CES 2026: Part Four (Wednesday)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, someone through a portal to the podcast to
mention I am ed Zitron and this is better Offlines
coverage of the Consumer Electronic Show. It's goddamn Wednesday, and

(00:24):
we're here at the goddamn Palazzo Hotel and beautiful Las Vegas,
Nevada all week with an open bar, tacos and the
comfy place to relax. Reporters covering the largest and I
don't know, most offensive technology show in the world, i'd say,
And we're here all week with two episodes today and
we've got an all star cast bring you the best
and well mostly the worst from the show floors at
the Las Vegas Convention and Venetian Expost centers. And my

(00:47):
first contestants are joining me on nice and damp from
the show floor. That was actually in the notes before that. Chloe,
I apologize. I've got just.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Filled half a can of liquid death all over myself.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
In this I bought an entire can over this tape yesterday.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
It like exploded because it froze.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Anyway, mister Longuso Junior and Junior Jesus Christ, I'm keeping going.
Thank you for joining me. Take Bubble newsletter of course.
Thank you thank you, happy to be here, and you've
got a star of Is this thing on Chloe Radcliffe? Yes,
comedian as well, that's right all this intro and Cole
stand up comedian host of the Factually podcast Adam.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
Connove, Hello, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
So it sounds like you've all been on the convention
flaws and based on the little I've heard, real bang
of day, Chloe, you got some free stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
The very first booth that I walked into was a
dongle that basically makes you be able to air drop
between Mac and PC things.

Speaker 5 (01:42):
Huh and I do.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, super useful and it's like adorable. I truly was
magneted over because I was like, the word dongle is
really funny and I wonder if I can make some
jokes out of that. And then I saw it and
was like, oh, this actually kind of rocks, and uh,
I have I feel like an asshole saying I have
an assistant, but I have an assistant and she uses
a PC laptop but a MAC phone, And I was like, oh,

(02:03):
I think I would like to buy this for her
as a gift. Yeah, And so I was asking about
the price and they said they were like, oh, well,
we'd love to send you some free product.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Let me send them, let me take a photo of
your badge whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
And truly my eyes like popped out of my skull,
went cash dollars rolling through my eyes, and I was like.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
I can get free things.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
The corner is on.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, And so then I started trying to go over
and like like show interest in things that I might want,
and most of them did not involve for it.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Just walking up to the eighty seven inch TV you want?

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, Wow, that's so nice.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
I love that, just kicking, just looking eyes with them.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
I love this.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Give it to me, my my badge, says digital content creator.
That's what you want, right, you want me to create
digital content about your four thousand dollars TV.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Right?

Speaker 3 (02:55):
You like this? You pick?

Speaker 5 (02:57):
Give it to me.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
So aside people not giving you stuff for free, anything interesting.

Speaker 5 (03:03):
Uh, there was.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Well, so I really got gummed down. I spent too
much time on the accessories.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
They were great.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
There was one actually a booth that was had a
super useful like travel uh a wireless charger that like
flips out. It looks like a like a makeup compact actually,
and there's a wireless charger for your phone, and a
wireless charger for your AirPods and a little baby one
for your Apple Watch.

Speaker 5 (03:33):
Right, And I.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Don't use those three things, but my boyfriend does. And
so I was, oh, fuck Christmas presents.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
This is awesome.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Great, I'm just starting to make Christmas presents list on
the CEES floor, which actually seems like the best possible.

Speaker 5 (03:46):
Yeah, that that is what it should be.

Speaker 4 (03:49):
You should walk around and go, oh, stocking stuffers, little
googaws that will make Grammy happy. Yeah, like consumer Electronics expo.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, yeah, it is for it is at a retail
level for the consumers, me and my family. And but
then at that same booth where I was, so I
was like really owed by this, the little flip open
k Wiler sharger.

Speaker 5 (04:11):
And then a guy.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
The guy was walking me around and he was showing
me the other things that they have whatever whatever, other
char power blocks and charging. And then another guy at
that same booth came up and there's I have a
photo of it, but it's probably not worth showing. They
have a little set of power banks in the back
that's like pastel colors. And I didn't look at that
and go, oh power banks for girls. I didn't gotta

(04:35):
say that thought never crossed my mind. I just thought,
a power bank that's pink as I do, and light
green whatever, very progressive, and it looks kind of like
a makeup bottle, like it's like one color on like
for two thirds of it, and then it kind of
looks like it might have a clear glass top.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
It's not.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
It's just a power bank. But I again, this is
not a thought that I had. But the second guy
walks up and he goes, it looks like a foundation,
clearly with the tone of like, you're a lady, you
will like that.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Now there's a guy who knows makeup. Yes, it looks
like conquila.

Speaker 4 (05:10):
He worked for the product.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
He worked for the company.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
For the company, yeah, I And I went, oh, yeah,
it looks like a foundation, and he like doubled down
on it and he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, so
I think you'd like it.

Speaker 5 (05:23):
It looks like a foundation.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
And I went, oh, so these are for these are
the power banks for girls, and he went yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
they're for girls.

Speaker 5 (05:30):
And I think the first guy.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Who I was talking to you understood that I hated
what was going on, like that I was having fun
and sort of mocking the whole thing, but he couldn't
step in and stop it, and the guy who I
was mocking fully did not track what was going on.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
I love that there's still like it's like nineteen ninety
five and like, what if computer for woman? Yes, woman,
they're using this thing now, the birds truly.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
I he kept doubling down and tripling down so hard
on it that I eventually pointed, we're still standing in
front of power banks for girls, and I pointed to
one on the end that it was black, and I went,
see this one, I go, what is that?

Speaker 4 (06:04):
No dog?

Speaker 5 (06:05):
I literally hit my forehead with them.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
But this one, I go, that makes me happy.

Speaker 5 (06:14):
The first guys like humiliated.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
I was like, I'm sorry, but your coworker is really
fucking annoying.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
That's so good.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
I love that they're still doing shit like that.

Speaker 5 (06:26):
It was crazy.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
I mean, it reminds me of when I purchased in
twenty thirteen a twenty ten used Prius Prius the Prius
dealership and the guy is driving around me and my
girlfriend at the time, and she's in the back. I'm
the one purchasing the car. But he turns to her
and he goes. So Toyota actually pulled a thousand women

(06:47):
on what they would like in the car and so
there's a place to put your purse right here, like
under the console. And she hated that so much she
talked about that for ten years.

Speaker 6 (07:00):
Don't look at her and say.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
We've we asked your kind.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
We lost one thousand woman and that is it. We
no more, no need to do. It's just I don't know,
without without being too preach about It's like it's twenty
twenty five at this point.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
It's like pink is for girls, blackest for boys.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, this will fit in your handbag, which you don't
appear to have.

Speaker 5 (07:22):
All of this shit fits in my head. It's all
very small.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, it's like like were the go Ones smaller and
thinner or they just colors they were it was just
pink and purple.

Speaker 4 (07:33):
And see they gotta go. They gotta go further than
that when they make it like super girly. Like I
went to the Razor booth and they had this is
an old product, but they had the headphones with the caddiers.
Yeah that's I feel like that's not so bad because
that's like, you know, if you're super if you're like
a fucking egirl twitch streamer and you like you your
whole you know, streamer room is hello, kitty shit right.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
It's like I would say, I would say that headphones
with caddiers is the third gender.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
Artistic.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
I would love these guys could be like.

Speaker 5 (08:08):
Hey, it's like my.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
Headphones are the exact ones.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
I looked, and I looked for hours and hours and hours,
and I tried several of them, and I talked to
multiple friends and then I found the perfect one and
they weren't perfect, so I returned them and tried another
one and then they were perfect.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
Yeah, that's the fourth gender.

Speaker 5 (08:25):
Just diagnosed.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
I'm fresh. I'm fresh to listeners, the listeners who have
been trying to diagnose me for two years, Like finally,
I mean, I'm finally edified.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, oh god, So okay.

Speaker 7 (08:40):
I just want a vendor to look at me and
be like, you know, plays a little wrap.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
You know, this goes in your sneakers, sneakers you into
those oh god.

Speaker 7 (09:01):
Instead, when I roll up, they look me up and down,
they see the press card, and then they immediately direct
their press person over like uh, they're a bodyguard.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
And forced. Well if I asked, like two questions, but
how does this work, They're like.

Speaker 7 (09:15):
Oh, yeah, he'll tell you, He'll tell you money.

Speaker 5 (09:19):
Here they did.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, it's so set again, it's twenty twenty five in
this to like, whoa okay, one of you guys.

Speaker 7 (09:28):
My goal has basketball, Yeah, that I gotta find. I'm
gonna find someone to riff with. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's
my goal in this this convention. Not to find a
product I like, but someone who someone who won't be
a little scared.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
Yeah, will be too scared.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Oh yeah, actually will get nervous. Someone's just like I
don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I've never I've meant
tons of people like you. Yeah, but wait, what did
you see today?

Speaker 3 (09:54):
What anything funny?

Speaker 4 (09:56):
I mean, it was nothing interesting. I circled back.

Speaker 5 (09:58):
To nothing, a really funny review.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Of another good tech line for the show.

Speaker 5 (10:06):
Nothing that's really interesting.

Speaker 7 (10:09):
I circled back to a lot of the age tech
and kind of AI health companion stuff because I was
interested in seeing, Okay, maybe if I have a little
bit more of a conversation with them and then get
them to explain what the agent part means, or to
explain that use cases I may find something interesting, but
it was just more of the same.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (10:26):
You know, there's one firm I circled back to, like
I think their name is ali Q that is really
really big on elderly companions, right, and trying to have
something that your grandparents can talk to that may or
may not cause like chatbot psychosis if they spend a

(10:49):
lot of time talking.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
To be is it like a thing on the computer.

Speaker 7 (10:54):
It is just like a big old kind of looking
like an ORB, like a big old like a big ORB,
and some sensors around it and the pad that you
get to talk to and type in.

Speaker 4 (11:06):
Grandma loves to commune with the or.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
You know. Yeah, like your old granny told me, was
God your friends.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
In the computer?

Speaker 1 (11:18):
You know, I'm never alone now that I have my
So you have to log in.

Speaker 6 (11:26):
To talk to someone.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
Essentially you're going to work.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
You got to sit at your desk and be like, hello,
are you doing all? There's a person at the end
of a chat. But it's a chatbot. That's so sad.
And this chatbot is supposed to interface to the outer world,
trained on old people speak like what.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
It says the YouTube the TV TV volume max.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
It has the same conversation.

Speaker 5 (11:52):
It is too cold in here.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
It's also I do.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Agree that young people don't work enough.

Speaker 7 (11:57):
So instead of push notifications or you know, it basically
has push and notifications that are like, let's start a conversation.
So you'll be doing your thing and be like, hey,
I want to talk to you. Technology to harass your bread.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
No literally, I know so many grandparents who would take
that out back and.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Hit it with us.

Speaker 4 (12:17):
Can you imagine all they want is not to be bothered.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
Yeah, I'm just imagining.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
My My grandfather passed like twenty years ago, even like
way before URMs, just imagining Ken. He was a sign
pat in Dorset and born and trit catch Bob made England,
and he would have just he would have beat the
funk out of.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
This one minute.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
He would be like touching that, I'm not touching and
beat it with a stick.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
He would have loved that.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Actually they sent the machines to watch us. Oh, I
don't even say. He'd just be like offended by an
orb he has to talk to.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
So if we wanted to go down the pub.

Speaker 4 (12:50):
Did you guys see the booth for for tom Bought Incorporated.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
I saw it from afar and it looked so terrifying
and I.

Speaker 4 (12:56):
Didn't like a little dog puppet and it's booth is
like a living room and it's got framed photos of
the dog puppet and a and like a what is
a sampler sort of cross stitch thing that says a
pet for people who can't have pets, okay, And then
there's like a lady dressed up like a granny and
she's holding the puppet. I didn't really see what it does.

(13:17):
Presumably it's just like an AI dog. It's just it's
just a sad guy just sort of.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Sitting there was a natural fellow.

Speaker 4 (13:23):
There's like a fella sitting in there. He's like, a yeah,
he looks like he's bummed out. He's just sort of
sitting there like zone. It like dissociating, petting the dog
and settied up and like it could be it could
be useful, but it's also like it's such a bummer
just to be like this is for it's very elderly

(13:44):
people who've lost their ability.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
And I'm like fifty to fifty on those because I
can kind of see like there's it's been proven that's helpful.
I've heard good things but the time just like you're
too you're too old or sick to take care of
an animal.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
It's great, like seeing a whole booth of that. And
then the guy they paid to.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
Just sit their old day. Yeah bad, Yeah, you look depressed.
You feel bad for the demo. You're watching the demo
and you're like, oh, it's too bad that this guy
has to sit there and put that fake dog. He
doesn't look happy about it, whereas when people are with
a real dog they're so happy.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
That's such a good point. Surely he would want to
be like, hell, yeah I have Oh I love my dad.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
This dog is okay.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
He's like, no, just to wait waiting here until the
sun holds me in a week.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
I've seen the studies that you're talking about. They're also
true of plants. Like when you give plants in like
the nursing home, they give them plan they bring like
kiddies in. Like it's not it's not a particularly unsolved problem. Look,
we do need more technology for old people. I've always
thought like the Wii was such a hit for old people,
and then there's been no Wi since. I think that's
a tragedy of technology that like there's countless senior homes

(14:48):
that are still using their Wi from like two thousand
and seven to play we golf, because there's never been
anything like that.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Is quite did we go out of business?

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Nintendo is still in business.

Speaker 4 (14:58):
Yeah, they're still made up. They occasionally make a game
like that. But though WI was like this moment where
they developed a new way to control a video game
and a game that was very simple and resembled games
people already knew, and it was like this perfect thing
that people had never played a video game, especially elderly
people to like figure it out. And then it just
sort of wasn't popular enough among the core gaming audience

(15:20):
and they stopped making that type of game.

Speaker 1 (15:22):
It was also tough to develop for as well, and
it was really expensive. The controllers were weird. You have
to have like a weird bower above. You think it
was just like a lovely idea that just would not scale.

Speaker 4 (15:32):
Ever, you think you think not. I think maybe it
needed a different company to make. I think about this
a lot.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Kind of done it with the switch, with the control,
with the controls, it's not the same.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, but you're saying a company that's not motivated by
the youth gaming sector. Yeah, company that like doesn't doesn't
need to win the most billions of dollars, that like
could operate at.

Speaker 4 (15:53):
A sea I guess literally a company that's like trying
to get contracts with with senior homes.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Yeah, my favor.

Speaker 5 (16:02):
Schools.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
I feel like at this point kids want things that
feel digital but don't absolutely melt their brain.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
The thing is, though, like the I think we're describing
the problem of the modern state of capitalism where it's like, oh,
a company doesn't need to grow forever. I'm never gonna
fund that bullshit. Are you're gonna make consistent money?

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Fuck you?

Speaker 1 (16:19):
I will say I did find a weird one where
it was just one of these one of nine hundred
different companions. It was just these horrible little things wheeling around.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
Like Teddy Tubby's. But what was interesting was someone.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Had a dog, like a leaving dog, and he was
just going fucking batshit and I was like, this fucking rocks.
And then someone went and picked up the dog. If
they just had a booth, when I had a dog
going nuts on these things booth where a dog gets
to destroy a row, I would pay. I would pay
to watch like a large like even like a small

(16:50):
dog would be funny, but like a the one that
can climb walls, like a giant dog just ripping up
home how much would you Yeah, like a malamute just
fucking up like any of these robots would be sick.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
I feel like we need So there's the Edinburgh Festival,
which is in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it's a big performing
arts festival. And then there is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,
which grew up as a like people who were rejected
from the core Edinburgh Festival and now the Fringe has
become bigger and it's it's the biggest performing arts festival
in the world and it's the third biggest ticketed event

(17:23):
after the Olympics and the World Cup, and it's crazy whatever. Yeah,
I feel like we need a CEES fringe that can
grow where we can have booths like a dog attacks
a robot.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
That's actually a really good idea. Is there like a
counter programming like punk art festival that happens at the
same time as CEES that's.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
Like freaks, you know, that's what we're doing. We're going
to stop better offline fester. It's like bring your ship
for the dogs. We've hired to destroy and we will
look but we want we're pro lab, so we will
pay guys to sit around looking depressed on everything.

Speaker 5 (17:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
A guy staring at into the distance with gimme shelter playing.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
It's gonna be a guy who works for one of
the companies that have a booth at the real sea, Yes,
who then sits and looks sad as we watch as
he watches his stuff get destroyed.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
I saw another robot that was just this. It was
on the conveyor belts and it had big arms and
it was like home. It was like home patrol, elderly care,
laundry folding. And I just walked up like can I
see any of this? And they went no.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
I was like, okay, but does it do it? It will?
I just stared right, but what does it do?

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Now? Well it's there. I'm like, yeah, I got that part.
And just it has happened a lot. I mean, you
were talking about brisket, this fucking AI agent cooking thing, yes,
and it's just like you look at it and you're like,
AI Agent, Oh it can order food. Well, doesn't sound
like it can. No, they haven't figured that part out yet,
and what is the AI agent part.

Speaker 7 (18:49):
Well, that wasn't clear either because it wasn't working. Oh okay,
it it seems like there's just a chat bot that
has a there's a camera inside so it can like
take pictures of.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Your food and be like, oh, you like to eat this,
I've seen that. Yeah, no, there are so many one
of them food.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yes, yeah, you know you into this, yeah, you like.

Speaker 7 (19:09):
And it was fun because at first it was pitched
just like, oh, this will like prepare the food and
cook it for you, and then as you ask questions,
it's like, oh no, it's like you have to you
still you do everything? You still doing nothing. It was
just it was a pellet smoke.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
It wasn't that.

Speaker 7 (19:26):
Yeah, that's pretty much it, you know. But they're spinning
it as because they have other products, and that's when
they're like, oh, we have a grill that's also an
AI yeah, yeah agent grill, and we have you know,
any sort. We have a microwave that we're worked on.
So all of it is basically like we just have
a sensor inside that gets dated on what you like
to eat, and then we'll order some of the components
and then we will figure out a way to charge

(19:46):
you extra for that delivery Sertax and it's just a
chat GPT wrapper yes, yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
Blue Apron plus an AI, which which we kind of
already have.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
We have Tavala.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
We have like nineteen different Instagram services that the Instagram
ats that talk at me a week and probably five
times more.

Speaker 7 (20:04):
Yeah, because it also has a giant fucking screen on it.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
Grilling is like you can just go and buy a
ship toss like what like a poke shoulder and just
throw it in with some seasoning.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
And it's like, you don't need the computer to tell you.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
I don't need the computer.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
I don't Who are these.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
People who are like every day is just confusing to them?
I'm just fucking what do I eat? What do I do?
Throw the food in there? Oh god, I don't remember
the things I like to eat. I don't have tastes.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
These companies have not thought about, like even before, they're
all trying to solve the food problem, like the meal
delivery kit companies, and none of it sticks. People do
meal delivery kits for like a couple of months and
they stop. Is because eating is a solved problem. There's
like there's three kinds of people there's people who buy
frozen shit and heat it up or they boil hot dogs.

(20:54):
There's people who only eat takeout, and there's people who
enjoy cooking. Those are the and all of them already
have something. So people who hate cooking aren't gonna like
cooking because of the expensive shit that you sold them
to try to trick them into what cook for them,
sort of cooks for them or does it badly, or

(21:15):
send them shit in the mail. They don't fucking want
to cook at all, and they want to eat McDonald's
or they want to heat up a factor meal in
the microwave.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
And the thing is, I don't judge anyone who does
the meal kit stuff. I did it fine, especially when
you're trying to lose ways, it's fine, but it's also
like like it's steal a lot, like a decent amount
of efforts you have to select and it's like you
kind of like you heat them.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
I did it for a while.

Speaker 4 (21:36):
Did you enjoy throwing out five hundred small plastic bags?

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah? And also like if you fall behind on them
or travel or just have a stack of the fuckers,
and that's when you cancel the moment you have a
stack and I've still got some of them somehow. And
it's just I read the documentation for the Briskit that
I don't fucking care the brisk it, the brisk kit.

(22:00):
If it's called like the brisk It, I'd kind of laugh,
but like it's just like but I read it, and
it was like the little fake demo they had on
the leaflet that was like, what I want to eat this.
I want to limit myself to eighteen hundred calories and
I want to leave these foods out. It's just like,
all right, no one exists in this manner. Yeah, no
one is doing this, No one's going to use it

(22:20):
in this way. No one who is buying a I
assume thousand plus dollar grill is going to be like, yeah, okay,
a chatbot to finally tell me, if you're discerning enough
to like pick a grill that costs that much money,
you probably put more thought into cooking than just I
want to spend a thousand dollars for a cooker. That
would just too much to do. When you ask them
where the labor saving thing is, because they insist this

(22:44):
will save you time inconvenience, They describe a process that
is like longer than getting the food itself to end
cooking or meal planning your on your own. You know.

Speaker 7 (22:54):
It's like you, I'm spending what half an hour you know,
getting this thing ready as through.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
It, training it.

Speaker 7 (23:01):
Yeah, and then it'll it'll kind of recommend things for
me that I still got to.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Go out by design andre you know.

Speaker 7 (23:09):
So it's like what's actual, what's actually which seems to
be a trend's actual point?

Speaker 2 (23:12):
Like an in an earlier block we were talking or
an earlier episode, we were talking about, uh, the chatbot
that manages I think you were talking about this, the
chatbot that manages.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Your home.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
The chatbot that's like you don't want to pick up
your kids from groceries or from daycare whatever. But it's
like you still yeah, yeah, yeah, and it like looks
at your Google calendar for you and whatever, except you
still have to look at your screen to read what
the chatbot is telling you. So you could also just
look at your screen to look at your Google calendar. Ye,
Like it's not fundamentally and and look, maybe the designers

(23:47):
of that chat agent would be like, no, no, this
combines the six apps that you have to have open.
Except the reason that six apps are open is because
I have to make a decision about concretely what happens
in my life do I go to this place or
this place first? And the chat pot can't fundamentally can't
make that decision for me. It doesn't have enough information.
It can't. All of the information is in my brain.

Speaker 7 (24:11):
That's why you have to offload it into those Yeah,
and then then it can hallucinate.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Yes, I've been trying to write jokes about AI for
a while, but you know, Chloe has a comic when
someone has written a joke that's so good that you
can't write anything better, and it's like taking over your brain.
Very funny comic named Hayden Johnson who wrote a tweet
that was like, uh, every every AI ad is a
guy saying what should I eat? And the AI says sandwich?

Speaker 1 (24:35):
And the guy is like, wow, it really is a sandwich.

Speaker 6 (24:43):
I never thought whoa?

Speaker 1 (24:46):
And that's actually I think genuinely a Gemini ad. It's like,
what am I going to eat? It's like if you
tried this ham Sam, It's like, if you act like that,
go to a doctor.

Speaker 7 (24:56):
Yeah, because Gemini adds where it's like, hey, you know
you're in this book club you signed up for some
reason and you didn't do the reading. What if you
faked it and told all your friends that you did
use us? But if you joined a book club where
you didn't read, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
It's just like you know, or like what if you
lie to your friends?

Speaker 7 (25:11):
So yeah, yeah, right, we can help with that.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
It's very it's peculiar as well, because again, grilling, the
whole thing is just throw some burgers on there and
you there, we are assumed with friends or like you're
throwing a big brisket and it takes eighteen hours and
you kind of look at it. It's very analog. Like
I have two giant smokers and they are mostly like
the best one I have is a big stainless steel
beast that's basically a temperature measurer, a hopper for pellets

(25:39):
and then an auger to send him and sent them
on fire. It's not a computer. Adding computer to that
really wouldn't change much like I.

Speaker 5 (25:47):
Wouldn't Jane Roger.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
But I think the confusing thing to me, I want
masculinity to be tied to analog. Miss again, right and
right now, I think masculinity is tied to computer and
so it is interesting. I think in a lot. I
think there's a lot of like, Dad, you like this
grill because it has a computer in it.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, and it's like no, no, no, no, no, no no, Dad,
like plain grill.

Speaker 5 (26:11):
Dad, Like this may.

Speaker 4 (26:13):
Changing because that's that's Dad. But you know, there's like
the performative male archetype like TikTok thing, and that's all
wired headphones, reading, reading, belle hooks and paper form totally.

Speaker 5 (26:26):
But I don't think I think that.

Speaker 4 (26:28):
That is that's complicated because it's a stereotype created by
women about men. I was also gonna say not masculine.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
So it's never mind, Adam, with greatest respect, I think
that your feed over represents how many performative men are
in the world.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
So I think the whole performative male thing is is
nonsense bullshit as a meme.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
I think.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
I think it's really destructive and doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, I think masculine you should be tired to personal
responsibility and love for your friends and loved ones. Blest
person that is not computer, No, and it's not the
computer is no. I think the computer is innocent. The
people who the computer must be stopped. And this show
really is like I think I saw no less than
seventeen different companies that were like, yeah, we generate images,
you're a rapper. You're a rapper for a chat GPT. Oh,

(27:12):
we generate images and texts, so you use chat GPT
or claude. Yeah, we connect to your disparate documents and
we're allowed to summarize them. So chat GPT. And there
were so many of them. There were Hallway. I went
to Eureka Park because you can guess which is the
very sad small box area, mostly looking for funny names.
I'm not gonna lie I it was mostly just looking
for names that make me laugh. And it was just

(27:34):
so bizarre because what happens when all of this starts
getting more expensive, because it's all unprofitable, Just these companies
evaporate overnight.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
And I will say, we're coming towards the end of
this block.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
Whenevertheless, I will say Eureka Park felt and even the Expo,
the Venetian one felt smaller to me like previous years.
It felt a little more robust, and there was a
lot more like they would the countries, like the careers
like Le France and all that cut center. Yeah, yeah,
the I've got center of it was never above ground.
You put them in the in the basement where the
other countries apparently belonged with like the Social Security Administration

(28:09):
and the various scams. They were up top. They were
tops out security as a scam. No no, no, But
like I had a comma in that one. I promised,
but it was just thank you, Chloe. But it feels
like most of the show is just LM rappers now
and like we can laugh at that and goddamn will
We've got an hour and a half to cover. But

(28:29):
it's very worrying because before it was like, oh, there's
a bunch of Kickstarter shit, Indie Gogo shit. At least
there was money involved in products. This is like predominantly
companies that are using an API, and that's like, oh,
first of all, no differentiation, easily cloned by open ai,
but also just where's the fucking business, buddy, where is it?

Speaker 5 (28:49):
Where's the product?

Speaker 1 (28:50):
Oh that, don't worry it, There isn't one. It's just
other than the ones which are like, yeah, we have
a photonic sensor to put on the top of a
specific device. I fucking like all of those the industrial
ones where It's like, for a specific use case that
they to meet one of eleven people and they meet
all of them.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Those are cool, the rest not so much.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, I mean, the the what I wind up wondering
as a pure lay person is is the fact. So sorry,
let me let me sort of give you what I'm hearing. Yeah,
it sounds like, and I agree with this from my
experience on the floor, it sounds like some very high
preponderance of the offerings at CES this year are functionally

(29:32):
wrappers around an already developed AI tool.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yes, right, there are some interface with chatchip. Right.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Whether whatever that interface may be an orbit, a pillow,
an app, or whatever it is, it is the technology
at the core of it is something that somebody else
has already made that we are all aware of.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Yes, So in that.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Case, if that preponderance is higher this year, is that
because uh, there are like fewer problems to solve elsewhere,
fewer like consumer problems to solve elsewhere that we've like
actually advanced so far in technology that without without these
rappers for these lms, they would be CS would be

(30:13):
way smaller. Or is it that everybody has gotten so
distracted by lms that everybody's gone, well, we can create
a new interface for this, a new kind of rapper
for it, and that they've actually like directed their creative
energies away from solving a lot of other consumer.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
It's all of the above.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
It's andals are approaching the end of the half and hour,
but I'll wrap this on this. What is is that
It's that venture capital is pretty much only like fifty
percent of venge capital went into AI this like last year.
It's god, there's twenty twenty six now. It's also CS
usually just is magnetized to whatever trend that was met
with us. There's two years ago we had an AI
semen thing, not on that this yeah, no, come, no coming.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
I've never met intelligent semen.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Apparently there were a few years ago.

Speaker 5 (30:53):
Organically or artificially.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Okay, men are back, kill all men, kill men, more
woman on podcasts.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
Honestly, femail. This is gonna eat this up.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
All right, we're gonna rotate. Though we're gonna rotate. Here
comes an ad that specifically only for woman. It's pink,

(31:28):
and we're back in the room. Now. We've of course
got the wonderful Garrison Davis. If it could happen here, Hello,
and we're back with Chloe Radcliffe, actress of course in
the movie Is This Thing? On? Stand up comedian, comedian
and host of the Factually podcast Adam Connover.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
Hello, and we were just talking about l M rappers
and why.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Everything is LLLLM this year and AI this year more
so even than last year, and why there are so
many things that are just effectively wrapping around the chat
gpt API and what it is is, Yes, yes, magnetizes
the trends like it's just it goes wherever the trends are.
We've had a metaverse and VR and AR and ind
like twenty fifteen is very indieg go heavy crowdfunding and such.

(32:07):
But I think it's also the funding thing of where
venture capital is going. But also it's just fucking easier
to build a company on top of it. Now people
will frame this as, oh, it's democratizing building companies. No,
it's democratizing lazy, fucking assholes building nothing.

Speaker 5 (32:22):
And take that suckers.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
No, it really, it really is, though the sucker is
being venture capitalists and customers as well, because it's like, yeah,
I built a company. No you fucking didn't. You built
something on top of someone else's company, and you're claiming
it's yours. By the way those API rates are going
the way, they're too cheap, they don't make sense. But yeah,
it's just kind of sad because usually you go to CS,

(32:45):
i'd say forty percent of the stuff will be dead
in a year. This one is like, if things go
the way, I'm expecting all of it, like like maybe
seventy five percent of it to be fair. But like
every LLM powered thing you're saying about dog.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
Especially the robot dog, because that has.

Speaker 5 (33:03):
Oh, don't kill my robot dog.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
Not how many times we just talk about killing dogs
on the show.

Speaker 4 (33:09):
Every time that Chloe's on, I actually multiple times I
have a whole nother product I want to talk about.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
Oh, oh god it is.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
It is about Lane perfectly landed.

Speaker 4 (33:23):
So I wandered into a uh it was like a
consortium of Internet of Things home products or whatever. And
the guy recognizes me. He's like, oh, Adam, I like
your show.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Great.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
I'm like, what do you got in here? He's like, oh,
I represented all these different companies. He actually said one
of the you know when someone like accidentally said something
that sounds really useful here and he's like this thing
over here, will detective you left your stove on and
turn your stove off automatically. I was like, wow, that
that's great. Who did Why didn't we emit that fifty
years ago? That seems very obvious as a product. Then

(33:56):
he's like, over here, we got the smart dog crate.
Oh yeah, it's like a big like okay, first of all,
imagine if your dog crate was like a like a
twitch streamers room.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
We talked about this briefly, but I don't want to know.

Speaker 5 (34:11):
I think this is a different smart dog.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
This doesn't measure the heights of your dog. Uh, that
was the one, you know.

Speaker 5 (34:17):
I think it's different because the one that I was
looking at.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
So so, just to catch you up the short this
is one sentence overview. There's a little crate that measures
your dog's breathing rate, your heart rate, and the height
distance between the top of the crate and the top
of the dog.

Speaker 5 (34:31):
And I said, why do we need that?

Speaker 2 (34:32):
And the guy said, because if it if the number
doesn't change for a while, maybe the dog has died.

Speaker 5 (34:36):
And I said, but but wouldn't you.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Know that from the other numbers by looking?

Speaker 4 (34:47):
Oh god, the idea of the distance from the ceiling
to the dog has not changed in three days.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Something is wrong, it's different.

Speaker 5 (34:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I said.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
I told my my boyfriend Stewart last night about about
the dog grate that I saw, and he was like, well,
you want to avoid the terrifying case of your dog shrinking.

Speaker 5 (35:10):
Or worse, getting bigger.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
It's like, my dog is not in a perpetual state.
It's like my dog varies sometimes. Yeah, so adam one
a different one, tweet stream a different one.

Speaker 4 (35:22):
Yes. It had, among other things, had an iPad in
the dog create so you could show your dog videos,
video chat with your dog. It had like a privacy
screen that would open and close, like glass that you
could remotely open and close, and then.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
Your dog try on new outfits.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
Your dog wants to pretend it's in a limo.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
Yeah, yep, yep, or like if you were, you know,
had your dog in some sort of like prison visitation situation.
It was like, if you.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Don't want strangers to see your dog's.

Speaker 4 (35:52):
Dick, this is the thing I vaguely knew already.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
Existed, but.

Speaker 5 (35:58):
I want my dog to be modest.

Speaker 4 (36:00):
They said, it was, you know, he was like some
people put a blanket over the crate, but now you
don't have to do that. And again it's one of
those things where it's like, yeah, what was the problem
with the blanket over the.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Carry and also the blanket of the crate is to
make the dog think, is to make the dog go
to sleep.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, it's to say it's nighttime now, not uh Yeah.

Speaker 4 (36:19):
They called it privacy screen, and it was cool, like
I was aware this already existed, like a pane of
glass that if you like run a current through it,
it suddenly turns opaque or something. And that was cool
to see go even though I knew it already existed.
But then a big part of it was like, if
you are at home and your smoke alarms go off

(36:39):
and your house is on fire, you can open the
door of the crate automatically so the dog can run
away from the fire, or if you're on your way
home when you want to let the dog out a
little early. And the thing in my mind is, I'm like,
who's who's crating their dog?

Speaker 8 (36:52):
This?

Speaker 4 (36:52):
Much like use when your dog's a puppy.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Maybe yeah, you're trading a dog to stain in the
crate and be happy in it. And the whole point
is that it can't leave, like you kind of like
train it to like the crate, Like, why would you
let it I guess if you let it out early out.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
The whole point of a dog is that it knows routine,
as everybody knows the point of a dog, the.

Speaker 5 (37:12):
Points of a dog.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
The point of a dog is maximal efficiency is optimize
your dog dog. But if you let the dog out,
if you open the dog crate early, and the dog
has no way of predicting when you're going to open the.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Crate remotely and you will not there and you're not.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
There, Like I feel like if you have a dog
created while you're gone, because I.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Do know people who are, like, there are tons of
people who do.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah, and do you know it's whatever, whatever judgment decide
about whether you should have your dog in the crate
that much or not. Totally setting that aside, just dealing
with the reality of there are people who do. If
you drive home and the dog hears the garage door opening,
or the dog here's the front door opening or whatever,
then the dog gets to be excited because the crate
is about to open. But if you're just randomly opening it,

(37:56):
it's like, do you know those Do you know that
experiment with rats where they like shocked them where they
played they.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
Played that's azz that's was that the one where they
shocked the dog.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
I think I know they had one with skins that
I'm thinking of where it was where they like play
a beep and then shock the rat. And those rats
survived like two or three times longer than where they
where they just randomly shocked without the beep, because the
rats who didn't have the beep were so anxious the
entire time, were so stressed because they didn't know when

(38:26):
the shock was coming, Whereas when they knew it's it's
right after the beep, they could prepare for it for
the second between the beep and the shock. And I
feel like that's what you're doing to your dog if
the dog's just.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
Like this door could open at any moment. Could a
person fit in this thing?

Speaker 5 (38:41):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Well no, we're talked about the things. You got an
iPad on the it was like a weird streamer. I've
got a few furry listens. Yeah, I definitely know. No,
That's why I'm like the if the yiff maxes, yes,
there's gonna be one person new emails saying they love that,
and another that threatens to kill me.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
It's gonna be great.

Speaker 4 (38:59):
It was kind of charming, It wasn't that to your point,
cluy I think if you were a dog and you're
like in the crate all day and then suddenly the
door just like silently swings open, yeah, I'd be like, oh,
humanity is gone. They've died, and I've been released from
my I'm in like a twenty eight days later situation.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
Yeah, like it's the beginning of.

Speaker 5 (39:17):
The movie and have to eat my owner.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
You just come back with dog fucking kills.

Speaker 4 (39:22):
It's too ominous, all right?

Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yeah, what have you seen today?

Speaker 5 (39:26):
Today?

Speaker 8 (39:26):
I've been to once again, more Panels. I went home
the Panasonic booth ones. Actually I would I would prefer
to go over your favorite part of Cees what you mean,
which is showstoppers.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yes, showstoppers who have made war with me.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah, because I work at a PR firm, They've decided
I cannot go very unfair, very nasty. So if you
ever go to showstoppers, my my request is you eat
a lot of horrible food. I want you to op
a deck every toilet in that place, and we turn
this into the most icly cantina.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
I got it.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
I like when that accident comes out, what is that
specifically with the cos.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, it was like it's west, it's West London. It's
West West London. Yeah, it goes between my pulshvaxcent in
the West London.

Speaker 4 (40:09):
And it's all in the consonants like they're tight.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it's there. There's something wrong with me.
Tell me about the about host Stoppers.

Speaker 8 (40:17):
It was the worst Showstoppers I've been to in a
few years, which I'm honestly I'm saddened to say, Like
I usually kind of look forward to Showstoppers.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
And could I request on one to two sentence overview of.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
What shost Stoppers is.

Speaker 8 (40:27):
Showstoppers is a media event for journalists where a bunch
of products, usually from like Eureka Park, usually like the Ces,
like innovation type products have boots in a ballroom in
the Blagio and there's food and drinks and in journalist
we'll walk through and you can talk to you know,
people from these companies. It's it's it's like another condensed

(40:49):
version of like the Show, all in like one room
and it's like every Tuesday night and ces and is.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
There uh uh who gets to be there?

Speaker 1 (41:00):
Not that?

Speaker 5 (41:00):
No, no, no, not who gets to look.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
You have to pay?

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Who gets to show like exhibitors?

Speaker 1 (41:04):
Who gets to stop the show?

Speaker 2 (41:05):
But I guess what I'm saying is like, can you
just pay enough and be one of those exhibitors? Like
it just it's it's not like nobody's picked its, like
we think these are actually the best.

Speaker 1 (41:15):
Degree of that, and that's something that's outright fraudulent. They
would probably say no to, but probably not.

Speaker 8 (41:21):
Yeah, because there's there's not much space and so they
kind of defer to to people who want like to
see Yes, Innovation Awards every year.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
So you got there was like a few of those boots.
But what was almost made about it? What was not?

Speaker 5 (41:33):
What it was?

Speaker 8 (41:34):
They changed venues, It was in a much smaller ballroom
than the Terrible in the past few years. Yeah, and
I would say about forty to percent of the show
floor was once again your favorite product, smart glasses. So
many smart glasses boots. Interesting, there was like three three

(41:54):
like regular smart glasses, all all the back ended via
lms like the auto translation glasses.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
I tried on.

Speaker 8 (42:02):
One was a sound translation where they like have speakers
in the arm that they were running that translation through
Microsoft's AI. They had another like a backup translation that
you could run through chat GPT's I did a.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
That's funny because Microsoft is powered by GPT. This is
I'm noting with the guys. I'm saying you're wrong. I'm
just like, that's just like classic ces brain. It's just
like what it runs through chat GPT or chat GPT
with the.

Speaker 8 (42:31):
Other the other ones which were like the visual visual
translations as well as like navigation, like they hook up
to Google Maps so they can do do that sort
of thing if you're like biking. But the big ones
were the ro Kid glasses, the crowd funded AI smart glasses.
They worked better than the sound ones. The sound only

(42:54):
ones worked but with a pretty significant delay, so long
a ten seconds jesus, so you can't have a conversation
with them. They were prettier. They were they look like
normal glasses. The wealthy glasses are a little bit more
obvious that they're smart glasses. But the translations faster. It's
obviously it's hard to have eye contact with someone in
a conversation when you're text You have like the kind

(43:17):
of like blurry like hologram text. But as long as
you can focus your always multitask, it's like okay that
that one runs through TRAT GPT. I there's a two
different like in ear like earbuds which listen to and
transcribe conversation also run through TRAT GPT. The worst part
about those though that they were they worked really well

(43:40):
and you could like whisper. Then that that was the
main fixed that was that was the main feature. It
was like auto auto dictation if you like whispers even
like a loud showroom.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Yeah, yeah, that's so.

Speaker 8 (43:50):
Even even in like a loud showroom, the person who
had it on could like whisper something.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
Uh.

Speaker 8 (43:55):
I could not hear it standing like two feet away,
but it was like it was perfectly transcribed and I
could like actually like via like reading lips and it
was good.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
But and is this sorry hold on, this is a
translation through language and transcription.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
It does both and this is at.

Speaker 8 (44:11):
These were basically basically like like yeah, like like a
AirPod style cool, But the dictation feature is a subscription model.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
You have debate to keep using it, and it's powered
by GPT and all and.

Speaker 8 (44:24):
It's also powered by GPT, so there was a few
things like that. Uh, there was smart like swim goggles.
There was smart like ski goggles by goggles.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
Long questions just with the previous ones.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Sorry, so you need a subscription, but do you need
an internet connection as well? Oh I didn't ask that.
That's because it must connect to your phone or something,
which is just like because yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, because
like ostensibly, if you're.

Speaker 8 (44:47):
The dictation needs the phone because you see the dictation
like getting updated on your ves so bad, they're gonna
it's it's gonna be sync to your mobile device, but.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
You'd want that anyway. That one's not so bad. But
the translation ones, it's like, if you're in a foreign country,
you can't necessarily.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
Rely like the situation.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
The situations you need translation will probably not be in
a major metropolitan area because depending on the country, and
if it's a country where is Maltinarian, it doesn't have
this translation. The cell service might not be good, You're
not might not.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
It's just also the idea of walking up to a
person who doesn't speak English, who speaks like literally so
much zero so zero of English that you can't yeah,
you can't converse model through and being like hold on
let me put in my thousand dollars machine into my head.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
That is going to make me be able to talk
to I mean a lot of the glasses.

Speaker 8 (45:37):
At least it's for like putting on so you can
hear people like around you, which isn't too bad. It's
not necessarily even for conversation, but at least at least
you can, like you can hear someone speaking.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
You catch the leaves drop so that these people who
are specifically.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Who have switched to a foreign language, specifically so that
you won't understand what they're saying.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
This is what my did. No, it was really funny
when I was a kid and my parents used to
speak in French in front of my brother and I
to try and avoid us hearing what we didn't tell
them for fucking years.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
We could understand then, we could completely understand.

Speaker 5 (46:05):
What they're doing is teaching you frendship.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
No, I No.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
We were just listening to work out why that, Like
we're like how long we were going to stay places,
or if there was something we were going to do
we didn't want to do. And then eventually I think
one of us like laughed at something they said. It
was like ship, God, damn it years of the scam.

Speaker 8 (46:21):
Okay, it's kind of useful if you are someone who
only speaks English talking is talking to someone who's speaking
another language but can like understand English but maybe maybe
can't speak.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
It very right, I do.

Speaker 5 (46:32):
Actually that's a translation.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
That's like the main case.

Speaker 4 (46:35):
There's stuff like this has been normalized a little bit too,
Like I've got to plenty of hotels where there's someone
from mainland China trying to check into the hotel and
they're using the translation thing. It's like and then they
show the phone, yes, and like that'll get more refined,
and I don't know, it seems to me like translation
is one of the few things that like I was
about to say, this really good for like it is

(46:55):
an improvement.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yes, yeah, totally, and like it is. It is a
positive use case. It is a like non harmful at
least broadly non harmful use case. I've always imagining the
setting though, like when you're in the you know, the
rural Uzbek mountains and you're trying to communicate with it,
Like I'm trying to watch the setting where you have
no WiFi, but you're like trying to use these earbuds

(47:19):
which just feels like a you know, a set piece
in a movie.

Speaker 8 (47:22):
So like, although some of these things kind of like
works to some degree, the audio one is a little
bit slower. Like these are all stuff I've tried on
at c yes before. Like I was gonna say, I
feel like we had this conversation last year. We've had
the exact exact conversation before. Like, these are not new
and this was this was it like forty to fifty
percent of the show floor at Showstoppers was just these
was like this genre of product, right. The only new

(47:44):
thing is that they put like these smart glasses technology
and like ski goggles, like swim goggles, scuba goggles, so
you can have like a you know, headsep view if
you're wearing a scuba goggles.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Like that's like a new ish. I guess I.

Speaker 5 (47:57):
Feel like, why do you want a headset view?

Speaker 8 (47:59):
You know, maybe maybe you need to play a app
with gesture controls because.

Speaker 4 (48:05):
You saw the Terminator forty years ago and you're like,
it would be cool to see text on my eyes.

Speaker 8 (48:11):
Look as pretty as it is to scuba dive. You
could also be watching Instagram reels at the same time.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, like brain row as you're looking at beautiful tropical fish.
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
You're like, hey, do you like to swim laps because
it's the one place that you cannot bring your phone.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
Yeah, we got the solution for you.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
The whole thing about the phone is that you can
look away from it. Yeah. Like, to me, the main
reason VR didn't catch up is because like when I
would play a VR game, I would, you know, sometimes
I would enjoy them, but after like twenty minutes, I'd
be like, what if my house is on fire? What
if somebody needs me? And then I take the thing off,
and then it's such a big phase change you don't

(48:50):
want to go back into it. And just the ability
to glance away from stuff is so important, and I
just feel like, I don't know, heads up display I
don't want for that reason, and it fits the thing.
I've really been struck by how many people I've been walking.
If you look at the way people are using their
phones at this thing, everybody is on their phones all
the time. They're just they're in like hunched over phone position,

(49:11):
you know, like like elbows on knees looking at the phone,
And I'm like, I don't see any of these companies
unseating Apple and Android, like it's we have the here,
this is where the AI is happening.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
This is where all that you can leave.

Speaker 4 (49:24):
We've done it. I don't think even happening.

Speaker 8 (49:26):
Now you can do it, John, Like I was just
in Japan and you can do translation on your phone.
You can type, You could type the thing and you
could show it to someone. They can type it back,
and that's going to be faster and more efficient.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
I went to Japan in twenty seventeen and I literally
just used Google Translate. Yeah, and I feel like it'd
be way more offensive to this man who did not
speak a lick of it. I went to rock and
it was amazing and like it was way less offensive
to be like, oh, I don't understand you. I'm going
to use this and being very honest to be like
one second beep beep, now speak.

Speaker 5 (49:54):
Yeah, that's what I mean.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
You know inm Basil, who cannot converse with versus being
like yeah, we're both from different countries, Like yeah, how magical. Yeah,
there is a barrier, and technology has solved this barrier
without removing the honesty of conversation versus I have paid
someone five hundred dollars and twenty five bucks a month
so that you and I can pretend we understand each
other because we don't.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
And I do, I really do think that, like at
the at the broadest levels, I do think that the
translation use case makes them makes more sense than almost
any other to me. And you know why it makes
that sense because it's written in English. But Adam, what
you were saying earlier, I couldn't miss it anyway. But
the burden of being a comedian they have to take
a little hanging free. But Adam, what you were saying

(50:34):
earlier of just a second ago, about like we've already
like the winners are here.

Speaker 5 (50:38):
The winners are the iPhone and android phones.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Yeah, sort of goes back to what I was asking
in the earlier block about, which about why are the
rappers so prevalent? And is it because ed I'm hearing
you that that a huge part of it is that
we're following the trend. But also like, is it that
there is some degree of the biggest consumer tech gaps

(51:03):
have been closed right now or like the biggest consumer
gaps that we can imagine right now. I'm sure in
ten years there will be they will be will be
in a totally.

Speaker 4 (51:11):
I mean, the iPhone was like ninety percent of all
technological advancement. That's yeah, that was possible when it was invented.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
That's what I mean.

Speaker 4 (51:20):
Like it sort of picked. It was all the low
hanging fruit all at once. It's been refined over twenty years.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
And they planned for it. Like there was a famous
Golmon Sachs analysts called Jim Cavelli who said, like the iPhone,
they knew it was going to happen, like at decade beforehand.
They just needed Bluetooth to be smaller, they needed GPS
to be smaller on mode ends and such.

Speaker 4 (51:36):
And like Apple has made the same thing in a
dozen other form factors and they're all less popular than
the iPhone. They're just like less, the iPad less, the
Apple Watch less. The iPhone is like the main thing.

Speaker 8 (51:48):
Well obviously the Vision Pro, which is the most successful
for me.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yeah, that's the popular product everyone loved. I think. I
think there's another level of it as well, which is
it's follow a culture, because it's when a big company goes,
we're going to try this. And I think the meta
glasses because a lot of credulous journalists when Wow, I
could use this to video myself cooking. I could use

(52:12):
this were walking around. I did a content video as
a content creator. This is now a thing. And because
that happened, everyone goes, oh, but those fucking dumb fuck
vcs will buy anything.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
No one, they will, and I don't.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Yeah, but vcs will. But have we seen any proof
that consumers? No, no, no, no, no, but yeah vs will. But
it's like, oh, yeah, we can clone the very popular
meta ray bands you mean the horrendously unpopular one sorry,
the unprofitable but also not super profitable like metas.

Speaker 4 (52:43):
I've never seen them in the real world using them.

Speaker 8 (52:46):
I've literally seen one person using them. Yeah, Don Lemon,
don Lemon.

Speaker 5 (52:56):
You could not have said a funny.

Speaker 4 (53:02):
That man was Don Lemon. You could tell me a
story about anybody doing anything and that they say it
was Don Lemon.

Speaker 3 (53:08):
That very that's very good.

Speaker 5 (53:09):
Yeah, that's the thing.

Speaker 8 (53:11):
That he's shorter than what you would think. He's like
maybe five seven of most.

Speaker 3 (53:17):
That's not good. Yeah, that's a shorter man than I expected,
kind of.

Speaker 4 (53:24):
I went to the Razor Booth, which I know we
talked about yesterday, but I did have a good time
there and I actually kind of left going like they're
doing it in an honest way because you know, I
walk in and most of the stuff. Look, they're a
second tier hardware company that makes accessories for gaming, right,
and they make good ones. I had a Razor mouse.

(53:44):
They had some keyboards. They went click click clicking. It
was very nice. And then they had like a their
their LLLM Rapper was a pair of gamer headphones with
cameras and they're like, this is better than glasses because
it's like a little bigger and no one can hear you.
And then they did the same demo as where like
literally they had a plastic cutting board full of plastic

(54:04):
food and the girl goes, what can I make with this?
And the LLM is like spaghetti and she's like wow, thanks,
like it's literally spaghetti.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
And you see.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
The wife tube.

Speaker 4 (54:14):
I did. I did see the wife tube, but just
to finish first. Then they're like, look, you can connect
to Claude or Opus or any of them. And I'm like, okay, great,
So Razor has gone. I know who gives a fun
but Razor has gone. We're a hardware company. We make hardware.
This is a thing that people are maybe using here's
a hardware interface for it that's like pretty good, yes,

(54:35):
and like fine, And they called it Project Makoto, which
is a little bit over the top, but like it's
functionally a gamer a gamer headset, right, it's not that bad.

Speaker 5 (54:46):
Now.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
The little tube I thought was funny.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
And this is a holographic tube with the WIFU in it.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
It's a little holograph. Have you seen this clothes? You
should probably go check the wife. You would enjoy it.
I would like to see you interact with it. It's
a little so like a little on your desk, a
little tube and inside the tubes a little anime girl
and you can talk to it and it's just like
talking to Chad GPT. But you can say like hey, hey,
get out my gun in Battlefield four and then she goes, okay,

(55:12):
I added a scope to it, but.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
Did that work? This is what the wife tube looks like.

Speaker 4 (55:16):
By the way, Yeah, it's but it's a little avatar tube.
It can see you. And the guy goes, hey, what
do you think of Adam's outfit? Because, by the way,
everybody in the Razor booth that was the most recognized.
I was all weekend because they're all Internet nerds loaded,
so you want you. They kept come going up and
saying hi, Adam. I was like, are you fucking stop it?

Speaker 3 (55:40):
It pos ten seconds every time he some.

Speaker 4 (55:43):
But so the guy goes, he reveals that he knew
who I was because he goes, what do you think
of Adam's outfit? And it sort of goes like wow,
cees badge on fleek looking super professional and like a boss,
and Jesus Christ, you know, yep, I guess there's some
gamers who might need compliments, like a little compliment tube,

(56:04):
but it was dumb but also compliment a little toy.
I felt like they weren't even taking it that they're
kind of shrugging, going like, yeah, you know.

Speaker 5 (56:14):
This is the bullshit we gotta do this year.

Speaker 4 (56:16):
Yeah, it's were a razor. Hey you want a mouse
or you want a little anime girl too? You want
something you scholowed? You want whatever the fuck this pervirtue?
Yeah at least yeah, but they make led fucking you
know desktop towers.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
Nobody doesn't love it, love it?

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Yeah, but like I don't know, I just like, if
you buy the wife You Tube, they should fucking put
you on the list.

Speaker 3 (56:39):
I'm sorry if you're.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
Like I desire a tube or right where to quote
Robert from Yesterday, where like Krieger's Hentai wife from Archer resides,
you should you should not be allowed to like you
should have to introduce yourself to your neighbors. Like it's
just it's just a very worrying product. And also who
the fuck for?

Speaker 3 (56:59):
Like who is because.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
It's not good enough to give you actual if I
like ces batge on fleek, wow, fuck off.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Just well, that's the thing is that, Like that's one
of the things is sure, are there a lot of
gamers who could use some compliments without a doubt, absolutely,
but like it sort of feels insulting to their intelligence.

Speaker 5 (57:21):
It feels insulting.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
I think the way AI talks, the kind of sycophantic chat,
all this, yeah, feels feels like insulting to anybody's intelligence.
And it's it's sort of shocking to me that we
just go, yeah, that's how it should talk and that's
fine and we accept that and aren't like that's humiliating
and stupid.

Speaker 4 (57:42):
But if fits into me in the gamer context actually,
because something that so many games do that I find annoying,
But clearly people must like is like, thank you so much.
You saved the whole village. You're the strongest hero we've
ever met. Like games, you will compliment you for doing
basic things. I don't even think games do that.

Speaker 5 (58:01):
I mean, you saved the whole village.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
At them, that's more than you see that in like
a textbox and it goes away and you've forgotten to happen,
and I'm hammering X. I'm like, I'm just like full autists,
like I need to get in this fucking bit.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Fuck you did. I don't care about the story.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
And it's just most gamers I talk to would be
very annoyed to have any interruption and just having this
demented Hentai thing in the corner.

Speaker 5 (58:28):
Flake and not to need to wash.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Do you say you need to watch utility it's a
wash tube then just reminds gamers to shower. Actually, this
is a use case for AI. Then I can get
Oh no, we're gonna get some memos saying I'm a
gamer and eye wash. But by the way, if you
email me that, I'm asking how often.

Speaker 4 (58:53):
It is funny that, like you know, maybe it's the
computer from Star Trek, right, whether you go computer do
this or that? And it would answer. The computer didn't go,
what a great idea, Captain. That's sure decisive and a
great shows leadership on your part.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
I think that actually is it though it's trying.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
To think of how much better Captain would have felt
about himself if the computer had said that.

Speaker 4 (59:12):
Oh, Captain Percartt had self respect.

Speaker 1 (59:14):
But here's the thing they're doing. They're doing that because
you can't just be like, do something. You can't be like,
do this because it can't do anything true. It's like
you can't be like, oh you the battlefield example, It
actually can't do that because it would require it to
interact with the game, which it definitely can't do. So
it's like, yeah, they add all the sycophancy because you
can't actually be like, can you do this for me?
Can you find this? Because there'll be a five to

(59:35):
ten second posset and they'll go Olympia is the capital
of Washington's like I needed the fucking time, man.

Speaker 4 (59:41):
It said that it did it. The guy said, kid
out my gun, and it said a bunch of stuff
about the gun. I didn't know the game enough well
enough to tell if it did, but I asked the
dude I was like, do you think that gamers want
this like a game assistant, because to me, a video
game is like the paragon thing that you would want
to do yourself. Yes, and I in this he was like, well, yes,

(01:00:02):
but sometimes people people want to get better at a
game like League of Legends or a game like that
has a high skill ceiling, and so maybe it can
give you tips. And I was like, okay, like a coach.
And he's like yeah. And I was like, all right,
maybe that's a use case and training a training AI
that's gonna give you because people do higher like like
video game like coaches.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
That is a market just good at a game.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
Yeah, not like a regurgitation of how money game FAQ pages.
I'm not even I'm not even being selcastic like people.
I've had many people helped me with games, but people,
and the whole point is they watch you and go
that was wrong, that was wrong. No, do this like
you're doing this. I see you regularly making this action.
I don't think you could recognize that through a camera.

Speaker 8 (01:00:46):
I guess it could maybe used for like for like
walk through guides. If you're like stuck at a part
you don't know how to, you can ask and it'll
like regurgitate some ign article about how to get past
the fourth dungeon.

Speaker 4 (01:00:57):
Already has that built in?

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
Yeah really yeah they really brought it in as well.

Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
Yeah they have a future. The developers have to like
build it in. But like Astrobot has this all done,
because that's like a super fish party game. It like
you hit the PlayStation button and it has like game hints.
So literally, you know, if you're on a level and
you're like, where's the fucking third puzzle piece, and it'll
like show you a little video or give you a hint.
But that's like basically they just put the game fact

(01:01:23):
in the game.

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
The game.

Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
It's I used to.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
Write video game guides.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
And the problem is is the the things that people
get stuck on can be so dip because it's why
they have like yellow things on ladders that you have
to climb now, because something that seems really obvious to
one million out of one sorry, one point nine million
out of two million people is really just not obvious
like a thousand people, and all of those people post
online and they are just like what the fuck do

(01:01:49):
I do here? And then you get the people who
are mad that it's too obvious.

Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
But it's like.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
It's yet another thing where it's like a solution in
search of a problem, and it's just kind of sad
and I hate to do this really abrupt thing, but
we're at thirty minutes and the next thing will solve
either all of your problems will cause you more your choice,
but you really have to give them your money whatever
it is, and if it's a podcast, you have to
listen and trust them wholeheartedly. We return to our scene.

(01:02:25):
We've rotated once more, bringing back Matt Binder of Mashable.

Speaker 5 (01:02:28):
Hey, nice to be here again.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
And of course stand up comedian and star of Is
This Thing On? Chloe Ratcline.

Speaker 6 (01:02:34):
Who you have her?

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
Where is she? Bring her out there? She is? I
must see her.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
Someone's gonna someone who's gonna see Is This Thing On?
As result, they've heard the name so many.

Speaker 5 (01:02:44):
Don't you know? What I want people to do?

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
Who cares about it?

Speaker 2 (01:02:47):
And it's not No. The movie's amazing and I'm very
happy to be in it. What I want you to do?
Can I do a little plug?

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Please? Please?

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
I want you to come to my stand up shows
in either Cincinnati this weekend January tenth and eleventh or
DC next week in January seventeen, the eighteenth, or my
solo show called Cheat in Philadelphia January twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
First and I saw Cheat, want I saw cheese fucking brilliant.
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (01:03:09):
I mean to do that too, Pula, she plugged. I
gotta plug.

Speaker 5 (01:03:13):
Uh. Now we know it's only my turn.

Speaker 4 (01:03:16):
This weekend, I'm gonna be a comedy on State in Madison, Wisconsin,
one of the best clubs in the country. And then
I'm going to be next weekend in Fort Wayne, Indiana,
which I will not say, at the Summit Comedy Club
in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which I will not say, is
one of the best clubs in the country. But if
you live at Fort Wayne, Indiana, it's probably the only
club you have access to. And I will be there,
So go see me there and then and then Houston

(01:03:37):
later and I will.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
Be at the Chuckle Hunt Las Vegas doing my doing
my new set bom actually stolen Valor and it's me
doing the DreamWorks eyebrow for fifteen minutes. Anyway, we're back
talking about CS Matt Benderer's return. What have you seen recently?

Speaker 5 (01:03:54):
I I don't even know anymore. Yeah, it's just just
everything all at once, multiple places. I will say that
this is very insaary in terms of being here, but
it's fine. They they Vegas has very specific Uber pickup points. Yes,
and it seems like when CS comes to town they
just decide to fuck with everyone and move them place. Yes,

(01:04:16):
they get telling the uber drivers yep. So you know,
you try to get somewhere and you just can't because
the Uber driver can't fucking get to you.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
West you have to go to the West Hall and
go to the Diamond Lot, or you have to go
to the Renaissance Hotel. That's the only way to get
out of the LVCC. You can also take the tram
if you want to be shoulder to shoulder with people
who will want to die. Today, I walked from the LVCC.

Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
Great, how long did it take.

Speaker 5 (01:04:37):
You, uh LVCC to hear?

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
It took me half an hour maybe a little bit
less Samu powerwalk. Yeah, my priority is speed. What that's
like an English thing that I'd see in Eureka Bark
when your priority is speed and it's just a SaaS product. Yeah,

(01:05:00):
but Matt, have you not seen the game? No? No?

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Have you beheld?

Speaker 5 (01:05:03):
All right? So I did. I don't even remember the
name of it, but I did. I remember the last
time I was on this show, I was larding the
fact that crypto and blockchain is dead at cees.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
Oh, do you find something?

Speaker 5 (01:05:13):
I unfortunately found something. I don't remember what it did.
It was a mining company. I don't know what their product.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Did.

Speaker 5 (01:05:19):
I mean, but one thing I saw one thing, so's
we don't got to shut out here. It's es when
it comes to crypto, but it seems like it is
still dead other than that one thing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:30):
Right, Yeah, it's the way. I will also say when
Crypto was here, and I do remember it, it was
so half hearted because first of all, it's the problem
all the AI shit runs into, which is it's Internet connected.
But it's also where AI really doesn't work. Crypto really
really doesn't work. It's right, Yeah, it's a blockchain game. Great,
So what you do is you get the thing. It

(01:05:50):
takes ten to fifteen minutes based on the ethereum blockchain.
And now one thing has happened, Now you'll do another thing. Yeah,
you're going to need more ethereum because every single time
you touched this. I I've definitely walked around a few
of those. I'm like, yeah, so does this work? What's
proof of concept? We've got a white paper. I'm like,
fucking just everything.

Speaker 5 (01:06:08):
That's not good, that's not good showcase material for a count.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
It was.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
And last year I did see a panel that was
a guy talking about quantum web three and I thought
it would be funny. No, it was just a guy.
It sounded like someone with a concussion, like web three,
web three, web three, quantum quantum fast but quantumle break blockchain,
and everyone going, hm.

Speaker 5 (01:06:29):
You you bringing up web three. It did make me
remember that I did. I didn't go into it, but
I did pass by. Apparently Jason Calacananas whatever his name is,
from all In they were doing a live just him,
were doing a live all In podcast at no interesting
going in, but I mean they sent they sent like
the the what the least successful.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
We've sent our clammiest man, our dampest man is here
to bring you the dampest coverage of the ces.

Speaker 5 (01:06:58):
Because the other guy, Chopped whatever Chop whatever his name is,
he's he's the most wealthy one, I think, right, and
then and there's just David said and David Sackson too busy,
too busy with his insidery trading stuff with the Trump administration. Yeah, so,
I mean, I guess Jason kalakan Asen whenever how you
ever said his last name? Yeah, I mean where was
his claim to fame again?

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
He sold Mahalow.

Speaker 5 (01:07:20):
Yeah, the SEO Yeah, the SEO Show, and then weblows engineer,
but weblogs which created and gadget.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
It's like a weird thing where like he had a
hand and he was also right right right right basically,
what the fuck is he doing here?

Speaker 5 (01:07:33):
He's on the All In podcast. He's one of the
four hosts, right, I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
What Yeah, But I mean, I guess I can't really
judge someone of being like I'm going to do a
random podcast at CES.

Speaker 3 (01:07:43):
It's not random. I planned it all right, right no, but.

Speaker 5 (01:07:45):
I mean it wasn't though, Like this is ed Zitron show,
and ed Zitron is here. Yes, they all In is
four guys, and they sent just the one guy. They
don't really even like that is really.

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
Yeah, they did a regular episode doing one right now,
It's like, yeah, Jason and each to cover Cees. Fine
fucking Christ, Okay, let's do the Let's do the show.
Jason's gone, God, that would be really I think is
there four of them?

Speaker 5 (01:08:09):
There's four of them. I never remember the fourth one.
But because he stays out of the political world, I
think for the most part.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
They had Trump on and he was just like, we're
gonna be the biggest immigrants. Are gonna have the biggest
immogrants in the world. They're gonna be the largest, and
the like, that's so great. You should do one h
one bees. I don't like Barners, Like, yeah, we don't
like them either, we need h one bees. Well you
don't like them, but they were the biggest.

Speaker 5 (01:08:30):
He was looking at Chamith. I'm sure when he said
I don't like Varners. I'm sure.

Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
Yeah, I'm sure sure that that was fine. Oh God,
I can't believe, Like this is stay at this is
meant to be Actually, this is a good segue. This
is meant to be the consumer electronics show. But I
keep running into non consumer like, oh, Eureka Park is
like full of just meaningful enterprise stuff like sensors and
like a solar things and like things that when you

(01:08:55):
look at you want to make a joke at it
be like, okay, this is a specific center for like, oh,
it's of wetness sin so for a specific like cleaner
of something.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):
It's like a very specific thing.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
And then just like a count litter, like a robotic
catlt thing that was not available.

Speaker 4 (01:09:11):
Right, I mean, yeah, I was taking a video of
just like I was at I was in something that
had like a whole lot of signs up like it
was a science fair, and and I was I videoed
just like the titles because they were baffling to me.
Fleet management with vision AI nice EDGI meets human touch
what and then AI Native compute for the IoT.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
These are not consumer products, these are money lending operations.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
Yeah, that's just connecting.

Speaker 1 (01:09:39):
That's just connecting various phrases together to see how many
venture capitalists actually read the things they invest in.

Speaker 5 (01:09:45):
That's classic CES. Though a few years ago it was
every company was a web three metaverse interactive artificial intelligence
blocked on the blockchain.

Speaker 1 (01:09:55):
My favorite one was one that was just want to
buy that? Yeah, No, My favorite one was one that
just said, let's say it was called sorb and it
solve via sorb. Let's just bring this up. Yeah. I saw,
for a second, I thought he's sorb sort solve via
sorb solve your accent is making this specific and this
is really difficult. I just read s sor V solved

(01:10:18):
via sorb and I will admit I didn't want to
know anything more because mostly to handle it like I
got I got it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
My I'm constantly like what do I do? And I
sor right, that's I'm sorbin.

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
A side note on the accent, this is a completely
unrelated I'm also dating a British man and I'm dating
a man who is also British, and uh, he tried
to make a joke of what's your source on that?
But he pronounced it, but he was The joke was
what's your sauce on that? But in a British accent,
source and sauce are exactly the same word, like there

(01:10:51):
is no distinguishing. And I made him say what's your
sauce on that? Probably fifteen times in a rope because
I was like, I don't understand what the joke is.
I know you are making a joke.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
This is like there's the show called p a w
N Stars. Now here's my problem. If I started saying, yeah,
I was watching porn stars.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):
This this, this leads to more questions than answer for
all that the Brits are are king of wordplay in America.
We've come up with a lot of wordplay that absolutely
paralyzes you.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
Kind and I'm like, yeah, I'm watching porn Stars. There's
this big guy called Chumley and then there's Rick and
they're like all right, it's like yeah, one, he's constantly
conning people, and like, whoa, this is some weird porno.

Speaker 3 (01:11:35):
I'm like, no, no is.

Speaker 4 (01:11:36):
I literally was thinking of pwn Stars like one hundred
and twenty seconds ago, because when you were talking about
them sending the one guy from all in, I was like,
that's like if it was the cast of pawn Stars
and they only said Chumley. I was like, maybe that's
a joke I should say, And then I let it
pass because I'm like, yeah, ponn Stars kind of an
old reference.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
And then here you are, yeah right two minutes later.

Speaker 5 (01:11:55):
Have you ever told anyone added who your favorite character is?
And then you have to let them know it's the
old Man? Yes, yeah, my brain, it's my favorite porn star.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
Yeah, I like the old man that ows like this
in my porn start. Yeah, it's but every episode of
that show is great because it's just Charlmley being like, yo,
I bought a Corra, a Toyota Corolla for fifteen thousand dollars,
and then Rick's like, ah, that's terrible, but I scammed
an old lady out of a fifty million dollar coin
by giving her three hundred bucks. It's just an evil

(01:12:27):
show and I love it. Yeah, but they charge you
to go in there. Now, they should be on the
show for why don't Cholmley should just kind of like
amble through the RecA they charge you to go into
the actual physical Yeah I've not I've not actually been
because I think every Vegas resident just stays out of
the tourist areas.

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
But yeah, it's I would love them to come on
the show.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
This is this is back to my pitch about a
CEES fringe festival.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
Yes, we could have ship like yeah, the.

Speaker 2 (01:12:56):
Pond stars guys have have a booth.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):
Some trying to buy his thoughts up?

Speaker 8 (01:13:02):
Is it?

Speaker 4 (01:13:02):
Genuinely? I mean a CS fringe festivaloud be kind of
like like XO XO or another like creative tech festival.
You could do something like that nearby and have like
cool people with like their itch dot io projects. Yeah yeah, yeah,
like they're weird, hacky things, you know that would be fun.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
And just like you get the Grandma orb and you
just fucking blitter ate. You just have a fifty cow
rifle that you unload into a computer.

Speaker 3 (01:13:26):
Okay, this is actually.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
Like a rage room for you can go to CES
and then there's a rage room with all of the
products at CES.

Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
You then get to.

Speaker 3 (01:13:34):
Walking around the shopping like, do you mind if I
shoot this?

Speaker 1 (01:13:36):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:13:36):
What what?

Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
I just want to I want to state for the record,
if any listener decides to start a CEES fringe, you
have to you have to credit me as a co creator.

Speaker 4 (01:13:47):
Oh okay, okay, but they don't have to pay you.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
I would maybe, Okay, that would get too expensive.

Speaker 5 (01:13:52):
It's your ip.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
It's developed here on the show.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
Developed on bet rough Line and thus owned by iHeart
Radio this fun. Yes, No, the ideas on the show
are owned by I think me. I haven't really checked anyway. No,
it's it's such a peculiar show and I don't want
to repeat myself and just it's useless, but it is.
There are less cameras, dildos and batteries companies, which is disappointing,
And there are less practical, like I've been looking for

(01:14:18):
anchor a n K E R. Right, they're like my favorite,
Like I got big fucking ankor battery.

Speaker 5 (01:14:23):
Make a lot of mobile chargers and stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
Mobile chargers and stuff like I like them. Can't find
no like. And it's funny the description of the useful
products so far stuff that exists still like a battery
for girls, like.

Speaker 5 (01:14:36):
That's that's new that doesn't exist?

Speaker 1 (01:14:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because a woman, if you try and
picked up this battery.

Speaker 5 (01:14:41):
It's too heavy, you'd be like, whoa.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
I go, arms, mister, can you live this really? Thank you?
I don't like this one because it's black, but if
it had flowers on it, then I'd love it. Then
I go, that's for me.

Speaker 4 (01:14:57):
The little mirror on it you can check your makeup
so you could look at.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
Yourself, because women do that.

Speaker 5 (01:15:02):
I love mirror.

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):
You could get so far at this show.

Speaker 4 (01:15:09):
Yeah, but as a man, I prefer to have a hologram.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
Wife who I will say, okay, not to be all
a woman about it. The wife tube, I was you
gonna have?

Speaker 4 (01:15:20):
You could put a man in the tube.

Speaker 1 (01:15:22):
And does anyone which one?

Speaker 4 (01:15:25):
The razor one?

Speaker 3 (01:15:27):
Yeah, Volksori was saying there's a man with tattoos you can.

Speaker 1 (01:15:30):
Put an Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:15:31):
So I don't remember if we even talked about this
when I was on last time.

Speaker 3 (01:15:34):
We should keep talking.

Speaker 5 (01:15:35):
About the Okay, so the Razor one is the Project
Koto or something like that.

Speaker 4 (01:15:41):
No, that's the headphones, Project Ava is the is the
wife in the tube?

Speaker 9 (01:15:45):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (01:15:45):
No, you're right, you're right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
I was just really project You are correct.

Speaker 5 (01:15:51):
Yes, I'm glad you're on this, thank you, because I'm not.
But there are weirder ones because because the the Razor one,
actually do they showed it to you, right, so they
were like actual I wouldn't use it, but they were
there were actual use case applications like and you can
put a.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
Guy in a yeah, and like you're.

Speaker 5 (01:16:10):
Playing you're playing a video game and you're like, oh,
is this the best uh you know configuration for my character?
And no one does. But that at least is like
an idea they got.

Speaker 8 (01:16:21):
There.

Speaker 5 (01:16:22):
There's one that I saw from a company called They've
Got an Idea. I mean that's that's yes, they got
an idea. They got an idea.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
I guess alternative tubes.

Speaker 5 (01:16:40):
Yes, So so this company Lempro has this is this
tube called amy, and it's not as good as a hologram,
but it's still You put a woman in a box,
which is weird. A tiny woman in a box is
a big thing now, apparently because a lot of companies
want to do this.

Speaker 3 (01:16:55):
It's very weird video. But the whole, the whole.

Speaker 5 (01:16:58):
Purpose of the a me from lempro seems to be
not AI assistant or any ideas like that. It's simply
you're a lonely guy and you want to talk to
this woman, and you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Don't have a woman trapping a woman.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
You don't want her to be full sized, right, and
you don't want her to be able to go anywhere.

Speaker 5 (01:17:18):
Because they were they were they were talking about it
as an AI companion, and my colleague at Mashable was
doing a video on it, holding the device talking about it,
said you know, if you need a friend, I guess,
And while he's saying friend, the little woman in the
box starts literally like gyrating her body as if she's
like doing a strip tease. And I had to be like, buddy,

(01:17:40):
I don't think she's meant to be your friend.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
I mean, have you ever wanted the experience of thinking
a strip a fell in love? With you every day, right, And.

Speaker 5 (01:17:48):
It's it's because listen, I I don't want to put
a stigma on sex text. Yes they did that years ago.

Speaker 3 (01:17:53):
We already talked about jack and right.

Speaker 5 (01:17:55):
But but like, this doesn't feel like sex tech. This
feels like gooner. I don't know, it doesn't feel like
something that like is normal even for like what people
should be experiencing sexual.

Speaker 4 (01:18:07):
In order to wanna have it socially, you need to
be socially stunted in a way that other people perceive
as on you. Like I remember what I was a
nerd and I grew up around other nerds and then
occasionally I remember, now he's.

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):
A cool, Yeah, now he's cool.

Speaker 4 (01:18:23):
I remember me like sixteen, and one of my friends
would say something about about women where I'm like, oh,
you really don't see them as people and not in
like even a You feel so pathetic internally, you have
so little ability to communicate that you sort of see
it as you see another person as as being a
stimulus producing machine for your purpose. And there are people

(01:18:45):
like that, and you you to buy one of these products.
You have to. That's how you have to see other people.
You have You have to be like really mentally socially,
emotionally like disabled in a way.

Speaker 2 (01:18:56):
Yeah, and I just want to I want to sort
of plant a flag very firmly. And we don't even
have to analyze this, but just sort of like for
posterity's sake, the sort of the broadest and most most
foundational symbology of a technology where it says, here's a
little woman that lives in a box on your desk

(01:19:17):
is just sort of every sentence, every word in that
scene explaining worse and worse and worse for gender dynamics.
It really does symbolize somebody who doesn't see women as.

Speaker 3 (01:19:31):
Equals, right.

Speaker 5 (01:19:31):
I mean one of the one of the recommended demo
like uh commands you were they they told you to try,
was to go up to the box and say dance
for me. I mean that that alone is very weird,
like pretty damning. And for people who use this tea
of the Hut?

Speaker 3 (01:19:50):
Do you want do you want to be like jab
of the Hut?

Speaker 4 (01:19:53):
I had a long dude, show me, Oh that's good.

Speaker 5 (01:19:59):
No, do like I like it?

Speaker 1 (01:20:08):
Oh my god? But also I hate to ask, but
how what was the woman white and thin?

Speaker 4 (01:20:15):
By any chance?

Speaker 5 (01:20:16):
There were there were a few women.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
Many women to trap, but you could you could pretty
much guess.

Speaker 5 (01:20:21):
Yes, there was like a white like a blonde white
school girl, and then a a like, uh, like a
Japanese woman dressed in like traditional Japanese garb. But you
know the type of it's really bad.

Speaker 1 (01:20:35):
Yeah, it's really really.

Speaker 4 (01:20:37):
Making it for me. Actually making it anime makes it
slightly more palable because.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
There but it's not anime.

Speaker 4 (01:20:44):
Oh, it's not anime.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
It's it's just a white school girl.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
It's just people.

Speaker 5 (01:20:49):
They're not real, they're not like human models. They are
sort of like cartoony, but it is like anime style.

Speaker 4 (01:20:56):
But I was gonna say there' stuff like gen Should
Impact where people like collect their favorite characters they find
them sexy. Both women and men do this, and it's
like it's a little it's sort of like fun fantasy land.
And I can see a version of this product that
like appeals to the Genchin Impact player were like the
average person might be like, that's kind of weird, but
I don't enough people who do it where I'm like,

(01:21:16):
you can do it in a fun way, but like
in general, as ghost is a companion, which is bad.

Speaker 5 (01:21:23):
Right, Like the Raison one. You said, like the model
of the woman in there was like an anime character.
It was like a known I don't know who she was,
but it was a known person. And while she might
have been dressed like provocatively, it was the character. But
also there's no actions that add to that that that
that that at all her characters. I agree, but I'm

(01:21:44):
just trying to differentiate the two products. This one, this
one is great. They were they were they were stressed
that way and then acting out ways you would fantasize someone.

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
And not wait, are you saying the Razor one is
a real character?

Speaker 1 (01:21:59):
Is a character that in the worst Yeah? And then
these are not.

Speaker 5 (01:22:01):
These are just the AI companion creations.

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):
And you think about it and you're like, you know,
these people you have when you're designing a companion, you
have a literal infinite number of human characters who you
could you know, like, why not pick a sixty five
year old lady bus driver in the Bronx?

Speaker 1 (01:22:20):
Why not?

Speaker 3 (01:22:21):
Honestly, why not?

Speaker 5 (01:22:22):
But this is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):
But the reason that you are laughing at this, and look,
I'm saying that it's not sexual, But.

Speaker 5 (01:22:27):
The reason that I'm laughing want me Streep in a box.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
I'm going to be honest.

Speaker 5 (01:22:32):
I want to fuck Meryl Streep. No, okay, what if
I just want to talk shop with Meryl Streep about
her film career and a little box.

Speaker 3 (01:22:40):
But I'm going to be honest.

Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
Some of the best conversations I've ever had have been
with like random old people at airports, Like a few
years ago, I was out of random. I forget where.
I was like maybe sort Lake City or regardless. I
just talked to this guy next to me and he
was a former NFL player from like the sixties or
set like it was before.

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
It was like a high paying job just.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
Chat ship for half an hour. Have we kind of
talked about this and I was like, yeah, I'm going
through some shit right now. I'm like, we had an
honest conversation that was probably like icon imagine that.

Speaker 5 (01:23:04):
Was more socially hewing and.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
As far as like, yeah, to your point, executly sorry,
it means tokoby, and it's like the actual woman, No,
they're going to get me for this. But the loneliness thing,
the isolation isn't solved by sex, and like immediately placing
women in this situation where they are the solution to
men's problems is put to its male loneliness. Bullshit. It's

(01:23:27):
claiming that women are somehow the solution to men not
seeking introspection and companionship.

Speaker 2 (01:23:32):
And what's funny is that it's not even woman is
the solution, because there's a there's a sixty five year
old bronx bus who would not count as the solution.
What it is is there is a there is a
specific checklist of a woman's weight, facial beauty, and social

(01:23:54):
subservience that are supposed to that are supposed to fit
into into this very narrow range of measurements, and that
woman then owes service to man who is lonely. Yep,
and I want to be I want to be like
as fair as possible. So say a man is very

(01:24:15):
lonely a man, a man lives a very isolated life
and goes I can see a use for an AI
companion as a like a social like fill the hole
that is in my life that I can't figure out
another way to fill that. Maybe we would say, hey,
what do you like? Do you like chess? Go find
a once a week chess or once a month chest night.

(01:24:36):
Hey do you like I don't know whatever.

Speaker 5 (01:24:38):
There's chess playing robots that will solve that problem.

Speaker 2 (01:24:41):
You don't know what to talk to me about, right that, Like,
I understand that there are people who live an incredibly
isolated life that I would maybe look at it and go,
there are ways to solve this. There are analogue, human
to human ways to solve this and to take baby
steps forward.

Speaker 5 (01:24:55):
Sure, of course, I mean I think that that's the solution, and.

Speaker 2 (01:24:58):
I'll be all but like I can imagine somebody who
goes that kind of human facing solution is impossible for me.
I cannot imagine leaving my apartment. I cannot imagine going
to a chestnight, I cannot imagine whatever insert Sure, fine, okay,
So I'm trying to like be as fair as possible.

Speaker 1 (01:25:11):
Have as much as much empathy as possible.

Speaker 2 (01:25:14):
And and this person, first of all, the idea that
this person doesn't have inherent Sorry I'm really on my
soop box now, this is but the idea that that
person doesn't already it like, hasn't already been inherently soaked
in sexist assumptions and standards and and a view inherently
of women as unequal, because that is we all I

(01:25:36):
view women as an unequal because that is the water
that we swim in, that is how we live, that
is how that is how we are socialized. So like,
those assumptions already exist in all of us, and particularly
in this isolated person.

Speaker 5 (01:25:47):
But again I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:25:48):
Being as fair as possible say that those assumptions are
not actually surface level, they're inherent. They they operate in
how we make subconscious judgments. But this person is not,
you know, sort of like outright a sexist. They buy
wife in a tube and suddenly there, if we're assuming
that they're pretty isolated, suddenly they're a huge bulk of

(01:26:12):
their interaction with what feels like a human is Japanese
lady in a kimono, well, who probably has big hits
under that kimono.

Speaker 5 (01:26:22):
Good for you know, like a good.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Is that it's like that Suddenly it becomes your only
interaction with with the concept of a woman, or or
the vast majority of your interaction with the concept of
a woman like that inherently is going to poison how
you interact with your interactions with gender.

Speaker 5 (01:26:45):
And I just like that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:48):
That to me, that is my fairest take where where
where I'm not saying it's evil at the top. I'm sorry,
it's like evil at the out from the outset. I
think the product is evil from the outset, but the
person doesn't necessarily have to be like fucked up from
the outset.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):
But I just think this product is going to heat
to I want to write, I want to add one
thing to that, which is it also inherently connects loneliness
with sex and physical validation, because it's like, why isn't
a guy like why do you have to have a
woman you are attracted to to solve your loneliness? Why
is your companion by default the opposite sex and I
assume validating how you look and telling you you're a

(01:27:25):
Why is that? Because that is not because that's where
it gets into the like woman subservience thing for me.

Speaker 3 (01:27:30):
As well, because it's service.

Speaker 5 (01:27:33):
That's that's because all these all these all these products
aren't solved if your issue is solving your your social problem,
none of these no tech product is going to Yes,
but the whole point we're or like exposing like exposure
to the outside world, right, Like you, if you have
a problem socializing with people, then the way you fix
that is by forcing yourself to socialize with people like

(01:27:56):
Tech can't by definition fixed that because Tech is not
a person.

Speaker 1 (01:28:00):
And I mean I used to be a very awkward
but like even like you're not chloyed, but he's cool now,
but I'm cool and no I am not. But it's like,
and it took having to have some very harsh conversations
with myself and my therapist and just accepting that, like, yeah,
I was awkward, I was not thoughtful about my conversation style,
and I was just hated myself and didn't think I

(01:28:20):
was human. Yeah, I'm being to fucking therapy now. It's great,
but it's solving that would not be someone validating my
every whim. You kind of need to hurt a little
bit because no one's perfect. But it's like saying, oh, yeah,
a sexy wifu in a tube is your prisoner now,
and now you won't be lonely because the prison wife
is yours and.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
I can and again like being as fair as possible,
giving giving as much credit to the other perspectives as possible.
I can imagine somebody saying when you're saying, like, I
don't want the solution to be loneliness, to be inherently
tied to romance. I agree at a philosophical level, but
I can imagine that from a pragmatic view, a huge

(01:29:00):
amount of very lonely people are like, yeah, I would
love to be in love.

Speaker 5 (01:29:04):
There's a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:29:05):
Isn't solve it. It doesn't solve If you hate yourself
and you meet someone and you have sex with them,
and you're with them and you still fucking hate yourself,
you are going to become dependent on that one and
you are going to be a fucking You're going to
be a tumor on them.

Speaker 3 (01:29:20):
It's just I hate It's that sucks, Chloe.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
My autism is such I genuinely don't think about your
both ever. And you know, I'm like the one person
Wait my favorite Oh no, it's sucking rocks.

Speaker 3 (01:29:39):
It's the store anyway.

Speaker 4 (01:29:40):
No, no, Claire, Chloe. She's got a big birthmark for
those who are just hearing her via audio. Look, it is,
first of all, the loneliness. The loneliness epidemic is real.
It does kill people. It's like the discourse about it whatever,
but like it is a real problem. It's also like
evidence of such a deep distortion in our society that

(01:30:02):
we have it because the thing that we have the
most of in the world is other people.

Speaker 1 (01:30:08):
Yes, we go too many.

Speaker 2 (01:30:10):
We are literally the most second only to other chickens.

Speaker 4 (01:30:13):
And the whole idea of replacing people with technology at
all is insane because we've got eight billion of us
up from six billion when I was in like high school.
And guess what, they're cheap, Like you want one in America,
you can get one for seven bucks an hour and
they'll do whatever the fuck you want, you know, Like
that's and by the way, even when it comes to

(01:30:35):
like companionship, right, there's a role for people to do
that commercially. I'm friends with women who are sex workers,
and they see at least a couple of them as like, look,
there's guys who like they need love and sex. It's
a human need. They like have their neurodivergent or have
some other issue in such a way, and I can
provide a service and they get something out of it.
It's reciprocry. That's the best version of it, right, et cetera.

(01:30:58):
I could go into but like that's a real that's
a real that's a uh, that's like an occupation that
stigmatized in our society. Yeah, but like it's a real
thing that a human could do better. Un Yeah, the
idea that we're replacing people as insane.

Speaker 5 (01:31:13):
Yeah. There is a difference, though, I think between like
the the loneliness epidemic and like the socialization problem. Like
there were guys who have plenty of friends just have
trouble with women, so they go to sex workers, and
that's that's fine, and hopefully they don't you know, they
are normal people other than that. But you know, but
the socialization thing, these people who aren't even thinking about,
you know, interacting with another woman even for pay like this.

(01:31:37):
These are people who who just want to control something
because they don't even want to. I don't think they
want to fix the socialization problem, because why would you
buy a woman in a box? If you're like, I'm
socially awkward, I need to talk to someone. That doesn't
solve your issue. That's not even something that gets you
in that direction in my.

Speaker 1 (01:31:52):
Opinion, I just I don't think it doesn't involve any introspection, right,
it's just about I got a thing that kind of
solves the problem so that I don't have to think
about solving the problem.

Speaker 5 (01:32:03):
Right, Like many people online like that's a fairly new thing.
And you know what, it solved a lot you Actually
it's technology. You use technology to actually enhance your real life,
your your real work.

Speaker 1 (01:32:14):
Every single person in this room who has been on
this show, including Phil, who I've known for fourteen years,
I know through the Internet, right, every single fucking one.
I'm like the drill crying tweet. It's like my beautiful
wife crying, my job, crying, my watch, crying. Now get
the fuck out of my office. But that with the Internet,
and it's like, it is difficult. I'm not pretending like

(01:32:35):
loneliness isn't like a thing, but I fuck it. I
resent the male loneliness thing because women get lonely too,
and they solve it in a vastly different way. And
there's not just a series of different cons set up
to corn a woman.

Speaker 3 (01:32:49):
It's being like you want.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
A husband tube, right, you want that? Do you want
the man tube?

Speaker 5 (01:32:53):
There is none, right, there's nothing that no one putting
in a guy in a box.

Speaker 1 (01:32:56):
That's no one saying that because women have put in
a position where them it's work them meant to fucking
work out. Women have to fucking work out women And
tell it's your fucking fool lonely? Why are you?

Speaker 3 (01:33:04):
Why are you too emotional?

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
Why this?

Speaker 3 (01:33:05):
Why are you that?

Speaker 1 (01:33:06):
Fucking just it pisses me off because it's like these
whindy fucking men who are like, oh, yeah, I'm fucking
loneli and also I'm gonna become racist and it's just
fuck hot. I'm sorry. I have some very spicy feelings
about this because I went through the actual work and
it was very difficult and annoying.

Speaker 5 (01:33:23):
I agree. I fully agree with you. I think, you know,
I don't think they consider the fact that women are
are can be lonely, like it's not because in a
lonely guy's world they think, and you see this online
all the time because you could see how angry they
get when oh, a woman decides to like start an
only fans and they are successful and they make money
doing that. They're like, oh, it's so easy for women.

(01:33:45):
They just go out there and they could talk to anybody,
and every guy will want to talk with them. And
it's like, you know, but you could just go out
there and talk to what's nothing.

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
Stopping Oh I'm going to say something really out there.

Speaker 1 (01:33:56):
Every guy who says that get on only fans start
selling pictures of your car. I'm serious, I'm actually fucking serious.

Speaker 2 (01:34:04):
Who they would never there because gay is bad? Because
why is gay bad? Because it is close to women.

Speaker 1 (01:34:12):
It's feminine. You can possibly look at a man's penis
might turn gay.

Speaker 2 (01:34:18):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's just comes down to the
like such foundational views. It's the it's the it's the
most foundational framing of women in society, which is women
are uh there to be consumed and men are there
to consume. Yeah, And it's so deeply fucked up, and

(01:34:41):
it holds, it kills, It kills women and arguably it
kills men.

Speaker 5 (01:34:46):
Yeah, thank you Adam for staking the men.

Speaker 4 (01:34:50):
Well, you know, I think that the point you make
is you guys can you can go and talk to
anybody and the time is true to me, It's it's
similar to a lot of other social problems like you know,
poor nutrition, people being in poor shape, not exercising right. Yes,
anyone can eat better and jog or whatever. And also
some people grow up in an environment where everything that

(01:35:12):
they're ever told, every product they ever purchased, their entire
environment is pushing them away from doing that thing, and
they just never get around to it. So like my
dad has no friends, my mom has twenty friends, not
because my dad's a piece of shit, just that's the
way American society is structured. And so yes, my dad
has a responsibility. And also society can look at this
overall problem. But what the fuck are we doing wrong

(01:35:34):
here that's causing this like demographic problem. And the answer
is not wife who's in tubes? The answer is like
connecting people with other people vices?

Speaker 5 (01:35:44):
But also is is your dad lonely? Like there's some
people who's.

Speaker 1 (01:35:47):
Prefer actually just my father, my family.

Speaker 5 (01:35:51):
Like for it to be a socialization problem, you have
to be a lonely guy who's upset you're alone, you feeling.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
Like you're alone and not trying to change that, right.

Speaker 5 (01:36:00):
Right, right, because because if there are people who are
completely content being isolated, and they don't view themselves as that,
but like you know, they prefer to stay in then
go out and hang out or party like they like
their time to themselves, and that's completely fine. But there's
people who are inside and are angry they're inside and alone,
and that's the difference.

Speaker 4 (01:36:17):
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:36:17):
So yeah, so I hate to do this.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
We're going to rotate again coming up and ad for
men and women.

Speaker 4 (01:36:24):
Whoa like.

Speaker 3 (01:36:26):
They got them for both birds and the fellers.

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
Now, wow, we're in the fourth quarter and I haven't
had any war. That's actually true. I have not drunk
a drop of war. I think I've had eleven diet code.

(01:36:49):
Do you have a bottle of water?

Speaker 5 (01:36:50):
Next?

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
Yeah, it's mostly I just like to sit with it. Okay,
we're back's better offline and we'd talk about my lonely
this epidemic.

Speaker 3 (01:36:58):
I guess we're back. And of course with a meeting
an actress Chloe Radcliffe.

Speaker 1 (01:37:01):
We will let you do your plagues plags. Do your plags. Yeah,
you plagues plagues at the end, and you, of course
Adam Connor a stand up comedian, Hello, and of course
the host of the Factory broadcast. And we're actually joined
by Ben, my good mate Ben Rudolph is there, CEO
of Cartographic.

Speaker 3 (01:37:18):
And you did fifteen years at Microsoft.

Speaker 6 (01:37:19):
I sure did.

Speaker 3 (01:37:20):
You did the poff of Windows Vista.

Speaker 6 (01:37:22):
You were saying, enterprise pr for Windows Vista the worst
job in the company.

Speaker 3 (01:37:25):
But it's honestly though, that's the most poff thing.

Speaker 2 (01:37:28):
You like.

Speaker 1 (01:37:28):
You all always have one. Yeah, you have one thing.
I made it though you made it and you're still smiling.
I'm here, but that's like, it's Jermaine's what we're talking about,
like positive male role models, positive male discussions. Because I
brought you, because you're a good mate and we've done
a lot, like we're friends online and you've talked to
me about fitness and being like you've genuinely changed my life,
like helping me build a workout routine.

Speaker 3 (01:37:49):
This so like you. My relationship with you.

Speaker 1 (01:37:51):
Solved more male loneliness than any like romantic relationship have ever.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
Are you Are you a fitness coach?

Speaker 4 (01:38:00):
Are you just for no?

Speaker 6 (01:38:02):
Not really no at all.

Speaker 1 (01:38:04):
He's just and just to give you a Nightea. Ben
is fucking like jacked. It's awesome.

Speaker 6 (01:38:08):
I'm trying every day and to get a little bit more,
a little bit more.

Speaker 1 (01:38:12):
Yea, yeah, no I'm not.

Speaker 6 (01:38:13):
I'm not a fitness coach at all. I uh, I
love lifting weights. I try and keep myself in shape.
I've got nine kids, so yeah, so I had a
lot of people who are dependent on me lift up.
It's a lot of exactly and not a functional fitness
Oh but seriously, like it's great for my health. It's
great for my mental health.

Speaker 3 (01:38:32):
Yeah, it's great for my.

Speaker 6 (01:38:33):
Family, you know, and like you d like, it solves
as many mental challenges for me as it does physical challenges,
So like it's not a career for me. It's just
something I really enjoy doing. And it's so deeply ingrained
into my day to day routine that I really can't
imagine living without it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
Yeah, And we met over X the Everything app and
The Ultimate Post the Championship with the You Me Caleb
and Tachiana, and we just talked fitness and like, ick
up my body real bad doing connected fitness stuff. Actually,
who was like fight Camp and Tonal and I was
lifting real hard. I was not in a good place
and I kind of went to bed. I'm like this
keeps happening and I keep getting this pain. And Ben

(01:39:11):
just sends me a video of him and his son.
He's like, I'm gonna show you how to throw a punch,
and it was lovely, like someone's like you ready, and
he just threw this perfect like spiral punch and went, wow,
I've been punching wrong for several months because you need
to like rotate your hips and such. And it's just
like It's one of the things I cherish because it's
like a wonderful relationship over the internet, for sure, a
wonderful positive thing based with talking to another bloke about

(01:39:35):
something positive. And I think it's really easy to dilute
a lot of loneliness to well, I need a female
or a romantic companion. I need someone to make me
feel better about myself versus helping me along a journey
where I do that work while someone inspires me. Because
you're cute and you've done you always post the ones
where've got like eighty nine inch by SEPs Us whatever,
I think it's lovely. And also I'm saying, if you're

(01:39:57):
listening to this as a man and you're saying, oh,
I'm lonely, as go and talk to another fella, ask
him how he's feeling, talk to him about how you feel,
don't fucking say I need the wife tube.

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):
And now I do think, Okay, so again I'm trying.
I'm I really am keeping central in my vision, thinking
about the other perspective and being as fair as possible.
So if I'm a man listening to this podcast and
I'm like, I'm lonely, and Ed's advice is go tell
another man how you're feeling.

Speaker 5 (01:40:25):
I think that the gap.

Speaker 2 (01:40:27):
Between where a lot of men exist and being able
to tell another man how you're feeling is pretty deep.

Speaker 3 (01:40:33):
I'm going to say something simple.

Speaker 4 (01:40:34):
It's hard to do.

Speaker 1 (01:40:35):
If you really can't, email me easy at better offline
dot com. I'm not fucking kidding. Signal me easier on
seventy six. If you really want to talk about your
emotions and you're too scared because your cowardly male friends
are not in touch with their things, do it. I
don't care you cry. I cry when I fucking need to.
I'm fucking you. Solve this by facing the problem by
doing stuff well.

Speaker 5 (01:40:54):
We solve this way.

Speaker 1 (01:40:55):
I have that weight issues, and honestly, you help me.
Ben turn weightlifting into I lift light now, i'd lift volume.
It's about completing things, it's about building something rather than
thrashing my fucking body.

Speaker 4 (01:41:06):
But I think we need to I think we have
to start by recognizing that it is difficult for men
for some reason, that we could get into Me and
one of my best friends, I've known him for twenty years.
I see him twice a week at minimum. We're both
in therapy. We're progressive guys. We care about our emotions.
He number of years ago, seven years or so, got divorced,

(01:41:29):
didn't tell me for a year, you know, christ Like
we were on a hike and he was finally like,
I want to let you know, like me and her
are separated, and I was like, yeah, man, I haven't
seen her around. I know, but we didn't talk about it.
Then I went through a big breakup, like a year
and a half ago, and he's had to come to
me and occasionally go like, hey, man, how are you doing?
You know, like we haven't talked lately, and we everything.

(01:41:52):
For some reason, we have to remind each other and
we do it less than we But actually, yeah, you're right.
I think I get that you need to remind.

Speaker 2 (01:42:00):
The solution there might be ask your friend a question
that sounds simple. Yeah, that and this is not necessarily
like how do you tell your friends how you're feeling?
This likely will open up a conversation. But like your
friend saying, hey, how are you doing?

Speaker 1 (01:42:17):
Post breakup?

Speaker 2 (01:42:19):
Arguably you it's it sounds like you had noticed that
something had gone weird in his marriage. You hadn't seen
his wife around for a long time, but it sounds
like you didn't say, like, how are things with you
and my wife?

Speaker 4 (01:42:31):
Yeah, I didn't say anything to him either, and.

Speaker 2 (01:42:33):
So to me, it's like asking that question, even if
that feels so like such a steep hill to climb,
Like I've I've been as a as a woman with feelings.
I've been in conversations with my girlfriends who I'm super
super close with where I'm like, god, it is really
fucking hard to be like anyways, so how is your
marriage doing?

Speaker 5 (01:42:52):
Like that?

Speaker 1 (01:42:53):
That seems like.

Speaker 2 (01:42:55):
It seems like if the answer is good, then I'm
like opening suspicion into an area that I don't need
to be opening suspicion into. If the marriage is bad,
if she's not telling me, there must be a reason
she's not telling me. But the answer is actually just
we are sort of all socialized to not reveal a
lot of that information. And then women have been permitted
to be like we have been sort of saddled with

(01:43:17):
the their emotional and their dramatic But what that the
light side of that is that we are permitted to
express difficult things a little bit more easily.

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
And a little bit more Sorry, but we've just stropped
you in the middle of Now, this is great, but
it's it's like you, you and I.

Speaker 6 (01:43:31):
I mean, I think men and Jack are you know,
we're supposed to be strong, physically strong, mentally strong, spiritually strong,
all those things. You and I started talking not just
about fitness, but when you were like, hey, I struggled
with my weight. Yeah, like I was able to say, like,
I struggled with my weight too, like, yeah, it's been
two thousand and nine or so, I lost about seventy pounds.

Speaker 4 (01:43:51):
I was big.

Speaker 1 (01:43:52):
So I gave us, which for you is like one
percent of your body mass, yeah, wund Yeah, but it's
all muscle.

Speaker 6 (01:43:58):
Yeah, more more now than he's used to. But that
gave us an opportunity to like to talk over that,
and that was like something that we could bond over
and something we could you know, you're not the only
person and that we can do. And like, I still
always feel like the fat kids.

Speaker 3 (01:44:14):
I was saying, Oh, absolutely feel fat all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:44:17):
I feel fat right now and it's weird, right, and
I always do.

Speaker 6 (01:44:21):
And it's always like ways on me because I was
a heavy kid and you're my twenties and I didn't
really turn it around till it's about thirty years old.
And once you figure that out and you find out
that other people have gone through the same thing, then
all of a sudden you can have a very different
conversation about it. And it's not about lifting to go
in the mister Olympia, and it's not about trying to
as set a bench press record. It's really it's about,
like you know, trying to build yourself up as much

(01:44:44):
physically as it is mentally, and other people are trying
to You're just trying to get through the day. And
also it's okay.

Speaker 1 (01:44:48):
I will say in my experience pushing a little further
on guys being like are you really okay? So a
lot of guys will open up and be like, I'm not,
and you have a nice conversation and you'll work. I'm
The feminization of emotion is disgusting because it's like, oh
my god, the amount of times artcrime and my my
ole friends and vice versa, and it's felt so much

(01:45:08):
fucking better.

Speaker 3 (01:45:09):
Well, when I've cried in front.

Speaker 1 (01:45:10):
Of you, client, I've cried close to how we met.

Speaker 3 (01:45:13):
It is like two days later.

Speaker 1 (01:45:15):
But it's great and it's good, and it's just it's
really easy to find other stop gaps, and I want
to be clear, like these companies are taking advantage of that.
They're not, because I wanted to say this last episode
is well, it's like the reason that there is a
lonely in this epidemic is there are no third spaces,
there are fewer walkable cities, and these social networking tools

(01:45:35):
no longer. It is such a fucking like Dennis Leary's
doll and a social networking tool don't let you socialize.
But really though, you don't have a chronological feed of
the people you want to fucking follow on most platforms,
there's obstructions between it. There's like random platforms just become racist.

Speaker 4 (01:45:50):
They're not designed to get people into physical space, with
the exception of dating apps, which are. But even then,
like yeah, true, and those are all fucked up and gamified.
But like you know, what was the name of the
site from like the late nineties or like meetup, dot
com or dot org.

Speaker 1 (01:46:04):
Do you yeah, me, I think they're still around.

Speaker 4 (01:46:07):
Maybe it was literally designed to it was like sort
of pre Facebook, designed to be fine stuff to do.

Speaker 3 (01:46:15):
Meetups.

Speaker 1 (01:46:15):
Yeah, meetups are so like that as a branded name.

Speaker 4 (01:46:19):
Okay, well that is the focus of most social networking
tools in the early days. Totally, there were a lot
that were like, hey, let's get people to meet up
in the real world, and now that's the last thing
Facebook wants you to do.

Speaker 3 (01:46:28):
Yes, And it's just.

Speaker 1 (01:46:31):
There are ways that this could be fixed. I don't
I'm not an inventor, but I don't know the problem
being that men don't want to talk. That's not something
that's an analog problem.

Speaker 5 (01:46:41):
Yes, I'm just saying, like the prescription.

Speaker 3 (01:46:43):
Oh no, I'm agreeing.

Speaker 2 (01:46:44):
I'm agreeing, tangible subscription can be ask your male friend
a question, any question.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
A question, Yeah, and also ask ask your girlfriend as
well if you have one questions.

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
Asking anyone in your life a questions and actually they
will love well.

Speaker 4 (01:47:00):
Really, all I want to add to this is I
think it needs to start with a recognition that, like,
in the same way that when I started working out,
I was like, oh, yeah, everything in my life has
been telling me to sit on my ass and I
have to like make an effort to.

Speaker 3 (01:47:13):
Do it right.

Speaker 4 (01:47:13):
Well, that's even, but it was a little bit easier
because yes, men are supposed to be strong, right, Everything
in men's lives are sort of telling them not to
open up. It is like a barrier, defensive almost, and
like you have to like treat it as like this
is not going to be super easy, Like I have
to you know, I have to like pry it out
of myself and out of my mail, which is why, like,
you know, again, my friend to me was like, we

(01:47:36):
need to talk.

Speaker 2 (01:47:37):
It's been a while, which is exactly why why I'm saying,
and I'm glad they did, And that's exactly why I'm
trying to point out the gulf between somebody listening to
this and going I feel isolated and the the other
side of that crevasse of like just talk about your
feelings and that I do think that there's like an
easy concrete.

Speaker 6 (01:47:55):
You're intentionally opting into something hard, yes, y right, Like
that's I mean, and it's it's we are you know,
to get too metaphysical, but like we're nothing if they
are not challenges for us to yeah attack and doing.

Speaker 4 (01:48:05):
Hard things can be rewarded, exactly.

Speaker 6 (01:48:07):
Right, And like it is no harder to learn how
to bench press than it is to talk about your feelings.

Speaker 1 (01:48:12):
These are both hard and with fas as well, I
had to like push past the thing of like I
have to be strong. It was this incredibly negative relationship
I had with my body because I was a fat
person that didn't f I was a fat, sedentary piece
of shit. Until I got past that, I could not
have a body I liked. Until it was about building
something and recognizing weakness and the fragility of one's body,

(01:48:33):
but also the fact that going about it and beating
the shit out of yourself to become strong is unsustainable
because it just means that every like a good thing,
a powerful thing, progressive thing, is inherently progressive. You were
just hurting yourself. And where is the end point of that?
How are you gonna go? Oh, I've reached a good point.
It's just you're a piece of shit if you fall
below this level. And I fucking thought with that.

Speaker 6 (01:48:54):
Yeah, And there's I mean, especially when it comes out
like the body dysmorphius stuff and which never stops, right.
I mean, there's like there's memes and jokes about it.
Like I've been I've been bodybuilding for five years, Like
when does the body dys morphia stop?

Speaker 1 (01:49:05):
Like?

Speaker 6 (01:49:05):
Oh, well it does it?

Speaker 5 (01:49:06):
Right?

Speaker 6 (01:49:06):
It's like you're just getting started, man, like you uh,
you see the guys even not that I would ever
advocate for this, but like the guys who are like
the pro bodybuildings, the wind shows, and they'd be like,
what are you doing him? He's very famous, like Jay
Cutler who won Mister Olympia four times. They interviewed him
after he won and he was They were like, what
are you gonna do to celebrate? He's well, I gotta
go to bed early because I got cardio in the morning.
And it's like, you just won, like you know, the

(01:49:28):
World Series of Bodybuilding and he's not taking a day
off because he was so wrapped into it and so
like deep into it that it was just like it's
all he.

Speaker 2 (01:49:36):
Could think about and like you know, and and there's
no finished not to be a woman.

Speaker 3 (01:49:41):
About this, please be at I.

Speaker 2 (01:49:43):
Just want to state for the record that I I
love I am so glad that men are talking about
body dysmorphia and the way that body dysmorphia shows up
in women is so uh much more socially connected with
our value like that like I do not I want

(01:50:05):
to be like I totally get it. I do totally
get it, and I get it. I think probably more
than you might think I do and then just a
quick shout out for the girls that like. Then it
is connected to the women are there to be consumed,
that like the extra layer of value when you feel

(01:50:30):
about it.

Speaker 1 (01:50:30):
Well, it gets back to the wife tube thing, which
I'm liking saying that phrase. I guess where it's like, Yeah,
it's not a overweight woman, it's not a man. It's
a sexualized presentation of the idealistic woman for the certain
customer of this thing. Because I am not a woman.
I experienced body dysmallphee every day, but I'm not like
me being overweight is not the thing that precluded me

(01:50:54):
from being happy. It was how I felt about myself
to be cleared, like, I want to feel better about myself,
but my value as a man is not directly affected
in the exactly way exactly exactly, so when I wanted that,
it was not keeping me from job opportunities exactly.

Speaker 5 (01:51:07):
That's what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:51:08):
It's that, like I think probably the emotional experience of
body dysmorphia is very very similar in women and men,
and and even the like men are supposed to be
strong and so like there is a social value associated
with that. But it is that when men fall outside
of what we consider the classically attractive bounds, the way

(01:51:28):
that their lives are negatively impacted tend to be much
more minimal negative impacts than the way that women's lives
are impacted when they fall.

Speaker 1 (01:51:37):
Outside of the bounds of class. I would say when
I was very three hundred and fifty pounds, there was
definitely a level of like respect I didn't get, but
it was not like it wasn't to the level where
women are just fucking completely excluded if they do not
look like the heteronormative idea of what a woman should
look like a certain level of thinness and attractiveness and

(01:51:58):
make up.

Speaker 3 (01:51:58):
And all of these.

Speaker 1 (01:51:59):
Yeah, it's very it's very different. Yeah, or it's just
like a whole nother fun Yeah, you get, you get
like several more layers of.

Speaker 4 (01:52:06):
I mean, look at the look at the people at
this conference, and look at the you know, there's people
who are there's there's men walking around who are not
fitting conventional, conventional notions of what an attractive man is
and they're powerful, successful men at this conference, and I
think you'd have a hard time finding women are in
the same position. Right, Like we're talking about all the

(01:52:27):
other dimensions of you know, uh, of the social value
and status like so much more connected for women.

Speaker 1 (01:52:34):
Absolutely, and everything goes with women as well as weight
loss and thinness and certain presentations and minutes about a
certain level of bigness and the metrics are even different.
It's just it's I'm glad we're talking about this on
the show because I know we probably have more men
listening than we do women. I hope, like I would
love that not to be the case, But it's about technology.

(01:52:54):
What do you fucking think? And it's just like it
sucks because yeah, there are lonely men, but it's like, yes, sadly,
you bring this shit to a woman before you fixed it,
you're now her problem she needs to keep and you're
gonna have many of these things about your body that
you transfer onto her. You judge her the same way
you judge yourself until you can get past that. Even
the internalized sexual sexism of like how a man and

(01:53:17):
a woman are meant to feel. When I was when
I was heavy, like I had to go through a
lot of things of just like no one needs to
look a certain fucking way at all, Like I might
need to be thin for myself that might be what
I need to aspire to, but that's no one else's
fucking job. No one has to look a certain way
for me or for them, only for themselves, and it

(01:53:38):
it sucks. The more I think about these fucking wife tups,
as funny as it's to say, the more like angry
I get. Yeah, it's just like reinforcing gender stereotise, but
also adding a new layer of like woman prison. I
mean it's it's like it's it's fantasy subjecation.

Speaker 10 (01:53:52):
Yes, well, and it's it's a technological fake solution to
a real social problem that is like preying on both
the customers and the women who are quite represented.

Speaker 1 (01:54:07):
Yeah, there's this tube where you had like an anime
wife you could talk to.

Speaker 3 (01:54:10):
I probably should have multiple products.

Speaker 6 (01:54:12):
I disculled it from the conversation. Yeah, yeah, that sounds
like a terrible idea.

Speaker 1 (01:54:17):
It's it's a really good band aid on a multitude
of problems, because I maintain you want to you want
to actually genuinely go talk to a priest, like I
don't mean it, even if you're not religious, you just
fucking maybe you need some spirituality in your life. Maybe
you need more than just how you look or how
you feel and trapped in your own head. They'll talk
to you for a priest will talk to your all
fucking day. Don't need to be religious. I'm not even joking.

(01:54:39):
Like the monk, the the Dominican monk, Fry Gabriel is
sadly not here, Father Gabriel, pardon me. He talked to
him for hours. I'm not religious at all. I'm like agnostic.
Who fucking knows. But it's like the problem is if
you talk about your problems, then you have to recognize
your role in them and how they make you feel.
And when you've never done that, this the sympathy I'll

(01:55:00):
give it hurts.

Speaker 5 (01:55:02):
Well, there's when you've never done that.

Speaker 2 (01:55:04):
And also when the technology that is in our world
is so is so effective at like pressing the immediate
dopamine button, yeah, or right that, we are presented with
a drug that is more instant and more powerful and
more replicable than ever.

Speaker 1 (01:55:22):
In human history.

Speaker 2 (01:55:23):
And so why would you do something that feels bad
when you can just do something that feels good right away,
even if it feels bad on a long scale term
and long term scale. And you sort of understand that
inherently yeah, but you can still just do the drug again.

Speaker 5 (01:55:35):
You can just press the button again. You can just
feel better again.

Speaker 1 (01:55:37):
And why wouldn't you? Of course Chinese peptides like it
really does connect though. No, but we were talking about these
Chinese peptids yesterday. It's like, yeah, a quick and easy solution.
To be clear, you used GLP one from a doctor, brilliant. Well, however,
your weight loss journey happens if that's what you need,
brilliant Sadly and Ben and I can tell you can
lose all the weight, be you still gonna feel bad
about yourself until you solve that. Do you find a

(01:55:57):
way to calm out your own self, you're gonna be
You're gonna be in trouble. When I say this to
someone who has been in trouble, who has taken years
to build the internal and external me that I want it.
And it's like all these fitness things they they don't
even really try that as well. I think Victorislms make
the point mobile times that these these numbers, the useless
numbers who were talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:56:18):
I said that my theme for cees is numbers you
don't need.

Speaker 6 (01:56:23):
It's just like there's no substitute for the work?

Speaker 1 (01:56:26):
No, right, I mean like that's it, there's no But
everybody's like, but is this a substitute for the worst?

Speaker 5 (01:56:31):
Exactly?

Speaker 6 (01:56:32):
Like we've been trying this for free.

Speaker 5 (01:56:33):
Yes, twenty twenty six. But is this substitute for the great?

Speaker 6 (01:56:36):
It's a great uh. I think you and I have
talked about it. For him, Rollins wrote a great article. Yeah,
the iron, the iron so yes, amazing were talked about
like the iron never lies right at the end of
the day. I forget that. I'm gonna butcher the quote,
but he wraps it up. I being like, you can
be the biggest guy in the room and the smallest
guy in the room. You can have the best body
or the worst body. You could just gotten married or
just gotten dumped. You know, you fired from your job,

(01:56:57):
promoted at the end of the day, and that two
hundred pounds is still two hundred pounds. Are either lifted
or you don't like it. It's the work is there
to be done. You change the same, like the process
of lifting heavier or eating better or whatever is like
the hard is what makes it good. It's not just
about the aesthetics or about how much weight you can push.

(01:57:18):
It's about the the process that you go through, you know,
and those glp ones like and other peptides like they
are miracle drugs. They are miracle drugs. And I know
lots of people who have gone on them. And the
people who are successful are the people who go on
them and then also lift the weights and also do
the cardio, yeah, but also eat better. The people who

(01:57:39):
just take them and then kind of like deflate because
they're not doing anything have horrible metabolic problems because they
took the shortcut. And you get you get the results
of the shortcut.

Speaker 1 (01:57:49):
And you feel still miserable about it. And I say
this is I've lost. I was three hundred and fifty pounds.
I dropped to one hundred and thirty pounds when I
was nineteen, and then went back up to two hundred
and sixty something by the end of my like the
midpoint of my thirties, and maybe a buck sixty five.
Now that last part was the first time it stayed
like I've stayed consistently this way, not because I've stayed

(01:58:11):
consistent with my fits. I've been off for the last
few months, but because I've been more focused on what
good feels like than I have on am I fucking
push and bannishing beaten the fuck. I remember texting my
friend Touchiana friend at the show, Touchiana, Yeah, my arms
feel like they're full of broken glass and I was
happy and she was like, I don't think that's what
that's meant to feel like, and I was like, yes,

(01:58:32):
it is.

Speaker 3 (01:58:33):
I'm good.

Speaker 1 (01:58:34):
She it wasn't a good as it's not long before
I started talking to you, Ben, And I think it's
just like, it's really easy to fucking hate yourself for
bad reasons and then also not really be critical of
yourself for the good ones, such as I'm fucking up
my body repeatedly so that I can be sexy for
a woman.

Speaker 2 (01:58:53):
And I want to add another a corollary to it's
really easy to hate yourself. Yes, Also it is really
easy to justify a fairly nihilist point of view. I
think now more than ever, I think it's very easy
to be like nothing matters and we're all gonna die,
and so why am I?

Speaker 3 (01:59:12):
Why would I try?

Speaker 2 (01:59:13):
Or like the world is so fucked up and obviously
there's no uh like to keep to rationalized to justify
whatever your repeated choices are and I'm talking to myself
more than.

Speaker 5 (01:59:26):
Anybody like I have.

Speaker 1 (01:59:27):
I have a million of these.

Speaker 2 (01:59:28):
Ruts and that I get myself into. And I think
it's very, very easy to justify self destructive choices, particularly
the mildly self destructive choices, the ones that aren't like
driving causing you to drive your car into a tree.

Speaker 1 (01:59:43):
At the end of the night.

Speaker 3 (01:59:44):
You know, like what then oh, just like eat, like.

Speaker 2 (01:59:48):
Justifying promising yourself that you'll eat better and then not
even if it's not to a crazy degree, but it's
to a degree that keeps you unhealthy in a way,
or like you know, it's like if you're not getting
black out drunk every week, but you're like I when
I drink, I wake up the next morning and I
feel anxious in a way that cripples me for the
whole next day. But I'm just gonna have another drink.

(02:00:10):
I'm just gonna have one more drink with my friends
tomorrow night or whatever. And it's and again like this
these are things that I do, These are this is
my own life.

Speaker 1 (02:00:16):
This is nobody saw uh Adam just dropped the nihilism thing.

Speaker 6 (02:00:21):
I mean, like my favorite Jim T shirt that I
lifted all the time is like the counterpoint to that,
and it says like we're all gonna die, might as
well get strong? Yeah, Like I think, is it Pascal's wager?
Isn't it past right? It's like it's like that, but
for life, choices exist, Like you might as well act
as if God exists, because even if he does not exist,

(02:00:42):
living in a moral way yourself, I totally agree.

Speaker 5 (02:00:45):
I'm just saying.

Speaker 2 (02:00:46):
I'm saying, like, I think a lot of people easily
fall into a justification where it's not even that they like,
I think that there's people listening to this who wouldn't
say I hate myself, who would just say everything is.

Speaker 3 (02:00:57):
So bah, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (02:00:59):
Yeah, yeah, and the thing.

Speaker 2 (02:01:01):
Is or or my my jadedness is correct, not even
it doesn't matter stuff where they're like it could matter,
but like, look at I think people rationalize.

Speaker 1 (02:01:12):
I also think it's really easy for guys to in particular,
and no, I take that back, It's not true. Women
do this kind of self harm as well. And where
it's like for the beauty standards of both women and men,
where it's I need to hurt, the pain is necessary,
no pain, no gain.

Speaker 3 (02:01:29):
Actually pain is not brilliant, and with woman it can
often be.

Speaker 1 (02:01:34):
I mean, they do the same thing with fitness, but
like dietary stuff, with a woman, it is much harsher.
It's like the ways we punish ourselves and they usually fail.

Speaker 3 (02:01:41):
Like I am generally not.

Speaker 1 (02:01:43):
In pain when after I woke out, I feel worked,
but I feel good, And it's like that's the thing
to look for. But it's really easy because you got
on Instagram, especially if you like start talking about fitness
in the DM and Instagram's like, oh, we're not looking,
but it looks like you need some peptoides. And you
can get this fucking pressure of these guys who are
just they're younger than you, stronger than you, they've gone

(02:02:06):
through crazier journeys, they've lost more weight, they've done this.
It's really easy for guys to pretend like this doesn't happen.
You don't look at another guy's body and you feel inferior.
It fucking happens, and you're like, if I look like
that 'll feel better, you probably won't mate. Yeah, And
women talk about this publicly all the time. Men don't
want to because it's fucking's gay. Oh you're fucking good Lord,

(02:02:28):
the worst thing that could happen to you is that
you're gay. Jesus Christ. That sounds fun, like who gives
a shit? You're in love with a man. It sounds nice.
You're in love with a woman who gives a fuck.
But it's like this feminization of anything, any kind of
pain and emotion. Men are just fucking strong.

Speaker 3 (02:02:43):
Got a wife, you will talk to me out lift
from all.

Speaker 1 (02:02:48):
Oh, No, it's nice to have a conversation like this
in this scenario like this is well a very male
dominated space and more dominated industry. And it's also scary
for men to think about this stuff. And it's much
easier to blame everyone else. Yeah, other men too.

Speaker 6 (02:03:03):
That being said, I'm gonna try and lift a million
pounds this year. No, but you do it because it's
a million pounds of volume, that's the goal.

Speaker 1 (02:03:08):
No, but that's fucking you're doing that.

Speaker 6 (02:03:10):
Because I'll get there.

Speaker 3 (02:03:11):
But you're doing it for fun.

Speaker 6 (02:03:13):
I'm doing it for fun and because like it is,
it is a it is a therapeutic thing for me.
Like the joke of you know, lift heavy rock said, yeah, right,
but it's like it's it's true, it is a it
is a great physical thing, it's a great mental thing.
It's good for my marriage, right, Like I'm a better husband,
I'm a better father, I'm better professionally because I'm able
to focus.

Speaker 1 (02:03:31):
And energetic and you've energetic. Yeah, exactly, and you build something,
you see the results patching over something exactly right.

Speaker 6 (02:03:39):
I'm so glad we're talking foundational Adam.

Speaker 1 (02:03:41):
What do you think about all that? Yeah, sorry, you've
been quiet this whole time.

Speaker 4 (02:03:44):
Oh yeah, we've been podcasting for two hours. I'm I'm
a little tired. Uh yeah, No, I mean I think that, Uh,
it's just the trip that I'm on is like, I
do think that we underrate how much society, like all

(02:04:05):
of us together as a society, push men down the
wrong path on this stuff. And I think at the
same time as we are saying like, you know, men
need to step up and like change their attitudes, I
also think we need to like create space for other men, yes,
to do these things. That's men and women need to
do this. Men need to do it, I think with

(02:04:26):
each other each other. But it is like, you know,
a and I think the thing that because there's so
many elements of this you can talk about sexism and
patriarchy and stuff affects men and women, and you can
almost always go it affects women worse. It's true, right, yeah,
but a deficiency that I think that the reason I'm

(02:04:47):
glad we're having this conversation is I think a division
difficiency at least I think that's unequivocally true, is that
men talk about it less. I grew up watching just there,
just the evolving conversation about sexist directed towards women for
my entire life and like processing it. Oh, we're developing,
how we're thinking about this, We're trying to address this

(02:05:07):
product all still exists, but we're and like we just
we have never had it for men on a cultural level,
and when we try a lot of times people go,
you know, like why you know I talk about this
on stage sometimes and you know, people come up to
A woman came up to me and says like, oh,
it's kind of it's kind of like I want somebody
think of the men. And I'm like, yeah, kind of,

(02:05:27):
it is kind of what somebody think of But the
thing is I get what she is saying.

Speaker 1 (02:05:32):
In the it's very very is to full into the
trope like, oh, poor men, but it's like the actual
solution is you can say that, but only if the
answer is talking to other guys, not like and that's
where women come in and that's how having sex. And
by the way, I would just say that will not
solve your image issues. That will not do it. It's
a fucking band aid too.

Speaker 2 (02:05:54):
Yeah, I mean, adam t to your what you were
just saying, I think that the solution to uh, there's
I don't know that there's like a way to really
solve gender dynamics, you know, fingers, but.

Speaker 1 (02:06:11):
Like fifteen minutes, we've actually only got five.

Speaker 2 (02:06:16):
But you know, if I were there listening to the
woman say, that's kind of a think of the men,
and your answer is yet it is think of the men.
That's because the only way that we make any progress
is with empathy and kindness, yes to the people, to
every player involved in this in the scenario.

Speaker 1 (02:06:36):
Yeah, yeah, And it's but empathy means empathy requires in respection.

Speaker 3 (02:06:40):
Sorry I didn't mean still.

Speaker 1 (02:06:41):
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, totally. And on that point,
I'm going to end this two hour long episode. Ben Rudolph,
where can we find you?

Speaker 6 (02:06:49):
I'm on X The everything appen well, it's been the
PC guy.

Speaker 1 (02:06:52):
It's my wonderful friend Mandall.

Speaker 6 (02:06:54):
Or you can go to cartographic dot com at c
A R t O g r A f i q
dot com because we wanted to make it super hard
to spell.

Speaker 4 (02:07:02):
Nice, I can I just ask that a question? Did
you see one cool thing?

Speaker 3 (02:07:06):
At the ES?

Speaker 4 (02:07:07):
We've been talking shit on tech products and men generally.
Is there anything that you were excited about?

Speaker 6 (02:07:15):
So I haven't spent that much time around the floor.
I've been working with my clients. I think there's finally
some we could do another two hours away. Should we
get in should we get into like the transition from
AI hype to like what you can actually do with
it that actually matters. I have seen some stuff that
I think it's interesting and fun. I haven't seen anything
that I'm like, wow, that's going to change my life.

(02:07:36):
Like there's a lot of like autonomous like scooters and
yeah and stuff like that that seem interesting, but I
don't know if.

Speaker 4 (02:07:45):
Well that's all I want to know.

Speaker 1 (02:07:47):
Thank you, Adam. Why don't you do your cool outs
where you're going to be doing stand up?

Speaker 4 (02:07:50):
Okay this weekend, h I'm going to be a Madison,
Wisconsin Next weekend I'll be on Fort Wayne, Indiana. Then
I'm going to Louisville, Kentucky at the end of January.
That in early February, will be in Houston, Texas. And
then I'm taping my new special at the Punchline in
San Francisco February nineteen through twenty first. Adam conover dot
net for tickets.

Speaker 1 (02:08:09):
Hell yeah, Chloe, Hi.

Speaker 2 (02:08:11):
This weekend I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio. Next weekend i am
in Washington, d C. The week after that, not the
weekend January twentieth, twenty first, and twenty second, I'm doing
my solo show called Cheat, which is a completely separate hour.
It is not the hour of stand up that I
do on the road. Ed has seen it and loved it.
In Philadelphia. Cheat in Philadelphia January twenty twenty one, twenty two,

(02:08:32):
and then the weekend after that or oh then two
weekends after that, I'll be in from months at the
end of it.

Speaker 1 (02:08:36):
And as we end this show, big shout out to
the departed a past last year Shan Paul Adams, friend
of the show, friend of the Suite, Please donate to
the Pediatric EPILEEPSI Research Consultium in honor of his son,
who is epileptic. His family would deeply appreciate it. Thank
you so much for listening. We've gotten other two hours
for you coming soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 11 (02:09:04):
The editor and 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 my newsletter. I also really recommend

(02:09:26):
you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
to check out our reddit.

Speaker 3 (02:09:33):
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 9 (02:09:35):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 (02:10:02):
In the home, schools, school

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