It Could Happen Here - We Visit The Tech Industry's Scary Vision for the Future

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Gare and Robert talk about the most fucked up and frightening trends in tech right now, and what they mean for the future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture

in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Meow. That's horrible. You didn't like that, Garrison? No.

Well, they can't all be winners. This is part, I guess, three of our coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show and what the tech industry has in store for all of us in the future. Last episode, we talked about the stuff we saw at CES that was both cool and optimistic and spoke to some potentially positive trends in tech. And today, we're going to get back to what we do best, which is making you feel bad. But first, I want to open this up a little bit with Garrison. You're a Canadian. You're a very young Canadian, 20 years old, grew up in a cult,

and now you have just seen Las Vegas, Nevada for the first time. Did it change your life? I mean, I guess so. I guess it did change my life in my perception of what Las Vegas is and my desire to never return. In my perception of what Las Vegas is and my desire to never return.

But yes, we've been able to spend probably around half our time at CES, the other half just soaking in the impeccable vibes of Las Vegas, Nevada. Yeah, I've been tour guiding you around soberly and safely. We went to the Venetian and the Palazzo. We took a very expensive gondola ride. That was an expensive gondola ride. Got to see the beautiful blue skies of Venice and all their four corners. Yeah, your reaction to seeing inside the Venetian.

If you've never been, the Venetian, the interior of it, it's this massive casino, as they all are. They're all like small towns inside buildings massive and the venetian is like a replica of the city of venice with a fake sky and that is one giant mall uh i believe it's the second largest hotel in the world yeah it is um unbelievably large uh incredibly expensive and the fidelity of like the fakeness of all of these things that are based on real stuff is is quite high too it's it's a whole thing yeah it's it's really interesting because some of the most impactful stuff is all of like the fake storefronts inside because in many ways they're kind of just all glorified malls yeah um and glorified arcades a la slot machines and it's funny because like you know they they they make all of these facades on the inside

they have they have the the ceiling painted to look like the sky but it's it's it's just it's so dark in there like it's so like it's you see blue skies above you but there's like no light anywhere there's no light anywhere there's no clocks in the rooms no you never know what time it is you never see the outdoors you're all isolated in these little corridors leading from one shop to another with slot machines all along the way you're flying back soon are you looking forward to not being in a maze of lights designed to bewilder and slowly damage you enough that you sit down at a craps table and spend...

I'm very excited to see a real tree that's not a palm tree. We saw. Very excited to, like, touch grass, because there's no grass in Las Vegas. No, it's actually, I think, illegal in a lot of parts of the city to have, like like a grass lawn. Yeah. So one of the things, so obviously Vegas is, in an objective sense, incredibly wasteful. A huge amount of resources get poured into what is effectively just for gaming. But the other thing,

like another thing that you have to hold in your mind when you recognize that is that of all of the states in the Southwest utilizing the very limited water resources there if i'm not mistaken because i was just reading an article about this nevada is the one state that has reduced its water usage while it's grown by like three quarters of a million people yeah um so it contains multitudes and also nevada like vegas is where the the i'm spacing on the name right now but basically you have all of these different states in the Southwest that are all kind of coming together to try to figure out how to deal with the fact that Lake Mead, water levels are getting lower, and the Colorado River is disappearing in some areas. And it is the only thing that makes life out here possible on the scale that it currently exists on. currently exists on. And a couple of months before CES, they had their big meeting in Las Vegas in order to talk about how to try and deal with the calamitous water situation. So it is very much

this city that is like filled with simulacra of the past, which it uses to try to hack your brain to get you to stay up for four days in a row gambling and spending tens of thousands of dollars. And it also, because it's the best place to hold a convention in a very technical sense, like it is the most prepared for a large convention. This city can handle 150, 200,000 people coming in overnight and needing places to stay and needing infrastructure in order to... So it's also where a lot of things about the future get decided, which is when you spend enough time walking in the hotels... Kind of horrifying.

It's kind of horrifying. The fact that important decisions get made in this realm of... In this place that's designed to be mind-altering. Yeah, exactly. It is crafted. We're not joking about this. There are no clocks in the hotel rooms. The casinos are crafted to damage your perception of time.

So I don't know. Somebody should maybe look into that. I do like when you're talking about Lake Mead, a great example of the overall vibes of Las Vegas is as Lake Mead is drying up, we keep finding bodies inside the lake. Yes. Bodies that have been there a long time

bodies of people who had alternate ideas about how vegas should look yeah a lot of them were probably in yeah yeah anyway walk walk to the venetian walk through caesar's palace uh they they had they had some nice vapor wave uh leds displays outside briefly went into the the paris one which was honestly i think they paris handled this handled the fake sky the worst because not only was this the sky painted ceiling so low the the bottom part of the eiffel tower just stops where the ceiling stops they didn't even try they don't even try to continue the illusion. It's just a hard stop. Yeah. We rode a roller coaster. We went to New York.

We went to the New York... That's all a little blurry for me because... You were so drunk. But I... I just bought a... I dumped the attempt at like buying drinks from places and just got a handle of Woodford Reserve, which allegedly you can mix into one of the THC pina coladas that they have,

and allegedly it's a pretty good time. We went to Rainforest Cafe. I unfortunately bought... You got sicker than I did eating that Rainforest Cafe dessert. I bought this volcano cake, and it was quite regrettable. And then we walked over to the New York-themed casino inside Las Vegas. walked over to the New York-themed casino inside Las Vegas. So if you want a city-themed casino inside the city that you're in, you can go there.

But a different city. Creating microcosms within microcosms. You're just like nesting all the way down. And in an effort to make both me and Robert vomit, we went on a roller coaster, which we barely survived. That did feel like a very dangerous roller coaster. We were so close to vomiting everywhere.

Just, yeah. It was a good time. That was pretty fun. I felt great. So I just felt people would enjoy your first Vegas experience. And of course, you stayed at Circus Circus, which we just walked through earlier today one last time.

One final goodbye. Got to see a family of four with $38,000. I imagine losing $40,000 at Circus Circus. Unbelievable. At the worst casino in the world. Well, I think in order to segue into our next topic, it's Prount Seag. I think Las Vegas is probably

one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the United States. It would be hard to find one with more, especially when you're on the Strip. Obviously, there's a lot of Las Vegas... I have family who live here, and they can go years without visiting the fucking Strip, because it's terrible. But another... And so,

kind of, in a similar sense, at CES, there was a lot of stuff about surveillance, a lot of stuff about different new innovative ways to collect data on you and your appliances and what's in your home. Do we want to start by talking about the homme de pure of surveillance tech? Yeah. There was actually just an article in the Washington Post about this, about how unsafe quite a bit of it is. And one of the things that you may have caught in some of your news

because this was probably one of the more viral stories is that there was a lot of piss-based technology. A lot of pee analyzation. Yeah, Vivu had a thing. There was at least three different pee test kits that were on the show floor. I think some of them won some

of the CES Innovation Awards where basically you can analyze what's in your urine. Yeah, and these are always framed as like, it can let you, give you confirmation if you have a UTI. It can help people who have all these different illnesses. It can help diabetics. And I'm sure there's a degree to which that's true. But I asked the Vivu lady, and I didn't speak with the... There was another called U-Scan by Withings.

And U-Scan's urine sensor analyzes hormone levels in urine. That's interesting. Yeah, which is why it won some awards and also why a bunch of folks, including Consumer Reports, put out a warning about it, saying we shouldn't be celebrating this. This is an incredibly dangerous product because it all is going to your phone. The data is being collected digitally. And if, for example, you are in a state that heavily restricts women's access to reproductive health care, there is literally nothing stopping the law enforcement or the government of those states from demanding all of that data be handed over, potentially even in real time. There's absolutely nothing stopping that.

And the company's already said they'll comply with law enforcement with government requests. with government requests. And they don't have any kind of plan for the fact that they are creating a way to surveil people's bodies for the government. And when I talked to one of the representatives of Vivo, which is another one of these urine companies that I don't believe detects your hormone levels, but is generating a lot of data about your body,

a lot of biometric data, and the most she would give me is that the data is encrypted, which, great. That's a fancy word for saying we have it. We are sitting here right after one of the most damaging data hacks of all time, which was LastPass. It was one of the massive password collecting apps where you basically like centralize all your passwords behind one

and remember and like it a lot of people are exposed as a result of that and um i i just think that like the the this show such a massive part of it was we are debuting devices that will allow you to monitor different parts of your body at all times and get real-time biometric data. Your body and your house and centralizing all this data about you. We'll talk about Ring in a second. In one place, because that's the same thing with smart homes and smart appliances were very popular.

Smart cars were a very big thing. We're talking about like... Smart cities were another big thing. Other we're talking about like smart cities were another big thing for just other ways to centralize all of the data about what you own where it is um and how to effectively provide advertising to get you to buy more yeah there's an attempt being made by republicans in oklahoma right now to make it criminal to do gender transition if you are under 26 years of age yeah there's no reason why a product like this couldn't be used to determine whether or not somebody is illegally taking hormones

in a state where they are attempting to restrict trans people. Like, this is all... We're not just being, like, fuddy-duddies. These are all very serious implications, and there's zero thought, zero evidence of thought being given to it with any of the biometric companies. Now, one of the reasons we talked about that, those smart glasses that are for people who are hearing impaired, that caption conversations live around them,

one of the reasons I was impressed by that is that it's all a closed loop. None of it goes to your smartphone. None of it's broadcast wirelessly. It is all on device, and none of it is stored anywhere. And when they said that, that was part of what convinced me these people understand the responsibility they have delivering a healthcare product. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising

Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. We should move on to the other part of the panopticon that we saw and talk about Ring.

Yeah, the Ring booth was one of the more terrifyingly dystopian booths. And it's, you know, and it's... Describe it for our listeners. Well, I mean, they basically made like a white picket house. Yep. Again, CES, these are massive, massive buildings, and so people can construct

a full house in there, and they did. So there's fake green grass, a nice little fence, this perfect little idyllic home, and the massive, massive sign above was like uh you know ring keep like keeping our keeping your neighborhood safe you know like all of all of all of that that type of messaging um the in the model home they had there was like a dozen cameras on you know every all all around the sides every approach on the outside multiple cameras on

the doors there's a doorbell camera, a peephole camera, a camera on the fence. They had one door with three cameras on the door itself. Yep. And Ring is owned by Amazon. There was Alexa-assisted Ring cameras. All of this data gets used by law enforcement. Ring partners directly with law enforcement

to make data immediately available and make feeds immediately available. And probably the silliest thing we saw at the ring booth was this home security tiny little drone. Yeah. So basically they've built, and it's weird because the box it comes in looks like a fucking dehumidifier that I used to have or humidifier that I used to have in my house.

It's almost identical. But it's like this little plastic box and a drone can take off and fly out of it. And the drone trains itself on your house so it knows how to get around. And if somebody thinks somebody's breaking in, a person who is effectively like works for Ring, like an actual human being sitting in a call center somewhere, takes control of the drone and can confront someone in your house, which I guess there's a potential security benefit there. But also, you are signing up to allow Amazon to have a random person travel around your home at any hour of the night in a thing they control, in a little flying machine that they control. And that, I cannot put myself in that. I get, obviously,

I get wanting to have cameras. I don't think it's unreasonable to have security cameras on your home. I even understand how some people unreasonable to have security cameras on your home. I even understand how some people who are not as privacy conscious as I am could be like, yeah, I don't care if it's connected to the internet, even though that's not a thing I like. I can't put myself in the head of somebody who would want that thing in their house. Yeah, it's bizarre. Obviously, there's – again, health-related, maybe if you've got an illness or something, you might want something like that. I can understand how very specific purpose-driven needs, but as a normal person, wanting an Amazon employee

to be able to wander around your home seems weird to me. I mean, that's obviously also all that data getting used by Amazon. You can scan your entire house to figure out what products you buy, what non-Amazon things are inside your home what types of trends that you're using and all that can get used to help get you to buy

more things the the the one of the more insidious parts of like all of the marketing and some of like the uh some of like the video commercials for ring that we saw you know playing on these giant giant screens inside is they're they're really trying to also push... They're trying to push and normalize using Ring as a part of your everyday life, but for non-security means. Like, you know, when you're leaving your grandma's house,

you say goodbye to her and her little Ring camera. You know, when you're getting to your friend's house, you do little funny pranks in front of their Ring camera. It's all these different ways to make Ring seem like this fun and normal thing to play with your friends and your family. It's social. When in reality, look, again, security cameras are inherently antisocial. It doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons to have one. And as someone who's been burglarized, I do understand that.

It's not bad, but it's antisocial because you are surveilling people because you're worried about what they might do. That is a fundamentally antisocial thing. And so the attempt to, like, turn that – the attempt to kind of, like, merge that into normal family life and to make it, like, friendly is really bad. Yeah. I think that we – I briefly stopped by the adt booth and this is kind of this is kind of similar to the little drone that we just talked about but a little bit more ridiculous yes um they have at the adt booth this home security robot like six six foot tall robot with uh with like an like a LCD

little face with this big smile on it and it's and it's powered, or not powered it is controlled by you, the owner, by wearing an Oculus headset and it has rolling feet so it can move around by rolling

but it's like six feet tall, it has two arms, massive smiling face. And if you have your headset with you and you think someone's breaking into your home, you can put this on and control this robot to chase them out. And I was overhearing the ADT guys talking about it. And they're like, yeah, this is even just a great deterrence. Imagine if someone's breaking into your home and then they see a massive smiling robot rolling towards you.

I would run away very quickly. And like, this thing has to cost like tens of thousands of dollars. And like, this is what you're doing to, like you're willing to spend that much money to create this sense of safety. Really? Really? This is what you're willing to spend that much money to create this sense of safety. Really? This is what you're doing.

You're getting a robot that gets powered by a Facebook headset so you can walk around your house in a rolling robot to make sure no one's going to take random shit from your house. Yeah. Number one,

anyone who would do that is is the kind of person that needs to be have things taken from them um but number two like if you're actually concerned for your actual safety and again i i think that's perfectly valid um none of these drones this robot is security theater it's It's theater. It's easy to damage. It's easy to spray paint it. It's on two wheels. You knock it over. It can't get up. Put on block so that you're completely

covered, knock it over, and then proceed to rob the house. It's not useful. It's just a security alarm at that point. It's wild. People will find ways to hack them and stuff. You can't hack a well-trained guard dog which also will cost you tens of thousands of dollars less and will love you like a doberman pincher will kill your enemies if they break into your home and loves you like the same way you know there was people getting into alexa machines a few years ago

there was alexa alexa machines listening and sending info when they weren't supposed to. There was a pretty big incident actually in Portland a few years ago of Alexa listening in when it wasn't supposed to and listening to different conversations and trying to finish conversational cues. It's only a matter of time

before someone figures out how to remotely control one of these ADT robots and you have something rolling around in your house that you don't control anymore. Yeah, there are always vulnerabilities in these things, and they always get hacked. And more to the point, well, if you have some sort of security drone,

like your Ring drone, there's no way... Again, Amazon would comply with law enforcement requests. There's nothing that says law enforcement, if it was part of an investigation, could not use this technology to surveil you in real time. Yeah. So I don't like that. Not my favorite. And while we're talking about surveillance, we can't ignore uh our good friends at palantir now if you haven't been paying attention to the surveillance industry palantir is a company that exists to collect data and build machine solutions and machine learning solutions um to surveil people and to help

equipment like drones targeting and whatnot work better they're an intelligence company right there's like lots of systems they do systems it's not like they make a single product they help build systems to collect data and enable governments and militaries to make decisions off of that data that is like the thing that they do primarily systems analysts yeah the tracking i mean like what one of the, one of the things we saw was them, you know, analyzing home-to-data around, like, water conservation, right? They're trying to put a variety of their usage,

not just kill brown people. But they do a lot of, the primary, the center of their booth was this massive military truck with a huge armored box on the back that was filled with computers, specifically to collect data and to, like, do command and control for drone fleets in theater. And one of the things you know when you see a vehicle of that size, and it was very massive, is that, well, this is intended either to be very far back from the front,

which mitigates some of the uses of it, or it is intended to be used in an area in which the enemy does not have air power. So again, the kind of places where you're just bombing them, right? Like theaters like Yemen, where the rebels have minimal ability to do something like bomb a gigantic truck that's a target. But you have kind of unrestricted ability to do stuff like drone strikes, school buses, which has happened repeatedly there. We had a couple of conversations with the good people at Palantir. They were, I don't, I think we kind of figured out they were primarily there looking for talent because they would not.

Looking for people to recruit, looking for different things to integrate into their systems. Yeah, they would not show much of what they had. No. Everything inside the van itself was classified. Here, would you hand me my phone? Yeah. Find that person's name.

But yeah, everything in there was classified. Whenever we started talking, especially the first time we were there, because I started asking some pretty specific questions about what was actually in that and how it worked and how it was different from current drone command and control solutions and there was a very specific woman with palantir who no matter who i was talking to would come up behind me and kind of direct conversation and i think also was there to listen to the answers that were being

provided to me and stop people from saying things on her team if they weren't supposed to say them. There were a couple of occasions in which I asked, hey, can we check this thing out on the inside? And we were told, no, it was classified. No one else could get in. You have to gain permission from the army, they said. I definitely saw some individuals exit it, but they were Palantir people. But then the next day we came back and I watched a woman exit the vehicle and a man from Palantir with her,

but the woman was not from Palantir. Now people wear badges at CES, so their names are on display. And what they do is on display, although it's easy to look this person up. And I saw she had a badge as a speaker. Her name was Mary, or sorry, her name was Melody Hildebrandt. So I googled Melody Hildebrandt because I wanted to know, she does not work for Palantir. What is she doing inside Palantir's giant classified robot murder box? Melody is the president of Blockchain Creative Labs and

the chief information security officer for the Fox company, for the, you know, that Fox corporation. So it looked like, by the way, her Twitter says CISO Fox Web 3 engineering cybersecurity, former war gamer lover of farm

animals i bet so that's cool um and yeah over here we've got her retweeting a post about anderil which is um one of the uh peter teal companies like palantir is uh raising 1.48 billion in their Series E funding. This new funding will enable us to accelerate R&D and bring new cutting-edge autonomous defense capabilities to market. Now, I don't know why... I wonder what they mean by the word defense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

She's also pro-NFT, so that's good. I'm going to tweet to her in a little bit. But... No, it was very clear that there was you know there was pr people on the ground to make sure that the line of questioning if they were to if people were asking questions about their surveillance tech about this uh big titan truck which is what it's called titan um that there's only very very specific answers and like they were not there to talk to journalists they were not there to talk to journalists. They were not there to talk to media. They were there to recruit people

to become more capable at their surveillance tech. That was very clear. They were also right across the street, right across the hall from the fantastic RoboSend Transformers robots. So on one side, you have a fun Optimus Prime robot that transforms. On the other side, you have the rolling metal

death cage. That was most of Palantir. They had this skybox, which was this box that had encrypted communications technology, drones and drone piloting technology, and

a military computer that all in this little tiny box that they can drop into people who are in trouble. Yeah, they were billing it as basically, number one, it could be for special forces teams. It has a laptop in there. It has potentially several drones in there.

And it has a bunch of specially modified field cameras so you could set up surveillance on an area. And those cameras kind of work with a machine learning algorithm to do stuff like try and identify where landmines are. And again, the stuff that's problematic primarily about Palantir is its data collecting, its surveillance, and the fact that we know that drone warfare is generally pretty fucked up and has an extremely high civilian casualty rate and is used in a lot of theaters.

Obviously not in a lot of theaters where they are primarily just massacring people, either fighting for their freedom or trying to survive. This is the problem with it. Obviously, all of this tech will also be used in generally positive things like for example dropping a box like this into the hands of some ukrainian special forces guys to get to integrate them into a more uh advanced command and control network so they have better access to tactical data like is not a thing i don't specifically have a problem with that application. The problem is more broadly Palantir. Do you want to

briefly explain, in case people are not Lord of the Rings fans? So, again, these are all companies owned by Peter Thiel, who is a self-described fascist. Believes in ending democracy. Believes that democracy and freedom are not compatible, because freedom he defines specifically as the ability of people with lots of money to not have any kind of restrictions on their behavior or what they can compel other people to do.

Peter Thiel owns Palantir and Anduril. The Palantir, both of those are names from Lord of the Rings. And in Lord of the Rings, the Palantir was an orb given by the big bad guy, Sauron, to one of his lackeys, a wizard named Saruman, so that he could surveil any part of Middle-earth he wanted in order to send his armies to crush the free peoples of the world. That is literally what this company is named after. It is the bad guy surveillance tech to use the Oroki against the free people of Middle Earth.

It is specifically something that only evil people use. It's pretty cool that the whole company is named after it. And there were all these very nice, polite people in Patagonia-style vests with Palantir logos stitched on them, standing around. Happy to answer any of your questions. Anyway, I'm curious as to why Melody Hildebrandt

was inside there, what the chief information security officer of Fox would want to do with one of those vans. That is curious. That is curious. She's on Twitter. I did reach out to her but we that we also saw a few of the robot dogs we saw the boston dynamics one which was very impressive in how it

moves um then we saw one much more cheaper um uh model of a robot dog that had not as great mobility but it seemed to be more more suited towards the types of the types of style of dogs that were, that we've seen law enforcement start to buy. Yeah. Um, the cheaper ones with less flexibility, more mounts to attach, you know,

things to the top of the robot, which you don't really see with, uh, the Boston dynamics ones. They, they do not like mounting extra things on, but the, the other robot dog we saw

had this little arm that had attached to the top. That was in the robotic section pretty close to Palantir. That one was much less impressive because we saw both robot dogs. If you've seen video of a robot dog that people are freaking out

about online, these are those robot dogs. The one we saw with the arm on it did not move. It was, number one, controlled directly by a guy with a controller. It was not autonomous. And it didn't move very smoothly. The sitting in front of the Boston Dynamics bot spot and watching it move was really surreal. Number one, we both talked about this, Garrison.

It's like watching CGI in real life. Yeah, because it's so fine-tuned. Yeah, it moves like a living thing, but it clearly is not. Yeah. And it moves like a living thing enough that it's not an uncanny valley. That's not the right way to describe it.

Yeah, no. Because the movements are kind of perfect. Yeah. It's just not alive. It's almost, it's not Uncanny Valley. It's almost like, instead, it's like too perfect. Yeah. It's just so fine-tuned.

It was pretty impressive to watch. It was very impressive, and it's become obvious to me that one of the things that absolutely is going on at Boston Dynamics is that they feel it is important to them as a business. Some of this may just be that this is a personal challenge for a lot of these engineering guys, but I suspect they also see this as valuable to their business to replicate physical emotionality. And when I talk about that, watch a dog, right? You can tell a dog's emotions from the way that the dog moves because that's how dogs work. The robot dog expresses physical emotion, and obviously it doesn't feel emotion,

but it physically expresses emotion in a similar way to a dog, like curiosity. They're very good at mimicking a curious dog and the way its body language works, which is really wild. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network.

Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead,

now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. That would be one of the things I did not like um i mean it's impressive a lot of this stuff is objectively impressive most of the other robotics we saw there was not that impressive like i saw this this robot bartender that was making boba but it but it didn't know it didn't know how or it wasn't able to actually deliver the boba onto the secondary robot that delivers the boba. So this one robot with arms made the drink. A human picked it up, inspected it, then put it on a secondary robot, which then delivered the drink.

And this technology – I mean I was eating at a Burmese place in Portland a few months ago where they were using this same food delivery robot system. It's not brand new. It's just becoming cheaper and more people are trying to make it a thing. And so there was a lot of those types of things, a lot of R2-D2 on Jabba's sail barge, delivering drinks style robots that are autonomous. They do move themselves around. They don't need a remote controller, but they're not that impressive. But that was the majority of stuff in the robotics section was that. There was a few other smaller rolling robots

that were to assist elderly people. If someone falls down, this robot kind of goes around and will help you. Yeah, I don't feel well... That specific stuff, I don't feel well that specific stuff i don't feel like well suited to describe like to to guess as to how well it would work um but i think more broadly talking about autonomous tech because that was one of the biggest product categories at ces it was all over the place um there were a lot of cars and a lot of companies

doing autonomous software and lidar solutions for cars i consider that all to be vaporware there's a great deal of evidence here but fully autonomous vehicles um in the way that some of these companies are advertising is simply not they simply do do not exist and do not exist and will not exist and we did talk to a couple of people so again for the stuff that's very real about autonomous tech, there's things such thing as autonomous trucks or cars. Like, they don't exist outside of very tightly controlled conditions. All we are trying to do is make truck driving safer and less stressful on the driver, which sounds great. I mean, obviously, there's problems with the way the trucking industry exists outside of that.

with the way the trucking industry exists outside of that. But that sounds, again, like one of those products meant to actually mitigate worker fatigue and discomfort and potentially make shit safer. So I'm on board with that kind of stuff. But... The other autonomous and smart tech that we... Like smart cars, EV, electronic vehicles and autonomous stuff. There was some stuff at the John Deere booth, which was pushing towards automation, like we talked about in the last episode.

And then also their EV tractor just launched. So John Deere, if you're not aware, has had a series of long-running legal battles, particularly with farmers in Ukraine, over the fact that they do not want it to be possible or legal for you to repair your tractor if you're a farmer. Farmers have previously in history often repaired and fixed and modified their vehicles. This is both necessary. If a thing breaks, you can't always get it back to a manufacturing facility in time. A lot of farms are in the middle of nowhere. A lot of farms are in the middle of nowhere, which is where food comes from. And you also, like, you can't wait.

You can't just be like, well, let's just put harvesting off for a week or two. That is a problem. John Deere sees that as a severe threat to their profits, and they have fought viciously in courts to try to make it illegal to repair your own devices. They have lost a lot of those fights in the United States, and to its credit, the Biden administration has taken a strong stance in favor of the right to repair. And what we saw from John Deere at this CES was a bunch of very impressive autonomous products that just coincidentally will also make it

completely impossible to repair your tractors. I mean, like, specifically with the new EV tractor that launched, so much of it is a computer that it is impossible to repair unless you work for John Deere. When we ask them, hey, if this thing breaks down, how would a farmer go about trying to fix this? Since a lot of it is not not it's it's not like motors and stuff from like a classic car it is it it is like it is computer driven um and they're like they just can't it's

just it's just so complicated that an average person cannot repair this like at all it just isn't possible so that's the way they could or could try to get around this uh this right to repair issue yeah we will just and and it's being done under the guise of we you know by having this much more advanced we can use a lot less pesticides which is better for the soil better for everything um using less carbon emissions using less carbon tractor the farmer will have more time because the vehicle can handle this autonomously so that's's eight hours the farmer gets to spend doing something else. And all of this stuff that's kind of meant to distract from like, well, I guess, yeah, maybe he'll have more time but also substantially less autonomy and be completely dependent upon the John Deere Corporation in order to produce the food that human beings need to survive. produce the food that human beings need to survive. I'm also going to point it out there and say, I started this by saying that one of the major lawsuits was between John Deere and a group

of Ukrainian farmers, the same farmers, presumably, who were towing a lot of Russian ordnance away with their John Deere tractors. I don't know. It's that kind of stuff. And one of the things that I think looking at a lot of this autonomous tech, some of it's great. Some of it will save lives. Some of it, rather than reducing the need for humans to do work that it would be good if they didn't have to do, will do just what you recognize. Create an even less human job for a human, like taking drinks from a robot that makes drinks to a robot that carries them to people, because we just couldn't figure out that interstitial step. So your job as a human being, as a member of a species that spent millions of years evolving to be capable of creating nearly

anything, your job will be to take a drink from one robot and set it down at another. I mean, the thing is, like, we already had that same idea in factories. Like, as factories have gone towards being more made by machines, there's still factory workers who need to do all those little in-between steps. So we're taking this factory model

and now just applying it to customer service, doing the same thing, trying to automize it as much as possible, and then only rely on humans for all of these little in-between steps that for some reason the robots and all of the autonomous tech just isn't very good at yet or isn't really focused on completing. And that's the main thing that humans are going to be doing in the autonomous boba store that's going to come to your neighborhood in like 10 years. Speaking of bad things about the future, or at least the present, let's talk about Elon Musk's celebrity death tunnel. So if you're not aware, Elon, one of the companies, actually the company he started that is based on his own legitimate ideas is The Boring Company, which makes big tubes underground so that people can drive their individual cars through them and avoid traffic. Now,

Elon Musk is a man who takes his private jet between airports in the same city in order to avoid traffic. There is nothing he hates more than the idea of being a normal person or being at all connected to the lives of regular people, which is why you get a private jet when you could just fly first class or something. Because even if you're flying first class, you're still going to an airport and through security around people. The poors.

The poors. Elon has been vociferous about his hatred of traffic. And public transit. But also he hates public transit because you might sit next to a serial killer. So his solution is dig holes underground and let people drive there. And most of the cities that have attempted

to have boarding tunnels completed have been ghosted by the company. It is kind of a con. But they did build one in Las Vegas and Garrison and I used it. And it took us from one side of the convention center to the other. Potentially, if we had made the most use of this service,

we might have gotten, I don't know, five to seven minutes that we didn't have to walk. Just you and me alone inside the Tesla, not having to be around other people in the RGB tunnel. One of the things Elon Musk literally said is like, well, if you take public transit, you might sit next to some serial killer. The way this tunnel thing works is you tell them whether you're going east or west, and they put you in a Tesla that some dude is driving that you don't know. And then they fill the Tesla with other people.

With other people. That you also don't know. You're still sitting next to strangers and you're in this this tube that is lit up the same way a pair of like razor gaming headphones are lit up um and you just slowly are stuck in this tunnel with two random people who you don't know very no possible escape um i horrible like one thing i feel like obviously if you're in like like, New York or something or Berlin, I've been in a lot of cities where I've traveled on the underground, and I don't feel scared traveling on the underground,

because those have existed for a very long time. And so we know what happens when there's floods and when there's fires, and there's a lot of systems built, which is why you don't generally hear about a shitload of people dying in subway. It's an extremely safe way to travel. This tunnel is filled with vehicles that take, we know, about 55,000 gallons of water to put out a fire when the battery catches fire. And the batteries on Teslas, we also know, catch fire with some regularity.

And you are trapped in a tunnel. There is sometimes traffic. Near the end of our ride, we wound up in a line of like 20 Teslas and that did not feel good. No. Because you can see nothing but Teslas ahead of you and behind you

and you're surrounded entirely by this tight claustrophobic wall with absolutely no emergency exits visible. Or fire suppression systems visible. I don't know what they have installed, but you can't see anything. You cannot see a thing. All you see is the Razer RGB gaming

mouse. And then, so as soon as we got off this thing that was supposed to take us to the central area, it just took us to the other side of the convention center. In order to actually get to where we needed to go, we just used the monorail. The thing that's been there for a long time and works fine.

And monorails are also not great ideas for a lot of reasons, but it got us right to the other end of the strip very quickly, conveniently, cleanly. It cost $5. So, good work, Elon. Love the tunnel. Hope

you're proud. Ringing endorsements. Can't wait for there to be tunnels like that in every city. Don't worry. The boring company is not a real company. Yeah. Anything else, Gare? I mean, we already talked about the digital health stuff, which was a very big part of CES.

Yeah, I think that's most of what we want to touch on for now. Touchant. Okay. Well, that's going to just about do it for all of us here at whatever show this is. We will, at some point, have some stuff based on... Oh, yeah, actually, let's end by... I want to end by talking about, I guess, another good thing,

but it's a good thing that relates to the bad things. We ran across a booth on our way out that on the first day I had seen, and I had thought was just like a, I had assumed it was like a GPS solution or something, because the company was called Off Grid. And it's the off grid phone, we talked to the founder of the company, Ben Wilson, who is just a guy who, as he put it, does not like that. We consistently ceded more and more control over our data, and over our communications to large companies and governments and whoever the fuck else gets access to these massive or massive not anonymous data sets and wanted to build a thing for himself that could eventually replace his smartphone. So he and the company he started have produced these,

they're dumb phones at this moment, that can text and can call and do encrypted end-to-end communication. They also, if you are off-grid, like in the middle of nowhere, and you and your friends have these, you can communicate through text or through phone to each other, even if there is no network, right? The phones themselves do, like, make a network. They communicate just to each other. Just to each other.

They do not connect to the wider internet. Yeah, which is really cool and potentially extremely useful. This is, there's a number of applications that this could have, Garrison. You mentioned that the Atlanta Forest Defense people could benefit from something like this because it will, it effectively, they're about 200 bucks a piece.

Anyone who can afford a few of these, you can set up your own secure comms network for wherever you are and whatever you're doing. And, and the other, the other feature of this is that you can set it onto something called sheep mode, where basically if, if, if you suspect that someone who you don't want to look at your phone, whether that's law enforcement, whether that's random other people, you can set it to this mode that when they either seize or gain possession of this device, all of the data is immediately wiped

before they can actually open up the phone. And they will open it up, they will see this fake profile that called the, well, not fake profile, but this alternate profile called the sheep profile, which shows not the stuff

that you were using the phone for. It can either just be blank, or you could stick some numbers in there. You could have a series of fake texts. You could do whatever you want with it. But if you ever regain possession of the phone, you're able to put in a special password that will send the data through encryption

back onto this device, so you still have the things that you would have lost. And obviously there's a degree of, like, you would have to have some trust for the company. Yes. Because as Ben says, and Ben says, like, we are attempting to do this. He was very open about the fact that

they have the phones, we saw them, like, some of this stuff is still getting built out. It is still in development, they're still figuring out different ways to keep the servers secure, to protect the servers from subpoenas from the American government and from other governments.

This is still something that is being worked on. It was just one of the... We see a lot of lofty promises and very little thing to show for. This is one of the things that had actually, you know, just this one guy that had, you know, some pretty relatable promises. And was very open about what they have done

and what they haven't done and what they're trying to do. No, he was not bullshitting. He wasn't trying to overemphasize what it can do or what it can do at the moment. Like, it's still being worked on. But this is one of the future things that we will want to follow up on in the next few months. I think we're going to try to have Ben on the show

in the near future because they're going to be doing a Kickstarter to fund one of the next phases of production of this. But you can look them up yourself. You can buy the version one of their product, which is on sale and functional now, at offgridphone.com, spelled the way you would expect. So yeah, check out offgridphone.com. We found it interesting. We'll

be following up on that. Ben gave me very strong, the good kind of libertarian vibes. Reminded me of a couple of people I used to hang out with in my youth. And it's very much as that kind of like product of just a cranky guy who knows tech and is angry at all of the data being sucked up and all of the data that we just kind of agree together we're going to give away to unsavory characters because life in the modern world is kind of impossible if you don't do that.

No, and like one of the things on his signs was something along the lines of, don't let the po-po look at your phone. So it is somebody who gets it. Yeah, yeah. We liked Ben. So yeah, that is the dark side of the future of tech as this year's CES has unveiled it to us.

This is also the conclusion of tech as this year's CES has unveiled it to us. This is also the conclusion of our reporting directly on the convention itself. We will have some reporting in the future that'll be influenced by things we found here that we're going to continue to look up. And we should have some of the audio that we pulled from inside the convention center. That should be edited together sometime in the near future.

Yeah, you can hear me talk to Palantir. That'll be fun. Yes, as a little kind of documentary, little daily diary of what we were actually doing on the ground. So that's being worked on. But as we're recording right now, this is the final day of CES. We are almost done.

We are both very sore. It is surprisingly hard on your body. We have to enter Eureka Park one more time, but then we will be finished. And then we'll have to enter Eureka Park one more time, but then we will be finished, and then we'll have to upload this and edit the rest of the stuff we've made into a little piece for you. So that is still coming.

You say we, which was very generous. You're going to be doing that. Me and Dan also are going to be doing that. Yeah, I will not be editing anything. I don't know how to. Anyway, go to hell. I love you. I don't know how to.

Anyway, go to hell. I love you. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into'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. sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead,

now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.