 Look at this crazy keynote. How did this happen? Let's say you're Intel. You make laptop chips and server chips, and they're good, but people don't really care about that stuff that much anymore. So what do you do? Well, you hold a giant keynote at the biggest electronic show of the year to tell a new story. But let's say a week or so before your giant crazy keynote, there's a huge, massive security flaw in every computer chip made in the past 20 years that could slow your stuff down by as much as 30%. Well, then what do you do? If you're Intel, you do this. Before we start, I want to take a moment to thank the industry for coming together for another purpose. To address the recent security research findings reported as Meltdown and Spectre. The best thing you can do to make sure your data remains safe is to apply any updates from your operating system vendor and system manufacturer as soon as they become available. Well, that was awkward, but it was necessary. Intel needs to be honest about Spectre and Meltdown. But it also wants to tell that other new story. And when you're at CES, the only way to tell a story is with a gigantic, crazy, light-up spectacle. Intel decided to let me go run around backstage at a rehearsal to see how that spectacle gets made. So we did that. So it's a couple days before CES actually kicks off, and we're here at the Park Theater at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas going backstage to look at Intel's keynote. They're rehearsing right now. We're watching lots of crazy stuff happen with data lines flying from a piano to AR, VR, guitar players. We're expecting a lot more, and this happens backstage at a CES keynote. Uh... So I am on the stage. This is surreal. I've never given a keynote before. Later on, we're going to see a giant helicopter drone thing called the Volocopter take off right here on stage. There's going to be a car, a self-driving car, that comes out. And, man, I don't even know. Intel is really, really motivated to convince you that they should be part of your story of all the data in the universe, and they want to also remind you that, you know, that chips are good, and even though they had to slow them down because of that security thing, they can do cool stuff. That is the CEO of Intel, Brian Krizanich. We were originally going to interview him about Intel's announcements right after this rehearsal, but then meltdown happened, and he decided that he needed to cancel the interview. But he did give us this photo bomb, so I guess that's nice. I wonder if he knew what I was talking about when he jumped on camera. Now, Spectre is everybody's problem, not just Intel's. Intel has a bigger problem. You don't buy anything from them. You buy from Apple and Amazon and Microsoft. And, sure, there's often Intel chips inside that stuff, but you don't care, and why should you? They're not right there, right in front of you. Anyway, there's so much more that they show us at their stage, so let's get back to that. CES is when Intel can get in front of you. It creates this massive production, this gigantic show, to convince you to care, to get you to feel as connected to Intel as you do to your phone. That's why Intel's keynote starts with sports. It's directly involved in the thing that you actually care about. Intel has these camera systems that are pointing at football fields, and with them, it knows where the players are, like characters in a video game. So you can see the game from the perspective of the quarterback. It converts everything that these cameras see into these things called voxels. Now, imagine a Rubik's Cube. Each of those cubes is a point in space. Now imagine a Rubik's Cube that covers an entire football stadium. Then imagine you can see and track every single one of those cubes. Intel is doing the same thing for the Winter Olympics. It's going to let them create VR experiences from the games. Intel's also getting into understanding other kinds of spaces, like roads. So it partnered with Ford to make better self-driving cars. All right, so now we're going to go look at the Ford Fusion self-driving car. What's interesting about this car is it's actually part of a fleet. They are rolling out, I don't know, 100 or something of these things, and they actually intend to have them on the road. They say they're level 4. Yeah, we rode in the car right there on the keynote stage. Intel's also trying to understand where things are in the air. It's helping make the Volocopter possible, which is this gigantic helicopter drone thing that both companies hope will someday become a self-driving vehicle, like a Jetsons car. We got to check out the Volocopter up close and see it fly during the keynote behind a giant glass wall right there in the room. Oh, look at this. So this is the Shooting Star Mini. It is, it looks, you know, it weighs like next to nothing. You've probably seen a lot of these little home drones that you can get that just fly all over creation. But this is much more stable, I think. You know, they had the little light show going. There's obviously Intel chips in here to power it. It seems, yeah, it seems like a good little drone. Intel has tiny new drones that can safely fly around indoors. Now, you can't go buy one, but you can go buy a hundred and turn them into a choreographed dancing star field. It doesn't look like much on the screen that you're looking at right now, but in real life, seeing those tiny points of light moving in a cyclone right above your head is kind of amazing. All the stuff happening on stage is just bonkers crazy. The floor is a giant screen. Pillars and balls of light descend and ascend from the sky. The weird wild graphics on the screen, they ride the line of a dystopian future hellscape, but they don't quite cross it. There's acrobats wearing completely crazy LED suits and helmets jumping around on trampolines. The spectacle of it all, the sound and the fury, the planning and above all, all of the money, it's all designed to convince you that Intel isn't just a boring PC chip company. Did it work? Yeah, the problem here is Intel isn't actually trying to tell one story. It's trying to tell half a dozen. One of those stories is about data. Did you hear? It's the new oil. Sure. They're also telling stories about quantum computing and neuromorphic chips and whatever else. Intel is kind of famous for making product demos that never go anywhere. The problem is Intel wants to be everything to everybody, which is impossible. So it often feels like Intel ends up being kind of nothing to nobody. This year, Intel is actually showing you stuff you're going to be able to experience, which is refreshing. The real story here is that Intel can turn real objects in space into data on your computer. Other companies know about pixels on a screen, but Intel is on a path to know about real 3D space. But that story, it got a little lost in all the spectacle. And again, getting lost in the spectacle is the oldest CES story of all. So for much more of what's happening here at CES 2018, go to youtube.com slash The Verge, hit that subscribe button, and prepare to soak in the strangeness of the Consumer Electronics Show.