CES 2026: Part Eight (Friday)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alzo Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
And Bam, thank you, ma'am, im ed zechron and this
is Better Offlines coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show twenty
twenty six. We are now as we have been all

(00:26):
week here in the Palazzo Hotel and beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada,
bringing you yet another episode covering c YES with a
crazy assortment of guests from the tech industry. We've got
an open bar, we've got tacos, a place to sit
down for members of the media and friends, whether they
join us on the microphone or not. It's Friday, and
we're on the first of our final two episode days.
And I mean, that wasn't perfect, but you're just gonna

(00:47):
like it. Then an epilogue tomorrow and good lord, do
we have a wonderful show for you or we're beginning
very strong. The first contestants on the Better Offline Challenge
are the legendary activist, author, and journalist Corey doctro me
all today you speak, say hello.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Oh hello, I wasn't sure if I was meant to
speak at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Hi, natural, Natural, And of course returning champion listener favorite
Sherlan lower vengall.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Listen her favorite, that's a strong introduction. I'm not sure
I deserve it.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's completely actually. Another listener favorite, Michael Fisher, the YouTuber
and CEO of Clicks. Now, that's ceo, co found co founded,
my bad buddy, A doesn't matter titles that we don't do,
we don't just fine.

Speaker 4 (01:31):
You're a helocracy like Tony Vegas favorite fe Admiral Admiral rear,
admiral well well.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Court martialed, but the Clicks So all right, I've had
a lot of people in myil in So just to
be clear, Michael's my friend. He's been on the show
a lot, had him on in his capacity's journalist still
here as well for that. But you are you are
the co founder of clicks, and you've got a little
device with you. I do, indeed, I have actually several devices.
Yes we add that thing. Thanks man. I was so
worried because I was like, I'm a Canadian, so blackberries

(02:08):
are in my soul.

Speaker 5 (02:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
This is a physical keyboard for the iPhone and for
Android phones.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Which were two years ago.

Speaker 6 (02:16):
I have it on a motoroal eraser now, which is fun. Flips,
but the I love the flipp I know you and
I agree on the fold. I just want, and I'm like,
I message on them, I don't.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Care it's coming. I know it must be coming.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Give me a foldable I phone.

Speaker 7 (02:28):
Everyone's saying the iphon phone, give me.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
My foldable slot. No, I'm so you've got this thing
that connects to the Mac. Say for the what have
you charge of the thing is?

Speaker 6 (02:39):
We we made custom molded cases with the keyboard attached
for several iPhones several andro and everyone was like, this
is great, but I don't carry that phone. And we
were like, yeah, this is great, but it costs a
lot of money to mold a custom case with a
keyboard for every phone. So we broke out the keyboard
into a little custom puck called power keys that.

Speaker 7 (02:58):
Everyone's grabbing out their iPhones now removing.

Speaker 6 (03:01):
Try just slap it right on the back there and
it bonds via Bluetooth and gives you that.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
So if you my region is not there's your target
zone there. Wait is this are you giving me your phone?
You do not have someone hand me a device for
this audio podcast, So go ahead, but you also have
the Android device that's where the actual clicks device it

(03:29):
does work. So uh, we're just gonna which can move
on from that so but you've done like a dedicated
Android direct thing. Yes, it's called the Clicks Communicator.

Speaker 6 (03:38):
It is actually a phone that Yes, it is a
four inch screen with a big, full, quirdy keyboard underneath it.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
People are calling it the new BlackBerry, but that is not,
of course. Jim Jim, who was the Yeah, yeah, no,
I was just talking to me yesterday. Yes, were you really?

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, literally we had a phone call this episode, all right.

Speaker 6 (03:59):
So they it's it's optimized for communication. It's optimized for
people who carry two phones already and want one of
them to be.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
More focused on communication than content. So you got a
nice big screen, just describing it for the less, this
nice big screen, it's decent, way a lot. You've got
this raised bit of the bit at the back. It's
quite nice.

Speaker 6 (04:14):
Little little little stippled the backplate here. And I will
say two which is which is what we like?

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, I will also say the keyboard feels better than
the original Clicks.

Speaker 6 (04:27):
We've increased the key size by thirty percent. If you
can believe that you're ready for the spectrum.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
And I will say this, like I don't use the
original Clicks because like, weirdly like the case didn't feel right.
It's just a personal thing. And I have like weird
little thumbs, like they're not long enough for most gloves.
Because I'm a monster, I understand, But these this thing.
I like this. In Caleb from Kill the Computer, who
is specifically asked about this, I like it.

Speaker 6 (04:50):
I think it's cool. So who's aimed at people who
carry two phones? So you ever see people walking around,
like make captive two phones, right, but you see people
walking around with the picks on an iPhone or two iPhones,
and neither one is optimized for the actual task that
it's trying to do. So we're not trying to compete
with the phone with a great camera and a big
old display. We're trying to make a communications tool. So
what I like about this though, is it runs Android,
but we've you know, added a custom launcher on top

(05:12):
with the folks at Niagara.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
You ever use that one? Can you say it? And
I want to want to play around? I cannot.

Speaker 6 (05:16):
That's a touch and feel sample. That's how early this
thing is. We don't launch it till later in the year.
But like Niagara has this beautiful aesthetic list and it's
not a it's on Nicon based os.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
It is a distraction scroll, isn't it like that? Because
that's the thing I would I'm a little I'm a
little hog with my devices. I love my keyboards and
my dad's and the like. Yes, And also there are
times when I will use like a like I have
like old laptops that I'll use if I just want
to focus on writing. And I would love something that
was just for like my iPad has like very stripped

(05:47):
down notifications times, so I can just focus on sitting
on the couch froom playing like ball lex Pit or
Rogue Dead Zone Rope my two favorite games of last year.
And I just want to chat ship with a friend, yes,
or like just send a silly a single purpose device
on a purpose and it's.

Speaker 6 (06:02):
Kind of a luxury thing though it's not for everyone. No,
absolutely not, And neither was the first click Like that's
the same. We've always made products for a small segment
of the market, but as long as one in one
thousands exactly.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (06:13):
But I'm pretty excited for Communicator because I was terrified
of it. You know, you work on something for so
long and you're not sure if it's good anymore. What's
out it is out later in the year. It's going
to be second half, but late second half.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
My wife gave me an Olivetti Valentine. What is that
manual typewriter nineteen sixty seven in MoMA Bright Cherry Red
has an integrated case that it slides out of. There's
you know photos of like Twiggy carrying it through the
Panams terminal at JFK and idle wild beautiful machine. And

(06:46):
I've been rehearsing my manual typewriter performance.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Can I ask you a really stupid question? Yeah, what
happens to you typo on a typewriter?

Speaker 3 (06:57):
You type an X.

Speaker 8 (07:00):
I had the typewriters that's right in the in the
type and it has the most beautiful when you reach
the end of the line.

Speaker 7 (07:12):
Oh, I never had the thing one.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
It's got a red ribbon and a black ribbon, so
it's got like a two side ribbon.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
And you go up and love for it, and.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Then you have to you have to get the key
with a snap. It's not how hard you hit it,
it's how it risk comes back you hit it and
then then you get a nice clean impression with the
So that is a genuinely single purpose device I'm really
enjoying that.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
And it's and it's meant.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
To be a luggable. You can just slap it around.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
And Michael, I need to ask the doesn't there a
device called the Peak once? Yes, the Peak?

Speaker 6 (07:42):
Right, it was an email only like BlackBerry esque device. Sorry,
I could also use it for Twitter. No, no, no, no,
I actually have one Ivy Green but green Guard let
me borrow his. I have to cover it on mister
mobile and my wind phones were fine.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
And here it is. It's it. Yeah, it's like a
little little screen and I like this. I like this
because like, look, you're not trying to pretend this is
for for one, you're not trying at all.

Speaker 6 (08:01):
And yeah, no you're not going to replace your pixel
or iPhone with it. You're going to carry it alongside it,
or you're going to carry it instead of it on
the weekends or the weekdays as the case. Maybe someone
uses as that daily driver. Always kind of limited. No,
it absolutely, it runs hundred sixteen, it's five G. It
has it even has Mike or SD and a headphone
jack for all the people. And yeah, you want to
bring back those old features. So yes, you could use
it as your main and We've heard from people who

(08:22):
are like, what if I wanted that's been my primary phones?

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Like you can, I think it's lovely. I think it's lovely.
That not because you've you are you and I have
had some of the deepest like I love the technology stuff.
It's cool. I love the phone. Oh I love tablets
and all this shit. And you actually made something that
you wanted to use.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, well, and it's actually got It's got two cameras
so you can scan a QR code.

Speaker 6 (08:41):
Absolutely, that's the thing. You can take a picture and
say this feel the way you want too?

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yes?

Speaker 8 (08:45):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Am I allowed to throw this away? Are these left?

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Is this good? Is this the final final.

Speaker 6 (08:50):
Way of it? It's close to final, probably within about
ten grams.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Only criticism I have is what about the battery? What happens?
Like what kind of warranty? What kind of batteries? So
the battery is four thousand MILLI empowers. I did push
for silicon carbon. This is the last time I get
super nerdy about this because I wanted more get that.

Speaker 6 (09:04):
This is my sha and I was like, no way
we can get it. But it turns out we could
afford it.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
It was great. The in terms of the support. I mean,
it's not. It's the only thing we couldn't do is
a removal battery, because that was kind of why I
was going at. What does it look like for a
service depot to swap it? Yeah, yeah, that's a really
good question. I take it to my guy on the corner.
Probably not.

Speaker 6 (09:22):
I mean I'm sure that the actually, you know what,
just because of what I just said, that's probably not
the case because silicon carbon is is rare these days,
like i'd say, it's so new, so I don't actually know.
That's one of the fifty million questions. I should have
been prepared for.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
This clicks button. So that's a shortcut key.

Speaker 6 (09:37):
So on all of our products, you hit the clicks
button and you hit a letter, and you can do
you can call a friend, you can so much.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
I'm serious that this has so much more. I'm not
just saying this because you want to make because you
know me well enough, i'd be lock it. I do.
It's got the weight you've given. It actually gives the
buttons the hef that the clicks case, I.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Think you mean gravitas.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
No, not the gravitas, I mean like the physical because
the other one i'd feel it bend back with my
kind sure fingers.

Speaker 6 (10:02):
Well, when you design the entire thing yourself and you
don't have to accommodate for a phone in a case
or another product, you can kind of control that fund.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Also, you'll you'll like this.

Speaker 6 (10:11):
I think the keyboard is capacitive, so when you swipe
your thumb over it, that you can like.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Some of your cases, so you can do the swipe
stuff over the physical case. Correct, fuck me that that's actually.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Very BlackBerry key one.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yes, that is right. Really, I'm actually going to send
this to Gyms right now. I believe.

Speaker 6 (10:29):
I believe we've talked to him about it because a
lot of our alumni or a lot of our employees
are blacker alumni.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Are they Canadians though, yes, don't trust Canadians speak, don't
trust Canadians.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
But all are so nice. Now it's just an act.
It's like the South here, that's right.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
A question as a as a long time friend of
Michael Fisher as well, So how rich are you now?

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Well? I stayed at Planet Hollywood if that tells you.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
That does tell me a lot. I stayed at the residence.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Michael professional question, are you here in capacity as the
Clicks co founder or are you covering for mister Mobi.

Speaker 6 (11:07):
Yes, yes, is the answer both. Yeah, I have to
split the time evenly. That's what the quiffer is for.
It's for a second hat.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (11:15):
One here was for being beautiful. You have to apply
so much hairspray because you're gonna put it. Actually, that's true.
I was doing a John Deere spot because they're my
sponsor on this one, and I had to put on.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
A John dear head.

Speaker 6 (11:25):
You've got to be on the big tract, and I was.
In fact, I went to visit the combine. Yes, drive
it away, but it's good. It satisfies my need for novelty.
I think you can really.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, you got some stuff to do. One thing for
ten minutes. It's too long. I gotta go, I gotta
go do something else. You know. The only thing I
can do consistently is podcast for two hours. That's the
only thing. Anything else that I'm just like lost.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
You just just give him throat like you're a man
who turns throat lozenges into podcast.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, yeah, exactly what the skeleton meme the skeleton squat meme.
But how have you felt about the show Michael, what
have you seen anything else other than your own thing
that you like?

Speaker 6 (11:58):
I have to tell you so I cannot stand everything
about the Las Vegas Strip and ce S is a
very training show as well.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Know.

Speaker 6 (12:07):
However, this particular one was so worth coming to based
on the stuff that was shown.

Speaker 5 (12:13):
For me.

Speaker 6 (12:14):
I got a new foldable phone out of Motorola that
was InCred you know when you say.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
You know they made it specifically for me, mister Fisher edition. Yes, exactly.
There was the new pebble or the you know the
pebble That's what I.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Was going to talk about after this, Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yes.

Speaker 6 (12:32):
And then as I was wandering between those two things,
I found, you know, there's something called a fidget gadget.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Have you all seen this.

Speaker 6 (12:38):
It's a little metal cube with like six buttons on
it and smart watch display fidget it's and it's a
little fidget toy and you can run.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
You know.

Speaker 6 (12:50):
It's like Arcanoid is like developer tools. It's open source.
You can.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
All mechanicals.

Speaker 6 (12:57):
So this is this is new. This is by one
guy making them in his garage and Ipsilante. It's like
exactly why I used to love coming to CES. You
know it's this little stuff.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
I know that. I hear that. I'm like, I wish
i'd have seen that because that would have made my day. Yes,
so it's just for dicking around with exactly you know
what toys. If it's a toy, it's a toy.

Speaker 6 (13:14):
And that's it, right, you see the guy's not saying
it's like, well, this is gonna be the I hope
to usher in a new era for you know, intentional
It's like, no, I made a toy.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
It feels good. It's fun to click and I don't
know what you can do with it but find out. Yeah,
you could do all sorts of stuff. That's fun. It's awesome.
So you have a good showing as well. You have
a good history with ces as well, Like you've been
here a lot. Yeah, this this one feels weird to me.
It's felt like a very peculiar show to me, Like
it feels like it's missing something.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
What do you think is missing?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
I don't know. That's why I'm ask like, it's like
it feels like like bits have been hollowed out. I
think there's a reason for that.

Speaker 6 (13:49):
I feel like if people were planning for their cees
in the first half of the year they were probably
gonna lean on AI all over again, and I feel
like there's been a very visible retraction from that, especially
other than the people who are here well right, no,
I know, but even though like yes, branding, Yeah, it's
not themed.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
So your thesis is that there would have been twice
as much dumb AI shit, Yes, if it wasn't for
the backlash that it's just the people who are just
so like balls out, clanker slopper Yep, then.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
I have a different theory as to why something feels missing.
I mean, I think there's a lot missing. I think
one thing that's really missing is the car side of things.
We had the FELA, but then the the you know,
the expiry or the doing away with the federal text
credit really dampen a lot of the mood around EV's
this past years of twenty twenty five, and so Hondo
was like, we're not coming to see yes this year,

(14:41):
and I think that's kind of set the tone leading
into CES this year as well. I mean, like there's
a lot of things not just cars, but that's probably
like our transport sort of area. We were like assigning
people to kind of pay attention to on our team.
They were just like there was nothing.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
That's so strange it is, do we think that there's
exhibitors who are like, I don't want to get kidnapped ice.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, I have to wonder if they were a terrif
l well terrafi late. It is kind of a common
but like immigration.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
Lots of events that I'm involved with are saying our
numbers are way down, and that's at ten D numbers
right right, and they're just people don't want to come
any more. Events are now saying, like, you know, a
lot of New York City events are like, should we
move to Toronto? New Yorkers won't find it that hard
to get there?

Speaker 2 (15:21):
And then yeah, quite.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
Like as a Torontonian New York run by the Swiss.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
It's also it's also doesn't help that there's like a
lot going on outside of CS.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
At the same time, so like anyone who had those
fears were not wrong to be a little bit concerned.
And as someone who's like herself an immigrant, like with
very good legal visas, that is in sight with you,
Yeah exactly. I I was so afraid to travel even
domestically for a while there and now it's like I've
I've done a few international trips. I'm na as concerned.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Oh I went through I had to go to Toronto last GM,
and I was like, straight up the whole scared, right,
So every moment in the airport, and then I remembered
you cleared immigration in Toronto, which is right.

Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yes, exactly. I flew through Dublin.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
It's like yeah, oh yeah, it's it's grim and it's
also like that the stuff that has made it it
feels and I say, this is a CS veteran, and
someone's gonna say the stolen ballot. But even by CS standards,
this feels like a bullshit year. It feels like worse
than the twenty fourteen twenty fifteen Indie Go Go Kickstarter boom,

(16:27):
where it was like it's a three D printed kitchen,
you just click the button and a burger come out.
Those ones I almost found, folks see because they were
like like a straight up snake oil salesman just like, ah,
come here, check my food. Now. It's just like ninety
seven different GPT wrappers and it's sad. I want my dude, adds,
I want my gizmo.

Speaker 6 (16:45):
It's funny because I've seen more gizmos and dude AADs
here this year. Tell me if that I'm seriously Besides
fidget Gadget and Pebble, which we've talked about Pebble okay, okay,
besides those, we have this sort of evolved version of
fidget Gadget which I checked out on a whim. Someone
said to me while I was demoing clicks to them,
have you seen have you seen Lego?

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Have you seen smart? They must go. I just I
feel that.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
I feel like that's just going to be mountains of
e waste. And also, isn't the whole.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Point thank you, thank you toy that you just oh wow,
wait to make you need a Lego.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Room? I have a machine that does the rooming for me.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yes, okay.

Speaker 6 (17:24):
And if I had not sat through the entire hour
long demo, I would have felt exactly the same way
I went in. I'm like, listen, this will be filler
for my video. I'll just get some footage. It'll be fun,
it'll be a break between phones. It'll be great. And
then they demonstrated literally every use case I've ever seen
a person think about in terms of like, how do
children play?

Speaker 2 (17:44):
How did I used to play?

Speaker 6 (17:45):
I used to remove the machines like this, and then
then it reacts and then you touch the break to
the other thing, and it knows what the color is,
and it's like it's it's not only smart, but it's
like smart in a way that a kid will instantly
understand and instantly appreciate.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
The e waste thing is the only thing that I
was like, Wow, man, that's gonna be an. But in
terms of evolving the play experience, I actually go to
push back. Please, I don't think Lego needs to evolve
the play experience. I think the whole point of Lego
is imagination, and I think playing with it and going
now from from and building deranged things and having things

(18:17):
in your head. But I understand, to be clear, understand
what they're doing. I'm surprised they haven't done it quick.
I'm sure they haven't. Yeah, I asked.

Speaker 6 (18:25):
I was like, guys, how long have you been involving this?
Like eight years? From certain the niama shows. It shows
in the product I'm telling, and technologically, I think it
is very interesting to have location of where blocks.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
So Bruce Sterling wrote an incredible novel called Distraction that
everyone should read because it's about fucked up computer mediated
elections nice and it is one of the most prescient
books you will read. And in it there are these
avant garde architects who put a slap bracelet around a
brick and it starts saying, I am a cornerstone. Take
me one step to the left, put me down. I'm

(18:56):
one degree off level. I am now level. Please add
mortar and a bunch of skilled people can put up
a building in a day. I rip this off from
my novel walk Away, and that kind of location awareness
super interesting and cool. And there are lots of times
in my life where I would have loved to have
had this. If you told me that Ikea has figured
out a way to use low cost electronics to tell

(19:17):
you when you've got the right two pieces, that would
be amazing.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
I want to inhabit like.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
As a as a child playing imaginatively with construction toys.
I I don't think my play experience would have been
enhanced by having some of the things that happen in
my imagination happened with electronics. I will rather get that
person an Arduino.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
So the waste. I think it's a good There is
actually a solution which is The good news is that
the chip fits inside a regular like it is still
a regular Lego brick, so you're still able to use
it like a Lego brick.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
But is it?

Speaker 2 (19:53):
But is the like?

Speaker 3 (19:56):
So when you throw this away, is it going to
be a mortal e waste or just a mortal plastic waste?

Speaker 2 (20:00):
That's the thing I actually truly is it.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
Going to be leaching you know, heavy metals into the
water table or just turning into microplas? I mean, do
people throw away Legos? You know that's kind of a
past that might throw away broken robotic Lego.

Speaker 6 (20:12):
But the thing is, but even then, yeah, but you're
cele brick right, You're right, though I don't know.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
My take on the Lego thing is. I used to
be on the Ed's side of it, and I then
read a lot of our coverage and was like, oh, okay,
that makes way more sense. So I came closer to
the Fisher side of it, and I'm just like, look,
if you don't like it, you can still not buy it, sure,
and you can still have the same Lego experience you
were having before.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Sure for the people who I will, I will also
give Legos some real credit in the despite the fact
that the entire Lego economy has been inflated by adult babies.
You like children's toys. I'm not talking about, by the way,
like the toach Mahole. Those are obviously for adults. I'm
talking about, like I don't know, as a father, the
Spider Man sets that are now inflated by thirty percent
because you fucking loses can't leave them alone for actual

(20:57):
fucking children, Jesus Christ. I will say, Legos app stuff
is really good. You can just type in the Lego
thing and you can sit there and kind of their
smartphone app. Yeah. Yeah, you can type in the number
of the set and you can rotate around it and
it's useful. Though they still do this insane thing where
they don't be able. They make it really difficult to

(21:18):
tell between like black, dark, gray and gray. Nevertheless, I
give them real credit because it's like it's an app,
but it's not an app for like selling me more Lego.
It's Hey, the instructions are limited because their paper we
found a way to get beyond that. I'm willing to
give them a bit of the benefit of the doubt
on this one. What I will say is you just
use it like you don't need an app for that. Yeah,

(21:38):
buy a.

Speaker 6 (21:39):
Set of them, use them, and then judge them, because
that is I was in the again. I was in
the exact same boat as you guys. And then then
I saw the demo and I was like, God, this
every part of this as well.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
I want to pop the stack one layer up because
there was a thing I wanted to say about the
fidget toys. Okay, so the fidget toy sounds amazing if
that is your thing, if you're excited by this. There's
a sculptor called Chris Bathgate who's a machinist who makes
beautiful kinetic fidget toys that fit in your pocket really uh,
and they are. They come in runs of like one

(22:11):
hundred to two hundred. He hand machines each one of them.
His sculptures are gorgeous. His static sculptures are amazing, but
his kinetic sculptures, the pocket sized ones, are insanely good.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
So Chris, Chris Bathgate, I'm going And he's written, you
had an a ring to take a note with me
if only I could press a button.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
So just a book about them.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
I just send a message to Corey to make sure
that's in the episode nuts. And I'm about to send
a text to Michael right now. While you're doing that,
I'm going to fidget with my let me fidget. I'm
saying he's a wonderful broadcast and I hope to have
him on again, as well as sending me a link
to that. This is a this is an emotion the
only show. But you see anything? Do you see anything else? Fun?

(22:52):
Because I'm genuinely like I wanted. Everyone's like ed, It's
actually no one's being like Everyone's like yeah, foxy, yes, Okay,
well right, settle down, settle down everyone. That's my job.
I'm the one who gets too angry.

Speaker 6 (23:05):
I don't like doing this because it is I don't
like to cross the streams between sponsored content and not.
But I will say that something was genuinely cool, that
is in a sea of technology that is conceptual or
maybe never become to a marketer has no value. One
of the John Deer things I was paid to promote
was an automated road paver. I'm just like I learned

(23:27):
about paving for like for like a half hour, and
I will this makes it possible for people, for fewer
people to do this job. And for fewer skilled people
to be required to do this Jobeah, but that's also
less late. Oh it's so scary though. Look, here's the thing.
The fact that the that this solves a problem is
my least favorite part of it. And the problem is
no construction workers can find enough labor I mean PayPal.

(23:52):
Well no, I know, this is what I was saying,
but apparently that's like that was the starting point. So
I'm watching this robot thing do it's thinking, like, you know,
hot asphalt and pouring stuff. I'm like, yeah, this is
what I want. I want to be dirty jobs.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
This is why I got into it. Some stuff good. Yeah,
I mean I took to a microphone. So I see
a job like that, I'm like, never take that job
from those people.

Speaker 6 (24:10):
Well, I agree, but I mean that's the thing. There's
not enough of those people. That's the that's the the thing.
Train them.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
But no, I get your point. And also be clear,
Michael Fisher is one of the one of the fewer
people who's more anxious than I am about any kind
of thing like this. So Michael is like squirming here
when it comes to like mentioning a sponsor. Do not
think that he's doing this with joy. He actually even
notice that. Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
I mean my concern with John Deere, and I don't
want to blow up your try. Concern with John Deere
is there. Yeah, they're they're a rapacious monopolist and they
have led the war against repair and they use the
fact that it's illegal to bypass an access control. This
is this law section twelve one of the Digital Monume

(24:50):
Copyright Act that establishes a fellony punishable by five year
prison sentence and a five hundred thousand dollars fine for
tampering with an access control to make it illegal for
farmers to fix their tractors. And you know you're a
Britain did you ever go to Beamish outside of Norfolk,
out of Newcastle? Rather the largest it's the largest open

(25:11):
air museum in Europe. It's we would call it Pioneer
village here, except it's not pioneers. It's old the tiny
English people. And they have transported Georgian coaltown with a colliery,
Victorian high Street, all kinds of weird old vehicles, and
there's a farmhouse on a Roman foundation and on the
Roman foundation there is a forge because farmers have fixed

(25:31):
their own farming implements since fucking Roman times. Enter John
Deere saying no, no, we have declared the end of history.
Farmers no longer fix their farm implement that's our job.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
No, no, it's my fault. You know. Here's the thing.

Speaker 6 (25:46):
This entire debate played out in my comments every single
time I covered John Dee organically, and I got so
fucking tired of it that I was like, I will
never cover this brand again because I'm tired of getting
in the middle of them, tired of having this conversation
and like be the mediator between them and things was
well now and I don't cover them marganically.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Now they're my sponsor. I am gonna I'm going to
aggressively segue away from this because I don't want a
good idea. Yeah, but I want to get to the
final thing, which.

Speaker 6 (26:13):
Is and I no, please, because I want to build
on one thing you said, that place I find fascinating,
the Roman foundation, That like the thing that's been unchanged forever.
As we talk about yet another show where people are like,
what's the next smartphone, what's the replacement for the smartphone?

Speaker 2 (26:28):
All this stuff. I had a wonderful moment at Mystic
Seaport in Connecticut. Have you been here?

Speaker 6 (26:32):
It has a lovely, you know, maritime history museum and
you can wander and you can see all kinds of
things in and there's a pocket watch case, because of
course there is. And I saw one that was really beautiful,
and I asked the curator. I'm like, how what is
this front? Perhaps nineteen nineteen oh five, and he's like
seventeen eighty nine, and I said, wait what? And then
I kind of looked at the history and like, this

(26:54):
form factor did not change meaningfully for two hundred years.
We figured something out, it was great, and then we
kept it around until somebody figured out how to strap
it under a wrist.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Right.

Speaker 6 (27:03):
That is how I feel about the smartphone these days,
and like, look, there will be augmented things in the
personal area network, there will be more accessories for them,
but we are still going to carry these bucks.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
This is the principal struggle of CES right now. Though.
It's all people trying to be like, what if you
had a smart glasses and it could do this? And
then you're like, well, as a human being, this is
not how I experienced life, And they're like, shit, you're right,
nobody actually uses. But what if you've changed your entire
existence so you had a weird, grainy green thing that

(27:32):
could sometimes be correct, which requires an Internet connection. And
the smart glasses stuff is really the auto translation or
write down what you're saying, you translate your business trip,
and you just slop me as stick me gun to
my head. It's just I'm almost really happy to hear

(27:53):
about Oh, they got thinner and lighter laptops with longer batteries. Brilliant, brilliant.
But it almost feels like we're reaching a point where
everyone's just saying, fuck, we're out of interfaces. We don't
have a new one. To your point about that that
pocket watch case, right, do.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
You know what I would love would be this huge
design trend from now on, we're putting black text on
white backgrounds, or sometimes white text on black backgrounds. And
we fired all the twenty two year old designers who
put ten percent gray on white backgrounds, and we have
we've sent them north for re education where they are
forced to endure, you know, long struggle sessions about the

(28:28):
things they've done to people with poor low contrast vision. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
I just think liquid glass is one of the where
my brain was liquids liquid ass is truly and I
am like an Apple pay pig at this point. I
have tolerated many an insult from this company, including the
vision pro, and I gotta be honest. There is one
thing that bothers me the most about this and it's

(28:53):
for some reason. On one of the windows there's just
like a blob in like one of the things. There's
just like a reflective thing looks like it's hard to see,
but it looks like an error in the LED panel
in my phone. Because of how are you talking about
like the weird it's weird reflective thing and if you
worked on liquid glass, were you forced to were you

(29:16):
forced to do this?

Speaker 1 (29:17):
They do talk about it as part of the UI.
That's sort of the way you move your phone and
then how it reflects light. It's supposed to be that.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
I don't want that on my phone, Liquid glass not all.
I would love to. I would love to go back
to the iOS eight or something like just give me
the phone normal.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
I want that. I want the phone UI that actually
like puts fake scratches on your screen or like fake.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
No, I will say, and we could wrap this in
a boat. It's why I kind of like the clicks
communicator because it's just a thing that nice, flawless no,
And I say, this is someone who like. If you
don't like it, I don't give a ship if you
buy it or not. Sorry, it's just that's that's not
my job. But I like it because it's like, what
do I want from a device that takes people fingy
to use message at to a place, look at website, fingy.

Speaker 6 (30:06):
You do the thing on a handful of very important features,
but just a handful of them. I didn't think that
i'd ever got on board the and this is a
web browser on it. Oh yeah, I mean it's Android sixteen.
You can run whatever you want on it. But it's
a matter of intention. But what we're saying, I never
thought i'd get on board the digital detox train or
anything like that. And that's not what communicators for, to
be clear, but just personally until I used the light

(30:28):
phone for two weeks this past summer.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
And you were a real one because when you did
the light phone thing, you actually fucking did it. You
turn off everything amazing.

Speaker 6 (30:37):
And I wish I could have survived in that world,
because it turned out in order to live that way
doing what we what a lot of us do. I
had to carry an iPad for the sessions that invariably
required me to be online for a secondary or laptop,
and then I was like, damn it, I can't live
this life. But what stuck with me were two or
three lessons that lived past July, and I was like,

(31:00):
every time I pull out my phone, now I'm like,
am I doing this for a purpose or am I
doing this because I'm voice? Every time I pull out
my phone to check notification, I'm able to better resist,
like bypass of like the door dash, Like isn't it
time to order a pizza at three pm?

Speaker 2 (31:14):
All the shitty notifications that you get all the time?

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Can you leave notifications on?

Speaker 2 (31:18):
No?

Speaker 6 (31:18):
I turn them off and then I miss my door
dash deliveries. This horrible seeside, Why aggressively?

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Please do this? But Michael, it's so good having you
as we wrap up this off for an hour. Thanks,
I just want to say the listeners want you back,
and I will have you back. But also, you have
maybe looked at phones differently, and I put aside the
clicks communicator. I think you have the right way of
looking at it, where it's like, why am I using
this device? Thank you? And why am I doing this?
What is this for? Now? I am built different in
the sense that I am really like I was mentioning. Yes,

(31:47):
they like the infinite feeds don't work on me. They
give me anxiety. Like I get to the I'm like,
where's the end? Where's the end? I want to finish
reading this? Sure, I don't know, but it's the opposite
most people like, oh, keep looking. I'm like, no, you
want to be done, and I'm just like, fine, you
want to do And the moment I feel anything being
done to me, I like reject it angrily. Sure, I

(32:08):
just no, No, it's pure autism. It's just like my
brain just like doesn't want to do anything other than
what it insists on doing, which is a Wikipedia or
like a very long conversation about one specific thing, which
is why we are here on Better Offline. So, Michael,
thank you so much for joining us. You. We will

(32:30):
bring you back sooner than this. I would love that,
And I'm looking forward to the clicks I might actually
pick on, not put a link to stuff that you
can have a look at it, judge your own judgment.
That's not a phrase, we now move to an ad
break for something that I either say you should buy
or listen to. Yeah, and I Heart Radio said no, actually,
I can't say that. We're just going to pretend I
never said that. And we're back in the room. We've

(33:02):
got Sherlin Low from me Gadget Yes, Hi, and we've
got edam Gaiso Junior at the Tech Bubble newsletter. Oh hello,
We've got author, activist and journalist Corey Doctor right, and
this time I know I'm supposed to reply Hello, nailed
it flause No. And I have had a few people say,
like email would be like why do you do this?
I'm like, because I get to hang out with my
friend's new cool shit for like an entire week. Why

(33:22):
are we alive? But we're here at CES, And I
mean there's also the question of why are we at CES?
That is a reasonable one, because it's a peculiar show. Corey,
we had the best time in Amazon, though. We need
to talk about this Amazon experience because to be clear,
we're walking into the show floor for the first time,
actually sees customer service, got his badge immediately and then

(33:44):
we walk in. I'm like, oh, there's Amazon. Why not
and last year, by the way Amazon, I had the
picture of the smiling man on my badge and the
woman outside grabbed it went wow, which is I don't
think it was a good well, but anyway, walk in
there with Corey. We immediately walk up to this five
thousand dollars like rock pulled surveillance tower pole thing with
like it's like a big big thingy with like a

(34:07):
poll and like just a ring of cameras and Corey
just walks over and starts asking questions.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Score well no, I mean I didn't even ask any questions.
The guy walked up and said, Hi, I'm the product
manager for this, do you have any questions. I wasn't gonna,
you know, bollock them out of the blue. I didn't
go in there looking for, you know, a victim, you
will not that type. But I was like, since you ask,
and I was like, well, so I know that there
was that the original ring.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Camera, the doorbell camera.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
You guys took the posture that that footage was only
available to the police in the event that the owner
authorized the transfer to the police, and but there had
been this persistent rumor that there was warrantless access to
this footage, even against the wishes of the of the
ring owner, which you initially denied, and later I had

(34:54):
to walk back. I know this because I got into
a big fight with Amazon PR when I published the
story and then they said it's not true, and then
later on it was proved to be true. What's the
deal with this? Can the police access it? Because this
is the thing that's meant to go into like a
parking lot at a job site or whatever. And it
had some as you pointed out, some racial overtime.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, there were the video behind it was, of course
two guys breaking in him. Would you be surprised to
hear they were Hispanic? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (35:19):
And then the white guys in there, and AI caption
was like two men removing things from trunk of red car.
So so I said, you know, so can the cops
access this footage, you know, without the owner? And he
was like, well, I'm not sure. And I'm like, okay, fine, fine,
who can access this footage? Is this footage intend encrypted?
Does Is it sitting as an encrypted blob that no

(35:42):
one at Amazon can access on your servers? So only
I can access it? And as the owner of the device,
and and so on and he says, oh, yes, that
is the case, just like with a ring doorbell. And
I'm like, well, wait, that's not true ring doorbell. So
hang on a second, Like it's just it is just
like an incontrovertible fact. You go into any court docket

(36:02):
for petty theft or whatever, there's a ton of footage
that cops have subpoenaed from ring doorbells, and so if
cops can subpoena then Amazon has to be able to
decrypt it.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
So and he's like, well, I'm not allowed to decrypt.
I'm the project manager and a product manager. I can't
decrypt it. I'm like, well that's good. You have some
access controls, but you're still asked growing the keys. And
then I'm like, well, is it all controlled by an
app or is there a desktop interface? And if so,
can I download my footage? And he's like no, it's desktop,
just like with the with the doorbell camera. And I'm like,

(36:36):
so I can just like grab all the MPEG files
and keep them on my hard drive and he's like, oh,
I don't think you can. And I'm like, so what
if I stop paying the subscription fee? Do I lose
all the footage? And He's like, no, we'll let you
download it. I'm like, so, wait, can.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I download it?

Speaker 3 (36:50):
Or can I not do it? And then he eventually says, well,
you're asking all these technical questions. I just don't know
the answer. And I'm like, well, I was just standing
here minding my own business when you came up and
introduced yourself to me as the product manager for this product. Like,
is the product manager capable of answering what seems to
me to be some pretty basic.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Does a website do something? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (37:10):
Like, like can I does? Is the footage available to
third parties?

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Is?

Speaker 3 (37:15):
I mean, because you know, just from a straight up
security perspective, Amazon's not immune to insider threats if you've
got you know, three sixty longitudinal video footage.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
And that's what this thing is. It can it has
a tube that goes into the sky with a bunch
of cameras. Yeah, and it was advertised as they had
this video behind with a picture of neighborhoods with all
these blue blobs where these things would pay. So good.

Speaker 9 (37:37):
I'm so happy you guys got to see one of
the new soon towers.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, here's here's our palent here exactly.

Speaker 9 (37:43):
Maybe they'll give you a little ring that could be
tied to you.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
It's got this like telescoping mask. But you could imagine, right,
if you've got this is quite a honeypot. Right, If
you've got the internals of a whole bunch of job
sites with a bunch of easily stolen things, and there's
an insider threat. At Amazon, they've got a lot of
employees and and famously, Amazon went through a series of
CISOs chief security officers because they had this product first

(38:08):
orientation where anyone who had a product team could download
the entire Amazon database christ and they had no access
controls and no logging. They did not know how many
copies of the internal Amazon database were, and their CISOs
would come in and say, okay, step one, we have
to stop doing this.

Speaker 9 (38:23):
Did they ever figured out how many people?

Speaker 1 (38:24):
No?

Speaker 3 (38:24):
No, no, there's no census of how many copies, like
multiple copies, because they've got aws right, right, So copying
the entire database of every skew and every purchase on
Amazon is like tractable within Amazon's own infrastructure. And so
you know, their ceso's first advice was always like, don't
do this. And then but the people who are in

(38:45):
charge of like product nimbleness would say, well, we are
able to spin up a product team and then figure
out whether the product is any good by grabbing this
giant data set mining it for insights. So we're going
to override the security person. And eventually they hired they
promoted someone internal who was too junior and didn't know
well enough, and then they had a gigantic breach. Right,

(39:05):
so I think this is all Andy Greenberg at Wired
did this report hillier and so you know, like they're
famously like vulnerable to insider threat.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
I will also say, if you were a listener who
works at Amazon Web Services and you're able to click
on that thing that says anthropic, why don't you sell me?
Send me more of them numbers? I want to see
I want to see them numbers. My favorite part of
this conversation, though, was right towards the end when he went, yeah,
you could buy one for your backyard. You think he
would and just you were like so much nicer than I.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
Well, I had to be fair to him. I said, like,
is this all being sold to business customers or are
there people with McMansions who want it? And he said,
do you want it for your mansion? And I was like,
do you have a mansion? And I was like, I
don't have a mansion.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
So he was kind of I think you miss that
after ten minutes of speedbacking, though I would have just
I would have been like, I this guy did not
know what to say. I'm dying. I need to leave,
but we won't. We had a good, good toll around today.
You got to see some CEO.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
We went to the Crap Gadget Room with all the
international pavilions and there was some good stuff. I'm trying
to pull up my favorite. So from one of the
universities around Tokyo, there was the you know, they have
these tech transfer offices where they're trying to like productize
things being made in the labs. And there was a
group called Integrated Electron Source who had a graphene electron
emitter which was basically a consumer electronics style imaging system

(40:25):
that could image down to four nanometers designed for visual
inspection of chips. And I've just come from Hamburg where
I saw Bunny Wang, who's the greatest hardware hacker in
the world, present on his work on building system on
the chips that are open to visual inspection, because Bunny
is absolutely convinced that people are hiding bad shit in silicon,

(40:46):
especially when we're talking about a system on a chip.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Which when you say badship, what do you mean specific.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
So, like you know, all all hardware is is software
in etched in silicon, right, So any program, any malware
you can imagine, you could hide.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
And so when you when you use the chip in
a piece of hardway, it's doing.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Something bad when it's back.

Speaker 9 (41:06):
Also when he says he's convinced that people are hiding
bad shit in hardware, is his belief that there's nothing
stopping along the point of production.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
The supply. Yeah, you can supply chain.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
So the thing to understand is that an SC wafer
is just a it's a risk like reduced instructions a
computing chip wafer, and the typical SC is using like
twenty five thirty percent of it. So most of that
chip is dark matter. And when you're taping out the
die and getting ready to nanolithograph the chip, you could
just tape out a whole bunch of other stuff. And

(41:41):
Bunny's talk at CCC was about how he convinced a
chip maker to let him tape out some open source
chips in the in the dark matter, because it was like,
you know, you're going to run ten million of these,
do another two hundred thousand. I'll pay for that part
of it. Everyone gets them really cheap because the product
gets cheaper the more of these you run. He was
able to fit five more processors on a processor, right,

(42:04):
So it's super cool. It's called the Bow chip. All
open source and all visually inspectable. So you can take
the chip, take the file that describes the chip, take
the chip and put it in a optical inspection unit,
and then it will produce a file and you can
lay the two on top of each other and see
if there's any extra gates that shouldn't be there is
this chip? The chip it says, it is just like
this incredibly important thing. Can you think about how much

(42:26):
of our world is running on this uninspectable silicon, and like,
how many people in the supply chain could do something
to sabotage that silicon? Anyways?

Speaker 9 (42:37):
I could, I could, I could read more and look
more at his stuff. This is yeah, my my, I'm pluralistic.
Yesterday I wrote a blog.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
I'll check that out.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
Because it calls it piggyback it.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
This makes me.

Speaker 9 (42:47):
Curious about you know, in video name their newest generation
of chips with the CPU and the GPU collaboration the
ver Rubin, And at first I thought it was just
like a very vague gesture on a few superficial levels
to ver Rubin, who uh discovered that we probably have
some either we have dark matter or we have some
fundamental failure in our explanatory model for the universe. But

(43:11):
also I'm curious, like, you know, is it just like
a tongue in cheek also joke or reference to the
fact that we.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
Have Yeah, I don't, I don't know know they know
exactly what's in the chip and it's getting more expensive.
That's well, oh god, are they doing like a deal
with I hate to do this, but Shelin just aggressive segue.
What have you seen it on the show?

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Just just just to put a button on it. One
last thing I want to say, no, please, four nanometers.
That was that. That was the thing that just fucking
blew myself. And that's four nanometer imaging in commodity hardware.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Holy shit, this is amazing and I'm pretty sure that's
like full nanimeters what they built the latest in video
black belt GPUs on I'd have to check. They couldn't
get they couldn't get down to three animeter and that
was a whole thing with the process. But shelin, what
have you seen on the food? Because you're you're only
with us for this group, so I want to him,
what have you seen this year that you liked?

Speaker 1 (44:02):
I mean, hearing all of you talk is just reminds
me like how diverse this show is. It's a huge show,
covers such a broad scope. I mean, and I got
lost in what you were talking about because it's fascinating,
but it also makes me question the c and ces consumers.
That's what is for the consumer? If it's all robots
and AI, I.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Mean, it's downstream, it's like eventually, but it's like, this
is so much of it as that consumer.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
Where are the consumers?

Speaker 7 (44:26):
Where are they are? Where's the thought for the consumer?

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Have you seen that in the show? Do you feel
like the overall show has been less consumer?

Speaker 1 (44:33):
I think to the point we were making at the
start of this episode, it's the physical manifestation of AI
slop and and a lot of the ones that were
here this year, the ones that braved the immigration risk
to come here and share their wares there. That just
means that their motivation was what to find partners, to
find someone to buy them. Yeah, it's and that's the

(44:54):
sense I'm getting of a lot of AI hardware out there,
because if you're still trying to make one at this
point without a clear different sater, then you are out
here trying to get some kind of VC major company
to buy you. And after Amazon bought B, it's just like,
who's going to buy the next best one?

Speaker 2 (45:08):
B was the one wearable that Victoria Victoria's song in
the world, Victoria's song Champion.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and and and I was I was
talking to the founder of B at the CES as well.
And you know, I'm not gonna dwell too much on
that just because I could be lucked out in getting
a home quickly.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
Look can get that paper, especially from Amazon.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
So go get that. But then the rest of them
that are here, what is what is the end game?
What is the goal? And to your point about e waste,
that's going to be e waste the ones that they make,
the ones that they sell, and limited quantities, but still
massive quantities.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Only smart watches that run on like a WS servers
that will get taken down the moment the company stops
paying for them, which will be quite quickly.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
Yeah, So I think it's it was just like a
lot of wading through this like existential dread of all
of this is going to end up in len fills,
all of these robots, all of these AI wearables, all
of these AI native devices. So we we tried very
hard to see things that we were interested in. And
I don't know if you've talked about this yet, but
we made a video of this device that has taken
off on at least by our standards, It's got like

(46:09):
millions of views at this point. It's called the wheel Move.
It is a wheelchair base.

Speaker 7 (46:15):
It's in a sissific.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
It's an assistive device that you attached to the front
of your wheelchair and it provides sort of a motorized
rugged wheel that props up the front of your wheelchair
and helps you over like rugged terrain, uneven surfaces, and
then extra boost. Yet and that is just so smart
because it's simple, right, It's not a whole over engineered wheelchair.

(46:37):
It's just an attachment to the front. And I was
talking to someone about it this morning who reminded me
that not all wheelchair users are always in wheelchairs. So
sometimes they're temporarily and I forgot. Sometimes they're just recovering.
Sometimes they're in rehab and they just need the assistance
for a bit. But getting out there, going for the
wheel move, wheel move, You're going out on like a
hike maybe or a walk, and sometimes you encounter, you know,

(46:59):
not the smoothest pavement, or sometimes you're.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Just showing everyone what it looks like. It's like a
wheel on the front of it. Fun and you know
what it's like. We've seen a lot of exa skeletons.
While we were on the floor, we saw like a
like a kind of a skateboard.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Yeah, so this is I brought the brochure back. So
we saw this thing called the stern board, which is
the same thing, but it doesn't clip onto a wheelchair.
It clips onto a motorized skateboard and turns it into
an all terrain motorized skateboard. It was this French dude
stern board str board.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Cool as shit. Like, I love the mobility stuff because
if you think about why technology exists is to make
humans better and able to do more and what limitations
we have can be surmounted with technology. The AI slop
doesn't seem to be that.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
I mean, I can understand some of them, what they're
saying and what they're trying to sell, but I sometimes
you can see right through some of them and I
get there. There's a lot of cute robots, and cute
is fine, but what is the frickin' point?

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Well, have you seen anything you liked? And I don't
mean this.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Scast wheel move I I.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
If the point is you haven't, that's totally no.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
No, I I did see something interesting, and last year
I came on this better offline of the CS edition
as well. I'm talking about an LED mask. Yes, year
I got another LED.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
That's fine, like a beauty mask, man, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
One of those like that puts red light on your face.
Looreal came through.

Speaker 6 (48:19):
With like.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
The LED masks that are flexible, so like there's skin
light in terms of texture instead of the rigid hardshells
that you've seen their body on the Luxx or Doctor
Devis girls make so it wraps on your face much
better and it is transparent soft. Yeah, it's supposed to
be more comfortable. Looreal wasn't letting people put the full
face version on their own faces for various like sanitary

(48:44):
and FDA related reasons. I saw the person put them on.
I saw it on the Mennican's head. I may have
seen other things, and I can tell you that the
proposition I have, I can't say things, but I can
tell you that it seems like it would fit better

(49:07):
on most heads, right, Like I don't have the same
nose another person might have, and I don't have the
same eyes, or I socket shapes that another person might have.
And I think that a more flexible shell for these
LED masks would be a bit more inclusive. I think
also much more comfortable because the button and where it
turns on the power running the LED lights is on

(49:27):
the mask, so it sits on your forehead, so you
press the power button there, as opposed to like a
cable dangling down the side of your face into a
power like remote control thing. And then the fact that
it's transparent is just wild. They've also made like underie
mask versions of it, And I am bringing like the
health and wellness sort of like vibes here into this episode,
but that's good. I just I just like that idea

(49:48):
and that Larel also says it's very close to producing
these for like, you know, actual sale. They're very close.
So I think that it's also another thing that's interesting
because this is not vaporware. It's actually going to be made,
and that's what we also look out for, not just
trash that's going to sit in a landfill some day.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
You've been to a lot of CSS and it feels
like this is one of the more vapor wary ones.
I'm really like, I don't want it to be. I
really don't.

Speaker 1 (50:14):
I know. I well, there's also like a lot of
things that will come out. I mean, so this year
and Gadget took our risk. We went, let's look at
all our best of CS winners from last year and
check out where they are now. Surprisingly, pretty much like
all of them are like either on track or have
already put their devices on sale, or are like, oh,

(50:34):
we will be at CS twenty twenty six to show
you the updates. One of them we did manage to locate,
so we're kind of like, what's going on there. So
it is like a kind of risky endeavor to do
that story because you want to know that as a publication,
we're only endorsing the right the more legitimate types of businesses.

(50:54):
At the same time, it's like, we want to do
the investigative work. We want to be very on if
this company end up looking.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Shady, right we look they were shady, or that they
were out competed by worst.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
They could exactly, you know, they could still be the
best one to a.

Speaker 9 (51:11):
Help they Also it's something that just ends up not working.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
You know.

Speaker 9 (51:16):
One thing that the last two years I've been really
interested in is technology that allows people who are deaf
or who are no sign language to communicate. My brother,
my older brother's death. One of my greatest anxieties and
fears is that he refuses to wear yeah, hearing aids
and any sort of assistive tech. And you know, there

(51:37):
have been many times, you know, and thankfully like we've
had this protocol stablished before, but there have been many
times where he's been stopped by cops and he just
like you know, he's immediately when stopped by cops reaching
into the car to get a note pad and pen
to write for them. So I've made him, you know,
call me beforehand so that we can talk about it,
so that you know, there's no misunderstanding any or of

(52:00):
escalation of things. But you know, technology that allows for
immediate communication would be nice. But then you know, a
lot of times when I go to these boots and
I sit down and I ask, Okay, what are the
scenarios in which they're interested in offering this sort of
assistive tech, They're almost exclusively in one very narrow scenario,
which is in a workplace and in a business, and
try I understand, but it's like that is actually also

(52:21):
not the space where I assume and from what I've
seen from people that I know who are deaf, and
from people are and from you know, my own brother,
you know, are interested in. But nonetheless you still have
firms who maybe are you know, they are created by
people who are deaf or around people who are deaf,
who know that that's not the use case, but are

(52:44):
not going to get funding interest or.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
I will also say with like checking back up your
old humans, yea, like you can go here and this
is the consumer electronics fraud show, Like I think it's
all about there are people who come here with the
intention of deceiving, and I don't think there's anything wrong
with being like, yeah, we.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Thought this was right, and that's where I was like, and.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
I think about I'm going to say push back if
you want to having read d gadget since like the
early like the mid two thousands, what haven't it's what
an gadget is now is really good. There's the reason
they have a lot of engadget people on is because
it's just people who like tech and they go and
look at stuff and they like it or they dislike it,
and you move on. And I say that as an
honest reader, and it's like, yeah, if you go back

(53:30):
and you say, yeah, we got fucking swindled by these people,
I feel like anyone who gets mad at that is
a moron. I just think if you're a dope, if
you're like, wow, a publication was like, yeah, we got
something wrong. Oh I don't like that, deceive me more, daddy.
And it's just like I feel like it's every single
publication should do that. It should not be something anyone

(53:51):
is afraid of. And indeed, if you don't do that,
it makes me deeply worried about the future, because you
know what, if you come here and you end up
writing about something that is just a lie or never
makes it, that ces right, and this particular Cees. There's
a lot of that, and in twenty twenty seven, we
need to do this because right, the AI bubble is

(54:13):
likely to burst in the next year and we're going
to need to dig through the ditches, so to speak,
and see what fucking happened. Yeah, because there's so much
AI rapper shit. I was hoping you'd love more stuff.

Speaker 7 (54:24):
But I did. I mean I I loved some well.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
I think part of it was the Cees more than others.
I was kind of chained to my laptop running things
rather than like going out there and seeing things. So
I okay, I saw something that I loved to hate on.
If that helps.

Speaker 7 (54:39):
Yeah, have you heard about the Lollipop Star?

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (54:43):
Yeah, so we gave it a worst in show I
like to show. I love to hate on Consumer Union
and the Repair Coalition.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Tell me why you gave it worse than show what
it is? It's exactly eWays and then so we lollipop Tell.

Speaker 9 (54:55):
Me more about this because I did not see this.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
I have no idea what this is. Uncompletely go ahead quest.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
I mean, it's just it's a sound chip and a
you know, sc in a lollipop handle and you put
a lollipop on top and through bone conduction you hear
a song while you eat a lollipop.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
It's just a lithium battery that goes in a landfill.
You're a psycho.

Speaker 7 (55:12):
Yeah, because you can't reuse it.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
You can't like and the battery is not like rechargeable,
which I guess makes sense, but it's it's kind of ridiculous.

Speaker 9 (55:20):
I saw this offered out a white Elephant that I
was at two weeks before I came here. Wow, just
like I and I was wondering. Everyone was like, this
seems like a horribike.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Was it? What favorite flavor? Did you get acorn?

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Or what idea it was?

Speaker 9 (55:32):
I did not get it. I tried. I was really hard.
I was honing in on the lottery tickets. There's a
stack of fifty lotto scratch offs and I really ride
them and every guest so I got.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
I got a books. I got a bunch of books.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
Singing lollipop is so. My last time at CS was
twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, two thousand
and three, and before that, I came a few times
in the nineties were wired and I have seen singing.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Lollipops at sea yes, exactly, they're not news.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
I also speaking of which though on the floor today
me and Ad saw a smell of Vision and.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Way way, that's what.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
We're saying this year on my team is that it's
kind of the comeback. So yes, the comeback of all
these older technologies that we've seen with like pebbles coming
back clicks with a communicator lego. It was not really
a comeback, but sure, Mike.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
I saw something that said, skateboard Penguin, I'm your little
sidekick company.

Speaker 7 (56:25):
I saw that.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Skateboard Penguin.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
A lot of ridiculous and pop let's pop the stack
just briefly, but also to get cryptached.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
No, also to get back to the thing you're talking
about there. The reason I was looking was because they
had the tagline welcome to the era of pseudo Reality.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
Oh yeah, that was the smell of vision. Yeah, yes,
they had smell vision and then they had like an
essential oil mister with that made smoke seem But on cryptech,
if anyone wants to follow a very good cryptech influencer,
Liz Henry used to be a build manager from Mozilla,
now is just doing cryptech. I think full time bookmaniac

(57:06):
dot org at, I'll send you the link.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
And she is in command of a small fund that
she disperses in thousand dollars in below grants to people
doing cool cryptech adaptation. So that is cryptech though for
those accessibility technology, so we.

Speaker 7 (57:21):
Check crypto tech.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Yeah, it was like security, no, no cryptech.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
So yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
Use we saw an amazing four line braille reader on
the floor.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
That was that was It was like a braille keyboard. Yeah,
and it was standards defined. It plugged into your usbc
as and showed up as a standard display.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
It just just and you know what I noticed about
I wish I remember the company name because they had
she deserve it. The guy was just like every like
people people really try and do like a micro jobs
being like meg a world, and this guy was just like, yeah,
it connects regularly like a keyboard. You can see it here.
That's not a software. That's that He was.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
Very all standards to find and he was very.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Clear to be like, this is not our software. This
just plugs into anything.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
The people who need.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
Brain don't need friction, right, Like that guy.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
Deserves the huge boots. That's every single blind person probably
could I'm not blind sweater. I truly don't. Sorry visually impaired,
So I don't know, wow what the experience is, but
I don't know. Seems like it fucking worked, and the
guy was not trying to like hawk anything.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
It was well built, it was standard fine, it was
chunky and rugged, and and it was it will outlive
changes to the OS because it's built around open standards.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
It was just the USB connected thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
I think when you said kryptach, I was reminded of
something that we didn't see in person, but we hurt
or read about. There's a water heater for your home
that will crypto mind while you shout.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
Oh, I've heard about these, I think I wanted to
put that together. There's a room heater as well that
does this is like a gimmick, right, it can also.

Speaker 9 (58:52):
Does There's a bathhouse in Williamsburg that does something that
is the most.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Yes, I know, is that the same one district? No,
it's not the same one where they legion is.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
Listen.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
I got.

Speaker 9 (59:10):
Like, yeah, you know, you know, I was landing them.
Then their name it's it's nothing to bathhouse.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
You know, Yeah, that's the legion is. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (59:22):
Yeah, So the guy who runs it, he loves crypto
and so you can paying crypto. And he initially tried
to market it as like, you know, like some of
the heat generation is going to go is coming from crypto.
But then he removed that silently. And I don't know
if you removed it because it was like it's not
actually or because he doesn't want people to.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
Just nocause it doesn't work. Just mining difficulty has reached
a point where all of these little.

Speaker 3 (59:50):
Just doesn't work. Scuba diving on Roatan, which is the
island where prosper the crypto city is and the future
beautiful little like dirt road island africabbing on and the
food's amazing, the diving is amazing. It's it's just a
lovely place. And then the former dictator of Honduras, who

(01:00:11):
was just pardoned by Trump, who was an ARCO trafficker,
sold them the sovereign rights to a chunk of this island.
And you walk down the dirt road in the dive
town and every shop has got a sign in the
window that says we accept bitcoin. And you walk in,
you say do you accept bitcoin, and they're like, of course,
we don't accept that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
You don't. I don't have fifteen minutes to wait for this.

Speaker 9 (01:00:34):
And these reactionaries they know how to pick a spot,
you know. Yeah, If I were going to make a
future network, Stay is one of the placeings I would
do it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
They don't have the actual stones to find a real
place where there's truly no laws, right well yeah, it
also all of the actual pirates and real criminals would
kill them.

Speaker 9 (01:00:55):
I mean this media thing with the Pirate Enlightenment book
of David Gray. You give you give fascists a lawless zone,
and you let other people come into the lawas zone,
and everyone else will go, why are there fascists here?

Speaker 3 (01:01:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Well do you know?

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
Do you know a libertarian walks into a bear? The
story about that libertarian exit town in New Hampshire where
they all moved in and then they ran for city
council and then they abolished the school district and they
did and they abolished all the rules. And then this
one lady kept feeding bears and they're like, please stop
feeding bears.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
She was like, I thought there were no rules. They
were all being mauled by bears.

Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
But Thiston wrong. This Marxist gun nut weed grower moves
in and he's like, I'm gonna grow weed and collect
guns and wait for the Marxist revolution. And they're like,
but we're a libertarian town.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
He's like, well, what are you gonna do? Actually, actually,
libertarian means you own nothing. Yeah. No, it's my favorite.
One of my favorite old school Internet videos is the
Libertarian Conference where it's like, well, I think the driver's
licenses should exist, and I think there should be some
competency in the driving. No allow us to die and

(01:01:58):
call crashes. We're approaching the break right now. But I
really have been trying all weightlessness. I swear to God,
I've been trying to get people to talk to me
about awesome stuff. The CS is weird. This is a
broken CS Listen. I do think wrong. I do think that.

Speaker 9 (01:02:15):
One plus I would say for the CS is it
is actually a really great spot for you to come
through and think about the way in which technological products
are offered, as in the role they play in your life.
You know, like, are you satisfied with tech products that
are solely around convenience or solely around you know, assistive

(01:02:36):
tech are solely around health or you know, like, what
is it that you want and do you think that
the industry and the sectors are interested in developing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Yeah, I think this is what are they interested in building,
rather than what I think.

Speaker 9 (01:02:49):
I think it's a very good place for coming and
talking to people and getting sense of whether or not
other people share those priorities with you.

Speaker 5 (01:02:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
You and I saw something that we went away and bought,
which was that were Coco espresso maker. That's hot water
pump it up. Yeah, it gets a nine atmospheres, It
ejects a shot of espresso. It has no battery.

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
It's like yeah. Another thing is like, do you like coffee? Right?
Imagine if you could have coffee on the go and
it worked the coffee I was.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
As a guy who flies around with an aero press,
but whose wife prefers espresso to coffee concentrate. I'm I
just like literally walked off the trade floor and bought
one because now I can it's small enough. I could
put both of them in my bag, and my wife
can have an espresso and I can have a coffee concentrate.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
If only old products are that good. Now, the upcoming advertisement,
I assume will be for a product that's even better
than that and even more useful. If it's a podcast.
You need to listen with complete detention. Put down your
phone or else. And we're back to the Bedro offline

(01:03:52):
CS experience. And we've got author, activist and journalist Cory
Doctor Hello and get you. It's Sherlyn Low and Garrison
Davis of it could happen here. How are you doing? Garrison?

Speaker 5 (01:04:03):
Oh, it's another beautiful Cees morning.

Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
In beautiful Las Vegas. About it? What have you seen
today today?

Speaker 5 (01:04:09):
If I finally did hold, I've been I've been neglecting Holid.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
What did you see? Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
That is fine?

Speaker 5 (01:04:21):
I guess I also also also had fun in the
Amazon booth. Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Yeah, we've been we've been punishing them.

Speaker 5 (01:04:27):
Yeah, I assumed. I assumed you've been punishing.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
We went in there to punish them. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:04:32):
No, it's if you lose your dog, you get you
can use all the all the ring cameras in your
neighborhood to find your pet.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
I have a five thousand dollars surveillance tower from a
trailer that now will tell me if anyone walks near
my house in any way, so I can donline one
one and claim there's a prowler.

Speaker 3 (01:04:48):
But will it measure their skull with cal Excuse me,
will it measure their skull with calipers to tell you
whether they are likely criminals.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Only on Ring plus with their new lightar system. Nice?

Speaker 5 (01:05:00):
Maybe No. There's also this like ring like mesh mesh network.
I'm not sure if you if you saw that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
Oh, they're doing this Nest bullshit.

Speaker 5 (01:05:07):
Ring sidewalk I think is what it's called. If there's
a Wi Fi outage, they will they will act as
a mesh to to still be able to notify you
if there's like movement around your house. There's no live
video because of because of how we boun so it
uses it uses like point like one like one percent

(01:05:29):
of like of the of like a homes like like
Wi Fi system to communicate peer to peer.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Experience of those is they don't work very well, like
the Nest one. If you ever try and install the
Nest product and it tries to connect to a Nest
another Nest product, it will break in my experience.

Speaker 5 (01:05:45):
But but the thing that I found interesting about the
the pet Finder is that it's it's basically making a
consumer product based on the capacity that police have been
using Ring for already, right, being able to like find
five people and have and have immediate nearly immediate access
to footage, and now they're just turning that into a
consumer a consumer side product.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
How does it work?

Speaker 5 (01:06:08):
You request that you're you, You send a message rightly
to like to some like Amazon app about your pet
being missing, and then it searches through all the ring
cameras in the neighborhood to see if you can find
the pet.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
I think that is completely and notly evil. I don't think.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
Can you access people's footage?

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
No, because they have it, they immediately have it.

Speaker 5 (01:06:28):
Right, So they're talking about how how this footage is
like secured and encrypted and no one can see it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
Meanwhile, they're offering products.

Speaker 5 (01:06:34):
Based on based on everybody having ring And that's the
other interesting thing is how all the new features are
like useless if you only have one ring camera. The
features are built or based on total societal acceptance that
everyone already has these things, and the fact that everyone
has these things enables all these extra features to work.
So the actual individual products of these things not very useful.

(01:06:57):
But as long as your whole neighborhood has it, then
then it's like a really great product.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
The Surveillance Society told lap arrist with university.

Speaker 5 (01:07:05):
And it's sacrificing privacy for for a convenience. Just thinking
the entire gamble with with the with this style of product.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
The last scene of the conversation just like ripping up
the sideboards and everyone's houses to try and find the
ring cameras. Very horrible. So wait, but you were in
hol D what'd you see in the hold again?

Speaker 5 (01:07:25):
More more more LLLM wrapper robots, A lot of smaller,
smaller like robots, not not like the big the big
one of the robots doing we I looked at a
few robots for like you know, like learning robots for kids.
For it's like kind of a toy, and it's also
like supposed to be some kind of learning assistance.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
You can see through that so quickly, I must be
clear when they.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
Get tired of it in like two minutes.

Speaker 5 (01:07:49):
Yeah, No, it definitely looks the ones the ones that
I saw, including from this This company called their their
product was called a Yambo yonbo x one, which they they.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
Thought as of the tongue.

Speaker 5 (01:08:01):
I mean, it's it's it's a it's a it's Chinese.
It's Chinese for it sounds similar to the word for hug.

Speaker 1 (01:08:09):
But this is the well yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
I don't speak any of the language, like.

Speaker 5 (01:08:16):
This is for natural language prompting. This is to help, allegedly,
according to them, we'll he will help kids learn another language.
The U S side product justice Chat GIPT. So if
you're if you're if you're wanting to learn learn another
language through chat GPT, this is what it'll do. It
was the Wi Fi and holdy is kind of off.

(01:08:36):
So it's hard to get good product. It's it's it's
it's hard to go to good baseline for how for
HW good the product is which everyone would search to me,
what were you gonna say?

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Show?

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
I was gonna say. Kind of off was the understatement
of the Wi Fi situation that the Venetian this year, it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Was freaking terrible.

Speaker 7 (01:08:51):
It's not all, it's all.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
It's worse this year because even the Wi Fi was down,
it was always the signal. It is always bad. By
the time you approached the Venetian, you have no more
five z R. But like in the Expo, then their
hone in house WiFi. Was that the irony of that was.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Because everyone has these GPT Yes, yeah, it's because everyone's
just pummeling a ws worse than ever yet beating.

Speaker 5 (01:09:15):
But yeah, we we tried to, you know, they try
to give a demonstration where we'd teach us like a
Chinese word, and so like, yeah, if you can learn
a word.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
Speak a little Chinese, but you can't.

Speaker 5 (01:09:24):
You can't actually you can't like learn grammar, and they
can't like correct a child to actually improve language, and
you can't actually you actually learn to speak a language.
You can learn individual words, but that's not that's not
language learning, right, you can do that. You can do
that like do a lingo, and that's not teaching you a.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
Lingal if you were just looking for a word and
do a lingo is already something that people who teach
languages are like, this is it's not all the all
the features that make do a lingos cut against the
pedagogical value of it as a language training tool.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
So there's a lot of stuff like that.

Speaker 5 (01:09:56):
I I did ask them about like what their plans
are if if the PI for chattypt it gets more expensive.
They said they do not expect that in the near future.
They have like five other lms that they're that they
work with. Specifically, their product is mostly in China right now,
and they they have they can they can swap, they

(01:10:17):
can talk to Lum whenever they.

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):
Want to, which, like is doesn't that kind of impact
the quality?

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Yes, because each because each of them is prompted differently. Yes,
I love that though it's like, what if something bad happens,
what if it doesn't?

Speaker 5 (01:10:30):
But if it doesn't, and even if it does, we'll
just use something good or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
I have a slightly different gloss on this though, because
we were saying before that, well, all these products seem
un differentiated. And if they're all undifferentiated because they're just
a wrapper on top of chat Gypt and their vulnerable
to changes, that's one thing, and it maybe speaks well
for chat GPT and that they'll have whatever companies among
these are successful, it'll have them over a barrel and
a can jack at the price on thread of bricking

(01:10:55):
their products and making their customers angry at them. But
if the case is that Chatchypt is a commodity back
end and there's fifty companies in China that can do
the same thing at a tenth of the price, and
chatch Ept's future plan is someday there will be so
many people so reliant on us that we can charge
two hundred dollars for something we're charging two dollars for

(01:11:16):
the answer is, the minute they start charging two hundred dollars,
there will be fifty Chinese.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Company charge you two dollars. Bryan Ches give Airbnb. Even
there's like a disgusting booster who was specifically involved in
making sure Clammy Samuelman managed to become CEO again. He
literally has said I'll use Chinese lms every day, which
is really funny. So really it's one of the two.
It's going to be either. But I also don't think

(01:11:39):
because they're API sales are like a small part of
their revenue. It's just actually, here's a question, general question.
Anyone hear about anyone used againthropics models even once.

Speaker 5 (01:11:48):
I've not heard mentioned Yeah, yeah, but I.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
Mean specifically on the floor as powering.

Speaker 1 (01:11:53):
Yeah, someone, do you know what ob Pebble uses?

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
Qual really interesting?

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
But to just do the for the ring they said
that was on device. There is no on device version
of Claude Oh Peurble. I was so nice about you.
Now I have to go and look into your in its.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
I can go, we should go.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
No, I'm genuinely curious about that because there is no
on device version of GPT or anything.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
Now you're making me question if I should like double chat.
I think what I'm talking.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
About, I think that that's worthwhile, not not because, but
the thing is, I'm a I'm a horrible freak that
looks at this stuff constantly. So my natural thought was like,
what do you mean? And I will admit the seventy
five dollars pebble ring I supposely on device as well,
that did seem a little rich to Meah, what do
you mean by rich as in like an on device
model and a tiny ring.

Speaker 1 (01:12:43):
It's not on the ring, it's on the phone.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Yes, but they're saying it's if it needs to go
through Claude. That's not I don't know. There's there's something
weird there, and again that's something that will increase in price.

Speaker 5 (01:12:54):
Another on water you go there. Alleged on device product
is the Lunar Pendant, which is real time a GI
emotion tracking.

Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
Okay, oh, well, because it's not doing anything real you
could put a random number.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Well it's not, actually it is.

Speaker 5 (01:13:08):
It is listening to every single thing you say and
building emotional assessments based on what you say as well
as you know, whatever kind of biometrics it can connect
from a pendant resting on your like.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
They mention what the customer might be. No, not, because
this always immediately goes to people with autism. We already
ran into someone with a dog a dog toy today.
It was like it could help autistic children.

Speaker 5 (01:13:34):
This was not this was this was not marketed to that.
This is what is this? Foreman, this is this is
for I wouldn't say women.

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
That was the classic.

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):
Doesn't understand women love to be told what are Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
Yeah, exactly. We finally found a device to be sexist
without the need of all of all.

Speaker 5 (01:13:55):
Of the was was was pretty yes, and it measures
like six or seven.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
That was a mistake.

Speaker 5 (01:14:03):
I'm sorry that it does. It does like six or
seven different emotions most but it's mostly done just through
listening on on device though they do not upload to
the They do not upload the audio to the cloud. Nice, okay,
it is on device.

Speaker 1 (01:14:21):
But so no biometric data, just listening.

Speaker 5 (01:14:25):
That's unclear. Uncle, It was mostly listening because again, I'm
it's some look sometimes I honestly language barriers when trying
to talk with some of these boots here.

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
I would respect them so much. It was for guys.
If it was just like you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Yea a sound Harry very ability, breathing and movement, that's
what it was.

Speaker 5 (01:14:48):
It's it's resting on your chest so you can have
some some heart, some breathing, but most mostly it's just
through listening to everything.

Speaker 1 (01:14:55):
The reason I asked this, that's the only thing that
differentiates it from like the Halo Tone wearable from you
just go buy Amazon that's already doing the same thing.
I'm very like I have a good memory for all
the devices that try to tell me what I'm feeling
and tell me to chill out, come down, so like this,
this is a sort of device that remembers. And there's
another product that was at CES that was like, clearly
men made this for women. It was like a broad

(01:15:16):
insert to like be a wearable to detect your detect
your booms. Well, no, you're you're metro like it's kind
of for gym purposes when you're working out. And I
was just like, if you've paid any attention to the
women's sports bra industry discourse at all, it's that we've
been asking for these broad inserts to be removed or
sewn in. We don't want them to be removable, fall

(01:15:37):
out of when they're trying. We just want them to
remain in place or just be done with.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
One of less classic situations, I did you talk to
a woman? Off? Do you make?

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
Or anything else?

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:15:48):
Like, if you're designing a product for someone in a wheelchair,
have you worked with someone who's actually using a wheelchair?

Speaker 3 (01:15:53):
Well, the saying is nothing about us with that, which
I discovered goes back to the Polish equivalent of the
Magna kurta and this sixteenth century, and it was what
the barons made the king agree was that nothing about
them would be done without them. It didn't didn't rhyme
in Polish.

Speaker 2 (01:16:07):
Yeah, and that's also definitely not how c S works.
Is like without you, we will sell to you.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
Yeah, it's tanry Ford. Right. If I ask people what
they wanted, they'd say faster horse, right, And so we're
here to tell you what you want.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
Yeah. Yeah, but these people would sell you like horseshoes
to make the horses faster, rather than it's like these
people don't get to anything. I'm still sitting there trying
to work out what that pendant is for. I'm gonna
be honest, like what alien.

Speaker 5 (01:16:33):
Well, sometimes you're suppled to know if you if you're
calm or if you're angry. Oh I know what I'm met.

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):
Yeah, I'm breathing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:44):
I recently started somadic therapy, and so I think I
can understand the idea of the benefits of knowing when
you're feeling something, identifying it and kind of like staying
with it. But I don't think a pendant is going
to tell me in real time. It's not built for
that exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
Well with any of that, I mean, what are you
supposed to be doing, like looking down and going, oh.

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
No, I'm angry and why and then breathe?

Speaker 2 (01:17:07):
It does? It does?

Speaker 5 (01:17:08):
It does connect to an app where like christ it
has it has an analysis of how you're feeling, how
you're feeling, you know, heart rate.

Speaker 2 (01:17:16):
This reminds me of Victoria's song posting the Aura Ring.
Think it's like stressed straight, like collective bar running seven
hours stressed right? Oh God? So what you got a
lot of paper that.

Speaker 5 (01:17:28):
I I just I just like collecting these.

Speaker 2 (01:17:30):
That's fine paper. Anything else you you regarded, Oh.

Speaker 5 (01:17:35):
I guess I'll talk about the the one that I
feel the weirdest about awesome. This is another CES Innovation
Award winner.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
Okay, this is from South Korea.

Speaker 5 (01:17:47):
This is the Self Insight Therapy Resolved x R oh.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
Okay, well I've got most of This.

Speaker 5 (01:17:57):
Is a VR experience to give you a final goodbye
to a deceased fred So the episode. So, we have
seen stuffing this before. We have we have seen these
kind of like VR experiences that are either fully scripted
or done with like an AI And I thought that's
what this that this was. I thought this was just
another one of those, and I was surprised why it

(01:18:19):
won an Innovation award because we've seen this stuff years ago.
This the reason why it's different is that this is
not an AI. This is not an AI system. This
is not a pre recorded movie either. This is a
avatar puppeted by a therapist as a part of a
as a part of like a therapy program where you

(01:18:39):
enter into it for a short amount of time to
give this like like visual like therapeutic exercise to someone
when they weren't able to say goodbye to a FAMI member,
usually after some kind of accident.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
Is what this was.

Speaker 5 (01:18:51):
And they they talked about a few instances of like
this really bad plane crash uh last year, and that
that's that was like the main main use case that
that is seen. It's right now just available in Korea.
They're trying to expand to Japan and the United States
where they would need to partner with with therapists in
those countries. So yes, I feel really odd about about

(01:19:14):
these types of products obviously specifically like the digital avatar
nature of it. Yeah, if you have a recording of
your of your deceased loved ones voice, it can try
to clone the voice, so it does use A so
it doesn't use AA for the voice. But the person
there's the therapist puppet.

Speaker 2 (01:19:33):
Puppeting it, who will who will do text to speech?

Speaker 5 (01:19:36):
So they will will will we'll we'll we'll text to speech,
uh the like, you know, whatever, the whatever the person
will like.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
It takes the speech as well. So no, it is
texting that That's what it is.

Speaker 5 (01:19:47):
It is text to speech. The therapist that's puppeting it.
The words coming out of the avatar are from a
therapist who's typing out who's typing out the words as
a part of this this therapeutic exercise. But then then
will be that will come out, is in a cloned
voice of the deceased?

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
Are they're also controlling like the gestures when you see puppetting.

Speaker 5 (01:20:04):
Yes, there is a pre pre recorded set of set
of movements that they can that they can initiate.

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
This sounds traumatizing.

Speaker 5 (01:20:15):
They said that the people have used it have liked it,
and there's a video of of course they're gonna say
that obviously, yeah, people, but that's you know, and I
saw I saw a footage of of of someone using it.
I think it is It is good that this isn't
just an a I L L M who's just talking
as your as you'r.

Speaker 2 (01:20:35):
As and it's not pretending to be that.

Speaker 5 (01:20:38):
It is a therapeutic experience and it is an exercise
similar similar, similar, well the pretty you know you're you're
wearing the r gogs, like you see the avatar in
like a setting and you like say goodbye and get
some kind of closure as a part of a therapeutic experience.
And like there's versions that we already just do this
in therapy, like you already sort of exercises with therapy.
This is putting in kind of in avatar over it.

(01:20:58):
I don't feel great at the avatar. But this is
this is certainly better and more thoughtful than just talking
to and just talking to an ll M. The fact
that it's you're partnering with a therapist you've already been
working with who already knows you for people and they
getting an extreme emotional grief, Like I can see that
they did stress that, like this isn't for everybody. This

(01:21:20):
is for people like dealing with they get extreme emotional grief,
and I, you know, ask like, you know, why did
you choose you know, why is this not just an AI.
They're like, well, I mean these people are very traumatized
and you actually need a skill.

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
I give them. I give him some credit. If that's
the If that's their reaction to it, yeah, I'm less.
I'm like, I'm not mad at it because if they're
very much like this is very specific, Yeah, I'm alright
with it.

Speaker 5 (01:21:43):
This is my experience at the booth because I went
in very skept hostile, hostile, because I was very hostile,
and they didn't necessarily win me over, but I understood
why the product exists over time more and I was like, yeah,
I feel very odd, not odd. I think digital. I
think digital necromancy is bad. Yeah, I've every every CS

(01:22:05):
I've been to. There's I've done some report on digital necromancy.
The fact that it's cloning the voice I don't love.
But the product's not for me, right, It's I would
not want to hear an ai voice of my dead friend,
but that is me and I'm you know, as a
gen Z Canadian American, I don't want this for some

(01:22:26):
people who are using using this product that might help
them in certain settings with an awareness that like you're
this is you know, this is an avatar, this is around.

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
I'm just into a therapist. I'm not a therapist, but
my view on that is like there are certain things
where it's leading you to get to conclusions and I
feel like adding a disembodied digital levatar controlled by a keyboard,
I'm like, if this helps someone, brilliant, but it's also
just like that's just it's adding a layer of something
that probably will get in the way of feeling better
because it's like like change comes from within, like.

Speaker 5 (01:22:56):
This is this is this is the gestalt to empty
chair technique. That's that's therapy Techniquely.

Speaker 3 (01:23:01):
I want to raise another point. So hagen Blix was
on this machine kills talking about chat or chat therapists,
and how the temptation on the firms that are delivering
therapy over chat is to pile more chat windows on
a single therapist and to get them to multitask and

(01:23:21):
then multi multitask. And so I'm not saying this firm
is doing it. I'm saying that this is a mode
of therapy that is uniquely amenable to speed ups that
are anti patient and anti therapists.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
I have also a thought, right, which is when I
was mostly furious about this until you mentioned this was
for extreme scenario, extreme cases of grief, And I was like, Okay,
can imagine if someone is so deep in their grief
that they wouldn't respond to anything, but you need anything,
You need anything. But then I think about, like even myself,
thinking about going through the process of anyone that that
has you know, a friend died in a car accident

(01:23:55):
two years ago, Like if the thought of talking to
an embodied version of him and hearing his voice just
get me out of my grief is already dubious, But
then you have to I was like, oh, but all
kinds of therapy rec there's a little resistance to that
sort of grief therapy anyway. So I was like trying
to make my peace with that. Then I remember, this
is x R. You're gonna have to convince the person
who's an extreme grief to put on a headset.

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):
Yes, just trap this brick to your face for five
seconds and strap this brick trap yourself.

Speaker 5 (01:24:22):
That's I mean, yeah, this is something that you're gonna
I don't think they're getting convinced into doing this. I
think it's that they will, you know, this is an
option that they can choose from. And I think it's
also specifically this is not like an extended things. This
isn't something you like go to talk to your friend.
It's it's it is a It is to give you
like a yeah one one time like good like like

(01:24:43):
closure exercise is I'm also just like that you also
have it for a pet.

Speaker 2 (01:24:48):
They also have a powkay. Because now it's like closure
isn't always clean. That's absolutely life is message, but also
you don't get closure on that. Therapy is about finding
finding a way through when you.

Speaker 3 (01:25:05):
The gift you give yourself is not a thing you
get from someone else.

Speaker 5 (01:25:08):
That's the more like larger like essential resistance that I
have to.

Speaker 2 (01:25:11):
This is hearing the pet thing really fills people angry
by yeah, yeah, yeah, yam yamyamao, yamyam maamyamao. No, it's
just also like you lost your pet. What the fuck
is seeing like a three D cat or dog? Like?

Speaker 3 (01:25:23):
What of Canada's most beloved prime ministers, John Diefenbaker, used
to go get advice for running the country from his
dog's ghost.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
What that was?

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Dead air there?

Speaker 2 (01:25:34):
It's true Cleveland Brown's dropped. Did Johnny mansiel based on
a homeless person's idea? I love this tell me everything.
That's all I know.

Speaker 3 (01:25:43):
We learned it in history. I was fourteen years old,
That's all I remember. It's literally the only thing I
know about chan T dog's ghosts. There's a lot of
buildings named after him as well. But he did Did
you learn this? What did you grow up in Canada?

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
I did grow up in Canada.

Speaker 3 (01:25:56):
Did you learn this in ninth grade?

Speaker 2 (01:25:58):
Know? By then I was already in the States. Okay,
so you.

Speaker 3 (01:26:00):
Didn't get our full year about just the Canadian Pacific Railroad,
World War One and John diefen Baker's dead.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
We got a little bit of the railroad, but that's it. Yeah,
you missed the year of Canadian education around dog ghosts.
I did miss that one.

Speaker 3 (01:26:13):
We're gonna put them on the new fifty.

Speaker 10 (01:26:15):
The dog ghost that's good, had a lot of them. Yeah,
the Supreme Leader Curry, We'll get right on that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:23):
I just see this stuff and hearing the pet thing,
I'm like, because my thought process with this was like, okay,
extreme situations. But then I'm like, the pet thing, I
don't yet. No, I hear pet and I'm like, so
it's not extreme situation. You will because my thought was, okay,
if this is very specific, like deep in the box
of tools, we've tried everything. Yeah, fuck yeah, we'll help

(01:26:44):
you with your other thing.

Speaker 3 (01:26:45):
And also if your favorite flavor of ice cream is
sold out at basketball yeah, yea, yeah, we've got.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
A model for that. It's also preparing you. I don't know.
Some of the most difficult things in therapy for me
have been accepting there is no such thing as closure.
In some cases, you will never have that.

Speaker 5 (01:26:58):
The other thing I don't think about the pet thing
is that it is that that is a reoccurring feature.
You can visit the Yeah, it's like you create a
space more than once which okay.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
I will say now that I'm reading the brochure, it
is not just about the grief. I think there's parts
of this that sound like that makes sense, or the
resolve extra part of it that's talking about the gestalte
empty chair thing. It's also like not just about grief,
but it's about like confronting difficult, like conflict moments that
one I could learn to deal with because like whenever
I'm dealing with like a manipulative talker and I don't

(01:27:26):
know how to like respond and I have these emotional reactions,
bubble up a bit of practice into dealing with the
The thing is.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
The like, you are completely correct, I sound like another lum.
But these are the soft edges where these people work
their ways in right. It's like, well, there could be
a situation where it makes sense. They're not preparing for
a situation if they have, I can revisit my dead dog.
They're just like, fuck it. Can I say enough of this?

Speaker 3 (01:27:51):
It's a structural problem with small backs products. Also, you
just want to expand the market.

Speaker 1 (01:27:55):
I'll also point out that on the brochure this you
should have said it here, But they are calling the
grief part of it good mourning with a U.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
And I'm just like, no, I love having good morning.

Speaker 3 (01:28:07):
That's that's very good.

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
That's that that tells me this is a state hairdresser.

Speaker 3 (01:28:11):
Hairdressers uh business name grade pun curl up and die
good morning.

Speaker 2 (01:28:17):
A bike called bike curious like Jesus fucking That's that's
the thing is. I'm really trying and hear, folks, I'm
trying to find some stuff. I'm trying to look not
cynically about it.

Speaker 5 (01:28:29):
Well, there's a bajillion AI cooking products.

Speaker 2 (01:28:32):
I did see what I did see. We saw one
which was just a giant box.

Speaker 5 (01:28:36):
No, they're all boxes and things you have. You still
do all the prepper work yourself. You still have to
assemble the ingredients. In most cases. It's it's it's it's
an oven, like it's a it's a quote unquote smart oven.

Speaker 2 (01:28:46):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:28:46):
That's all these A products that like that like take
the effort out of cooking. You're like, well, yeah, that's
just putting something in the oven, like right, and still
have to do a lot of work.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
You kind of have hoses that are just full of
congealed schmuds.

Speaker 2 (01:28:57):
Oh yeah, yeah. At some point, like three days in
it's going to just be congealed.

Speaker 5 (01:29:02):
Cleaning it's going to be a nightmare. It's it's easier
just to cook.

Speaker 1 (01:29:05):
Like it's like it reminds me of those videos where
like the influencers going these are my simple meals, no
cook simple meals. Step one caught some garlic and it's
just like no, no, no, you're cooking.

Speaker 5 (01:29:15):
Yeah no, Like this is like you put put a
piece of cardboard in the microwave, Like that's that's gonna
be more efficient if you really want to live a
lifestyle where you don't cook.

Speaker 2 (01:29:24):
Enough about British cooking.

Speaker 3 (01:29:25):
I just I just learned about from from Garbage Ryan
about uh kitchen cells, which is the Reddit forum for
in cells who cook elaborate meals and then feel bad
about themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
That's fun, Yeah, good for them at least better good
morning someone else. So that was that was a bitch,
you think to say, But no, I wait, so these
people are like in cells who would just so the
two varieties are very elaborate meal I cooked with a
caption that is just like I want to die, or
like someone who's literally microwaved a piece of cardboard and

(01:29:59):
it's the caption is I'm a piece of ship. That's
that second one is really funny. I mean, actually no,
the idea of doing like a five course tasting menu
and doing that is actually really good. That's pretty good.
That's that's But are they serious or is this so?

Speaker 3 (01:30:13):
This was the thing garbage Ryan said is he wasn't
sure to what extended was a bit think for some
of them it's a bit. It's it's like, yeah, like.

Speaker 2 (01:30:25):
I love those where it's just like a TV, a
like a high sensed TV on top of the box
that the hesned TV came in, and like an Apple
TV and a PlayStation five with like bent cables because
like like straight out the box plugs. I love that.

Speaker 3 (01:30:40):
My favorite one was the guy who bought a church
and he had a he had a bed and a
little table and in a church, and his his uh
caption was any suggestions for what else to do with this?

Speaker 1 (01:30:55):
Do an exorcism?

Speaker 2 (01:30:57):
I mean the thing you're going to do in six
months involving a news Sorry, but it's like, why did
you buy a church? There is this guy.

Speaker 3 (01:31:05):
Scarsing about a church. They're cheap. Religion is failing in America.

Speaker 2 (01:31:09):
I don't know if that's good or bad. Now, I
did see this guy on Instagram that I've been following
for like a while where he bought like a house
in an Eastern European country for five thousand euro and
he has put so much money into it just making
it and he's actually got like walls. Now he's like
day five thousand to buy my five thousand euro house.
My friend Kujuk came down and it's just like this

(01:31:30):
Eastern European guy who you could shoot with a gun
and it would just bounce the fuck off this.

Speaker 8 (01:31:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:36):
Yeah, it's all of these guys who are just like
actual work and stiffs who are like this is gonna
get me promo because they all make money off of it,
which is cool. Actually actually in a weird way, likely
helps the local economy. But it is funny watching just
the American guys being like fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
infrastructure doesn't work someplaces. Yeah. Well, as we wrap up
this half an hour section, I'm gonna advertise something now.

(01:31:58):
It's called a stuff buyer. Go to stuff buyo dot
Bierz and whatever you hear next, ignore that, ur L.
That's not where stuff buyo dot biz is where you're
going to buy your next products. Thank you please, I

(01:32:21):
am being gangstalk. Welcome back to Better Offline. I'm at
Cetron and we have one of grab with us. Of course, journalist, activist,
and of course I was author, yeah, author with keeping it.
It's fine, author Cory doctor Rowe. Hello, I'm so sorry.
That's okay, Garrison Davis.

Speaker 5 (01:32:36):
If it could happen here, there's been a white van
outside this hotel the entire time.

Speaker 2 (01:32:41):
Yeah, and they're only looking for me, Sheldon lower n
Gadget and we're going to actually start with some Engadget things.
What I engadget It's best to see, yes, like what
was the stuff that Engadget actually liked.

Speaker 1 (01:32:51):
I don't know if you'll hate us for this, because
we talked earlier in the episode this we we as
a team awarded the Lego Smartplay smartbreak system totally fort
and show. It was a show off hands type of
votement by the time we had gotten around to the
last one, and like we were doing ranked tories voting too,
so like we had to go around with everyone.

Speaker 2 (01:33:08):
Well, we were ready to stay.

Speaker 1 (01:33:09):
I know, thank you.

Speaker 9 (01:33:10):
We were.

Speaker 1 (01:33:11):
We've been progressive for a very long time.

Speaker 7 (01:33:13):
We uh, we were dedicated.

Speaker 1 (01:33:15):
We're like, however long this takes to find the best
and show, we're going to stay all through the night.
And then we got through the first few candidates and
then we got to Lego and then like more than
half way, more than half hands went up and we're like, oh, well,
good thing. We don't need to say the rest of
the night. Then it's quite obvious. Yeah, some quick math
was done. So anyway, I think the Best and Gadget's
Best of ce AS awards are going to reflect engadgets

(01:33:38):
choice and gadgets taste, and so that's good, right, I'm glad.
I think it shows that we're a bunch of childish kids,
nerds and that sort of thing, and I like that
about my team. And also then we had other winners,
like you'll see our list of winners include things like TVs, laptops,
concept devices.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
Look at this thrown toilet mount health.

Speaker 1 (01:33:59):
That's not an at war to be clear, that's the weirdestkedget.

Speaker 2 (01:34:02):
That's all the coolest text.

Speaker 3 (01:34:06):
W A And I'm like, is it a Shuri?

Speaker 1 (01:34:08):
I love that. I love that you got confused because
that's very good feedback for the team that I've been
trying to fight with about the headlines.

Speaker 2 (01:34:14):
Yeah, that completely confused me because the measure, Yeah put it.
I'm just going to show only be drinking diet cokes
for seven years.

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):
That will tell you we did not give that.

Speaker 2 (01:34:24):
Okay, So your best of CS, I will stop trying
to anticipate your dynamoon.

Speaker 1 (01:34:28):
Okay, I mean I can I do that too. Our
best of CS includes like the l G wall paper
TV that was shown. This's your very classic CS type
of price we got, that's it. Yeah, it's very thin,
very impressive. It just lost that sound bar base that
used to be what it came out of. And then
there's no cables like stuff for the power court because
it's got the wireless control center that always that the

(01:34:50):
brick that is kind of the little Yeah, you could
tuck it away low latency.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
Yeah, exactly saw that, and I was kind of like,
I love that. It's like way, it's like super expensive,
out of the range of most people, but it's cool
to And also so wait does the thing go on
it plugs in the walls.

Speaker 1 (01:35:04):
Still there's still a power court for the TV itself.

Speaker 2 (01:35:07):
HD mind such comes up the community? Did you get
the price on the wallpaper one? Or if they not
said it yet.

Speaker 1 (01:35:13):
I have had so many numbers, it's hard.

Speaker 3 (01:35:16):
And do they do the surveillance that is endemic to
smart TVs or is it like a dumb TV when
it comes to sending information about what you're watching?

Speaker 1 (01:35:24):
Yeah, I don't know that either. I had our TV
experts cover it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:27):
I just know that.

Speaker 3 (01:35:28):
I mean Consumer Union every time they look at TV's
are like very good one for us to look into.

Speaker 5 (01:35:33):
The stuff like the wallpaper TV and the transparent TV
aren't even really marketed towards most like nos like they're
they're kind of for like hotel lobbies or for like
like the paper.

Speaker 2 (01:35:42):
TV feels more business could be. It feels like more
like something eventually a person might buy, rather than the
transparent one, which you know what keeps fucking that chicken Like, yeah,
bring that weird ship with you.

Speaker 6 (01:35:52):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:53):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:35:54):
Speaking of weird Ship, Lenovo this year we're like, we
really like this thing. We want to give it an
a war. Let's think about like how which the Lenovo
Legion Pro seven eye rollable concept?

Speaker 2 (01:36:04):
Is that the one that kind of rolls.

Speaker 1 (01:36:05):
Yeah, it's a gaming laptop, but it's screen can expand
by rolling out into like twenty three point eight inches
of space, and so you can stop in between twenty
one point five inches or so, so you get like
different aspect ratios when you're gaming and you just want
to like drill in or you want to have discord
show up on the ride or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:36:22):
It knows what ext you've unrolled it, and that it's
always been the.

Speaker 1 (01:36:27):
Trick, right, not understanding how to place these items on
the screen. But it's gotten there.

Speaker 2 (01:36:31):
It's very interesting and that's just the concept though.

Speaker 1 (01:36:34):
It's just a concept.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
But they last year they had a concept with the
swivel which ended up being real.

Speaker 1 (01:36:38):
Actually the auto twist they're calling it this year.

Speaker 3 (01:36:40):
Yeah, but it's a laptop.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
Yeah, it's a gaming labe.

Speaker 2 (01:36:43):
So this is like Butterfly keyboard, but Butterfly screen. But
it like slowly rolls. It rolls. It's not like a
fold out press a button.

Speaker 1 (01:36:50):
And yeah, yeah, oh my god, need to show you
a video. You don't unroll it, like no, not by hand.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
Yeah, yeah, it's I like that. I also think that
we're approaching the point where we're limited by form factors,
so that is cool. Yes, I hope they're able to
do it in anything approaching affordability, right, I know that's
not the same time. For like a decade we've talked
about like rollable screens, screens. It's nice to see that
in a consumer tech housing and not yanky and not janky.

(01:37:18):
It had a little wobble, like just mentioned, it has
a little bubble. But I'm kind of like, it's a concept.
It's a concept concept, a concept. You're not talking about
selling it. I kind of like it. But wh else
she got on the list?

Speaker 1 (01:37:29):
I want to shout out the I x I autofocus
slash adaptive iewere Okay, so they're not officially as as
I think the parachute they dropped in. They were like,
let's take some meetings. These are you know how multifocal
slash bifocal classes right now are very clum.

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):
Now I don't know that.

Speaker 1 (01:37:44):
I don't know that, so some people might know, but
they get very clunky and very chunky because you have
like just the technology isn't there yet.

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
I have a stupid question by folk, what is like
so the top half.

Speaker 1 (01:37:54):
So some people have both near sighted and far sighted
as you age, so you one prescription doesn't cut it.
You need one like and sometimes they cut your lens
so that the top half is for your alongside it
and the bottom half is where you.

Speaker 3 (01:38:07):
Right, That's what I have in this lens, okay. And
it's minus progressive, so it's not a sharp line. That's
more magnified the further down it goes.

Speaker 1 (01:38:15):
Okay, so those are like multifocal. So so I XI
has technology. I'm very curious what you think about this
corey where it's using a mix of like LEDs around
the lens to detect your gaze and where you're looking,
and then a liquid crystal lens layer that changes the
prescription of the lens so you're whenever you're wherever you're

(01:38:38):
looking at something. It's just detecting the right prescription and
just working the way it should. See a demo. R
Matt Smith took a demo and he was impressed. We've
already interviewed I x I in September. We've known this
tech was coming, but now they're at CES with a
working demo.

Speaker 3 (01:38:55):
So what I would want to know is like, so
this sounds amazing. I had cataract surgery last year, okay,
and I got what's called oh god, I can't monofocus.
So this eye is focused at monovision. Rather, this eye
is focused at twenty three inches. This eye is focused
at twenty five feet. My brain switches between them depending
on what I'm looking at. And then this is the

(01:39:15):
only corrective region in my glasses. It's on the distance
eye and it's a close up region, so that if
I'm reading on this side, I don't have to turn
my head right, but I can get around. Like I
just went skiing without my glasses on for the first time.
My life is fucking amazing. Oh wow, no fog, nothing
like just so great scuba diving, just terrific. The thing
I'd be worried about, as a man who has dropped
his glasses fourteen million times, is what happens when these

(01:39:39):
things fall off your face.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
Well, I don't know yet. I think it has to
depend on who they team up with on the like
frames as well, and how they build these into like
retail ready products. I don't have all the details yet
because it was a late entrance to our lac as
a Wars discussions.

Speaker 3 (01:39:53):
It's an amazing idea, but also and the fact that
they made it work is incredibly and.

Speaker 2 (01:39:57):
Is there anything more consumer tech than that?

Speaker 9 (01:39:59):
Right?

Speaker 7 (01:40:00):
Right glasses.

Speaker 1 (01:40:01):
And also one more thing, spectacle technology. I glasses technology
hasn't changed. It's been stagnant since the nineteen fifties, So
for something like this to happen, it'd be cool. And
also imagine getting like one pair of lenses that you theoretically,
hypothetically don't need to keep changing as your eye as
your worsen or changes that could be sustainable, could be

(01:40:21):
just for your cost, for your budget. That would be
great too. So I just think there's so much potential.
We were so exciting, really cool.

Speaker 5 (01:40:28):
Multiple people could wear the glasses, I guess could be.

Speaker 1 (01:40:30):
I can't say because I think for them they can't
say things they love.

Speaker 3 (01:40:35):
I'd love to know, like, can you put it in
I'm painting D and D mini's mode and have it ratchet.

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
Hypothetically? Why not?

Speaker 3 (01:40:43):
You know, my grandfather was a watchmaker and he wore
a jeweler's loop. Yes, professional life and you know Popeye
squint right, Like if you could just be like, no,
I'm on the job now, I'm fixing a watch movement
and it just suddenly zooms up.

Speaker 1 (01:40:55):
You know, yeah, going to be pretty so cool.

Speaker 7 (01:40:58):
That's just really cool technologies.

Speaker 1 (01:41:00):
So we were very glad we were able to see
it here and then we you know, we talked about
the wheel Move earlier in the episode, gave the wheel
Move an award. We just didn't see enough sustainable slash
transport related technologies to have something for those categories. Literally
just there were there were things. They just weren't good.

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
No, no, I mean you didn't have anything you could
give an award to.

Speaker 5 (01:41:20):
I mean all those personal helicopters I think could serve
a great public service helicopters.

Speaker 2 (01:41:25):
Oh yeah, you can see.

Speaker 1 (01:41:27):
Yeah, so Richer is from last year.

Speaker 2 (01:41:29):
I talked.

Speaker 5 (01:41:30):
I talked with Richer last year. There was there was
I saw two personal helicopters this year.

Speaker 2 (01:41:33):
One of them was Richter. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:41:36):
I think I think we should be giving giving those
out to me. No, not to you, you're not You're
not rich enough. I think we should be giving the
personal helicopters to like maybe the top like point five people.

Speaker 10 (01:41:48):
Everyone should happen with whirling blades on the sale free. No,
I think everye they should all.

Speaker 5 (01:41:52):
We should all as a as a victory trilphy for
you won, you won, you won, society piece. Right here,
We're going to give you this personal helicopter. It's gonna
work great, it'll be fine. It's just as much as
you want.

Speaker 3 (01:42:05):
That pairs very nicely with this thing we saw. Oh god,
so we saw a personal airbag for old people worried
about breaking their hips.

Speaker 2 (01:42:13):
And it sounds that you fall Yeah, it sounds like
a good idea until you learn the details.

Speaker 3 (01:42:18):
Well, the business model, yes, So the business model is
so if you fall over, they call, they call the
emergency services.

Speaker 2 (01:42:25):
Yeah, that's a forty dollars a month subscription, which is nice.
And I said to the guy, like, is Twilio that expensive,
because like that's you're paying like like tiny amounts of
money for one take. There's so many fall detection Yeah,
like it's like there's no fucking way in hell. And
you can't repack the airbag after you use it.

Speaker 3 (01:42:44):
So it's it's use.

Speaker 2 (01:42:46):
You get four eight hundred dollars for two airbags what
and forty bucks a month? Otherwise, all it does is
the airbag thing. It doesn't. It doesn't. They're trying to scam.

Speaker 3 (01:42:55):
Let's scam people trying to scam it from medica. They were, well, yeah,
they were trying to get medicare proof. Man, who's also
had a hip replacement, but two hip replacements. Uh, and
was the youngest person on the ward when I had
it done that, Like, you know, forty month subscription from
an eighty year old does not generate that much revenue over.

Speaker 2 (01:43:15):
Months. Forty bucks. Fuck you man, it's a Twilio thing.
It's well, you're just paying Twilio.

Speaker 1 (01:43:23):
So then wouldn't you want to like make sure the
airbag is repackable because then you.

Speaker 3 (01:43:28):
Have m you don't know if it's going to work.
If the old person with the arthritis repacks it, then
we're worried that break a hip.

Speaker 1 (01:43:35):
But then then they stop paying the forty dollars a
month Onnesday is But.

Speaker 3 (01:43:38):
Another argument is if you get saved from breaking a
hip twice in a row, you'll happily buy another set
of airbags.

Speaker 2 (01:43:44):
That that may be true. Yeah, it's just I'm like,
the more I think about it's like, oh yeah, it's
forty bucks months for the text, which costs like a
tenth of a cent, which will also only have happened
ideally twice twice in the life of the product, right
like ideally never, but if you use them, this will
cost them feat So if you own it for ten years, right,

(01:44:05):
and what a you're actually paying for it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:07):
You have paid several thousand night what was up costs again?

Speaker 2 (01:44:12):
Eight hundred bucks for eight hundred and then forty a month.
That's right, that's right. And he was like, we're working
there's no Medicare code for this, yet, we're working on it. Well,
I'm sure, I'm sure that's all they're working on.

Speaker 3 (01:44:23):
I could see the Medicare case for it, right, if
you're starting to get inner ear problems, or if you're old,
brittle or.

Speaker 2 (01:44:29):
Whatever you balance, I can see the point. I could
see why Medicare would buy you a set of airbag,
just not the fucking subscription. Fuck you like, make the
subscription five bucks a month like that. Even then you're like,
you're still making insane magin my.

Speaker 3 (01:44:42):
Guess these things they're manufacturing in the small runs, it's
costing them more than eight hundred bucks. That they're losing
money on the eight hundred bucks. And they're like, this
is how we will make a profit is we'll sell
a loss leader and.

Speaker 2 (01:44:53):
Will sounds like a bad business to me.

Speaker 3 (01:44:55):
It does well, it sounds like a case for like
public investment in medical technology.

Speaker 2 (01:44:59):
Well, oh, what a lady, we need more knife drones.

Speaker 3 (01:45:05):
We need is that what we're calling the person a helicopter?

Speaker 2 (01:45:07):
Now? No ideal in a perfect world. No, the personal
helicopters are very safe and you're very rich, and you
need one, yes, trying them out. You don't need training,
there's an no. You're smart, you're rich.

Speaker 1 (01:45:23):
G I run it.

Speaker 2 (01:45:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:45:25):
Yeah, We've built an obstacle course for it. You can
fly over like lava and acid and broken glass.

Speaker 2 (01:45:31):
And you'll be you have the lathe of Heaven. You'll
be the mandate of Heaven. Even sorry, late of Heaven.
My brain just like, what words do you need? I
don't fucking know.

Speaker 3 (01:45:40):
You've just lath that into consistence. That's leg the l
of Heaven.

Speaker 2 (01:45:44):
There, Yes, thank you. Look for too much farming in
earth to see. Yeah, it's I'm actually a little sad
you don't have more. I'm not saying this is.

Speaker 1 (01:45:52):
A criticism, it's like, but it's like, even right, even.

Speaker 2 (01:45:57):
Last year, it felt like there was more. Yucks, it
was more.

Speaker 5 (01:46:00):
Definitely exactly more square footage is taken up by the
l M rappers and by just and by robotics and
sometimes combined. Sometimes it's a robot both not both rapper.

Speaker 1 (01:46:12):
Did you see the Project Ava thing by.

Speaker 5 (01:46:14):
Yeah, we've talked about the wife and I haven't what's
the I when you see the project everything, I have
not seen it yet.

Speaker 2 (01:46:19):
It's this tube.

Speaker 5 (01:46:22):
And you talk to the Hends like it's like Oscar
and there or something.

Speaker 1 (01:46:26):
I don't know the name of the Kira.

Speaker 2 (01:46:29):
I guess it's the name project It's Project Kira is
apparently some anime thing. And then you can have a
guy with tattoos, you can have a woman in a
business suit. It's like yeah, and it's just like I
feel like if you try and not that they're selling
its concept, you try and buy one that should put
you on a list. So I did.

Speaker 5 (01:46:48):
I did walk by that that really grows sex robot and.

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
Tell me everything.

Speaker 5 (01:46:56):
I had a hard time looking at it, like I
like walked up to this side and I looking at
it hands and it just looked like a corpse.

Speaker 2 (01:47:03):
It's so simple, what is this? This is a robot
that looks kind of like a woman and you aumence,
so we're talking real doll style, yes, okay.

Speaker 5 (01:47:13):
And allegedly this is something that you can have intercourse with.
And I walked up to the side and it has
a very realistic looking skin texture, but its head moves
like a like a like like an old Disney animatronic
and it has like an LLLM that's trying to talk

(01:47:33):
and move its mouth. And I stood there for about
ten seconds and I had to leave. I walked around
the corner and they had the little AI avatar section
which wasn't working because of the Wi Fi. Nice but
it's like the AA avatar that you can talk to
you which is synced to the little like jack Off robot,
so you can you can you can talk to talk
to the AI and then it can.

Speaker 2 (01:47:52):
Jack you off.

Speaker 3 (01:47:53):
That is a hell of a good cave accessory. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:55):
Well, and it also the jack Off robot.

Speaker 5 (01:47:58):
This company's been around to the twenty fourteen the jet well, no,
this is this is this is still the Love Sense
Love Both booth and they've been run for a while.
Did it did not look that good? But yes, but
it connects to games as well, connect online gaming.

Speaker 2 (01:48:14):
Wow, So so it really is you want to Tetris? Well,
you know, if they can connect.

Speaker 3 (01:48:19):
That trying to find a way into making the Tetris
movie for years, you were going to be like They've
been trying to fu Tetris for years.

Speaker 2 (01:48:28):
We never will.

Speaker 3 (01:48:30):
This is the plot of the Tetris.

Speaker 5 (01:48:31):
Mean, finally, if they can connect it to like Final
Fantasy Vin remake and have and and have Cloud, then
maybe they could have a real product on their hands.

Speaker 2 (01:48:38):
Well maybe they should do that because Cloud has a
wonderful cross dressing section and also Cloud completely autistic and no,
not horny at all. No, I think that whole game
is trying to avoid having sex. I think I think you.

Speaker 5 (01:48:49):
I think you would would be a great addition. This
is so like but like I'm not going to judge
them for the sex, but whatever. But it's also just
like the idea that you looked at it and immediately
faced revulsion. It made me feel and not in like
a not just like a Christian moral in a judgment,
more mostly well a little bit, but most mostly in
like an uncanny valley way, like if if if I

(01:49:09):
was engaged in this thing, it would it would feel
kind of like necrophilia.

Speaker 2 (01:49:14):
Oh god, and realistic skin is not a phrase that
I like saying sex have been a thing for a while,
But yes, it's just the.

Speaker 5 (01:49:24):
Which but for me that increases if it's just a
limp object. Then it is a necrophilia thing, but it's simple.

Speaker 2 (01:49:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:49:31):
Just the fact that it's trying to kind of behave
human I think makes it makes more makes that reaction,
that makes that negative Uncanny Valley reaction a bit stronger,
very strange.

Speaker 2 (01:49:41):
And also they put them in odd places. It sounds
like they don't have a Do they have a sex
pavilion here? No? Not, it's in like the health tech section.
Notoriously right, there was a best in show that was
rescinded for us, Yeah, bustin show.

Speaker 3 (01:49:56):
Yeah, for a woman sex toy that.

Speaker 1 (01:49:58):
Was like, not Lioness, it was Laura de Carlo, that's it.

Speaker 3 (01:50:01):
Yeah, And so they've had this love hate relationship. I
mean when I was sex timing twenty some years ago,
this was oh my Bob was always a thing. Well,
and it was being held at the same time as
the adult show well yeah, and so people would there
would be this kind of crossover, and you could go
to the party sometimes at AVN and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:50:17):
You had to see it.

Speaker 1 (01:50:19):
I had to walk past some of the AVI and
like expo ares and the booze to get to a
Lenovo briefing. One time. Wow rules it was fun.

Speaker 5 (01:50:26):
Other times I'm so sad. I'm so sad I missed it.

Speaker 2 (01:50:29):
I like the idea that they all these staid kind
of like tech executives seven to walk past the ass
plus the five thousand have you it was with their
bums is fine. No, it's just very strange to have
it like sticking in the middle of like the various
health tracking l MS powered.

Speaker 1 (01:50:45):
There was a party.

Speaker 5 (01:50:47):
Absolutely it was AI or l l M powered because
it's an l I mean, it's the at least like
the anime one was more interactable. Even so the Project
Dave it was, Yeah, I meant the sex Box. No,
I'm talking about that. Yeah, because it has it has
it has it has the AI avatar hooked up to
the jacking off the machine and yeah, it is.

Speaker 2 (01:51:06):
It is.

Speaker 3 (01:51:08):
So this is like in the N E S where
you had the robot that would pick up the spinning
top and it would match the action on the screen.
So you had a physical robot, you had a virtual robot.

Speaker 2 (01:51:16):
It's just like the original N E S.

Speaker 5 (01:51:18):
Yeah, basically with fucking cuck Hunt and it's like it's
like it's like right next to like three like smart Watch.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
That was the thing I was saying, that's exactly it's
like you've got.

Speaker 3 (01:51:30):
For the smart watch, booth and show boss.

Speaker 2 (01:51:34):
I'm really sorry, just stare at you need you need
to find us. Yeah, we're right by the Bonamax.

Speaker 3 (01:51:40):
The CMO really wants pictures of the booth frontage before
we tear down. Can you make sure you get a
picture of this? Try not to get the fuck bought
the shot.

Speaker 1 (01:51:50):
That's but to your point, Corey, the ct A has
struggled with what it wants to do with this sex
technology because we know that with everything sex cells R
and sex tech well like advance faster than any other
kinds of tech. Forget about people with accessibility needs right,
and so the CTA knows it needs to cover up
some space, but it won't give you a dedicated because
it somehow wants to be family friendly.

Speaker 7 (01:52:10):
Yeah, it's so ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:52:12):
All of the kids.

Speaker 1 (01:52:14):
Now we've turned into basically the like games Fares or
the toy fest. That's true in New.

Speaker 2 (01:52:18):
York because of all I wish, No I will push back.
I agree with you, that's not enough.

Speaker 1 (01:52:23):
If you want to make this a need more fun.

Speaker 2 (01:52:25):
The goofy dipshit show.

Speaker 1 (01:52:26):
It should be.

Speaker 2 (01:52:27):
I would love to. I would love to see some
useless crap that's just kind of funny.

Speaker 3 (01:52:31):
But that's the International Pavilions because they are like the
Country of Turkey sponsors twenty entrepreneurs to show up. They're
each weirder than the last. A lot of them are
really delightful to give them credit. Were not toys.

Speaker 2 (01:52:45):
They were like, we made a photonic cell, we made
a solar panel thing, we made specific software for this,
that and the other, which is awesome. And those people rock.
Not fun to talk about a podcast, but very funny
to look at and be like, oh cool, someone's useful hair.
And then there is just stuff. It is the listeners
already like, oh it's I was just saying, there's nothing here.

(01:53:06):
You fucking come to this and you do a podcast, asshole.
But it's just frustrating because I love a dude that
like having Michael on to show us the clicks was
nice because it was a thingy and it was so cool,
and also I really do like it and I love
my corn. If it was bad, I would have been
in a real If it was like, actually ship, I
would have genuinely been sad because I would have had
to find a way to trash it with.

Speaker 1 (01:53:28):
I did avoid him for a year after trying the
first click s keyboard.

Speaker 5 (01:53:30):
Oh oh yeah, clicks clicks was that shit? Yaers again
this year?

Speaker 2 (01:53:37):
Yeah, we just had Michael on and we liked the
clicks thing personally the case not for me, but nevertheless,
it's like, at least you fucking tried. And the other
thing that pisses me off is clicks proves that other
people could just because Android can fit into all sorts
of things, you could be trying all sorts of weird
fucking smartphone shit. You could have weird like a tube

(01:53:57):
smartphone kinds of tubes that this one when we have
a smartphone tube. But no, it's like, how do we
charge you for using the chat gptap?

Speaker 3 (01:54:06):
I mean, there was a time where you go to
like Guanhou and you go to the big mall and
there'd be the phone that.

Speaker 2 (01:54:11):
Was shaped like a Marlboro Hell yeah yeah, and that
ship rocks. We should have more of that. But no,
it's like it's it feels like the most nihilistic cis ever.

Speaker 1 (01:54:21):
It's just people being like I feel it gets worse
from here. I feel it's just the beginning.

Speaker 2 (01:54:26):
So my theory is that actually gets better from here,
but it gets the apocalypse is so much worse because
if you look at this and you realize how much
LM crap there is, yes, then.

Speaker 5 (01:54:35):
They realize, I think this is a I think this
is a dip year.

Speaker 2 (01:54:38):
Yeah, like this will be because Corey, to your point, Oh,
the commodity of LMS just because the Chinese models are cheap,
but doesn't mean that their margin positive. That's also true,
zupe zgine. I forget which one went went public and
they like lost. They spent three hundred million dollars in
or two hundred and something million dollars in six months
and made twenty seven million dollars in revenue. Not great?

(01:55:00):
Do that? Yeah, I mean like I could. If you
want me to lose two undred million dollars call me.

Speaker 3 (01:55:04):
Well, look, if you have three million dollars and you're
expecting a twenty some million dollar return, I'll tell you what.
I'll give you a twenty eight million dollar return.

Speaker 2 (01:55:11):
Nice, how would you do it?

Speaker 3 (01:55:12):
I will just keep all but twenty eight million, right right?

Speaker 2 (01:55:15):
Okay, it's no, it's like investing in like vineyards, like yeah, no,
it's and it's like all of these companies that rely
on LM's going away because they're going to get more
expensive and it's going to be apocalyptic. I think twenty
twenty seven could be like a really fucked up youf
many reasons, but CEUs twenty twenty seven would be really fun, might.

Speaker 3 (01:55:34):
Be really but usually remind me what I wanted to
talk about, which is Pete Wharton. We were talking about
him yesterday. So Pete Warton is an old school hardware
hacker specializing in machine learning and finding cool like one
of the people who was like figuring out that you
could use GPUs to do machine learning a million years ago.
And he just demoed on his blog a local AI

(01:55:56):
voice agent running on a system on a chip that
costs less than ten dollars. So he's got an SoC.
It's like an eight dollar SoC.

Speaker 2 (01:56:04):
You can put it in on EVA.

Speaker 1 (01:56:05):
You.

Speaker 3 (01:56:05):
The demo he built was a button you that on
your dishwasher and you smack the button and you say,
my filter is clogged, and it goes through the manual
and it finds the relatives just on the chip. And
it's all on chip, and we are again total cost
of goods under ten dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:56:19):
He built a whole model for this is his own model. Yeah,
and it all it does is reference and manual.

Speaker 2 (01:56:25):
All that is the kind that is the scale of
task it can do. So he can. That's why it's
like they could do other kinds of tasks.

Speaker 3 (01:56:32):
But he's like, I can build you an eight dollar
SoC with a model running on it that will help
you build your ikea furniture, whatever. All this kind of
there's a lot of room at the bottom. Here is
what I'm saying. And he has this other post. When
I was looking for the post, I found another one,
which the title says it all. I know we're in
an AI bubble because nobody wants me crying emoji. So

(01:56:54):
here's a guy who does real things that are absolutely sustainable,
Like could you be revenue positive shipping AI models run
on hardware that costs less than ten dollars? I bet
you fucking could. Yeah, right, and and uh and like
everyone's like, yeah, but the way we raise money is
from punters who don't understand the technology and whose only
way of assessing the upside is how much money we

(01:57:16):
spend on it. This is the pile of shit and
has a pony underneath it, right, And so we have
to spend a lot of money to prove to them
that we will make a lot of money. If we
show them a thing that is.

Speaker 2 (01:57:27):
Profitable, because it's very cheap to make, they'll be like, well,
there's no upside. I'm just really worried because even in
the Indiego go years, Indiegogo was not everything. This is
like AI has taken everything in people Anyone listening to
this being like AI is this or that and the
other like AI is taking over.

Speaker 1 (01:57:43):
No. The thing I can remember that most closely mirrors.
This year was the year that was about the Internet
of things.

Speaker 7 (01:57:49):
Everything so get annoying.

Speaker 1 (01:57:52):
I was so annoyed. I was just stop saying fucking
internet of things.

Speaker 2 (01:57:56):
Oh, what's the term internet of shit? Now? The beacons
I I beacons one million times. It's like, we will
put an eye beacon that you're I want to device,
like fucking Howard will put an ibacon hair Like it's
fucking ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (01:58:10):
Where has it gone?

Speaker 2 (01:58:11):
Nowhere? No, it was just like mad lips like five
G autonomous IoT.

Speaker 1 (01:58:19):
But but IoT is is similar in the sense that
like it's also rappers for things. It's also like small
little gadgets that don't do much and they're all e ways.
Now it doesn't cost as much because of the like
none of.

Speaker 2 (01:58:30):
The l because there's not a GPU service running in
the fucking cloud for it. It's just very unfortunate. I
think next ces could be kind of barren because of this,
because it's very like, if there were other options, they'd
be buying boots and I don't think that are.

Speaker 1 (01:58:45):
Or maybe they were like priced out because there was
so much AI.

Speaker 2 (01:58:48):
That's very possible, But the thing is it didn't. It
looked kind of sparse too, like there was a lot
more walking room than ever I feel like.

Speaker 3 (01:58:55):
And three after the dotcom crash was pretty good. This
is actually how was it. It was full of people
doing weird and interesting things, none of which made a mark,
I think, but it was it was a time in
which if you came to see us, it was because
you had done something very improbable in a time in
which there was no tech money.

Speaker 2 (01:59:16):
That might be twenty twenty seven for real though, because
even like LG with this kloid robot, it's like, hey,
check this out, we're doing this thing. Well, we're not
doing this thing, and you may be wondering if it
does the thing we're talking about. It doesn't, but it's
very slow at it and why do you want this? Well,
you can't have it.

Speaker 1 (01:59:35):
I have a question for you. When you say it's bars,
do you mean specifically some wholesome booth orp of.

Speaker 2 (01:59:41):
The Expost Center was fucking empty? And I don't just
mean like it's the last day's I mean like there
were just less things. There was less density. The usual
dildo battery security camera area was really not present in
the main hall in the same way. In fact, I
found way more of those top side in a way
that like I wouldn't usually. It's just very strange and
I think there's a strain on venture capital money and money.

(02:00:05):
Well south by Southwest last year the trade floor was
a quarter of the size. Wow, and there was an
entire row that was just massage guns. I saw. I
saw an area of the Palazza way gambling would usually
happen that was completely empty.

Speaker 3 (02:00:20):
That small worrying teapot, Yeah, ropes around it and they're
like vacuuming.

Speaker 7 (02:00:25):
I wondered.

Speaker 1 (02:00:27):
The usually I ask you is the reason I asked
you is because the West Hall and the LVCC Central
Hall that this whole facelift. I don't know, if you
see the Central Hall right this year, does it look different?
I didd so different from last year. It is still
kind of a slot. But because Central Hall is where
Samsung and LG used to have their gigantic but right

(02:00:47):
Samsung isn't there is doing the wind, So I think
that contributes to feeling like there's not that much going
on in the convention spaces, especially since Central Hall now
too with the sort of remodel, looks much bigger and
so you know, consequently like emptier and then has a
lot more like glass windows light letting in light, which
I love.

Speaker 2 (02:01:04):
It's nice.

Speaker 1 (02:01:05):
It's nice, but then also makes you feel like you
can see daylight, and therefore it doesn't feel as packed
and crowded and like that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:11):
And on top of the fact that a lot of
the things are just like gone.

Speaker 1 (02:01:14):
The ELG wall display.

Speaker 2 (02:01:16):
Was so muted this I know, usually there's like this,
like last year we have that giant transparent motherfucker, and
I like the year with the big like curved spectacle.
Unless you're a tractor, there's none. It's just I feel
like I feel like we're years into just the Hubris
Fest where it's just like, what if we didn't provide

(02:01:36):
anything useful and jump to the latest trend. It's a shame.
And as we come to the end of this first
two hour block, I will just say I want to
find cool stuff. And when we're back next year, which
we will be, I hope we find more of it.
And if you were someone with the CEA, when you're
someone putting stuff here, please think of actual people because
it's getting a little sad. But final words, Shelling, what

(02:01:59):
one is your takeaway from this CS in general? Big question?

Speaker 1 (02:02:03):
Huh Yeah, I thought I had something to say and
it's odd on my brain now, so I think I've
run out of a RAM which everyone was in.

Speaker 2 (02:02:08):
Sorrying, well, everyone's running out of the Divendra was just
on talking about the RAM crisis. But thank you for
joining us, Thank you for having so many Engadget people,
and we've had we had Christo and oh it's fucking
great to like actually talk about consumer electronics. And we've
of course had Garrison Davis and Mick could happen here.
Thank you Garrison of course, and Corey Doctor will be
joining us for the next episode as well.

Speaker 3 (02:02:27):
Excellent.

Speaker 2 (02:02:27):
Looking forward to it and I am at Zetron. You
can please subscribe to my newsletter. Good Lord, I'm not
doing a premium this week, so I need the money.
But more important than that, of course, our dealy departed.
Sean Paul Adams, who's a friend of the sweet friend
of the show, passed last year. We're honoring him by
getting you to donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium.
His son is epleptic and his family would deeply appreciate

(02:02:48):
you donations. Thank you for listening. We'll be back for
one more two hour episode today, but I guess it'll
be towards the end of the day either way. Thank
you for listening. You've all been so wonderful. Send me
your feedback. Go to the reddit I'm ed Zetron. Goodbye.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and

(02:03:10):
composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O. S
O W s KI dot com. You can email me
at easy at Better offline dot com or visit Better
Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course,
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(02:03:31):
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go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 (02:03:40):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 6 (02:03:42):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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