Better OfflineWelcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Venetian with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In the first episode, Ed introduces you to Better Offline’s coverage, bringing in writer Edward Ongweso Jr., as well as It Could Happen Here’s Robert Evans and Gare Davis.
We’ll be here all week - two episodes a day, with a finale on Saturday. A talk show in the center of the Rot Economy.
Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social
Robert Evans: https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social
Gare Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/hungrybowtie.bsky.social
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Also media, Hello and welcome to Better Offline live from beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host and most punished man ever to walk this earth, Edward Zitron. I live here, I live other places too, and I am joined by an incredible crew. This is going to be a week long extravaganza, roughly twelve and a half hours of What I want to say is radio, but I just mean the detritus of society and great reporters coming here and reporting live ish from the largest consumer electronics show I think in the world. And I just have an incredible crew tonight. I have Robert Evans, of course, the famous podcaster.
Representing the detritus section of the team.
Yes, yes, and Gar Davis of course.
Representing the i uh the lower southeast of the United States.
I am, of course representing the perverts and ed Ongueiso Junior, one of my two wonderful reporters who were joining with me this entire week. Ed thank you so much for coming here, Thanks for having me. Okay, so why are we doing this and what are we doing? So? I want to walk you through what the experience is like. We are sat in a recess level of the Venetian Hotel. In the other room is a full bar that we set up just for people to come in. Our guest, Robert Gere ed Mattasowski, a wonderful producer, and we're going to be doing this life to tape all week. This is going to be basically a tech radio show about a show that has no heart and no soul, a show that, as Gere correctly said earlier, is basically the same show as a year ago. Except a year ago, I was a terrified baby. I had just got handed the sword of podcasting. I was afraid of the microphone. Now the microphone is afraid of me. And the important thing is is that I brought everyone together not just to talk to you about this show, but I want to give everyone a temperature check of this fucking hellhole. Because what happens is reporters come here every year and they kind of walk in like they have to visit their racist uncle, except their racist uncle doesn't say racism. He says artificial intelligence every fucking year, and generally everyone here feels kind of miserable. I refuse to have that for my people. I refuse to have that for anyone in my orbit. So I set up a week long piss up where we talk about technology with people who actually know what the hell they're talking about and care about it. So, yeah, welcome to the Consumer Electronics Show. Gare Robert. You have actually seen things today though we ed and I only just got in today. What have you seen? What horrors?
Today? I did five hours of back to back panels official intelligence at the ARIA, and it was It included a number of great moments, including an entire room full of people, led by the folks on the panel, laughing about people losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence?
So how did that happen? Like what were they laughing at that?
The MC came up and she was like, Okay, I'm gonna do some yes or no questions, and one of them was there's going to be a lot of job losses due to AI. And like the the I can actually pull up who they were from. But like there was an initial attempt to be like, no, well it'll just be like job job the changes in the way jobs are lost, and then someone was like, no, there's gonna be a lot of job losses, and everybody started cackling in the entire room. It was like one of the most ghoulish experiences I had. I've had here. I've got the audio cued up, so we'll listen to it.
We can loop that in that that's fucking disgusting.
Yeah, it was pretty vile. And then there was there was a great moment where like the first panel I did today was about uh like AI using AI in Hollywood, And so the founder of that company's secret level that does like video game themed videos on Netflix and stuff Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Sorry, sorry Jesus Rob, but he was also one of the team members behind that all AI Coca Cola Christmas ad that everybody fucking hated.
Which I did not realize until you made that connection from me that it's it's those guys.
So if you love those visuals.
Yeah wait wait, So it was the actual company with the coke.
I mean, there were three companies, but his company was one.
It took three companies to make the greatest piece of art what's made?
And I don't know what they were doing because he came up to show videos that he had just made by like inputting text into an automatic image generator, like little movies that he'd made, which also looked like shit, but looked exactly as good as the fucking Christmas ads. I'm like, what were all those companies doing a fucking Christmas ad?
Laundering money?
Yeah yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, this sounds yeah, this cost fifty million dollars. Yeah no, no, no, we can't do accounting due to stuff. I wonder how much frauda is like that in AI at this but look how many just guys exist for like yal do your AI integration and they just dick around for three months and then they connect chat JPT.
I'm sure it was still cheaper than like the traditional coke things, but I'm sure there's a lot.
I'm not sure that's even true anymore, Like they don't get a.
Real polar bear, Like no, they certainly they don't. Like if they did that, maybe even then I don't think it would be as expensive, And it definitely wasn't. It was definitely not cheaper on the actual AI side, because news came out a couple day or two ago that apparently the two hundred dollars a month chat GPT subscription loses the money. And this is the thing. This is where we are in the tech industry at this point. We're in this world where we're meant to get extremely erect over the idea of a Coca Cola ad that looks like it was from made by the same people as the black Hole Sun video. And then we're meant to also look at like the apps we use and they fucking suck. And then we commit to CS and they're like, you know what's going to happen next year, the exact same thing that we have.
Nothing.
It's there's AI in an oven.
I think, oh, I'm very exciting, and and a grill. There's a grill that has an LM integrated into it.
Okay, the most exciting thing is that it it only gets smarter, It's only going to get better.
Oh, that's what Jason from Secret Level said. He played a video of like a bank heist chase where the main character, every time it cut back to him, he was dressed differently and his face. At one point, he's so sick. He's just driving down a normal city street, but there's randomly fires every thirty feet in the road because the AI just hallucinated them. Yes, at a certain point he crashes and he's on the run from the cops, and every time it cuts back to the cops chasing him, there's more or less cops from scene to scene.
This is that's the most realistic.
But union rules they got a fifteen minute break.
Listen, it took us fifteen million dollars when we redid a six star chase and grand the no, someone said it wasn't overtime, and they were like, oh, I got the paperwork.
No.
When we were in Chicago running away from police, if you turned the wrong corner, there would be more or less cops and what you thought, So, hey, you know you gotta give him maybe maybe maybe the benefit of the death.
Would I want to see.
You have qualified immunity for that?
Because he was was emphatic that, like all I did was read a script into it. Was like this, just put it. This is unedited, you know from that. And so what they really want to do is put the script to Heat into one of these things. Just see what that what the big gun fight from Heat looks like in this? Does it have that?
Michael, I'm trying to think of what I put into it, Like the Boris Balkan scene from the end of the Ninth Gate where he's setting himself on the fire. I would I would love to see what they're gonna do. But they also like.
About how about antichrist? I've never seen they do that.
The end of kids moving.
Let's just run that through. See what ESPT makes of it.
This is their favorite lie though they're like, oh yeah, it's just as symbol as a prompt. Even the cokead that, like, we have an editor, we have an editor, we have a separate colorist. Because it looks like ship and also probably looks completely different. This is the slot they want to give us.
And they're absolutely like hiring like Vick effects like clean up artists to like touch up all all of those visuals to make them like in any way publishable.
The colors were completely fucked on this, he complained, because all of the comments on this video, which had, by the way, for this company the big thing he was, every one of the room clapped when they played these things. I looked on YouTube. The best of them had like fifty thousand views, like like someone, we're just like five or six thousand, and the color grade. Everyone in the comments is like, the colors on this look like shit. His clothing changes, and Jason like referenced that and is like, yeah, I know people had the complaint, but come on, guys, this is the worst it's ever gonna look like that line. That's all here.
I keep seeing. This is the dumbest chatchy BT is ever.
Gonna take a shot.
Yeah, I love that. That's also their defense. Yeah, they're like, hey, it.
Sucks, yeah all us, it's all uphill from here.
Like we've all lived through the last eight years. If there's one thing everyone knows, it's that things only get.
Well.
My shadow theory is because I got open ayes a one model to do typos. I hope this is not really something I've proven in any way, And indeed the academics of us about it have not returned my emails due to woke and it's the I saw typos and I'm hoping that model collapse is happening. I hope they've fed the synthetic data into it, destroying these models, because that would actually be the funniest and dumbest way that chat GBT just starts like going on the fritz, because that's what model collapse. Just for listeners who don't know, you go back to March. You should have been listening to all the episodes. You go, I'm not my fault. Model collapse is when you feed instead of real training data from real human being, synthetic stuff created by another model. The problem is that human beings are magnificent creatures, very strange. Our fuck ups are actually quite hard to recreate. Those fuck ups are important for informing things like how words and logic are created. So if you have a synthetic version, there is something that no one really understands that fucks the whole thing up. Anyway, they are currently feeding synthetic data into all of these models, so what I'm hoping is it focks them up big time, because that would be the funniest thing because there's no fixing it.
There was a comment like that, and I think it was, uh, let's see which one of these. Uh, I just want to make sure I'm getting that AI Cinematic Spatial and x R, which was which was about XR is extended Reality. And there was a comment from I think it was Rebecca Barkin, but I may be wrong about that. It was it was one of the people on the panel. It might it might have been a Katie Henson, but like something on the lines of, hey, we're still going to need human beings to be making stuff because like otherwise there won't be anything to feed into the models like they were. I forget exactly who it was. Like that was like something I like underlined in my notes of the panel is like, okay, so you you know what you're doing.
It's also cool that like the point of humans is to have is like make things to feed into a model. That's yeah, that's all that matters, is that as long as we can feed the model, that's fine. That's it's the only value we have.
Here for the market, and you're here for the model. Yeah, it was the most important thing.
And what's important to know as well, is anyone saying that is not thinking too odd about it because they need more training data than exists. Yes, like five to fifteen times they don't have it. We're in the stupidest fucking era ever. There's a power like a pad of where people like, huh, wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of people lost their jobs they should turn into that scene from Kingsmen.
Yeah, like that's exactly what I thought.
Oh, I can change And it's like, this is one of the reasons that I really wanted to pull this together as well, because ces I don't think the WAYCS has been covered traditionally, and actually Garon Robert really opened my eyes to list last year because I've been avoiding panels for the twelve odd years i've been at CES.
It's it's easily the best way to see what kind of brainworms are going around because people up there just taught, and that no one expects to be challenged or there to be anyone in the room who's not completely taking the kool aid.
But what's insane is even on the floor. I hadn't looked at it properly. I'd always been like, I'm just here because I have clients here. So to explain the history of this, I've got the bar, I've got the suite previously Ashugh's with my dear friend Kevin Roposo works at easypr otherwise not mentioned the agency again. We would have this suite just kind of network with people who have clients journalists, and we stopped doing it off the COVID just because it was a lot of fucking money for just to piss up, which is always fun. However, the way I used to look at the show was just like this is all I almost like took it in good faith. I was like these people wouldn't spend one hundred thousand dollars in a booth where they're lying, well, wouldn't you know? And since I started doing better offline, and I was truthfully a bit scared when with you too last year, I was a bit freaked down. Now I'm not very excited, but also I was just flat out wrong about big Tech. I thought they I really at that point was just like, look, Facebook's evil, met as evil. But you know they have something that they get, something like Google, same deal. They never do something really fucking stupid again and again, and they would and everyone here would. And there are things that are at cos every year that never get made. If the please, if anyone sees the laundry folding robom, that's what.
If you see them, Yes, vaporware stories, they.
Are like they have been here. I have been coming to see yus since twenty eleven, and those motherfuckers have been promising to fold my laundry ever since.
Yeah, twenty ten was my first year nice and I think what keyed me into what was really going on here was the best like the best product in showy that won the award was the Motorola Droid, which was not a functional product and did not exist on the show floor. All they had was a just the plastic model that was working. It was basically just a like a digital photo case that was very running, like still extream shots off the phone would look because Android was still new at this point and it won Best in Show and there were functional phones at the show that year. Yeah, and so I remember sending to one of the editors at tech Crunch like it I feel like a right, you know, I'm new to this like tech reporting thing, but it's see, this seems like do you not consider this a real problem? This seems like a like a serious issue, Like this isn't really journalism if like, yeah, this is what's winning here because they didn't have a phone.
If they do, what's wrong with you? But it's true, though, there is a general sense of like no, you just why would you be mad at this? It doesn't exist.
It was the future.
Google has at their booth.
They brought us the future. How dare you?
Yeah?
And what's crazy is that's twenty ten. Today's tech meter is slightly upgraded, and that some of them don't do them and actually a lot of them are here. A lot of the reporters here generally just feel tired when I talk to them, and when you ask them what their favorite about the show that, they're like, Oh, like the LG. I got this big monitor, big television.
I'm excited to see another.
I'm excited to see what new big curved TV LG.
And we're gonna build the biggest. It's gonna be the most beautiful okay, with the most beautiful oie l O L e eds I'm going.
But it's not what it's gonna be. But to be clear, I love the big televisions. I love seeing big stupid ship and I wish that was more of it.
At least the big televisions are television.
And exactly like you can't really, I guess you can lie about like the specs and the monks and well that's.
Fun, son of a bitch Folds. I watched it.
I love all that dumb ship.
Why TV?
We have gotten so good at TV, we really have.
It's the only promise technology and it's it's.
Gonna watch you. It's gonna give you targeted at it's gonna give you a chat thought, it's gonna beautiful.
My mate just brought a replacement for our TV like an eighty five, And that's exciting because TV, like it's one of those like what the fuck, how does this the only thing that that came through? Yeah, just the.
Second Yeah it was not good. Great, it was good.
Was it like a C one?
No, it was.
It was like a dinosaur picture.
It was very it was it was very large.
And then I plugged it into my laptop then to play my little game.
It was very large. The frame rate never quite worked properly. All of all of the blacks like did not did not show correctly. Everything was really crunched. Very good, very very bad, very bad dynamic range, and it just slowly got worse over the years. It's it's it's it's something I'm still kind of confused by, Like what what.
What happened to River's TV? A little bit more?
A little bit, I swear, because every time, every time I try to watch a movie, I have never.
Heard of a television started to decay.
No, this is actually becoming more more a thing. Although TVs have been getting better, the new TVs are making faster interesting and this is something that I've noticed mostly due to like my friends, consumer choices. Is like I I have a TV that my friend gave to me like maybe like ten years ago, and it's it's like a it's like a tenned EPLG. It works great, movies look good. It's not four K, but it's fine. And he's gone through like three TV since then that have all like broken right, They've all had like, they've all had like better specs, they've all like looked really good, and then every once in a while something just goes like oddly wrong. And this has just become like a new pattern with UH, with Panasonics, with LG's, with Sony TV's, and although we are getting quite good at like making TVs, I feel like their lifespan is kind of shrinking. And maybe it's something that I want to like talk to people at CS about.
Honestly, it sounds like consumer electronics in general. I mean, my fucking iPhone's brand new, and even then it's fucking up already. Yeah, this is early schedule. Shit, we usually saved this bad boy for April. That's usually when the obsolescence comes in. But now it's just my new favorite thing that my fifteen hundred dollars fucking cell phone does is when I try and add a song to a playlist. I know it's an edge case. No one does that, but I did that and it just crashes Apple Music.
Now I can only add it reasonable burden.
Yeah, I know.
Why wouldn't only got eight cores?
They only have a specialized piece of silicon in it to make it work.
What sixteen gigs a RAM? You can't handle that on sixteen gigs a RAM.
No, I need my fucking MacBook Pro to do that. For my eight chrome types. I can have so format change Edwon Graso Junior. Please introduce yourself. Tell everyone about your work.
Okay, I am a tech writer. Write about tech. I write about finance, or write about labor a Silicon Valley, generally in anything that it's you know, tentacles touch.
Where'd you write?
I started advice, Freelance now magazine's news outlet. It's anywhere that will let me rant apout Silicon Valley basically.
So I brought ed here because he wrote many great things. But one of my favorite things is is kra Swisher piece. It's a beautiful piece of right the burn book review where you just really put the boots to her. But I think c Yes is probably the most Swisher coded event for a thing she's never been to, and I think it's jarring for the same reason, and that everyone's kind of just accepting a reality that isn't true but pretending to care. And it's frustrating. And I'm glad you're here to see this. This is your only ces, right, Yeah, my first time. I'm very excited. Linda Yakarino. You're going to listen to.
She's doing a s feeture.
She has she has the ex Corporation keynote tomorrow.
I eat.
Oh, I don't worry, Robert, I I already have it in your schedule.
I'm so glad you make his schedules.
The thing, I don't bring guns to these things because I would just myself, like have I just take care of that problem in my hotel room.
Well, you don't look for half an hour going like X is the place where it happens and that's the tea. Well, I can't wait for you to hear Yakarino talk because I'm she's a real yak Aino. Yeah. Sorry, but also I'm looking forward to it because well, you're African American. Yeah, and I truly do not know how they're going to treat you on the floor. Yeah, I don't know how they're going to act.
Yeah, I mean, do we think the school measures are going to be out in force? For the ex offender.
There'll be a guy like really excitedly calling you over. He's like, no, we got ai to do this now and use my ray bands.
Oh, it's gonna it's gonna be interesting. I'm very I'm also gonna be curious what the hell they're even talking about. I'm trying to go in with as little info as possible so I can take it in objectively without bias.
It's like watching Queer. You really just show ye, take it all it you know.
I'm here for the journey.
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's important as well, because that's exactly what I am here for. I want this to be a journey. And there are multiple reporters joining us. We have Jesse Farrah from Your Kickstarts as Sucks of course, and David Roth of course, my second elf. That's what I was calling them in my head, of the reporters I hired, that's what I'm calling them now, the Elves. David Roth of Defecta, a sports journalist, will be joining us tomorrow and for the rest of the week other than for our spa day on Saturday, which is very unfair, very nasty. And right now, our bartender Phil Braun. Now you're speaking to the microphone and say hello Phil.
Hello.
We will have a full rundown of Phil at some point later in the week. But Phil has been joining as the bartender here for years and he just handed me some so tall, so tall. I'm saying this.
That's right, it's good.
I nailed that. It's kind of but that's the thing. The whole point of this is journalists come here in this oasis. This is the oasis in the middle of the bullship. Because see, yes I was telling it earlier. There is nowhere to sit down.
No, they always want you to moving.
They want you to keep on, keep on traveling through. It's like a casino.
No, you can find place, plenty of places to sit down in casinos. This horrible place is an insult to our beautiful slot machines and our beautiful tables that we have. And they'll get you a seat at the table. Don't worry. Please come to my money. And Phil right now is gesturing because Phil is our wonderful bartenderho is bringing us drinks as the show goes, Probably not on the first half episodes, definitely on the.
Second Paloma, Okay, can I get something with the kill?
Wow? I don't give that went flawlessly? Yeah, that was that was an example of the bar working, but actually that is actually the bar working.
Well.
No. So the point of this week, though, is we want to be the oasis within a tech industry gone wrong and a conference that's gone wrong. No one likes coming here to cover this. No one is excited, everyone's depressed. We will not be. We will be probably not, in my case, sloppy, just in case the lawyers ask. But everyone else can be. Well, the reporters we bring here. We're gonna have two episodes each day, ninety episodes. Jesus Christ's already doing great, and it's gonna be a lot. But I want to bring you diverse voices. I want to bring you the people that have been here forever and the people who are just being exposed to this. The reason we have Ed and David is we really don't want this to be a fucking tech no offense to techn it. We don't want this to be a tech reported thing. We actually want this to be a temperature check of this industry.
You know that I always there's a lot to like roll my eyes out and be frustrated by. I always really like CEES. And when Gear first started coming to this, the way I explained your job at CEES as a good journalist is you are here to be a terrorist, find the richest asshole you can find and makes their day.
That is a joke.
No, not in a legal sense, but in an emotional terrorize there, harass them over something that overlies that they're talent.
Well yeah, and like the the hive mind, like group think mentality here is like crazy because you you will walk into a panel and you you will start hearing people say like insane ship and you look around to be like ha ha ha, that's crazy, right, and everyone's like no, not a long enthusiastically, and it slightly makes you question your own sanity.
Never once there was a complete certainty.
Someone I would posted on Twitter the other day They're like, would you trust a clone of yourself? And everyone was like I wouldn't. I be like absolutely, it's we would fucking cook anyway. Complete certain But it's so weird though, You're right, and people walk around and like damn, really so the AI for my pant, how's that going to work?
It's crazy, and it like because everyone is so bought into it. If you make any objection during like any kind of like shocking, any kind of Q and a panel, like people like are so surprised. It's it's like it's like you're a heretic. It's it's it's it's it's it's insane. It's like you don't believe in like the project of humanity.
Two of these people, it's like you don't believe in Santa Claus.
My sex wild one of these. When Rugged super Rugged speakers were like a massive product that you could find like half a dozen booths selling them. I would just go there and I would ask, can I can I test them out? Can I like drop them and stuff? And then I would pick up the heaviest object block because they usually had like flogs or something to post them on, and I would just break stuff on the show floor and it worked every time. They would always break, oh a bunch of stuff. And I learned that from we went to see a demo where they were they were showing off like an indestructible smartphone and they were doing it by like they pulled out all the journalists. I think we were in front of Caesar's palace and they were driving a limousine over the phone and then they would do it, and then the next troop of journals would come up and they would let a journalist set it down. And I don't know who this was. I wish i'd gotten his name, because he taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned. They were laying the phones flat, and he just wedged it under the wheel on its side, and they just drove over just to stop it.
Yeah, that's that's.
Being a journalist.
Yeah, but actually that's a very good metaphor for what's going on at the moment. Everyone's like, well, they say it works, we'll be fun.
Would they lie about it?
Why would they possibly lie about chat GPT becoming super intelligence?
Do you hear that?
Fucking Samuel? That motherfucker. He's not here. He's not here. This is, by comparison, this is pretty real stuff. Where's Sam Olman? He should be giving like a vacuous keynote about how this is going to replace doctors.
He's doing the real work.
He's doing the real work building by which he means trying to like leverage his his startup capital.
As I read today, we're just thousands of days away from.
That was said a few months ago, so we're actually about nine hundred and.
That was a few thousand days.
I love that, Honestly, I need to set a calendar invite for that. I need days from now, because I have Sam Worman's number and he is yet too. Takes me back.
Oh I am.
I am bummed that we haven't seen Palenteer here in recent years, because oh, they've.
Seen you though I.
Showed up. I can say this now. We showed up with a flipper zero and we're just turning off all of the televisions at the Pallenteer boo. They were doing demos.
Oh oh, someone probably got fired about it. Actually know, someone was probably like, oh i'll fix this. No, someone did that one ces and they got in a lot of drops. Oh yeah, because they video themselves doing it, which is the classic thing you do with crime.
Yeah, I remember that, which is why I did not about it except the shelf exactly.
You put it on a podcast years later.
Yeah, I approved.
You did it once. Yes, I did try a bit three or four times before I started getting anxious, which was I would just pick up something and ask if I could have it, and just like picked up the edge of it.
Can I have this?
And they look at you and they're like.
Like sometimes they say yes though, which is why you have to do it every lot of free sh You actually really can't surprisingly walk away with some really odd stuff.
I bet they. Eventually a security person looked at me in a kind of like should I memorize this guy's face? Well, and I thought, I don't want to be arrested at fucking ces. No. My lawyer will just be like again.
I'm not coming to your arraignment. Yeah, I know you're on your own bit. I know you're paid up, but I'm not doing you.
Fucking work this out, smart guy. Yeah, well you pick up, pick up the judges gavel and ask if you can have this? Click fucking ydie.
Well, speaking as a judge, that's very offensive.
Are you you were judged?
Yes?
What?
No?
This is not good.
This is a punicipal judge for the state of New Mexico. I got sworn in. I'm good.
What the fuck?
Right next door?
Right next door, very high the border. A fan of mine is a judge and was like, did you know that judges can just make other judges? Like thing, I gotta, I gotta.
You can make all of us judges.
No, it's again, it's it's it's interview with the vampire rules. Okay, so the youngest vampire does not have the power to make other vamps, and it's kind of unclear to me.
Your mate does.
Yes, yes, I's still the start of this situation.
But I can't how do I become an older vampire though? Because you realize that my goal here is not just to become a judge myself, but start making more judges.
That I don't know, because I have not looked up anything about Dodge.
This would be all I'd look We got to ask the people this, but they have to know.
I would get made to judge, and then the first thing I would be googling is how to make more judge, and I would be making those.
Of your first five judges that you're making.
I mean all of you other than Robert obviously, I would know. It would be like the entirety of cool Zone media. You make everyone judges.
Yeah, and then we can all go We can all go to New Mexico and do a blood Meridian fuck yeah, yeah, well yeah, there was actually a lot of child if you send that guys back.
So this is the format that you're going to have for the entire week with Better Offline. Because this is also something because after a year of doing this, I'm just trying everything, and I do think that Tech also kind of needs a talk show. And the reason I say that is Tech has got everything. It's got finance, it's got basically sports team shit. Do you like anthropic? Do you like open ai? And the thing is that really is like a let's think Cowboys jet situation, and that's gonna hurt someone's feelings. I'm very happy about that anyway, moving on from them, you've also got a bunch of gossip and you've got a bunch of shittheads that you can be pissed off at an actual, real events And I just think that nails. This format nail. And that's why I'm excited to start with all of you, because at the end of the first day, everyone feels a certain way dread for the rest of the week, sad about the horrible things they saw, or just wondering why they're doing the fucking job they're doing. They just no, none of us in this room. It's just very It's an interesting way when you talk to the tech media to see how they are doing, but also people who work. I wish I could get more people off the floor, but I don't want fucking companies on here. That would be so boring.
How did you feel your first cushen and you're going around on So I was just a child back then, I was twenty eleven.
I can't do imagine. Yeah, when I was a young boy.
That one.
I have some stories I can't tell, but I was a young I was a young PR person and I loved it because it was like twenty eleven, so before we realized tech had problems, we were just like ignoring them.
Well, and this was back to when the porn industry trade show was at the same time.
How I was terrified for them.
I watched Steve Balmer get out of a fucking h L elevator with two porn stars that were even taller than him, and he is massive.
It was.
It was amazing just from me. It was like watching Greek gods straight across the field. Yeah, the goad of sweat he did smell exactly like, yeah, you smoke crazy and I leaked that to another tech pub.
Very that's fucking journalism, right, But my first used to be fun when I was stupid, when I was just like, oh, this will happen. And also twenty eleven there was still new lands to Conka. They still had new fun things to find, new things that they could make that they could actually make good on. I think it's been like five or six years of them just being like, we don't have it, there's nothing.
That we've got, nothing else.
It's it's like I was.
So lucky that my first es the big thing was like crypto NFTs and.
So like like.
So one of the lasting industries I knew.
Going into that, like everything I hear here, everything I hear in this convention is complete bullshit.
Yeah.
And then the next year I came, the big thing was the metaverse. So again everything I hear here is bullshit.
Yeah. And you've just been able.
To like slowly watch the life and drain from the people's eyes because they know, like every every year there's like this new thing that's supposed to be like the new thing, like this is this is what we have done as an industry, and it and it and like it doesn't.
It doesn't work dry and and and it's.
It's odd because like this year is the first year where there hasn't really actually been anything new. It's just it's the same as last year. It's just more AI stuff Again.
I actually think twenty twenty four was pretty ahead of the pack. I was gonna say, this is this year.
I keep seeing places be like, this is the year of agents. They're gonna show agents.
They were talking about that a lot in panels.
Yeah, the one thing I've seen in the panel list is like there's been a lot more integration for like content creators and like streamers, right, And even saw this with the Golden Globes a few days ago, how like they let tons of streamers and influencers onto the carpet for like the first time. And there's way more panels this year that's about like how do we like get this whole like streaming ecosystem that's like separate from like legacy media and even like legacy like tech media, Like how do we how do we get that into our sphere?
And that was a big thing they talked about in my third panel, AI Cinematics, Spatial and XR the next level of creativity.
I am putting a gun into that.
They were specifically talking about how uh you know nowadays, like you know, individual creators can be as big as studios. And then someone of the panels like, well not really, like not in.
Any way that's actually made I'm excited to see the new movie from Destiny personally, really excited to see he.
Is trying that he actually is trying.
I would love movie just Wikipedia to life.
There was a there was a great moment in there speaking of like failed Ces's past where they like, because the extend XR stands for extended reality, which is just metaverse.
It's just the metaverse. But they can't say that because they will get murdered, and that's.
What they said that. Well, they were like, you can't say ever it's yes anymore, but we all know it's a real thing.
They say web three at any point, oh so much.
Arrested people.
They are characters. They still do say like they still definitely say web three, which is insane.
Is one. Yeah, well I'm just shocked they still say metaverse with a straight face, even like talking about this nonsense. But also x are x is a great term because it's been around for a while, and it usually just means I don't know if this is mixed reality or virtual reality. I don't know what device I'm selling this on.
You guys. Seeing this panel was Charlie Fink, who's like the oldest of the metaverse. He's like a Forbes writer who is like an old school he's writing. He wrote a metaverse book in twenty seventeen.
Honestly mad respect for actually like knowing stuff early. I don't know if I'd agree with all of the assumptions such as the metaverse existing.
That was my big disagreement with him, that it's a thing, because they were just on the metaverse is just you know, attempts to extend the Internet into every day life, and I was like, no, no, no, that's that's just.
That's just the Internet.
That's just every day life. That's not the metaverse. That I can now order food to be delivered to my house are fairly.
I do miss that period in the media though, when it was just like anything anything. They're like, yeah, they're going to have share houses, and then now we're going to have we're going to live in the meta We're going to live in the meta us, and that.
People spend money on nikes in the metaverse, and you'd have banks in the meta better.
Absolutely didn't they have like an Alby's in the meta use.
That's the only thing they were right. Is the only way I'm getting into it Rby's is if I know I cannot make physical content.
Someone too good for the for the the meat for the beat. The meats are not for you. But also what's important is I think we need to meet everyone who goes to the digital arbies and then connect them with mental health personnel, because not a red flag for a list, but I think you've got like therapists could be met. This is your therapy in the metaverse? Yeah problem, So yeah, not doing it in the fucking real world if they're in the metaverse arbies. But it's so funny as well that everyone's like the metaverse is happening, and then they're like, oh, how did you get in there? It's very simple. We have this expensive and uncomfortable stuff. Does it make you sick sometimes yes? Does it physically hurt yes, But when you get in there it sucks.
Vision Pro dropped less than a year ago, and did they.
Discontinue it, No? They just no, there was oh my god, I can't believe that review.
There was one of the Apple products.
They discontinue something that that sounds like Apple eventually, like they just give up.
Check that.
No no, no. So the vision Pro I know people are very upset with the fake news. People are very upset with me about my vision Pro review. Very unfair. It was second episode.
There is still learning, but got something there is.
Sorry.
The most reputable outlet, game rant yea says that Apple has reportedly ceased production of the headset.
Really well and that's the New York Times of ranting Edge.
Congratulations, you have won one off first.
Apparent apparently system game Rant is citing an article in another website called the Information dot com.
The information more or less, it's real ish, it's real, is the information.
I would just climb up that very high page. They've improved crazy, yeah, so be able to get around every single one now.
But also it's hard. It's hard now.
I feel like it was kind of insane. That was more insane to me than crypto, and crypto is pretty insane. But it's like, oh, how I'm gonna get in the metaverse this very shitty fucking headset that sucks Vision Pro was pretty good. I know my review. I know people are upset that I liked the product. There was potential there, they just did not access it.
Apple has the money for there to be potential there. But I still maintained that Steve and I'm not a guy as you know ed having said it from the hours, Yeah, I'm not a guy who worships Steve Jobs. I don't think he would have let that product out yet.
No, No, it needs like two or three years. But it had potential even then. Though this is the biggest company intake, they're really only company capable of making consumer electronics that are actually good anymore, like everyone else is kind of like just mostly making up and maybe putting shit together. Yes, they're company like Frame. There are there are others, but like the biggest, and they're like, here is our best.
Go at it.
And when I tried to watch June on my Vision Pro and a fly back from London, I got the worst migraine of my life. What was I was really enjoying the film, and actually the Giant Scream was super cool, but I was in so much pain. I took it off and I was like sweating.
Well, that was the extended reality of the Irakis.
It was extending your reality.
Yeah, like I say it, that is how it feels to read past the third book.
Okay, but what's important was I really watched too much of that movie and I had like a migraine felix a day.
Or two, like you see the Golden Path.
The Pain, but I did not.
I watched like the beginning of the film. I do not know the po that's gonna be you that Robert on the first episode of Better Offline will be the shihlud of content. I'm like, ah, yeah, j as we go.
That has been proven completely drue that.
Yeah, I live from a different era in which all of my friends in high school none of us had sex. We all had very strong opinions about it.
Well, let me tell you, I too come from a rich line of not fuckers and not having sex in high school at all. Absolutely my thing was ever quest. Okay, one might say I was even cooler than you were.
Yeah, it was wow for me.
Oh no, I got into well later it was like getting off of cocaine to do heroin. Yeah, yeah, barely worked on me. I just gave up after a while, turned to drinking anyway, it's just great that this is the tech industry now. It's just the group hallucination where we all go, yeah, fuck it this as we sit here and talk, and I know I'm grinding this act quite hard, but we're hearing a lot about AI in this fucking conference. Everyone's staple in chat, GBT and anthropics clawed to everything, and it's like, okay, great, but we are sitting here and every major company is not making a single fucking dollar, actually losing money on this, and I feel a bit insane. I feel a bit crazy every day because every every day I look out the window intake and we're just like, our biggest thing is everyone burning money. I've now seen two stories in the last week from major publications going what if AI is a bubble? Which is probably the most worrying songs, Like The Economist had one that was like, what if a bubble bursting was good? What if it was good that the bubble burst, which is insane because there is a David Leonard story in the New York Times saying that a housing bubble burst in the six o seven region would have been a good idea too. And let me tell you, I don't know history super well, but I don't think the housing bubble bursting went well for anyone.
No, So.
You need to have the disruptor mindset right, And the problem. The problem with the bubbles is that as they get bigger and bigger, it stifles innovation in other areas because we're all focusing on this bubble, right, So as soon as it bursts, now, now you have so many more opportunities to really disrupt who knows how many other industries.
Well, let me do. During the housing bubble, we had to innovate by like eating ninety nine cent burritos, and now four dollars of those stretched through some people.
And now we have airbnbs taking over half half of entire neighborhoods.
Innovation so much better.
That's good. Innovates sleeping and people were really they were innovating ways to top themselves. When I moved to New York in two thousand and eight, that was great. Fortunate people. That's the thing. You're not really going to have people doing themselves in on this one. But I don't think people realize the bubble bursting is going to be very bad for two reasons. One, all the tech stock's going to take a kind of a haircut. But also I think CS is kind of a bad omen the fact that there this is basically two thousand and four CS. That kind of speaks to the large problem I've talked about before, which is they don't seem to have a new thing. AI isn't new, and that's not working, and they're like, well, what if we put AI in a in a we can laugh at the kind of like AI in the oven thing, but really beneath the surface here and I look forward to seeing the shuffle on myself for this, there is this undercurrent of what the fuck do we do it? What? What we what do we doing that?
What?
What?
Well?
How do we make money now?
What?
What?
What the money? And please?
I think Ed had a really good point, which is that obviously what they see is AI agents being the future, and those kept getting brought up and what's one of them?
What did they say to me?
It's interesting to me is that obviously there's a there's a lot of potential value in being able to do something like say, hey, I want to plan a trip to this this and this location, sure, and having a thing that can book it. That's that's not a multi billion dollar industry. But there's utility or to being able to be like being able to plan out like five or six different meals that you want to you know, repeat over the course of a week or two and then like plan out or there. There's some utility there. But the way people talk about AI agents isn't in that way. It's about another living thing that they like bounce ideas off of and invite socially into their lives. There was a lady at the uh the first panel today which was about like AI in entertainment, who was like and my agent. Obviously she just is growing every year or every day, and it was like talking about her like a person like gendering she does her AI agent.
I must be clear, what was she talking about?
Her AI agent?
Okay, but does this thing exist? No?
No, no, Me and my rabbit have a very intimate relationship.
Sure, sure, real fuck up pets man, believe No.
No, she didn't say which product she was using, but there are a couple of them out right. Just to be clear, character AI was on people.
Talk, that's not an agent. Oh my fucking god, I have to do this, okay, yeah, an AI agent?
No?
No, no, that's what if she she was referencing because it might have been like her co pilot or some shit.
A co pilot is also not an agent. An AI agent is meant to be an autonomous AI that goes out and does shit and can do things and then respond to things based on how people.
Big part of it's like what Rabbit was trying to sell with the R one lass.
Rabbit wasn't even doing that. They were just doing like the very early stage agents, which is, okay, you're technically correct, which is that agents are meant to be they take actions for you. That's the official definition. But what everyone's talking about with agents, and this has driving me fucking insane because no one really wants to talk about the reality here is they're talking about I will staple a few fucking lms to each other, and then enough llllms will talk to each other that things will just start happening, kind of like the Incredible Machine if you ever played They just like a Rubegoldberg situation, he says, not really knowing that reference Peebee's Playhouse. I don't know. Nevertheless, these series of actions then allow theoretically this thing to do something at the end. The big common one, right, now is sales sales agents. These things are insanely expensive, and I have yet to hear of one that does more than send emails and answer emails. And I've yet to really see anyone explain how anything else is fucking possible. And the thing is people will say agent about anything. Character to AI is just an LLLM company.
That like they got a kid to kill themselves.
Insane, but also just like has like a denarious tulgarian bot that will also be a therapy. It's fucking insane, of course, So that's not an agent. Chat GPT not an agent. They want to said, I'm so glad you brought this up, because it's like this agentic thing is their next bullshit. But I cannot be clear enough. If you think regular lms are expensive, imagine a bunch of lms playing dipshit tennis with each other. That is how agents work.
You know, I think you know in sixteen Z is really big on this. There's a there's a manifesto, one of their many manifestos they hear they say, every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful, infinite and then they say that every person will have an AI assistant slash coach, slash mentor slash trainer slash advisor.
How can it be metor it doesn't know how to do things?
Slash therapist slash therapist. That's good, that's good.
It's infinitely patient and infinite compassionate, definitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.
I just they want a friend without having to do any of the work. That makes like having a friendship.
Yes, not only.
Makes these pople therapy, but also on top of that, if everyone keeps talking about this idea and I think they've been doing it for years, and this of AI being your assistant, why are there no AI assistants that work? Yes, you can make your phone do reminders now. Yeah, we're on like the sixteenth seventeenth iPhone and we can now make Siri most of the time understand.
Something like half the time for me.
But yeah, the British sery actually understands me unlike most people.
I have set a Scottish theory. But maybe maybe why maybe I like I like the way.
The way one of the panels where they are like is voice the new operating system.
I am going to kill myself, I will kill on.
The panel was British and was like, well, usually they don't understand what I'm saying, so like all of the Americans were like, oh, absolutely, and the one person with an accent was like, I probably not.
Okay. That makes me so angry because when fucking Alexa came out, we would we did this one already. We've done this one already. I've I have already done pitching for clients about voice being it wasn't guess what it was not the future because it turns out that talking is annoying.
Well, I've been seeing discussions about this. I saw someone online try to be like Scarlett Johansson fumbled the bag yes, and it's like, whoa what bag? Yeah. They were saying that if she had simply let open AI use her voice, she would have been the future of AI Voice forever, like.
Achieved immortalities, be like the AI Voice for generations.
I'm like, yeah, just like you know what happened with Alexa, right, I don't think that happened with Siri. I know the voice actors, all of them, I know them personally.
Gramble Chambers my favorite, like what a.
Bad like business decision for an actress, because now you'll have like kids who grow up with like like Alexa machines in their house, and then they'll watch a movie and be like, oh wow, the Alex is in. It's like it's like a voice servant.
It's Siri.
Casting directors will be like, well, Scarlett Johansson, No, she's that. She's that lady who everybody has to talk to get a dentist appointment. Nobody wants in a movie. Like, it's a terrible idea to be that.
You mean lost in translation.
I've watched her a little too many times as really one of the one of the factors that keeps coming in here, this idea that the voice is gonna be the transcendent thing there.
Yeah, I and also that it can do more than it can, because I don't think people realize and I know this due to my accent, how fucking bad voice is. Even in the best case. It just does not. Sometimes the things it hears are truly insane. And the more data you have in your phone, the more numbers and names you have, the more insane. The idea is, I don't need to text someone I know from North Carolina eleven years ago and I certainly don't need to text them about the burger I'm ordering. Was I ordering a bugger?
No?
I was trying to do a meeting related thing. But did this fucking thing hear me? But also it just angers me that I have to hear this. It's been like a decade. I thought we got away from this fucking angle. No, very foulmouth to that. I apologize to the.
Well, at the very least, at least there's no crypto.
To us, right. Oh, I'm sure we'll hit some I haven't run into it yet.
I'm sniffing it out.
No, I didcause one of the women on one of the panels worked for Republic, which is an app that allows you to everyone to do in like venture capital investing with as little as twenty five dollars sick and yeah, and also invest in crypto at the same time.
Why not?
And the one review of it said like, it's a great service if you want to diversify, but it's extremely risky and everyone loses money that's not diversified.
I guess people are still reeling from hawk to a coin, so maybe that might be more on the down low.
Uh here, I really I.
Love that she is probably in trouble the SEC. I love that the SEC is.
Gonna go somewhere with no extradition, tweet a bit, and then get extra.
People lacked the moxy of the classic scam artist.
Yeah, look, you.
Do that when you're in Costa Rica. You you fucking He was a.
Real piece of ship. But I missed McAfee.
Now, if McAfee, if he'd had just hung in there another year or two. My favorite John McAfee thing was if you looked at the Champagne he was drinking.
It's like the cheapest ship. He didn't have that much money, Like, he was a shitty yacht. They had terrible guns, but he.
Was eating like like like a woolgreens cheese.
Yeah, hell yeah, he's drinking like Corbell libertarian.
But like which is no one, no one, so no one. Dominicants took his guns. Wait did they really steal They did steal it. They steal his guns. He's sailed into a foreign port with a boat full of illegal they wow, country, you can't do that.
You're not allowed to do that as usual the fucking fun place. I woke mafia. Oh, I can't ride into another port with a bunch of guns.
This is obviously just because Dominican the Dominican Republic's so corrupt. It's like, man, yeah, it would take your guns. You can't do that.
But also this is just like one thing of a functioning democracy.
If a very strange man.
On all sorts of substances, clearly on drugs somewhere basically trafficking human beings.
If a guy turns up just like yeah, yeah, he sounds sounds like beavers but looks like.
He's dying, it's like, yeah, you could do that on the boat, but no, yo, yo, I'm like, hey, I have all of these guns out of that like just fucking lying around taking your boat jack back.
Yeah, like like like you've killed a bunch of NPCs on there and they've dropped their loot, like.
And he did. In fact, I mean like none of these modern day drifters can do. They don't live interesting, bold enough lives to have racked up the kind of body count.
Jean mccaut, he was like a like a Blacklist character. He sure was like, yeah, Raymond Reddington.
A lot of people in who died because they were his nephew died.
His nephew died.
They had like a paragliding thing that they did in the desert. They called themselves sky Gypsies, and they traveled around like like drifting from little airport in the desert to little airport in the desert, and like a seventy year old man and his nephew, Booth crashed and died, and then he fled the country for Costa Rica because his whole family got angry at him.
This is why he left. Yes, that's why he went to Costa Rica. That first of all insane.
Yeah.
Second of all, none of the tech people are this interesting, Absolutely not. Sam Molman has never fled a country. No ever, he might though now he won't. That's the thing.
It's the process is like Zuckerberg dressing like Stan you know from the.
I Love It. I love that he dresses like Kevin Federan.
Yeah yeah, but even all of that's just a Peter Teel's like bit. Yeah, it wasn't even his idea.
So this is one of the many consultants that have crawled up Mark Zuckerberg's asshole now being like, what you should do is you should dress like like you've you've just done a ZM pig, but you're also a nineties rapper and he's like, oh huh, yeah, will.
We ever get him rapping? You know those pictures of him?
I would love him to rap. I actually should try. We really do need a Howard Hughes era and a Crazy Crone era of tech. I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg is going to be like when he's like eighty, like an Al Davis style just and.
El director being yeah, just like a.
Lich just floating with you. He won't quit. I think he may Al Davis Meta And for the listeners who don't know the NFL, Al Davis was the owner of the Oakland Raiders and now the Las Vegas Raiders, and he held onto the team until he looked like he was physically dying. And I really do mean like bits were falling off of him on air like it was fucking insane. This is actually what I hope for Meta more than anything. I actually don't think Meta lasts than another ten years, but if it has the last decades, I hope it's Mark Zuckerberg just crazy. You know, like we're not running photos on.
Anymore, nothing but the website is nothing but ais of your dead grandparents and like literally loved once yea Zuckerberg running it alone.
You couldn't make your pop pop come back, you couldn't bring your beautiful life.
That's what he's gonna run for president? Yeah, that's what.
Yeah. Yeah, I can't of course as a resident.
Just want to really, you can't vote once, but you can vote twice.
No. No, people need to stop saying things that make it sound like I am committing a crime.
Don't joke about the title of our signal loop in here.
No, we will not be saying that, nor will we be saying it's blowing up like a cyber truck either. Yeah, I'm sure that was a great post for you sending it to my lawyer being like, it's a bit.
Look, he's already dead.
It's a bit. Yeah, I was.
I was planning a bit.
To bring my gray hoodie and my green jacket and my net Gator and just walk.
That's the thing, though, the show's got big enough now that people are responding to me with stuff like that. Luisg So I'm like, shot the man.
People people love posting about crimes.
People love to tell me the crimes they wish i'd commit.
Yeah, that's always true.
Yeah, yeah, I am a wow, would I am. I'm not hitting anyone. I'm terrified of violence, both happening to me and committing it.
The only drugs I do were the ones I legally buy its stores on the strip.
Yeah, mushroom would be We're like, what.
Kind of mushroom is in the gummy?
Yes, it's another introduction to the Consumer Electronics Show and this beautiful show I'm putting on. My boss, Robert evans Uh sat down at the table and then produced a mysterious bag. I think it's the fairest description saying these are mushrooms I bought at a corner store. I don't know a mushroom vape. There is also a mushroom everyone. Everyone has been letting me know about the mushroom vapory. Do not know what is? What kind of mushrooms?
None of them tell you what.
I'm not doing them, so.
We would never vapor in this hotel suite.
Yes, thank you two hundred and fifty dollars. I will not get back anyway. This is my boss, the mushroom man, and this is what the week is going to be like because we refuse to be held by the norms of tech coverage in the sense that we actually want to have a good time. And I believe, and I've done a lot of things about the tech media recently, and this is not the fault of the individual writers, but the outlets themselves. I believe we have all lost the fun in tech. I don't think people enjoy their gizmos anywhere near as much. No, No, I want to enjoy my shit. I love my phone. It's got problems with it, but I love technology. It's great.
The funnest thing that this show can't be the LG giant screen's exactly, and that's why I'm so I'm so thankful that you've put this thing together, because yeah, usually covering this is like kind of like brain breaking, and I love having something to look forward to that's not just the big screen, and also drinking as many, like as many cocktails at Showstoppers as I can, which we will be doing tomorrow.
Night here every year.
And the people of Showstoppers have been very unfair to me, very nasty. They said that I'm a public relations executive and they will not have me there.
Will they still not let you into shit? No, they want and make me pay and I'm not paying.
They should pay me.
Don't worry.
I will I will oh no show drink show stop drink for you.
Maybe it's Pepcom. They didn't let me into either way, if it showed it was Pepcom. I think nevertheless, many mean people of Pepcom. If you don't let me in your show, I will find a way in there. In spirit, this is a threat, which is most threat.
They're gonna blow down the door.
No, no, someone is going to be there that will tell me what happened, and then I will talk about it. I will not be doing any crimes. Crimes, thank you. It's going to be the entire goddamn week, isn't it. This is going to be my entire week. Is Robert and Gare and ed now and ed ed has joined in saying Ed, why don't you do crime? And I will be saying I won't. I've never committed, which is great. But this week is I think it's going to be a special week because I think over the course of the week, we're really going to realize how fuck the tech industry is. I think that they're there is some life in the hardware side, but I think there's a genuine fucking hole in the consumer electronics side that is just bleeding, and I think people need to wake the up about it. Maybe the reason CS is fucking miserable is because there's nothing here that's cool like that. I maybe that was why I liked it. In twenty eleven. Twenty eleven, there was Stills. I don't remember very much from that.
Poole had a slide. Maybe there was the Mobile World Congress that year. Either way, there was a slide at one point.
But also there was stuff that actually got made that was interesting, that solved needs. And indeed, it might be they've sold a lot of the needs already. But it's like fucking how No, Like tech.
Was evolving so much back then, Like like there was like genuine like massive massive changes and improvements on like the availability of having a supercomputerly in your hand at all times. And I've had the same iPhone for four years and nothing's.
But that's actually the problem.
Nothing is better.
Maybe we're at the end, Maybe at the end of time. Have we considered this?
Yeah, I mean I have a buddy named Francis.
Francis, okay, explain the joke for those of us who get it but need the audience to hold.
I mean, he wrote a paper that was largely misinterpreted about at the end of the Cold War, about the end of history.
Right.
It really wasn't saying what it sounds like.
He was saying sounds like a thing I should have read but did not.
It's okay, no one actually read Francis Fuki. We all just joked about, like.
A real Shoshana Zubov situation. I don't know who the fuck surveillance. She wrote a seven hundred page book. If you read the first hundred page, you're like, God, damn, I use it.
To keep my door open so my cats can get in my room.
It is a very long It's a very long book, and I say, this is someone who does very long podcast. But the first hundred page she's like, damn, you're really on something. In the next six hundred.
You're like an editor would have been helpful.
Oh, maybe definitely. But also the larger point is that capitalism is simply sick. That we must just fix the obvious problems because otherwise the tech companies would run well if capitalism worked well. And the answer is shut the fuck anyway. I'm gonna have Corey Doctor to talk about that book at some point, because he has some fucking views.
He wrote his own book about the books.
Yeah, but it is interesting, and I kind of want to. I think I'm going to try and ask everyone what they were excited about this, because I need to find out, first of all, who's a liar, and then second of all, I need to find out if someone truly believes that something is exciting here.
Why.
I don't remember a single thing I've ever seen at CES other than one year where I saw a sign for a seaman analysis thing with Ai. I was heading out at the time because and I was not in a great mood, because otherwise I would have gone in and be like, can I try it? What do you think?
Nah?
Like what you see? The I says it's bad?
Huh, I'm not, but you I'm pretty excited about that folding laundry robot that you guys were talking about.
I'd be really funny to go over there and be like, where's my fucking shirt? Two years ago? It's my fucking shirt. Man, he never gave me that ship back, like KG yelling, uh, where's my money.
I am a sicko laptop pervert, so I always look forward to like Lenovo's weird twisting folding laptops. I've got their folding the laptop now, and I love it. I do like their sick little laptop.
Weird little laptop, and I wish it was all that weird fucking laptop.
Look, give me a weird laptop. Put four screens on the side, should have it fold down to the size of a napkin.
That's what I want from seeingos I want. I don't mind if you don't make it. I just mind that it's fun and it's like, hey, here's something that's plausible and we are not building it. Yeah, that's so boring.
I don't get angry at the folding one hundred inch television. Yeah, I would never buy one, but I am like, that is a TV that's folding. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
And I could see that would be delayed due to the fact that you're doing the thing unassociated.
And no one wants mostly associated with.
Clothes, and also there is no market of any kind. But even then they still make them. You still get like the fifty thousand dollars lg TV that can run on a battery.
It's like that three million dollar glasses free three D television they used to bring around where it's like this fucker works. You gotta stand in one specific area.
But this is basically a giant three DS but it doesn't work well. Last year they had I think their biggest TV thing was like a transparent transparent TV.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that.
That was so stupid.
I love that because they were like, even like the tech journalists just trying, they weren't trying it. They were just reading off the fucking press.
And it's like, I.
Don't fucking know what. I don't fucking know why. We have no more horizons, No, there's no more landsall got the rock com bubble In July, I fucking said that there's nothing left. We're at the end. And I will not rate it because and that really it does feel like I'm narrating the end of the world at times, and this show does not fucking help. It doesn't give me hope. I don't get I don't see anything at cs WRO. I'm like, finally, no.
But I think it's so crucial because the whole thing about AI right now, the thing everyone says is like it's only going to get better, right this is this is the worst it's going to get. And the thing that you've been so good on like specifically for your beat, is showing how things don't actually like infinitely improve like a like Google search is such a good is such a good example that, like, no, sometimes things actually can't get worse. We can't assume everything will just get better.
Well it hasn't, though. I think that that's the real thing, and this show kind of shows it in the nothing has got better. They don't show us stuff here where I'm like other than TV stuff. TV's are cool. I love TVs whatever, big big computer fuss compute whatever. But like of actual things we've seen at CS, I first of all, cannot remember a single fucking thing I've seen it. See, I just I go in. I look at them for hours, and then my brain just leaves and I leave in. My brain's like it's gone, okay, that's going with where Spanish, French, German and Latin went.
So who are the winners? It's it's gamers, gooners, investors.
The thing is, I don't even think those always right.
Three groups that always keep winning Gamers, goers and tech enthusiasts.
But there's not even stuff for gunas anymore.
Oh no, no, no, no, you know you know.
A true goods.
They're always DTG as the kids.
We have been reporting on. I am come beat every cees.
Okay, Well, love to introduce my listeners to this, especially the ones that came in through the Very Serious podcast and the Lena Kahn interview. That's the ones the people hearing this from the Lena Connor.
Lena Khan come on, come, let's talk about the FCC.
No. No, she said she'd come back on theoretically.
You know what you're doing, Jesus Christ.
No, but I you know, twenty twenty five is the year that we are all that we are all going to have sex with robots.
I'm excited for some kind.
Of insane champaign room sex.
No, I'm waiting for some like some insane like like AI power like masturbation tool, because I I was I know, I know there's going to be a new one on the first year that they did. But there's gonna be a new one on the front this year.
They only sent us the sheaths, the actually handing out.
This.
You have to forge this one your it's somebody.
It's like the most like sex averse group of people walking the show floor and you have these like you have these people enthusiastically trying to like give people loose, and you're like, these people are these people are.
Similar from countries where you're not allowed to come.
Yeah, they're actually tell me I can't anyway moving home from that one. But I'm so sorry to like the respectable like table. We got like awards this year from like real business publication. There's some posts like I can't.
Wait to him this is like, this is good. This is actually a pretty big part of how the.
Fuck do we get gooning into the first episode of this goddamn because.
Because it's what else are you going to do with all of those curved all of this curved tvss?
Because what do you think they do with them after they hold the laundry? You know, they put them, put them off the line.
Mistake.
This is also like one of the one of the biggest uses of like all of all of these lbs.
It's just people using them as sex spots.
And actually, you know what, I don't mind what people do with that, but I will say I don't think that they've got anything else other than that. I don't think there's any other sticky that's.
Really walked into that fucking hell.
No, I actually conquim it sticky.
I learned a lot socially by meeting other weird freaks on World of Warcraft, right and doing role play sex with them. That was the way you grew up as a seventeen year old.
Race were you? And what race were they?
I mean you usually Niels obviously, of course. Okay, it was two thousand and seven.
I mean you could have been a NiFe. You could have been a no. No, they were good new No, you just you.
Just tried things on the internet back then. Lou is a person.
But nevertheless, it is funny that that appears to be the one use case of like because people are just like, just like millions of people getting into erotica for the first time. Now this is bartender. Phil just walked in and that was the first thing he heard. So very good stuff, Phil. All the normals are happening here.
We're talking about how AI is helping people come.
M I'm so I'm so sorry. By the way, some people who listen to this podcast ostensibly to learn about the Rotti economy and the tech industries collapse and now everyone's talking about their willies and who hasn't.
I mean, this is a core part of the industry though, like really, like this is why we have a little driven yah.
Yeah, Actually pornography has always driven tech, which is why they pulled the AVN away because then they'd have something to aspire to. And also that's a profitable industry, right.
Yeah, you can't remind people there's no money being actually made.
Yeah, Like, oh my god, this is the thing. I really I really didn't think about how likely it would be that someone would bring up gooning, let alone on the first episode. But I mean, this is still more fun I've had any c Yeah, because you go into these shows and they are definitely sexless. Yeah, and there are definitely guys in the tech industry like if they had like good sex, they'd be really happy, Elon Musk being one of them. But it's it is also weird how just like joyless, it is putting aside horniness deliberately. It does just feel very fucking joyless. No one seems to I think it's problem in the tech media as well. No one seems excited about anything, no one even is looking forward to it. It's like a group burden that we all share every year. I just refuse to have it that way. Anymore.
Yeah, it's uh. I think it's good. I'm excited for the rest of this. I think we probably should close things up.
Oh okay, don't worry. I'm I was just planning to and the MC Robert.
Now, I gotta show you guys some weird AI videos after this.
And I have to peek so little as we do our outro. Now, I'm going to talk you through the rest of the week. Robert and Gare will be joining us again on Friday for one of our two slots. But the way this is gonna work is you're gonna get this episode. You're listening to this around twelve am met I assume that this is the one thing you do with your day, and then maybe about eight ten hours like are you're gonna get the second episode. Then we're gonna have David Roth of Defectory's gonna be joining us. My two elves are going to be here to look on the floor. I will be going to the floor, Yes I will, but not until Wednesday due to situations. We will have a gaggle of wonderful reporter as well, Jesse Ferrara of your Kickstarter Sucks. We will have a real life priest an actual Dominican monk. I'm gonna have many more fun things in store. Robert Gare where can people find you?
You can find our d show It could happen here. We'll be talking about some of the great AI generated movies that I watched today during my panels. I do not look forward to seeing Oh you're gonna oh, I really unhappy and yeah, that's it. You can listen to us on it could happen here Social profiles. I am on the Blue Sky I write, okay, I don't want to tell you my Twitter. Get off Twitter dot, go on Twitter.
Get weacome people find I am not following you, now you're following me.
Now you're not following me On Blue Sky, right, I responded to a post game.
But yes i am.
I am on Blue Sky at at at Hungry Bootie dot blue sky dot Social.
I'm gray, so welcome.
People find you on on Twitter and on Blue Sky I am a big black Jacobin. And then I'm on the tech bubble, the substack mostly address tech bubble dot substack dot com.
Very good, and you can of course find me at zychron and gab and otherwise not No, I'm on I am not on gap.
I am not on anymore because it's just Twitter.
But it's a secret account.
I mean.
Some people I'm following you to do a shoot.
Just no, I'm not gonna tell you ship because you can see the episode links and also Zitron is on. Who the fuck else is a dumbass name like this? This is, of course, the first episode of the Better Offline c S Extravaganza Saga of course mastered by the wonderful Mattasowski, who is here producing us in real time. Thank you so much for listening, very excited for this week. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T T O S O W s k I dot com. You can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my new I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youread dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so much for listening Better.
Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
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