 Hello everybody, welcome to CES 2016, welcome to the Verge Lounge here at CES. We're in the corner, there's a car, a beautiful Ford car here. I encourage you to gaze at the car and then we are performing some sort of social engineering experiment where we're forcing people to tweet to drink water. I encourage you. I encourage you to refuse to do it. I am told that people are tweeting like crazy, so a literal thirst is driving the social engineering. But wait, you can only get water if you tweet 10,000 characters, is that right? You gotta go nuts. Anyway, I'm Neil Epstein, the editor of The Verge. This is my friend, Walt Mossberg. We're gonna actually start the podcast, I just wanted to say hello to the people. Hi, I'm Walt Mossberg and hello. Before I have to read this wonderful podcast ad, if there's one thing everybody loves about podcasts, it's pre-roll advertising, I think. That's what the data tells me. So I'm gonna read the ad, we're getting the show, thank you guys so much for being here. I think it's fun that we have an audience, so if you wanna laugh and make noise so people hear you, that'd be cool. Or if you just wanna stare at me in this first day of CES dead-eyed silence, that's also acceptable. If you wanna stare though, stare at him. All right, so I'm gonna read the ad, we're gonna start the show and we're gonna get right into it. Okay. Are you creative looking to build your network with like-minded individuals? Look no further. Talents, that's T-A-L-N-T-S, a social media platform where you can build your networking business by connecting with creatives like yourself anywhere in the world. Whether you're posting art piece, an editor reel, or producing a new music track, on Talents your portfolio is your resume. And now with Talents new vouching system, your connections can help build your awareness. So download Talents today on iOS and share your talents with the world. Also if you're an Android user, Talents will be available on Google Play at the end of the month. That's Talents T-A-L-N-T-S. Just as the music goes up. It's like a soaring real thing. Okay, so that happened. Hello, and welcome to Control Walt Delete, a podcast that I no longer am able to say is new because it is a totally different year than when we began it. It is. And we are starting out the year, 2016, at CES. I'm joined here by Walt Mossberg, my friend and the executive editor of The Verge. How's it going, Walt? Yeah, you know, it's gone CES. It's gone CES, I have to say that. So if you're listening to the show, you should know that we are at CES in The Verge Lounge, sponsored by Ford. I think I just collected $3 with an audience in front of us. It's super cool to have everybody here. I've been at CES for 500 years, and Walt got here yesterday. Today is the first official day of the show. We just walked through the LG booth and Samsung booth. I was mesmerized by everything, and Walt was like, why do you need this in your refrigerator? But I want to talk about CES, the top level. What is the Walt Mossberg experience at CES like? Well, it has evolved over the years. This is my 24th year of coming to either CES or its predecessor, Comdex, which some of the older attendees might remember, which was at one time where the computer industry went. It did not go to CES, and CES was much smaller. Comdex was about this size, maybe not quite as big, but almost. And then the computer guys started going over here, and Comdex kind of collapsed. But it's my 24th year of going to Vegas for a gigantic, massive trade show. My experience has changed somewhat over the years. Now I find the highest value to be private meetings, where I'm seeing things that are not on the show floor, or talking about them at least. Because there's two CESs, or at least there's maybe five CESs, two different ones. But the two that I'm thinking of are the show floor experience and then the kind of, well, here's really what we're working on. Here's what's coming the next year. And I prefer to go to the, I get more value out of those, to be honest. Yeah, but here, there's still all this stuff here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the most persistent criticisms of the show is that nothing that's announced here is valuable, or it's all nonsense, or it's all just like toaster fridges gluing two things together. But when I walk around, I see all these attempts to build new kinds of, is that just a new perception of CES, that it's all kind of silly, or has that been sort of always there? I'm critical of it, and you have the proof of that, which I guess you're going to read a little of. But I'm not critical of it because it's quote, silly. I don't think it's silly. I just think it's a kind of follower kind of event. There are for sure innovations here that will take root and become important, particularly in the areas which are the roots of this event, which are consumer electronics. So TVs, for instance. But if you think, my only point is, first of all, the five most important tech companies in the world have virtually no presence here. And secondly- Wait, name the five. Google and Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. Those are the big five companies with platforms and products that I'm pretty, I'll ask the people here, I mean, you all use something from these companies every day, and you rely on it in your business. Who has a Windows phone? In your personal life. Well, I mentioned Microsoft. If you can't get a Windows phone in a Verge booth, it's just not here. Well, that's good. So that's number one. Number two, if you look at the breakthrough game-changing products of the last 15, 20 years from any of those companies and some others, none of them were introduced here. The only exception is HDTV, because this has always been a TV show. My estimate was it took five CESs before it sort of took off. That's the other thing about it. It's a slow cooker kind of a show. It's not like Steve Jobs has walked out on the stage and three weeks after the launch of X, they've sold X million of them. That's not quite the way this one works. But I don't think it's silly. I've never said that and I don't believe it. Well, I think it's interesting you call it a TV show, because fundamentally that has been the heart of this show for so many years. Here's Sony's new Ranger TVs. They're going to take a bunch of Best Buy executives out to dinner and convince them to stock the TVs. Right. And I've never actually understood that dynamic, because they need the TVs. Why do you got to convince them? Because Best Buy has a lot of power over all the stuff, including even laptops. Tell the laptop makers, we think if you had this feature, you change this color, you move this thing over here, it would do better on the show. And that's kind of like what really happens here, right? The companies show off a bunch of new stuff. The vendors, the dealers, the partners show up. They look at it. That's why nothing ships until June or July out of CES traditionally. And I think that is what kind of gets lost from the show. But let's get into what actually happened here. Have you been paying attention to the news? You watch the crazy Samsung, LG, Sony press conferences? I don't go to the press conferences anymore. It's another change. The CEOs go to wall. Well, no, no. Well, it isn't that. At one time, I never missed a Bill Gates press conference, for instance, and stuff like that. But I think there's a lot of fantasy at the press conferences that doesn't relate to the real world. And there's just more valuable uses of your time. And we have a big staff and we have a lot of terrific reporters who are going to do a great job on those press conferences. So I'm kind of superfluous to it. But so the actual products that come out. So for example, when you see a company like Samsung say, this is the year for HDR 4K TVs, and then LG says it 10 minutes later, and then Sony says it five minutes later, does that strike you as, okay, finally this is happening? Or is that just silliness to you? It's absolutely not silliness. And I'm not buying into that term. But I keep saying it because that's the most precious thing. You know, Quantum Dots was something I actually sat through a one-hour briefing about two years ago because I thought, well, maybe this is important. I don't know. It's back. We just walked through, as you said, a couple of booths, and we saw signs that talked about Quantum Dots. I don't think I remember exactly what they are, but I know they're important. And I know that different companies have different names for them. And if anyone here has a good name that nobody else is using, let me know. So having HDR, that might be what they need to sell more 4K TVs. I just don't know. They tried, they succeeded with HDTV, although as I said, it took a number of years. They now have a problem because the replacement cycle of TVs, and this is, we know this from talking about how the replacement cycle of laptops has moved from every few years to every five, six, whatever. I don't think people really know. Tablets the same thing. We don't know. If something has a seven, eight year replacement cycle, which I think big TVs typically do, it's hard to move to the next thing and get people who just shelled out a bunch of money for an HDTV to buy the next thing. And I think that's why 3D failed. I mean, there may be other reasons, but that was one of the big reasons. People weren't ready to, it's easier, you know. You don't have to pull it off the wall. An iPhone or a Galaxy, you might be inclined to replace at least every other model or something like that. But a TV, you have to have spousal negotiations about it and it has to fit in the room. And there's a lot of things. Well, I think 3D failed because it just didn't offer any compelling reason that you're going to wear glasses in your home. I agree, but it's also not something that lends itself to an impulse by a smaller, like even a laptop could theoretically. But I look at 4K and HDR and I think there's a lot of people out there with first and second generation TVs in their living room and they have had no reason to upgrade them. And now you can go in the store and see something that's ridiculously thin that has streaming content that actually works in 4K or HDR that's slowly starting to come out. Although I will say, Sony just randomly at the end of their press conference announced, oh, we have another new 4K streaming service. And they didn't mention that they have an old one. But you see it happening with Netflix, you see it happening with other streaming services, they're investing in the content. So I think that upgrade cycle, in my estimation anyway, is about to turn around. You could well be right and it's the third or fourth CES for 4K. Which is about, you said, HDTV took five years. It's probably about to start and it will hit some stride in the next couple of years. Some of it depends on the macro economy and the people's wage levels and disposable income and stuff we're not qualified to discuss. So while you wrote this piece, I think the day after Recode launched a few years ago, it's called CES is not what you think it is. I only imagine that you wrote this under extreme duress of starting a new company. Very little sleep, yeah. And so it's this long thing and it basically sums up what we've been talking about here, which is that there's like five CESs happening. Somewhere here there's like, I just moderated a panel at the Cybersecurity Forum at the Venetian. I asked the people on the panel if they were ever coming here and they were like, no, we are never going to the show floor. Why would we go there? There's like random chip vendors here talking to platform vendors about putting new chips in. I mean, there's like 500 kinds of shows here. And then there's like TV companies trying to get TVs in the Best Buy. But I'm just going to read this paragraph, which I think sums up what most consumers think about CES, which is, did the iPod debut at CES? No. Did it have Windows 95? No. Google search, Facebook, the iPad, the first Android phone. There's five no's here. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Microsoft's historic first tablet computer, the Surface, nope again. Although, was it historic? Looking back on it now. It was historic because it was the first computer they made. There you go. And you've got this list of no's. And I think that's what, there's so much out there about what isn't here. What do you think is here for people? You know, this is not the first year that you could say this, but I think it's way up this year in its kind of presence. And that has to do with the car becoming a platform for software, for digital hardware, and the kind of battle that I think is shaping up. Some cases there'll be partnerships, but I think overall it's kind of a battle between the two big rival valley giants, Google and Apple, on the one hand, and the car industry. And it takes several forms. I mean, one of it is, we all know that Google's been working on making driverless cars. They've had years, I think they're ahead of everybody. We also believe strongly that Apple is working on building a car. I don't know if it's driverless or what it is, but whatever. The head of one of the major car companies said to me yesterday that his executive team has been told to just absolutely assume Apple is building a car, not based on any information, but just for their own planning, they better assume it. And what he said was, and we better assume it'll have a fabulous UI, UX. And we better, well, but that's what they're working against. You just get in your car, you go to turn on the radio, Apple music shows up. But the point is, that's one thing. The other thing that is maybe smaller scale, but it represents the clash, is control of the dashboard. Before we get to driverless cars and all the regulation and all the hurdles it has to go through, the near term thing that you're gonna see is control of the dashboard. And the car companies don't wanna give it up. And Apple and Google have Android Auto and CarPlay, which is Apple's, where I don't know how many people sitting here have tried it. I don't think this is a representation of the actual US or global population. But if you, just can I explain it really quickly? So if you go into a car that supports it, and there aren't beginning to be a reasonable number of them, and you plug in an iPhone or an Android phone, you get a subset of the apps on your phone with big icons. Most of these cars have touch screens, but it also works from voice. You don't have to use, so you don't have to use the software that the car makers put on. You can basically have right on the screen of your car those apps which are deemed to be safe to use and which you can control by voice. You get to use Siri or Google Voice, both of which, in my experience, are way better than the ones the car makers build in. And you just get to take your experience from the real world, cut down a little for safety, but very familiar into the car. Right, and there's been big announcements here, right? So Fiat Chrysler said all their cars are going to do it, Ford said their cars are going to do it. Well Ford sort of split it, right? I mean Ford announced its own platform or the expansion of its own open source platform. They're selling it to Toyota now. And Toyota is going to use it. But at the same time, Ford is, their 2017 models are going to have CarPlay and Android Auto. Most GM cars already have it. Honda Accord has it, Hyundai Sonata. I think this thing you're saying, it's funny, you see the industry saying we're going to do it, we're going to do it. And then Toyota says we're licensing the Ford platform, which now has the capability, but we are not going to do CarPlay. Toyota is a holdout and there are some others that are holdouts. But my position as a reviewer, as a tech journalist for a long time is it's much better, I think it's even better for safety, for you to have a familiar thing that you're used to, whether it's Google Maps or God forgive me, Apple Maps, which to be honest, has improved a lot. It's probably not going to drive you into a lake like it would have a few years ago, but it's not as good as Google. If you love Spotify and you have it on your phone, it's just there. And even Bluetooth phone calls are actually easier with this. So I have said to car company folks, both here and before this, I actually had a public discussion about it with the head of GM, Mary Barra, at our Code Conference last spring. Why don't you just say, you know what, we're really good at the engine, we're really good at the transmission, we're really good at the bending of the metal to make the car, we're not so great at this, why don't we just let, and every consumer either has an Android or an iOS phone, why don't we just put that in and let them do it. And not only that, why don't we have apps, we can build them ourselves or have somebody else build them, that controls the seat and controls the HVAC and it's all going to look like Android or all going to look like iOS. To me that would be the best thing. They don't want to do that. No, they'll never do that. They don't want to do that. They're very reluctantly putting these things in because it helps them sell cars, they think. But they don't ever want to give up the whole thing. And they actually claim that the, I had somebody claim to me just yesterday that the controlling of the position of the seat and the HVAC are things that play into their regulatory approvals and they can't give that to Google and Apple. I don't know, maybe it does. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because it's just, I just imagine Tim Cook getting into whatever extraordinarily expensive car he has and like fiddling with the defroster and being like, oh, this sucks. And Jim won't let me do it, so he's just going to build the whole car. It's like that level of, you can just see them being like, well, he's got to build the whole car then. But so there's that. There's like- So I think that's a big deal at CES this year. That's the first big deal. That's the incremental. The next one is this company called Faraday Future announced, we're building a car platform and basically the cars are going to be electric and autonomous. We partner with the Chinese entertainment company and they're going to play entertainment in the cars while they drive you around. And that's like some really futuristic stuff. Volvo announced a dashboard that flips open into a screen. Everyone thinks you're going to be watching things in the cars while they drive themselves. And it's like, there's just a little gap there of the technology is like, it's like they don't drive themselves yet. When you're built, but there's just the gap is like regulatory because the cars are really close to being able to drive. Well, I have to say there's a lot of things where if I was a government regulator, I would do things differently, but this is not one of them. If I was a government regulator, I would not say it's okay to have the cars drive themselves, unless I was like 600% sure that the cars really could do this safely. And we're not there yet. I do believe that by the end of the decade, we'll probably have some thoroughly mapped out, geo-fence limited areas of certain cities where you'll be able to use these kinds of cars. At least not fully self-driving, you'll still have that feature where you can grab the wheel if you had to. Which California, where most of this is going on, actually that their proposed regs, which Google is very upset about, actually call for that. But to get a completely self-driving car where you'd be comfortable sitting watching a movie in the front seat. There's so much of that here. We have been talking about it as a staff. It's like the company is like, you know what, this regulatory stuff is too hard. What if we just build a bunch of screens in the car? So BW yesterday showed a new electric micro bus called the Buddy. And if you just look at the interior of that car, they've basically taken out all the windows and replaced them with screens. So that you can just watch movies, presumably project other landscapes going by. Fantastic for drug dealing. It's fantastic. Kidnapping. If you were a government regulator, there's a lot of things you would do differently. Right. And letting people- Why don't they just call it the Kidnap-o-mobile? No one can look in windows. It's crazy. But it's just funny to see how much of that. These shows about TVs, what the car companies are doing is like, what if we make the whole car a TV? Yeah. And I think that's really interesting. And look, if we get to cars that are bulletproof in their ability to drive themselves and that talk to the roads. I mean, look, I'm not a deep expert on this, but my understanding is to get to where we want to go, the roads have to be smarter. But Congress won't even pass the money to fix the bridges that are falling down, never mind build roads of the future. But if we get it, let's say we have a few roads in, I don't know, in the Bay Area, a few roads somewhere in Florida, a few roads somewhere around DC because they want to impress the regulators, whatever it is. That would be fascinating. It's not happening at this CS though. So they're a little ahead of themselves. Right. But what I think is interesting is there's a bunch of smart city stuff happening here. And you see companies like AT&T did something. Panasonic is like, we're going to build you a smart city. Unclear. Panasonic, by the way, one of the craziest booths. They built a stadium and a house to demonstrate their smart home stuff. They literally built a house in the middle of CS. But anyway, so AT&T did smart city, Panasonic. There's another company. And you can see it's the thing that has to sit next to the car. You have to improve. No, I agree. I think self-driving cars, if and when they come, and they will come, but most people say what, 2020? Yeah, and I think one company, I think it was VW. No, not 2020. They say later than that, right? I don't know. 2020 has been a target date for the past few years. But there's a number of stages, which we would really bore people to go into all of them. But I think they're going to want to get to stage four. Stage two anyway. Or is that what it is? Well, I think the first stage is the intelligence of the car will mostly let you, like there will be a traffic mode, right? Where you're in heavy traffic, you push. But we already have that. But it's coming, so that's like the first one. And then they're going to do more and more and more stuff for you until they take the steering wheel away. That's basically the map here. But getting from the last possible stage of automation, which still requires you or allows you to grab the steering wheel and a pedal to the one where they're not even in the car. That's going to be the big gap to get through for regulators. I can't wait for that, by the way. And by the way, not only federal regulators. You can imagine, even if they somehow got it through the federal regulators, there's 50 states. There's God knows how many cities. Perfectly. I mean, I don't know what the law is on this, but I can't imagine that some states won't take it upon themselves to say, well, you can do that in Illinois, but you can't do it in Indiana. That's true. Although, you know, my personal theory is the states with big mass transit systems will be more resistant than where I'm from in the Midwest, where drunk driving is a massive problem. I think the states with that problem are going to want it a lot faster. Yeah, that's fascinating. But it still implies a differentiation among the states. Oh, yeah, of course. It's just funny because Uber and Google, they're kind of fighting now. But Google was an investor in Uber to ride sharing and eventually do self-driving cars. And at this show, GM invested half a billion dollars on Lyft to do self-driving ride share cars. And you can just see that that is a particular vision of the future, where no one owns a car. You push a button, and the robot shows up and drives you where you want to go. I agree with you. And I think that one is very exciting. For this show to suddenly be a place where we incrementally get closer to that vision is very interesting to me. It is very interesting. It's like being a TV show. It does fit the pattern, though, of not being the first place. The first place Google talked about totally self-driving, no touch the steering wheel cars, and showed a video of it, and was the conference I run, the Code Conference, which does not compete with this. It's not a trade show. It only has 600 people, not 165,000 people. But it's typical of that size event separate from this is where these companies tend to or their own events is the way these companies tend to make these things first known. Love it. So we are sadly out of time. We are? Yeah. It's been out of my time. This is the first time we've done it together, though. It is. This is literally the first time we've done this face to face. So what you haven't seen me do is just read my computer. I haven't just been checking the website while we talk. No, but this is great. It's great to have you here. It's great to have Walt at CS. We're going to make a bunch more stuff with Walt. I think you have a whole date with the video team tomorrow. We're going to do a Walt Explore CS. I don't have a whole date with the video team tomorrow. Yeah, a whole full day. But there's something I need to do. It'll be very exciting. Because we are together. Yeah. We're physically present in the same room. Oh my God, I'm afraid of this. I have a friend of mine, Mr. Benjamin, finally paying you your blood money that you've extracted from me. Finally paying his debt. Thank you. Thank you for the applause. How much? When do I get the interest? Get off my stage, Mossberg. All right. All right. Well, that was it. That was Control with Delete. Thank you guys all so much for being here in the audience. Thank you for listening at home. We have a ton of stuff from CES coming. Literally right after this, I'll be retaping the Vergecast. Joanna Stern and Sam Sheffer are on the Vergecast today. David Pierce is on tomorrow. We have three more, four more Vergecasts coming. Tons and tons of videos. Please hit our YouTube page. We're going crazy on YouTube, uploading videos all over the place there. Sam Sheffer just wandered into it. He's logging. I don't know what's happening. Sam, you've abandoned me. Sam, I don't know what's going on. Anyway, this is the not very precise end of Control with Delete. All right. Goodbye. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.