Better Offline - CES 2026: Part Two (Tuesday)

Episode Date: January 7, 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 Tuesday’s first episode, Ed is joined by Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast, Henry Casey of CNN Underscored, Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here and Ed Ongweso Jr. of The Tech Bubble newsletter to talk about smart glasses, wireless TVs, and the big lie of consumer robotics. 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/ Gare Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv Henry Casey - https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/about/henry-t-casey https://bsky.app/profile/henrytcasey.net Ed Niedermeyer of The Autonocast: https://www.autonocast.com/https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ LG’s robot: https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/lg-brought-a-robot-that-cooks-folds-laundry-and-empties-the-dishwasher-to-ces/  The Aura TV with a soundbar built in: https://global.dreametech.com/products/dreametv-s100 Displace Wireless TV: https://displace.tv/ --- 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 for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. media. You were bearing witness to a great becoming. We're back. It's Better Offline. That's right. It's our second day of coverage of the Consumer Electronics show here in beautiful, scenic, rustic, Las Vegas. And we're here for two, two-hour-long episodes today, this being the first of course. And I am, of course, your host Ed Zittron and the King of Pigs, the Dale Cooper of podcasting. We've got an open bar, we've got tacos and places to relax with journalists. And good Lord, have we all seen some crap. Our first contestants are the remarkable Edward Onguyser of the Tech Bubble newsletter, Ed? Hello.

And of course, we've got Ed Needemeyer, the author, and of course, he's the co-host of the Autonocast. Howdy? And we've got Gare Davis, if it could happen here. Gare, how you doing? The only non-Ed present. Yeah, you've got three ads and one Gair, and I think that the mathematics works there.

I was at the convention center today. I power walked through two halls in the space of a morning. I pray for death. But I'm going to start with the fact that I think smart glasses are evil. I tried several ones of them. And there was one where I put them on.

And it's meant to be, you meant to look at your photos in there, you meant to listen to music and all this. And it was blur. I just go, yeah, it's really blur. And it goes, yeah, and just looks at me. I'm like, you know, he's like, yeah, you know. I'm like, how much is it? $1,200.

I'm like, oh, great. He's like, yeah, but that's with discounts. And it's just like, who the, I know that there's the whole thing about assistive technologies. That's cool and all, but it's like, who the fuck is this actually for? I'm just kind of lost. I had a similar feeling. There was a lot of times I would come across assistive tech that would be like, this is interesting.

And then I get introduced to the rest of the ecosystem, which itself is dubious, or there are other additions or features that don't really seem to need to be grafted on. I mean, I think similarly with smart glasses, you know, I feel like the only ones I saw that I was interested in were some that allowed you to hear better and functioned as like a hearing aid. But then almost, yeah,

it's like, you know, okay, if you really don't want to wear a hearing aid, you know, if you're really self-conscious about that, even though we have invisible ones, but Yeah. I saw these even, then there's an app and the, and an ecosystem you have to get locked into. The worst ones I saw, and I hate to chit-talk-specific company, but they do it, is the even G2As.

And what they were, you put them on, and they had like a, it looked like the pit boy. It was like green and black. Yeah. And I had this ring, you had to put a ring on. and control them. And the ring didn't work. Like, you had to, like, violently smack your, smack your finger. Like, you're, you can't see this. You're listening to a podcast, but I'm just, like, smashing my aura ring with my thumb. And it wasn't working. And I turned to them, went, yeah,

it's not really working. And they just went, yeah, you know, it rocks to about our technology. We just like, ah, you know, mate, you know, it just, they're fucking so. I don't know, mate, what to tell you. But, like, technology is not cutting edge unless it's janky, right? I mean, that's kind of part of the deal. Like, cutting edge has become this term that we think of as just, like, good. But really, the definition of it is that it's, like, not fully developed. Yeah, and it's, it used to be, maybe I'm just, I'm having some nostalgia here. Maybe it's not true.

But it felt like about 10 years ago at CES, you'd see something here, and then when it came out, it'd be complete. Now it's just they release everything in Alpha. Yeah. We're living in the world that Elon Musk created. I mean, not to be reductive, but. I was literally going to say, you're an Elon Musk head, a big Elon's, on Stan. And yeah, he really has ushered in the era of just bullshit. Yeah, like, like, I mean, if we live in a world where you can promise, you know, specifically, like, your car will be

able to do level five autonomy. This is like a very specifically, you know, defined thing. And you can get away with, we're saying end of the year, 10 years in a row, which is what we're at now. It'll be, it'll actually be the 10 year anniversary in the fall. That's nice. Like, These are things people, people see these things happen and they're like, well, why not me? Yeah. And why should I fucking bother? Yeah. So, Ed, you've been on the floor.

What do you see today? What kind of, what kind of cramp? I mean, I saw a lot of stuff that was categorized around, let's say, age tech, you know? Like what? So the goal here is you have AI companion bots or chat bots that you speak to. you have smart homes and surveillance systems that constantly log your information and give people away from you

insight into your home. You're generating as much data as possible to feed into something that can analyze it as much of this tech. I saw like a Boston Dynamics looking ass dog robot thing and it was by this very I think you should leave style thing of like a guy who'd fallen out of a hospital bed. I'm going to pull this up just so you can see this.

So if you see here like this guy has fallen out of his bed and the dog is just looking at him. And it says, de-cloak brain. He's just sitting, just lying on the floor. Now, I get that there's probably a reason like this, but are you saying that every hospital is just going to be stalked by Boston Dynamics stocks going, Dijing, J-JITAN. Yes. He's dead. He's fallen out of it. Is that cheaper than a person I am? So is this being aimed at hospitals or is that like consumers? It was not clear because there were tons of other use cases as well that were very vague, like, old person, a neighborhood watch. What's that dog going to do to me? I'll kick it so hard. It flies. Yeah.

I'll send it to hell. Yeah. I mean, like the whole thing of selling robots to consumers is really interesting because, you know, all of the successful robots that exist really are, are not consumer facing. They exist in factories. These very, like, controlled environments. They do the same task over and over and over again. We know how to make money. And it's fairly straightforward, right? Yeah, exactly. And like, a human home is not, you know, a constraint. I mean, it's constrained, right, but like a lot of random stuff happens or relative to, say, a factory. And like a Roomba

is something that you can kind of work if all your floors are perfectly flat and you don't have transitions. And, you know, but even that, like, that's a successful product class, relatively speaking. And it's really the only one in consumer facing robots. And actually, I robot went under. So.

Right. Why do you think, why is there this constant to turn to reinvent it or to rediscover this path that ends in, that goes down the dead end. So, well, so I think what the reason, the reason that that robots are being sold to consumers is because they know that consumers don't understand them. I think, you know, you mentioned all this age tech, like selling sophisticated, data-driven technology to old people. Why do you do that? Yes, there are some needs there, but also, you know, wealthy people will, will buy it without really thinking too hard about it. Yeah. When I talked with them, they were, you know,

with a lot of these firms, they were like, well, actually, it's supposed to only be sold to like nursing homes and larger businesses. But yeah, sometimes people buy them individually because they're really concerned about their family members. So I think that's similar dynamic where it's like, you know, if you know it, and also if you want to take advantage of it, you probably just can't buy one for your, you know, for your home for your grandparent. Yeah. Do you see any robots?

See anything robotic today? I walked past the robot that you showed, but I've not really been looking for products on show floor, but mostly been going back and forth to panels and keynotes. What'd you say? Tell me about some panels. I went to the, like the CTA, the Subaru Technology Association. Sure. I'm a professional. I know. I know who runs this convention.

I went to their keynote this morning and they brought on like a few like CEOs from other, other, other companies. Like they had they had the Nevada guy on at the end. What he's, anything interesting or is it just like a lot of wordslaw? No, he was he was talking with the CEO of, I'm going to say Siemens. Yeah. Yeah. And they were talking about like digital, the use of digital twins in manufacturing for like these large, these large, like, complex simulations. Yeah.

So they talked a bit. They were also talking a lot about the movement towards quantum, how this is, this is the next thing because we're kind of getting tired with the AI stuff, right? So quantum is where they're going to be moving to like the new hype thing. I'm guessing next CES. We're going to see a lot more quantum stuff. But they have this CES foundry event space to set up, specifically about merging AI in quantum. And that opens on Wednesday.

So we're going to have to check that out. Oh, my God. I don't. But no, and they did mention smart glasses during the keynote. One of the few products that the actual, like the CES, like Guy, like Gary, I think is the name, who like actually mentioned was a persona smart glasses for tutoring. And like I've tried on smart glasses.

at this show before. I haven't, not this year yet. Like the auto translation ones were always kind of interesting. Yeah, those ones always seem like useful, but it's like you never really fucking see them in real life. They're very limited. You don't see them in real life. They're usually the resolution's pretty low. These things are going to get better over time. But there was another CEO that they, they brought on and I apologize, I can't remember his name. But it was during the first keynote Tuesday morning on talking a lot about how wearable tech is going to make a big, is going to make a big comeback because all of these wearables are now smart enabled. And you're going to have the AI in your ring, in your glasses, in everything you're wearing,

your watch, is it going to start learning more about your life? And those AIs are going to learn about how the real world actually works, which allows them to be smarter and more useful and help us out in a whole bunch of new ways. And so they were talking about how, like, you know, Fitbit first was a CES thing years ago and wearables since then of some success but have kind of become, but has kind of been more gimmicky. And they're talking about how like wearables

are going to become like a major, a major, a major thing now with the smart enabled stuff. Right. But yeah, and it's, the other thing that both Gary, the CTA guy and the Simmons guy reiterated on a lot was like electricity

defined the last, last generation. Jesus fucking crap. AI will illuminate. the next. And this was, this was, I've heard this a lot this morning. So electricity defined the last generation. Like the last six century. Like the last hundred years like innovation was, was, was, was because of like electricity. This was like the thing. Right. The next thing is, is AI. And the, the coolest thing happened during, during, uh, the Siemens opening keynote where he, he was like, you know, 120 or however many years ago, there was no electricity. And then all the lights in the convention

Center turned off, like, for the, for the show. Everything went black, including, they didn't think of it. Including the teleproctors. So it was this, like, real, like, big dramatic, it was this big dramatic moment. And, like, and then he, like, paused for, like, 30 seconds because he didn't know what to say next. And someone ran on stage with a binder of his script so he could read the paper as he introduced how electricity entered the world and like illuminated everything and then the lights came back on

and it was just this it was this beautiful CES moment See I would have just If I was there with you I would have been like quick I'm gonna lie on the ground I need you to scream at the top of your lungs He's dead

He's been murdered Who did this? Lock the doors There's a murder That's really good though And no one thought this through Yeah It was beautiful.

And he can't even remember the fucking 15 words he needed to. I just. And I love that. It also just proved that, right, that like electricity is still actually quite important. It's very important. Also, the AI isn't going to keep the lights on. As useful as all these AI things are, sometimes you need a binder with paper on it. Also, I just can't, can you not remember what you had to say next?

It's not like, it's not like you were saying anything that mattered. It's just you, he went out. electricity define the next generation. AI will... This is the industrial AI revolution, Ed. Physical AI, right? There is... World models.

This is one of the interesting things, though, actually I'm seeing, is beyond, like, the lofty things about quantum, we are seeing, I think, a movement back towards the material in the way that AI is being talked about here. Because, like, the past two years, AI was much more speculative. Now that, in some ways, they kind of had this cultural dominance, you have this emphasis on, like, manufacturing. And this is something that like the CTA guys like talked about during their keynote is like this

for the first for the first time in a few years we're really emphasizing like the manufacturing side of things and trying to like bring this these like lofty AI things pretty down to earth on like how is this actually going to help on like industrial like cases. And could they explain any? Well, see that's the beautiful thing but see yes that's something that we get to all discover together throughout this weekend. And this is this world model shit. Elon's talking about. The digital twin. thing. That's really what they were talking about, specifically with the Navidia and Siemens' conversation

between their two guys. What is sparing the interest in world models, this idea that, okay, there are limits to LLMs, even if we are LLM's savior, are fanatics, and we think it's going to save the world. We need to find another way to embody it without embodying it. Yeah, essentially. So

Jan Lekoon's whole thing is like, yeah, like language is not sufficient to create real general intelligence. Like the whole thing is animated by the idea that AGI is a thing that we can achieve. And that basically LLMs have proven that language alone can create a like a simulacrum of intelligence up to a certain point. But like it has to understand the world around it, which is not just made up of language. It's so interesting that in response to being like, oh, we reached all these milestones

that we thought would open up the doors, the solution isn't that Uiurago we need to radically rethink And it's like, actually, we need to, we just need a little bit more juice. Well, here's the thing. I think this world model bullshit and the digital, I've been here. So, great thing about running a PR phone in tech, because you hear a lot of terms repeatedly. I've heard world models for 10 years. Sorry, not world models, digital twins. Digital twins was like, and like it was a simulation thing kind of.

And it was like, you a little. Yeah, but then during the metaverse time, it was just like, it's a space that's the same. Yeah. World models are just, they're a scam. Like, I just, like, Faye Faye Lee, everyone talks very fondly about her spatial intelligence and all that. Why the fuck are, like, where's her product? Where's the thing she's done?

Because world models, the reason they're pushing these in digital twins is because it's another use for GPUs. I was talking to an analyst this morning. Well, yeah, that's why the video was on stage when they were talking about this. Please God, keep buying the GPUs, please God. And Jensen Huang needs another leather jacket. Funnily enough, he was wearing it.

How shiny. It was so shiny. So you had the shiny. My man, it was shiny and it was firm scales. Yes. Yeah. It was it was the scaling one. It was it was very hard looking. Yeah. It's yeah. It's just very sad as well because they're not saying that though. Because with other lams, they're like GPUs. We need more of these. We need more power. With world models, they're just like digital twin copy. Simulation. And then the information mentioned this. Yes. They put out a story saying that Mvydia's omniverse software. Yeah, I love saying it. that it was not making much money and they had to shut down the cloud because nobody wanted it and the software sucked. And it's just like they're running, they're out of ideas, but they're just getting up.

It's like watching a pair of parents stay together for the kids. Yeah, we all love world models. Digital twins? Yeah, those are good, right? We both know what this means. Yeah, we could model a warehouse. Couldn't we miss the seaman? They modeled an HD Hyundai shipyard. Yeah. So in the auto industry. end is my question. Every nut and bolt. Yeah, but, but like this is not, the problem is that, is that these digital twins for manufacturing, like, you only, there's only so much demand for it. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, when you design a factory, like, that's a big effort and you do one and then you usually,

you know, reproduce it. And so you're not doing that design like a bunch, right? You want to get it right the first time because the tooling is so expensive as well. To answer actually a question you're on with robots, that what their thing is, and they kind of showed it with the Nvidia press yesterday where it's like, oh, you could put the robot in a digital simulation and then you could do that. And then they stop talking. They just stop describing because they're like, and then the robot will be smart

and able to deal with the real world. They don't really seem to link those two things together so precisely, though. They talked a little bit about that specifically for the manufacturing those, and one of the uses for the digital twin stuff is that, and even putting AI in all the wearables, once they have enough data,

both in the digital manufacturing, the AIs will know how to do it enough that we can make them run all physical manufacturing. Then you have AIs building robots who are building robots and like all of the, that sort of like automation stuff is kind of how they referred to it. But it wasn't something they like emphasized. To your point, I hadn't thought about this until you said it.

But yeah, what is the composition of demand going to look like where it's like, yeah, I actually just need to do it once because these are highly like, I need to know how to my robot should operate in a specific circumstance. I need to know what the factory looks like. And then after that I'll just copy and paste it. Why should I use? The software more than that's actually a good point. Like what happens when you program the road?

Surely once the robot's done being programmed. Do they have any? So that's the whole point with with the humanoid thing. The whole idea behind the humanoid thing is that you create a physical embodiment that has the versatility that a human body has. And then you can continuously evolve the software for it so that it can eventually do anything. Really, in a lot of ways, it's a way to, right? Like, you know, with LLMs, people find the limits of what, right, the hallucinations, the unreliability, all those problems.

This is a way of sort of repackaging the dream of universal capability, but like in this physical form. But it's a dream, though. It's a dream. General robotics is not a thing. Generalized robotics is a big talking point right now. And like robots are getting more generally capable. But like, again, you know, that's how they're talking about it. It's like how do you get like AI driven innovation?

like how can AI like find new solutions that we wouldn't think of without the hallucination problem? And specifically using these models, they're like, if when these models run long enough, they'll be able to improve how these like factories or shipyards function in ways that LLMs simply like can't as adjust to language model. It always seems like it's just they will. Like it's there because I feel like we've heard this robot digital twin thing for a while. I feel like we've heard about robots.

Everyone's shifting to robots now. Even China just delayed, actually it was Hong Kong, pardon me, is the Hong Kong. Wow. Yeah, I know. Just, yeah, I'm going to get killed by someone. No, they just delayed a robot IPOing over there because there's a bubble growing. This shit hasn't even launched and they're like, yeah, mate, we're already at a bubble. We speed ran this one, motherfucker.

I just think I saw the LG robot and they didn't have the demo ready and they showed this video of this woman being like, hey, robot, how are you doing? I'm great, you should work out. And it was just, and it was like, thank you, thank you, Globo, or whatever it was called. I do want my robot to neck me out. No, no, it was funny. It was like, it walked over with like two pound dumbbells and it was like, yeah, you should do what. Have you seen these lately? Yeah, it was close.

And she was like, oh, if I didn't have you, I'd just be laying around all day. Should I order more lays potato chips for you? You, oh, hog, you look, you sweaty hog, get up off your up. And then it was doing the squats with her. it was like a little bit more depth. And it's just, I swear there is regulation against lying like that. And LG is a public company.

But it's just, what the fuck are you do? Like, when is this thing kind of come out? What is the plan with it? And also... It's a forward-looking vision. It's, but it's what we're talking about yesterday. It's like, who the fuck actually needs this? If I had a robot walk up to me in my house

and go, you need to lift some weights, I beat the ever-living shit out of it. I'm not a violent person, but if like a machine decided to impose its will upon me with pathetic two pound dumbbells, I'm at fives. And just, yeah, it was so strange. And I tried to talk to someone over there about it

and they didn't really have any answers. And they couldn't even tell when the demo would start. Very sad. Well, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that like the leading sort of seller of, right, again, Elon Musk with optimists. Like, the main is a South African and a racist and like he's selling the idea of slavery.

Like, that's literally the very thing. Right? It's that we create these things. The software evolves to the point where it's human. It's essentially a mechanical human. And it just does everything for us. And it transforms our economy and everything. And like, it's like you are just, this is slavery. I wonder how much of sort of the political tides that are happening right now are sort of are tied to this. I feel like, well, with the AGI conversation, no one ever wants to talk about the fact that it is just slavery. It's like, what have we had? Except they're not people. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I will, I will be like, yeah, but like they are people though. Yeah, no, no, but it's like if you make a conscious being... Well, yeah, but it's not a conscious being. But if they made a conscious being with AI, eventually, maybe. Eventually they can't do it. Like, but I'm saying, but if you ever mention this to AGI, people that get really upset, it's like, it's not slavery.

I'm like, you trapped a conscious being and bent it to your will. What would you call that? And they're like, computer. And, but with robots, I just think that they're just starting shit at the war. They're just like, I guess... Because the actual robot you'd want is something that can handle anything, which is an impossible idea. And also, I will train it.

to be articulate and competent like a human. Have you met more than one person? Because people vary in their abilities to do stuff. Humanoid, the humanoid form is also not particularly efficient for every task. No. And like creating a human hand, I mean, like the engineering of a human hand, which is what we get a lot of our versatility from is like absolutely insane. But I mean, I have a coordination disability, dyspraxia. And it's like, yeah, I don't know. If you're doing a bunch of training data, which they are like, oh, that's how we're going to do it. training data. Great. Are you going to make, what's a perfect human? Are you going to get like eugenics level data? Like what the fuck? How do you get perfect data? Are you going to get

very data? What is good data? And no one ever asks these questions at the panels and no one ever gives an answer anyway. I think, I think the way to think about like the consumer market for like the attempt to develop a consumer market for humanoid, but other other robots in general is like slop. Because like it, the whole thing with robot, right, it's really hard to sell a robot to a car company. Like I went to Toyota and went to the place where they test all of their robotics. This is a few years ago now. But like they're like, yeah, we buy every time a company comes out with a new robot, whatever, almost any kind, like we test the shit out of it. And the thing is is that they think, and I was like, so how many robots do you adopt? They're like, well, not that

many really. I said, why? And they's like, well, once you start a car factory operating, if something breaks out, one piece breaks down, like the whole thing just stops. And a sudden you're burning like millions of dollars a second. And, and then you have to fly someone from the other side of the world. So like robustness, to get value out of automation, it has to be really, really robust. And, you know, that's why it's really hard to sell this stuff to companies, is because they don't want to become dependent on something that's just going to break down and then they can't operate for like days. With a consumer, you can sell them slop. Because part of it is the spectacle, the prestige. I'm an early adopter. I have the new tech thing. The fact that

it's janky and it doesn't work, this is exactly what's happening with Tesla autopilot. It's something that looks self-driving. It has this prestige, but it doesn't actually deliver. the robustness and safety that, that, you know, you need to, like, take a nap in the back seat. This is the real, this is the real tension of the Consumer Electronics Showcase because you have half of it trying to be directed,

you know, for industries, right? A lot of these, a lot of us, like, you know, AI automation stuff is, like, for manufacturing. But it's, the other side is the consumer electronics part where they're selling kind of, kind of janky things that don't work to a little bit, like, gullible people, or people who want to believe in this, like, Jetson's vision.

Yeah. And you have both these things kind of working in tandem. and when they rub up against each other, it creates these like cognitive frictions. Yeah, one thing that's also been interesting this year and last is seeing the stuff that would not be able to pass a sniff test for business to business

or even regulatory oversight that is sold to consumers with almost, you know, like we're getting up to the edge of what might be a Theranos in a sense that they're saying, okay, with digital information, we can approach the limits of what's physically impossible and deliver that to you with a little bit of analytics, with a little bit of artificial intelligence instead of relying on a really sophisticated

technology that are, or biomedical tech that we just don't have. I just think it's funny, though, because if the robots did what they said it, they did, it'd be kind of cool. I'd love a robot butler. I think we can all agree. I just want a robot that brings me a Diet Coke and, be honest, but like, you could have a regular Butler. I don't want to, like, that's the thing. We get into the AGI conversation. I just, I just want to wrote, but even then it's like, but it's, even in Aristotle, have you seen Black Butler. What that? Oh, no, I have actually seen Black Butler. There you go. Yeah. I would like, you know, like a butler that would kill people for, beat people out for me. That'd be fucking sick. Yeah. And the best you didn't

expect me to have seen Black Butler. No, I figured. We, baby. Um, but this is the thing as well. It's like, even then I'm like, joking around. Oh, that'll be fun. It's like, not really. I can get, I can get off my ass and grab a die. Yeah. Oh, no, no, I got a vacuum. It'll take me fucking five minutes. It's not that bad. That's something I was seeing on the floor. It felt like a lot of use cases that people were offering for agents were actually Oh, hell. You know,

it was just like convenience via a chat thought interface. You know, I would talk to people, they'd be like, this is AI agentic cooking. And it's like, what's the, what's the adjantic part of it? Not you, but then. I know, that's what I said. You know, I was like, what's the agentic part? And they're like, oh, well, like, it had, you know, there's a camera inside and it can see what food you have there.

And then you have a list of recipes. I'm like, that's not an agent. But word, okay. You know, we have other agents that are saying we do, you know, agentic health analysis. And it's like, what's the agent part? Well, it's like, well, you can talk to it about different things. Well, it's like, oh, that's not really. I will not be happy until there's an AI in my Vitamix that tells me how to make the smoothie,

what the smoothie is going to do to my body. And what ingredients I need to get from the store. I need a robot to tell me I'm fat. I saw. Because my mind doesn't do that already. So one of my mortal enemies, well, a recent mortal enemies, it's, you know, the makers of the OmniPod. What's the Omnipod? It's a, it's a diabetes piece of a wearable tech that allows you to pump, yeah, insulin.

And they were, you know, they didn't say, hey, we're, you know, we got AI in here. They were just there to advertise themselves. Right, right. But, you know, one reason I hate them, but I also think of them in contrast with everyone else is, you know, my partner is diabetic. And I see up close how often the device fails every single fucking day. And that feels like a thing that we know. about and should be able to solve. But it's also like, as far as I can tell, they are never going up and saying with AI, we can

make it a little bit better. That's nice. You know, but with every single other, you know, not to be a fucking insolent show, but, you know, with almost every single piece of biomedical tech I saw to this year so far and last year, I mean, I'm saying, well, yeah, you know, like there are a lot of inaccuracies. There are a lot of physiological limitations. There's some physical limits. There's some chemical limits.

But with artificial intelligence and with enough. data collection, we can transcend those. And that's the thing. How much data? How much data? Next time, like, if you are listening to this and you're at CS or any of you three, and next time someone says with enough data, ask them how much? And ask them to get specific, because they don't have

a fucking answer. And the answer is they also don't know what data they need. Well, so, and the amount of data that you have is only part of it. The other part is constraining the problem space. Right. And we know that it's from the autonomous vehicle space, right? Like where Tesla says, well, this is going to work everywhere. And we have all this data from all these cars. And so it's going to wear it. And people buy it. It's a narrative

that makes intuitive sense to a lot of people. Because it kind of makes sense to a person, even though it's not true. But it really isn't. Whereas, you know, at Zooks, they're now, you know, last year I got a ride on the strip. And now they're like all over the place. And they're able to do that because they constrain the operating space. And especially with driving where it's like safety critical, like you have to be able to validate that safety to like a high degree. And if it's just operating everywhere, how do you do that?

Like you can only do it by constraining the level of complexity by constraining the problem space. And so, and so like, for all of these AI things, the question to ask is, like, right, like, if someone is saying, like, we're just going to solve all the problems, you're going to solve none, right? And, and for me, like, the test of any AI product is, like, how focused are you? And that's the thing. You can't really, you can't solve every problem with the Nvidia thing yesterday, the panel, where it goes like one, one robot for all things. I mean, yeah, like we were talking about with these generalized robots. You can't generalize anything. Unless, of course, you're listening to the following advertisement. This will solve every

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Ed Niedemeyer of the Autoncast. Hello. And Gair Davis, if it could happen here. Now, here's the thing. I was also seeing some terrifying AI children's products. Oh, I love those. Yeah, I love those. There was one.

I'm just going to pull this up, because there was one that just all I could think of was kicking. AI me land. You should put AI and child into your search bar right now. No, I'm not. I don't use X. For some great news stories. AI plus love, A live. AI me can listen, speak, and think.

Powered by advanced AI, it senses your voice and presence reacts to emotion and learns through real interaction. Over time, sometimes something begins to grow inside AIM. AI me, tiny feelings, gentle awareness and thoughts shaped by the world, shares with you until AI me starts to feel alive, brackets, lean in, and listen to AI me's inner voice. I could not get close enough to one of them, but I would love it if they're just sitting and they're going, I'll fucking kill you. Just like muttering cereal. Just reinventing Chucky. Yeah, I'll kill them all. And I watched the demo of this woman and they were doing,

they were really like the hogs watching me like, ooh, as the woman just did this demo that was so, it's like, wow, how did you remember that? That happened so long ago. And it's just, again, thought I saw that last year, pretty sure. We saw a lot of this stuff last year. And it's just, this idea of handing a child in L&M is insane as a parent. And also there was the one we talked about yesterday where it was like, it's like saying that Taiwan isn't part of China and it gets upset at you. It's just like, it's so fucking, yeah, exactly. It's like teaching your child poisons. It's just, And they keep saying these things like, oh, it will grow over time.

They won't. Especially if the company's defunctant, like, two years. When they run out of money in a month. Because they spend it all on the booth. Oops, no more server space. Letting your kid just talk to themselves of their little figurine.

I'm curious how they offer. I'm curious about shareholder value. Right. That's the kind of upsetting to me, though, because, like, in the conversation about how AI's getting into all these wearables. Like, these people really want

AI basically in every action figure. Yeah. They want, they want, like, agentic AI in every single toy so that, like, it becomes,

like a normal thing. Like, you're not just going to get, like, a bare piece of plastic ever again. Yeah, no. It's so they can subscribe you. I would have lost my mind if my Ugi-Gi-o cards talk to me.

You're kidding me. That's the thing, though. It's like, it's devices made for people that don't use stuff. Like, here's the thing. I use my aura ring. I have an Apple watch.

I've got a fucking eight-sleep bed. And I've got like things that measure my sleep. I have years of sleep data and I cannot tell you anything. Just more data, Ed. No, but it's like, just one more data. Just one more data, bro. I swear. One more data, one more data point. It's all I mean. But that's the thing. It's like, all of this time, they're like, well, when we get all this date, we'll be able to do this. When, motherfucker, I have the data now. Can you not tell me when my best sleep times are? Can you not tell me how, like, what I could do differently? Like, I'm not sure what to do with this.

information. And then like, what with the power of AI you could do something? I'm like, what is it? Uh, no, we're not there yet. Um, the, apparently aura is here showing something off and it's like, and Luna. And Luna. It's just like, and all these rings, it's what could you do with them? We're having Victoria's song on later. And she put it where it's like, yeah, if you use an LLM connected to it, you can sometimes get a useful out, just fucking, just stop. Stop, stop pretending. I asked them, I was like, what is the different? There are a few rings I went stop by and I was like, what is the difference between me collecting all this data myself with a bunch of jinky things and I'm putting it into some, you know, literally the table,

and then asking a chat bought about it versus whatever you guys are doing. And they're like, well, you know, like, we have other people's data that we are looking to get into. I don't know if that's the answer you should have told me. But it's also like human bodies are varied things. Certain things work for different people. I imagine that there should be trends within workout data. Nothing. Nothing, nothing.

I would love it if they could tell me what would be the most effective workout, what would be the best. But see, this is why you make products for children is they don't ask questions like this. They ask, why isn't it working? They're like, what, what? Your data is not providing enough actionable insights. It's Taiwan. Can you imagine you wake up a little bit about your kid says that? Your data does not work for me, father.

Fix it. Father, the analytics. Father, father, my analytics. Papa. Papa, please can I have some... I do not have enough actionable insights before I go to bed. It just feels like... I really think they're just trying to work out ways to give us subscriptions to everything.

Yeah. I can't play just Pokemon regularly. I've got to subscribe to Pokemon Plus. I mean, oh my God, I forgot. With the AIAgentic kitchen or oven, one thing they added, it's not just an oven. You can't actually get it to just cook the food. You have to have a delivery subscription. Are you...

Are you... It's like a jucero? A jucero oven? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Is that Suvi? That's one of those. During, during COVID, I had tovala.

No. I really shouldn't say that. It's called brisket. Fuck off. What's a terrible? Terrible SEO. Yeah. I'm just going to look up this company.

Oh, 150,000 articles. Actually, I do want a brisket. Yeah, that sounds fucking good. I bet that's one thing you can't cook it in. But then I also asked them, who are your delivery partners? They said, oh, we're not there yet. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah.

Are you? That was so sick. I said, okay, weird. If only we had a tech media to go on. It's just like, I do wonder why there is no legal recourse with people going to this. Like, if just like you get lied to for several days. The market is the legal recourse. You don't go to market if you don't have it.

So true. So true. I also think we need less electronics in things as well. I know Matt Bender likes the Lego brick and I can see. it's fine, but it's like, I don't need a fucking microchip in a leg of brick. Yeah. I know, if it needs to go,

you can just do that with your mouth. I don't want my extravictors to talk to me. Part of the fun as a kid was talking for them. Absolutely. We're going to spoil the next generation of voice actors. Yeah. It's really devastating. Also, we're going to turn chill.

Like, I'm like wishy-washy when it comes to how bad scream time is, but you know what? I actually think it is bad making every single toy and some individualized, autonomous AI, even though that's complete bullshit, some LLM driven bullshit and like they make the noises for you because it's like one of the joys of

being a job was like having an imagination 100% and it's like I don't know what like they want to take that way so they can put a subscription into it but it gets back the thing we're saying yesterday as well where it's like these are just products made by people that don't interact with anyone it's like what my biggest problems

my kid keeps want to talk to me I was going to say what better way to tell your kid that you hate them than giving them a chapbook I mean, like, it makes sense because, like, they're selling this to people who are, like, upper middle class, upper class, they don't have time to spend with their kids. Like, these, that's what these products are targeting is, you know, both parents are working. They probably have some kind of, like, live-in nanny, that's kids probably relatively isolated. Like, that's what these products are really for.

It's, it's for these, like, relatively wealthy parents to buy for their kids because they don't spend time with their kids. Right. And, like, that's, like, because people who are, like, working class aren't, aren't buying these things. I can't afford them. because they're insanely expensive. Yeah, exactly.

One of the most unexpected use cases for autonomous vehicles actually now is people putting their kids in Waymo's. No. Yeah. And like this is a real thing. And they've... Uber has a whole thing for this. Uber and Lyft now, right? Oh, do they?

Yeah, they have advertising for now you can just send your kid off and they're safe. Your kid will be safe. Which they had to massively mark on the safety because adult passengers are safe. Oh my goodness. No, we need like a new Q&on to shut this thing down. Yeah, I know. I know. Wayfar, like, Wayfair traffic and children in Waymo's.

The right wing is just like, now we need to attack. They're straight to, to Trump. They're sending these kids in Waymo's to Marlau go. Take it to Comet Pizza. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's so, wait, wait, okay, completely off CES for a second. So you put your child in the autonomous vehicle, at which point your child is alone in a car. Yeah.

And it drives around. Yeah. What if something goes wrong? That's a great. great question. Okay. This is for, you know, like, Ed, aren't you a journalist? You should, you should be asking these questions.

Yeah, I, I am. I'm on the podcast. I mean, I think, I think the magic of, like, CES and stuff is that, like, technology does make people turn their brains off. Like, people are so conditioned to believe that a machine is somehow better than them. We're so surrounded by a machine. Like, you know, the, and, and I think that's, like, a perfect example, right? Like, like, why pay someone who is, like, trained to take care of,

your child when like a robot will be just as fine. Yeah. I still think we need to, my big socialist thing is I think we need to create like a state funded nanny system and like for like working families and just make it the best paid thing. I agree. I agree. Just turn it into like an incredible economy because that's a good one on this. Hopefully they'll do that in New York. But like you see you see parts of the tech industry is to seize that kind of want, but they want to fill it with like a gentic child. healthcare or whatever. Finally. I mean, that's also the thing with the age tech, right? I mean, it's like, okay, so look, we have a large scale problem in our society where a lot of people

aging. They don't have support infrastructure. A lot of ways we can handle this. How are we going to handle it? Well, since we don't really do technological innovation, we're going to do the lowest bottom denominator thing, which is, you know, we let the private financiers drive the development of what the care infrastructure is going to do. And a lot of that just means bullshit so that they can scale up to then get into some other business model, right? So it's just not, it's just, it's like same with the childcare, same with the elderly care. All of this shit sucks and it's also not even seen as the end point. It's like a stepping stone so that they can get into some real business.

The thing is, I don't think that there's as much intention behind it is my thing. I don't think, I don't think there's a master plan. I just think they're like, fuck, what my biggest problem? My old fucking dad keeps calling me. My kid, Claude, won't stop asking me. me for things. My home is sometimes dirty between the eight cleaners. What do I do? What would a robot? What do people deal with in regular life? Dirt? And by the way, I mean, Japan has been, you know, because of their demographic situation, the aging population, they've been, and, you know,

technological prowess, they've been developing robots for, for seniors and, and various kinds of, you know, aging assistance. And the reality is, is that, like, despite huge investment and huge support from the government and like everything that they could possibly want, the results are not like that impressive, basically. It's because ultimately, you know, my poor grandmother when she passed like 10 or 11 years ago, 94 year old granite, past Marion. She liked being called on the telephone. People.

Yeah. It's like someone's my dad going and visiting her. Like it's like, what's going to help your kid talking to them and asking questions? Or if they're curious about something, you can use Google, but you can. talk to them about it. And it, yeah, there's another piece to, I, sorry, in a past life, I was actually a caregiver for development to disable people. Um, you know, it's one of those jobs where like, there's a lot of time where you just sort

of sit there. Yeah. You know, and there's just like nothing happening. And then there will be, you know, I mean, like, I had a client who would, you know, smear feces every once in a while. Right. And then you had, and that was when you were really, you know, earning, earning the pay. The point I'm getting at is that, um, you know, the majority of work, of the value of, of, of the value of the work that people do, especially in service type jobs like that, is in what you would call an edge case. Right. You know, and again, like following the autonomous vehicle space has been really useful for

understanding this stuff where 90% of driving is just like boring and just sit there and anyone could do it. And what makes someone a good driver is how you deal with it when shit goes sideways, right? Yeah. Which is very rare and very sudden and very challenging to negotiate. It's the same thing with a lot of consumer service jobs and then other kinds of just like service caregiving type jobs, the value is created in when things start to break down. And that's when automation doesn't work. And no matter, like, no amount of like large,

large models is going to change that. Because ultimately, like, as soon as you see something out of distribution, right, out of your training set, you know, it's useless. Yeah. And that, again, that's where caregivers like, make, you earn their money, right? Yeah. It's, it's just deeply sad as Well, because there are very straightforward problems that people have. It's just you can't really solve them with technology. Oh, well, we have the edge cases in customer service. You want to know what increases customer service calls? The fact that products fucking suck now, the products aren't very good,

that they get released in alpha or beta stages, the fact that they require a subscription for certain features, or the support documents are dog shit, or the guide to put them together is dog shit. It's like the actual problems are the companies are fucking things up regularly. Yep. And they're like, what if we had more customs? Well, no, no, no, no, no.

Actually, that would involve paying someone. What if we just had an AI, I guess? And maybe it could say a slur occasionally, but sometimes it could even answer a question. SoftBank had a robot called Pepper, called Pepper. Are you familiar with Pepper? No, I just love SoftBank. Yeah. And you're supposed to call it.

Yeah, of course, anything they touch is. Oh, that's the golden egg. Yeah. Come on the show, man. But Pepper was this, it was a customer service robot. And it was like, you know, sort of vaguely here. humanoid, but it sort of rolled around on wheels. And they used it in like, uh, shopping centers and anyway, I don't remember how much money soft bank sunk into this. I think it was a French company or

something. It didn't, it did like, it did not work. I loved it because everyone expects the headlines of like the robots are taking their jobs. And like every, everywhere this pepper robot went, it would lose its job. It was like the headline was always like robot fired replaced by humans because and again, it's because customer service is fundamentally about helping people, right? Like, if everything is in its right place on the shelf, you know, maybe and certainly back, badly laid out in large stores. Maybe someone needs a little bit of assistance finding where the section is, where their thing is.

But for the most part, like, when people have a problem that they require customer service help with, like, it's because something has gone wrong. The shelf is not stopped. Yeah. Like, something is bad. And again, like, if it's an abnormal set of circumstances, the robot is almost never helpful. Yeah, by definition. Yeah.

And, like, that's where the value should be created. And the robots can't do it. I saw this good post on X the Everything app lately. Which was, this could go so many directions. Yeah, good. Engineers are building like an AI bar and they program every single possibility for someone ordering drinks at it at the bar. Ordering other things to the bar. Ordering a horse at the bar.

They have everything, everything figured out for people to go to this bar. And then a customer walks in and they ask where the bathroom is and the whole model breaks. Fuck, yeah. That's the thing, though. I love the idea of also a robot bartender. No, bars are about ambience and available Diet Coke's for me. And it's like, I like how it feels.

And I like there being a person there. You have like a no conversation or some conversation. Each bar is a different bartender. That's part of the joy of going to a bar. I don't need a fucking robot arm to go, here you go. Well, and then the other failure mode is, right, is like, do you see the Wall Street Journal thing

where they have the vending machine with the LLM? Oh, that random. I haven't seen this. I love Joanna Stern. I think she did a good job. But the whole thing is like, why are we not just like straight up saying this is broken dog shit? Why do we have to couch everything with, but it might work in the, no. Yeah.

No. The idea is, right, you put a, you put a sort of agentic, yeah, Claude sort of on the, you know, sort of to cover. All right. But, but right then, like, oh, this will just magically cover all the edge cases. Well, it sort of did, but like people were able to get it to like buy a PS5. Or to like make everything free. It basically just like burned all this money because people were able to just say like, just get me this thing. I would have literally just stood by it all day.

I would have I would have had that thing. This is a physical vending machine. Yes, yes. With the software on. I mean, I remember one of the parts they already perfected vending machines. Yeah. It's a problem.

What if they did it? Just go to Tokyo. It's perfect. But just go to like a guest station sometime. Yeah, what was the rationale actually for putting EA on this? What if we invented the machine that could vend thing? Like, it's just like, what if you could service things using, like, coins and cash? You know, I would have kind of expected them to do, like, surveillance pricing.

Like, what if we were able to make something? Yeah, it would measure your school a little bit and then figure out how much you would be willing to pay. But you don't need an LLM for that. Like, it's the search for like, surely there must be some use for this. And it's like, sure. And, you know. I mean, it's part of this, like, we're trying to, like, ground, quote, unquote, AI into these, like, physical things now, now that it's not just hype. Right.

And you can see stuff like this for like they're trying, but it's like, yeah, come on. And it's a convenient bandy to slap on something, right? You can sort of develop a robot to do certain things. And it's like, well, as soon as we get out of, you know, out of our training set, we'll just have an LLM just sort of swoop in and sort of magically solve it. And the reality is that either it can't often or, or it solves it in ways that create like other totally unexpected problems. I just like the idea of them being like, what if we did? Oh, yeah, it doesn't work. Just like, obviously broken, doesn't work.

And this is the second time Anthropics done this. They did a store. And the way they wrote, it was like, I'm doing air quotes because it was like, we had it run a store. Could it work? No. It made up meetings. It made up this. It did.

And it was just like, yeah, guess this doesn't work. But if it did, we'd have a vending machine. There are also people who like, will use, they take all the models. They pay for the premium uses of them and they let them lose on the stock market. And they're like, oh, this is great. Let's see who does best. Nightcap. We already had that with night.

capital in 2012, I think it was. I mean, algorithmic trading has been a thing for a while. I have not heard about the LLM trading. Oh, I want. I want. That's terrifying. I love that idea. It does not work. No, it's, it's because most stock advice online is

bullshit. In fact, almost all stock advice is bullshit because if you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't share that. You would not be talking about it. You would just trade. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's really good that they're working on ways to to do vending machines. Jesus fucking.

Do you guys feel over the past two or even three years that you're also seeing a lot of times there's a product that actually has maybe some interesting improvement in how it functions and it's, and maybe in how a consumer can use it. But they just feel I cannot actually get people interested in this unless I say there's AI and graft it onto this. I've been trying to understand because I feel like I keep seeing products where it's like, I don't actually understand what the AI here is. I talk to you. You don't really seem to have a. televisions. TVs. That's my answer.

Yeah, the smart TV thing. I've been walking around. It's like, oh, does it help with the picture? No, no, no. If you ask it what the capital of Washington State is, it can sometimes answer it. It's like, great. Anything else?

Like, could it control the TV's phone? Oh, God, no. You can't turn the volume up. And even if it could, it would be like, volume up. Volume messed up. It's... Honestly, I think that the thing for me,

actually, to circle back to where we started, maybe the smart glasses. Yeah. Smart glasses were kind of kind of the same like three, four years ago. And they're now trying to keep selling them by framing them as, you know, AI powered smart glasses when the practical functionality is almost identical. And you have these, you had that one like New York startup that was like that cheating smart glasses thing. Oh, cluel.

Cluelly. Yeah, right? So like they're trying to find these ways to like make smart glasses to like find, find, find ways to convince people to actually buy these things. It's just like what freak would use them? And that's the problem. The only thing that's actually gotten people to buy the smart glasses is the covert recording.

That's the only thing that's actually gotten people to buy and wear these things is that you can secretly record people. That more than the AI thing is actually been the thing that sold these glasses. I wonder if there's going to be more of it. I mean, like, I'm old enough to remember the glass backlash. How is that not? I mean, I've been seeing in New York, people break up. Yeah, okay.

There was this amazing video of someone on the subway. And he's got just like exactly the kind of white guy. He's being like, watch, no, you're going to fucking do so? You're going to do something. And the woman is just staring, dead-eyed at the camera. Just kind of like, come over here, see what happens. Still hasn't gotten in trouble. They should get the key to the city.

The Mandarani Caliphate should elevate them. Oh, yeah, we're looking into it. No, it's, I just also like, Like, who is walking around, I was saying this just like, who's walking around being like, what the fuck is going on? What the fuck? What is that? It's curtain. Who is sitting around being like what kind of tree?

That would be a great, that would be a great Tim Robinson character. Yeah, you know? What is the, that is just the tip. What the fuck is going on? A friend of the show, Casey Newton once I think promoted something about how it was like this AI thing you could talk about and ask questions as you were on a drive about, like maybe you're driving over a bridge. bridge and you're asking like, okay, like, how old is the bridge? Wow. Why does it mean?

And so I was like, well, you also can just like ask yourself those questions or look it up or like, you use your phone. Yeah, it's taking away the American, the American right to be driving while scrolling on your phone. Yeah. It's just not. Yeah. Which is also funny because it's like, if they sold it as like a safety thing, I feel like

it would be have better standing than actually, haven't you ever just looked at something and wondered what's going on there? How are they not marketing it? like a safety thing for like for like how like like you know like hands free enabled like like like search while driving yeah you want a shit post while you're driving you also it's happening yeah they have to yeah I also just don't walk around thinking things like that like I don't often walk around and be like what maybe if I'm like in a botanical garden right yeah what kind of flower is that but I mean I I do I just I just I just write down

Wikipedia all day I just write down I mean when I'm when I'm walking around yeah I do I just would either remember to look it up later or like or take down notes so like so I can enjoy the thing in person when I'm there and then if I want to learn about it. Yeah, I don't want a disembodied voice being like, if I want to learn about it, I can get like a coffee somewhere and like look it up. And that's like a separate, a separate experience. It's just what and it's a good one too. It's also a good. I think like the thing I'm always surprised by is they're always trying to paint any non-AI mediated experience as a bad, inefficient inferior experience. And that actually what you really want, what you don't really know you want is you want to have

an interlocutor that is not real. This reminds me of the very first product that I, that was mentioned during the, the CTA keynote. Oh. And this is something that I have not found on the show floor yet. And I, I have to, I have to look it up. I have to, I have to find it and talk to these people. Oh, yeah.

It is. You're, you're a love to say. Yeah. It is an AI holographic windshield display for your car. Wait, wait, wait. Like, here. Let's talk about it. No, I'm actually not going to be as cynical as you expect here.

Because this is a fairly standard thing. Like BMW has their like heads up display, which is kind of useful. It's a digital interface on the windshield. They've kind of already got those? On the windshield. But the whole thing? All across the whole thing. Oh, my God.

Yeah. And so you have like weather. You have maps. You have all these random things. If you could pair it with some kind of smart glasses thing, you can search and you can see results there. Oh my God. And so I need to actually find the company. I need to find the company's location and like I ask them about it.

And like talks about like the, you know, the obvious like safety problems of like if something goes wrong and the screen gets blocked. But but yeah, it's, it's so funny. They're this led by the car crash industry. Yeah. Like you said, like there is, there is versions of this thing, which which kind of work. I think keeping it away from the windshield, probably a good idea. Right. Keep the display on like the dashboard.

But having it directly on like the borders and emerging onto the center of the entire And above your eye level so you take your eyes off the road. And you have to look to the corner. And specifically on the, on the, there was like one picture of it during the keynote. And they have information like all across the board. So yeah, your eyes are going to be darning to the other side to like the corner of the road to read some kind of like pop up thing on the screen. I love being on my phone.

I want to be, I love the computer so much. I have so many screens. But I don't know. When I'm driving, I quite. enjoy not having that. I enjoy, I can listen to a podcast, driving back from a moment with a girlfriend, listened to last podcast on the left the other day. That was lovely. Learned all about Casey Anthony. Horrible. Truly awful stuff. Didn't get there in England, but it's like that and like the time when I was just facing forward and listening and spending

some quality time with someone I love, like when I'm driving on my own, I get a chance to listen to podcast or listen to music. I don't want to bleep, I don't, I, what's the way like I can look at the window? I imagine. I sound like fucking Dennis Lary. Like driving up, stay. I just want to I'm a hundred percent. It's a beautiful road up state. And you get an intrusive thought, what a year did Genghis Khan in that happened? And you ask it and you, and the screen lights up like someone threw a flashbang inside because every surface gets illuminated with information.

Genghis Khan was born in 1982. In 1258. For 10 years, though, like the auto industry has been coming to CES and trying to do what I think like all of these AI companies are trying to do, which is ultimately, either replace like Google or really like your phone as like the portal to the digital realm. Yes. And there was and like to this day there's still this like battle inside these OEMs of like there's factions who believe like that cars should be cars. And I think they're actually sort of you're seeing sort of like physical buttons come back. Which I love. That pendulum is swinging back.

And I think that's because the reality is is that your phone is still the best way to do all this stuff. And but they're working on making that worse. I will say it was exciting when I was at the Renaissance hotel. I saw Faraday Future. Oh, they're still here. Yeah, they've got like these weird like dad wagons now. Tell me about what's Faraday Future. Oh, that's a long, long and sorted story. And tell me if I'm wrong. Faraday Future is a company that sometimes makes cars, but sometimes goes bankrupt. So they've managed amazing. They're one of these companies that like no one is quite sure how they haven't gone bankrupt yet. Oh, I thought they did. I'm thinking of Fisker. Yeah, Fisker. Sorry. We've gone through two Fiskers.

Fuck yeah. Yeah, no, there's... I love it. Two, different ones or two, one, they've gone bankrupt and then they're like, we're back. It was this guy started a second company. Sick. Fisca was the one with all the weird Chinese money. Yeah, so the first one was one that was sort of like, it was like a kind of like sexier

Model S sort of, but it was like a hybrid. So it wasn't quite like that electric. So that was sort of, you know, 2013, 14, 15, something. That went bankrupt. And then he came back and made this car the Fisker Ocean. But wait, wait, right. Faraday Future, though. The Ferry Future, okay.

So it's like, it's like this Chinese, I think money laundering operation. Yeah. I'm really, you know, I'm not entirely sure. I'm not comfortable calling them an automaker. Well, they have costs. They would cost and they have like three screens. No, I remember. They have a car.

I think was it 2017 that they, there was a, there was a, they, they were one of the, in the peak sort of like post or so like Tesla fueled like car, car hype era. They had like a legendarily. It was them in Leico. I get the two of them mixed up. But they, both of them had like, legendary like, like bad,

but like expensive and massive, like, spectacles here that, like, did not go well. My kind of car. And then, like,

the next year, they were like, they didn't even have a booth, but they would just sort of, like, brought their car and just sort of, like, parked it on the curb. And,

hope that people would see it. And, like, I think they have, they're supposed to have a factory here. I think there's, like, three different places where they're supposed to have factories or supposed to one in Southern California

and one here. Yeah. And then I feel like they pivoted to AI at some point there, too. But I genuinely like, there's only so much you can pay attention to. So it's the Hyundai Mobius, I guess. The Hyundai Mobius. That it is. The holographic windshield display, which is a transparent display system that transforms

vehicles windshield into a digital interface. I don't. I want a window. The technology enables the display of navigation, driving data, and digital content while maintaining cockpit openness and visibility. I someone's watching porn on that immediate just my overdrive being projected onto the windshield

nice I mean I already like What are we doing guys? Look at the road Have you seen the size of screens in modern cars too Like you need it's not enough to have the I have an iPad Like why you can see like why are they projecting a fucking movie On the right side of the windshield It gets back to Avatar 3

It gets back to the thing though Where like these people don't have human experiences because these people all get car service. 100%. You think any of these people are getting in their car to drive other than like their fucking...

You think they're trying to be like, how do we recreate what you want from first principles? No, it's like, what are those fucking pigs who drive around all day? I don't look at my driver. But like when he drives,

he seems to be looking at that transparent thing. He's just looking off into nothing. He should be maximizing his efficiency. What if he was maximum... What if he was content maxing? Why don't we have LinkedIn on the windshield? Oh. But like, you know, there's, like, parts of this, like, having, having, like, the navigation map, like, right above the steering wheel.

Maybe not a bad idea. Yeah. Maybe not a terrible idea. Kind of already happening. Having a movie, having digital content displayed on the right side of the windshield. Like, why? Why? So I'll tell you, I think that...

For a congression. I'm guessing, knowing the auto industry, sort of the thinking behind this is probably that this is, like, a software addressable thing, right? So in the same way that Tesla took all of these controls that used to be with knobs and buttons and dials and menus and this and that. and put it all onto basically like an iPad. This is sort of the next generation of that where then you're no longer constrained to one screen. You can create like almost infinite variety. It's like modular.

If it's sort of a projection based system. It's a projection system. That's how I, so and again, it's, you know, I think, you know, in the auto industry, you know, you want to make an investment in, in hardware that you can then maximize over a lot of time. And so, you know, software addressability is like the, or software defined vehicle is like the buzzword, right? Yeah.

And the idea is that you can do what Tesla has done, which nobody in the industry thought was possible, which would make the same car for 10 fucking years. And just, you know, throw the plebs some, like, fresh software updates every six months or so. High brightness, full color images directly onto the glass. I love this. And we have to cut this up. Well, we're cutting this 30 minutes there.

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Hello. And we're joined by Henry Casey of CNN underscore Henry. Thank you so much. joining us again. And thank you for having me this here. So I actually, I'm going to start up by saying I saw something I kind of liked. Maybe it's kind of like there's a specific use case for this, like show floors, whatever. I saw a company that's doing wireless TVs. Like it's a wireless bracket. You put the TV on it and it charges it. You can charge it and they sell their own TVs. I thought it was cool. I thought it was fun that somebody did something new. And maybe this is just how beaten down I am from years of CES. I'm like, what if a TV was wireless? I'm like, what if a TV was wireless?

guess. And it's like, yeah, I saw that. I talked to them for longer than I think they expect it. And then just walked off and I think they expected that was going to get a business card. I didn't. So it has like a battery pack and you have it on a charging and you pull it somewhere else? Or how wireless is it? You have to, you can put any TV on the thingy. You click it in and it powers the TV. And they sell their own ones as well. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun. I now saying it out loud, I see the kind of dead eyes of everyone looking at me. I'm like, maybe I slightly, uh, had more fun with this than anyone else ever will. It sounds like it would kill with those people who are like obsessive about cable management. No, they did. They also may have,

they didn't laugh when I said this, even though I thought it was very, I was like, they were like, oh yeah, you can do a 110 inch with four TV screens. And they were like, yeah, so for like trade shows. I'm like, yeah, that's useful. Or you could be like one of those insane gambling guys with four TVs. And the woman just stared at me. Just fucking stare. I'd love to watch four sports games. I love, like, that's part of the fun of Vegas. Or the ultimate Mario Kart tournament. Marriott Tournament, Land Party. Yeah.

I mean, kind of... Smash Brothers. Smash Brothers. I did also see, actually, and this is a genuinely good thing. It was a company could Aura. At a mini-L-D 4K TV. It was 85-inch. It was $1,599.

Sorry, $1,500. And it came with a soundbar built into it. That's nice. Mini-L-E-D, big TV. Again, we're describing the things that like it. It's just the thing that exists, but slightly better. I saw a big-ass outdoor TV. 100, I mean, I don't know, it felt like 100 inches, but I have no idea how large it was.

But at the same time, I do think that when I saw the marketing and outdoor TV, I was like, I think it should be illegal for an individual to buy it. But maybe we can let the businesses, you know, let them buy these outdoor TVs. I mean, if you got, you have a TV in the garden. Have the garden. Have the garden in the hot tub. Have the garden in the hot tub. Nice. You want to have a smoke outside?

You don't think there would have been an outdoor television, but I thought Tony soprano's pool. Like, come on. They've also had them for a long time. I'm just saying, I'm coming in from New York. We're looking into it and we're going to ban them in the Maldani Caliphate. Okay, we're looking into outdoor television. Mammani's the struggle sessions for outdoor TV owners. Hey, listen, we're starting there for landlords. Yeah, that's the good shit. Henry, what have you seen at the show? Now that my two things I like to bomb. Well, to bouts it off the wireless TV stuff. It's not exactly wireless.

You can see the one wire connection going to it, but LG's new wallpaper TV is their new kind of take on what if an art TV with also an OLED TV? Art TV is for the uninitiated Samsung's frame. You can put art. This is like an OLED. So you don't really want to have a static image because you're going to ruin your television set with Vernon.

Instead, you can have a slideshow mode of your art, but it's barely, it's like it's nine millimeters thick. And there's one power port coming out of the back. corner you can hide it and Samsung's been doing similar with the frame pro but the thing i'm most excited about is an $80,000.000 million power bank from nimble. It breaks in half and one half has a USB connectors that unfolds. The other half has a USBC cable. So my best friend when we go out, he never brings a portable charger. I do. Now share the wealth, don't have to sit next to each other

and it's like actually solving a problem which is like the CES question is this solving a shareholder dilemma and capitalism growth or is it doing something like my parents will really like because one of them will remember to bring it and the other one will never remember.

Yeah, that's the thing like all of like I saw an LG thing where it was again another wireless team there's a few of these things but it was basically you had the TV and one plug and then you could plug all the HDMI shit into it it was low latency, no latency. That's cool. But again it's like everything we're describing doesn't feel like the future.

Like, I'm just, I'm saying these things out loud. I'm like, yay, what if something was like, oh. But that, right, that's like the, the bifurcation of the show is that it's either, right, these like small iterations that are actually useful or it's these like wild pie in the sky that will never actually. That just don't work. Yeah. Yeah.

And you kind of have to have both for a show. I mean, do, you know what? I actually, you don't have to have the vaporware stuff. It would be nice if, because I don't know, maybe we're just out of ideas, but I, I don't, I I know that it may seem like I'm a huge cynic. I would love to be wowed. I would love to be amazed and I would love to see stuff that made me go, wow, new thing that I like. I'll be the positive guy again. Please, please. Okay, vaporware that becomes actual product and it wasn't vaporware to begin with. We see the words concept product a lot at T. Yes. I think I might have mentioned last year that Lenovo's had a laptop that would rotate its screen to track your face. That's actually going to be for sale. They announced, they showed off the finished version of it this year.

How much? I, the price escapes me. I'm not even sure. That's the thing. That's the thing they never. I didn't write the article. My coworker, my co-intern,

but CNN underscored. He's got a video on it. We covered it. But no, it's like you knock on the lid and it opens up on its own. That's fun. And if you're in the kitchen

and you're wanting to watch a, read a recipe on your laptop screen and you're moving your head around. I could see that being useful. Also content creators, Twitch people, like all the sorts of people. There is like,

it's a weird. You're going to figure out who needs. this, but it's something that was seen like vaporware one year and actually is on sale and it's going to come to sale the next. So it's sort of like saying, hey, don't think CES is just for the next version of the human, the friend pendant, like stuff like that. Have you, have you seen any friend pendants though? I'm looking for anything like that. I want, I want a sassy. Oh, I think I saw, I saw I did not get to go to the pendant,

but there's a, there's a pendant on the Venetian Expo floor that I have to have to chat with them about. I was a little too taken with all the biomedes. Oh, okay. Now, I, I really want to, I want more AI that's hostile towards you. Yeah. I want, look, when Victoria was on a few months ago, where it was just like, no, that's not true. Just gaslight me. Yeah. It's like, fuck me out. Because, you know what, stop pretending this is going to be my friend, because I know it won't be. Yeah. I mean, I do love one day, like, hey, you know, like, we're going to have robots in these workplaces and they're just going to be your buddy. Yeah. They're not going to be your worker. You're not going to be your colleague.

They're not going to be your slave. They're going to be your buddy. So I was going through my photos as well, trying to find something useful. But I did find a booth where I could not work out what they did. It was just called Wow Now. And the tagline was, make your inside outside. Make your inside outside. It's a threat. It's like a threat.

I'll take a threat. Thanks, but that is actually the plot of shrouds. It's one of the best movies of the years. Yes, yes, exactly. It's a defense against fairies when you turn your clothes inside out. That's the only way they don't get you. We will talk about that out. I saw a company called POM where the logo kind of looked like it said, porn.

That was nice. Yeah, it's, I really, I really did look. I've been looking for stuff. I saw a company called Zeus that was claiming they had the only GPU designed for high performance workloads. It's like, they got love sense again, you know. What's love sense? Sex toys. That's nice.

But a little, you know, maybe. Software to find. Yeah, yeah, right. Also, um, so it's got some software. Power hat. I found a power hat. Power hat. You put the hound.

It's like a, And it gives you power. One of those floppy hats, it connects to like a solar charger, I guess. What? Yeah. And dual USB C ports. You know what? It's a solar charging hat.

I'm doing a bit. No, that's, that is the only permissible one is like if you're like long distance hiking or a fisher. But the people buying this might, maybe they'll be outdoors people. Like Robert Evans, I know there's a bunch of like, so. I think he's done solar stuff where he's just like when he goes into the woods for a few months, like to hunt the Sasquatch. I'll ask him about that later.

But it's like, that makes sense. But I just, I see this. I'm like, I want to believe, man, but probably. I'll believe them when they do a solar bonnet. When they do a solar bonnet for my people, then I know they're serious about this. The Solar Somerara. Yeah, yeah. You know, the solar Farrell Canadian Mountie hat.

He's always going to be the brand ambassador every other year. Like, come on. That big ass hat could probably fit PlayStation 5 out there. We won't get Grand Theft Auto 6 anytime soon. But yeah. Nor will we get another pop bang and like happy. No, well, not like we're getting a fucking other N.RD album. You don't think we're getting it this year?

Fly or Die is a perfect album and he never made anything better than it. Farrell Williams, come on my show and talk specifically about 2005's Fly or Die. Classic album, great album. You should all listen to it. Email me if you've listened. Or talk about his beef with the Neptunes. No, not interested. Just the album. And then you can explain to me why he hasn't made anything good like that since. You don't think the Lego movie soundtrack was going to be good? I think that Despicable Me's had a pretty good soundtrack. I will give him the fact that Dispicable Me Too and Despicable Me Three,

nano banana, fucking, I had not thought about nanobanana all day. That's not my fault. So one of the things that makes this like absurd stuff so, so interesting and so extra absurd to me is that there is like legitimate technological innovation going on right now. Like one of the big announcements, if not kind of arguably the biggest, announcement in the mobility space as this company called Donut Lab. And they're basically beat all the major automakers and battery companies to the punch on a, or at least they say they have to a solid state battery. And this is something. Can you explain what that means? Yeah, it just means,

so it just means that it's solid, so it's completely the, rather than using a liquid or gel in the, in the anode, it's just the whole battery is solid state. Yeah. So just to be stupid because I really don't know. Yeah. Regular batteries are full of like liquids. Yes. I know that it's an electrolyte. Yeah, it's a fluid electrolyte. And the solid state is just a brick of something. Yeah. That's cool. It is. And it has like really specific, uh, advantages. So like they claim 400, uh, water hours per kilogram. It's like, you know, not much denser than like modern, you know, uh, like the current state of the art. But they, they say you can charge it in five minutes. Oh, I think what they said like, oh, that's why the liquid ones charge slower. Yeah. So and, and what happens to. And, and what happens to. And, is with the liquid ones, like, they form dendrites and things. And so it's, it's not, what does that mean? Sorry. No, I get, I get above my own pay grade really fast with this. A battery technology is like really complex.

But basically, you can think of it as like sort of almost like crystalline structures. Right. Okay. So things form inside at the slow them down. Yeah. And, and it create friction and heat and then fire. Mm. But they made the solid state one.

The solid state does not have that issue. So it's like unaffected by temperature. Cool. And, and you can charge it really, really fast. That's actually like really good. So that unlocks, does that unlock new new use cases then? If it's like you don't have to worry about the internal temperature, maybe you can run it a little bit hotter than.

Well, I mean, it would, yeah, it would be. It's so, I mean, like, ideally this is, this is the future, right? And so, like, all the major automakers are doing this. And they all make kind of somewhat similar claim. So, like, right, they say, like, you fully charge in 10 minutes, 60 kilometers of combined range per minute of charging. And up to 600 kilometers on a single charge. Sorry for the metrics.

No, no, this is great. No, please. So I think like it's, this is something that, right, Toyota's been working on talking about for a long time. Hyundai's doing it, like the Chinese battery supplies as well. I think this is like a little British consulting firm and their first use case is a motorcycle. So it's a little questionable. Did they show it yet? So apparently the motorcycles are going to be shipping this year.

So like, or like first quarter of this year. So they should have a guy just doing the 600 kilometers around the US all the whole time. And with all this stuff, anything automotive. you got to validate it over so many miles. And the idea that they're going to be able to build this at quality and then the robustness, yeah. But this is the city of traffic and the frustration of getting around time. You talk to any journalist doing CES this year.

You will see somebody who has been frustrated about how long it takes an Uber to blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is the kind of thing where hands on or hands off demos are the thing that would really sell it. And you'd have like, even like an e-bike would be. Yeah. Yeah, I just read about it. I wasn't at their event or anything. I've been in touch with them. So they may be giving demos or something. But I think what I've read about it, like, there's a little bit of like, how are these guys, like, kind of the first

getting this to market? That's my first thought. Like, it's a little British consultancy. Never, ever trust the British. And also just, is Britain a hub for battery technology? It has been more so. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. So, like, I don't want this to be fake. I want this to be real. No, no. There are incredible British engineering outfits, especially in the odd motor space. So, like, a lot of Formula One engineering work takes place in the, K in the middle. Oh, of course. Yeah. And so, and that's all heavily electrified now and becoming more so, um, uh, with the new 22nd sexual rules. So you were in the car section as well, right? Do you see anything? Just very briefly, unfortunately. Yeah, I had to go to a, I've listened to the,

the, um, the NHTS administrator, uh, talk, which is interesting. How was that? I mean, honestly like, uh, for this administration, it was like sort of surprising. And that's the national highway traffic safety administration. Yeah, they am. Yeah. So I remembered all those words. Yeah, but anything good or just? Well, from that conversation. Yeah, well, like a much higher level of sophistication than I expected from someone who works for Sean Duffy. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was like a pleasant surprise.

And, like, clearly, like, you know, I think the administration wants to be seen as doing something to help autonomous vehicles. Right. The problem is that, like, regulation is not actually preventing autonomous vehicle deployment. Like, that's not. It's kind of like AI. It's like, they're like, oh, we need less regulations around. it's like, that's not, we don't have those. Yeah.

Oh, we got one going through. No, fuck off. The problem is you don't have enough power and no one wants to pay for it, dickhead. With autonomous cars, it seems like the problem is the edge cases, like you were mentioning. Yeah. Yeah. So he was talking, and this is interesting. So kind of the big challenge with AVs is that, right, like, you can't just create a, right?

We have a driver's test, right? You go out and you do some basic things and you prove that you have the sort of like general capability and they sign off. Yeah. You didn't almost kill anyone and you can be a driver now. That doesn't work with this. technology because all you do is train for the test. Yeah. Right?

And then you get vehicles to train for the test and then they pass the test and they're like totally useless in the real world. So this is actually like a non-creating regulation for AV is actually a much less trivial of a problem than people think. Right. People are very quick to say, oh, we'll just regulate it. Well, when you get into the weeds of how to do it, it's actually quite complex. And again, I was shocked that the guy at NHTSA is actually has like a

an articulate level. Yeah. And like a kind of a sophisticated sense of like, okay, you, need to have a test, but you can't have it be some static thing. And, and, like, the fact is, like, you know, we have this sort of self-certification system anyway, and that, like, if you're faking compliance with the, with the safety standard, that that's sort of illegal already and stuff. So it was, like, sort of encouraging. The problem is that, is that this is also being used as, like, a power grab at the federal level, because states, right, so, like,

historically, cars are regulated by the federal government, drivers are regulated by the state. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, that makes sense. state DMV. Well, so that's a huge problem, right? Like, like, the AV companies absolutely do not want the little patchwork of, of, uh, of, uh, of regulation. And so they're trying to get a test at the federal level so that they can kind of preempt the state's right to, to regulate these systems. Yeah, because I guess it's regulating a technology, but kind of regulating a driver as well. These two separate things have become one. And, and in a real sense is much more of regulating a driver than a car. How can you regulate something when you have the, because from my understanding

with these autonomous cars, you actually have an overlord watching as well. You have a customer service rep. How does that play into it? So, yeah, this is one of the most misunderstood. And, you know, different companies do things differently. Different companies have different levels of transparency around this. So, you know, no one description is going to be true, true of everything. But like, for example, with Waymo, what they say, and I think they have like pretty good credibility on it is that, right, like for a vehicle to be autonomous, and this is sort of the established, like, you know, engineering view of it. For a vehicle to be autonomous, when it encounters something that it cannot deal with, it has to perform what's called fallback autonomously. It has to return to what's called

a minimal risk condition. And this is like not a defined thing. It just means the safest place to sort of pull over. Right. And if you're not doing that autonomously, it's not autonomous. And so like Teslas are not autonomous because when they fail, the human has to step in and intervene. A lot of people believe that because there is this link that every AV has to either a remote operator or the ability to send new guidance to the vehicle, that that is somehow remotely intervening to prevent a crash. So it's physically not possible. It's not possible. Because I didn't imagine they had a joystick. Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure that folks have tried it and it just doesn't work. So what happens is that system encounter something you can't deal with. it performs a fallback autonomously. The new guidance is just to sort of get it through. Yeah, to get it out of danger. And then it takes back over again. Okay. So changing gears.

Henry, what if, if you see anything interesting laptop-wise, you mentioned a concrete keyboard, which sounds good for hitting people? Yeah, Kikron actually is doing really fun stuff with the materials that their keyboards, wireless keyboards are made out of. There was one that was porcelain,

like a, and one of those concrete. And I was thinking, even the most angry Redditors, won't be able to move this by typing. Like, you might use it for self-defense if you're that kind of person. But, like, I was, but you were,

what I was just talking out that made me really think was building something for the test. And while, okay, laptops at CES, there is a big story sort of happening with Dell and pricing, but did people see the LG laundry folding robot

thing? No, it, I saw the robot. I didn't see it fold anything. I didn't see it folding anything. I thought moving one thing to another. and I was like, is this being designed to do the test of the convention center and then do everything else later? So that's why I'm just like, it's also doing it at the slowest. It's the sloth in the Zootopia movie trailer. I'm like, so that's the thing.

So in laptops, one of the most interesting things is a year ago, Dell said the XPS brand was dead. It was replacing Dell XPS 14 with Dell Premium 14. And tech journalists everywhere were like, what are you doing? I love my XPS. People love it. And then this year, they literally an exact came out and said, I owe you an apology. You guys were right. And then they released the Dell XPS is back.

And here's the weird thing, though. They got rid of all the things we hated about it. The function keys are actually physical keys again. Interesting. Capacitive touch thing. Oh, God. But it was laid up. It wasn't an OLED, like the touch bar on the max.

But the problem is that I believe, let me just. check right now. I believe it's, um, they had a last second price change on it. And I believe it's going to be 2050 for the starting price at first for the 14 inch XPS. And it's going to, in February, there will be lower price, much lower price under $2,000 versions. And they didn't say why this is. We can all assume one of two things. What is it? Tariffs or memory shortage. Yeah. The RAM thing is fucking everything up. I don't know if you've talked to anyone else at the show. but I've been hearing from quite a few people that this is just fucking up everything now because of AI. That's just smart.

The Samsung mentioned they're going to raise the price of phones because of fucking AI and RAM. Kill me. People are saying that the iPhone 18 not coming until next year, supposedly, is due to that because Apple wants to wait for the lowest costing phone. They want to wait a year to wait out this freaking memory shortage problem because that's the rumor at least. They're moving to a spring year cadence for the main phone. But like, it's laptops from here on out, we're a little bit concerned about what, if there's going to be a good amount of RAM or it's going to be overpriced.

Like, it's, yeah. I'm glad I have my M1 14 inch MacBook Pro and that's going to last me forever, hopefully, but. It kind of feels like it's going to price people out of electronics soon because tariffs already raised things and now RAM is going to raise things, also that we can generate sexier wifos, I guess. Like, it's very strange. and I don't think, I've never seen anything like it in the history of tech. Like, we've seen shortages around COVID and then post-COVID.

But I don't remember just like, I remember the price of everything going up, the thing's becoming harder to get in general, but not like one thing within the computing world. Yeah, and to be fucking up a business that makes money in order to build a business that doesn't. Well, the RAM business is making tons of money. Well, sure, yeah. But every other business. That's what I'm saying, like devices broadly are going to take a hit because of costs. And PC sales are already down, I think.

I do not keep track of that, thankfully. Yeah, it's just, it's, I just, ha, ha, I keep coming to this show expecting the future, but it just kind of feels dystopian, but not in like the cyberpunk way, but just in a everything's more expensive and slowing down way. Yeah. Well, okay, this is the funniest part. Of all things I never expected to get faster, Amazon's revealed that the fire TV interface is getting an update and it's getting faster.

They're making new fire TV's Amazon store. Well, they're just updating the OS. basically and they've updated a couple things recently but they showed i was watching it today and it was loading smoothly and it looked a little cleaner yeah if you've never used these TVs they are fuck it it's like you what you hit you hit the button it takes like three seconds for the box to move across five years that broke only because i was uh i had a bunch of people in my room and one of them rammed up into it because it was getting routed then it smashed into the floor indestructible otherwise yeah you what you mean is you were wearing your freezer costume

for Halloween and the tail bumped it. And I may have been a little lid and then someone hit it, yeah. And someone was my tail. And it gets worse if you just bought the Prime Day cheapest fire TV stick. And who knows how low powered that is

trying to run whatever. But they said every, they showed it off on a demo on a regular TV that was running their fire OS. And I was just like watching going, I've been recommending Roku to my parents and for a lot of people for a while. It's simple. easy for people just want a grid of tiles.

Like I, nobody can afford, not everybody can afford an Apple TV. I wish they could. And I think a lot of people think Google TV is content overload. It is. And it's like you're just getting Black Mirror episode two, I think.

Is that, is there a black mirror of time with that? No, just all the ads have been all at once. No, I have, remember it's the million credits episode and not, I've don't seen any of it. Sorry, Charlie. Charlie does remove it. I'm sorry, Charlie.

But yeah, no, Amazon actually is answering the, I've been writing for years. Like, why is this so, so slow and stuttery? And so I can't wait to update the Nike shoebox of streaming sticks I have at home because I've been reviewing this stuff for how many years now. I've collected everything just to make sure I can cross-reference and back reference. Do you see anything you really like, though? Anything exciting? Anything good?

Okay. I don't have the space for it in my home, but if you're a projector nerd for watching stuff, Samsung's Freestyle Plus that keeps auto-adjusting to whatever space you put it on, It projected against curtains And it was clear It was clear first of all But it took a second You saw it like ripple

And then it auto corrected around To a rectangle on top of the curtain That's actually fucking cool That is cool But it gets better Because they had two different size projector screens that it was on And if you moved it from one to the other

It recognized the black Outline of the projection screen And it really automatically It automatically resized I like that And then they did it on a three-class corner corner of a wall and it resized. Like I go to Samsung's villa of its forever first look every year.

Samsung Villa. It's like they have a minor city almost. If you think Cesar's is a state, this is Vegas. This is a minor city. And like the freestyle plus projector is the thing that I was like, whoa. Again, how much though? I don't even know if they have announced pricing because a lot of these stuff, they don't announce pricing.

But the other weird thing from Samsung, and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it, in the corner of their experience, there's an S-958. OLED TV that they're claiming can be an art TV and a regular, but they had one static image on it for the entire multiple hours I was there. And I was like asking everybody, did you guys beat Vernon? What is going on here? How is this happening? I haven't gotten an answer yet. I don't know if it was just for the show of it all, like showing it can do it. But if they've somehow done it and they were quietly not explaining it, I have more questions for their PR team and that process and I do their technical team. Good luck on those though, because they

They don't look, from what I hear of their PR team, they're not particularly helpful with answers to questions. They're responsive to email. They're a nice group of people. Okay, okay. Maybe they've changed over the years. But no, everybody's had trouble with different PR, different outlets. It's not, that's, it all depends on who's, what your history of who. But that's the thing, though, with these art TVs, they're always a lovely idea. It's like, I don't fucking earth. I want some art on my wall. I just put up art. And even, I saw one of these e-ink things as well. I'm going to show you. There was like an entire hall of e-ink things. it just broke? It's just... It's very artistic, actually. It's like...

That's the future. Yeah. That's the other one. Yeah, it's just... It's like a nice idea, but you're like, okay, but again, practically... I think I saw those at the club last night. At the club? Yeah, it was just too late for you.

No, it's really... It's frustrating as well, because some of these ideas are like, all right, that's the nice one. How much? Oh, just out of the range of most people. Oh, an e-ink screen. Okay, I guess, but how much is hundreds of dollars fucking... I just...

They should have a cheap section. They should literally have a cheap section of this show, like a below 300 bucks. I looked up the projector. I think they typically have cost around 900 bucks. Oh, that's. They haven't announced this particular one. I've heard. For a projector.

Yeah, I mean, like the Nebula X1 Pro, the tall thing's like five grand. And the X1 little box is like to. And this is like a small tube like, like, like, very cool. It is a cute looking, I want to call it Pixar-esque, but like it is a nicely designed. I was like, this is fun to use. I have a TV, and I don't care that it's a black rectangle sometimes. I'm not the audience for the art TV, and I'm not really a projector audience. But while we were watching this freestyle plus doing it's thing, I was like, okay, this is cool.

This is the article headline. This is like the actual. But also that's something you could use in an apartment potentially because it adapts to any surface. Finally, something that sounds useful. Yeah. Well, I think also it's like a, I think a little bit of a premium thing too. It feels like screens. TVs have gotten so cheap and so big.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like having your TV, like, having it be either like disguised as art or like hidden as a projector. Like this sort of like a, I'm too good to even have a TV. TVs are for like, you know, the plebs. Yeah, yeah. I did see like the most limp story. It was like Amazon's news TVs have rounded corners. I'm just like at this, at this point, may, just don't, you don't need to post about it.

Mate, who cares? It's got rounded corners. You're nice. Yeah, it's just like, and also I went and looked, they look pointy. They looked actually pointing. Why not a circular TV? They're rounded. Give me a circular TV.

Yeah, I want a rounder. I want a rhomboid television. Yeah. Everything has to be filmed at the fish eye lens. Yeah. I just, though, if you want to do something weird, great, send it my way. Don't pretend like it's for everyone. If you just want to, this is for perverts.

The pervert section. Pervert TV. Pervert TV. I think we have that. I think we have pervert. The Palma is like, you know, Edson is. It's television pervert.

It's new from YouTube. My name's Brian DePaul. I've been watching Pervert TV for the past 40 years. I'm proud to introduce it to CES. Yeah, I was going to make a liquid television joke, but that could get gross real quick. Well, we're going to wrap up this 30 minutes.

Maybe I'm Siemens. Yeah, there we go. Siemens AI, television, pervert television. It's physical. Coming up next, an ad from Pervert Television, the new streaming service by perverts for perverts. And if you're the advertiser that comes, next. I am very sorry. I am very sorry. And if this is one of the ones where it's my voice

recorded, that's even better. I'm not, I'm not running pervert TV, I swear. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

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

We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Frum. friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

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The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my. life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the

mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star Lela 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 like. 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. And we're back. We're back with an incredible group of people, Edwin-Gueso Jr. of the Tech Bubble newsletter, Ed Niedemeyer of the Autonogast, and Henry Casey of CNN underscore. And we've just been looking at fake stuff for a few minutes because I wanted to talk briefly about this thing called the pickle. Now, the pickle. The pickle is yet more fucking smart glass bullshit. But what it is, is it, they call it a sole computer. And I think just, I think we can start at this point. If you call anything a sole computer, straight to jail. Straight to jail. Just fucking right down you go. But what's great, is this thing is this, is these glasses that project images across the, across the, across.

the glasses, the transparent oleds, and then it has some mystical AI in it that remembers everything. I'm just going to read this. For a better life in every dimension, we need an intelligence that sees with you, remembers your life and learns to understand you. And you soul, it talks to you,

it can teach you like guitar stuff and it claims it has like memories of stuff you've seen before. Now, this has caused some sort of scandal online. First of all, because it's blatantly fucking fake. And there's got, Matt Doward I think, has gone completely nuts about it's just like, that's fucking fake. And now the CEO of Pickle is now arguing with him. I love that.

I just got to say the CEO of Pickle. Why is the company called Pickle? I don't fuck it. To be extra special annoying. And Alex Heath was like, it's completely fake, it's stupid, it's wrong. But wouldn't it be cool if it was real? What if your soul was a pickle? What if you was, what if you, well, first of all, if you make a company called Pickle with a fake device, you probably don't have a soul. I have such a negative association with pickles because I had a roommate who would buy so many pickles and not touched them that they would fill up the fridge and it broke all the shelves. Just the just the jars.

The compound weight of pickles. Yes. Like open the door and it's like an avalanche of pickles. Literally. Literally. And then glass also and pickle juice. What was the justification for purchasing so many of them? I like pickles, but would get so fucking how they'd forget that all the pickles and the how do you forget?

You smoke a lot of weed and then you go into our basement, very spacious basement. Right. And you smoke more weed and you just... But you get to the pickle dispensary, your fridge. And you'll see your resplend... No, not you, but the person in question. But that's what I'm saying. His mind was like, at least a one of their pickles.

The answer is he didn't have a smart device. He didn't remember his leaves. You don't need to buy more pickles. You have more pickles than you can ever desire. But this is now a scandal because basically everyone's saying this is fake and bullshit. And the guy is just on X the Everything app, just fucking going to town with people. so cool. I'm fine with that this existing, but he has to

post. Is it, is it sort of like people are trying to do like a Marcus Brownlee with what was the device that he sort of like? Oh, the humane pin. The humane pin, yeah. The reason I bring this up, though, is I like that every, the last two CES is we've had, oh no, maybe it was 20, 24, we had the Rabbit R1. That was 24th,

that was the most, that. The most show was there for that one. No, it was before BetRough-Line, I was a much larger set of person, so I didn't really have as much fun as I could with it. But that was the one where like everyone fell for it because it was kind of real. And it's just like, that company is still rolling around in its own filth. Didn't it get acquired by like HP or somebody? Oh my. No, that was the humane pin. Oh yeah. H.P. bought another company to put it with the Palm

pre, I guess. Like, like, it's just really, I think every year we need a fake thing. We need that, we need something that's like aggressively just. I got handed a bunch of fake stuff. that... What you got that? They're... They're just look like boxes. Yeah, they're boxes that hold things that remind me now that you say that they look like

the rabbit. There's supposed to be AI agents that can... They're AI agents, but they're in cardboard boxes. Yeah, there's cardboard boxes that look like fridge magnets when you open them up.

Let's see what you got in there because I'm quite curious to know what's in this box if there's an AI agent in there. It looks like a toy. Podcasting is a visual medium. Yeah, yeah. It's like a children's toy.

I see some paper. Yeah. I see a flat. There's two boxes. and I'm opening one right now. It's like a little green box. A little green magnet. I said, what is the, it's an agentic AI.

I said, what's the agent party? He's like, oh, you know, if you want a girlfriend. Can I see this? Can I see this? Thank you. A.I. Okay, this is just a box with a connector on it. That's the other few memory.

It's the other box. We're about to see. This is just a battery, man. I'm going to be honest. No, it is. There's no agent in there. Well, I'm disappointed. You're not looking hard enough.

Now, the rabbit R1 was an NFT project. that I wrote like a huge piece about because they're a fucking fake entity thing. But I like that we have, we should have, if you want to do fake, you have to go all the way. Because this is, Pickle has the most glossy website. It's like the most like sheen-filled website. It looks so professional. On mobile, it just keeps going. Yeah, it's an endless fucking thing.

And they're just like, yeah, it'll do everything now. You fucking pig. But it's, it just made me look at it. You look at that. And you're like, wow, this looks very. I hope this is another battery. He's just opening the box again. And there's just, it's not, though, there's something on.

There's, it looks like another battery, but it's blue. Yeah. But it's blue. It's got a screen, a tiny little tomogacci screen. Fuck yeah. Let me see this. Let me see this. Now we're cooking. Okay.

So this thing is, I'm just going to describe this to. It says X, X origin, Zorigen. Yeah. Zorigen. They're calling it Zirigen. They're calling it Zirigen. Not to be confused with it. Okay.

I hit the button and it's like flashing blue. And it is doing nothing else. So you have to, you have, you got to put them together. I put them together. Okay, you put them together. And then when the API, AIPI, when the AI Pi, AI Pi is connected only to the battery module. Press the power button briefly.

Okay, I pressed the power button briefly and it went blue. Release it after the white light turns on. Oh, the white light turns on. Okay. So this is great for a audio media, I realize. The thing is about this is it's like, this is just too. It looks like we're playing with smart Legos. Yeah.

Which is a thing of FES. Yes. It's really hard to describe how. How underwhelming. It is just like a cleany box. It's just the crap show now. Because, but when you read about the pickle, it's funny, especially after a day of looking at actual smart glasses,

where everything is just blurry. And the guy was like, oh, what are you seeing? And it was, I think, what were those ones? Was that at the TCL booth, I think I saw them? It was that one was, it was like $1,200 and it didn't really work very well. And you had to control it by, these people don't use products, I think, because it's like, yeah, you just, like, rub your finger across the top right part of it.

And it was like a picture of Leonardo da Vinci. And it was like photos. And you could take video with it. And I had to walk away because all I could think of the back of my office is, I just want to ask him what the fucking point of any of this is. But I think I would have turned into like Werner Herzluck. You make me put this device on my face. And it takes me away from humanity.

And then you steal my money for it. I was just decided not to do the bit there. It's just, I'm really this whole time. I've been trying to rack my brains of why I would ever want, because I like the idea of a heads-up display. I think the idea of walking around being able to pull one up. But all of these things seem to run into the same thing, which is they want to be constantly on. Yes. They don't want to, they don't seem to want to be like things you briefly look at. They want to absorb your attention fully. And it just doesn't feel like any device does that other than the phone. And the phone doing it doesn't seem to be for good reasons either.

Or with good results. Or with good results. Yeah. So I've been using the X-Real 1S, I believe. Okay, what's that like? It's the newest, and it's good. What I like about it is, it will meet you where your posture is, especially if your posture is, like, let's see I'm in my hotel and I'm like, want to play a video game on my, like, whatever portable, the Legion Go S-Stem OS, but I don't want to hold this thing. I was just on a flight for a while. Yeah, right. But I put these glasses on I have the-

And it's just a TV screen effectively. It basically puts the screen above you and you can move it and you can just have the, you. controller in your hands. And sure, I feel like I'm in Wally's origin stories. Right, right. But in that case, and if I had managed to pack it correctly on the airplane, which I couldn't because everybody goes to CS over PACs, it's the problem. But like, no, I think XREL is one of these companies. And they're doing a bunch of different partnerships. They're working with seemingly everybody possible, which you sort of want if like, you won't cross compatibility, right? I wouldn't, but I went to the XREAL booth. And I was, I was kind of excited to go over there,

because I thought these are just going to be glasses that are little TVs and your eyes. And I'm like way less, they're way more offensive things on the show. And I get there and there's just a fucking thing that says vibe agent. And I try and they're like, you could book a demo. I'm like, you don't want to see me. You don't want to put me in a box with this fucking thing. Only one of us is leaving. There's a vibe agent.

I don't know. It's a Vivance. Vivance agent. It's a Vivance agent. I take methyl fennaday. It's fine. I'm trying to find this thing because it was so. bizarre to me that they're just putting these words to get it's like vibe description at this point like

AI agent glasses fucking fucking flop and then they should just say it's just take slop and I saw a guy one of the demo guys very overly eager fella was like yeah I call these my Tony Stark glasses and I tried to use them as like sir there's a line and there was like a 25 person line I'm just like this is just I lining up for anything feels deranged here yeah and I always think the same thing which is if you you had double the amounts of these, you would be fine. Maybe they're trying to do, like, they're trying to make it so that it's scarcity, so you're like, oh, why's everyone lining up for this? Maybe they're just trying to put friction between people and the products.

They just don't fucking work that well. Is there right? There must be AI shit in this. It said agents. No, no, I wonder, was the, where was this? Because, like, were there two boots? It was in the, what's it called? The South Hall, I believe.

Because I've been going, because I've been fucking X real affair. They are, I will say the words AI slop as many times as I feel like it. And I don't think I've seen that much AI, if any, in their stuff.

Reddit thread here, saying the instant translation, visual assistant, object recognition, productivity boost, quickly access charts, reminders or instructions while you do something else.

Yeah, and it's an Xreal product. Here we go. Project aura, it feels like tomorrow. Jesus fucking Christ. It's on Android XR hands-free control. It feels like tomorrow.

Oh, yeah, I see it, yeah. It's an unlock early access. Yeah, this is not something I have gotten my hands on yet. Why didn't they say it looks like tomorrow? I don't know. Wouldn't that be better? Because feel is something you feel. Oh, yeah, I see.

Looks could be deceiving. Yes, it might not look like tomorrow. Also, look is the signature weasel word when you're not really able to commit to anything yet. Yeah. looks like, Open AI looks like it could be a company that isn't lying to us. But then why doesn't feel get that? It's just like, I keep seeing this thing of like this, they have this imaginary person who

is just looking around going, what's that, what's that, what's that, what's that, what's that, what's that dude, what's that, what's that, what's that object, what's that. But then you come here and you do see that person. That person is on the floor. Or hordes of that. Yeah, yeah. That photo that Ed posted of just like the horde trying to like break in at 10 a.m. Oh my God.

Yeah. Did I send you guys a picture of like that? You posted the photo of the people like trying to break into the show floor. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all the hogs. I had the same thing. I was like, is it always like this? No, and I said out loud, I'm like, what are you so excited about? I saw the largest crowd I've seen yet in NECS around a Roomba.

A new Roomba device. That wasn't a Roomba, but like a Roomba. Rumbaesque. And I was like, what the heck. My gosh. At least that's a proving part of category. Like you said, you know. That is something.

That works. Every year and like last year, I didn't check out the robot vacuums this year, but I remember last year they were like, we've got little arms that can pick stuff up. I did. That actually led me to one of the funniest things. I'm sure that this was for like legitimate reasons.

There was a robot vacuum company where you could pick up a cleaning struggle. It said, one, pick your struggle, two, drop your coin. Three, get your magna. You are now entering the cleaning struggle zone. And then it just had,

A, dust always hides under low furniture. Hair always gets tangled in the brush. Too busy. No time to clean. Cleaning requires too much disassembly. I, there are times when I want to know more, and there are times when I just read something, I'm like, yeah, that's all I need.

You know, but like, this is the issue is that you can fully automate a task, but like the robot will need to be maintained. Yeah. Like, do you want to, you're sort of trading one thing for the other. And again, with like consumers, people will buy the thing because they're like, oh, I'm lazy. I don't want to, I don't want to, you know,

I totally get that. But they don't think that what they're doing is they're trading, like, the occasional sweep or vacuum of their floor for like, you know, maintaining this, complex machine with like LiDAR and like... I have a fucking Robo Rock. If you're listening from Robo Rock, your shit sucks.

That's what it was. It was Robo Rock. It was big giant black and red pavilion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a quite expensive Robo Rock. And the dust that that shit doesn't pick up, I don't do that shit with a fucking sweat. The fact that I have to clean up after my robot, at this point, just make it do little turds, make it a game. You have an AI lawnmower. An AI lawnmower.

Isn't that interesting? See, that's one where I'm like, I could almost imagine the industrial applications if you just take AI away. Because robotics has been doing AI for a while. That's fine. Another one of the things where it's like, you know, what might be an interesting innovation that it could be sold into or pitched? They glom AI onto it. And then I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, I don't want to touch it.

Even though it was already AIRob, because you've already had like IROB doing like gutter cleaners and shit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anything like that, whether it's like the lawnmowers or. like pool cleaners is another class of like actually useful robots that that were i mean that's that that was AI before yes they just didn't have to call they didn't have to say world models yeah so hearing aids that were just they were literally just hearing aids and they made some improvements and they are throwing AI but then you ask them about it and it's like the technology that like you said

last generation they're already using yeah you know algorithmic systems to try to improve your ability to hear things at distance it's just like deep I'm now thinking you just chop the word AI off and it would be fine. But did you see any robot vacuums or I'm going to have to chase these fuckers down myself? I am not the one covering the robo vacuum on the team. I just saw the dancing AGI robot. Yeah, okay. Talk to me about this goddamn thing.

It danced like me at my, the first wording I ever went to when I was 10 years old. And it was unfortunately named AGIBot. And I'm like, no, this isn't actually, this is doing a pre-rehearsed routine. Like, why are we? words have meaning or at least they should. So it's like I... I will kick that thing so hard. It flies. There were two of them so they might try to come at you from both sides.

I've been boxing for years. I'll take those fuckers out. No problem. And we have weapons. Robots don't have weapons. Robots don't have weapons and they don't have friends. They don't have dance moves apparently. But the Boston Dynamics people have made people afraid, which is the whole thing where this... They made some people afraid. No, that's the thing where most people engage with the idea of the robot that do anything is that one social video they saw

a Boston Dynamics thing three years ago and then that's informed them to think oh shit I got to be careful about everything from now on but when you look at it's like oh it's trying to serve a press demo yeah those are all highly rehearsed as well what's it a demo for what is the purpose of the dancing robot it's a disarm you

impressing you and getting your money to invest in it so the very first chat bot was created in the in the 60s and Eliza yeah and so there's the Eliza effect I think so much of what we see here is driven by sort of different versions of that, which is where you show people something doing a task that they've only ever seen a human do before. Right. I'm dancing or mowing a lawn or whatever else. And because like our only metaphor for intelligence is humans,

we automatically leap to this must be a human level of intelligence. Right. This is what has fueled Tesla's autopilot sales. Yeah, that makes sense that, yeah, it's like if we make it seem human adjacent, they'll just fill in the gaps. That's what they've done with LLMs. And exactly right. And what this does is this, it locks you into this mode.

Again, we've seen 10 years of this with Tesla Autopilot where it's like, it's getting better. It's getting better. It's getting better. It's getting better. It's getting better. It's getting better. Is the illusion. Yes. And what is completely like left out of this entire framework for engaging with, with any kind

of automation technology is the fact that at some point it becomes actually useful. There's actually real value. And with autonomous vehicles, it's really. simple when that point is. It's when the company says, we take legal responsibility for this system. And they never will. Well, Waymo does. Zook does. Do they actually take? Of course. I didn't know that. Yeah, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no human in them. I mean, the Zooks that are running on the strip and the waymos are all over the waymows that's no, there's no human in them to take responsibility. It's, it's all. Oh, I suppose that's right. Yeah, I mean, what about the robotoxies in, in Austin?

Oh, they still got people in them? Those have someone in the, in the passenger seat. But no, I mean, in Texas, Like those are technically considered to be autonomous vehicles. By Texan autonomy laws. Yeah, which are essentially non-existent. Nice. That's good. That's really. It's funny.

When you actually pull up the Tesla Robotaxy app, it says if your ride is in Texas, it's autonomous. If your ride is in California, it's not. And it's the same experience. I mean, it's the same thing. Very fucking cool. Have you used, have you used Zooks? Yeah.

So I had a ride with Zuchs a year ago at CES. Right. So I haven't. So that was cool. but I was, you know, it was with the CTO. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, sort of a whole thing. And to be perfectly honest, like, at the time, I was like,

it's a very, it's, it's the only product that you can kind of write in right now that is designed from the ground up to not just be a car. Yeah, because it's like an empty room with wheels. Yeah. And so. That's kind of cool. So the Dockland's light railway. And it's perfect for the strip.

And like, for a long time, the AV space was like, like, AV companies were like, ah, we can't, like, market on the novelty of this because it's, like, such a serious thing. Yeah. We're going to conquer the world. And like one of the cool things that's happened is that there's been so much like struggle to get this stuff to market that now it's sort of like, well, fuck, it is, it is novelty, right? Like this is just a cooler way to ride down the strip to the club or to the, you know, the casino or to this. To the guns shop.

Yeah. And like, I think that's fine. I don't know. I don't know how they're making money doing it. And I don't know. That's actually, are any of these companies making any money? No. The robotaxing companies are not yet making money.

Why are they bleeding so much? Well, because it's extremely expensive. I mean, each one of these, well, so each one of the vehicles, so like, you know, we work with estimates, but, you know, best estimates for like a Waymo is, you know, two to three hundred thousand dollars a vehicle. Right. And then the operating costs are very high. We don't, we know very little about, like, how many, how many miles can they go, right? Because they're, there are these electric vehicles. Right. And they're powered by, you know, they're powering not just the drive, but also all this LiDAR and radar and compute and all these other things. So like the utilization, how many rides can it give before it has to go back and. And they mask all the costs. and charge. Well, I mean, apparently they're burning somewhere on the order of $2 billion a year. Jesus fucking Christ. Is that from purchasing more of them? that is they're scaling very aggressively. Right. And, and they're also, they're continuing to use most of the, so, so they were ready to sort of

start bringing in this vehicle from China, which was using fewer sensors. And so really bringing the cost down. And then of course, tariff screwed that up. Right. I think they've got that back on track based on my conversations here. So, you know, I think they're, look, I think Waymo will get to a point where, where they will, you know, have a viable business. I think they're raising.

I've heard $15 billion right now to get to IPO. We're running out money. We're running out of money. I swear to fucking go, but we're going to run out money. Liquidity in 2026 is going to be wild because, yeah, Waymo is not the only company that needs to raise money.

There's huge IPO, SpaceX, Open AI, Topic, all supposed to... Open AI is not going to fucking IPO. I don't know that any of them are. I don't think SpaceX is going to IP on this year.

I think SpaceX could. I'm a, I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I mean, we'll see like, you'd know better than I would. Prove me wrong.

I mean, look, uh, you know, I think, I think SpaceX like Tesla has the kernel of a real business there, with the, and nine launch program. It's the most cost-effective way to get into orbit.

Right. The basic critique that I have, and again, like, you know, make the numbers public. I hope they go public because we'll see the numbers. This is why I want to, I want anthropic and open AI to go public so bad. No, to just file. Let me look. Let me look onto the hood. Let me see how much you're burning because I bet it's a lot. I mean, I was talking to you about this off air, but there's two Chinese AI companies that go in public about Zuchi and Minimax.

they called. I saw someone in Lima and Sam wrong on that one. But they, um, I think one of them makes like 35 million dollars in revenue a month and spends 200 billion, a 200 million even, sorry. You got to. Yeah, and that you've got to spend money to lose money, I guess. But I think that, you know what, if this is the year when we finally get some clarity over that, I'd be really happy. Well, and, and I mean, just in terms of Elon Musk, I mean, like, XAI burned what, like 14 billion, 13 billion? Yeah. And, and like, he's made this. And, and like, he's made this. his whole thing work for a long time by, you know, he's really good at raising money, but then also, you know, they just raced around today.

Did they? Yeah. That's nice. Jersey, I think. The level of burn has that, that XAI itself, which has no profitable business to it, is like dramatically higher. Tesla has always lost, or not always, but almost always lost money. But like they could mitigate that loss and they could kind of string it along and go a couple years between fundraising rounds.

But this is, yeah, $10 plus billion dollars a year. Elon's empire is really fragile even without that kind of cash burn. And so I think 2026 is a fascinating year. Yeah, they raise $20 billion. Series. Vela equity partners steps. Yeah. Fidelity management fell for it again award.

Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Barron Capital Group among other key partners. Investors in the round include Nvidia and Cisco. We're doing the doc. We're doing the dogcom boom again. Folks, we love the dogcom boom. Okay, well, so they love raising money. They've got a couple years of burn now. And guess what?

Do they? Well, maybe a year. $20 billion. Data centers. XI. continues to expand its decisive compute advantage with world's largest AI super computers at Colossus 1, barely built, and Colossus 2, not built at all, ending the year with over 1 million H-100 GPU equivalence.

Now, for the non-technical audience, that's just a lot of GPUs so they can generate CSAM, I guess. but my favorite part of this is GROC 4 series our frontier language models are built on the best in class training infrastructure powered by Colossus. They've pushed reinforcement learning training to unprecedented levels, refining

GROC's intelligence reasoning and agency using pre-training scale compute. What do you train on? You've been generating child port. I mean... No, that's the... But what's the product, too? What's the revenue?

Oh, sorry, they don't have that here. They don't have that. They will say, though, our reach spans approximately 600 million monthly active users across the X and GROC apps, bull fucking shit. Getting scales easy when it's free. Also, Twitter doesn't fucking gap

that many users. Like, I genuinely don't think they've done that. Are you suggesting that Elon Musk might be lying? I know, Ed. I know. You're a big Elon Musk fan. I mean, it's hurtful

to have his credibility question this way. He is charting a path that will spread the light of civilization beyond our planet. Yeah. I wish everyone. I wish the listener could see everyone's faces when I said that even in the... Just took a drink when you said that.

No, it's... It is... I just feel like this is a year of reckonings. I think that that's the thing, because, sure, they've got $20 billion. But he needs to build fucking Colossus and Colossus too. I mean, it's either that or we're going to get getting blitzed in December being like, it's all fucking fraud. But the thing is, but as I've been saying, we're running out of money.

Yeah. Like, we're running at $20 billion, whatever. He wouldn't be talking about it. talking about a SpaceX IPO if he wasn't desperate. Yeah, he's the value, Elon always has to have the thing that he dangles out in the deep future. And like the Mars, he said so many times, it's like a really important part of the fanboy orthodoxy that like the mission to Mars is so important that we cannot compromise it by allowing, you know, shareholder value to become an issue with it. And as long as Elon's the richest

guy in the world, like that was totally like that worked. The moment he started, it is. fascinating because the vibe has been getting wrecked in the in the Tesla subreddits for like years now for a number of reasons. The SpaceX ones really fell this this last year and the IPO. They were they were crumbling already just the number of times Starship was exploding. Yeah, yeah. But the IPO news was the thing that really I saw these forums start to like actually melt down because the whole point of all of this is now like Elon can't guarantee it. Right. Like if he turns SpaceX over to shareholders, there's no guarantee that the mission happens. I mean, I wonder how they'd react also because, you know, he said they weren't also doing a series E fundraising round last year. Yeah, he said this isn't happening. But it's also an upsized. Fake news. Now, it's like, you know, it's even bigger than before. So.

What happened to that big Nvidia data center deal, though, the SPV? But he was going to do a special purpose vehicle. We don't talk about that. We don't talk about previous deals. We don't need. The valor. The valor. Yeah.

It was the, no, it's the $20 billion, $2 billion from Nvidia. Valor was the middleman or they're doing the lease back or something. But it's all private. So you don't know like. Yeah, but they did it close? I think so. Yeah, but that's the thing. Like this or now just getting back into my regular bullshit.

There's a $38 billion deal that Oracle has been talking about doing for months. That's disappeared off the thing. I just think the banks are running out of money. It's so sick also that that deal was talked about so loudly as like, is it this is going to be a cornerstone of the coming overbuilt for compute. Yeah. allow us to be able to put ourselves in the lead and ahead of any other competitor. When I remember people from from banks saying after the Twitter deal that like that dead debt that they weren't able to get off the books was really starting to impact their ability to fund like

like new deals. And it was really starting to sound like the, especially with banks that have been historically very close. I won't name many names. But with Elon, it sounded like the magic was was sort of over. But then AI. It seems like there's, yeah. There's still.

No, it's day. It's data centers bullshit. Like, it really, it's just the, everyone's so goo-goo for data centers these days that they're just like, what if he builds more? The funny, it's also so funny to close this the same week as the fucking CSAM thing. You're like, like, I don't know. If I'm a business journalist and I have any chance of asking anything, I'm like, hey, fidelity, are you investing in the data centers? No comment. Or the child porn date.

Because that's the thing. It's like, I'm not even being like, I'm not even being like. I'm not trying to be crass. It's a fucking question. Yeah. Like Bryce Elder Legend from the FT did a great piece today where it was like, oh, it's like the pornography generator connected to a social network. And it was just a list of all the staff at X, but with clown makeup on. So good.

The FT. Bryce Elder Alphaville legends. No, it's, it's very funny watching this. And he doesn't usually do anything at CES. I wish he never. I wish he did. I wish the big companies would fuck this place up a little. little bit more just to make it more chaotic.

Listen, one year, you're going to notice that there's going to be a South Africa section. And you're going to see all your favorite, all the stars. Peter Thiel. All the famous South Africans. Mark Andresen is not South Africa. Oh, right. It's the other

motherfucker that I, oh my God. The other bald motherfucker I always forget. His name will come to me. I'm sure the listeners can fill in the gaps. Grumple Shilts. That's his name. I'm calling him. No, no, not. But I'm going to look them up now. It's going to bother me.

All right. I think we're going to wrap it there, though. Now we've talked about Elon Musk a little bit. This has been such a lovely episode. Thank you all for listening. Edongrezzo, Jr. of the Tech Bubble newsletter. Ed Niedemeyermeyer of the Autonautical. And of course, Henry Casey of CNN underscore. And as ever, please donate to the pediatric epilepsy research consortium in honor of Sean Paul Adams, who is a wonderful friend of the suite.

Sean Paul's son is epileptic and his family deeply appreciated. Thanks so much for everyone for listening. We'll be back in a few hours. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com

or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed. dot at to visit the discord and go to our slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Coolzone Media.

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