The robots, phones and Lego of CES 2026

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With industry leading AI, automation and continuous monitoring. So whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. The results, according to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slash over $500,000 a year in costs and are three times more productive. Establishing trust is an optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Visit Vanta.com slash Voxport to sign up for a free demo today. That's v-a-n-t-a.com slash Voxport. Welcome to the Firstcast, the flagship podcast of the Samsung Frame TV being bad and also the only TV that exists anymore in the entire world. I'm your friend David Pierce, Neyup, Tails here. Hey buddy. Hey, it's been like two weeks. How are you? How was your holidays? It was good. We went home to Chicago. We went to the Balloon Museum in Chicago. You can't pay us to say anything, so this is a very sincere operation. You should go to the Balloon Museum. What is a Balloon Museum? It is perfectly calibrated to appeal to both me and my seven-year-old daughter. In the sense that it is basically just a large warehouse full of balloon exhibits with little signs that insist the balloon exhibits are actually like very pretentious pieces of art. I see. This giant balloon is covered in pencils that mark the walls to make you consider the nature of impermanence. Max gets to go knock a giant balloon around and get dirty. You see how those things combine perfectly? Yes. Anna, my wife, one of her main theories as long as I have known her is that every museum should just be filled with things you can touch. If you can't touch it, what's the point? I can just look at it on the internet. I think this is a terrific point about the world. Every museum should just be tactile in some weird way. This was very tactile. It was very... There's just a room full of bubbles and there's a sign about how the bubbles should make you feel. There's one room. It's a giant ball pit. If I remember correctly, the sign before you enter the giant ball pit stated that it was designed to make you feel every emotion in human existence. I think the answer was that it did. Because first you feel elation that it's a giant ball pit, then you feel excitement, then your daughter says, I lost my shoe in the giant ball pit and then you feel fear or an anger. Then you find the shoe and you feel happiness and elation. It's a lot. There's a woman standing there who goes, take your AirPods out of your pocket. If they're AirPods, fall out of your pocket, we will not find your AirPods. That's her whole job. There's just thousands of AirPods down at the bottom of the list. This is a gold mine. Anyway, that was our trip home. It was very good. But that is pretty good. Is that one of those museums that was explicitly created to be Instagrammed? Because that is a trend I do not enjoy. It is absolutely okay. Okay. But it was very fun. Like the ice cream museums. You remember those when it was just all it was was walls to take pictures on in various places? Yeah. That's not the same. Little signs that say these are actually art. I doubt that these are actually meaningful works of art. It's just when you put them all together in the same building and then let children run through it. And another thing happens to the art. Yeah. It's not to say it doesn't work. Is it you know, Craven and Gross Shore, but it boy does it work. Boy does it work. It was very good. And we also went to the field museum. We saw Sue the dinosaur. It's great. Yeah. The biggest or the most complete T-Rex that you can find. And then you read about the backstory of Sue the dinosaur. Virgis has the strings with others so I won't go into it. But you're like, the dinosaur is cool. Also someone went to jail for finding this dinosaur and you're like, I shouldn't tell my daughter about this for it. It's fun. I'm at the stage of parenthood where all I'm looking for is large rooms because I have one kid who just wants to run around in places and one kid who needs to be pushed around in strollers because that's the only way he falls asleep. So all of our life is just calibrated to what large room can we go to and cause the least damage by being loud and touching things. So we spent a lot of time at the Aaron Space Museum outside of Washington. It was just a delight. No notes on the Aaron Space Museum. So we're back and it is CES week. This feels like an unusually fast explosion back into CES time. It always comes up too early. But this time it's like we went from everyone is still on vacation to everyone is in Vegas in 24 hours. Brutal. And usually the keynotes and assments are they happen early in the week. But there's a whole list of embargoes and pre-events and because everybody can just shove AI into stuff this year. There's just a lot of gadgets like I love a gadget every year. I say the gadgets are back in CES. But this is the most to quote David Pierce. Is this a thing? AI gadget explosion that we have seen in quite a while. And most of it is fully ridiculous. Yes, I agree. So we're going to do two episodes this week. One, we should say is our live event in Vegas on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Bowl. So if you can come out, please come out. It's going to be very fun. We're also doing a decoder, right? We're going to be there doing fancy things before that. Yes, decoder is with Razor CEO Minlin Tan. Razor always has a bunch of wild announcements at CES. No company better at is this a thing at CES than Razor. I'm dying to ask how he makes decisions in this specific context. So it'll be fun. That's also you can go to VoxMeD.com slash decoder live. We'll try to get as many people in the door as we can. But that'll be a good one. All at Brooklyn Bowl back-to-back podcast. It's going to be a great time. And there is bowling, much too much to Neelize, Sugar in I won and there will be bowling. But so, okay, so here's what we're going to do over these two shows. I think what normally happens at CES is there is just a day loose of stuff. And then we spend a couple of days walking around and talking to people and kind of digesting all the news and then we get to sort of look at trends and see some bigger pictures. We're going to do some of the like bigger picture stuff on Wednesday and try to sort of put a lot of this in context. What I want to do now is just talk about just an ocean of gadgets. Is that not okay? We're just going to fly through a billion announcements that just happened. And we're just going to ask, is this the thing over and over again for the rest of the show? Yeah, it sounds good. It sounds perfect. You want to start with robots. We have to start with robots. I think of all of these is this a thing. Robots might be the loudest one at CES this year. The loudest and also the most obviously nonsensical. Like nonsensical to the point where you can just watch the demos or the concept videos. These companies are showing off. I mean, like, that doesn't work. Like I don't even, that's dumb. Like we should start with the LG one. Cloid. Cloid. So it's a home robot. It's at CES. It's supposed to be full laundry. Everyone is promising that these robots will make breakfast, which we will come to. I'm just going to call out our former AI reporter James Vincent. One of my favorite reporters in all of our history. He's sort of a long piece for like Harper's magazine about AI and robots. He has this line in there that is just I want everyone to think about as we talk about these robots. He's like, if you were to just blank sheet design a machine to wash your dishes, you would invent a dishwasher. Right. You would say, I need a waterproof box. And it's just going to hose the dishes down until they're clean. And then the dishes will be clean. You would not at all design a humanoid robot. That's just not what you would do. You would you would have the solution that we have. The problem is we have all those boxes in our houses. And you want one robot to like use them all. So you end up with all these humanoid robots. And you look at them and they are absolutely not ready to actually use these appliances. And so LG's big demo of Cloid was on stage in real time, the live demo, the presenter handed it a towel. One single towel, which it took away from him gingerly. Like I thought he was going to throw the towel and was going to catch it when we were all going to like burst into a plus. No, he like very carefully approaches hands at the towel. And then it turns to the washing machine. And it can't open the door of the washing machine. LG had to make a washing machine with a motorized door. So then the door of the washing machine opens for the robot. And it like stuffs this whole washing machine. And the door closes automatically. And this is what I mean. Even if you watch the demo, you're like, well, that's not any good. You shouldn't have washing machine lock in for your robot. There's so many things about this. So I first encountered this on TikTok from a supercut that our video teammate. Can I just play you a brief part of this supercut for TikTok? It is everything about this just makes me crazy. I facilitate convenience and comfort by orchestrating devices and spaces to manage chores. Like toasting your croissant just the way you like it. Clearing the dishes after meals and keeping your day flowing smoothly. Okay, real quick cause. The way it said smoothly is like full on the last thing you hear before you die. That's just a guy. But you know that's not it doesn't can't actually do that. That's just a guy. Keeping your day flowing smooth. I'm not saying they didn't hire a murderer. I'm saying it's just a guy. This robot just told me that if I get off schedule, it will kill me in my own house. Anyway, I'm just keep playing. The power's motor movement are actuators built on LG's legacy of motion innovation. You're not taking this wet towel for me. Yes, here we go. I'll get the laundry started. Let me show everyone what I get. Look at this dude is like, should I give it to him? He has the guy walks all the way over to the robot. But he like stops. He's like, you know, you don't get the towel or what? And it does and do it. It's just cool. It just stares at him. I know he wants to impress everybody out there. There it is. The washing machine opened for the robot. And I guarantee you that only works if you are fully locked in to the LG think with a Q platform. And that is bad. The whole point of the humanoid robot is you're going to just use this stuff. Just like the whole point of all the AI agents is going to just like go out and web and do stuff. But none of them can actually do that. Right. So you have to have the LG washing machine that is on the same network as your robot to accept the API command to open a door when the robot is holding by a single towel. This is all ridiculous. Yeah. Well, and this is also, I think, a theme that is immediately emerging from CES is that actually the story of AI as we've been talking about for years now is not sort of doing the task at the end of the rainbow, right? Like, teaching a computer to do a thing, not actually that complicated, largely solve the problem, right? Like, how to press order and have McDonald's come to your house, not complicated. On computers anymore. What we're trying to do now is build these like incredible orchestration layers of everything that can make all of it make sense and can problem solve and can be proactive and can do things for you. And the only way your dishwasher becomes more than a dishwasher is if it can do those things for you, right? If it can clear the table and wash the dishes, now we've accomplished something. But there are so many like unbelievable technological breakthroughs between here and it can clear the table and wash the dishes that the idea that it can just sort of slowly roll over to an automatically opening washing machine. That's so far from the solution to the problem here. We've solved all the easy problems, actually, in that demo, all the easy problems are solved and all the difficult ones aren't even on stage. This is what I was saying about James pointing out that you would invent a dishwasher if you just wanted to get the dishes clean automatically. The hard part is actually washing the dishes. Yeah, exactly. We should talk about the switchpot robot, which has a complicated backstory. But does it? This is another fully fantastical concept video. This is actually just a rebrand of a Chinese robot called the onero with the company is called anero. This video they put out their concept video, fully fantastical. None of this works. And there's a part where it holds out a plate of toast and eggs. And it's like, there's no way this thing can make scrambled eggs. Maybe it can put bread in a toaster. But actually, have you watched the Gordon Ramsay scrambled eggs video? It can't do it. There's no way. There's no way it has a sensor suit. There's another one where it's squeegeeing a window. And squeegeeing a window is one of those things. We have a glass shower. We have to squeegee a lot. I think about this all the time. It's one of those things where you actually have to put the right amount of pressure on the window to make the squeegee work. Otherwise, you're just making a mess. Another thing I learned from my seven-year-old daughter who wants to do this test and has not yet learned that she actually pushed down. There's no way it can do it. No. Zero percent chance. It can do all of these things. And the claims that AI is going to make them all better at that is equally fantastical. Because as we've seen, there's not enough world model training data to actually get the models to do these things. You need to get a robot in Joanna Stern's house being remotely operated by a guy who kind of sucks for a long time before these... But you watch this video and it is mind-blowing the things they are claiming. Yeah. But you're going to let it use fire. Right. But that's the thing is unless it does, it's useless. I think one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is when people are surveyed over and over about what they want robots to do in their house, it is these like menial tasks of being alive. Right. Like wash my dishes, fold my laundry, do the sort of basic administrative tasks of life so that I don't have to. Great. That's... I think you could argue that like that is a terrific use of a robot's time and attention so that I can do other things. It only works if it can do all of that. Right. The idea that I'm going to have a robot to wash my dishes and a robot to do the cooking and the fleet of home robots I think is not the correct answer in anyone's mind. So you need something that is actually an all-purpose thing or else it's kind of useless to you. It's just mostly taking up space in your house and that does not feel like it is remotely close. But it is interesting that everyone is pushing on this same idea, even harder. There is a sense that if this is going to happen, the AI that is being worked on now is going to be what enables it. This feels to me so much like the first time we did the voice-disistent revolution where everybody is like, okay, we have the tech. What do we do with it? And we're in such a version of that this year at CES that is like, we have this fascinating new underlying technological architecture for everything. What can we do on top of it? And it's so obvious that everyone's coolest, most exciting idea is humanoid robots in your house washing dishes. Yeah. Again, cooking eggs, which requires there were a lot to use fire. There's no way I would let this thing make fire for me. Like watch these videos and you're like, no, I don't believe you. That doesn't work. Which is really the theme of all of our coverage. You know, there's the idea that you're talking about, which is like there's a cool technology and where can we put it to make it work? I remember the year that everything had a microphone to speak around it because everything was going to be Alexa. Oh yeah. Like smoke detectors with Alexa and them for no reason. And that was enough. Like you just talk to Alexa in every room. I hate to tell you, but we're doing that again this year. We're going to get to that. All right. You know, right next to all these robots is Elon Musk saying that optimists will exist in revolutionized the world and optimists is obviously being teleoperated all the time. Have you seen the video of the guy taking his headset off in the optimist robot falls down? I mean, come on. Like the company spending the most money are nowhere close. And I don't think Switchbot rebranding a Chinese robot is going to beat them to the punch of I will allow this robot to make eggs using fire. And I don't know what the point is. I was Switchbot announced a whole bunch of other stuff at CS. So it probably is just to get hype. Yeah. But at some point, like the bill comes do, right? Like you can't keep announcing stuff that never comes to pass. Like all this stuff, I think is very much just demo. Switchbot says it's going to take orders for this thing. I wouldn't do it. I sure would. They say they're going to take pre orders for it. Yeah. It's not great. The one of the robot I want to mention before we move on is this company Xeroff. It's an AI robotic startup has actually licensed Wally from Disney to build a Wally robot. And the Wally one is only available in China for now. But there's another one I guess coming to the rest of the world. It costs $5,600. I'm not super clear on what it does. But it's very cute. But there is one thing that I just immediately keep thinking of, which is when Wally first came out, Andrew Stanton, who directed the movie for Pixar, gave a lot of interviews as they do. And one of the things he talked about all the time was how they spent years working on the eyes for Wally, the way that each eye sort of individually articulated and the way that his eyes moved and the way that they communicated things. It was like, their big discovery was there's actually nothing you can't do without dialogue, which was the whole reason that movie works. But it's because they spent all of this time building the character of the thing through the eyes. And then you look at the picture of this Xeroff robot and it has none of that. And so it's like, I think, and again, this is the thing we talk about with AI a lot, right? It is convincing and fun to use that actually buys you a ton of runway for the product not working very well. That is the story of chat GPT people like talking to it. So it doesn't really matter if it's any good. But the bar for that with like a robot running around my house is really different. And there's just doing that in real life is going to be very different from doing it in a Pixar movie where you can just control what the thing does at every individual second. And it's just like that gap between here's the thing that I saw in a movie and here's the thing that I can put in your living room that's actually much creepier and sort of dead in the eyes is not going to be great. Look Xeroff says the W1 can transport items, follow you around, serve as a game host and take 13 megapixel photos. I just got to the point where it travels at a maximum speed of 1.1 miles per hour, which means it will follow you around as long as you very slowly shuffle around your house. Yeah, anyway, we should move on. That's the I think robots that so much of the like meta story of CES and technology to me is built in these robots. But there's some others that's happening, including it's Monday afternoon as we're doing this. So I am reluctant to call this now. But I think there's a chance that we already know the gadget of CES and that it's the clicks communicator. Really? I really I really think it's possible. It's a mid-range Android phone. It's the I saw it post the other day from somebody on threads who is like, this is the phone that you would make if you're somebody who has been grumpily reviewing phones for years because it just has all the things that they took away from the phones. It has it's basically it looks like a blackberry. It clicks is run by the guy who's run crackberry. Loves blackberries like this is the legacy there is very long. And it's designed to be sort of a companion phone, but it's also very much it's able to be its own standalone phone. I'm a little confused on the value prop, but it's $500. It has a physical keyboard, it has a headphone jack. It has all of the things that everyone thought they would want very badly in like 2007. Our commenters are very excited about it. I would say our commenters are suspicious that this thing exists and will ship. It notably doesn't say anywhere how much ran it has. It's unfair. I will point out there's been a lot of vaporware lately. Yes. A lot. We just spent some time talking about some of the deepest most ridiculous vaporware that we've ever talked about. And so much AS stuff is vaporware. Mid-range Android phones are not difficult to bring up. Sure. You can just do a five. Like the only person who can't figure out how to ship a mid-range Android phone is Donald Trump Jr. Maybe the only person in the whole ecosystem that hasn't figured out how to ship a mid-range Android phone. I think there's a strong chance clicks is better at this than Donald Trump Jr. Like I guarantee you the clicks communicator will come out before the Trump phone ships. Whatever the Trump phone is. In any form. Yes. Strongly agree. So I just, you know, and there are physical prototypes of the thing. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to see them this week. And I think, I don't know. You know I'm a sucker for a device like this. It's a, a sort of more minimalist, more specific companion device. They show it. It's running a special launcher that they made with Niagara that's designed to be a little more relaxed. And it's all about messaging. And their whole idea is like, this is the phone for when you just want to talk to people. Yeah. It's a pager with maps. Do all the other stuff. It's a pager. So I want that. I get what they're doing. You say that like it's a joke. And I'm like, yes. David, you single handedly made the books. Palma happened for like a enormous number of people. You gave that company such a complex or like we're doing it again with color. And it's like, nope, you got it wrong. No. I get, no, I think I, I'm just saying gadget of CS is a little, I get it. And maybe it's a gadget of CS because it's the one that's most likely to ship for the price they're saying. Maybe it's a gadget of CS just because they've already announced the price and it's not insane. 500 bucks feels right for this thing. So the, the, the issue here, right, is that it's a secondary phone or it's meant to be a secondary phone. And that works great if you have an Android phone. Because you can just log it into Google messages and you're probably fine or what's app we're ever using. And if you have an iPhone in your shirt because they're not doing any, I message hacks. Yeah. It's basically useless to you if you have an iPhone in the United States. This is where everybody starts to write the email to me saying, actually outside of the United States, everybody just uses what's happening. Please know that I know this. I do know this. And it is, it is just not helpful for all of the people in the United States who use eye message where it is essentially ubiquitous among iPhone users. So it's fine. It's pretty. It is pretty. And I think I just love the idea of it. Basically they went back and we're like, what are all the cool things that we've gotten rid of? We've, we got rid of the physical mute switch. We got rid of the headphone jack. We got rid of external storage. We got rid of physical keyboards. I don't know if I said that already, but it bears repeating. We're putting them all back. We're going to do funky colors. There are a bunch of systemic reasons this thing will be harder for people to use than they want it to be. Carriers don't make it easy to move things between devices easily as you move around. I hope this thing does well. I really do. And I think this is as good a version of this idea as I've seen. I also think I was kind of underwhelmed by the last clicks things. So I'm, that was just a case, right? Because there are other things as a case, but cooler. Yes. Now the case has battery and it, it, it magnets to the back of your phone instead of being a whole case. Big improvement, very good idea. And you can use it in landscape, which is adorable. Yes. Do you remember the LG, what was it called? The wing, the phone that sort of opened into a T like that? That's what, that's what the clicks looks like now. It's awesome. I've always never a physical keyboard person and I know everybody has all these feelings about these things. And at, I don't know, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but I was just never a physical keyboard person. And I'm more excited about the Samsung Z tri-fold. I am excited about the Samsung Z tri-fold, which was previously announced, right? It was an announcement in Korea. People got to use it in Korea. You know, you know me, I, I'm still, give me one phone and I get to the office, I can unfold it and it's my computer. This is all I want. Yep. And then you look at how thick it is when it's folded and you're like, maybe I don't. My favorite part is you have to fold it in a specific order, right? It, like, it, which makes sense. It opens into three pans and you have to do one pane and then the other. And if you do, if you do the wrong one first, the phone yells at you. Which to me is like, of course, that's how it works, right? You need the cameras oriented in the right place. It all makes perfect sense. But it is, it is such a funny little quirk of these kinds of devices that you're, you're folding it wrong is like just a thing that's going to happen. And it's, it's a weird time. Every time this comes up, Travis our producer just sends me a message and is like, who is this for? And the answer, I think he's right is, is essentially no one, but I don't care. It's cool. I think it's kind of for a lot of people. I, so the gacha people are people too, Travis. I spent a lot of years on this debate between, is the correct future that I have one device to rule them all, right? And I essentially have a computer and an accessory system. And that's everything that I need forever. Or is the answer that everything is a computer and what I, all I actually need is like my log info and every device everywhere becomes my computer? I think the one device to rule them all, people lost that battle a long time ago. Yeah, I agree. And this is like, this is very much a one device to rule them all kind of play that I just don't think sort of works for the world that we live in and are going to continue to move towards. Well, there are some meaningful questions here, right? It hasn't actually been out. We have no idea how reliable it actually is. We have no idea how delicate that screen actually is. Samson's gotten better at this over the years, he folds. Maybe it's better, but one wrong fold in the opportunities for wrong folds as you've noted or manifest here. We have no idea what the battery life is going to be with all this extra screen. So if you use the thing as intended and you're unfolding it all the time and running more screen on what it most looks like twice the battery given how thin everything is, like, who knows? And that's where like one device to rule them all really falls apart. Right? You have a phone and an iPad. The iPad is living its own life, right? You have a phone and a tablet. The tablet's living its own life. Your phone battery isn't killing your tablet battery. This is a big trade off here. So I'm very curious. Obviously, I'm excited to go see it this week, but I agree with you. I think the two devices is kind of where it's at. You know, the aspect ratio of the fold is still, I think, up for grabs. Yes. I totally agree with that. Right? Do you want the big phone to get smaller or do you want the big phone to get bigger? It's like a... Still, I think still an open question. Again, I want to be the person who doesn't carry anything but a phone. But if you're the person who needs to have a tablet sometimes, it also feels like you're going to annoy everyone around you. When you're like, sorry guys, you don't have my laptop. I just have this dumb thing. Yeah. So, all right. Before we switch gears, the biggest things that this show does are TVs and nonsense. And we're going to do those after we take a break. But before we get to TVs and nonsense, we got to start with smart home stuff because that's the other thing I think that CES has pretty aggressively become the last few years. Because it's a gadget show. Yeah. If this is the new... What mobile accessories were 10 years ago, right? Which is the most sort of simple, easy technology to make lots of is now smart home gadgets. It's pretty easy to make a bunch of water ingress sensors that you can put in a house, right? There's a lot of ways you can get into this market if you're a small company or trying to do new stuff. So what we have is just a truly wild amount of smart home stuff. I feel like I'm obligated by Verge Cass Law to point out that the reason for that is that the standards have started working. Yeah. Yeah. Matter is... You or Mr. Poupu matter, it's going to go away. I was wrong. I'm thrilled to have been wrong. Matter is a standard has enabled all kinds of companies to make all kinds of new stuff, the new smart lock standard, which is called Alero, which is very silly. That is official now. I think we're going to see many more kinds of locks. It's just because you can plug this stuff into HomeKit, into Google Home, into smart things, into whatever you want, into Alexa. It works with Android and iOS. The standard enabled more companies to participate, which again, if you're a Verge Cass listener, you know that we have won. We have vanquished capitalism. Yeah. We've made these companies develop a standard. They all work together and that means actually there's more competition which is good. Yeah. No, I agree. So we've seen a ton of gadgets. I would say big things we've seen are there's a lot of smart lock stuff happening here. Using your face to unlock your front door, using your veins to unlock your front door, using all kinds of tools. Not with needles with scans. You hold your hand over it. You don't just to be clear. I don't like it either way. Either one. All of this to me is just like I've been rewatching the Mission Impossible movies and all of this to me is like it just feels like somebody is trying to do Mission Impossible when actually a long time ago we realized that keys are really good. They're just not as cool on camera. We have the slaged locks, the previous ones and beeping it with an Apple Watch or a phone tremendously useful. I'll give you that. And even like the NFC tap stuff, one of the reasons I think Alero is going to be exciting is that it makes that sort of quick contact thing work. Right. And the idea that I should be able to walk up, touch my phone or my wrist or whatever to the front door and it opens. Awesome. The idea that what I actually want is to stand in front of it while it does a retinal scan is like no, I don't work in a in a clean room in the CIA. No, that is not required to get into my house. But anyway, did anything of the smart home stuff excite you? Is there anything in here that you're looking for? There's a lot of smart shades. I was going to call out. We didn't realize this, but the data shows, for Chastelist and I are very into smart shades. Yes, it does. You knew. So Lutron has new wood blinds and it's cassette align, which I'm not a wood blinds person, but their pricing is really interesting. It's just a flat cost for every size. Every other if you go and try to like, if you go on Amazon and get the can of stay ones that I bought, as you enter in the specs, the pricing changes and it seems like it's really expensive really fast. So Lutron is just like whatever they cost this much. Because that stuff is really reliable because Lutron owns its own RF frequencies like they bought Spectrum and they run it. So that's great. Not matter, but they integrate with all the platforms. And then GE or is it GE lighting, a different division of a different conglomerate? Who knows at this point? The 30 rock jokes just write themselves. They really do. All these brands have been split up and bought by PE and Weird Chinese conglomerates. But GE lighting, to be specific, has new matter compatible shades at 300. That's great. Again, this is what I mean by the standards are enabling more companies to just enter these markets and bring these prices down. If you were going to ship the proprietary ZigBee shades or whatever people were using, no one is going to buy them because they wouldn't integrate in anything and you would have to maintain the software bridges to blah, blah, blah to connect to HomeKit. Now it just matters. So you can just ship this stuff. I'm confident this is a rebranding of whatever. I'm dying to buy this to figure out what it's a rebrand of because undoubtedly a rebrand of something. But you see that there's just more entrance in the market and the pricing is going to come down or become more rational. Like Lutron pricing, everything at the same number regardless of size, I think is in the world the smart trade is like a big deal. It means the prices are going to come down on the bigger stuff. There's also a bunch of other neat stuff. Do you see this lithics mirror that is just like a matter of compatible with like lights in it that you can play in the wall. They have a new dimmer switch which looks bananas. It's also a matter controller. A lot of pressure is going to end up on Apple to make these matter buttons work better. So I have a scene controller in my house. It just has like five buttons on it for buttons on it. And what you want is to assign each of those buttons to a light. And so when you push it, it turns on and we push it, it turns off. So you know, homekit does not natively support that functionality. What does it do? It's meant the way it's designed right now is that it's meant that you need one scene that's on and one scene that's off and you assign one button to on and off. So to control one light, you have to use two buttons, which is bananas. Or you're going to love this. You can write a shortcut that checks the state of the light and says if light is on, turn off, if light is off, turn on. And so you end up writing this like little basic program. And this is all ridiculous. Like Apple needs to figure this stuff out because there's now a flood of these devices and the other platforms are going to get better at it real fast because they have incentives to get better at it real fast. So you just see like, oh, there's something happening here that's really interesting. Where there's new kinds of controllers, new kinds of tools, new kinds of lights, new kinds of shades. And the platforms themselves now have incentive to help people get use out of it. The really interesting one here, do you see this view board? Yes, Gen2E's all time favorite gadget in history. It appears this has been Gen's like white whale of a smart home controller for as long as I have known Gen. I mean, it's just a plank of wood that you match on the wall. I'm very curious to see what it looks like in person because when you touch it, it lights up behind your finger. It's like a passive touchscreen underneath a wood plank, essentially, right? But does it have like dots drilled into the wood? Like how is the light getting through the wood? That's a really good question. Or is it just really, really thin veneer? I'm just dying to know. It looks like it's just really, really thin veneer over a screen. Yeah. Like a DOM matrix display. But this thing itself is a matter controller. So the question I have is when you say it's a matter controller, does that mean you have to add all of your stuff to this things matter platform as well? Or can it just read your Apple and Google ones or your Alexa ones? Like, at some point you run into this. So everything's interoperable, but I'm still adding devices to two independent ecosystems for no reason. Whereas what it should be is I have one ecosystem and all of these tools can control it. Right. And we're not there at all yet that like I've been dealing with this. So I bought a bunch of bunch of these IKEA buttons with no idea what I was going to do with them. They were just eight bucks a piece and I was like, sure, I'll buy some IKEA buttons. And the process of getting them to work and do the things they're supposed to do is so much easier than the process of figuring out how I manage the settings of the thing. Do you know what I mean? It's like the administration of this network is vastly more complicated than actually operating the network. Again, like as matter gets more ubiquitous and gets more robust like all this stuff starts to get better. But it does rely on Amazon and Apple and Google and all of these other providers have actual lots of work left to do to make this happen. And this brings me to we're going to talk a lot more about Alexa plus on Wednesday because I have a lot of feelings about it that I need to go use a bunch of devices to really sort out. But just one more smart home gadget I want to mention is a new coffee machine from Bosch. It's called the personal AI barista, which I hate just hate that. And it's basically an Alexa plus coffee machine. And Bosch has had Alexa enabled coffee machines before. And what Jen discovered in attempting to use this thing is that Alexa plus is much worse at understanding basic coffee instructions than Alexa. And this goes back to a lot of things we've been talking about, right? Where it's like actually what Alexa plus is really good at is like open ended conversation and sort of understanding complicated inputs. What I need from my coffee machine is latte. Skin milk. And that's actually much better suited to the last generation of voice assistance. And with all of these things, I think again, we're talking sort of at these different layers of AI, right? Where it's like what I want some things to do is be open ended in conversational and thoughtful. And then with other ones, I want the Star Trek thing T Earl Grey hot. That is as complex as my interaction with my coffee maker needs to be. And it feels like what we're seeing here in many ways is we're just like way overshooting conversationality. And what we actually need to get back to is like just make the thing easy to use. And with all of this smart home stuff, it's like, but there's so much new stuff it can do. And I'm just like, does it turn the light on and off when I push the button? That's the point. I mean, this point me saying that smart home is canary in the coal mine for AI is it's like a verga casse meme. It's on the bingo card. It is on the Travis wants to vibe code the bingo card. It goes there. I need to correct you by the way. It's very important to you. It's actually called the personal AI barista powered by Alexa plus. Oh, sure. And it is not a product. It is a software capability coming to the Bosch 800 series of fully automatic is press machine. I will not be doing that software. So instead of just something that's understandable, you actually have a complicated software. You're going to wake up one morning. And instead of being useful, your coffee makers can be like, what's up dude? How are you doing today? I don't know. It's all hold on. Anyway, do you love me? And you're going to fall down the rabbit. And I'm just going to stand there and yell coffee at it until something happens. This is the this is the promise. This is why everybody is so excited about AI or at least LLMA, which is it all of this stuff is brittle. Like fundamentally, all computers are brittle. And if you put the wrong inputs in the API, the API crashes out and nothing happens. If you miss program, your IR blaster automation and your 1995 home theater or the TV doesn't turn off, like it's all brittle. And all falls apart if the inputs and the outputs don't match up. If the system gets the wrong input. And the whole point of AI is to reduce the brittleness of the input. As far as I can tell, that's what we're trying to get to. And then you can make a whole bunch of claims about how clod opus is now live or whatever people are saying on X in between whatever sex spot scandal we're doing on X. I don't think it's actually working out. I think we've reduced the perception of the brittleness. But then you're like make me an espresso and it can't do it as well as the previous brittle system. That's the big mismatch. Well, isn't it that both things that you just said can be true, right? That it is it is better at understanding unclear communication and worse at understanding clear communication. It is like the the the tacit assumption of every one of these AI bots is that something complicated is happening. And I have to I have to address all of this complexity with lots of context and all of this information. And I have to go look on the web. And it's like, no, actually all you need to do is hear me say the word coffee and make a coffee. Wait, can I do this by analogy? Sure. This is a really dumb analogy. So we lived in the woods for three years. Right. In the pandemic, we moved upstate to the middle of nowhere in New York. We lived on an unpaid road. We had no trash service. We had all these people come to our house to like fix stuff that was broken and one of them was an exterminator because we're in the woods and our house was surrounded by the woods and bugs and stuff like that. And no matter what I said to the exterminator, he was like, yeah. And then he would go to his truck and he would get a tank and he would like spray stuff. Right. Like that. And I was like, I basically have a subscription to that tank of chemicals. Like I'd say that they're spiders and then that tank of chemical shows it doesn't matter what I say. That dude's going to show up with that tank of chemicals. And he's going to spray around my house and I don't want to know what's in that tank. And I don't want to handle that stuff myself. But like at the end of the day, what I have is a subscription to that tank of chemicals. And the whole point of my analogy here is the actual human being whose job it was to keep the bugs out of my house was accepting all kinds of unstructured chaotic, extremely emotional input about the number of lady bugs in our house. And then he is like, I know what to do. And he would do the very deterministic thing, which was go to the truck, get the chemicals and spray the chemicals in the house and be like, that'll work until he called me next time. And these AI systems can't actually do that next time. They're always starting from scratch. Right. And then he's like, I need a coffee or like, I need coffee or tea or all very hot. And it's like, how do I do that? Right. Which is essentially the same as me being like, I'm going to get the chemicals. Which is, yeah. No one wants me to do that. And to like really beat this analogy to death, there is, it is an open question whether your exterminator knowing all of the details of the spiders in the woods is useful. Right. Like, yes, yes, it can know in much richer, greater detail, all of the things around your house. But if the answer is just a bucket of chemicals, does that have we solved any new problems? He might have been mixing up new batches of different blends, you know, this one had a much more floral top note. Like, I don't know, man. I just know what it looked like, which is the technical showed up. We got sprayed on the house all the time. And all I'm saying is, what you pay for there is expertise. Yeah. Right. This is the thing. You pay the plumber the ton of money to come and it takes some two minutes and it's because they know what they're doing. And that's the thing you're paying for. Because AI systems do not have the expertise. And so I think even in the coffee example, which is very dumb, it doesn't know how to make coffee. It knows that there's a coffee machine with API inputs and it might have some ability to use those API inputs on actually unclear how this is all working in the background. But you tell it, I want this coffee and it's started kind of starting from scratch every time. And I think that's why we're seeing the LMS breakdown this one. So much, they don't know like no matter what you're saying, you want the hallway lights to be turned on. That's actually what you're trying to get to. Like you can just shut up shut up the lights are on, right? Like the previous systems were kind of like, yeah, I did it. Right. I heard the keywords. And that's why people talk in that clipped Alexa voice because you learn that you just needed to say the keywords. And that was much more efficient and much more reliable than this thing. This like, can I run 10,000 GPUs as hot as they can for a minute to not make any coffee? Yeah. Well, again, Alexa, we're going to see a lot of Alexa plus of the show Amazon is there and for sure is other Amazon stuff to talk about. Gemini is coming to TVs like this is this is the bet is this a thing. And on the other end of it, particularly this one, I think we just keep seeing that gap between we've reduced the bread illness of the input and increase the bread illness of the output. Yeah. Agreed. All right. By the way, I think a very fun thing to do would be to take a fog horn into the convention center and just start yelling Alexa commands and just see how many booths respond. All right. We need to take a break and then we're going to go back and we're going to talk TVs because me like you have won the future and I'm furious about it. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skin care. It's straight and multi-stiler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on l'Oreal.com. L'Oreal Group create the beauty that moves the world. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication and when every message counts sounding rushed or generic can be getting lost in the shuffle. 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Sometimes it's new acronyms about TVs that I don't understand and you have to explain to me on the show. What appears is the story of CES is art TVs. Yeah, everyone realized you can take your five-year-old panel and sell it for high numbers. And that will be great. I think a lot of these TV companies looked at Samsung selling an ancient, edglet LCD panel with a subscription for art. And thought, that's dumb. Check out our new OLEDs. That's what the people want. They want high quality colors and brightness and resolution and black blacks. And Samsung's like, you know, they want a five-year-old panel with a subscription to an art store and a lot of influencer marketing saying this is the best TV for your house because you don't actually watch TV. You watch TikTok. Here we are. So they all figured it out that actually making a huge profit margin on old technology is better than making a small profit margin on your technology. To me, it's a model list. The moment that made this feel sort of obviously mainstream was when Amazon announced that it was making an art TV. The Ember Art Line TV, it is just purely a Samsung frame TV running fire TV from Amazon. And that to me is like this when this is when we've reached sort of full market penetration is when Amazon, a company not particularly interested in selling you luxury goods, is in on this. Can I just compliment Amazon for the best gadget name in a long time? It's a fire TV but it gets really dim. Oh, yeah, that is good. I didn't even put that, that's, that is good. It's good. It's really good. Amazon has really gone, I would say, too hard on the whole like Kindle and Fire and the whole, the whole Ember is pretty good. Because it gets dim. Yeah. It's a dim fire TV. Do you see what I mean? That's not very smart. So here's my question on this. There's a lot of this stuff coming out. And like you said, the thing that all of these are competing on is like lots of different color frames and thinness and you know, they have Dolby vision and they have, is there even a tech war to be had in art TVs? No, I mean the tech war is, do they look the most like art? And this is a real fight between, do you want it to look like art or do you want it to look like good TV? And I keep joking, these are five year old panels. The reason they're all five year old panels is because the state of the art in back lights are, you know, massive amounts of local dimming zones now powered by micro RGB LEDs. Like the back light technology on the make a good TV side of the house is still rapidly advancing. But none of that stuff is good at make it look really dim, almost reflective. Like it's reflecting the light in the room instead of producing its own light, which is an edge lit TV is still pretty good at. So you just have this like fight between what, what do you actually want this thing to look like? You want it to look like a piece of art? Do you want to look like a great TV? Like LG announced one, but they won't say, they just, we'll say it's a special screen. And it's like obvious that it's, they're just obvious in the fact that it's still just an edge lit LED TV. Yeah. So I think the question is, you know, Samsung has its variety of sensors and ambient light controls. You know, there's several generations into the technology to make it look like a good piece of art. Does that stuff actually work well? It's kind of up for debate. If anyone can do that better, I think that's actually what people are buying these for. I think if you said this is a great frame TV and it looks much better as a TV and it looks worse as a piece of art, it's actually less competitive in this market. I like it. I think people will trade off how it looks as a TV all day every day for how good it looks as a piece of art. So I don't know how, how well Amazon has done with that. Of course, they've added Alexa Plus to this thing. There's microphones in it and then they have this banana's feature where you can take photos of the room on your phone and it will choose what art to display on the screen. That's just, that's just nothing. That is, it's so nothing. I think I don't know. All of this stuff, and there's a bunch of stuff. There was a frame that we covered right before Christmas that was basically like an AI-generated art frame. That's dumb. All of this is just, I don't know, solutions in search of problems on that particular front. But I do think you've been asking for a couple of years now why this isn't a more robust and competitive category. It's been so obvious, I think, to you in particular, that the art TV is a powerful and good idea in the TV marketplace. Why isn't everybody doing it? It seems like 2026 is the year everybody's doing it. It's just out there now. Yeah, they're getting walloped by frame TVs. Yeah. I think there, again, I think there's a certain amount of pride at these companies that keeps them from shipping five-year-old panels with subscription services and calling that a day. I think they would rather ship really great TVs and then build the connected TV advertising ecosystem by watching everything you watch and integrating the apps. That feels like a much more robust business. Then you're like, well, or we could charge you $50 a year to look at art on your TV. That's enough. I don't know what it is, man. But I hear from our audience, I look at it in our comments whenever we talk about it, the number of people who are like, it looks good to me, stop complaining about their frame TV. But we should briefly talk about the very other end of this spectrum here. There are a lot of high-end TVs happening. LG continues to do the wallpaper TV thing. No, they brought it back. They don't continue to. It went away. It came back. We went away. I thought it just sort of went away. It was 2017 and this one is actually thicker than the one I got 2017. I would have told you that was like two years ago. Good Lord. Okay. Well, then the last one was in 2020, apparently. 2017, 2020, the wallpaper TV is basically like super flat, stick on the wall, they hide all the cables. This is before frame TVs were a thing. How thin can you make the TV? Was it a thing? So it's back. And the thing about this one is it has the zero connect box. So there's no, you plug nothing into these TVs. You plug everything into the zero connect box, which you can place 30 feet away and then it wirelessly sends everything to the TV and I do not like that. Don't like it at all. It's a good idea in theory. There's just too many ways for that to fall apart. Yeah. I mean, they all mostly have so far as they have shipped. Yeah. Again, I think this is just to go to my point that people are now buying TVs to not watch them. And so when they fall down on things like do the inputs work, it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. But then you have TCL doing quantum dot stuff. Samsung continues to do the, what's it called the timeless frame, which I think is a truly lovely television. Did I tell you that I tried for a while to convince Anna to buy an easel TV? That was a great. You should get one of those that motorizes into the TikTok mode. That's the one I wanted. You should get that one. We can watch everything on this. That was not that didn't go. There's a motorized mount for the frame TV. We have at least one reader who has one. That's amazing. It's apparently it works about as well as you think it does. That's fair. But is there anything in the high end of TVs that you're seeing that actually seems interesting and useful to you? So LG's OLED tech is getting brighter. They're still doing tandem. So the OLEDs, again, as sort of OLEDs get brighter, we're seeing right next to it micro RGB backlights, which are brighter and more colorful are the black levels with local dimming and even out. I don't know. We're also seeing much of mini LED backlights, which are now mainstream basically. So you just have LEDs catching up to OLED black levels in various different ways. And then you never race to be even more colorful on both the OLED side and the micro RGB side. And that's just a bunch of backlight technology. This is what I mean, like the emissive backlight that this screen looks like it's producing light at you is that is a spec war. It's a spec war to end all spec wars. The TVs are just going to keep redding brighter. And you can go into ABS forum. You can go into our own comments and you will see people point out that maybe there's a limit to how bright you actually want your TV to be, especially because nothing on streaming has mastered over a thousand. It's really nothing on blue rays even master over the end. You get into this walkingness really, really, really quickly. But when you're buying the TV in the store, the brightest one wins. So there's a race to get the brightest TV possible. And these are the these are the emissive technologies are doing it. And then again, I'm just going to keep pointing this out. And then on the other side of the spectrum, the TVs everyone are actually buying of the TVs that can get as dim as possible and look like they're reflecting light because you put an art on them instead of actually watching TV. And I don't know. I don't know if the incentive to keep making the other technology bigger and brighter is going to be there for much longer, except in in gaming monitors where we're starting to see starting to see some of this technology creep in and then obviously on phones where everyone wants their phones screen to be ever brighter forever. Yeah. I mean, this is the one of the things I was thinking about reading all of this news is it does seem like we were on a run there for a long time of honest to God's spec worse, right? And you could argue whether any of it meant anything to most people when they turned on their TV. And I think art TVs are proof that no, it didn't. But at the very high end of TV, these things were getting like technically meaningfully better kind of over and over for a long time. And there were a bunch of different ideas about how it would work. And then everybody kind of centered on a couple of them. And but we were pushing in a bunch of different directors all the same time. And it feels like now we're at a moment of, I don't know, call it like stasis or plateau. But there, I don't see any sort of meaningful leaps forward in new technology about displays here so much as lots of ideas about what your TV looks like in the room. And maybe that's just the cycle that we do here where it's like the tech it's really good. And then we start to say, okay, how do I make it thinner? What stand should I put it on? Where do we mount it? What does it look like? What does it do when it's off? And then we have some other tech breakthrough and we redo the spec war again. But it just feels like we're at the end of some kind of how good can the picture look road here, which I actually think is kind of a good thing because that means that I'll get cheaper. My frame TV might not look like shit next time. And then we'll be the idea of like how do we fit this stuff into your house in a way that looks nice becomes the question that matters the most. Yeah, that's right. Every new display technology is what changes the form factors of everything. Yeah. I know where phones are going next you look at the cutting edge of display technology. And you would have seen folding phones five years ago. But I mean, that just how this goes. So in TV specifically, yep, some of these ideas enabled frame TVs, which are cool, what they're enabling now is huge TVs. So I know five years ago, the idea of a hundred inch TV that you could just buy was not available to you. Now they're pretty you can just go to Costco. You can get a pretty cheap, gigantic TCL TV and it will cost five dollars. It will surveil you until the day you die. Yes. But it will exist on your wall. It will look like crap, but it'll be fine. And so I think you're just kind of this place where the display technologies are enabling the big TVs and kind of a split where you either want the TV to be those dominant thing that has ever existed in your entire home or so invisible people are surprised when your artwork turns into a TV. And those are your two choices. You either want a hundred and fifty inch Samsung timeless frame that literally sits on an easel and requires you to live in a museum. Then it will dominate the gallery of the museum or you want a frame TV, which maybe no one will ever even notice. And it's unclear what's in the middle of that anymore. I'm not sure. And I think over time it will be less than us. And then the TV will just get bigger and or more art modian visible. And that sort of middle class of TV is going to squeeze or nothing because people are just watching their phones anyway. Where do you stand on projectors? Which I would argue if there is a sort of third thing in that equation, maybe it's projectors where that presentation of display in your house can literally come and go. And there's a ton of projectors. They continue to get brighter. That's one where there does seem to be a real spec war in terms of how we actually project this stuff. We did a really cool video with a projector that is sort of spatially aware. And if you project it. It's the freestyle, right? Yeah, it's the freestyle that's right. And if you if you project it on a curtain, it will actually straighten the picture on a curtain. So it doesn't look like it's wavy the way the curtain is. You can put it against two walls. It will still show you a flat picture like that maybe is the next version of a lot of this is like, how do I display stuff in my house? Maybe a projector becomes a more meaningfully interesting answer pretty fast here. Yeah. The same thing freestyle this new one. Just reach generations in that technology where it is examining what it's projecting on and compensating for it. The most impressive one there is they projected it onto wallpaper and it figured out the colors and patterns of the wallpaper and then compensated the image to disappear the wallpaper. Oh, wow. That's ridiculous. It's really cool. Like fully ridiculous. And it stays in focus the whole time you do it. So you're just like knocking it around putting it the the there's the one the two walls in the corner where it made the screen looks straight on a corner. You can put it against the ceiling to so it looks like a square floating at the corner of a ceiling and stays in focus. I love that stuff. You are trapped into a weird tizen to sure. I do. So this is the TV life we're all choosing somehow. This is the TV life we're all choosing and I think the idea that I want to watch a movie I'm going to bring this thing out plug it in. It will automatically calibrate itself set it up. Maybe all I have to do is take one picture off the wall for a few hours and put it away. That does feel very powerful. One of these companies are yet marketing anything that way. Yeah. I think the actual people in the market are starting to use these things. That's why which is why you see the third generation of the Samsung freestyle. I have a really good friend who has no TV in his living room and he has a big fanciful in the basement and he was like, I don't spend any time with my family because I'm always going to the basement. So he just brought a projector for the living room. It's like a very it's a pretty one. And he's like, this has changed the vibe of my family. Wow. We all just stay upstairs now. Because we don't want a TV on the wall in this room. But now I have this like it's apparently a beautiful projector. I haven't actually seen it. He's just telling me about it. But it's like it looks like a little piece of art. It looks like a fancy walnut cabinet thing. And he's like, yeah, we all just spend time upstairs now. Like no one disappears downstairs to watch this thing. But it doesn't look like we have a TV in our living room. I think that's a victory. That feels like a good thing. It feels like a victory. Yeah. So you can see these kinds of things are going to keep happening because people don't want to put TVs on their wall. The first solution was the frame TV. I think the next solution is no TV is at all. Because people are just watching their phones. And then the sort of like intermediate one is I still want to watch a movie. Sometimes I still want to watch sports. Can I get a projector? And there's more action there than I think in the 150 inch micro RGB TV world. I bet. But there's something on that freestyle that's very cool. Yeah. That's another one where like you go to the US and you see these giant panels of TVs. And I always think of those as like the outfits they put on like super models at fashion shows that no actual person will ever have. But they're there to like look cool and make you feel things. That to me is that that's the 110 inch TV. You know what we should all go and look like in the country of TVs is. Yeah. Yes. You know, Amazon has fire TVs are putting Alexa plus and all their TVs. Whatever. Gemini is coming to Google TV in a lot of ways. Yeah. And the most interesting thing that they're doing on Gemini is they're putting nano banana and VO support directly into Google TV. So you can just sit in front of your TV and prompt it for videos, which is ridiculous. That to me is like we talk about a lot of things that are like ideas that somebody had in a meeting that seem exciting as long as you don't actually think about it at all. And that to me is the most perfect example of that that I can think of that is everybody is going to do that once and go, huh, and then never ever touch it again. And that we're going to do it all day long. No, I just don't believe that. Like I think there is there is no evidence that that is and we're going to get to this at the very end because there's some holiday AI news that I need to get very upset about on this podcast. And one of those things is this idea that actually the idea that everyone is going to make an interactive AI content of all day every day is like inevitable. Not only is it not inevitable. Completely unproven and I think it's just flatly not true. And this is like Google being like, well, what if the future of YouTube is you make your own YouTube? And I'm just like, no one wants that. It won't work. And also no one wants that. Oh, I think this battle's already lost. I think the apocalypse is coming gone. We are fully in the post. What is a photo apocalyptic landscape, which is I think is the holiday news you want to talk about. It is. In fact, and actually before we do that, let's take a break. And we're going to go back. We're going to lightening around our way through some other stuff. And we're going to be out of here. We'll be out of that. Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skin care. Light, straight and multi-stiler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. And more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com. L'Oreal Group create the beauty that moves the world. Hey, Cara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of today. Explained? Tuffy Talks, Prof.G. Markets, and of course, your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and On with Cara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brnai Brown and Adam Grant, Markets Brownlee, Keef Lee, Vivian 2, and Robin Arzhan. It's all part of the Vox Media Podcast stage at South by Southwest, presented by Odo. Visit voxmedia.com slash SXSW to preregister and get your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com slash SXSW to register. Really, you should register. We sell out and we hope to see you there. After decapitation strikes against Iran's leadership, what can we expect next in the escalating war? The big question is, if there is going to be a next strong man in Iran, what kind of strong man will that person likely be? I don't think that there's going to be another powerful cleric, supreme leader. I'm John Feiner, and I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week we sit down with Kareem Sajapur to discuss what to expect in this next phase of the war against Iran. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. So there's lots more guys to talk about. We also have a bunch of news that happened over the two weeks we've gone. So we're just going to lightening around our way through some of the most important stuff going on right now. You get to go first. What do you want? CES, other news, you pick. I'm starting with a party speaker. What's more important? We're so back in the light. We're so back. You know, it's CES. There's party speakers in that. So I'm confident we'll see many more this week. Can I tell you that? I'll read it. I'll read it. By the way, there hasn't been that many like giant party speaker announcements. And yet you and I are going to go to Vegas and I suspect we'll each be encountered by thousands upon thousands of party speakers. I mean, they are the only successful new gadget category of the past 10 years. There's the iPhone and there's party speakers name anything else that is there's rock to the culture in similar ways. Just say your thing. I'm just pointing it out. Bring this up at your next family dinner. You're like name a gadget that has changed the culture as much as the iPhone or a party speaker. Can't do it. LG announced a new X Boom party speaker is a really cool little one. I know this counts. It just looks cool. It's called the X Boom Mini has a little like fabric handle. Anyway, they have AI in them obviously and the AI can just remove vocals from songs. So you can just karaoke. Anything you want, which is a solve problem because it Spotify is full of bootleg karaoke tracks. But you know, it's a party speaker. It's yes. They got lights. I'm not going to lie. I actually think this is an amazing idea. Yeah. This is this is the next big trend in media karaoke party. It's such a good idea. You know lyrics, which is a real problem. Anyway, I'm saying we're going to see more and where if you are at CS and you've got the biggest party speaker in Vegas, let us know. We'll see what we can do. Okay. Neal, let me let me just cast a vision for you here. Oh my God. You fire up your X Boom. You start karaoke mode. Your Floyd robot starts dancing. And your LG gallery TV shows the lyrics. This is the future. Thank you. Lockin is where I want to be. It's miserable smart home platform. Well, we were in Chicago on the break. It notified me every single day that our refrigerator had an available software update. And I was like, there's no way I'm updating the refrigerator from hundreds of miles away. That's like there's a real like sequence of horror movie events that start with Neal, I updated his. Yeah. It's none of it's good. That's pretty good. All right. So, this is some breaking news as we are recording this on Monday afternoon, which is that the Lego group made a CES announcement, which is an interesting and unusual thing. They're launching a thing called smart bricks, which are basically little two by four Lego bricks that have a bunch of sensors and batteries inside of them. And they the idea is that you will use these smart bricks to essentially like be aware of the thing that you've made and make it come to life. They're selling sets that when you when you turn it on, it will make the the lightsaber make noise. All this and stuff. They wirelessly charge the idea of having to charge Lego bricks is like, I can just every parent I know is dying inside at the idea of having to not only keep track of, but charge your Legos. But this thing, these like little tiny thing, they have a they have a battery pad, they have light sensors, they had they make noise, they can do lights. This is like a big leap for this very old toy. There's one, I think Sean Haas wrote about this first and he mentioned one that will play the Imperial March from Star Wars when you sit the emperor of Halpatine Lego piece onto his throne. Like that's just cool, right? This is such a like over technology solution to an imagination problem, but is is nonetheless very cool and I think is going to be pretty fascinating. Also the smart bricks have a microphone, which certainly won't cause any consternation or privacy problems for anyone ever. I fully lost the argument in my family that everything is listening to Sir Rads. I have explained why if I'm tracking, I've explained all of it so many times, like not just listening to get over it. It's wild. I think societally we have lost that fight. Yeah, it's over. I think if you just pulled America, almost everyone would tell you that their microphones are listening to them. Yeah, I think most people are like, well, I could either listen to you go on and on about reconciling databases or I could say it's listening to me. Yeah, right. I'm going to pick listening to me. In any case, the microphone in the Lego brick is just a button. It's not actually a microphone. So just detect sounds and my triggers some action. Right. But it's still a microphone. It is. Yeah, you did just describe a microphone. Well, no, it doesn't like take any input or record anything. Right. It just closes a circuit. Yeah, fair enough. But yeah, I think the idea of that, that's one of those things that is like, there's lots of really interesting potential for how you can do that stuff. Because someday when we get like the home assistant Lego thing and I can just set up my smart home by piecing together Lego pieces, that's the stuff. That's what you want. You want to sit and for a prop as you know, the throne and my blinds come up. Yeah. I see what you're doing. It's the dream. What's your next one? Okay. So this is, you might have noticed that I have a haircut. I did notice. I have a lot to say about the circuit. Your hair was, it's good for people who can't see Neelie right now. Neelie's hair was getting, I don't want to say out of control, but like close to out of control. It was, I was going for a full flow. It was at the edge. It stopped cutting my hair when the baby was born in July. And then it was fully out of control. And then I saw a picture of myself at the balloon museum and I was like, well, we're done now. Like our experiment with growing the flow has come to an end. Okay. And I wish that I had the glide smart hair clipper, which has an AI cutting coach and automatic fade trimming and only requires you to wear a face band so it can track your head and go around your head. I don't even know how to describe this face band. Like imagine you're an NFL player and you're wearing the helmet, but you're only wearing the part of the helmet that goes around your eyes. So face mask the guard. It is, this is the most ridiculous looking thing. And then somehow it looks like the cutter is cutting the elastic band of the face band. Do you see in a spot? It is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. I love it. I've been cutting my own hair since the pandemic. Have you really? See, I mean, we moved to the woods. There's nothing there. The exterminator couldn't cut my hair. You just brought the tank of chemicals. So I bought a bunch of stuff and I have a thing with a vacuum in it. It's great. So I cut my own hair. But then I was in Chicago. We went to the Bloom Museum and I was like, I have a hair. And I don't know if you know this. In my mind, this is like received wisdom for dudes. But if you are a brown dude and you go into a barber, whatever ethnicity of the barber is the one you come out with. Like I'm just a blank canvas. It's the same. So I went to Pilsen. I won't say what kind of neighborhood Pilsen is, but I came out looking like a hot Pilsen guy, including the shave. They cut my beard. And I was like, I'm ready to rock. This is too hot to handle. So that's why I have like a dramatic swoop in my hair. I've been thinking you were unusually intimidatingly attractive. This has been... See what I'm saying? I look fly shit. I'm pretty uncomfortable doing this podcast for reasons I'm not prepared to talk about. But when I said to my sister, I was like, I went to Pilsen. I came out looking like a living mill sin. And she's like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, you know, like in my 20 year old nephew, I was like, yeah, everybody knows that. Obviously. That's really interesting. But I think the glide, I don't think I could have told the glide to be like, make me look sick. No, I think it would have just shaped my ears off. I'm looking at the glide website. And it's basically you go through their app and pick a bunch of presets. And one of the top presets that says recommended just says sides and top. This is the haircut sophistication level we've arrived at. I dare you all. Next time you get a haircut, walk in and say, I'd like a sides and top. And let me know how that goes for you. Yeah. And then you have to wear this thing on your face. Like there's, I walked into a, you know, a Pilsen barbershop and came out looking like the hottest guy in Tilsen. And then there's, I'm going to wear this thing in my face and no woman will ever talk to me again. Yeah. And then my sides and top. Yeah. I'm going to cut my own hair in the dark, in the bathroom with the door locked. So no one knows my shame. That's good. It's very good. Yeah. All right. My next one is I need to get very mad about AI for just a minute. As two things happened over the holidays, one is that Satya Nadella, do you see of Microsoft and now a blogger apparently wrote a whole thing about basically how we should talk about AI and essentially his argument is like, stop saying slap because AI is going to be great. There's a line in here that just blows my mind where he's like, we need to get beyond the arguments of slot versus sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our theory of the mind that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. There's nothing there. That's I understand what he is trying to say sort of. And all he's saying is we need to, we like the metaphors we use for how people make things are broken now. So we need new ones like that's all he's really saying. Sure. Because theory of the mind actually has a meaning. So he's just using it wrong. Yes. But what he's trying to say is we need a new, we need a metaphors to talk about how we make things. But like, there's fine. Have you used co-pilot? Nothing about co-pilot suggests we need new metaphors to talk to human beings. No, no, it's super doesn't. And then so put that next to this thing that Adamistary, the head of Instagram posted I think what he was trying to do was talk about what human authenticity means going forward. And basically what he said is we have now, we have sort of crossed the Rubicon where you can no longer assume that what you're seeing is a thing depicting real life made by a real person. And then just trying to think about like where do we go from here? And he starts talking about, you know, the who becomes more important than the what, but actually authenticity is going to be able to be produced at scale, which is like an insane thing to say. But also that what matters now is who you are more than ever. And he said that, you know, the feed is dead and we're on to all these other things. And I've just been thinking about this ever since and there is this thing that is coming out of these tech companies that both of these things together really hit for me, which is this assumption that all of this is inevitable and it is done. And that like Neil Mohan says stuff like this about YouTube, right? That like, of course, AI is going to become the vast majority of the content that we see on YouTube. And we're all going to be producing things with it this way. And nano banana is going to be the way that we create and consume content for forever. None of that is inevitable. It's just, it's just not. These are choices. Adam Misari is reacting to choices that he and his team made about its platform. Like Adam Misari should have written this as I did all of this to you. And here is what I'm saying. And Satya Neda is saying the same thing. He's like, I'm pivoting my company around this stuff. Please stop calling it slap. It hurts my feelings. Like this drives me so crazy because we have not a lot of people talk about tech in general as if this stuff happens to us and our only responsibility is to learn how to live with it. It's just not true. It doesn't have to be true. We are not required to just live with this stuff. These things don't have to be like this. And the idea that all of your feeds are going to be overrun with AI slap and that that's just what we have to deal with is not how it has to be. And everybody should just stop it. So let me make the counter argument and let me offer you the the bearous liver of sympathy for Adam Misari. Wow. Wow. This is not a lot. I love it. I read this first. It's worth reading in full. It kind of looks like it was written a little bit by it, but it's worth reading in full. Adam has a pretty good sense of what's happening on Instagram. Yeah. It's a product in a way that I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is connected. This post is raw nihilism. Adam has lost. He has lost the war to like sexy AI influencers and unending course scams and Instagram just being only fans of marketing. Like all of that is lost. He has lost it. Whatever pretensions to high art that he thought were happening in Instagram are gone. That thing is a marketing platform is turned into a QVC for lifestyle influencers. That's the thing it is. And now AI is overrunning that and he cannot stop it. He might want to. He might have made the wrong choices and failing to prevent it at the top of all of it, but it is gone. It is out of his control. And I think he feels a little bad about it. And I think he has no ability to fix it. There's just whole line here about how the camera companies are doing the wrong thing. I'll read the quote. Platforms like Instagram will do good work identifying AI content, but it'll get worse and it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media. Camera manufacturers are cryptographically signed images of capture creating a chain of custody. That's only part of the solution. We need to service much more context. Blah blah blah blah. He's basically like, this isn't going to work. It's not going to work for you to do content authenticity initiative and for us to show you labels. And to your point, David, it's like, I don't know that it won't work because you have never tried. Yes. It stopped accepting the inevitability of this. And I just think that the reason they're not trying is because they know they've already lost to what? To just the flood of slop on these platforms. If you go on Instagram today, it is overrun by people teaching you how to make your own SEXY AI influencers to collect whatever money you can collect from your own SEXY AI influencers. A secondary economy of people trying to sell courses. So you can create your own SEXY AI influencers, which is just the worst. People teaching you unethical ways to make money on YouTube by doing AI content of like puppy's getting rescued. And you see they're like, I made a hundred videos and they all made $20. So now I have $2,000. And I'm just going to do it a hundred more times and I'll have $20,000. Like, you see how their brains are working, right? Every one of those dollars is a dollar that's not going to a human creator. Yeah. There's not infinite dollars, right? So every dollar that YouTube spends on AI brain rot is a dollar that isn't going to go to a real creator. Every view on Instagram, it doesn't go to a human creator that goes to a SEXY AI influencer is gone. Right? There's only so many minutes of attention. In reality, what it is is it's one dollar to an AI system rather than five dollars to an influencer, which is, which is why you make the trade. Like I get it. But I'm saying they've, because that economy exists in such force already to fix it now requires turning it off. And I think their tools to turn it off do not exist as powerfully as the tools to have prevented it in the first place. I think that's probably true. I mean, and to some extent, this is reminiscent of Google's fight against SEO for so many years, right? Forever kind of really and forever kind of in gesture only tried to fight the flood of crappy content intended to game Google systems, all the while telling us that all Google does is uprank good stuff, like despite all evidence to the contrary. And but what you could do is just say if our systems detect that you use AI, we are going to downrank not only your content, but your account. Like you could solve that problem in one move. Would it have lots of problematic false positives and downstream effects? Sure. But if the music industry wanted Instagram to do that, Instagram would do that. You just like you were just deciding to do this, right? Like YouTube has really good content identification systems that it is choosing not to apply to AI because it wants that on your feed. And I just it wants to present it to you as if this is just the natural course of things. And it isn't. And a bunch of people have decided that this is what we want against all evidence to the contrary. And I just we if Adam is serious, just like I'm going to make so much fucking money from this that it's going to blow your mind and we're going to become the most valuable company in the world. Sorry losers. I would actually be more sympathetic to the post than I am to this. Like don't pretend you don't have any moves here. Oh, Adam's got this line in here that I've been debating with all kinds of people for years now. He said individuals not publishers or brands establish there's a significant market for content from people, trust institutions and all of that. And I'm like, that's not the nature of the universe. That's you guys did that. The social media platforms to yeah, you destroyed the trust institutions by elevating an infinite army of teenage creators who you can all replace once you burn them out economically. And then there's new ones. Correct. And the point of the institution is to resist that by existing over time. So you were always opposed to the institution because the institution would demand that you pay them, which is the history of the media over the last 20 years. The meat like Buzzfeed was like, we'll be so viral Facebook will pay us money and Facebook is like, we'll destroy you instead. Here's an infinite army of teenage creators. And now here's an infinite army of ass love. Yeah, I get that. I'm just saying my barest sliver of sympathy is I agree with you. These are there, we exist in the product of the platform on our choices. I think Adam is looking at this. I mean, like I do not know how to put this journey back in the bottle. I think that's right. But nihilism in this post is real. I think that's right. And I think, yeah, I don't necessarily lay it all at the feet of Adam Miserie for making these decisions about it. Oh, you can't. By the way, you're totally fine. I lay some of it at the feet of Adam Miserie. I think he'd get fired if he tried to do the things I think he should do. I also think I lay more of it at the feet of somebody like Mark Zuckerberg, who is one of the few people who actually has the agency and protection to do the right thing and just continues to choose not to. Like, it's just, it's just bad everywhere. And I'm deeply tired of this idea that all of this is happening inevitably and all we can do is get on board. Because that's how we got here and we should stop it. Yeah. No, I mean, I'll be this other guy. And we wrote this story. This is very much like if you were reading the Virginie, this was coming three years ago because we were just blithering on about what is a photo. And then Sarah wrote the headline about the pixel that was no one is ready for this. And she was like, the flip to not trusting a photo from implicitly trusting every photo is will change society. Adam's got that line here. Years later, after Sarah John wrote that for us, he says, for most of my life, I could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened. That is clearly no longer the case. That is the what is a photo apocalypse. We've been talking about it forever. These companies have heard us talk about it. They have laughed at us because we spend so much time talking about it. We have become cartoons of ourselves talking about it so much. And now that I get it happened, who could have possibly seen this coming? Do you know what institution actually has the ability to say whether or not something is real? Instagram. Yep. Instagram has the ability to say this photo is verified. This is true. We have enough money to fat check information and label the stuff that we have verified is real. If you don't see this badge, then you can look at the authenticity of the creative, whatever it is. But there are some stuff that we do know is real and they're not going to do it. This is them shutting down content moderation. This is Mark Zuckerberg saying, I don't want to be the arbiter of truth. This is them disclaiming their essential responsibility as a distributor of information for saying even the the bearest whisper of verifying metadata, we know this one's true. Yep. It's OK. It's breath out there. All right. What's your next one? It's me and Baye. I slap. This is the story blew up over the weekend. It is just such a perfect example of this. There's a Reddit post from someone who claimed to be a developer at a major food delivery app. And when on and on in great detail about how all of the systems are rated against the drivers, how they're stealing money from you that when you pay for rush ordering, you don't actually get rush ordering, everything else gets slowed down. And everyone believed it. Then the second wave of stuff happened where people like, is this real? We reached out. I think Casey reached out. The person behind the post sent us a fake badge, a fake Uber eats badge. Turns out all this is turned around by, yeah. This is like a medium scale AI news hoax that just went down over the weekend and everyone is a kind of vacation. So it just didn't get this scrutiny and it went super viral for several days. The CEO of DoorDash had to be like, this is an us Uber had to be like, this is an us. And a bunch of people who work in these companies are like, a lot of stuff like SoundScrack but isn't. And then you also get the, well, we hate these companies anyway. So we're just willing to believe any negative thing that we hear. And it's like, oh, this is that this is all the people who hate AI are, this is kind of a perfect bend diagram with the people who ate food delivery apps. And it's like, you are falling for the AI slot now because it's what you want to hear. This is bad on every level. But anyway, it's all hoax. We did get sent that their Uber eats badge and putting that in air quotes. There's no such thing. It was generated by AI. It was fascinating. And I even fell for it a little bit to the extent that it did seem perfectly plausible that all of this stuff is happening, right? Even like the CEO of DoorDash is coming up being like, this is awful and no one should do this. And I believe in when he says that because the stuff that is being described in this is awful. But I do think the ways in which a lot of people immediately were like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that these companies would be doing that. Yeah. Was so fascinating to me. The tech industry has lost the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. If they're on a bit, it seemed out of character at all. Yeah. If there's a story of 2026 that we'll be tracking, it's the fact that these companies can't say or do anything without immediate backlash because they have trashed their own reputations totally. And Nendela being like get over it. Stop calling it slop. It's like, that's not going to work for you, dude. Well, you got to earn it back. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. All right. My last one because this is the Verge Castle. This is what we do here. Yeah. They didn't ship a Trump phone. Oh, they missed the deadline. They was, I mean, it's happy 2026. The Trump phone doesn't accept the surprise. They were going to make it at the Foxconn factory right after they started shipping masks and building a website right Google. It was going to be September. And then it was going to be later this year. And now no one knows. The Dom Press on our team continues to heroically reach out to try and get a comment and continue to not get any comment. The financial times did some reporting. Shout out to the financial times for following us. And we do, we do a lot of inspiring are the world's financial newspapers. They got one quote, which I think we've gotten in the past. Trump mobile blamed it on the government shutdown, which very much implies that there was a phone that was tied up in some sort of regulatory and just like that's not true. I can't help it. Not even a little bit. Yeah, it would have been just based just come out and say the Democrats did it, right? Like Joe Biden never shipped a Trump phone. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Obama won't let me ship this phone. It's like a perfectly in character thing for them to say. But yeah, I think we are going to continue to cover this because I think it's just deeply fascinating and weird and perfectly. I get it. I'm going to hold on to my bet. The clicks phone will come out before the Trump phone. It's a good bet. And I also think there are signs when something is going to ship like this, you start to see things like they show up in the FCC, things will start to leak. Information, information exists. There are people who are tapped into supply chains that start to know about these things. It's very hard to make a product that exists without anybody knowing about it. It's very hard to do that. Do you think these people are going to try to keep it a secret? No, this is what I'm saying. There has been not one Iota of information that the Trump phone exists except for the Trump mobile website, which is my absolute favorite thing about it. They're not trying to keep a real thing a secret. They're trying to make a fake thing really obvious. It's just such a wild and Trump-y way to think about launching a phone. I'm looking for ideas. I mean, poor Dom, we told him he has to come over this every week. He is doing, it has become like a poetry reading in many ways. Like, he just has to ruminate on nothing every week for a few hundred words. And it's very good. If you can think of ways for us to make this story even bigger, you let us know. We're here for it. If you have a Trump phone, call me. I will fly to your house. If you know anybody who works at the Trump phone call center where they are apparently paying people to say whatever they want about the Trump phone, you let us know. Yeah, we'd love to hear from you. And also come to our live show in Vegas. We should get out here because you and I have planes to get on. But we're going to be live in Las Vegas. You're doing decoder and then we're doing a verged cast Wednesday afternoon at the Brooklyn Bowl. Keep an eye on the site. We're already on ground doing tons and tons and tons of stuff at CES. This is going to be an interesting one in that it's midday Monday and a huge amount of news has already happened. And we have like a whole week of this left to go. So I think we're going to get like into the true like, dregs and bowels of CES in a way that we don't often get to do. And I'm very excited about it. Oh, I'm going to go. I'm going to see if one of these robots will fall in love with me. My truly for me, it's like the real sign of how deeply have I done CES is have I gone to the bottom floor of the Venetian where it's just it's just like various countries bring groups of developers to show you whatever phone case they've built. And that is that's the true meaning of CES as far as I'm concerned. And I'm very much looking forward to it. Look out for David on the basement of the Venetian everybody. I will I will be there. And we'll be there. We're running around. We're going to have a last go say hi to our team. Be nice to everybody. We we're going to get out of here. Also remember subscribe to the verge. It's 2026. Thank you to everybody who renewed already. If you haven't subscribed. I don't know, near as a solution. Give us money. You get to every podcast. You do get ad free podcasts. You can also email us forgecasts.com. Call the hotline 866 version 1. If you see weird stuff at CES that we haven't seen. Tell us all about it. Our team is very good at seeing all the weird stuff. Let's send us your weird stuff. And we won't hear about it. Until then the first cast is a virgin production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will all be in Vegas. We hope to see a lot of you this week. Until next time, Neili, it's good to be back. Back to roll. 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