You've Got to Be a Grownup When You're on the Internet

CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE As The Vergecast progresses as a premier, category leading podcast, it is important to identify its core strengths and messaging. To that end, we have identified some key themes: -Confused introductions -Varied degrees of Star Wars enthusiasm -Hype -British Christmas specials -Principals -Food and Man living in harmony 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.

• 0:06Nilay Patel?

  Hello.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Emmet.

• 0:07Nilay Patel?

  Hi. No, that was gonna be great. It was gonna be great. Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. A show where Chris Plant just trolls the shit out of our audience. You know, if you would just let me start it. No! I could do, go so well. I just, greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Vergecast.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  You guys made that sound like that was gonna be a very, very strange opening and like, I didn't see anything unusual about it.

• 0:31Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Except the giant pause.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was completely unusual. Neelai missed the landing and then blamed it on me. There's nothing unusual happening.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  That's how we begin the show. Uh huh. By not doing it well. I feel like, and this is how I think about it, we do everything else so well that we need to screw something up consistently.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  We gotta be relatable.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. We're like people. We're just like you guys.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  When you do this motion, you're not like people.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Also, also. Yes, that's, that's how I think of the people. Have you seen us on Twitter? Because we screw up plenty in, plenty of places. It's fun. Okay. Hello, this is The Vergecast. It's a show about The Verge, I guess, and like, mostly our emotions having to do with The Verge. I'm Neelai Patel. I'm Dieter Bohn.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  I'm Chris Plant.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  And I'm not gonna let you do it. I'm gonna introduce you, because you're special. We have a guest. Her name is Emily Oshida. She is our new entertainment editor. She is the best.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I don't think I'm a guest anymore.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh shit!

• 1:33Speaker 02

  I think I'm at home.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  I can't, I don't know if that was like an awe moment or a super burn moment.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  That's like really rough. But no, Emily's our new entertainment editor. We're very excited. Obviously, I think if you've been reading The Verge for a while, if you're listening to the show, you certainly have, I hope. Because if you just walked into this, like, what the fuck?

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  You know that we've been covering entertainment a lot. We do a lot of stories. We're gonna talk about Star Wars in a minute. And Emily's here. She came off a great stint at Grantland for a while. And to help us focus and like really direct that stuff and like make it cooler and better and more Verge-like. So that's very exciting. Do you want to say anything?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I'm stoked to be here. I am, and I'm glad to be back, back behind a podcast, Mike.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Where I belong.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Emily had a great podcast for a long time and now she's here and I, I'll tell you this, a sneak peek into 2015 at The Verge, we are gonna do more podcasts. We used to have lots of shows. We're gonna have some more. I know Chris has been trying to podcast Subtrifuge all over the place.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Every single meeting that I have at The Verge, Chris Plant like walks in and like tries to insert his podcast into the agenda. It just like pops up.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Did you check the iTunes reviews?

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Like, guys, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta clean your dishes.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  That's how you do everything.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  You tell people to troll iTunes reviews?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Do this.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, all right. Everybody gets a podcast.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Can I say one other bonus?

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't think we can stop you.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Since Emily joined our company, before, there was silence when I did my work. Now Sailor Moon gently plays throughout the day. And it's like, is that Sailor Moon?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Sailor Moon. I hope at least one person from the Grantland office is listening to this right now because they will know exactly what you are talking about.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  It's amazing. The phone just.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  All of my phone sounds are Sailor Moon sound effects and.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  I just, I, I appreciate the commitment to going through and like downloading all the audio.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  It was an afternoon project. I think it rained one afternoon in Los Angeles and I'm like, shit, I guess I know what I'm doing today.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  No one's going outside here today.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  I like it. Okay. We, there's actually some stuff to talk about this week. It was a slow week in its way.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  We had two weeks of stuff.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  Because of Thanksgiving.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  Also, hi, I'm Sam Sheffer. I have a podcast also.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Now, Sam, we were, I was gonna, I was gonna surprise the people with your new.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  I just, you guys did the intro and then you got into the news.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  That camera needs to go down.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Your title is cut off.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  Guys, guys, so here's the thing.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  All right.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  We have, there are more new people there. There's a lot of new, a lot of new faces here.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  And Sam, I know we've been hype checking with Sam, but Emily, she's new, she's in charge and has renamed, renamed Sam's area as the hype audit department.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  It seems a little more, yeah.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  We've given him a much more professional desk and title.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  He's the government job.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  In the corner.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Like, why does he have a five?

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Hype audit, all right.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Is that, has that not been there?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  No, this is not what you, I'm usually in that corner.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  This is not, okay, okay.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  You need a, you need a presidential portrait.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Let me describe what Sam looks like right now.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  Sam is a middle school principal. The area, he's behind, there's a wood panel behind him with an American flag and a nameplate that says his swagasty.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  He's really stressed.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  We've been debating, is it swagasty or swagasty?

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  It's swagasty, okay.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, can I describe one other thing?

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  The way the video shot is framed is that they didn't move the background over far enough so you can see that it's just a piece of wood. And you look in the far right corner, it's just, oh, I'm like, no.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay, okay, okay, okay. No, that's just like my middle school. Like, they ran out of wood paneling.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  There's been some budget cuts at those departments.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  The kids are happy. The kids are happy.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  There've been some real swag cuts at the school. They, they didn't want to cut the music department, so they stopped wood paneling.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Music bust.

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  What is happening on this podcast?

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man, you're the hype auditor. You tell, hype audit, wood paneling.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Guys, you can tell we're really stalling about talking about Star Wars.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to talk about Star Wars.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  It's an exhausted topic.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's probably true, but we have to talk about it because it's our show.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Hype audit, the, the trailer was fucking awesome.

• 5:51Nilay Patel?

  You don't get to declare your own hype audit. You have to, other people audit you.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Do I have to submit a, a request to hype audit?

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Listen, listen, listen, we've paid our hype taxes. But can we talk, okay, Emily, I know it's exhausting, but tell us why you believe the Star Wars trailer is exhausted. I know, I know Chris is gonna have many opinions about marketing.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing is that that trailer dropped while I was in the middle of moving to New York and I didn't really have an internet connection. So I spent about 24, I, I watched it on my phone like in a very, not very good way, like it was skipping, it wasn't loading properly. And then I was just like looking at the internet and watching the reaction for a day after that without really fully feeling like I had watched the trailer. I, I tend to have experiences like this with things like that. For some reason I have bad luck with this kind of thing, but um, yeah. So by the time I actually sat down and watched it with headphones on, I was like, oh yeah, let's do this Star Wars trailer. I just, I, it was, it was like it had already had the, all of the, the life sapped out of it or something, but I'm still, I, it's a good trailer.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  It's like, I, mm.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Sorry, I was gonna say, here's, here's how I recommend you watch the Star Wars trailer for the first time. Go to your family's house for Thanksgiving.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's where you're supposed to watch.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  While your five-year-old nephew is watching The Phantom Menace, run upstairs, pause the movie, sit down with him and hit play, and just watch him lose his mind.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  Is that what happened?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  It was pretty great. Here's what I think about Star Wars, only small children like it and people who remember what it was like to like it when they were small children. It's like the Princess Bride though. Uh, no, that's true.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Bride is actually.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  Like the princess, if you don't, no, no, like so Becky, uh, my wife is, had never seen it as a child. And so like one of her best friends like loves it, favorite movie, we gotta all watch it. And I was like, oh, I love that movie, you gotta watch it. And we watched it and we were both sitting there like watching with the new adult eyes. And she was like, what is this?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  It's garbage.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it was really rough. Like it almost tore our relationship apart.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Why?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Well, I wanted you to tell your story about, about the other eighties movie that you recently rewatched.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Oh, we're doing a whole thing on that tomorrow.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Never mind. You have to wait.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  The, we're putting this out tomorrow.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we're making a separate video just about that.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Are we doing a whole series about it?

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Does it hold up?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  You know, this is what we do. I come onto the program and I talk about things that I may or may not make. Go review us, five stars on iTunes.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  No, you can tell the people, give it away, it's fine.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I want to talk about Star Wars.

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  I want to talk about my thing, because here's my feeling about Star Wars. And I'm gonna say, I like the trailer. Before this, I had like a whole rant about like, how I don't like Disney's method of like, making marketing last forever. And I kind of felt that way with the James Bond news.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Which we're gonna talk about, where it's like, great, I now have to care about marketing for two years before I get to enjoy something. But, with this, here's what it felt like, and I didn't realize I had this growing on me, but it was like, I loved the original trilogy of Star Wars movies, like, obsessively as a kid. That was, that was my thing, that was my G.I. Joe's.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  And then, the new one came out, the new trilogy, the prequels, and it created this like, boil on my neck, of like, hate. And it was like, growing, and growing, and growing, to the point where I like, couldn't even remember liking any Star Wars. Uh, and, watching that trailer felt like I was getting that boil lanced, and like, all the hate was spewing out.

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh!

• 9:19Speaker 01

  So it's not that I, it's not that I want to see Star Wars, it's that like, it just feels like a relief to be like, oh yeah, there was something I liked about this thing, and now I can kind of remember it again. Like, it probably, like, reminded me why I cared, to begin with.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I have almost the exact same relationship with Star Wars as a fan. It's like, yeah, it's like a very, it's really hard to just watch this trailer with like, completely clean eyes. Like, you can't just go into it being like, yay, I'm purely excited about Star Wars, there's going to be a million other caveats with it.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  But, I mean, I don't know, we haven't seen that much, it's not like there's anything to really...

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, who's the stormtrooper? There's all the, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, that's why I'm saying it.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Uh, John Boyega?

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I think that's how you pronounce his name.

• 10:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, but there's like, the controversy over a black stormtrooper. Like, it's at that level of like, they reset the canon, right? And it's like...

• 10:15Speaker 01

  But, but they, eh, I, that's...

• 10:17Speaker 03

  No, they reset the canon...

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  To just be the other movies.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  Including the three movies that suck. And I think that's like, that's why I have such, like, fear, because I would prefer they reset the canon to like, just pretend this never happened.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  The prequels?

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  We didn't have, what is it, Metaclorians?

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Can we make that a sound clip that we can just use every single time?

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  You can have Sailor Moon on your phone and whenever my phone rings, it's all us grumbling, all us being somewhat unhappy.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  I just read the, oh shoot, some guy did a book about Star Wars and he like got into like the origins of it and all about Lucas writing it and how much effort he put into writing it and how it was like, he's gonna go bleed on the page is what he kept on saying. And dude's really bad at writing.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Like, he would just spend months and months and just overwrite it and people would be too, like, the reason that the other movies turned out well, the first ones, is that there was a story about, about Han Solo, the actor's name is Harris Ford, saying, "You can, you can write this shit, George, but you can't speak it."

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  And like, people said that stuff to him in the, the first trilogy and then nobody was able to say it in the second one.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  And also, was, what's his name, Lawrence Kasdan?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Lawrence Kasdan, yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Wrote Empire and Jedi 2, yeah.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, I just think that George, did he read, you know, modern, do you guys know this? Modern Farmer Magazine is a magazine, is like, shutting down, basically. But, so as I was reading-

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Media news!

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  Let me get there. Let me get there.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Really sad for goats.

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  Let me get there. So this magazine started because-

• 11:56Speaker 03

  How Star Wars conquered the universe.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  Anne Marie Gardner wanted to pitch a TV show about like, farming. And she was like, "The only way I could think to frame this TV show would be if the main character was the editor of a farming magazine." And then she like, kept going and she ended up just making a magazine.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is true. And instead of, there was no TV show and she just was like, "To figure out what the editor of Farm Magazine should do, I should like, plot out a farming magazine." And then she like, plotted it out. And she's like, "Oh, this is a really good idea." And she made the magazine. George Lucas is like, "What would cause war in the galaxy?" "A trade conflict." And then he like, made a trade conflict and then he fucking made a movie about it. And it's like, that's your problem. Like, you didn't stop. You shouldn't have made the magazine. And like, the whole prequels are about like, taxes. They're, they're a hype audit.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  Sam's not happy with that.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  What's the audio equivalent of shaking your head in shame and disgust?

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  Sam, Sam. Real talk, though. Hype check the trailer.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  I liked it a lot. I really, I really did like it a lot. Because, because, okay, so I'm really, I'm gonna get a lot of heat for this. I haven't really even, I haven't really seen Star Wars. I saw the, the three originals as a child. I was a child when I saw these movies with my parents. And I just, I don't really remember seeing, like, I've seen the Back to the Future trilogy at least five times. And I'm like, I know that movie. I don't really know Star Wars. I saw, I had a birthday party when I was like, whatever. What is the connection between, no, no, no, no. No, no, I'm explaining, I'm explaining the lead up to this. Because like, I, I. Just let him go. I'm, I'm suppressing the boil on your neck.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  So, so my connection to Star Wars is not nearly as deep as most people's connection to Star Wars is. I just know it and like, know the hype and lightsabers are cool and that kind of thing. No, we gotta talk about that lightsaber. And, and to me, I mean, I'm a huge Lost fan, so, and you know, seeing J.J. Abrams have a hand in this is really cool. And the trailer just felt very, very good. It was like, wow, this looks, I'm, I'm anticipating seeing this film. A lot of like, quick shots and the music was good and it felt, I don't know, it felt really nicely done.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Okay, can we pause for just one second? Because when, when you said Lost, Emily's hand did this thing. And I don't know what it was.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I was making a mental bookmark, which looks like me punching the table.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  So, okay, about Lost.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So you have weird ideas about bookmarks?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Like, I just punched a hole in this.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  My bookshelf was a disaster.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Do we give J.J. Abrams credit for, like, the whole of Lost or just the beginning?

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Like, maybe it's like the first episode.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  The thing that freaks me out about J.J. Abrams is, uh, name an example of him, like, building on a universe instead of establishing a universe. And the only one, like, that I have personal experience with is the second Star Trek movie and, uh, well.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't really know, I mean, I'm not a big, I don't, I'm not a J.J. Abrams fan. In fact, I wrote something for Greyland when it was first announced that he was gonna do it, where I was just like, I just felt like he has the monopoly on so much genre stuff right now. It just doesn't seem right and it does, it, not even that it doesn't seem right, it's just like, not very interesting. Like, I don't need to see every beloved franchise that nerds love be filtered through his vision, like.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  And lens flares.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, particularly that.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  The one thing that I do appreciate about him though, versus, and the Terminator trailer just came out today, is.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  Talk about that.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. For contrast. For contrast. Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  But at least JJ's movies are shot in daylight. Like, so much of the good stuff you actually see.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And it's like, that is refreshing on its own. And at this point, I don't feel like it's reliable to expect most directors to do that, which is such a small thing. But so much of that trailer, that Terminator thing, except for San Francisco, which is like, great, I remember the end of X-Men 3. Um, but it's just like that.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  Do you?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot, yeah, because it was.

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  Cause I drank my way through that movie.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  That, that is a fantastic ending of a film because it starts out in the day and they're like, oh, it's time to do action and it's immediately midnight. It's like, oh, cool. Good thing you have control of time, X-Men.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Weather.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Weather, yes, yes. Storm comes in and it, I don't know, it needs to be midnight. That's not.

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  Can I ask a fundamental question about Storm and in the X-Men series? Oh, man. I just, I just wanna go here.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Sure, go ahead.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  Her.

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna go deep, it's gonna happen, alright?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  Is her power to control the weather or to control water?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  It's weather.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  It's weather, right?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  And that's how she can fly because she can make like a miniature tornado under her feet so that she can levitate.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. But if you can just like make clouds, like clouds are made of water vapor.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 16:34Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you can just like, right, like that's a thing that I think about.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Look, there's an element called weather that she has.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  That she has power over.

• 16:43Nilay Patel?

  Got it.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  She has wind and water, but not earth, fire and heart.

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  God.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  She's got some heart.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  Alright, just, I've always wondered. Anyway, carry, carry on with, with your thing that you're talking about.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  No, I'm just saying, I, I like that I can expect to see that movie and like actually see the action sequences when they happen.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  It's so simple and stupid and that doesn't mean it's gonna be a great movie, but at least I have that, which if we're gonna like switch over to Terminator now.

• 17:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, we, we need to go back to lightsaber, but let's switch to Terminator and I'm gonna say, you know what? I like the trailer, I think it's gonna be a good movie. You like the Terminator trailer? Yes, I do. You know why? Why do you hate it? I bet you all the reasons you hate it are wrong. I hate it. Except for the night thing, which is totally true. I will say one thing about that trailer. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  Arnold Schwarzenegger is at least three distinct ages throughout the trailer. Including flying old man.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  That is the only reason I want to see the movie.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  That makes no, no, it seems like that, that they have the same problem as Star Wars in the Terminator series and they're solving it in a worse way.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  No, I think they're solving, I think that you need to think of the source material of Terminator as a fable, as set. You don't get mad when they make another Cinderella movies. Oh God, here we go. They're screwing up the Cinderella story. They're resetting Cinderella assholes. No.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  No, I actually think that. I think that all the time.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Really?

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  And so like the Terminator source material is like a fable to us now. It's part of our culture. And so you can just make a new movie and not worry about the continuity of how the other movies lead up to it.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Even though they kind of do. It's like they do just enough.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  They do, they do.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  To humor the hardcore fans.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Time travel, crazy reset alternate universes. Okay, now we can do what we want.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, but the last one had none of that.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  But they get to play on the same tropes of the original movies. That's actually fun.

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  The last one, what was the?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  They all exist in the same timeline, I believe.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  That one was Judgment Day?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's like seven timelines.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  Judgment Day is the second one.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Not Judgment Day. No, what am I talking about? The one with Christian Bale in it? Was that the last one?

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't remember.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  But there's no time travel on that one.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And Anton Yelchin.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  That one like literally happens in chronological order. Huh?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Oh, he's in Star Trek.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, yeah, he's doing all right.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  What, I mean, what do you think? Does Terminator look good to you?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm not a, I'm not the person to ask. That's one thing that is, that's a, yeah, it's a dark spot for me. I have no, no.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  Right, because all.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Serious, yeah.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  Because all the new ones have been so terrible.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  It's not even that they're terrible. I have nothing against terribleness at all. Obviously I'm into Star Wars. It's like.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's easy. That's achieved. I should not get an O for that. That's not, that's just out there.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  The camera's vibrating because like all the fans are like trying to push their way through it.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  They're gonna walk down security downstairs.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Like millions of subway riders just started hitting each other.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Somebody said it. We've all known all along.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I, I, I mean, I've watched, I'm like, I've watched, I think I've watched all of the, I think I watched the first three movies at least once. All of them and, and I watched a little bit of the show too, but like, I have no idea how that one, I have a sense of the timeline, but it's like, I also don't know how all these different things exist within this single mythology, how much of it is reboot or like reinterpretation of it and like, I don't know, I, I just, I haven't paid enough attention to really know.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  My favorite diss that I saw was Jordan Hoffman, one of like the, one of my favorite movie writers and just plugging him there, right? But he was like, it looks like a mediocre motion comic. Yeah. And it's like, it has that, like, it has this flatness to it. Yeah. Where like, the guy jumping from one car to the next looks bad, uh, the robots look flat. Yeah. There's something to it. It's clearly not fitted. People haven't shot, uh, what is it, uh, real stuff in so long, like they've been using CG, that when you're seeing these movies finally going back and like trying to use practical effects, it feels awkward, like they're not that great at it.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, Fast and the Furious, one of the best movies out there, um, gets it so well that like, whenever I see these like car sequences, it's like, oh, great, cool. You figured out that cars can flip. Like that is like every movie that isn't Fast and the Furious, when they try to do something interesting with vehicles, they're like, but what if it flipped? Oh, great, cool. How many millions of dollars do you need? Cool, just kick it all.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  You know what movie had the best, oh, Chris is gonna kill me for saying this.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Oh, here we go.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  One of the movies with the best car effects in the world, practical car effects.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Tork?

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Motorcycles.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and it's, it's really bad, uh, uh, uh, The Dukes of Hazzard, the new one.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Really?

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, when they're drifting the, the Charger, like, that's hard to do. Like, it's like a, like, they, it's like.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Have you done this?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  As a man who drifts his Charger.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  No, it's like, it's like that, like, there's a reason drift cars are not generally like 60s muscle cars. And they like, make it fly, like, there's good driving in that movie, that's all I'm saying. Chris, like, you can hear Chris like thundering down the stairs. Super mad at me. Uh, okay, there's other stuff going on. There's James Bond stuff.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Lightsaber.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  We have Emily here, so I'm just like going hard on entertainment news to start with.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I haven't watched the James Bond trailer yet. I should have.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  It's not even a trailer.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Not the trailer. Oh, yeah, I saw the news.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  Casting news. Is James Bond also like a legendary fable?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  He's like a superhero.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Especially in this iteration because they're bringing back all the classic Bond stuff that they weren't allowed to use because of lawsuits.

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know a little bit about this, but you probably know more.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  So, I mean, there was the, there was the fight over, uh, Thunderball, but then like the, like the rights to some of the original Bond mythology like Spectre. And, uh, some of the villains, uh, like Paramount had it or it's like there, there was, there was this whole debate of who could make it. That's why we had, you know, the extra Bond movie in the early eighties. Anyway, I don't, I don't, I can't go through the whole story. It's somewhere a geek is very mad at me right now. But the fact that like they're rebooting stuff, they're bringing back, they're bringing in a new M and they're sort of like bringing back the classic mythology of the villains and Spectre. Uh, is kind of exciting and it just, you know, there's no, there's never been continuity in Bond. They'll, they'll do continuity for like a six movie stretch and then they start over again.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Can I make an awful prediction? Cause something terrible just hit me.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  So they're bringing back all these like established things, all like the pandering to fans. And I think of how every, uh, company wants its Marvel now where they can like milk Spider-Man across like eight movies. And I think like they fought to get the rights for Spectre and they have Christoph Waltz as like the villain and they're putting big casting into it.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  I maybe probably this isn't going to happen, but it makes me wonder if they're like, hey, what if we turn Bond into like three movies? What if we had an M movie? And what if we had a villain movie? And Spectre is like a big thing. What if we expand it?

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, like the Spectre Universe?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Just about the Spectre Universe.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  No, that's a bad TV show in the making.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, like just.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  It feels.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  Spectre, the TV show.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  It's not until you said that, it's like, man, that makes a lot of cynicism.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  They're like, well, Shield is an acronym of a TV show.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  And what if they all, okay.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I would watch the M show, just like her chilling at home.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  No, but she's not, she's.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, but did you say there's, did you say there's gonna be a new one?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  No, no, it's, it's Refine's.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I didn't see that.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  That's, I don't know. I, I think James Bond is like, uh,

• 24:12Speaker 03

  There's just a moment where he, like, the character stopped being cool. Because he's like-

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Get out. He's a dad in a suit. Like, it's, there's something like-

• 24:21Speaker 01

  No, I think it's the opposite. He was uncool. I mean, this is a dude who, there's like, one of his most famous action sequences is skiing down a hill casually, shooting at people, and they're like, whoa. And then he gets in like, a submarine, and like, he seduces a woman who is like, 50 years old, and they're like, and she's like, fine, great, like, find love later in life, more people shooting. But like, he's not like, anything but a cruel dad.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  Right, no, the essence of this character is like, the coolest dad, like, the cheesiest coolest dad.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Or the worst dad, because he like, can't stay with any woman, and treats them awful, and sometimes he shoots them.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't, he doesn't shoot them all. Just the evil ones.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  They made the, um, they made this current Bond, though, kinda emo, just because he lost his lady in that first one.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  No, but the Bond losing his lady is like, they've been trying to like, humanize James Bond by killing a lady for like, 20 years.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  No, the Pierce Brosnan Bond lost a lady.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Oh my god, you guys.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Was that like a multiple movie arc?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Honor Magic's Secret Service.

• 25:22Nilay Patel?

  Cool Dad Dieter Bones about to get real pissed.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  The guy who got the one movie with the frilly shirt.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  His wife died at the end, and the car crashed, killed by Spectre, by the way, and then that's what made him angsty.

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  Emo Bond, like, they really, really tried with Emo Bond.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And now they wanna bring back Funny Bond, maybe, yeah, a little bit of that. Didn't Dano Craig complain about how Austin Powers ruined the fun of James Bond?

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  No, I would say Triple X ruined James Bond.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm not even kidding.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Triple X didn't ruin anything. Triple X had to matter to a single person for it to ruin anything.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Got Ben.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  Sam, I bought it, James Bond.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Triple X.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  James Bond has been around, it, it feels like days of our lives, like, that, that series has been around, like, just enough already, 19, whatever, goes back to the 60s. Like, how many more James Bond movies can you make?

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  How many more, I'm, I'm doing, yeah, that's a question, is it like a classic?

• 26:23Speaker 04

  They'll, they'll just keep doing it.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Forever and ever.

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  But the question is, will anyone care?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  No, the question was, hype on it, triple X.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  That movie was good.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  I got it, cool.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  I liked the last Bond movie, though, I will say.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  I saw it in IMAX, too, because it had that slick Richard Deacon cinematography, that whole sequence in Shanghai. That was cool, man. That was a great movie.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  I also liked that it's just Home Alone. At the end of the movie, they're like, but what if we just had him be Kevin? He was like, yeah, that sounds good. He's gonna cause hijinks in that house.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Daniel Craig is a better James Bond than Pierce Brosnan, though.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  Although Pierce Brosnan was great for the bringing Bond back after the height.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  He was Bond Dad. Pierce Brosnan was Bond Dad.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  No?

• 27:08Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Who was Bond Dad?

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, who was the other one?

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Uh, Sean.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  The bad one, the worst one.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Dalton is the worst one.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:15Nilay Patel?

  Timothy Dalton, that's my dad's Bond.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  But he wasn't really daddy, he was just bad. He was just coked up Bond.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  Eighties Bond.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  I mean, the.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  When's the next time you think we'll have a pretty Bond? Because Pierce Brosnan was a pretty, pretty man.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  I would argue.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  Craig, Daniel Craig is pretty pretty.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Hype on it, Daniel Craig.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  You can't see what I'm doing right now, but I'm giving him the okay. He's a good, great lucky man.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  What was the first? You can't see what I'm doing, but I'm giving him the okay.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Casino Royale had him, like, coming out of the ocean and, like, whipping his hair back shirtless.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Like, completely irony-free. It was great. Oh, yeah.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  I will say, um, no, it's funny, because James Bond, like, for Verge audience, like, James Bond is, like, the gadgety one, right?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and it's just funny, because.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  He's a Sony Ericsson.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, all of his gadgets have been so bad lately. It's like, check out my cool Nokia. I'm driving an Aston Martin. It's like, you wouldn't, I don't, that's actually, like, I can't, I can't believe you.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  It was a Sony Ericsson or BMW.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, was it?

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Was that in Casino Royale?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  No, that was, that was pre-Casino Royale. Uh, they brought that, the Aston Martin for the new stuff. Look, man, I was telling Plant earlier, like, I played the James Bond role-playing game from Victory Games. I know my James Bond lore.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  Wow, alright.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  At least I used to.

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  Is it? So here's, yeah, here's the question. Is it possible for a modern James Bond to have cool gadgets for a gadget, like, world? That's deep.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but no, it can't be like, cool gadgets to make you believe in the future. It has to be like, cool, clever things that you wouldn't normally want to carry around or have thought of. But like, Bond used to be like, this is a thing that like, whoa, that, I can't believe the technology that enabled that. And like, that doesn't matter anymore, like, that won't impress us. It has to be like, oh, that's a clever thing.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  I also feel like the Nolan Batman, Batman movies took over that, that lane a little bit as far as, I don't know. I feel like there were more things that were like, insane technology and like, the scene where you just unveil the car and stuff. That, that really became like, the one kind of fun, not super serious part of those movies.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  No, because I watched the first, like, Batman Begins, that, that movie is way more comic book. Like, that series like, took a really hard turn with The Dark Knight, towards like, gritty realism. But the first movie is like, super comic booky, like, in its way. I don't know. But yeah, I don't, like, I just don't think James Bond can like, like, part of James Bond is like, suddenly he has a pen that's a gun.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  I think the other thing is, you, it's more serious, so you can't have like, that lackey stuff, right? Like, back in the day, it could be like, it's a penguin, but it's actually a robot. And you sneak inside, James.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  James, nobody sees you. He's a six-foot tall penguin.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  I feel like audiences now are gonna be way more skeptical of that kind of stuff, too. You can't have a parachute inside a pen, because people will be like, nah, that couldn't happen, or whatever. Like, people will actually be thinking.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's been one too many Apple design videos of Johnny I being like, it took me hours to design this thing.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Like, he had, he had the actual jetpack that people were trying to sell, and it was the first time anybody had actually seen it. And it was a huge, holy shit moment. But like, there's no technology that is feasible that you could like, discover by watching James Bond. Right? It's just, there's theverge.com, we're gonna scoop James Bond every time.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It also helps that like, DARPA has made things far scarier than our minds can possibly imagine.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  So it's like, oh, cool, a giant robot dog that'll chase you down and bite your face off? Oh, don't worry, we've had that for five years.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we should keep going.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we should keep going.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  We didn't talk about the lightsaber. Can we talk about the lightsaber?

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  I checked the lightsaber.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  It was, it's very cool. Just forget about how it works. It is badass. The one, the one comes out and then the other two, it's like, holy shit, that was awesome. Totally unexpected.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  No, do you think?

• 31:17Speaker 03

  No, totally expected. I expected the shit out of that.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  That blew my mind to smithereens. It was so badass. And like especially the voiceover too, and the dark side and just boom.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Did you know that was Andy Serkis?

• 31:29Speaker 04

  No, I didn't know that.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  It's Andy Serkis.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  He was playing with his toys while doing it.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Look, it was, it was cool. I'm allowed to like things, Dieter. You're, it's okay to like things.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  No, that's true. I will say this.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  That lightsaber is badass.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I will say this about The Verge. Uh, we're getting better at liking things and accepting that it is okay to like things.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  I love liking things.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's our favorite. Except for Android.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Crazy. I think, I think the lightsaber is cool. Neela, how do you feel about the lightsaber?

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the lightsaber is poison. I don't, oh god. I don't, I don't have any faith in this movie. That's like, that's fucked.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  You know what, you know what gives me less faith in this movie is the camera hijinks of the Millennium Falcon flying around.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Oh, that was so cool.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  No, because if you see the stabilized version, it's, all it's doing is like making a single move over the ground. If you like actually like stabilize the camera from a single perspective.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, instead they're like, oh, look at this.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  It like, it like the music comes on and it does like that awesome turn and it's just like.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Have you just been watching the trailer over this whole time?

• 32:29Speaker 04

  I really?

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Have you tried watching the trailer without the music? Cause it feels different.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  I think you have to go back and remember that the only Star Wars movie that has swag is Tia's.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Don't worry about Chris, he's fine. He's just having a heart attack.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  I mean, Emily, you do have a point. You do. I really, I haven't seen, I haven't seen the movies to have like turnbills on this.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  This is, you've probably watched more minutes of this trailer than like all of Star Wars combined. So it's okay. You're allowed to like it. It's cool.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Also Sam, you're right. The fact is you're right. Because what Dieter said is maybe the worst description of watching a movie ever. Well, if you stabilize all the images and you take the sound away, it really doesn't work quite as well. Great, yeah. I mean, if you like close your eyes and punch yourself in the neck, it isn't the best movie ever. Like.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  If you think about it.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  You're the one who described the previous movies as a festering boil.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I can still recognize something's good.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  I said the Terminator thing was good. I think this is gonna be great.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Whatever.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  I'm gonna watch the hell out of this movie.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying I'm nervous.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  The reality of the hype with the lightsaber is that it's real.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  The reality of the hype.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  The reality of the hype. Hype audit, it's cool as hell. And if you don't like it, you probably can't handle a lightsaber yourself. I'm sorry.

• 33:37Nilay Patel?

  But no one can.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  In fact, yeah.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  Let's move on. There's, okay, let's transition slightly from entertainment. I've got a segue in mind here. Ready?

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Here we go.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna happen.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Right, a segue.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  When we did the Engager podcast and Trent produced them, he would actually put in that noise.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  No, he did that. He did, it was the Jetsons car.

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, John, you have, you have something to aspire to as a podcast producer, buddy. No, so Sony Pictures Hollywood Studio, make entertainment.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of their movies got leaked over the past week. This is actually a big story. I will say that I think we were a little too slow to jump on it because we're like, oh, Sony got hacked again. Because I'm actually kind of used to Sony getting hacked. Like Sony blowing it is like a thing.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  More like even death threats.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like it's whatever. But Sony got hacked like very badly because of the interview, the movie, which is about killing Kim Jong Un, right?

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Un.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Un.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Do we know that? I don't feel like we know that for sure, though.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  That he dies.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we don't know. Well, so. Wait, the hack is definitely the malware is written in Korean that came out today. And Sony has been basically saying we are on the cusp of confirming that the hack was from North Korea for like three days now.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  But didn't they say specifically that they didn't? Like, I don't know. I'm, I'm, I feel like it has to be North Korea, but at the same time, they keep saying like, no, it definitely wasn't.

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  Sony. I think, I think Sony is actually, I think they're playing both sides because they don't want to get hacked again.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  And I think the other piece of it is, I mean, this is just like wild speculation, but I think the, the reality is probably that Sony is, it was not difficult. And they don't want to be wide open for other malicious people who are opportunistic and like riding the wave. So there's like a tiny little appeal to nationalism here. That's like, I suspect that that's why they keep talking in North Korea. But anyway, but they got hacked badly. Like four movies were leaked early.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Lots of personal.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  A lot of personal.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Juicy memos.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Internal memos complaining about Adam Sandler.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  PowerPoints.

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  The PowerPoints are make me want to kill myself.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  What are they?

• 35:44Speaker 03

  They're really bad.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  You haven't seen them?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  No, I haven't.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Oh my god, they're like for marketing, they're marketing strategies for like the Smurfs movie and stuff. And they look like they were written by somebody who maybe had like a third grade education. Like, it's like listing bubbles of like what people like about the Smurfs. It's like, I don't know, I can't even, whoa, what was that sound? Live stream, we're live, live TV.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  The hackers.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  It's the hackers.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it's, it's like, it's really bizarre. It's also, it kind of gives you an inside look at like why marketing for so many movies is so terrible.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  So here are some of the bubbles for grownups too.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Target, target categories include accessories, automotive, beverage, grownup jobs, electronics, and then this is all contained in one bubble, the next one, men's issues slash potty humor.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Potty humor.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  Slash potty humor. Men's issues slash potty humor. Or like, literally, that's like the same thing.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  That is the biggest problem with being a white man.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  Here are some key, it's like key themes for the Smurfs 2, naughty versus nice, love and happiness, friendship, the color blue, and magic.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  It feels like, it feels like notes for like an adult swim show or something. Like it's that level of bizarre abstractness, except this is actual marketing notes.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  There's like a real chance we could just do this for the rest of the show. Here are the key themes for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. Things are not always as they appear. Believe in yourself. True friends value who you are. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Food and man living in harmony.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Living in harmony.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  What? What? Which is so confusing as a concept. I don't understand.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  And so I think it was on the Gawker post, they pointed out, that's actually not what these movies are about because that food is attacking people.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  I have a question about these, the hacks, because I didn't read all of it, but I saw there was stuff in there about Adam Sandler movies and tremendous anxiety about having to make Adam Sandler.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a lot of internal stuff about.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  There are certain things that you just assume are going to be in the documentation. And if you make Adam Sandler movies, you just assume that there's going to be angst about that in the documentation, right?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  And then it proves itself to be real.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I will say that the slide for Elysium says exoskeleton insights curiosity, but don't overplay.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  That's my new Twitter bio.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  Don't overdo the exoskeleton thing, guys.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Also, like, a couple of interesting things. I think Elysium may be another movie where they were like, don't play up the sociopolitical themes of this, which is like, yeah, that was.

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  There's pretty much a movie about sociopolitical themes. I'm sorry, I'm just, I just got to the Spider-Man 2 bubbles. So here's the thing about these slides.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Adhesives.

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  Salty snacks. Carbonated beverages. That's your marketing strategy? A carbonated beverage is big business, man. There's probably a carbonated beverage guy upstairs desperately trying to sell The Verge.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Does kombucha count?

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  Yes. No, so here's, I have deep conflict in my heart about covering this because it's a hack. Like, the hackers are criminals. They shouldn't have done this. Were they sponsored by the government presumably? It's unclear. I mean, like, the overwhelming, like, evidence suggests that, like, the North Korean government, like, sponsored a hack on Sony Pictures because of this movie. And that's what everyone who's talking, like, off the record or on background is basically leading the press to, like, that conclusion. There's nothing, like, we don't know.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, nobody's really officially claimed responsibility.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  Except for, what is this, Guardians of Peace, the GOP?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  Which is just like, of all of the, of all of the political parties to get confused with, like, the GOP hacks Sony Pictures. Didn't happen. Anyway, so, but, so, like,

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  It's fascinating for us to look at these slides and report on the contents of this leak. But it's not the NSA. This isn't like the Edward Snowden files.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's really, it's, this is how major this leak is, is that it actually makes you feel bad for Sony.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Which, like, when I first saw this news, I was like, oh, you know, like, something like this happens every once in a while, and it's a giant corporate entity, and they'll bounce back. But, I mean, this is major, and this is like really affecting people's personal, and people who had nothing to do, like, people who weren't making these PowerPoints, like, regular employees are having their medical records out there for everybody to see. And that shouldn't happen to anybody, like, regardless if they put out Grown Ups 2 or not, you know?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And like you said, Sony just keeps getting it.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Like, it's just like-

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  Three years ago, the PlayStation hack.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Or this year, when, what was it, the president or vice president of Sony Online had that death-

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  And the plane-

• 40:52Speaker 01

  The plane, they had to land the plane.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  It's like, they're just, it feels like they, they take a lot of it.

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, it, it's because, I mean, Sony is, as much as they stumble in actually producing the products, they are the only company ambitious enough to try to, like, make the content, and the video game console, and the MP3 player, and like, whatever. And like, they stretch themselves across so many of these categories and try to make all the stuff, that you can only imagine, like, how vulnerable many, many, many of their systems are to do it, because they're such a crazy-ass company, basically.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  Um, but it's, so I'm conflicted, because I think the contents of this, like, give us a pretty unprecedented view into how a movie studio operates, unless you're on the inside. But the hack is like a verg story, obviously, it's like a big cybersecurity story. And it's like, which one of these things are we going to, like, which one of these paths are we gonna go down? Are we gonna, and it actually, like, I think I watched our staff sort of, like, react to this news, and none of us knew what to do.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  We just sort of, like, waited, and then we, and then we had to be like, no, this is a big story, we have to go aggressively pursue it, even though we all feel really bad about it.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I feel like the story is less about the actual information in there, because it's like, ah, some movies got leaked and stuff, and, and, you know, I mean, the, the, the PowerPoints are obviously the most entertaining thing, and that's like something you can put out there. But a lot of it, I mean, it's not like you need to report, I feel, I feel, like, on what was actually leaked. It's more, you know, the story that the leak happened, and, you know, what people are gonna do about it. Um, yeah, because it does feel a little bit, it feels a little bit weird to

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  But just start regurgitating all that stuff.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  What are you typing? You've like got into like

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  Sorry.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  I gotta tell people when I think about this Sony leak, but not on here.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  Not so that's all right. Somebody just slacked me. Somebody important just slacked me.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  What else do you have to talk about? What, something good, something happy.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  We've been talking about a lot of sad things.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  I was gonna talk about Apple and DRM, but

• 42:57Speaker 03

  really not exciting at all.

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  Exciting, I don't know. Emily, what's, what's happening exciting for you?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Um, Black Mirror.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, convince me to watch the show.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I, I, I still am like, I feel like I live in a bubble where everybody that I know watches it and thinks that it's the best show on TV because it is. It was first, uh, it was for a long time, you kind of had to say you, uh, flew to England. I think is what we used to say on our podcast about watching Black Mirror because there was not really a legal way to watch it here. Uh, about a year ago, uh, DirecTV put it on their, their audience network. And so that was the first time it was available here to watch it. Now it's on Netflix, so you can stream it and watch it at your leisure. And you should do that because there's going to be a Christmas special that will be on in the UK on December 16th.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  And here on, just on DirecTV again, on the 25th on Christmas. Um, and the first trailer for it came out today or the first, it was, it's like a Channel 4 promo. And it looks great, but, um,

• 44:01Speaker 01

  There's our boy Jon Hamm in it.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jon Hamm, just signing on to, to, to join that techno paranoia universe.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Do all British shows do Christmas specials or just Doctor Who and Black Mirror?

• 44:13Speaker 02

  It's, uh, well, Downton Abbey is doing one with George Clooney in it this year.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  What's the deal with the guy?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  It's like, uh, I've, I've, I've seen it attempted to be explained a couple of times. It's just sort of a tradition. I mean, I mean, we have Christmas specials here, but it's not like our, and we have like Christmas episodes.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Yes, it's like the early 90s.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Weirder season structure, don't they sometimes use Christmas specials as like standalone? So it's like kind of between.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in between seasons.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  That's the Downton Abbey ones, I think are always like these one standalone episodes.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Or the Office, the fight that was.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was after.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  After pretty much everything.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  But isn't there just an inherent hokeyness to like doing the holiday, like the one off?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  They're the best. Christmas episodes of everything are the best. Seconded by Halloween episodes.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Halloween episodes.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Because Halloween's where they can break the rules that the show establishes and like get away with it. Like you can have like Sean get, you know, see everybody get murdered in Boy Meets World.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  Okay, oh, that makes sense. I see what you're saying.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  I mean, that's like.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  The one rule is actually murder. Like, don't murder, don't murder my carriers.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Costumes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Emily, and why should we watch the show?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pitch you the show. Uh, so it is, uh, the easiest way to pitch it is that it is Twilight Zone for the information age. Um, each episode is a standalone story. They all take place either i- in the very near future to the semi distant future. Um, and they are all extremely plausible stories about technology ruining people's lives.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  So something happy then, is what you're giving us.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Incredibly dark and not in a like Red Wedding, Game of Thrones way. It's like dark in a, oh, I can see myself, this happening to me in 10 years. Kind of way. Uh, it will, I hate to bring this up at a tech site, but it will make you want to throw all your devices, uh, out the window.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  No, that's, that's the, that's the thesis of our site.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, great.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  Live away in like the woods.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  We just want people to see the doom coming. We don't, we don't want to stop it.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing about the show. And like, I, I mean, I, I'm love the show. There's only six episodes, two seasons, three apiece because.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  What are they, an hour long each?

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, they're all about an hour long.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Is that ever gonna, is that ever gonna happen in like the American market where we?

• 46:23Speaker 02

  They keep kind of whittling it down, I feel like. Uh, I think people have realized that a lot of times it's more economically reasonable to do a 10 episode or 13 episode run. Everybody's kind of following the, the, the premium game, cable model, but I don't know. I feel like, like channels like CBS and stuff are probably still gonna do 20 episodes.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  No, CBS will never do anything good.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Until, yeah, until it's audience time.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, can't. Like, they just like, huh, man, that Sherlock show and the BBC's pretty good. Elementary.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  It'll be made money, and then they do.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  I watched my first episode of Two and a Half Men the other day.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Oh my.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  I never, I never watched that show. Uh, I, I avoided it scrupulously. Uh, dude, that show is just.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Isn't it shockingly awful?

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  I think the first time I watched it was maybe sometime in like the second or third year it was on. Like, oh, this will just be boring and not funny, but it's actually super offensive all the time.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it really tries hard.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And trashy. That's why I'm always surprised with CBS because when I picture CBS, like its audience, I picture like my grandmother falling asleep in front of the TV.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  But then you like watch a show and all the shows are is like graphic murder and like, like really trashy sex.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Like, it's like, oh, here's Charlie. He wears like a Hawaiian shirt and here are five women in bikinis. What's gonna happen this week?

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  What's this show?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  It's Two and a Half Men.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  I thought it was Hawaii Five-O.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. See, that's the whole problem. Like, uh, which one?

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  I thought it was two brochures.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Which one is this?

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  Here's an Asian stereotype and some boobs.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's actually a really good show.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  But, but back to Black.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it's not a good show.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Back to the Black Mirror though, real quick. It is, um, it's very, yeah, it's, it's a quick watch. You can watch all of them at once. I think when I first watched it, I spread it out over a summer because once I watched the first two episodes, I was like, this is the best thing in the world. And I wanted to last forever and ever. Um, but it, I don't know. It's also really fun to talk about people, uh, talk about with people just as far as like what your favorite episode is. Cause it's very revealing about what is the thing you're most terrified of.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  Someone just tweeted at me that the pig is not plausible. I don't know what that means, but they told me.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  The pig is not plausible?

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  They told me to ask you about the pig, which is not plausible.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  The thing about that, the thing about that, I'm not gonna be spoilery about it, but the thing about that episode, he's talking about the first episode. And it is perhaps the central, uh, thing that happens in it is not plausible. But the way that the entire, um, story unfurls where, and that's the one that takes place. That's one of the only ones that really takes place in definitely our universe. You know, they talk about like YouTube and stuff like that on it. And the way that it's basically a PR catastrophe is what this is about at a very, very high level. And the way that it happens, the way that the disaster sort of explodes is incredibly plausible, I think. And that's and that that also, I think a lot of people don't like that episode for several reasons, which I don't want to.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Is it the plausibility of the pig?

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Uh, it's just the pig in general. But, uh, but I think it does a really good job of like laying out what kind of show it's going to be and like what it's concerned with. Yeah.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Yes, Steve.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  I am really curious about your general philosophy on spoilers.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Oh, um.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Cause you're like being super careful not to spoil it for us in this room.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I hate being spoiled, so I'm very empathetic to it. At the same time, I think, I think that, you know, you gotta be a grown up when you're on the internet. Have you seen an article about?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  I don't think anyone on the internet follows that rule.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  I know, it's like an uphill battle here.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  In real time, that's the rule.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  No, I mean, if you see a headline for something or a link on Twitter that it's about something you haven't watched yet, don't click on it, like, just don't. I, there have been lots of things where it's like.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  By the way, it's already on the internet.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  My, my beef with like the movie blogging community, movie writing community that I follow is some people, uh, it's not the links. Like, it's like, we're just gonna talk about this.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they just tweet it.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  This, we're gonna have entire conversations across like, like, all right, for this side, all right, for this side, we're going to talk about the ending of this thing that is two weeks old. And then if you like get upset about it, it's like you're stymying critical analysis.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  So what's the threshold? How many, how many weeks can pass before it's acceptable? Is it a month?

• 50:43Speaker 02

  I think, I think two weeks, if you're, if you're, I think if, if you wait more than two weeks after like a, especially like a highly anticipated movie or something comes out, you don't care about it that much. So if it gets spoiled for you a little bit, like.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  So a month?

• 51:00Speaker 02

  I think a month is definitely safe. I don't know, I don't know.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the move.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  If a movie comes out and you haven't seen it within a month, and also like TV shows, TV shows you should be catching up within the month. And I think a movie.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Also, TV shows is tough though, because sometimes people don't have a cable subscription and they're waiting for it to hit streaming.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let me ask you this, when it is, when is it okay to spoil the first episode of House of Cards?

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  I still haven't seen that, actually. I've never seen that episode of House of Cards.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  You mean, you mean, House of Cards, season two?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Season two, episode one.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  No, like, like, the new, okay, sure.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  Oh, that one is a new one.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Season two, episode one. That's the one you're talking about.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  I had that spoiled for me before it.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, right, okay, but whatever. So, let's say, season three is coming, right? When is it, whenever that, let's say, season three drops tomorrow, right? When is it okay to spoil the first episode of House of Cards?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  I mean, right now, because I stopped watching it in the middle of season two, because I just couldn't care.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  Got a little boring. Um, but, okay, so the following question is, when is it okay to spoil the last episode? But, God.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I was just gonna say that that's just like an interesting new problem that the Netflix shows have.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Because they're all at once.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  And it's so, I, I kind of feel like, long-term, it sort of hurts them, because you can't have that ongoing conversation that is like meted out week by week by when an episode comes out. So, it's like, everybody, like, some people watch all of it in the first 24 hours, some people watch it over a couple of weeks, but nobody really, everybody just sort of looks around at each other and is like,

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Have you seen it yet?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Can we talk about this? Yeah, yeah, and, and, yeah, there's not this one moment that, you know, you have the event and the conversation that follows after it. It's kind of all happening at different places everywhere, but...

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Right, so, I mean, the question is, when is it okay to spoil the last episode of that season?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Why is it okay?

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  When is it okay?

• 52:37Speaker 02

  When is it okay?

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  Because I get the sense that it's never okay to talk about the last episode of a Netflix show. Because you never know if anyone has finished that show.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, are you talking about, like, publicly on Twitter, or are you talking about something that you're writing?

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Both.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  What if you give it, what if you give it a week, what if you give it a weekend episode? So, if it's a 10-episode run, 10 weeks after it gets dropped on Netflix, and then you can...

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  And I, these are like new rules, man.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  You know what Netflix should do? They should have, they should have it come out, if you're a regular Netflix subscriber, it comes out every week, and that's when we have the conversation. But, I, you can, you can hit a button and give Netflix an extra four bucks, so you can watch it all at once.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  But, but then those people...

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's so cruel.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Are gonna be dicks.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  Yo, I paid the money.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's my beef with, like... That's my problem with spoiler stuff in general is like, there's this weird like privilege to it because it's like, oh, if it's a movie, if you don't see it within the month, it's like, I know people who like wait to watch movies on TBS because they don't want to spend, if you live in New York, thirty dollars to go see a movie or like, or literally-

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  But your backup plan to not go into theaters waiting for TBS?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  For me, I'll wait till it's on demand because I can watch it with like-

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you have terrible experiences.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  I'm not saying me, I'm saying other people.

• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, just pay for the better experience.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, TBS does a great job.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  They have really targeted advertising.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  They figured it out.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I think I have that problem, not so much with like the money thing, but the time thing. It's like, sometimes I have, I have different tiers of priority for pop culture things that I'm gonna watch. And like, sometimes it's like, oh, well, you're not a big fan of this and like, you haven't, you haven't watched this yet, so like, you deserve to have this. Well, it's like, no, actually, like, I have a job and stuff and, you know, like, I mean, especially if it's not something that I'm actually covering for work. Because obviously, a lot of stuff I watch for work, but if it's not something like that, then, I don't know. I think, I think that everybody has a different lifestyle, a style and the way that they wrap it around their pop culture intake is kind of in conflict, but, I don't know.

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, I think the most interesting thing about like, really trying to cover entertainment on our site is understanding how those patterns change because of like, all of the new delivery. Like, it's a thing we talk about. Like, it's funny that you were talking about this trailer makes more sense without audio. I bet a fuck ton of people watch that trailer without audio. Yeah. Because they watch it at work, or they watch it the way I watch it, which is like, hovering over a laptop speaker with like, really quiet sound because I, my headphones weren't close to me and I didn't want to bother anyone. Right? Like, vox.com, this is true, they, they make really popular videos on YouTube. They, as a rule, do not require, like, they make the videos so they don't require audio. Because they know that the way the videos are shared is like, they'll be played on mute, so they make sure that

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  they, it's like, all that's crazy. Like, really understanding how the stuff travels. And like, when you make it pop culture, like, really understanding how pop culture travels in a world where all of the old ways are broken is like fascinating. Because it's changing the media. And like, I don't know. Like, I bet you they mixed this Terminator trailer to not require like, low end. Right, because they know it's gonna get played through laptop speakers, like primarily.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:51Nilay Patel?

  And if you, if you don't like, that's crazy. That's like a crazy thing to think about.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  So you're saying that, what?

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, John, our producer, selling us our headphones, that we, Verge videos are mixed at any low end.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  But, but we're not allowed to tell you the listeners.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  Can we start doing the subwoofer edition of The Verge?

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna only be played like a nasty old Civic with like a trunk full of subs.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  So you're saying, basically, that when I watched it, like, in, like, with one bar on my phone?

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  That's probably the experience they're going to.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  That's the end experience, okay.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  No, but like, that's like a crazy thing. Like, that's the reason, like, our site does the way, does the coverage it does. Like, that's the reason the scope is big, because you can't, like, I don't think, like, straight entertainment publications can talk about, like, we, they mix the video, like, that's like a, whoa! Like, check out this fact we know, like, they mix the videos that low. And for us, it's like, yeah, because of laptops, it's because of laptops. Like, and it's like, just understanding how these things all talk to each other, to me, is like, the most interesting thing.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  You're a nerd. You're a nerd.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  Because I'm a huge, because I'm a huge nerd. Sam, Sam, hype check subwoofers.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  They're necessary when you're trying to listen to dubstep, yo.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Hey, this guy knows what I'm talking about!

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  Sam, Sam, you're supposed to be-

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Cut you disco ball, Sam. This is like the trance or something, like I don't watch that.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  This middle school principal loves to party! It's like, picture the principal, like, in the furry boots and Coachella, like, yeah!

• 57:24Speaker 02

  The announcements come on in the morning.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  It's a new day at Greenwood High.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Highwood High.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  No, no, it's not. We're done. Is the show done? That's how you end it. Highwood High. Is there anything else we can talk about? Is there any hope in the world?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  A new hope.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  That was really quick, Chris.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  A force of woken in me and I let it out.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Oh, alright, two in a row.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  The anti-discrimination bill is gonna be named after Tim Cook.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  That's good, that's good.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Is there anything cool happening this week that people should be... I don't know, anything?

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Thursday, I mean, it's the week's start.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  This weekend?

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  What's going on this weekend? The real problem for me is that I'm terrible at this job.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  Of hosting this podcast.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  And so I don't know what's going on, I don't know what we should talk about, and I don't prepare.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 58:23Nilay Patel?

  And that is basically the story of The Vergecast.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Showing respect to the audience.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  But they like it.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  So, here's what you can do, we're here every week, you can go to iTunes to leave a review.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  Mute me.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Maybe five stars.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  Mute me on the podcast circuit, man, alright.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  If you want to leave a review this time, here's what we recommend you do, say, "Maybe Dieter should do the intro."

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  No. No, no.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  And if you want Dieter to do it, let us know in the review.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Mix it up in the comments.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna have to open iTunes now to look for these.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  People love conflict.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, here's what I think you should do, you should go open your iTunes and leave a review for The Vergecast, and you should in-state.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  How many stars?

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  State, five stars, and state in your review why Dieter should switch to iTunes as his primary music application on his computer.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  It works super well with the BlackBerry Passport.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  How long did that last?

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man, alright, well, that's our show, you can actually, there are many ways to talk to us.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Sure, you can do that, I'm gonna let Sam do it, because Sam does this better than anybody.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  Alright, Social Sam. Hype Town.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Coming to you live from the swag office, I guess, that was really weak. We are on Facebook, facebook.com/verge, we are on Twitter, @verge, you can email us at vergecast, at theverge, at theverge.com, Dieter is, you can't do that anymore?

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, right now.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  Well, you can't do that anymore. Dieter is @backlon on Twitter, Neelai is Reckless, Chris is ChrisPlant.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  It's not true.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Just Plant, just Plant.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  Just Plant.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  With an E.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  Plant with an E, and Emily is Emily Yoshida.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Yep, where are we on Tumblr?

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  We are, this is theverge.com. Soon, soon.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Soon we are coming for our trademarks.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  Yes, and I'm Sam Sheffer on Twitter and you should add us on Snapchat. We are the real verge and if you are listening to the verge cast, you should tweet. I listen to the verge cast and if you watch verge cast, you should say I watched the verge cast. It's interesting because a lot of people did that last week and like half of them were I listened to and half of them were I watched. So people watch and listen, which is cool.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  You should download Snapchat just for Sam's Snapchat because it's the

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  His personal or his verge?

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  The verge one because it's the only interesting thing I've seen done on Snapchat. Like I have like tried to find anything good and like, I mean, following my friends, sure, they're okay. But like Sam has figured out Snapchat like none other. He is, he has mastered Snapchat.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  I will say that there is, there is cool stuff. We're gonna do a Snapchat next year. We're thinking a lot of ways. It is cool. You should download. I mean, it's just clear. You should download, you should download, get some apps.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, cool.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  We are the real verge on Snapchat.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  Find us on the apps.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  And for those wondering, I open every single snap and I respond to a lot of them. So like you can converse with me on Snapchat if you want. And I've gotten some weird snaps. So keep it weird.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  If you are, if you are in a sauna, send, send your snap.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Be cool as principals.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  By the way, this is how Bill's little principals end up on the local news.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  Do we like eat, TV and raving and like getting the kids on Snapchat?

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Some of them are weird.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Get nude with me on Snapchat. All right. That, that was our show. Uh, thank you for being one of the tens of thousands of people who endure this with us, with us, who endure us.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Sure. Alongside.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Alongside.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Trimmer went out the window a long time ago.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and that's it. That's the verge cast. Thank you for listening. Uh, everyone's getting a podcast soon. So we'll just, we'll just go ahead and diversify this. Good night.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Bye! Bye!