January 12, 2024 • 46 mins
The Cool Zone CES crew sit down again, this time to talk about the stuff they saw that didn't suck, including a suicide plane car for billionaires inspired by Harry Potter.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Aol Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh man, welcome back to it could happen here the
only podcast that takes sole responsibility for the assassination of
So we're back. We're still at CES. We're slightly more
sober than we were last night.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Yeah, but we are more high on ces.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
We are higher on cees. If you haven't been, The
Consumer Electronics Show is one hundred and twenty thousand or
so people all flooding into Las Vegas for about four days,
where they walk around in a convention center that if
you grew up in a small town, the convention center
is larger than where you grew up. And it's just
wall to wall a mix of incredible new technology, achievements
(00:53):
that are going to change people's lives, absolute nonsense, vaporware,
repackaged old shit, and stuff that will get someone you
love killed, all just crammed together in this massive room
the size of a small world, and yeah, you just
kind of go crazy slowly living in it. This is Robert,
(01:15):
you know me and Garrison? Hello, you know Garrison, And
returning from part one is Tavia Mora, our resident technological expert. Tavia,
how'd you feel in your second day out on the floor.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Exhausted and excited to be impressed by stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, yeah, well that is what we're doing today today's episode.
Last time we tell keep that mic in your hand.
Last episode we talked about the most obviously stupid products.
So Tavia, I want you to start us off with
what is a good product something you saw today or
yesterday that you thought that thing is fucking cool.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Well, let's see. I think we're in the North Hall.
It was in the North Hall that we saw This
is a gadget called wheel me that was just a
simple rolling platform that I would track along where it
was supposed to go on the ground. But what I
saw on it was a road case, and I was
very excited. Since I work in a lot of the
(02:11):
event spaces and when I have to move to and
from kind of where we're like staging a lot of
stuff to where the site is, it's really nice to
have the extra help. The extra lift that was marketed
pretty much directly toward me. As soon as I saw it,
instantly wanted it. I could see I use for that.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, yeah, it seemed like a potentially really useful thing. Obviously,
the mount that they had wouldn't be able to go
up or down stairs. Well, but if you're moving across
like a large warehouse space or something like the kind
of folece where a lot of events are held, or
a concert space, I could see it being a real
labor saver. And we did see there was another product
there that was like it was a delivery robot for
(02:48):
like delivering food that they had built away for it
to go upstairs, where it basically had a large, maybe
two feet diameter wheel and there were like plastic spokes
and then the outside of the wheel is like soft
plastic like the actual tread itself, and so it would
just kind of bend to conform to the shape of
the stairs, and it was able to roll smoothly upstairs
(03:10):
on its wheels as a result of that, which I
thought was kind of impressive. And that's one of the
nicer things, is like seeing like, oh, somebody really puts
some thought into that. That's a legitimately clever idea as
opposed to a product we didn't mention last time. But
it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. A
guy who created smart plants, who used the power of
(03:31):
AI to make your plants able to communicate with you,
so It's basically a huge plastic flower plant pets with
a Z spelled with a Z.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
And basically you can't talk to it. But most of
what humane to we were just molesting the plants.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
It will it has speakers in the flower pots, so
would you like stroke the leaves? It will giggle like
this is It was immediately like, oh, this is made
for some kind of weird sex freak like some.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
And didn't it like spin back and forth a little
bit as oh, he's giggling.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It like it shimmered, it like danced the pod around,
it made it made small little noises. It was. It
was quite something. And the guy was incredibly enthusiastic about
his about his talking, his talking giggling plants.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
He was following his passion truly.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
You could see yeah in his eyes. I will say
the product worked. I'm just not sure it did work
the product is for, but it was one of the
more functional pieces of technology we've seen. It did.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He also said that like when the plants were dry,
it would like make the sound like a bubbling water sound,
which I think is a mistake. It should scream at
you when you have not watered the plants recently enough.
But I do love how clearly he was obsessed with
the brilliance of this design. That is one of the
fun things at the smaller booths at a show like this,
because like you know, you got like big companies LG
(04:49):
and Lenovo and Honda, all these massive companies with very slick,
expensive booths, and then you have in other areas just
like a little square that's just a crazy person with
the thing that they've dedicated their life to building. And
sometimes it's the most brilliant thing you've ever seen. And
sometimes it's a flower poth that that giggles when you molest.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Sometimes it's plant, but it's you.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
I always appreciate the fact that, well, at least you
threw your life into this stupid thing.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yeah. No, it's always kind of endearing, like yeah, yeah,
no matter what it is, it's it's fun to see
someone who's like, figure it out life.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, a man. Yeah, you know who you are. You're
the plant pets guy. Is that a good thing to be?
I don't know, that's not yeah, that's not that's not
on me. Uh.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
I mean, we certainly saw a lot of a lot
of products walking walking the show floor today, not nearly
as many metaverse products as there were last year, and
there were still some. I was finally able to try
the Haptics tax suit, which I missed last year. This
is it's basically a vest that zips up. It's it's
not as painful as some of the other haptic suits
(05:57):
that I tried out last year, which I kind of
you enjoyed the ones that are just like actually hurt you.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, but like basically shock you in such a way
as to simulate a stab, wound or something.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
That was cool. Yeah, this one by B hacked. This
one by b Haptics was very user friendly. It wasn't
it wasn't really painful, but it worked. It worked pretty well.
What else? What else did we see walking walking into
the big central hall? Oh? There was there was that
thing that I wish was real but probably will never be,
(06:27):
which is the LG podcasting camphor hand.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah. So LG the people who may or may not
have made your TV, but there's a decent chance they did.
They have their big booth. It's mostly like TVs and
smart home connected and entertainment stuff. But then they had
like a concept product that was like a camper trailer.
It was actually a really nice layout, but for what
you know camper trailers, they have all these little like
cubby holes and storage spaces built into the sides in
(06:52):
the back, and so underneath the bed that took up
the back, they had like a folding down space where
it was like it was like stored a half dozen
bottles of wine and glasses in a very like pleasing way.
But then in the center of the wine and the
glasses are two like recording microphones. Like that's just like
they made a van for podcasting alcoholics and.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
I respect very targeted audience there.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah. On the other side of it was a fold
down panel that was like a lot of campers have
that you could fold it down and it's like a table,
but on the wall, like once you fold it down,
underneath the part of it that folds down, it's like
a TV screen that they had tuned to like a
fire place, like a campfire video. Just like if I
am out in the wilderness, I am not putting on
(07:37):
a campfire video. That's the most depressing thing I can imagine.
Why would you do that? But that was fun in
terms of like actually impressive things. There's a product we
saw our first night out there. The time Kettle. I
don't know why they gave him up that name. It
has nothing to do with what the product does. This
(07:57):
is a translation device specifically, it's it's like the star
trekiest thing I saw, because first off, it's a little
retro It's like a kind of a thick rectangular prism
with a screen on it. And the rep from the
company was like a Chinese man who clearly was like
spoke Mandarin is his native language, and we had a
conversation talking into this thing, and it would translate and
(08:19):
speak back to each other. And there's like a little
compartment on it that pops out, and it has two earphones.
You could each put one in each person's ear to
have like a live conversation that's translated over it. You
can also hook it in through your phone. I know
there's a couple of devices like that. This is the
one I've seen that seemed both the smoothest and the
most kind of like purpose built of them. I thought
(08:42):
it was really impressive, and it's one of those only
you don't get those so often these days, but like
every now and then at a show like this, you
see a piece of technology that's like, well, this is
what I assumed we would be doing with computers when
I was a kid in the future, right, there would
be an instant translator, a babblefish device that you could
just fit in your pocket, and it is kind of
(09:02):
fucking dope, and I thought it worked really well. Liked
I could have conducted an interview with this guy through
that thing and it would have been pretty seamless, which
which was nice to see. Speaking of Mandarin, I don't know,
whatever products you're listening to, there's like a good thirty
percent chance they're made over in China. So support the
Chinese economy. We're back. So one of the things we
(09:35):
did at this trade show, most of the time we
spent was not out on the floor looking at products,
it was attending these different speeches and panels, like where
they'll have people from like they had like one of
Google's AI heads and like the head of McDonald's AI integration,
which is happening for some reason. We'll talk more about
this in our dedicated AI episodes that are coming a
bit later. But on one of the panels it was
(09:56):
AI is the Fifth Industrial Revolution, was the name of
the panel. They did not once to talk about what
industrial revel The other four were or why this one was?
They just said that title like five times. They were
very proud of it. And one who was that Lady Garrison.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
The Alexa lady with the iHeart AI shirt.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yes, there was a lady with a shirt that said
iHeart is Was she the dividend lady?
Speaker 3 (10:21):
No, the dividend lady was from was from the Synthetic
Information panel?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yes, yes, oh sorry, sorry sorry that was the other panel. Yeah. Yeah,
there was a panel in like deep fakes and AI harms,
and there was a lady on there who was like
some sort of relevant expert. But she kept using the
term the liar's dividend to refer to the money that
you make if you're a scammer, and she kept using
it in the way she used it. I immediately thought, like, oh,
(10:51):
this lady wants to sell a book and that's the
title of the book, right, Like, that's very clearly she's
mentioning it in such a pointed, unnatural way. That was
my assumption. Aparently the term.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Has existed for a few years now.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It seems useless to me because like, if you're saying
someone is a fraudster, well, the diviend is the money
they make committing fraud. Like, you don't need to give
it another name. It's not like that's like again, it's
like calling the money you get robbing a bank the
bank robbers dividend. Well, that's just a stupid thing to say. So, yeah,
we've been using that for everything now and now you
(11:23):
are all enjoying the podcaster's dividend here. You know, that's
that's what you're listening to.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Speaking of listening, we tried good pivot here, say thank
you loud to you, thank you. We call that the
Segway dividend. We tried. I know Robert's familiar with this,
but I've not tried them out before until today. I
think it's called chokes shocks. Shocks.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, I wear those headphones every day. Yeah. They're like
bone conducting headphones.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Bone conducting headphones, so they don't go in your ear.
They go around like around the back of your head.
They hook around your ear lobe and they vibe right
and they can make you hear sounds in your brain.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
They were they had they just launched a new waterproof
model targeting like swimmers.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yes, IP sixty eight or something like that. Like, yeah,
it's it's supposed to be. You can submerge it for
like hours at two meters of depth, so you can
like swim with them on.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
But I really enjoyed these. Yeah, apparently they can help
some people who have like targeted hearing loss, So that's
that's an actually neat piece of working technology.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, it's really cool if you're not aware of these,
because when we say, like Whin said, you can hear
sounds to them. They're just like wearing normal headphones. But
we have a friend who is deaf in one ear
and put them on for the first time recently. It
was able to like hear out of that ear for
the first time in years, which is like kind of
an amazing thing to be able to do with a
fucking set of headphones that are they're not cheap headphones,
(12:52):
but they're not like inaccessibly expensive. All right, Tavia, you
got another one you wanted to talk about.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Yeah, there was the product that we ran into that
was very close to the tact suit that Garrison had
tried on, and it's called three D Desk. It looks
to be like an additional add on you can put
on top of your desk that you would use if
you were working. The one that we had seen was
a standing sitting style desk and it has the actual
(13:20):
product itself on top of it, which looked to be
like a stand, and it had two monitors attached to
one plane of it, and then with like I think
a simple button switch, it would sort of like another
monitor would swoop out from behind them, and there was
sort of like this cycling monitor arrangement that I hadn't
quite seen before. And I work a lot with a
(13:42):
bunch of different types of programs, and I'm like more
or less stuck to my desk most of the time.
So this actually looked to be another really useful product
for somebody like me, not unlike the wheel me.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah. One of the thing you can if you've seen
like a drafting table, right like those desks, it's basically
a big desk that you can like pushed down so
that like the desk part is almost parallel and you
can like put stick paper and stuff on and you
can draw draw on it, like it's what architects use.
It has that, so like underneath the monitors there's this
top desk piece that you can like flip up and
(14:15):
you can put stuff on, like use it as like
a drafting table, or push it back down, you know,
with the switch of a button. It's pretty cool looking desk.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
Yeah, it would have like the two monitors and then
this sort of like this plane that would be sitting
at like a thirty nine degree angle or so kind
of from you, so you can set a bunch of
books up or a bunch of notes you're taking or organizing.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, as a general rule, it was one of the
like the products that I kept finding myself gravitating towards
in our free time. There was like anything that had
nothing to do with AI, because yeah, anyone who could
who could find any reason to stick AI in something
like people there's people selling like battery generators that are
like AI assisted, and it's like, what do you mean
it means? It means it cuts off the power when
(14:57):
it's full.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Well, unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
That's not a that's just a battery working better, Like,
come on, guys, It's this thing the tech industry does
that that has has been exposed by like a lot
of the products we've seen this year, many of whom
are like just absolute nonsense, like the the wehead thing
that that that like hideous chatbot that looks like a
(15:20):
broken human face and just deeply off putting. Now that said,
there was a really cool product that we uh uh
that I actually like liked, the AI use application. So
there's a company called Cellistron that makes they're calling it
a like a home observatory, and it's it looks like
a big telescope. It's not cheap. It's not insanely expensive
(15:43):
for a telescope, mind you, but it's it's not inexpensive,
and it is like a motorized telescope that it uses
like AI, like some sort of AI program in order
to cut out light pollution and stuff and enhance the
images that you're you're getting so that you can actually
(16:03):
get clear images of like galaxies and other planets from
your backyard. And it hooks into like a phone or
a tablet or computer like wirelessly. It actually generates its
own Wi Fi network, so you can still use even
if you don't have Internet. But one of what you
can do is you could control it from like an iPad,
and you could port the feed directly to your TV,
and you could like direct you could have like a
(16:25):
group of people sitting around snorting whatever drugs you prefer
to snort and like looking at different galaxies and shit
in space. And that was pretty fucking cool and actually
like an actual application of machine learning that I thought
was positive.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Yeah, you can have like your little at home star parties.
I dug in a little bit more on like how
AI gets used there, and it seemed like it was
mostly part of the image processing before controls get set
to the user and they have like other adjustments such
as brightness, contrast, that kind of thing, But it sounds
like it does like some image processing as part of
(17:00):
its AI capabilities.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, that was that was neat. Again, not a cheap product,
but like actually something that's seeing it used impressed me
and I could see wanting to have that, And I
could also see like a clear bit my roommate has
telescopes and stuff, and there's usually the light pollution is
too much of a pain in the ass and fucking
even in Portland, which is not the worst city for
(17:24):
light pollution in this country to use them very well.
So something like that, and also just being able to
easily drop it onto your TV and like hang out
with friends, like if I had fight at access to
something like that back when I was doing hallucinogens. I
think it would have used it a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, that sounds that sounds promising.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Speaking of things that I would have used a lot
as a young man. Garrison, you want to tell us
about the hand job machine.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Sure, So there's this Company's what you said to get
a second there. So there's this company in Norway called Handy.
They they make they make interactive, interactive sex toys. They
started by targeting the male sex toy demographic, or as
(18:09):
they I actually liked that. They that they actually more
often said the penis uh demographic, which yeah, which was nice.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I appreciate that.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, But anyway, it's uh, it's it's a little thing
that you can you can slight and it.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Goes up like it looks like a nice coffee thermoscy.
Its kind of like with like a little tube that
has like a clear plastic penis prism.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Next to it. It has what has when it has
like a has like a stroker sleeve attached in and
you can control like the speed and vibration just on
on the little like thermous looking thing. But the real
features of the Handy is that it also has hands
free control that you can you can hook this thing
up via an app to many different sources. You can
(19:02):
hook this up to whatever you're watching on your computer.
You can hook this up to movies. You can hook
this up to an Amazon Alexa if that's your thing,
and the sounds will will impact how the how the
Stroker moves. The one of the more promising applications which
(19:22):
it really also opens opens the field of music, is
that you can hook it up to like your Spotify
or something and the music and like the beats of
the rhythm will impact the vibrations and speed on the stroker.
So we can now learn which songs are best for orgasms,
which opens a whole new, whole new category for the Grammys.
I think there's a lot of trial and error. I
(19:44):
think one hundred gex is definitely gonna be up there.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
I think nickel Back is going to make a comeback.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, this is gonna be the Billie Joel renaissance. Just
just people spilling ropes over down Easter Alexas Christ.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
They also just launched a second product called I Think
just a the O, which is just a more classic
small handheld vibrator. Similarly like the Handy, It's it's based
on actual like sound vibrations, not a motorized vibration. So
it similarly can hook can hook up to music and
that changes the way it feels. So we have we
(20:17):
have not been able to test these yet because he
didn't actually have free copies.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
They only had to give Garrison a penis sheath.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
They only they only had the free sleeves. But the
actual device is two hundred dollars, which is not is
not super expensive. Uh, considering this style of like sex toy,
that is kind of standard. Yeah, yeah, that was. That
was one of the the more professional booths sexually. Yeah
and see yes, and this is they did a really
good job.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
This is a good time for me to tell my
favorite masturbation machine story. Oh so there's a product. Oh boy,
you know, for the penis having demographic, there's not as
many sex toys traditionally, not as many at least fun
ones out there. It's it's it's a little bit of
a barren wasteland. But there is the flesh light. And
if you haven't seen a fleshlight, maybe you've heard about them.
(21:01):
It does look like a big, heavy plastic flashlight and
you unscrew the top and there's a fake vagina in
there right. Some of them are shaped like asses, some
of them are sex asses.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Sometimes there are a button. Sometimes there are a mouth too.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, oh yeah, there's mouths too. And I once had
a friend who got in some trouble with the law,
and we had to drive to their house and grab
a bunch of things in their house and throw them
away because we weren't sure if the police were going
to be showing up. And so after we did that
that night, it was a very depressed, very sad night,
and we all got extremely drunk, and three of the
(21:34):
four of us are standing out on the front porch
in front of like the house that we're at, and
then the fourth person in the room, who was like
roommates with the person who had just been arrested, comes
out with the arrested person's fleshlight and for reasons known
only to them, and God hurls it at us. Now
we're in like this is a we're in Richardson, Texas,
(21:54):
and like it's kind of this walled off by concrete bricks,
little front porch area, and we all bolt to get
away from the fleshlight and it hits the brick wall
and the plastic case shatters and then the thing hits
the ground and the fake plast silicone vagina inside of
it slithers out like like a living creature, probably lubricated
(22:19):
by some sort of substance, and it was one of
the most unsettling moments of my life.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
I'm really glad you could share that with the Strawberry
that the sound was incredible.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
It did. Yeah, it sounded a lot like if you've
ever seen that episode Always Sonny where where Danny DeVito
gets berthed from a couch like covered in sweat. It
sounded a lot like that, I imagine.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
And we call that experience the flesh Lights Dividend.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
The Fleshlight Dividend. That's right now, speaking of jacking off,
The next product we're going to talk about is Jackery,
a company that makes some really actually pretty cool like
survival equipment, specifically like solar battery, solar panel and battery resetups.
And we're going to talk about that because it's definitely
like of the products we saw here the most in
our miliu as like the world is falling apart show.
(23:09):
So we're gonna get to that. But first, here's some ads.
We're back and we're talking about Jackery, which it's fun.
One of the things I appreciate about this is that
(23:29):
the hand job machine could have been called jack the Jackery,
or the company could have been called Jackerreye. And likewise,
the company that makes batteries and solar panels could have
been called Handy because it's handy. They have a solar
battery around when you're camping. Curious, interesting, interesting stuff. Yeah,
a lot of thoughts there thoughts to be thought.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Oddly, that ven diagram crossover is closer than I thought
it would be.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
So jackerrey is a cut I would recommend googling their
stuff they make. There's a lot the field of like
solar batteries and panels is super crowded right now, and
most of the batteries you're gonna are gonna be made
like one of the same two or three factories. It's
basically the same factory makes a bunch of companies batteries,
and a lot of them are very unsafe. There was
a company that sent me some review samples like a
whole solar generator and battery last year that I was
(24:16):
going to kind of do a piece about, you know,
surviving on a solar generator, and then a month after
it arrived I was still testing it. It came out
that they had burned down a bunch of people's houses
because the batteries were insane. No, yeah, so you want
to be careful with this stuff. Jackery is one of
the I have had good luck with some of their products.
They seem to be of a high build quality. I
have not heard horror stories about them. When you go
(24:38):
to the the their booth of people there seem to
be genuinely knowledgeable, and the way in which they set
it up and demo it suggests a degree of knowledge
about the product and like what people want out of it.
So one of the things they do have some really
large including some like some solar batteries with generators with
solar panel generators that are large enough to run like
(24:59):
a deep freeze, which is really cool being able to
do that. And the setup they had specifically was a
like an actual like serious, like solid like not one
of those folding panel setups that goes on the roof
of your car or truck alongside with like a tint
like one of those via truck talk tents for overlanding,
and then plugs into you know, either their one thousand
(25:22):
or like two thousand watt solar generator or yeah so
or a battery generators and just everything about the way
it was set up seemed really practical. It seemed durable.
It didn't feel like something was gonna fall apart. Yeah,
I can see it being like a legitimate like even
outside of the car, because that's more or less like
a hobby it's sort of thing. But having one of
these generators that you can actually run your fridge and
(25:44):
your freezer and your lights in your house all like
they had some like an outage.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Microwaves, stuff, cooking implements, o other kind of stuff you
might take for like like you know, like a week
in mountain trip or something. The main the main roof
Mountain Pad, I think I was able to pull four
hundred watts, and then it had two sliding up panels
that can pull three hundred watts so that they could get.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Hot and in a sunny day, they said you could
get like nine hundred watts an hour.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, exactly, really good for watts an hour, which is
which is quite impressive. And they have all the batteries
to store it. And by by far, I think Jackery
is the most consistent company in this field that I
could I routinely see high praise for because the feel
of like portable solar like solar charging is kind of
(26:36):
a little bit sketchy sometimes, Yes, stuff can easily break,
things to be really easily over marked. Like I had
a solar panel to to to charge my iPad that
really only lasted like two weeks and it just completely
stopped working. But I've only heard only heard good things
about Jackery. I have not tested them out myself. I
know Robert has some of them. Robert has some of
their battery equipment, but hopefully we'll be able to get
(26:58):
our hands on some of that this year.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
They also had a lot of different form factors of
the same types of products, so a lot of smaller
versions of things that seem to be really good if
you need a kind of more modular setup. That was
for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, they had like large ones that you could basically
have plugged into your house in case you lose power
for a small period of time in order to like
ensure that you don't like you don't actually have a
period where the power's out. And then they had a
lot of like really good camping sort of like off
grid battery options it's just cool. Take take a look
at the if you are if you are someone who
(27:32):
is in the kind of financial situation that you can
prep in that way where you're buying like solar equipment
and batteries, which definitely is never super cheap, right, I
would recommend checking them out at least as you kind
of do your research.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
There's like two more products I think I want to mention.
The first is Shift. This is a company I was
already familiar with, but I got to try these out.
They look kind of like roller skates, but they're not
roller skates. They are these sort of boots with motorized
and locking wheels that attach onto your shoes. And their
use case for this is like factory workers. It makes
them real, It makes them be able to walk and move.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
They said two and a half times faster, considerably faster.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
I was able to walk at at a pretty at
a pretty decent speed. You can you can lock the
wheels if you need to, like do more like delicate
mobility tasks.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Go upstairs stairs ladders.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
That was one way to even lock and unlock the
shoes themselves from being used. There's like a certain gesture
you had to make by you.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Lift up your heel I think it was, and it
locks the shoes so the wheels don't.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
Come you lift up your heel in twest and and
it Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
The boot itself had a hinge that was just under.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
The Yeah, so I've seen these before. They look they
look kind of fun, but they're four kind of factory works.
So it's it's it's it's kind of a mixed bag
where the device worked quite well, and it took me
like just like maybe like like one minute to get
used to it. Then I could then I was really smooth.
But the actual operational use case they're envisioning is like
(29:02):
being able to get like get more, get more productivity out.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Of their workers the same amount of money, the same
amount of money.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
So like, yeah, I think Robert made the pretty good comparison.
Like last year we tried out this exoskeleton, which also,
you know, they talked a bit about a little bit
about productivity specifically for like again factory workers, but that
extra teleton was also designed to help that worker not
damage their body. Like it was it was to make
sure that they actually can can stay safer and not
(29:33):
to as much damage their knees, their joints, their back
versus these little roller skate type shoes. Yeah, I have
no such have no such ability.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
I mean it would it made you go faster, kind
of like one of those walkways that you have in
the airport. Who doesn't want to go a little bit faster.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, that was the way the guy repped it too,
where he was like, we have these factory workers. They're like,
I have the best job in the company. Now, it's
so fun skating around on these things. Nobody said that
to you, bro, Like, don't lie.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
It's a nice thought.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
He also claimed that there's not been one fall or
injury with these things, on which I just I do
not believe because I almost fell down to testing these out.
I'm sure if you're carrying like heavy boxes like it's
it's very easy for your weight to get to get
away from yourself when you're literally walking on wheels like
and it can be controlling. It actually is more intuitive
(30:31):
than I thought it would be. But mistakes happen, and
those those sorts of big claims are a little bit
a little bit sketchy.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
I found myself kind of waving my arms a little
bit out in front of me to keep my balance.
I wasn't like confet on them.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah. Yeah, just watching you both, I could see like, well, yeah,
people are gonna get hurt. Now, I don't I am
sure because it seems to be easy enough to use
that I suspect it would. You could really get a
lot of extra money out of your workers as an
employer using these things, but at the cost of some
of them are gonna like fucking eat shit and hurt themselves,
(31:05):
which is not like in the grand scheme of corporate evil,
especially at the show where everybody's like talking about the
potential of AI to eliminate tens of millions of jobs.
Not really, it doesn't really scan. And I think we're
still putting this on the good episode because like they
worked in a way that they were technically impressive. We
just found it kind of upsetting that they were bragging about,
like you can get more money out of your already
(31:26):
exploited workforce with these. Yeah, but I could see someone
just getting these and because they would allow you if
you like, yeah, if you if you live in a
walkable city.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
City neighborhood, it can make your commute times much faster.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
And still probably safer than like you less risk maybe
than like a bike or something like that.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
Yeah, I want to see somebody wear those at a
roller skating rink.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
So yeah, that's called that's called Shift Robotics. I believe
they're based out of Texas. Yeah. The last thing I
want to talk about. For both mine and Robert's job,
we use a lot of computer screens. I'm looking in
Roberts hotel room right now where we're recording. He has
a laptop hooked up to a second monitor. I have
a very similar setup I have. I have a laptop
(32:09):
and a secondary monitor on my desktop. I have like
three or four monitors always running at the same time,
just because of the absurdity of what our works sometimes entails,
so it could be hard to get things done on
a single screen. And we saw this one product that
looked just like a like a very like thick keyboard
with a with a touchpad, but it had these like
(32:30):
AR glasses attached. Now, AR is a tricky field. We
tried a lot of AR stuff last year. Most of
it some of it was okay, some of it was
a little bit finicky. But this company was called Sightful. Yeah,
and what this basically was is that it was a
fully functioning computer but instead of a instead of just
having a regular display, it has a display built into
(32:53):
these yeah, into these glasses.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
The product itself looks like just the bottom half of
a laptop, like the keyboard part that holds the PCU
and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to
the keyboard part that holds like a set of glasses
that are plugged in directly to the laptop. That's how
it like looks.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
And when you put the glasses on, you get like
four screens that pop up. The screens aren't too big,
they're not too small. You can change the size by
using using the touchpad. And this require a lot less
like like a like a focusing like you usually when
you put on ar AR glasses you have to kind
of dial in the focal length to make them look right.
(33:35):
But this was all very clear. That text was easy
to read, Changing from one screen to another was pretty
was pretty easy. They had they had They had a
pass through mode like a lot of good ar does.
They had a mode where you can lock the screens
in place. You can turn your head and they don't move.
They had another version where you just with like keystrokes,
you could turn your head and the screens follow you,
(33:55):
so it was it was a pretty It was a
pretty useful device.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah. You could press a button and it would go
the screens would disappear, Like if you're walking while using it,
you can press a button and it would go clear,
so you wouldn't see it, but you could see where
you were.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Walking pass through.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, Like I typed an email or two, and like
did some googling on it, and I very quickly adapted
to the screens being virtual but still using a physical keyboard.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
I we didn't get like motion sick with it. It
was not. Now. I think this is like either the
first or second iteration of this product.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
First the first to market, the first.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Yeah, I think there is some ways to improve. It
runs its own Android operating system, which you know, if
you're trying to download applications. The fact that I can't
run Windows or Linux or even Apple's system, you know
that that could be a bit of a limitation. It
only had like two hundred and two hundred and like
fifty gigs of work.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
It wasn't really a full storage and power. It's a
little bit beefier than your phone.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
The company the product, by the way, is called spacetop. Yeah,
sightful as the company's spacetop is the is the actual
product itself, and yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Uh, we're gonna We're gonna keep our eye on it.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, I wouldn't buy the first in of this thing.
It's about twenty two hundred bucks, which is like upper
mid level cost for a laptop.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
My issue is at based on how expensive it is,
the laptop itself isn't powerful enough to justify that price. Certainly,
the fact that you know, I can act like I
have four monitors wherever I go, that is, that is
very convenient. I think I just need the laptop to
be a little bit more powerful, especially with how many
tabs they have open at all times. Having only eight
gigs of RAM just will not cut it. But I'm
(35:37):
certainly certainly hopeful that we'll be able to see small
improvements going forward.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Indeed, yeah, they had mentioned it as being a web
first device instead of anything else.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Yeah, Yeah, it's like a Chromebook, and I think in
terms of like it's actual yeah, efficacy.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Very similar to a Chromebook, like operation.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Wise, But my hope is that like the kind of
technology they've developed, it will get you know, if it's successful,
they'll make more parers. Now I do kind of worry
about how successful it will be, because, like Garrison and
I were both like, oh, this is perfect for what
we do, but we have a very specific use case
for our machines. And I'm not sure like how many
other people are in our position. But I was really
(36:14):
impressed with just like how well it immediately worked.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, No, I I was happy with it. You can
hook up an external monitor if you if you want to,
So that's that's nice.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
And I am a glasses wearer, and so one stuff
that they had for me is that they took my
glasses and approximated my prescription.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Oh that's cool.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Yeah, and they slid on these magnetic sort of like
eyeglass pieces onto the headset that you're wearing, or like
the glasses that you're wearing. That way, I could actually
use it without wearing my prescription glasses.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah, And that was really It's stuff like that that
lets you know that people making something didn't just aren't
just like trying to rush some shit out the door
to make money, Like, Oh, you put some thought into that, motherfucker.
I appreciate that. And this all leads us the easily
the best product of the entire show. Honestly, the only
one really worth talking about, Garrison. Will you hand me
the flying car brochure? So Jesus Christ, this is the
(37:07):
Cees of flying cars. Robotaxis is the term we heard
a lot. We went to a panel that was like
serious people in the robotaxi industry, which they admitted does
not exist, by the way, Advance to air mobility, Advance
of air mobility. It was the acronym AAM. Yeah. No,
there are several companies that are using effectively like these are.
(37:28):
Some of them are like ultra lights. There was one
of the companies that came here bragged like you can
buy buy a plane that doesn't require a pilot's license
because it's so light, but it's still a plane, which
seems like a horrible idea to me. But there are
some real companies who are like testing out electronic aero taxis.
Some of these are this is not vaporware. These products exist. Now,
(37:48):
what doesn't exist is the legal framework to allow people
to do this. Like the panelists were like openly like,
we want this to be an industry, but first there
have to be it has to be legal right now,
we don't know, like they they're still trying to figure out,
like what the rules are going to be. They're hoping
by the end of this year the FAA puts out
like a temporary rule set about how robot air robo
(38:10):
taxes work and also how they called them verta ports,
which is because these are all vertical takeoff and landing craft.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
At least the one that we saw on the show
floor looks like a looks like a Lamborghini with a
massive drone, like a.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
DGI type round top. And that's that's the one I
want to talk about, because all of those were real products.
The exit paying the air road product, in my opinion,
is absolutely not. It's built as a low altitude air
mobility exploring. Yeah, it looks like a huge drone like
you'd buy a fucking best Buy attached to a Lamborghini.
(38:48):
And apparently the whole drone part, all of the rotors
fold back into the body when you're driving it as
a car.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
Like a like a transformer, like a transformer.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
And the reason why I say this is the best
product in cees is not that I think it would
work or be safe. Because we talked to the people
and the person who was told to us is their
technical expert, and neither of them could answer if it
had airbags. They did say probably. They did say probably.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Which isn't what you want to hear.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
No, that you should have that answer.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
That's not a tough question, that's not a gotcha does
your car have airbags?
Speaker 3 (39:25):
First, First, the PR guy that we were talking to
was very open about knowing almost nothing about the technical
aspects of this device. And then when we talked to
the technical person, they too didn't know very much about it, so,
which just isn't very reassuring.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Like and I even tried to do it the easy
way where I was like, well, I know ultra light
aircraft you don't need a pilot's license for so do
you need Does this qualify? And they were basically said, no,
we don't know, we don't know yet. Yeah, it'll take
some kind of license probably. What kind of range does
it get? They said twenty kilometers by.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Air about twenty minutes per.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Chart, Yeah, which seems like a dangerously short amount of
time to be flying you and a loved one potentially
in a thing it is.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
It is pretty low altitude. I think they said it
maxes out at around one hundred meters.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
One hundred No, they said one hundred meters.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Sorry, So it's really not for going up super high.
And I when we went to the more like expert panel,
a lot of these use cases for this, they imagine
is kind of replacing helicopters in cities. There's like metavac
use cases. But a lot of people were talking about
like testing these things out in New York where rich
(40:37):
people use helicopters to get around the city, and this
is what they want to replace them with. Because these
can be purely electric, these can be much more because
these can be much quieter. So that was what a
lot of what they were talking about. However, again most
of the panel was just them just complaining that the
government hasn't done enough work to make this a real industry.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Garrison, I got, you're not aware of this topic. You
just handed me the flyer we got from them that
I don't think either of us read through. Here's their story.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Oh oh boy.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Sale Beyond Limits twenty thirteen. Zoo Deli ignited Erot with
a daring dream to turn the enchanting broomsticks of Harry
Potter into tangible wonder. Oh no, a tribe of daring
mind set forth on the thrilling journey of crafting electric
marbles that could take humans to the skies through tireless exploration.
The first ever prototype, the flying motorcycle. Gracefully, this is
(41:33):
all a Harry Potter thing. Some madman from China fell
so in love with Harry Potter that he made a
death car. I'm back around to loving it again.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Average tech industry guy, brain poisoned by Harry Potter creates
death device.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
I feel like this guy and the plant pet sky
are probably like pretty tight.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
They're both the same kind of why is there somebody
apocaly ten based around Harry Potter?
Speaker 3 (42:02):
What's going on in this industry?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
And it is so the other brochure they had it
shows like the flying car, the modular flying car, which
looks like a cyber truck because if it had like
you know, you can get a truck, you can put
like a bed cap on the beds. It's basically like
a big it's like a cyber truck with one of those,
but the bed cap opens up to deploy like a
quad copter thing that human beings can ride in.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Kind of like sound wave in Transform, which.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Is like it's a cool idea from like a kid's
point of view. I think the idea here is that,
you know, John McAfee used to do this thing where
he would live in the desert with a cult of
weirdos and they would fly around on gliders until he
got his nephew and an old man killed in a
glider crash. This is this is the dream yeah, of
that Harry Potter fan.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
I mean, I this The reason why I'm actually very
pro this product is because the only people that are
going to use these are really rich. Yes, yeah, I
think there's a high chance this could take out a
lot of them.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
This this has the best chance of dropping multiple billionaires
of anything since the Death's Up.
Speaker 5 (43:09):
Like we comel from one hundred meters in the air,
just crashing out of the sky in Santa Monica and
san billionaires just taking out whole lanes of traffic.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Imaginers, I meagine you're walking through the park one day
and a billionaire comes flying down from the sky and
lands in like a two million dollar drone.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
The prototype that they say they got to fly was
two tons. Wow, you could really do a lot of
damage with that. Well, this is this is all quite exciting.
Keep your eye on the sky, folks, Maybe wear a
helmet for a while until this all shakes out. Like
there's the story in the news right now that like
(43:52):
some dude in Portland had the fucking door of that
Alaska Airlines flight in his backyard. And I can't wait
until that's like a third to Elon Musk, just like
Lance in someone's yard.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Like two million dollars.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Oh yeah, yeah. And by the way, if fucking a
billionaire's carcass winds up in my lawn, I got a
new punch bowl with their skull, I'm gonna harvest their pros.
We call the billionaires division the billionaire's dividend. Well, all right, everybody,
anyone Tapia, you have anything to plug?
Speaker 4 (44:24):
Oh yeah, you can find me on Twitter or x
at cut Mora, or if you want to learn a
little bit more about me and my interactive and immersive work,
you can see my work at tabiamora dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
You can also see her work in my book A
Brief History of Ice, where she did all the illustrations,
or in my book After the Revolution where she did
all the illustrations, or in the sequel which will come
out when I finished those last two fucking chapters like
three years from now, huh or in Vegas, yeah tomorrow
to Laura. All right, well we're done.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot 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 cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Aol Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh man, welcome back to it could happen here the
only podcast that takes sole responsibility for the assassination of
So we're back. We're still at CES. We're slightly more
sober than we were last night.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Yeah, but we are more high on ces.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
We are higher on cees. If you haven't been, The
Consumer Electronics Show is one hundred and twenty thousand or
so people all flooding into Las Vegas for about four days,
where they walk around in a convention center that if
you grew up in a small town, the convention center
is larger than where you grew up. And it's just
wall to wall a mix of incredible new technology, achievements
(00:53):
that are going to change people's lives, absolute nonsense, vaporware,
repackaged old shit, and stuff that will get someone you
love killed, all just crammed together in this massive room
the size of a small world, and yeah, you just
kind of go crazy slowly living in it. This is Robert,
(01:15):
you know me and Garrison? Hello, you know Garrison, And
returning from part one is Tavia Mora, our resident technological expert. Tavia,
how'd you feel in your second day out on the floor.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Exhausted and excited to be impressed by stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, yeah, well that is what we're doing today today's episode.
Last time we tell keep that mic in your hand.
Last episode we talked about the most obviously stupid products.
So Tavia, I want you to start us off with
what is a good product something you saw today or
yesterday that you thought that thing is fucking cool.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Well, let's see. I think we're in the North Hall.
It was in the North Hall that we saw This
is a gadget called wheel me that was just a
simple rolling platform that I would track along where it
was supposed to go on the ground. But what I
saw on it was a road case, and I was
very excited. Since I work in a lot of the
(02:11):
event spaces and when I have to move to and
from kind of where we're like staging a lot of
stuff to where the site is, it's really nice to
have the extra help. The extra lift that was marketed
pretty much directly toward me. As soon as I saw it,
instantly wanted it. I could see I use for that.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, yeah, it seemed like a potentially really useful thing. Obviously,
the mount that they had wouldn't be able to go
up or down stairs. Well, but if you're moving across
like a large warehouse space or something like the kind
of folece where a lot of events are held, or
a concert space, I could see it being a real
labor saver. And we did see there was another product
there that was like it was a delivery robot for
(02:48):
like delivering food that they had built away for it
to go upstairs, where it basically had a large, maybe
two feet diameter wheel and there were like plastic spokes
and then the outside of the wheel is like soft
plastic like the actual tread itself, and so it would
just kind of bend to conform to the shape of
the stairs, and it was able to roll smoothly upstairs
(03:10):
on its wheels as a result of that, which I
thought was kind of impressive. And that's one of the
nicer things, is like seeing like, oh, somebody really puts
some thought into that. That's a legitimately clever idea as
opposed to a product we didn't mention last time. But
it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. A
guy who created smart plants, who used the power of
(03:31):
AI to make your plants able to communicate with you,
so It's basically a huge plastic flower plant pets with
a Z spelled with a Z.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
And basically you can't talk to it. But most of
what humane to we were just molesting the plants.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
It will it has speakers in the flower pots, so
would you like stroke the leaves? It will giggle like
this is It was immediately like, oh, this is made
for some kind of weird sex freak like some.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
And didn't it like spin back and forth a little
bit as oh, he's giggling.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It like it shimmered, it like danced the pod around,
it made it made small little noises. It was. It
was quite something. And the guy was incredibly enthusiastic about
his about his talking, his talking giggling plants.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
He was following his passion truly.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
You could see yeah in his eyes. I will say
the product worked. I'm just not sure it did work
the product is for, but it was one of the
more functional pieces of technology we've seen. It did.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He also said that like when the plants were dry,
it would like make the sound like a bubbling water sound,
which I think is a mistake. It should scream at
you when you have not watered the plants recently enough.
But I do love how clearly he was obsessed with
the brilliance of this design. That is one of the
fun things at the smaller booths at a show like this,
because like you know, you got like big companies LG
(04:49):
and Lenovo and Honda, all these massive companies with very slick,
expensive booths, and then you have in other areas just
like a little square that's just a crazy person with
the thing that they've dedicated their life to building. And
sometimes it's the most brilliant thing you've ever seen. And
sometimes it's a flower poth that that giggles when you molest.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Sometimes it's plant, but it's you.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
I always appreciate the fact that, well, at least you
threw your life into this stupid thing.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yeah. No, it's always kind of endearing, like yeah, yeah,
no matter what it is, it's it's fun to see
someone who's like, figure it out life.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, a man. Yeah, you know who you are. You're
the plant pets guy. Is that a good thing to be?
I don't know, that's not yeah, that's not that's not
on me. Uh.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
I mean, we certainly saw a lot of a lot
of products walking walking the show floor today, not nearly
as many metaverse products as there were last year, and
there were still some. I was finally able to try
the Haptics tax suit, which I missed last year. This
is it's basically a vest that zips up. It's it's
not as painful as some of the other haptic suits
(05:57):
that I tried out last year, which I kind of
you enjoyed the ones that are just like actually hurt you.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, but like basically shock you in such a way
as to simulate a stab, wound or something.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
That was cool. Yeah, this one by B hacked. This
one by b Haptics was very user friendly. It wasn't
it wasn't really painful, but it worked. It worked pretty well.
What else? What else did we see walking walking into
the big central hall? Oh? There was there was that
thing that I wish was real but probably will never be,
(06:27):
which is the LG podcasting camphor hand.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah. So LG the people who may or may not
have made your TV, but there's a decent chance they did.
They have their big booth. It's mostly like TVs and
smart home connected and entertainment stuff. But then they had
like a concept product that was like a camper trailer.
It was actually a really nice layout, but for what
you know camper trailers, they have all these little like
cubby holes and storage spaces built into the sides in
(06:52):
the back, and so underneath the bed that took up
the back, they had like a folding down space where
it was like it was like stored a half dozen
bottles of wine and glasses in a very like pleasing way.
But then in the center of the wine and the
glasses are two like recording microphones. Like that's just like
they made a van for podcasting alcoholics and.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
I respect very targeted audience there.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah. On the other side of it was a fold
down panel that was like a lot of campers have
that you could fold it down and it's like a table,
but on the wall, like once you fold it down,
underneath the part of it that folds down, it's like
a TV screen that they had tuned to like a
fire place, like a campfire video. Just like if I
am out in the wilderness, I am not putting on
(07:37):
a campfire video. That's the most depressing thing I can imagine.
Why would you do that? But that was fun in
terms of like actually impressive things. There's a product we
saw our first night out there. The time Kettle. I
don't know why they gave him up that name. It
has nothing to do with what the product does. This
(07:57):
is a translation device specifically, it's it's like the star
trekiest thing I saw, because first off, it's a little
retro It's like a kind of a thick rectangular prism
with a screen on it. And the rep from the
company was like a Chinese man who clearly was like
spoke Mandarin is his native language, and we had a
conversation talking into this thing, and it would translate and
(08:19):
speak back to each other. And there's like a little
compartment on it that pops out, and it has two earphones.
You could each put one in each person's ear to
have like a live conversation that's translated over it. You
can also hook it in through your phone. I know
there's a couple of devices like that. This is the
one I've seen that seemed both the smoothest and the
most kind of like purpose built of them. I thought
(08:42):
it was really impressive, and it's one of those only
you don't get those so often these days, but like
every now and then at a show like this, you
see a piece of technology that's like, well, this is
what I assumed we would be doing with computers when
I was a kid in the future, right, there would
be an instant translator, a babblefish device that you could
just fit in your pocket, and it is kind of
(09:02):
fucking dope, and I thought it worked really well. Liked
I could have conducted an interview with this guy through
that thing and it would have been pretty seamless, which
which was nice to see. Speaking of Mandarin, I don't know,
whatever products you're listening to, there's like a good thirty
percent chance they're made over in China. So support the
Chinese economy. We're back. So one of the things we
(09:35):
did at this trade show, most of the time we
spent was not out on the floor looking at products,
it was attending these different speeches and panels, like where
they'll have people from like they had like one of
Google's AI heads and like the head of McDonald's AI integration,
which is happening for some reason. We'll talk more about
this in our dedicated AI episodes that are coming a
bit later. But on one of the panels it was
(09:56):
AI is the Fifth Industrial Revolution, was the name of
the panel. They did not once to talk about what
industrial revel The other four were or why this one was?
They just said that title like five times. They were
very proud of it. And one who was that Lady Garrison.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
The Alexa lady with the iHeart AI shirt.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yes, there was a lady with a shirt that said
iHeart is Was she the dividend lady?
Speaker 3 (10:21):
No, the dividend lady was from was from the Synthetic
Information panel?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yes, yes, oh sorry, sorry sorry that was the other panel. Yeah. Yeah,
there was a panel in like deep fakes and AI harms,
and there was a lady on there who was like
some sort of relevant expert. But she kept using the
term the liar's dividend to refer to the money that
you make if you're a scammer, and she kept using
it in the way she used it. I immediately thought, like, oh,
(10:51):
this lady wants to sell a book and that's the
title of the book, right, Like, that's very clearly she's
mentioning it in such a pointed, unnatural way. That was
my assumption. Aparently the term.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Has existed for a few years now.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It seems useless to me because like, if you're saying
someone is a fraudster, well, the diviend is the money
they make committing fraud. Like, you don't need to give
it another name. It's not like that's like again, it's
like calling the money you get robbing a bank the
bank robbers dividend. Well, that's just a stupid thing to say. So, yeah,
we've been using that for everything now and now you
(11:23):
are all enjoying the podcaster's dividend here. You know, that's
that's what you're listening to.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Speaking of listening, we tried good pivot here, say thank
you loud to you, thank you. We call that the
Segway dividend. We tried. I know Robert's familiar with this,
but I've not tried them out before until today. I
think it's called chokes shocks. Shocks.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, I wear those headphones every day. Yeah. They're like
bone conducting headphones.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Bone conducting headphones, so they don't go in your ear.
They go around like around the back of your head.
They hook around your ear lobe and they vibe right
and they can make you hear sounds in your brain.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
They were they had they just launched a new waterproof
model targeting like swimmers.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yes, IP sixty eight or something like that. Like, yeah,
it's it's supposed to be. You can submerge it for
like hours at two meters of depth, so you can
like swim with them on.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
But I really enjoyed these. Yeah, apparently they can help
some people who have like targeted hearing loss, So that's
that's an actually neat piece of working technology.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, it's really cool if you're not aware of these,
because when we say, like Whin said, you can hear
sounds to them. They're just like wearing normal headphones. But
we have a friend who is deaf in one ear
and put them on for the first time recently. It
was able to like hear out of that ear for
the first time in years, which is like kind of
an amazing thing to be able to do with a
fucking set of headphones that are they're not cheap headphones,
(12:52):
but they're not like inaccessibly expensive. All right, Tavia, you
got another one you wanted to talk about.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Yeah, there was the product that we ran into that
was very close to the tact suit that Garrison had
tried on, and it's called three D Desk. It looks
to be like an additional add on you can put
on top of your desk that you would use if
you were working. The one that we had seen was
a standing sitting style desk and it has the actual
(13:20):
product itself on top of it, which looked to be
like a stand, and it had two monitors attached to
one plane of it, and then with like I think
a simple button switch, it would sort of like another
monitor would swoop out from behind them, and there was
sort of like this cycling monitor arrangement that I hadn't
quite seen before. And I work a lot with a
(13:42):
bunch of different types of programs, and I'm like more
or less stuck to my desk most of the time.
So this actually looked to be another really useful product
for somebody like me, not unlike the wheel me.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah. One of the thing you can if you've seen
like a drafting table, right like those desks, it's basically
a big desk that you can like pushed down so
that like the desk part is almost parallel and you
can like put stick paper and stuff on and you
can draw draw on it, like it's what architects use.
It has that, so like underneath the monitors there's this
top desk piece that you can like flip up and
(14:15):
you can put stuff on, like use it as like
a drafting table, or push it back down, you know,
with the switch of a button. It's pretty cool looking desk.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
Yeah, it would have like the two monitors and then
this sort of like this plane that would be sitting
at like a thirty nine degree angle or so kind
of from you, so you can set a bunch of
books up or a bunch of notes you're taking or organizing.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, as a general rule, it was one of the
like the products that I kept finding myself gravitating towards
in our free time. There was like anything that had
nothing to do with AI, because yeah, anyone who could
who could find any reason to stick AI in something
like people there's people selling like battery generators that are
like AI assisted, and it's like, what do you mean
it means? It means it cuts off the power when
(14:57):
it's full.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Well, unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
That's not a that's just a battery working better, Like,
come on, guys, It's this thing the tech industry does
that that has has been exposed by like a lot
of the products we've seen this year, many of whom
are like just absolute nonsense, like the the wehead thing
that that that like hideous chatbot that looks like a
(15:20):
broken human face and just deeply off putting. Now that said,
there was a really cool product that we uh uh
that I actually like liked, the AI use application. So
there's a company called Cellistron that makes they're calling it
a like a home observatory, and it's it looks like
a big telescope. It's not cheap. It's not insanely expensive
(15:43):
for a telescope, mind you, but it's it's not inexpensive,
and it is like a motorized telescope that it uses
like AI, like some sort of AI program in order
to cut out light pollution and stuff and enhance the
images that you're you're getting so that you can actually
(16:03):
get clear images of like galaxies and other planets from
your backyard. And it hooks into like a phone or
a tablet or computer like wirelessly. It actually generates its
own Wi Fi network, so you can still use even
if you don't have Internet. But one of what you
can do is you could control it from like an iPad,
and you could port the feed directly to your TV,
and you could like direct you could have like a
(16:25):
group of people sitting around snorting whatever drugs you prefer
to snort and like looking at different galaxies and shit
in space. And that was pretty fucking cool and actually
like an actual application of machine learning that I thought
was positive.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Yeah, you can have like your little at home star parties.
I dug in a little bit more on like how
AI gets used there, and it seemed like it was
mostly part of the image processing before controls get set
to the user and they have like other adjustments such
as brightness, contrast, that kind of thing, But it sounds
like it does like some image processing as part of
(17:00):
its AI capabilities.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, that was that was neat. Again, not a cheap product,
but like actually something that's seeing it used impressed me
and I could see wanting to have that, And I
could also see like a clear bit my roommate has
telescopes and stuff, and there's usually the light pollution is
too much of a pain in the ass and fucking
even in Portland, which is not the worst city for
(17:24):
light pollution in this country to use them very well.
So something like that, and also just being able to
easily drop it onto your TV and like hang out
with friends, like if I had fight at access to
something like that back when I was doing hallucinogens. I
think it would have used it a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, that sounds that sounds promising.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Speaking of things that I would have used a lot
as a young man. Garrison, you want to tell us
about the hand job machine.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Sure, So there's this Company's what you said to get
a second there. So there's this company in Norway called Handy.
They they make they make interactive, interactive sex toys. They
started by targeting the male sex toy demographic, or as
(18:09):
they I actually liked that. They that they actually more
often said the penis uh demographic, which yeah, which was nice.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I appreciate that.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, But anyway, it's uh, it's it's a little thing
that you can you can slight and it.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Goes up like it looks like a nice coffee thermoscy.
Its kind of like with like a little tube that
has like a clear plastic penis prism.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Next to it. It has what has when it has
like a has like a stroker sleeve attached in and
you can control like the speed and vibration just on
on the little like thermous looking thing. But the real
features of the Handy is that it also has hands
free control that you can you can hook this thing
up via an app to many different sources. You can
(19:02):
hook this up to whatever you're watching on your computer.
You can hook this up to movies. You can hook
this up to an Amazon Alexa if that's your thing,
and the sounds will will impact how the how the
Stroker moves. The one of the more promising applications which
(19:22):
it really also opens opens the field of music, is
that you can hook it up to like your Spotify
or something and the music and like the beats of
the rhythm will impact the vibrations and speed on the stroker.
So we can now learn which songs are best for orgasms,
which opens a whole new, whole new category for the Grammys.
I think there's a lot of trial and error. I
(19:44):
think one hundred gex is definitely gonna be up there.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
I think nickel Back is going to make a comeback.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, this is gonna be the Billie Joel renaissance. Just
just people spilling ropes over down Easter Alexas Christ.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
They also just launched a second product called I Think
just a the O, which is just a more classic
small handheld vibrator. Similarly like the Handy, It's it's based
on actual like sound vibrations, not a motorized vibration. So
it similarly can hook can hook up to music and
that changes the way it feels. So we have we
(20:17):
have not been able to test these yet because he
didn't actually have free copies.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
They only had to give Garrison a penis sheath.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
They only they only had the free sleeves. But the
actual device is two hundred dollars, which is not is
not super expensive. Uh, considering this style of like sex toy,
that is kind of standard. Yeah, yeah, that was. That
was one of the the more professional booths sexually. Yeah
and see yes, and this is they did a really
good job.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
This is a good time for me to tell my
favorite masturbation machine story. Oh so there's a product. Oh boy,
you know, for the penis having demographic, there's not as
many sex toys traditionally, not as many at least fun
ones out there. It's it's it's a little bit of
a barren wasteland. But there is the flesh light. And
if you haven't seen a fleshlight, maybe you've heard about them.
(21:01):
It does look like a big, heavy plastic flashlight and
you unscrew the top and there's a fake vagina in
there right. Some of them are shaped like asses, some
of them are sex asses.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Sometimes there are a button. Sometimes there are a mouth too.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, oh yeah, there's mouths too. And I once had
a friend who got in some trouble with the law,
and we had to drive to their house and grab
a bunch of things in their house and throw them
away because we weren't sure if the police were going
to be showing up. And so after we did that
that night, it was a very depressed, very sad night,
and we all got extremely drunk, and three of the
(21:34):
four of us are standing out on the front porch
in front of like the house that we're at, and
then the fourth person in the room, who was like
roommates with the person who had just been arrested, comes
out with the arrested person's fleshlight and for reasons known
only to them, and God hurls it at us. Now
we're in like this is a we're in Richardson, Texas,
(21:54):
and like it's kind of this walled off by concrete bricks,
little front porch area, and we all bolt to get
away from the fleshlight and it hits the brick wall
and the plastic case shatters and then the thing hits
the ground and the fake plast silicone vagina inside of
it slithers out like like a living creature, probably lubricated
(22:19):
by some sort of substance, and it was one of
the most unsettling moments of my life.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
I'm really glad you could share that with the Strawberry
that the sound was incredible.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
It did. Yeah, it sounded a lot like if you've
ever seen that episode Always Sonny where where Danny DeVito
gets berthed from a couch like covered in sweat. It
sounded a lot like that, I imagine.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
And we call that experience the flesh Lights Dividend.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
The Fleshlight Dividend. That's right now, speaking of jacking off,
The next product we're going to talk about is Jackery,
a company that makes some really actually pretty cool like
survival equipment, specifically like solar battery, solar panel and battery resetups.
And we're going to talk about that because it's definitely
like of the products we saw here the most in
our miliu as like the world is falling apart show.
(23:09):
So we're gonna get to that. But first, here's some ads.
We're back and we're talking about Jackery, which it's fun.
One of the things I appreciate about this is that
(23:29):
the hand job machine could have been called jack the Jackery,
or the company could have been called Jackerreye. And likewise,
the company that makes batteries and solar panels could have
been called Handy because it's handy. They have a solar
battery around when you're camping. Curious, interesting, interesting stuff. Yeah,
a lot of thoughts there thoughts to be thought.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Oddly, that ven diagram crossover is closer than I thought
it would be.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
So jackerrey is a cut I would recommend googling their
stuff they make. There's a lot the field of like
solar batteries and panels is super crowded right now, and
most of the batteries you're gonna are gonna be made
like one of the same two or three factories. It's
basically the same factory makes a bunch of companies batteries,
and a lot of them are very unsafe. There was
a company that sent me some review samples like a
whole solar generator and battery last year that I was
(24:16):
going to kind of do a piece about, you know,
surviving on a solar generator, and then a month after
it arrived I was still testing it. It came out
that they had burned down a bunch of people's houses
because the batteries were insane. No, yeah, so you want
to be careful with this stuff. Jackery is one of
the I have had good luck with some of their products.
They seem to be of a high build quality. I
have not heard horror stories about them. When you go
(24:38):
to the the their booth of people there seem to
be genuinely knowledgeable, and the way in which they set
it up and demo it suggests a degree of knowledge
about the product and like what people want out of it.
So one of the things they do have some really
large including some like some solar batteries with generators with
solar panel generators that are large enough to run like
(24:59):
a deep freeze, which is really cool being able to
do that. And the setup they had specifically was a
like an actual like serious, like solid like not one
of those folding panel setups that goes on the roof
of your car or truck alongside with like a tint
like one of those via truck talk tents for overlanding,
and then plugs into you know, either their one thousand
(25:22):
or like two thousand watt solar generator or yeah so
or a battery generators and just everything about the way
it was set up seemed really practical. It seemed durable.
It didn't feel like something was gonna fall apart. Yeah,
I can see it being like a legitimate like even
outside of the car, because that's more or less like
a hobby it's sort of thing. But having one of
these generators that you can actually run your fridge and
(25:44):
your freezer and your lights in your house all like
they had some like an outage.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Microwaves, stuff, cooking implements, o other kind of stuff you
might take for like like you know, like a week
in mountain trip or something. The main the main roof
Mountain Pad, I think I was able to pull four
hundred watts, and then it had two sliding up panels
that can pull three hundred watts so that they could get.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Hot and in a sunny day, they said you could
get like nine hundred watts an hour.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, exactly, really good for watts an hour, which is
which is quite impressive. And they have all the batteries
to store it. And by by far, I think Jackery
is the most consistent company in this field that I
could I routinely see high praise for because the feel
of like portable solar like solar charging is kind of
(26:36):
a little bit sketchy sometimes, Yes, stuff can easily break,
things to be really easily over marked. Like I had
a solar panel to to to charge my iPad that
really only lasted like two weeks and it just completely
stopped working. But I've only heard only heard good things
about Jackery. I have not tested them out myself. I
know Robert has some of them. Robert has some of
their battery equipment, but hopefully we'll be able to get
(26:58):
our hands on some of that this year.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
They also had a lot of different form factors of
the same types of products, so a lot of smaller
versions of things that seem to be really good if
you need a kind of more modular setup. That was
for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, they had like large ones that you could basically
have plugged into your house in case you lose power
for a small period of time in order to like
ensure that you don't like you don't actually have a
period where the power's out. And then they had a
lot of like really good camping sort of like off
grid battery options it's just cool. Take take a look
at the if you are if you are someone who
(27:32):
is in the kind of financial situation that you can
prep in that way where you're buying like solar equipment
and batteries, which definitely is never super cheap, right, I
would recommend checking them out at least as you kind
of do your research.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
There's like two more products I think I want to mention.
The first is Shift. This is a company I was
already familiar with, but I got to try these out.
They look kind of like roller skates, but they're not
roller skates. They are these sort of boots with motorized
and locking wheels that attach onto your shoes. And their
use case for this is like factory workers. It makes
them real, It makes them be able to walk and move.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
They said two and a half times faster, considerably faster.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
I was able to walk at at a pretty at
a pretty decent speed. You can you can lock the
wheels if you need to, like do more like delicate
mobility tasks.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Go upstairs stairs ladders.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
That was one way to even lock and unlock the
shoes themselves from being used. There's like a certain gesture
you had to make by you.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Lift up your heel I think it was, and it
locks the shoes so the wheels don't.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
Come you lift up your heel in twest and and
it Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
The boot itself had a hinge that was just under.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
The Yeah, so I've seen these before. They look they
look kind of fun, but they're four kind of factory works.
So it's it's it's it's kind of a mixed bag
where the device worked quite well, and it took me
like just like maybe like like one minute to get
used to it. Then I could then I was really smooth.
But the actual operational use case they're envisioning is like
(29:02):
being able to get like get more, get more productivity out.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Of their workers the same amount of money, the same
amount of money.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
So like, yeah, I think Robert made the pretty good comparison.
Like last year we tried out this exoskeleton, which also,
you know, they talked a bit about a little bit
about productivity specifically for like again factory workers, but that
extra teleton was also designed to help that worker not
damage their body. Like it was it was to make
sure that they actually can can stay safer and not
(29:33):
to as much damage their knees, their joints, their back
versus these little roller skate type shoes. Yeah, I have
no such have no such ability.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
I mean it would it made you go faster, kind
of like one of those walkways that you have in
the airport. Who doesn't want to go a little bit faster.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, that was the way the guy repped it too,
where he was like, we have these factory workers. They're like,
I have the best job in the company. Now, it's
so fun skating around on these things. Nobody said that
to you, bro, Like, don't lie.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
It's a nice thought.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
He also claimed that there's not been one fall or
injury with these things, on which I just I do
not believe because I almost fell down to testing these out.
I'm sure if you're carrying like heavy boxes like it's
it's very easy for your weight to get to get
away from yourself when you're literally walking on wheels like
and it can be controlling. It actually is more intuitive
(30:31):
than I thought it would be. But mistakes happen, and
those those sorts of big claims are a little bit
a little bit sketchy.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
I found myself kind of waving my arms a little
bit out in front of me to keep my balance.
I wasn't like confet on them.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah. Yeah, just watching you both, I could see like, well, yeah,
people are gonna get hurt. Now, I don't I am
sure because it seems to be easy enough to use
that I suspect it would. You could really get a
lot of extra money out of your workers as an
employer using these things, but at the cost of some
of them are gonna like fucking eat shit and hurt themselves,
(31:05):
which is not like in the grand scheme of corporate evil,
especially at the show where everybody's like talking about the
potential of AI to eliminate tens of millions of jobs.
Not really, it doesn't really scan. And I think we're
still putting this on the good episode because like they
worked in a way that they were technically impressive. We
just found it kind of upsetting that they were bragging about,
like you can get more money out of your already
(31:26):
exploited workforce with these. Yeah, but I could see someone
just getting these and because they would allow you if
you like, yeah, if you if you live in a
walkable city.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
City neighborhood, it can make your commute times much faster.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
And still probably safer than like you less risk maybe
than like a bike or something like that.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
Yeah, I want to see somebody wear those at a
roller skating rink.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
So yeah, that's called that's called Shift Robotics. I believe
they're based out of Texas. Yeah. The last thing I
want to talk about. For both mine and Robert's job,
we use a lot of computer screens. I'm looking in
Roberts hotel room right now where we're recording. He has
a laptop hooked up to a second monitor. I have
a very similar setup I have. I have a laptop
(32:09):
and a secondary monitor on my desktop. I have like
three or four monitors always running at the same time,
just because of the absurdity of what our works sometimes entails,
so it could be hard to get things done on
a single screen. And we saw this one product that
looked just like a like a very like thick keyboard
with a with a touchpad, but it had these like
(32:30):
AR glasses attached. Now, AR is a tricky field. We
tried a lot of AR stuff last year. Most of
it some of it was okay, some of it was
a little bit finicky. But this company was called Sightful. Yeah,
and what this basically was is that it was a
fully functioning computer but instead of a instead of just
having a regular display, it has a display built into
(32:53):
these yeah, into these glasses.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
The product itself looks like just the bottom half of
a laptop, like the keyboard part that holds the PCU
and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to
the keyboard part that holds like a set of glasses
that are plugged in directly to the laptop. That's how
it like looks.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
And when you put the glasses on, you get like
four screens that pop up. The screens aren't too big,
they're not too small. You can change the size by
using using the touchpad. And this require a lot less
like like a like a focusing like you usually when
you put on ar AR glasses you have to kind
of dial in the focal length to make them look right.
(33:35):
But this was all very clear. That text was easy
to read, Changing from one screen to another was pretty
was pretty easy. They had they had They had a
pass through mode like a lot of good ar does.
They had a mode where you can lock the screens
in place. You can turn your head and they don't move.
They had another version where you just with like keystrokes,
you could turn your head and the screens follow you,
(33:55):
so it was it was a pretty It was a
pretty useful device.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah. You could press a button and it would go
the screens would disappear, Like if you're walking while using it,
you can press a button and it would go clear,
so you wouldn't see it, but you could see where
you were.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Walking pass through.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, Like I typed an email or two, and like
did some googling on it, and I very quickly adapted
to the screens being virtual but still using a physical keyboard.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
I we didn't get like motion sick with it. It
was not. Now. I think this is like either the
first or second iteration of this product.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
First the first to market, the first.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Yeah, I think there is some ways to improve. It
runs its own Android operating system, which you know, if
you're trying to download applications. The fact that I can't
run Windows or Linux or even Apple's system, you know
that that could be a bit of a limitation. It
only had like two hundred and two hundred and like
fifty gigs of work.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
It wasn't really a full storage and power. It's a
little bit beefier than your phone.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
The company the product, by the way, is called spacetop. Yeah,
sightful as the company's spacetop is the is the actual
product itself, and yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Uh, we're gonna We're gonna keep our eye on it.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, I wouldn't buy the first in of this thing.
It's about twenty two hundred bucks, which is like upper
mid level cost for a laptop.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
My issue is at based on how expensive it is,
the laptop itself isn't powerful enough to justify that price. Certainly,
the fact that you know, I can act like I
have four monitors wherever I go, that is, that is
very convenient. I think I just need the laptop to
be a little bit more powerful, especially with how many
tabs they have open at all times. Having only eight
gigs of RAM just will not cut it. But I'm
(35:37):
certainly certainly hopeful that we'll be able to see small
improvements going forward.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Indeed, yeah, they had mentioned it as being a web
first device instead of anything else.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Yeah, Yeah, it's like a Chromebook, and I think in
terms of like it's actual yeah, efficacy.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Very similar to a Chromebook, like operation.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Wise, But my hope is that like the kind of
technology they've developed, it will get you know, if it's successful,
they'll make more parers. Now I do kind of worry
about how successful it will be, because, like Garrison and
I were both like, oh, this is perfect for what
we do, but we have a very specific use case
for our machines. And I'm not sure like how many
other people are in our position. But I was really
(36:14):
impressed with just like how well it immediately worked.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, No, I I was happy with it. You can
hook up an external monitor if you if you want to,
So that's that's nice.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
And I am a glasses wearer, and so one stuff
that they had for me is that they took my
glasses and approximated my prescription.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Oh that's cool.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Yeah, and they slid on these magnetic sort of like
eyeglass pieces onto the headset that you're wearing, or like
the glasses that you're wearing. That way, I could actually
use it without wearing my prescription glasses.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah, And that was really It's stuff like that that
lets you know that people making something didn't just aren't
just like trying to rush some shit out the door
to make money, Like, Oh, you put some thought into that, motherfucker.
I appreciate that. And this all leads us the easily
the best product of the entire show. Honestly, the only
one really worth talking about, Garrison. Will you hand me
the flying car brochure? So Jesus Christ, this is the
(37:07):
Cees of flying cars. Robotaxis is the term we heard
a lot. We went to a panel that was like
serious people in the robotaxi industry, which they admitted does
not exist, by the way, Advance to air mobility, Advance
of air mobility. It was the acronym AAM. Yeah. No,
there are several companies that are using effectively like these are.
(37:28):
Some of them are like ultra lights. There was one
of the companies that came here bragged like you can
buy buy a plane that doesn't require a pilot's license
because it's so light, but it's still a plane, which
seems like a horrible idea to me. But there are
some real companies who are like testing out electronic aero taxis.
Some of these are this is not vaporware. These products exist. Now,
(37:48):
what doesn't exist is the legal framework to allow people
to do this. Like the panelists were like openly like,
we want this to be an industry, but first there
have to be it has to be legal right now,
we don't know, like they they're still trying to figure out,
like what the rules are going to be. They're hoping
by the end of this year the FAA puts out
like a temporary rule set about how robot air robo
(38:10):
taxes work and also how they called them verta ports,
which is because these are all vertical takeoff and landing craft.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
At least the one that we saw on the show
floor looks like a looks like a Lamborghini with a
massive drone, like a.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
DGI type round top. And that's that's the one I
want to talk about, because all of those were real products.
The exit paying the air road product, in my opinion,
is absolutely not. It's built as a low altitude air
mobility exploring. Yeah, it looks like a huge drone like
you'd buy a fucking best Buy attached to a Lamborghini.
(38:48):
And apparently the whole drone part, all of the rotors
fold back into the body when you're driving it as
a car.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
Like a like a transformer, like a transformer.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
And the reason why I say this is the best
product in cees is not that I think it would
work or be safe. Because we talked to the people
and the person who was told to us is their
technical expert, and neither of them could answer if it
had airbags. They did say probably. They did say probably.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Which isn't what you want to hear.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
No, that you should have that answer.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
That's not a tough question, that's not a gotcha does
your car have airbags?
Speaker 3 (39:25):
First, First, the PR guy that we were talking to
was very open about knowing almost nothing about the technical
aspects of this device. And then when we talked to
the technical person, they too didn't know very much about it, so,
which just isn't very reassuring.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Like and I even tried to do it the easy
way where I was like, well, I know ultra light
aircraft you don't need a pilot's license for so do
you need Does this qualify? And they were basically said, no,
we don't know, we don't know yet. Yeah, it'll take
some kind of license probably. What kind of range does
it get? They said twenty kilometers by.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Air about twenty minutes per.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Chart, Yeah, which seems like a dangerously short amount of
time to be flying you and a loved one potentially
in a thing it is.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
It is pretty low altitude. I think they said it
maxes out at around one hundred meters.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
One hundred No, they said one hundred meters.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Sorry, So it's really not for going up super high.
And I when we went to the more like expert panel,
a lot of these use cases for this, they imagine
is kind of replacing helicopters in cities. There's like metavac
use cases. But a lot of people were talking about
like testing these things out in New York where rich
(40:37):
people use helicopters to get around the city, and this
is what they want to replace them with. Because these
can be purely electric, these can be much more because
these can be much quieter. So that was what a
lot of what they were talking about. However, again most
of the panel was just them just complaining that the
government hasn't done enough work to make this a real industry.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Garrison, I got, you're not aware of this topic. You
just handed me the flyer we got from them that
I don't think either of us read through. Here's their story.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Oh oh boy.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Sale Beyond Limits twenty thirteen. Zoo Deli ignited Erot with
a daring dream to turn the enchanting broomsticks of Harry
Potter into tangible wonder. Oh no, a tribe of daring
mind set forth on the thrilling journey of crafting electric
marbles that could take humans to the skies through tireless exploration.
The first ever prototype, the flying motorcycle. Gracefully, this is
(41:33):
all a Harry Potter thing. Some madman from China fell
so in love with Harry Potter that he made a
death car. I'm back around to loving it again.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Average tech industry guy, brain poisoned by Harry Potter creates
death device.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
I feel like this guy and the plant pet sky
are probably like pretty tight.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
They're both the same kind of why is there somebody
apocaly ten based around Harry Potter?
Speaker 3 (42:02):
What's going on in this industry?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
And it is so the other brochure they had it
shows like the flying car, the modular flying car, which
looks like a cyber truck because if it had like
you know, you can get a truck, you can put
like a bed cap on the beds. It's basically like
a big it's like a cyber truck with one of those,
but the bed cap opens up to deploy like a
quad copter thing that human beings can ride in.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Kind of like sound wave in Transform, which.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Is like it's a cool idea from like a kid's
point of view. I think the idea here is that,
you know, John McAfee used to do this thing where
he would live in the desert with a cult of
weirdos and they would fly around on gliders until he
got his nephew and an old man killed in a
glider crash. This is this is the dream yeah, of
that Harry Potter fan.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
I mean, I this The reason why I'm actually very
pro this product is because the only people that are
going to use these are really rich. Yes, yeah, I
think there's a high chance this could take out a
lot of them.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
This this has the best chance of dropping multiple billionaires
of anything since the Death's Up.
Speaker 5 (43:09):
Like we comel from one hundred meters in the air,
just crashing out of the sky in Santa Monica and
san billionaires just taking out whole lanes of traffic.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Imaginers, I meagine you're walking through the park one day
and a billionaire comes flying down from the sky and
lands in like a two million dollar drone.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
The prototype that they say they got to fly was
two tons. Wow, you could really do a lot of
damage with that. Well, this is this is all quite exciting.
Keep your eye on the sky, folks, Maybe wear a
helmet for a while until this all shakes out. Like
there's the story in the news right now that like
(43:52):
some dude in Portland had the fucking door of that
Alaska Airlines flight in his backyard. And I can't wait
until that's like a third to Elon Musk, just like
Lance in someone's yard.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Like two million dollars.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Oh yeah, yeah. And by the way, if fucking a
billionaire's carcass winds up in my lawn, I got a
new punch bowl with their skull, I'm gonna harvest their pros.
We call the billionaires division the billionaire's dividend. Well, all right, everybody,
anyone Tapia, you have anything to plug?
Speaker 4 (44:24):
Oh yeah, you can find me on Twitter or x
at cut Mora, or if you want to learn a
little bit more about me and my interactive and immersive work,
you can see my work at tabiamora dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
You can also see her work in my book A
Brief History of Ice, where she did all the illustrations,
or in my book After the Revolution where she did
all the illustrations, or in the sequel which will come
out when I finished those last two fucking chapters like
three years from now, huh or in Vegas, yeah tomorrow
to Laura. All right, well we're done.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot 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 cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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