Better Offline CES 2025: Day 4 - Pt. 1
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On April 25th, 1986, a disaster happened. I was born.

Better Offline.

Not really. Edwin Grasso Jr. tomorrow. How are you doing, Ed? Doing pretty good. Pretty good. So you're fresh back from the convention floor, right? Yeah, after thinking I lost my passport there. Just...

Amazing. Yeah, I found it. Well, then you'll be just trapped here forever. I choose everyone's dream. Yeah. I did not want to say this to you, but that is actually a CES rite of passage. Of the people, the lifers I know, at least, I think like five people I know of like, I lost my entire wallet in the LVCC. I didn't lose it in the LVCC, but one of the first CESs I ever went to, I had a connecting flight back through Minnesota. There was a snowstorm. I was stuck there for an extra day while bedridden.

every single airline counter to like put me on a flight out, I lost my wallet. Yeah.

So my company put me up with an extra hotel. I get to the hotel and they're like, you kind of need ID to check in. I was like, I don't know how to tell you. I just lost my wallet at the airport. And so they're very nice in Minnesota. So they just let me stay. The next morning I get up early and you can fly without an ID domestically. You just have to go really early. You just do like a credit check. You have to go really early though because they do check early.

everything you own with great scrutiny. Oh, no, I know. Because the last time I did it, it was like, what car do you have? The lady was going through my dirty underwear and that was my biggest nightmare. But on the way to the airport, I had left a review unit laptop in the hotel room, so I had to go back. And then on the way back from going back...

the Uber blew a tire because it was so cold. Oh my God. It was so stressful. I was like, oh my God, this is the worst flight of my life. I got home. It was like 48 hours after I was supposed to. And then two weeks later, the very nice people in Minnesota, the lost and found at the airport, sent me back my wallet after I'd canceled every single card I own. So...

That's such a lovely story. So talking of finding things you don't want, what has your experience been as the preeminent wearables reporter? Oh, thank you. What have you seen that's crap or interesting or funny or good?

Oh, you know, I wish I remembered all the crap that I saw, but I feel like I just jettison it from my head unless it's like super egregious. Oh, wait, no, I remember now. I wouldn't call it crap. I would just call it ridiculous, if that makes sense. It's the Ultra Human Rare.

The Ultra Human... Well, the name says it all. The Ultra Human Ring Air is actually a smart ring that I enjoy quite a bit. I did this thing over the summer where I wore six smart rings at once to determine who was going to be the one ring to rule them all. Right. That one came in second. So I found it quite good. And at CES, they're like,

but what if late-stage capitalism? Okay, okay, great. So they made The Rare, which is like, it's a desert-themed collection of luxury smart rings, and there's Desert Rose, cue the Sting song, Dune, and then Desert Snow. Rose gold, gold, and silver, basically. The rose gold and gold are made out of 18-karat gold. The silver, quote-unquote, is PT950 platinum. Guess how much they cost? How much?

So the gold are $1,900 each, like converted from British pounds. The platinum is $2,200. Great. I saw them on the floor and I was like, I have $6,000 worth of smart rings on my hand. I took a photo, posted it online and everyone was like... No, and everyone was just like, you know what though? Your nails look better. And I was like, these are $10 press-ons. Nice try. You know, it just goes to show you money isn't necessarily what...

So they were expensive because of the metals. They were expensive because of the metals. The $300 worth of metals, at most. So the actual ring, tech specs...

All the same. So the actual ring is $350. So we're talking five to six times the price. And I'm like, you know, I was talking to the guy and I was saying, you know, tech becomes obsolete so quickly. Right. The battery is going to die in like three years. Oh, yeah. My aura ring is already dying. Yeah. And, you know, rings that are actual gold, like people don't blink spending that much money on real gold, high quality jewelry. Right.

But you get to keep those forever. Those are heirlooms. You can pass them down. So like, how do you reconcile that? And he was like, well, there will be an upgrade path that we're working on to guarantee the value of the metals. Like a skill tree. Yeah. And then also just like, maybe we'll like, I think they're working on a way to try and swap out the tech portion so that you can keep the metal. And I was like, I had to work that one out first. Big if true.

Big if true. This is the only way to get people into smart rings is to just construct artificial scarcity. That's the only thing. And I know, Victoria, you've covered this stuff a lot. I firmly believe that that whole category is bullshit. I say that wearing one. Yeah, I mean, I see. Respectfully, it is very popular among women. I'm sure. Or as demographic is now majority women instead of men. And it's because they don't want to wear the square.

want to watch this. They just don't. This is the thing. That story is not well told in the media. I'm not saying it's any failure, but this is actually a failing of Better Offline, as you literally just heard, a preconception that we had as guys, which is just an even my experience of using Aurora. The question is, what is it that attracts them? Is it

Is it that the data is more useful for women, that women are more connected with those products? In some respects, because they do have pregnancy. They have been putting so much effort into pregnancy research over the last few years. They found that they could actually, they did a clinical study. So it's clinical. It's not like- And a real clinical one. It's not, it's a real, that's what I mean. It's a real clinical one. It's not a white paper, which is what I see a lot in my field. And what is the difference there, just for the listeners? So a white paper is like,

a book report by a company saying we did our own internal research. A clinical study or a clinical paper is something that they've done, that they've paid the money to get published in an academic journal or a peer-reviewed journal, and that cost can be sometimes up to $25,000 for that review. Was it a reputable journal?

I mean, there are so many of them, but yes, actually it was. And they're working with actual researchers from universities to find that sort of stuff. And they continuously do it. They have a long dedication to it. So they found that they can find temperature predictions with pregnancy detection. And they haven't necessarily done anything with that, but they're saying it's possible. And they've also partnered with Natural Cycles. What's that? Natural Cycles is – you're going to enjoy this. It's an FDA-cleared birth control app. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So I could go off about that forever and the controversies with that. There has been controversies. This is the place if you'd like. So that's a long story. But the point being is that a lot of people or a lot of women have fertility issues. This is something that is discreet that they can wear that.

with other stuff that has like clinical backing because a lot of people use basal body temperatures to try and track their fertility, but that's so difficult to do accurately because you have to do it first thing in the morning when you wake up. You cannot drink. You cannot get out of bed. And you can sleep with these. You can sleep with these. Right. It's much more. So for a lot of women, there is a benefit to that. It is, you know,

A lot of women I know are just like, okay, I have a bunch of rings on my hand. There are some that are thin and stylish, which I quite like. And then there's these honking smart rings. So, you know, that's not for everyone necessarily, but it is discreet compared to, I don't know, an Apple Watch. A lot of women find Apple Watches ugly. And sleeping with those is difficult. And sleeping with them is difficult. They're totally difficult. I understand the like...

functional, useful aspect of a smart ring for women. That totally makes sense. I think overall as a market though, if you're not always looking for temperature markers, it's so niche. It's so niche. It's not like your first... I always say that a smart ring is better with a smart watch. So it's kind of a high cost entry. I think the price is the problem as well. It is. And also they're very annoying. They're very annoying. I wanted the next Aura because I really like my sleep tracking other than the fact that the charging cycle lasts like...

a day and a half at best and then it screams at me like an angry cat but it's 300 and the next one i was like i might get it like a christmas present for myself and it's like no no no mate don't just try and buy this man you've got to re-measure your fingers

I can actually tell you why. Oh, thank you. They changed the sensor array. So I have the 4 on me right now. If you look at yours and you take yours off, you have the bumps, right? Yeah. This has no bumps. It's bumpless. It's bumpless. They've changed the sensors and the arrays on that, so that has affected the sizing quite a bit. Still annoying. So I went from an 8 to a 9. That is the case, but the battery lasts a lot longer. So with SPO2 tracking, those last like three or four days. What is SPO2 tracking?

Thank you. So, like, with that tracking, that last maybe two to three days, I found it really annoying. This is seven. That's not bad. Yeah. But it's still niche, though. It's still very niche. It's still very niche. But I will say, at the live VergeCast recording that we did last night, when we were meeting readers, I had so many come up to me and they're like, look at my aura ring. I bought it because of you. And I was like, I...

I never tell people to buy things. It's your fault. Yeah, but they're like, look, look, look, I bought it. And I was like, oh, congratulations. So, you know, like me, I've never used these wearables. You know, what is the value proposition for someone who is not already in wearables?

the marketer ecosystem using it for one of the use cases you've kind of laid out, you know? Usually, so the killer quote unquote, the killer app for wearables is health. There are so many different kinds of wearables, but the one that people most resonate with now is health.

And usually like they get into it because they want to change something or they've had like a health scare. So, oh, like I don't sleep well and that my doctor says I have sleep apnea. Oh, I should track this sort of thing. Or, oh, my parent just had like a cardio respiratory issue. I'm going to buy them an Apple Watch.

Actually, the scenario I get asked most often is like, my parent had a health scare. What Apple Watch do I buy? So it has a lot of different purposes. What health scares does it actually help? Is it just falls or do they do more than that? Falls. If you have abnormal heart rate, like if you're at rest and your heart rate

abnormally dips too low or too high, it'll alert you and be like, this is kind of messed up. And there are many stories of people who have gone to the hospital and had their lives saved because of that. And the idea of having Apple Watch with built-in cellular too, and then you're all on the Apple family plan and your parent could call you and say, hey, I've fallen or something, or they get immediate emergency help, whereas their phone could be in another room

All those uses seem pretty useful. It's just what Ed is asking here is a question I think many people ask about wearables. And I know we spent most of the show just being like crapping on everything. But I like my Oura Ring when it fucking works. When it works.

And you know what? Is that not the tech industry right now? But what Ed's asking is like something they've kind of failed at. Victoria, I know you might not like the idea that you've effectively sold an aura ring by proxy, but someone probably read the thing and went, oh, this actually explains what it does in a way that doesn't make sense to me. And I want to use it for that. Yes. This has a use case of sort. A very specific use case. Maybe an unpopular thing. Does anybody remember the Jawbone app? I do. What was that? Ring back.

I'm going to look this up. You were definitely in PR at that point. It's a screenless fitness tracker. I hear that quite a lot from people who are just like, I don't want the smartwatch. It was thin. It was really light, but they couldn't get the engineering.

Wasn't the draw button also kind of crap at building stuff sometimes? Well, their speakers were great. But the up destroyed them because it was a flexible bracelet. It feels like a more challenging product to build. It was really hard to build. And they kind of bet the whole company on it and it all fell apart. Do you have any wearables, Devendra? I have an Apple Watch and I always forget to wear it. So that's a thing. But I love the idea of an Apple Watch. And certainly, I'm thinking about my parents. I'm thinking about my daughter, too, who's six years old now. And parents have to think about...

Devices for your kids, I don't want to put a tracker on her. But you don't want to give her a phone. But you also don't want to lose her. And also, if she's off somewhere doing activity, she misses the bus or something, I would love an emergency way for me to, in a couple of years, not at six, but at eight to ten, yeah, be able to call me, be able to call for help, something. Even just to hit a button. Or to see where they are on GPS if they're on a school trip or something because there are trips where kids get left behind. So, you know, not...

Surely not like the most important thing in the world, but it is something I think about. And certainly as parents age too. Yeah. A connected device that can instantly help them or get them to emergency help like that seems super valuable. I kind of want to put one on my mom. There you go. No, she's totally fine. She's doing well. She just forever does not pick up her phone. So it'd just be nice to know. That too. My mom would probably not hear this, but I'm sorry, mom, in advance if you do.

So, Devendra, changing gears slightly, have you seen anything exciting on the show? Anything really been revving your engine? Revving my engine? I spend a lot of time with NVIDIA, and I know you guys have been talking about NVIDIA a lot. By all means. I do think it is interesting watching NVIDIA's transformation to this sort of like AI superpower company. But I also feel like I've been covering NVIDIA for a while. I've been covering Jensen Huang for a while.

Did you guys see that CS keynote? I didn't see the keynote. And just to be clear, it was not good for him. When you say you've been covering them for a while, how long?

I don't know, 2010? Like pretty much since I started doing tech stuff. Thank you. I knew that was the case, but for listeners, this is important. A lot of the people, not Max Czerny, he's a dog, but a lot of people talking about NVIDIA now have recently started writing about it. And they say, NVIDIA. And when you say that, I know you're a poser. People say NVIDIA? People say, Gary Shapiro said NVIDIA on stage. Oh, yeah. So, yeah.

Didn't he yell at a sound person as well? I was there for that too. I think Jensen's going through some stuff. So why was it bad for Jensen? Bad for Jensen because that was like a two hour long keynote where the thing everybody was there filling that auditorium. They just wanted to hear about the video cards. Give me the new RTX 5090 or some shit. And he spent maybe five or ten minutes talking about those things. The rest of it was on

Their robotics, AI, virtualized training operations, nobody gave a shit. It was like a comedian watching every single joke fall flat. And you could tell on stage that it was kind of affecting him. He's pivoting. He's trying to pivot. Also, what they're...

Their real or industrial metaverse that they're trying to construct. Which is the Omniverse. The Omniverse. It's the goddamn Omniverse. Plus NVIDIA Cosmos. What the fuck is Cosmos? Cosmos. So Omniverse is this sort of simplistic view of a 3D environment that you could use to train a robot or something. Cosmos is a real...

almost looks like a real-world version of that environment, so like a photorealistic environment. And these are interesting ideas. Yeah, these are useful things for actually training robots. How would you train a robot with a decent amount of artificial intelligence to perform certain tasks?

In a Black Mirror-esque way, you have them... This is actually a digital twin. This is actually describing... People have been saying it for many reasons. So it's Black Mirror. You have them run through that simulation over and over, get better at it, and that's the whole thing. Really interesting pitch. Maybe not for the CS audience. And that kind of affected him. And then, yeah, the next morning, there was a press Q&A where people were asking questions to you. But he also seemed really uncomfortable and also like... Yeah, he was...

really picking on the sound guy at that poor Q&A because he was like, the speakers are pointing at me and making it hard for me to hear. We're all like, no, Jensen, you're hearing the reflections of the speakers on the wall that are coming to the audience. He was like, no, I know I'm right. It was a weird thing. That man is such a penis. But I think he's just like, he admitted in that Q&A that he did a bad job at the keynote. He was like, I failed. That's what investors love to hear. Yeah, that's what you want to hear. That's what you wake up thinking about. I don't feel, I mean, dude's a multi-billionaire.

Yeah. Oh, I feel, I'm laughing at his pain. He's dealing with a lot of stuff. But yeah, the NVIDIA stuff is interesting. The video cards are interesting too, because they're leaning more on AI. So tell me about with the video cards. So the lower end one is meant to be the equivalent of what, the 4090, I want to say? This is where it gets confusing. Because they're using DLSS. They're using DLSS. Can you explain that for us? AI upscaling. So these new cards have DLSS 4, which have AI upscaling to,

basically smooth out frame rates so they can generate for every single real frame that video card renders it can generate three artificial frames which kind of smooth out gameplay so if you have a really fast monitor it'll look a little better they can say the FPS is higher

because this DLSS will auto-generate... They generate new ones, yeah. And then you can go back to the last card, the 4090, and be like, well, this is not generating as many frames. That one could generate one frame for every real frame. So the number, they can say the number is right, but if you turned off DLSS and you just looked at pure...

gaming performance without any of the AI stuff, certainly like the 40, the 50, 70 would not be as fast as the 40, 90. So they're picking and choosing more marketing from Jensen. They've always done this, but yeah, you're picking and choosing which benchmarks they're talking about. So just, and just before we get off the subject, so Nvidia, you've been covering since 2010, they've been pulling these games for a while, but they always have done puffed up marketing. They have, but also the thing is like,

What's changed then? They do succeed. Like some things do work. DLSS, when they first talked about it, even Jensen admitted, he said nobody believed him that this idea of using AI to upscale a lower resolution to a higher resolution on the monitor was

gives you less like processing power on the card so it gets you higher frame rates um nobody believed that that would work but it turned out it worked pretty well right there were some issues and they got better and better and better at it and he said basically for the past six years there's like a supercomputer at nvidia servers that's just been crunching dlss algorithms to like sort of make that thing better so that is a real thing but i think he tends to overstate how good it is at times uh

It's a weird thing because I think he's full of a lot of bluster, you know, but the actual the results, the products are good, certainly compared to AMD's video cards and all that stuff. Yeah.

So, Victoria, returning to you. Anything good? Oh, lots of good stuff. Okay, what's actually been exciting? I asked this question with some alarm because most people have had nothing. So, my favorite thing on the show, it's kind of girly, but it's L'Oreal's Cell Bioprint. It's meant for something like a dermatologist or an esthetician's office, and it is a machine.

Basically, you take these skin strips and you take a sample from your skin. You put it in a chemical buffer solution. You stick that on a cartridge, and then that cartridge is stuck into this machine. It goes beep-bop-boop. And then it tells you if your skin's chronological age and biological age match or if your skin ain't doing so good. It can analyze different criteria like wrinkles, blemishes.

skin barrier function, pore size, even skin tone, like a bunch of different things. And then based on the proteins that it had detected from your skin and then the solution, it can tell you whether you're prone to have those problems in the future if you don't take care of things. And so what is the thing you're meant to do with this information? It is meant to help you wade through the cesspool of skinfluencers hawking different products to you. So like if you...

If you're a woman, probably, you're on TikTok and they're like, oh my God, you need to buy a retinol. You need to have retinol every day as soon as you start 30 or you will shrivel up like an old crone and die. What is that? Retinol is vitamin A and it is the most clinically studied skincare ingredient. It is basically what dermatologists would give you if nothing's freaking working. But it is a tough ingredient because a lot of people are...

like sensitive to it. So there's something called purging. So if you use it, you could end up instead of having clear skin, have a bunch of breakouts. And it's because it's increasing cell turnover and it's just getting all the impurities out of your face. And, you know, it'll be fine after that. The problem is it looks like

it looks the same as an intolerance or insensitivity to retinol, meaning it doesn't work for everyone. And those people are just getting skin. So it can tell you if you're responsive to it and whether it's worth using. That's actually really cool. Yeah. That's actually really cool. And so like from different things that you notice. So like for me, it said, uh, you have some issues with skin tone evenness. And yeah, I know that I can see it and it pisses me off and I'm trying all these different things. How do you deal with something like that? So, um,

It's called hyperpigmentation, and there are different ingredients that are said to fight that. So vitamin C is one. Another one is niacinamide. There's just like tranexamic acid and all of those. So, you know, like the girlies, we're on TikTok, and we are learning about all these ingredients that we are supposed to use in different serums, potions, promotions. But this will tell you how it will give you more direction? It'll give you more direction. And like when I was talking to them, they're like, it's going to help you know what not to buy.

Because when you have all these marketers and these skinfluencers, they're just telling you all these things. I was on there and I was like, do you know what the Koreans use? The Koreans use Befida. And I'm like, what the fuck is Befida? Do I need Befida in my thing? Everything on social media. So the other thing is you go to Sephora or something and be like, help me out. And I have bad skin, so I have to look at this stuff too. And either you will get a good salesperson who's like, I got you.

I will take care of you. Or you get somebody who wants to make a lot of money and they will lead you to, oh, you need niacinamide, you need hyaluronic acid, all the fun stuff, plus retinol. And then your face is a mess. And then you end up with a 10-step skincare routine, which was popular like 10 years ago in Korea. It's like super...

No, it's like my cousin's kid is like 11 years old and she came to me. She's like, let me show you my skincare routine. I'm like, you're 11. The only thing you should be using is moisturizer and sunscreen. Like a Dexter style setup. Yeah, no. And she was breaking out. And I was like, you know why you're breaking out? You're overloading your skin and you're too young. You don't need any of this. All you need is a moisturizer and a sunscreen. So does this thing give direction or is it just like don't buy it?

It does give you direction because for me it was telling me like, oh, you have hyperpigmentation, but technically the proteins, you're not prone to it. So there's something that's going on. What are the consequences there? So what could that mean even? That means like I should probably be using a vitamin C. I don't currently. So I'm like, oh, I was trying a different ingredient. Obviously it ain't working. So like I can look for a vitamin C. It told me I was responsive, like highly responsive to retinol, which means it's

will likely work better for me than someone who's intolerant of it. And so that means I should probably use a retinol. And the actual consequences here is saving hundreds of dollars. Hundreds of dollars because these things are not cheap to buy. If you know what Drunk Elephant is, it's a very premium brand. In Sephora, you walk in, one bottle, like 70 milliliters, is like $150. Yeah.

These things can cost a lot of money. And there's all this pressure on social media to buy, buy, buy to fix every problem that you have. During the pandemic, skincare just blew up. And then Korean skincare is super popular now because you look at the stars of Squid Game. How old do you think they are? They're like 55, 60. And their skin looks incredible. They do not look whatever. And it's because they take skincare so much more seriously. The tech...

that L'Oreal did, it was actually paired with a Korean startup in microfluidics. So they're taking like protein, this product took them 10 years to build because of the science and all that. This reminds me of, there was a booth I stopped by, it was a Korean skincare company with some tech and they had like four pamphlets that had nothing to do with the tech and just talked about why skincare was so big as an industry in Korea. It's huge. Which I thought was really interesting because

I feel like almost every single pamphlet I've read, besides those ones, has been trying to pitch me or sell me on the tech, which I suppose that probably was in a way. I mean, it's interesting too because there's an obsession with lighter skin too. Like whenever I go to Computex, the stuff you see on billboards and everything is like, you want a light complexion, you want a fair complexion. It all feels like this is all kind of, I was like, I see what you're up to, guys. Like there is very clear colorism going on there. So you're like literally just blushing

scrubbing your face off, scrubbing skin off your face just to get a shade lighter, which is part of the marketing too, which is a shame. I'm really glad you brought that up though because the thing is with CES is it is very easy, as I will know, to be a bit cynical and definitely pessimistic when you look around. It's just...

everything has AI on it. It is nice to hear, especially for the tech industry, something for a woman that is very helpful. This seems extremely helpful. It seems like it comes outside the tech industry too, right? It's more of a L'Oreal thing. No, it's like using technology to solve a problem, which is usually not the tech industry's idea. It is. The funny thing is that people hear L'Oreal and they don't think they do tech. They have been a huge presence at this show for six, seven, eight years now. And they are doing interesting things with tech. And, you know,

I hate the term femtech because they usually talk about it in a certain way. Usually it has to do with reproductive health tracking, yada, yada, yada. They have a really high-tech hair dryer that uses infrared light to help you dry your hair. Why is that good? Most hair dryers, and hair dryers are gadgets, okay? They're the second most power-intensive thing in your house. I think they use more power than a microwave.

Really? Yeah. And you use them for a long period of time. They use heating coils. And that heating coil, like, you want your hair to dry fast. You put it really close to your head, it damages your hair. Oh, of course, because there's a giant heat source. Yeah, there's a giant heat source. So you can hold it from further away, use less heat, use less damage, and save a lot of energy. So it's, like, good and it's, like, not the sexiest thing in the world per se. It's not things like, oh, my God.

oh my God, we're going to revolutionize the world. Well, unless you're Dyson. How is this different than the Dyson? Because they did try to revolutionize. So the Dyson still is using Airflow. It's like Airflow versus...

They did a lot of cool things with airflow and engineering with the motor. This is more like... It's like cool air, not hot air. But this is not actually applying heat to it. No, it is applying heat, but it's applying heat from the light. It's light. So it's like, the way they describe it is like when you have something rain and there's no sun, the next day the water will dry, but not quite as well because it's like the wind and whatever will evaporate the water. But if you have rain and the next day there is sun and wind, it dries much faster.

It's the same concept, but applied to your hair. And I will respond to one thing you said. No, I actually think things for women's skin and hair dryers that are less damaging to hair are actually the real revolutions. If CES was all shit like this, it would actually be a really cool show. If it was all like ways to use less water in a tap, that still gets you as wet as you need to be. I mean, there's people, I think it's because like the industry is like full of,

The press industry for tech is like full of men. I mean, we kind of proved it at the beginning. I'm actively apologizing. I'm actively the only woman in this room at this point in time. No, I know. It's my failure. No, but it's like they have a lipstick printer. That's pretty cool. That's fucking cool. You can take a pic. You can app. You look at yourself. You can try out different colors and then custom print the actual thing. If you have a celebrity whose makeup look you like, you can take a photo. You can color pick their exact shade of lipstick and print it for yourself and then take it on the go. It's very thoughtful. Yeah.

They have like a hair dye wand that like precisely applies dye so you don't like destroy your bathroom. Hair dyeing is like a ritual where it's like your bathroom will never be the same. It takes forever to clean up. You can just brush your hair and you've dyed it. That's it.

It's super cool. It's a real future. I wish all of CES was this. Sadly, we're wrapping this block. Devendra Hardewa, where can people find you? Find me at Engadget. I do the Engadget podcast there and I podcast about movies and TV at the Filmcast at thefilmcast.com. Lovely. Victoria, where can people find you? I am at VicMSong on all social handles. But God, we got to find an alternative to Twitter.

Twitter, but then I'm also at The Verge, so you can find me there. Wonderful. And Mr. Ongwe, sir? Newsletters, detectbubble.substack.com, podcast This Machine Kills, and Big Black Jacobin on Twitter and Blue Sky. You can find me hanging from various banisters as I crawl into your room to make you listen to the podcast a second time. I need these downloads, everyone. We'll be right back after these insane advertisements that will blow your mind.

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And we're back. Buy the thing, download the thing, or else. We have now been joined by Mr. David Roth of Defector. Hello. He is fresh from the Hyperloop, which he described as thrilling. Yeah, it was amazing. I had no idea that you could...

take a car through a tunnel. Like that was something that... Yeah, how was the car ride? Oh, you did it too. I did it too. Yeah, did you actually? Oh my God. You know, in Dune, there's all this talk in Dune about ancestral memory, but nobody ever remembers what it's like to be that sperm swimming through the primordial ooze. And you know what? If you want to know what that is, get in one of these Teslas and travel through these patchy white ooze-looking walls

and the fake rocks and the Disney world colors. Travel a very short distance, like a very useless distance. It feels overwrought. I cannot emphasize enough how walkable this is. It's like some of the, like basically a football field. You're in the thing for like less than two minutes. They spent years digging into the ground to do this. I spent minutes thinking about why I did it. Amazing. The first time I went in it and the only time I went in it,

we had a traffic jam and I just started to panic. I'm going to be honest. Yeah. It's a nightmare. I was very claustrophobic. I was like, ah,

I was doing like the Tina from Bob's Burgers sound. It's like whenever you go in an underground tunnel, like into Manhattan or something, you're like, this could be bad. There's nowhere else to go. You're just in the tube. And so... Yeah, that's the thing. I never loved... I'm not like a big heights guy. I'm not a big confined spaces guy. I'm just a real cowardly guy. I'm always afraid every moment of my life. But...

In those tunnels, it's like, it's a big... There's other cars in there. It feels like it should exist. We're in it together. Right. There's a whole movie about that. There's also... Stallone movie Daylight or Daybreak. If you get out of the car in a tunnel, theoretically, you could walk around the cars. In this one, I don't know where you'd get out. You'd be meat. The tunnel is the size of the car, which I didn't care for. Also, very steep getting in and out. Even by the sort of degraded standards of what we're talking about here, which is basically like...

getting in a car with one or two other people you don't know and then traveling the distance of two football fields.

It shouldn't be as unsafe feeling as this. I feel like we got to clown the Hyperloop more. Just how dumb and useless and expensive it was and how it only existed to stop the... By all means, do some journalism. I will say Defector, we have taken that torch and run with it, but there's also only so many things you can say about it. It's only so far it goes. You got to remind people this was the thing Elon Musk used to kill the high-speed rail in California. You got car in tunnel.

You don't need a train. This is all it took. It cost $53 million to build. And it cost, oh, wow, yeah, $53 million to build and then $47 million for the two tunnels and three stations. That's awesome. Work every fucking penny. Yeah, especially as somebody who frequently rides the subway where one car can hold, like a train can hold like 1,200 people. Yeah.

people. Yeah. Like in this case it's like a car where there's a guy that helps you get into it and then there's a guy that drives it. So the ratio of people helping to people riding is either one to one or very nearly one to one.

And also it doesn't work. Like every time people get out, they're just like, please exit like ahead of the car. And I would say that in the times that I was watching that worked like maybe 30% of the time. Amazing. Yeah. Super stuff. Great shit. This is the modern day Tony Stark. Yeah. He's amazing. He's so good. So what did you see on the floor exactly? So I tried to see as much as I could in terms of like, I wanted to see the sort of the high end stuff.

low of it. Because I know that when we were talking about it yesterday, I had only been to the sort of the space here in the Venetian. And a lot of that was like, you know, sort of their products, like they're identifiably like things that, you know, in many cases, they're like, you know, you're making it so you buy it. And like, in some cases, it's like,

it's a vibrator or it's like a dog door or whatever, but it's like, it has a practical use. Right. Which is incredible. Yes. There was one that we talked about. This was the air purifier, which we should probably go back to. Oh God. Still some confusion. But the, in this case, it's like, so the convention center, I'm, yeah, I know you all have been over this a million times on the podcast, but I'm just going to say it. We can say it again. All right, cool. Uh, it is like the biggest of the big brands have their sort of like LG, uh,

experience stuff. And this is like a huge 20,000 square foot thing. Big, awesome, deep pile carpet. It's like a pleasure to experience. But then if you go upstairs, it's like all the white label Chinese electronic brands that sell on Amazon. And so I got to see, I wanted to see both of those. And there's also this sort of area where

The first is bleeding into the second, where there's brands that are doing ambitious stuff, where they make a robot or whatever that your kid is supposed to play with or something. But it also kind of sucks. It's not like the LG shit was interesting to me, because as much as we discussed yesterday, that some of the AI elements are so...

as to like almost be poignant. Right. Can you give an example of one? Like just a stupid one? The smart home stuff really like kind of was weird to me because that was, so I ran into a coworker of yours, an Engadget guy, up on the Chinese electronics floor. Is it Dan Cooper? Dan Cooper. Great dude. Very happy to talk to him. And he was sort of telling me about an ad. It's

I was struck by the smart home stuff in the LG space. All the products themselves, as a product, are cool. The OLED screens blew my mind. They were incredible. There was stuff where you could basically have a more or less dirt-free home garden thing. That's cool. It looks sick, dude. It looked like something from the Jetsons. Right.

Legitimately thinking that it would be a nice thing to have in my home. A dirt-free home garden? Yeah, it was like... And it looked... It was the size of like a boom box, basically. Like there were these little slots with plants growing up through it. And they said you could grow vegetables in it. I don't think I would do that. I think there's a bunch of those already. Like those self-contained things. Also, one can eat vegetables. Certainly. That's a useful thing. That's a practical thing. That's a thing that something does. Yes. And so all of those...

were neat to me. But then the smart home thing was basically like the most degrading thing imaginable where they're like, is this what you hogs want? You want a robot to pick your clothes for you and then map your commute? I bet you want that, right? Do you think that, what if we told you that the robot cared for you? There was a lot of stuff. It was your best friend. Yeah, there's so, that language, especially LG has.

it. Is this affectionate intelligence? Affectionate intelligence. Jesus Christ. Empathetic AI. Two years later it dies because the cloud service died. And it's going to make you feel like shit. You should have been far premium planned. You didn't love me enough. You killed him. You killed the guy that picks your pants every day. But you can bring him back to life for 79 extra dollars a month. Did you guys hear about the robot for kids, Moxie? Yeah, the one that...

Tell us the story. I mean, Moxie was this very expensive robot for kids developed by the iRobot CTO. So somebody who really wanted to build a companion, especially for kids who are maybe special needs or autistic kids, and just something for them to interact with, learn language.

A year or two later, that thing dies. Now you have to tell your child that their robot best friend is dead because this company couldn't get funding in time and the cloud service is dead. So now you just have a really expensive, I think it was like $1,500 in the beginning, plus a $50 monthly price. That's so cool. Growing up for me has been realizing I'm the guy in like these sci-fi movies who'd be like, I better not fucking see you with a cyborg. Yeah. I better not fucking see you.

There's like a new version of what you're describing. Amy, A-I-M-E. What was this? Similar thing. Looked like a Furby. It blinked. And it talked in a childlike voice. And it was a companion. So this is, again, one of those things where you kind of do got to hand it to them in the sense that it's cute. People were lining up to get their picture taken with it. I watched three different guys just walk up, get handed the thing, like...

the Stanley Cup or whatever, just hit the soy face while someone took a picture of them and then pass it to the next dude that did the same thing. People want cute robots. Like, we've seen a lot of those categories. Like, there was one that just stares at you. On a technical level, it just, like, looks up at you and it's like,

Hi. Hello. That would freak me out. That's all it exists for. I don't need like an aggroed NPC from Morrowind just snapping to me as I walk into the room. On some level, it's like it is technically impressive to be able to figure out a way to hack into what we view as cute. Figure out a way to get something that you're going to let into your home like that. But then it

immediately brings you to the next question. Do you need it? Yeah. And that's exactly, that's where I was going with it too. That it's like, as a design thing, it's like, it's a triumph. That's an idea. Like I thought it was, I wanted to pet it. You know, I wouldn't have minded holding that thing. And yet like the idea of it, like talking to my child, like no fuck,

No. Like, that's just not a thing where, I mean, again, this is the other aspect of what you're saying. Like, there are other needs and applications for this stuff. And so when I look at something and I'm like, well, I wouldn't use that. Like, I don't want to be in a robot that exercises for me. Like, well, I don't have, like, a unilateral, I don't have, like, issues. I have a child and a lot of experience with special needs kids as well. And guess what? This stuff's fucking repugnant to me. It is disgusting to me, the idea that...

And I understand it's like, yeah, companionship, what have you, but it's like, anytime, I don't mean you, Devendra, any of these companies that try and suggest, oh, this is the, we're going to use the computer to fix your sons, because that's what the actual suggestion is. It's not that they're like, this is really going to help you. And there are examples of things that can. Even for like, older people with dementia, for example, they had these kind of companions that were literally just like effectively...

like fluffy toys that kind of purred like a cat and it just made them feel like... That was the CS robot, the headless cat. And it was just very... But that had a very specific thing. But these robots is this kind of catch-all. If something's wrong with your child, because that really is what they're saying. And it's just... But I'm also not buying your head off because it's like...

Theoretically, the idea of one of these things is sensible. Like, I'm a loser and I'm lonely and I could use some company. Or like a child would like a teddy bear that could talk to it, theoretically. But it feels like none of these people have got beyond that stage ever. They're not like, and how would this...

operate with a person. That was the bit that I... So the thing that kind of left me feeling sad-ish leaving the convention center was that aspect of it. That all of it is sort of not just... So the smart home was bizarre to me because it was infantilizing. But there's also, and this was the bit that Dan told me about,

was that he was like, this is also great to talk to more people with that like thousand yard stare. They've been to 13 fucking CESs. Like the dad is scarred. Yeah. And so he was like, Oh, this is probably six CESs ago. Um,

Drag on a cigarette. Pre-pandemic times. You have to imagine this is actually just like a perfectly cheerful man with a British accent. He's also British. But he was talking about an LG ad that they had that clearly had stayed with him. Do you know the video that I'm talking about? I don't. I think so. So this was their sort of smart home thing that they were working with then.

And it seems like an important distinction that this is like a pre-pandemic thing because so much of this stuff feels like it's designed to be like, are you so lonely and you never see anybody?

Right. Which I think is an experience that's now like more current than, or like at least more, you can kind of like put your finger on a time. It's within the zeitgeist. Yes. Whereas like, I feel like six years ago, there's a part where it's like, no man, I just go to the store. Like I don't have to, like if I want to see another person, I just do it. But in this case, so the video he was describing was like, it's the life of a guy who's got like an LG AI support that is sort of taking care of everything. Is this the one that talks about his kid? No, this, so here, he wakes up

The thing is like, hey, good morning. It's 71 degrees outside. Would you like me to pick your outfit out for you? And you just say, thank you. And then it does. And then it comes out of a steamer that's built that's in your home. So everything's fresh and flies. You leave the home. You get in a car. The same robot drives you to work. Then it turns out that it's arranged a blind date for you based on-

What the fuck? Right. This is where it starts getting darker. Based on your preferences, presumably based on the same sort of algorithms that tell you that today's not a day to wear linen pants. Today's a day to wear cotton pants. So then the video follows the guy. He's on this blind date with this woman. It's working. And then the AI takes, because it can control the projection on the windows of the building across the street, changes to show that it's a heart.

And so that shows you... That robot is just an Indian mother. Yeah. It's just...

Wake up, my son. Here's your outfit. Here's your clothes. I found a date for you. That's all it is. So the bit that was striking me about there's no agency in any of this, he was like, Dan's words on it, he was like, this guy just gets bullied all day by his fucking AI. He's being manipulated by a robot. He doesn't make a single choice all day long. That actually sounds great, though. Yeah. I'd love to wake up with that. I think a lot of people would want...

they would find some solace in reducing choices. I am mostly kidding, by the way, the idea of waking up and the... Look, look, look. There's going to be a big market for pro-drama AIs. I am nothing like this. I just wake up and read three different apps that tell me how to feel every day. I just go and read pages of stuff that twangs my emotions, and then I go and use the text app to text my therapist, I read a post again.

Yeah, it's totally different. That's the bit that's weird about this too, though. So what made me sad about it was the idea of just being like a foie gras goose. And your whole life is just piped down your throat like butter. And you're just like, oh, thank you. I feel so full. This really is the hog era. This is what you guys like? Just eat out this trough. We've taken care of it. All you need to do is... This is the WALL-E future we're moving towards. WALL-E predicted everything. It's going to be a shit one.

It doesn't even work this well. But I do feel like... So it doesn't... The fact that it doesn't work is, like, funny to me, but it is also... Like, the fact that they're promising this is... That was the part that was, like, uncanny about it. Like, the idea of...

You want to take all of this mastery that you have that's made your products so unfathomably cool and project it across every spectrum of somebody's life. To a certain extent, I would want to be asked my consent. But also, you see how good those OLED screens are. And there's a part of me that's like, I don't know, man. Fuck me up. You guys do cars? We're moving beyond OLED. We're in micro LED now. And that stuff is...

It's wild. You don't need a girlfriend where we're going. No pixels. You see no pixels. It's just so dense. That's the idea of it, though. I don't want to be protected from every aspect of being alive. There's another thing that pisses me off about this. First of all, they're lying. First of all, they're lying, but two...

If you look at how the tech industry actually treats customers, do you think that any of this would, even if it did work, be good? It's like, I'm going to meet with a woman who is actually a pig butchering scam waiting to happen. And my car ends up pulling over to the side of the road because there was a traffic cone in the road. And I'm late for the day. And now the woman's threatening to kill me. But don't worry, the trousers I have on have a giant stain on them from the LG cabinet. And I also will admit,

I have the LG steam cabinet. Oh, yay. I actually use it. Like, I genuinely, like, I use suits a lot. This is an audio medium, but Ed looks amazing right now. Thank you. Thank you, David. He's steaming right now. I am just steaming here. But even then, that thing works mostly, but it just doesn't get all the wrinkles. It's like, they can't even get the fucking steamer right. The problem is...

These companies think all we want is no friction in our lives. They think we want to glide through life like we're fully lubricated. It's just like, oh, no problems. I don't want to think about clothes. I don't want to think about choices. But also they don't remove the friction. This is my one regret for CS. I didn't get to visit the fintech section. The fraud section. That's where they believe in removing friction, and they do. Whether or not they do so, whether or not doing so is good or bad,

You know, let's see. It's almost always, and not almost always, it is always bad. You know, when one of these fintech firms removes friction in making a transaction or a trade. But that's like one place I think of when I...

when we're talking about removing friction, making your life more of some coherent engine towards some end, and that's where they've done it. And it's been disastrous. But also these companies don't remove that. I would like, perhaps I don't need to be fully lubed, but partially lubed. Like I would like less friction. Instead, as you heard in one of the previous episodes, it's like there's more friction than ever. And even with these companies, it's,

They sell this dream, and LG, I think, is one of the more guilty ones. They have all the apps in the world. I think I have... I forget which washer I have, but I think I have an LG washer, and it's like, there's an app... They make the best appliances. Yeah, the appliances are good, but notice that there's never, like...

Like those things don't like the ways they change are just like clothes are more reliably clean. Yeah. The extensions from there have never worked because I feel like I've been to multiple CESs where there has been some form of demo where someone goes like LG intelligence, please, please warm up my bagel. I've already put it in the toaster, Michael. Yeah. It's already in there. And don't worry, I already emailed your wife.

And it's like these things are meant – like they've been promising this, but they don't fucking work. It's just make-believe. It's pure fantasy. But the thing about the friction thing, which I've noticed since I've been at CES since 2010. I've just had a four-year gap because of pandemic stuff and I had kids. I didn't want to leave my wife alone with young kids. You never have to explain why you didn't.

I got it. This is my duty. It should have to explain why you're here for. I've been coming here for 28 years. But the whole, the rise of startups, the rise of startups, what consumer electronics has been trying to do for the past 15 years is just remove that friction. And I think we've only really started to realize you remove friction, you remove humanity. And to a certain extent, we need,

We need a little friction in our lives. We grow with challenges. We grow with challenges, but maybe it's better for you to not have an automatically prepared cup of coffee when you walk into the kitchen. Maybe you should just go outside and go to the neighborhood cafe. There are other things you can do. I mean, a consumer is not a person, right? And this is a key part of, I think, the quest to remove friction. A consumer is someone who is...

is anxious or eager to move from one transaction to the next. And any time in between those transactions, any time between transforming labor into some sort of productive end is wasted. And I think what it is, is they are removing friction, just not for us. It's just between us and the purchase. Yeah. And that's, again, like sort of this brings us back to like the sort of the uncanny aspect of it in terms of being like,

it's not necessarily making my life any easier. It is simply making it easier for me to like, it's more transacted, right? Yeah. To like be productive and to consume more effectively or whatever, but it's not adding value in any way. Like I think about what these chat bots that are coming in for therapy, it's like, is the therapy that they're offering going to actually help? No, but now it's actually a more, it's a, it's a more transparent and quantifiable market.

So you can search out for whatever product you think is going to be a fit for your specific issue. Whether or not it's going to help you is another question. But you can find it and identify it. It's one less human you have to deal with. Which is also the other thing. Less humans. It's part of using apps instead of calling a restaurant or something. I mean, no, it won't.

I will fully admit, like a mental health thing with me, I've loved that for years. And I found it because I got my various issues with anxiety and not wanting to go outside and being scared of talking to people. Long story short, I got over that. But also, there was a certain level of like, yeah, the internet is really, and tech is really good at selling you those abstractions between people. So you can live a weird hermit life. And I absolutely did at one point. And then you think society is you and these tech people.

products exactly you become more around exactly less experiences you don't grow like and this is this is why i hate the the the stupid the google thing where it'll call a restaurant and make a reservation for i do like that for my accent i hate it so much because it's like what burden are you putting on this restaurant it's like oh i'm busy like i'm dealing with real customers real reservations this fucking robot calls me i will argue slightly on this one yep

My accent when I call and I have to spell Zitron or even just like my number. So many people don't understand it. I've had to like... Because you're like Z-I-T-R. You have not learned American Z yet. I do sound exactly like that. One day Ed will learn American Z. I have to Americanize my accent to a certain extent. I totally get that. Yeah, I'm sure. But also...

I would say in that case, an app way too, like a thing that actually makes life better for a restaurant, hey, just log this reservation, please. Rather than, that's a case where you don't need to call the manager of the restaurant to do all this stuff. And that's a case where an app-based thing could be better. But now we're abstracting to the point where a robot is calling a number and talking to this human, and this human does not know it's a robot talking to them. Then they're expecting a conversation that's confusing for them.

I hate that whole thing. Yeah. I agree. It is horrible. And this is something that's been like a recurring theme in the conversations that, that I've been a part of for this, where it's like, they invented a solution to like a pretty minor problem and now are sort of like, I mean, not to no, no, no. You're right. Also mine is like minor in comparison to like,

But yes, so in this case, it's like, there's, you know, something like that, it can't be easy, right? I mean, like, there's a lot of moving parts. I mean, I don't understand any of them, but it does feel like the sort of thing where that is a, in its way, you know, like an impressive achievement. And yet at the same time, and this is the real recurring part, like, it's a very labor-intensive, presumably very expensive solution to a problem that, like,

probably is more urgent for like a...

Like somebody who doesn't have anything else to worry about but making restaurant reservations. Yeah. And ditto for the idea of being like a robot makes your coffee for you, a robot picks your – or whatever, like some secret computer intelligence picks your clothes, makes your food. Because Cory Doctorow made this point last year on the podcast. He said that algorithms are inherently conservative. They move people towards the norm. That is actually culturally dangerous, I think. It will eradicate people.

people of color or eradicate culture that made America and made many countries the way they are. And something that you're seeing on a much, well, not necessarily a smaller scale with social media, with what's popular, what's popular on TikTok, the influences of that. But when you add in that algorithmic side, not that I think that any of this bullshit's part, I don't think they'll ever have a thing that picks your outfit for you. But if they ever do, that is slightly, like there is something kind of darker about that. Right, because every, I mean, like...

everybody's going to wind up dressing the same. Yeah, that's exactly it. And that's presumably, again, based on the training data that it's given, which will probably lean more white. Right. But this is also like one of those things where there's like, this is again, like a very labor intensive solution. Yeah. They're really breaking the back of this one. Like if you're somebody that just has like, sometimes you got stripes and plaids on, like you can fix that.

Like someone could just tell you that that doesn't look nice. You can learn that lesson once in your life and apply it moving forward. Yes, yes. I'm still waiting for them to like – hey, there are – I think most home tech is like kind of garbage even though, yes, I also – there was a sale on the LG fridges with the little window and I got an LG fridge with the window because it looks cool. Yeah. You knock on it. It's fine. You knock on it. You have like double doors, whatever. Great for kid snacks. But –

I spend an hour every night cleaning my kitchen and I hate it. Yep. Like every single night. It's like, okay, give me, yes, Rosie the robot. Forget these companion robots. Yeah. Give me a robot to do the things that really suck in our lives. And I think open gives you more time to be with your family and do other things. Right.

That possibility is still there, but nobody's doing that because LG is just like, "Hey, I want to control your life." Rather than do the simple tasks that nobody likes. Also, there's something quite joyful about when you're like, it took me until like the end of last year to really enjoy dressing myself. And there's something fun about it. To quote Derek Gaia, "Clothing is like social language." Forgive me if I misquoted you, Derek.

It's like there's something about it and it takes a while. And before you work it out, you feel very self-conscious. I don't think an AI telling you what to wear

fixes that problem. It's just, hey, do this so we have decided what looks good versus you've found you. There's always an in-between, right? You don't have to be like, maybe we don't need an AI dictator, but hey, you have these clothes. Suggestions. Try this. Try this. And maybe actually, I think you would be looking, like having a friend who's supportive to be like, hey, try this. I know you don't normally wear it, but maybe it would look good on you. That's an important distinction, I think. Shout out to Mac Levine, by the way. He does that for me on text.

Very nice. So I was talking to Phillip before when you guys were recording Block A. Yeah.

about his experience with Pandora, which I didn't use, but was always the one that my friends did. That's the music recommendation one. And he was sort of explaining what it was like as it got worse. Like how did, I'm talking about you, dude. Phil just walked in the room. Basically, that was a sort of like, of all the sort of algorithmic musical recommendation applications that have existed, that's the one that I think anybody ever had good feelings about.

Spotify is easy to use, but I don't think anybody... But is it good? No, right. I don't think anybody's like, I love Spotify. It's like, I think of it as... Maybe early on. When the Europeans only had Spotify, they lorded that over everybody in America. When I got in England, I was like, ooh. Americans can't stream music. And it was just... Yeah, all right. So that makes sense. The convenience aspect of it. So what Pandora did was basically you would...

Maybe, Philip, you can even just grab the mic if you want to talk about it because it actually understands how this stuff works. But I thought this was interesting in terms of how it got worse is what I was talking about. All right. So the exciting thing for Pandora for me was the seeding where it was actually looking for a flavor...

of what you were interested in, looking for the sound you were after, not, oh, you like rockabilly, let me give you an entire catalog of rockabilly. It would ask you for what is your inspiration point, and the best inspiration point I gave it was Tom Waits'

Black Hole Sun, Pink Floyd's Echoes. Okay. So to deeply confuse the algorithm forever for – And I'll name Dr. Jones. Try to figure out what to give me for that. And it did. But my goal behind that was – and what Pandora did a great job doing –

was finding things I'd never heard of that I might like that fit in that gap. I found so many bands I'd never knew about. I have found, and it is something that will both age me and piss some people off, my favorite comment. I remember my Pandora experience. I was out in Penn State, and I put in a bunch of bands, and I got Cave-In, a band called Cave-In. They did a song called Anchor, I think it was, of an album called Antenna, just fucking up every word in that sentence. Yeah.

And I remember being like, this is so good. Now, the funny thing is that this is Cave-In's one alt-rock album surrounded by hardcore music that was just impossible to listen to for me. And so I stopped using Pandora because every other Cave-In album I listened to was completely insane for me. And I assumed that there were two Cave-Ins for years. Anyway, the point is...

After this point, I have never had a recommended band on any system ever. Not Spotify, Apple Music, anything that has ever made me feel anything. It's always been shit. Apple Music wants me to listen to Burden in My Hand by Soundgarden. Whatever song I'm listening to, it's like, hey, you remember Pretty Noose by Soundgarden? You ever heard Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden? This shit, it's just so frustrating. I was going to say you should say the...

That was your experience, like how it broke down. So where it broke down and Pandora itself fell apart is the seeds started bleeding into each other. And it basically learned me better and better and stopped recommending anything new. And you're done. I mean, after I had found the Dreadnoughts, which was a really great band, which then led me to a handful of other bands I'd never heard before, that was pretty much the last thing Pandora...

found for me that was new and exciting. Since then, the closest I've come is SoundCloud, but SoundCloud does not work well for discovery, to find things for you. So, as we wrap up the episode, Devendra, I know you have to go in a minute. I would like to know, is there anything that really made you smile at the show? I like a computer. A simple computer. The Asus ZenBook A14. This thing, it weighs under 2.2 pounds.

And I hold this thing and I'm like, that's a real computer? That weighs less than a hardback book? It weighs half a pound less than a MacBook Air. And I'm like, Asus, how did you do this? Because Asus is normally the company that's out there copying Apple, basically. And I think they've gotten to the point where they've innovated. They do stuff like dual screen computers. I don't think those are as useful. This is just a simple, really, really light computer. It has an OLED screen. MacBook Air doesn't have OLED. It has ports. It has all the goddamn ports you want. USB-A, USB-C, HDMI.

In a thing smaller than the MacBook Air, it's like, Apple, what is your excuse? What was the keyboard like on it? It's not bad. It's not bad. Asus makes okay keyboards. What pricing were you looking at? Subscription model. Yeah. I think it's going to be like $1,200. It's Asus. They don't go too hard, but this is a Snapdragon CPU, so it has that thing where it's... What's the limitation there? It's going to be emulating some older Windows apps. Last year, from what we saw on the surfaces, it's actually gotten better than it has been in years, so I think for most people it would be fine. But, man, a 2.2-pound computer...

Just like a little laptop that basically feels like a tablet and can do everything. Did you write this up? I wrote it up. It's up there. It actually is one of our best of CS awards. Hell yeah. Okay. Where can people find you, Devendra? Yeah, I'm at Devendra on Blue Sky and all the fun places. At the Filmcast, at thefilmcast.com, where I podcast about movies and TV. And Engadget, in the Engadget podcast. Check me out there. Lovely. David?

Defector.com is the website. The Distraction is the Defector podcast. There's a Hallmark movie podcast. I'm mentioning it every other time. I'm linking it every time now. So this is called It's Christmastown. Thank you. And yeah, I'm David J. Roth on Blue Sky. Mr. Ongweza. This Machine Kills is my podcast. Thetechbubble.substack.com is my newsletter. Big Black Jackabin on X, the Everything site, and Blue Sky is where I live online. You can find me on Google. Type in

What happened to Google search or who is Prabhagar Raghavan? And I should pop up. Now, after I stop speaking, you must start purchasing. You are a consumer, as Ed said. Follow this by consuming what's next. Don't think, especially if it's one of the ones that embarrasses me.

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And we're back. And now we are joined by Mr. Philip Broughton, the health physicist that we know and love that has been giving us drinks all the time. How are you doing, Phil? Hello. I think it's funny, though, that story about Pandora and this recommendation system that used to work but doesn't, yet the company seems to still. It feels symbolic of everything. It feels like everything's just kind of slowed down. And even CES doesn't even seem that...

willing to convince us anymore. Based on everything you guys, Ed and David, have seen, it feels like there's a lot of just, this is what you want, rather than, hey, we're fucking selling you something, right? Yeah, it's interesting, right? Does that sound about right to you? Yeah, you know, I... And if I'm wrong, please correct me. And I also think I've, you know, today I tried to shift gears and instead be like, okay, let's pretend...

The things I'm coming into are like for a real person. Right. And kind of falling into like a drain around the smart home stuff and being like, I'm not... And most human beings are not the target audience for this in a way that feels like a snake eating its own tail. I mean, like, you know, I went to a lot of the...

There's a section that's pretty much just like how to build your own power grid for your own home or if you're going camping and you can't be offline. Oh, yeah. The anchor stuff. Yes. Anchor, EcoFlow. I like that. It's sort of cool to me. But yeah, go on. No, I mean, it's like it is fascinating that you're able to literally power the equivalent of like a home out in the woods. But then it raises the question, especially with their marketing, where they're like, this is the sustainable way to...

be technologically progressive. And it's like, what in the sustainable way to be like, maybe we don't consume even more in some spaces. And so stuff like that is really interesting to me, paying attention to advertising and being like, oh, okay, they're for homes that are built like crypts and mausoleums, like just massive empty spaces filled with nothing other than consumer electronics. Wow. Heaven. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, for a lot of people at this conference, it is. And I think that's been important in constructing a better sense of who a lot of these things are for beyond investors. Seeing like, okay, there are things that consumers who might not normally have something like this be interested in, but they're also, I think the other day we were talking about status symbols and it's like, one, what other way to kind of also signal that flag than to be able to go out in an RV in the middle of the woods and still have the equivalent opportunity

of a house. Yeah. And there's some of these people who, just to be clear, there are plenty of people who go camping and do that and it's like, I want to power a grill. Sure. I want to power this. But it's not like... You don't need 6,000 watts to have a grill. You need a portable nuclear reactor. That's what I'm surprised no one's trying to sell you. That was the thought that I had looking at that stuff too because there's a part of me that's like, oh, that's cool. You couldn't do that. Yeah. You know, like whatever, five, ten years ago. And then to see like...

I guess this is the sort of thing where it's like you find the solution to... I mean, it's not a super pressing problem, but it's a solution. Like, you went from a thing that didn't work to a thing that does work. But then all you can do is, like, make it bigger. Yeah. Like, that's the only solution is just sort of like, yeah, now it's like 6,000 watts. Now you could, like...

like basically like a Red Rocks performance. Yeah. To be fair, I have an Anker charger on me. Because like all of their dense chargers are really cool because like the gallium nitrate stuff, which Phil, I will have you explain in a moment. No, no, you won't. You don't know what that means either? It batteries. It does a battery at you. I will explain gallium nitrate is a thing where I don't know the science stuff and I assume the flipping science guy might. Yeah.

Now I'm F. It's really more of a bartender if you think about it. You should riff. Tell us what you think. I can actually tell you what it does more than what it is. That's what I'm doing with the subject of this podcast every time I come on. No, it basically allows them to make more powerful chargers in a much smaller form, which has led to battery chargers that can charge more powerfully and they're much smaller. And it's really cool. But then you get to this stuff where it's like, what if

what if you had 600,000 MAH and you could power a house and you could power your friend's house? You could live... Who is the... What is the customer base there? Because it feels like at a certain point, you just don't need more. Yeah, that's the customer base thing to Edward's point that I thought was really... This was the thing that was very much on my mind looking at a lot of the smart home stuff was... I think a lot of people...

I mean, not to say that this is like, you know, it's obviously it's elite stuff. This is like concept car shit. I don't think that, I don't know how many LG smart homes exist in the wild, but is it like, is it a thousand? Is it a hundred? You know, like, but whatever. I think most people, and maybe I don't actually know what most people's experience is, don't have especially reliable wireless internet service. It's expensive. It's not very good. Yeah.

The amount of connectivity that would be required to make this all-seeing robot that helps you with every aspect of your life, that would have to be reliable. Electricity isn't reliable. It's the thing where, obviously, it would be a bummer about this stuff. If Southern California is fucking on fire, that's where I see a lot of these manses in my mind, these sort of technologically, like you were describing, just basically a vast...

stylish spare space with like perfect connectivity and technological things. So Palm Springs. Yeah, basically, right. But also like,

Oh, no, I was going to say we live in New York. You know, it's like in New York, you know, we've had all these private public partnerships to expand connectivity. And have they done jack shit? I mean, to the extent that like you, you know, you it's not until something else happens, you realize how bad you have it. And how much at the mercy of the firms you are to get any sort of fix going on. Right. Yeah.

So the thing that comes to mind immediately as you're telling me about these ridiculous generators, not generators, battery packs, there's generator substitutes, is the experience of the most recent fires that happened in Santa Cruz since Los Angeles is in mind has left PG&E service in the Santa Cruz Mountains deeply fractured and fragile. So they offered to do power walls for a whole bunch of people because they

They said, we can't promise you we're going to give you power and that the power will be reliable, and we will be shutting you off regularly. Anytime debris so much as blows. So what these battery packs told me is an admission of fragility. I mean, that's crazy.

Kind of where we're approaching with the marriage. But they're not selling it for that, though. It seems like the marketing is still recreational. Yeah, I understand why they're not, too. It's like a bummer to think about that. Yeah, but this is CES. But they are also selling it to an audience that is thinking about it. Sure, but I'm saying that we're one year away from CES. Preppers also come to mind for off-grid living. But I think there's going to... This is my one CES prediction for 2026. Preppers.

I think there's going to be more prepper sales. The idea of being able to live off of grid. The idea of being able to not rely on the power grid, which is so cool. Some of the marketing felt like a probe there. It was explicitly on grid, but also off grid. And not just like RV living, but just if you, for some reason, happen to have a home that was off the grid and needed to be powered like it was a four-bedroom apartment in a city, then...

But that definitely, that is interesting too because I could definitely see that sort of, because I got that sense of it that there was this sort of like, it's a non-political version of the idea of being like fully self-reliant.

You could do whatever you want to do. You'll never be inconvenienced because of this technology that you have. And yet, the next step from that, the political version of that is you will never be inconvenienced by whatever. Agents of the state, by the feds, if the ATF is laying siege to your

or whatever, you know, that like you will have like- A classic Nevada activity. Loudspeakers will continue to warn them, get off your property. You are trespassing. I am a sovereign citizen. My name is LG Sovereign Citizen. But also it's going to branch off from there, I think in a year and be like disaster relief. It's going to be like, hey, when shit starts breaking-

And this is both a political and a non-political. This is something the American power grid, the AI thing, has been pushing. Generative AI and the data centers associated have been pushing the grid to its brink. It was already old as shit. And so we're in this weird thing where I'm just predicting this for next year. I bet they start marketing on that. And it's so dark. And also, there will definitely be the insane people sales as well. It appears that every single one of the modular nuclear power startups that have...

popped up in the last decade and change. What did you just fucking say? What is that? Modular nuclear startups for pocket-sized reactors. In all seriousness, please spell out what those mean, though. Okay, people are looking for sub-gigawatt reactors that they can treat effectively as nuclear batteries. This is

To what end? So that you can go ahead and power just a neighborhood with your private nuclear reactor. Oh, good. That belongs to you and the co-op. And you have nuclear power as a service, so NAS, where they will regularly come in and swap fuel out for you to keep your enclave perfectly powered. Not enclave from Fallout. That's a totally different thing. And now I'm going to talk about something more evil, HOAs.

That actually is the overriding people who would be paying for it and administering it somehow with a license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Unless, and this hasn't happened yet, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to generally license one of these pocket nuclear reactors. Okay.

Except all of them have pivoted off this idea to, we're going to make the power that supplies to make crypto happen or make your AI happen because the grid is not stable enough to do it. Are these reactors real? Are there any of these actually out in, or is this just marketing?

They do exist. We have built them before at experimental levels at the national labs and have never licensed them to be real. Can you imagine these dipshits who would actually buy one for an enclave actually having a nuclear? That's actually a real dystopia. You mean Microsoft? Private nuclear reactor is sending me so fucking hard right now. It's just an unbelievably perverse idea.

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about... No, sorry. It is a perverse concept. I'm talking about an HOA having one of these and judging by every HOA I've ever seen, they would blow this thing up.

This is one of the hopes to get them to generally licensed, so you can't touch it. It goes in the ground. Your nice service people from Microsoft Nuclear will show up. Is there a subscription fee? I told you, as nukes as a service, that's how you get them. They will go ahead and do the swap for it. All you can do as part of your neighborhood is just hook into your local grid.

And that's all you should do as a consumer. Right. That is correct. Honestly, that's still like that. Again, hate it. Want to be clear. Getting it on the record. Don't approve that as a business.

That said, it's still better than giving it to the single most disagreeable and ambitious person in your neighborhood. Just the idea of whoever your HOA president is. I trust Microsoft Nuclear over Stacey. Oh, you just made my asshole clench. But I don't like either of them. The idea of being...

A health physicist beholden to the head of the HOA. Oh, yeah. Just getting some super officious email. And that's why I drink. This sounds like Fallout DLC. Yeah. This sounds like a James Bond movie. Actually, this could be a really banging movie. We're cooking here. Isn't that like Mission Impossible 3? Like Suitcase Nuke? No, no, no. I'm thinking just like a countrywide blackout or something. Just do a date. I need to write this goddamn thing. Yeah.

Spectre was good. Pitch the family that runs the Bond thing because they don't want to touch it with Amazon. I'll be James Bond. The broccoli. Fucking idiots. You ever had a James Bond that occasionally smokes weed? No? Yeah. I'm kind of lazy. He calls a reefer. Dank Bond. Yeah.

What if James Bond smoked weed is probably the first real podcast idea we've had or show? That's another good GoFundMe Indiegogo project. Act two of the movie, Candy Flips, and it's to his detriment. They use it to kidnap his love interest. Money, Petty, this is a sativa.

Anyway, please, let's talk about tech again. That is tech. Weed is not tech. But Acid and Molly disagree at a rave for previous years. That's innovative. Yeah.

Yeah, is there weed innovation here? If you hear about this, email me at easyatbetteroffline.com. I want to hear about that. I had the experience today. I know you all talked about it yesterday, but when I was getting off the bus from the convention center, I discovered a whole other floor under the floor at the Venetian that I was at yesterday. Of the mall people. Yeah, the Eureka zone or whatever, which is the one that you were talking about yesterday, which is basically just somebody... Were there skaven? Skaven.

You want to tech tech. Yeah, but it's also, apparently that is the one where it's just like, if you can fit in the room, they'll let you hang out. Yeah. I guess it's like, whatever. So I'm going to go down there and check that shit out either tomorrow or later today. I expect there will be a laser bong for you to see if there's any weed tech. Yeah, that's where the weed tech is being, you know. The funny thing is, is with weed tech, not saying I smoke it or not, but like they have not really fixed grinders yet. Like that is just a weird industry where there's like one that only kind of works. Yeah.

It's very strange, but I guess, and like some of them, not saying from personal experience, when you put the cone on, it's actually quite fiddly. And when you're using them, not quoting my specific experience or anything...

Because I'm being very clear about who uses this or not. How the fuck do stoners use these very fiddly little tools? Is it just like stoners enter Hitman-level folk? They go into bullet time when making one. I think yes. Because I wouldn't if I used one, which I haven't. If you did smoke weed, would you be a roller? Would you pearl your joints? In this hypothetical scenario, I found one where you can just...

put the cone and then the grinders on top of it. It's like 50 bucks. It changed my theoretical life.

It would have. In this fan fiction we're talking about. In this simulation. I think I've even said it in another episode. I don't know what I'm doing. Ed 2. Ed 2. Yeah, this is... Parody. Earth 2 Ed. Parody? But it's... You would think that there would be more of that, though. There would be more like... Maybe you'll see it when you go and look. Maybe... I would love to hear the weed stuff for someone else. But also...

That's also one that feels solved as well. Like at some point. To a certain extent. Although again, it's like that's the type of shit that I liked that I saw here, especially in the Venetian yesterday, is the attempt where it's just like it's inventor stuff. It's like taking a practical problem and then like working out some way to, you know, fix it or make it, you know, it's not always affordable or whatever.

But if the practical problem in question is like no soft serve in my house, like someone made a machine that fixed it, you know, like it's $2,500 after the discount here, but it's still like I had the soft serve. It was pretty good soft serve. Like these things can be fixed. I went to a coffee station and

they were like oh it's ai powered and so i went so i got the coffee and i'm like how is it ai powered they're like oh well this is a generator i was like what yeah what do you mean this is a generator and so then i'm actually gave the coffee station a real look and i was like oh okay you have the coffee thing here that's very small and then right next to it is a massive generator you've stacked on here that kind of looks like it's the coffee machine but it isn't what is

It's called EcoFlow. It's one of the ones I was talking to you about, which is like, for your home, thousands and thousands and thousands of watts. But they were just using it as an example to be like, oh, you like the coffee? Well, the coffee is plugged into a system that would be able to figure out whether it should draw from the grid or the solar power. Is it waste heat from...

AI calculation to make coffee? No, the AI has nothing to do with coffee, but they say it has to do with coffee. What it has to do is it's supposed to plug into your home to figure out energy efficiency. And if you got one of their coffee things, you'd happen to be able to take advantage of that so that you wouldn't be using the more expensive energy. Another subscription service. Once again, one of those things that everything that you described there sounds okay enough to me. I just don't know why you have to say AI.

when you're saying all the rest of it. Yeah, me either. Yeah, it's just confusing. It's actually fun because I asked him a bunch about the AI. I couldn't really find it. Then we spent like 10, 15 minutes talking about my locks because he was like, oh my God, are these dreadlocks? Yeah.

How do you grow them? I've heard that they're so complex. What are the major questions to get asked? Just the color of this person's skin. He had so many questions. It was fun. Was he a white guy? No, no, he's from China. Okay, that's also good. Still not a great question. But, you know, I was being empathetic because I'm like, these are probably the first ones. I've seen six other black people on the floor. After four days. You know?

Have you learned other names already? We nod to each other every time we see each other. How was the coffee? It was...

It was regular degular black coffee. Okay. That's so funny. You've had better. Yeah. I've made better and I don't drink coffee like that. By the way, I'm still mad just sitting here. I thought of a better use case for AI to actually heat water to make coffee with than their actual product. We're not in the business of fixing problems. Shit, that's what I do. Yeah, that's not why we come here. You're a consumer.

You must consume. Now, if I can help, may I offer you something you can go troll people with if you happen to find a laser bomb? I don't like to do that kind of thing. Hey, we don't troll in this family. So you go ahead and ask them, so when you're using the laser on the weed, does it...

How's it burning? Does it burn it enough? Because that's a problem. I feel like there would be people... That's one of those spaces where sometimes you'll go someplace and the person that's selling it is just like, they're doing their best. Yeah, but they're not like a...

In love with it. I'm just fucking him. It is kind of amazing, though. I've seen less weed tech than crypto. Like, I've seen crypto three or four times now, but weed, zero? Yeah, it's weird. Because I feel like if you had to pick one of those things to still exist in five years...

I mean, they're probably both going to exist. That's a flip from a previous CES. There was Weed Tech. Really? Maybe it's dying. Maybe they forgot. So one was this healthcare management device that was on the blockchain. And the other was an AI trainer that would make...

That was not financial advice, but it would make decisions for you. Every time there's any financial thing, they're like, not financial advice, but... I love the AI trader one because it gets back to a conversation I had with my mate Casey, where it's like,

If the AI trader was so good, why would you fucking sell it? Wouldn't it be so good you just turn this shit on and off you're on your yacht? It can't be that fucking good. It also feels like, again, one of those things where it's like, for all the promise of AI, ostensibly, you know, all the promise of it, like everybody that uses it knows it doesn't work very well. And so the idea of being like, well, I'm not going to, like, as part of my participation in the work of building an AI that works,

It works. I'm going to let it control my money while I do. This is the, all the others. This goes back to like some of the stuff about the smart house. It's like all of these things that like give you extra time to do what? Yeah. Like none of these, like more trading. Yeah. And it basically does like all the time in your house that you'd be spending, like preparing food or like showering, which is like basically the part of my life that I like because it's the part of my life that I'm not working. Yeah.

I like when you bathe too. I also love taking a shower. That is a good point. A lot of AI is structured to be anti-bureaucratic, cutting through the supposed layers of filth that prevent you from living your life. But then when you get down to it, what's left?

more space for them to commodify, well, now you don't have to write or create anything. So you can focus on consuming. Part of that filth. But that's like this observation. I don't remember who said it. It was basically like the idea that like because of it, maybe because of the people that invented it or just maybe this is what it is.

most practicably applied to. That it's like, it's doing all of the stuff that like, is your life to give you more time to work. When I think realistically, like most people would be, if you ask them, they'd be like, well, can it do my work for me? Cause like, I want to learn how to paint or whatever, you know? And that's like- You don't have to paint. Yeah. You can just ask-

For it to do the... It'll draw you whatever version. Yeah, why would you want to do that? You can't imitate Picasso. Why would you want to... But it can make the best dick butts. I like when people tell me I'll write my blogs for me. I don't know what I'm writing when I sit down to write. That's the muse. I let the power of Christ consume me and I write five and a half thousand words in two hours and I research it while I go. I send it to my editor, all caps. Is this good? And Matt Hughes then...

doesn't respond immediately because it's two in the morning there. And then I send him three more messages saying, I changed a bit. I changed a bit. It's not, I don't love it. And he has to explain to me why it's good. That is the creative process. What if an algorithm did that for you and you sat perfectly still for those three hours, having no thoughts of any kind? Wouldn't that be nice? Having ADHD and tinnitus, that sounds great. Yeah. Just, and that's the thing. None of these things seem to take away suffering.

Well, no. It doesn't seem like they're reducing like... They get a little bit of what it means to be a person, but not the whole lot. I've been saying this a lot. Again, it sort of suggests that the people involved, these things that are minor inconveniences for most people are the idea of having to do the dishes. That's the worst thing in the life of the person that is trying to sell you this. No, no, no. Those people don't do the dishes. What they've done is they've gone, shit, what do people do?

Yeah. Fuck. What are regular people? Food. What do they eat? Oh, they love that stuff. They can't dress themselves. They're idiots. They can't date.

And what do they do? Dishes? My cleaner does those. They charge their devices. Yeah, they need to charge stuff. Oh, they love their devices. Most definitely. They don't have time to spend with their stupid little kids. Yeah, their wife and their stupid child. Their moron child. But they haven't even got one of those because they're inferior. Don't worry. LG will get you there. And you will now meet a woman thanks to Lucky Gold Star Corporation. That's what the few...

And I keep going back to this point. It's like, what are the problems you solve? Is that what LG stands for? Lucky Gold Star? Yes, it does. Wow, cool. I didn't know that. I learned something today. I could have made that up. Oh, shit. Yeah. The thing that they have it on the signs is life's good. And I was like, I mean, again, that's one of those things where it like, I don't think that's the real name of the company. Lucky Gold Star makes more sense because that has this sort of, where it just feels like they used to be like a ready mix conquer.

company or like an international shipping line you know and then at some point they've like discovered I actually think they might have made concrete like you know so I mean color star did color star the uh LG concrete ink super good well that's where it begins you start with that and then and steel

Anyway, we learned a lot today. Now, it's just frustrating because I'm not asking, I just want to be clear for the listeners, I'm not asking, did you see anything good to be facetious? I genuinely, like, I was so happy that Devendra had found a laptop he liked. It sounded cool. I'm so excited about that. And the skin products that Victoria was talking about, the fact that you can actually make these, that's what tech should do. It should be like, hey, here's an actual friction point. You spend hundreds of dollars on skincare.

Now you don't have to do that because you can spend, theoretically, hundreds on the stuff that actually works so you don't have to spend more in the future. And then it's like, okay, that's one company who knows one thing, but the overarching thing is the CEO saying, fuck, what do people do at jobs? What do people do during their job that they do? They wash dishes and they answer emails and they read them? Yeah, that little bit of disconnection to me seems like it's sort of like at the root of...

like so much of what is like not working about a lot of this that there's because the ones that it seems to me and maybe this is just my own bias for like small over large or whatever you know I'm like gonna own my my preferences here the stuff that is like

designed to like fix a specific thing or improve a specific thing is better to me than and like much more easy for me to sort of like understand as you know just an idiot standing in front of a demo or whatever I need you to stop saying that well it's a little term that I like to use to describe myself but the like so that but anyway but I get it in that way whereas the idea of like a

a thing that fixes or improves everything or that is like that, like sort of global idea of it. I understand why these companies, which are, you know, their job is to grow into like sort of a bigger thing that will then grow. Right. And yet like, not only does it become like sort of hard to see like what the actual vision is,

It gets not just like more abstracted, but it like it gets weirder. This is the thing that we keep sort of coming back to that like you're not fixing the problem like by like devising a house that does all my decisions for me. It does not in any way diminish the fact that I'm still paying too much money for skincare products. Right. You know, and I guess like this is something that Ed Ehrmeyer was saying last night.

about the idea of, like, all of these sort of, like, individual solutions to broader structural problems and that, like, the idea of just, like, continuing to throw the idea of being, like, well, this is, like, a better way of getting around. And it's, like, it might even be a better way of getting around, and yet, like, when the systems themselves are sort of not working in your favor, it doesn't matter that much how, like,

down to the last decimal point efficient your experience of it is. Because you're still going to be stuck on the road with everybody else. It kind of reminds me of what Ed was saying about fintech and removing friction. Oh, you'll be able to trade better and do this. The real structural problem there is it's very, very hard to accumulate wealth as a regular person. The actual, that is more of a symptom of a problem. Mm-hmm.

than it is. And also, as I understand it, that all of these things, like the one, there's one that was either Andreessen or Thiel or one of the fucking super friends that backed a thing that was like basically like not FDIC backed. Like that was the whole, they were like, finally, like you can bank without big government being involved. And it's like, and it collapsed right away. Thank goodness there's no insurance to help save minds. Yeah, but that's like one of those things where like understanding the idea that like this

is a part of a bigger system. It's just not something that computes for them. And so what you wind up with instead is the worst invention of all time. Like a bank that ruins you. Something that might have been invented by a rich dilettante in the 1830s.

Yes. Like at a time when there wasn't really a system. And so they're sort of, yeah, like just the Rube Goldberg. There's so many of the crypto things that do feel like an insane thing that a guy would do in a cult. Yeah. Yeah. It's a coin about this woman who talked about what she used to do with the Willie and you should invest in the Hawk to a coin who has a podcast for some reason. This is your God. Now I have a few friends who have made a lot of money from crypto and they're

The way that they approach it is like, they're like, I am deeply cynical about it, but everyone here is an idiot. And if you make enough money to begin with, then you get plugged into the networks of people who are actively manipulating people. So what you mean is that they believe... Straight up. No, they believe it's every grift ever, which is...

I'm being scammed, but what they don't know is I'm scamming them better. Yes. And that's the bit that I always am curious about with like, because this is, I think it's been like demonstrated that like absent any other

of the like sort of many factors that could make somebody become like that, that like made people vote for Trump or that like push people to the right. That like crypto is the single most powerful indicator there that it is like the thing that like owning crypto is associated with voting like often to the very hard to the right in a way that nothing else is. And I think that there's an aspect of that where like the idea of being like, all right, it's a scam. I'm scamming somebody. I'm probably being scammed, but I know enough to get out. Yeah.

That seems to be true, not just at the people, like you were saying, your buddies who are plugged into the people that are actually in the whale community and know when it's time to bail on the Hawk 2 coin or whatever. Or shit coin. Yeah. Or if it's fast, you know, whatever the fuck. Right. Yeah, that's like everything. All of those things that basically are the most obvious, like, do not buy this, this is a gag sort of thing. And yet, I think everybody that is involved with that at every level, right down to just...

like, manosphere shut-in 19-year-old on a gaming computer doing all this stuff. All of those guys somehow still believe that they're like, yeah, I know it's bullshit, but like, I'll know when it's time to get out. But that's, I think you're right. No, it's the ultimate con, which is to pretend to give people industry, to give people hope, to give people more

a feeling of more control while controlling them and probably being controlled by someone else. It's deeply cynical. I've tried to talk with them about this because I'm like, I really do think for y'all, it comes down to luck. You know, it's like, like you said, it's literally everyone believes that and everyone believes that in so many industries, right? The difference between you and some other bloke is like, maybe you heard about it an hour earlier or you just like, there's like something that you got wrong

For no other reason other than love. It's important to note that we're saying this inside of a casino. Yeah. Right. No, an honest. Everyone thinks they have a system to play. And the true beauty of sitting in a casino is sit there, cross your arms, watch people.

and try to figure out what system they think they're using and watch it fail. So we're gambling tonight, right, boys? Not for me. I'm trying to lose $500 in 20 minutes. So we're wrapping this episode up, but I will say the Friday episode, the show floor closes today, by the way, guys. So there's nothing tomorrow? No, just podcasting. Oh, wow. Only Zool.

So we're going to wrap this one up, but tomorrow we can talk about gambling. I haven't even been to the Eureka Vault yet. You're going to the Eureka Vault immediately following this. What the hell is the Eureka Vault? That's the one under the one. That's where you're going. That's where the Skaven are. I am sending you to the rat nest. Oh my God. We'll talk gambling tomorrow though, of course. Oh yes. Because how dare you?

How dare you ever think to compare the dishonest crooks of cryptocurrency with our six-way parlance. The Las Vegas, sorry, the Nevada Gaming Commission, I'm very sorry for anything I implied. The swindlers in the sports book, but you know, we love our odds there, but you know the truth is our beautiful slot machines and our honest tables that have the odds on the table. How dare you compare it to cryptocurrency? But we have to wrap up. I apologize. Okay.

No six-way stuff. No, it's good. That's how you make big money. You'd make tens of thousands. Phil, where can people find you? Sorry. I'm Phil Broughton. You can find me on Blue Sky at Funranium. And you can find me at my blog, funraniumlabs.com. David.

Defector.com is the website. Distraction is the podcast. And It's Christmas Town is the Hallmark podcast. You messed up. You said you were going to do it every other time. So now you have to do it every time. Damn it. Kablamo. And it? Newsletter, thetechbubble.substack.com. Podcast, This Machine Kills. And X, the everything site in blue sky, Big Black Jacobin.

You can find me on the new social network, Hawk Tour Social, and everywhere else. And you're going to complain after this. You can say, Ed, it's the thing that you were meant to re-record, and Manasowski told you a month ago, and then actually two months, and Ian Johnson also told you, and you need to be sorry for those people. Anyway, I'm going to re-record the bit at the end.

You've got one more episode today and then tomorrow another two episodes and then Saturday there's just one. These are going to be the real magic ones. These are going to be where people are really deteriorating mentally. Is this where I get to be mad about regulators? I'm going to make you mad somehow. I believe in you. I'm just going to be Googling annoying things. Not even about the show. You don't need to Google. You just do it. Yeah, it's a natural thing. I'm generative. Anyway, thanks for listening to this episode. More to come from the Consumer Electronics Show.

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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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.