It Could Happen Here: "Inside Our AI Future: Report from CES"

Date: January 8, 2026
Hosts: Robinson Meyer, Garrison Wells
Network: Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts

Episode Overview

This episode departs slightly from the usual tone of collapse and crisis by offering a lively on-the-ground report from CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Hosts Robinson Meyer and Garrison Wells cover the latest trends, tech panels, and the vibe of the consumer electronics show—with a particular focus on the pervasive influence of AI, the stagnation of consumer gadgets, and the philosophical and social anxieties underpinning today's tech industry. Their skeptical, wry tone cuts through the hype, highlighting the real-world consequences and oddities surrounding AI's march into every facet of modern life.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The CES Experience & General Vibe

• The show is described as a blend of early promise and present-day stagnation, with a "warming tide of lukewarm garbage water" (00:36).
• Robinson Meyer notes that CES is about two things:
  • New gadgets (some promising, some absurd)
  • Industry panels where tech leaders pontificate about the future—often out of touch with most people’s actual needs.

Notable quote:

“A bunch of the world's big tech companies come together...and Garrison and I show up and largely just kind of let it wash over us like a warming tide of lukewarm garbage water.”
—Robinson Meyer (00:36)

2. Gadget Trends: The Lull and the Wearables Surge

Smart Glasses Rule the Roost (03:13–05:40)

• Roughly 40% of Showstoppers (a media-focused showcase) was smart glasses in various iterations.
• Most glasses offer similar features: audio or on-screen translation, heads-up displays, incremental hardware changes but little revolutionary function.
• An emerging trend: smart eyewear for sports (biking, swimming, skiing) that incorporate heads-up tech.

The Broader Gadget Slowdown

• Both hosts comment on how exciting, transformative devices have given way to incremental, sometimes pointless upgrades.
• Phones, laptops, graphics cards—little left to surprise consumers or drive excitement.

Notable quotes:

“I'm not excited when I get a phone anymore. Neither is anyone I know...The only thing that's exciting is like, well, my old phone was literally not working anymore.”
—Robinson Meyer (06:20)

“Kind of one of the only spaces where [tech] are still improvements and where there's a lot of competition in the market is smart glasses.”
—Robinson Meyer (07:02)

Timestamp:

• Smart glasses trends: 03:06–05:40
• Discussion on the gadget stagnation: 05:40–07:54

3. AI Everything: Wearables, Cheating, and the ‘AI Hype’ Fatigue

Wearables & AI ‘Helpers’ (07:02–08:40)

• CES keynote plugged AI-powered wearables as a major trend, including rumored "Smart Tutor" glasses and other learning/assistance devices.
• Amusingly, for every AI cheating aid (glasses for exam answers), there’s another for anti-cheating surveillance—highlighting the arms race dynamic.

Notable quote:

“You have AI powered tools that will monitor you to make sure you're not cheating while you use an AI powered tool to help cheat at the same time.”
—Garrison Wells (08:12)

The Diminishing Returns of the AI Boom

• AI is still the ‘additive property’ for everything, but the victory lap is over; now there’s fatigue in both industry and society.
• Panelists frame AI as ‘augmenting’ jobs rather than taking them, emphasizing that you should learn AI or risk being “left behind.”

Timestamp:

• Wearable/AI fatigue: 08:40–09:59

4. Shifting Focus: Industry & Enterprise Over Consumer

Industrial Pivot (10:02–12:13)

• CES panels are now much more focused on industrial/enterprise applications for AI—manufacturing, robotics, “digital twins” (virtual versions of factories to simulate outcomes), and exoskeletons for warehouse workers.
• Consumer wow-factor is mostly gone; most new AI tools are for work or B2B, not personal devices.
• Real admission: "there's not much to hand consumers anymore on a yearly basis."

Notable quote:

“I think consciously more focused on industrial applications than on consumer technology because there's not that much new to give the consumer right. And they are also, I think, starting to recognize that you can get people using ChatGPT and the like, but they're mostly not using it.”
—Robinson Meyer (12:13)

5. The AI 'Funnel' and Model Hacking: Marketing in the Age of Chatbots

AI-Powered Marketing & SEO for Bots (17:17–21:44)

• A major marketing challenge: young people buy things based on chatbot recommendations, not search or ads—so companies are trying to ‘hack’ AI models, seeding training data to bias results.
• Example: Allegra (the medication brand) specifically lobbied for its “non-drowsy” formula to be referenced in chatbot outputs, a strategy referred to as “model hacking.”
• Advertising via AI remains lackluster—disastrous AI-generated ads (McDonald's in the Netherlands, Coca Cola) have mostly resulted in negative reactions.

Notable quote:

“Model hacking, I think was the exact term used. That was the only specific example that I got how any of this works too...everyone else was just talking in vague terms about...our team's creativity soar, or whatever.”
—Robinson Meyer (20:14)

Timestamp:

• Funnel and Allegra model hacking discussion: 17:17–21:44

6. Data, Security & Prompt Injection: The Intuit/OpenAI Saga

The Prompt Injection Concern (21:44–28:46)

• Intuit is partnering with OpenAI to build AI assistants into TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, etc., giving these models deep access to users' financial data.
• Serious security risks: “Prompt injection” (users hiding commands in data sent to an AI) could leak private information, and there’s no established defense or clarity on legal liability.
• When pressed, Intuit’s CMO Thomas Reniz had no real answer—emphasizing a widespread carelessness in the tech industry regarding AI safety.

Notable quote:

“When not if an AI powered financial tool leaks customer data through a prompt injection attack, who is liable? The company using QuickBooks? Intuit? OpenAI? The regulations weren't written for this scenario.”
—Robinson Meyer quoting security researcher Chris Black (24:43)

"A key part of marketing this should be being able to tell people what kind of safety precautions are being taken with their data. And the fact that he didn't and clearly had never thought about any of this stuff...is emblematic of how careless everyone adjacent to this industry is..."
—Robinson Meyer (27:52)

Timestamps:

• Prompt injection Q&A, panel flaw: 21:44–28:46

7. Agentic AI and the Limits of Hype

The ‘Year of Agentic AI’ That Wasn’t (29:01–31:57)

• Agentic AI: Machine ‘agents’ that can complete tasks for you (like booking flights end-to-end) are a persistent industry goal, but the tech is far from reliable: even the best AI agents still fail at most real-world tasks.
• Despite repeated claims (“next year will be the year of agentic AI”), mass adoption and functionality haven’t materialized.

Notable quote:

“2025 was supposed to be the year of agentic AI and now they're saying, well, 2026 is going to be the year of agentic AI. Not because none of this stuff works.”
—Robinson Meyer (30:45)

8. AI Governance, Trust, and Data Protection

Regulatory Skepticism, International Perspective (32:41–35:26)

• Some European officials at panels claimed “data protection” inhibits innovation. A recurring tension is the need to “find the middle way” between privacy and technological progress.
• Others praised minimal government regulation (even referencing Ronald Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric)—framing rapid AI adoption as inevitable and desirable.

Notable quote:

“Data protection is very huge. But on the other side there between data protection and innovation, you need to find the middle way because sometimes data protection is not good for innovation.”
—Secretary of State of Austria (33:34)

9. Marketing, Influence, and the AI-Driven Internet

The AI-Optimized Internet (35:26–38:17)

• Panels stress that future digital content is being crafted less for humans and more to optimize how AI models and search engines digest and recommend brands—a sign of where the industry’s priorities lie.
• The promise of AI wearables “is not actually about the consumer experience...it’s about providing data to this machine.”

Notable quote:

“We are building websites to be scraped so that an LLM can understand what you want it to understand about your brand.”
—Jay Patasol, Principal Analyst at Forrester, as recounted by Robinson Meyer (36:23)

10. Creativity by Subscription: The Death of the Human Touch

AI-Generated Book Trilogies (41:08–49:16)

• Most depressing booth of CES: An AI service that, for a fee, will generate a trilogy of novels in 6–24 hours based on a brief user prompt.
• Excerpts read (42:41–48:14) reveal prose that is “an imitation of a story,” with surface-level scene details but no real character or plot—a telling metaphor for AI-powered creativity’s current limits.
• The hosts lampoon the marketing language of “democratizing creativity”—now “any ordinary person could write a book,” assuming they have a credit card and no standards.

Notable quotes:

“You can leverage an artist and create infinite examples of their work. By which he means you can find an artist that you like, sign a deal with them and then have AI create infinite examples in their style.”
—Jesse Damasek, Diageo, as recounted by Robinson Meyer (39:45)

“Now, luckily, through AI, as long as you have, you know, money to pay a subscription service and a computer...then you, too, can be an author of a trilogy.”
—Garrison Wells (49:13)

11. AI, Ethics, and Abdicated Responsibility

Individual vs. Collective Responsibility for AI Ethics (49:16–51:44)

• Ethics panelists claim it is up to individuals to develop “an ethical rubric” for what AI to trust, since corporate/government oversight will be lacking (by design).
• Some are more personally concerned about AIs influencing individual taste in music/film than about AIs making life-or-death recommendations in medicine—a sign of the complicated, contradictory nature of tech anxiety.
• Tech optimism reduced to personal wins: one panelist’s “AI victory” was finally persuading his wife to use ChatGPT to plan a holiday.

Notable quote:

“It’s kind of incumbent upon people to develop an ethical rubric for how and what sources and what AIs they trust and why and figure that out...because it’s not going to get done by anyone else.”
—Robinson Meyer (49:47)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “That's what these people see the Internet as. They see it as...a place for brands to feed information into machines that then spoon feed the information directly into customers who trust it like little lambs. That's what they want the Internet to be and that's what they believe they've gotten to. That's what AI. That's the promise of AI.”
  —Robinson Meyer (36:23)

• “If you ever have to read through a lot of AI writing...this all feels very familiar....It was too boring that I forgot to take pictures of these pages because I was just like—it was a struggle to finish each page.”
  —Garrison Wells (45:16)

• “None of these people, they dress it up with all sorts of fancy language but it's...mostly bullshit. But it's occasionally worth it for moments like when I was on the agentic AI Cutting through the hype panel...”
  —Robinson Meyer (36:11)

Additional Timestamps for Important Segments

• CES setup & general tech trends: 00:36–03:06
• Stagnation in smartphone, laptop markets: 05:40–06:40
• Panel discussion: ‘AI won’t take jobs, it’ll augment them’: 09:21–10:59
• Marketing and tampering with the information “funnel”: 17:17–21:44
• Exposing Intuit’s lack of AI data security answers: 21:44–28:46
• "Year of agentic AI" hype cycle, repeated failures: 29:01–31:57
• International regulatory panel ("Reaganomics" bit): 34:29–35:26
• Artificial creativity, whiskey labels, and book generators: 39:45–49:16

Tone & Language

The hosts maintain a skeptical, wry, and sometimes acerbic tone throughout—constantly questioning the earnestness of tech boosters, the shallowness of AI-driven creativity, and the abdication of both regulatory and self-imposed ethical restraints in the rush to adopt AI.

In Summary

This CES 2026 episode of It Could Happen Here is equal parts tech industry anthropology and reality check. The hosts capture the sense of exhaustion, repetition, and creeping unease permeating what was once the world’s most exciting tech showcase. AI is everywhere, but, for all its claims, it has delivered more in gimmicks and marketing tactics than in revolutionary products or solutions. Widespread uncertainty lurks beneath the industry optimism—regarding privacy, regulation, creativity, and the fundamental question: What is any of this for?