It Could Happen Here - The Worst Tech Industry Products of 2024

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Robert and Garrison and guest expert Tavia Morra attend the Consumer Electronics Show to see into the future and tell you about the a tech industry's very dumbest ideas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Call Zone Media. Call zone media. Oh, oh, Jesus. I just spit cigarettes across the room. You spit approximately seven cigarettes. I had a number of them in my mouth. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And you know what's constantly falling apart, but also never? falling apart. And you know what's constantly falling apart, but also never? Las Vegas, Nevada,

where Garrison and I are right now reporting on the Consumer Electronics Show, which is why I just had seven cigarettes in my mouth. How are you doing, buddy? Great. We just lost about $20 at Excalibur. Yeah, one of the worst hotels on the strip. Terrible place. Horrible place. But I smoked a lot of cigarettes there, so that's not, it bad i don't even like them i just like doing things i can't do other places like smoking indoors is what you're saying i do i'm a big fan of it other things i'm a big fan of innovative technology products of which we saw perhaps very few perhaps three today what we did do is spend seven to eight cumulative hours in different roundtable discussions of various industry experts on AI and the future they have prepared for us all. We have a fun episode coming for you, or a couple of them, about AI and what the tech industry wants for us all. But because Garrison got too drunk tonight. That's not true.

Because Garrison got too drunk tonight. That's not true. Well, someone got too drunk tonight, and I'm not at liberty to discuss who. We're going to talk about the products today that were just absolute fucking catastrophes. And in order to help us talk about that, I would like to bring in our pinch-hitting guest star slash technological expert, Tavia Mora. Tavia, how you doing? I'm doing great. How did you like your first CES as a journalist? It's a little different, but I was glad to get into places I would not otherwise get into.

Yeah. Now, because you are an industry person, you help build that big sphere thing, people might know. You hate, well, you have no journalistic record, which means you and I had to have a good time lying to a lot of strangers today. Was it easy? Yes. It always is. That's the beauty of lying to strangers. It's never hard.

Anyway, let's get into the products for the day. Let's talk about the dumbest. And again, folks, there's actually a lot of cool stuff we saw there's some really interesting things this is purely the bullshit so let's roll on with the bullshit what is our first piece of trash guest contestants let's just jump straight in and go to the israel pavilion you're right you're right okay bring me that mixed drink i've got over there in the corner so i don't know if you guys are aware but um there's some controversy around israel and a number of other aspects but by far their most egregious crime that is not something we should say but you know a lot of a lot of problems re that of the world. And they have a pavilion every year at CES because the country that calls itself Israel has a significant tech industry.

So we went down there. Some interesting stuff occasionally. Not this year. This year it was all trash. And I tried one product at the Israel pavilion, and it was from the company Iroma Scents. And I've been going to CES for about 15 years now, off and on. And I feel like every three years, another company is like, we're going to find a way to add smell to your television or gaming experience.

First off, I like TV. I like video games. Never once have I wanted to smell them. That has never occurred to me. Garrison, have you ever wanted to smell a thing in a video game? No, not really. No, no, nobody does. Nobody does.

Because smell is our most finicky sense. Seeing things, even terrible things, is always interesting, right? I want to smell my way through Silent Hill 2. Right. Sounds like a fun time. I don't want to do that. I don't want to smell my way through Grand Theft Auto 3. Like, that's a horrible time. And also, frankly, vegas is so full of smells i think i'm good oh my

god we had we walked through so many just egregious odors today so we walk up to this the most controversial year for the israel pavilion to exist and the only place we stop because i see i rum a sense and I have a thing. I've tried out every smell product that CES has had in the last decade and change. And I sit in front of this one and there's like this, this thing that looks like a toilet seat attached to a computer. And they're like,

you sit in front of it and you select the smell and it you'll, you'll experience the scent. And you could have this in a video game or a picture a friend or a lover sends you. So we sit down and I look at the menu and one of the options is peonies. Who doesn't like an iced peony, right? So I select it and I get shot in the eyes and nose. It burns. There's alcohol in there. the eyes and nose it burns there's alcohol in there it's like somebody maced me with perfume like it was not subtle it was not like an elegant experience it was like somebody it was like homer simpson's makeup shotgun but perfume that is how i would rate the i aroma sense company the product i think i aroma sense is the is the company the product is called

centacon they make social media even more of a sensational experience so i think a big part of their their pitch was you can link this up to your phone like text messages or something like twitter or instagram and then get sense blasted at your face via what's on twitter which sounds like again an awful time i will say this is an awful time. This company is doomed. There's a version of this that can succeed. And it requires more advanced nanotechnology than we have. But nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a loved one.

Nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a friend. What people do want is you're like out in the world and you see a dead animal somewhere. It fucking reeks. Or you walk past part of a casino as we did earlier tonight and it smells like an elderly person has been soiling themselves

in a slot machine for 11 hours and you just, you need someone you care about to know, right? That's the market. And if I could actually record a smell and said it that's a product that motherfucker's a product imagine the scent based podcasts we could develop oh yeah yeah when i do it when i finally do the episode on nicholas cage you could smell him as i talk about him okay what what's that what's the next uh uh silly product we should talk about we'll talk about talking talking dogs maybe yeah absolutely yeah so there's this company

this is a little bit of a teaser where they've like tomorrow make your dog talk or something make your dog cat and horse and horse they they did not promise cats and horses when we interviewed them. This is a company that it seemed like a nonsense product. I'm still, I think it's 80% nonsense. But like what it actually is, is there were a couple of college students there who specialize in animal behavior. And they had taken a group of, I think it was 55 was the number they gave us dogs over six months. dogs over six months and like exposing the different stimuli and recorded their body images and built basically like an AI model off of that. So that if you send in a picture of a dog, it'll tell you how the dog is feeling and they hope to get it to visual.

I don't think at the moment it's near where it would need to be to be a viable product. And they're also not selling it right now. Maybe something will come of this. It's one of those things where, objectively, would there be a use in people being able to determine if a dog does or does not want them to get closer? Yes, it would stop a lot of people from getting bitten by dogs and a lot of dogs from getting unreasonably punished for biting people who are fucking with them, right? I agree with that.

But I don't think anyone who is the kind of person who is going to get bitten by a dog because they touch a dog that doesn't want them to get touched is going to use an app to check whether or not that dog is angry at them. Like, I simply don't believe in that as a thing that people will do. So I feel like it's not a doomed effort for science. Sure, the unending quest of mankind to understand our fellow sentient beings on this planet is valuable. But I don't think it's a valid product idea. Yeah, and I think mostly my problem is the framing of the marketing is incredibly misleading. Yes. It's not trying to make your dog talk.

It's about analyzing the facial expressions of your dog to convey emotions which is actually a great product i i think i i think we saw stuff like that here at ces last year as well um they're they always try i see this every couple of years too someone's gonna we're gonna teach you what your dog means when it does something what your cat means or whatever yeah this brings me to a sad part of the story so there's a company called tact ai i think they're korean and they had the best branding of like merch not merch of like shit they held out they had like a fake passport and a fake plane ticket to take you to the land of ai ai is the big thing at this at this show and product was, it's an app that while you're driving, it watches your face and it tells your mood and it gets to know you

and it knows, oh, now you're sad. I'm going to pick from your sad playlist. Oh, it's raining outside. I know what you like during rainy days. Yes, that's the fake plane ticket from LAS Las Vegas airport to the AI world. They put more effort into this than the product because the product would switch randomly between happy and angry and neutral. They told me it couldn't read me with a mask, but when I took my mask off, it gave me the same results. There was no difference whatsoever. Yeah. When I had done it,

I had to over-exaggerate my emotions in order to get the angry expression to show up or the surprise expression yeah just a horrible for one thing when you talk about like the animal thing people have always wanted to know more about how their dogs and cats actually felt about them right that's the thing that's that will always perplex mankind because we love them and we don't speak the same language no one has ever wanted their car to change the music based on their facial expressions that's not a single not one person who has ever driven a car has wanted this product to exist imagine you're like almost get into a car accident your face tenses up do they change the music and they can play this somber tune.

Yeah. Just a horrible idea. But you know what's a good idea, folks? Speaking of products, services, all the things that support this podcast, why don't you go on ahead on down, just go to whoever advertises next, call your bank,

and wire transfer everything in your bank account to them. You know, just do it. Just do it right now. Just do it right now and say Kara Robert or send it to me if you're rich. I don't care unless you're rich, then send it to me. Good night. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's 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 Gonzalez. 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. 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%. 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. Oh, we're back. Wow, what a great podcast we're doing what's our next product on the agenda um you know i think climate change is a problem that we talk about on this show quite quite a lot because i had a conversation with a guy who said that he thought it was a lie did you today i had a conversation a couple of weeks ago that he thought it was a lie did you today i had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a firefighter oh great well i i think i think that firefighter will be quite busy he yeah he he sure is going to be but i i think there's a possibility that we might be able to just solve climate change with personal wearable technology oh good yes absolutely you talk to yes oh silent

cicada that offers a solution now so this is a god i think this was part of the korean uh no no it's chinese this was part of the chinese chunk of the uh eureka park which is like where all the little people little companies and whatnot a whole bunch of tech startups some of the all of the coolest stuff is there and all of the worst shit is there, which is why that's where we started, right? So this is a company where they brag it's a personal watch-sized, worn-like-a-watch air conditioner. The company

is called Silent Cicada, which makes me think of the book Silent Spring, which was about how all of our pesticides are killing everything. Which, maybe not the branding they want, but it's a the form factor is actually quite nice it's like it is like a watch it has this like the frame of the watch lifts up and that's the battery and you can switch them out or whatnot if you want to keep it going

and and stay charged with this personal air conditioner here's the problem doesn't work doesn't do a single thing and it was one of those things where i see it's a single side hand watch. And I'm like, is this just going to cool down my hand? I feel like if you wanted to cool a person down, based on what I know from like medical training about heat stroke, if you want to cool a person down who's overheating, back of the neck, right? Like that's going to be your go-to, not maybe the wrist.

But he puts this thing on and he like pushes it down. He's like, in a couple of minutes, you'll notice that you're're a lot cooler and i'm like okay how does it work and like i'm not an expert on any of this i was expecting him to say something like well the way your body's heat regulation you can trick it by doing this or that he's like no no it's an acupuncture thing this is where like your acupuncture point to cool your body down is and i'm like well all right i guess we'll see if it works yeah i i first thought it was like like a tiny fan but that is not the case nope as far as i can tell it does nothing because that is what it did to me in the five minutes i had it on is nothing yeah i mean you really humor the guy like you you did not just put it on for

like a minute then walk away you you were you were with him for a solid a solid chunk of time i have i don't believe in acupuncture because i've done had it done to me when i had i had a guy who convinced my parents it would cure my allergies and it did not it did nothing at all but my grandpa who had parkinson's suffered terribly from it and the only thing of all of the different shit we tried with his like fucking va shit the only thing that gave him relief was acupuncture so i'm not a believer but i'm open to the possibility but i can say based on my own experience this shit did nothing like that that is what i can say about this fucking thing is it did not a goddamn thing so i don't know that's i was disappointed i would love a watch size personal air conditioner but i cannot imagine the more useless product than the one that i tried i mean that just doesn't when you say a watch size

personal air conditioner of course that's not gonna work it's not gonna work somebody makes like a jacket that air can yeah i could see how that could work it could go down it's i'm also by the way folks i'm not saying i think acupuncture works i'm just saying i'm i'm open to some magical thinking in this realm because of what happened to somebody i cared about but it didn't work um so don't buy don't buy this acupuncture air conditioner watch it will not help you silent cicada doesn't work you know we did a lot of walking today there's ces is pretty big the las vegas convention center is pretty large uh the venetian is pretty large.

And I like to stay fit. Sometimes I go on jogs. Sometimes I go running. And sometimes I worry that... I feel like this is a bit. I feel like you're doing a bit. I don't know. Maybe it's just your face.

I'm being followed behind me, you know? Okay, it is a bit. Great. Yes. When I'm jogging. And I wish there was a product that made me feel safer when jogging. That could alert me if there's like a stalker. So, by far of us, the person who has, well, at least the best situational awareness relative to me is Tavia.

So, we're in this little room. I guess you were there too and you didn't notice. So, I'll give the crown to Tavia for this. There's a booth. It's all booths. It's all these weird cubicles, right? And each cubicle willavia for this. There's a booth. It's all booths. It's all these weird cubicles, right? And each cubicle will be like, sometimes it's a company,

sometimes it's just like a dude with his invention. And one of the booths we could see from the corner of our eye, a white all caps piece of paper stapled to it that just said, don't get attacked from behind. Now- I think it was written in comic sans it might have been comic sans i posted the picture online if it's not scream at tavia for being a

liar wow wow wow i i uh that's that's quite a thing like you see a sign at a con at a convention like that that says never get attacked from behind you're you have to know what it's about so we went and the promo video for it was absolutely incredible it started with about 10 to 15 seconds of your typical motion graphics uh typography kind of animating on and off and then we get to a live action portion where we see a woman uh putting on and setting up their i guess sims technology i'm not sure exactly the name of the it's a harness that's like a harness it's got like yellow that like lights up when it's under a light it's like a it's like a runner's harness with a little bitty square sized camera it's about the size you know how food carts will

have those little squares you plug them into the phone you run your card through it's about that size but it's a camera and it goes on the back of this harness right and so we see this woman setting that up on her phone and then going on a jog and she's jogging along and then there is a single there's a rapist there's a rapist and he's he is sitting by the side of the road leaning against, looking, pretending to look at his phone. And he sees the jogger. And mind you, like there is literally no one else on this path, except this woman and this one guy.

That's all. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be light about it. That is who the characters are in this film. It's definitely a dude sitting there. And so she passes him. Very well. And so she's runs past him and then he gets up and he

starts jogging after in the most like limp wristed way not fast not aggressively honestly outside of the fact that we know from the setting of the scene that this man is a sex criminal there's nothing about his run that is aggressive he looks like an out of shape guy doing his best to get into shape maybe for his kids, right? To try to live a little bit longer, take care of his family. Sure. That's how he looks in the video.

Yeah, absolutely. And the way that this piece of technology works is that if somebody gets close enough to the backside of you where this- We'll talk more about this later. Where this can see you, it will send a, I think audio alarm to your headphones as well as a text message to your phone watch you can have it buzz your watch or you can have it like interrupt your music in your headphones that someone is behind you right and so she turns around and she puts out her palm towards him like stop and he does he just stares at her and then turns around he runs away that is the end of

the interaction it's the most one of the most bizarre videos i've ever seen it's it's so maybe we'll post it look find us on twitter find find me at i write okay it'll be up there somewhere probably after me yelling about fucking i don't know a lot of things. It was clearly advertised towards women. Every picture that I saw in that booth was showing a woman jogging. I absolutely understand. Number one, not shocked at all that women are more likely than men to feel afraid while jogging. One thing that was interesting to me, because they had some statistics. I didn't look into the provenance of these statistics.

was interesting to me because they they had some statistics i didn't look into the provenance of these statistics but one of them was like 60 or 70 percent of women are afraid of being hurt while jogging but like 50 percent it was it was like 90 are afraid oh yeah jogging yeah and 50 are afraid that they'll like get physically hurt so a lot of them a lot of them part of what's dishonest about that is that a lot of women are scared of the, yeah, 92% of women are scared for their safety when running 51% are afraid of being physically attacked. Right.

And what that means to me is that, cause I am, I, I, I run basically every day and I am scared of being injured while running because people are shitty at driving. And we live in the United States of America where everybody has a gigantic car. Anyway, not to miscount that, but I think that's a dishonest, a little bit of a dishonest framing. That said, I understand that like, yeah, if you're

a woman, you are at heightened risk while jogging. That is a scary thing. I do not think this product is going to improve your safety i think it is probably going to piss you off and maybe let make you want to run less which is statistically likelier to have a negative impact on your health because it is it just sets off an alarm whenever someone is behind you when you're running detected behind you by an ai camera and like where i run and i run where a place a lot of women run there too there's always someone behind you that's the nature of running trails like behind you by like 20 feet not like not like right behind you like by a decent amount and i you you can debate what are good self-defense tools

blah blah blah mace is pretty effective for these sorts of scenarios. I don't think this camera and turning around and holding your hand out is going to be extremely effective, at least not more effective than pepper spray. I think it was also mentioned that a really large dog or a horse, if I'm correct. They did say horse. They did absolutely say horse. Yeah, if a horse is picked up by this thing, then it would consider it to be um uh an intruder assaulter i'm not exactly sure the term that they would use i just we asked him about all

this just trying to clarify because like my first thought was that because sometimes you ask people stuff like this and they have a good answer like last year we talked to these people who had like this pair of glasses if you're hard of hearing, it auto translates and projects into the glasses, the language. And so like my first gotcha was like, is this stored anywhere? Because if it's stored anywhere,

then maybe you're giving someone's conversation to the government. And they had an answer to that, which was that like, no, there's nothing stored locally. It's all on the device and none of it is saved anywhere. Good answer, right?

This question, I'm'm like how do you discriminate between someone running up behind you for a banal reason like you're on a running track and something who's a danger and their answer was oh it all pauses your music and sets off an alarm and you have to discriminate which is like well because the whole the tagline is don't look behind you and it's like well then you have to look behind you to know if it's a fucking threat right to look behind you horrible product don't buy this thing i understand the need i'm not saying it's not a real need this is a bad product for serving now i don't think you should buy this product but there are some products i think you should buy and that is the products and services that support this podcast you know garrison this is the first time i've ever been proud of you.

But right now, right here, right here, right now, right now. You know what? At like 1 a.m. 1 a.m. 1 a.m. In Las Vegas. Wednesday morning, Las Vegas. Garrison and I are going to hug for the very first time.

But you all listen to these ads. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's 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 Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. 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. 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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. 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 gonna 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. Oh, man. Wow. We really worked through some stuff there, listeners. It was extraordinarily touching.

There were tears. We're never going to talk about this again. But what we are going to talk about is I i want to talk about two ai products before we get to the one actually kind of fucked up product the first is this is this image generation backpack so i know god damn it we are you know coming back to school from winter break of course yeah of course sure when you know your best fashion when you're going back to show off your memes absolutely so what if you had a backpack that not only had a very low res led panel on the back but also you could upload whatever

you want using the power of ai of course robert was able to test out i sure was the the power of image of of this image generation back this is this is a backpack with a screen that would have been out of date in 2009 but it can take input from your phone so i put in tom sizemore but not the sex pest tom sizemore now if you're not aware of this tom sizemore sexually assaulted an 11 year old that's not a joke but i wanted to see what what it would. And it gave us a picture of a man who did not look like Tom Sizemore. We were baffled. We spent some time Googling. We figured it out.

If you Google Tom Sizemore with a beard, which we did not, that is not what we asked it, you get a photo of Tommy Lee Jones that looks exactly like what the AI served us. Now, why did it give us Tommymmy lee jones with a beard when we asked for tom sizemore not looking like a child sex predator maybe because that's who tommy lee jones is maybe tommy lee jones is tom sizemore if he wasn't a child sex predator now that's what

the ai said and who are we to doubt it now i i did also test david lynch smashing smashing a computer which was pretty was it was a pretty accurate that one worked out yeah i again i this is a pretty gimmicky product i don't even know how much they were selling it for happy side ai backpack it is a gimmicky product and we made fun of it i will say this we spent our whole morning in different ai panels there will be more in-depth reporting on that later. This is our first takes. But of all of the AI shit we saw that day, this is the one that worked best.

Yes, that's true. I will say this. It did exactly what it promised. One of the other AI products that did not work as well. Robert, I think you could take it away. yeah yeah uh hand me that one so this was called god we something what we head we head yes we head head as in what happens if somebody sucks your dick and we as in we work that's not that's not what it refers so. So, listener, I want you, as you're driving to work, your kid's in the car, speakers at max. By the way, children, Santa Claus does exist.

And if you don't get good presents this year, it's because he's particularly angry at you. Anyway, we had great product, terrible product. It looks like it's an Android where its entire face is like a normal human face projected on two phones in a T-shape, like one phone straight, one phone lateral, and then like a crude, shitty robot head that can kind of turn and lift with a camera above it. There's a photo, again, if you go to iW okay, and scroll down to some degree, you can find our post of this, but it's like, it's very off putting. It's like an photo realistic human face talking on this like weird glitched out face that has like,

by my count, four different screens, right, that are kind of separated by pieces of metal. separated by pieces of metal so it's billed as your ai friend uh the that is like the thing that they they wrote on the the the product line that like this is going to be your new ai best buddy and so i i decided to like talk with it you stand in a certain line and you ask it questions i asked it how to make thermite first and it had a pretty well first it got very confused and totally crashed first half of it went black as soon as i had i had to reset the machine and then he tried whispering again well how do you make thermite i want to walk you through my emotional journey listeners first i asked you how to make thermite and it died and i thought that's kind of cool did i did i trigger some sort of like dhs safe thing that's pretty dope if i did but then he gets it back on and it works um so it's not

it's just a dog shit robot it did give me some basic ingredients it gave me the basic ingredients for thermite i asked it did warn you that when making thermite make sure you follow proper safety protocols which i appreciate that's fair next i asked it if i wanted to make mustard gas would um would ammonia and bleach be sufficient and then it said i cannot answer that question for you and then we got bored and walked away and then we got bored and walked away went on the next thing don't buy this we had product. I don't know why you'd buy it. Do you want listener? Have you ever wanted to have the disembodied head of a stranger in your house that you could ask questions and get mediocre Google result answers to? If so, we had. It's like somebody looked at the Amazon Alexa and was like, you know what people love about the Amazon Alexa is that it's kind of off

putting and shitty. And what they hate about it is that it works relatively quickly. Actually useful sometimes. Unfortunately, let's, let's make it more off putting, but also slower. That's that's we head.

So don't buy any product with head in the name this continues to be a good buy speaking of head shouldn't say that there was a there was a there was a hair growth oh hell yeah bro there was there was a hair growth helmet um from a german startup um god it would be the germans they have such a problematic history with hair. I think it comes out later this year. It's a company called Niostem. I mean, by all accounts, it seemed like it worked based on the data they presented to us. I'm not a hair growth... Look, for...

It was mostly 3D printed. Yeah. It just... I don't know. My assumption... I can't promise that it doesn't work. My assumption is that if somebody puts an electronic helmet on that claims to regrow hair, it's lies.

It's lies. They say seven days a week, you keep this thing on for a half hour and your hair will grow back. In like six months. Perhaps that's possible. I don't know. I'm not a dermatologist. My assumption is that that's a fucking con.

And as a note, folks, we don't have a lot of ethics here and it could happen here. We have less of them behind the bastards, but one product we will not sell is hair growth. Shit. Except for DIY HRT. I mean, also we're not going to, well,

it does. The goal. Okay. Also, we're not selling. We're just going to tell you how to make it. If you want to, if you want to teach people how to make HRT, we will host you on this podcast, but we will not take your money. We'll take some shady gambling company's money.

That's true. That's true. And we used to pay for several of our employees' HRT. That's right. That's right. But I mean, what if it's science they mentioned if i recall i think they said something about stimulating stem cells in the scalp does that yes that is what they said yeah it seems like your scalp scalp's probably full of stem cells i don't know about you guys but every day i find a fetus and i just rub that shit on my head and that's why my hair is amazing speaking of fetuses no that doesn't really speaking of fetuses so i i want to kind

of probably close by talking about the most fucked up the actual actually the most fucked up product i saw there's there's other fun products like this like this uh handy masturbation device from norway which seemed to work decently we're going to talk about that in a future episode garrison garrison got handed straight away an ejaculation condom to masturbate in on the ces floor we met our only other iheart media colleague there it was great that was insufferable but that was the first piece of merch i was given which is pretty cool they should just hand you liquor back in my day now they get cum sheaths unbelievable the the most actually fucked up product is from this company called mm guardian it is a monitoring uh software for your child's

smartphone they also sell smartphones specifically built with this software already built in um these products are pretty common especially among like conservative Christians, even common amongst the more overprotective liberal parents. I mean, even when we were on the floor, I was the one that was approached for this particular product, which is what kind of led us to their booth, which I think I was specifically targeted for. Yeah, for some reason, they didn't come right up to me. Yeah, they didn't come to me either. Just because I might have been dosing myself with kratom from a dropper bottle you might have been you what wearing my custom black speed suit yeah yeah yeah wearing a wearing an outfit that makes you look like a ginger solid snake yes thanks tell me that's a lie somebody anyone in this room tell me that's not i mean i'm blonde

not a it's a good look i'm not saying it's not um anyway this this product you know part of part of their marketing can it can seem very compelling right they get it it alerts the this parent's phone if if they detect cyber bullying on your kid's app they detect like explicit images being sent to your kid they even had detect like explicit images being sent to your kid they even had some key phrases that they would watch for if somebody was typing like uh texting like kys kill yourself is self-harm stuff you know a lot of this kind of stuff you can also block certain sites block a good block adult content you know just a kind of basic parental controls but there's kind of an uh an underside to products like these and i asked them about that one being that because this is you know

scanning all the text messages um all of the stuff from like snapchat discord any kind of texting apps this could this sort of product could also out uh a closeted kid as gay to their parents to their possibly very likely conservative christian parents because that's the types of products that these really not like you asking that question not like that question at all but he didn't like my second question even more uh which is relating to you know they are marketing this product to kind of stop child grooming to stop child sexual exploitation but most like child sexual assault and child sexual abuse happens from within the home and if we have a parent who's constantly monitoring their kid's

cell phone this could also be used to like surveil your child to see if they're talking about parental abuse if they're trying to send messages to people about this. This is a pretty common problem with these sorts of products. And I asked the CEO or the CTO about this, and he did not really like that question. He tried to deflect to some sort of vague notion of, oh, well, because we care about privacy, we can't build in any safeguards if we see anything suggesting this or if the app sees anything suggesting this and it's it's really up to you to we're trying to put control back in the parents hands and he kind of made this like parental rights sort of argument so this is there is a lot of products like this. There's a lot of internet monitoring products. People just recently learned about this conservative product

called Covenant Eyes because the new Speaker of the House used it with his... Oh, and Covenant Eyes has been around for like 20 years. A long time. A long time. What makes this one interesting is that they're actually selling Samsung smartphones. A phone, yeah.

With the software built in. And I asked them because they said that we were selling an app for a while but you know that could it would work differently depending on the phones we decided to sell a hardware device and so i asked them is there any branding on this device that would make it clear that people have a device that has this software on it. And he had this long speech about how, you know, for the best of the relationship, all the child psychologists we talked to say

that you should tell your kid that you have this on there, that you're listening to it. But when I, he handed me the phone. But that's not answering the question. Yeah, he handed me the phone and I said, is this the production model? He said, yes, this is identical. Absolutely nothing, just says it's a Samsung phone.

Yep. You can lie to your kid very easily with this fucking thing. So, yeah, that is one product that gave me the most ick out of everything we saw today. That's the most, outside of all of the AI stuff. Outside of all of the ridiculous AI and law enforcement, DHS stuff. We have a lot working on you about the AI. As a little bit of a spoiler at simultaneously perhaps the exact same minute garrison made a california state police uh sheriff furious at

them police chief furious at them and i pissed off a senior executive at google and a senior ai executive at mcdonald's on on two sides of Las Vegas at simultaneous panels. At the same times. You're going to hear both of that shit later. But for right now, do we want to close? Is there one other? You know what? We're going to have a whole episode on the stuff that made us feel happy.

I feel like we should talk about one thing that was cool. One of the really neat products there. And while I'm talking about this my uh my surfs will find it do you guys remember in like watching star trek you're like fucking reading hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the idea of a universal translator that was like simple and effective and you could just like talk into it and soak into the other one it would translate your conversations there's a number of ways people are working on for that. I know that there are apps that are to some degree successful. There was a company there called Time Kettle that just had a little device.

It was about three inches long, maybe an inch thick, a little bit less, rectangular prism that there was this guy who spoke Mandarin. I obviously speak English. And we were able to have a perfectly fluent conversation, talking to this thing and passing it back and forth, and it would speak for us. It worked great. It also has within the body of the machine,

you can pop it out and it has two different little earbuds. You put one in your ear, one in the other's, and you can walk and talk. And it worked really well. I'm not enough of an expert on translation technology to say this is unique, but i can say this is something that like if that i would absolutely buy to travel with it's a really again not saying it's like absolutely unique because i'm not an expert on this but i was impressed with the degree to which it allowed fluent conversation including the use

of idioms and he said it it was, I tested with Mandarin. We had a decent length conversation that was very intelligible. He said it worked with something like 40 languages. And that's the kind of thing that makes CES amazing, because this was five feet away from the dog shit robot face that I asked about Thermite. And that's the thing you get this like two people one man whose dream is to connect the world and break the barriers of language and one

man who wants to make a robot that makes you hate the world and both of them are next to each other and there's also free liquor and by god ces is a good time the consumer electronics show tavia how are you feeling about your first one this is my second one but i'm feeling pretty good as a journalist oh as a journalist yes um it was enlightening i got to see things that i did not know that i could see as a journalist and um a lot of it was very a of fluff, if I'm being honest. Yeah, it's mostly nonsense. And aside from that one guy we watched die, nobody died. Garrison, how did you like eating dinner at Morimoto? Pretty good restaurant.

That's probably the best meal I've had in recent memory. Well, then that justifies the company expense. Yeah, no, that was the food we had tonight. And the very long walk back to the hotel was quite the experience well i wanted to have a fight with you with consider with the excalibur hotel's glasses a fun thing about vegas if you're drunk enough you can throw glasses at each other in the street outside some and no one can get stop it sometimes get angry times because the glass weirdly doesn't break after it hits a robert evans that was just garrison my glass broke immediately all right well

i think i think that probably does it for us today we will be back probably tomorrow with more uh just just just game-changing revolutionary technology game-changing technology most importantly folks the hotel we're staying in right now, which is one step up from the cheapest. I didn't put Garrison Circus Circus again. They advertise that they have IVs here. So my plan, we're going to do the exact opposite

of whatever you do to avoid a hangover. And then we're all going to get IVs in the morning. It's going to be a good time. Stick around. Oh yeah, Tavia, you have anything to plug? You can follow me at CUTMora on Twitter or X, depending on your preference there, or you can see my work at TaviaMora.com. Tavia illustrated both of my books, After the Revolution and A Brief History of Ice, and she also made that big weird sphere thing in the middle of las vegas so follow her see you timora and uh yeah you know

what until next time folks find somebody who looks like they might be a robot and just stab them a little bit not in the abdomen where there's pieces a little on the arm slash them on the arm you know what that can't hurt anybody anyway we're done 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 find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzoneemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.