The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 247 Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association and CES Show

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association and CES Show The Chris Voss Show Podcast on iTunes! http://apple.co/1IsK7Ht Google Play (Android) http://bit.ly/2lcdBHs Youtube http://bit.ly/XF5yer iHeartRadio https://ihr.fm/2AnCoNW Spotify https://spoti.fi/2QKPbAx

Hi, Bunkster's Foss here from thechrisfossshow.com, thechrisfossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. You guys are the best audience. As always, we have the most brilliant leaders, thought leaders, authors, people who come out with the best stuff, who are great CEOs of their companies, brilliant minds that are coming to the Chris Voss Show to share their data with you. Today, I have a, as always, most excellent guest. It's Gary Shapiro.

He is the president and CEO of Consumer Technology Agency, CTA. It's a U.S. trade association that represents more than 2,200 consumer technology companies and owns and produces, you may have heard of it, the biggest show in the world, it seems, the CES show. And he directs a staff of more than 160 employees, thousands of industry volunteers, and he leads the organization's promotion of innovation as a national policy to spur the economy, create jobs, cut the deficit. I've heard that's good. He has testified before Congress. I've seen him in the White House over the years signing bills or watching bills be signed. I should put it that way.

I think I just made you president. He's also been named one of the top lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and one of the most 100 influential people in Washington by Washington Life magazine. He's authored three books, and his newest one's coming out. We'll talk about it here. Ninja Innovation, The 10 Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses, The Comeback, How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream, and his newest, Ninja Future, The Secrets to Success in the World of Innovation. Welcome to the show, Gary. How are you today? Chris, it's great to be here. I'm so honored to be on your show

along with that great introduction and all the leaders. I have to say as a U.S. Chris, it's great to be here. I'm so honored to be on your show along with that great introduction and all the leaders. I have to say as a U.S. taxpayer, I feel I've paid many bills, but I haven't signed any bills yet. If you run for office, I will vote for you. So there you go. That's terrific. Well, there's one. Full disclosure, I'm friends with Gary on Facebook, and I'm honored to say you're just a wonderful, genuine person. You have a beautiful family on Facebook. And so I get to see your adventures in life and business. I've seen you testify in front of Congress. And then of course you have to put up with me and my Siberian Husky pictures. Yes. Well, it's the intimacy of Facebook reveals a lot about us that my wife chooses to

reveal. Yeah. Yeah. They made me take down all my nude pictures. So other than that, there is a lot of intimacy on Facebook. So you've got a lot going on. Tell us about this new book. Well, you know, this is my third book, as you mentioned, and the last one focused on the ninja innovation was so popular, we decided to do another one in the Ninja series, while the last one focused on what the best businesses did. This is more of a forward-looking book about the technology and the future that we know is coming, some of the things we think are coming. And it focuses on what a person, a business, a government can do to survive in these rapidly changing times. I mean, there's no question that we're living in an era of history that we're all sharing here, which is the most phenomenally revolutionary time in the history of mankind in terms of innovation and technology.

It's almost logarithmic. So we're heading towards a future of self-driving cars and robotics and artificial intelligence. We're 5G, which we'll of course see at CES, as well as just fundamental changes in medicine and healthcare. And we're getting older and all these things are happening. We're living longer and we need assists and technology will provide them. Certainly it's going to make us live longer and longer and solve our healthcare problems and food production and clean water. And we're moving to cities more and more, and we're going to have to deal with smart cities. And it's to say here, if you're a government or a

business or a leader or just a person to trying to survive, and you want to understand that and benefit from it, then here's what you should know. And they can get your book on amazon.com. I guess the release date is when? You can order it now. It ships December 31st. It'll be at CES. I'll be signing at CES a number of different times and meeting people. I really enjoy that because I read people who've read my prior books and they come back for more. It's great. Well, you definitely have a heck of a peak outlook on everything that goes on with business in our world because I admire how you do it because you have to deal with,

I mean, how many people show up at the, how big is the CES show? Give people an idea as to how large that show is. It's the largest business event in the world. It has over 180,000 people come. It's not open to consumers. We get about 7,000 press, including you, thankfully, that come, as well as 4,000-plus exhibitors. We get about one-third of the people that come. We had 65,000 people come last January from outside the United States. And it fills so much space. It's unbelievable.

So, you know, Las Vegas has three of the 10 largest convention centers in the country. We end up using the three that they have in different ways. Plus we have all sorts of hotels that we fill. It's really a big deal because no one can see all of it, no matter how hard they try, but people are inspired because they see a bright future. And increasingly we're finding actually that policymakers from around the world are coming. We have several ministers coming from many different countries. We have cabinet secretaries in the United States. Of course we have legislators and we have a whole bunch of government people.

His job it is to see without that. And we always divide the government officials into two types. One is those that have been to CES and those that haven't. Those that have been to CES understand the dynamism of innovation and how they have to be careful that they don't mess it up because the U.S. has done pretty well in it. And then when there are those who stay and they're inside the beltway, never get out, or they're ivory tower or academics, and they're always proposing things, which frankly, my job is to make sure some of these proposals don't become law

because they would quash innovation. And I think of so many things, the direction we've almost gone in the last few years, I'm pretty grateful. We've had a pretty good track record of allowing and encouraging innovation, which I feel has been my life's work. Yeah. And with CTA, you guys are a trade organization. So all these different companies these are the subscribers building to your association you guys help represent them represent them to the government yeah help lobby for to make sure that they don't in but in they don't ruin innovation and you guys can do all this stuff the CS show is like so huge you take over my whole city it's just a hell of a giant toy store for me I go there and I'm just like, oh my God, look at this.

Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. And it's always like, sometimes it's stuff that's coming out next year. Sometimes it's stuff that might not hit the retail markets for years to come, but it's so huge. You take over my whole city and it's just awesome. It is exciting.

Since I went to my first CES last century, I just said, I want to be part of this. And I managed to get myself a job. I was an outside consultant to the organization and they offered me a full-time job. So I've been going for a long time now. And the transformation has been unbelievable. I mean, it was a great show when I first went there, but now it's the world's best show in the world in terms of getting people who, like you, who are excited about the future. And it's an optimistic view of the future too, I might add, in the sense that you think things will be better.

We could see like the healthcare portion of the show is growing so quickly because now, you know, we talk about the opiate problem. Well, there's all sorts of companies that will be exhibiting there that show ways of dealing with pain without using drugs, ways of monitoring without having to go to a doctor's office, ways of accessing all things, ways of avoiding, ways of monitoring our parents who are getting older and we can't be there with them. So there's so many solutions that are coming using technology. And a lot of it is artificial intelligence. A lot of it will be 5G, but it's also, as I talk about in the book, it's these little sensors that have gotten

so cheap because there were literally billions of smartphones that the microelectromechanical sensors, MEMS, and they actually, these tiny little things you can barely see actually measure things like movement and temperature and location and even smell or you name it. They're starting to measure almost everything. And you put those together in ingenious ways as entrepreneurs around the world are doing, and you're solving a lot of fundamentally human problems, whether how much water to give your crops or whether your kid or dog will be safe if they go outside a certain area. I mean, there's so many things that are being solved today that just used to be huge problems years ago. I forget what the term is. There's an IBM term, the Watson rule. It's a rule where every, within a certain segment, things double.

And it was with the processors, I believe. And we're just living in that time, like you say, that it's just things are moving faster and faster. And the innovation and the things that are happening are moving faster. I think, like you say, also health is driving. The big thing is baby boomers get older as gen uh wire is gen y or z gen y people like me are getting older and and you know we're starting to go hey man we need some you know we need some better meds we need some better ways to fix us and repair us and keep us going for longevity and uh it's just amazing what's uh being done out there and going to cs

show is just the funnest thing i do every year uh last year digi ops named me one of the top 15 influencers for talking about cs show so clearly i have a big mouth never shut up about it i love cs but uh i you know i don't know how you manage that show it is so huge and and you must have just a hell of a team do you take like a whole month off after you're done with the cs show uh honestly no uh the person you're talking to arranges has convinced me that i have to be in davos so we'll be there uh right afterwards but we do have an amazing team the the best people in the in the trade show conferences world. Of course, everyone recognizes that and people try to steal them. But you mentioned the doubling of, it's like we don't invent anything.

It's a great team, including me, but we don't invent anything. There's like brilliant scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs that are making things happen. But Moore's law did say you double every 18 months or so, but that's almost come to an end. So the next stage, and we're going to have the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, speaking about it, is quantum computing. So right now, the way digital works, everything's zeros or ones. That's the way it's been for the last 30 years for digital, even more going back in computers. But now we can't get it smaller. But they're saying, you know, between the zero and one, there's another thing which could be created, a maybe. And so that, you know, logarithmically increases the opportunity.

So everyone is, not everyone, big companies like IBM and Intel and others are in a race to see who could get to quantum computing first. Because if you can get to quantum computing, you know, everything becomes very fast in terms of coming up with things. It's also the basis which we'll be talking about for blockchain, if you think about it. So blockchain, which confuses the heck out of me until I keynoted at a conference and I talk about and explain it a little bit in the book, is blockchain is basically, you know, also works on this principle of it's just not zeros and ones, it's just not one another. You go along to when you validate information and if you have enough ways of validating it, you expand the opportunity to prove things and to do right without actually having to

expose confidential information, essentially along the way you're validating it. So the more choices you have to validate something rather than yes or no, and you go to a likely, and it becomes more and more likely as there's or no, and you go to a likely and it becomes more and more likely as there's more validation, then you could do a lot more things on the internet in a secure way. I use that in my Tinder profile. Is that a yes or no or a maybe? Well, you know, I got to tell you the story since you've raised it. Listening to a French mathematician explain all these things at this blockchain conference I spoke at, he went through all these, I thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world. He

said, you know, airline pilots, when they have a co-pilot, everything is yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. But they found it's more effective to say yes, strong no, no, and maybe no. And then they can make better decisions about whether, because they're flying pilots only have like three choices. You know, they go, they stop, or they shift direction. So basically with that, they're making better directions. And it's all just more mathematical possibilities. And when you get to a strong no, you really have to do something as opposed to a weak no, where you just look at it a little more carefully. And I asked him if my wife and I could make decisions on that basis. And he said, only if you have several wives, which I really didn't understand.

You're assuming that your wife lets you have a choice. You know, the only no you don't want to hear in a cockpit is the really strong no that's like, no! Well, that's the one for the passengers, right? The bad no right there. So CS show is just huge. CTA is huge. And it seems like every year this thing gets bigger. It's bigger this year, I'm sure.

Correct? Yeah, it's pretty much the same size as last year. The footprint will be a little bit bigger. We honestly don't know how many people will show up until after the show is over and we're independently audited. I mean, there's all sorts of ways of measuring it. But by almost every measure, it's phenomenal. We're a little landlocked right now in Las Vegas because there's only so much convention space. They're building a new convention center.

They've broken ground and there's going to be the next couple of years, there'll be some dislocations. But eventually we're going to have a brand new convention center and a remodeled old convention center. We'll have more space. And there's a lot of construction going on in Las Vegas. Well, you actually probably know better. I just spent the day yesterday with a lot of the top executives in Las Vegas. And there's some great things happening in Vegas with new hotel rooms. There'll be 10,000 new hotel rooms in the next few years. And all sorts of great things are happening. Las Vegas is a city that always is reaching for something better. And, you know, we have a great relationship with them.

And just the number I learned yesterday, so you'll be the first that will hear this, is the number of flights during CES has expanded so radically just during that one week that there are 19,500 additional passenger seats that were added by airlines just for CES. Yeah. And 10,000 of those are domestic and 9,500 are international. Yeah, you've probably been the contributor of the expansion of this, like the SANS Convention Center and the Las Vegas Convention Center. Just like every year they're just trying to grow and grow and grow

and make it so they can accommodate you guys every year. You guys just dominate the city. But it's fun when you guys every year. You guys just dominate the city. But it's fun when you guys are here. It's just you guys own this city when you're here, and it's awesome. I mean, you guys take up all these giant convention centers that are the size of small cities almost, and then you're in several of the hotels, I believe the Venetian, and you just spread out and take over the whole city. And thank God we're, we've gotten Uber and Lyft here and more taxi cabs because it's a lot of people.

Yeah. I mean, the only issue for us and for your Las Vegas viewers, we, transportation around Las Vegas is one of our biggest challenges. I mean, we, we pay millions of dollars for buses and, uh, but a lot of the Uber and Lyft we fought to get in Las Vegas. I was stranded one time in Las Vegas on the outskirts. And if you're not on the Strip, boy, you had no choices. Now you do. But no, but there are

a lot of travel. Now what we do do is we encourage people to plan their days in Vegas so they don't move around a lot. Like, you know, go to one area, map out your day. And by the way, anyone is going, including you, I urge you to download the app. Not only does the app help you get from one place to another

and tell you what's going on and it's geofence and located, but there's safety features on that app where if you see something, you report it. If also there's issues with sexual harassment, there's all sorts of ways of dealing with any potential crisis or emergency. And that app is, we've invested a huge amount to make it as effective, the best app in the world for an event. And it obviously requires people to use it. And we're looking forward to everyone using it this time. You know, I'm glad you brought that up because I noticed that in the new app,

when I started using it, you guys have a security measure in there where you can get right through to someone for security. I think that's awesome. I've been loving the security steps you've been taking because these are big events. There's a lot of people crammed into a lot of places. I'm so glad I can bring my press bag in and out of CES. Well, we have a partnership with LiveSafe, which does a lot of major college campuses and corporations, and they've been very fast-growing in terms of their way of helping encourage safety at physical facilities around the world. Also, amazing things like it allows you to work with your colleagues and companions

to make sure they get to their car safe, get a ride. It does all sorts of great things, which I think is just so cool because the world is a place where we have to be careful. I mean, after that Las Vegas incident last year, which horrified us all, you know, we're very, very sensitive and we do all sorts of things. You know, we have, we deal with a lot of dogs and, you know, I'm not going to go into all the security things we do, but trust me, it's top of mind. I always feel very secure when I'm at CES and it's just gotten better over the years. Every year you guys seem to be investing in it. So what are you excited to see this year at CES? What are you excited from what you've seen

from your vantage point? Well, artificial intelligence is going to be throughout the show. AI, because it's the basis of solving a lot of problems that we have as human beings in the future. And a lot of companies are having interesting things in the health area I mentioned is going to be very, very big. We're actually certifying doctors

with medical education credits. We have a whole program at CS because there's so much health related there. That's exciting. 5G, you know, every 10 years, there's a new G. It started in 1980 when the cell phone, 1990 was 2G, 2003 G, and now we're in 4G. But 5G, Verizon, AT&T, top people are speaking. You'll see it at Qualcomm and Intel. I mean, everyone's talking about these things. The telecommunications companies are there. And there's a global battle, both in AI and in 5G. And we see that play out. Smart speakers, we see also the battle between some of the major companies being fought out. We have C-Space, which is focused on content and entertainment and production, where we have CMOs

from around the world, because they got to know every new platform, every new change, because if you're there first, you win. If you're there last, you pay the most. Think about, you know, like Google word searches or something like that. So they all gather to learn about the platforms and the platforms are all there. And then of course there's self-driving cars and that auto portion is just huge. And it's more future oriented. It's not a public car show. It's a show where the ecosystem is there for cars. And we have a new thing called Resilience, connected with Smart Cities, which we introduced in 2018. Resilience is focused on the fact that people are moving to cities.

There's a local movement. There's climate change. There's all these things going on and we want to give people technology and the tools to deal with the fact that when you're moving everyone in a city you're you're changing how things are delivered you're having things like electric scooters there's new ways of transportation but there's new ways of getting uh food and provisioning and utilities and everything and also surviving i hate to say it but electrical breakdowns and things like that uh there's and there's like a company, for example, that takes air from the Las Vegas desert and sucks out the humidity and turns it into water

that you could drink. I mean, it's really cool stuff. And the third world implications for some of this stuff is absolutely huge. So there's a whole focus on resilience. And actually the guy who pushed us to do this, Dr. Carmaco Roberts He's not only one of our board members, but he also is running Microsoft, Bill Gates' new foundation fund that's focused on resilience. He has like a billion dollars to spend investing in companies which do stuff like that. So this is world-changing, human-changing stuff out there. And to me, it's so exciting to see it all in one location, not only in our event, to be honest, but events around the world. I mean, these things are happening. And although I'm the cheerleader for the technology industry, the truth is I love going to these events like ours. I enjoy going to other events where I don't have any responsibility and seeing, you know, basically people learning about these

new things and focusing and cutting deals and seeing a five cents experience and then judging each other as people, forming relationships. And the value of serendipity is so huge. Just the discovery of something you never would have thought of. Because success in the business world today, and I talk about this in my book a little bit, is going across from one vertical to another, discovering something you didn't know. You can't just be an expert in accounting or in trains or in electronics. You have to go and deal with people across that you've never thought of before, across cultures, across countries, and across industries to succeed and to be a real innovator today. And that's the beauty of CES show.

It's this adventure where you go booth to booth and you're like, what do you got? What do you got? And you see the stuff that just blows your mind, some of the thinking that people are going into. You guys have some of the greatest speakers in there. In fact, I just saw our good friends at AT&T have John Donovan, the CEO at AT&T Communications. I think they're keynoting this year.

Yeah, and I might add also Hans Vestberg, the new CEO of Verizon. And we've got the two top companies in the U.S. And plus we have other telecom communications companies that I don't know if we've announced yet. So I'll be careful what I say. But the point is, thank you, by the way, for giving us our 2020 marketing campaign. CES is an adventure. I love that. Yeah, CES the adventure.

It'll be on your shirts for CES there. And, yeah, just buy Chris Voss. Buy Chris Voss. It'll be on your shirts for CES there. And, yeah, just buy Chris Voss. Buy Chris Voss. It'll be fun to see AT&T there. AT&T, of course, helps the Chris Voss show at all these events. And they keep our bandwidth running so that we can broadcast live from the show and everything. What's really great is they put in the Las Vegas Convention Center put in like extra things so you can get really good cellular connectivity inside the giant buildings now.

Yeah, I mean, that used to be the number one complaint at CES was Wi-Fi at CES and cellular service. And, you know, those complaints I haven't heard in a couple of years. Oh, yeah. It's awesome in there. I can do my live broadcasting. And, of course, like I said, AT&T really helps us out. We have the GoPro cameras that we'll be excited to see their booth this year.

And, of course, the Samsung Galaxy. I'm a big Samsung fan. So Samsung always has just this giant setup, the CS, that's just fun to go through. That's fast. I mean, Samsung is definitely one of the most beautiful companies in terms of how they display themselves. It's absolutely huge what they do. And it's always exciting. I look forward to seeing what they're doing.

I got to be honest with you. I'm not really that excited about 5G. I'm holding out for 6G. Well, let's hope we live long enough to, I guess that'll be in 2030, 2029. Oh, God, is it really going to take that long? For 6G, yes. But for 5G, I promise you, Chris, you will have a 5G phone in the next two years. I probably will, thanks to AT&T.

We've had a great relationship with them since 2011, and they make sure we have the fastest upload and download speeds. Plug. There you go. It's awesome. The Ryzen is coming, and they'll be keynoting as well. Yes. And, you know, we see telecommunications executives from across the pond in Europe and others, and we see a lot of the companies because they want to see the future as well.

And this 5G battle, AT&T is doing fantastic actually, but it is a global battle. And it's something that we're focused on because lower latency speeds, broader bandwidth, it's going to be, I think, part of the self-driving car solution because if another car is approaching, you need to know it and you need redundancy in those systems to make sure. I mean, we're talking about life and death situations that 5g will help uh foster and protect which is why i think there will be rollout also chris i'm sure you're aware that the 5g uses these tiny little dishes so and there'll be a lot of them and it's not as difficult to place as the big dishes we've used for the other g's um but it will require more of them but that bandwidth they get, especially in the urban environment, people are going to love.

And there's already deployments occurring. AT&T is already deploying 5G. You'll be able to buy phones. They're being sold, and you'll learn more and more about them in the next year. It's going to be the story. You'll change your mind by next January. You'll be excited. Oh, I'm sure I will.

I just love that joke when I tell people. I'm like, hold on. I'm holding up for 6G, and they're like, what? I believed you. So there it is. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show, Gary. I certainly do, and I appreciate being a good friend of yours on Facebook and stuff. Everyone go check out his newest book.

You can find it on Amazon, Ninja Future Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation. Anything you want to part us with? Any thoughts on CS show coming up? Uh, Chris, we appreciate your support that, you know, as we tell you're a Las Vegas person, but people who haven't been there, you know, drink plenty of water, wear comfortable shoes and objects in Las Vegas are actually further than they appear. You know, the funny thing about your show is every year, like right about now, I have to start going to the gym. I got to get my legs up. I got to get

my legs up for CS. I got to start working out. I got to get ready. And that's the one thing that everyone tells everyone, wear comfortable shoes, like really wear comfortable shoes. And I make it my goal every year to walk that thing front to back I'm like, I'm gonna see every inch of this bloody space and I I never have physically been able to do it But it's still my goal every year Well, hopefully you'll never be able to do because if you do it that means our show will have shrunk dramatically Chris Thank you about hiring like a guy to put me on one of those

Dollies and I'll just kind of stand, lean on it and he'll, he'll walk me around and I'll just be like, what is that over there? There you go. Well, Chris, happy holidays and I wish you health. And usually I tell the people safe travels, but safe getting around Las Vegas to get to see us. And I look forward to a, a Chris seeing you in early January with stronger legs. Sounds good. I'll look forward to seeing you too. Happy holidays, safe travels, and thanks to Monarch for tuning in.

We'll see you guys next time. Thank you. Take care, Chris.