Apple glucose monitor rumors, Marvel fatigue, and podcast misinformation

Today on the flagship podcast of hyper specific wearable sensors: 01:19 - Victoria Song joins Alex Cranz to talk about the latest rumors around Apple’s big progress in blood glucose monitoring. Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Tracking for Its Watch Continuous glucose monitor startups still have to prove their worth Apple is looking at opportunities to do great things in health in India: Sumbul Desai 17:14 - Ariel Shapiro talks with Valerie Wirtschafter, a data analyst at the Brookings Institution, about how often podcasts spread political misinformation, and what that means for the medium. Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims Policy recommendations for addressing content moderation in podcasts 43:57 - Alex and Charles Pulliam-Moore chat about the latest episode of The Last of Us and all the Marvel movie fatigue that has cropped up since Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania came out. [Warning: Spoiler alert] HBO’s The Last of Us is pushing all the right buttons by telling new stories HBO’s The Last of Us is wisely skipping to the cutscenes Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania review: this is your brain on Kangs Email us at [email protected], or call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Alex Cranz?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of hyper-specific wearable sensors. Yeah, that's a thing. And we're the flagship for it. I'm your friend Alex Krantz, and I'm super excited about this week's episode because it's just a bunch of like really neat conversations with coworkers and at least one senior data analyst. Victoria Song is going to be joining me to talk about the latest rumors around Apple's big progress in blood glucose monitoring. This has been a very hot topic of conversation since Mark Gurman wrote a big piece in Bloomberg last week. In fact, this week, Apple's VP of Health, Sumbul Desai, did an interview with the Hindu business line where the blood glucose monitoring work got name checked. She didn't say much, but it definitely feels like we're

• 0:46Alex Cranz?

  like in a moment. So Victoria and I are going to talk about that moment. And then Ariel Shapiro is going to come on to talk with the data analyst at the Brookings Institution, all about podcast misinformation, which is super interesting. And finally, I got to admit, I got selfish. And I brought back Charles Pullenmore because we absolutely had to talk about the latest episode of The Last of Us and all of the Marvel fatigue that's cropped up around Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania. So we're going to go all over the place this episode, but it's a lot of super interesting conversations. Stay tuned.

• 1:19Speaker 01

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• 2:03Alex Cranz?

  Okay, and we're back. Victoria Song, hello.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Hello, how are you?

• 2:08Alex Cranz?

  I'm doing great, Victoria. Thank you for asking. So Victoria, I want to talk about this rumor, first reported by Bloomberg, that Apple has been working on a device that will let you test your blood sugar. Because that is like really, really useful for people with diabetes, but it could also be useful for people who don't know they should get tested for diabetes. Am I right?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's actually a lot of reasons why anyone might want to test their blood sugar, including like hardcore athletes who are doing endurance races, who are just like, oh my god, do I need to fuel? Do I, how are my carbs doing? So, you know, there was this article in Bloomberg from Mark Gurman, the quote unquote "Apple prophet", this past week that was saying that Apple had made huge strides in their non-invasive glucose monitoring tech. And, you know, that sounds pretty cool. All it means is that you can read your blood sugar without having to prick your finger, which, you know, any person with diabetes would know that's, it's not fun pricking your finger to get a little blood test all the time. So that is what's kind of been causing a little buzz

• 3:11Speaker 03

  in non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, this past week at least. But, you know, it's actually been around for a while. Like, the concept of it has been around for quite some time, like over 10 years, I want to say.

• 3:23Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow. I didn't realize it's that long. Because I think when we think about testing for diabetes, testing your glucose, it's generally the pin prick, just taking blood. And then also, I know there was the patch. Nicole Wettsman did this wonderful piece about testing one of the patches and her blood sugar versus her friend who has type 1 diabetes. So generally, the idea is you have to take blood. And some people were working on, well, what if you could actually get the the blood sugar level from sweat? Is that what Apple is doing?

• 3:52Speaker 03

  No. So there's two types of non-invasive blood glucose monitoring. The first type is optical, and that's what Apple is working on. Optical is similar to, you know, how This Apple Watch has a PPG sensor and it reflects light into your skin. And based on the reflection that comes back, it can kind of estimate what your heart rate is from that. So, Apple is basically working on a optical version using spectroscopy. That is basically going to, based on the article, shine light into your interstitial fluid. And based on that, figure out how much blood sugar is in your body. So, interstitial fluid is the fluid that sits in the space between your cells.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  It's basically how they get powered is also where all the waste product goes out. There's glucose in there.

• 4:40Alex Cranz?

  So, it's not blood?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  It's not blood. It is interstitial fluid, which is the fluid between the spaces of your cells. It is a legitimate thing that they use to measure blood glucose. So, it sounds science fictiony, but it's real. We all have it. It sits right beneath the skin. That's what Bloomberg says that Apple is approaching it from. But the other way is the way that you were mentioning, where you find blood glucose from a fluid. So, that's your urine. That's your tears. That's what a couple of years back, Google was thinking of trying to make smart contacts that could read your blood sugar from your, you know, your eyeballs, the fluid there. But this is very complicated. There's a lot of stuff that goes into this.

• 5:23Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's complicated and also there's a lot of different body types and stuff. And oftentimes, these tests initially are for just one type of body, for one just type of skin type. We see a lot of different ways that it can kind of then mess up. I think we're seeing that right now, right, with with blood oxygen and some of the other optical sensors that Apple and other wearables are making, where they don't work on darker skin colors. And they just flat out do not work at all on tattoos.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Right. So, you know, in the case of the PPG sensors, these are the green lights that you see on the back of every wearable that measures your heart rate. That color of light is very much impacted by melanin and by tattoo ink. So, that's why you have a lot of tattoo users who have very dense tattoos on their wrists, who cannot use the Apple Watch properly. You know, they have to like get epoxy stickers and stick that on and somehow that makes it work. It's slightly different in the case of blood glucose, because if you're gonna do optical blood glucose measurements, you're gonna be using a type of infrared wavelength and ideally you'll be using more than one wavelength. But that causes its own problems because blood glucose has a lot more challenges than heart rate does.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Heart rate is relatively easy. You're measuring your pulse is essentially what you're doing with the optical sensors and you know, you can feed pulse into an algorithm and that's cool. But blood glucose is about infinitely more complicated because glucose is a very, very tiny molecule and there's a lot of other molecules in interstitial fluid and other places. So there's a lot of signal interference. So that's one of the big problems there.

• 7:01Alex Cranz?

  This is even more complicated, but also it feels like it has an even higher risk if you fail.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 7:08Alex Cranz?

  You know, if my heart rate skyrockets, I'd like to know, but it's not necessarily the end of the world. It could be because I took the stairs too fast. It could be because I got really exciting or really devastating news. If my blood sugar is off and I have, say, diabetes or something, well, that could just mean I die.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's actually gonna be something that requires FDA regulation, our very good friend, the Food and Drug Administration. But that the stakes are higher with blood glucose, right? Because you cannot get this wrong for diabetics. So, you know, the image that we have of what these smartwatch blood glucose monitors are gonna be is just replacing the finger pricks, replacing the continuous blood glucose monitors that they use needles. So that's kind of the perception that we have for it. But if you read closely into the Bloomberg piece, I really don't think that's where Apple's gonna go first. So, you know, they were saying that they were gonna do it to screen prediabetes and there's multiple types of prediabetes.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  You know, the human body is a wonderland that we know nothing about, basically. The further you go into health tech, the more you realize how much doctors have no idea how this how our bodies work. So basically, you know, they're talking About you wear this like device all the time and it can continuously monitor your blood glucose and then give you a ping and say, hey, you might have risk factors for prediabetes. And that's very different than monitoring your blood glucose for a diabetic. So what we're going to see at least first is something I think, I think similar to what Apple did with heart rate and ECG and AFib. So Apple's not diagnosing anything for you, right?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  They're just saying, hey, you show signs that kind of indicate that you might have this issue. So go see a doctor. And that's what I think that they're going to do. Based on like that article, the idea of pre-screening for diabetes. That's what I think wearable version of this is going to go towards first, at least. I don't think we're going to go straight into a wearable monitor for people with diabetes. Precisely because if you fuck up, people might die and nobody wants that.

• 9:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was about to say like, so my mom has type 2 diabetes. I am obviously at risk because family factors. And I wouldn't want my mom to rely on solely an Apple Watch unless it is really gone through the rigors and can match that, that PIN prick test. Whereas it might be nice for me to be able to say, oh, I should have a conversation with my doctor and find out if I just need to be less dumb about eating breakfast or if I've got other issues.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  I mean, I have the same thing. My dad had diabetes. I have PCOS. I am predisposed to being a diabetic. So, you know, every single time I go to the doctor, they're like, oh, let's check your blood sugar levels.

• 9:56Alex Cranz?

  Got to know your A1C, man. You gotta, you gotta.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you gotta know your A1C. Yeah. So, you know, the idea is to kind of be like Nicole put this a really great way. A warning light for wearables to kind of go, hey, I think you should go talk to a medical professional. Because you will never get in trouble for saying, hey, go talk to a medical professional. We actually do not give you medical advice. And any wearable you see, even the ones with FDA cleared features are going to say, this is not in lieu of medical advice. And the reason is liability. They don't want to be in trouble for you not listening to them, but they do want the credit for when it saves your life.

• 10:37Alex Cranz?

  I do wonder if Apple does go down this route and it's not a diagnostic feature, but it is a feature, a warning feature. Does that mean Apple's just kind of getting into the business of making us terrified of our own bodies every time we put on an Apple Watch?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  I mean, a little bit. I, this is, this is the dark side of wearable tech is that it can very much cause anxiety. And I wrote a thing recently about, you know, how to use fitness trackers and smartwatches in a less anxiety inducing way. And, you know, I test these for a living. I have anxiety because these things tell me certain, there was like a woman who got one of the notifications on the Apple Watch and then took like 900 ECGs over the course of the year because she was really anxious. And this was a study that they did and it does induce this level of anxiety within people. So that's a thing that I don't think we as a society and at the medical community has really come to grips with yet is the fact that this tech is very new.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  You're putting monitoring in the hands of people, continuous monitoring, passive monitoring. And then they go to their doctors with data and the doctors are like, well, I don't know what to do with this data. I don't know how to help you with treatment. And in some cases it's very obvious and okay, like, oh, we can see that you do have this issue. And in other cases, doctors are just going to be like, okay, so your heart rate was high once and you're fine now, right?

• 11:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  So the, the promise is that, you know, remote patient monitoring, that's the real promise of all of this. But when it comes to diabetes, I'm not even sure how doctors would necessarily use it. But most likely at first it'll follow the path that continuous blood glucose monitors, this is like a tongue twister every single time I have to say it, like that they did, which is, you know, they were not meant to be your primary form of testing blood sugar. They were kind of a supplement. You were supposed to do the pin prick and then that could be kind of a supplemental, you know, secondary type of monitoring method. And it's most likely that if we do get this technology in a wearable, that's probably what it's going to be.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  But getting it small enough to be in a wearable, this is like a recurring theme, is very difficult to do because. As I mentioned, the signal is going to be really small for glucose and it's just going to be a lot of interference. So the AI model, the algorithm has to be extremely precise. And then on top of that, you know, there's, there's other issues with blood glucose compared to heart rate that are a zillion times more complicated. Not least of which is that you and I can eat the same foods and our blood sugar will decrease or spike at a different rate. It's not linear per se.

• 13:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  So that's a lot. How are they going to program that? That's difficult. That requires a lot of testing.

• 13:19Alex Cranz?

  Which right now, it sounded like in, in Gorman's article, it sounded like it's still very, very large.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:24Alex Cranz?

  This isn't even close to being on the wrist yet.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  So, you know, the, the major milestone that Garmin was referring to is that the first version of it was this giant thing that sat on a table. And now they're working on a prototype that's about the size of an iPhone that you would wear on your bicep. So, you know, we are years away. Like he does mention that in the article, right? He's not saying that this is coming out next year.

• 13:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  It is a big milestone to go from something that has to sit on a table to something that can be worn. But going from an iPhone sized object to a watch sized object is, is a whole other ballpark. And that's really the challenge that you have with wearable devices in general.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  So next time we hear somebody say a rumor that the next Apple Watch is going to have continuous glucose monitoring.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's, that's, I call bullshit on that because it's not easy to do, first off. And, you know, they're probably already in regulatory talks because this kind of product doesn't exist. It just doesn't. There were some failed versions of like smartwatchy prototype versions of this stuff. But, you know, the FDA is probably going to have to sit there and be like, okay, how do we even get you to test this thing in a way that's not going to endanger human life? And, you know, I've, I've been talking to some scientists about how they do test this type of technology. And first off, they, they test it with a glass of water. Because if you cannot read blood sugar from water, you're screwed and you have to go back to the drawing board.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  And then they have another like, um, they call it a phantom, which is kind of like a mannequin that has human like stuff on it. And you know, it's a proxy for human testing, but it's not the same thing. So this stuff is very hard to test in a safe way. Like, you know, the ethics of testing this tech is really tough with SPO2. You basically have to make people go hypoxic for a certain period of time in a controlled setting, which, you know, hypoxia is when your blood oxygen level goes to points where you should be in a hospital. So this is very difficult testing to do, and that's only one portion of FDA regulatory clearance. There's also stuff like making sure that the way you store your data is HIPAA compliant. That's

• 15:40Speaker 03

  just regulatory clearance. Just because something has regulatory clearance does not mean it's an accurate device for that particular purpose. Like, the easy way for me to say it is that, yes, this tech is being developed. Yes, we are seeing progress in terms of miniaturization and accuracy. AI is getting better. The sensors are getting smaller. But there are so many issues, like because most of the optical methods are using infrared light. Did you know that if it gets hot in the room, the sensors are going to pick up on that? And they may say you have a spike in blood sugar, even though it's just hot. Like, that's an actual problem that scientists are dealing with and that, you know, they had a study that showed that.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  So it's very challenging from an AI perspective, from the fact that the signal is so small, and just the fact that you have to have so many different wavelengths of infrared light that it could get hot.

• 16:34Alex Cranz?

  So one last question for you. Which do you think we get first? The Apple Watch with continuous glucose monitoring, or smart glasses from Apple that you would want to wear in public?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  If Apple has figured out how to handle the ambient light problem, like relatively well, I think that because that you could use as a heads up display, you know, you see them in cars now and directions. There's, there's, there's a use case for everybody there that everyone will want to use that likely will not burn your eyeballs off and is not something that requires super regulatory clearance with lots and lots of clinical testing. So I'm going to guess that.

• 17:17Alex Cranz?

  I was unaware that smart glasses could potentially burn my eyeballs off.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Well, the contacts might.

• 17:23Alex Cranz?

  Victoria, thank you for coming on and popping all of the hype bubbles. Appreciate it.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  I live to pop everyone's health tech bubble just by being a wet blanket saying, actually, you're going to have to wait a really long time for all the cool stuff.

• 17:38Alex Cranz?

  Okay, we're going to take a break and when we get back, we're going to move from talking about blood glucose monitoring to podcast misinformation with Ariel Shapiro. It is actually really exciting. They're totally unrelated, but it's going to be a lot of fun. More right after this.

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• 19:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay, and we're back and I'm here with Ariel Shapiro. Hey Ariel, how you doing?

• 19:18Speaker 05

  I'm doing well, Alex. How are you doing?

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  I am doing fantastic. I hear you have been interviewing some people about a very fun little segment for the show all about podcasting.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, a couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Valerie Wirtschafter, who's a senior data analyst at Brookings. Last year, she put together this tool that I have been obsessively playing with that tracks a bunch of the most important political podcasts.

• 19:43Alex Cranz?

  Oh, cool.

• 19:44Speaker 05

  So it started out just looking at the frequency of episodes in terms of conservative versus liberal versus moderate. But recently, they came out with a really extensive and troubling study about misinformation in these podcasts. And it really runs the gamut. Some podcasts do pretty well in terms of fact checking, and then some, one out of every five episodes will feature either blatant misinformation or unverified information.

• 20:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no. So like, what's the criteria here? Does The Vergecast count? Does Joe Rogan count? What counts as a political podcast?

• 20:19Speaker 05

  So neither Vergecast nor Joe Rogan were part of the study.

• 20:23Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  They limited it to specifically political podcasts that rank or have ranked in Apple Podcasts Top 100.

• 20:33Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  So Joe Rogan doesn't count because he's only on Spotify. So, but if he was on Apple, he would count. Or podcasts that are recommended through those podcasts, through Apple's algorithm. It doesn't encompass the entire political podcast world, but it does look at the podcasts with the most reach. So that's Ben Shapiro's show, that's Steve Bannon's show, which is actually only allowed on Apple Podcasts of the major platforms. They are banned from YouTube and from Spotify. But also, you know, shows on the liberal end of the spectrum like Pod Save America. So Valerie talks about the findings of the data, what it means for podcasting, and what it means for tech companies, and what they can do with the findings.

• 21:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay, well, that sounds like a very interesting conversation. Let's go ahead and listen to it.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for being here, Valerie. Your research really seems to be the first of its kind that's looking this in-depth at podcasts and what kind of information or misinformation gets shared on them. And so, we hear a lot about misinformation on cable news and on social media. Why did you choose to look into podcasts in particular?

• 21:46Speaker 06

  So, at the Brookings Institution, my team is really interested in exploring artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and their broader societal implications. And so, for me, that also includes especially the role of new media and the internet in shaping this information ecosystem. And so, the reason I thought about focusing on podcasts is because, well, it really struck me as increasingly important. People love their podcasters. Really, there's kind of a unique attachment that we see to podcast hosts. And it seems like, you know, anybody can really start a podcast. Obviously, having a successful podcast is another question, but anybody can be a host,

• 22:27Speaker 06

  sort of anybody can have the microphone, anybody can be an expert on anything that they decide they're an expert on in that day. And so, those kinds of elements seemed really interesting to me as kind of this new media aspect, sort of the Twitter personalities or YouTube personalities who kind of gain their platforms seems really applicable to podcasting. But at the same time, there isn't that kind of dialogue element to it. It's very much more in the vein of a traditional media space where the podcaster is speaking to the audience and there's not a ton of dialogue possibilities. Usually, it's a much more kind of top-down information provision. And so, I thought that was really interesting as a dynamic as well.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  So I get the sense that podcasts don't really get as much attention as they might deserve in terms of the political influence they can have, aside from like Joe Rogan, who absolutely dominates the news cycle, but especially because it's so easy to develop these parasocial relationships with podcast hosts, it seems like they can actually have a lot of influence. Why do you think this is an area that's gone so unexplored?

• 23:36Speaker 06

  I mean, I would say probably the biggest reason, for me at least, is the challenge of the medium, the kind of actual audio-based function of the medium versus something like text-based analysis. So we see a lot of research on Twitter, which, you know, it's very short snippets of text, very available, up until recently at least, with the API interface. So academics, researchers could really access Twitter data very quickly. Podcasting, you know, I kinda, I had to sort of think about a whole strategy and design an approach to be able to collect the audio files and then from there, get the audio files into a space

• 24:16Speaker 06

  that was, you know, large enough to hold 36,000 MP3s. And then from there, transform it into a text-based format. And then from there, continue along to actually find small claims, small elements in, you know, some of these hosts, like Joe Rogan obviously was not in this report, given the sort of Spotify-exclusive nature of his podcast and the data collection process. They sort of didn't align. But a lot of these hosts, like Joe Rogan, you know, like Steve Bannon, will have, you know, four episodes a day, hour-long episodes. And so it's a lot of text. And so the methods alignment was a bit of a challenge

• 24:57Speaker 06

  to figure out. And so I think that has maybe pushed some people away from the medium, potentially, in terms of an analysis side of it. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I don't know if people actually sort of saw this space as highly political or highly politically charged in terms of the content that people were producing. We have great series like Radiolab, or This American Life, or, you know, true crime podcasts like Serial. And so, you know, I think maybe that's kind of the perception of the medium, but there is this entire world of political punditry that is growing increasingly popular and increasingly prominent.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  And one thing that is pretty shocking when you look at the tracker in terms of the frequency of episodes published, you separate it into conservative episodes, moderate episodes, and liberal episodes. And based on your criteria of shows that appear in Apple's top 100 and affiliated podcasts that are recommended through the algorithm, it is so overwhelmingly conservative. Why is that? It seems just completely out of balance.

• 26:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, so there's two elements to that. One is, so the series is not necessarily as imbalanced as the number of episodes. So I'm not remembering the exact numbers at the moment, but I think it's something like 1 and 1/2 to 1 ratio for conservative series. So say we have 40 conservative series, we're going to have 30 liberal series, or something like that, in terms of the imbalance from the selection process. But then when you get at the episode level, it's something like triple the amount. So conservative podcasters are producing many, many more shows than liberal podcasters. And so I think that that is really what that explosion is built around, is just the kind of, you know, and Steve

• 26:48Speaker 06

  Bannon has a less than PC way of saying it, of like flooding the zone with garbage, is sort of some sort of his media strategy. And so, you know, we do see this kind of, you know, whether, whatever the quality is, we do see this approach of like continuing to air episodes daily, sometimes multiple episodes a day. And I think that's a lot more of the conservative media ethos built around talk radio, things like that. And so I think that's where a lot of that originates from. And so that imbalance, I think, is particularly striking at the episode level. It's, I'd say, less, it's still an imbalance, but less dramatic at the series level.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  What surprised you most when you were going through the data?

• 27:31Speaker 06

  You know, I think that there were a few sort of specific things. One, I think that what surprised me actually is that kind of disparity in terms of some shows really do kind of air a lot of these types of claims somewhat frequently, like maybe one in 10 episodes, one in five episodes for some of them. And then there are really, I think, very high-quality shows that are just, you know, do a really excellent job. And so the kind of distinction between those that shared quite a bit of content that was maybe unsubstantiated or not backed by evidence versus those that really didn't do it much at all. And so that distinction, I think, was quite visible.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  In your report, you found that overall in this, among the shows you were looking at, that it was about 1 in 20 episodes featured either unsubstantiated or false claims. But the worst offenders had rates of 15%, 20% of their episodes with this sort of misinformation. So is this a podcasting problem, or is this maybe limited to a group of particularly irresponsible podcasters?

• 28:38Speaker 06

  That's a good question as well. I mean, I think that the nature of the medium is such that, you know, this type of content just naturally filters in. It's very conversational, very extemporaneous, somewhat informal, you know, people are bound to throw around, and I think I did it at the beginning of the show, people are bound to throw around like estimates that they remember off the top of their head that may or may not be accurate. And so I think that, you know, it's just a natural function of the kind of back and forth of the medium. But, you know, I do think as the medium becomes increasingly concentrated in terms of political series, and even since the data collection for this report was completed, there's, you

• 29:21Speaker 06

  know, dozens of new shows that are really kind of highly politically charged. And so I don't see this necessarily as something that will be fading or that is concentrated amongst just a few people. It's something that I think will continue to grow as I think the medium continues to grow as well.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  And in terms of the frequency of misinformation that you found, how does it compare to other types of media? Whether that's TV, or social, or terrestrial radio?

• 29:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that is, you know, it's hard to quantify because the tools have been lacking. So, recent research up until, you know, maybe a couple of years ago, really focused on domain-based content. So focused on what was perceived to be low-quality domain sharing. And even those, which is, I think, a very inclusive definition, and you're bound to grab a lot of content that is, you know, it might be highly political, but it isn't necessarily false. That was a very inclusive measurement tool. And even then, it was very small. In terms of the repeated sharing especially was low. And then, you know, for users, there's a few studies that look at users.

• 30:36Speaker 06

  I think it's quite low in terms of percentage that share information that links to these sort of suspect websites or domains. And then, other research that's maybe gotten a little bit more complicated and looking at browsers and broader media habits, really gets into like, you know, I think the rate is maybe like one minute per day or something is the exposure. And so, that, I think, puts into perspective the amount for podcasting. I do think the fact that 70% of the series shared something, and that's liberal podcasters, that's conservative podcasters, that's moderate podcasters, and those that I couldn't, you know, assign a political ideology, 70% is very high.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  But based on the nature of the medium, that doesn't necessarily surprise me. And so, I, you know, I would put this as like, on the higher side. But, you know, it's obviously not every two episodes, or every five episodes. So, I still think that it is comparatively high, but not so-so high that we're entering this like, very troubling space.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Right. And some of these hosts that fall into the top 10 worst offenders are really prominent. So in addition to Bannon, who had the highest rate of 1 in 5 episodes featuring misinformation, you had Charlie Kirk and Sean Hannity, very, very well-known pundits, right? Is the issue that these claims on the podcasting side just go unnoticed? Or that maybe the audiences who are listening to them in the first place just agree with them? Or that people who might look at media in a critical sense just aren't really paying attention to these podcasts?

• 32:15Speaker 06

  I think it's all three. You know, all three of those elements are what makes this medium slightly different than television, which is much more visible. You know, there's a fixed number of channels, there's a fixed number of shows. People are watching, whether critically or for confirmatory evidence. And there are guardrails in place, right? Like, after the election, Fox News cracked down on what its pundits could say about the election, especially after the safe harbor deadlines passed and when there were kind of lawsuits flying around about voting machines. And so, you know, there are sort of guardrails in place a little bit. Whereas in this space, it's kind of, you know, anything seems to go.

• 32:58Speaker 06

  It could be because it kind of flies under the radar, this sort of sandbox of ideas where, you know, let's test out this possibility, see if it sticks, see if it gets some traction, and then maybe expand it to a broader set of conversations. And so I think that that's what makes podcasting a bit different than those other spaces.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  And so, I know this is a complicated question, but what kind of steps can the platforms take to mitigate these misinformation issues?

• 33:27Speaker 06

  I see a few ways to go about just broadly even improving the medium. I mean, the architecture is so sparse for a lot of these apps that, in some ways, building that out a little bit, putting some investment into a more collaborative medium, potentially. You know, we see on Twitter now with content moderation, it's kind of this wisdom of the crowd approach. Wikipedia is a very wisdom of the crowd approach. Reddit has moderators. Stack Overflow, which is more on the like data science side, maybe a bit of a niche. Medium, but in any case, they all have these sort of community-based approaches. You know, podcasting could could experiment with something like that, incorporating a little bit of an

• 34:12Speaker 06

  audience check. You know, some apps have no potential even for reporting series or reporting episodes, or when they do have that in place, it's so sparse and so lacking in detail that, you know, it's basically useless at that point. And so reincorporating the audience, making it a little bit more of an interactive medium potentially. Can users add transcripts? Maybe they want to add show notes. I know that some podcasters who have really kind of loyal fanbases have this automatically, like now there's a podcast about the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast.

• 34:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 34:46Speaker 06

  Like summarize it. So like, you know, obviously, some shows don't have that loyal of a following or that kind of excited of a following, but like building in some opportunity for that potential, I think would be really useful. Absent broader content moderation practices. I think, you know, just transparency in general, like what are your content moderation practices? Detailing those, I think Apple has something that in their content moderation practices, it's like mean spirited content, but like, what does that mean?

• 35:18Speaker 05

  That could be anything.

• 35:19Speaker 06

  Right. What does that mean? And then, you know, thinking about like the algorithms that govern what series people are exposed to transparency around those, right? So I think that, you know, other than word of mouth, those lists that are curated are often ways that people find podcasts. And so, you know, what goes into making those lists? Obviously, people are going to then try and game those lists. And so, you know, being careful, but providing a little bit more transparency around that. Are there series that are lines where the content can stay up, but it won't be recommended or things like that? So just the broader transparency space, I think can be really greatly improved. A little bit more

• 36:01Speaker 06

  effort into kind of the community that's building around a lot of these podcasts, letting the audience play a role, kind of removing that top-down information flow and adding like a bottom-up conversation as well, I think could be really useful, too. And then, you know, beyond platforms, you know, I would love to see more researchers paying attention to this medium. I hope that this research project has shown that it's possible to explore this space systematically. Even though I only, you know, bit off seventy-nine series out of, you know, the thousands that are out there and thirty-six thousand episodes out of the millions that are out there, but it was sort of strategic and systematic.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  And so it is possible to explore this space in a way that is productive as opposed to cherry picked here and there for the worst offenders. And so hopefully, I think that galvanizes the research community a bit more because I do see this space as growing and becoming increasingly prominent.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Have the platforms reached out at all saying, hey, maybe, maybe we should change our approach a little bit or be more specific in how we define dangerous content?

• 37:14Speaker 06

  I mean, I have seen even from past research, so this is kind of the major report out of a lot of, out of about two years of research into this space in which various blog posts were published on the Brookings website. And so even from those, I've seen shifts from the platforms a bit. So Google has made it clear that they aren't actually hosting content and like pop-ups on their website. So, you know, I think that's a clear distinction between like a Twitter and a Google Podcasts is the hosting element. You know, Apple has expanded its sort of feedback form to include specific categories that do align with their content moderation practices.

• 37:59Speaker 06

  It's unclear if that's wholly in response to this sort of line of research inquiry, but I have seen some small changes. Another one that's an interesting one actually is also Apple. You know, a lot of these shows used to be classified as news. And so we would see, you know, The Wrestling Ball Show or Pod Save America or whatever being classified as news. And, you know, there's now a new category that is news commentary. And so I think that that is really important as well, just to be able to add in a layer of editorialization because, you know, it is news commentary. It's, it's not necessarily news. And so I think that's also like a micro shift that is.

• 38:42Speaker 06

  Meaningful in some respects, but there's way more to do in this space. And I think that the apps have recognized it as a space that will need to be dealt with, especially for places that are thinking about more monetization, expanding sort of these, you know, exclusive arrangements, or, you know, like Apple Podcast Plus or things like that, where they have additional content or things like that. So actually paying a bit more attention to these things, I think as the monetization grows, will definitely be something that I would see a lot of these places doing.

• 39:17Speaker 05

  A lot of these platforms have very explicit policies on overtly dangerous content, right? Violent content, clear hate speech. And then when you get into misinformation, that's just a little bit trickier. How far do you think they'll be willing to go to tackle misinformation?

• 39:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think that that's our huge challenge. And we saw it a ton during the pandemic, right? Like especially as the pandemic evolved, things that were obviously incorrect at a certain point in time then became more accurate down the road. And so while I think it's important to add sourcing or notes or things like that, tags that say like, the claims made in this are blah, blah, blah, or are the opinion of the podcaster, or here's your coronavirus information center or things like that. You know, I think all those things are important. And just giving people more context and more ability to find the authoritative information, I think would be really useful as opposed to saying, you know,

• 40:19Speaker 06

  oh, you shared this theory, like delete your episode, one more strike, you're done. Because I do think what that has shown us is that it's a really, like especially in the midst of an evolving health crisis, the information ecosystem is very fluid. But it's also important to make sure people have access to, you know, the latest medical guidelines or the latest recommendations. And so, you know, incorporating that into the architecture of the apps, I think would be really important as well.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  Where do you think we are in terms of moderating audio technologically? Right? Like, we've seen some improvements already. You know, Spotify recently acquired a company that uses AI to identify dangerous information. They look for specific buzzwords, that kind of thing. How much further does the technology have to improve before we can really adequately moderate this kind of content?

• 41:16Speaker 06

  I mean, there's two things I'll say to that. So, one is regardless of the machine learning algorithm or whatever detection software is in place, I think it's so important to still have a level of human oversight. This report required at least two coders for every episode that was flagged through a text-based process. And so because of the context around these claims, because of the nature of the conversation, it's really important to be able to have people to be able to actually get in there and look at the surrounding content, which I think at this point is very much still in the realm of human review.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  There are ways to sort of look at like negating words or things like that, or to add that context in a little bit, but I do think that having that human oversight is super important. And then even in terms of progress, even in the span of this research project, we were using sort of larger platform transcription tools that had a cost associated with them. And so even in that span, OpenAI has, it's called Whisper, which is a free, open-source software for transcription, and it does a fairly good job. You know, even the AI software that I use for speech-to-text recognition failed occasionally. One of the funny ones that I came across was like Fauci's role, like Anthony Fauci's

• 42:46Speaker 06

  role in all this, sometimes transcribed to like foul cheese roll.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  And that was paid for, right? And so there's still those issues in that space as well. But Whisper has obviously some of those challenges built into it still. Even with the kind of state of the art softwares, we were still getting some of those bugs in, which obviously is par for the course, I think, would likely lead to an undercount as opposed to an overcount. But even so, like now there are open source softwares that we can use to make this a much more affordable process. Even podcasters, if they want to add free transcripts to their episodes, can do it now using these softwares. And so I think that that has been an evolution that has happened quite quickly. And so it's kind of a mixed bag, right?

• 43:36Speaker 06

  Like, there still has to be, I think, that level of manual oversight to make sure that sort of the context of the claim, the intent of the claim, or whatever is being searched for are actually meaning what we think they're meaning. And, you know, while sort of automated processes can help with that, the manual oversight is, I still think, very important. But then the tools are evolving and becoming more accessible as well. And so I think it's a bit of both.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  You know, every election cycle, it seems like there's a new media narrative that emerges, right? Like, cable news is the problem, or Facebook is the problem, or Twitter is the problem. And we haven't really seen podcasting get much credit or blame for how it's shaping political thought. Do you think that's something that's going to change in the 2024 cycle?

• 44:25Speaker 06

  I mean, the thing about podcasting and a lot of the kind of political hosts is that they have platforms everywhere. So podcasting is just another tool in a broader portfolio, right? Where they have a Twitter presence, maybe they're on a cable news channel, also potentially on the radio, also potentially on podcasting. And so I think whether it is the primary focus, I don't necessarily think so, but I think it only can amplify. And by virtue of the challenges inherent to analyzing the medium, might be a space where, you know, something that was maybe taken off of Twitter flies in the podcasting world. You know, hopefully it can be incorporated into a suite of kind of analyses, processes

• 45:10Speaker 06

  that explores all these different spaces as opposed to, you know, just Twitter, or just Facebook, or just YouTube. You know, thinking of them holistically is really important.

• 45:22Alex Cranz?

  Valerie, thank you so, so much.

• 45:24Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 45:31Alex Cranz?

  Okay, we're gonna take one more break and then we're gonna be talking about something that is really, really fun that I'm super excited about. Entertainment coverage. Charles Pulliam Moore is gonna be talking with me all about The Last of Us and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Mania. It's just a bunch of nerds nerding out. More right after this.

• 45:54Speaker 07

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• 46:24Speaker 08

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• 47:06Alex Cranz?

  And we're back. And I've got Charles Pulliam Moore here to talk about The Last of Us and Marvel fatigue. Yeah. Let's start with The Last of Us, because this was the first time we met Riley. They're doing the adaptation of the DLC from the game, and it was an absolutely emotional downer of an episode.

• 47:24Speaker 09

  Riley, where have you been? I will tell you everything. You have to come with me for a few hours.

• 47:30Alex Cranz?

  We're almost to the end of the first season. This was the big episode where we did like flashbacks to stuff that was in comic books and stuff, right?

• 47:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, like Riley is mentioned in the first Last of Us, but it isn't until The Last of Us comic that we really sort of start to see the full story of what went down between Riley. Not just like how they were friends in the QZ, but sort of like one of the most like momentous parts of their relationship like takes place sort of like right before the video game picks up. And so when we're meeting Ellie as like a player, it's just sort of like, oh, who's this aloof kid who's just kind of sort of out about, you know, in the wilderness, you know, doing their own thing. And Ellie, you know, is truly like in the thick of like some emotional distraughtness that Joel isn't clued into and we're not clued into because, you know, we're seeing things from his perspective.

• 48:22Speaker 10

  But when you dig into the comic, you sort of see like, oh, like Ellie, she's not an asshole, right? Like she's coping with everything. This episode just really just introduces us to Riley with a fullness that was not the case in the video game. And in the same way that a lot of people were sort of like lit up by episode three, Long, Long Time, and the way that it sort of brought Frank and Bill into the picture.

• 48:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 10

  I remember when I was watching the screeners, I had that same feeling for this episode, because like you said, it is another flashback episode with some sort of sad moments, but it's also sort of this bottle episode that uses its being in the past to show you like what all these people have lost. And it just like really moves me.

• 49:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I thought it was interesting. We'd kind of been teased about Riley on the show. There was this expectation because there had been this, this DLC starring her, there'd been this comic book featuring her. So fans knew who Riley was and there was almost treated like an Easter egg in early episodes where people would mention Riley and Ellie would get all stone faced and upset. But now we finally, we finally see her and Stormree really has to like live up to a lot of hype.

• 49:31Speaker 10

  Right. In the same way that we are supposed to really sort of have this deeper understanding of the pain that Joel is carrying with him after we sort of meet his daughter, Sarah, the same sort of has to happen here after we meet Riley. Obviously, their dynamic is a little different. So I'm like, in the context of the show, given that we've had another Bottle episode that was about Bill and Frank, I think that the challenge that Storm Reid was really up against in portraying Riley was like, you have all of sort of like the textual elements of the character that we have from the comic and the game. But then within the context of the show, you also sort of have to nail, I hate to put it this way, but like, surprise, you're another sad queer character who exists wholly in the

• 50:12Speaker 10

  past. We need you to exist here and stand out from the other sad gays that our show has had. Can you do it?

• 50:20Alex Cranz?

  No, but that's, that's true. Like, like-

• 50:22Speaker 10

  You and I are two queers who watch a lot of media and we consume a lot of queer, like sad queer media in particular. And it's like-

• 50:29Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 50:30Speaker 10

  You get like one in a show, it's like, all right, you've used your, your ticket to sad queer town, do something a little different. And for this show to be like, oh, we're going back for another one.

• 50:39Speaker 09

  What do we do now?

• 50:42Speaker 09

  We're gonna figure it out.

• 50:44Speaker 10

  I think that in focusing on like, a young lesbian romance between two teenage girls in the apocalypse, that in and of itself already fundamentally shifts what kind of story is being told, right? Like-

• 50:55Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 50:56Speaker 10

  This episode was really sort of great because it picks up at a, it's not really showing you the origins of their friendship and their bond. We sort of meet them. Riley is essentially like, gone missing and everyone assumes that she's dead.

• 51:10Speaker 09

  Are you okay? I'm fine. I just ran away for a bit. That's all.

• 51:13Speaker 10

  So many of these scenes kind of reinforce that. The loneliness that Ellie leads with, that hard loneliness, that hardened loneliness that she leads with, that was coming and fits and starts here. When this episode opens, you know, we're seeing that she's being bullied by these other kids at school and she's, you know, she's whooping these bullies asses, which is great. But she's also really sort of in pain in a way that she thinks she's never really going to be able to pull herself out of until Riley shows back up.

• 51:39Speaker 09

  Tonight, I'm gonna show you the four wonders of the mall.

• 51:43Alex Cranz?

  I think what's interesting, if we compare and contrast this with the Bill and Frank episode, because I think there's a lot to compare and contrast there, right? Is that this episode is much more about highlighting that loneliness.

• 51:53Speaker 10

  Hmm.

• 51:54Alex Cranz?

  And so we really feel like the stakes to her saving and protecting Joel in this episode, and in the episodes that are going to follow, has to hit a lot harder. And I think both actresses just did a really, really fantastic job of nailing this relationship and making us feel something so that her loneliness and her stakes are all kind of there for the rest of this, for this next big arc that Ellie has to experience.

• 52:20Speaker 10

  Something that this episode really sort of highlights, and I think in a really beautiful, subtle way, it does sort of get into how being born into this fundamentally changes a person. And it's not a change that any of those people themselves can perceive, but it is something one imagines that adults like Joel and Tess could see in kids like Ellie, like, oh, you moved through the world differently as a child, and we all know why. And there's nothing that any of us can really do to change it because there's no amount of like shielding, or coddling, or making things relatively okay that can really counterbalance growing up in the apocalypse. You know what I mean?

• 52:57Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 52:57Speaker 10

  Watching the show, it's difficult to understand like what the Fireflies are entirely, but this episode does a solid job of really conveying to you how life is so shitty that working with the Fireflies seems like a viable option for Riley.

• 53:09Alex Cranz?

  And there's just enough hope, particularly in her relationship with Ellie, there's just enough hope there that you can feel kind of the hope, but always she comes back to this, this core weariness.

• 53:19Speaker 10

  There's a weariness, but there's also this pragmatism, right? Which I really love. One of my least favorite tropes in post-apocalyptic fiction is where kids wander outside of the zone, like, let's go do dangerous things.

• 53:30Alex Cranz?

  You little dumb asses.

• 53:31Speaker 10

  Why, why, why would you do that? Like, your existence up until this point suggests to me that you don't do stupid things like this, but apparently I'm wrong. But with this, because the show has really established, like, look, in order for the QZs to function the way they do, runners have to be able to go outside regularly, right? Kids like Ellie and Riley are growing up, understanding that there are people going in and out of the boundaries regularly. And presumably they, you know, some of them get jazzed up to do it themselves. And for it to be like, hey, do you want to come to like, do you want to come to the mall with me? Do you want to come to the mall and make the most noise possible? Again, not smart, not smart at all. In the context of the episode, it does kind of play like, look, I know you and I are really accustomed to being no nonsense. Let's not do stupid shit, but do you just want to do the tiniest bit of stupid shit together?

• 54:15Alex Cranz?

  They just have so much fun and happiness that they accidentally wake up a zombie and get bit. No, no, no, no, no, no.

• 54:26Speaker 10

  We don't have to see it. And that just sort of goes back to how this show understands, or rather, this show has really stuck to its commitment to be about human emotions and not so much the gore, the gruesomeness. I'm torn on that because I wrote this in my review. Personally, I wanted to see more zombies, or rather, I wanted to see more fungus. They don't need to be fighting them. Like truly, if I just saw bloaters walking down the street, because they get around, right? They're not always fighting, like just show me hordes. And like a couple of them are special zombies, but the show has decided not to do that. I get it. But every time there is one of these sort of like, ah shit, I got bit. It does always hit really hard. So I have to say like, it's the show's doing a good job with that.

• 55:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's nice. I think we've had probably what? Two really graphic death by zombies from characters that we actually like. And that was Cass and then Sam. And otherwise it's been like doing a real kindness. You're just going, you've seen all these other ones. You don't need to see this teenage girl turn and her friend like sobbing as she has to kill her. Like, we can skip that. You can, you can just imagine that.

• 55:35Speaker 10

  The casual, oh yeah, she got got to that quality to how Kathleen got gotten in just like the chaos of the zombies coming out of the ground. I love that the show is just like, here's a big bad that you need to be worried about. And then by the end it's like, yeah, and then, you know, a random zombie just jumps on her. We'll not talk about her anymore.

• 55:56Alex Cranz?

  Well, speaking of things coming out of the ground and then everybody talking about it furiously, let's, let's talk about this. Is that my segue for Marvel and Ant-Man and Marvel fatigue?

• 56:07Speaker 02

  I used to ask myself a lot of questions. Scott, you're a Dex Con. How are you an Avenger? That doesn't make sense.

• 56:14Alex Cranz?

  Because Ant-Man Quantumania, you and I both saw it. I liked it more than you did. You were like, this is fine. And I was like, this is solid, like BB plus. And most people do not feel that way about it.

• 56:24Speaker 10

  You and I have been talking about this movie for the past week. And every time you've come talk to me, I'm like, Cranz, my goodness, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I don't have any space in my mind for Quantumania anymore. And it wasn't until this weekend that I looked and saw that like, it's not that it's being review bombed, people just do not care for this movie.

• 56:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 10

  People are passionately against Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania. I get it. I get it to a certain extent. It is not my favorite film from Marvel Studios by any stretch of the imagination, even though I don't think it's Marvel's worst film. I think it is a film that is suffering from when it comes out in the grand scheme of things. Like if we were to anthropomorphize Marvel films, I think that Black Widow and Quantumania would be sitting at a table by themselves, saying, wow, look at how they've done us dirty.

• 57:11Alex Cranz?

  Just refusing to make eye contact with all the other movies around them.

• 57:15Speaker 10

  Truly, truly. You know, Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania, it is the third Ant-Man film, I guess, finally sort of making good on like the promise of the quantum realm. I went into this thinking like, this is going to be the one that finally kind of sort of tries to explain what the quantum realm is. Is it just a waystation for time travelers? Let's find out. And Quantumania says, not just that, it's essentially the microverse, right? Comic book fans, I'm not going to get into what the microverse is, but TLDR, it is an entire universe, but tiny.

• 57:43Alex Cranz?

  The secret universe beneath ours. Yeah, it gets, it like moves right past the science. There's like a minute of science and then it's like, no, we're just going to go do Journey to the Center of the Earth, but with tons more CGI.

• 57:56Speaker 10

  You see Journey to the Center of the Earth. I see Osmosis Jones. It's your standard Marvel film, right? We get sucked into a strange place where there is a villainous type character who has complicated motivations, who is terrorizing people. In this case, it's Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, who is, he's conquered the quantum realm. And at one point, he was very good friends with Janet Van Dyne, Michelle Pfeiffer, who you know from the second Ant-Man movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp. She got out of the quantum realm in the second movie and didn't tell anybody anything about it. And this movie is like, yo, Janet, what was going on down there? And all of this is, again, all of this is just your, this is all very standard Marvel fare.

• 58:38Alex Cranz?

  I would definitely say of all of the Marvel, like, trilogies, little sections, Ant-Man, pound for pound, is still the strongest.

• 58:46Speaker 10

  No.

• 58:47Alex Cranz?

  Because Iron Man 2, I like, I think Iron Man 2 is significantly worse.

• 58:51Speaker 10

  Oh, it is.

• 58:52Alex Cranz?

  And so like, it drags, it drags down the Iron Man franchise more than Quantum Mania drags down the Ant-Man franchise.

• 59:00Speaker 10

  And the promise of Quantum Mania is like, one, I feel like Quantum Mania and Multiverse and Madness are two of like, the better names that Marvel has ever had. Like, oh shit, what's going on? And they both just under-delivered in big ways. But that's what I was saying. So the confluence of factors, right? It's the third movie in a franchise, which can go either way. It can be a great, like, we can, you can Ragnarok it and be like, oh shit, let's revitalize things and bring everybody in. Or you can Iron Man 3 it and sort of just kind of.

• 59:27Alex Cranz?

  Wrap it up.

• 59:28Speaker 10

  Right. There's that going on for it, but there's also been a gradual shift in the way that Marvel makes movies, right? If you go back and watch the first Ant-Man movie, it's set predominantly in San Francisco, right? We are moving through the real, the regular human world and playing with perspective and size in ways that are comedic, right? Oh my God, Tom's a tank engine is humongous. Look at that, so crazy. Scott Lang's going down a pipe. That's cool. We can all recognize what that is. You know what I mean? We can recognize what a lot of those set pieces were, sort of what the jokes are meant to be. Here in Quantum Mania, everything is set in the quantum realm. And while this could have been an opportunity to explain sort of what the quantum realm is, what it does, it's literally just a big CGI fest.

• 1:00:11Speaker 10

  My impression, watching this, everything looks as if it was shot on a soundstage, partially because the lighting.

• 1:00:17Alex Cranz?

  And also it was shot on a soundstage.

• 1:00:19Speaker 10

  Well, but you know what I mean.

• 1:00:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Speaker 10

  Everything is just lit so aggressively that it looks like it's a staged play, which it shouldn't, right? When you're throwing this much expensive VFX at something, right? This is a lesson that James Cameron understands very well. When you're going to be that expensive, it has to look real. And the challenge is settling on a reality to sort of shoot for, right? It's not, when we go into an Avatar, The Way of Water, we are not looking for shots of reality that gel with our own experience of Pandora, because we haven't been there, right? We are looking for something that has determined what its reality is going to be, and then done everything in its power to make that reality look organic

• 1:01:03Speaker 10

  and living and breathing, so much so that you are tricked into thinking, oh, this looks real, right? When people say that The Way of Water looks realistic, I think to myself, point to me in the movie where it was realistic. Please show me, show me, show me, show me. You may have an argument when it comes to the way that the light is refracted through the water. Sure, but everything else is sort of ridiculous. It's just that it's all working in concert together to create an illusion. Quantum Mania, there are many, so this is not a spoiler because you've seen it in the trailer. The Lang family, everybody, right? Everybody gets sucked in the quantum realm. It's underwhelming, and part of it is because a lot of these things are difficult to visualize. I was thinking this watching one of the latter Hunger Games movies over the weekend,

• 1:01:47Speaker 10

  where no one knew what they were acting against. And it's, you can say that it's the actor's job to be able to know, but it is hard to conjure the emotion of being in, of being chased by a wall of black liquid or being in the quantum realm, surrounded by amoeba people. So everyone is doing their best job at being like, wow, there's. Energy spirals in the sky and yet it does not read on the screen. And I think that a lot of the negative reaction to this film, it stems from the fact that the creation of the illusion is just so subpar in multiple ways throughout the film that you, or rather that audiences are just like, huh, this is the third Ant-Man movie, isn't it? Huh, no one has talked about what's going on with that eternal hand coming out the planet,

• 1:02:32Speaker 10

  have they? I guess Marvel is kind of sort of entering a weird spot and not fulfilling, you know, my expectations. And that's fine, but I don't think that it's fair entirely to blame it solely on Quantumania.

• 1:02:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think, I think the fatigue is separate from, from this particular movie. I think like this movie, that the flaws of this movie highlight that fatigue because people are tired of things with no stakes. And the stakes have gotten so cosmic, they've gotten so big in the Marvel universe that they've gone right back around to not having, not really having stakes.

• 1:03:07Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:03:08Alex Cranz?

  They're not grounding it enough. And so they try to, they try to get like, Michelle Pfeiffer, bless her heart, she is working.

• 1:03:14Speaker 10

  She's great.

• 1:03:15Alex Cranz?

  To give this film stakes, yeah.

• 1:03:17Speaker 10

  Part of the issue with Quantumania is that there are too many people in it. We have Ant-Man and the Wasp, cool. We have Scott's daughter, Cassie, cool. We've also got the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym and his wife, Janet Van Dyne, who have drama with their daughter, Hope, that is being addressed in this movie. And I'm sure that there's a flowchart somewhere in Marvel HQ being like, here's how it's all going to work together perfectly and synergizing. It totally could have, it just didn't here. Do I want to see cool old man, Michael Douglas, commanding armies of ants? Sure, but I also want to see, and I say this in the Marvel branding sense, I want to see like old woman Janet in the quantum realm, you know, shooting stuff with her blasters. And the film, you can tell that the film is trying to play in all of these spaces, but it can't commit to any one of them. And in doing so,

• 1:04:01Speaker 10

  A lot of the stories, they are all addressed and touched upon to equal levels of depth, I think, but not quite deep enough for any of them to really hit or land, which would be fine if this was like the second hit man movie, I kind of feel. But for the, this is the one that kicks off the next phase and this is the one where we're seeing Kang the Conqueror in full action. It's like, all right, well, let's focus on that because that kind of seems to me like it's important, no?

• 1:04:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it felt like the film got kind of dragged down by the expectations of the over the overarching plot. So it felt more like when you're watching, you're watching your little show and I'm going to refer to like the CW, DC Universe shows, you're watching your little show, you're having a good time and then suddenly everything shifts because they've got to go serve their purpose to the big crossover episode.

• 1:04:50Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Alex Cranz?

  And it's that same feeling of like, okay, but like I was Supergirls, I got this whole thing going on and I'm really excited about this plot and now I gotta suddenly worry about the Flash. And like, I didn't ask for that.

• 1:05:01Speaker 10

  And that's kind of how the movie's supposed to work, but it's like at the beginning, I'm thinking to myself like, oh no, like I'm Ant-Man and I'm super famous and I don't know what to do with my life and I kind of sort of don't have a relationship with my daughter. I'm like, oh, Scott Lang, just, I want this, like, give me, give me this. And I imagine that Marvel, Kevin Feige's had many a conversation about this. How do you start to seed the universe with the new big bad, right? Because pre Thanos, the Marvel movies were just like, oh, like Thor got his hammer back. Oh, look at that, Iron Man is still alive. And then at one point, it was just Thanos just showed up, truly a purple man just showed up. It's not that it didn't make any sense, but there was no warning. The purple man showed up, the nerds lost their minds and Marvel said, we got him.

• 1:05:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 10

  The difficulty with all these things, once you, you know, pulling off a trick ones does not ensure its success again. And now Marvel has tried to do, Marvel has tried to do something similar by having a Kang variant pop up at the end of Loki, but it just hasn't quite stuck. It's like, all right, well, so what?

• 1:06:00Alex Cranz?

  I don't think Making King, the big bad is the problem, right? Like Jonathan Majors is just killing it. But they're trying to build, they're trying to set up a multiverse. And the thing is, we've seen a lot of multiverses at this point. Like, we as audiences are familiar with them. Say what you will about the CW shows. It did a really good multiverse and it did it well. And it did a super entertaining job. Spider-Man Into the Multiverse, that does a really good job of doing multiverses. And we're seeing all these, we've seen some other multiverses out there too, right? But the Marvel one is just weird. It's not gelling. And I think part of that is because we don't care about any of the other characters in the multiverse. They're all just like, what, canon fodder? And then it seems to take like the impact of Kang, diminish the impact of Kane? Because there's a ton of Kings.

• 1:06:45Alex Cranz?

  So it's like, okay, which is like the big bad?

• 1:06:48Speaker 10

  I have said this in public before. My interest, my investment, rather, in the MCU started to diminish once characters I liked started to disappear, either because the actors who played them died or because Wanda became bad and then she left and then she died. And now I'm just kind of like, all right, well, I don't really know why I'm here anymore. I think part of the fatigue is people don't like having to keep track of all of this. I think it's not that people don't want to do the work. People aren't willing to do the work, rather, of watching a Disney Plus show here, seeing a movie there. But the expectation is that that work is going to be rewarded at some point or that there's going to be some sort of payoff to it.

• 1:07:28Speaker 10

  And this phase in particular right now has definitely felt like, I know that the official Marvel line is, this is the multiverse saga. This feels like the holding pattern saga, more so than anything else, right? This has felt like, everybody's got to have kids and then we're going to have the kids set up for the future. And then we're going to introduce the next big bad and then everything can start coming together. And for like the nerdiest of nerds, sure. But for your average casual fans who are just like, I want to see The Avengers, right? People who expect to see a team of superheroes and want to get their money's worth. Like, none of these solo projects, they want to see sweeping shots of people standing back to back, saving the world. We haven't quite gotten there.

• 1:08:08Alex Cranz?

  We haven't. Part of that is we're seeing the scaffolding of this. We're seeing the structure of Disney creating this new storyline, right? Like, Quantum mania, I think one of the things that is probably most difficult for people is that they know they're being set up. They know that this is a setup movie. There's emotional payoff, right? We see that that that relationship between Scott and Cassie take a turn and he starts to trust her as being a superhero. And we see Hope kind of fix things a little with her mom, kinda. But for the most part, it feels like, no, we're in this holding pattern and we know exactly why we're in this holding pattern, because there's going to be more movies and they need to save some of the plot for those movies. Whereas those first couple of phases in the Marvel Universe,

• 1:08:53Alex Cranz?

  those didn't feel like we're getting the band together, but hold up a second because we got to make sure everybody's contracts are signed and we're good to go. Those first ones were just like, oh, wow, look at all these characters and now they're all coming together. This is crazy. And like the Guardians of the Galaxy are here. What do they do? This is wild. And now it's like, okay, most of these other ones, by the end of the film, people have not grown. Or they've grown and then are abruptly murdered.

• 1:09:15Speaker 10

  Right, or they're pulled into space for a space tribunal. And it's like, okay, sure, I guess we'll see that in seven years.

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and and it's just, it's, I get why people are fatigued, especially if you didn't, if you haven't had to already do all of this reading comic books. Like a lot, you and I, we're like, it's a little tiring, but we've been doing this for years because we read comic books. And this is how comic books handle big stories and it's really irritating and we hate it. And Marvel's like, yeah, it is really irritating and you do hate it, but it sells comics. So we're going to do the exact same thing for films.

• 1:09:47Speaker 10

  But you saying earlier about the scaffolding, I think that's so interesting because you're right. Like, thinking back to, I'm like, what is the most interesting thing that Marvel has put out recently? Or the thing that's like lit me up the most? And I think the, when we're talking about the MCU proper, I'm still kind of stuck on Ms. Marvel, right? Because it was, it just felt really fresh and sort of really new for the space. But in that last episode, when you hear the theme song from the X-Men playing, it's so interesting because at one point in time, that would have just been like, uh, ha, ha, the X-Men are showing up, you guys, get excited.

• 1:10:21Alex Cranz?

  An Easter egg and you're like, oh, nice.

• 1:10:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, and now it's like Kamala's a mutant. What does this mean for everybody? When are the X-Men coming up? How is Kamala going to become a part of them? And part of that is. It's our own fault, right, for being the speculative rumor-hungry nerds that we are. But the studios play into it now, right? Like, it's very much intentional, and it has the unintended consequence of making everything sort of feel inconsequential. Not inconsequential, but when you have your focus so firmly fixed on the future, the present doesn't mean quite as much, right? So, thinking to myself, I'm still stuck on, is Kamala a mutant? We have a poster for the marbles. They're all going to space together, and she's got a new costume. And I'm thinking to myself, what's going on with your genetic makeup? Right?

• 1:11:05Speaker 10

  And I think, like, that's good synergy to a certain extent, but I think that it's not always ideal, because you are sort of keeping your eye on the horizon. So, the entire time watching Quantumania, to your point, it's a set of movie, I'm thinking, well, the Kang dynasty is coming, right? No matter how this movie ends, I know that Kang, one of them, is going to succeed in some way that necessitates the Avengers teaming up to try to take him down. And that's definitely an exciting prospect for me Kang fan. But for me, person who was trying to give Scott Lang another try, I'm like, all right, Scott Lang, show me what you got. But I looked at my watch a couple of times while I was watching the movie, I'm not gonna lie.

• 1:11:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I did too, and I would give it a, I'd still give the movie a solid B. But that is because I just love whenever somebody goes to buy a new planet and sees a meat puppy.

• 1:12:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, thank you, thank you, Charles, as always, for popping on and talking to me about what's going on in the pop culture universe.

• 1:12:06Speaker 10

  Of course.

• 1:12:08Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thanks for listening. There's a lot more stuff from all of these conversations at theverge.com, and we put a bunch of links in the show notes. And if you have any thoughts, feedback, feelings, tips, you can always email us at [email protected], or you can call the hotline. It's 866-VERGE11. That's 866-VERGE11. We may answer a question you have in a future episode. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Menters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai Richard and I are gonna be back on Friday with more of the Verge crew to talk all about Mobile World Congress, gadgets and more. So, we'll see you then.

• 1:13:01Speaker 11

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