Speaker 1: Alzo Media.
Speaker 2: And Bam, thank you, ma'am, im ed zechron and this
Speaker 2: is Better Offlines coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six. We are now as we have been all
Speaker 2: week here in the Palazzo Hotel and beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada,
Speaker 2: bringing you yet another episode covering c YES with a
Speaker 2: crazy assortment of guests from the tech industry. We've got
Speaker 2: an open bar, we've got tacos, a place to sit
Speaker 2: down for members of the media and friends, whether they
Speaker 2: join us on the microphone or not. It's Friday, and
Speaker 2: we're on the first of our final two episode days.
Speaker 2: And I mean, that wasn't perfect, but you're just gonna
Speaker 2: like it. Then an epilogue tomorrow and good lord, do
Speaker 2: we have a wonderful show for you or we're beginning
Speaker 2: very strong. The first contestants on the Better Offline Challenge
Speaker 2: are the legendary activist, author, and journalist Corey doctro me
Speaker 2: all today you speak, say hello.
Speaker 3: Oh hello, I wasn't sure if I was meant to
Speaker 3: speak at this point.
Speaker 2: Hi, natural, Natural, And of course returning champion listener favorite
Speaker 2: Sherlan lower vengall.
Speaker 1: Listen her favorite, that's a strong introduction. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I deserve it.
Speaker 2: It's completely actually. Another listener favorite, Michael Fisher, the YouTuber
Speaker 2: and CEO of Clicks. Now, that's ceo, co found co founded,
Speaker 2: my bad buddy, A doesn't matter titles that we don't do,
Speaker 2: we don't just fine.
Speaker 4: You're a helocracy like Tony Vegas favorite fe Admiral Admiral rear,
Speaker 4: admiral well well.
Speaker 2: Court martialed, but the Clicks So all right, I've had
Speaker 2: a lot of people in myil in So just to
Speaker 2: be clear, Michael's my friend. He's been on the show
Speaker 2: a lot, had him on in his capacity's journalist still
Speaker 2: here as well for that. But you are you are
Speaker 2: the co founder of clicks, and you've got a little
Speaker 2: device with you. I do, indeed, I have actually several devices.
Speaker 2: Yes we add that thing. Thanks man. I was so
Speaker 2: worried because I was like, I'm a Canadian, so blackberries
Speaker 2: are in my soul.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: This is a physical keyboard for the iPhone and for
Speaker 2: Android phones.
Speaker 1: Which were two years ago.
Speaker 6: I have it on a motoroal eraser now, which is fun. Flips,
Speaker 6: but the I love the flipp I know you and
Speaker 6: I agree on the fold. I just want, and I'm like,
Speaker 6: I message on them, I don't.
Speaker 1: Care it's coming. I know it must be coming.
Speaker 2: Give me a foldable I phone.
Speaker 7: Everyone's saying the iphon phone, give me.
Speaker 2: My foldable slot. No, I'm so you've got this thing
Speaker 2: that connects to the Mac. Say for the what have
Speaker 2: you charge of the thing is?
Speaker 6: We we made custom molded cases with the keyboard attached
Speaker 6: for several iPhones several andro and everyone was like, this
Speaker 6: is great, but I don't carry that phone. And we
Speaker 6: were like, yeah, this is great, but it costs a
Speaker 6: lot of money to mold a custom case with a
Speaker 6: keyboard for every phone. So we broke out the keyboard
Speaker 6: into a little custom puck called power keys that.
Speaker 7: Everyone's grabbing out their iPhones now removing.
Speaker 6: Try just slap it right on the back there and
Speaker 6: it bonds via Bluetooth and gives you that.
Speaker 2: So if you my region is not there's your target
Speaker 2: zone there. Wait is this are you giving me your phone?
Speaker 2: You do not have someone hand me a device for
Speaker 2: this audio podcast, So go ahead, but you also have
Speaker 2: the Android device that's where the actual clicks device it
Speaker 2: does work. So uh, we're just gonna which can move
Speaker 2: on from that so but you've done like a dedicated
Speaker 2: Android direct thing. Yes, it's called the Clicks Communicator.
Speaker 6: It is actually a phone that Yes, it is a
Speaker 6: four inch screen with a big, full, quirdy keyboard underneath it.
Speaker 2: People are calling it the new BlackBerry, but that is not,
Speaker 2: of course. Jim Jim, who was the Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I was just talking to me yesterday. Yes, were you really?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, literally we had a phone call this episode, all right.
Speaker 6: So they it's it's optimized for communication. It's optimized for
Speaker 6: people who carry two phones already and want one of
Speaker 6: them to be.
Speaker 2: More focused on communication than content. So you got a
Speaker 2: nice big screen, just describing it for the less, this
Speaker 2: nice big screen, it's decent, way a lot. You've got
Speaker 2: this raised bit of the bit at the back. It's
Speaker 2: quite nice.
Speaker 6: Little little little stippled the backplate here. And I will
Speaker 6: say two which is which is what we like?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will also say the keyboard feels better than
Speaker 2: the original Clicks.
Speaker 6: We've increased the key size by thirty percent. If you
Speaker 6: can believe that you're ready for the spectrum.
Speaker 2: And I will say this, like I don't use the
Speaker 2: original Clicks because like, weirdly like the case didn't feel right.
Speaker 2: It's just a personal thing. And I have like weird
Speaker 2: little thumbs, like they're not long enough for most gloves.
Speaker 2: Because I'm a monster, I understand, But these this thing.
Speaker 2: I like this. In Caleb from Kill the Computer, who
Speaker 2: is specifically asked about this, I like it.
Speaker 6: I think it's cool. So who's aimed at people who
Speaker 6: carry two phones? So you ever see people walking around,
Speaker 6: like make captive two phones, right, but you see people
Speaker 6: walking around with the picks on an iPhone or two iPhones,
Speaker 6: and neither one is optimized for the actual task that
Speaker 6: it's trying to do. So we're not trying to compete
Speaker 6: with the phone with a great camera and a big
Speaker 6: old display. We're trying to make a communications tool. So
Speaker 6: what I like about this though, is it runs Android,
Speaker 6: but we've you know, added a custom launcher on top
Speaker 6: with the folks at Niagara.
Speaker 2: You ever use that one? Can you say it? And
Speaker 2: I want to want to play around? I cannot.
Speaker 6: That's a touch and feel sample. That's how early this
Speaker 6: thing is. We don't launch it till later in the year.
Speaker 6: But like Niagara has this beautiful aesthetic list and it's
Speaker 6: not a it's on Nicon based os.
Speaker 2: It is a distraction scroll, isn't it like that? Because
Speaker 2: that's the thing I would I'm a little I'm a
Speaker 2: little hog with my devices. I love my keyboards and
Speaker 2: my dad's and the like. Yes, And also there are
Speaker 2: times when I will use like a like I have
Speaker 2: like old laptops that I'll use if I just want
Speaker 2: to focus on writing. And I would love something that
Speaker 2: was just for like my iPad has like very stripped
Speaker 2: down notifications times, so I can just focus on sitting
Speaker 2: on the couch froom playing like ball lex Pit or
Speaker 2: Rogue Dead Zone Rope my two favorite games of last year.
Speaker 2: And I just want to chat ship with a friend, yes,
Speaker 2: or like just send a silly a single purpose device
Speaker 2: on a purpose and it's.
Speaker 6: Kind of a luxury thing though it's not for everyone. No,
Speaker 6: absolutely not, And neither was the first click Like that's
Speaker 6: the same. We've always made products for a small segment
Speaker 6: of the market, but as long as one in one
Speaker 6: thousands exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But I'm pretty excited for Communicator because I was terrified
Speaker 6: of it. You know, you work on something for so
Speaker 6: long and you're not sure if it's good anymore. What's
Speaker 6: out it is out later in the year. It's going
Speaker 6: to be second half, but late second half.
Speaker 3: My wife gave me an Olivetti Valentine. What is that
Speaker 3: manual typewriter nineteen sixty seven in MoMA Bright Cherry Red
Speaker 3: has an integrated case that it slides out of. There's
Speaker 3: you know photos of like Twiggy carrying it through the
Speaker 3: Panams terminal at JFK and idle wild beautiful machine. And
Speaker 3: I've been rehearsing my manual typewriter performance.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you a really stupid question? Yeah, what
Speaker 2: happens to you typo on a typewriter?
Speaker 3: You type an X.
Speaker 8: I had the typewriters that's right in the in the
Speaker 8: type and it has the most beautiful when you reach
Speaker 8: the end of the line.
Speaker 7: Oh, I never had the thing one.
Speaker 3: It's got a red ribbon and a black ribbon, so
Speaker 3: it's got like a two side ribbon.
Speaker 2: And you go up and love for it, and.
Speaker 3: Then you have to you have to get the key
Speaker 3: with a snap. It's not how hard you hit it,
Speaker 3: it's how it risk comes back you hit it and
Speaker 3: then then you get a nice clean impression with the
Speaker 3: So that is a genuinely single purpose device I'm really
Speaker 3: enjoying that.
Speaker 2: And it's and it's meant.
Speaker 3: To be a luggable. You can just slap it around.
Speaker 2: And Michael, I need to ask the doesn't there a
Speaker 2: device called the Peak once? Yes, the Peak?
Speaker 6: Right, it was an email only like BlackBerry esque device. Sorry,
Speaker 6: I could also use it for Twitter. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 6: I actually have one Ivy Green but green Guard let
Speaker 6: me borrow his. I have to cover it on mister
Speaker 6: mobile and my wind phones were fine.
Speaker 2: And here it is. It's it. Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 2: little little screen and I like this. I like this
Speaker 2: because like, look, you're not trying to pretend this is
Speaker 2: for for one, you're not trying at all.
Speaker 6: And yeah, no you're not going to replace your pixel
Speaker 6: or iPhone with it. You're going to carry it alongside it,
Speaker 6: or you're going to carry it instead of it on
Speaker 6: the weekends or the weekdays as the case. Maybe someone
Speaker 6: uses as that daily driver. Always kind of limited. No,
Speaker 6: it absolutely, it runs hundred sixteen, it's five G. It
Speaker 6: has it even has Mike or SD and a headphone
Speaker 6: jack for all the people. And yeah, you want to
Speaker 6: bring back those old features. So yes, you could use
Speaker 6: it as your main and We've heard from people who
Speaker 6: are like, what if I wanted that's been my primary phones?
Speaker 2: Like you can, I think it's lovely. I think it's lovely.
Speaker 2: That not because you've you are you and I have
Speaker 2: had some of the deepest like I love the technology stuff.
Speaker 2: It's cool. I love the phone. Oh I love tablets
Speaker 2: and all this shit. And you actually made something that
Speaker 2: you wanted to use.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and it's actually got It's got two cameras
Speaker 3: so you can scan a QR code.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, that's the thing. You can take a picture and
Speaker 6: say this feel the way you want too?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Am I allowed to throw this away? Are these left?
Speaker 2: Is this good? Is this the final final.
Speaker 6: Way of it? It's close to final, probably within about
Speaker 6: ten grams.
Speaker 2: Only criticism I have is what about the battery? What happens?
Speaker 2: Like what kind of warranty? What kind of batteries? So
Speaker 2: the battery is four thousand MILLI empowers. I did push
Speaker 2: for silicon carbon. This is the last time I get
Speaker 2: super nerdy about this because I wanted more get that.
Speaker 6: This is my sha and I was like, no way
Speaker 6: we can get it. But it turns out we could
Speaker 6: afford it.
Speaker 2: It was great. The in terms of the support. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's not. It's the only thing we couldn't do is
Speaker 2: a removal battery, because that was kind of why I
Speaker 2: was going at. What does it look like for a
Speaker 2: service depot to swap it? Yeah, yeah, that's a really
Speaker 2: good question. I take it to my guy on the corner.
Speaker 2: Probably not.
Speaker 6: I mean I'm sure that the actually, you know what,
Speaker 6: just because of what I just said, that's probably not
Speaker 6: the case because silicon carbon is is rare these days,
Speaker 6: like i'd say, it's so new, so I don't actually know.
Speaker 6: That's one of the fifty million questions. I should have
Speaker 6: been prepared for.
Speaker 2: This clicks button. So that's a shortcut key.
Speaker 6: So on all of our products, you hit the clicks
Speaker 6: button and you hit a letter, and you can do
Speaker 6: you can call a friend, you can so much.
Speaker 2: I'm serious that this has so much more. I'm not
Speaker 2: just saying this because you want to make because you
Speaker 2: know me well enough, i'd be lock it. I do.
Speaker 2: It's got the weight you've given. It actually gives the
Speaker 2: buttons the hef that the clicks case, I.
Speaker 3: Think you mean gravitas.
Speaker 2: No, not the gravitas, I mean like the physical because
Speaker 2: the other one i'd feel it bend back with my
Speaker 2: kind sure fingers.
Speaker 6: Well, when you design the entire thing yourself and you
Speaker 6: don't have to accommodate for a phone in a case
Speaker 6: or another product, you can kind of control that fund.
Speaker 2: Also, you'll you'll like this.
Speaker 6: I think the keyboard is capacitive, so when you swipe
Speaker 6: your thumb over it, that you can like.
Speaker 2: Some of your cases, so you can do the swipe
Speaker 2: stuff over the physical case. Correct, fuck me that that's actually.
Speaker 1: Very BlackBerry key one.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is right. Really, I'm actually going to send
Speaker 2: this to Gyms right now. I believe.
Speaker 6: I believe we've talked to him about it because a
Speaker 6: lot of our alumni or a lot of our employees
Speaker 6: are blacker alumni.
Speaker 3: Are they Canadians though, yes, don't trust Canadians speak, don't
Speaker 3: trust Canadians.
Speaker 2: But all are so nice. Now it's just an act.
Speaker 2: It's like the South here, that's right.
Speaker 1: A question as a as a long time friend of
Speaker 1: Michael Fisher as well, So how rich are you now?
Speaker 2: Well? I stayed at Planet Hollywood if that tells you.
Speaker 1: That does tell me a lot. I stayed at the residence.
Speaker 2: Michael professional question, are you here in capacity as the
Speaker 2: Clicks co founder or are you covering for mister Mobi.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, is the answer both. Yeah, I have to
Speaker 6: split the time evenly. That's what the quiffer is for.
Speaker 6: It's for a second hat.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 6: One here was for being beautiful. You have to apply
Speaker 6: so much hairspray because you're gonna put it. Actually, that's true.
Speaker 6: I was doing a John Deere spot because they're my
Speaker 6: sponsor on this one, and I had to put on.
Speaker 2: A John dear head.
Speaker 6: You've got to be on the big tract, and I was.
Speaker 6: In fact, I went to visit the combine. Yes, drive
Speaker 6: it away, but it's good. It satisfies my need for novelty.
Speaker 6: I think you can really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got some stuff to do. One thing for
Speaker 2: ten minutes. It's too long. I gotta go, I gotta
Speaker 2: go do something else. You know. The only thing I
Speaker 2: can do consistently is podcast for two hours. That's the
Speaker 2: only thing. Anything else that I'm just like lost.
Speaker 3: You just just give him throat like you're a man
Speaker 3: who turns throat lozenges into podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly what the skeleton meme the skeleton squat meme.
Speaker 2: But how have you felt about the show Michael, what
Speaker 2: have you seen anything else other than your own thing
Speaker 2: that you like?
Speaker 6: I have to tell you so I cannot stand everything
Speaker 6: about the Las Vegas Strip and ce S is a
Speaker 6: very training show as well.
Speaker 2: Know.
Speaker 6: However, this particular one was so worth coming to based
Speaker 6: on the stuff that was shown.
Speaker 5: For me.
Speaker 6: I got a new foldable phone out of Motorola that
Speaker 6: was InCred you know when you say.
Speaker 2: You know they made it specifically for me, mister Fisher edition. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: There was the new pebble or the you know the
Speaker 2: pebble That's what I.
Speaker 1: Was going to talk about after this, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 6: And then as I was wandering between those two things,
Speaker 6: I found, you know, there's something called a fidget gadget.
Speaker 2: Have you all seen this.
Speaker 6: It's a little metal cube with like six buttons on
Speaker 6: it and smart watch display fidget it's and it's a
Speaker 6: little fidget toy and you can run.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: It's like Arcanoid is like developer tools. It's open source.
Speaker 6: You can.
Speaker 3: All mechanicals.
Speaker 6: So this is this is new. This is by one
Speaker 6: guy making them in his garage and Ipsilante. It's like
Speaker 6: exactly why I used to love coming to CES. You
Speaker 6: know it's this little stuff.
Speaker 2: I know that. I hear that. I'm like, I wish
Speaker 2: i'd have seen that because that would have made my day. Yes,
Speaker 2: so it's just for dicking around with exactly you know
Speaker 2: what toys. If it's a toy, it's a toy.
Speaker 6: And that's it, right, you see the guy's not saying
Speaker 6: it's like, well, this is gonna be the I hope
Speaker 6: to usher in a new era for you know, intentional
Speaker 6: It's like, no, I made a toy.
Speaker 2: It feels good. It's fun to click and I don't
Speaker 2: know what you can do with it but find out. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you could do all sorts of stuff. That's fun. It's awesome.
Speaker 2: So you have a good showing as well. You have
Speaker 2: a good history with ces as well, Like you've been
Speaker 2: here a lot. Yeah, this this one feels weird to me.
Speaker 2: It's felt like a very peculiar show to me, Like
Speaker 2: it feels like it's missing something.
Speaker 1: What do you think is missing?
Speaker 2: I don't know. That's why I'm ask like, it's like
Speaker 2: it feels like like bits have been hollowed out. I
Speaker 2: think there's a reason for that.
Speaker 6: I feel like if people were planning for their cees
Speaker 6: in the first half of the year they were probably
Speaker 6: gonna lean on AI all over again, and I feel
Speaker 6: like there's been a very visible retraction from that, especially
Speaker 6: other than the people who are here well right, no,
Speaker 6: I know, but even though like yes, branding, Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: not themed.
Speaker 3: So your thesis is that there would have been twice
Speaker 3: as much dumb AI shit, Yes, if it wasn't for
Speaker 3: the backlash that it's just the people who are just
Speaker 3: so like balls out, clanker slopper Yep, then.
Speaker 1: I have a different theory as to why something feels missing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's a lot missing. I think
Speaker 1: one thing that's really missing is the car side of things.
Speaker 1: We had the FELA, but then the the you know,
Speaker 1: the expiry or the doing away with the federal text
Speaker 1: credit really dampen a lot of the mood around EV's
Speaker 1: this past years of twenty twenty five, and so Hondo
Speaker 1: was like, we're not coming to see yes this year,
Speaker 1: and I think that's kind of set the tone leading
Speaker 1: into CES this year as well. I mean, like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of things not just cars, but that's probably
Speaker 1: like our transport sort of area. We were like assigning
Speaker 1: people to kind of pay attention to on our team.
Speaker 1: They were just like there was nothing.
Speaker 3: That's so strange it is, do we think that there's
Speaker 3: exhibitors who are like, I don't want to get kidnapped ice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to wonder if they were a terrif
Speaker 2: l well terrafi late. It is kind of a common
Speaker 2: but like immigration.
Speaker 3: Lots of events that I'm involved with are saying our
Speaker 3: numbers are way down, and that's at ten D numbers
Speaker 3: right right, and they're just people don't want to come
Speaker 3: any more. Events are now saying, like, you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of New York City events are like, should we
Speaker 3: move to Toronto? New Yorkers won't find it that hard
Speaker 3: to get there?
Speaker 2: And then yeah, quite.
Speaker 3: Like as a Torontonian New York run by the Swiss.
Speaker 1: It's also it's also doesn't help that there's like a
Speaker 1: lot going on outside of CS.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the same time, so like anyone who had those
Speaker 1: fears were not wrong to be a little bit concerned.
Speaker 1: And as someone who's like herself an immigrant, like with
Speaker 1: very good legal visas, that is in sight with you,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. I I was so afraid to travel even
Speaker 1: domestically for a while there and now it's like I've
Speaker 1: I've done a few international trips. I'm na as concerned.
Speaker 2: Oh I went through I had to go to Toronto last GM,
Speaker 2: and I was like, straight up the whole scared, right,
Speaker 2: So every moment in the airport, and then I remembered
Speaker 2: you cleared immigration in Toronto, which is right.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. I flew through Dublin.
Speaker 2: It's like yeah, oh yeah, it's it's grim and it's
Speaker 2: also like that the stuff that has made it it
Speaker 2: feels and I say, this is a CS veteran, and
Speaker 2: someone's gonna say the stolen ballot. But even by CS standards,
Speaker 2: this feels like a bullshit year. It feels like worse
Speaker 2: than the twenty fourteen twenty fifteen Indie Go Go Kickstarter boom,
Speaker 2: where it was like it's a three D printed kitchen,
Speaker 2: you just click the button and a burger come out.
Speaker 2: Those ones I almost found, folks see because they were
Speaker 2: like like a straight up snake oil salesman just like, ah,
Speaker 2: come here, check my food. Now. It's just like ninety
Speaker 2: seven different GPT wrappers and it's sad. I want my dude, adds,
Speaker 2: I want my gizmo.
Speaker 6: It's funny because I've seen more gizmos and dude AADs
Speaker 6: here this year. Tell me if that I'm seriously Besides
Speaker 6: fidget Gadget and Pebble, which we've talked about Pebble okay, okay,
Speaker 6: besides those, we have this sort of evolved version of
Speaker 6: fidget Gadget which I checked out on a whim. Someone
Speaker 6: said to me while I was demoing clicks to them,
Speaker 6: have you seen have you seen Lego?
Speaker 2: Have you seen smart? They must go. I just I
Speaker 2: feel that.
Speaker 3: I feel like that's just going to be mountains of
Speaker 3: e waste. And also, isn't the whole.
Speaker 2: Point thank you, thank you toy that you just oh wow,
Speaker 2: wait to make you need a Lego.
Speaker 3: Room? I have a machine that does the rooming for me.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay.
Speaker 6: And if I had not sat through the entire hour
Speaker 6: long demo, I would have felt exactly the same way
Speaker 6: I went in. I'm like, listen, this will be filler
Speaker 6: for my video. I'll just get some footage. It'll be fun,
Speaker 6: it'll be a break between phones. It'll be great. And
Speaker 6: then they demonstrated literally every use case I've ever seen
Speaker 6: a person think about in terms of like, how do
Speaker 6: children play?
Speaker 2: How did I used to play?
Speaker 6: I used to remove the machines like this, and then
Speaker 6: then it reacts and then you touch the break to
Speaker 6: the other thing, and it knows what the color is,
Speaker 6: and it's like it's it's not only smart, but it's
Speaker 6: like smart in a way that a kid will instantly
Speaker 6: understand and instantly appreciate.
Speaker 2: The e waste thing is the only thing that I
Speaker 2: was like, Wow, man, that's gonna be an. But in
Speaker 2: terms of evolving the play experience, I actually go to
Speaker 2: push back. Please, I don't think Lego needs to evolve
Speaker 2: the play experience. I think the whole point of Lego
Speaker 2: is imagination, and I think playing with it and going
Speaker 2: now from from and building deranged things and having things
Speaker 2: in your head. But I understand, to be clear, understand
Speaker 2: what they're doing. I'm surprised they haven't done it quick.
Speaker 2: I'm sure they haven't. Yeah, I asked.
Speaker 6: I was like, guys, how long have you been involving this?
Speaker 6: Like eight years? From certain the niama shows. It shows
Speaker 6: in the product I'm telling, and technologically, I think it
Speaker 6: is very interesting to have location of where blocks.
Speaker 3: So Bruce Sterling wrote an incredible novel called Distraction that
Speaker 3: everyone should read because it's about fucked up computer mediated
Speaker 3: elections nice and it is one of the most prescient
Speaker 3: books you will read. And in it there are these
Speaker 3: avant garde architects who put a slap bracelet around a
Speaker 3: brick and it starts saying, I am a cornerstone. Take
Speaker 3: me one step to the left, put me down. I'm
Speaker 3: one degree off level. I am now level. Please add
Speaker 3: mortar and a bunch of skilled people can put up
Speaker 3: a building in a day. I rip this off from
Speaker 3: my novel walk Away, and that kind of location awareness
Speaker 3: super interesting and cool. And there are lots of times
Speaker 3: in my life where I would have loved to have
Speaker 3: had this. If you told me that Ikea has figured
Speaker 3: out a way to use low cost electronics to tell
Speaker 3: you when you've got the right two pieces, that would
Speaker 3: be amazing.
Speaker 2: I want to inhabit like.
Speaker 3: As a as a child playing imaginatively with construction toys.
Speaker 3: I I don't think my play experience would have been
Speaker 3: enhanced by having some of the things that happen in
Speaker 3: my imagination happened with electronics. I will rather get that
Speaker 3: person an Arduino.
Speaker 2: So the waste. I think it's a good There is
Speaker 2: actually a solution which is The good news is that
Speaker 2: the chip fits inside a regular like it is still
Speaker 2: a regular Lego brick, so you're still able to use
Speaker 2: it like a Lego brick.
Speaker 3: But is it?
Speaker 2: But is the like?
Speaker 3: So when you throw this away, is it going to
Speaker 3: be a mortal e waste or just a mortal plastic waste?
Speaker 2: That's the thing I actually truly is it.
Speaker 3: Going to be leaching you know, heavy metals into the
Speaker 3: water table or just turning into microplas? I mean, do
Speaker 3: people throw away Legos? You know that's kind of a
Speaker 3: past that might throw away broken robotic Lego.
Speaker 6: But the thing is, but even then, yeah, but you're
Speaker 6: cele brick right, You're right, though I don't know.
Speaker 1: My take on the Lego thing is. I used to
Speaker 1: be on the Ed's side of it, and I then
Speaker 1: read a lot of our coverage and was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: that makes way more sense. So I came closer to
Speaker 1: the Fisher side of it, and I'm just like, look,
Speaker 1: if you don't like it, you can still not buy it, sure,
Speaker 1: and you can still have the same Lego experience you
Speaker 1: were having before.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: Sure for the people who I will, I will also
Speaker 2: give Legos some real credit in the despite the fact
Speaker 2: that the entire Lego economy has been inflated by adult babies.
Speaker 2: You like children's toys. I'm not talking about, by the way,
Speaker 2: like the toach Mahole. Those are obviously for adults. I'm
Speaker 2: talking about, like I don't know, as a father, the
Speaker 2: Spider Man sets that are now inflated by thirty percent
Speaker 2: because you fucking loses can't leave them alone for actual
Speaker 2: fucking children, Jesus Christ. I will say, Legos app stuff
Speaker 2: is really good. You can just type in the Lego
Speaker 2: thing and you can sit there and kind of their
Speaker 2: smartphone app. Yeah. Yeah, you can type in the number
Speaker 2: of the set and you can rotate around it and
Speaker 2: it's useful. Though they still do this insane thing where
Speaker 2: they don't be able. They make it really difficult to
Speaker 2: tell between like black, dark, gray and gray. Nevertheless, I
Speaker 2: give them real credit because it's like it's an app,
Speaker 2: but it's not an app for like selling me more Lego.
Speaker 2: It's Hey, the instructions are limited because their paper we
Speaker 2: found a way to get beyond that. I'm willing to
Speaker 2: give them a bit of the benefit of the doubt
Speaker 2: on this one. What I will say is you just
Speaker 2: use it like you don't need an app for that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: buy a.
Speaker 6: Set of them, use them, and then judge them, because
Speaker 6: that is I was in the again. I was in
Speaker 6: the exact same boat as you guys. And then then
Speaker 6: I saw the demo and I was like, God, this
Speaker 6: every part of this as well.
Speaker 3: I want to pop the stack one layer up because
Speaker 3: there was a thing I wanted to say about the
Speaker 3: fidget toys. Okay, so the fidget toy sounds amazing if
Speaker 3: that is your thing, if you're excited by this. There's
Speaker 3: a sculptor called Chris Bathgate who's a machinist who makes
Speaker 3: beautiful kinetic fidget toys that fit in your pocket really uh,
Speaker 3: and they are. They come in runs of like one
Speaker 3: hundred to two hundred. He hand machines each one of them.
Speaker 3: His sculptures are gorgeous. His static sculptures are amazing, but
Speaker 3: his kinetic sculptures, the pocket sized ones, are insanely good.
Speaker 2: So Chris, Chris Bathgate, I'm going And he's written, you
Speaker 2: had an a ring to take a note with me
Speaker 2: if only I could press a button.
Speaker 3: So just a book about them.
Speaker 2: I just send a message to Corey to make sure
Speaker 2: that's in the episode nuts. And I'm about to send
Speaker 2: a text to Michael right now. While you're doing that,
Speaker 2: I'm going to fidget with my let me fidget. I'm
Speaker 2: saying he's a wonderful broadcast and I hope to have
Speaker 2: him on again, as well as sending me a link
Speaker 2: to that. This is a this is an emotion the
Speaker 2: only show. But you see anything? Do you see anything else? Fun?
Speaker 2: Because I'm genuinely like I wanted. Everyone's like ed, It's
Speaker 2: actually no one's being like Everyone's like yeah, foxy, yes, Okay,
Speaker 2: well right, settle down, settle down everyone. That's my job.
Speaker 2: I'm the one who gets too angry.
Speaker 6: I don't like doing this because it is I don't
Speaker 6: like to cross the streams between sponsored content and not.
Speaker 6: But I will say that something was genuinely cool, that
Speaker 6: is in a sea of technology that is conceptual or
Speaker 6: maybe never become to a marketer has no value. One
Speaker 6: of the John Deer things I was paid to promote
Speaker 6: was an automated road paver. I'm just like I learned
Speaker 6: about paving for like for like a half hour, and
Speaker 6: I will this makes it possible for people, for fewer
Speaker 6: people to do this job. And for fewer skilled people
Speaker 6: to be required to do this Jobeah, but that's also
Speaker 6: less late. Oh it's so scary though. Look, here's the thing.
Speaker 6: The fact that the that this solves a problem is
Speaker 6: my least favorite part of it. And the problem is
Speaker 6: no construction workers can find enough labor I mean PayPal.
Speaker 6: Well no, I know, this is what I was saying,
Speaker 6: but apparently that's like that was the starting point. So
Speaker 6: I'm watching this robot thing do it's thinking, like, you know,
Speaker 6: hot asphalt and pouring stuff. I'm like, yeah, this is
Speaker 6: what I want. I want to be dirty jobs.
Speaker 2: This is why I got into it. Some stuff good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I took to a microphone. So I see
Speaker 2: a job like that, I'm like, never take that job
Speaker 2: from those people.
Speaker 6: Well, I agree, but I mean that's the thing. There's
Speaker 6: not enough of those people. That's the that's the the thing.
Speaker 6: Train them.
Speaker 2: But no, I get your point. And also be clear,
Speaker 2: Michael Fisher is one of the one of the fewer
Speaker 2: people who's more anxious than I am about any kind
Speaker 2: of thing like this. So Michael is like squirming here
Speaker 2: when it comes to like mentioning a sponsor. Do not
Speaker 2: think that he's doing this with joy. He actually even
Speaker 2: notice that. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3: I mean my concern with John Deere, and I don't
Speaker 3: want to blow up your try. Concern with John Deere
Speaker 3: is there. Yeah, they're they're a rapacious monopolist and they
Speaker 3: have led the war against repair and they use the
Speaker 3: fact that it's illegal to bypass an access control. This
Speaker 3: is this law section twelve one of the Digital Monume
Speaker 3: Copyright Act that establishes a fellony punishable by five year
Speaker 3: prison sentence and a five hundred thousand dollars fine for
Speaker 3: tampering with an access control to make it illegal for
Speaker 3: farmers to fix their tractors. And you know you're a
Speaker 3: Britain did you ever go to Beamish outside of Norfolk,
Speaker 3: out of Newcastle? Rather the largest it's the largest open
Speaker 3: air museum in Europe. It's we would call it Pioneer
Speaker 3: village here, except it's not pioneers. It's old the tiny
Speaker 3: English people. And they have transported Georgian coaltown with a colliery,
Speaker 3: Victorian high Street, all kinds of weird old vehicles, and
Speaker 3: there's a farmhouse on a Roman foundation and on the
Speaker 3: Roman foundation there is a forge because farmers have fixed
Speaker 3: their own farming implements since fucking Roman times. Enter John
Speaker 3: Deere saying no, no, we have declared the end of history.
Speaker 3: Farmers no longer fix their farm implement that's our job.
Speaker 2: No, no, it's my fault. You know. Here's the thing.
Speaker 6: This entire debate played out in my comments every single
Speaker 6: time I covered John Dee organically, and I got so
Speaker 6: fucking tired of it that I was like, I will
Speaker 6: never cover this brand again because I'm tired of getting
Speaker 6: in the middle of them, tired of having this conversation
Speaker 6: and like be the mediator between them and things was
Speaker 6: well now and I don't cover them marganically.
Speaker 2: Now they're my sponsor. I am gonna I'm going to
Speaker 2: aggressively segue away from this because I don't want a
Speaker 2: good idea. Yeah, but I want to get to the
Speaker 2: final thing, which.
Speaker 6: Is and I no, please, because I want to build
Speaker 6: on one thing you said, that place I find fascinating,
Speaker 6: the Roman foundation, That like the thing that's been unchanged forever.
Speaker 6: As we talk about yet another show where people are like,
Speaker 6: what's the next smartphone, what's the replacement for the smartphone?
Speaker 2: All this stuff. I had a wonderful moment at Mystic
Speaker 2: Seaport in Connecticut. Have you been here?
Speaker 6: It has a lovely, you know, maritime history museum and
Speaker 6: you can wander and you can see all kinds of
Speaker 6: things in and there's a pocket watch case, because of
Speaker 6: course there is. And I saw one that was really beautiful,
Speaker 6: and I asked the curator. I'm like, how what is
Speaker 6: this front? Perhaps nineteen nineteen oh five, and he's like
Speaker 6: seventeen eighty nine, and I said, wait what? And then
Speaker 6: I kind of looked at the history and like, this
Speaker 6: form factor did not change meaningfully for two hundred years.
Speaker 6: We figured something out, it was great, and then we
Speaker 6: kept it around until somebody figured out how to strap
Speaker 6: it under a wrist.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: That is how I feel about the smartphone these days,
Speaker 6: and like, look, there will be augmented things in the
Speaker 6: personal area network, there will be more accessories for them,
Speaker 6: but we are still going to carry these bucks.
Speaker 2: This is the principal struggle of CES right now. Though.
Speaker 2: It's all people trying to be like, what if you
Speaker 2: had a smart glasses and it could do this? And
Speaker 2: then you're like, well, as a human being, this is
Speaker 2: not how I experienced life, And they're like, shit, you're right,
Speaker 2: nobody actually uses. But what if you've changed your entire
Speaker 2: existence so you had a weird, grainy green thing that
Speaker 2: could sometimes be correct, which requires an Internet connection. And
Speaker 2: the smart glasses stuff is really the auto translation or
Speaker 2: write down what you're saying, you translate your business trip,
Speaker 2: and you just slop me as stick me gun to
Speaker 2: my head. It's just I'm almost really happy to hear
Speaker 2: about Oh, they got thinner and lighter laptops with longer batteries. Brilliant, brilliant.
Speaker 2: But it almost feels like we're reaching a point where
Speaker 2: everyone's just saying, fuck, we're out of interfaces. We don't
Speaker 2: have a new one. To your point about that that
Speaker 2: pocket watch case, right, do.
Speaker 3: You know what I would love would be this huge
Speaker 3: design trend from now on, we're putting black text on
Speaker 3: white backgrounds, or sometimes white text on black backgrounds. And
Speaker 3: we fired all the twenty two year old designers who
Speaker 3: put ten percent gray on white backgrounds, and we have
Speaker 3: we've sent them north for re education where they are
Speaker 3: forced to endure, you know, long struggle sessions about the
Speaker 3: things they've done to people with poor low contrast vision. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I just think liquid glass is one of the where
Speaker 2: my brain was liquids liquid ass is truly and I
Speaker 2: am like an Apple pay pig at this point. I
Speaker 2: have tolerated many an insult from this company, including the
Speaker 2: vision pro, and I gotta be honest. There is one
Speaker 2: thing that bothers me the most about this and it's
Speaker 2: for some reason. On one of the windows there's just
Speaker 2: like a blob in like one of the things. There's
Speaker 2: just like a reflective thing looks like it's hard to see,
Speaker 2: but it looks like an error in the LED panel
Speaker 2: in my phone. Because of how are you talking about
Speaker 2: like the weird it's weird reflective thing and if you
Speaker 2: worked on liquid glass, were you forced to were you
Speaker 2: forced to do this?
Speaker 1: They do talk about it as part of the UI.
Speaker 1: That's sort of the way you move your phone and
Speaker 1: then how it reflects light. It's supposed to be that.
Speaker 2: I don't want that on my phone, Liquid glass not all.
Speaker 2: I would love to. I would love to go back
Speaker 2: to the iOS eight or something like just give me
Speaker 2: the phone normal.
Speaker 3: I want that. I want the phone UI that actually
Speaker 3: like puts fake scratches on your screen or like fake.
Speaker 2: No, I will say, and we could wrap this in
Speaker 2: a boat. It's why I kind of like the clicks
Speaker 2: communicator because it's just a thing that nice, flawless no,
Speaker 2: And I say, this is someone who like. If you
Speaker 2: don't like it, I don't give a ship if you
Speaker 2: buy it or not. Sorry, it's just that's that's not
Speaker 2: my job. But I like it because it's like, what
Speaker 2: do I want from a device that takes people fingy
Speaker 2: to use message at to a place, look at website, fingy.
Speaker 6: You do the thing on a handful of very important features,
Speaker 6: but just a handful of them. I didn't think that
Speaker 6: i'd ever got on board the and this is a
Speaker 6: web browser on it. Oh yeah, I mean it's Android sixteen.
Speaker 6: You can run whatever you want on it. But it's
Speaker 6: a matter of intention. But what we're saying, I never
Speaker 6: thought i'd get on board the digital detox train or
Speaker 6: anything like that. And that's not what communicators for, to
Speaker 6: be clear, but just personally until I used the light
Speaker 6: phone for two weeks this past summer.
Speaker 2: And you were a real one because when you did
Speaker 2: the light phone thing, you actually fucking did it. You
Speaker 2: turn off everything amazing.
Speaker 6: And I wish I could have survived in that world,
Speaker 6: because it turned out in order to live that way
Speaker 6: doing what we what a lot of us do. I
Speaker 6: had to carry an iPad for the sessions that invariably
Speaker 6: required me to be online for a secondary or laptop,
Speaker 6: and then I was like, damn it, I can't live
Speaker 6: this life. But what stuck with me were two or
Speaker 6: three lessons that lived past July, and I was like,
Speaker 6: every time I pull out my phone, now I'm like,
Speaker 6: am I doing this for a purpose or am I
Speaker 6: doing this because I'm voice? Every time I pull out
Speaker 6: my phone to check notification, I'm able to better resist,
Speaker 6: like bypass of like the door dash, Like isn't it
Speaker 6: time to order a pizza at three pm?
Speaker 2: All the shitty notifications that you get all the time?
Speaker 3: Can you leave notifications on?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 6: I turn them off and then I miss my door
Speaker 6: dash deliveries. This horrible seeside, Why aggressively?
Speaker 2: Please do this? But Michael, it's so good having you
Speaker 2: as we wrap up this off for an hour. Thanks,
Speaker 2: I just want to say the listeners want you back,
Speaker 2: and I will have you back. But also, you have
Speaker 2: maybe looked at phones differently, and I put aside the
Speaker 2: clicks communicator. I think you have the right way of
Speaker 2: looking at it, where it's like, why am I using
Speaker 2: this device? Thank you? And why am I doing this?
Speaker 2: What is this for? Now? I am built different in
Speaker 2: the sense that I am really like I was mentioning. Yes,
Speaker 2: they like the infinite feeds don't work on me. They
Speaker 2: give me anxiety. Like I get to the I'm like,
Speaker 2: where's the end? Where's the end? I want to finish
Speaker 2: reading this? Sure, I don't know, but it's the opposite
Speaker 2: most people like, oh, keep looking. I'm like, no, you
Speaker 2: want to be done, and I'm just like, fine, you
Speaker 2: want to do And the moment I feel anything being
Speaker 2: done to me, I like reject it angrily. Sure, I
Speaker 2: just no, No, it's pure autism. It's just like my
Speaker 2: brain just like doesn't want to do anything other than
Speaker 2: what it insists on doing, which is a Wikipedia or
Speaker 2: like a very long conversation about one specific thing, which
Speaker 2: is why we are here on Better Offline. So, Michael,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for joining us. You. We will
Speaker 2: bring you back sooner than this. I would love that,
Speaker 2: And I'm looking forward to the clicks I might actually
Speaker 2: pick on, not put a link to stuff that you
Speaker 2: can have a look at it, judge your own judgment.
Speaker 2: That's not a phrase, we now move to an ad
Speaker 2: break for something that I either say you should buy
Speaker 2: or listen to. Yeah, and I Heart Radio said no, actually,
Speaker 2: I can't say that. We're just going to pretend I
Speaker 2: never said that. And we're back in the room. We've
Speaker 2: got Sherlin Low from me Gadget Yes, Hi, and we've
Speaker 2: got edam Gaiso Junior at the Tech Bubble newsletter. Oh hello,
Speaker 2: We've got author, activist and journalist Corey Doctor right, and
Speaker 2: this time I know I'm supposed to reply Hello, nailed
Speaker 2: it flause No. And I have had a few people say,
Speaker 2: like email would be like why do you do this?
Speaker 2: I'm like, because I get to hang out with my
Speaker 2: friend's new cool shit for like an entire week. Why
Speaker 2: are we alive? But we're here at CES, And I
Speaker 2: mean there's also the question of why are we at CES?
Speaker 2: That is a reasonable one, because it's a peculiar show. Corey,
Speaker 2: we had the best time in Amazon, though. We need
Speaker 2: to talk about this Amazon experience because to be clear,
Speaker 2: we're walking into the show floor for the first time,
Speaker 2: actually sees customer service, got his badge immediately and then
Speaker 2: we walk in. I'm like, oh, there's Amazon. Why not
Speaker 2: and last year, by the way Amazon, I had the
Speaker 2: picture of the smiling man on my badge and the
Speaker 2: woman outside grabbed it went wow, which is I don't
Speaker 2: think it was a good well, but anyway, walk in
Speaker 2: there with Corey. We immediately walk up to this five
Speaker 2: thousand dollars like rock pulled surveillance tower pole thing with
Speaker 2: like it's like a big big thingy with like a
Speaker 2: poll and like just a ring of cameras and Corey
Speaker 2: just walks over and starts asking questions.
Speaker 3: Score well no, I mean I didn't even ask any questions.
Speaker 3: The guy walked up and said, Hi, I'm the product
Speaker 3: manager for this, do you have any questions. I wasn't gonna,
Speaker 3: you know, bollock them out of the blue. I didn't
Speaker 3: go in there looking for, you know, a victim, you
Speaker 3: will not that type. But I was like, since you ask,
Speaker 3: and I was like, well, so I know that there
Speaker 3: was that the original ring.
Speaker 2: Camera, the doorbell camera.
Speaker 3: You guys took the posture that that footage was only
Speaker 3: available to the police in the event that the owner
Speaker 3: authorized the transfer to the police, and but there had
Speaker 3: been this persistent rumor that there was warrantless access to
Speaker 3: this footage, even against the wishes of the of the
Speaker 3: ring owner, which you initially denied, and later I had
Speaker 3: to walk back. I know this because I got into
Speaker 3: a big fight with Amazon PR when I published the
Speaker 3: story and then they said it's not true, and then
Speaker 3: later on it was proved to be true. What's the
Speaker 3: deal with this? Can the police access it? Because this
Speaker 3: is the thing that's meant to go into like a
Speaker 3: parking lot at a job site or whatever. And it
Speaker 3: had some as you pointed out, some racial overtime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were the video behind it was, of course
Speaker 2: two guys breaking in him. Would you be surprised to
Speaker 2: hear they were Hispanic? Yeah?
Speaker 3: And then the white guys in there, and AI caption
Speaker 3: was like two men removing things from trunk of red car.
Speaker 3: So so I said, you know, so can the cops
Speaker 3: access this footage, you know, without the owner? And he
Speaker 3: was like, well, I'm not sure. And I'm like, okay, fine, fine,
Speaker 3: who can access this footage? Is this footage intend encrypted?
Speaker 3: Does Is it sitting as an encrypted blob that no
Speaker 3: one at Amazon can access on your servers? So only
Speaker 3: I can access it? And as the owner of the device,
Speaker 3: and and so on and he says, oh, yes, that
Speaker 3: is the case, just like with a ring doorbell. And
Speaker 3: I'm like, well, wait, that's not true ring doorbell. So
Speaker 3: hang on a second, Like it's just it is just
Speaker 3: like an incontrovertible fact. You go into any court docket
Speaker 3: for petty theft or whatever, there's a ton of footage
Speaker 3: that cops have subpoenaed from ring doorbells, and so if
Speaker 3: cops can subpoena then Amazon has to be able to
Speaker 3: decrypt it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So and he's like, well, I'm not allowed to decrypt.
Speaker 3: I'm the project manager and a product manager. I can't
Speaker 3: decrypt it. I'm like, well that's good. You have some
Speaker 3: access controls, but you're still asked growing the keys. And
Speaker 3: then I'm like, well, is it all controlled by an
Speaker 3: app or is there a desktop interface? And if so,
Speaker 3: can I download my footage? And he's like no, it's desktop,
Speaker 3: just like with the with the doorbell camera. And I'm like,
Speaker 3: so I can just like grab all the MPEG files
Speaker 3: and keep them on my hard drive and he's like, oh,
Speaker 3: I don't think you can. And I'm like, so what
Speaker 3: if I stop paying the subscription fee? Do I lose
Speaker 3: all the footage? And He's like, no, we'll let you
Speaker 3: download it. I'm like, so, wait, can.
Speaker 2: I download it?
Speaker 3: Or can I not do it? And then he eventually says, well,
Speaker 3: you're asking all these technical questions. I just don't know
Speaker 3: the answer. And I'm like, well, I was just standing
Speaker 3: here minding my own business when you came up and
Speaker 3: introduced yourself to me as the product manager for this product. Like,
Speaker 3: is the product manager capable of answering what seems to
Speaker 3: me to be some pretty basic.
Speaker 2: Does a website do something? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Like, like can I does? Is the footage available to
Speaker 3: third parties?
Speaker 2: Is?
Speaker 3: I mean, because you know, just from a straight up
Speaker 3: security perspective, Amazon's not immune to insider threats if you've
Speaker 3: got you know, three sixty longitudinal video footage.
Speaker 2: And that's what this thing is. It can it has
Speaker 2: a tube that goes into the sky with a bunch
Speaker 2: of cameras. Yeah, and it was advertised as they had
Speaker 2: this video behind with a picture of neighborhoods with all
Speaker 2: these blue blobs where these things would pay. So good.
Speaker 9: I'm so happy you guys got to see one of
Speaker 9: the new soon towers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's here's our palent here exactly.
Speaker 9: Maybe they'll give you a little ring that could be
Speaker 9: tied to you.
Speaker 3: It's got this like telescoping mask. But you could imagine, right,
Speaker 3: if you've got this is quite a honeypot. Right, If
Speaker 3: you've got the internals of a whole bunch of job
Speaker 3: sites with a bunch of easily stolen things, and there's
Speaker 3: an insider threat. At Amazon, they've got a lot of
Speaker 3: employees and and famously, Amazon went through a series of
Speaker 3: CISOs chief security officers because they had this product first
Speaker 3: orientation where anyone who had a product team could download
Speaker 3: the entire Amazon database christ and they had no access
Speaker 3: controls and no logging. They did not know how many
Speaker 3: copies of the internal Amazon database were, and their CISOs
Speaker 3: would come in and say, okay, step one, we have
Speaker 3: to stop doing this.
Speaker 9: Did they ever figured out how many people?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: No, no, there's no census of how many copies, like
Speaker 3: multiple copies, because they've got aws right, right, So copying
Speaker 3: the entire database of every skew and every purchase on
Speaker 3: Amazon is like tractable within Amazon's own infrastructure. And so
Speaker 3: you know, their ceso's first advice was always like, don't
Speaker 3: do this. And then but the people who are in
Speaker 3: charge of like product nimbleness would say, well, we are
Speaker 3: able to spin up a product team and then figure
Speaker 3: out whether the product is any good by grabbing this
Speaker 3: giant data set mining it for insights. So we're going
Speaker 3: to override the security person. And eventually they hired they
Speaker 3: promoted someone internal who was too junior and didn't know
Speaker 3: well enough, and then they had a gigantic breach. Right,
Speaker 3: so I think this is all Andy Greenberg at Wired
Speaker 3: did this report hillier and so you know, like they're
Speaker 3: famously like vulnerable to insider threat.
Speaker 2: I will also say, if you were a listener who
Speaker 2: works at Amazon Web Services and you're able to click
Speaker 2: on that thing that says anthropic, why don't you sell me?
Speaker 2: Send me more of them numbers? I want to see
Speaker 2: I want to see them numbers. My favorite part of
Speaker 2: this conversation, though, was right towards the end when he went, yeah,
Speaker 2: you could buy one for your backyard. You think he
Speaker 2: would and just you were like so much nicer than I.
Speaker 3: Well, I had to be fair to him. I said, like,
Speaker 3: is this all being sold to business customers or are
Speaker 3: there people with McMansions who want it? And he said,
Speaker 3: do you want it for your mansion? And I was like,
Speaker 3: do you have a mansion? And I was like, I
Speaker 3: don't have a mansion.
Speaker 2: So he was kind of I think you miss that
Speaker 2: after ten minutes of speedbacking, though I would have just
Speaker 2: I would have been like, I this guy did not
Speaker 2: know what to say. I'm dying. I need to leave,
Speaker 2: but we won't. We had a good, good toll around today.
Speaker 2: You got to see some CEO.
Speaker 3: We went to the Crap Gadget Room with all the
Speaker 3: international pavilions and there was some good stuff. I'm trying
Speaker 3: to pull up my favorite. So from one of the
Speaker 3: universities around Tokyo, there was the you know, they have
Speaker 3: these tech transfer offices where they're trying to like productize
Speaker 3: things being made in the labs. And there was a
Speaker 3: group called Integrated Electron Source who had a graphene electron
Speaker 3: emitter which was basically a consumer electronics style imaging system
Speaker 3: that could image down to four nanometers designed for visual
Speaker 3: inspection of chips. And I've just come from Hamburg where
Speaker 3: I saw Bunny Wang, who's the greatest hardware hacker in
Speaker 3: the world, present on his work on building system on
Speaker 3: the chips that are open to visual inspection, because Bunny
Speaker 3: is absolutely convinced that people are hiding bad shit in silicon,
Speaker 3: especially when we're talking about a system on a chip.
Speaker 2: Which when you say badship, what do you mean specific.
Speaker 3: So, like you know, all all hardware is is software
Speaker 3: in etched in silicon, right, So any program, any malware
Speaker 3: you can imagine, you could hide.
Speaker 2: And so when you when you use the chip in
Speaker 2: a piece of hardway, it's doing.
Speaker 3: Something bad when it's back.
Speaker 9: Also when he says he's convinced that people are hiding
Speaker 9: bad shit in hardware, is his belief that there's nothing
Speaker 9: stopping along the point of production.
Speaker 2: The supply. Yeah, you can supply chain.
Speaker 3: So the thing to understand is that an SC wafer
Speaker 3: is just a it's a risk like reduced instructions a
Speaker 3: computing chip wafer, and the typical SC is using like
Speaker 3: twenty five thirty percent of it. So most of that
Speaker 3: chip is dark matter. And when you're taping out the
Speaker 3: die and getting ready to nanolithograph the chip, you could
Speaker 3: just tape out a whole bunch of other stuff. And
Speaker 3: Bunny's talk at CCC was about how he convinced a
Speaker 3: chip maker to let him tape out some open source
Speaker 3: chips in the in the dark matter, because it was like,
Speaker 3: you know, you're going to run ten million of these,
Speaker 3: do another two hundred thousand. I'll pay for that part
Speaker 3: of it. Everyone gets them really cheap because the product
Speaker 3: gets cheaper the more of these you run. He was
Speaker 3: able to fit five more processors on a processor, right,
Speaker 3: So it's super cool. It's called the Bow chip. All
Speaker 3: open source and all visually inspectable. So you can take
Speaker 3: the chip, take the file that describes the chip, take
Speaker 3: the chip and put it in a optical inspection unit,
Speaker 3: and then it will produce a file and you can
Speaker 3: lay the two on top of each other and see
Speaker 3: if there's any extra gates that shouldn't be there is
Speaker 3: this chip? The chip it says, it is just like
Speaker 3: this incredibly important thing. Can you think about how much
Speaker 3: of our world is running on this uninspectable silicon, and like,
Speaker 3: how many people in the supply chain could do something
Speaker 3: to sabotage that silicon? Anyways?
Speaker 9: I could, I could, I could read more and look
Speaker 9: more at his stuff. This is yeah, my my, I'm pluralistic.
Speaker 9: Yesterday I wrote a blog.
Speaker 2: I'll check that out.
Speaker 3: Because it calls it piggyback it.
Speaker 2: This makes me.
Speaker 9: Curious about you know, in video name their newest generation
Speaker 9: of chips with the CPU and the GPU collaboration the
Speaker 9: ver Rubin, And at first I thought it was just
Speaker 9: like a very vague gesture on a few superficial levels
Speaker 9: to ver Rubin, who uh discovered that we probably have
Speaker 9: some either we have dark matter or we have some
Speaker 9: fundamental failure in our explanatory model for the universe. But
Speaker 9: also I'm curious, like, you know, is it just like
Speaker 9: a tongue in cheek also joke or reference to the
Speaker 9: fact that we.
Speaker 2: Have Yeah, I don't, I don't know know they know
Speaker 2: exactly what's in the chip and it's getting more expensive.
Speaker 2: That's well, oh god, are they doing like a deal
Speaker 2: with I hate to do this, but Shelin just aggressive segue.
Speaker 2: What have you seen it on the show?
Speaker 3: Just just just to put a button on it. One
Speaker 3: last thing I want to say, no, please, four nanometers.
Speaker 3: That was that. That was the thing that just fucking
Speaker 3: blew myself. And that's four nanometer imaging in commodity hardware.
Speaker 2: Holy shit, this is amazing and I'm pretty sure that's
Speaker 2: like full nanimeters what they built the latest in video
Speaker 2: black belt GPUs on I'd have to check. They couldn't
Speaker 2: get they couldn't get down to three animeter and that
Speaker 2: was a whole thing with the process. But shelin, what
Speaker 2: have you seen on the food? Because you're you're only
Speaker 2: with us for this group, so I want to him,
Speaker 2: what have you seen this year that you liked?
Speaker 1: I mean, hearing all of you talk is just reminds
Speaker 1: me like how diverse this show is. It's a huge show,
Speaker 1: covers such a broad scope. I mean, and I got
Speaker 1: lost in what you were talking about because it's fascinating,
Speaker 1: but it also makes me question the c and ces consumers.
Speaker 1: That's what is for the consumer? If it's all robots
Speaker 1: and AI, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, it's downstream, it's like eventually, but it's like, this
Speaker 2: is so much of it as that consumer.
Speaker 1: Where are the consumers?
Speaker 7: Where are they are? Where's the thought for the consumer?
Speaker 2: Have you seen that in the show? Do you feel
Speaker 2: like the overall show has been less consumer?
Speaker 1: I think to the point we were making at the
Speaker 1: start of this episode, it's the physical manifestation of AI
Speaker 1: slop and and a lot of the ones that were
Speaker 1: here this year, the ones that braved the immigration risk
Speaker 1: to come here and share their wares there. That just
Speaker 1: means that their motivation was what to find partners, to
Speaker 1: find someone to buy them. Yeah, it's and that's the
Speaker 1: sense I'm getting of a lot of AI hardware out there,
Speaker 1: because if you're still trying to make one at this
Speaker 1: point without a clear different sater, then you are out
Speaker 1: here trying to get some kind of VC major company
Speaker 1: to buy you. And after Amazon bought B, it's just like,
Speaker 1: who's going to buy the next best one?
Speaker 2: B was the one wearable that Victoria Victoria's song in
Speaker 2: the world, Victoria's song Champion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and and and I was I was
Speaker 1: talking to the founder of B at the CES as well.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm not gonna dwell too much on
Speaker 1: that just because I could be lucked out in getting
Speaker 1: a home quickly.
Speaker 2: Look can get that paper, especially from Amazon.
Speaker 1: So go get that. But then the rest of them
Speaker 1: that are here, what is what is the end game?
Speaker 1: What is the goal? And to your point about e waste,
Speaker 1: that's going to be e waste the ones that they make,
Speaker 1: the ones that they sell, and limited quantities, but still
Speaker 1: massive quantities.
Speaker 2: Only smart watches that run on like a WS servers
Speaker 2: that will get taken down the moment the company stops
Speaker 2: paying for them, which will be quite quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think it's it was just like a
Speaker 1: lot of wading through this like existential dread of all
Speaker 1: of this is going to end up in len fills,
Speaker 1: all of these robots, all of these AI wearables, all
Speaker 1: of these AI native devices. So we we tried very
Speaker 1: hard to see things that we were interested in. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've talked about this yet, but
Speaker 1: we made a video of this device that has taken
Speaker 1: off on at least by our standards, It's got like
Speaker 1: millions of views at this point. It's called the wheel Move.
Speaker 1: It is a wheelchair base.
Speaker 7: It's in a sissific.
Speaker 1: It's an assistive device that you attached to the front
Speaker 1: of your wheelchair and it provides sort of a motorized
Speaker 1: rugged wheel that props up the front of your wheelchair
Speaker 1: and helps you over like rugged terrain, uneven surfaces, and
Speaker 1: then extra boost. Yet and that is just so smart
Speaker 1: because it's simple, right, It's not a whole over engineered wheelchair.
Speaker 1: It's just an attachment to the front. And I was
Speaker 1: talking to someone about it this morning who reminded me
Speaker 1: that not all wheelchair users are always in wheelchairs. So
Speaker 1: sometimes they're temporarily and I forgot. Sometimes they're just recovering.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they're in rehab and they just need the assistance
Speaker 1: for a bit. But getting out there, going for the
Speaker 1: wheel move, wheel move, You're going out on like a
Speaker 1: hike maybe or a walk, and sometimes you encounter, you know,
Speaker 1: not the smoothest pavement, or sometimes you're.
Speaker 2: Just showing everyone what it looks like. It's like a
Speaker 2: wheel on the front of it. Fun and you know
Speaker 2: what it's like. We've seen a lot of exa skeletons.
Speaker 2: While we were on the floor, we saw like a
Speaker 2: like a kind of a skateboard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is I brought the brochure back. So
Speaker 3: we saw this thing called the stern board, which is
Speaker 3: the same thing, but it doesn't clip onto a wheelchair.
Speaker 3: It clips onto a motorized skateboard and turns it into
Speaker 3: an all terrain motorized skateboard. It was this French dude
Speaker 3: stern board str board.
Speaker 2: Cool as shit. Like, I love the mobility stuff because
Speaker 2: if you think about why technology exists is to make
Speaker 2: humans better and able to do more and what limitations
Speaker 2: we have can be surmounted with technology. The AI slop
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to be that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can understand some of them, what they're
Speaker 1: saying and what they're trying to sell, but I sometimes
Speaker 1: you can see right through some of them and I
Speaker 1: get there. There's a lot of cute robots, and cute
Speaker 1: is fine, but what is the frickin' point?
Speaker 2: Well, have you seen anything you liked? And I don't
Speaker 2: mean this.
Speaker 1: Scast wheel move I I.
Speaker 2: If the point is you haven't, that's totally no.
Speaker 1: No, I I did see something interesting, and last year
Speaker 1: I came on this better offline of the CS edition
Speaker 1: as well. I'm talking about an LED mask. Yes, year
Speaker 1: I got another LED.
Speaker 2: That's fine, like a beauty mask, man, Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of those like that puts red light on your face.
Speaker 1: Looreal came through.
Speaker 6: With like.
Speaker 1: The LED masks that are flexible, so like there's skin
Speaker 1: light in terms of texture instead of the rigid hardshells
Speaker 1: that you've seen their body on the Luxx or Doctor
Speaker 1: Devis girls make so it wraps on your face much
Speaker 1: better and it is transparent soft. Yeah, it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be more comfortable. Looreal wasn't letting people put the full
Speaker 1: face version on their own faces for various like sanitary
Speaker 1: and FDA related reasons. I saw the person put them on.
Speaker 1: I saw it on the Mennican's head. I may have
Speaker 1: seen other things, and I can tell you that the
Speaker 1: proposition I have, I can't say things, but I can
Speaker 1: tell you that it seems like it would fit better
Speaker 1: on most heads, right, Like I don't have the same
Speaker 1: nose another person might have, and I don't have the
Speaker 1: same eyes, or I socket shapes that another person might have.
Speaker 1: And I think that a more flexible shell for these
Speaker 1: LED masks would be a bit more inclusive. I think
Speaker 1: also much more comfortable because the button and where it
Speaker 1: turns on the power running the LED lights is on
Speaker 1: the mask, so it sits on your forehead, so you
Speaker 1: press the power button there, as opposed to like a
Speaker 1: cable dangling down the side of your face into a
Speaker 1: power like remote control thing. And then the fact that
Speaker 1: it's transparent is just wild. They've also made like underie
Speaker 1: mask versions of it, And I am bringing like the
Speaker 1: health and wellness sort of like vibes here into this episode,
Speaker 1: but that's good. I just I just like that idea
Speaker 1: and that Larel also says it's very close to producing
Speaker 1: these for like, you know, actual sale. They're very close.
Speaker 1: So I think that it's also another thing that's interesting
Speaker 1: because this is not vaporware. It's actually going to be made,
Speaker 1: and that's what we also look out for, not just
Speaker 1: trash that's going to sit in a landfill some day.
Speaker 2: You've been to a lot of CSS and it feels
Speaker 2: like this is one of the more vapor wary ones.
Speaker 2: I'm really like, I don't want it to be. I
Speaker 2: really don't.
Speaker 1: I know. I well, there's also like a lot of
Speaker 1: things that will come out. I mean, so this year
Speaker 1: and Gadget took our risk. We went, let's look at
Speaker 1: all our best of CS winners from last year and
Speaker 1: check out where they are now. Surprisingly, pretty much like
Speaker 1: all of them are like either on track or have
Speaker 1: already put their devices on sale, or are like, oh,
Speaker 1: we will be at CS twenty twenty six to show
Speaker 1: you the updates. One of them we did manage to locate,
Speaker 1: so we're kind of like, what's going on there. So
Speaker 1: it is like a kind of risky endeavor to do
Speaker 1: that story because you want to know that as a publication,
Speaker 1: we're only endorsing the right the more legitimate types of businesses.
Speaker 1: At the same time, it's like, we want to do
Speaker 1: the investigative work. We want to be very on if
Speaker 1: this company end up looking.
Speaker 3: Shady, right we look they were shady, or that they
Speaker 3: were out competed by worst.
Speaker 2: They could exactly, you know, they could still be the
Speaker 2: best one to a.
Speaker 9: Help they Also it's something that just ends up not working.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 9: One thing that the last two years I've been really
Speaker 9: interested in is technology that allows people who are deaf
Speaker 9: or who are no sign language to communicate. My brother,
Speaker 9: my older brother's death. One of my greatest anxieties and
Speaker 9: fears is that he refuses to wear yeah, hearing aids
Speaker 9: and any sort of assistive tech. And you know, there
Speaker 9: have been many times, you know, and thankfully like we've
Speaker 9: had this protocol stablished before, but there have been many
Speaker 9: times where he's been stopped by cops and he just
Speaker 9: like you know, he's immediately when stopped by cops reaching
Speaker 9: into the car to get a note pad and pen
Speaker 9: to write for them. So I've made him, you know,
Speaker 9: call me beforehand so that we can talk about it,
Speaker 9: so that you know, there's no misunderstanding any or of
Speaker 9: escalation of things. But you know, technology that allows for
Speaker 9: immediate communication would be nice. But then you know, a
Speaker 9: lot of times when I go to these boots and
Speaker 9: I sit down and I ask, Okay, what are the
Speaker 9: scenarios in which they're interested in offering this sort of
Speaker 9: assistive tech, They're almost exclusively in one very narrow scenario,
Speaker 9: which is in a workplace and in a business, and
Speaker 9: try I understand, but it's like that is actually also
Speaker 9: not the space where I assume and from what I've
Speaker 9: seen from people that I know who are deaf, and
Speaker 9: from people are and from you know, my own brother,
Speaker 9: you know, are interested in. But nonetheless you still have
Speaker 9: firms who maybe are you know, they are created by
Speaker 9: people who are deaf or around people who are deaf,
Speaker 9: who know that that's not the use case, but are
Speaker 9: not going to get funding interest or.
Speaker 2: I will also say with like checking back up your
Speaker 2: old humans, yea, like you can go here and this
Speaker 2: is the consumer electronics fraud show, Like I think it's
Speaker 2: all about there are people who come here with the
Speaker 2: intention of deceiving, and I don't think there's anything wrong
Speaker 2: with being like, yeah, we.
Speaker 1: Thought this was right, and that's where I was like, and.
Speaker 2: I think about I'm going to say push back if
Speaker 2: you want to having read d gadget since like the
Speaker 2: early like the mid two thousands, what haven't it's what
Speaker 2: an gadget is now is really good. There's the reason
Speaker 2: they have a lot of engadget people on is because
Speaker 2: it's just people who like tech and they go and
Speaker 2: look at stuff and they like it or they dislike it,
Speaker 2: and you move on. And I say that as an
Speaker 2: honest reader, and it's like, yeah, if you go back
Speaker 2: and you say, yeah, we got fucking swindled by these people,
Speaker 2: I feel like anyone who gets mad at that is
Speaker 2: a moron. I just think if you're a dope, if
Speaker 2: you're like, wow, a publication was like, yeah, we got
Speaker 2: something wrong. Oh I don't like that, deceive me more, daddy.
Speaker 2: And it's just like I feel like it's every single
Speaker 2: publication should do that. It should not be something anyone
Speaker 2: is afraid of. And indeed, if you don't do that,
Speaker 2: it makes me deeply worried about the future, because you
Speaker 2: know what, if you come here and you end up
Speaker 2: writing about something that is just a lie or never
Speaker 2: makes it, that ces right, and this particular Cees. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of that, and in twenty twenty seven, we
Speaker 2: need to do this because right, the AI bubble is
Speaker 2: likely to burst in the next year and we're going
Speaker 2: to need to dig through the ditches, so to speak,
Speaker 2: and see what fucking happened. Yeah, because there's so much
Speaker 2: AI rapper shit. I was hoping you'd love more stuff.
Speaker 7: But I did. I mean I I loved some well.
Speaker 1: I think part of it was the Cees more than others.
Speaker 1: I was kind of chained to my laptop running things
Speaker 1: rather than like going out there and seeing things. So
Speaker 1: I okay, I saw something that I loved to hate on.
Speaker 1: If that helps.
Speaker 7: Yeah, have you heard about the Lollipop Star?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we gave it a worst in show I
Speaker 3: like to show. I love to hate on Consumer Union
Speaker 3: and the Repair Coalition.
Speaker 1: Tell me why you gave it worse than show what
Speaker 1: it is? It's exactly eWays and then so we lollipop Tell.
Speaker 9: Me more about this because I did not see this.
Speaker 2: I have no idea what this is. Uncompletely go ahead quest.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just it's a sound chip and a
Speaker 3: you know, sc in a lollipop handle and you put
Speaker 3: a lollipop on top and through bone conduction you hear
Speaker 3: a song while you eat a lollipop.
Speaker 2: It's just a lithium battery that goes in a landfill.
Speaker 2: You're a psycho.
Speaker 7: Yeah, because you can't reuse it.
Speaker 1: You can't like and the battery is not like rechargeable,
Speaker 1: which I guess makes sense, but it's it's kind of ridiculous.
Speaker 9: I saw this offered out a white Elephant that I
Speaker 9: was at two weeks before I came here. Wow, just
Speaker 9: like I and I was wondering. Everyone was like, this
Speaker 9: seems like a horribike.
Speaker 1: Was it? What favorite flavor? Did you get acorn?
Speaker 2: Or what idea it was?
Speaker 9: I did not get it. I tried. I was really hard.
Speaker 9: I was honing in on the lottery tickets. There's a
Speaker 9: stack of fifty lotto scratch offs and I really ride
Speaker 9: them and every guest so I got.
Speaker 2: I got a books. I got a bunch of books.
Speaker 3: Singing lollipop is so. My last time at CS was
Speaker 3: twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, two thousand
Speaker 3: and three, and before that, I came a few times
Speaker 3: in the nineties were wired and I have seen singing.
Speaker 2: Lollipops at sea yes, exactly, they're not news.
Speaker 3: I also speaking of which though on the floor today
Speaker 3: me and Ad saw a smell of Vision and.
Speaker 2: Way way, that's what.
Speaker 1: We're saying this year on my team is that it's
Speaker 1: kind of the comeback. So yes, the comeback of all
Speaker 1: these older technologies that we've seen with like pebbles coming
Speaker 1: back clicks with a communicator lego. It was not really
Speaker 1: a comeback, but sure, Mike.
Speaker 2: I saw something that said, skateboard Penguin, I'm your little
Speaker 2: sidekick company.
Speaker 7: I saw that.
Speaker 2: Skateboard Penguin.
Speaker 3: A lot of ridiculous and pop let's pop the stack
Speaker 3: just briefly, but also to get cryptached.
Speaker 2: No, also to get back to the thing you're talking
Speaker 2: about there. The reason I was looking was because they
Speaker 2: had the tagline welcome to the era of pseudo Reality.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was the smell of vision. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 3: they had smell vision and then they had like an
Speaker 3: essential oil mister with that made smoke seem But on cryptech,
Speaker 3: if anyone wants to follow a very good cryptech influencer,
Speaker 3: Liz Henry used to be a build manager from Mozilla,
Speaker 3: now is just doing cryptech. I think full time bookmaniac
Speaker 3: dot org at, I'll send you the link.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: And she is in command of a small fund that
Speaker 3: she disperses in thousand dollars in below grants to people
Speaker 3: doing cool cryptech adaptation. So that is cryptech though for
Speaker 3: those accessibility technology, so we.
Speaker 7: Check crypto tech.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like security, no, no cryptech.
Speaker 3: So yeah.
Speaker 2: Use we saw an amazing four line braille reader on
Speaker 2: the floor.
Speaker 3: That was that was It was like a braille keyboard. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it was standards defined. It plugged into your usbc
Speaker 3: as and showed up as a standard display.
Speaker 2: It just just and you know what I noticed about
Speaker 2: I wish I remember the company name because they had
Speaker 2: she deserve it. The guy was just like every like
Speaker 2: people people really try and do like a micro jobs
Speaker 2: being like meg a world, and this guy was just like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it connects regularly like a keyboard. You can see it here.
Speaker 2: That's not a software. That's that He was.
Speaker 3: Very all standards to find and he was very.
Speaker 2: Clear to be like, this is not our software. This
Speaker 2: just plugs into anything.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: The people who need.
Speaker 1: Brain don't need friction, right, Like that guy.
Speaker 2: Deserves the huge boots. That's every single blind person probably
Speaker 2: could I'm not blind sweater. I truly don't. Sorry visually impaired,
Speaker 2: So I don't know, wow what the experience is, but
Speaker 2: I don't know. Seems like it fucking worked, and the
Speaker 2: guy was not trying to like hawk anything.
Speaker 3: It was well built, it was standard fine, it was
Speaker 3: chunky and rugged, and and it was it will outlive
Speaker 3: changes to the OS because it's built around open standards.
Speaker 2: It was just the USB connected thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think when you said kryptach, I was reminded of
Speaker 1: something that we didn't see in person, but we hurt
Speaker 1: or read about. There's a water heater for your home
Speaker 1: that will crypto mind while you shout.
Speaker 3: Oh, I've heard about these, I think I wanted to
Speaker 3: put that together. There's a room heater as well that
Speaker 3: does this is like a gimmick, right, it can also.
Speaker 9: Does There's a bathhouse in Williamsburg that does something that
Speaker 9: is the most.
Speaker 2: Yes, I know, is that the same one district? No,
Speaker 2: it's not the same one where they legion is.
Speaker 3: Listen.
Speaker 2: I got.
Speaker 9: Like, yeah, you know, you know, I was landing them.
Speaker 9: Then their name it's it's nothing to bathhouse.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, that's the legion is. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So the guy who runs it, he loves crypto
Speaker 9: and so you can paying crypto. And he initially tried
Speaker 9: to market it as like, you know, like some of
Speaker 9: the heat generation is going to go is coming from crypto.
Speaker 9: But then he removed that silently. And I don't know
Speaker 9: if you removed it because it was like it's not
Speaker 9: actually or because he doesn't want people to.
Speaker 2: Just nocause it doesn't work. Just mining difficulty has reached
Speaker 2: a point where all of these little.
Speaker 3: Just doesn't work. Scuba diving on Roatan, which is the
Speaker 3: island where prosper the crypto city is and the future
Speaker 3: beautiful little like dirt road island africabbing on and the
Speaker 3: food's amazing, the diving is amazing. It's it's just a
Speaker 3: lovely place. And then the former dictator of Honduras, who
Speaker 3: was just pardoned by Trump, who was an ARCO trafficker,
Speaker 3: sold them the sovereign rights to a chunk of this island.
Speaker 3: And you walk down the dirt road in the dive
Speaker 3: town and every shop has got a sign in the
Speaker 3: window that says we accept bitcoin. And you walk in,
Speaker 3: you say do you accept bitcoin, and they're like, of course,
Speaker 3: we don't accept that.
Speaker 2: You don't. I don't have fifteen minutes to wait for this.
Speaker 9: And these reactionaries they know how to pick a spot,
Speaker 9: you know. Yeah, If I were going to make a
Speaker 9: future network, Stay is one of the placeings I would
Speaker 9: do it.
Speaker 2: They don't have the actual stones to find a real
Speaker 2: place where there's truly no laws, right well yeah, it
Speaker 2: also all of the actual pirates and real criminals would
Speaker 2: kill them.
Speaker 9: I mean this media thing with the Pirate Enlightenment book
Speaker 9: of David Gray. You give you give fascists a lawless zone,
Speaker 9: and you let other people come into the lawas zone,
Speaker 9: and everyone else will go, why are there fascists here?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well do you know?
Speaker 3: Do you know a libertarian walks into a bear? The
Speaker 3: story about that libertarian exit town in New Hampshire where
Speaker 3: they all moved in and then they ran for city
Speaker 3: council and then they abolished the school district and they
Speaker 3: did and they abolished all the rules. And then this
Speaker 3: one lady kept feeding bears and they're like, please stop
Speaker 3: feeding bears.
Speaker 2: She was like, I thought there were no rules. They
Speaker 2: were all being mauled by bears.
Speaker 3: But Thiston wrong. This Marxist gun nut weed grower moves
Speaker 3: in and he's like, I'm gonna grow weed and collect
Speaker 3: guns and wait for the Marxist revolution. And they're like,
Speaker 3: but we're a libertarian town.
Speaker 2: He's like, well, what are you gonna do? Actually, actually,
Speaker 2: libertarian means you own nothing. Yeah. No, it's my favorite.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite old school Internet videos is the
Speaker 2: Libertarian Conference where it's like, well, I think the driver's
Speaker 2: licenses should exist, and I think there should be some
Speaker 2: competency in the driving. No allow us to die and
Speaker 2: call crashes. We're approaching the break right now. But I
Speaker 2: really have been trying all weightlessness. I swear to God,
Speaker 2: I've been trying to get people to talk to me
Speaker 2: about awesome stuff. The CS is weird. This is a
Speaker 2: broken CS Listen. I do think wrong. I do think that.
Speaker 9: One plus I would say for the CS is it
Speaker 9: is actually a really great spot for you to come
Speaker 9: through and think about the way in which technological products
Speaker 9: are offered, as in the role they play in your life.
Speaker 9: You know, like, are you satisfied with tech products that
Speaker 9: are solely around convenience or solely around you know, assistive
Speaker 9: tech are solely around health or you know, like, what
Speaker 9: is it that you want and do you think that
Speaker 9: the industry and the sectors are interested in developing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is what are they interested in building,
Speaker 2: rather than what I think.
Speaker 9: I think it's a very good place for coming and
Speaker 9: talking to people and getting sense of whether or not
Speaker 9: other people share those priorities with you.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You and I saw something that we went away and bought,
Speaker 3: which was that were Coco espresso maker. That's hot water
Speaker 3: pump it up. Yeah, it gets a nine atmospheres, It
Speaker 3: ejects a shot of espresso. It has no battery.
Speaker 2: It's like yeah. Another thing is like, do you like coffee? Right?
Speaker 2: Imagine if you could have coffee on the go and
Speaker 2: it worked the coffee I was.
Speaker 3: As a guy who flies around with an aero press,
Speaker 3: but whose wife prefers espresso to coffee concentrate. I'm I
Speaker 3: just like literally walked off the trade floor and bought
Speaker 3: one because now I can it's small enough. I could
Speaker 3: put both of them in my bag, and my wife
Speaker 3: can have an espresso and I can have a coffee concentrate.
Speaker 2: If only old products are that good. Now, the upcoming advertisement,
Speaker 2: I assume will be for a product that's even better
Speaker 2: than that and even more useful. If it's a podcast.
Speaker 2: You need to listen with complete detention. Put down your
Speaker 2: phone or else. And we're back to the Bedro offline
Speaker 2: CS experience. And we've got author, activist and journalist Cory
Speaker 2: Doctor Hello and get you. It's Sherlyn Low and Garrison
Speaker 2: Davis of it could happen here. How are you doing? Garrison?
Speaker 5: Oh, it's another beautiful Cees morning.
Speaker 2: In beautiful Las Vegas. About it? What have you seen
Speaker 2: today today?
Speaker 5: If I finally did hold, I've been I've been neglecting Holid.
Speaker 2: What did you see? Yes?
Speaker 1: That is fine?
Speaker 5: I guess I also also also had fun in the
Speaker 5: Amazon booth. Uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've been we've been punishing them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I assumed. I assumed you've been punishing.
Speaker 2: We went in there to punish them. Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, it's if you lose your dog, you get you
Speaker 5: can use all the all the ring cameras in your
Speaker 5: neighborhood to find your pet.
Speaker 2: I have a five thousand dollars surveillance tower from a
Speaker 2: trailer that now will tell me if anyone walks near
Speaker 2: my house in any way, so I can donline one
Speaker 2: one and claim there's a prowler.
Speaker 3: But will it measure their skull with cal Excuse me,
Speaker 3: will it measure their skull with calipers to tell you
Speaker 3: whether they are likely criminals.
Speaker 2: Only on Ring plus with their new lightar system. Nice?
Speaker 5: Maybe No. There's also this like ring like mesh mesh network.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure if you if you saw that.
Speaker 2: Oh, they're doing this Nest bullshit.
Speaker 5: Ring sidewalk I think is what it's called. If there's
Speaker 5: a Wi Fi outage, they will they will act as
Speaker 5: a mesh to to still be able to notify you
Speaker 5: if there's like movement around your house. There's no live
Speaker 5: video because of because of how we boun so it
Speaker 5: uses it uses like point like one like one percent
Speaker 5: of like of the of like a homes like like
Speaker 5: Wi Fi system to communicate peer to peer.
Speaker 2: Experience of those is they don't work very well, like
Speaker 2: the Nest one. If you ever try and install the
Speaker 2: Nest product and it tries to connect to a Nest
Speaker 2: another Nest product, it will break in my experience.
Speaker 5: But but the thing that I found interesting about the
Speaker 5: the pet Finder is that it's it's basically making a
Speaker 5: consumer product based on the capacity that police have been
Speaker 5: using Ring for already, right, being able to like find
Speaker 5: five people and have and have immediate nearly immediate access
Speaker 5: to footage, and now they're just turning that into a
Speaker 5: consumer a consumer side product.
Speaker 2: How does it work?
Speaker 5: You request that you're you, You send a message rightly
Speaker 5: to like to some like Amazon app about your pet
Speaker 5: being missing, and then it searches through all the ring
Speaker 5: cameras in the neighborhood to see if you can find
Speaker 5: the pet.
Speaker 2: I think that is completely and notly evil. I don't think.
Speaker 3: Can you access people's footage?
Speaker 2: No, because they have it, they immediately have it.
Speaker 5: Right, So they're talking about how how this footage is
Speaker 5: like secured and encrypted and no one can see it.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, they're offering products.
Speaker 5: Based on based on everybody having ring And that's the
Speaker 5: other interesting thing is how all the new features are
Speaker 5: like useless if you only have one ring camera. The
Speaker 5: features are built or based on total societal acceptance that
Speaker 5: everyone already has these things, and the fact that everyone
Speaker 5: has these things enables all these extra features to work.
Speaker 5: So the actual individual products of these things not very useful.
Speaker 5: But as long as your whole neighborhood has it, then
Speaker 5: then it's like a really great product.
Speaker 2: The Surveillance Society told lap arrist with university.
Speaker 5: And it's sacrificing privacy for for a convenience. Just thinking
Speaker 5: the entire gamble with with the with this style of product.
Speaker 2: The last scene of the conversation just like ripping up
Speaker 2: the sideboards and everyone's houses to try and find the
Speaker 2: ring cameras. Very horrible. So wait, but you were in
Speaker 2: hol D what'd you see in the hold again?
Speaker 5: More more more LLLM wrapper robots, A lot of smaller,
Speaker 5: smaller like robots, not not like the big the big
Speaker 5: one of the robots doing we I looked at a
Speaker 5: few robots for like you know, like learning robots for kids.
Speaker 5: For it's like kind of a toy, and it's also
Speaker 5: like supposed to be some kind of learning assistance.
Speaker 2: You can see through that so quickly, I must be
Speaker 2: clear when they.
Speaker 1: Get tired of it in like two minutes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, it definitely looks the ones the ones that
Speaker 5: I saw, including from this This company called their their
Speaker 5: product was called a Yambo yonbo x one, which they they.
Speaker 2: Thought as of the tongue.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's it's a it's a it's Chinese.
Speaker 5: It's Chinese for it sounds similar to the word for hug.
Speaker 1: But this is the well yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: I don't speak any of the language, like.
Speaker 5: This is for natural language prompting. This is to help, allegedly,
Speaker 5: according to them, we'll he will help kids learn another language.
Speaker 5: The U S side product justice Chat GIPT. So if
Speaker 5: you're if you're if you're wanting to learn learn another
Speaker 5: language through chat GPT, this is what it'll do. It
Speaker 5: was the Wi Fi and holdy is kind of off.
Speaker 5: So it's hard to get good product. It's it's it's
Speaker 5: it's hard to go to good baseline for how for
Speaker 5: HW good the product is which everyone would search to me,
Speaker 5: what were you gonna say?
Speaker 2: Show?
Speaker 1: I was gonna say. Kind of off was the understatement
Speaker 1: of the Wi Fi situation that the Venetian this year, it.
Speaker 2: Was freaking terrible.
Speaker 7: It's not all, it's all.
Speaker 1: It's worse this year because even the Wi Fi was down,
Speaker 1: it was always the signal. It is always bad. By
Speaker 1: the time you approached the Venetian, you have no more
Speaker 1: five z R. But like in the Expo, then their
Speaker 1: hone in house WiFi. Was that the irony of that was.
Speaker 2: Because everyone has these GPT Yes, yeah, it's because everyone's
Speaker 2: just pummeling a ws worse than ever yet beating.
Speaker 5: But yeah, we we tried to, you know, they try
Speaker 5: to give a demonstration where we'd teach us like a
Speaker 5: Chinese word, and so like, yeah, if you can learn
Speaker 5: a word.
Speaker 2: Speak a little Chinese, but you can't.
Speaker 5: You can't actually you can't like learn grammar, and they
Speaker 5: can't like correct a child to actually improve language, and
Speaker 5: you can't actually you actually learn to speak a language.
Speaker 5: You can learn individual words, but that's not that's not
Speaker 5: language learning, right, you can do that. You can do
Speaker 5: that like do a lingo, and that's not teaching you a.
Speaker 3: Lingal if you were just looking for a word and
Speaker 3: do a lingo is already something that people who teach
Speaker 3: languages are like, this is it's not all the all
Speaker 3: the features that make do a lingos cut against the
Speaker 3: pedagogical value of it as a language training tool.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of stuff like that.
Speaker 5: I I did ask them about like what their plans
Speaker 5: are if if the PI for chattypt it gets more expensive.
Speaker 5: They said they do not expect that in the near future.
Speaker 5: They have like five other lms that they're that they
Speaker 5: work with. Specifically, their product is mostly in China right now,
Speaker 5: and they they have they can they can swap, they
Speaker 5: can talk to Lum whenever they.
Speaker 1: Want to, which, like is doesn't that kind of impact
Speaker 1: the quality?
Speaker 2: Yes, because each because each of them is prompted differently. Yes,
Speaker 2: I love that though it's like, what if something bad happens,
Speaker 2: what if it doesn't?
Speaker 5: But if it doesn't, and even if it does, we'll
Speaker 5: just use something good or whatever.
Speaker 3: I have a slightly different gloss on this though, because
Speaker 3: we were saying before that, well, all these products seem
Speaker 3: un differentiated. And if they're all undifferentiated because they're just
Speaker 3: a wrapper on top of chat Gypt and their vulnerable
Speaker 3: to changes, that's one thing, and it maybe speaks well
Speaker 3: for chat GPT and that they'll have whatever companies among
Speaker 3: these are successful, it'll have them over a barrel and
Speaker 3: a can jack at the price on thread of bricking
Speaker 3: their products and making their customers angry at them. But
Speaker 3: if the case is that Chatchypt is a commodity back
Speaker 3: end and there's fifty companies in China that can do
Speaker 3: the same thing at a tenth of the price, and
Speaker 3: chatch Ept's future plan is someday there will be so
Speaker 3: many people so reliant on us that we can charge
Speaker 3: two hundred dollars for something we're charging two dollars for
Speaker 3: the answer is, the minute they start charging two hundred dollars,
Speaker 3: there will be fifty Chinese.
Speaker 2: Company charge you two dollars. Bryan Ches give Airbnb. Even
Speaker 2: there's like a disgusting booster who was specifically involved in
Speaker 2: making sure Clammy Samuelman managed to become CEO again. He
Speaker 2: literally has said I'll use Chinese lms every day, which
Speaker 2: is really funny. So really it's one of the two.
Speaker 2: It's going to be either. But I also don't think
Speaker 2: because they're API sales are like a small part of
Speaker 2: their revenue. It's just actually, here's a question, general question.
Speaker 2: Anyone hear about anyone used againthropics models even once.
Speaker 5: I've not heard mentioned Yeah, yeah, but I.
Speaker 2: Mean specifically on the floor as powering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, someone, do you know what ob Pebble uses?
Speaker 3: Qual really interesting?
Speaker 2: But to just do the for the ring they said
Speaker 2: that was on device. There is no on device version
Speaker 2: of Claude Oh Peurble. I was so nice about you.
Speaker 2: Now I have to go and look into your in its.
Speaker 1: I can go, we should go.
Speaker 2: No, I'm genuinely curious about that because there is no
Speaker 2: on device version of GPT or anything.
Speaker 1: Now you're making me question if I should like double chat.
Speaker 1: I think what I'm talking.
Speaker 2: About, I think that that's worthwhile, not not because, but
Speaker 2: the thing is, I'm a I'm a horrible freak that
Speaker 2: looks at this stuff constantly. So my natural thought was like,
Speaker 2: what do you mean? And I will admit the seventy
Speaker 2: five dollars pebble ring I supposely on device as well,
Speaker 2: that did seem a little rich to Meah, what do
Speaker 2: you mean by rich as in like an on device
Speaker 2: model and a tiny ring.
Speaker 1: It's not on the ring, it's on the phone.
Speaker 2: Yes, but they're saying it's if it needs to go
Speaker 2: through Claude. That's not I don't know. There's there's something
Speaker 2: weird there, and again that's something that will increase in price.
Speaker 5: Another on water you go there. Alleged on device product
Speaker 5: is the Lunar Pendant, which is real time a GI
Speaker 5: emotion tracking.
Speaker 3: Okay, oh, well, because it's not doing anything real you
Speaker 3: could put a random number.
Speaker 2: Well it's not, actually it is.
Speaker 5: It is listening to every single thing you say and
Speaker 5: building emotional assessments based on what you say as well
Speaker 5: as you know, whatever kind of biometrics it can connect
Speaker 5: from a pendant resting on your like.
Speaker 2: They mention what the customer might be. No, not, because
Speaker 2: this always immediately goes to people with autism. We already
Speaker 2: ran into someone with a dog a dog toy today.
Speaker 2: It was like it could help autistic children.
Speaker 5: This was not this was this was not marketed to that.
Speaker 5: This is what is this? Foreman, this is this is
Speaker 5: for I wouldn't say women.
Speaker 2: That was the classic.
Speaker 1: Doesn't understand women love to be told what are Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. We finally found a device to be sexist
Speaker 2: without the need of all of all.
Speaker 5: Of the was was was pretty yes, and it measures
Speaker 5: like six or seven.
Speaker 2: That was a mistake.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry that it does. It does like six or
Speaker 5: seven different emotions most but it's mostly done just through
Speaker 5: listening on on device though they do not upload to
Speaker 5: the They do not upload the audio to the cloud. Nice, okay,
Speaker 5: it is on device.
Speaker 1: But so no biometric data, just listening.
Speaker 5: That's unclear. Uncle, It was mostly listening because again, I'm
Speaker 5: it's some look sometimes I honestly language barriers when trying
Speaker 5: to talk with some of these boots here.
Speaker 2: I would respect them so much. It was for guys.
Speaker 2: If it was just like you guys.
Speaker 1: Yea a sound Harry very ability, breathing and movement, that's
Speaker 1: what it was.
Speaker 5: It's it's resting on your chest so you can have
Speaker 5: some some heart, some breathing, but most mostly it's just
Speaker 5: through listening to everything.
Speaker 1: The reason I asked this, that's the only thing that
Speaker 1: differentiates it from like the Halo Tone wearable from you
Speaker 1: just go buy Amazon that's already doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: I'm very like I have a good memory for all
Speaker 1: the devices that try to tell me what I'm feeling
Speaker 1: and tell me to chill out, come down, so like this,
Speaker 1: this is a sort of device that remembers. And there's
Speaker 1: another product that was at CES that was like, clearly
Speaker 1: men made this for women. It was like a broad
Speaker 1: insert to like be a wearable to detect your detect
Speaker 1: your booms. Well, no, you're you're metro like it's kind
Speaker 1: of for gym purposes when you're working out. And I
Speaker 1: was just like, if you've paid any attention to the
Speaker 1: women's sports bra industry discourse at all, it's that we've
Speaker 1: been asking for these broad inserts to be removed or
Speaker 1: sewn in. We don't want them to be removable, fall
Speaker 1: out of when they're trying. We just want them to
Speaker 1: remain in place or just be done with.
Speaker 2: One of less classic situations, I did you talk to
Speaker 2: a woman? Off? Do you make?
Speaker 1: Or anything else?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Like, if you're designing a product for someone in a wheelchair,
Speaker 1: have you worked with someone who's actually using a wheelchair?
Speaker 3: Well, the saying is nothing about us with that, which
Speaker 3: I discovered goes back to the Polish equivalent of the
Speaker 3: Magna kurta and this sixteenth century, and it was what
Speaker 3: the barons made the king agree was that nothing about
Speaker 3: them would be done without them. It didn't didn't rhyme
Speaker 3: in Polish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's also definitely not how c S works.
Speaker 2: Is like without you, we will sell to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's tanry Ford. Right. If I ask people what
Speaker 3: they wanted, they'd say faster horse, right, And so we're
Speaker 3: here to tell you what you want.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, but these people would sell you like horseshoes
Speaker 2: to make the horses faster, rather than it's like these
Speaker 2: people don't get to anything. I'm still sitting there trying
Speaker 2: to work out what that pendant is for. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: be honest, like what alien.
Speaker 5: Well, sometimes you're suppled to know if you if you're
Speaker 5: calm or if you're angry. Oh I know what I'm met.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm breathing.
Speaker 1: I recently started somadic therapy, and so I think I
Speaker 1: can understand the idea of the benefits of knowing when
Speaker 1: you're feeling something, identifying it and kind of like staying
Speaker 1: with it. But I don't think a pendant is going
Speaker 1: to tell me in real time. It's not built for
Speaker 1: that exactly.
Speaker 3: Well with any of that, I mean, what are you
Speaker 3: supposed to be doing, like looking down and going, oh.
Speaker 1: No, I'm angry and why and then breathe?
Speaker 2: It does? It does?
Speaker 5: It does connect to an app where like christ it
Speaker 5: has it has an analysis of how you're feeling, how
Speaker 5: you're feeling, you know, heart rate.
Speaker 2: This reminds me of Victoria's song posting the Aura Ring.
Speaker 2: Think it's like stressed straight, like collective bar running seven
Speaker 2: hours stressed right? Oh God? So what you got a
Speaker 2: lot of paper that.
Speaker 5: I I just I just like collecting these.
Speaker 2: That's fine paper. Anything else you you regarded, Oh.
Speaker 5: I guess I'll talk about the the one that I
Speaker 5: feel the weirdest about awesome. This is another CES Innovation
Speaker 5: Award winner.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is from South Korea.
Speaker 5: This is the Self Insight Therapy Resolved x R oh.
Speaker 2: Okay, well I've got most of This.
Speaker 5: Is a VR experience to give you a final goodbye
Speaker 5: to a deceased fred So the episode. So, we have
Speaker 5: seen stuffing this before. We have we have seen these
Speaker 5: kind of like VR experiences that are either fully scripted
Speaker 5: or done with like an AI And I thought that's
Speaker 5: what this that this was. I thought this was just
Speaker 5: another one of those, and I was surprised why it
Speaker 5: won an Innovation award because we've seen this stuff years ago.
Speaker 5: This the reason why it's different is that this is
Speaker 5: not an AI. This is not an AI system. This
Speaker 5: is not a pre recorded movie either. This is a
Speaker 5: avatar puppeted by a therapist as a part of a
Speaker 5: as a part of like a therapy program where you
Speaker 5: enter into it for a short amount of time to
Speaker 5: give this like like visual like therapeutic exercise to someone
Speaker 5: when they weren't able to say goodbye to a FAMI member,
Speaker 5: usually after some kind of accident.
Speaker 2: Is what this was.
Speaker 5: And they they talked about a few instances of like
Speaker 5: this really bad plane crash uh last year, and that
Speaker 5: that's that was like the main main use case that
Speaker 5: that is seen. It's right now just available in Korea.
Speaker 5: They're trying to expand to Japan and the United States
Speaker 5: where they would need to partner with with therapists in
Speaker 5: those countries. So yes, I feel really odd about about
Speaker 5: these types of products obviously specifically like the digital avatar
Speaker 5: nature of it. Yeah, if you have a recording of
Speaker 5: your of your deceased loved ones voice, it can try
Speaker 5: to clone the voice, so it does use A so
Speaker 5: it doesn't use AA for the voice. But the person
Speaker 5: there's the therapist puppet.
Speaker 2: Puppeting it, who will who will do text to speech?
Speaker 5: So they will will will we'll we'll we'll text to speech,
Speaker 5: uh the like, you know, whatever, the whatever the person
Speaker 5: will like.
Speaker 2: It takes the speech as well. So no, it is
Speaker 2: texting that That's what it is.
Speaker 5: It is text to speech. The therapist that's puppeting it.
Speaker 5: The words coming out of the avatar are from a
Speaker 5: therapist who's typing out who's typing out the words as
Speaker 5: a part of this this therapeutic exercise. But then then
Speaker 5: will be that will come out, is in a cloned
Speaker 5: voice of the deceased?
Speaker 1: Are they're also controlling like the gestures when you see puppetting.
Speaker 5: Yes, there is a pre pre recorded set of set
Speaker 5: of movements that they can that they can initiate.
Speaker 2: This sounds traumatizing.
Speaker 5: They said that the people have used it have liked it,
Speaker 5: and there's a video of of course they're gonna say
Speaker 5: that obviously, yeah, people, but that's you know, and I
Speaker 5: saw I saw a footage of of of someone using it.
Speaker 5: I think it is It is good that this isn't
Speaker 5: just an a I L L M who's just talking
Speaker 5: as your as you'r.
Speaker 2: As and it's not pretending to be that.
Speaker 5: It is a therapeutic experience and it is an exercise
Speaker 5: similar similar, similar, well the pretty you know you're you're
Speaker 5: wearing the r gogs, like you see the avatar in
Speaker 5: like a setting and you like say goodbye and get
Speaker 5: some kind of closure as a part of a therapeutic experience.
Speaker 5: And like there's versions that we already just do this
Speaker 5: in therapy, like you already sort of exercises with therapy.
Speaker 5: This is putting in kind of in avatar over it.
Speaker 5: I don't feel great at the avatar. But this is
Speaker 5: this is certainly better and more thoughtful than just talking
Speaker 5: to and just talking to an ll M. The fact
Speaker 5: that it's you're partnering with a therapist you've already been
Speaker 5: working with who already knows you for people and they
Speaker 5: getting an extreme emotional grief, Like I can see that
Speaker 5: they did stress that, like this isn't for everybody. This
Speaker 5: is for people like dealing with they get extreme emotional grief,
Speaker 5: and I, you know, ask like, you know, why did
Speaker 5: you choose you know, why is this not just an AI.
Speaker 5: They're like, well, I mean these people are very traumatized
Speaker 5: and you actually need a skill.
Speaker 2: I give them. I give him some credit. If that's
Speaker 2: the If that's their reaction to it, yeah, I'm less.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I'm not mad at it because if they're
Speaker 2: very much like this is very specific, Yeah, I'm alright
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 5: This is my experience at the booth because I went
Speaker 5: in very skept hostile, hostile, because I was very hostile,
Speaker 5: and they didn't necessarily win me over, but I understood
Speaker 5: why the product exists over time more and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: I feel very odd, not odd. I think digital. I
Speaker 5: think digital necromancy is bad. Yeah, I've every every CS
Speaker 5: I've been to. There's I've done some report on digital necromancy.
Speaker 5: The fact that it's cloning the voice I don't love.
Speaker 5: But the product's not for me, right, It's I would
Speaker 5: not want to hear an ai voice of my dead friend,
Speaker 5: but that is me and I'm you know, as a
Speaker 5: gen Z Canadian American, I don't want this for some
Speaker 5: people who are using using this product that might help
Speaker 5: them in certain settings with an awareness that like you're
Speaker 5: this is you know, this is an avatar, this is around.
Speaker 2: I'm just into a therapist. I'm not a therapist, but
Speaker 2: my view on that is like there are certain things
Speaker 2: where it's leading you to get to conclusions and I
Speaker 2: feel like adding a disembodied digital levatar controlled by a keyboard,
Speaker 2: I'm like, if this helps someone, brilliant, but it's also
Speaker 2: just like that's just it's adding a layer of something
Speaker 2: that probably will get in the way of feeling better
Speaker 2: because it's like like change comes from within, like.
Speaker 5: This is this is this is the gestalt to empty
Speaker 5: chair technique. That's that's therapy Techniquely.
Speaker 3: I want to raise another point. So hagen Blix was
Speaker 3: on this machine kills talking about chat or chat therapists,
Speaker 3: and how the temptation on the firms that are delivering
Speaker 3: therapy over chat is to pile more chat windows on
Speaker 3: a single therapist and to get them to multitask and
Speaker 3: then multi multitask. And so I'm not saying this firm
Speaker 3: is doing it. I'm saying that this is a mode
Speaker 3: of therapy that is uniquely amenable to speed ups that
Speaker 3: are anti patient and anti therapists.
Speaker 1: I have also a thought, right, which is when I
Speaker 1: was mostly furious about this until you mentioned this was
Speaker 1: for extreme scenario, extreme cases of grief, And I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: can imagine if someone is so deep in their grief
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't respond to anything, but you need anything,
Speaker 1: You need anything. But then I think about, like even myself,
Speaker 1: thinking about going through the process of anyone that that
Speaker 1: has you know, a friend died in a car accident
Speaker 1: two years ago, Like if the thought of talking to
Speaker 1: an embodied version of him and hearing his voice just
Speaker 1: get me out of my grief is already dubious, But
Speaker 1: then you have to I was like, oh, but all
Speaker 1: kinds of therapy rec there's a little resistance to that
Speaker 1: sort of grief therapy anyway. So I was like trying
Speaker 1: to make my peace with that. Then I remember, this
Speaker 1: is x R. You're gonna have to convince the person
Speaker 1: who's an extreme grief to put on a headset.
Speaker 3: Yes, just trap this brick to your face for five
Speaker 3: seconds and strap this brick trap yourself.
Speaker 5: That's I mean, yeah, this is something that you're gonna
Speaker 5: I don't think they're getting convinced into doing this. I
Speaker 5: think it's that they will, you know, this is an
Speaker 5: option that they can choose from. And I think it's
Speaker 5: also specifically this is not like an extended things. This
Speaker 5: isn't something you like go to talk to your friend.
Speaker 5: It's it's it is a It is to give you
Speaker 5: like a yeah one one time like good like like
Speaker 5: closure exercise is I'm also just like that you also
Speaker 5: have it for a pet.
Speaker 2: They also have a powkay. Because now it's like closure
Speaker 2: isn't always clean. That's absolutely life is message, but also
Speaker 2: you don't get closure on that. Therapy is about finding
Speaker 2: finding a way through when you.
Speaker 3: The gift you give yourself is not a thing you
Speaker 3: get from someone else.
Speaker 5: That's the more like larger like essential resistance that I
Speaker 5: have to.
Speaker 2: This is hearing the pet thing really fills people angry
Speaker 2: by yeah, yeah, yeah, yam yamyamao, yamyam maamyamao. No, it's
Speaker 2: just also like you lost your pet. What the fuck
Speaker 2: is seeing like a three D cat or dog? Like?
Speaker 3: What of Canada's most beloved prime ministers, John Diefenbaker, used
Speaker 3: to go get advice for running the country from his
Speaker 3: dog's ghost.
Speaker 2: What that was?
Speaker 1: Dead air there?
Speaker 2: It's true Cleveland Brown's dropped. Did Johnny mansiel based on
Speaker 2: a homeless person's idea? I love this tell me everything.
Speaker 2: That's all I know.
Speaker 3: We learned it in history. I was fourteen years old,
Speaker 3: That's all I remember. It's literally the only thing I
Speaker 3: know about chan T dog's ghosts. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: buildings named after him as well. But he did Did
Speaker 3: you learn this? What did you grow up in Canada?
Speaker 2: I did grow up in Canada.
Speaker 3: Did you learn this in ninth grade?
Speaker 2: Know? By then I was already in the States. Okay,
Speaker 2: so you.
Speaker 3: Didn't get our full year about just the Canadian Pacific Railroad,
Speaker 3: World War One and John diefen Baker's dead.
Speaker 2: We got a little bit of the railroad, but that's it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you missed the year of Canadian education around dog ghosts.
Speaker 2: I did miss that one.
Speaker 3: We're gonna put them on the new fifty.
Speaker 10: The dog ghost that's good, had a lot of them. Yeah,
Speaker 10: the Supreme Leader Curry, We'll get right on that.
Speaker 2: I just see this stuff and hearing the pet thing,
Speaker 2: I'm like, because my thought process with this was like, okay,
Speaker 2: extreme situations. But then I'm like, the pet thing, I
Speaker 2: don't yet. No, I hear pet and I'm like, so
Speaker 2: it's not extreme situation. You will because my thought was, okay,
Speaker 2: if this is very specific, like deep in the box
Speaker 2: of tools, we've tried everything. Yeah, fuck yeah, we'll help
Speaker 2: you with your other thing.
Speaker 3: And also if your favorite flavor of ice cream is
Speaker 3: sold out at basketball yeah, yea, yeah, we've got.
Speaker 2: A model for that. It's also preparing you. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Some of the most difficult things in therapy for me
Speaker 2: have been accepting there is no such thing as closure.
Speaker 2: In some cases, you will never have that.
Speaker 5: The other thing I don't think about the pet thing
Speaker 5: is that it is that that is a reoccurring feature.
Speaker 5: You can visit the Yeah, it's like you create a
Speaker 5: space more than once which okay.
Speaker 1: I will say now that I'm reading the brochure, it
Speaker 1: is not just about the grief. I think there's parts
Speaker 1: of this that sound like that makes sense, or the
Speaker 1: resolve extra part of it that's talking about the gestalte
Speaker 1: empty chair thing. It's also like not just about grief,
Speaker 1: but it's about like confronting difficult, like conflict moments that
Speaker 1: one I could learn to deal with because like whenever
Speaker 1: I'm dealing with like a manipulative talker and I don't
Speaker 1: know how to like respond and I have these emotional reactions,
Speaker 1: bubble up a bit of practice into dealing with the
Speaker 1: The thing is.
Speaker 2: The like, you are completely correct, I sound like another lum.
Speaker 2: But these are the soft edges where these people work
Speaker 2: their ways in right. It's like, well, there could be
Speaker 2: a situation where it makes sense. They're not preparing for
Speaker 2: a situation if they have, I can revisit my dead dog.
Speaker 2: They're just like, fuck it. Can I say enough of this?
Speaker 3: It's a structural problem with small backs products. Also, you
Speaker 3: just want to expand the market.
Speaker 1: I'll also point out that on the brochure this you
Speaker 1: should have said it here, But they are calling the
Speaker 1: grief part of it good mourning with a U.
Speaker 2: And I'm just like, no, I love having good morning.
Speaker 3: That's that's very good.
Speaker 1: That's that that tells me this is a state hairdresser.
Speaker 3: Hairdressers uh business name grade pun curl up and die
Speaker 3: good morning.
Speaker 2: A bike called bike curious like Jesus fucking That's that's
Speaker 2: the thing is. I'm really trying and hear, folks, I'm
Speaker 2: trying to find some stuff. I'm trying to look not
Speaker 2: cynically about it.
Speaker 5: Well, there's a bajillion AI cooking products.
Speaker 2: I did see what I did see. We saw one
Speaker 2: which was just a giant box.
Speaker 5: No, they're all boxes and things you have. You still
Speaker 5: do all the prepper work yourself. You still have to
Speaker 5: assemble the ingredients. In most cases. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 5: an oven, like it's a it's a quote unquote smart oven.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: That's all these A products that like that like take
Speaker 5: the effort out of cooking. You're like, well, yeah, that's
Speaker 5: just putting something in the oven, like right, and still
Speaker 5: have to do a lot of work.
Speaker 3: You kind of have hoses that are just full of
Speaker 3: congealed schmuds.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. At some point, like three days in
Speaker 2: it's going to just be congealed.
Speaker 5: Cleaning it's going to be a nightmare. It's it's easier
Speaker 5: just to cook.
Speaker 1: Like it's like it reminds me of those videos where
Speaker 1: like the influencers going these are my simple meals, no
Speaker 1: cook simple meals. Step one caught some garlic and it's
Speaker 1: just like no, no, no, you're cooking.
Speaker 5: Yeah no, Like this is like you put put a
Speaker 5: piece of cardboard in the microwave, Like that's that's gonna
Speaker 5: be more efficient if you really want to live a
Speaker 5: lifestyle where you don't cook.
Speaker 2: Enough about British cooking.
Speaker 3: I just I just learned about from from Garbage Ryan
Speaker 3: about uh kitchen cells, which is the Reddit forum for
Speaker 3: in cells who cook elaborate meals and then feel bad
Speaker 3: about themselves.
Speaker 2: That's fun, Yeah, good for them at least better good
Speaker 2: morning someone else. So that was that was a bitch,
Speaker 2: you think to say, But no, I wait, so these
Speaker 2: people are like in cells who would just so the
Speaker 2: two varieties are very elaborate meal I cooked with a
Speaker 2: caption that is just like I want to die, or
Speaker 2: like someone who's literally microwaved a piece of cardboard and
Speaker 2: it's the caption is I'm a piece of ship. That's
Speaker 2: that second one is really funny. I mean, actually no,
Speaker 2: the idea of doing like a five course tasting menu
Speaker 2: and doing that is actually really good. That's pretty good.
Speaker 2: That's that's But are they serious or is this so?
Speaker 3: This was the thing garbage Ryan said is he wasn't
Speaker 3: sure to what extended was a bit think for some
Speaker 3: of them it's a bit. It's it's like, yeah, like.
Speaker 2: I love those where it's just like a TV, a
Speaker 2: like a high sensed TV on top of the box
Speaker 2: that the hesned TV came in, and like an Apple
Speaker 2: TV and a PlayStation five with like bent cables because
Speaker 2: like like straight out the box plugs. I love that.
Speaker 3: My favorite one was the guy who bought a church
Speaker 3: and he had a he had a bed and a
Speaker 3: little table and in a church, and his his uh
Speaker 3: caption was any suggestions for what else to do with this?
Speaker 1: Do an exorcism?
Speaker 2: I mean the thing you're going to do in six
Speaker 2: months involving a news Sorry, but it's like, why did
Speaker 2: you buy a church? There is this guy.
Speaker 3: Scarsing about a church. They're cheap. Religion is failing in America.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's good or bad. Now, I
Speaker 2: did see this guy on Instagram that I've been following
Speaker 2: for like a while where he bought like a house
Speaker 2: in an Eastern European country for five thousand euro and
Speaker 2: he has put so much money into it just making
Speaker 2: it and he's actually got like walls. Now he's like
Speaker 2: day five thousand to buy my five thousand euro house.
Speaker 2: My friend Kujuk came down and it's just like this
Speaker 2: Eastern European guy who you could shoot with a gun
Speaker 2: and it would just bounce the fuck off this.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all of these guys who are just like
Speaker 2: actual work and stiffs who are like this is gonna
Speaker 2: get me promo because they all make money off of it,
Speaker 2: which is cool. Actually actually in a weird way, likely
Speaker 2: helps the local economy. But it is funny watching just
Speaker 2: the American guys being like fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Speaker 2: infrastructure doesn't work someplaces. Yeah. Well, as we wrap up
Speaker 2: this half an hour section, I'm gonna advertise something now.
Speaker 2: It's called a stuff buyer. Go to stuff buyo dot
Speaker 2: Bierz and whatever you hear next, ignore that, ur L.
Speaker 2: That's not where stuff buyo dot biz is where you're
Speaker 2: going to buy your next products. Thank you please, I
Speaker 2: am being gangstalk. Welcome back to Better Offline. I'm at
Speaker 2: Cetron and we have one of grab with us. Of course, journalist, activist,
Speaker 2: and of course I was author, yeah, author with keeping it.
Speaker 2: It's fine, author Cory doctor Rowe. Hello, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: That's okay, Garrison Davis.
Speaker 5: If it could happen here, there's been a white van
Speaker 5: outside this hotel the entire time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're only looking for me, Sheldon lower n
Speaker 2: Gadget and we're going to actually start with some Engadget things.
Speaker 2: What I engadget It's best to see, yes, like what
Speaker 2: was the stuff that Engadget actually liked.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'll hate us for this, because
Speaker 1: we talked earlier in the episode this we we as
Speaker 1: a team awarded the Lego Smartplay smartbreak system totally fort
Speaker 1: and show. It was a show off hands type of
Speaker 1: votement by the time we had gotten around to the
Speaker 1: last one, and like we were doing ranked tories voting too,
Speaker 1: so like we had to go around with everyone.
Speaker 2: Well, we were ready to stay.
Speaker 1: I know, thank you.
Speaker 9: We were.
Speaker 1: We've been progressive for a very long time.
Speaker 7: We uh, we were dedicated.
Speaker 1: We're like, however long this takes to find the best
Speaker 1: and show, we're going to stay all through the night.
Speaker 1: And then we got through the first few candidates and
Speaker 1: then we got to Lego and then like more than
Speaker 1: half way, more than half hands went up and we're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: good thing. We don't need to say the rest of
Speaker 1: the night. Then it's quite obvious. Yeah, some quick math
Speaker 1: was done. So anyway, I think the Best and Gadget's
Speaker 1: Best of ce AS awards are going to reflect engadgets
Speaker 1: choice and gadgets taste, and so that's good, right, I'm glad.
Speaker 1: I think it shows that we're a bunch of childish kids,
Speaker 1: nerds and that sort of thing, and I like that
Speaker 1: about my team. And also then we had other winners,
Speaker 1: like you'll see our list of winners include things like TVs, laptops,
Speaker 1: concept devices.
Speaker 2: Look at this thrown toilet mount health.
Speaker 1: That's not an at war to be clear, that's the weirdestkedget.
Speaker 2: That's all the coolest text.
Speaker 3: W A And I'm like, is it a Shuri?
Speaker 1: I love that. I love that you got confused because
Speaker 1: that's very good feedback for the team that I've been
Speaker 1: trying to fight with about the headlines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that completely confused me because the measure, Yeah put it.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to show only be drinking diet cokes
Speaker 2: for seven years.
Speaker 1: That will tell you we did not give that.
Speaker 2: Okay, So your best of CS, I will stop trying
Speaker 2: to anticipate your dynamoon.
Speaker 1: Okay, I mean I can I do that too. Our
Speaker 1: best of CS includes like the l G wall paper
Speaker 1: TV that was shown. This's your very classic CS type
Speaker 1: of price we got, that's it. Yeah, it's very thin,
Speaker 1: very impressive. It just lost that sound bar base that
Speaker 1: used to be what it came out of. And then
Speaker 1: there's no cables like stuff for the power court because
Speaker 1: it's got the wireless control center that always that the
Speaker 1: brick that is kind of the little Yeah, you could
Speaker 1: tuck it away low latency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly saw that, and I was kind of like,
Speaker 2: I love that. It's like way, it's like super expensive,
Speaker 2: out of the range of most people, but it's cool
Speaker 2: to And also so wait does the thing go on
Speaker 2: it plugs in the walls.
Speaker 1: Still there's still a power court for the TV itself.
Speaker 2: HD mind such comes up the community? Did you get
Speaker 2: the price on the wallpaper one? Or if they not
Speaker 2: said it yet.
Speaker 1: I have had so many numbers, it's hard.
Speaker 3: And do they do the surveillance that is endemic to
Speaker 3: smart TVs or is it like a dumb TV when
Speaker 3: it comes to sending information about what you're watching?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know that either. I had our TV
Speaker 1: experts cover it.
Speaker 2: I just know that.
Speaker 3: I mean Consumer Union every time they look at TV's
Speaker 3: are like very good one for us to look into.
Speaker 5: The stuff like the wallpaper TV and the transparent TV
Speaker 5: aren't even really marketed towards most like nos like they're
Speaker 5: they're kind of for like hotel lobbies or for like
Speaker 5: like the paper.
Speaker 2: TV feels more business could be. It feels like more
Speaker 2: like something eventually a person might buy, rather than the
Speaker 2: transparent one, which you know what keeps fucking that chicken Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: bring that weird ship with you.
Speaker 6: I love that.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of weird Ship, Lenovo this year we're like, we
Speaker 1: really like this thing. We want to give it an
Speaker 1: a war. Let's think about like how which the Lenovo
Speaker 1: Legion Pro seven eye rollable concept?
Speaker 2: Is that the one that kind of rolls.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a gaming laptop, but it's screen can expand
Speaker 1: by rolling out into like twenty three point eight inches
Speaker 1: of space, and so you can stop in between twenty
Speaker 1: one point five inches or so, so you get like
Speaker 1: different aspect ratios when you're gaming and you just want
Speaker 1: to like drill in or you want to have discord
Speaker 1: show up on the ride or whatever.
Speaker 2: It knows what ext you've unrolled it, and that it's
Speaker 2: always been the.
Speaker 1: Trick, right, not understanding how to place these items on
Speaker 1: the screen. But it's gotten there.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting and that's just the concept though.
Speaker 1: It's just a concept.
Speaker 2: But they last year they had a concept with the
Speaker 2: swivel which ended up being real.
Speaker 1: Actually the auto twist they're calling it this year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's a laptop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a gaming labe.
Speaker 2: So this is like Butterfly keyboard, but Butterfly screen. But
Speaker 2: it like slowly rolls. It rolls. It's not like a
Speaker 2: fold out press a button.
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, oh my god, need to show you
Speaker 1: a video. You don't unroll it, like no, not by hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's I like that. I also think that
Speaker 2: we're approaching the point where we're limited by form factors,
Speaker 2: so that is cool. Yes, I hope they're able to
Speaker 2: do it in anything approaching affordability, right, I know that's
Speaker 2: not the same time. For like a decade we've talked
Speaker 2: about like rollable screens, screens. It's nice to see that
Speaker 2: in a consumer tech housing and not yanky and not janky.
Speaker 2: It had a little wobble, like just mentioned, it has
Speaker 2: a little bubble. But I'm kind of like, it's a concept.
Speaker 2: It's a concept concept, a concept. You're not talking about
Speaker 2: selling it. I kind of like it. But wh else
Speaker 2: she got on the list?
Speaker 1: I want to shout out the I x I autofocus
Speaker 1: slash adaptive iewere Okay, so they're not officially as as
Speaker 1: I think the parachute they dropped in. They were like,
Speaker 1: let's take some meetings. These are you know how multifocal
Speaker 1: slash bifocal classes right now are very clum.
Speaker 2: Now I don't know that.
Speaker 1: I don't know that, so some people might know, but
Speaker 1: they get very clunky and very chunky because you have
Speaker 1: like just the technology isn't there yet.
Speaker 2: I have a stupid question by folk, what is like
Speaker 2: so the top half.
Speaker 1: So some people have both near sighted and far sighted
Speaker 1: as you age, so you one prescription doesn't cut it.
Speaker 1: You need one like and sometimes they cut your lens
Speaker 1: so that the top half is for your alongside it
Speaker 1: and the bottom half is where you.
Speaker 3: Right, That's what I have in this lens, okay. And
Speaker 3: it's minus progressive, so it's not a sharp line. That's
Speaker 3: more magnified the further down it goes.
Speaker 1: Okay, so those are like multifocal. So so I XI
Speaker 1: has technology. I'm very curious what you think about this
Speaker 1: corey where it's using a mix of like LEDs around
Speaker 1: the lens to detect your gaze and where you're looking,
Speaker 1: and then a liquid crystal lens layer that changes the
Speaker 1: prescription of the lens so you're whenever you're wherever you're
Speaker 1: looking at something. It's just detecting the right prescription and
Speaker 1: just working the way it should. See a demo. R
Speaker 1: Matt Smith took a demo and he was impressed. We've
Speaker 1: already interviewed I x I in September. We've known this
Speaker 1: tech was coming, but now they're at CES with a
Speaker 1: working demo.
Speaker 3: So what I would want to know is like, so
Speaker 3: this sounds amazing. I had cataract surgery last year, okay,
Speaker 3: and I got what's called oh god, I can't monofocus.
Speaker 3: So this eye is focused at monovision. Rather, this eye
Speaker 3: is focused at twenty three inches. This eye is focused
Speaker 3: at twenty five feet. My brain switches between them depending
Speaker 3: on what I'm looking at. And then this is the
Speaker 3: only corrective region in my glasses. It's on the distance
Speaker 3: eye and it's a close up region, so that if
Speaker 3: I'm reading on this side, I don't have to turn
Speaker 3: my head right, but I can get around. Like I
Speaker 3: just went skiing without my glasses on for the first time.
Speaker 3: My life is fucking amazing. Oh wow, no fog, nothing
Speaker 3: like just so great scuba diving, just terrific. The thing
Speaker 3: I'd be worried about, as a man who has dropped
Speaker 3: his glasses fourteen million times, is what happens when these
Speaker 3: things fall off your face.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know yet. I think it has to
Speaker 1: depend on who they team up with on the like
Speaker 1: frames as well, and how they build these into like
Speaker 1: retail ready products. I don't have all the details yet
Speaker 1: because it was a late entrance to our lac as
Speaker 1: a Wars discussions.
Speaker 3: It's an amazing idea, but also and the fact that
Speaker 3: they made it work is incredibly and.
Speaker 2: Is there anything more consumer tech than that?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 7: Right glasses.
Speaker 1: And also one more thing, spectacle technology. I glasses technology
Speaker 1: hasn't changed. It's been stagnant since the nineteen fifties, So
Speaker 1: for something like this to happen, it'd be cool. And
Speaker 1: also imagine getting like one pair of lenses that you theoretically,
Speaker 1: hypothetically don't need to keep changing as your eye as
Speaker 1: your worsen or changes that could be sustainable, could be
Speaker 1: just for your cost, for your budget. That would be
Speaker 1: great too. So I just think there's so much potential.
Speaker 1: We were so exciting, really cool.
Speaker 5: Multiple people could wear the glasses, I guess could be.
Speaker 1: I can't say because I think for them they can't
Speaker 1: say things they love.
Speaker 3: I'd love to know, like, can you put it in
Speaker 3: I'm painting D and D mini's mode and have it ratchet.
Speaker 1: Hypothetically? Why not?
Speaker 3: You know, my grandfather was a watchmaker and he wore
Speaker 3: a jeweler's loop. Yes, professional life and you know Popeye
Speaker 3: squint right, Like if you could just be like, no,
Speaker 3: I'm on the job now, I'm fixing a watch movement
Speaker 3: and it just suddenly zooms up.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, going to be pretty so cool.
Speaker 7: That's just really cool technologies.
Speaker 1: So we were very glad we were able to see
Speaker 1: it here and then we you know, we talked about
Speaker 1: the wheel Move earlier in the episode, gave the wheel
Speaker 1: Move an award. We just didn't see enough sustainable slash
Speaker 1: transport related technologies to have something for those categories. Literally
Speaker 1: just there were there were things. They just weren't good.
Speaker 2: No, no, I mean you didn't have anything you could
Speaker 2: give an award to.
Speaker 5: I mean all those personal helicopters I think could serve
Speaker 5: a great public service helicopters.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you can see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Richer is from last year.
Speaker 2: I talked.
Speaker 5: I talked with Richer last year. There was there was
Speaker 5: I saw two personal helicopters this year.
Speaker 2: One of them was Richter. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think I think we should be giving giving those
Speaker 5: out to me. No, not to you, you're not You're
Speaker 5: not rich enough. I think we should be giving the
Speaker 5: personal helicopters to like maybe the top like point five people.
Speaker 10: Everyone should happen with whirling blades on the sale free. No,
Speaker 10: I think everye they should all.
Speaker 5: We should all as a as a victory trilphy for
Speaker 5: you won, you won, you won, society piece. Right here,
Speaker 5: We're going to give you this personal helicopter. It's gonna
Speaker 5: work great, it'll be fine. It's just as much as
Speaker 5: you want.
Speaker 3: That pairs very nicely with this thing we saw. Oh god,
Speaker 3: so we saw a personal airbag for old people worried
Speaker 3: about breaking their hips.
Speaker 2: And it sounds that you fall Yeah, it sounds like
Speaker 2: a good idea until you learn the details.
Speaker 3: Well, the business model, yes, So the business model is
Speaker 3: so if you fall over, they call, they call the
Speaker 3: emergency services.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a forty dollars a month subscription, which is nice.
Speaker 2: And I said to the guy, like, is Twilio that expensive,
Speaker 2: because like that's you're paying like like tiny amounts of
Speaker 2: money for one take. There's so many fall detection Yeah,
Speaker 2: like it's like there's no fucking way in hell. And
Speaker 2: you can't repack the airbag after you use it.
Speaker 3: So it's it's use.
Speaker 2: You get four eight hundred dollars for two airbags what
Speaker 2: and forty bucks a month? Otherwise, all it does is
Speaker 2: the airbag thing. It doesn't. It doesn't. They're trying to scam.
Speaker 3: Let's scam people trying to scam it from medica. They were, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: they were trying to get medicare proof. Man, who's also
Speaker 3: had a hip replacement, but two hip replacements. Uh, and
Speaker 3: was the youngest person on the ward when I had
Speaker 3: it done that, Like, you know, forty month subscription from
Speaker 3: an eighty year old does not generate that much revenue over.
Speaker 2: Months. Forty bucks. Fuck you man, it's a Twilio thing.
Speaker 2: It's well, you're just paying Twilio.
Speaker 1: So then wouldn't you want to like make sure the
Speaker 1: airbag is repackable because then you.
Speaker 3: Have m you don't know if it's going to work.
Speaker 3: If the old person with the arthritis repacks it, then
Speaker 3: we're worried that break a hip.
Speaker 1: But then then they stop paying the forty dollars a
Speaker 1: month Onnesday is But.
Speaker 3: Another argument is if you get saved from breaking a
Speaker 3: hip twice in a row, you'll happily buy another set
Speaker 3: of airbags.
Speaker 2: That that may be true. Yeah, it's just I'm like,
Speaker 2: the more I think about it's like, oh yeah, it's
Speaker 2: forty bucks months for the text, which costs like a
Speaker 2: tenth of a cent, which will also only have happened
Speaker 2: ideally twice twice in the life of the product, right
Speaker 2: like ideally never, but if you use them, this will
Speaker 2: cost them feat So if you own it for ten years, right,
Speaker 2: and what a you're actually paying for it.
Speaker 3: You have paid several thousand night what was up costs again?
Speaker 2: Eight hundred bucks for eight hundred and then forty a month.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. And he was like, we're working
Speaker 2: there's no Medicare code for this, yet, we're working on it. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm sure, I'm sure that's all they're working on.
Speaker 3: I could see the Medicare case for it, right, if
Speaker 3: you're starting to get inner ear problems, or if you're old,
Speaker 3: brittle or.
Speaker 2: Whatever you balance, I can see the point. I could
Speaker 2: see why Medicare would buy you a set of airbag,
Speaker 2: just not the fucking subscription. Fuck you like, make the
Speaker 2: subscription five bucks a month like that. Even then you're like,
Speaker 2: you're still making insane magin my.
Speaker 3: Guess these things they're manufacturing in the small runs, it's
Speaker 3: costing them more than eight hundred bucks. That they're losing
Speaker 3: money on the eight hundred bucks. And they're like, this
Speaker 3: is how we will make a profit is we'll sell
Speaker 3: a loss leader and.
Speaker 2: Will sounds like a bad business to me.
Speaker 3: It does well, it sounds like a case for like
Speaker 3: public investment in medical technology.
Speaker 2: Well, oh, what a lady, we need more knife drones.
Speaker 3: We need is that what we're calling the person a helicopter?
Speaker 2: Now? No ideal in a perfect world. No, the personal
Speaker 2: helicopters are very safe and you're very rich, and you
Speaker 2: need one, yes, trying them out. You don't need training,
Speaker 2: there's an no. You're smart, you're rich.
Speaker 1: G I run it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, We've built an obstacle course for it. You can
Speaker 3: fly over like lava and acid and broken glass.
Speaker 2: And you'll be you have the lathe of Heaven. You'll
Speaker 2: be the mandate of Heaven. Even sorry, late of Heaven.
Speaker 2: My brain just like, what words do you need? I
Speaker 2: don't fucking know.
Speaker 3: You've just lath that into consistence. That's leg the l
Speaker 3: of Heaven.
Speaker 2: There, Yes, thank you. Look for too much farming in
Speaker 2: earth to see. Yeah, it's I'm actually a little sad
Speaker 2: you don't have more. I'm not saying this is.
Speaker 1: A criticism, it's like, but it's like, even right, even.
Speaker 2: Last year, it felt like there was more. Yucks, it
Speaker 2: was more.
Speaker 5: Definitely exactly more square footage is taken up by the
Speaker 5: l M rappers and by just and by robotics and
Speaker 5: sometimes combined. Sometimes it's a robot both not both rapper.
Speaker 1: Did you see the Project Ava thing by.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we've talked about the wife and I haven't what's
Speaker 5: the I when you see the project everything, I have
Speaker 5: not seen it yet.
Speaker 2: It's this tube.
Speaker 5: And you talk to the Hends like it's like Oscar
Speaker 5: and there or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know the name of the Kira.
Speaker 2: I guess it's the name project It's Project Kira is
Speaker 2: apparently some anime thing. And then you can have a
Speaker 2: guy with tattoos, you can have a woman in a
Speaker 2: business suit. It's like yeah, and it's just like I
Speaker 2: feel like if you try and not that they're selling
Speaker 2: its concept, you try and buy one that should put
Speaker 2: you on a list. So I did.
Speaker 5: I did walk by that that really grows sex robot and.
Speaker 2: Tell me everything.
Speaker 5: I had a hard time looking at it, like I
Speaker 5: like walked up to this side and I looking at
Speaker 5: it hands and it just looked like a corpse.
Speaker 2: It's so simple, what is this? This is a robot
Speaker 2: that looks kind of like a woman and you aumence,
Speaker 2: so we're talking real doll style, yes, okay.
Speaker 5: And allegedly this is something that you can have intercourse with.
Speaker 5: And I walked up to the side and it has
Speaker 5: a very realistic looking skin texture, but its head moves
Speaker 5: like a like a like like an old Disney animatronic
Speaker 5: and it has like an LLLM that's trying to talk
Speaker 5: and move its mouth. And I stood there for about
Speaker 5: ten seconds and I had to leave. I walked around
Speaker 5: the corner and they had the little AI avatar section
Speaker 5: which wasn't working because of the Wi Fi. Nice but
Speaker 5: it's like the AA avatar that you can talk to
Speaker 5: you which is synced to the little like jack Off robot,
Speaker 5: so you can you can you can talk to talk
Speaker 5: to the AI and then it can.
Speaker 2: Jack you off.
Speaker 3: That is a hell of a good cave accessory. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and it also the jack Off robot.
Speaker 5: This company's been around to the twenty fourteen the jet well, no,
Speaker 5: this is this is this is still the Love Sense
Speaker 5: Love Both booth and they've been run for a while.
Speaker 5: Did it did not look that good? But yes, but
Speaker 5: it connects to games as well, connect online gaming.
Speaker 2: Wow, So so it really is you want to Tetris? Well,
Speaker 2: you know, if they can connect.
Speaker 3: That trying to find a way into making the Tetris
Speaker 3: movie for years, you were going to be like They've
Speaker 3: been trying to fu Tetris for years.
Speaker 2: We never will.
Speaker 3: This is the plot of the Tetris.
Speaker 5: Mean, finally, if they can connect it to like Final
Speaker 5: Fantasy Vin remake and have and and have Cloud, then
Speaker 5: maybe they could have a real product on their hands.
Speaker 2: Well maybe they should do that because Cloud has a
Speaker 2: wonderful cross dressing section and also Cloud completely autistic and no,
Speaker 2: not horny at all. No, I think that whole game
Speaker 2: is trying to avoid having sex. I think I think you.
Speaker 5: I think you would would be a great addition. This
Speaker 5: is so like but like I'm not going to judge
Speaker 5: them for the sex, but whatever. But it's also just
Speaker 5: like the idea that you looked at it and immediately
Speaker 5: faced revulsion. It made me feel and not in like
Speaker 5: a not just like a Christian moral in a judgment,
Speaker 5: more mostly well a little bit, but most mostly in
Speaker 5: like an uncanny valley way, like if if if I
Speaker 5: was engaged in this thing, it would it would feel
Speaker 5: kind of like necrophilia.
Speaker 2: Oh god, and realistic skin is not a phrase that
Speaker 2: I like saying sex have been a thing for a while,
Speaker 2: But yes, it's just the.
Speaker 5: Which but for me that increases if it's just a
Speaker 5: limp object. Then it is a necrophilia thing, but it's simple.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Just the fact that it's trying to kind of behave
Speaker 5: human I think makes it makes more makes that reaction,
Speaker 5: that makes that negative Uncanny Valley reaction a bit stronger,
Speaker 5: very strange.
Speaker 2: And also they put them in odd places. It sounds
Speaker 2: like they don't have a Do they have a sex
Speaker 2: pavilion here? No? Not, it's in like the health tech section.
Speaker 2: Notoriously right, there was a best in show that was
Speaker 2: rescinded for us, Yeah, bustin show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for a woman sex toy that.
Speaker 1: Was like, not Lioness, it was Laura de Carlo, that's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so they've had this love hate relationship. I
Speaker 3: mean when I was sex timing twenty some years ago,
Speaker 3: this was oh my Bob was always a thing. Well,
Speaker 3: and it was being held at the same time as
Speaker 3: the adult show well yeah, and so people would there
Speaker 3: would be this kind of crossover, and you could go
Speaker 3: to the party sometimes at AVN and stuff.
Speaker 2: You had to see it.
Speaker 1: I had to walk past some of the AVI and
Speaker 1: like expo ares and the booze to get to a
Speaker 1: Lenovo briefing. One time. Wow rules it was fun.
Speaker 5: Other times I'm so sad. I'm so sad I missed it.
Speaker 2: I like the idea that they all these staid kind
Speaker 2: of like tech executives seven to walk past the ass
Speaker 2: plus the five thousand have you it was with their
Speaker 2: bums is fine. No, it's just very strange to have
Speaker 2: it like sticking in the middle of like the various
Speaker 2: health tracking l MS powered.
Speaker 1: There was a party.
Speaker 5: Absolutely it was AI or l l M powered because
Speaker 5: it's an l I mean, it's the at least like
Speaker 5: the anime one was more interactable. Even so the Project
Speaker 5: Dave it was, Yeah, I meant the sex Box. No,
Speaker 5: I'm talking about that. Yeah, because it has it has
Speaker 5: it has it has the AI avatar hooked up to
Speaker 5: the jacking off the machine and yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: So this is like in the N E S where
Speaker 3: you had the robot that would pick up the spinning
Speaker 3: top and it would match the action on the screen.
Speaker 3: So you had a physical robot, you had a virtual robot.
Speaker 2: It's just like the original N E S.
Speaker 5: Yeah, basically with fucking cuck Hunt and it's like it's
Speaker 5: like it's like right next to like three like smart Watch.
Speaker 2: That was the thing I was saying, that's exactly it's
Speaker 2: like you've got.
Speaker 3: For the smart watch, booth and show boss.
Speaker 2: I'm really sorry, just stare at you need you need
Speaker 2: to find us. Yeah, we're right by the Bonamax.
Speaker 3: The CMO really wants pictures of the booth frontage before
Speaker 3: we tear down. Can you make sure you get a
Speaker 3: picture of this? Try not to get the fuck bought
Speaker 3: the shot.
Speaker 1: That's but to your point, Corey, the ct A has
Speaker 1: struggled with what it wants to do with this sex
Speaker 1: technology because we know that with everything sex cells R
Speaker 1: and sex tech well like advance faster than any other
Speaker 1: kinds of tech. Forget about people with accessibility needs right,
Speaker 1: and so the CTA knows it needs to cover up
Speaker 1: some space, but it won't give you a dedicated because
Speaker 1: it somehow wants to be family friendly.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's so ridiculous.
Speaker 2: All of the kids.
Speaker 1: Now we've turned into basically the like games Fares or
Speaker 1: the toy fest. That's true in New.
Speaker 2: York because of all I wish, No I will push back.
Speaker 2: I agree with you, that's not enough.
Speaker 1: If you want to make this a need more fun.
Speaker 2: The goofy dipshit show.
Speaker 1: It should be.
Speaker 2: I would love to. I would love to see some
Speaker 2: useless crap that's just kind of funny.
Speaker 3: But that's the International Pavilions because they are like the
Speaker 3: Country of Turkey sponsors twenty entrepreneurs to show up. They're
Speaker 3: each weirder than the last. A lot of them are
Speaker 3: really delightful to give them credit. Were not toys.
Speaker 2: They were like, we made a photonic cell, we made
Speaker 2: a solar panel thing, we made specific software for this,
Speaker 2: that and the other, which is awesome. And those people rock.
Speaker 2: Not fun to talk about a podcast, but very funny
Speaker 2: to look at and be like, oh cool, someone's useful hair.
Speaker 2: And then there is just stuff. It is the listeners
Speaker 2: already like, oh it's I was just saying, there's nothing here.
Speaker 2: You fucking come to this and you do a podcast, asshole.
Speaker 2: But it's just frustrating because I love a dude that
Speaker 2: like having Michael on to show us the clicks was
Speaker 2: nice because it was a thingy and it was so cool,
Speaker 2: and also I really do like it and I love
Speaker 2: my corn. If it was bad, I would have been
Speaker 2: in a real If it was like, actually ship, I
Speaker 2: would have genuinely been sad because I would have had
Speaker 2: to find a way to trash it with.
Speaker 1: I did avoid him for a year after trying the
Speaker 1: first click s keyboard.
Speaker 5: Oh oh yeah, clicks clicks was that shit? Yaers again
Speaker 5: this year?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we just had Michael on and we liked the
Speaker 2: clicks thing personally the case not for me, but nevertheless,
Speaker 2: it's like, at least you fucking tried. And the other
Speaker 2: thing that pisses me off is clicks proves that other
Speaker 2: people could just because Android can fit into all sorts
Speaker 2: of things, you could be trying all sorts of weird
Speaker 2: fucking smartphone shit. You could have weird like a tube
Speaker 2: smartphone kinds of tubes that this one when we have
Speaker 2: a smartphone tube. But no, it's like, how do we
Speaker 2: charge you for using the chat gptap?
Speaker 3: I mean, there was a time where you go to
Speaker 3: like Guanhou and you go to the big mall and
Speaker 3: there'd be the phone that.
Speaker 2: Was shaped like a Marlboro Hell yeah yeah, and that
Speaker 2: ship rocks. We should have more of that. But no,
Speaker 2: it's like it's it feels like the most nihilistic cis ever.
Speaker 1: It's just people being like I feel it gets worse
Speaker 1: from here. I feel it's just the beginning.
Speaker 2: So my theory is that actually gets better from here,
Speaker 2: but it gets the apocalypse is so much worse because
Speaker 2: if you look at this and you realize how much
Speaker 2: LM crap there is, yes, then.
Speaker 5: They realize, I think this is a I think this
Speaker 5: is a dip year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like this will be because Corey, to your point, Oh,
Speaker 2: the commodity of LMS just because the Chinese models are cheap,
Speaker 2: but doesn't mean that their margin positive. That's also true,
Speaker 2: zupe zgine. I forget which one went went public and
Speaker 2: they like lost. They spent three hundred million dollars in
Speaker 2: or two hundred and something million dollars in six months
Speaker 2: and made twenty seven million dollars in revenue. Not great?
Speaker 2: Do that? Yeah, I mean like I could. If you
Speaker 2: want me to lose two undred million dollars call me.
Speaker 3: Well, look, if you have three million dollars and you're
Speaker 3: expecting a twenty some million dollar return, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 3: I'll give you a twenty eight million dollar return.
Speaker 2: Nice, how would you do it?
Speaker 3: I will just keep all but twenty eight million, right right?
Speaker 2: Okay, it's no, it's like investing in like vineyards, like yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's and it's like all of these companies that rely
Speaker 2: on LM's going away because they're going to get more
Speaker 2: expensive and it's going to be apocalyptic. I think twenty
Speaker 2: twenty seven could be like a really fucked up youf
Speaker 2: many reasons, but CEUs twenty twenty seven would be really fun, might.
Speaker 3: Be really but usually remind me what I wanted to
Speaker 3: talk about, which is Pete Wharton. We were talking about
Speaker 3: him yesterday. So Pete Warton is an old school hardware
Speaker 3: hacker specializing in machine learning and finding cool like one
Speaker 3: of the people who was like figuring out that you
Speaker 3: could use GPUs to do machine learning a million years ago.
Speaker 3: And he just demoed on his blog a local AI
Speaker 3: voice agent running on a system on a chip that
Speaker 3: costs less than ten dollars. So he's got an SoC.
Speaker 3: It's like an eight dollar SoC.
Speaker 2: You can put it in on EVA.
Speaker 1: You.
Speaker 3: The demo he built was a button you that on
Speaker 3: your dishwasher and you smack the button and you say,
Speaker 3: my filter is clogged, and it goes through the manual
Speaker 3: and it finds the relatives just on the chip. And
Speaker 3: it's all on chip, and we are again total cost
Speaker 3: of goods under ten dollars.
Speaker 1: He built a whole model for this is his own model. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it all it does is reference and manual.
Speaker 2: All that is the kind that is the scale of
Speaker 2: task it can do. So he can. That's why it's
Speaker 2: like they could do other kinds of tasks.
Speaker 3: But he's like, I can build you an eight dollar
Speaker 3: SoC with a model running on it that will help
Speaker 3: you build your ikea furniture, whatever. All this kind of
Speaker 3: there's a lot of room at the bottom. Here is
Speaker 3: what I'm saying. And he has this other post. When
Speaker 3: I was looking for the post, I found another one,
Speaker 3: which the title says it all. I know we're in
Speaker 3: an AI bubble because nobody wants me crying emoji. So
Speaker 3: here's a guy who does real things that are absolutely sustainable,
Speaker 3: Like could you be revenue positive shipping AI models run
Speaker 3: on hardware that costs less than ten dollars? I bet
Speaker 3: you fucking could. Yeah, right, and and uh and like
Speaker 3: everyone's like, yeah, but the way we raise money is
Speaker 3: from punters who don't understand the technology and whose only
Speaker 3: way of assessing the upside is how much money we
Speaker 3: spend on it. This is the pile of shit and
Speaker 3: has a pony underneath it, right, And so we have
Speaker 3: to spend a lot of money to prove to them
Speaker 3: that we will make a lot of money. If we
Speaker 3: show them a thing that is.
Speaker 2: Profitable, because it's very cheap to make, they'll be like, well,
Speaker 2: there's no upside. I'm just really worried because even in
Speaker 2: the Indiego go years, Indiegogo was not everything. This is
Speaker 2: like AI has taken everything in people Anyone listening to
Speaker 2: this being like AI is this or that and the
Speaker 2: other like AI is taking over.
Speaker 1: No. The thing I can remember that most closely mirrors.
Speaker 1: This year was the year that was about the Internet
Speaker 1: of things.
Speaker 7: Everything so get annoying.
Speaker 1: I was so annoyed. I was just stop saying fucking
Speaker 1: internet of things.
Speaker 2: Oh, what's the term internet of shit? Now? The beacons
Speaker 2: I I beacons one million times. It's like, we will
Speaker 2: put an eye beacon that you're I want to device,
Speaker 2: like fucking Howard will put an ibacon hair Like it's
Speaker 2: fucking ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Where has it gone?
Speaker 2: Nowhere? No, it was just like mad lips like five
Speaker 2: G autonomous IoT.
Speaker 1: But but IoT is is similar in the sense that
Speaker 1: like it's also rappers for things. It's also like small
Speaker 1: little gadgets that don't do much and they're all e ways.
Speaker 1: Now it doesn't cost as much because of the like
Speaker 1: none of.
Speaker 2: The l because there's not a GPU service running in
Speaker 2: the fucking cloud for it. It's just very unfortunate. I
Speaker 2: think next ces could be kind of barren because of this,
Speaker 2: because it's very like, if there were other options, they'd
Speaker 2: be buying boots and I don't think that are.
Speaker 1: Or maybe they were like priced out because there was
Speaker 1: so much AI.
Speaker 2: That's very possible, But the thing is it didn't. It
Speaker 2: looked kind of sparse too, like there was a lot
Speaker 2: more walking room than ever I feel like.
Speaker 3: And three after the dotcom crash was pretty good. This
Speaker 3: is actually how was it. It was full of people
Speaker 3: doing weird and interesting things, none of which made a mark,
Speaker 3: I think, but it was it was a time in
Speaker 3: which if you came to see us, it was because
Speaker 3: you had done something very improbable in a time in
Speaker 3: which there was no tech money.
Speaker 2: That might be twenty twenty seven for real though, because
Speaker 2: even like LG with this kloid robot, it's like, hey,
Speaker 2: check this out, we're doing this thing. Well, we're not
Speaker 2: doing this thing, and you may be wondering if it
Speaker 2: does the thing we're talking about. It doesn't, but it's
Speaker 2: very slow at it and why do you want this? Well,
Speaker 2: you can't have it.
Speaker 1: I have a question for you. When you say it's bars,
Speaker 1: do you mean specifically some wholesome booth orp of.
Speaker 2: The Expost Center was fucking empty? And I don't just
Speaker 2: mean like it's the last day's I mean like there
Speaker 2: were just less things. There was less density. The usual
Speaker 2: dildo battery security camera area was really not present in
Speaker 2: the main hall in the same way. In fact, I
Speaker 2: found way more of those top side in a way
Speaker 2: that like I wouldn't usually. It's just very strange and
Speaker 2: I think there's a strain on venture capital money and money.
Speaker 2: Well south by Southwest last year the trade floor was
Speaker 2: a quarter of the size. Wow, and there was an
Speaker 2: entire row that was just massage guns. I saw. I
Speaker 2: saw an area of the Palazza way gambling would usually
Speaker 2: happen that was completely empty.
Speaker 3: That small worrying teapot, Yeah, ropes around it and they're
Speaker 3: like vacuuming.
Speaker 7: I wondered.
Speaker 1: The usually I ask you is the reason I asked
Speaker 1: you is because the West Hall and the LVCC Central
Speaker 1: Hall that this whole facelift. I don't know, if you
Speaker 1: see the Central Hall right this year, does it look different?
Speaker 1: I didd so different from last year. It is still
Speaker 1: kind of a slot. But because Central Hall is where
Speaker 1: Samsung and LG used to have their gigantic but right
Speaker 1: Samsung isn't there is doing the wind, So I think
Speaker 1: that contributes to feeling like there's not that much going
Speaker 1: on in the convention spaces, especially since Central Hall now
Speaker 1: too with the sort of remodel, looks much bigger and
Speaker 1: so you know, consequently like emptier and then has a
Speaker 1: lot more like glass windows light letting in light, which
Speaker 1: I love.
Speaker 2: It's nice.
Speaker 1: It's nice, but then also makes you feel like you
Speaker 1: can see daylight, and therefore it doesn't feel as packed
Speaker 1: and crowded and like that.
Speaker 2: And on top of the fact that a lot of
Speaker 2: the things are just like gone.
Speaker 1: The ELG wall display.
Speaker 2: Was so muted this I know, usually there's like this,
Speaker 2: like last year we have that giant transparent motherfucker, and
Speaker 2: I like the year with the big like curved spectacle.
Speaker 2: Unless you're a tractor, there's none. It's just I feel
Speaker 2: like I feel like we're years into just the Hubris
Speaker 2: Fest where it's just like, what if we didn't provide
Speaker 2: anything useful and jump to the latest trend. It's a shame.
Speaker 2: And as we come to the end of this first
Speaker 2: two hour block, I will just say I want to
Speaker 2: find cool stuff. And when we're back next year, which
Speaker 2: we will be, I hope we find more of it.
Speaker 2: And if you were someone with the CEA, when you're
Speaker 2: someone putting stuff here, please think of actual people because
Speaker 2: it's getting a little sad. But final words, Shelling, what
Speaker 2: one is your takeaway from this CS in general? Big question?
Speaker 1: Huh Yeah, I thought I had something to say and
Speaker 1: it's odd on my brain now, so I think I've
Speaker 1: run out of a RAM which everyone was in.
Speaker 2: Sorrying, well, everyone's running out of the Divendra was just
Speaker 2: on talking about the RAM crisis. But thank you for
Speaker 2: joining us, Thank you for having so many Engadget people,
Speaker 2: and we've had we had Christo and oh it's fucking
Speaker 2: great to like actually talk about consumer electronics. And we've
Speaker 2: of course had Garrison Davis and Mick could happen here.
Speaker 2: Thank you Garrison of course, and Corey Doctor will be
Speaker 2: joining us for the next episode as well.
Speaker 3: Excellent.
Speaker 2: Looking forward to it and I am at Zetron. You
Speaker 2: can please subscribe to my newsletter. Good Lord, I'm not
Speaker 2: doing a premium this week, so I need the money.
Speaker 2: But more important than that, of course, our dealy departed.
Speaker 2: Sean Paul Adams, who's a friend of the sweet friend
Speaker 2: of the show, passed last year. We're honoring him by
Speaker 2: getting you to donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium.
Speaker 2: His son is epleptic and his family would deeply appreciate
Speaker 2: you donations. Thank you for listening. We'll be back for
Speaker 2: one more two hour episode today, but I guess it'll
Speaker 2: be towards the end of the day either way. Thank
Speaker 2: you for listening. You've all been so wonderful. Send me
Speaker 2: your feedback. Go to the reddit I'm ed Zetron. Goodbye.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
Speaker 2: composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
Speaker 2: can check out more of his music and audio projects
Speaker 2: at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O. S
Speaker 2: O W s KI dot com. You can email me
Speaker 2: at easy at Better offline dot com or visit Better
Speaker 2: Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course,
Speaker 2: my newsletter I also really recommend you go to chat
Speaker 2: dot where's youreaed dot at to visit the discord, and
Speaker 2: go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 6: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 6: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 6: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.