Samsung foldable software, eye-scanning orbs, and the future of the arcade

Today on the flagship podcast of texting on the outside screen: 03:28 - The Verge’s David Pierce chats with Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert about the software design of Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5. 32:54 - David takes a trip to the Dave & Busters to find out why the games on your phone ended up in your local arcade. 49:48 - Alex Heath joins the show to discuss his experience getting his eye scanned by an orb from Worldcoin, a crypto startup co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. 1:14:45 - Our hotline question of the week about wearables without screens. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of texting on the outside screen. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am doing a little belated digital spring cleaning. Normally, every few months, I try to back up all my important documents, put all my photos on an external hard drive that I keep in a safe, clean up my computer, all that good stuff. This year, I've done a bad job of keeping on top of all that. So in my spare moments this week, I'm trying to catch up. Today's project is to clean up some of the old stuff in my downloads folder. Actually, should we just do this together? You want to hear what's in here? This is sort of terrifying. Let's see. Okay, we go to "Date Added" and we go to "Oldest First." First thing I have is a bunch of PDFs of boring minutes from FCC meetings, for some reason. Not really sure what

• 0:47David Pierce?

  that's about. I have screenshots from a Slack redesign. I have a bunch of receipts from food that I don't think I actually care about at all. I have a photo of a weird thing that Starbucks did, where they made a thing that looks like, I think they were Galaxy Buds headphones case, but it looks like a latte. Sure. I have a picture of that meme that says, you know, "I'm not reading all that, but I'm happy for you," or "Sorry, that happened." I have that picture here somewhere. I guess I used that. I have a bunch of photos of apps that I can't even identify as I'm sitting here. Oh, one of them is the weather app for iPadOS. I have audio of my baby's first heartbeat. That's

• 1:30David Pierce?

  nice. I'll keep that. I have a bunch of pictures of the Lego NES system for, you know, obvious reasons. A lot of old pictures. I have a bunch of UPS labels that I for sure don't need anymore. This is the point, right? This is why I need to do this more than once a year, because otherwise I go back and I'm like, "Why do I have a 4MB image of a Kindle cover just chilling on my computer?" Do some spring cleaning, folks. It helps. Anyway, we have a great show coming up for you today. We're going to dig back into the new Samsung phones, the Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5, and try to figure out what they can actually do that makes them special, and see if, as a result, you might need more flip and fold. Then we're going to talk about arcades and how it happened that the games on your

• 2:14David Pierce?

  phone ended up in your local arcade. This is a thing I've been wondering about for a while and we finally, I think, got to the bottom of it. And finally, we're going to talk about WorldCoin, one of the most ambitious, bizarre, and frankly interesting crypto things you've ever seen. All that's coming up in just a sec, but first I have to do my number one favorite ritual in all of the digital spring cleaning process, which is just to select everything in my downloads folder that's either a screenshot, a zip file, or more than a year old, and just delete it all. Feels so good, y'all, and I have never regretted it once. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 3:53David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So, we talked on the show last week about the new Samsung phones, the Z Flip 5 and the Z Fold 5. But I want to dig back into them, especially now that we've had a chance to actually try the phones a bit, because I continue to think the most interesting question about these phones is just, what do they actually add to your life? This is true of all flip phones and foldable phones, by the way. Does having a small screen that folds into a big screen meaningfully

• 4:20David Pierce?

  Actually change what you can do with your phone and how you do it? What about a phone that folds closed? Does that do anything? So much of Samsung's efforts with the Z Flip and the Z Fold series, especially on the software side, have been about trying to find answers to that question. And I think every year it gets a little bit closer. So I want to see what's actually happened this year and whether we think Samsung's really getting there. And as always, when we're talking about this stuff, there are just two people in the world I really need here with me. The Verge's Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert. Hi Allison.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 4:54David Pierce?

  Dan, hello.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 4:56David Pierce?

  My flip and fold people, this is, this is what has happened. This is what we have come to, and it makes me very happy that anytime I want to litigate flip and fold phones, I have to do it with the two of you. So Allison, you have these phones now, correct? The last, I was on vacation last week, I listened to the podcast, you seem devastated that you did not have the phones.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  There was a devastating 48 hours where I did not have the phones than I was supposed to, but it's resolved, I have them all as well.

• 5:21David Pierce?

  Okay, I'm very happy to hear this. Dan, do you, did you get the phones this year?

• 5:25Speaker 04

  I did not. I'm living vicariously through Allison's experience.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  Samsung, how could you? That's what we're going to do here. We're going to spend the next 30 minutes talking about why Samsung didn't send you a review unit, Dan. This is going to be great.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  In all fairness to Samsung, I did get a pile of tablets this morning, so.

• 5:41David Pierce?

  One of which is, if I remember correctly, 40 to 60 inches in screen size.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Did you hang it on the wall?

• 5:49David Pierce?

  Okay, so y'all did a segment, Allison, last week about the phones, and we got a bunch of responses from people saying, "Talk more about how these things work", which I actually think is interesting and very instructive, because especially with flip and foldable phones, we're still in the like, "What are these things for?" phase. And Samsung, as we've talked about, is deeper down the "What are these things for?" road than just about anybody, and has some truly wild ideas. But I wanted to like get back into this idea of, are these things meaningfully different? Do they change the way that you experience and use and interact with your phone? Is it worth, right now, like the extra cost, but also the trade offs that you make in order to get one of these? Over the candy bar phones we've all spent with the last decade.

• 6:33David Pierce?

  So let's start with the flip because I think this year that seems to be the most interesting one. And also the place where Samsung pushed the hardest on the software. Allison, let's talk about the outside screen first because as we have talked about, the these big outside screens make a big difference. And in this case, it seems like just poking around and looking at videos, this thing Samsung did. I think it's called the the flex window where you can you can basically like swipe through a bunch of widgets on the outside. And you have this sort of big, almost smart watchy looking thing that you can mess around with. What's been your impression so far? How does it feel?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  It's great. And I'm going to compare it to the Motorola Razr because that's kind of the only reference I have. But my quick take is that I like how Samsung is handling widgets. The widgets that they have that you swipe through on the cover screen are just way better, like way more informative. You've got like weather and your calendar and set a quick timer. There's more ways to interact with them and view them. You can like pinch and zoom out and you'll see them all kind of in a tile interface. So that's that's one point for Samsung here.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  And this is, I want to preface like, this is like sicko territory of like using flip phones, running full apps. I'm liking better on the Motorola phone. And they're both kind of like, they both put the the option to run like a full app on the cover screen kind of out of sight. Because it's maybe not a great idea.

• 8:06David Pierce?

  No, it's objectively no baby involved. It's it's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  But it's surprisingly like Samsung kind of puts it at more of an arm's length. Like you can add Google Maps and messaging like without jumping through too many hoops. It's in the labs feature. But if you want to do anything beyond that, you have to and you have to go to the Galaxy store.

• 8:31David Pierce?

  Where everyone goes from time to time.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to download Goodlock and then you have to download like a specific module for Goodlock to enable a launcher for the cover screen.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  I just want to jump in and say, if you are a sicko. Goodlock is like your favorite best friend ever. Like, like Goodlock is the reason to create the stupid Samsung account to get to the stupid Samsung store and download it, especially if like you really want to like do anything with your Samsung device. I think the people that makes it, uh, the Goodlock modules and stuff are all a bunch of like really nerdy Samsung engineers that just want to do weird stuff with these, this hardware. And that is like, that is your path to do that. So, yeah, keep going, Allison. I just want to say, Goodlock is a lot of fun.

• 9:18David Pierce?

  Well, and I, I will say to that point, actually, one of the things that seems to have happened with this round of these phones is that Samsung is pushing more towards the thing it's gotten better at with the galaxies over the years, which is like giving you lots to do, but only sort of showing you the easy stuff. Or like for years, you, I, my experience is always, I would get Samsung's newest phone, it would boot up, I would log in with my Google account, and then it would present me 1,000 options. And I had to make a decision about every one of those 1,000 options. And they eventually got to the point where they're like, okay, there's still 1,000 options. And if you want to do stuff, there's more stuff to do on a Samsung phone than basically anybody else. But they've done a much better job of saying, here are the things we want to

• 10:03David Pierce?

  sort of put in front of you. And then here are the things we want to let you find. And I feel like Goodlock is a perfect example of like, it's great that that exists. I think it's awesome that that exists. That absolutely is not a thing that most people should even need to know exists.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they won't find it either. Like, right. To know about Goodlock means that you have to have been told about Goodlock, right? Either through a blog, or your friend, or

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, you typed into Google, how do I do this on my Samsung phone? Yeah. I just think it's interesting that Motorola like doesn't make it that hard. There's sort of An apps panel for the cover screen and then you you go in and you enable every app individually and it gives you a warning or something. It's like this might be a dumb idea, but it's much more like permissive. And there are certain apps I think are pretty good and like helpful to have on the cover screen like Google Maps, which you want to glance at some directions. Like I'm the worst when I get out of like, not in Seattle, but like out of a subway stop. I'm like, I have no idea which direction I need to be going. And that's when you just kind of like glance at Google Maps.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  I'm curious. I assume that both Motorola and Samsung have like a widget to like play, pause and skip your music tracks that's playing. But can you run? I guess you can force like Spotify to run if you wanted to like browse to a different playlist or something like that. Is that like a thing that is like feasible or doable or even a good experience? If you do that?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  So questionable whether it's a good experience. So the way Motorola does it, there's a Spotify widget, like specifically it's broken like most of the time. So it's not very helpful. You know, the bulk it, they both give you the like media player, like pause or fast forward, whatever happens to be playing. Yeah. If you want to browse Spotify or do anything beyond that and the Samsung phone, you got to do the good luck thing. And then I was just looking through it and like I got a pop up about some new Spotify feature. I was like, well, this is blocking the whole screen and I need to quit this app now. So not great on either.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  I suspect that stuff will get better. And I do think one of the interesting questions developers are going to have to ask is like, what is our outside screen experience going to be? Because the you can just run the full app thing is a useful hack. But if these phones are going to get popular and they're not there yet, but if they are going to get there over time, Spotify is going to have to figure out like, what is the closed screen experience and

• 12:38Speaker 04

  I don't think Spotify is ever going to figure that out.

• 12:40David Pierce?

  It may not.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  I think Samsung is going to have to figure that out. And then like Samsung is going to have to be like, we reformatted your app to fit this screen because I think that what's going to happen is the same thing that we saw with Android tablets forever and ever is that like, the companies are not going to really invest a lot in the app experience for the different sized screens that are not phone shaped and phone sized, but Samsung will do the legwork to like.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Allow you to run a window or allow you to split the screen in different ways, or make use of the larger screen, or in this case, the smaller screen in a way that is more practical and more useful. And I would be, I would not be surprised if we don't see like Spotify widget by Samsung that like, you know, kind of addresses those problems because Spotify won't do it, or Amazon won't do it, or whatever, you know, name your app developer.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  I think widgets, it's the year of the widget.

• 13:34David Pierce?

  It really is.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Let's just have more. Let's keep going with widgets.

• 13:37David Pierce?

  I'm, I'm into it. And so one, one more thing on the Google Maps thing, because I was watching a video in which they were all excited about Google Maps navigation on the outside screen. And it made me think, so if I have a flip phone and I open up my phone, or I guess I take my phone out of my pocket and I'm like, I need to navigate home. Am I gonna open up the phone, type it in, start the navigation and close it and then like dock it to the thing in my car? Am I gonna leave it open? Like, I don't know what the correct phone behavior is anymore. And it feels very weird in that sense. Like, to close my phone and then look at navigation seems weird, even though that's possible. And then it's like, if I want to add a stop, should I open my phone? Should I leave my phone closed? Does it not matter? Is this

• 14:22David Pierce?

  too many options? Like, I don't know. It just feels weird.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  I, I've definitely have those moments where I was, you try and do too many things on the cover screen and you're like, oh, okay, I've, I've pushed it too far. This is like, one too many things. It's just not a comfortable experience. Yeah, I, I find myself when I'm starting navigation or whatnot, you know, opening the phone, doing the like fiddly stuff. And then I think if I was driving with it, I would, I would keep it open. But if I'm walking, then I close it, put it in my pocket. And that's when I'm like, I might need to glance at something or check, you know, respond to a text message. It's sort of like a choose your own adventure. And I, I think there's, if you're going to buy a flip phone right now,

• 15:08Speaker 03

  I think you need a little bit of that kind of sense of adventure, or like, you're sort of excited about figuring those things out. You can use it and just out of the box, just have like, a fine experience with widgets. But I think like, the people who are gonna get the most out of it are kind of like, ooh, I have options. I can do this on the cover screen, or the inside screen, or run a app.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Can you take a call on the cover screen?

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And it goes automatically to the speaker phone.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Okay. So you're not holding half of a phone up to the side of your face.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Hello. Yeah. I don't answer the phone. So.

• 15:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just all robocalls. What's the, who's the trick question?

• 15:51Speaker 04

  I know with the Flip 5, one of Samsung's things is a new hinge. Is this hinge any more one-handable, flickable than we've seen in the past?

• 16:00Speaker 03

  I hate doing that. I've like, I don't know.

• 16:03David Pierce?

  No, because that's the, like, done right. That's the best part.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't enjoy it. Like, you gotta get your, I'm already putting my nails like under the screen in a way that I don't like. And I wouldn't say it's any better or worse. It's the same and I don't recommend it. I think it's a bad idea.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  I think we've talked about this before, but we need a button that you push a button on the side and you got the spring-loaded action.

• 16:27David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Like, you know, one of those switchblade combs.

• 16:30David Pierce?

  Give me the thing he has in the matrix. That is the answer. That is the correct answer. I totally agree. We should get off of the outside screen here in a sec, but customization is the other thing that Samsung made a big deal about, being able to change the background and move the widgets around and have it look like your thing. And obviously, like, this is, this is the lock screen of this phone in a super real way. Have you been playing around with it? What, what cool stuff have you discovered?

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I, I went pretty intense with it. Yeah. Like, I've got like the font. I've got a cute picture of my kid. I turned, there are a lot of options. And yeah, you can, you can treat it as like, first of all, there's an always on display. So that's an option you don't get on the Motorola. And you get little app, you know, icons for your notifications. You can turn on the battery percentage or turn that off. Yeah, it's pretty customizable and flexible. And you get to a point where you're like, which of these background colors goes best with this photo of my kid wearing sunglasses in a funny way? And I, I went down the rabbit hole this weekend. So I'm very pleased.

• 17:38David Pierce?

  Are y'all big lock screen customizers in general?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am. I get into it.

• 17:43David Pierce?

  I believe that. Dan, what about you?

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Yes, but I view it from the lens of productivity. Because I'm a huge nerd. I'm like, no, there are no kids on my lock screen.

• 17:54David Pierce?

  More widgets.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  What are, what are the most useful widgets? And what is the wallpaper that signifies I'm in work mode now? So that that's kind of how I do it. I know with Samsung and I know with Android 14, they added a bunch of like wallpaper lock screen customizations that I've not really played with a bunch, but at least on an iPhone, what I've done is set up a bunch of different ones that tie into the focus mode that I'm using at the current moment and then it switches. And so my weekend one has kids, but the weekday one doesn't.

• 18:23David Pierce?

  Dan Seifert loves his kids, but only on the weekends. That's the, that's the takeaway. No, my customization has been, I have discovered it is actually very powerful to not have app icons accessible to me. So all the customization I've done now is mostly on my home screen, which is just, I have one that I hit at the end of the workday that just makes it much harder for me to open Slack. And I've just discovered that even that tiny little bit of friction goes a very long way. So I've become a big believer in, in that kind of customization, but only really in the last like six months. All right, Alison, before we switch to the fold, anything else on the flip that you've noticed in terms of like, how you use it? I saw the, everybody's doing the, the new gesture where you can like flick a thing up to the top screen. So you can do stuff on the bottom screen. How does that work?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  You know, I, I go right for the camera and that's a thing I like on this form factor on the flip phones. And I'm just enjoying the hell out of it. Like you can, you can do some other things. You can make it like a little, like a little view camera where you're, you've got it folded in half and you're looking at the image on the bottom. You can record video like, I like that Becca pointed that out in our hands on. You can kind of flip it like a camcorder. All those things are, they're not new, but they're still here and I'm still enjoying them.

• 19:40David Pierce?

  And one question we've gotten a bunch is the transition from the different modes. If you're using something with it closed or you have it flipped around into one of the viewing modes, and then you open up the phone to use it like a normal phone. How does, how do all those transitions work?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  I'm not noticing, like, I think Samsung treats the two screens as two different sort of experiences more than Motorola. Like, if you're doing something on the cover screen and you open the phone, you're like, this is frustrating, I need to open the phone and do it. It'll open that app or whatever you were working on. But something, I think the Motorola phone does a little better is if you're, you're like in Google Maps and you set up navigation and you close the phone, Motorola will give you a little icon that's like, do you want to open this on the cover screen? And Samsung is just kind of like, you're done.

• 20:30David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Case closed.

• 20:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, I feel like in both directions, I would want some continuity there. And it's like, back to the Spotify thing, right? If I start playing Spotify and I close my phone, I feel like the correct thing to do would be pop up Spotify controls on the outside screen.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:45David Pierce?

  Or at least ask me if that's a thing that I want.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it might give you media controls at that point. I think the default behavior is to just like, the screen goes dark, you're done.

• 20:55David Pierce?

  So when you close your phone, Samsung is like, you are finished.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I think that's what I like most of the time. Cause I know with the folding, the fold and like the pixel fold and stuff like that, there are some people who like to like, close it and then continue what they're doing when it's closed. If I'm closing the device, I'm probably putting it down or putting it in my pocket or putting it in a bag or something like that. Like, that is my signification that, or signifier that like, I'm done doing what I'm doing. And if there's music playing in the background, it'll continue to play, that's fine. But I don't want it to like, light up again or throw something at me unless I pick up the phone again with intention to like, keep using it.

• 21:29David Pierce?

  You know what gesture I love to that end is on the flip five, if you have it closed and you get a phone call, you silence it by putting your hand over it? Kind of like you do on the, on the, on the watch where you just like, cover it with your hand and it shuts down. I think that should be like a universal gesture for all things, right? Like-

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Talk to the hand!

• 21:46David Pierce?

  Literally, like, that is a way of just saying sort of, I am finished. Like, I love so much.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  It's a power move.

• 21:52David Pierce?

  It really is.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:54David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  It's like, no more out of you.

• 21:56David Pierce?

  Like, whatever you're doing, just stop it.

• 22:00David Pierce?

  Exactly. So, all right, let's talk about the fold a little bit. Dan, I'm particularly curious for you as the fold sicko of our little family here. Anything in the fold five that blows your mind? It seems like the big upgrade here this year was the hinge. Was there any software stuff we're excited about?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  So Alison can confirm, but I believe that there are two software features, both of which are going to be coming to the four and maybe the three and the two or whatever. The first one is you get on the taskbar at the bottom, which is like a permanent strip of your apps. You get another slot for a recent app. So instead of like two or three, it's now up to four, maybe five now, which is cool.

• 22:37David Pierce?

  I will just say the fact that you led with that as the first software feature is not super exciting.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Other software feature that I'm aware of is if you are organizing your home screen, you can now like tap and hold and pick up an app and then use another finger to like swipe to a different screen and then drop the app, which you've been able to do on an iPhone or an iPad. And it makes it a lot easier to like, kind of organize your home screen. Samsung's now added that. Otherwise, it's got a new hinge.

• 23:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  I'm going to be like perfectly blunt here. I think that Samsung should have done so much more this year than it did. It needed to do the hinge, like that was a necessary thing. They need to finally get rid of the gap and they did that. And I'm happy that they did and they made it ever so slightly lighter or whatever. But the processor upgrade is just your standard Qualcomm chip bump. I don't think anybody really had any performance issues with the four. So like, are you going to notice any difference in the five? No, the camera's exactly the same. The screens are basically exactly the same. The software is almost identical and it's going to be backported to the older devices. So at least for people that already have a fold four, even with Samsung's like incredible trade in promotions, it's really hard to justify buying a fold five. And I, like, I own a fold four and I have no intention to buy a fold five.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  And it's really interesting that this is the year when Samsung finally has some competition and it's done maybe its most iterative update to the, to the phone ever. And all of the updates have been really iterative, but this one is most iterative. So I was really hoping Samsung would do more, kind of knowing that Google had the Pixel Fold. All knew Google was working on the Pixel Fold for like two years. Like that's, it's not a surprise.

• 24:12David Pierce?

  But on the software front, Samsung is still a mile ahead of Google, right? And we talked about this with the Pixel Fold, like the Z Fold's ability to move apps around is so much better than anything on any other Android large screen device. And in a lot of ways, it's better than the iPad. Like it's, it's very good at letting you move a bunch of things around on the screen and put apps where you want them to go. And like it's, it seems a little clunky in spots, but like it's very powerful.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and like, like we were talking about with Goodlock, like we said on the show before, Samsung's software makes the Fold phone feel like a PC that you shove in your pocket with all of the like good and bad that comes along with that. So if you want a portable computer, like the Fold 5 is going to do all of that stuff just as well as the Fold 4 did. So like, if you don't have one already, sure, you're getting a slightly refined experience this year. But if it didn't like really like, if you weren't sold by that pitch a year ago, I don't think the Fold 5 is going to change anything in that matter.

• 25:11David Pierce?

  That's fair. Allison, have you noticed anything that feels different in actually using the thing?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  No, it's feels very much like using the Fold 4. I mean, just coming from the Pixel Fold more recently, I do notice that it's quite a bit lighter than the Pixel Fold, which the Fold 4 was lighter also. So I'm, I'm appreciating that. The kind of like, yeah, there's more like drag and drop options. You can kind of like, there's a two-handed copy and paste, which didn't work the first three times I tried it, but I finally got it working.

• 25:47David Pierce?

  Wait, explain, what, what is a two-handed copy? Is this, is this a good thing?

• 25:51Speaker 03

  So the, the, you have a picture in the like Samsung gallery app and you can do that like long press on a person and it'll cut it out thing.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  I see. Sure.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  And then you can, you can leave that finger there and grab another app, open another app with your other hand. And it'll just like drag and drop the image to the new app and voila. I don't know, but like Dan said, that's going to come to the older fold phones soonish. They never say. So yeah, there's, there's really not much here. If you, if you have a fold four, if you were sort of on the fence before, and this year's the year to buy a foldable for some reason, like, yeah, get, get the fold five. That's nice, but that's about it.

• 26:41David Pierce?

  It is interesting how quickly the fold in particular seems to have settled into the like, it's very mature and now just gets slightly better every year thing. And maybe there are more sort of big turns to have, but it feels like with, you know, regular smartphones, it took a lot longer to get to the like, we know what this thing is, and it's just going to sort of slowly improve over time phase. And Samsung is already there.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  I mean, I think Samsung thinks Samsung is there.

• 27:05David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  There are absolutely a list of things that I would have loved for them to address on the fold four that they did not on the fold five.

• 27:12David Pierce?

  Tell us the list, Dan. That's what we're here for.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  All right. So this doesn't matter as much to me, but it matters to the vast majority of people. The camera is exactly the same. And the camera we know is not as good as the cameras that you can get on other phones for half the price. They did nothing there to improve that. So like, that could have been an improvement. They did make it a little bit lighter. It's 10 grams lighter, two nickels, as Alison says. That's great, but it's also like barely perceptible. And we've seen phones from China, from Honor and Huawei and Xiaomi and other brands that are noticeably lighter, like 40 grams lighter. They're thinner. They are, they are more pocketable and, and portable. Would have loved to see improvements there. It's great that they fixed the hinge, but it's still kind of a chunky, thick phone.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  The outside cover display is a big blocker for a lot of people in that it is still weird and narrow and awkward.

• 28:03David Pierce?

  It's still a TV remote.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's still a TV remote. I kind of understand why Samsung is using that. And we talked about this in the past of like, when you open the phone, the screen experience is better because it matches your apps better and things like that. And that kind of dictates the cover's geometry. Trillion dimensions. But again, we've seen phones from China that have a portrait oriented inside display, but have larger outside displays that are wider and more normal aspect ratios and are easier to use. So I would have loved to seen Samsung make some progress or forward momentum there. They still are not dust resistant. I know Allison just wrote a piece on the site that it looks like they are exploring ways to make them dust resistant, but they're still the same level

• 28:47Speaker 04

  of dust resistance as before. They still have the same kind of like construction on the inside of the screen panels and cover and like screen protectors and things like that. So you have to be careful with these and things like that. So like, there's a lot of progress. And I think what I would like to see is more experiments and more innovation from Samsung that we're not. They've kind of like settled into this. We're going to make very tiny tweaks to this formula because we screwed it up the first year and are very scared of screwing it up again. And so that's kind of like what we're getting. But another example, you still can't put the S pen in the phone. You have to buy a case to hold the S pen. And it's like external and they made the S pen smaller and they came up with a new case design to like hold it and stuff like that's great and

• 29:30Speaker 04

  all. Put a silo in the phone that you can put the S pen in like, like there's like so many things that they could be doing, but they are just like either planning them out over a 10 year period and doing one at a time, or they're just, they just feel like it's not worth the time. So I don't know. The last point is it's still $1800. And that is the biggest turn off to everybody that you talk about about this phone. They didn't move the price budget anywhere. There were rumors that it was going to be more expensive because of inflation and what have you. And they kept the price the same, which is great, but still $1800 or $2000 if you upgrade the storage or whatever it is, is still like just completely nonstarter for for very massive amounts of people. So like, why couldn't we get it to 1500 or 1400 or close to 1000, whatever?

• 30:14David Pierce?

  Well, and this goes back to why I think the flip continues to be the more interesting of the two phones at the moment, partly because they just did more to it this year, but also because I think even in the early days of these foreign factors where there's not some sort of instant App that's like if you if you buy a Z Flip, you can do this, this and this that you just straight up can't do on your normal Galaxy phone. It's an interesting tiebreaker, right? And like, kind of what you're talking about, Alison, that it lets you do different stuff, different ways. It gives you these kinds of new ideas about when your phone should work and how you interact with it and all this stuff. And if that appeals to you, terrific. You have to make what seems to be relatively small camera trade offs.

• 30:55David Pierce?

  And there is the dustproof issue, but you get something in exchange for that for about the same price. The fold comes with all of those trade offs and another eight or $900 in cost. And that's just tough. And so I think the thing we're at right now is it seems like the Flip 5 is a phone that a lot of people might actually stand in the store and think about buying instead of the S27000 or whatever we're going to get next. And I think that's really exciting. And it feels like, Alison, you and I have both written that like this is kind of the moment for flip phones. And it seems like the Flip 5 genuinely has a shot to be kind of the the first real one for a lot of people.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had some friends over this weekend and the phone was on the table. And generally, my friends are extremely uninterested in whatever phone I'm reviewing. But they were kind of like, what is this? You know, tell me more. And I think their reaction is totally different if I have the Z Fold out. It just sort of has, I think instantly, someone who's not super into tech or phones is like, oh, I can tell that's not for me. That that looks pretty intense. But the flip form factor is it's familiar. We had flip phones back in the day. We kind of know what that is. And and you can see immediately, like I'm showing them the widgets on the cover screen

• 32:17Speaker 03

  and how I opened the daycare app to sign my kid out without flipping the phone open. And the oohs and ahs from the crowd.

• 32:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think you're going to have to keep us posted on how your reviews come, because I wonder if there are big messy things left to be discovered. Because we are like, all these apps have to figure out how this is going to work. Samsung has to figure out how people are going to use it. And like, as all the flip and fold phones get more popular, we're just going to discover new ways in which they're still early and broken. I think it's going to be fascinating.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm excited.

• 32:52David Pierce?

  All right. Well, thank you both. I am confident that we will have more reasons to talk about flips and folds in the next few months. So we'll be back soon. But thank you. Thank you.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 33:03David Pierce?

  All right, we got to take a break and then we are going to come back with a little bit of an investigation into the present and future of arcade games. We'll be right back.

• 33:17Speaker 01

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• 34:21David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Have you ever seen those videos on TikTok of people playing that arcade game? I don't know what it's called, but it's the one where you just put the quarters in and then you try to use that quarter to push a bunch of other quarters off the edge.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Leave a like on the video for that win right there. That is amazing.

• 34:42David Pierce?

  The game is sort of dumb, and watching other people play it on TikTok is definitely dumb. But I had this phase where I was watching a surprising amount of it.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  This fell right off of the pusher. There was a massive tower of quarters sitting inside the coin pusher. I had to turn this $5 bill into 20 by winning it on the edge of this coin pusher.

• 35:00David Pierce?

  There's just something about seeing the quarters, like, teetering over the edge, that is surprisingly riveting, at least for me.

• 35:11David Pierce?

  Anyway, the TikTok algorithm pretty quickly decided that I must love arcade games, which isn't untrue. I do like arcade games. I especially used to play that old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side-scroller one all the time, but it's been a few years since I was in an arcade at all. But I started seeing these videos all the time, just of people hanging out at Dave and Buster's, trying to hack the games to get more tickets.

• 35:36Speaker 07

  Yo, today we'll be showing you guys how to get women and Dave and Buster's tickets with the boy. You already know, let's get it.

• 35:42David Pierce?

  Or just straight up cheating. There's a lot of TikTok videos of just people cheating. Like, there's one I saw where this guy is just climbing into the machine where you throw the ball to knock the clowns over, and just knocking all the clowns over with his hands.

• 35:55Speaker 08

  This dude out here really cheating.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  I guess that's fun. I also came across a lot of people claiming to have tricks to get you enough tickets to get a PS5, and one guy who calls himself the Arcade Goat, who says he got 10 Oculus quests just from playing arcade games.

• 36:16David Pierce?

  In watching all of these videos, I started noticing games I recognized. Not arcade games I recognized, but games I know because they're on my phone.

• 36:28David Pierce?

  Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crossy Road. I saw console games like Halo and Mario Kart 2. This all seemed really strange to me. Why would I go all the way to an arcade to pay a bunch of money to play games I already have on my phone? Is it just for the tickets? Like, are people making these games so that people will play these games just to get a PS5? That seems strange. Is it just fun that it's louder and not in my house and they serve beer? It's all very confusing to me. So, one afternoon, I went to the arcadiest arcade I could think of, the Dave and Buster's location in Times Square in New York City, where I would only go for journalism. Alright, the Dave and Buster's here is located on the third floor.

• 37:09David Pierce?

  So I'm on an escalator going up to Applebee's and then Dave and Buster's. This is actually one of the biggest and in a lot of ways, most popular arcades in New York City. You can go to places like Barcade where they are really focused on retro stuff, but this is just all about gaming. So here we go. Eventually, I made it past the Applebee's, passed all the tourists, got upstairs to D and B's, waited for my turn and went in and had a look around. Alright, I made it into the arcade and I already cannot believe how many games I recognize from console games and even just pop culture, like there's Tomb Raider and Star Trek and Jurassic World and all that kind of stuff, but especially from mobile. There's a Crossy Road game, there's a Flappy Bird game that they call Dave and Buster's Floppy Tickets,

• 37:53David Pierce?

  even though it's just straight up Flappy Bird, love that. There's a Mario Kart game that is one of those arcade games with the chairs and the steering wheel and you actually drive. There's Candy Crush. You can just stand here and play Candy Crush. And it is precisely the same game I would play on my phone, except the screen is bigger and the room is louder and it feels more exciting somehow. After that, I did a couple more laps. I played some Crossy Road and some Mario Kart Arcade GP and then I played more Mario Kart and then after that, I think I played more Mario Kart. Alright, as expected, Mario Kart in an arcade is amazing. It makes me want to get one of those big $10,000 racing simulator kits, but not play Gran Turismo or any cool games. Just go hard into Mario Kart.

• 38:37David Pierce?

  It's also maybe the most popular game in this entire arcade. It's either that or the air hockey, but there is a long line for Mario Kart and I keep winning, so they keep letting me back, but I figured I'd give somebody else a chance. It's not that there are no older school arcade games left anymore. Dave and Buster's still has Ski Ball and the Papa Shot Basketball one and a new and kind of high def Space Invaders and Pac-Man and a bunch of those racing games where you just sit in the seat and grab the steering wheel. I will say though, there's a lot less pinball, a lot less of the side-scrolling games like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one that I loved and The Simpsons and that X-Men one that everybody

• 39:20David Pierce?

  used to play. Most of that is just not here anymore. And the real truth is the arcade, as it used to be, is mostly dead in general. We don't need to go too far into all of that, but the arcade as a place you used to go and hang out was a staple of American life for like decades. A huge portion of the gaming world as we know it now wouldn't exist without arcades. And now all we're left with is Dave and Buster's and a bunch of bar arcade things and not much else. The reason why that happened is pretty obvious, right? It's that we all started playing games at home on consoles and then on our phones. And why would I go all the way to an arcade and

• 40:01David Pierce?

  pay money just to play the same game I can play as long as I want for free in my living room? All of that is all the more reason I'm fascinated by these mobile games in the arcade. If Dave and Buster's and all these other arcades are having trouble convincing people to come out and play games at all, wouldn't it be the worst idea ever to make those games the same games you can already play on your phone? It's like, come pay us money to play the game you got for free already seems like the worst pitch of all time. And I think the best example of all those games in Dave and Buster's is probably Angry Birds.

• 40:39David Pierce?

  Angry Birds in general is one of those totally unavoidable franchises. You can play a million different versions of it on every imaginable screen and surface. You can buy Angry Birds cereal, you can get plush toys, there was an Angry Birds movie, and like a million other things I have very deliberately ignored over the years. So what's it doing in an arcade asking for my money? To answer that question, I called up the people who made that game.

• 41:04Speaker 09

  I am Drew Kraus. I am the COO and I run development here at Ice.

• 41:08Speaker 10

  And I'm Josh Kraus. I run our home arcade game sales, marketing and advertising here at Ice.

• 41:14David Pierce?

  Ice makes a lot of arcade games, including a bunch you probably know, like the one where you throw the ball and try to knock the clowns over that everybody on TikTok likes to cheat at, or the air hockey game that they have called Extreme Air FX. The company actually started with bubble hockey, which is apparently still super popular in arcades. And more recently, they also made a game called Angry Birds Arcade.

• 41:39David Pierce?

  The Kraus has told me that the whole mobile games to arcade trend has actually been happening for a while. And the reason is honestly pretty simple.

• 41:48Speaker 09

  You know, no variety. It gets you to walk up to it no matter what. So that's a huge, huge plus. Now, a lot of the arcades like it because it brings licensed brands to their location. A big facility like a Dave and Buster's who has 160 across the country, you know, they have movie studios coming to them saying, hey, Ghostbusters 19 is coming out. Can you guys do a Ghostbusters game? I mean, that's how Ghostbusters, you know, we're talking to Sony and looking at products and then Sony's talking to Dave and Buster's also saying, hey, I like Ghostbusters. Hey, we're doing a Ghostbusters. Let's do a Ghostbusters game. It just, sometimes it falls into place like that.

• 42:25David Pierce?

  So if you're trying to make games that will make people walk up to them, Angry Birds was a pretty easy win. It's one of the biggest games ever. So when ICE reached out to Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds, Drew said they started talking about an Angry Birds arcade game with one really specific question in mind. How do we build something you can't do at home?

• 42:46Speaker 09

  So I start to bring in physical attributes like, hey, what would Angry Birds be even better if it was Angry Birds Plus, right? So, all right, I actually want to launch a physical ball 10 feet across the room and hit a touchscreen monitor. And to me, that's where my brain starts going to...

• 43:03David Pierce?

  That mechanic he's describing is actually how Angry Birds Arcade works. You walk up to the game, you grab that mechanical slingshot in two hands, and then you aim and launch these pool ball sized balls with birds painted on them at the huge screen. When it hits the screen, the pigs go flying. Or at least, if you're any good, that's what happens. The best thing I can compare it to is like one of those golf simulators where you see people smack the ball into a screen, which then simulates where it goes and how far. It's like that. It's really fun and genuinely does feel different from swiping my finger on the screen.

• 43:41David Pierce?

  ICE's Drew Kraus told me that making these on-screen games more physical like that is a huge part of the job.

• 43:48Speaker 09

  You know, when you asked, "Hey, I saw a bunch of these games just show up in the arcade on a giant screen," I'm gonna say 90% of those, they lasted for about 60 to 90 days, lasted as far as they made money. Okay, you play it once, "Oh, this is the same thing I have on my phone, just giant." It gets on real quick.

• 44:05David Pierce?

  The other part of the job for anyone making arcade games is to make sure the game is not only fun, but fun to play over and over. Arcades want games that you'll play for a minute and then pay to play again, not pay once and play forever, or pay once and then immediately leave. Repeatability is the thing. That also means making games easy for people to figure out in the first place, because as Drew said, people expect to just walk up and start playing, especially a game they've seen before.

• 44:32Speaker 09

  When you're home on your phone, you can lose 100 times and not get frustrated. You go onto an arcade and, "Oh, I know what Doodle Jump is. I never played it." You go play it in the arcade, and you've gotta figure out puzzles. You're putting a dollar in, you're not happy. You know, sometimes you have to teach them how to play, opposed to expecting everybody can walk up to it and play. So, it took me and ICE a while to learn some of those nuances when we take what we think is easy, bring the app to the market.

• 45:01David Pierce?

  That means basically two things, as far as I can tell. Making the game skill-based as much as possible, so you're not just playing a slot machine every time you step up, and giving people tickets for their successes. That's how you get people to keep playing. Speaking of Doodle Jump, by the way, that's another game ICE worked on. Drew told me that at first, they had a ball, kind of like Golden Tee, to move things back and forth, but it landed on this big yellow joystick, which you slide from left to right to move your character as it jumps between things. That's the physical object, kind of like the slingshot in Angry Birds. Again, it's super simple, maybe too simple for me, actually. I'm not sure I'd spend a ton of money on Doodle Jump in an arcade, but it's actually been a huge hit for ICE.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  Anyway, with all of this in mind about physicality and big screens and all this different stuff, I went back out to a different arcade to see if I could make sense of all these games in a new way. Alright, it's been a few weeks and now I'm at a different arcade. This is the Fredericksburg Funland in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And after talking to some of the folks who make these games, I'm starting to see the mechanics they talk about everywhere. Fruit Ninja is here, it's called Fruit Ninja FX, and it's basically you just stand in front of a large screen and swipe on it the way you would in Fruit Ninja. And that's all fun and good, but the best ones of these games, and the ones I'm seeing the most people play, are the ones where they make it physical in some way. There's one game where all you do is try to explode something and launch someone out

• 46:32David Pierce?

  of a cannon, and they made this very cool lever that actually feels like you're pressing it, and it's different than it would feel if you were just playing it on your phone, even a really big version of your phone. There's a Space Invaders game, which is like from a million years old video game, but it's this huge screen and you actually sit there in a seat with a blaster. It takes the same mechanic, it's just these 8-bit aliens coming at you, but it feels bigger and cooler and different because it has this physical mechanic to it. This is the kind of thing I think about as we move all of the online, digital, screen-based culture into the world. How do you make this stuff more than just bigger screens but actually make it physical? Also, fun fact, the most popular thing here, again, is Mario Kart GP.

• 47:17David Pierce?

  But the one other one I want to talk about is Guitar Hero. This is the other one I keep seeing at all these arcades, and it might actually be the best, earliest example of this that I can think of. It's a video game, it's a thing that happens on a screen, but your controller is part of the game. You don't just touch or press buttons, you're actually playing guitar. And it works at home for the same reason it works in an arcade. It just feels like you're doing something, even though all you're doing ultimately is playing a game on a screen. It's very cool, I'm now seeing this absolutely everywhere I go. I love it. I really did think a lot about Guitar Hero through this whole process. And Dance Dance Revolution also, and really, everything Nintendo has done since the Wii.

• 48:00David Pierce?

  The gaming industry has been exploring ideas about how to make controllers more than controllers for a long time, and how to bring your body into the equation more and more. That's what the Kinect was, right? That's what the PS Move is, all these different ideas. And as VR gaming continues to become a thing, we're gonna get entirely new explorations of that idea. Mobile games, I think, maybe more than most, need a lot of help figuring that out. So many of the games we play now, whether it's Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, or more complicated things like Clash of Clans and Subway Surfers, they were built on swiping and tapping, but that's never been the most fun or immersive way to play these games. Even just looking at the App Store's top charts right now, it's fun to imagine how a game like Alto's

• 48:43David Pierce?

  Odyssey, or even something like Fortnite or Roblox, might go way beyond screens and controllers and just sitting at my TV. It won't work for everything, but I suspect the next turn for a lot of these games is going to be back toward the physical in that way. Figuring out how to build new mechanics, and new control systems, and new ways to bring more than just your finger into the game. Think about something like the Apple Vision Pro headset. I can basically guarantee you that there will be Angry Birds for the Vision Pro at some point. But it'll be a huge bummer if all that is, is a big screen you tap to do stuff. That just feels unambitious, feels like not enough. I don't really think arcades are gonna become what they once were. Playing games at home

• 49:28David Pierce?

  or on my phone is just too fun and too easy for me to venture back out every time I wanna play Angry Birds. But there's some part of me that kinda hopes I'm wrong, that physical gaming spaces do become a big thing again, and bring people back together in the real world, even to do screen-based things. Drew Kraus is obviously biased towards that perspective, since, you know, he makes arcade games, but I like the way he thinks about bringing together the best of both worlds.

• 49:54Speaker 09

  Let's stay in the reality, and if we can make you throw a ball instead of flicking on your phone, I think we won.

• 50:02Speaker 09

  I'm just trying to bring people back to being a kid and playing with physical stuff a game by adding in cool apps, cool ideas and video, right?

• 50:12David Pierce?

  I think I agree with that, and I think it's going to be fascinating to see what it looks like to bring the best of our screens out into the world more. Think about headsets. Are we going to use headsets to bring technology with us more places? Or are we going to use them as ways to be home and be in our own worlds more often? I don't know. I know I'm looking forward to getting screens out more because I know I own Mario Kart at home, and yet I spent objectively an upsetting amount of money playing Mario Kart GP at both Dave and Buster's and at Funland. I don't know, the chair and the steering wheel and the loud crowd just do something for me, you know? I don't think I can get that at home.

• 50:55David Pierce?

  All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to talk crypto, but not the crypto you're probably thinking of. We'll be right back.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition, even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 52:13David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So if you've been following crypto over the last couple of years, WorldCoin is probably one of the companies you've heard the most about. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, who's one of the founders of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT and GPT-4, and obviously is a big deal just because it's related to Sam. But it also has really big ideas about not just creating a currency, but for helping identify all the humans in the world and universal basic income and all this big sort of heady futurist stuff. Even if you don't know about WorldCoin, I bet you've heard about the orb, which is the big metal ball that WorldCoin wants to use to scan your irises to verify you're human. This all sounds insane, even as I'm saying it out loud,

• 52:56David Pierce?

  and I feel obligated here to give you a thousand disclaimers about the risks of investing in crypto and the huge environmental implications of the blockchain and the many, many, many, many scams that have come through this space. And actually, you know what, let's just get started and we can get to all of that. Alex Heath recently became our foremost WorldCoin expert. He's here now. Let's talk about it. Hi, Alex.

• 53:20Speaker 11

  Hey, David.

• 53:21David Pierce?

  We're going to talk about WorldCoin because you just had a very interesting experience with WorldCoin. How would you put WorldCoin as a thing in kind of the broader crypto landscape? It's not Bitcoin in the sense that it's just a thing that people buy and sell to make money, but it's not not Bitcoin. Like, how do you think about WorldCoin in that space?

• 53:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, I would say to understand WorldCoin, you have to really understand Sam Altman.

• 53:43David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 53:44Speaker 11

  So he's the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, obviously. And his stated goal with OpenAI is to build artificial general intelligence, AGI. And the thinking here is that AGI will eventually happen, and when it does, machines will be smarter, more capable than humans. AIs, for example, are already starting to evade CAPTCHAs, but the thinking that is eventually they're going to run the world for us or maybe over us is the dystopian view of that. And so in that future theoretical world run by AGI, you know, to borrow from Westworld, you kind of need to know who is a human and who is a host. And so I would actually describe WorldCoin, and we can talk about the crypto aspect of it, but in totality, WorldCoin

• 54:29Speaker 11

  Is in a way an antidote to what Sam Altman is building with his other company, OpenAI. And he's not running WorldCoin day to day, but he's the co-founder, kind of public face of it. He's been tweeting about the lines people are forming to get their eyes scanned and kind of using his clout to advance the project. So, you know, he also, Altman, is a huge fan of this idea of universal basic income. I've heard him talk about this in interviews. He uses this example of, you know, eventually we have these AGI-controlled robots and they're doing solar power farming on our beheads in mines. They're running things for us. Basically, humans won't need to work as

• 55:10Speaker 11

  much. They'll make our homes for us. They'll do everything for us. And so, in a future world like that, maybe you do want some kind of universal basic income. The problem with that, obviously, is governments may not like that. UBI has never worked to date at scale in the modern world. It's actually funny, you know, researching this, I found out that UBI actually dates back to the Romans and Julius Caesar. So it was something that happened a long time ago. So yeah, the goal really simply is to scan every eyeball on earth so that you can then distribute WorldCoin, the token, and eventually down the road in some kind of theoretical future, that token will be used for some kind of universal basic income. Now, this sounds like the kind of pitch that I can totally

• 55:53Speaker 11

  imagine some venture capitalists falling in love with as they're walking through the Presidio in San Francisco. But, you know, the criticism is that it's a solution in search of a problem. But that's, in a nutshell, kind of the philosophy behind WorldCoin and what Altman is doing.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, to me, this just strikes me as like a series of solutions in search of a problem. And I think, to some extent, I actually don't want to like litigate WorldCoin because it's sort of in this crazy world that if everything were different, this might be useful and necessary. And that's all fine and good. I do think the question of how currency and the identification thing fit together is really interesting because the pushback on this has been basically, a lot of people are being asked to give their Iris scans to this company and in exchange they're getting some amount of this currency. And then it's like, fast forward a bunch of years, this becomes a very important currency. Could be super interesting. Who knows? We'll save that for another day. The thing on the ground is that there are a lot of people who are like, there's this sort of meaningless,

• 56:54David Pierce?

  not staked to anything money that is just being passed around and in exchange you're taking a huge amount of my data. In order to verify that I'm a person because of the other tools that you've made, which are getting so good so fast, that you're now solving the problem you've created with a new creation that creates its own problems. And I just, I get like twisted into knots, trying to figure out even like which part of this to sort of be annoyed by.

• 57:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, there is a lot to be potentially annoyed by, a lot to be skeptical of. I think the people at WorldCoin and the parent company, which is called Tools for Humanity, of course, have high-minded intentions here. I guess maybe it's helpful to rewind just a little bit. Up until last week, WorldCoin was not out in the world. It wasn't a token that you could access at all. And what WorldCoin had been doing for the last couple of years is going around mostly in poorer countries outside of the US and Europe, though they did quite a bit of this in Europe as well, but particularly in Africa, parts of India. They would go out and send contractors to basically convince people in villages,

• 58:00Speaker 11

  people who maybe just got a smartphone for the first time, to have their eyes scanned in exchange for, you know, some tether or some Bitcoin or a nominal amount of money. And they claim that over 2 million people have already scanned with the orb. And now with the token out, importantly, it's not available in the US for reasons we can talk about, or in China. So the whole world aspect of that is kind of defeated on day one. But now that the token is out, basically all those people had IOUs in the form of you're going to get the token at some point and now it's out. And to the idea of it being a currency, it's actually a horrible currency because it behaves like a security.

• 58:40Speaker 11

  And that's, I think, why it's not available in the US is the SEC and regulators here in the US have started cracking down on crypto quite a bit. We've seen a lot of lawsuits, stuff going on with Coinbase that's still ongoing. And there's this whole debate about, you know, should these tokens be regulated like securities, which come with important disclosures that right now the crypto economy does not have. If you're thinking about this as a currency, A, it can't be used for anything right now. So it just exists in the world app when you get it airdropped if you're not in the US. So it's not really good currency in that respect, though they plan to eventually let people send it back and forth. It also fluctuates like crazy, the price of it, because it behaves like a speculative asset.

• 59:21Speaker 11

  So immediately, this became one of the 10 most valuable crypto tokens in the world the week it launched. The app, the world app, was the number one downloaded app on iOS and Android in Kenya, where a lot of people had already been doing signups pre-launch. There's just a lot of pain that's going to happen here with normal people who are doing this because they want some kind of magic bean, and then they realize the price of that bean is not going to be what it was when they signed up. And we've seen this time and time again with crypto projects. And I think that's been the harshest criticism I've seen of the way that they're structuring the actual token so far. And I think that's fair. I mean, I think if you're trying to build a utility, if you're trying to build something that

• 1:00:04Speaker 11

  everyone in the world is theoretically going to have one day, I don't really understand the way they've rolled it out initially.

• 1:00:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. And I think one of the things I've wondered about this project the whole time has been to what extent WorldCoin would be as kind of interesting and big as it is if Sam Altman weren't involved. Because obviously, in the world of AGI, there are very few people who have done more and put their money where their mouth is more often than Sam Altman. Like, guy has a history of being right. And some of the stuff we're talking about, I think, is sort of specific to WorldCoin, right? Like, the underlying tech, the iris scanning stuff, all of which we're about to get into, that is different. But some of these, like, big, long-term promises that they're making about, you know, banking the unbanked and helping create one single global financial system, like, that's what everybody in the crypto industry has been saying for a long time.

• 1:00:54David Pierce?

  And I think you've been obviously following this and Sam for a while. Like, is a lot of the hype here just that Sam is kind of the Midas of this industry and everything he touches seems to work and people want to be along for the ride?

• 1:01:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, he's been going around the world on behalf of OpenAI over the past several months, meeting with regulators, holding talks in different countries. And he's been mentioning WorldCoin. He's been helping to hype it. I saw him tweet a, God, what is it? X a photo now of him in Europe finally getting scanned himself a month or two ago. So yeah, the halo of Altman around this is certainly helping. You know, this is also like a company that's raised a lot of money. Like, we should note, they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz. I should note, one of their earliest investors was actually Sam Bankman-Fried, believe it or not. Which, you know, obviously, that's, that's a problem, but they've moved on from that. And yeah, they have a lot of money and it's not a nonprofit either.

• 1:01:53Speaker 11

  So, you know, there is a business here somewhere. You know, investors in the project have told me that the kind of initial business plan is to create a kind of API business. Is for other companies to be able to access the world IDs so that they can verify that someone is who they say they are theoretically. So like Okta, for example, I think just in Germany, has already rolled out world ID as a way that you can authenticate. So, yeah, I guess like right now, yes, the project is technically only like two weeks old at this point. But world ID and WorldCoin can't really be used for much of anything, except hoping that WorldCoin's price continues to go up.

• 1:02:32David Pierce?

  Right. And that's where it becomes like Bitcoin. So, okay, there are a million disclaimers and a million questions. And generally, I think most crypto stuff is nonsense. And to all of that, we will just leave aside for now. Because I think if nothing else, this is a show about weird technology and how it makes us feel. And you just experienced this thing. You have seen the orb. This thing's been out for a while. Like you said, it's been kind of out in the world, but it hasn't sort of officially been launched. And now it is officially launched and you got to try it. So tell me about it. Like, what happened? How did this happen? Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone?

• 1:03:06Speaker 11

  I'm okay so far. We'll see if there's any drones around my house afterwards here. Yeah, so I guess it was the day after the token launch. I'd been following WorldCoin kind of leading up to this, but not super in-depth. But I was kind of reading up on it. And then I saw that they weren't making the token available in the US, but they were still doing orb scans in a handful of cities. And I just went online to their website. It was like booking through Calendly or something. Like, I looked for like two hours out on the very same day and there were a ton of appointments. At multiple locations in LA. So I booked one for about an hour out. I got in my car, drove across town to West Hollywood here in Los Angeles to this nondescript coworking space to get my eyeball scanned by Sam Altman's orb.

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Before we start, do you have any questions about the project or the orb or anything?

• 1:03:54Speaker 11

  No, I was reading that like your biometrics don't leave the device, right?

• 1:03:59Speaker 05

  So that is correct. However, when you accept the terms of service, there'll be a third optional thing where you can keep your iris image stored in their database.

• 1:04:10Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  You don't have to.

• 1:04:12Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:04:13Speaker 05

  And the only benefit of it is if they do an update that requires you to like, that changes their algorithm for hashing your iris image, your iris code, you'd have to rescan.

• 1:04:24Speaker 11

  Oh, okay.

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  So it's a convenience thing. If you don't want it stored, then yes, it will be used on the orb to hash and then it will delete transaction.

• 1:04:33Speaker 11

  It was kind of funny because it's a coworking space, right? So there's a bunch of like people there kind of working around different desks, just kind of like plugging away like normal. And then in the very center, you've just got this like frankly, kind of weird dystopian looking shiny metallic orb. It looks like Hal 9000 from Space Odyssey. Just sitting there, it's about a foot tall with a guy behind it who's the orb operator, so to speak. So the, oh, okay.

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  Now's the time.

• 1:05:01Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:05:02Speaker 05

  There's your little bit.

• 1:05:03Speaker 11

  All right.

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  So yeah, now it should be verifying you on the cloud. Make sure that you didn't try to sign up twice and trick us.

• 1:05:13Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:05:14Speaker 05

  And then you get a sticker and you get a badge and then you're done.

• 1:05:18Speaker 11

  Okay. You know, I guess the weirdest part of all of this is that my orb operator didn't ask who I was, didn't ask me to confirm my appointment time or even my email or anything like that. He never knew my name. He just walked me through the process and I was scanned and gone within five minutes. Wait, what? I know. Yeah, that's the reaction. It's like, what? But that's kind of the point. The point of this technology is that WorldCoin and other companies that use their API one day don't need to actually know. Know who you are. They just need to know that you're a human being. And so through a kind of complicated process, I won't go super in depth on here. Basically, what happens is the orb scans your eye, makes some little noises.

• 1:06:01Speaker 11

  And then it creates this hash of numbers tied to your iris scan that theoretically is not supposed to leave the orb, but helps them assign you a world ID. And then there's a corresponding code that's then eventually put on this Ethereum based blockchain that corresponds to your iris hash. But because of fancy cryptography technology, there's no way of linking the two. Basically, it's like just having a code saying, I am real according to the orb. My operator for the orb was, of course, a guy who said he works in Web three. But he wasn't a WorldCoin employee, you know, they're using contractors and paying them per scan to do this. So he tried to answer some of my questions, but couldn't really answer all of them.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Do you work at WorldCoin? I'm a community specialist. Oh, okay. I don't work full time. I actually, I work in Web three full time, but this is just my like fun little. Oh, cool. I saw, yeah, I saw the the token launch. Are people coming in like for mainly to get the token? So in the US, you don't get tokens. Oh, yeah. So you won't get tokens. So it's basically just to have your ID. It's just to have your ID. Like, I guess maybe they think if they're like, they do early engagement, maybe in the future, there might be. Yeah. But like, nothing official's been announced like that. Oh, wow.

• 1:07:17David Pierce?

  You're making me feel a lot of feelings I did not expect to feel right now. But I think the the thing that I had not fully processed about WorldCoin until you just explained that is that WorldCoin doesn't care who you are. It just cares that you're a person.

• 1:07:31Speaker 11

  That's right.

• 1:07:32David Pierce?

  Which I had not really thought about. Like, I've been thinking about WorldID as like a a sort of blockchain identity system, right? That eventually they'd be like, we're gonna get rid of your physical passport and exchange it for something on the blockchain. And part of me just like wants to give that two middle fingers. But they're not doing that. They're going one step like much higher in the abstraction layer. They're just saying, this is a person. And we can now sufficiently convincingly say, this is a person. That's that's the goal here. That's it.

• 1:07:58Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's literally the only goal. And that now, you know, the fact that you have been verified by an orb is theoretically provable on a blockchain. And other companies can know this and use that identity layer for their services.

• 1:08:15David Pierce?

  Did this whole thing seem legit to you? Like, you're in a you're in a coworking space. It's just like a contract person. We've read all these stories about the people who are like in malls doing iris scanning. This strikes me as the kind of thing that you'd see in a sci fi movie and they would be in like the top floor of a huge skyscraper. And there would be like people in white lab coats doing this. This is so different from that.

• 1:08:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's very bottoms up, community organized. Like, obviously, these people are getting paid to do these scans, but they're really just enthusiasts. Like, my operator said he worked in the Web three space, of course, and that he was just interested in the technology. And that most of the people that he's scanned were coming in kind of just because they thought it was like a cool idea. Maybe they saw Sam Altman tweet about it. He did say that a fair number, like maybe a quarter, 20% of people were asking, where are my tokens? Even though they're not available in the US, there's certainly like, people are token farming. There's already been reports of people buying world IDs on like the dark web so that they can then get the tokens associated with that world ID.

• 1:09:19Speaker 11

  So this is by no means a fail proof system. But yeah, that's what they're doing at a high level. And they're doing it with flair, you know, like this orb was designed by Thomas Meyerhofer, who was Johnny Ive's first designer hire at Apple. And, you know, they've hired a lot of, you know, big names across the tech industry. So, yeah, it's definitely this kind of weird sci fi thing meets reality, but definitely did not feel as like high stakes as I thought it would when I walked in.

• 1:09:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. What is your sense of what they're trying to do with the hardware? Because I kind of see it a bunch of ways. On the one hand, you have this thing that they would want to make seem as normal and unscary as possible. If they could just like point their phone at you and make it seem every day that that would be great. On the other hand, they seem to have leaned into this very futuristic idea. It's this big shiny object. Like you said, it looks like Hal 9000. It just looks like a robot. And I can't imagine that was not intentional. Like, what did you make of the actual hardware itself?

• 1:10:18Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, it's designed to look like an eye, like you're looking into an eyeball, which is pretty creepy, but it was like super fast. It made some cute noises. And over time, I think what's interesting is that Tools for Humanity, the parent company, says they want to open source the design of the orbs and let other people make them and distribute them. So it becomes this like kind of decentralized thing on top of the blockchain aspect of this. Sounds pretty problematic because what happens when some kind of vendor installs malware or like something into the orb that isn't, you know, to spec and there's a huge data leakage or something. But for now, it's all designed

• 1:10:59Speaker 11

  and operated and maintained by WorldCoin. These are very expensive devices. I think they cost like 5,000 plus each to build. But yeah, eventually the goal is that the whole company moves towards this DAO model, decentralized autonomous organization where not only are the orbs able to be operated by other people and made by other people, but the WorldCoin itself can be used to vote on how governance works and how the company operates. So they want to move to this foundation model that would also govern the orbs. They haven't done that yet. I think that's another pretty fair criticism of doing this right now is it's kind of putting the car before the horse on what a lot of they're trying to do. But I also see the other side, you know, investors are telling me like, look, they got to start somewhere. This is a chicken and egg problem. How else

• 1:11:44Speaker 11

  you can incentivize people to scan their eyes in this frankly, kind of creepy thing? So yeah, that's, that's kind of where it stands now.

• 1:11:51David Pierce?

  Okay. And what do you get as a person who has now had your iris scanned? You got a sticker, which is like rad. I love a sticker. And you have an app that I guess like says you're human. Like what, how has your life changed now that you've had your iris scanned?

• 1:12:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, I've got my unique human sticker and then I've got in the world app that says I'm verified. I'm anonymous, but I'm verified with an orb. It says when I was verified. And at some point in the future, I guess, because I'm in the US, I probably won't get the world coins, but. At some point in the future, this ID I may be able to use to log in somewhere, I guess, would be the most immediate implication of having it. But for now, it's just, just this little virtual badge.

• 1:12:34David Pierce?

  That is, I mean, one of the things that is very funny to me about WorldCoin is there's a version of its story that if you play out the future in One Direction, it is this like huge society shaping thing, right? Like if you go all the way out into universal basic income and AGI and we end up in this totally different place than we are now, something like WorldCoin could be really interesting and really important. I would say in a much more sort of immediate and plausible worldview, it's just like a fancy login system. Like, it's very funny to me that it's integrating with Okta because it's just Okta. Like, in a lot of ways, it's like, this is a person who would like to log into a website and it just has cooler technology hardware than like my Apple Watch Okta Verify app.

• 1:13:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, or you could be more cynical and say it's actually just a pump and dump scheme. So 25% of all WorldCoins are held by the company and its investors and they have not been able to sell any of that yet. They're in a lockup. So a bunch of WorldCoins is going to get dumped, you know, in a year or so, most likely. And, you know, retail again, like, has been the case and so many of these crypto stories will be left holding the bag.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 11

  I think what's clear in the short term is the only reason to own WorldCoin is because you think the price will go up. But in the long run, if you buy this UBI thing and you buy AI may one day rule the world, you may want to have it. But it comes back to what I was saying originally, like, this is a solution in search of a problem. And I think whatever happens, I guess, I find the idea behind WorldCoin to be deeply unsettling because it suggests a future in which humans are indistinguishable from machines. And I know we've had that in sci-fi, you know, I love Westworld as much as the next person, but the idea that, you know, Sam Altman, one of the leaders in this space, is actively building towards this future that he thinks is definitely going to happen

• 1:14:25Speaker 11

  is pretty unsettling. And I think, you know, we as a society may be having bigger conversations about this in the coming years.

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  I think that's right. I think the thing that gives me immediate hope is that this launch happened at a very funny time, which is right around the same time that OpenAI ditched its project for figuring out what text was created by AI because it didn't work. And I just think we're at this funny phase now where like, it keeps making me think of, I watch a lot of HGTV. And there was this whole run of HGTV shows where it was like, regular people learn how to flip houses. And then there was a whole other run of HGTV shows that were regular people tried to flip their houses and screwed them up so badly that they had to call in professionals. And now that's what that show is about. There's just literally a show called like, Help, I Wrecked My House. And it's just like, that's the phase of AI that I think we're heading into where it was like, okay,

• 1:15:17David Pierce?

  AI got out of control. We're going to build tools to fix the AI. Those aren't going to work. So we're gonna, we're gonna bring in people to fix the AI, but then we're going to use the AI to beat people. And it's just like, we're like caught in this loop forever. And it just sort of seems like Sam Altman is going to be the one sitting on every side of it, just like laughing hysterically as he makes billions and billions of dollars.

• 1:15:37Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38David Pierce?

  So to some extent, like, you know, kudos to Sam Altman for getting it like coming and going.

• 1:15:42Speaker 11

  I mean, yeah, there's nothing like building the problem and the antidote and being able to profit off of both, right?

• 1:15:48David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 1:15:49Speaker 11

  Altman is such an important aspect of this, as we've been saying, you know, the fact that it's not launching in the US as he's really wooing regulators, going to DC, meeting with President Biden about AI stuff recently, for example. You know, a lot of this is wrapped up in him and his, how he's perceived. And it makes sense to me now, a little bit more, why he's been this super vocal voice, talking to regulators, saying we need safety around AI. Guess what? He's got a solution, right? He's got a for-profit solution to the problem. And so, yeah, we've been hearing a lot about ChatGPT in the broader world and society. I do think we'll start hearing more about WorldCoin in the coming months, as Altman starts talking about it more and using his platform.

• 1:16:32Speaker 11

  So stay tuned. And you're listening to this episode, you're getting kind of the, the early look at, I think, something that everyone else is going to be talking about.

• 1:16:39David Pierce?

  All right, Alex, appreciate you stopping by as always, and this time, thank you especially for scanning your eyes for journalism. If you do end up needing new eyes, by the way, let us know because that's like truly excellent Vergecast material. So keep us posted. You can read more about Alex's experience with the orb in command line, his excellent newsletter, which you can sign up for at theverge.com/newsletters. All right, one more thing to do, and then we're gonna get out of here. Let's answer a question from the Vergecast hotline.

• 1:17:10David Pierce?

  As a reminder, the hotline number is 866-VERGE11. Please call and ask us all your deepest, darkest, weirdest tech questions. We love them all. You can also email [email protected], send us a voice memo, whatever makes you happy. We love hearing your questions. For this one, I brought in V Song. Hi, V.

• 1:17:28Speaker 12

  Hey, what's up?

• 1:17:29David Pierce?

  I have not played you this question. I just, I gave you like a vague sense of what's coming. So let's, let me just play the question. I think you'll be ready for this, but I'm excited to see where we go because I also have this question. Here we go.

• 1:17:42Speaker 13

  Hey, guys. It's Mark again. And I have a question about wearables, or particularly wearables without screens, because I have a pretty, well, I think they're, I think it's a cool old G-Shock slash vintage Casio watch collection, and I really enjoy wearing them. But I also would really love to get a lot of the health tracking and sleep tracking features of something like an Apple Watch or whatever Samsung's rolling out these days. And so I tried an Apple Watch for a little bit. I just don't really care for a screen on my wrist, being honest with you. I already feel like the notifications on my phone are a little bit too much, so I'd rather avoid that on my wrist, too. But I also would really

• 1:18:25Speaker 13

  like to track my health stuff. So I'm wondering, are there any wearables without a screen these days? Something kind of closer to like the Fitbit Flex that used to exist, R.I.P., or also anything that's like not, frankly, what I think is kind of expensive, like the Oura Ring? Anyways, thanks for the help. Bye.

• 1:18:42David Pierce?

  Okay, you're you're making the face that made me want to do this question. It's it's bleak, dude.

• 1:18:47Speaker 12

  It's bleak. Like when you said something not as expensive as the Oura ring, I was like, uh oh. Because that is basically what I think fits 99% of what Mark's asking for. Because it's it's going to get you really great clinically. I don't want to say validated, but clinically tested. Sleep tracking, like they just, I've been on calls with them and they just told me how like their sleep tracking is, I want to say around 75, 79%. Corresponds to polysomnography, which is the gold standard. So if you want really accurate sleep tracking, the Oura ring is one of the best options for it. It's not invasive in the sense that you never get a single notification from this on your on your body.

• 1:19:31Speaker 12

  Like, the only problem with that is it can run out of battery and then you're like, oh, I missed two nights because I missed that one notification on my phone. That says, uh, charge this thing up.

• 1:19:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 12

  So that's the one thing with that. The other one would be Whoop and Whoop is still kind of expensive.

• 1:19:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, and Whoop also picks, it's it has such a different idea about what to measure and what you care about. That I've always had a hard time recommending it to people because it's like, like Mark wants step tracking and sleep tracking fundamentally, right? All the other stuff is well and good, but that's fundamentally what it wants. And Whoop has this very different picture of how you should measure health. And if that works for you, it makes a lot of sense. It's really interested in recovery and lots of different ideas about how to sort of track exertion. That's all fine and good, but it's not step tracking and sleep tracking.

• 1:20:22Speaker 12

  Well, it is sleep tracking because the sleep tracking kind of feeds into their recovery metrics.

• 1:20:26David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:20:26Speaker 12

  It's it's not really going to help you so much on the step tracking part of it. It's really geared towards people who have. You know, ambitious training regimens and who really care about their HRV and they want to check their exertion and want to be at optimal like priming. That's, those are the two that are like the most well-known screenless devices. The other one would have been the Amazon Halo, but that's kaput because they also went the screenless route. There is the Fitbit Inspire 3, which has the most like not even a screen, screen, because it's just, it's, it's basically

• 1:21:08Speaker 12

  kind of like the Fitbit Flex a little bit. It's, it's got a OLED screen now, so it's not as the monochrome LCD as it used to be, but you know, it's really not going to tell you much because it's a tiny little screen and you're not really going to be looking through notifications on that. So that is an option if you don't mind double wristing as, as I do. But you know, there is a couple of smart rings that are coming out. I've got a sizing kit for one, so I'm going to be testing that. And if that's an option, that'll be cool. But the problem with smart rings is that they all kind of cost around the amount that the Oura ring does. There's not really a, what I would call a super affordable option for screenless at the moment, because they're, they're being,

• 1:21:53Speaker 12

  like the people developing the screenless tech at the moment are the ones who are really invested in research and that sort of stuff. So you're going to get people who are like, hey, you want a subscription so you can find our research? And the answer is always, no, I don't want the subscription. But if you're looking into like cost effectiveness, whoop, recently lowered their subscription prices. So if you want to lock yourself in there for a long time, you can get a lower monthly subscription and the hardware is quote unquote free. You know, they, they say that it's never free. It's just built into a much higher monthly subscription. So if you want to, and you know, I, I believe they have like year-long commitments, so that's kind of not

• 1:22:36Speaker 12

  my favorite thing. But yeah, so the Oura ring is still unfortunately, I think your best bet, unless you're willing to cobble together multiple devices to just like jerry-rig something. I unfortunately don't think that that's really great. But if sleep tracking is your number one thing, there are actually a number of sleep tracking apps on your phone that are pretty good. There's SleepCycle. I like Rise, Rise Science, which is, that does have a yearly subscription, but I believe it's like $60. And if you really get on top of that sleep habit, then it's not really gonna be a forever thing. Rise is interesting because it takes into account your circadian

• 1:23:19Speaker 12

  rhythms and based on like your phone tracking you in your sleep, it'll be like, oh, okay, this is your sleep need, this is your sleep debt. Like, these are the times of the day where you should plan high intensity activity and these are the ones where you should do like lower intensity because your energy is gonna dip. And I've, I've been doing that for, I wanna say, six, seven months now. It's interesting. After a while, I don't pay attention to it anymore. So that's kind of the trap with sleep tracking apps. So I, I feel really bad, Mark, because I have very unsatisfying answers for you. But yeah, I, I do think the Oura ring is like 99% of what he's looking for, except for price, which is always the issue with the Oura ring.

• 1:23:59David Pierce?

  That's exactly where I landed too, is I did a bunch of research and landed on the Oura is kind of the only answer. And that's really the, the last thing I'm curious about from you before, before we let you go here is I think what it seems like has happened is the whole market for people like Mark has disappeared, right? For a while, we had, you could buy a thing that looked more or less like a bracelet, like the original Jawbone is still my favorite wearable of all time. It was that nice sort of, it was like a little too snap bracelet looking, but it just like fit around your wrist. It looked much less like technology and more like a thing you might actually wanna wear on purpose, which was great. And then there were the Fitbit trackers that you could clip to things. Those were cool. Like, we had this run of things that weren't smartwatches. And all of those

• 1:24:42David Pierce?

  have died in favor of either smartwatches on one end, that's kind of the mainstream idea, or the like capital S scientific tools that are very expensive and designed for people who wanna do like clinical studies on themselves. And it seems like the middle ground is just gone. Is that ever gonna come back? Like, have, my argument would be that we've pushed too many people towards smartwatches, including a lot of people who actually don't want smartwatches, and that maybe there is room in the middle, but maybe I'm crazy.

• 1:25:09Speaker 12

  No, you're not crazy. You're 100% correct. So what ended up happening is, one, Google bought Fitbit and that kind of killed the middle market. Fitbit smartwatches are blah, especially with the latest generation. But I still think that the Inspire 3 is quite good. And I believe with the Inspire 3, you can pop out the, the main unit. And you can stick it in like different accessories. So that that's one option. Garmin makes a single fitness band at the moment, which actually may be more up Mark's alley. Now that I think about it, the old issues that Garmin sleep tracking kind of sucks. So that's that's actually the the the worst part about a Garmin is that its sleep tracking is, I think,

• 1:25:52Speaker 12

  not good. It's good enough to do your like recovery metrics because that's pulling on different things like heart rate variation. But in terms of like you wanting to sleep better, it's not very helpful.

• 1:26:04David Pierce?

  And even that, the the Vivo Smart falls into that same, it's a smaller screen, but it's still a screen category.

• 1:26:10Speaker 12

  It's still a screen. So um, months ago, um, I was reviewing Amazfit's Amazfit. Still don't know how to pronounce it. Um, Amazfit's Band Seven. It is a $50 fitness tracker and it, if you want to throw back to all the different uh, mid-range fitness bands of yesteryear, that's a really great option. It has a lot of the health tracking features. Uh, the sleep tracking is all right. Uh, the battery life is pretty good. It's not a looker. It's fairly, you know, I want, I don't want to say chintzy, but it's it's not the best looking device. It's very utilitarian. The only issue I've seen with recommending this to people is that people are like, well, it's a Chinese company

• 1:26:53Speaker 12

  and Chinese company is gonna have my health data. No, thank you. To which, you know, the problem is, is that Fitbit started dying off because these Chinese company like Xiaomi and Amazfit. They basically came in and was like, hey, what if we sold you these fitness bands for not $100 like Fitbit's asking for, but somewhere between $20 to $50 and it's largely going to get you a good portion of the experience. So that just kind of cannibalized the whole market. You know, I had a reader ask me the other day, why didn't Samsung update the the its fitness bands? I was like, honey, they have not updated these since the last time I went to EFO, which I think was like 2019.

• 1:27:34Speaker 12

  Part 2018, 2019, maybe even 2017. Like, it was a really, really long time ago. So. I too, you know, I might, I might end up blogging this, but like I too have wondered where the fitness bands have gone. And I get a lot of questions like those from Mark, and I feel really bad that I'm like, well, if you got built a time machine and traveled back to 2014, I have some options for you there. But all of those options have since lost support because the companies went under as well. So you are kind of stuck with smartwatches, which I do think is tragic because not everyone wants a smartwatch. I even take smartwatch free days once in a while to maintain my own sanity. So it's, I really feel for Mark,

• 1:28:17Speaker 12

  but you know, there, you know, thinking about it, I do have a sleep tracker buying guide or sleep tech buying guide, which if sleep is really your main thing, there are non-invasive, non-contact sleep options. The Nest Hub is one. It'll track you via radar. The Wything Sleep Mat, I believe it's called, is like a $100 sleep mat that you stick under your mattress and it can read your heart rate and all of that stuff. So that's kind of cool. I have an 8Sleep Pod Pro cover, which is not cheap. That is even more expensive than the Oura Ring, but it does offer temperature cooling. So, you know, yeah, either, if you really want to avoid the screens and sleep track, you're going to have to go with like

• 1:28:59Speaker 12

  six different devices, at which point it's kind of going to add up to the cost of an Oura Ring. So, you know, I, I am going to say right now, your best option is the Oura Ring until more people like you start complaining that screens are ruining their lives and then we can get our more simple fitness tracker blast from the past bands back, which, you know, I would actually be really happy about. I miss, I miss the old Fitbit days sometimes.

• 1:29:27David Pierce?

  All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from sleep tracking, buying guides to world coin or experiences on theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, read the website, leave us a comment on the post about this episode. We'd love to hear everything you think. And we do answer at least one hotline question every episode, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about probably more Samsung, the latest going on with the X sign on top of the Twitter building, and lots more. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:30:21Speaker 14

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