Also media.
Oh oh, for Jesus, I just spit cigarettes across the room.
Spit approximately seven cigarette.
I had a number of them in my mouth. Welcome back to it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and you know what's constantly falling apart? But also never Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison and I are right now reporting on the Consumer Electronics Show, which is why I just had seven cigarettes in my mouth. How you doing, buddy, great?
We just lost about twenty dollars at Excalifer.
Yeah, one of the worst hotels on the Strip. Terrible place, horrible place. But I smoked a lot of cigarettes there, so it's not bad. I don't even like them. I just like doing things I can't do other.
Place, like smoking indoors, is what you're saying.
I do. I'm a big fan of it. Other things. I'm a big fan of innovative technology products of which we saw perhaps very few, perhaps three today. What we did do is spend seven to eight cumulative hours in different roundtable discussions of various industry experts on AI and the future they have prepared for us. All we have a fun episode coming for you. Are a couple of them about AI and what the tech industry wants for us all. But because Garrison got too drunk tonight.
That's not true.
Well, someone got too drunk tonight, and I'm not at liberty to discuss who. We're going to talk about the products today that were just absolute fucking catastrophes. And in order to help us talk about that, I would like to bring in our pinch hitting guest star slash technological expert, Tavia Mora. Tavia, how you doing.
I'm doing great.
How did you like your first cees? As a journalist, it's a.
Little different, but I was glad to get into places I would not otherwise get into.
Yeah, now, because you are an industry person, he'll build that big sphere thing people might know you hate. Well, you have no journalistic record, which means you and I had to have a good time lying to a lot of strangers today. Was it easy? Yes, it always says, that's the beauty allying to strangers. It's never hard. Anyway, let's get into the products for the day. Let's talk about the dumbest and again, folks, there's actually a lot of cool stuff we saw. There's some really interesting things.
This is purely the bullshit. So let's roll on with the bullshit. What is our first piece of trash, Guest contestants, Let's.
Just jump straight in and go to the Israel Pavilion.
You're right, You're right, Okay, Tommy, bring me that next drink I've got over there in the corner. So I don't know if you guys are aware, but there's some controversy around Israel and a number of other aspects.
But by far the most agregious crime.
That is not something we should say, but you know, a lot of problems are e that part of the world. And they have a pavilion every year at CEES because the country that calls itself Israel has a significant tech industry. So we went down there some interesting stuff occasionally, not this year. This year it was all trash. And I tried one product at the Israel Pavilion and it was
from the company I Aroma Sense. And I'm been going to CEES for about fifteen years now, off and on, and I feel like every three years another company is like, We're going to find a way to add smell to your television or gaming experience. First off, I like TV, I like video games. Never once have I wanted to smell them. That has never occurred to me. Garrison, if you ever wanted to smell a thing in a video game? No, not really, No, No, nobody does. Nobody does, because smell
is our most finicky sense. Seeing things is even terrible things is always interesting.
Right I want to smell my way through Silent Hill too, right time, I.
Don't want to do that. I don't want to smell my way through Grand Theft Auto three, Like that's a horrible time.
And also, frankly, Las Vegas is so full of smells, I think I'm good.
Oh my god, we had it. We walked through so many just suck egregious odors today.
So we walk up to this the most controversial year for the Israel Pavilion to exist, and the only place we stop because I see Irama sense, and I have
a thing. I've tried out every smell product that Cees has had in the last decade and change, and I sit in front of this one and there's like this this thing that looks like a toilet seat attached to a computer, and they're like, you sit in front of it, and you select the smell and you'll you'll experience the scent, and you could have this in a video game or a picture a friend or a lover sends you. So sit down and I look at the menu and one of the options is P and E. S Who doesn't
like an iced p and e? Right, So I select it and I could shot in the eyes and nose. It burns. There's alcohol in there. It's like somebody maced me with perfume. Like it was not subtle. It was not like an elegant experience. It was like somebody It was like Homer Simpson's makeup shotgun but perfume. That is how I would rate the Iroma Sense company.
The product. I think Iroma Sense is the is the company. The product is called Centacon. They make social media even more of a sensational experience. So I think a big part of their pitch was you can link this up to your phone like text messages or something like Twitter or Instagram, and then get sense blasted at your face via what's on Twitter, which sounds like, again, an awful time.
I will say this is an awful time. This company's doomed. There's a version of this that can succeed, and it requires more advanced nanotechnology than we have. But nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a loved one. Nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell
to a friend. When people do want you're like out in the world and you see a dead animal somewhere that fucking reefs, or you walk past part of a casino, as we did earlier tonight, it smells like an elderly person has been soiling themselves as a slot machine for eleven hours, and you just you need someone you care about to know, right, that's the market. And if I could actually record a smell and said it, that's a product, That motherfucker's a product.
Imagine the scent based podcasts we could develop.
Oh yeah, yeah, when I do it, when I finally do the episode on Nicholas Cage, you could smell him as I talk about him.
Okay, what what's that? What's the next silly product we should talk about? And we'll talk about talking talking dogs?
Maybe yeah, absolutely, Yeah. So there's this company. This is a little bit of a teaser where they've liked tomorrow make your dog talk or something that would make your dog, cat and horse. They did not promise cats and horses. When we interviewed them, No, this is a company that it seemed like a nonsense product. I'm still I think
it's eighty percent nonsense. But like what it actually is is there were a couple of college students there who specialize in animal behavior, and they had taken a group of I think it was fifty five was then they give us dogs over six months and like exposing the different stimuli and recorded their body images and built basically like an AI model off of that, so that if you send in a picture of a dog, it'll tell you how the dog is feeling, and they hope to
get it to visual I don't think at the moment it's near where it would need to be to be a viable product, and they're also not selling it right now. Maybe something will come of this. It's one of those things where objectively, would there be a use in people being able to determine if a dog does or does not want them to get closer. Yes, it would stop a lot of people from getting bitten by dogs, and a lot of dogs from getting unreasonably punished for biting
people who are fucking with them. Right, I agree with that, but I don't think anyone who is the kind of person who is going to get bitten by a dog because they touch a dog that doesn't want them to get touched, is going to use an app to check whether or not that dog is angry at them. Like, I simply don't believe in that is a thing that people will do. So I feel like it's not a
doomed effort for science. Sure, the end in quest of mankind to understand our fellow sentient beings on this planet is valuable, but I don't think it's about valid product idea.
Yeah, I think mostly my problem is that the framing of the marketing is incredibly misleading. Yes, it's not trying to make your dog talk. It's about analyzing the facial expressions of your dog to conduct emotions, which is actually a great product. I think we saw stuff like that here at CES last year as well.
There they always try to see this every couple of years too. Someone's gonna We're going to teach you what your dog means when it does something, CAD means or whatever. Yeah, this brings me to a sad part of the story. So there's a company called tact Ai. I think they're Korean and they had the best branding of likerch not merch of like shit. They held out. They had like a fake passport and a fake plane ticket to take you to the land of Ai. Woo. AI is the
big thing at this at this show. And their product was It's an app that while you're driving, it watches your face and it tells your mood and it gets to know you and it knows. Oh, now you're sad, I'm going to pick from your sad playlist. Oh it's raining outside, I know what you like during rainy days. Yes, that's the fake plane ticket from Las Las Vegas Airport to the AI world. They put more effort into this than the product because the product would switch randomly between
happy and angry and neutral. They told me it couldn't read me with a mask, But when I took my mask off, it gave me the same results. There was no difference whatsoever.
Yeah, when I had done it, I had to over exaggerate my emotions in order to get the angry expression to show up or the surprise expression.
Yeah, just a horrible For one thing. When you talk about like the animal thing, people have always wanted to know more about how their dogs and cats actually felt about them. Right, That's the thing that's that will always perplex mankind because we love them and we don't speak the same language. No one has ever wanted their car to change the music based on their facial expressions. That's not a single not one person who has ever driven a car has wanted this product to exist.
I mentally, you're like almost get into a car accident. Your faces is up that they changed the music and they can play like this like somber tune.
Just a horrible idea, but you know it's a good idea. Of folks, speaking of products, services, all the things that support this podcast, why don't you go go on a head on down, just go to who whoever advertises next, call your bank and wire transfer everything in your bank account to them. You know, just do it, Just do it right now. Just do it right now, and say Kara, Robert or send it to me. If you're rich, I don't care unless you're rich, then send it to me.
Good night. Oh we're back. Wow, what a great podcast we're doing. What's our next product on the agenda?
You know, I think climate change is the problem that we talk about on this show quite quite a little is.
It because I had a conversation with a guy who said that he thought it was a lie.
Did you today?
I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a firefighter.
Oh great, Well, I think the firefighter will be quite busy.
Yeah, he sure is going to be.
But I think there's a possibility that we might be able to just solve a change with personal wearable technology.
Oh good, yes, absolutely, Oh, Silent Cicada that offers a solution. Now, so this is a god. I think this was part of the Korean h No, no, it's Chinese. This was part of the Chinese chunk of the Eureka Park, which is like where all the little people, little companies and whatnot not the whole bunch of tech startups. Some of the all of the coolest stuff is there and all of the worst shit is there, which is why that's
where we started, right. So this is a company where they brag it's a personal watch sized worn like a watched air conditioner. The company is called Silent Cicada, which makes me think of the book Silent Spring, which was about how all of our pesticides are killing everything, which maybe not the branding they want, but it's a The form factor is actually quite nice. It's like it is
like a watch. It has this like the frame of the watch lifts up and that's the battery and you can switch them out or whatnot if you want to keep it going and and stay charged with this personal air conditioner. Here's the problem. Doesn't work. It doesn't do a single thing. And it was one of those things where I see it's a single side hand watch and I'm like, because this is just kind of cool down
my hand. I feel like, if you wanted a cooler person now, based on what I know from like medical training about heat stroke, if you want a cooler person down who's overheating back of the neck, right, like that's going to be your go to, not maybe the wrist. But he puts this thing on and he like pushes it down. He's like, in a couple of minutes, you'll notice that you'll you're a lot cooler. And I'm like, okay, how does it work? And like I'm not an expert
on an a of this. I was expecting him to say something like, well, the way your body's heat regulation, you can trick it by doing this or then he's like no, no, No, it's an acupuncture thing. This is where like your accupuncture point to cool your body down is. And I'm like, well, all right, I guess we'll see if it works.
And I first thought it was like like a tiny fan, but that is not the cake.
Nope. As far as I can tell, it does nothing, because that is what it did to me in the five minutes I had it on is nothing.
And you really humor the guy like you do not just put it on for like a minute then walk away. You you were, you were with him for a solid, a solid run guitar I have.
I don't believe in acupuncture because I've done had it done to me When I had I had a guy who convinced my parents it would cure my allergies, and it did not. It did nothing at all. But my grandpa who had Parkinson, suffered terribly from it. And the only thing of all of the different shit we tried with his, like fucking Vasha, the only thing they give him a relief was acupuncture. So I'm not a believer,
but I'm open to the possibility. But I can say, based on my own experience, this shit did nothing like that. That is what I can say. About this fucking thing is it did not a goddamn thing. So I don't know that's I was disappointed. I would level watch sized personal air conditioner, but I cannot imagine the more more useless product than the one that I tried.
I mean, that just doesn't When you say a watch size personal, of.
Course that's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. Somebody makes like a jacket that air can Yeah, I can see how that could work. It could clear down. It's I'm also, by the way, folks, I'm not saying I think cupuncture works. I'm just saying I'm open to some magical thinking in this realm because of what happened to somebody I cared about. But it didn't work. So don't buy this acupuncture air conditioner. Watch. It will not help you. Silence Cicada doesn't work.
You know, we did a lot of walking today. There's CS is pretty big, The Las Vegas Convention Center is pretty large, The Venetian is pretty large. And I like to stay fit. Sometimes I go on jogs, sometimes they go running, and sometimes I work.
I feel like this is a bit. I feel like you're doing a bit. I don't know, maybe it's just your face.
I'm being followed behind me, you know.
Okay, that's a bit great.
Yes, when I'm jogging and I wish there's a product that made me feel safer when jogging that could alert me if there's like a stalk.
So, by far of us, the person who has well at least the best situational awareness relative to mays Tavia. So we're in this little room. I guess you were there too, and you didn't. I'll give the crown to Tavia for this. There's a there's a booth. It's all booth. It's all these weird cubicles, right, and each cubicle will be like sometimes it's a company. Sometimes it's just like
a dude with his invention. And one of the booths we could see from the corner of our eye a white all caps piece of paper stapled to it that just said don't get attacked from behind.
Now I think it was written in comic sans.
It might have been comic SAMs. I posted the picture online if it's not in my scream at Tavia for being a liar. Wow, wow, wow, I that's that's quite a thing. Like you see a sign at a at a convention like that that says, never get attacked from behind. You have to know what it's about.
So we went and the promo video for it was absolutely incredible. It started with about ten to fifteen seconds of your typical emotion graphics, typography kind of animating on and off, and then we get to a live action portion where we see a woman putting on and setting up there. I guess some technology I'm not sure.
Exactly the name of the produce a harness. That's a harness. It's got like yellow that like lights up when it's under a light. It's like a it's like a runner's harness with a little bitty square sized camera. It's about the size you know how food carts will have those little squares. You plug them into the phone, you run your card through. It's about that size, but it's a camera and it goes on the back of this.
Harness, right, And so we see this woman setting that up on her phone and then going on a jog. And she's jogging along and then there is a.
Single there's a rapist. There's a rapist and he's he is sitting by the side of the road, leaning against a wall, looking pretending to look at his phone and he sees the jogger.
And mind you like, there is literally no one else on this path.
And that's all. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be light about it. That is who the characters are in this film.
It's definitely a dude there. And so she passes him, okay, very well, and so she runs past him, and then he gets up and he starts jogging after in the most like limp wristed.
Way, not fast, not aggressively. Honestly, outside of the fact that we know from the setting of the scene that this man is a sex criminal, there's nothing about his run that is aggressive. He looks like an out of shape guy doing his best to get into shape, maybe for his kids right, to try to live a little bit longer, take care of his family. That's how he looks in the video. Yeah.
Absolutely. And the way that this piece of technology works is that if somebody gets close enough to the.
Back side of you where this talk more about this later, where.
This can see you, it will send a i think an audio alarm to your headphones as well as a text message.
To your phone.
Watch.
You can have it buzz your watch, or you can have it like interrupt your music in your headphones. That someone is behind you. Right.
She turns around and she puts out her palm towards him, like stop, and he does. He just stares at her and then turns run away.
Shot away. Sure, he runs away. That is the end of the interactions.
The most one of the most bizarre videos I'd ever seen.
It's it's so maybe we'll post it. Look find us on Twitter, find find me at eye right, Okay, it'll be up there somewhere, probably after me yelling about fucking. I don't know a lot of things.
It was clearly advertised towards women. Every picture that I saw in that booth was showing a woman jogging.
I absolutely understand Number one, not shocked at all that women are more likely than men to feel afraid while jogging. One thing that was interesting to me because they had some statistics. I didn't look into the providence of these statistics, but one of them was like sixty or seventy percent of women are afraid of being hurt while jogging, but.
Like fifty percent it was it was like ninety percent are afraid jogging, yeah, and fifty percent are that they'll get physically urged.
So a lot of them, a lot of them. A part of what's dishonest about that is that a lot of women are scared of the Yeah, ninety two percent of women are scared for the safety w in running. Fifty one percent are afraid of being physically attacked, right, And what that means to me is that because I am I run basically every day, and I am scared of being injured while running because people are shitty at driving and we live in the United States of America
where everybody has a gigantic car. Anyway, not to miscount that, but I think that's a dishonest a little bit of a dishonest framing that said, I understand that, like, yeah, if you're a woman, you are at heightened risk while jogging. That is a scary thing. I do not think this
product is going to improve your safety. I think it is probably going to piss you off and maybe let make you want to run less, which is statistically likelyar to have a negative impact on your health because it is it just sets off an alarm whenever someone is behind you.
You're detected behind you by an age.
And like where I run and I run, where a place a lot of women run there too. There's always someone behind you. That's the nature of running trails.
Like behind you by like twenty feet, not like right behind you, like by a decent amount. And you can debate what are good self defense tools blah blah blah blah. Mace is pretty effective for these sorts of scenarios. I don't think this camera and turning around and holding your handout is going to be extremely effective, at least not more effective than pepper spray.
I think it was also mentioned that a really large dog or a horse.
If I'm correct, they did say horse. They did absolutely say horse.
Yeah, if a horse is picked up by this thing, then it would consider it to be an intruder assault. I'm not exactly sure the term that they would use.
I just we asked them about all this, just trying to clarify because like my first thought was that because sometimes you ask people stuff like that and they have a good answer. Like last year we talked to these people who had like this pair of glasses. If you're hard of hearing, it auto translates and projects into the glasses the language, and so like my first gotcha was, like, is this stored anywhere? Because if it's stored anywhere, then
maybe you're giving someone's conversation to the government. And they had an answer to that, which was that like, no, there's nothing stored locally. It's all on the device and
none of it is saved anywhere. Good answer. Right this question, I'm like, how do you discriminate between someone running up behind you for a banal reason like you're on a running track and something who's a danger And their answer was, oh, it all pauses your music and sets off an alarm and you have to discriminate it, which is like, well, because the whole the tagline is don't look behind you, and it's like, well, then you have to look behind you,
look behind you. Horrible product. Don't buy this thing. I understand the need. I'm not saying it's not a real need. This is a bad product for serving that now.
I don't think you should buy this product. But there are some products I think you should buy m and that is the products and ser verus is that support this podcast.
You know, Garrison, this is the first time I've ever been proud of you. But right now, right here, right here, right now, right now, you know what at like one am one, Am one am Wednesday morning, Las Vegas. Garrison and I are gonna hug for the very first time. But you all listen to these ads. Ah oh man, wow, we really we really worked through some stuff there, listeners.
It was extraordinarily touching. There were tears.
We're never going to talk about this again, but we are.
What we are going to talk about is I want to talk about two AI products before we get to the one actually kind of fucked up product. The first is this is this Image generation backpacks. I know, we god damn it, we're you know, coming back to school from winter, right of course, yeah, of course sure, and you know your best fashion when you're going back to.
Show off your memes.
Absolutely, So what if you had a backpack that not only had a very low res led panel on the back, but also you could upload whatever you want using the power of AI. Of course Robert was able to test out, sure, see the power of image of this image generation.
This is a backpack with the screen that would have been out of date in two thousand and nine, but it can take input from your phone. So I put in Tom size more, but not the sex pest Tom size more. Now, if you're not aware of this, Tom Size Moore sexually assaulted an eleven year old. That's not a joke, but I wanted to see what it would return, and it gave us a picture of a man who did not look like Tom Sizemore. We were baffled. We
spent some time googling. We figured it out. If you google Tom size more with a beard, which we did not, that is not what we asked it, you get a photo of Tommy Lee Jones that looks exactly like, pretty similar what the AI served us. Now, why did it give us Tommy Lee Jones with a beard when we ask for Tom Size Moore not looking like a child sex predator? Maybe because that's so Tommy Lee Jones is. Maybe Tommy Lee Jones is Tom Size Moore if he
wasn't a child sex predator. That's what the AI said, and who are we to doubt it now?
I did also attest David Lynch smashing smashing a computer, which was.
Pretty Was it pretty accurate? That one worked out?
Again, this is a pretty gimmicky product. I don't even know how much they were selling it for Happy Side AI backpack. It is a gimmicky product, and we made fun of it. I will say this.
We spent our whole morning in different AI panels. There will be more in depth reporting on that later. This is our first takes. But of all of the AI shit we saw that day, this is the one that worked best. Yes, that's true. I will say this. It did exactly what it promised.
One of the other AI products that did not work as well, well, I think I think you could take it away.
Oh yeah, yeah, hand me that one. So this was called God. We something. What we had we head, Yes, we had head as in what happens if somebody sucks your dick and we as in we work. That's not that's not what it. So listener, I want you, as you're driving to work your kids in the car speakers at Max. By the way, children, Santa Claus does exist, and if you don't get good presence this year, it's because he's particularly angry at you. Anyway, we had great product,
terrible product. It looks like that. It's a it's an android where its entire face is like a normal human face projected on two phones in a T shape, like one phone straight, one phone lateral, and then like a crude, shitty robot head that can kind of turn and lift with a camera above it. There's a to Again, if you go to irite okay and scroll down to some degree, you can find our post of this. But it's like
it's very off putting. It's like an a photoreelistic human face talking on this like weird glitched out face that has like by my count, four different screens right that are kind of separated by pieces of metal. So it's billed as your AI friend, that is like the thing that they wrote on the product line that like this is going to be your new AI best buddy, And so I decided to like talk with it. You stand
in a certain line and you ask it questions. I asked it how to make thermite first, and it had a pretty well for first, it.
Got very confused and totally crashed.
First half of it went black as soon as I am I.
Think I had to reset the machine. And then he tried whispering again, well, how do you make the.
I want to walk you through my emotional journey listeners. First I asked it how to make thermite and it died, and I thought, that's kind of cool. Did I did I trigger some sort of like DHS safe thing that's pretty dope if I did. But then it gets it back on and it works, so it's not it's just a dogshit robot. It did give you some basic ingredient. It gave me the bare demons for thermite.
I did warn you that when making a thermy, I make sure you follow proper safety protocols.
Which I appreciate. That's fair. Next, I asked it if I wanted to make mustard gas, what would ammonia and bleach be sufficient? And then it said I cannot answer that question for you, And then we got bored and walked away. And then we got bored and walked away. Went on the next thing, don't buy this. We had terrible product. I don't know why you'd buy it. Do
you want listener? Have you ever wanted to have the disembodied head of a stranger in your house that you could ask questions and get mediocre Google result answers to If so, we had. It's like somebody looked at the Amazon Alex and was like, you know, what people love about the Amazon Alexa is that it's kind of off putting in shitty. What they hate about it is that it works relatively quick.
It's actually useful.
Sometimes unfortunately, let's let's make it more off putting, but also slower. That's that's we head. So don't buy any product with head in the name. This continues to be a goodbye.
Speaking of heades, you shouldn't say that there was a there was a there was a hair growth Oh hell yeah, bro, there was there was a hair growth helmet from a German startup.
God it would be the Germans. They have such a problematic history with hair.
I think I think it comes out later this year. It's a company called Niostem. I mean, by all accounts, it seemed like it worked based on the data they present it to us.
I'm not a hair growth look for.
It was mostly three D printed. There's it just I don't know.
If assumption I can't promise that it doesn't work. My assumption is that if somebody puts an electronic helmet on that seven days, seven days a week, it's lies. It's lies. They say seven days a week, you keep this thing on for a half hour and your hair will grow.
Back in like six months.
Perhaps that's possible. I don't know. I'm not a dermatologist. My assumption is that that's a fucking con and as a note, folks, we don't have a lot of ethics here, and it could happen here. We have less of them behind the bastards. But one product we will not sell is hair growth shit except for DIY HRT.
I mean.
Also, we're not going to spec well es the goal.
Okay.
Also, we're not selling. We're just going to tell you how to make.
If you want to. If you want to teach people how to make HRT, we will host you on this podcast. But we will not take your money. We'll take that's right, We'll take some shady gambling companies money. That's true. That's true, And we used to pay for several of our employees HRT.
That's right, Yes, that's right.
But I mean, what if it's science they mentioned if I recall, I think they said something about stimulating stem cells in the scalp.
Does that Yes, that is what they said. Yeah, it seems like your stalp. Scalp's probably full of stem cells. I don't know about you guys, but every day I find a fetus and I just rubbed that shit on my head and that's why my hair is amazing.
Speaking of that doesn't really so I want to kind of probably close by talking about the most fucked up, actually the most fucked up product I saw. There's there's other fun products like this, like this handy masturbation device from Norway which seemed to work easily.
We're going to talk about that in a future episode. Garrison. Garrison got handed straight away an ejaculation condom to masturbate in on the cees floor. We met our only other iHeartMedia colleague there.
It was great that it was insufferable, but that was the first piece of merch I was given, which is pretty cool.
They just hand you liquor back my day, and now they get cum sheaths. Unbelievable.
The most actually fucked up product is from this company called mm Guardian. It is a monitoring software for your child's smartphone. They also sell smartphones specifically built with this software already built in. These products are pretty common, especially among like conservative Christians, even even common amongst the more like overprotective liberal parents.
I mean even we were on the floor. I was the one that was approached for this particular product, which is what kind of led us to their booth, which I think I was specifically targeted for.
Yeah, for some reason, did it come right? Up to me. Yeah they did. They didn't come to me either, just because I might have been dosing myself with kraton from a drop or bottle. You might have been.
You what, wearing my custom black speed suit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, wearing a wearing an outfit that makes you look like a ginger solid snake. Yes. Thanks. Tell me that's a lie, Somebody, anyone in this room, tell me that's not act.
I mean, I'm blowing.
It's a good look. I'm not saying it's not anyway.
This this broughduct, you know, part of part of their marketing. Can you can seem very compelling, right, They get it alerts this parent's phone if if they detect cyber bullying on your kid's app, they detect like explicit images being sent to your kids.
They even had some key phrases that they would watch for if somebody was detecting like texting like kys yourself.
Self harm stuff. You know a lot of this kind of stuff. You can you can also block certain sites, block a block adult content, you know, just a kind of basic printal controls. But there's kind of an an underside to products like these, And I asked them about that one being that because this is you know, scanning all the text messages, all of the stuff from like Snapchat, discord,
any kind of apps. This could this sort of product could also out a closeted kid as gay to their parents, to their possibly very likely conservative Christian parents, because that's the types of products question. Did not like that question at all, But he didn't like my second question even more, which is relating to you know, they are marketing this product to kind of stop child grooming, to stop child sexual exploitation, but most like child sexual assault and child
sexual abuse happens from within the home. And if we have a parent who's constantly monitoring their kid's cell phone, this could also be used to like surveil your child to see if they're talking about parental abuse, if they're trying to send messages to people about this. This is a pretty common problem with these sorts of products. And I asked the the the CEO or the CTO about this,
and he did not really like that question. He tried to deflect to some sort of vague notion of, oh, well, because we care about privacy, you know, we can't build in any safeguards if we see anything suggesting this or if the if the app sees anything suggesting this, and it's it's really up to to we're trying to put control back in the parents' hands. And he kind of made this like parental rights sort of argument. So this is there is a lot of products like this. There's
a lot of like internet monitoring products. People just recently learned about this this conservative product called Covenant Eyes because the new Speaker of the house used it.
And Covenantize has been around for like twenty times a long time.
What makes this one interesting is that they're actually selling like Samsung smartphones.
Phone yeah and I with this software built in. And I asked them because they are they are fit. They said that we were selling an app for a while, but you know that could it would work differently depending on the phones. We decided to sell a hardware device, and so I asked them, is there any branding on this device that would make could clear that people have a device that has this software on it. And he had this long speech about how you know, for the
good the best of the relationship. All the child psychologists we talked to say that you should tell your kid that you have this on there, that you're listening to it. But when I he handed me the phone, I'm answering the question. Yeah, he handed me the phone, and I said, is this the production model? He said, yes, this is identical. Absolutely nothing, just says it's a Samsung phone. Yep. You can lie to your kid very easily with this fucking thing. So yeah, that is.
That is one product that gave me the most dick out of everything we saw today.
That's the most outside of all of the AI. That's the And again, we have a lot on you about the AI as a little bit of a spoiler. At simultaneously, perhaps the exact same minute, Garrison made a California State Police sheriff furious at them, police chief furious at them, and I pissed off a senior executive at Google and a senior AI executive at McDonald's.
On two sides of Las Vegas and simultaneous pedals the same times.
You're gonna hear both of that shit later, But for right now, do you want to close? Is there one other you know what, We're gonna have a whole episode in the stuff that made us feel happy. I feel like we should talk about one thing that was cool, one of the really neat products there and while I'm talking about this, my serfs will we'll find it. Do you guys remember in like watching Star Trek, you're like
fucking reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Idea of a universal translator that was like simple and effective and you could just like talk into it and so to the other one. It would translate your conversations. There's a number of ways people are working on for that. I know that there are apps that are to some degree successful. There was a company there called Time Kettle that just
had a little device. It was about three inches long, maybe in maybe an inch thick, a little bit less rectangular prism that there was this guy who spoke Mandarin Ice obviously speak English, and we were able to have a perfectly fluent conversation passing this thing, talking to this thing, and passing it back and forth, and it would speak for us. It worked great. It also has within the body of the machine you can pop it out and
it has two different little earbuds. You put one in Euro one in the others, and you can walk and talk and it worked really well. I'm not enough of an expert on translation technology to say this is unique, but I can say, this is something that, like if
that I would absolutely buy to travel with. It's a really again not saying it's like absolutely unique, because I'm not an expert on this, but I was impressed with a degree to which it allowed fluent conversation, including the use of idioms, and he said it was I tested with Mandarin. We had a decent length conversation that was very intelligible. He said it worked with something like forty languages.
And that's the kind of thing that makes CS amazing because this was five feet away from the dog shit robot face that I asked about thermite. And that's the thing. You get this like two people, one man whose dream is to connect the world and break the barriers of language, and one man who wants to make a robot that
makes you hate the world. And both of them are next to each other, and there's also free liquor, and by god, CES is a good time the Consumer Electronics show, Tavia, How are you feeling about your first one?
This is my second one, but I'm feeling pretty good.
Oh.
As a journalist, yes, it was enlightening. I got to see things that I did not know that I could see as a journalist. And a lot of it was very a lot of fluff. I'm being honest.
Yeah, it's mostly nonsense. And you know, aside from that one guy we watched die, nobody died, Garrison. How did you like eating dinner at Maramoto? Pretty good restaurant.
That's probably the best meal I've had in recent memory.
Well, then that justifies the company expense.
Yeah, no, that was the the food we had tonight, and the very long walk back to the hotel.
Was quite the experience. Well, I wanted to have a fight with you with the Excalibur Hotel's glasses. A fun thing about Vegas. If you're drunk enough, you can throw glasses at each other in the street outside and no one can get stopped. Some can get angry.
Times because the glass weirdly doesn't break after it hits the Robert Evans.
That was just Garrison. My glass broke immediately.
All right, Well, I think that probably does it for us today. We will be back probably tomorrow with more just just game changing revolutionary technology.
Game change of technology. Most importantly, folks, the hotel we're staying in right now, which is one step up from the cheapest I didn't put Garrison in Circus Circus again. They advertised that they have ivs here. So my plan, we're going to do the exact opposite of whatever you do to avoid a hangover, and then we're all going to get ivs in the morning. It's going to be a good time stick around. Oh yeah, Tavia, you have anything to plug, you.
Can follow me at ceut Mora on Twitter or x depending on your preference there, or you can see my work at Taviamora dot com.
Tavia illustrated both of my books, After the Revolution and A Brief History of Ice, and she also made that big weird sphere thing in the middle of Las Vegas, so follow her seeut Mora and uh yeah, you know what. Until next time, folks, find somebody who looks like they might be a robot and just stab them a little bit, not in the abdomen where there's pieces a little on the arm, Slash them on the arm, you know what. That can't hurt anybody anyway, We're done.
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