TLOP: The Love of Physics

This week on the Vergecast, with Dieter, Nilay, and Nicola missing we have put together an alternative cast featuring Chris Ziegler, Sean O'Kane, and Loren Grush, with video director Mark Linsangan and social video reporter Kirsten Frisina discussing the news of gravitational waves, Google cars, and maybe a little Valentine's Day talk. Also, will there be a Clockstoppers 2? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Today is February 11th, 2016. My name is Chris Ziegler. No, my name is Neelai Patel today, actually. You may notice there is a lack of Dieter and Neelai here. We've put them in a closet. They are concealed for the moment. No, actually, Dieter's wedding is this weekend. He is far, far away. Yes.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Clapping culture.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Clap culture.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Hooray for Dieter.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  For Dieter. Well deserved. So he is not in the country, nor is Neelai. I'm subbing, joined by Sean O'Kane, Lauren Grush. I think you've both been on the Vergecast before, right? We have. You're familiar. Often together. Yeah. Familiar to the Verge audience. And then in the hype desk, we have not one but two people joining us.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Double hype desk.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Kirsten Frisina and Mark Linsangan, one of our video directors, who is a hype beast for phones. Am I right, Mark?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yes, Chris. Yes. Very much so.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  He also only whispers.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Hype check phones.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  10 out of 10?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  10 out of 10.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, all phones, right now.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Just hype check phones in general. So if you're joining us, first of all, you're not joining us. Let's not kid ourselves because Yeezy Season 3 just kicked off and The Life of Pablo livestream is supposed to be happening right now.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Lauren's face is like, uh...

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, The Life of Pablo is supposed to be live streaming right now on Tidal. I'm hearing, this is live information being piped into my skull, that there are problems with that stream. So if you're taking a break from it to see what we're up to, thank you for that. Hopefully you won't tune back once the stream starts, because we want to keep your attention for the next hour, undivided. Actually, Andrew, our producer, and I were joking earlier that we should just put picture-in-picture. We should have Yeezy Season 3 picture-in-picture and then have The Life of Pablo kind of playing in the background this entire...

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I like that idea. I also like that. We're about to talk about a really crazy scientific discovery.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  We are.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  And that happened today, yet live streaming and video conferencing are still like the biggest trash fires in technology. Like it's 2016 and we can't figure those two things out.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Why, why did Albert Einstein have to spend his time working on this theoretical nonsense? When he could have been solving

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Live streaming.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  The real problems of our day like live streaming.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  It's ironic because the live stream announcing the scientific discovery today also cut out.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Shocker.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And it was momentarily pulled from because YouTube is so

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  twitchy about its copyright claims.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Also, they changed the name of gravitational waves like four times before the actual.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Speaking of gravitational waves, we should get right into it. So you may have caught the announcement this morning was at 10:30 ish, right?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  That they've discovered these waves.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  For real this time.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  For real.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Lauren, why don't you tell us about that?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  So this was a concept put forth by Albert Einstein about a century ago. It's part of his theory of general relativity. And basically, everybody thought they existed. There, there really was no, you know, no doubt about it. Well, there's maybe some, but not a lot. But no one had could.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  It's like, how much faith do we actually put in Albert Einstein is the question, right?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a lot of faith. I mean, his theory has stood up against the test of time and, you know, tons of testing in general.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  What is time anyways?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is time? What is space time?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Well.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Let's get really existential about this.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  What a great question to ask. We have a delightful video that kind of explains this whole gravitational wave nonsense and what space and time really are. So if we can play that, let's go.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Roll that.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Scientists say they have found evidence for gravitational waves for the first time ever. The discovery was made by a group of researchers called LIGO. And if it's true, it marks one of the biggest scientific finds in decades.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Gravitational waves are considered ripples in spacetime. What is spacetime? Let's try to visualize it by imagining it as this blanket. Yes, we're compressing four dimensions into three. A smaller object on the blanket's surface doesn't change the shape all that much. It will just roll straight across. But if you place a bigger object with more mass on the blanket's surface, it warps the overall shape much more significantly and affects other passing objects. This is basically how gravity works in our universe. Objects seem attracted to each other, but really, they follow the curvatures of spacetime created by the presence of other larger objects. Now, let's switch things up a bit.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Instead of a blanket, imagine spacetime as a pool of water. If you move an object through the pool, it causes a ripple effect outward. A similar scenario happens when large masses move throughout the universe. They produce gravitational waves that warp spacetime. Everyone basically agrees that gravitational waves exist, but nobody has been able to prove them. In fact, the movement of every object in the universe supposedly produces these waves, but they're usually way too weak to be observed. So to find them, the scientists at LIGO looked for the biggest ones out there. That means observing two super-dense black holes merging far away. This huge explosive event generates enormous waves

• 5:37Speaker 03

  that can be picked up by LIGO's observatories. Each facility is shaped like a giant L. The arms are vacuum-sealed tubes 2.5 miles long. At the end of each arm is a mirror. When the gravitational waves pass the mirrors, they warp spacetime, making it appear that one mirror is closer than the other. The scientists can measure this phenomenon by timing how long it takes for lasers to bounce back from each mirror. The relative movement of these mirrors is incredibly slight. By the time the waves from the black holes make it to Earth, they only change LIGO's instruments by about 1/10,000 the size of a proton.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  That means these measurements are incredibly difficult to detect and are very susceptible to error. Plus, the science community has been burned before on gravitational waves. In 2014, scientists studying the early universe said they had found evidence for the waves, but later it turned out the measurements were just the result of cosmic dust. But finding gravitational waves is still a huge deal. It confirms the last big part of Einstein's theory of relativity that has yet to be proven. It could also open up a whole new way of studying our universe. Before now, we haven't been able to see objects like black holes or neutron stars because they are way too faint, but we could use gravitational waves to study these objects more directly than ever before.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  So I want to get into this a little more, but first can I just say, science is insane.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  I cannot believe you guys compressed four dimensions into three. How dare you?

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Can we talk about how genius that video is?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's an amazing video. Shout out to Miriam Nielsen and Phyllis Pizzito, who shot and directed this and did some amazing animations for it. Really, like, I understood it, which is saying something. So shout out to those guys. But yeah, I mean, science is insane. We were talking about this earlier, the fact that this doesn't necessarily have immediate practice, like, you and I are not going to experience any change in our lives because of this discovery, but still, the fact remains that there are these mirrors separated by thousands of miles that detected this insane thing.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  A couple miles.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Many, well, no, no, but they're in different parts of the country, right?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  That's true, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  So, and then this detection is how many light years away?

• 8:01Speaker 04

  So it was 1.3 billion light years away, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  That is ridiculous.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  That is completely ridiculous.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  So that's so technically the waves that they detected happened.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Like the explosion of the black holes happened 1.3 billion years ago. And it's just now getting to us, the effects of it are just now getting to us.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  That we can measure them and they're and they're so slight like like they're saying it's one ten thousandth the size of a proton is is how much it warps the space time around these mirrors. So the fact that we can, you know, make those measurements with that kind of, you know, precision is just insane.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  So Albert Einstein has been completely vindicated at this point. All of his theories have been proven.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Uh, but this isn't the end, right? Like they're gonna deploy this into space somehow, they're gonna.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the the idea is, well, right now, the only way we can really look at objects in the universe is by using light of some kind, um, some kind of optics. Um, but you can't do that with black holes or neutron stars are way too faint to see. So the idea is we can see how they manipulate the gravity around them with these gravitational waves, uh, to to learn more about them and kind of see them in a different type of way.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  It's like a whole new, I mean, it's like a whole new starting point. Like you have not been able to work with, if you think of it like a medium, you haven't been able to work with this medium yet. Now that you know how to detect them and where and how sensitive you need to be and everything.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Now you can go back out to all these places that you've been sort of pegging, uh, throughout the years of like, oh, maybe this would be a great place to detect gravitational waves, et cetera, et cetera. Now you can go back to those spots and like rework what it was that you were studying.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Right. Which is really crazy. One of the physicists I talked to had a really good point. It's like when we discovered radio waves or, you know, built the first like radio telescope, we discovered all these crazy new things. So, you know, finding a new medium for measuring the universe will probably discover things that we never thought were even possible.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's really cool, obviously.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Uh, and this and this specific instrument or set of instruments was only at like a third its potential sensitivity, right? I mean, like.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, they can definitely amplify the sensitivity. So this is just the first step, you know?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  You need to get the confirmation out of the way to be like, okay, we've found the gravitational waves. Now the time is to keep finding them and to make our instruments more precise so that we can actually use them as a form of measurement, rather than just saying that they're there.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  And this, is this like fully peer reviewed at this point, or is that another step that they need to go through?

• 10:44Speaker 04

  No, they publish, they publish their study in a physical journal, I can't remember the exact name, Physical Journal Letters, or whatever.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  You're saying it wasn't Us Magazine?

• 10:54Speaker 04

  No, it was not Us Magazine. And so that went through peer review. It had like a, over a thousand authors on it, too. So a bunch of people signed up on this. And I'm sure it's gonna have to space up to a lot of scrutiny. You know, even if it's peer reviewed, things that go through peer review aren't always correct. And a lot of people are definitely looking at this. However, you know, it seems pretty legit. They have a lot of people on it. So I'm hoping, I mean, fingers crossed that they got everything right.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  I'd like to contend that this won't change people's lives, because I think that it's this kind of stuff that makes people more interested in the science that's going on, you know, about our earth and about space and things like that. And when you start to go down these roads of learning about what this stuff means, it changes your perspective on everything. And I think it can change. It doesn't have like, yes, that like immediate impact. Like, I'm not gonna not gonna work tomorrow because there are gravitational waves now.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  That would be awesome.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  You can't go buy some gravitational waves.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I'm taking a personal day.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  To sort of absorb what this means.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  To absorb some waves.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I mean, it's

• 12:02Speaker 04

  No, I agree with Sean on that. Yeah, for sure.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  It's, it's super cool that they were able to do this. And that is like the most reductionist way to talk about it. Like, oh, it's so cool. Good job, guys. Next thing.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Kanye West. But it's, yeah. But that being said, it is always nice when they can connect it to something real, right? Like what the implications are. And I think what, what makes this even more exciting than your normal scientific discovery is the fact that they don't even know how big the implications are yet, right? Because they don't know what they're going to discover, knowing that they have this new instrument available to them.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, yeah, that's kind of what's so big. So it's gonna change the lives of many in the scientific community. It's just not, it's, it doesn't have an immediate impact for us right now.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  But I think it definitely will have an impact on just our, our understanding of science.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  And how we study it.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Um, so I need to hype check two things. Uh, first I need to hype check Gravity.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  The movie starring George Clooney.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  The movie starring George Clooney, different, different rating than actual Gravity.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  So I, by the way, speaking of the movie Gravity, I have an alternate theory of, of what happened in that movie.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Oh, please explain.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, go.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  George Clooney's character was, did not die.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  Where'd he go?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  I'm sorry if I spoiled that movie for anybody.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  I mean, it's been a couple of years.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's been a couple of years.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  Get on it.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  I don't, like, I, I think that he was actually in the, the, the cap, like, he returned to the capsule.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I think that's

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Why?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Totally

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Be- because it was too real. It was too real.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Also, can we talk about how George Clooney did not need to die in that movie? Because if you're gonna have a science person on, she, so he was flying off

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  into space.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  And she grabs him with a, with one of the cords and stops his, his flight.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  And instead of, that would have just stopped him and he would have just, a gentle tug would have come, he would have come back. But for some reason, some kind of invisible force was making

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Gravitational waves.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  No.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  It was definitely gravitational.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  The, the unified theory of the movie Gravity has finally come together.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. George Clooney has spent three years waiting for vindication and now his theory of how he died.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  Okay, but if there were gravitational waves, he probably would have gone up and down in an oscillating fashion or something. Sorry.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Uh, okay, so we've gotten the, uh, the hype check of Gravity out of the way.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  No, wait, we didn't though.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  No, we, that's true. Yeah, yeah, we kinda got sidetracked.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  I think Kirsten wants to take over that.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  I have, I have no feeling. I, I refuse to hype check that movie.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  No, like, the actual force of gravity.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Physical property.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Oh, the physical property, 10 out of 10. Very helpful.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Nice, nice.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Very generous hype desk today.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Uh, and then hype check gravitational waves.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Maybe seven out of 10?

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Wow. I did not see that coming.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  You're gonna have a lot of people coming after you.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Do you think higher or lower?

• 14:49Speaker 05

  Oh, higher. Are you kidding me? This is like inventing, like, basically a new type of telescope. Like, this is like peak hype.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  That's fair.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  So like 10?

• 14:56Speaker 05

  This is a 10 out of 10.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Alright, so we got us eight.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  So what's, what's the average, Sean?

• 15:01Speaker 05

  8.5. Eight point five?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Eight point.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Do math real quick.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, this this math is a little beyond our our pay grade. Let's move on. Um, can someone just check for me very quickly? Is the the Yeezus livestream up yet?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeezus, what year are you in?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  No, Yeezus, uh, season three.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeezy season three.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Yeezy, excuse me.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Geez. Uh, our entire staff is like sitting up on the couches watching that livestream too. Like, we are, we are alone in a bubble of.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  I know Jameson is having some struggles.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Literally, nobody is is watching.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Like, no one's even typing in our main Slack channel.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  That's, that's. It's really depressing.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  That's how you know nothing's going on.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Really well or really poorly.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  That's good. You know what? We're live to tape. We'll, we'll make an excellent show for later, uh, this evening or perhaps this weekend. When you're done with Kanye.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  We hope you're enjoying it tomorrow night.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, tomorrow night. Uh, so let's talk, um, Virgin Galactic. You're going where next week?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  To the Mojave Desert next week.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Mojave Desert, and you're gonna see?

• 15:59Speaker 04

  We're going to see Virgin Galactic's new spaceship. It's the replacement for Spaceship Two, uh, after it suffered an unfortunate crash last two years ago now.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  A year and a half.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Year and a half, yeah. Uh, so we're gonna go see that. Maybe, maybe not Stephen Hawking might be there. We don't know.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  That would be cool.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  That would be cool. Depends on his health is what they're saying. Um, so yeah, we're hopefully gonna get up and close with it and.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And do we have any speculation on what we're gonna see? The kinds of changes or not changes?

• 16:33Speaker 04

  I would assume it's still a, a similar spaceplane style.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Cause it still connects to the Spaceship One.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Uh, it's the White Knight.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  White Knight, excuse me.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  White Knight Two.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  White Knight, so it still connects to White Knight Two. They're just replacing the.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  You need to learn an entire new language to understand what Virgin Galactic is doing.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Right, so, so yeah, some background on Virgin Galactic for people who don't know. Uh, they are not your standard rocket company. They're, they don't make the cylindrical, vertical takeoff rockets that you normally think of when you think of rockets. They make spaceplanes, um, that, yeah, they have to be taken up on an additional plane, which takes that spaceplane to a certain altitude. deploys the space plane and then that goes into suborbital space.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  And they were the first, basically the first major private space company to burst on the scene in the early 2000s, promising like, once this technology is ready, we're gonna let everybody go to space. We're gonna start by selling tickets for $250,000. All these celebrities and bigwigs decided to start buying up these tickets in advance of that promise. Uh, and then every year it was sort of like, well, we'll get to it next year and then every, you know, the next year. Uh, you'll get your ride next year. And it just kind of kept getting pushed until they finally started testing them. And then, once they started testing the flights, that's when.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Did they have like a big disaster?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they ran.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So on Halloween, I think.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, October 2014.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, um, I remember, cause I was getting ready to go out.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  I was getting dressed in my costume and I, and that news broke and I was like, well, that this is happening now. Um, yeah. So, uh, what ended up happening is, okay, so if I can explain it correctly, the, the spaceship has a thing called a feathering technique where it changes the position of its wings. And what happened was one of the pilots accidentally unlocked that feathering process too early. And so it caused the wings to change position, change position before it was at the right spot. And that kind of, I think that made the, the plane.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  At that speed, any change in the aerodynamics is just.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Not good.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  And.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  It wound up being not.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  So if nothing else, they would probably make that somehow safer, whether they automate that process or make it more difficult to.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  I would assume it's, I would assume it's going to be more automated or at least, um, protect against user error. Because that was one of the things that, um, I believe it was the NTSB board that, um, looked into it. They concluded that the original design was, did not account for mishaps from the pilot themselves.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been one of the biggest criticisms in the last couple of years, uh, since, or the last year and a half since this happened was that that seems like a thing that with thorough review, you should have realized. We need to make sure that this, these like foils are locked into place and that they can only be deployed at the certain speed that they need to be deployed. And that was, it, it's been, I think, part of the reason why it's taken them this long to unveil the new version of the plane and even longer because it won't be for another at least couple of months before they get back up in the air.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Well, it's, you know, I'm armchair quarterbacking here, but, but I, I mean, if you, if you think about how automated a modern airliner is, why would they not seek to make a, an aircraft with as many critical failure points as that has as automated as possible?

• 20:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask. Is this normal of other like space launch vehicles?

• 20:09Speaker 04

  That's the thing, I mean.

• 20:11Speaker 05

  Do they normally give humans that much control?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Well, the thing is, space launch vehicles aren't normal, you know, so.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And especially ones piloted by humans.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Exactly. So it, they're still in a very experimental phase, the industry is, and that's kind of echoed in our, in our legislation around it right now, too. There's not a lot of regulation in terms of how the vehicles are supposed to operate because it's very, it's still very much considered a new experimental field. So.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And that's definitely changing now. That's, it's been, it, the sort of reins have been pulled in a little bit since Virgin had its accident, where the FAA is like at least paying more attention to these specifics.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, I do agree with that. They did just pass legislation, though, that said, that's going to extend this period of, this experimental period without regulation. But I, I can, from what I've gathered, the FAA is a little hungry to start to step in and, and not go crazy with regulations, but maybe make a few adjustments.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, speaking of the FAA, just gonna squeeze one more thing in here because if, if this actually goes through, it's, it's big news. Ben Popper just wrote about this, I believe, a few minutes ago. There is some discussion of changing the, the rules about drone registration so it would only apply to drones above four pounds, which is. A very important number because the phantom is under four pounds.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of the ones that people think about are under four pounds.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Thinking about commercial drones.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Would they still cause damage? I feel like the ones that are under four pounds.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  That's what you said when you saw this. Think it still mess up somebody.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, if, yeah, right. If, I mean, it's if a, if a three and a half pound phantom goes into a jet engine, it's still going to be a problem.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  The idea is that they're still restricted to a certain height, right?

• 22:03Speaker 00

  They're still, yeah, they're still restricted to daytime use only below 400 feet. Of course, people aren't necessarily going to obey those rules, but, but that the, the bottom line is that if this goes through, would pretty dramatically change the landscape of who needs to register their drones and when and why. Because I, yeah, I don't think there are any real consumer drones that are over four pounds, maybe like the, the Inspire one.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but even that's kind of prosumer.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, what's the rule right now?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Everything, well, everything over half pound, I think.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever, whatever those like little toy micro drones are like the only thing under the weight limit right now, basically.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  That would be amazing if you had to register those. You had to get like a little like tail number for your, your palm drone.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  I have a bunch of those things. I love those.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  It's, it's, that's gonna be one of the things. I mean, there's so much that we cover and so much that we don't cover that like is gonna change dramatically over the next like five years, let alone like the next 10 years. But drones is one of those things that is going to be, I think, make radical differences in certain areas. Maybe not as like broadly reaching as we think, like drones filling the skies, but like, that's one thing.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  No, drones are gonna fill the skies. That's the thing, right? Like if all these shipping companies get their way, there are gonna be these routes of drones just nonstop, all day and all night, moving across the sky. So they do need to have, and you know, Ben Popper has done a lot of reporting around this, but the, you know, they need collision avoidance. They need to interface with aircraft using ADS-B or some other transponder technology. They need, you know, they need all these things in place so that they can talk to each other and ATC knows where they are.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  Is it easy to put ADS-B on a drone?

• 23:41Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, I think they've done it. I think Google and Amazon have both done it already.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  As long as you don't let the people who run Kanye's livestream do it.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  They're not gonna get it done.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Uh, it's Kanye himself. He's personally running his own livestream.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  By the way, ADS-B is like the radar technology, the radar tracking technology for planes.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Right, so that they can talk to each other in the sky and back to ATC. Um, and, uh, yeah, I mean, they're, they're just gonna have to be very careful about how that goes. Because again, you don't want to suck those things into a jet engine. Or hit them in a personal plane, or with a Virgin Galactic.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  No, I don't think they can get as high as Virgin Galactic's.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  No, but you could, you could see how like if someone was trying to film it from above and then it took, I don't know. It could be bad news.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Anyway, let's, uh, let's talk about Squarespace, shall we? Sure. I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about Squarespace.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  What is Squarespace?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Well, I'm glad you asked, Sean. Uh, building a website can be tough. And even if you do know your way around coding, uh, creating something that looks good and works well is a time-consuming affair. Sometimes you wish you could just stop time with a simple push of a button on your watch. Uh, but you know, Squarespace makes it easy to build beautiful websites without breaking a sweat. Squarespace provides simple, powerful, and beautiful websites that look professionally designed regardless of skill level. No coding required. Not only does Squarespace provide you with intuitive and easy to use tools to create websites. Squarespace also has state-of-the-art technology powering your site to ensure security and stability.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  And you know, you can trust in Squarespace for your website needs when millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world trust them too. You know, back in my previous life, I was an entrepreneur and craftsman selling replicas of the iconic watch from Nickelodeon sci-fi film Clock Stoppers. I would spend countless nights perfecting my recreation to exact specifications of the prop. From its yellow finish to the Quantum Tech logo display.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, of course, it did not accelerate the user's molecules to speed where the world appears to be standing still. But damn, did it look good. Now, it was hard to get these bad boys off the shelf considering they weren't officially licensed. So I decided to create my own website to sell my product. It took so much work to do this. You have no idea, people. I spent almost as much time creating the website as I did creating my hyper time technology. Squarespace would have saved countless hours of my time coding. But seriously, you can't beat the ease and simplicity of Squarespace. Squarespace gives you 24/7 online support and a beautiful website. So what are you waiting for? The announcement of Clock Stoppers 2? Come on now.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure you use the offer code VERGE. That's V E R G E. To get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for Vergecast. We thank Squarespace for their support of the Vergecast. You should.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I'm Ron Burgundy.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  I'm Ron Burgundy.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  You handled that really well.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  So.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I am definitely way too old to have any idea what Clock Stoppers is. And I'm not that old.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  That Nickelodeon movie?

• 27:06Speaker 05

  It was a great movie. I will defend Andrew and his writing on this one. It was a great movie.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Hype check.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Are you excited about Clock Stoppers 2? Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  Oh, 11 out of 10.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  I've never seen it.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, more than gravitational waves.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Right now, right now, I am to be 5.2 out of 10, 29% on Rotten Tomatoes and 40% on Metacritic.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  There you go, reasons why I probably shouldn't see it.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  We need to get the hype check in this Google card so that people can just Google stuff and know what the hype desk thinks about it.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have to say personally, and maybe y'all don't agree with me, but personally, I find that the lower the Rotten Tomato score for a movie, the more I enjoy it.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  No.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  All right, next.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely. If I'm at.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  Example.

• 27:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, give us a good example on that one.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Crank 2.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Crank 2 is a phenomenal film. Probably has a zero on Rotten Tomatoes is my guess. Uh, can you do a quick check? Sixty-three percent? Wow.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Wait, we gotta talk about how, real quick, we gotta talk about, uh, the Fast and the Furiousa. Charlize Theron might be a villain in Fast and Furious, right?

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Yes, that's right.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Can we talk about that?

• 28:16Speaker 04

  I may actually watch a Fast and Furious film now.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Lauren, have you not seen the entire series?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Hey, Chris, can we have a watch party at your house?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Heck, yeah. Yeah. I mean, first of all, Mark, let me just clarify, every day is a watch party at my house. I have all the films in my Apple TV that are available to you whenever you like.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  And they're, uh, extended edition?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. Only the best for my buddies.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  It's on Amazon now. I just went down a really weird rabbit hole because you were talking about Clockstopper's watches. And for some reason, I thought about, all I still really want is that, uh, in, back in November, when the Alien watch got remade by Psycho, the, the watchmaker.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  I don't remember this at all.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Oh, my god, sorry. This is a really weird tangent.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  You're in a rabbit hole that no one else here is in.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  You don't remember that?

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Oh, that looks awesome.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  They reissued the watch from Alien and I'm...

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Wait, is that, is that for sale? Can you buy that?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I don't know. It still doesn't make any sense because the site is in Japanese.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Okay, well, guys, I'm sorry, we're buying watches now, so we can't...

• 29:18Speaker 04

  We can't do the Vergecast.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  No, Neel, I would be proud. We're buying things during the Vergecast.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Well, yes, that is, that is a tradition.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  All thanks to Squarespace.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  I believe that, I believe that Neel I bought his Nexus 6P during the Vergecast.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 29:30Speaker 05

  Yes, as a viewer, I can confirm.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Which, which I don't think he still uses or may even own.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Did, I don't even think I've ever seen him hold that phone.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  You say that judgmentally, like you don't burn through tech gadgets in an afternoon.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Okay, but the difference is that...

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Chris at least holds them for like a day.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Yes, and, and I keep track of them. If I, if I, if I need to dispose of them, which occasionally I do, I know where they're going and when and why. Neel I probably still has that Nexus 6P and has no idea where it is, is my guess.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  For $386.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Okay, you, you buy some watches, I'm gonna talk about cars.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, actually, let's talk about cars.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  This is my Vergecast now, and we're talking about cars.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Buckle up.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  So, ah, that's, yeah, goodbye, Lauren.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  That's rough.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  So the first thing, the first thing we're going to talk about is this, this tentative decision from the, the National Highway Safety Transportation Agency Authority Association, NHTSA, I just know them as NHTSA, is, is ruling that the Google, basically a computer can be a driver, if you want to boil it way, way down to what's happening at a very high level. And this has broad implications for self-driving overall, because what it means, if you look at the regulatory framework right now for how cars exist and operate on US

• 31:01Speaker 00

  roads, many of those regulations are around the very valid assumption until recently that there's a human behind the wheel. Because in 1960, why would you assume otherwise?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I feel like back then, like in 1970 or 1980, maybe you could say that, but 1960 was like when everybody was like, "The future, it's going to be great. Your food will cook itself."

• 31:22Speaker 00

  But Knight Rider was an 80s film.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  True.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Or a series, rather. So the, the bottom line is that this means that a lot of features and knobs and bells and whistles about a car that are there for the function of interfacing with a human driver, don't necessarily need to be there because they're interfacing directly with a computer instead. Now, if you extend this, this, this broad thinking that a computer can be a driver to other areas as well, you can see how this might apply to, say, liability. You're saying that a computer can be considered a driver. Or, I don't know, bottom line is

• 32:07Speaker 00

  that the implications go far and wide for this, if it actually sticks. But that's not to say that every computer can be considered a driver. You still need to go through the, the testing to ensure that you actually know how to drive. A computer is no different.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Right. And you have to, I mean, these regulations still have to change state to state around the country, which is also Going to take a long time.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Which they're, yeah, they're trying to harmonize.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  But this could grease the wheel a bit for that, right?

• 32:30Speaker 04

  What I'm curious about, though, is I know for, there was a whole big thing about Google's self-driving cars. They had them ready and then they have to change them because they had to be able to have a person in the driver's seat.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  That, does that kind of take away that requirement now?

• 32:46Speaker 00

  In, in the long term, that certainly the goal is to make it so that, you know, you summon a car with an app and it pulls up and there are just two passenger seats, no driver's seat.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  The, the cars that are on the road right now in Austin and, and, and Mountain View and soon in, in Washington State have a steering wheel, they have an emergency shut off switch, they have pedals. And for exactly the reason you say, like a human needs to be able to take control for both legal reasons and also because the computer software isn't finished. So like if the car gets itself into trouble, the, the computer needs, or excuse me, the human needs to be able to take over. But theoretically, long-term, when they get everything sorted out, which I believe is still many, many years away, but someday they'll be in a position where they can just let the computer do everything.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  So Chris, how does this change how people are developing these driverless cars now? So like, does this change, like if Apple is hypothetically working on a car, does this change the way that they're developing this? Does this just take away the steering wheel?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  That, that's a very good question. I, the way I would look at it is the, the same way you look at, say, Uber, where Silicon Valley, being Silicon Valley, has just sort of been in the mindset of pushing forward as quickly as it can, irrespective of the, the regulatory hurdles that it faces. And I think that's been the case with the driverless car. They, they, they have just assumed all along that they would find a way around the rules.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Or they would find a way to change the rules. And so late last year, Recode reported this, I believe Reuters did as well. They sent a letter to NHTSA saying, yo, like we, we need to sort this out. And that's where this, this.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  This new ruling or this temporary ruling came from, yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that Google knew all along that they were going to get to that point. They have a, you know, they have a huge lobbying organization and, and that industry in general, I think is very. Convinced that they can get around any of those restrictions.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Not just Silicon Valley, though. I mean, it's some of the traditional auto manufacturers have been assuming that as well. I mean, like, that's why when I went out last year to see Daimler's self-driving big rig. I mean, they went to one of the only states that would let them like basically develop and test that. And they just sort of like.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  But, but, big difference there is that they are very careful to tell you that you still need a truck driver, right? They were very careful about that.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  But I think half of that is coming from not wanting to offend the truck driving base.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Agreed, agreed. But, but I do think in talking with GM and Ford as well, and Toyota, some of these other big automakers, legacy automakers, I think that they are taking a much more measured approach to how they think about this stuff. They are thinking of it in terms of, you know, a lot of it is very pragmatic. They're just trying to push the liability as far off their plate as they possibly can, with the exception of Volvo, who says they'll take full responsibility. So they are saying, look, at the end of the day, the responsibility falls on the driver to make sure the car doesn't drive off the road or into another car. Regardless of what the computer is doing or thinks it's doing. And then you have Tesla, just like Google, which is like, we're just going to deploy this in beta. We're just going to push this to every car overnight.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  You now have a, you know, your car can drive itself. It's in beta. Just be careful. And then a week later.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  We see like all of these videos of people.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yep.

• 36:04Speaker 05

  Almost crashing into the side of a highway.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  You can't tell people, oh, hey, we're going to give you the software that like will totally jeopardize your life. Just like, keep your hands on the wheel.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  It's actually strange to me that they didn't get more pushback on that. Because that's, that's insane. I love that. I love the way that they approach software in those cars and what they're trying to do with a lot of that stuff, and especially with autonomous, the semi-autonomous stuff that they're rolling out to the Model S. But, and as someone who wants to buy a Model 3, probably as his next car, which we should talk about next. I love that idea, but I also think that that is really crazy that they, I mean, you can only assume so much in like how people are going to treat your technology, but.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I think it's, it gets at a very deep. Between the legacy auto industry and the new auto industry where the new auto industry coming from tech is used to the mindset of, oh, you know, it's it's a continual, it's an iterative process of improving the software over time. You're just pushing software updates as you need and that's how we're going to do it. And then, but when you get to a car, it becomes a matter of life and death.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's funny because it sounds very reminiscent of what Musk does with his rockets, too, you know, like with each new rocket, we found out that they were kind of changing things around for each launch.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Or even testing things like it came out in the biography about him that they would often load up some rockets with like competing technologies, stuff that they were building in-house so that they could, you know, gather that data back after a launch and say, then and then go to suppliers and say, hey, look like your thing did worse than our thing that we built in-house. Like, can we get it for cheaper? Or they do a lot of that stuff.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  But, you know, no one's riding on his rockets yet.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Someday, right?

• 37:50Speaker 04

  Someday. So.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  What I really want to know about this, obviously, this is like temporary. Google's not talking about it, you know, all this stuff. But this sort of ruling from the the NHTSA, does it, like you said, I don't think it changes how people approach this technology, at least in Silicon Valley. But does it speed up the timeline? Like, everybody keeps talking about, oh, 10 years out, or, oh, 20 years out. And they have like, sort of different guesses on when we might get, you know, Ubers that are autonomous or Lifts that are autonomous, or or commercial, you know, production cars that are autonomous. There's like different timelines for all those. It all starts about 10 years out now. Does this change that timeline?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Well, you know, you have, you have three different variables that are pulling on one another. You have the regulatory issues, you have the liability issues, and you have the technological issues. And if you'd asked me that question a year ago, I would have said, it's regulatory, that that's, that's going to be the long pull because they have so much to figure out and they don't know what they're doing and blah, blah, blah. And they're doing on a state by state basis, which is insane. And then, if you'd asked me six Six months ago, I would have said, it's probably going to be the liability issue. Like, no one figures, no one has figured out, like, who is responsible when a self-driving car crashes. There's no sign that it's going to be solved anytime soon. Now, I think it's actually coming full circle back to the technology of it.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Because Secretary Fox, US Department of Transportation Secretary, is pushing very hard on trying to standardize this stuff. He's trying very hard to harmonize it across states, which was an enormous concern. And he seems to be pulling on all the right threads to make that happen. On the liability side, still a lot to figure out there, but Volvo has, like I mentioned before, has come out and said, we will take responsibility if our cars crash.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And that just seems like what's going to happen going forward.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  I mean, they are, they are the first domino to fall in that respect.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  So it's going to be the companies.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, yeah, well, if Volvo's precedent ends up spreading, then yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  What would be the other option in terms of?

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Is there something else that makes sense?

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think that, I think the, I think that the assumption for a long time, and maybe the assumption still with some automakers, is that if, as long as you have someone sitting in what is traditionally the driver's seat, even if the car is controlling itself and the car gets into a crash, it's that person's fault because they should have seen the crash is going to happen and take control back. And, and I think that there are still companies who are hoping that's how it plays out.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  There's just no way it can go that way because like one, when the technology moves forward a couple more steps, people who are in that position, if there are even still like wheels and pedals there for them to take back over, are going to more and more believe that the computer should be able to protect them from whatever they see on, like incoming.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  And even if they eventually were going to take over and try and avoid it at the last minute, like, that hesitation caused by knowing the technology is there is like enough to, I mean, you just can't blame the person in that situation.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  These things happen so quickly. I mean, there's no way.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  It seems like it would be way safer to have a computer making that decision.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Well, and we've already, this has already happened IRL. We had the, the company, Cruise, I think is the name of the company. They were testing their aftermarket self-driving solution on a Nissan Leaf in San Francisco. We wrote about this in San Francisco and in the process of transitioning control from the computer to the driver, the car crashed and it was ruled to be the driver's fault. I think it sideswiped a parked car.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's like in the millions of miles that Google's self-driving cars have driven so far, the only handful of like dozen, 15 or 16 accidents, I think that have happened have all been human error.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Well, human, not just human error, but the other driver's fault.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  But that's, isn't that what Google said?

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, but.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Is it true?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  They, they can't really dodge the reporting.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think there's, yeah, I mean, like, if you think about the logistics of it, it would be very hard for them to lie out of that because there would be insurance issues and like it would come out.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  And on top of that, they started, so they definitely started self-reporting that stuff, which like you're right to question it, but they also are self-reporting it and attaching like the police reports and all this other, it's not just them saying like, no, trust us. They actually come back.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Uh, what do you think happens first? All 50 states allow some, right now it's, we have what Nevada, California.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Florida.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Florida and there's one more, right? Four? There's four, like four states that allow the testing of self-driving cars on public roads.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, explicitly, yes, but then there's a broad gray area with other states like Texas.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Right, where you can test in Austin and stuff.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  All right, but so, but that, it shows like how slow this is rolling out because that's just testing, let alone like allowing it to be. So what do you think happens first? That sort of regulation spreads to all 50 states or marijuana is legalized?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  That's it, the, the race is on because you have Colorado and, and Washington, Washington DC. That's a, that's a very good point. Not a question I'd considered before. They may actually happen, they may happen in lockstep because as more drivers get high, the more they need to rely on computers to get where they're going safely, right?

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Soon, soon everyone's just gonna be smoking weed in their driverless cars.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  It picks you up from the airport.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Fog in cars.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  It's like a Bob Marley branded weed branded car.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  This is, the last time I was on the Vergecast, we went down this weird road at CES about how once all this stuff is happening, all the self-driving cars and like Uber and Lyft are self-driving, it's like, it's all just gonna be branded. It's gonna be, oh, I can pay 10 bucks for the ride from the airport in a self-driving Lyft, or I could pay 5 bucks for like the CBS Network wrapped one, and like, I get The Big Bang Theory blasted in my face the entire ride from the airport.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  There is no amount of money CBS could pay me to have Big Bang Theory blasted in my face.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  But if you, if you could-

• 43:51Speaker 04

  Okay, but if it's like 5 bucks from JFK home-

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it's, or it's like, it's surge pricing right now. Surge pricing, but if you wanna ride in like the TBS, like Conan O'Brien car, it won't be surge pricing.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  I mean, the Conan O'Brien car wouldn't be terrible, right?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  It's only clips of Andy Richter.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  No, hey, Andy Richter is, is from Illinois.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Sorry, I like, I like Andy Richter.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  He's okay.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  It's Seth Rogen, it's Seth Rogen.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that could be.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  It's just James Franco reading his poetry.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  James Franco is a self-driving car. Sorry, this-

• 44:28Speaker 00

  If James Franco is watching the Vergecast and he hears that, that will be a movie in like 12 months. James Franco is James Franco in James Franco as a self-driving car, directed by James Franco, produced by James Franco.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Direct to Hulu.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Spring Breakers 2, James Franco is-

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Hype check, self-driving cars.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  I mean, these are softball hype checks.

• 44:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is the easiest hype checks.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  I'm not a big fan of self-driving cars. I like driving cars, cuz-

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I do too.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Right? It's a nice feeling to-

• 44:59Speaker 01

  I feel a little torn.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  I would like a Minority Report kind of universe.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, or iRobot.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, where like he had the option of the steering wheel coming down when he was, when he was done.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  Honestly, do you want other people driving cars? Like, I get that you wanna drive a car.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  But I don't want anybody else driving their own car on me.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  No, this is exactly-

• 45:19Speaker 05

  That would be so much safer.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  This is exactly it. The more I've made my, the trip, I made the trip from my- Home in upstate New York to, um, you know, like ever since I started going to college in Long Island, I've been down in the city.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  And I've been making that six hour trip for like my entire life. And the more I make that trip, the more I realize how awful the drivers are around me. And the more I'm like, wow, I dodged like seven bullets on this drive home or on this drive back to New York. And the, every time I get, especially big rigs especially, but also just like regular passenger cars. And every time I make the drive, I get to where I'm going, either home or back here.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  I'm like, man, I'm kind of ready for it.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  No. In terms of hype check though, maybe five out of 10.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  The current level, like cause self-driving cars right now are like.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  I like, I can agree with that.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Pretty lame. So I'll give it like, I'll agree with that five.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say they're lame. They're just not mainstream just yet.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. There are some cases that you may want the car to drive you, but at the same time.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Well, I think the, the happy middle ground, um, in my, in my opinion is that we are reaching the point where in the next, I think five to 10 years max. Cars are going to be virtually uncrashable. Like they may not be self-driving, but it will not be possible for you to crash one. Volvo's already almost there. They have this system called city safety that I think is standard in all their vehicles now, or is about to be. Where, uh, below, I think it's 30 miles an hour. Like you basically can't crash it. Like if you try to scare it into something, it'll just be like, nope. And, and like, uh, so I mean, like.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  We saw this trend at Detroit and the, at the Detroit auto show.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Where it's like, that kind of technology, I mean, just basically collision avoidance and stuff, but even that kind of technology, which is really important. Is almost an afterthought when you talk to these automakers. Obviously at Detroit, they're like trying to, there are a lot of those companies were still going after sort of traditional, like it's a V8, it's a V12. Like, I mean, they're, they're pumping out like more traditional, like sexy auto, uh, specs and stuff.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  We did spend like an hour in the, in the backseat of a Rolls Royce Dawn.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but like it, it's so commonplace now that like these cars are having that stuff built in that they're almost forgetting about it.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  It was always like an afterthought, like the, uh, what was it? The, the Lincoln Continental was like the only presentation. When they announced that car that was like technology first, you know, car interior like engine, all that stuff second.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  Do we have any statistics on how has anything changed or has this not been implemented widely enough? Like these kind of anti-crash measures?

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you look at the stats over the last decade, when I think stability control became required by law, there's a broad trend toward lower crashes per million miles driven, per mile driven, whatever the unit measure is. And there was a slight, this made news recently, there was a slight uptick in the past year. No one really knows why, a very popular theory is that people are playing with their smartphones. But the, but when you look at the uptick in the context of how much the crash rate has gone down in the last decade, it's still pretty miraculous.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  This is why I'm really excited about what Tesla is doing. I mean, all these other car companies are building in this sort of safety. But that's like, I'm of the mindset of I don't really want an internal combustion engine anymore. I don't really care how cheap gas gets like, I just don't, there's too much on the backend of how that gas gets to my car. As far as like harming the environment and I'm ready for an electric car and.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  They have to, they have to kill elephants for every gallon of gas.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just don't have the time to wait for the elephant to get into my car. So this is why I'm really excited about the Model 3. And I think we should talk about that right now because we finally found out that on March 31st, we already knew like in March ish.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  We knew March 2016.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  That Tesla's next car was going to be unveiled. But now we know March 31st. Yeah, the last, I mean, it's like, give it.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  It was like when SpaceX returned to flight, it was like the week before Christmas.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. If Musk is anything, he is reliably inconsistent. And it's like, of course they're going to like push it to the very end of when he was trying to say he was going to announce his car. And so they're going to reveal this car, but then we also don't know.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Reveal means.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  How much, God, he's so frustrating.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. And on the earnings call yesterday, he was literally like. I haven't decided how much of the car I'm gonna show. I don't know whether I should just show it or like, hold some parts close to the vest.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  If they're gonna be taking pre-orders on that day, they have to show it. Like, you can't just like-

• 49:47Speaker 00

  But, but in fairness, they could just flash like, the headlight of the car and they would still get a million pre-orders.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  They would, but that's really, really shitty. I mean, they're not gonna do like a Faraday Future at CES and show like, a concept car. They're gonna show like, they're gonna have the car. It's gonna be-

• 50:02Speaker 00

  It'll probably be, my guess is that it'll be a concept version of the car. I don't think it will be production metal. Maybe it will. But I think, you know, if you look at the Model X and the Model S, they showed, uh, they showed designs that were very close to the production design before, well before the car actually came out.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  But did they start taking pre-orders?

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. The Model X, they've been taking pre-orders since the 1800s. And it's sold in shipping and volume. So I think, you know, the, the business model is, is like, annoying as it is, works well for them and people are responding to it, so.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I'm, I, I think as long as they're able to sustain it, I like the way that they're treating their business. But, uh, obviously the question is like, whether or not they can sustain it until this car comes out, because everything really hinges on the Model 3. I mean, like, the Model X, the Model S, everything has been almost not a diversion, but like, it's not even really groundwork as much as it is ground swell for the Model 3.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Where like, they were trying to get people interested in the idea of an electric car. Like, the roadster was like, "Hey, we can make a really sexy car and it'll be electric and it'll have crazy range and it'll be really fast." No one will be able to afford it.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Uh, the Model S is like, a much bigger step down from that, still way out of everybody's price range.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  But like, a normal looking sedan that has really great range, is really fast, enough to beat like Lamborghinis off the line, and is ready to- by the way, congratulations on launching your Sick Lambo show on Snapchat.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Snapchat, Verge. Uh, thanks to Kirsten for producing that.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yes, look at, look for that next week. Uh, you, I hope you get big enough that you have people ripping it and putting it on YouTube like DJ Khaled's Snapchat.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Where like, "Oh, you missed Sick Lambo this week? Oh, we got you. It's on YouTube."

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Well, then I'll tell those people, "You played yourself."

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. But then, then we had the Model X. I mean, it's like, we've gone- Through this winnowing of like bringing things down to more affordable and now there's going to be this big jump to the Model 3, which is supposed to cost $35,000 before any tax incentives. And the federal government in this country will give you $7,500 back if you buy an electric car. And then your state will give you differing amounts up to as high as like six grand if you live in like Colorado and stuff. So you could theoretically get the Model 3 for 25 ish thousand dollars, depending on where you live.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Okay, so I'm someone who hasn't owned a car in six years now.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  How has this changed? Is it feasible to actually have an electric car? Like what?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  What is, what is the infrastructure like for that?

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a couple of very important things have happened.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  One, one is that 2016 is the first year and 2017 in earnest where electric cars with practical range are becoming affordable. We're seeing that with the Chevy Bolt and then we're going to see that with Model 3 in theory. The other important thing that has happened is there has been this explosion of Level 2 chargers, which are like the standard fast chargers that you see in parking garages.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Like fill up in like 20 or 30 minutes.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, Level 2 is like four hours or something.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  And then Tesla's supercharger is 20.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Superchargers, so Tesla has done a fantastic job of building out that supercharger network with the idea that you can take a reasonable cross-country trip and hit superchargers along the way. Get lunch, it's like a half hour fill up and then you're good to go. It's 80% in half an hour, right?

• 53:18Speaker 02

  So, question, Chris.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Are all the Teslas, can they take superchargers? Some of them can't, right?

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Well, so, supercharging at one time was an option on the Model S, I believe.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  I believe it was an option where you could spec a Model S without supercharging support. I don't think that's the case anymore.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  I think that all Model S's currently sold have supercharging.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  They need, I mean, they need that to be standard.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  They do.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  There's, there's no way that they could survive without it.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  And there is, by the way. Because this is true in every single industry on the planet, there is a, there's a spec war for fast charging. Of course. There's supercharging, which is proprietary to Tesla. And then there's DC fast charging. And there's another one called Chotamo, which is only used by the Nissan Leaf, I believe. But it's technically a standard, but in the US, the only car, the only real car that people own that that use Chotamo is Leaf. DC fast charging is being supported by basically everybody else who is in Tesla, GM, BMW, Volkswagen. So this is going to become more and more of an issue.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  And do they have ways to find these chargers in the cars themselves?

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Yes. So the Model S has rolled out in a software update last year, they rolled out a system where it basically communicates to you as you drive, whether you're getting into an iffy, like if your range is low enough so that it's going to be difficult for you to get to a charger in time, which is kind of clever. Like you don't have to be actively navigating to a, to a place. You can just be driving and there's an indicator. It's like, yeah, you might want to like look for a charger now.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  So that's in that car. But I think basically every EV sold, including the Bolt, and I think even the Volt, they all have some sort of integration in the navigation system that makes it easier to find charging stations.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  And the thing is like the, the charger network is a huge deal for sure. And there, you know, Tesla's got really big ambitions on building that out even further than it already has, which is already been pretty extensive, but the Model 3 can get you close to, depending on the circumstances, about 300 miles on a charge, right?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  The Model 3?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Or Model S, sorry.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Oh, Model, yes. Model S is, yeah, it 275 ish, I think.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  So Model 3 is going to be 200?

• 55:45Speaker 00

  We don't know yet. Yeah, it'll be over 200, but we don't know.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  The P85 would get around 275.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  I don't think it can go up to 300. It's, I mean, it's doable if you're not constantly like going 80 miles per hour.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  And Musk has said on a call last year, when he announced the, the P90, he said that he expects the battery technology to improve literally every year. So it wouldn't surprise me if he rolled out a P95 this year and then a P100 the year after that. You know, it just keeps getting incrementally better.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Along with the software updates, like his big, his big thing for Tesla is that like, if you buy a Model S today and I buy one in two weeks, like mine. Pretty like assuredly will be better.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Incrementally, but yes.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah incrementally, but like if not just because of the software and you won't have to download it, but because of things like that, like if they do finally hit that breakthrough at a Gigafactory, where they can come up with new sets of batteries.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  It'll be like getting a new phone.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Build it in.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  You'll need to get the new Tesla in two years.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  The Tesla's success.

• 56:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  But like even 200, say the Model 3 is 200 miles. It'll, I hope more than that, but it's at least 200 miles. Like that's plenty. That is plenty for basically.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Cause how much, do you know, Chris, the P70?

• 57:04Speaker 00

  There is no P70.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  The 70. What was the mileage on that?

• 57:10Speaker 00

  I had two, it was over 200. I don't know the exact.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  But it wasn't going over 250 though.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  I don't think so, no.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  But I think there, you know, there's a psychological barrier for people where once you get above 200, it feels comfortable, like, you know, it feels practical. Like the Leaf, the first generation Leaf, when it first launched, it was what 55 or 60.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Something really low.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  It's like.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  And even now it's only up to 85.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's, and that's true with the E-Golf too. And it's like.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Which is still enough for most people on a daily basis.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Sure, but, but it doesn't give you that, that buffer, that safety buffer to make you feel like comfortable. And it also doesn't match, and this is very important for people psychologically, it doesn't match the range of a gasoline car.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  What's the average range of a gasoline car?

• 57:55Speaker 00

  200 to 400. Yeah. I mean, it just depends on the tank in the car, but.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  I have a kind of like maybe stupid, simple question. How long does it take to charge a battery on a Tesla? So like you're saying it'll go like 300 miles, but how long?

• 58:08Speaker 02

  So I drove a Tesla for like several weeks when I was living in California. I would take it to a supercharger. It would take an hour from.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  That's to 100%, right?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Tend to like, well, they don't want you to actually charge it to 100%. They want you to go through like 85, 90.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause the problem with superchargers now is that like as they might have them in like every place that you can charge up, but like there's only one or two there and there's this like war of like everybody fighting for the super.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  When I went to a supercharger, there was a ton of people. I mean, California, there are a ton of people driving electric cars and most of them are driving Teslas.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  And, and so you, you were in for a wait. Yeah, I remember when I test, when I test drove a Model S in, in California, uh, when, when it first came out, basically, there was a supercharger, um, in, um, uh, the name of the town escapes me, South San Francisco. I can't remember, but anyway, um, yeah, I had to wait. And this was like, there were like 10 Model Ss on the road at this point.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  But you can, but to answer Kristen's question, you can plug it in overnight, right? Like in your garage.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And i- i- if you want to, you can even plug it into a regular while outlet. It'll just take forever to charge, but you can do that. So we need to wrap up in a minute. Um, I want to go through a few quick things.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  That, uh, that you should all be aware of. Uh, there is a new Twitter timeline, uh, which is opt in right now. Is that right?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I haven't, I haven't been prompted. I just got it this morning. Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 05

  I don't think you get prompted. You have to go into your settings.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I didn't see it.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  It'll be a toggle. Yeah. I didn't, mine didn't show up until this morning.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is it good or bad?

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. What's different about it?

• 59:40Speaker 05

  Honestly, I really like it. It's basically until you pull down for the first time, it'll give you like algorithmic stuff. But then if you go back to the top of your feed and pull down, it goes back to reverse crown order.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  It sounds, so it sounds like a more expanded version of the sort of while you were away.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's just while you're away without the while you're away, like little tab.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  I'm totally fine with.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I like that.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  More while you're away as well. So it's more than just like.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  But then once you refresh it.

• 1:00:06Speaker 04

  I use the while you're away to like things that you guys post from like hours ago.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  My while you're, my while you're away is always Chris Ziegler or Casey Newton. It's like only them, maybe Dan.

• 1:00:16Speaker 05

  Mine is all Nicola Fumo. It was just like six of her tweets. It was great.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Uh, I will say it is a little, it's like vaguely unsettling when someone faves a tweet that's like eight hours old. You're like, what?

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  What circumstance led you to be looking at my tweet from eight hours ago?

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  I was searching through your feed.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  It's like miles away from like, uh, going into someone's Instagram and liking one photo from like five months.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  That's like the, that's, that's like a whole different level of thirst.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  This is true. Um. Next, we should mention that there are rumors, I think Wall Street Journal reported this, of a Google-developed VR headset. And the idea is that this would sit somewhere between Gear VR, which is, requires a phone, and like a full-fledged Rift setup, right, or Vive? This is in-between where it's self-contained. To me, it sounds like the Goldilocks VR headset.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I bought a Gear VR for a couple of weeks ago. I've been using a Note 5 pretty exclusively since December. And I finally bought the Gear VR. And it definitely has its limitations, but it's, it's, nothing beats how easy it is to use.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  How often do you use it? Is it just for games?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  So that's what's weird about it. Like, the experience is great, and you don't have to charge it. I mean, there's so many things about it that it's light, and that's great. What's weird is, like, I never feel comfortable using it in the apartment, because like, my girlfriend's always there. And so it's, so it's like, you get that weird social moment of like, do I want to use this like, while she's in the room? Or like, even while she's in the next room? Like, I usually just wait. And then if I find myself alone with a couple hours, it's like, alright, let's pop into VR, see what's new. So it's like-

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  It's jacking the matrix for a few minutes.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  It's like, really kinda weird, like-

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  It will have to get used to it someday.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we'll see, maybe at I/O, this will be a thing, the VR headset, we'll see.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  That would be cool. I would love to see them roll that out there.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be a good thing for that. We, we mentioned before, but, but you have to know this by now. There's a new Kanye West album out. How could you not know this?

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Also-

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Presumably, it's live streaming right now.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a theory that Kanye knew about the gravitational waves announcement before it came out. Because he announced his album was gonna, or was gonna drop today.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  And it was originally gonna be called Waves.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Like, what? And then on Monday, the Lego collaboration, which discovered the Waves, said they were going to announce something big on Wednesday, on Thursday.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  And then, next thing you know, it's not called Waves anymore.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  I know. Well, he changed the name, like, Monday morning. T new something.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  He, Kanye is jacked into the scientific community more than we could possibly know.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  So the title of Kanye's album is now called-

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  The Life of Pablo.

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  Life of Pablo. It was, it was T L O P.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  T L O P.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  And we were, we were speculating what it might mean.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  And now we know.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  The love of physics.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  And, and if you follow, if you follow Sean O'Kane on, on Twitter, S O Kane one, he is posting rapidly a bunch of fake The Life of Pablo album covers with different words.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  I made one for Andy, our transportation reporter. And then I made another joke one, cause I always make, every time there's like a big Twitter.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  You gotta make jokes in threes.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, I did. Uh, sure, but that will make it four.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  I don't want to ruin the comedic symmetry.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  I don't know. I would have to figure something out. I don't know.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Uh, one more quick thing. Uh, uh, New York Fashion Week, uh, is in the midst of starting. It's going on for the next week, I think. Uh, our, our own, uh, Kwame Opam is going to be at some of the events around this. Uh, but also, also you should follow our sister site, rack.com. Uh, they are, uh, of course going to be covering the heck out of that. And there are some tech implications here. Uh, Fitbit announced a partnership with, um, with the fashion house. Earlier this week, there was an Epson event where they're printing textiles. Kwame was at that. Um, and, uh, there are things going on. You'll want to check it out.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  There's, there's like no, there's no better interdisciplinary thirst than the tech industry and the fashion industry. Like both of them want to be the other so badly. It's like, it's amazing.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  It is a very thirsty collaboration. And on, on that note.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Wait, one more before we go. MTV News is coming back. That just broke while we were doing the show.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  If Kurt Loder is not involved, I don't care.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Is Kurt Loder involved?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Right answer.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Uh, okay, Kirsten, Mark, why don't you, uh, give us some, some social channels?

• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  Social channels? Well, as we mentioned, we had a new Snapchat show this week with Chris, his grand return.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Lambos.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  It was so good.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you should follow The Verge on Snapchat. We're just Verge on Snapchat.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  We used to be the real Verge and then we got really cool.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  We're, we're still just as real.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  We're still real.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  You can just find us under Verge.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  We're as real as gravitational waves.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:02Speaker 05

  And then let's see, well, they should subscribe to the YouTube channel.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's youtube.com slash The Verge. Uh, got tons of awesome videos coming soon.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  That's true, including one. I, I don't want to give too much away, but when I saw that's coming next week that I'm very excited about, uh, that's all I'm going to say.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  There is some really crazy, the amount of stuff that's come up.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  We've got content coming.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have content, hashtag content.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Since even before CES, it's been crazy.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  We have, we're @verge on Twitter, is that right? Why am I saying is that right? Of course it's right. I know what we are on Twitter.

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, @verge.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  And then, what are your Twitter handles? You both have Twitter handles, you're both on the Twitters.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  We are both on the Twitters. I am at FluxinTime.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  And then I'm at HaymarkL.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  And then Lauren, you are?

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  I'm just pretty simple, Lauren Gresh, L-O-R-E-N.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  No underscore?

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Sean has the most complicated, I don't know what.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  I'm, yeah, I've been.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  It's like an old AOL username.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Well, it was consistent, it was consistent with like, everything I used in like, the old web. And now it just followed me forever. And I've been trying to get Twitter, if you're listening, I want either @okane, nevermind. I've been DMing the Twitter account, you got me. I'm @sokane1.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  @sokane1.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Hopefully not for long.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  I am @zepower.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  And that's it, thanks for watching.

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  The.