Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of TheVerge.biz. It's a new thing. Can I tell you a story? I can't tell the story, so I'll dot to the person.
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Excellent. Anyway, I'm here, you're listening to me, you've been listening to Dieter, there he is. You've also heard Ashley Carbin's voice. Hello.
And you've heard Jake Ashnack's voice. Hello. There he is. I actually don't know if I spoke yet.
I think I laughed. True virgin. I was in the middle of the story. You've heard Jake chuckle, but he's here.
Paul Miller is sadly sick. Also, I believe it's his birthday, so he's not here. Paul's birthday today? There's like a rumor floating around on his birthday.
I've not verified this rumor. What? He's sick on his birthday. That's really sad.
That's really sad. I just want to make it clear that we do not run this sort of workplace where you have to fake being sick to take a date off on your birthday. But I'm thinking about changing our policy such that that is the case. Anyway, we're here.
Happy birthday, Paul, if it isn't your birthday. Who knows? Again, I haven't checked. I'm a bad friend.
No, Paul is sick. Are you looking? I googled Paul Miller B-Day. Can we have Paul Collin to just answer this?
He's sick. He's not that sick. Yeah, I actually could see Paul. Yeah, he was literally walking out.
He was here, but he said, I'm not here. And I was like, we're here. Paul, he's available on Twitter. Just tweet him some wishes, and hopefully that will help him heal his sick body.
Is that a phrase? It's not a phrase. Look, there was not a lot of news this week. You may have noticed by the extended vamping that we don't have a lot to talk about, but there is some stuff.
First, I just want to point this out. The trailer for the next Pacific Rim movie came out. It's called Pacific Rim Uprising. It is the most important thing in my life at this moment because it invites you to join some sort of Jaeger army, and that is my dream.
I'm just putting it out there. Were you not a battle mic person? I did not see the original Pacific Rim. Oh, my God.
Get out of here. Tell me your second name. Why should I be excited about the Pacific Rim, too? The first movie is perfect.
It's like robots fighting in the ocean or something, right? One, the answer is yes, and two, the answer is an emphatic yes. Yes, it's giant robots fighting in the ocean. Fighting monsters in the ocean.
That actually sounds right. Dean, I'm assuming you were a battle mic person, because I was a deep battle mic person. So there's two schools of battle mechs. There is the school from when Pacific Rim comes, which is the classic Japanese battle mech, you know, Robotech, like that line, and that's like Power Rangers are sort of in that zone, and Voltron also, honestly, belongs in that zone.
So that's like the very classic line that we think of. I am not of that lineage. I'm a battle tech guy, which is a very American style of battle mechs. I do see the games.
It involves people with video games. Second, OG battle tech people had hexagon maps and little tiny miniatures and turn-based things and sheets that laid out all the specs and stats and powers and guns and armor of their battle mechs with tiny little, I kid you not, in order to fill in your armor, there were little tiny bubble sheets that you had to fill in with pencils as though it were an SAT test. And it was a turn-based strategy game. And then there was also MechWarrior, which was a role-playing game in which you could be the character that piloted the battle mechs.
MechWarrior 2 was the aim I had for my Mac, and it was awesome. Yeah, yeah. It's a canonical RPG. I think it's...
I think we've made this extremely clear. MechWarrior 2, one of the best videos. Actually, it's the opposite. Just a bit clearer.
Ashley, were you a different person? I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Both of you need to leave this place and go watch that first movie. It is great.
I vaguely remember an ocean when I saw... Yeah, we're done. We're done with this whole thing because it's making me sad. Okay, there's real news to talk about.
Actually, this blew up our day today. This is a real thing that happened. Elon Musk just randomly tweeted, based on nothing specific that we can find, I just got verbal approval to build a tunnel for a Hyperloop between New York, Baltimore, and D.C. New York to D.C.
in 29 minutes. A lot going on here. Okay, can I just say, love the Hyperloop, super excited. I've noticed it continues to get longer and longer, and yet there is still zero Hyperloop.
Like, he went from nothing to, what if I go across multiple states? Yeah, this is going to be the world's longest tunnel. And so we just, like, chatted with somebody in the White House, and they were like, yeah, well, that sounds good. Yeah.
JJ, we call him. So it seems like he just went to the White House, had a chat with Jared Kushner, and Jared Kushner was like, yeah, sure, that sounds sweet. And now, apparently, that's not... The White House kind of confirmed it today, too.
But, like, does the White House have the power to, like, authorize a, like, massive interstate tunnel system? I mean, I guess they do stuff with the highways. They made an author now. Can they do underground?
I think there's a lot. First of all, this is my favorite take on this. It's Matt Iglesias at Vox. And he goes, I think the tunnel will have to go through New Jersey, but it would never stop in New Jersey.
Right? Because he was just going to three cities. He's like, I don't think New Jersey is going to be super pumped about everyone just skipping New Jersey. Like, they got most of New Jersey so you can just get by it as fast as any human has ever traveled across New Jersey.
So that's, like, a first problem. I don't know if there's a federal government. It's another Chris Christie snub. Yeah.
I'm sure Elon had to stop there, and they're like, it's not happening. Then there's the city. So Ashley pointed out, like, you're going to have to dig up New York City. Yeah, I don't understand how they're going to dig up New York City.
Like, maybe both were fine. Well, no, they're going to do it by digging very, very deep, and that's when the monsters come out. Like, Elon Musk is going to discover a Balrog. Yeah.
I mean, so he's been digging up the parking lot at SpaceX. This is a true fact. It's his new company, The Boarding Company. He's like an eight-year-old boy.
He's just like, I'm digging a tunnel. I will say to you, there have been many reports. I'm not even, this is not a joke. I'm not exaggerating.
This is not a story. There have been many reports that parking is already quite bad at SpaceX. Like, I've heard it from people. I think it's funny that Elon Musk is like, whatever.
Like, I'm going to dig up the parking lot just to prove I have this tunnel company called The Boring Company. He also doesn't really own a Hyperloop company. Yeah, wait. So is The Boring Company supposed to be creating this tunnel slash Hyperloop?
No, no. So he said he, remember, he released the Hyperloop as, like, an open source set of, like, plans. And yet it does not actually exist. There are some test Hyperloops.
Like, Hyperloop One is, like, running sleds in a tube in the desert. No vacuums yet. No vacuums yet. They're just, like, proving that trains in tubes is fine.
It's not that far. Elon has a hypothetical, like, transportation system. A hypothetical tunnel building company. And, like, hypothetical approval.
I think tunnel building is not. Like, tunnels exist. His claim is that he can dig a tunnel faster. He can dig a tunnel in a parking lot.
Wait, I'm sorry. When was the last time you dug a tunnel in a parking lot? The man's flying rockets that they're landing. The cars are driving themselves.
That's completely different technology. It is fair. It's a different technology. But, you know, you've got to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Okay, it's like, does he actually just have unlimited money? Like, who can waste money on digging tunnels in a parking lot for, like, a hobby? Like, is he planning on turning these things into business? It can't be, like, that much money.
It's your own parking lot. Yes. I don't know. I just have to throw the shovel all the time.
Just, like, I'm doing this. But it's a good idea. It's a great idea. Infrastructure.
Trains. Excellent. Love it. But he did tweet, I got verbal approval, which is just not how it works.
For better or worse. Like, getting the thumbs up from, like, a Trump family member is not how you partner. They're very good at sticking to promises. And then he, like, slowly walked it back.
There was another tweet where he said, they're excited about it. Still many approvals to go. Get excited. And it feels like what he was doing was that everybody's all amped up about this project.
Because the Northeast Corridor is, like, Amtrak's most important line. He's got everybody all amped up about it. Now people are going to want it. So he can, like, go, for example, to the state of New Jersey and say, no one wants to come here anyway.
Just let me through because I got the tweets. Look at all these retweets, Chris. Which I believe is how politics in New Jersey works. Probably.
Yeah. But I think it's exciting. That's, like, the most exciting thing I think that happened this week. The idea of traveling 30 minutes to D.C.
from New York is exciting. Yeah. Good news. I do that.
And it's going to stop right at the E.V. I didn't even think about that. If he just, like, pitches it as, like, keep it exclusive to the Trump family for a year. They have a plane.
They have the best plane. They have Air Force One. Yeah. Do you think that can do it in half an hour?
I mean, Air Force One's capabilities are technically less. I bet they can't. I bet it's not actually secret. They can't learn to land and go through security.
I'm sure they have to do some sort of stuff. That's true. All right. We should talk about much more mundane things.
There's voice assistant news in this world, Peter. That's your favorite. So Bixby basically launched. Is that the long and the short of it?
Yeah. The voice assistant is the thing that you can have. It's rolling out in the U.S. Samsung all over the launch of this thing by delaying it.
And then they added, like, hashtags to the description of the male and female voices that you can get from Bixby. Completely unnecessary, by the way. I don't know if you need a hashtag to describe a voice to you when you're picking one. Yeah.
But for the male voice, they said it was assertive. And for the female voice, I believe they said it was chipper. Yeah. Which, that's super not a good look, Samsung.
That's such an unforced error. It's a totally unforced error. There's no reason you didn't need the hashtags. Right.
And the thing itself is, like, kind of broken. Right. Yeah. So Dan wrote a really good piece that it really reminds him of old Samsung.
We're talking, like, S5 Samsung, where it makes blips and loops, and it's just, it's, like, software for software's sake. The fact that it's, not only is it tied to that button, and you can't remap that button, but Samsung is actively and aggressively shutting down any attempts to circumvent the hard pairing of the Bixby button to Bixby. And so that's annoying. And it just, you know, it doesn't work.
The whole point of Bixby is you can talk to your phone interface rather than tap on your phone interface, but it can't quite get there. And I feel like it's, to get a voice assistant to work, you don't have to get 100% there because nobody's there yet. But you've got to get to, like, 60. And they're not at 60.
And so it's the same thing that happened in the early days of Siri, where people were like, oh, well, this doesn't work. But it's way less acceptable now because you could just go use something else, like Google Assistant or, you know, apparently Alexa. I mean, if you could remap the button on the side to open the Amazon app and then talk to Alexa, that would be more useful. Yeah.
But you can't. Dan had a great line that's, like, Samsung software bloat has now manifested in hardware bloat, which is brutal, but I love it. I just, I don't want to just say Samsung sucks, Samsung software sucks. I do actually, because Dan, you know, he went to China and wrote the big feature about, like, the scope of their ambition here.
And so I want to give Samsung, even now, even when this thing is launched and it's, like, not really that good yet, but I want to give Samsung the benefit of the doubt in the space to try to innovate and create its own ecosystem and try to innovate on the idea of human software interface through voice. Like, those are all genuinely good ideas. The challenge for Samsung is how do you get those genuinely good ideas out of the world when you know the first iteration is going to be not that great, and how do you manage around that? And I feel like they've just done a pretty terrible job of setting expectations, explaining to users what it can and can't do, and putting it in a context that, like, actually makes people feel delighted about it and not disappointed by it.
If Bixby were, like, an optional thing on the button and you could turn it on if you want, you could turn it off if you want, and, like, you could say, hey, Bixby, whatever, but it were not so core to the identity of the phone, then they would end up building a small group of people who really were into it. It wouldn't grow as fast. It wouldn't be as splashy, but then they could work out some bugs for a while. They kind of did this with the early access program, but, I don't know, they could have spent longer doing that, I think, is sort of my take.
They should have launched this thing without hard mapping it to the button. They would have had a bunch of people, like, refuse to use it. That would have sucked for them. But on the other hand, people would have put it in a context where they were happy with what they got and so disappointed with what they got.
That's true. I think Bixby is one of those Samsung things where two years from now it will be in a settings menu that you can turn on, but other than that, I'll be on. And I'm like, wow, your assistant sucks and you're forcing it upon people with refrigerators. Yeah, the number of things Samsung wants to put Bixby in is, like, terrifying, considering Dan's experience with it, as he wrote in his piece, it mostly gets it wrong.
It gets it wrong so often that I don't want it controlling anything with a heating element in my home. Like, that seems terrifying. Sears, I don't know if this is, like, totally adjacent news, but Sears is basically, they have a line of appliances at Kenmore line, they've only sold them in Sears stores. Selling them through Amazon now, so the idea of buying a washing machine on Amazon, insane.
That just seems like something you should buy in a store and not just, like, push a button online, but so it goes. They're all going to be Alexa-enabled, like, all of the Kenmore appliances on Amazon. So this is happening, whether or not we want it to happen. There's also the thermostat this week with Cortana.
That thermostat looks a piece of garbage. It's pretty see-through. I like it. I think it looks awesome.
It looks like it's made by Johnson Controls, a partnership with Microsoft. Just go look at it. It looks like it, I don't know how to say this. I think first-ass listeners might understand what I mean when I say this.
It looks like the software is slow. You know that thing where you touch it and nothing happens? It just, I looked at it, I was like, it's cool, it's clear, the screen's trying. I was like, I bet when you touch it, it's slow.
That is immediately what I thought when I saw it. I don't know why, but I encourage you to look at it. It's like, it says that this is a beautiful thermostat. I think it looks great.
I have a feeling that when you put that in the house. I agree it looks slow, but like. It's trying to look kind of futuristic. I think it's going to look really tacky at home.
And be slow. I'm just going to point out again that the worst part of that is it's slow. I don't know how you're judging the slowness right now. I mean, it just looks like it will be, first of all, it runs Windows.
And I remember that, like, right, like three years from now, the thing is funny. That's why Windows is a thermostat. This is Windows 10T. It's literally called Windows 10T.
I'm just telling you, three years from now, your thermostat has ransomware on it. So we're going to load it down. That's it. Windows is great.
Everyone loves Windows. So is your washing machine going to be Bixby? Your thermostat going to be Cortana? Yeah.
And your Echo is your Alexa? This is the endless problem. This is why I think Amazon will slowly win, because they'll have $35 dots sitting in everyone's house, and people would prefer to buy the one that works with them. Also, I think the question of Andy Rubin's big bet is that he's going to solve this problem with Essential.
That's the whole point of Essential and him making a home speaker home, whatever the thing is. I can ship an Android phone faster than Andy Rubin than ship an Android phone right now. We should raise Andy Rubin. Let's send Dan back to China.
You can put a phone together in like a day there. We've already been talking to you on manufacturers. That's not how every Kickstarter video ends. We've got all our designs done.
We're talking to tier one manufacturers. We just need your help. We just need your help to beat Andy Rubin to market with a Android phone. All right, so here's what we're going to do.
As you know, Next Level, Lauren Good's show is going on. I talked to her about this episode that's really interesting. It's about what you'll be doing to measure your emotions while you watch movies and TV shows. It's wild.
So I'll talk to Lauren about that. It's going to happen for 10 minutes. I'm going to read an app and we'll come back and talk to some other things. Here is Lauren.
Hey, Lauren, how are you? Hey, Eli, I'm good. How are you? I'm great.
I'm talking to you about your show again. So everybody, it's Lauren Good, the host of Next Level with Lauren Good. I like saying your name at the beginning and end of that phrase. It makes me happy.
But you just did your second episode. Yes, it just published earlier this week on theverge.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and as I said before, directly into your brain. And we're really excited because this one was a little different from last week. Last week's was all about planes.
It was about modular planes and it got this wild response. And this week, we talked about Hollywood. Well, I mean, so the conceit of your show is that there's what we see and then there's iterative development of what we see. So like every year of phones get a little better and we're all used to the world because it's like next level technology.
And so you're looking at the next level of Hollywood stuff, right? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. We were looking to highlight some of the concepts, innovations, crazy, bizarre prototypes, things that are in beta, things that are happening that maybe you haven't heard about yet or really seen or experienced.
Because like you said, like other stuff that we cover is wonderful and we love gadgets but sometimes can be a little bit iterative. So in this case, it's kind of a funny story. I was at Dolby months ago now, Dolby Labs in San Francisco, because they were having this kind of press tour day and it was pegged to the launch of Iron Fist. I don't know how many of you have watched the Netflix series of these Iron Fist.
There was some controversy around it. I don't think it did very well, but there was this big like two days... I suffered through all of Iron Fist. You watched all of it?
It's in like HDR. It's available. It was real pretty on my TV and I suffered through all of it. Well, that's exactly it.
HDR. So it was Dolby that mastered Iron Fist after the fact. And so we were being taken on this press tour through Dolby Labs a few months back and we walked by this room and there was a woman sitting on a couch in this lab and she was wearing an EEG cap. I don't know if you know what an EEG cap is, but it's an electroencephalogram cap that has all these little nodes on it and those nodes are measuring your brain activity, essentially.
So this woman's sitting on a couch in this crazy-looking cap that looks like something shit out of the matrix. She's got all kinds of sensors on Dolby and skin response sensors, heart rate sensors. There's a FLIR camera pointed at her and we were like, what is happening in here? And Dolby said, this is this product that we've been working on.
So for Next Level, we went back, maybe we've been video directors and we shot an episode inside this crazy biophysical lab at Dolby. So what do they do? Do you watch videos and you measure your response? How does it work?
Yes. So the whole idea is that as the subjects are sitting in this lab, they're watching movies and TV shows, presumably ones that Dolby has mixed and mastered, but maybe not. And the scientists at Dolby are measuring emotional responses that people are having to this content. And the whole lab is run by this really, really smart woman named Poppy Crum.
She's a neuroscientist, but she's actually, I think, a neurophysiologist, but if she wasn't so great and smart, I feel like Poppy Crum would definitely be a good villain name. A children's book character. A children's book character, yeah. But she's running the lab and they have all these subjects that are coming through and they're trying to figure out at what point do people do their heart rates increase?
At what point do people start sweating? At what point do people feel aroused or excited? And they're taking all that data and they're able to then tell their Hollywood partners they do the mixing and mastering for, we know that people will have this type of biophysical response to these types of scenes, color palettes, sounds, HDR. It's kind of crazy.
I mean, it's not altogether surprising because the more I started digging, the more I realized that a lot of entertainment companies are starting to do this and they want to better understand people's emotional responses to content. But it's kind of cool to just get into the lab myself and try it out. Yeah, I mean, one of the first times I ever saw Dolby Vision, which is their HDR format, like two or three years ago now, is it CES? And the person demoing it to me literally said, we know that we're going to play an explosion for you and your body is so bright your body will perceive it as heat.
And he's like, just watch. And I play the explosion, I was like, wow, I feel warm. He's like, yeah, you're not actually warm. Like, it's just so bright that we can make you feel heat.
And it seems like they've taken that idea all the way out. Yes, they know now that your body is conditioned to feel warm when it sees that level of heat. And I mean, there's a few different things sort of going into, sort of going to play there. The first is that they have the sensors or the types of cameras now to track that, right?
So in this case, they might be using the FLIR thermal imaging camera to see that your face, your cheeks, whatever, might actually be flushing. The second is that we have screens now. We're looking at things on screens that are bright enough to get even closer to reality. So I think that the metric they'll be used to describe it as 20,000 candelas per square meter in terms of how bright the screens get.
And some technologists will say nits, others will say candelas. They're like some variation of the same metric. But they're basically saying the screens we have now are so bright that it can make you feel like this is reality. So you've got this hyper-realistic content, we're talking about fingerprint sensors, we're talking about facial recognition, we're talking about all these things that are built into all of the products that we now have.
But when you think about that confluence of things, that these sensors are now really accessible, they're actually pretty cheap, the more interesting thing is actually what are people trying to do with all this data that we can gather from them. Yeah, so I don't want to give away but Pixar scientists are using this to design their movies. Yes, one of the anecdotes that a lot of people really liked in the videos is when Poppy Crumb says how she was working with the Pixar lead image scientist and when they were doing the color for the movie Inside Out, there's a scene where a baby is born and a baby is born and there's, to use Poppy's words, a diffuse white screen that sort of takes over, fills the screen, fills the frame and that was a very conscious choice because the image scientists said we want people to feel physiological pain. That's what happens when a baby is born, you feel physiological pain and so what sort of color pattern or color scheme can we use here that will make people feel that in some way whether they are conscious of it or not?
It's kind of crazy to think about. Yeah, I mean, you know, at some level, when you're going to the movies or you're watching a show or even if you're doing something like going to some crazy VR installation on a rollercoaster, I don't know, I think about all those people sitting in that giant Samsung installation at CES who are just being yanked around while they're wearing VR headsets and probably getting very nauseous but when you participate in anything like that, you are going for entertainment, you're going for an intensive entertainment experience and on some level, you're kind of expecting to be manipulated, you're expecting to escape in some way but this is like next level, we can use these imaging and sound tools to manipulate the way you feel and it's just everything can now be sort of engineered to do it. Before, film directors have used certain color palettes for decades now, that's very well known and in film school, they'll teach this stuff and effective computing is something that's been studied for decades but now these companies are getting so good at such a granular level that things can actually be engineered to trigger a reaction. So you got to try it, right?
You wore the cap and it measured you, what was that like? That was a little bit anticlimactic to be honest. Really? Yeah, I'm like, don't watch the video but it wasn't anticlimactic ever because what's happening is they're showing you your data on these giant screens that are in the Bilby lab and so I could sit there and I could see my own thermal image.
I found out that my armpits were very sweaty by the way because it will show things like armpit sweat and chest sweat. It can be a little mortifying and then I could see my heart rate spiking and things like that but that's all the raw unprocessed data. I mean, Bilby's going to take all of that data that they're getting from all the subjects that are sitting there and they're going to process it and they're going to analyze it and so I didn't really have the chance to do that. All I could see was, okay, there's my heart rate, there are the spikes and the dips and sort of the same stuff that you would see if you're just looking at your heart rate from a wristwatch reading or something like that.
So that part was a little bit anticlimactic but I would love to, and what we were watching too were these kind of preformed clips, these clips of fire and things that Bilby had determined were good for a demo but I would love to sit and watch an entire two-hour movie especially if it was in some type of giant movie theater where there's a lot of sound, great sound, surround sound, 3D sound and maybe your seat is shaking or whatever it might be and actually understand at what points I was reacting for lack of a better term, having an emotional response. It feels as though part of the idea here is to figure out how the experience of being in the theater where all the Dolby stuff is happening, Dolby makes the sound systems, they make the surround sound, they make the screen technologies versus being at your house with Dolby Vision in your soundbar or whatever. It feels like part of the cell here to call it a cell is that they can create more of those experiences in the theater and they're going to amplify those I'm not going to do Netflix because I believe in the theater window and I want to put my movies in the theaters. There's a piece of this where the technology they need to actually affect your emotions in that way like you're talking about in the theater with big screen comes with speakers versus what they can do at home is it's going to start splitting ever more.
I think that's fascinating. If you want to get the most intense experience you have to go to this place that can always do something that is very hard to do at home. And I say this as a man with Dolby Vision TV and like 500 speakers. Right, because you're a speaker-hound.
Yeah, we talked about your speaker-hound before. I'm going to watch movies at your house next time. Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense that any company at this point that is using biosensors to gather data that proves something that they would want to prove something that benefits their core competency. So for Dolby, that is, you're exactly right.
It's getting people into theaters or convincing them that that intensified human experience can only happen with Dolby tools in a Dolby theater with Dolby surround sound, right? Like that makes perfect sense. One of the things that we mentioned in the piece too is when you look at companies like Netflix and Hulu they're also using biosensors in some capacity but they're using them, they're using eye trackers specifically when they're doing testing for their app redesigns. So they're saying, okay, well we see as people are looking at our app their eyes are going over here instead of over there or they keep having to move their eyes back and forth as they look through a menu option or look at a thumbnail and so they're using it to inform how are people engaging with their app because at the end of the day getting people into their app and to use their app and to stream stuff from their app is the most important thing whereas Dolby is using it because they're like, hey, you should really be using Dolby technology to amplify your movie or TV show experience.
So all these biosensors are being used in different ways but ultimately it comes down to this thing where it's a little bit creepy because they are being used to affect us in ways that we might not be fully aware of. You know, we talked about this a little bit before like when you were editing the episode I've been thinking about you saying that for a while and it just, what strikes me is like the point of art is to manipulate you, right? Like if you're the artist you're aiming to have some people feel some way when they view your work and I don't know how I feel about being able to quantify that so it's less about your instincts and your expression as an artist and it's more about I want people to feel sad and I can dial in these settings on the screen for maximum sadness. I think there's something really interesting there.
I don't know if we have enough time to fall down that total rabbit hole but it's a really fascinating thing to puzzle over after, of course, you have gone and watched Next Level. Yes, you should go watch it. After we talk about it for the past 15 minutes so you just go watch it. Yeah, you've heard us describe the images and now go look at the images.
So before we go real quick you've got another episode coming out. Give the people a tease on that one. Oh, I love giving the people a tease. So next week of our videos.
Next week on Tuesday that's going to be July 25th we are publishing an episode that's about prescription video games. We're fascinated by this. Video games have, of course, gone a little bit of a bad rap over the past few decades since they've been mainstream. People have been concerned about their potential impact on aggressive or violent behavior how they impact child development if someone's young and they're familiar and they're playing video games all day.
All of that. There's a group of scientists here in San Francisco and actually an offshoot company in Boston that are focused entirely on developing, running trials on and possibly pushing through for FDA approval prescription video games that would boost your cognitive abilities in some way. And so we went to the labs we played some of the games we interviewed a lot of people for this video and we're really excited to show it to you. Yeah, I think this episode in particular is one of the most interesting and challenging of all of the things that you've looked at.
One thing that you've said repeatedly about the show is Next Level Tech is a little bit dangerous it's a little bit challenging and I think in a way that iterative tablet software improvements just aren't but this is really meaningfully challenging and potentially a little bit dangerous as well. Yes, absolutely. Especially when you see me trying to walk on one of those Omni Virtuix platforms while wearing a VR headset you understand the danger the actual physical danger of me possibly falling off this crazy little treadmill with a VR headset on. It was one of the few times I felt I had to take the headset off because I was feeling pretty nauseous.
Wow. Okay, let's not give it all away. That's next week. It's coming out on Tuesday.
Everywhere your mind can wander on the internet just look for it and you'll find it and watch it and share it of course. And Lauren, it was great to have you back on the show. We'll have you next week. We'll talk about prescription videos.
It was great to be on Verge House. Thanks everyone. See ya. This episode of Verge House brought to you by Squarespace.
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The offer code is Verge. We're back. Can we talk about this on Android phones? Real quick.
We wrap that up. I know we should have kept it in the voice assistant section. It's a very well-defined voice assistant section of our show today. Alexis coming to every Android phone in the form of like an option inside the Amazon shopping app, which is surreal to me.
Like, why isn't it a separate app? Google made Google Assistant a separate app. Maybe it makes it more likely that people use it. Maybe they just threw it in there.
But it shows to me that like the Amazon shopping app is basically the like you can buy stuff equivalent of Facebook's. What do they call it? The big blue app? What's the big thing for it?
The big blue app. Yeah, they just throw stuff in there. Which is funny because Android has an accommodation where you can like actually choose your voice assistant on, you know, most phones that don't hide that from you. They could have done that.
Cortana's done that on a few different phones. So yeah, I don't know. Like, am I going to open up the Amazon shopping app to use Alexa? No.
Do I hang out in the Amazon shopping app enough that I'm like, oh, hey, Alexa's here. I can use that. It's already here. Would you, if, say you have a whole bunch of home automation stuff set up and now you're on the go and you need to, I don't know, turn your lights on for some reason.
I can't really foresee why you need to do that. But right, if you need to control something at home your way, that's your gateway to do it. I'm not, I don't actually think a lot of people are going to open up the Amazon app and use this. I mean, that's the worst thing.
Why is it in the Amazon app and the iPhone? Why is it in the Amazon app? I don't think anybody opens apps to use voice assistants. Yeah.
I mean, I think that's correct. Nobody, the Google Assistant has terrible rankings in the iPhone app store. Yeah. That's a true thing.
It's just more likely you're going to have the Amazon app. Of course you're going to put it in there. Amazon's biggest facing consumer brand is Alexa. Wait, they also have an Alexa app, don't they?
They have an Alexa app and it doesn't have Alexa in it. It's just like for messaging or something, right? No, it's for controlling your Alexa stuff. You can't actually talk That's where you enable the skills and you name the devices and you put them in the iPhone network.
So Alexa is an Amazon app. Alexa settings is an Alexa app. Yeah. Just like on the iPhone, insanely, settings are in the settings app even though you are currently in another app which you would like to adjust settings.
That makes sense. It does. Just go with me. All of this makes sense, Jake.
I'm a pig. Yeah. None of it actually makes sense. Everything should be in the same place and that place is the Amazon app.
what about the Alexa app it should be in the Alexa app the Alexa app should be in the Amazon app okay sure and you're like done setting your lights I need some light bulbs push the button we need to unbundle all of this there should be a light bulb app washing machine app so you just described HomeKit brutal okay Jake I got you here whenever you're here so Comcast Comcast is a thing just try to walk people through the thing yes okay so this week the first round of net neutrality comments were due and a bunch of companies filed their comments including Comcast the one that everyone was so excited to hear from Comcast by the way investor in BoxMedia that's your disclosure yes they're just an investor they're just out there yes it's more than occasional but yeah they always do regret it so yeah Comcast let us comment and we were looking through it you know it's almost entirely exactly what you expect from Comcast they're like wow net neutrality sure is horrible it's just ruining our business things were great and now they're terrible and the internet's going to be ruined and at the same time they're going you know but we would be so cool with these rules if only x y and z so at some point in their filing we notice that they're saying you know we actually like this no paid prioritization thing except for like a couple things here and there and they're like one reason you might want to allow paid prioritization is autonomous cars because it might be really helpful for autonomous cars and we thought that was pretty interesting we never heard that claim before yeah usually it's like health devices yeah usually it's health devices and you know that that like certainly makes more sense because like if it's a pacemaker or something you know probably it should you know be instant but autonomous cars we never heard before and then our transportation reporter Andy Hawkins decided to look into it and he found out that it turns out autonomous cars don't talk to the internet at all so Comcast just threw this argument in there and there's absolutely nothing behind it like either they're they just said that like hoping that one day the internet will be part of ours and this way they can make money or they just like didn't pay any attention because it sounded nice well there's two points for that purpose so there's like a whole separate radio set of radio spectrum that is available just for the cars so that's what you mean by they don't talk to the internet at all they're happening yeah they have their own network but and this I think was really interesting mobile carriers want that spectrum back because mobile carriers love having spectrum and they want to get all the internet and have the car makers and cities pay to prioritize that information on the internet which is like just use the thing that you have and I think it's interesting because the FCC is so deep into like a GPI to his credit is very high in more unlicensed radio usage so things like wifi and bluetooth and they've got a whole band for unlicensed radio usage where you expect all this innovation and standards to happen but the carriers are like what if we don't do that yeah I've been hearing for years you know telecom companies being like well you know what if we can like share this spectrum somehow and I don't entirely know how that would work out but it definitely sounds like Comcast is hoping that one day they'll be able to get in on that I think this was last week Microsoft announced for like the 500th time in the past decade that they're moving forward with their white space internet project so it's this crazy idea where they will use computers to identify gaps in like a TV spectrum and then send like super wifi over the gaps and they've been in fights I'm not even kidding they've been at it for a decade like I wrote about white spaces imagine a decade ago and every year on the dot Microsoft was like we figured it out super wifi is here and it never shows up but it's a lot of plans along those lines yeah so why is Microsoft doing that is it just because they just want to get more people connected I think you know it's like they got a guy on staff it's everyone's friend he brings the beer around on Fridays and he's working on white spaces and I'm like yeah keep trucking Tom like he's just doing it I don't know it's literally been a decade of Microsoft saying we can somehow programmatically there was something about a billion dollars it sounds like maybe they just made up that number no I'm not sure that was like their news release so like investing in it but I'm just saying spectrum sharing games I see as you're looking for gaps and then going in where you can yeah right yeah so I mean the whole complex thing it was just like this is the thing that keeps happening where we look at these arguments they're making and on their face they sound fairly reasonable right yeah they probably should be fast and then you look into them and you go well the grounding here does not make a ton of sense and we've been doing a ton of that stuff where like if you look at the claims about investment into internet infrastructure if you look at the harms on small internet providers this stuff just isn't quite holding up the way that they're you just talked to a bunch of like literally mom and pop ISPs right yeah this is a big thing I mean in completely honesty I kept so G-Pai kept talking about mom and pop ISPs and I'm like that's not possible what's a mom and pop ISP that's made of but they're totally mom and pop ISPs and like one company I spoke with is literally just this guy and his daughter in Colorado and they have like a thousand customers just like they set up these wireless things and like their greatest struggle in life is trees which get in the way of their signal and so yeah I ended up speaking with a bunch of these companies to find out whether they've been hurting them or not and it was super interesting because half the ones I spoke with were like no what are you talking about there's like literally been no harm and the other ones were saying basically a lot of like hypotheticals they were worried about what could happen and you know it's like a little over two years on and like so far these harms haven't really come there's one company that said they had spent like $40,000 to like come into compliance because they had to like write some open internet statement just like they spent some like legal counsel but there wasn't anyone that had actually said they had really changed their plans or not made an investment the one big one as you probably had actually cited this one woman's testimony she is in charge of the ISP Aristotle and she said that they were going to triple their subscriber base but didn't because of the net neutrality rules and it is true that they delayed their plans because they wanted to spend some money coming into compliance with net neutrality but they're now moving forward with those plans again and they started that before the election before they knew it was going to be overturned which I think sort of goes to show that net neutrality is not just flat out killing this stuff even for people who right out the gate were saying this is going to be a problem it's going to stop investment so what happens next right he just got reconfirmed he just has a hearing he's not exactly reconfirmed yet I don't think but I think we've got another month about for the net neutrality comment period now's the reply comment period so now's when the more heated arguments that's going to be fun it's not going to be fun and yeah and then it's sort of a waiting game where I mean I think the FCC probably has a pretty good idea of what they want to put out for their final net neutrality proposal but technically they're supposed to take all of these comments into consideration so it'll probably be at least a couple months as they look through these comments there are like over 8 million comments that's more than last time right yeah last time I think it was like 3.4 million comments or something like that in total and right now we're at the halfway point and there are already more than twice as many comments that's crazy is it all bots because the FCC's going to be all bots that's a really good question yeah I don't know but yeah so they're going to have to somehow look through all of those I don't know how you look through 8 million comments they probably normally get like 10 comments I read an insane Reddit conspiracy theory oh yes I read this I'm just letting you know it's a Reddit conspiracy theory that the bot attack on the FCC came from inside the house because the FCC has not yet released an analysis I think his motto foiled them to ask what this hack that they claimed had happened and they said they didn't have any information on the hack so then the Redditors went nuts why would they have hacked themselves so they can toss out all the comments I mean look it's a Reddit conspiracy theory and as much as we give pie crap on the show I don't think that he set up like a rogue internal hacking operation at the FCC but if he did that would be cool and I think Jason Bourne should punch him in the face because that is a plot of a Bourne movie is it? comments on FCC no it's inside the house he's attacking the government from the inside it doesn't matter what they're actually doing what do the bad guy want in any Bourne movie just to leave a great comment and Jason Bourne being like we gotta do something about it the only thing the villain wants in a Jason Bourne movie is to create a government inside the government it's just layers of internal shadow government the goals of that government are never made clear there's just a secret more super agents punch in the face to create more super agents yeah but it's never made clear what the purpose of those super agents are except to wake up so my segment let's talk about translucent gadgets is here once again love this time you know I gotta be honest this is kind of slow gadget week but Tivoli Audio if I'm saying that right released a limited edition summer bluetooth radio it's clear and it's translucent it's cool looking it lights up inside you can adjust the LED light I don't know I'm pretty into it is it like the old Game Boys yeah it looks just like that it's a white it's not purple tinted I had the purple one yeah for one but there's LEDs inside the Game Boy didn't have LEDs inside right there's a little lights up do you adjust them with an app I'm assuming it's an app that's what you want in your life so it's $200 which seems very expensive for radio and who listens to the radio anymore I don't know you can pair with it over bluetooth but it's an FM radio so you can play your Spotify or whatever but this is a clear version of the Spotify it's called the Pale BT Glow the original is called the Pale BT okay Pale spelled like pale like P-A-L I'm not like a pale today I have it I'm pretty excited about translating this I feel like this is like for a summer this is my segueing to the Instagram so I'm talking about but for like the summer partygram they're holding the radio I sent them a piece I was like this is for your outdoor deck so please virtual readers if you or listeners I should say if you buy this radio let me know and send me a picture of it on your outdoor deck because I want a deck no you need a super stylish gram send me the gram on the deck I just got back from Midwest I saw backyards I miss that I'm thinking rain slick in New York City streets you got all the lights in the background you're holding the radio up it has a huge antenna too alright here's another gadget that is back dude I know you're excited about this Google Glass this one is two years old I don't really know how this went down so what we know is that the Enterprise Edition of Glass is in fact newer hardware with a slightly better camera and a slightly longer battery life and an actual red LED light on the front to show you that it's recording and it is getting custom sold with custom software in most cases to basically factories so that people can use it while they're assembling parts together it's even the over at Backchannel or Wired where he is the relationship between those two is so confusing has a really big long feature he went to a factory in Minnesota and sure it looks great it seems like a very good use case for the thing that they made but it has no effect on me on my life there's no maybe someday they can take the stuff they put here and use it for actual AR stuff but it seems like the make smart eyeglasses that show you things stuff like the problems that Glass solves are easy problems right it's have an operating system display some stuff connect to a Wi-Fi if you need to have a battery have a screen like it doesn't solve the hard problem which is make it look normal and make it feel socially appropriate which is a problem that the Snap Spectacle solved in a much better way than Google did with its Explorer program so good on you for not completely destroying and spring cleaning the entire project away but I guess I don't see this thing being anything outside of particular things like doctors or factories am I crazy am I too much of a hater no I think you're right it's not an AR device it's like they missed the window of this being useful it's a screen that floats in front of your eye and you can ask it for things but it's not looking at stuff and showing you more information about this stuff and it feels like Google had they had that window and they blew it basically because the product was not great and now they're basically like saying you don't have to look at the laptop the screen's in front of your eye but the thing that's crazy to me about it is they were doing this two years ago there's an NPR search like two years ago it's basically the same story and the news this time is now more people more companies can buy it which I think is I think it's Google trying to drive a press cycle around like we've already got funky future helmets happening in this world it's weird because this is supposed to be like a almost like a happy ending or something for Glass like look we were able to make something good but on some level I feel like just any news about Google Glass is bad news like I saw it and I was just like ah that's yeah did not work out like I don't know are they making money off of this why are they doing this like is there a big enterprise business I guess there were like I remember CES a couple years ago there were a handful of companies doing stuff like this and I feel like maybe like Lenovo or something had one these other ones might have been targeted like enterprise applications I don't know maybe there was a market there or something just not that there's like a few of these right that's what you're saying and that market is people who assemble things like the number one use case is do you make wiring harnesses and the answer is some people do actually make those okay there's a few more things I want to talk about speaking of weird glasses you can now buy Snap Spectacles directly from Amazon Snapchat added a bunch of new features I'm just looking at you you're like my Snapchat guru are people still into Spectacles I haven't seen a Spectacles video in a thousand years no I don't think so I think it's a serious one of those things like if you bought it it's like alright cool I'll take it on vacation with me if I'm ready to charge it are you going to use it like I just don't see anybody using it I'm pretty sure I saw a pair ones at the Vatican recently yeah I think on vacations what okay I saw some at Pitchfork University Festival yeah but seeing people with the hardware versus seeing the videos it's supposed to be I know that's what bothers you about this is you see them wearing it like you always bring up Sheffer how many wears his but never post it never I never see any Spectacles video from Sam well I think it's more like home videos like my friend took her to Mexico with us and she recorded a lot of footage she just has the footage for herself so in three years we can look back and be like hey remember this funny moment or whatever where is it stored? she keeps it on her phone again so she's just going to watch Circle videos on her phone in three years? I guess so that's so weird yeah well that's where we are yeah it's Circle but I will say I need to buy a pair just so I can say I have a pair should I get Coral or should I get Black?
Coral uh oh everyone has Black it's because it's fashionable alright there's all kinds of new editing there there's multi-snap recording which is hilarious Snapchat keeps adding such cool features and like their filters still even it's better than Instagram like it's so obvious that Facebook's technology is just worse like it is yeah just from using it but I don't know I feel like Snapchat keeps creating these features and it's actually really hard to use use them like they're really specific use cases you have to know the app so well which i guess is always what snapchat's thing has been it's like you're a power user you know how to actually use the app but like i don't know it feels like they're just kind of stumped at this point yeah like hey look what we can do facebook no one actually needs it so i mean so we have these other two stories here about instagram this week and they're way deeper stories so casey a big feature on how restaurants are being designed to be instagramable which if you you should read the story but if you scroll through it there's like this depressing moment when there's like 45 pictures of the same tile floor in a restaurant on instagram yeah i read it on my phone and it was just like if you see it on your desktop you're like oh okay there's there's a bunch here but when you see it on your phone you just have to scroll through them and it really just by the time you get to the bottom you're just like well everything is terrible in the world yeah no originality is left in this universe um and then uh megan uh took a trip to la and went to like a social media star summer camp where they teach teens who go to social media i love this story learn how to say like make sure to like and subscribe to this and share what's up you guys all right try again more feeling um they like did things back around it was a summer camp for social media stars speaking of which make sure to share this if you enjoyed it yeah smash that like button fam i don't know what this is there's a line that's really good um there's a line that's where all the teams are like my favorite platforms instagram all right those two things where instagram is affecting like design choices in the real world and you know all the kids are saying instagram is a platform that's the competition with snapchat right i think we've just hit a point where instagram is so much more vital than almost any other social network that i'm on and i can't really pinpoint why except it's happy i mean yeah it's just pure positivity there's like literally no other way to i mean you have to like really try pretty hard to express something that's other than neutral or positive yeah and like it just doesn't fit in i mean i think that's it though right like i go to instagram and i enjoy myself and that's like something i can only say about instagram right um even like you know even my favorite websites like there's going to be some depressing like news and not just like cool stuff well also maybe the thing too is like i was going to say it's because for us we have facebook we like friended our high school friends this is high school and now my facebook is just painted i'm like i don't care enough to delete all of you also i just don't care if you're up to me i don't use facebook but the nice thing about instagram is like if someone follows me i don't follow them back necessarily right so it's like i'm only following the people i care about plus it's the positivity so you're able to actually curate whereas facebook is like this is a mutual friendship and we must follow each other no it's terrible give me your thoughts real quick on instagram snapchat because that's the real fight i think well it's just i think they're very different like instagram like you said the design choices it's like instagram is permanent and beautiful and i love instagram yeah snapchat is fun like i use snapchat to interact with my best friends and make silly faces yeah that's not that's like a hard business for snapchat to own like all they're doing such cool stuff and it's like i don't know how to make them better are you gonna watch the two minute nbc news news news show they're gonna i actually like this channel so use it yeah i like this channel i watch like cosmo stuff it's like really stupid but i'm like hey this is enjoyable for me because i like stupid shit sometimes so it's fun like i'm just saying it's also snapnap is cool i know there's all this privacy stuff but that's impressive to me i don't know instagram's not doing that stuff i have my snapchat my snapnap and it's like all my friends are home with their kids well that's what's happening here yeah i think there's a peak cool looking though like an emoji yeah i don't know the emoji's a real thing that was a good person okay i want to talk about apple stuff but we were out of time and it's quite frankly very boring confusing we need to know it's foxconn you have to give us two sentences on it i think it is so counterintuitive that apple buys phones from foxconn it is just not how you expect that business to work apple buys the items from foxconn so now foxconn is doing qualcomm too it's there's something crazy happening there and i hope sarah john our new reporter can help me figure it out because i have yet to understand it completely but foxconn is not doing qualcomm too at the end of this there might not be a qualcomm is basically my final thing but we'll figure it out okay that's it that's the show wow wait to leave them on that note we'll see who knows who doesn't that might still be a qualcomm yeah everyone's favorite um yeah everyone's favorite uh it's funny because i read a qualcomm out on the show but those are different things those are different people that's another um disclosure i read a qualcomm out on the show you may have noticed uh okay that's the show please go watch next level with lauren good uh lauren also has a great show called to embarrass ass which you listen to on uh basically our podcast are uh you can listen to other recode podcasts all that is available on itunes find it review it uh we're doing fun stuff on anchor go to anchor.fm slash verge you can listen to little experiments that people are doing we ran one last week that actually yeah i was like oh how nice yeah that's good uh and you can tweet us i'm at reckless teachers at back one jake jake and for k ashley ashley r carmen and we'll be back next week with more for chastis show thanks everybody paul i'm just saying all things myself orb is done