The Vergecast - TLOP: The Love of Physics

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

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

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

He is far, far away. Yes. Clap and culture. Laugh. A lot of applause. Hoorah for Deeder. For Deeder. Well deserved. So he is not in the country, nor is an Eli. I'm subbing, joined by Sean O'Kane,

Lauren Grush. I think you've both been on the Verge cast before, right? We have. You're familiar to the verge audience. And then in the hype desk, we have not one but two people joining us. Double Hype Desk. Hi. Kristen Frasina and Mark Lansangan, one of our video directors who is a hype beast for phones. Am I right, Mark? Yes, Chris. Yes. Very much so.

He also only whispers. Hype check phones. 10 out of 10? 10 out of 10. Yeah, all phones. Right now. 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 Easy Season 3 just kicked off. And the Life of Pablo LiveStream is supposed to be happening right now. Lauren's face is like... Yeah, the life. of Pablo is supposed to be live streaming right now in title. 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 easy season three picture and picture and then have the life of Pablo kind of playing in the background this entire. I like that idea. I also like that. I mean, we're about to talk about a really crazy scientific discovery. We are. 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.

Why did Albert Einstein have to spend his time working on this theoretical nonsense when he could have been solving the real problems every day? like live streaming. It's ironic because the live stream announcing the scientific discovery today also cut out. Shocker. And it was momentarily pulled from because YouTube is so twitchy about its copyright claims. Also, they changed the name of gravitational waves like four times before the actual half. Speaking of gravitational waves, we should get right into it. So you may have caught the announcement this morning. It was at 1030-ish, right? That they've discovered these waves for real this time. For real.

Lauren, why don't you tell us about that? 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 really was no doubt about it. Well, there may be some, but not a lot. But no one could ever... It's like, how much faith do we actually put in Albert Einstein is the question, right?

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. What is time anyways? Yeah, what is time? What is space time? Well, let's get really existential about this. 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 we can play that. Let's go. Roll that. Let's check that out. 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. Gravitational waves are considered ripples in spacetime. What is space time? 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 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 over.

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 space-time created by the presence of other larger objects. Now let's switch things up a bit. Instead of a blanket, imagine space-time 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 space time. 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 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 space time, 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 1,000th the size of a proton.

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. So I want to get into this a little more, but first can I just say science is insane. I can not believe you guys compressed four dimensions into three. How dare you. Oh, my God. Can we talk about how genius that video is? Yeah, well.

Oh, yeah. It's an amazing video. Shout out to Miriam Nielsen and Phyllis Bezito, 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. A couple last. Well, no, no, but they're in different parts of the country, right? That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and then this, this detection is how many light years away? So it was 1.3 billion light years away, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is ridiculous. Yeah. That is completely ridiculous. So technically, the waves that they detected happened, 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, that we can measure them. And they're so slight. Like they were saying, it's one 10,000th the size of a proton 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. So Albert Einstein has been completely vindicated at this point. All of his theories have been proven. Yeah. But this isn't the end, right? Like they're going to deploy this into space somehow. They're going to... Yeah, so the idea is, well, right now the only way we can really look at...

at objects in the universe is by using light of some kind, some kind of optics. But you can't do that with black holes or neutron stars. They're way too faint to see. So the idea is we can see how they manipulate the gravity around them with these gravitational waves to learn more about them and kind of see them in a different type of way. Got it. 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 it and how sensitive you need to be and everything. Now you can go back out to all these places that you've been sort of pegging 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. Right. One of the physicists I talked to you 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 we never thought were even possible.

Yeah. And that's really cool, obviously. And this, and this specific instrument, or set of instruments was only at like a third its potential sensitivity, right? I mean, like, yeah, they can definitely amplify the sensitivity. So this is just the first step, you know. 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. And is this like fully peer reviewed at this point? Or is that another step that they need to go through? No, they publish their study in the physical journal. I can't remember the exact name. physical journal letters or whatever. You're saying it wasn't Us magazine. No, it was not Us magazine.

And so that went through peer review. It had like over a thousand authors on it too. So a bunch of people signed off on this. And I'm sure it's going to 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. 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 immediate impact. Like, I'm not going to not going to work tomorrow because they're a gravitation. waves now. You can't go by some gravitational waves.

I'm taking a personal day. To sort of absorb what this means. To absorb some waves. Yeah. I agree with Sean on that, yeah, for sure. It's super cool that they were able to do this. And that is like the most reductionist way to talk about it. It's so cool.

Good job, guys. Next thing. Kanye West. But it's not. 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 makes this even more exciting than your normal scientific discovery is the fact that they don't even know how big 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.

Yeah, I think, yeah, that's kind of what's so big. So it's going to change the lives of many in the scientific community. It just not, it doesn't have an immediate impact for us right now. But I think it definitely will have an impact on just our understanding of science. and how we study it. So I need to hype check two things. First, I need to hype check gravity. The movie starring George Clooney. The movie starred George Clooney, different rating than actual gravity. By the way, speaking of the movie, Gravity, I have an alternate theory of what happened in that movie.

Oh, please explain. Yeah, go. George Clooney's character did not die. I'm sorry if I spoiled that movie for anybody. It's been a couple years. Yeah, it's been a couple years. Get on it. I don't, like, I think that he was actually in the, the, the cap, like, he returned to the capsule.

I think that's, why? Totally. Because it was too real. It was too real. Also, can we talk about how George Clooney did not need to die in that movie? If you're going to have a science person on, she, so he was flying off into space. Yeah. And she grabs him with a, with one of the cords and stops his, his flight. Yeah. And instead of, that would have just stopped him.

and he would have just, a gentle tug would have come, you know, come back. But for some reason, some kind of invisible force was making him keep going. No. It was definitely gravitation. The unified theory of the movie gravity has finally come together. Yeah. George Clooney has spent three years waiting for vindication,

and now the theory of how he died. Okay, but if there were gravitational waves, you probably would have gone up and down in an oscillating fashion or something. Sorry. Okay, so we've gotten the hype track of gravity out of the way. No, wait, we didn't, though. No, that's true. Yeah, we kind of got sidetracked.

I think Kirsten wants to take over that. No, I have no feeling. I refuse to hype check that movie. Wow. No, like the actual force of gravity. Yeah, the physical property. Oh, the physical property, 10 out of 10. Very helpful.

Nice, nice. Very generous hype desk today. And then hype track gravitational waves. Wow. Maybe seven out of 10. Ooh. Wow. I did not see that coming.

Sorry. You're going to have a lot of people coming out for you. Incorrect. You think higher or low? Oh, higher. Are you kidding me? This is like inventing like basically a new type of telescope. So this is like peak height. So like 10? This is a 10 out of 10.

All right. So we got as eight. So what's the average, Sean? 8.5? 8.5? 8.2 math real quick. Yeah, this math is a little beyond our pay grade. Let's move on. Can someone just check for me very quickly is the the Yisysis live stream up? Jesus. What year are you in? Yes, it is.

No, you just, season three. Easy season three. Easy, excuse me. Geez. Our entire staff is like sitting up on the couch is watching that live stream too. Like we are, we are alone in a bubble. I know Jameson is having some struggles.

Literally nobody is watching this right now. Like no one's even typing in our main Slack channel. That's really depressing. Something is either going really well or really poorly. That's okay. You know what? We're live to tape. We'll make an excellent show for later this evening.

When you're done with Kanye. Again, when you're done with Kanye. So we hope you're enjoying it tomorrow night. Yeah, tomorrow night. So let's talk Virgin Galactic. You're going where next week? To the Mojave Desert next week. The Mojave Desert.

Yes. And you're going to see. We're going to see Virgin Galactic's new spaceship. It's the replacement for spaceship two after it suffered an unfortunate crash. Last two years ago now. Yeah. A year and a half. Year and a half, yeah.

So we're going to go see that. Maybe not. Stephen Hawking might be there. We don't know. That would be cool. It would be cool. Depends on his health is what they're saying. So, yeah, we're hopefully going to get up and close with it.

And do we have any speculation on what we're going to see? The kinds of changes or not changes? I would assume it's still a similar spaceplane style. Because it still connects to the spaceship one? It's the White Knight. White Knight. White Knight, too. Yeah.

So it still connects to White Knight II. just replacing the... You need to learn an entire new language to understand what Virgin Galactic is doing. Right. So, yeah, some background on Virgin Galactic for people who don't know. They are not your standard rocket company. They don't make the cylindrical, vertical takeoff rockets that you normally think of when you think of rockets.

They make space planes 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. 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 going to let everybody go to space. We're going to start by selling tickets for $250,000. All these celebrities and bigwigs decided to start buying up these tickets in advance

of that promise. And then every year, it was sort of like, well, we'll get to it next year. And then the next year, 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 did they have like a big disaster yeah they ran yeah so on Halloween I think yeah October 2014 yeah they um I remember because I was getting ready to go out oh yeah I was getting dressed in my costume and I and that news broke and I was like well that's this is happening now um yeah so uh what ended up happening is okay so

if I can explain it correctly, 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 before it was at the right spot. And that kind of, I think that made the plane. At that speed, any change in the aerodynamics is just not. Not good.

And it wound up being not good. So if nothing else, they would probably make that somehow safer, whether they automate that process or make it more difficult to. I would assume it's, I would assume it's going to be more automated or at least protect against user error. Because that was one of the things that I believe it was the NTSB board that looked into it. They concluded that the original design did not account for mishap. from the pilot themselves. Yeah, it's been one of the biggest criticisms in the last couple years, 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 these, like, foils are locked into place and that they can only be deployed at a certain speed that they need to be deployed. And that was, it's been, I think, part of the reason why it's taken this long to unveil the new version of the plane and even longer, because it won't be for another at least couple months,

before they get back up in the air. Well, you know, I'm armchair quarterbacking here a bit, but I mean, if you think about how automated a modern airliner is, why would they not seek to make an aircraft with as many critical failure points as that has as automated as possible? Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Is this normal of other, like, space launch vehicles? That's the thing. I mean.

Do they normally give humans that much control? Well, the thing is space launch vehicle. aren't normal, you know. So, um, especially ones piloted by humans. Exactly. So it, they're still in a very experimental phase the industry is. And that's kind of echoed in our, in our, um, legislation around it right now, too. There's not a lot of regulation, um, in terms of how the vehicles are supposed to operate

because it's very, is still very much considered a new experimental field. Um, so. And that's definitely changing now. Well, it's been, the sort of reins have been pulled in a little bit since Virgin had its accident. I don't. Or the FAA is like at least paying more attention to these specifics. I, 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 can, from what I've gathered, the FAA is a little hungry to start to step in and not go crazy with regulations, but maybe make a, at, a few adjustments. Yeah. It's, speaking of the FAA, I'm just going to squeeze one more thing in here. Because if this actually goes through,

it's big news. Ben Popper just wrote about this, I believe, a few minutes ago. There is some discussion of changing 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. Yeah, most of the ones that people think about, are under four pounds. Yeah. Thinking about commercial drones, right?

Would they still cause damage? I feel like the ones that are under four pounds. That's what you said when you saw this. Yeah, I think they'd still mess up somebody. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, if a three and a half pound phantom goes into a jet engine, it's still going to be a problem.

Yeah. The idea is that they're still restricted to a certain height, right? 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 the bottom line is, is that if this goes through, it would pretty dramatically change the landscape of who needs to register their drones and when and why. Because, yeah, I don't think there are any real consumer drones that are over four-pile. Maybe, like, the inspire one.

Because what's the rule right now? Yeah. Chris, what's the rule right now? Everything. Everything over half pound, I think. Yeah, whatever those little toy micro drones are like the only thing under the weight limit right now, basically. That would be amazing if you had to register those. You get like a little like tail number for your,

your palm drone. Yeah, right. I have a bunch of those things. I love those. It's, that's going to 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

going to 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. Drones are going to fill the skies.

That's the thing, right? Like if all these shipping companies get their way, they're going to 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, you know, they need collision avoidance. They need to interface with aircraft using ADSB 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. Is it easy to put ADSB on? A drone? I think, yeah, I think they've done it. I think Google and Amazon have both done it already. As long as you don't let the people who run Kanye's live stream do it. They're not going to get it done. It's Kanye himself.

He's personally running his own live stream. By the way, ADSB is like the radar technology, the radar tracking technology for planes. Right, so that they can talk to each other in the sky and back to ATC. And yeah, I mean, they're just going to have to be very good. careful about how that goes because again you don't want to suck those things into a jet engine or hit him in a personal plane or with a virgin galactic no i don't think they can get as high as virgin galactic space no but 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 anyway let's uh let's talk about square space shall we

sure i'm going to i'm going to talk about square space what is square space well he i'm glad you asked Sean, building website can be tough. And even if you do know your way around coding, creating something that looks good and works well is a time-consuming affair. Sometimes you wish you could just stop time with a simple push of a button on your watch. But you know, Squarespace makes it easy

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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 the Nickelodeon sci-fi film Clockstoppers. I would spend countless nights perfecting my recreation to exact specifications of the prop from its yellow finish to the quantum tech logo display. 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 hypertime technology. Squarespace would have saved countless hours at 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. 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.

I'm Ron Burgundy. I'm Ron Burgundy. You handled that really well. So. I am definitely way too old to have any idea what clock stoppers is. And I'm not that old. that Nickelodeon movie. It was a great movie.

I will defend. Rotten tomatoes disagrees. His writing on this one. It was a great movie. The hype check. Are you excited about clock stopers too? Yeah. Hype check clock servers too.

Oh, 11 out of 10. I've never seen. Oh my God. More than gravitational waves. Right now, right now IMDB 5.2 out of 10, 29% on rotten tomatoes and 40% of metacritic critic. There you go. reasons why I probably shouldn't see you.

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. 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. No. All right. Absolutely. If I'm at.

Example. Yeah. Give us a good example on that one. Crank 2. Oh, no. Crank 2 is a phenomenal film. Probably has a zero on Rotten Tomatoes, is my guess. Can you do a quick check?

63%? Wow. Wait, we got to talk about how, real quick. We got to talk about the Fast and the Furiosa. Charlie's Theron might be a villain in Fast and Furious, right? Yes, that's right. Can we talk about that? I may actually watch a Fast and Furious film now.

Lauren, have you not seen the entire series? Oh, man. Hey, Chris, can we have a watch party at your house? Heck yeah. I mean, first of all, Mark, let me just clarify every day's a watch party at my house. I have all the films in my Apple TV that are available to you whenever you like. And they're extended edition?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Only the best for my buddies. It's on Amazon now. I just went down a really weird rabble because you were talking about Clockstopper's watches. And for some reason, I thought about all I still really want is that back in November when the alien watch got remade by Psycho, the watchmaker. I don't remember this at all.

Oh, my God. Sorry. This is a really weird tangent. You're in a rabbit hole that no one else here is in. You don't remember that? Oh, that looks awesome. They reissued the watch from Alien. They did.

Is that for sale? Can you buy that? I don't know. It still doesn't make any sense because the site is in Japanese. Okay. Guys, I'm sorry. We're buying watches now. Sorry.

We can't do the Vergecast. No, Nealai would be proud. We're buying things during the Verge. That is a tradition. All thanks to Squarespace. I believe that, I believe that Neelai bought his Nexus 6p during the Vergecast. Oh, my God. Yes.

As a viewer, I can confirm. Which I don't think he still uses or may even own. I don't even think I've ever seen him hold that. No. You say that judgmentally. Like, you don't burn through tech gadgets in an afternoon. Okay. But the difference is that...

Chris at least holds them for like a day. Yes. And I keep track of them. If I need to dispose of them, which occasionally I do, I know where they're going and when and why. Nelai probably still has that Nexus 6p and has no idea where it is, is my guess. So for $386. Okay, you buy some watches. I'm going to talk about cars.

Okay. Actually, let's talk about cars. This is my Vergecast now, and we're talking about cars. Buckle up. So, yeah. Sorry. Goodbye, Lauren. That's rough.

So the first thing we're going to talk about is this tentative decision from the National Highway Safety Transportation agency authority association. NHTSA, I just know the myth of NETSA, 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 U.S. 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? 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. But Night Rider was an 80s. True. All right.

Or a series, rather. So 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 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 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 testing to ensure that you actually know how to drive. A computer is no different. 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. Which they're, yeah, and they're trying to harmonize that. But this could grease the wheel a bit for that, right? What I'm curious about, though, as I know for there's 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.

Does that kind of take away that requirement now? 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 seat. Right. The cars that are on the road right now in Austin and Mountain View and soon in Washington State have a steering wheel. They have an emergency shutoff switch. They have pedals. And for exactly the reason you say it.

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 computer needs, 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. 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? Does this just take away the steering wheel? That's a very good question. The way I would look at it is 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 regulatory hurdles that it faces. And I think that's been the case with the driverless car. They have just assumed all along that they would find a way around the rules. 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 Netsa saying, yo, like, we need to sort this out. And that's where this decision.

ruling or this temporary ruling came from. Yeah. And I think that Google knew all along that they were going to get to that point. They have a huge lobbying organization. And that industry in general, I think, is very convinced that they can get around any of those restrictions. 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...

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. But I think half of that is coming from not wanting to offend the truck driving pace. Agreed, agreed. 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, their 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. You now have a, you know, your car can drive itself.

It's in beta. Just be careful. And then a week later. We see like all of these videos of people. Exactly. Yeah. Almost crashing into the side of a highway. It's like you can't tell people, oh, hey, we're going to give you this software that like

will totally jeopardize your life. Just like keep your hands on the wheel. It's actually strange to me that they didn't get more pushback on that. Because that's insane. 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 the autonomous, the semi-autonomous stuff that they're rolling out to the Model S. But, uh, and as someone who wants to buy a Model 3 probably as his next car, which we should talk about next. Uh, 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 yeah.

Well, I think it is it, it gets at a very deep rift between the legacy auto industry and the new 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 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. Yeah, it's funny because it sounds very reminiscent of what Musk does with his rockets do, you know? like with each new rocket, we found out that they were kind of changing things around for each launch. Or even testing things.

Like it came out in the biography about him that they would often load up some rockets with like competing technology, stuff that they were building in-house so that they could, you know, gather that data back after a launch and say, 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, you know, et cetera? Like, they do a lot of that stuff. But, you know, no one's riding on his rockets yet. Oh, yeah. Someday, right?

Someday. So what I really want to know about this. Don't think he's in a way with that. Obviously, this is like temporary. Google's not talking about it, you know, all this stuff. But this sort of ruling from 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. that, you know, Ubers that are autonomous or lifts that are autonomous 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? 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's going to be the long poll 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 ask me six months ago, I would have said out 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 sold anytime soon.

Now, I think it's actually coming full circle back to the technology of it because Secretary Fox, U.S. 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 for our cars crash. And that just seems like what's going to happen going forward. Yeah. I mean, they are the first domino to fall in that respect. So it's going to be the companies. Yeah, well. If Volvo's precedent ends up spreading, then yeah.

What would be the other option in terms of who are you? Is there something else that makes sense? Well, I think that the assumption for a long time, and maybe the assumption still with some automakers, is that 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 I think that there are still companies who are hoping, that's how it plays out. There's just no way it can go that way. Because 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. Yep. 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. These things happen so quickly.

I mean, there's no way. It seems like it would be way safer to have a computer making that decision. Well, and we've already... This has already happened in IRL. We had 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. driver's fault. I think it's sideswiped a part car. 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've happened. It've all been human error.

Yeah. Well, human, not just human error, but the other driver's fault. Right, yeah. But isn't that what Google said? Yeah, but... Is it true? They can't really dodge the report. 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. 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. It's like they actually come back. Right. Yeah, okay. What do you think happens first?

All 50 states allow some. Right now it's, we have what, Nevada, California, Florida. 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. Yeah. Well, explicitly yes. But then there's a broad gray area with other states like Texas.

Right, where you can test in Austin and stuff. Yeah. 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 in all 50 states. The race is on because you have Colorado and Washington, Washington, D.C. That's a very good point.

Not a question I've considered before. They may actually 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? Soon everyone's just going to be smoking weed in their driverless cars. Yeah, yeah. It picks you up from the airport. It'll just be fog in cars. It's like a Bob Marley branded weed branded car. The last time I was on the Vergecass, we went down this weird road at CES about how once all this stuff is happening, all the self-driving cars in like Uber and Lyft or self-driving cars.

It's like it's all just going to be branded. It's going to be, oh, I can pay $10 for the ride from the airport in a self-driving lift or I can pay $5 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 to the there. There is no amount of money CBS could pay me to have Big Bang Theory blasted in my face. But if you could... Okay, but if it's like five bucks from JFK home.

Yeah, if it's like... It's surge pricing right now. Surge pricing, but if you want to ride in like the TBS like Conan O'Brien car, it won't be search pricing. I mean, the Conan O'Brien car wouldn't be terrible, right? It's only clips of Andy Richter. No, what, hey, Andy Richter is from Illinois. Sorry, I like Andy Rickter.

He's okay. It's Seth Rogen. It's Seth Rogen. Oh, gosh. Yeah, that could be. It's just James Franco reading his poetry. James Franco is a self-driving car. Sorry.

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. Franko in James Franco as a self-driving car directed by James Franco produced by James Franco. Direct to Hulu. Spring breakers to James Franco. Hype check self-driving cars. Oh my gosh. These are softball hype-chairs.

This is the easiest hype checks. I'm not a big fan of self-driving cars. I like driving cars. I do too. Right? It's a nice feeling. I feel a little torn. I would like a minority report kind of universe.

Or I robot. Yeah. Where like he had the option of the steering wheel coming down when he was done. But honestly, do you want other people driving cars? Like, I get that you want to drive a car. Yeah. I don't want anybody else driving their own car on me. No, this is exactly.

That would be so much safer. This is exactly it. The more I've made my trip, I made the trip from my home in upstate New York to, you know, like, ever since I started going to college in Long Island, I've been down in the city. 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 yeah I'm like man I'm kind of ready for it no in terms of hype check though maybe five the current the current level like because self-driving cars right now are like I can agree with that. Pretty lame. So I'll agree with that five. I wouldn't say they're lame. There's just not mainstream just yet.

There are some cases that you may want the car to drive you, but at the same time. Well, I think the happy middle ground, in my opinion, is that we are reaching the point where in the next, I think, five to ten years max, cars are going to be virtually uncrashable. 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 is about to be where below I think it's 30 miles an hour. Like you basically can't crash it. Like if you try to steer it into something, it'll just be like, nope. And so I mean like we saw this trend at Detroit in the Detroit auto show. It's where it's like

that kind of technology. I mean just basically like collision avoidance and stuff. But even that kind of technology, which is really important, uh, is almost an afterthought when you talk to these automakers. Obviously at Detroit, they're like trying to there, 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. We did spend like an hour in the, in the backseat of a Rolls Royce done. Yeah. But, but like it's so commonplace now that like these cars are having that stuff built in that they're almost forgetting about it. Yeah. It was always like an after the, what was it, 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. 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? 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 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. Yeah. 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 back end of how that gas gets to my car as far as, like, harming the environment. And I'm ready for an electric car. They have to kill elephants for every gallon of gas. 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, that Tesla's next car was going to be unveiled. Yep. But now we know, March 31st.

Yeah, the last day. I mean, it's like give it. It was like when SpaceX returned a flight. It was like the week before Christmas. 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 how much. God, he's so frustrating. Yeah, and on the earnings call yesterday, he was literally like, I haven't decided how much of the car I'm going to show. I don't know whether I should just show it or like hold some parts close to the vest. If they're going to be taking pre-orders on that day, they have to show it. Like you can't just like.

But in fairness, they could just flash like the headlight of the car and they would still get a million pre-orders. They would, but that's really, really shitty. I mean, they're not going to. do like a Faraday Future at CES and show like a concept car. They're going to show like the, they're going to have the car. It's going to be. 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, they showed designs that were very close to the production design before, well before the car actually came out. But did they start taking pre-orders? Yes. Okay. Yeah.

The Model X, they've been taking pre-orders since the 1800s. And it stills in shipping and volume. So I think, you know, the business model as, as, like, annoying as it is, works well for them, and people are responding to it. So I'm, I think as long as they're able to sustain it, I like the way that they're treating their business. But obviously the question is, like, whether or not they can sustain it until this car comes out, because everything really hinges on the model three. 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. Yeah. 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. Right. The Model S is, like, a much bigger step down from that, still way out of everybody's price range. Yeah. 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-Lambos with Chris.

Snapchat, Burge. Thanks to Kirsten for producing that. Yes, look for that next week. I hope you get big enough that you have people ripping it and putting it on YouTube like DJ College Snapchat. Yes. We're like, oh, you missed Sick Lambo this week? Oh, we got you. It's on YouTube.

Well, then I'll tell those people you played yourself. But 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 tax. 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 three for

$25,000, depending on where you live. Okay. So I'm someone who hasn't owned a car in six years now. How has this changed? Is it feasible to actually have an electric car? Like what is, what is What is the infrastructure like for that? Yeah, so a couple of very important things have happened. One is that 2016 is the first year in 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 two chargers, which are like the standard fast chargers that you see in parking garages. Like fill up in like 20 or 30 minutes. No, no. No, level two is like four hours or something. Tesla's supercharger is 20. 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% and half an hour, right? So a question, Chris. are all the Tesla's, can they take superchargers? Because I know some of them can't, right? Well, so supercharging at one time was an option on the Model S, I believe.

It wasn't? 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. Okay. I think that all Model S is currently sold have supercharging. They need, I mean, they need that to be standard. They do. They do.

There's no way that they can serve without it. And there is, by the way, because this is true in every single industry on the planet, there is 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 Chautimo, which is only used by the Nissan Leaf, I believe. But it's technically a standard. But in the U.S., the only real car that people own that,

that use Chathamo's is the 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. And do they have ways to find these chargers in the cars themselves? 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 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. Yeah. So that's in that car. But I think basically every EVs 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. And the thing is, like, the charger network is a huge deal for sure. And, you know, Tesla's got really big ambitions on building that out even further than it already has, which has already been pretty extensive. But the Model 3 can get you close to, depending on the circumstances, about 300 miles on a charge, right? The Model 3?

Or Model S, sorry. Oh, model, yes. Model S is, yeah, 275-ish, I think. Right. So model 3 is going to be 200. We don't know yet. Yeah, it'll be over 200, but we don't know. Well, us, the P85 would get around 275. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. And Musk has said on a call last year when he announced 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. year and then a P100 year after that. You know, it just keeps getting incrementally better. 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. Incrementally, but yes.

Yeah, incrementally, but like if not just because of the software and you won't, I 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, like they'll just build it in. Yeah. You'll need to get the new, the new Tesla in two years. The new, the Tesla success. Yeah.

But like two, even 200, say the model three 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. Because how much, do you know, Chris, the P70? There is no piece. No, no, no, no. The 70.

Yeah. What was the mileage on that? I had two, it was over 200. I don't know the exact number. But it wasn't going over 250, though. I don't think so, no. Right. But I think 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 60s? Yeah, something really low. And even now it's only up to 85? Yeah. And that's true with the E-Golf, too. And it's like...

It's still enough for most people on a daily basis. Sure, 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 doesn't match the range of a gasoline car no it does what's the average range of a gasoline car 300 to 400 yeah I mean just depends on the tank in the car but I have a kind of like maybe stupid simple question uh how long does it take to charge a battery on a Tesla so like you're saying it'll go like 300 miles but 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. That's to 100%, right? 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. Because 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 supercharger.

So when I went to a supercharger, there was a ton of people. I mean, California, there are a ton of people driving a lot. electric cars and most of them are driving teslas and and so you you were in for wait yeah i remember when i test when i test when i test ro of model s in in california uh when it first came out basically there was a supercharger um in um 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 s is on the road at this point but to answer christin's question you can plug it in overnight right like in your garage yeah 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. I want to go through a few quick things that you should all be aware of. There's a new Twitter timeline, which is opt in right now. Is that right? Yeah, but I haven't been prompted. Yeah. I don't think you get prompted. You have to go into your settings. I didn't see it. It'll be a toggle. Yeah, I didn't, mine didn't show up until this morning. Is it good or bad? Yeah, what's different about it. 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 feet and pull down, it goes back to reverse chrono order. So it sounds like a more expanded version of the sort

of while you were away that they were right. It's just while you're away without the while you're away like little tab. Which I'm totally fine with. Yeah, I like that. And it's more while you're away as well. So it's more than just like five or ten weeks. I use the while you're away to like things that you guys posts from like hours ago. My while you're away is always Chris Ziegler or Casey Newton. It's like only them. Maybe Dan. Mine is all Nicola Fumo.

Yeah. It was just like six of her tweets. It was great. 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 circumstance led you to be looking at my tweet from eight hours ago? I was searching through your feet. It's like miles away from like going into someone's Instagram and liking one

photo from like five months ago. Yes. That's like the, that's like a whole different level of thirst. This is true. 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, you, requires a phone and like a full-fledged like Rift setup, right, or Vive. This is in between where it's self-contained. To me, it sounds like the Goldilocks VR headset. Yeah, that sounds great. I have a, I bought a gear

VR for a couple 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. Yeah. How often do you use it? Is it just for games? 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 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 like if I find myself alone with a couple hours it's like all right let's pop into VR see what's new so it's like

it's jacking in the matrix for a few minutes yeah it's like it's it we'll have to get used to it someday yeah so we'll see uh maybe at I oh this will be a thing uh the VR headset we'll see that would be cool I would love to see them roll that out there yeah that would that would be a good thing for that We mentioned before, but you have to know this by now. There's a new Kanye West album out. How could you not know this? Also, presumably it's live streaming right now.

Yeah, we have a theory that Kanye knew about the gravitational waves announcement before it came out because he announced his album was going to drop today. Yeah. And it was originally going to be called waves. Yes. Like what? And then on Monday, the LIGO collaboration, which Discovered the Waves said they were going to announce something big on Wednesday on Thursday.

And then next thing you know, it's not called waves anymore. I know. Well, he changed the name like Monday morning. He knew something. Kanye is jacked into the scientific community more than we could possibly know. So the title of Kanye's album is now called The Life of Pablo. It was T-L-O-P. T-L-O-P.

And we were speculating what it might mean. Yeah. And now we know. The love of physics. And if you follow Sean O. Cain on Twitter, S.O. Kane 1, he is posting rapidly a bunch of fake The Life of Pablo album covers with different words. Well, made one for Andy, our transportation reporter. And then I made another joke one because I always make, every time there's like a big Twitter meme. You got to make jokes in threes. Yeah, well, yeah.

And I did. Sure, but that will make it four. Oh. I don't want to ruin the comedic. symmetry. I don't know. I would have to figure something out. I don't know.

One more quick thing. New York Fashion Week is in the midst of starting. It's going on for the next week, I think. Our own Kwame Opom is going to be at some of the events around this. But also, also, you should follow our sister site, rack.com. They are, of course, going to be covering the heck out of that. And there are some tech implications here. Fitbit announced a partner.

with a fashion house earlier this week. There was an Epson event where they're printing textiles. Kwame was at that. And there are things going on. You'll want to check it out. There's like no, there's no better interdisciplinary thirst than the tech industry and the fashion industry.

Both of them want to be the other so badly. It's like, it's amazing. It is a very thirsty collaboration. And on that note, wait, one more before we go. MTV News is coming back. That just broke while we were doing the show. If Kurt Loader is not involved, I don't care. Exactly.

Is Kurt Loader involved? It's the right answer. Okay, Kirsten, Mark, why don't you give us some social channels? Social channels? Well, as we mentioned, we had a new Snapchat show this week with Chris, his grand return. Sick Lambo's. It was so good. Yeah, so you should follow the Verge on Snapchat.

We're just Verge on Snapchat. We used to be the real version, and then we got really cool. We're still just as real. Yep. We're still real. You can find us under. Where is real as gravitation? waves.

Yes. And then let's see. Well, they should subscribe to the YouTube channel. Yeah, so it's YouTube.com slash The Verge. Got tons of awesome videos coming soon. That's true. Including one, I don't want to give it too much away, but when I saw that's coming next week

that I'm very excited about, that's all I'm going to say about. There is some really crazy, the amount of stuff that's come up from the video team. Yeah, we have content, hashtag content. Since even before CES, it's been crazy. We have, we're a 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. It's at Verge. Yeah. At Verge. And then what are your Twitter handles? You both have Twitter.

You're both on the Twitters. We are both on the Twitters. I'm at Flux in Time. And then I'm at Hey Mark L. And then Lauren, you are? I'm just pretty simple. Lauren Gresh. L-O-R-E-N.

No underscore? No. Sean has the most complicated. I don't know what. It's like an old AOL username. Well, it was consistent. It was consistent with like everything I used in like the old web. And now it just followed me for us.

And I've been trying to get Twitter if you're listening. I want either at Okane. I don't, never mind. I've been DMing the Twitter account. You got me. I'm S.O.K.N.1. S.O.K.1. Hopefully not for long.

I am Zed Power. Zed power. And that's it. Thanks for watching. Bye.