Two possible futures for AI
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Welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of decreasing the cost of A I infrastructure. I'm my friend David piers, and I am sitting here updating all of my AI gadgets. So like six months ago, giver, take a couple of weeks, I reviewed both the humane open and the rabbit r one kind of back to back didn't like either one.

Neither one was any good. And to be totally honest, I basically turn them off, stash them and and forgot about them. But six months later, these companies are still here.

There are still making stuff. Uh, humane has lashed its prize in way that is just not a lot of people are buying that stuff. Rabbit, I think, has confused people more than entice them over six months.

But theyve made a little changes. Rabbit is saying it's getting close to shipping the large action model that it's been promising for forever. Humane does time is now.

So I figured after six months may be time to police things out and see a for any closer to A I gadget getting anywhere that's for a future for cast. I literally I have spent like hours just sitting here charging and updating software on these things. And I had to find a sim card for the rabbit, and I had to redo service for the A I pin, cause that's for a future verge cast.

Today, we are going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about the sort of doing blog posts from dario m. Day anthropic and same optima at OpenAI about the future of A I.

I think Normally I find this boy who is sort of ridiculous, but the fact that there were two of them and there from these two people at this moment time, I think matters. So we going to talk about what's in those letters, what they agree on, what they disagree on and what we might be able to learn about the future of ai. We're also gone to talk about earthquake detection and this huge sprawling project under way, especially on the west coast, to alert people more quickly to earthquakes.

Super important problem turns out to be more complicated and chAllenging than than you might think for a lots of super interesting reasons. Wilpon has been reporting the story out for a while, and he has come to talk about IT. And i'm very excited.

We also have a hot line, lots of funds stuff to do this week. Very excited about this epo de, all that is coming up in just a second. But literally, as we've been sitting here, both of these things just finished update and now both have another update. So i'm going to go do ourself to our updates and we will be right back. This is the broadcast seem .

sect support for the verge cast comes from batman artem shadow, available only a medic st. Three and three s meta biggest and most anticipated release of twenty twenty four is batman are come shadow, a ground breaking new entry in the celebrated outcome series experienced the world of gathering city through batman's eyes and his fists become the night batman outcome shadow is included when you buy metal quest three or three s available now learn more a batman on shadow doc m great a tea fourteen batman archie dow is only in V R and meteorous three and three s offer valid on qualifying products purchase from the september twenty five, twenty twenty four through April thirty.

twenty twenty five terms supply. Welcome back. So about a month ago, sam altman, the C.

E. O. OpenAI, and probably the single most prominent person in the A. I. World right now, what this boy post called the intelligence age, all about basically his vision for the future of ai, why it's going to be huge, why it's so exciting, why we should all be so excited when it's going to happen, sort of big flowers stuff about the future day. I ordinary those blog poster are like, whatever.

I think people paid more attention to this one because IT sam and sam is like right at the center of the tech industry right now. But still, we wouldn't have spent a ton of time on IT otherside. But then a couple of weeks later, darro amede, who is the CEO of anthropic, which might be open A S most interesting competitor, wrote his own blog post called machines of loving Grace.

That is sort of spiritually the same, but structurally ally very different. He wrote this ten thousand word plus ops, full of details and full of thoughts about specific ways that A I might be implemented to make the world a Better place. And he leans in sort of of the same place, which is everything.

He would be amazing. But I think the structure of the way he talks about IT is really different and really interesting. We talked about both of these, I think, briefly on the show before, but what they say together is really interesting.

These are two of probably the three most important people in A I. I think the third would be d is who runs deep mind google and is increasingly more powerful in all of the stuff that google is doing, an ai. He, as far as I know, has not written a many thousand word blog post about how terrific I S but these two have.

And so I think what I wanted to do was really digg into this and see what we can learn about where A I is going from these two blog posts, where they're the same, where they're different, where there might be conflict between these two companies and these two ideas. But also, if you believe the vision of silicon valley, and I think somewhere in these two blog post is the vision and delay for A I, what does that look like? The virtuous kley Robinson has been covering all of this.

He has read these black post. She's talked to people about the blog post. SHE, I think, could probably recite some of these blog post for memory at this point. And I figured, who Better to come on and see if we can make sense of all of this. Kelly, welcome to show.

Thank you for .

having me just unrelenting A I K S in in your life? yes. yeah.

IT never. IT never stops.

We do have a lot of bit of tiny news that we're going to get to at the very end some next model stuff ah, which we should just talk to really fast. But the the thing I have brought you here to do to talk about these two blog posts, yes. And first I want to know if you agree with my assessment that most corporate CEO blogs are nonsense. What's the first one that do you agree that? Yes.

okay.

yes. But also I I don't know something about the fact that both of these happened from these two people in particular, like within a couple of weeks, just felt like more of a moment to me than your average, like C, E, O. Pontificate about the future. Thing has happened. You ready to?

yes. And at the time when I wrote about IT, I had real A I A G, I believe s yelling at me because like, how could I ever consider I keep saying us, your macas, our business men i'm sorry, it's calculated. So yeah, I do the same .

conclusions. okay. So the the homework gai gave you head of this was to come up with, uh, three ways in which these two men agree and three ways in which they disagree. Ah let's start with what they agree on, a what's what's the first thing you feel like this sugar.

So I think that they do agree on that. The world is gonna such a beautiful place with A G I of course I would say to flip on disagree I think that darro was a lot more measured where open was a lot more um you know grateful dead about IT.

I would actually put that differently. My reason this is ban.

I think sam altman feels like it's inevitable that like that his whole blog post is basically like we've done IT IT is done and there's even a sign that I pulled out that was something like, uh, deep learning works and and the rest will solve itself like that someone says, but that essentially what IT that compared to daria, who goes over and over and over, like to the point where IT makes the blog post too long of being like, none of this is inevitable. IT doesn't have to be like this. We all have to do IT on purpose.

A lot of things have to go right, like you just get the sense from sams that he is like problems solved. We just have to sit back and weight for this like you're talking about a beautiful, incredible future. Everything is wonderful. And dara is like maybe like that, that future exists, but IT is not certain that we're going to get there. And that to me was totally the most striking difference between .

and that sounds like a that is exactly right. Um no, because it's been a long week and I haven't thought about these blocks, but yeah that that is exactly correct.

Who do you believe these exams, right? I really want you to just be like, I think exams right? We did IT. It's all done. Futures can be beautiful.

I just keep thinking one of these two men has been fired from the job for lying.

Yeah, well said, alright. What's the second thing? What else agree on? We actually let me let me drill down into the first one before we get to the second one. Do you think like biggest picture, most beautiful future, they roughly agree on where that might go. Like in the in the absolute best case scenario, do you think these two CEO, and by extension, anthropic and open eye, think IT might be as good in the same way as .

each other? I think you can see this in the actions of both companies. One is absolutely guarding safety and the other is doubling down on on safety.

So I would say that they disagree or like what the future looks like, I think opens a lot more optimistic than dario and dario says at the topic. You know there's there's potentially a lot of bad things. I don't want to talk about that here because we talk about IT a lot. So I think that's that's the difference between the two of them. I think, dara, he's a lot of the what could go horribly wrong and opens like did IT can be beautiful .

yeah I think that's right. Anything that was the thing I kept having to remind myself reading dara post and like to he says right up front, I think there are a lot of problems. I'm not going to talk about them here yeah unlike every paragraph of his thing, I kept to like raise my hand me like what I have one thousand questions about all the things that make wrong in service of doing this cool thing.

They are imagining a my okay, that's not. That's not. We're doing here. I have, I have to take him IT as word that he thinks there are problems were just not talking about there right now. So yes, fine, we're talking about the big beautiful future ah what else to agree on, what else to write down.

how this is going to transform labor, the economy work. They both seem to agree that a lot of road tasks in monotask jobs are going to get replaced by A I in that perhaps we should have some plan for that. I think I think that something they both agree on for all min, he has explored ubi universal basic income. He ran a test giving people certain amounts of money for an extended period of time to see how to change their life. Um anthropic has not done that same, same kind of research, but I sense that they both agree that this is going to change the way humans work and that's important to explore.

Were you satisfied by either of their answers as to what we do about IT? And and again to to dari OS credit in particular, he's pretty up front about I don't have all the answers. This is going to be complicated, but they do both treat IT as inevitable that at some point, this thing will essentially blow up our data day lives and the overall economy as we know IT. And they kind of just like I will figure out.

no, i'm not of course, i'm not satisfied IT. And I was just on decoder talking about this with new light about ah there are so many unanswered tions, this is not so easy. It's not a fun answer to hear.

You know you expect that A I report be like we have all the answers. And I think that's what people expect from these executives to like. But we don't we just don't have all the answers and IT is unsatisfying. Like, okay, if A G I was real, which like I don't even see that as a possibility necessarily, but if that were to happen, then we could all be at our jobs. But i'll figure that out.

It'll be fine. Somewhere between three years and a million years from now, everybody's screwed. But what things .

is exactly? Hopefully the sun .

explode before then. I live on mars and then I want to be a problem. perfect. Ah what's the third thing?

They both in in practice and not even in practice in riding, agree on the alignment of these systems. And i'm trying to talk to researchers, I think, tomorrow about what alignment really is and how it's such a fuzzy term. But I think that they both agree that broadly, they should be safe.

Systems that are aligned with what we value as humans shouldn't be running a muck in writing. However, as I said earlier, one has gutted safety and the other has not. But I think they broadly agree that I would not be good to create world destroying ai.

Yeah, I mean, it's a hard take, but you know, it's it's, it's a theory. I like that, right? I yeah, I T, I called that too.

And I think the idea that that is a thing we have to do on purpose is sort of encouraging, right? Like, again, you can read what you want into the actions of these two companies. And I have a lot of thoughts that are a lot less optimistic than these two blog posts on what they do.

But the sensitive, like the way we build these tools in the way that they get used in, the way that we managed them together, like one of dara's big ideas, was that we should have. I don't think he called IT this, but essentially like a united nations of A I were like a bunch of countries bands together to build and manage I in a way that promotes liberal democracy around the world. Yes, like I don't know if that makes any feasible sense technologically, but that's the kind of thing we should be thinking about that OK.

We are if this thing is going to be anywhere near as powerful as we think, that's the kind of stuff you have to start doing and you have to start building the tools at the beginning to be like that. And I think I think they both agree on that, whether a both companies are interested in taking the time to do that in a crazy gold rush of A I uh the answer seems to be no mostly so far. But I like in in the long run that strikes me slightly encourage totally.

This is something i've been digging to recently um just about if for the listener researchers who want to do safety research at these big companies require a certain amount of compute to do these studies to figure that out.

And kind of a block of important safety researchers at OpenAI left because altman n promised them about percent of the companies 的 compute to do safety research and they did not get that and I really pissed them off。 So I think um as dara said, IT is you have to continue making this choice to align to to do that work. And I think that's important important to watch to see how how serious ly they're taking IT because the researchers will tell you .

they no about IT. Yeah they are not shy. No, right? So any any other agreements before we moved to safety, they don't agree on. I think what do they disagree on what's first in your less?

I would say that darro is a little bit more scared of helping up A I than all minutes. And I think that's kind of what we discuss already is that he's like, I know I don't know if I should be doing this. Like I don't know if this is not available in opens, like in a thousand days, we hit the joint in a thousand days. It's all gonna so IT for IT, you know.

So this is actually a good that I think I was going to ask you about, which is why this to people brought these two blog posts at this particular time. And you have a strong theory about why, and I won't know .

what that theory is. I have a strong theory, and people like to talk about this topic, and I like, you know, motivations aside, and like, what aren't motivations like the biggest piece here, why they're writing this at the time at the writing this um so altman wrote his just around the time he was closing six point six billion dollars in funding for open eye, the largest round for a private company in history that we know of and then when I read this blog, the first thing I was seeking as anthropic is also trying to raise money.

We don't know how much yet anthropic is also trying to raise button ads of money and that I think that's the timing of this is you know investors are kinda pettis because there's this problem of you need to think so much money into these models and there's a lot of promise in hype involved that this will change the future. But at the moment, I cannot even count the number of hours in strawberry. So so I think fourteen thousand words is a good way to say, look, I promise.

I mean, like, I guess he doesn't promise. He says he could or could not happen. We have to make those choices.

We have to do the work. However, IT is such a beautiful future. If you give us billions dollars.

yeah, do you feel like spiritually this is not that different from lake travis colonic back in the day who is just like once I have, you know, cars on the road with an APP, but eventually robot cars are going to transform the way that every. And it's like I feel that is to some extent just the classic silicon valley story, like you have to tell a story ten times bigger than your actual story in order to get people to give you all this money because of like the structure venture capital demands that you may be worth that much, much. It's like it's just all this weird stuff that eventually you sort of have to lie about the possibility for the thing that you're building in order to get the money to even try and maybe get to half of that over time.

Yes, I A hundred percent agree.

So you can imagine both of these work posts as like hostage negotiation. They like, it's like, they're like, I know I hear you. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Let me just i'll put this out and then you give me money.

give exactly no I I think that IT is IT is exactly the same um and luckily I work at the verd with a bunch of great people who have lived through a lot of bubbles and there are A K I remember the c saying almost exactly the same thing like sergey brin once said that um there are new health division. Our google was going to cure death.

That's in the article oh.

and I put this this is even a bit in silicon value 的 TV show where one of the the caricature for attack executive， he says, I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to live in a world where someone makes you a Better place than we deo. And that is that, I mean, IT is just a tailor, as old as time. And unfortunately, the people who really believe in A R like this is different.

Like I, I get IT I, I don't a slam A I, I do think that I could prove to be really useful. And IT is useful in a limited use cases today. However, IT is not. We were talking about the spreading democracy thing that something I read in dara blog. I also can come on me, yeah, you know, they do have to make these gram program tions as the same as decades before them.

Well, there is a certain amount of uh like you know how in TV shows when they get to lag season five or six. They've made the stakes so high because you to keep inventing new things to do to keep people interested like are exhausted, all of the interesting stuff. So like fast ferry ious nine is literally like in space like it's just the stakes creep is so real.

And I feel like A I and general is such an incredible case of stake cream where so good we have hit this point now where like everything has to be the biggest thing. It's so appropriate that it's five like you can, you can come back from fire. And so like, this is all I read now is I just see these things I like.

This is fast in furious in space. Like this is, this is like die hard where he jumps a car into a helicopter. Like we've just we've just lost our minds on how big all this stuff has to be because we're so desensitized .

to the rest of IT that is so good and mad. Yes, very curious space.

This is, I spend a lot of time, the last couple of days lying on the couch watching T V. So this this is, it's for work now I get to spend all that time that I spent the catch watching T V. Ah what else? What else do they disagree on?

What sex where you supposed to tell me?

When are you? Fine, i'll give you mind. Are the timing they disagree on in a way that I found actually very surprising.

And I think this is one way in which, and again, this is just it's two blog posts, what these men actually like are saying in meetings and what they believe and even what they said publicly sometimes differ. This, uh, same ultimate is less convinced that this is all going to happen tomorrow. Then dial was which I was very surprised by. Like his his thing is basically were a few years, this historic, a few years away from what he calls powerful AI because IT isn't like A G I, which fine. Uh, and then after that, all the stuff he's describing, all the stuff we have been talking about, all these changes to democracy, and we're going to cure. He puts out on a five to ten years time frame like that it's like reluctant at like our twenty forty at a at a conservative guess for dorio as like everything about the world has completely changed forever because ai sam is comparatively more restraint like he says he says the next couple of decades which again is like it's soon but it's not the same he sort of immediate like we're a couple years away from the thing and then five more years away from changing everything um and then I what is that he says a few thousand days which is such a like delighted, meaningless thing to I .

check but I feel like maybe just say a few thousand days I thought you said eight thousand days but yes I told an opening eye source of mine recently because they hadn't read that blog post and was like, well, sam says about a thousand days that will get the A G I and he was like, really I think it's going to be well.

He thought he's like it's going to be a lot sooner than that he's like, I know which is just really interesting um and I really wanted note that was the things but like I think most people think that this is bullshit and then there's these people I live in the disco. I'm talking these people all the time. I'm having drinks with them, going to dinners and they like, yeah it's inevitable.

You know, next year like what where am I uh.

so I don't know who to believe because I think that these people are really smart and they are building really smart systems, I believe that. But also we're going to cure death.

you know yeah, and we are all going to be in robot taxi. But like I get this is this is the game that we play. And I think like the what's the bill gates thing? Everybody underestimates they can do in a year or not over estimates that they can do in a year and underestimates that they can do in ten years.

I think there's probably a lot of that coming. Yeah A I like I, I, I would put a lot of money on all the over of one year from now, certainly. yes. So what what is the next one on your list of of how they differ?

So I think that just generally, these are completely different people. For instance, if you guys don't know, dial left OpenAI because he is like, this is not safe and calculated and we need to make a more safe public benefit corporation that became ethra pic. So I think the difference is just these two people.

Dario is safety slow ess, which is why I thought this blog was so out of place. And that's what made me think about funding. And sam is more like hitting a joint in space vinita.

This is going to happen. It's happening soon. I think that these are category ally. Different people attacking the same problem. They both want to build A I. They're both building IT and basically the same way they both have big cloud partners. Um but there are just completely different people approaching IT much differently totally.

I mean, I think the funnest thing about looking at these two bug per side by side is hell sort of embarrassingly underthought. Sam seems in comparison. I like IT really is like this is like a long tweet from somebody who got like a little high and had some thought about ai.

And darro is like my man, just like road, an academic thesis about that. And and they might both be totally wrong. They might be wrong about different things. But like the just the sheer like difference in level of thought here is just crazy.

Like I just came back and find this there's such a funny moment in sams bog post where he says there are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it's a mistake to get distracted by any particular chAllenge. Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems. That's like dorio says, like eleven thousand words about those two sentence.

Yes, it's it's just crazy to me and I do think again to instead they like trying to do different things. That's fine. But reading seems after reading darrius was like, this is the kindergarten level of thinking compared to that which was striking .

to me that's funny the the order that you read them because yeah, of course and I think that's why it's hard for me to compare because this doesn't like the only piece that often has wrote about agi. But IT is like timing. Why is easy to compare them? And I agree, IT is A A thesis about, you know, I think he wants to genuinely inform daria wants to genuinely inform the public of his thinking. And he talked about how he's been writing in the since August is gone through about a different versions. And yeah, w seems extreme just far this off.

And here we are yeah and that's fine. Who the longest hasn't just fired off a blog post that too many people read right? Like it's ccp heard. I will say one thought that I had in this was that, uh, IT makes a lot of sense to me why anthropic is building Better products to OpenAI right now.

Like like consumer products, I mean, you go through and like dora's is just full of ideas about things a person might do with A I and what they the only one same mentioned is like, uh, it's gonna a personal assistance that will help you accomplish tasks and like, fine, everybody has that idea with that that idea for decades uh, but like it's it's a bit of a galaxy brain take to just read that out of two blog posts. But like, I think anthropic is destroying OpenAI when he comes to actually building good products for people to use. And, uh, you can see that from these two. I don't even think that that hard to take clock is Better than tragic.

T right now it's just this. I I agree I agree um I keep named dropping podcast I got on recently but I said as some private they were asking me what's my favor? What's my favorite? I was clod obviously so much Better than the competition is crazy.

Yeah yeah. And I think the the question of what is the underlying technology is, is going to be like a forever game of the frog between a bunch of companies. Principle two, uh, but right now, like anthrops is just a mile ahead in terms of actually building good consumer products. And you can see IT in da flic, he has ideas about how people might use IT in a way i'm not sure there's not a lot of evidence I does right.

So you can't germany I out .

geni is just so its own thing that is they're just like google is just like over here kind of like winning nobel prizes. I still like my true galaxy brain because I think google is just going to win all of this and it's not onna matter and we're going have to reckon with that sometime very soon, but that's for another day.

Have a lot of I am also like i've been fighting that fight for too long now, so I have to die on the google is further I have been anybody realizes hill, yeah, I think i'm get dying on that right? Look, require some news and the molecule here. Um we we had two scopes last week about upcoming new big stuff from both open a eye and google. Tommy.

he was gonna yes. So my scoop with tom warn, our microsoft t reporter, was about how by the end of the year OpenAI is planning to release all yan, which you can think of as GPT five IT would be the successor to GPT for, uh, so there just in september, we wrote in the article that they threw the researchers through a party for finishing training the model uh, at microsoft, they are preparing the compute to host our microsoft gets at first.

And then they are going to release IT to limited partners so they can you find their own use cases, find the features that they want to build with hyon, uh, which is the code name of the project orion. So that's supposed to happen by the end of the year. Um all men, I had my first real run in with tech executive hits joint and takes to twitter.

Um he called IT fake news, which um it's not and I I said it's at the top of the episode de and i'll say again, one of these people was fired for lying. Um so yeah that that was coming out by the end of the year. It's of course, subject to change.

And then more more interestingly, in december, google alex eth, my college alex y throughout this in command line, he wrote that google was planning to release its next big gi model in december. So OpenAI loves to front run google so that's something to watch every time. If google is going to have a big announcement, you can almost certainly expect open the eyes going to fire somebody, release a big new feature or something yeah.

I do think I mean, to your point about like who's really going to win here, open the eyes certainly think google is is made in competition. yes. And anthropic is just kind of over on side doing a different thing and that might turn out to be true. It's certain ly turn right now in terms of like shine and resources. But ah I think anthropic is closer behind and IT gets created for in a lot of ways totally.

I I agree. And okay, have you ever watched madmen? Yeah do you know the elevator seen is like I feel bad for you and is like I don't think about you at all. That's very much good, good open relationship percent.

Yeah, hundred percent. Google is. Yeah, google is not super word about IT like there are winning nobel Prices like google is going to be. This is this will eventually write in an even longer blog post and and we will be back doing this again.

Oh my gosh, I can't wait. In part of that, I forgot to mention that alex wrote that this is not super thrilled about the capabilities of its model right now, the next one that that supposed be releasing. So that'll be interesting, I think, of a lovel way that's more clear than benchMarks of how to weigh these against each other. I don't think with there ia and I just don't trust self evaluated benchMarks in a lot of cases. Um but yeah, I am excited to see how you all stack up in december .

IT will be fascinating because we've been at this now for, I don't know, a year and change where google, OpenAI, anthropic and meta have all just continued to release Better and Better models and where the point where like every two weeks somebody is releasing a slide Better model and i've been asking people forever when it's going to stop being so easy to improve the state of the art um and everybody i've talked to at this this kind IT would be fascinating if they started to be if if somebody comes out already behind that might change things.

You know, that's funny because the air people i've talked to just last week, like I think that we're hitting that point. We are finally hitting that point where he is getting harder to scale. These are to make them Better than before because for a minute, IT was really easy to just like leap frog, drug leap frog. But we're starting to slow down in that sense.

I guess we will see in december might be holiday season, there be googlers working over Christmas. Ky, thank you. Is always thank you for having me. We got to take a break and then we are going to come back and we're going to talk about earthquakes will be right back.

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twenty five terms supply. Welcome back. Wilful is here. Well, hello hello. What are we doing here? Well, if I know earthquakes that i've got, what are we doing here?

Yes um so to to start us off um I have a terrible, terrible sound that I want to play which the best way to start upon, yes, I am told, is to make people take off their headphones as quickly as possible so with that in mind.

我 来 个。

Okay, that's enough. okay. Can I tell you where my brain immediately just went? Yes, please. A mix of jack camera on the streets of new york city yeah.

And like the the star leg pit in star wars, like a really creepy metal door opening up plus jack camera. That's not fun. I didn't like that.

I mean, it's it's cooky season as we record this, so that all kind .

of works here. So what what is this? What am I listening to?

That is the sound of my house getting seismically retrofit, which is basically like earthquake proofing. I wanted to get my house earthquake proof. I because I live in seattle, which is earthquake country, I am also very terrified of earthquakes.

And so I was told by a lot of experts that this is a thing that I should do. And so a few weeks ago, A A bunch people came to my house and crawled under my crawl space and drilled a whole bunch of bolts into concrete right beneath my feet. And I thought IT was a good idea to try to work from home while this was happening. sure.

So what? Which lasted about five minutes, but this, this is me trying to work from home. They are crawling around in the crawl space and drilling very large bolts into the concrete foundation of the house.

which I get the whole .

houses vibrating, like I I can feel this work in my teeth, and I need to get out of here. He is a bad day. I had a bad day. First of all.

incredible pod castle instincts to say, this horrible noise is happening. I must record .

IT that people must know.

I, I applaud you for this. Also, why? Why are you doing this? Why did you do this?

Your house? So this is sort of the cultivation of just like A A long journey between me and earthquakes. I lived sanford, go the bay area for like ten years, and that's where I developed my my fear earthquakes. I had reason to, I felt them a bunch. And I was told constantly to prepare for the bay area, big one, which, in the case of san Francisco, would be a repeat of that famous nineteen, no six quake along the same, and try as fault that burn down a lot of the city, among other things. Um so I spent a lot of time thinking about that seven cisco and then moved to seattle, which seismically is more quiet data day like i've lived here for foreign half years, I haven't felt anything, but it's also very much earthquake country and not feeling anything is a real false sense of security. Did you ever read there's a new yorker article that came out about ten years ago .

and the really big one, the really big one.

Yes, yes.

This peace scared me more than maybe any magazine story. IT was very .

good and terrifying. What do you remember from that?

Wait, okay. Can I go find a line for you in the story that I read that I still occasionally think about to see the full scale of the devastation? When that tune I recedes, you would need to be in the international space station.

Just a sentence I think about a lot. And this is in the new yorker. This is not a thing that is prone to hyperbole and intensive, can resume other sense piece, and is caring me all over again.

This, this is fun for me. I am having a great time here in virgin. 谢 谢谢。

Geologically ancient Virginia says OPEC estimates .

that in the I five core, IT will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity a month to a year, or or drinking water and serious service six months to a year to restore major highways and eighteen months to restore health care facilities on the coast. Those numbers go up. what?

Yeah, there's a, there's a quote somewhere in there that someone said, effectively, ly, everything of everything west of I five is going to be toasts that I think those were the words I live west of .

I five ah yeah and again, this is like sober magazine article that is essentially like were on borrow time so I can understand how you would become somewhere between rationally and the irrationally terrified of what's happening here.

Yes, so let me give you all the other like the full rational cause to be concerned OK. So at some point, probably roughly may be in the next five hundred years, but also maybe tomorrow because that's our earthquake's work. There will be this mega thrust quake in the pacific northwest.

It's going to be felt from northern california all the way up to british columbia. It's on a fault that's called the cathodic subducting zone that runs north, south, all of the west coast, just off the coast. IT could hit category nine on the rector scale.

It'll produce maybe five minutes of shaking in seattle, which is bananas. It's going to do a tony damage all in its zone. And like you remember, it's going to produce this even more devastating tsunami across the pacific northwest.

Pe, the earthquake is the first thing, but then it's what he does to the water that .

causes the worst of IT. All, absolutely. K, so really, really very bad news.

And you lived there on purpose.

And I was I moved there intentionally after I read this article, and so that I don't know what that says. So that's the very, very bad news. The good news is I not long after I moved here, I heard about this earthquake early warning system called shake ler that had just gone fully live all up and down the west coast.

So there's no way to predict earthquakes. That's not a thing that's not a science right now, but scientists can detect them right as their beginning. And the internet moves a whole lot faster than shaking from an earthquake.

So if there is a big quake today and I happen to be far enough away from the epson, like if it's off the coast, i'll get an alert on my phone that says there's an earthquake coming and IT might be a few seconds or IT might be a minute to before the shaking reaches me, which is awesome for me and my fear of earthquakes. But the more have looked into this, the more realized that making a detection and warning system that's both reliable and fast enough to be effective turns into this massive, massive chAllenge. And in a lot of ways, detecting the earthquake is the easy part. The hard part is using existing technology to notify a tony people all at once about this disaster that might only be seconds away.

So I forget, the best way to understands all this earthquake early warning stuff is just to follow the chain of technology from point to point, basically how an earthquake is detected, how an alert message gets generated from that, and how IT gets all the way to my phone, which turned into this fund goose chase all around seattle. And IT started with this small kind of creepy shed next to a wastewater treatment plan right here, town. So this pop to show everything, yeah, we.

Okay, so much .

to stay open.

That's right. That's flickering is not from the works. Good thing is out of video.

Yeah, right. You're hearing dog gibs field technician at the university of washington or the u. dub. As we locals like to call IT, he offered to meet me here at this shed and show me some earthquake surveilLance hardware.

Yeah, so what we have here, this is a time strong motion excel omelet that is bolted to the foundation of the building. Here the device is this plane Green box, like the size of a love of bread. So if the ground starts to shake electronics inside, this thing will capture a three dimensional snapp shot of the movement.

It's oriented north to south, and inside of there, they're actually three different size momeby. There's one placed in the northern south direction measuring checking on that access, one placed on the eastern west direction in one place in the vertical direction. Dg plugged the laptop in and he showed me the raw output of the size momeby, basically three different graphs that show the amplitude of motion at this one spot. It's basically like a digital version of those old earthquake read out uc and movies, the needle scribes back and forth on that rolling pizza paper oh yeah.

the one that kind of looks like a light detector test yeah it's it's small and it's huge and then it's small. Ah ah bigger scribes.

bigger earthquake, three of them for three axis motion got IT and it's so sensitive I can even just detect me just spending my knees up and down literally one little shift in weight and two of the grass one so that how that is incredibly sensitive.

That's wild. Yeah, it's fun. So I must just be doing things all the time.

IT is and it's constantly feeding that to places that will get too soon. But it's it's it's taking samples many times a second constantly. So over the past ten years or so, field text like dug have installed maybe fifteen hundred censors like this all up and down the west coast.

It's part of this huge effort, LED by the U. S. Geological survey to keep tabs on all the seismic activity in this part of the country and its sensors, like this one, that power shaker, the early warning system for people like me and we know, are confidence that that we've got enough instruments to issue good warnings to people.

So here I feel like we should stop and just do a little earthquakes one or one, because it'll help a lot with everything we're about to talk about. So when in earthquake happens, when when two parts of the earth crust suddenly slip past each other, there are two kinds of waves that ripple out from the epic. They're called the primary and secondary waves, or p waves and s waves.

The primary waves move really feast like a little more than three a half a miles per second, but they're too weak to do any damage. You probably wouldn't even notice them. The secondary waves are the ones that can really cause harm, but those move about half fast as the pee waves.

And that's the big opportunity for early warning. All those really sensitive size moments, like the one I just saw, they can pick up those pee waves when the real shaking is still miles away. Let me put this all in real world terms because I think that'll help you make more sense.

So let's take this really big one at nine point o earthquake that I am completely Peterie ed of that could start anywhere up and down the west coast. Say IT starts due west of seattle. This is like worse, the in area for me.

Better to just face your fears head on. That's about one hundred and thirty five miles west of seattle off the coast. The cascadia fault is about forty miles offshore. So that means that those first p waves have a good forty miles to get ahead of the actual shaking.

So when the pea waves pink, those coastal sensors, the real earthquake is still about ten seconds away from the shore, which means it's forty or fifty seconds away from downtown seattle. So that chunk of time, let's call IT forty five seconds or so, that's the window of time that shake alert has to warn this major metropolitan city that this huge natural disaster just appeared out of nowhere. So step by step, here's how they actually do that.

When the p waves hit those first sensors, those little size, moment or graph Spike, and that data gets forded straight onto you, dub over radio or hardwire internet or satellite, really, whatever is available, right where the sensors are located. And that part happens really fast within a fraction of a second, you know, second or less, we want this data to to head back to you tub. And that's from shaking in the ground to the sensor recording IT, creating a packet, sending IT to a communications device.

That communications device either sending IT through a radio wave or through the internet back to you. B IT lends at a server onsite at the university, just one. So we just .

walked into kind of a small ish room that has a bunch of computer racks in, including in the whole bunch of computers yeah just Green blinky lights that all the data from the field comes in here continuously and then gets, uh, process.

We're now in the basement of an earthern space science is building at utah in seattle. My tour or guide is we're not a hard talk. SHE helps build, shake its algorithms. The servers in here, along with others in northern and southern california, they run a pair of algorithms that analyze any incoming quake.

So one algorithm IT just looks for um IT just looks at the fair beginning of the signal 嗯 and um then IT correct tries to based on the amputates so IT associated into， oh, this is an earthquake uh just IT has a point on the map and an estimate of what the man you do to the earthquake .

was basically it's like a snap judgment of the epic or and the magnet de of the quake. They have the second algorithm that slower. But I can model the whole quake beyond just that first point on the map, which is a thing I never knew about earthquakes. Incidently, the epic is really just a starting point. As an earthquake grows, IT can get bigger and bigger as more miles of the fault line slip, and that means longer shaking and more people affected.

So for example, a large or cake of the pacific coast here on the cascadia induction zone, if IT starts somewhere in the southern end, able to take minutes, probably before that whole fault plane has ruptured all the way from the sudden end to the north.

an end. And finally, based on all of that, shake ler estimates the geographic area that will get hit the hardest. And IT creates an alert to be delivered to phones.

And that part happens super fast too. By the way, the first alert leaves the server after just a second or two of processing. And if the quit keeps growing like they do, IT can send out additional waves of alerts a couple times a second.

Okay, ay, wait a hole. Do the do the math for me right now, where are we in terms like lag until i'm imagining the p waves are going, the s waves are going, where where are the waves and where the alerts at this moment in time.

So this is what I kept trying to do, as I was having these conversations, are trying to add up all of the egg from the beginning to now. And so I kept asking all these people about all these steps. How long does this take? How long is this stake? And everyone was like, I don't know, a second, less than a second.

Everything that we've talked about so far is just super fast. The sensors picking up the pea waves, sending that information over the internet to you, doub the algorithm running in making decisions. All of that added up is like to wish seconds. So in our scenario, the earthquake is still like forty or forty five seconds away from means seattle.

okay. That's pretty good. So it's like i'm imaging sort of jaws music as it's like slowly creeping towards us as we get here.

We still we're still ahead the game here. We still have a solid chunk of time to. I mean, forty five is forever, but it's something .

IT is something if IT actually gives me forty five seconds because there's there's one other link in this chain that we have not talked about yet. And that's the alerts getting from the server to my cell phone. And that's where things kind of get messy.

So the deal is we already do have this really good system in a lot of ways for getting alerts out to a gazillion an cell ones all at once. It's called the wireless emergency alert system or via. So if you've ever gotten an Amber alert on your phone or a tornado warning or some other kind of emergency paying, that's probably we i'm sure you've seen these things before. The al alerts versions of this.

Is this the one that also failed spectacularly in hawaii and scared to one of people that did something like a bab?

Was incoming the bullish c missile? yeah. The incoming ballistic missile that alert there was just like, hug your loved ones yeah.

Then they were like, sorry, never mind. That was wea. yes.

yeah. That was wea. okay. So we do know .

how to do this exactly. That was .

developed back in twenty twelve by the federal government. This has been around for a while. And IT uses this kind of funny technology called cell broadcast.

And basically, IT uses cell towers like giant bullhorns. They just blare out the simple digital message to any device that's programmed to pick IT up. So this is great for earthquake alerts because there's no need to opt in or download anything. If your cell phone is in the danger zone when the earthquake hits, you'll get in alert on your phone as long as your phone and your career support, via which somewhere between most and all of them do.

are we a messages that are good deliver to cells? Ones are are built for ninety characters. Because we know that the majority of phones, even non smart phones, will be able to get those alerts if you go about those ninety characters, people might not get them. So we we're in the position of crafting messages so that we can make even people who still use flat funds to be all the access earthquake early warning .

that's bobb the route he leads the shake ler Operations team out opacity in a california. He says that via is the single biggest, best channel for reaching the fifty million eco people on the west coast but at the same time, he's also really aware of its a killer heel .

when the wireless emergency colour system was developed, didn't have shaker speeds in mind, Operating IT the the the horizon of minutes was sort of, well, that's fast, but now were asking a system to Operate in matters of seconds and traction of a second.

We are is just not as quick as the rest of the shake of alert system that we stepped through. In fact, when shake ler was in development, no one even knew what we is like was bob's team actually set up these two tests in california, where they pushed out in alert to a specific area and then measured how long IT took to reach their phones.

We took a bunch of cell phones, including mine and including my colleagues. We put numbers on them and then lay them on the table, and then took a go pro basically and filmed all those phones.

He sent me the the video of this test, and it's really funny. It's this long table with a whole row of different kinds of phones spread out. And a lot of people are all gathered around these phones waiting for the test to start.

So we waited for the alerts to come through and the phones let up when the alerts came through.

The very fastest turnaround that they recorded was around four seconds. The medium was in the six to twelve second range. A bunch phones just never got the alert. And then there were residents within the test area who reported and even wider range latencies. The point is, even with that controlled test, via is still this really frustrating black box.

How do we not know Better? I mean, this seems like a sort of technology be very important and see a thing we've been doing in using for a long time IT seems like this should be a totally known clinic at this point.

I I had that same feeling, and I took me attempting to map out all of the people involved in. We are to understand that it's just not one thing. It's not this technology that is implemented by one organization that can be optimized throughout this whole chain.

There are those, the federal government, their telecom's anisa handset manufacturer. And every career might handle implementation of the standard differently. They might prioritize IT differently on their networks.

All of this is voluntary for them. So it's kind of whatever systems they've set up. And so there seems to be all these differences in delivery.

There's different kinds of leg across the two g and three g and forging and five g networks across different styles of phones. Bobb said that like a burner phone that he got at the seven eleven turned out to be the fastest livery mechanism. So if you like, really want to be on point with weird.

just go get us of a burner. No bay. It's not a burner. Is my earth way of .

my earth tor. So it's it's just a little bit of a mess. There's no building way to measure and to end lencs. And again, this wasn't built for earthquakes, ly warning. So no one in any part of this process was ever told you have to find ways to shave off every second possible from this system. And again, we've been tossed sing this forty five second number round in our scenario.

And so given that a second here, there might not seem like a big deal, but the thinking got to keep in mind is that that's the amount of time that shake alert t has to notify me in seattle about a cascadia earthquake. First of all, even in that scenario, there are a lot of people that live closer to the coast, so they're not going to have forty five seconds to play with. And even for me in seattle, there are other faults to worry about.

And good evening. A rather typical late morning in the state of washington was turned suddenly into a rumbling and rolling panic. An earthquake measuring six point eight has left million shaken. The damages widespread. The injure list continues to change in at least one person has lost their life.

That was the two thousand. One is quality quake. IT hit right underneath the seattle area, and IT shook the whole region for about forty five seconds. IT ultimately did maybe two billion dollars worth. The damage is one of the costly est quakes in us history, and the fault that produce IT is really busy before two thousand and one IT produced similar quakes in one nine hundred and sixty five, one thousand hundred and forty nine and one thousand nine hundred and twenty seven. That's basically every twenty to forty years.

Those are our most typical significant earthquakes. I guess you would say that's a once in a generation event as opposed to the cascadia earthquake, which is once in the life of a nation kind of event.

gave a lot of works on engagement with the shape or team here at you dub, and explained to me that the fault responsible for the unique quake sits a good forty miles below the seattle area.

So let's say you have a repeat of the inequality earthquake today, that earthquakes arts deeper down, but it's right below our feet. Specifically, right below are the city of olympia.

since the waves are coming directly up from below us, IT means more of the region gets hit all at once. And for this one, we just get a lot less warning time .

as the area of shaking spreads out. You could get five, ten, fifteen seconds, depending on where you are.

exactly just to bring that all home. Five or ten or fifteen seconds is roughly the amount of leg time that's in the wear system. So for this quake, the one that I will very likely experience myself in the coming decades, that's squshy ss in via, could determine whether or not a lot of people get warnings in time.

There's definitely A A deeply bleak world in which you can imagine getting this notification like two or three minutes after the earthquake has hit yeah, which sounds very pleasant and really.

truly awful just yet that just the biggest knife twist.

So IT sounds like if if we is not the answer, or at least not the perfectly tuneable answer, are we just on our own? Is this is there just not a Better system .

here via is not the whole answer clearly, but the people building shaker are thinking way past via to all of the possible platforms for delivering a message like this. So for example, a team at U. C.

Berkeley built a smart t phone APP called my shake. I have IT on my phone and IT works like a Normal smartphone APP. I share my location with IT, and if i'm within the alert radius of an earthquake, IT sends me a push notification. And push notifications generally arrive in one to two seconds, much Better than five to fifteen.

Okay, so this makes a lot of sense to me and is one of the things I was gonna ask, as I feel like for you as a as a seattle, if somebody was like, hey, download this APP and give you your location and we will tell you you if there is an earthquake coming, that is the single best case i've ever heard in history for why you shot.

So absolutely, I but I guess.

I guess there are chAllenges there too. But IT IT doesn't sense to me that that you would say, just do this one thing and then we can do something much Better.

Yes, absolutely. And the secular people are shouting that from the rooftops. The fact that it's opt in vers, opt out for something like this means that out of the gates, you are capturing such a smaller chunk of the population, and that you are otherwise there's just no getting around that.

The secular team has been at this for a while, and there are now three and a half million also registered users of this APP, which is awesome in huge progress. But again, there are fifty million people on the west coast, so it's getting people signed on to this before a bike earthquake becomes this consumer tech problem. IT becomes an APP development problem.

IT becomes a social problem. IT just gets messer. Now, google has been thinking about this for a while, and they have done one Better. They baked shake lt. Android at the OS level, which gives them the power to issue a couple of different kinds of alerts that you can do just within APP.

If it's a smaller earthquake, it's just just looks like a push notification. If it's a larger earthquake, it's a full screen takeover. IT will break through a silent mode or anything like that. Do you have no choice but look at this thing that makes a sound IT takes over your screen IT buzz. And it's possible to turn off these alerts, but they are on by default, which I think there's a really good thing when life safety is on the line yeah, you don't want to mess around with whether or not a user will pay attention to an alert.

Apple so far has not built anything like that into IOS. There is a way to speed up with alerts, but it's this tagle that's buried in the IOS system settings. I will put a link in the show notes about that.

I did ask apple about all of this, but they didn't get me any more information anyway. The point is, there are these other ways that you can get in alert, but IT depends on where you are and what phone you have and what you're proactively signed up for. So this is where everything outside of weird just gets really peace meal.

right? Yeah it's it's an interesting adoption problem because you get to a point really like, okay, even if we solve this problem, you know the only way to get people reliably to download and naps is to promise them like free cheap clothing from china.

So like I will pass metal along to them yes.

but you mentioned three and half million people have downloaded this thing. The system seems to be sort of fully realized. Has IT been tested? Have we ve been through a shake allow earthquake before?

Yes, in california, we've actually been a lot of them that have have put all of these different platforms to the test. Actually, just back in september, there was a pretty decent quake in mala, abu and IT all worked. And some people got like twenty seconds of warning, which is enough time to take cover.

It's enough time to get away from windows that like you can do a lot in twenty seconds. Overall, the rollout has not been perfect. Back in twenty twenty one, there was another quake in southern california that shake ler ended up misinterpreting as multiple smaller quakes. So a lot of people just never got that warning. In some ways, though, the mistake that experts worry about even more is a false positive in irony alert, here's Gabriel again.

If we tell people there is an earthquake and the reason we lose credibility and that reduces public safety, because then you have the boy, right wolf.

that did happen once in california, a back in twenty twenty U. S, G, S. Had to send a follow up message, which I kind of love because IT red and I quote, shake alert message cancelled, investigating if you protected yourself. Well done.

It's almost like past .

of aggressive yeah is what's a little bit like this was kind of a test anyway, which is great, but also really not great because as we all well know, we have spent years and years and years getting really good at ignoring annoying up notifications. And if earthquake alerts get that reputation, then the whole system collapses and people will .

turn off their notifications. They will go into their phone settings, dig around and find out how to turn these off.

But even without any mistakes, a learning becomes this kind of funny mix of art and science. With any automated system like this, there is always going to be some alerting threshhold, a preset that says above this amount of shaking will warn people, and beneath that we won't. But finding that threshold is a social problem more than anything else.

I actually happened to be in los Angeles for a couple of back to bec earthquakes back in the summer of twenty nineteen. And back then, shake alert was this experimental APP was just for people in that way. So I didn't have IT.

But for those earthquakes, actually, no one gotten alert because the shaking just wasn't heavy enough. But the response from the public was, we just made this earthquake alarm. Why didn't we use IT? They felt shaking.

They didn't get an alert. They've been told that there was this awesome earthquake er early warning system that there was going online. So that turned into a whole thing.

And the feedback from the public ended up helping us gs decide to lower some of the alerting threshold. So that's just one example of one quake. But the point is there's always gonna these h cases and they're going to have to keep dialing in these threshold.

And poor bob ed group from U S. G S, here's about IT. Every time the earthquake.

I manage our our shaker x social media account at U. S, G, S, scully. And we, I, I, I always entertain these questions of people saying, I got the alert, didn't get the to alert.

Why did I not get dealt? I didn't feel very much all why the hacked did I get in? And of course, you know, insert your favorite word in response. Generally, most people are good nature, and I love interacting with people on x because they have really good genuine questions, are very, very thoughts. But sometimes people get a little little excited as somebody who lived in instances go for a bunch of years and thus experienced inferences go earthquake twitter yeah, feel bobbin is a good time on the internet. And is somebody whose job is the earthquakes I I feel for bob.

right? Yeah, if you're the one, all those tweet are going to have a different story.

Yeah exactly. But I feel like if i'm thinking about this big picture, yeah you sort of describe the bunch of pieces that we need that all exist. right?

Everybody has a device in their pocket that can, in theory, be alerted. We have the apps. The systems are getting Better.

You are saying the sensors are all over the place, but there are a lot of different parties required to get this together, right? You mention the the Carriers and the Operating system companies and the government, so on and so forth. Do we just have a steel mate here?

We're we're going to have a bunch of possibilities. But IT would require somebody to just put them all together. And that is harder than IT seems like IT ought to be. We have to like weird bureaucracy, collective action problem with earthquake alerts.

Well, so all of this energy has been put in to cell phones because that is like the obvious massive delivery mechanism, right? And so like getting into the weeds around cellphones has taken up a lot of time and energy. And there are places, especially around wea, where IT does feel like, okay, is what IT is.

You know, this makes me think of other way. This is a total brain of aside. But remember, early in the pandemic, when apple and google started to work together on some of the notification systems for people who had been exposed, and just the sheer amount of work and ranging IT took to get that stuff to work and talk to each other and makes, and that was obviously earthquakes are a big deal like that, took a literal global pandemic. So these two companies actually, like, sit down in a room together, like to how to make some, uh, I think, clearing that bar with anything short of a global pandemic, even for something as important as a natural disaster, just strikes me as very complicated completely.

And they were under the gun during the pandemic in a way that if everyone involved in earthquakes talks about the fact that until there's a big earthquake, that resets the idea of earthquakes and everyone's mind and pushes earthquakes to the forefront of everyone's minds, it's just hard to get people to pay attention sometimes and to identify IT as a potentially really important thing to do.

right? And like you said, with phones, you just without those two platforms playing along.

you can only get so far right? exactly. So that's been all of the the cell phone m and development. But there's a lot of other things that you can do with these alerts that go way beyond smart phones, and people are working on that too. So you think about smart speakers ah you think about homa size, you think about smart tvs.

The people I interviewed for the story were basically like anything with a speaker or a screen should be a delivery mechanism for earthquakes. Ly warnings like there. All of those companies, all of those platforms, those could all be distribution channels.

Then you think about big public channels like highway signs or pa systems in schools and hospitals, and you think about all the other automated things that don't have anything to do with just warning you as a person. You can open fire station doors so that they don't get stuck down if they're damaged by earthquake. Water utilities can shut off valves or pumps.

You couldn't slide on trains or you can recall elevators. There's all these other stuff that you could do with this information. And in a lot of ways, it's just early days in figuring out how to plug this information into all of these different systems.

Also seems that IT makes that thresh hold of when you do and don't trigger and alert, uh, become very important.

very important and potentially different for all of those different systems. totally. Yeah yeah. It's it's system mess.

So some of that is already happening, but IT means working with one organization or agency at a time is really slow going. But shake a alert has only fully been online for a little more than three years now. So this is still really early days of actually plugging IT in the stuff.

Is the sense that shake alert is kind of a thing, sort of a project out of a university that is like interesting research for how to do IT? Or is IT be thing?

Oh, it's on the west coast of the united states. Is the thing okay? There other similar systems elsewhere, but there's thank god there isn't like a competing earthquake early warning like standards.

We have to do a whole other story about have a folder full of apps yeah all of the rival engineers and scientists trying to make a different one. Um no it's it's the the system is in place. All of the state and local governments are aware of IT. All of the big technology providers are aware that it's just a matter of making IT as useful as I can possibly be.

okay. So do you have the my shake up?

I do. I absolutely do.

How many how many notifications have you gotten from IT recently?

What this is the this is the thing about living in washington. It's just it's like it's quiet.

It's too quiet, too quiet.

And that I I swear to god, a lot of these folks that I interviewed for this story all told me some version of, I just want there to be like a good medium earthquake in washington or thereabouts. That just reminds everyone about earthquakes that doesn't damage per say, doesn't kill anyone IT just puts IT back in people's minds. They just want like a nice fun reminder, quake, the earthquake that just knocks like .

one plate out of a cabinet yeah.

everyone loses a plate and it's like, maybe everyone's favorite and so they're, where's that play? The earthquake got IT yeah.

one hundred. Yeah, that makes sense. All of this made you more, less terrified of earthquakes.

I act like strong. Both I talking to the science people about all of this taught me about all the other faults are around me. Besides just the cascades abduction, there is a fault that runs basically under my house, like very shallow, and it's much less well known and well understood than the others.

So that's just like a new abstract fear for me. So that's cool. On the other, it's genuinely very heartening to see this really messy conStellation of organizations try to figure out early warning, government agency's states, local governments, universities, telecom company, cellphone makers like they're all doing their best. And the result is something that I cannot almost certainly say I will benefit from at some point in the future. I just have to wait and see you when um also I really want an android phone now we're all buying .

android burners that might take away from this is everybody gets an android burner and it's going to save the world .

one hundred percent.

So yet back to the house. We're done with the noises. How how was the process was this? Are you glad you went through this crazy earthquake fitting process at your house?

I am IT was only a couple of days, and now IT is like everything else about earthquake es. It's completely abstract until it's not. So I just like i'm just standing here in my house knowing that the house is now bolted to the foundation and I just have this like magical thing that I don't see protecting me in theory.

And so now I just have to go about my business. But I will say just like it's like having an amulet, it's like much more real than that, obviously. But just knowing that that happened, I can kind of just like put that part of my mind to bed totally.

Alright, we got to take a break. But roque k, give people to call the action。 What if you're on the west coast? And what about this? What what should you do about that right now?

yes. So if you're on the west coast, if you have an iphone, we'll put in the shown notes how to turn on a feature called local awareness. That's the thing that speeds up vm messages um android and IOS you can download the my shake APP um and you go to ready dot gov for just general earthquake advice for before and during and after love IT alright will put .

all that in the show notes will thank you is always should .

I play just like a little bit more of that drill sounds to play a some of the .

verge of music yeah let's really brewing everyone's day on our way out .

to IT see everybody.

right? We got to seek one war break, but will stick around. And you're going to help us do a question from the verge cast hot line. We'll be right back.

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We're back wild still here.

Hi well hi, I haven't left.

Will will just lurks in the background .

of every verge where 都在 找我 一直 拍 视频。

Uh, so we've been thinking over the months about all the stuff we can do with the verge has hotline. We get tons of good questions. Uh, lots of them are weird and are basically just like, is my iphone bad and we say, like I know is fine, but occasionally we get questions that like make us really like go deep down rabbles to try and figure out what's going on. And so we have been trying to figure out we is to go down more of those rabid holes. They're also like an alarming number of people in the slack room now who see all the hot line questions because everybody loves getting .

these questions really fun. I IT became part of my jobs, someone recently, but I would have been doing IT anyway because it's just a fun way to spend a minute at a time.

IT is good fun, except when people are mean to us. Please don't use the email to be mean to us yes but when you call be nice that's so yeah uh but you are I have no idea what you're about to do, but you found a rabid hall that you went down, yes, on the hot line. So set this up for us.

Well, either is not much set up other then I found a question that I personally wanted the answer to. So I was like, okay, I will go try and find the answers and that will be a hot line.

So that's already doing here, right? Set up the question who's a question .

from this question comes from a listener who has a kid who is running around all the time and he wants to take pictures of that kid and he has a question about that.

He is Peter from burglars. I had no idea of how to show the new features on the iphone sixteen s. Be really good to do a race to take, uh, different types of pictures in different situations with the new phones.

First of the old phone, I want to know, can you really take the camera out open enough and get a shot at moving kid factor? Can you really change the appeal faster, although the different settings is a really faster with the new controlled of the old ones that thanks. Have good.

okay. So I went straight to Allison Johnson for this because, a, he did our iphone sixteen review and B, I know from listening to this show that he has lots of experience chasing small kids around with a camera. Hello, Allison.

hello. So I was curious about this question because I am one of those people that watches every apple cano every year just to see what the camera does now. And I feel like even for me, this this year was a very like camera event. Do you feel that way also?

Yeah, IT wasn't so much like anything drastic and happened, you know, is the camera pipeline or whatever. But you know, the camera control was the big thing on both of the iphone sixteen or the iphone sixteen models um in kind of the the new um filter um options you have. yes. So yeah it's it's like camera forward update. I would say.

well, I watched I saw all of that and a my question was kind of the same as Peters, which is, you know, how much does that button make IT feel like you have appointment shoot camera in your pocket, which to me is is just like a muscle memory question, is not a question that you can answer from watching the keynote or watching demo s or anything because it's all about the like routines of how you just like pull out and use your camera without thinking about IT when there is a todder running by doing something cute, for example.

So i'm curious to get your take on what routines you have around your phone and what routines you ve had over the years and then whether the the sixteen and that button meaningfully changes any of that. So you know, historically, before the sixteen, walk me through your reflexes for taking a photo really quickly. You've got your phone in your pocket. Your kid is doing something cute like water .

the steps yeah so I I switched between android kp phone like quite a bit throughout the um so that changes things up. But on its actually super easy because I can double like the power button and like I think i'm basically every end right phone will just open the camera APP from where where you are um so I can do that without looking on an iphone. Typically i've will take the thing out of my pocket and I could be clever and map the camera to a triple press of the homebush ton or something. I just not that um smart, I guess and I always just end up like swiping from the home screen, like you can you can tap the camera icon and like holder and .

that that's what I do .

yeah that's I think what uh sensible person does. I don't know why I have trouble with that. I swipe I I slide my figure, a crossing and that's how I open up up. So it's like one extra beat where I have to kindly like have the phoned vertex in the screen, you know, wakes and I swipe and then not ready to go.

Goddess, there is some like homestead friction.

Yeah yeah, a little bit. Maybe it's of my own making. No yeah.

I know the feeling of of just like reaching in my phone to quickly take a picture of something. And then I like the the screen doesn't quite wanna wake up or the like IT doesn't register the the little camera icon tap there is a little i've like i've lost pictures because something in there just doesn't like quite happen the first trial or the first two tries and that's super frustrating .

and then i'm distracted like trying to swipe on the screen and then my kid has run off and used to do something else yeah so disaster.

Yeah so there's an in between that experience, pretend really and this new fancy camera button and it's the the action button on the iphone fifteen. Did have you played on with that over the course of the past year? And is that meaningfully different if they know a lot of people just mapped their camera to that button?

Yeah yeah okay um yeah it's totally reasonable to use action button as that like camera short up on. I find the placement of IT a little funny for that is kind of like on the other side, the phone that I feel like i'm reaching for in its kind of a high above the the volume buttons. So for me, I feel like I have to kind of do a do a little manoeuver to get there. But he seems to work for a lot of people, I guess.

Yeah but it's not it's not the like IT doesn't form the muscle memory for you the way that .

you wanted to. yes.

Gotch, okay. So what about the literal camera button that is now on these phones? How is that? Has that changed this like quick draw routine to go back to the beginning? Like kid is doing something cute. Your phone is in your pocket.

What do you do? Yeah so I just had a really cost of emotions, the camera button because it's like coded like everything I would like. You know it's like a real button.

It's controls the camera. You can do a bunch of call like change, explosion and stuff with that. Um I don't actually like IT as much as I thought I would. I know my kid is doing something cute in front of me. I will definitely press IT to launch the camera. The screen has to be a week already before IT will do that like pushing IT just the one time will wake up the screen so you have to kind of do IT again um interesting .

yeah which .

you would would like start that process when the phone is in my pocket so it's .

hitting the button, wants to turn the screen on and then again to launch the camera APP and then again .

to take a picture yes. And oh for the third thing for the taking a picture, I don't like IT very .

much because .

I know IT is it's kinds stiff like it's a little bit resist yeah um with the from the other phone which makes sense because you don't want you accidentally take about pictures um but IT just feels like that little bit it's too stiff and like I have to push a little bit hard on IT that I feel like i'm shaking the whole phone and i'm still you know maybe the iphone can cope with .

that but i'm so like I don't any shake .

me can crit or something. I don't like that so you .

i'm i'm really stuck on this like once this like scenario and the like individual beats of this kid has a cute thing one click to turn the thing on one click to into the camera and then you're hitting the software about on the screen.

Yeah yeah that's been my process and maybe I wake up when .

I poked there.

That's basically ah .

yeah but it's still a little fit. Is IT faster, meaningfully. Is there anything about this that does speed up the process even if it's fitly?

I feel like I do like having that just a button to press down and that like feels to me like I am starting the process even if it's not like, you know, but I am gonna get a shot just like that yeah um one thing IT is really useful for in this is something i've kind of like used more and long term testing and not exactly in those like quick draw moments um is changing the exposure compensation because when you do that like little half press or the light press on IT um that's how you access you can set IT to a bunch of different things um but the one I like as you exposure your compensation um because I don't know if you very tried changing the brightest on an and a photo that you're taking but it's such a pain on an iphone is .

that that's where you have to like tap the screen until the little sun icon shows up and then you have to drag the sun up and down and yeah I .

can never do right IT never feels like i'm dragon IT enough and then images like like spending so much time fiddling with that that like whatever I was taking a picture of his long gone um yeah this is just like a little little bonus exposure compensation dial which I love so that's been my favorite part of the camera control honestly.

Okay, do you feel like I do? You can you get to other settings really quickly? I just the like the vision I have of what apple one side of that button is for people to very intuitively, just like we thinker back and forth by few millimeters and like, do seventeen things and take a picture, yeah, do you feel like you are like psychotic connected to this button the way that they want you to be?

I do not um and it's a little fun. It's like something you have to kindly get used to cause your you're like half pressing this button is not there's not actually a half press. It's that's still like capacity.

You know IT gives you a little haptic buzz like you did IT um and then you supose to keep your finger on there and slide back and forth and I end up like taking my finger off or like I I slide IT and I need to reposition my finger to like you know do the adjustments some more um which feels a little like choppy and not quite right and then yeah no good way to like exit the control which is a weird thing. That new line I both noticed in the review is like you kind of want to just like tap to get out of there. And it's just weird .

how IT works. How do you get out of there? You know, have you figured or or is that setting been up since you cut the phone?

Let's see. No, no, no. You you tap the live. You, oh god, the sun icon is back. I don't I don't know. Um yeah no, IT feels like you should do a light tap again and that would exit and that's .

what happened.

That does not work. Yeah, that's the the weird behavior.

Uh, okay. Well, I can't say IT feels like you're selling this.

but I am really not trying to .

I guess, yeah, I clearly I that, that is fair and understandable. I guess the lake I guess Peters question was, is this any faster? And my sort of tack on question is, is this meaningfully Better? And I guess all of that rules up to, is this a meaningful factor in deciding to buy a phone if you really care about taking pictures quickly?

Yeah, the thing I kind of come around you is like, IT doesn't hurt, like literally nothing was taken away. You can use the camera in any other way that you prefer and this is like an extra thing that you know for opening the camera itself kind of helps. I don't prefer IT for taking a photo but is not like apple took away all the other ways and take a photo right um and then you get that little extra control that like sometimes does come in handy. So it's it's like I I don't know if it's a net positive, but IT doesn't hurt .

and that's what you want out of any flagship feature of a fun IT does is not damaging .

my do not something like that. And I think it's just like a lot of other things with um phones is like I don't see a lot of new you know on IOS or on enjoying a feature that i'm like, wow, you should absolutely throw away your old phone and get a new phone this year for this thing. It's sort of like are you in the right time and that like cycle of for some people it's maybe like two to three years or for other people that they just wanted to shop for a phone as long as they can. Um it's sorry. Like where are you in the discomfort with your current phone and how appealing are the things on the new phone? I think the sixteen, like the regular sixteen of particular this year are pretty good value proposition of like you get these new buttons and like maybe apple intelligence will turn out to be something and it's but besides, that is just like the new iphone and it's pretty good.

So yeah, yeah, that is fair. I guess my my last question is that we talk all lot about whether in the future we're all gone to keep using our phone for everything, or whether the phone is gonna get splinter red into a bunch of ether gadgets, point to cameras are having a moment if you care about, you know, wiping out a device and taking a picture really quickly. Is there a worldly should just get a point and shoot camera and not worry about all of these fddi buttons and software updates?

What do you think I I was really hoping I could shortcut to this could be a cool pointing to camera with the camera and with the photographic tiles. Yeah, because you get a fug film to film stocks, they are whatever you wanted, call them. And IT IT does not feel that way to me.

Like of course that doesn't. It's a phone like it's still gonna a phone. It's still gonna like paying you with slack messages year out trying to take some pictures. So I think that is true. Like button is not going to turn this into like you know a super great camera in a way that IT wasn't before. Um it's still the camera I used most of the time but yeah it's, I don't think na gna swear anyone from from a nice footy film camera or I don't know, is the matter rbs like that, that will take a photo faster than taking a phone out your pocket? So and I don't know.

brian, there are other ways. Yeah, okay, well, I I don't know where Peter goes from here.

but i'm sorry, Peter.

I want to I just want to like hit this button in a bunch of of times now i'm curious to see. But thank you, elson. Yeah, thank right.

That is IT for the first test today.

Thank you to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at the verge dot com. All of our coverage of it's going on with OpenAI.

All of our coverage of the iphone stuff will link to both blog posts in the shower notes. You should really read them. It's a lot of reading and he gets pretty flowers at some points, but both of these things are good reads and a recommend checking about.

As always, if you have thought, questions, feelings or blog posts about A I that you would like to share, you can always email us at verge, cast at the verge dot com, or all the outline IT excess. Third one, one we love hearing from you. And like I mentioned, there is that sack room and everyone's in IT.

And I can even begin to guess all of the fun places that online questions are going. So thank you so so much. Everybody reaches out.

It's the best. This shows produced by liam James Wilson or in our comments, verge casts is verge production and part of the box media podcast network. Me and I will be back on friday to talk about more OpenAI news, all of apples gadget announcements from this week and lots more. I'll see that rock now.

Support for the verge cast comes from batman ARM shadow, available only a medic st. Three and three S M, S. Biggest, most anticipated release of twenty twenty four is batman outcome shadow, a ground breaking new entry in the celebrated ARM series experiences the world of gotham city through batman's S, S, and his fists become the night that men are come.

Shadow is included when you buy medic st. Three or three s available. Now learn more. A batman ark shadow dotcom RAID a tea fourteen batt man ark shadow is only in VR media st. Three and three s offer valid on qualifying products purchased from september twenty five, twenty twenty four, three, eight, thirty, twenty twenty five terms apply.