CES 2016 Day 4

Today on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, Casey, and Nicola gather together one more time at CES 2016 and chat about what they saw, what they learned, and what is next to come post-CES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast on the 500th day of CES 2016. The show that never sleeps or stops or produces any product news. No, it's our last day here at CES. I think you can hear the sleepiness in my voice. But I'm Neelai Patel. I'm joined here today by my friend Casey Newton.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Good to be here.

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  You gotta talk right into that mic.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Gotta talk right into the mic and tell you that it's good to be here.

• 0:31Nilay Patel?

  It's good to be here.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  I am Dieter Bone, I'm still here.

• 0:34Nilay Patel?

  My girl Fumo's here.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  What up? I'm just dying to know what you've been up to.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  Nicola just appears randomly at CES. You appeared on the show yesterday, then you disappeared, then you appeared at a party I was at, then you disappeared.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, we have had some weird run-ins.

• 0:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Only run-ins.

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, only run-ins.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Not the other run-ins.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  I want some quality time.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  We're here now.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  We have one hour, I guess.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Let's grind through some quality time together.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Spend some goddamn time together as family.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  What do I do? I don't know, it's a really great question.

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, let's start with Casey. So Casey, what have you been up to at CES? What have you been seeing? What have you been talking about?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Neelai, as you know, CES falls somewhere outside my core interests. I'm not a big Internet of Things guy, but I did check in.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Is there any big Internet of Things guys?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  That man right there is a huge Internet of Things person.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  He's Wi-Fi enabled. That straw actually has Intel's Curie chip in it.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a Bluetooth straw.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  So what I've been doing is going to the live blogs of the various multinational corporations, your Intels and your Nvidia's and your Samsung's and I think there was one more, LG. And this is gonna sound like a joke, but the thing that I've been most excited about are household appliances.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Because they are useful in ways that are serious. For example, a washing machine that also dries your clothes. Why did it take us till 2016 to get a good one of those? I don't know. But we have one now. And by we have one, I mean it will become commercially available and remain unaffordable. To me, probably, but I thought that was very cool. And then the Samsung fridge has a 21.5 inch touchscreen in it. And you can send all sorts of, you know, crazy trolls to your friends there.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  I read your live blogs.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  And I have to say, your enthusiasm for these products now.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  Was not matched.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It was not apparent?

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think it was one of those things where the more I thought about it, you know, even as I was cracking wise, because how could you not?

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, everyone should read.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  He drops a few F bombs.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Everyone should read Casey's live blogs and these events. There's one where they said, there's literally nothing this washing machine can't do. And Casey just goes, that is a bold claim.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a very bold claim. But what's funny is some of the companies that I was making fun of started to reach out to me to go like meet the people I'd been making fun of. So for example, Dolby.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  You know, which is just like a middleware company that doesn't actually like sell to consumers. Like was continually interrupting other presentations to be like, hey, like we put, we put Dolby in this. It was like Dolby's entire role at corporate presentations. Like, we put some Dolby in this, you guys. And so they hired this like James Bond looking character named Giles Baker to tell the world about this. And so I was like making, you know, various James Bond jokes in the live blog. And then I got an email the next day that just said Giles Baker would like to meet with you. And so yesterday, I went with my tail between my legs to Dolby and met with Giles Baker. And he explained to me all of the different kinds of Dolby that Dolby puts into things.

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And it was very lovely.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  What's his favorite kind of Dolby?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you the most sort of bromantic moment that we shared together. They took me into the Dolby testing lounge where they have a sort of high end, but commercially available TV and like Klipsch sound system. And Giles Baker and I sat on a sofa and we watched Justin Bieber perform an acoustic version of What Do You Mean? at an insanely loud volume. And I honestly had like chills, like the hairs on my neck were standing up. And so Giles Baker really, you know, left me with a lot to think about, yeah.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  You know, what's interesting is theverge.com now, Casey's installed some Dolby. Yeah. Just get that fine Dolby experience.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Look for Dolby on the box. That's what I have to tell you.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  If you haven't read, I'm so tired.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  It's a long one.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  Look, I played blackjack until 5:00 in the morning. Let's just be honest and direct. It's Las Vegas.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Did you win or lose?

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  I watched somebody else insist that they were lucky and winning while spending somebody else's money.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  And then she took that money. She took whatever. She, because there was someone else's money coming in, she decided that she had doubled her money and walked away, not paying back. It was, anyway. Look, it's Las Vegas.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  And I'm an easily tempted human being.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Sure. Would you say that you know when to hold them or when to fold them?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  That's not blackjack.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, it's a Vegas line.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  You know when to hit them or when to quit them?

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  I would say that I'm getting better at knowing when to quit them.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Okay, that's good.

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  That's a, in my 35th year, I think deciding when to quit them is a thing I'm gonna focus on.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Right, so when 5:00 AM came around, you said, "Yeah, that's probably enough for tonight."

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I consulted the flow chart that I've been developing on my phone. And it said, "Are you lonely and by yourself in a casino?" And the phone said, "Yes."

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  It's funny. Nicola, what have you been on to?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Mostly looking at things you can put on your wrist.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  And if you should or shouldn't do that, basically.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Should I put something on my wrist?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  I would say...

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I have very thin wrists.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Okay, thank you.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  No, we're not gonna do that.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go with no.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  No, because he has a computer with him. I feel like most of the time. Um, yeah, I've been looking at all...

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  Wait, if you have a computer with you, you don't need something on your wrist?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, because of doing the job that there's the thing in front of you. Why would you want that redundancy?

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you've been looking at watches, not like, I thought you were looking at like fitness trackers.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, and those.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but...

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Connected bracelets even.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, somebody... Some e-brace? I don't know, it's not a bracelet.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Don't shorten it, it's not good. Um, yeah, no.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  But no laptop can do what a fitness tracker can do.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  No, no laptop can do what a fitness tracker can do.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  That's what you just said. You said you shouldn't put anything on your wrist because he has a laptop.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Okay, fine, he can put whatever he wants on his wrist.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Fuck, fine. Why is this so hostile? I feel like you've been looking at a lot of products that made you kinda mad.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Tell me about those.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Um, the maddest I got was...

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Uh, when, whenever there's jewels put on something for women and...

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  We talked about this a little bit yesterday, right?

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  Zerowski everywhere.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, just more of that, more jewels on things.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Um, man, today, today, what did I, we made a video, it's gonna be great, you're gonna love it.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  It's me and Lauren.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, weren't good?

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, putting stuff on your wrist.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Real magic.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  What was the ugliest thing that you've seen?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Um...

• 7:09Speaker 02

  I mean, her immediate thought was your face, and she didn't want to say it.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  I, yeah, Nicola's just like on fire today. She came in, sat down, started throwing jabs.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a really, actually, no, I was telling someone that CES is releasing my inner snob. Like, I try to keep it quiet, or at least internal, and I'm just like saying things out loud that are just mean and judgmental and based on appearances.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  Why's that?

• 7:34Speaker 03

  I don't know, something about this is...

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  CES or is it Vegas?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  No, this is not Vegas. We're not in Vegas. This is CES.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  I would say CES is the most Vegas thing that I go to every year.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  I would say...

• 7:43Nilay Patel?

  But I come here every year, so...

• 7:45Speaker 03

  I would say, I would say barring like probably a cumulative four hours, I haven't been in Las Vegas, I've been in CES.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  I saw Cher's farewell show in Las Vegas, and that was the most Las Vegas thing I've ever seen.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  That sounds like it.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the very end of the show, before we had even stopped clapping, Cher was on a helicopter back to Los Angeles, which tells you a lot about the way that people feel about Vegas at the end of their time here.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  And also, the crowd kept clapping long enough...

• 8:10Speaker 01

  We, we felt like fools. We kept expecting her to come out and take a bow.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  Little did we know. Should we see a show tonight?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Is Britney playing tonight?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  We're gonna find out.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  No. The crew knows.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Our producers are fully aware.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  In case you're wondering what people do over there while we're recording the first jazz.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Scour StubHub for Britney tickets.

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  Dan and Andrew are scouring for Britney tickets.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  I did see Chris Brown last night.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Andrew's website is BritneySpearsSuperfan.com.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Wait, you saw Chris Brown where? Oh, play.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  How's Chris Brown?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Oh man, where, how far do we want to go into this?

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  All the way, tell the whole story.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so, like, being in a club here is so weird, but it's like a brand-sponsored event, because it's all the, like, CES, oh, suit jacket and lanyards, like, everywhere in the club, and it's so weird, and-

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Putting your hand over your face isn't gonna hide you from these people, they still see you.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  They know.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Um, but it's like, the club is full of mostly that, and then there's like, that's probably like, a healthy eighty-nine percent. The drinks are free, so you drink them. And you don't stop drinking them.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  What Hemingway nightwear are you describing?

• 9:21Speaker 03

  And then-

• 9:22Speaker 01

  The drinks are free.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  The weird thing about the parties here is that usually-

• 9:25Nilay Patel?

  The ocean is roaring at me.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Uh, the weird thing about the parties here- Is that, many things, but the artists that are scheduled to perform actually go on at regular hours. And usually, like, anything you go to, you're like, oh, there's a gas grate, they're gonna be on at two in the morning, or something.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  So Chris Brown came on at, like, maybe eleven? Like, a really reasonable hour. Um, started by himself, mostly played, like, kind of slow jams, like, it wasn't like a hot intro, and then four male dancer to appear, dancers appeared later.

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  And then they would go away.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what, what brand sponsored this party? Did I miss it?

• 10:00Speaker 03

  iHeartRadio.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, that's the thing that they do here.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  We went to the Twitter Spotify party-

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Nilay Patel?

  In search of Drake.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  When we got there, we were told that Chromio was playing, but then Neil and I walked into the, uh, stage area, and they just had a boombox playing Juvenile's "Back That Ass Up",

• 10:17Speaker 01

  which was not very Chromio at all.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  It was very confusing.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but no, Drake, they, I mean, they lured us there with Drake.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  What, how did they say?

• 10:25Nilay Patel?

  They said Drake will be playing.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  The classic Drake, very subtle.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  But wouldn't your mind be like, he couldn't possibly be at a Spotify event, that would be not possible because of Apple Music, right? What? You didn't do that in your head immediately?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Well, his manager was there, is something else we were told. And earlier in the day, at a Twitter event, I had run into Flo Rida, who was there trying on headphones from a company that Twitter has taken a minority stake in, for literally no reason that anyone will tell me. Twitter invested in a headphones company. They built a little kind of city environment in the Cosmopolitan hotels. There were like these little storefronts and you could go in and there were meeting rooms. And it was like very elaborate and very well done and like it all looked very cool. And one of the storefronts was a headphones store. The company's named Muzik, M-U-Z-I-K. Twitter took a stake in it. I have no idea why. And who was in there when I walked by trying on headphones? None other than Flo Rida himself.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Do you recognize my face?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Obviously, somebody had to tell me that it was Flo Rida. I mean, I've of course heard the songs.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  I'm, yeah, not living under a rock over here, people. But I do not know what he looks like.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  I don't know what he looks like.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Mostly because he won't return my calls to set up our first date, so.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  Are you an Uncle Flo?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Did you mention to him that his name is actually just the word Florida with a space?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  I wanted to, because I think when he finds out, he is gonna be so embarrassed. He's like, "What have I been doing for the last five years with this name?"

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  He loves Florida so much that he was like, "You know what my rap name is gonna be? Florida."

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Right. I want mine to be Cal Aforan. And just see if that could kind of catch on.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  Actually, we should talk about headphones for a minute.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Let's get into it. These are terrible. Who got these for him?

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, these are all... Andrew's crying in the corner. This is the part of the CES where you start emotionally abusing each other. No, so every year, there's an Apple leak at CES.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  There's all, Apple always, you know, I'm a conspiracy theorist. I believe that this stuff happens for a reason.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  But no, if it were happening for a reason at CES, they wouldn't have waited until today.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  But why is it every year? Anyway.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  All right.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  It always happens. What a surprise. It happened again. So the Apple leak...

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  Is confirmation that Apple's gonna cut the headphone jack out of the next iPhone. Make it yet even thinner. Just fuck battery life. Uh, and they're gonna, they're gonna build wireless Beats headphones. Like earphones.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  It was earbuds, it was wireless earbuds.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Wireless earbuds.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Which like finally became a real thing this year at CES.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, they're everywhere. And they'll, they'll pack in some garbage, AirPods to plug in the landing board.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Okay, so the, the actual included ones, we do not think are gonna be wireless.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Obviously the thing that they're gonna say is we don't need a headphone jack anymore. Because you're gonna buy these sick.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Now, what, I mean, talk to me about, you know, the audio quality.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  That's the big Apple leak of the, of the show.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  What is the audio fidelity of wireless earbuds?

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  So it's gotten, like five years ago it was bad. It's gotten way better. So like Bluetooth headphones are pretty good now. Um, it's APTX.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  APTX, yeah, but.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I mean, cause I'm already getting, you know, only mediocre sound from Spotify, right? I have like very nice headphones when I'm at my desk, but it's, you know, Spotify, it's, you know, 320 kbps. Um, I don't want to degrade that any further.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you'll be able, I don't think that signal path is gonna get, you know, you're adding one piece of, like, it's, they're not, they're gonna do something, but you're probably wanting to hear it because that information is probably already gone.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  What if they're not Bluetooths? What if they come up with their own custom proprietary wireless standard?

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's very Apple, but they wouldn't, because then you can only use them with a phone, you know?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  So does, does this feel like the sort of inevitable future, or is this Apple tinkering for the sake of tinkering?

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Apple's in a real Samsung place lately, right?

• 14:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I definitely have used smartphones that didn't have headphone jacks. Like the trios didn't, HTC made a bunch of phones that were, had a, it had this weird mini USB. We hated it. It was the most annoying thing.

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  What was HTC's connector called?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  It was like some USB, it wasn't USB and you had to plug in dongles to get it.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  It was mini USB, but it was like a trapezoid instead of proper mini USB.

• 14:38Nilay Patel?

  Man, that company should just continue slowly dying.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Or HTC.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  Sorry to talk.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  It was the HTC multi-function audio adapter.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I remember, because it has such a catchy name.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Would you wear wireless headphones, like individual wireless earbuds?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  I don't want to.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Why not?

• 14:53Speaker 03

  They're gonna make me, though, I guess.

• 14:55Nilay Patel?

  Or you can just use regular headphones, one assumes.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Um, because it's another thing to misplace.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Like, the tangle, I can find it. You know?

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  What's cooler, the over-ear cans or butts?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Well, I like the idea of having over-ear, but in my woman-on-the-go lifestyle, I just can't be encumbered.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  That's a busy millennial.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  I'm a busy, young professional millennial. Um...

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  It's true. Uh, but, yeah, no, I need that. It has to go in my bag. It has to go away. It can't, like, it can't have a precious, like, this thing that's as big as a sandwich. Like, he carries sandwich all the time. Only a piece of gum.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  That's the rule.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  These headphones are nice, but, hmm, breaks the sandwich rule. Um, I don't know. I think carrying an audio jacket is such an enormous mistake. Uh, it just seems like they're just doing it to do it. Like, yes, the connector's been around for, like, 100 years or something crazy.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, am I the only person who would get really excited if this year's leak had been, like, the iPhone 7 will be, like, 3mm thicker and the battery life will be, like, 12 hours longer?

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  No, you can buy, but you can buy an ugly battery case. I mean, like, that's the thing that they want, right? Like, it's funny, like Joanna Stern's review of the iPhone 6S was like... Literally, she, like, walked around the street and, like, people are like, "I want longer battery life." And she's like, "Now you can press the screen." And they're like, "No, I don't. That's not useful to me." Um, I just like, they're, I think they're, they're just finding ways to make it ever thinner for no discernible reason.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, like, and to be clear, I don't think the iPhone has terrible battery life.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Also waterproof.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, waterproof.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  Was a thing that they, was leaking out there.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, I mean, that's like, that's genuinely useful, right? People do break their iPhones because they drop them in the toilet. Um, my brother himself, I think, has lost, like, eight phones in the toilets. Uh, so that's, that's great. But changes happen.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Wait, eight?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  I know. No, not that many. But between him and his wife, like, they're always like scrounging around for an upgrade because somebody either dropped it, or, you know, into the ocean, or that kind of thing. They're, they're, you know, they were placed under some sort of curse, I don't know.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  Were they, it's fine. Dropped into the ocean is kind of amazing, because you don't have to be above the ocean.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  They spent a lot of time, they spent a lot of time parasailing, kite surfing, very active.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  No, waterproof is great. I just think, there, I get that wireless, like Bluetooth headphones are a thing, they're a big market, people buy the hell out of them. But I just think that that is the thing that people won't buy iPhone, because it doesn't have an iPhone jack.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, they'll be like, you know what, like, I invested in headphones, or, I just like wrapping a cord around something and putting it away. Like, I have no interest in wireless earphones.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's gonna have a huge effect on sales one way or the other. Again, it's just not the leak that I would have been looking for.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I have no interest in charging wireless earphones.

• 17:41Nilay Patel?

  Last, last year what leaked was the MacBook.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Like, hang on, if, if Apple, if you want to live in the Apple world, they are gonna expect you to charge every night a phone, earbuds, and the watch.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  Or buy a Lightning set of headphones, or buy a Lightning adapter for your headphones. It's just like a silly thing, right? Like, suddenly headphones no longer work.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  You think it'll come with a Lightning adapter?

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  I think it will come with Lightning AirPods.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  The world's worst headphones. Do you remember the video when they put out the AirPods, and Johnny, I was like, "I have studied sound for hundreds of years." He's like, "You finally did it."

• 18:16Speaker 01

  You know, something that I do a lot is, I charge my phone while I'm like taking a call, you know, which I take on my, my AirPods. That's just, like, is all that stuff is gonna go away? The more I'm thinking about this, I guess, the less excited I am about. Because I charge my phone in while using the headphones all the time.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Because if you, yeah, if they're there and your phone's there, then where are you gonna talk? How's it, how are you gonna do that? You have to hold it? We're going backwards.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, garbage.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Such garbage.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know, man. I didn't make the leak, but every year there's a leak. Last year was an actual hot new laptop.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  This year it's what I think is a retrograde decision about headphone jacks. Oh, you gotta talk about peach.cool.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here's the real news. Yeah, let's step outside of our Las Vegas bubble right now.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Is it back, or did you destroy it?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Uh, we can see right now. I took down a social network today. I probably shouldn't take credit for that because I'm actually not sure if I did. But what I can tell you is that peach.cool is the hottest thing on kind of media Twitter and early adopter Twitter.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  So, last June, actually, I wrote a big story about an app called Byte, which was created by a guy named Dom Hoffman, who's the co-founder of Vine. So he's had a lot of success building these social networks. Byte was this crazy creation tool. You could use it to do almost anything, and that was sort of its undoing. Nobody really knew what to do with it. You could add gifs, texts, photos, you could make music and put it into the app. So it looks like they sort of created a little side project, which is called Peach, which is a little bit more straightforward. You can add a text update, you can post a photo, you can do a drawing. But it adds in these things it calls magic words, which are kind of like Slack commands. So you can type in gif and it'll bring up a little box to search for gifs. Or you can type in here and it'll let you post your current location.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And then, as you'd expect, you can add a heart or you can comment. The best part of the app is that it kind of took Facebook's poke feature and then expanded it into this range of like eight or 10 actions. So you can poop someone, you can wave at them, you can kiss them, you can put a ring on them.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Can you poop emoji them?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  You cannot poop emoji them, but you can quarantine them, which is amazing.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Quarantine TC.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, rightly so. So that's like kind of a weird, fun mechanic. Where it's like they've kind of created their own little language. So, like, I just saw people were tweeting about this. I got on the beta last week. Didn't really think much of it because with these social networks, you honestly never know what's gonna take off and what isn't. There seems to be sort of no rhyme or reason to it. In this particular case, it's a little bit silly and it's a little bit... A bit dumb, and that often is enough to get an app about a hundred thousand users. And so we'll see if we're also talking about this on Monday, but like right now, I'm getting, you know, like dozens.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  He's blown up on Peach.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I'm getting, I'm getting blown up on Peach, and I'll be moving all of my social networking there.

• 21:06Nilay Patel?

  Are you on the Peach?

• 21:07Speaker 03

  No, I just found out about it in the traffic.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  It, it has the best URL of any social network, which is peach cool.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe peach dot horse would have been better, but peach dot cool is, you know, the best that I'm aware of.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  I get stolen a lot lately.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Yeah, stolen is really interesting.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what's going on.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  So stolen is a game, um, sort of moving right along to the other kind of big viral phenomenon, uh, which I haven't written about yet, uh, but want to. Um, it was created by a guy who had, uh, previously worked at Zynga, so he kind of knows about how to create these viral apps. Um, but had been working on this journal app called Heyday, which like had some nice qualities about it, but just wasn't taking off. So they decided to see if they could save the company by creating a viral game.

• 21:49Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  And so they created this thing called stolen, which was based on a previous thing that they had did, um, that was called Friends for Sale. And in Friends for Sale, like your friends had like pet avatars and you would steal them or something like that. Um, what stolen does is it lets you steal Twitter avatars. So I can go onto stolen and you get a certain amount of money, virtual currency to start with, and you're worth a certain amount of virtual currency. And then I could buy you. So let's say you're 10,000, I buy you for 10,000. And if somebody buys you, like shortly thereafter, like your stock goes up and you get a cut of the sale. And the person who stole you the first time gets to like, keep whatever like the differences between what he bought you for and what he sold you for.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  You should just see Nicola's face right now.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  I love this.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  She's so excited about this concept.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  It's very, uh, I was very skeptical about it, but I've been playing for the past couple of days.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Why are you so excited about this?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  I, I don't know. I'm trying to like, think why. The problem with CES is your brain doesn't work all the way.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Again, it's also a Las Vegas brand.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, no, I don't know why I like this so much, but I really like it. I think people are gonna love it. Because it lets people be on pedestals above each other.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  People love ranking.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  And, and also too, like, I think for a lot of us on Twitter, there's always somebody cooler than you on Twitter that like, won't follow you back.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Stolen, you can just buy them. So there's something like very empowering about the idea of like-

• 23:10Speaker 03

  I know who my first buy would be for sure.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  It would be Bieber.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  No way.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  You can't afford it, it means 99 million coins.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's too many coins. Although you can buy more coins.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's obviously-

• 23:20Speaker 01

  That's how they monetize it.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Um, but you can actually have plenty of fun on Stolen for free, which is something I like.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  I just get a lot of notifications, it's like, you have been stolen for 20,000, I'm like, leave me alone.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Oh, you're getting Twitter notifications about it?

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  But once you own them-

• 23:32Speaker 01

  People get excited when they steal you.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Once you own them, what can you do with them?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  The only thing you can do is if they're not stolen from you, like, they generate some sort of currency, so like, you visit the app one day.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  Am I mining Bitcoin by accident?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  You probably are.

• 23:43Nilay Patel?

  Is that what's happening?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  It's probably a big Bitcoin mining scheme.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  Did you see the heater that was here?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  No, is it a Bitcoin heater?

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  There was a, a shared, this is actually-

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Like a cigarette?

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  I, I, I need to Google. No, no, it was like a, it's a heater for your home, and it has like, computational ability, and it connects to a cloud, a shared computing cloud service. And so it generates heat for your home by like, do, mining Bitcoin and like, doing other things.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  And so the waste heat is like, used to heat your, it's like ridiculous. And then they were like, we need this cloud storage thing because you don't, you don't need computational resources evenly. So we have to send you some to like, heat your home when you're not doing it. I gotta find this, it was amazing.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  That sounds like somebody really overthought the concept of a heater.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, it must use so much electricity.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  I just Googled-

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Relative, it must be so inefficient relative to a regular old heater.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  I'll find it.

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  Project Exe- Exergy? I know, it was here, it was at Showstoppers or PepCon or one of the ones I went to. And it was such an insane, such an only at CES product where I was like, "What is this?" And they're like, "It's a heater. It mines Bitcoin." It's like, that's usually the other way.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  Um, you went to a fucking crazy booth today.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I went to a totally normal booth today. There's one like right there. Uh, it's just a company out of St. Louis that makes everything.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  And they just, they go, they've got a design center in Hong Kong or Shenzhen and they, they just, "We want to make a hoverboard. Well, this is the one the factories make. We'll make ours look a little bit this way."

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  And we want to make a blender. We want to make a alarm clock. They make like 15 different kinds of alarm clocks. And you probably have one in your house or in your hotel room because they've got 50 white labels.

• 25:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Um, and it was just like fascinating to go in there and like, "What is your CES like?" Well, my CES is like convincing Walmart to like buy my stuff and put it in the, you know, the checkout aisle.

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Um, and like, but they had like good stuff, like fine stuff. No- nothing there was like utter garbage. And even if it was, it's like, "Well, that's somebody, they'll get rid of it somewhere." Um, but like, the, the thing, I mean, I wrote a whole piece about it, but the thing that I realized is like, the, the worst stuff here is like 20% better than it was

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  two or three years ago. Same thing with the best stuff. And so like, "Yeah, go out and buy a crappy Bluetooth speaker. You'll be fine."

• 26:05Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, I'm thinking about it. I had the same drum box for like four years, but now like the battery won't charge, so it only works if it's plugged in, so I'm in the market.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. They've got ones that float? They've got ones with suction cups?

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  You gotta watch this video. Dieter, it's Dieter and Walt, just playing with toys.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, Walt and I walked around.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  That sounds fantastic.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  He told me stories.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  Hey, did you hear your backpack story?

• 26:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  We had a, we had a story. Who pitched it? It was somebody?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  I don't know. I still don't get it.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  Somebody who was like, "CES is the only place on earth where, where everyone is constantly wearing a backpack and it's acceptable."

• 26:35Speaker 03

  I don't know if that's true.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, um.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  That man's wearing a backpack?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  High school?

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  Call it out. Sub backpack.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  I see a lot of people who don't have backpacks.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Sir, I applaud you for turning around when I said sub backpack.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  But there isn't one. There isn't one. There isn't one.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  We have to stop. A, this is terrible radio if you're in a car. B, we are literally just yelling at people.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  We're engaging with the audience.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  I brought a backpack.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  You brought a backpack?

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wanted to fit in.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  What kind of backpacks do you bring? Your backpack's cool. Can I be cool?

• 27:04Speaker 02

  What's cooler, a backpack or a messenger bag?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  A backpack.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  Whoa, really?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Let's hear it. Why?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Um, I don't know. I mean, one, the weight distribution on the messenger bag makes no sense. It's terrible.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Well, that's not true.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's so bad.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  You gotta wear it high tight and then it's more even.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Okay, now we're wearing the messenger bag high tight and even.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  Alright, fine. We're done with this. You know what we need to talk about? I just realized and I've been, my wifi's out and I can't get the whole story, but maybe you guys know it. There was a raid on a hoverboard company here.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  We're sitting inside a crime scene.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  Yes. The federal officials raided at the behest of One Wheel, but then Segway is here, like just over there. Uh, Razor's here with a hoverboard, um, and Swagway, the world's worst named company.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, shouldn't Segway send the cops to Swagway?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  You know, there's a case to be made.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, anyway, they released a product called the Swagtron, which is actually just a robot Sam Treffer. He just says outlandish things about blocking.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Beef.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Buzz. Beef.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. Anyway, do you guys, can somebody walk me through the federal raid story?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so One Wheel, um, didn't want their stuff, their patented things stolen by other companies.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  How are there patents on this? Like, the whole point is that there are no patents. That's why, anyway, keep going.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Sounds like somebody reinvented the One Wheel.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  We're done. Shut it down.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Goodnight!

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  So they, they, they've got some kind of patent and so they, they, another company, like, whenever anybody makes a hoverboard, immediately, uh, the same thing gets made by everybody else. They all talk to each other in these factories. Yeah, and so like, well, if I wanna go make a Bluetooth speaker, I go, I fly out to Shenzhen and I go to like fifteen factories and they all say, well, these are, these are the kinds of Bluetooth speakers we should make. And I say, okay, how about that one? And they're like, cool. And I said, okay, can you like put a flower on it so it's at least unique? And they're like, yeah, sure, here's a flower. And the same thing happens with the hoverboards. And so whatever parts, whatever factory, I'm guessing, made their stuff, like, it just got all stolen. And so some of those companies end up coming out to CES and they, uh, you know, a bunch of these, a bunch of the bigger companies are tired of it. So they like...

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Told the feds and the feds like, yeah, and they went and raided the Changzhou First International Trade

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Booth or building and took them out, didn't take them out.

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that's harsh.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Took them away.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  The penalty for hoverboard patent infringement is summary execution immediately on the trade show floor.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Which I look, because normally we write these patent stories and they're so like impenetrable, but like a good old fashioned raid.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Like where you feel like you're in like prohibition era America is amazing.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, so it happens way more often in like Germany. So every year there's some MP3 raid story. So there's MP3 is patented with Fraunhofer Institute. I don't know if you know this.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Say the institute again. Thank you. Okay.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  You know, us patent aficionados or anyway, whatever. Every year there's some company that doesn't pay the license for MP3 and they put out MP3 players. And every year the German authorities raid EFA and I like, I have written this story or reblogged this story like for a decade.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:17Nilay Patel?

  Like they did it again. The cops showed up and it's just funny that it's, I've never really heard about it happening here.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Well, what's fascinating to me.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Why would you pick that company and not any of the others?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  They're bigger. I don't know. Um, they've, they've been trying to get them stopped for a while now. They've been trying, they've been sending them cease and desist and they told them, don't come to the show and then they came anyway. And so I'm like, okay, well, we're doing this. Um, but what's fascinating to me about the hoverboard story.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  Swag wave, like got an alert on his phone. It's like, the cops are here. Everybody pack it up.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Gets on his little one wheel and starts wheeling out here. He's like, no one can know. Uh, what were you saying?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  I was saying, what's fascinating to me about hoverboards is like, I don't even know if we can call some of these things knockoffs. Cause like, it's hard to know where the original actually was. And so they're all like knockoffs of each other. And so like the term, like here's the genuine article and here's the fake version of it doesn't really even apply. And that's happening like across like all of the tech industry right now. It doesn't happen with like, you know, the laptops, the phones, the brands that we have, but all the other little geek awes that you can get in your house. There's other versions of it everywhere else. And the line between what's real and what's, what's the knockoff is really vague. And we only noticed it with hoverboards because the frickin' things were lighting out of fire.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny. The marketing line for two different hoverboards here is like, this one won't explode.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  That's a really low bar and it's like, Swagway is like the Swagtron. The battery is protected, so it won't kill you.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  The battery's protected by like being encased in aluminum, which if it does fail, it's gonna fail way more spectacularly. It's got shrapnel now.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Also, if I'm 13, you know a tagline I don't want to hear? This won't explode.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Sell me on the danger. Like, my tagline for a cool teen hoverboard would be like, "This thing will take you right off a fucking cliff, bro." "Yeah, mom, I want this one." Put a skull and crossbones on it.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  I feel as though as our designated teen reporter. You're moving farther and farther away.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Actually, Caitlin is our designated teen reporter now.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, she did a great teens at CES story. All the stuff that was branded and marketed for teens.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  She found the Kodak booth as well.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah?

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. She was like, "I love it here."

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Yes, it's a great place to be.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  It's funny that both of you like zeroed in on this one experience.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  That is really funny.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  And she's like, "Why is there a selfie spot here?"

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  What's your favorite place at CES this year? Is it the Kodak booth?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Um, my favorite place at CES? Um...

• 32:49Speaker 03

  No, it can't be that. It's not that good. There's gotta be something better.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Mine's the Drone Zone.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what was it?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Have you been to the Drone Zone?

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  What did you just think of?

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know if I like anything anymore.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  You gotta go to the Drone Zone, I'm telling you.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Dude, two days and you're wrecked.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Done.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  You just can't handle it anymore.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  I rescheduled my flight to go home later because I got here later and I'm like, "I wish I was gone."

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. It's like, we've just been here for a week.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  I know.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  We have like four days to go.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  It's scary.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  We have four days to go.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  We're gonna be here till December.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What else happened at the show? What do we need to talk about? What are some other themes? We wrote a bunch of stuff today.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Uh, so Nick Stat had an awesome story about how Amazon was the secretly most interesting thing here.

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes, we definitely have to talk about that.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Talking about this all day.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Um, well, go ahead.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Well, no, you can go.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  You've been talking all day.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm tired of talking about it.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  God damn it.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  All right. We are so angry and snippy.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  Snippy on the Vergecast. Everyone needs to take a break.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Let's all just, let's leave about 15 minutes of dead air. Let the audience collect their thoughts.

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  You know what great radio is? Is moments of silence. My new podcast, Moments of Silence.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  No, so the story is, is that Amazon, you know, whenever CES happens, we email the companies, "Are you gonna be there? Are you gonna be there?" And Amazon's like, "Nah, we're not showing up." There might be some stuff with Alexa, but don't worry about it. And we're like, "Okay, cool. I guess we won't plan to like, think about Amazon at CES." And instead, Alexa and the Amazon Echo is basically the thing that's actually winning the fight for what's gonna be the standard for the smart home. And they've done it in this really clever way where Apple's like, "We made HomeKit. We made a standard. Build our standard into your stuff. And we're gonna get the whole industry and we're gonna fight Google, we're gonna fight Samsung sort of things, and we're gonna win. We're gonna fight, have a good, grand old ecosystem battle. Let's get VHS versus Beta all over again. We can't wait to get into it." And Google did the same thing with Brillo, but they're like, "We're open."

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  It was really weird when Tim Cook got up on stage and said that.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And Samsung's doing kinda the same thing. Everybody's got different shades of like, "We're open. We have, it's easy to use, blah, blah, blah." And Amazon, meanwhile, is just like, "Yo, like, here's how to do it. And you don't need to buy into our whole ecosystem. We'll work with everybody. We don't care. Like, we'll work with if this and that. We could, you could just, here's how it is. Go do it." And everybody has the speaker in their house, because it's, you know, 150 bucks a hour. And so like, all of a sudden, they're just like, they're the coolest way to deal with your smart home here at CES. And everybody else that's like, got way more money and way more effort invested in like, building a massive smart home ecosystem, it's just like, watching Amazon walk away with the mind share of, "This is how you control your smart home."

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think it's amazing, actually. That, like... I think I've said this on the show a couple of times, the Echo is the best gift they gave at Christmas. Because it's so, I mean, this is literally a framework company in every product, right? It demands nothing of you at any time. You plug it in the wall, you leave it alone.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  And then when you want stuff, you like talk to it and it delivers things to you. And like the range of things it's starting to deliver to you is like getting, like if Apple instead of, this is ridiculous and like, there's probably good reasons Apple made this decision. But instead of doing the watch, if they had made an Echo-like product and said, "We're gonna start to add intelligence to the rest of your home and now Siri is in your kitchen all the time."

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, why didn't they do that?

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  People would have, people would have bucked the f*** out of that.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  They should have done that.

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  It would have been like, I mean, literally like Apple would have been like, "This is revolutionary." Instead of Amazon's doing it super quietly. And all of these smartphone products need an interface. And the interface cannot be yet another app on your phone. And there's no good interface that controls everything at once from a single app. Which is basically a smart things model. It's like, it's fine.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  So the idea that they all need a great voice interface? Like if you're one of these smaller, if you're Belkin or whatever, there's no way you can hire the researchers and the designers, the intelligent people, to build a great voice interface with the WeMo switch. So you just get Amazon's for free. It's a kind of an incredible move.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I, I agree with everything you said and yet I still hate voice interfaces.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yes. Siri still gets stuff wrong for me all the time.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  No, but do you, have you used an Echo?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I haven't, no, I need to.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  One of the genius things that Amazon did is they just paid more attention to the microphones. And the microphones on the Echo are incredibly good. And like, that's actually probably the most impressive part of that hardware. It's not the speaker, it's not the wifi.

• 37:05Nilay Patel?

  The speaker's like pretty middling, actually.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not that great.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  All I know is that in any case where I could send a text rather than use my voice, I would almost always rather send the text.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Oh, we should talk about bots.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is sort of one of the, you know, a tangent that comes out of this piece that I wrote this week about how in Silicon Valley, so much of the attention right now is turning to these messaging interfaces, which are powered by bots. So it's kind of two things, right? Like, one is, in this day and age, like messaging just dominates the way that we do everything on our phones, right? Like, if I were to walk by any one of you at any time during the day, like the thing you were using would probably at least have messaging in it if it weren't actually So, you know, everybody who's, you know, struggling inside the App Store right now is thinking, hmm, well, maybe we can use that interface to link together a bunch of other kinds of services because there are so many APIs out there. And so they're starting to write these bots that can do almost anything. And some of them are really sort of horizontal, like Facebook

• 37:59Speaker 01

  M. You know, I type in anything I want, Facebook M tries to make it happen. And some of them are very like, vertical, where it's like, this is an app that helps you get fit. And you have this conversation via text about what you want. People love this kind of interaction. I don't think they love voice. In fact, after my piece, somebody who I know who works closely with Apple and Google told me that internally, the traction that Google Voice and Siri have gotten is considered to not be great. Google Now, yeah. The Google Now and Siri are not seen as huge successes inside those companies in terms of the traction that they're getting. And I don't necessarily think that's because they're bad products. I think it's just because it's not in our nature to want to open up our mouth and look for the microphone and

• 38:44Speaker 01

  make sure that we know the right command, right? Like, it's more opaque than a DOS prompt. And so that's just something that I think that these companies are gonna have to work on. At the same time, like, I also agree with everything that you said, that when it comes to the smart home in particular, you don't necessarily want to have to get out your phone and be like, you know, turn these lights blue. And so maybe the smart home does become the place where the voice interface is executed the best.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Right. I don't, I think you don't want to look crazy in public.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's a goal, I think, for any technology product. But does this make me look insane in public?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  And that is why the Bluetooth headset is like, a niche product, right? But when I'm home and it's the Echo, I'm like, I'm literally just like, yo, play some music. Like, hey, what's the...

• 39:27Speaker 02

  What music do you have plugged into your Echo?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Smooth jazz.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's just my Prime, whatever Prime.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  It's the worst. I gotta like, get on my music again somehow.

• 39:36Nilay Patel?

  No, it's turning me into a real dad because it has every Wilco record. And it's just like, it just knows. It knows that like, whatever, like, I'll settle for every Wilco record.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  You don't settle for a Wilco record. You feel blessed that Wilco's in our lives.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  I really want to change the voice prompt, the thing that lights it up from Alexa to fuck it. So I can just say, fuck it, play some Wilco. And like, it'll just do it.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Fuck it, order me more Oreos.

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  Exactly.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  I think that would be wonderful.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Fuck it, another pint of Ben and Jerry's.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  Exactly.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  I don't know if there's anything that you can't say to Alexa that isn't better by saying fuck it.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Beforehand. Set a timer.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  Fuck it, what's the weather? Yeah. Fuck it, set a timer for five minutes. It's like, I just keep, and that's like a thing that you can do in your home? And like, you just say it out loud and like, things begin to happen? I don't know, man. Like, I think that, I think the Siri and Google thing is because you have to, the microphone on the phone isn't good. It often doesn't work, it needs, like, the echo because it's plugged into the, literally plugged into the wall and like, stationary. It gets better, like, the, my niece and nephew love it because when you talk, when you ask it, like, the circle lights up and the light points at you. Uh, and I think all this smart home stuff, it's like, we're just in this minute where we're just, the phone isn't, like, we know its capabilities and how we're building these other experiences.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  When Siri came out, the first thing Paul Miller said was, "Why can't I write to you?" Like, "Why, I have this interface, why can't I just type at you?"

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  Because that's an artificial, like, that's, and it's funny that we're now at the point where we're basically typing in AIs.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  Because we don't want to be crazy and problem.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  And I'm one who thinks that Siri would be tremendously more valuable if it did have a texted interface.

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, and, and the benefits to Apple would be, think about, if, if it did become very popular, think about all the data that it's feeding into Siri and training it.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I, I think there's a real opportunity there.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Can I, can I say something?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  That Cortana.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Are you guys gonna get really mad? Well, Cortana, yeah, but you know, you know what else had a really great, uh, text box, you could just type anything into it?

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  It was a WebOS.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  A WebOS?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  WebOS, yeah, okay. It just had a keyboard just all the, all the time there, so if you wanted to do something, you just open it up and start typing and then it would happen.

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  Was it, was that feature called Just Type?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  It was, it was called Just Type.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's wonderful. That's a wonderful operating. The dream of WebOS is still alive in a series of LG TVs that no one will purchase.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the setup, you know, have you gone and seen TVs yet, Nicole?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they all look the same.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  They're, they're big and square.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Some are curved.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Some are curved.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  Have any of these TVs convinced you to buy any television?

• 42:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  What's it gonna do?

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  You're so mad.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  What's it gonna do?

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  The only thing.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Everything feels boiled down to like, real animal instincts at this point.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  There's like, literally waves of anger like emanating from you, like, like heat.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  When you, when you say waves of animal instinct, do you mean that like, as you look around the show floor, you're just thinking like, how do I protect my family from any of that that might emerge?

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  You know, Nicola's doing that thing where you look at an animal and you like, see, see what parts of its body are steak. You're like, oh, I see. That's the, but she's doing that with people.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Is she like a 1940's cartoon?

• 42:43Speaker 03

  I might be.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Her tongue falls out of her mouth in a staircase.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, something that I enjoy at our time in CES is, I often drink with Casey. When Casey gets a little drunk, talks like a 40's gangster.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  I do. For some reason, I'll have like three old fashions and all of a sudden, say, what's the big idea?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  The best part of CES has been the alcohol with coworkers.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  I feel like-

• 43:07Speaker 01

  It's like any war. You, you fight some like horrible battle and then you like, you just like go get the beers and talk about what happened.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  What we're gonna do when we go back to New York is we're all gonna sit around a VFW hall and keep talking about CES.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  There, there should be like VFW halls but for retired bloggers, where they just gather around with their laptops and smoke and tweet.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that Twitter? Smoke and tweet. Oh, that's awful. What else hap- we, we've got a few minutes left. What else, what else happened on the show?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Well, I just want to point out that, uh, the peach dot cool story is number one on the website.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  Come on.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  This, this, the story is, it's people, people want to know about the hottest news social networks.

• 43:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I have to say this, oh, I, I remember what I was gonna say about Siri and search. It's funny because if you think about it, Apple has two different messaging interfaces on iPhone already. If you swipe right, you get a search box that's somewhat intelligent and will like tell you things. But you cannot type into that, what is the weather and get a Siri result.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, you could just combine those things and get there.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  That's exactly where I want it to be.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, as long as we're talking about that screen, let me 3D touch the app icon suggestions.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  You know what I'm dying to, oh, and then like pop it open. So you're like, you know what I really need is when you search for an app, I need it to tell me on what fucking screen it is.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  I would love that too.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't, it's like just, where is it? Can you just take me to that screen instead of what?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  The, the, the reason that no one will ever solve that problem is because the average person probably only has one screen of apps in the future.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Wait, your problem is you can't-

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  So like.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  If you have apps in folders.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  How many pages do you have?

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  I have like hundreds of pages of apps.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Why?

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  Cause I navigate my phone. No, but I, how do you find the apps to put them in folders? Find all my banking apps.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Take, take 10 minutes.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  It's not 10 minutes, it's like 6 hours.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  It's a fun hobby for the subway.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  This is a man who fought me for 3 months over switching his Google authentication app.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  No, don't tell them. Don't tell them.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  They'll hack it.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  They're all hackers. Don't tell them what I'm doing.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  I'm scared of them.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  I used triple factor authentication. You can't possibly be cracked. Wait, is that a challenge?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, don't do that. What is the hacker psychology?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Let's just have a gentleman's agreement with the hackers.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  That's never come.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  I moderated this Mr. Robot panel and the dude, um, I don't remember, there was, one was the Vice President at Mandia and the other one was the Chief Security Officer at Tany, these huge security companies. And the one guy was like, I investigate some of the most heinous and disturbing computer crimes that ever exist. Yet, I know that there's nothing I can do in my personal life to protect myself. So I just use my credit card all the time. It's constantly getting hacked. You just gotta live with it. And it's like, that was terrifying.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Wait, like, so people come after this guy because they know that he's essentially like the computer cop?

• 45:53Nilay Patel?

  Well.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And they wanna mess with him?

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, look, I hung out with some computer cops. I can do.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  What's the big idea with these computer cops?

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  I can do. Me and the boys in blue. Just getting down.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  The long arm of John Law. Checking you into the old Ray Bar Hotel.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  That's our show, everybody. No, he was like, there's nothing you can do. Like literally, and their thing was like, everybody should turn on 2 Factor, that's about as best as you. And then they're like, don't use garbage companies. Right?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Like Peach that cool.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're like, don't give, and I was like, I was like, dude, you know, they asked the audience a question like, who here use the same password for everything? And like, half the audience like sheepishly raised their hands. And they're like, you're idiots. And they're like, who here has a burner password for companies they think are garbage and will leak their data? And like, half the audience raised their hand.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  So yeah, so I mean, I don't consider them burner passwords, but so I, you know, I sign up for new apps every week now and I generate an individual password for all of them. It took me a long time to gum around to that, but once I did.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  The Ford's reverse lights are turning on.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Someone's playing in it.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm just saying, those are the lights that usually come on when the car's about to move in reverse.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna die on stage.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna die today.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  It's not a CES.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  Not by the, not by the hand of this focus.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Oh, that would be the worst.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  No sync operated vehicles shall kill me this day.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  There are some cool ways to die in Las Vegas, getting backed over by a Ford Focus is not one of them.

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  Ass end of CES. Save me inflatable Bluetooth speakers. Alright, I don't know. He just put up a headline that says, "This is the CES guy that Conan O'Brien called the titbit."

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  I think we've done everything we can do here.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I know what that was. That was, uh, she was on this stage during that interview.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  Um, also we had Palmer Lucky on stage yesterday.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Patty.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Um, also, by the time this is out, I don't think it'll be a surprise. We had stormtroopers on the stage.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  We did actually a lot. We should, so we are obviously very tired from talking about nonsense. Nick, do you have any more nonsense you want to talk about?

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Oh, nonsense?

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What, are you going to a party tonight?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  What are you going to?

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Oh, I got options.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  Are you, are you doing like the CES Vegas Tinder on the side just to check it out?

• 48:10Speaker 03

  No, I quit Tinder.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Remember? And I stuck to it and my life's way better, way better.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always, I feel weird about using Tinder in like strange cities that you only visit once a year because you're like, alright, great, I matched with a dental student. That's good. I'll just put that in my bag.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  Hashtags. I feel like the way, we should do a story about the way married people talk about Tinder. Like it's a wonderful playground.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  There's a like in there.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  It is a little bit of just like a self-esteem engine. I mean, I guess ultimately that is why you use it when you visit another city is that, uh, you know, somebody thinks you're cute and you think they're cute and, you know, in another world, maybe you just quit your job and move to that city and live with them. You know?

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Or you could just assess your local values.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  This is, I mean, you know, while I'm waiting for live blogs to start, it's nice to be like, can I start a life with this person? Instead of live blogging about Nvidia's self-driving car lunchbox.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  So did you match them?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, some nice matches. They'll be hearing from me. Stay tuned.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  No, seriously, we should just like, we should just do a man on the street and find many people like, "What do you think Tinder is?" And they're like, "Instant fucking."

• 49:21Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's the app that has sex with your man.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's Uber for adultery.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  It's the one where you just push the button and they're like, babes show up, right? It's like, that's how, anyway. Trey let me use his Tinder ones.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was real mad at you.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I had, I don't have, my Tinder game, he was like, "What were you typing?" And it's all like, "Hello, I am a man." He's like, "You gotta, you're out the game, dude. Never again." Alright, so we gotta, we gotta wrap up. Thank you, everybody who's listening to our show. Thank you, these people. Most of them work for us, so thank you for continuing your employment at TheVerge.com.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  He's like, Dave's like, "Run." He's like, "Fuck this."

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Thank you for using that terrible TV as a monitor for low these many days. Anyway, we have done so much at CS. There's obviously this show, which is great. There's many episodes of that. We did a podcast with Walt here, but we also did tons and tons and tons of video interviews on the stage. Everybody from the CEO of Fitbit, I said, "Palm of Lucky" was here. There were stormtroopers here. Just tons of stuff on the stage. You should look for that. We had a really cool video with the next generation of big online storms. I think it's awesome. We did tons and tons of other videos that are on, and I think this is cool if you're like into the future of media. We've been recutting the videos and targeting towards different platforms. So the main place to see everything, everything's on YouTube. Go there, subscribe

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  to our YouTube page. You can watch everything from CS. There's some really great ones. But then if you go look at our Facebook page, the videos are actually slightly different, which I think is really interesting. And people are watching the hell out of them there, too. So hit our Facebook page, hit like, watch videos there. I want to call out a couple from today that are amazing. Lauren Grush wore an exoskeleton, like a robot exoskeleton, that instead of giving her superpowers, made her an old person. So there's like a VR headset that like... Fucked with her vision.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  And like made her move really slow, like gave her arthritis. And she, that video is incredible. Especially because she's so tired and at the end she just begs you to subscribe to the YouTube channel.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  In the most defeated television voice you've ever heard.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  She's like, "Please Scott."

• 51:33Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  "Gun, they have a gun to my head. They demand that I say this in every video." So that one's great. And then Lauren and Sean, our two space cadets, went to the NASA booth. And Rover drove literally over their body, like they laid on the ground, the Rover. It was super fun. There's just tons of videos to watch. Please watch them all at the YouTube page or the Facebook or wherever the hell it is.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Well.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  Anywhere but Go90, the worst of all the experiences.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  But do make sure to add The Verge on peach.cool.

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  On peach.cool.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  We will be pumping in lots of content there shortly.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  And Nicola and Kirsten, you guys snap again today?

• 52:07Speaker 03

  No, I haven't seen her all day.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  So Kirsten's been out in the world snapchating, so look at us on Snapchat. I have to say, just wrapping up the show, like relatively boring show, relatively quiet, not a lot of like big flashy product news. But lots of things that are very cool. And just looking at, it's funny to look at our site and be like, "Oh man, it wasn't that big breakout chart beat explosion of traffic on the website." But then we made all these videos of things that are legitimately fucking cool here. And people are watching the hell out of them because there's so much cool stuff here that isn't news.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  Right? It isn't a big headline that's gonna like explode because Samsung or whatever did the next thing. It's pieces of technology that legitimately look like the future or a piece of the future or something that will change your life. I mean, I'm just like, we have a bunch of cars, we have a levitating speaker, it's ridiculous. Screw that. It's funny because I said like, I was gonna read some inspiring things and it's like levitating speaker, the Swagtron. But anyway, but like.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  We went to the Neon Museum.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  We went to the Neon Museum, we saw a styrofoam drone, we saw a hydrogen fuel cell phone charger. So instead of having to charge the battery, you have these, there's like little things, inserts. You put it in, it turns it into a fuel cell and will charge your phone so you can just carry additional power with you.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's ridiculous. That's not a headline. That's like a new product, right? It's not news from CES, but you. You just see how people are responding to the videos of being able to see what these cool new things here look like, and it's actually kind of inspiring and powerful. So, I know it's terrible, I know Nicola is like, she's staring at me like I'm an awful person for even daring to say something positive.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  No, I'm looking at you and I'm seeing what you would look like as a cartoon dog. I can see it really clearly.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  Nicola's stunned, and I think, I don't know if we use legal here, a cartoon dog?

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can see it right now, in the state of being that I'm in right now.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  I think you would be a mouse.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Me? A mouse?

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  Like a cute mouse, you know what I mean?

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I almost thought a bunny rabbit personally.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, something with ears, something gigantic. Disney is sending in federal officials to shut, Mickey Mouse.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  It's gotta go.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, PokéHos. I'm just yelling copyrighted phrases to see if Disney will arrest me.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  How much longer before this Vergecast will be shut down by a police raid?

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  Let it go!

• 54:21Speaker 03

  I hope I'm on one.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  Alright, that was our show, uh, please, like I'm saying, there's so much cool stuff to look at from the show, uh, thank you for sticking with us on the podcast, uh, and I actually won't be on the Vergecast next week, Dieter will be hosting, but we'll be back to our regular, because I'll be in a place. Oh yeah. We've got some prizes coming, um, now we're just making clicking sounds. Uh, God, kill me. We're in Vegas for another full day. Um, this is, the show's not even over, tomorrow's the last full day of the show, we just refuse to acknowledge it. Um, no, tomorrow's the day when you can walk around and buy stuff on the cheap. Yeah. That's what we should do, we should try to buy stuff on the cheap tomorrow. That's a good idea. Anyhow, um, we're back to our regular, regular Verge schedule, starting immediately

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  on Monday, uh, only everyone will be a little bit more tired, and a little bit wiser, and our family will have grown ever stronger because we have suffered this pain together. That was it, rock and roll, bye.