesus Christ. And they had no access controls and no logging. They did not know how many copies of the internal Amazon database were. And their CSOs would come in and say, okay, step one, we have to stop doing this. Did they ever figure out how many people? No, no, no. There's no census of how many copies, like multiple copies because they've got AWS, right? So copying the entire database of every skew and every purchase on Amazon is like tractable within Amazon's own infrastructure. And so,

you know, their CSO's first advice was always like, don't do this. And then, but the people who are in charge of like product nimbleness would say, well, we are able to spit up a product team and then figure out whether the product is any good by grabbing this giant data set, mining it for insights. So we're going to override the security person. And eventually they hired, they promoted someone internal who was two junior and didn't know well enough. And then they had a gigantic breach, right? So I think this is all Andy Greenberg at Wired did this report. Hell yeah. And so, you know, like they're famously like vulnerable to insider threats.

I will also say if you're a listener who works at Amazon Web Services and you're able to click on that thing that says Anthropic, why don't you send me more of them numbers? I want to see, I want to see their numbers. My favorite part of this conversation, though, was right towards the end when he went, yeah, you could buy one for your backyard. You think he would. And just, you were like so much nicer than I would. Well, to be fair to him, I said, like, is this all being sold to business customers or are there people with McMansions who want it? And he said, do you want it for your mansion? And I was like, or do you have a mansion? And I was like, or do you have a mansion? And I was like, I don't have a mansion. So he was kind of, I think you missed that. After 10 minutes of speedbagging, though, I would have just, I would have been like, I, this guy did not know when to clear. I'm dying.

I need to leave. But we won't, we had a good, we had a good toll around today. You got to see some CES. We saw some fun stuff. Yeah, we went to like the crap gadget room with all the international pavilions. And there was some good stuff.

I'm trying to pull up my favorite. So from one of the universities around Tokyo, there was the, you know, they have these tech transfer offices where they're trying to like product things being in the labs. And there was a group called Integrated Electron Source who had a graphene electron

emitter, which was basically a consumer electronics style imaging system that could image down to four nanometers designed for visual inspection of chips. And I've just come from Hamburg where I saw Bunny Wang, who's the greatest hardware hacker in the world, present on

his work on building system on a chips that are open to visual inspection because Bunny is absolutely convinced that people are hiding bad shit in Silicon. Yeah. Especially when we're talking about a system on a chip, which... When you say bad shit, what do you mean specifically? So like, you know, all hardware is, is software in etched in silicon, right?

So any program, any malware you can imagine, you could hide... And so when you use the chip in a piece of hardware, it's doing something bad. It's backdoor it. Also, when he says he's convinced that people are hiding bad shit in hardware is his belief that there's nothing stopping along the point of production to deliver. Yeah, in the supply chain. So the thing to understand is that an SOC wafer is just a, it's a risk, like reduce instructions, a computing chip wafer.

And the typical SOC is using like 25, 30% of it. So most of that chip is dark matter. And when you're taping out the dye and getting ready to nanolithograph the chip, you could just tape out a whole bunch of other stuff. And Bunny's talk at CCC was about how. he convinced a chip maker to let him tape out some open source chips in the in the dark matter because it was like oh you know you're going to run 10 million of these do another 200,000. I'll pay for that part of it. Everyone gets them really cheap because the product gets cheaper the more of these you run. He was able to fit five more processors on a processor. Right. So it's super cool. It's called the bow chip all open source and all visually inspectable so you can take the chip, take the file that describes the chip, take the chip and put it in a, an optical inspection unit, and then it will produce a file, and you can lay the two on top of each other

and see if there's any extra gates that shouldn't be there. Is this chip the chip it says it is? Just like this incredibly important thing, you think about how much of our world is running on this uninspectable silicon and like how many people in the supply chain could do something to sabotage that silicon. Is that place I could read more and look more at his stuff?

This is fascinating to me. On pluralistic yesterday, I wrote a blog post about it. Okay, I'll check that out. He calls it piggybacking. This makes me curious about, you know, Nvidia named their newest generation of chips, the CPU and the GPU collaboration, the Verrubin.

And at first I thought it was just like a very vague gesture on a few superficial levels to Vera Rubin who discovered that we probably have some, either we have Dark Matter, we have some fundamental failure in our explanatory model for the universe. But also I'm curious, like, you know, is it just like a tongue in cheek also joke or reference to the fact that we have? We don't know what's in the chip. Yeah, I don't.

I don't know. No, they know exactly what's in the chip and it's getting more expensive. That's, well, oh, God, are they doing like a deal with arm? I hate to do this, but Sherlin, just an aggressive segue. What have you seen on the show? No, just to put a button on it. One last thing I want to say, no, please, four nanometers. That was the, that was the thing that just fucking blew myself up.

And that's four nanometer imaging in commodity hardware. Holy shit, this is amazing. And I'm pretty sure that's like four nanometer is what they built the latest in VDivio Blackwell GPUs on. I'd have to check. Yeah. Two in our lifetime. They couldn't get down to three nanometer and that was a whole thing with the process.

But Shirling, what have you seen on the floor? Because you're only with us for this group. So I want to hear more. What have you seen this year that you liked? I mean, hearing all of you talk is just reminds me like how diverse this show is. It's a huge show. It covers such a broad scope. I mean, and I got lost in what you were talking about because it's fascinating.

but it also makes me question the C and CES. Consumer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not consumer. What is for the consumer if it's all robots and AI? I mean, it's downstream, it's like eventually, but it's like this is the consumer. So much of it is that. Consumer.

Where are the consumers? Where are they, where's the thought for the consumers? Have you seen that in the show? Do you feel like the overall show has been less consumer? I think to the point we were making at the start of this episode, it's a physical manifestation of AI slop and a lot of the ones that were here this year, the ones that braved the immigration risk to come here and share their wares, that just means that their motivation was, what, to find partners, to find someone to buy them?

Yeah, and that's the sense I'm getting of a lot of AI hardware out there, because if you're still trying to make one at this point without a clear differentiator, then you are out here trying to get some kind of VC, or a major company to buy you. Yeah, sure. And after Amazon bought B, it's just like who's going to buy the next best one. And B was the one that records you. Victoria.

Victoria Song, cursed tape reporter in the world. Yeah. Victoria's song, I champion. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Oh, no, fucking get that paper, especially from Amazon. Go, go get that. But then the rest of them that are here, what is the end game? What is the gold? And to your point about E-waste,

that's going to be E-waste. The ones that they make, the ones that they sell in limited quantities, but still massive quantities. On these smartwatches that run on like AWS servers that we'll get taken down the moment the company stops paying for them, which will be quite quickly. Yeah. So I think it was just like a lot of waiting through this like existential dread of all of this is going to end up in lenfills. All of these robots, all of these AI wearables, all of these AI native devices.

So we tried very hard to see things that we were interested in. And I don't know if you've talked about this yet, but we made a video of this device that has taken off on, at least by our standards. It's got millions of views at this point. It is called the wheel move. It is a wheelchair-based... It's an assistive device that you attach to the front of your wheelchair. And it provides sort of a motorized, rugged wheel that props up the front of your wheelchair

and helps you over, like, rugged terrain, uneven surfaces. This fucking rocks. And an extra boost. Yeah. And that rocks. It's just so smart because it's simple, right? It's not a whole over-engineered wheelchair. it's just an attachment to the front.

And I was talking to someone about it this morning who reminded me that not all wheelchair users are always in wheelchair. Sometimes they're there temporarily, and I forgot. Sometimes they're just recovering, sometimes they're in rehab, and they just need the assistance for a bit. But getting out there, going...

It's called wheel move. Wheel move, yeah, going out on like a hike maybe or a walk, and sometimes you encounter, you know, not the smoothest pavement, or sometimes... Just showing everyone what it looks like, it's like a wheel on the front of it. I love shit. And you know what?

what? It's like we've seen a lot of exoskeletons while we were on the floor. We saw like a like a kind of a skateboard. Yeah. So this is, I brought the brochure back. So we saw this thing called the stern board, which is the same thing, but it doesn't clip onto a wheelchair. It clips onto a motorized skateboard and turns it into an all-terrain motorized skateboard. It was this French dude. Sternboard, S-T-E-R-N board. Cool as shit. I love the mobility stuff, because if you think about why technology exists, it's to make humans better and able to do more. and what limitations we have can be surmounted with technology. The AI slot doesn't seem to be that.

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

But what is the freaking point? Well, have you seen anything you liked? And I don't mean this sarcastic. The wheel move. If the point is you haven't, that's totally fine. No, no. I did see something interesting. And last year I came on this better off line of the CES edition as well

and talking about an LED mask. Yeah. This year I've got another LED mask. That's fine. Like a beauty mask mask? Yeah, one of those that puts red light on your face. L'OREL came through with the LED masks that are flexible. So like their skin light in terms of texture.

Instead of the rigid hard shells that you've seen their body, Omnilux or Dr. Dennis Gross make. So it wraps on your face much better and it's transparent. Is it comfortable? Yeah, it's supposed to be more comfortable. L'Oreal wasn't letting people put the full-face version on their own faces for various like sanitary and FDA-related reasons.

I saw the person put them on. I saw it on the mannequin's head. I may have seen other things. And I can tell you that the proposition is interesting. Yeah. Tears like, yeah, tears and rain. I have, I can't say things.

But I can tell you that it seems, like it would fit better on most heads, right? Like, I don't have the same nose another person might have. And I don't have the same eyes or eye socket shapes that another person might have. And I think that a more flexible shell for these LED masks would be a bit more inclusive. I think also much more comfortable because the button where it turns on the power running the LED lights is on the mask. So it sits on your forehead. So you press the power button there as opposed to like a cable dangling down the side of your face into a power like remote control thing.

And then the fact that it's transparent is just wild. They've also made like under eye mask versions of it. And I am bringing like the health and wellness sort of like vibes here into this episode. That's good. I just like that idea. Laurel also says it's very close to producing these for like, you know, actual sale. They're very close. So I think that it's also another thing that's interesting because this is not vaporware.

It's actually going to be made. And that's what we also look out for, not just trash that's going to sit in Atlanta. feel someday. You've been to a lot of CESs and it feels like this is one of the more vapor wary ones. I'm really, like, I don't want it to be. No, I know. I really don't. I know. I, well, there's also like a lot of things that will come out. I mean, so, so this year and Gadget took a risk. We went, let's look at all our best of CES winners from last year. Oh, wow. How they are now. Surprisingly, pretty much like all of them are, are like either on track or have already put their devices on sale or are like, oh, we will be at CS 2026 to show you the updates.

One of them we did manage to locate. So we're kind of like what's going on there. So it is like a kind of risky endeavor to do that story because you want to know that a publication we're only endorsing the right, the more legitimate types of businesses. At the same time, it's like we want to do the investigative work. We want to be very honest. If this company end up looking shady. Right.

But do we look at... What if they were shady or that they were out-competed by worse companies? Right. It could also be that. Exactly. You know, they could still be the best when at...

Right. Thank you. That helps. Yeah. Or sometimes, you know, they also... It's something that just ends up not working. You know, one thing that the last two years I've been really interested in is a technology that allows people who are deaf or who no sign language to communicate.

My older brother is deaf. One of my greatest anxieties and fears is that he refuses to wear hearing aids and any sort of assistive tech and you know there have been many times you know and thankfully like we've had this protocol established before but there been many times where he's been stopped by cops and he just like you know he's immediately when stopped by cop reaching into the car to get a notepad and pen to write for them

so I've made him you know call me beforehand so that we can talk about it so that you know there's no misunderstanding or any sort of escalation of things but you know technology that allows for immediate communication would be nice. But then, you know, a lot of times when I go to these boots and I sit down and I ask, okay, what are the scenarios in which they're interested in offering this sort of assistive tech? They're almost exclusively in one very narrow scenario, which is in a workplace and in a business area, which I understand.

But it's like that is actually also not the space where I assume and from what I've seen, from people I know who are deaf and from people and from, you know, my own brother, you know, are interested in. But nonetheless, you still have firms who maybe are, you know, they are created by people who are deaf or around people who are deaf who know that that's not the use case. Yeah. But are not going to get funding interest or skin. Yeah, that's very depressing. I will also say with like checking back up, you're all humans. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like you can go here and this is the Consumer Electronics Fraud Show. Like I think it's all about there are people who come here with the intent. tension of deceiving. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being like, yeah, we thought this was really. Right. And that's where I was like. And I think about, I'm going to say, push back if you want to. Having read Engadgett since like the early, like the mid 2000s, what haven't, it's, what Engadgett is now is really good. There's a reason I have a lot of Engadgett people on is because it's just people who like tech and they go and look at stuff and they like it or they dislike it and you move on. And I say that as an honest reader. And it's like,

yeah, if you go back and you say, yeah, we got fucking swindled by these people, I feel like anyone who gets mad at that is a moron. I just think if you're a dope, if you're like, wow, a publication was like, yeah, we've got something wrong. Oh, I don't like that. Deceive me more, daddy. And it's just like, I feel like every single publication should do that. It should not be something anyone is afraid of. And indeed, if you don't do that, it makes me deeply worried about the future. Because you know what? If you come here and you, end up writing about something that is just a lie or never makes it, that's CES. Right. And this particular CES. There's a lot of that. And in 2027, we need to do this because

the AI bubble is likely to burst in the next year. And we're going to need to dig through the ditches, so to speak, and see what fucking happened. Yeah. Because there's so much AI rapishir. I was hoping you'd love more stuff. I did. I mean, I, I'm, I loved some stuff. Well, I think part of it was to see us more than others, I was kind of chained to my laptop running things rather than like going out there and seeing things. So I, okay, I saw something that I loved to hate on if that helps. Have you heard about the lollipop star? Oh, yeah. So we gave it a worst in show. Oh, wonderful. So love to hate on, right? Yeah. Consumer Union and the repair coalition. Tell me why you gave it worst in show. EWs. Exactly. It's exactly EWays. And then so we posted.

Singing lollipops. Tell me more about this because I did not see this. I have no idea what this is uncompletely. I mean, it's just a sound chip and a, you know, SOC in a lollipop handle, and you put the lollipop on top, and through bone conduction, you hear a song while you eat a lollipop. It's just a lithium battery that goes in a landfill. You're a psycho. Yeah, because you can't reuse it. You can't, like, and the battery is not, like, rechargeable, which I guess makes sense,

but it's kind of ridiculous. I don't know. I saw this offered at a white elephant that I was at two weeks before I came here. Wow. And I was wondering, everyone was like, this seems like a horrible. Was it what favorite flavor did you get ACON or wide out? No idea. I did not get it.

I tried. I was really hard. I was honing in on the lottery tickets. There's a stack of 50 lotto scratchoffs and I really wanted them. Did you get them? No. I got a book. I got a bunch of books.

The thing about the singing lollipop is so my last time at CES was 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, 2003. And before that I came a few times in the 90s for Wired. And I have seen singing lollipops at CES before. I'm not new. Also, speaking of which, though, on the floor today, me and Ed saw smell of vision. And the smell of vision is another thing I've seen in every single single season. So that's what we're saying this year on my team is that it's kind of the comeback CES, the comeback of all these older technologies that we've seen with like pebbles coming back,

clicks with a communicator, Lego. It's not really a comeback, but is adding tech. I saw something that said skateboard penguin. I'm your little sidekick company. Oh, I saw that. I saw that too. Skateboard penguin. Yep.

This was a lot of ridiculous. And to pop, let's pop the stack just briefly back to Crypt Tech. No, no, but also to get back to the thing you were talking about there, the reason I was looking was because they had the tagline, welcome to the era of pseudo-reality. Oh, yeah, that was the Smellivision people. Yes, yes, yes, that's why. They had Smellivision and then they had like an essential oil mister that made smoke for steam. But on Crypt-Tech, if anyone wants to follow a very good cryptic influencer, Liz Henry, used to be a build manager from Mozilla,

now is just doing crypticic, I think, full-time. BookManiac.org. I'll send you the link. Thank you. And she is in command of a small fund that she disperses in $1,000 and below grants to people doing cool cryptic adaptation. What is cryptic though for those?

Accessibility technology. So wheelchairs. I thought crypto tech. I don't need that. No, no, no, cryptic. So, yeah. I get what it is. I know what I was saying.

We saw an amazing. amazing four-line braille reader on the floor. That was cool. It was like a braille keyboard. Yeah. And it was standards defined. It plugged into your USBC as and showed up as a standard display. It just just great piece of hardware.

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

He was very quick. All standards defined. And he was very clear to be like, this is not our software. This just plugs into anything that people who need breath. You don't need friction, right? And like, that guy deserves the huge boots. That's right. Every single blind person probably could, I'm not blind, so I truly don't.

Sorry, visually impaired. So I don't know what the experience is. But I don't know. Seems like it fucking worked. And the guy was not trying to like hawk anything. It was well built. It was standards to find. It was chunky and rugged.

And it was. it will outlive changes to the OS because it's built around open standards. It was just the USB connected things. Yeah. I think when you said Crypt Tech, I was reminded of something that we didn't see in person, but we heard or read about. There's a water heater for your home that will crypto mine while you shower.

Oh, I've heard about these. I think I've wanted to put that together. There's a room heater as well that does this. This is like a gimmick, right? Yeah. There's a bathhouse in Williamsburg that does something. Oh, fuck off. Yeah.

That is the most Brooklyn thing ever. Yes, I know. Is that the same one where you could... Oh, no. No, it's not the same one where they all got Legionnaires? Listen, I got... You think I know that one. Thankfully.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I was slanded them. Their name, it's another two-spous. Bathhouse, you know, it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the Legionnaires one. Yeah, yeah. I hear.

Wait, so they do crypto mining? Yeah, so the guy who runs it, he loves crypto. And so you can pay in crypto. Classic Brooklyn. And he initially tried to market it as like, you know, like some of the heat generation is going to go, is coming from crypto. But then he removed that silently.

And I don't know if he removed it because it was like, it's not actually or because he doesn't want people to. No, I think it doesn't work. Yes. Mining difficulty has reached a point where all of these little. Just doesn't work. Conalt is do that shit.

We go scuba diving on Roatown, which is the island where Prospera the Crypto City is. in Honduras. The future capital of the world empire. It's this beautiful little like dirt road island, Africa Caribbean island. The food's amazing. The diving's amazing.

It's just a lovely place. And then the former dictator of Honduras who was just pardoned by Trump, who was an arco trafficker, sold them the sovereign rights to a chunk of this island. And you walk down the dirt road in the dive town and every shop has got a sign in the window

that says we accept Bitcoin. And you walk in and you say, do you accept Bitcoin? And they're like, of course we don't accept Bitcoin. Are you fucking kidding me? We don't even have reliable. I don't have 15 minutes to wait for this again or an internet connection. These reactionaries, they know how to pick a spot, you know.

Yeah. If I were going to make a future network state, that is one of the places I would do it. They don't have the actual stones to find a real place where there's truly no laws. Right. Well, yeah. And also, because all of the actual pirates and real criminals would kill them immediately. I mean, this is part of the thing with the Pirate Enlightenment book of David Graber.

You know, you give fascists a lawless zone and you let other people come into the lawless zone and everyone else will go, why are they fascists here? Yeah, yeah. Well, do you know, a libertarian walks into a bear of the story about that libertarian exit town in New Hampshire where they all moved in and then they ran for city council and then they abolished the school district and they did all and they abolished all the rules? And then this one lady kept feeding bears and they were like, please stop feeding bears. She was like, I thought there were no rules. And then they were all being mauled by bears. But this Marxist gun nut weed grower moves in. And he's like, I'm going to grow a weed and collect guns and wait for the Marxist revolution.

And they're like, but we're a libertarian town. He's like, well, what are you going to do? Actually, libertarian means you're nothing. No, it's my favorite, one of my favorite old school internet videos is the libertarian conference where it's like, well, I think the driver's licenses should exist. They're like, boo! Boo! I think there should be some competency in the driving. I remember saying that.

No, allow us to die in car crashes. We're approaching the break right now, but I really have been trying all week listeners. I swear to God, I've been trying to get people to talk to me about awesome stuff. The CES is weird. This is a broken CES. There's something wrong.

I do think that one plus I would say for the CES is it is actually a really great spot for you to come through think about the way in which technological products are offered and the role they play in your life. You know, like, are you satisfied with tech products that are

solely around convenience or solely around you know, assistive tech or solely around health or, you know, like, what is it that you want? And do you think that the industry and the sectors are interested in developing? Yeah. I think this is a great place. What are they interested in building rather than what are your problems?

I think there's a very good place. for coming and talking to people and getting sense of whether or not other people share those priorities with you. You and I saw something that we went away and bought, which was that Waco espresso maker. Yeah. You add hot water, pump it up. It gets to nine atmospheres. It ejects a

shot of espresso. It has no batteries. It's like, yeah, another thing is like, do you like coffee? Right. Imagine if you could have coffee on the go and it worked. The coffee was delicious. As a guy who flies around with an aeropress but whose wife prefers espresso to coffee concentrate, I just like literally walked off the trade floor and bought one because now I could, it's small enough I could put both of them in my bag and my wife can have an espresso and I can have a coffee concentrate.

If only all products are that good. Now, the upcoming advertisement, I assume, will be for a product that's even better than that and even more useful. If it's a podcast, you need to listen with complete attention. Put down your phone or else. 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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earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levant this plant to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds. Just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know.

Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back to the Better Offline CS experience, and we've got author, activist, and journalist Corey Doctor, Hello. And Gatjit's Sherlyn Lowe. Hi. And Garrison Davis, if it could happen here. How are you doing, Garrison? Oh, it's another beautiful CES morning. In beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. What have you seen today? Today, I finally did Haldi. I've been neglecting Haldi. What did you see? Huh. And that's CES.

Aldi is fun. I guess I also also had fun in the Amazon booth. We've been punishing them. Yeah, I assumed. I assumed you've been punishing them. We went in there to punish them. Yeah, no, it's if you lose your dog, you can use all the ring cameras in your neighborhood to find your pet. I have a $5,000 surveillance tower from a trailer that now will tell me if anyone walks near my house in any way so that I can dial 911 and claim there's a prowler. But will it measure their skull with calipers? Excuse me, will it measure their skull with calipers to tell you whether they are likely criminals?

Only on ring plus. With their new LIDAR system. Nice. Maybe. No, there's also this like ring like mesh network. I'm not sure if you saw that. Oh, they're doing this nest bullshit. Ring sidewalk, I think is what it's called.

Yeah, it's on by default, I think. If there is a Wi-Fi outage, they will act as a mesh to still be able to notify you if there's like movement around your house. There's no live video because of how weak... And with constraints. So it uses like point, like one percent of like the, of like a home's like Wi-Fi system to communicate peer-to-peer to send messages. My experience of those is they don't work very well. Like the Nest one, or if you ever try and install the Nest product and it tries to connect to a nest, another Nest product, it will break in my experience. But the thing that I found interesting about the pet finder is that,

it's basically making a consumer product based on the capacity that police have been using Ring 4 already, right? Be able to like find people and have, and have immediate, nearly immediate access to footage. And now they're just turning that into a consumer side product. So how does it work? You request that you're, you send a message probably to like to some like Amazon app about your pet being missing. And then it searches through all the Ring cameras in the neighborhood to see if you can find the pet. I think that is completely an utterly evil. I don't think regular people.

Well, it certainly answers the question, can you access people's footage? No, because they have it on. They immediately have it, right? They're talking about how this footage is like secured and encrypted and no one can see it. Meanwhile, they're offering products based on... Right. Not us.

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

it's like a really great product. The Surveillance Society, toward the aberrist with the university. I mean, it's sacrificing privacy for convenience. Just thinking... That's the entire gamble with this style of product. The last scene of the conversation,

just like ripping up the sideboards and everyone's houses to try and find the ring cameras. Very horrible. So wait, but you were in Haldi. What did you see in there? Haldi. Again, more, more LLM rapper robots.

A lot of smaller, smaller, like, robots, not like the big, the big ones. What were the robots doing? I looked at a few robots for, like, learning robots for kids. For it's, like, kind of a toy, and it's also, like, supposed to be some kind of learning assistant.

Kids see through that so quickly, I must be clear. Or they get tired of it in, like, two minutes. Yes. No, it definitely looked. The ones that I saw, including from this company, their product was called Yonbo, Yanbo X-1, which they thought. Rolls off the tongue. It's a, it's a, it's a Chinese, Y, NBO, Yenbo. It's Chinese for, it sounds similar to the word for hug. Right. But this is, they, they, yeah. Oh, okay. I don't speak any other languages. Like, this is for natural language, prompting. this is to help, allegedly, according to them,

will help kids learn another language. The US side product just as chat GPT. So if you're wanting to learn another language through chat GPT, this is what it'll do. The Wi-Fi and Haldi is kind of off, so it's hard to get good product. It's hard to go to good baseline for how good the product is,

which everyone would assert to me. What were you going to say, Sheldon? I was going to say kind of off was the understatement of the Wi-Fi situation that the Venetian this year, it was freaking terrible. It's always as bad. It's all, it's worse this year because even the Wi-Fi was down. It was always the signal is always bad.

By the time you approach to Venetian, you have no more 5G RLTE. But like in the expo, their own in-house Wi-Fi was a, that the irony of that was just ridiculous. I wonder if that's because everyone has these GPT wrappers. Yeah, it's because everyone's just pummeling AWS. It's worse than ever, yeah. Just beating the fuck out of it. But yeah, we tried, we tried to give a demonstration where we'd teach us like,

a Chinese word. And so, like, yeah, if you, you can learn a word. Speak a little Chinese. But you can't, you can't actually, like, learn grammar. And they can't, like, correct a child to actually improve language. And you can actually learn to speak a language. You can learn individual words, but that's not, that's not language learning, right? You can do that, you can do a lingo.

And that's not teaching you a language. Well, Google, if you were just looking for a word. And duolingo is already something that people who teach languages are like, this is not great. All the, all the features that make duolingo, duolingo sticky, cut against the pedagogical value of it as a language training tool. So there was a lot of stuff like that.

I did ask them about what their plans are if the API for chat GPT gets more expensive. They said they do not expect that in the near future. But they have like five other LLMs that they work with, specifically their product is mostly in China right now.

So they can swap. They can swap. they can talk to the LLM whenever they want to. Which like, doesn't that kind of impact the quality of the experience? Yes, because each, because each LLM is prompted differently. Yes. I love that, though. It's like, what if something bad happens?

What if it doesn't? But if it doesn't? And even if it does, we'll just use something good. Well, I have a slightly different gloss on this, though, because we were saying before that all these products seem undifferentiated. And if they're all undifferentiated because they're just a rapper on top of chat, GPT, and they're vulnerable to changes. That's one thing.

And it maybe speaks well for ChatGPT and that they'll have whatever companies among these are successful, it'll have them over a barrel and it can jack at the price on threat of bricking their products and making their customers angry at them. But if the case is that ChatGPT is a commodity back in, and there's 50 companies in China that can do the same thing at a tenth of the price. And ChatGPT's future plan is someday there will be so many people so reliant on us that we can charge $200 for something we're charging $2 for. the answer is the minute they start charging $200, there will be 50 Chinese companies that will charge you $2. A Brian Chesky of Airbnb even, who's like a disgusting booster who was specifically involved in making sure clammy Sam Altman managed to become CEO again. He literally has said, I'll use Chinese LLMs every day, which is really funny.

So really, it's one of the two. It's going to be either, but I also don't think because their API sales are like a small part of their revenue. It's just actually, here's a question, general question. Anyone hear about anyone using Anthropics models? Even once? I have not heard Anthropic mentioned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean specifically on the floor as powering.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know what? Oh, Pebble. Pebble uses Cloud. Oh, really? Interesting. But to just do the... For the ring, A, yeah, yeah, yeah. For the answering.

But they said that was on device. There is no on-device version of Claude. Oh, Pebble, I was so nice about you. Now I have to go and look into your innards. I can go, we should go ask the founder. No, I'm genuinely curious about that, because there is no. on-device version of

of a GPT or any of the... Now you're making me question if I should like double-chat who I'm talking about. I think that that's worthwhile. Not because... But the thing is, I'm a horrible freak that looks at this stuff constantly. So my natural thought was like,

what do you mean? And I will admit, the $75 pebble ring, supposedly on-device as well, that did seem a little rich to me. What do you mean by rich? As in like an on-device model on a tiny ring? It's not on the ring.

So it's on the phone. It's on the phone, yes. But they're saying it's, if it needs to go through Claude, that's not, I don't know, there's something weird there. And again, that's something that will increase in price. Another on-offing up there. Alleged on-device product is the Luna pendant, which is real-time AI emotion tracking. Okay.

Oh, well, because it's not doing anything real, you can put a random number. Well, it's not, actually it is. It is listening to every single thing you say and building emotional assessments based on what you say. what you say, as well as, you know, whatever kind of biometrics that can connect from a pendant resting on your, like, chest. Did they mention what the customer might be? No, not really. Because this always immediately goes to, yeah, people with autism.

We already ran into someone with a dog, a dog toy today. It was like, it could help autistic children. This was not, this was not marketed to that. What is this for then? This is, this is for, I wouldn't say, women. That was what they said. The classic doesn't understand emotion. Women love to be told what are we feeling.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We finally found a device to be sexist without the need of a man. Without the mental need. All of the design was going that way to me. That's pretty femme coded, yeah. Yes. And it measures like six or seven. That was a mistake.

I'm sorry. Oh, is that like a young people? It does like six or seven different emotions. but it's mostly done just through listening. On device, though, they do not upload the audio to the cloud. Nice. Okay. It is on device. So no biometric data just listening?

That's unclear. Okay. And you know when it's unclear it was. It was mostly listening. Because, again, I'm, some... Do you mind if I look? I honestly... I honestly...

Slight language barriers when trying to talk with some of these boots here. I would respect them so much if it was for guys. if it was just like, you guys never seem to know. It does HRV. Yeah. It's a sound tone, HR, hearty variability, breathing and movement. That's what it was. Yeah. So it's resting on your chest.

So it can have some, some heart, some breathing. But mostly it's just through listening to everything you say. The reason I ask is that's the only thing that differentiates it from like the halo tone wearable from A. just go by Amazon that's already doing the same thing. I'm very, like I have a good memory for all the devices that try to tell me what I'm feeling and tell me to chill out, down. So like this. this is a sort of device that reminds.

And there's another product that was at CES that was like clearly men made this for women. It was like a bra insert to like be a wearable to detect your, detect your boobs. Well, no, your metrics. It's kind of for gym purposes when you're working out. And I was just like, if you've paid any attention to the women's sports bra industry discourse at all,

it's that we've been asking for these bra inserts to be removed or sewn in. We don't want them to be removable fallout when they're trying. We just want them to. remain in place or just be done with. One of those classic situations of did you talk to a woman before or after you made this? Or anything else, right? Like if you're designing a product for someone in a wheelchair, have you worked with someone who's actually using a wheelchair?

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

CES is like, without you, we will sell to you. Yeah, it's Henry Ford, right? If I ask people what they wanted,

they'd say a faster horse, right? And so we're here to tell you what you want. Yeah, yeah, but these people would sell you like horses to make the horses faster

rather than, it's like these people don't connect to anything. I'm still sitting there trying to work out what that pendant is for, I'm going to be honest. Like,

what alien? Well, sometimes it's too useful to know if you're calm or if you're angry. Oh, I know when I met. And now I can tell you.

Your lips are moving. Yeah, yeah. I'm breathing. I recently started somatic therapy. And so I think I can understand the idea of the benefits of knowing when you're feeling something, identifying it, and kind of like staying with it. But I don't think a pendant is going to tell me in real time. And it's not built for that. Exactly.

Or with any of that. I mean, what are you supposed to be doing? Like looking down and going, oh, no, I'm angry. And then why? And then breathe. It does connect to an app where. Oh, okay. Oh, thank Christ. It has, like, analysis of like how you're feeling, how often you're feeling, you know, heart rate.

Right. This reminds me of Victoria's song posting the aura ring. Think of just like, stressed. Like, collected barrenning, seven hours, stressed. Oh, God. So what, you got a lot of paper there. I just like collecting these. That's fine.

Anything else you regarded? Oh, I guess I'll talk about the one that I feel the weirdest about. Awesome. This is another CES Innovation Award winner. Oh dear. This is from South Korea. This is the Self-Insight Therapy Resolve XR. Oh.

Okay. Well, I've got most of it from the name. This is a VR experience to give you a final goodbye to a deceased friend. Oh, Jesus, So the Black Mirror episode. So we have seen something as before. We have seen these kind of like a VR experience. that are either fully scripted or done with like an AI.

And I thought that's what this, that this was. I thought this was just another one of those. And I was surprised why it won an innovation award, because we've seen this stuff years ago. Yeah. This, the reason why it's different is that this is not an AI. This is not an AI system. This is not a pre-recorded movie either.

This is an avatar puppeted by a therapist as a part of a, as a part of like a therapy program where you, and enter into it for a short amount of time to give this visual, like, therapeutic exercise to someone when they weren't able to say goodbye to a family member, usually after some kind of accident is what this was. And they talked about a few instances of like this really bad plane crash last year.

And that was like the main use case that's seen. It's right now just available in Korea. They're trying to expand to Japan and the United States where they would need to partner with therapy. in those countries. So, yeah, I feel really odd about these types of products, obviously, specifically like the digital avatar nature of it. Yeah.

If you have a recording of your of your deceased loved one's voice, it can try to clone the voice. So it does use AI. So it does use AI for the voice, but the person, there's the therapist, the puppeteer. Puppetting it who will do text to speech. So they will text to speech. the, in like, you know, whatever the, whatever the person will, like, say.

It's text to speech as well. So, no, it is text. That's what it is. It is text to speech. So, like, the, the therapist that's puppeting it, the words coming out of the avatar are from a therapist who's typing out, who's typing out as a part of this therapeutic exercise. But that then will be, that will come out is in a cloned voice of the deceased person. Are they also controlling, like, the gestures? When you see puppeting the...

Yes, there is a pre-recorded set of movement. set of movements that they can initiate. This sounds traumatizing. They said that the people have used it have liked it and there's a video of course they're going to say that obviously. Yeah, people hate it. But that's, you know, and I saw, I saw a footage of someone using it. I think it is, it is good that this isn't just an AI LLM who's just talking as your, as your,

as your dead ground. And it's not pretending to be that. it is a therapeutic experience and it is an exercise. Where you type in... Similar, well, the person, you know, you're wearing VR goggles so you see the avatar in like a setting

and you like say goodbye and get some kind of closure as a part of a therapeutic experience. And like there's versions that we already just do this in therapy. Like you already can do these sort of exercises with therapy. This is putting in kind of an avatar over it.

I don't feel great about the avatar. But this is, this is certainly better and more thoughtful than just talking to it, just talking to a, in LLM, the fact that it's you are partnering with a therapist who you've already been working with, who already knows you. Yeah.

For people, like, getting extreme emotional grief. Yeah, I can see that. They did stress that. Like, this isn't for everybody. This is for people like dealing with an extreme emotional grief. And I, you know, ask, like, you know, why did you choose, you know, why is it not just an AI? And they're like, well, I mean, these people are very traumatized and you actually need a skill.

I give them, I give them some credit. If that's their reaction to it, yeah. I'm less, like, I'm not mad at it. Because if they're very much like, this is very specific, I'm all right with that. And this is my experience at the booth, because I went in very hostile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I was very hostile. And they didn't necessarily win me over, but I understood why the product exists over time more.

And I was like, yeah, I, I feel very odd. Not odd. I think digital, I think digital necromancy is bad. Yes, yeah. I've, every CES I've been to, there's, I've done some report. on digital necromancy. The fact that it's cloning the voice I don't love, but the product's not for me. I would not want to hear an AI voice of my dead friend. But that is me, and I'm, you know, as a Gen Z Canadian American, I don't want this. For some people who are using

this product, that might help them in certain settings with an awareness that this is, you know, this is an avatar, this is a replica, you're talking to a therapist. I'm not a therapist, but my view on that is like, there are certain things where it's leading you to get to conclusions. And I feel like adding a disembodied digital avatar controlled by a keyboard, I'm like, if this helps someone brilliant, but it's also just like, that's just, it's adding a layer of something that probably will get in the way of feeling better because it's like, like change comes from within. Yeah, this is, this is, this is the Gestalt to empty chair technique. That's the, that's the therapy technique. I want to raise another point. So Hagen Blix was on this machine kills talking about, um, there,

chat therapists. Yeah. And how the temptation on the firms that are delivering therapy over chat is to pile more chat windows on a single therapist and to get them to multitask and then multi-multitask. And so I'm not saying this firm is doing it. I'm saying that this is a mode of therapy that is uniquely amenable to speedups that are anti-patient and antithotherapists. I have also a thought, right, which is when I,

I was mostly furious about this until you mentioned this was for extreme scenario, extreme cases of grief. And I was like, okay, I can imagine if someone is so deep in their grief that they wouldn't respond to anything but an avatar. You need anything. You need anything. But then I think about, like, even myself thinking about going through the process of anyone that has, you know, a friend died in a car accident two years ago. Like if the thought of talking to an embodied version of him and hearing his voice just get me out of my grief is already dubious. But then you have to. I was like, oh, but all kinds of therapy.

there was a little resistance to that sort of grief therapy anyway. So I was trying to make my peace with that. Then I remember, this is XR. You're going to have to convince the person who's an extreme grief to put on a headset. Yeah, yes. Just strap this brick to you. Stop crying for five seconds and strap this brick to you. Trapped yourself.

That's thingy. Yeah, this is something that you're going to, I don't think they're getting convinced into doing this. I think it's something that they will, you know, this is an option that they can choose from. And I think also specifically, this is not like an extended thing. It's just something you like go to. talk to your friend. It's, it is a, it is to give you like a closure. Yeah, a one-time session. It's a one-time, like, good, like, like, closure exercise. I'm also just like, that you also have it for a pet. They also have a pet. Okay. That makes that,

that now, I'm now fully against this because now it's like closure isn't always clean. Yes, absolutely. Are they going to voice close? Life is messy. No, life is messy, but also, you don't get closure on things. Therapy is about finding, finding a way through when you don't. It's a gift you give yourself. not a thing you get from someone else. That's the more like larger, like essential resistance that I have to this is hearing the pet thing really feels me full of angry bio. Meow meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow,

meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, no, it's just also like, you lost your pet. What the fuck they're seeing like a 3D cat or dog? Like, I mean, Canada, one of Canada's most beloved prime minister is John Defenbaker used to go get advice for running the country from his dog's ghost. What?

That was dead air there. It's true. What's the, is the pet solution different from me? drafted Johnny Manseal based on a homeless person's idea. I love this. Tell me everything. That's all I know. We learned it in history. I was 14 years old. That's all I remember. It's literally the only thing I know about John Defenbaker. My dog's ghost. There's a lot of buildings named after him as well. But he did, did you learn this? Do you grow up in Canada? Did you learn this in ninth grade history?

No, by then I was already in the States. Oh, okay. So you didn't get a full year about just the Canadian Pacific Railroad, World War I and John Defenbaker's dead dog. We got a little bit of the railroad, but that's it. You missed the year of Canadian education around dog ghosts. I did miss that one. We're going to put them on the new 50, the dog ghost. That's good. Trudeau had a lot of them. Yeah.

Supreme Leader Carney will get right on that. I just see this stuff and hearing the pet thing, I'm like, because my thought process with this was like, okay, extreme situations. But then I'm like... The pet thing, I don't, yeah. No, I hear pet and I'm like, so it's not extreme. situation. Because my thought was, okay, if this is very specific, like, deep in the box of tools, we've tried everything, fuck yeah, okay. But we'll help you with your pet. And also if your

favorite flavor of ice cream is sold out at Baskin-Romans, we've got a model for that. But it's also preparing you, I don't know, some of the most difficult things in therapy for me have been accepting there is no such thing as closure in some cases. You will never have that. The other thing I don't like about the pet thing is that it is, that is a reoccurring feature. You can visit the Yeah, it's like you create a space. More than once. I will say now that I'm reading the brochure It is not just about the grief I think there's parts of this that sound like

They make sense So the resolve XR part of it That's talking about the Gestalt empty chair thing It's also like not just about grief But it's about like confronting difficult Like conflict moments That one I could learn to deal with Because like whenever I'm dealing with like a manipulative talker

And I don't know how to like respond And I have these emotional reactions bubble up A bit of practice into dealing with you know The thing is You are completely correct I sound like another LM there. But these are the soft edges where these people work their ways in.

It's like, well, there could be a situation where it makes sense. They're not preparing for a situation. If they have, I can revisit my dead dog. They're just like, fuck it. Can I say enough of the thing? It's a structural problem with small batch products, right? You just want to expand the market.

I'll also point out that on the brochure, this, you should have said it, yeah, but they are calling the grief part of it, Good Morning with a U. And I'm just like, no. I missed that. I love having good morning. That's very good.

That tells me this is a shit. That's hairdresser's business name, grade pun. It's right. It would curl up and die. Good morning. Like a bike shop called bike curious. Like, Jesus fucking Christ. That to me is bad.

That's the thing. I'm really trying here, folks. I'm trying to find some stuff. I'm trying to look not cynically about it. Well, there's a bazillion AI cooking products. I did see. I did see. We saw one.

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

Right. You still have to do a lot of work. It's going to have hoses that are just full of congealed schmuts. Oh, yeah. Yeah, at some point, like three days in, it's going to just be congealed fat. The cleaning is going to be a nightmare. it's easier just to cook. It reminds me of those videos where the influencers going,

these are my simple meals, no cook simple meals. Step one caught some garlic. And it's just like, no, no, no, you're cooking. You're cooking. You put a piece of cardboard in the microwave. That's going to be more efficient if you really want to live a lifestyle where you don't cook. Enough about British cooking.

I just learned from Garbage Ryan about kitchen cells, which is the Reddit foreign for insoles who cook elaborate meals and then feel bad about themselves. That's fun. Yeah. Good for them. Yeah. That's a better name than Good Morning Kitchen cells.

So you love from someone else. Sorry. So that was a bitchy thing to say. But no, wait. So these people are like insoles who are just like, I'm going to make a fucking firecloth meal. So the two varieties are very elaborate meal I cooked with a caption that is just like, I want to die.

Or like someone who's literally microwaved a piece of cardboard and the caption is, I'm a piece of shit. That's funny. That's funny. See, that second one is really funny. Self-depriving. Actually, no, the idea of doing like a five-course tasting menu and doing that is actually really good too.

No, that's pretty good. But are they serious or is this? So this was the thing Garbage Ryan said is he wasn't sure to what extent it was a bit. He thinks for some of them it's a bit and for some of them it's not. Yeah. It's like R slash male living space. Yeah, like every, like male living space.

I love those where it's just like a TV, like a high sense TV on top of the box that the high sense TV came in and like an Apple TV and a PlayStation 5 with like bent cables because like straight out the box plugs. I love that. My favorite one was the guy who bought a church and he had a, he had a bed and a little table and in a church. And his, his caption was any suggestions for what else to do with this room. Do an exorcism. I mean, the thing you're going to do in six months involving a new, sorry, but it's, why did you buy a church? There is this guy on us. Josh Scalzi bought a church. They're cheap. Religion is failing in America. I don't know if that's

good or bad. Now, I did see this guy on Instagram that I've been following for like a while where he bought like a house in a Eastern European country for 5,000 euro. And he has put so much money into it, just making it. And he's actually got like walls now. He's like, day 5,000 to buy my 5,000 euro house. My friend Kujuk came down. and it's just like this Eastern European guy who you could shoot with a gun and it would just bounce the fuck off. Boris the bullet catch.

Yeah, yeah, it's all of these guys who are just like actual work and stiffs who are like, this is going to get me promo because they all make money off of it, which is cool actually. Actually, in a weird way, likely helps the local economy. But it is funny watching just the American guys being like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,

infrastructure doesn't work some places. Yeah, I, well, as we wrap up this half an hour section, I'm going to advertise something now. It's called a stuff buyer. Go to stuffbuyer. And whatever you hear next, ignore that URL. That's not always. Stuffbuyer.

This is where you're going to buy your next products. Thank you, please. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

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Open your free, I Heart Radio app. Search Learn the Hardway and listen now. I am being gangstalked. Welcome back to Better Offline. I'm at Zittron. We have wonderful crap with us, of course, journalist, activist, and of course, I was... Author?

Yeah, author. We're keeping it. It's fine. Author, Cory Dr. Hello. I'm so sorry. That's okay. Garrison Davis, if it could happen here. There's been a white van outside this hotel the entire time.

Yeah, and they're only looking for me. Sherlin Lower of Engadgett, and we're going to actually start with some Engadgett things. What are Engadgett's best of CES? Like, what was the stuff that Engadget actually liked? I don't know if you'll hate us for this because we talked earlier in the episode about this. We as a team awarded the Lego SmartPlay, Smart Break, System. Totally fine. The best in show.

It was a show-off hands type of vote by the time we had gotten around to the last one. And like we were doing rank choice voting too So like we had to go around the room Everyone very well We were ready to stay I know thank you We were we've been progressive for a very long time We were We were dedicated

We're like however long this takes to find the best in show We're gonna stay all through the night And then we got through the first few candidates And then we got to Lego and then like more than half Way more than half of hands went up And we're like well good thing We don't need to stay the rest of the night then It's quite obvious

Yeah Some quick math was done So anyway I think the And Gadget's Best of CES Awards are going to reflect in gadgets' choice, and gadgets' taste. Yeah, but that's good.

Right, I'm glad. I think it shows that we're a bunch of childish kids, nerds, and that sort of thing. And I like that about my team. And also then we had other winners like, you'll see our list of winners include things like TVs, laptops, concept devices. I've got to look at this thrown toilet-mounted health track.

That's not an award, to be clear. That's the weirdest gadgets. All the coolest tech. When you said throne, I heard THROWN, and I'm like, is it a shuriken? Ed, I love that you got confused because that's very good feedback for the team that I've been trying to fight with about the headlines. Yeah, that completely confused me because the fist measure, oh. Yeah, put it, I'm just going to show them. You've only been drinking Diet Cokes for seven years.

That will tell you. We did not give that thing in a war. Okay, so your best of CES. I will stop trying to anticipate your denim on. Ooh, okay. I mean, I can, I'd do that too. Our best of CES includes like the LG wallpaper TV. that was shown this.

You're very classic CES type of product. What's good about it? Yeah. It's very thin, very impressive. It's lost that sound bar base that used to be what it came out of. And then there's no cables except for the power cord because it's got the wireless control center that you use. Oh, is that the brick that is kind of.

Yeah, the little, yeah, you could tuck it away out of sight. Low latency. Yeah, exactly. And I saw that. And I was kind of like, I love that. It's like way, it's like super expensive out of the range of most people. But it's cool tech. Yes.

Also, so wait, wait, does the thing go on it plugs in the wall? still. There's still a power cord for the TV itself. But HDMI and such comes out in the wireless. Did you get the price on the wallpaper one or if they not said it yet? I have had so many numbers. That's okay. Don't worry about it's hard to remember. And do they do the surveillance that is endemic to smart TVs or is it like a dumb TV

when it comes to sending information about what you're watching back to? Yeah, I don't know that either. I had our TV experts cover it. I just know that we put. I mean, consumer union, every time they look at TVs, they're like, every one of these. Very good one for us to look into. Yeah. The stuff like the wallpaper TV and the transparent TV aren't even really marketed towards most homes.

They're kind of for like hotel lobbies or for like, for like, for like, for like, for like, for like, for like, for like, for like, for like, it feels like more like business. Could be one day. It feels like more like something eventually. Yeah. A person might be buy rather than the transparent one, which, you know what, keep fucking that chicken. Like, you bring that weird shit with you. Yeah. I love that.

I love it. Speaking of weird shit, Lenovo, we this year, we're like, we really like this thing. We want to give it an award. Let's think about, like how. Which Lenovo, Prigo, um, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 and Unile. rollable concept. Is that the one that kind of rolls out? Yes. It's a gaming laptop, but its screen can expand by rolling out into like 23.8

inches of space. And so you can stop in between at 21.5 inches or so. So you get like different aspect ratios when you're gaming and you just want to like drill in or you want to have discord show up on the ride or whatever. That's pretty. And the OS knows what to what extent you've unrolled it. And that is always been the trick, right? Not understanding how to place these items on the screen, but it's gotten there.

That's cool. And that's just a concept though for now, right? It's just a concept. But last year they had a concept with the swivel, which ended up being real. Actually, the auto twist, they're calling it this year. Very cool. But it's a laptop? Yeah, it's a gaming laptop.

So this is like butterfly keyboard, but butterfly screen. But it like slowly rolls out. Yeah, it rolls out. It's not like a fold out. Oh, you press a button and it goes, yeah. Yes. Oh my God, I need to show you a video. You don't unroll it like a...

No, not by hand, no. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's... I like that. I also think that we're approaching the point where we're limited by form factors, so that is cool. I hope they're able to do it in anything approaching affordability. Yeah, right. I know. That's not, yeah. Same time, for what, like a decade? We've talked about, like, rollable screens, pendable screens. It's nice to see that in a consumer tech housing.

And not janky. And not janky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had a little wobble, like Robert Evans mentioned. It has a little bubble, but I'm kind of like, it's a concept. It's a concept. For a concept. I've seen more. For a concept, you're not talking about selling it. I kind of like it. But what else you got on the list? I want to shout out the IXI AutoFocus slash Adaptive Eyewear. Okay, so they're not officially at CES. I think they parachuted. They dropped in.

They were like, let's take some meetings. These are, you know how multifocal slash bifocal glasses right now are very clunky. I don't know that. I don't know that. So some people might know, but they get very clunky and very chunky because just the technology isn't there yet.

I have a stupid question. Bifocal. What is this? So the top half, so some people have both nearsighted and far sided as you age. So one prescription doesn't cut it. You need one, like, and sometimes they cut your lens so that the top half is for your long-sided, and the bottom half is for you to look at close-by things.

Right. That's what I have in this lens. Oh, okay. And mine is progressive, so it's not a sharp line. It gets more magnified the further down it goes. Oh, okay. So those are like multifocal. Yeah.

So IXI has technology. I'm very curious what you think about this, Corey, where it's using a mix of like LEDs around the lens to detect your gaze and where you're looking. and then a liquid crystal lens layer that changes the prescription of the lens. So wherever you're looking at something, it's just detecting the right prescription and just working the way it should. Also, we did see a demo. Our Matt Smith took a demo and he was impressed. We've already interviewed IXI in September.

We've known this tech was coming, but now they're at CES with a working demo. I love that. It worked. So what I want to know is like, so this sounds amazing. I had cataract surgery last year. And I got what's called, oh, God, I can't remember, monofocus. So this eye is focused at, monovision rather. This eye is focused at 23 inches.

This eye is focused at 25 feet. My brain switches between them, depending on what I'm looking at. And then this is the only corrective region in my glasses. It's on the distance eye. And it's a close-up region so that if I'm reading on this side, I don't have to turn my head. Right. But I can get, like, I just went skiing without my glasses on for the first time.

My life is fucking amazing. Oh, wow. No fog, nothing. Like just so great. Scooby diving. Just terrific. The thing I'd be worried about, as a man who has dropped his glasses, 14 million times, is what happens when these things fall off your face?

Well, I don't know yet. I think it has to depend on who they team up with on the frames as well and how they build these into, like retail ready products. I don't have all the details yet because it was a late entrant to our CES Awards discussions. It's an amazing idea. But also, and the fact that they made it work is incredible. And is there anything more consumer- tech than that.

Right, right. Glasses. And also, one more thing. Spectacle technology, eye glasses technology hasn't changed, has been stagnant since the 1950s. So for something like this to happen, it would be cool.

And also, imagine getting like one pair of lenses that you, theoretically, hypothetically, don't need to keep changing as your eye, you know, worsen or changes. That could be sustainable. Could be just for your cost, for your budget. That would be great too.

So I just think there's so much potential. We were so excited about it. That's really cool. Multiple people could wear the glasses, I guess. Could be. I can't say because I think for them, they can't say things. I'd love to, sure. The FDA needs to root.

I'd love to know, like, can you put it in? I'm painting D&D minis mode and have it ratchet up to like a macro lens. Hypothetically, why not? You know, my grandfather was a watchmaker and he wore a jewelers loop. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, pop-eye squint, right? Like, if you could just be like, no, I'm on the job now.

I'm fixing a watch movement and it just suddenly zooms up, you know. Yeah. I gotta be pretty dope. That's so cool. That's just really cool technology. So we were very glad we were able to see it here. And then we, you know, we talked about the wheel move earlier in the episode. We gave the wheel move an award.

We just didn't see enough sustainable slash transport-related technologies to have something for those categories. Wait, you literally just... There were things. They just weren't good. No, no, I mean, you didn't have anything you could give an award to. I mean, all this personal helicopters, I think, could serve a great public service. Oh, that's true. Personal helicopters here?

Oh, yeah. Did you see Richter? No. So, Richter was from last year. Oh, I talked, I talked with Richter last year.

There's, there was, there was, I saw two personal helicopters this year, one of them is Richter. Yeah, I think, I think we should be giving,

giving those out to, uh, me. No, not to you, you're not, you're not rich enough. Woo!

I think we should be giving the personal helicopters to, like, maybe the, the top, like, 0.5% of people. Everyone should have,

free. In a room with, whirling blades on the ceiling. Free. No, they should all, We should all, as a victory trophy for, you won, you won, you won society. Instead of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here, we're going to give you this personal helicopter. It's going to work great. It'll be fine. Just fly it as much as you want. That pairs very nicely with this thing we saw. Oh, God. We saw a personal airbag for old people worried about breaking their hips. And it sounds like, you fall?

Yeah. It sounds like a good idea until you learn the details. Well, the business model. Yes. So the business model is, so if you fall over, they call the emergency services. That's a $40 a month subscription. Which is like, and I said to the guy like, is Twilio that expensive?

Because like that's how you're paying like tiny amounts of money for one take. There's so many fall detection. Yeah. Like, there's no fucking way in hell. And you can't repack the airbag after you use it. So it's, it's, uh, single use. You get $400 for two airbags. What?

And 40 bucks a month. Otherwise, all it does is the airbag thing. Then why are you paying? They're trying to scam money out of people. They're trying to scam it from Medicare. They were trying to get Medicare approval. I have to say as a man who's also had a hip replacement, but two hip replacements and was the youngest person on the ward when I had it done.

That like, you know, a $40 a month subscription from an 80-year-old does not generate that much revenue over the entire. You're not in months. But also like 40 bucks. Fuck you, man. It's a Twilio thing. You're just paying. Twilio. Also, then wouldn't you want to make sure the airbag is repackable? Because then you have a long yours subscription. We don't know if it's going to work. If the old person with the arthritis

repacks it, then we're worried that they'll break a hip. Well, but then they stop paying the $40 a month once they deploy it. Well, their argument is if you get saved from breaking a hip twice in a row, you'll happily buy another set of airbags. That may be true. Yeah. But it's just, I'm like, the more I think about it's like, oh yeah, it's 40 bucks a month for the texts, which costs like, a tenth of a cent. Yeah. Which you will also only have happen, ideally never. Twice in the life of the product, right?

Like, ideally never, but if you use them, this will cost them 50. So if you own it for 10 years, right? Yeah, what are you actually paying for? You have paid several thousand dollars to send at most two taxes. And what was that cost again? 800 bucks for $800 and then $40 a month. That's right. That's right.

And he was like, we're working. There's no Medicare code for this yet, but we're working on it. I'm sure. I'm sure that's all they're working on. I could see the Medicare case for it, right? If you're starting to get inner ear problems or if you're old and brittle or whatever you balance. I can see the point of it. I can see why Medicare would buy you a set of airbags.

Just not the fucking subscription. Fuck you. Like make the subscription five bucks a month. Like that, even then you're like, you're still making insane margin. My guess, these things, they're manufacturing them in small runs. It's costing them more than 800 bucks that they're losing money on the 800 bucks. And they're like, this is how we will make a profit is what. will sell a loss leader and will.

Sounds like a bad business to me. It does. Well, it sounds like a case for like public investment in medical technology. Whoa. What a novel idea. We need more knife drones. Very true.

Is that what we're calling the personal helicopter now? No, no. No, ideal. In a perfect world. No, the personal helicopters are very safe and you're very rich and you need one. Yes. Try them out.

You don't need training. There's an app for that. No, you're smart. You're rich. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just let AGI run it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've built an obstacle course for it.

You can fly it over like lava and acid and broken glass. And you'll be fine. You have the lathe of heaven. You'll be the mandate of heaven even, sorry. I like the lathe of heaven. My brain just like, what words do you need? I don't fucking know. We've just lathed that into existence.

That's LaGuin, the lathe of heaven. There we go. Yes, thank you. Look for too much farming in Earthsea. Yeah, it's, I'm actually a little sad. You don't have more... I'm not saying this is a criticism. It's like...

But it's like... In those categories, right? Yeah. But even last year, it felt like there was more yucks. There was more stuff we could look at. Yeah, exactly. More square footage is taken up by the LLM rappers and by just...

And by robotics. Right. Sometimes combined. Sometimes it's a robot. Yes, both. Why not both? Did you see the Project Ava thing by Razor? Yeah, we've talked about the Wife Tube a lot.

I haven't... I haven't... I've been waiting to see the project Ava thing. I have not seen it yet. It's this tube with... They're just a little of them and it with a hentai wife. And you talk to the hentai wife. So it's like, it's like Oscar in there or something?

I don't know the name of the, oh, uh, Kira, I guess is the name of, Yeah, it's Project, it's Project Ava. Kira is apparently some anime thing. And then you can have a guy with tattoos or you can have a woman in a business suit. Got it. It's like, it's like, yeah, we talked about it. Yeah. And it's, it's just like, I feel like if you try and not that they're selling it's

concept, if you try and buy one, they should put you on a fucking list. No, well, I did, I did walk by that, that, that really, grow a sex robot in... Oh, Lavences, Emily, right? Emily. I did not see this sex, but tell me everything. I had a hard time looking at it. Like, I walked up to this side, and I tried looking at its hands, and it just looked like a

corpse. Let's start simple. What is this? This is a robot that looks kind of like a woman. And you meant a sex. So we're talking real doll style. Yes. Yes.

Okay. And allegedly, this is something that you can have intercourse with. Uh-huh. And I walked up to the side, and it has very realistic looking skin texture, but its head moves like an old Disney animatronic. And it has like an LLN that's 69 trying to talk and move its mouth. And I stood there for about 10 seconds, and I had to leave. I walked around the corner, and they had the little AI avatar section,

which wasn't working because of the Wi-Fi. Nice. But it's like the AI avatar that you can talk to, which is synced to the little jack-off robot. So you can talk to the AI and then it can jack you off. That is a hell of a Goon Cave accessory. Yeah, well, and also the jack-off robot. This company's been around since 2014.

Well, no, this is still the Love Sense. Lovens, yeah, yeah. Lovence and Booth. And they've been around for a while. It did not look that good, but yes. But it connects to games as well. It connects to online gaming. Oh, wow.

So it really is a Goon-Cave. You can- Fuck Tetris? Well, you know, if they can connect that to... You know, they've been trying to find a way into making the Tetris movie for years. I thought you were going to be like, they've been trying to fuck Tetris for years. We never worked out. This is the plot of the Tetris movie, finally. If they can connect it to like Final Fantasy 7 remake and have Cloud, then maybe they could have a real product on their hands.

Well, maybe they should do that. Because Cloud has a wonderful cross-dressing section. And also Cloud completely autistic and not horny at all. No, I think... That whole game is him trying to avoid having sex. I think you... I think you would be a great addition. This is so...

But, like, I'm not going to judge him for the sex, but whatever, but it's also just like, the idea that you looked at it and immediately faced revulsion. It made me feel... Not in, like, a, not in just like a Christian moralism way. Not in a judgment way. Mostly, well, a little bit. But mostly in like an uncanny valley way.

I was engaged in this thing, it would feel kind of like necrophilia. Oh, God. And realistic skin is not a phrase that I like saying how loud. Sex dolls have been a thing for a while. Yeah, yes. It's just the AI side of it. It's just the AI thing.

It's, yeah. But for me, that increases the uncanny value. Exactly. I agree. If it's just a limp object, then it is a necrophilia thing, but it's simple. Yeah, you just. The fact that it's trying to kind of behave human, I think, makes, makes more, makes that reaction, makes that negative uncanny valley reaction a bit stronger. Very strange.

And also, they put them in odd places. It sounds like they don't have a, do they have a sex? in here? No, not at... It's in like the health tech sex. Yeah, it's called A to D. Notoriously, right, there was a Bastion show that was rescinded for us.

Yeah, Boston show. Yeah, for a woman sex toy. That was like, not Linus, it was Laura Di Carlo. That's it. Yeah. And so they've had this love hate relationship. I mean, when I was coming 20 some years ago, this was Oh my mom was always a thing. Well, and it was being held at the same time as the adult show.

Well, Avian, yeah. And so people would, there would be this kind of crossover and you could go to the parties sometimes at Avian and stuff. You had to see... I had to walk past some of the Avian Expo areas and the booths to get to a Lenovo briefing one time. Wow. That rules. It was fun. I'm so sad. I'm so sad I missed it. I like the idea that these all these stayed kind of like tech executives having to walk past their ass blast of 5,000 or what have you.

It was fun. What people do with their bombs is fine. No, it's just very strange to have it like sticking in the middle of like the various health tracking LLMs. Was it empowered by any children? There was an, it says AI power, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. Was it AI or LLM powered? Because it's an LL, I mean, it's the, at least like the, the anime one was more interactable.

Oh, so that Project Ava was, yeah, I meant the sex bar. No, I'm talking about that, yeah. Oh, God. Because it has, it has the AI avatar hooked up to the jacking off machine. And yeah, it is, it is. You got this. So this is like in the NES where you had the robot that would pick up the spinning top, and it would match the action on the screen.

So you had a physical robot. You had a virtual robot. It's just like the original NES. Yeah, but basically. With fucking. Cuck hung. And it's like, it's like, right next to like three like smartwatch booths. That was the thing I was saying.

That's exactly it. It's like you've got the Bono Max 5,000. Can you imagine paying for the smart watch booth and showing us? Yeah. Guys, boss, I'm really sorry. They have to stare at this. Oh, you need to find us. Yeah, we're right by the Bonamax.

The CMO really wants pictures of the booth frontage before we tear down. Can you make sure you get a picture of this. Try not to get the fuckbot in the shot. But to your point, Corey, the CTA has struggled with what it wants to do with this sex technology because we know that with everything sex sells, right? And sex tech will like advance faster than any other kinds of tech forget about people with accessibility needs, right? And so the CTA knows it needs to cover up some space, but it won't give you a dedicated booth because it somehow wants to be family friendly. Yeah.

It's so ridiculous. For all of the kids attending. Right. Exactly. Well, now we've turned in. to basically the like games fess or the toy fest that's true New York because of all the robots I wish no I will push back I agree with you there's not enough if you want to make this we need more fun the goofy

dipshit show it should be I would love to I would love to see some useless crap that's just kind of funny but that's the international pavilions because they are like the country of turkey sponsors 20 entrepreneurs to show up they're each weirder than the last a lot of them are really delightful shout out to give them credit were not toys they were like we made a photonic cell we made a solar panel thing

we made specific software for this that and the other which is awesome and those people rock not fun to talk about on a podcast but very funny to look at and be like oh cool someone's useful here and then the rest is just stuff I and the listeners are already like

oh it's just saying there's nothing here you fucking come to this and you do a podcast asshole but it's just frustrating straighten because I love a dude. Like having Michael on to show us the clicks was nice because it was a thingy. And it was so cool, actually. And also, I really do like it.

And I love Michael. And if it was bad, I would have been in a real, if it was like actually shit, I would have genuinely been sad because I would have had to find a way to trash it. I did avoid him for a year after trying the first clicks keyboard. Oh. Oh, yeah. Cruel. Clicks. Clicks was that show?

Yeah. Yeah. We just had Michael on and we like the clicks thing. Personally, the case not for me. But nevertheless, it's like, at least you fucking tried. And the other thing that pisses me off is clicks proves that other people could just, because Android can fit into all sorts of things. You could be trying all sorts of weird fucking smartphone shit.

You could have weird, like a tube smartphone. We could all kinds of tubes at this one when we have a smartphone tube. But no, it's like, how do we charge you for using the chat GPT API? I mean, there was a time where you go to, like, Guantjo and you go to the big mall, and there'd be the phone that was shaped like a Marlboro package. Hell yeah. Or Suns, yeah. Yeah.

And that shit rocks. We should have more of that. But no, it's like, it feels like the most nihilistic CES ever. It's just people being like, fucking AI. I fear it gets worse from here.

I feel this is the beginning. So my theory is it actually gets better from here, but it gets the apocalypse is so much worse. Because if you look at this and you realize how much LLM crap there is. Yes. Then they'll realize. I think this is a, I think this is a dip here.

Yeah. Like this will be because, Corey, to your point, oh, the commodity of LLMs, just because the Chinese models are cheap, but doesn't mean that they're margin positive. That's also true. Zupi, Zoujin, I forget which one went public and they like lost, they spent $300 million in, or $200-something million in six months and made $27 million in revenue. Not great.

I could do that. Yeah. I mean, like, if you want me to lose $200 million, call me. Well, look, if you have $3 million and you're expecting a $27 million return, tell you what, I'll give you a $28 million return. Nice. How would you do it? I will just keep all the $28 million back and give him $28 million back to you.

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

Might be really, but you just remind me what I wanted to talk about before, which is Pete Warden. We were talking about him yesterday. So Pete Warden is an old school hardware hacker specializing in machine learning and finding cool, like one of the people who was like figuring out that you could use GPUs to do machine learning a million years ago. And he just demoed on his blog a local AI voice agent running on a system on a chip that costs less than $10. So he's got an SOC. It's like an $8.00 SOC. You can put it in whatever. The demo he built was a button that on your dishwasher and you smack the button and you say my filter is clogged and it goes through the manual and it finds the relevant passages. Which is just on the chip. And it's all on chip and we are again

total cost of goods under $10. He built a whole model for this is his own model? Yeah. And it all it does is reference a manual. That is the scale of task it can do. So he can make it do other kinds of tasks. But he's like, I can build you an $8 SOC with a model running on it that will. That will will help you build your IKEA furniture, whatever. All this kind of, there's a lot of room at the bottom here is what I'm saying. And he has this other post when I was looking for the post. I found another one, which the title says it all. I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me crying emoji.

So here's a guy who does real things that are absolutely sustainable. Like, could you be revenue positive shipping AI models that run on hardware that costs less than $10? I bet you fucking could. Yeah. Right. And like everyone's like, yeah, but. the way we raise money is from punters who don't understand

the technology and whose only way of assessing the upside is how much money we spend on it. This is the pile of shit big enough has a pony underneath it. And so we have to spend a lot of money to prove to them that we will make a lot of money if we show them a thing that is profitable

because it's very cheap to make. They'll be like, well, there's no upside. I'm just really worried because even in the Indiegogo years, Indiegogo was not everything. This is like AI has taken everything and people, anyone listening to this being like, AI is this or that and the other, like AI is taking over. No.

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

Internet of shit? No, the beacons. I think I had eye beacons one million times. It's like, we'll put an eye beacon in it. That year I wanted to vomit. Like fucking Howard. We'll put an eye beacon here. Like it's fucking ridiculous.

And where has it gone? Nowhere. It's just smart home now. No, it was just like Madlips, like 5G autonomous. Right. IOT. And they're all, but IoT is as, is similar in the sense that like it's also rappers for things. It's also like small little gadgets that don't do much and they're all e-waste now.

It doesn't cost as much because of the like none of the LLM side of it. Well, because there's not a GPU service running in the fucking cloud for it. It's just very unfortunate. I think next CES could be kind of bad. because of this, because it's very, like, if there were other options, they'd be buying boots. And I don't think there are. Or maybe they were like priced out because there was so much AI stuff. That's very possible. But the thing is, it didn't, it looked kind of sparse too. Like, there was a lot more walking room than ever. I, I feel like, 2003 after the dot com crash was pretty good.

This is actually, how was it? It was full of people doing weird and interesting things, none of which made a mark, I think. But it was a time in which, if you came to CES, it was because you had done something very improbable in a time in which there was no tech money. That might be 2027 for real, though, because even like LG with this cloyed robot, it's like, hey, check this out.

We're doing this thing. Well, we're not doing this thing. And you may be wondering if it does the thing we're talking about. It doesn't. But it's very slow at it. And why do you? you want this? Well, you can't have it. I have a question for you.

By all means. When you say it spars, do you mean specifically some hall, some booths or LVCCC in general? The top of the expo center was fucking empty. And I don't just mean like it's the last day. I mean like there were just less things. There was less density. The usual Dildo battery security camera area was really not present in the main hall in the same way. In fact, I found way of those topside in a way that like I wouldn't usually. It's just very strange. And I think there's a strain on venture capital money and property money. Well, South by Southwest last year, the trade floor was a quarter

of the size. Wow. And there was an entire row that was just massage guns. Oh my gosh. I saw a area of the Palazzo where gambling would usually happen that was completely empty. That's more worrying to me than any I saw that spot. Yeah. With the velvet ropes

around it and they're like vacuuming. I wondered, the reason I asked you is the reason I asked you is because the West Hall and the the LVCC Central Hall got this whole facelift I don't know if you've seen it yet Yeah, the Central Hall Right, this year

Does it look different? It's so different from last year It is still kind of a slot to me. It is still kind of a slot but because Central Hall is where Samsung and LG used to have their gigantic But Samsung isn't there Right, Samsung isn't there is doing the win So I think that contributes to feeling like there's not that much going on

in the convention spaces Especially since Central Hall now too with the sort of remodel Looks much bigger And so, you know, consequently like emptier and then has a lot more glass windows letting in light, which I love. It's nice. It's nice, but then also makes you feel like you can see daylight,

and therefore it doesn't feel as packed and crowded and like, you know. And on top of the fact that a lot of the things are just like... Gone. The LG wall display, you know, it's gone. Yeah, LG was so muted this year. I know. Usually there's like this, like last year we had that giant transparent motherfucker. I like the year with the big, like, curved screen.

Yes, the canyon of walls. That's no spectacle. There's no spectacle unless you're a tractor. There's none. It's just, I feel like, I feel like we're years into just the hubris fest where it's just like, what if we didn't provide anything useful and jump to the latest trend? It's a shame. And as we come to the end of this first two-hour block, I will just say, I want to find cool stuff.

And when we're back next year, which we will be, I hope we find more of it. And if you were someone with the CEA, when you're someone putting stuff here, please think of actual people because it's getting a little sad. But final word, Shirling, what, what is your takeaway? from the CES in general. Big question. Huh. Yeah, I thought I had something to say and it's out of my brain now.

So I think I've run out of a RAM, which everyone will is here. Well, everyone's running out. The Devendra was just on talking about the RAM crisis. But thank you for joining us. Thank you for having so many NGadgett people on.

We've had Chris. Thanks for having them on, yeah. And no, it's fucking great to actually talk about consumer electronics. And we've, of course, had Garrison Davis and it could happen here. Thank you, Garrison.

Of course. And Corey Doctor, I'll be joining us for the next episode as well. Excellent. Looking forward to it. And I am Ed Zittron. You can please subscribe to my newsletter. Good Lord, I'm not doing a premium this week, so I need the money. But more important than that, of course, our dearly departed, Sean Paul Adams, who's a friend of the sweet, friend of the show, passed last year.

We're honoring him by getting you to donate to the pediatric epilepsy research consortium. His son is epileptic, and his family would deeply appreciate you donations. Thank you for listening. We'll be back for one more two-hour episode today. But I guess it'll be towards the end of the day. Either way, thank you for listening. You've all been so wonderful. Send me your feedback. Go to the Reddit. on goodbye. 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 at to visit the Discord, and go to R-S-Betteroffline. to check out all Reddit.

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