Hello, welcome to the merch cast. I'm Yolaphtel. I just trust I have no idea what day it is or what time it is.

But I know that it is either the first, second or third day that we have been at CS.

We are now called in... Hello, I'm Dieter Bohn. In previous years we called this the press day of the day when they're all the press conferences.

We used to call it day zero. But that's dumb. Well, yesterday was day zero.

Yesterday was day negative one. Dan C for this here. Oh, yeah, this is Dan C for... I'm also here.

I'm a fan of the negative number days as well. Yeah, the negative number days.

So here's... Let's start with some real inside baseball media shit.

Yeah. Or let's start with the sound of a large foreclad. So if you haven't heard of the emergency...

It's early enough that they're still building it. We are high-pitched.

It's early enough that I'm still... We should introduce the first cast to all our brand new listeners who are following us because of CES.

That's true. So hello, this is the verge cast. We're very professional.

It is the flagship podcast of multi-channel media experience known as the verge.com.

Today we're broadcasting from Home Depot. No, but we are live at a large trade show called the Consumer Electronic Show.

CES for short if you're in the know. Or if you're an extremely pedantic employee of the Consumer Technology Association.

Which recently renamed itself from the Consumer Electronics Association because electronics is a bad shitty word but technology probably means you're like a startup billionaire.

Yeah. I see what they did there. Pretty sure that's what that means.

So anyway, we're at CES. It's the biggest trade show in tech. It happens for whatever insane reason the first week of January.

So you go home, you see your family, you open the presents. I don't know what you do. Whatever you do at the holidays.

Whichever way you wish to celebrate. Drink. You drink, you relax. And then you get on a plane to Las Vegas for a week to be basically just overwhelmed by insane things.

All of which would all of which light up and have LEDs. So if you're at me that that fills you with a rapture is joy.

If you're the rest of the tech press. Mostly you just like I don't complain on Twitter. But I loved CES. I have for years.

And so this show it's weird. It used to just be about like home theater stuff. And then now it's basically about like smartphone things that connect to your smartphone.

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