Better Offline - CES 2026: Part Four (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 first episode, Ed is joined by Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here, Matt Binder of Mashable, Ben Rudolph of Cartographiq, standup comedian and host of the Factually Podcast Adam Conover, Ed Ongweso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, and standup comedian and actor Chloe Radcliffe to talk about an “agent-powered” BBQ, showstoppers, the multiple wife cubes being shown on the floor, how solving male loneliness comes from male introspection, empathy and kindness, and how CES perpetuates a culture of trying to make women the solution instead.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/ Matt Binder: https://mashable.com/author/matt-binder Gare Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en https://punchup.live/chloeradcliffe Adam Conover:  https://www.instagram.com/adamconover/?hl=en  www.adamconover.net/tourdates Ben Rudolph:https://www.cartografiq.com/ https://x.com/benthepcguy 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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And we're here all week with two episodes today and we've got an all-star cast bringing you the best and, well, mostly the worst, from the show floors at the Las Vegas Convention and Venetian Expo Centers. And my first contestants are joining me on nice and damp from the show floor. That was actually in the notes before that, Chloe. I apologize. I've just filled half a can of liquid death

all over myself in this chair. I bought an entire can over this table. Yesterday, it like exploded because it froze. Anyway, Mr. Onguoso Jr. Hello, my friend. Jesus Christ. I'm keeping going. Thank you for joining me.

Tech Bubble newsletter, of course. Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here. And you've got star of is this thing on, Chloe Radcliffe, stand-up comedian as well, that's right, flawless intro. And of course, stand-up comedian and host of the factually podcast, Adam Conover. Hello, thank you for having me. So it sounds like you've all been on the convention floors, and based on the little I've heard, real bang a day.

Chloe, you got some free stuff? The very first booth that I walked into was a dongle that basically makes you be able to air drop between Mac and PC things. Oh. And I don't, yeah, super useful. And it's like, adorable. I truly was magneted over because I was like the word dongle is really funny. And I wonder if I can make some jokes out of that. And then I saw it and was like, oh, this actually kind of rocks.

And I have, I feel like an asshole saying, I have an assistant, but I have an assistant. And she uses a PC laptop, but a Mac phone. And I was like, oh, I think I would like to buy this for her as a gift. Yeah. And so I was asking about the price. And they said, they were like, oh, well, we'd love to send you some free product. let me take a photo of your badge, whatever. And truly my eyes, like, popped out of my skull,

went cash dollar signs rolling through my eyes, and I was like, I can get free things on this floor. Yeah, and so then I started trying to go over and, like, show interest in things that I might want. And most of them did not fall for it. Just walking up to the 87-inch TV one. Yeah. Wow, that's so nice.

I love that. Which I am. Just like kicking. Just locking eyes with them. I love this. Give it to me. I, my badge says digital content creator. That's what you want, right?

You want me to create digital content about your $4,000 TV, right? You like this, you pig. Give it to me. So aside from people not giving you stuff for free, anything interesting? There was... Well, so I really got gummed down. I spent too much time on the accessory. area. That's fine. Those were also things. They were great. There was one, um, actually,

a booth that was, a, had a super useful, like, travel, uh, a wireless charger that, like, flips out. It, it looks like a, like a makeup compact. Right. Right. And there's a wireless charger for your phone and a wireless charger for your AirPods and a little baby one for your Apple Watch. Right. And I don't use those three things, but my boyfriend does. And so I was like, oh, fuck, Christmas presents. This is awesome. Great. I'm just like starting to make Christmas presents list on the CES floor, which actually seems like the best possible use case for CES. That is what it should be.

Yeah. You should walk around and go, oh, stocking stuffers, little goo gauze that'll make Grammy happy. Yeah. Like useful electronics. Consumer. Electronics Expo. Yeah. Yeah.

It is at a retail level for the consumers, me and my family. And but then at that same booth where I was, so I was like really odd by this, the little flip open kid. Yeah. wireless charger. And then a guy, the guy was walking me around and he was showing me the other things that they have, whatever, whatever. Other power blocks in charging. And then another guy at that same booth came up. And there's, I have a photo of it, but it's probably not worth showing. They have a little set of power banks in the back that's like pastel colors. And I didn't look at that and go, oh, power banks for girls. I didn't, that got to say, that thought never crossed my mind. I just thought a power bank that's pink and light blue and light green, whatever. Very progressive. And it looks kind of like a makeup bottle. Like it's like one color for two thirds of it.

And then it kind of looks like it might have a clear glass top. It's not. It's just a power bank. But again, this is not a thought that I had. But the second guy walks up and he goes, it looks like a foundation. Clearly with the tone of like, you're a lady, you will like that. Now, there's a guy who knows makeup. Yeah, it looks like I'm conchela.

He worked for the product? He worked for the company. Okay. And I went, oh, yeah. It looks like a foundation. And he like doubled down on it. He was like, yeah, yeah. So I think you'd like it.

It looks like a foundation. And I went, oh, so these are the power banks for girls. And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're for girls. And I think the first guy who I was talking to understood that I hated what was going like that I was having fun and sort of blocking the whole thing. But he couldn't step in and stop it. And the guy who I was mocking fully did not track what was going on.

I love that. I love that there's still, like, it's like 1995 and like, what if computer for woman? Yes. Woman, they're using this thing now, the birds. Truly. I, he kept doubling down and tripling down so hard on it that I eventually pointed, we're still standing in front of power banks for girls. And I pointed to one on the end that was black.

And I went, see, this one, I go, what is that? No, dumb. I literally hit my forehead with the ball of my head. And I pointed to the colors and I went, but this one, I go, that makes me happy. The first guy is like humiliated this whole time. And I was like, I'm sorry, but your coworker is really fucking annoying. That's so good. I love that.

I love that they're still doing shit like that. It was crazy. I mean, it reminds me of when I purchased in 2013, a 2010 used Prius. Right. The Prius dealership. And the guy is driving around me. and my girlfriend at the time, and she's in the back. I'm the one purchasing the car,

but he turns to her and he goes, so Toyota actually polled a thousand women on what they would like in the car. And so there's a place to put your purse right here, like under the console. And she hated that so much. She talked about that for 10 years. So look at her and say,

we asked your kind. We asked 1,000 women. And that is it. We know more, no need to do. It's just, I don't know. Without being too preach about it's like, it's 20, 25. At this point, it's like, pink is for girls, black is for boys. Yeah.

This will fit in your handbag, which you don't appear to have. Also, all of this shit fits in my handbag. It's all very small. Yeah, it's like, were the girl ones smaller and thinner? Are they just colors? It was just pink and purple and... See, they got to go further than that. When they make it like super girly, like I went to the razor booth and they had,

this is an old product, but they had the headphones with the cat ears. Yeah. That's, I feel like that's not so bad because that's like, you know, if you're super, if you're like a fucking E-girl Twitch streamer and you like, your whole, you know, streamer room is hello kitty shit. Right. You know, it's like an aesthetic. I would say that headphones with cat ears is the third gender.

Fair enough. That is neither girl nor boy. What of a hundred. Autistic. I would love one of these guys to be like, hey. It's like my headphones don't have ears on. My headphones are the exact ones I looked, and I looked for hours and hours and hours, and I tried several of them, and I talked to multiple friends, and then I found the perfect one,

and then they weren't perfect, so I returned them and tried another one, and then they were perfect. Yeah, that's the fourth gender. Just diagnosed. I'm fresh. I'm fresh. The listeners who have been trying to diagnose me for two years. for two years alike. Finally, I'm finally edified, yeah.

Oh, God. So, okay, talk with Benz. I just want a vendor to look at me and be like, you know, this thing plays a little rap music. Yeah, you're directing this is the urban market. Yeah, yeah. You know, we, this goes in your sneakers. Yeah, you like sneakers?

You know, you went to those? Oh, God. Instead, when I roll up, they look me up and down. They see the press card and then they immediately direct their press person over like they're a bodyguard or enforcer. Or if I ask like two questions about how does this work? They're like, oh, yeah, he'll tell you. He'll tell you all about if they disappear. They disappear.

Yeah. That's so sad. Again, it's 20, 25 and they're like, whoa. Okay, one of you guys is. My goal. This computer has a basketball. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. You went to that? I'm going to find someone to riff with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my goal in this convention. Not to find a product I like, but someone who won't be a little scared. Yeah. Or be too scared.

Or, yeah, actually, it will get nervous about it. Someone who's just like, I, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I've met tons of people like you. But wait, what did you see today? Anything fun? I mean, it was nothing interesting.

I circled back to a... It was nothing interesting. A really funny review of CES. Another good tagline for the show. Welcome to CS 2006. Nothing interesting. That's really interesting. I circled back to a lot of the age tech and kind of AI health companion stuff because I was interesting.

Okay. Maybe if I have a little bit more of a conversation with them and then get them to explain what the agent part means or to explain to actual use cases, I might find something interesting. But it was just more of the same. You know, there was one firm I circled back to, like, I think their name was Allie Q. that is really, really big on elderly companions. Right. And trying to have something that your grandparents can talk to that may or may not cause like chatbot psychosis

if they spend a lot of time talking to. Right. And is it just a chat bot? Is it like a thing on the computer? It is just like a big old kind of looking like an orb. Like a big orb. Yeah, like a big orb and some sense. around it and the pad that you get to talk to and type into.

Grandma loves to commune with the orb. Great news, Granny. I got you an orb. You like your orb, granny. He told me it was God. Your friend's in the computer. I'm never alone now that I have my orb. So you have to log in to talk to someone, essentially.

You're going to work. You've got to sit at your desk and be like, hello. How are you doing? But there's a person at the end or a chatbot? It's a chatbot. That's so sad. Yeah, and this chat about supposed to be your interface to the outer world.

Is it trained on old people speak? Like what it... It says the YouTube's... Yeah, yeah, right. Show them. AI videos. It turns up the TV volume to max automatically. It has the same conversation.

It agrees, it is too cold in here. It's also... I do agree the young people don't work enough. So instead of push notifications, or you know, it basically has push or notifications that are like, let's start a conversation. So you'll be doing your thing and it'll be like,

hey, I want to talk to you. We invented technology to harass your granny. I know, literally, though. I know so many grandparents who would take that out back and hit it with a slide-jave. Can you imagine? All they want is not to be bothered. I'm just imagining my grandfather had passed like 20 years ago,

like way before LLM's. Just imagining Ken is a sign painter in Dorset in Bournem. And Christchurch, pardoned in England. And he would have just, he would have beat the fuck out of this. One minute, he would have been like, I'm not touching that. I'm not touching that. I'm not touching that. I'm not beat it with a stick.

He would have loved that, actually. They've sent the machines to watch us. Oh, I don't even think he'd just be like offended by an orb he has to talk to. So I've been worried go down the pub. Did you guys see the booth for Tombot Incorporated? I saw it from afar and it looked so terrifying. What is that? It's like a little dog puppet and it's, the booth is like a living room.

and it's got framed photos of the dog puppet and like a, what is it, a sampler sort of cross-stitch thing that says a pet for people who can't have pets. Okay. And then there's like a lady dressed up like a granny and she's holding the puppet. I didn't really see what it does. Presumably it's just like an AI dog puppet. There's always this sad guy just sort of sitting there.

Wait, that was an actual fellow? There's like a fellow sitting in there. Like a real guy? Yeah, he looks like he's bummed out. He's just sort of sitting there like, zoning, like dissociating, petting the dog. Zanied up. And like it could be,

it could be useful, but it's also like, it's such a bummer just to be like, this is for, it's very elderly people who've lost their ability. And like 50, 50 on those, because I can kind of see like there is, it's been proven that that's helpful.

I've heard good things. But the same thing it's like, you're too old or sick to take care of an animal. It's great, but like seeing a whole booth of that. And then the guy they paid to just sit there all day. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's $15 an hour. Yeah, you're going to look depressed. You feel bad for the demo. You're watching the demo and you're like, oh, it's too bad that this guy has to sit there and pet that fake dog. He doesn't look happy about it. Whereas when people are with a real dog, they're so happy. That's actually a good point. Surely he would want to be like, hell yeah.

I have a dog. Yeah, this dog is so good. He's like, no, just waiting here until my son calls me in a week. I've seen the studies that you're talking about. They're also true of plants. Like when you give old people plants. In like the nursing home, they give them plants. They bring like kitties in.

Like it's not a particularly unsolved problem. Look, we do need more technology for old people. I've always thought like the Wii was such a hit for old people. And then there's been no Wii since. I think that's a tragedy of technology that like there's countless senior homes that are still using their Wii from like 2007 to play Wii golf because there's never been anything like that is quite that again. Did we go out of business?

No, Nintendo is still in business. Yeah, they still make stuff. And they occasionally make a game like, that but the Wii was like this moment where they developed a new way to control a video game and a game that was very simple and resembled games people already knew and it was like this perfect thing that people had never played a video game especially elderly people could like figure it out and then it just sort of wasn't popular enough among the core gaming audience and they stopped making that type of game it was also tough to develop for as well and it was really expensive

the controllers were weird and you had to have like a weird bar above your thing it was just like a lovely idea that just would not scale ever. You think not? I think maybe it needed a different company to make. I think about this a lot. They've kind of done it with the switch with the control, with the controls, but it's not the same.

Yeah. But you're saying a company that's not motivated by the youth gaming sector. Yeah. A company that like doesn't need, doesn't need to win the most billions of dollars that like could operate at a Yeah, I guess literally a company that's like trying to get contracts with with senior homes. Yeah.

Or something. Like, Ale Q, you know, we can pitch them. Or like schools, I feel like at this point, kids want things that feel digital, but don't absolutely melt their brains. The thing is, though, like, I think we're describing the problem of the modern state of capitalism where it's like, oh, a company that doesn't need to grow forever,

I'm never going to fund that bullshit. Are you going to make consistent money? Fuck you. I will say, I did find a weird one where it was just one of these, one of 900 different companions. It was just these horrible little things wheeling around, like teletubbies. But what was interesting was,

someone had a dog, like a living dog, and he was just going fucking bat shit. It was just like, gna, gna, gna, gna, gna, and I was like, this fucking rocks, and then someone went and picked up the dog, if they just had a booth where I had a dog going nuts on these things, like, chewing them. Yeah, a booth where a dog gets to destroy a robot.

I would pay. I would pay to watch, like, a large, like, even like a small dog would be funny, but like a, what's, Malawar? The one that can climb walls, like a giant dog just ripping up. How much would you, yeah, like a Malamute, just fucking up, like any of these robots would be sick to me.

I feel like we need, so there's the Edinburgh Festival, which is in Edinburgh, Scotland. It's a big performing arts festival. And then there is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which grew up as a like people who were rejected from the core Edinburgh Festival. And now the fringe has become bigger, and it's the biggest performing arts festival in the world,

and it's the third biggest ticketed event after the Olympics and the World Cup, and it's crazy, whatever. Yeah. I feel like we need a CES fringe that can grow where we can have boots like a dog attacks a robot

That's actually a really good idea Is there like a counter programming Like punk art festival That happens at the same time as CES That's like freaks Better Offline Fest That's what we're doing We're gonna start better off line fest

It's like bring your shit for the dogs We've hired to destroy And we will of course But we'll of course pay But we're pro labor So we will pay guys to sit around Looking depressed on everybody Yeah yeah yeah yeah

A guy's staring out into the distance with Gimmie shelter playing. It's going to be a guy who works for one of the companies that have a booth at the real CES, who then sits and looks sad as he watches his stuff get destroyed. I saw another robot that was just this, it was on like conveyor belts and it had big arms and it was like home patrol, elderly care, laundry folding. And I just walked up and like, can I see any of this? And they went, no. I was like, okay, but does it do it?

It will. I just stared right, but what does it do now? Well, it's there. I'm like, yeah, I got that part. And just, this happened a lot. I mean, you were talking about brisket, this fucking AI agent cooking thing. Yes. And it's just like, you look at it and you're like, oh, AI agent.

Oh, it can order food. Well, doesn't sound like it can. No, they haven't figured that part out yet. And what is the AI agent part? Well, that wasn't clear either because it wasn't working. Oh, okay. It seems like it's just a chap bond. that has a, there's a camera inside

so it can like take pictures of your food and be like, oh, you like to eat this. I've seen that five times today. No, there are so many. A, one of them food eaters? Yeah. You know, you into this? Yeah, you like this sort of slop?

And it was fun because at first it was pitch just like, oh, this will like prepare the food and cook it for you. And then as you ask questions, it's like, oh, no, it's like, you have to, you still, you do everything. You still do almost every single part. Nothing. All it is, it was just an oven. It was a pellet smoke, wasn't that?

Yeah, that's pretty much it, you know, but they're spinning it as, because they have other products and they're like, oh, we have a grill that's also an AI agent grill. And we have, you know, any sort, we have a microwave that we're worked on. So all of it is basically like, we just have a sensor inside that gets data on what you like to eat. And then we'll order some of the components. And then we will figure out a way to charge you extra for that delivery service. And it's just a chat GPT wrappers. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Blue apron plus an AI. Which we kind of already have. We have. We have. We have. Tovala we have like 19 different Instagram services that Instagram ads that target me a week. And it costs probably five times more than the other thing because it also has a giant fucking screen on it. But also the fun part of pellet grilling is like you can just go and buy a shit ass like what like a pork shoulder and just throw it in with some seasoning and it's like you don't need the computer to tell you.

No, but you need the computer. I don't. Also what are these people who are like every day is just confusing to them. I'm just fucking, what do I eat? What do I do? Throw the food in there. Oh, God, I don't remember the lost. What are the things I like to eat?

I don't have tastes. These companies have not thought about, like, even before AI, they're all trying to solve the food problem, like the meal delivery kit companies. And none of it sticks. People do meal delivery kits for like a couple months and they stop. And it's because eating is a solved problem. There's like, there's three kinds of people. There's people who buy frozen shit and heat it up or they boil hot dogs. There's people who only eat takeout, and there's people who enjoy cooking.

Those are the, and all of them already have something. A solution. The people who hate cooking aren't going to like cooking because of the expensive shit that you sold them to try to trick them into what to what. That doesn't cook for them. Yeah, that sort of cooks for them or does it badly or sends them shit in the mail. They don't fucking want to cook at all. They want to eat McDonald's or they want to heat up a factor meal in the microwave. Yeah.

And the thing is, I don't judge. judge anyone who does the meal kit stuff. I did it for it. Especially when you're trying to lose ways, it's fine. But it's also like, uh, like, I still a lot, like a decent amount of because you have to select. And it's like, you're kind of like, you heat them. I did it for a while. Did you enjoy throwing out 500 small plastic bags? Yeah. And also like, if you fall behind on them or travel, you just have a stack of the fuckers. And that's when you cancel. The moment you have a stack, and I've still got some of them somehow. And it's just, I read the, the documentation for the brisk it. I don't fucking care. The brisk it? Yeah.

Yes. Woo! Yeah. The brisk it. If it was called like the brisk IT, I'd kind of laugh. But like, it was just like, but I read it and it was like the little fake demo they had on the leaflet that was like, what I want to eat this? I want to limit myself to 1800 calories and I want to leave these foods out. It's just like, all right.

No one exists in this manner. No one is doing this. No one's going to use it in this way. No one who is buying a, I assume, thousand plus dollars. grill is going to be like, yeah, okay, a chat bot to finally tell me, if you're discerning enough to like pick a grill that cost that much money, you probably put more thought into cooking than just, oh, I don't want to spend $1,000 for a cooker that will just turn what to do. When you ask them where the labor saving thing is, because they insist this will save you time

and convenience, they describe a process that is like longer than getting the food itself and cooking or meal planning on your own, you know? It's like I'm spending what half an hour, you know, getting this thing ready. Yeah. Constantly cycling through it, training it. Yeah. And then it'll kind of recommend things for me that I still got to go out by design to deal around and prepare.

You know, so it's like what's actual, what's actual point? Which seems to be a trend. What's actual point? Like in an earlier block we were talking of, or an earlier episode, we were talking about the chatbot that manages, I think you were talking about this, the chatbot that manages your home, the chatbot that's like, you don't want to pick up your kids from grocery or from daycare, whatever. Yeah, it's like, you still, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it like looks at your Google calendar for you and whatever, except you still have to look at your screen to read what the chatbot is telling you. Right. So you could also just look at your screen to look at your Google calendar. Yeah. Like it's not fundamentally. And look, maybe the designers of that chat agent would be like, no, no, this combines the six apps that you have to have open,

except the reason that six apps are open is because I have to make a decision about concretely what happens in my life. Like, do I go to this place or this place first? And the chatbot fundamentally can't make that decision for me. It doesn't have enough information. It can't. All of the information is in my brain.

Which is why you have to offload it into the... Yeah. Then it can hallucinate. I've been trying to write jokes about AI for a while, but you know, Chloe has a comic when someone has written a joke that's so good that you can't write anything better and it's like taken over your brain.

Very funny comic name Hayden Johnson who wrote a tweet that was like every AI ad is a guy saying what should I eat? And the AI says sandwich and the guy is like, wow. It's so true. It's really, it's like sandwich.

I never thought of it. Whoa. And that's actually I think genuinely a Gemini ad. It's like, what am I going to eat? And it's like, have you tried this ham sam? It's like, if you act like that, go to a doctor. You have a Gemini ads where it's like, hey, you know, you're in this book club you signed up for for some reason and you didn't do the reading.

What if you faked it and told all your friends that you did use us to fake it? What if you joined a book club where you didn't read? Yeah, yeah. It's just like, you know. Or like, what if you lie to your friends? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if you lied to them deceive your loved ones? Yeah, right.

We can help with that. It's very, it's peculiar as well because, again, grilling. Mm-hmm. It, the whole thing is you just throw some burgers on there and you're there where I assume with friends or like, you throw in a big brisket and it takes 18 hours and you kind of look at it. It's very analog.

Like, I have two giant smokers and they are mostly like the best one I have. There's a big stainless steel beast that's basically a temperature measurer, a hopper for pellets, and then an auger to send him and set them on fire. It's not a computer. Adding computer to that really wouldn't change much. Like I... Wouldn't change much, but I think the confusing thing. to me, I want masculinity to be tied to analogness, okay?

Right. And right now I think masculinity is tied to computer. And so it is interesting. I think in a lot, I think there's a lot of like, dad, you like this grill? Because it has a computer in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Dad like plain grill.

Dad like men like normal grill. That's dad. But, you know, there's like the performative male archetype, like, TikTok thing and that's all. Wired headphones, reading, reading bell hooks and paper form. Totally,

but I don't think, I think that that is. That's complicated because it's a stereotype created by women about men who are perceived as not masculine. So it's never mind. Adam, with greatest respect,

I think that your feed over represents how many performative men are in the world. Oh, I think the whole performative male thing is nonsense bullshit as a meme. I think, and I think it's really destructive

and doesn't exist. Yeah, I agree. I think masculinity should be tied to personal responsibility and love for your friends and loved ones. And that is not computer. No, and it's not. The computer is, no, I think the computer is innocent. The people who fuck with the computer must be stopped.

And this show really is like, I think I saw no less than 17 different companies that were like, yeah, we generate images. You're a rapper. You're a rapper for a chat GPT. Oh, yeah. Oh, we generate images and text, so you use chat GPT or Claude. Yeah, we connect your disparate documents and we allow you to summarize them. So chat, GPT. And there were so many of them. There were hallway. I went to Eurinka Park, as you can guess, which is the very sad small box area. Mostly looking for funny names. I'm not going to lie. I was mostly just looking for names that make me laugh. And it was just so bizarre because what happens when all of this starts getting more expensive because it's all unprofitable? Just these companies evaporate overnight. And I will say, we're coming towards the end of this block, but nevertheless, I will say, you're Rika Park felt, and even the Expo, the Venetian one, felt smaller to me. Like, previous years, it felt a little more robust and there was a lot more, like they would,

the countries, like the careers, like Le France and all that. The Epcot Center. Yeah, yeah. The Epcot Center was never above ground. You put them in the, in the basement where the other countries apparently belonged with, like, the Social Security Administration and the various scams. They were up top side. Not to say that Social Security is a scam.

Oh, no, no, no. But like, I had a comma in that one, I promise. But it was just, thank you, Chloe. But it feels like most of the show is just LLM rappers now. And like, we can laugh at that and God damn will we've got an hour and a half to cover. But it's very worrying because before it was like, oh, it was a bunch of Kickstarter shit, Indiegogo shit. At least there was money involved in products. This is like predominantly companies that are using an API.

And that's like, oie. First of all, no differentiation easily cloned by OpenAI, but also, just, where's the fucking business, buddy? Where is it? I, where's the product? Oh, don't worry, it, there isn't one. It's just, other than the ones which are like, yeah, we have a photonic sensor to put on the top of a specific device, I fucking love all of those. The industrial ones where it's like for a specific use case, they're to meet one of 11 people and they meet all of them. Those are cool. The rest not so much. Yeah. I mean, the, the, what I wind up wondering as a pure layperson,

is the fact, so sorry, let me sort of give you what I'm hearing. Yeah. It sounds like, and I agree with this from my experience on the floor, it sounds like some very high preponderance of the offerings at CES this year are functionally wrappers around an already developed AI tool. Yes, exactly. They are some interface with chat GPT. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. Whether, whatever that interface may be, an orb, a pillow, an app, or whatever. It is, it is, the technology at the core of it is something that somebody else has already made that we are all aware of. Yes. So in that case, if, if that preponderance is higher this year, is that because, uh, there are, like, fewer problems to solve elsewhere, fewer, like, consumer problems to solve elsewhere that we've, like, actually advanced so far in technology that without, without these rappers for these LLMs, they would be, uh, CES would be way smaller. or is it that everybody has gotten so distracted by LLM so that everybody's gone, well, we can create a new interface for this, a new kind of wrapper for it, and that they've actually directed their creative energies away from solving a lot of other consumer problems.

It's all of the above. It's, and I realize we're approaching the end of the half an hour, but I'll wrap this on this. What it is, is that venture capital is pretty much only, like 50% of venture capital went into AI this, like last year. It's got, there's 2026 now. It's also, CES usually just is magnetized to whatever trend. There was Metaverse. there's VR. Two years ago, we had an AI semen thing.

None of that this year. No come. No coming. I've never met intelligent semen. Apparently, there were a few years ago. Organically or artificially. Okay. Men are back.

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And we're back with Chloe Radcliffe, actress of course, in the movie Is This Thing On? Yeah. Stand-up comedian. Yeah. Sound comedian and host of the factually podcast, Adam Conover. Hello. And we were just talking about LLM rappers and why everything is LLM. this year and AI this year, more so even than last year and why there are so many things that

are just effectively wrapping around the chat GPT API. And what it is is yes, CES magnetizes the trends. Like it goes wherever the trends are. We've had our metaverse and VR and AR and like 2015 was very Indiegogo heavy crowdfunding and such. But I think it's also the funding thing of where venture capital is going, but also it's just fucking easier to build a company on top of it. Now, people will frame this as, oh, it's democratizing building companies. No, it's democratizing lazy fucking assholes building nothing. Take that suckers. No, it really, it really is, though. The suckers being venture capitalists and customers as well, because it's like, yeah, I built a company. No, you fucking didn't. You built something on top of someone else's company and you're claiming it's

yours. And by the way, those API rates are going the way. They're too cheap. They don't make sense. But yeah, it's just kind of sad because usually you go to CES, I'd say 40% of the stuff will be dead in a year. This one is like, if things go the way I'm expecting, all of it, like maybe 75% of it, to be fair. But like every LLM power thing, you're saying eating the robot dog? Especially the robot dog, because that has physical. No, don't kill my robot dog. And not how many times were we going to talk about killing dogs on the show. Every time the Chloe's on.

I actually have a whole... Multiple times we've... I have a whole other product I want to talk about killing dogs. Oh, God, fucking... It is about dogs. He landed the plane perfectly. He really landed it. So I wandered into a...

It was like a consortium of Internet of Things, home products or whatever. And the guy recognizes me. He's like, oh, Adam, I like your show. Great. I'm like, what do you got in here? He's like, oh, I represent all these different companies. He actually said one of the... You know when someone accidentally says something that sounds really useful here?

Yeah, he's like, this thing over here will detect if you left your stove on and turn your stove off automatically. I was like, wow, that's great. Who didn't invent, why didn't we admit that 50 years ago? Yeah, that seems very obvious as a product. Then he's like, over here, we got the smart dog crate. Hell yeah. It was like a big, like, okay, first of all, imagine if your dog crate was like a, like a Twitch streamer's room. Oh, good.

We talked about this briefly, but I want to. No, I think this is a different smart dog crate. Does it measure the height of your dog? No, I think it's different because the one that I was looking at. So just to catch you up the short, this is one sentence overview, there is a little crate that measures your dog's breathing rate, your heart rate, and the height distance between the top of the crate and the top of the dog. And I said, why do we need that?

And the guy said, because if the number doesn't change for a while, maybe the dog has died. And I said, but wouldn't you know, that from the other numbers. Or by looking. Just the idea of like, the distance from the ceiling to the dog has not changed in three days.

Something is wrong. Anyway, so no, I think it's a different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, I told my, my boyfriend Stewart last night about, about the dog rate that I saw. And he was like, well, you want to avoid the terrifying case of your dog shrinking.

Or worse, getting bigger. It's like my dog. is not in a perpetual state. It's like, my dog varies at times. But wait, so Adam, you found another one. Another one, a Twitch streamer crate. A different one, yes. It had, among other things, it had an iPad in the dog crate so you could show your dog videos and video chat with your dog.

It had like a privacy screen that would open and close, like glass that you could remotely open and close. And then your dog wanted to try on new outfit. Your dog wants to pretend it's in a limo. Yep, yep. Or like if you were, you know, had your dog in some sort of like prison visitation situation. It was like... I guess if you don't want strangers to see your dog's dick. This is the thing I vaguely knew already existed.

When does that happen? I want my dog to be modest, Ed. They said it was, you know, he was like, some people put a blanket over the crate, but now you don't have to do that. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, what was the problem with the blanket over the crate? And also the blanket over the crate is to make the dog think, is to make the dog go to sleep. Yeah. It's to say it's nighttime now, not, uh, Mr.

I need some privacy. Yeah. Yeah, not. They called it privacy screen. And it was cool. Like I was aware this already existed, like a pain of glass that if you like run a current through it, it suddenly turns opaque or something. Right. And that was cool to see go, even though I knew it already existed.

But then a big part of it was like, if you are at home and your smoke alarms go off and your house is on fire, you can open the door of the crate automatically. the dog can run away from the fire. Or if you're on your way home and you want to let the dog out a little early. And the thing in my mind is I'm like, who's, who's crating their dog this much? Like, when your dog's a puppy, maybe. Yeah, you're trading a dog to stay in the crate and be happy in it. And the whole point is that it can't leave. Like, you kind of, like, train it to like the crate.

Like, why would you let it? I guess if you let it out early. Also, the whole point of a dog is that it knows routine. Yeah. As everybody knows, the point of a dog is routine. The point of a dog is maximal efficiency. Is optimize your dog. Optimize your dog.

But if you let the dog out, if you open the dog crate early, and the dog has no way of predicting when you're going to open the crate remotely. And you're not there. And you're not there. Like, I feel like if you have a dog crated while you're gone, because I do know people who are like... There are tons of people who do. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, it's whatever. Whatever. Judgment decide about whether you should have your dog in the crate that much or not. Totally setting that aside, just dealing with the reality of there are people who do. If you drive home and the dog hears the garage door opening or the dog hears the front door opening or whatever, then the dog gets to be excited because the crate is about to open. But if you're just randomly opening it, it's like, do you know that experiment with rats where they, like, shocked them, where they play the buzzer?

Was that the one where they shock the dog? I know they had one with rats that I'm thinking of, where it was, where they like play a beep and then shock the rat. And those rats survived like two or three times longer than where they just randomly shocked without the beep because the rats who didn't have the beep were so anxious the entire time were so stressed because they didn't know when the shock was coming whereas when they knew it's right after the beep

they could like prepare for it for the second between the beep and the shock. And I feel like that's what you're doing to your dog if the dog's just like, this door could open at any moment. Could a person fit in this thing? It was gay Well no We were talking about the cat ear things

You got an iPad in you So it was like a Twitch streamer I got a few furry listeners No yeah I definitely know people That's got I'm like the Yif The Yifmaxes Who listen Yes

There's gonna be one person who emails Saying they love that And another that threatens to kill me It's gonna be great It was kind of charming It wasn't that To your point Chloe I think if you were a dog

And you're like in the crate all day And then suddenly The door just like Silently swings open Yeah I'd be like Oh, humanity is gone. They've died.

And I've been released from my... I'm in like a 28 days later situation. Like, it's at the beginning of the movie. I'm gonna have to eat my owner. You just come back with dog fucking kills. It's too ominous. All right. Gare, what have you seen today?

Today I've been to once again more panels. I went to the Panasonic booth once. Actually, I would prefer to go over your favorite part of CES. What do you mean? Which is showstoppers. Yeah. Showstoppers who have made war with me. Because I work at a PR firm.

They've decided I cannot go very unfair, very nasty. So if you ever go to showstoppers, my request is you eat a lot of horrible food. I want you to up a deck every toilet in that place. And we turn this into Moss Isley Cantina. I got enough of dress. What is that specifically with the consonants? Like what do you call it? Moss Isley Cantina.

It's West London. It's West London. Yeah, it goes between my posh accent and the West London. And it's all in the consonants like they're typing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something wrong with me. But get, tell me about the, tell me about hostoppers. It was the worst showstoppers I've been to in a few years, which I'm honest.

I'm sadden to say. Like, I usually kind of look forward to showstoppers. And could I request a one to two sentence overview of what showstoppers is? Showstoppers is a media event for journalists where a bunch of products, usually from like Eureka Park, usually like the CES, like innovation type products, have boots in a, ballroom in the bellagio and there's food and drinks and in journalists. It's pretty nice. We'll walk through and you can talk to, you know, people from these companies.

It's like another condensed version of like the show all in like one room. And it's like every Tuesday night and CES. And is there, uh, who gets to be there? Not that, no, no, no, not who gets to look. You have to pay. Who gets to show? Like exhibitors. Who gets to stop the show?

But I guess what I'm saying is like, can you just pay enough and be one of the those exhibitors? Yes. It's just, it's not like, nobody's picked these products as like, we think these are actually the best. There's a degree of that in that something that's outright fraudulent. They would probably say no to, but probably not. Yeah, because there's not much space.

And so they kind of defer to people who won like the CES Innovation Awards every year. So you got, there was like a few of those boots. But what was, what was made about it? What was not? It was, they changed venues. It was in a much smaller ballroom. Oh, that's actually a terrible. than the past few years.

Yeah. And I would say about 40% of the show floor was, once again, your favorite product, smart glasses. So many smart glasses, boots. Interesting. There was like three, three, like, regular smart glasses, all, all, like, back-ended via LLMs, like, the auto-translation glasses I tried on. Right. One was a sound translation where they, like, have speakers in the arm, that they were running

that translation through Microsoft's AI. They had another backup translation that you could run through chat GPT's. That's funny because Microsoft is powered by GPT. This is... No, no, but I'm not saying... I'm not saying you're wrong.

I'm just like, that's just like classic CES brain. It's just like, well, it runs through chat GPT or chat GPT with a different hand on. The other ones, which were like the visual, visual translations as well as like navigation, like they hook up to like Google Maps so they can do that sort of thing. If you're like biking.

But the the big ones were the Rokid glasses, the crowdfunded AI smart glasses. Did they work? They worked better than the sound ones. The sound only ones worked but with a pretty significant delay. How long about? 10 seconds. Jesus Christ. So you can't have a conversation with them.

They were prettier. They were, they look like normal glasses. The roclic glasses are a little bit more obvious that they're smart glasses, but the translation's faster. It's obviously, it's hard to have eye contact with someone in a conversation when you're trying... If you're text in front of them.

You have like the kind of like blurry like hologram text. But as long as you can focus, you're always multitask. It's like okay. That one runs through chat GPT. There's a two different like in ear, like earbuds which listen to and transcribe conversation also run through chat GPT.

the worst part about those, though, they worked really well, and you could, like, whisper. That was the main feature. That was the main feature. It was, like, auto dictation, if you, like, whisper, even, like, a loud showroom.

Yeah, yeah. That's kind of cool. So, even in, like, a loud showroom, the person who had it on could, like, whisper something. I could not hear it standing, like, two feet away, but it was, like, it was perfectly transcribed, and I could, like, match via, like,

via, reading lips. And it was good. And is this, sorry, hold on, This is a translation through language and transcription. It does both. And these were earbuds? These were basically like, yeah, like an AirPods style. Cool.

But the dictation feature is a subscription model. You have to pay to keep using it. And it's powered by GPT and all that. And it's also powered by GPT. So there was a few things like that. There was smart like swim goggles. There was smart like ski goggles, bike goggles. One question just with the previous one.

Sorry. So you need a subscription, but do you need an internet connection as well? Ooh, I didn't ask that. That's good. Because I assume it must connect to your phone or something, which is just like because. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like, ostensibly if you're... The dictation needs the phone because you see the dictation like getting updated on your phone. That's not too bad. It's going to be synced to your mobile device. But you'd want that anyway. That one's not so bad. But the translation ones, it's like, if you're in a foreign country, you can't necessarily rely. Guarity you'll have data. Yeah. The situations you need translation will probably not be in a major metropolitan. because depending on the country, and if it's a country where it is a major proletterian, it doesn't have English translation, the cell service might not be good, you might, may not, it's just...

Also, the idea of walking up to a person who doesn't speak English, who speaks, like, literally so much zero, so zero of English that you can't... Yeah, you can't converse with them. Yeah. And being like, hold on, let me put in my $1,000 machine into my head that is going to make me be able to talk to... I mean, you... A lot of the glasses, at least,

it's for, like, putting on so you can hear people, like, around you. Which isn't too bad. It's not necessarily even for conversation. What? At least, at least you can, like, you can hear someone speaking in a foreign language, then you can eavesdrop. So then these people who are specifically,

who have switched to a foreign language specifically so that you won't understand what they're saying. This is what I did to... No, it was really funny when I was a kid. And my parents used to speak in French in front of my brother. And I, to try and avoid us hearing. We didn't tell them for fucking years

we could understand. We could completely understand. Totally. What they're doing is teaching you French. No, I've, no, we were just listening to work out why that we're like, how long we were going to stay places or if there was something we were going to do, we didn't want to do. And then eventually, I think one of us laughed at something they said. It was like, oh, shit.

God damn it. Years of the scam. But, okay. It's kind of useful if you are someone who only speaks English, talking to, talking to someone who's speaking in another language but can, like, understand English, but maybe, maybe can't, like, speak it very well. I do actually think that's, that's just, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, That's like the main use case.

There's stuff like this has been normalized it a little bit too. Like I've gone to plenty of hotels where there's someone from mainland China trying to check into the hotel and they're using the translation thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, and then they show the phone. Yes. And like that'll get more refined. And I don't know, it seems to me like translation is one of the few things that like LLMs are really good for.

Like it is an improvement. Yes, it is an improvement. Yeah, totally. And like, it is a positive use case. It is a non-harmful, at least broadly non-harmful use case. I was imagining the setting, the like, when you're in, you know, the rural Uzbek mountains and you're trying to communicate with, like, I was trying to imagine the setting where you have no Wi-Fi, but you're like trying to use these earbuds, which just feels like a, you know,

a set piece in a movie. So, like, although some of these things kind of, like, worked to some degree, the audio one's a little bit slower, like, these are all stuff I've tried on at CES before. Like, I was going to say, I feel like we had this conversation. last year. We've had this exact conversation before. Like, these are not new. And this was, this was, like, 40 to 50% of the show floor at showstoppers was just these, was like this genre of product.

Right. The only new thing is they put like these smart glasses technology and like ski goggles, like swim goggles, scuba goggles. So you can have like a, you know, a heads up view if you're wearing a scuba goggles. And like that's like newish, I guess. I feel like, why do you want headset view if you're wearing scuba goggles? Maybe you need to. play an app with gesture controls.

Because you saw the Terminator 40 years ago and you're like, it would be cool to see text on my eyes. As pretty as it is to scuba dive, you could also be watching Instagram Reels at the same time. Yeah, like brain raw as you're looking at beautiful tropical fish. Jesus Christ. You're like, hey, do you like to swim laps because it's the one place that you cannot bring your phone?

Have we got the solution for you? The whole thing about the phone is that you can look away from. Like to me, the main reason VR didn't catch up is because like when I would play a VR game, I would, you know, sometimes I would enjoy them. But after like 20 minutes, I'd be like, what if my house is on fire? Yeah, yeah. What if somebody needs me? And then I take the thing off and then it's such a big phase change. You don't want to go back into it.

And just the ability to glance away from stuff is so important. And I just feel like, I don't know, heads up display. I don't want for that reason. And it fits into the thing of, I've really been struck by how. many people I've been walking, if you look at the way people are using their phones at this thing, everybody is on their phones all the time. They're just, they're in like hunched over phone position, you know, like, like elbows on knees looking at the phone. And I'm like, I don't see any of these companies unseeding Apple and Android. Like it's, we have the here, this is where

the AI is happening. This is where all the, we've done it. I don't think we're been happening that. You can do, like, I was just in Japan and you can do translation on your phone. You can type, you can type the thing in, you can show it to someone, they can type it back, and that's going to be faster and more efficient. I went to Japan in 2017, and I literally just used Google Translate. Yeah. And I feel like it would be way more offensive to this man who did not speak a lick of it. I went to Iraq and it was amazing. And like, it was way less offensive to be like, oh, I don't understand you, I'm going to use this and being very honest to be like, one second. Beep, beep. Now speak. That's what I mean.

You imbecile who cannot converse me versus being like, yeah, we're both from different countries. Like, how magical. Yeah. There is a barrier. And technology has solved this barrier without removing the honesty of conversation versus I have paid someone $500 and $25 a month so that you and I can pretend we understand each other because we don't. And I do, I really do think that, like, at the broadest levels, I do think that the translation use case makes more sense than almost any other to me. And you know why?

It makes that sense because it's written in English. But Adam, what you were saying earlier, I couldn't remember. miss it. Anyway, but the burden of being a comedian, they have to take the low hanging freedom. But Adam, what you were saying earlier, just a second ago about like, we've already, like the winners are here. The winners are the iPhone and Android phones. Sort of goes back to what I was asking in the earlier block about which, about why are the rappers so prevalent? And is it because, and I'm hearing you that, that a huge part of it is that we're following the trend. But also like, is it that there is some degree of,

the biggest consumer tech gaps have been closed right now. Or like the biggest consumer gaps that we can imagine right now. I'm sure in 10 years they will be, they will be in a totally good situation. The iPhone was like 90% of all technological advancements. That's, yeah. That was possible when it was invented. That's what I mean.

Like it sort of picked, it was all the low-hanging fruit all at once. It's been refined over 20 years. And they planned for it. Like there was a famous Goldman Sachs analyst called Jim Covelli who said like the iPhone, they knew it was going to happen like a decade beforehand. They just needed Bluetooth to be smaller. They needed GPS to be

smaller and modems and such. And like Apple has made the same thing in a dozen other form factors and they're all less popular than the iPhone. They're just like less, the iPad, less. The Apple Watch less. The iPhone is like the main thing. Well, obviously the Vision Pro, which is the most

successful for a show. Yeah, that's the popular product everyone loved. I think there's another level of it as well, which is it's follower culture because it's when a big company goes, we're going to try this. And I think the meta-glasses is because a lot of credulous journalists went,

wow, I could use this to video myself cooking. I could use this while walking around. I did a content video as a content creator. This is now a thing. And because that happened, everyone goes, I bet those fucking dumb fuck VCs will buy anything. No, what? And they will.

And I don't, yeah, but VCs will. But have we seen any? proof that consumers will. No, no, no, no, but... Yeah, VCs well. But it's like, oh, yeah, we can clone the very popular meta-ray bands. You mean the horrendously unpopular one? I'm... Sorry, the unprofitable, but also, not super profitable? Like, metas... I've never seen them in the real world. I've never seen anybody using them. I've literally seen them once. I've seen one person using them. Yeah.

Don Lemon. Don Lemon. Is that real? Yeah. It's his real. Yes, this is real. You could not have said a funny. Giley Maxwell. And that man was Don Lemon. You could tell me a story about anybody doing anything

and at the end say it was Don Lemon. That's very good. He's shorter than what you would think. How old is he? He seems so tall. He's like maybe 5'7 at most. Oh, baby. That's not good.

That's a shorter man than I expected. For a man that stood up to Elon Musk. Kind of. I went to the Razor booth, which I know we talked about yesterday. but I did have a good time there. And I actually kind of left going like they're doing it in an honest way because, you know, I walk in and most of the stuff, look, they're a second tier hardware company that makes accessories for gaming, right?

And they make good ones. I have a razor mouse. They had some keyboards. They went clicky, clicky, clicky. Yeah, nice. It was very nice. And then they had like a, their LLM wrapper was a pair of gamer headphones with cameras. And they're like, this is better than glasses because it's like a little bigger and no one can hear you.

And then they did the same demo as, like, literally they had a plastic cutting board full of plastic food. And the girl goes, what can I make with this? And the LLM is like, spaghetti. And she's like, wow, thanks. Like, it's literally spaghetti and tomatoes. I did see the wife tube, though. But just to finish first, then they're like, look, it can connect to Claude or Opus or any of them. And I'm like, okay, great.

So Razor has gone. I know who gives a fun. But Razor has gone. We're a hardware company. We make hardware. This is a thing that people are maybe using. Here's a hardware interface for it. That's like pretty good.

Yeah, sure. And like, fine. And they called it Project Makoto, which is a little bit over the top. Okay. But like, it's functionally a gamer headset, right? It's like, not that bad. Now, the little tube I thought was funny. And this is the holographic tube with the wifu in it.

It's a little holograph. Have you seen this Chloe? No. You should probably go check this. I think you would enjoy it. I would like to see you interact with it. It's a little, so like a little on your desk, a little tube, and inside the tube's a little anime girl, and you can talk to it. And it's just like talking to chat GPT, but you can say like, hey, hey, kid out my gun in Battlefield 4.

And then she goes, okay, I added a scope to it. But did that work? This is what the wife tube looks like, by the way. Yeah. But it's a little avatar. Wife in a tube. Wife tube. It can see you.

And the guy goes, hey, what do you think of Adam's outfit? Because by the way, everybody in the Razor booth, that was the most recognized I was all weekend because they're all internet nerds. So they're like, I saw you on you. They kept going up and saying, hi, Adam. I was like, are you fucking AI? Like, stop it.

They pause 10 seconds every time he talks to them. But so the guy goes, he reveals that he knew who I was because he goes, what do you think of Adam's outfit? And it sort of goes like, wow, CES badge on fleek, looking super professional and like a, Like a boss. Jesus Christ. You know, yep, I guess there's some gamers who might need compliments,

like a little compliment tube. But it's, but it was dumb. But also it was a little toy. I felt like they weren't even taking it that. Sure, sure, sure. They're kind of shrugging going like, yeah, you know. This is the bullshit we got to do this year. Yeah.

It's a razor. Hey, you want a mouse or you want a little anime girl too. You want something useful or you want whatever the fuck this. Pervert tube is. Yeah, but they make LED fucking, you know, desktop towers. Nobody needs any of that shit. But the people that love it, love it. Yeah.

But like, I don't know, I'm just like, if you buy the wifu tube, they should fucking put you on a list. I'm sorry. Like, if you're like, I desire a tube array where to quote Robert from yesterday, where like Krieger's hentai wife from Archer resides, you should not be allowed to, like, you should have to introduce yourself to your neighbors. Like, it's just a very worrying product.

And also, who the fuck for? Like, who is, because it's not good enough to give you actual, like, CES badge on fleek. Wow. Fuck off. Just, I. Well, that's the thing is that, like, that's one of the things is, sure, are there a lot of gamers who could use some compliments?

Without a doubt. Absolutely. But, like, it sort of feels insulting to their intelligence. It feels insulting. I think the way AI talks. The kind of sycophantic chatter. You got this. Yeah.

Feels like insulting to anybody's intelligence. And it's sort of shocking to me that we just go, yeah, that's how it should talk. And that's fine. And we accept that. And aren't like, that's humiliating and stupid. But it fits into me in the gamer context, actually, because something that so many games do that I find annoying, but clearly people must like is like, thank you so much. You saved the whole village. You're the strongest hero we've ever met.

Like, games will compliment you for doing basic things. I don't even think games do that. I mean, you saved the whole village at him. That's more than just a basic thing. But you also, you see that in like a text box and it goes away and you've forgotten to happen. And I'm hammering X. I'm like, I'm just like full autist.

Like, I need to get the next fucking bit. Fuck you. I don't care about the story. And it's just most gamers I talk to would be very annoyed to have any interruption. and just having this demented hentai thing in the corner of being like, the badge is on flake. And not to be...

You need to wash. Do you say you need to wash? Now look, that has utility. If it was mean... If it's a wash tube, then just reminds gamers to shower. I actually... This is a use case for AI that I could get by.

Oh, no. We're going to get some emo saying, I'm a gamer and I wash. But the... By the way, if you email me that, I'm asking how often? It is funny that like, you know, maybe it's the computer from Star Trek, right? Where they would go, computer, do this or that, and it would answer.

But the computer didn't go, what a great idea, Captain. That's sure decisive and a great, shows leadership on your part. I think that actually is it, though. It's trying to come up. And think of how much better Captain would have felt about himself if the computer had said that. Captain Picard had self-respect. But here's the thing. They're doing that.

And gamers? They're doing that because you can't just be like, do something. You can't be like, do this because it can't do anything. That's true. It's like, you can't be like, oh, you, the battlefield example, it actually can't do that because it would require it to interact with the game, which it definitely can't do. So it's like, yeah, they add all the sycophancy, because you can't actually be like, can you do this for me? Can you find this? Because there'll be a five to ten second pause and it'll go, Olympia is the capital of Washington. I was like, I needed the fucking time, man. It said that it did it. The guy said, kid out my gun and it said a bunch of stuff about the gun. I didn't know the game well enough to tell if it did. But I asked the dude, I was like, do you, think that gamers want this, like a game assistant, because to me, a video game is like the, the, the, the Paragon thing that you would want to do yourself. Yes. And I asked him this, he was like, well, yes, but sometimes people want to get better at a game, like League of

Legends or a game like that has a high skill ceiling. And so maybe it can give you tips. And I was like, okay, like a coach. And he's like, yeah. And I was like, all right, maybe that's a use case. It's like a training, a training AI that's going to give you, because people do hire, like, Like video game, like coaches, that is a market. Yeah, but if you're good at a game. Yeah. Not like a regurgitation of how many game FAQ pages. I'm not even being sarcastic.

I've had many people help me with games, but people. And the whole point is they watch you and go, that was wrong. That was wrong. No, do this. Like, you're doing this. I see you regularly making this action. I don't think you could recognize that through a camera. I guess it could maybe use for like, for like walkthrough guides.

If you're like stuck at a part, you don't know how to continue you can ask and it'll like regurgitate some IGN article about how to get past the like fourth dungeon and like PlayStation already has that built in yeah really yeah with astrobot they really brought it in as well yeah they have a feature the the developers have to like build it in but like astrobot has this all done because that's like a super first part of game rocks it uh like you hit the PlayStation button and it has like game hints so literally you know if you're on a level and you're like where's the fucking third puzzle piece and it it'll like show you a little video or give you a hint. But that's like basically they just put the game fact in the game.

It's, I used to write video game guides. And the problem is, is the, the things that people get stuck on can be so deep, because it's why they have like yellow things on ladders that you have to climb now. Because something that seems really obvious to one million out of one, sorry, 1.9 million out of 2 million people is really just not obvious to like a thousand people and all of those people post online. And they are just like, what the fuck do I do here? And then you get the people who are mad that it's too obvious, but it's like, ah, it's yet another thing where it's like a solution in search of a problem. And it's just kind of sad.

And I hate to do this really abrupt thing, but we're at 30 minutes. And the next thing will solve either all of your problems or cause you more. Your choice, but you really have to give them your money, whatever it is. And if it's a podcast, you have to listen and trust them wholeheartedly. 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 acapella 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. To the group. The yarn herds, right? 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. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think Iheart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Call 844-844-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 great. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.

When Jacob met Levant this plant to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive. The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life.

Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going from the WMBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel on. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeke. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile. That means the world to me. And that's what motivates me

to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can 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 IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of I Heart Women's Sports. We return to our scene. We've rotated once more, bringing back Matt Binder of Mashable. Hey, nice to be here again.

And of course, stand-up comedian and star of this thing on, Chloe Radcliffe. Who, you have her? Where is she? Bring her out. There she is. I must see her. Someone is going to see is this thing on. As a result, they've heard the name so many times.

No, you know what I want people to do? Who cares about it? No, the movie's amazing and I'm very happy to be in it. What I want you to do, Can I do a little plug? Please, please. I want you to come to my stand-up shows in either Cincinnati this weekend, January 10th and 11th, or D.C. Next weekend, January 17th, and 18th, or my solo show called Cheat in Philadelphia, January 20th, 21st, and 27th.

And I saw Chee. That's what I want you to do. I'm fucking brilliant. Thank you. I need to do that too. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, do a plug, please. She plugged.

I got a plug. No, no, it's only my turn. This weekend, I'm going to be a comedy on state in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the best clubs in the country. and then I'm going to be next weekend in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which I will not say at the Summit Comedy Club in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which I will not say is one of the best clubs in the country. But if you live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, it's probably the only club you have access to,

and I will be there. So go see me there. And then Houston later this year. And I will be at the Chuckle Hut, Las Vegas. Fucking one. Doing my new set. Um, actually. Stolen valor.

And it's me doing the DreamWork's eyebrow for 15 minutes straight. Anyway, we're back talking about Cucle. Matt Bender has returned. Ah, yeah. What have you seen recently? I don't even know anymore, man. Yeah, it's just a slob. It's just everything all at once in multiple places.

I will say that this is very insidery in terms of being here, but... That's fine. Vegas has very specific Uber pickup points. Yes. And it seems like when CES comes to town, they just decide to fuck with everyone and move them places without telling the Uber drivers. Yep. So, you know, you try to get somewhere and you just can't. because the Uber driver can't fucking get to you.

West, you have to go to the West Hall and go to the Diamond Lot or you have to go to the Renaissance Hotel. That's the only way to get out of the LVCC. You can also take the tram if you want to be shoulder to shoulder with people who want to die. Today I walked from the LVCC. Great. How long did it take you? LVCC to here.

It took me half an hour, maybe a little bit less. Damn, you power walk. Yeah, my priority is speed. What? What a voice. That's like an ingrish thing that I'd see in Eureka Park when your priority is speed and it's just a SaaS product. Yeah. But, Matt, have you not see the...

No, no, there... What have you beheld? All right. So I did... I don't even remember the name of it, but I did. I remember the last time I was on this show, I was lauding the fact that crypto and blockchain is dead at CES. Oh, do you find some? I unfortunately found something.

I don't remember what it did. It was a mining company. I don't know what their product did. I mean. But one thing. I saw one thing. So it's, it's, it, we don't got a shut out here at CES when it comes to crypto. But it seems like it is still dead other than that one thing. Right. Yeah, it's, I will also say when crypto was here, and I do remember it, it was so half-hearted. Because first of all, it's the problem that all the AI shit runs into, which is it's internet connected. But it's also where AI really doesn't work, crypto really, really doesn't work. It's like, yeah, it's a blockchain game. Great. So what you do is you get the thing, it takes, it's, it takes. 10 to 15 minutes based on the Ethereum blockchain. And now one thing has happened. Now you'll do another thing.

Yeah, you're going to need more Ethereum because every single time you touch this, I've definitely walked around a few of those. I'm like, yeah, so does this work? What's proof of concept? We've got a white paper. I'm like, fucking just everything. Well, that's not good showcase material for a convention.

None of it was. And last year I did see a panel that was a guy talking about quantum and Web 3. And I thought it would be funny. No, it was just a guy. It sounded like some. someone with a concussion. Oh,

like Web 3, Web 3, Web 3, Quantum. Quantum fast, but quantum will break blockchain. And everyone going, hmm. You bringing up Web 3 did make me remember that I did, I didn't go into it, but I did pass by. Apparently, Jason Calacananan, whatever his name is from All In, they were doing a live, just him was doing a live all-in podcast at CES. Jesus Christ.

I had no interest in going in, but I mean, they sent, they sent like the, what, the least successful. We've sent our clammyest man. Our dampest man is here to bring you the dampest coverage of the CES. Because the other guy who chopped, whatever his name is. He's the most wealthy one, I think, right?

And then... And there's just David Sacks. And David Sacks is too busy. It's too busy with his insidery trading stuff with the Trump administration. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess Jason Kalakhancenin, whatever, how you ever say his last name.

Cuckarach. Yeah, I mean, what was his claim to fame again? He had that... He sold a... Harlow? Yeah, the SEO. Yeah, the SEO shop and then weblogs. But weblogs, which created in gadgets, like a weird thing where he had a hand. He was also early on over. Right, right, right, right. Basically, what the fuck is he doing here? He's on the All In podcast. He's one of the four hosts, right. I mean, what? Yeah, but I mean, I guess I can't really judge someone of being like,

I'm going to do a random podcast at CES. It's not random. I planned it. Right, right. No, But I mean, it wasn't, though, like, this is Ed Zitron show and Ed Zitron is here. Yes. All in is four guys and they sent just the one guy they don't really even like. That is really. Yeah, they did a regular episode. They're doing one right now. It's like, yeah, Jason and each cover CES.

Thank fucking Christ. Okay, let's do the show. Jason's gone. God, that would be really. Is there four of them? There's four of them. I never remember the fourth one. Because he stays out of the political.

world, I think, for the most part. They had Trump on and he was just like, yeah, we're going to be, the biggest immigrants, is going to have the biggest immigrants in the world, they're going to be the largest. And they're like, that's so great. You should do one, H-1Bs. I don't like foreigners. And like, yeah, we don't like them either, but we need H-1Bs. We don't like them, but they were the biggest. He was looking at Chammoth, I'm sure, when he said, I don't like foreigners.

I'm sure he said, yeah, I'm sure that that was fine. Oh, God, I can't believe. Like, this is, this is meant to be, actually, this is a good segue. This is meant to be the consumer electronic show, but I keep running into non-consumer like, like, Eureka Park is like full of just meaningful enterprise stuff,

like sensors and like a solar thing and like, things that when you look at, you want to make a joke at it, be like, okay, this is a specific center for like, oh, it's a wetness sensor for a specific,

like, cleaner of something. It's like a very specific thing. And then just like, a cat litter, like a robotic cat litter thing that was not available. Right.

I mean, yeah, I was taking a video of just like, I was in something that had like a whole lot of signs up like it was a science fair. And I was, I videoed just like the titles because they were baffling to me. Fleet management with vision AI. Nice.

Edge AI meets human touch. What? And then AI native compute for the IoT. These are not consumer products. These are money laundering operations. That's just connecting, that's just connecting various phrases together to see how many venture capitalists actually read the things they in.

That's classic CES though. A few years ago, it was every company was a Web 3 Metaverse, interactive, artificial intelligence on the blockchain. My favorite one was one that was just... I want to buy that. Yeah. No, my favorite one was one that just said, let's see, it was called Sorb. And it just said Solv via Sorb. Let's just bring this up. Yeah.

So for a second I thought he said... Sov. Sov. Solve. Solve via Sorb. Sov. Your accent is making this specific. This is really difficult. I just, SOARV, solved via SOAP. And I will admit, I didn't want to know anything more

because mostly that handled it. Like, I got, I got it. I'm constantly like, what do I do? And I sawp. Right. I'm sobbin. A side note on the accent, this is a completely unrelated. I'm also dating a British man.

And I'm dating a man who is also British. And he tried to make a joke of, what's your source on that? But he pronounced it. But he was, the joke was, what's your sauce on that. But in a British accent, source and sauce are exactly the same word. Like, there is no distinguishing.

And I made him say, what's your sauce on that? Probably 15 times in a row because I was like, I don't understand what the joke is. I know you are making a joke. This is like, there's a show called P-A-W-N stars.

Now, here's my problem. If I start saying, yeah, I was watching porn stars, this, this leads to more questions. for all that the Brits are king of wordplay in America we've come up with a lot of wordplay

that absolutely paralyzes you guys and I'm like yeah I'm watching porn stars there's this big guy called Chumley and then there's Rick and they're like all right it's like yeah one he's constantly conning people and they're like whoa this is some weird porn now I'm like no

I literally was thinking of pawn stars like 120 seconds ago because when you were talking about them sending the one guy from All In I was like, that's like if it was the cast of pawn stars and they only sent Chumley. I was like, maybe that's a joke I should say. And then I let it pass because I was like,

oh, pawn star is kind of an old reference. And then here you are. Yeah, right. Two minutes later. Have you ever told anyone at it who your favorite character is? And then you have to let them know it's the old man. The old man. Yes.

He is, he's my favorite porn star. I like the old man that sounds like this in my porn star. Yeah, it's, but every episode of that show is great because it's just Chumley being like, yeah, I bought a car, a Toyota Carolla for $15,000. And then Rick's like, ah, that's terrible. But I scammed an old lady out of a $50 million coin

by giving her $300 bucks. It's just an evil show and I love it. But they charge you to go in there now. They should be on the show floor. Chumley should just kind of like amble through Eureka Park. They charge you to go into the actual physical store now? I've not actually been because I think every Vegas resident just stays out of the tourist areas. But yeah, it's, I would love them to come on the show.

This is, this is back to my pitch about a CES fringe festival. Yes. We could have shit like the pawn stars guys have, have a booth. Chumly trying to buy a startup. Is it genuinely, I mean, a CES fringe festival would be kind of like, like, exo-XO or another, like, creative tech festival. You could do something like that nearby. and have like cool people with like their itch.io projects. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like they're weird hacky things. You know, that would be fun. And or just like you get the grandma orb and you just fucking obliterate it. You just have a 50-cal rifle that you unload into a computer. Okay, this is actually like a rage room for, you can go to CES and then there's a rage room with all of the products at CES.

Yeah. You then get to. Walking around the shopping, like, If any listener decides to start a CES fringe, you have to credit me as a co-creator. Oh, okay, okay, but they don't have to pay you. I would like you to pay me.

Okay. That would be nice of you, maybe. It's your IP. It's my IP. It's developed here on the show. Developed on Better Offline and thus owned by IHalt Radio. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Yeah, no, the ideas on this show are owned by, I think, me.

I haven't really checked. Anyway, no, it's such a peculiar show, and I don't want to repeat myself. I'm just, but it's useless, but it is, there are less cameras, dildos, and batteries companies, which is disappointing. And there are less practical. Like, I've been looking for anchor A-N-K-E-R. Right. They're like my favorite, like, I've got big fucking anchor battery.

They make a lot of mobile chargers and stuff. Yeah, mobile charges, projectors and stuff. Like, I like them. Can't find. No, like, and it's funny, the description of the useful products so far, stuff that exists. Like, a battery for girls. Like, that's new. Now, that doesn't exist.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because a woman, if you tried and picked up this battery, it's too heavy. You'd be like, whoa. I go, my arms are so weak. My tiny. My tiny woman. Ouch, Mr. Can you live this for me? Thank you.

I don't like this one because it's black. But if it had flowers on it, then I'd love it. Then I go, that's for me. A little mirror on it. You can check your makeup. Oh, so you could look at yourself because women do that. I love mirror. You could get so far at this show.

but just bail. Yeah, but as a man, I prefer to have a hologram wifu. Now, I will say, okay, not to be all a woman about it, but the wife tube, I was, I was going to have, you could put a man in the tube. And does anyone? Which one you talk? The man in the tube. The razor one.

Oh, the razor one. We draw that last thing. Victoria was saying there's a man with tattoos you can put in it. Yeah, so the, I don't remember if we even talked about this when I was on last. No, this would be, no, we should keep talking about the tube. Okay. So the razor one is the project. Mokoto or Mokatu or something like that.

No, no, that's the headphones. Project Ava is the, is the wife in the tube. Oh, no, you're right. You're right. I was just there and I really learned it. I got confused. You are correct. Yes.

I'm glad you're on this one. Thank you. Because I'm not. Yeah, but there are weirder ones because the, the Razor one actually did they show it to you, right? So they were like actual, I wouldn't use it, but there were actual use case applications. Like, and you could put a guy. it if you wanted to. And like, you're playing a video game and you're like, oh, is this the best, you know,

configuration for my character? No one does that. In the marketing material. But that at least is like an idea they got. There's one that I saw from a company, a company, I never heard of it. It's pretty low bar when we're like, they've got an idea. Yeah. They got an idea.

That might be the, the tagline is. Another one is CES. They got an idea. I guess. Anyway, wait, wait. But you've seen alternative tubes. Yes. So this company Lempro has this tube called Amy.

And it's not as good of a hologram, but it's still you put a woman in a box, which is weird. A tiny woman in a box is a big thing now, apparently, because a lot of companies want to do this. It's very weird. It's an oingo boingo video. But the whole purpose of the Amy from Lempro

seems to be not AI assistant or any ideas like that. It's simply, you're a lone. only guy and you want to talk to this, a woman and you don't have a woman to talk to. You never thought about trapping a woman. And you don't want her to be full size. Right. Right. And you don't want her to be able to go anywhere. Because they were, they were talking about it as an AI companion. And my colleague at Mashable was doing a video on it, holding the device talking about it, saying, you know, if you need a friend, I guess. And while he's saying friend, the little woman in the box starts literally like gyrating her body as,

if she's like doing a strip tease. And I had to be like, buddy, I don't think she's meant to be your friend. I mean, this is. Have you ever wanted the experience of thinking a stripper fell in love with you every day? Right. And it's because listen, I don't want to put a stigma on sex tech. CES already did that years ago. We already talked about Jack enough of time.

Right, right. But, but like this doesn't feel like sex tech. This feels like gooner tech. I don't know. It doesn't feel like something that like is normal even for like what people should be experiencing sexually. In order to want to have it socially, you need to be socially stunted in a way

that other people perceive as on you. Like, I remember what I was a nerd, and I grew up around other nerds, and then occasionally, I remember, like, now he's a cool. Yeah, now he's cool. I remember me like 16, and one of my friends would say something about women where I'm like, oh, you really don't see them as people.

And not in like even a, you feel so pathetic internally. You have so little ability to communicate that you sort of see it as, you see another person as, as being a stimulus producing machine for your purpose. And there are people like that. And you, you,

to buy one of these products, you have to, that's how you have to see other people. Right. You have to be like really mentally, socially, emotionally, like disabled in a way.

Right. And I, I just want to, I want to sort of plant a flag very firmly, and we don't even have to analyze this, but just sort of like, for posterity's sake, the sort of,

the broadest and most foundational symbology of a technology where it says, here's a little woman that lives in a box on your desk, is just sort of every sentence, every word in that sentence. Imagine explaining that to someone. It's like worse and worse and worse for gender dynamics. Yeah. It really does symbolize somebody who doesn't see women as equals. Right.

I mean, one of the recommended demo, like, commands you were, they told you to try was to go up to the box and say, dance for me. I mean, that, that alone is very weird. Pretty damning. And for people who use this type of thing, there's dance for me. Are you Jabba the Hut? Do you want, do you want to be like Jabba the Hut? I've had a long day.

You dance for me. Dance for me, Chube Woman. Show me. Oh, that's good. No, do it more like I like it. Yes, yes, that's good. Yes, that feels good. Oh my God.

But also, I hate to ask, but how was the woman white and thin by any chance? There were a few women options. Oh, many women to trap. But you could pretty much guess, yes, there was like a white, like a blonde white schoolgirl and then a, a, a, like a Japanese woman dress. in like traditional Japanese garb. You know, the type of stuff. It's really bad. Yeah.

It's really, really bad. I think making it, for me, actually, making it anime makes a slightly more palatable, palatable because there is. But it's not anime. Oh, it's not anime. It's just, it's just a white school girl. Yeah, it's just people who fetishization women. They're not real, they're not like human models.

They are sort of like cartoony. Okay. But it is like anime style. Because I was going to say, there's stuff like Genshin Impact where people like collect their favorite character. They find them sexy. Both women and men do this. And it's like, it's a little, it's sort of like fun fantasy land.

And I can see a version of this product that like appeals to the Genshin impact player. Right. Where like, the average person might be like, that's kind of weird. But I know enough people who do it where I'm like, you can do it in a fun way. Right. But like in general. The school ghost shit. What they're selling is a companion, which is bad.

Right. Right. Like the reason when you said, like the model of the woman in there was like an anime character. It was like a known, I don't know who she was. but it was a known person. And while she might have been dressed like provocatively, it was the character, but also there's no actions that add to that,

that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, I'm just how, her character's dressed. I don't, I think it's all evil. I agree, but I'm, I'm just trying to differentiate the two products. This one, this one, this one, they were, they were, they were dressed that way and then acting out ways you would fantasize

someone. And not, wait, are you saying the Razor one is a real character? Is it a character that exists in the world? Yes, yes. And then these are not, these are just their own AI companion creations. And you think about it and you're like, you know, these people, you have, when you're designing a companion, you have a literal infinite number of human characters who you could, you know, like, why not pick a 65-year-old lady bus driver in the Bronx? Why not? Honestly, why not?

But this is what I'm saying. But the reason that you are laughing at this. And look, I'm saying that it's not sexualized. But the reason that I'm laughing, you're laughing because it's not sexualized. Streep in a box. Merrill Streep in a box. I'm going to be honest. I want to fuck Merrill Streep.

No, not saying that. Okay. What if I just want to talk shop with Merrill Streep about her film career in a little box? I'm going to be honest. Some of the best conversations I've ever had have been with like random old people at airports. Like a few years ago I was at a random, I forget where I was like, maybe Salt Lake City or regardless. I just talked to this guy next to me and he was a former NFL player from like the 60s or set.

Like it was before it was like a high paying job. And we just chat shit for half an hour. And we kind of talked about. And I was like, yeah, I'm going through some shit right now. And like, we had an honest conversation. That was probably like, I can't imagine. That was more socially healing. And as far as like, yeah, to your point, exactly, sorry, I mean to talk over you.

It's like the actual thing. I'm a woman. I know. They're going to get me for this. But the loneliness thing, the isolation, isn't solved by sex. And like, immediately placing woman in this situation where they are the solution to men's problems is put to, it's male loneliness bullshit. It's claiming that woman are somehow the,

solution to men not seeking introspection and companionship. And what's funny is that it's not even woman is the solution because there's a 65-year-old Bronx bus driver who would not count as the solution. What it is is there is a specific checklist of a woman's weight, facial beauty, and social subservience that are supposed to that are supposed to fit into this very narrow range of measurements. And that woman then owes service to man who is lonely. And I want to be, I want to be like as fair as possible. So say a man is very lonely.

A man, a man lives a very isolated life. Yeah. And goes, I can see a use for an AI companion as a like a social, like fill the whole. that is in my life that I can't figure out another way to fill. That maybe we would say, hey, what do you like? Do you like chess? Go find a once a week, or once a month chess night. Hey, do you like, I don't know, whatever.

Well, there's chess playing robots that'll solve that problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't have talked to people. Right, that like, I understand that there are people who live an incredibly isolated life that I would maybe look at it and go, there are ways to solve this. There are analog human to human ways to solve this and to take baby steps forward. Sure. I mean, I think that that's the solution and all be all.

But like, I can imagine somebody who goes, that kind of human-facing solution is impossible for me. I cannot imagine leaving my apartment. I cannot imagine going to a chestnight. I cannot imagine it. Whatever. Insert, sure, fine. Okay, so I'm trying to, like, be as fair as possible,

have as much empathy as possible. And this person, first of all, the idea that this person doesn't have inherent, sorry, I'm really on my lady's soapbox now. But the idea that that person doesn't already, It, like, hasn't already been inherently soaked in sexist assumptions and standards and, and a view inherently of women as unequal because that is, we all, I view women as unequal because that is the water that we swim in.

That is how we, that is how we are socialized. So, like, those assumptions already exist in all of us, and particularly in this isolated person. But, again, I'm being as fair as possible. Say that those assumptions are not actually surface level. They're inherent. They operate in how we make subconscious judgments. Right. But this person is not, you know, sort of like outright a sexist.

They buy wife in a tube. And suddenly they're, if we're assuming that they're pretty isolated, suddenly they're a huge bulk of their interaction with what feels like a human is Japanese lady in a kimono who probably has big tits under that kimono. Good for, you know, like, good surprise. And one other thing, though, is... That it's like, that suddenly becomes your only interaction with... With the concept of a woman, or the vast majority of your interaction with the concept of a woman,

like, that inherently is going to poison how you interact with... Your interactions with gender. And I just, like, that to me, that is my fairest take where I'm not... not saying it's evil at the top, or I'm sorry, it's like evil at the out from the outset. I think the product is evil from the outset, but the person doesn't necessarily have to be like fucked up from the outset, but I just think this product is going to be too I want to, right. I want to add one thing to that, which is it also inherently connects loneliness with sex and physical validation. Because it's like, why isn't a guy? Like, why do you

have to have a woman you are attracted to to solve your loneliness? Why is your companion, by default, the opposite sex, and I assume validating how you look and telling you you're a trick. Why is that? Because that's where it gets into the like woman subservience thing for me as well, because it's how are woman a service. That's because all these, all these products aren't solved. If your issue is solving your social problem. Yeah.

None of these, no tech product is going to. The therapy will do that. Yes, but the whole point. Or like exposing, like exposure to the outside world will do that. Like you just, if you have a problem socializing, with people, then the way you fix that is by forcing yourself to socialize with people. Yeah. Yeah. Like, tech can't, by definition, fix that because tech is not a person. And I mean, I used to be a very awkward, but like, even like, you're not Chloe.

But he's cool now. But I'm cool now. No, I am not. But like, it's like, and it took having to have some very harsh conversations with myself and my therapist and just accepting that, like, yeah, I was awkward. I was not thoughtful about my conversation style. And I was just hated myself and didn't think I was human. Yeah, I've been to fucking therapy now. It's great. But it's solving that would not be someone validating my every whim. You kind of need to hurt a little bit because no one is perfect. But it's like saying, oh yeah, a sexy wifu in a tube is your prisoner now.

And now you won't be lonely because the prison wife is yours. And I can, and again, like being as fair as possible, giving as much credit to the other perspectives as possible, I can't imagine somebody saying, when you're saying like, I don't want the solution to be loneliness to be inherently tied to romance. I agree at a philosophical level, but I can imagine that from a pragmatic view, a huge amount of very lonely people are like, yeah, I would fucking love to be in love.

There's a lot- It doesn't solve it. It doesn't solve it. If you hate yourself and you meet someone and you have sex with them and you're with them and you still fucking hate yourself, you're going to become dependent on that woman. Yeah.

And you're going to be a fucking, you're going to be a tumor on them. It's just, I hate to... It's a birthmark, Ed. It sucks. I literally, you know, Chloe, Chloe, my autism is such that I genuinely don't think about your birthmark ever, and you know I'm like the one person.

Oh, no, 100% of it's my favorite joke to make. Oh, no, it fucking rocks. If it's the store, anyway. Those don't know, Claire, Chloe, she's got a big birthmark. For those who are just hearing her via audio. Look, it is, first of all, the loneliness, the loneliness epidemic is real. It does kill people. It's like, I know, the discourse about it, whatever. But like, it is a real problem. It's also like evidence of such a deep distortion in our society

that we have it because the thing that we have the most of in the world is other people. Yes. We are literally, we are literally the most second only to other chickens. And the whole idea of replacing people with technology at all is insane because we've got eight billion of us, up from $6 billion when I was in high school. And guess what? They're cheap. Like you want one in America? You can get one for $7 an hour and they'll do whatever the fuck you want.

You know, like that's... And by the way, even when it comes to like companionship, right, there's a role for people to do that commercially. I'm friends with women who are sex workers and they see at least a couple of them as like, look, there's guys who like they need love and sex. It's a human need. They like have their neurodivergent or have some other issue. in such a way and I can provide a service and they get something out of it.

It's reciprocal. That's the best version of it, right? Et cetera. I could go into details. But like that's a real, that's a, that's a, that's like an occupation that's stigmatized in our society. Yeah. But like, it's a real thing that a human could do better.

Even then the idea that we're replacing people is insane. Yeah, there is a difference though, I think, between like the loneliness epidemic and like the socialization problem. Like there were guys who have plenty of friends just have trouble with women, so they go to sex workers, and that's fine. Hopefully they don't, you know, they are normal people other than that, but, you know, but the socialization thing, these are people who already even thinking about, you know, interacting with another woman, even for pay. Like, these are people who just want to control something because they, they don't even want to, I don't think they want to fix the socialization problem, because why would you buy a woman in a box if you're

like, I'm socially awkward, I need to talk to someone? That doesn't solve your issue. That's not even something that gets you in that direction, in my opinion. I just, I don't think it, it doesn't involve any introspection. Right. It's just about, I got a thing that kind of solves the problem so that I don't have to think about solving the problem. Right. Like, meeting people online, like, that's a fairly new thing.

And you know what, it's solved a lot of problem for a lot of people. Because you actually, it's technology, you use technology to actually enhance your real life, your real world. Every single person in this room who has been on this show, including Phil, who I've known for 14 years, I know through the internet. Every single fucking one. I'm like the drill crying tweet, where it's like my beautiful wife crying,

my job crying, my watch crying, now get the fuck out of my office. But that with the internet. And it's like, it is difficult. I'm not pretending like loneliness isn't like a thing, but I fuck it. I resent the male loneliness thing because women get lonely too,

and they solve it in a vastly different way. And there's not just a series of different cons set up to corner women being like, you want a husband tube? Right. Do you want the man tube? There is none, right. There's nothing,

the one putting in a guy in a box, right? There's no one saying that because women are put in a position where they're meant to fucking work out. Women have to fucking work out. Woman has to fucking, it's your fucking fooling, you're lonely.

Why are you too emotional? Why are this? Why are you that? It pisses me off because it's like, these whiny fucking men who are like, oh yeah,

I'm fucking lonely. And thus I'm gonna become racist. And it just fuck hard. Sorry, I have some very spicy feelings about this because I went through the actual work and it was very difficult and annoying. I agree. No, I fully agree with you. I think, you know, I really think they consider the fact that women are, can be lonely. Like, it's not, because in a lonely guy's world, they think, and you see this online all the time, because you could see how angry they get when, oh, woman decides to like start an only fans and they are successful and they make money doing that. They're like, oh, it's so easy for women. They just go out there and they could talk to anybody and every guy will want to talk with them.

And it's like, you know, but you could just go out there and talk too. Nothing's stopping you. Oh, I'm going to say something really out there. Every guy who says that, get on OnlyFans, start selling pictures of your cock. I'm serious. I'm actually fucking serious. To gay men. Yes.

Who they would never allow to purchase pictures of their cock because gay is bad because, why is gay bad? Because it is close to woman. It's feminine. You couldn't possibly look at a man's. penis, you might turn gay. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, just comes down to the like, such foundational views. It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the most foundational framing of women in society, which is women are, uh, there to be consumed and men are there to consume.

Yeah. And it's so deeply fucked up. And it holds, it kills, it kills women. And it kills, and it kills. And arguably it kills men too. Oh, it absolutely kills men. Yeah. Thank you, Adam, for sticking up for the men.

Well, you know, I think that the point you make is you guys can go and talk to anybody anytime is true. To me, it's similar to a lot of other social problems like, you know, poor nutrition, people being in poor shape, not exercising, right? Yes, anyone can eat better and jog or whatever. And also, some people grow up in an environment where everything that they are ever told, every product they have. ever purchased. Their entire environment is pushing them away from doing that thing. Yeah. And they just never get around to it. So like my dad has no friends. My mom has 20 friends. Not because my dad's a piece of shit. Just that's the way American society is structured. And so yes, my dad has a responsibility. And also society can look at this overall problem. What the fuck are we doing wrong here that's

causing this like demographic problem? And the answer is not wifoos in tubes. The answer is like connecting people with other people. So it's basic. But also is your dad lonely? Like there's some people who prefer actually just not... My father, he's quite happy. He hangs out. My mom, my family. For it to be a socialization problem,

you have to be a lonely guy who's upset you're alone. Yeah, you feel like you're owed something. Who's upset you're alone and not trying to change that? Right, right, right. Because if there are people who are completely content, being isolated, and they don't view themselves as that. But like, you know, they prefer to stay in

and then go out and hang out or party. Like, they like their time to themselves. Yeah. And that's completely fine. But there's people who are inside. and are angry there inside and alone. And that's the difference, I think. So, you know.

So I hate to do this. We're going to rotate again. Coming up, an ad for men and woman. Whoa. There are products like that. They got him for both birds and the fellas now. Wow. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide.

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

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I think I've had 11 Diet Coke. You do have a bottle of water next. Yeah, it's mostly. I just like to sit with it. Okay, we're back as Better Offline. We talked about male loneliness epidemic, I guess. We're back, and of course, with comedian and actress Chloe Radcliffe. We will let you do your plagues.

Plags. Plags. Do your plagues? Yeah. Put your plagues on people. You, of course, Adam Conover, stand-up comedian. Hello. And of course, the host of the factually broadcast.

And we're actually joined by Ben, my good mate, Ben Rudolph. It's good to see me. He's the CEO of Coddographic and you did 15 years at Microsoft? I sure did. You did the P.L for Windows Vista you were saying. Enterprise PR for Windows Vista, the worst job in the company. It's honestly, though, that's the most PR thing like you all, always have one. Yeah. You have one thing. I made it though. No, you made it and you're still smiling. I'm here. But it's, it's Jermaine's what we're talking about, like, positive male role models, positive male discussions, because I brought you here because you're a good mate. And we've done a lot,

like, we're friends online and you've talked to me about fitness and being like, you've genuinely changed my life, like helping me build a workout routine. This, like, my relationship with you solved more male loneliness than any, like, romantic relationship I've ever had. Are you, uh, are you a, uh, fitness coach or are you just to do, okay. No, I, not really, no, at all. He is just, and just to give you an idea, Ben is fucking, like, jacked. It's awesome. I am trying every day. And he's huge to get a little bit more, a little bit more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm not, I'm not a fitness coach at all. I, uh, I love lifting weights. I try and keep myself in shape. I've got nine kids. So Jesus Christ. Yeah. So I had a lot of people who are dependent on me. Sure.

Go lift up low of kids. It's a lot of, exactly. A lot of functional fitness. Oh, but seriously, like, it's great for my health. It's great for my mental health. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great for my family. Yeah.

You know, and like you had, like it, it solves as many mental challenges for me as it does physical challenges. So, like, it's not a career for me. It's just something I really enjoy doing. And it's so deeply ingrained into my day-to-day routine that I really can't I can't imagine living without it. Yeah. And we met over X the Everything app and we, the ultimate poster championship with the

you, me, Caleb and Tatiana. And we just talked fitness and like, I fucked up my body real bad doing connected fitness stuff. Actually, it was like, um, fight camp and tonal. And I was lifting real hard. I was not in a good place. And I kind of went to Ben. I'm like, this keeps happening. And I keep like getting this pain.

And Ben just sends me a video of him and his son. He's like, I'm going to show you how to throw a punch. And it was lovely. Like your son was like, you ready? And he just threw this perfect like. spiral punch. I went, wow, I've been punching wrong for several months because you need to like rotate your hips and such. And it's just like, it's one of the things I cherish because it's like a wonderful relationship over the internet. For sure. A wonderful, a positive thing based with

talking to another bloke about something positive. And I think it's really easy to dilute a lot of loneliness to, well, I need a female or a romantic companion. I need someone to make me feel better about myself versus helping me along a journey where I do that work while someone inspires me, because you're fucking cute and you've done, you always post the ones where you've got like 89 inch biceps or whatever. I think it's lovely. And also I'm saying, if you're listening to this as a man and you're saying, oh, I'm lonely as, go and talk to another fellow. Ask him how he's feeling. Talk to him about how you feel. Don't fucking say, I need the wife tube. And now I do think, okay, so again, I'm trying, I'm, I really am keeping,

in my vision, thinking about the other perspective and being as fair as possible. So if I'm a man listening to this podcast and I'm like, I'm lonely and Ed's advice is go tell another man how you're feeling. Yeah. I think that the gap between where a lot of men exist and being able to tell another man how you're feeling is pretty deep. I'm going to say something simple. It's hard to do.

If you really can't email me, easy at betteroffline.com, I'm not fucking kidding. Signal me easy atron.76. If you really want to talk about your emotions and you're too scared, because your cowardly male friends are not in touch with their things. Do it. I don't care. You cry. I cry when I fucking need to.

I'm fucking sick. You solve this by facing the problem. By doing stuff. Yes, you solve this by walking. I have weight issues. And honestly, you help me, Ben,

turn weight lifting into, I lift light now. I lift volume. It's about completing things. It's about building something rather than thrashing my fucking body. But I think we need to, I think we have to start by recognizing that it is difficult for men, for some reason.

that we could get into. Me and one of my best friends, I've known him for 20 years. I see him twice a week at minimum. We're both in therapy. We're progressive guys. We care about our emotions. He, a number of years ago, seven years or so, got divorced. Didn't tell me for a year.

Jesus Christ. We were on a hike and he was finally like, I want to let you know, like me and her are separated. And I was like, yeah, man, I haven't seen her around. I know, but we didn't talk about it. Then I went through a big breakup like a year and a half ago, and he's had to come to me and occasionally go like, hey man, how are you doing?

You know, like we haven't talked lately. And we, everything, for some reason, we have to remind each other and we do it less than we should. But actually, you're right. I think I get that you need to remind. The solution there might be, ask your friend a question that sounds simple. Yeah.

And this is not necessarily like, how do you tell your friends how you're feeling. This likely will open up a conversation. but like your friend saying hey how are you doing post breakup arguably you it sounds like you had noticed that something had gone weird in his marriage you hadn't seen his wife around for a long time but it sounds like you didn't say like how are things with you and the wife yeah i didn't say anything to him either so i and so to me it's like asking that question even if that feels so like such a steep hill to climb like i've i've been in as a as a woman with feelings i've been in

conversations with my girlfriends who I'm super, super close with, where I'm like, God, it is really fucking hard to be like, anyway, so how is your marriage doing? Like, that seems like, um, it seems like if the answer is good, then I'm like opening suspicion into an area that I don't need to be opening suspicion into. If the marriage is bad, if she's not telling me, there must be a reason that she's not telling me. But the answer is actually just, we are sort of all socialized to not reveal a lot of that information.

And then women have been permitted to be like, we have been sort of saddled with their emotional and they're dramatic. But what that, the light side of that is that we are permitted to express difficult things a little bit more easily and a little bit more publicly. Sorry, Ben, we've just dropped you in the middle of this. No, this is great. It's like you and I, I mean, I think men in general are, you know, we're supposed to be strong, physically strong, mentally strong, mentally strong, all those things.

you and I started talking not just about fitness, but when you were like, hey, I struggled with my weight. Yeah. Like, I was able to say, like, I struggled with my weight too. Like, yeah. In 2009 or so I lost about 70 pounds. Oh, yeah. I was big.

So I gave us a point. Which for you is like 1% of your body mass. Yeah, I weigh 700 pounds. Yeah. But it's old muscle. Yeah. More, more now than he used to me. But that gave us an opportunity to like to talk over that.

Yeah. And that was like something that we could bond over it. and something we could, you know, you're not the only person who's ever dealt with the weakness that we could compare. And like, I still always feel like the fat kid. Oh, same. Absolutely. And I feel fat all the time.

I feel fat right now. And it's weird. Right. And I always do. And it's always like weighs on me because I was a heavy kid and through my 20s. And I didn't really turn it around until it's about 30 years old. And once you figure that out and you find out that other people have gone through the same thing, then all of a sudden you can have a very different conversation about it.

And it's not about lifting to go in the Mr. Olympia. And it's not about trying to set a bench press record. It's really just about like, you know, trying to build yourself up as much physically as as it is mentally. And other people are trying to, you're just trying to get through the day. And also, that's okay. I will say, in my experience, pushing a little further on guys being like, are you really okay?

It's all right. A lot of guys will open up and be like, I'm not. And you have a nice conversation and you're worried. And I mean, the feminization of emotion is disgusting. Because it's like, oh, my God. The amount of times I'd cry with my male friends and vice versa. And it's felt so much fucking better. Or when I've cried in front of you, Cluyn.

I've cried my... I think that's close to how we met. It was like two days later. Yeah, it's two days later. But it's great and it's good. And it's just, it's really easy to find other stopgaps. And I want to be clear, like, these companies are taking advantage of that. They're not...

Because I wanted to say this last episode as well, it's like, the reason that there is a lonely in this epidemic is there are no third spaces. There are fewer walkable cities. And the social networking tools no longer... that is such a fucking, like, Dennis Liery's doll. The social networking tool, don't let you socialize. But really, though. You can't have a chronological feed of the people you want to fucking follow on most platforms.

There's obstructions between it. There's, like, random platforms just become racist. They're not designed to get people into physical space, with the exception of dating apps, which are. But even then? Like, yeah, true. And those are all fucked up and gamified. But, like, you know, what was the name of the site from like the late 90s or like, Meetup.com or dot org.

Yeah, yeah, me. I think they're still around. Maybe. It was literally designed to, it was like sort of pre-Facebook designed to be, find stuff to do in real life. There are things called meetups. Yeah, meetups are still, like that as a branded name. Okay, well, that is not the focus of most social networking tools.

In the early days, there were a lot that were like, hey, let's get people to meet up in the real world. And now that's the last thing Facebook wants you to do. Yes. And it's just, there are ways that this could be fixed. I'm not an inventor, but I don't know. The problem being that men don't want to talk, that's not something, that's an analog problem. Yes.

I'm just saying like the prescript. Oh, no, I'm agreeing. I'm agreeing. A tangible prescription can be ask your male friend a question, any question. Any question. Yeah. And also ask, ask your girlfriend as well. If you have one, more questions.

Ask anyone in your life a question. And actually, listen. They will love it. Well, I really. All I want to add to this is I think it needs to start with a recognition that like in the same way that when I started working out, I was like, oh, yeah, everything in my life has been telling me to sit on my ass and I have to like make an effort to do it, right? But it was a little bit easier because, yes, men are supposed to be strong, right? Everything in men's lives are sort of telling them not to open up. It is like a

barrier. Yeah, defensive almost. And like, you have to like treat it as like, this is not going to be super easy. Like I have to, you know, I have to like pry it out of myself and out of my male which is why like, you know, again, my friend to me was like, we need to talk. It's been a while. Which is exactly why I'm saying. And it's, I'm glad they did. And that's exactly why I'm trying to point out the gulf between somebody listening to this and going, I feel isolated and the, the other side of that crevasse of like, just talk about your feelings. And I do think that there's like an easy concrete. You're intentionally opting into something hard. Yes. Right. Like that's, I mean, and it's, it's, we are, you know, not to get two metaphysics.

but like we're nothing if there are not challenges for us to attack and doing hard things can be rewarded exactly right and like it is no harder to learn how to bench press than it is to talk about your feelings those are both hard and with fitness as well i had to like push past the thing of like like i have to be strong it was this incredibly negative relationship i have with my body because i was a fat person that didn't i was a fat sedentary piece of shit until i got past that i could not have a body i liked until it was about building something and recognizing weakness and the fragility of one's body, but also the fact that

going about it and beating the shit out of yourself to become strong is unsustainable because it just means that every, like a good thing, a powerful thing, a progressive thing is inherently regressive. You are just hurting yourself. And where is the end point of that? How are you going to go,

oh, I've reached a good point. It's just you're a piece of shit if you fall below this level? And I fucking thought with that. Yeah. And there's, I mean, especially when it comes out, like the body dysmorphia stuff, which never stops, right?

I mean, there's like, there's memes and jokes about it. Like, I've been, I've been bodybuilding for five years. Like, when does the body dysmorphic you stop? I'm like, oh, it doesn't. Right. It's like, you're just getting started, man. Like, you, uh, you see the guys even, not that I would ever advocate for this, but like the guys who are like the pro bodybuilders, they'll win shows. And they'll be like, what do you do? He's very famous, like, Jay Cutler, who won Mr. Olympia four times. They interviewed him after he won. And he was, they were like, what are you going to do to celebrate? He's

well, I got to go to bed early because I got cardio in the morning. And it's like, you just won, like, you know, the world series of bodybuilding. And he's not taking a day off because he was so wrapped into it and so deep into it that it was just like, it's all he could think about. And like, you know, and again, not to be a woman about this. Please be a woman about it. I just want to state for the record that I, I love, I am so glad that men are talking about body dysmorphia and the way that body dysmorphia shows up in women is so much more socially connected with our value. like that like I do I do not I want to be like I totally get it I do I do I do

I think probably more than you might think I do and then just a quick shout out for the girls that like then it is connected to the women are there to be consumed that like the the extra layer of value when we feel body this morning gets back to the wife tube thing, which I'm liking saying that phrase, I guess, where it's like, yeah, it's not a overweight woman. It's not a man. It's a sexualized presentation of the idealistic woman for the certain customer of this thing, because I am not a woman. I experienced body dysmorphity every day, but I'm not, like, me being overweight is not the thing that precluded

me from being happy. It was how I felt about myself. To be clear, I need, I, like, I want to feel better about myself, but my value as a man is not directly affected in the same way. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. When I was fat, it was not keeping me from job opportunities. Exactly. That's what it is. It's that, like, I think probably the emotional experience of body dysmorphia is very, very similar in women and men. And even the like, men are supposed to be strong. And so, like, there is a social value associated with that. But it is that when men fall outside of what we consider the classically attractive bounds, the way that their lives are negatively impacted tend to be much more minimal negative impacts

than the way that women's lives are impacted when they fall outside of the bounds of class. I would say when I was very, it was like 350 pounds, there was definitely a level of like respect I didn't get, but it was not like, it wasn't to the level where women are just fucking completely excluded if they do not look like the heteronormative idea

of what a woman should look like a certain level of thin, and attractiveness and makeup and all of these, yeah, it's very, it's very different. Yeah, or it's just like a whole other fun layer. Yeah, you get like several more layers of. I mean, look at the, look at the people at this conference and look at the, you know, there's people who are, uh, there's, there's men walking around who are not fitting conventional, conventional notions of what an attractive man is and they're powerful, successful men at this conference.

And I think you'd have a hard time finding women are in the same position. Yeah. Right. Like, we're talking about all the other dimensions of, you know, of social value and status. They get so much more connected for women, absolutely. And everything goes with women as well as weight loss and thinness and certain presentations. And I mean, it's about a certain level of bigness and the metrics are even different. It's just, it's, I'm glad we're talking about this on the show because I know we probably have more men listening than we do, woman. I hope, like, I would love that not to be the case.

but it's about technology, what do you fucking think? And it's just like, it sucks because, yeah, they're a lonely man, but it's like, yeah, sadly, you bring this shit to a woman before you fixed it, you're now her problem, she needs the key, and you're going to have many of these things about your body that you transfer onto her. You'll judge her the same way you judge yourself until you can get past that. Even the internalized sexual, uh, the sexism of like how a man and the woman is meant to feel. when I was heavy I had to go through a lot of things of just like

no one needs to look a certain fucking way at all. Like I might need to be thin for myself. That might be what I need to aspire to. But that's no one else's fucking job. No one has to look a certain way for me or for them, like only for themselves. And it,

it sucks. The more I think about these fucking wife tubes, as funny is to say the more like angry I get. Yeah. Because it's just like reinforcing gender stereotypes, but also adding a new layer of like woman prison. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, a technological fake solution to a real social problem that is like preying on both the customers and the women who are being represented.

Yeah, there's this tube where you had like an anime wife you could talk to. I probably should have played it. There's multiple products, though. I distilled it from the conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea. It's a really good band-aid on a multitude of problems because I maintain you want to, you want to genuinely go talk to a priest.

Like, I don't mean it, even if you're not religious, you just fucking go. Maybe you need some spirituality in your life. Maybe you need more than just how you look or how you feel and trapped in your own head. They'll talk to you. If a priest will talk to you all fucking day, you don't need to be religious. I'm not even joking. Like the monk, the Dominican monk, Frye Gabriel, is sadly not here. Father Gabriel, pardon me.

I talked to him for hours. I'm not religious at all. I'm like agnostic. Who fucking knows. But it's like, the problem is if you talk about your problems, then you have to recognize your role in them and how they make you feel.

And when you've never done that, this is the sympathy I'll give. It hurts. Well, there's when you've never done that. And also, when the technology that is in our world is so, is so effective at like pressing the immediate dopamine button

or right, that we are presented with a drug that is more instant and more powerful and more replicable than ever in human history. Yeah. And so why would you do something that feels bad when you can just do something that feels good right away, even if it feels bad on a long-scale term, long-term scale, and you sort of understand that inherently, yeah, but you can still just do the drug again. You can just press the button again.

You can just feel better again. And why wouldn't you, of course. And perhaps Chinese peptides. Like, it really does connect. No, but we were talking about these Chinese peptides yesterday. It's like, yeah, a quick and easy solution. To be clear, you use GLP 1 from a doctor, brilliant. Well, however your weight loss journey happens, if that's what you need, brilliant.

Sadly, and Ben and I can tell you, you can lose all the weight, but you're still going to feel bad about yourself until you solve that, until you find a way to carve out your own self, you're going to be in trouble. And I say this to someone who has been in trouble, who has taken years to build the internal and external me that I wanted. And it's like, all these fitness things, they don't even really try that as well. Victor Rissons make the point multiple times that these numbers, the useless numbers we're talking about. I said that my theme for CES is, numbers you don't need.

It's just like, there's no substitute for the work. No, right. I mean, like, that's it. There's no substitute for the work. But everybody's like, but is this a substitute for the work? Exactly.

Like, we've been trying this for forever. CES 2026, but is this a substitute for the work? There's a great, there's a great, I think you and I've talked about it before. Henry Rollins wrote a great article called the Iron. The Iron and Soul. Yes. Amazing article.

We're talking. right where he talks about the iron never lies. At the end of the day, like, forget, I'm going to butcher the quote. But he wraps it up by being like, you can be the biggest guy in the room or the smallest guy in the room. You can have the best body or the worst body. You could just gotten married or just gotten dumped, you know, fired from your job, promoted. At the end of the day, man, the 200 pounds is still 200 pounds. You're lifted or you don't.

Like, it's the work is there to be done. You change, but the iron stays the same. It's the same. Like the process of lifting heavier or eating better or whatever is like the heart. is what makes it good. It's not just about the aesthetics or about how much weight you can push. It's about the process that you go through.

And those GLP ones and other peptides, like they are miracle drugs. Yeah. They are miracle drugs. And I know lots of people who have gone on them. And the people who are successful are the people who go on them and then also lift the weights

and also do the cardio and also eat better. The people who just take them and then kind of like deflate because they're not doing anything, have horrible metabolic problems because they took the shortcut and you get the you get the results of the shortcut yeah and you feel still miserable about and they say this is I've lost I was 350 pounds I dropped to 130 pounds when I was 19 I then went back up to 260 something but the end of my like the midpoint of my 30s and maybe a buck 65 now that last part was the first time it

stayed like I've stayed consistently this way not because I've stayed consistent my fitness I've been off for the last few months, but because I've been more focused on what good feels like than I have on, am I fucking push and punishing beating the fuck? I remember texting my friend Tachiana, a friend of the show, Tachiana. Yeah, my arms feel like they're full of broken glass. And I was happy. And she was like, I don't think that's what that's meant to feel like. And I was like, yes, it is. I'm good. It wasn't a good. It was not long before I started talking to you, Ben. And I think it's just like, it's really easy to fucking hate yourself. for bad reasons and then also not really be critical of yourself for the good ones, such as

I'm fucking up my body repeatedly so that I can be sexy for women. And I want to add another, a corollary to, it's really easy to hate yourself. Yes. Also, it is really easy to justify a fairly nihilist point of view. I think now more than ever. I think it's very easy to be like, nothing matters and we're all going to die. And so why am I, why would I I try. Why, but I can try. Or like the world is so fucked up. And obviously there's no, like to keep to rationalize to justify whatever your repeated

choices are. And I'm talking to myself more than anybody. Like I have a million of these routes that I get myself into. And I think it's very, very easy to justify self-destructive choices, particularly the mildly self-destructive choices, the ones that aren't like driving, causing you to drive your car into a tree at the end of the night? What are the minor ones? Oh, just like, like, justifying, promising yourself that you'll eat better and then not,

even if it's not to a crazy degree, but it's to a degree that keeps you unhealthy in a way. Or like, you know, it's like if you're not getting blackout drunk every week, but you're like, when I drink, I wake up the next morning and I feel anxious in a way that cripples me for the whole next day. Right. But I'm just going to have another drink. I'm just going to have one more drink with my friends tomorrow night or whatever. And again, like, these are things that I do.

These are, this is my own life. This is, nobody saw. Adam just dropped. The nihilism thing, I mean, like, my favorite gym t-shirt that I lift in all the time is, like, the counterpointed that. And it says, like, we're all going to die. Might as well get strong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I think, is it Pascal's Wager?

Isn't it Pascal's Wager? Right? It's like, it's like that, but for life choices. Yeah. You can act as if God exists. Exactly. Like, you might as well act as if God exists because even if he does not exist, living in a moral way.

It's the benefit of yourself. I totally agree. I'm saying like I think a lot of people easily fall into a justification where it's not even that they, like, I think that there's people listening to this who wouldn't say I hate myself, who would just say

everything is so weak. Yeah, who gives a fuck. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is. Or my, my jadedness is correct.

Not even it doesn't matter. Stuff where they're like, it could matter, but like look at, I think people, people rationalize jaded. I also think it's really easy for guys to, in particular, and no, I take that back. It's not true. Woman do this kind of self-harm as well. And where it's like, for the beauty standards of both woman and men, where it's, I need to hurt. The pain is necessary. No pain, no gain. Actually, pain is not brilliant. And with women,

it can often be, I mean, they do the same thing with fitness, but like dietary stuff with women is much harsher. It's like the ways we punish ourselves, and they usually fail. Like, I am generally not in pain when I, after I work out. I feel worked, but I feel good. And it's like, that's the thing to look for. But it's really easy because you go on Instagram, especially if you, like, start talking about fitness in a DM and Instagram's like, oh, we're not looking, but it looks like you need some peptides.

And you can get this fucking pressure of these guys who are just, they're younger than you, stronger than you. They've gone through crazier journeys. They've lost more weight. They've done this. It's really easy for guys to pretend like this doesn't happen. and you don't look at another guy's body and you feel inferior. It fucking happens.

And you're like, if I look like that or feel better, you probably won't, mate. Yeah, and woman, woman talk about this publicly all the time. Men don't want to because it's fucking gay. They're like, it's gay. Oh, you're fucking. Good Lord. With the worst thing that could happen to you is that you're gay, Jesus Christ. That sounds fun.

Like, who gives a shit? You're in love with a man. It sounds nice. You're in love with a woman who gives a fuck. Yeah. But it's like this feminization of anything, any kind of pain and emotion. And men are just fucking strong. Go to wife tube.

Wife tube will talk to me. I'll lift a million pounds. I don't know. It's nice to have a conversation like this in this scenario like this as well, a very male dominated space, a male dominated industry. And it's also scary for men to think about this stuff. And it's much easier to blame everyone else. Yeah.

Other men, too. That being said, I am going to try and lift a million pounds this here. No, but you do it because it's a million pounds of volume. That's the goal. No, but that's fucking, you're doing that because. I'll get there, but we'll try. No, but you're doing it for fun. I'm doing it for fun, because, like, it is.

It is a therapeutic thing for me, like the joke of, you know, lift heavy rock, sad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But it's like, it's, it's, it's true. It is a, it is a great physical thing. It's a great mental thing. It's good for my marriage, right? Like, I'm a better husband.

I'm a better father. I'm better professionally because I'm able to focus and put that. You're energetic and you've, yeah, exactly. And you build something versus. You can see the results. Patching over something. Exactly right. I'm so glad we're talking about it.

Adam, what do you think about all this? Yeah. Sorry, Adam. You've been quiet this whole time. Oh, yeah. We've been podcasting for two hours. I'm a little tired. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that it's just the trip that I'm on is like I do think that we underrate how much society, like all of us together as a society push men down the wrong path on this stuff. and I think at the same time as we are saying like, you know, men need to step up and like change their attitudes. I also think we need to like create space for other men.

Yes. To do these things. That's actually what I'm trying to intentionally do. And men and women need to do this. Men need to do it, I think. With each other. With each other. But it is like, you know, a,

and I think the thing that, because there's so many elements of this, you can talk about how sexism and patriarchy and stuff affects men and women, and you can almost always go it affects women worse. It's true, right? Yeah. But a deficiency that I think that the reason I'm glad we're having this conversation is, I think a deficiency, at least I think that's unequivocally true,

is that men talk about it less. I grew up watching just evolving conversation about sexism directed towards women for my entire life and like processing it. Oh, we're developing how we're thinking about this. We're trying to address this process all still exists, but we're, and like, we just, we, we have never had it for men on a, on a cultural level. And when we try, a lot of times people go, you know, like, why, you know, I talk about this on stage sometimes.

And, you know, people come up to, a woman came up to me and says like, oh, it's kind of, it's kind of, oh, won't somebody think of the man. And I'm like, yeah, kind of, it is kind of won't somebody think of me. And I, the thing is, I get what she is saying in the, it's very, very easy to fall into the trope of like, oh, poor men, but it's like, the actual solution is, you can say that, only if the answer is talking to other guys, not like, and that's where woman come in. And that's how having sex. And by the way, I would just say, that will not solve your image issues.

That will not do it. It's a fucking band-aid too. Yeah. I mean, Adam, to your, thinking about what you were just saying, I think that the solution to, uh, there's, I don't know that there's like a way to really solve gender dynamics. you know, just not my fingers. But like, but. We've got 15 minutes left.

We've actually only got five. But, you know, if I were there listening to the woman say, it's kind of a think of the men. And your answer is, yeah, it is think of the men. That's because the only way that we make any progress is with empathy and kindness. Yes. To the people, to every player involved in the scenario.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, but empathy requires interest. I didn't mean to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, totally. And on that point, I'm going to end this two-hour-long episode. Wow. Ben, Rudolph, where can we find you?

I'm on X the Everything app. Oh, nice. Ben, the PC guy. It's my wonderful friend. Or you can go to cartographic.com at C-A-R-T-O-G-A-F-I-Q-Q-C-O-G-R-A-Q-Q-Q-C-E-C-C-O-G-R-A-Q-C-E-C-C-E-C-E-G. Because we wanted to make it super hard to spell for everyone. Nice. Ben, Ben, can I just ask a question?

Yeah. Did you see one cool thing at CES? We've been talking shit on tech products and men generally. Is there anything that you were excited about? So I haven't spent that much time around the floor. I've been working with my clients. I think there's finally some, we could do another two hours. Should we get into the transition from AI hype to like what you can actually do with it that actually matters?

I have seen some stuff that I think it's interesting and fun. I haven't seen anything that I'm like, wow, that's going to change my mind. life. There's a lot of like autonomous like scooters and yeah and stuff like that that seem interesting but I don't know if well that's all I want to know thank you Adam why don't you do your callouts to where you're going to be doing stand-up. Oh okay this weekend uh I'm going to be a Madison Wisconsin next weekend I'll be on Fort Wayne Indiana then I'm going to Louisville Kentucky at the end of January that in early February I'll be in Houston Texas and then I'm taping my new special at the punchline in San Francisco.

go February 19th through 21st, Adam Conover.net for tickets. Hell yeah. Chloe. This weekend I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio. Next weekend, I am in Washington, D.C. The week after that, not the weekend, January 20th, 21st, and 22nd, I'm doing my solo show called Cheat, which is a completely separate hour. It is not the hour of stand-up that I do on the road. Ed has seen it and loved it.

In Philadelphia, cheat in Philadelphia, January 2021, 22, and then the weekend after that, or oh, then two weekends after that I'll be in Vermont at the end of it. And as we end this show, big shout out to D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-Parted passed last year. Sean Paul Adams, friend of the show, friend of the suite. Please donate to the pediatric epilepsy research consortium in honor of his son, who is epileptic. His family would deeply appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening.

We've got another two hours for you coming soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit.

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