 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast after hours at CES 2014 presented live from beautiful downtown Las Vegas, Nevada in the heart of the Bible Belt. There are no Bibles in Nevada. I'm Josh. By state law. I'm Josh. They were all thrown away when they're invited to Hooker's Inn. I'm Josh Tupolsky. I'm just ashamed. And I'm Casey Newton. Casey. Casey Newton is here, everybody. Check him out. Yeah. Get a look at that. Behold. Let your brain soak it in. Let your eyeballs soak it in and then let that information travel into your brain. Yeah. So, Vergecast after hours. Day one. Day one of the real CES. It's like day four of me being awake. We've been doing this for what seems like 36,000 years. Correct. I'm going to drink this tiny beer. And we're having some drinks. We're getting loose. Some situations have occurred today. We went to the show floor today. Is that what I look like for real? Can you get that? Is this what I look like? I look like a guy who's going to go gamble. Yeah. Hello. I don't know. What am I doing? You know, like a cozy way. This is a great... Is cozy gambling a thing? This is the only time during the day that I see myself. Do you know that? All right. This is the first time and I'm shocked by what I'm seeing. It's upsetting. It's gross. And I should be put in jail. Is cozy gambling a thing? You look like you're going to gamble like a cozy... Cozy gambling. Like there's a fire roaring. You're wearing a... You get onto like a chest or field. You're wearing a fuzzy shirt. Yeah. And they roll over a slot machine with a gold leather, like a hand, a gold thing with a leather wrapped and you pull it. You're watching your favorite movie. Instead of going very fast, it's very slow. Right. Yeah. No, that doesn't exist. Well. Anyhow, so we had a big day today. Another. I mean, just today was the... It was one of our best days. It got real today. It got really real. Yeah. In a variety of ways, it got real. Yeah. So we should start... I mean, the day... I'm trying to look at all the news that happened here. I'm already overwhelmed that I want to kill myself. But I think today really started last night and it started with this story. Wow. That's true. I think it was maybe in the morning, as far as I can tell, when T-Mobile CEO John Leisure was kicked out of the AT&T party. Hold on. Is it John Leisure or John Legere? I've been saying Leisure. I think it's Legere. Yeah, but... Are you saying like John Leisure? You think he's the kind of guy who has rules? Because I don't. I think that when it comes to rules, John Legere ain't having them. He's not. Look, he's about unlimited... So you went to go see him out in the morning. You say he's about unlimited data. Is that what you're going to say? That's all he cares about. Unlimited data. He's a wild guy. Unlimited freedom. He's not about unlimited data. No, he was kicked out of his party last night, and he has an announcement tomorrow. So this news broke at like two in the morning. He went to go see Macklemore at the AT&T party. He was wearing a pink shirt. I think the most shocking part of this whole story is that he's a dork who still does the bunny ears in the photo. With Roger Jett. I'll tell you what's most disturbing is that 45-year-old CEO of T-Mobile thinks doing bunny ears on somebody in a photo is cool. Well, I'll tell you, there's a huge correlation between bunny ears people and Macklemore fans. Yeah. It's true. Macklemore is like the living embodiment of somebody doing bunny ears in a photo. All right, Eddie, I'll go on. Anyway, but he has a big... So this news is like happening. By the way, it's Macklemore. Macklemore? I say Macklemore, but it's apparently Macklemore. Do you know this? Carry on. It doesn't matter. Once I've had a couple of these tiny beers, it's all going to fade away in the wash. It's just going to be a slur. A slur of an M sound. I don't remember. Followed by projectile vomiting. Anyway, so he's got a big thing tomorrow. All day today, I've been hearing about just here and there about this dude getting kicked out because I don't think AT&T security knew who it was. I think it was planned. I think they just thought he was a Bon Jovi fan. I think he went there. He was going to their party. I think he went there. He took a bunch of photos doing bunny ears on people. Security saw it and they're like, these guys harassing our patrons. And they kicked his ass to the curb. I love him though. He's great. But Roger Chang said that AT&T was not happy he was there. At least that's what Roger said on Twitter. I understand that Ralph De La Vega personally, well once he got out, you know how in the movies there's always the club manager who's like, and I don't want to see you back here. In this case, it was Ralph De La Vega. He does seem like he has the look of a guy who would do that, right? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. So that was that. Then this morning, we started with Sony. Sony went all out. And I will say, Sony, yesterday we did their official press conference. What is the story this year with everybody having several press conferences? I don't know. I have a theory about it. The CEA, this was a slow year for CES. I believe it is a slow year. Did they announce record numbers or anything? Oh, they do that after. I think it's a slow year. I think that they had slots open and could not fill them for keynotes and events. And I think they were like, hey, what if you guys did two keynotes? The nighttime keynotes have always been- Two for the price of one. That's right. The official CEA nighttime keynotes have always been completely devoid of any news. They've always been about spectacle and loving the industry. Microsoft used to have the opening keynote for years. Generation Mobile. You're right. Qualcomm, god only knows what that was. I think god and other people know what it was. It was the most awesome keynote of all time presented by Dr. Paul Jacobs. Yeah. Who's sadly on his way out. Oh, I mean, no. He's- You know, everything changed for Qualcomm after that day. It seems like that keynote sealed Dr. Paul Jacobs' fate. That was the height of air games for Qualcomm. Try explaining that one to shareholders on the earnings call. We spent $2 billion and it made no sense. I can't wait to see the behind the music on Qualcomm. They're like, at the height of drug abuse and vanity, Dr. Paul Jacobs took to the stage and brought Big Bird with him. It's a band in Big Bird. Band in Big Bird, Rolls Royce, the woman from Star Trek. Yeah. Who just looks scared. You can name anything right now and people would be like, yeah, that happened. Be like, a unicorn that killed an elephant. That's occurred on CES. There's been none of that here. It's all been like, Sony's thing was like, here's a lot of products. Today we were expecting kind of a kickoff CES morning thing. And KaaZ actually came out and announced a bunch of stuff. Yeah. It's cool. It's really cool. The coolest stuff, I think, so far. Cool if working. Well, yeah, but PlayStation now works. We went and played with it. So that's- PlayStation now. We bought Gikai and now it's streaming so you can stream PS3 games to all kinds of things. Sony TVs, Blu-ray players. Gikai tech all over the place. So that's cool. People are really into it. Everybody who I've seen who's played with it really likes it. They announced a live TV service, like an internet TV service. Which as far as I can tell is- Does it have- Consists right now of just an icon and a slide. The internet service does not have a name. It's gonna be like Sony Video Unlimited or Sony Entertainment Unlimited. Whatever their names are, they've dumbled into it. Short throw projector. And then they announced this crazy, crazy stuff. This life, what is it called? Life O-House or something? No, it's, where is it? Life O-House? I have it. God, all the names are really bad. It's called Life Space UX or Life Space Ux. That's pretty close. Yeah. Life Space Ux? Life Space Ux. So Sony has all these crazy laser projectors that only need basically a little over two feet to put up 120 inch images. And so I went and saw it just now at their booth. It looks like a piece of furniture, but not a great piece of furniture. I was surprised- It looks like kind of like my air conditioning unit. I was surprisingly- Or like the back of a Testarossa. So that whole white thing is the unit? Yeah. So it's gonna be like $15,000. Oh, I mean that's a prototype. I was surprisingly impressed by the short throw projector. I heard them say the word projector and I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And then they showed what it does and I was like, yeah, this is cool. I want one. I spoke to Kaz Harai earlier today. Yeah. I know Kaz a little bit. Kaz and I go way back. We hit the links sometimes together shooting our golf balls all over the place. Just firing at people. And so he did some interesting stuff. First off, he dissed you hard. He said, so this is really weird. He was like, I was like, what's the deal with cloud TV? What kind of partnerships are you gonna strike? They didn't want to talk to anyone, say anything about partnerships. He says, we don't want to compete with cable TV. We want to integrate. It really sounds like what the Xbox One is doing where it's trying to integrate everything into a single place where you can watch whatever you want to watch whenever you want to watch it. But it didn't sound like there was gonna be a pass through solution. So one of two things, he was like, we don't want to compete with cable companies. Then he was like, well, maybe with live TV we'll compete with cable companies. And it's like, well, what else is there beyond like- Nobody has an answer for this. Stuff that isn't live TV, which is readily available for everybody. And then the other stuff, which is live TV. It's a, I mean, nobody has the answer and he's probably lying. But they can't do pass throughs. So my guess is they're either gonna like try to strike some deals with some straight up with content providers. Like ABC is gonna give them their ABC channel and do live. But they can't. I mean, like, if Sony could pull that off, then Apple would have been able to pull it off a year ago or two years ago. This is what Intel just abandoned. Wait, hold on. Right, but let me just offer you a problem. But he made a point. But no, but here's the problem. Like here it is. I wanna hear his point. You're Sony, right? And you wanna start this stuff and they're like, man, table stakes to get television to people. We need the big networks. Okay, let's go to a tap tape. ABC says yes. CBS says yes. They wanna see what the others are. Oh, we should go talk to NBC. You know who owns NBC? Comcast. Yeah. You know where you just hit the brick wall and you're done. Like that's the end of that. Sounds to me like a little bit of a monopoly. Yeah. Okay, but here's the thing. Nobody watches any of those stations anymore. No, they're the vast majority of the watchers. But here's the thing. I think the argument he made is true when you see their... Like CBS is the number one network. I mean, when you see their output. Have you ever watched Two and a Half Men? Religious group. It's crazy. You're into it. It's like being on another planet where everybody is super dumb. So it's like CBS. Yes, a little bit like CBS. But his argument was we have a huge installed user base. We have PS3s and 25 million homes in the US. So I think that they're... And which is interesting is that he wasn't like, this will be our next gen thing. He was like, we're gonna bring this to several different devices. So I mean, maybe there's deals to be struck with these cable providers. I don't know. Maybe they're the ones who can crack it. Maybe they're like, we're already making this stuff and they sold 4.2 million PS4s. They're approaching, what, 30 million units that just sit around people's houses. That's not nothing. But it's super hard for these hardware companies to offer services, right? So finally, a hardware company like Sony, it's getting religion about services. We have to offer people more than just the hardware. But look at Apple falling all over themselves to create services that are worth our money. And they can't do it. And they can't do it. I think Sony's gonna run into similar problems. I mean, I hope they don't. But Sony's thing is like they at least, right, they make Breaking Bad. That's a Sony pictures product. I guess they could leverage. I guess they could. I mean, look, there's all contracts. Hypothetically, Sony could leverage their content and say, listen, you scratch our backs, we'll scratch yours. No, but they already do. So when you buy, the only company that can possibly do this is Sony. When you buy a Sony 4K TV, it comes with movies. They just give you 100, like here's a box. That's because they're like, what else are you gonna play on this? But like Samsung doesn't do that. On this hunk of crap that doesn't do anything. There's no way that, but I'm saying, look, Samsung cannot possibly do that. You haven't seen the Samsung films? They're really good. They're like, they're like exactly like the Sony movies. What happens if you Google Samsung films? But it's slightly different. Man, I went and played with the Samsung tab. Wait, hold on, let's get to that. Wait a second. I want to, Kaz also said 4K mainstream adoption five to seven years away. Yeah. I heard 2016 from somebody today. I mean, 2016 is extremely generous. 2016 is. That's two years, not mainstream adoption. Yeah. So 2016 is like, you know, maybe like a quarter of the sales. Well, he was, yeah, what is interesting is that he was very upfront about, he was like, how long did HD take? Yeah. It was like a decade, you know? Yeah. And you know, they were, the guys at the Sony guys were even, you know, willing to say like, look, even five years ago, HD did not. It just started to get picked up by cable companies, you know? So you have to think about the map. I mean, I'm not like gloating or anything about the lack of, of, of traction. Yeah. What you want is crappy pictures. You want to look at bad things. I don't care. I just want my, as long as you give me season seven of Breaking Bad, I'm a happy guy. Okay. That's all I want in life. But anyway, I just don't think. Walt, Walt. Oh, I almost spoiled. Yeah. I almost, I almost gave it away. Yeah. Go ahead. Let's not give it away. I look weird. I thought you were going to say something about Walt. I mean, every time I catch a glance of myself in this thing, they say the camera adds 10 pounds, but it's also making me look like a mutant. Yeah. The camera adds 10 pounds and also a slight vampire effect. Yeah. Yeah. A werewolf. I would say if, if I do kind of look like, you know, where there's a werewolf quality to my face, but also it's vampiric. Right. Due to its paleness. So she's talking about this. Like a Dracula and a werewolf. So Kaz announced all this stuff and we ran a super cut of Kaz and the title we put on was weird Sony is back. Right. Because I, last year and the year before Kaz really like started talking, you know, he took over as CEO. Yeah. Like cleaned up, he announced one Sony. Yeah. He was always like. They restructured, they slimmed down. He kept on talking about challenges and exchange markets and currency problems. And this year he's like, we've got to make things that are great. We can't make things that are commodities. And like their weird ideas about things are maybe they're not the right ideas. Like maybe you don't want a piece of furniture that's a projector, but I'd rather have Sony trying to make those things than not. I said, I tweeted that the aspirational Sony is back. And I remember talking about. I mean, it really does look like the back of a tester or so. Yeah, I remember talking about Sony's, the aspirational quality of their products. And they've even taught, they've even said that I, that's where Sony came to dominate. Right. Was making, saying like, we're not going to make the commodity stuff. We're going to make the special stuff. But I asked them, I said in that same meeting, I didn't, I have a bunch of quotes and a bunch of things I didn't actually write up, but I asked Kaz how they protect themselves. You know, let's say in five to seven years, panels are going to be cheaper. Other companies like Samsung and LG are all doing 4k. Everybody's doing 4k. So how do they protect themselves in 4k the way they did not protect themselves with HD? Which is like clearly Sony was on the cutting edge of television technology for the longest time. And then all of a sudden China happened, you know, Korea happened and you have these much cheaper panels. You have companies like Vizio coming in and just pulling the rug out from under them. And I was like, how are you going to ensure that that doesn't happen again with 4k? Clearly they're investing a huge amount of money and time and resources into 4k. And Kaz was like really pragmatic. He's like, we need to be, you know, we've restructured, we've trimmed down. He's like, we want to be, we need to be able to offer the cheaper products, but not commodity product, you know, not just the commodity product and still do the high end and still be leading the way. And you know, I think they are aware now, much more aware thanks to him of their position and how much more precarious it is. Well, at this point it's not there yet. Yeah, but I think they know what to do, which is like a surprising moment for Sony. Like they, I loved Howard Stringer and I really got the sense that like he knew what to do about Apple and software and the internet. Right? Like you thought that? No, I was, he didn't. Oh, I get the sense that Kazari kind of knows what to do. It seems like, he seems like there's a vision there and they're working through towards something. Right. And whereas Stringer was like, I don't know what Stringer was all about. Stringer was about being awesome. He liked movies, he seemed to really like single damn about anything. He'd bring Tillie McGuire out, no problem, no big deal. I asked him, while you were interviewing Kaz, I was interviewing their new, the new president of Sony Electronics. So Phil Molyneux was like the long time president of Sony Electronics. Well, these weren't quite concurrent because he was also in my meeting, but anyhow, go on. Oh, they were like an hour apart. They were very close together. They were like an hour apart. It would have been incredible if it was at the same time. Look, there's a reason they replaced Phil with Mike and it's because he can be everywhere. There's two, he literally can be everywhere. And I asked him and he's like, he was the one who put, he used to be the chief marketing officer of Sony. And he was like, yeah, I was the one who brought Taylor Swift in. And I was like, what happened? Like, why did you stop doing it? He's like, we really need to start focusing on what we can actually deliver people and not like spectacle. He screwed up those things very badly. And I told him that that was a huge mistake because that Taylor Swift Sony keynote was like three years ago. Most important moment of your life. Well, it was just the audacity of Sony to be like, okay, we make 3D cameras and 3D TVs. So put on these 3D glasses and then Taylor Swift is going to come out. But don't look at her. Look at us filming her in 3D and then watch it over here. And everyone was like, no. And everyone took off the glasses. It was a pretty cool idea. It was explosions. If it hadn't worked, it's a pretty cool idea. So then after that, they talked about curved a little bit in our meeting. They did? Yeah. Do they just diss it hard? No, actually. They were sort of positive about it. Really? I just went and looked at a bunch of them. I cannot figure out one reason why I want to go. I feel like somebody said in the meeting, once you see curved, it's hard to look at normal television. That might have been a diss on curved. Yeah. Might have been like, it's hard because curved looks distorted and weird. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know Sony's. I don't think Sony's weird. Deed and I just took a little walk on the show floor and we kept on looking at the curved ones and we're like, why? Why? Because 3D is dead. Yeah. We also went to LG where I texted a washing machine and a stove. Yeah. What did you text it? Was it a sext? I think we texted- Did you take pics? Yeah. I texted it, I checked this out. I'm like, that needs a clean- It doesn't have a phone number. You have to use a- You need to refill that or do you need to put things in the washing machine? It doesn't have a phone number. You have to use a special LG app called Home Chat. So I'm already excited. I get to download the text your washing machine app. You love, you love, you love. You can send it things like- Yeah, Terry. That sounds like that's going on my home screen. Yeah, it's really insane. Even the woman who was demoing it to us was like, yeah, I mean, I mostly texted things like, where are you? And then the washing machine texts you back like, I wish I was free, which is hilarious. No, really? If I had that demo, I would have asked for a written apology at the end. Come on. What are we doing here? I mean, I, what would you tell, I don't understand. You know what? Let's just not. Yeah. We have a lot to talk about. We don't need to talk about it. I don't want to get into it. All right, so let's talk about what really happens to me. So Sony, wait, is there anything else that Sony- No, I mean, Sony's like, I think they're really ambitious in a way that I haven't seen a lot of time. I think that's cool. Yeah. They're probably going to bring out like, some of the laserdisc player next. Yeah. Blu-ray, Blu-ray laserdisc. Can you imagine how much content you could fit on a size of a laserdisc? It's like 800 movies. Yeah, a BluDisc. So let's talk about what really happens to me. Casey? Yeah. The Yahoo keynote. Yahoo. Yeah. This was like- Which I characterize by the way, as nonstop flop sweat. Just nonstop bombs. Yahoo had- And not by like, the drop the mic bombs, just like jokes bombing hard. The Yahoo keynote had moments of utter sublime transcendence. And then it had moments, mostly moments of me- Screaming in rage. Just being enraged or disappointed or- So Casey was there- Reverse, what's reverse laughing? Frowning? I think so. It's FOF, I believe it's called. Oh yeah, FOF. Frown on face. Frown on face. I love it. A lot of FOF-y today. And not really out of anger, but just disappointment. Just like, why is this happening? So Casey, you ran the best live log ever. What happened? Thank you very much. So, you know, if I'm going to say something in Yahoo's favor, it's the difficulty level for this keynote was super high. They're not a hardware company. The things that get us excited when we go to these keynotes is, hey look, it's a new tablet, it's a new phone. And they got to come out and say, hey, we have a new mobile app for reading the news. Hey, we made an acquisition. Hey, here are some people from Saturday Night Live. But I think- Did that happen? I totally- That did, yeah. Where was I? So, you know, Yahoo owns the Saturday Night Live library and they stream it to their apps and on the web. And they started showing a clip and then Marissa came out and said, hey, you know what, it would be great if this were actually live. And then she brought out Cecily Strong and Kenan Thompson and they did a little weekend update bit. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Totally- Every single one of these jokes bombed. Yeah. Like, they delivered a line and it was like just silence. Were they funny? At one point she rolled her eyes. No, she was like, what's his name? The Somley guy's name? Nick D'Alioso is how you pronounce that. D'Alioso. Yes. That's how Marissa Meyer pronounced it. And she was like, Nick D'Alioso, he's a young man and she's like, and all the ladies are like, is he 18 yet? And then there was just dead silence. Well, I'll say this. Dead, awful silence. Let's be honest. CS audience, not known for their ability to laugh. True. Or get jokes. And SNL is outside their wheelhouse, right? Way outside. Yeah. Like, asking- I mean, the biggest laugh was at the end when dude was like, good job on that search engine and everyone exploded. Like, you made a really good search engine and everyone was like, you just burned Yahoo with their own keyboard. Yeah. I mean, it was miserable. Every moment of that. Like, Katie Couric, like, being a robot was, I don't know. Let's get into some real talk. Yeah, let's talk about it. David Pogue. There was some burns. Before today, I was like, I kind of tolerated David Pogue. He's a pleasant fellow. After today, I just, I have to say, he seemed genuinely unlikable today. And not just because he was dissing, like, all of the sites that he's now in a smear with. No, no, I get it. I understand it now. I've gotten some distance. I had a tiny beer. Yeah. I figured it out. That was, he was doing an Apple presentation. That's all he knows in his heart. That wasn't- No, it was like- No, no. What are the best presentations I know? It was like a Cheki Green with Cheki Green's jokes. He was like, let me show you all the other sites and why they suck. Now let me show you what we're going to do. And then it's like, dude, but it's not an iPad. Yeah. It's like the relative scale of things that we- There we are. En Badger, The Urge. Can we just look at these puns? Hashtag The Urge is like a- Gizmoody. Gizmoody, you nailed it, dude. Knocked it out of the park. I mean, I'm sure, I have no doubt right now the members of the Gizmodo staff curled into fetal positions, crying uncontrollably due to this harsh, clever diss, this play on their name, Gizmoody. Yeah, they closed up shop. What's the point anymore? Some of the worst photo shopping as well. Also, by the way, this new, this, listen, let me tell you guys something. Yeah. Our, our word mark is a altered font. If you really wanted to get this right, you'd have gone and found the font and put the proper you in there. This is some lazy shit. Yeah. Is that like, what, is that Futura? What are we looking at? Yeah, I don't know. He drew it on his iPad. Yeah, right. Could somebody tweet the you font at us? I would actually like to know. Yeah. No, that's not a you font. He drew, he literally drew an orange square and then erased it into the shit. So here's the deal. David Pogue was like, oh, listen, New York and California, amazing brainiacs, middle of America, dumb shits who don't deserve our time, energy or attention. Normals. Right. He's like, we're going to make a tech blog for dumb asses like all of the people in the middle of America. And here's the thing, like, here's what I'll say. All jokes aside about like our fake name and Gizmodo's fake name and everything. David Pogue is fundamentally incorrect about what he thinks about adoption of technology and understanding of technology in America. What he thinks is, hey, the mainstream is dumb and they need to be talked down to and we need to dumb shit down for them because they won't get it otherwise. Here's what's happening. The mainstream is getting smarter about technology. The mainstream understands technology better today than they have ever understood it and is becoming an integral, completely normal part of their lives. And so his idea that somehow we need to dumb this stuff down because they don't understand it is probably literally only based on the fact that Yahoo's readership skews old. And he's coming from the New York Times, which I think specifically for him has an audience that his tech audience in the New York Times is they have no idea what's going on. They're not they're not they're not young. They're not representative of like the core of American consumers. And at one point it was just really weird because he literally divided America into red states and blue states. And then he kind of like yelled at an invisible Obama for a while. Like he was doing the thing like, I don't understand why you guys keep using these words like form factor. And it's like, A, I'm not there. B, I haven't done that in a long time. The other thing is the other thing that he did is that if you look at the you know, and not to get go down a rabbit hole here, but if you're a person with a brain who's read any of the sites that he mentioned, which is Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge and Recode, like they're wildly different. Yeah, distinctly different. Gizmodo does not do the same thing as Engadget. We do not do the same thing as any of those sites. Recode is completely different. I mean, and I don't mean different like they cover different stories. They write differently. They have different types of headlines. Their coverage areas are different. And it's like, it was simplistic. It was insulting. And the most important part of what he presented, it was fucking wrong. And I have to say, like, you know, I didn't take to Twitter and say anything about it. I'm not going to write an editorial about it. I mean, frankly, everybody else on Twitter handled it for me. But it was like, I would describe it as like a relatively odious presentation. Like I'm not insulted that he was making fun of us. He doesn't know what we do. That's pretty obvious to me. Right. But what was it like in the room? But he's wrong. But here's what I think. But he's wrong. I just said this. He's wrong about America. I agree. He's wrong about how people understand technology. And what he did was insulting to people rather than inclusive and exciting to people. That's my opinion. Right. So but here's, because here's another drink. Yeah, I also, can I have another tiny beverage, please? Just unrelated to Pogue. Can we just get a pitcher or something? Can we get a pitcher of vodka? So here's my question. So yeah. So there's been kind of a theory, a meme out there that Marissa Meyer, she came in, she was a big celebrity. She's a superstar executive. She came in, she's the CEO. She started buying all these young hip companies. She's going to turn Yahoo into a technological force by getting all this talent. There was an app we covered today, a news stream. Yeah, News Digest. News Digest. I wanted to hear the mood in the room. Are you getting to that? Yeah, I'm getting to that. Which I think is very actually innovative. It has some problems, but like it looks beautiful. And then I feel like Pogue stood in front of an audience of tech journalists and just burned all of that goodwill that she had stored up. So what was it like? And also just sounded like not in touch with what's happening. Right. I mean, I think it was a bold move to go after the tech blogs, the tech sites, tech publications the way that he did. And in fact, some Yahoo people came up to me afterwards and were like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I think I can deal with this burn. The most minor of burns. Right, right. So, you know, certainly it made us think about David Pogue a certain way. But, you know, as far as the mood in the room, prior to him, it had been sort of a little bit chilly, a little bit staid. It had been sort of Katie Couric talking to Marissa Meyer and sort of like polite hugs and air kisses. And then David Pogue comes out and sort of goes into stand up comic mode and he's trying to get laughs and he's talking loud and he's like punching his lines. He was doing some some aces stuff, Johnny Shih. Like the the hardcore emphasis. Yeah, but everybody loves Johnny Shih. Well, yeah, I know he's awesome. But I'm just saying it was like the. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Wonderful man. Hey, I got beer for you guys. Hey, thanks. I'm taking it personally. Screw this tiny cup. Yeah, just drink out of the. Oh, you're going for the you're doing the tiny. Oh, boy. Casey's got manners. Oh, boy. San Francisco. Oh, boy. Oh, my goodness. Drink up and then tell us what you really think. Oh, no. That's wow. Can we get this guy up? That's beautiful. I've never poured a beer into a cup that small before. This is like a volumetric challenge right there. That actually makes me wonder, are there non moist towelettes? Are there just towelettes? Yeah, of course. Paper towels. No. Oh, but is it when does it become a towelette? I think it was wrapped in a small package. I think you could be right. Anyhow. Yeah. Where were we? You were just tells that what? Yes. To what? He's asking you to in the on your sets, he's saying he wants you to cheat out. To cheat out, which is like, yeah, like you sort of. Oh, yeah, I cheated out. John, I don't think you've this has ever gone subtly. Is this what you ever have you ever tried to make this a seamless thing where I wasn't handing him a roll of paper towels? This is what I wanted you to cheat out of me lies shots. I love this. Give you these. Can we just see what it would look like if he knew what cheating out was? Can we just? Okay, so now where were you? Where did you want to cheat out to the several feet? Am I going not this way? No, no, no, no, no. Go ahead. Let's see what I have to do. Well, you guys aren't hearing which was what's in my and Josh's ears. It's the sound of John Locomarcino dying. Just just dying. This is for me. Thank you. Great. Wow. We're really ruining everything. This is this for me like he doesn't need this. Believe me. I'll say, hey, boy, no, let me drink this. And I think you know what's happening here. And it's not good. I'm gonna Josh and I are gonna cuddle tonight. Oh, no, that's not what I bet. But it does sound nice. Actually gets cold in Las Vegas. I just got it. I just got a tweet that says get to the meet. Anyhow, yeah, we need to get it's never happening. All right. So I'm sorry. I'll just go out. Yeah, just let me just shoot these towels over to you. Welcome to the virtual. Yeah. This year. Like so. Nobody could see this. Very nice. Just doing this like so. Somebody sent us to you. Somebody says to you. Thank you, AJ. Gago. Yeah. Send us the what they sent us to you. Oh, we found the you from the urge. Is it is it our. Is it our. Is it our. Is it our. Is it our. Is it our. Is it our. Oh, it's our real you. Yeah. Yeah. If you'd have done one second of searching, you could have found the real. He doesn't do searching. Normals don't find the real. You sound like you find the real you sounds like a great slogan for a company that specializes in digital meditation devices. OK. Mood in the room. Yeah. So in the room. So I think people are sort of taking it back. And then I think, you know, frankly, his jokes seem to fall a little bit flat. That's an elf. Folks definitely got more laughs than he did. Maybe not that many. Not that many, which is not safe. So that's not safe. I will say I have to speak in defense of Kenan Thompson, who I believe is a national treasure. He is the greatest living Saturday Night Live performer who's currently on the show. I believe that is the case. And he really like you like you could see how hard he was trying on his face. And he actually did make me laugh a couple of times. No, but when he at the end, when he was like the search engine joke. Yeah. Like that murdered. Yeah, no, totally. Let me just say something. Yeah, let's let's see. Yes, the tough crowd. You know why people here don't know how to laugh. Yeah. They didn't come here to laugh. They came here to make a back reveals on RAM. Right. Right. They came here to check out the new steam machines. Right. I think of the Verge's mission here is really to teach people how to laugh. Don't you think so? I'm absolutely not only to teach people how to laugh, but to teach ourselves how to laugh. I will say a new a new weird thing has happened to me this year at CS where the people in the booths are now ready for us. Yeah. So I went into the Samsung booth and I was immediately accosted by people. We went to the LG booth and we were immediately accosted by people. Accosted in what way? Like in a friendly way? They were putting it in a cell. Yeah, they're ready for us. And they're like, it used to be I would show up and be relatively anonymous and break stuff for a while. Now I understand it. But now it's like a lot of people being like, let me show you these features. That's very new. It's like they I think the CS has gone from being only about the backdoor RAM deals to being really about the press. About the front door. And that's what I think. Yeah. Front door RAM deals. That's my new metal pan. Now wait a second. So then Pogue did his shtick. Yeah. Katie Couric was on stage. Yeah. I thought Marissa Mayer did a nice job. I don't know if it was because of her, but I liked hearing her talk. I like her. I mean, you know what was refreshing? I actually emailed somebody at the CA. I was like, have we ever seen a female keynoter? Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's only been one other. Is that right? Yeah, 2004 and 2005 and her name is now escaping me because I glanced at the email during the Marissa Mayer thing. And at any rate, I can pull it up. So they're very few and far between. And I actually, it was like just weird because it's the show is so full of like, right. There's so many dudes on stage and so many do. And look, you know, look, we have a lot of dudes at the verge, you know, like, okay, you know, don't kill me. We're sexist. I mean, we're, we're, we're in our charter with sexism is mandatory. Man, man is in that. There's actually a no girls allowed sign on the trailer. No girls allowed. Addie has been working in an Oculus Rift just outside the trailer. That's right. We just, in a virtual recreation of the interior of the trailer. She's just outside. That's how, that's how advanced we are in our sexism. Yeah. Anyhow. No, but it was, it was great to have her there. And I think the best thing that Yahoo did was, was that they had Gary Shapiro introduce her because so out of control in 15 seconds. It's Shapiro. That is just not Shapiro's off the hook. Shapiro is the most in control. Shapiro said the word innovation 11 times in one sentence. And then it was like, and now Marissa Meyer and just like the relief that you feel when he leaves the stage, like you cannot be more excited about what's going to happen. Shapiro is my homeboy. I love Shapiro. It was Carly Fiorina, HP. Carly Fiorina. Yes. Thank you. Okay. HP went on to great success. Did not end well for Carly. Not a great, but you know what? It gave, gave, gave her all. I mean, it was cool that Yahoo was here. I just, it's David Pierce said something at the end of it. He's like that. David Pierce, who I consider to be our David Pogue. When you really think about it. Right now, David, right now, David, if he's watching. Somewhere David Pierce just exploded. He's dying. He's dying. Here's a, here's a fact about the verge. Are you ready for it? David Pierce used to be David Pogue's intern. Pierce was Pogue's intern. So was Joanna. We have a long policy of only hiring David. Joanna Stern. Or David Pogue's intern. Joanna Stern is now at the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, also, also former Pogue intern. But David Pierce, his nickname is DP2. And it's gotten to the point where he hated it so much. And now he just quietly answers to it. I don't want, I won't. Because of the emotional toll it has taken upon him. Ron, there's something going on with my hair right now. Can you get back to that single? Guys, I'm looking at a picture of Doc Brown playing, fucking shredding, while wearing Google Glass. I don't know what to do. Let this be a lesson. Have you ever seen more joy? Can we put this picture on the screen? Can we put Doc Brown up? Doc Brown shredding while wearing Glass. I really feel sorry. I really feel sorry for people who are watching this. I have to say. Sometimes you think, what's it like to experience this as a third party? David quit. And my impression is, my impression is it's terrible. David just out loud in the trailer said I quit. Can we get Doc Brown on screen? So I will say there's, my God in heaven. I don't see Doc Brown on this screen. This is what tells you what CES is like. There are a lot of gimmicks here. Today I saw like lady dancers dancing inside of a gigantic fake Android phone. What's a lady dancer? They're dancers or ladies. There's all manners of booth babes here. It's really weird. It's like the return of the booth babes. Of course there's booth babes. Oh, there we go. No, no, but it's like the return. But Doc Brown and DeLorean. Check the headline here. I think it's, it's pretty good. It's sad and also very funny. But like this has been the greatest CES publicity son of all time. The Back to the Future car with Doc Brown shredding in Google Glass. But I will say this. I mean, I don't know if we'd have covered it if we weren't so close to it. I mean, the Gibson 10 is literally this car was parked next to our trailer. We're like, is that the DeLorean from Back to the Future? These pictures are, did Michael do these? Yeah. These pictures are amazing. Yeah. They are amazing. I mean, the last one in particular is. This is bad. This is just not good. Come on. You have never seen joy out of a face like that. You know what? God, he looks a lot like Tim Cook in this picture. I have to say. In the last one? Yeah. Where's the Tim Cook laughing picture? Could be a future. I see what you're saying. I think we both the Tim Cook laughing picture. That's a by the way, if you're looking for it in the arts in our in chorus, it's Tim underscore cook underscore laughing. Jaypeg. Cool. Cool. I don't think it is. Dude, come on. They're totally wildly different. No, they're like they're like scrawny white guys with white hair. They're wildly different. Maniacally. Get that Christopher Lloyd shot up. Can you photoshop a guitar into the Tim Cook picture? I think we can. I think someone can. I think it's so tiny and brown. I'm just surrounded. So Yahoo. Let's start. Sorry, Casey. It's going to be up here in a second. No, I got real. They're just doing the thing. It's the only way I like it. All right. So let's talk about some other things. No, no, no, no. No, all right. We don't have to. What else happened? Can we talk about the self-discovery? Oh, my God. Come on. That's not. I don't. Yeah. That's uncanny. Can we photoshop Tim Cook's head back a little further? That's uncanny. Yeah, actually, it kind of works as Dave Grohl is in that. We've got Dave Grohl's neck to be in this picture, and it's kind of out of control. It's like it's like. Why did your husband die in Las Vegas? Well, he began choking on a beer when he gazed upon Dave Grohl's neck in a two-year-old photo. Can you zoom in on that? No! Can you brighten it? Enhance. Enhance. It's a little funky. What is happening? I mean, I shouldn't talk. You know, my neck probably looks like that under whatever's going on. Oh, you got a funky neck, dude. Oh, really? Really? Yeah. Very nice. All right, Casey, what else happened? Well, do we want to talk about this NewsDidist app? Because it's interesting in this very specific way, right? So the kid Nick. Nick D'Alioso. D'Alioso. He seems like a really sweet kid. He's smart. He created an app called Summly. He created an app called Summly. Yahoo purchased it for $30 million. But not before Gizmodo publicly shamed. Gawker. Gizmodo or Gawker? I believe it was Gizmodo. Well, no, Gawker published it. Not before Gawker publicly shamed a 15-year-old, which to me is reprehensible on several levels, but I digress. Yeah. I just kind of just say 15-year-olds are the worst, okay? They do tear. If you knew me when I was 15, I'm bad now. If you knew me when I was 15, you would have spit on me as soon as you could. You spit on you? You would have. You would have. You would have spit on me because I was so horrible. You have? Okay. I mean, I just- You didn't grow up in Pittsburgh, I guess. That's right. That's fucking right. You didn't grow up in Pittsburgh. Mean streets. That's right. Sorry, Casey. Yeah, so here's why I think this app is interesting. We're talking about Yahoo News Digest. It's iOS only right now. It's US only right now. I can't believe we're switching back to our serious conversation. We're trying. Honestly, the thing is we're talking about. So we live in this world where because of the success of companies like Facebook and Twitter, everybody has an endless stream, right? Any app you visit now, there's just this activity feed that goes on forever. And Yahoo has developed several of these apps. That's not it. No, this is Yahoo Tech, which is an endless stream, right? So it's totally to my point. So then Yahoo comes along and from what I'm told it was this guy's, Nick's idea, this 18-year-old's idea, he wanted to make the news more like a newspaper. He said newspapers, believe it or not, got one thing right, which was people like to finish them. I don't know how a 17-year-old can possibly have any perspective about what newspapers got right, but I will say... He was right? Well, no, but I mean... Everyone just keeps tweeting the Tim Cook picture at me. It's happened like four times. I don't know. I mean, I guess a sense of completion. Have you ever finished an entire newspaper? Yeah, I mean, I've worked at newspapers. Have you ever read cover to cover every article in a newspaper? No one's ever read... I've skimmed the classifieds. Because that's the thing. I think what's amazing about newspapers is that they are skimmable and you don't have to finish them actually. But yeah, go ahead. But it's still at least a package of information and it's at least theoretically possible to finish it. We live in a world now where there's this idea that we should just overwhelm people with links. And all of the other big news reading apps on the market, I'm thinking of apps like Circa, like Prismatic, they just give you all of these links. And I think this app is really refreshing because it's like you need fewer links. So we're just going to interrupt you twice a day and be like, here are 10 things you need to know now. You can skim through it in a couple of minutes. And the design is really crisp. I think it's a really interesting app. Yahoo is not known for being a particularly progressive, forward thinking company when it comes to product design. This app actually strikes me as ahead of the curve. Yeah, I completely agree. I played with it. You showed me it a little bit and it's awesome. There's a weird robot writing thing going on. Well no, I haven't had a chance to use the app but the writing in it is not good. But it's computer generated, right? Explain to me how it works. Okay, so the Summly algorithms that made D'Aliosso a millionaire at the age of 17 go out and they crawl the web. 30 times now. And they find links and they sort of aggregate these multiple documents and they purge them down into one. And then you have this kind of text that summarizes the article. That's what Summly used to do. That's still in this app. But this app goes further than that. It pulls in maps, it pulls in photos, it pulls in Wikipedia links. So if you want to dive deeper on the topic, you can. What's the level of human involvement in that? So what they've told me is that the same people who program the Yahoo homepage, so those people who are finding news and are kind of curating that, they're working on this app. They're helping to curate those links. So the algorithms are basically presenting them with a menu. The human editors come in and they say, let's hit these 10 things and they push them out on the web. But in the actual creation of an article? They're not writing. I believe that they're doing some kind of quality assurance stuff and making sure there are no obvious errors. Is the app attributing any of the sources? The sources are sort of buried at the bottom. But if you want to see the source links for all the articles, you can tap, you can get them. I mean, it sounds like, let me just say this, and I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but it sounds like a terrible idea that is going to lead to widespread misinformation. And it's because of the robot stuff? Yeah, but more importantly, poorly written information, which I think is the greater offense. But I think it's also kind of lame that it's like, hey, here's all this information that real people put together, and we're going to just grab a few snippets out of it, turn it into a new thing, and push it out to you as a remix or whatever. I just don't think that the transmission of intellectual information happens in weird robotic ways like that. I think that you need people. I mean, maybe I'm biased because we have a news website. But does Circa have human editors? Circa also has human editors. So there's like a mix? There's a mix. They're doing, I think, a little bit more writing. Circa's more like story streams, where it kind of puts together pieces from each article as slices, right? It's not trying to make a perfectly readable article, right? Am I crazy? Well, I mean, it's a readable article. The thing with Circa does that's cool that I would like to see another app try is you can follow a story. So I used it during the government shutdown, because I really did- You mean like the Verge app? Yeah, like the Verge app. And cheers to us for leading the way on that. But Circa lets you cover, lets you follow stories outside of the scope of things that we write about. I don't know. It's all right for that. But for the most part- I will say the design of News Digest is really awesome. It's a terrible name. I agree with that. News Digest is really not like, oh, how are you getting your information? Oh, I'm using News Digest. I do wish they'd sort of try to create a new brand with this and just say, let's come up with something that doesn't just sound so plainly utilitarian. Yeah, News. Do they still use the exclamation point? Is that just going to be there forever? I think so. That exclamation point's too hard. We should talk about Aviate. So Yahoo bought Aviate, which is a home screen replacement for Android, which I think is really interesting. I mean, at the beginning of the thing, I was like, oh my god, they're going to do a Yahoo phone. And now they basically have like the core of a Yahoo phone, which is a home screen. Yeah, that's going to be super interesting to watch. I actually met with one of the founders of Aviate after the keynote. And one of the things he said that surprised me was, Aviate's going to continue to be live. You can still go download it. This sort of thing struck me as a prime candidate for just sort of being shut down and sent to the Yahoo Stunt Quartz. It's like an Aqua hire. Yeah, but they're going to keep it alive. They have a lot of things they want to try. What's going on? Can we get that on screen? Who did that? Oh my god. Did you do that? Oh, gosh. That's amazing. Give that to our guys. They need to see that. I'll send it to you. You'll see it momentarily. I know you have it. Okay, if you have it, show it. Show it to me. We've got something really special for you. If our video guys aren't here. Yeah. This is where the promise of tonight's Virgcast comes true. Yeah, there we go. I mean, and I think you have to admit, no real break in the action. Thank you to Howard Pinsky. No real break in the action there. Completely seamless. Not confused at all. But upset it. Make me so happy. All right, what else happened today? Oh, god. So much other stuff happened. Not that much stuff. Oh, Oculus. Oculus Rift introduced the new version. So I'm very confused with the new Oculus Rift. So it's the Crystal Cove. Crystal Cove. It's a more, I think it's a more. Some more final. But they added. No, no, it's not more final. It's a new version of Oculus Rift. It has some better sensors, some more sensors. It requires a camera now because it has LEDs and does head tracking. It can tell when your body and head are in different positions. Wasn't Crystal Cove where Murder She Wrote took place? That sounds like the kind of thing that the Oculus Rift did. Sounds like the kind of thing that Casey would definitely do. How would you even possibly know? You know what? It was Cabot Cove. I apologize. What's Crystal Cove? Crystal Cove. Crystal Cove sounds like a resort town. Yeah, that's definitely. Crystal Cove is like where you go to live out the rest of your days. Yeah. In a really nice condo. I don't know. It sounds to me like Crystal Lake. Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. Which makes me think of Jason. In the Crystal Cove State Park. And Friday the 13th. And it makes me think of people being murdered. Stabbed to death. Heads chopped off. Being dragged to the bottom of a lake. And that's a lot of ways for the Oculus Rift. So also Oculus confirmed that they're making its own games. John Carmack joined. Right? Yeah, recently. A few months ago. A Mac. The return of the Mac. So they're making their own games which I think is... To me... Carmack is there so you can make games. No, but it's very strange. It's very like... The Oculus was awesome last year. It's been a year. They did another one. They added some more like... We can track your head in more ways. It's more immersive. But there still is no reason to have one as far as I can tell. There has yet to be... Here's Addy checking it out. I think it does look more sensitive in terms of its awareness of your head location and responsiveness. I'm sure. But it's like... But why would you want... That's their big problem. They invented a technology that to me is just insane. It's the most like wild futuristic thing that I've seen in a long time. And I still kind of don't know why I want it which is disappointing. There isn't some killer app where it's like, oh my god, when you play this game using the Oculus Rift it'll change your whole idea about what gaming is like. I think the potential is so huge and their technology is so much better than anything that anybody else has shown off at a consumer level that you're like, well, that's gonna happen. That's not gonna happen. It just hasn't happened yet. And with Carmack on board and $75 million in the bank, which is what they just had a huge investment, it seems like they now have what they need to do that. But they need buy-in from other developers. They need a path to a consumer product. Right now it's awesome. I mean, we went crazy for it last year. We've been tracking it throughout the year. They've clearly become a real player. I mean, a very interesting hardware startup. But you need the games and you need support. I think support, you know, there are consoles that could support the Oculus Rift. I don't think Sony or Microsoft are gonna come out of the woodwork and be like, hey, we want to support your VR headset. But it could be done. I think the closest they're gonna get is Steam Machines. I don't want to get back into the Steam Machines conversation. Boy, what a lazy showing. Here's the thing with Oculus. They have the biggest problem, right? Which is you've got to give up all of the things you're used to to engage their platform. And the only reason you're gonna do that is if you get some insane benefit to doing it. Besides, this was weird and now I kind of have a headache. I don't know. I mean, if there was a really good zombie game you could play using the Oculus Rift that was like you were fully immersed in the world of zombies trying to eat the skin and flesh off of your bones. If there was an email client and I could just shoot emails with a gun, I'm thinking outside the box here. Why? Why not? You gotta try something new. You just look around. You know, it's weird because that's funny. You know why VR was invented, right? It was to kill email. No, I mean, the original invention of VR was, and by the way, somebody will probably correct me but I think I'm relatively right, Jaron Lanier, who's one of the creators of virtual reality, was needed... I might be mixing up a couple of different stories here, but my understanding is that the creation of VR was that it was used to look at extremely long integers or numbers and that you couldn't... A monitor couldn't do it. You had to keep scrolling back and forth and you need to be able to see the numbers at the beginning and the end or whatever or very large amounts of... He was like, how do I make the numbers? Numerical data so you'd be able to pan and go back and that's the reason, that's like the beginning of VR. Also, I could have just made that up. Yeah, that sounds completely insane. It's not. Can you check it out? I mean, what? Check out virtual reality. How do you do it? Wikipedia, search, virtual reality, slash... Why do I ever... Just tweet it, Josh, yes or no. Yeah, just tweet yes or no, Josh. Tweet yes or no, Josh. Do you believe the story about virtual reality? Let's see what happens. So the other thing that happens... Hashtag Virgcast. The other thing that happened today was MetaWatch just blew it as far as I can tell. I don't get this thing. MetaWatch gets the Virtue... Here's the new one. MetaWatch gets the Virtue designer. No, this makes complete sense to me. If you looked at Virtue phones, you're aware of Virtue phones. Of course, yeah. Super fancy. If you looked at those and then you're like, what if that guy made a watch? You would land right here. Well, I will say this, very expensive... It's like a steampunk smartwatch. That's what this looks like to me. Very expensive watches are on a regular basis totally offensive from a design standpoint. Like here's a $75,000 watch and it looks like a pile of ass cheeks. And not like sexy ass cheeks, bad ones. Yeah, pile of ass cheeks is like every other R. Kelly album cover. That's his new record. R. Kelly's pile of ass cheeks. I love that record. Very sexy stuff. It's definitely, by the way, the cover of his new record. Is it a pile of ass cheeks? Well, the... Yeah. Black panties. Black panties. Black panties. By the way, black panties, I'll bet probably the second most popular color of panties. White. White panties. Just tweet yes or no at Josh. Is that the most popular color of panties? What is the most popular panty color? Black or white? Where did we go? Let me ask you something. How did we get here? Are black panties always sexy? Another question I'd like to have answered. Reasonable people can do that. Where are we at with my virtual reality story? True or false? Does anybody know? A lot of nopes. Just nopes for days. If you just Wikipedia... If I invented that story, somebody should turn that into a mini-series on the Hallmark channel. The first mini-series of all time. Great. Old men trying to look for numbers. They would have been young men at the time. We're talking in the 80s. In 1986, 85. John, let's go to the lab so I can look at longer numbers. Just tell me about the creation of our history. It's the worst sequel to the real genius. You want to talk to the real genius? I'm looking. Oh my God. This is the worst. Here we go. Here we go. Pioneers and notables. I don't know what I'm doing. Come on. Can we not have Wikipedia on this? Wait a second. Wait a second. This is the worst. Can someone read that to me? I can't see it here. Do you remember when we used to always online shop on the Vergecast? This is a thousand times worse. It was popularized by Jaron Lanier. All right. Yeah. I think you took that off because it's too controversial that I'm right. We've done enough here. Yeah. Sounds like I'm totally 100% right and I didn't make that story up at all. Anyhow. All right. Boy, Vergecast. Vergecast and CS is really living up to its name. It's a real problem. What else? We never talked about the MetaWatch. We landed on Blackpanties and then we started reading Wikipedia. Do we have a result of the Blackpanties versus Whitepanties sexiness level? No, I'm sorry. Which is more popular than also are Blackpanties always sexy? We're still tabulating the results. A few counties are still out. I'm terrified to look at my Twitter. This will be Casey Newton's last day at the Verge. Flipping this gigantic table and leaving right after this. I had a wonderful time. Casey, would you say that this is what you expected? It was what I expected. All right. The MetaWatch. It's super ugly. Can you talk about it, Josh? Say some more. Me? Yeah, you. I was just checking Twitter. Just react to this photograph. I mean, if you wanted to make a smartwatch that typified everything you didn't want in a smartwatch and everything that scared you about the concept of smartwatches, I think MetaWatch knocked it out of the park. I think if they wanted to say to people who would never have bought a smartwatch in the first place, continue not buying these things, home run. Here's my new strategy for Vergecast and CS. Josh, react to this picture. That's all I have to do. Here's the one thing they got right. Nothing. Yeah. I mean, would you wear this? No, I would not wear that. It does not look like that much of an improvement from the little smartwatches that people would wear when I was in junior high. Just a lot of tiny little numbers. A lot of mistakes. A lot of mistakes. I mean, a lot of tweets right now. Very few about panties. That's a shame. Wait a second. I haven't hit that portion. Josh, let me ask you a question. You're not happy. You're unhappy, surprised, disappointed by that. What emotion are you feeling about your Twitter right now? Well, I just got to Tim Carmody, our good friend Tim Carmody, just favorited an RLRT about my vampiric paleness. Oh, God. You're so behind on your Twitter. No, no, no. I got to... This is... Okay. I don't know if you... Before every episode of the Vergecast, Josh and I have a tiny little lover's quarrel about whether or not he's allowed to have a laptop because he's not allowed to have a laptop. And what he hasn't said now is a series of ever-increasing, like, larger phones. Yeah, excuse me. I'm going to have the Galaxy Tab Pro. I don't even have 12-point... Like, no, it's on my phone. And then I'm going to put it down and I'm going to get the keyboard dock out and I'm going to have a laptop. No. You're going to pay the price. Slow, slow, Bernard. So, Josh, it's cool. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. No, I don't want to know any of the answers to any of these questions. Black. Although I know it's black. Yeah. Hold on. Wikipedia says no. Wikipedia has the answer to that question? No, yes, yes. I don't know what that means. Hold on. This one I really don't understand. Does anyone like to run by the trailer and cut the hard line? Is that just a picture of R. Kelly? Crying. 1920s vehicle sim. No long numbers. I don't know what that means. John, is there... If I were to say to you the phrase, cut the hard line, would that mean anything? The hard line. I'm done. Yeah, if it had an ax. Does anybody at CES have an ax? Yeah. Doc Brown. All right, Casey, how many CES have you been to? This is only my second CES. So this is different than last year. This is quite a bit different. But it's been great. I have to say, there's been enough that has been cool to keep me excited about what we're going to see the rest of the week. Yeah. I don't know if it's funny, but it's not funny. One lesson I wish I'd learned was don't drink an enormous thing of water right before you come on the VirgCast. Because after about an hour, you're feeling that. What's happening? Yeah. You're feeling like you just want to sneak off the stage. Let me tell you something. You're just trying to cheat out? I want to cheat out. I want to disappear. I want to melt off the world. See, I feel when I live-blog, once the adrenaline hits you... Of course, I don't know how much adrenaline was happening to the Yahoo! Live blog, probably not that much. But I find that when the adrenaline hits you, all worldly needs fade away. Go away. I was hoping for that. All earthly needs just slide off to the sides of your existence. And you're just in the zone. Just locked in. You're like a Formula 1 racer strapped into the... You had, I think, the best live event thus far of CES. It was the most fun to watch, I think. What was the John Legend stuff at the end? It seemed relatively deep and weird for the end of Aquino. He played three songs, which was like two more than I thought he would do. He started out with Here Comes the Sun, and it was really nice. And then he did two of his own, Green Light and All I Need, I think, is the name of the other one. It was great. Yeah. Well, there's hands. There's hands. We don't know whose hands that is. Underneath that wrist, there's a smartwatch. Yeah. There's a Meta watch. He's like, why did I buy this? It's so ugly. Yeah. I guess Meta watch, that's the person we can cross off the list for next year at CES that we'll be talking to. But listen, you know you guys make great products, and the Virtue guy, total slam dunk. Slam dunk. I think on that note, is there anything else we have to talk about? Really, I mean, I think... Where are we on time? Let me check my regular watch. Nothing Meta about this. Also not hideously ugly. I think we're good. What do you guys think? Should we wrap this up? Yeah, I got a thumbs up from... Really? And that, the rolling thing? Yeah. Is there a name for this? Please Stop. Yeah. No, this is like Wrap It Up, right? Yeah. You think Wrap It Up would be more like this? Like... That's... Okay, anyhow, that's the VirgCast for the second night, the second official night of CES Tuesday. And that was a series of mistakes that we recorded with the... That was 2014. The nice thing is, no matter what happened here... We're never putting it on iTunes. I think very few people... This is why it doesn't go on iTunes. We're not putting it on iTunes, and I like to think very few people were watching it. You're so wrong. It's the number one post on our site right now. Oh, oops. Well, shit happened. That's the VirgCast. That's CES. That's the VirgCast at CES on Tuesday night, day two, as we like to call it. Day one. Day five. Day six. Day six. We'll be back. We'll be back. Should I say... Oh, yeah, you could follow... Whatever. You know how you could follow us. You're watching this. If you stuck with us to this point, you have a disease. We'll be back tomorrow night with more VirgCast-y goodness. Also tomorrow morning, really? Are we doing first again? Yeah. Okay. Tomorrow morning, Ross Miller and I will be doing first, the only show you need early in the morning at CES. And we're gonna be talking about these exact same topics, but not drunk, so you may actually get some information out of them. And then we'll have another VirgCast. Let me ask you a question. And it's another yes or no. Who are you asking this to? The group here or out there? I'll just ask you. Are you stupider when you're drunk or sleepy? Drunk. Okay. Oh, uh... Josh is like, both. I mean, what do you mean stupider? I'm real dumb when I'm sleepy. I think that I... I can fake it real good when I'm drunk. I guess I'd have to say... A lot of head shaking in the studio right now. I guess I'd have to say sleepy, because when I drink, I feel like I'm just a more awesome, elevated version of myself. That's how you feel. No, I don't know what everybody else experiences. I'm sure it's terrible, but that's not my problem. I'm drunk. Anyhow. Good night. Hold on a second. That's the VirgCast. Poor Casey. We'll be back tomorrow night. No, Casey's laughing. I'm loving it. Look at that. Wow. As always, I wish you and your family the very best, even though they've all been given Meta Watches as gifts.
 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast after hours at CES 2014 presented live from beautiful
 downtown Las Vegas, Nevada in the heart of the Bible Belt.
 There are no Bibles in Nevada.
 I'm Josh.
 By state law.
 I'm Josh.
 They were all thrown away when they're invited to Hooker's Inn.
 I'm Josh Tupolsky.
 I'm just ashamed.
 And I'm Casey Newton.
 Casey.
 Casey Newton is here, everybody.
 Check him out.
 Yeah.
 Get a look at that.
 Behold.
 Let your brain soak it in.
 Let your eyeballs soak it in and then let that information travel into your brain.
 Yeah.
 So, Vergecast after hours.
 Day one.
 Day one of the real CES.
 It's like day four of me being awake.
 We've been doing this for what seems like 36,000 years.
 Correct.
 I'm going to drink this tiny beer.
 And we're having some drinks.
 We're getting loose.
 Some situations have occurred today.
 We went to the show floor today.
 Is that what I look like for real?
 Can you get that?
 Is this what I look like?
 I look like a guy who's going to go gamble.
 Yeah.
 Hello.
 I don't know.
 What am I doing?
 You know, like a cozy way.
 This is a great...
 Is cozy gambling a thing?
 This is the only time during the day that I see myself.
 Do you know that?
 All right.
 This is the first time and I'm shocked by what I'm seeing.
 It's upsetting.
 It's gross.
 And I should be put in jail.
 Is cozy gambling a thing?
 You look like you're going to gamble like a cozy...
 Cozy gambling.
 Like there's a fire roaring.
 You're wearing a...
 You get onto like a chest or field.
 You're wearing a fuzzy shirt.
 Yeah.
 And they roll over a slot machine with a gold leather, like a hand, a gold thing with a
 leather wrapped and you pull it.
 You're watching your favorite movie.
 Instead of going very fast, it's very slow.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 No, that doesn't exist.
 Well.
 Anyhow, so we had a big day today.
 Another.
 I mean, just today was the...
 It was one of our best days.
 It got real today.
 It got really real.
 Yeah.
 In a variety of ways, it got real.
 Yeah.
 So we should start...
 I mean, the day...
 I'm trying to look at all the news that happened here.
 I'm already overwhelmed that I want to kill myself.
 But I think today really started last night and it started with this story.
 Wow.
 That's true.
 I think it was maybe in the morning, as far as I can tell, when T-Mobile CEO John Leisure
 was kicked out of the AT&T party.
 Hold on.
 Is it John Leisure or John Legere?
 I've been saying Leisure.
 I think it's Legere.
 Yeah, but...
 Are you saying like John Leisure?
 You think he's the kind of guy who has rules?
 Because I don't.
 I think that when it comes to rules, John Legere ain't having them.
 He's not.
 Look, he's about unlimited...
 So you went to go see him out in the morning.
 You say he's about unlimited data.
 Is that what you're going to say?
 That's all he cares about.
 Unlimited data.
 He's a wild guy.
 Unlimited freedom.
 He's not about unlimited data.
 No, he was kicked out of his party last night, and he has an announcement tomorrow.
 So this news broke at like two in the morning.
 He went to go see Macklemore at the AT&T party.
 He was wearing a pink shirt.
 I think the most shocking part of this whole story is that he's a dork who still does the
 bunny ears in the photo.
 With Roger Jett.
 I'll tell you what's most disturbing is that 45-year-old CEO of T-Mobile thinks doing bunny
 ears on somebody in a photo is cool.
 Well, I'll tell you, there's a huge correlation between bunny ears people and Macklemore fans.
 Yeah.
 It's true.
 Macklemore is like the living embodiment of somebody doing bunny ears in a photo.
 All right, Eddie, I'll go on.
 Anyway, but he has a big...
 So this news is like happening.
 By the way, it's Macklemore.
 Macklemore?
 I say Macklemore, but it's apparently Macklemore.
 Do you know this?
 Carry on.
 It doesn't matter.
 Once I've had a couple of these tiny beers, it's all going to fade away in the wash.
 It's just going to be a slur.
 A slur of an M sound.
 I don't remember.
 Followed by projectile vomiting.
 Anyway, so he's got a big thing tomorrow.
 All day today, I've been hearing about just here and there about this dude getting kicked
 out because I don't think AT&T security knew who it was.
 I think it was planned.
 I think they just thought he was a Bon Jovi fan.
 I think he went there.
 He was going to their party.
 I think he went there.
 He took a bunch of photos doing bunny ears on people.
 Security saw it and they're like, these guys harassing our patrons.
 And they kicked his ass to the curb.
 I love him though.
 He's great.
 But Roger Chang said that AT&T was not happy he was there.
 At least that's what Roger said on Twitter.
 I understand that Ralph De La Vega personally, well once he got out, you know how in the
 movies there's always the club manager who's like, and I don't want to see you back here.
 In this case, it was Ralph De La Vega.
 He does seem like he has the look of a guy who would do that, right?
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Go ahead.
 So that was that.
 Then this morning, we started with Sony.
 Sony went all out.
 And I will say, Sony, yesterday we did their official press conference.
 What is the story this year with everybody having several press conferences?
 I don't know.
 I have a theory about it.
 The CEA, this was a slow year for CES.
 I believe it is a slow year.
 Did they announce record numbers or anything?
 Oh, they do that after.
 I think it's a slow year.
 I think that they had slots open and could not fill them for keynotes and events.
 And I think they were like, hey, what if you guys did two keynotes?
 The nighttime keynotes have always been-
 Two for the price of one.
 That's right.
 The official CEA nighttime keynotes have always been completely devoid of any news.
 They've always been about spectacle and loving the industry.
 Microsoft used to have the opening keynote for years.
 Generation Mobile.
 You're right.
 Qualcomm, god only knows what that was.
 I think god and other people know what it was.
 It was the most awesome keynote of all time presented by Dr. Paul Jacobs.
 Yeah.
 Who's sadly on his way out.
 Oh, I mean, no.
 He's-
 You know, everything changed for Qualcomm after that day.
 It seems like that keynote sealed Dr. Paul Jacobs' fate.
 That was the height of air games for Qualcomm.
 Try explaining that one to shareholders on the earnings call.
 We spent $2 billion and it made no sense.
 I can't wait to see the behind the music on Qualcomm.
 They're like, at the height of drug abuse and vanity, Dr. Paul Jacobs took to the stage
 and brought Big Bird with him.
 It's a band in Big Bird.
 Band in Big Bird, Rolls Royce, the woman from Star Trek.
 Yeah.
 Who just looks scared.
 You can name anything right now and people would be like, yeah, that happened.
 Be like, a unicorn that killed an elephant.
 That's occurred on CES.
 There's been none of that here.
 It's all been like, Sony's thing was like, here's a lot of products.
 Today we were expecting kind of a kickoff CES morning thing.
 And KaaZ actually came out and announced a bunch of stuff.
 Yeah.
 It's cool.
 It's really cool.
 The coolest stuff, I think, so far.
 Cool if working.
 Well, yeah, but PlayStation now works.
 We went and played with it.
 So that's-
 PlayStation now.
 We bought Gikai and now it's streaming so you can stream PS3 games to all kinds of things.
 Sony TVs, Blu-ray players.
 Gikai tech all over the place.
 So that's cool.
 People are really into it.
 Everybody who I've seen who's played with it really likes it.
 They announced a live TV service, like an internet TV service.
 Which as far as I can tell is-
 Does it have-
 Consists right now of just an icon and a slide.
 The internet service does not have a name.
 It's gonna be like Sony Video Unlimited or Sony Entertainment Unlimited.
 Whatever their names are, they've dumbled into it.
 Short throw projector.
 And then they announced this crazy, crazy stuff.
 This life, what is it called?
 Life O-House or something?
 No, it's, where is it?
 Life O-House?
 I have it.
 God, all the names are really bad.
 It's called Life Space UX or Life Space Ux.
 That's pretty close.
 Yeah.
 Life Space Ux?
 Life Space Ux.
 So Sony has all these crazy laser projectors that only need basically a little over two
 feet to put up 120 inch images.
 And so I went and saw it just now at their booth.
 It looks like a piece of furniture, but not a great piece of furniture.
 I was surprised-
 It looks like kind of like my air conditioning unit.
 I was surprisingly-
 Or like the back of a Testarossa.
 So that whole white thing is the unit?
 Yeah.
 So it's gonna be like $15,000.
 Oh, I mean that's a prototype.
 I was surprisingly impressed by the short throw projector.
 I heard them say the word projector and I was like, you've got to be kidding me.
 And then they showed what it does and I was like, yeah, this is cool.
 I want one.
 I spoke to Kaz Harai earlier today.
 Yeah.
 I know Kaz a little bit.
 Kaz and I go way back.
 We hit the links sometimes together shooting our golf balls all over the place.
 Just firing at people.
 And so he did some interesting stuff.
 First off, he dissed you hard.
 He said, so this is really weird.
 He was like, I was like, what's the deal with cloud TV?
 What kind of partnerships are you gonna strike?
 They didn't want to talk to anyone, say anything about partnerships.
 He says, we don't want to compete with cable TV.
 We want to integrate.
 It really sounds like what the Xbox One is doing where it's trying to integrate everything
 into a single place where you can watch whatever you want to watch whenever you want to watch
 it.
 But it didn't sound like there was gonna be a pass through solution.
 So one of two things, he was like, we don't want to compete with cable companies.
 Then he was like, well, maybe with live TV we'll compete with cable companies.
 And it's like, well, what else is there beyond like-
 Nobody has an answer for this.
 Stuff that isn't live TV, which is readily available for everybody.
 And then the other stuff, which is live TV.
 It's a, I mean, nobody has the answer and he's probably lying.
 But they can't do pass throughs.
 So my guess is they're either gonna like try to strike some deals with some straight up
 with content providers.
 Like ABC is gonna give them their ABC channel and do live.
 But they can't.
 I mean, like, if Sony could pull that off, then Apple would have been able to pull it
 off a year ago or two years ago.
 This is what Intel just abandoned.
 Wait, hold on.
 Right, but let me just offer you a problem.
 But he made a point.
 But no, but here's the problem.
 Like here it is.
 I wanna hear his point.
 You're Sony, right?
 And you wanna start this stuff and they're like, man, table stakes to get television
 to people.
 We need the big networks.
 Okay, let's go to a tap tape.
 ABC says yes.
 CBS says yes.
 They wanna see what the others are.
 Oh, we should go talk to NBC.
 You know who owns NBC?
 Comcast.
 Yeah.
 You know where you just hit the brick wall and you're done.
 Like that's the end of that.
 Sounds to me like a little bit of a monopoly.
 Yeah.
 Okay, but here's the thing.
 Nobody watches any of those stations anymore.
 No, they're the vast majority of the watchers.
 But here's the thing.
 I think the argument he made is true when you see their...
 Like CBS is the number one network.
 I mean, when you see their output.
 Have you ever watched Two and a Half Men?
 Religious group.
 It's crazy.
 You're into it.
 It's like being on another planet where everybody is super dumb.
 So it's like CBS.
 Yes, a little bit like CBS.
 But his argument was we have a huge installed user base.
 We have PS3s and 25 million homes in the US.
 So I think that they're...
 And which is interesting is that he wasn't like, this will be our next gen thing.
 He was like, we're gonna bring this to several different devices.
 So I mean, maybe there's deals to be struck with these cable providers.
 I don't know.
 Maybe they're the ones who can crack it.
 Maybe they're like, we're already making this stuff and they sold 4.2 million PS4s.
 They're approaching, what, 30 million units that just sit around people's houses.
 That's not nothing.
 But it's super hard for these hardware companies to offer services, right?
 So finally, a hardware company like Sony, it's getting religion about services.
 We have to offer people more than just the hardware.
 But look at Apple falling all over themselves to create services that are worth our money.
 And they can't do it.
 And they can't do it.
 I think Sony's gonna run into similar problems.
 I mean, I hope they don't.
 But Sony's thing is like they at least, right, they make Breaking Bad.
 That's a Sony pictures product.
 I guess they could leverage.
 I guess they could.
 I mean, look, there's all contracts.
 Hypothetically, Sony could leverage their content and say, listen, you scratch our backs,
 we'll scratch yours.
 No, but they already do.
 So when you buy, the only company that can possibly do this is Sony.
 When you buy a Sony 4K TV, it comes with movies.
 They just give you 100, like here's a box.
 That's because they're like, what else are you gonna play on this?
 But like Samsung doesn't do that.
 On this hunk of crap that doesn't do anything.
 There's no way that, but I'm saying, look, Samsung cannot possibly do that.
 You haven't seen the Samsung films?
 They're really good.
 They're like, they're like exactly like the Sony movies.
 What happens if you Google Samsung films?
 But it's slightly different.
 Man, I went and played with the Samsung tab.
 Wait, hold on, let's get to that.
 Wait a second.
 I want to, Kaz also said 4K mainstream adoption five to seven years away.
 Yeah.
 I heard 2016 from somebody today.
 I mean, 2016 is extremely generous.
 2016 is.
 That's two years, not mainstream adoption.
 Yeah.
 So 2016 is like, you know, maybe like a quarter of the sales.
 Well, he was, yeah, what is interesting is that he was very upfront about, he was like,
 how long did HD take?
 Yeah.
 It was like a decade, you know?
 Yeah.
 And you know, they were, the guys at the Sony guys were even, you know, willing to say like,
 look, even five years ago, HD did not.
 It just started to get picked up by cable companies, you know?
 So you have to think about the map.
 I mean, I'm not like gloating or anything about the lack of, of, of traction.
 Yeah.
 What you want is crappy pictures.
 You want to look at bad things.
 I don't care.
 I just want my, as long as you give me season seven of Breaking Bad, I'm a happy guy.
 Okay.
 That's all I want in life.
 But anyway, I just don't think.
 Walt, Walt.
 Oh, I almost spoiled.
 Yeah.
 I almost, I almost gave it away.
 Yeah.
 Go ahead.
 Let's not give it away.
 I look weird.
 I thought you were going to say something about Walt.
 I mean, every time I catch a glance of myself in this thing, they say the camera adds 10
 pounds, but it's also making me look like a mutant.
 Yeah.
 The camera adds 10 pounds and also a slight vampire effect.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 A werewolf.
 I would say if, if I do kind of look like, you know, where there's a werewolf quality
 to my face, but also it's vampiric.
 Right.
 Due to its paleness.
 So she's talking about this.
 Like a Dracula and a werewolf.
 So Kaz announced all this stuff and we ran a super cut of Kaz and the title we put on
 was weird Sony is back.
 Right.
 Because I, last year and the year before Kaz really like started talking, you know, he
 took over as CEO.
 Yeah.
 Like cleaned up, he announced one Sony.
 Yeah.
 He was always like.
 They restructured, they slimmed down.
 He kept on talking about challenges and exchange markets and currency problems.
 And this year he's like, we've got to make things that are great.
 We can't make things that are commodities.
 And like their weird ideas about things are maybe they're not the right ideas.
 Like maybe you don't want a piece of furniture that's a projector, but I'd rather have Sony
 trying to make those things than not.
 I said, I tweeted that the aspirational Sony is back.
 And I remember talking about.
 I mean, it really does look like the back of a tester or so.
 Yeah, I remember talking about Sony's, the aspirational quality of their products.
 And they've even taught, they've even said that I, that's where Sony came to dominate.
 Right.
 Was making, saying like, we're not going to make the commodity stuff.
 We're going to make the special stuff.
 But I asked them, I said in that same meeting, I didn't, I have a bunch of quotes and a bunch
 of things I didn't actually write up, but I asked Kaz how they protect themselves.
 You know, let's say in five to seven years, panels are going to be cheaper.
 Other companies like Samsung and LG are all doing 4k.
 Everybody's doing 4k.
 So how do they protect themselves in 4k the way they did not protect themselves with HD?
 Which is like clearly Sony was on the cutting edge of television technology for the longest
 time.
 And then all of a sudden China happened, you know, Korea happened and you have these much
 cheaper panels.
 You have companies like Vizio coming in and just pulling the rug out from under them.
 And I was like, how are you going to ensure that that doesn't happen again with 4k?
 Clearly they're investing a huge amount of money and time and resources into 4k.
 And Kaz was like really pragmatic.
 He's like, we need to be, you know, we've restructured, we've trimmed down.
 He's like, we want to be, we need to be able to offer the cheaper products, but not commodity
 product, you know, not just the commodity product and still do the high end and still
 be leading the way.
 And you know, I think they are aware now, much more aware thanks to him of their position
 and how much more precarious it is.
 Well, at this point it's not there yet.
 Yeah, but I think they know what to do, which is like a surprising moment for Sony.
 Like they, I loved Howard Stringer and I really got the sense that like he knew what to do
 about Apple and software and the internet.
 Right?
 Like you thought that?
 No, I was, he didn't.
 Oh, I get the sense that Kazari kind of knows what to do.
 It seems like, he seems like there's a vision there and they're working through towards
 something.
 Right.
 And whereas Stringer was like, I don't know what Stringer was all about.
 Stringer was about being awesome.
 He liked movies, he seemed to really like single damn about anything.
 He'd bring Tillie McGuire out, no problem, no big deal.
 I asked him, while you were interviewing Kaz, I was interviewing their new, the new president
 of Sony Electronics.
 So Phil Molyneux was like the long time president of Sony Electronics.
 Well, these weren't quite concurrent because he was also in my meeting, but anyhow, go on.
 Oh, they were like an hour apart.
 They were very close together.
 They were like an hour apart.
 It would have been incredible if it was at the same time.
 Look, there's a reason they replaced Phil with Mike and it's because he can be everywhere.
 There's two, he literally can be everywhere.
 And I asked him and he's like, he was the one who put, he used to be the chief marketing
 officer of Sony.
 And he was like, yeah, I was the one who brought Taylor Swift in.
 And I was like, what happened?
 Like, why did you stop doing it?
 He's like, we really need to start focusing on what we can actually deliver people and
 not like spectacle.
 He screwed up those things very badly.
 And I told him that that was a huge mistake because that Taylor Swift Sony keynote was
 like three years ago.
 Most important moment of your life.
 Well, it was just the audacity of Sony to be like, okay, we make 3D cameras and 3D TVs.
 So put on these 3D glasses and then Taylor Swift is going to come out.
 But don't look at her.
 Look at us filming her in 3D and then watch it over here.
 And everyone was like, no.
 And everyone took off the glasses.
 It was a pretty cool idea.
 It was explosions.
 If it hadn't worked, it's a pretty cool idea.
 So then after that, they talked about curved a little bit in our meeting.
 They did?
 Yeah.
 Do they just diss it hard?
 No, actually.
 They were sort of positive about it.
 Really?
 I just went and looked at a bunch of them.
 I cannot figure out one reason why I want to go.
 I feel like somebody said in the meeting, once you see curved, it's hard to look at
 normal television.
 That might have been a diss on curved.
 Yeah.
 Might have been like, it's hard because curved looks distorted and weird.
 Yeah.
 I don't know.
 I don't know Sony's.
 I don't think Sony's weird.
 Deed and I just took a little walk on the show floor and we kept on looking at the curved
 ones and we're like, why?
 Why?
 Because 3D is dead.
 Yeah.
 We also went to LG where I texted a washing machine and a stove.
 Yeah.
 What did you text it?
 Was it a sext?
 I think we texted-
 Did you take pics?
 Yeah.
 I texted it, I checked this out.
 I'm like, that needs a clean-
 It doesn't have a phone number.
 You have to use a-
 You need to refill that or do you need to put things in the washing machine?
 It doesn't have a phone number.
 You have to use a special LG app called Home Chat.
 So I'm already excited.
 I get to download the text your washing machine app.
 You love, you love, you love.
 You can send it things like-
 Yeah, Terry.
 That sounds like that's going on my home screen.
 Yeah, it's really insane.
 Even the woman who was demoing it to us was like, yeah, I mean, I mostly texted things
 like, where are you?
 And then the washing machine texts you back like, I wish I was free, which is hilarious.
 No, really?
 If I had that demo, I would have asked for a written apology at the end.
 Come on.
 What are we doing here?
 I mean, I, what would you tell, I don't understand.
 You know what?
 Let's just not.
 Yeah.
 We have a lot to talk about.
 We don't need to talk about it.
 I don't want to get into it.
 All right, so let's talk about what really happens to me.
 So Sony, wait, is there anything else that Sony-
 No, I mean, Sony's like, I think they're really ambitious in a way that I haven't seen
 a lot of time.
 I think that's cool.
 Yeah.
 They're probably going to bring out like, some of the laserdisc player next.
 Yeah.
 Blu-ray, Blu-ray laserdisc.
 Can you imagine how much content you could fit on a size of a laserdisc?
 It's like 800 movies.
 Yeah, a BluDisc.
 So let's talk about what really happens to me.
 Casey?
 Yeah.
 The Yahoo keynote.
 Yahoo.
 Yeah.
 This was like-
 Which I characterize by the way, as nonstop flop sweat.
 Just nonstop bombs.
 Yahoo had-
 And not by like, the drop the mic bombs, just like jokes bombing hard.
 The Yahoo keynote had moments of utter sublime transcendence.
 And then it had moments, mostly moments of me-
 Screaming in rage.
 Just being enraged or disappointed or-
 So Casey was there-
 Reverse, what's reverse laughing?
 Frowning?
 I think so.
 It's FOF, I believe it's called.
 Oh yeah, FOF.
 Frown on face.
 Frown on face.
 I love it.
 A lot of FOF-y today.
 And not really out of anger, but just disappointment.
 Just like, why is this happening?
 So Casey, you ran the best live log ever.
 What happened?
 Thank you very much.
 So, you know, if I'm going to say something in Yahoo's favor, it's the difficulty level
 for this keynote was super high.
 They're not a hardware company.
 The things that get us excited when we go to these keynotes is, hey look, it's a new
 tablet, it's a new phone.
 And they got to come out and say, hey, we have a new mobile app for reading the news.
 Hey, we made an acquisition.
 Hey, here are some people from Saturday Night Live.
 But I think-
 Did that happen?
 I totally-
 That did, yeah.
 Where was I?
 So, you know, Yahoo owns the Saturday Night Live library and they stream it to their apps
 and on the web.
 And they started showing a clip and then Marissa came out and said, hey, you know what, it
 would be great if this were actually live.
 And then she brought out Cecily Strong and Kenan Thompson and they did a little weekend
 update bit.
 Oh, look at that.
 Yeah.
 Totally-
 Every single one of these jokes bombed.
 Yeah.
 Like, they delivered a line and it was like just silence.
 Were they funny?
 At one point she rolled her eyes.
 No, she was like, what's his name?
 The Somley guy's name?
 Nick D'Alioso is how you pronounce that.
 D'Alioso.
 Yes.
 That's how Marissa Meyer pronounced it.
 And she was like, Nick D'Alioso, he's a young man and she's like, and all the ladies are
 like, is he 18 yet?
 And then there was just dead silence.
 Well, I'll say this.
 Dead, awful silence.
 Let's be honest.
 CS audience, not known for their ability to laugh.
 True.
 Or get jokes.
 And SNL is outside their wheelhouse, right?
 Way outside.
 Yeah.
 Like, asking-
 I mean, the biggest laugh was at the end when dude was like, good job on that search
 engine and everyone exploded.
 Like, you made a really good search engine and everyone was like, you just burned Yahoo
 with their own keyboard.
 Yeah.
 I mean, it was miserable.
 Every moment of that.
 Like, Katie Couric, like, being a robot was, I don't know.
 Let's get into some real talk.
 Yeah, let's talk about it.
 David Pogue.
 There was some burns.
 Before today, I was like, I kind of tolerated David Pogue.
 He's a pleasant fellow.
 After today, I just, I have to say, he seemed genuinely unlikable today.
 And not just because he was dissing, like, all of the sites that he's now in a smear
 with.
 No, no, I get it.
 I understand it now.
 I've gotten some distance.
 I had a tiny beer.
 Yeah.
 I figured it out.
 That was, he was doing an Apple presentation.
 That's all he knows in his heart.
 That wasn't-
 No, it was like-
 No, no.
 What are the best presentations I know?
 It was like a Cheki Green with Cheki Green's jokes.
 He was like, let me show you all the other sites and why they suck.
 Now let me show you what we're going to do.
 And then it's like, dude, but it's not an iPad.
 Yeah.
 It's like the relative scale of things that we-
 There we are.
 En Badger, The Urge.
 Can we just look at these puns?
 Hashtag The Urge is like a-
 Gizmoody.
 Gizmoody, you nailed it, dude.
 Knocked it out of the park.
 I mean, I'm sure, I have no doubt right now the members of the Gizmodo staff curled into
 fetal positions, crying uncontrollably due to this harsh, clever diss, this play on their
 name, Gizmoody.
 Yeah, they closed up shop.
 What's the point anymore?
 Some of the worst photo shopping as well.
 Also, by the way, this new, this, listen, let me tell you guys something.
 Yeah.
 Our, our word mark is a altered font.
 If you really wanted to get this right, you'd have gone and found the font and put the proper
 you in there.
 This is some lazy shit.
 Yeah.
 Is that like, what, is that Futura?
 What are we looking at?
 Yeah, I don't know.
 He drew it on his iPad.
 Yeah, right.
 Could somebody tweet the you font at us?
 I would actually like to know.
 Yeah.
 No, that's not a you font.
 He drew, he literally drew an orange square and then erased it into the shit.
 So here's the deal.
 David Pogue was like, oh, listen, New York and California, amazing brainiacs, middle
 of America, dumb shits who don't deserve our time, energy or attention.
 Normals.
 Right.
 He's like, we're going to make a tech blog for dumb asses like all of the people in the
 middle of America.
 And here's the thing, like, here's what I'll say.
 All jokes aside about like our fake name and Gizmodo's fake name and everything.
 David Pogue is fundamentally incorrect about what he thinks about adoption of technology
 and understanding of technology in America.
 What he thinks is, hey, the mainstream is dumb and they need to be talked down to and
 we need to dumb shit down for them because they won't get it otherwise.
 Here's what's happening.
 The mainstream is getting smarter about technology.
 The mainstream understands technology better today than they have ever understood it and
 is becoming an integral, completely normal part of their lives.
 And so his idea that somehow we need to dumb this stuff down because they don't understand
 it is probably literally only based on the fact that Yahoo's readership skews old.
 And he's coming from the New York Times, which I think specifically for him has an audience
 that his tech audience in the New York Times is they have no idea what's going on.
 They're not they're not they're not young.
 They're not representative of like the core of American consumers.
 And at one point it was just really weird because he literally divided America into
 red states and blue states.
 And then he kind of like yelled at an invisible Obama for a while.
 Like he was doing the thing like, I don't understand why you guys keep using these words
 like form factor.
 And it's like, A, I'm not there.
 B, I haven't done that in a long time.
 The other thing is the other thing that he did is that if you look at the you know, and
 not to get go down a rabbit hole here, but if you're a person with a brain who's read
 any of the sites that he mentioned, which is Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge and Recode,
 like they're wildly different.
 Yeah, distinctly different.
 Gizmodo does not do the same thing as Engadget.
 We do not do the same thing as any of those sites.
 Recode is completely different.
 I mean, and I don't mean different like they cover different stories.
 They write differently.
 They have different types of headlines.
 Their coverage areas are different.
 And it's like, it was simplistic.
 It was insulting.
 And the most important part of what he presented, it was fucking wrong.
 And I have to say, like, you know, I didn't take to Twitter and say anything about it.
 I'm not going to write an editorial about it.
 I mean, frankly, everybody else on Twitter handled it for me.
 But it was like, I would describe it as like a relatively odious presentation.
 Like I'm not insulted that he was making fun of us.
 He doesn't know what we do.
 That's pretty obvious to me.
 Right.
 But what was it like in the room?
 But he's wrong.
 But here's what I think.
 But he's wrong.
 I just said this.
 He's wrong about America.
 I agree.
 He's wrong about how people understand technology.
 And what he did was insulting to people rather than inclusive and exciting to people.
 That's my opinion.
 Right.
 So but here's, because here's another drink.
 Yeah, I also, can I have another tiny beverage, please?
 Just unrelated to Pogue.
 Can we just get a pitcher or something?
 Can we get a pitcher of vodka?
 So here's my question.
 So yeah.
 So there's been kind of a theory, a meme out there that Marissa Meyer, she came in, she
 was a big celebrity.
 She's a superstar executive.
 She came in, she's the CEO.
 She started buying all these young hip companies.
 She's going to turn Yahoo into a technological force by getting all this talent.
 There was an app we covered today, a news stream.
 Yeah, News Digest.
 News Digest.
 I wanted to hear the mood in the room.
 Are you getting to that?
 Yeah, I'm getting to that.
 Which I think is very actually innovative.
 It has some problems, but like it looks beautiful.
 And then I feel like Pogue stood in front of an audience of tech journalists and just
 burned all of that goodwill that she had stored up.
 So what was it like?
 And also just sounded like not in touch with what's happening.
 Right.
 I mean, I think it was a bold move to go after the tech blogs, the tech sites, tech publications
 the way that he did.
 And in fact, some Yahoo people came up to me afterwards and were like, are you okay?
 And I was like, yeah, I think I can deal with this burn.
 The most minor of burns.
 Right, right.
 So, you know, certainly it made us think about David Pogue a certain way.
 But, you know, as far as the mood in the room, prior to him, it had been sort of a little
 bit chilly, a little bit staid.
 It had been sort of Katie Couric talking to Marissa Meyer and sort of like polite hugs
 and air kisses.
 And then David Pogue comes out and sort of goes into stand up comic mode and he's trying
 to get laughs and he's talking loud and he's like punching his lines.
 He was doing some some aces stuff, Johnny Shih.
 Like the the hardcore emphasis.
 Yeah, but everybody loves Johnny Shih.
 Well, yeah, I know he's awesome.
 But I'm just saying it was like the.
 Okay, thank you.
 Thank you.
 Wonderful man.
 Hey, I got beer for you guys.
 Hey, thanks.
 I'm taking it personally.
 Screw this tiny cup.
 Yeah, just drink out of the.
 Oh, you're going for the you're doing the tiny.
 Oh, boy.
 Casey's got manners.
 Oh, boy.
 San Francisco.
 Oh, boy.
 Oh, my goodness.
 Drink up and then tell us what you really think.
 Oh, no.
 That's wow.
 Can we get this guy up?
 That's beautiful.
 I've never poured a beer into a cup that small before.
 This is like a volumetric challenge right there.
 That actually makes me wonder, are there non moist towelettes?
 Are there just towelettes?
 Yeah, of course.
 Paper towels.
 No.
 Oh, but is it when does it become a towelette?
 I think it was wrapped in a small package.
 I think you could be right.
 Anyhow.
 Yeah.
 Where were we?
 You were just tells that what?
 Yes.
 To what?
 He's asking you to in the on your sets, he's saying he wants you to cheat out.
 To cheat out, which is like, yeah, like you sort of.
 Oh, yeah, I cheated out.
 John, I don't think you've this has ever gone subtly.
 Is this what you ever have you ever tried to make this a seamless thing where I wasn't
 handing him a roll of paper towels?
 This is what I wanted you to cheat out of me lies shots.
 I love this.
 Give you these.
 Can we just see what it would look like if he knew what cheating out was?
 Can we just?
 Okay, so now where were you?
 Where did you want to cheat out to the several feet?
 Am I going not this way?
 No, no, no, no, no.
 Go ahead.
 Let's see what I have to do.
 Well, you guys aren't hearing which was what's in my and Josh's ears.
 It's the sound of John Locomarcino dying.
 Just just dying.
 This is for me.
 Thank you.
 Great.
 Wow.
 We're really ruining everything.
 This is this for me like he doesn't need this.
 Believe me.
 I'll say, hey, boy, no, let me drink this.
 And I think you know what's happening here.
 And it's not good.
 I'm gonna Josh and I are gonna cuddle tonight.
 Oh, no, that's not what I bet.
 But it does sound nice.
 Actually gets cold in Las Vegas.
 I just got it.
 I just got a tweet that says get to the meet.
 Anyhow, yeah, we need to get it's never happening.
 All right.
 So I'm sorry.
 I'll just go out.
 Yeah, just let me just shoot these towels over to you.
 Welcome to the virtual.
 Yeah.
 This year.
 Like so.
 Nobody could see this.
 Very nice.
 Just doing this like so.
 Somebody sent us to you.
 Somebody says to you.
 Thank you, AJ.
 Gago.
 Yeah.
 Send us the what they sent us to you.
 Oh, we found the you from the urge.
 Is it is it our.
 Is it our.
 Is it our.
 Is it our.
 Is it our.
 Is it our.
 Is it our.
 Oh, it's our real you.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 If you'd have done one second of searching, you could have found the real.
 He doesn't do searching.
 Normals don't find the real.
 You sound like you find the real you sounds like a great slogan for a company that specializes
 in digital meditation devices.
 OK.
 Mood in the room.
 Yeah.
 So in the room.
 So I think people are sort of taking it back.
 And then I think, you know, frankly, his jokes seem to fall a little bit flat.
 That's an elf.
 Folks definitely got more laughs than he did.
 Maybe not that many.
 Not that many, which is not safe.
 So that's not safe.
 I will say I have to speak in defense of Kenan Thompson, who I believe is a national treasure.
 He is the greatest living Saturday Night Live performer who's currently on the show.
 I believe that is the case.
 And he really like you like you could see how hard he was trying on his face.
 And he actually did make me laugh a couple of times.
 No, but when he at the end, when he was like the search engine joke.
 Yeah.
 Like that murdered.
 Yeah, no, totally.
 Let me just say something.
 Yeah, let's let's see.
 Yes, the tough crowd.
 You know why people here don't know how to laugh.
 Yeah.
 They didn't come here to laugh.
 They came here to make a back reveals on RAM.
 Right.
 Right.
 They came here to check out the new steam machines.
 Right.
 I think of the Verge's mission here is really to teach people how to laugh.
 Don't you think so?
 I'm absolutely not only to teach people how to laugh, but to teach ourselves how to laugh.
 I will say a new a new weird thing has happened to me this year at CS where the people in
 the booths are now ready for us.
 Yeah.
 So I went into the Samsung booth and I was immediately accosted by people.
 We went to the LG booth and we were immediately accosted by people.
 Accosted in what way?
 Like in a friendly way?
 They were putting it in a cell.
 Yeah, they're ready for us.
 And they're like, it used to be I would show up and be relatively anonymous and break stuff
 for a while.
 Now I understand it.
 But now it's like a lot of people being like, let me show you these features.
 That's very new.
 It's like they I think the CS has gone from being only about the backdoor RAM deals to
 being really about the press.
 About the front door.
 And that's what I think.
 Yeah.
 Front door RAM deals.
 That's my new metal pan.
 Now wait a second.
 So then Pogue did his shtick.
 Yeah.
 Katie Couric was on stage.
 Yeah.
 I thought Marissa Mayer did a nice job.
 I don't know if it was because of her, but I liked hearing her talk.
 I like her.
 I mean, you know what was refreshing?
 I actually emailed somebody at the CA.
 I was like, have we ever seen a female keynoter?
 Oh yeah.
 Yeah.
 And there's only been one other.
 Is that right?
 Yeah, 2004 and 2005 and her name is now escaping me because I glanced at the email during the
 Marissa Mayer thing.
 And at any rate, I can pull it up.
 So they're very few and far between.
 And I actually, it was like just weird because it's the show is so full of like, right.
 There's so many dudes on stage and so many do.
 And look, you know, look, we have a lot of dudes at the verge, you know, like, okay,
 you know, don't kill me.
 We're sexist.
 I mean, we're, we're, we're in our charter with sexism is mandatory.
 Man, man is in that.
 There's actually a no girls allowed sign on the trailer.
 No girls allowed.
 Addie has been working in an Oculus Rift just outside the trailer.
 That's right.
 We just, in a virtual recreation of the interior of the trailer.
 She's just outside.
 That's how, that's how advanced we are in our sexism.
 Yeah.
 Anyhow.
 No, but it was, it was great to have her there.
 And I think the best thing that Yahoo did was, was that they had Gary Shapiro introduce
 her because so out of control in 15 seconds.
 It's Shapiro.
 That is just not Shapiro's off the hook.
 Shapiro is the most in control.
 Shapiro said the word innovation 11 times in one sentence.
 And then it was like, and now Marissa Meyer and just like the relief that you feel when
 he leaves the stage, like you cannot be more excited about what's going to happen.
 Shapiro is my homeboy.
 I love Shapiro.
 It was Carly Fiorina, HP.
 Carly Fiorina.
 Yes.
 Thank you.
 Okay.
 HP went on to great success.
 Did not end well for Carly.
 Not a great, but you know what?
 It gave, gave, gave her all.
 I mean, it was cool that Yahoo was here.
 I just, it's David Pierce said something at the end of it.
 He's like that.
 David Pierce, who I consider to be our David Pogue.
 When you really think about it.
 Right now, David, right now, David, if he's watching.
 Somewhere David Pierce just exploded.
 He's dying.
 He's dying.
 Here's a, here's a fact about the verge.
 Are you ready for it?
 David Pierce used to be David Pogue's intern.
 Pierce was Pogue's intern.
 So was Joanna.
 We have a long policy of only hiring David.
 Joanna Stern.
 Or David Pogue's intern.
 Joanna Stern is now at the Wall Street Journal.
 Yeah, also, also former Pogue intern.
 But David Pierce, his nickname is DP2.
 And it's gotten to the point where he hated it so much.
 And now he just quietly answers to it.
 I don't want, I won't.
 Because of the emotional toll it has taken upon him.
 Ron, there's something going on with my hair right now.
 Can you get back to that single?
 Guys, I'm looking at a picture of Doc Brown playing, fucking shredding, while wearing
 Google Glass.
 I don't know what to do.
 Let this be a lesson.
 Have you ever seen more joy?
 Can we put this picture on the screen?
 Can we put Doc Brown up?
 Doc Brown shredding while wearing Glass.
 I really feel sorry.
 I really feel sorry for people who are watching this.
 I have to say.
 Sometimes you think, what's it like to experience this as a third party?
 David quit.
 And my impression is, my impression is it's terrible.
 David just out loud in the trailer said I quit.
 Can we get Doc Brown on screen?
 So I will say there's, my God in heaven.
 I don't see Doc Brown on this screen.
 This is what tells you what CES is like.
 There are a lot of gimmicks here.
 Today I saw like lady dancers dancing inside of a gigantic fake Android phone.
 What's a lady dancer?
 They're dancers or ladies.
 There's all manners of booth babes here.
 It's really weird.
 It's like the return of the booth babes.
 Of course there's booth babes.
 Oh, there we go.
 No, no, but it's like the return.
 But Doc Brown and DeLorean.
 Check the headline here.
 I think it's, it's pretty good.
 It's sad and also very funny.
 But like this has been the greatest CES publicity son of all time.
 The Back to the Future car with Doc Brown shredding in Google Glass.
 But I will say this.
 I mean, I don't know if we'd have covered it if we weren't so close to it.
 I mean, the Gibson 10 is literally this car was parked next to our trailer.
 We're like, is that the DeLorean from Back to the Future?
 These pictures are, did Michael do these?
 Yeah.
 These pictures are amazing.
 Yeah.
 They are amazing.
 I mean, the last one in particular is.
 This is bad.
 This is just not good.
 Come on.
 You have never seen joy out of a face like that.
 You know what?
 God, he looks a lot like Tim Cook in this picture.
 I have to say.
 In the last one?
 Yeah.
 Where's the Tim Cook laughing picture?
 Could be a future.
 I see what you're saying.
 I think we both the Tim Cook laughing picture.
 That's a by the way, if you're looking for it in the arts in our in chorus, it's Tim
 underscore cook underscore laughing.
 Jaypeg.
 Cool.
 Cool.
 I don't think it is.
 Dude, come on.
 They're totally wildly different.
 No, they're like they're like scrawny white guys with white hair.
 They're wildly different.
 Maniacally.
 Get that Christopher Lloyd shot up.
 Can you photoshop a guitar into the Tim Cook picture?
 I think we can.
 I think someone can.
 I think it's so tiny and brown.
 I'm just surrounded.
 So Yahoo.
 Let's start.
 Sorry, Casey.
 It's going to be up here in a second.
 No, I got real.
 They're just doing the thing.
 It's the only way I like it.
 All right.
 So let's talk about some other things.
 No, no, no, no.
 No, all right.
 We don't have to.
 What else happened?
 Can we talk about the self-discovery?
 Oh, my God.
 Come on.
 That's not.
 I don't.
 Yeah.
 That's uncanny.
 Can we photoshop Tim Cook's head back a little further?
 That's uncanny.
 Yeah, actually, it kind of works as Dave Grohl is in that.
 We've got Dave Grohl's neck to be in this picture, and it's kind of out of control.
 It's like it's like.
 Why did your husband die in Las Vegas?
 Well, he began choking on a beer when he gazed upon Dave Grohl's neck in a two-year-old photo.
 Can you zoom in on that?
 No!
 Can you brighten it?
 Enhance.
 Enhance.
 It's a little funky.
 What is happening?
 I mean, I shouldn't talk.
 You know, my neck probably looks like that under whatever's going on.
 Oh, you got a funky neck, dude.
 Oh, really?
 Really?
 Yeah.
 Very nice.
 All right, Casey, what else happened?
 Well, do we want to talk about this NewsDidist app?
 Because it's interesting in this very specific way, right?
 So the kid Nick.
 Nick D'Alioso.
 D'Alioso.
 He seems like a really sweet kid.
 He's smart.
 He created an app called Summly.
 He created an app called Summly.
 Yahoo purchased it for $30 million.
 But not before Gizmodo publicly shamed.
 Gawker.
 Gizmodo or Gawker?
 I believe it was Gizmodo.
 Well, no, Gawker published it.
 Not before Gawker publicly shamed a 15-year-old, which to me is reprehensible on several levels,
 but I digress.
 Yeah.
 I just kind of just say 15-year-olds are the worst, okay?
 They do tear.
 If you knew me when I was 15, I'm bad now.
 If you knew me when I was 15, you would have spit on me as soon as you could.
 You spit on you?
 You would have.
 You would have.
 You would have spit on me because I was so horrible.
 You have?
 Okay.
 I mean, I just-
 You didn't grow up in Pittsburgh, I guess.
 That's right.
 That's fucking right.
 You didn't grow up in Pittsburgh.
 Mean streets.
 That's right.
 Sorry, Casey.
 Yeah, so here's why I think this app is interesting.
 We're talking about Yahoo News Digest.
 It's iOS only right now.
 It's US only right now.
 I can't believe we're switching back to our serious conversation.
 We're trying.
 Honestly, the thing is we're talking about.
 So we live in this world where because of the success of companies like Facebook and
 Twitter, everybody has an endless stream, right?
 Any app you visit now, there's just this activity feed that goes on forever.
 And Yahoo has developed several of these apps.
 That's not it.
 No, this is Yahoo Tech, which is an endless stream, right?
 So it's totally to my point.
 So then Yahoo comes along and from what I'm told it was this guy's, Nick's idea, this
 18-year-old's idea, he wanted to make the news more like a newspaper.
 He said newspapers, believe it or not, got one thing right, which was people like to
 finish them.
 I don't know how a 17-year-old can possibly have any perspective about what newspapers
 got right, but I will say...
 He was right?
 Well, no, but I mean...
 Everyone just keeps tweeting the Tim Cook picture at me.
 It's happened like four times.
 I don't know.
 I mean, I guess a sense of completion.
 Have you ever finished an entire newspaper?
 Yeah, I mean, I've worked at newspapers.
 Have you ever read cover to cover every article in a newspaper?
 No one's ever read...
 I've skimmed the classifieds.
 Because that's the thing.
 I think what's amazing about newspapers is that they are skimmable and you don't have
 to finish them actually.
 But yeah, go ahead.
 But it's still at least a package of information and it's at least theoretically possible to
 finish it.
 We live in a world now where there's this idea that we should just overwhelm people
 with links.
 And all of the other big news reading apps on the market, I'm thinking of apps like Circa,
 like Prismatic, they just give you all of these links.
 And I think this app is really refreshing because it's like you need fewer links.
 So we're just going to interrupt you twice a day and be like, here are 10 things you
 need to know now.
 You can skim through it in a couple of minutes.
 And the design is really crisp.
 I think it's a really interesting app.
 Yahoo is not known for being a particularly progressive, forward thinking company when
 it comes to product design.
 This app actually strikes me as ahead of the curve.
 Yeah, I completely agree.
 I played with it.
 You showed me it a little bit and it's awesome.
 There's a weird robot writing thing going on.
 Well no, I haven't had a chance to use the app but the writing in it is not good.
 But it's computer generated, right?
 Explain to me how it works.
 Okay, so the Summly algorithms that made D'Aliosso a millionaire at the age of 17 go out and
 they crawl the web.
 30 times now.
 And they find links and they sort of aggregate these multiple documents and they purge them
 down into one.
 And then you have this kind of text that summarizes the article.
 That's what Summly used to do.
 That's still in this app.
 But this app goes further than that.
 It pulls in maps, it pulls in photos, it pulls in Wikipedia links.
 So if you want to dive deeper on the topic, you can.
 What's the level of human involvement in that?
 So what they've told me is that the same people who program the Yahoo homepage, so those people
 who are finding news and are kind of curating that, they're working on this app.
 They're helping to curate those links.
 So the algorithms are basically presenting them with a menu.
 The human editors come in and they say, let's hit these 10 things and they push them out
 on the web.
 But in the actual creation of an article?
 They're not writing.
 I believe that they're doing some kind of quality assurance stuff and making sure there
 are no obvious errors.
 Is the app attributing any of the sources?
 The sources are sort of buried at the bottom.
 But if you want to see the source links for all the articles, you can tap, you can get
 them.
 I mean, it sounds like, let me just say this, and I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but it
 sounds like a terrible idea that is going to lead to widespread misinformation.
 And it's because of the robot stuff?
 Yeah, but more importantly, poorly written information, which I think is the greater
 offense.
 But I think it's also kind of lame that it's like, hey, here's all this information that
 real people put together, and we're going to just grab a few snippets out of it, turn
 it into a new thing, and push it out to you as a remix or whatever.
 I just don't think that the transmission of intellectual information happens in weird
 robotic ways like that.
 I think that you need people.
 I mean, maybe I'm biased because we have a news website.
 But does Circa have human editors?
 Circa also has human editors.
 So there's like a mix?
 There's a mix.
 They're doing, I think, a little bit more writing.
 Circa's more like story streams, where it kind of puts together pieces from each article
 as slices, right?
 It's not trying to make a perfectly readable article, right?
 Am I crazy?
 Well, I mean, it's a readable article.
 The thing with Circa does that's cool that I would like to see another app try is you
 can follow a story.
 So I used it during the government shutdown, because I really did-
 You mean like the Verge app?
 Yeah, like the Verge app.
 And cheers to us for leading the way on that.
 But Circa lets you cover, lets you follow stories outside of the scope of things that
 we write about.
 I don't know.
 It's all right for that.
 But for the most part-
 I will say the design of News Digest is really awesome.
 It's a terrible name.
 I agree with that.
 News Digest is really not like, oh, how are you getting your information?
 Oh, I'm using News Digest.
 I do wish they'd sort of try to create a new brand with this and just say, let's come up
 with something that doesn't just sound so plainly utilitarian.
 Yeah, News.
 Do they still use the exclamation point?
 Is that just going to be there forever?
 I think so.
 That exclamation point's too hard.
 We should talk about Aviate.
 So Yahoo bought Aviate, which is a home screen replacement for Android, which I think is
 really interesting.
 I mean, at the beginning of the thing, I was like, oh my god, they're going to do a Yahoo
 phone.
 And now they basically have like the core of a Yahoo phone, which is a home screen.
 Yeah, that's going to be super interesting to watch.
 I actually met with one of the founders of Aviate after the keynote.
 And one of the things he said that surprised me was, Aviate's going to continue to be live.
 You can still go download it.
 This sort of thing struck me as a prime candidate for just sort of being shut down and sent
 to the Yahoo Stunt Quartz.
 It's like an Aqua hire.
 Yeah, but they're going to keep it alive.
 They have a lot of things they want to try.
 What's going on?
 Can we get that on screen?
 Who did that?
 Oh my god.
 Did you do that?
 Oh, gosh.
 That's amazing.
 Give that to our guys.
 They need to see that.
 I'll send it to you.
 You'll see it momentarily.
 I know you have it.
 Okay, if you have it, show it.
 Show it to me.
 We've got something really special for you.
 If our video guys aren't here.
 Yeah.
 This is where the promise of tonight's Virgcast comes true.
 Yeah, there we go.
 I mean, and I think you have to admit, no real break in the action.
 Thank you to Howard Pinsky.
 No real break in the action there.
 Completely seamless.
 Not confused at all.
 But upset it.
 Make me so happy.
 All right, what else happened today?
 Oh, god.
 So much other stuff happened.
 Not that much stuff.
 Oh, Oculus.
 Oculus Rift introduced the new version.
 So I'm very confused with the new Oculus Rift.
 So it's the Crystal Cove.
 Crystal Cove.
 It's a more, I think it's a more.
 Some more final.
 But they added.
 No, no, it's not more final.
 It's a new version of Oculus Rift.
 It has some better sensors, some more sensors.
 It requires a camera now because it has LEDs and does head tracking.
 It can tell when your body and head are in different positions.
 Wasn't Crystal Cove where Murder She Wrote took place?
 That sounds like the kind of thing that the Oculus Rift did.
 Sounds like the kind of thing that Casey would definitely do.
 How would you even possibly know?
 You know what?
 It was Cabot Cove.
 I apologize.
 What's Crystal Cove?
 Crystal Cove.
 Crystal Cove sounds like a resort town.
 Yeah, that's definitely.
 Crystal Cove is like where you go to live out the rest of your days.
 Yeah.
 In a really nice condo.
 I don't know.
 It sounds to me like Crystal Lake.
 Crystal Cove Beach Cottages.
 Which makes me think of Jason.
 In the Crystal Cove State Park.
 And Friday the 13th.
 And it makes me think of people being murdered.
 Stabbed to death.
 Heads chopped off.
 Being dragged to the bottom of a lake.
 And that's a lot of ways for the Oculus Rift.
 So also Oculus confirmed that they're making its own games.
 John Carmack joined.
 Right?
 Yeah, recently.
 A few months ago.
 A Mac.
 The return of the Mac.
 So they're making their own games which I think is...
 To me...
 Carmack is there so you can make games.
 No, but it's very strange.
 It's very like...
 The Oculus was awesome last year.
 It's been a year.
 They did another one.
 They added some more like...
 We can track your head in more ways.
 It's more immersive.
 But there still is no reason to have one as far as I can tell.
 There has yet to be...
 Here's Addy checking it out.
 I think it does look more sensitive in terms of its awareness of your head location and
 responsiveness.
 I'm sure.
 But it's like...
 But why would you want...
 That's their big problem.
 They invented a technology that to me is just insane.
 It's the most like wild futuristic thing that I've seen in a long time.
 And I still kind of don't know why I want it which is disappointing.
 There isn't some killer app where it's like, oh my god, when you play this game using the
 Oculus Rift it'll change your whole idea about what gaming is like.
 I think the potential is so huge and their technology is so much better than anything
 that anybody else has shown off at a consumer level that you're like, well, that's gonna
 happen.
 That's not gonna happen.
 It just hasn't happened yet.
 And with Carmack on board and $75 million in the bank, which is what they just had a
 huge investment, it seems like they now have what they need to do that.
 But they need buy-in from other developers.
 They need a path to a consumer product.
 Right now it's awesome.
 I mean, we went crazy for it last year.
 We've been tracking it throughout the year.
 They've clearly become a real player.
 I mean, a very interesting hardware startup.
 But you need the games and you need support.
 I think support, you know, there are consoles that could support the Oculus Rift.
 I don't think Sony or Microsoft are gonna come out of the woodwork and be like, hey,
 we want to support your VR headset.
 But it could be done.
 I think the closest they're gonna get is Steam Machines.
 I don't want to get back into the Steam Machines conversation.
 Boy, what a lazy showing.
 Here's the thing with Oculus.
 They have the biggest problem, right?
 Which is you've got to give up all of the things you're used to to engage their platform.
 And the only reason you're gonna do that is if you get some insane benefit to doing it.
 Besides, this was weird and now I kind of have a headache.
 I don't know.
 I mean, if there was a really good zombie game you could play using the Oculus Rift
 that was like you were fully immersed in the world of zombies trying to eat the skin and
 flesh off of your bones.
 If there was an email client and I could just shoot emails with a gun, I'm thinking outside
 the box here.
 Why?
 Why not?
 You gotta try something new.
 You just look around.
 You know, it's weird because that's funny.
 You know why VR was invented, right?
 It was to kill email.
 No, I mean, the original invention of VR was, and by the way, somebody will probably correct
 me but I think I'm relatively right, Jaron Lanier, who's one of the creators of virtual
 reality, was needed...
 I might be mixing up a couple of different stories here, but my understanding is that
 the creation of VR was that it was used to look at extremely long integers or numbers
 and that you couldn't...
 A monitor couldn't do it.
 You had to keep scrolling back and forth and you need to be able to see the numbers at
 the beginning and the end or whatever or very large amounts of...
 He was like, how do I make the numbers?
 Numerical data so you'd be able to pan and go back and that's the reason, that's like
 the beginning of VR.
 Also, I could have just made that up.
 Yeah, that sounds completely insane.
 It's not.
 Can you check it out?
 I mean, what?
 Check out virtual reality.
 How do you do it?
 Wikipedia, search, virtual reality, slash...
 Why do I ever...
 Just tweet it, Josh, yes or no.
 Yeah, just tweet yes or no, Josh.
 Tweet yes or no, Josh.
 Do you believe the story about virtual reality?
 Let's see what happens.
 So the other thing that happens...
 Hashtag Virgcast.
 The other thing that happened today was MetaWatch just blew it as far as I can tell.
 I don't get this thing.
 MetaWatch gets the Virtue...
 Here's the new one.
 MetaWatch gets the Virtue designer.
 No, this makes complete sense to me.
 If you looked at Virtue phones, you're aware of Virtue phones.
 Of course, yeah.
 Super fancy.
 If you looked at those and then you're like, what if that guy made a watch?
 You would land right here.
 Well, I will say this, very expensive...
 It's like a steampunk smartwatch.
 That's what this looks like to me.
 Very expensive watches are on a regular basis totally offensive from a design standpoint.
 Like here's a $75,000 watch and it looks like a pile of ass cheeks.
 And not like sexy ass cheeks, bad ones.
 Yeah, pile of ass cheeks is like every other R. Kelly album cover.
 That's his new record.
 R. Kelly's pile of ass cheeks.
 I love that record.
 Very sexy stuff.
 It's definitely, by the way, the cover of his new record.
 Is it a pile of ass cheeks?
 Well, the...
 Yeah.
 Black panties.
 Black panties.
 Black panties.
 By the way, black panties, I'll bet probably the second most popular color of panties.
 White.
 White panties.
 Just tweet yes or no at Josh.
 Is that the most popular color of panties?
 What is the most popular panty color?
 Black or white?
 Where did we go?
 Let me ask you something.
 How did we get here?
 Are black panties always sexy?
 Another question I'd like to have answered.
 Reasonable people can do that.
 Where are we at with my virtual reality story?
 True or false?
 Does anybody know?
 A lot of nopes.
 Just nopes for days.
 If you just Wikipedia...
 If I invented that story, somebody should turn that into a mini-series on the Hallmark
 channel.
 The first mini-series of all time.
 Great.
 Old men trying to look for numbers.
 They would have been young men at the time.
 We're talking in the 80s.
 In 1986, 85.
 John, let's go to the lab so I can look at longer numbers.
 Just tell me about the creation of our history.
 It's the worst sequel to the real genius.
 You want to talk to the real genius?
 I'm looking.
 Oh my God.
 This is the worst.
 Here we go.
 Here we go.
 Pioneers and notables.
 I don't know what I'm doing.
 Come on.
 Can we not have Wikipedia on this?
 Wait a second.
 Wait a second.
 This is the worst.
 Can someone read that to me?
 I can't see it here.
 Do you remember when we used to always online shop on the Vergecast?
 This is a thousand times worse.
 It was popularized by Jaron Lanier.
 All right.
 Yeah.
 I think you took that off because it's too controversial that I'm right.
 We've done enough here.
 Yeah.
 Sounds like I'm totally 100% right and I didn't make that story up at all.
 Anyhow.
 All right.
 Boy, Vergecast.
 Vergecast and CS is really living up to its name.
 It's a real problem.
 What else?
 We never talked about the MetaWatch.
 We landed on Blackpanties and then we started reading Wikipedia.
 Do we have a result of the Blackpanties versus Whitepanties sexiness level?
 No, I'm sorry.
 Which is more popular than also are Blackpanties always sexy?
 We're still tabulating the results.
 A few counties are still out.
 I'm terrified to look at my Twitter.
 This will be Casey Newton's last day at the Verge.
 Flipping this gigantic table and leaving right after this.
 I had a wonderful time.
 Casey, would you say that this is what you expected?
 It was what I expected.
 All right.
 The MetaWatch.
 It's super ugly.
 Can you talk about it, Josh?
 Say some more.
 Me?
 Yeah, you.
 I was just checking Twitter.
 Just react to this photograph.
 I mean, if you wanted to make a smartwatch that typified everything you didn't want in
 a smartwatch and everything that scared you about the concept of smartwatches, I think
 MetaWatch knocked it out of the park.
 I think if they wanted to say to people who would never have bought a smartwatch in the
 first place, continue not buying these things, home run.
 Here's my new strategy for Vergecast and CS.
 Josh, react to this picture.
 That's all I have to do.
 Here's the one thing they got right.
 Nothing.
 Yeah.
 I mean, would you wear this?
 No, I would not wear that.
 It does not look like that much of an improvement from the little smartwatches that people would
 wear when I was in junior high.
 Just a lot of tiny little numbers.
 A lot of mistakes.
 A lot of mistakes.
 I mean, a lot of tweets right now.
 Very few about panties.
 That's a shame.
 Wait a second.
 I haven't hit that portion.
 Josh, let me ask you a question.
 You're not happy.
 You're unhappy, surprised, disappointed by that.
 What emotion are you feeling about your Twitter right now?
 Well, I just got to Tim Carmody, our good friend Tim Carmody, just favorited an RLRT
 about my vampiric paleness.
 Oh, God.
 You're so behind on your Twitter.
 No, no, no.
 I got to...
 This is...
 Okay.
 I don't know if you...
 Before every episode of the Vergecast, Josh and I have a tiny little lover's quarrel about
 whether or not he's allowed to have a laptop because he's not allowed to have a laptop.
 And what he hasn't said now is a series of ever-increasing, like, larger phones.
 Yeah, excuse me.
 I'm going to have the Galaxy Tab Pro.
 I don't even have 12-point...
 Like, no, it's on my phone.
 And then I'm going to put it down and I'm going to get the keyboard dock out and I'm
 going to have a laptop.
 No.
 You're going to pay the price.
 Slow, slow, Bernard.
 So, Josh, it's cool.
 Wait a second.
 Wait a second.
 Wait a second.
 No, I don't want to know any of the answers to any of these questions.
 Black.
 Although I know it's black.
 Yeah.
 Hold on.
 Wikipedia says no.
 Wikipedia has the answer to that question?
 No, yes, yes.
 I don't know what that means.
 Hold on.
 This one I really don't understand.
 Does anyone like to run by the trailer and cut the hard line?
 Is that just a picture of R. Kelly?
 Crying.
 1920s vehicle sim.
 No long numbers.
 I don't know what that means.
 John, is there...
 If I were to say to you the phrase, cut the hard line, would that mean anything?
 The hard line.
 I'm done.
 Yeah, if it had an ax.
 Does anybody at CES have an ax?
 Yeah.
 Doc Brown.
 All right, Casey, how many CES have you been to?
 This is only my second CES.
 So this is different than last year.
 This is quite a bit different.
 But it's been great.
 I have to say, there's been enough that has been cool to keep me excited about what we're
 going to see the rest of the week.
 Yeah.
 I don't know if it's funny, but it's not funny.
 One lesson I wish I'd learned was don't drink an enormous thing of water right before you
 come on the VirgCast.
 Because after about an hour, you're feeling that.
 What's happening?
 Yeah.
 You're feeling like you just want to sneak off the stage.
 Let me tell you something.
 You're just trying to cheat out?
 I want to cheat out.
 I want to disappear.
 I want to melt off the world.
 See, I feel when I live-blog, once the adrenaline hits you...
 Of course, I don't know how much adrenaline was happening to the Yahoo!
 Live blog, probably not that much.
 But I find that when the adrenaline hits you, all worldly needs fade away.
 Go away.
 I was hoping for that.
 All earthly needs just slide off to the sides of your existence.
 And you're just in the zone.
 Just locked in.
 You're like a Formula 1 racer strapped into the...
 You had, I think, the best live event thus far of CES.
 It was the most fun to watch, I think.
 What was the John Legend stuff at the end?
 It seemed relatively deep and weird for the end of Aquino.
 He played three songs, which was like two more than I thought he would do.
 He started out with Here Comes the Sun, and it was really nice.
 And then he did two of his own, Green Light and All I Need, I think, is the name of the
 other one.
 It was great.
 Yeah.
 Well, there's hands.
 There's hands.
 We don't know whose hands that is.
 Underneath that wrist, there's a smartwatch.
 Yeah.
 There's a Meta watch.
 He's like, why did I buy this?
 It's so ugly.
 Yeah.
 I guess Meta watch, that's the person we can cross off the list for next year at CES
 that we'll be talking to.
 But listen, you know you guys make great products, and the Virtue guy, total slam dunk.
 Slam dunk.
 I think on that note, is there anything else we have to talk about?
 Really, I mean, I think...
 Where are we on time?
 Let me check my regular watch.
 Nothing Meta about this.
 Also not hideously ugly.
 I think we're good.
 What do you guys think?
 Should we wrap this up?
 Yeah, I got a thumbs up from...
 Really?
 And that, the rolling thing?
 Yeah.
 Is there a name for this?
 Please Stop.
 Yeah.
 No, this is like Wrap It Up, right?
 Yeah.
 You think Wrap It Up would be more like this?
 Like...
 That's...
 Okay, anyhow, that's the VirgCast for the second night, the second official night of
 CES Tuesday.
 And that was a series of mistakes that we recorded with the...
 That was 2014.
 The nice thing is, no matter what happened here...
 We're never putting it on iTunes.
 I think very few people...
 This is why it doesn't go on iTunes.
 We're not putting it on iTunes, and I like to think very few people were watching it.
 You're so wrong.
 It's the number one post on our site right now.
 Oh, oops.
 Well, shit happened.
 That's the VirgCast.
 That's CES.
 That's the VirgCast at CES on Tuesday night, day two, as we like to call it.
 Day one.
 Day five.
 Day six.
 Day six.
 We'll be back.
 We'll be back.
 Should I say...
 Oh, yeah, you could follow...
 Whatever.
 You know how you could follow us.
 You're watching this.
 If you stuck with us to this point, you have a disease.
 We'll be back tomorrow night with more VirgCast-y goodness.
 Also tomorrow morning, really?
 Are we doing first again?
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Tomorrow morning, Ross Miller and I will be doing first, the only show you need early
 in the morning at CES.
 And we're gonna be talking about these exact same topics, but not drunk, so you may actually
 get some information out of them.
 And then we'll have another VirgCast.
 Let me ask you a question.
 And it's another yes or no.
 Who are you asking this to?
 The group here or out there?
 I'll just ask you.
 Are you stupider when you're drunk or sleepy?
 Drunk.
 Okay.
 Oh, uh...
 Josh is like, both.
 I mean, what do you mean stupider?
 I'm real dumb when I'm sleepy.
 I think that I...
 I can fake it real good when I'm drunk.
 I guess I'd have to say...
 A lot of head shaking in the studio right now.
 I guess I'd have to say sleepy, because when I drink, I feel like I'm just a more awesome,
 elevated version of myself.
 That's how you feel.
 No, I don't know what everybody else experiences.
 I'm sure it's terrible, but that's not my problem.
 I'm drunk.
 Anyhow.
 Good night.
 Hold on a second.
 That's the VirgCast.
 Poor Casey.
 We'll be back tomorrow night.
 No, Casey's laughing.
 I'm loving it.
 Look at that.
 Wow.
 As always, I wish you and your family the very best, even though they've all been given
 Meta Watches as gifts.