VR, Amazon Echo, and more VR

Nilay and Dieter are joined by senior reporter Adi Robertson to talk VR technology and fan favorite: Amazon Echo. Racked style editor Nicola Fumo operates the hype matrix once again in this week's episode of Vergecast! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, which is sponsored by Scissor Vodka, the vodka brand that I made up last week and that I intend to bring into reality through sheer force of will and repetition on the show. Scissor vodka, cut through the night.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I can't wait for Scissor Vodka flavors. Pumpkin spice Scissor vodka.

• 0:21Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:22Nilay Patel?

  Scissor vodka's

• 0:24Speaker 02

  It's gonna be more forward thinking than pumpkin spice.

• 0:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Red Bull vodka.

• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  It's like premixed. That's really sad. I don't know. I think Scissor vodka is more the... Anyway, buy it. There's already a Twitter... People have been tweeting nonstop at me about it.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Someone made a video advertisement for it.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Did you not see that one?

• 0:44Nilay Patel?

  I didn't see that one.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  It's like four seconds long.

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. Anyway, hi, I'm Neil Appertel. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of this, The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge. Now, regardless of my clear intent becoming a YouTube video property, so if you're listening to this in a car, just know that the people are against you, but I'm still with you. Anyway, Dieter's here.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. I've been talking all day. I just want to warn the audience, I have literally not stopped talking since nine this morning, all day. I had one break. I was telling Nicola this on the way down. I had one break. That was when I went downstairs to order a salad. In the time I was in the elevator, I stopped talking, but then I had to go and tell the person what I wanted in the food. And that was... To me, that's still... I'm still talking. Anyway, it can be loopy. Anyway, Dieter's here. Addie Robertson's here.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  And Nicola's here.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Nicola has a video monitor.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  What's on your video monitor?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  This is a surprise to me. I have a video graph of my hype matrix that I invented during Dieter's hiatus because I wasn't doing a good enough job hype checking.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  And now it's been turned into visuals to reward the handful of thousand of people who watch this on YouTube instead of

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Listening to hundreds of thousands of people.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Can you guys name the device that's the drab ostentatious?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. What is that thing?

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that Microsoft and telemass explorer 8000?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  I saw it on your Twitter.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Ostentatious.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, oh, yeah. It's a vi dude. Come on. It's a vi UX.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Wow. Did you name that mouse?

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that's what that mouse is.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Okay. To to explain the quadrants, in case you're catching up here. Practical drab. Our intersection is most computer mice. Please stop tweeting me good looking computer mice. I haven't seen one yet.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and please stop tweeting me pictures of good looking extension cords.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  That's like really happening to me a lot. Although actually, please continue tweeting me pictures of good looking extension cords.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Ostentatious drab is something Neil I just named that is, I think it's like a computer that's also a sidekick.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  Like it flips open. That's the vi UX. Oh, I forgot. Slack, somebody to bring my vi IP down.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  That's the vi UX. So Sony for this like amazing minute in like 2010, somewhere around there. They decided that the future of PCs was something called the mobile internet device, the mid. It's great. And they would pack full Windows PCs into tiny insane form factors. So that thing is a Windows seven PC. It has like a regular Intel chip. It's a computer. It's a computer.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  But you can take it with you?

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it was like this big. It was huge.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Is it?

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  Compared to, it was really small compared to a laptop, but really huge compared to any reasonable thing. And the, that antenna is the wireless internet antenna. And the screen slid open and revealed the keyboard and I don't care what you, and that little rectangle on the side, on the right side is a mouse. Maybe that's a trackpad.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  I love it personally.

• 3:50Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that thing to me, it was so expensive. It was like $3,000. It served. I could not. Why would you?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  What year is this?

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  2010 ish.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Oh, really recently.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Wait, I think I was playing Hitman Blood Money and it was in 2006, 2007 and he was using something very like that.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is like one of those things where like before people thought phones are going to be phones. They were like, what will computers look like in the future? And like someone at Sony was like, wait, we own a factory and they like made them, right? Like that's the Via UX and they were amazing. Completely useless, very slow, but beautiful, beautiful. And then like Sony stopped doing that.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Moving on though.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Should I play a Hitman game? I've never played a Hitman game.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  I don't know. Rich has a long defense of them. When I did one mission and it felt great, like I was discovering things and learning things and now I'm stuck.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyway, you want to move on? And the last one is a bottle of champagne.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that's ostentatious elegant. And then our iPhone is practical elegant.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  So for those of you, oh, this Dieter face so good. For those of you who are, who are in the car, now you know. The car is your, is Neelai's favorite place to imagine you.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  That's where I imagine you. That's where you are.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I also give a hint to people in the car that Neelai is currently Lager Felting. An OG Samsung gear.

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  Look at this thing. It's a mess.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  It's a rectangle.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  It's a rectangle. It's got a camera bump on the side.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  I thought it was a proper noun watch from over here.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, here's what happened. I'll tell you, I'm going to tell you a five second story. Our sales team is moving to, all of OXME is moving to new office in a year. Sales team is moving early.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's getting bigger and they're cleaning out their existing part of the office and one of them walked over. And they were like, we did this campaign for Samsung for the original gear and we have it. We're going to throw it away. Do you want it? Cause they just, they could not see the value in it.

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  So I took it and now I'm wearing an original Galaxy gear and I have to tell you this is not a good product, but it's hilarious. So I'm gonna wear it for the rest of the day. Anyhow,

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Big old wart in your ear.

• 5:51Nilay Patel?

  There's news, whatever, it doesn't matter. So much news, so much to get through. Addy is here because the VR, the VR moment is upon us. Like a very serious way. Well, I mean, like the hardware shipping.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, not yet. Not for a month.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  It's very close.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  It's close.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  It's upon us.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  But you've been living in the HTC Vive basically non-stop for the past week.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yes, except now I'm making everyone else live in it. I think Ben was upstairs shooting when I

• 6:18Speaker 01

  So we, we set up this room, used to be like a video editing room and it's, it's a very dark room, but it's basically empty, which worked really well for VR. And every time I walk through the hall of our office, I just like see out of my peripheral vision, somebody standing there alone in total silence, flailing their arms around. And you just like walk over and just watch them for like a minute.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And then you just leave.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  And we can't tell.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Nobody knows.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Yesterday I played a game, Chris Grant, the editing chief of Polygon was in there doing something and I played a game where I just tried to get my hands as close to his face as I could for a while. He didn't know. That's the thing. But anyway, the vibe is here. We, we have a vibe in the office. Addy put up a great piece about it. Oculus shipping in about a month.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  So like when I say,

• 6:59Speaker 03

  It's half shipping in a month.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Some, yeah, the, the touch controller.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Half of it is shipping.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Which the controllers are really the most important part in my estimation and those aren't shipping yet.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Yes. After a year of downplaying it and saying you didn't need to actually do anything in VR, Oculus now has a thing that's very important and wonderful and it's not coming out for six months.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyway, but you've got the vibe. Tell us about the vibe.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Um, the vibe is amazing. Uh, Vive is the first thing that I've been able to actually like feel like I'm playing games in and like I'm not compromising on the games. Like every other, there are fun things, but I'm always like, why am I using this horrible trackpad? So I just got out of a really amazing game called Budget Cuts, where you're teleporting around and it's a spy game. And so you're like crouching and, and also flailing and like throwing knives at robots because you pick them up and you have to, have to do this.

• 7:46Nilay Patel?

  Why is it called Budget Cuts?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Uh, cause you're in an office and stealing things and looking at other people. Well, yeah, you have knives.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  Have you tried any of this yet?

• 7:54Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  I haven't been invited to the VR cave.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  The VR cave is literally like 20 feet away from where you sit.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I know, but no one's invited me in.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  We invited the whole staff.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  What am I, how am I just gonna put it on? Just walk in there and put it on?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  There's instructions posted on the wall. Addy made them up. They're, they're great.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  You can just go in whenever you want?

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I have a question for you. You just said got out of. I want to get deep into the vibe because I think it's really interesting. I think the HTC Steam, I'm sorry, Valve collabo and the reliance on Steam is like a very fascinating thing. But you just said get out of. Are you saying the preferred vocabulary here is get in the VR and get out of the VR?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I don't know. I guess so, because that's what I've been saying probably since Gear VR.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Partly just because it, it like hurts and it's weird and a lot of things. And so it feels like you're escaping from something when you get out of the Gear VR after a bad session.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  You get in, you get out. You don't like put it on. You don't dawn the VR.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a whole thing.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Put on the headset, but no, you got out of the game.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I, this is one of those things. Like this is like a technology and culture moment. Like what are we, what words are we going to use? I don't know.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  But I think I'd say that about Fallout. I don't know.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  You'd say I just got out of Fallout?

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  I would say I stopped playing Fallout.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  It would be more weird and I'd be less likely to.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  But that's also because I think Fallout 4 is deeply boring. I'm sorry. I can't handle it.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm trolling everyone again. Um, anyway, so the vibe, so the, just if the people don't know, you don't know.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 9:23Nilay Patel?

  HTC was a mobile phone company. They were bad at making mobile phones. Yes, bring me. Well, actually give it to Nicola. Have you seen my, my pink V I P?

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Oh, this was what you bought last week?

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's probably the battery is probably way dead. Is that not one of the most beautiful computers ever made?

• 9:38Speaker 03

  It's the best.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  Uh, also I was not aware that it's an Argentinian model, so the keyboard is insane.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Oh, look at that.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's all of, anyway, we'll talk about that. But the vibes, HTC blew it in phones. Like they were the, they were the apex of the Android market for a minute and then.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  They still make the best phones. I still have an HTC phone. I'm really sad.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. Do they think they make the best phones? I think the, the 6P is the best Android phone on the market right now.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe not anymore, but when I got the M8, it was like the thing that I wanted. It had great hardware. It was the only thing that looked as good as an iPhone.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  No, so, okay, I'll give you this. HTC made great hardware, had killer design sense, um, and they just couldn't, something went wrong with HTC.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  I would say it was their strategy of putting crappy cameras in the phones.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  It is bad, although I also had a Nexus phone before that, so.

• 10:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're just moving up the curve. Anyway, doesn't matter. Valve partnered with HTC.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  And the key element of all of this, and the reason Oculus partnered with Samsung, is you can take the internals of a smartphone, the screen technology, the hardware, the, there's a camera on the front of the Vive, right?

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, okay, so the Vive is weird because it's basically like, it's like the VR equivalent of Half-Life 3. If like, Half-Life 3 had actually come out, that just for years and years, you had the fabled like Valve VR room, that they had been building this thing for ages. They had this incredibly sophisticated setup that you could walk around in. Brendan and Arif of Oculus would say, no, this is the best experience, period. It's just not a consumer experience. And then they partnered with HTC and were like, we can release this and mass produce it.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. And what HTC brought to the table was, we know how to build phones, and many of the components of phones and that supply and chain are going to translate into, I mean, it's a screen and a processor, right?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Partly. Although I'm also, I don't know how much intent to actually attribute to anything Valve does, because after the steam machines, like, I don't know what they did there.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's true. Anyway, but Valve isn't going to start a cellphone, like a manufacturing organization, right? So HTC's manufacturing this thing, but really, it is an expression of Valve's R&D. And that product, and that product came out, and nobody thought it was going to come out, and beat Oculus to market. And Oculus's partner was, obviously, was Samsung.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Yes, but not for the Rift.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  Not for the Rift?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Is Samsung making the screen?

• 11:50Nilay Patel?

  Samsung's building the screens in the Rift.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's partnered like the way that, I don't know, Apple's partnered with Samsung.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. That's totally fair. But I always, I thought the Samsung Oculus screen connection, the display connection was much tighter.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  It probably is because they make the Gear VR.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  But the Oculus is not, the Gear VR, the Rift is not a Samsung product the way the Gear VR is.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Okay, that makes sense. Anyhow, but you're, what is surprising about all of this, and I think that is worth exploring, like, all of these relationships between the platform providers and the hardware makers, like, all of that is endlessly fascinating to me because it's like a new way of doing business. But what is actually interesting is the Vive is out. And it might be, fuck.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Actually, it's a Vive Pre that we've.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  I keep calling it the Vive because it just looks like Vive to me. I don't know what else to say to you. The Vive is out. It's one of those words you only read, you rarely say.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I ever tell the story that I didn't know how to pronounce hors d'oeuvres till I was like 22?

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  What'd you say?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  I said it phonetically like it's spelled.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  Horse divorce?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I'm not, yep.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're all there. Yeah, we all, well, it's yours. Do you have one?

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  Think on it. Anyway.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  But it might be better than the Oculus, and I think that is very surprising to people.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  I think the thing is that it's not that it's better. It's like that they have an actual marketing strategy for once, an actual release strategy for once. But Oculus had these amazing controllers and it's shipping its system half finished.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  And then the Vive comes out a day, like five days later, and I don't think its controllers are as good. But I just, they, they're remotes. You hold them like remotes and the touch controllers you actually hold like you're making a fist.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  And that fits way better with a lot of games. Like if you're holding a gun, if you're holding, if you're like pushing it with your finger. Anyway. It's a matter of taste, but like the room scale thing is a really huge deal, although most people probably will not be able to take advantage of that.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. What does that mean?

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Um, so you can walk around a lot more due to different technologies.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  You can walk around more?

• 13:56Speaker 03

  So the deal with the Vive is that it, you just put a laser tower in the corner of each room and you get like 15 by 15 feet. Oculus, right now, I think you'd be able to move a couple of steps. You can move more if you put a second camera around because it uses tracking cameras.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Okay. Also.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Do you need one laser tower or two? We have two set up.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  It comes with two.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Also, laser tower is the coolest phrase.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Technically they're called lighthouses, but that is less cool than laser.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Way less cool.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they look insane. They're like, they're just boxes that shoot. I mean, you can see like the red lenses of lasers and it just looks crazy to me. No.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  It vibrates.

• 14:31Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Why?

• 14:33Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Lasers.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  You gotta get in there, man.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  I gotta.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  You gotta, have you done any VR stuff?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  What?

• 14:42Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I know. It just doesn't intersect with my life until someday. Give VR.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Give VR cardboard?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, cardboard I've done.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  I wrote a huge like how to buy VR guide. That's good.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what I want you to do is buy a gaming PC.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  What's a game? What does a gaming PC fit on your thing?

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  It's ostentatious.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  It's gotta be drab ostentatious. I mean, it's really an extra thing to own. It's a really extra purchase.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  The problem is it's really.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Not for a lot of people.

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  A gaming PC is really.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Very. A gaming PC is really practical, though, because it's designed so that you can add stuff to it and fix it yourself. And you can also like do Excel spreadsheets on it.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's practical and ostentatious.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  At the same time.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Is it a PC that you own in addition to other computers, though? Because that to me seems excessive.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I think a proper, full-on, neon-lit, water-cooled gaming PC fits smack dab in the center of the hype matrix.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  It's everything. It's all of it.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  It's not elegant.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  It's drab and elegant.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, ours is kind of elegant. The cables are managed very nicely.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, ours is good.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true. I mean, literally ours has a light-up video card in it.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  TC Builder?

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:49Nilay Patel?

  Huh?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Said.

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not like any, move to the right. It's more to the center and then go up to ostentatious.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  This is great radio.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Look, you're in your car. Imagine a square and then Nicholas is somewhere close to it.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  What are we gonna do when you can watch video in your car because they're self-driving?

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a really thing. We're all gonna get motion sickness.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  This is why Lay TV, what's the Chinese company?

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  Now they're called Letgo.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Letgo?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Letgo?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  They're like funding self-driving cars.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  It's a self-driving car that you could mispronounce as Letgo? Oh, I remember that.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, L E Echo, E C O.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  I know, but that's really funny.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  Um, no, it's a Chinese company. They put a ton of money into Faraday Future, which is like a self-driving car full of screens. And their whole thing is that you'll get in the car and then you'll like play Netflix at you.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  Which. Or you'll wear a VR headset.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I would wear a VR headset. If the crash is coming, I don't even want to see it in my peripheral vision.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  You just want to be somewhere else.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  I just bam, gone.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Can't actually, so VR headsets are really bad in cars and it's not for the reason you'd think. It's not because you get motion sick. It's because you aren't choosing when you turn.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  So the way you do it with something like Faraday Future, I assume, is that you'd have it tied to, like you'd normalize it like gravity.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Um, you'd have it tied to the motion of the car and you would tell it to correct.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Um, but you can't just do it in a normal car.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  It really freaks out.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  So you wrote, you did just write a huge buyer's guide.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:15Nilay Patel?

  What would you buy? Should you buy, should you spend the money on a gaming PC? And an Oculus and a gaming PC and divide, I mean, like, is it even the time to do it? I mean, HCC sold how many, like 15,000 the first second or something?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  10 minutes.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, ridiculous.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. The best advice is seriously like, don't buy anything for the next three months. Like, wait until we know when PlayStation VR is coming out. Wait until Oculus touch controllers are going to come out. Wait until we know what games there are. Wait until, you know, the prices of the PCs are only going to get cheaper.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Um, like, wait till we know how much everything is.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  Is it just me or the Oculus ready PCs like not, not wonderful? They just seem like they meet the minimum base spec. They're still pretty expensive and they'll be obsolete real fast.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Wait, like the standard or which one?

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  The, like, the, the regular Alienware and Dell, there's a third one too. They just seem like not great PCs to me.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, and anything with those specs is perfectly high end as a PC. Like it would be very good for a gaming PC.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Um, there's ugly, the, the pre-built ones.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they are.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  That's the main thing.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  I just feel like you could, if you were going to, if you're the sort of person who's going to buy a PC to run the Oculus Rift. You are the sort of person who can spend exactly that amount of money and buy components and build a PC that's way, way better.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, I think that building your PC is like the absolute ideal solution, but there are people who can't. Um, the main thing is that the people who can't normally would want to buy laptops. And that's difficult, I think, right now.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's not hard to build, I mean.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  It's hard to build a laptop. It's very hard.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  It's very hard to build a laptop. I'm saying it's not hard to build a PC, like.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  You can fry it. Like if I have to put together a build, I actually do. I have like the moment of freak out like, am I getting all the right components? What if I'm screwing something up?

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  Right. We should definitely do a guide on the PC that you and TC built.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  TC built that. He put it together in like a day. He said, we can take it apart and put it back together and make a video.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  We should do that.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  He let me hold the processor.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Briefly.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  He very proudly opened the clear cover and showed me the water cooling unit yesterday.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's a closed system, you know, you don't actually have to fill my water to it.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Tell me something else about the Vive.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Um.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  Really great question.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  They don't have the the front facing camera on yet, but when they do, it's going to be kind of crazy.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. This is like the big key, right? You can explain what that means.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so there are like two features that are really weird about the Vive. And the first one is that there's a camera in the front. And so if you go outside, you're like lighthouse space. Normally you see a grid. And then if you step outside it with this camera, you'll also just see the real world, except it's all blue. So it's like you get outlines of everything. So you can tell if you're at a chair, you could like, I don't know, set your drink down.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  And it's really detailed. Like it could pick up stripes on my shirt.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Oh, so like you you can still like play the game. They just outline the real world for you, just in case you want it.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Right. If you step outside the bounds of the place where you're playing the game.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  And I think you can hit a button to just turn everything on. The other thing is funny is the phone system, which I can't tell if that's going to be really good or really bad, that you can take phone calls from inside VR.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Why don't you never have to leave?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Hi, mom. Yeah.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  We're just jacked in the matrix.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  I mean, to be fair, like not being able to get any kind of notifications in VR is kind of worrying if you're at work.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Or if you are waiting for anyone to do something.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's our, literally, it's Addy's job to use VR.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  No, but like if you were like a regular person.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's a million reasons.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, if you're a designer, you could do VR paintwork. Um, there's a VR desktop program that I'm really curious to try, but they haven't sent me a build yet.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, if you had like a small office and you put on the headset, you would have a big office. Like, it's like hilarious. Like, you have to try it like, okay, we're not doing a good job of selling this. This thing's fucking amazing, right? Like, you put on the Vive or the Viveve if you're French, um, you put like it's, I think it's better than Oculus. Like I've worn the Oculus several times. I've played many Oculus games. I've had the touch controllers. It's very much like the Oculus to me is a demo. Everything about it is like demo world. This thing has like an operating system inside it. It's like basically running Windows, but like Windows is all around you. You can like play with the Steam store. And then the games like Addy is saying are real games where you can like play with them. Yesterday I just drew smiley faces in fire for like 10 minutes. I mean, it's amazing.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  So the thing is partly that like Oculus has a lot of those things. Like if you, have you ever tried Medium in Oculus?

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Um, it's a sculpting program that two people can be in at the same time. Yeah, there's that. Um, the problem is just that it's like everything's good, requires the touch controllers. It's like, we can't even talk about the Rift for another however many months.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I, I honestly, I think part of it is every time I try the Oculus. It's in one of their demo booths, which are basically like huge self-contained container rooms.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, those are like super max cells.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, it's what they ship to trade shows, right? And so even at Facebook's office, they're just sitting in the middle of the floor at the office and they're like these huge boxes. And you go in and like, they're soundproof and there's a laptop and there's a very kind person there, like.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Why are they soundproof? Wait, wait, wait. What? Like, I've been in this. Why is it soundproof? Is it because like people are screaming about what they're seeing in VR and you're freaking other people out?

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  The trade show away from you. They're for trade shows, right? So like if you're at CES and like the speaker system company is like, we're gonna shake your butt. Like you don't want.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  All right.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  That noise, that's what you yell. That's what speaker system companies do. How's your butt? Is it shaken? We're gonna throw it. And like you're in VR, you're like, what's that? Um, but anyway, yeah, but it's like, it's very, it's just a very isolated.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  It's dystopian.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  It feels very like, you know, like it literally like the woman's like, and now we're going to take all of your blood out of your body. Like it's just that kind of hushed.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  And then the vibe is like in our office, the setup is kind of fucked up. It's a little bit like broken. The lighthouses are like on, on like light stands.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Laser towers.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  Laser towers.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  They're on like C stands, you know, it's like, it's real. It's like in our office and it's real and you can like play with it and it works really well.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  See, that's why I'm hesitant to criticize the Rift because I've like when I have one in the office, I'll do that.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Like it's so hard for me to cat to compare something that I've had and I'm able to play with just for hours and do fun stuff on versus something that I get to see for five minutes at a time.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Right. So assume that you, you know, don't live in New York and therefore you have a house or an apartment with multiple rooms. And if you have those multiple rooms, one of those rooms is what, uh, when I was a kid, we called it the computer room. Now people just call it a study like normal humans are in office. Um, that's where your PC is. Are people going to want to put the Rift in their living room or is it going in the computer room?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  So it has to have the computer for one thing. So

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  You have to either bring your gaming, giant gaming PC out to the living room.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  But it's also

• 24:04Speaker 01

  But it also, you, you've been saying for a while that like VR seems to work best when you're sitting on a swivel chair, right?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Seated VR does. The vibe is like anything with motion controllers. Actually, it's like the world's best standing desk.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  But for anything like the Gear VR cardboard, yeah, you basically have to be at a swivel chair.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Um, the other thing is that's hard about VR now for the living room is it's not like the Kinect where you can get a bunch of friends and play Dance Central or whatever.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Like you have to be kind of alone and you can't have any furniture and nothing can walk in and you will fall over anything that is placed there. So you really should just have a VR room.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  To me, it sounds like you have a sitting room upstairs, first floor, no screens. Downstairs, you have your room with, you know, the casual living room that has the, has the television. And then in like the unfinished corner of side from the rec room, that's the VR room.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  What state did you grow up in?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Wisconsin.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. We should have the same names for rooms that we totally don't. No.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Living room, rec room, that's a thing. Our rec rooms like

• 25:04Speaker 03

  A recreation room.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Rec room is the basement, but They're

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, this is modern recreation.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  And you don't need a yard anymore because you're inside.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. Yeah. You just keep, the house keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  And you just keep filling it with the warm bodies of humans jacked in the matrix.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 25:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's something really dystopian about all of this.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I think what's gonna happen is we're gonna end up just, we're gonna bring back Rumpus Room. And that's what the VR room is gonna be called.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Oh, God, it is. Or, I mean, my friend had a bonus.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Enormously fat people just bumping into each other.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Rumpus Room.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  No, my friend's house was a bonus room. I mean, the problem is that all our stories.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  The new definition of rumpus.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  It's like a gaggle of geese, a rumpus of fat people.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  It's terrible.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  I don't know. So Ready Player One, the idea was hamster balls.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Where you spun in hamster ball, hamster balls. It's funny that this is like our most utopian depiction of VR. It's like the most positive depiction of VR and it's still set in a horrible world where no one wants to live.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, it's, it's funny because if you read the, it's particularly, actually, I want to talk to Eddie about this a lot. Like, if you read the cyberpunk literature of VR.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Cyberpunk literature, yes.

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  Right. Well, you know what I mean? Like, there's like the canon of.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  There's like Neuromancer and stuff. Like, there's, there's those books.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  And it's just clear that the people making the hardware now definitely read those books.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  I think I heard that Ready Player One was required reading. Um, and a bunch of people, yeah, everybody read Neuromancer, um, a bunch of other.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  But Ready Player One is like, it's very modern compared to those.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  It's modern, but it's also, it's aspirational. Like, William Gibson was kind of, like, he was a writer. He was describing things that could exist and seeing how they could be interesting. Ernest Cline is like, always like he's writing a manual.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. Yeah, but, I don't know. I read Ready, I just recently read Ready Player One.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. It doesn't.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  It's just like deeply.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Hold up as well as I hoped. It's good. Don't get me wrong.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  It's a long list of things.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's a list of things tailored exactly for my tastes.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, do you like Back to the Future? Here's a Back to the Future scene. Here's a list of things that were in Back to the Future. Did you also like Knight Rider? What about a list of Knight Rider things? Like, it's just that over and, and it's fine because it's fun and there's like a whole little mystery story. But mostly it's like, part of the mystery was solved. And now another list of cool lady shit.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Yes, a major plot point is being able to recite the entire dialogue of a film.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Of War Games, I think.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Was it War Games?

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  And you have to like act it out.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Like, it's just the weirdest thing ever.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  I don't know, the new Ghostbusters movie seems like it's probably gonna be kinda like that, though.

• 27:48Nilay Patel?

  Probably. I mean, like, that's, so that's the thing. So a major plot point of Ready Player One is, they have a name for this kind of thing. Like, GDC is coming. Are we gonna see VR games that take those concepts from those books and make them real in a way that they've never been able to be real before? Is like an honest question I have. Like, is someone gonna build?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Virtual nostalgia instantiation.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  So the VR arcade was, I think, loosely based on Ready Player One, that there's just a giant room full of arcade machines. People have been trying to make these things for, like, from the very beginning. That was the first thing everybody wanted to do.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Put a screen in VR?

• 28:28Speaker 03

  No, not the arcade. It was like, how can we make this thing from a book? Or it'd be, I think there's like a bunch of cyberpunk stuff. One of my favorite games, which is Darknet, the designer was like, I tried to think about what it would be like to be in Hollywood cyberspace. And I made that, and it turned out to look really cool.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, and we're just at this moment. I don't think there's ever been a moment where people have been imagining what the product will be like for so long and like skipping ahead of the early stage of the product. Like, I can't think of a single book that's like, here's what the first days of consumer VR were like. Everything is skipped ahead 100 years when it's like, you're a sack of meat in VR and like, your body doesn't matter anymore. And like, I'm just really interested to see how the VR designers, how fast they accelerate to like what they think the next thing is instead of building the product for now.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  See, that's the thing that's really interesting about stuff like Neuromancer is that it kind of, it posits a world where this is just an everyday thing, but it's all about people going places and travel and all of the things that people pretend that VR is going to make us stop doing.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Like, everyone goes out to physical bars, and you have, like, you have SimStim, you have the sort of virtual experiences, but everyone still travels.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Right. Well, I mean, the book opens with the guy not being able to do it anymore. I mean.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:50Nilay Patel?

  It's, that one to me is like really interesting, but. Even like Snow Crash, like Snow Crash is like, people are going everywhere all the time.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Which partly is a book. It's really boring to have a story where nobody ever goes anywhere, does anything.

• 30:04Nilay Patel?

  Building a website can be tough. And even if you do know your way around coding, creating something that looks good and works well is a time-consuming affair.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  How much time?

• 30:11Nilay Patel?

  So much time. The most time. Whether it's for a business site, a portfolio, a restaurant, or whatever else, in this day and age, you probably need a website. Let's just be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror. Do you have a website?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, lucky for you, tough guy. Squarespace makes it easy to build beautiful websites without breaking a sweat. Squarespace provides simple, powerful, and beautiful websites that look professionally designed regardless of your skill level. No coding required. Not only does Squarespace provide you with intuitive and easy-to-use tools to create your website, Squarespace also has state-of-the-art technology. That state-of-the-art technology powers your site, it ensures security and stability, and you know you can trust in Squarespace for your website needs when millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world trust in Squarespace as well. Addy, tell me about your first website.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Um, I think I got some hosting space on gorge.net, my local ISP, and I coded, I think you could still use the blink tag back then.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I mean, you can use a blink tag now.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Okay, well, but no one would. You can use nuclear weapons now.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  Squarespace ad getting dark.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  So yeah, I coded, I coded the whole thing myself.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but now you could presumably use Squarespace. Seriously, you can't beat the ease and simplicity of Squarespace. Squarespace gives you 24/7 online support and a beautiful, just, I mean gorgeous, eyes, eyes bursting with happiness, gorgeous website. So what are you waiting for? Please start a trial with no credit card required. Start building that website today. When you decide to start up with Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code VERGE to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for this, The Vergecast, the show that you have been enduring for the past 40 minutes. Thank you, Squarespace, for your support of the show. And remember, it's all for code VERGE.

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, what's on your face?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I liked, I liked that I trolled you in the middle of your ad by putting on the Avagant glyph.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  That thing to me, looks like the revenge of Beats headphones.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know that's what that was.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  If that was, if you could-

• 32:12Speaker 03

  That's good, that's what they're going for.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  If you could do the ultimate Beats commercial, it's like, I don't know. It's, who am I, I'm just like a football player. It's like Aaron Rodgers, like wearing the Beats and like the reporter's like, "You threw an interception," and Aaron Rodgers like flips the thing down and starts watching TV in your face.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Alternately though, where it is-

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  That's what it's a TV-

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Put it on as headphones and then-

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you don't know what they are, they, they look like a giant ass pair of headphones.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  It's Beats you wear on your eyes.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And then it has little LED lights that shine into micro mirrors that like reflect the image directly into your retinas. So you just put it on and you're staring straight ahead into a 720p screen that could be in 3D if you have 3D content to put in it. And it works with anything that you could plug into it with HDMI. Um, I think they're 500 bucks?

• 33:00Speaker 03

  I thought they were more than that.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I gotta check. Um, they just started shipping. A bunch of people put up a review, we'll have a review next week. But I will tell you right now, um, it's super nerdy.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  $700.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  $700. It's super nerdy, it's super expensive. You gotta really want them and, but if you do, you'll be into them as long as you take the proper time to adjust them for your eyeballs. Because if you don't, everything just feels wrong.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't-

• 33:28Speaker 01

  You gotta adjust the lenses back and forth. You gotta adjust them left and right.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  We're a little bit close here.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  You gotta move the nose pad up and down.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, can you get to a point where it doesn't feel like it's in danger of falling off your face?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  No, it, right now it does not feel like it's gonna fall off my face, but I, I think we wrote about this, uh, James Vincent, who just looks at the LG VR headset, do you wanna play with that?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  Was like, the big problem with the LG one that they just came out of NWC, uh, is that it shows the world around you.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's the, this, they don't call this a VR headset. They're very explicit that this is like a cinema experience. You could even plug it in-

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  It's just falling off Eddie's face.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  You can plug it into a computer, I guess. Um, I mean, I've done it, you can, although it's hard to see the corners, but they're like, "This is for watching movies or playing games or working on, you know, I don't know, spreadsheets you don't want the person sitting next to you on the plane to see," I guess.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  I mean, this is because this is virtual boy syndrome that virtual boy would have been okay. If you hadn't called it VR, you call it VR and everyone expected something that it wasn't.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Right. So the, the thing about using this though, I, I think the longest I've used it at a stretch is probably just under two hours. Um, but even people that have used it for like five minutes, you take it off and like, you forget that this thing is shooting light beams into your eyeball. And so, you know, when you like glance at a light bulb for a little bit too long, or like you like, look at the sun for a second and then you like see spots, your entire field of vision becomes that big rectangle of the screen you were staring at. So everything is sort of like behind this weird white haze.

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  You have the feeling that we're just like totally building hacks that our body is not capable of receiving. You know, it's like, these are like iron blasters for your eyes. And like, really, the answer is just, just jack something directly into your brain, like bypass your, bypass your shitty eyeballs and go straight in the optic nerve.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I've been thinking about that with VR a lot.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Of like direct brain interfaces with something like the HoloLens, because the ultimate thing is just modifying your reality.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. No, it's just crazy. It's like, these are hacks, right? Like we're building all this sensory experience and we're going through interfaces that were meant for reality. It's like actually really interesting to me. Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  One of my friends said to me yesterday, just put my phone in my brain already.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Cause I wanted to screen cap something that involved reality and also my phone. And was like, oh, I can't, it's not a thing I can do. It's not how a screen cap works.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  So I need you to hype, I need you to hype matrix for this thing.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  Did you think about taking a picture of your phone in reality?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  What it was is that my nail is painted the same color as the Twitter app. And so when my, when I opened it and my thumb was hovering over the Twitter, it was like camouflage. I was like, ooh, this is cool.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, wow. Okay.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Real question though, how do you take a selfie with a brain computer?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  How do you do a video call in VR?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Exactly. I've been wondering about this with HoloLens for ages.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right. Cause they're always showing Skype. Yeah. Oh, you're just looking like an idiot.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  This is why they, but this is, they have like game studios.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  One person can see you.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  No, but they always do it with like a connected camera on the wall. And that's what it broadcasts.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Is you in the HoloLens?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a real, I don't know, how do you? This is why they keep doing the demo of the Kinect mapping your face on the

• 36:38Speaker 03

  They would reconstruct your face, maybe from you'd scan your face, reconstruct it and then project you into whatever your eyes were taking a picture of? I don't know. It'd be hard.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but there's just something there. There's something deeply creepy and bad about that, right?

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Or you could just implant a camera in your arm? That's my, like

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Stand out with your arm pointing out?

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  What's gonna happen at GDC this year?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Uh, lots of VR apparently. I went through the schedule and it usually, like, there are all the sort of normal things that are gonna be really fun. There's a game design challenge where you're supposed to build a game that you play for over, you play over the course of 30 years.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow. The boyhood of games.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, a few years ago, it was, uh, like, a game, it was the last game on Earth, and there was Jason Ror's game that was buried out in the desert somewhere. He didn't know the rules. So there's always that thing. That's gonna be fun at, uh, GDC, but a lot of it's VR. Sony has a VR event. We're probably gonna learn how much PlayStation VR costs.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  This is the thing that's gonna make me buy a PS4.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, same. Actually, I'm gonna buy a PS4, or at least I've decided. Well, my Because PlayStation Vue is better than Sling TV.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  No, and my Xbox One is just turning into the crashiest piece of garbage with the new dashboard. The dashboard quits behind my games. So it, like, airs out behind my games all the time now, and then the games start glitching as the dashboard restarts. It's the most annoying thing. And you're like, oh, the game's screwing up. I'll just go to the dashboard and come back, and then push the button, the dashboard's crashed.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Like, I'm gonna go buy a PS4 on my way home tonight. Cause I need, I want, I've been testing this glyph out on the Xbox and I wanna get 3D on the PS4.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, that's the thing. Anyway, so PlayStation VR.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  PlayStation VR, Oculus has a bunch of stuff, um, throughout the early part of the show. Uh, the, so there were VR, like, in VR building versions of game editors, like Unreal, uh, that were announced a few months, like, weeks ago, and they're gonna show up at GDC.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  So if you wanna build game levels inside virtual reality by, like, walking around inside the game levels.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Oh, that makes sense.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Which it either makes sense or it doesn't make sense like that. Wissywig isn't the way that everybody wants to do everything. That like sometimes you want to play with, like you want to mess with numbers and you want to type things and you want to be able to do things very precisely.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you also want to democratize the tool, right? I mean, like if nobody knows what the stuff is going to be, then you've got to democratize the tool in a way. Right? Like Wissywig is like a democratizing.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  I'm not sure if this is ultimately democratizing though, because like it's not that much harder to look at. A model in Unity and spin it around with your mouse than to get in there and physically move it with a controller.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Like the idea is that you're supposed to be able to do things like C scale.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Um, which could be useful. And I think something that just let you pop in and out would be really interesting. Um, because that's what people are doing already. Um, but it's hard to say whether you want to actually build a level. Inside VR.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  Do you have any idea if a VR headset where the screen flips up so you can actually pop in and out? With like, because it's really hard to pop.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Gear VR has a button you can hit for a pass through camera.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you're not going to sit at a computer like coding a thing and then hit like through the pass through like.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  I did that. I can't read the screen though, because the camera's.

• 39:52Nilay Patel?

  Right, right. I will say this, this is the Addie and I don't mean this to sound weird. This is the longest I've looked at your face in like months. And Addie sits like right across from me.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  It's been like weeks.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Weeks. I mean, she's had a VR headset on her face nonstop for weeks. But you add a number of weeks together, you get months, so.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Well, I have like 10 guard boards on my desk right now.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, I mean, Addie is, I just say this, like the deepest in the VR game of almost any reporter I know. And like just always, the other night I was in the office super late and I was walking out and it was just Addie. Just clicking around in VR and she was just playing Fruit Ninja.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  Just making some noise in there, just doing it.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Having fun.

• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like you do. We gotta, we gotta talk about the next thing because there's another.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  You want to talk Phantom or Echo?

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to talk about five seconds about Tango and your theory about Tango?

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Oh, so, uh, my theory about Tango is that. For VR to work, you need laser towers or an external camera to have it be really immersive. And that's called, Addie told me this, outside in. But that what everybody really wants is inside out where the. Thing on your face itself is able to map the room around you. And it turns out that there are already Android devices that do that. It's Project Tango. We tried it last year at Google I/O. There's a Lenovo phone shipping this summer that's going to have it built in. There's a Qualcomm reference phone. And everybody knows that Google just put a guy named Clay Bavor in charge of this whole new VR division. And he's really good at his job.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  And so we're expecting Google to finally get into the VR game in a very real way. And it seems to me like they've already got all the pieces they need to build a VR thing that lives in between like the mid-range Gear VR and the high-end Oculus stuff. The Wall Street Journal says that they're making a standalone thing. And then there's also like, they might make one that has the cameras on it. And then you can stick a phone in it. So my theory is they'll make a standalone VR headset, whatever. It'll be relatively cheap, but they'll also make it a slightly cheaper one. I don't know, call it 150 bucks, where it has the Tango cameras in it. And then you plug your Android phone into it and then you get the like spatial movement

• 42:02Speaker 01

  and recognition that you get out of a high-end VR headset, but without the external cameras. And it'll work off of an Android phone, running the next version of Android, which is N.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Which is Nugget.

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  Nugget?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Nugget.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Nugget's the name of Lorn Good's cat. So I think we're all betting on Nugget. That makes sense. It makes sense to you?

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's super smart. I think all-in-ones are a bit of a more complicated proposition. Like, all the ones I've ever seen have been terrible.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  And you have a phone, like, why not put it in? So if something would use any Android phone, any new one, would be amazing.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think they have to sell an all-in-one because in order for this to work, I think they need Android N. And it's going to take a while for that to get out there. So the only thing it would work with on Nexus phones for a while anyway. So they may as like, if they could like, make one of these for relatively cheap, like...

• 42:47Speaker 03

  But they couldn't. It would be way more expensive.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Oh, they pull out the cellular phone processor. They like, they'd make it external storage so they don't need to put a ton of storage into it. It's like, bring the price down. They'd basically just bring the price down, like, all the standard phone junk that you usually need. They could buy a cheap, big, huge battery because it's already strapped to your face. They don't need to like, spend a lot of engineering work to like, make all the components really thin.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  They don't need to spend a ton of engineering work and spend all the money to make everything really small and fit compactly. I don't know.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  So you're talking about something that has like an external pack and then you connect it?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  No, I think it just all would all fit in there. Just like when you engineer a phone, you gotta make everything tiny and small. But when you engineer a headset, you've got like a little more room to play with.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  You really don't. It makes it really heavy.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know. I was, I didn't think they were gonna make a standalone, but the Wall Street Journal does. So like, I'm just guessing based on what the Wall Street Journal said.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  No, it's, I think they could be, but I think it's gonna, it's like more of a reference design thing. I don't know.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  That makes sense. It is Google I/O. Like, they gotta get it out there so that developers know how to code to it. Which they've been doing already with Tango.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Who knows? You could, you could be right. I'm not sure.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  We gotta get Nick to try all these things.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  I gotta try all these things.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  You're missing out.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, come up to the Vive afterwards.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Yes, afterwards, and you should write about it.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  You have a fish out of water, like, first experience story right here.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  The thing is, you'll be in the water, because there's an ocean experience in VR. So you'll be a fish out of water in the water.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  Did you see that Magic Leap whale thing?

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  There was like the demo of like the people in the high school gym and they're all like presumably all wearing Magic Leaps and like the whale, like a blue whale like jumps out of the basketball court and like splashes down.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Wasn't that another like early promo material? When they got, not bought by, invested in by Google?

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  I just thought, it was all over yesterday. It was like one of those things. Like, it was one of those things where it just re-popped up in my Facebook feed.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  I'm very skeptical of Magic Leap.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  They do make a lot of insane promises.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, we gotta talk about Amazon, then I'm gonna read that, and then we gotta lightning round, then we're gonna wrap this up. Amazon.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Amazon, two, two products that they announced today. One is called the Amazon Tap, which is a Bluetooth speaker, portable Bluetooth speaker. But it's basically an echo that you could like pick up and walk around with. It's 130 bucks, and you can't just bark at it from across the room. You gotta push the button to make it work. And nobody seems that excited about it compared to the other thing I announced, but I don't care about one. Because I need a new Bluetooth speaker, because my Jambox is just falling, just not, doesn't make noises anymore. It's, battery lasts about 30 seconds.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  So I just need a Bluetooth speaker. And the thing that sold me on the Amazon Tap, I kid you not, is it comes with a little circular dock. So instead of like plugging in a USB thing, I can just like set it on the dock.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then anytime you go anywhere and you wanna charge it, you gotta take your little

• 45:23Speaker 01

  No, it also has a USB plug.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Um, so.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  Bezos.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Right. Uh, but it also does all the echo stuff. So as long as it has Wi Fi, you can like pick it up. So like, imagine having a Bluetooth speaker. That's nice to have. It's nice to like carry out to your deck or like into your room where you don't have a speaker, whatever. But instead of like pairing your phone to it and then getting your music that way, you just pick it up and tell it's placed on Spotify.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  What's the reasoning between, behind not being able to yell at it?

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Oh, because this was battery life. In order to like have the omnidirectional six array, six microphone array, then like have them listening all the time, like that is not cheap and power wise.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  So they didn't want to like have it kill the battery. So that's why you gotta push button. If you want to be able to yell at this thing from across the room, they also released the Echo Dot, which is an Amazon Echo, but like lop off the top of it and just keep that.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And then you can plug it into a speaker. It also has a tiny little speaker on its own. If you like, want to like hear something quiet. Or like an alarm clock. And that is really cool, except

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Amazon made it, so you can only buy it.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  You can buy it online. People have been tweeting me.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Well, you did. There's a hack.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's ways to jump through.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, their intention was you're only supposed to be able to buy it if you already have an Echo or a Fire TV.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna go out and buy one just because I have an Echo.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  But why?

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I buy everything.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  I am furious because today is the day that at eight in the morning I bought an Echo.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  I'm not kidding you.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  You bought an Echo literally an hour before they announced new Echos.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  It was like, and then I came here.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  You bought the right Echo. You, you definitely bought the right one. You don't want the fucking dot. You don't want the, this Bluetooth speaker, you gotta push the button is stupid.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  No, but the dot seems like for me.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Do you have a speaker to plug it into?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  It's on all the time?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Okay, good. Cause the thing is that it, the regular Echo is on back order. And I was like, oh, it's only one place you can get it. This is so weird. I can't get the thing I want.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  And.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  You could buy one on eBay, I'm sure.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  I can't get the thing I want.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  I can't get the thing I want. And, uh, yeah, so I bought it this morning and then I came in and found this out and I was just like, are you fucking kidding me?

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's the, um, the, the dot is a fascinating pro, pro.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:29Nilay Patel?

  Product.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Product.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say problem, a fascinating problem. What no one knows the answer to is if they all talk to each other.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  Cause the thing that you want is to buy like 50 dots and put them all over your house and have Jarvis, right? Where you're just talking and stuff's listening to you.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  But it's not clear to me that like my, you know, New York City apartment, it's like not huge, but presumably I could put a dot in the bedroom and have the regular echo in the kitchen.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  How far away can you yell at it from?

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  Pretty far. I can talk to the Alexa in my kitchen from the, if the door is open and I'm like, I talk loudly, it can hear me.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 48:08Speaker 02

  But like, how far is that?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  About as far as you can talk to like a, a, a person that's like mildly hard of you, like as far away as you can talk to me, basically.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  So if I was getting ready to balance.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Alexa could hear you.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  I can like poke my head out and be like, hey, what's the weather?

• 48:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's like a really good thing. Like this, that multi-directional microphone array is very good.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  I know exactly.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  The other thing that you can do, actually you can talk to it really far away. If you host a podcast and you yell, Alexa, buy a dot.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  Which is ruining everyone's life.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Somebody who's listening to it on a speaker is scrambling to cancel the order I just made for them.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. But you look, but so here's what I don't know. And I'm still trying to figure it out.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Let's hear it.

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  If you have two of them and they can both hear you.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Which one?

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  Do they both just start answering? Do they both just start independently playing random Spotify playlists?

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Or does one know it's a primary?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Why don't you just take the review unit echo we have home, set them next to each other and see?

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, because those didn't talk to each other. But if you release more and particularly the dot, which is designed to be small. Like that's how you get an ecosystem of things. And it's just no one, no one knows the answer to this question. And Amazon has apparently been.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  They have to, if they make you own an echo to buy an echo dot, they have to figure that, have figured that out.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Which is an insane thing because you're asking the older robot for the newer robot.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Cause you're going to get rid of the older robot.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  You're not going to get, no, because the newer robot doesn't have a speaker.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  It's so mean.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's like asking it to have a friend.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  I think they just have limited supply and they're doing something clever.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  That's the.

• 49:40Nilay Patel?

  It's a gimmick, right? And everyone's going to, everyone's going to do it. They're going to say, Alexa, buy a dot.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Someone sent me the dot thing today and I was like, oh, great. This is great. I'll just cancel the other one. And I kept scrolling all down the whole page. I was like, all right, I've got this video. Okay, scrolling as well. I was like, where's the buying button? I don't get it.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  I like how only Dieter got the troll that I just deeply trolled everybody with. I got it.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  I missed it.

• 50:00Nilay Patel?

  No one else, I just said it again.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  With the dot, by a dot?

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Hey, I didn't, no, I didn't say, I didn't say Alexa. I didn't say what it says.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  We're so bad.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  What? Okay, Google.

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Google, play Hotel California.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Wow, that is mean.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  That's not mean. That's, that's just what you expect from this show now, is the Eagles will play us out. No, so we've been talking about Alexa on the show.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  A bunch.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  A lot lately.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Lauren just put up a really great piece about it.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  So what's your, what's, is this, do they just accident into this?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  This is actually an ecosystem for them?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  It will be.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  Or is Apple just gonna put out one of these things and kill them?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  They could, except Apple is never going to be as open and friendly to third-party developers for Siri as Amazon has had to be with Alexa. The headline for Lauren's story is like, their smartphone flop was the best thing that happened to Alexa. They, their smartphone failed completely. They had this assistant they wanted to do something with. They made the Echo and they needed it to kind of work. They needed people to buy it and be interested in it. So they had no choice but to make it super easy and super popular for anybody to make it do stuff, to add those skills to it. So they added if this and that, they made it popular with nerds. Nobody was expecting it to do anything. And so the fact that it was successful at all meant that it looked like a huge success.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Like if they had sold as many Fire phones as they have sold Amazon Echos, we would all be making fun of it.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Right? We'd all be like, oh, this thing that's got like 0.5% market share, it's a failure. But this doesn't have to compete with phones. This just has to compete with literally nothing.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  And so it ends up being a success. And so now they've got like a good storyline to build on. They've got good, like, warm feelings from consumers and developers. And so they can continue to build out this ecosystem and like make these things interoperate. Like, the other thing that came out today is Nest is like, yeah, sure, whatever. Go ahead, Alexa, you can control my Nest, I don't care. We're not gonna like wait for Google to figure it out, our parent company.

• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  But that's not Googly to keep anything locked away.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  But I will say, so I know what you're talking about, because there's a really great Mark Bergen piece, Recode.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  Um, where he was like, Nest just said fine and Amazon can be the intermediary before. Because Nest is a smart home company.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  They're supposed to be the ones building this stuff.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  And there's this really great, it's anonymous, but I trust Mark, it's well sourced.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Quote where it's like, having a Google device in your house that is always listening to you would be too creepy. So Google is like, we need to, we need to like, separate ourselves from the Nest product. Because you wouldn't, would you like, let a Google speaker that listens to you all the time into your home? Like, I think people like.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it freaks people out. Well, you have your phone, but yeah.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, like, the phone isn't always listening in a way that Alexa is like, really deep. Like, Alexa does creepy, always listening shit.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so does Google. Okay, Google.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Hey Siri.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The hey Siri never works. This shit just doesn't work. Hey Siri.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  It just doesn't work.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, on the 6P, okay, Google doesn't work either.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I think that's actually a thing, like, and that's why I think this Echo Bluetooth speaker kinda gets it wrong. Right? Cause if you're gonna press a button, you might as well press the button on your phone.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Like, I.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, the secret to the Echo is that it demands nothing of you. You plug it in and it's just.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  But this is why I like the Bluetooth speaker version of it, the tap, is the thing that I hate, the, one of the reasons I don't listen to music is I'm not in the room where my good speaker is, and I don't wanna pull up my phone, open up Bluetooth, pair it to the thing, make sure the thing is on and ready to be paired to and fully charged, then go open to Spotify and then pick my music. I, if I could just pick up a speaker and say, play me some music and set the damn thing down, I'm gonna listen to music all the time.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  What?

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  I just got, I just figured out that that's the use case for it.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's, it's a music stick. It's a, like, it's a thing you can pick up and command to play Spotify at you.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  But can't you do that with your phone?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this, this is a louder speaker.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep it in my room. I'm gonna pick it up, I'm gonna like, carry it into the bathroom, I take a shower, I'm gonna have a play NPR in the morning, and they'll set it back on its little dock, I don't have to replug it back in to make sure it's charged. I'm telling you, this is the better one.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  But don't you have a regular Echo?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm not gonna put the regular Echo in the bathroom, I'm not a monster.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  No, but like, you pick up the thing, you're like, walking out of wherever it's charging, you push the button, you're like, play some NPR, and the regular Echo hears you.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:55Nilay Patel?

  And then everything starts playing, like, they need to know.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Maybe all the Echoes, like, whichever, whichever Echo hears it loudest, oh, they only, oh.

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  So one, right now, you can call one Amazon, they have like, multiple names for them.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  It's, I think.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  You can say, you can use Echo.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  You can use Amazon.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I don't think you can use Echo.

• 55:12Nilay Patel?

  You can use Echo.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  You can use Echo now, okay.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's three, but you need more names, what we need is like luxurious names for our voice activated products.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Call mine Horatio.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right, like, you'd need to be able to specify names.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  No way, I'm calling mine Yorick.

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  This is the new baby name.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  No way, I'm calling mine Portbras.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  The new baby name.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Only names from Hamlet.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Wait, why can't you name your Echo, why can't you pick the name now?

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  I know. I mean, you should be able to literally set any repeatable noise.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Mine is Jared, I don't know why.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, I think that, I think that the reason is that, they have to, they have to really, they have to really test what the, the computer is able to understand in multiple situations, so apparently, when Google was choosing its phrase, they went through a bunch of ideas before they landed on OK Google, because OK Google is really easy for a computer to recognize from far.

• 56:00Nilay Patel?

  Cause a lot of phones just recognize that shit. Hey Siri, still doesn't work.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Hey Siri, does not, do you have it on?

• 56:06Nilay Patel?

  Of course I have it on. Hey Siri. Anyway, are you gonna buy one of these, Addie?

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Why?

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  I've just been like, the past 20 minutes trying to tell you why.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  No, I don't have a speaker system, I have like, I can shout to anything, to anything in my apartment, and there are only interesting things in one room of my apartment.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Like, I guess I could have something for my kitchen, because that's the only thing that's really separated.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  That's where I keep, that's where I keep mine.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  But I, why wouldn't I just use headphones?

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it wants me to reset up, hey Siri.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we're not, we're clearly not doing this here.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Is that hair on your face, Dieter?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  You should shave it off.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  I will. How will I do that?

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  Using a Harry's razor. Guys, everybody knows good things come in sets of three. What does this have to do with anything?

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  Here's some words that explain that. Get this, March is the third month of the year, and it also happens to be our friends over at Harry's' third anniversary.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  And today is March 3rd.

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  If you're new to Harry's, they've got a special deal for you. Try three of their expertly crafted five-blade German razors. Should've cut it down to three for this promotion.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  No, but if you buy...

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  You want five.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  If you buy... Never mind.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  Look, whatever. You sign up for Harry's, you get three five-blade German razors, you get a handle, you get shaving cream, costs 10 bucks. Dieter, although I've seen Dieter without a beard. I'm not sure that I...

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Look, I got rid of the glasses. Everybody freaked out, but now no one talks about it anymore.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  The next step is to shave the face.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and then you're...

• 57:40Speaker 01

  And then I will look 12 again, which is how I ought to look.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  I haven't shaved my face in like easily five years. But when I did, it was Harry's man.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  That was five years ago. They only turned three. We just said it.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  No, but like, there was a time when like, I regularly shaved, and that was a Harry's man.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  I really like the Harry's. I like their face scrub, personally.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Right, and you think people should sign up for Harry's and buy the face scrub?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, add it to your cart. I don't know.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it was a good shave. Like, they actually make great razors. You should try the products. You should just get into it. Harry's is the only shaving company that has both amazing quality and low prices. They're German-engineered, five-blade cartridges. You get a close, comfortable shave. There's no cuts or burns. There's a face scrub that is fucking excellent from what I can tell. And the quality is guaranteed, and there's a full refund if you're not happy. And the prices are low, right? It's direct from the factory. There's no middleman. It ships right to your door. The blades are half the price of leading brand. Leading brand, also garbage quality in my opinion. Over 1 million guys have already made the switch. Nicola, at least one lady, just scrubbing her face.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  And thousands more switch every day. So, why pay $32 for an eight-pack of blades when you can get them for half the price at harrys.com? Harry's Starter Set, amazing deal. For $15, you get a razor, you get a moisturizing shave cream, you get three razor blades. Harry's doesn't discount. The prices are already low, but it's the Vergecast, so there's a deal for you. You get $5 off your first order with promo code VERGE. That's V-E-R-G-E.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Stop overpaying for a great shave. Go to harrys.com right now. That's H A R R Y S dot com and enter. What's that offer code?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  V E R G.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  Verge.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Verge.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  And buy, buy some face scrub.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Get the face scrub.

• 59:27Nilay Patel?

  Get in there. But it's, it's, you know, it's for you.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  You know, we get a lot of notes about the ad reads.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I am.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  And how they're not good.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  From who?

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Everybody.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  Just like people.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Literally everybody.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  People who wish they had ads in their podcast.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  People who breathe.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  But, I mean, the people know that, I mean, whatever. But you listen to them because you want to see exactly when I'm going to drive this truck directly off the bridge. Right? You want to know when that 18 wheeler is about to just careen off the bridge, hit the ground, explode into a million pieces, and then explode again.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  The next storyline is like, do they come back? Will Harry's come back?

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  They'll come back. What was that one cloud services company? They started tweeting at me. They were so happy.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Oh, Cloud Layer motherfuckers.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  I mean, it's got a ring.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Those are free ad scenes. They're going to come back now.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  You have an amazing future in advertising.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  I do not.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  Because of the journalism.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  But no, whatever. Terry's is great. Squarespace, my favorite. If you were going to start a website about shaving, it would be a website on Squarespace. We should connect the Harry's people to Squarespace people.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  They should know each other.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  Offer code verge, everybody.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Hey, Derek. Derek?

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Hey Cortana.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  Derek?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  You just tweeted at me.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  Derek?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  No, there's a guy named Derek who's mad that we, we, we trolled Siri, we trolled Google, we trolled Alexa, we haven't trolled Cortana yet. So, hey Cortana.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  That's fair.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  Derek, I hope you're happy.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to name my Alexa Derek.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Jared and Derek.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  That's what I want. Jared and Derek are literally the worst names for your intelligent assistants.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  I really avoid them.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Hey, but they are best friends and they're frat.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  They were.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Derek and Derek.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  Don't be so mean to her. All right. Don't you wish to look good in white jeans? Derek and Jared don't.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  They're guys who wear white jeans.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Ew, I think they have backwards baseball hats, but they're like not cool baseball hats.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  But they they will play Spotify for Spotify for you at the drop of a hat. Sorry.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  Why would you give them those names?

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  I don't know. It just came to me.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  What would you name yours? If you.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  I already told you.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  Horatio. Oh. Addie?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  No, wait, no, wait. Rosenkrantz. No, wait, wait. Gildenstern.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, you'd have presumably you'd have two. And they would argue.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Right. Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern. Definitely.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I'd have to name mine like Dromancer then or something. Wintermute.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  And then they would argue.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, wouldn't one have to subsume the other at some point?

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then then only they'd form a gigantic sort of quasi voodoo entity that would control the entire internet.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  And it's really unclear what happens at the end of that book, isn't it?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll try the third book. I I took me like five reads to be able to half explain that plot of Mona Lisa Overdrive.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'll try it. I just read Seven Eves.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I got through like 50 pages of that.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Oh, you gave up on it?

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  My library expired.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Did you finish it?

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  It's rough.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  It's real long.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  It's very long.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  But it's very long. And then there's like an extra little tiny book that's terrible added at the very end.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that that tiny little extra book is like kind of the whole point.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  Like you could cut out easily.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Can I skip to that book then?

• 1:02:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no. I mean, you really. You really could. You could read the last, you could read the first chapter.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  You could read the first like 200 pages and the last 50 pages.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, you you gotta read some middle pages. So you can read the first 20 pages. I'm not going to spoil anything. These are literally the first words of the book. The moon blew up unexpectedly without warning.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got it. I got to.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like that. I I promise you I did not spoil anything. It is they're the first words of the book. You read through that. You read through the part where they like, understand. Then you like skip way ahead to the end of that piece. And then you like read the little book at the end. And then all of the

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  There's some good stuff in the middle.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's like, you know, Game of Thrones is like just a series of dinner things happening.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Just all dinners.

• 1:03:36Nilay Patel?

  It's my new show pitch for HBO. It's like a series of dinners interspersed with murders.

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I'm thinking. It's a bunch of New York hip New Yorkers and they have dinner every so often. But in between the dinners.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  Extremely unrealistic.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  In between, they eat at their desks every day. It's a bunch of hip New Yorkers eating at their desks. Every now and again, they discuss dinner, but don't know where to go, so they don't go anywhere. Every couple of episodes, half of them die. That's the whole show. New New Yorkers are all constantly being introduced and telling jokes until they do die. Um, anyway, so Seven Eves is like, read that first part, then there's like a revelation that you should like know about.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  There's some like cool, like space survival stuff in the middle that is a bummer to miss, but it takes, it's like, it's like 15% of the middle 800 pages is good.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Can somebody just make me a guide of like which pages of Seven Eves I should read?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  But then I'd have to read it again.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  I read it on my Kindle and I literally thought, I'm gonna wear out this button. I've turned so many pages on the Kindle.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  See, I think I would have actually been better with a physical book because then I could have at least felt like the physical passage of it.

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know how on a Kindle it like tells you percentage of the book and time left?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  It's like, all right, so it does. So it tells you, like, it tries to guess how fast you read, but it doesn't, in Seven Eves, it doesn't take account for skimming endless technical description. So it like keeps on getting it wrong. It's like, you have two minutes left. And it's like, no, dude, I definitely just blew that.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  No, the worst part of the Kindle stuff is like, I read books that have lots of footnotes. And so it's like, you are 30% through the book. I'm like, oh God, this is gonna be, I'm done. What happened?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Oh, see, I read, I account for that.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Oh, so do you like check to see where the footnotes start?

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  No, I read the, figure out the tone of the book. And I'm like, how many footnotes is this book gonna have?

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta do lightning round and we're gonna wrap this up. Let's start with this. There was a VR fashion show.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  No, it hasn't happened yet. It's on Sunday.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  Balenciaga has a brand new designer and they have decided to stream their fashion show in virtual reality. It's in Paris, so it'll be in New York. I will be awake at 5:30 AM watching it on my humble Google cardboard.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  Why are you watching the cardboard when we have 10,000 better headsets to watch it on?

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  I don't think you can watch it on the Vive.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  We can watch it probably in a Gear VR.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, we could do that.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Do I have that at my house at 5:30 in the morning on Sunday?

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  I mean, you can.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  I'm gonna watch it on the... Anyways.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  We got better shit now. Anyway.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Options. But it's kind of, I mean, it's obviously like a splashy move. They're like, ooh, we got a new designer and we're gonna do this thing because no one else has streamed in VR their fashion show. But...

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  They've not done it live. They've streamed non-live.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  But then, is streaming and live, don't you have to be live?

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  No, it's like streaming like Netflix. Like Daredevil is not live. Okay, I think.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  That'd be amazing. All right, get in the hallway again, everybody. You're just gonna...

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  That really explains the acting now.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  If Daredevil was live, that would 100% explain the acting.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 1:06:37Nilay Patel?

  It's like, super lazy. Anyway. No, Murdock, don't hurt anybody. Oh, God. Sorry. I'm sorry, Nicole.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Ow. Wow. She's real mad at you.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, we, it's been, go ahead. This is your show.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  No, I'm done. I just said everything I need to say.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  No, you haven't, clearly.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  And I'm done.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're fighting. So we're fighting. We both drank a bucket of wine.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  I drank half of my bucket.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  All right. Kanye's new album is called TurboGrafx-16.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Sounds real nut art.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I'm into it. If there is a reason The Verge exists, it's for a major rapper or his name is console after 80s, 90s game consoles. Name is Alabama.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I bet their price is just way up on eBay.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  Um, Scott Kelly is back from Earth.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Yay.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Apparently, he like, he's taller and younger and...

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  I'm going to space.

• 1:07:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, NBA players, like, I gotta go to space.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  I mean, technically it makes you weaker because it's just stretching out your spine and it comes back and you get shorter. Because I was really disappointed when I found that out.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  Um, Microsoft's Astoria project put...

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  I have so many feelings about this.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  I don't think I can fit them all in the late...

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Just explain what Astoria is.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  So it was a project so that Android apps could work on Windows Phone and possibly Windows 10. It was named after the neighborhood that I live in. And so, of course, it was doomed from the start.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  I really like Astoria. Also, why can nobody make Android work on desktops? Except for that one company.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Remix OS.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Remix OS.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, I bought this pink 5P and I love the hardware so much and it fills me with joy and Chrome OS is so slow.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Well, on that thing.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's because the graphics card isn't supported.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm doing my, um, my old MacBook Pro 15, like one of the, the last, one of the ones that had the last CD drives. I'm switching it to Chrome OS.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Joanna did a black MacBook and she loves it.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  Um, what else we got here? iPad Pro 9.7.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Apparently they're gonna call it an iPad Pro instead of like iPad Air 3 or whatever. And that means it's gonna have a pencil. Apparently it's gonna have a better screen for reflection and they're also gonna call the iPhone, the new iPhone, the iPhone SE instead of putting a five in there.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  But it's still gonna be small.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  How do you feel about a small phone?

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  We've been over this.

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  Why don't you do it? It's lightning round.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  I don't care.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  Strike.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it's fine, but it won't, it's not for me. I love my six plus.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  I can't wait.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Addy, Xbox console upgrades, which to me sounds like a very bad idea.

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, I really don't know why you would still buy an Xbox.

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  You can play Oculus on it.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  You can play Quantum Break. We just found out more about Quantum Break.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. I mean, whatever. Um, any thoughts on the Apple legal case? The FBI case, which to me, by the way, still the most important story in tech, but I just can't talk about it anymore than I've been talking about it already.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  No, it is absolutely major and the problem is that it's kind of like the election that I'm not sure I want to know what everyone else thinks about it.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Yo, that's real.

• 1:09:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Neil, here's one for you. Supercars at the Geneva Auto Show, all the supercars were there, every single one.

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Bugatti Chiron is beautiful. Um, I agree with Chris that the new Lamborghini is like, nah. Yeah, um, you should watch the snap while I guess it's over, but we had great snaps from the auto show. Um, Phil Esposito, adorable, went around supercars, super good. Um, I don't know. I think there's like a lot to be said about cars that don't all look the same and have different kinds of vengeance in them. And like every time I think about the Apple car, it's like they're kind of betting on the same thing as the iPhone, which is everyone will standardize around one thing. But I don't think cars are, I don't think cars are the same way.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  You see that, well, I forget the Hyundai car. You see the story about that?

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  The Ioniq.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  The Ioniq?

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  It's like, you can buy it as a hybrid. You could buy it as an electric that you can replace the battery. You could buy it as this other thing. We'll just, we'll do whatever. It doesn't matter.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  It's real Samsung of cars.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:10:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's modular. It's like the, it's the LG G5 of cars.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Here, it's got a camera grip.

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's terrible. Um, okay, that's it. Is that it? Lightning round over. Make a, make a lightning sound. Do you have any lightning round items for us?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Lightning doesn't make sound. Thunder does.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Well, if they're related though, technically, I mean.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  Lightning, they, it's the same thing. Just one comes to you later.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  I'm just saying.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  The thunder is the sound of the light.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  What's a lightning sound?

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  Thunder.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Oh. I think Dieter's point was right then.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:11:08Nilay Patel?

  You guys don't understand. You see the lightning and then you hear the thunder later because it's the same.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's not a lightning sound. It's the sound of thunder.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  I mean, we can all agree that my point still stands because words and concepts don't make noise. Mouths and things in the world do.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Technically, your mouth isn't making the noise, right?

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  They're not really though.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  It's the vibration of the air.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the lightning itself doesn't make the noise. It's the disruption that causes the air around it.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Listen to the air, everyone. That's it. Here's, it's, look, this is a Vergecast. I'm not actually speaking right now. I'm just causing the air to vibrate in your car.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yo buddy, you just got actually.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  By who?

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Me.

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the same thing.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  If you'd like to follow us.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. Please tweet at Backline and explain to him that thunder is the sound of lightning.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Thunder is the word that represents the sound of lightning.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  It's later.

• 1:11:58Nilay Patel?

  It's the same thing.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  No, the word is not on there. The concept that represents symbiotics 101, brother.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  If they were the same, then they wouldn't have separate definitions. No.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  No, this is just because people, like old timey people, didn't understand that light and sound travel at different speeds. So you see the lightning first because light travels way faster and then you hear the sound.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  How can you hear a thing that you see, Eli? Explain that to me.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm seeing you right now. Wish I wasn't hearing you.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Sorry, that was just like.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  Alright, this has to be over.

• 1:12:39Nilay Patel?

  It's the same thing.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Follow us on Twitter. We're at Verge, which shouldn't be a surprise to you, given how.

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  Given the fact that you've endured this hour and a half.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  We're also on Snapchat. If you missed the Geneva Auto Show snaps, I'm very sorry, but there are more awesome snaps coming. We are Verge there. We're also on Instagram, also Verge. It's pretty consistent. We're also on iTunes. It's iTunes.com/theverge, where you'll find a ton of podcasts, including What's Tech? Control, Walt, Delete, and Verge ESP. And there's also Rico. He's got a couple of podcasts you should check out, too. You can follow us on YouTube. That's cool to do.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  Verge.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, subscribe there.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  I am Backlon. Neil is Reckless. Addy is the Dextrarchy.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Is that the right way to say that?

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Sweet. And Nicola is Nicola Fumo with an underscore.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Between my first and last names.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Right in there.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm just, it's the same.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Let's all go try the vibe.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Rock and roll. We're gonna put Nicola on a VR headset. Goodbye.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Bye.