It Could Happen Here - The Actually Cool Gadgets Coming From the Tech Industry in 2024

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

The Cool Zone CES crew sit down again, this time to talk about the stuff they saw that didn't suck, including a suicide plane car for billionaires inspired by Harry Potter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. poetry will explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Call Zone Media. Thursday. Oh man, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast that takes sole responsibility for the assassination of... So we're back. We're still at CES. We're slightly more sober than we were last night. Yeah, but we are more high on CES. We are higher on CES. If you haven't been, the Consumer Electronics Show is 120,000 or so people all flooding

into Las Vegas for about four days where they walk around in a convention center that if you grew up in a small town, the convention center is larger than where you grew up. And it's just wall to wall, a mix of incredible new technology achievements that are going to change people's lives, absolute nonsense vaporware, repackaged old shit, and stuff that will get someone you love killed.

All just crammed together in this massive room the size of a small world. And yeah, you just kind of go crazy slowly living in it. This is Robert. You know me and Garrison. Hello. You know Garrison. And returning from part one is Tavia Mora, our resident technological expert. Tavia, how did you feel in your second day out on the floor? Exhausted and excited to be impressed by stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Well, that is what we're doing today. Today's episode, last time we talked, keep that mic in your hand. Last episode, we talked about the most obviously stupid products. So Tavia, I want you to start us off with what is a good product, something you saw today or yesterday that you thought that thing is fucking cool? Well, let's see. I think we were in the North Hall. It was in the North Hall that we saw this. It was a gadget called Wheel Me that was just a simple rolling platform

that I would track along where it was supposed to go on the ground. But what I saw on it was a road case. And I was very excited since I work in a lot of the event spaces. And when I have to move to and from kind of where we're like staging a lot of stuff to where the site is, it's really nice to have the extra help, the extra lift that was marketed pretty much directly toward me. As soon as i saw it instantly wanted it could see a use for that yeah yeah it seemed like a potentially really useful thing obviously the the amount that they had wouldn't be able to go up or down stairs well but if you're moving across like a large warehouse space or something like the kind of place where a lot of

events are held or a concert space i could see it being a real labor saver and we did see there was another product there that was like it was a delivery robot for like delivering food that they had built a way for it to go uh upstairs where it basically had a large maybe a two foot diameter wheel and there were like plastic spokes and the outside of the wheel is like soft plastic like the actual tread itself and so it would just kind of bend to conform to the shape of the wheel is like soft plastic, like the actual tread itself. And so it would just kind of bend to conform to the shape of the stairs. And it was able to roll smoothly upstairs on its wheels as a result of that,

which I thought was kind of impressive. And that's one of the nicer things is like seeing like, oh, somebody really put some thought into that. That's a legitimately clever idea as opposed to a product we didn't mention last time, but it's one of the dumbest things i've ever seen uh a guy who created smart plants who who uh who used the power of ai to make

your plants able to communicate with you so it's basically a huge plastic flower plant pets with a z spelled with a z and basically you can't talk to it but most of what he was doing was just molesting the plants yeah it will it has speakers in the flower pot so would you like stroke the leaves it will giggle like this is it was immediately like oh this is made for some kind of weird sex freak like so and didn't it like spin back and forth a little bit as oh yeah giggling it like it shimmered it like danced the pod around it made it made small little noises it was it was quite something and the guy was incredibly enthusiastic about his but his talking his talking giggling plants he was following his passion truly you could see yeah in his eyes i will say the product worked i'm just

not sure it did work as i'm not sure who the product is for, but it was one of the more functional pieces of technology we've seen. It did. He also said that like when the plants were dry, it would like make the sound like a bubbling water sound, which I think is a mistake. It should scream at you when you have not watered the plants recently enough. But I do love how clearly he was obsessed with the brilliance of this design.

That is one of the fun things at the smaller booths at a show like this. Because, like, you know, you got, like, big companies, LG and Lenovo and Honda, all these, like, massive companies with very slick, expensive booths. And then you have, in other areas, just, like, a little square that's just a crazy person with the thing that they've dedicated their life to building. And sometimes it's the most brilliant thing you've ever seen and sometimes it's a flower pot that less that giggles when you molest sometimes it's plant but it's you i always appreciate the fact that well at least you threw your life into this stupid thing yeah no it's always kind of endearing like yeah yeah no matter what it is it's it's fun to see someone who's figuring out life.

Yeah, you know who you are. You're the plant pets guy. Is that a good thing to be? I don't know. That's not for me to decide. Yeah, that's not on me. We certainly saw a lot of products walking the show floor today. Not nearly as many Metaverse products as there were last year there was still some i i was finally able to try the haptics uh tack suit which i missed last year

uh this is it's basically a vest that zips up it's it's not as painful some of the other haptic suits that uh i tried out last year which i kind of actually enjoyed the ones that are just like actually hurt you yeah that like basically shock you in such a way as to simulate a stab wound or something. That was cool. Yeah. This one by B-Haptics was very user-friendly. It wasn't really painful, but it worked pretty well. What else did we see walking into that big central hall?

Oh, there was that thing that I wish was real, but probably will never be, which is the LG podcasting camper van. Yeah. So LG, the people who may or may not have made your TV, but there's a decent chance they did. They have their big booth. It's mostly like TVs and smart home,

connected entertainment stuff. But then they had like a concept product that was like a camper trailer. It was actually a really nice layout but for what you know camper trailers they have all these little like cubby holes and storage spaces built into the sides in the back and so underneath the bed that took up the back they had like a folding down space where it was like it was like stored a half dozen bottles of wine and glasses in a very like pleasing way but then in the center of the wine and the glasses

are two like recording microphones like that's just like they made a van for podcasting alcoholics um and i i respect that very targeted audience there yeah on the other side of it was a fold down panel that was like a lot of campers have these you can fold it down and it's like a table but on the wall like once you fold it down underneath the part of it that folds down it's like a tv screen that they had tuned to like a fireplace like a campfire video it's just like if i am out in the wilderness i am not putting on a campfire video that's the most depressing thing i can imagine like why would you do that? But that was fun. In terms of actually impressive things, there's a product we saw our first night out there, the Time Kettle. I don't know why they gave them up that name. It has nothing to do with what the product does. This is a translation

device. Specifically, it's like the Star Trek-iest thing I saw because first off, it's a little retro. It's like a kind of a thick rectangular prism with a screen on it. And the rep from the company was like a Chinese man who clearly was like spoke Mandarin as his native language. And we had a conversation talking into this thing and it would translate and speak back to each other. And there's like a little compartment on it that pops out and it has two earphones. You could each put one in each person's ear to have like a live conversation that's translated over it. You can also hook it in through your phone. I know there's a couple of devices like that. This is the one I've seen that like seemed both the smoothest and the most kind of like purpose built of them. I thought it was really impressive. And it's one of those, you don't get those so often these days, but like every now and then at a show like this,

you see a piece of technology that's like, well, this is what I assumed we would be doing with computers when I was a kid in the future, right? There would be an instant translator, a babblefish device that you could just fit in your pocket. And it is kind of fucking dope. And I thought it worked really well. Like I had a, I could have conducted an interview with this guy through that thing and it would have been pretty seamless, which was nice to see.

Speaking of Mandarin, I don't know, whatever products you're listening to, there's like a good 30% chance they're made over in China. So support the Chinese economy. AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists

in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente.

And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like,

how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. I'm not saying you're going to get 15 percent every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

So one of the things we did at this trade show, McDonald's AI integration, which is happening for some reason. We'll talk more about this in our dedicated AI episodes that are coming a bit later. But on one of the panels, it was AI is the fifth industrial revolution was the name of the panel. They did not once talk about what industrial revel the other four were or why this one was they just said that title like five times they were very proud of it and one of the who was that lady garrison the alexa lady with the eye with the iheart ai shirt yes there was a lady with an a shirt that said iheart is was she the dividend lady no the dividend lady was from um was was uh from the synthetic information panel yes yes oh sorry sorry sorry that was the other panel yeah yeah there was a

panel on like deep fakes and ai harms and there was a a lady on there who was like some sort of relevant expert but she she kept using the term the liar's dividend to refer to the money that you make if you're a scammer um and she kept using it and the way she used it i immediately thought like oh this lady wants to sell a book and that's the title of the book right like that's very clearly she's mentioning it in such a pointed unnatural way that was my assumption apparently the term has existed for a few years now it seems useless to me because like if you're saying someone is a fraudster well the dividend is the money they make committing fraud like you don't need to give it another name it's not like that's like again it's like calling the

money you get robbing a bank the bank robbers dividend well that's just a stupid thing to say so yeah we've been using that for everything now and now you are all enjoying the podcasters dividend here you know that's that's what you're listening to speaking of listening we tried good good pivot garrison proud of you thank you we call that the segue dividend um we we tried uh i know robert's familiar with this but i've not tried them out before until today uh i think it's called Shokes. Shocks. Shocks.

Yeah, I wear those headphones every day. Yeah. They're like bone conducting headphones. Bone conducting headphones. So they don't go in your ear. They go around the back of your head and they hook around your earlobe and they vibrate and they can make you hear sounds in your brain, which is pretty cool. They just launched a new uh waterproof model uh targeting like swimmers it's like ip68 or something like that like yeah it's it's supposed to be you can submerge it for like

hours at two meters of depth so you can like swim with them on but i really enjoyed these yeah apparently they can help some people who have like targeted hearing loss so that's that's a an actually neat piece of working technology yeah it's really cool if you're not aware of these because when we say like when garrison said you can hear sounds with them they're just like wearing normal headphones but um we have a friend who is deaf in one ear and put them on for the first time recently. It was able to like hear out of that ear for the first time in years, which is like kind of an amazing thing to be able to do with a fucking set of headphones that are,

they're not cheap headphones, but they're not like inaccessibly expensive. All right, Tavia, you got another one you wanted to talk about? Yeah, there was this product that we ran into that was very close to the tact suit that Garrison had tried on. And it's called 3D Desk. It looks to be like an additional add-on you can put on top of your desk that you would use if you were working. The one that we had seen was a standing sitting style desk. And it has the actual product itself on top of it, which looked to be like a stand.

And it had two monitors attached to one plane of it. And then with, I think, a simple button switch, another monitor would swoop out from behind them. And there was sort of like this cycling monitor arrangement that I hadn't quite seen before. And I work a lot with a bunch of different types of programs and I'm like more or less stuck to my desk most of the time. So this actually looked to be like another really useful product for somebody like me, not unlike the wheel me. Yeah. One of the, you can, if you've seen like a drafting table, right? Like those desks, it's basically a big desk that you can like push down so so that the desk part is almost parallel and you can

put stick paper and stuff on it. You can draw on it. It's what architects use. It has that. So underneath the monitors, there's this top desk piece that you can flip up and you can put stuff on. Use it as a drafting table or push it back down with the switch of a button. It's a pretty cool looking desk.

Yeah. It would have the two monitors and then this plane that would be sitting at a 39-degree angle or so from you. So you could set a bunch of books up or a bunch of notes you're taking or organizing. Yeah, as a general rule, it was one of the products that I kept finding myself

gravitating towards in our free time there was anything that had nothing to do with ai because yeah anyone who could who could find any reason to stick ai in something like people there's people selling like battery generators that are like ai assisted and it's like what do you mean it means means it cuts off the power when it's full well unbelievable that's not ai that's just a battery working better. Like, come on, guys. It's this thing the tech industry does that has been exposed by, like, a lot of the products we've seen this year, many of whom are, like, just absolute nonsense,

like the Wii head thing, that, like, hideous chat bot that looks like a broken human face and just deeply off-putting. Now that said, there was a really cool product that I actually liked the AI use application. So there's a company called Celestron that makes, they're calling it a home observatory, and it looks like a big telescope. It's not cheap. It's not insanely expensive for a telescope, mind you, but it's not inexpensive.

And it is like a motorized telescope that it uses some sort of AI program in order to cut out light pollution and stuff and enhance the images that you're getting so that you can actually get clear images of like galaxies and other planets from your backyard and it hooks into like a phone or a tablet or computer um like wirelessly it actually generates its own wi-fi network um so you can still use it even if you don't have internet but one of the what you can

do is you could control it from like an ipad and you could port the feed directly to your tv and you could like direct you could have like a group of people sitting around snorting whatever drugs you prefer to snort um and like looking at different galaxies and shit in space and that was pretty fucking cool and actually like an actual application of machine learning that i thought was positive yeah you can have like your little at-home star parties um i dug in a little bit more on like how ai gets used there and it seemed like it was mostly part of the image processing um before controls get set to the user and they have like other adjustments such as brightness contrast that kind of thing but it sounds like it does like some image processing as part of its AI capabilities.

Yeah, that was neat. Again, not a cheap product, but like actually something that seeing it used impressed me. And I could see wanting to have that. And I could also see like a clear bit. My roommate has telescopes and stuff. And there's usually the light pollution is too much of a pain in the ass and fucking, even in Portland,

which is not the worst city for light pollution in this country to use them very well um so something like that and also just being able to easily drop it onto your tv and like hang out with friends like if i had if i had access to something like that back when i was doing hallucinogens i think it would have used it a lot yeah that sounds that sounds promising speaking of things that i would have used a lot as a young man garrison you want to tell us about the hand job machine sure so there's this company i just realized what you said it took you a second there so there's this company in norway called handy um they they make they make interactive sex toys they started by targeting the male

sex toy demographic or I actually liked that they actually more often said the penis demographic which was nice I appreciate that yeah but anyway it's it's a little thing that you can slide a sleeve in and it goes up

and down it looks like a nice coffee thermos it does it has kind of like with like a little tube that has like a a clear plastic penis prism yeah next to it yeah it has one has one it has like a has like a stroker sleeve attached in um and you can control like the speed and vibration just on on the little like thermos looking thing but the real features of the handy is that it also has hands-free control that you can you can hook this thing up via an app to many different like sources you can hook this up to whatever you're watching on your computer. You can hook this up to movies. You can hook this up to an Amazon Alexa, if that's your thing.

And the sounds will impact how the stroker moves. One of the more promising applications, which really also opens the field of music is that you could hook it up to like your spotify or something and the music and like the beats the rhythm will impact the vibrations and speed on the stroker so we can now learn which songs are best for orgasms which opens up a whole new whole new category for the grammys um i think there's a lot of trial and error. I think 100 Gex is definitely going to be up there.

I think Nickelback is going to make a comeback. Yeah, this is going to be the Billy Joel Renaissance. Just people spilling ropes over Downeaster Alexa. Jesus Christ. They also just launched a second product called, I think, just the O, which is just a more classic, small, handheld vibrator. Similarly, like the Handy, it's based on actual

sound vibrations, not a motorized vibration, so it similarly can hook up to music, and that changes the way it feels. So, we have not been able to test these yet, because they didn't actually have free copies. They only had free sleeves. They did give Garrison a penis sheath. They only had the free sleeves but uh the actual device is 200 which

is not is not super expensive considering this style of like sex toy that is kind of standard yeah yeah that was that was one of the the more professional booths actually yeah in ces and this is they did a really good job this is a good time for me to tell my favorite masturbation machine story oh so there's a product oh boy you know for the penis having demographic there's not as many sex toys traditionally not as many at least fun ones uh out there it's it's a little bit of a barren wasteland um but there is the fleshlight and if you haven't seen a fleshlight maybe you've heard about them it does look like a big heavy plastic flashlight and you unscrew the top and there's a fake vagina in there right some of them are shaped like asses some of them are sex asses sometimes they're a butt and

sometimes they're a mouth too yeah oh yeah there's mouths too and i once had a friend who got in some trouble with the law and we had to drive to their house and grab a bunch of things in their house and throw them away um because we weren't sure if the police were going to be showing up. And so after we did that, that night, it was a very depressed, very sad night. We all got extremely drunk. And three of the four of us are standing out on the front porch in front of the house that we're at. And then the fourth person in the room, who was like roommates with the person who had just been arrested, comes out with the arrested person's fleshlight and for reasons known only to them and

god hurls it at us now we're in like this is a we're in richardson texas and like it's kind of this walled off by concrete bricks little front porch area and we all bolt to get away from the fleshlight and it hits the brick wall and the plastic case shatters and then the thing hits the ground and the fake plast silicone vagina inside of it slithers out like like a living creature probably lubricated by by some sort of substance and it was one of the most unsettling moments of my life. Wow, I'm really glad you could share that with us, Robert. I bet the sound was incredible.

It did, yeah. It sounded a lot like, if you've ever seen that episode of Always Sunny where Danny DeVito gets birthed from a couch covered in sweat, it sounded a lot like that, I imagine. And we call that experience the flesh lights dividend the fleshlight dividend that's right now speaking of jacking off the next product

we're going to talk about is jackery a company that makes some really actually pretty cool like survival equipment specifically like solar battery solar panel and battery setups and we're going to talk about that because it's definitely like of the products we saw here the most in our milieu as like yeah the world is falling apart show um so we're going to get to that but first here's some ads hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,

the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF,

to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about jackery which it's fun one of the things i appreciate about this is that the handjob machine could have been called jack the jackery or the company could have been called jackery and likewise the company that makes batteries and solar panels could have been called handy because it's handy to have a solar battery around when you're camping curious interesting interesting stuff yeah a lot of thoughts there

yeah thoughts to be thought oddly that venn diagram crossover is it's closer than i thought it would be so jackery is a cut you i would recommend googling their stuff they make there's a lot the field of like solar batteries and panels is super crowded right now and most of the batteries you're gonna are gonna be made made in one of the same two or three factories. It's basically the same factory makes a bunch of companies' batteries, and a lot of them are very unsafe. There was a company that sent me some review samples, like a whole solar generator and battery,

last year that I was going to kind of do a piece about surviving on a solar generator. And then a month after it arrived, while I was still testing it, it came out that they had burned down a bunch of people's houses because the batteries were unsafe. Oh no! Yeah. So you want to be careful with this stuff.

Jackery is one of the, I have had good luck with some of their products. They seem to be of a high build quality. I have not heard horror stories about them. When you go to their booth, the people there seem to be genuinely knowledgeable. And the way in which they set it up and demo it suggests a degree of knowledge about the product

and what people want out of it. So one of the things, they do have some really large, including some solar batteries with solar panel generators that are large enough to run a deep freeze, which is really cool being able to do that. And the setup they had specifically was like an actual like serious, like solid, like not one of those folding panel setups

that goes on the roof of your car or truck alongside with like a tent, like one of those Viet truck tents for overlanding and then plugs into, you know, either their 1000 or like 2000 watt solar generator or yeah so or battery generators and just everything about the way it was set up seemed really practical it seemed durable it didn't feel like something was going to fall apart yeah i can see it being like a legitimate like even outside of the the car because that's more or less like a hobby it's

sort of thing but having one of these generators that you can actually run your fridge and your freezer um and your lights in your house off like like they had some like in an outage microwave stuff cooking implements other kind of stuff you might take for like yeah like you know like a weekend mountain trip or something uh the main the main roof mounted panel i think was able to pull 400 watts and then it had two sliding out panels that can pull 300 watts so that they could get in a hot and in a sunny day they said you could get like 900 watts an hour yeah exactly really good from 900 to 1000 watts an hour uh which is which is quite impressive and they have all the batteries to store it. And by far, I think Jackery is the most consistent company in this field that I routinely see high praise for. Because the feel of portable solar charging is kind of a little bit sketchy sometimes.

Yes. Stuff can easily break. Things can be really easily overmarked. Yes. Stuff can easily break, things can be really easily overmarked. I had a solar panel to charge my iPad that really only lasted like two weeks and it just completely stopped working.

But I've only heard good things about Jackery. I have not tested them out myself. I know Robert has some of their battery equipment, but hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on some of that this year. They also had a lot of different form factors um of the same types of products so a lot of smaller versions of things that uh seem to be really good if you need a kind of more modular setup that was for sure yeah they had like large ones that you

could basically have plugged into your house in case you lose power for a small period of time in order to like ensure that you don't like you don't actually have a period where the power's out um and then they had a lot of like really good camping sort of like off-grid battery options it's just cool take take a look at the if you are if you are someone who is in the kind of financial situation that you can prep in that way where you're you're getting you're buying like solar equipment and batteries which definitely is never super cheap right um i would recommend checking them out at least as you kind of do your research. There's like two more products I think I want to mention. The first is Shift. This is a company I was already familiar with, but I got to try these

out. They look kind of like roller skates, but they're not roller skates. They are these sort of boots with motorized and locking wheels that attach onto your shoes. And their use case for this is like factory workers. It makes them be able to walk and move. They said two and a half times faster. Considerably faster. I was able to walk at a pretty decent speed. You can lock the wheels if you need to do more delicate mobility tasks.

Go upstairs. Stairs, ladders. more delicate mobility tasks. Go upstairs. Stairs, ladders. That was one way to even lock and unlock the shoes themselves from being used. There was a certain gesture you had to make by... You lift up your heel, I think it was,

and it locks the shoes so the wheels don't come in. You lift up your heel and twist and... Yeah, the boot itself had a hinge that was just under the ball of your foot. Yeah, so I've seen these before. They look kind of fun, but they're for kind of factory work. It's kind of a mixed bag

where the device worked quite well. It took me maybe one minute to get used to it, then I was really smooth. But the actual operational use case they're envisioning is being able to get you like get more get more productivity out of their workers for the same amount of money for the

same amount of money so like yeah i think robert made a pretty good comparison like last year we tried out this exoskeleton which also you know they talked a bit about a little bit about productivity specifically for like again factory workers but, but that extra skeleton was also designed to help that worker not damage their body. It was to make sure that they actually can stay safer and not do as much damage to their knees,

their joints, their back, versus these little roller skate type shoes. I have no such ability. It made you go faster, kind of like one of those walkways that you have in the airport who doesn't want to go a little bit faster yeah that was the way the guy repped it too where he was like we have these factory workers they're like i have the best job in the company now it's so fun skating around on these things nobody said that to you bro like

don't lie it's a nice thought he he also claimed that there's not been one fall or injury with these things on which i just i do not believe because i almost fell down to testing these out i'm sure if you're carrying like heavy boxes like it's it's very easy for your weight to get out to get away from yourself when you're literally walking on wheels again it can be controlling it actually is more intuitive than i thought it would be but mistakes happen and they those those sorts of big claims are a little bit uh a little bit sketchy i found myself kind of waving my arms a little bit in front of me to keep my balance i wasn't like 100% confident on them yeah yeah just watching you both i could see like well yeah people are gonna get hurt now i don't i am sure i because it it seems to be easy enough to use that i suspect it would

you could really get a lot of extra money out of your workers as an employer using these things but at the cost of some of them are going to like fucking eat shit and hurt themselves, which is not like in the grand scheme of corporate evil, especially at the show where everybody's like talking about the potential of AI

to eliminate tens of millions of jobs. Not really, it doesn't really scan. And I think we're still putting this on the good episode because like they worked in a way that was technically impressive. We just found it kind of upsetting that they were bragging about like,

you can get more money out of your already exploited workforce with these. But I could see someone just getting these and because they would allow you, if you live in a walkable city. A walkable city, walkable neighborhood, it can make your commute times much faster. And still probably safer than like,

less risk maybe than like a bike or something like that. I want to see somebody wear those at a roller skating rink. So yeah, that's called Shift Robotics. I believe they're based out of Texas. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about, for both mine and Robert's job, we use a lot of computer screens.

I'm looking in Robert's hotel room right now where we're recording. He has a laptop hooked up to a second monitor i have a very similar setup i i've i have i have a laptop and a secondary monitor on my desktop i have like three or four monitors always running at the same time just because of the absurdity of what our work sometimes entails so it can be hard to get things done on a single screen and we saw this one product that looked just like a very thick keyboard with a touchpad, but it had these AR glasses attached.

Now, AR is a tricky field. We tried a lot of AR stuff last year. Most of it, some of it was okay. Some of it was a little bit finicky. But this company was called Sightful. And what this basically was is that it was a little bit finicky but this company was called sightful yeah and what what this basically was is that it was a fully functioning computer but instead of a instead of just having a regular display it has a display built into these uh yeah into these glasses the

product itself looks like just the bottom half of a laptop like the keyboard part that holds the pcu and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to the keyboard part that holds the pcu and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to the keyboard part that holds like a set of glasses that are are plugged in directly to the laptop that's how it like looks and when you put the glasses on you get like four screens that pop up the screens aren't too big they're not too small you can change the size by uh using using the touchpad and this required a lot less focusing. Usually, when you put on AR glasses, you have to kind of dial in the focal length to make them look right. But this was all very clear. The text was easy to read. Changing from one screen to another was

pretty easy. They had a pass-through mode like a lot of good AR does. They had a mode where you can lock the screens in place. You can turn your head and they don't move. They had another version where just with keystrokes, you could turn your head and the screens follow you. So it was a pretty useful device. Yeah, you could press a button and it would go, the screens would disappear.

Like if you're walking while using it, you can press a button and it would go clear so you wouldn't see but you could see where you were walking pass through yeah like i typed an email or two and like did some googling on it and i very quickly adapted to the screens being virtual but still using a physical keyboard yeah i i we didn't get like motion sick with it um it was not now i think this is like either the first or second iteration of this product. First. I think first to market. I think there is some ways to improve.

It runs its own Android operating system, which if you're trying to download applications, the fact that it can't run Windows or Linux or even Apple's system, that could be a bit of a limitation. It only had like 250 gigs of storage. It wasn't really a full laptop in power.

It's a little bit beefier than your phone. The company, the product, by the way, is called Space Top. Yeah, Sightful is the company. Space Top is the actual product itself. And yeah, I... We're're gonna keep our eye on it yeah i wouldn't buy the first gen of this thing it's about 2200 bucks which is like upper mid-level cost for a laptop it my issue is that based on how expensive it is the laptop itself isn't powerful enough to justify that price certainly the fact that you

know i i can act like I have four monitors wherever I go, that is very convenient. I think I just need the laptop to be a little bit more powerful, especially with how many tabs I have open at all times. Having only 8 gigs of RAM just will not cut it. But I'm certainly hopeful

that we'll be able to see small improvements going forward. Indeed. Yeah, they had mentioned it as being a web-first device instead of anything else. That makes sense, yeah. Yeah, it's like a Chromebook, I think, in terms of its actual efficacy. Yeah, very similar to a Chromebook operation-wise.

But my hope is that the kind of technology they've developed, it will get, you know, if it's successful, they'll make more progress. Now, I do kind of worry about how successful it will be because like Garris and I were both like, oh, this is perfect for what we do. But we have a very specific use case for our machines. I'm not sure like how many other people are in our position, but I was really impressed with just like how well it immediately worked. Yeah, no, I was I was happy with it. You can hook up an external monitor if you want to.

So that's nice. And I am a glasses wearer. And so one step that they had for me is that they took my glasses and approximated my prescription. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, and they slid on these magnetic sort of like eyeglass pieces onto the headset that you're wearing

or like the glasses that you're wearing. That way I could actually use it without wearing my prescription glasses. Nice. Yeah, and that was really, it's or like the glasses that you're wearing that way i could actually use it without wearing my prescription glasses nice yeah and that was really it's stuff like that that lets you know that people making something didn't just aren't just like trying to rush some shit out the door to make money like oh you put some thought into that motherfucker i appreciate that and this all leads us to easily the best product of the entire show honestly the only one really worth talking about garrison will you hand me the flying car brochure god so jesus christ this is the ces of flying cars robo taxis is the term we heard a lot we went to a panel that was like serious people in the robo taxi industry which they

admitted does not exist by the way advanced air mobility advanced air mobility was the acronym aam yeah no there are several companies that are using effectively like these are some of them are like ultralights but there was one of the companies that came here bragged like you can buy buy a plane that doesn't require a pilot's license because it's so light but it's still a plane which seems like a horrible idea to me but there are some real companies who are like testing out electronic aero taxis some of these are this is not vaporware these products exist now what doesn't exist is the legal framework to allow people to do this like the panelists were like openly like we want this to be an industry but first there have to be it has to be legal like right now we don't know like

they um they're still trying to figure out like what the rules are going to be they're hoping by the end of this year the faa puts out like a temporary rule set about how robo air robo taxis work and also how they called them vertiports which is because these are all vertical takeoff and landing craft at least the one that we saw on the show floor looks like a silly looks like a lamborghini yeah a massive drone like a dgi type drone yeah and that that's the one i want to talk about because all of those were real products the x-pang aero product in my opinion is absolutely not it's built as a low altitude air mobility explorer and yeah it looks like a huge drone like you'd buy at a fucking um best buy

attached to a lamborghini and apparently the whole drone part all of the rotors fold back into the body when you're driving it as a car like a like a transformer like a transformer and the reason why i say this is the best product in CES is not that I think it would work or be safe. Because we talked to both their PR rep and the person who was told to us is their technical expert. And neither of them could answer if it had airbags. They did say probably. They did say probably. Which isn't what you want to hear.

No, you should have that answer. That's not a tough question. That's not a got question that's not a gotcha does your car have airbags first first the pr guy that we were talking to was very open about knowing almost nothing about the technical aspects of this device and then when we talked to the technical person they too didn't know very much about it no like it just isn't very reassuring like and i even tried to do it the easy way where i was like well i know ultralight aircraft you don't need a pilot's license for so do you need is this qualify and they were basically said no we don't know we don't know yet yeah it'll take some kind of

license probably what kind of range does it get they said 20 kilometers by air about 20 minutes per charge yeah which seems like a dangerously short amount of time to be flying you and a loved one potentially in a thing it is it is pretty low low altitude i think they said it maxes out at around a hundred meters a hundred no they said a hundred meters sorry so it's really not for going up super high and i it when we went to the more like expert panel, a lot of these use cases for this, they imagine is kind of replacing helicopters in cities. There's like medevac use cases,

but a lot of people were talking about like testing these things out in New York where rich people use helicopters to get around the city. And this is what they want to replace them with because these can be uh purely electric um these can be much more because these can be much quieter so that was what a lot of what they were talking about um however again most of the panel was just them just complaining that the government hasn't done enough work to make this a real industry garrison i got you you're not aware of this toffee just handed me the uh the flyer we got from them that i don't think either of us read through here's their story oh oh boy sail

beyond limits in 2013 zow delhi ignited erot with a daring dream to turn the enchanting broomsticks of harry potter into tangible wonders a tribe of daring minds set forth on the thrilling journey of crafting electric marvels that could take humans to the skies. Through tireless exploration, the first ever prototype, the flying motorcycle gracefully... This is all a Harry Potter thing! The flying motorcycle? Some madman from China fell so in love with Harry Potter that he made a death car. I'm back around to loving it again. Average tech industry guy, brain poisoned by

Harry Potter, creates death device. I feel like this guy and the plant pets guy are probably pretty tight. They're both the same kind of man. Why is there so many apocalyptic tech based around Harry Potter? What's going on in this industry and it is so the other brochure they had it shows like the flying car the modular flying car which looks like a cyber truck it does if it had like you know you can get a truck you can put like a bed cap on the bed sure it's basically like a big it's like a cyber truck with one of those but the bed cap opens up to deploy like a

quadcopter thing that human beings can ride in kind of like sound wave in transformers just like sound wave and wow it's a cool idea from like a kid's point of view i think the idea here is that you know john mcafee used to do this thing where he would live in the desert with a cult of weirdos and they would fly around on gliders until he got his nephew and an old man killed in a glider crash. This is the dream of that Harry Potter fan. I mean, the reason why I'm actually very pro this product is because the only people that are going to use these are really rich. Yes, yes. And I think there's a high chance this could take out a lot of them this

this has the best chance of dropping multiple billionaires of anything since the deaths of like falling from a hundred meters in the air just crashing out of the sky in santa monica and san francisco billionaires just taking out whole lanes of traffic imagine there's imagine you're walking through the park one day and a billionaire comes flying down from the sky and lands in like a two million dollar drone the prototype that they say they got to fly was two tons wow you could really do a lot of damage with that well this is this this is all quite exciting keep your eye on the sky folks maybe wear a helmet for a while until this all shakes out like there's the story in the news right now

that like some dude in portland had the fucking door of that alaska airlines flight in his backyard and i can't wait until that's like a third of Elon Musk just like lands in someone's yard. And like $2 million of equipment. Yeah. And by the way, if fucking a billionaire's carcass winds up in my lawn, I got a new punch bowl with their skull. I'm going to harvest their bones. That's what we call the billionaire's dividend. That's the billionaire's dividend.

Well, all right, everybody. Anyone, Tavi, you have anything to plug oh yeah you can find me on twitter or x at c-u-t mora or if you want to learn a little bit more about me and my interactive and immersive work you can see my work at tabiamora.com you can also see her work in my book a brief history of ice uh where she did all the illustrations or in my book after the revolution where she did all the illustrations, or in my book, After the Revolution, where she did all the illustrations, or in the sequel, which will come out when I finish those last two fucking chapters, like three years from now, huh?

Or in Vegas. Yeah. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. All right. Well, we're done. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. Well, we're done. at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. you Thank you. into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

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