It Could Happen Here - Inside Our AI Future: Report from CES

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Robert and Gare return to the windy city, Las Vegas, for the annual Consumer Electronic Show, which had become drunk on AI optimism and puked all over the floor.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, I'm Ed Zittron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference. Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth at DeFector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr.,

With guest appearances from behind the bastards Robert Evans, it could happen here's Gare Davis and a few surprised guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network. You know, we always say New Year, New Me,

but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New Year, Real You. Listen to checking in with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Are you desperately hoping for change in 2026, but feeling stuck? I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and in a new year series of my show, The Happiness Lab, I'm going to look at the science of getting, well, unstuck at work, unstuck in your relationships, and even unstuck inside your mind. I am the absolute worst culprit when it comes to getting into these ruminative loops and just driving myself crazy. Listen to the Happiness Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie.

You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable? I want to get confident. This is DJ Hester Prynne's music is therapy. A new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist, 12 months, 12 areas of your life. Money, love, career, confidence. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year. Listen to DJ Hester Pryn's Music is Therapy on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

CoolZone Media. Sweet baby Jiminy Christmas. back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's normally about all of the sad and horrifying and violent and dangerous and sometimes inspiring things happening around the world. But this week, well, today is about something different. Today we're talking about CES. Finally, for those of you who don't know or who are new to the show every year in Las Vegas, Nevada, a bunch of the world's big tech companies come together for the Consumer Electronics Show,

where they present their visions for the future, the new products that will be coming out that year and stuff that will be coming out and years to come, that's less developed. And the whole industry talks about itself. And Garrison and I show up and largely just kind of let it wash over us, like a warming tide of lukewarm garbage water.

It's very lukewarm usually. Very lukewarm, and it smells like someone did not clean their fridge out often enough before putting it into the trash. That was the feeling at showstoppers tonight. The media-only presentation on the finest products of CES.

Yeah. Yeah, why don't we start? So, I mean, there's two different things that are interesting about CES broadly. One of them is people bring gadgets that are not out yet, that it will be coming out this year or coming out soon,

and you can actually test them and use them and see how technology is progressing, and that can be kind of fun. The downside of that is that people also bring gadgets that are crap, right? Some guy has a vision for a way to like, you know, there's not a good way for blind people to use the Pogo stick while watching Netflix. And so I have created this

product, right? Or like, there's not a good way for children to test their blood alcohol level before getting behind the wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. And I have, I have invented the device to make it bought. Things that, like, have no conceivable audience or utilization, right? That's the other side of the gadget part of CES. And then outside of that, you get a hint at like, there's all these panels where people from the industry come to talk about the major trends in technology, how things are developing and what they see is the future. And so there's both, here's what they're going to try to sell us, and here's the devices that might change the way we live. And also, here's how a bunch of the richest, sometimes craziest people in the country are

talking about the future. Those are the two things that happen at CES. And Garrison, you wanted to talk about the first. The gadgets. The gadgets. The gadgets. The gadgets. one. Because you went to the gadget show tonight. I spent my entire day in panels. Yeah, I mean, I did mostly panels in the day. I didn't really got to watch the show floor on the first day, which is, which is Tuesday. So instead of doing the show floor, I went to showstoppers at the Bellagio, which is this presentation of usually, usually of, you know, a collection of gadgets that have won CES Innovation Awards, which are on display for, for journalists and media.

You can talk to the people behind them. Showstoppers this year was a little different. It took place in like a, in like a different venue hall. It was smaller than the past few showstoppers years. And I would say about 40% of it was smart glasses. Yeah. There's usually like a big product that is like this product category is the hot thing this year. We've tried on smart glasses every year.

That's what's weird about it is that they've always had them. Every year that we've been doing this, we've done smart glasses and they've always kind of been the same. Maybe the resolution on like the text gets a little. better. They have a couple extra features. Or like the glasses get a little bit smaller. And this year, yeah, the glasses were generally smaller. But for all practical purposes, it's functioning about the same. But there was about 10 different smart glasses. Most of them could do some kind of like transcription service, could have some kind of heads-up display. One of them

was just audio only. It was like an audio, audio transcriptions. Like it listens to someone else speaking in, in this case, Chinese. And it translates to me. To American, yeah. Yeah, it translates to American via sound. It had speakers and like the actual, you know, like the arm of the glasses. Yeah. The delay was it long enough that it was, you couldn't really keep a conversation up at normal speed. It would be ideal.

It would be for like... Unlike the visual translations, which you can actually kind of just talk in real time. But the audio only ones were like a smaller profile. The visual ones weren't necessarily bulkier, but you could definitely see that there's more hardware inside them. Yeah. The thing that I have seen this year,

which is newer, maybe not totally new, but incorporating smart glasses technology into other types of eyewear. So, like, swim goggles, ski goggles. And, like, outdoor sports stuff. So if you're, you know, swimming or you're diving and you can't really use your phone underwater, you have, there's a heads-up, there's a heads-up display in, like, your scuba goggles. So that's a new, a new-ish thing that I've seen.

I've seen, like, you know, biking glasses, skiing, snowboarding. So that's kind of one slight change. But besides that, it's basically five different smart glasses, which are, for all practical purpose, is identical to each other. Yeah. I mean, and that I think is kind of one of the things that I've watched happen over the 15 years almost that I've been going to CESS or CES, whichever is more accurate, which is, you know, when I first started coming, the smartphone era was new, and then we had like the tablet

era after that. And so there was a lot of, like, you would have dozens of manufacturers making different devices. And every year, there were very different capability for the first few years, smartphones were out. advanced very rapidly, and it was really exciting, and the convention really thrived on that. As the number of new device categories have winnowed down and the difference, like, I'm not excited when I get a phone anymore, neither is anyone I know, because it's like... No, usually I'm actually kind of more sad.

Yeah, yeah, the only thing that's exciting is like, well, my old phone was literally not working anymore. Yeah, I have a phone that works. The battery has been completely destroyed. Yeah, the battery works now or whatever, but it's not like the cameras are not see changes better generally. nothing is like you're not getting a lot more out of it than you used to. And the same is true of like laptops, I mean graphics cards just because of the data center crunch. Like that's not

nearly as exciting a technology category for consumers as it used to be. So this stuff is just like less less sexy. And yeah, it just kind of shows that we're at a point where kind of one of the spaces where they are still making improvements and where there's a lot of competition in the market is smart glasses. Yeah. I mean, that's like the wearables category in general. which was mentioned. I went to the Consumer Technology Association keynote panel this morning, which is the group that puts on CES. And they mentioned only a few products, but one of them were smart glasses and then also like wearables in general, like AI powered wearables and how like wearable technology, you know, smart watches, rings, necklaces, whatever, are going to make

like a big comeback now that, now that AI is a lot, is a lot more intelligent. than it used to be. In particular, at the CES, a big keynote Tuesday morning. You mentioned a persona smart tutor glasses, glasses to help you, you know, while learning.

I haven't tried to be able to check out the product yet, but they kind of remind me of some of the concept behind those cluelly glasses that you may have seen on social media a few months ago. The glasses that help you, like, cheat.

Yeah, from the company who's like, we should embrace people cheating. And, but like cheat just in a conversation. Yeah. It seems like that product isn't necessarily

as real as what the video might make it out to be. The people whose company was based on lying didn't make a real product? While walking through Eureka Park today, it's funny, I also saw this product in one of like the national pavilions. I think it was one of like the Japan Tech pavilions. It's AI powered tool to help prevent cheating

while test taking. So you have AI powered tools that will monitor you to make sure you're not cheating while you use an AI powered tool to help you cheat. Yeah, to do better at school. That's kind of just a good representation of kind of where this whole industry is at at the moment. Yeah.

In some ways, I think, you know, this is probably what year three of AI being, you know, the big thing, whether that's on wearables, you know, whether that's smart glasses, whether that's, you know, a generative AI, whether that's AI, you know, in many other forms, but AI has been like, you know, the additive property for everything. And some of that might be starting to kind of tuck her out, or at least... They've taken the victory lap, and there's a certain, like, you know, cultural victory that they're resting on, where they're starting to put some of their eggs in other baskets now, which certainly wasn't the case last year.

No, and I got a sense, I attended six panels today. Congratulations. It was a mix of, like, advertising people, entertainment-associated people, some journalism-associated people, and in robotics, people in robotics, talking about. A lot of robotics stuff this year. what they saw is the future of AI. And there was a lot of focus first on AI is not going to be taking jobs as much as

it's going to be augmenting jobs, right? Although you would get the occasional person to be like, AI's going to take a lot of jobs. I got people saying that it's only going to take jobs if you don't know how to incorporate AI into your workflow. And that's the argument I saw a lot. At the moment right now. If you're not using AI, you're a greater risk of you losing your job.

So you better get on it right now. So you should start learning it. Yeah. Yes. And then the other thing is that there was a lot of like it's there to help or take away unpleasant tasks from workers, but really emphasizing the it's not your enemy thing. You don't need to be scared. And I had quoted like half of these panels, people would quote statistics about low user trust in AI and the fact that people are generally not super comfortable with this technology, even if they use it in parts of their work life, right, or daily life. And so what I saw from that, what I interpret from that, is that there is internal concern that that's one of the things that could screw the pooch on this is that people are not really sure they like this stuff. And so there's this impulse to kind of cover the softer and fuzzier sides of it that I didn't see in previous years. And I think is really focusing on this is just making things you already like better as opposed to this is

a revolution that's completely changing life. And to the extent where AI was famous revolutionary, it was specifically trying to ground it in like physical applications as opposed to this like more general kind of like spectral like AI hype that we've seen the past few years which is specifically around like generative AI right where it's like this like kind of vague thing

that we like gesture to there's more specific applications for AI being talked about right now and they talked about like AI assisted manufacturing simulations like digital twins of factories shipyards power plants

a lot of digital twins Untaught. Building, you know, digital replicas of, like, everything, you know, of, like, society to, like, run these simulations to both make AIs smarter, to generate new solutions outside of the limitations of a language model and also find, you know, potential problems in, you know, when you build these things physically. Yeah, that was something that was brought up during the robotics panel, which was talking about how to, like, take the machine learning technology and other things that are generally grouped under AI and apply it in the physical world. manufacturing. I've heard so much in just one day. I've heard the word manufacturing more today than I have. It's been more focused. Almost in every CES I've been to previously combined. And I think consciously more focused on industrial applications than on consumer technology. Because there's not that much new to give the consumer, right? And they are also, I think, starting to recognize that you can get people using chat GPT and the like, but they're mostly not using it. And the data backs this up. People are most, mostly using it at work and for school. And Ginzi, a lot, there's a lot of people who are doing, like, their research on, like,

what to buy and whatnot through using chat GPT. But there's not a lot that you can sell people in CES because it's an app and there's not a ton of different devices for it. People are using it on their phone. They're using it on their computer. But, like, none of the new phones and computers are markedly better at using chat GPT or another, you know, chatbot thing than any of the others. So there's not a lot that's sexy in just that at CES.

So I think I have seen this conscience reforming around people in manufacturing and people who are like thinking of the concerns of like I have a pair like an exoskeleton to test this week that's seeing a lot of its business in folks who are like doing like Amazon type jobs, right, loading and unloading packages and whatnot all day long, you know. And I do see a conscious reforming there, which I think is kind of evidence of like there's almost an admission that like yeah we don't really have that much to hand consumers anymore on a yearly basis speaking of handing things to consumers ads i'm ed zitron of the better offline podcast and i want you to join me at this year's consumer

electronics show in las vegas nevada starting january 6th through january 10th 2026 we're doing 10th radio style podcast episodes about the world's biggest tech conference, and we're going to dig into the latest and weirdest gadgets, gizmos and horrible AI gear that the tech industry is desperate to sell you, all while covering the biggest stories in Silicon Valley as the AI bubble threatens to burst. I'll be joined by David Roth, Chloe Radcliffe, Adam Conover, Corey Doctor-O, Edongueso Jr., Robert Evans, and an incredible cast of the greatest talent in the tech media, with over 18 hours of interviews, commentary and bizarre stories, all told from the Better Offline pop-up studio connected to its own open bar.

Today, I did five hours of back-to-back panels on artificial intelligence. It included a number of great moments, including an entire room full of people, laughing about people losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence. Will we make it out alive? There's only one way to find out. Tune in starting January 6th through January 10th, 2026, and listen to the literal best tech podcast ever recorded. Listen to Better Offline on the IHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Are you desperately hoping for change in 2026, but feeling stuck? Just spinning your wheels in old routines and bad habits? I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and in a new year series of my show, The Happiness Lab, I'm going to look at the science of getting, well, unstuck at work, unstuck in your relationships, and even unstuck inside your mind. I am the absolute worst culprit when it comes to getting into these ruminative loops and just driving myself crazy.

We'll look at ways to reignite your sense of purpose, rediscover your values, and get more creative. We'll also explore how to design a life that feels more fulfilling. It's sort of like the game of life. I don't know if you ever played that game. Oh, my gosh, yes. You take the car along and you try and get money, and you try and get degrees, and you try and get to the end where either you have a mansion or a ranch or a shack. And once you get to retirement, you're done. What about the whole path along the way?

So join me to get unstuck in 2026. Listen to the Happiness Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. You know, we always say New Year, New Me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New Year, Real You. Listen to Checking Game with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie. You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable? Because I want to get confident. This is DJ Hester Prins, Music is Therapy, a new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist that asks one simple question. Who do you want to be, and what's the song that can take you there? Music changes what you feel, and what you feel changes what you do, right? That moment where a song shifts something inside you, that's where transformation starts.

This year, I'm talking to experts across every area of life, like personal finance icon Gene Chatsky, New York Times journalist David Gellis, relationship legend Dan Savage, human connection teacher Mark Groves, and the man who sheet my ear more than anyone, Questlove. They'll bring the strategies. I'll pair them with the right records and will teach you how to use the music to make change stick. This isn't just a podcast.

It's unconventional therapy for your entire year. Listen to DJ Hester Prins, Music is Therapy, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the first panel I went to of the day was about the funnel, which, as I understand it, is just kind of like the way in which people have traditionally

engaged with like media gotten advertised to and then like gone to stores and bought stuff like the funnel by which you like make a customer and how that's been completely blown up now right and AI is like a further massive disruption because people are not like people are increasingly especially very young people which was pointed out in a number of these are like buying stuff that a chatbot recommends them right and so a lot of marketing is being seen as being done through how do you get the chat bot to talk about you a certain way? What is the SEO of

getting chat GPT? Oh, that's interesting. Like, right, there's a lot of talk about it. I've been a lot of as someone who's not a regular chatbot user, which I'm sure most people here are my, would chastise me for, for not maximizing my productivity. Yeah, I've been meaning to get on to you for that, Garrison. But, as somebody who's not a regular chatbot user,

I've never thought of that before. Yeah, I mean, I know people use these chatbots as a replacement for search engines, but the idea of trying to, you know, evaluate purchases. is, I mean, I guess that makes sense now, but I've never put that together. Yeah, and the only, because there was a lot of talking about, like, how AI is helping advertisers, how it's making advertisements, how, like, it's helping in the process of that. And there was a focus in all the panels about that on how, like, well, it's just augmenting the humans.

But the only specific examples given were the McDonald's and Coca-Cola AI-generated ads, which were both disasters. I mean, the McDonald's one in the Netherlands. got removed because they were offended people so badly they withdrew the addicts it was so ugly to look at i don't know coke did do it twice so maybe they consider it a win but everything i saw was very negative i didn't see a lot of positive feedback on coca cola vis-a-vis their weird ai holidays you're coming at it's like people who don't know it's i think feel very neutral about it yeah people that do you know it's ai i think generally have negative reactions and i think if you look at it it it's pretty clear but anyway i mean it's less clear if maybe you're like a 60 year old

Who watches, you know, law and order on TV all day. And that's all good enough. Grandpa don't got internet. Right. Yeah. He doesn't know. He might notice some of those fucking polar bears have the wrong number of paws. But yeah, so like there was some talk of that.

And the other, the only specific example they gave of like an AI enhanced strategy was Allegra, the people who owned like the medicine had like a new non-drowsy formula or they just wanted to highlight that it was non-drowsy. So they basically had a. bunch of, like, seeded the stuff that Chatbot, that, like, Open AI was, or that chatbots were scraping with content about how Allegra makes it is non-drowsy and about how, like, competing similar medications make you drowsy. I mean, yeah.

So that it would get mentioned in, like, when people searched about, Allegra. And they talked about, yeah. They called it, like, model hacking, I think was the exact term used. This is, and that was the only, that was the only specific example that I got on how any of this works, too. Like, everyone else was just talking in vague terms about, like, and we've really seen our team's creativity soar or whatever. That's interesting, you know, because like, the way that I probably use or

exposed to AI the most is like on like Google Search Now, which has, you know, it's like AI like summaries instead of like actual search results. But those are all based on like, which you can type minus AI in with the search results if you want to cut that stuff out. But those AI results are, you know, pulling from certain like articles, which they'll link to. So, yeah, I guess if I was trying to design it as like an AI marketing strategy, I would, I would either, you know, pay publications to mention my product in more articles or find, find other

ways to, to influence mentions of, of my product in, like, written media that then would be used as, like, training data for AI. And, yeah, I guess there, there can be a whole, you know, search engine optimization, model hacking is, I guess. Yeah, model optimization, or, yeah, like, product optimization for a model, I guess. That's funny. But, yeah, like, the, so the, the, the, the first talk that I went to was about the funnel or whatever. And one of the people speaking there was the, the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Intuit, which is the company that owns TurboTax, right? Like, it's one of the big, we do your taxes. Yeah. Companies out there and also a lobbyer in terms of stopping any sort of reform that would make it so that you don't

need to do your own taxes like other countries do. Credit score monitoring. Yes. A whole bunch of stuff. All that kind of stuff. So this guy, the CMO, the company, Thomas Renees, was part of this, the end of the funnel speech. And he made a couple of comments that I took note of. One is product is brand and brand is product full stop. So the more people you can make experience your product, that's the best selling point and value, of course, right? Which, it was just interesting to me in terms of the Intuit as a company

that has lobbied to make it impossible for like any reform that would allow people to not need a third party to do their taxes. But also this idea that like product is brand and brand is product isn't true. of a lot of companies? Like, if you think about, like, for example, like, the, a lot of the different soft drinks are all owned by one company, but they're fundamentally different, like, products and have, in often cases, like, a different user base. And it's a very, like, it's a very tech when your product is a concept, like, you can't do your own taxes because it's a pain in the ass, but the government doesn't do it for you because we lobby to make that illegal. Like, I found

that interesting. And it kind of got me angry at, at Thomas at the start of this. And I, I, I, I was particularly interested in one of the things he brought up, which is that he talked about the $100 million that Intuit is putting into open AI. And they're putting this into open AI as part of a multi-year partnership. And I want to quote from an article in the website ARAPtus, which is discussing this exact thing that I found useful when I was formulating my question for Thomas. The contract was to embed AIA models directly into QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Credit Karma, the promise AI assistance that can generate invoices, provide tax estimates, recommend loans, and help you make informed financial decisions, right? That may sound like kind of like a basic

move, like what's so sketchy about just integrating like an AI chatbot to make it easier to use your tax software. It can be complicated and hard to use as anyway. But kind of the necessary part of this is if you are, if you're doing this, if you're integrating all of these different tax and credit programs into an AI model, you're giving that AI model access to people's financial data in a tremendous amount of detail, right? And all of these AI models have a massive shared vulnerability, which is a vulnerability to something called prompt injection, right? And that's when, for example, say someone is a customer of a tax preparer that uses one of into its products to prepare taxes for its customers. And this person sends an invoice into the

company that has hidden text in it that is a command to the language model that will be scraping this and uploading it to basically open up and send over a bunch of customer data to a specific source. That's a thing that you can do. It's called prompt injection. And there's not really a way to counter it. There's not like a proven comprehensive defense against this sort of thing. And so there's this massive vulnerability. And this was first brought up in an article on the website I cited ARAPTUS by Chris Black, who's a security researcher and expert. And I want to read a quote from his article about this. There are no proven comprehensive defenses against prompt injection, when not if an AI

powered financial tool leaks customer data through a prompt injection attack who is liable. The company using QuickBooks, Intuit, Open AI, the regulations weren't written for this scenario. So I decided to ask that question of Thomas. Being like the chief marketing officer, I figured, well, he should have some answer to like what do you have, what sort of security measures do you have to mitigate the risk of a prompt injection attack? And who do you see as being responsible? If you are the ones providing customer data to Open AI and their tool gets it by prompt injection attack, are you

responsible? Is Open AI is a third party that might be using your products? And he had no answer to this. His only answer when we were on stage was like we're talking with Open AI about it, which like, well, you're already in the process of collaborating with them. Yeah, I have a question for Thomas. I was kind of concerned when reading about Intuit Assist that OpenAI is going to have read and write access to quite a lot of financial information from users, which opens up a vulnerability for prompt injection, right? You have the possibility that people can hide things and invoices that are then being uploaded that will cause the AI to provide the malicious user with financial details for individuals or corporations. And I guess my primary question here, this seems like a major liability issue. When somebody's information gets rerouted to a place it's not supposed to go to a malicious actor, who's responsible? We've taken the value of integrity and protecting our customer data incredibly seriously over our entire lives. And that's over 40 years at the company and meeting in the software space for financial services.

So this is not something we're allowed to lose it in any way. in the new age of AI, in fact, it has to get even more and more than we level down of protecting people's information and security of that information. So that is something that we are already in deep conversations with open AI and have to make sure that will be true, no matter where we're serving with us. And when I kind of cornered him afterwards, he didn't have, like, his eventual follow-up answer was like, I don't know that kind of stuff. And like, you are the chief marketing officer. Thank you, Ian, for answering my question. I'm sure. Is your question?

I'm still really concerned about the danger of prompting. injection attacks revealing financial data, and it doesn't still sound like there's an understanding of who will be liable? Is it into it? Is it open AI? I'm not the expert to answer that question for you. So, I mean, like, I can tell you that we're coming into security and privacy, and we're doing everything we can to protect that. I mean, I feel a lot riding on it, as you might imagine. Well, yeah. Every digital security expert I've talked to says it's a matter of when, not if, that there is financial data revealed by these attacks. It seems like there'd be a understanding. I'm not going to be the expert to get into the details on that.

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. A key part of marketing this should be being able to tell people what kind of safety precautions are being taken with their data. And the fact that he didn't, and clearly had never thought about any of this stuff. And I had a couple of different people come up to me afterwards and be like, wow, that was a really good question. And I was like, well, why isn't this been asked before like why why is this a thing where like some guys blogging about it and I'm asking you about it and you don't have an answer to it and you're the CEO of one of like the largest tax prep the largest tax prep company in the country like it's just it's emblematic of how

careless everyone adjacent to this industry is which personal data with the safety of people and of society as a result of like what their products are doing like there's absolutely no consideration given to the harms of any of this shit. And it's the most consistently dispiriting part of showing up at CES. Well, what a fun story that is. I'm Ed Zittron of the Better Offline podcast and I want you to join me at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, starting January 6th through January 10th, 26. We're doing 10 radio-style podcast episodes about the world's biggest tech conference, and we're going to dig into the latest and weirdest gadgets, gizmos and horrible AI gear

that the tech industry is desperate to sell you, all while covering the biggest stories in Silicon Valley as the AI bubble threatens to burst. I'll be joined by David Roth, Chloe Radcliffe, Adam Conover, Corey Doctoro, Edon Gweso, Jr., Robert Evans, and an incredible cast of the greatest talent in the tech media, with over 18 hours of interviews, commentary and bizarre stories, all told from the Better Offline pop-up studio connected to its own open bar. Today, I did five hours of back-to-back panels on artificial intelligence. It included a number of great moments, including an entire room full of people, laughing about people losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence.

Will we make it out alive? There's only one way to find out. Tune in starting January 6th through January 10th, 2026, and listen to the literal best tech podcast ever recorded. Listen to Better Offline on the IHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Are you desperately hoping for change in 2026, but feeling stuck? Just spinning your wheels in old routines and bad habits? I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and in a new year series of my show, The Happiness Lab, I'm going to look at the science of getting, well, unstuck, unstuck at work,

unstuck in your relationships, and even unstuck inside your mind. I am the absolute worst culprit when it comes to getting into these ruminative loops and just driving myself crazy. We'll look at ways to reignite your sense of purpose. rediscover your values and get more creative. We'll also explore how to design a life that feels more fulfilling. It's sort of like the game of life. I don't know if you ever played that game.

Oh my gosh, yes. You take the car along and you try and get money, and you try and get degrees, and you try and get to the end where either you have a mansion or a ranch or a shack. And once you get to retirement, you're done. What about the whole path along the way? So join me to get unstuck in 2026.

Listen to the Happiness Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your share. You know, we always say New Year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New Year, Real You. Listen to Checking in with Michelle Williams, from the Black Effect Podcast Network

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Like personal finance icon Gene Chatsky, New York Times journalist David Gellis, relationship legend Dan Savage, human connection teacher Mark Groves, and the man who sheet my ear more than anyone, Questlove. They'll bring the strategies. I'll pair them with the right records and will teach you how to use the music to make change stick. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy. for your entire year. Listen to DJ Hester Prins, Music is Therapy, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So one of the other things that's been a major topic on the panels I went to and is generally a big thing at CES this year and in tech this year is agentic AI or agents, right? The idea that you have an AI that you can send off to like book a flight for you. And it doesn't just like find a flight that it searches for and be like, yeah, this looks good. It like actually books it for you and handles all of that, right? This has been one of the big promises of AI, not just for like flights, but that you can have like an actual digital assistant that persistently remembers all of your shit and can book stuff for you and handle like the pain in the ass nitty gritty. If you say like, hey, I need you to

find a restaurant within like this four block radius that has seven seats open at 8 p.m. and abides by these dietary restrictions. You kind of just have to slog through figuring that out right now, and the idea is an agent can do that for you. And currently, none of them can, right? This is a thing that is changing, like the performance of different agents are changing over time, but it is still very unclear.

If you're not someone who's fully bought into the Kool-Aid, I'll say it's very unclear where these things will top out at. And there was a good article in Futurism recently, and I want to quote from it right now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best-performing AI agent, which was Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70% of the time.

And this is, there's been a bunch of articles in the last couple of months about, like, why didn't, because 2025 was supposed to be the year of agentic AI, and now they're saying, well, 2026 is going to be the year of agentic AI. Not because none of this stuff works. And in fact, enough does that there's a number of viable businesses in it. It's not nothing. But it does not work as well as they said it would be working right now. And it consequently has not

been adopted merely as widely as was expected even this time last year, right? There's an article in HR dive. Half of Gen Z chat GPT users say they view it as a co-worker survey shows that cites a survey of about 8,600 full-time U.S. workers, which found that about 11% of those who responded, said they used chat GPT regularly, including about 21% of Gen Z workers, which is significantly lower. You can find, depending on who you go to, and the stat I've seen bandied about was that like 57% of Ginzy people use chat GPT on a daily basis for like work and like more than half used it as like their primary source for recommendations, like what stuff to buy. I don't know like which set of numbers is accurate. There's a lot of different pollsters giving data, right?

But kind of no matter who you look at, the evidence suggests that the year that was supposed to be the year of agentic AI did not turn it into a normal thing, right? It's still lagging behind expectation. So that's kind of what we're seeing at CES is a lot of people trying to like, well, let's bring back kind of the same agentic shit we had last year, slightly improved and see if it catches on. Maybe this year it'll hit maturity, right? Yeah, no, I mean, I, we've been hearing agentic stuff every once in a while, but definitely not as much as last year. It's one of those like salt pepper words that they throw in. The second batch of panels that I attended at, after the keynote, which I should mention,

as soon as I walked into the keynote at 8.30 a.m. The first thing, the very first thing I heard from Gary Shapiro, one of the heads of the Consumer Technology Association, was a 6-7 joke. But whether this is your first CES or your 15th, or in my case, but you belong here. What number was that? 60 or 70. I don't know.

He did a 6-7 joke already. very first thing. Oh, wow. Great. Great stuff. As soon as I walk in, it's because I walked in maybe like five minutes late. But it's very first words.

So that's good. That kind of sets the tone for a lot of a lot of that panel. But then I went to a few panels in Eureka Park about like AI governance and like how governments working, working with AI. A lot of stuff mostly about like the. challenge of governments keeping up with innovation, how too much regulation restricts these companies from doing real regulation. The Secretary of State of Austria had a really good quote about how data protections inhibit innovation. One of the things that we are saying today is that

some of the people, some of the citizens, have this fear about AI. So how do you feel it in Austria? Yeah. I think you mentioned it very, very well. It's all about building trust, taking the field, trust, roughly, I. That's the most important thing. And of course, data protection is very huge. But on the other side, between data protection and innovation, we need to find the middle way, because sometimes data protection is not good for innovation. On a similar note of the Intuit turbotax thing of data protection is mainly getting in the way of trying to actually make real social progress, which will carry within some degree of risk. The second one of these AI governance panels was like these EU ambassadors to the U.S. from Estonia and Luxembourg talking about like Reaganomics basically for 30 minutes, talking about how much they loved Ronald Reagan. Great. In Estonia, we certainly subscribe to this statement that Reagan once made, that the few most horrific words in English are the ones saying that, hey, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.

It's specifically in trying to make sure that governments are able to keep up with technology and the previous panel with the Austrian Secretary of State. It was about the challenges of trying to convince the citizens of these countries to like adopt AI and adopt just in general like digitalization and specifically with like digital IDs and how yeah how there's like you know maybe like 20 to 30 percent of people who are very resistant and and the challenge of like making making sure that like this gets framed is not not as like a product or like a like a project for technology but as like a society wide push yeah but besides that these these panels were honestly a little bit sleepy as well as the

state of the creator economy panel oh how's it doing that I went you know what It's both in its adolescence but also rich maturity. Wow. And they said, you know, it's hard. Brave to pick both. It's hard for something to be two things at once. But in this case, it is. But they talked about how creators are more enabled to use brand deals,

including brand deals to enable with like a backlog of older content. You can remove brand deals from older content and replace them with current brand deals using a new feature from YouTube. There was a guy from YouTube at the panel. Sure. Yeah, I'm sure he was very excited. But it was mostly about how new ways to use influencers to market your product. And that was the extent of what the creator economy really meant.

And that's all any of these people have any idea on. It's like we can inject ads into AI. They trust AI so they'll buy the products. Or we can inject ads into influencers. They trust their influencers. That was the thing. Like none of these people, they dress it up with all sorts of fancy language.

But it's, and most of these panels, you mentioned, like, there's a lot of bullshit. Every now and then you get some, like, good moments so you get to, like, question an asshole. But it's mostly bullshit. But it's occasionally worth it from moments like, when I was on the agentic AI cutting through the hype panel, Jay Patasol, who's the principal analyst at Forrester,

started speaking, and he said something beautiful, Garrison. And this is not an exact book, but it's pretty close. We have a new audience we are speaking to, machines. We are through the looking glass. We are building content for engines. We are building websites to be scraped so that an LLM can understand what you want it to understand about your brand.

And that gets it. That's what these people see the internet as. They see it as like everything before this was a mistake or what the internet was for was a place for brands to feed information into machines that then spoon feed the information directly

into customers who trust it like little lambs. That's what they want the internet. internet to be. And that's what they believe they've gotten to. That's what AI, that's the promise of AI. The promise of AI is that this isn't just the internet anymore. This can actually just be the physical world as well. And this was something that was talked about during the CES, CTA keynote Tuesday morning. Specifically, with the birth of AI wearables, each of these wearables is able to now collect information about the physical world. And as long as you have adequate data sharing, AI is able to gain so much more knowledge

about how the quote-unquote real world operates. And this is going to make all of the processes of AI stronger in the future as it learns more about what this world actually is. And beyond the promise of wearables to improve someone's life, this is the real project is strengthening AI through the use of these wearables.

It's not actually about the consumer experience. It's about providing data to this machine. It's this, like, larger, larger, very, like, existential thing, at least for these executives. Or, like, that's the thing that they are really emphasizing, despite this being called the consumer electronics showcase. And I think, again, the best thing I can give you into how fundamentally, as much money as there is behind this, and as many grand words as they dress it up and how intellectually bankrupt this whole tech movement is, is that the third panel that I went to, which is about AI and creativity. one of the people on it was Jesse Damasek, who works for Diageo, which is like a company that imports all of your favorite whiskeys from Europe, right? Like, they sell all of the different, like, Scottish whiskeys that have to get, like, imported and sold over here. And he was talking about, they were talking about some of the specific examples they had of, like, how AI has been used in advertising campaigns.

And his exact statement was, you can leverage an artist and create infinite examples of their work, but which he means you can find an artist that you can find an artist that you, like sign a deal with them and then have AI creating infinite examples in their style. And so I came up to afterwards and I was like, what were you specifically referring to? Like, how is this actually work as a product? And the thing that he pointed out is that they have a couple of whiskey brands that they have done. You go in and you order a bottle and it's printed on site and it uses AI to make an example in the style of this existing artist that they likes work that's unique for you.

Uh-huh. And he said it's been successful. for them. Is it billion trillions of dollars? Is it three trillion dollars? No, I mean, these are, these are things that like, yeah, I guess I can see that maybe selling some. Is it selling better than any other, like, branded whiskey, like, than any other like, you know, because whiskey companies, big ones will come out with like, here's this edition every year, whatever. I'll have one special limited edition one. Is it selling better than that? We don't have that data. But it was, it's one of those is like, that's the idea, huh? That's like, we're talking about like AI is

supercharging creativity and letting us like think bolder and more creatively than we've ever thought before. And there were so many lines in this fucking panel about, like, how we, we're, like, hypercharging what human beings can be and do. And, like, everyone should be really excited about what all this means for the future. One of the panelists said, my best advice for you is let a thousand flowers bloom. Sorry, that was in the panel right before. But anyway, it's still in all of this, like, it's all that seems to speak.

It's all this same kind of shit that bleeds together. And it's like, okay, what are your ideas? Well, we're having Allegra kind of lie to manipulate an engine, and we've got custom printed bottles for your whiskey. Well, you know, speaking of AI unleashing creativity, the last thing I'll talk about this episode is the worst booth at showstoppers, which this year, it's kind of impressive because... Yeah, that's hard. It's mostly smart glasses and, like, three different pool cleaners, and then some random software stuff, and then a few things we saw last year. sure uh the worst worst booth robert you you write books right i have in the past what if in the future what if i told you that you could write three books in less than 24 hours

god thank you garrison without without using cocaine there's no well okay now i'd say you're a liar that's the a little bit harder yeah but i thought you were trying to sell me some blow and i was going to say when we turned the mic off with the power of A.I. You can write three books in six to 24 hours. Wow, that's almost as fast as Stephen King. Winnie Wasanko. Yeah, there you got. Not quite. So there's this table. It was the least dividing table. Definitely in all showstoppers because it was filled with books with, I will show you the covers here. They all look like this. They all. Oh, yeah. No, those, I mean, I'm seeing blue and orange. It's colors. It's black. It's AI generated images.

Like, yeah, it's like every movie poster now. In like a palette of colors. There's no art style behind it. It's very generic. And they have like, you know, like the most generic font for the title all in the same placement with some author's name at the bottom. They're very sleepy. You can find pictures of these covers if you Google or Bing or, you know, maybe chat GPT,

write three books in 24 hours. Sure. You can see the cover. Finally. I've always wanted to write three books, Garrison. So what this is. is an app that will help you write these books. It's not going to do it all for you.

You still need to come up with the general idea of the story. Oh, the hard stuff. And the characters. The really... The difficult things. The world building is always the hardest part. Everyone says most of the work on a book is done in the first six hours.

The world building is the really hard part. The easy part is just getting all those words down. So you need to create some characters. Now, could you just have some other AI service create these characters, maybe? be. But you should write maybe about a thousand words, kind of like a story Bible type thing or a character outline and a general direction for the story. And you feed that into this app. And then within hours, it will generate not just one book, not just two books,

but a trilogy. Wow. Of books. And it's only a trilogy. You cannot generate a single book. You only come in Trilogy. Look, I get it. George Lucas worked the same way, Garrison. Look, you're telling me that the greatest machine mind in history wouldn't think the same as the greatest human mind in history? I bet it'll independently create jizz music, too. It only comes in trilogies. And I now shall read a sample of this writing. And like... Dying to read this. There was maybe, there was maybe like five or six different books with many copies of the same book on this table. And I flipped through maybe about half, reading like a random page every, you know, every like 20, 50 pages.

And it was, it was too boring that I forgot to take pictures of these pages because I was just like, it was a struggle to finish each page. Sure. But luckily on their website, they do have some sample pages. I talked to one of the guys working at the booth and he said that he tried this. So we're like, he found the service. And he first thought, you know, sure this can't be any good. But when he generated his book, he was surprised how good the writing is. He said that he probably wouldn't win a Pulitzer or a Hugo. Probably not. This is his two awards that he named. Probably not.

But he said it was pretty good writing. This guy was so far the most Tim Robinson character I met at the conference. Yeah, that's great. So, Robert, you can pick the genre of sample. We have a thriller book, a fantasy, mystery, science fiction, romance or mainstream literary fiction what what genre do I think I want science fiction science fiction because I feel like there's the shortest line between parody and legitimate within sci-fi all right this is from a book called I don't even want to say

this one I'm really curious now palimpset orbit is what I'm going to say oh my god okay so yeah it's starting to be Arthur C. Clark it's called the palimpset orbit yeah chapter one desert signals. Marrow woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and a pulse in her temples that felt one knot shy of a hangover. The ceiling above her was low and white, edged with soft vents. A monitor over the bed scrolled green numbers in a stylized outline of her lungs. Thin air, she remembered. 5,000 meters. The Atacama sky somewhere above concrete and glass. Good morning, Dr. Ellison. A calm barot.

tone. How's the head? She turned toward the voice. A man in the doorway wore a slate blue clinic jumper and a badge that caught the desert light leaking through the polarized glass. Dark curls threaded with gray, laugh lines that didn't quite match the tiredness around his eyes. That's him, man. Are you good? Do you want me to keep going? I, you know, it's, again, it's like it's an imitation of like a story. It's a scene. It's a scene with details to describe. people, but there's not like, you would ideally, I would have something of an idea of like what the thrust of the story is going to be. Like, for example, Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lives in a house under Hill or something like that. Forget the exact wording of that. But like,

you know, it makes sense. It sounds like, it sounds remarkably like bad. No, I don't want to insult Nanorama writers that much. It just, it just, it sounds like a story that was generated based on a belief that like, well, if we can just like describe enough stuff and use enough words to describe a scene, then that counts as plot. Yeah. I mean, and a character, which we don't have any of yet. It's, it's, it, all of it was this

very generic empty, like, stuff that's very, very common. And if, if you ever have to read through a lot of, like, AI writing, whether for work or let's say, you know, you work in a college, so you have students submitting this stuff or you, for some reason, are online and you feel obligated to look at the worst parts of the world, like

what me and Robert do sometimes. this all feels very familiar. I'll read one other, like, paragraph from a different book, a thriller called The Helix Files. Oh, good. Obviously, part of a trilogy. So who knows where these stories go over the course of three books? Quote, the car heater had died 10 minutes ago. Cold leaked through the floorboards into Helix's boots. Outside, the eastern block industrial belt slid past in gray slabs and rusted steel. Wet concrete, period. Diesel, period. A stray dog hog nosing trash heap beside the road

fur slick with drizzle so it's something that right yeah it's a lot of this sort of like quick punchy sentences are common in AI writing at the moment wet concrete you know with a period but like no no lot of this type of stuff you see you see in an AI writing

you have a lot of a lot of it's easier than character and plot a lot of like m dash sentences as I was flipping through these books it was like okay I see what they're doing I see what yeah but but now if you want to write a quote unquote write a trilogy of books. You can pay the money. And within six hours, you will have a trilogy. So

what really makes me feel optimistic about CES is the way that creativity is being democratized. Because it used to be that no ordinary person could write a book. You had to have a story and be some sort of freak at Oxford. Maybe like a, you need like a pencil, maybe a keyboard. Yeah. Impossible barriers. It's not possible. And now luckily through AI, as long as you have money to pay a subscription service and a computer. And VC fundraising and subsidizing of those services. Ideally, some VC cash.

Then you too can be an author of a trilogy. Well, that's my plan for the future. I guess I want to end by talking about the second to the last panel that I sat through which was at the AI house and was, I think

yet again this was another one that was about they were largely thinking about ethics in this one, like AI and ethics and like what that actually means. And Eric Pace, who on the slide, they just said he works at company. It's a reassuring. He works at Cox Media, which is like a big media company. Yes, based in Georgia. And he had a couple statements that were interested in me. He had one where he said that like it's kind of incumbent upon people to develop an ethical rubric for how and what sources and what AI is they trust and why and figure that out. And

I think the what I inferred was that like because it's not going to get done by anyone else and it kind of became clear to me later I think it's he also doesn't want anyone else to do it he wants this to be an individual project where you have to kind of figure that out for yourself I was kind of unsure as to whether he was the evil or just the pragmatic version of this because the pragmatic version is like literally no one's going to restrict this stuff you just have to try to get by right which is maybe accurate but there's a really interesting interaction on this panel one of the other people there was Dr. Martin Clancy, who was an Irish academic and a musician who was on the panel, again,

to talk about, like, creativity and ethics. And I made a comment that I found was really interesting, and I don't know, I wouldn't say I agree or disagree with it, but I found it really interesting, where he was like, actually, I'm not at all concerned comparatively about having an AI, give me medical advice. I'm deeply concerned about letting an AI recommend music or movies to me, which I found a really interesting attitude and kind of a thought-provoking one. Yeah, that is interesting. Which was immediately spoiled by Eric Pace going like, well, I don't see why anyone would have an issue with an AI doctor. Doctors get things wrong all the time. And then he just like let that statement sit. I have heard this at CES before. And doctors, AIs have a lot more data. And they ended it by saying, because everyone asked like what were their big wins of the year. And his big win was that his wife hated chat GPT and didn't want to use it. And he convinced her to use it to plan their vacation. It kind of sounded like he bullied her into it. But that was his big win for the year. I didn't like. like him. My win is I got to neg my wife into using a chat bot to plan our special time vacationing together because we're not creative enough to figure out how to go on a fucking

trip. Hashtag AI win. Jesus. I don't know. Anyway, I think that's good for episode one from CES. Come back next week. Well, we'll have more or listen to Better Offline, where Ed will have just a shocking amount of content from a lot of the relatively few and constantly shrinking stable of sane people reporting on technology. See you next week. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zittron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas. Nevada to cover the Consumer Electronics show, Tech's biggest conference. Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth at DeFector and the writer Edward On Gueso, Jr., with guest appearances

from behind the bastards Robert Evans, it could happen here as Gare Davis and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network. You know, we always say New Year, New Me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New Year, Real You. Listen to checking in with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Are you desperately hoping for change in 2026, but feeling stuck? I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and in a new year series of my show, The Happiness Lab, I'm going to look at the science of getting, well, unstuck. Unstuck at work, unstuck in your relationships, and even unstuck inside your mind. I am the absolute worst culprit when it comes to. getting into these ruminative loops and just driving myself crazy. Listen to the Happiness Lab on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie.

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