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Oh man, welcome back to it could happen here the only podcast that takes sole responsibility for the assassination of So we're back. We're still at CES. We're slightly more sober than we were last night.
Yeah, but we are more high on ces.
We are higher on cees. If you haven't been, The Consumer Electronics Show is one hundred and twenty thousand or so people all flooding into Las Vegas for about four days, where they walk around in a convention center that if you grew up in a small town, the convention center
is larger than where you grew up. And it's just wall to wall a mix of incredible new technology, achievements that are going to change people's lives, absolute nonsense, vaporware, repackaged old shit, and stuff that will get someone you love killed, all just crammed together in this massive room the size of a small world, and yeah, you just kind of go crazy slowly living in it. This is Robert, you know me and Garrison? Hello, you know Garrison, And
returning from part one is Tavia Mora, our resident technological expert. Tavia, how'd you feel in your second day out on the floor.
Exhausted and excited to be impressed by stuff.
Yeah, yeah, well that is what we're doing today today's episode. Last time we tell keep that mic in your hand. Last episode we talked about the most obviously stupid products. So Tavia, I want you to start us off with what is a good product something you saw today or yesterday that you thought that thing is fucking cool.
Well, let's see. I think we're in the North Hall. It was in the North Hall that we saw This is a gadget called wheel me that was just a simple rolling platform that I would track along where it was supposed to go on the ground. But what I saw on it was a road case, and I was very excited. Since I work in a lot of the event spaces and when I have to move to and from kind of where we're like staging a lot of stuff to where the site is, it's really nice to
have the extra help. The extra lift that was marketed pretty much directly toward me. As soon as I saw it, instantly wanted it. I could see I use for that.
Yeah, yeah, it seemed like a potentially really useful thing. Obviously, the mount that they had wouldn't be able to go up or down stairs. Well, but if you're moving across like a large warehouse space or something like the kind of folece where a lot of events are held, or a concert space, I could see it being a real
labor saver. And we did see there was another product there that was like it was a delivery robot for like delivering food that they had built away for it to go upstairs, where it basically had a large, maybe two feet diameter wheel and there were like plastic spokes and then the outside of the wheel is like soft plastic like the actual tread itself, and so it would just kind of bend to conform to the shape of the stairs, and it was able to roll smoothly upstairs
on its wheels as a result of that, which I thought was kind of impressive. And that's one of the nicer things, is like seeing like, oh, somebody really puts some thought into that. That's a legitimately clever idea as opposed to a product we didn't mention last time. But
it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. A guy who created smart plants, who used the power of AI to make your plants able to communicate with you, so It's basically a huge plastic flower plant pets with a Z spelled with a Z.
And basically you can't talk to it. But most of what humane to we were just molesting the plants.
It will it has speakers in the flower pots, so would you like stroke the leaves? It will giggle like this is It was immediately like, oh, this is made for some kind of weird sex freak like some.
And didn't it like spin back and forth a little bit as oh, he's giggling.
It like it shimmered, it like danced the pod around, it made it made small little noises. It was. It was quite something. And the guy was incredibly enthusiastic about his about his talking, his talking giggling plants.
He was following his passion truly.
You could see yeah in his eyes. I will say the product worked. I'm just not sure it did work the product is for, but it was one of the more functional pieces of technology we've seen. It did.
He also said that like when the plants were dry, it would like make the sound like a bubbling water sound, which I think is a mistake. It should scream at you when you have not watered the plants recently enough. But I do love how clearly he was obsessed with
the brilliance of this design. That is one of the fun things at the smaller booths at a show like this, because like you know, you got like big companies LG and Lenovo and Honda, all these massive companies with very slick, expensive booths, and then you have in other areas just like a little square that's just a crazy person with the thing that they've dedicated their life to building. And
sometimes it's the most brilliant thing you've ever seen. And sometimes it's a flower poth that that giggles when you molest.
Sometimes it's plant, but it's you.
I always appreciate the fact that, well, at least you threw your life into this stupid thing.
Yeah. No, it's always kind of endearing, like yeah, yeah, no matter what it is, it's it's fun to see someone who's like, figure it out life.
Yeah, a man. Yeah, you know who you are. You're the plant pets guy. Is that a good thing to be? I don't know, that's not yeah, that's not that's not on me. Uh.
I mean, we certainly saw a lot of a lot of products walking walking the show floor today, not nearly as many metaverse products as there were last year, and there were still some. I was finally able to try the Haptics tax suit, which I missed last year. This is it's basically a vest that zips up. It's it's not as painful as some of the other haptic suits that I tried out last year, which I kind of you enjoyed the ones that are just like actually hurt you.
Yeah, but like basically shock you in such a way as to simulate a stab, wound or something.
That was cool. Yeah, this one by B hacked. This one by b Haptics was very user friendly. It wasn't it wasn't really painful, but it worked. It worked pretty well. What else? What else did we see walking walking into the big central hall? Oh? There was there was that thing that I wish was real but probably will never be, which is the LG podcasting camphor hand.
Yeah. So LG the people who may or may not have made your TV, but there's a decent chance they did. They have their big booth. It's mostly like TVs and smart home connected and entertainment stuff. But then they had like a concept product that was like a camper trailer.
It was actually a really nice layout, but for what you know camper trailers, they have all these little like cubby holes and storage spaces built into the sides in the back, and so underneath the bed that took up the back, they had like a folding down space where it was like it was like stored a half dozen bottles of wine and glasses in a very like pleasing way. But then in the center of the wine and the
glasses are two like recording microphones. Like that's just like they made a van for podcasting alcoholics and.
I respect very targeted audience there.
Yeah. On the other side of it was a fold down panel that was like a lot of campers have that you could fold it down and it's like a table, but on the wall, like once you fold it down, underneath the part of it that folds down, it's like a TV screen that they had tuned to like a fire place, like a campfire video. Just like if I am out in the wilderness, I am not putting on a campfire video. That's the most depressing thing I can imagine. Why would you do that? But that was fun in
terms of like actually impressive things. There's a product we saw our first night out there. The time Kettle. I don't know why they gave him up that name. It has nothing to do with what the product does. This is a translation device specifically, it's it's like the star trekiest thing I saw, because first off, it's a little retro It's like a kind of a thick rectangular prism
with a screen on it. And the rep from the company was like a Chinese man who clearly was like spoke Mandarin is his native language, and we had a conversation talking into this thing, and it would translate and speak back to each other. And there's like a little compartment on it that pops out, and it has two earphones. You could each put one in each person's ear to have like a live conversation that's translated over it. You can also hook it in through your phone. I know
there's a couple of devices like that. This is the one I've seen that seemed both the smoothest and the
most kind of like purpose built of them. I thought it was really impressive, and it's one of those only you don't get those so often these days, but like every now and then at a show like this, you see a piece of technology that's like, well, this is what I assumed we would be doing with computers when I was a kid in the future, right, there would be an instant translator, a babblefish device that you could just fit in your pocket, and it is kind of
fucking dope, and I thought it worked really well. Liked I could have conducted an interview with this guy through that thing and it would have been pretty seamless, which which was nice to see. Speaking of Mandarin, I don't know, whatever products you're listening to, there's like a good thirty percent chance they're made over in China. So support the
Chinese economy. We're back. So one of the things we did at this trade show, most of the time we spent was not out on the floor looking at products, it was attending these different speeches and panels, like where they'll have people from like they had like one of Google's AI heads and like the head of McDonald's AI integration, which is happening for some reason. We'll talk more about this in our dedicated AI episodes that are coming a
bit later. But on one of the panels it was AI is the Fifth Industrial Revolution, was the name of the panel. They did not once to talk about what industrial revel The other four were or why this one was? They just said that title like five times. They were very proud of it. And one who was that Lady Garrison.
The Alexa lady with the iHeart AI shirt.
Yes, there was a lady with a shirt that said iHeart is Was she the dividend lady?
No, the dividend lady was from was from the Synthetic Information panel?
Yes, yes, oh sorry, sorry sorry that was the other panel. Yeah. Yeah, there was a panel in like deep fakes and AI harms, and there was a lady on there who was like some sort of relevant expert. But she kept using the term the liar's dividend to refer to the money that you make if you're a scammer, and she kept using it in the way she used it. I immediately thought, like, oh, this lady wants to sell a book and that's the title of the book, right, Like, that's very clearly she's
mentioning it in such a pointed, unnatural way. That was my assumption. Aparently the term.
Has existed for a few years now.
It seems useless to me because like, if you're saying someone is a fraudster, well, the diviend is the money they make committing fraud. Like, you don't need to give it another name. It's not like that's like again, it's like calling the money you get robbing a bank the bank robbers dividend. Well, that's just a stupid thing to say. So, yeah, we've been using that for everything now and now you are all enjoying the podcaster's dividend here. You know, that's that's what you're listening to.
Speaking of listening, we tried good pivot here, say thank you loud to you, thank you. We call that the Segway dividend. We tried. I know Robert's familiar with this, but I've not tried them out before until today. I think it's called chokes shocks. Shocks.
Yeah, I wear those headphones every day. Yeah. They're like bone conducting headphones.
Bone conducting headphones, so they don't go in your ear. They go around like around the back of your head. They hook around your ear lobe and they vibe right and they can make you hear sounds in your brain.
Yeah, which is pretty cool.
They were they had they just launched a new waterproof model targeting like swimmers.
Yes, IP sixty eight or something like that. Like, yeah, it's it's supposed to be. You can submerge it for like hours at two meters of depth, so you can like swim with them on.
But I really enjoyed these. Yeah, apparently they can help some people who have like targeted hearing loss, So that's that's an actually neat piece of working technology.
Yeah, it's really cool if you're not aware of these, because when we say, like Whin said, you can hear sounds to them. They're just like wearing normal headphones. But we have a friend who is deaf in one ear and put them on for the first time recently. It was able to like hear out of that ear for the first time in years, which is like kind of an amazing thing to be able to do with a fucking set of headphones that are they're not cheap headphones,
but they're not like inaccessibly expensive. All right, Tavia, you got another one you wanted to talk about.
Yeah, there was the product that we ran into that was very close to the tact suit that Garrison had tried on, and it's called three D Desk. It looks to be like an additional add on you can put on top of your desk that you would use if
you were working. The one that we had seen was a standing sitting style desk and it has the actual product itself on top of it, which looked to be like a stand, and it had two monitors attached to one plane of it, and then with like I think a simple button switch, it would sort of like another monitor would swoop out from behind them, and there was sort of like this cycling monitor arrangement that I hadn't
quite seen before. And I work a lot with a bunch of different types of programs, and I'm like more or less stuck to my desk most of the time. So this actually looked to be another really useful product for somebody like me, not unlike the wheel me.
Yeah. One of the thing you can if you've seen like a drafting table, right like those desks, it's basically a big desk that you can like pushed down so that like the desk part is almost parallel and you can like put stick paper and stuff on and you can draw draw on it, like it's what architects use. It has that, so like underneath the monitors there's this top desk piece that you can like flip up and you can put stuff on, like use it as like a drafting table, or push it back down, you know,
with the switch of a button. It's pretty cool looking desk.
Yeah, it would have like the two monitors and then this sort of like this plane that would be sitting at like a thirty nine degree angle or so kind of from you, so you can set a bunch of books up or a bunch of notes you're taking or organizing.
Yeah, as a general rule, it was one of the like the products that I kept finding myself gravitating towards in our free time. There was like anything that had nothing to do with AI, because yeah, anyone who could who could find any reason to stick AI in something like people there's people selling like battery generators that are like AI assisted, and it's like, what do you mean it means? It means it cuts off the power when it's full.
Well, unbelievable.
That's not a that's just a battery working better, Like, come on, guys, It's this thing the tech industry does that that has has been exposed by like a lot of the products we've seen this year, many of whom are like just absolute nonsense, like the the wehead thing that that that like hideous chatbot that looks like a broken human face and just deeply off putting. Now that said, there was a really cool product that we uh uh
that I actually like liked, the AI use application. So there's a company called Cellistron that makes they're calling it a like a home observatory, and it's it looks like
a big telescope. It's not cheap. It's not insanely expensive for a telescope, mind you, but it's it's not inexpensive, and it is like a motorized telescope that it uses like AI, like some sort of AI program in order to cut out light pollution and stuff and enhance the images that you're you're getting so that you can actually get clear images of like galaxies and other planets from your backyard. And it hooks into like a phone or
a tablet or computer like wirelessly. It actually generates its own Wi Fi network, so you can still use even if you don't have Internet. But one of what you can do is you could control it from like an iPad, and you could port the feed directly to your TV, and you could like direct you could have like a group of people sitting around snorting whatever drugs you prefer to snort and like looking at different galaxies and shit
in space. And that was pretty fucking cool and actually like an actual application of machine learning that I thought was positive.
Yeah, you can have like your little at home star parties. I dug in a little bit more on like how AI gets used there, and it seemed like it was mostly part of the image processing before controls get set to the user and they have like other adjustments such as brightness, contrast, that kind of thing, But it sounds like it does like some image processing as part of its AI capabilities.
Yeah, that was that was neat. Again, not a cheap product, but like actually something that's seeing it used impressed me and I could see wanting to have that, And I could also see like a clear bit my roommate has telescopes and stuff, and there's usually the light pollution is too much of a pain in the ass and fucking even in Portland, which is not the worst city for light pollution in this country to use them very well.
So something like that, and also just being able to easily drop it onto your TV and like hang out with friends, like if I had fight at access to something like that back when I was doing hallucinogens. I think it would have used it a lot.
Yeah, that sounds that sounds promising.
Speaking of things that I would have used a lot as a young man. Garrison, you want to tell us about the hand job machine.
Sure, So there's this Company's what you said to get a second there. So there's this company in Norway called Handy. They they make they make interactive, interactive sex toys. They started by targeting the male sex toy demographic, or as they I actually liked that. They that they actually more often said the penis uh demographic, which yeah, which was nice.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, But anyway, it's uh, it's it's a little thing that you can you can slight and it.
Goes up like it looks like a nice coffee thermoscy. Its kind of like with like a little tube that has like a clear plastic penis prism.
Next to it. It has what has when it has like a has like a stroker sleeve attached in and you can control like the speed and vibration just on on the little like thermous looking thing. But the real features of the Handy is that it also has hands free control that you can you can hook this thing up via an app to many different sources. You can hook this up to whatever you're watching on your computer.
You can hook this up to movies. You can hook this up to an Amazon Alexa if that's your thing, and the sounds will will impact how the how the Stroker moves. The one of the more promising applications which it really also opens opens the field of music, is that you can hook it up to like your Spotify or something and the music and like the beats of the rhythm will impact the vibrations and speed on the stroker.
So we can now learn which songs are best for orgasms, which opens a whole new, whole new category for the Grammys. I think there's a lot of trial and error. I think one hundred gex is definitely gonna be up there.
I think nickel Back is going to make a comeback.
Yeah, this is gonna be the Billie Joel renaissance. Just just people spilling ropes over down Easter Alexas Christ.
They also just launched a second product called I Think just a the O, which is just a more classic small handheld vibrator. Similarly like the Handy, It's it's based on actual like sound vibrations, not a motorized vibration. So it similarly can hook can hook up to music and that changes the way it feels. So we have we have not been able to test these yet because he didn't actually have free copies.
They only had to give Garrison a penis sheath.
They only they only had the free sleeves. But the actual device is two hundred dollars, which is not is not super expensive. Uh, considering this style of like sex toy, that is kind of standard. Yeah, yeah, that was. That was one of the the more professional booths sexually. Yeah and see yes, and this is they did a really good job.
This is a good time for me to tell my favorite masturbation machine story. Oh so there's a product. Oh boy, you know, for the penis having demographic, there's not as many sex toys traditionally, not as many at least fun ones out there. It's it's it's a little bit of a barren wasteland. But there is the flesh light. And if you haven't seen a fleshlight, maybe you've heard about them. It does look like a big, heavy plastic flashlight and you unscrew the top and there's a fake vagina in
there right. Some of them are shaped like asses, some of them are sex asses.
Sometimes there are a button. Sometimes there are a mouth too.
Yeah, oh yeah, there's mouths too. And I once had a friend who got in some trouble with the law, and we had to drive to their house and grab a bunch of things in their house and throw them away because we weren't sure if the police were going
to be showing up. And so after we did that that night, it was a very depressed, very sad night, and we all got extremely drunk, and three of the four of us are standing out on the front porch in front of like the house that we're at, and then the fourth person in the room, who was like roommates with the person who had just been arrested, comes out with the arrested person's fleshlight and for reasons known
only to them, and God hurls it at us. Now we're in like this is a we're in Richardson, Texas, and like it's kind of this walled off by concrete bricks, little front porch area, and we all bolt to get away from the fleshlight and it hits the brick wall and the plastic case shatters and then the thing hits the ground and the fake plast silicone vagina inside of it slithers out like like a living creature, probably lubricated by some sort of substance, and it was one of
the most unsettling moments of my life.
I'm really glad you could share that with the Strawberry that the sound was incredible.
It did. Yeah, it sounded a lot like if you've ever seen that episode Always Sonny where where Danny DeVito gets berthed from a couch like covered in sweat. It sounded a lot like that, I imagine.
And we call that experience the flesh Lights Dividend.
The Fleshlight Dividend. That's right now, speaking of jacking off, The next product we're going to talk about is Jackery, a company that makes some really actually pretty cool like survival equipment, specifically like solar battery, solar panel and battery resetups. And we're going to talk about that because it's definitely like of the products we saw here the most in our miliu as like the world is falling apart show. So we're gonna get to that. But first, here's some ads.
We're back and we're talking about Jackery, which it's fun. One of the things I appreciate about this is that the hand job machine could have been called jack the Jackery, or the company could have been called Jackerreye. And likewise, the company that makes batteries and solar panels could have been called Handy because it's handy. They have a solar battery around when you're camping. Curious, interesting, interesting stuff. Yeah, a lot of thoughts there thoughts to be thought.
Oddly, that ven diagram crossover is closer than I thought it would be.
So jackerrey is a cut I would recommend googling their stuff they make. There's a lot the field of like solar batteries and panels is super crowded right now, and most of the batteries you're gonna are gonna be made like one of the same two or three factories. It's basically the same factory makes a bunch of companies batteries,
and a lot of them are very unsafe. There was a company that sent me some review samples like a whole solar generator and battery last year that I was going to kind of do a piece about, you know, surviving on a solar generator, and then a month after it arrived I was still testing it. It came out that they had burned down a bunch of people's houses because the batteries were insane. No, yeah, so you want
to be careful with this stuff. Jackery is one of the I have had good luck with some of their products. They seem to be of a high build quality. I have not heard horror stories about them. When you go to the the their booth of people there seem to be genuinely knowledgeable, and the way in which they set it up and demo it suggests a degree of knowledge about the product and like what people want out of it.
So one of the things they do have some really large including some like some solar batteries with generators with solar panel generators that are large enough to run like a deep freeze, which is really cool being able to
do that. And the setup they had specifically was a like an actual like serious, like solid like not one of those folding panel setups that goes on the roof of your car or truck alongside with like a tint like one of those via truck talk tents for overlanding, and then plugs into you know, either their one thousand or like two thousand watt solar generator or yeah so or a battery generators and just everything about the way it was set up seemed really practical. It seemed durable.
It didn't feel like something was gonna fall apart. Yeah, I can see it being like a legitimate like even outside of the car, because that's more or less like a hobby it's sort of thing. But having one of these generators that you can actually run your fridge and your freezer and your lights in your house all like they had some like an outage.
Microwaves, stuff, cooking implements, o other kind of stuff you might take for like like you know, like a week in mountain trip or something. The main the main roof Mountain Pad, I think I was able to pull four hundred watts, and then it had two sliding up panels that can pull three hundred watts so that they could get.
Hot and in a sunny day, they said you could get like nine hundred watts an hour.
Yeah, exactly, really good for watts an hour, which is which is quite impressive. And they have all the batteries to store it. And by by far, I think Jackery is the most consistent company in this field that I could I routinely see high praise for because the feel of like portable solar like solar charging is kind of a little bit sketchy sometimes, Yes, stuff can easily break,
things to be really easily over marked. Like I had a solar panel to to to charge my iPad that really only lasted like two weeks and it just completely stopped working. But I've only heard only heard good things about Jackery. I have not tested them out myself. I know Robert has some of them. Robert has some of their battery equipment, but hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on some of that this year.
They also had a lot of different form factors of the same types of products, so a lot of smaller versions of things that seem to be really good if you need a kind of more modular setup. That was for sure.
Yeah, they had like large ones that you could basically have plugged into your house in case you lose power for a small period of time in order to like ensure that you don't like you don't actually have a period where the power's out. And then they had a lot of like really good camping sort of like off
grid battery options it's just cool. Take take a look at the if you are if you are someone who is in the kind of financial situation that you can prep in that way where you're buying like solar equipment and batteries, which definitely is never super cheap, right, I would recommend checking them out at least as you kind of do your research.
There's like two more products I think I want to mention. The first is Shift. This is a company I was already familiar with, but I got to try these out. They look kind of like roller skates, but they're not roller skates. They are these sort of boots with motorized and locking wheels that attach onto your shoes. And their use case for this is like factory workers. It makes them real, It makes them be able to walk and move.
They said two and a half times faster, considerably faster.
I was able to walk at at a pretty at a pretty decent speed. You can you can lock the wheels if you need to, like do more like delicate mobility tasks.
Go upstairs stairs ladders.
That was one way to even lock and unlock the shoes themselves from being used. There's like a certain gesture you had to make by you.
Lift up your heel I think it was, and it locks the shoes so the wheels don't.
Come you lift up your heel in twest and and it Yeah.
The boot itself had a hinge that was just under.
The Yeah, so I've seen these before. They look they look kind of fun, but they're four kind of factory works. So it's it's it's it's kind of a mixed bag where the device worked quite well, and it took me like just like maybe like like one minute to get used to it. Then I could then I was really smooth. But the actual operational use case they're envisioning is like being able to get like get more, get more productivity out.
Of their workers the same amount of money, the same amount of money.
So like, yeah, I think Robert made the pretty good comparison. Like last year we tried out this exoskeleton, which also, you know, they talked a bit about a little bit about productivity specifically for like again factory workers, but that extra teleton was also designed to help that worker not damage their body. Like it was it was to make sure that they actually can can stay safer and not to as much damage their knees, their joints, their back
versus these little roller skate type shoes. Yeah, I have no such have no such ability.
I mean it would it made you go faster, kind of like one of those walkways that you have in the airport. Who doesn't want to go a little bit faster.
Yeah, that was the way the guy repped it too, where he was like, we have these factory workers. They're like, I have the best job in the company. Now, it's so fun skating around on these things. Nobody said that to you, bro, Like, don't lie.
It's a nice thought.
He also claimed that there's not been one fall or injury with these things, on which I just I do not believe because I almost fell down to testing these out. I'm sure if you're carrying like heavy boxes like it's it's very easy for your weight to get to get away from yourself when you're literally walking on wheels like and it can be controlling. It actually is more intuitive
than I thought it would be. But mistakes happen, and those those sorts of big claims are a little bit a little bit sketchy.
I found myself kind of waving my arms a little bit out in front of me to keep my balance. I wasn't like confet on them.
Yeah. Yeah, just watching you both, I could see like, well, yeah, people are gonna get hurt. Now, I don't I am sure because it seems to be easy enough to use
that I suspect it would. You could really get a lot of extra money out of your workers as an employer using these things, but at the cost of some of them are gonna like fucking eat shit and hurt themselves, which is not like in the grand scheme of corporate evil, especially at the show where everybody's like talking about the potential of AI to eliminate tens of millions of jobs. Not really, it doesn't really scan. And I think we're still putting this on the good episode because like they
worked in a way that they were technically impressive. We just found it kind of upsetting that they were bragging about, like you can get more money out of your already exploited workforce with these. Yeah, but I could see someone just getting these and because they would allow you if you like, yeah, if you if you live in a walkable city.
City neighborhood, it can make your commute times much faster.
And still probably safer than like you less risk maybe than like a bike or something like that.
Yeah, I want to see somebody wear those at a roller skating rink.
So yeah, that's called that's called Shift Robotics. I believe they're based out of Texas. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about. For both mine and Robert's job, we use a lot of computer screens. I'm looking in Roberts hotel room right now where we're recording. He has a laptop hooked up to a second monitor. I have a very similar setup I have. I have a laptop
and a secondary monitor on my desktop. I have like three or four monitors always running at the same time, just because of the absurdity of what our works sometimes entails, so it could be hard to get things done on a single screen. And we saw this one product that looked just like a like a very like thick keyboard with a with a touchpad, but it had these like AR glasses attached. Now, AR is a tricky field. We tried a lot of AR stuff last year. Most of it some of it was okay, some of it was
a little bit finicky. But this company was called Sightful. Yeah, and what this basically was is that it was a fully functioning computer but instead of a instead of just having a regular display, it has a display built into these yeah, into these glasses.
The product itself looks like just the bottom half of a laptop, like the keyboard part that holds the PCU and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to the keyboard part that holds like a set of glasses that are plugged in directly to the laptop. That's how it like looks.
And when you put the glasses on, you get like four screens that pop up. The screens aren't too big, they're not too small. You can change the size by using using the touchpad. And this require a lot less like like a like a focusing like you usually when you put on ar AR glasses you have to kind of dial in the focal length to make them look right. But this was all very clear. That text was easy to read, Changing from one screen to another was pretty
was pretty easy. They had they had They had a pass through mode like a lot of good ar does. They had a mode where you can lock the screens in place. You can turn your head and they don't move. They had another version where you just with like keystrokes, you could turn your head and the screens follow you, so it was it was a pretty It was a pretty useful device.
Yeah. You could press a button and it would go the screens would disappear, Like if you're walking while using it, you can press a button and it would go clear, so you wouldn't see it, but you could see where you were.
Walking pass through.
Yeah, Like I typed an email or two, and like did some googling on it, and I very quickly adapted to the screens being virtual but still using a physical keyboard.
I we didn't get like motion sick with it. It was not. Now. I think this is like either the first or second iteration of this product.
First the first to market, the first.
Yeah, I think there is some ways to improve. It runs its own Android operating system, which you know, if you're trying to download applications. The fact that I can't run Windows or Linux or even Apple's system, you know that that could be a bit of a limitation. It only had like two hundred and two hundred and like fifty gigs of work.
It wasn't really a full storage and power. It's a little bit beefier than your phone.
Yeah.
The company the product, by the way, is called spacetop. Yeah, sightful as the company's spacetop is the is the actual product itself, and yeah, I.
Uh, we're gonna We're gonna keep our eye on it.
Yeah, I wouldn't buy the first in of this thing. It's about twenty two hundred bucks, which is like upper mid level cost for a laptop.
My issue is at based on how expensive it is, the laptop itself isn't powerful enough to justify that price. Certainly, the fact that you know, I can act like I have four monitors wherever I go, that is, that is very convenient. I think I just need the laptop to be a little bit more powerful, especially with how many tabs they have open at all times. Having only eight gigs of RAM just will not cut it. But I'm certainly certainly hopeful that we'll be able to see small improvements going forward.
Indeed, yeah, they had mentioned it as being a web first device instead of anything else.
That makes sense.
Yeah, Yeah, it's like a Chromebook, and I think in terms of like it's actual yeah, efficacy.
Very similar to a Chromebook, like operation.
Wise, But my hope is that like the kind of technology they've developed, it will get you know, if it's successful, they'll make more parers. Now I do kind of worry about how successful it will be, because, like Garrison and I were both like, oh, this is perfect for what we do, but we have a very specific use case for our machines. And I'm not sure like how many other people are in our position. But I was really impressed with just like how well it immediately worked.
Yeah, No, I I was happy with it. You can hook up an external monitor if you if you want to, So that's that's nice.
And I am a glasses wearer, and so one stuff that they had for me is that they took my glasses and approximated my prescription.
Oh that's cool.
Yeah, and they slid on these magnetic sort of like eyeglass pieces onto the headset that you're wearing, or like the glasses that you're wearing. That way, I could actually use it without wearing my prescription glasses.
Nice.
Yeah, And that was really It's stuff like that that lets you know that people making something didn't just aren't just like trying to rush some shit out the door to make money, Like, Oh, you put some thought into that, motherfucker. I appreciate that. And this all leads us the easily the best product of the entire show. Honestly, the only one really worth talking about, Garrison. Will you hand me the flying car brochure? So Jesus Christ, this is the
Cees of flying cars. Robotaxis is the term we heard a lot. We went to a panel that was like serious people in the robotaxi industry, which they admitted does not exist, by the way, Advance to air mobility, Advance of air mobility. It was the acronym AAM. Yeah. No, there are several companies that are using effectively like these are.
Some of them are like ultra lights. There was one of the companies that came here bragged like you can buy buy a plane that doesn't require a pilot's license because it's so light, but it's still a plane, which seems like a horrible idea to me. But there are some real companies who are like testing out electronic aero taxis. Some of these are this is not vaporware. These products exist. Now, what doesn't exist is the legal framework to allow people
to do this. Like the panelists were like openly like, we want this to be an industry, but first there have to be it has to be legal right now, we don't know, like they they're still trying to figure out, like what the rules are going to be. They're hoping by the end of this year the FAA puts out like a temporary rule set about how robot air robo taxes work and also how they called them verta ports, which is because these are all vertical takeoff and landing craft.
At least the one that we saw on the show floor looks like a looks like a Lamborghini with a massive drone, like a.
DGI type round top. And that's that's the one I want to talk about, because all of those were real products. The exit paying the air road product, in my opinion, is absolutely not. It's built as a low altitude air mobility exploring. Yeah, it looks like a huge drone like you'd buy a fucking best Buy attached to a Lamborghini. And apparently the whole drone part, all of the rotors fold back into the body when you're driving it as a car.
Like a like a transformer, like a transformer.
And the reason why I say this is the best product in cees is not that I think it would work or be safe. Because we talked to the people and the person who was told to us is their technical expert, and neither of them could answer if it had airbags. They did say probably. They did say probably.
Which isn't what you want to hear.
No, that you should have that answer.
That's not a tough question, that's not a gotcha does your car have airbags?
First, First, the PR guy that we were talking to was very open about knowing almost nothing about the technical aspects of this device. And then when we talked to the technical person, they too didn't know very much about it, so, which just isn't very reassuring.
Like and I even tried to do it the easy way where I was like, well, I know ultra light aircraft you don't need a pilot's license for so do you need Does this qualify? And they were basically said, no, we don't know, we don't know yet. Yeah, it'll take some kind of license probably. What kind of range does it get? They said twenty kilometers by.
Air about twenty minutes per.
Chart, Yeah, which seems like a dangerously short amount of time to be flying you and a loved one potentially in a thing it is.
It is pretty low altitude. I think they said it maxes out at around one hundred meters.
One hundred No, they said one hundred meters.
Sorry, So it's really not for going up super high. And I when we went to the more like expert panel, a lot of these use cases for this, they imagine is kind of replacing helicopters in cities. There's like metavac use cases. But a lot of people were talking about like testing these things out in New York where rich people use helicopters to get around the city, and this is what they want to replace them with. Because these can be purely electric, these can be much more because
these can be much quieter. So that was what a lot of what they were talking about. However, again most of the panel was just them just complaining that the government hasn't done enough work to make this a real industry.
Garrison, I got, you're not aware of this topic. You just handed me the flyer we got from them that I don't think either of us read through. Here's their story.
Oh oh boy.
Sale Beyond Limits twenty thirteen. Zoo Deli ignited Erot with a daring dream to turn the enchanting broomsticks of Harry Potter into tangible wonder. Oh no, a tribe of daring mind set forth on the thrilling journey of crafting electric marbles that could take humans to the skies through tireless exploration. The first ever prototype, the flying motorcycle. Gracefully, this is all a Harry Potter thing. Some madman from China fell so in love with Harry Potter that he made a
death car. I'm back around to loving it again.
Average tech industry guy, brain poisoned by Harry Potter creates death device.
I feel like this guy and the plant pet sky are probably like pretty tight.
They're both the same kind of why is there somebody apocaly ten based around Harry Potter?
What's going on in this industry?
And it is so the other brochure they had it shows like the flying car, the modular flying car, which looks like a cyber truck because if it had like you know, you can get a truck, you can put like a bed cap on the beds. It's basically like a big it's like a cyber truck with one of those, but the bed cap opens up to deploy like a quad copter thing that human beings can ride in.
Kind of like sound wave in Transform, which.
Is like it's a cool idea from like a kid's point of view. I think the idea here is that, you know, John McAfee used to do this thing where he would live in the desert with a cult of weirdos and they would fly around on gliders until he got his nephew and an old man killed in a glider crash. This is this is the dream yeah, of that Harry Potter fan.
I mean, I this The reason why I'm actually very pro this product is because the only people that are going to use these are really rich. Yes, yeah, I think there's a high chance this could take out a lot of them.
This this has the best chance of dropping multiple billionaires of anything since the Death's Up.
Like we comel from one hundred meters in the air, just crashing out of the sky in Santa Monica and san billionaires just taking out whole lanes of traffic.
Imaginers, I meagine you're walking through the park one day and a billionaire comes flying down from the sky and lands in like a two million dollar drone.
The prototype that they say they got to fly was two tons. Wow, you could really do a lot of damage with that. Well, this is this is all quite exciting. Keep your eye on the sky, folks, Maybe wear a helmet for a while until this all shakes out. Like there's the story in the news right now that like some dude in Portland had the fucking door of that Alaska Airlines flight in his backyard. And I can't wait until that's like a third to Elon Musk, just like Lance in someone's yard.
Like two million dollars.
Oh yeah, yeah. And by the way, if fucking a billionaire's carcass winds up in my lawn, I got a new punch bowl with their skull, I'm gonna harvest their pros. We call the billionaires division the billionaire's dividend. Well, all right, everybody, anyone Tapia, you have anything to plug?
Oh yeah, you can find me on Twitter or x at cut Mora, or if you want to learn a little bit more about me and my interactive and immersive work, you can see my work at tabiamora dot com.
You can also see her work in my book A Brief History of Ice, where she did all the illustrations, or in my book After the Revolution where she did all the illustrations, or in the sequel which will come out when I finished those last two fucking chapters like three years from now, huh or in Vegas, yeah tomorrow to Laura. All right, well we're done.
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.