Verge Extras

By The VergeNews Technology Tech News

Verge Extras episodes

January 20, 2017 Judges, not Trump, will decide Obama’s environmental legacy
President Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle many of the environmental policies passed under president Barack Obama. But environmental groups and some states are ready to fight back and bring the administration to court.
Host: Alessandra Potenza
Directors: Miriam Nielsen and Kimberly Mas
Audio: Andrew Marino
Special thanks to:
Maria Belenky
Director, Policy and Research at Climate Advisers
Vicki Arroyo
Executive Director, Georgetown Climate Center
David Doniger
Director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at NRDC

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5 min
January 11, 2017 Listening to machines to understand why they break
There is nothing more frustrating than taking your car into the mechanic with only the vaguest sense that something is wrong. You know that odd little creak or strange whine is new, but you don’t have a clue what it’s trying to tell you. You would like to know before it becomes a serious problem, and an expert is going to charge you a bunch of money to find out.
What if we could diagnose machines, and keep them healthy, just by listening to the noises they make. That’s the premise of Augury, a startup based in New York City. And since Augury is all about sound, we decided to do this piece as an audio report. Take a listen below and let us know what you think.

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4 min
December 27, 2016 A highly specific Tinder problem
What’s the biggest problem you run into while using the popular dating app Tinder?
Is it that almost all the children of the Earth seem appalling when reduced to four photos and the opportunity to describe themselves in two sentences? Is it that you are a busy modern creature with precious little time to message the people in your life you already care about, much less strangers about whom you know nothing? Is it your terrible reflexes, never more inconvenient than when you have only a split-second to get someone else’s unbidden genitalia out of your face?
Or, like Circuit Breaker writer Ashley Carman, is that you never know how or when to save a person in your phone? Ashley wrote about this on The Verge a few weeks ago, regaling us with the charming anecdote of the time a boy saved her in his phone as a fishcake emoji. After her post went viral in Vox Media’s Slack rooms and out loud in Verge HQ, we (myself and Verge culture reporter / news editor Lizzie Plaugic) knew we had to congregate in a very dark closet and talk about it at some length.
So we did it! Using anecdotal evidence and one impromptu phone call to a former romantic interest, we figured out the best way to go about saving numbers in the age of Tinder. Spoiler: it’s definitely not to refer to people by their first names, as 108 percent of the male population of the United States is named “Matt.”

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19 min
October 14, 2016 Emotional (Tech) Support
as seen on Circuit Breaker
facebook.com/circuitbreaker/videos

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42 min
August 13, 2016 1,000 Words: bringing pictures of the internet to your ears
It's a familiar problem for podcast listener: a host vaguely references a picture or a video or something in their recording booth, but you can't see what it is this person is talking about. This happened recently on Vergecast 214. Yeah, a video would solve this problem, but you're standing on the train sandwiched between strangers or driving a car or jogging. Isn't that what you listen to podcasts for? You can't spend that time on Google, Reddit, or Tumblr, you can only rely on your ears.
That's where this experimental podcast comes into play. Meet 1,000 words. The Verge Extras podcast, hosted by editor of Circuit Breaker Paul Miller and social media manager Dami Lee, is dedicated exclusively to describing pictures from the internet.
To make the experience as realistic as possible, we recorded the show with a binaural microphone. We placed the mic at the head of the table, with Paul to the left and Dami to the right, to make it seem as if you are sitting down with them while they see these pictures for the first time. (The best way to listen to this would be with a pair of headphones.)

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36 min
June 03, 2016 Paul Miller's gadget corner 06/03/16
Paul Miller's gadget corner 06/03/16 by The Verge

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4 min
April 20, 2016 Extended interview with Prof. Randal Picker
Nilay talks with Randal Picker; professor at University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the recent news about Google's antitrust charges.

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19 min
January 22, 2016 Extended interview with T-Pain
Recently, The Verge visited T-Pain at his home to talk about the music industry and the new Garageband software available. This is the full extended interview we had with T-Pain that day.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/20/10799000/t-pain-interview-auto-tune-music-technology
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/20/10798478/t-pain-garageband-ipad-update-demo-video

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34 min
October 09, 2015 Chris Ziegler at Code/Mobile
Though the connected car is one of the hottest topics in the transportation sector this year, the concept of the connected car is anything but new: Systems like GM’s OnStar, BMW Assist and Lexus Link launched well over a decade ago, wirelessly linking millions of cars via GPS and the cellular networks that were just beginning to reach global penetration. By some accounts, those systems have been very successful — for instance, GM just recorded its billionth customer interaction via OnStar several months ago.
But the idea of what a connected car is — what capabilities it should offer, what it should look like — is rapidly changing. That’s a topic Chris Ziegler and Julia Boorstein of re/code explored at the Code/Mobile conference at The Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California on October 7, 2015.

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17 min
August 13, 2015 John Gaeta can see the future of VR
Bryan Bishop (@ Bcbishop) and The Verge video team recently took a visit to Industrial Light & Magic’s xLab. It’s a kind of next-generation entertainment sandbox, exploring virtual reality, augmented reality, and other immersive experiences — all under the umbrella of the Star Wars universe.
One of the people we spoke with is xLab creative director John Gaeta. John’s a real visual effects visionary. He created bullet time for the Matrix, pioneered new methods of virtual cinematography, he worked on Speed Racer. Hearing his ideas about the future of storytelling and an interconnected virtual world, all originating from stories like Star Wars, is a little like reading Ready Player One - only he and the xLab team are actually making it for real.
We liked what he had to say so much, that we decided to break out our interview with him into its own podcast.
Read and watch the full piece here:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/13/9131805/ilm-ilmxlab-interview-virtual-reality-star-wars-movies
youtube link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeaLgPMGzkQ
Thanks to Ryan Manning for editing this interview along with our xLab featurette, and to John Lagomarsino and Tom Connors for shooting the footage at ILM.

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28 min