CES 2026: Part Two (Tuesday)

Summary

Better Offline – CES 2026 Part Two (Tuesday)

Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Date: January 7, 2026
Host: Ed Zitron
Guests: Edward Ongweso Jr. (Tech Bubble), Ed Niedermeyer (Autonocast), Matt Osawski, Henry Casey (CNN Underscored)

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Episode Overview

This episode continues Better Offline’s irreverent, critical coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from Las Vegas. Host Ed Zitron and his rotating panel of tech industry reporters dissect the latest trends, products, panels, and the “material slop” that tech companies are peddling this year—especially the collision of AI hype, dubious robotics, and increasingly useless “smart” consumer gadgets. With cutting wit and a ground-level presence at the show, the crew explores how tech promises the future while often delivering less-than-practical “innovation.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. State of CES 2026: Disenchantment & Déjà vu

Timestamps: 01:24–04:25, 10:22–12:47

• The mood among the hosts is a mix of CES fatigue and resignation at the endless parade of half-baked, janky prototypes and buzzword-heavy “innovation.”
• Ed Zitron recounts miserable experiences with smart glasses: expensive, ineffective, and blurry—“Who the fuck is this actually for?” (02:16)
• The sense of nostalgia for an earlier CES era: “It felt like about 10 years ago, CES, you'd see something here and then when it came out, it'd be complete. Now it's just they release everything in alpha.” (04:38, Zitron)

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2. Smart Glasses & Wearables – (Still) Searching for a Reason

Timestamps: 02:16–03:46, 09:43–11:23, 52:11–54:01

• Smart glasses widely panned as useless, overpriced, clunky, or simply not ready for consumers.
  • “I tried several... it was blurry... $1,200. I'm like, oh, great... who the fuck is this actually for?” (02:16, Zitron)
  • Matt Osawski notes most functionalities promised for years remain theoretical: “They never really fucking see them in real life.” (10:22)
• Industry panels trumpet AI and wearables as “the next big thing,” yet panelists are skeptical it’ll move beyond niche or vanity use.
• The only real mass market driver: secret recording and surveillance, especially post-pandemic (52:47, Osawski)
• Notable moment: Ed Zitron describes demoing a pair that used a malfunctioning finger ring for control—“you had to like violently smack your... smashing my aura ring with my thumb and it was not working” (03:58).

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3. Robots, AI Companions, and the Specter of “Agentic” Tech

Timestamps: 05:35–08:46, 19:06–26:29, 32:34–40:02

• CES is saturated with consumer robot demos—everything from “Boston Dynamics-style” dogbots in hospitals to home assistant robots and digital-nanny gadgets.
• Persistent disconnect between robotics that works (factory, Roomba) and attempts to inject “AI agency” into products for aging and childcare.
  • On robots in care: "You know, my poor grandmother... she liked being called on the telephone, people. Yeah, yeah, it's like someone's my dad going and visiting her. Like, what's going to help your kid? Talking to them and asking questions..." (43:33, Zitron)
• A harsher critique: The fantasy of “AGI butlers” is little more than a rebranded vision of slavery. “[Elon Musk is] selling the idea slavery. Like, that's literally the vision, right?... It is slavery.” (22:04, Niedermeyer)
• Use cases rarely survive basic questioning; “agentic” just means “you can talk to a chatbot,” not true autonomy: “What's the part of it not you... well, like, it had, you know, there's a camera inside and it can see what food you have there... that's not an agent but word, okay.” (27:13, Ongweso Jr.)

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4. AI Data Delusions & the Limits of LLMs

Timestamps: 14:44–18:59, 29:12–30:45

• Industry hype cycles are pivoting from “AI everything” to “digital twins,” “world models,” and now quantum—often in search of new demand for high-margin GPUs.
• The panel exposes how companies claim to solve every problem “with enough data” but cannot (and will not) specify how much data would actually be required.
  • “Next time someone says, with enough data, ask them how much, and ask them to get specific, because they don't have a fucking answer.” (29:12, Zitron)
• Consumer AI “agentic” products, from health devices to kitchen gadgets, often amount to nothing more than rehashing the same basic analytics—just with a chatbot face.

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5. Tech for Kids, Subscription Creep, & “Agentic” Toys

Timestamps: 32:42–39:47

• AI “friend” toys and “agentic” dolls, marketed as emotional companions for children, raise serious ethical red flags and risk replacing imagination with subscription-based, personality-driven LLMs.
• “They want like agentic AI in every single toy... Like you're not just going to get like a bare piece of plastic ever again... so they can subscribe you.” (34:54, Ongweso Jr.)
• Notable exchange:
  • “If I had a robot walk up to me in my house and go, you need to lift some weights. I beat the everliving shit out of it.” (21:36, Zitron)

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6. Auto Industry Tech: Digital Dashboards & RoboTaxis

Timestamps: 56:02–63:39, 79:04–83:49, 113:52–116:12

• The push for increasingly elaborate dashboard displays, including AI-powered full-windshield HUDs, is met with skepticism about safety and utility: “I want a window.” (61:22, Zitron)
• Industry is seeking a “software-defined vehicle,” maximizing flexibility for updates but often delivering feature bloat and distraction.
• Autonomous vehicles and robo-taxis (Waymo, Zoox) technically impressive but billions deep in unprofitable “bleed.” Operating costs, edge cases, regulations, and practical safety hurdles discussed.
  • “[Robotaxi companies] are not yet making money... They're scaling very aggressively... burning somewhere on the order of $2 billion a year.” (114:36, Niedermeyer)

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7. Actual Useful Tech: The Rare Glimmers

Timestamps: 65:56–70:59, 90:04–93:47

• Amid the slop, some genuine innovations: wireless TV brackets (charging + mounting), robust battery packs, and Samsung’s new projector with automatic correction steal the show for Henry Casey.
  • “Samsung's Freestyle plus... it auto corrected around to a rectangle on top of the curtain... I was like whoa.” (90:03, Casey)
• Regular TVs, projectors, and functional wearables still have practical appeal—if only as incremental upgrades.

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8. Hype, Gimmicks & the Pickle Debacle

Timestamps: 95:55–103:20

• The “Pickle” smart glasses—a “soul computer” remembering everything—becomes a live case study of venture vaporware and overpromising at CES.
  • “If you call anything a soul computer... straight to jail. Fucking right down you go.” (96:24, Zitron)
  • Online backlash from industry stalwarts underlines how skepticism is now open and vocal.

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Notable Quotes

• On Smart Glasses: “Who the fuck is this actually for? I'm just kind of lost.”
  — Ed Zitron (02:16)

• On the state of tech demos: “Technology is not cutting edge unless it's janky, right? ... Cutting edge has become this term that we think of as just, like, good. But really the definition of it is not fully developed.”
  — Ed Niedermeyer (04:25)

• On robot butler fantasies: “The man is a South African and a racist. And like, he's selling the idea slavery. Like, that's literally the vision, right?”
  — Ed Niedermeyer (22:04)

• On data hype: “Next time... someone says, with enough data, ask them how much, and ask them to get specific, because they don't have a fucking answer.”
  — Ed Zitron (29:12)

• On AI toys: “They want like agentic AI in every single toy so it becomes like a normal thing... so they can subscribe you.”
  — Edward Ongweso Jr. (34:54)

• On auto industry dashboards: “I want a window.”
  — Ed Zitron (61:22)

• On the spectacle at CES: “You can sell them slop. Because part of it is the spectacle, the prestige. 'I have the new tech thing.' The fact that it's janky and it doesn't work. This is exactly what's happening with Tesla Autopilot.”
  — Ed Niedermeyer (24:26)

• On Robot Vacuums: “If you're listening from Roborock, your shit sucks.”
  — Ed Zitron (108:54)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | |------------------------------------------|-------------------| | CES 2026, mood & smart glasses | 01:24–04:25 | | Robotics, AI companions & age-tech | 05:35–08:46 | | Industry buzzwords & hype (“world models,” digital twins, quantum) | 14:44–18:59 | | Data hunger, LLM critique | 29:12–30:45 | | Toy & child AI “agents,” social context | 32:42–39:47 | | Auto dashboards, robo-taxis | 56:02–63:39; 79:04–83:49; 113:52–116:12 | | Useful/non-useful product round-up | 65:56–70:59; 90:04–93:47 | | The Pickle “soul computer” saga | 95:55–103:20 | | Closing, open skepticism, funding crisis | 113:52–124:21 |

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Tone & Style

The panel maintains a sardonic, often expletive-laden tone (true to the personalities and brand), balancing deep industry knowledge with the eye-rolling skepticism of weary veterans. They call out bullshit directly, interrogate the real-world value of touted innovations, and ground their critique in personal anecdotes, hands-on demos, and practical consumer sense.

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Conclusion

If you’re wondering what’s actually going on at CES—beyond glossy press releases and staged keynotes—this episode is a bracing, funny, and highly informative listen. The hosts interrogate the gulf between marketing promises and what people actually need, dissect the self-reinforcing tech hype cycle, and expose both the spectacle and the scams. Through it all, they occasionally find authentic incremental progress—but keep coming back to the question: “Does this really solve a problem, or is it just more slop?”

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Memorable Closing Quote:
“They should have a cheap section. They should literally have a cheap section of this show. Like a below 300 bucks.”
— Ed Zitron (92:32)

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For further engagement:

• To see more CES impressions, check out the Tech Bubble newsletter & Autonocast.
• Support the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium, as recommended by Ed Zitron.
• Email feedback to ezeteroffline.com; Discord and Reddit links via BetterOffline.com.

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Transcript

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[Ed Zitron]

You are bearing witness to a great becoming.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

We're back.

[Ed Zitron]

It's better offline. Better offline, that's right. It's our second day of coverage of the Consumer Electronics show here in beautiful scenic, rustic Las Vegas. And we're here for two 2 hour long episodes today. This being the first, of course, and I am of course your host, Ed Zitron and the king of pigs, the Dale Cooper of podcasting. We've got an open bar, we've got tacos and places to relax with journalists and good lord, have we all seen some crap. Our first contestants are the remarkable Edward Onguesta of the tech Bubble newsletter.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Ed, hello.

[Ed Zitron]

And of course we've got Ed Neidermeyer, the author and of course he's the co host of the autonocast. Howdy. And we've got Gay Davis. That could happen here. How you doing?

[Matt Osawski]

The only non ed present.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, you've got three ads and one gare and I think that that the mathematics works there. I was at the Convention center. Today I walk through two halls in the space of a morning. I pray for death. But I'm going to start with the fact that I think smart glasses are evil. I tried several ones of them and there was one where I put them on and it's meant to be. You meant to look at your photos in there. You meant to listen to music and all this, and it was blurry. I just go, yeah, it's really blurry. And the guy goes, yeah, and just looks at me. I'm like, you know, he's like, yeah, you know, I'm like, how much? $1,200. I'm like, oh, great. He's like, yeah, but that's with discounts. And it's just like, who the fuck. I know that there's the whole thing about assistive technologies that's cool and all, but it's like, who the fuck is this actually for? I'm just kind of lost.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I had a similar feeling. There was a lot of times I would come across assistive tech that'd be like, this is interesting. And then I get introduced to the rest of the ecosystem, which itself is dubious. Or there are other additions or features that don't really seem to need to be grafted on. I mean, I think similarly with smart glasses. You know, I feel like the only ones I saw that I was interested in were some that allowed you to hear better and functioned as like a hearing aid. But then almost, yeah, it's like, you know, okay, if you. If you really don't want to wear a hearing aid, you know, if you're really self conscious about that. Even though we have invisible ones.

[Ed Zitron]

But yeah, I saw these even.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

There's an app and an ecosystem you have to get locked into.

[Ed Zitron]

The worst ones I saw, and I hate to shit talk a specific company, but when do it is the even G2 as what they were. You put them on and they had like a. Looked like the Pip boy. It was like green and black.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And I had this ring. You had to put a ring on and control it and the ring didn't work. Like, you had to like violently smack your. Smack your finger. Like, you. You can't see this. You're listening to a podcast. But I'm just like smashing my aura ring with my thumb and it was not working. And I turned to them and went, yeah, it's not really working. They just went, yeah, you know, it's just. It rocks to put our technology where you're just like, ah, you know, ah, mate, you know, it just. They Fucking suck. I don't know, mate, what to tell.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

You, but, like, technology is not cutting edge unless it's janky. Right? I mean, that's kind of part of the deal. Like cutting edge has become this term that we think of as just like, good. But really the definition of it is that it's like not fully developed.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And it's. It used to be. Maybe I'm just, I'm having some nostalgia here. Maybe it's not true, but it felt like about 10 years ago, CES, you'd see something here and then when it came out, it'd be complete. Now it's just they release everything in alpha.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

We're living in the world that that Elon Musk create. I mean, I was going to. Not to be reductive, but I was.

[Ed Zitron]

Literally going to say, you're an Elon Musk head. A big. A big Elon. Elon Stan. And yeah, he really has ushered in the era of just bullshit.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, like, like, I mean, if we live in a world where you can promise, you know, specifically, like your car will be able to do level five, this is like a very specifically, you know, defined thing and you can get away with was saying end of the year, 10 years in a row, which is where we're at now. It'll be. It'll actually be the 10 year anniversary in the fall.

[Ed Zitron]

That's nice.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like, these are the people. People see these things happen and they're like, well, why not me?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, why should I fucking bother? Yeah. So, Ed, you've been on the floor. What you see today, what kind of.

[Matt Osawski]

What kind of cramp?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I mean, I saw a lot of stuff that was categorized around, let's say, age, tech, you know, so the. So the goal here is you have AI companion bots or chat bots that you speak to. You have smart homes and surveillance systems that constantly log your information and give people away from you.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Inside, into your home. You're generating as much data as possible to feed into something that can analyze it. I saw this tag.

[Ed Zitron]

I saw like a Boston Dynamics looking ass dog robot thing. And it was by this very, I think you should leave style thing of like a guy who'd fallen out of a hospital bed. I'm gonna pull this up just so you can see this. So if you see here like this guy has fallen out of his bed and the dog is just looking at him, it says D Cloak brain. He's just sitting, just lying on the floor. Now, I get that there's probably a reason like this, but Are you saying that every hospital is just gonna be stalked by Boston Dynamic stocks going, yes, he's dead, he's fallen out of. Is that cheaper than a person I am.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Are. So is this, is this being aimed at hospitals or is that like consumers?

[Ed Zitron]

It was not clear because there were tons of other use cases as well that were very vague, like old person, neighborhood watch. What's that dog going to do to me? I'll kick it so hard it flies. Yeah, well, I'll send it to hell.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, I mean like the whole thing of selling robots to consumers is really interesting because, you know, all of the successful robots that, that exist really are not consumer facing. They exist in factories, these very like controlled environments. They do the same task over and over and over again.

[Ed Zitron]

We know how to make forward, right?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, exactly. And like a human home is not, you know, a constraint. I mean it's constrained.

[Josh Whalen]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But like a lot of random stuff happens there relative to say a factory and like a Roomba is something that you can kind of work if all your floors are perfectly flat and you don't have transitions. And you know, but even that, like that's a successful product class, relatively speaking. And yeah, and it's really the only one in, in consumer facing robots. And actually iRobot went, went under, so.

[Henry Casey]

Right.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Why do you think, why is there this constant attempt to reinvent it or to re, you know, rediscover this path that ends in, that goes down a.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Dead end so well. So I think the reason, the reason that, that robots are being sold to consumers is because they know that consumers don't understand them. I, you know, you mentioned all this age tech, like selling sophisticated data driven technology to old people. Why do you do that? Yes, there are some needs there, but also, you know, wealthy people will buy it without really thinking too hard about it.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, when I talked with them, they were, you know, with a lot of these firms, they're like, well actually it's supposed to only be sold to like nursing homes and larger businesses. But yeah, sometimes people buy them individually because they're really concerned about their family members. So I think, yeah, that similar dynamic where it's like, you know, if you know it and also if you want to take advantage of it, you probably just can't buy one for your, you know, for your home, for your grandparents.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Do you see any robots, see any, anything robotic today?

[Matt Osawski]

I walked past the robot that you showed, but I've not really been looking for products on show floor. I've been mostly been going back and forth to panels and keynotes.

[Ed Zitron]

What'd you say? Tell me about some panels.

[Matt Osawski]

I went to the, like the cta, the Consumer Technology Association.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure.

[Matt Osawski]

I'm a professional.

[Ed Zitron]

I also don't know.

[Matt Osawski]

I know. I know who runs this convention. I went, I went to their keynote this morning and they brought on, like, a few, like, CEOs from other, other, other companies. Like, they, they had, they had the Nvidia guy on at the end. What?

[Ed Zitron]

Is anything interesting or is it just like, a lot of word slot?

[Matt Osawski]

No, he. He was, he was talking with the CEO of, I'm going to say Siemens.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Matt Osawski]

And they were talking about, like, digital. The use of digital twins in manufacturing for, like, so, like these large. These large, like the complex simulations.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Matt Osawski]

So they talked a bit. They were also talking a lot about the movement towards Quantum, how this is, this is, this is the next thing. Because we're kind of getting tired with the AI stuff.

[Henry Casey]

Right.

[Matt Osawski]

So Quantum is where they're going to be moving to, like the new hype thing. I'm guessing next ces, we're going to see a lot more Quantum stuff, but they have this CES Foundry event space to set up specifically about merging AI and Quantum, and that opens on Wednesday. So we're gonna have to check that out. But no, and they, they did mention smart glasses during the keynote. One of the few, one of the few products that the actual, like the ces, like, guy like Gary, I think is the name who like, actually mentioned was a Persona. Smart Glasses for tutoring. And like, I've tried on smart glasses at this show before. I haven't tried, not this year yet. Like, the auto translation ones were always kind of interesting.

[Ed Zitron]

Those ones always seem, like, useful, but it's like you never really fucking see them in real life.

[Matt Osawski]

They're very. You don't see them in real life. They're usually. The resolution is pretty low. These things are going to get better over time. But there was another CEO that they, they brought on and I apologize, I can't. Can't remember his name, but it was during the first keynote Tuesday morning. And talking a lot about how wearable tech is going to make a big. Is going to make a big comeback because all of these wearables are now smart enabled. And you're going to have the AI in your ring, in your glasses, in everything you're wearing. Your watch is going to start learning more about your Life. And those AIs are going to learn about how the real world actually works, which allows them to be smarter and more Useful and help us out in a whole bunch of new ways. And so they were talking about how like, you know, Fitbit first was a CES like, you know, thing years ago, and wearables since then have some success, but have kind of. Kind of, has kind of been more gimmicky. And they're talking about how like, wearables are going to become like a major, A major, A major thing now with. That's with the smart enabled stuff.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Right.

[Matt Osawski]

But yeah, and it's the other thing that both, both Gary, the CTA guy and the Siemens guy reiterated on a lot was like, electricity defined the last, last generation.

[Ed Zitron]

Fucking.

[Matt Osawski]

I will illuminate the next. And this was, this was. I've heard this a lot this morning.

[Ed Zitron]

So electricity defined the last generation.

[Matt Osawski]

Like, like, like the last century, like the last hundred years. Like innovation was, was, was because of, like, electricity. This was, this was like the thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Matt Osawski]

The next thing is, is a. And the coolest thing happened during, during this, the Siemens opening keynote where he was like, you know, 120 or however many years ago, there was no electricity. And then all the lights in the convention center, like, turned off, like for, for the, for the show. Everything went black. Including. They didn't think about this, including the teleprompter.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Oh, no.

[Matt Osawski]

So it was this like, real, like big dramatic. It was this big dramatic moment and like, and then he like, paused for like 30 seconds because he didn't know what to say next. And someone ran on stage with a binder of his script so he could read the paper as he introduced how electricity, like, entered the world and like, illuminated everything. And then the lights came back on and it was just this. It was this beautiful CES moment.

[Ed Zitron]

See, I would have just. If I was there with you, I would have been like, quick, I'm going to lie on the ground. I need you to scream at the top of your lungs. He's dead. He's been murdered. Who did this? Lock the doors. There's a murder.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

That's.

[Ed Zitron]

That's really good though. And no one thought this through.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, it was.

[Ed Zitron]

Remember the fucking 15 words he needed to. He's. I just.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And I love, I love that. It also just proved that, right, that like, electricity is still actually quite important. It's very important. Also, the AI isn't going to keep the lights on.

[Matt Osawski]

As useful as all these AI things are. Sometimes you need a binder with paper on it also.

[Ed Zitron]

I just can't. Can you not remember what you had to say next? It's not like it's not like you were saying anything that mattered. It's just you. He went, electricity defined the next generation AI Will.

[Matt Osawski]

This is the industrial AI revolution, Ed Physical AI, right. That's what there is.

[Ed Zitron]

World models.

[Matt Osawski]

This is one of the interesting things though actually I'm seeing is beyond the lofty things about Quantum. We are seeing, I think a movement back towards the material and the way that AI is being talked about here because the past two years AI was much more speculative now that in some ways they kind of had this cultural dominance. You have this emphasis on manufacturing. And this is something that the CTA guys talked about during their keynote. For the first time in a few years, we're really emphasizing the manufacturing side of things and trying to bring these lofty AI things pretty down to earth on. How is this actually going to help on industrial use cases and could they explain. Well, see, that's the beautiful thing about cs. That's something that we get to all discover together throughout this weekend.

[Ed Zitron]

And this is this world model shit. Elon's talking about the digital twin thing.

[Matt Osawski]

That's really what they were talking about specifically with the Navidia and Siemens conversation between their two guys specifically about the.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Digital twin spurring the interest in world models. This idea that, okay, there are limits to LLMs, even if we are LLM savior or fanatics and we think it's going to save the world, we need to find another way to embody it without embodying it.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, essentially. So Yann Lecun's whole thing is like. Yeah, like language is not sufficient to create real general intelligence. Like the whole thing is animated by the idea that AGI is a thing that we can achieve and that basically LLMs have proven that language alone can. Can create like a simulacrum of intelligence up to a certain point, but like child pornography, the world around it, which is not just made up of language.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's so interesting that in the response to being like, oh, we reached all these milestones that we thought would open up the doors. The solution isn't that we are going. We need to radically rethink it. It's like, actually we need to. We just need a little bit more juice.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I think this world model bullshit and the digital I've been hearing so great thing about running a PR firm in tech is you hear a lot of terms repeatedly. I've heard world models for 10 years. I've heard. Sorry, not world models, Digital twins. Digital twins was like. Like it was a simulation thing kind of.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But I see you a little.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. But then during the metaverse time, it was just like, it's a space that's the same. World models are just. They're a scam. Like, I just like Fei. Fei Li. Everyone talks very fondly about her spatial intelligence and all that. Where the fuck. Where's her product? Where's the thing she's done? Because World models, the reason they're pushing these in Digital twins is because it's another use for GPUs. I was talking to an analyst.

[Matt Osawski]

Well, yeah, that's why Nvidia was on stage when you were talking about, please.

[Ed Zitron]

God, keep buying the GPUs. Please God. Jensen Huang needs another leather jacket.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Funnily enough, he was wearing a thousand.

[Matt Osawski]

It was so shiny.

[Ed Zitron]

So he had the shiny mom.

[Matt Osawski]

It was shiny and it was firm scale.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, it was the scaly one. It was very hard looking.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's just very sad as well, because they're not saying that though. Because with. With LLMs, they're like GPUs. We need more of these. We need more power. With world models, they're just like digital twin copy simulation. And then the information mentioned this. Yes. They put out a story saying that Nvidia's Omniverse software. Yeah, I love saying it. That it was not making much money and they had to shut down the cloud because nobody wanted it and the software sucked. And it's just like they're running, they're out of ideas, but they're just getting up. It's like watching a pair of parents stay together for the kids. Like, yeah, we all love world models. Digital twins. Yeah, that's. Those are good.

[Josh Whalen]

Right?

[Ed Zitron]

We both know what this means.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

We could model a warehouse, couldn't we, Mr. Seaman? They.

[Matt Osawski]

They modeled an HD Hyundai shipyard.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

So in the auto industry, end is my question.

[Matt Osawski]

Every nut and bolt.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But. But like, this is not the problem is. Is that. Is that these digital twins for manufacturing, like you only. There's only so much demand for it.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, exactly.

[Matt Osawski]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like when you design a factory, like, that's a big effort and you make one and then you usually, you know, reproduce it. And so you're not doing that design like a bunch. Right. You want to get it right the first time. The tooling is so expensive.

[Ed Zitron]

But this, to answer actually a question you want with robots that what their thing is. And they kind of showed it with the Nvidia press yesterday, where it's like, oh, you could put the robot in a digital simulation and then you could do that. And then they stop talking, they just stop describing because they're like. And then the robot will be smart and able to deal with the real world. They don't really seem to link those two things together so precisely though they.

[Matt Osawski]

Talked a little bit about that specifically for the manufacturing. Those and being one of the uses for the digital twin stuff is that. And even putting AI in all the wearables is once they have enough data, both in the digital manufacturing, the AIs will know how to do it enough that we can make them run all physical manufacturing. Then you have AIs building robots who are building robots and like all, all of that, that sort of like automation stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Matt Osawski]

Is kind of how they referred to it. But it wasn't something they can, they like emphasized.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I also to your point, I hadn't thought about this until you said it, but yeah, what is the composition of demand gonna look like? Where it's like, yeah, I actually just need to do it once because these are highly like, I need to know how to my robot should operate in this specific circumstance. I need to know what the factory looks like. And then after that I'll just copy and paste it. Why should I use the software more than.

[Ed Zitron]

But that's actually a good point. Like what happens when you program the rope? Surely once the robot's done being programmed, do they have.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So that's, that's the whole point with, with, with the humanoid thing. The whole idea behind the humanoid thing is that you create a physical embodiment that, that has the versatility that a human body has and then you can continuously evolve the software for it so that it can eventually do anything really. In a lot of ways it's, it's a way to write like, you know, with LLMs, people find the limits of what. Right. The hallucinations, the unreliability, all those problems. This is a way of sort of repackaging the dream of universal capability, but like in this physical form.

[Ed Zitron]

But it's a dream though.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's.

[Ed Zitron]

It's a dream. Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

General, General robotics is not a thing. Generalized robotics is, is a big talking point right now. And like robots are getting more generally capable, but like people again, you know.

[Matt Osawski]

That'S how they're talking about it. It's like, how do you, how do you get like AI driven innovation? Like how can AI find new solutions that we wouldn't think of without the hallucination problem? And specifically using these models. They're like, if, when these models run long enough, they'll be able to improve how these factories or shipyards function in ways that LLMs simply can't as adjust to language model.

[Ed Zitron]

It always seems like it's just they will. Because I feel like we've heard this robot digital twin thing for a while. I feel like we've heard about robots. Everyone's shifting to robots now. Even China just delay. Actually, it was Hong Kong. Pardon me, is the Hong Kong. Yeah, I know. Just. Yeah, I'm gonna get killed by someone. No, they just delayed a robot ipoing over there because there's a bubble growing. This hasn't even launched. And they're like, yeah, mate, we're already at a bubble. We speed ran this one. I just think I, I saw the LG robot and they weren't, they didn't have the demo ready and it, they showed this video of this woman being like, hey robot, how are you doing? Because I'm great. You should work out. It was just. And it was like, thank you, thank you, Glorbo. Or whatever. It was called Body Shame, by the way. No, no, it was fun. No, it was funny. It was like it walked over with like 2 pound dumbbells and it was like, yeah, you should do.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Have you seen these lately?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it was close. And she was like, oh, if I didn't have you, I'd just be laying around all day.

[Matt Osawski]

Should I order more lay's potato chips for you? Oh, hog.

[Ed Zitron]

You look, you sweaty hog, get up off your. And then it was doing the squats with her and it was like a little bit more depth and it's just. I swear there is regulation against lying like that and LG is a public company, but it's just. What the fuck are you doing? Like when is this thing kind of come out? What is the plan with it?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And also it's a forward looking vision.

[Ed Zitron]

It's what we talk about yesterday. It's like, who the fuck actually needs this? If I had a robot walk up to me in my house and, and go, you need to lift some weights. I beat the everliving shit out of it. I'm not a violent person. But if like a machine decided to impose its will upon me with pathetic 2 pound dumbbells. I'm at fives. And just. It was so strange. And I tried to talk to someone over there about it and they didn't really have any answers and they couldn't even tell me when the demo would start. Very sad.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that like the leading sort of seller of right Again, Elon Musk with Optimus. Like, the man is a South African and a racist. And like, he's selling the idea slavery. Like, like that's, that's literally the vision, right? It's that we create these things. The software evolves to the point where it's human. It's essentially a mechanical human, and it just does everything for us and it transforms our economy and everything. And like, it's like you are just. This is, this is slavery. I wonder how much of sort of the political tides that are happening right now are, are sort of. Are sort of tied to this.

[Ed Zitron]

I feel like. Well, with the AGI conversation, no one ever wants to talk about the fact that is just slavery. Yeah, it's like, what if we had.

[Matt Osawski]

Except they're not people.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, exactly.

[Matt Osawski]

I will. I will be like, yeah, but like, they are people, though.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

No, no, but it's like if you make a conscious being.

[Matt Osawski]

Well, yeah, but it's not conscious.

[Ed Zitron]

But if, but if they made a conscious being with AI, eventually, eventually they can't do it. Like, but if you ever mention this to AGI, people that get really upset, like, it's not slavery. I'm like, you trapped a conscious being and bent it to your will. What do you. What would you call that? And they're like computer and. But with robots, I just think that they're just throwing shit at the wall. They're just like. I guess because the actual robot you'd want is something that can handle anything, which is an impossible idea. And also I will train it to be articulate and competent like a human. Have you met more than one person? Because people vary in their abilities to do stuff. Humanoid. The humanoid form is also not particularly efficient for the Every task.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No. And like creating a human, I mean, like the engineering of a human hand, which is what we get a lot of our versatility from, is like absolutely insane.

[Ed Zitron]

But I mean, I have a coordination disability, dyspraxia. And it's like, yeah, I don't know if you're doing a bunch of training data, which they like, oh, that's how we're going to do it. Training data, great. Are you going to make what's a perfect human? Are you going to get like eugenics level data? Like, what the fuck? How do you get perfect data? Are you going to get very data? What is good data? And no one ever asks these questions at the panels and no one ever gives an answer anyway.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I think, I think the way to think about like the consumer market or like the attempt to develop a consumer market for humanoid. But other, other robots in general is like slop. Because like it, the whole thing with, it's really hard to sell a robot to a car company. Like I went to, to Toyota and I went to the place where they test all of their robotics is a few years ago now. But like they're like, yeah, we buy every time a company comes out with a new robot, whatever, almost any kind. Like we test the shit out of it.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And the thing is, is that they, and I was like, like how many robots do you adopt? They're like well, not that many really. I said why? And they said well, once you start a car factory operating, if something breaks out, one piece breaks down, like the whole thing just stops and you're burning like millions of dollars a second and then you have to fly someone from the other side of the world. So like robustness to get value out of automation, it has to be really, really robust. And you know, that's why it's really hard to sell this stuff to companies is because they don't become dependent on something that's just going to break down and then they can't operate for like days with a consumer. You can sell them slop. Because part of it is the spectacle, the prestige. I have, I'm an early adopter, I have the new tech thing, the fact that it's janky and it doesn't work. This is exactly what's happening with Tesla Autopilot. It's something that looks self driving and has this prestige but it doesn't actually deliver the robustness and safety that, that you know, you need to like take a nap in the backseat.

[Matt Osawski]

This is the real, this is the real tension of the consumer electronics showcase because you have half of it trying to be directed, you know, for industries. Right. A lot of these like, you know, AI automation stuff is like for manufacturing. But the other side is the consumer electronics part where they're selling kind of, kind of janky things that don't work to a little bit like gullible people or people who want to believe in this like Jetsons vision. And you have both these things kind of working in tandem and when they rub up against each other it creates these like, these like cognitive frictions.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah. One thing that's also been interesting this year and last is seeing the stuff that would not be able to pass the sniff test for business to business or even regulatory oversight, but is sold to consumers with almost you know, like we're getting up to the edge of what might be a, theranos in the sense that they're saying, okay, with digital information, we can approach the limits of what's physically impossible and deliver that to you with a little bit of analytics, with a little bit of artificial intelligence, instead of relying on a really sophisticated technology that. Or biomedical tech that we just don't have.

[Ed Zitron]

I just think it's funny, though, because if the robots did what they said it. They did, it'd be kind of cool. I'd love a robot butler. I think. I think we can all agree. I just want a robot that brings me a Diet Coke and be honest.

[Matt Osawski]

But, like, you could have a regular butler.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't want to. Like, like, that's the thing. We get into the AGI conversation. I just want to. I just want to wrote. But even then it's like, thing.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But it's even an Aristotle.

[Matt Osawski]

Have you seen Black Butler?

[Ed Zitron]

What's that? Oh, no, I have actually seen Black Butler, the anime.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I would love, you know, like, a butler that would kill people for. Beat people up for me. That'd be sick.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And bet she didn't expect me to have seen Black Butler.

[Matt Osawski]

No, I. I figured we.

[Ed Zitron]

Baby. But this is the thing as well. It's like, even though I'm, like, joking around, like, oh, that'll be fun. It's like, not really. I can get. I can get off my ass and grab a diet.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, no, no. I've got a vacuum. It'll take me five minutes. Is not that bad.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

That's something I was seeing on the floor. It felt like a lot of use. Cases that people were offering for agents were actually. Oh, you know, it was just like convenience via a chatbot interface. You know, I would talk to people, they'd be like, this is AI agentic cooking. And it's like, what's the part of it not you. But then I know that's what I said. You know, I was like, what's the agentic part? And they're like, oh, well, like, it had, you know, there's a camera inside and it can see what food you have there. And then you have a list of recipes. I'm like, that's not an agent, but word. Okay. You know, we have other agents that are saying we do, you know, agentic health analysis. And it's like, what's the agent part? Well, it's like, well, you can talk to it about different things. Well, it's like, oh, that's not.

[Matt Osawski]

I will. I will not be happy until there's an AI in my Vitamix that Tells me how to make this smoothie, what the smoothie is going to do to my body.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Matt Osawski]

And what ingredients I need to get.

[Ed Zitron]

I need a robot to tell me I'm fat.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I saw.

[Ed Zitron]

Because my mind doesn't do that already.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

So one of my mortal enemy. Well, or recent water enemies. It's, you know, the makers of the Omnipod. And what's the Omnipod? It's. It's for. It's a diabetes piece of a wearable tech that, you know, pump. Yeah. Insulin. And they were, you know, they didn't. Off. They didn't say, hey, we, you know, we got AI in here. They were just there to advertise themselves. Right, right. But, you know, one reason I hate them, but I also think of them in contrast with everyone else, is. Is, you know, my partner's diabetic, and I see up close how often the device fails every single fucking day. But.

[Ed Zitron]

And that feels like a thing that we know about and should be able to solve.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But it's also like, as far as I can tell, they are never going up and saying, with AI, we can make it a little bit better.

[Ed Zitron]

That's nice.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

You know, but with every single other, you know, not. Not to be a fucking insolent show, but, you know, with almost every single piece of biomedical tech I saw today, this year so far and last year, everyone was saying, well, yeah, you know, like, there are a lot of inaccuracies. There are a lot of physical, physiological limitations. There's some physical limits, there's some chemical limits, but with artificial intelligence and with enough data collection, we can transcend those.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing. How much data? How much? Next time, if you are listening to this and you're at CS or any of you, three, and next time someone says, with enough data, ask them how much, and ask them to get specific, because they don't have a fucking answer. And the answer is they also don't.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Know what data they need.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, so. And the amount of data that you have is only part of it. The other part is constraining the problem space, Right? And we know this from the autonomous vehicle space, right? Like where Tesla says, well, this is going to work everywhere. And we have all this data from all these cars. And so it's going to work. And people buy. It's a narrative that makes intuitive sense.

[Ed Zitron]

Makes sense to a person, even though.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It'S not true, but it really isn't. Whereas, you know, at Zoox, they're now, you know, last year I got a ride on the strip. And now they're like all over the place. And they do, they're able to do that because they constrain the operating space. And, and especially with driving where it's like safety critical. Like, you have to be able to validate that safety to like a high degree. And if it's just operating everywhere, how do you do that? Like, you can only do it by constraining the level of complexity, by constraining the, the problem space. And so, and so like, for all of these AI things, the question to ask is like, right, like if someone is saying like, we're just going to solve all the problems, you're going to solve it none. Right. And for me, like the test of any AI product is like, how focused are you?

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing. You can't really, you can't solve every problem with every, with the Nvidia thing yesterday, the panel where the guy was like one, one robot for all things.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I mean, yeah, like we were talking.

[Ed Zitron]

About with these generalized robots, you can't generalize anything. Unless of course, you're listening to the following advertisement. This will solve every single problem you have ever faced. Don't be mad at me if it doesn't. Be mad at them.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Foreign.

[Josh Whalen]

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[Ed Zitron]

All right, we're back. We've got, of course, the great Edward on Gray, so Junior of the Tech Bubble Newsletter.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Hello, folks.

[Ed Zitron]

Ed Niedermeyer of the Otonocast.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Hello.

[Ed Zitron]

And Gaya Davis. If it could happen here. Now, here's the thing. I was also seeing some terrifying AI children's products.

[Matt Osawski]

Oh, I love those. Yeah, I love those.

[Ed Zitron]

There was one. I'm just gonna pull up, pull this up, because there was one that just. All I could think of was kicking.

[Matt Osawski]

You know, Aimee Land, you should put a AI and and child into your search bar right now.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm not. No, I'm not.

[Matt Osawski]

I don't use eggs for some great new stories.

[Ed Zitron]

AI plus love. A live AI Me can listen, speak, and think. Powered by advanced AI, it senses your voice and presence, reacts to emotion, and learns through real interaction. Over time, sometime, something begins to grow inside AM AI Me. Tiny feelings, gentle awareness, and thoughts shaped by the world it shares with you. Until AI Me starts to feel alive, Brackets lean in and listen to Aime's inner voice. I could not get close enough to one of them, but I would love it if they just sit and go, I'll kill you. Just like muttering cereal, reinventing Chucky. Yes, I will kill them all. And I watched the demo of this woman, and they were doing. They were really like the hogs watching me, like, ooh. As the woman just did this demo. That was so. It's like, wow, how did you remember that? That happened so long ago. And it's just. Again, thought I saw that last year. Pretty sure we saw a lot of.

[Matt Osawski]

This stuff last year.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's just this idea of handing a child an LLM is insane as a parent. And also there was the one we talked about yesterday where it was like. It's like saying that Taiwan isn't part of China. It gets upset at you.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's just BDSM tips.

[Ed Zitron]

It's so. Yeah, exactly. It's like teaching your child poisons. It's just. And they keep saying these things like, oh, it will grow over time. They won't.

[Matt Osawski]

Especially if the company's defunct in, like, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

When they run out of Money in a month. Yeah, because they spend it all on the booth.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

No more server space, letting your kid just talk to themselves at their little figurine. I'm curious how they offer.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm curious about shareholder value.

[Matt Osawski]

This is the, this is. That's kind of upsetting to me though, because like in. In the conversation about how AI is getting into all these wearables. Like, these people really want AI basically in every action figure, right? Yeah, they want. They want like agentic AI in every single toy so that like it becomes like a normal thing. Like you're not. You're not just going to get like a bare piece of plastic ever again.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, no, it's so they can subscribe you. They won't mind if my Yu Gi oh cards talk to me.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the thing though. It's like, it's devices made for people that don't use stuff like. Here's the thing. I use my aura ring. I have an Apple watch. I've got eight sleep bed and I've got like things that measure my sleep. I have years of sleep data. And I cannot tell you anything.

[Matt Osawski]

Just more data, Ed.

[Ed Zitron]

No, but it's just one more data.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Just one more data, bro.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I swear.

[Ed Zitron]

One more data.

[Matt Osawski]

One more data. That's all I need.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Please, bro.

[Ed Zitron]

But that's the thing. It's like all of this time they're like, well, when we get all this data, we'll be able to do this when I have the data now, can you not tell me when my best sleep times are? Can you not tell me how what I could do differently? Like, I'm. I'm not sure what to do with this information. And then like, what, with the power of AI, you could do something. I'm like, what is it? Oh, no, we're not there yet. I'm the. Apparently aura is here showing something off. And it's like.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And Luna.

[Ed Zitron]

And Luna. It's just like. And all these rings, it's. What could you do with them? We're having Victoria's song on Leo and she put it where it's like, yeah, if you use an LLM connected to it, you can sometimes get a useful out. Just fucking. Just stop. Stop pretending.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I asked him. I was like, what is the difference? There are a few rings. I stopped by and I was like, what is the difference between me collecting all this data myself with a bunch of janky things and then putting it into some.

[Ed Zitron]

It's literally the same.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And then asking a chatbot about it versus whatever you guys are doing? Well, you know, like, we have other people's data that we are looking. I don't know if that's the answer. You should have told me.

[Ed Zitron]

But it's also like human bodies are varied things. Certain things work for different people. I imagine that there should be trends within workout data that could. Nothing, Nothing, nothing. I would love it if they could tell me what would be the most effective workout, what would be the best.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But see, this is why you make products for children is they don't ask questions like this.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Why isn't it working?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, they're like, your data is not providing enough actionable insights.

[Ed Zitron]

It's timewarm.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Your kid says that your data does not work for me. Father. Fix it.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Father. The analytics.

[Ed Zitron]

Father. My analytics. Papa. Papa, please can I have some not.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Have enough actionable insights before I go to bed?

[Ed Zitron]

It just feels like I really think they're just trying to work out ways to give us subscriptions to everything. Yeah, I can't play just Pokemon regularly. I got subscribed to Pokemon Plus. I mean.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Oh my God, I forgot with the AI agentic kitchen or oven, one thing they. They added. It's not just an oven. You can't actually get it to just cook the food. You have to have a delivery subscription. Are you.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Are you so like juicero for the oven? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Is that sous vide? That's one the of. Of those.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I. During.

[Ed Zitron]

During COVID I had Tavala. I really shouldn't say that.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Briskets off.

[Ed Zitron]

I also terr. Terrible SEO. Yeah, I'm just gonna look up this company. Oh, 150,000 articles.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I do want a brisket.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that sounds good. I bet that's one thing you can't cook it in.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But then I also asked them, who are your delivery partners? They said, oh, we're not there yet.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Are you.

[Matt Osawski]

Are you serious?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Are you?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

That was so sick. I said, okay, we had a media to go on.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just like I. I do wonder why there is no legal recourse with people going to this. Like, if just like you get lied to for several days, market is the legal reocourse.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

You don't go to market if you don't. So true.

[Ed Zitron]

So true. I also think we need less electronics and things as well. Like, I still. I know Matt Bender likes the Lego brick, and I can see it's fine, but it's like, I don't need a microchip in a Lego brick. Yeah, I know. If it needs to go, you can just do that with your mouth.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I Don't want my extra Victors to talk to me. Part of the fun as a kid was talking for them.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Absolutely.

[Matt Osawski]

You know, we're gonna spoil the next generation of voice actors. It's really devastating.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Also we're gonna turn to like, I, I'm like wishy washy when it comes to how bad screen time is.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But you know what?

[Ed Zitron]

I actually think it is bad. Making every single toy and some individualized autonomous AI, even though that's complete some LLM driven bullshit. And like they make the noises for you because it's like one of the joys of being a job was like having an imagination.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

100%.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's like, I don't know what, like they want to take that away so they can put a subscription into it. But it gets back to the thing we're saying yesterday as well, where it's like, these are just products made by people that don't interact with anyone. It's like one of my biggest problems. Fuck. My kid keeps want to talk to me.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I was going to say, what better way to tell your kid that you hate them than giving them a chatbot?

[Matt Osawski]

I mean like, this makes sense because like they're, they're selling this to people who are like upper middle class. Upper class. They don't have time to spend with their kids. Like these, that's. These products are targeting is, you know, both parents are working. They probably have some kind of like live in nanny. The kids probably relatively isolated. Like that's what these products really for. It's for these like relatively wealthy parents to buy for their kids because they don't spend time with their kids.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Right.

[Matt Osawski]

Like that's like. Because people who are like working class aren't, aren't buying these things.

[Ed Zitron]

I can't afford them because they're insanely expensive.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

One of the most unexpected use cases for autonomous vehicles actually now is people putting their kids in Waymos.

[Ed Zitron]

No.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And like this is, this is a real thing.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And they. Uber has a whole thing for this. Uber and Lyft now, right? Yeah, they have advertising for now you can just send your kid off and they're safe. Your kid will be safe. Which they had to massively mark safety.

[Matt Osawski]

This, this adult passengers. Oh, my goodness.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

No, this.

[Matt Osawski]

We need, we need, we need like a new QANON to shut this thing. Yeah, like they like way far, like Wayfair trafficking children in Waymos.

[Ed Zitron]

The right wing is just like, no, we need to attack straight up.

[Matt Osawski]

They're sending these kids in Waymos to Mar. A lago.

[Ed Zitron]

Take it to Comet Pizza.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, yeah, it's so, so wait, wait. Okay. Completely off CES for a second. So you put your child in the autonomous vehicle, at which point your child is alone in a, in a car.

[Josh Whalen]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

And it drives around.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

What if something goes wrong?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

That's a great, great question. This is for, you know, like, Ed.

[Matt Osawski]

Aren't you a journalist? You should be asking these questions.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I, I am. I'm on the podcast.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean, I think, I think the magic of, of like CES and stuff is that like, technology does make people turn their brains off. Like, people are so conditioned to believe that a machine is somehow better than them. We're so surrounded by machine. Like, you know, the. And, and I think this is like a perfect example, right? Like, like, why pay someone who is like trained to take care of your child when like a robot will be just as fine?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

You know, I still think we need. My big socialist thing is I think we need to create like a state funded nanny system and like, for like working families and just make it the best paid, you know.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I agree. Like an incredible economy, because that's a good one.

[Matt Osawski]

Hopefully they'll do that in New York. But like, you see, parts of the tech industry sees that kind of want, but they want to fill it with, with like agentic childcare or whatever. Right.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I mean, that's also the thing with the age tech. Right. I mean, it's like, okay, so look, we have a large scale problem in our society where a lot of people are aging, they don't have support, infrastructure. A lot of ways we can handle this. How are we going to handle it? Well, since we don't really do technological innovation, we're going to do the lowest bottom denominator thing, which is, you know, we let the private financiers drive the development of what the care infrastructure is going to be.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And a lot of that just means bullshit so that they can scale up to then get into some other business model. Right. So it's just not, it's just, it's same with the child care, same with the elderly care. All of this shit sucks. And it's also not even seen as the end point. It's like a stepping stone so that they can get into some real business.

[Ed Zitron]

The thing is, I don't think that there's as much intention behind it is my thing. I don't, I don't think there's a master plan. I just think they're like, fuck.

[Matt Osawski]

What?

[Ed Zitron]

My biggest problem, my old fucking dad keeps calling me. My, my kid Claude won't stop asking me for things. My home is sometimes dirty. Between the eight cleaners. What do I do? What would a ro. Robot. How to f. What do people deal with in regular life? Dirt.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And, and by the way, I mean Japan has been, you know, because of, of their demographic situation, the aging population they've been and, and you know, technological prowess. They've been developing robots for, for seniors and various kinds of, you know, aging assistants. And the reality is is that like despite huge investment and huge support from the government and like everything that they could possibly want, the results are not like that impressive.

[Ed Zitron]

Basically it's because ultimately you know what my, my poor grandmother, when she passed like 10 or 11 years ago, 94 year old granny Palace Marion. She liked being called on the telephone people. Yeah, yeah, it's like someone's my dad going and visiting her. Like it' what's going to help your kid? Talking to them and asking questions or if they're curious about something, you can use Google but you can talk to them about it.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And there's another piece too. So in a past life I was actually a caregiver for development to disabled people. And you know, it's one of those jobs where like there's a lot of time where you just sort of sit there.

[Josh Whalen]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

You know, and there's just like nothing happening. And then there will be, you know, I mean like I had a client who would you know, smear feces every once in a while.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And then you had. And that was when you were really, you know, earning, earning the pay. The point I'm getting at is that you know, the majority of work, of the value of the work that people do, especially in service type jobs like that is in what you would call an edge case.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

You know, and again like following the autonomous vehicle space has been really useful for understanding this stuff where 90% of driving is just like boring and just sit there and anyone could do it. And what makes someone a good driver is how you deal with it when shit goes sideways. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Which is very rare and very sudden and very challenging to, to, to negotiate. It's the same thing with a lot of consumer customer service jobs and then other kinds of like service caregiving type jobs. The value is created in when things start to break down and that's when automation doesn't work. And no matter, like no amount of like large, large models is going to change that because ultimately like as soon as you see something out of, out of distribution right out of Your training set, you know, it's useless.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And again, that's where caregivers like, make. Earn their money. Right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's. It's just deeply sad as well, because there are very straightforward problems that people have. It's just you can't really solve them with technology. Oh, well, we have the edge cases in customer service. You want to know what increases customer service calls the fact that products fucking suck. Now, the products aren't very good. They get released in alpha or beta stages. The fact that they require a subscription for certain features or the support documents are dog, or the guide to put them together is dog. It's like the actual problems are the companies are fucking things up regularly and they're like, what if we had more customers? Well, no, no, no, no, no. Actually that would involve paying someone. What if we just had an AI, I guess, and maybe it could say a slur occasionally, but sometimes it could even answer a question.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

SoftBank had a robot called Pepper. Are you familiar with Pepper?

[Ed Zitron]

No, I just love Softbank.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And you're supposed to call it. Yeah, of course. Anything they touch, that's the golden egg.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, Come on the show, man.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But, but Pepper was this. It was a customer service robot and it was like, you know, sort of vaguely humanoid, but it's rolled around on wheels and they use it in, like, shopping centers and stuff. Anyway, I don't remember how much money SoftBank sunk into this. I think it was a French company or something. It didn't. It like, it did not work. I loved it. Because everyone expects the headlines of, like, the robots are taking their jobs. And like every. Everywhere this Pepper robot went, it would lose its job. It was like, the headline was always like, robot fired, replaced by humans. Because. And again, it's because customer service is fundamentally about helping people. Right. Like, if everything is in its right place on the shelf, you know, maybe in certainly badly. Like laid out in large stores, maybe someone needs a little bit of assistance finding, like, where the section is, where their thing is. But for the most part, like, when people have a problem that they require customer service help with, like, it's because something has gone wrong. The shelf is not stock.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like something is bad. And again, like, if it's an abnormal set of circumstances, the robot is almost never held by definition. And that's where the value should be created. And the robots can't do it.

[Matt Osawski]

I saw this good post on X, the Everything app lately, which was, this.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Could go so many directions.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, good.

[Matt Osawski]

Engineers are building like an AI bar and they program every Single possibility for someone ordering drinks at the bar, ordering other things at the bar, or ordering a horse at the bar. They have everything figured out for people to go to this bar. And then a customer walks in and they ask where the bathroom is, and the whole model breaks.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Fuck. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the thing, though. I love the idea of also a robot bartender. No bars are about ambiance and available Diet Cokes for me. And it's like, I like how it feels, and I like that being a person there you have like a. No conversation or some conversation. Each bar is a different bartender. That's part of the joy of going to a bar. I don't need a robot arm to go, here you go.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, and then. And then the other failure mode is right, Is like, did you see the Wall Street Journal thing where they had the vending machine with the LLM?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, that random.

[Ed Zitron]

Everyone's saying, I haven't.

[Matt Osawski]

I haven't seen this.

[Ed Zitron]

I love Joanna Stern. I think she did a good, good job. But the whole thing is like, why are we not just, like, straight up saying, this is broken dog. Why do we have to couch everything with. But it might work in the.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No, yeah, no, the idea is, right, you put a. You put a gentic. Yeah, Claude. Sort of on the. You know.

[Ed Zitron]

All right, we got to stop saying agentic. It's Nell. I'm sorry, but.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But right, that, like, oh, this will just magically cover all the edge cases. Well, it sort of did. But, like, people were able to get it to, like, buy.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And, like, make everything.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It basically just, like, burned all this money. Because people were able to just say, like, just get me this thing.

[Ed Zitron]

I would have literally just stood by it all day. I would have. I would have had that thing.

[Matt Osawski]

This is a physical vending machine with.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

With this software on. I mean, I remember what one of.

[Matt Osawski]

The parts they already perfect. They already perfected vending machine.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

What if.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

What if they did it? What if they did it? Just.

[Matt Osawski]

Just go to Tokyo. It's perfect.

[Ed Zitron]

Go to, like, a gas station sometime.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

What was the rationale actually for. For putting EA on this?

[Ed Zitron]

What if we invented the machine that could vend thing? Like, it's just like, what if you could service things using, like, coins and cash again?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

You know, I would have kind of expected to do, like, surveillance pricing. Like, what if we were able to.

[Ed Zitron]

Make something that, like.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, it would measure a little bit and figure out how much you would be willing to.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But you don't need an LLM for that. Like, it's the search for, like, surely there must be some use for that.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's like, you know, I mean, it's.

[Matt Osawski]

It's part of this, like, we're trying to, like, ground, quote, unquote, AI into these, like, physical things now, now that it's not just height, right? And then, yeah, you can see stuff like this where, like, they're. They're trying, but it's like, yeah, come on.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And it's a convenient band aid to slap on something, right. You can sort of develop a robot to do certain things. And it's like, okay, well, as soon as we get out of, you know, out of our training set, we'll just have an LLM just sort of swoop in and sort of magically solve it. And the reality is that either it can't often or it solves it in ways that create, like, other totally unexpected problems.

[Ed Zitron]

Like the idea of them being like, what if we did? Oh, yeah, it doesn't work. Just like, obviously broken doesn't work. And this is the second time Anthropic's done this. They did a store, and the way they wrote it was like, I'm doing air quotes. Because it was like, we had it run a store. Could it work?

[Matt Osawski]

No.

[Ed Zitron]

It made up meetings, it made up this, it did that, and it was just like, yeah, guess this doesn't work. But if it did, we'd have a vending machine.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

There are also people who, like, will use. They take all the models that pay for the premium uses of them, and they let them loose on the stock market and they're like, oh, this is great. Let's see who does best.

[Ed Zitron]

They all eat Night Capital. We already had that with Night Capital in 2012, I think it was.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean, algorithmic trading's been a thing for a while. I haven't. I have not heard about the LLM trading.

[Ed Zitron]

I love that idea.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It does not work.

[Ed Zitron]

No. Well, it's. It's because most stock advice online is, in fact, almost all stock advice is because if you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't share.

[Matt Osawski]

You would not be talking about.

[Ed Zitron]

It would just trade. Yeah, yeah. It's just. It's really good that they're working on ways to. To do vending machines. Jesus.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Do you guys feel over the past two or even three years that you're also seeing. A lot of times there's a product that actually has maybe some interesting improvement in how it functions and, and it's. And. And maybe. And how a consumer can use it, but they just feel, I cannot actually get people interested in this unless I say there's AI and grafted onto this. I've been trying to understand because I feel like I keep seeing products where it's like I don't actually understand what the air is. I talk to you, you don't really seem to have televisions, TVs.

[Ed Zitron]

No TVs. That's my answer.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, the smart TV thing, every I've.

[Ed Zitron]

Been walking around, it's like, oh, does it help with the picture? No, no, no, no. If you ask it what the capital of Washington state is, it can sometimes answer. It's like, great. Anything else? Like, could it control the TV smoke? Oh, God, no. You can't turn the volume up. And even if it could, it would be like, volume up, volume messed up.

[Matt Osawski]

Honestly, I think that the thing for me actually to circle back to where we started, maybe the smart glasses. Yeah, smart glasses were kind, kind of, kind of the same like three, four years ago. And they're now trying to keep selling them by framing them as, you know, AI powered smart glasses when the practical functionality is almost identical. And you have these, you had that one, like New York startup. It was like that cheating smart glasses.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, cluly, Cluly.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, right. So like, they're trying to find these, these ways to like make smart glasses, to like, find, find, find ways to convince people to actually buy these things.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just like, what freak would use them?

[Matt Osawski]

And that's the problem. And the only, the only thing that's actually, I think got people to buy the smart glasses is the COVID recording. That's the only thing that's actually gotten people to like, buy and wear these things, is that you can secretly record people. That's. That more than the AI thing is actually the thing that sold these glasses.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I wonder if there's going to be more. I mean, like, I'm old enough to remember the glass backlash. How is that not.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I mean, I've been seeing in New York, people break up.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

There was this amazing video of someone on the subway and these guys just like, exactly the kind of white guy being like, what?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No, you're gonna do.

[Ed Zitron]

So you're gonna do. And the woman is just staring dead eyed at the camera. Just kind of like, come on. As far as I know, come over here.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

See what happens.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Stars are not in trouble.

[Josh Whalen]

They.

[Ed Zitron]

They should, they should get the key to the city. The Mandani caliphate should elevate them.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Like, yeah, we're looking into it.

[Ed Zitron]

No, it's. I just also like, who is walking around? I Was saying this yesterday. Who's walking around being like, what the is going on? What the. What is that curtain? What kind of. Who is sitting around being like, what kind of tree?

[Matt Osawski]

That would be a great, that would be a great Tim Robinson.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. You know, what is that is just.

[Matt Osawski]

What the fuck is going on.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Friend of the show Casey Newton once, I think promoted something about how it was like this thing you could talk about and ask questions as you were on a drive about like you. Maybe you're driving over a bridge and you're asking like, okay, like how old is the bridge?

[Ed Zitron]

Wow.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Why was it made? And so I was like, well, you also can just like ask yourself those questions or look it up or like.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, or you'll just get it.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, it's taking away the, the American, the American right to be driving while scrolling on your phone.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Which is also funny because if they sold it as like a safety thing, I feel like it would be. Have better standing than actually. Haven't you ever just want looked at something? What's going on there?

[Matt Osawski]

How are they not marketing it as like a safety thing for like, for like how like, like a, you know, like hands free enabled like, like search while driving?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, you want to post while you're driving.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, they have to do that.

[Ed Zitron]

I also just don't walk around thinking things like that. Like, I don't often walk around and be like, what? Maybe if I'm like in a botanical garden, right. I'll be like, what kind of flower is that?

[Matt Osawski]

But I mean, I, I do, I just, I just, I, I just write.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Down Wikipedia all day.

[Matt Osawski]

I just write down, I mean, what.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I do when I'm walking around.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah, no, I, I do. I just would either remember to look it up later or like, or take down notes because like, so I can enjoy the thing in person when I'm there. And then if I want to learn.

[Josh Whalen]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I don't want a disembodied voice being.

[Matt Osawski]

Like, if I want to learn about it, I can get like a coffee somewhere and like look it up. And that's, that's like a separate, a separate experience.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's just what.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And it's a good one too.

[Ed Zitron]

It's also a good.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I think like the thing I'm always surprised by is they're always trying to paint any non AI mediated experience as a bad, inefficient and inferior experience. And that actually what you really want, what you don't really know you want is you want to have an interlocutor that is not real.

[Matt Osawski]

This reminds me of the very first product that I, I, that was mentioned during the, the CTA keynote.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh.

[Matt Osawski]

And this is something that I have not found on the show floor yet. And I, I, I have to, I have to look it up. I, I have to, I have to find it and talk to these people. It is, you're, you're in a love said.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Matt Osawski]

It is an AI holographic windshield display for your car.

[Ed Zitron]

Wait, wait, wait, let's talk about it. So I'm actually not going to be as cynical as you expect here because this is a fairly standard thing. Like BMW has their look like heads up display which is kind of useful.

[Matt Osawski]

Like it has the digital interface on the windshield. So they've kind of already got those on the windshield. But the whole thing, all across the whole thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh my God.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Matt Osawski]

And so you have, you have like, you have like, you know, weather, you have maps, you have all, all these random things. If you could, you could pair it with some kind of smart glasses thing. You can search and you can see results.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh my God.

[Matt Osawski]

And so I need to actually find the company. I need to find the company's like location and like ask them about it and like talks about like the, you know, the obvious like safety problems of like if something goes wrong and the screen gets blocked. But, but yeah it's, it's, it's so.

[Ed Zitron]

Funny this led by the car crash industry.

[Matt Osawski]

Like you said like there is, there is versions of this thing which, which kind of work I think keeping it away from the windshield probably a good idea keep, keep the display on like the dashboard but having it directly on like on like the borders and emerging onto the center of the entire and.

[Ed Zitron]

Above your eye level. So you take your eyes off the.

[Matt Osawski]

Road and you have, you have to like look to the court and specific on, on the, on the we there was like one picture of it during the keynote and they have information like all across the board. So yeah, your eyes are going to be darting to the other side to like the corner of the road to read some kind of like pop up thing on the screen.

[Ed Zitron]

I love being on my phone. I want to be, I love the computer so much. I have so many screens but I don't know when I'm driving I quite enjoy not having that. I enjoy, I can listen to a podcast. Driving back from Vermont with girlfriend. Listen to last podcast on the left the other day. That was lovely. Learned all about Casey Anthony. Horrible, truly awful stuff. Didn't get that in England but it's like that and like the time when I was just facing forward and listening and spending some quality time with someone I love. Like, when I'm driving on my own, I get a chance to listen to podcasts or listen to music. I don't want to bleep. I don't. What's the weather like? I can look out the window, imagine I sound like fucking Dennis. Larry. Like, driving. I just want to know.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I just want a regular phone.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's a beautiful road up state. And you get. And you get an intrusive thought. What year did Genghis Khan? And you ask it, and you. And the screen lights up like someone threw a flashbang inside because every surface gets illuminated with information.

[Ed Zitron]

Genghis Khan was born in 1982.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

1258.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

For 10 years, though, like, the auto industry has been coming to CES and trying to do what I think, like, all of these AI companies are trying to do, which is ultimately either replace, like, Google or really, like, your phone as, like, the portal to the digital realm.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And there was. And, like, to this day, there's still this, like, battle inside these OEMs of, like, of there's factions who believe, like, that cars should be cars. And I think they're actually sort of. You're seeing sort of, like, physical buttons come back, which I love. That pendulum is swinging back. And I think that's because the reality is, is that your phone is still the best way to do all this stuff and.

[Ed Zitron]

But they're working on making that worse. I will say it was exciting. When I was at the Renaissance Hotel, I saw Faraday Future.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Oh, they're still here.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

They've got, like, these weird, like, dad wagons now with, like.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Long and sordid story.

[Ed Zitron]

Tell me if I'm wrong. Faraday Future is a company that sometimes makes cars but sometimes goes bankrupt.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So they've managed. Amazing. They're one of these companies that, like, no one is quite sure how they haven't gone bankrupt.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, I feel they did. I'm thinking of Fisker.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, Fisker. We've gone through two Fiskers.

[Ed Zitron]

Fuck. Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. No, there's.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I love two different ones. Or two. One, they've gone bankrupt and then they're like, we're back.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It was this guy started a second company.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Sick.

[Ed Zitron]

Fisker was the one with all the.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Weird Chinese money market.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So. So the first one was one that was sort of like. It was like a kind of, like, sexier model S, sort of. But it was like a hybrid, so it wasn't quite like that electric. So that was sort of you know, 2013, 14, 15 something that went bankrupt and then he came back and made this car, the Fisker Ocean.

[Ed Zitron]

But wait, wait for a future though.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The fair day future. Okay. So it's like. It's like this Chinese I think money laundering operation. I'm really, you know, I'm not entirely sure I'm not comfortable calling them an automaker.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, they have costs. They were cost. And they have like three screens.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No, I remember they have a car I think. Was it 2017 that they. There was a. There was a they. They were one of the in the peak sort of like post or so like Tesla fuel like car. Car hype era. They had like a. Legendarily them. It was them and eco. I get the two of them mixed up. But there were both of them had like legendarily like like bad but like expensive and massive like spectacles here that like did not go well.

[Ed Zitron]

My kind of car.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And then like the next year they were like. They didn't even have a booth but they would just sort of like brought their car and just were like parked it on the curb. People would see it and like I think they have. They're supposed to have a factory here. I think there's like three different places where they're supposed to have factories or supposed to be one in Southern California, one here.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And then I feel like they pivoted to AI at some point there too. But I genuinely like there's. There's only so much you can pay attention to.

[Matt Osawski]

So it's the Hyundai Mobis. Mobius.

[Ed Zitron]

I guess the Hyundai Mobius that it.

[Matt Osawski]

Is a holographic windshield display, which is a transparent display system that transforms a vehicle's windshield into a digital interface.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't. I want a window.

[Matt Osawski]

The technology enables the display of navigation, driving data and digital content while maintaining cockpit openness and visibility.

[Ed Zitron]

I. Someone's watching porno on that immediate. Just my Uber driver being projected onto.

[Matt Osawski]

Onto the windshield.

[Ed Zitron]

Nice. I mean I already like everything.

[Matt Osawski]

What are we doing guys? Look at the road.

[Ed Zitron]

No.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Have you seen the size of screens in modern cars too? Like you need the Mercedes.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I'll have an iPad.

[Matt Osawski]

Like why you can see like why. Why are they projecting a movie on the. On the right side of the windshield.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

So you can watch Avatar 3.

[Ed Zitron]

It gets back to the thing though where like these people. People don't have human experiences because these people all get car service 100. You think these people are like getting in their car to drive other than.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Like they're so you think they're Trying to be like, how do we recreate what you want from first principle?

[Ed Zitron]

No, it's like what do those pigs who drive around all day.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I don't, I don't, I don't look.

[Ed Zitron]

At my driver but like when he drives he seems to be looking at that transparent thing.

[Matt Osawski]

He's just looking off into nothing. Yeah, he should be maximizing his efficiency.

[Ed Zitron]

What if he was maximizing. What if he was content?

[Matt Osawski]

Max, why don't we have LinkedIn on the windshield? But like, you know, there's like parts of this like, like having having like the navigation map like right above the steering wheel, maybe not a bad idea. Yeah, maybe not a terrible idea happening. Have having a movie having digital content displayed on the right side of the windshield. Like why?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, so I'll tell you. I think that for a Congress, I'm guessing knowing the auto industry, sort of the thinking behind this is probably that this is like a software addressable thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So in the same way that Tesla took all of these controls that used to be with knobs and buttons and dials and menus and this and that and put it all onto basically like an iPad, this is sort of the next generation of that where then you have, you're no longer constrained to one screen. You can create like almost infinite variety if it's sort of a projection based system. That's how I. So, so and again it's, you know, I think, you know, in the auto industry, you know, you want to make an investment in hardware that you can then maximize over a lot of time. And so, you know, software addressability is like. Or software defined. Software defined vehicle is like the buzzword, right?

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And the idea is that you can do what Tesla has done, which nobody in the industry thought was possible, which is make the same car for 10 fucking years and just, you know, throw, throw the plebs some like fresh software updates every, every six months or so.

[Matt Osawski]

High, high brightness, full color images directly onto the glass.

[Ed Zitron]

I love this. And we have to cut this. Well, we're cutting this 30 minutes there. And next ad for us is from Glunt, the slop for hogs. What if you hear anything else, it's for Glunt, I promise you. But yeah. Catch you in a minute.

[Josh Whalen]

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[Ed Zitron]

We are back on the show. It's the Consumer Electronics Show. I am, of course, Ed Zitron. I didn't identify myself in the last one ones, but, you know, I think you worked out by now. We've got Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Hello.

[Ed Zitron]

And Edward Ongweiso Jr. Of the Take Bubble Newsletter.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Hello.

[Ed Zitron]

And we're joined by Henry Casey of CNN Underscored. Henry, thank you so much for joining.

[Henry Casey]

Us again and thank you for having me this year.

[Ed Zitron]

So I actually, I'm gonna start off by saying I saw something I kind of liked. Maybe it's kind of like there's a specific use case for this, like show floors, whatever. I saw a company that's doing wireless TVs. Like, it's a wireless bracket. You put the TV on it and it charges it. You can charge it and they sell their own TVs. I thought it was cool. I thought it was fun that somebody did something new. And maybe this is just how beaten down I am from years of ces. I'm like, what if a TV was wireless, I guess, and it's like, yeah, I saw that. I talked to them for longer than I think they expect it and then just walked off. And I think they expected I was gonna get a business cardio.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I didn't.

[Henry Casey]

So it has like a battery pack and you have it on a charging and you pull it somewhere else or how wireless is it?

[Ed Zitron]

You have to, you can put any TV on the thingy. You, you click it in and it powers the tv. And they sell their own ones as well. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun. I now, now saying it out loud, I see the kind of dead eyes of everyone looking at me. I'm like, maybe, maybe I slightly had more fun with this than anyone else ever will.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It sounds like it would kill with those people who are like obsessive about cable management.

[Ed Zitron]

No, they, they did. They also may have, they didn't laugh when I said this, even though I thought it was very. I was like, they were like, oh yeah, you got the, you can do 110 inch with four TV screens. And they were like, yeah. So for like trade shows, I'm like, yeah, that's useful. Or you could be like one of those insane gambling guys with four TVs. And the woman just stared at me. She just said, I'd love to watch four sports games. I love. Like that's part the fun of Vegas. Or the ultimate Mario Kart Tournament America Tournament Land Party.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I mean, Smash Brothers.

[Ed Zitron]

Smash Brothers. I did also see actually, and this is a genuinely good thing. It was a company called Aura at a mini LED 4K TV. It was 85 inch. It's 1599. Sorry, 1500. And it came with a sound bar built into it. That's nice. Mini led, big tv. Again, we're describing the things. I like it. It's just the thing that exists, but slightly better.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I saw, I saw a big ass outdoor TV. TV or was 100 or. I mean, I don't know, it felt like 100 inches, but I have no idea how large it was. But at the same time, I, I do think that when I saw them marketing an outdoor tv, I was like, I think it should be illegal for an individual to buy it, but maybe we can let the business, businesses, you know, let them buy these outdoor TVs.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, if you got, you have a TV in the garden.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Have the garden in the hot tub.

[Ed Zitron]

Have the garden in the hot tub. Nice. You want to have a smoke outside.

[Henry Casey]

You don't think there would have been an outdoor television beside Tony Sopranos pool.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, come on, they've Also had them for a long time.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I'm just saying. I'm coming in from New York. We're. We're looking into it, and we're going to ban them in the Mom Donnie elephant.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Okay.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

We're looking into outdoor television Mumdani, the.

[Ed Zitron]

Struggle sessions for outdoor TV owners.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Hey, listen, we're starting, though, for landlords.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's the good shit. Henry, what have you seen at the show? Now that. Now that my two things I liked have bombed.

[Henry Casey]

Well, to bouncing off the wireless TV stuff. It's not exactly wireless. You can see the one wire connection going to it. But LG's new wallpaper TV is their new kind of take on what if an art TV was also an OLED tv? Art TV is for the uninitiated Samsung's frame. So you can put art. This is like an oled. So you don't really want to have a static image because you're going to ruin your television set with burn in. Instead, you can have a slideshow mode of your art, but it's barely. I think it's 9 millimeters thick. And there's one power cord coming out of the back corner. You can hide it. And Samsung's been doing similar with the frame pro. But the thing I'm most excited about is an $80, 10,000 milliamp power bank from Nimble. It breaks in half, and one half has a USB connector that unfolds. The other half has a USB C cable. So my best friend, when we go out, he never brings a portable charger. I do now share the wealth. Don't have to sit next to each other. And it's like actually solving a problem, which is like the CES question of, like, is this solving a shareholder dilemma and capitalism growth, or is it doing something that, like, my parents will really like because one of them will remember to bring it and the other one will never remember.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that's the thing. Like all. Like, I saw an LG thing where it was again, another wireless T. There's a few of these things, but it was basically, you had the TV in one plug, and then you could plug all the HDMI shit into it. It was low latency, no latency. That's cool. But again, it's like everything we're describing doesn't feel like the future. Like, I'm just. I'm saying these things out loud. I'm like, yay, what if something was slight?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But that. Right, that's like the. The bifurcation of the show is that it's either right These, like, small iterations that are actually useful, or it's these, like, wild pie in the sky that will never actually.

[Ed Zitron]

Just dumb work.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. You kind of have to have both for a show.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, do you know what?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I actually.

[Ed Zitron]

You don't have to have the vaporware stuff. It would be nice if. Because, I don't know, maybe we're just out of ideas, but I. I don't. I know that it may seem like I'm a huge thing. I would love to be wowed. I would love to be amazed, and I would love to see stuff that made me go, wow, new thing that I like.

[Henry Casey]

I'll be the positive guy again, because vaporware that becomes actual product, and it wasn't vaporware to begin with. We see the words concept product a lot at cbs. I think I might have mentioned last year that Lenovo had a laptop that would rotate its screen to trap your face. That's actually going to be for sale. They announced. They showed off the finished version of it this year.

[Ed Zitron]

How much I.

[Henry Casey]

The price escapes me. I'm not even sure.

[Ed Zitron]

But, yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. They never.

[Henry Casey]

I didn't write the article. My coworker did. CNN underscored. He's got a video on it. We.

[Ed Zitron]

We covered it.

[Henry Casey]

But, no, it's like you knock on the lid and it opens up on its own.

[Ed Zitron]

That's fun.

[Henry Casey]

And if you're in the kitchen and you're wanting to watch a. Read a recipe on your laptop screen and you're moving your head around, I could see that being useful. Also, content creators, twitch people, like all the sorts of people. There is like, it's a weird. You're gonna figure out who needs this. But it's something that would seem like vaporware one year and actually is on sale is gonna come to sale the next. So it's sort of like saying, hey, don't think CES is just for the next version of the humane human, the friend pendant, like, stuff like that.

[Ed Zitron]

Have you seen any friend pendants, though? I've been looking. I'm looking for anything like that. I want. I want a sassy.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Oh, I think I saw. I saw. I did not get to go to the pendant, but there's a. There's a pendant on the Venetian Expo floor that I have to have to chat with them about. I was a little too taken with all the biomed stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay. Now I. I really want to. I want more AI that's hostile towards you.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I want. When Victoria was on a few Months ago where it was just like, no, that's not true. Just gaslight me.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

It's like, me up. Because you know what? Stop pretending this is going to be my friend, because I know it won't be.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, I mean, I do love when they're like, hey, you know, like we're gonna have robots in these workplaces and they're just gonna be your buddy.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

They're not gonna be your worker. You're not gonna be your colleague. They're not gonna be your slave. They're gonna be your buddy.

[Ed Zitron]

So I was going through my photos as well, trying to find something useful. But I did find a booth where I could not work out what they did. It was just called wow now. And the tagline was make your inside outside.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Make your inside.

[Ed Zitron]

Make your inside outside.

[Henry Casey]

That's David Cronenberg.

[Ed Zitron]

Thanks.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But yeah, that is actually the plot of Shrouds.

[Henry Casey]

It's one of the best movies of the year.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes, yes, exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

It's a defense against fairies. When you turn your clothes inside out, that's the only way they don't get.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

We will talk about that after.

[Ed Zitron]

Dude. I saw a company called Palm where the logo kind of looked like it said porn. That was nice. Yeah, it's. I really. I really did. Look, I've been looking for stuff. I saw a company called Zeus that was claiming they had the only GPU designed for high performance workloads. It's like they got love sense again, you know? What's love sense?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Sex toys. That's nice with a little, you know, maybe.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's got some software power hat.

[Ed Zitron]

I found a power power hat. You put the hound. It's like a.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And it gives you power.

[Ed Zitron]

One of those floppy hats. It connects to like a solar charger, I guess.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And dual USB A and USB C ports. You know what?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's a hat.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I'm doing a bit.

[Ed Zitron]

No, that's. That is the only permissible one is like if you're like long distance hiking or a fisher. But the people buying this might. Maybe they'll be outdoors. People like Robert Evans. I know, does a bunch of. Bunch of like. So I think he's done solo stuff where he's just like. When he goes into the woods for a few months, like to hunt the sasquatch. I'll ask him about that later. But it's like. That makes sense. But I just. I see this. I'm like, I want to believe, man.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But probably I'll believe them when they do a solar bonnet. When they do solo for my people, then I know they're serious about this Solar sombrero.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah, yeah, you know, the solar Pharrell, Canadian mount. He. He's always gonna be the brand ambassador every other year.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, come on, that big ass hat could probably fit PlayStation 5 up there.

[Henry Casey]

We won't get Grand Theft Auto 6 anytime soon, but.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, nor will we get another pop banger like Happy. Well, not like we're getting a fucking.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Another nerd this year.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, Fly or Die is a perfect album and he never made anything better than it. Pharrell Williams, come on my show and talk specifically about 2005's Fly or Die. Classic album. Great album. You should all listen to it. Email me if you've listened.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

We're talking about his beef with the. With the Neptunes.

[Ed Zitron]

No, not interested. Just. Just the album. And then he can explain to me why he hasn't made anything good like that. Since you don't think the Lego movie.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Soundtrack was gonna be good.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that Despicable Me had a pretty good soundtrack.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I'll give.

[Ed Zitron]

I will give him the fact that Despicable Me. Despicable Me too. And despicable me 3. Banana. Nano banana. I had not thought about Nano Banana all day.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, it's not my fault. So one of the things that. That makes this like, absurd stuff so, so interesting and so extra absurd to me is that there is like, legitimate technological innovation going on right now. Like, one of the big announcements, if not kind of arguably the biggest announcement in the mobility space is this company called Donut Lab. And they're. They're basically beat all the major automakers and battery companies to the punch on a. Or at least they say they have to. To a solid state battery. And this.

[Ed Zitron]

Explain what that means.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, it just means. So it just means that it's. It's solid. So it's a completely. The. Rather than using a liquid or gel in the. In the anode. It's just because the whole battery is solid state.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. So just to be stupid, because I really don't know. Regular batteries are full of, like, liquids.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yes, I know that. It's an electrolyte. Yeah, it's usually a fluid electrolyte. And.

[Ed Zitron]

And the solid state is just a brick or something. Yeah, that's cool. It is.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And it has like, really specific advantages. So like, they claim 400 watt hours per kilogram, like, you know, not much denser than like modern, you know, like the current state of the art. But they. They say you can charge it in five minutes. Oh, I think what they said.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, that's why the liquid ones charge slower.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. So. And what happens too is with the liquid ones, like, they form dendrites and things. And so it's. It's.

[Ed Zitron]

What does that mean?

[Matt Osawski]

Sorry.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No, I get. I get above my own pay grade really fast with this battery. Technology is, like, really complex, but basically you can think of it as like sort of almost like crystalline structures.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay. So things form inside it that slow them down.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. And. And, and they create friction and heat and then fire.

[Ed Zitron]

But they made the solid state one.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The solid state does not have that issue. So it's like unaffected by temperature.

[Ed Zitron]

Cool.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And. And you can charge it really, really fast.

[Ed Zitron]

That's actually like really good.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

So that unlocks. Does that unlock new use cases? Then? If it's like, you don't have to worry about the internal temperature, maybe you can run it a little bit hotter than.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I mean, it would. Yeah, it would be. It's.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So, I mean, I like, ideally, this is. This is the future. Right. And so, like, all the major automakers are doing this and they all make kind of somewhat similar claims. So, like.

[Henry Casey]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

They say, like, you fully charge in 10 minutes, 60 km of combined range per minute of charging and up to 600km on a single charge. Sorry for the metrics.

[Ed Zitron]

No, no, this is great. No, please.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So, So I think, like, like, it's. This is something that, that. Right. Toyota has been working on talking about for a long time. Hyundai's doing it. Like the Chinese battery suppliers as well. I think this is like a little British consulting firm and their first use case is a motorcycle. So it's a little questionable if they show it yet. So apparently the motorcycles are going to be shipping this year. So like. Or like first quarter of this year.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

So they should have a guy just doing the 600 kilometers or.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the thing.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And with all this stuff, anything automotive, you gotta validate it over so many miles. And the idea that they're gonna be able to build this at the quality and then scalelessness. Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

But this is a city of traffic and the frustration we're getting around town. You talk to any journalist doing CES this year, you will see somebody who has been frustrated about how long it takes an Uber to blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is the kind of thing where hands on or hands off demos are the thing that would really sell it. And you'd have like, even like an.

[Ed Zitron]

E bike would be.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, yeah, I just read about it. I wasn't at their event or anything. I haven't been in touch with them, so they may be getting down or something.

[Henry Casey]

Like.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

There is, but I think what I've read about it, like, there's a little bit of, like, how are these guys, like, kind of the first.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, my, my. That's my first thought. Like, it's a little British consultancy. Never, ever trust the British. And also just. Is Britain a hub for battery technology?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It has been more so.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, okay, cool. I don't want this to be fake. I want this to be real.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No, no. Like, there are incredible British engineering outfits, especially in the automotive space. So, like, a lot of Formula One engineering work takes place in the uk, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, of course, yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And so. And that's all heavily electrified now and becoming more so with the new 2020 rule.

[Ed Zitron]

So you were in the car section as well, Right. Do you see anything?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Just very briefly, unfortunately.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I had to go to. I've listened to the. The nits administrator talk, which is interesting.

[Ed Zitron]

How was that?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean, honestly, like, for this administration, it was, like, sort of surprising.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the nice. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Yeah, I remembered all those words.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But anything good or just.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, from that conversation, it was, like, a much higher level of sophistication than I expected from someone who works for Sean Duffy.

[Henry Casey]

Oh, okay.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

This is, like, a pleasant, pleasant surprise. And, like, clearly, like, you know, I think. I think the administration wants to be seen as doing something to help autonomous vehicles.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The problem is that, like, regulation is not actually preventing autonomous vehicle deployment. Like, that's not.

[Ed Zitron]

It's kind of like AI. It's like they're like, oh, we need less regulations around AI. It's like, that's not. We don't have those. Yeah. Oh, we got one going through. No, fuck off. The problem is you don't have enough power and no one wants to pay for it.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Dickhead.

[Ed Zitron]

With autonomous cars, it seems like the problem is the edge cases like you were mentioning.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, yeah. So he was talking, and this is interesting. So. So kind of the big challenge with AVs is that, right, like, you can't just create a. Right. We have a driver's test, right? You go out and you do some basic things and you prove that you have this sort of, like, general capability and they sign off. You didn't almost kill anyone, and you can be a driver Now. That doesn't work with this technology because all you do is train for the test.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And then you get vehicles that train for the test, and then they pass the test and they go out and they're like totally useless in the real world. So this is actually like a non creating regulation for AV is actually much less trivial of a problem than people think. People are very quick to say, oh, we'll just regulate it. Well, when you get into the weeds of how to do it, it's actually quite complex. And again, I was shocked that the guy at NHTSA actually has like a. Yeah, and like a kind of a sophisticated sense of like, okay, you need to have a test, but you can't have it be some static thing. And like the fact is like, you know, we have this sort of self certification system anyway and that like if you're faking compliance with a safety standard, that that's sort of illegal already and stuff. So it was like sort of encouraging. The problem is that this is also being used as like a power grab at the federal level because states. Right. So like historically cars are regulated by the federal government, drivers are regulated by the state, you get your driver's license, state dmv. Well, so that's a huge problem. Right. Like the AV companies absolutely do not want the patchwork of regulation and so they're trying to get a test at the federal level level so that they can kind of preempt the state's right to, to regulate interest systems.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, because I guess it's regulating a technology, but kind of regulating a driver as well.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

These two separate things have become one. And in, in a real sense is much more of regulating a driver.

[Ed Zitron]

Regulate something when you have the. Because from my understanding with these autonomous cars, you actually have an overlord watching as well. You have a customer service rep. How does that play into it?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, so yeah, this is one of the, the most misunderstood and, and you know, different companies do things differently. Different companies have transparency around this. So you know, no one description is going to be true. True of everything. But like for example, with Waymo, what they say, and I think they have like pretty good credibility on it. Is that right? Like for a vehicle to be autonomous, and this is sort of the established like, you know, engineering view of it, for a vehicle to be autonomous when it encounters something that it cannot deal with, it has to perform what's called fallback autonomously. It has to return to what's called a minimal risk condition. And this is like not a defined thing, it just means the safest place to sort of pull over.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And if you're not doing that autonomously, it's not autonomous. And so like Teslas are not autonomous because when they fail, the human has to step in and intervene.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

A lot of people believe that because there, there is this link that, that every AV has to either a remote operator or the ability to send new guidance to the vehicle that that is somehow remotely intervening to prevent a crash. That's.

[Ed Zitron]

That's basically not.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's not possible.

[Ed Zitron]

That's not possible because I didn't imagine they had the joystick.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, I mean I'm sure that folks have tried it and it's. It just doesn't work. So. So what. What happens is that.

[Josh Whalen]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

System encounter something you can't deal with, it performs a fallback autonomously.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

The.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The new guidance is just to sort of get it through.

[Ed Zitron]

You have to get it out of danger and then.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And then attack takes back over again.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, so changing gears. Henry, what if you seen anything interesting laptop wise, you mentioned a concrete keyboard, which sounds good for hitting people.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah. Keychron actually is doing really fun stuff with the materials that their keyboards, wireless keyboards are made out of. There was one that was porcelain like and then one of those concrete. I was thinking even the most angry Redditors won't be able to move this by typing. Like you might use it for self defense if you're that kind of person. But like I was. But what I was just talking about that made me really think was building something for the test. And while. Okay, laptops. Yes, there is a big story sort of happening with Dell and pricing. But did people see the LG laundry folding robot thing?

[Ed Zitron]

No. I saw the robot. I didn't see it fold anything.

[Henry Casey]

I didn't see it folding anything. I saw it moving one thing to another. And I was like, is this being designed to beat the. To do the test of the convention?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

And then do everything else later. So that's why I'm just like. It's also doing at the slowest. It's the sloth in the Zootopia movie trailer. Like I'm like, so that's the thing. But so in laptops one of the most interesting things is a year ago Dell said the XPS brand was dead. It was replacing Dell XPS 14 with Dell Premium 14. And tech journalists everywhere were like, what? What are you doing?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I love my XPS People love it.

[Henry Casey]

And then this year they literally an exec came out and said, I owe you an apology. You guys were right. And then they released the Dell XPS back. And here's the weird thing though. They got rid of all the things we hated about it. The function keys are actually physical keys again. They had a weird capacitive Touch thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh God.

[Henry Casey]

But it was light up. It wasn't OLED like the touch bar on the max. But the problem is that I believe. Let me just check. I believe it's. They had a last second price change on it and I believe it's going to be 2050 for the starting price at first for the 14 inch XPS and it's going to. In February there will be lower price, much lower price, under $2,000 versions. And they didn't say why this is. We can all assume one of two things. What is it tariffs or memory shortage?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, the RAM thing is fucking everything up. I don't know if you've talked to anyone else at the show, but I've been hearing from quite a few people. This is just fucking up everything now because of AI, that is just smartphone. Samsung mentioned they're going to raise the price of phones because of fucking AI and RAM. Kill me.

[Henry Casey]

People are saying that the iPhone 18 not coming until next year supposedly is due to that. Because Apple wants to wait for the lowest costing phone. They want to wait a year to wait out this fricking memory shortage problem. Because that's the rumor at least they're moving to a spring year cadence for the main phone. But like it's laptops from here on out. We're a little bit concerned about what if there's going to be a good amount of RAM or it's going to be overpriced. Like it's. I'm glad I have my M1 14 inch MacBook Pro and that's going to last me forever hopefully. But.

[Ed Zitron]

But it kind of feels like it's gonna price people out of electronics soon because tariffs already raised things. Now RAM is gonna raise things also that we can generate sexier waifus. I guess. Like it's very strange and I don't think I've never seen anything like it in the history of tech. Like we've seen shortages around Covid and then post Covid. But I don't remember just like the. I remember the price of everything going up, the things becoming harder to get in general, but not like one thing within the computing world.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And. And to be up a business that makes money in order to build a business that doesn't.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, the RAM business is making tons of money. Well sure, yeah, but every other business.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

That's what, that's what I'm saying. Like devices broadly are going to take.

[Ed Zitron]

A hit because of PC sales are already down, I think.

[Henry Casey]

I do not keep track of that thankfully.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's Just, it's. I just ha. I keep coming to this show expecting the future, but it just kind of of feels dystopian, but not in like the cyberpunk way, but just in a everything's more expensive and slowing down way.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

Well, okay, this is the funniest part of all things. I never expected to get faster. Amazon's revealed that the Fire TV interface is getting an update and it's getting faster.

[Ed Zitron]

They're making new Fire TVs. Amazon still.

[Henry Casey]

Well, they're just updating the OS basically. And they've updated a couple things recently, but they showed. I was watching it today and it was loading smoothly and it looked a little cleaner.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, if you never use these TVs, they are. Fuck it. It's like you. What, you hit the button. It takes like three seconds for the.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Box to move across for five years. That broke only because I was. I had a bunch of people in my room and one of them rammed up into it because it was getting crowded, then it smashed into the floor. Indestructible otherwise.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, you, you. What you mean is you were wearing your freezer costume for Halloween and the.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Tail bit and I may have been a little lit and then someone hit it. Yeah. And someone was my tail.

[Henry Casey]

And it gets worse. If you just bought the prime day cheapest Fire TV stick and who knows how low powered that is, trying to run whatever. But they said every. When they showed it off on a demo on a regular TV that was running their Fire OS and I was just like watching going, I've been recommending Roku to my parents and for a lot of people for a while. It's simple, it's easy for people just want a grid of tiles like I. Nobody can afford. Not everybody can afford an Apple tv. I wish they could. And I think a lot of people think Google TV is content overload.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It is.

[Henry Casey]

It's like you're just getting Black Mirror episode two, I think.

[Ed Zitron]

Is that. Is that. Is there a black mirror tie in with that or.

[Henry Casey]

No, just all the ads. Oh yeah, no, I. I remember it's the million Credits episode and not.

[Ed Zitron]

I've never seen any of it. Sorry, Charlie. Charlie does read my work.

[Henry Casey]

I'm sorry, Charlie, but yeah, no, Amazon actually is answering the critic I've been writing in for years. Like, why is this so slow and stuttery and so I can't wait to update the Nike shoebox of streaming sticks I have at home because I've been reviewing this stuff for how many years now. I've collected Everything Just to make sure I can cross reference and back reference.

[Ed Zitron]

Do you see anything you really like though? Anything exciting? Anything good?

[Henry Casey]

Okay. I don't have the space for it in my home. But if you're a projector nerd watching stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Henry Casey]

Samsung's Freestyle plus that keeps auto adjusting to whatever space you put it on. It projected against curtains and it was clear. It was clear first of all. But it took a second, you saw it like ripple and then it auto corrected around to a rectangle on top of the curtain.

[Ed Zitron]

That's actually fucking cool.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

That is cool.

[Henry Casey]

But it gets better because they had two different size projectors screens that it was on and if you moved it from one to the other, it recognized the black outline of the projection screen and it really automatically, automatically resized.

[Ed Zitron]

I like that.

[Henry Casey]

And then they did it on a three corner corner of a wall and it resized like I would go to Samsung's villa of its ever first look every year.

[Ed Zitron]

Samsung villa.

[Henry Casey]

It's like they have a minor city almost. If you think Caesar's is a state this Vegas, this is a minor city. And like the Freestyle plus projector is the thing that I was like whoa.

[Ed Zitron]

Again how much though?

[Henry Casey]

I don't even know if they have announced pricing because a lot of these stuff they don't announce pricing. But the other weird thing from Samsung and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it. In the corner of their experience There was this S95H OLED TV that they're claiming can be an art TV and a regular but they had one static image on it for the entire multiple hours I was there and I was like asking everybody, did you guys beat burnin what is going on here? How is this happening? I haven't gotten an answer yet. I don't know if it was just for the show of it all, like showing it can do it, but if they've somehow done it and they were quietly not explaining it. I have more questions for their PR team and that process than I do their technical team.

[Ed Zitron]

Good luck on those though. Because they don't look from what I hear of their PR team, they're not particularly helpful with answers to questions.

[Henry Casey]

They're responsive to email. They're a nice group of people.

[Ed Zitron]

Maybe they've changed over, over the years.

[Henry Casey]

But no, I mean everybody's had trouble with different PR at different outlets. It's not. That's. It all depends on who's what, your history of who.

[Ed Zitron]

But that's the thing though with these art TVs they're always a lovely idea. It's like I don't fucking know if I want some art on my wall. I just put up art and even I saw one of these E Ink things as well. I'm going to show you. There was like an entire hall of E Ink things that just broke. It's just.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's very artistic actually.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah, that's the wrong one.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's just. It's like a nice idea but you're like, okay, but again practice all those.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

At the club last night.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that was just too late for you. No, it's really. It's frustrating as well because some of these ideas you're like, all right, that's a nice one. How much? Oh, just out of the range of most people. Oh, an E Ink screen.

[Henry Casey]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

I guess. But how much? Hundreds of dollars. Fucking. I just. They should have a cheap section. They should literally have a cheap section of this show. Like a below 300 bucks.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I looked up the projector. I think they typically have cost around 900 bucks. Oh, that's. They haven't announced.

[Ed Zitron]

That's not particular. Worst I've heard.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And for a projector.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I mean like the Nebula X1 Pro. The tall things like five grand and the X1 little box is like.

[Henry Casey]

And this is like a small tube. Like it is a cute looking. I want to call it Pixar esque but like it is a nicely designed. I was like this is fun to use. I have a TV and I don't care that it's a black rectangle. Sometimes I'm not the audience for the art TV and I'm not really a projector audience. But while we were watching this freestyle plus doing this thing, I was like okay, this is cool. This is the article headline. This is like the actual.

[Ed Zitron]

But also that's something you could use in an apartment potentially because it adapts to any surface. Finally something that sounds useful.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, I think also it's like a. I think a little bit of a premium thing too. It feels like screens TVs have gotten so cheap and so big.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

That it's like having your tv like having it be either like disguised as art or like hidden as a projector. Like this sort of like I'm too good to even have a TVs are for like, you know. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I did see like the most limp story. It was like Amazon's used TVs have rounded corners. I'm just like at this, at this point may just, just don't. You don't need to Post about it, mate. Who cares? It's got rounded corners. It gives. Yeah, it's just like. And also, I went and looked. They looked pointy.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

They looked.

[Ed Zitron]

They looked actually pointy.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Why not a circular tv?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

They're round.

[Ed Zitron]

Give me a circular. Yeah, I want to round up. I want. I want a.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Into my skull.

[Ed Zitron]

A rhomboid television. Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Everything has to be filmed at the Fish Islands.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. I just know if you want to do something weird, great, send it my way. Don't pretend like it's for everyone. If you just want to. This is for perfect Perverts. The pervert section.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Pervert tv.

[Ed Zitron]

Pervert tv. I think we have that. I think we have Pervert De Palma.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Is like, you know, television pervert.

[Ed Zitron]

You from YouTube.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

My name is Ryan DePalma. I've been watching pervert TV for the past 40 years. I'm proud to introduce it to CES.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I was gonna make a liquid television joke, but that could get gross real quick. Well, we're going to wrap up this 30 minutes.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I'm Siemens.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, there we go. Siemens AI Television. Pervert Television.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's physical.

[Ed Zitron]

Coming up next, an ad from Pervert Television, the new streaming service by Perverts for Perverts. And if you're the advertiser that comes next, I am very sorry. I am very sorry. And if this is one of the ones where it's my voice recorded, that's even better. I'm not. I'm not running Pervert tv. I swear.

[Josh Whalen]

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Call 844-844 iHeart to get started. That's 844-844, iHeart.

[Ed Zitron]

And we're back. We're back with an incredible group of people. Edward Ongweso Jr. Of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast, and Henry Casey of CNN Underscored. And we've just been looking at the fake stuff for a few minutes because I wanted to talk briefly about this thing called the Pickle. Now. The Pickle. The Pickle is yet more fucking smart glass bullshit. But what it is, is it. They call it a soul computer and I think just. I think we can start at this point if you call anything a soul computer.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Straight to jail.

[Ed Zitron]

Straight to jail. Fucking right down you go. But what's great is this thing is this is these glasses that project images across the. Across the glasses, the transparent OLEDs. And then it has some mystical AI in it that remembers everything. I'm just gonna read this. For a better life, in every dimension, we need an intelligence that sees with you, remembers your life, and learns to understand you. And you soul, new soul. It talks to you. It can teach you, like, guitar stuff. And it claims it has, like, memories of stuff you've seen before. Now this has caused some sort of scandal online, first of all, because it's blatantly fucking fake. And there's like, Matt Dowd, I think, has gone completely nuts about it. It's just like, that's fucking fake. And now the CEO of Pickle is.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Now arguing with him.

[Ed Zitron]

I love that I just got to say. The CEO of Pickle, why is the company called Pickle? I don't fuck it to be extra special annoying. And Alex Heath was like, it's completely fake. It's stupid, it's wrong. But wouldn't it be cool if it was real?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

What if your soul was a pickle?

[Ed Zitron]

What if you was. What if you. Well, first of all, if you make a company called Pickle with a fake device, you probably don't have a soul.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I have such a negative, negative association with pickles because I had a roommate who would buy so many pickles and not touch them that they would fill up the fridge and it broke. All the shelves kept just. Just the putting jars.

[Ed Zitron]

The compound weight of pickles.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like open the door and it's like an avalanche.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Literally. Literally. And. And then glass also, and pickle juice.

[Ed Zitron]

What was the justification for purchasing so many of them?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I like pickles, but would get so high they'd forget that all the pickles.

[Ed Zitron]

How do you forget?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

You smoke a lot of weed and then you go into our basement, very spacious basement, right. And you smoke more weed and you just.

[Ed Zitron]

But you get to the Pickle dispensary, your fridge, and you see your pickles. No, not you. But that's what I'm saying. Yours is.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Mine was like, these are one of their pickles.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The answer is, he didn't have a smart device.

[Ed Zitron]

You don't need to buy more pickles. You have more pickles than you could ever deserve.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Desire.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but this is now a scandal because basically everyone's saying this is fake. And. And the guy is just on X. The everything app. Just going to town with people. It's so cool. I. I'm fine with that. That this existing, but he has to post.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Is it. Is it sort of like a. People are trying to do, like, a Marcus Brownlee with. What was the. The device that he sort of like?

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, the humane pin.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The Humane pin.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Josh Whalen]

I.

[Ed Zitron]

The reason I bring this up, though, is I like that every last 2 cess we've had. Oh, no, baby, it was 20.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

24.

[Ed Zitron]

We had the rabbit R1.

[Henry Casey]

That was 24. Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

24 rabbit that was there for that one.

[Ed Zitron]

No, it was before Better offline. I was a much larger, sadder person, so I didn't really have as much fun as I could with it. But that was the one where, like, everyone fell for it because it was kind of real.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's just like that company is still rolling around in its own filth.

[Henry Casey]

Didn't it get acquired by, like, HP or somebody?

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, my. No, that was the humane pin. HP bought another company to put it with the Palm pre. I guess, like. Like, it's just really. I think every year we need a fake thing. We need that. We need something that's, like, aggressively just.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I got handed a bunch of.

[Ed Zitron]

You got handed fake stuff that. What you got there. It just look like boxes?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, they're boxes. I just hold things that remind me now that you said I look like the. The rabbit. This must be AI Agents that can.

[Ed Zitron]

They're AI Agents, but they're in cardboard.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, they're cardboard boxes that look like fridge magnets when you open them up.

[Ed Zitron]

What you got in there? Because I'm quite curious to know what's in this box and if there's an AI agent in there.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Looks like a podcasting is a visual medium.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's like a children's.

[Ed Zitron]

I see some paper. Yeah, I see. I see.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's two boxes, and I'm opening one right now.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

This is. It's like a little green box, a little green magnet.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I said, what is the. It's agentic AI. I said, what's the agent part? He's like, oh, you know, if you want a girlfriend. Can I see this?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, can I see this?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Thank you, AI PI.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, this is just a box with a connector on it.

[Henry Casey]

That's the EF2 memory card we're about to see.

[Ed Zitron]

This is just a battery, man. I'm gonna be honest.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

No, it is.

[Ed Zitron]

There's no agent in there. Well, I'm disappointed. Down now the rabbit R1. Was an NFT project that I wrote like a huge piece about because they're a fucking fake NFT thing. But I like that we have. We should have.

[Matt Osawski]

You want.

[Ed Zitron]

If you want to do fake, you have to go all the way. Because this is. Pickle has the most glossy website. It's like the most like sheen filled website. It looks so professional on mobile.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It just keeps going.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's an endless. And they're just like, yeah, it'll do everything now if you pig. But it's. It just made me look at it. You look at that and you're like, wow, this looks very. Is it just.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

This is another.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just opening the box again and there's just.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

No, no, there's something on.

[Ed Zitron]

There's. It looks like another battery. But it's blue.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah, but it's blue. It's got a screen. A tiny little.

[Ed Zitron]

Let me see this. Let me see.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Now we're cooking.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, so this thing is. I'm just going to describe this to you. It says X. X Origin. Zorigion. Yeah, Zorigen. They're calling it Zurigin. There's original, not to be confused.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Which.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, I hit the button and it's like flashing blue and it is doing nothing else.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

So you have to. You have. You gotta put them together.

[Ed Zitron]

I put them together.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Okay, you put them together. And then when API. Aipi. When the AI PI. AI is connected only to the battery module, press the power button briefly.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, I pressed the power button briefly.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

And it went after the white light turns on.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, the white light turns on. Okay, so this is great for a audio medium, I realize. But the thing is about this is.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's like.

[Ed Zitron]

This is just too.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It looks like we're playing with smart Legos.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

Which is a thing of ces.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's really separate. Hard to describe how underwhelming it is. Just like a tiny box.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just. It's the crap show now because. But when you read about the Pickle, it's funny. Especially after a day of looking at actual smart glasses where everything is just blurry. And the guy was like, oh, what are you seeing? And it was. I. I think. What were those ones? Was that the TCL booth? I think I saw them. Is that one was. It was like twelve hundred dollars and it didn't really work very well and you had to control it by. These people don't use products, I think because it's like. Yeah, you just like rub your finger across the top right part of it and it was like a picture of Leonardo da Vinci and it was like photos and you could take video with it. And I had to walk away because all I could think at the back of my. I just want to ask him what the fucking point of any of this is. But I think I would have turned into Werner Herzog. Make me put this device on my face and it takes me away from humanity and then you steal my money for it. But I was just decided not to do the bit there. It's just I'm. I'm really. This whole time I've been trying to rack my brains of why I would ever want because I like the idea of a heads up display. I think the idea of walking around being able to pull one up. But all of these things seem to run into the same thing which is they want to be constantly on.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

They don't want to. They don't seem to want to be like things you briefly look at. They want to absorb your attention fully. And it just doesn't feel like any device does that other than the phone and the phone doing it doesn't seem to be for good reasons either.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Or with good results.

[Ed Zitron]

Or with good results. Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

So I've been using the xreal one S I believe.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay. What's that like?

[Henry Casey]

It's the newest and it's good. It's what I like about it is it will meet you where your posture is. Especially if your posture is like. Let's say I'm in my hotel and I'm like, I want to play a video game on my like whatever portable, the Legion GO s Steam os. But I don't want to hold this thing. So just on a flight for a while. Tired. But I put these glasses on. I had the.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's just a TV screen effectively.

[Henry Casey]

It basically puts the screen above you and you can move it and you can just have the controller in your hands. And sure I feel like I'm in Wall E's origin stories at some point, but in that case. And if I had managed to pack it correctly on the airplane, which I couldn't because everybody goes to CES over packs. It's a problem. But like no, I think xreal is one of these companies and they're doing a bunch of. Of different partnerships. They're working with seemingly everybody possible. Which you sort of want if like you want cross compatibility. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

I wouldn't. But I went to the xreal booth and I was, I was kind of excited to go over there because I thought these are just going to be glasses that are little TVs in your eyes. And I'm like, way less. There are way more offensive things on the show. And I get there and there's just a fucking thing that says Vibe agent. And I try and they're like, you could book a demo. I'm like, you don't want to see me. You don't want to put me in a box with this thing. Only one of us is leaving as a Vibe agent. I don't know.

[Henry Casey]

I don't know.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's a Vyvanse.

[Ed Zitron]

Vyvanse agent. It's a Vyvanse agent. I take methylphenidate. It's. It's fine. I'm trying to find this thing because it was so bizarre to me that they're just putting these words. It's like Vibe description at this point, like, AI agent, glasses slop. And then I just text. It's just tech slop. And I saw a guy, one of the demo guys, very overly eager fella, was like, yeah, I call these my Tony Stark glasses. And I tried to use them as like, sir, there's a line. And there was like a 25 person line. I'm just like, this is just. I don't. Lining up for anything. Feels deranged here.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And I always think the same thing, which is if you had double the amounts of these, you would be fine. Maybe they're trying to do like, they're trying to make it so that scarcity. So you're like, oh, why is everyone lining up for this? Maybe they're just trying to put friction between people and the products. They. They just don't work that well. Is there, there must be AI in this? It said agents.

[Matt Osawski]

No, no.

[Henry Casey]

I. I wonder was the. Whether. Where was this? Because, like, were there two booths?

[Ed Zitron]

It was in the. What's it called? The south hall, I believe.

[Henry Casey]

Because I've been going. Because I've been like, they are. I. I will say the words AI slop as many times as I feel like it. And I don't think I seen that much AI, if any, Reddit thread here.

[Ed Zitron]

Saying the instant translation, Visual assistant, object recognition, productivity boost. Quickly access charts, reminders, or instructions while you do something else.

[Henry Casey]

And it's an X Real project.

[Ed Zitron]

Here we go. Project Aura. It feels like tomorrow. Jesus Christ. It's on Android xr. Hands free control.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Feels like tomorrow.

[Henry Casey]

Oh, yeah, I see it. Yeah, it's an unlock. Early access. Yeah. This is not something I have gotten my hands on yet.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Why didn't they say it looks like tomorrow?

[Ed Zitron]

I. I don't know.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Wouldn't that be better?

[Henry Casey]

Because feel is something you feel.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Oh, yeah, I see. It's in your heart.

[Henry Casey]

Looks can be deceiving.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes. It might not look like tomorrow, then.

[Henry Casey]

Also, look is the signature weasel word when you're not really able to commit to anything yet. Yeah, it looks like, like, OpenAI. Looks like it could be a company that isn't lying to us.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But then why doesn't feels get that?

[Ed Zitron]

It's just like, I keep seeing this thing of, like, this. They have this imaginary person who is just looking around going, what's that? What's that? What's that? What's that do? What's that? What's that object? What's that?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But then you come here and you do see that person, that the person is on the floor, or hordes of them.

[Henry Casey]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

That photo that Ed posted of just like, the horde trying to. To, like, break in at 10:00am oh, my God.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Did I. Did I send you guys a picture like that?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

You posted the photo of the people, like, trying to break into the show floor.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

The same thing. I was like, is it always like this?

[Ed Zitron]

No, I. And I said out loud. I'm like, what are you so excited about?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I saw a crowd, the largest crowd I've seen yet in NECs around a Roomba, a new Roomba device that wasn't a Roomba, but like, a Roomba Roomba S. And I was like, what?

[Matt Osawski]

Come on, guys.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

At least that's a proven product.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Like you said, that is something that works every year.

[Ed Zitron]

And like, last year, I didn't check out the robot vacuums this year, but I remember last year, they were like, we've got little arms that can pick stuff up. I did. That actually led me to one of the funniest things. I'm sure that this was for, like, legitimate reasons. There was a robot vacuum company where you could pick up a cleaning struggle. And it said, one, pick your struggle. Two, drop your coin. Three, get your Magnum.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

You are now entering the cleaning struggles.

[Ed Zitron]

And. And then it just had a dust always hides under low furniture. Hair always gets tangled in the brush. Too busy, no time to clean. Cleaning requires too much disassembly. I. There are times when I want to know more, and there are times when I just read something. I'm like, yeah, that's all I need, you know?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

But, like, this is. The issue is that you can fully automate a task, but, like, the robot will need to be maintained.

[Josh Whalen]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like, do you want it? You're sort of trading one thing for the other. And again, with like, consumers, people will buy the thing because they're like, oh, I'm lazy. I don't want to. I don't want to. You know, I totally get that. But they don't think that what they're doing is they're trading like the occasional sweep or vacuum of their floor for, like, you know, maintaining this complex machine with like, lidar and like, I have a fucking roborock.

[Ed Zitron]

If you're listening from roborock, your shit sucks.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

That's what it was. It was roborock. It was big, giant black and red pavilion.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a quite expensive roborock. And the dust that that shit doesn't pick up, undo that shit with a fucking sweat. The fact I have to clean up after my robot at this point, just make it do little turds. Make it a game.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Some AI lawnmower.

[Ed Zitron]

An AI lawnmower.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Isn't that interesting?

[Ed Zitron]

See, that's one where I'm like. I could almost imagine the industrial applications if you just take AI away. Because robotics, yes. Has been doing AI for a while.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

That's fine. Another one of the things where it's like, you know what might be an interesting innovation that could be sold into or pitched. They glom AI onto it. And then I'm like, I don't know.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Even though it was already. Because you've already had like, iRobot doing like, anything. Gutter cleaners and.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yeah. You know. Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean, any. Anything like that, whether it's a. Like the lawnmowers or like pool cleaners, is another class of, like, actually useful robots that. That were. I mean, that's. That was AI before.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Yes.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

They just didn't have to call.

[Ed Zitron]

They didn't have to say world box.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I saw hearing aids that were just. They were literally just hearing aids and they made some improvements and they are throwing AI, but then you ask them about it and it's like the technology that, like you said last generation, they're already using, yeah. You know, algorithmic systems to try to improve your ability to hear things at distance.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just like I'm now thinking you just chop the word AI off and it would be fine. But did you see any robot vacuum? So I'm gonna have to chase these down myself.

[Henry Casey]

I am not the one covering the robo vacuum on the team. I just saw the dancing AGI robot.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Okay, Talk to me about this goddamn.

[Henry Casey]

Thing at Poop Con Dance like me at the first wedding I ever Went to when I was 10 years old and it was unfortunately named AGI Bot. And I'm like, no, this isn't actually. This is doing a pre rehearsed routine. Like, why are we. Words have meaning, or at least they should. So it's like, I. I will kick.

[Ed Zitron]

That thing so hard it flies.

[Henry Casey]

There were two of them, so they might try to come at you from both sides.

[Ed Zitron]

And I've been boxing years. I'll take those out. No problems. Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Robots don't have weapons.

[Ed Zitron]

Robots don't have weapons and they don't have friends.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

They don't have dance moves, apparently.

[Henry Casey]

But the Boston Dynamics people have made people afraid, which is the whole thing where this.

[Ed Zitron]

That's where most some people afraid.

[Henry Casey]

Well, no, that's the thing where most people engage with the idea of the robot that will do anything. Is it one social video. They solve a Boston Dynamics thing three years ago.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Henry Casey]

And then that's informed them to think, oh, I got to be careful. Careful about everything from now on.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Henry Casey]

But when you look at. It's like, oh, it's trying to serve a press demo.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, those are all highly reversed as well.

[Ed Zitron]

What's it a demo for? What is the purpose of the dancing robot?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It.

[Henry Casey]

To disarm you, impressing you and getting your money to invest in it.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So the very first chatbot was created in the. In the 60s and.

[Ed Zitron]

Eliza.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Eliza, yeah. And so there's the Eliza effect, I think. So much of what we see here is driven by sort of. Of different versions of that, which is where you show people something, doing a task that they've only ever seen a human do before, whether it's dancing or mowing a lawn or whatever else. And because, like, our only metaphor for intelligence is humans, we automatically leap to. This must be a human level of intelligence.

[Josh Whalen]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

This is what, this is what has fueled Tesla's autopilot.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Henry Casey]

That.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's like if we make it seem human adjacent, they'll just fill in the gaps. That's what they've done with LLMs.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Exactly. Right. And what this does is this. It locks you into this mode again. We've seen 10 years of this with Tesla Autopilot, where it's like, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better. But, like, what's getting better is the illusion.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And what, what is completely, like, left out of this entire framework for engaging with. With any kind of automation technology is the. Is the fact that at some point, it becomes actually useful. There's actually real value. And with autonomous vehicles, it's really simple. When that point is, it's when the company says, we take legal responsibility for.

[Ed Zitron]

This system and they never will.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, Waymo, does Zoox.

[Ed Zitron]

Do they actually take.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Of course. There's no. Yeah, there's no. There's no. There's no human in them. I mean, the Zooxes that are running the Strip and the Waymos that are all over the Bay, there's no. There's no human in them to take responsibility. It's. It's all.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, I suppose that's right. Yeah. I mean, what about the Robo taxis in Austin? Oh, they still got people in them.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Those have someone in the passenger seat. But no, I mean, in Texas, like, those are technically considered to be autonomous.

[Ed Zitron]

Vehicles by Texan autonomy laws.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah. Which are essentially non existent.

[Ed Zitron]

Nice. That's good.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

It's funny, when you actually pull up the Tesla Robotaxi app, it says, if your ride is in Texas, it's autonomous. If your ride is in California, it's not.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's the same experience.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean, it's the same thing. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Very fucking cool. Have you used. Have you used Zoox yet here?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

So I had a ride with Zoox a year ago at ces. Right. So I haven't. So that was cool. But I was, you know, it was with. With the cto, like, sort of a whole thing. And to be perfectly honest, like, at the time, I was like, it's a very. It's. It's the only product that you can kind of write in right now that is designed from the ground up to not just be a car.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Because it's like an empty room with wheels.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And so that's good.

[Ed Zitron]

That's kind of cool. So the Docklands Light Railway, and it's.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Perfect for the Strip. And, like, for a long time, the space was like, AV companies were like, we can't, like, market on the novelty of this because it's like such a serious thing. We're going to conquer the world. And. And, like, one of the cool things that's happened is that there's been so much, like, struggle to get this stuff to market that now it's sort of like, well, fuck, it is. It is novelty.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like, this is just a cooler way to ride down the Strip to the club or to the, you know, Dino, or to this. That.

[Ed Zitron]

To the guns shop.

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And. And, like, I think that's fine. I don't know. I don't know how they're making money doing it. And I don't know that's actually.

[Ed Zitron]

Are any of these companies making any money?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

No, the Robotaxi companies are not yet making money.

[Ed Zitron]

Why are they bleeding so much?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, because it's extremely expensive. I mean each one of these. Well, so each one of the vehicles. So like, you know, we, we work with estimates but you know, best estimates for like a Waymo is, you know, two to three hundred thousand dollars a vehicle.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

And then the operating costs are very high. We don't, we know very little about like how many, how many miles can they go. Right. Because they're these electric vehicles, right. And they're powered by, you know, they're powering not just the, the drive, but also all this lidar and radar and compute and all these other things. So like the utilization. How many rides can it give before.

[Ed Zitron]

And they must go by and charge.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, I mean we, I, apparently they're, they're burning somewhere on the order of $2 billion a year.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus Christ. Is that for. But is that from purchasing more of them?

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Them.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

That is, they're scaling very aggressively, right? And, and they're also, they're continuing to use most of the. So, so they were ready to, to sort of start bringing in this vehicle from China which was using fewer sensors and so really bringing the cost down. And then of course tariffs screwed that up.

[Josh Whalen]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I think they've got that back on track based on my conversations here. So, you know, I think they're, look, I think way more will get to a point where, where they will, you know, have a viable business. I think they're raising, I've heard $15 billion right now to get, get to IPO.

[Ed Zitron]

We're running out of money. We're running out of money. I swear to God, we're going to run out.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Liquidity in 2026 is going to be wild because yeah, Waymo is not the only company that needs to, to raise money. There's huge IPO is SpaceX OpenAI and Topic all supposed to open.

[Ed Zitron]

AI is not going to IPO.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I don't know any of them are. I don't want to IPO. I think SpaceX could, I'm a, I'm pretty, I'm pretty. I mean, we'll see.

[Ed Zitron]

Like no better than I would prove me wrong.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean, look, you know, I think, I think SpaceX like Tesla has the kernel of a real business there with the, with the, the Falcon 9 launch program. It's the most cost effective way to get into orbit.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Right?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The basic Critique that I have and again, like, you know, make the numbers public. I go, I hope they go public because we'll see the numbers.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Actually.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, this is why I want to, I want anthropic and open AI to go public so bad. No, to just file.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Let me look.

[Ed Zitron]

I just know. Let me look under the hood. Yeah, let me, let me see how much you're burning because I bet it's a lot. I mean I was talking to you about this off, off air, but there's two Chinese AI companies that are going public. Zoochi and Minimax I think they're called. Forget. Saw someone on the Man Sam. Wrong on that one. But they, I think one of them makes like 35 million dollars in revenue a month and spends 200 billion. 200 million even. Sorry, you gotta. Yeah. And that you got to spend money to lose money, I guess. But I, I think that, you know what if this is the year when we finally get some clarity over that, I'd be really happy.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Well, and I mean just in terms of Elon Musk, I mean like X. I burned what like 14 billion, 13 billion. Yeah. And like he's made this whole, his whole thing work for a long time by you know, he's really good at raising money.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But then also they just raced around today.

[Ed Zitron]

Did they?

[Matt Osawski]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That's nice.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I think the, the level of burn has that, that XAI is itself which has no profitable business to it is like dramatically higher. Tesla's always lost or not always, but almost always lost money. But like they could mitigate that loss and they could kind of string it along and go a couple of years between fundraising rounds. But this is yeah, ten plus billion dollars a year. Elon's empire is really fragile even without that kind of cash burn. And So I think 20, 27.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, they, they raised $20 billion. Series E Vela Equity Partners steps. Yeah. Fidelity. Fidelity Management fell for it again. Award Qatar Investment Authority MGX and Baron Capital Group among other key partners. Investors in the round include Nvidia and Cisco. We're doing the dot com. We're doing the dot com boom again folks. We love the dot com boom.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Okay, well so they, they got, I love raising money. They got a couple years of burn.

[Ed Zitron]

Now and guess what do they. $20 billion data centers Xia continues to expand its decisive compute advantage with world's largest AI supercomputers at Colossus 1 barely built and Colossus 2 not built at all. Ending the year with over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents. Now for the non technical audience. That's just a lot of GPUs. They can generate CSAM, I guess. But my favorite part of this is Grok 4 series are Frontier language models are built on the best in class training infrastructure. Powered by Colossus, they've pushed reinforcement learning training to unprecedented levels. Refining Grox intelligence, reasoning and agency using pre training scale Compute what you train on. You've been generating child porn.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean no, that's the. But what's the product too? What's the revenue?

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, sorry, they don't have that here. They don't have that. They will say though our reach spans approximately 600 million monthly activities users across the X and Grok apps. Bullfucking shit.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, getting scales easy when it's free.

[Ed Zitron]

Also, Twitter doesn't have that many users. Yeah, like I genuinely don't think they've. They've done that.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Are you suggesting that Elon Musk might be lying?

[Ed Zitron]

I know, Ed, I know you're a big Elon Musk fan.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I mean it's hurtful. It's hurtful to have his credibility question.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Charting a path that will spread the light of civilization beyond our planet.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I wish, I wish the listener could see everyone's faces when I said that.

[Ed Zitron]

Even took a drink when you said that. No, it's. I just feel like this is a year of reckonings. I think that that's the thing because sure, they've got $20 billion, but he needs to build fucking Colossus and Colossus 2.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I mean it's either that or we're gonna get getting blitzed in December being like it's all fucking fraud.

[Ed Zitron]

But the thing is, but as I've been saying, we're running out of money. Yeah, like we're running out $20 billion.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

He wouldn't be talking about a SpaceX IPO if he wasn't desperate. Yeah, he's the value, Elon.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's an upsized round.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Also the thing that he dangles out in the deep future and like the Mars he said so many times. It's like a really important part of the fanboy orthodoxy that like the mission to Mars is so important that we cannot compromise it by allowing, you know, shareholder value to become an issue with it. Yeah. And as long as Elon's the richest gu in the world, like that was totally like that worked. The moment he started is fascinating because the vibe has been getting wrecked in the, in the Tesla subreddits for like years now for a number of reasons. The Space X ones really fell this, this last year and the ipo, they were, they were crumbling already. Just the number of times starship was exploding. Yeah, but the IPO news was the thing that really I saw these forums start to like actually melt down. Because the whole point of all of this is now like Elon can't guarantee it.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Right.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Like if he turns SpaceX over to shareholders, there's no guarantee that the mission happens.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, because it was.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

I wonder how they'd react also. Because, you know, he said they weren't also doing a Series E fundraising round.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, he said this isn't happening.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But it's also an upside. Fake news around now. It's, you know, it's even bigger than before.

[Ed Zitron]

So what happened to that big Nvidia data center deal? Like these, the spv. But that was going to do a special purpose vehicle. We don't talk about that SPV shit.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Talk about previous deals.

[Ed Zitron]

We don't need Valor.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

The Valor.

[Ed Zitron]

The Valor. It was. No, it's the $20 billion. 2 billion from Nvidia.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Valor was the middleman or they were doing the leaseback or something. But it's all private, so you don't know. Like.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but did it close?

[Ed Niedermeyer]

I think so.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but that's the thing. Like this or now just getting back into my regular Bullshit. There's a $38 billion deal that Oracle has been talking about doing for months that's disappeared off the thing. I just think the banks are running out of money.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

It's so sick. Also that that deal was talked about so loudly is like, is it. This is going to be a cornerstone of the coming overbuild for compute. This is going to allow us to be able to put ourselves in the lead and ahead of any other competitor.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

When I remember people from, from banks saying after the Twitter deal that like that dead debt that they weren't able to get off the books was really starting to impact their ability to fund like, like, like new deals. And it was really starting to sound like the. Especially with banks that have been historically very close. I won't name any names but. But with Elon it sounded like the, the magic was, was sort of over.

[Ed Zitron]

But then it seems like they're.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, they're still.

[Ed Zitron]

No, it's data centers. It's data centers. Like it really. It's just the, everyone's so goo goo for data centers these days that they're just like, what if he builds more? I mean, it's also so funny to close this the same week as the fucking CSAM thing. You're Like. Like, I don't know if I'm a business journalist and I have any chance of asking anything. I'm like, hey, Fidelity, are you investing in the data center comment or the child porn? Because that's the thing. It's like, I'm not even being like. I'm not trying to be crass. It's a fucking question.

[Ed Niedermeyer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, Bryce Elder, Legend from the ft, did a great piece today where it was like, oh, it's like the. The pornography generator connected to a social network, and it was just a list of all the staff at X, but with clown makeup on. Dry Zelda, Alphaville Legends. No, it's. It's very funny watching this, and I. He doesn't usually do anything at ces. I wish never. I wish he did. I wish the big companies would fuck this place up a little bit more, just to make it more chaotic.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

Listen, one year there, you're gonna notice that there's gonna be a South Africa section and you're gonna see all your favorite. All the stars, Peter Thiel, all the.

[Ed Zitron]

All the famous South Africans. Mark Andreessen is not South Africa.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

All right? It's. It's the other that I. Oh, my God, the other bald. I always forget his name will come to me.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm sure we'll. I'm sure the listeners can fill in the gaps. Grumple Shields. That's his name. I'm calling him that.

[Edward Ongweso Jr.]

But I'm gonna look him up now. It's gonna bother me. All right.

[Ed Zitron]

I think we're gonna wrap it there, though. Now we've talked about Elon Musk a little bit. This has been such a lovely episode. Thank you all for listening. Ed on Gracer Jr. Of the tech Bubble newsletter, Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast, and of course, Henry Casey of CNN underscored and as ever, please donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium in honor of Sean Paul Adams, who is a wonderful friend of the suite. Sean Paul's son is epileptic, and his family deeply appreciate it. Thanks so much for everyone for listening. We will be back in a few hours. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osawski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links. And of course, my newsletter I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed.app to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit.

[Matt Osawski]

Our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out.

[Ed Zitron]

On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Whalen]

This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.