A lazy person’s guide to getting in shape

The Verge’s Victoria Song joins the show to talk about the most popular and most-bailed-on New Year’s Resolution of all: getting in shape. She tells us about the apps that help you work out more without being rude about it, the data you really need to care about in your fitness tracker, and much more. After that, we talk to Anna Valtonen, one of the curators and researchers behind the new Nokia Design Archive. She tells us about the concepts, presentations, and overall culture that made Nokia such an important company in the history of phones. Finally, we answer another question on the Vergecast Hotline about how audio works on your phone. It’s all still too complicated. Further reading: Ladder Fantasy Hike Stompers Runkeeper 5K Runner Our interview with Adrian Hon about Zombies, Run The Nokia Design Archive Nokia’s “Morph” concept The Nokia Communicator The Nokia Moonraker smartwatch From Apple: Share audio with AirPods and Beats headphones from iPhone or iPad Also from Apple: Play audio through multiple devices at once in Audio MIDI Setup on Mac From Samsung: Play music on two Bluetooth devices from your Galaxy phone 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.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of immediately giving up on every single one of your New Year's resolutions. It's the best way, can't recommend it highly enough. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am in sunny West Palm Beach, Florida, where I'm here to see a thing called TGL Golf, which is basically trying to take the game of golf, which is famously played outside on grass, and move it inside and make it really technologically advanced with big screens and complicated actuators and all kinds of new ideas about what watching and playing golf can be like. We're gonna have more to say about that on this show and on the verge.com in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned for that. But it's nice to be outside. What are you gonna do? Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're gonna do two things. First, we're gonna talk

• 0:48David Pierce?

  to V Song about New Year's resolutions. She is a person who thinks a lot about exercise and how people can do better without making it so much work to do better. And right now is the time of your people want to be healthier and want to get in better shape and want to exercise more. So V and I are gonna try to figure out how you can do that in a safe, sane, healthy way. It's gonna be great. After that, we're gonna talk about this incredible new thing called the Nokia Design Archive, which is this huge repository of concepts, presentations, lifestyle videos, all these different ideas back when Nokia was at the peak of its powers, trying to figure out the future of cell phones. Super fun and we're gonna get into what's inside all of it. We also have a question on the Vergecast

• 1:31David Pierce?

  hotline that's kind of a follow-up to last week's question on the Vergecast hotline about how audio comes and goes on your phone. Really fun one. Thank you again to everybody who emails and calls. All that is coming up in just a second, but first, I honestly, I have to get out of the sun because this is the first time I've been outside in like three months and I think I'm already starting to burn. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 3:18David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, I'm back from Florida. I have suitably embarrassed myself trying to play on that gigantic simulator in West Palm Beach. Let's get into it. So last week I talked to Kevin Nguyen about how to read more books. It's a New Year's resolution a lot of people have, I think, in a bunch of different directions. Right? There's the I want to read more books. There's also the I want to spend less of my time scrolling on my phone and more of my time doing something useful on my phone. So I talked to Kevin, who is the best and most accomplished book reader I know about how all that worked. Super fun. We got a lot of great feedback from people. Thank you to everybody who enjoyed that and told us so. Super fun to hear from all of you. This week, we're going to do something similar on a very different topic.

• 4:01David Pierce?

  I think if you had to pick a number one New Year's resolution, it is I want to get in shape. And again, that comes in lots of different varieties. Some people are like, I want to go for one walk. And other people are like, I am going to get like Brad Pitt in Fight Club level shredded in two weeks. Happy New Year, let's go. I think most of those resolutions don't work. People don't stick to them. Famously, there are huge amounts of gym memberships that get bought the first two weeks of January and canceled the second two weeks of January. Like, this stuff is tough. And I think part of it is because we don't make it easy on people to stick to these kinds of resolutions.

• 4:43David Pierce?

  So I recruited The Verge's Victoria Song to come on and help me figure out how we can do a little better. How you can use apps and wearables and platforms and all of these different ideas about how to exercise and be in better shape and do more healthy stuff in your life to our advantage and not be sort of beaten down by them to the point where we don't want to use them anymore. V thinks about a lot of this in a way that I really like. She is like the most happy exerciser, but also thinks the whole idea of exercising is absurd. And I love that. Like, I think that's exactly right. So I knew she'd be the right person to come on and do this with. So let's get into it. V Song, welcome back.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Hello. Thanks for having me.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  There's just a lot of stuff happening right now. I feel like we could talk about rings. We could talk about other things. I don't want to talk about any of that stuff. None of it.

• 5:36David Pierce?

  So we did this thing with Kevin Nguyen last week where we basically tried to break down one of the very common New Year's resolutions into something that is like achievable for regular people. And I think you have an even harder job, which is we're going to do this again with everybody's number one New Year's resolution, which is I'm going to get in shape.

• 5:56David Pierce?

  It's that time of year, so.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  It is that time of year. Let's, let's destroy the New Year's resolution fitness industrial complex. I'm here for it.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  I like, I like that we're doing this kind of at the end of January because there are a lot of people who have already lapsed on the gym memberships that they signed up for. A lot of people who have like, you know, they went on six runs and they were like, this is it. And then, and then it got cold and it stopped. And to all those people, I just want you to know. Big same, like same, exact same.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Same for me too, and I'm the running lady at the verge. So like, big same. Like, it's, it's, it's fine. Don't worry about it. Like, I, you know, like, if I can go off on New Year's resolutions, particularly with relation to fitness, like, this year was particularly annoying, just because it was Apple and I think also Ladder, which is the strength training app that I use. They both had these ad campaigns centered on this idea of quitters' day. And quitters' day is the second Friday in January, and it's the day that statistically, all these fitness apps have determined is the day that most people quit their New Year's resolutions with relation to fitness.

• 7:10David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  And I think it's the biggest hawk of bullshit in the world, quitters' day, because what, this year it was January 10th. I was flying back home from CES. What do you mean that by the 10th of January, I have quit and failed my, like, entire 2025 New Year's resolutions? There's like 265 days left in the year. What are we talking about here? What is the concept of this? So, yeah, yeah, like, I'm not about it.

• 7:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm completely with you. The idea that if you haven't been to the gym every single day so far, you've failed and you should give up is like the source of everything that is wrong with everything. And it's actually a good segue, because what I want to talk about, you and I talked to the founder of Zombies Run a while ago, and talked a bunch about this, like, how do we find a saner way to help people exercise more thing? And we got a ton of feedback on that episode. People really liked it. And so I want to, I want to help people in kind of that same way here. So I've been thinking about my own, like, chiller exercise system for a while, and have been trying to figure out a way to do it that A, doesn't shame me when I don't exercise for a while, but also, like, is good and helpful and useful and productive.

• 8:26David Pierce?

  But I want to know yours. Like, you, you have a, like, psychopath version of exercise, I would say. Which is like, you wear a bunch of, you wear a bunch of rings, you use a bunch of apps, you're like forever trying all of this stuff, but like... Regular humans should not do that. Like, where would you start a regular human in this world?

• 8:44Speaker 04

  I would start a regular human, um, not doing anything digital, actually. Uh, I would start a regular human with maybe just a pen and paper and ask them like what their actual goals are. Like, what, what do you actually want to do? Because, uh, goals like get shredded by June. Um, if you have already nineteen percent body fat, okay, maybe we can do that for you. But if you like, you kind of just have to take stock of where you are very honestly. And then figure out what your goals are. And then how do we break that? Like, really, it's about goal setting. So, um, I used to do things like in a year, I'm gonna run a marathon. Well, guess what, guys?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  That, that didn't happen because like, that just wasn't achievable. If you're going from couch to marathon, like, you'll see all these influencers online and they'll say things like, hey, it's totally doable within a year. It's doable within a year if you want to suffer and like, do it badly. Yeah, like, it's technically doable in a year, but do you want to enjoy it? Like, that's the thing that none of these apps and digital things tell you is that they are just tools. And my big beef is that all of the, all of them are coming out and saying things like, we have AI, we have an AI chatbot, it's gonna help you figure out everything that you need to do that you don't know, which I'm empathetic to because figuring out your own fitness routine, like, I hate to tell you this, it's going to take you years.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  It's not gonna be something that happens in a few weeks. It's not gonna be something that happens in a few months. It's gonna be a years-long journey to get to absolutely shredded for that one summer. So it's like, uh, first of all, like, slow your roll, figure out what your goals are. And then once you've done that, like, just kind of look at yourself honestly and be like, how well do, like, what do I respond well to in terms of coaching and in terms of style? Because if you are looking for one of these apps to kind of help coach you, like, are you someone who responds well to drill sergeant stuff? Are you someone who, like? You just need your hand held and like be told that you're great and that everything

• 10:51Speaker 04

  is wonderful and that it's okay. I'm actually the latter. I don't respond well to drill sergeants.

• 10:57David Pierce?

  I was just about to guess that about you. I don't, yeah, I don't think yelling at you is, is the way to get you to succeed.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  No, I actually was going to boxing classes for some period of time a few years back and I had a drill sergeant in a class and he's like, "I didn't say you could give up." And I was like, "I didn't say I was giving up." And so I went really hard and then afterwards I vomited in the locker room because I went too hard. I didn't listen to myself. Like I was like sweating and I, like my friend was like, "Are you okay? I think, I think you went too hard." And it's like, "Yeah, because the drill sergeant made me angry." So you have to be honest with yourself about like that sort of stuff. And then from there, you can kind of sort through the stuff that works for you. And because I don't like drill sergeants, because I don't like, I am a perfectionist by

• 11:41Speaker 04

  nature, so I don't like feeling like I'm failing. I do really well with the chill stuff. And so I have settled on using an Apple Watch or a Garmin, depending on where I am in my testing cycle. This is like, again, very specific to me that I only have two wrists and I always have to be testing things. So I settle on the trackers that for me as a runner, offer me the most running specific stuff that I can use. A running app, which has like a little training program in there for me. And I use gentler streaks a lot because it uses the concept of streaks, but it also allows you

• 12:20Speaker 04

  to take several breaks and you're not penalized for it. It will basically be like, "Hey, you pushed it really hard. Maybe don't do that." And then if you're kind of falling off, it might pop up and say like, "Hey, you haven't done things for a while. Hon about we do something like really fun and gentle to get back into things?" And like, I'll admit, over, over Christmas, I got one of those notifications of like, "No, shut up. I thank you for reminding me that I forgot to put you on pause. I will be going back to Christmas cookies presently."

• 12:53David Pierce?

  Somebody gave me advice one time that their like main idea for me was that if you have to lie to your exercise system, it's the wrong exercise system.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 13:02David Pierce?

  And it goes for everything, right? Like if you have a personal trainer and you have to lie to your personal trainer, you have the wrong, you either shouldn't have a personal trainer or you have the wrong personal trainer. If you have to go in and like dial down the settings in an app on your phone in order for you to be able to hit your goal, you have, you have set up the incentives in the wrong way. And I say this as somebody who has done both of those things. And it just, it should be a sign if you have to go into your streaks app and be like, no, no, I did it yesterday, wink, wink, just to keep the streak going. Like this is a bad system for you.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, like you should be able to pause. That's why I was so happy last year when Apple introduced pausing your rings.

• 13:39David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  Because it, it basically kind of ensures that you can take breaks and that you can take rests. And like, there's, there's a lot of stuff out there about how you should never break your streaks. And again, this is bullshit because life is life. You will break your streaks. It's a matter of not if, but when.

• 14:01David Pierce?

  I think a lot about you saying to me a while ago that you break yours on purpose sometimes when you find yourself getting too attached to them. And I think that's actually like weirdly good life advice.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  It is. No, you should like, cause here's the thing, if you are so obsessed with your streaks, and this is like therapy with V about fitness.

• 14:19David Pierce?

  That's what we're here for.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  If you are so obsessed with your streaks, then at some level, you do not have confidence in yourself that you will go back to it. Like you are depending on the streak to say that you are consistent. Now, break your streak and trust in yourself that you will go back to it. Like that's, that's how you prove to yourself that like the streak isn't what matters. It's the, the knowledge that you have built, uh, some sort of consistent routine. And like, this is like fundamentally what we're going to get at though, is that all of this, all of these things, they're tools. They're tools that you use. You are the captain of the ship. You get to decide like what is gonna work for you and like what you enjoy and what, what like.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  It's basically tricking yourself into deciding like, I enjoy this and until it's actually true. So like, I didn't start out running enjoying it. I, I am telling you, I was, I was running and I was like, this is fricking torture. Who are these people who do this? And now I don't feel good if I don't run per week and I don't like that.

• 15:20David Pierce?

  Okay, but I agree with every single thing you just said, but you're describing like an end state, right? Like this is, this is the thing you should get to. And I think I, I agree that that is an achievable place for everybody to get and it's easier than you think. I think to me, the, the biggest challenge is like, it's the trough of disillusionment, right? The thing where I've been on four runs because I have, I have some internal discipline, hooray for me, running still sucks. I'm just gonna stop, right? And that is like, for me with, with exercise, that has been the thing that has killed me so many times, right? It's like, I get, I have, I have this much discipline and so I will, I will use the discipline that I have

• 16:00David Pierce?

  to go out and do something and then I, it doesn't immediately get better or more fun or show results. And so I bail. And I think one of the things I have spent a huge amount of time looking for in the fitness space as a result is the like, the right cadence of helping me improve and sort of reminding me to improve. And one thing, you mentioned the, the like couch to marathon pipeline. One thing that I have found that I love is couch to 5K apps. Uh, because like, I actually, I, I am, I, I exercise enough that I'm not starting at the couch level, but having the thing where it's just like, okay, David, today what we're gonna do is we're gonna go for a six minute walk and all you have to do is not die is like, that's actually perfect for me.

• 16:44David Pierce?

  That it is like, just the, the tiniest bit of push to get out. And then it's like, maybe I'll ignore the app and keep running, or maybe I'll do the six minute walk and go home and feel good about myself because I've accomplished my goals for the day.

• 16:55David Pierce?

  So few apps do that well because they're all either geared towards people for whom fitness is like a lifestyle, or they're trying to convince you that fitness is a lifestyle, because that's how they, you know, get you engaged in buying merch and buying their subscriptions and stuff. And this like, how to start and do better without making it your whole personality thing is so hard to find in this space. And it is the thing that drives me the most crazy about it.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  It is really hard. And so like, I just, it's, it's difficult because I don't think anyone does it particularly well for true beginners. Like, I think Fitness Plus does it okay, except for the fact that all of their strength stuff still puts in pushups and like, no, just no, like, excuse me, no. And they're like, you can do it on your knees. No, we need to go to, to the part where you show someone doing it on a wall. Because like, wall pushups are like where, let's be honest, a lot of people are going to be starting.

• 17:50David Pierce?

  I'm just gonna lie down while you do pushups. It's like, that's, that's where I'm at.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  Like, I'm, I'm not at the point where I do knee pushups even still. Like, I'm, I'm at the wall, like, a lot of times. And I think it's, it's just allowing yourself to say, I'm gonna do it so easy that it feels like I'm not actually doing it. So, like, one thing that I like from services like Fitness Plus is that you can do 10 minutes. You can do five, 10 minutes. Just do five, 10 minutes, three times a week. You can program it in there. And, you know, we have this tendency to be like, go hard, go fast. No, go slow, go easy. Like, it should be easy. Like, fitness should be easy. It should not be something that is difficult, like, at all. Like, you hear a lot of stuff about people

• 18:34Speaker 04

  saying things like, oh, my god, grind, like, no pain, no gain. And actually, like, I'm here to tell you, no, do, do a really easy thing. Like, what I love about Couch to 5K apps, like you said, is that day one is a six-minute walk. Anybody can do a six-minute walk. And one of the things that really helped me out of a slump, because it's a lie that if you are someone with established fitness habits, that you will not slump. I had a really bad slump last year where I was just like, not, I didn't want to do any of it. I felt my fitness, like, completely, like, 2023, like, my fitness era was just like, going so down. And it was super depressing, because all of these apps were just showing me in quantified data how slow I was getting, how, like, the arrows were all down, and I was not happy about it. And so-

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Like, one of the things you have to do is to be able to go like, this is not working. An established system I have is not working. I then went and downloaded this app called Fantasyhike, and I love it. It's off-brand Lord of the Rings. You're walking to Mount Doom. Like, you're competing with Mr. Underhill, who's Frodo, but you know, copyright safe. And you know, there's Harry Foot Potter and Jon Snowflake and...

• 19:49David Pierce?

  So it's like a step tracker with like gentle competitiveness in it?

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Gentle competitiveness. You can like, you could only compete against Frodo, who like walks really fast. Like, and absurdly, you're not gonna beat Mr. Frodo. But you can absolutely beat Harry Foot Potter, who like is so, like, his little description is like, he's really tired from like his life and he's just going real easy. You definitely can beat him. You definitely can beat him. And so I've been using this app for a little over a year now and I'm almost at Mordor. And it's so nice because it's just whatever I do during a day. Like, it's not anything, there's a little bit of competition in there. So I use it to be like, I gotta beat Alice. I'm definitely not gonna beat Jon Snow, but like, maybe I won't be beat by him by too much.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  I definitely wanna finish in between those two. So that's kind of my goal. And then some days I'll be like, oh, I've moved not at all today. Uh, let me just put a few miles between me and Alice and it's great.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  Wait, I really like that. So one of the things I was thinking about coming into this is the thing that I have found is most useful for myself is just step tracking. Like, I find there's a lot of like, you know, I wanna get stronger, I wanna get faster, whatever. And like that, you can focus on that. But in terms of like day-to-day health maintenance, like it just is true that walking is very good for your health.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Walking is the best.

• 21:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, and like the 10,000 step thing is is sort of nonsense, but is also like a useful bar. Like if you walk that much, it is good for your body to do so. But what I've always struggled with is I'm like, okay, I get in the like eight range, just kind of by being alive most days, right? Like I have a kid that I chase around. There's a coffee shop that is the exact right distance that I go there several times all the time. It's like I get there. And so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get like 12 or 15. And I find even motivating myself to do that requires going out and doing something sort of on purpose. And I don't because I'm lazy and don't want to. But this idea of like I'm I'm gonna not only am I doing this like for the benefit of my health that there is this sort of game going on in the background.

• 22:00David Pierce?

  I think that might work for me.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's really great because every once in a while you hit a milestone. I was like, oh, I hit the dancing pony. Or whatever the off brand version is like, it's like a Riverdale, not Rivendell is like the little castle. And it's like, oh, I've hit I've hit the council. Cool. So like, I'm I'm in Mordor at the moment. I'm almost at I'm almost there. And it's just like, oh, and like what I love about that particular app, which is unfortunately, it is iOS only, and you do have to pay to like move more than a mile a day. I find it worth it. But like, the thing I love about it is that it kind of very visualizes your it's very visual and seeing your progress. Because in a year, I've walked maybe 1600 miles.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Or I'm about to get to 1600 miles because that's the distance that they go. So you can kind of see like, oh, no, I actually did walk from the Shire to you know, Mordor. Like that is that is like a very visual thing and it works for me. It tickles my brain in such a delightful way.

• 23:03David Pierce?

  It's such a good like context list number too, because I have no idea if in the scheme of things, that is a lot or a little. But it sounds like a lot and it feels like you've accomplished something and that's really cool. And that's kind of all it needs to do.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  That's all it needs to do because I love step tracking in the sense that like I think it's a very there there was like a push away from it because like they said 10,000 steps is just a number that they used for marketing for a pedometer a long time ago. There's no scientific basis in it, which is which is true. But it can feel mundane to just like not hit your goal every day, right? It can feel like a little bit like failure this there's there's no daily prescription that you have to do. You're just walking, you're just walking to Mordor, you're just visualizing your progress over this time. And there's like a lot of different ways to do kind of step count. I think a lot of times it's tweaking what you viewed the metrics to be. So instead of a daily step count, maybe you do a weekly one because that gives you a little flexibility to be a couch potato once in a while.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  So like finding something that will let you track your steps weekly and putting those widgets up front instead of like, you know, like Fitbit lets you customize which widgets you see and what you do. So some for some people steps may not be it, but like activity minutes are. So, okay, you put activity minutes up and the guided goal is like 150 minutes of moderate activity per week is all you really need. And like whatever it is, I think it should feel so easy when you're starting out that it feels like cheating. Like this can't possibly be correct. It it it's good, it's all good, it's all good. And then eventually over time you build it up, but like it should be easy. It should be like so easy that you feel bad not doing it.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Like, uh, you know, sometimes you're in bed and you're like, oh, I should really, I don't know, check the mail. Like it should be that degree of of easy and you just like build it into your day over time because like we like you, you, you pointed out, we're so eager to get to the end state. And then I have some bad news, you're never going to reach end state. Like, like, I don't know what to tell you, you just never reach an end state. Cause you hit one goal and then you're going to want to do another because like that's just not what it's about. So like for my quote unquote new year's resolution, like my goal, which is a carryover from last year is to do a 5K in under 30 minutes. I'm at.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  Thirty two minutes for a 5K, which is great because I had had a slump way before. And I was like much slower than that for a while. And you know, there is a past version of myself that was much faster. Like I was at one point doing 5Ks in 27, 28 minutes. And I'm not that at that point anymore. And I could feel bad about myself or I could just be like, oh, this app said, good job. I did do a good job.

• 25:52David Pierce?

  I made it to Mordor.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  I made it to Mordor or like we did Stompers as as an office for a while, which was just.

• 25:59David Pierce?

  Which one is Stompers?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Stompers is the the Soren Ivanson app where you just whack each other with with bats.

• 26:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  And for a while that was really fun while people were into it. Now I feel like I'm the only person still doing it. And now I have to friend strangers and whack strangers in the middle of the day. But it's nice because I'll get a notification and it's like someone just passed you. And I'm like, by how much? Oh, not by much. Let's walk a little bit and whack this stranger. It's like I have fun doing that. Um, it's just, how can you trick yourself into having fun? Like honestly, it's fun. So like for you, David, it just might be that you haven't found the thing that you genuinely find is fun. And or maybe walking is the thing that's fun for you and do that. You don't have to run. I'm gonna say athletes are the most annoying people, especially quantified fitness athletes, because they're all on Strava and they're all talking about all of these things.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  You have my full permission as the wearable ladies to just turn off all your notifications for the rest of January. You have my full permission to do that.

• 26:59David Pierce?

  Let's talk about that piece of it for one second because I think, again, all of these things want you to make fitness your entire personality and become a Strava person. And if you want to do that, that's fine. Just don't talk to like, leave me alone about it. But like, there are lots of other people on Strava who want to talk to you about their Strava numbers. So like, Godspeed. But there is some quantification here that is useful. Like, I think if you're a person who is like, I want to get in shape this year, spending a lot of time worrying about your VO2 max in 2025 is probably not useful.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:29David Pierce?

  What is useful? Like, what, what numbers should people pay attention to?

• 27:33Speaker 04

  Uh, so the numbers that they should pay attention to are their baselines. Like, just figure out where you're at. Give yourself like two to four weeks to figure out what your baseline is. And like, you're gonna feel so impatient because you're gonna feel like you're not doing anything. You are doing the most important thing, which is to just figure out what your baseline is. Because if-

• 27:52David Pierce?

  Baseline in what sense? Like, go, go run an easy mile and just see how that goes and start from there? Like, that kind of thing?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:59David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  See how that goes. Just how long does it take you to run a mile? Can you even run a mile? Like, that's fine. Uh, what is your daily step count? Like, just naturally, just as you are doing now, like, just neutrally, you're not bad for having an unimpressive step count. You're not bad. You just need to know where to start. Because the thing about all of these tools is that they're like, here, here, here we are. We're gonna give you all of these metrics. But yeah, nobody fuck all. Like, what does, what do these numbers mean? The most important thing is for you to understand what your baseline is. So let's say you baseline in your average daily life, all you're doing is two to 3,000 steps. Great. I love that for you. So next week, try 500 steps more per day.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  That's it. That's it. That's all you gotta do. Just 500 steps more. That's like two minutes of walking, maybe. Like, it's not a very long amount, but just 500 steps more. See, see how you do. See how, how that is. Is that easy for you? Okay, cool. And then after two weeks of doing that, add 500 steps to that. Oh, all of a sudden, you're doing 1,000 more and just go until you hit a goal number. And there are just gonna be some weeks where you don't hit that goal. Okay, so then you just repeat it. And just repeat it until you can do that. Same thing with calorie. Like, just choose one thing. Just choose one metric to, to be your metric. So either choose activity minutes, how many minutes you're doing during a week. Choose your, your steps if that's what works and for your brain the most, or

• 29:25Speaker 04

  choose like if you are already committed to working out at the gym, choose like a number of times you go to the gym. Like, go to the gym. Go on the treadmill for 10 minutes and that's it, you can go home. Like, I just did that with, with my spouse last night. We were both like, it's icy out. We both prefer running outdoors, but we can't because we'll break our neck. Hon about we go to the gym for 15 minutes? And if we do more, that's a success. We did 22 minutes and then we left. That's it. I did, I did the world's most half-ass treadmill run because I hate treadmills. And I was like, I did 20 minutes on the treadmill. I am a god and I left.

• 30:03David Pierce?

  I had, I had a friend a while ago who's, he set his goal as, uh, like I can, I can check it off. If I walk in the door of the gym. If like, literally all I have to do, I have to walk in the front door and I can turn around and leave and it counts. And I did it. And he was like, I never actually just did it. But the point was like, make the goal so easy that you're gonna hit it all the time. Because it's the not hitting the goal that prevents you from stopping.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:28David Pierce?

  And I think about that, I think about him all the time. It's just like all I like, just, he just like walks in, opens the door to Planet Fitness, like high fives the person behind the desk and leaves. And he's like, great work.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  That's me. That's, that's, that's me. That's, that's what I do too. And it's, it's honestly like, I just have to go get on the treadmill for five minutes and I'm allowed to leave at that five minutes. And I almost never do leave at the five minutes. Maybe I'll do 10 or whatever. But the, the whole point is that you're just tricking yourself the entire time. And setting the goal, like my, my number one tip for any of the devices that you get is to, one, pick a metric and then make the goal so stupidly easy, you feel like you're cheating. And then you'll, you'll increase it over time, but like, I, I really think that anyone who's a beginner should just start out doing like, I want to say 10 minutes twice a week. That's it. That's it. You can do that. Anybody can do 10 minutes twice a week.

• 31:23Speaker 04

  And then, uh, you just go up from there. And if you never go up from there and you're just doing 10 minutes, uh, twice a week, that's still better than doing nothing. So you're still winning, like in, in that, in that respect. So like, really the key to fitness is to. Make it easy. Just make it easy and make it fun. Like, find a thing that's fun and find a thing that's easy. If you enjoy doing walks, listening to audiobooks, just do that. Just do that. You do not have to like run a marathon. That's, that's crazy. Like, I, I haven't run a marathon yet and I run a lot. So like, you don't have to do that if that's not for you. Uh, a lot of people will say like, oh, the habit, building the habit is hard. Like, the consistency is what these tools are for.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  Yes. But you cannot be consistent unless you find the thing that you like. So find the thing that you like first. Like, that's, I mean, it's, it, all these tech companies are gonna yell at me because I'm basically saying your tools are shit. But it's, it's, it's, honestly, what you're doing is you're building the wisdom to use the tools effectively because they're tools. And you're gonna fall, you are gonna fall into the trap of being obsessed with streaks. Break them. Just break them on purpose. Break them on purpose and forgive yourself for breaking them on purpose. If your exercise is supernatural in a VR headset, do it. Do it. Play Dance Dance. I know people who have lost 50 pounds just going to the arcade and playing Dance Dance Revolution.

• 32:44David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Do it. That's exercise. It counts. Like, have fun. It shouldn't be work. It really should not be work. It should be something that does not feel like work. Like, for me, running, running is now like a time where I get to think about a draft that is bothering me and like, working out some stuff in my head and it, it always works. Or like, it's a time, if I do have to go to the dread, the treadmill is what I call it. Um, I have a YouTube playlist of K-pop videos I haven't gotten around to watching. I get to watch K-pop videos while I suffer. And that's a way that you can make fitness more tolerable.

• 33:21David Pierce?

  One of the best things I ever did was I had a show that I only allowed myself to watch at the gym. It was just, I just decided this, I, I love this show and I'm watching it and I'm only allowed to watch it at the gym. And, uh, the problem was there weren't that many episodes of the show. So I literally fell off as soon as the show ended. But it was a surprisingly good way to, A, get me there because I was like, oh, I like this show. I'm enjoying it. I'm, I'm gonna go to the gym so I can watch it. And B, it kept me on the treadmill for longer. I just like had it on the iPad and I would watch, I would run for a whole episode. Uh, and that was like, that, that became part of the process and I, I really enjoyed that. So like, that little, that little carrot, for me, was really productive.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  Also, you're allowed to quit. You're allowed, if you don't, it's like, Readers will say this about DNFing books. Don't waste your time on an activity that you don't enjoy. Like, you wouldn't spend all that time trying to read frickin' Gravity's Rainbow by, like, I, I regret reading that book. I hated it from like,

• 34:19David Pierce?

  Clearly.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  I hated it 200 pages in. I forced myself to get through, like, the rest of the 800-page book, but like, those 600 pages, I could've spent reading something enjoyable that I liked. So I regret powering through that. The same thing with exercise. Okay, you don't like running, don't do it. You don't like strength training? Don't do it. Maybe what your thing is, is rock climbing. Do that. And, you know, some people will say that I'm telling you bad health advice just because, oh, there's benefits to strength training. Your muscles will atrophy as you grow older, yada, yada, yada. What I found, because I hated strength training, was that I wanted to get faster at running. So now I do strength training because I want to get faster at running. It took me a really long time to get to that point. Like, a really, really long time to get to that point.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  And that's okay. You'll get to it eventually. It's fine. Just, it's fine. Maybe, maybe you like Pilates. God, God bless you. Pilates people are a different breed of crazy.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  Pilates freaks me out. Yeah, can't do it.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  They're, they're a different breed of like, I, I was doing it for a while and I've decided to quit. Like, I decided to quit. Like, you're allowed to quit. If you don't like it, just quit. Find something else. Try something else. Like, walking. Just, walking is all you do. Just walk. Just walk. Walking's great. Like, make it easy. Make it fun.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  I, I like this. Um, okay. One, I, I have a recommendation that I just want to throw out, because this is a thing that I did last year that has worked very well for me. And then I have one more question for you. The single best fitness thing I did last year was by one single dumbbell. I bought, I, I just have, sitting next to me at my desk, a, a 25-pound dumbbell. And have discovered that with one weight and 15 minutes, you can do a shockingly complete workout. And it has been really useful for me as just like a thing where if, if I'm like, feeling tense or itchy or whatever, I can just like, stand up and, and work out for just like a couple of minutes and it helps. It's not a full workout. Uh, no one is going to accuse me of being shredded. But it is like, that, that is a thing that like, to your point of like, making it easy.

• 36:15David Pierce?

  I made that specific piece of working out really, really easy. And it really helped. Uh, and the like, Amazon Basics dumbbells are very cheap. Uh, and the box is hilariously heavy and, uh, I, I recommend everybody doing that. Uh, my last question to you before I let you go is, uh, for people who are kind of like, one level up from Just sort of learning how many steps they take in a day. And I'm like, I want to exercise more. I want to be more consistent. I think a lot of those people are looking for a place to manage that. Right? Like a, an app or a smartwatch or like, maybe the answer is a piece of paper or something. Like, I, I am a person who exercises a little and I want to be a little more regimented and intentional about exercising more. Where would you point those people?

• 37:01Speaker 04

  So unfortunately, a lot of it is based on what you want to do. Like, if you like strength training, I really love the ladder app. It's what stuck with me. Because my, my problem with strength training and why I put it off for so long was I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Like, I wanted to strength train as a runner. I didn't know what exercises to do. I don't know how long to do it for. I can turn my brain off with this app. And it's great because they have six week progressive overload programs and then a two week break. And they just repeat that add in fun item. There's different types of strength training programs in there. So I'm in MoveWell, which is like for beginners and it focuses on movements that are good for runners. So it's like, perfect.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  And wow, I got faster at running. Oh, my God. And then that success kept me going. But if you're someone who wants to get shredded, they have those things for people at the gym who are doing the scary Smith machine, like all that sort of stuff. They have those programs for you too, different teams. If you're a yoga person and a Pilates person, they have strength things that incorporate that. So there's just like a bunch of different things that you can go to. I think if you're a beginner or intermediate and you just don't want to think about crafting your own program or hiring a personal trainer, that's a great app. It's been working for me. I love it. If you are a runner, I think any running app, and you can like do research. I use Runkeeper. They have like little training programs. So they're like, oh, here's my goal. Here's what I want to do.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  It generates a little training program for me based on weeks. And that's how I've trained for marathon, half marathons. And my current goal of doing 5K.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Basically, I tell it how many days I want to run, what my time goal is. And I want to say, after a really solid seven month training block last year, I reduced my four mile time by 16 minutes.

• 38:56David Pierce?

  Good work.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Insane. And like, I was showing up and like, once you start getting progress, it gets addictive. And I was like, oh, yay. Like, that's there for me. Like, I don't have to think about like, what kind of exercises and training I'm gonna do. It's all, there's speed work in there, there's tempo runs in there, there's long runs in there. And there are so many different apps that do that for runners specifically. There's Runa, there's Nike Run Club. So just pick one.

• 39:24David Pierce?

  I'm gonna get emails for saying this, but I think the running apps are like a dime a dozen.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  They are.

• 39:29David Pierce?

  Pick the one that is like, start with one that's free, A, because a lot of these will try to make you pay very quickly, and B, just pick one that seems fine. Right? Like, they're, they're, for like a straightforward running plan, it's, there are a million out there that will work for you.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, pick one that like, a chill friend of yours is on. That's the key. Like, my chill friend was on Runkeeper, so now we just like, like each other's activities and it's nice.

• 39:55David Pierce?

  That's smart. The Couch to 5K one I use, by the way, is called 5K Runner, and I like it very much. And it has one of those AI coaches that at the end of every run is like, you did such a good job. And I'm like, you're lying. I walked most of this. And it's like, I'm so proud of you. You're terrific. See you in a couple days.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  I'm gonna tell you, in most races that I've ever run, there are plenty of people walking. So,

• 40:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  the idea that you have to do a long race and just completely walk the entire time is bullshit. It's just bullshit. You can, you can take a walk break. Many professional runners take walk breaks. It's very normal to do that. But yeah, so find whatever, there's so much out there. Like, I will continue to write about the ones that I find that I like, that help me, because I am absolutely not the crazy, like, DC Rainmaker is a really nice guy. I love his stuff. I could never do what he does. And I think most of us are in that boat. We're just normal people trying to be. Relatively not dying as a couch potato. And, and, and because of that, you are not an Olympian. You do not have to do what Olympians do.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  You don't. That doesn't make any sense. So just, just relax. I really love your dumbbell hack, though, because I think that's exactly the type of thing that counts. Like, and most exercise research will say, like, you doing that is probably like elongating your, your longevity in your life by like, an amount that is stupidly high proportional to the work that you're putting in. It is, it's just like, I think, I think walking five flights of stairs a day is enough to like, increase your, like, cardio health by a crap ton. Like, you just have to do five staircases a day. That's it. That's doable for most people. So yeah, just do, just do small, do small things. Don't make your goal get shredded by June.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Make your goal get shredded by June 2040. Like, and then like, or something like that. That's, that's actually my goal. My goal is to get shredded in four years for my 40th. So that's it. That's it.

• 41:56David Pierce?

  I love that.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Like, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it in a year. I'm doing it in four years. Like, that's, that's kind of the, the energy you need to have.

• 42:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, I know. I, I keep harping on this, like, it, it, there are people who do this as a lifestyle thing. And that's like, I feel like it's useful to remember that that is, that is like a hundred on the zero to a hundred scale. We treat it as like, a zero and a one, right? Like, either

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:18David Pierce?

  you're a couch potato who's gonna die in three days, or running is your life. And like, no, there's actually, there's so much in between. And you can just, there, there's, there are literally huge benefits to going from a zero to a one, or from a five to a six, or from a 25 to a 26. Like, that's, and that's the way I've, I've tried to learn how to think about this, is like, don't, I don't need to become, quote unquote, a runner. I'm just gonna go for a run. That's it. That's it. I'm gonna go for a run. And if I like it, maybe I'll run tomorrow. And if not, I don't know. I'll play more supernatural. It'll be fine.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like, I, you know, I went to CES. I brought four sets of workout clothes. And I was like, if I do one, that's a success. I did two. So I super succeeded. Like, that's, that's how it goes.

• 43:04David Pierce?

  I appreciate the optimism of four outfits for it, though.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  I, it was very optimistic, but I was just like, it was very optimistic, but I went for two, which I thought I was gonna go for zero. I went for two. I fricking crushed it.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Like it's it's snowing outside. I can't go for a four mile run right now like I normally would. I'm gonna go for a shitty, not very great run on a treadmill. You know what? I'm crushing it. That's all that is. That's all it is. Just like, give yourself a participation trophy. Like, that's it. That's it. You don't need to win a gold medal. Just get the participation trophy.

• 43:41David Pierce?

  Do you want to know the best thing? I this, I had not thought of this until just now, but as you're talking about this, when my now wife and I first started dating, she was a big runner and she got me to run with her by always running to donuts. We, we found, we were living in New York and we, we would just run to different donut shops all over New York. The single most consistently I have ever run. And part of it was because like I liked her and wanted her to like me, but I also got to run to donuts. And I'm convinced that I ran faster and longer and more consistently to donuts than I have ever run in my life. So like, you get your participation trophy, I get donuts. Everybody wins.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  The, the donut is the participation trophy, is what I'm saying.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  It's perfect.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Just whatever your participation trophy is, go get it. Because that's all you need.

• 44:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, I love it. All right, V, thank you as always.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 44:32David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break, but then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about really old cell phones. We'll be right back.

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• 46:15David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So a couple of weeks ago, a group at a university in Finland launched this thing called the Nokia Design Archive. And basically, it is thousands of old documents from Nokia, from like the early 2000s all the way back into the 90s. And if you don't remember, Nokia was the cellphone industry at the time. In a very real way, this was like the biggest, most successful company in the early days of cellphones. And inside this design archive, right now, it's 755 documents, all about just the design and thinking inside of that company about what phones should be. And there's all kinds of truly incredible stuff in there.

• 47:00David Pierce?

  You go through and there's tons of different just lifestyle images of like two dudes sitting on a tennis court and one of them is talking on his phone. And it's the kind of thing that now is like, that's just a picture of two people. But that picture's from the 90s, when it was not common for two dudes sitting on a tennis court to have cellphones. In addition to all of the promotional materials, there are tons of concepts. I think if you do one thing in this design archive, you should go through and look at some of the concepts. And there are concepts for all kinds of things. Some of them are phones, right? Like Nokia had big ideas about how phones maybe should be squishy or how phones should maybe be modular.

• 47:43David Pierce?

  There were lots of different ideas about what if a phone was just a little kind of candy bar shaped thing that you could stick into lots of different sorts of cases and maybe wear or have an FM radio on top of or any number of things. There's one that I really like that's called Moonraker. And it was a Nokia smartwatch that never made it on the market, never got shipped. But it's just an Apple Watch. Like, I don't know how else to put it. It has a vertical UI. It looks like an Apple Watch. It's kind of a mix of the Apple Watch and like the tile look of Windows 8. Maybe that combination is not a super good idea, but it's just fascinating. This is in 2014, so it's not like Nokia is, you know, a million miles ahead of what Apple is doing.

• 48:27David Pierce?

  But everybody was thinking about this stuff. And one of the things that I think is so interesting about all of this is to see how much of what's going on in tech is actually going on everywhere. And the big question is like, how are these things supposed to work? And how are you going to use them? And what do they mean in your life? One other thing you should check out is called P-Tech Clothing. That was one of these big modular ideas that Nokia had. And they had this idea that maybe you'd wear your phone on a lanyard around your neck. And you'd have one that was like cool and Gucci made during the day. But then you'd have one that was like rubbery and sporty that you'd wear when you were, you know, out on the go. Nokia had so many interesting ideas about how people would use phones.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  And I think that's really cool. And it's not the kind of thing you see now where everybody is trying to sell phones to, you know, 3 billion people all over the earth. Now you see all these companies who are trying to sell phones to, you know, billions of people at a time. And so we've gotten to the point where so many phones in particular have just hit kind of a lowest common denominator. I don't mean that as an insult. They're just not different anymore. Even if you and I buy different phones, you buy a Samsung phone, I buy an iPhone, you buy a Huawei phone, I buy a OnePlus phone. They're just slabs of glass at this point. They all have cameras in basically the same place. They all do basically the same thing. And it's really fun to go in and see Nokia reckoning with this idea of how do we change everything? And there's this sense of like,

• 49:58David Pierce?

  Phones aren't inevitably this one thing. Like, there's no sense inside of Nokia that they're building towards this one specific platonic idea of a smartphone. Instead, they're just like, what if our phones kind of looked like gaming handheld consoles? And then they have one that's called Hitchhiker, that is like a prop from a sci-fi movie with the keys on the side and the screen in the middle. Uh, that one actually was very cool, and it's co-named Hitchhiker, which I think absolutely rules. Nokia had so many ideas about technology, and I found myself going through this wondering how unusual this company really was. I think over the course of 20 years, we get to see all of this information and these

• 50:42David Pierce?

  concepts and these presentations in which Nokia just tries to invent the future in a thousand different directions. And maybe that's what every company is doing, but maybe not. And maybe the fact that we have glass slabs of smartphones is a sign that we need more of this, more weird ideas, more trying to invent the future in a thousand different directions all at the same time. I find this whole archive fascinating, and I really think if you're listening to this podcast, you are the kind of person who should go and just poke around it for 20 minutes. You will find something you've never seen in here before. I absolutely guarantee it, and I truly cannot recommend just poking around and looking at some of these different concepts enough. I'll put a few of them in the show notes because frankly, just everyone should see

• 51:27David Pierce?

  these, but it's a really good time. All that said, I knew immediately after getting into this that I wanted to talk to somebody who actually worked on this and has seen all of these materials and can help me make some sense of the story behind all this stuff. So I called up Anna Valtonen, who is one of the researchers who actually put this whole archive together. She is a professor at Alto University, which is where this archive is being held. She also worked at Nokia in the design department for a long time. She's seen all sides of this and knows this space better than just about anybody. So I figured I'd have her just bring me through the archive a little bit and help me see if we can figure out what lessons to learn. So let's just dive in. I started by asking Anna to just explain her history a little bit and how, in particular,

• 52:12David Pierce?

  she got started at Nokia.

• 52:14Speaker 06

  Okay, well, I started at Nokia a long time ago. I was recently graduated. It was in the mid nineties or late nineties. So then I worked there as in the design organization and did all sorts of different kinds of roles for a good twelve or thirteen years. Uh, but this project actually started a lot later than that. So um, when I was still working back in Nokia, we used to keep store, you know, things in archived in a, in a big room in the basement of the new headquarters at the time. Uh, but then when I started doing research around this, I was really focusing on what do designers do and how do they work and so on. So I was quite keen on, on getting all the, the material from there. Uh, and eventually we did, when by the time Nokia had sort of sold off its phone

• 52:59Speaker 06

  activities to Microsoft and Microsoft was going to move out from Finland with their phone design, or I'm not even sure if they were going to continue doing phone designs at all at the time. So we got the stuff. And we, we pulled it all over to the uh, Alto Archives or basically a storage room to start with. We didn't really know what to do with it. Um, cause it was a lot and it was, it was not very, you know, it wasn't organized. So it was big boxes with all sorts of things mashed up together. So after a while, we got a research project around it, got some funding so we could hire people and hands and start documenting what we had and put them in order and, and start understanding what relates to, to what and so on. And, and we've been in a, a really

• 53:41Speaker 06

  wonderful transdisciplinary team, working with that material for a good four years now.

• 53:46David Pierce?

  Okay. So what was your sense at the beginning of what might be inside of this trove of stuff?

• 53:54Speaker 06

  There's all sorts. There's everything from sketches to physical mockups, early stage mockups, very early sketchy kind of mockups and very finalized products or, or products close to launch. There's documentation of, of what happened while people were working on these ideas and so on. And I think To me at least, they really, all the material, it shows the work that goes on behind a finalized product or before you get that far. So can you use design to start thinking of what could be or, or, you know, provoke a discussion of should we maybe be doing that? Or, or use it for understanding what will people like or what would be important for them? Or create a discussion and a debate around, you know, could we do something completely

• 54:39Speaker 06

  new or different? And that's sort of what I'm hoping that the archive will do now when it's open for, for, for anyone to, to dive in is if it creates or generates more of an imagination of what could be or gets us to think of how could we tackle these things that we don't quite know what they are yet. And, and, you know, in a sense, I think we're in a similar situation now with new technology, AI coming and no one quite knows what it will be or how it will be concrete in, in our lives. So we could at least imagine and we could try stuff and we could test it and we can see what works.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of the things that struck me most going through the archive is there's this real sense of questioning what a smartphone is supposed to be and what technology is supposed to be and how we're supposed to hold it and use it. And Nokia was obsessed with this idea of like gadgets that go into little containers that change the features of those gadgets. You like, it just seemed like every designer at Nokia had some idea about, you know, these modular gadgets. Uh, like, do you remember those kinds of conversations back then when, when it wasn't so obvious to everybody what a smartphone was? I think we think about it now as sort of inevitable that like, this is what a smartphone is. It's a slab of glass.

• 55:57David Pierce?

  Uh, I don't think it was inevitable. And I don't, and I think there were, there were so many different ideas back then. Like, does it, does it bring up some of those questions again to look at all these things now?

• 56:08Speaker 06

  It was far from inevitable. There were so many, I remember many of the discussions. One I remember particularly well was when sometime far in the future, there were going to be 3G networks. They might make it possible to send a picture, or you could even have a video one day. And, and some of the concepts were trying to, to make that concrete. So what would it be if you could actually talk with someone so that you would see them at the same time? Or you could send content that would be visage, which today seems completely self-evident.

• 56:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 56:42Speaker 06

  And obvious. And we're, we're having this discussion today over, you know, we can see each other while we're talking. So a lot has happened.

• 56:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think it's just so interesting to think about, going back to before all of that stuff was so obvious. And these questions of like, what does it mean? And how are we supposed to use it? And there, one of my favorite things in the archive is all these concept videos that are in there that just absolutely don't make any sense. Like, there's one where there, there, she's looking through a thing and there's an owl in it. And then all of a sudden, there's an owl flying around in a room. And it's, I, I could not even explain to you what that is about. But there is this open question. And I think Nokia was very good at this before almost any other company was thinking about it, about like, how the technology that you have and the real world that you're in are supposed to interact. And, and I think just now, on the other end of, you know,

• 57:35David Pierce?

  20 years of all of us being pulled more and more and more into screens, it was just neat to go back and be like, okay, this is, this was a question we had about, these are things that should exist in the real world that we should use in the real world and that should interact with the real world. And I was just, I was so struck by that way of thinking almost, it felt more like science fiction than product design in a lot of ways.

• 57:56Speaker 06

  But what you're also bringing up is a very important point on the fact that it takes time, that, that, you know, there's, there's a long, it could be a lot later. So, you know, you might have a first idea of something and then it goes through all sorts of levels of product development and ideation and, and further refinement and whatnot. And then you get a first product out and that might be years from when you, you know, first were discussing it. And then when the first product comes out, it might still not make a market or be. Self-evident and then take five years later and everyone thinks that it's quite normal. So it's maybe, or at least for me, it's been really wonderful to hear people look at the archive and they realize, well, this looks, you know, normal.

• 58:38Speaker 06

  And then they look at the year and say, oh, it was 10 years before it was on the market. Or, oh, it was, you know, 15 years before we thought that was normal. So it shows you, or I'm hoping that it will give people the idea of perspective too. That technology doesn't just appear, we're actually all creating it.

• 58:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. What do you think it was about Nokia in particular that so many of those things were happening inside of that company so long before they were out in the world? I think to some extent, this question of what if we can see each other on video has been on everybody's mind since, you know, a century ago. It was, that was kind of an obvious thing that would eventually happen. But there's so much of this in the archive that is just products we have now. And I think maybe that's true lots of places, but I was shocked going through it, how much of 2024 and 2025 exists in these drawings from like 2000. What do you think it was about Nokia that led to that?

• 59:36Speaker 06

  That's a very good question. And it's, it's always easy to, to be smart, you know, hindsight. But I do think it was a wonderful working culture of where there was an allowance for testing and for trying things out, and almost an enthusiasm for, for what could be. But I also think that many organizations have similar activities with them today. It's just that we don't know about it because we can't see into other organizations. So that's why I'm so happy about this archive, that it's, it's one glimpse in, into what has happened for real. It's not potential or maybe, or, you know, it's, it's actual empirical material of, of things that happened.

• 1:00:20Speaker 06

  Might miss pieces in between, but at least it's there. The one area that I really like, and this is probably because of my own research and my own background, I really like that it makes the design process very concrete. That you can really understand what happens in these teams, because the teams are often big. They're multidisciplinary, there's a lot of people interacting and so on. And it's easy to talk about these heroic designers or something like that. But this archive actually shows that there's a lot of people involved. And what do they actually do? Well, they come up with a mood board, or they come up with a sketch, or they have a meeting where they talk about this. So somehow it's so tangible to me.

• 1:01:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was struck by how iterative some of this stuff is. Where there was one I was thinking of where it's a gaming machine. And it looks a lot like the Nintendo Switch, right? Like, there's a thing, I think it's from, it's either 2000 or 2003, I forget. But it is just straightforwardly a gaming handheld. And in it, there is just this one document of basically every imaginable version of a gaming handheld. And which I loved very much. It's like, here are the six wild ideas about what this could be. And then you can sort of see over time, you winnow it down slightly, and then you expand it slightly. And then you winnow it down slightly, and then you expand it. And it's like, that's the design process, not someone goes into a dark room and comes back fully formed at the Nintendo Switch.

• 1:01:46David Pierce?

  It's like, this is how this work actually gets done. And I think you're right that we don't see the way that these things get done, because everybody wants to come up at the end and say, here is this beautiful thing that emerged from the earth fully formed. And that's just not at all how it ever actually works.

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So I'm hoping that people explore that.

• 1:02:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was a very fun, I kept going through, looking for gadgets that exist now that were being talked about back then, and you can find them everywhere. There's a thing that looks like the Apple Watch, there's a thing that looks like the Nintendo Switch. There are every smartphone and PDA that you can imagine, it was very fun. I enjoyed that very much.

• 1:02:25Speaker 06

  There's probably 25 different kinds of smartwatches.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:02:28Speaker 06

  From different parts of the company, and different times, and different levels of technology, and, you know, different user. Ideas and so on. So it's not one, there's a lot.

• 1:02:39David Pierce?

  Yeah. So the, a lot of the folks listening to this show are gadget people. This is what we do at the Verge for gadget people. Doing all this research, did you have any, any favorite gadgets or concepts or wild quixotic quests that Nokia went on that, that jumped out to you? Any sort of favorite historical artifacts?

• 1:02:58Speaker 06

  Many. For me, I think the, the most important ones were the ones that I had no idea of. When I was there, because it was a big company and there's a lot of things happening and going, going on. And also maybe, and let's see if, if what your audience will think. I think the easy access point is to look at crazy and wild concepts. But if you take a little bit more of an effort and you go into the actual presentation documents that are attached to them, that's where you really see the wits of it. Ah, okay, look, they had this kind of background understanding and look, this is what they thought about. And, and oh, they did five different ideas that were completely different than what actually turned out in the end and so on.

• 1:03:41Speaker 06

  So I'm wishing and hoping for that, that people would take the time and effort to go a little bit beyond only cool gadgets, but let's see.

• 1:03:50David Pierce?

  There are so many cool gadgets, though. You could, there's just so many cool gadgets. Why do you think, this is the thing I've been thinking about and, and you've spent more time in these documents than I have. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts. Why was Nokia so obsessed with these modular gadgets? I mean, truly, everything is like, it's a thing that goes into a case and becomes something else or bends around. There's one that was like, you can put it on your ankle or around your wrist or hold it like a phone. And there was this, this obsession with these sort of malleable gadgets. Why do you think that was so pervasive?

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  There's probably many answers and I'm, I'm not sure that was always the, the obsession either. But I think it's, it's good to remember, what did the real products look like when these concepts were made? So many of the early modular concepts, the real products were actually huge lumps that you were dragging along. You know, so if you, if you did want to use it while using sports, for example, maybe you didn't wanna go jogging with something that weighed a lot. Maybe it would have been a lot easier if you could take just a small part of something with you. So maybe people also imagined. In relation to what they had at the time. So you take the challenge with what you have then.

• 1:05:04Speaker 06

  And then you try to imagine a solution that would be better than that. But now we only see the proposed solution and we forget why they thought that was better than what they had.

• 1:05:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think that there was that kind of thinking going at the same time. As Nokia was kind of at the peak of its powers, though. I mean, the company was so big and so powerful and made the phones everybody had. But still seems to have this sort of wildly experimental arm going on. And again, maybe there's more of that going on in some of these companies than we think. But my sense is now, especially, these gadgets are so big and so important. And there's so much money in them that I just would bet there are not a lot of people inside of Apple thinking about wholesale lifestyle changes to the iPhone, right? Like, these things maybe have just matured beyond that point.

• 1:06:01David Pierce?

  But it's forever interesting to me that even at the moment Nokia is making all of the bestselling phones on earth, all of them. It was still in this phase of like, how can we reimagine everything all the time?

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  Agree, but I can also contradict you a little bit. I think it's actually normal because we have other research that shows that in a moment of big pivot, when everything is changing in the world, where technology shifts are happening, big shifts like we have today. Then that's exactly the moment where you need to be more creative. So that's also the moment in time where you need to think with a broader mindset.

• 1:06:39David Pierce?

  And was there something about Nokia's sort of corporate culture that pushed towards that? With just people given permission to do that kind of thing more than most?

• 1:06:48Speaker 06

  I think there was, and I'm not sure they were given permission or if the culture was just such that they dared to take the permission, even without getting it.

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  So so more of a culture of try it and see. Um, which is great and which there's a lot of other scholars talking about today that that's the kind of organizational culture that would be great to have, where people aren't afraid to try stuff or or so. So so, but of course, we don't know what other companies are doing at the moment.

• 1:07:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  But.

• 1:07:19David Pierce?

  But hopefully they'll share now too.

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  Exactly, but there's something in in the air today where we are a little bit cautious. We're very afraid of doing wrong. Whereas I think it's wonderful when we can try things out, then maybe some of them can be right.

• 1:07:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, and is it? Are there things to be learned for tech companies now? Do you think on on how all of this worked? I mean, to some extent, some of this stuff is so different in the world in which it was taking place than the one that we live in now, that uh I I wonder how like some of the some of the sort of specifics are probably not applicable, like Nokia's wild ideas. Some of them are less wild now and some of them are even more wild now. Uh, but do you think if I'm a if I'm a tech company in twenty twenty five, trying to think through how to replicate processes like these, like, are there lessons from Nokia in that?

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Definitely, and I think ways of working are still very valid. So say, for example, that you are in a completely different company, a smaller one that's starting with this kind of of, you know, future technology thinking, maybe it's a good thing to be able to peek somewhere. But how did they do? Because much of the ways of doing it are still very much the same. You try to understand end users and you try to imagine what could be and you develop products which will be the best possible for whomever you're trying to approach and so on. So so I think, or I'm hoping at least, maybe one day it could be useful also for someone who who should know how it works, but isn't quite sure. You know, maybe it could be your backdrop so that you could you could check how they did before you go into a meeting of your own or or something, I don't know.

• 1:08:59David Pierce?

  Do you think we are back at a similar moment because of AI? I think we certainly have not had. A moment as sort of specifically culturally transformative since cell phones. And you can kind of write that timeline however you want, but it's probably been somewhere between 15 and 20 years since we had a moment like that. Do you think we're back in one of those moments because of AI?

• 1:09:24Speaker 06

  Very much so, and I don't think it's only the arrival of new technology. And that's what I'm hoping that this archive will show too. It's society only shifts when people shift how they, you know, interact and are in the world too. And that's, that's where people come in. And, and that's, I think, what something that you can see from this material that, you know, it really tries to understand what do people do with it? And how do they conduct their lives and what would make sense for them and so on? And I think we are definitely in that societal pivotal moment now where, where we, we know that new technology will be with us. But we don't quite know how we will use it in our everyday. It isn't very tangible yet. We don't know how, how we will conduct our lives differently through it.

• 1:10:09Speaker 06

  So, so I think it would be a wonderful moment in time to, to use similar methodology and to, to, to learn from at least what has been and, and, and to try and be creative, maybe be optimistic or, or, or imagine what could be.

• 1:10:25David Pierce?

  A question I find myself talking about with, with product makers a lot is just how far into the future is it even useful to think about? And I increasingly I talk to folks in tech who are thinking about like 18 months from now and, and three years from now. Because they're of the mind that it's just not useful to make bigger, longer prognostications because the world changes very fast. And also who cares, right? Like, we'll figure that out when we get there. But even, again, just to go back to the science fiction comparison, there is so much in this archive that is just pure sort of futuristic science fiction.

• 1:11:02David Pierce?

  And, and I wonder inside of a company, what value that brings for a company that is like shipping and making new products to also think, what is the world going to look like in 10 or 20 or 50 years? And Nokia was clearly doing a lot of that. And, and I have forever kind of wondered how valuable that kind of thinking is inside of a company like that.

• 1:11:24Speaker 06

  I think the important point is that the world doesn't happen. Someone does something that changes something. And, and you know, this shows some examples of how that was done. But, but that's exactly how, so this eighteen month thinking cycle, it means that you think that someone else will create the world and you'll just be reacting to it. Whereas you can also think of what would you want it to be or what would you not want it to be and, and start having a discussion around that. And then hopefully, maybe, you know, coming out with something that makes sense in whatever you've imagined.

• 1:12:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, do you think, do you think Nokia gets credit for moments like that in, in some of the history you've been looking at? Are there kind of before and after moments because of something that came out of this company?

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  I think Nokia got a lot of credit of all the great things it did when it was as its biggest. Then it got a lot of negative sort of insights from, from when it didn't do so well. And we've been living in that wave now with a lot of people trying to think what went wrong and so on. But I'm hoping that we're sort of getting beyond both of those now to a period where we can look at it with more, not neutral eyes, but different eyes, you know, to see different perspectives out of the material and, and different angles that we hadn't thought of before and so on. So, so that's, I think, quite typical that near time, we're always blind. So in the Nokia case, I think we've been blind in both directions.

• 1:12:55David Pierce?

  Looking through the archive, I found myself torn between sort of two overarching theories. One is that there was kind of a unified theory of Nokia about phones in particular and the future and kind of how technology and people were supposed to interact. And I feel like I could, I could sort of twist into like a unifying theory of everything. And on the other side, I was struck by the fact that actually what's going on is just this unbelievably chaotic design process where everybody is trying to think about everything and then you just throw it all in a pot and hope something cool comes out. And that maybe that's actually the magic of design is that there is something unknowably weird going on here.

• 1:13:42David Pierce?

  Is it, is it either one of those two things? Is it something in between?

• 1:13:45Speaker 06

  I think it's probably both.

• 1:13:46David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:13:47Speaker 06

  So it's, of course, it's messy and, and creative while you're at it. And of course, there's always some structure into it. But it can also depend on, on who's, who you will be asking. When you will be asking and and what the the opportunities to do something around you are. But but it's definitely both of those. It's it's very rarely completely clear from the very beginning. It's it's very, you know, complex and messy and you try stuff out. And then at some point, it has to get slightly clearer because otherwise you won't be an organization that actually produces anything. So so so there's a there's both.

• 1:14:24David Pierce?

  Okay, I just think the the unifying theory I keep coming back to, and I'm just gonna I'm gonna posit this, and then I'm curious how what you think about it. I think we live in a moment now where technology is such a destination, right? Where everybody is building metaverse worlds for you to go to and games you're supposed to spend time in and screens you're supposed to stare at for hours at a time. And everything is supposed to sort of draw you in and engage you more and more. And I feel like Nokia at that moment, and I'm thinking particularly kind of right after to the year 2000, kind of in that phase between cell phones were everywhere, but smartphones were nowhere yet, right? In that moment, Nokia had this very human centric idea of technology, that it was a thing that should

• 1:15:09David Pierce?

  fit onto you and be an accessory and be around you, but was not meant to be this sort of all consuming, engaging thing. They were it. It all feels more like fashion than electronics in a way that I find really interesting. And that's probably not everything, but I think that to me just felt so different than what I'm used to in technology. That I was like, maybe this is just maybe Nokia had a different idea about how we're supposed to use technology than a lot of companies.

• 1:15:37Speaker 06

  Could be. And doesn't it always every trend is always followed by a counter trend and then back again? So if you have something that is, you know, very focused on doing something well, then you come to a period when where something should do everything for everyone. And then you might be coming back to a period where something should do something well for someone. I can see the same. We have a lot of people talking about how the digital era made everything untangible and and, you know. Just pixels and now I can also in our students, I can see a trend back that the haptic and the feeling of things and and and materiality gains in importance again. So so somehow these things also, I don't know, but it seems like they're almost going

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  in waves a little bit.

• 1:16:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I I look at so many of those concepts and presentations and and they're so obsessed with materials and and plushiness and like they made electronics that were squishy. Nothing is squishy anymore. I love that they were squishy.

• 1:16:37Speaker 06

  How does it feel to your skin and how do you interact with it in a yeah?

• 1:16:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, maybe I hope we get some of that back.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  At least we can learn from it.

• 1:16:46David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and I have a follow up to last week's hotline question. We'll be right back.

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• 1:18:32David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So last week on the Vergecast Hotline, we answered a question about audio on your iPhone. And basically, why can't you listen to two things at the same time on your phone? I got a lot of feedback from that hotline question, which was really fascinating. And the biggest thing I heard from a couple of folks, from developers in particular, is that when you have the thing that you're listening to music or a podcast or whatever, and you open an app that isn't immediately playing audio, but turns off the audio you were already listening to? Like, a lot of games do this. Like I said on last week's show, the ESPN app does this. That's bad development. And I know that, but I don't think I hit that hard enough. That is not how that's supposed to work. That the way that these apps manage

• 1:19:16David Pierce?

  outside background audio input is up to them, and they could all stand to do a much better job. One thing I like is I think a bunch of games actually do this really well, where you can be listening to a podcast, but playing the game, and it'll play the game over top of the audio sometimes. But if you also just, you know, turn off all the audio in the game, you can just play your podcast. So like, this thing can work. And the fact that it doesn't is a little bit Apple's fault, because I think Apple tries to hold people's hand too much. But it's also developers' fault for not caring about getting that right. So if you run into an app that's not getting that right, complain, because they can do better. All that said, we got a question from Gus along the same lines that has had me thinking all week.

• 1:20:00David Pierce?

  Gus says, "Sitting in the train, listening to last week's show, I had a question. You explained the difficulties of combining audio sources to a single output. I wonder why it's also complicated the other way around. When I want to share the audio from my phone to two sets of Bluetooth headphones, this appears impossible. Yes, you can share earbuds, but not headphones. Aux audio splitters were a thing. Why is this not a thing with wireless?" This is the most fascinating question. So I looked into this a bunch and I have a couple of theories, but my theories are actually not the most interesting part. So let me just get through that really fast. I think one of the reasons this is hard to do on an iPhone in particular is, again, it's not a particularly popular thing.

• 1:20:41David Pierce?

  And I think if you're a company like Apple, having it set so that you can send all your audio to all your headphones, all at the same time, just feels messy. And so for Apple to be able to say it's essentially one audio device at a time, you don't have to manage it. You don't have to go in and turn them off. You don't have to mess with it. You just tap the one that you want and you start listening. Like, I think about the Sonos thing where if you have a bunch of Sonos speakers, you can set up kind of infinite overlapping sets of those speakers. You're like, okay, I want this to just play in my bedroom and in the bathroom, but I want this to play in the living room, the bedroom and the bathroom. And I want this one to be on all of them. That's really handy, but it's a lot of work.

• 1:21:22David Pierce?

  And I think for Apple, particularly because Bluetooth frankly does get messy. It is not a particularly great protocol. So if you're trying to send synced audio to a bunch of places at once, it can get really complicated. There's actually a way to do this on Android. I'll put a link in the show notes, but especially if you have a Samsung phone, this is a pretty easy thing to do. One thing I've learned, by the way, through this process is that Samsung phones are very good at just letting you do things. And I've come to really appreciate that about Samsung phones. They're like overly complicated in a lot of ways. They have too many settings menus. But when I look up like, how do you do this hard thing on a phone? The answer most of the time is like, you can't do it on iOS. You can kind of do it on Android and Samsung just has a setting for it. And I love Samsung for that. But I want to share with you the thing that I discovered.

• 1:22:07David Pierce?

  And it's possible that I am the last person on earth to have learned this, but I learned this and so I'm going to share it. There is this thing on iOS that lets you share audio from your device to multiple sets of headphones at the same time. I had no idea this existed. I have done the thing where my wife and I sit on the bed and she has one AirPod and I have the other AirPod. And we just like share a pair of headphones that way. We have to keep our heads really close to each other. Like, that's bad. And I just had no idea there was a better way. But it turns out that if you have a supported device, which is basically any newish iPhone or iPad, it doesn't seem to work on other devices.

• 1:22:50David Pierce?

  You can actually do it on a Mac by using the MIDI settings thing on the Mac. That's a little more complicated, but on an iPhone in particular and on an iPad, which I think is where most people would want to do this kind of thing. Basically, you put on your AirPods. This only works if you have AirPods or Beats headphones. But if you put on your AirPods and then when something is playing, you tap the like, I guess it's this sort of AirPlay-y thing. It's the little triangle with the radial circles around it. It's sort of a sharing menu, sort of an AirPlay menu. I don't really know what to call it. But it's an icon and you tap it. And if someone near you has headphones that you can bring close to your own device, you get a thing that says Share Audio.

• 1:23:35David Pierce?

  And you tap Share Audio and it'll pop up a new set of headphones as if you're pairing a new set of headphones to your device. You then, at least what I've had to do in the past, is press and hold the button on the back of those AirPods, like the pairing button on the case. But then it actually syncs it up to your phone and you can play through two sets of AirPods at the same time. This blew my mind. Like, how is this not a more known feature? Maybe I'm the last person on Earth, again, to have discovered that this exists. But this is just a thing you can do. You can do it in Control Center. It's most accessible, I've found, by the little live activity notification on the lock screen where you can hit the Share button that way.

• 1:24:19David Pierce?

  But the idea that you can actually have your phone connected and synced simultaneously to two sets of AirPods is very cool. Again, it's only AirPods and Beats headphones and it's only iPhones and iPads of a certain recency, but odds are, I think, most of them seem to be, if your device still works, it's new enough that it'll work. But this is nuts. And this, I think, will solve a lot of problems for a lot of people because the iPhone AirPods connection is pretty real. So if I have AirPods and an iPhone and you have AirPods, we can both listen through our AirPods to the same thing at the same time. It's kind of hacky and it took me like three tries to get it to work the first time with my wife's AirPods.

• 1:25:01David Pierce?

  And then you have to make sure that they're both checked when they're connected and they'll kind of disconnect if you take one of your headphones off then because then the pause gets sort of wacky. And this is the kind of thing where I'm like, okay, I get why Apple is not super excited about this. Like if I'm wearing AirPods and I have it set so that when I take my headphones out, my music will pause. Should it also pause for you if you're wearing AirPods and we have our audio sync? This stuff is complicated and I don't think it works super well. I've been testing this a little bit and it's not perfect. But like the, the use case that I have is I have a sleeping child in my room and we want to watch something that we can both listen to. This legitimately solves that problem and I think that's very exciting.

• 1:25:44David Pierce?

  So I'm going to share a link in the show notes to Apple's support page for how this works. It's pretty helpful and, and does a good job of explaining how it works. But sharing audio really works and you can do it on lots of different devices and I highly recommend it if you want to solve this problem in a less hacky way. If you want to solve this problem in a more hacky way, you can do what I've been doing for years and just buy a headphone splitter. I have been traveling with a headphone splitter for a very long time and I just plug it into the iPhone, plug two sets of headphones in, Bob's your uncle, as they say. It's a useful hack, but this one's a little more elegant, let's say. Anyway, I am still fascinated by how audio works on these devices. So if you have more funky edge cases or ideas about how all of this should work, I got

• 1:26:29David Pierce?

  a lot of people who agree with my theory that what Apple needs here is a really good now playing app that lets you control this stuff more manually. I don't think we're ever getting that, but if you solve this, I want to hear all about it. Anyway, for now, that is it for the first cast. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com. I'll put a bunch of stuff in the show notes. I'm going to link to as many of the apps and things that Vee mentioned that I can find. I'll put some stuff for the Nokia Design Archive in there. And as always, readtheverge.com. The news continues unabated, my friends. It's crazy out there. By the way, thank you to everybody who's reached out with ideas about how we should cover politics and how you use ChatGPT. We're going to talk about a bunch of that stuff with Neelai on Friday.

• 1:27:13David Pierce?

  So if you have more ideas and more thoughts, get them in. We're going to have a pretty hotline-y episode on Friday. I'm very excited about it. And as always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions about anything else, you can always email us at [email protected], call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We truly love hearing from you. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Will Poor and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai and I will be back on Friday, like I said, to talk about ChatGPT, politics, people raising tons of money, how big is Mark Zuckerberg's data center and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:27:56Speaker 07

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