203: Top Five and More From CES 2024

On today’s episode of Still To Be Determined, we’re going to be talking about Matt’s trip to the strip. That’s right. Matt visited Las Vegas to go CES 2024. And we’re going to have a quick chat about the tech that he saw, the hits, the misses. And no, we won’t be talking about his wife. We’ll be talking about the misses in tech.

Sorry about the confusion there, everybody. Hi everybody. I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some stuff for adults. I write some stuff for kids and I’m just generally curious about technology. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

Matt, how are you

doing? I’m good. You’re firing on all cylinders today with the bad dad jokes. That’s

right. We’re recording this one a little later in the day. So I have had all day to kind of like. Get ready, get girded up. Plus my son is now back at college, so I really don’t have a place to be expending all that dad joke energy.

Uh, my partner literally flees the room when I start. So there’s only you. That’s you and our listeners, our fine,

fine listeners. Every listener is going to put up with this. That’s right. Enjoy

it, everybody. Before we get into our conversation around Matt’s trip, we would like to revisit some of our earlier episodes.

As usual, I like to go back through the mailbag and see what all of you have been saying on our previous episodes and going back to episode 201. This is Matt’s. Ask me anything that he did. And there was this comment from B Cooter who wrote one suggestion I have regarding technology and ways to incorporate it into our daily lives.

Workplace charging. I think that workplace charging will be a big driver of EV adoption. I think you and your channel would be a perfect fit for exploring workplace charging, how it’s being implemented, and the benefits for the employer as well as the employee. Workplace charging is the answer for apartment dwellers who cannot charge at home overnight.

Is this something that you have seen? Is this something And we’ll combine it a little bit maybe with the CES discussion. Was there anything in this vein at CES as far as like employers, workplaces, tech that might be something that would be running in the background, not at your home or necessarily in places like hospitals, malls out in the world, but places specifically targeting the workplace environment and the technology there.

Yeah,

I didn’t see any specifically at this CES, but there is this tech out there for helping workplaces set up, um, charging, uh, at kind of scale across their parking lots so that you could add it as a perk. Like you work for us, you get free charging, or it could be you create an account and you’re you’re charged a small fee for the energy you’re using.

There’s also things I’ve been seeing in Europe along these lines where office buildings have bi directional charging put in so their employees could sit there. plug their car in it charges up but then the building and the utility can tap into that kind of mass battery of all these cars and then the owner of those cars if they’re participating in that get a little like discount or a little cash back on their accounts for participating in that so this is stuff that you’re starting to see Kind of slowly kind of get some traction.

Um, for me, the bi directional stuff is the one that’s most exciting, but it’s also the one that seems to be for some reason taking forever to kind of roll

out. It makes sense that this, like you mentioned, this being a kind of perk, the various things that workplaces put into their. Practice around transportation, like the pre tax, uh, tax benefit of, um, commuting costs.

Like I have the ability to, if I stock, if I sock some of my paycheck away, I can use that pre tax dollar to buy my MetroCard in the city, for example. So it makes sense that you might have a. Pre tax or tax free energy benefit for employees who might be bringing their electric vehicle to the lot. It starts to cross into strange territory though, when you think about what if you’re the one person who doesn’t have yet an electric vehicle and everybody else is benefiting from something.

The lack of equity there might be a head scratcher or a thorn in somebody’s side, but I think that’s something that will be ironed out in the wash as we move forward and this tech becomes more and more, uh, pervasive. In all these different ways. For sure. There was also this comment from episode 202.

This was our discussion around wind turbines for the home, a new approach. And this was built largely around Matt’s conversation with Chris and Cheryl, who are the heads of Harmony Turbines. Where they are developing what they think might be a solution to the problem of high winds, size and scale. Uh, effectively, their wind turbine looks a little bit like a large coffee can folding in on itself.

It has this really unique design where the arms open up, the canister effectively opens up to catch the wind, but if it moves Faster and faster in higher winds, those arms slowly come back in, allowing for the turbine to still operate in higher winds, which as Matt’s video points out, is a problem when higher winds normally cause turbines to need to be shut down so they literally don’t rip themselves apart.

So Chris and Cheryl in their startup trying to make a technology that is not only more resistant but more available to the homeowner. And there were comments like this from Lord Dragon who said, they seem to be on the cutting edge. Congratulations to them. And also comments from people like Ryo Kage who wrote, I would love to have this tech on my property.

Even if it’s an outdated unit, it’s better than what we currently have. Which is nothing. And I think that’s an interesting take on this. Did they talk at all about what they see as the life cycle of this technology? I got the impression that this technology might actually last longer in their vision than are more traditional windmill style turbines.

And if that’s the case, unlike solar, I don’t know that there would be a secondary market for this kind of design. What did you think in your conversations with them about that?

We didn’t address that specifically. Um, cause I think it’s a little too early days for them to say. Like, they were kind of cagey about what it might cost, it’s because they don’t know yet.

So, it’s the same thing with something like longevity, but I’m pretty sure they would feel like these would last a very long time. Components of it would, that might need replacing because they’d wear out, like some of the mechanical parts might need to be replaced, but you might not need to replace the entire thing.

So, it’s, there’s this, this kind of thing probably does have a longer lifespan than you might expect. Where the horizontal ones. Maybe 10 years, 15 years, uh, for these home sized ones, uh, if they don’t fly themselves apart. Um, so it’s like, I, I wouldn’t be surprised if these would match or beat that at all.

On now to our discussion about Matt’s most recent episode. This is his discussion around CES, what he saw. He saw a bunch of stuff that the video. It takes on a real have you ever wanted to go shopping in Blade Runner feel. It was, it was a bit like, Oh yeah, I’ll take the giant hologram projector and, and install that in my home.

The idea of a television, which is see through until you need to actually use it. One of the things you didn’t mention is Okay, it turns effectively into what might be considered just like a large picture frame on the wall. So it has that kind of like visual impact where it stops being the thing you see, which is not being used and turns itself into something that looks more decorative.

Is there any planning from anything you heard at CES? Are they like, yeah, these could be windows. I imagine the technology that’s going in, you wouldn’t want it to have rain hitting it, but it seemed very amenable to like, why not just make it a window? And this

is the thing where it’s like, you think about the use cases for this and the first places that come to mind are stores.

It’s like, this makes. Perfect sense for like a storefront or a window front, the middle of an aisle where people are walking on both sides of it or something like that. It makes perfect sense. Home use, it gets a little, uh, dicey. Um, some people I’ve talked to were like, you know, they have an aquarium. It’s like, imagine, you know, that’s kind of in the middle of room.

Imagine this is kind of away from the wall in the middle of the room and you could have it, um, or room divider where people have, you know, like fireplaces that are two sided. So two sides of a room. They’re separated by a wall. You could have something similar like this. But yeah, this is the kind of thing where I would absolutely imagine seeing this in storefronts or windows, uh, first.

Um, cause it’s, like I said, for home use, I have, I have zero desire for this thing ever. Um, but I can see, I can see like a more of a niche market for it than anything else. But I got it. I said it in the video. It was eye popping to see it. In real life, like when it came out on stage, I kind of did a double take of like, wait, wait, what?

And then when I saw it in person, like I was up close to it, it was just mesmerizing to watch. But at the same time, I was just like, yeah, I’ll pass. Yeah, I imagine

like in my own trying to apply it to places that I think would make sense in my life, I was thinking similarly storefronts, um, you know, having the ability to have a bunch of these in your front storefront window and having an ad swirl away and then literally be looking into the store.

So that like, you know, mattress firm suddenly being like showing these people enjoying mattresses and then it goes to a clear window and you just see the showroom of, of mattresses.

That kind of thing. Another use case might be offices. It’s like, imagine like my job before YouTube spent a lot of time in conference rooms and some of these conference rooms had big windows overlooking out of the skyscraper.

It’s like you could, instead of having a giant TV. On taking up a wall, you could have the TV in front of one of those windows, and when it’s not in use, it’s just full daylight, everything coming through. Right. But then when you’re having a conference call, it goes opaque, and then you have the image right there.

So there’s space and light, and it keeps things bright and airy. For situations like that, I can totally see that being a use case, too.

I can only imagine what the price tag is, though.

Oh, it’s gotta be so expensive.

It’s really also kind of interesting to think that the sales pitch is, Would you like to spend more money on a screen than you normally spend?

So when you look at the screen, you don’t see the screen. That’s right. Yeah. But we’ll still see your money. Thank you very much. Look at the big brains on Brad. What a sales pitch. So you talked about things like there was energy storage breakthroughs that were being marketed, lots of modular stuff, which seems to be trying to find a way to branch, not only scale upward, but also downward.

And as somebody who lives in an apartment where I don’t have the ability to say like, Oh, I’ll put that in the garage. I’ll put solar panels on the roof and stuff like that. The apartment. Uh, the balcony solar panels, the modular storage solutions. Do you see, you mentioned this briefly and I’d like for you to just talk about it more, the way that the trend seems to not be hitting the U.

S. to scale downward that way. Versus other parts of the world where a lot of these products being brought to us by were they being brought to CES by non U. S. companies? Is that the trend where the companies that are outside the U. S. have a market that they see and in the U. S. they don’t. So they don’t, they don’t follow that path.

Is that the kind of breakdown? This is

pretty much. Think about it like a lot of Chinese companies, um, there were imagine a factory makes these modular systems and then they’re branded with three or four different brands. But then there are some Chinese companies that are doing more boutique things just for themselves.

So most of the stuff I was saying were Chinese companies, um, Chinese manufacturing, that kind of stuff. And I talked to one company, his name was, uh, the company’s name was Mars Tech, I think it was. And in talking to him, he was, the, the rep, uh, was saying. They don’t have a distributor here in the U. S. So one of the reasons they were at CES was trying to find distributors for our market.

So there’s all these technologies that are just waiting to come in, but there’s just nobody to sell. Uh, and they’re not going to build out their own sales infrastructure because that’s a huge amount of effort and work when these companies are basically focused on technology companies. There’s battery manufacturers that are just packaging it up and they need somebody else to sell it.

The exceptions are EcoFlow and Anker, which I talked about in the video. They have their own distribution network. So they are the first ones that are starting to kind of hit the US. But the other aspect of the thing that’s slowing this down isn’t just, I think, interest, it’s policy? Because the way these systems work still kind of breaks my brain, Sean.

Um, you get this battery pack, and it has like a little inverter box, so you plug The battery into this box and then the box that plugs into just any standard household outlet in your apartment. And we think of outlets in our homes as, Oh, energy comes out of the hole. Yes. Well, energy can actually go back in too.

Right. So just by plugging this thing into any standard hous household outlet, you now are backing up your apartment. You have two way power going in and out. Now granted is 120 volts here in the U. S. 15 to 20 amps. So you’re not going to be able to go above that amount. So it’s, it’s not a ton of energy you’d be feeding back into the outlet, but for an apartment, you may not have a lot of stuff that you’d be running on in a blackout or things like that anyway.

So it’s

just a fridge or something like that,

right? It’s probably just fine. There’s regulations around that that are required to approve that. And one of the first countries that’s doing this is Germany. They have policies and rules in place that people in apartments can do this. But I was just, uh, somebody pointed this out to me.

I think it was on Mastodon. Uh, there’s a YouTuber that’s in Germany that’s done a lot of stuff about this. I was watching a bunch of his videos with like the auto translate on it. It was, it was fascinating to hear how it’s breaking down, but like, It’s kind of like, uh, here in the United States, if you want to get solar in your home and you live in a, uh, a homeowner’s association, a lot of HOAs can go, nope, they’re ugly, you can’t get them.

Apartment dwellers, I want to get satellite TV. Nope, it’s an ugly dish, we don’t own our building. So policy had to come in place that said HOAs cannot stop you from getting solar. Apartment owners cannot prevent you from getting satellite TV. Right. Germany’s kind of in this weird place where The size requirements of what you can get for your apartment, certain sizes don’t need a landlord approval.

They still need utility approval, but they don’t need landlord approval and others do. And so the Germany is starting to change some of the rules and regulations. I’m hand waving this. I’m not giving exact details because it’s still kind of wrapping my head around it. But that’s part of the reason why you’re not seeing me here in the U.

S. because it’s, it’s kind of, the technology is moving faster than. Yeah. Yeah. People can keep up

with it. Well, it’s a use. It’s a use that is, was never envisioned when any of these policies were being written and regulations were being made. Nobody I mean, our power grid is effectively now like a hundred years old probably.

And so to think back to somebody saying like, but what if somebody someday comes up with a way of making their own power and they want to feed it back into the system? How do we handle that? Nobody was thinking that. So it makes sense, but it also does then put the onus on. Us, the end users, to start pushing our representatives, reaching out to them regarding this policy perhaps, right to your local city council members, right to your local legislators at the state level.

Start pushing the idea of like, we need solutions here because if you’re going to start having, if you’re going to continue to do what we’ve been doing, which is we effectively push the environmental protection onto the end user, then we as the end user need to ask for these things. I’m not defending the idea of the end user ultimately being the best place for all that responsibility to be put.

I don’t think it is, but that’s currently largely what we have, and given that, it means use your voice. So if people are listening to us and have been to CES and saw these things and want to be able to engage with them, start reaching out to your policymakers and start asking for the ability to do these kinds of things.

Was there anything that stood out as a, huh, that’s interesting? But it didn’t make the grade for your video. Was there something that you thought I’ll revisit that at the next CES and see if they’ve actually been able to make it happen? Oh, that’s a

hard question to answer. There was, there was stuff I saw that was kind of like, really?

That’s a thing?

I liked, I liked in your video where you were saying there’s a lot of stuff that maybe will work for us. And it was a robot that looked like its arms were made up of, of macaroni pieces that were all super, super bendy. And it looked like a giant, weird jellyfish or octopus. And so I thought I’d like that to make me a cup of coffee.

Yeah. Samsung and LG. Both have their own little household robots that you can buy now, that you can get. And they’ve been making these now for years and showing them off at CES, and it’s like vaporware. It’s like, look what the future could be. We have this little robot that will roll around your house.

It’s a ball. It’ll just roll around your house and do stuff. And now Companies like Samsung and LG are making them to actually start selling them. So like it’s, it was vaporware a few years ago, but now it’s like, Samsung is like, no, we, here’s our, the one, here’s the iteration now that’s actually going to be sold later in 2024.

And I looked at those robots and I watched some of the demos in person and I was just kind of like, yeah, no. Because it’s like, what is the utility? What is the utility of these things? It’s like, they’re so limited in what they can do. It’s basically like having an Amazon Alexa or, you know, Google smart speaker or a HomePod on wheels, essentially is what it is.

And so it’s like. Would you want to come home, open your door, and have a little robot wheel up to you and go, Hey, Sean, welcome home. You’re like, I don’t need you right now. Get out of my way. I’m just trying to come in the house. And then it’s like trying to tell you what you’ve missed over the course of the day.

It’s like, no, I don’t need this like little yippy dog or like little kids saying, mom, mom, mom, look at this. Look at this. It’s like this. You know what I mean? You don’t, you don’t need that. And that’s what these current things are. Samsung’s had a projector in it, which is kind of neat. And one of the demos they showed was a woman exercising and it’s projecting the exercise routine she’s doing on the wall.

Yeah, that’s great

because she probably doesn’t have a TV.

But this is where it gets interesting. It’s like she’s exercising in a workout room. And then she sits down to do sit ups, and when she’s doing sit ups, now she’s looking at the ceiling, and all the robot did was just roll backwards, and now the screen’s on the ceiling as she’s doing workouts.

It’s like, okay, that’s neat ish, but yeah, that’s not a, um, that’s not making me want to buy this thing. It’s like, it’s just a projector and smart speaker on wheels, and smart assistants at this point are kind of useless. They’re, they’re barely useful at this point. So it’s kind of like, it’s like the cart before the horse a little bit.

Right. So, uh. It’s something I’m interested in. Robots are coming. It’s just way too early days for that kind

of stuff. Right. Do you think the version of robots This is something I think about. Are we trapped in our imaginations that have been built largely around sci fi stories as to what a robotic environment around us would look like in the form of, here comes C 3PO.

And he’s going to help me by making me tea and bringing me my paperwork and checking in on me if I need anything at the end of the day. Or are we going to just have a lot of smart devices that are going to be around us discreetly working together in a way that you don’t see, but it’s just like you want that cup of tea.

And you say in your living room, I need a cup of tea. And then when you go up to the kitchen, the teapot has made itself a cup of tea and we won’t have a Butler.

Okay. So my take on this, it’s going to fly in the face if I know a lot of like technologists that are very gung ho. A lot of companies like Tesla and others are trying to build a humanoid shaped robot right now.

Like there’s a race to build one of these things. And I get the rationale because our world is constructed for us. So, doorways and steps, and it’s for our human form. So by making a robot in a human form, they’ll make it easier for them to become more useful and utilitarian to us throughout our lives. I get it.

That feels like robots of Don and Isaac Asimov, okay, that’s a hundred years from now where maybe we get stuff like that. But for our lifetimes, I am full in the camp of we’re going to have boutique robots that are designed for specific tasks. So my robot vacuum. It’s a robot, didn’t need to be a humanoid shape, it’s just a little disc that rolls around the floor.

I actually just got, last week, I’m testing it out now, a robot snowblower. It didn’t have to be a humanoid shape, it just looks like a little tank with treads and a big like blower in the front of it. So it’s like, you can make things that are going to make our lives more useful, and they’re robots, but they’re more utilitarian than they are humanoid.

I will admit that the sci fi comedy nerd in me wishes, though, that your Roomba was in fact humanoid shaped. The idea of the robot coming out of the closet to clean the floors and then getting down on its hands and knees and going, UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

is

just really appealing to me.

And a robot snowblower that again, your garage door goes up and a robot steps out and then just starts like, picking up handfuls of snow and throwing it as fast as it can off the driveway.

We’re missing out on opportunities for comedy, is what I’m saying. We’re too focused on the technology. We’re not focused enough on the humor. So, what do we do about that? Who do I write about that? Who’s the policy person I need to reach out about that? Some comments on the video that caught my eye like this one from Stover who wrote in to say a deep dive into those new high density solar cells would be awesome.

There’s also this one which is a very, uh, touching, uh, comment I think from James Mayes who wrote in as someone who is hearing damaged from the army. It has trouble with speech discrimination in crowded spaces. I would love to learn more about the OrCam device. When you have hearing damage and you can’t hear the person across the table from you in a restaurant, you end up losing more and more places where you feel comfortable.

The fact you might be able to solve the problem in a way that doesn’t mean just being isolated will be hugely impacting on so many people’s lives. Thank you, James, for that comment. That’s a very impactful. Uh, sort of great use case scenario. And I’m wondering if that ties into accessibility. And this came up in, uh, between Matt and me in a different, um, context.

The idea of accessibility, uh, talking about that, not only on the channel, but incorporating it more on the channel in the form of there are plugins that are available that would make things like. Uh, subtitling, descriptions for, uh, sight impairment, and also, um, transcripts available for people who need to read the podcast or our discussion instead of being able to listen to it.

And, Matt, I wonder, how much did you see around accessibility? At the show, were there companies that were incorporating accessibility into existing things, or were there new products like these earphones that seem to be really taking a stand and saying like, there’s a very specific group of people for whom this might be a key solution?

There was a lot. I didn’t get it. Let me say it this way. CES is massive. And I was there for two days out of an entire week. Um, I didn’t get to go through the, there’s like a biotech health section that I didn’t even get to go into. Um, I didn’t get to go there. There was probably countless amounts of what you’re talking about there, but like OrCam, there were some robotic companies that had little robots that are assistive devices for people who are unable to like pick things up.

Here’s a little robot that can go pick something up for you and bring it to you. So there’s a lot of that stuff that is kind of becoming. I think commoditized would be the right word. It’s, it’s, it’s coming or it’s here already and it’s, um, definitely going to help improving lives. I mean, it was part of the reason why I got really excited about Overcam when I was walking through, it was a little show after the expo had closed.

It was in the evening and I went into this show and it was called Pepcom and I saw that booth and was walking by. I was just like, caught my eye of like, immediately, Oh, this is interesting. This is going to help actually improve people’s lives. And that’s the tech I was trying to look at because, oh my God, Sean, there’s just so much crap.

It wouldn’t be the best way to put it around. It was like finding the stuff that looked like it was going to be impactful was the stuff that was catching my eye the most. And so this stuff is definitely there. Um, I just, next year I want to go and go for a couple extra more days. And get into that health biotech section

for this exact kind of stuff.

The OrCam earbuds, were they designed entirely around the use of It looked like a plug in that goes in the bottom of the phone, which helps with probably firmware to be able to make everything run properly. Because I imagine it has a Oh, it’s okay. It’s about latency. So you end up plugging that in and using that to be able to, like we just talked about, you have trouble hearing in a movie theater.

So you have that, it’s focused in on the movie screen, or you’re at a crowded restaurant and you can’t hear the person across the table from you. So you plug it into to them. Do the earbuds also work just as regular Bluetooth? Earphones that you could then Yeah, like disconnect the thing and then just walk around and listen to music or you know, have a phone call if you wanted to.

I didn’t ask them about that. I assume the answer would be no. Um, ’cause the earbuds, my understanding is they’re basically just kind of like the earbuds themselves are kind of dumb devices that are connecting to that dongle plug in their phone plug. Okay. So it’s using some kind of proprietary wireless protocol that’s very low latency.

And the reason for that is all the processing is really happening on device. And then radioing back to the earbuds, um, because it’s, it’s too much is going on for an earbud to be able to do it by itself. So. If it’s going back and forth like that, it would be very, if you were doing over Bluetooth or something like that, it would be, there’d be this latency.

So as somebody is talking, it’s like their mouth would be ahead of what you’re actually hearing. Right. So I think because of that, I don’t think they’re like a duo it’s Bluetooth plus this thing. I’m, I’m assuming just based on my conversation with them that it’s, it’s dedicated to that dongle and that’s the only way to do it, but you could use it to listen to music.

There’s nothing that would stop you from doing that.

Right. Did they have a price point on it?

Uh, that was something I didn’t talk to them about and I’m kicking myself, but my guess would be it’s going to be, uh, not cheap, just knowing how this stuff goes, maybe a few hundred bucks, uh, would be my guess.

For somebody that needs something like this, I think it would be worth every single penny. And on top of which Our mother has hearing aids, and hearing aids is a, is a segment that’s ripe for disruption. It is crazy expensive for hearing aids right now. I’ve actually

already

started seeing stuff that’s about, like, the hearing aid market.

Tech that is built around that, that is using phones as the plug in, and it is, I think you’re right. It, that we’re, and that may have a downside, there’s aspects to hearing that, like, a doctor helping you fine tune. The range that the hearing aid is working at is critical for hearing aid. Again, our mother’s experience, we know from, uh, dealing with her that it’s a very specific range that is impacted.

Um, but I’m at the early days myself of my partner saying to me, why is the TV so loud? And it’s because somebody can’t hear what, um, so something like this for me might be the Step before the full blown hearing aid, so

well, there’s just really quick. There’s something with um, This is not an Apple show.

The apple AirPods, there’s already, it already can do some rough, you know, removing noise and allowing human voices to come through. It’s not like the the OrCam, the OrCam was specific voices. Mm-Hmm. Apple’s devices. Just as just human voices. So it wouldn’t help you crowd bad. Yeah. But there’s already assistive stuff in the operating system.

I think Android may do this too, but don’t quote me on that. Where you can go through and. Turn on accessibility mode and it basically does a kind of a pseudo hearing test with your AirPods in. And then after it’s done, it creates a custom EQ profile to make up for the frequencies that you’re low in. So just already today, just with some of the devices we already have access to, there are ways that you can actually improve what you’re hearing around you just with AirPods and other earbuds that are already in existence.

So it’s. Interesting. I’m very excited for where this is all heading. It’s, it’s going to make it better for you and I. We just need this help later

in our lives. And you’ve talked in the past about Apple watches, wearing them for tracking of health concerns, but the tricorder that you saw, and I’m going to call it a tricorder, I don’t care what the company that’s making it is calling it.

It’s a tricorder. We’re calling it a tricorder. It’s a tricorder from now on. Uh, something like that. Is that, was that promoted as like home use or was that doctor’s office use? Are they talking about This is home use. So it was literally like Something doesn’t feel good and you have the ability to say like, okay, here’s my temperature.

Here’s what my blood pressure is. And this thing is going to listen to my heart and check my blood flow. Like, stuff like that. Yeah. Well, just

to kind of show how interested I am in this tech behind me over my shoulder back here, there’s a tricorder replica and then you probably, you probably can’t see it, but down on the desk, I was a Kickstarter backer of a company that created something called the Scanadu Scout.

And it was this little disc, um, that was a beta tester on it that you put it on your temple and hold your fingers on it. And it would take your temperature, do an ECG, do all this kind of like blood oxygen level all in one go. Off This one device and I got it I was like, this is a tricorder. I got to get this.

Um, that tech didn’t actually become a product for consumers, but the advances they made the company spun it off into other things. This withings thing that you’re talking about this tricorder I saw is basically that in product form that I was talking about. It’s meant for home use. Imagine you have Like when we were all in lockdown, like telehealth.

So it’s like you have a, you could have a doctor’s appointment. What are the things they do to you when you go to the doctor’s office just for a regular checkup? They take your blood pressure. They check your blood oxygen sometimes. They weigh you. They take your temperature. It’s like they walk through stethoscopes to listen to what’s going on.

This little device does not all of that, but most of it. So it’s like you could remotely give access to your doctor on one of those telehealth calls to this device, and you could be holding the device against your chest. And he could tell you to put it down lower, then put it over here, and he could literally listen to your chest.

From the comfort of his own office, you know what I mean? So it’s, this is, I am super excited about this deck. I’ve already kind of put my name into the wait list for when, as soon as it’s available to buy. Cause I, I want to try this thing out. It’s really cool. I already feel

bad for your cat.

Hey Luna, you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be

standing behind her with woo, woo,

woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

She’s

a cat. In that vein, uh, David Gray jumped into the comments to say The earbud tech is getting extremely close to the universal translator from Star Trek. So, was there anything like that that you saw that was like live translation, interactive, that it didn’t matter what language you spoke to a thing, you would be able to communicate with it?

Not that I saw

there. Again, that’s actually built into our devices today already. It’s like, you can hold up Google Translate on your phone and Speak to anybody you want, but there’s that lag. They have to finish saying what they’re saying, and then it translates it, and then you say what you say, and then it translates it back, and you’re having to show screens.

Um, I did not see anything where it’s like real time, like you’re at the UN and have something in your ear and you’re hearing a real time translation. I didn’t see anything like that. But oh, Sean, I so want that.

Oh, yes. Me too. Me too. So, listeners, was there anything that you saw in the video that you would like to follow up more on?

Or is there anything in our discussion that you think we skipped a step and you’d like us to revisit it? Jump into the comments and let us know. And if you can’t think of anything specific, you can jump to the comments and just say, Matt’s Tripped to the Strip. And, uh, let us know what you thought about the general discussion.

Thank you so much for the comments. They really do help drive the content of this show. And they also help inform the content of Matt’s main show, Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Don’t forget his CES discussion. He asked again and again, which of these techs would you like a deeper dive in? So jump into the comments there or here and let him know, and we’ll see those.

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