Hack the planet

This week on Vergecast, it's Wilderness Week! Nilay, Paul, and Dieter welcome video director James Temple to the show to talk about his new Verge series, Climate Hackers, which features scientists set on trying to reverse the effects of climate change. The cast also goes into this week in tech: the performance of the Galaxy Note 7, Apple's rumored Snapchat clone, as well as Android Nougat and the problem with getting it on certain phones. 2:07 - Android Nougat 14:02 - Android update problem persists 18:41 - Note 7 performance 25:08 - Apple rumors 34:50 - Citi ad 35:22 - Climate Hackers with James Temple 47:03 - GraphicStock ad 48:19 - Paul's "Let me touch you with science" weekly segment 52:53 - Lightning round 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This is bad. I should start over. All right, let's do it.

• 0:07Nilay Patel?

  Hello. Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, the website that Paul thinks is about everything.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Oh, you just put that on me now.

• 0:17Nilay Patel?

  On blast, Paul. Anyway, I'm Eli.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I want to talk about Play-Doh and jewelry.

• 0:22Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. Play-Doh, the malleable material?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:25Nilay Patel?

  Or Play-Doh, the ancient philosopher?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Both, actually.

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot to be learned. Anyway, I'm Neelai Patel. I'm Paul Miller.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  I'm Dieter Bohm.

• 0:34Nilay Patel?

  There you go. Woo. It can be a great episode today. Mm-hmm. Lots of stuff going on. We have a whole segment in the middle. That's gonna be fun. It's Wilderness Week at theverge.com this week, if you didn't know. Lots of excellent wilderness content about being outside and honestly, just a lot of gross things happen outside. We wrote about them all. Uh, but it's the, it was the 100-year anniversary of the National Park Service. And as you know this, but TC Sodik, before he worked The Verge, worked in the government where he was a lobbyist. But he wasn't one of those fat cats. He begged the government for money for the park system. That. Saddest lobbyist ever. I was like, eat a lot of steak dinners? He's like, no one, no one fed me anything.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Did he get paid in like leaves? Like pine cones?

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, we have a bunch of people at The Verge who love the outdoors. Liz, TC, Zelenko. People love being outside. It's the new, the new hot stuff in 2016.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Outside is the new inside.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so it's Wilderness Week. We run a bunch of stories around the anniversary. James Temple, one of our talented video directors, has a series called Climate Hackers that he's interested in starting up. There's a bunch of people doing crazy stuff to sort of counteract global warming. So he's gonna be on the show later on, talking about his first episode. But for now, there's a couple of things we gotta do. One, I just have to say the word scissor vodka cut through the night.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Okay, got it.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Because the sponsor is so demanding.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Check.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  And that sponsor is me. Uh, second, we gotta talk about some, uh, some tech news.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  How's that tech news going?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  It's going.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. So what happened this week?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Uh, Android 7.0.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Nugget.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Or, or as, as our, as our British friend, James Barron, pronounces it, Nugar.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  Nugar? That's a thing, huh?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Huh. Apparently.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so Dieter, you reviewed it?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  I did. Uh, and, you know, it's Android. It's a really good Android release. So, okay, I'll talk about it. The most important stuff about it is it does split screen. That's like the thing that like as a user you will see. So on both phones and tablets, you can now split the screen in half and do stuff on two different windows and adjust the size of the windows. The other things that you should know, you know, it does better security, I guess. I don't know.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  You can change the keyboard color?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  It's Android. Yeah, you can change. Oh, so the keyboard thing is hilarious. It's actually technically not nougat. It's just the Google keyboard. You can now theme the keyboard, which is hilarious. No, the other user facing thing that I actually do want to talk about is notifications. And like, I could get pretty deep on notifications, but I feel like

• 3:08Speaker 01

  If there was ever a show.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  I've always felt like Android does better with notifications, and I feel like it just continues to do better with notifications than than iOS. So the change here is you can long press on it to adjust like priority or adjust whether or not you want to see the damn things. Android's had this priority system for a long time, but nobody uses it. And so now they've just made it a straightforward thing where you just like show them silently or block them. The priority is still there if you want to go hunting for it, but nobody wants to do that because we're normal humans. The other thing they added to notifications is quick replies, which was a long time coming. iOS had it for a while. Now Android has it properly instead of like in a weird app by app basis.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  I feel like with Android, when I use Android, I end up getting tons of notifications for things that I don't care about. So this this sounds like it would really match my problem.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  More so than you do on the iPhone?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Well, like, I feel like every time, and maybe it's because I don't use Android enough, but I feel like every time I turn on the phone, it's like, hey, guess what? This like service that relies on this other service updated or it's thinking about updated. What do you think? Or like, yeah, like there's like more of the internals are notifying you that they're updating all the time.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  I like that. What do you think?

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  Android has updated several of your apps. What do you think about that? What do you think? And you're just like, that's great. I'm so proud of you.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Google Play is always updating and then it's like you can't ever install new applications with, maybe it's because I have an S6 and the S6 is just the worst.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  It seems because you don't use your phone enough.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Probably that too.

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  If you use it every day.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  If you haven't turned it on for a month, of course, you're going to get, when you turn it on, it's going to like take in all the notifications that you have received.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  I like to think of that as Xbox disease.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  Or PS, or PS4 syndrome.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  My Xbox One S, I wanted to play a video game last night and I had to wait 45 minutes to do it. Because it was updating.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  I, we've talked about this a bunch of times on the show, but the Xbox silent overnight update is just, it's just one of those things where if it works, it's great.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  But it could also just be a lie, like a shared delusion that people have about the Xbox.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Pretend that it does that.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, you know, it updates at night. It, yeah, absolutely. It updates at night.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Has that ever happened to you?

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  It's, mine has never updated at night, but have I had a shared delusion with several other people? Yeah. I went to college.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  There, there does something, there's something about the way the Xbox changes DUI very frequently. That makes me feel like I'm being like, like a gaslight situation.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  That never happened to you.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I can't quite remember what's different, what's new.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  What's changed? It's like, oh yeah, that was always there. It's like, what?

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  What if they just go back to Blades?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I miss the Blades. With the triggers.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was so silly. They really.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Android.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, Android. What if Android had Blades?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  That'd be fine. Wait, I want to talk about multitasking.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Are you using it? Like, do you, do you have a situation on your phone? Cause I, I, I think there's an ideal situation as a writer where you can pull up reference information on one side, put your, like a text document on the other side and you can write and reference. And like, now you can actually do your job because you have multitasking or split screen.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  On a tablet, absolutely yes. And it's great. On the phone, it's hard because like that standard situation of I want to type some notes and look at my reference. Like there's only so much space, even on a big phone for fitting the keyboard and two Windows. So I, I'll use it for like, I'm watching a video and the video is kind of boring, but I'm not going to stop watching it. So I'll throw Twitter up and scroll through tweets. Right? You know, and I'll also use it. I'll do a little bit of note taking, but it's sort of one of those things where like, if you need it, you'll feel it and then you can use it. And it's great. And most of the time you won't, but it's kind of convenient. The thing that's interesting to me about the multitasking is how it sort of gets handled. You don't think

• 7:09Speaker 02

  of it as like, you've got two windows and you can do whatever you want with them. When you multitask, you're basically like pinning the left hand and or top app and you can't switch that one easily. Like you've got to like bail out of split screen, then switch that app and go back into split screen to switch the left hand app. Yeah. So basically what, think of it as pinning. So like the right hand app or the bottom app, you can switch around. You can, you know, go back to the home screen and open something else up and just run down the line and move it around. But the, the app on the left is harder to switch. You have to like bail out of it. So it's like, in the same way that on iOS, you like slide that thing over to the right, but the main app is just sort of there. But when you hit home, you're messing with the main app, but the app on the right that you slide in is like different. It's like the interaction model for changing stuff is different.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  They don't have two different interaction models for finding your app on Android. So it's a little bit smarter, but you just have to get it in your head that it takes a minute to figure out how to change the app on the left or the top.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  Wait, that's not exactly right about iOS though.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  That's kind of right.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, no, because if the interaction model is, is only different for the smaller app.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  So you can slide the slider all the way to the left and make the app big on the right and then make the app on the left small?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Oh, you could do that on Android too. You can, you can still slide it over, but when you want to switch an app, you're always switching the app on the right. Whereas on iOS, when you want to switch the app on the right, you get that weird like vertical tile multitask thing.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I'm saying, but you can, you can change the nature of that app by making it the bigger app. And then the home button will change that app and the vertical switcher thing will change the app on the left.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Are you sure?

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's really weird. I play with it. If you watch the Mr. Obad after show and you see me staring at that iPad all the time, I might be reading comments from the IRC or I might just be fucking with the iOS multitasker because it's really fun.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's like, all that is wild to me.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Have we found, have we found the right way to do this yet?

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I feel like, I feel like it's, it's not correct on, um, on OS 10 either.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  You don't think OS 10 multitasking works? What?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Oh, the OS 10 split screen stuff. Yeah, no, because it's

• 9:17Speaker 01

  It's really weird.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  It wants, like, the OS 10 split screen stuff really wants you to use multiple, like, spaces and like, go fullscreen on stuff. And so like, your like, old school desktop windows live over here, but your split screen stuff lives over there.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  And I almost never use it. I use like, a third-party tool to like, manage my windows, because I don't like, get panicked by having more than two windows on the screen at once.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  Dude, I'm still on Yosemite. I'm just gonna be real with everybody.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use Better Snap Tool to like, snap my windows around, which basically emulates like, the Windows style of like-

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Windows Snap stuff is good.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  But, I don't know, like, I never, I'll probably upgrade to Elk, but I have, I, I like Dieter, I have a wide variety of weird window hacks. Like, utilities that are just kinda like, I think I actually have a better Snap Tool, and I use Stay, which, when you plug in a monitor, it remembers all the window positions. That one's real good. What's the one that you use, Dieter?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Uh, I use Moom, M-O-O-M, which combines all of the above into a, a single tool, and I'm pretty, pretty pleased with it.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we figured this out exactly right, because I use, I use that iOS 10 multitasking once a week for the Robot Show, because I need to monitor Twitter and I R C at the same time, and I can't have a laptop, so it's fine to do on a tablet. But every week, I'm like, there's something about this that is not exactly right yet.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Well, the, the classic place where you have like, real power over split screen is like, in a text editor like Vim, or in like, a terminal like T-Mux or something like that, and you use all these key commands to like, you're basically in a frame, and you put in a key command that will split that frame either in half vertically or in half horizontally, and then you have key commands to like, jump between them, and then from within that frame, it's like, it's a whole operating system, or it's a whole text editor, or whatever. So then you can change what's happening in that frame, in that tile or whatever.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  That's the model that I want.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  That that basically requires a keyboard and memorization of keyboard commands.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  I do kinda like a GUI a little bit. I don't want to have a keyboard command for everything. I think, but to like meet in the middle, it's what Paul's talking about is that there's that model, but it's it's two independently full powered environments.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Right. There's something about that split and now I can do anything in either split.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  Right. And on a so desktop PC, every Windows independently a full app.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  And the nicest thing Android is doing.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Sorry. The nicest thing Android is doing with its split screen is it from the jump will let you have a Chrome window in both windows. Uh, which it took, it's taking iOS until I think 10 to get there. Uh, oh, and I forgot about the best part about the way multitasking works in Android. You can double tap the square button, which by the way, did you know the square button is called the overview button?

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  No. What?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  I thought it was the home button.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  It's called, it's called, no, the, the home button is a circle button. And then the multitask button, the square button is the overview button.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Whatever. You can double tap it and it'll just switch to your last app and double tap it again and it'll switch back.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  Hold on. The square button, it depends, the buttons are, hold on.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  The square button typically brings up that slide, the deck of.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  The multitasking.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what I think of it as.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's called the overview button and that's called the overview.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Has it always been called the overview button?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  I just had a moment of pure panic where I couldn't remember what order those buttons were in.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's a square, circle and a triangle.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Samsung phone. You've used a Samsung phone recently and they, they swap them.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was like, I don't know what's going on here.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  What, what button is which?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. But no, like, just like being able to really like how, like when I switch apps, I'm almost always like going from like one password to the other app or

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  between like Twitter and Chrome or something. And like just being able to pop, pop, pop real quick is super convenient.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  Um, I got, so I installed Nougat on my 6P, my beloved Huawei built Nexus 6P. I swear it made it slower. Oh no. But I, I don't know if it's just like, it's doing the thing where I hadn't had it on like a week.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Right. It's gotta get all.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  And so like every update in the world.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Wants to update so bad.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  Google Play is like, I haven't talked to the Google servers. I want to tell them everything.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  What? Google's called Alphabet now? Ah, this changes.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  So I don't know if it's that, or if it's just like some post-install optimization, but do you notice that, Dieter? Is that just me?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I've been on the betas for a while, so I haven't noticed that. But like, I mean, Android mysteriously chugging for people has been in the news this week, hasn't it?

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  Ah, excellent transition, my friend. You want to talk about it? There's one more nougat note.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Actually, there's a lot more we could get into with nougat, but I don't know what you are.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, I want to know everything. But the one that we should talk about is the Android update problem persists, right? Like, I think Vlad wrote a thing, a classic Vlad, the Xperia Z3 is not getting nougat. The phone is not even two years old. Remember, there was something like the Android update guarantee for a minute?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  What did they call that?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  No, they do it every year. There's like a new gambit to try and make this happen. And this year, the gambit was they released the beta like way back in March, and we'll see.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Well, they were also talking about how they're going to update it more like piecemeal now, something like that.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  They do that with Play Services a little bit.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Right, the apps will...

• 14:44Speaker 02

  So there's like three things you need to be paying attention to now with Android updates. There's like the core, are you going to get the latest version of the OS, which is as messy as it has ever been? And we'll see what happens if the earlier beta helped with that. There's, they're rolling more stuff into Google Play Services instead of into the core of Android, so they can push out stuff to more phones more quickly, and they're unbundling some things from the core OS. That's great, except that it, you know, it means that like more of Android is tied to Google instead of to, you know, the idea of being built into Android. So that applies to stuff like the browser and, you know, a few other places. And then the third thing to be aware of now with Android are the monthly security updates.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  And so when you go to Samsung, or HTC, or Motorola, or whoever, and they release a new phone... Instead of saying, hey, are you going to update the latest version of Android and when? You need to say, hey, are you going to update the latest version of Android when? And also, hey, are you committing to installing the monthly security updates that Google is putting out for this version of Android? And the answers to all of those questions are really frustrating and bad.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Well.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  And that's a problem.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  There was just a terrible.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  iOS.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  iOS security flaw.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  You turned it around like a day.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  By the time I had heard of it, and I work at a tech publication, but I was working hard today and I wasn't paying attention.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  And by the time I'd heard of it, there was an update available on my phone and I've updated it now and come at me hackers. Don't, don't actually.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  But I, I'm, I'm updated.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  I'll give you physical access to Paul's phone.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  You can hold it in your hand and see how much you can get out of it.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  No, it was like a really bad one, too. It was like a, it was like a click this link and we own your phone level bad. And people were just getting texted with it. But yeah, like Apple just fixed it.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  The worst part about the, the Android thing is they actually with new phones coming out with new get, they have an incredibly good update system. They, it's called seamless updates. So there's actually two parts of your memory where they store the operating system and it will, like an Xbox is supposed to, I guess. It will silently download the next version of the OS in the background onto the other partition. And then when it's time, when it's done and verified, the next time you boot up, it just boots off, off of that new OS on the new partition. And then the old partition just hangs out just in case until the next OS update comes along.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  How often?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Which is really smart.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  Do you have to actually reboot the phone?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you reboot the phone, but then when you reboot the phone, because they have a, a new Git compiler for art apps and they've got some other stuff that you're not going to have to watch every single Android app update after an OS update. It will, they'll, they, they compile themselves as necessary, just in time. I'm, I'm being really fast and loose with the technical stuff here, partially because.

• 17:35Nilay Patel?

  The people, the people at XDA are literally taking a transcript of this right now.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Does stand for just in time.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yes, it does. Anyway, the, the bottom line is like, Google has, especially with Android 7.0, new get, newger, they've built a really, really good update system and.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  I would love it if the OEMs and the carriers and Google could get in a room and agree to use it. But I would also, like, I'm tired of complaining about it.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Uh, but I did it again in this review, like, half the review is me complaining about this situation. But like, I don't even know who to yell at anymore. I kind of just don't even, like, it's like, eh.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Like, is it Google's fault? Yes. Is it Samsung's fault? Yes. Is it Verizon's fault? Absolutely, yes.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  This is why I can't buy a Note 6, right? Like, I wanna buy a Note 6. Really like a Note 6? Or Note 7, geez. They skipped 6.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  They skipped 6.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  It's like, my brain is broken. I wanna buy a Note 7, but I can't. Cause it's, I just don't wanna live in that hole, so I'm just gonna keep using Nexus phones.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Don't worry, Fuchsia will fix everything.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we should talk, yeah, Fuchsia. That's gonna work. We should talk about the performance of the Note 7, actually. Cause that was, it was a thing that came out this week. Sadly, Dan Seifert is out, so we can't have him talk about it directly. But Dieter, you wanna walk us through it?

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Well, a few things. So the reviews came out, Dan seemed really happy with the performance of the Note 7. It seemed to him to be on par with other Snapdragon 820 phones. But then, there's a video comparing its, like, speed at launching multiple apps compared to a 6S, iPhone 6S. And the iPhone seems to do way better. And, uh, XDA wrote a, wrote a piece where they, they ran some benches and did some stuff. And they are like, the real world, you know, use of this thing is horrendous.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  It's like particularly Dropbox is bad. That's like my favorite one.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  And it's like, you know, I, in order to like verify these claims more fully, we need to run through every single carrier variant. Cause like, there's like, there's talk that like the Verizon version is way west than, way worse than say the T-Mobile version, so.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, the T-Mobile version compresses every video frame, so that.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's fine. But the knock on Android has always been that it's got a little bit of jank to it. Especially compared to iOS. And, I mean, I, I can't say that's not totally true, right?

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Things have gotten better and they've thrown a lot of horsepower at it and they've done a bunch of stuff. There's been a bunch of, you know, initiatives inside Google to speed up the OS and, you know, etc.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

  Project Butter!

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Butter, yeah.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  Remember Project Butter? When Google stood on stage and said, "Our big initiative is called Project Butter."

• 20:09Speaker 01

  It's clear that my brain cannot hold all the Google initiatives anymore.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  I want Google to start an initiative where they try to cut down on the number of initiatives and then I'll pay attention.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Project streamline.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Project streamline the butter.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  I know, it's gotten better.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  The thing I want from the note-

• 20:26Speaker 02

  All we can say is like Dan's experience with the Note 7 was that it was fast.

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  But like, he may have been using a different version than everybody else, or it like, sometimes Android just takes longer to like, start to get janky.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and there was an on-in-tech piece where they did a bunch of benchmarks and their conclusion was, it's on par with all the other 820 phones. It's like, better in some places and worse in some, and I think that's fair. I do think the Samsung phones in particular, kinda like, wear themselves into a state of being pretty sludgy after a while.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  And that's like, I am interested in like, how anyone thinks, as a review organization, we should do, like, do we need to review the phone in six months and be like, it got slow? Because someone like Dan can't really do that, because he's gotta review all the other phones.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  The, the notion of Samsung phones getting sludgy after a while, I think, until they figure out a way to fix it, which they should fix, we should probably, probably think about. I don't know. But, it's, I think the phone is fast enough, right? Like, unless you're looking for absolute performance, I don't think you're gonna notice. At least is the takeaway that I have gotten from the people who have the phone.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's basically where I'm at. I, I haven't used it myself for long enough to, to weigh in, but like, you know, I talked to Dan about it, he's on vacation, he called me from the beach and was like, I'm using it right now, it's fast.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Um, but, you know, like, it's also like, there's, and, and this is the really hard part about it, is like, when you talk about real world performance, you get into like, really like, personal things, you get really like, this is how I experience it, and how I experience it's how, you know, somebody that's like, watching for the slowdown might experience it totally differently. And, but, like, I think there's some, there's some there there with the Note 7 not being as fast as it ought to be, especially given its specs, but like, the there that's there is so wildly different across different carrier versions and different like, different installs of crap that gets put on phones, from whoever, whatever your phone is, that it's like, it's really difficult to like, superpin down, like, objectively.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Right. And software, like the moment you start to have more apps on your phone, or you've opened some and closed some, and like, you've got a few files on your, in your storage, and you've, the RAM is warmed up, and then...

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I love that warm RAM. That was a major part of Project Butter, was pre-warming the RAM.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  I'm trying to agree with Dieter, is that there are wildly divergent states that an operating system can get in, with very little use.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  So, you, your day one, even your day one phone is slightly different, maybe, you know, you've got slightly different chips, or slightly different, you know, like, you've got a bum unit. I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  You're just all over the place right now.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  No, like, the yield, the processor yield was bad, somehow.

• 23:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you had some cold RAM, you had a bum unit. Real garbage.

• 23:17Nilay Patel?

  Stick that thing in the microwave, but anyway. But I will say, the overall problem, for as good as people think the Snapdragon 820 is, is that Apple is way out ahead of them in terms of raw performance. So, any, like, underlying jank in iOS gets smoothed over, and they're just gonna put out the, a new processor, soon, presumably in a new phone, that's gonna be even faster. So, Apple gets to get away with more jank, and then they control the whole stack.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  So, there is fundamentally kind of like less...

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Like, because Samsung is supposed to be using, like, Vulkan, and like, trying to really speed up, like, their user interface and stuff like that.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, that, the Vulkan stuff applies to games right now. Like, it's not like Vulkan runs the UI on the thing.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  But Samsung is, is porting parts of TouchWiz to Vulkan. Because Vulkan is basically how you talk to the GPU, and you want the GPU to accelerate your user interface, not just...

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  I can't believe it's like, a decade into mobile, and we're just now getting to, we're using the GPU to accelerate.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  No, we've been using the GPU for a long time.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  So, why is Vulkan better?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  It's just that, like, Apple's, Apple has the Metal API.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  No, that's what I mean. It's, it's taken us all the way to now.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  To like, build the system.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Before they were using, like, OpenGL.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  Apple was using OpenGL. What was Android using?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  OpenGL.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  It was OpenGL on Android, too?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know that. OpenGL, what a garbage fire that is. Seems like OpenGL sucks.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  How it's taken us a long way.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember when Apple added OpenGL to the Mac and it was like the world's biggest deal? Do you remember what game they demoed OpenGL with on the Mac?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Was that Halo?

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, was what became, it was Marathon. It was.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  No, Bungie made Marathon and then they demonstrated Halo.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  At a Mac world and then.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was gonna come out of both Mac and Windows at the same time and then like, yeah. OpenGL, the dream is dead. Halo is only for the Xbox One and that's never gonna update. Anyway. And Windows. There is some Apple news that we should talk about.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  A little bit. So if you've been following the Apple media beat, and I know that our listeners, media critics through and through, you know that Mark Gurman, who was the nine to five Mac scoop machine, is now at Bloomberg. Scoop machine. Scoop machine, still being a scoop machine. And Daisuke Wakabayashi, who was the Wall Street Journal's Apple scoop machine, is now at the New York Times. It's a big new competition for both of them. I'm just saying, the winds are changing in the Apple scoop game.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  So the scoop machines continue to scoop, but for, for different publications.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and I think particularly in Gurman's case, a much larger, richer.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  Mike Bloomberg is just like, Gurman, give me an Apple scoop and he throws a bag of money at him and then something happens.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  You know, that's the thing, whenever I talk to somebody who's like not real, like doesn't really know a lot about what The Verge is.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  All they ever say is like, just tell me when the next iPhone's gonna come out.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  You've got inside information, right? Tell me when the next iPhone's gonna come out.

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  That's all anybody wants to know.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  That's all anybody wants to know.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  And the answer is next week, on Tuesday.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  That's what I always say, like, next week, go buy one now.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  It's gonna have three headphone jacks.

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, Bloomberg had a little scoop, Apple working on a Snapchat clone for the next version and presumably come out with the, the new phone and, you know, iOS 10 when that launches. And then, I thought this one was really interesting. Back Channel, the Medium publication run by Stephen Levy, legendary sort of tech features writer Stephen Levy, had just an incredibly long piece about Apple and AI, featuring.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  Like photos of Apple executives in pastel shirts in front of whiteboards on which equations had been written, which is always like my favorite sort of like, how do we illustrate this complicated story technique? And both of those together, kind of, they kind of are the same story, which is Apple is in this very reactive mode, right? They know what people are doing on the phone. They know what the industry is all about. Tim Cook just gave a big profile interview to Fast Company. He talked about AI in that as well. Obviously, Apple's competitors have been talking, and I think we've done 90 episodes of the show on like bots.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  But Apple's competitors have been talking about bots and assistants and messaging, and Apple's saying, your AI stuff is cute. And then to back channel, the whole story is, but we've been doing it forever. And Siri got so much better, you wouldn't even believe it, because we added some AI to it. And there's no way to measure it, because you wouldn't, there's no before and after, obviously. But there's that, which is, we're already ahead of the curve in AI. We have the best AI people working at Apple. And then we just don't have a specific division for it, and we don't brag about it as much. It's just sort of.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  We don't publish research.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they just make the stuff and ship it, which is, you know, the Apple way. And then, on the flip side, there's this like leak that Apple is going to do this like video sharing social network. And both of those, to me, are the biggest trends right now in tech, as near as I can tell, are AI and bots on sort of the deep research feature side. And on the what are the, what are the kids doing side, it's very much like Instagram Stories and Snapchat and these like weird share a moment of your life products. And obviously, Apple's doing a lot of that in iMessage or blowing it out. But the idea that they're going to build another dedicated kind of social network just points to a reactivity that we're not really used to seeing. I mean, this is the only other Apple social network I can think of. Is ping.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  Ping.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  I now, guys.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  Love ping.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  It's kind of unclear to me, like, is this really a social network? Or is this a way? Because, because one thing that I, I, I communicate a lot over iMessage. But you can make weirder, cooler things in Snapchat or, you know, some other app, right? And so for there to be an Apple native way to just like, I don't know, make a cool thing for, for delivery over iMessage, that makes a lot of.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Or delivery over Twitter or Facebook.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, it would be the generic way to make a cool thing to share to lots of these different places.

• 29:18Nilay Patel?

  There's generic photo filters in the Kyma app.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Right, but.

• 29:21Nilay Patel?

  But they would add more stuff to it. Like, that's the other thing, is this, is this gonna be an independent app or built into the camera?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Maybe like a little doggy face.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Did you think about a little doggy face?

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  This, this one's called Hudson.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, can you wait for the keynote when they go through each of their filters?

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Like, like imagine, imagine a deliberate, like, this one makes your eyes really big and your voice high. Now, you, you might have seen stuff like this, but we, we wanted to do it right.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Your voice is really high in front of you.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, let's just.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  We used machine learning, AI, as some people like to crow about, to train a neural network with people talking after inhaling helium. It sounds so much like you inhaled helium.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  This one turns you into a puppy.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  This one turns you into an actual puppy.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Let's just wait, I mean, like, the inevitable Craig Federighi, Eddie Q puppy message is coming for us. Are you ready?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Are you ready for that one?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  Is there one that's just gonna put Craig Federighi's hair on you?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  I would use that one. We all need that one. So.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the, the thing that I'll say about like, they, I don't trust Apple to like, build a social network. Really? I just like, I don't think that they could pull it off.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Like, I don't, I don't expect them to be able to do that. I would like to see them create a tool to make more fun stuff that is, you know, maybe in the, in the line of, you know, my favorite app that I won't shut up about, MotionStills. You know, they could make stuff to make more cool things and then I could put them on whatever network I feel like. Like, that's fine.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  And I think-

• 31:04Speaker 02

  But the thing about it is like, how many Apple actual like iPhone apps do you like, deeply, truly love at this point? Like, that's kind of the problem. Like, do people deeply love Apple Music? Maybe they've got a shot. Do people deeply love Safari? Well, they, they depend on it, but do they really like, use it day to day? Like, there are apps on the phone, on phones that are getting made by other people that people have a deep like, I love Snapchat, or I love Instagram, I love this app. And, uh, Apple, like, it makes the OS, and so its apps are like, all kind of utilities. Nobody deeply loves the mail app. I don't know anybody that deeply likes the mail app. And so-

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  Everyone deeply with sans the mail app.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Right? Does Apple want to get in the game of like, making apps that people like, deeply dearly love? I really think they should. I think it's been a while since I've seen them put something out where it was like, oh my god, this thing makes my heart flutter.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  I mean, if you think about like, what was, I mean, this is maybe comparing apples and oranges, because it's old timey computer history. But when you thought of the original Macintosh, it's like, oh sure, you could do, you know, nerdy lame stuff on PCs, on the IBMs.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  You can push a button and split the window into two different editors.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  But with, with a Macintosh, you can draw pictures, you can do word processing, and we've got these laser printers and like, and there's definitely like, um, I, I imagine Apple filters, if they made a really good app, it becomes kind of like a class thing a little bit.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like the blue bubbles and the green bubbles.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And the screen caps of the Notes app. I mean, how many celebrities have you ever seen post a editorial that they wrote in Android Notes app?

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, his name is Donald Trump.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  There's no such app.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  There's no such app.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  He's the one.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  There's Google Keep, I guess, but...

• 32:54Speaker 02

  No, Trump uses Android phone.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  That's like...

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but what's the Android Notes app?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  No, but does he screen cap the Notes app for editorials?

• 33:01Nilay Patel?

  I will give you a month off if you can get into Trump Tower and teach Donald Trump how to take a screenshot on his Android phone.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  If that's a video we can make, I literally, you can, you can just leave for a month. I'll give you a pro- I'll give you a thousand dollars.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  What?

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'll just keep amping it up. I'll buy you a car.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  What?

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  If you get a video.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  You're gonna buy me a car?

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  It won't be a good car, but I'll buy you a car. If you, we get a video of you teaching Trump to screenshot on his Android phone.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  And then do celebrity style.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  So then we could get like longer form?

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Longer form Trump. I'm into it.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  We all need longer form Trump sometimes.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  He's the only celebrity I can think of that like consistently using Android. Kim Kardashian uses her classic BlackBerry. That's the only other one.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Except, except the, uh, oh, was it her that she, her, her last BlackBerry just died?

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and so she's like on the hunt for more and there's no more on eBay.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  I'll give you, I'll buy you a car if you can get Kim Kardashian a BlackBerry.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  What?

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna start promising people cars for Impossible Stories. I mean, I'm not saying it will be a good car. In fact, I already know a car.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And also I don't want a car, so I'm gonna just turn around and sell it right away.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's gonna be like one of those like really beaten down eight hundred dollar Jeep Wrangler.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Why don't you just give me the thousand? I liked the thousand dollars.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  Cause I want you to have a, like a really, really wrecked white Jeep Wrangler.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  To drive around in for my like month off.

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  I forgot to promise you the month off.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  Damn it!

• 34:22Speaker 01

  This could be great.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  FYI, Chrissy Teigen sent Kim Kardashian flowers and a card.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  All right, if anybody knows how, how I can get ahold of, um...

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  DJT?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Out of, of, of Mr. Trump, just, uh, hit me up. My DMs are open. At Future Paul.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  But the only thing you can do with him is teach him how to take a screenshot.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  I'm gonna teach him how to screenshot on Android.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, I want that video. I think that would be a great video.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's read an ad for a bank and then we're gonna come back with James Temple.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast, as you know, is supported by Citi Cards with Android Pay. How cool is it that we live in a world where you can use the same device to listen to the Vergecast and buy your morning coffee, groceries, and more? Did I mention that it's a super fast way to pay? Just use your Citi card with Android Pay at the register. Get in, get it, and get going. Download the Android Pay app on Google Play or visit citi.com/androidpay to get started. Android Pay is available for eligible Citi Consumer Credit and Debit Cards.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  So we're back. What a wonderful ad read that was. Mm-hmm. They're the best. Wilderness week here at The Verge, celebrating the great outdoors. I love being outside. That's a lie. I do. I mean, it's tolerable. But other people love being outside. And the problem with being outside is that it just keeps getting hotter and hotter.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  It's been a miserable summer. Anyway, James Temple's here. James, one of our great video directors, you've got a new series kind of brewing up. You want to tell us about it?

• 35:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so just this week, we finally launched Climate Hackers, which we've been working on for the last couple of months. Basically, we're taking a look at, you know, obviously, climate change is a big deal and a big problem and an important issue, but instead of sort of focusing on and highlighting how big a problem it is and so forth, which people have done ad nauseam, we thought that it made sense to start looking at what are some of the potential ways of addressing this stuff. And so we have started talking to some scientists and technologists that are doing really interesting work to combat the effects of climate change, starting this week with David Keith. He's a professor at Harvard, professor of public policy and physics, who's working

• 36:29Speaker 03

  on what's called solar geoengineering, which is this idea that you can actually spray particles into the stratosphere that would bounce back light and heat into space and therefore offset a big chunk of the global warming that we expect to see this century.

• 36:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so you got your first installment, and I have to say, you led with the big, wild idea, which is great. I mean, they're all big, wild ideas, but this one is just particularly crazy. It's, I mean, I'm going to say it and it's going to be wrong, but this is how I think of it. It's scientists shooting gold dust into the sky to block the sun, which is not exactly right, but it's so close to being right.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  It's, it's actually really close. And in fact, you know, one of the particles that David Keith has talked about, that would be probably the most effective, uh, would actually be diamond dust. So, so gold and diamond, not, not too far off there.

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, just a good night out.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  What about like the tears, the tears of, of babies?

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna shoot baby tears into the sky. Uh, wait, so tell, so you-

• 37:32Speaker 03

  That hasn't been evaluated.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  Obviously, everyone should go watch the thing, but walk us through it. Like, what is this idea? Like, how would it actually work?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  And is it at all practical?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  I mean, the thing is, it probably is practical, because this is a rare instance where we've seen nature already doing this. Volcanoes, you know, massive volcanoes in the, in the past spew just tons, tens of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky. And when it happens, in the following year, we have often seen a decline in, in temperature. So, the, the question is just, well, there's two questions. One is, can, can humans mimic it? And there's a pretty good sense that we could. It's not that, technically, it's not that complicated. It's just, you know, get a plane that can fly into the stratosphere and eject some stuff. The bigger question-

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Diamonds.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Diamonds. Uh, the, the bigger question is, uh, what are the side effects?

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  And, and, and what are the environmental side effects? And, and how can we kind of work around those things?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I have a million questions.

• 38:30Nilay Patel?

  Let me rewind and ask one question. It might, it might be crazy. Why couldn't we just try to make volcanoes explode? Because that would be spectacular.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  What you need to do is you need to get the Thetans to fly the DC-10s into the volcano.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's actually why I love this series. Like, the audacity of these ideas is terrific. And then, you know, you confront them and ask, why couldn't we do it? But like, you know, it's obviously not, I think, wise to compel volcanoes to erupt in massive eruption.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  It depends on the volcano.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and the location around it. I think there are probably some negative downsides to it as well. So

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  What are the whole bearing of people?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  There's, there's diamond dust, but there's also like other chemicals that we might just spray around like, how, how do they decide, why, why diamonds or why, what was there?

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  It's like sulfur dioxide or something?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  So, so the other two that have been looked at are alumina and sulfur dioxide.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Sulfur dioxide.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  The issue with sulfur dioxide, which is what volcanoes actually spew, is that it also would, uh, it, it eats away the ozone layer and that's not a good thing. So that's why, uh, Dr. Keith started looking at some of these other things, just to see how you could minimize some of these environmental downsides.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Okay. So we, we could see what volcanoes did. And I know that there are some people that say that they, you could do a small scale study, but they, I don't, I, you need to explain that to me. But my sense is that you just kind of do it, hope it works and there's no take backs. Like if we, if we throw a whole bunch of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, a whole bunch of diamond dust in the atmosphere or the stratosphere, and we're like, oh shit, that, oops.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Like, we can't undo it, right?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Well, we can't immediately undo it. I mean, one of the benefits of this approach is that it's not permanent in that, you know, this stuff eventually falls out of the stratosphere. So, but, but yeah, we're locked into that, whatever change we've, we've, uh, whatever change occurs, we've locked in for a year or so. So we want to be able to live with that. Um, though, you know, some of the, the, the critics definitely say, you're not really going to know what happens until you roll this out at full scale. But the scientists I talked to who've looked, taken a hard look at this, do you think that you can do limited trials in, in limited areas and just, you know, you, you can, you can learn important things. You maybe don't know exactly what's going to happen once it's rolled out at full scale, but you can learn what some of the unknown unknowns would be in terms of secondary

• 40:55Speaker 03

  effects and so forth. So, so I think there is a lot to be learned still, but, but I do think that you're right. We're not, we may, you know, there is something, uh, an experiment conducted at the scale of the planet and the complexity of the climate system, there are inevitably going to be some things that we just, we can't predict or control for.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Would, would you even want like an even distribution of this? Cause it like, if the planet keeps getting hotter, uh, there's parts of the planet that are going to really like that. And, and it's better for them. And then there's parts of them, of the planet that's like, wait, that's too hot. Can you, can you target the two hot parts?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, like just Ohio and Iowa, but not California. I mean, I was, I was asking about that and it sounded like our ability to localize this is, is pretty limited, that, that natural events in the stratosphere are gonna spread this stuff out pretty, pretty broadly.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  So, how would you do this? I mean, that's like, the big question is, we have this idea for, well, I don't, Dr. Keith, I believe, has an idea to spray some particles, including, but not limited to, diamonds in the sky.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  You just, you literally just load them on a plane and fly real high and let them go? What's the, what's the mechanism?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  I think that's right.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  That's it?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  Is there like a heist? Like, I think there should be a heist first. Like, we should steal the diamonds and then grind them into dust.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  This is actually what people, some people are very scared about, because this is not this complex, technical thing, right? Any nation that can afford a plane that can fly into the stratosphere could pretty much go and try to do this themselves. And that's actually why a lot of the scientists are saying, listen, we, we have to do the studies and figure out how this is done safely and what the effects are, because frankly, a na- a nation or even a wealthy individual, Peter Thiel, could, could go rogue at any moment, and just, just try to do this on their own.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, if Peter Thiel goes from, "I killed Gawker," to, "I'm interested in fortifying my body with the blood of the young," fact, to, "I'm spraying diamonds over Canada just to see what happens." Why not?

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Yes, he, he would be even more well-loved figure, I'd say.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I would say- He's absolutely a Bond villain. Uh, that's like a hard left turn, to go from being a Bond villain to like eco, eco mastermind? A lot of the Bond villains are eco masterminds. Yeah, he, he, he pulls off a massive heist, he goes to wherever, uh, you know, the De Beers warehouse of diamonds that they stockpile. He like walks, he walks in, he's like, "I, I made PayPal." Dude-

• 43:31Speaker 02

  You gotta, you gotta stick with me on the whole Bond. Okay, I'm with you. Plot. Like, the Bond villain doesn't just go buy a bunch of stuff, they have to go steal it. So De Beers obviously stockpiles diamonds because they're an evil conspiracy that drives up the price of diamonds and convinces all that we need to put them on rings when we get married. And so they've got a massive stockpile to keep diamonds rare. So Peter Thiel goes and steals them and he puts them in his mountain fortress. Yep. And then, in order to mess with the nation states that are preventing him from creating his independent seasteading empire where nobody can bother him, he releases diamond dust into the air over the countries that he disagrees with. Cooling them massively. To cool, to cool them down.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Such that he can get the international permission from the UN, which he's co-opted to create his new seasteading nation state. I'm ready. Because it's not gonna be a problem for global warming.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Can he say to those nations, chill out?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  So, James, James, welcome to the Vergecast, my friend.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Thank you, this has been great.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  What's next? Like, what's the, what's the takeaway? Is it, is there motion behind this? Is there, not motion, is there momentum behind this? Is there energy? Are there government moves to be made? What, what happens here?

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Yes, I, I would say that, you know, I, I started covering this stuff a couple of years ago when I was at the San Francisco Chronicle, and at the time, it, it seemed like an idea that had maybe just started emerging from the, the fringes of the scientific world. And I think now, I wouldn't say it's necessarily mainstream, but a lot of very serious, very well-credentialed scientists are, are taking a hard look at this. And we've just seen a, a senator introduce a proposal to earmark some, some money in the Energy Department to start actually studying this sort of stuff. We saw the, I think the National Science Foundation came out with a report on this recently, again, saying that, let's not rush into this or anything, but this is at least an area that, that we want to

• 45:35Speaker 03

  start researching more. So I do think that there is building momentum behind these ideas, and not because anyone thinks that this is like a brilliant idea, but because it's very clear to everyone that, that climate change is gonna be a disaster and, and, and we're not doing anything substantial to, to really address it yet.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Peter Thiel, Diamonds in the Sky.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  That's the move. All right. I gotta put you on the spot. Should we do it?

• 45:59Speaker 03

  So, my personal view of it is that we should study it. That, you know, I don't, I don't think that, I think anyone who is sort of like instinctually or reflexively dismissive of it doesn't fully appreciate the full extent of the dangers we face with climate change. But I don't, I also think that we have a lot more to learn before we should go out and just start spraying stuff into the stratosphere and hoping that it all works well.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I want the audience to stay tuned for more Climate Hackers. We got more coming up. There are more crazy ideas about how to fix this planet of ours and James, we-

• 46:36Speaker 03

  More heists?

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  More heists. Dieter, I'm actually really sad that at no point during your tale did Dieter Bone put on a tuxedo and save the nations of Earth from a frozen fate. Anyway.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  That's Act Three.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bone. Yeah. Or James. James, you could save everybody.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I don't have a tux.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, more Climate Hackers can come. James, thank you for joining us.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me on, guys.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

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• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  During a seven-day free trial, you can download 140 pieces of content, and it's only $99 for an annual subscription after that, which is less than $10 a month. Do the math. Everything is 100% royalty-free, even if the subscription is canceled. You get unrestricted usage rights for personal and commercial projects. You keep what you download, you maintain those rights forever. So, listeners, this is a bit of an exclusive for you. Sign up for a seven-day free trial today at graphicstock.com/vergecast. That's graphicstock.com/vergecast for a free seven-day trial.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  Back.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Graphic Socks.

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  Everyone likes free. Paul.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  What do you have a recurring segment on the show? What's it called?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  It's called Let Me.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  It has the same name every week, right?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's called Let Me Touch You With Science.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  Why is it called that?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  No. You definitely can't call it that.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Are you sure?

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  Ah, well.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  It's too late now.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  Way too late now. James again.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we've been doing it for weeks.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone, everyone's so used to it and there's been no listener outcry whatsoever because of that, Ben. All right, tell us, my god. Tell us what happened here.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  All right, uh, so somebody's making this like exoskeleton for VR that like imagine a creepy robot hand. Here, Neil, I just hold out your hand, all right? Hold out your, hold out your.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  Why would you ask me this after naming this segment what you named it?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I wanna touch you with science. Hold out your hand, all right?

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  You know, I love you and I trust you.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Now, here comes the robot hand.

• 49:19Nilay Patel?

  You could betray that trust.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  On top of your hand.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  First of all, it's an audio show.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  Second of all, Paul and I are just holding hands in the most awkward way possible right now.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  This isn't holding hands. I have my hand on top of your hand.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  Would you say that you're holding my hand?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Would you say that this feels a little awkward?

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  I think that you're holding my hand and I'm not holding your hand.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Now, imagine I'm a robot.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  You're done.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  And you're like trying to grab a rubber ducky in VR. And then I stop your fingers with my, my robot fingers, right? So you're trying, you're trying to grab something and I grab your fingers back because I'm a creepy robot exoskeleton.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  So here is the problem with the demo Paul just tried to give me.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Is that his hand was atop my hand.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  It didn't work at all.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  But they weren't actually attached so that when I moved my fingers, Paul had to individually grab each one of my fingers.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's why we need robots.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  That's why you need, so it's a glove?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  It's a, no, it's an exoskeleton.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  So like clips on your, your body.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  So when you go to, when you go to grab something, there's resistance from the thing that you grab so your hand doesn't go through it like a ghost. Uh, and this thing mimics that resistance by holding your fingers back with its creepy robot, uh, hand on top of your hand.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like a head crab from Half-Life.

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  This is an excellent episode of your show, 1,000 Words, a podcast about describing images on the internet.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  This is a secret. Way for him to record the podcast. I see what's happening.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is native content.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  This is one of those ideas that needs to happen though, but I, I always think about it in terms of you'll wear the glove and the glove, it'll make you feel like you're holding something as opposed to resisting you actively.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:56Nilay Patel?

  Cause you wanna, you wanna feel like you're touching something, not like you can't move your fingers.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but when you, you, you, you literally, when you're holding something, can't move your fingers because your, your hand doesn't go through the thing you're holding.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  It's just like a reverse version of it. It's like you're being held back. Instead of pressing against something, somebody's pulling back on you.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  And I'm saying that is not usually what holding something feels like.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Man, it's just, it's force vectors either way, man.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Force vectors. What do you say?

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  Probably should really warm up that RAM before you do this segment, bro.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  I just think haptics in VR is gonna be really important. I still, I still tell people my favorite experience in VR, the thing that feels the most real is holding the two Vive controllers. Because a lot of the games have a one-to-one representation of the Vive controllers that you see.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And you can feel them, you can tap them together, and that somehow is the most immersive thing.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  Um, there was that report this week that, uh, the HTC Vive is the most, has the most active development community. And I think a lot of it is because of controllers.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  It's just so cool.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's neat. I got, did I tell you I got lost in the Vive the other day? I was like, I was, James Barham, our creative director was like, let me show you these pictures. And he was like, I'm trying to find him. And I was like, sitting in the cave with him. And I put on the Vive and I started playing. Told you we were gonna talk about Play-Doh today. And I put on the, yes, I was in a cave. That's what happened. And I found myself. And I, no, I was in the controllers. I started playing whatever the first game that I could click on was, I didn't even know what it was called. And I was in a forest. And I was just like stuck behind a tree and I was walking out of the room like crashing into shit. And I was just lost. I was like, I'm not leaving here until I solve this puzzle. And James is like, you are just walking in the chairs right now. That was my story with him.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Did you solve the puzzle?

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  No. The end. VR is a failure. All right, lighting round. We got a few minutes left here. Let's do this thing. Reports, Amazon might launch a $5 per month music streaming service that only works in the Amazon Echo. What do you think?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Only on the Echo?

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's my question too. I mean, why am I paying for, I think if someone put it from theverge.com, why am I paying a fee to listen to music exclusively on one bad speaker?

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. A new theme for Spotify that makes it look more like audio.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Don't believe the lies.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  Too soon.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Don't believe the lies.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  You had a lot of music stuff going on here.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I've been trying to use Spotify.

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Because I want Spotify to like, show me cool recommendations because everyone's like, oh, the weekly recommendations are so good.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  It's fact. They are.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  But so far Spotify thinks I'm like half of who I was whenever I used Spotify last, which was like 2011 or something like that. And half now where I just listen to that one, like that one dance song by Drake.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we are, we are all just layers of our past selves, Paul. That's what I learned in the cave.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  Just off the road, Frank Ocean Blonde, Apple Music exclusive. First, record's very good.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Very good. Please stop listening to this podcast.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Because you should be listening to Frank Ocean right now.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Exclusively on Apple Music.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  That's a free one, Eddie. Sorry, just doing fake ads.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just type verge into Apple Music and see what happens. It's, uh, it's nothing, but it could be something, Apple.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Micah wrote a great piece about exclusives and the, the idea that artists of this size don't need a label anymore. So labels are now afraid of exclusives because you get paid by Apple. You don't need to get paid by Warner Brothers or whatever. I think that's like, that's a, that's an interesting moment.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  It's so what's, what's funny about this is like it, it, he set it up really well and it's going to come down to a fight between streaming services and labels. And if you look at Apple Music, where their original like trademark, what they were and weren't supposed to do. They had that fight with the Beatles and now they're like, they're literally going to be put in a position where they're like, going to be actively destroying music labels, which is like the thing that they weren't supposed to do when they got them.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, they got them. They, they paid, they paid the Beatles. They're good. The Beatles are happy.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  I know. They're good.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  Um, but it's funny because what did a label used to do for you? They used to do many, they primarily they did manufacturing, distribution and marketing, right?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  So, yeah. And so it sounds like.

• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  You don't need any of those things anymore.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  And Mike's thing is like, because labels are becoming afraid of this, we might have fewer exclusives. But I could also see it going the other way where we have Hulu, Amazon, Netflix exclusives, you know? And it's like, you get a few, a few shows in common, but for the most part to watch all things that exist, you need to subscribe to all of them. Don't you think that could happen for music?

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  No, the thing about labels, like you would, an artist would sign a label because you were just a person who was good at making music and you had no idea how to manufacture LPs and put them on trucks and get them into stores and you just don't need to do that anymore. Apple will take your, I don't know, your AI FF files from you, whatever you master on, and then they will distribute it through Apple Music on the millions of phones. They'll market it with their enormous reach and they'll play it for people and they're, you know, somewhat okay app. And like, if you're a label, that's like an existential threat.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  This was the first album on Apple Music where it's like, okay, I want this. All right, Apple, ready? Adding this, download it to my phone and it did.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Every time I've done that before, it's like, okay, I know I downloaded that album, so it's totally going to be on my phone now that I'm in the subway. And then it's like two tracks and then like the next one's like.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  Apple Music is so confused with my stuff that I have, I have two copies of virtually every track now and I just don't know what to do with it. Anyway, lightning round continues. PlayStation now, game streaming to PC. That seems very exciting to me. I would play PlayStation games on a PC.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  I didn't know that service was going well at all.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  It's just going.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Is it going well?

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  Just doing a thing. Yep. Uh, one more. I mean, that's pretty much the lightning response.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  I just hate the latency.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Hey, I wanna, I wanna take advantage of having a, a, a science, uh, writer and video director here.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  To talk about the PlayStation? James, this is a lightning round and we've had a Vergecast debate and I need you to weigh in. Okay. I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna ask you two questions. Can you see thunder?

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, god damn it. Thunder is the sound of lightning.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Can you see thunder? I, I'm, I'm leaning toward, uh, Neelai's response there.

• 57:33Nilay Patel?

  There you go!

• 57:34Speaker 02

  So, yes or no? So, no. No. You can see lightning. But, but then what, can you hear lightning?

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes!

• 57:42Speaker 01

  I get it, I get it. Dieter just got you good.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  What do you mean?

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Perplexing.

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  Thunder is the sound of lightning. One is the property of the other.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Can you hear a clap?

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Can you see a clap?

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Right, right? A clap is the physical motion of the two hands hitting.

• 58:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Right? Which you can see, but you can also hear that in sound waves. Thunder is just hearing lightning.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  It's just the sound produced by lightning.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  I'm with you.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Can you hear a troll, Neelai? I hate you. I hate you so much. Cause you just did. It was great.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  But you can't.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Dieter, good job. Give it, give that guy a raise.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Because they always, Dieter, I'll give you a month off if you can see thunder. I'll buy, I will buy you a car. Uh, it'll be a crappy car, but you go show me some thunder. I can see thunder, it's called lightning. I hate you.

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  Alright, last one. Last, last one.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  We didn't talk about the Slim.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, two more. Okay. PS4 Slim leaks. Looks bad.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  It looks terrible.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  It looks so bad.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, that's, sorry. It looks like 90 Sony.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Leaks always look bad, though.

• 58:50Nilay Patel?

  In the worst way.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Like, leaks always look bad. Like, the iPhone 4 leak looked bad.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's cause Gizmodo like literally shattered it into a million pieces and peed on it. Like. They're like, "We found the iPhone!"

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like it definitely plays some sort of proprietary audio codec.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  No, it's like the worst of 90 Sony.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  And accepts memory sticks.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  I bet it does. I'm super bet it does. I gotta, speaking of cameras. Hello. Uh. I've been drinking. I don't know, man. Uh, Canon 5D Mark IV announced. Uh, 4K video, it's got Wi-Fi. Uh, according to this URL, it also has a price.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  I, these days, these days, I'm really behind.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say, that was an SEO joke for my SEO friends.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  It does have a price. It's $3,500.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  That's not a high price for that camera.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  It's a lot of money.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  But you're a pro.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  I just feel like the 5D Mark II, which introduced this video, digital SLR, like really changed cinema.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Changed the world.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  And I feel like I haven't really kept track of all the camera specs in the meantime. Like this, this has 4K at 24 or 30 frames per second. It's got like 60 frames per second, 1080p. And that seems great. It's 120 frames per second, 720p. That's all exciting. And there's like new processors. I'm sure it's great.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Um, but I just, I just, I'm just happy that this, a little gadget, Canon 5D Mark II changed.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  Changed, literally changed the world. There's a whole thing about how it made the, the cost of HD video capture low and created a new generation of cinema.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  And for some reason Canon has only made two sequels.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  Because they don't need to.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  I mean, they've got a lot of other interesting cameras.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  If you look at, there's tons and tons and tons of verge photography that James shoots that's all shot in this Mark II.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  It still looks beautiful.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  The Mark II is the reason that I moved into video. I mean, it was definitely this fundamental thing. But at this point, it's interesting that we're on to the four and all they're doing is catching up with what most other DSLR cameras and mirrorless cameras have, have had for years. So it's weird that they sort of, you know, created this, this, this area of, you know, shifting all these photojournalists into videographers, but it seems like they've, they're getting their lunch eaten.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  What would you say?

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  By Sony and mirrorless.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of people I know that in video are really into the Sony. Would you say that's the Mark II of, of right now? What, what's that called? The Alpha something?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  The AS72 or AS7?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  The AS7, AS72. That's the hot one.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  Two.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Yep. That's what I just bought.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  And no buyer's remorse after seeing the Mark IV.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Nope. No, I mean, why do I, why do I want to go back and have this big, heavy camera? When, you know, the Sony has all of those things that Canon just finally got around to adding.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  Because it's not a video camera. That's actually the thing, right? The Mark II was particularly remarkable because it was a still camera to which Canon added video capability.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  So you could excuse it to yourself that I'm still getting a still camera.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, because then you could, you were, you were able to suddenly use this library of lenses. You were able to get the look.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  Now the Mark IV is, you know, I think there's still a question for, existentially, is it a camera or is it a video camera? And the video cameras have like caught up and surpassed it. Like, we don't shoot on Mark II's anymore. We shoot on C100s, which Canon makes, using many of the same components remixed to make a video camera.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Way better low-light performance.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Something I know about the C100.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. James, for all the people who are mad at you for buying a Sony camera, where can they find you on Twitter?

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  At J Temple.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  At J Temple. If you are a Canon fanboy, once again, that is at J Temple.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Underscore Sony the best.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  Paul is at FeaturePaul, Dieter's at Backlon, I am at Reckless, The Verge is at Verge on virtually every platform. Just go to one of them, indicate to that platform that we are your preferred provider of social content.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  That would be very helpful. Please go to iTunes, an app that should be speedily killed, but continues to exist and distribute our podcasts. Go to that app. Find the stars.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  It's gotten a little bit better.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  Choose the maximum amount of stars.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Loop button always works for me now.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  And then submit that amount of stars to Apple, Apple Incorporated.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Can you also heart in the, in the, in the podcast zone? You can, you can star it, but can you heart it?

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  The fact that it has stars and hearts. We, that was a great piece. That was one of my favorite pieces that we ever written. Anyway, uh, do that. And then while you're in iTunes, while you're subjecting yourself to that experience, check out everything else. Get up what's tech? Mr. Christopher Plant. That hits on Tuesdays. Control Alt Delete has been off for two weeks. It's back next week. Me and Walt hanging, talking, rapping, jamming. Verge ESP with Emily and Liz. It's on Fridays. They're going strong. And you can, yeah, just generally hang with the Verge. Wherever fine internet is served. That's it. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Paul.