Better Offline - CES 2026: Part Five (Wednesday)

Episode Date: January 8, 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 Wednesday’s second episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Karissa Bell of Engadget, Jared Newman of the Advisorator newsletter, standup comedian and host of the Factually Podcast Adam Conover, Ed Ongweso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Robert Evans of Behind The Bastards and standup comedian and actor Chloe Radcliffe to talk about very slow laundry robots, the return of the pebble watch (and their new ring), robotic assistive technology products, the sloppification of CES, and asking “who cares?” to every single booth.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 The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Karissa Bellhttps://www.engadget.com/about/editors/karissa-bell/ Jared Newman:https://advisorator.com/members/signup/ https://cordcutterweekly.com/ Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en https://punchup.live/chloeradcliffe Robert Evans:  https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?l=en-GB Adam Conover:https://www.instagram.com/adamconover/?hl=en www.adamconover.net/tourdates Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/  --- 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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We've got an open bar, tacos and places to sit down for members of the media, whether they join us on the microphone or not. Those joining me here at Swaggaj Klam are the incredible Carissa Bell of Engadgett. Hello, hello. And we've, of course, got the impeccable Jared Newman of the advisoryated newsletter. Hey. Returning guest for several years now. Well, I mean one year. One year. It's only been one.

It just feels like many. And of course, the incredible actress and stand-up comedian Chloe Radcliffe. Yeah, fresh off the elliptical in your hotel suite. One of us is fucking used. I've been doing podcasting. So, Carissa, we're going to start with you because you saw something I could not see moving every time I went by. the LG-Cloid laundry folding robot. How was that?

You said it here that it folded laundry and served food very slowly. Give me an idea of how slowly. Well, there's a TikTok in that story that you can see. And one of the top comments was, it'll take three weeks to do your laundry at this pace. Right. And I don't know if it was slow, because for the demo purposes,

they're trying to draw it out and make it more traumatic. But it started off with it was out of washing machine, and it's trying to pull something out of a hamper, load it into the wash machine. And it just is doing it so slow. It takes its time kind of picking it up. Does it have any trouble? It doesn't have trouble picking it up, really?

It's just, it's not really clear why it takes so long. It's just like I think the arms are just kind of calculating maybe like each little movement. Slowly puts it in, slowly closes the washing machine door, slowly rolls over to a table where there's like a pile of washcloth, slowly picks one up, slowly starts folding it, like just excruciating. I love it. And then it picks up the folded thing and then it messes up a little bit. Did it fix the mess up?

No, but there was like an LG person. I just had an arm reach out and they. But when you say mess it up, how so? Like it was folded. Like if you imagine something that's very symmetrically folded. And then when it's robot hand picks it up, like the top corner kind of comes like comes unaligned. Awesome.

How much is this robot? Did they say anything like that? Oh, I don't think they're going to sell it. Okay. That's always what happens with laundry folding robots. Yeah, yeah. No, that's like the... There's a rich history of CES and laundry folding robots.

Is Laundry mate here? Oh, they all went on. We love laundry mate. Laundry mate, I think... I've been coming to CES in 2011. Are they dead finally? They're dead. All the 2010s ones are dead.

That's... Yeah. Look what they took from us. So, yeah, you also said it served food. I'm guessing it also did that weirdly. Yeah, you know, walked out, rolled over

because it did not have legs. It has like a wheeled kind of robot vacuum. Is it humanoid at all? It has arms and like a head unit. Take a look at that. Look at that piece of tube. A head unit. Yeah,

that's what they called it. You know, they're kind of selling this as it works with all of LG's appliances. So when it rolls over to the fridge, the fridge opens, it pulls out your milk, rolls over to the table, sets it down.

That's so bad. And like I'm guessing it would only be compatible with the LG stuff? Is this just a concept? Yes. It is a concept. So, I mean, the whole presentation, it kind of felt like watching something at Disneyland.

Yeah. It was like very high production value. They had this very charismatic presenter clearly memorized this very tight 15 minute script. That included a video that was playing, and they invented this story about this family and how this, how Floyd is going to help the dad find his keys and help. Really slowly.

Yeah, make the breakfast. And you're watching it and you're kind of like, okay, that seems cool that the robot can do this. But then if you read the... But can it? Well, if you read the press release, what they say is, well, you know, we're really interested in moving more into robotics technology, but they don't say anything about actually making Coyd selling it. The only thing that they mentioned is roboticized appliances, like fridge doors that open automatically or oven doors. So I feel like they're selling us the robot, but what they're actually going to sell is just like a fridge that can open by itself.

Like a fridge with a trunk off of a new SUV. Yeah. Yeah. But no, no, you have to get like the $7,000 LG one that you can kick to open. Yeah. Yeah, it's these things are, I just want the coldest possible Diet Coke. Is that too much to ask? Also, is it's name, C-L-O-I-D, but the eye is small for some reason.

I just, it's so strange to do this thing. And it got all the headlines and everyone's going, robot, this is the year of robotics, a C-S. And the most famous one is not being released. No. And it's great. You can have breakfast ready if you started at 1 a.m. Like just like just incredibly. Like Henry Casey kind of put it as like the sloth from Zootopia.

Just fucking just like, yeah. It's so, what a strange thing to do? Because if that worked much faster, it would be kind of cool. And that's the yes. But it's like it's just not being released. They just, why show it? I mean, I think, are you? said it. They got all the headlines. It looks cool. I think they're trying to show off that,

you know, like you said, everyone's saying that this is the year of a lot of robots who are trying to, we're finally seeing that some of them are capable of kind of doing these tasks, but these companies aren't yet ready or able or willing to actually make this into real products. Like, I think it's probably just not feasible. This thing is huge. Yeah, how big was that? I would say, I didn't get close to it because it was sort of behind like a rope line and you could line up for like a selfie, but I booked it out of the booth. I think it's taller than I am. I'm trying. I actually think I saw, I don't think I saw

the laundry demo, or I saw some portion of the demo, because what I noticed about it, and now this is the different perspectives that we come at it from, I was like, wow, all of these robotics companies and, you know, electronics companies just wind up hiring these very hot actors who are very charming to run the demo. Yeah. Because the guy, I don't know if the guy who was, I don't know if there was a person

helping with the laundry and food demo, but there was a guy who was like doing this demo as I walked by very quick. And he's this fucking gorgeous man. Right. Being like, hey, Cloid, do you, anything else that you can do to help me make my life easier? And it's like, yeah, of course. I guess, I guess.

Croy, shrink my shit. Yeah, yeah. I mean, truly. It's like, Chloe, do you want to come over here and touch my pecks? It's like, and you really sort of do you watch it and you're like, I guess I want to fuck the humans, so maybe I will buy the robot. It seems to sort of be the vibe of these demos. You cannot do either.

No, can't do either. You might be able to. But yeah, it is, it's a big robot. Yeah. And that's why I said it's kind of like being at Disneyland. Yes. Where they have this like very nice, very carefully orchestrated demo that they set up. And it's like watching a little movie of what they are trying to say is going to be the future, I guess.

And when you're watching it, you're like, oh, that's pretty. neat, like all of that, look, works together, the robot rolled over there. Look, it found that guy's keys. But then you like, think about it for a second and you realize that, no, they're not actually going to have that. It's like a very clean house, which is traditionally not where you lose your keys. Yeah. It's not like you lose it in an empty room and you're like, oh, it's in the corner, not underneath something. And also, if the way that the robot is going to be able to find the keys is by having something like an air tag on the keys that the robot is connected We have that.

And also the robot doesn't have legs, so if your keys are upstairs, it can't help you. It's very mall cop on a segue coded, where you can just get up onto a curve and obeyed. Like a darling. So you also saw this switchbot, switchbot, which also does. They have a laundry folding robot. How is that? I saw that one, too.

What happened? Well, I didn't see it fold laundry. So they, because they had it out and they had a bench, with a few rumpled pieces of clothes on. I was like, great, I'm gonna see it fold laundry. This is what I came here for. And it stood there for like five minutes doing nothing. And then it very slowly rolled over to one piece of laundry.

And I was like, great, it's gonna fold the laundry. It very slowly picked up the piece of laundry and then very slowly moved over to the washing machine and put the garment in the washing machine very slowly. And then very slowly closed the door. And then waited another five minutes. minutes and then went over to another garment and did the exact same fill. One at a time, each individual piece of laundry it went to put in the laundry machine and didn't fold any of the...

You know this is like a heavily prepped demo. They've had to go through a lot, like the Boston Dynamics videos where they like show the robot working, 100 takes. 100 takes for the robot just like rolls on its back somehow like explodes. I love this. I love that they're trying to pretend. It's just like fraud. There's something very fraudulent about this. about this. Like, the robots are here. Yes, they're here. But are they able to do anything? Yes, kind of. If I needed someone to very slowly put laundry in my washing machine and eventually do it,

I would be myself. I was going to say, I stand first five minutes completely still resisting folding laundry. And then slowly move one shirt. Yeah, yeah, does the robot look at its phone and scroll Instagram for like 17 minutes before it puts in one t-shirt? And can you program it to leave the washing in the washing machine and forget to do it. It has to do like a visibly heavy sigh before it's starting. This is the most drama that folding laundry has ever been the recipient of. Other than in like a deteriorating relationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there it's like a symbol of drama.

You're like, this is the one thing I came here to see. And it was torn because I was like, how long can I wait to see if it actually was it was, Was it going to run the laundry? And then I had to wait for it to come out of it. Just looking at this video, it's also, like, got a very strange long body with, I got, like, with the arms. That's cute. But it's also like, if I saw this in my home, it would chill me every day. I'd never get used to seeing this, like, slender man robot.

It looks a little dead behind the eyes. I see it. Yeah, it has, like, these weird, like the chowls from Sonic Adventure. There we are. There's all 18 people who got that. Yeah, it's just. To their credit, they did tell me that they are. planning to sell it.

Wow. Towards the end of 2026. Wait, Cloid or that one? That one, Switchbot. The Sunderb. Coyd will never leave the LG, the LG prison.

They put it in. Did you see any working robots either of you? One? I saw the fighting robot. Right. And I saw that guy's dog shit form when he was fighting it.

Just like no, didn't plant his feet at all. Pathetic. Yeah, what was the purpose of that? Are you meant to fight it? Is it like a boxing robot? It was, it also danced and I think it was just like

one of those general, Look at all these things that this robot can do. It feels like what they sell on Black Friday. Like it's just like, is that the one that I see in like various Instagram videos where it's just like running into a wall? There was a sign that said $5,000. So I guess you could just buy it.

Oh my God. And honestly, that feels like you can haggle. Yeah. It's one of those S-CES like things. I'll give you $35.00. I'll give you $35. I'll give you $35.

like you can take a tax loss. I will take this. whatever this is. I'm beating the fuck out of it regardless. The weirdest category of stuff at CES is the things that you can buy at CES. Like the massage chairs. Like the wonderful massage chairs. I actually did see on the way through CES to get back here, I found a massage chair company called Dr. Boss.

And it just says, do you have any problems with your spine? And spine is in blue, bold letters. And then there were like three or four spaces with a question mark. I love them. I love the weird massage chair companies. I was mentioned earlier episode that they scan. you. They're like, yeah, I got a special CESD. Always like, you don't.

You have like 7,000% margins on this. You're just like everyone is defrauded. Yeah. Any working robots of any kind? Because even last year I thought I saw working ones. There was a TikTok dancing robot. There's one that does rock, paper, scissors against you, and it wins every time. Because it can detect right as you're about to do. Yeah, it was actually like a cheating robot because it was like a second behind your gesture.

It just looked at what you're doing and then it was like, all right, I'm going to do the other thing. Oh, that blows. What the fuck is the point? I'm sorry, I've been trying this whole week to find good stuff. And every time I'm like, it's the year of the robots, let's look at the robots, you can't.

How many other years has it been the year of robotics? I actually don't know. That's a great question. Yeah, I don't think that. Like, that feels like a headline that has happened before, right? I feel like I probably wrote that headline at one point. They play with the idea occasionally. But it's, there's just something very,

bizarre about this. I guess it's like, well, we can't claim LLMs do anything, so won't we lie about something else? Okay, hey, we have robot vacuums, all right. And the robot vacuums are fine other than picking up dust in my apartment, apparently. And yeah, I just, I'm very confused. And we discussed this earlier as well, like the robot, they had arms last year and now the robots have legs, like the robot vacuums. Yeah. And yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's so weird. It's really weird. Like, I feel like I'm going a little crazy because everyone, I've read tons of articles about like robots, robots. But it sounds like the practical experience is they don't work, they don't do the things and or you can't buy them. It is a very hard problem to solve, like anything involving

like limbs and all that. That's why the laundry, bro, like I wrote about another laundry folding robot last year. It was one that, like, their idea was like it was like lamp, lamps and then the lamps are actually robot arms that turn into, and they released this like very flashy concept video and a bunch of people preordered it based on just this rendered video that is not actually the robot and they would not show like a prototype of it actually working. And it is. It's just like there's all these edge cases of any kind of garment you have to pick up and deal with like getting a having all the training to deal with all that takes forever and nobody's figured that out yet. Would any of this be solvable if we weren't so committed to having the robots look

humanoid? No. Like, like if there was like a big tube, all right, here comes my idea. Okay, okay. You've cracked the code. It's a big tube. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm having an idea right now as a stand-up comedian that no one else here at CES has had. But like if there was like a big tube and you dumped your clothes in and then somehow there was like a vacuum space. Okay, no, that does. I don't know. There was somehow a way to like stretch the clothes flat like create tension in the fabric no matter what the shape is. like suspended in the tube you guys writing this down yes suspended in the tube okay you're with me

I like this this is good I've got buy in so far and then somehow there could be like a wire that like bisects that and then it at least folds in half and then like does the same you know but like it's not it's not a humanoid it's a machine it's not a it's not a my buddy you even have to identify though like where the edges of the clothes are and that itself is not easy to do it's just lasers you're describing it's like what do we need a robot to do I could make food for me. Ah, not really. Launching? Not really.

You can do a TikTok. You want to see something cheat at rock paper scissors? Because I'm constantly annoyed that I can't find a better person as a rock paper scissors champion. I have never been able to be defeated by anyone. It's just so fucking weird. But you know what? Changing subjects. Did you find anything you actually liked either of you?

I can go. Please. Pebble. Okay. Okay. I've heard Pebble get mentioned a few times. What's Pebble up to this? Well, so they, you know, they're doing new watches.

They're back. And it's, you know, it's one of those things that is just like a passion project, which, you know, I feel like. And I can accept that. It's kind of like authentic. It's the same thing with like clicks. You know, it's like these people that, yeah, they know it's not for everybody. They just want this thing to exist and they put it into existence. Yeah.

We've got Michael coming on on on Friday. We'll talk about that. Yeah. I mean, I respect. That kind of thing. I think the pebble watches are great. So it's just the watches. So they're a ring as well. Yeah. So they're starting with the watches and now they have the thing called the index. I believe it's called. Yeah, and you wear it on your index finger. And it's basically just a button that you can push to take a note. And then like a voice note? Yeah.

Do you have to speak into the ring? That's cool. Yeah. Do you have to speak into the ring? I think you can know. I think you can just. There's a little microphone in it. Yeah. Does it make a noise or can you record people secretly? It's not persistent. It's like a push to talk kind of thing. But you can break state law. Yeah, I think you can break state. Not in Nevada.

It's a one party state. Interesting. In New York, it's a two-party consent. I thought New York was a one-party. No, I believe in New York, because I break it all the time. So the NSA, Chloe. I shouldn't, just A, admit that on a podcast, and then B, do an evil laugh after. She meant parody.

She meant parody. But so it's just a record. It doesn't do any health stuff. No, there's no. stuff. There's no any of that. And then I think there's like a secondary function where maybe you can like program some stuff if you wanted to do something else. How much did it? Oh, you're putting on me a spot here. Something like $100.75 down. I'm ugly. I mean, it's presentable. I think. There's a, there's a button on it. So I guess however you feel about the button. The thing is I can see the use for that.

Like I don't like voice notes at all. Like I don't like hearing myself speak. I've, well, I think it will transcribed. I've never listened to a single episode of this show, which everyone listening to this who works, I hope it's going to love. And it's like, I can't hear myself speak. But if I could do transcription, I might actually buy it. That'd be the first thing I've seen at CES where I'm like, I would purchase that. Yeah, I think more broadly that, you know, they're just things, their mantra is sort of, not even a mantra, but just like, it's this dude. He's done our right for himself in tech. And he just like wants to make cool gadgets that he doesn't see in the market and whatever. I, you know what? I like that. I'm reporting live on the Pebble Index ring. It really looks like a ring that somebody is

using to record you. Let me see it. Let me see. A sketchy ring. Turn this towards me. Oh yeah. Like it really looks like, no, no, I don't have a microphone in my ring. It's like a, like a hat that Homer Simpson wore with the camera in it, but a ring. Like just like, yeah, I'm just clicking this nondescript, giant black button. What are you doing? Nothing. It's an awesome idea. Now say all the crimes you committed. tell me all your secrets. No, I can't move my thumb. I can't move my thumb at all.

I now actually know I'm now going to start critiquing this. So you have to, is it one you can click once and it will record? Because if you have to hold it the whole fucking time, that might be. I cannot recall. That's fine. You know what? I mean, even the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't do something so fucking stupid. Yeah.

We're going to the fucking stupid. It's fun to watch Ed changes. Just like, go from. Oh, I like that. Trashing everything, then hearing something, then like becoming an optimist. And then immediately be like, no. No, no, no, fuck that. No, I hate it.

That's a good instinct to have, though. No, also, we've got plenty of people who won't. We've got plenty. We've got fucking cell side analysts there as well. Carissa, anything you've been enjoying? I saw some robotic sneakers that were kind of cool. Tell me more. What do you mean?

So they're sneakers that attach to a kind of exoskeleton. Oh. And they're meant for people who can't, like, walk long distances or want to be able to walk more. Robert Evans has been using like an excess color of an ice or so, please tell me what. Yeah, these ones are different because they attach to a special shoe and they're battery powered and then you can kind of it learns your gate the first 20 steps or so.

And then as you're walking, it just kind of like pushes you up a little bit. It's a very strange sensation for somebody who doesn't have mobility issues, yeah. Doesn't really have trouble walking. But like three hours later, my feet were hurting so bad after being on them for four or five hours. And I was thinking like, maybe that would like feel kind of good right now. I've got an ankle injury that sounds great. I did see another one.

And every time I see them, like, my hater instinct kicks in. Then I'm like, no, actually, this is what technology should do. Yeah. That it can help you if you've been walking too much or if you have serious mobility issues. The downside is they cost $4,500. That actually doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Like, if I hear that and I'm like, okay, it literally helps people who can't walk much walk,

4500, I'm like, that's actually reasonable. I did see a few of them, but I'm actually kind of excited to see that. I don't know, like, I realize it just went from being a huge hater, but like, I have tons, like, several family members with mobility issues, my mom, like, I myself, my ankle, when it gets bad, really gets fucked up and I can't walk, like, like literally two weeks ago was having problems with my feet. It's quite lovely. Well, you are consistent in what you, in what you like and don't like. Yeah. And that is, is there a tangible, describable problem that this is solving? Yes. And I think the more physical, not necessarily like, corporal. but the more physical a problem, the more you are going to be inclined to like the tech presentation of a solution. Exactly. And it's like, I think I also, I don't know, I think that's what technology is meant to do. It's meant to allow you to do things you can't do, to streamline things, to make things easier. That's cool. And there were quite a few of them. I want more of

this shit. Like, let those who can't walk. Is there anything more technological than that? Yeah, the accessibility stuff is actually kind of interesting. I'm always looking out for that. I was writing about it this year. And so many times it's hard to find anything like that because so much of it is just, yeah, cramming tech into products that don't need it or, you know, all the crap that we're used to seeing here of smart belts and just weird stuff.

Smart belts? Do you remember Belty from like years ago? I do kind of remember that. Belty? It was called Belty. What is Belty? Oh man, this is probably like 10 years ago. It was a smart belt.

Do you remember that year at CS when like Internet of Things was kind of just and like everything was just like a flower pot that's connected to the internet this and it was a belt that I think could automatically adjust like as like maybe you ate more or something oh god

okay that's well sorry I'm like my fifth piece of chicken well actually we're gonna go back to shit robots though because everyone has kind of mentioned AGI bot or Aggie bot or however the fuck he says and this is the TikTok robot you saw what was that?

Yeah, so there is two, they have two different humanoids. One is a smaller one, that was the dancey one, it has like these bright yellow shoes. They have a larger one that's about, about five feet, like my height, maybe.

And they are humanoid robots. They can walk around, the little one can dance. They have some kind of like AI functionality in them. So they're meant, like the large one, what they explained to me is that it's meant for

kind of like either for business hospitality use cases, like maybe you put one in a museum and it can like welcome guests and kind of like show them where to go. Can it do that though? Yeah. So what's interesting is

this is the Chinese company that's making them. Okay. And they already have sold several thousand these in China. We went to another robotics company booth and the whole spiel of this booth was that the booth is run entirely by robots

and there's like a human guy there who's kind of like can answer a question for you if you want. But the booth is just a super two robots and they were the adjibot robots and so the larger one was there and it had a little microphone and you could talk to it and you could have this interaction with it

so I came up and I was like okay roast me and it actually it started off kind of tame it was but then it got pretty mean yeah well then I said I was like actually I was like can you be meaner like can you do more how mean did it get? Not too bad I made fun of what I was wearing

and could it see what you were wearing yeah it could and then at the end I was like, okay, well, you know, all good. Let's have a fist bump. And it was like, great. And it actually did it. What did it say about what you were wearing? I want to judge this from a joke rat at a standpoint. Honestly, I don't remember exactly. It just kind of was like, oh, and you're wearing that. Like, you're making fun of me, but like you're, like, it was kind of generic. Then you wanted it turn into the boxing robot. Yeah. I wanted it to be ruder. I want to find this thing and do battle with it. You're able to have like a back and forth.

There's a slight delay when you say something, maybe two, three, for it to come up with a response. But you can actually, and its voice actually sounded pretty natural in a way that most robot voices. Models was it? Like, was it using a model? Was it like, did they explain any of that? It is. I'm not sure. I imagine that that company, it was called Intobot. That was the booth that had these like customized versions. And that wasn't AgiBot? Was that AgiBot? Yeah, so it was an Agibot robot, but the company that was showing them off was Intobot. And I guess they had customized, they had bought these robots and somehow customize them for But the, what you're chatting with, it's not just chat GPT or open AI or whatever.

Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. I think they probably use several different models. And then they also have like cameras and sensors so they know, you know, you know, what's in front of them? I want to go back and ask it about Tiananmen Square. I'm sorry. I want to, I want to be like, what do you think of Winnie the Pooh? And it just goes, yeah, yeah. Because like just looks at me personally and goes, you look fat. I'm like, fuck. No, I'm actually going to say it sounds like it worked, which is. unusual. That's genuinely unusual. That's the nicest thing I've ever that you say about a robot. It works, kind of. But what was the, what's the purpose?

For intbot? Yeah. I'm actually not sure because we just went because we wanted to like, because their whole, their whole premise is that our booth is just run by robots. So we're like, well, we got to go check that out.

And then we just, we talked to it and made a TikTok and I didn't find out what they're trying to do with them. But you should have asked it like can you grab me some press materials and hand them to me? And it would like fail. It starts trying to fold them. Oh my God. I love it. We get to a thing.

It's like, yeah, it works. Why though? And they're like, oh, fuck. I just did this for the yucks. I could introduce you to a museum. So off, okay, on the broader theme of why, though. Yeah. I was walking around today at the convention center and wondering what is,

the not what is the point of CES but pretty close like how effective is CES and in what way for the majority of people who are here? Effective at war. Well, that's sort of, I'm asking as a complete naive user, you know, like, but it's like, are people, I understand that like there were buyers from Sam's Club walking around being like, we're looking for a new, I don't know what the fuck they're looking for, but like, I understand that if you, like, there's, you know, some small proportion of buyers who are looking for some small proportion of specific tech. But like a lot of people, it seems like they're just sort of in booths showing off stuff that like largely already exists. Maybe with like a slightly new extra spice, but like for the most part, it's not blowing anybody's minds. And then a lot of people are walking by picking it up going, oh, setting it down and continuing walking. And it's like, what effect beyond just like,

a trip to Vegas that is justifiable via work. Yeah. What effect is this having in most people's business? I mean, as somebody who's, I'm not super pessimistic about CES, despite how ridiculous is. How? You've been here long ago now. I don't know. I guess, I guess for me, and maybe this is the point, too, is like.

You love leaflets. I love leaflets. No, I just, you know, there's probably some value in just getting a bunch of people into one place. Sure. Sure. That I can. We don't have a lot of that anymore, you know. We're going to rotate our owls.

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And once again, we're joined by Carissa Bella Van Gadget. Hello, hello. Jared Newman of the advisory at newsletter. Yo. I nearly said newsletter wrong. And of course, Chloe Radcliffe, actress of is this thing on? Yeah. And the stand-up comedian.

Yeah. And we're back. And we're just talking about how and why people do CES. And I'm getting this prevailing, just feeling about conferences in general, Jesus. They are just there to give people something to do. Like, you put people in a room. Yeah, there's, to an extent, but like, I'm going to admit, I don't go to conferences in general. I've never had run PR firms since 2012. Like, I've just not gone. It's never affected. Every time I've gone to a conference other than CES, I've just been like, why? And it's like, oh, we got to meet salespeople from this. And it's like, okay, but why, though? And there's so much stuff here. If this year feels like a landmark year for just shit that don't exist. And I say, say that remembering the Web 3 Metaverse year, even that one, they seem to be like, we have a new thinner TV that's also wet for some reason. Like, they were trying new things

of TVs and soundbars, and I guess we've got some of that. But it feels dominated by just vaporware, vaporware. Like, maybe it was worse during the Indiegogo boom. You remember the 2014, 2015 Indiegogo boom when that was just like, down in the bowels of the Venetian. The Eureka Hall where it was just like the most insane shit. Like, it's a cool. that's also a razor blade to kill people. I want to donate to that. No, that's the thing. The Indigogo fraud generation was fucking cool

because it was just shit that was impossible to make. We've raised $500,000, the money laundering operations that go through Indiegogo have funded this. And I will deliver it in 10 years, and then the company will shut down in three. Like that I found kind of like honest... Laundry folding robots. Well, laundry may, RIP in piss.

Like they, the most obvious, fake one. I respect, they got like, it was like a tower laundry man. Yeah, yeah. It was like this weird tower and it was never clear how it worked. And every year they were like, next year, this is hidden consumers. And then they just died. The only laundering that Indiegogo can do robots can do, robots can do is financing. Yeah. But I feel like this is like a legendary year because they're trying to pretend robots work. Because the reason you can't do robots for mass consuming, mass consumer audiences, is because training for edge cases is fucking difficult. Yeah.

I don't know. It's a shame because I'd love a robot. I'd love like a... Well, I think a laundry folding robot is like a billion-dollar idea if it actually works. But it... I have this tube idea. Let's revisit the tubes. Have you heard of Indigo?

Actually. Yeah, the tube idea's a little real for Indigoco. We've got to do like a movie that never gets made or like a card game made by it. like a disgrace substacker, like a board game by a guy with an allegations section on Wikipedia. Like, that's all we do on here. It's just weird because I say this with a little sadness because, like, I may seem like a cynical bone broken heart romantic. If we had like a natural laundry folding rubber, that's cool.

Yeah. That'd be cool. I'd love that. Did you, did you, did you run the show floor? Yes. So what did you see? What did you like? That's a fucking long quote.

I walked around. Don't ask me that. I walked around Eureka Park today. I walked around, I was about to say, Kentia Hall, those of us who have been to E3. That's a whole other, yeah. You know, the Sky, Kentier Hall, if you don't know, is so E3 is the former games journalism, the games equivalent of this show. And Kentia Hall was like, the scariest place to go with the media badge.

You'd go down there, every head would snap to your media badge. Stop Citizen, like Morrowind, like you'd stolen a piece of bread from a shopkeep. And they'd be like, because they want to talk to you because games is just, games, right about the game. This was all the very. small like developers that had nothing going on. And so like not like, you know, not like Activision. Yeah.

This is it for them. And I went to Eureka Park and everything I saw was a chat GPT rapper. And I went upstairs and I was like, fuck me up. Show me something. And I saw a Wi-Fi barbecue. I feel like I see one of them every fucking year. And I wanted to see. I didn't even see anything funny.

I was trying to noodle on this idea. Like, I don't think this is the right term. but like AI slop product. Do you know what I'm talking about? No, no, there's a real slop nature to it. It was just like, what is it? How you want a document analysis? Yeah.

Well, like an example I'm thinking of is like, I think it was high sense. Like they had a oven and then the oven had like a very small display on it, smaller than a phone. And they were showing like, you could be like, I'm in the mood for pizza. And then it would like generate a pizza recipe for you. You know what I mean?

So it's like the recipe itself is slopped, but then also like the implementation of AI is slopped. Do you know what I mean? You're just looking at this tiny little screen. It's like, roll out the dough. And again, and I've made this point before on this very podcast earlier today and yesterday. But just to reiterate, if you are going to look up a pizza recipe, you're going to look it up on your phone, which is a small screen. Of course. And then if you look it up on your smart oven, you are also looking it up on a small screen.

it is not eliminating any step in the process or any screen in the... Oh, it will turn the oven on for you. Oh, fuck. It'll turn the oven on? Fuck. Has this ever happened to you and just bashing your hand on different parts of the oven? How I turn oven on. I am woman.

I know this instinctive, but I do not make happen. It's like a Tim Robinson bit. What do I do? What do I do? And then the screen goes, turn on oven. Finally. It turns the oven on? It turns the oven on?

It's like the thing I keep coming back. to that I actually liked was just a $1,500 TV with a built-in soundbar with like micro-l-D. I was just like fuck yeah. Great. Awesome. T-Bs are getting thinner and they're getting soundbars in them and that's why everything has AI in it because it's

very clear that it's becoming really cheap to make thin and big, good looking televisions. The actual difference between like a fancy fucking LG one and a combination of different letters you can buy on Amazon, most people can't fucking tell, I'm sorry.

It's, it's, that is, that's a whole other thing. But yeah, there's like micro LED and now micro RGB. I don't know. I don't. Both of them, if you stand in front of them, it looks like you're like looking into the eye of God. But like, they're kind of the same. But I kind of, I love it. I genuinely love the fact that like a good looking TV is easy to get now and you can get them. Everyone. They're really like really good. Like even the kind of cheap, cheap ones are pretty good. Like, yeah. I can notice the difference because I stare at screens all the time, but I think most people would be really happy. Otherwise, I'm just like, show, I want to like some. I genuinely, I would love to, I would love to be taken by the magic of

CES. It doesn't, the magic's got, like, what do you think would, other than a laundry folding robot, what do you think would, like, what would take you? What would, what would blow you away? There are like magical ideas. They've had, like, wireless power that if Phil hears me, talking about, who come and fucking kill me. But like, wireless power. Bluetooth that works, perhaps. Unbreakable Bluetooth would be very popular at CES where Bluetooth, my fucking headphones cut out constantly. Like, something like that might be kind of a boring demo, but it's like, I don't know, a Wi-Fi router that doesn't stop working after six months. Like, every problem is just like, shit sucks. T. T.P. Link has a router with an AI agent now

that you can talk to. That's cool. I got a T-P. DECA. T-LINK deco I had to throw away because it's so fucking shit. If I won't work, but you can, like, yell at it. And it'll do therapy for you. You're from TP Link. You listen to this. Deco fucking sucks. It blows.

You suck. I spend so much money on that. I can't even fucking sell them on eBay. God damn. Did you see the IKEA, smart home stuff? No, tell me about that. So that was one that we thought was pretty cool.

A couple of my colleagues saw it. It was, they have a whole new line of like smart plugs, smart light bulbs, like connected home stuff. Very, like, kind of boring. But the stuff that you want from IKEA, like, cheap connected light bulbs and smart plugs that will actually work and like work with real iot standards that you want and not you know i don't know if anyone here has tried to install smart bulbs in their homes and they're they're extremely expensive or they're like really cheap

like off-brand ones from amazon that never end up working or like the app breaks or the company goes under and like you kind of want a company that's used to making 40 million of everything to do this kind of thing because then you just know it's always like an industrial Yeah. It's going to work and it will, they can do it at scale in a way that makes us be able to pay a reasonable price. We have four light bulbs in our bedroom and so I will be like Alexa turn off the lights. And about like 10% of the time, one of the lights will stay on of the four. I have, I have Lutron in my house and one day the box just stopped connecting. So I just have to use the fucking light switch.

And I'm so spiteful that I just refuse. But wait, it sounds like these sounds work though, Chris. Yeah, I haven't tried them, but I mean, it's IKEA, so I feel like we have, I have decent amount of confidence that they can do this. I hope so. I mean, I have some smart light bulbs in my home and they're like an off-brand Chinese one. And they're the kind you can change color and we set them to specific colors for the specific rooms. But we can never change them back. And then like every few months, like the app breaks.

And then they like the totally wrong color. And then we just can't use those lights until we fix it. It's so frustrating. It's like the product I want from CES is shit. just works and they don't care. That's a shame as well because I actually like the smart home stuff. I like the Roseanne Clapper except you use

your voice. It's fun. It's good. But again, one thing breaks. It's like Wi-Fi that works. I don't think that'll make a good C-Sie. But I was looking through your N-Gadgette coverage and I want to talk about the dreamy robot vacuum with the legs. Oh, I saw that too.

Just the CyberX. Yes. What are these legs? Tell me, how do they protrude? Do they crawl? So the promotional image they sent me at first had it kind of like standing upright, like a spider on these legs. But they're sort of like more like treads. They're like legs that kind of have these like rubber treads. And so when I saw it move, it moves more like a tank.

Like it kind of rolls up the stairs and down the stairs. They look like little chainsaw. It's like chainsaw, man. It's terrifying. And what was not clear though is that that whole unit with the legs is actually just like a little like docking station for the actual robot vacuum. Oh, it's like a vehicle. Yeah, so the actual robot vacuum like zooms in there and like parks itself and then

the thing goes up the stairs and then it can send out the robot to actually do the vacuuming. What this means, though, is that it can't actually clean the stairs themselves. Apparently, Robo rocks can climb and vacuum the stairs. This one, which is just a concept, can just like move up. I'm showing everyone just for the listeners at home, I'm showing everyone a video, which works really well. it's a concept so I'm giving them

some affordance for how slow this is I find this kind of cool I kind of like like it you know what when it comes to

robot vacuums I'm oddly like generous especially because this is just like very fun to watch it's like kind of shoving its crotch

into the stairs and it slides up yeah and then when it makes that bend and it starts to go down it's kind of funny because it's sort of like half of it goes up

I think that's cool I think it's cool yeah people have asked for years for a robot vacuum that can do like multiple floors. Yeah. Without having to pick it up and whatever. I like them. I just find the robot rock that I have doesn't clean dust sometimes, which is a classic exhibit of the floor. Yeah. But you know what? I feel like robot vacuums are like the state, like they're the like, um, block and tackle of CES.

You see, I've been seeing robot vacuums here for years. It's like watch watching them keep going. Like watch it. Hey, little buddy. How are you doing? Oh, you got a fucking arm now. Nice. I feel so biased against robot vacuums because I think I've, like, lived with a roommate who had one and it never worked. Yeah. That was like one experience a long time ago.

But just, like less than a month ago, I shot a whole production piece in Denver. And our whole small crew was staying in one big Airbnb in like this big, big fancy house in Denver. And they had robot vacuums on every floor for this exact reason. So I bet these people would love robot vacuums that can climb stairs. But they didn't turn off. I don't know fucking why. Whatever it was, all of these robot vacuums were programmed to turn on at midnight. And they were so loud and so scary.

And you had no idea what was going on. And so my boyfriend and I were sleeping in a bed here functionally. And just we were asleep. And then from that far away, you just hear this horrible, like, and then downstairs, one of our crew who was staying in the basement, her robot vacuum actually pushed her door open, came into her room in the middle of the night. And she was like, I genuinely thought I had an invader, like a home invader.

I would have destroyed it. I thought I was going to be assaulted. And it's just a room. What a horrifying. I would never have one. I really sort of have a personal vendetta against robot vacuums. It's also just like the problem is, is that like every robot thing, it's the edge cases. It's the shit between the corners that's actually the problem when it comes to sweeping the floor.

That's pretty easy. If you have a perfectly flat surface, it's good. It's just like we all want it to work. Have you tried any of the wet, dry ones? You've seen those? I'm intrigued by them, but I've never. Just the idea of like having a little robot looking just spooge on my, floor feels like, like I don't, they already seem to do pretty bad with the brushes. I don't want them to

have to have to be able to like, sorry, ejaculate. It's like an eggwood child. God. Yeah, I'm sorry. All right. Oh, buddy, you got excited. Calm down, mate. I think that's kind of, you know, that's the core disconnect of CS, right? Like, you just want stuff that works a little better. Yeah. And that's not something that you can have a CES booth about. Like, like, it finally. works. What if it did more but didn't work? That's often what it is though. That's another CES tagline.

It does more. It does more. The dreamy vacuum with the arm, it can change out the arm. It has a little cubby in its station and it can change out the little claw thing for like a vacuum nozzle. Okay. And like reach that arm up and like suck. Well, it's not that long, but it can, it's like going to corners or little spots that.

That's actually. How can it see? How can it tell where? it needs to go. He's got radar? I don't know. I asked them at their booth because they were demonstrating

the kind of claw arm just sort of picking up balls and putting them in a basket. And I asked them if they could show me it going to fetch its little attachments and they said no. Oh, they do not work. That just means they don't work.

That doesn't happen. They looked very alarmed that I asked. Oh yeah, no one's asked. That's, I love these moments though where you can see nobody. Like there's like 2,000 members of the media here. I'm just being like, can you show me it, do that?

I keep asking, but who cares when they tell me something? Because I just have so little repercussions for being. This is why I asked you to be here. Did anyone have an answer? It usually takes them like a couple, it takes people a couple tries. And then I would say probably two thirds of people have got, been able to answer the but who cares question. But it's just so clear that like nobody's prepared.

And I understand that I'm being like incredibly brisk about it. But I'm also like, I don't know, man. You should have an answer for that. I feel like you should. Yeah. I like, there was one like cable stand that where it's like it looks really fancy. And he's telling me all about it. And I was like as far as I could glean, the only thing special about the cable was you can make it extra long.

Hmm. It wasn't. I was like, oh, are you saying, like, you can change out the heads of the cable and you can, whatever, whatever. There were like all these little pieces. And then he was like, no, no, it's all the same head. You can't change it out. It's only USBC, but you can connect them. And I was like, so it's just really long.

Connect walk. And two USBC cables to each other to make a long USBC cable. And I went and I was like, but who cares? Like, why not just buy a long? Sure, I guess. No, I get it. Like, it's just this kind of stuff where it's like, I just want to know the answer to. So what?

It's kind of alarming that everyone doesn't have that answer. Yeah, that's the thing. I, yeah, I understand that I am being annoying and in your face. I get that you're saying that and you're being nice, but also this feels like you should just be able to explain. Totally. Real easy. Totally. Because otherwise you paid like 25,000.

dollars a day to be in like the South Hall to show off the goobest microwave with AI or whatever it's called. There's often, there is often that question when you're looking at something. It's like, well, why couldn't I just do this? And then, I don't know. Yeah. Neither than they. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, like, I was at Lenova's booth today and they have their own. What are they doing? What are they up to? I think I talked about this last year, too. Like, they got cool hardware stuff. Okay. I want to hear.

Please. That sounds fun. They have a gaming laptop. It's a concept, of course. But to their credit, some of those concept things they turn into products. Yeah, Henry Casey was mentioning the turning screen. They actually made that one. Yes. And then they have a gaming laptop that goes from like regular 16 by 9 into like ultra wide.

Hell yeah. Yeah. I fucking love that shit. I know. I love that shit. Great. It's like probably insanely expensive. But so what I'm guessing is it like you pull out the screen.

It's a rollable display. You just press a button. Yes. Let's fucking go. Yeah. Great. The consumer electronic show. Show me some weird shit.

Great. That was like in the back and then they have an AI chatbot for Windows. What is the reason they claim that is? I could not get an answer about that. Usual AI stuff. You have a document. Yeah, it's like you have a document and then you ask about the document and it tells you about the document. It summarizes your notification.

And it was like, well, why wouldn't I just use co-pilot? or chat to PT. And there wasn't really a clear... Get him out of here. Get him out of here now. Just fucking... You'll leave him. Guards?

Guards. Yeah. They also had people telling me that it was on-device language models and then like the product manager was like, oh, no, that's incorrect. Wait, what's the... So large language models

traditionally are run in the cloud, so you have to have a persistent internet connection. There are on-device language models. They require a shit ton of RAM to run because large language models, models are extremely ram dependent. Are you, have you downloaded functionally? I don't, I'm asking the stupidest question.

Have you downloaded a file that is the size of the large language model? Like, do you, are you holding the whole? No, no, they, not in this case. They, the product manager. Yes, in this case, they were not. In theory, yeah, you would have to have this like pretty powerful computer in a lot of space and whatever. And it still wouldn't work as well as like chat chabit. Yeah, it would take.

But then, and then you would, and, you would, and, But yeah, I was asking about it because you're dealing with, like, they were taking screenshots of what you were doing so that they could summarize and it's like, well, I don't really want that data going up who knows where. It's like, finally, you can tell me what I'm looking at. Yeah. How else would I know? I'm not looking at it.

That's such a shit because Lenovo makes some reliable shit. And the, was that Legion Go, their handheld gaming PC is pretty fucking cool. Did they have anything like that? No new gaming handheld stuff this year. Well, thank God. with using all the world's high bandwidth RAM to generate various wife tubes. Like, it's just such a shame. Now, Carissa, I'm going to change the weird company to choose for something that's actually

kind of interesting. Metis doing some stuff with this armband, right? And I was nearly ready to make fun of it as an artist myself, but this one that can see facial gestures, can you, or like emotions and such. For the blind, though. Yes. So this is actually a startup that is, so the startup is, so the startup is, you know, the startup is is independent from meta, but they made this wrist-based, like, wearable device that's supposed

to work in conjunction with meta's smart glasses. So the idea is that you're wearing meta-smart glasses, they have these kind of like real-time AI capabilities. So I'm talking to you, the video's on, that's going back to an app that's run by this startup. The app can detect, they have these models to detect kind of like facial expressions, gestures. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can customize. Right. And then this wristband will send a signal to the wristband and it vibrates in different patterns based on like if you do a thumbs up, it might vibrate like in a certain way. If you do a thumbs down or you frown or you know. For someone who's visually impaired, that actually sounds quite useful. If somebody is talking to

a blind person and they give a thumbs up, that person. Yeah, actually that's a good. That's a good point. That's a good point. Anybody who thinks that they can communicate with a blind person via hand gestures should be walked off. You are doing the jackoff gesture at me. My armband's fucking telling me you are just doing this with your hand. Well, I just could do more subtle ones too.

And I think it's also, they said that, you know, there's people who, you know, they're talking to their kids and they're like, oh, I never get that feedback from my kids of like knowing how their expressions. Goet. Get back in line. No, no, they did say that, yeah, they think that perhaps there's a use case for people who are neurodivergent who just like can see the facial expression but just like don't know what it means but i say this as someone with autism if i heard someone say that to me they might be blind by

the end of the conversation i'm i will say this if you're a visually impaired listen to the show i would actually love easy at better offline.com please email me because i i can see like i don't experience your life i'm actually genuinely curious if these things happen because i know last year there was this cane that talked and we kind of like like we made fun of it but it was like people like like, no, this is actually really useful. And I want to know because I don't want to give people shit for something that's actually useful. The fact they're mentioning the neurodivergent thing

really fucking pisses me off, though. Because that is like the experience of someone who does not have autism or anything related to that because it's just like, that's not how it fucking works. We're not sitting there like with, what is they? The bloke from lie to me. Or it's just looking for micro expressions. Nobody saw that show.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's just mostly it's just Tim Roth going, You lie, mate. And then, like, every scene is cut between, like, a picture of, like, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton, like, frowning at someone is, like, frowning. They should have to lie to be bloke at CS. You know what?

It's weird. Meta seems to have, like, oddly interesting accessibility stuff, though. Like, I have a mate who works over there. It's like, they seem to be trying something there. And then there's all the other stuff that Meta does, like, 10% of their revenue being from fraud in 2024, which is real. Does that mean that mean that like somebody high up in some pyramid at Meta is actually well-intentioned? Yes.

I must be clear, I think Meta is a deeply evil organization run by a scumbag. And when Mark Zuckerberg, I assume from natural causes from this world, or throw a fucking party for that piece of shit. That being said, there are people at Meta, I'm familiar with, inaccessibility in particular who actually give a shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just they're not running the company. And I think it might be sadly like an after effect of the larger product.

But at the same time, if there's some fucking good for me. It's just, it's hard to get excited about something from. Yeah, exactly. It's like, especially because like my, the only meta product I unashamedly loved was the portal. Oh, really? It was great. But it's because it could, like, it was a very, it's weirdly hard to find a thing to call someone from a TV. And like on Christmas, my kid and I might call my parents.

And it's like, it's easy for my dad and my mom to work. And they just click and it works. And they, of course, discontinued this product because Meta is not... Yeah, Meta's not about connecting you to people. It's about showing you either like dogs barking or like dog whistles mostly. AI dogs barking at this point. Yeah, like the worst AI stuff. AI generated like sprouts another head and then that head starts barking.

So I'm like being like reverse gangstocked by Meta though because I don't get any AI slot. Oh really? I've never been shown any. I don't know that I get shown AI stuff either. I've seen other people's feeds and they are just like, I have a friend who's, it's exclusively AI. I get like,

I get Gen Z people being like showing a clearly homeless person pictures of like brain raw. And this person in distress, just being like, why am I being harassed by a man with broccoli hair and eight cameras? And it's like, oh, God, but luckily I've trained my thing. So all I get is like silk and wind howl. now. Like, shout out to Chloe and Abby and all those wonderful dogs. Everyone knows what I'm

talking about. Just moving on. But yeah, like, I've had to train my feed. But it's a shame because it's like, I guess at some scale with a company like that, you do eventually do a good thing, just most of the other things are bad. Do they still support the portal? Does it work? It works for now. What is the portal? It's like literally, it's just an HDMI camera you connect to your TV and you can connect to someone else. It works. It works really well. And you're looking at it It's a FaceTime call for your TV. Yeah, and it follows you quite well as well. It's like, it was a cool product, which is why they stopped it, because we can't have that.

Yeah, yeah. We can't be having you connect to people on Facebook. No, no, because, you know, what that does, it takes you off of Facebook. Yeah, you can't be shown the feed. But it's like, it's interesting to see them try shit. It's just, there's all the other stuff. Also, it's kind of rare to see a hyperscaler here. Because, like, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they don't really, Amazon will have like a side thingy.

I remember last year when I had a picture of the side. smiling man on my badge. And I went into the Amazon thing. A woman stopped me and went, wow. She's, I mean, there are no good reactions to that picture and everyone knows it. But yeah, they usually don't have a presence. So meta trying to do stuff is good. Like, right? Like, I don't know. Yeah, I'm like, try, I guess. Everyone is looking quite pain. I mean, the smart glasses are interesting. They, you know, I've written a lot about this. I have very mixed feelings about them because they're genuinely good products. You roast me every time I post it on my Instagram.

I don't roast you. I'm nice to you. When did I ask roast you? No, you don't roast me. But I did one time post a poll of like, do these look good on me? And you were like, and you were the first person, the instillings like, no, absolutely not. It's the Roy Orbison glasses. But anyway, you have complex feelings about them.

It's true. Because they are actually like a good product. If you use them, they work really well. Some of the AI stuff, you're going to hate this. It's cool. The translation features. I've used them on vacation. Consistently, that's the only feature where, like, everyone's kind of like that and dictation and stuff is kind of works. They're good. The display glasses, they look unfortunate. Yeah.

No, I've used one. I use one on the show. They're like, they're kind of cool. Yeah, they're cool. You know, I tried today. They, they just launched a handwriting, the handwriting feature. What's that? So, you know, they use this neural band that you can control gesture. So if you want to. So the glasses, you put them on and you control. it with the wristband just for play's sake. Yeah, you kind of do little swipes, and that's how you control the interface. And it works pretty well. And it does.

And so up to now, if you get like a WhatsApp message and you want to reply, basically you have to like use your voice to like dictate a reply. So now what they're going to do is they have a feature that's feature called a handwriting where you can basically just trace letters with your hand, like on any, like on your leg, on a table, you know, just say cool, like just do the letters. And then that will appear on the screen. And I tried to say it was actually like it worked really well. It did not work with cursive, although I'm the only old person who probably would even try that. Uh-huh.

Well, I mean, that's, I cannot, like, dyspraxia, physical disability where, like, writing is one of the worst things. It's, like, eventually painful. I kind of want to go and hunt this down just to be like, yeah, let's fucking go, mate. I have a disability. Let's go. But actually, you know, maybe it works. But wait, so it's how you write them. Do you do it by letter?

Yeah, so you just do it letter by letter. and then when you want to do a space, you do like a left to right. When you want to delete something, you can go right to left. I'm oddly, like, intrigued by this because there's when they brought Swipe, I don't even remember Swipe, it's like when you just drag the, it's now fairly common, but it like, that works pretty well. Oh, yeah, I love that. I'm kind of like, all right, Meta, if you want to do one.

You want a whole booth for Swipe at CES? No, they did one year. Swipe, I think, actually had like a small booth. I swear to God this happened. Yeah, it sounds like something plausible and I just Mandela are affected. into the world. It's just like YouTube videos popping up. No, it's, I, I can't believe like, meta.

Fucking meta is the company that brought something that worked to CES. Oh, God, it's like a three-headed dog being born. Disgusting. I mean, I think what you were, what you were saying earlier about, basically, the trend is the most pragmatic things are the things that actually will help the world and that consumers actually want and actually need, but they just are the least shiny and they get the least positive feedback and they hit the fewest headlines. Yeah.

And if you allow me to tell a brief story. Please, please. Close out this third. This is, okay, here we go. I think you, I think you're, for the first minute of this, you're going to go, why are you telling this story? And then I think you will understand. For my wonderful boyfriend's birthday earlier this year, I had a couple grand plans.

I have this very vivid memory of him having, when we first started dating a couple years ago, having this plug by his bed that had multi-cords coming out of it, like a little octopus set up kind of thing. And he would move it from next to his bed to his office and then from his office to wherever we were going. And two years ago, I was like, it would be awesome to get. him a second one of those so that he didn't have to move it around. And then he also thinks that the M&M store in Times Square is very funny. And so I was like, I also will get him some Eminem's

store branded merchandise. And then I think I had a third idea that I don't remember now. And then it was the day before my boyfriend lives in London. It was the day before I was, I think it was the day that I was flying to London. Right. Had not purchased any of this. Went to the Times Square store in London. The Eminem's store, I'm sorry, the Eminem store in Times Square. Couldn't find anything that he would want.

Got him a pair of boxer shorts that I knew he wouldn't like. It's not the type that he wears. But I was like, at this point, I really have backed myself into a corner. Landed in London, went immediately to a multiple department stores looking for this type of cable, whatever. None of them had the setup that I wanted. I wound up buying, what's the fancy? It's like Macy's. It's like a step down from that.

It's a two word, two name. John Warris. John Lewis. John Watter. I fucking wish. Yeah. So he went to John Waters. Went to John Wattice.

Went to John Lewis, bought him a plug and two cables that all were sold separately. Couldn't figure out what the third, like couldn't find the third thing. Whatever. I wound up for his birthday. And just for context. The year before he had turned 40 and I had gotten him a vintage Tottenham Hotspur, which is the soccer team that he supports, warm up jacket from the year that he became a fan, 1993, like went, hunted on eBay, found the exact, it was this incredible gift.

And this year I brought him Eminem's boxers and a plug and two cords. And he was like, you are the idiot husband and I am the long-suffering wife and Fairpoint. But the entire point of this story. is, out of all of the presents I have gotten him over the last two years, you want to know what he fucking uses every fucking day? The plug? The cable. And I'm like, see? And you are still

the fucking husband. You're still the husband. I'm still the husband. You're still the husband. You're still the husband who got the gift. They're like, look, it's good. It's good. You like it. You like it. You're happy. And it was expensive. Stop muttering under your breath when I mentioned Christmas. All right, we're going to rotate to our next guest. The next

advertisement is brought to you by Blort, the sun cream for dogs. 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. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You're the name. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

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Call 844. I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on 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 conspirators. he's I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levan this went 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 Aihar Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or we're ever. ever you get your podcast. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi,

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Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel on. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladecki. The ability to show gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me.

And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up. Even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Welcome back to the show. I'm Ed Zittron. I'm joined by Carissa Bell of Engadgett. Hello, hello. Jared Newman of the Viserated newsletter. Hey, I'm Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. I am loving the drive-time radio DJ version of Ed Zetron.

I'm really enjoying this. Are you even doing this all day? Yeah, I really. I'm going to be everyone. Has it's gotten old yet? not for me. Have you taken reader questions? I would love them.

If you want it easier, better offline.com, I'll answer all your questions. No, you've been Daniel Goodman, my producer, sorry, my producer is Matt Souski,

but Daniel produces went in person. It's not a fair. And Bahad as well. Nevertheless, we've been working on it, but I think the idea of like a drive time show with me is a really,

you don't need to, you don't want to have that unholy force come out of the world. But Robert, you've got a stack of paper in your crusade against trees. I do. I do. I hate trees. I love printed advertisements for products that are going to destroy the company releasing them. Yes. And I've been collecting quite a few. These are just the ones that I

managed to grab out of my bag quickly. Nice. But talk to me about some of the things you've seen today. Well, I mean, easily the most impressive product that's at the show today. And there's a wide variety of stuff. There's like apparently some sort of like magnetically fired net gun for taking out drones. Oh, okay. You know, there's all sorts of incredible, like, different, like, in smart vehicle products, like, different kind of electric engines and, like, all sorts of crazy new battery and solar technology. But it's the AI that's really set off the convention this year. Everyone's talking about AI. And there's no AI product that people are talking about more than AI Moon, the world's first Zodiac AI fairy.

Oh, my fucking good. I mean, obviously. Please like, look at the, I mean, I would describe them as like if a furry, that's not a nice joke. If a furry head fetal alcohol syndrome, right? Like, that's kind of like how these look to me. I don't mean that like negative. It's just a description. Yeah, and these are to replace your astrologer.

You know, they're trying to get rid of astrologer. They're coming after our scam artists. They're coming after the scam artists today. The newspapers are going to shut down. They already talk classifieds away. And for one thing, I cannot tell how much is AI generated of the pictures of people in this brochure. Everything looks a little wrong to me. Can I?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They brag that they have a proprietary astrology engine with a birth horoscope and a composite chart analysis, a long-term memory system. So it gets to know you better with every chat. And a personalized personality that's customized, based on user data. They're good as friends, as emotional comfort.

They brag that it can help you cure certain problems that you might have. So I'm going to say... The other ad thing I've got. Yes. I'm going to say, Jesus Christ. First of all, I don't think the audience could possibly know how low resolution these images are. It's a badly made brochure. And you've got some...

Yeah, here's the thing. Because there's like astrology where it's like based on like when you were born and what times. and like there's also like thoughts. This is not that. This is like various photos that I, okay, this is like, did they Photoshop this thing in? That's what they don't quite look right. And I can't tell if that's just because they used AI photos or if there's just like a deep well of madness at the center of this product. Are these physical objects?

Yeah. Yeah. They're little furby sized objects that give you are like horoscope chatbots that are supposed to like learn and evolve the more they work with. you. And they're also supposed to like counsel you and be like quasi-therapists. So they, they had like four different archetypes of these robots that they were advising. One is the relationship advisor. Filter out toxic. Filter out the toxic. Making the ones you love, making the, sorry, making the ones you love cherish you even more, which is a weird sentence. How? First off, like, okay. Sure. And this one is sharp tongue, emotionally rich,

sharp intuition, strong empathy, insensible. And obviously it's a Scorpio. And then the Capricorn one is your career lucky charm. It cures overthinking, which might be a violation of FDA rules on advertising. Cures inaction. Masters hustling and career building. I want to know how it cures in action, just by it's so horrifying you make it. Yeah, I need to get up and leave my house to get away from the doll.

Yeah, and then there's the joyful protector. tap once to ditch the mental overload. Stay upbeat and carefree 24-7. And I really wanted to try these out, but they did not seem to be functioning. At least the demo I got, I couldn't really hear it. And it connected, it just like wasn't connecting, I guess. Like, that's been an issue because I've tried a bunch of different.

We slapped, we gave access to Gemini or to fucking chat GPT, to a ring or to a pencil or something like that. And most of the ones, when I'd ask, like, can I try it? They're like, well, the signal's not really working right now. That's been a lot, though, because the Wi-Fi doesn't work and all these things are off-device. Yeah, well, and that's one of the products that I did really like was from a... I initially just discovered the company because I saw their name, and I was like, that can't be an American company because they would not have picked this name.

And it's for a... They do translation-based AI products, and the company's name is Trans-AI. Oh, I saw that. So I just looked, I just kind of like, that got me. But then their products were actually really neat. They had a device that's like a transcription tool. It's about the size of a smartphone. It's got the screen.

It looks nice. It's got a swiveling camera that has like a little engine on it. And so you can just set it down when you're doing an interview and it'll transcribe that. But it also, it acts as a translator. It's got like 150 languages. Like you can have translate convent, which a bunch of products do. A ton of people. And this was on.

I remember them saying this was all on device. And it's on device. That's what I really liked. because a lot of people are offering, this is a translator, but it's in the cloud. Or it's literally like chat GPT is on it too. And like, so you want me to have like interviews that might be sensitive and then throw that shit back to chat GPT

or else we're on the, no, I want it on device. And especially with these cheap companies, you know they're not paying the extra to keep it. So it's not being used to this training data. Yeah. And that will be trans AI is going to have this out. If you just Google TransAI Kickstarter, they've got a Kickstarter going to fund this device,

which I didn't get to test it fully. I did get to like hold and look at it. It seemed at least physically well made. Like it's a good industrial design. I can't. Well, I did. I mean, there's only so much you can try standing around. They did give me though a set of wireless earbuds that are automatic translators.

Okay. So I am going to get to try that out. I like that. So we'll see how well it works. Were the earbuds on device as well? No, no, no. Those are because they're just little earbuds, right? But it may just be, though, that downloads enough onto your phone.

I'm not, I haven't gotten to try that yet. I feel like in a few years anything that's left of the air bubble will all be on device just because nobody trusts this shit. Right. Well, and just, yeah. And nobody wants to pay for it. No. It wants to pay for it.

And for stuff that's really crucial, like being, like, if you're trying to sell, like, you can have conversations when you're traveling around the world, maybe in, like, weird off-grid locations, I don't want to have to have, like, 5G. I don't have to connect to an app. We were just saying that earlier. It's like if you're in somewhere where you desperately need the translation, there's no English speakers around. It's probably also not a Wi-Fi-rich environment. And you have more experience of this, I think, than anyone. And you'd always prefer to have a person, but that's not always super feasible. I mean, always. So what else you've got in your pile of papers? Okay, let's see. What else do I have in my... Well, I've got this book that I can't wait to read, Patterns for Building AI Agents by Sam Bogwatt, who is the co-founder. That's a great name. I think it's just a normal name.

Sam Boguar is some. Co-founder and CEO, something called Master A-I. I don't know what it is, but 11 of these were sitting out at a bus stop on the way to the convention center, so I just went ahead and grabbed one. It's like when you're walking around Brooklyn, you find a Scientology thing. Yeah. Yeah, it might be a cult. I have not

confirmed it's not a cold. Okay, so, okay, the patterns for building it, Sam, Watwan. Yeah, I don't know. I'll look at this later and I'll tear it. This is... Oh, actually, I can't read this. It's the sequel to principles

of building AI agents. Oh, okay, you got to read the first one. You can't watch the Empire Strikes Back first. Sorry, I found the name. This is the device I was talking about, the AI, the world's first on device, AI meeting note taker, the trans AI note. You can like, see, it's like a nice looking gadget.

By the way, there was another device called Trans AI or Trans, it's something with Transn's an AI in the name, and it was voice cloning. It was a translator that, It's a translator that tried to make your voice sound like it was in the other language. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah, it was a little unsettling.

That's really good for fraud. Like, that really is going to hybrid charge. It's great for fraud. Because I've been really wanted to take advantage of a lot of French people at scale, and it's just hard to do right now. Yeah, I'm just reading this agent book, example, coding agents. Replit agent feeds errors back into context and kicks off an alt-a-made feedback loop. Based on everything I've ever read about their company, that is wrong.

It may be. Just the fraud masters. There was, oh, there was the Cybo Pal, which is, it was one of those products where, like, I can see the cool in this, but it doesn't work very well, where it's supposed to be a site tracking intelligent monitor that moves on its own with your head. I can see the value. As you, like, move it. Now, obviously, you don't want it to just physically move whenever you move your head, because

that would be a nightmare. That would, like, literally be hell. Like, if this gadget is just constant. As you're like, I got to like move over, take a hit of a vape pen or something. But so they had to figure out like how can you, what is like an easy, seamless, unobtrusive way for you to tell this thing to move? And they settled on a complex series of different hand gestures that you have to use what, like you have to go aim at one of two different sensors.

And first the lady who was like the PR representative that was supposed to show it off, tried to. And about one out of every four times it did what she asked it to. and then the guy who I think was one of the inventors who's definitely her boss there's a language bearer so it was a little hard to tell their exact roles in the company sat down and he did a lot better it responded to what he asked it

about 70% of the time but it's still a lot both of them a lot of the time are just like doing this like repeating the same like two finger gesture whatever over and over at a camera to get it to move and when it because periodically for like 40 seconds it would do like five or six gestures in a row would move.

And I was like, oh, that's kind of neat. Yeah, if it worked, it would be great. CES 2026. Yeah, exactly. And it's just one of these, it's another like AI product. Well, for one thing, that's not AI. I'm sorry, guys. Like, we're using that for every, it's the same thing like.

They had that company that Apple bought like in 2011 that was like they had a can. It was like a bar. It was like a wee bar. You're attached to your monitor and you could like do gestures. And that barely fucking worked. Hell yeah. And if the Xbox. Lenovo actually had a tilting,

a swiveling screen laptop and that follows your head when you're on. Did it work? Yeah, it worked. These people are fuck then. Sorry, you're gonna say something?

I was just say, we had that, didn't Xbox have that technology like 10 years ago? Well, connect, but it couldn't see black people. That was like,

it's like a better off TED joke. That keeps happening too. That's not the first, nor will it be the last time. The law doesn't seem to do that either. Well, sometimes. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, And the whole frustration of, like, things labeled it, because there's a mix of, like, shit labeled as AI that under no circumstances, does anyone reasonable consider, like, a robot that responds to a gesture by moving a screen? And that's all it does.

That's not an intelligence. And also just, do you have fucking hands? And have you met people with other hands? Like, we've been, and we've been doing that for forever. Like, machines that you can, like, do something into a camera, and it recognizes a simple command. It's just basic, like, you get that on device. now. And likewise, like, I keep seeing, like, I like this AI, this meeting note taker. I don't, is it

AI? I guess it's more AI to recognize and, like, transcribe a conversation. But the appeal is not that it's a thing that you can communicate with. The appeal is that it can do a task, right? It's this, they, there's a bunch of different AI pins and AI glasses. And the ones I hated all had chat integration into it to where you can communicate with it. And the ones that, they, that were cool, we're like, yeah, it's a pen that can listen to a conversation and transcribe it for you. Right. Right. And I was like, well, yeah, that's, that might be useful, you know?

It's just like, it all gets back to the classic thing of like, yeah, I want this to do a task and they're like, oh, no, no, sorry, AI doesn't do that. Yeah. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it, I feel like this is just the logical end point of where this is CES has been going for 10 years, which is slowly distancing itself from reality. Yeah. and promise to just this point when 97% of the stuff is just like, if it works, wouldn't it be kind of useful sort of? Well, it's like, you know, I was talking about like AI slop products earlier, you know, and it's the kind of thing where like, okay, you can talk to your router and the router

will tell you what's wrong, whatever. But it's like, you could just design a UI that just like told you that that just gave you that information in a visually appealing way. Or a router that works. People don't, look, as a print journalist, like, people don't want to read a block of text, unfortunately. They just want visual and yet we're reverting into this thing where like the technology communicates with you via a block of text that was generated by, yeah. I also love that with routers as well because I think for like every CES I've ever been

to there was a router company that said, yeah, it'll just fix your network problems for it. Everyone's lying. Every single one of them's lying. It's wrong every time. It's never worked. TPLink. Deco, fuck you, TeeP link. I'm sorry that shit. Don't work. It's busted and fuck that. Hundreds of dollars wasted. Yeah, and it's the most product category type I have seen at CES is some form of digital assistant and or a new chat bot or like companion, right? Right. Like there's a huge booth for a company called T-U-Y-A that was like they've got this holistic. It does everything digital companion.

You can like there's a health version of it so you can like feed this thing your health data. Like you can give it access to your wearables. And it'll not just like tell you what's my heart rate at, how much, you know, many calories did I burn. But it'll tell you like it'll like make workout plans for you and like recommend diets and stuff for you. Which like I guess I'm sure there are people who want that. I have the concern I always have with like, okay, so you're feeding all of your biometric data into this machine that you're feeding all of your communications to it. It has access to your email. It has access to your notes.

it's you've got a wearable device and it's listening to you. There's a mobile version running through your house. How secure are you? How much do you trust this company's data safety? Yeah. Considering big companies have breaches all the time. I will also add, if you get the wrong workout plan, you can actually really hurt yourself.

I'd say this is someone who's done it to myself. It's just like that feels, I feel people are very cavalier about that as well, where it's just like, oh yeah, I'll just take the workout from the air. And you fuck your leg up, you fuck your arms up, all the things I've done. Yep.

And there's a, so they have an AI pet robot for two you that can live in your house. It's got, it looks like a big white donut with wheels. And I think the hole in the middle is meant, at least based on the crudely photo or the crudely photoshopped cat sitting in it to be like, your pet can sit inside the AI robot companion. See, it's part of the family.

I've always, A pet for my pet? Or is it kidnapping your cat? And it's telling that they couldn't get a real cat in that thing. They had to Photoshop a cat crudely into that thing. Because no cat is getting inside a wheeled robot to drive around. Bob was killing that shit. Bob was fucking running across the house to like donkey kick that shit.

And they describe again, it just looks like a donut with wheels. Galactic design, harmonious coexistence, sleek, sci-fi aesthetics for pets and people. Yeah, it's Oh, Jesus Christ When am I going to meet somebody who buys one of these? Yeah, I want to meet someone. I actually want to study the brain of someone who goes to that. He's like, yes.

Yes, finally. It was a big booth, so clearly there's money behind these people. I think this is, yeah, I'm not sure where the company is based out of. I haven't looked into it enough yet. There was a panel going on to you. X, Tuya and Google Cloud from AI first to AI everywhere, which was the same as half of the other panels. I've heard it was just a bunch of platitudes about. I want to tie someone to a chair. Like how the AI's just getting better. It's coming to everything. Don't you love your digital

assistant? I don't go anywhere without my digital assistant. What was it? You said the last year, this is the worst that will ever be. It actually seems to have got worse. It's at least not any better. And yeah, they've got the health management thing. It's got a fitness coach. It does sleep analysis. And again, I just keep thinking like, okay, so you're just handing literally your entire life's data to this fucking app. This is, they do the donut thing and they have the companion app that can also, one of the things they bragged about is that if you just, oh, it can run your smart home. So you can plug your security system into this. In addition to your biometric data, it's a security guardian, 24-7 protection for peace of mind. and it can run your smart power system,

it can run your smart home, and it's also just a companion. And one of the things they advertise this companion can do is if you just tell it a topic, it'll automatically generate a podcast for you. Aren't we all, you know, we're in danger now, Ed. It takes a little more skill than that. Yeah, no, no, chat with hey to you.

By the way, it's hey to you. Sounds a lot too much like hawk twas. Yeah. I'm also just thinking like everything's like sleep analysis. So as a chat GPT rapper, you feed the sleep data into health analysis. It's just, they release chat GPT for health today. AI podcast. Alex Heath said, listen to what you love.

Alex Heath of sources says that chat GPT health is going to be big. I think that that's irresponsible. Yeah. And also bullshit. Like a massive numpty would use chat GPT health. It's like, what's it going to fuck? And it also, it's great. It's like use it for this, this.

but it's not for health advice. Yeah. So why the... No, he said that we can't advertise that right now. Jesus, the liability. But also, what the fuck is it for then? It's for giving you health advice. Yeah, it's like, it's for health.

Here's the other thing, though. Like, if we buy, and this is an if, but like if we buy the idea that generative AI, agents like chat GPT and Gemini and I, whatever, are like the operating systems of the future. Which I of course do. I know you believe that. Obviously. But like, you now you,

you have all these other products like that, which is like its own AI kind of agent. And so, and there's like a million of them on the show floor. So like, are you going to have that? And then another device that has its own AI thing and another device has its own AI thing. And you really would rather just use chatGBT or whatever. That's the thing. It's like what happens to all these companies when Open AI copies all of them? Yeah. Or dies. What if OpenAI raises their prices? Do the market? And these products are literally just a thing that, like a computer that we slapped into a ring or something and gave it wireless, like gave it like access to chat GPT, right? That's all it is. What if you can't afford that anymore? Yeah. What if they raise the prices by 10%? Because that doesn't sound like much if you're like paying 20 bucks a month. But if you're doing, I don't know, thousands of dollars, tens, hundreds of money. You wipe them out immediately. If your margins are 10%, And like most of your business is spent on chat GPD.

It's just, it's inevitable, but also so easily clonable. I'm looking forward to the chat GPT furry astrologer. Sure. Now that's a responsible use. That's ethical AI. And that really seems like ethical AI to me. Yeah, very worrying. There was a good one on mental health and AI that was by a panel.

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't so much a panel as like a speech by like, a clinical therapist who I've got this written down my notes. I'm basing her name right now. But she was taking very much the reasonable tact of like, okay, what has already happened is that a shitload of people are using chatbots as therapists. That is happening. That is a thing that is going on. There are harms we are starting to document and will continue to document with that.

But it's a thing that's happening. what would a healthy, like, and the other thing she was saying that I don't fully agree with, but I think it's an arguable point is because lack of access to mental health resources is such an endemic problem in the United States and the world, there is an opportunity if you can make ethically a clinical, like an AI therapist, right, or something that can do counseling or whatnot, to reach people who could another way. Now, I don't agree with that. But it's for the purpose of, like, listening to the speech,

I can follow with like, okay, how would you, I want to hear your pitch on, like, what an ethical version of this would be. And what I appreciated is that she doesn't really, didn't really come to a conclusion. Like, she was like, these are the things you would need to do. I don't know if it can be done. That was kind of the three one is like,

I'm not sure that this is actually, here's what it would need to be if it was, if you were going to try to do this. Here's what you couldn't have it doing. Here's the things you'd have to keep in mind. And like one of the things she brought up, which I think is why this is a fundamentally impossible thing is she said, okay, one of the major problems with chatbots, especially because people are using them as therapists, is that they are designed to keep you on and to

keep you using them. And they like, we'll gas you up. They'll lie to say whatever to keep you using them. And that's bad for like therapy. Yeah, you need pushback. Right. You need pushback. You need critical analysis of what you're doing sometimes.

You don't need a machine that is trying to keep you happy so that you continue to use it. That's not therapy. And she was like, so any responsible version of this technology turned towards therapy would have to not do that. And so I came up to her afterwards. And I was like, well, the problem to me then is people will always have access to the robots that are really dangerous and terrible therapists that make them feel good and want to talk to. them, why would anyone use and pay money for a presumably more expensive therapeutic bot that doesn't make them feel good? And she was like, well, yeah, I think that's probably like an insurmountable problem. Basically, like, that was the, that wasn't her word, but her words were

essentially like, yeah, I have the same concern that I'm not sure it's possible to do this. So what frustrates me, she's right, sure, but what frustrates me about that is like, I'm tired of people saying if it did this, it would be great, if it's just not possible, if it's just, But most of CES this year is like if it worked, it would be good. Hers was more people are using chatbots for therapy. Is it what would you need to see for this to not be irresponsible? That's, and I think that's reasonable. I just, I think it's just people, what, she's right, it's a good thing, but it's like,

it's not a good, I think it's the conclusion was you can't do it probably. Yeah. And it's also, people will conflate that by saying, and if we just buy more GPUs, then therapy bot will exist. And it's also just people misunderstand what therapy is. It's good that someone said what would be required, but the moment you think about what would be required, you realize it isn't possible.

Well, it's the same. Last year, we talked to a guy who made an AI-enabled device that was like four, as a companion for old people. Primarily, it's like this like head-shaped kind of robot, but didn't have like a face that had cameras on it and could, like, move a little bit and engage with you, that you would, like, keep in a kitchen or something like an appliance, and you could use basic stuff with it.

It'll tell you, like, the weather outside. It can look up stuff for you. Like Alexa, basically. Like Alexa, but it also, it's programmed to engage you and ask you to, like, hey, do you want to record a story for your grandkids? Like, you can build an archive. Hey, you have these friends who also have this device. Why don't I call one of them?

That seems reasonable. To try and keep them active, to try to keep them active, to try to keep him engaged with their family to make sure. And talking to the inventor of it, he was incredibly concerned both about privacy, but also about this is a medical device. And this is a device that would give people better access to their doctors, better access to their families, give their families a better idea of what's going on with them. And so I don't think it's going to work as a product.

I'm sure the company has already failed to be entirely honest, because I don't think anyone's going to buy this thing. But I appreciate like, okay, you had a good. good impulse coming in here. This is not a cash grab for you. You were attempting to make something that would solve a problem. And be a good business as a result of that. Right. And this year, I came across a company that this is the company, I showed you the Harrow, um, uh, Zeroeth that had the, the Wally robot. They have the Wally robot that they say they're working with Disney to do a licensed version of. But they have these tiny robots that look like Rockham Sockham robots that are like

companions for the elderly, even though they look like a toy, a kid would have played with in the 1990s. Is this an AI me or something like that? No, no, that's a different egg. But it can like walk around, I can hobble around and the thing, when I asked like, what does it do? She said, well, it'll tell your, it'll tell, like, an elderly person's family member if they're not doing well, if they like seem to be less social or like stressed or anxious. And I was like, well, based on what? And he said, well, if you look, you can see like, we've got this, you can see like how the machine sees through the cameras, and it looks like the Terminator, and it'll zero in on faces, and it'll notice, like, micro-expressions that show you that somebody's, like, hiding,

and I'm like, you're, number one, you don't know any of this. Yeah, you're making this off. Number two, telling me that your, like, elder care device looks at people the way the Terminator does, doesn't give me a lot of confidence. And just the difference in, like, this man who this was a very personal invention to him, and he, at every step was thinking about what will actually be best to the people I want to help, versus this marketer being like, yeah, it's like a fucking Terminator.

I'll tell you if your grandma's dying. Fucking rules. And what are you meant to do with that day? And it's tiny. It's like 18 inches tall. Grandma's going to have this walking around. She's going to trip on it. Yeah, like what the fuck?

Like the classic thing that old people do is trip on stuff. And it's like, we need another one of them. Yeah, what grandma needs is a tiny robot that looks like a toy that her 40-year-old grandson now would have played with as a kid. And like, why do she want this in her house?

You get it between like T-moon notifications. and Instagram notification, Grandma dead. Grandma dead. Details later. Grandma dead. Or like your cat's pissed. Like you get the notification.

It really is notification. If you bought even seven of these devices, your entire life is just a nightmare. Just like, ping, cat dead. The rest of your life trying to scroll through one day's notifications. I mean, my fucking phone is already like that. It's insane.

You install a new app that's like, oh, it's the self-frages app. And it's like, did you know you can buy pants? And it's like, I'm familiar. Thank you. Selfridges. But I think it kind of gets back to like, you know, what I was saying before about like pebble and clicks.

It's like, you know, it is so in short supply at CES to find like authenticity, somebody who is like really passionate about like this thing. A thing. A problem. I want to solve a problem. But when you find it, it's very exciting, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Like the guy who made the mug that has a fan on it. For when you're at like, you're drinking at the. at the stadium or something during like a summer game and you want both a fan and you want your beer, your Gatorade, whatever you put in there, you know? A C-U-N TV shit. Well- It's stupid. I don't want one. It barely counts as consumer electronics, but at least a man had a dream, you know?

So we're going to rotate again, and the next ad is, whatever it is, it's perfect. You have to buy it immediately. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

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That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me.

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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. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards.

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Diane, I'm once again in front of a microphone in the Palazzo in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm drinking my 11th Diet Coke. I'm surrounded by the warmth and love of friendship and camaraderie. Joining me is Chloe Radcliffe, the wonderful stand-up comedian, actress from Is This Thing On? Who? What? Where? It's you. Who?

Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards? Yes. Correct. I'm going. I'm just... Standup comedian Adam Konova and also the host of the Factory The podcast. Hello. And of course, Edward Lengueso Jr., who writes the Tech Bubble newsletter.

Hello. And we're back. We're back for the final bit of the Wednesday's CES episode. I'm on, this is what, 12 and a half hours. It's great. I've got so many more. I fucking love doing it. I'm not even complaining. I love doing this. But everyone else appears, everyone else is tired. And I'm so sorry everyone for dragging you into this. But yeah, so we've got two people who've never been to CES before. Oh. Chloe, Adam.

Yeah. How'd you feel? What do you think? Welcome to the jungle. I mean, it makes me want to like go see someone play an acoustic guitar with no amplification. Yeah. You know what I mean? I'll tell me more.

Yeah. It makes me want to like walk by a playground like, you know, it's recess and the children are just sort of like running around. Yeah, it makes me want to build a fire and dig a hole with my bare hands. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it makes me want to like have a basic, a basic pleasure of life. And it, I'm having trouble like, you know, putting the two worlds together, you know.

How do you mean? Like, what are the two worlds in this case? Well, it's just, you know, like this is, it's the, the center of, you know, the tech industry in many ways, or at least a certain piece of it, right? It's like all sort of coalescing around. this, you know, moment. It's like a little black hole. And like the bowels of the tech industry.

Yeah, right? Because it's not ready to like shit all this stuff out yet. So we're kind of watching it as it. And it's like, it's like supposedly, yeah, it's supposedly the most important, you know, industry in America.

That sets the tone for the year as well because it's in January. Drives the economy. These are the people who are like creating the future. And so much of it could not be more distant from most people's lives or horrifying to their lives. Did you see anything new today that horrified you? Yeah, there were three different kiosks that were selling body trackers that would track you while you're driving a car. Sorry, it's not for you the driver, though. It's for your employer to track you while you're driving the car. Like if, you know, to track UPS drivers or Uber drivers or other people

who are driving a fleet. And it can, you sit there. and it draws a little skeleton over your body and your face to track you. And then it has a little icon. Oh, we can tell you're yawning. A little voice will say, put on your seatbelt. Like it's human monitoring to mechanize people. I guess if you're a logistics company that can't afford Waymoes, which are also all over the place,

this is a way of sort of putting your drivers into a little virtual prison. That feels so much more invasive than, you know, hey, we do have an alarm on the car door so we know every time you get in and out of the vehicle and we have GPS in the car and we know when you're stopped. We have like a governor so it can't go above a certain speed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, it was kind of fun to play with because they have a camera set up and you want to track your body. And me and Edward were playing with it. And then I was like waving at it. And then I kind of pretended I was in a car crash and then I kind of like yanked the equipment around and it wasn't put, and then a German man came over

and he was like, you must leave. That has been enough fun. I was like, I'm sorry. Yes, you must leave. Yeah. Each time you said, each time Adam said, I'm sorry, he's like, oh, yes, yes. You have to go. You must be.

That rocks. By the way, I was, like, pretty stoned for the entire two hours that we were there. I love getting in trouble at booths. Like, my second or third CES. I used to have this thing where I would go. would seek out all of the rugged products because this was right when they were starting to make a bunch of Bluetooth speakers, 15 years ago, starting to make a bunch of like power banks and stuff. So like rugged electronics was coming into like its own as a field. And so I would always,

I would track down like where they had and there was there was one year where one of the companies selling them had a bunch of like these big boxy rugged speakers and like logs that like you could sit on or that they were stacking them on. They just brought the logs as decorations. Right. But they were like stump sized. And I asked them like, hey, so it's like drop resistant crush proof. And they were like walking me through the stats. And I was like, can I try just dropping one of these logs on top of it? And they were like, yeah.

And so I fucking hit it as hard as I could. And I crat the son of a bitch in half. Hell, yeah. And a German man said, you must leave. You must put the lockdown. She apologized to me. Because she said it. I asked.

I didn't do, I didn't assault the device. Well, you assaulted the device, but with, Express consent. With consent. But this was also a device you were meant to assault. Yes. Well, and that's what my very first CES,

they had an indestructible cell phone, not a smartphone, a cell phone. And they took a bunch of journalists out to, I think we were in front of Caesars. Maybe it was the Venetian. But they had like a car that had like company branding on it. And they would,

each journalist could go and set the phone down and they would drive over it with like an SUV. Right. To show you how tough it is. And everyone did the exact same thing and took a video while it was driving over it. And I did the same thing as everyone else. I put the phone down flat.

They drove over it. I was like, yep, that's a tough phone. And one guy stacked it on its side, and they drove over it and it popped it right open because it hit a seam. And that is one of the most influential, like, moments in my career as a journalist where it's like, that's how you do journalists.

I feel like this is the CES thing. It's like, we have got one thing this does and most people are not going to wash. Because this is not for people to use, it's for people to sell. Right. And it's like, oh, yeah, yeah. Well, what if it does this? Wait, what?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, does it work? Ah, mm-hmm. Claude, I feel like you were talking about something earlier, Chloe. It was just like, you asked one question, my brain just seizing up in real time. Yeah, I'm trying to remember which specific. I just have so many products that I've been like, but what's the point? Yeah, that's the question.

It's like, what's the point? And they're like, why? Fuck. Wait, wait, wait. No one's ever asked us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You got any dregs left?

Chloe, things to declare. I saw, this is not a, well, I actually don't know what product this was associated with. It must be a product. Probably for the best. But there was a like, test how strong your punches. Oh, yeah. They've had a section.

And I stood for a couple of minutes and just watched, with the greatest respect, the dwebiest, loseryest, sweet little dorks, some young, many old, walk up and just like try and rail this thing. And like, you know, everybody punched it. But watching, watching dudes in just like weirdly fitting suits whose faces move a little

strange be like, it is my turn to punch now. I was like, this is incredible. This is beautiful. And I was like, I'm not going to take a video of this. I'm not going to take it. This is not. I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to make this a side show.

But this is cinema. Yeah. I saw also like there was one. where you could throw footballs at Target. And I was just, I watched this old man just walk up and he just fucking lamping the footballs there. And then he just, and his wife was like, like videoing him to do it.

And they just walked off. And you could see the people at the booth be like, wait, were you not gonna talk to us about the TV? And they just walked off. No, no. That guy fucking rocks. I love that. That's beautiful. I wanna throw the fucking football

and I don't wanna go. I'm done here. I don't need to talk to you and your like gooby TV or whatever it was. It was like one of the, weird off-brand television companies that spends way too much of this show. Yeah. Your first CES and you're now really, I feel like this is an, I don't want to say

a typical year, but it's one of the sadder ones. Like, I'm having a great time. There's not a lot of new ideas. One thing I, maybe the only thing I liked actually was I saw this massive John Deer tractor. Didn't know they could be this fucking big, massive. A two-story house. Yeah, literally.

I climbed stairs to get up there, crazy hydraulic. I had a vision of just not doing any of this shit and farming with the big-ass tractor. Like really industrial farming. Yeah, with the industrial farming. You know, I come from a long line of farmers. I feel like that. That felt right for a second. And then I had intrusive thoughts about running over all the tech.

Yeah. And that would be ideal. Oh, that felt more right. When I climbed up there, I started, you know, because you climb into this thing and you're 30 feet above the ground. and it's like the bridge of like the Starship Enterprise. It's like a hydraulic chair and like a giant thing. And you're looking at the rest of the show floor. And you're just like, oh, if I had a missile launcher on this, I could blow it all up.

And the front of it looks like weaponry because it's like 20, like imagine a cone, the sheep of a traffic cone, but as tall as a person. Right. And then on its end, like with the sharp part pointed out, like 20 of those lined up. That's what you're driving. It's tract to though? It is, I believe it's picking corn, like off the cobs and putting it into a giant, like, dump truck looking thing that goes along in sync with it. Which is another part of the gap between the stuff at this show and reality, because it's like, this is so far from what most people think of it as a farm. You know, this looks like...

But isn't that how, but that's how most farming is. Yeah, it's not what the farming is. Oh, I know, but it's just the gap between... It looks like if you were playing like a video game. and you were like terraforming Mars. Like this is what this thing looks like. I just like the idea of a giant tractor and just turning the fucking thing on driving forward until I'm out at this convention center.

Drive away, leave this all by me. Just head for the hills. Yeah, just go up to hit Red Rock. Go out to Area 51, me and the boys. Yeah. That's our dear president. That's one of his bits, right? You remember when he had that truck and he was like, you know, I could just drive away.

They won't let me, but I could just go. all off into the sunset. You know, you could do that with the tractor. You know, maybe if you're hot wire, I don't know if it actually has an engine. Imagine you could, imagine a tractor that you are describing is the size of a spaceship,

but if you just know exactly where to cut and you can just make red wire touch blue wire and turn this thing on. The CES massacre. Mo over CES. The Las Vegas tractor massacre. Blasting big green tractor out of the speakers. There were,

I do want to say, behind us in line for the tractor, there was like a bunch of folks from Japan and they were like vibrating with excitement to get in the tractor. Because I can only imagine just the Americanness of a John Deere tractor and the size of it. It was like, they were they like shoved me out of the way to get in. I'm, I will also say this is a unique thing that Americans can't understand how small some other countries are. Like when I got to America and I saw my first cruise ship, I kind of freak the fuck out. I say it's just so large, so much. It looks like. It looks like the size of London.

They're visually upsetting. I still freak out over them. They're massive. They're huge and they're terrifying. They look horrified. And like if I got on this big tractor, I would either feel overwhelmed with power or like just like I wouldn't want that to exist. But I also like that they had a big tractor at C.S.

That makes me. Yeah. I feel like the big tractor is like the ring of power and that no matter whether or not you like hate it before you get behind the wheel, as soon as you start driving it, it changes you. You just hear Dracula in your head. Yeah. It was pretty clear.

It was pretty clear. You don't even drive this thing. You supervise it. You sit there and this would be my green goblin mask. You've got Mr. Worf behind you on the weapons table. You're a coward. Alex Heath is here.

I'm sorry, Alex. Sorry, Alex. I don't mean, I'm not going to run you up for a truck. I do love that. Every now and then you'll name job someone you're like, I wish I could do bodily harm. Just kidding. Yeah.

I also would not do bodily harm to Alex Heath. I apologize, Alex. Parody. That's not what the poster that you made didn't put on the wall behind who says. I wasn't going to comment on it. It's weird. Yeah, but just the fucking signal chat from last year was just like an actionable threat against an executive.

I was like, and it was the second I got here as well. He was like, Sam, when we're going to, and I'm not going to fucking repeat it. Yeah, it's not illegal to make actionable threats against people. is not it depends on who you voted for that's what boss folks yeah it's I these are jokes

these are bits we're doing bits we're having a laugh we're having a laugh it's bans it's we're bandmaxing we're bantering yeah yeah that's how it works

so Adam this is your last day though did you see anything you like so you're on an edible yes yeah no no I know I was vaping I have a dry herb vape which is the best way to consume week. I actually am curious. What does that mean? Okay, so what it means, I love explaining this. What it means is you, you know Robert? You know what this is? Yeah, it's just like a vape that,

yeah, I mean, you can explain it, but yes. Most vapes that people think of our oil that have like chemically extracted the THC and suspended it in like an oil. It's how all of the vapes used to work, like volcanoes and stuff when we were kids. Yeah, the ones with the bag. This is you put plant material in it. It heats it to a precise temperature where it does not burn. It just vaporizes the THC and other oil, as such oils. And one of the great things, about it is it makes almost no vapor. So I use this thing at the fucking airport. Like nobody notice, you know, if no one's looking at you,

no one is going to notice you using this thing. So it is great for this kind of environment. But it doesn't taste like strawberry melon. No. I guess weed babes maybe never do. Wow. Spoken like a person who really knows her drugs. I did see something that I really did pop for,

which was, and Ed was there too, the, uh, it was a, uh, okay, so imagine like a white van, like a normal van and on top of it, are sort of a couple of blue tubes that go up and down and rotate. Kind of like a, like if you built like a Lego version of an anti-aircraft. Right. That looks like, that looks like a home anti-aircraft weapon. And it turns out that's what it was because it shoots a net at drones.

Sure. Um, using, not gunpowder, it's just some kind of electromagnet. It's like, yeah. It's like a, like, almost, a rail gun type. I asked the guy, was this a rail gun? And he was like, kind of. What's a rail gun? He uses magnets to propel around. Nothing

much more railgun with you. Sorry. It's like a, yeah, like a sci-fi torpedo kind of. Can we cut that out of the podcast? But yeah, so it shoots a, it shoots a net at the drone, and then it catches the drone, and then there's a little parachute so the drone like falls down

to Earth. It was like super fucking just like metal gear solid five. Yeah. It's interesting because it's like, he was like, there's a legal gray area where it's like, you know, you see a drone that you don't know, and you're like, who's a drone is this and you want to shoot it, but you can't. Yeah. You know, you might get in trouble. You can shoot any drone that flies over your area.

Yeah, so he says, so you're not destroying it. You can just, you can give it back to the owner after you retrieve it. I mount that shit on the back of my truck, like a technical. And I'm just standing in the park. Just driving in your pickup truck with a bunch of drones in the back. I mean, what we think Mad Max is going to look like. like is like old gas trucks. It's actually going to just be semi-trucks with drone trophies.

Off to the revolution. Nailed to the semis. Because the drones are going to have countermeasures eventually. That's all they are. Put chaff or they're going to dodge, you know? They've already, I mean, that's, yeah, that is the nature of drone. Like, that's what we're seeing in Ukraine right now, which is like it's, it's this, it's gotten to this insane escalation of countermeasure where if you go to a lot of

frontline villages, they're covered in miles of fiber optic cable. It looks like the whole village is covered in spiderwebs. Stupid question. Why? Because you almost have. have to have all of the drones be wired because jamming is so prevalent, right? So you can't jam one that's got like a wire on it. So they're basically taking off with these long spools and flying around.

And it leaves because they're getting shot down constantly. Drones don't have a long lifespan in the field. So you just wind up with these villages that are, it looks like a giant spider. Yeah, full of cables. It's like a hole that like hangs on the tree. I have no idea about it. Yeah, that's, yeah. Drone warfare's nuts.

I hate it. That's the thing that came closest to killing me overseas was a fucking drone. But yeah, it's all this like red queen measure, countermeasure shit. Like everyone's been sprinting as fast as possible to stay more or less in place for the last four years. What I liked about this company was, I was like, is this for the military? And he was like, I mean, we're pitching the military. But like, you know, we talk to them. But like, we think you could use it, you know, to like guard a private, you know, like a.

A power plant or like, I was like, we used it at Coachella or whatever. I mean, I once on, there was an episode of Adam Ruins everything where we couldn't shoot for like 90 minutes because some dumb ass was flying a drone over the shoot. And we had to find the guy to stop because it was fucking like,

because you could have used it that day. You had to break his legs. I remember that episode. Adam Ruins this man's life. Yeah, that's, I love that. I do love, I honestly, every time I hear about this, I just want to play with one.

I just want to fucking shoot it at a guy. Like duck hunt. Like you're playing a guy. Jesus Christ. Oh, no. A guy in the sky. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. If you see a guy in your airspace, we can't. That's exactly what I mean. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. Every time the blue angels fly over. Not a guy I'm just looking at in the streets. No.

My, in capturing my nets. He's got to be high enough that the, the, the, the man guns have to be able to aim at them. I mean, the last time I saw the Blue Angels at Fleet during Fleet Week in San Francisco, I couldn't stop myself from thinking like, I could take them. Like, I could take them. Like, I could take them. Yeah. Take them. Why not?

Take them with Waltz? Do you mean the planes? Well, they're flying real close to each other. I feel like it's not hard to fuck that up. Oh, you're not expecting it. Just like a big rock? Just a little shove ski. Just like a rock or something?

Because they were in a plane. Yeah, a rock. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, wait. No, we do actually want to know. What, take them how? Okay.

So they're flying pretty low. If I ever need to take the Blue Angels, I would like these instructions. Like, how low? Like, are we talking to 150 feet low? I feel like if you get on top of the Salesforce Tower when they're doing some of those really low flights and you get like a potato gun, you could get one of those lodged right into one of the air intake things. Oh, sure.

And they're probably like they're going so fast. I feel like any little mistake would be catastrophic. Yeah, he is. And don't get him started on how we'd fuck up the Harlem Globetrotters, okay? He killed those motherfuckers. What that manhunt look like, you know, you're like posted up. up on the Salesforce tower, you used a potato gun. Parody.

It was a joke. It was a bit. He's doing bans. He's bans. Bants were bans, bans. Yeah. Bance. But yeah, um, it's so, it is quite funny watching people like, I'm gonna call you to normal.

I think that that's fair. Yeah. Watching- A lot of my exes would disagree. Yeah. And I don't know. But normal, you've seen this show and it's funny watching regular people to be like, yeah, so most of it's useless. Most of it doesn't work.

Some of it, most of it will never exist. I mean, I asked the question in the last episode with none of these guys here. I basically said, what does, what is the point of CES? I was like, what does anybody walk away from CES with the people who are involved in? Yeah. Well, I was asking Edward and maybe someone here knows the answer. Who's the customer? Like, I went to Toy Fair once.

And at Toy Fair, there's buyers from retail chains walking around going like, yes, I'll take 10,000 sticky hands or whatever. Which makes sense. Here it's not custom. Like, who's, who's, there are. So there's, CES is really a couple of different events, right? Right. A huge number of the booths here, particularly when you get to the areas where all of the

company, all the booths are small and all of the companies have like different, like, like Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Taiwanese names, right? When you get to like that chunk of the, of the show, most of the people who are walking around those booths, it's not like journalists, because. Because in a lot of cases, a bunch of the booths have the same products that are just like slightly different, like the same battery, but a different case. Because who's advertising there are like OEMs? It's like factories and like manufacturers of different like things that are advertising.

We make this. We make this. And you can like buy this part to make or to sell like as part of other tech gear. Right. And there are buyers and there are representatives of companies that are like looking to contract with manufacturers and whatnot who make and do business here. That's like a chunk of the event that we don't have really any... Because that's not...

Journalists aren't interested in that. And that's a lot of Ureika... Most of that. Ureca Park is kind of full of these. I was mentioning, like, photonic sensors and weird things just for like one group. I went past like 20 booths that were all just selling different pieces of solar panels. Right. Yeah, that's not for me.

And very valid. Right. And that's fine. And so that's like a big chunk of the event. And then another chunk of the event is consumer electronics, which is where most of the bullshit is, right? because it's like 80% well this, no one will ever buy this. This is a terrible idea.

And 20% ranging from, okay, there's probably a customer for this to like, oh, that's actually really cool. And then the third chunk of the event, which journalists are also involved in, is like, this is not a product yet, but it will be, or these are ways in which we are looking to integrate technology

into, like, things that are above the consumer level, like all of the smart city stuff, all of like the smart vehicle stuff, right? where journalists are interested in that, consumers are interested in that, but you as a consumer aren't going to go buy a smart street light, right? Yeah. So I kind of look at it as like those are the three events that CES is. Okay, that's clarifying. Thank you.

I think like the majority of this year just feels like chat GPT rappers. Yeah, yeah. That's most of what I've seen is some form of AI chatbot integration or glasses. Or glasses that have chatbots. I saw one interesting, we talked to one vendor. that was like an AI thing that actually seemed to kind of do something. Okay, I'm curious.

Okay, if you have an autonomous driving system and it goes on a drive and the drive doesn't go well, this will simulate a slight version of the... Like, they can take a real drive, turn it into a simulation, and then have the agent, or whatever it is, the Waymo, do it again like in its head

to like make it do it better the next time. I'm like, okay, that seems like an AI company that a different one of these companies might contract. What I like about that is that that's a company, I don't know how well this product will work, but that's a company that's thinking about solving a problem. I always gravitate towards like someone identified a problem and they made a thing. Maybe it doesn't work. That's a fucking intention. I suppose the one's just making up a problem and then failing to solve it.

You know how your kid doesn't have a robot hallucinating horoscopes for it? Well, we've solved that issue. What does your... Does your... Does your kid think that, uh, Taiwan is Taiwan or China? Right. Well, this, this, this, this toy is going to tell your child

that it has offended it. Terribly. Do not mention Winnie the Pooh to AI Bob. You will get fucking drones. You little shit. Claude, don't talk about Tiananmen Square. Is your four-year-old having too much trouble finding which under the sink chemicals are most caustic. This new teddy bear will make sure they know and teach them how to open all your

pill bottles. This adorable rabbit will teach your five-year-old about BDSM. And what's funny is we are sounding like we're making jokes, but this is what is happening today. This is a thing happening today. Welcome. Welcome. Because you may be thinking, well, also, doesn't it do all the assistant stuff? And you'll be surprised to hear it does not. None of this. Every fucking, I am like, I would actually love to be elated. I would love to see something. I'd love to I brought in so many people, spoken so many hours, and I swear to fucking God, I'm trying. I'm trying.

Like, there was, okay, a cool thing I saw today is this company that is advertising, like, paper batteries, right? Okay. And the actual battery isn't paper, but, like, the battery, like, the core of the battery is made out of cellulose. And so the only other, and that decomposes. And so basically, instead of dealing with batteries

the way you do now, with batteries like this, you throw them into compost, You compost them and then you filter the metal bits out and you can recycle the metal bits separately. And then the compost is usable compost, right? That's useful. It sounds great. Again, I have not looked into this company and done like third-party reporting. This is how they are claiming it works.

I don't know if it works, but it's at least an idea. And if we establish it, by here, filter the metals. I'm like, yeah, who's going to be doing that? But also, that has great ramifications for disposable things. Yes. That's for vapes. And again, someone's trying to take. humanity a step forward and at least that's good. As opposed to like the 18th different vacuous

autonomous driving company. As opposed to what I saw next to that booth. Mameet, which the company name is just M M M M-M-E-T-T-T. Don't know what that means. And it's, they have an AI business card. They actually have two different card products. One is it's the size of a business card. If a business card was way thicker and could actually fit in your wallet and would be super easy to break even if it wasn't your wallet. Okay, sick. But you tap it to someone's phone and if their phone has an NF reader, like, or not NFC. Yeah, NFC. NFC. Sorry. No, I couldn't. If your phone

has an NFC reader, it'll populate automatically with their like business card. One quick problem. Sure. If you bump most phones together, it will do this without you having like an easily breakable piece of electronics. Interesting. What if I told you it also, as long as you have an internet connection, can translate things? Because they can just stick that on whatever now.

I would. I would be using a shuddy. speaker, I assume. Oh. Well, I'm sold. I just fucking... And the other product they had was a thicker card that they bragged was as thin as three millimeters, houses four AI

assistants, all the chat bots. They don't actually live in the product. Again, it's connecting to the internet and streaming it white, why do you need four? Okay, but just really simple, what is for? What is for? Is that just different? That's just prompt engineering. These motherfuckers are claiming

there's like 11 AI systems. Ah! No, no. You're being unfair. They've got the AI meeting assistant. Turn conversations anywhere into summaries, insights, and action items to boost productivity. They've got an AI translation assistant. Break language barriers across 145 language. So there's not four AIs. No, it's just four different things.

The AA does. It's just prompt engineering. I do think they were lying. Yes, you're right. Because it's like all using chat GPT. Yeah. So to explain what. They've got a sales assistant.

Which is, so prompt engineering is literally just every single AI product you have ever seen on this floor is just prompts. It's prompts for the API and telling it, you are a sales assistant. You are a meeting assistant. That's all it is. It's just text. It's just, it's all text.

Every single one of these is just text. I am. Yep. Well, what about the AI? Yeah. Sometimes it's pixels. Yes. It's multimodal.

It's the AI inspiration assistant. Capture finding ideas and develop them into future possibilities. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You could use that. you're a writer, you can lose it. Yeah, exactly. I love what people say that. What do you mean capture fleeting ideas?

Do you mean have an idea, focus on it in, I've got to be clear, your own brain. No. Then you can't, an AI, if it's fleeting, it leaves your brain faster than you can type it into your business card? I'm thinking about like, because I keep a notebook and sometimes I like jot down ideas in it. I'm thinking about like that time I woke up after blacking out and just written on a page in the notebook was Hitler with abs question mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. That's good.

That's good. The AI could have really helped me. That could have been something, you know? Hitler with abs could have been the next Google. Wow, Robert. Hitler with abs sure is an invigorating and original idea. You're not just coming up with an idea. You're touching into something that everyone else.

this feeling. What if he had abs? What if he had abs? Right? So I'm, as we wrap up... It's not just an idea. It's a revolution. That's another great...

Let me Hitler with abs that. Real quick. It's like another one of those tweets about AI where it's like every AI thing is like, it's not just big. It's huge. That has literally become to me in the last month that has, if I, whenever I see, it's not X, it's Y. I'm like, that's LLM text.

So I, as we wrap up and Adam is finally released into the, into the, into the, wild again is that I'm just going to tell you the worst name I saw on the show floor and I fucking looked and it would be junkie cream yeah yeah I caught junkie cream yeah that's hard to beat and it is just an AI slop company it was just like it was just I don't want to talk about what they did because they couldn't work it out and also it was very obviously we're trying to be like because it's not a cream that's so that's exactly no no no it's like an it's like an it's like an it's like semi animation producing what Yeah, it's very clearly meant to make you go, oh, junkie cream.

Right, and that's actually exactly why I... It looks like, come. I haven't brought it up because I saw it yesterday, and I was like, Junkie Cream, that's crazy. And then as soon as you walk over, the whole vibe is, isn't this crazy? We named a junkie cream. That ruins it. Like, that's not, it's not funny anymore.

There's a couple of those. We were talking about yesterday, the jerk off machines. The handy. And I saw that today. I love the handy. I get exactly what you mean, though. It's like a, mm-hmm. You can look.

It's not your grandma's jackoff machine. It's like a very sad thing. It's only funny when it's when the product is in earnest. Like, okay, I think, Edward, I think you were talking about toilet cams, but I then saw, I think, a different toilet cam than you did. And when the guy was explaining it to me, he was, first of all, the words camera in your toilet are, To a woman, the scariest camera in the toilet.

Four words that you can string together. Yeah. And so then when he was explaining it, he was like, yeah, and so then the camera, so you put the thing in. You've already fucked up. And he put the camera in your toilet. And he goes, and I said, I was like, and it's facing down, right? And he goes, yeah. Or he goes, he goes, obviously it's facing down.

And I was like, and then he paused and he goes, or maybe it wasn't obvious. And I was like, yeah, honestly, it was not obvious. You're talking about putting a toilet in a, or a camera in a toilet, everything's on the table from you. I don't know what you might do. Yeah. And what happens to those photos? Yeah. And what fucked up person? They are used to train the toilet.

What is this product supposed to do? It's looking at your shit and going, hey, you got to drink more water. That's the way it does it. It's insane. With a permanent camera. No, I forget who posted it. But it's like, yeah, I know it because my piss is like, looks like a high viz. vest.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the consistency of your poop is all ready. You know it when it's happening. Yeah. If you're wondering, I have diarrhea. Yeah.

Yeah. I also need it's something. Tell me I have diarrhea. I also ask them. And this little machine has so many pieces to it. Like it's probably, you know, like as you're holding it,

it feels like it's probably like four separate housings that have been attached together to like make it all work. Right. And I say that it looks, it looks fine. I just say that to say there's a lot of seams in the thing. Sure. And a lot of pictures of piss and presumably. Well, that's in the cloud. That's for anybody to access. Oh, good. I'm sure

that won't be breached. But I said, I was like, how do you clean the toilet cam? And he said, oh, you clean it in the same way that you would clean your toilet. And I was like, well, first of all, yeah, really weird answer. Yeah. Like, how does he clean his toilet? Yeah. How does he clean his toilet? That's the follow up question. How often? Also, this is sitting on the rim, I, like, I'm happy to use the scrub brush, but it is once a year at best that I really like getting there with elbow grease around the rim. And then this thing has so many. Once a year.

Once a year. Yeah, you got to do it once a year. I guess that's exactly how I clean my toilet cam. I pay a lady. To clean your toilet camp. Yeah. Yeah, to clean my toilet camp. And then to look through the photo history.

Also, I have a camera on my toilet. It is called my cell phone, which I bring with me every time I use the toilet. Yeah. Also just if you, I'm just going to, as we wrap the episode, I think the statement I want to make is if you are thinking I'm going to put a camera in a toilet, you're a fucking scumbag. I'm sorry. I'm like, I met the guy who found it the company and he seemed sweet and like he just had bad shits. Yeah. But it is like, I don't know, buddy. It can't, a camera can't be the answer. I just, but I think the, go on, Robert. I mean, it's just, because you're right that this is something that is going to be more immediately like, more women are going to immediately respond. negatively to this idea than men, because there's a chunk of men, I'm sure there's a smaller number of women, too, but there's a chunk of men who have absolutely no interest in their own privacy, have absolutely no concerns about privacy, and are shocked and kind of scared when they realize other people have a sense of privacy. And most of those guys work in the tech

industry. Right. Right. Exactly. Who are like, what, you don't want a camera on you at all huh? You don't want a camera on you like when you're having sex? That's weird. Yeah, you wouldn't want to know data? Yeah, do you want data? You would be upset if I had a camera in a public space trained on you? You don't post about how many erections a robot said you have every night?

Oh my God, I bet that's it. All right, we're going to wrap up. I'm going to read my favorite name from the show floor. Shenzhen City, Wanzieda, Motor Manufacture Co-Limited. That's a fucking name. Shenzhenzen Pan Brain Technology Co-Limited. Pan Brain Technology Co-Limated. Man brain. These are like brain brain, like in a head?

Yeah, it's like, it's actually a really worrying photo. I don't know if I can really see it. It's just like a guy sitting there full of sleep faster. And it looks like a sleep acne of the mask, but it just looks like a horrifying thing. It looks like it looks like something that people use in Kink. Yeah. Yeah. Looks like how the guy in Manhunter was like towards the, anyway.

Can I tell one more story? Please, please, please. Okay, this is the most useful thing that I'm going to leave with. And Edward was there. You can jump into those. if you want. We went to the Waymo booth. Yeah, right. Which was mostly just Waymo is here. You know,

Waymo, here it is. But they had a little line, and if you scanned your badge and you push a button, it would dispense a little goody for you. And first of all, very clearly there's just a person in there. And they get very upset if you suggest otherwise.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. If you say that they are a person. But like, sometimes you'd scan your thing and then sometimes it would take like four or five seconds and like the little pin would like come out at an irregular angle. You're like, there's a guy back there. And like, that's much cheaper than any other mechanism. And then you take the little pin and they go, oh, you're a winner.

Everybody was a winner. But like, oh, you're a winner. And then you go to a different guy and they give you a Waymo hat and a little be and tomorrow I'm flying in Madison, Wisconsin. It's going to be cold. It's going to be cold. I didn't bring a hat. Wow.

Waymo is made my life better. So you've become a corporate chill. Well, you know what? You're going to advertise for Waymo. I think it's going to be pretty clear. It's ironic. Okay. If my hat says,

Adam, we know how that's gone in the past. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. You should make that I'm saying. I'm so sorry. I'm a little, I'm a little tipsy. So for a second, it was unclear to me. I thought you were saying that Waymo had given you a ticket to Madison, Wisconsin.

Yeah. It was like, what an incredible advertising platform. The busing stand-up comedian. We're flying half a CES to Madison. Get in there. Yeah. All right. As we wrap this up and Adam has to go,

Adam, plug your stuff, plug your shit. Okay, I'll be, well, it's in the factually podcast, which it adds on sometimes. But I'm going to be Madison, Wisconsin, do a stay out this weekend, a comedy on state. Next week, I'll be Fort Wayne Summit Comedy Club. After that, Louisville, Houston, Texas, and finally taping a special on at the punchline in San Francisco from February 19th at 321st. Lovely, Chloe, why don't you? Because you do this, too. Yeah, I do this, too.

This weekend I'll be in Cincinnati. Maddie. Next weekend I'll be in Washington, D.C. And the week after that, not the weekend, I will be doing my solo show called Cheat in Philadelphia, January 20, 21, and 22. And then at the end of January, I'll be in Vermont. And then Fort Collins, and then Fargo. Going to Fargo. Oh, okay. That's cool. That's going to be colder than Madison. Oh, yeah. Of course. And as we wrap, of course, in honor of Sean Paul Adams' friend of the show passed last year, please that. this to and donate to the pediatric epilepsy research consortium. Sean Pohl's son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate it. Thank you so much to listening for another day of Better Offline. We'll be back tomorrow and Friday, a little bit on Saturday. I love you all. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-S-K-I-D.

com. You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.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 our slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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