It Could Happen Here - CES 2025: The Best And Worst Tech Products Coming Soon

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Robert and Gare sit down with a panel of traumatized experts to sum up the years first and greatest trade show.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeartRadio app, apple podcast, or, the consumer electronics show, happening here to everyone. And of course, it is in fact happening to everyone because over the course of the day, all of our subjects here, all of our experts here have watched different kinds of dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to replace with a chat bot that was trained on Reddit. So I'm going to go around a circle and introduce our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed Angueso Jr.

Ed, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me on. We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not going to say it at the same time because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less, but you're contractually obligated to not mind. Yes, thank you, boss. Uh. Great to be here as always.

Very natural, very natural. Zai? Hi, hi, hello. Hello, hello, hello, thank you. This is your first CES as well. That's right. Your first time being a journalist. Also true.

How do you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble, perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes? I love wearing a dress shirt and tie and just getting very drunk. Yeah, you were very surprised when I gave you your gun, but you can't be a journalist without one.

That's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love playing with it. I love can't be a journalist without one. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. I love playing with it. I love dealing with it. Without the safety, remember. And last, but certainly not least,

in fact, maybe better than some people in the room. Again, I'm not gonna say who, you can wonder that for yourself. Thanks, thanks, Robert. David Roth. Thanks, I agree that I'm pretty good. How much better I am than how many people in this room? I'm not even really like, that's not something I like talking about.

Yeah, exactly, because we haven't gotten those numbers back from OpenAI. Yeah, it would be irresponsible to speculate at them in. You gotta wait for 03. So what I want to do here, I think this is kind of our roll up. We've spent our last day on the floor. I want to go around, and I'll start first first you guys have a second to get your thoughts together What comes to mind immediate is like this is the thing that I had the most positive Reaction to and this is the thing that I had the most negative reaction to I think is a solid way for us to start

Out and I think my most negative reaction obviously was the Amy artificial child best friend toy Which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable. And I hated both that like, I could tell from an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design. Like it looked like something like, oh, a kid will think that's cute. And from a, this is our intent for this product standpoint,

it felt like a replacement for the love of adults and the life of a small child, which I thought was like evil in a profound way. And I guess the best thing that I saw, I'm not perfectly competent at this point to analyze how well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with NaQI, Naki's, basically reads facial micro-emotions

in order to let people control the computer. Not exclusively, but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. I thought that was really interesting. And it's the kind of thing, because honestly I might loop that in with, there was a AI assisted like cane for people who were blind.

There was another device that led you to control a computer through like facial movements in your mouth. It was like a retainer, all of the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really, people care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to utilize technology, to let them reconnect to the world. That's like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a toy.

Ed, you're in the hot seat next. You know, the thing I loved the most was obviously the global pavilion for connecting Web3 businesses across crypto, blockchain, DeFi, FinTech, CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies, and legal advocacy. You know, this made my heart flutter because you know what? Even when you think they're down, crypto finds a way to swarm into your life. It really is the zombie of the tech world. Because it's dead and yet it's undead.

It's constantly trying to crawl back. Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous. Now dude, that's like. Yes, exactly. It's specifically a zombie. I will try to figure out what's the vampire, but specifically crypto is the zombie. Yeah, when I first read the line, that is not dead which can't eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.

Hock to a coin. I did not guess that it would be referring to Hock to a coin. When I think of, you know, 28 years later trailer where they use that poem for... Oh, the Kipman poem. ...the Kipman poem, yeah. ...the Kipman poem, yeah. ...six, you know, like them just guessing where the price of Bitcoin is gonna go.

I think we're at the beginning of a golden age, not for us, but for the grifters. You know, next week when our dear golden boy gets, or orange boy gets elected, or inaugurated, because he already won the election. He sure did. Right. Well, well, that's debatable.

I think there was some very curious irregularities in multiple swing states. Straightforward from here. We really don't need to be encouraging the blue and ons here. People have no ability. No, let him have it. Let him have it. You're right. He wasn't shot at all.

That was all an AI trick. Yeah, that was too. That was all an AI trick. Yeah, that was too, that was an all. An AR-15 would blow your whole head off that way. You know, the thing I actually did like the most, similar to you, I really did like the assistive tech. I mean, the stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able-bodied, they're experiencing either

cognitive decline or, you know, neurodegenerative things or paralyzed. Like, this is actual stuff that we need a lot more investment and development and I assume maybe to scale up production of it and figure out ways that it can be offered to people in a variety or in a spectrum of use cases, right? I think the stuff that I did not like, hmm,

you know, I didn't really care for a lot of the luxury surveillance stuff. You know? The fake CGMs that, you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right next to me it was a medical device. And when I asked, she looks at my tag and goes, no. It's not a medical device. Not in any legally binding sense. We had a beautiful moment where it was this like,

it was like a set of smart goggles, which there were a lot of that had like night vision, but also it had like threat assessments. So the specific thing they bragged is like, it can help a police officer identify if somebody has a gun. Right? Oh, oh boy. Nice. This was right after we had gone to an AI security camera that I had flipped off with

both hands and it had identified as a man giving the thumbs up to the camera. And I was like, I don't feel great about it identifying guns. So luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for AI recognition. Also, like they had it in litter boxes and shit. They don't need that. Really don't fucking need that. Why does the litter box need to be connected to the internet and why does it need a camera in it?

That does make me think of a better world where we have exactly as much money in focus on AI, but it's all integrating it into cat focused products. Like $50 billion being poured into cat AI. Translate whatever your cat is saying into French perfectly. Your cat can make deals with Chinese businessmen. And by the way, we've hooked him up to venture capital. He has an open line to SoftBank.

Siri, why, you know, that, I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make some deals. Help me figure out why or how he learned to open my door. You know, things like this. But what we get now? Bullshit. help me figure out why or how he learned to open my door, things like this, but what we get now, bullshit. I wanna see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs be like, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally done it. We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat.

They now understand their mortality. Just meowing, wow. Actually that like common ad where he's talking about AI, but he's like, we taught proofs to a dog got a turtleneck on a dog would think about dogs sitting at a table smoking a cigarette. The future. Mm hmm. Garrison, you're up. Best of CES, I think, was definitely the VLC media booth

at Goethe Park, where they had big traffic cones on their head wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks. They were dressed as wizards. They were dressed as wizards, and we walked up to them, and they said- Let's start. VLC folks, if you don't know this, this was especially relevant to those of us

who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows you to basically play any kind of like. Any video file. Video file, yes. Or audio file and now it will automatically give you subtitles too, using local AI that's not like reaching to the cloud or anything to do it.

Because putting subtitles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard. So they said we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching, and we will put subtitles up for you. We walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything. We have nothing to sell you.

In this beautiful, they're French. So it was in this like- Yeah, wonderful accent. I'm not gonna fake it. The degree of like, I don't give a fuck about anything else in this stupid goddamn show that they gave off, they exuded it. And they're by far the coolest because of something,

Robert, you said to them. I walked up and I was like, VLC is a very popular app. They just crossed six billion downloads. I've been using them for almost as long as you've been alive. And I walked up and I was like, I've been using your product for as long as you've been alive. And I walked up and I was like, I've been using your product for 15 years

in order to pirate media. And they said very, nonchalantly, keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Keep doing that. Keep doing that. I'm obsessed. That's amazing.

I feel bad about this too, because it's a good app. I have also used it. I saw the guy in the hat and I was like, oh, it's the VLC from, you know, from on your desktop. And then I was like, that, it's the VLC from you know from on your desktop And then I was like, that's that's stupid. I don't need to talk to the man He's wearing a hat and a cape and I'm glad that you followed through as a journalist

Push aside your instinct to be like do not approach a stranger in a cape. Garrison does not have that I feel a magnetic attraction This is why I keep an air tag on them. Great way to get abducted. I think similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids, all of the AI slop is obviously bad. We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing that's kind of like the worst is what you said, Ed. A level of surveillance tech I tried out multiple AI systems that are supposed to like detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or gesture and

This is really tricky. There was one at Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company That's powered I believe by Samsung with money and also they've access to like their training data. They're called with money and also they have access to their training data. They're called Visomatic. And specifically, why this exists, it is a camera that you can put on a computer. It will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists is for online test taking. It's so people don't look at their phone to cheat. So it tracks where your eyes are moving and if your eyes look down too much, it's

going to flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously introduced after the pandemic. There's a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of like online exams that they as a company will put on, you know, whether it's like for people, students, employees. But they also had like other features where you could switch it. I assume it's doing all the same work. It just is placed differently on the monitor. Instead, I can do like object detection, you know, what you're wearing and the general

like behavior analysis. If you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also is South Korean company for their own like surveillance detection. But I asked if it's a medic like like what kind of use cases do you see for this Beyond Test-Taking? Yeah, general surveillance. Yeah, we want to learn how to predict or analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by the SK version, one quite funny thing,

as I walked by, it first identified me as a blonde woman holding a cup. It then changed and said blonde person, which I think is pretty neat. Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook. Yeah, it could sense the pronouns. It's like, hmm, maybe not a woman, maybe not a blonde person. But but yes, that was, you know that was something that was quite well done, specifically the visimatic stuff, very functional. It could tell when I was looking at the screen, when I was looking at my phone.

It could tell from various angles what I was holding, what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed. It was very well done. It was very accurate, but possibly scary. Well speaking of possibly scary scary the sponsors of this podcast Don't know who they are could be the Washington State Highway Patrol again in which case Thank you boys for your noble service on our nation's roads I'm not saying that because I I got pulled over the other week, and I'm really trying to fight a court case right now

I would never do that anyway Thanks guys and I'm really trying to fight a court case right now. I would never do that. Anyway, thanks guys. ["The Daily Show Theme Song"] John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics

in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Would you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. No. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning I know you. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. Is it my turn? It is your turn. Okay, so I'm going to introduce our special white woman correspondent, Zai, to give us some exciting breaking news in the white woman tech development world. Okay, so the first one is positive for context.

I'm a trans woman and one of the booths that was pretty interesting, it was this group. Were they French? Garret, do you remember? I, I, ah, you know, they're, they're, they're European. They're called Ellie, Ellie Health. That's E-L-I. Anyways, this is a at home hormone tester. So it is saliva based.

It's like a little disposable package. Currently they only advertise cortisol and progesterone, but they have plans for estradiol and other hormones. Testosterone as well. Testosterone as well. Sorry. And yeah, so you swab your mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait, what was it like 15 minutes? 20 minutes.

20 minutes and then you scan this little like QR thing on the device and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this has very interesting implications for like the DIY like hormone market or use case. I started DIY and did my own like blood tests, but a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that so this is a it's a good idea if it's actually effective like we don't have hands on yet we haven't tested it yet but i would love to do a comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying this very interesting very intriguing yeah we will certainly as soon as possible test this compared to the regular like mail-in blood tests Which is like the current way to do it

But that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory and that's maybe not always the best or or even like convenient So being able to test this just at home without shipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really really cool Right. There's no insurance involved. This is completely supposedly close source. From what y'all were telling me earlier today, when you, you explain this to me, it sounded kind of like the people making this have an understanding of the, the dangers inherit particularly to the trans community and why they might want to use this and a focus on privacy for that reason. I didn't press them on that because I don't know,

I felt a little weird. It's CES, you know? Yeah, it's CES. Wide variety of, yeah. No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible about kind of what their future plans are, but not specifically like in that level. But privacy, like they seemed like they had

a reasonably good understanding. Of course, because it is your own DNA and hormones. You know, like I do not know if this company is even thinking about trans people, because it is your own DNA and hormones. I do not know if this company is even thinking about trans people, if it is trans friendly, but it could be used by trans people regardless. Yeah, much like a Glock. Exactly, exactly. The potential is great. And then probably my least favorite booth,

I have to call out some other white women. My SoCal Boho white women is Evjects. And how's that spelled? EV. EV. J-E-C-T. Okay. And what this is.

Oh God, yes. Yeah. This is a special plug for your charging port of your EV. So the idea is a nefarious party sees you in your fancy EV and approaches you and you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words. Their words, by the way. Like they see your fancy car and you're at targets. So this device will like ejects you can just drive away from the charging cord.

It ejects the power cord? It ejects the power cord, by the way. Leaving broken pieces of plastic on both the charger itself and your car. Non-reusable, by the way. Like, this is not reusable. It's single use. One-time use. Yes. So, yeah. All those people targeting SoCal white women.

They're AVs. This is finally someone is serving the community of people that think that if you find a zip tie on your car door handle, MS-13 is going to take you. That was the first thing I said as soon as we walked away. I was like, this product wins the Cool Zone Media Award for the most white woman product. It specifically reminded me of like,

if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted, run away. woman product. It's specifically not like if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted. This is that exact demographic of people who think they're going to get trafficked in your local Olive Garden parking lot. Gang stalked Americans. In the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California, where the average income is in the eight figures. I gotta say though, you're being very unfair to them.

It was so nice of them to put down the phone where they were doom scrolling TikTok to look at all of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted and talk to you about this product. You know? They're like, finally, someone's gonna do something about it.

Create a disposable piece of plastic. You notice that guy's always sitting down at the gym and the coffee shop and the gas station. This is so he doesn't get shot. Gotta be careful. I feel like I could have upsold him and like, what if we put some explosives in this? Really like keep him off of the car, like blow it away.

Like a flashbang? Create a diversion. An agent inside of it called the police station and took a picture of him and sent it. Someone scared a lady driving a Vibe. That's one of the electric cars, right? An agent inside of it called the police station and took a picture of him and sent it. Someone scared a lady driving a Vibe. That's one of the electric cars, right? It's like a crocodile tail.

As soon as it ejects, it whips around, immobilizing anyone in the vicinity. We're calling it the iguana, and it does spin with enough force to break a grown man's thigh. Yes, yes. Okay, David Roth. So there's a lot of, I guess I gather less

than in years past that this was at one point like basically a car show, there was not a lot of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to see very much of it, but I did have, I guess this is both my best and my worst experience, the most powerful transit experience of my life. So I live in New York City, I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go.

And you know, it has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good. It moves like 1200 people through a tunnel of 30 odd miles an hour. And for the most part, everybody leaves everybody else alone or, you know, watches videos on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there had to be a better way. And at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it.

You're familiar, Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur. Yeah, so he invented something called the Hyperloop, which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at 11 miles an hour. And it takes, someone has to drive it, and also someone has to help you get into the car. But you can fit up to three additional people into the car. So that ratio of...

That's everyone I know. Yes, right. So, yeah, you got two people moving three people, 200 yards, at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades ago. Right, exactly. I mean, this was the sort of thing that... There had been tunnels.

They were mostly used by animals, voles. Miners. Yes, exactly. I mean, this was the sort of thing that there had been tunnels. They were mostly used by animals, voles, miners. Yes, right. And that was mostly for pirates in at least one movie I saw recently. Yes, but no one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing. It was more of a like a place where you would go if you needed to get copper. And of course, but in this case, so this is like where it's good to have, and I guess every CES is like, this was my first, to be reminded that there are visionaries out there who are like, what if you put car through hole? What if instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once, you had a thing that took exactly the same number

of people to move that number of people. The net's slightly more than one person. Yeah, so that was cool. I mean, it's just like fun to see like where this stuff is going. And I really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things like cars on the streets of American cities, you know, like it could be. Okay, David. I mean, most of the obvious is the tough thing with going last.

There's like three or four good things. You all said them. I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here. And there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on. Yeah, up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the, you know, like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that nobody is so whatever, your boss can tell if you're really looking at the Zoom that you're on. Don't really love that personally, but for me, a lot of the smart home stuff is real drag. Like just in the sense that it clearly,

first of all, beyond being like sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make human life human life and just being like, I would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day. I'll simply stand here waiting for that to happen. Yeah. Just fucking grim actually.

Like didn't really care for it. That's I feel like you gotta, like what are you using that time to do? Yeah. What are you getting? What are you optimizing from yourself by not having like pieces of, like the thing that a human being does, which is like pick your clothes.

Right. Yeah. I wonder how you feel about this, cause you and I have been going to CES from, and I guess a broadly similar number of years. Like I've never been to CES. Oh really? This is your first time? No, I'm a fucking sports writer, man. Like this is, I'm out here cuz Ed got me a folding head

I have like the dead eyes veteran. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm very tired Yeah, this is the thing with like I think as far as I can tell it seems like it's a loop Where you more or less like you start out? It's too much You get big eye right away, and then you just sort of feel zombified But then we have talked to people over the last few days that are like, you know I remember like 14 CESs ago. That was pretty good. Like, and they're also tired

and also deranged by this point. But- Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer, I was like, oh man, science has given me everything I want. Like, and I guess it's, I don't know. Do you remember like when the last one was that you felt like even sort of that stirring? Yeah.

20, like 11 or 12, when I, they did a, I got to see inductive charging of a car for the first time. And it like was so big, the Las Vegas Convention Center is like the size of a city and seeing like the lights in that whole convention center dim as they were doing, because it was very inefficient. Not out of reverence, but because. Yeah.

Power was had to go out. Yeah, but that was just like, oh wow, this is kind of amazing that this is even possible. But yeah, not really since. Not really since. That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the Hyperloop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be, unless something goes wrong.

Would have started to seem kind of grim otherwise. Well, the smart home stuff is interesting because that has been, as long as I've been going to these, they've been trying to sell people on smart homes. And I don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what a smart home is that I think a person would want. I can think of two things a person would want, right? One of them is it would be nice if like,

I didn't have to think about playing music. I could just like tell my house to play the music I wanted and it would play the music and I could hear it everywhere. And I didn't have to futz with a bunch of shit. And the second is what if I'm coming home from vacation and my house is cold? It would be nice to turn on the heater like an hour before I get home.

And one of those things you'd use every day and one of those things is not really viable to base a business off of, but like they keep trying to find new ways to stick computers in my house. And I don't know, does anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking smart home? No, I mean, like it's not an accident

that my apartment is basically going to be in the year 2005 forever. Like, I mean, it's expensive to do all this stuff. This was the bit that with so many of these demos, you start to notice how incredibly grandiose the residence is in which all of this stuff is being postulated as being useful is. It's like the Lexus December to remember sales event type energy, just a big fucking... What lives do you live? Yeah. Also, we've talked about this on Ed's show, that there's a lot of stuff here that feels like

the first 15 minutes of a George Romero movie, like just getting you set for eventually there's gonna be a lot of disembowelings and hideous shambling zombies. And a smart home, not a bad horror movie concept, I don't think it's a great consumer concept. Yeah, speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment,

sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Drell. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shape shifters, to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturna Tales from the Shadows

as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Sweet Obituary"] All right, we're back. And I wanna close us out by asking everybody a question,

which is, how do you feel about where tech is going? I think we're going to hell. I think we are speeding... Wrapped it up. Very fast into sweet abyss. I'm worried about the fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance, around precursor forms of prepping,

around very soft forms of like perfection and optimization that rhyme with eugenics. I don't like the direction that a lot of this stuff is going, but also I don't know what to do about it because so much of it is driven by private interests. It's like venture capitalists, well-capitalized individuals, and firms that they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed, and these corporations. Yeah, the nature of like, you can really tell that a lot of the health products are very optimized for rich tech executives.

There's a lot of sleep products that all relied on you being willing to bathe yourself in speakers playing banal beats while you slept and like a different Devices measure your like do an ECG and it's like I don't know my aunt's not gonna do that Oh, yeah, you know like I was you know, I was I took with my partner about this They have type 1 diabetes to have a CGM they use it constantly and they're in we've been talking about and thinking about writing About how there's been a crop of devices that are like trying to push onto you this idea that you need to have close monitoring of it to preempt if you are going to be diabetic or to optimize what you're eating throughout the day.

But that, you know, when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, wow, you know, if your sugar slightly goes out, it's because you're being a bad person. It's because you're eating the way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing or character failing there that this tech can help purify you of, and you can be your best self,

which is really just like not large. And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a lot of the biometric surveillance stuff, even though there are applications that are not that. Yeah, it's kind of focused on there are applications that are not that. Yeah. You know? It's kind of focused on like the sin, the health sins that you're committing.

We spent a decent amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest, and I do feel like several tech companies were the ones trying to sell us indulgences. Yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah. All right, Gare.

There's small improvements for consumer tech, right? This is a very consumer-based, it's supposed to be a consumer-based tech show. There's products like the Shox headphones, which every year get a little bit better. I tried out bone conducting headphones last year, which are very good, they work underwater. If you're deaf in the ear, you can listen to your music

the way you used to be able to. Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works, but it does work. I can hear it if you're standing like two, three feet away. There's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle of my head despite having to not put an earbud actually in my ear.

They're super useful, they work great, really good sound quality. They're durable. I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day, like sweat, really good sound quality. They're durable. I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day. Like sweat, rain, great product. It's like small improvements, right? It's not necessarily revolutionizing hearing,

but it's very small improvements. Whereas the other kind of big trend, which isn't necessarily wholly consumer-based, it's kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards. Is I feel like they're trying to replace friendship with this form of like technology and like AI enabled technology. You used to have friends to get recommended new music. You used to have like friends to like tell you about new stuff that they're interested in no longer.

Now you have an agent that can do that for you. You don't need friends to help kind of talk about, you know, you had a rough breakup. Instead you can have a short term replacement using AI. You can have a friend replacement, a girlfriend replacement. It's all these things that are trying to replace the core concept of friendship. Even as like a baby, even as a toddler, your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside. It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize

your fridge, tell you what to do, tell you what you need on your shopping list, roll around your house in the middle of the night with cameras, and that can be your first friend. It's replacing the core concept of friendship. It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life, making it as smooth as possible, that completely ignores what it means to be human. It's the fascinating difference

between that eldercare robot, LEQ, which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to help people, and what I usually see with AI, which is trying to design a device to remove the need for human empathy. Like I went to a, there was a vet app called Leica that's like chat GPT for veterinarians and they were like, yeah, you know what, most of it we focused initially on like technical questions.

So like if I have these symptoms, what can that mean? But what vets kept asking us is like, we would really like advice on how to talk to people that their pets are going to die. And I was like, do you, are vets not getting us is like, we would really like advice on how to talk to people that their pets are going to die. And I was like, are vets not getting out of vet school? Because that's like, that's a big part of being a vet. Like, do they need chat GPT for this? I saw this other company that was like, it was designed to help you get over the loss of your pet

where you could pump tons of photos of your pet into this AI generator, and it will generate new images, and this is proven to help you move on from loss. Which is literally a Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago. It's seven years ago, and like, no, you should talk with your friends about that. That's why you are a human. That's how you can move on from loss. You have to make new connections. Poorly AI generated images of your cat

aren't gonna help you move on. Like why? Anyway. Oh, that's bleak. Replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do. Maybe because they don't really understand real human relationships that aren't innately transactional.

I'm not sure, but that is a huge trend that I've seen multiple people mention. Alright. Zai? So I've worked in this industry for like three years now, and this is my first big convention. And I would say this has just affirmed pretty much all of my disillusions with the tech world and most of it's just nonsense and Maybe the post-Civ people are on to some stuff Well you say that but I really do think Viridox is gonna revolutionize The way in which mysterious fogs kill large numbers of people But don't name it something so sinister.

Yeah. Yeah. If you were to be like, this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time, that would be great. I would just don't. Call it Apple Fresh. Yes. But don't. Call it Apple Fresh. By the way, you should listen to Better Offline to hear context for Veridox, which we discussed in the last episode of our daily CES coverage over there with the wonderful Ed Zitron, but essentially Veradox is this mist

that gets sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps it stay shelf stable for a few more days, allegedly. 33%. 33%. Exactly. And so maybe that shelf stable mist will also translate to waking up the dead.

Possibly, but you don't know that it's gonna do, you don't know that it's not going to do that. Right, right. We just know it keeps things fresh. Yes. As a journalist, it's our job to ask these questions. And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline. Yeah, we did discuss whether the ability

to bring red leaf lettuce back to life does have any repercussions in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead loved ones. David. It's me, sorry. A lot of good points. I mean, I think Gary and Edward both made the point about the sort of sociopathic like thread of a lot of this, just sort of like an inability to understand, not

just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to feel. Not, I mean, there probably are people, I imagine that's like, if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards, you know, he's like, Brian Johnson, yeah. Brian Johnson, we love Brian, he's the best. Oh yeah, yeah, we love Brian. We love Brian. Yeah.

But he, like, I feel like he would've been walking through this clapping his hands with delight. Clapping his hands, eating his 400 pills a day. Yep. Drinking his son's blood. Yep, time for, yeah. It's a, it's, that's sort of. In fairness, I drink his son's blood pretty right.

It's not bad. It's a high quality platter. But that, it felt like it was that, that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization unto like transcending being human at all. And I don't think, I mean, again, there probably are people that want that. They certainly have money.

I don't imagine that, I think what most people would like. I mean, you don't expect technology to make you feel more human, but something I've been thinking about a lot, we've been talking about this a lot on Better Offline, that there's a passivity that a lot of this sort of seems to be forcing on to people where you're just like sort of things are happening to you that make your life more efficient and convenient. And I don't think that I want that. I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the, you know, market that I think they're aiming for with this.

But it's certainly old enough to remember, as you said, like finding music. Like that's a thing that, you know, your friends tell you about it. And in my case, I mean, again, just being in my middle age, you like go to a store and you flip through shit. Like there's the distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed to something like you're a foie gras goose, and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being. And I think it's an important distinction. I think that little bit of agency of having some sense of doing the things that you want to do. I would imagine that, well, I don't have to imagine it.

Technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you, I think that... I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking Matrix pod. And I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the Matrix pod dwelling community. Yeah, I think that's about the best line we could go out on. Like, that's... yeah. You nailed it. Thanks. I thought I crushed that one.

Yeah, you did. You did. Out of the park. Great job, Dave. Where can people find your work, Dave? Defector.com. Let me do that without crushing my water bottle. No, no, no, no. That's a load-bearing piece of content. Defector.com is the website. And Ed? without crushing my larvae. No, no, no, no, that's a load-bearing piece of content. Defector.com is the website. And Ed? Big Black Jackabit on Twitter,

and Blue Sky, This Machine Kills is my podcast, techbubble.soapstack.com is the newsletter. Hell yeah. Do you want to tell people how to find you? Zy? At Neo Woman on Twitter with zeros. Zeros for Neo. Zeros, all right everybody.

Well, that's gonna do it for us here at It Could Happen Here and our week at CES. Just try to hug your loved ones until the Viridox sweeps through all of their homes, neighborhoods. They're gonna be coming soon. Oh no, it's in the room, it's in the room! What? What?

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