Better Offline CES 2025: Day 1
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I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a player boy in my adult. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him.

From novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, live from beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host and most punished man ever to walk this earth, Edward Zitron.

I live here, I live other places too, and I am joined by an incredible crew. This is going to be a week-long extravaganza. Roughly 12 and a half hours of what I want to say is radio, but I just mean the detritus of society and great reporters coming here and reporting live-ish from the largest consumer electronics show, I think, in the world.

And I just have an incredible crew tonight. I have Robert Evans, of course, the famous podcaster. Representing the detritus section of the team, yes. Yes. And Gare Davis, of course. Representing the lower southeast of the United States. I'm

I am, of course, representing the perverts. And Ed Ongueso Jr., one of my two wonderful reporters who are joining with me this entire week. Ed, thank you so much for coming here. Thanks for having me. Okay, so why are we doing this and what are we doing? So I want to walk you through what the experience is like. We are sat in a recessed level of the Venetian Hotel. In the other room is a full bar that we set up just for people to come in. Our guests, Robert, Gare, Ed, and...

Matt Eselsky, our wonderful producer. And we're going to be doing this live to tape all week. This is going to be basically a tech radio show about a show that has no heart and no soul. A show that, as Gare correctly said earlier...

is basically the same show as a year ago, except a year ago I was a terrified baby. I had just got handed the sword of podcasting. I was afraid of the microphone. Now the microphone is afraid of me. And the important thing is, is that I brought everyone together, not just to talk to you about this show, but I want to give everyone a temperature check of this fucking hellhole. Because what happens is reporters come here every year and they kind of walk in like they have to...

visit their racist uncle except their racist uncle doesn't say racism he says artificial intelligence every fucking year and generally everyone here feels kind of miserable I refuse to have that for my people I refuse to have that for anyone in my orbit so I set up a week long piss up where we talk about technology with people who actually know what the hell they're talking about and care about it

So yeah, welcome to the Consumer Electronics Show. Gare, Robert, you have actually seen things today, though. Ed and I only just got in today. What have you seen? What horrors? Today I did five hours of back-to-back panels on artificial intelligence at the ARIA conference.

And it was – it included a number of great moments including an entire room full of people led by the folks on the panel laughing about people losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence. So how did that happen? Like what were they laughing at? The emcee came up and she was like, OK, I'm going to do some yes or no questions. And one of them was there's going to be a lot of job losses due to AI and like the – I can actually pull up who they were from. But like –

There was an initial attempt to be like, no, it'll just be like the changes in the way jobs are lost. And then someone was like, no, there's going to be a lot of job losses. And everybody started cackling in the entire room. Oh, my God. It was like one of the most ghoulish experiences I've had here. I've got the audio queued up, so we'll listen to it. We can loop that in there.

That's fucking disgusting. Yeah, it was pretty vile. And then there was a great moment where the first panel I did today was about using AI in Hollywood. And so the founder of that company, Secret Level, that does like...

video game themed videos on Netflix and stuff. Amazon Prime video. Amazon Prime, sorry. Oh, very good. Jesus, Robert. But he was also one of the team members behind that all AI Coca-Cola Christmas ad that everybody fucking hated. Which I did not realize until you made that connection for me that it's those guys. So if you loved those visuals. Wait, wait, so it was the actual company that did the Coke one? I mean, there were three companies, but his company was one of the companies. Wait, it took three companies to make that piece of shit? To put that together? The greatest people.

piece of art that's ever been made in human history. And I don't know what they were doing because he came up to show videos that he had just made by like inputting text into an automatic image generator, like little movies that he'd made, which also looked like shit, but looked exactly as good as the fucking Christmas ad. So I'm like, what were all those companies doing on that fucking Christmas ad? Laundering money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

How much did it cost? Yeah, this sounds like, yeah, this cost $50 million. No, no, no, we can't do accounting due to stuff. I wonder how much fraud there is like that in AI at this point. Like how many just guys exist for like, yeah, I'll do your AI integration and they just dick around for three months and then they connect chat GPT to something. I'm sure it was still cheaper than like the traditional Coke,

things but i'm sure there's a lot of i'm not sure that's even true anymore like they don't get a real polar bear like no they certainly don't like if they did that maybe even then i don't think it would be as expensive and it definitely wasn't it was definitely not cheaper on the actual ai side because news came out a day or two ago that apparently the 200 a month chat gpt subscription loses them money

And this is the thing. This is where we are in the tech industry at this point. We're in this world where we're meant to get extremely erect over the idea of a Coca-Cola ad that looks like it was made by the same people as the Black Hole Sun video.

And then we're meant to also look at the apps we use, and they fucking suck. And then we come here to CES, and they're like, you know what's going to happen next year? The exact same thing. We have nothing. There's AI in an oven now, I think. Oh, I'm very excited. And a grill. There's a grill that has an LLM integrated into it.

The most exciting thing is that it only gets smarter. It's only going to get better. Well, that's what Jason from Secret Levels said. He played a video of like a bank heist chase where the main character, every time it cut back to him, he was dressed differently and his face was different.

That's so sick. He's just driving down a normal city street, but there's randomly fires every 30 feet in the road because the AI just hallucinated them. At a certain point, he crashes and he's on the run from the cops. And every time it cuts back to the cops chasing him, there's more or less cops from scene to scene. That's the most realistic bit. That actually is very realistic. Someone fell over.

Union rules, I get a 15 minute break. Listen, it took us $15 million, but we redid a six star chase in Grand Theft Auto. No, someone said it wasn't overtime and they were like, oh, I got to do paperwork. No, when we were in Chicago running away from police, if you turned the wrong corner, there would be more or less cops than what you thought there were. So, hey, you know, you got to give them maybe the benefit of the doubt.

We have qualified immunity for that. Because he was emphatic that all I did was read a script. It was like, send a script to this thing. They love this bullshit. Just put it out. They love it. So this is unedited from that. And so what I really want to do is put the script to Heat into one of these things. Oh, yeah. Just see what the big gunfight from Heat looks like in this.

Does it have that Michael Mann quality? Trying to think of what I'd put into it. The Boris Balkan scene from the end of the Ninth Gate where he's setting himself on fire. I would love to see what they're going to do with it. But they also lie about it. How about Antichrist? Just like, see how they do that? The end of Kids. Okay, moving on. Nymphomaniac.

Let's just run that through. See what chess GPT makes of it. This is their favorite lie though. They're like, oh yeah, it's just as simple as a prompt. Even the co-cad, they're like, we have an editor. We have an editor. We have a separate colorist because it looks like shit and also probably looks completely different. This is the slop they want to give us. They're absolutely hiring VFX cleanup artists to touch up all of those visuals to make them in any way publishable.

- The colors were completely fucked on this. He complained because all of the comments on this video, which had, by the way, for this company, the big thing, he was, everyone in the room clapped when they played these things. I looked on YouTube, the best of them had like 50,000 views.

Like, some of them were just like 5,000 or 6,000. And the color grading, everyone in the comments is like, the colors on this look like shit. His clothing changes. And Jason referenced that and is like, yeah, I know people had that complaint, but come on, guys. This is the worst it's ever going to look. Like, that line, I keep fucking hearing. That's a line I keep seeing also. I love this. This is the dumbest chat GPT is ever going to be. Take a shot. Yeah.

I love that that's also their defense. Yeah. They're like, hey, it sucks. But it's all uphill from here. We've all lived through the last eight years. If there's one thing everyone knows, it's that things only get dumber. Yeah. Like...

Well, my shadow theory is because I got OpenAI's O1 model to do typos. This is not really something I've proven in any way, and indeed the academics have asked about it, have not returned my emails due to woke. And I saw typos. I'm hoping that model collapse is happening. I hope they fed the synthetic data into it, destroying these models, because that would actually be the funniest and dumbest way that ChatGPT just starts like...

going on the fritz because that's what model collapse just for listeners who don't know you go back to march you should have been listening to all the episodes you got i'm not my fault model collapse is when you feed instead of real training data from real human beings synthetic stuff created by another model the problem is that human beings are magnificent creatures very strange our fuck-ups are actually quite hard to recreate those fuck-ups are important for informing things like how words and logic are created

So if you have a synthetic version, there is something that no one really understands that fucks the whole thing up. Anyway, they are currently feeding synthetic data into all of these models. So what I'm hoping is it fucks them up big time because that would be the funniest thing because there's no fixing it. There was a comment like that in, I think it was, let's see, which one of these? Just want to make sure I'm getting that. AI Cinematic Spatial and XR.

Which was about XR as extended reality. Right. And there was a comment from, I think it was Rebecca Barkin, but I may be wrong about that. It was one of the people on the panel. It might have been Katie Henson, but something along the lines of, hey, we're still going to need human beings to be making stuff because otherwise there won't be anything to feed into the models. Like they were – Yeah.

That's so cool. I forget exactly who it was. But not too many. Something I underlined in my notes of the panel was like, okay, so you know what you're doing. It's also cool that the point of humans is to make things to feed into a model. That's all that matters is that as long as we can feed the model, that's fine. That's the only value we have. You're here for the market and you're here for the model. Yeah.

Those are the most important things. And what's important to know as well is anyone saying that is not thinking too hard about it because they need more training data than exists. Yes. Like five to 15 times. They don't have it. We're in the stupidest fucking era ever. There's a panel, like a panel where people like, wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of people lost their jobs? They should turn into that scene from Kingsman. Yeah. Like that. That's exactly what I thought. Oh, I can change. Um, it,

It's like, this is one of the reasons that I really wanted to pull this together as well, because CES, I don't think, the way CES has been covered traditionally, and actually, Gare and Robert really opened my eyes to this last year, because I've been avoiding panels for...

12 odd years I've been at CES. It's easily the best way to see what kind of brain worms are going around because people are up there just taught and no one expects to be challenged or there to be anyone in the room who's not completely taking the Kool-Aid. But what's insane is even on the floor,

I hadn't looked at it properly. I'd always been like, I'm just here because I have client share. So to explain the history of this, I've got the bar, I've got the suite. Previously, as dudes with my dear friend, Kevin Raposo, works at EZPR, otherwise not mentioning the agency again. We would have this suite to just kind of network with people that have clients, journalists. And we stopped doing it after COVID just because it was a lot of fucking money for just to piss up, which is always fun.

However, the way I used to look at the show was just like, this is all, I almost like took it in good faith. I was like, these people wouldn't spend $100,000 on a booth where they're lying.

Well, wouldn't you know? And since I started doing better offline, I was truthfully a bit scared when I met with you two last year. I was a bit freaked out. Now I'm not. I'm very excited. But also, I was just flat out wrong about big tech. I really at that point was just like, look, Facebook's evil, Meta's evil, but you know they have something. They get something. Like Google, same deal. They'd never do something really fucking stupid again and again. And they would.

And everyone here would. And there are things that are at CES every year that never get made. Please, if anyone sees the laundry folding robot, if you see them... That's one of my favorite CES vaporware stories. They are like, they have been here. I have been coming to CES since 2011. And those motherfuckers have been promising to fold my laundry ever since.

Yeah. 2010 was my first year. Nice. And I think what keyed me in to like what was really going on here was the

the best product in show that year that won the award was the Motorola Droid, which was not a functional product and did not exist on the show floor. All they had was just the plastic model that was working. It was basically just like a digital photo case that was just like running, like still screen shots of what they thought the phone would look like. Because Android was still new at this point, and it won best in show, and there were functional phones at the show that year.

And so I remember sending to one of the editors at TechCrunch an email being like, I'm new to this tech reporting thing, but do you not consider this a real problem? This seems like a serious issue. This isn't really journalism if this is what's winning here because they didn't have a phone. And he was like, what's wrong with you? But it's true, though. There is a general sense of like, no, you just...

Why would you be mad at this? It doesn't exist. This is the future. Google has a slide at their booth. They brought us the future. How dare you? And what's crazy is that's 2010. Today's tech media is slightly upgraded in that some of them don't do that. And actually, a lot of them are here. A lot of the reporters here generally just feel tired when I talk to them. And when you ask them what their favorite bit of the show, they're like, oh, like the LG. I got this big monitor.

Big television, maybe? I forget. I'm excited to see another big TV. I'm excited to see what new big curved TV LG has. Listen, we're going to build the biggest boom cave yet. It's going to be the most beautiful. Okay. With the most beautiful OLEDs you can imagine. Some are going to get QLED, but it's not...

What is a TV if not a wall? But to be clear, I love the big televisions. I love seeing big stupid shit and I wish there was more of it. At least the big televisions are televisions. Yeah, exactly. You can't really... I guess you can lie about the specs and the models and all that. No, but that son of a bitch folds. I watched it. Oh, man.

I love all that dumb shit. I don't know why you'd want your TV to do that. We have gotten so good at TV. We really have. It's the only promise of technology that's coming through 100%. It's going to watch you. It's going to give you targeted ads. It's going to give you a chatbot. It's going to be beautiful. My roommate just brought a replacement for our TV, like an 85-inch OLED. Oh, that's exciting because your TV has been shit. It's one of those, like, what the fuck? How is this the only thing that came through? Yeah.

Just for a second, how bad was Robert's television? It was not good. It was great. It was not good. Was it like a CRT one? No. It was... Was that like a dinosaur with pictures that goes, it's a living... It was very large. And then I plugged it into my laptop. Then I used it to play my little games. It was very large. The frame rate never quite worked properly. Nice.

All of the blacks did not show correctly. Everything was really crunched. Very good. Very, very bad. That is a problem in the tech industry. Very bad dynamic range. And it just slowly got worse over the years. It's something I'm still kind of confused by. What happened to Robert's TV? Turn the motion smoothing on a little bit harder. A little bit more. I swear, because every time I try to watch a movie... John Lithgow looks like he's 30. I have never heard of a television that started to decay.

No, this is actually becoming more a thing. Although TVs have been getting better, the new TVs...

are breaking faster. Interesting. And this is something that I've noticed mostly due to my friend's consumer choices. I have a TV that my friend gave to me maybe like 10 years ago, and it's like a 1080p LG. It works great. Movies look good. It's not 4K, but it's fine. And he's gone through like three TVs since then that have all broken.

They've all had better specs. They've all looked really good. And then every once in a while, something just goes oddly wrong. And this has just become a new pattern with Panasonic, with LGs, with Sony TVs. That's so weird. Although we are getting quite good at making TVs, I feel like their lifespan is kind of shrinking. Yeah.

Maybe it's something that I want to talk to people at CES about. Honestly, it sounds like consumer electronics in general. I mean, my fucking iPhone's brand new and even then it's fucking up already. This is early schedule shit. We usually save this bad boy for April. That's usually when the obsolescence comes in. But now it's just my new favorite thing that my $1,500 fucking cell phone does is when I try and add a song to a playlist. I know it's an edge case. No one does that.

But I did that, and it just crashes Apple Music now. I can only add it by playing. That's an unreasonable burden to put on a phone. It's only got eight cores. They only have a specialized piece of silicon in it to make it work. Those are what, 16 gigs of RAM? You can't handle that on 16 gigs of RAM. No, I need my fucking MacBook Pro to do that for my eight Chrome tabs I can have. So, format change. Edwin Grasso Jr., please introduce yourself. Tell everyone about your work. Okay, um...

I am a tech writer. I write about tech. I write about finance. I write about labor, Silicon Valley generally, and anything that it's tentacles touch. Where did you write? I started at Vice, Freelance Now, magazines, newsletters.

outlets, anywhere that will let me rant about Silicon Valley, basically. So I brought Ed here because he wrote many great things, but one of my favorite things is his Kara Swisher piece. Oh, that's a beautiful piece of writing. The Burn Book Review, where you just really put the boots to her. But I think CES is probably the most Swisher-coded event for a thing she's never been to. And I think it's jarring for the same reason, in that everyone's kind of just accepting a reality that isn't true, but pretending to care. Yeah.

And it's frustrating. And I'm glad you're here to see this. This is your only CES, right? Yeah, this is my first time. First time. I'm very excited. Oh, I am too. To see all the fake tech that's out there. Linda Iaccarino, you're going to listen to... I'm going to listen to... Right, she's doing a speech or some shit, isn't she? She has the X Corporation keynote tomorrow. When tomorrow is that? Oh, don't worry, Robert. I already have it in your schedule.

I'm so glad you make his schedule. It's a good thing I don't bring guns to these things because I would just myself, you know, like I would just take care of that problem in my hotel room. Well, you don't look for half an hour of her going like, X is the place where it happens and that's the tea. Right. Well, I can't wait for you to hear Yaccarino talk because...

She's a real yak-erino. Why do you call it a yes-erino? Sorry. But also, I'm looking forward to it because...

Well, you're African-American. Yeah. And I truly do not know how they're going to treat you on the floor. Yeah. I don't know how they're going to act. Yeah. I mean, do we think the score measures are going to be out in force for the X event? There'll be a guy like really excitedly calling you. I was like, no, we got AI to do this now. And you're like, oh, I use my Ray-Bans.

Oh, I see. It's going to be interesting. I'm also going to be curious what the hell they're even talking about. I'm trying to go in with as little info as possible so I can take it in objectively without bias. It's like watching queer. You really just kind of want to show up and take it all in. You know, I'm here for the journey. Yeah, and I think that's important as well because that's exactly what I am here for. I want this to be a journey, and there are multiple reporters joining us. We have Jesse Farrar from Your Kickstarter Sucks, of course, and David Roth, of course, my second elf friend.

That's what I was calling them in my head of the reporters I hired. That's what I'm calling them now. The elves. David Roth of Defector, a sports journalist, will be joining us tomorrow and for the rest of the week, other than for our spa day on Saturday, which is very unfair, very nasty. And right now, our bartender, Phil Braun. Now, you speak into the microphone and say hello, Phil.

Hello. We will have a full rundown of Phil at some point later in the week, but Phil has been joining as the bartender here for years, and he just handed me some Sotol. Sotol. Sotol.

Sotol? Sotol Parejo. That's right. It's good. Yeah, I nailed that. Is that a miscount? It's kind of. But that's the thing. The whole point of this is journalists come here. It really is delicious. In this oasis. This is the oasis in the middle of the bullshit because CES, I was telling Ed earlier, there is nowhere to sit down.

No, they always want you moving. No, they want you to keep on traveling through. It's like a casino. It's like a casino, yeah. No, you can find plenty of places to sit down in casinos. This horrible place is an insult to our beautiful slot machines and our beautiful tables that we have. And they'll get you a seat at the table. Don't worry, please come spend money.

And Phil right now is gesturing because Phil is our wonderful bartender. He's bringing us drinks as the show goes. Probably not on the first half episodes, definitely on the second. Can I get a Paloma?

No, we have no grapefruit juice. Okay, can I get something with tequila? Wow. I don't give a shit. Thank you. That went flawlessly. That was an example of the bar working. Actually, that is actually the bar working well. No, so the point of this week, though, is we want to be the oasis within a tech industry gone wrong and a conference that's gone wrong. No one likes coming here to cover this. No one is excited. Everyone's depressed. We will not be. We will be.

Probably not, in my case, sloppy, just in case the lawyers ask, but everyone else can be. The reporters we bring here, we're going to have two episodes each day. 90 episodes. Jesus Christ. 90 minutes. Let's go for it. Already doing great. And it's going to be a lot, but I want to bring you diverse voices, diverse

I want to bring you the people that have been here forever and the people that were just being exposed to this. The reason we have Ed and David is we really don't want this to be a fucking tech. No offense to tech media. We don't want this to be a tech reported thing. We actually want this to be a temperature check of this industry.

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus is

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's what I'm talking about.

It's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy model. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the centre of this murky world is an alleged predator.

You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior. He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, Ed, I always, there's a lot to like,

roll my eyes at and be frustrated by, I always really like CES. And when Gare first started coming to this, the way I explained your job at CES as a good journalist is you are here to be a terrorist. You are here to find the richest asshole you can find and make their day worse. That is a joke. No. Not in the legal sense, but in an emotional sense. You're supposed to terrorize them. Your job is to harass them over lies that they're telling. Well, yeah, and like,

The hive mind group think mentality here is crazy because you will walk into a panel and you will start hearing people say insane shit and you look around to be like, ha ha ha ha, that's crazy, right? And everyone's nodding along enthusiastically. It slightly makes you question your own sanity. Never once. Complete certainty. Someone posted on Twitter the other day, they're like, would you trust a clone of yourself? Hmm.

And everyone was like, I wouldn't. I'd be like, absolutely 100%. We would fucking cook. Anyway, complete certainty. But it's so weird though, you're right. And people walk around and like, damn, really? So the AI for my pet, how's that going to work? No, it's crazy. And because everyone is so bought into it, if you make any objection during any kind of Q&A panel, people are so surprised. It's crazy.

It's like you're a heretic. It's insane. It's like you don't believe in the project of humanity. Yeah. To these people. It's like you don't believe in Santa Claus. It's wild. My second impression of one of these...

when rugged, super rugged speakers were like a massive product that you could find like half a dozen booths selling them, I would just go there and I would ask, can I test them out? Can I like drop them and stuff? And then I would pick up the heaviest object, because they usually have like logs or something to pose them on, and I would just break stuff on the show floor. And it worked every time.

every time. Did you actually break it? Oh, a bunch of stuff. Hell, that is so good. And I learned that from, we went to see a demo where they were showing off like an indestructible smartphone and they were doing it by like, they pulled out all the journalists. I think we were in front of Caesar's Palace and they were driving a limousine over the phone. Right. And then they would do it and then the next group of journalists would come up and they would let a journalist set it down. And I don't know who this was. I wish I'd gotten his name because he taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned.

They were laying the phones flat and he just wedged it under the wheel on its side and they just drove over it and it popped in half. That's being a journalist. But actually, that's a very good metaphor for what's going on at the moment. Everyone's like, well, they say it works. We'll be fine. Why would they lie about it? Why would they possibly lie about ChatGPT becoming super intelligence? Did you hear that fucking Samuel? That motherfucker, he's not here.

He's not here. By comparison, this is pretty real stuff. Where's Sam Altman? He should be giving like a vacuous keynote about how this is going to replace doctors. He's doing the real work. He's doing the real work. He's building superintelligence. By which he means trying to like leverage his startup capital. As I read today, we're just thousands of days away from AGI. Well, Robert, thousands of days. That was said a few months ago, so we're actually about 960.

That was set a few thousand days ago. I love that. Honestly, I need to set a calendar invite for that. For thousands of days from now? Because I have Sam Altman's number and he is yet to text me back. Oh.

I am bummed that we haven't seen Palantir here in recent years. Oh, they've seen you though. That is true. We showed up, I can say this now, we showed up with a flipper zero and we're just turning off all of the televisions at the Palantir booth while they were doing demos. Someone probably got fired about that. That's true.

Actually, no. Someone was probably like, oh, I'll fix this. No! Someone did that one CES and they got in a lot of trouble. Oh, yeah. Because they videoed themselves doing it, which is the classic thing you do with crime. Yeah, I remember that, which is why I did not tweet about it from the show floor. Exactly. You put it on a podcast years later. They never proved you did it. One CES I did try a bit three or four times before I started getting anxious, which was I would just pick up something and ask if I could have it.

and just like picked up the edge of a TV. Can I have this? And they look at you and they're like, sure. No. You see them being like, wait. Sometimes they say yes though, which is why you have to do it at every booth. You can get a lot of free shit if you're really bold. Because you actually can surprisingly walk away with some really odd stuff. I bet they, eventually a security person

looked at me in a kind of like should i memorize this guy's face well that's good and i thought i don't want to be arrested at fucking ces no my lawyer will just be like i had again i'm not coming to your arraignment yeah like i know you're on your own bitch i know you're paid up but i'm not doing you fucking work this out smart guy yeah i will you pick up pick up the judge's gavel and ask if you can have this click a fucking idiot well speaking as a judge that's very a

Are you a judge? Yes. What? No, this is not good. I'm a municipal judge for the state of New Mexico. I got sworn in. I'm good. Fuck. Right next door. Right next door. Very close. You got to cross the border when you do a cross. A fan of mine is a judge and was like, did you know that judges can just make other judges? Yeah.

Like, you have to read a little thing, and then you're good. I got an idea. You can make all of us judges. No, again, it's interview with the vampire rules. Okay. So the youngest vampire does not have the power to make other vampires. Oh.

And it's kind of unclear to me. But your mate does. Yes. She's the Lestat of this situation. But I can't. How do I become an older vampire, though? Because you realize that my goal here is not just to become a judge myself, but start making more judges. That I don't know. Because I have not looked up anything about what a judge is. This would be all I'd look up. We've got to ask the Deloitte people this. They have to know. I would get made a judge. And then the first thing I would be Googling is how to make more judge.

And I would be making them... Who are your first five judges that you're making? I mean, all of you other than Robert, obviously. No, it would be like the entirety of Cool Zone Media. You make everyone judges. Yeah, and then we can all go to New Mexico and do a Blood Meridian. Fuck yeah. Not anymore. Well, yeah, there was actually a lot of child abuse in that guy's background. But...

So this is the format that you're going to have for the entire week with Better Offline. Because this is also something, because after a year of doing this, I'm just trying everything. And I do think that tech also kind of needs a talk show. And the reason I say that is tech has got everything. It's got finance. It's got basically sports team shit. Do you like Anthropic? Do you like OpenAI? And the thing is, that really is like a, let's think,

Cowboys Jet situation and that's going to hurt someone's feelings. I'm very happy about that. Anyway, moving on from that, you've also got a bunch of gossip and you've got a bunch of shitheads that you can be pissed off at and actual real events. I just think that nails, this format nails it. And that's why I'm excited to start with all of you because at the end of the first day, everyone feels a certain way. Dread for the rest of the week.

sad about the horrible things they saw or just wondering why they're doing the fucking job they're doing. They just, none of us in this room. It's just very, it's an interesting way when you talk to the tech media to see how they're doing, but also people who work. I wish I could get more people off the floor, but I don't want fucking companies on here. That would be so boring. How did you feel your first CES when you were, when you're going around? So I was just a child back then. I was 2011. I can't do math. Yeah. I was a young boy. Um,

That one I have some stories I can't tell, but I was a young PR person, and I loved it because it was like 2011. So before we realized tech had problems, we were just like ignoring them. Well, and this was back too when the porn industry trade show was at the same time. I didn't – oh, I was terrified of women. I watched Steve Ballmer get out of a fucking –

elevator with two porn stars that were even taller than him and he is massive it was amazing it was like watching Greek gods stride across the field yeah the god of sweat he did smell exactly like that you know it smelled crazy I leaked that to another tech publisher that's fucking journalism but my first but CES used to be fun when I was stupid

When I was just like, oh, this will happen. And also 2011, there were still new lands to conquer. They still had new fun things to find. New things that they could make that they could actually make good on. I think it's been like five or six years of them just being like, we don't have it. There's nothing. We've got nothing else. I was so lucky that my first CES, the big thing was like crypto NFTs. So one of the lasting industries. I knew going into that, I'm like...

Everything I hear in this convention is complete bullshit. And then the next year I came, the big thing was the metaverse. So again, everything I hear here is bullshit. And you've just been able to slowly watch the life drain from these people's eyes because they know every...

Every year there's this new thing that's supposed to be the new thing. This is what we have done as an industry. And it doesn't work. They're dry. And it's odd because this year is the first year where there hasn't really actually been anything new. It's the same as last year. It's just more AI stuff again.

I actually think 2024 was pretty ahead of the pack. I was going to say this is this year. I keep seeing places be like, this is the year of agents. They're going to show agents. They were talking about that a lot in panels. Yeah. The one thing I've seen in the panel list is like, like there's been a lot more integration for like content creators and like streamers. Right. And you even saw this with the golden globes a few days ago, how like they let tons of streamers and influencers onto the carpet for like the first time. Um,

And there's way more panels this year that's about how do we get this whole streaming ecosystem that's separate from legacy media and even legacy tech media. How do we get that into our sphere? And that was a big thing they talked about in my third panel, AI, cinematic, spatial, and XR, the next level of creativity. I am putting a gun in my mouth. They were specifically talking about how

you know, nowadays, like, you know, individual creators can be as big as studios. And then someone on the panel is like, well, not really. Like, not in any way that's actually meaningful. I'm excited to see the new movie from Destiny, personally. Really excited to see that. Mr. Beast, you know, I'm excited to see that. He is trying, though. He actually is trying. I would love a Destiny movie, just Wikipedia brought to life. Yeah.

There was a great moment in there, speaking of failed CES's past, where they like... XR stands for extended reality, which is just metaverse. It's just the metaverse, but they can't say that anymore because they will get murdered. They said that in the panel. They were like, you can't say metaverse at CES anymore. They'll kick you out. But we all know it's a real thing. Did they say Web 3 at any point? Oh, so much. Why is that okay, but not the metaverse? That's what we arrested people for.

They are careful about NFT. That's what we need a Gulag for. They still do say... They still definitely say Web3. Which is insane. That's the more embarrassing one. Well, I'm just shocked they still say metaverse with a straight face. Even like talking about this nonsense. But also XR is a great term because it's been around for a while and it usually just means...

I don't know if this is mixed reality or virtual reality. I don't know what device I'm selling this on yet. The guy emceeing this panel was Charlie Fink, who's like the oldest of the metaverse guys. He's like a Forbes writer. He was like an old school. He wrote a metaverse book in 2017. Honestly, mad respect for actually like knowing stuff early. I don't know if I'd agree with

All of the assumptions such as the metaverse existing. Yeah, that was my big disagreement with him, that it's a thing. Because they were just saying the metaverse is just, you know, attempts to extend the internet into everyday life. And I was like, no, no, no, that's just...

That's just the internet. That's just everyday life, homie. That's called the tech industry. It's not the metaverse that I can now order food to be delivered to my house. Are you sure? Yes. Fairly certain. I do miss that period in the media, though, when it was just like anything. They're like, yeah, they're going to have houses in there now, and we're going to have families. We're all going to live in the metaverse. We're going to live in the metaverse. That was so funny. People thought that.

People are going to want to spend money on Nikes in the metaverse. Yeah, and you'd have banks in the metaverse that would be better than our real banks to centralize finance. Oh, sure, absolutely. We don't have our own Federal Reserve. Didn't they have like an Arby's in the metaverse? That's the only thing that we're right about. The only way I'm getting into an Arby's is if I know I cannot make physical contact with the food.

Oh, la-di-da. Someone too good for the Arby's. For the meats? The meats are not for you. But also what's important is I think we need to meet everyone who goes to the digital Arby's and then connect them with mental health personnel. Maybe a red flag, then maybe take their guns. Not necessarily for a list, but I think you've got like therapists could be met. Just do therapy in the metaverse. Problem solved. Not doing it in the fucking real world if they're in the metaverse Arby's. But

but it's so funny as well that everyone's like the metaverse is happening and then they're like oh how'd you get in there well it's very simple we have this expensive and uncomfortable stuff does it make you sick sometimes yes does it physically hurt yes but when you get in there

It sucks. Vision Pro dropped less than a year ago. Did they discontinue it? No, no. Oh my God, I can't believe that review. There was one of the Apple products. No. Did they discontinue something? That sounds like Apple eventually. They just give up. We've got to check that. No, no, no. So the Vision Pro, I know people are very upset with me. Fake news? People are very upset with me about my Vision Pro review.

Very unfair. It was the second episode. Still learning. Oh, Gare's got something. There is, sorry, the most reputable outlet, Game Rant. Oh, yeah, I know Game Rant.

says that Apple has reportedly ceased production of the headset. Really? Wow. It is game rants. Well, that's the New York Times of ranting about games. Ed, congratulations. You have won our first fact point. Apparently... Fact point system. I'm going to use format. Apparently, Game Rant is citing an article in another website called theinformation.com. Oh, no, the information. Yeah, the...

More or less real. It's real-ish. It's real-ish. The information I would trust. You just have to climb up that very high paywall, which they've improved crazy. I used to be able to get around every single one now. It's hard. It's hard. I feel like it

It was kind of insane. That was more insane to me than crypto. Crypto is pretty insane. But it's like, oh, how am I going to get in the metaverse? This very shitty fucking headset that sucks. Vision Pro was pretty good. I know my review. I know people are upset that I liked the product. There was potential there. They just did not access it. Apple has the money for there to be potential there. But I still maintain that

And I'm not a guy, as you know, having said it over the four hours, I'm not a guy who worships Steve Jobs. I don't think he would have let that product out yet. No, it needs like two or three years, but it had potential. Even then, though, this is the biggest company in tech, the really only company capable of making consumer electronics that are actually good anymore. Like everyone else is kind of like just mostly making up and maybe putting shit together. Yes, there are companies like Framework. There are others, but like the biggest companies.

And they're like, here is our best go at it. And when I tried to watch Dune on my Vision Pro on a flight back from London, I got the worst migraine of my life. And what sucked was I was really enjoying the film and actually the giant screen was super cool. But I was in so much pain, I took it off and I was like sweating.

Well, that was the extended reality of the vision. Yeah. Arrakis. It was extending your reality. That's how it feels. That is how it feels to read past the third book. Oh, no, no. We cannot slander the worst and best book. No, no, no. That's a compliment. That's a compliment. That is true. Okay. But what's important was I really watched too much of that movie and I had like a migraine for like a day or two. Could you see The Golden Path?

That was your time in the pain box? I did not think I watched like the beginning of the film I do not know the plot You didn't know that's gonna be you Robert on the first episode of Better Off Line called Be the Shy Halude of Content I'm like ha ha ha yeah great Googling it as we go That has been proven completely true though I came from a different era in which all of my friends in high school none of us had sex but we all had very strong opinions about porn

Well, let me tell you, I too come from a rich line of not fuckers and not having sex in high school at all. Absolutely not. But my thing was EverQuest. Oh, okay. One might say I was even cooler than you were. It was wow for me. Oh, no, I got into wow later. It was like getting off of cocaine to do heroin. Barely worked on me. I just gave up after a while. Turned to drinking. Anyway, um...

It's just great that this is the tech industry now. It's just the group hallucination where we all go, yeah, fuck it. As we sit here and talk, and I know I'm grinding this axe quite hard, but we're hearing a lot about AI in this fucking conference and everyone's stapling chat GPT and Anthropix clawed to everything. And it's like, okay, great.

But we are sitting here and every major company is not making a single fucking dollar actually losing money on this. And I feel a bit insane. I feel a bit crazy every day because every day I look out the window in tech and we're just like, our biggest thing is everyone burning money. I've now seen two stories in the last week from major publications going, what if AI is a bubble? Which is probably the most worrying. So it was like the economist had one that was like, what if a bubble bursting was possible?

What if it was good that the bubble burst, which is insane because there is a David Leonard story in the New York Times saying that a housing bubble burst in the 06-07 region would have been a good idea too. And let me tell you, I don't know history super well, but I don't think the housing bubble bursting went well for anyone. No. It did go well for some people. You need to have the disruptor mindset.

And the problem with the bubbles is that as they get bigger and bigger, it stifles innovation in other areas because we're all focusing on this bubble. So as soon as it bursts, now...

Now you have so many more opportunities to really disrupt who knows how many other industries. Well, as a kid during the housing bubble, we had to innovate by eating 99-cent burritos and making $4 of those stretched three to five days. And now we have Airbnbs taking over half...

Half of entire neighborhoods. Innovation. So much better. That's good. Innovate sleeping. And people were really, they were innovating ways to top themselves when I moved to New York in 2008. That was great. That's the thing. You weren't really going to have people doing themselves in on this one, but I don't think people realize the bubble bursting is going to be very bad for two reasons. One, all the tech stocks are going to take a kind of a haircut, but also I think CES is kind of a bad omen. The fact that this is basically 2004 CES is,

That kind of speaks to the larger problem I've talked about before, which is they don't seem to have a new thing. AI isn't new, and that's not working.

And they're like, well, what if we put AI in a – we can laugh at the kind of like AI in the oven thing. But really beneath the surface here, and I look forward to seeing the show floor myself for this, there is this undercurrent of what the fuck do we do? What are we doing now? How do we make money now? Where money and where, please? I think Ed had a really good point, which is that obviously what they see is AI agents being the future. Oh, my fucking God. And those kept getting brought up. And what's one of the things that's interesting to me –

It's interesting to me is that obviously there's a lot of potential value in being able to do something like say, hey, I want to plan a trip to this and this location. And having a thing that can book it, that's not a multibillion-dollar industry. But there's utility. Theoretical utility. Or to being able to plan out like five or six different meals that you want to repeat over the course of a week or two and then like plan out. There's some utility there.

But the way people talk about AI agents isn't in that way. It's about another living thing that they like

bounce ideas off of and invite socially into their lives. There was a lady at the first panel today, which was about like AI and entertainment, who was like, and my agent, obviously, she just is growing every year or every day. And it was like talking about her like a person, like gendering her AI agent. I must be clear. What was she talking about? Her AI agent. Okay, but...

Does this thing exist? No, no, no. Me and my rabbit have a very intimate relationship. Sure, sure. We all fuck up at this, man. No, no. She didn't say which product she was using, but there are a couple of them out right now. Just to be clear. Character AI was the one people talked about. That's not an agent. Oh, my fucking God. I have to do this. Okay. Yeah. An AI agent. No, no, no. That's what she was referencing. It might have been like her co-pilot or some shit. A co-pilot is also not an agent. No, no. An AI agent is meant to be.

an autonomous ai that goes out and does shit and can do things and then respond to things based on how people part of it's like what rabbit was trying to sell with the r1 last it wasn't even doing that they were just doing like the very early stage agents which is okay you're technically correct which is the agents are meant to be they take actions for you that's the official definition but what everyone's talking about with agents and this is driving me fucking insane because no one's

really wants to talk about the reality here is they're talking about, I will staple a few fucking LLMs to each other and then enough LLMs will talk to each other that things will just start happening. Kind of like the Incredible Machine, if you ever played that. Just like a Rube Goldberg situation, he says, not really knowing that reference. Pee-wee's Playhouse? I don't know. Nevertheless, these series of actions then allow, theoretically, this thing to do something at the end. The big common one right now is sales. Sales agents. Right.

These things are insanely expensive, and I have yet to hear of one that does more than send emails and answer emails, and I've yet to really see anyone explain how anything else is fucking possible. And the thing is, people will say agent about anything. Character.ai is just an LLM company that, like... That got a kid to kill themselves. Yeah. Insane. But also just, like, has, like, a Daenerys Targaryen bot that will also be a therapist. It's fucking insane. Of course. But that's not an agent. Right.

Chat GPT, not an agent. They want to... Ed, I'm so glad you brought this up because it's like this agentic thing is their next bullshit, but I cannot be clear enough. If you think regular LLMs are expensive, imagine a bunch of LLMs playing dipshit tennis with each other. That is how agents work. You know, I think, you know, A16Z is really big on this. There's a manifesto, one of their many manifestos. Um...

They say every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. Infinite. And then they say that every person will have an AI assistant slash coach slash mentor slash trainer slash advisor.

How can it be a mentor? It doesn't know how to do things. Slash therapist. Slash therapist. That's good. That is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. They want a friend without having to do any of the work that makes having a friendship. Not only makes it happen, but worth. None of these fucking people need therapy. But also, on top of that,

If everyone keeps talking about this idea, and I think they've been doing it for years, of AI being your assistant, why are there no AI assistants that work? Yes. You can make your phone do reminders now. Yeah. We're on like the 16th, 17th iPhone.

And we can now make Siri most of the time understand sometimes. It's like half the time for me, but yeah. The British Siri actually understands me, unlike most people. I have mindset to Scottish Siri, but maybe that's the problem. I like the way that voice sounds. One of the panels where they're like, is voice the new operating system? I am going to kill myself. One of the ladies on the panel was British and was like, well...

usually they don't understand what I'm saying. So like all of the Americans were like, oh, absolutely. And the one person with an accent was like, I probably not. That makes me so angry because when fucking Alexa came out, we would, we did this one already. We've done this one already. I've, I have already done pitching for clients about voice being. It wasn't guess what? It was not the future because it turns out that talking is annoying.

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I've been seeing discussions about this. I saw someone online try to be like Scarlett Johansson fumbled the bag. I saw that too. Yes. And it's like, well, what bag? Yeah. They were saying that if she had simply let open AI use her voice, she would have been the future of AI voice forever. Wow. Like achieved immortality. It's being like,

the AI voice for generations. I'm like, yeah, just like, you know what happened with Alexa, right? And the thing that happened with Siri. I know the voice actors. Yeah. All of them. I know them personally. Granville Chambers, my favorite. What a bad business decision for an actress. Because now you'll have kids who grow up with Alexa machines in their house and then they'll watch a movie and be like, oh wow, the Alexa's in...

And more than that, casting directors will be like, no. You're being typecast as a voice servant? It's Siri. Casting directors will be like, well, Scarlett Johansson? No, she's that lady who everybody has to talk to to get a dentist appointment. Nobody wants to see her in a movie. It's a terrible idea to be that.

You mean Lost in Translation? And that's the only film I've seen of her? They've watched her a little too many times. That's really one of the factors that keeps coming in here. This idea that the voice is going to be the transcendent thing there. Yeah, and also that it can do more than it can because I don't think people realize, and I know this due to my accent, how fucking bad voice is even in the best case. It just does not...

Sometimes the things it hears are truly insane. And the more data you have in your phone, the more numbers and names you have saved, the more insane the idea is. I don't need to text someone I know from North Carolina 11 years ago. And I certainly don't need to text them about the burger I'm ordering. Was I ordering a burger? No, I was trying to do a meeting related thing. But did this fucking thing hear me?

But also it just angers me that I have to hear this. It's been like a decade. I thought we got away from this fucking angle. Very foul-mouthed there. I apologize to the humorists. Well, at the very least, at least there's no crypto at CES, right? Oh. Oh. I'm sure we'll hit some crypto. I haven't run into it yet. I'm sniffing it out. No, I did. I did. Because one of the women on one of the panels worked for Republic. Oh, my God.

which is an app that allows you to everyone to do in like venture capital investing with as little as $25 sick great and yeah and also invest in crypto at the same time why not and the one review of it said like it's a great service if you want to diversify but it's extremely risky and everyone loses money that's not

diversify I guess people are still reeling from Hawk to a coin so maybe that might be more on the down low you know I hope Hayley Welch is here I really love that she is probably in trouble with the SEC I love that the SEC is gonna have to go somewhere with no extradition tweet a bit and then get extra these people like the the moxie of the classic scam artist

Yeah. You do that rug pull when you're in Costa Rica. He was a real piece of shit, but I miss McAfee now. If McAfee had just hung in there another year or two. My favorite John McAfee thing was if you looked at the champagne he was drinking. Oh, yeah. It's like the cheapest. It's always shit. He didn't have that much money. Like it was a shitty yacht thing.

They had terrible guns. But he was eating like Walgreens cheese. Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. He was drinking like Corbell. Real libertarian. Which is no one. No one saw. Till the Dominicans took his guns. Wait, did they really steal his guns? Yes, they did steal. Well, they didn't steal his guns. He sailed into a foreign port with a boat full of illegal rifles. They did what any country would do. You can't do that. You're not allowed.

As usual, the fucking fun police, the woke mafia. Oh, I can't ride into another port with a bunch of guns. This is obviously just because the Dominican Republic is so corrupt. And it's like, man, any country would take your guns. You can't do that.

But also, this is like one thing of a functioning democracy. If a very strange man on all sorts of substances turns up- Clearly on drugs. Possibly trafficking human beings. If a guy turns up just going, yeah, yeah. Sounds like Beavis, but looks like he's dying. It's like, yeah, you could do that on the boat,

but no guns. And like, hey, I have all of these guns out of there, like just fucking lying around. You're taking your boat, John Mecham. Yeah, like you've killed a bunch of NPCs on there and they've dropped their loot. And he did in fact. I mean, that's the thing none of these modern day grifters can do. They don't live interesting, bold enough lives to have racked up the kind of body count John Mecham did. Yeah.

He was like a blacklist character. He sure was. Like Raymond Reddington. A lot of people in Grant's nephew died.

because they were, his nephew died. His nephew died? Paragliding. No. They had like a paragliding thing that they did in the desert. They called themselves sky gypsies and they traveled around like drifting from little airport in the desert to little airport in the desert and like a 70 year old man and his nephew both crashed and died. Oh.

And then he fled the country for Costa Rica because his whole family got angry at him. John McAfee. This is why he left. Yes. That's why he went to Costa Rica. Oh my God. My God. First,

First of all, insane. Yeah. Second of all, none of the tech people are this interested. No, absolutely not. Sam Altman has never fled a country. No. Ever. He might, though. No, he won't. That's the thing. The closest is like Zuckerberg dressing like Stan, you know, from the.

I love that he dresses like Kevin Federer. Yeah, but even all of that's just a Peter Thiel bit. It wasn't even his idea. This is one of the many consultants that have crawled up Mark Zuckerberg's arsehole now being like, what you should do is you should dress like you've just done a Zen pic, but you're also a 90s rapper. And he's like, uh, huh?

Will we ever get him rapping? You know, there's pictures of him with rappers. I would love him to rap. He should try. We really do need a Howard Hughes era and a crazy Crone era of tech. I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg is going to be like when he's like 80. Like an Al Davis style, just wretch. An Al director being. Yeah, just like a lich.

Just floating. He won't quit. I think he may Al Davis meta. And for the listeners who don't know the NFL, Al Davis was the owner of the Oakland Raiders, now the Las Vegas Raiders. And he held onto the team until he looked like he was physically dying. And I really do mean like bits were falling off of him on air. Like it was fucking insane. This is actually what I hope for meta more than anything. I actually don't think meta lasts another 10 years, but-

If it has to last decades, I hope it's Mark Zuckerberg just crazy and all like, we're not putting photos on there anymore. Nothing but the entire website is nothing but AIs of your dead grandparents and like elderly loved ones and Mark Zuckerberg running it alone. Like if you believe in me, you can make your pop pop come back.

You can bring your beautiful wives back. That's what he's going to run for president. Yeah, that's what he's finally... And you know what? That's what I'll vote for. Oh, yeah. Well, I can't vote, of course, as a resident. Just want to really put my government... No, you can't vote once, but you can vote twice. No. No.

No, people need to stop saying things that make it sound like I am committing a crime. Now, don't joke about the title of our signal loop in here. No, we will not be saying that. Nor will we be saying it's blowing up like a cyber truck either. I thought it was a pretty good post. Yeah, I'm sure it was a great post for you. Sending it to my lawyer being like, it's a bit. Look, he's already dead. It's a bit.

Yeah, I was planning a bit to bring my gray hoodie and my green jacket and my neck gaiter and just walk around all over the CEO booth. Cosplay as Luigi. That's the thing, though. The show's got big enough now that people are responding to me with stuff like that. Yeah, Luigi, son. I'm like, shut the fuck up, man.

People love posting about crimes on the internet. People love to tell me the crimes they wish I'd commit. Yeah. Wouldn't it be cool if you did? That's always true. Yeah. I am a coward. Murder one.

I'm not hitting anyone. I'm terrified of violence, both happening to me and committing it. The only drugs I do are the ones I legally buy at stores on the street. Yeah, like that weird mushroom gummy where they don't tell you what kind of mushroom is in the gummy. Yes, but we're on. That's another introduction to the Consumer Electronics Show and this beautiful show I'm putting on. My boss, Robert Evans...

sat down at the table and then produced a mysterious bag, I think it's the fairest description, saying, these are mushrooms I bought at a corner store. I don't know what's in... There's a mushroom vape. Vape.

There is also a mushroom vape. Everyone has been letting me know about the mushroom vape as well. Hit the rig, hit the rig. We do not know what kind of mushrooms. None of them tell you what kind of mushrooms. I'm not doing them. Also, we would never vape in this hotel suite. Yes, thank you. That would be illegal. $250, I will not get back. Anyway, this is my boss, the mushroom man.

And this is what the week is going to be like because we refuse to be held by the norms of tech coverage in the sense that we actually want to have a good time. And I believe, and I've done a lot of things about the tech media recently, and this is not the fault of the individual writers but the outlets themselves. I believe we have all lost the fun in tech. I don't think people enjoy their gizmos anywhere near as much as I do.

I want to enjoy my shit. I love my phone. It's got problems with it, but I love technology. It's great. The funnest thing at this show can't be the LG giant screen. Exactly. And that's why I'm so, I'm so thankful that you put this thing together because yeah, usually covering this is like kind of like brain breaking. Um,

And I love having something to look forward to that's not just the big screen and also drinking as many cocktails at Showstoppers as I can, which we will be doing tomorrow night. Every year. And the people of Showstoppers have been very unfair to me, very nasty. They said that I'm a public relations executive and they will not have me there. Will they still not let you into Showstoppers? No, they want to make me pay. And I'm not paying. They should pay me.

Don't worry. I will. I will. Oh, no. I will drink. I will drink for you. Maybe it's Pepcom they didn't let me into. Either way, it was Pepcom, I think. Nevertheless, many mean people at Pepcom, if you don't let me in your show, I will find a way in there in spirit. This

This is a threat. Which is mostly through me drinking their... Okay, not that kind of threat. You're going to blow down the door. No. No. Someone is going to be there that will tell me what happened and then I will talk about it. I will not be doing any crimes. No crimes. Thank you. This is going to be the entire goddamn week, isn't it? This is going to be my entire week is Robert and Gare and Ed now...

And Ed. Ed has joined in saying, Ed, why don't you do crime? And I will be saying, I won't. I've never committed. Which is great. But this week is – I think it's going to be a special week because I think over the course of the week, we're really going to realize how fucked the tech industry is. I think that there is some life in the hardware side, but I think there's a genuine fucking hole in the consumer electronics side that is just –

bleeding and i think people need to wake the fuck up about it maybe the reason ces is fucking miserable is because there's nothing here that's cool like that i maybe that was why i liked it in 2011 2011 there was i don't remember very much from that google had a slide maybe there was a mobile world congress that year either way there was a slide at one point but also there was stuff that actually got made that was interesting that solved needs and indeed it might be they've solved a lot of the needs already but it's like fucking hell no like tech was evolving so much back then

There was genuine massive changes and improvements on the availability of having a supercomputer in your hand at all times. And I've had the same iPhone for four years and nothing's... But that's actually the problem. Nothing's better. Maybe we're at the end. Maybe we're at the end of time.

Have we considered this? Yeah. I mean, I have a buddy named Francis Fukuyama. Okay. Explain the joke for those of us who get it but need the audience to know. I mean, he wrote a paper that was largely misinterpreted at the end of the Cold War about the end of history. Right. He really wasn't saying what it sounds like he was saying. Sounds like a thing I should have read but did not. It's okay. No one actually read Francis Fukuyama.

We all just joked about... Like a real Shoshana Zuboff situation. I don't know who the fuck that is. The surveillance capitalism person. She wrote a 700-page book. If you read the first 100 pages, you're like, God damn, this is so good. I use it to keep my door open so my cats can get in my room. It is a very long book. And I say this as someone who does very long podcasts. But the first 100 pages, you're like, damn, you're really on to something. And the next 600, you're like...

Maybe an editor would have been helpful. Oh, definitely. But also the larger point is that capitalism is simply sick. That we must just fix the obvious problems because otherwise the tech companies would run well if capitalism worked well. And the answer is, shut the fuck up. Anyway, I'm going to have Corey Doctorow talk about that book at some point because he has some fucking views. Oh, yeah. He wrote his own book about the book. Oh, yeah. But it is interesting and I kind of want to –

I think I'm going to try and ask everyone what they were excited about this. Because I need to find out, first of all, who's a liar. And then second of all, I need to find out if someone truly believes that something is exciting here, why? I don't remember a single thing I've ever seen at CES other than one year where I saw a sign for a semen analysis thing with AI. Oh, yeah, all the cum products. I was heading out at the time because I was not in a great mood because otherwise I would have gone in and be like, can I try it?

What do you think? Nah. You like what you see? AI says it's bad, huh? I don't know about you. I'm pretty excited about that folding laundry robot that you guys were talking about.

They're going to get it right this year? It would be really funny to go over there and be like, where's my fucking shirt? I gave it to you two years ago. Where's my fucking shirt, man? You never give me that shit back. Like KG yelling, where's my money? I am a sicko laptop pervert, so I always look forward to Lenovo's weird twisting, folding laptops. I've got their folding 13-inch laptop now, and I love it.

I like their sick little laptops. A weird little laptop. And I wish it was all that. Weird little fucking laptop. Yeah, give me a weird laptop. Put four screens on the son of a bitch and have it fold down to the size of a napkin. That's what I want from CES. I don't mind if you don't make it.

I just mind that it's fun. If it's like, hey, here's something that's plausible and we are not building it, that's so boring. I don't get angry at the folding 100-inch television. I would never buy one, but I am like, that is a TV that's folding. That's pretty cool. And I could see that would be delayed due to the fact that you're doing the thing unassociated. And no one wants one. Mostly associated with clothes. And also there is no market of any kind.

But even then, they still make them. You still get like the $50,000 LG TV that can run on a battery. It's like that $3 million glasses-free 3D television they used to bring around where it's like, this fucker works. You got to stand in one specific area, but by God, it works in that area. This is basically a giant 3DS, but it works. It does work. Well, last year they had, I think their biggest TV thing was like a transparent. Transparent TVs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. That was so stupid.

stupid i love that because they were like even like the tech journalists just trying they weren't trying they were just reading off the fucking press it's like i don't fucking know i don't fucking know we have no more horizon no there's no more lands to cut the rock con bubble in july i fucking said it there's nothing left we're at the end and i will narrate it because and that really it does feel like i'm narrating the end of the world at times and this show does not fucking help

It doesn't give me hope. I don't get... I don't see anything at CES where I'm like, finally. No, but I think it's so crucial because the whole thing about AI right now, the thing everyone says is like, it's only going to get better, right? This is the worst it's going to get. And the thing that you've been so good on, like, specifically for your beat is showing how things don't actually, like...

infinitely improve. Google search is such a good example that, no, sometimes things actually can get worse. We can't assume everything will just get better. Well, it hasn't, though. I think that that's the real thing, and this show kind of shows it. Nothing has got better. They don't show us stuff here where I'm like, other than TV stuff. TVs are cool. I love TVs, whatever. Big computer, fast computer, whatever.

But like of actual things we've seen at CES, I first of all cannot remember a single fucking thing that I've seen at CES. I just – I go in. I look at them for hours and then my brain just leaves and I leave and my brain is like – Yeah, it's gone. Okay, that's gone with where Spanish, French, German and Latin went.

So who are the winners? It's gamers, gooners, investors. The thing is, I don't even think those... Oh, always, right. Those are the three groups that always keep winning. That's the Guy Fieri show. Gamers, gooners, and tech enthusiasts. But there's not even stuff for gooners anymore.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. If you know a true gooner, they're always DTG, as the kids don't say. We have been reporting on the cumbit every CES. Okay, well, love to introduce my listeners to this, especially the ones that came in through the very serious podcast and the Lena Kahn interview. That's the ones, the people hearing this from the Lena Kahn interview. Lena Kahn, come on. No. No. Let's talk about the FCC. No. No.

No. She said she'd come back on, theoretically. You know what she just said, Ed? Yeah.

Jesus Christ on the fucking earth. No, but I, you know, 2025 is the year that we are all, that we are all going to have sex with robots. I'm excited for some kind of, You guys aren't having sex with robots. No, there's no sex with robots. I'm waiting for the right one. It's like the champagne room of sexology. No, I, I, I'm waiting for some like, some insane like, like AI power, like masturbation tool, uh, because I, I, I know, I know there's going to be a new one on the floor. They did, but there's going to be a new one on the floor this year. Uh,

They only sent us the sheaths. They didn't send us the actual device. Like a fucking samurai. We're handing out dumb sheaths.

You have to forge this one yourself. It's like the most sex-averse group of people walking the show floor and you have these PR people enthusiastically trying to give people lube and you're like, these people aren't having sex. They're from countries where you're not allowed to come.

Yeah, there are ads that tell me I can't. Anyway, moving on from that one. But no, I'm so sorry to like the respectable like tape. We got like awards this year from like real business publication. There's some person who's like, I can't wait to hear what's out. This is important though. What's gooning? This is actually a pretty big part of CES. How the fuck did we get gooning into the first episode of this goddamn fucking show?

Because it's CES. What else are you going to do with all of those curved TVs? And the humanoid robots. What do you think they do with them after they don't fold the laundry? They put them on the line. On the goon line. Maybe the show was a mistake. This is also one of the biggest uses of all...

of all of these LLMs is just people using them as sex bots. And actually, you know what? I don't mind what people do with that, but I will say, I don't think that they've got anything else other than that. I don't think there's any other sticky... That's the thing. I could have chosen another word. You really walked into that. Fucking hell.

No, I actually can't come out sticky. I learned a lot socially by meeting other weird freaks on World of Warcraft and doing role play sex with them. That was the way you grew up as a 17 year old when I was a kid. What race were they? I mean, usually night elves, obviously. Like, of course. It was 2007. I mean, you could have been a gnome. You could have been a gnome.

Sometimes they were gnomes. You just tried things on the internet back then. Love is love. You grew as a person. But nevertheless, it is funny that that appears to be the one use case of all that. Because people are just like millions of people getting into erotica for the first time. Our bartender Phil just walked in and that was the first thing he heard. So very good stuff, Phil. All the normals are happening here. We're talking about how AI is helping people cum.

I'm so sorry, by the way. There are people who listen to this podcast ostensibly to learn about the rot economy and the tech industry's collapse. And now everyone's talking about their willies and hoo-hahs and such. This is a core part of the industry, though. It is.

This is why we have Blu-ray. Porn is always driven tech. Used to. Yeah, actually, pornography has always driven tech, which is why they pulled the AVN away, because then they'd have something to aspire to. And also, that's a profitable industry. Right, yeah, you can't remind people there's no money being actually made. Yeah, like, oh my God. This is the thing. I really didn't think about how likely it would be that someone would bring up Gooning, let alone on the first episode. But I mean...

This is still more fun I've had any CEO. Because you go into these shows, and they are definitely sexless. And there are definitely guys in the tech industry who are like, if they had good sex, they'd be really happy, Elon Musk being one of them. But it is also weird how just joyless it is. Putting aside horniness, deliberately...

It does just feel very fucking joyless. No one seems to... I think this is probably in the tech media as well. No one seems excited about anything. No one even is looking forward to it. It's like a group burden that we all share every year. I just refuse to have it that way anymore. Yeah, it's... I think it's good. I'm excited for the rest of this. I think we probably should...

close things up? Oh, okay. Don't worry. I was just planning to. I'm the MC, Robert. Because I've got to show you guys some weird AI videos after this. And I have to pee. So, as we do our outro now, I'm going to talk you through the rest of the week. Robert and Gare will be joining us again on Friday for one of our two slots. But the way this is going to work is you're going to get this episode. You're listening to this around 12 a.m. ET. I assume that this is the one thing you do with your day. And then...

maybe about eight ten hours later you're gonna get the second episode then we're gonna have david roth of defector he's gonna be joining us my two elves are gonna be here to look on the floor i will be going to the floor yes i will but not until wednesday due to situations we will have a gaggle of wonderful reporters we'll have jesse ferrara of your kickstarter sucks we will have a real life priest an actual dominican monk and we're gonna have many more fun things in store robert gare where where can people find you

You can find our daily show, It Could Happen Here, where we'll be talking about some of the great AI-generated movies that I watched today during my panels. I do not look forward to seeing them. Oh, you're going to be really unhappy, Ed. And yeah, you can listen to us on It Could Happen Here. You've got social profiles, too?

I am on the blue sky. Blue sky. That I write, okay? I don't want to tell you my Twitter. Get off Twitter. Don't go on Twitter. Get away from people. Am I not following you? No, you're following me now. You're not following me on blue sky, Robert. I've responded to a post asking. But yes, I am. I am on blue sky at hungrybotai.bluesky.social. On Grayso, where can people find you? On Twitter and on blue sky, I am BigBlackJacobin. And then...

I'm at the tech bubble at Substack. What's the address?

techbubble.substack.com very good and you can of course find me at ed zitron and gab and otherwise not no i'm i'm on i am not on gab i am not on gab you don't need to anymore because it's just twitter now i am on gab but it's a secret account i mean just to see if that's real donald trump people i'm following are about to do a mass shooting or have just no i'm not gonna tell you shit because you can see the episode links and also ed zitron is on who the fuck else is a

dumbass name like this. This is, of course, the first episode of the Better Offline CES Extravaganza Saga, of course, mastered by the wonderful Matt Osowski, who is here producing us in real time. Thank you so much for listening. Very excited for this week. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.whereisyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash 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 our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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