A Vergecast holiday re-run marathon

Happy Holidays! The Vergecast is off this week, but we also know you might be doing a lot of traveling and / or avoiding of your family this time of year, so we figured we'd do something a little different. We compiled a bunch of our favorite Vergecast segments and moments from this year — a full six hours of them! — in case you need something to listen to. You may have heard them all before! They might all be new! Maybe it'll be a mix! This one's an easy skip if you're looking for one, but if you need some Verge in your ears this holiday season, we've got you covered. We'll be back for real in January, starting at CES. If you'll be in Vegas, come see us live on Wednesday, January 8th! https://voxmediaevents.com/vergecast And in the meantime, have a great holiday, and rock and roll. Here are the segments we picked, in order, with timestamps (because we can't do chapters, we know, we hate it too): The wild world of undersea cables — 00:04:32 Meet Tony Delivers — 00:42:19 The story of the Delta emulator — 00:56:29 Phones are the ultimate AI gadget — 01:37:12 The history and future of notebooks – 02:04:34 What is a photo? — 02:41:07 An existential gaming console crisis — 03:17:46 Inside the AI music lawsuits — 03:52:12 The history of podcasts — 04:40:59 Our Vision Pro score debate — 05:03:15 A road trip on the hydrogen highway — 05:35:13 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.

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• 1:23David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really, really, really long podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am on vacation. We are releasing this episode on Christmas Eve, December 24th, and so I hope you are also on vacation. I hope everybody gets to have a restful, relaxing end of the year. It has been a bonkers year in just so, so, so many ways, and I hope everybody gets a chance to wind down a little. Because 2025 also seems like it's gonna be pretty precarious, but we'll get back to that. For this episode, we want to do something we've never done before. This might be a horrible idea. Everybody might hate this. We might never do it again, but I just wanted to do it just in case. So we've published a lot of stuff over the course of this year,

• 2:08David Pierce?

  and we're also not publishing anything for the next couple of weeks because we're off, everybody's off. Things are, you know, pretty slow in the news world anyway. So this is usually a time we just take a couple of weeks off. But we've also heard from a lot of folks who travel a lot during this time of year and would like to have something on in the background, maybe so you don't have to talk to your family or an excuse to wear headphones so that you don't have to talk to your family. Lots of things going on. So what we did was we went back through this whole year of Verge Casts and we found a whole bunch of things that frankly, we just really liked. We've published a lot of stuff this year. Some of it, I think, is really good, some of it less so, but some of it, I think, is really good. And some of it is also pretty timely and newsy and makes less sense now than it did,

• 2:53David Pierce?

  you know, three or six or nine months ago. But some of the stuff I think we've done kind of holds up and is still interesting and evergreen and worthwhile. So we compiled a lot of it. I think it's like six hours of it into just a bit of a clip episode of some of our favorite stuff that we've made this year. To be clear, if you've been listening to the Verge Cast all year, there is nothing, not one second of new stuff in this episode. Absolute no hard feelings. If you don't listen, you won't miss anything. Totally fine. This is just if you want more Verge Cast, more background noise, or just frankly, something to listen to, because sometimes we all need something to listen to. And I guess I think of this as like, you know, I've seen every episode of The Office

• 3:37David Pierce?

  50 times and I still like it. So maybe you'll like hearing some cool Verge Cast stuff again. I don't know. Again, this is just an experiment. I would love to know what you think. I think there's something to this like clip showy thing because we make a lot of this stuff. I've seen podcasts do like reruns of their best ofs and I've always really enjoyed that. If you have ideas on how we can do this better next year, please let me know. [email protected]. I'm also [email protected]. Hit me up. We'd love to hear from you. But for the next six hours. We're just going to play you some of our favorite Vergecast stuff. Some of this now is going to be wildly out of date. We tried to pick things that are pretty evergreen and still pretty interesting and relevant. But you'll hear some details, some numbers, some facts and figures. I mean, we talk about the Vision Pro when we did the review.

• 4:22David Pierce?

  That was 11 months ago. Like, lots has changed, but it was still a fun conversation. And I think a lot of it still holds up and is still interesting. So we're going to play that for you at some point here, too. Two more notes, and then we're getting into it. One, there are no chapters in this podcast. And please understand that this is both the perfect, perfect episode to have chapters for. And because our platform does not allow it, we don't have it. There are timestamps in the show description. I think a lot of platforms will let you click on those timestamps to jump. That's the best thing we can do. We'll also put kind of the table of contents of all the stuff that's going to be in here. So you can jump around if you'd like to. I promise we are working on chapters. It is the thing we want the most. I know it's the thing you want the most. We're going to keep working on it.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  Thing number two, like I said, we are off for the rest of the year and we will be back at CES. And if you are going to be at CES in January, you should come see us. January 8th, which is Wednesday at CES, at the Brooklyn Bowl on the Link Promenade. It's like right in the middle of the strip. The Vergecast is free. We'll put a link in the show notes. You can come, hang out, eat, drink, make dumb jokes about technology with us. We would absolutely love to see you. Very much looking forward to that and looking forward to seeing all of you. So that's enough preamble. Let's get into it. Here are, I think it's 11, 10 or 11, many, many hours of our favorite Vergecast things that we've done this year. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and we'll see you in a couple of weeks.

• 5:52David Pierce?

  Here we go.

• 5:54David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Over the last few years, one of those ongoing news stories that always makes me stop and think is whenever a company, usually Google or Meta recently, announces that they're starting a project to build a cable between countries or continents or across the ocean. Like in 2022, both those companies announced these big plans to build cables pretty much all the way around the African continent. The diagrams of them alone are mind blowing. Just imagine you were sort of loosely tracing your way around Africa three or four times, all the way around. That's what it looks like. Thousands of miles of cable underneath the ocean, hitting land at these various points all around Africa. And increasingly, this is what the whole world looks like.

• 6:37David Pierce?

  The whole internet is just right there, underneath the ocean, all over the world. The Verge's Josh Jezza has been reporting on these cables for months, and he's found himself inside a whole huge industry that really nobody ever knows or talks about, which is the folks tasked with laying and, just as important, maintaining and fixing these undersea cables. If you're hearing this on Tuesday as this podcast goes live, his story just also went up. We might have actually beaten him by a couple of hours. So keep an eye on theverge.com. So we figured we'd have him on the show to talk about it and explain this whole under the sea world to us. Josh Jezza, welcome back to the Vergecast.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 7:14David Pierce?

  You have spent however many months at sea, learning about the weird machinations of the internet.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Yes, unfortunately, in port, but I guess it's still technically the sea.

• 7:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's good enough. So I want to like, talk through this big story that you've been working on and just published for us. But I also want to kind of explain the infrastructure of the internet in a way that I think you're now sort of uniquely set up to do. And my sense is what you've discovered, if we're just gonna start from the very beginning, is that like, yes, in fact, the internet is just a series of tubes.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely, it is a series of tubes. I was surprised at actually how tube-like they are. Like, you imagine, at least I imagine, I feel like a lot of people imagine, kind of big pipes at the bottom of the ocean, but it's actually just little garden hose with tubes running between continents. They have some fiber optic cables in the middle, basically just strands of glass that lasers pulsing through encode data, and that is how data travels around the world.

• 8:17David Pierce?

  So give me kind of the big picture way to think about this infrastructure. Like, I know it's lots of very long cables, but like, how, how sort of big and sprawling is the undersea cable universe?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  It's huge. It's um, there are 500 or so cables around the world, around 800,000 miles of cabling, uh, often going through between sort of big population centers. So you have a lot going from UK, Western Europe to New York, New Jersey. On the other side, you have various parts of California going to Japan or other locations in Asia. And that is how, you know, you think about these big global networks, you are, even if you're not always like, if two people in America in the US are emailing, they're probably just on terrestrial cables. But the second you're accessing data

• 9:10Speaker 04

  that's overseas in some capacity, if you're watching YouTube videos that were posted from somewhere overseas, it's cached locally at a data center, but it got there using an undersea cable from some other data center somewhere. And if you, of course, zoom or email or whatever with someone overseas, it's going through one of these cables.

• 9:29David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. How would you think about in the sort of day to day life of a normal person? How important are these cables, do you think?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  I would say they're very important, but they might not be directly accessing them every day. If you're on a big continent like North America, you're largely traveling over terrestrial network, but services you interact with are dependent on these cables. So you have like big global platforms like YouTube and TikTok. That content is reaching you like the last mile is going to be terrestrial, but it got to North America using a subsea cable. A lot of financial debt data, any kind of international transfer is happening on a subsea cable. Anytime you call customer service and you're talking to someone overseas, that's on a subsea cable. And then you have kind

• 10:19Speaker 04

  of the bits of the internet. You have, you might a little website. It might seem like it's local, but you have, you know, software libraries and various things that could be stored somewhere else that it's calling on, and you don't necessarily know where it's coming from. So I would say every day you're doing something that maybe on a secondary tertiary level relies on these cables.

• 10:43David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. And undersea cables, if I understand correctly, are not like a new internet-y idea, right? The idea of having a cable that connects the United States to Europe and Europe to Africa and Africa to Asia or whatever. We know how to do this at this point, right?

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, one of the surprising things to me in doing this story is how little this has changed over the years. And I'm not just talking like the decades of the internet, but like a lot of these companies trace their lineages back to the telegraph era and a lot of the practices are date from the telegraph era. Like you lay cables, you repair cables, pretty much how you did in the 19th century.

• 11:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're talking like mid 1800s, right? When the telegraph was starting to kind of move around the world?

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, you read these accounts of the early telegraph people and it's quite, a lot of it's trial by air. It's quite exciting as people, they don't really know how electricity works. They don't really know what the bottom of the ocean looks like. And they're just sort of setting out being like, well, we strung a cable over through the English Channel, like, why not do the ocean? And it goes terribly for several decades before they eventually figure out how to do it.

• 11:51David Pierce?

  Okay, so today, what does it take to keep all these important garden hoses safe and working?

• 11:57Speaker 04

  So they're breaking all the time. They break 200 times a year. It's like every other day, a cable breaks.

• 12:03David Pierce?

  So we have 500 cables and 200 of them break every year?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, they get 200 breaks. Sometimes they're on the same cable. It's complicated. But yeah, basically, a good chunk of them are breaking. There's enough redundancy in the system that data can be routed around on alternate paths. So you don't really notice. But you know, if they, if 200 cables were to stay broken, you would notice things, very bad things would happen. So yeah, these breaks happen all the time, 200 times a year. And when one breaks, traffic is rerouted along alternate paths. And while that's happening, one of this small band of ships will sail out with some spare cable and fix the break. You know, as the internet has become more important, there was a report that was interesting

• 12:47Speaker 04

  a couple of years ago that talks about how cables have not become more vulnerable in recent years. It's just that our dependence on them has grown exponentially. So say in the nineties, there's a massive break. Some things break. It's not bad. You might not notice in your day to day life. Now everything breaks. You know, banks stop working, companies can't function, supply chains break, websites don't load. We rely on it for everything, but the industry that repairs it, keeps things running is basically the same. It's just sort of handled by private companies that have a bunch of contracts with cable owners. And they have this arrangement that is sort of, you know, days back, half a century, maybe,

• 13:30Speaker 04

  where everyone kind of pays into a organizing body that has a couple of ships that stand by and repair any cables that break in a big zone. And like the zone is the Atlantic Ocean.

• 13:44David Pierce?

  It's a big, big zone. Yeah. So how do these cables break?

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Overwhelmingly, it's people break them. Specifically fishing vessels break a lot of cables. You have these dredging nets, trawl fishing. They scrape these big hooks across the bottom of the sea with a net and they snap cables all the time.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  So it's not like a targeted attack on the cable. It's just sort of this gets caught up in the fishing net and snaps kind of thing.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. One of the interesting, there's been hardly any proven hostile attacks on a cable. It's almost all just sort of accidental damage. You have a fishing vessel, you have like a ship drags its anchor in the wrong place, things like that. And then you have natural disasters. You have like landslides under the ocean, basically earthquakes, volcanoes, weird currents, things like that. And then, you know, there have been cable breaks that people suspect could maybe be from a malicious actor, but it's never really been proven. The one case I've seen cited was like during World War One, when various, the UK and Germany sort of sent people ashore to cut telegraph cables with axes.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Other than that, there hasn't really been any documented cases of an attack on a cable.

• 14:58David Pierce?

  World War I, lot of fights over TikTok in World War I.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:01David Pierce?

  From what I remember. So you you mentioned the the maintenance industry here. What does this industry look like? This feels like this incredibly important gigantic job. Like, is this is this a huge teaming industry of huge teaming multinational corporations fixing the Internet?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  It's really not. It's actually quite a small industry, like ballpark, maybe a thousand or so people in the direct sort of maritime side of maintenance.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  For all 800,000 miles of undersea cables?

• 15:32Speaker 04

  That's right. So you have, there's about 70 cable ships in the world, but most of them mostly do installations, which pays better. You have like 22 or so dedicated maintenance vessels. And they are stationed around the world, you know, a handful per ocean, basically. And their job is to, you know, like firefighters, stand ready 24 hours a day to sail out within 24 hours of being notified of a cable fault. So they belong to these consortiums. They, you know, maybe for a couple of different maintenance providers have a ship in a given ocean and they cover the whole area. And if you're a cable owner, you call the maintenance provider and say, hey, I have a cable broken.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Send a ship out and they send a ship out to fix the cable. It's basically how how it works.

• 16:20David Pierce?

  Wow. It's like it's like an adventure story every time. They're like, we have to, we have to go explore the depths of the ocean to find a broken garden hose and figure out what to do with it.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  It really is like, drop everything. We go to a random place in the middle of the ocean often.

• 16:36David Pierce?

  Wow. 22 ships strikes me as not a lot of ships to cover A, all of the problems you've described and B, just the sheer size and scope of all of this. Can they do it with 22 ships?

• 16:49Speaker 04

  So they have done it with 22 ships.

• 16:52David Pierce?

  Okay, fair. I guess, yeah, the Internet still works. We're still here. Okay.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  I think the concern is that a lot of these ships are getting pretty old. They're like several decades old. There's not a lot of money coming into the industry. And if there were to be a big event, like a big earthquake or a deliberate attack on a cable choke point or something like that, then you could have a real disruption. So the ships are really this critical component of the internet that so far have been able to keep things running, but it's pretty lean. If there were a major event, it would be challenging, I think, in some cases for them to do the job.

• 17:29David Pierce?

  Okay. And who are these people? Is this like a, is this a sort of manual labor kind of job on a ship? Is this like a incredibly technically complicated job on a ship? Like, who are these folks doing this work on these ships?

• 17:43Speaker 04

  It's both manual labor and very technically complicated. You have a mix of, you have crew who are sort of seafarers and run the ship. And then you have cable engineers who kind of come from all the kinds of different backgrounds. But the job requires, you have to be quite good at geometry and angles and forces and sort of ocean engineering stuff to know how to, you know, pull up a cable from several miles at the bottom of the ocean without things snapping. You're dealing with these big metal hooks that are used to catch the cables, high tensions. It's like quite physically demanding work. And then at its heart, it's these various technical tasks that involved with figuring out where the fault is,

• 18:28Speaker 04

  splicing the fibers, which is just ultra-precise work that's done. You know, you're fusing two strands of glass end to end with as perfect as you can get a connection. And that stuff is, it's, you know, it's like neurosurgery. It's extremely delicate.

• 18:44David Pierce?

  And you have to do it on a ship in the middle of the ocean?

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, on a rocking ship that is in the middle of the ocean.

• 18:51David Pierce?

  This is like everything possible on incredibly hard mode at all times.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty, as you see the workshops and it's just like in the belly of a ship, sort of surrounded by tarps. It's really not, you know, it's not this precision factory that you would want to be doing this work in.

• 19:07David Pierce?

  So now I can't help imagining the like montage action scene of everybody snapping into action, one of these things happening. So like, walk me through the process a little bit. I'm in port in some centrally located city somewhere, waiting for a call. I get a call from, I'm assuming it's like Google and Meta, who seem to be the companies that own more and more of these cables over time?

• 19:28Speaker 04

  They own a lot of the cables. They've, a lot of the newly built cables are coming from the big, big tech companies, Google and Meta primarily. And then you have cables that are owned by, you know, dozens, sometimes ISPs and telecom companies and things.

• 19:44David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  And so each cable will have someone who's in charge of maintenance and, you know, they'll get a message from their network operations center saying, hey, we've got a cable down. Here's what we know about it. That person will then call someone at the repair organization. It could be public or private, but it's one of these consortiums usually.

• 20:06David Pierce?

  I was really hoping there would be like a big red button on somebody's desk that's like cable down and the alarms start going off in the ship somewhere?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are alarms and big red warnings, but then it's a lot of people calling people around the world at weird hours. So they call someone at the, on the maintenance side. That person then calls the ship and says, you know, get ready. We're going to need X miles of spare cable for this cable system. We think it's here. We think this cut it, whatever information they have. And then they, and then they kind of plan out what the repair's going to look like.

• 20:36David Pierce?

  Okay. And what, what does a repair normally look like? Like, walk me through a little bit of what it would look like actually on the boat trying to do the repair?

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the first thing you do is you need to locate where the fault is approximately. And that's done on either end of the cable. Basically, you have people in the landing station on either end of the cable. So on opposite sides of the ocean. Shoot a laser down there and it hits the brake, reflects back, and the time it takes to come back will tell you pretty much where along the cable the brake is.

• 21:08David Pierce?

  So like wherever the signal dies, that's, that's the point you send them to?

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 21:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  And so you sail out to there with a certain amount of spare cable in your ship and a bunch of these big hooks that are called grapnels.

• 21:21David Pierce?

  Which I Googled, by the way, and they just straight up look like Batman's grappling hooks. Like, that's just, that's just what they are.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  It's exactly what they are, and there's a bunch of different kinds. You have like multi-grapnel things. You have ones with giant arms and blades, depending on what the ocean bottom looks like, whether it's muddy or rocky or what. Cables are laid with such little slack on the seabed that you can't just, you know, hook it and pull it to the surface. It's too hot. So the first thing you need to do is you need to cut the cable somewhere near where it's broken, using one of these grapnels, but one with a big blade in the middle. So you drag this blade across where you think the cable path is. And then you turn around with one of these grapnels and catch one end of cable, pull it to the surface, attach it to a buoy, go back to the other side, catch the other side of the cable, bring it to the

• 22:12Speaker 04

  surface, and then you do the splicing. So you splice like a piece of spare cable to that end, go back to the other side that's attached to the buoy, splice it to that end, and then test it, and you should have a working cable that then you have to lower back down to the ocean floor.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  So it's basically like you're fishing for cables on the ocean floor, right? Like, how do they know if they've caught one?

• 22:32Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. Like fishing, based on just the tug on the line. In this case, you have this enormous metal hook that you're dragging along the ocean floor, and as that's happening, someone is in the bridge watching this one dial called the tension meter and watching it waver back and forth. And one of the interesting things about it is it's an analog dial. It's not an ultra-precise digital readout because you want that kind of fuzziness to be able to judge intuitively what's happening. Is tension rising or falling?

• 23:08Speaker 04

  And falling fast or slow that you can't get from a bunch of numbers jumping around. And so you're watching this dial and if it's moving up slowly, kind of wavering, maybe you're going through some mud. If it jerks up quickly, maybe you hit a rock and what you want is this slow increase, slow steady increase in intention that shows you've hooked. This cable and you're dragging it along the ocean floor and that's when you know it's time to reel it in.

• 23:34David Pierce?

  Interesting, man, that's such a inexact science, but that's like you just described like an art form more than a piece of sort of data analysis.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  It really is. One of the, one of the engineers I was talking to in Japan, it's, it really is this act of kind of reading what's happening on the ocean floor, imagining based on this dial, you know, oh, I'm, I'm going, I'm going over a trench. I'm, I've hit a rock.

• 23:55David Pierce?

  It's wild. And how long does that process take?

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Uh, like days to weeks to, to months, even if it's hard to find the cable. Everything here is at just a massive scale. So like, if you're in deep water, the garden hose is several miles down. And just the act of like lowering it down to the ocean floor and hauling it up can take, you know, nearly a day because it's so deep. And then, so each step of this process takes several days. Splicing the cable takes about a day. It's just incredibly time consuming. And then so it's like, if you don't catch the cable on first try, then, you know, several more days to try again. And it adds up. Pretty soon you're like, you're out of sea for weeks.

• 24:35David Pierce?

  It just keeps reminding me of one of those movies where there's like, there's the one shark that they're trying to catch. And they're like, we, we think we found it. It's over here. And then they go and they don't get it. And it's like, okay, well, we, we think we know where it'll be next. And it is this like sort of perpetual cat and mouse game that you're playing with this thing, trying to get it into your arms and then you can do something with it.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's remarkable how little visibility, you know, they have onto the ocean floor and what's happening down there. You know, there are times when people are doing, you know, a dozen passes back and forth, being like, well, that wasn't there. Maybe it's a mile that way and let's try over here and.

• 25:08David Pierce?

  That's that's nuts. Why don't we know better? This is one of the things I found myself wondering, reading your story, is I feel like I could make a solid argument that the location of these cables should be like closely held state secrets, that no one knows, that because they're so important to the way that the world works, that they should be, you know, it should be like the bunkers where the president goes. Like you just, it just should be all classified information. On the other side, I can imagine a world in which we should do much more work to have much better knowledge of how these things work and where they are and what's going on with them, because they're so important and because laying them and fixing them needs to happen so quickly. But it seems like we're in sort of a weird middle between those two things. We're like, we kind of know, but not really.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a trade off. So you can go and you can see telegeography, tracks cables. You can see kind of broadly where they are in the ocean. If you're like a sea captain, you get charts that have cable areas marks, you know, with some degree of precision. And that makes a lot of sense because the biggest actual threat to cables is someone accidentally dropping an anchor on them. And so if you are worried about an attack and you make them a secret, you're probably going to increase the number of accidental cable breaks. On the other hand, they are vulnerable. It would be fairly, you know, you don't need a low tech attack. You can just drag an anchor across the ocean floor. In practice, the network is redundant enough. You're still talking about like a really small thing in a big ocean. So it's not quite that easy to attack.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  It would take a pretty sophisticated antagonist to actually cause a catastrophic cable outage. So so far it's been fine, but it is a topic of active debate, I think, in in governments. What should we do? How should we protect these cables that are so important?

• 26:54David Pierce?

  And for the people whose job it is to actually maintain them over time, what is life like? You talk to a bunch of people who are sort of in this industry and in some cases have been for a very long time, right? What's it like to be a sort of superhero keeping the internet running?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  It's a very strange job. People, you know, when they join, they tend to kind of stumble into it. It's not a very well-known industry. And so you have people who are working as cable engineers in some other area or, you know, in merchant marines or something like that, geologists in optics. And they sort of stumble into it. And, you know, if they, if they stay for a bit, they tend to stay for a long time, like decades. A lot of the work is earned on, learned on the job. And so people tend to sort of move around between different roles. But it's not an easy job. It's a weird lifestyle. You rotate in and off ships. You're often far from home, out of contact. You know, this is changing now a bit with Starlink.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  But like when you're onboard one of these ships, historically, you're pretty much cut off. You don't have great internet connections. You can't stream things or FaceTime or anything like that.

• 28:02David Pierce?

  You have the fast internet literally in your hands. You just can't do anything with it.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. It's a difficult job. Just the lifestyle is hard. But people come to love it because it takes you to very unusual places. It's exciting. And a lot of them have like a real sense of purpose. They're maintaining this infrastructure that the modern world runs on, even if no one actually knows about it or what they do.

• 28:24David Pierce?

  Knowing you as I do, I'm confident that at some point in reporting this story, you tried to live the cable maintenance life yourself. And you were like, yes, I will live the ship life. How close did you get?

• 28:37Speaker 04

  Not that close. I did try, you know, when I first heard about this industry, I was like, well, I should go onboard for a repair. And was basically laughed at several times, you know, for various reasons. The big one was security. It's a, it's a secretive industry. They just can't have a journalist hanging out on a cable ship in most cases. And then the other very compelling reason was that they don't know how long they'll be gone. So like, yeah, you can come along, but maybe we'll be gone for a week or two. And maybe we'll get called off to another repair and you'll be at sea for months, which is just, you know, hard to really plan around.

• 29:09David Pierce?

  That's fair. So were you, were you able to get any kind of firsthand glimpse into this life?

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I ended up going to Japan to talk to people who work at KCS and going aboard the Ocean Link, which was the ship that repaired a lot of the cables in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. And so it was in port for a period of time and I was able to go there and visit the crew and go to tour the ship.

• 29:38David Pierce?

  What was the ship like?

• 29:39Speaker 04

  It was fairly big, like 400 foot long, sort of tall, working ship. It's from the 90s. It's kind of old at this point, but well maintained.

• 29:49David Pierce?

  I'm imagining sort of a big fishing vessel, but instead of like nets and containers, it just has a massive spool of cable.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  That's basically right. It essentially is a massive spool of cable. Like the middle of it are these, I think, three big empty tanks that are just kind of spindles of wound spare cable. The interior is really empty. It's kind of like a, it's built kind of like an aircraft carrier or something where there's no sort of beams or struts or anything because it's all just, you have to string cable out of these tanks to the workstation and then out to the front where there's kind of a rolling pulley kind of thing where it goes over and into the ocean.

• 30:28David Pierce?

  Got it. So it pulls it up and then you sort of spool from the middle. Boy, what a complicated system.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  It's counterintuitive how the, how the ship is put together and how it all works, but then makes sense when it's, you're working with a material that is thousands of miles long. It just creates all these weird logistical problems.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. So you mentioned the Fukushima incident in 2011 in Japan, which was a big part of the story that you wrote, kind of how they repaired and the reaction to all of this. What was it about those repairs that was sort of different? I feel like you found one of the hardest cases you could have to tell this story about what happened in that case.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there are a few, there have been a few major, major cable events. This was one of them. They tend to be earthquakes that caused the most damage. So, so in this case, there was this very, very large earthquake off the coast of Japan. It sent a large tsunami that caused immense devastation. And part of that, that tsunami knocked out the Fukushima nuclear reactor, causing a nuclear meltdown. You have this disaster on top of a disaster. And then you have the other disaster, which is not really well known, but happened at the same time, which is that the earthquake caused all of these submarine avalanches. That wrecked the majority of the cables Japan uses to connect to North America and the rest of the world.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  And so while the earthquake tsunami recovery was happening, while Fukushima was, you know, people were trying to bring Fukushima. Under control, the ship had to set out and try to fix these cables as fast as possible. While contending with the fact that there may or may not be a cloud of radiation over them.

• 31:59David Pierce?

  So, yeah, I mean, again, it just feels like so much of this process is just unknowns on top of unknowns on top of unknowns. It's just going out and trying to figure out, okay, something happened to these cables. We don't know what or where or what it's going to take or how we're going to fix it. Uh, and just bit by bit, they just solve it.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's really just, it's very methodical, like, like you've just got to kind of follow the steps. And so they, they, they looked at the cable map, they figured out, okay, based on the timing of these faults. You know, interestingly, a lot of them happened hours after the tsunami, like, like that night, basically. You have these big debris flows that sort of barrel down these canyons and end up wrecking the cables. And from the timing of the breaks, they figure out that's probably what happens. The seabed is probably very transformed, they're going to need a lot of spare cable. And typically you figure out, you know, it's not usually up to the maintenance provider, which cables they fix first. It's usually kind of first come, first served from the cable owners, whoever calls in their fault first. But in this case, the cable owners are like, you guys figure it out.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Like whatever, whatever cable you can fix, uh, fix it. And so they settled on, you know, the one farthest from Fukushima. Cause the other thing is that normally in a big event like this, other ships arrives to help. But there was so little known about what was happening with Fukushima and no one felt comfortable sending their crews into that. And so they were sort of the only ones doing it for the first, uh, the first period of time.

• 33:25David Pierce?

  So and then there was a moment in the Fukushima response where they had pulled the cable up and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, right? Am I right? What happens here? You get the cable up above the ocean and then you have to figure out what to do. What did they do?

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this was the first repair. They hooked this cable and they start reeling it in and it's under an unusual amount of tension. And basically what happens, you know, they start reeling it very, very slowly because every cable has a certain amount of tension. You don't want to exceed it because the cable could snap. And so they're just moving very, very slowly and it takes them nearly a day to get it to the surface. And what they learn when it gets there is that it's just been completely mangled. And, and what they think happened is some enormous landslide happened. It dragged the cable, it buried it under a bunch of debris, and now they've been slowly pulling it tighter and tighter and tighter until it reaches the surface. Now they can see it. It's on the front of the ship.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  It's on the, the foredeck and it is hooked around one bar with a grapnel and totally stripped and mangled and under a huge amount of tension and.

• 34:30David Pierce?

  So you basically at this point have like a thousands of miles long bungee cord like sitting on your boat.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. Attached to a heavy metal hook that if the bungee cord snaps, uh, which it's being strained at sort of each wave and, and swell, it will fly across the ship, kill anyone it hits, smash into the cable control room, just do immense damage. And so the priority becomes you're, you can't repair a cable under this kind of tension that's this damaged. They need to get it off the ship. And so they do this sort of complicated precarious procedure where they, they hook chains around each side of the cable, swap the grapnel out for a blade of grapnel, lower it back over the bow of the ship while they've evacuated the area. And then once it's under the water, they release the chains, the cable is cut and goes back to the bottom and, and they start over.

• 35:20David Pierce?

  That feels like a really interesting test case because you know, like you said, these cables go back a century, but 2011 is very much like the internet. And as we've learned, you know, catastrophes happen, things like this happen all the time in lots of places. That was a particularly bad one, but like earthquakes happen. We just had one in New York. Like, these are things that happen. Did that, were there any sort of lessons learned from that? Like, do you, do you feel like whatever 13 years after that, we're in a different era of how we think about undersea cables?

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Yes and no. I mean, it's interesting to look back on the coverage of 2011. Like, a lot of the, when the internet was mentioned, it was usually that, you know, this is remarkable, the internet fared remarkably well. It stayed up.

• 36:01David Pierce?

  Oh, really? So for all the, for all the issues, the internet stayed up in Japan?

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then so you have these reports and, and people were basically just, you could only use the internet to communicate. In the immediate aftermath, people were sending emails, they were tweeting, people were posting videos. Other telecommunications were cut out, like the terrestrial cables were cut, the cell towers were wrecked. And so they were really reliant on the internet. But you talk to the people who were at the operation centers and on the ships, and it was so much more precarious than people knew. Basically, they had succeeded in rerouting all the traffic over the remaining cables. But if one of those cables had gone down, you would have started to see a real degradation in service. You know, things would have started to drop, it would have been difficult to communicate. And so it was sort of right on the cusp of being a communications disaster.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  And the lesson that the industry learned from that is, is largely around redundancy. There's not like a real geographic reason, unlike the Red Sea or the Lusanne Strait or something. There's not a geographic reason why all the cables were in one place there. It was a sort of habit, like we always put cables there and they always kind of landed at the spot. And so that makes sense. And so you had this, these sort of choke points that then when a landslide comes through, it wrecks a bunch of them. And there's more of an awareness that you need multiple landing points, but in practice, that doesn't always happen, because it's, you know, cheaper to follow new routes or whatever.

• 37:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. So where, where does it feel like this industry is right now? Obviously, it's as critical as ever, if not more so, like the world relies on this stuff more than we ever have. And I feel like purely anecdotally, I've heard more about undersea cable projects just in the last couple of years, I feel like than I ever have. And that might just be because I pay attention to companies like Google and Meta, and they're doing a lot of this stuff. But is there, is there energy in this space to increase from, you know, 500 cables and 800,000 miles to, are we going to have more than that or multiples of that over time, do you think?

• 38:03Speaker 04

  There we are in a cable boom right now. There's a lot of new cables going in. Whether that means the net number of cables goes up is a debated debated topic because the cables are also higher and higher capacity. So some think maybe there'll be fewer of cables. They'll just be really, really, really high bandwidth. But but there are a lot of new cables going in that's driven by the tech companies primarily, which starting a couple of years ago, decided, you know, rather than purchase bandwidth on these cables, let's have our own cables. And so they started laying their own systems largely between their data centers. And the reason for that is that they need a ton of capacity to kind of sync all of their data centers around the world to keep these like huge content libraries up,

• 38:46Speaker 04

  to keep their cloud services running. And so they wanted to kind of that all under their own umbrella. But that hasn't really spilled over into the maintenance side yet. It's mostly kind of the installation side.

• 38:57David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, are we still at we're still at 22 ships?

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, still not a lot of new ships there. And and, you know, while the new cables do provide a lot of redundancy, you also don't want, you know, your handful of super high capacity cables to go down because it's difficult to to sort of move that traffic over onto other routes.

• 39:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, as you were talking to people, did you get a sense that there are new kinds of threats to these cables too? Whether it's some of the ones that have been there a long time, getting old and not getting replaced quickly enough, or climate change, or like the geopolitics of the internet, which are becoming a bigger and bigger deal all the time. Is there a sense that this could get worse rather than better as we fight about undersea cables?

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Geopolitics are the big thing. Climate change will make certain things harder. All these cables all land on the coastline, which is eroding and sinking, and that will be a problem. But part of the reason you're also hearing more about cables is the geopolitics around them have become really sensitive. Largely, that has been China-US conflicts. You have the US saying, we don't want Chinese-owned cables landing in the US. And China also denying repair permits for the South China Sea or or sort of slowing them down and

• 40:13Speaker 04

  About routing cables through China's waters or into Hong Kong has caused this kind of reconfiguration of the the network. You have alternate routes going through the Philippines or a lot of cables landing in Singapore or China trying to build up its own cable maritime industry so that it doesn't have to rely on on the West. And these changes are making it, it's not necessarily harder, but very different. It's just a period of change in the industry and and kind of one that is increasing, getting increasing attention from from various governments that more governments are saying we need to control this infrastructure in some way.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  So and as you talk to people in this small, kind of under talked about and under resourced industry, is the sense that given all of that, it is just change and this is stable and this is how we're going to keep doing things? Or do you do you run into people who are like, screw all of this, the answer is satellites and we have to get there as quickly as we possibly can? Or like, is this just what it is and we have to figure out how to do it better?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  There's a fair amount of concern, I think, about the long term sustainability of the industry. It can't all be satellites. That was the other thing that everyone reminded me of. Satellites can carry like half a percent of the global traffic. It's it's going to be cables. They're they're just way more efficient and cheaper to transmit data. There's a sense that they will have to navigate this. I think the industry has been pretty stable for decades. And there's some anxiety about these changes, the big tech companies coming in, governments taking a greater interest, the sort of geopolitical jockeying around cable cable routes that are just going to be tricky, I think.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  A lot of the anxiety comes from kind of the market forces involved, like the big tech companies, they have so much buying power. They can drive down prices and so they can negotiate lower rates. And so, well, that means maintenance companies can operate year to year. It maybe means they don't have enough to invest in a new vessel. And so you have this kind of slow degradation, which also means that they have trouble recruiting because no one wants to join this sort of aging fleet.

• 42:25David Pierce?

  Sure. Yeah, having done this whole process of reporting and sort of understanding how this world works, does it change the way you think about the internet? Like, I feel like the more I learn about the actual infrastructure of the internet, the more remarkable it seems that any of this ever actually works. And I feel like I got some of that sense from your story that on the one hand, this is this incredibly robust, incredibly impressive group of people working on this thing that we understand and have worked on for a long time. On the other hand, the internet is forever like one wayward anchor away from falling apart.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's really, it's one of these cases I feel like you hear about every so often, like the ways in which the internet is just sort of this cobbled together apparatus is way less stable than it seems. This is sort of an ordinary user. It does depend on just sort of these, these random people, whether it's like a software engineer who's keeping things running or these people who are really good at catching internet cables with hooks in the ocean that if it weren't for their sort of largely invisible work, the system would fall apart.

• 43:40David Pierce?

  Welcome back. For years now, I've been conflicted about these delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats. They are super convenient and they're helpful and sometimes I don't want to cook or go out and most of us don't live within walking distance of a million good restaurants. Like, I get it. I get why they're helpful and good, but I also can't shake this idea that actually these services are bad and they're bad for everyone involved. They make your meals more expensive, often more than you know through sneaky price increases. Like, the menu on Uber Eats is sometimes just more expensive than the menu at the restaurant. They also don't pay delivery people enough or offer them the protections or benefits that the people who work there should get. And for the most part, historically speaking, they're not even a very good business for

• 44:24David Pierce?

  the companies running them. It's hard to make money for anybody, including the restaurants, the drivers, everybody. It just seems bad. So what are we doing here? Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, there was this guy who went viral online because of some posters he had put up around Seattle saying, basically, skip the apps, call me instead, I'll deliver your food. He became kind of a folk hero online. So we sent our producer, Will Poor, to go see what's going on.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  This is one of those stories that exists because of a perfect storm-type situation. Here's what happened. For years, gig workers here in Seattle, notably delivery drivers, have been pissed at the lousy pay they've been earning in this very expensive city. So in 2022, the city council stepped in and mandated a higher pay rate for app-based delivery workers.

• 45:13Alex Cranz?

  It's a good day for gig workers, as the City of Seattle's new ordinance takes effect.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  The new pay scale went into effect this past January, and the apps didn't take the change graciously.

• 45:24Speaker 07

  In reaction, apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash began charging customers $5 in what they're calling a local operating fee.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  That's on top of the service fees and delivery fees that apps routinely charge, to say nothing of tips. And customers are finding their limits. Fewer people are ordering from the apps, gig workers are feeling even more squeezed, and everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else.

• 45:48Speaker 08

  Food delivery orders plummeting since Seattle implemented new minimum wage requirements for delivery workers a month ago.

• 45:55Speaker 05

  This kind of battle is playing out in other markets, too. New York City enacted similar rules last year, which the apps have also been fighting tooth and nail. But there's one thing Seattle has that no one else does: a guy named Tony Isles, who I am trying to literally chase down right now.

• 46:11Speaker 09

  I always carry, like, a tennis ball in my pocket for, like, the round fluidity of a ball. I just like the idea of, like... When I was in San Francisco, I had a conversation with my buddy, and I was like, "Do you think shapes have thoughts?" And I think it do. I think they do. I think that they influence the way that you think. And I always carry that tennis ball, so I always feel like I have, like, a fluid mind.

• 46:31Speaker 05

  Tony is telling me this while flying across downtown Seattle on a rented e-bike in the pouring rain. I'm on my own rental, trying to listen and keep up at the same time. We're weaving in and out of bike lanes, dodging construction, and crashing through puddles that could be potholes.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  It's chaos, which is partly the setting and partly Tony's fluid mind. In the first 30 minutes or so of pedaling, we have talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, China's social credit score, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. And I haven't asked any of the questions I came to ask.

• 47:05Speaker 09

  There's this idea called the method of Loki. I don't know if you know what that is?

• 47:08Speaker 05

  I don't.

• 47:09Speaker 09

  It's like this way of remembering things verbatim historically in like these ancient societies. It was this book that I read, it was called Moonwalking with Einstein. Take a left.

• 47:19Speaker 05

  Hey, if we get separated for any reason, just go finish your delivery and text me when you're done. I'll find you again, all right?

• 47:27Speaker 09

  Okay. Oh, because I'm hustling?

• 47:29Speaker 05

  Well, I just realized that I signed up to do a story about a delivery guy.

• 47:33Speaker 09

  You're all right, man.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  And I don't know how I expected this to go, but...

• 47:36Speaker 09

  It's a pleasure meeting you.

• 47:37Speaker 05

  I gotta up my game here. Tony's backstory is pretty simple. He was driving for Uber Eats when those new fees suddenly killed demand. So at the beginning of February, he decided to go it alone. He put up some very DIY flyers downtown with an offer. Text him a food order from any restaurant within a couple square miles, and he'll get it to you for $5. No taking a cut from restaurants, no service fee, no delivery fee, no local operating fee, just a tip if you're feeling generous. He went viral pretty much instantly.

• 48:12Speaker 10

  Right now on Cairo 7 Tonight, growing frustrations for Seattle's new food delivery rules.

• 48:17Speaker 08

  One driver becomes his boss's competitor.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Now, just a few weeks later, Tony is a full-on local celebrity. He's all over the news, Reddit, Twitter, slash X, and he says the orders have followed. The biggest challenge is cadence. He might get five texts all at once and then nothing for a while. So he's trying to figure that out, along with the fame. Has this amount of attention been weird?

• 48:40Speaker 09

  Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's just like, all of a sudden, my opinion matters. A lot of people are asking me, they're just like, "How much money are you making?"

• 48:49Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 48:50Speaker 09

  And I'm like, "Well, I'm not a monetary guy, not a business-oriented person." But what's interesting is, is like, I feel like I've introduced a solution for like a social thing.

• 49:01Speaker 05

  Tony's social solution goes something like this. Because of apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, yes, delivery has gotten expensive. But more than that, it's gotten rushed and sloppy and impersonal. It's just bad vibes all the way down, and it's ruining takeout for everyone.

• 49:18Speaker 09

  It's such a hard position to be in.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  For who?

• 49:21Speaker 09

  For everybody, every party that's involved. The restaurants, the city, the people that are working as a deliverer. They're in this terrible, toxic relationship with somebody.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Like the restaurant owners and the apps, and the apps and the drivers, and just like that whole, that whole thing.

• 49:38Speaker 09

  Well, just like, think about it, last time you went into a restaurant and some driver goes in and is like, cuts in front of you, and you're just like, what in the world? Like, hey, man, I've been standing here for five minutes, what's your problem? You know, that person is, they're like, they're hustling, right? So they're going in, and they're not thinking about that at all, because that's not their psychology.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  No, they gotta keep moving.

• 49:56Speaker 09

  Right.

• 49:57Speaker 05

  And from where Tony's standing, the apps are moving in precisely the wrong direction.

• 50:01Speaker 09

  I think that they, the apps have this kind of misaligned misdirection of where they think the market is and what they're planning for. I think that their whole goal is to like, send robots to the buildings and, you know, send automated cars, and it's like, okay, well, if that's your solution, then you might bleed for a while, right? Like, and so it's like, I'm not a monetary guy, but I could tell you how to make it work a little bit better.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  Tony's whole thing is to strip all the tech and anonymity out of the process, and be your friendly neighborhood delivery guy. And he thinks people will actively prefer a more social alternative, even if that care and attention limits him.

• 50:39Speaker 09

  I'm almost like, kind of certain, once I get to a certain number of people that order from me, I almost kind of want to cap it, to kind of ensure the law of Dunbar.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Dunbar's number is another favorite Tony topic. It's a theoretical limit to the number of social relationships any one person can maintain. You want to cap the number of people that order from you so that you can stop and chat for a couple of minutes, so you can get to know repeat customers.

• 51:05Speaker 09

  Wouldn't even call them customers. I would just call them my friends, the homies, you know?

• 51:08Speaker 05

  There you go, yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 09

  They're literally like, "Yo, Tony, can you get this for me?" And I think that's kind of the thing is, is like, when you try to turn it into a business-to-customer relationship versus a person-to-person relationship, they're not going to be as understanding.

• 51:20Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 51:21Speaker 09

  If I forget your drink right now, someone will be like, "Tony, it's fine."

• 51:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 09

  "You don't have to go back to Chipotle."

• 51:26Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 51:26Speaker 09

  But if I forget on Uber Eats, they're going to be like, "Yo, man, what's going on here?"

• 51:31Speaker 05

  In short, Tony thinks that there is a whole lot more to delivery than speed and cost. But yes, he is cheaper than the competition, and often faster, too.

• 51:41Speaker 09

  I've never seen anybody run through a Target. I picked up somebody's Target stuff and I was running through the Target.

• 51:49Speaker 09

  I'm gonna run here real quick.

• 51:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  I follow Tony as he makes two, maybe three, deliveries back-to-back. Some chicken and a shake from Dave's Hot Chicken.

• 51:59Speaker 09

  Does it come with a drink or anything?

• 52:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, let me get that.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  A salad from a healthy bowl place called Evergreens. I'm honestly not 100% sure. It was such a blur. But at each pickup and drop-off, Tony lives up to his own pitch. He's courteous, warm, casual, and chatty.

• 52:16Speaker 09

  So, man, how are you doing today?

• 52:18Speaker 05

  We pull up to our next destination, a big apartment building. And while we wait in the lobby for Tony's customer, sorry, his homie, to come down, he's recognized by a stranger.

• 52:27Speaker 09

  You're the guy? Yeah, I am. Nice to meet you.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  I stop and chat with Tony's homie for a few minutes. He says that he and his roommates have ordered from Tony maybe 10 times in the past month.

• 52:39Speaker 12

  I was just scrolling through Reddit one day, and then I saw someone posting a... They posted a picture of one of his flyers that were posted, like, in the city. And I was like, "Oh, that's pretty interesting. It's cheaper than DoorDash." So I was like, "Let me give it a try." And then ever since, it's like, been me and my roommates I go to.

• 52:55Speaker 05

  Oh nice, so you guys are like, serious regulars at this point.

• 52:57Speaker 12

  Like, exactly, between the three of us, type thing.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  And were you Uber Eats, DoorDash people before that?

• 53:03Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly. DoorDash mainly, and then it was just like, got expenses, so we're like, let's see what else there is.

• 53:07Speaker 05

  What's the like, the Tony experience like, and how is it different from the, the apps?

• 53:13Speaker 12

  I think it's a lot nicer, because first of all, all you have to do is just like, text him. So that's already a lot easier, he's much faster. And it's always nice, like, having a quick conversation with him, and like, the lobby, he always waits. He's fun to talk to, he's a, he's a very chill guy, like, we've had some nice conversations, it's cool.

• 53:30Speaker 05

  At the end of the lunch rush, Tony and I sat down at a cafe to talk some more. I went into the story wanting to know whether a guy like Tony can make it. Seattle's minimum wage is almost $20 an hour. So to match that, he'd need four deliveries an hour, not accounting for tips. Which, after seeing him in action, definitely feels doable, but it is a hustle. In other words, it's still gig work. And Tony's only working the lunch and dinner rushes right now. So after this whole adventure, my question remains: can he make it? It turns out, that is Tony's least favorite question.

• 54:05Speaker 09

  I'm looking at it as like, I just understand people, you know, people, they all have their perspectives. And all I'm trying to be is the glue that glues you in that connective tissue. So that, that way you can get off Reddit and stop arguing about how much money I'm making. Get off Reddit and stop arguing whether it's gonna be financially responsible, I can figure that out on my own.

• 54:24Speaker 05

  I get the sense that Tony has become a kind of avatar. Everyone's putting all their thoughts and feelings about the gig economy onto him. I think that's why his story blew up online. If you're frustrated by big, powerful companies making life more annoying, he is the folk hero to root for, which is just way too much for Tony to take on.

• 54:45Speaker 09

  All of a sudden, like, people are texting me, and they're like, "You got a great business mind." And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And I think that what people are trying to do, they're trying to box me. They're trying to say, "Tony fits here." And I think what they're, they're lacking of understanding is, is like, I actually don't fit anywhere. I'm this like, round ball that's just rolling down the street.

• 55:07Speaker 05

  Like the one in your pocket?

• 55:08Speaker 09

  That's exactly, exactly.

• 55:11Speaker 05

  Tony has no idea whether Tony delivers will make it, or what will happen to food delivery more broadly. He just knows that something needs to change.

• 55:20Speaker 09

  Like, what they tried to do is they tried to put food on a conveyor belt and deliver it like an Amazon package. And it's not going to work. They're winning right now, but at the end of the day, it's not going to work. It's too expensive. They're like waiting for things to be solved. And they're hoping. They're hoping that somebody down the line is like, intelligence is going to hit that escrow. They're going to be able to plug in the robots and they're going to be able to do it. And I'm here to tell you, it's not going to work.

• 55:47Speaker 05

  As cagey as Tony is about his own future, he will say that he's been fielding calls from all over the country, people who have heard his story and want to do what he does.

• 55:56Speaker 09

  So it's like, all right, well, how can I then be the Energizer Bunny for some things that we do like and that we do think about? And maybe that I can kind of more positively impact in a different sense. Just giving people the right direction, energizing their body, you know, so to speak, giving them the battery to kind of the right mindset.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  So what does this all reveal about the gig economy? Well, Tony has clearly tapped into something. And in spite of his grander pronouncements, what he's saying is pretty straightforward.

• 56:28Speaker 09

  I think that what it represents, I think personally, is like, this idea that we don't need the apps.

• 56:38Speaker 05

  We're so used to apps mediating all of our activities that at this point, what if not apps actually feels revelatory? But it's telling that Tony's customers are more than happy to ditch Uber Eats and DoorDash at the drop of a hat, or the drop of a new fee. And if big tech companies really do double down on automation and robots, more people might actively seek out more humanity, more idiosyncrasy, more Tony.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  Tony himself wants to experiment and meet people and hopefully pay the bills. And if he accidentally starts a revolution along the way, all the better.

• 57:17Speaker 09

  It would be nice to be known as the guy that was trying to connect us back together. That'd be kind of cool, but not in like the sense of like, this was the guy. It was just more like, oh, like this Tony Isles mentioned this and we thought it was like a good idea and it worked and then like eventually like we reconnected.

• 57:50David Pierce?

  Welcome back. For all of the last two weeks, the most popular app in the Apple App Store has been a game emulator called Delta. We've been talking a lot about Delta on this show over the last few weeks, both because it's a huge hit and because it seems like maybe the start of a new era for the App Store. Like in the history books of smartphone apps, there might be a before Delta and an after Delta for lots of reasons. But there's actually nothing even remotely new about Delta. The story of this app is actually a full decade long, and it starts with this guy.

• 58:25Speaker 13

  I'm Riley Testa, and I'm the founder of Alt Store, developer of Delta.

• 58:29David Pierce?

  Riley has had, as you might expect, a pretty wild few weeks. In the middle of it all, I asked him to come on the show and just tell me the whole Delta story, why he wanted to build an emulator in the first place, how the regulatory and technological world changed around him, and in general, how Delta went from a big hack to a big hit. It starts with Riley in high school, just kind of looking for something to do.

• 58:52Speaker 13

  I was just back in high school. I think it was my junior year, and I just one day came across just like the open source repo for a jailbreak Game Boy Advance emulator, GPS phone. And I was like, oh, this is cool. This is all the code. I can probably just download this and tweak it and then put it on my own phone without having to jailbreak. Because yeah, I've never been a fan of jailbreaking. It's just never really appealed to me. So I found this code base. I hacked out of it for a couple of months, put it on my phone. I put it on a few of my friends' phones. They liked it. And then I uploaded it to GitHub and called it GBA for iOS, and then kind of left it there for a bit, and then... People found it on GitHub and started talking about it.

• 59:37Speaker 13

  And so I was like, oh, there's interest in this kind of thing.

• 59:40David Pierce?

  So you just made it as as sort of a, it sounds like a mix of like a thing that you thought would be useful and just kind of a thing to do.

• 59:46Speaker 13

  Yeah, I just want to Pokemon on my phone. That was literally just, I found this, I was like, oh, cool, I can Pokemon on my phone now. And that's awesome. And that's really all I was thinking at the time. And then I put on my friends' phones and then we were playing just Pokemon ourselves. And then just completely coincidentally, there was this service that came out around the same time that lets you connect like get open source GitHub projects and sign it with Apple's enterprise certificate, basically. There's a company that had enterprise certificate and you could just connect your GitHub account and then re-sign your apps like that. And so I was like, oh, cool, I'll connect this to GBA for iOS and then people can install it outside the App Store. Maybe a few people will download it. And that's basically when I learned, oh, wait, there's a huge demand for this thing.

• 1:00:27David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:00:28Speaker 13

  I did that and then within like a week, people were like posting videos about how to install it. There were lots of Reddit posts and I was like honestly caught off guard because at this point, it was still just a project I made for me and my friends like in high school. And so then I was like, okay, there's demand for this thing. Let's take this seriously. Let's like build like a real version of this app that's not like thrown together, not hacky. And so that's when I got my friend Paul Thorson on board, my also still in high school. And we were like, we're going to do a brand new version of GBA for iOS, GBA for iOS 2.0. We're going to redesign it from the ground up, just build it and make a really polished experience. And so we basically spent all of senior year working on that. And in like halfway through senior year, we released GBA for iOS 2.0.

• 1:01:12Speaker 13

  And that's the version that most people know. That was the version that you installed from my website. You set your date back like 24 hours and you can install it because of the weird bug that allowed enterprise certificates to work that way, even if they're expired.

• 1:01:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, so really just pause for a second and explain the enterprise certificate thing to me. Cause I feel like part of the story here is like Riley's adventures in figuring out how to install apps on phones.

• 1:01:36Speaker 13

  Yes, slowly getting more and more complicated. Yeah, so this was the easiest hack. It's just, yeah, as long as I found enterprise certificate. I could just sign GBA for iOS with it and literally anyone could just download it from a website on the phone. Super simple.

• 1:01:50David Pierce?

  And the idea is basically it's like that's the certificate you would use if I'm like a company wanting my employees and no one else to have that app, right?

• 1:01:57Speaker 13

  Yeah, the exact same flow. And so it's just, you're not supposed to do it for this reason. And so what Apple normally would do is they would just like revoke the certificate. They'd make it, this is no longer valid and all apps that are signed with it can no longer be installed. And so the bug that I took advantage of was apparently at this time, like in iOS seven, if you just set your date back on your phone by more than an hour, the checks for whether a certificate is valid or not just don't work. They just don't do it.

• 1:02:25David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:02:25Speaker 13

  You did try to install GBA and Apple would have revoked the certificate, but because you set your date back, iOS was fine installing it. And so it was just like a really weird bug that I could take advantage of because Apple couldn't do anything easily about it. They had to actually fix iOS to address it. They couldn't just be like, okay, nope, turn off certificate. It was about nine months later that they finally addressed it. And then that was when I moved on basically from GBA for iOS is when they, it was like iOS eight point one. They killed the date trick. It was literally on my birthday when it actually happened. And I was like, oh, that's funny. But honestly, at that point, I'd just gone to college. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to move on from this whole thing. GBA for iOS is really cool. I wanted to go on to the next thing.

• 1:03:06David Pierce?

  Do you know how many people were using GBA for iOS, like at that sort of peak moment before it got shut down?

• 1:03:11Speaker 13

  Um, a lot of people, like more than 10 million.

• 1:03:16David Pierce?

  Wow. Whoa. That's like a zero or two bigger than I thought you were going to say.

• 1:03:21Speaker 13

  Yeah, there was a stupid amount of people using GBA for iOS, which is why I was so motivated to do this for this whole time was I just knew that there was a market for this kind of thing, that everyone just kind of assumed there wasn't. I'm like, no, GBA got 10 million downloads outside the App Store. Like it's just, people just really want to do this, like play old games.

• 1:03:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. Okay. So you kind of, you're sort of forced to shut down that project a little bit. Was there a moment where you're like, okay, I'm ready to go to war with Apple. Let's fight this to the death and figure out how to get GBA for iOS back or when?

• 1:03:53Speaker 13

  When the sort of exploit gets shut down, do you just kind of say, you know what? Like you said, I'm going to college anyway. This is just a moment. Let me focus on other things. It is basically that. Yeah, I was like, you know, this is just a sign that I should move on to something else. This is really cool. I'm glad I got to do this. Got a lot of experience, but maybe I'll try to make an app in the App Store next time. That was what I was thinking. I'm like, this is a lot of work to have an app outside the App Store. So then that whole thought process lasted like a few months and then I got bored and I needed a new app to work on. And so, yeah, Swift had also just been announced like the previous year. And so I was like, oh, you know what? Let me just make another toy app for myself to learn Swift just for me. And you know what? I'll make another emulator. It'll have more systems, but it's just for me. Like I'm again, like, it's just like a fun thing I wanted to work on to learn Swift.

• 1:04:38Speaker 13

  That was like my entire motivation. So you're just run the exact same playbook again without even realizing. Exactly. I was like, you know, I'm just gonna make for fun. Yeah, I know. You'd think I'd learn at some point. Okay, so and that's where Delta starts. Yes. And so that's the beginning of Delta was like, okay, I'll call it Delta and just build it for fun. And that is what I thought I was gonna work on. And then I went to WWDC that year. It was my first time ever at WWDC. What year is this at this point? 2015. Okay. So I go to WWDC and I talked to the app review team, like, because they have like a lab there. And I basically just say, hey, I'm working on this emulator app. Is there any world that it could be approved in the App Store? And then they were like, actually, yeah, we'll allow that. You just gotta like comply with some weird things.

• 1:05:22Speaker 13

  Basically, they said I had to like submit a list of approved games to them. Whenever I submitted a version of Deltas, that they could just make sure all the games that Delta supports were safe. Like they just didn't want to have like an open pipeline of like games and everything. And so like, okay, fine. That works for me. I'll submit a version of Delta to you and I'll have like a list of games that you can play. And then every app update, I'll expand it to include more games. And it seemed like that would be something I could do. And so I was really motivated. I'm like, cool, I'm gonna get Delta in the App Store. And so then I spent the next year like actually building it for real. I was like, okay, this is now a real app, no longer just for me. I like really want it to be polished. I want it to be good. I took a lot of my time. I got on my college schedule to be working on it.

• 1:06:04Speaker 13

  And then I went to the WWDC next year and I talked to the same person. And I said, hey, I'm ready to submit. Can I submit it now? And he was just like.

• 1:06:15Speaker 13

  So I talked to some people. We can't allow emulators. And that was just all I got. I didn't get a why. It was just like a, we can't allow that. I was just pissed off.

• 1:06:28David Pierce?

  Do you think this person was wrong the first time they told you it would happen? Or do you think something happened in that year? And they changed their mind?

• 1:06:36Speaker 13

  Honestly, I don't know. It's either one's possible. My guess is though, that they thought it was okay. And then they talked to someone in the year. And then maybe they had discussions about it. And then they came away basically, it's not worth the risk. Cause I think that's what it's been this whole time. Apple's like, it's not worth the risk to allow these emulators. There's so, so much stuff that could open up. So I think they're just like, eh, it's one kid. Whatever. We don't need to allow his app in the App Store and it'll be fine.

• 1:07:00David Pierce?

  And at that point, I mean, I, I, I confess, I was late to the iOS emulation universe. But it seemed, it's a weird thing. Like GBA for iOS was huge. And then it kind of went away. And so I would assume we're back to like lots of pent up demand. People are very excited about it. So it's not like you're the first person in history to ask Apple this question. I'm sure. But at that point emulation was just kind of, it was sort of nowhere on the iPhone. So I guess for them to say, no, we're going to continue to not allow it is not totally out of character.

• 1:07:30Speaker 13

  Exactly. Like, yeah, I wasn't surprised. I was just pissed off. Like, I was just like, I wasted a year of my life working on this. And, cause you told me I could release it. That was really just all I was feeling.

• 1:07:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So what do you, at that moment, you're faced again with this same decision of like, okay, do I just call this a successful project? I learned how to use Swift. Let me just move on with my life. Or do I go the other way? I know the answer. Historically speaking, but what is that? What do you, what is that moment like?

• 1:07:57Speaker 13

  Yeah. And this time I was just so pissed off. I was just like, you know, this is not okay. I am gonna get this out there somehow. It's just like really what I came to. And I didn't, at that time, I really didn't know what it would be. But I was like, I just wanted to show Apple that they can't treat developers kind of like this. It was really just like, I was like, you can't treat us like this. You can't tell us one thing and then change your mind the next year. Cause real people are spending real time doing this kind of thing. So I, yeah, I just motivated to just kind of prove them wrong. The best I could say. And so the I was like, I'll figure out a way. So then next project is figure out a way. Like, how do you? How do you even start? I just got lucky, honestly. Apple had also just around that time made it so that you can install

• 1:08:38Speaker 13

  apps from Xcode for free with a free Apple ID. Like, they just changed that rule of right around now so that students could start developing. And so I saw that and I was like, wait, you can install apps for free if you just have an Apple ID? There's something there. Like, I was like, that's all the technical thing I needed. I could make something from that. And so that was just like the beginning of Alt Store. Like, okay, I gotta do something with this free Apple ID sideloading from Xcode thing that Apple has just announced. And then I was basically just like, took a few years to research that, build it up, find out what would be the most convenient flow. Because, yeah, there are a lot of obstacles with that. It was apps installed this way only could last seven days.

• 1:09:20Speaker 13

  You could only have three apps installed at a time, this method. So it was just a kind of trying to come up with creative ways to make a lot of these restrictions not as annoying. Like, the fact that Alt Server is a thing was the number one, that Alt Server could just refresh your apps every week in the background. And when I thought of that, that's when I was like, okay, I think there's something here we can at least work with. That's good enough. So when did the first version of Alt Store, like, work? What was sort of the first version of it that you had that you were like, okay, this this does the thing that I need it to do? Uh, I think that was 2019 is when I finally, like, had put together all the pieces into one flow. Whereas in like, I had a program on my computer that could install Alt Store onto my

• 1:10:02Speaker 13

  phone, and then Alt Store could send apps to that device or to my computer and then reinstall it. And then it was early 2019. I was like, okay, this can work. Like, just seeing it actually work in practice. It was totally janky, like, the UI was horrible, but just like the fact I could press a button on my phone and it would do everything, send it to Alt Server and install it was just honestly kind of magical. So explain to me why that worked in the sort of infrastructure of Apple's universe? Like, why did that system work? Because, so the way Apple allows students to test out their apps. Is they have to have a Mac and they have to be using Xcode and they have to plug their phone into Xcode. And then they have to install an app from Xcode onto the phone.

• 1:10:43Speaker 13

  Like you can't just download a file and do it. It's all through Xcode and all through a computer. And so Alt Server is basically replicating everything Xcode does. You can have an app file, but iOS can't install an app file on itself. You have to send it to a computer and then Alt Server does the same stuff Xcode does behind the scenes to install it back onto the phone. As if you're a developer testing out yourself.

• 1:11:05David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. And you were able to basically build a thing that lets anyone kind of mimic that system for themselves. When I set it up, it was, I wouldn't say it was a lot of work, but it wasn't no work.

• 1:11:17Speaker 13

  It's, yeah, it's a lot. It's a bit, yeah. Especially on the Mac, there is the mail plugin for a long time. That was just really, it's, yeah, it was confusing to everyone. And I was like, oh, this is too nerdy to try to explain even to people why it matters. But just, yeah, people got through it.

• 1:11:34David Pierce?

  Well, so, and this is, this is, I feel like the, the sort of ongoing story here is you're, you're finding these increasingly complicated ways to do this. And continuing discover that there is so much demand for something like Delta. That people will jump through basically any hoops that you ask them to jump through in order to do this.

• 1:11:49Speaker 13

  Yeah. The biggest thing I was surprised about with Alt Store is we need to get your Apple ID and password to like login with your account. And I was like, wow, we really are just asking people to trust us and give us your Apple ID and password. And I mean, we're, we do everything we can with it. We literally don't touch ourselves. We send it straight to Apple. But I was like, ooh, that's a big scary thing that you really just aren't supposed to give your password around to people. And then nope, people are still giving us their passwords. They don't care. I'm like, this is cool, but also it makes me nervous for security as a whole that people are just doing this without thinking about it.

• 1:12:21David Pierce?

  Oh, for sure. And it puts you in a really interesting position, I would think, as the, as the developer of this to say, okay, what is this thing? Like, am I just building this as sort of a fun side project for people who want to play Pokemon on their phones? Which comes with, I think, one set of like security and privacy implications. Like to some extent, honestly, if you send your Apple ID and password to just a dude. I don't think you have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Like, I think it's a good thing that you were taking care of people's privacy as best you could. But I think for me as the user, I deserve what I'm getting at that point, right? But then if you're, if you're like a company that is, that has a terms of service and is set up to make money and you're like, we're in this for the long haul and we're serious about it.

• 1:13:02David Pierce?

  I think that changes both the way you have to treat stuff and the way that I can expect you to treat stuff. And it seems like as you were going through this, you were also trying to decide, like, how professionalized do I want this thing to be? So that, is that fair?

• 1:13:16Speaker 13

  That's pretty fair because when the first version of Alt Store that launched was literally just like a Delta installer. The only app in it was Delta. It could install Delta. And I just knew that was important, but even at that point, I knew I wanted Alt Store to be a bigger platform. That was like, kind of what motivated, is like, I didn't want to build a whole nother workaround just to install Delta. The fact that I could do it for Alt Store and for other apps too, made it more appealing to me. I was like, fine, I can do the work and then lots of other apps can take advantage of it. And so it was always the plan to expand beyond Delta. But I just didn't know really what that would look like until probably like a year or so after we launched and I started, we started actually having some third-party apps wanting to be on the store.

• 1:13:57Speaker 13

  And then I got a sense of, okay, this is the type of apps people wanted to install. This is what I gotta be dealing with. And yeah, that's helped a lot.

• 1:14:04David Pierce?

  So yeah, so what, what was that? Like, we're going to get into the kind of history moved towards you a little bit aspect of this in just a sec. But I am curious, in that moment, the idea of like, I'm going to get my third-party app store to be sort of, you know, legitimate in Apple's eyes, was completely off the table. Like, 2019, 2020, there was just no world in which that was going to happen. But you're like, you're talking about, you know, other apps that want to do this kind of stuff. What were you starting to see? What was kind of the, the like unifying thesis behind apps that wanted to be part of this thing you were doing?

• 1:14:35Speaker 13

  Uh, I mean, at first it was just any app that wasn't allowed in the App Store. And honestly, it's still a big appeal day. It's just like, for whatever reason that was rejected for whatever type of rule, they just couldn't be the App Store. And so then they'd see Alt Store and then they'd be like, oh, an alternative. There are a lot of emulators, like obviously. So there are plenty of those. There's stuff you can, like, I Torrent had like an app. And you can, yeah, I can see why Apple wouldn't approve it, but stuff like that. Uh, UTM, the virtual machine app, just running Windows on your iPad, really cool. Not allowed in the App Store. So it was just like a bunch of different random project. Or another one I liked, that I think is really cool, Old OS, if you've heard of that one.

• 1:15:13David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:15:13Speaker 13

  It's so, it's like a high schooler just recreated iOS 4 in Swift UI. And so it's just like the whole experience, you open the app and it's the home screen from iOS 4. You can open all the apps and it looks exactly like it did back in the day.

• 1:15:26David Pierce?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:15:27Speaker 13

  And it's really cool. And so it's just like, oh, a fun little idea that not allowed in App Store. So it's, yeah, a bunch of stuff like that. So I launched Alt Store and the first year was really great. But the first year was also a lot and it was just me working all at the time. And then I honestly was like, what am I doing here? Am I gonna keep with Alt Store? Is this ever gonna be a real thing? Should I just like move on to something else now? I was really going, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And then it was really at that point I realized what I wanted was, I saw basically that the US was investigating Apple and that the EU was investigating Apple around this time. And I was like, you know what? I feel like there is gonna be something that happens in the next few years. I wanna be ready for that, but I need help.

• 1:16:08Speaker 13

  And that's when I basically brought on my partner Shane Gill, who is my best friend and I've lived with for like 10 years. And I was like, hey, I need you with this with me. I need, just do it together. I need you to do all the business stuff and so I can just focus on the programming. And then we can make that happen. And at that point, we started like making the plans for what Alt Store is today. Or at least an Alt Store in the EU, Alt Store Pal.

• 1:16:30David Pierce?

  Okay. So you, you actually really were betting on the theory that eventually this was gonna be a real thing that you could do and not just sort of a series of ever more elaborate hacks?

• 1:16:40Speaker 13

  Yes. Yeah. By that time I was convinced it would happen, just, I didn't know when, but just that. Some point in the future.

• 1:16:46David Pierce?

  That's fair. Okay. So, and this was like peak COVID if I'm, if I'm doing my timing math here correctly. Everything's weird at this time and you're like, well, let's, let's just go for it.

• 1:16:56Speaker 13

  Everything's weird. I'm, yeah, everyone's reevaluating their lives. My original plan was, I was like, hey Shane, let's move to New Zealand together. Let's just escape everything. Let's build this in New Zealand. Cause I'm a New Zealand citizen, so it'd be cool to go home for me, but that didn't work out. It was too hard to get to New Zealand during COVID.

• 1:17:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 13

  Understandably so. We're in Dallas now, which is the same thing.

• 1:17:15David Pierce?

  This close.

• 1:17:16Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18David Pierce?

  Okay. So you start building this thing and was the idea, we want to build sort of a full app store? Like was that, is it as simple as that? That was the pitch?

• 1:17:28Speaker 13

  Uh, yeah. When Shane Karen board, that was the full pitch. Like we're going to build a real app store and show people what life could be like if there are other apps, just like, just be the example. And then whenever it was official, be the official, like be an official store.

• 1:17:40David Pierce?

  And what was, what were developers saying? Were you like reaching out to folks being like, do you want to be part of this? And what were they telling you?

• 1:17:46Speaker 13

  Honestly, we didn't need to be reaching out to anyone. People were just reaching out to us. Like there are a lot of people who just have app ideas that just aren't getting in the app store. And just, and even I'm like, wow, there are just so many apps that like, were getting like reaching out to us. I'm like, oh wow, that was rejected. That was rejected. So we just, yeah, people just reaching out for us.

• 1:18:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. And were you having any contact with Apple at this point? Other than, you know, those two conversations at W W D C, was there any inclination that Apple was even sort of aware of your existence throughout this process?

• 1:18:14Speaker 13

  We did at one point, when the EU started investigating stuff, me and Shane sent an email to the executives at Apple, basically saying, hey y'all, I think the EU may be going too much. And do you like, we just reached out, hey, like we're here and we don't want like a crazy world of side loading. Do you want to like be on the same page here? And they didn't respond at all. But we were at the time just thinking, we don't want a crazy free for all. And that's what it seemed like maybe the EU was going to be. We wanted a more restricted side loading world where the app store was still the main app store.

• 1:18:46David Pierce?

  Why?

• 1:18:47Speaker 13

  I really think that's what makes iOS so good for like the vast majority of people. Like it is just so simple that you can get any app that you trust through one store. I think that's really valuable. It's why like so many people I know personally use an iPhone that aren't techies. And so I just always knew that there needed to be a way for side loading to exist without taking over the app store, or taking like so many apps away from it.

• 1:19:09David Pierce?

  Okay, so you then are watching the regulation stuff happening. Are you like barreling through all the DMA white papers and trying to get the deep sense of what's going? Like, how into this were you as that regulation was happening?

• 1:19:21Speaker 13

  Once the DMA was like an actual thing and they were talking about it, oh yeah, we were very much deep in it. And then we were just like, we gotta be ready for anything. Because literally until Apple announced what they were doing, we just were like, are we gonna be a side-loading tool? Are we gonna be a full App Store? Are we gonna exist at all? Like, we just had no idea what was gonna come next. We just knew that there'd be some way of installing apps.

• 1:19:43David Pierce?

  Okay, and so I guess with that idea, you can kind of keep building Delta and Alt Store the way you had been, without making too many kind of unchangeable decisions at that point?

• 1:19:55Speaker 13

  Yes, we basically were working on like stuff that we knew would be true no matter what. Like, we were building up like the UI for browsing apps. And like, we were expanding like Orbit, building the Patreon flows so that people could connect their Patreons and install that. Because we just knew, no matter what, that would be good for this world. We just didn't go into like the really technical stuff about like the actual installing process. It was just basically making the app look as much like a store as it could be.

• 1:20:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And at that point, how are you thinking about like the business of Delta? You've been working on this thing for an awfully long time without making any money on it. I'm assuming there were conversations about like, how do we all get rich from this thing that clearly lots of people want?

• 1:20:34Speaker 13

  People do keep asking me. But the thing that I've believed in, and what Shane, like Shane before he even joined Alt Store, he was the one that convinced me to make a Patreon for all this in the first place. He was like, hey, when you're working on Delta and Alt Store, just have a Patreon on the side to support yourself. Because honestly, I thought my original plan was to release Alt Store and Delta, and then move on to something else, like just let it exist and let people install it. But Shane was the one telling me, no, people want to support creators right now. You should just have a Patreon that people want to subscribe to and just support future development. And so I launched Alt Store with that, and it did really well. Like, it has paid for everything ever since I started Alt Store. We really believe that's a really important thing that should exist. Because developers right now-

• 1:21:19Speaker 13

  You can't sell apps through Patreon in the App Store. And it's just such a really good way, I think, for creators to build a relationship with their audience. And just, people also don't mind spending a few bucks to a person, but they do mind spending a few bucks on an app.

• 1:21:34David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:21:34Speaker 13

  Such as like very different relationship. And so we're basically just trying to really promote the Patreon idea. Our own income basically is just through the Patreon. We're still selling or having access to our betas for our patrons. And that's worked out pretty well as a way of monetizing Delta, honestly.

• 1:21:51David Pierce?

  Okay, yeah, I mean, even just the idea of thinking of an app developer as a creator in the same way that you think about like a content creator as a creator is really interesting and is totally not how most people perceive it, right?

• 1:22:03Speaker 13

  Exactly.

• 1:22:04David Pierce?

  And I think, I think it's coming around a little bit, like personally, at least, I've seen a lot more of this sort of bootstrapped one-person app become a thing that people like in a way that I didn't, and they like associate the app with the person who makes it.

• 1:22:17Speaker 13

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:22:18David Pierce?

  But I think for most people, it's all so faceless, right? Like you just, it's just an app that exists. I don't know if it's made by one person or 10,000, and I don't care, I'm just mad that they're charging me money.

• 1:22:27Speaker 13

  Yep.

• 1:22:28David Pierce?

  And it's interesting to think that like, maybe the business model is part of the problem there, that because it all just sits in the App Store and it is so divorced from personality and people, that maybe that's the problem. So actually connecting Patreon to that is a really interesting way of just changing the way people think about what like an app is and how it gets made.

• 1:22:46Speaker 13

  Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I'm really excited for that. And another nice benefit is we can just have our apps be free and then people just get the betas. And but so it means there's no features that are locked behind paywalls like forever. It's just a, you can wait forever and get it for free, or if you just want early access, you can donate. And I think that's more appealing to people to like when they're trying to support an app versus, oh, you've locked away a feature and now I can never use it unless I pay. It's just like, yeah, that difference, I think, makes a huge deal.

• 1:23:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I totally agree. So, okay, so right before the DMA drops and I guess, what was it like? March of this year when Apple put out its third-party App Store plans?

• 1:23:28Speaker 13

  It was end of January, yeah.

• 1:23:29David Pierce?

  Okay, so this year.

• 1:23:31Speaker 13

  Yeah, this year.

• 1:23:32David Pierce?

  Apple, right before that, what was kind of the status of Delta and Alt Store? It sounds like it's growing, people are using it, like, how were things?

• 1:23:42Speaker 13

  Things were good. We had like, at that point, like, four million users on Alt Store, like, just existing. I was like, oh, wow, this is going great. Things are going great at Delta. We had been prioritizing basically a new version of Delta, 1.5, to release alongside whatever Apple announced. And so we just like, we're working on that. But then, basically, by January, we're just like, okay, everything is in a good spot. We're ready to go. We just need to know what the hell is happening. And so we were just basically just waiting around to see like, okay, we can do this. We had, like, the store had been finished by then, like, all the UI was done, Delta was ready, Clip was ready, so.

• 1:24:22David Pierce?

  So you have this thing and you're like, this exists, we made it, it's good. We have absolutely no idea what we're about to do with it.

• 1:24:29Speaker 13

  Exactly. That is exactly where we were.

• 1:24:30David Pierce?

  What a strange place to be.

• 1:24:32Speaker 13

  It was very strange. It was, yeah, because we're just, every day, we're like, what do we do? Like, we can't move forward in a lot of things, but, so it was just a lot of planning and strategizing.

• 1:24:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes sense. So then, end of January, Apple drops like a million press releases and technical documents about how all this is gonna work. What happens to you on that day? What do you do?

• 1:24:51Speaker 13

  Wow, what, that was an overwhelming day, like, for sure. And the first thing that we try to do is figure out, okay, can we exist at all in this new world? Because, yeah, there's all these, like, restrictions and we're trying to figure out what the hell, like, alternative marketplaces and like. And so, yes, we're, we spend that whole day basically trying just to parse what Apple's announced. And then we basically are like, okay, we think we can do this. We think we can meet the criteria if we get very creative. Because, yeah, the criteria was like a lot of things, like, you needed to have like the standby letter. We need to have a subsidiary in the EU. And just like a bunch of things that we just sat down like, okay, we gotta make all this happen in a month, basically, because we're like, okay, we have until March 7th was like

• 1:25:36Speaker 13

  the DMA compliance day. We're like, okay, let's set up a subsidiary. Let's get the standby figured out. Let's build everything. Because also, they announced all the stuff we had to build. And it's like, okay, let's build everything we need to do. And then for the next month was like, extreme crunch time, just like getting everything done. Shane, honestly, was incredible. He was calling so many countries to figure out where we could incorporate. We finally incorporated in Ireland. So we have a nice subsidiary in Ireland, which is great. He was on talking to banks to get someone to believe in two people who are trying to do something crazy, and they need this.

• 1:26:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, how hard was that process? You're like, so we build a game emulator and also other app stores. I'm imagining a bunch of banks are just like, this is a prank call and hang up.

• 1:26:20Speaker 13

  A lot did. Yeah. So many people just like, wouldn't listen to us. It was pure luck that we found one person. His name's Logan. He is just like Morgan Stanley, and he was just understood what we were doing and really wanted to go out of his way to help us. And I honestly think if we had not met Logan, I don't know if we would have got this all figured out. But he was like, okay, let's do this. I believe in y'all. I can work with my bosses. We can make it happen. That was a big win, getting that one, for sure.

• 1:26:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I remember when the news came out, thinking that there were, like you described, a bunch of technical challenges, but there were always going to be a bunch of technical challenges, right? I feel like that, you sort of know going in, there's going to be a bunch of weird work you have to do to get this thing to comply with what Apple wants. But the business challenges of just like, the hoops you had to jump through as an organization, seemed like they were designed to keep almost everybody out, except for the truest of true believers and maybe just the most stubborn people building this thing.

• 1:27:21Speaker 13

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:27:22David Pierce?

  And part of me wonders if going back a few months, Apple just deeply underestimated your willingness to pick this fight. After so many years of picking this fight, you're like, I've been through your nonsense before, Apple.

• 1:27:33Speaker 13

  Oh, I, yeah, I know they were caught off guard. They told us that. They like, when we end up going to the lab and everything, they just said straight up, oh, we did not expect anyone to be this prepared, especially as a two-person team. They just did not expect us to be as prepared as we were, which

• 1:27:48David Pierce?

  That had to feel good.

• 1:27:50Speaker 13

  Oh, it did feel good. I was like, cool. But at the same time, I was like, Well, then let us launch. It was like, cool. Okay, that's amazing. Let us launch. We're ready.

• 1:27:57David Pierce?

  Was there any question for a team of two whether to invest all this time on something that, at least for now and potentially forever, is only going to exist in the EU? Like, there's a lot of people in the EU, but there's a lot of people not in the EU also.

• 1:28:11Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, so two parts. I'd be like, one, I do think this is going to come outside the EU at some point. I think it's a question of time. So I, yeah, I expect to see within a few years it'll expand out to like, I don't know, Japan, United States eventually. So we view this as like the beginning of a much longer process for us to expand. But then the other thing was like, we had nothing to lose. This is literally all we're doing. All our income is working on Alt Store Delta. We're like, well, we might as well just go all the way with it. Like, what else? Like, why not?

• 1:28:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the long bet, I think, is probably a safe one. Again, it's a question of how long it takes, but I do think you're probably right. It also seems like you were in a position where, even if it didn't sort of immediately reach a ton of people, you were going to get so much notice just because this is such a big thing and such a big change that like, I, all of a sudden, Alt Store just appeared in so many headlines in like February and March of this year, which is like,

• 1:29:06Speaker 13

  Yes, that was very, very surreal seeing that all of a sudden. Yeah.

• 1:29:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's so funny because like explaining Alt Store to people, it's like, okay, it is this bizarre sort of convoluted experience where you have to set up a server. And I'm seeing this in like mainstream news articles.

• 1:29:21Speaker 13

  I know. I'm like, oh, my God.

• 1:29:22David Pierce?

  It's like, oh, my God, if my mom asked me what Alt Store is, I'm not going to know how to answer that question for her.

• 1:29:27Speaker 13

  Same. Yeah, I explained to my friends, I'm like, eh, don't worry about it. It's just a tool to install apps. That's it.

• 1:29:34David Pierce?

  So, okay, so then we're almost to the present time, but I feel like we still have not gotten to the single wildest part of this whole timeline.

• 1:29:40Speaker 13

  Yeah, that's accurate.

• 1:29:42David Pierce?

  So you're, you're building the store. Things are going well. You launch, I think on launch day, right? March 7th, was it ready to go?

• 1:29:49Speaker 13

  No, we. We were ready. We were all ready to go. And that was the beginning of like this frustration. So we were, yeah, we were invited to a lab in Cork for the Apple to like help us implement our backend and everything. So like a week long lab for us just to work with Apple engineers to get everything working. So then we flew out to Cork. It was like the week before March 5th, so the end of it, the end of February. We flew out. Day one, I showed up. I said, okay, here's everything. We're ready to go. Can we launch? And then they were like, oh, uh, hold on. They expected you to show up and be like, I'd like to build an app store. And instead you show up and you're like, I have built an app store. They literally, I really think they expected everyone to show up with like no code base, like to just start from scratch and how to do this.

• 1:30:32Speaker 13

  And yeah, so we show up and we're like, here's the entire product. It has store pages, it has everything you could possibly need, downloading works. And then they were just like, oh, wow. Yeah, just very clearly, they were not expecting that. And so it basically was then, okay, so Monday I was like trying to pressure them. Can we launch tomorrow? Can we launch tomorrow? iOS 17.14 is coming out tomorrow. Can we be there? And then it just became clear that this whole process was going to be much longer than we expected for a lot of boring reasons. Like basically just legal, like giving them documents, having them review documents, stuff like that. So iOS 17.14 came out and me and Shane were very bummed because we're like, we were ready to launch on launch day. We were all ready to go. And then, uh, so that was frustrating.

• 1:31:17Speaker 13

  So how long did it take before you actually got the thing up and running? Then I think it was two months later, like it was, yeah, it was April 17th. Like, yeah, so, yeah, from May, from March 5th to April 17th was just waiting, so a month and a half. And so we did that. And then, yeah, the reception was immediately just phenomenal. People just so excited. And but then we also immediately saw, which we expected, that Delta was the main story. Sure. That Delta in the App Store was the big deal. But we had to figure out what to do and we knew that would be the outcome. If we released Delta in the App Store, that Delta would get like its big moment to be everywhere. And we just were like, you know, that's fine. It's free marketing for Alt Store. Everyone just knows about Delta and then they talk about it and then they get it through Alt Store in the EU. So you just, you

• 1:32:01David Pierce?

  You just glossed past part of it, though, like the the whole Apple suddenly allows emulators in the App Store.

• 1:32:08Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08David Pierce?

  You say that as if you expected that to happen. I don't think anybody expected that to happen.

• 1:32:12Speaker 13

  Not at all. The most, yeah, unexpected thing that could have happened. And me and Shane had different reactions at first. Shane was more like, this changes everything. Now we gotta think through. And my just reaction was, wow, what validation that Apple had to change the rules to allow emulators because they were threatened by us about to launch with an emulator. Like, that to me was like invigorating. I was like, this is, yes, it means we're doing something right. That Apple is literally like doing something I never thought they'd do because it was the only way they could try to make the story not, the EU now has the best apps. Outside the EU has, doesn't have the coolest apps. And I just knew Apple, yeah, they just couldn't have that story.

• 1:32:52Speaker 13

  Which is also why emulators are allowed worldwide, is my guess, is the story just could not have been that the EU has better apps than the rest of the world.

• 1:32:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And it is very hard to argue that this wasn't specifically about Delta. Like, I just can't, the timing, it's too.

• 1:33:08Speaker 13

  It is all about Delta. We haven't had a direct confirmation from Apple, but our app, Delta, was being notarized for like five weeks. They changed this rule. It's approved the next day. Oh, wow. It's almost like they were holding it to figure out what they could do about it.

• 1:33:24David Pierce?

  Did you get any heads up that they were gonna make this change?

• 1:33:26Speaker 13

  Nope, nothing at all.

• 1:33:28David Pierce?

  Well, and I would guess after that happened, you would have expected it to be big. It sounds like you did expect it to be big. But I feel like it's been, it's certainly been bigger than I expected, like.

• 1:33:38Speaker 13

  It is bigger than I expected.

• 1:33:40David Pierce?

  It's been nuts, man.

• 1:33:42Speaker 13

  It's so validating. Like, I really can't, like, because, yeah, we're doing this because we just really believe that people just want to play old Nintendo games or old, old games. We just, I think it's just a thing people want to do. And for so long, everyone just says, no, that's only for the nerds. It's only for like people who know what they're doing. And I've just been like, you just have to make it accessible. That's all it, like, all you gotta do. If it's accessible, people will know how to do it and they will love it. We're seeing that that is exactly the case. And yes, so even. More people than I thought are enjoying it. It is the most surreal thing, seeing it not only in the App Store, but being the top app in the App Store.

• 1:34:19David Pierce?

  For like a long time. Are you still the number one app in the App Store?

• 1:34:22Speaker 13

  I mean, I think last time I checked, but yeah, since we've launched, we've been number one. And yeah, so surreal like the most like any time my life, I've never felt more like I actually am dreaming right now. Like I need like pinching myself like, because it was just too perfect. Like work on this app for 10 years and then day one in the App Store, it's the top. I was just incredible.

• 1:34:45David Pierce?

  Has it changed what you think about how to do all of this? I mean, if you had charged $2.99 for Delta, you would have made a crap ton of money by now. Like, have you, are you thinking about the business of all of this differently after it's blown up the way that it has?

• 1:34:58Speaker 13

  Um, I think we want this to be bigger than just like Delta. And we want this to cause like actual change in like the emulation scene or in the gaming sphere. Just like, we want to make this more accessible for everyone. We want people to start talking about it and have real conversations about it without just being like piracy, piracy. And so a lot of what we're doing is we thought Delta, to make that change happen, we had to like, it had to be free. Had to be, everyone had to have it. And that's, I think, just what we're focused on really is like, as long as we're making, we're making enough to support ourselves. And so we're not in need of more money, but I just think for Delta to have the biggest impact is just make it as fully free and accessible to as many people as possible. And let them just start reliving games.

• 1:35:42David Pierce?

  Are you worried at all about legal ramifications? I mean, there was obviously the, the Yuzu thing that happened kind of right before this. It's been a, it's been a weird moment in the emulation community. Have, has, have you heard from any Nintendo lawyers?

• 1:35:55Speaker 13

  Yeah, that came out as we're also like in Europe trying to launch this. I'm like, oh, interesting, very, very relevant to us. But I'm not going to say I'm not nervous about things, but I am confident in what we're doing. I've learned a lot of what not to do over the past 10 years. And I think that we are really trying to show how you can do something like this legally. Like we're not Yuzu, we're not emulating a current generation console. We're not. Not doing a lot of things that other emulator's getting in trouble like there's no DRM we have to deal with to like for the game. So just the game files ripped from cartridges. So we don't have to do anything like that. We're doing everything we can to do it right. And there was no world that I wouldn't have done this. I guess it's a better way. Like, I wouldn't have got this far and not released Delta. I just had to.

• 1:36:40David Pierce?

  No, I think that, well, and I think that's part of why this moment of your story is so interesting because we're at the beginning of this weird new era of apps in the App Store. And I think a lot of stuff is changing and a lot is going to continue to change. But we're also, in a funny way, kind of at the end of your 10-year journey, like the, this, you, you finally finished the thing.

• 1:37:01Speaker 13

  That, that is what it feels like. It's really weird, but I'm like, wow, it actually happened. Like, it got in the App Store and yes, it does feel like the culmination of that whole journey, which is very weird.

• 1:37:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. Does that make it feel like I finally got to do it and it worked and it was huge and it was awesome? And now I can go do something else.

• 1:37:22Speaker 13

  I honestly, the, the fact that Delta's doing so well has just motivated me to just want to work on it so much for right now. Because I've just been working on it in isolation, assuming one day it could like be a big deal that, I don't know. Actually seeing everyone play it right now has made me really motivated to like really focus on it again. And also because so much of the past two years has been like a lot priority of working on Alt Store. And now that we launched Alt Store, we can just like have some time with Delta again. Like, there's just so many fun features I want to add that I haven't had time to because we had to get Alt Store up and running for this deadline. But, so I'm looking forward to a lot of that, but I don't know if this is a 10-year thing. I don't know if this is the beginning of like another 10-year adventure. To me, I think it's, I'll work on Delta for a bit and I think I got to finish up what Alt Store is.

• 1:38:04Speaker 13

  Like, we still have some to do to prove it out. Like, we got to get the third-party apps on there. We got to build up the platform. And I think that's, to me, the next step. It's just making sure that Alt Store is a real App Store that people are using and happy with. And then maybe I'll be done.

• 1:38:20David Pierce?

  And then, then you will have resoundingly defeated Apple, which very few people can say.

• 1:38:25Speaker 13

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:38:33David Pierce?

  Welcome back. For the last few weeks, I've been immersing myself in AI gadgets. The Humane AI pin, the Rabbit R1, the Meta Smart Glasses, this voice recorder I have called Plod, a bunch of apps, everything I can get my hands on that is like a way to use AI. And the number one question in front of all of these devices in particular, I think, is the same thing. Why isn't this just an app on your phone? Actually, that might be the number two question. Number one is just, is this thing any good? And a lot of them aren't. But let's focus on the phone thing for right now. The Verge's Allison Johnson wrote a piece last week arguing essentially that a smartphone is the perfect AI gadget, that we don't need dedicated devices, we have the dedicated

• 1:39:14David Pierce?

  devices. And she ran an experiment to prove it. So of course, I had to ask her to come on and tell us how it went. Allison, welcome back.

• 1:39:22Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 1:39:23David Pierce?

  We usually talk about phones when you come on the show, and this time we're going to talk about phones, but maybe in the weirdest way that we've ever talked about phones, which I'm very excited about.

• 1:39:32Speaker 14

  I'm here for it.

• 1:39:33David Pierce?

  So let's just start at the beginning here. Tell me about this wearable phone experiment that you devised for yourself.

• 1:39:40Speaker 14

  Oh, my gosh. I have never been so glad that I just work in my own house alone. I was just sort of ranting about how, you know, the Humane pin reviews came out and I was like, this thing is just an Android phone, like a mid-range Android phone. And I was like, I have so many mid-range Android phones. So I just kind of set out to like recreate the capabilities with what I had. And it was surprisingly hard. I tried a flip phone. I had the Motorola Razr Plus and I had it like, kind of clamped over the collar of my shirt, you know, like you do. And I got like, so far with that, like I could kind of talk to Google Assistant.

• 1:40:18David Pierce?

  So wait, so you dangle it over with like, what, the front screen facing out?

• 1:40:22Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22David Pierce?

  And you just, and then you just sort of like, hey gee it from?

• 1:40:26Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26David Pierce?

  There.

• 1:40:27Speaker 14

  And I figure, because then you have cameras facing forward, you could do Google Lens. That was the, the thought. It's not very easy to do any of that, kind of out of the box. Like, the flip phones won't let you download the Gemini Assistant, which is strange. So you kind of have to-

• 1:40:43David Pierce?

  That's weird.

• 1:40:43Speaker 14

  Like, sideload it. If you try and, and trigger the Google Assistant with the phone closed and the cover, just using the cover screen, it tells you to open up the phone. So it kind of like, it was already not off to a great start.

• 1:40:57David Pierce?

  So did you ever find an actual solution with the phone itself? We're gonna get to headphones in a minute.

• 1:41:04Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05David Pierce?

  Foreshadowing, but did you ever find a version of like a wearable phone that actually kind of worked?

• 1:41:10Speaker 14

  I did not really. I had, I just ran chat GPT in the kind of like talking mode, the conversation mode. And I had that on my shirt and just, but it's just always listening and like waiting for you to say something. So you can't just like go about your day and we had a very pleasant conversation about like the weather, whatever. But yeah, nothing, nothing really worked the way I thought it would.

• 1:41:35David Pierce?

  Well, this is why I wanted to talk about this because I think you and I have been talking about this for months now. And the question everybody brings up about every single AI gadget is like, why isn't this just an app on my phone? And my thoughts on the subject and why it shouldn't just be an app on your phone are actually becoming increasingly strong and intense. And I feel like I'm more right than I was before. But I am curious, like at a, at a broad level, do you buy that argument? Like, are you also one of the people who is just like, this is all ridiculous? This should just be an app on my phone.

• 1:42:06Speaker 14

  I think I'm, I'm like 20% rooting for like a gadget that does these things and 80% just, it just feels like realism. Like phones have already solved so many of these problems, like these little gadgets get hot. They have to connect to the internet. They need cameras, like checkmarks on all of those for phones. Like they did it. Battery life, you know, regular software updates. They got it. And I'm just like, I'm having flashbacks of covering compact digital cameras for years where it was like, you know, oh, these are so much better than your phone and which is like not even true anymore.

• 1:42:50Speaker 14

  But it was like, no, the phone is good enough for most people and people do not want to carry around two things. That is, that is what we learned from that experiment is if you can carry one thing instead of two things, you will carry one thing.

• 1:43:05David Pierce?

  I do agree with that. And that is, I think, maybe the most convincing argument against the AI gadget is just, it's the good enough hypothesis, right? That it's like, I don't need it to be as good. I just don't want to carry and charge and worry about two things. But I think my most strident opinion on this subject is that I think we all have forgotten how annoying it is to use your phone. Like, we've just been doing it for so long that I think it's why I believe in flip phones, for the same reason. It's like, our phones are these big, chunky things that you balance on top of your pinky to the point where most of us have like divots in our fingers now from trying to hold these things. You have to sort of like worm your thumb around this gigantic screen in order to touch anything.

• 1:43:50David Pierce?

  Like, from a pure, in-a-vacuum user experience, it's not good. And if your hands are full, you can't do anything. And I spend like an alarming amount of my time with like, dog and stroller in one arm and phone in the other. Like, it's just bad. And I, this idea that, okay, every time I want to do anything, the right user experience is for me to dig into my purse, pull out my phone, unlock it, swipe, swipe, swipe, open an app, tap on the app, log in, do a thing. Like, that's bad. And the idea that you can shortcut all of this by just yelling a thing is good. I believe in that. And this is why I liked your experiment so much. Because it's like, okay, can I make my phone that thing? Which I think is where we get to earbuds.

• 1:44:32Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33David Pierce?

  The longer we do this, the more I am coming to the answer of like, maybe headphones are the problem solver in all of this.

• 1:44:39Speaker 14

  Yeah. And this is something our colleague V Song has written about is like, with wearable tech, it's so important that it's just like, something you want to put on your body and is comfortable and is kind of like socially accepted. And I just come back to earbuds. Like, we're just, people just walk around with them. I feel like such an old person being like, these kids, they just walk around with their earbuds all the time. But like, you have a good transparency mode, you know? And those things could get smarter about the sound they let in and the sounds they keep out. And then you have this connection to your phone that you can just like, summon it when you want it and keep it in your pocket and not have to do the whole dance of like,

• 1:45:23Speaker 14

  Tapping on things because I think we've come, we're sort of blind to that. Like, we are just so conditioned to like, this is how you get things done on a phone. You take it out, you do all this, you get distracted. And yeah, once you start kind of like conceptualizing not having to do that, it's like, oh yeah, I, I buy into that vision and I, but I think we're just gonna be able to do it without touching our phone, but it's still gonna be phone.

• 1:45:49David Pierce?

  Yes, and well, and that turned out to be sort of the second half of your experience with, with this phone AI gadget thing, right? You, you basically went like full pixel.

• 1:45:58Speaker 14

  Yeah, I did, like, I downloaded the Gemini assistant and switched into it. And there's still like weird workarounds you have to do because you can have Gemini assistant running on the phone, the earbuds are not going to trigger Gemini because they're, they don't talk yet.

• 1:46:15David Pierce?

  This is the most Google thing you've ever said.

• 1:46:17Speaker 14

  Yeah, seriously. Well, like the Pixel Watch, you, you can't have Gemini on it yet. So you're like talking to one assistant here, you're talking to a different assistant on the phone. The Google Home in my kitchen is constantly being like, what? So I had to like unplug that and I kept Gemini like open and running on the phone, which is not an ideal user experience, but had the earbuds in. And my like lightbulb moment was I took a picture of this recipe I was making and I was like, look at this and remember it. And I just walked around my kitchen doing things and I would ask it questions like, how long do I put the fish in? How do I chop the vegetables? Just kind of out of order and like as I was doing things and it, it got it right all the time.

• 1:47:00Speaker 14

  And it was like, oh, this is super helpful. I would be running back to this recipe with like stuff on my fingers, trying to figure it out. And it's like, man, those earbuds.

• 1:47:11David Pierce?

  That is maybe the single coolest use of AI I've ever heard, by the way, to take a picture of a recipe and then just pepper the assistant with questions about that recipe as you go. That's very cool.

• 1:47:24Speaker 14

  I was super into it and it's that kind of thing of like, I run out of things to talk about with ChatGPT. I'm like, there's only so many like. Business proposals you can brainstorm, but I'm like, if you give it a little data set of like, I'm doing this thing, help me out. Like it makes so much more sense to me that way.

• 1:47:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. Are you a voice assistant person in your day to day?

• 1:47:46Speaker 14

  Not at all. I set timers and I ask the weather and like trying to get myself, I'm starting to like realize I can use it a little more, especially if I am using a phone with Gemini on it. Like I asked, but you just, man, you gotta keep an eye on it because it'll make up a word or like, I was asking it if the bridge they were working on in my neighborhood had reopened and, and it like got the days backwards. It was like, yes, it's open, but it's opening tomorrow. So you just have to keep an eye on it, but it's, it's like converting me a little bit to more of a voice assistant person, I think.

• 1:48:24David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah. I think one of the big questions I have about this space right now is, did voice assistants work because they were a bad idea? Or rather, did voice assistants not work because they were a bad idea? Or did they not work because they weren't very good? And I think they definitely aren't very good, right? And I think the Siri experience sort of proves that for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people's first experience with these things was Siri. And you ask it to do something and it just fails or it's like, here's what I found on the web. And you're like, well, this is useless. And then you never really try again. And so the first attempt, we all had to build that habit. It failed spectacularly and there are a lot of like kids who grew up asking Alexa silly questions and getting silly responses. And that was the thing that worked. So I think the attach rate there has actually been better

• 1:49:09David Pierce?

  as a result. But then I come around to, okay, we all bet on this a decade ago. Like the tech industry was like, this is the thing. Conversational interfaces, they're going to change everything and they super didn't. And now to some extent, we're back in that exact same thing. And the promise is no, it was the right idea with the wrong underlying technology. And at least my experience so far has been, I still see the theory of it. But even as I use all these things, I'm not, I'm using it more. I agree with you. I've definitely found more reasons to do this stuff, particularly with like, I really like to use an AI voice notes app to like say my to do list out loud.

• 1:49:50David Pierce?

  And they're actually getting pretty good at turning that into just a structured list of stuff I have to do today. I feel like a doctor who's like saying all of my charts into my voice recorder and then like something magical happens. It's great, but I still don't feel like I have hit the thing where it just sort of that becomes the main way I use my phone. And what people say when I say that to them is, oh, it's just an interface question. It's because once you have your phone out, why not just use your phone the way that you're used to? Which is why they're all excited about these new gadgets. And so I just, I don't know, I spin in circles about like, what is the actual sort of roadblock here to this actually becoming real? Cause it seems like there are a lot of them.

• 1:50:26Speaker 14

  Yeah, there's just sort of like a pain versus reward, you know, ratio of like, I feel like it's starting to even out a little bit with the voice assistants, but you still get burned where you're like, there's nothing worse than like being at the grocery store and being like, I'm going to use the voice assistant. And then it's, it just fails and you have to like either keep talking to it or like take your phone out. I think once you had that experience, you're like, oh, just use my phone for this.

• 1:50:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 14

  But yeah, I think, I think it's something we can adjust to. And it really has to like that threshold of public embarrassment or just like frustration has to change. And there's like signals that that will happen, I think, but yeah, it's, it's not proven, I wouldn't say.

• 1:51:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. One of my developing theories is that headphones are going to be where a lot of this goes for that reason. It's like, it's a thing you can wear one of in the grocery store and no one will look twice at you. Like we have solved the public weirdness problem of headphones. Sony did that for us 45 years ago.

• 1:51:32Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:51:33David Pierce?

  Thank you, Sony.

• 1:51:35David Pierce?

  But what I wonder now is like, should you have the AI system that is just purely baked into your headphones? Like, one of the conspiracy theories that I have no evidence for, but believe to my soul, is that the next AirPods Maxes are going to be local AI devices. Because they're big, and they're heavy, and they have a big battery, and they can do stuff. But like, if you try to run some of that stuff on AirPods, or the Pixel Buds, or it's just, the battery's gonna die in one minute, and there's just, there's literally no place to put the AI stuff.

• 1:52:05Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:52:05David Pierce?

  But maybe it's, maybe that's okay. Maybe Bluetooth headphones and your phone in your pocket or purse is enough interface. And it does seem like in your experiment, that's kind of where you landed.

• 1:52:14Speaker 14

  Yeah, that, that kind of proved out, and that didn't solve the camera thing, which is also like, an intriguing, related, you know, like, feature, which the humane pin has the camera, and you're both like, wanna look at something and ask a question about it, or if you want a hands-free way to take pictures, which both are kind of intriguing to me. So, I mean, everybody keeps bringing up the Meta Ray-Bans, and, yeah, that kind of solves a couple of those problems, and doesn't look stupid.

• 1:52:44David Pierce?

  True. Do you wear glasses normally?

• 1:52:46Speaker 14

  I wear contacts, so, I'm, I'm so close to buying these things. I don't know.

• 1:52:52David Pierce?

  Really?

• 1:52:52Speaker 14

  Yeah, it'd be so good for just like, taking picture of a kid running around, and, I don't know. But another gadget. Do I want another gadget?

• 1:53:02David Pierce?

  I, I hear you. I've been, I've been debating this with some of the folks on our team for a while, because I think they're definitely a huge leap better than like, having a headset on your face, to have the Meta Smart Glasses. And Meta is leaning into the fact that we've also solved, having glasses on your face is not weird. And, I don't know what your experience has been, but when I wear the Meta Glasses, no one ever looks at me sideways.

• 1:53:24Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24David Pierce?

  Like, I got more public notice, more sort of weird double-takes, wearing the humane pin, than I ever have wearing the Meta Glasses, by a mile.

• 1:53:34Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34David Pierce?

  So that's, that's a huge victory. But I also don't wear glasses. Normally, and I don't want to start wearing glasses. Like, I wear sunglasses when I'm outside and I have mostly replaced my sunglasses with the Meta glasses, which I like a lot. But in terms of a sort of always on assistant, like, I'm not going to get to work and keep wearing glasses I don't need just to use my assistant.

• 1:53:54Speaker 14

  It's a different vibe. Yeah, you have to be ready for that shift.

• 1:53:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, if we can normalize sunglasses indoors, just in order to make AI happen, I'm here for it. This, this works.

• 1:54:05Speaker 14

  We'll work on that.

• 1:54:05David Pierce?

  But yeah, I do think, I have definitely come around to the idea in testing the Humane Pin and now the Rabbit and some of the other stuff that's out there now, that actually what we need to figure out is how to put AI into other socially acceptable things that already exist before we try and invent some wholly new thing.

• 1:54:22Speaker 14

  Yeah, like, the Humane Pin kind of tries to hide it, but it's sort of like, look at this, this is kind of a cool gadget. I appreciate that the Rabbit is just like, this is a thing. It is bright orange. It like practically glows in the dark. I don't know if you've had this experience where I walk into a dark room and I'm like, there's the Rabbit art.

• 1:54:44David Pierce?

  It really does. It, it sort of screams at you from wherever it is. What do you think about the Rabbit? Speaking of experiments you've been doing, you've been, you've been testing Rabbit's AI stuff with some of the other stuff that's out there. How's that gone?

• 1:54:55Speaker 14

  It is, boy. That's a tough.

• 1:54:59David Pierce?

  That sounds right.

• 1:55:00Speaker 14

  It's a tough one. The, the battery life is just god awful, which, you know, as it turns out, is important because I don't, if I just have it in my bag and I go somewhere, I'm like, I'm going to leave it off because the minute I turn it on, it's going to be like draining the battery. So like, A, if there's no battery, it doesn't help you do anything. It's just a cool orange thing. I've seen a couple of moments when I'm like, okay, this is maybe doing a little more than a Gemini. I took a picture of my plant on my desk and it, it did the typical thing of like, this is a pothos plant, blah, blah, blah. And it, it kind of like went into the care instructions and it was like, your plant looks happy in its current pot.

• 1:55:42Speaker 14

  I'm like, you know, I, I don't get that assessment from Gemini. It just sort of spits out a bunch of stuff at you, like, don't overwater it, don't underwater it. So I don't know, there's, there's like something that is a little more like, could tune itself to like what you're actually doing or looking at that feels like not just Googling something. But I don't want to give this thing too much credit. It has not done that very often and it it kind of feels that basic stuff.

• 1:56:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's bad. Like, I think we're gonna have, we're gonna have more to say about it, both on the site and on this podcast. But the the the rabbit R1 is not good is is a pretty easy takeaway. But I'm curious, you've been testing it against ChatGPT in particular, pretty strenuously, right? Are they? My assumption would be that most of these things should come out relatively the same, because it's all kind of pulling from the same backend infrastructure. Have you noticed anything interesting poking at all this stuff?

• 1:56:38Speaker 14

  Well, I think that something you mentioned, I think, is that it's running perplexity. So you get a little more like real time info than a ChatGPT or the free ChatGPT I use that was trained whenever ago. So I can ask it, like, is that bridge open? That was closed over the weekend and I get a real response. So that's interesting, but it's it's such a strange little strange little creature. It's like very adorable. I think there's an adorable factor. It perks up its little ears when it's listening to you, but TBD on that.

• 1:57:18David Pierce?

  Does that do anything for you, actually? Because I think I have, I've definitely had the same experience that I like that it the little rabbit on the screen sort of bounces, waiting for you to talk, and then you ask it a question and it perks up its ears and stops bouncing. And when you're playing music, it it wears headphones. And there's a lot of sort of charming little things about it, I think. And I can't decide if that's what I want or is totally the opposite of what I want from a device like this. Because you you use Gemini or ChatGPT or Siri or whatever, and it's all very matter of fact, right? Like, they are, they are tools to do a job. And actually, every time we've seen these things exhibit personality, it's been in really bad, ugly, problematic ways mostly.

• 1:57:58David Pierce?

  And so they've all learned to just sort of shut all that down and just be there to execute whatever they are required to execute and then move on. And part of me is sort of endeared to rabbit for trying something else. And part of me is also like, well, maybe if it worked but was less cute, I would like it better. And maybe that's what actually matters here.

• 1:58:15Speaker 14

  Yeah, like, there's a cute little animation of the rabbit in a hamster wheel or something when you when you need to charge it. I'm like, this is adorable, but I'm annoyed that I need to charge this thing again. Like, cute only gets you so far, I think.

• 1:58:31David Pierce?

  Yeah. Do you think there's gonna be ways to put more of this stuff onto phones in interesting ways? Like, is the next round of flip phones and foldable phones and smartphones gonna have some of the stuff we're seeing in these gadgets? Or are we just gonna keep getting phones? Cause like, I just keep thinking about the Razer as you're talking about it. It's like, what if the external screen of the Razer could run an assistant and could have that outward facing camera? Like, it kind of has all the hardware it needs to do that. Are we gonna get that, do you think?

• 1:58:59Speaker 14

  I, I would like it. I mean, it would be an ideal world where you could kind of choose from your AI assistant and you don't just have to use the one that your operating system baked in.

• 1:59:10David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:59:10Speaker 14

  But yeah, then you get into like, the tech company is gonna let the app makers in, you know, like, get into the system the way it would have to, where you don't run into a wall like ChatGPT can't change settings on my phone or like, put something on my calendar, you know? So I feel like there is a pretty like, firm wall on that right now, and, and that would be interesting. I think that's kind of like, Rabbit's, you know, ethos is like, how do we get around that? And the answer is a weird system where you log into stuff and, um, on, I don't know, a virtual computer.

• 1:59:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, the answer is largely you can't, right now, it turns out.

• 1:59:51Speaker 14

  That, that seems to be not working also, so.

• 1:59:55David Pierce?

  But yeah, it's, it's an interesting question, and my sense would be, that's only happening if regulators make it happen, right? It seems, to some extent, like, more powerful than setting your default browser, which you can do. Even more powerful than setting your default search engine, which has only become a thing because of regulatory pressure. And essentially, you could kind of argue it's like allowing you to install another operating system on top of your operating system. Like, if you were allowed to let ChatGPT run your phone, that's a pretty big thing for any of these companies to be able to do. I kind of agree that that's how it should shake out if this tech is going to get better in the way that everybody says it's gonna get better. It'll be cool to have options and not just be forced to use better Siri or better Gemini or better ChatGPT or whatever.

• 2:00:40David Pierce?

  I don't know that I would bet on that ever being a possibility.

• 2:00:43Speaker 14

  Yeah, that does seem like a big question mark. And then you get back to just like, well, what if you could just talk to your operating system while you're walking around the kitchen? It's like not the ideal future that I want. I think I want a future where there's weird gadgets or you can download a virtual assistant that can actually do things for you. Yeah, I think that's why I'm on like team phones because it's the realist in me is like, oh, they're not going to let this stuff happen.

• 2:01:17David Pierce?

  I think that's probably right, but I do also remember somebody, I forget who it was, somebody at one of the phone makers years ago was like, we're going to get to a point where the phone in your pocket is basically just a cellular modem. And all the accessories around are going to be connected to that in some way. Your wearable is going to use that to connect to the internet. Your headphones are going to use that to connect to the internet. Your laptop is going to use that to connect to the internet. But it is, it's going to be less the device you use for everything and more the device that just lets you use everything everywhere.

• 2:01:45Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46David Pierce?

  And I think that's a really interesting version of the future. And it's kind of what you discovered with this is like, I can just use my phone as a go-between to all these services that exist and with headphones that I already own. I actually don't need to invent a completely new pipeline for that stuff. I just need a new way to kind of get at that pipeline.

• 2:02:04Speaker 14

  Yeah, and I've become just an addict for the smartwatch. Like I, over the past couple of years, like I never used one before. And now I cannot live without one. It's just like, it's the right kind of light interface for when I need to do stuff. Like I'm out on a walk and I need to pause music or just check a quick notification or a text and it's like, you run into the wall very quickly of like, you can't really respond to a text very well, or you can thumbs up emoji something.

• 2:02:34David Pierce?

  Right.

• 2:02:35Speaker 14

  But boy, has that been like, that is the point where I'm like, I am so willing to charge this extra thing and it has its own special charger that I have to bring along when I travel and like, it crosses that threshold of like, yes, I will do all of that because I find it so useful.

• 2:02:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think smartwatches probably land in the earbuds category of that kind of light input system that really works. Like when I wrote, when I wrote the humane pin review, the overwhelming response was, what you're describing is just a better Apple Watch.

• 2:03:08Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 2:03:09David Pierce?

  Other than the camera stuff, which is left to be solved, but right now is only kind of somewhat useful anyway. That is true. Like, my big regret right now is that I didn't buy a cell-connected Apple Watch.

• 2:03:22Speaker 14

  Right?

• 2:03:23David Pierce?

  And I wish, I wish that I had, because then I could do all that sort of lightweight stuff you're talking about without needing my phone in my pocket.

• 2:03:30Speaker 14

  Yeah, you could just leave the house. Can you imagine?

• 2:03:33David Pierce?

  I mean, first of all, no.

• 2:03:35Speaker 14

  No.

• 2:03:35David Pierce?

  But also, that sounds wonderful. The idea of your phone as a thing that lives in your pocket, that it lets everything else connect to the internet, strikes me as much more the sort of AI gadget future than like these all-encompassing new ideas about gadgets.

• 2:03:51Speaker 14

  Yeah, I know. It's kind of depressing, but it's also, I think, true.

• 2:03:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it means like, all these other companies, humane, rabbit, everybody else, is like desperately trying to get around your phone, just like you said. And it's like, oh, this maybe keeps the world the way that it is, if that's how we do it, more than I would like, but it also just might be inevitable.

• 2:04:11Speaker 14

  Yeah, and it's an interesting moment, at least.

• 2:04:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 14

  Boy, is it not dull right now.

• 2:04:18David Pierce?

  I know, and I'm still thinking about the camera comparison, and cameras never came back.

• 2:04:23Speaker 14

  No.

• 2:04:23David Pierce?

  They just, like, mid-range. We found a lot of interesting stuff to do at like the high end, and I think about like, the Fuji series that people really love. Like, I feel like if you want like a good camera, your options have never been better. But if you want a pretty good camera, they don't exist because you have a smartphone.

• 2:04:40Speaker 14

  Yeah, you already have it.

• 2:04:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I wonder, maybe that's where we're gonna go with AI stuff. And we're a ways away from the AI gadgets being any good. So maybe we're, we're gonna be in a real sort of valley with that stuff for a little while, it feels like.

• 2:04:52Speaker 14

  Yeah, we're gonna find out.

• 2:04:54David Pierce?

  But luckily, phones are getting better. So I'll take that.

• 2:04:56Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah. Phones are sticking around, I think.

• 2:04:59David Pierce?

  And you've given me yet another reason to buy a flip phone, which is all I really needed from you was more reasons.

• 2:05:05Speaker 14

  I took that Motorola out of the closet. I was like, this is so nice. Just shutting it, just shutting it feels good.

• 2:05:13David Pierce?

  I'm gonna start buying T-shirts with the pocket on the, on the breast. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna fold it out and just stick it right there and chat with it all day. It's gonna be amazing.

• 2:05:20Speaker 14

  Yeah, it looks super cool.

• 2:05:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I, I believe that. I bet you made a lot of friends and everybody thought you were super normal and cool all the time.

• 2:05:28Speaker 14

  Yeah, I was taking pictures of it for the article and my husband walked into the kitchen and just slowly backed away. I don't understand what's happening here and I'm not gonna question it.

• 2:05:38David Pierce?

  That's, that's the correct way to react to AI of all sorts.

• 2:05:41Speaker 14

  Yeah, probably. Just back away.

• 2:05:44David Pierce?

  All right, Alison, thank you as always.

• 2:05:46Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 2:05:54David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So a few weeks ago, I started reading this book called The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It's by a guy named Roland Allen and it traces like a thousand years of history of how people write on paper. He makes this big case that paper is this incredibly critical invention in the history of the world. And that actually without paper, without notebooks, we wouldn't have modern capitalism. We wouldn't know nearly as much about history as we do. That actually a lot of the world that we live in is defined by the way that people wrote stuff down and what they wrote stuff down on. He tells a whole history of notebooks all the way through the Renaissance

• 2:06:38David Pierce?

  and all the way up to now and even in the future. If you listen to the show, you know that I love note-taking apps. I love thinking about how people write stuff down. I think the systems for all this are fascinating. And this book was like catnip for me. So I asked Roland to come on the show and talk through some of the big ideas in his book. And also why notebooks continue to survive in this increasingly digital world. It's a super fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to him. And yes, there is more. 12th century history in this episode than most, but we're gonna go with it. So to start with Roland, I asked him to quickly recap the case that he makes that

• 2:07:19David Pierce?

  paper is a hugely important invention in the history of the world and that without paper, we might not have any of this. Here's what he said to that.

• 2:07:29Speaker 15

  Yeah, permanence is really why.

• 2:07:33Speaker 15

  For thousands of years, we've had different ways of writing things down as human beings. So you go back to, you can, you can carve on stone. You can make little dents in clay tablets, which you then fire and dry out and they're permanent, but they are clay tablets. So they're not super portable or practical or robust. Then you have papyrus, papyrus, the reed product, which grows in Egypt. And you can write on that, you can draw on that, but papyrus, it turns out, unless it's actually in an Egyptian tomb, completely dry with no movement and nothing to disturb it, it will just automatically fall apart. It can't cope with any kind of damp or it can't really cope with being handled. So papyrus is handy, but it's not permanent.

• 2:08:18Speaker 15

  And then you have wax tablets and these are beautiful things. They're amazing, completely died out in Europe, but for about 2,000 years, this is how Europeans retained information, took notes, wrote poems, agreed contracts, bills of sale, whatever, with a layer of wax on wood, which you would then scrape into with a little stylus. Now, obviously that's not permanent. So it's very useful for being in a poet's notebook, for instance, because you can wipe it over at the end of the day when you finish writing your poem. But for a business record, it's no good at all because, you know, you have to know what you agreed, what you contracted.

• 2:09:00Speaker 15

  Then you have parchment and parchment comes along a little bit later during the period of the Roman Empire probably. And that's a really good writing material. It's very tough. It's completely indestructible. And you can write on it beautifully and you can also paint on it if you like. So the illuminated manuscripts, which we see, the Book of Kells and so on. These are all on parchment and they're very beautiful. But the problem is when you write on parchment with a pen, the ink sits on the surface and dries, which means you can scrape it off, which means that again, it's not permanent. You can change it. You can affect the record, so it's no good for business. Paper turns up in Europe around the year twelve forty, twelve fifty. And very quickly, a few people realize it's a game changer because anything which is written

• 2:09:45Speaker 15

  on paper with ink stays there. So you can have a contract, you can keep a business record, you can do anything legal, you can have a deed, for instance, and you don't have to worry about it being forged. Yeah. And that's important. So paper is really important because it's permanent. And that leads to its very, very rapid adoption in the business community in particular.

• 2:10:10David Pierce?

  Was that where it started? I was, I was trying to match some of the timelines and going back through, it seems like i- if I have the timeline correct, there were, there were two threads. There was kind of the people who use it for business and people who use it for recording things in their own personal lives. But it does seem like business became a real use case for notebooks first.

• 2:10:34Speaker 15

  Yeah, absolutely, a hundred percent. And the analogy which you can very easily draw is with the modern computer. Yeah, that comes from IBM and it's businesses and governments which have it to begin with for the first, how long, thirty years, maybe forty years? And then you get people using it creatively and then you get people like Jobs thinking, oh, you can have some fun with this thing, you know, you can play games on it, but you can also be seriously creative. So now you have Pixar, for instance, and I don't think anyone at IBM in the nineteen forties was thinking that Pixar was going to happen.

• 2:11:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 2:11:06Speaker 15

  Looking back, it seems inevitable that people would do something like that. And it's exactly the same kind of relationship with notebooks. You have. Businesses come to rely on notebooks utterly. They use them for everything. And therefore, notebooks get into everyone's hands, particularly in a culture like Italy, which at the time Italy is the richest part of Europe, but it's also where they invent banking, where they invent companies, where they invent accountancy, double-entry bookkeeping, limited liability partnerships, futures markets, all of these things which we know and love.

• 2:11:40David Pierce?

  And a lot of that you talk about happens not sort of it's a that doesn't happen and then they put it down in notebooks, like the existence of those things and notebooks and this new writing permanent technology go hand in hand.

• 2:11:56Speaker 15

  Absolutely. You can't do one without the other. But then, of course, so they have to have these notebooks. And once they have to have them, in the evening, they take them home and then they do the fun stuff with them. And that's entirely accidental, I think. But, you know, thank God, from our point of view, it's given us all of this interesting literature and art and poetry.

• 2:12:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. So I confess, I am particularly interested in the fun stuff. So let's start there. I think the first thing I had written down in my notes was like, let's go back to Florence. And there's a word that starts with a Z that I can't pronounce. And it was it was my gut tells me it's pronounced Zibaldoni, but I could be wrong.

• 2:12:35Speaker 15

  You're dead right. Yeah. You just have to imagine yourself ordering a Zibaldoni in an Italian restaurant and you'll be fine.

• 2:12:41David Pierce?

  A type of notebook and also a beautiful croissant like thing that I will like very much. Tell me what those were. Talk a little bit about kind of how that spread.

• 2:12:51Speaker 15

  Okay, back to the restaurant. Zibaldoni seems to have been a word for salad. And that's exactly what it is. So it's a collection of lots of different things jumbled together. Now, this is a time before print. We're talking about about 1300 and it's Florence. And it's a time before print. So if you wanted to have any book or literature or poetry in your house, you had to basically write it down yourself. Yeah. And therefore.

• 2:13:19Speaker 15

  Florence is a very businesslike community. They're very entrepreneurial. Everyone's got their own little business, therefore everyone's got their business notebooks. They take them home in the evening. And if they hear a poem which they like, or if they hear, um, one of Aesop's fables is very popular, or a bit of Ovid, or a prayer which is particularly resonant to them, or a recipe. Very often they're writing down medicinal cures. Anything you want to keep written down in your house, you just write it down in your Zibaldoni. And it's a very personal notebook, but it's completely unsorted. So it's like a salad in this jumbled up way. And they're brilliant because they're these windows into what Florentine people loved. Yeah. So we know the poetry they like to read. We know the prayers that they wanted to remember.

• 2:14:04Speaker 15

  We know the stories that they like to tell and we know what they liked to eat when they had a headache. You know, all of this kind of information, because everyone in Florence at this time, who could read or write, which was most of them unusually, they kept a Zibaldoni. And it was a really strange local thing, but it was so fun.

• 2:14:22David Pierce?

  I also get the sense that folks back then were reckoning with the same thing people reckon with now, which is like, what do I do with any of this? And this is sort of the eternal question of notebooks, right? Is you, you write a bunch of stuff down, you collect all this stuff. And as a historical artifact, especially in aggregate, it's very cool, right? You, you get a sense of what people were doing in a, in a community. But if I'm a person in Florence in the 1300s, keeping one of these, what do, what am I doing with it day to day? What's going to happen to these notebooks? Are they thinking about like the grand sweep of history and their responsibility to write this stuff down? Like what were the, what was the point of these notebooks?

• 2:14:59Speaker 15

  So the Zibaldoni, the only point was fun. They weren't thinking about the grand sweep of history, but they knew that they were a bit precious because they would leave them in their wills. So this is how we know, one of the ways we know how many people had them. Because the wills often survive. Um, and also you see these little dedications in them. Someone will start their Zibaldoni, then they'll leave it to their son. And then the son will have an argument on the pages of the Zibaldoni with his brother saying, oh no, dad left it to me, actually, you know? So you have these little bickerings. Um, and you can see that sometimes they pass down three generations and that people maintain them because the handwriting changes. So that's one thing. So Zibaldoni, they're always for fun, but people definitely keep, know that they have a value.

• 2:15:44Speaker 15

  The other thing that they also start doing is viewing their family as a kind of business and then keeping what they would call a libri di famiglia or ricordanza is the other word for it. Where they keep a family record, which is essentially births, deaths, marriages, investments, you know, we bought this house, I invested in this company. My daughter got married, my son died, my grandson was born, he was baptized, et cetera. And they're very businesslike, you wouldn't call them diaries because there's no emotion in there. There's no happiness or sadness. But they just record the central of most important events of a family's life. And then that would get passed down through the generations as well. And that, but that's more viewing your family in a kind of quite serious businesslike way.

• 2:16:30Speaker 15

  If you were at grammar school in the, say, fifteen hundreds, sixteen hundreds in Europe, you were expected to keep a commonplace book in a very rigorous way. And that was a very formal kind of thing. But that was educational, you know, that wasn't, no one ever really did that for fun because it's such hard work.

• 2:16:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:48Speaker 15

  It's a, it's a real effort and it's study. But I think that outside of school, you have people like Leonardo, who would just draw all over the place, you have people who doodle, you have people who write very intimate personal diaries, people who write very formal ones, people who write about their relationship with God. You know, there's no hard and fast rules.

• 2:17:09David Pierce?

  Okay, and that feels like the, the thing that lingers most over time is that everybody is perpetually finding new ways to fill up a notebook.

• 2:17:19Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 2:17:19David Pierce?

  Kind of more chaotic over time too. Everybody gets weirder and weirder about notebooks. Da Vinci is an interesting one, you, you mentioned him and obviously I would say you've obviously done more research on this than I have, but I would say Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, probably history's most famous notebooks, fair to say?

• 2:17:38Speaker 15

  Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, those, the ones, when I was telling people that I was writing history of notebook and they were looking baffled, I'd go, you know, Leonardo.

• 2:17:47David Pierce?

  Well, one thing I thought was really interesting in, in your telling of his story was that he. Did not seem to imagine that his notebooks would eventually become wildly famous. And the idea that these were for public consumption was kind of a thing that happened much later. The notebooks were very personal and very individual. How did that change come about? Like, at what point did people start writing notebooks, even in some of the styles that you're talking about, thinking about other people?

• 2:18:17Speaker 15

  Very, very late in the day, I would say. I think what's interesting, Leonardo's notebooks are fascinating for two reasons, I think, very far apart in time. Firstly, because they're an amazing record of his thoughts, his researches, his explorations and his personality up to a point. So that that period around the year 1500, wow, you know, there was something really incredible going on there. And then, basically, they just vanish into aristocrats' libraries, you know? And no one reads them, no one, they probably pull them off the shelf and just look at them as a curiosity. No one studies them at all until the 1890s, when a German guy called Richter goes around Europe.

• 2:18:59Speaker 15

  He looks at them all, he transcribes them, he researches, he writes about them. And then, for the first time, 400 years nearly after Leonardo dies, people actually realize, oh, he wasn't just a good painter. He was also all of these other kinds of genius as well, because he was just known as a painter up to that point. And then, and I think it is a direct result of the publication of Leonardo's notebooks. And people understanding that there's this process behind his genius. Then everyone else starts taking their notebooks much more seriously. So Picasso, for instance, he starts painting in the 1890s at exactly the same time, or learns how to paint, he's a boy. And he, for instance, took his sketchbooks incredibly seriously.

• 2:19:44Speaker 15

  He never gave them away, he never lost them, he kept them filed away in boxes in his house in the south of France. And they were numbered, catalogued, ordered. He knew that his sketchbooks were really important. Whereas painters 100 years before him.

• 2:19:59Speaker 15

  It seems to have been a very casual relationship, you know, or rather they themselves used their notebooks, but they had no sense that anyone else would ever find them interesting. So, um, yeah, I think there's definitely a change and I think that Leonardo sort of accidentally, four hundred years after his death prompts it. Yeah. And to the extent, you know, if any kind of well-known writer now will sell their papers to the University of, uh, the University of Austin, for instance.

• 2:20:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 2:20:28Speaker 15

  You know, collects writers' notebooks and it will pay good money for them. A hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago, you know, universities were not doing that. They wouldn't have seen the value.

• 2:20:38David Pierce?

  Do you think that changes the way we look at those notebooks now? I mean, I think about even go back to Florence. Like you, you, you think about those as an important record of real life in a way that as soon as people become self-conscious that someone else might see their notebooks, it sort of ceases to be a record of real life. It, it becomes an Instagram version of real life where everything is maybe subtly self-consciously changed to be for public consumption in a way that, uh, I don't know, like I, we, we think about notebooks as these intensely private things, but as soon as you understand that someone else might see it, I wonder if it changes what that thing is.

• 2:21:18Speaker 15

  Oh, well, certainly when it comes to diary writing in particular. So the, um, any number of published diaries, you can tell were written with publication in mind. Uh, I write a diary every day and I don't expect that anyone else will ever read it. Uh, and it's certainly never going to be published and it's, I think you're right. It's more intimate and it's, you know, that it's pretty uncensored, um, unfiltered. But then you have the Tony Blairs of this world, whose diaries are published, I think, or, uh, and that's a completely different kettle of fish.

• 2:21:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I guess that's okay. Both of those things can exist, but they are very different things.

• 2:21:56Speaker 15

  Yeah. Yeah. Very, very definitely. Yeah.

• 2:21:59David Pierce?

  Okay. I am really curious about how you, as a person in, in a digital world, came to think about notebooks, because again, there is such a, there's so much about that history that A feels very modern, like we're, we're talking about the same kinds of things now. And like you said, using computers for the same kinds of things that people were using notebooks for eight hundred years ago. But I wonder if you're going through and you have to spend time thinking about the thing itself. And, and like you said, paper is this crucially important invention. And if we had invented computers in 1200 instead of inventing paper, would it have gone roughly the same way? Or is there something about

• 2:22:42David Pierce?

  that thing and that time and that invention that made it different from even everything that came after?

• 2:22:50Speaker 15

  I think up to a point, the invention makes the time. You know, you said to me very confidently that we live in a digital world, you know? And, and of course you are right. Yeah, we do definitely live in a digital world. We're speaking to each other, you know, via a digital link up and surrounded by amazing technology. I would also, if I was being contrarian, say to you, you're living in a notebook world. Because capitalism, which gives us all of what we see around us, that for 600 years was entirely based in notebooks. We would call them ledgers or account books. But it was an entirely notebook based system until the first IBM machines. So,

• 2:23:34Speaker 15

  and that was invented at the same time as, or roughly speaking, the same time as the notebook arrives in, in Europe and sort of in that place in Italy around the year 1300, they invent all of the mechanisms of capitalism. So really, we are in that world as much as we're in the digital world. But yeah, and there is definitely a sense of you have an invention and then it shapes the world that you live in, but in unexpected, surprising, fun, hopefully, ways. No one saw that Twitter was coming 10 years before Twitter arrived. And then suddenly it's everywhere and then suddenly it's nowhere again, you know, so who knows?

• 2:24:11David Pierce?

  So, okay, let's, let's fast forward a bunch in history to not now, but close to now. And I want to talk about the bullet journal. And the reason I wanted to start with this, is that I feel like you can draw a straight line from that thing in Florence 800 years ago to the bullet journal phenomenon of today. Like, like a dead straight line through almost a millennium of time. How, how is that possible? Like, why do you think this, this thing, this idea of how we want to record our lives in a physical notebook has been so insistently persistent?

• 2:24:53David Pierce?

  Over so many centuries.

• 2:24:55Speaker 15

  Um. It's a really great, simple, minimal tool. I think like it with with any kind of technology, there's a there's a or any kind of invention, there's a real virtue to simplicity, you know? So your your knife and fork or your chopsticks, chopsticks are great because they're minimal. Yeah, you can't. Once you've pictured them, you've invented them once, you cannot improve on them. And a notebook, I think, is a lot like that. It came to a kind of very quickly. It became

• 2:25:23Speaker 15

  kind of perfect in terms of it's how practical it was, how cheap it was, how available it was to everyone. And you can't really improve on that as a bit of technology, you know, because and then people will use it in different ways over history. And bullet journals are, I think, a really good example of how you can take this really simple thing and just use it in a slightly new way and suddenly it opens possibilities for people which they never appreciated before. Like, there are a lot of people um who's genuinely, there are a surprising number of people whose lives have really been improved by doing bullet points to organize their life and it kind of helps them to rationalize things and make proper decisions and act more intentionally and therefore thereby live happier lives.

• 2:26:07Speaker 15

  I think I I find it constantly incredible how this really simple thing can be reinvented so regularly. But you're right, there is a continuous line all the way through. I think it's just because it's incredibly simple and it doesn't require batteries. It doesn't require system updates. It's, you know, if you drop it, it doesn't break.

• 2:26:24David Pierce?

  What was it that was interesting to you about the bullet journal and and its history? Like, why? Why did that jump out to you as a as a thing worth adding to this history?

• 2:26:33Speaker 15

  Um. It was important to me because uh firstly, because it was a it was a real thing. It was a real trend, you know, when I was starting to think about the book and it gave me sort of confidence that there was going to be an appetite of people who were interested in this stuff, um, which is very key in terms of building my confidence. And then what was interesting was I never I've never bullet journaled myself. I've never done the Ryder Carroll method, but I got his book and then I spoke to him, interviewed him, and he's really thought about it quite deeply. And he's thought about the implications of writing stuff down and of organising your thoughts on the page and having this notebook which you carry everywhere and which you write everything down on. And that kind of encouraged me to think deeply about it, too. You know, he's

• 2:27:18Speaker 15

  taken it very seriously for a long time. And he's thought about it in a particular way, and I've got a more historical angle and I think about it in different ways, but they're completely compatible. But the, just the fact that he had taken it seriously, I found really interesting. And hence giving him a chapter, I think, was, you know, kind of fair, because he was really about the only person who had written a book about notebooking, you know, before I did. So, and he also had some really interesting things to say about notebooks which aren't bullet journals. He was really inspired, for instance, by kind of artists' scrapbooks and sort of collages and sketchbooks, which were sort of more than sketchbooks, which had elements of diary in them. So not pure bullet journal

• 2:28:03Speaker 15

  stuff, but stuff which is a really interesting expression of your experience. And Ryder definitely put me on to those things.

• 2:28:12David Pierce?

  Why do you think that way of thinking about notebooking and journaling and keeping track of your life lagged so much the business side of things, which, as you chart in the book, got really systematised and really specific? And like, we built capitalism on top of these things, right? Like, double-entry accounting became a worldwide phenomenon and people understood how to do it. And there were kind of accepted rules on how to keep these kinds of notebooks. But in people doing it in their own lives, like you said, there have been bits and pieces of this over time. But somebody like Ryder Carroll comes along hundreds of years later and really thinks like, okay, how can I break this thing

• 2:28:54David Pierce?

  down into sort of understandable, repeatable pieces? That just happened much later. Why do you think that is?

• 2:29:01Speaker 15

  Honestly, I have no idea. There are questions you can't answer. I mean, another big question, which I just have no idea, is why did people start writing diaries? Or rather, why did they start writing diaries in England in around the year fifteen seventy? When they'd never done them anywhere else in the world before. I've looked really hard trying to find out what was so special about England at that time, which made people start to keep a diary, like you would, an emotional diary of how they felt about the day's events. I'm sorry, not very good podcast material. I'm making a baffled expression.

• 2:29:39Speaker 15

  Just in the picture that. I have no idea. And I think my answer to your question is, it's a good question. I have no idea.

• 2:29:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's I, I have, I have a theory and it's based on nothing, but it's a theory. And I'm going to, I'm going to give you my theory as a way of asking you another question, which I also have about this.

• 2:29:55Speaker 15

  I'm here for it.

• 2:29:56David Pierce?

  I think as, especially as we became more enmeshed with digital tools. Life took on like a new level of informational chaos. There is just more stuff coming at us now than there ever has been. And that's true in our professional lives, but it's also true in our personal lives. I think in a, in a new way. In the last, I don't know, several decades, that there's just more happening around you and to you all the time. And we're, we're still reckoning with that as people, right? This question of like, we understand what is going on in the world in a way that we are like evolutionarily not equipped to do. And what do we do with that?

• 2:30:41David Pierce?

  All these really interesting questions, but I think one thing that I see all the time is people crave systems. There, there is this idea that if I can just find a way to make this make sense. Everything will be better, right? And I think, and you mentioned the, the getting things done method. In, in the book also, and I think that speaks to the same thing where it's like, there is this swirling mass of stuff in my life. And if you can just tell me where to put it and how, my brain will get quieter. And I think that's meaningful to people. And, and again, I, there, there is a definite. Sort of we are people of our time and technology thing that is all kind of swirling together there. But I feel like when I see people who like really love bullet journal,

• 2:31:25David Pierce?

  what it what it says is like, the world is insane and messy, but I have made this thing that is like my world and it is beautiful and looks like me. And it just feels good. And it's why like people get mad at all the bullet journalers who are like spending all of their time organizing their pages and not time getting stuff done. And it's like, no, the organizing the pages is actually the point of the thing.

• 2:31:45Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 2:31:46David Pierce?

  As much as anything else.

• 2:31:47Speaker 15

  It's taking control.

• 2:31:48David Pierce?

  Right. Like making the notebook is the point. And I feel like that was one of the things that just keeps coming up throughout history in your book is like the act of making the thing is as much the point as anything else. Going back and reviewing it is fine. Doing stuff with what you put in it is fine. But the act of making the notebook in the first place is maybe the most important part of the whole process. And I feel like there's so much of that happening right now that

• 2:32:11Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 2:32:12David Pierce?

  we need structure around that more than ever. That's just a theory.

• 2:32:16Speaker 15

  That's it. And my answer to that is yes. That's the short answer. Slightly, slightly more involved example, or to sort of back up what you said. So I have a day job and I do this, I write books and talk to people about it. And so the level of inputs into my life in terms of communication and things flying at me from different directions. I've got two email addresses. I've got the Instagram. I've got the Twitter, which I'm switching off shortly, but I've got the Facebook. I've got WhatsApp on the phone, etc., etc. It just goes on. And that's before I'm in a room with anyone actually talking to them

• 2:32:57Speaker 15

  face to face. And my way of dealing with this is to write a diary. Yeah. So at the end of the day, I will put it all down in here. And, and it's, it's under control, as you say, and I've turned this. Ephemeral, non-stop flow of craziness, most of which is completely trivial, but has to be managed somehow. And I've just turned it into a calm thing on the page. Yeah, I completely agree. And as to how that makes me feel, the analogy I use is it's like having a shower. Yeah, showers are lovely. Yeah, just great. I like to have a shower every day, but if I can't, if I have to go a day without, that's fine. No one really

• 2:33:40Speaker 15

  minds. Two days without, it's, you know, mentally, I start to smell. So, and that's what I'm like with the diary. No, I can miss a day.

• 2:33:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:50Speaker 15

  I can't miss two days. I start to smell mentally and, and it really cleans me out. Sort of that process of just dumping it on the page really, really is refreshing and cleansing in that sense.

• 2:34:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, I like that a lot. Why do you think we haven't found a way to do that digitally in the way that is satisfying and valuable in the same way that we have in notebooks? Cause like, we pretty much do business on computers now. There, there's not a lot of paper notebooks out there responsible for how capitalism runs anymore.

• 2:34:23Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 2:34:23David Pierce?

  But I think, I, I am someone who has tried every note-taking app on planet Earth. I, I obsessively use them. I build these systems. Uh, and overwhelmingly the ones that feel the best. And as I talk to people, the answer is you try them all and you eventually just get a nice notebook and a pen and you start filling it. And there is, there is something about that that we have not replaced. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on why it has been so hard to replace.

• 2:34:50Speaker 15

  I have lots of thoughts. I'm going to give you the deepest one because I think this is, I think your listener can cope with a sort of high level, uh, bit of neurobiology. So when you write on a notebook page, and they've done this with MRI scans and a very clever way of using multiple MRI scans called voxel-based morphometry, when you can look at multiple brains at once. When you write in a notebook, you use different parts of the brain to when you type. Or when you write something on your phone or your tablet. And one of the different parts you use is the hippocampus. Now, this is right in the bottom of the brain and it's your mental map. So when you drive to your place of work, you're using your hippocampus.

• 2:35:34Speaker 15

  Uh, when you know where the coffee cups are in your kitchen, you're using hippocampus. Taxi drivers, cab drivers have amazingly well-developed hippocampi. It was like an early case study in, um, brain plasticity, actually. Right, so this is very interesting. Why do you engage your hippocampus when you're writing in a notebook? And it's because your notebook is a place, right? And it has its own geography. So when you write things on the pages of a notebook, you remember, or I certainly tend to remember, oh, that was on the left-hand side at the top. Oh, that was, I, I wrote that in blue somewhere. Now that was at the back of the notebook, that was at the front. And I'm thinking about the notebook in quite a different way to how I think about a digital note.

• 2:36:15Speaker 15

  And what they think, the people who research this, is that when you scroll or you carry on writing and what you've written on a screen just scrolls up, up, up, up, up, top of the page and vanishes off the top of your screen. It just vanishes. It has no place in the geography of your lived experience, unlike stuff which you write down in a notebook page. So I've got my yellow notebook and I know that if I open it halfway through, roughly speaking, I'm going to find what happened in July. And I can't do that with notes I've made on an iPad. But just because my brain hasn't thought about them in that geographic way. So that's one reason why you feel more comfortable and you navigate those notes more happily than you do when they're digital.

• 2:36:59Speaker 15

  Um, other reasons are to do with, I think, the sort of the sensory experience of writing, fingers on the page, the pen in your hand, being a slightly richer experience. It's more difficult as well. It's very easy to type. You can type, you could, roughly speaking, type everything I said to you right now. You'd get it all pretty much down. You can't do that with a pen and ink. You have to filter, you have to parse the ideas, you have to process them and paraphrase. And that gives you a much richer, deeper understanding of what you are actually listening to. You can type whatever I say without actually listening to what I'm saying at all. But to write it down, you have to paraphrase it and therefore you have to actually interact with the ideas.

• 2:37:43Speaker 15

  So this is why teachers and academics much prefer their students to to write notes rather than to type them. So those are a couple of answers.

• 2:37:51David Pierce?

  Do you think there's a marriage there that we can make work? I mean, I keep thinking about you. You start the book with Moleskine, uh, which is probably

• 2:37:58Speaker 15

  Hmm.

• 2:37:58David Pierce?

  At the first notebook, most people think of when they think of notebooks. And Moleskine for years has been building digital tools. And they have, they have a really beautiful calendar app. They have a really interesting journaling system. Like it's all very good. Nobody cares about it the way that they care about physical Moleskine notebooks. Uh, and you know, there, there was this phase for a long time of like, maybe we're going to do smart pens where I'll write in a notebook, but it will transcribe it digitally. And now there are things where like, okay, you can write with a pen, but it's on your iPad and it will recognize the text and make something out of it. And it feels like we're poking at this thing where the, the act that you're describing, I think, is absolutely the best one.

• 2:38:41David Pierce?

  But having a notebook that is a bunch of words on a page that sits on my bookshelf waiting for me to do something with it feels like it's missing something. Like there is a best of both worlds here that I think I desperately want to exist. And I don't know, maybe, maybe it just doesn't and can't and won't. But I am curious, like, do you, do you think we can marry those two things?

• 2:39:05Speaker 15

  Uh, I'm not going to say never.

• 2:39:08David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 2:39:08Speaker 15

  But I've not seen it done yet in a way which I think some people, that sort of the Moleskine magic paper, the dotted paper, whatever, they, they make it work for them and, and good luck. And that's great. And some people also manage to make those kind of posh tablets, the, um, the remarkable tablets work in, in a similar way. And again, go you. Um, personally, I haven't ever managed to.

• 2:39:32David Pierce?

  Okay, last thing, and then I will truly let you go. Tell me just briefly about Moleskine and why you you start the book with Moleskine. I want to end our podcast with Moleskine. Why is Moleskine so ascendant? What is it about this company and this thing that has made Moleskine the brand, the notebook, the thing in our sort of modern world?

• 2:39:55Speaker 15

  It's the complete refinement. She took, and I say she, Maria Segrebondi, who was the woman who conceived the the Moleskine notebook, who took the very simple, basic notebook that we knew. She added to it. She added this little elastic strap, the pocket in the back, the little page at the front saying, if you find this notebook, please return it to. She added all of these things to a very minimal product and she somehow made it seem even more minimal. So, and the analogy I make, she made she made it minimal and she made it black. And that was the most Italian thing you could do. It's like pears or sunglasses, Prada, little black dress, espresso, you know, that's what they do. They make it minimal and black.

• 2:40:38Speaker 15

  And she did that and somehow she just she tricked us, if you like. She fooled us and thank God that she did. I wouldn't have written this book if it wasn't for Moleskine's, I think, because she made us look again at this simple notebook and think of it as something which had some material value, that had some material beauty and was could be therefore inspiring in a way that your school exercise book couldn't be. So she's, from that point of view, she's my heroine creatively. She's also for me a figure of awe, because if you look at Moleskine's numbers, the company's numbers through history, that company's profit margin is ridiculous. It's like forty three percent profit every year, gross profit, and it's a manufacturing company. No company does that, you know?

• 2:41:23Speaker 15

  How did they do it? So I take my hat off to her and I can forget quite easily about all of the ridiculous collaborations with Evernote and Adobe and things like that.

• 2:41:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, listen, you gotta do some weird stuff.

• 2:41:34Speaker 15

  Because the key product is amazing.

• 2:41:36David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and to that point, actually, one of the things you say, kind of as an aside in the book, is that there are a million other notebooks that are like, they give you ideas and prompts and they put stuff inside and they're like, this one's for your recipes, this one is for your travels. And what actually turns out to be the case is nobody wants that, they want the blank one. And I think that is like, as a perfect metaphor for all of this, that just carries with me through the whole thing, that like, you can, you can make it whatever you want, you can gust it up and people will want the blank one, because then they can do what they want with it. And there's something very powerful in that.

• 2:42:11Speaker 15

  Yeah, freedom.

• 2:42:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the story of the notebook, right? It is permanence and it's freedom in very real ways.

• 2:42:17Speaker 15

  Lovely, yes, I'll take that. Can I, can I, can I have that? Yeah, I'll take that.

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• 2:42:56Alex Cranz?

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  Caramel?

• 2:42:59Alex Cranz?

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• 2:44:08David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So this app, Halide, or Halide, again, we're gonna figure that out in a minute, has been around for a bunch of years, and it has gone through a lot of changes as the iPhone has gone through a lot of changes. Not only, you know, the tech getting better and the things about the design changing and the lenses moving around and all that stuff, but the whole idea of what the iPhone camera is supposed to do and be feels like it has changed. And the two guys, Ben and Sebastian...

• 2:44:35Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm Ben Sandofsky, and I'm co-founder of Lux Optics, and I'm the developer half that works on Halide and Kino and our other fun side projects.

• 2:44:43Speaker 18

  I'm Sebastian DeWitt. I'm the design half of that, so the co-co-founder and designer slash photographer part of it.

• 2:44:51David Pierce?

  Have been going through all of this and trying to figure out not only how to make a really great camera app, but what kind of camera app people need now, given what the iPhone and other smartphones are becoming. We had a really fun conversation. Neelai and I grabbed Ben and Sebastian, hashed all this out for a long time. Let's hear it.

• 2:45:11Speaker 17

  Excellent. All right, and Neelai Patel is also here. Hi, Neelai.

• 2:45:14Speaker 07

  I think we should just get them to pronounce Halide over and over again.

• 2:45:17David Pierce?

  You just did the thing that I wanted to do first, which is how in, how is it Halide or is it Halide? Can we, can we solve this for people in the world right now? You just said Halide, Ben. Is this the official, correct answer?

• 2:45:29Speaker 07

  I alternate because it's based on halogens, right?

• 2:45:32David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 2:45:32Speaker 07

  And so Silver Halides, halogens, as long as it's not Halide, which is a Middle Eastern name.

• 2:45:37Nilay Patel?

  No, that's what it is now.

• 2:45:39Speaker 07

  Well, yeah.

• 2:45:40Speaker 18

  Sorry, there was, there was actually someone who worked at The Verge, John Porter, I think he has moved on now, but he, he once pronounced it on a podcast, Haliday, and we sent him a Happy Holidays Christmas card, and we'll never let him live that down. We continue to do this every year.

• 2:45:53Speaker 07

  That's very good.

• 2:45:56Speaker 07

  That's very good.

• 2:45:57Speaker 18

  Halide or Halide, depending on how fancy you feel.

• 2:45:59David Pierce?

  No, no, you guys, this is the worst. We have to pick one. Let's do this right now, here on The Vergecast. Can we name your app, please?

• 2:46:06Nilay Patel?

  What is your name?

• 2:46:08Speaker 07

  On three. One, two.

• 2:46:10Speaker 18

  Halide.

• 2:46:10Speaker 07

  Halide. Okay, there we go.

• 2:46:12David Pierce?

  All right, good.

• 2:46:12Speaker 07

  And I just want to point out that, like, when we released...

• 2:46:15Nilay Patel?

  I want to point out that you super cheated in saying first.

• 2:46:19Speaker 07

  I, I, he went on, he went on two. You never go on two.

• 2:46:25Speaker 18

  We're a very good team, actually, when it comes down to it.

• 2:46:27Speaker 07

  I just want to close this discourse on names that we were like, when we're building Keynote, no one can mess up that name. And then it was featured in the keynote from Apple, and they told us, we're having trouble because it sounds a lot like keynote.

• 2:46:41David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 2:46:41Speaker 07

  And so I think every time we build a new app, it just needs to challenge someone.

• 2:46:46Speaker 18

  Well, the best part was that I was like, it's actually pronounced Kino. And then they were like, really? And I was like, no.

• 2:46:52David Pierce?

  Happy Kino, everybody. That's what we're doing now. Okay, so I think we have a bunch of stuff to talk about, and we should just, we've been getting into our feelings on this podcast about what a photo is for years now, and we have invited you two to essentially do the same thing with us. But my first question, as we get into this, and I want to talk a lot about Process Zero and a lot about what has changed with iPhone photography in particular and all this stuff. But I am desperately curious, like, when you guys started building a camera app many years ago at this point. Did you know at the time how big a like philosophical exercise it was to build a camera app? I think we think about it as like you add a bunch of filters and buttons, but it's really like you are making

• 2:47:34David Pierce?

  decisions about the universe when you build a camera app in a way that I think people are only coming around to. Did you know this all those years ago when you started working on Halide?

• 2:47:41Speaker 07

  So I guess like the origin story. I think like the first, the first code commit for Halide was 2014 for about like one day.

• 2:47:51David Pierce?

  It's pronounced Halide, actually.

• 2:47:51Speaker 07

  Halide, I don't, I'm gonna switch three times over.

• 2:47:53David Pierce?

  Oh my god, it's all over the place.

• 2:47:56Speaker 07

  So for Halide, in 2014, it was like three lines of code and then put away until like 2016. And so I'd say that in 2016, none of this computational photography was happening. It was, to put it simply, a lot of these apps were just wrappers around the APIs that Apple gave you and it was just a more pretty veneer. And so what we were doing at the time was, and then I connected with Sebastian in 2016, like we were adding a value like focus peaking so that you could actually tell what was in focus. You could dial in manual values, but for the most part, until Apple released RAW up there about, it was that you had no real say on how the final image would look.

• 2:48:40Speaker 18

  And what's interesting is I think when it came out, so Halide is now seven years old. It's, it came out in 2017. That's exactly when the iPhone X launched that year. And with the iPhone X, I think Apple started using the word smart HDR for the first time. And they kind of, they started using that very famous slide where they take one photo and they kind of onion slice it into like 12 of them. And to try to show you like, oh, look, we look, we do a lot of stuff and there's a lot of smart things happening here. And I think that was, you know, around the same time that Pixel started, you know, talking, the Pixel team started talking about like the Italian Renaissance and how we can use science to influence things. It was, it was a very early time of people trying to figure out like, how do we get better images out of these tiny sensors? And that's when everything exploded with like night mode and all those kinds of things when

• 2:49:22Speaker 18

  it basically turned photography from just taking a snap to like a data science. And it was like, okay, in a way, if we actually just use these processors and like do crazy amount of computation on it. We can fundamentally alter the output and we can just, we can beat physics. We can just cheat it like we can do depth of field. We can all these things that big cameras can because have giant lenses and giant sensors. We can shoot at night and we can totally take photos with like, okay, it's not real, but nobody cares because you're still taking a photo at night. You're still taking a photo with what looks like a shallow depth of field. And so we were kind of emerging at the same time as that all emerging.

• 2:49:55David Pierce?

  So, and, and how much control over that stuff do you get? Like, do you look at that in those early days as like, oh my God, look at this incredible toolkit? We suddenly have to play with all of the, the light that this thing is capturing instead of just doing like a thing at the end of the pipeline? Or is it like, oh, this is barely photography anymore? What, how do we deal with that? It's like, what, how do you look at that when those tools start to come available?

• 2:50:18Speaker 07

  I'd say like around 2020 is when things started to converge of where things were getting a lot smarter. Also, we had like this existential question of why should our app exist when the first party camera is getting so much better? And fortunately, both Sebastian and I were already shooting raw photography, which in a nutshell means that you're capturing the sensor data as a file and then you can bring it into a third party app like Lightroom and you can make different decisions on how you want to process the final image. And so around 2020 was like, we were starting to see like, wait a minute, like what Apple's doing is great. You tap a button and anyone can get a good photo. Like my parents who don't know anything about photography, tap a button and they got a photo of their grandchild, right? But if you looked at the underlying sensor, Apple is kind of underselling like how much

• 2:51:03Speaker 07

  better the hardware was getting. And then over time, the sensors were getting bigger and better. The optics were getting better. And so that's when we started being like, wait a minute, like, how can we build a feature around this where it stands on its own?

• 2:51:14Nilay Patel?

  One of the questions I have about raw is what it has come to signify?

• 2:51:19Speaker 18

  What is a raw photo?

• 2:51:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Not, not quite that. But people are like, I don't like my iPhone 15 camera or I don't like my iPhone 14 camera. And then you see in the comments on social media, people say, oh, you should shoot raw. And my reaction is like, that is, that's a horrible suggestion. But all it really, because you're going to get this giant file and you actually have to process it to a look. But what it really means is, oh, there's a way to turn off this processing. Right? Even inside of Apple's like Pro raw system, you're going to generate a file that lets you turn off this ultra HDR look. And that just means something to people. And the fact that the word is raw, I think is deeply fascinating.

• 2:52:05Nilay Patel?

  Like the word and what it means and what you get are all kind of wrapped up in a mess. But you guys are describing like, we're going to take the sensor data and start making different kinds of images with it.

• 2:52:17Speaker 07

  I think we take an effort to say native raw versus Pro raw, because what Apple calls raw in Pro raw is not technically raw. And if you read the comments on a photography website like Petapixel, I'm sorry. But it'll be just constantly that guy being like, you know, it's not really raw. And like, yeah, yeah, cool.

• 2:52:35Nilay Patel?

  Makes a difference for people who aren't as deep in the weeds as we are. What is Apple's version of Pro raw? What is your definition of native raw?

• 2:52:42Speaker 07

  So technically raw is you have these sensors that have voltage values from light converted to, you know, these numbers, right? And then that's it. And then you need to run an algorithm to take on the sensor. There's this Bayer filter, which are discrete red, green and blue values. So it needs to kind of mush them up in a blender. And it's all like, it's like, basically like if you were to buy the ingredients of making a cake. And then the JPEG is the final cake. Well, um, I guess Pro raw is kind of like a half baked cake. Like, like you get to pick the frosting. If you, if you like sprinkles, whatever, raisins, I hate you. But Pro raw is Apple's solution to what you're just talking about, where it felt like you needed a PhD

• 2:53:28Speaker 07

  in image processing to take one of these native raws and make them approximate anything that Apple has. And that's partly because Apple, when they take a photo, they're actually taking a burst of nine photos and then merging them together. So the concept of having any of these Bayer underlying values just doesn't exist anymore because it's all going to be squashed together to create smart HDR to reduce noise and do all these effects. I really wish Apple hadn't said Pro raw, because it's, it's going to haunt me for the rest of my life explaining this to people. But it's like, kind of halfway between the native raw and the final JPEG.

• 2:54:01Nilay Patel?

  And I think what is a really important thing to say there, because I see a lot of people saying something like,

• 2:54:06Speaker 18

  Oh, like, this is just the same, like, if you just take a raw photo, that in itself is a really fascinating turn of phrase, because if you say a raw photo, a raw file technically is not a photo yet. So what Ben said, you know, it's like you got this sensor data, red, green, two green, two, one blue, one red, subpixel basically to make up the pixels. All the data needs to be combined. You can think of it as kind of a giant spreadsheet that's just like, has all these values of what the sensor caught in that moment in time from one photo, one important, one photo. And that's not a picture. Like, you have to process a native RAW file to get the photo out of it. So per definition, a RAW file has to be processed for it to be displayed on a screen. It actually has too much information to even be displayed on a screen.

• 2:54:50Speaker 18

  And so a pro RAW file is essentially already done that step. It has created an image because a lot of the processing that happens on iPhone images requires it to become an RGB image, a bitmap essentially. And so it's a very deep image with separate information for stuff like what Neil I mentioned, like the tone mapping, which you now have the tone control for iPhone 16. That's separately stored in the profile gain table. So you can now adjust just how much that HDR effect is. You can adjust the white balance completely. You can adjust the amount of sharpening. Noise reduction is something that is baked in per se, and not just because Apple thinks noise shouldn't exist, like notably native RAW files have a lot of noise because you have a tiny sensor, you're gonna have a lot of noise. But if you combine images, you can think of it, if you perfectly combine the same image, noise is different for every frame.

• 2:55:33Speaker 18

  So you're going to average out the noise no matter what you do, if you're combining images.

• 2:55:36Speaker 07

  Behind the scenes, like when we're talking about RAWs, we've been trying to call them digital negatives. Which I don't know if that's any better for casual users, but it's the same concept of when you had film photography, you would have a negative, but then a lot of the work of great photographers would be during the development where you would take the negative and print it on paper, you would dodge and burn it to recover the dynamic range, which is now an algorithm that Apple does for you. But like, there's really cool videos of like Ansel Adams with some of his majestic landscapes. He's kind of doing like analog photoshopping where he's like, okay, I gotta bring back some of the sky values and bump this part up. So this isn't particularly new, but Apple gives you like, okay, you want it on or off, or somewhere in between. That's all.

• 2:56:20Speaker 07

  You can have any colors as long as it's black, like, yeah.

• 2:56:23Speaker 18

  Well, I was just gonna say, it's just fascinating to me that a lot of people say, I see all the processing that's happening and maybe sometimes don't even have a word for it. Like, that's kind of like what you're alluding to, Neil, I was like. People are just like taking photos and and then they take a photo with this and they that's like prefer it even though it lacks this absolute like I mean literally the best teams in the world right now in photography are working at Google are working at Samsung and working at Huawei at Apple like to make this processing to do all this processing engineering and they work from Silicon up to do like insane innovations and then people because they're like haha I'll download an app and skip all that and get what off sometimes is an objectively worse image if you were to objectively judge image quality

• 2:57:01Speaker 18

  but we find that people yeah people just seem to have a current preference for authenticity through imperfection I think and that is really interesting.

• 2:57:12David Pierce?

  I just keep coming back to this idea that like and we've talked a bunch about this on the show that there is this increasingly pervasive feeling among people that their iPhone camera in particular is bad and and I think like to your point that on any objective measure of quality it gets better and better and better and yet people seem to like it less than less at the end and I like that disconnect is so fascinating to me because and it goes back to what you were saying about like the iPhone has decided that noise is bad period right like it noise sucks shadows suck they should not be allowed and we will get rid of them at all costs and I think like to your point about imperfections like I think that's right and I think everybody has sort of ideas about what older photos look like

• 2:57:57David Pierce?

  and there is a thing where like photos can be too good but I also think as the hardware has gotten better the software has gotten vastly more opinionated about how a photo is supposed to look in a way that just feels sort of incongruous right and like maybe what's happening now is we're getting some of that choice back where it's like oh the hardware is really good you can do a bunch of stuff with it here are some options and it seems like maybe that's what you guys have even seen as developers is some of those tools are becoming available to you to make available to other people and that actually that's what people want now is some some choice back with all this great hardware instead of just wild new ideas about shadows.

• 2:58:35Speaker 07

  So actually can I just dial back I just said that process zero is rebranded raw and I can already see a thousand comments on petapixel and I thank you for pointing out. Haunted by the comment section on petapixel that's what I'm getting from you. Yeah, no, it's I think that it you know but that's between me and my therapist. Now the thing.

• 2:58:56Speaker 07

  What the value add here is that we do have opinions about, you know, there's a million different ways that we could develop the raw. And what I think with process zero is we decided we like noise. I have a friend who works in visual effects and he calls noise analog dithering. And you can't remove noise without removing these details because that's what was captured at the time. We have opinions on sharpening. Our images are a little softer by design. And if you look at, you know, you look at analog photography, actually last summer before we really went all in on this. I was shooting with a Canon AE1 on 35mm film. And I was like, oh, it just feels so warm. Like it's, it's so flawed, but I love it. The fact that you can't get this crazy HDR in there.

• 2:59:40Speaker 07

  And I think the challenge is going to be as we're building out more features and we start, you know, adding the ability like in the future, if you want to recover dynamic range, okay. At what point do we allow users to make fake looking images? Right. And it's something we'll have to face in the future.

• 2:59:55David Pierce?

  That's a big question. And at what point does something become fake looking is like back to big philosophical existential questions about photos. Like where to draw that line is super messy.

• 3:00:06Speaker 18

  I think one of the things that you're touching on there well, too, is like, at some point, these cameras all started looking very similar, right? So you get your photo out of Samsung phone of the pixel out of the iPhone. They all look like they boost the shadows way up. And there, there could not be any reduction or clipping of dynamic range. That is just considered data loss. We cannot have any noise. We've all agreed on that. And I think what that's simply the result of making a camera for the greatest common denominator. Like this is a camera that's a work for everyone. I think at some point someone was mentioning like, oh, I use my camera for like reading like a serial number on the bottom of like a car or something. Right. Like at that point, like if you don't, if you get an artistic photo that just has like really nice cheriscura rendering, that's really cool for you, but like this camera literally doesn't work for me anymore. And so that's a really, really difficult position to be in. I often tell people like,

• 3:00:51Speaker 18

  Well, I would, on the one side, it's a fascinating job to design the camera at Apple, but at the same time, I have to make a camera that works for my one and a half year old daughter and like my 80 year old father and myself, like who is like an incredibly pedantic, annoying photographer that frequents the peda pixel comment section. Maybe it's simply the time that like cameras do allow, and this is what apps cater to, do allow people to like find their own style and shoot in a different way. And you see that now with like the very un-Apple like thing of like adding so much control to like what kind of like final output you get in your image. And maybe that goes down to processing too, because processing, I think people are becoming aware of how many creative decisions are being made for you. And that's fascinating to me because there was one time, like in 2020, a year of unprecedented

• 3:01:33Speaker 18

  times, if I want to like pull an anecdote, where people ran into this because they were all taking photos with their Samsung or Pixel or iPhone. And they woke up in San Francisco one day and the entire city was orange, like completely orange, because there was a huge wildfire near the place where I live now. And the sun was being filtered through it and it was all orange and people took a photo with it and the craziest thing happened. The camera recognized it as being like, oh, the white balance is way off. We're going to correct for that. This doesn't really happen because it's trained on everything that's happened before it. And it has, it's literally all this smart stuff is based on precedent. And we were in 2020, living in unprecedented times. And so people started downloading like a camera app, like ours, to, you know, like try to correct for that, set manual white balance.

• 3:02:15Speaker 18

  And that I think was like beginning to be the turning point around when people started like exploring options like that and being aware of something like that existing, like they were aware that as they took a photo like, oh, wait, it's doing something for me and I don't like that it's doing that. And that has become a greater awareness, even in like Gen Z, even in people who don't know what a file is, they know that processing is a thing and that that increasingly is making decisions for them to go out a long rant, but yeah.

• 3:02:45Nilay Patel?

  One question I have, and I've talked to you about this ever so slightly.

• 3:02:50Nilay Patel?

  Apple designs the camera as a system. Samsung is a system. Google is a system. You've got the hardware, the lens, and then you've got a processing pipeline to lean on. And they obviously know exactly what's going to happen in their processing pipeline. In the case of Apple, they're designing their own chip as part of that processing pipeline. And it feels like they can make decisions about what they can handle in processing at the expense of what the hardware can do. And if you all are making an app that just pulls the raw data off the sensor, Apple gets to say, well, we know there's going to be some fringing. We know there's going to be some distortion in this lens, but we're going to optimize it to collect all the light we can because our pipeline can fix almost anything except not having the light.

• 3:03:32Nilay Patel?

  Has that come up for you now in these, in the newer versions of the phone where you can see that optimization starting to shift against like quality out of the lens, for lack of a better term, in favor of just light collection?

• 3:03:45Speaker 18

  Yeah. The, that was actually one of the craziest things I saw when we started shooting a lot of native RAW again, because for a while I was just like ProRAW maxing, like just shooting on ProRAW all the time. And then I was like, okay, let's go back to native RAW for a second. I noticed that the output was just getting a little, was just getting a little worse. Like if I were to objectively look at it, you know, and just take this, again, to clarify, the difference between ProRAW and native RAW is you get raw sensor data, which you just, I just quickly threw in Lightroom to develop it. Lightroom processes that sensor data and spits it out. There's actually some corrections already baked into that. So some of the pipeline does raw data on the Apple iPhone, and some of it then it starts converting it to images so it can start merging, geometric, geometry corrections, those kind of things. For instance, your ultra wide camera will have a lot of corrections because otherwise

• 3:04:29Speaker 18

  it looks like a crazy fisheye lens, basically, right? And then, yeah, we noticed a few years ago, like the main camera especially, which is the one that needs to gather the most light, you know, the camera people use for 99% of the time, it has more color fringing than it has in the past. And we, I think we talked about this in person briefly, Neelai. I was like, no, like the crazy thing that's happening here is they just, there's a realization there that like, oh, wait. It might be color fringing, but we can just fix that in the pipeline. If we get more light in, we can just correct that out. And the smartphone will make up for what would traditionally be considered a bad, the worst photographic lens, right? It just, it just becomes a data problem, essentially. And that is coming up a little bit. And I wrote a little bit, I just published a review of the iPhone 16 yesterday.

• 3:05:13Speaker 18

  And I wrote like, look, you've got to get used to processing because gadgets in our phones, I can, I can see them going in one direction. David, I feel like you're the pixel fold kind of guy, but like you're going to get devices that are thinner and folding. And sometimes they fold three ways now. In China, I hear the devices are folding three ways. It's, it's going, it's going that way. We're not going to opt for thicker phones and bigger cameras. And to make cameras work that are smaller and thinner and tinier and fit into like very small headsets and Ray-Ban glasses, we're going to need more processing because the sensors, the images aren't going to get any better. That's just physics. So I fully believe that, you know, as we go towards slimmer and foldable iPhones or

• 3:05:57Speaker 18

  whatever, our output on something like a process zero image is probably going to get objectively worse. That's just the way it is. But old fashioned photography in that way, that's just, I don't know how long that's going to be around on these kinds of devices as they get smarter and smarter. Cause they'll just start relying more on the fact that they're magic, hyper powerful computers and they're not going to rely on the fact that they're good at collecting light because they're just not.

• 3:06:20Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so let me ask you about that. Let me send you all the way down the existential rabbit hole. This is where I live. Welcome to the basement. At the end of this, right? You, you, the hardware is just there to collect light and everything else happens in the processing stack. Everything else is an average of values from the past, right? Is that, do you see that all the way at the end? That it, you just spin the dial all the way on the path that we're on and we don't really care if the sensor is any good or the lens is any good, as long as we can collect as much mass of light as possible?

• 3:06:54Speaker 18

  See, I think that's a great philosophical question because if you come down to it, everything, you can solve it the way the Samsung moon photo situation happens. Most of the world is completely been captured before and done before. If you train a good enough model with a bad enough sensor, you can probably take photos of 99.95% of the things out there and they'll be really good. So like. I don't know. That seems kind of like a reality that we're heading towards where the processing is just simply good enough and the reality does the reality of capturing images just needs to correspond to like what the internal logic can can can cohere together. And I personally philosophically find that a really big problem. I want to make a camera that like if you go to the what is a photo thing, I was talking to Ben about this was like, we should probably think about what we consider to be a photo.

• 3:07:36Speaker 18

  And to me, it is an image that's generated largely majority, at least by photons that you have captured at a moment in space and time. But I'm not sure if that is going to be the case. I think in the future, some cameras, maybe not all of them, but some cameras are going to increasingly rely on data sets of what the world should look like and what images should look like and just use data in use light as data, not as like a visual aid as much.

• 3:08:00David Pierce?

  What is halide for all the way at the end of that road? Like, what's what's your job when we get all the way to the end of that?

• 3:08:07Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, like, the invention of the automobile didn't put an end to horses. It's just horses were allowed to be this fun thing. You had to look at them and ride them and stuff, right? But as far as utility for every day, you know, people stopped keeping barns, I guess. And I mean, like, look, you know, photography didn't end painting, painting. The reason people look at paintings is because the amount of skill and craftsmanship that goes into it and being able to work within these constraints. And again, it was really eye opening last summer, shooting analog, because there is just something about an analog photo and actually the removal of details, right? And so I don't know if anyone tried to watch one of these high frame rate movies like The Hobbit at 48 frames per second

• 3:08:49Speaker 07

  or or that HDR Will Smith movie, the one with his clone. What was it called? Gemini Man? There we go. And like, it was ultra high frame rate HDR. And what ends up happening with movies is when you shoot high frame rate ultra realism, it breaks the magic because your mind isn't able to fill in the details. And it turns out 24 frames per second with a slow shutter, like, it feels more dreamlike and you're able to suspend disbelief, right? And so with photography, there's just something about a photo that is less perfect that feels magical about it. So I think there's always going to be that as an art form. And but as far as something that you're gonna just tap a button and get a nice photo, you know, I think that we are smart enough that we're never gonna enter that kind of battle

• 3:09:34Speaker 07

  with a world's most valuable company.

• 3:09:37Speaker 18

  Just put your definition of the test. Photons you collected at a moment in space and time.

• 3:09:42Speaker 07

  Right.

• 3:09:42Nilay Patel?

  I buy that. That's a pretty good definition. Does that count if you're taking nine photos and merging them? That that moment is extended to nine captures, right?

• 3:09:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think so. The thing is, like, let's say, you know, and the same thing goes for cleaning ups. Like, let's say you use AI cleanup to erase a part of the photo. I still think it's a photo. But once you fill that in with the majority of a cleanup feature, so like 50% or more of the pixel will become filled in by a model, I feel like it ceases to be a photo, meaning in a meaningful way, because it has now been filled in by a data set.

• 3:10:14Nilay Patel?

  You guys are making it to, it sounds very much like you're focused on the creative and artistic aspects of photography. There's a whole other conversation about can we trust these images that exists in the world? Have you looked at the various watermarking features from C2PA that say, actually, this happened, right? This photo of Donald Trump, it occurred, we're going to mark it, we're going to send it to Getty, Getty is going to know this was real. Those photos were marked at the camera level when they went to Getty. Have you looked at doing that? Is that something you're allowed to do on iOS?

• 3:10:43Speaker 07

  That's all bullshit. Am I allowed to swear? Like, if not, like, write down? Okay, good.

• 3:10:47Nilay Patel?

  You are allowed to swear.

• 3:10:48Speaker 07

  So, all right, everything that Adobe is pushing as far as like content authenticity is, it's just, it's like Divix and anti DVD kind of stuff in the 2000s. It's like, if you look at it, the ability to just strip the metadata, the fact that you can just point your camera at a screen and take a photo, like, it's not going to do anything other than convince people to sign up for Creative Cloud and use Adobe products. I don't know, I don't know how much deeper you want to get in that, but I don't think it's a useful use of time. Although, they do have a verification feature where I think it does like a signature of like, you can, I think, kind of like CSAM detection, like, it'll get a signature of the photo, you could drag and drop it to UI,

• 3:11:29Speaker 07

  and whoever first posted it, like, it'll tell you who did that. That's pretty cool. But the rest of the stuff is just a waste of time.

• 3:11:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just curious, this is right next to the creative part of how much can I change this, or how much data processing can I do, is the how much can I trust this? And it feels like both of those are unsolved.

• 3:11:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, when we launched Process Zero, like, I thought, I was talking to Ben, I was like, can we use the fact that we shoot a JPEG that is the Process Zero component and like the RAW, the sensor, again, the sensor, single shot RAW?

• 3:11:58Nilay Patel?

  Bayer data as sort of a proof of provenance, like a proof like that. There are not a lot of data sets of generative AI, if any, I haven't found any at least, that work on raw files. Right. But conceivably, you could totally do it. That's the thing. So it's, it's, it's not a good, you know, it'd be a fig leaf of authenticity. It would be like, look, there is a rough file. You can see that it was actually taken. But, you know, like, it's still, it's just such a losing battle. We, at some point, you philosophically, as a photographer or a camera app maker, or both, or esteemed member of photography comment sections, you just go through the same existential crisis and you just realize, okay, there's nothing stopping this.

• 3:12:38Speaker 07

  And can I just back up to what you're saying about like editing photos and where's the line that you're going to draw? So in 2016, there was a famous National Geographic photographer, Steve McCurry. And so he got in a hot water because people noticed one of his award winning photos was actually different on his website. Because there's like a dude in the background who wasn't in the final award winning photo. And people started digging into it and like, basically, he would use what is iOS 18's object removal feature before it existed. He did that equivalent kind of editing and this was a huge, like, you, you don't do that if you're actually taking photos. So I, I, and I guess this is also a question for you as journalists, like when you, at what point, when you're doing like an interview,

• 3:13:22Speaker 07

  or you're transcribing, you're pulling quotes, at what point is it okay to remove the likes and the butts? You'll be doing a lot of that with me and thank you. But at what point are you then editorializing what you're trying to capture and telling a story that actually didn't occur? And effectively, you know, everyone has to have that level of journalistic integrity if they want to call it a photo.

• 3:13:44Nilay Patel?

  So David and I are both going to answer on three and we're going to see if we have the same answer.

• 3:13:48Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 3:13:50Nilay Patel?

  Actually, I'll let David answer. My, my quick version of that is that's norms, that's professional norms. That's what you're describing. Right. This guy was a professional photographer, entered a professional photography contest. He broke the rules, he got kicked out, they got in trouble. You're a journalist, you get a bunch of quotes, you go too sideways, you're over the line, right? Like the journalist club, if it still exists, will get mad at you and your, your reputation will suffer. If you're a Getty photographer, there's a, there's a list of rules of things you're allowed to edit. And most of them are like, you can change exposure and that's about it, right? You can do some vignetting. If you look at New York Times photos.

• 3:14:27Speaker 18

  All they're allowed to do is vignette, so they're all just vigneted to hell and back. Cause that's the only button they get. So like, that's professional norms. I don't know what consumer norms are gonna be. And what we're seeing is an explosion of consumer photography. And that, I think, is really challenging. I don't know, David, what's your answer?

• 3:14:44David Pierce?

  I, I, I think about the same. I mean, there's been a, a big discussion this year about, uh, how people transcribe Donald Trump. Uh, there, there's been all this stuff about sane washing Donald Trump where he'll, he'll go on like a nine-minute ramble of nonsense. And then a, a reporter will, will essentially try to make it make sense, which on the one hand is like, good, useful journalism. Like, here are the words that he was trying to say. On the other hand, it, it makes somebody who doesn't make any sense, makes some sense. And I think, uh, it's, it's a complicated thing. Like, at what point is my job to make something make as much sense as possible? So I can help my reader understand. And at what point is my job to represent something as it was?

• 3:15:26David Pierce?

  In all its messiness. Uh, and it's like, I think it is kind of a perfect analogy for what we're trying to do with photography. And I, I don't have great answers because it's, especially when it's messy, how un-messy you're supposed to make it is really complicated.

• 3:15:39Speaker 18

  And, and really the question is, can you make everybody believe in the professional norm? The answer is just like, obviously no.

• 3:15:46Speaker 07

  So I guess the closest that we have around ethics right now is Apple's decision that they're not gonna allow fully generative AI, uh, in iOS 18. And there was the interview with Gruber where they're talking like, okay, we're gonna generate cartoons, but we're not gonna generate photorealistic stuff. And so that's nice when you have someone who is, you know, not enabling outright bad actions. Although then you have someone like Google who's also putting you like, yeah, just change the background, type in what you want.

• 3:16:16Speaker 18

  That does like, remind me of like, that amazing quote that Neel I got from Apple's John McCormack that basically was like, okay, we believe a photo is a thing that really happened. Which is still not going as far as saying like, a photo is a thing you capture with a camera, or is light that is captured. It is a thing that happened, which totally fits in the model of having a generated future where there is a super great Apple model that will just basically fill in the blanks if the image data isn't good enough. It just needs to confirm that a thing has actually happened. So it's like, yeah, like, surely we will continue to have journalistic standards. And there will be a few of these things like C2PA to work in their niches, but. I mean, there's no stopping the train that's heading down the tracks of like the absolute apocalypse of like what the meaning, the meaningfulness of photos on the internet.

• 3:17:00Speaker 18

  I truly think if I look at my daughter, she's one and a half years old now. When she's a teenager, I don't think she will believe any single image she sees on the internet.

• 3:17:08David Pierce?

  I think the, the piece of this that gets lost in a lot of this conversation, I think is like, we, we talk a lot about the sort of really high stakes photos. And we talk a lot about like the photos of a serial number, right? But I think like, Sebastian, to your point, you, you have a young kid. I think I have a young kid, Neil has young kids, Ben, I don't, I don't know.

• 3:17:29Speaker 07

  I got one, he's got hand, foot and mouth disease right now. So yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:34David Pierce?

  Good times all around. But I think like, Sebastian, to your point, your kid will probably grow up in a world where they don't believe photos they see on the internet. I think that's probably right. But the question of like, will they believe photos about themselves from when they were kids? Is, is the other part of this that I think is like complicated and is, is such a like normal everyday use case? We don't talk about in this context, but the, the question of like, when I, when I take pictures of my kid, what is, what is, what responsibility in, in air quotes, do I have to like truth and honesty versus like taking a fun picture of my child having fun?

• 3:18:11David Pierce?

  I feel like is, is such a like mainstream, every single person use case that we just don't talk about enough because it, it feels mealy, but I don't know. And as you guys think about highlight, like people download this stuff in part because they want to make beautiful art that hangs in museums and in part because they want to take better pictures that are kids. And like, what, what is the job there in, in this world?

• 3:18:31Speaker 07

  All of my son's photos are in native raw, so I can show him the receipts afterwards.

• 3:18:36David Pierce?

  He can develop the negatives himself.

• 3:18:38Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 3:18:41Speaker 18

  No, but that's, that's a really good point.

• 3:18:43David Pierce?

  On his eighteenth birthday, here's son, I've made you some negatives.

• 3:18:45Speaker 07

  You know, it's important that every dad has a talk with his son about noise reduction. It's a dangerous world out there and you need to be prepared.

• 3:18:55Speaker 18

  Yeah. But to, I mean, to that point, like, some part of me feels like, you know, we're gonna go back and look at, we're gonna recognize this era of mobile photography for looking a certain way. That's just a fact. And we're recognizing the first generation of Instagram photos by the heavy filters, which also means people are going to look at the first generation of Instagrammed photos and be like, oh, these are real, there's no generative AI in them, because you can see by how bad these filters are. This was before the end times of photographic integrity, which is fascinating to me, by the way, that those fake sepia filters are gonna go down in time as like, a symbol of authenticity, which at the time were derided as being universally-

• 3:19:30David Pierce?

  Deeply real photos.

• 3:19:31Speaker 18

  Yeah, deeply unreal, yeah, deeply real photos. Must be real. And I think we, we'd love to kind of, in a same, in a way, provide that niche too, because we want to offer that extra tool that just gives you, A, a more authentic shot, because it's a bit more true to like, what an old fashioned camera might have captured, that has a bit less of that process look going on.

• 3:19:53Speaker 18

  But two, like, I, I also believe those photos are more representative of your memories, because they, they are more like the way you remember a moment. Like, when I edit my photos, actually, I tend to make the sunsets warmer, and the cozy times nicer, and the time when I walked in Tokyo alone, 3am, bluer, and more cyber punky, because that's just the way it felt. And I think those aren't perfect representations of reality, and that greatest common denominator photography thing is kind of what's making people pull towards that a bit more. And maybe also, ironically, making the pull more towards generative things or more creative ways altering photos, because they're deeply unsatisfied with how, how perfectly photos represent reality,

• 3:20:33Speaker 18

  when they're sensing reality around them, but not the world that they perceive, per se, emotionally.

• 3:20:47David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, so I'm in the middle of kind of a gaming dilemma. I've been really a gamer off and on, over the course of my life. It's not something that, it's kind of a consistent activity, but I'll play a lot for a few months, and then kind of put the console away for a few months, because whatever things- Get busy or I get into something else. But then I always come back to games and really for me, it's sports games that are the most consistent. Like I play Madden every year. I like the NBA games. 2K is really good. I've been a FIFA player for forever. I like Fortnite. I like games that I can kind of come and go to and play a whole bunch all at once. And then leave for a little while and then come back. I also like games that I can play for like 15 minutes at a go.

• 3:21:31David Pierce?

  And the challenge I've always had with a game like Elden Ring is I just want to play it for hours. And I feel like it never rewards you for just a couple of minutes of playing at a time. In a way that some of these more finite battle royale or like football game sized games really are. So all of this is to say, I'm pretty happy with my gaming setup. I haven't really felt the need to get a PS5 or anything like that. I'm still on a PS4 Pro. It works fine. Everything's great. But more recently, I want something new. We've been talking a lot about handheld consoles on this show over the last eight months or so, I would say. And there's just a lot of cool stuff happening. I also travel more than I used to.

• 3:22:12David Pierce?

  And I'm back to wanting something I can play on the train or on a plane or in a hotel room when I'm not at home. I also just spend too much time sitting at my desk. Like right now, I'm sitting at my desk. My monitor is in front of me. My computer is underneath it. I have a Mac Mini that I use for most things. And then right off to the right is my PlayStation. And so having this one space be the place that I sit for work all day and then to play games at night, I just don't like it. And I want something that I can take and sit on the couch while I hang out with the dog or play out in the backyard when the weather's nice. So I'm really into the idea of a handheld console, but I have no idea which one to get. So I enlisted two people to help me figure it out. Sean Hollister and Alex Cranz.

• 3:22:56David Pierce?

  They both know this stuff way better than I do. And together, we are going to make a decision about which handheld console I'm gonna buy. Let's get into it. Alex Cranz, hello in Texas.

• 3:23:07Alex Cranz?

  Howdy, y'all.

• 3:23:09David Pierce?

  Well, this is, this is what we're gonna do here. Sean Alistair, hello.

• 3:23:13Speaker 20

  Hi, from the land of gaming handhelds.

• 3:23:16David Pierce?

  I have brought you here to do personal tech support for me because that is what the first test is about, is helping David figure out which gadgets he should buy. Good. I'm going to lay out for you my current situation and then you are going to help me solve my current situation. So my current situation is I have a PlayStation 4. I've had it for a million years. It's fine. It plays video games. I would like to upgrade, but I don't think what I want is a PS5. I think what I want is something handheld and portable because my PS4 like lives next to my computer in my basement and I'm spending too much time sitting in this chair looking at this screen. And I would like to have something that can like go out in the world with me and I travel a lot and all these things.

• 3:23:56David Pierce?

  So I want something that is like primarily, but not entirely, a portable handheld gadget. I would like to play lots of games. We can talk about which games I do and don't care about, but I have exactly one non-negotiable game, which is, which is FIFA. EA Sports FC is the new name of it. I will call it FIFA until the day I die. I play that game more than I play every other game combined and I need that game. That's it. That's literally like, that is the entirety of where I am and I want to buy something and I want you to tell me what to buy.

• 3:24:28Speaker 20

  Why, why is that your game? Why is that your game? Because I have an answer for you, but the answer has just been foiled by the fact that you have picked a game, which, and I quote, runs a, "This program encountered E11100B during initialization."

• 3:24:44David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:24:45Speaker 20

  Error message when you tried to run it on a Steam Deck. So I guess I'm not gonna tell you to buy a Steam Deck.

• 3:24:51David Pierce?

  My worry was this is going to be the shortest first cast in history because I was gonna say all that and you were both gonna say Steam Deck and then we were gonna hang up and move on with our lives. If it were not for this one game that I require, is the world sort of that simple at this particular moment?

• 3:25:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:07Speaker 20

  It kind of is and it maybe it won't be in like

• 3:25:11David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:25:11Speaker 20

  two weeks. In, in, in two weeks or so, through, is it three weeks? There will be a Windows handheld with a battery that is bigger than any other handheld on the market and maybe that will solve the issue of Windows handhelds don't have great battery life.

• 3:25:24Alex Cranz?

  That won't solve all the other problems with the Windows handheld. I'm gonna say, David, you're on the Vergecast, so I feel very comfortable saying, "You like to tinker. You enjoy a little tinkering."

• 3:25:36David Pierce?

  So I do and I don't. I will say what I'm willing to tinker. Like, if it's a matter of I need to buy this thing and spend a couple of hours like downloading and tweaking and doing whatever I need to get it set up, fine. I am not buying a thing with the intention of screwing with it forever. I would like this thing to play video games and I want to be able to sit down on my couch and be playing video games as quickly as possible. That's actually very important to me.

• 3:26:03Speaker 20

  Would you spend those two hours, hear me out, would you spend those two hours setting up your Steam Deck to dual boot Windows off of an SD card occasionally with the one non-negotiable game that apparently you must have?

• 3:26:19Alex Cranz?

  You can get FIFA on the Steam Deck without doing dual boot. I was looking this up.

• 3:26:25David Pierce?

  Tell me more.

• 3:26:26Alex Cranz?

  You will need to be comfortable diving into the Linux side of Steam Deck.

• 3:26:33David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:26:33Alex Cranz?

  And do some tweaking. And also, does it have to be FIFA 24?

• 3:26:39David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 3:26:40Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it can't be FIFA 23?

• 3:26:42David Pierce?

  Well, no, what's important is that it's going to be 25 in like six weeks. And it's actually, what I need is that one.

• 3:26:49Speaker 20

  Do you have to play it online? Because it's the Annette cheat. That's the problem here. EA insisting on its own version of Annette cheat instead of the ones that actually work on the Steam Deck.

• 3:26:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, I need to be online.

• 3:27:00Speaker 20

  Shit.

• 3:27:01Alex Cranz?

  I feel like the other FIFA games have appeared in Xbox Cloud, and I feel like this one would also appear in Xbox Cloud.

• 3:27:08Speaker 20

  That was my next thought.

• 3:27:09David Pierce?

  You make a very good point here, which is a thing that I should have said. I don't need to be able to play this game on the first day that it is available. I just need to play it at some point.

• 3:27:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:17David Pierce?

  And what I have discovered about the video game world is that those things are very different. Like, when things come to Game Pass and there's stuff that comes to PlayStation's Cloud stuff later on that isn't there like day and date when they release. Like, the reason I picked this game that matters is because I can just like get lost down this impossible universe with any game that I want, and it's all very complicated. But just to tie off the one piece of this, if all I was saying is I want a handheld thing to play games on, and I did not give you any specific games.

• 3:27:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:46David Pierce?

  Is the answer like the Steam Deck and it's not even close?

• 3:27:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:50Speaker 20

  It really is. It really is. The Steam Deck, we're in this moment where all of these other companies are like, "We want a piece of that Steam Deck action, but we're going to build it on Windows because gamers tell us that Windows is where all of the games are and they want to just be able to play the games they already own."

• 3:28:09Alex Cranz?

  Which is true.

• 3:28:09Speaker 20

  Which is true. But the reality is that the Steam Deck plays Windows games and it plays more of them better than a native Windows system plays Windows games.

• 3:28:21David Pierce?

  What is the problem with the native Windows system?

• 3:28:23Alex Cranz?

  Because Windows is built for computers, for laptops and desktops and things you use with a mouse and a at least 13-inch display. And then you put that on a 7-inch display and instead of a mouse, you have a joystick.

• 3:28:39David Pierce?

  Okay, that sounds awful. Now that I'm thinking this through, that sounds like a nightmare.

• 3:28:44Speaker 20

  That part's kind of it. You can, if you want to spend your two hours of setup, you can certainly spend 10 minutes of them, setting up Steam to launch every time you launch your Windows computer, and to launch right into big-picture mode. And then you have an interface that's similar to the Steam Deck, but it doesn't have the ability to like tweak the handheld very easily so that you get great battery life. The chips won't give you great battery life to begin with because there's all that other overhead for all the other shit you don't need in Windows. Sometimes you'll turn off your Windows system. You'll put it to sleep and you'll turn it back on again and wake it up again. And all of a sudden, your app will be gone. And where did it go? I wonder why it isn't fullscreen anymore. It's this tiny icon on the Windows taskbar. That's not great. Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. It'll have restarted itself.

• 3:29:29David Pierce?

  I'm having like netbook flashbacks to 10 years ago as you're describing this.

• 3:29:33Alex Cranz?

  Sometimes for some reason, I can't get it to stop asking for the password when I open one of my Windows game consoles. And so then I have to like figure out how to get the accessibility keyboard up, which always takes at least five minutes, and then very carefully type in the password, which is super long because I like to be safe. It's my favorite thing to do. David, you don't want to do that?

• 3:29:55David Pierce?

  This is not the most compelling case you've ever made. But wait, Sean, you alluded to maybe there is something coming that solves this problem for me?

• 3:30:04Speaker 20

  Okay, not most of these problems, but the battery life, the battery life problem. Asus with the ROG Ally, the ROG Ally, they're gonna hop on me. So the ROG Ally came out a year ago as like a Steam Deck, but worse in almost every way, except that it had a better screen, a variable refresh rate screen. It has since been surpassed by the Steam Deck OLED, which has an OLED screen that goes 90 Hz. I'm gonna stop getting into the weeds. But they're coming out with a new version of that later this month. That will have a doubled battery in it and all kinds of other creature comforts. It'll be more comfortable to hold. In the year since they shipped the original ROG Ally, the UI has gotten a little bit better.

• 3:30:47Speaker 20

  It's smoother, like Tom Warren likes his. I think he might prefer that over the Steam Deck. He is a notorious Windows fanboy.

• 3:30:55Alex Cranz?

  That's why he doesn't count.

• 3:30:57Speaker 20

  I think it's going to be, very possibly, the first Windows handheld that I can recommend, because they've gotten so many things right, but it fundamentally still runs Windows. And Microsoft has not improved Windows in any meaningful way in the year and a half, two years since Steam Deck came out.

• 3:31:15Alex Cranz?

  They could though, right? Like, we've been hearing a lot of rumors that they're gonna introduce some sort of Xbox handheld in the next couple of years. That'll very likely run on Windows, because technically, the Xbox runs on that. There's like the opportunity. I feel like a lot, like, remember when AMD was having its big resurgence? Nvidia was the game GPU? And then AMD was like, "We're gonna start doing this again." And the difference was Nvidia actually did software and made the games work really, really well, whereas AMD didn't for at least a year or two. That's where the Windows handhelds are. No one's done those really important software tweaks. So the Steam Deck is better.

• 3:31:51Speaker 20

  But Microsoft would have to be like, "We're gonna ship a different OS on it. We're gonna ship a version of Windows that's so stripped down, you don't recognize it as Windows anymore."

• 3:31:59Alex Cranz?

  Look, if it opens EA Origins, then they're like, "I'm fine."

• 3:32:02Speaker 20

  EA is one of the Achilles of the Steam Deck. You brought up FIFA. FIFA, EA games will notoriously, particularly if you need online, they will just break on Steam Deck because EA does not give a shit about Valve's handheld. And they'll just like change their stupid mandatory like DRM app all the time. It used to be called Origin, now it's like EA App. And games will just break there on Steam Deck. But everything else works pretty good.

• 3:32:25Alex Cranz?

  But they do participate in cloud gaming. They, most of their stuff is available on the various cloud gaming platforms. And all of those work on the Steam Deck. And you can get them up and running pretty quickly. And then not have to like constantly go into the Linux backend to tweak them. Just the one time.

• 3:32:40David Pierce?

  Meaning like, I could do like Steam Deck plus Game Pass and solve my problem?

• 3:32:46Speaker 20

  Yeah.

• 3:32:47David Pierce?

  Is this a good idea?

• 3:32:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you could do that. You could even, you could stream your Sony PS4 from there. So you don't have to like sit in front of it to play The Last of Us.

• 3:32:56Speaker 20

  Oh yeah. You can stream your Xbox and your PlayStation and Cloud to the Steam Deck. It does all these things.

• 3:33:03David Pierce?

  I'm glad you brought this up because this is a thing I have deeply investigated and have come up with. Is it, is just a terrible nightmare that I will not subject myself to. There are, there are things about remote streaming your own console that are really great. And they immediately fall apart as soon as you get anywhere outside of your house. Like it just doesn't.

• 3:33:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:23Speaker 20

  Do you, do you need to play FIFA outside your house?

• 3:33:25David Pierce?

  I do. Like for me, honestly, the, the two biggest things I'm trying to solve in switching from this console on my desk to the handheld is I wanna play other places in my house than at this desk, which is a victory for console streaming. And I wanna play when I travel. In part because I'm addicted to this game and it's set up in such a way that the mechanics are, if you don't play every day, it's actually kind of like, it's a real problem as I'm describing this. But this is where I'm at in life. And the console streaming thing is great for the first thing. Like I can, I can sit upstairs on my couch and play my PS4 on like an iPad. And it actually works passably well. Total non-starter trying to stream any stuff over the internet. I just, it's just not even worth it.

• 3:34:07Speaker 20

  This goes for all streaming.

• 3:34:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 3:34:08Speaker 20

  All streaming breaks down once you leave your house because you no longer have control over making sure you have a good internet connection. If you're out there like on 5G, if you have a great 5G signal and nobody else in the node is using it right then, yeah, you could have a great streaming experience. But I would sit, I would sit in, you know, a hospital waiting room or out in a cafe and I'd be using that, that Razer device, which could only really do cloud streaming. And I would have a beautiful streaming experience that would drop out five minutes later and be completely unplayable. Over and over and over again, I had that experience with cloud gaming, with a good cloud gaming service like GeForce Now, great service. This connection would not maintain that. Now, if you're talking about going over to a friend's house, who, which your friend

• 3:34:50Speaker 20

  also has amazing internet at home and you want to stream from Xbox Cloud there, great. That, that could, that could, that could work great.

• 3:34:56Alex Cranz?

  I was just assuming that David has like a hotspot with him at all time that gives him brilliant internet, like 90% of the time.

• 3:35:03David Pierce?

  To be honest, I do a lot. It's called, it's called an iPad Pro with cell connection and it's actually like an unbelievably great hotspot. The problem is, I'll give you the worst case scenario for my own gaming usage is on an Amtrak train from DC to New York. And at that point, realistically, what I need is games I can play offline, right? Which I think just rules out full reliance on game streaming services. Like I actually, this is why I'm compelled by the combination of Steam Deck and Game Pass. Like I can do mostly online stuff and like I have, I don't need to be able to play FIFA online while I'm on Amtrak Wi-Fi. That's like not possible in the world that we live in. So I'm fine with that, but I need to be able to do something on that thing when I have crappy connection.

• 3:35:46David Pierce?

  And the idea of just having like a brick in my hands when the Wi-Fi is bad feels bad.

• 3:35:52Alex Cranz?

  I do have one other suggestion and it is actually even more basic than the Steam Deck and it's a Switch.

• 3:35:59David Pierce?

  I'm glad you brought this up.

• 3:36:01Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's like the Steam Deck gives you all of the customization and gives you, it's like a Swiss Army knife. The Switch is like just a really good K-bar. Like it's good for one thing and that's playing the games that Nintendo is okay with you playing on it.

• 3:36:15David Pierce?

  And one of those games is, is EA Sports FC 24, the dumbest name game in soccer.

• 3:36:22Speaker 20

  But you're still not going to play it online on the Amtrak, right?

• 3:36:24David Pierce?

  No, but so I have almost landed there, except, and, and Cranz, I'm glad you brought this up because I want to know what you guys think, right now. Feels like a stupid time to buy a Switch. It feels like the end of a Switch cycle. They have already talked about the next one. Like, the Switch, by all accounts, is still very good, but this feels like a ridiculous time to buy a Switch.

• 3:36:43Speaker 20

  It is absolutely the end of the Switch cycle. They're delaying it a little bit. They're not like, they don't want to come out right away and do Switch 2. They're biding their time, probably because they want to get some great software lined up for it. And I imagine that that software, if you want to play Metroid Prime 4 or whatever the next game is that Nintendo does, it probably won't work as well on the current Switch, because the current Switch is not only seven years old in terms of its processing power, but also was already weak to begin with. Like, when you played Zelda: Breath of the Wild on day one on the Switch, and you go to the forest where the master sword is, like, it's choppy. It was choppy then. It was choppy seven years ago, you know?

• 3:37:26Alex Cranz?

  I was like, FIFA will look like a bunch of potatoes are on a big greenfield. But you'll be, but you'll know what those potatoes are, and you'll be able to control all the little potatoes. So like, if the control of the potatoes is important and not how they look, the Switch could be an option. Because there's a lot of good deals right now, because there's a ton of different ones. Like, I just recently picked up the new Zelda one, because somebody left it on a plane and I bought it at a thrift store.

• 3:37:51Speaker 20

  Have you played the new Zelda yet?

• 3:37:53David Pierce?

  I have. So I actually have an OG Switch, and it worked great, and I loved it very much. And then it got to the point where literally the battery lasted like six minutes. Like, it's fine. The thing is seven years old. I got a lot of love out of it. I used it for a long time, and it just basically doesn't work anymore. And so now it's just like a pretty yellow thing that sits over there.

• 3:38:13Speaker 20

  Do not trade that in, because if it's an original Switch, that the battery is six minutes, it also means that it is hackable, and you can do fun things with it, and it is worth money, so.

• 3:38:22David Pierce?

  Deal. Okay, well, that's David's side business in selling old gadgets is a whole nother thing you and I should do on this show, Sean. So, yeah, so I think one of the outcomes I'm afraid of is that the answer is just wait a year, because there's going to be a new Switch, and they might fix Windows, and maybe we'll get the Xbox thing. And it feels like, in a weird way, we're in like a bad middle zone between good things.

• 3:38:44Alex Cranz?

  No, you need to get the Steam Deck with OLED and just be done and happy.

• 3:38:49Speaker 20

  I think what you need to do is, you need to unlock, you need to unlock a mountain of amazing PC games you've been missing that are incredibly cheap and brilliant and beautiful and run on this handheld with an amazing screen. That's what you need to do.

• 3:39:04Alex Cranz?

  And it's also hackable.

• 3:39:05David Pierce?

  Sean, I gave you one game, one game that I need to play, and you're telling me that I can have everything I want except the one game that I need to play.

• 3:39:14Speaker 20

  If you want to play Fortnite on there, it doesn't do that either. So unless you're gonna stream that.

• 3:39:18David Pierce?

  I literally, I almost wrote down that the two games were Fortnite and FIFA, and I decided I can live without Fortnite because there are other good David Has An Hour To Kill Battle Royale games out there. I could, I could take or leave Fortnite at this point in my life.

• 3:39:30Alex Cranz?

  I was like, you can just use your iPad.

• 3:39:32David Pierce?

  That is, that is true. So let me float another idea by you, which is that I, instead of buying one thing, I buy several things. And, and I just acknowledged that at least for this next phase of my life, the right thing to do is get a PS5 and a PS Portal for my house projects, and then I get a Steam Deck for travel. I have just quadrupled the amount of money that this is costing. Is this the outcome?

• 3:40:00Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that. Save your money. Just get like, never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy a Portal unless you just have zero computer skills. If you have none whatsoever, if all you do, if you like struggle to turn your phone on, get the PSP Portal.

• 3:40:18Speaker 20

  People love the Portal. There, there are people who love the Portal. It is selling really well. I would never touch one, except to like, to have the knowledge of having touched one, because the Steam Deck has an app on it, and the app is the PS Portal.

• 3:40:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's.

• 3:40:34Speaker 20

  In an app for your Steam Deck, basically. It's called chiaki, chiaki for deck, and it works great. Just make sure your PS5 or PS4 has an ethernet cable plugged into it, or it will not work very well.

• 3:40:45David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:40:45Alex Cranz?

  Don't get the PS Portal, because that is, that's for like, that's for people who love to game and don't have a lot of computer skills. And so they're like, okay, I just need to go play right now. And that's great, but like, you spend a little bit more money, you get the Steam Deck, you spend a little extra time, and you have just way more capability.

• 3:41:04David Pierce?

  Okay, so all right, so let me, let me play out this scenario. So what's happening here is I'm going to make sure that my PlayStation streaming setup is as good as possible. I'm going to make sure that I have an ethernet port. I'm gonna, I'm gonna plug my PlayStation into the Eero Gateway and not the Eero in the basement. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make sure that my internet connection for my PlayStation is as good as possible. TBD on whether that's gonna be a PS4 or a PS5, we're gonna see how poor I feel at the end of this episode. But that, that essentially becomes my, like, dedicated FIFA machine, which is an absurd place to have landed, but again, here we are.

• 3:41:42Speaker 20

  If you've already got the PS4, I mean, why not?

• 3:41:44David Pierce?

  So that, I'm relegating this thing to being my FIFA machine. And then I'm going to download the app you just said for the Steam Deck for when I want to play FIFA. And I'm going to play FIFA on the Steam Deck through my PlayStation, which seems ludicrous, but you're telling me will kind of sort of work as long as I have very good internet.

• 3:42:01Alex Cranz?

  It'll work great.

• 3:42:02Speaker 20

  Inside your house. Remote is theoretically possible, but you'll play it in your house, realistically.

• 3:42:07David Pierce?

  So I've, that's my solution to the, how do I play on my couch instead of in the basement problem? Great. For everything else, I'm just going to broaden my horizons and play less FIFA and play more other games? Is this what you're telling me, this is, this is where I need to land?

• 3:42:21Alex Cranz?

  I, I feel like you can find a really good FIFA clone, but like, they all have swords or something. I like, I feel like this exists. Someone's made this game in alpha.

• 3:42:31David Pierce?

  So what is ironically possible is that because EA Sports FC is no longer called FIFA, somebody else is making a FIFA game. And maybe that FIFA game will be on the Steam Deck, which will solve all of my problems all at once. This is, this is what I'm hoping for.

• 3:42:45Alex Cranz?

  Done.

• 3:42:45Speaker 20

  And also you will write about this experience, hopefully, for The Verge, and then EA will start taking care of it.

• 3:42:52David Pierce?

  Okay, so EA, very large company, makes a lot of very popular games. Is there any hope for EA on the Steam Deck ever? Like, should I have any optimism for that to be a thing? The Steam Deck's very popular. What are we doing here?

• 3:43:02Speaker 20

  Yeah, I mean, they just, they just break things willy-nilly and they don't think about it. It's not like they don't want money.

• 3:43:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, EA is like, kinda notorious for being one of the worst companies in the United States. Like, I think when Consumerist existed, it was regularly beating cable companies for being the worst. Because they just, they put money ahead of usability frequently. And so, they could fix it, but I don't think they have a whole lot of interest. Because most of their players, the bulk of their audience, is not, is, you know, it's on the Switch. It's on the PlayStation.

• 3:43:34David Pierce?

  Okay, one other Steam Deck question. The, the one other thing I forgot to mention is I do want to be able to plug this thing into a large screen and play it. I don't think that's like, the most common use case for me, but I do want to be able to sit in front of a television and play it like a console, as I normally would. And for me with the Switch, I have done that way less than I expected, because you have to have such specific hardware to pull that off. And like, carrying around the dock is annoying, and I bought the little plug thing and that helped, but then I lost that. And so, I want, I want something that is a little easier to turn into like, a full-fledged console when I want to. Is the Steam Deck good at that?

• 3:44:10Alex Cranz?

  You're still gonna need a little dongle to, to mirror things.

• 3:44:15Speaker 20

  Dongle or dock?

• 3:44:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're gonna need a dongle or dock. I think the official one's like, what, a hundred dollars, Sean?

• 3:44:20Speaker 20

  It's less, it's, I wanna say seventy, eighty, something like that. But you can buy much cheaper than that. I'd used like, an off-the-shelf, like, thirty-five-dollar USB-C hub that had HDMI, that worked. I used docks from like, JSAW, J-S-A-U-X, great company with an alphabet soup name, surprisingly. Forty, fifty bucks, and those docks are, do all the things you'd want from a dock. It's really easy, once you get one of those things, to get it up there. The question is, is your TV like, 4K and you're expecting 4K visuals from a console that normally plays at 800? Because it's not gonna look as good on a big 4K TV.

• 3:44:54David Pierce?

  I will say, and Liam or producer can vouch for this, the least Vergecast-y thing about me is I don't care all that much about pixel density. So the idea of playing like at, you know, medium settings and having it work okay is completely fine with me.

• 3:45:06Alex Cranz?

  I just heard Neelai screaming.

• 3:45:09David Pierce?

  This is the last time you'll ever hear from me on the Vergecast. But that is, that is where I'm at. And especially with something like this, like battery life is much more important to me than like getting 10 extra frames per second. And so I think, again, the customizability of the Steam Deck to be able to like dial that up and down as I want it seems useful.

• 3:45:28Alex Cranz?

  You want a Steam Deck OLED, like get the Steam Deck OLED. Every once in a while you'll plug it into the TV. You'll be like, oh, I did it. This looks kind of shitty. And then you'll unplug it and go back to the really pretty OLED display and be very happy.

• 3:45:41David Pierce?

  I do suspect my Switch experience has been that I set it up in such a way that it was going to be really easy to dock. It was going to be great. And then most of the time I would sit on my couch in front of the TV and just play on my lap. And I would assume the Steam Deck will end up being kind of the same way.

• 3:45:55Speaker 20

  Yep, it's so good. We'll watch, watch some shows together with my wife and I'll, I'll have my hand held out and get to do some, some gaming at the same time. It's great.

• 3:46:03David Pierce?

  Okay. Are there any other like crazy wildcard possibilities coming that we know of that might win? Like you, you mentioned the, the RAG Ii X seems like a possible improvement, if not sort of equal to the Steam Deck. Is there anything else on the horizon that in three months I'm going to be like, oh, this is the one I needed?

• 3:46:22Speaker 20

  I don't think so, but there are two very different directions you could go. And I don't have one of them here in front of me. But one of them is a 10.1 inch laptop with like keys that actually feel good. Full-size SD card reader. You could actually shove the SD card all the way inside. We've got full-size USB A ports.

• 3:46:44Alex Cranz?

  It has more ports than a MacBook.

• 3:46:45Speaker 20

  USB C ports. There's an Oculus port HDMI. It is your dock built into it. And then you take these little things off and you got joysticks, a D-pad. And even, even this, this menu button in the center acts like an Xbox button, which for some reason, none of the other Windows handhelds have. And this thing is way expensive. I mean, it's twice the price of your Steam Deck. It costs more than any of the handhelds, but it doubles as a laptop. It has the power of one of those other gaming handhelds and a decent sized battery, all this stuff.

• 3:47:17Alex Cranz?

  But Sean, how's it, how is it to play?

• 3:47:20Speaker 20

  It is a laptop first. And a game handheld second.

• 3:47:25David Pierce?

  Such a perfect gadget because that is both the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I want it so bad.

• 3:47:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right? It's beautiful.

• 3:47:34David Pierce?

  It's like, what if instead of the touch bar, we just put a PlayStation controller in pieces? Like, I love it.

• 3:47:40Speaker 20

  I can't get, I can't get over the boss mode. Like, you got this thing and you're like, no, I can't show my gamepad at work. Let's take this little metal, let's take this little slip of metal out of the back of the thing and drop it on top. Boss mode, it's a physical boss mode.

• 3:47:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:56Speaker 20

  Okay, moving on from that. Okay, so your other possibility is you could embrace, you could embrace software piracy. And you could buy one of these things, which is, looks like a Game Boy Advance SP. This is the Anvernic thing. But actually just comes with thousands of pirated games. And, and so you could play all your Game Boy Advance and PlayStation games on this. Maybe you delete the pirated games first and dump your own ROMs or something like that.

• 3:48:22David Pierce?

  As I always do.

• 3:48:23Speaker 20

  As you do, yes.

• 3:48:24Alex Cranz?

  I feel like Anabrik's already gonna get wrecked for you just saying, yeah, it comes with all of the pirated games on it.

• 3:48:30David Pierce?

  Every time Sean talks about one of these, there was, I think you did a, you did a TikTok, Sean, talking about the, the new Anvernic thing. And every single comment was like, Sean, be cool, man. Stop telling people about this. Give me my free game.

• 3:48:42Alex Cranz?

  TikTok shop is all over those things. Like, it's been snitched on enough.

• 3:48:47Speaker 20

  Just to illustrate, though, that the EA, the EA FIFA game is not a Steam Deck problem. The top comment on EA Sports FC 24 is, EA FC 24 not launching on PC after anti-cheat back to EA app. So it's not a Steam Deck thing so much as it is an EA doesn't care thing.

• 3:49:06David Pierce?

  Interesting. Okay, so it truly is, EA is like, there are ways you could get around the rules that we have. So we're just taking our ball and going home.

• 3:49:14Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 3:49:15David Pierce?

  That doesn't feel like it's getting better anytime soon. That, that does not give me hope for the, for improvements coming here. Which also means, listen, there's, there's a lot of sports games this means I can't play anymore. But now I'm gonna have to get into like, cool nerd games. It's gonna be great.

• 3:49:28Alex Cranz?

  You, you can play them streaming.

• 3:49:31David Pierce?

  That's true. Steam Deck plus Game Pass, I think is starting to feel like the realist answer I have here.

• 3:49:36Alex Cranz?

  You'll have Halo and FIFA? Like, you will be the, the hit of every frat party you go to.

• 3:49:42David Pierce?

  Okay, last question. And then, and then we have to go.

• 3:49:46Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 3:49:47David Pierce?

  Am I stupid for buying a Steam Deck right now in the same way that I might be stupid for buying a Switch right now? Where are we in the Steam Deck cycle?

• 3:49:54Alex Cranz?

  We're fine, right?

• 3:49:55Speaker 20

  We're mid, yeah. We're mid-cycle. We're not late yet. The thing that Valve needs, they've told us, like, told me to my face. What they need to see is, they need to see a major improvement in performance without sacrificing battery life from a chip manufacturer before they start building the next true Steam Deck. And I've heard this from other companies, too, like Asus with the ROG LIX. They were like, "We don't think we can get it right now, so we're gonna ship the ROG LIX with the same chip."

• 3:50:25Alex Cranz?

  And I don't think Qualcomm has changed that calculus at all with the Snapdragon.

• 3:50:30David Pierce?

  And even if it has, we're a ways away from that actually appearing inside of a product.

• 3:50:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think, I think we're probably a good, we're at least a year out. I think you'll have one beautiful blissful year before you get FOMO, at least.

• 3:50:43David Pierce?

  Okay. And that's, I mean, honestly, in gadget world, that's, that's all you can ask for.

• 3:50:47Alex Cranz?

  I was like, a year is an eternity in gadget world.

• 3:50:50David Pierce?

  I mean, listen, I've made it this far into the PS5 cycle without upgrading. Like, it turns out I can, I can manage my FOMO on this one.

• 3:50:57Alex Cranz?

  I am so impressed.

• 3:50:59David Pierce?

  Thank you. That's actually the other question I should ask. It's like, am I being ridiculous? Should I just buy a PS5 and move on with my life?

• 3:51:04Speaker 20

  Ooh.

• 3:51:05Alex Cranz?

  I mean, have infinite, if you have infinite money, yes.

• 3:51:09David Pierce?

  If I buy a PS5, I almost certainly will end up buying a Portal. And I hate myself for it, but it will probably happen.

• 3:51:16Alex Cranz?

  Then I say, "Don't," because I want to save you from the Portal.

• 3:51:19Speaker 20

  You could buy a used Steam Deck LCD for the price of a Portal and also have a Portal built into it with an app.

• 3:51:25David Pierce?

  Oh, well, that's very compelling.

• 3:51:26Speaker 20

  But PS5, like, if you do love that I'm sitting on my couch with my 4K OLED TV experience, it's hard to beat the PS5 for that. I'm playing Spider-Man 2 on it right now on just a gorgeous new OLED panel that was deep discounted recently. And wow, the pop of that city, the lights at night, it's, it's, it's, it's really something.

• 3:51:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I do love that, but I think I am increasingly coming around to, like, having a thing with me is more important than the sort of very best possible experience. I would love to have both, but I don't think you can really have both right now in the world we live in.

• 3:52:04Speaker 20

  And if you really want to have that thing with you, I don't think there's anything that beats the Steam Deck. There's just so much you can now take with you that you can't, the same way with the Windows handhelds, you can't really with Android.

• 3:52:17David Pierce?

  All right, well, we have ended where we began, which I find very frustrating, but also sort of telling. I'm gonna buy a Steam Deck. Yeah. I probably should have bought a Steam Deck a really long time ago. I'm gonna buy a Steam Deck and I will start yelling loudly at EA. I will report back.

• 3:52:31Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited for you. Everybody's excited about the EA, though.

• 3:52:34David Pierce?

  Do you have any immediate setup tips? Before we talk again, I will have purchased a Steam Deck. What should I do immediately out of the box with my brand new Steam Deck OLED?

• 3:52:42Speaker 20

  I have so many nerdy suggestions.

• 3:52:44David Pierce?

  I don't want nerdy suggestions, Sean. I say this with love. I want to get to playing games well as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Like, I am worried about the Steam Deck because I'm worried it's so fidgety and finicky that I'm gonna spend my whole life goofing with the joysticks and not playing games.

• 3:53:01Alex Cranz?

  So Steam Deck has this, like, on the Steam Deck, they have compatibility for games. And you can also see it on the Steam software. So like, you can just go download Steam ahead of time, find some games you like, make sure they're compatible, and then it'll be just out of the box, ready to go. Anything that's like yellow or red, you'll have to mess with a little bit. That's where you have to start tweaking things. Like, I tried to play Crusader Kings on it. Don't, that's, it's not for the Steam Deck. It's terrible.

• 3:53:26Speaker 20

  There's even a tab in the store where you can just like, "Only show me games that work well with the Steam Deck." And for the most part, they do.

• 3:53:34Alex Cranz?

  They, yeah, and it's a lot of stuff, right? Like, it's a ton of stuff. The ones that don't is stuff that's like Mass Effect, which is an EA game, so you know why it doesn't work well.

• 3:53:43David Pierce?

  I will say the other game in my life that I have loved with my whole heart the way that I have loved FIFA with my whole heart is Portal. And the idea of having a Steam thing that will let me play the Portal games forever is very exciting.

• 3:53:54Alex Cranz?

  And it'll just, straight out of the box, you'll be off to the races, having a great time. Yeah, it really is so easy to just get going on the Steam Deck. Provided you already own games.

• 3:54:06Speaker 20

  Elden Ring plays well there. Ori and the Will of the Wisps, if you haven't played that yet, play that on the Decolet. Oh my god, it looks brilliant on the Decolet. That game is made for HDR. Persona 5, have you played any Persona games?

• 3:54:19David Pierce?

  Bits and pieces, but never, never super deeply.

• 3:54:22Speaker 20

  Okay. Get Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal, whichever one's better for your budget. Play that on Steam Deck. It's epic. We could spend the rest, you've spent another hour talking about games to play on.

• 3:54:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was about to say, have you played Final Fantasy Remake yet? Like, beautiful on the Steam Deck.

• 3:54:38David Pierce?

  Alright, my list is long and none of them are the only game that I needed, but you know, we're doing the best we can here.

• 3:54:44Alex Cranz?

  You can get FIFA 23 fairly easily on the Steam Deck.

• 3:54:48David Pierce?

  Okay, that might help. Maybe that's like my gateway drug out of being obsessed with FIFA. I'll just play old games enough to satiate me and then go play better games.

• 3:54:57Alex Cranz?

  You get Ted Lasso in that one, you'll be fine.

• 3:55:02David Pierce?

  Alright, thank you both. This was very helpful. I'm gonna go spend a bunch of money.

• 3:55:05Alex Cranz?

  Alright.

• 3:55:13Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm your friend Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 3:55:15David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 3:55:16Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz is on a break, but for our first segment, Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop is joining us. Hey Charlie.

• 3:55:24Speaker 21

  Hey guys, thanks for having me.

• 3:55:25Nilay Patel?

  We have a lot of AI, music, copyright to talk about. There's some lawsuits. As always, Drake is involved. It just seems to be the way of the world. There's a bunch of new phone events coming that just got announced, we'll talk about. There are new party speakers from Ultimate Ears, that's very important to me. We got a full show before the 4th of July. This is America's technology podcast. But before we begin, I have to issue a correction. There are some words that I only read and I never say out loud.

• 3:55:59Speaker 21

  Ooh, which ones?

• 3:56:00Nilay Patel?

  There are lots of those words. Tons of them. I was a small nerdy child in the middle of Wisconsin. Who read a lot of books that the other children in Wisconsin were not interested in this just a whole universe of vocabulary words.

• 3:56:14David Pierce?

  What is like your main one from when you were a kid that you you were like 26 and all of this? I feel like chameleon is like the classic of the genre, right? Where like the half the people in the world grew up thinking it was chameleon. For me, it was learning that Hermione's name is Hermione and not Hermione. As I call her for however many books I read before I saw the movie. Did you guys have these that you grew up with?

• 3:56:35Nilay Patel?

  Um, I still.

• 3:56:36David Pierce?

  Way late.

• 3:56:37Nilay Patel?

  I still don't know whether it's dearth or Darth. And I don't want to find out.

• 3:56:44David Pierce?

  Fair enough. Don't email us about it.

• 3:56:46Nilay Patel?

  Don't tell me. Though I don't, and I don't know if it means a lot or not enough.

• 3:56:52Speaker 21

  On Switched on Pop, we have an ongoing uncertainty about whether it is homage or homage. And we have been written many emails that it's both. And so we've refused to use the word from now on out.

• 3:57:04Nilay Patel?

  Niche and niche, very confusing.

• 3:57:07Speaker 21

  Both acceptable.

• 3:57:08Nilay Patel?

  Also have been told it's both. So there's a lot of these.

• 3:57:10Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 3:57:11Nilay Patel?

  One of them in recent times is risk five, which is, I would say, not a thing that comes up in casual conversation for anyone, even the people who are working on risk five. Brian just walked around the office saying risk five.

• 3:57:28Nilay Patel?

  I said it was risk V the other day. All right. I'm sorry. I mean, this is your correction. You got one on me. I apologize. I don't know what kind of slash dot nerds are reading it out loud.

• 3:57:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you're my people and you're listening and you know, like, we have a bond here. You're listening to a podcast in which the word is said out loud and you, the audience, know that I've mispronounced, there's something special there. Precious, I want to protect it. I'm just saying, we are the only people who know.

• 3:57:59Speaker 21

  How do you know they're right and that you aren't now?

• 3:58:01Nilay Patel?

  Also, it's also a good question, Charlie. Am I being gaslit by an internet conspiracy?

• 3:58:05David Pierce?

  I would also like to posit that with all Roman numerals, the, the letter and the number are both correct. Like when the iPhone X came out and it was the iPhone X, it was the iPhone X. I don't care what anyone said. I got a lot of crap for that and it was the iPhone X because it was, it was the iPhone and then the letter X. You call it whatever you want. I, I submit that both should be allowed at all times.

• 3:58:30Nilay Patel?

  So I would, I, I, I support this in theory. It's Super Bowl XL.

• 3:58:34David Pierce?

  Unless it's more than one letter, then.

• 3:58:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, but Super Bowl XL, like they, they were hyped for it, right?

• 3:58:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, they did a thing.

• 3:58:40Nilay Patel?

  That's your moment. But I was one of those slash dot nerds who was like, it's me, it was 10. So I'm sorry. Like I, you know?

• 3:58:48David Pierce?

  Even though it's not, it's OSX.

• 3:58:50Nilay Patel?

  We kind of.

• 3:58:52Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, that's your correction. I'm just telling you what we, what we share as a group is special. And I'm, I'm sorry that I pushed the boundary of it, but I'm also saying, no one says these words out loud.

• 3:59:03Nilay Patel?

  It's just not a thing that happens and I feel nothing.

• 3:59:06Speaker 21

  Charlie XCX has entered the chat.

• 3:59:11Nilay Patel?

  What is the, what is XCX in numbers?

• 3:59:13Speaker 21

  It isn't a real one.

• 3:59:15Nilay Patel?

  Isn't C in Roman numeral?

• 3:59:17David Pierce?

  C is 100, so that would be 100. It would be 90 and then 10 more.

• 3:59:21Speaker 21

  I don't think it allows you to put them in this order.

• 3:59:24David Pierce?

  It's just Charlie C.

• 3:59:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how Roman numerals work. Speaking of things that are bad at math, AI.

• 3:59:36David Pierce?

  That's good.

• 3:59:37Nilay Patel?

  It's good. A big week in the AI landscape. A weird week for me emotionally. I'll explain why in a second. The major labels have sued two AI companies that you may or may not have heard of. Udio and Suno, these are classic Silicon Valley names. We should all be proud. They're music companies, AI music companies. Udio is the company whose tool was used to make BB Eldrizzy. We'll have Charlie explain that entire chain of events. And then Suno has a deal with Microsoft. It's in Copilot and you can ask it to Giant Music and Copilot. How would you train an AI tool to make music? You might ask, as did the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America. And the answer is you just put a bunch of music in them.

• 4:00:19Nilay Patel?

  And you train the model on a bunch of music, including what appears to be a remarkable amount of the recording industry's music, not just music that's out in the world. The companies are sued, there's a lawsuit, the RIA is mad, the RIA is already mad. They say that they asked the companies what was used to train the models. The companies, Suno, deflected and said their training data was confidential business information. Fine, UDO made the same statements. And then Suno also said, our stuff is transformative and designed to generate completely new outputs, not memorized and regurgitate pre-existing content. We'll get to that in a second because that is actually a very funny claim based on what you can do.

• 4:01:03Nilay Patel?

  The RIA put tracks in lawsuit, which we will listen to. It straightforwardly can just make Johnny B. Goode in a song called Prancing Queen.

• 4:01:12David Pierce?

  Which is my favorite.

• 4:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Deeply hilarious. There's just a part of this where these companies knew that what they were doing was training on copyrighted work. And they kind of assumed that they would get away with it, or at least be able to like pay the money and move on.

• 4:01:27David Pierce?

  Can I ask, can I ask a very possibly dumb framing question about this? Because I want, we're going to get into the weeds of like a very specific music case. But a lot of what you just described, the sort of basic outlines of like how these companies trained their data and what they're being accused of doing and who's mad feels identical to me to every other conversation we've had about these AI models. Right? Like, it seems to me that if you change Johnny B. Goode and Suno to the New York Times and ChatGPT, we're functionally talking about the same thing. So like, I want to get into the, deep into this in weird ways, but like, is there something different about the fact that we're doing this with music?

• 4:02:09David Pierce?

  Then the fact, the way we've been doing this with like the web for the last year or so?

• 4:02:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and it's that the music industry is organized and aggressive when it comes to protecting its rights.

• 4:02:21Speaker 21

  So the difference is lawyers.

• 4:02:23Nilay Patel?

  The difference is lawyers. And also, the history of music and the internet is lawyers. Like, the reason I'm so conflicted about this is that I went and became a copyright lawyer because Napster came out when I was in college and I was radicalized because I thought everyone was stupid, which is what should happen when software comes out when you're in college.

• 4:02:44Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 4:02:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming there are some kids out there today who are radicalized for the presence of new software. But that wasn't, for me, it was Napster. I went off and became a copyright attorney. I sucked at it. I don't ever want anyone to think I was good at this. As a practicing attorney, I was garbage. But the thing I did was I worked at a law firm that defended other college kids who got sued for using Kazaa against the RIA. And the RIA was suing college kids and actually suing the universities to get the IP address of the college kids on their networks who are using the tools and then identifying the college students and suing the college students.

• 4:03:17Speaker 21

  It was my roommate's computer. It wasn't me.

• 4:03:19Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 4:03:19Speaker 21

  I swear.

• 4:03:20Nilay Patel?

  This is like a lot, right? That's just a lot to be like, the universities are caving and not protecting their students. All this stuff is happening. And they were running this program at break even. They just wanted $5,000 settlement so everyone would be scared and stop doing it. And they won. That worked, sort of. Now we're back to it, right? But like, the movie industry is not quite as good. It's stopping higher seas than the music industry was. And they ran that program to kind of shut it down and chill Napster and Grokster and Kazaa and all the other ones. They ran Grokster all the way up to the Supreme Court. That decision is 20 years old now. The RIA versus Grokster. Great. Then they did the iTunes Store and they got deals with Steve Jobs and then other music stores.

• 4:04:03Nilay Patel?

  And then they did Spotify and Apple Music and streaming. And all along the way, they have been extraordinarily litigious and extraordinarily protective of their copyrights because people have an emotional connection to music that they can trade on. This is true in a way that even Hollywood doesn't. Like, when Disney's like, we must protect the copyright to the Avengers, people are like, go fuck yourself. Like, right? In a way that the music industry, when it's like, you're stealing music. You are making it so artists don't get paid. There's an emotional resonance that argument tends to have. Charlie, I'm curious how you see that changing over time, but. They've been good at it and they've run the playbook over and over and over again. Music is also a closed ecosystem of like four big companies.

• 4:04:43Nilay Patel?

  And so you see things like interpolation where an artist uses a bit of a song from another artist and fans get mad and then writing credits get distributed and money flows inside of a closed ecosystem. None of that is true about the web. None of that is true about the media. So if you're like are a writer at a media company, nothing, like no one cares. Like there's not some big apparatus designed to make it as seem like your work is emotionally resonant and should be protected in the way that the music industry does. So I think that's a huge difference here. The other difference, and this is where I really try, I'm very curious for your take here, is that the outputs of these systems are just the songs, right?

• 4:05:27Nilay Patel?

  And they're, the lawsuits are about training, right? All copyright lawsuit, all copyright is dumb. Like it's a dumb legal system because it just regulates copies. And so like you made a copy to do this thing and you didn't have the permission to do the thing with the copy that you made. So copyright infringement, weird. All computers do is make copies. We've talked about this so many times on the show. So they're not talking about the outputs, but I think the outputs are so convincing. Like in order to get to the thing can just make Johnny be good. It is obvious that you made a copy of Johnny be good. Charlie, what do you think then?

• 4:06:04Speaker 21

  I feel like the music industry is the one place that copyright becomes part of public conversation in a very frequent way. People talk about when Pharrell is borrowing from Marvin Gaye. People talk about when Stairway to Heaven might be of, might have been copied by another song. People constantly are debating in social media. Hey, you kind of sound like you borrowed this other person's thing. They should get a credit on it. There's no thing in journalism where someone's like, hey, you know, Neil, I kind of use someone else's text. Maybe we should give David some extra credit on that piece that Neil I plagiarized. I'm sorry, I'm obviously not accusing you.

• 4:06:40Nilay Patel?

  I do that all the time. I don't specifically, Neil, I does that all. I have a god mode Google Docs access and I just lift everybody's copy left and right.

• 4:06:49Speaker 21

  There's just no other creative industry that where there's this like level of actual infringement that happens that then there is this internal litigious system where these major players are constantly trading credits back and forth. And the public is in on it, often debating whether or not they're the artist that they stan is making original work. This is part of popular discourse and it happens in music. So it's really different when the music industry is going after AI than if the New York Times is. Because I've just never been in a circumstance where I'm talking about that article was completely lifted from this other article, but we constantly talk about is so and so writing their own songs?

• 4:07:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. I'll give you a dumb example from movies. The movie The Dark Knight is basically an interpolation of the movie Heat, except with Batman.

• 4:07:38Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 4:07:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like many of the shots are the same. Christopher Nolan is out there being like, Heat is the greatest cops and robbers movie ever made. Like, I just wanted to make Heat, but with Batman. And then you like, watch both movies. Like, oh shit, like dude just made Heat with Batman. And that's great. And I think everyone's like, this is the best. Like, this is so cool. And then you get to, I don't know, Miley Cyrus is writing Flowers, which the lyrics just reference.

• 4:08:01Speaker 21

  Bruno Mars.

• 4:08:02Nilay Patel?

  Bruno Mars. And people are like, should she have to pay Bruno Mars? It's like, why? Like, why? Like, the melodies aren't like, she's just saying some of the same words.

• 4:08:12Speaker 21

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:08:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. But the expectation is that there should be some economic exchange of value.

• 4:08:16David Pierce?

  Well, and I would, I would think then that the existence of that exchange of value is also how you get to something like this, right? Where it's, it's not just everybody's sort of yelling and then nothing ever happens. It's that we actually have a system by which this gets solved, right? Where, where we have people get songwriting credits and then they get paid for it. And there's like, the music industry has built ways for all of this to work. And like you said, is very good at picking fights with those who do not play inside of that system. And so like, now I'm just thinking, okay, the difference between the music industry and the, the others who are fighting against OpenAI and others, like just groups of authors or whatever, is not only

• 4:08:59David Pierce?

  Does the music industry have a system by which it understands how everybody is supposed to get paid? That has existed for a long time and everybody kind of sort of understands. But also is able to marshal that whole system against anyone who wants to exist outside of that. And part of what we've been saying forever is like, all the money is on the side of the AI companies. Like, who is going to be able to run a lawsuit against Google all the way to the end? And there probably aren't that many creative industries other than the music industry that might be able to do it.

• 4:09:30Speaker 21

  They've done it before.

• 4:09:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:31Speaker 21

  They have one major concession. We wouldn't have content ID if not for music labels going after YouTube.

• 4:09:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 4:09:38Nilay Patel?

  And the music labels have gone after YouTube, right? Universal, this is where Drake gets involved. There's fake Drake that we've talked about endlessly on the show. Shout out to Laser Bong, a song that has been just aggressively censored from every major platform. Boy, does TikTok not want electronic music about bongs on its platform.

• 4:09:57David Pierce?

  Sue about that, record labels.

• 4:09:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, you want to talk about government censorship?

• 4:10:02Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 4:10:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, the Chinese government is like, no bongs for American teens. Just saying it. And the piece of that puzzle that's super interesting to me is Universal was mad about fake Drake. They went to Spotify, Apple, they said, don't have this, don't have this song. And Spotify and Apple control the catalogs on their music service they can pull down. YouTube is open access, right? So anyone can upload anything. And then there is content ID and they have these other copyright management systems on YouTube. But it's not the same catalog control where you can just delete the song, the way that Spotify and Apple Music can just delete the song. So they had to come up with some other system and YouTube did give the concessions, right? They put out a list of like AI principles that they would work on about safety, about this other stuff.

• 4:10:44Nilay Patel?

  And a lot of it was, we're going to work directly with Universal and the rest of the music industry to figure out what tools are valuable and what tools aren't. And even to allow some creators to like, do some of this AI music generation, because we think it's cool. And then we'll, obviously we'll figure out how to pay them. This is implicit, if you're like, co-announcing that tool with Universal Music, Universal Music is going to get paid.

• 4:11:04Speaker 21

  Yes.

• 4:11:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, the heat death of the universe could occur and Lucy and Grange, the CEO of Universal Music, would get paid. Like, he's good at it.

• 4:11:11Speaker 21

  Yes.

• 4:11:12Nilay Patel?

  These two companies did not do that. There's a quote from one of the VCs in Suno, a Rolling Stone profile from March. He just says to Rolling Stone, if we had deals with the labels when the company got started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.

• 4:11:28David Pierce?

  Wild thing to say out loud.

• 4:11:30Nilay Patel?

  Incredible thing to say out loud.

• 4:11:31Speaker 21

  They said the quiet thing out loud because behind all of this, they haven't ever really quite publicly admitted that they are using copyrighted works. They've talked around that in every way they possibly can without denying it. And this is sort of like the big, yeah, this is the, this is the smoking gun.

• 4:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then the other smoking gun, and this is probably should just listen to some of this music, is the output of the models themselves, which is, I mean, let's listen to it and we can talk about it. David, take us through it.

• 4:11:59David Pierce?

  Okay, I have, I have brought some sound. Uh, thank you to Andrew and Liam for getting all of this together. Uh, we have three examples and I, I will just roll through all three. Stop me when you have feelings about this. Uh, the first thing we'll do is, uh, this is just titled Real Chuck Berry in Riverside. Uh, so let's just listen to this first.

• 4:12:20Nilay Patel?

  By the way, and this is all fair use. No copyright infringement intended. All right, YouTube. All right, go ahead.

• 4:12:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's enough. Stop it before the robot censors arrive.

• 4:12:40David Pierce?

  Great song.

• 4:12:40Speaker 21

  I can confirm.

• 4:12:41David Pierce?

  I really love it.

• 4:12:42Nilay Patel?

  If you don't know that song, one, go watch Back to the Future. Incredible movie that you should just watch. And two, like, stop, go get culture.

• 4:12:51Speaker 21

  Johnny Be Good, Chuck Berry.

• 4:12:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:53Speaker 21

  Founder of rock and roll, one of them.

• 4:12:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. And now we have a song from Udeo, which is not called Johnny Be Good, but just listen.

• 4:13:17David Pierce?

  So, I mean, it's.

• 4:13:19Nilay Patel?

  So that one is not a copyright infringement, just on its face.

• 4:13:22Speaker 21

  Yeah, you can't.

• 4:13:24Nilay Patel?

  You can't copyright the AI work.

• 4:13:26David Pierce?

  Yeah. Uh, okay. So that's one. Uh, next we have.

• 4:13:30Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can we, can we just, I just want to ask Charlie a, like a hard question. Charlie's a professor of music at NYU, I believe, right?

• 4:13:37Speaker 21

  Yes.

• 4:13:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, professor.

• 4:13:40Nilay Patel?

  Let's say you didn't have Johnny B. Good in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of rock and roll that is built on Johnny B. Good. Could you back your way into Johnny B. Good?

• 4:13:52David Pierce?

  Monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare, right? Like, that's the, is that the theory here?

• 4:13:55Nilay Patel?

  You don't need, do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of rock and roll?

• 4:14:01Speaker 21

  It's a really good question because, you know, if you look at this era of, of music where R and B, rock and roll are sort of like rockabilly, are all kind of one entity. The music is drawing on 12 bar blues, a very standard song structure. They're often in the same keys that play well on guitar. They're using a lot of the same kind of guitar licks. They're mostly using pentatonic scales. They're using a lot of the same language. And you might think, yeah, you could just sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words, let's be clear, the copy is worse. It does not sound nearly as good as the real Johnny B. Good. You could never get to that same place without having heard that Johnny B. Good. I feel confident.

• 4:14:44Speaker 21

  And if these two songs, one being a real song and the other being, nobody owns the copyright and it's made by an AI, if, if there were a copyright case made against the copy, it would definitively lose. I, I have, the, many of these cases, many of these music copyright cases are not clear. They're often fought over eight notes, sometimes six notes, sometimes a general feel in the case of blurred lines and I got to give it up. This is a direct copy of the rhythm and the words and most of the melody. So, no, you had to have heard this song in order to make Johnny B. Good twice.

• 4:15:24Nilay Patel?

  By the way, if you want more on eight notes and how complicated it is, Charlie and I did an entire episode of Decoder pulling that apart. We'll link that in the show notes somewhere, but let's move on. Let's listen to the next one.

• 4:15:32David Pierce?

  It's very good. All right, next up, we have James Brown. First, real James Brown.

• 4:15:49David Pierce?

  I mean, the classic, all-timer.

• 4:15:51Nilay Patel?

  Another one where if you're listening to Verchass and you have never heard this song, like, I don't know what you're doing.

• 4:15:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. Go listen to Switched On. You need it very badly.

• 4:15:59Nilay Patel?

  Go to school and then come on, come on home.

• 4:16:01David Pierce?

  And now we have AI James Brown.

• 4:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Wow!

• 4:16:06Speaker 08

  I feel good.

• 4:16:07Nilay Patel?

  Ooh!

• 4:16:08Speaker 08

  I knew that I would not.

• 4:16:09Nilay Patel?

  It's spicy.

• 4:16:12Speaker 08

  I feel good. I knew that I would not.

• 4:16:19Speaker 08

  So good.

• 4:16:20David Pierce?

  Okay, so this one, I actually think is very fun because it is a little, it's like a little tiny bit further away from it. In the way that the first one just is Johnny B. Good but worse. This one is like one tiny tick further away from being just the thing.

• 4:16:35Nilay Patel?

  This is a lounge band with pretension. Where everyone's like, just play it the way that, can you stop it? All right, like, we get it. You thought you had something. I have one question about this, and it, I actually felt the same way about Johnny B. Good. The way these models work, right, is you ingest a bunch of data into them. They set a bunch of model weights, and then they like statistically make the next bit. Right, they're just sort of like assembling the thing around the prompt. Which means they're kind of just assembling ones and zeros to make a sound wave here, which is pretty wild if you think about it. Like, that makes sense with words, right? What is statistically the next word in the sentence around this prompt? When you get to like, what are the ones and zeros of a sound file? And you get to statistically hear the next ones and zeros?

• 4:17:20Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty weird. It's actually a pretty weird way to make an audio recording. And the thing that strikes me about these, this one in particular, but the other one a little bit, the instruments don't sound real at all to me. Those horns sound so fake. Not like synthesizer fake.

• 4:17:37David Pierce?

  No.

• 4:17:37Nilay Patel?

  But almost exactly like what you would expect if you asked a computer to statistically produce a horn section.

• 4:17:43David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 4:17:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's almost played again. You're like, just listen to it. It's so weird.

• 4:17:48Speaker 08

  Wow! I feel good. I knew that I would not.

• 4:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Do you hear how like weird and thin it is?

• 4:17:58Speaker 08

  I knew that I would not.

• 4:18:07Speaker 21

  It doesn't sound like an ensemble of horns. It sounds like this weird synthesized thing where the, the beginning of the sound and the end of the sound is exactly lined up. The sound is, uh, yeah, there's this artifacting quality to it. This is like the Pope's jacket version of sound.

• 4:18:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 4:18:22Speaker 21

  It's like, you got it close, but all the lines are wrong. Why does he have seven fingers?

• 4:18:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's a, it's a statistical approximation of a hand, right? But as expressed as a horn section, which is really weird, like just on its face. And you can, you know, people are like, it'll get better and blah, blah, blah. But like, you can, to me, you can hear a meaningful difference. Once you know what you're listening for. And it's like, oh, this is a fake instrument. It's not, and it's not a fake instrument the way a synthesizer is a fake instrument.

• 4:18:49Speaker 21

  Right.

• 4:18:49Nilay Patel?

  It's just fake. Like it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

• 4:18:52Speaker 21

  Over the top of all of it right now, I don't know if this is a solvable problem. I imagine it probably is, is that everything sounds kind of grainy. There's like, there's this top level hiss kind of over the entire recording of any AI output. It sounds maybe equivalent to, uh, Neelai, those files that you were not downloading in college. But like the really low bit rate MP3s when MP3s were actually noticeably worse.

• 4:19:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:19:17Speaker 21

  That's what these sound like. All of them have this artificial sheen on top that sound very lo-fi.

• 4:19:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:19:24Speaker 21

  In addition to the artificial instruments.

• 4:19:26Nilay Patel?

  Just a side note, I can't listen to the song In Between Days by The Cure without mentally inserting the weird compression artifacts at the high end. Cause I listened to a shit MP3 of that song so many times that the symbols are just forever distorted in my brain.

• 4:19:40Speaker 21

  There's literally a plugin and guitar pedal called Lossy that is made to recreate the sound of early 2000s MP3s.

• 4:19:50Nilay Patel?

  That's very good.

• 4:19:50Speaker 21

  So if you need it, I can run it. It's just the elder millennial button.

• 4:19:53Nilay Patel?

  All right. So wait, yeah. So that's the sound.

• 4:19:57Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 4:19:57Nilay Patel?

  Talking about the actual music here, is this right? We're trying to be good. You're like, that's straight copyright infringement. This is weird, right? It's like slam rhyme. What do you think?

• 4:20:06Speaker 21

  I think that it's the exact same rhythms. I'd have to look at the notes. I think they're quite close. They're the exact, if they're in, maybe they're in a different key, but they're like the same intervals, moving in the same direction at the exact same time. That would almost certainly lose in court. Uh, if these were, again, if. We should be clear, the AI companies are not being sued for the output.

• 4:20:30Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 4:20:30Speaker 21

  But these outputs, if you were to try to make a case, I'm sure a judge would rule in favor of the James Brown estate because it is the same line. Well, it's more or less the same line. It's an interpolation of the line. There's slightly different words, but it's the same rhythms, same melody that almost always is going to, uh, that's always going to win.

• 4:20:48Nilay Patel?

  And here, the, the output is proof of the input.

• 4:20:51David Pierce?

  Right. They're, they're not suing for the output, but the output seems unusually important here in that respect, that it's, it's like if, if Udio is doing the thing that it claimed to be doing, which is, which is transforming stuff into other stuff. Uh, we have a very different kind of fair use case, but reading through the RAA's lawsuit, like the thing they did over and over and over was just go reproduce songs that exist in the world.

• 4:21:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah.

• 4:21:14David Pierce?

  And that's how we're fighting about training. Like I went through and pulled a bunch of the prompts that they use to get songs.

• 4:21:18Speaker 21

  We did the same thing.

• 4:21:19David Pierce?

  They're so funny. They're so funny. Like to get, uh, to get the Green Day song, I think it was American Idiot. The prompt is pop punk, American alternative rock, California, 2004, Rob Cavio. Perfect.

• 4:21:33Nilay Patel?

  And that produced a pastiche of American Idiot?

• 4:21:36David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 4:21:37Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 4:21:37David Pierce?

  To get My Girl by The Temptations, it was my tempting 1964 girl, Smokey Singh hits Phil soul pop, got My Girl by The Temptations. Uh, this one you'll enjoy, Neelai. Uh, to get All I Want For Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey. The prompt is Mariah Carey, but with a space between each letter so that it's not, because presumably these things are trained to throw out artist names. Uh, so it's M space, A space, all the way through the name. Contemporary R&B holiday, Grammy award winning American singer songwriter, remarkable vocal range. That produced All I Want For Christmas Is You. Uh, I mean, there's a million of these.

• 4:22:13Nilay Patel?

  What they're proving is that it's in set. By the way, the argument in response that I'm sure we're going to hear, because this is the argument opening I made about the Times lawsuit, was one, no human prompts like this. And B, these prompts are so weird, they represent a hack of our system, which is remarkable. Uh, but I'm confident based on how OpenAI replied to the Times that that is what these companies will reply.

• 4:22:32David Pierce?

  There is one very good one, uh, that the prompt was create a song by an artist that rhymes with true string bean that produced a Bruce Springsteen song.

• 4:22:40Nilay Patel?

  That's very good.

• 4:22:41David Pierce?

  Fantastic.

• 4:22:42Nilay Patel?

  So that question I asked Charlie about the, do you, if you have the entire history of rock and roll, do you need the first song, right? Or do you need Chuck Berry? Okay, maybe you don't, maybe you do, right? Like, I think this third example is the funniest example because I can't figure how you would get to this without specifically one thing. Go ahead, David.

• 4:23:03David Pierce?

  I'm glad you agree because I left this for last for precisely this reason. So here is, I won't even spoil it, here's the real one.

• 4:23:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, right? Everybody's heard it a million times. That's our boy, that's our boy JD.

• 4:23:20Speaker 21

  The longest lasting digital career that I never expected to happen.

• 4:23:26David Pierce?

  And, and here, here is the AI. I just want to say this was created by a prompt on Udio. This is in theory a completely synthetic new work of art.

• 4:23:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 4:23:46Nilay Patel?

  It does sound like a Jason Derulo song. Like, my routine of, does this sound like real music aside?

• 4:23:51David Pierce?

  It's even got the little, like, vocal riff at the end, like, it's, it's right.

• 4:23:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, does Jason Derulo sound like synthetic music? That's your problem.

• 4:24:00Speaker 21

  This one's interesting, though, because, you know, Neil, you've talked a lot about the issue that likeness is not copyrightable, right?

• 4:24:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:24:07Speaker 21

  And so, there's a question of, like, if, you know, we're going back to this hypothetical, there is no suit that's suing over this particular Jason Derulo riff. Someone could just, I could say Jason Derulo on a song, probably, and it's not, you can't copyright that.

• 4:24:20Nilay Patel?

  So you wait, hold on, hold on. This is weird.

• 4:24:23David Pierce?

  Didn't we have this fight the last time with the Metro Boomin?

• 4:24:25Nilay Patel?

  With the Metro Boomin song. So Metro Boomin's producer tag was the copyrightable expression in the fake Drake song.

• 4:24:32Speaker 21

  If it's exactly, if it's exactly the recording of the tag, though, right? Because it's, it was, the issue was that they actually kept in the sample of the producer tag and reproducing a recording, you can copyright that.

• 4:24:47David Pierce?

  So we could start every episode of The Vergecast with Neil singing Jason Derulo.

• 4:24:51Speaker 21

  Jason Derulo.

• 4:24:52Nilay Patel?

  And we will.

• 4:24:53Speaker 21

  I think he probably would have a lot of issues, a lot of nasty letters.

• 4:24:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, in terms of ways to boost this podcast profile after 13 years, Jason Derulo suing us is high on my list.

• 4:25:05Speaker 21

  That's wonderful. But this, this definitely proves, like, you had to have had access. There is no monkeys in the back writing Shakespeare that ends up on Jason Derulo. It just doesn't happen, it's not possible.

• 4:25:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I think if you if you took the worst impulses of the music industry and fed them into an AI, you might produce Jason Derulo.

• 4:25:23Speaker 21

  This one's also important, though, because everything else we've heard has been written by artists pre copyright act of 1974 and probably also reflects some of maybe who the lawyers are writing these, you know, these cases because,

• 4:25:39Speaker 21

  you know, we're talking about the cases reference Frank Sinatra, right? And to bring in Bruce Springsteen.

• 4:25:47Nilay Patel?

  Right, it's like Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Johnny Chuck Berry.

• 4:25:52Speaker 21

  The early ones are all Chuck Berry, like The Temptations.

• 4:25:56Nilay Patel?

  Right, are you getting it like the judges are old?

• 4:25:57Speaker 21

  I'm saying everyone, yeah, and that's actually potentially very advantageous in knowing the judge and who you might go in front of. But then to show that also they're taking all the latest music as well. We're bringing in Jason Derulo, yes.

• 4:26:07Nilay Patel?

  Judge, have you heard, Your Honor, are you familiar with Jason Derulo?

• 4:26:10Speaker 21

  I want to bring Jason Derulo into the courtroom. Jason Derulo.

• 4:26:15Nilay Patel?

  By the way, another total side note, there's an incredible Katie Notopoulos piece about hardcore Jason Derulo stans and what their stan culture is like that I will dig up and put in the show notes.

• 4:26:25Speaker 21

  Oh my gosh, that's fun.

• 4:26:26Nilay Patel?

  It is truly one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet. Just because A, it exists and B, because Katie is good at finding things like that that exist.

• 4:26:34Speaker 21

  Have you all tried running these prompts, by the way?

• 4:26:36Nilay Patel?

  No, have you?

• 4:26:38Speaker 21

  Yeah, you can go to Udio and to Suno and you can run the prompts that the that these lawsuits are alleging. And you don't get the same songs, obviously, but like if you write, make a jazz crooner song about New York, paratone voice, you will definitely get, it's Frank Sinatra. There's just like, there's no other song but Frank's. And I don't think that that really is hacking the systems. It's really easy. The other thing I get a lot, by the way, are random prompt, hey, that sounds strangely like Crazy Town by Butterfly. My prompt was actually, I tried to make a rap about American founder, Thomas Jefferson.

• 4:27:15Nilay Patel?

  Butterfly by Crazy Town.

• 4:27:16Speaker 21

  Yeah, sorry, thank you, Butterfly by Crazy.

• 4:27:18Nilay Patel?

  If there's a band called Butterfly that had a song called Crazy Town, that would be perfect.

• 4:27:21Speaker 21

  In another universe.

• 4:27:23Nilay Patel?

  On Udio, I'm sure there is.

• 4:27:24Speaker 21

  I tried to, I tried, I did try to hack these systems a little bit and I wrote, I want you to write a rap about American founder, Thomas Jefferson, about not throwing away his shot, nasal male rapper Boom Bap. And what I got was basically Butterfly by Crazy Town.

• 4:27:40Nilay Patel?

  Just like total random.

• 4:27:42Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 4:27:42Speaker 04

  With enhanced scrubbing out the revolution.

• 4:27:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 4:28:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry Ted. I'm just sorry for listening to this.

• 4:28:09Nilay Patel?

  That really is Butterfly by Crazy Town.

• 4:28:11Speaker 21

  I think it's also a little bit of, uh, who was that song Superman?

• 4:28:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Oh, wow.

• 4:28:15Speaker 21

  Who's Superman by?

• 4:28:18Nilay Patel?

  I'll be your kryptonite or whatever. That was horrible.

• 4:28:20Speaker 21

  Yeah, kryptonite, three doors down. Is that who it's by?

• 4:28:23Nilay Patel?

  Down. It is by three doors down.

• 4:28:25Speaker 21

  It's got a little bit of that. It's just, you can so easily hear references that are not even the thing that you prompt. And I just, I have to say that if you, right now, if you go to the homepage of Udio, the two most popular tracks are exact sound alikes of Eminem and Snoop Dogg. So people are doing this, like people are trying to make sound alikes.

• 4:28:47Nilay Patel?

  So the argument from all these companies is, look, training is fair use. And that's the argument for OpenAI, that's the argument for Google, it's the argument for Suno and Udio. The organization of these cases is different because the plaintiffs are different, right? The New York Times is situated differently than the major labels. People have different emotional relationships with different kinds of work. But this is the argument, like when Google eventually goes and sues OpenAI for training on YouTube, the weirdness of that argument is Google telling OpenAI the training on YouTube is not fair. Like, that's what's gonna happen here. It's all the same argument. It's all kind of in a circle.

• 4:29:23Speaker 21

  Wait, so Google can do it and it's fair use, but Suno and Udio cannot do it because it's not fair use?

• 4:29:28Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is the trap the industry has set for itself.

• 4:29:31Speaker 21

  And our giant consolidated.

• 4:29:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. It's like, it's all the same VCs and all, in all different directions.

• 4:29:37Speaker 21

  Kind of like the music business.

• 4:29:38Nilay Patel?

  That's true. There's that line though, it's like, you have to be perfect every time and I just have to get through once. Yeah. It's like, I can't, I don't remember exactly what it is. That's what's like. It's like the hacker creed, right? Like you have to stop me every time. All I have to do is, I just have to get through once. Yeah. And that is, that feels like the copyright situation for AI right now. This is a house of cards. And maybe, maybe the Times will win. Maybe the record labels will win. Maybe Sarah Silverman will win. Like, there are so many of these. Maybe Google and OpenAI reach an agreement about training on YouTube, and then a bunch of YouTube creators sue, and maybe they win. Like, you can just game it out a hundred different ways. At some point, someone is

• 4:30:22Nilay Patel?

  going to win a lawsuit that says training is not fair use.

• 4:30:25Speaker 21

  Yeah. The fair use argument here, I feel like is notable, I feel like is quite different than what the New York Times can claim. Because part of fair use is, for example, the effect on the potential market, right? And with New York Times, they're going to have to argue, well, you know, you're using our articles, and other people are taking that and creating text and putting it on other pseudo journalistic sites, right?

• 4:30:50Nilay Patel?

  I, I, I'm pretty sure the Times is suing for both the output and the training.

• 4:30:54Speaker 21

  I see. Okay.

• 4:30:54Nilay Patel?

  So I, I, I think these cases are all different. This is what I mean. Like, the strategy for one doesn't work for all of them in the same way.

• 4:31:01Speaker 21

  Right. In the case of music, the marketplace argument, like, is it going to affect the marketplace? Is, I think they have a very strong argument here. I think the RIA has a very strong argument. They're basically saying, Suno and Udio, you are charging users' money to make songs that you are allowing them to upload to the exact same place where we also have all of our songs, on Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera. And so you are actually changing the marketplace for music, having used all of this output. But is that, is that not part of the argument, you're saying?

• 4:31:33Nilay Patel?

  I, I think we have to find out how that shakes out.

• 4:31:37Speaker 21

  Right.

• 4:31:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, I don't know, they gotta get assigned a judge, right? Like, right now, what they've done is they put out a complaint in a press release. There hasn't been a reply to that complaint, or an answer. They haven't been assigned a judge. Like, they haven't done any discovery. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. And we certainly don't know where they're going to put their focus. But that part where copyright law is just about making copies, and in the history of computing, every single copy has been litigated down to, again, I bring it up, I think I bring it up every time, MAI versus Peak Systems, you go look it up. This is, are you a third-party software seller allowed to load software into a computer's memory without permission? Crazy, a crazy court case.

• 4:32:20Nilay Patel?

  Can you put a disk in a computer and load software from the disk to the hard drive without my permission? Got litigated and they lost. Crazy, they lost and then we had to get all the way through caching. Our ephemeral copies on your ISP's network equipment. Are those copies that should be litigated? This is copyright law, it's dumb, like it is a very dumb rationale, but it litigates the creation of copies. So here it's, did you have permission to make a copy to train your model of all these songs? And every time you didn't have permission, by the way, we want the statutory maximum of $150,000. Which essentially ends up being a pretend amount of money.

• 4:32:59Speaker 21

  It's gotta be bigger than the US GDP.

• 4:33:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like crazy, right? Like, did you have permission to copy every song in the world? And if you didn't, every song in the world times $150,000 is what we're asking for.

• 4:33:08Speaker 21

  I'm gonna run this.

• 4:33:09Nilay Patel?

  If you didn't have that permission, can we do an analysis that says that use is fair use? Right, so fair use is what's called an affirmative defense to copyright infringement where you you you admit it. Like, I did, I did it, but under this other rationale, that's that's fine. And so that's like the winding path here is, well, first, they won't even cop to having made the copies. Which is why the music industry is putting out, well, here's just Johnny B. Goode. Like, you can't output Johnny B. Goode unless you copy Johnny B. Goode on the on the front end, right? Okay, so first we gotta get them to cop to making the copies at all, which they claim is proprietary business information. Sure. Then it's, was that copy allowed? They obviously didn't have permission, this is why they're in a lawsuit.

• 4:33:54Nilay Patel?

  And then it and then it's, is it fair use? And then we run the analysis. And the analysis is like the purpose and character of the use, the amount of the use, the nature of the use, the and then the last factor is the effect on the market.

• 4:34:06Speaker 21

  Right.

• 4:34:07Nilay Patel?

  On the output side, I think the market argument is really strong.

• 4:34:09Speaker 21

  Right, right. So the question is, does this case, this is what I actually don't understand, maybe you can explain with your copyright law degree. Can can is there like some wall between the input and the output in in this argument that says, well, there's no marketplace.

• 4:34:24Nilay Patel?

  You know that emoji that's like this with the hands? It's the hands are up like I'm just that emoji right now. I don't know.

• 4:34:29Speaker 21

  Cause, cause I was trying to say, oh, well, there's a clear change in the marketplace for songs, which are all outputs. But it sounds like, you know, we don't know what the responses are going to be, but they could say, well, there isn't currently a marketplace for training data in this kind of way. And so it's not affecting that marketplace.

• 4:34:43Nilay Patel?

  But if you, there will never be a market if you just set the rate at zero.

• 4:34:48Speaker 21

  Right.

• 4:34:49Nilay Patel?

  Right? So if you're like, I want really high quality music for my high quality music AI program, I'm going to go pay a bunch of artists. But then these guys come along and steal it. But you've just, you've actually preemptively destroyed the market. You've never allowed that market to set some rates. And I've heard from publishers who are taking the deals with OpenAI, disclosure, Vox Media has a content licensing deal with OpenAI. I've heard from other publishers, not our company, that one of the reasons they've taken these deals is to create that market. Right? So that the times can go to court and say, this has an effect on the market. Look at this market. Look at the money that's moving around. And so some of these publishers are playing kind of a strategic game to say, we should create a market to help that factor along.

• 4:35:33Nilay Patel?

  I think that's fascinating. The, but I don't think that the AI company, I think they thought they could just buy forgiveness. And what's crazy to me is when it was Napster or YouTube or Google Search even, buying forgiveness worked because people liked the companies. They liked the products, they liked the experiences they were having. And here, people, I mean, I'm, if you're listening to this and you have a very different view of this, let me know. But our audience is pretty loud with us that they don't like these companies and they don't, they, they perceive this as a moral problem. And I, I think that's just a very different position for them all to be in.

• 4:36:12Speaker 21

  Which brings us to your moral quandary. Seems like you flipped sides from 20 years ago.

• 4:36:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the idea that I'm sitting here being like the RIA as a point is crazy. Like it's bananas. And Sarah Jeong and I have been like all day, every day, like slacking, like who have we become? You know, this is like the horseshoe theory of copyright law politics. It's weird, man. And I, I think one of the pieces of the puzzle, and I'm curious how you see this in the music industry itself, Charlie. One of the pieces of the puzzle here is that the internet just blew the bottom out of the music industry. Like there's no, there's no way to be like a middle class musician anymore. There's no guaranteed way to make money. You're like, you're playing the same algorithmic game as everyone else. You're beholden to some labels. You don't have any powers as an individual against these platforms.

• 4:36:58Nilay Patel?

  So now this next group of people who's come and taken your work for free and is going to extract value from you. Well, sure, like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's, it's kind of the vibe. But I'm wondering if you see that reflected in the actual music industry.

• 4:37:13Speaker 21

  Absolutely. I mean, the public perception here is so different than what was happening back in the Napster era. Back in the Napster era, the labels were enemy number one. Selling out to labels was, was a big, you know, they were, they were, they were the worst players. Today, I actually think they've done a very effective job of using their proxy Spotify and let Spotify be the enemy. And everyone's like Sony Music, who are they like Warner, UMG? Like they labeled, but they are not, they're, they're not the, the topic of conversation of who's really screwing who. Now they basically help set the rates of what gets paid out in streaming. And it's the distributors now that really are taking all the heat. And so they're actually in a better, I think, place of public perception in terms of within the music industry.

• 4:37:53Speaker 21

  I, I see songwriters, producers, fans totally freaked out about what's going on. When you go and scan through a lot of the, the YouTube comments of some of these AI songs. The, the sentiment is we are screwed. Music is over. I give up. I am not learning an instrument. Like it's, it's sort of, it is not, the future is bright. We're going to create new beautiful music. Like my creativity is going to blossom. I think that there is a, a real existential fear that is, exists within all of the, you know, the AI world. But you're, you're getting into like our human emotions and the beautiful creative output, hopefully beautiful. How you feel about?

• 4:38:36Speaker 21

  Don't bring Jason into this.

• 4:38:38Nilay Patel?

  We gotta get Derulo on the pod.

• 4:38:39Speaker 21

  I don't really do.

• 4:38:40David Pierce?

  That's obviously like, reading through the RIA's lawsuit, like that is, they talk about the creativity and human emotions at all. But is the, is the end of this just, they're trying to get checks? In the same way that there are a lot of folks out there just trying to get checks? Like, well, because part of me, like, I think obviously that's the answer, but also part of me wonders if the labels are feeling the same way that you do, which is that, oh, this is not just a thing we need to make money off of tomorrow. This is like an existential crisis for our business down the road. Or if they're like, whatever, this is just a new turn, we have to make sure we get paid.

• 4:39:13Speaker 21

  This is an existential crisis because they are already losing market share to, you know, people who are not on major labels. But major label, uh, listening is down, right? As an overall share of all listening. It's still a lot of it. It's still the majority of listening. But, so they've recognized that flooding, uh, the streamers with more and more independent music has not necessarily been good for their business. And with more flooding, it's just going to bring everything down to, everything is valueless entirely. If you own music and it gets played a lot on streaming, there's a lot of money in it. Like, there's billions and billions and billions of dollars in streaming. How it's distributed is not always fair. And people get upset about this. But they very much need to figure out how to, how to enter and participate in this

• 4:39:55Speaker 21

  marketplace. And I think kind of like a content ID system, they want to figure out how to properly license. You want to use Jason Derulo's voice? Jason Derulo says yes. And it costs this. And now we've got Jason Derulo copies and that.

• 4:40:05Nilay Patel?

  So by the way, of all of the artists who would let his voice get deep faked to make like commercials.

• 4:40:10Speaker 21

  Jason Derulo.

• 4:40:11Nilay Patel?

  Jason Derulo. And look, I'm not, I'm not even saying, I've, I've talked a lot of Jason Derulo related-ish on this episode. I'm aware of it. I just know that he is a commercial mastermind.

• 4:40:21Speaker 21

  Yes.

• 4:40:21Nilay Patel?

  That man's gonna make a bag, no matter what happens.

• 4:40:24Speaker 21

  Yes.

• 4:40:24Nilay Patel?

  Um, friend of the pod, Blake Reed, he's a professor at Colorado Law, teaches copyright, telecom, all this stuff. He wrote me a note, uh, last week or the week before, and he said something really smart that I've been thinking about. And it's related to what you're saying, David. Copyright law is like a economic system, right? We create scarcity and then we can like charge money for things because you're not allowed to just like freely copy them. So if you do something bad in the world of copyright law, the answer is you pay money and you fix it and you even out the economic problem that you've created, right? Olivia Rodrigo might have sung four notes of a Taylor Swift song. The answer is Taylor Swift gets a writing credit and then some money flows to Taylor Swift and that is the end of that story.

• 4:41:08Nilay Patel?

  And it's just an economic problem that you've solved by redistributing money. AI is a moral problem. This is the thing Blake pointed out to me is like the money doesn't solve the perceived moral issue here. So the labels might get paid, they might find some business model that lets some license to music into perpetuity or whatever. But the thing you're seeing in the YouTube comments, the thing our audience is feeling, the thing I think a lot of artists are feeling, does not get solved with money, right? It's like another problem. And so like you see these deals come up and get signed and whatever, and everyone's like, eh, it's still pretty icky, right? And there's something there that I think is important. I haven't quite puzzled it out. I actually want to do something with that idea. If you have further thoughts, let me know what you think about it. But that gap is the gap, right?

• 4:41:52Nilay Patel?

  We can move a bunch of money around, like the VCs in Hollywood and Recording Industry Association of America, God bless them, they will move the money around. Lucy and Grange will get paid. Is that going to solve the other problem, right? And that's, I think that's really hard.

• 4:42:09Speaker 21

  Well, there's two things that musicians need to not fear. One is that because the output of all of these models cannot be copyrighted, this music is kind of in this weird limbo space. Like maybe it's gonna, we will definitely find some streams, but it probably won't be synced on television and film because no TV producer is gonna want to have a song where they like, don't really understand the rights associated with that song. And if they have the right to it, and does it also secretly contain a vocal sample of James Brown that has been stolen? Like, so nobody wants to, any rights holder doesn't want to use this music that can't be used in a weird way. So I think composers and people who are putting stuff on TV and film, I think that there's still very much a business for them until these much bigger legal issues get sorted out.

• 4:42:53Speaker 21

  The other place is that music is about human connection, and I don't say this in some like wishy washy way. It's like, there is no fandom for Olivia Rodrigo without an Olivia Rodrigo. Like you need the person. The time that the music industry tried to create like an avatar. racially strangely coded. What was that guy's name? It was terrible. They tried to do like their NFT avatar pop star and it was an utter failure, but both because it was completely racist and because why would we develop a relationship to this thing? And so the the fandom side, the pop stardom side of pop music, I don't think is ever going to go away.

• 4:43:28Nilay Patel?

  What about Hatsune Miko? Right? She's she's like the cartoon character. I just learned that she's officially codenamed CVO1.

• 4:43:37Speaker 21

  Yeah, there are the there are these avatar characters that are finding some fandoms online. Yes, that's gonna happen. I still just like that doesn't that's not Olivia. That's not Taylor. That's not Gaga. I'm sorry. It's just different.

• 4:43:49Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to end it. They're not Jason Derulo.

• 4:43:51Speaker 21

  They're not Jason Derulo.

• 4:44:00David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Do you remember when you first heard about podcasts? If you've been listening to this show, The Verge Cast, since 2011, maybe it was that. Or if you were a listener of the NGadget podcast before even that, maybe that's where you got into it. Or really, to be way less self-absorbed and much more realistic about it, maybe it was Serial in 2014 that turned you and frankly, millions of other people onto the idea of radio on demand. That's when podcasts became a thing. But I bet that for most people, the farthest possible distance back you could go would be this moment in 2005, when Steve Jobs got on stage at WWDC,

• 4:44:43David Pierce?

  and before he announced that Apple was switching to using Intel chips, and before he said that Leopard would be the next version of macOS, he explained to a lot of people why they were about to start seeing podcasts in iTunes.

• 4:44:54Speaker 22

  As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now. And podcasting, of course, is a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting. And what is podcasting? It's been described a lot of different ways. One way has been TiVo for radio. You can download radio shows and listen to them on your computer or put them on your iPod anytime you want. So it's just like television programs on TV. And that's true. Another way it's been described is Wayne's World for Radio, which means that anyone without much capital investment can make a podcast, put it on a server and get a worldwide audience for their radio show. And that's true, too. We see it as the hottest thing going in radio.

• 4:45:37David Pierce?

  A fun fact from that one, by the way. Jobs talked about how there were 8,000 podcasts available at that time in 2005. And that was a huge number. He was really excited about it. Now that number is somewhere between three and five million podcasts. Lots changed. Anyway, a lot of people credit Jobs with mainstreaming both the word and the concept of podcasts, which is probably at least a little true. Podcast was the Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2005. It beat out, in case you're wondering, bird flu, reggaeton, life hack, whole bunch of other stuff. But Jobs didn't create the concept or the word. The concept, I think, is the one of those two that is trickiest to figure out. Technically, you

• 4:46:20David Pierce?

  could argue that the idea of a podcast is just like radio, and we've had that around forever. But I think you can make a pretty good case that the thing we now know as a podcast became a thing in about 2003, and it involved a guy named Chris Lyden.

• 4:46:35Speaker 23

  It was a very exciting coincidence for me. For one thing, I had been ignominiously bumped out of a wonderful job in public radio and looking for something new. Charlie Nesson at Berkman Center said, "Come and think with us." Dave Weiner arrived a few weeks later, and he said, or Charlie told me David Weiner was coming.

• 4:46:57David Pierce?

  Charles Nesson, by the way, was the creator of the Berkman Client Center for Internet and Society, which was kind of an early internet think tank at Harvard that actually still does a lot of really interesting digital work. Dave Weiner is one of the internet's earliest and longest tenured bloggers. His blog just turned 30 last week. He's also a key creator of RSS, which is the technology that spreads feeds of content around the internet. And he's just a guy who cares a lot about web publishing standards. At the time, if you wanted to start a blog, calling Dave Weiner was like calling Gordon Ramsay for tips on how to open a restaurant. And Chris Lyden, hit him up.

• 4:47:32Speaker 23

  I wrote to Dave Weiner saying, uh, six months ago, I couldn't spell blog. Now I want to be one. And we went through the blog cycle very, very quickly. But then he said, you know, radio, I know programming. What the world needs is an MP3 file that can go worldwide instantly. I said, sounds good to me. And we got to work. It only took, oh, a couple of months, I'd say. And he said, I think we got it. I said, now what, Dave? He said, well, that's obvious. You're going to do a conversation with me and we're going to put it out. We did.

• 4:48:03David Pierce?

  Leyden and Weiner ended up publishing that conversation in July of 2003. And I just want to play you the first 30 seconds or so of it, which I found, by the way, thanks to James Kridland over at podnews.net. He did a great whole big thing on the history of the word podcast. And we're actually going to talk to him about the future of podcasts later in the show. Anyway, here it is.

• 4:48:23Speaker 23

  Dave Weiner, I feel like a new immigrant in this blogger world where you're a kind of founding father. Walk me around it. And I'm not talking about the technology. I want to know what kind of democratic experiment this blog idea really amounts to.

• 4:48:39Speaker 24

  Well, um, gosh, it changes all the time. I mean, when we first started doing this, it was just a bunch of people sort of, uh, writing hello world and being amazed that it was possible to do that. And, uh, and then the next step was recognition of other people and say, wow, there's somebody else doing this and, um, learning how to communicate and, um, gosh, I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, it is what you make of it. Everybody brings something different to it and different set of expectations and everybody molds it to be whatever it means to them.

• 4:49:18David Pierce?

  They don't call what they're doing there a podcast, but I mean, that's a podcast right there. Like it's two dudes talking tech. It's all very meta. Sound quality is good, but kind of messy. That's all the hallmarks of podcasts, all in one place. And I think the thing that Weiner says at the very end, it is what you make of it, turned out to be more prescient than maybe either of them realized at the time. But still, they weren't calling it a podcast. Nobody was. They were calling these things audio blogs, if they were calling them anything. There were a handful of them out there, but none of them were podcasts until Ben Hammersley showed up. Ben, I should say right up front, is not exactly psyched that he is part of this particular slice of podcast history.

• 4:50:01Speaker 25

  Fucking bane in my life. Because there's absolutely no honor in the origin story, right? That, you know, when I die, I want to be remembered for, I don't know, a 20-year project or something, or saving orphans from a burning building, or something, something like that, rather than a word that was invented in a sort of deadline frenzy that I didn't even realize I was doing until a few months later.

• 4:50:31David Pierce?

  In 2004, Ben was working on some early RSS and publishing tech and was also writing about the burgeoning tech industry for The Guardian. And in February of 2004, he published a piece called Audible Revolution, all about the cool stuff people were doing online with audio. At the time, there were people building software that could automatically record radio streams over the internet and make them available for listening later. The iPod, obviously, was everywhere, and people were also building software to take all those streams that you had downloaded and put them onto your iPod. One step at a time, all of this stuff was starting to come together. Ben actually interviewed Chris Lyden for the piece that he wrote, and Lyden talked about how audio over the web was going to change people's relationships with their audience. It was going to democratize media.

• 4:51:16David Pierce?

  They had all these big, high-minded ideas about what audio might do. But it's right there, in the second paragraph of the story, that Ben Hammersley does the thing. Actually, let me just read you the first two paragraphs. "With the benefit of hindsight, it all seems quite obvious. MP3 players, like Apple's iPod, in many pockets, audio production software cheap or free, and web logging, an established part of the internet. All the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audio blogging? Podcasting? Gorilla media?" There it is. That, almost everyone agrees, is the first published use of the word podcasting. It's a big moment. Of course, Ben had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he wrote that word.

• 4:52:00Speaker 25

  The Guardian at the time was a print-first paper, as in, you wrote for the paper and you had a print deadline when the physical printing presses would run at 6 o'clock. And if you missed that deadline, the words weren't going to go onto the page. And that meant that every day, the sort of working rhythm was that there was this big rush to get everything done by... Quarter to six or whatever. And I'd written this article and about 5:30 or so, you know, just before the print deadline, I get an email from my editor saying, we've put it on the page and it's very nice, but it's kind of a line short and it doesn't

• 4:52:42Speaker 25

  look very good on the page. You know, the text hasn't gone green in the typesetting program. Can you write me another sentence? Just to pad it out, right? Just to make it fit beautifully on the printed page. And so I wrote an extra sentence and emailed it over. And the sentence is this sort of like mildly meaningless sentence of, but what do we call this new phenomenon? And then I sort of invented three words and put them in there and then sent it off. And then I went to the pub.

• 4:53:08David Pierce?

  Look, on the one hand, thank God, we call it podcasting and not guerrilla mediating. You know what I mean? But Ben doesn't even remember how he came up with podcasts. Everyone now says it's a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, which is what Steve Jobs said in that clip earlier. And Ben basically just said, yeah, that seems reasonable enough. But he doesn't even remember coming up with it. He also, at the time, had no idea, truly no idea what he had done.

• 4:53:36Speaker 25

  And it was only a few months later that I got emails from the Oxford English Dictionary saying, where did you find this word? We're trying to find an earlier citation for it than your piece and we can't. Where did you get it? And I, you know, pulled it out of the back of my head on a deadline panic. I had no idea. And I looked on all of the RSS related development mailing lists and so on, which is the place where it would have been. And I couldn't find any trace of it either. And so I said, well, clearly I just must have made it up. And then he said, great, because it's word of the year. And then, you know, and then it became the thing that Apple took on. And that's what they called their app. And that's what it became known as. And, you know, the rest is history.

• 4:54:20David Pierce?

  Ben made very clear several times when we talked that he didn't invent the idea of a podcast and nor does he deserve credit for what podcasts eventually became. But all these years later, he does seem to kind of like the word he came up with. It's got that nice plosive P. You can use it as a noun or a verb pretty easily. It's a good, useful word that way.

• 4:54:43Speaker 25

  But also that within it, there are context clues that normies could understand. So, you know, the iPod was the biggest thing in the world at that time. That's where the pod bit comes from. And although it was super fiddly at the beginning to to take these podcasts and put them on to your iPod, pretty rapidly, some software came out that made that simpler. And then soon after that, Apple made it possible within iTunes. And to say it's kind of like TiVo for radio that you listen to on your MP3 player is a pretty good sentence in 2002, 2003.

• 4:55:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:55:21Speaker 25

  Right. To sort of not not necessarily just hugely techie circles, or even like super early adopters, but to sort of, you know, the whoever comes after the early adopters, those people, you know, they they can understand it. And so I think it becomes one of those things where it's a fun word to say, but also it kind of has meaning within it that somebody who's used to new technologies can kind of understand straight away. And so and it becomes a self evidently good idea. Right. And then when you have a few years later, you have these very successful professionally made podcasts which take full advantage or start to take full advantage of the of the fact that they're at liberty to use as much

• 4:56:06Speaker 25

  space or as little space as they need, as much time, as little time, different episode lengths, all that sort of thing, that people started exploring that and being able to self commission and make make programs that were something you would never ever have heard before on regular broadcast radio, then then suddenly it becomes its own its own thing very rapidly. And people start to see the value of it hugely tied in with the call of gadget on the market at the time. So I think it it sort of catches that lightning of all of those different things happening at the same time.

• 4:56:41David Pierce?

  Most people do seem to agree that Ben coined the term podcast, or at least used it first. But there is one other person in the equation who definitely deserves credit. That's Danny Gregoire, who's a software engineer who used the word in an email to a list of folks working on and with an app called iPod. iPod was one of those things that could automatically take recorded audio and Put it on your iPod. The list at the time was brand new and iPoder was an app started by a guy named Adam Curry, who had an audio blog of his own at the time called Daily Source Code. Adam was a longtime radio guy. He'd also been an MTV VJ for years, and he'd also been an early internet entrepreneur. And for years at this point, he had been chatting with Dave Weiner and others

• 4:57:25David Pierce?

  about the whole concept of putting audio files in RSS. But Adam was one of the very first people to have kind of a whole vision of how this on-demand internet radio thing should actually work.

• 4:57:37Speaker 26

  Now, it was end of 2003

• 4:57:41Speaker 26

  when a friend of mine said, "Look at this cool thing I have." I said, "What do you have?" And it was the iPod. And I looked at this iPod and it was like, literally like lightning bolts because it looked, I don't have any, it looked exactly like this transistor radio my grandmother had given me when I was seven years old. This little, little Sony transistor radio, nine-volt battery. I'm like, "Yeah, you can call this a digital Walkman or, you know, whatever you want." But this to me was a radio receiver. And right away, I'm like, "Oh, let's hook it up to this RSS thing." So again, with my very poor scripting skills, I tried to rig this together with Apple Scripts. And then Kevin Marks, who I think worked at, I don't know if he worked at Google,

• 4:58:26Speaker 26

  he worked in Silicon Valley somewhere. He basically said, "Oh, here's the script that you need." And boom, I was like, "Okay, it works." So I could create a blog post and then this little script would be looking to find a new item in my blog post with a file attached to it. It would download the file. It would, because you still had to sync your iPod back in the day to your computer. And so it would trigger an update and then in the morning you'd walk in and there would be your iPod with, as the album would be basically, we didn't have the name Podcasting yet. It would be, you know, kind of the blog name or the, you know, the show name. And then it'd have these episodes under it. And I immediately started to just- Get the word out there because I needed software developers who could create this for real.

• 4:59:11David Pierce?

  That thing he's describing, that script, was iPoder. It would watch RSS feeds for audio files. It would download them, sync them to your iPod, and you're done. That's just a podcasting app, right? Adam Curry made a podcasting app. That's all it was. And in fact, his show, Daily Source Code, was in part a podcast for its own sake, you know, entertainment and content and whatever. But it was also in part sort of an ongoing beta test of how all of this podcasting technology stuff might really work.

• 4:59:41Speaker 26

  So I'd like, OK, I have an audience. It's these guys and a couple gals at the time who develop software. How do I keep them engaged in this process? Well, I need to give them content every single day. And it has to be about the stuff they're doing, which is programming. What do you do in programming? You create source code. So I did it every single day for a long time. And I missed one from time to time and they became more spaced out over time. But we kept Daily Source Code. And I would literally talk about the developments they had done the previous day. So they needed something to test on. There were no programs. So they needed something daily that sounded like, you know, a show

• 5:00:24Speaker 26

  that they could use so we could figure out, well, where did show notes go? And, you know, when someone first subscribes to a feed, do you give them the most recent one? Do you download all of the archives? All of this stuff. And so I know from my radio background, when you talk about people on the radio, it makes them feel good. So when I was talking about Andrew Grummett and, you know, the guys at iPoder X and, you know, one was in Australia and the other one was in, I don't know, somewhere in Vienna, that motivates you. And so it was both a feedback loop because I was the ultimate user, both from the content creation side and from the listener side.

• 5:01:05David Pierce?

  So you can hear this flywheel going at this point. The programmers are making podcasts. They're listening to each other's podcasts. They're building better software for listening into and making those podcasts. They're making new stuff to test it and round and round and round it goes. And a lot of that conversation was happening on the iPoder Dev email list. Which is where we come back to Danny Gregoire. In September of 2004, he wrote to the iPod or dev list that he could imagine a world in which people would want to be able to subscribe to one of these audio programs and get access to older stuff. He didn't know whether to call that older stuff, posts or episodes or shows. He actually suggested calling them pods or sods, which I'm very glad did not catch on.

• 5:01:48David Pierce?

  And he thought they might want an easier way to go through the archives. But then he wrote this. I guess one could argue that this is simply an RSS slash server side issue and that the podcaster, yes, I like making up words, should be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds of old sods by month, year, season, et cetera. He kind of made up podcasts again. Dave Weiner and others have, over the years, given Gregoire credit for, if not making it up, at least making the term podcast a thing. Adam Curry, in particular, is pretty forceful about it.

• 5:02:20Speaker 26

  And for my money, Danny Gregoire is the one who showed up with that, with that name. I know Ben Hammersley feels he invented it. He used the word a long time before that, but I'd never heard it. So Danny showed up with podcasts. It made a lot of sense because we were doing this on the, on the iPod, and so it was obvious where it came from.

• 5:02:42David Pierce?

  However, it came into be, Weiner and Curry both bought into the word immediately and did a lot of work promoting the word podcast, once it had been sort of unofficially decided on. As usual, there is no clear story about who did exactly what, who knew what, when, where the word came from, and if anyone is singularly responsible. I don't know that it matters, to be honest, but I do know this. After Gregoire's email to the iPod or group, the word podcast caught on really fast. I think the first podcast to ever refer to itself as a podcast was probably Dave Slusher on Evil Genius Chronicles, which had been around in blog form for a couple of years and was becoming an audio blog at the time.

• 5:03:21David Pierce?

  Three days after Gregoire's email, in September of 2004, like all good early podcasts, Slusher spends a long time talking about how all this new fangled technology works for making and downloading audio, talking about his servers and BitTorrents and bills and all this stuff. And then he talks about what he calls it.

• 5:03:42Speaker 27

  And so, and I saw somebody, uh, there's, somebody has registered podcasting.net. And I saw a podcaster or podcaster.net. And I saw podcaster as a user agent, you know, hitting my RSS feed. And I went and looked at it and right now it's just a coming soon page, but I'm going to pay attention to that. I want to see who's, who's got that and what they're doing. But that term, I think they've coined the term. So iPod platform just doesn't, you know, spring from the tongue, tongue. But what I'm doing right here and what Adam's doing and what Dave Weiner is doing and what IT conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term. I am using that from here on out, you know?

• 5:04:22Speaker 27

  So I am a podcaster and they are podcasters and I am podcasting right now and you listen to my podcast. Fucking A.

• 5:04:31David Pierce?

  Think about how quickly that changed. A few months after Ben Hammersley haphazardly wrote the word in a story, a few days after Danny Gregwar brought it up to that super influential mailing list, podcasts were being called podcasts. One really fun thing about listening to some of the podcasts from this era is hearing these podcast hosts actually reckon with the idea of being podcast hosts. Like, here's a clip from a show called The Don and Drew Show, also from September of 2004. This is their very first episode and you can hear them kind of trying on the term for size.

• 5:05:05Speaker 12

  All right, now.

• 5:05:06Speaker 08

  Wait, what is podcasting?

• 5:05:09Speaker 12

  We're broadcasting to pod devices, which

• 5:05:13Speaker 08

  What's a pod?

• 5:05:13Speaker 12

  An iPod would be.

• 5:05:14Speaker 08

  We don't have

• 5:05:14Speaker 12

  An MP3 player.

• 5:05:16Speaker 08

  But we don't have an iPod.

• 5:05:17Speaker 12

  Well, that's why we're podcasting. It's been, the term has been coined and, uh,

• 5:05:22Speaker 08

  Is someone gonna give us one for free?

• 5:05:24Speaker 12

  I wish.

• 5:05:26Speaker 08

  Dear Incarnate, please give me a pod.

• 5:05:29Speaker 12

  Me as in we.

• 5:05:29Speaker 08

  Because Drew has like a little machine, this little tiny thing that he puts music in and I don't have one.

• 5:05:35Speaker 12

  It's a Lyra from RCA. But see now that would technically be considered a pod in this regard.

• 5:05:42Speaker 16

  I think we should call it inside of pods to do this.

• 5:05:46Speaker 08

  I have some right here. Let me unzip it.

• 5:05:50David Pierce?

  Get out of my pod.

• 5:05:51Speaker 08

  Oh shit, there's someone in there.

• 5:05:54David Pierce?

  At this moment, it has still only been a few days since the word podcasts hit that mailing list. And already, it's just the accepted term. They're broadcasting to pod devices. They're podcasts. That is how quickly it happened. And now, for better or for worse, 20 years later, they're still podcasts.

• 5:06:17Nilay Patel?

  It's Verchess. I'm your friend Eli David Pierce is here.

• 5:06:19David Pierce?

  Hi.

• 5:06:20Nilay Patel?

  Alex Trans is here.

• 5:06:21Alex Cranz?

  Hi, I'm your friend that really misses Microsoft's Windows.

• 5:06:25Nilay Patel?

  The HoloLens people are so mad at me. They're like, how did you do this whole review and you never mentioned HoloLens, the thing that invented spatial compute? And it's true. Microsoft invented a number of these words with no regard for what they meant. They're like, HoloLens is mixed reality. That means augmented reality. This VR headset in Windows, that's Windows mixed reality. Like, just anything. And all the words meant the same thing. And I have done some very cool HoloLens demos in my life. I put on a HoloLens, and I changed a spark plug on an ATV in the basement of a Microsoft building. And it guided me.

• 5:07:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:07:06Nilay Patel?

  It put arrows, like, go to this drawer, open this drawer. I don't know if any of that was real or if it was totally state, whatever. It was awesome. I was like, this is definitely the future of changing spark plugs in an ATV. As long as the room is set out exactly right and the computer knows where all the parts are, like, this is how we should change spark plugs. Which, by the way, if you set up the room exactly right, you know where all the parts are, you no longer need the computer to change the spark plugs.

• 5:07:28David Pierce?

  Because you put the spark plugs where they go.

• 5:07:31Nilay Patel?

  But whatever.

• 5:07:32Alex Cranz?

  You outsource that.

• 5:07:33Nilay Patel?

  But they were like, imagine a mechanic on an airline. And now, I'm like, man, I wish Boeing had bought more HoloLenses. They're also in Seattle. Just putting that out there, Microsoft. The problem with the HoloLens, oh, and I did a very cool demo, Microsoft, one of the few companies in VR that has ever solved colocation. So I wore a HoloLens and someone else was wearing a HoloLens. And we were looking at the same thing at the same time. And like I would interact with, it was like a model of something. And I would interact with it and they would spin it the other way. And no one else, as far as I can, very, no other companies on a commercial scale. I don't think the Quest headsets can do that. The Vision Pro can't do it.

• 5:08:12Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's cool then.

• 5:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, so I, it's all credit to HoloLens. The HoloLens is a gigantic failure, which is why I didn't mention it. It failed as a product. The person who was leading the project got forced out of Microsoft for sexual misconduct allegations. They did a bunch of layoffs on the team. They've reorganized their hardware portfolio and they say, quote, and this is a real quote, "We'll make a next version of the HoloLens when the time is right."

• 5:08:41Alex Cranz?

  Oh, there you, is it, is it right?

• 5:08:43Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 5:08:46Nilay Patel?

  You know what they're gonna do? They're gonna make a bunch of AI stuff and print money instead of being like, "You can change a spark plug with our glasses on."

• 5:08:54Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I'll never be able to change a spark plug though.

• 5:08:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, anyway, so shout out to the HoloLens people.

• 5:08:59David Pierce?

  HoloLens also objectively the coolest product name in this entire category.

• 5:09:04Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:09:04David Pierce?

  No question, HoloLens kicks ass.

• 5:09:07Nilay Patel?

  It's good, it's a good name. And the first one was cool and the second one was even better from what I'm told. I never tried the second one. And you know, if, if you have the perfect spark plug setup.

• 5:09:18Alex Cranz?

  Are you?

• 5:09:19Nilay Patel?

  That thing kicked ass.

• 5:09:20Alex Cranz?

  Are you saying you, you don't fondly remember the Acer AH101DBEY Windows Mixed Reality Headset? That had a good name, that's a good ring.

• 5:09:31David Pierce?

  Say it slower, slower.

• 5:09:32Nilay Patel?

  But Addie and I just decided what the words would mean in our review. We made a sidebar, we're like, "This is what mixed reality means and this is augmented reality means." And then Addie was like, "You know, this is a flip of how Microsoft wanted it." And it's like, "I don't care." Like, "I'm putting my foot in the ground and this is what we're saying." Anyhow, so that, shout out to the HoloLens people, I feel you. It was a cool demo.

• 5:09:53David Pierce?

  Did any magically people get at you?

• 5:09:55Nilay Patel?

  The magically people were just happy to be mentioned.

• 5:09:59Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, your product is a true AR product, optical AR, that has fatal compromises in it, and no one should buy it. They're like, "Oh my god, finally, the validation we deserve." Some people, I will say two things. Some people, I basically called the top on two technologies in this review. I said, "Camera-based pass-through has, is, might be a dead end." And I feel that it might be a dead end. And I said, "Hand-eye tracking," there's a part of it that's valuable for some things, but it's also a dead end. It cannot be the primary input. And I heard from people who've been working on this who have shipped-

• 5:10:33David Pierce?

  Wait, sorry, real quick, we should just say, by the way, this is your review of the Vision Pro, which went up this week. We talked a bunch about it on Tuesday.

• 5:10:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:10:39David Pierce?

  If you, if you haven't been living inside of Nilay's brain for the last week or so, he's talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which we just got to so fast.

• 5:10:51Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say, let's, no, this is right. I woke up, I use this app called Sleep Cycle on my, it's my alarm clock. And yesterday, I woke up and it basically congratulated me on finally getting some sleep.

• 5:11:02David Pierce?

  Oh boy.

• 5:11:03Nilay Patel?

  It was like, "Good job, you've got 400% more sleep last night than you've been getting." And I was like, "This is a disaster." So yeah, I'm wired. Now I've like, got too much sleep, but the amount of caffeine, I've basically only eaten cinnamon toast crunch this week. It's bad. All of it's bad.

• 5:11:20Alex Cranz?

  The inside of your mouth after that much cinnamon toast crunch.

• 5:11:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, I didn't eat it all in one go.

• 5:11:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but it's cumulative.

• 5:11:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's cumulative in that each bowl is 25 grams of sugar.

• 5:11:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god.

• 5:11:33Alex Cranz?

  We'll miss you.

• 5:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just like, "Why, the crash is gonna be bad. We're not buying this anymore." But that's, I would like, get home, be like, "What can I eat?" You know, like, fast.

• 5:11:42Alex Cranz?

  Cereal.

• 5:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Cereal. And I was like, "This cereal." Anyhow, yes, Vision Pro review. I heard, the, the two things I'm gonna read that I- They were like, the big ideas that I didn't overly highlight is Vision Pro is the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand-eye tracking they've ever seen. And I was like, it might have inadvertently proved that these are dead ends. And I have heard from people who have shipped millions of devices with camera pass-through and who have invested millions upon billions of dollars into hand-eye tracking. And they were like, you have a point about camera pass-through. It's good for what it's good for. And like, it's not a dead end if you use it right, but Apple's trying to make it do too much, which I thought was really interesting feedback.

• 5:12:25David Pierce?

  That's fair. Because it is like, on the Quest 3, it's useful in spots, right? It's like the, I'm playing a VR game and I like double-tap on the headset and it opens up so I can like see what's around me or whether I just kicked my dog or whatever. But it's not like, you don't live in the pass-through. And so for that, I think pass-through works fine. Apple is like, default state is pass-through. And I think that might be where it's pushing too hard.

• 5:12:47Nilay Patel?

  There is a really cool app that Gen 2, we posted on the site, where it's shortcuts.

• 5:12:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:12:52Nilay Patel?

  And you can put the shortcuts all around your house, so you get all these shortcuts by your TV and all this stuff. And that's really cool. It's like, oh, but to use that, you have to wear this all the time.

• 5:12:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 5:13:00Nilay Patel?

  So not, no longer useful. So this is the argument, this is a simulator of what Apple really wants. But they're like, look, camera pass-through has its uses, but if you try to pretend it's AR, you're going to run into the problem. We agree with you there. And then the note about eye-tracking, and this person has spent a lot of money on eye-tracking in their life, was you are overloading an input channel by trying to use it for output, which is fascinating.

• 5:13:26David Pierce?

  Wait, explain.

• 5:13:27Nilay Patel?

  So your eyes are an input channel. So you're used to taking in a lot of information with your eyes, or an input channel. And then you overload it by trying to use it as an output channel to control the device.

• 5:13:37Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's smart.

• 5:13:38Nilay Patel?

  And so the feedback was, you hit on something that this industry has been talking about for a long time.

• 5:13:43David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 5:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Which is, you can't overload your input channels as output channels. And you'll run into this problem with eye-tracking because you have to look at what you want to look at. You have to look at what you want to control instead of what you're looking at.

• 5:13:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because historically eye tracking was just to like enhance it. So like if you kind of glanced to one side, the camera would move. So you'd see what was ever whatever was over there.

• 5:14:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like. That's foveated rendering.

• 5:14:03Alex Cranz?

  Right, yeah, and it didn't really.

• 5:14:05Nilay Patel?

  But that's to save processor cycles.

• 5:14:07Alex Cranz?

  Right, but no, it also made it a smoother experience. It made it like less, oh, I'm just staring at some screen.

• 5:14:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, so it's a blurry.

• 5:14:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like it made it a nice experience. And even when you do it just on a regular laptop screen, I did a. I reviewed way too many Tobii laptops once upon a time. It was really useful because you could just kind of look at things and and it would pop up and make it a little brighter. It'd make it a little easier. But like anytime I would try to like. Control the computer with it, I was like, oh, I hate this.

• 5:14:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:14:34Alex Cranz?

  Because I'd like glance at my watch and my character just start running around in circles.

• 5:14:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this is overloading an input channel as output. So you when you use it in the way you're describing for foveated rendering for highlights, right? That make it a little brighter. You're enhancing the input channel.

• 5:14:48Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 5:14:49Nilay Patel?

  When you use an output channel, you might overload yourself. So this person was like, yeah, in the history of eye tracking, this is a thing that we understand. And then they said, I had it wrong on hand tracking.

• 5:14:59Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 5:14:59Nilay Patel?

  That there's the industry believes in hand tracking. They're gonna get it right because it is the most natural way of doing things. And there's a lot of work being done. I keep pointing out, so computers always watching. And the vision regardless of that joke, the vision pro does mis-register a lot of hand input. Also cannot differentiate between your hands and someone else's hands.

• 5:15:18Alex Cranz?

  Also, you personally look really goofy doing it in the office. It was so good.

• 5:15:24David Pierce?

  Wait, hold on. So if you're just sitting at your desk on the vision pro, I can just stick my hands in front of your face and start literally typing on your keyboard?

• 5:15:32Nilay Patel?

  Sure can. Or you can just put your hand in front and click your fingers together and it'll register click.

• 5:15:37David Pierce?

  I'm gonna do this to you so much when I see you. I can't wait.

• 5:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Assuming that I'm wearing the headset.

• 5:15:42David Pierce?

  What a good prank.

• 5:15:43Nilay Patel?

  It's a good prank. So you screw with people like when I say the thing is lonely. It does not contemplate anyone else being around you who is not on their best behavior, which is all the time. All other people are not on their best.

• 5:15:54Alex Cranz?

  Is it just assuming that like the pass through will suddenly pop on and you'll see David being like, youink? I assume that's the noise David's gonna make.

• 5:16:03David Pierce?

  That's what I do when I type, yeah.

• 5:16:04Nilay Patel?

  The only AR feature is in it. Specifically, it recognizes David Pearson and makes that sound.

• 5:16:11Nilay Patel?

  So anyway, I thought this is all really interesting feedback because people who have been working on this stuff for a long time were like, we liked your review. Here are the things we think you got right and wrong. And the camera-based pass-through as a replacement for true AR feels directionally correct to me, right? This might be the ceiling for that. Eye tracking, they're like, yeah, people are gonna react to it differently. We will see. This is the first big eye tracking at scale that will happen. And then they're like, you're just wrong in eye tracking. So we'll see. The fact that like it just misregisters input to me is, again, people are gonna, by the time you're listening to this, people will have them. By the way, I just seen has already worn a Vision Pro and a Cybertruck.

• 5:16:52Alex Cranz?

  Just immediately.

• 5:16:54Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 5:16:54Alex Cranz?

  Like as soon as the embargo lifted, she was walking out.

• 5:16:57Nilay Patel?

  She's, I mean, she's funny as hell. So like, I appreciate that she did that. But like some other kind of YouTuber, not I just seen, who is wonderful. Some other kind of YouTuber is gonna do the actual thing with the Cybertruck and the Vision Pro and the clock is just ticking.

• 5:17:10Alex Cranz?

  Unsafe. Don't do that.

• 5:17:11David Pierce?

  Don't, don't do it.

• 5:17:12Nilay Patel?

  They're not gonna listen to us. They're doing it for the views, man.

• 5:17:14Alex Cranz?

  Don't do it for the clicks. Do something else cool.

• 5:17:16Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. I'm excited for people to actually get their hands on this outside of just experiencing other people's experiences.

• 5:17:24Nilay Patel?

  And I'm very curious to see how people react to hand and eye tracking in particular.

• 5:17:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Also, if you got one, as you're hearing this on Friday, the second, it's the day this stuff is coming out. If you got one, call us and tell us about it. Well, this will be a super fun thing to do on the hotline for the next few weeks. I just want to hear people's experiences.

• 5:17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:17:42David Pierce?

  With the Vision Pro. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what's cool. Tell us what sucks. Give us, give us your like 60 second review of the Vision Pro, literally whenever you want. Call the hotline, send us emails.

• 5:17:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:17:52David Pierce?

  [email protected].

• 5:17:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to know. You can tell me, tell them, tell me I'm wrong, whatever you want. I'm dying to know how you feel about this product because it is new and that's what's exciting about it, which leads me into the score. So a lot of people have asked me about the score and I will tell you, and David in particular will tell you that I drove myself crazy trying to give this thing a score after I'd written the review.

• 5:18:13David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 5:18:14Nilay Patel?

  Just bonkers. Like, because I'm the one who says world of no sevens. Then I gave it a seven.

• 5:18:22Nilay Patel?

  So if you don't know, World of No Sevens, a thing I say all the time, which is, the seven is just the default score. It is milquetoast. And so if you say World of No Sevens, it forces you to make a very hard choice between six and eight.

• 5:18:36Nilay Patel?

  And I am the person who says this, and I definitely gave this thing a seven. And I tortured myself over that seven.

• 5:18:42David Pierce?

  And you got it wrong.

• 5:18:43Nilay Patel?

  And David thinks I should have given it a seven.

• 5:18:45David Pierce?

  You got it wrong.

• 5:18:45Alex Cranz?

  I tend to agree with, I was genuinely shocked because I didn't participate in the review, but, but we, you know, we did the Vergecast. And so I went as soon as it posted and I click and I scrolled down and I saw that seven and I was like, but we, it felt like a six in the Vergecast that we recorded. This is interesting.

• 5:19:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I said on the Vergecast, and I have to own this.

• 5:19:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:19:05Nilay Patel?

  Inconsistent input system is a full point deduction. And at that moment in time, and I, this is 100% true. The score that was entered into our little score database was a six.

• 5:19:15Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 5:19:16Nilay Patel?

  And I said that knowing that I'd already typed the six into that database.

• 5:19:20Alex Cranz?

  What pushed you back up to a seven?

• 5:19:22Nilay Patel?

  I had a conversation with Verge and Becca, in particular, Becca, our wonderful video directors, who made this whole review with me and used it a lot in the course of that review. And they reminded me that it was really fun.

• 5:19:37Alex Cranz?

  So it lost a point for inconsistency, gained a point because it's fun as hell?

• 5:19:42Nilay Patel?

  It lost a point for, Verge was, we were like, we were in it. We were like, we opened up our own how we rate page and like read our own definitions of the numbers. Like, you're in an office with people for hours upon hours arguing with the dumbest, like you just like fall down the rabbit hole completely.

• 5:19:59Nilay Patel?

  We discussed bringing back decimals, which we had got rid of a couple of years, like the whole thing. And Verin's line was, we need a, we need a number that means fantastic but useless. Because that, he's like, this is fantastic. I have no idea why I want to use this.

• 5:20:15David Pierce?

  What about the number that says it's $3,500?

• 5:20:20David Pierce?

  Do you know how many, you want fun, buy a Nintendo Switch and you'll have $3,200 left. Isn't that cool?

• 5:20:27Nilay Patel?

  So look, like I say, I was at six for a long time.

• 5:20:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:20:30Nilay Patel?

  It was a six. I swear to you, it was a six. And Beck, it was like, but you have had, like, the thing you are doing, you were constantly talking about, this thing that you keep coming back to, like, I'm lonely in here, is because you're having fun and you want other people to have fun with you. Which is not how I feel about the meta quest. Which is like, this is fun. Like, I'm swinging a bat around. Like, there's not a point where I'm like, look at this thing that you is wild that I want you to see. Like, the art gallery of webpages that I made in our cafe. It's like, this is crazy. Like, nothing else can do that right now. The meta quest can sort of do it, but they're kind of shaped, like, this is like perfectly locked in place windows and you can just leave the room and come back. That's your point, is it was fun. It was a full point deduction for the stuff I complained about.

• 5:21:13Nilay Patel?

  And it, it earned its way back into the seven zone. Because it's not an eight.

• 5:21:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I was gonna say, it was never an eight.

• 5:21:21Nilay Patel?

  It was, there was no point with this thing getting an eight.

• 5:21:23Alex Cranz?

  Did it ever go to five?

• 5:21:25Nilay Patel?

  So I was texting with Dan Seifert.

• 5:21:26Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 5:21:26Nilay Patel?

  Wonderful reviews that are number one Dex fan in the world, Dan Seifert.

• 5:21:30Alex Cranz?

  Traitor.

• 5:21:30Nilay Patel?

  Dan just left the verge, so he was not part of this review. We wish him well on his new journey in life. It's gonna be really fun for him. But Dan texts me after the review and was like, seven, huh? And I was like, dude. And like, literally, people are jumping out of the woodwork to quote Dan at me throughout this process. Because Dan's quote is, you never regret giving something a lower score. Ever. Like, if you just instinctively pick the lower score and you, it's five years from now, you won't have regret in it. You might be like, ah, I gave that stupid thing an eight. Why'd I do that? But you'll never be like, I judged it too harshly. Like, literally, I'm like, walking down the street and people are like, you know what Dan would say? It's like haunting me.

• 5:22:08David Pierce?

  And I will say, that's not, that's not a, like, judgment decision. That's not saying, like, we reflexively hate products. That is like a decade of hard-worn experience.

• 5:22:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:22:18David Pierce?

  And this is the mistake that you made, Neelai, is you got sucked in by the thing being fun. Like, that's a stupid reason. It's just a stupid reason. Like, this is a $3,500 computer. You don't judge your MacBook on whether it's fun. You judge it on whether it does the things it is supposed to do. And this fundamentally doesn't. It, there are a lot of things that it is supposed to do that it either doesn't do or doesn't do very well. And it is $3,500. Like-

• 5:22:47Nilay Patel?

  I take the criticism and I, I, look, I knew what I was buying. I was buying a bunch of people telling me that I did give it a high score, including David on this very podcast. I knew how this Verchass would start today when I gave it that seven.

• 5:23:00David Pierce?

  You did. But wait, I just, I just want to point at the tension of this, which I think is both the tension you felt in reviewing this and the reason we all think the Vision Pro is so interesting, is that it is objectively cool and new and interesting, right? Like, Joanna Stern, a friend of the Wall Street Journal, made a video, and there's a moment in it where she sets two timers and puts them over two different things on her stove. Like, that kicks ass. It's so small and so silly, but it's so cool, and people really responded to it. That is not a reason to buy a $3,500 product or to wear a headset on your face all day. But she said- Right. But it is cool. It is undeniably cool. The shortcuts thing you were talking about is like, undeniably cool, and I want to live in a world where that is part of my life.

• 5:23:42David Pierce?

  I will not wear the headset and I will not buy the headset in order to get that thing. But like, that's that tension, right? Where you have these moments where you're like, oh, this is it. Like, they, they did it. This is it. And then you have to weigh that against, what is this thing I have on my face? What does that mean for like, my life? Is this worth the cost? And you even said in the review, right, we, we review things not just based on like, what they might be someday, but what the thing is in the box. But that is so-

• 5:24:08Nilay Patel?

  But that's not, that's not what got it the seven. I, I, that's my rule.

• 5:24:13David Pierce?

  It's a good rule. It's the right rule, but it's, it's so hard to do, especially in this case. Because A, Apple has a longer history of being right about these things than most. So like, most of the time, you genuinely should not assume this thing will ever get better for any reason, because most of the time it doesn't. With Apple, it usually does. And so you have to believe that more than with most companies. But then also- It's 3,500.

• 5:24:38Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's how that price thing also weighed on my mind. Another good argument for six. If it's a phone review, and even in phone reviews now, it's like you're just reviewing iPhones for people who buy iPhones. You're very rarely writing a review for somebody with an Android phone, except for like blunt curiosity if the camera's good or bad.

• 5:24:59Nilay Patel?

  My assumption going into this was that I was not writing buying advice. The people who are buying the Vision Pro are buying the Vision Pro, whether or not I think it's good or bad.

• 5:25:05Alex Cranz?

  So what was that score speaking to?

• 5:25:07Nilay Patel?

  So the score was like, okay, like however many they sold, 80,000, 120,000. The vast majority of people are going to try this thing on, and my guess is after a while they're like, yeah, it's seven. And like, that is where that came from. Right? Is, eh, it kind of works a lot of time, but oh, man, I sometimes have a really good time. Like that, that exact thing, the reason it's world of no sevens. Is the, that is why I got there. Cause sometimes you're like, oh, this is great. And then sometimes you're like, I'm looking at the, look at the, right? And like, that is like a real challenge in there. It's not broken. The last Apple product I gave a six to was the Apple Studio Display, whose webcam basically shipped in unusable state.

• 5:25:47Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 5:25:47Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, this is six because this display technology, the panel is fine, but the backlight technology is steam powered. And this camera is effectively broken. Six. And that was what, $1,200, $1,300?

• 5:25:59David Pierce?

  $1,600.

• 5:26:00Nilay Patel?

  1,600? I should have given that a five.

• 5:26:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, you should have. That's what I was about to say. You scored that thing too high.

• 5:26:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. Maybe I'm just wrong.

• 5:26:07David Pierce?

  But I will say, a bunch of people pointed out the similarities between what this thing is and what the original Apple Watch was, which I think is really interesting because you give both a seven, and I think you were right about the Apple Watch and wrong about this. And I've been trying to figure out what it is.

• 5:26:21Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 5:26:22Alex Cranz?

  I know what it is.

• 5:26:23Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, I want to hear what David's theories.

• 5:26:25David Pierce?

  I have two theories. One is $3,500.

• 5:26:29David Pierce?

  And the other is, I think the first Apple Watch got the form factor almost right, and hadn't quite figured out the use case. But it was like, still a nice thing to wear. I got furious at the first Apple Watch because it didn't tell the time. The screen wasn't on all the time. Like, how are you a watch if you don't tell me the time when I look at you? But it, like, the thing was there, right? It was close enough to being what the thing should be, and it already did some of the things you would want it to. So it was like, that felt closer to me than this, in which the thing itself is nowhere near what it's supposed to be.

• 5:27:03Nilay Patel?

  Nope.

• 5:27:04David Pierce?

  Not even close. And so that's where it loses me. Like, I deduct a full point for absolutely no one thinks this is what this is supposed to look like.

• 5:27:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say, I feel very vindicated by the modern rereading of the Apple Watch reviews. Guy got raked over the coals for giving that thing a bad score.

• 5:27:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, it holds up. It really does.

• 5:27:20Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, this thing is a, I believe I used the word bauble. I was like, this thing is a bauble, and you will buy it, and if you buy it, you will like it, because people like baubles. But it is not fashion. It is technology that looks like fashion, and they need to figure out what it's for. And it took them three generations to get there. And they totally rebooted the software. And I was like, no one will ever, and like, for a long time, people were like, you were just unnecessarily harsh. And this time, like, literally, there are screenshots comparing my two reviews.

• 5:27:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:27:49Nilay Patel?

  Being like, oh, this is the same exact thing. And the only thing I will remind everyone of is, one, I was right. I'll always remind you of that. No, but two, the path wasn't set when the thing was launched. Right? So being like, this thing happened to the Apple Watch means it will happen to the other thing. They had to adjust.

• 5:28:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 5:28:11Nilay Patel?

  And actually, the review is like, it adjusts them. Like, they take the feedback from the market, from the customers, from the reviewers, and they like, make decisions based on it. And one of the big decisions they had to make along the way was, we are totally rebooting watchOS. To make the interface different, to completely decrease our reliance on third-party apps in an app store.

• 5:28:32Alex Cranz?

  You're just telling me your watch review should have been a six.

• 5:28:37David Pierce?

  But also, Apple, with the Apple Watch, and this is true of a lot of Apple things, right? Apple starts by getting the hardware pretty close to right.

• 5:28:43Alex Cranz?

  I gotta leave.

• 5:28:44David Pierce?

  And the software is further away.

• 5:28:46Nilay Patel?

  Alex will be joining Dan Seifert in the world beyond.

• 5:28:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, can we just re-review every Apple product we've ever done right now? Let's just rescore them all.

• 5:28:55Nilay Patel?

  I get a lot, yeah.

• 5:28:56David Pierce?

  The watch hardware was very close. And then the question is, how do we make this thing into what it ought to be inside of this box? And Apple usually gets the box right. In this case, neither one of them is right.

• 5:29:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:29:08Alex Cranz?

  Well, like, the watch shipped to people and they could use it and they could set it up and they didn't have issues with it. And lots of people bought one.

• 5:29:16Nilay Patel?

  Wait, famously Karl Lagerfeld could not set his up and he wore it around.

• 5:29:20Alex Cranz?

  Does not.

• 5:29:20Nilay Patel?

  Do you not know about this? This is like an old Verchess joke. Karl Lagerfeld was photographed, you know, they gave it to all the fashion people.

• 5:29:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:29:26Nilay Patel?

  They photographed Karl Lagerfeld wearing, proudly wearing it with the setup screen on the face.

• 5:29:32Nilay Patel?

  And that's like, we call, we started calling it Lagerfelding, where you're just like wearing a dead Apple Watch, just as a, as a fashion accessory.

• 5:29:39Alex Cranz?

  That's awesome. But again, that was another reason to give it a seven, because it was like a fashion thing, not necessarily a good one, but it was fashion. And this is just like such a developer kit that I keep him like, I keep thinking about that a lot. Like, it feels like such a developer kit.

• 5:29:54Nilay Patel?

  They just won't say it, man. There was a story in Vanity Fair.

• 5:29:57Alex Cranz?

  A beautifully photographed story in Vanity Fair.

• 5:30:00David Pierce?

  It was.

• 5:30:00Alex Cranz?

  Stunning.

• 5:30:01Nilay Patel?

  A photographed story in Vanity Fair. Tim Cook is wearing the headset.

• 5:30:05David Pierce?

  He's blinking. Did you notice this?

• 5:30:07Nilay Patel?

  His eyes are closed.

• 5:30:08David Pierce?

  His googly eyes on the front of the headset are closed. He's blinking in the photo.

• 5:30:13Nilay Patel?

  That's very funny.

• 5:30:13David Pierce?

  It's fantastic.

• 5:30:14Nilay Patel?

  They should put that on the website. Anyhow, there's a story in Vanity Fair and it is, I mean, honestly, a story could be from 10 years ago. I know Nick Bilton, who wrote it, Nick is a very nice guy. I've had a taco at a party at his house before, like, he's a very nice guy. But it could have been written 10 years ago about VR.

• 5:30:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 5:30:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, the line is like, "Tim Cook saw himself on the moon and he knew it was the future." Like, that line has been written about Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer.

• 5:30:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you could have just like done "find and replace" Magic Leap for every time they say Vision Pro in that review.

• 5:30:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, do you remember Magic Leap? Was it Wired that ran the story where?

• 5:30:51Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 5:30:52Nilay Patel?

  Ronny Bravitz was like, "I'm hacking the GPU of your brain."

• 5:30:54David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 5:30:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, we've just been here, man. Like, and so I think Apple can't say it's a developer kit. They can't. Place themselves in the long line of companies that have been doing this for a long. They have to say it's finished, which is why they have to, they have to have entertainment. And they have to do this. James Cameron is in that Vanity Fair piece quoted as saying, this will change everything. And it's like, dude, you have done more scuba diving VR than anybody.

• 5:31:22Alex Cranz?

  I have been thinking about that quote specifically more than anything else that's come out of this whole situation, because James Cameron is like, not generally a guy. Hmm. I was gonna say, he's not generally a guy prone to hyperbole, but he did once declare himself king of the world.

• 5:31:37David Pierce?

  I don't know if that was hyperbole at some point.

• 5:31:40Nilay Patel?

  At that moment in time.

• 5:31:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But when it comes to like, technology, he's not usually a guy prone to hyperbole. And so when he's like, no, this changes everything. And he's specifically talking about the display technology, like, which sounds really, really incredible. I was like, is there something there? Like, have we missed something that James Cameron is seeing that we're not, besides like, the inside of the headset?

• 5:32:00Nilay Patel?

  It is legitimately amazing display technology. I have nothing but admiration for how hard it was to build those displays. They are genuinely amazing.

• 5:32:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 5:32:08Nilay Patel?

  They are available, apparently, on the market. The same person who told me about hand tracking being something he believed in was like, you know, Meta could have bought those. Like, they, that was a thing that Meta had the opportunity to buy, but Meta's version of headset would have been even more expensive, because Meta doesn't have M1 chips or M2 chips. They would have had to go and buy chips with more power and more battery. And they're like, this is, we can't go this way.

• 5:32:30Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 5:32:31Nilay Patel?

  So Apple uniquely was able to make use of these displays, which are, again, an engineering marvel. But like, James, they're just better than what you have now, right? They're just like, linearly better than the thing you have now.

• 5:32:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:32:46Nilay Patel?

  And that, if you're James Cameron, like, you should be able to see, like, this is the step, like, this is the step change that changes it all is like, not the thing.

• 5:32:53Alex Cranz?

  I really want to like, sit him down and be like, did they just like cherry pick your quotes here?

• 5:32:57Nilay Patel?

  They run Apple TV Plus, man. I know.

• 5:32:59Alex Cranz?

  Like, I need, I just need to know more from Jim. Jim, call me. I know you listen to Vergecast.

• 5:33:04Nilay Patel?

  He does.

• 5:33:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We'll talk about the, the sub too.

• 5:33:07Nilay Patel?

  Jim was the guy who told me about Meta. He's the source.

• 5:33:10Nilay Patel?

  If you're listening, Tim Cook, that's not true at all, not even like the slightest picture. A little bit, it's, it's by the time you're listening to this, it is, will be out. I'm sure some of you are driving your cars, wearing it right now. Stop it, pull over to the side of the road. Apple today, a little bit more, Apple announced along with the launch of Vision Pro, 600 apps will be at launch, which seems like a good number.

• 5:33:34Alex Cranz?

  It's a lot.

• 5:33:35Nilay Patel?

  For, for a new platform, it's a good number.

• 5:33:37David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 5:33:38Nilay Patel?

  I think so.

• 5:33:39David Pierce?

  I mean, it's fine, it's some apps, but like, this is the company that spends a lot of time talking about hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of apps. 600 is, is good.

• 5:33:49Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna point out, I once got really roasted for be, for complaining about how few games launched with the Nintendo Switch.

• 5:33:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:33:57Alex Cranz?

  Granted, I did say it when Zelda came out and it was one of the best games ever made.

• 5:34:01Nilay Patel?

  But like, here's the 600.

• 5:34:02Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, 600's impressive.

• 5:34:04Nilay Patel?

  600 is great.

• 5:34:05David Pierce?

  600 is Vision Pro, like, built for spatial computing. It's also gonna have all the iPad stuff.

• 5:34:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, 1 million apps, 600 Vision Pro apps.

• 5:34:13David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 5:34:14Nilay Patel?

  Which I will just point out is 999,000, 900, uh, 600, 999,000.

• 5:34:21David Pierce?

  400.

• 5:34:22Alex Cranz?

  400.

• 5:34:23Nilay Patel?

  400.

• 5:34:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:34:25Nilay Patel?

  No, that's 100, that's a million. Yep, okay, I'm gonna do this math right.

• 5:34:27David Pierce?

  Math, please leave this in.

• 5:34:29Nilay Patel?

  No, do not leave this in.

• 5:34:30Alex Cranz?

  Leave it in.

• 5:34:31Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's gonna find Dan if we leave this in. All right, all right, all right, um, which I'll just point out is 999,000, 400 iPad apps. That's a lot of iPad apps.

• 5:34:44Alex Cranz?

  It's a lot of iPad apps.

• 5:34:45Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, among this, it's, 600 is not bad if it's the right 600, but I will just point out, among the 600 they announced, compatible apps from top cable services, including Charter, Spectrum, Comcast, Xfinity, Cox, Contour, Sling TV, and Verizon FiOS.

• 5:35:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's what I want.

• 5:35:03Nilay Patel?

  If you're rocking the Verizon FiOS app in space, like, what are you doing, man?

• 5:35:11Nilay Patel?

  Paying your bills. If you buy the space computer and take it out of its little marshmallow and put it on your head, you're like, "Let's open the Charter Spectrum app." What are you doing, man? Well, you gotta pay your bills so you can keep downloading stuff. That is the funniest, and that, obviously, you're trying to point out, like...

• 5:35:30Nilay Patel?

  Entertainment. It's entertainment. It's not Netflix, it's fine. Do you know what those apps stream in? 480p that they lie as 720p. That is the lowest bitrate video you can get, which is hilarious to me. Because I, this is all buried in the review. I should quick post on the site just to break it out. It will not support VR video on YouTube. It's like, won't do it. Right. And they're like, because the VR video on YouTube is too low quality. Apple. So it doesn't have a YouTube app, and if you go try to watch them 360 video on YouTube, it just won't work. The end. Can I say one more weedsy thing, and then we can break out of this? Yeah. Yeah. It's very weedsy, but, uh, people asked us this question a lot, and I didn't know the answer when we did the old episode. How does it smell? How does it smell? Okay.

• 5:36:14Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it smells like the future, obviously. The faintest whiff of roasted marshmallows. Uh, people asked about the Mac display sharing, and I finally know how it works. Which is very complicated. It is basically a 27-inch, like, Studio Display or iMac display. So you tell your Mac you're sharing to it, your Mac imagines a 27-inch 5K display. Hmm. It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, which is a perfect 2:1 scale. That's how a 27-inch iMac works by default. You cannot change it. So a 27-inch iMac display, you can run it at other resolutions, and it'll be fine. This one, it says, it gives you a low resolution warning. So it wants to run at this 2:1 scale. Then it takes that 5K display

• 5:36:56Nilay Patel?

  and sends it as a 4K video stream to the Vision Pro, which you can then resize at will. No. So it is not pixel perfect at all. It looks great. I have no complaints about how it looks. But the thing that is happening is that it is imagining a 5K display that a Mac knows how to run at, because that is the 27-inch iMac, the 27-inch Studio Display.

• 5:37:15Nilay Patel?

  It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, but if you're running something 4K, it has enough pixels to just do it because it's a 5K display. But then the thing that is happening is streaming at 4K to the Vision Pro. So it compresses that and it makes it smaller.

• 5:37:30Alex Cranz?

  It sounds both technologically cool and also like, I just hate it from, in the same way I hate when people say, "Yeah, this is 720p streaming."

• 5:37:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:37:42Alex Cranz?

  When it's secretly 480.

• 5:37:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or if they're like, "This is HD and it's 720."

• 5:37:46Alex Cranz?

  Lies.

• 5:37:47Nilay Patel?

  Fox. Just putting that out there. Anyway, everyone asked me that question and that is the answer. And so it is correct that they keep calling it a 4K Mac display. It's actually a 5K Mac display, but it's actually running at 2560 by 1440 and whatever, it looks fine and you'll use it unless you need pixel-perfect accuracy, in which case take your face computer off and just look at your screen.

• 5:38:07Alex Cranz?

  There we go.

• 5:38:08Nilay Patel?

  Six out of 10.

• 5:38:12Speaker 00

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 5:38:16Speaker 00

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. And, wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 5:38:43Alex Cranz?

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• 5:38:44Speaker 01

  Maybe dark roast?

• 5:38:45Alex Cranz?

  Vanilla?

• 5:38:46Speaker 01

  Caramel?

• 5:38:47Alex Cranz?

  Blueberry?

• 5:38:48Speaker 01

  You could get them to agree on one flavor or give everyone what they want. With Keurig, there's over 500 K-Cup Pod varieties of fresh, flavorful coffee. No effort, no grind, no settling. Great coffee without the grind. Keurig.

• 5:39:09Speaker 28

  Everyone's talking about the prospect of a democratic wave in the midterm elections. But here's something that matters just as much: the battle to control state legislatures.

• 5:39:20Speaker 29

  That's the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

• 5:39:23Speaker 28

  The GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, which means they control the governor's seat, plus the state house and the state senate. For Democrats, it's 16 states.

• 5:39:33Speaker 29

  Meaning that the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports, things like increasing minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion.

• 5:39:45Speaker 28

  If Democrats flip just a handful of state legislatures, the majority of Americans will now live in a state under full democratic control, which could have big policy implications.

• 5:39:56Speaker 29

  That's all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

• 5:39:59Speaker 28

  This week on America Actually, we're in Wisconsin, and we talked to Francesca Hong.

• 5:40:03Speaker 29

  We have an opportunity through Wisconsin to actually start improving the brand for Democrats.

• 5:40:10Speaker 28

  Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:40:20Speaker 05

  20 years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California announced that it was time to rethink the car.

• 5:40:27Speaker 08

  Thank you very much for a nice introduction.

• 5:40:30Speaker 05

  He argued that gasoline and other petroleum fuels were polluting the air and keeping us hooked on foreign oil. California was ready to get serious about a post-petroleum future, and the best technology to get it there was hydrogen.

• 5:40:45Speaker 08

  We will not just dream about the hydrogen highway. We will not just dream about the hydrogen fueling stations. We will not just dream about the hydrogen cars. We will build it.

• 5:40:55Speaker 05

  This was 2004, years before Tesla got everyone jazzed about battery-powered electric cars. Batteries were promising, but another technology was farther along. Hydrogen fuel cells could power an electric motor using only hydrogen gas. The cars produced no emissions or byproducts, except pure water.

• 5:41:18Speaker 05

  Governor Schwarzenegger got very excited about fuel cells, and he proposed an elaborate hydrogen highway to support them. The government would help fund a network of fuel stations, which would encourage automakers to build cars. More cars would lead to more stations. And by 2010, the plan went, every Californian would have access to hydrogen fuel. From there, advocates predicted a nationwide expansion. It could spell the end of the petroleum era in America. That is not what happened. San Jose, Snell Avenue, under maintenance. Oh, offline? Since this morning at 10:50. Oh, jeez.

• 5:42:00Speaker 05

  The station is offline for repair. 20 years later, I found myself driving across California in a fuel cell car, a Toyota Mirai.

• 5:42:11Speaker 07

  Rolling again.

• 5:42:13Speaker 05

  I was there to find out what became of that grand green vision of the future.

• 5:42:18Speaker 04

  We are 23 minutes away from the closest station.

• 5:42:21Speaker 05

  Today, there are hydrogen-powered cars you can buy in California and some stations to fill them up at. But the statewide network never materialized, let alone a national one. And those stations are failing.

• 5:42:35Speaker 30

  Maybe one pump worked for months at a time. Sometimes, none of them worked.

• 5:42:40Speaker 05

  The cost of fuel is skyrocketing. $36 a kilo, and it's insane. And car sales are plummeting. I'm trying to take it back to Toyota. The hydrogen experiment is teetering on the brink. Right now, the auto industry is making this huge seismic shift to battery-powered cars. Why not hydrogen? Why didn't that version of history win out? Who's still fighting for hydrogen today? And what's happening to the thousands of drivers still sticking it out with their cars? This all felt like a lot of questions that only a road trip could answer. So in June, I roped in fellow producer Andrew and our video director Alex. The three of us flew to San Francisco,

• 5:43:25Speaker 05

  rented a Mirai on Turo, and charted a course from the Bay Area to Los Angeles along whatever was left of the hydrogen highway.

• 5:43:36Speaker 05

  Here to here, we are going there.

• 5:43:55Speaker 05

  We picked up our Mirai in the parking lot of a mini golf course outside San Jose, just south of San Francisco. It's a very ordinary-looking sedan. If it weren't for the little fuel cell badge on the back, you wouldn't know there was anything unusual about it.

• 5:44:14Speaker 05

  Under the hood, a Mirai and a Tesla are surprisingly similar. They're both powered by electric motors, and a fuel cell is basically a battery. Just instead of pumping in electricity to store and use later, you're pumping in hydrogen to react with oxygen and generate electricity on the fly. In other words, a Mirai's hydrogen tank and a Tesla's battery are just two different ways of storing energy until it's needed to power the car. Oh, there's one other difference. The fuel cell creates a decent amount of water as a byproduct. In the Mirai, it's almost a cup per mile traveled, so the car does need to pee.

• 5:44:59Speaker 05

  As the Mirai drives, it occasionally shoots water out a little hole underneath the car. You can also make it pee on command by hitting a button on the dashboard.

• 5:45:08Speaker 31

  Yeah, go ahead and start the car.

• 5:45:11Speaker 31

  The remote is in the middle, you saw it? The remote?

• 5:45:14Speaker 05

  The guy we rented from, Salman, gave us a quick tour of the car. And it's a luxury car. It drives beautiful, actually. Once you drive this, you'll feel it. The Mirai has a classy interior and a flashy nav system with a gazillion cameras. The only oddity is this hump in the back row of seats. The main hydrogen tank sits underneath it. It makes sitting in the middle kind of awkward. Salman told us we'd love the car, but he wasn't sure about our travel plans.

• 5:45:41Speaker 31

  When I came to know you were in L.A., I was like, "Wait a second." I was a little... Uncomfortably.

• 5:45:46Speaker 05

  The problem is, most of the fuel stations in California are clustered around the Bay Area and Los Angeles. There's just one pump on Interstate 5 in between. It's at a place called Harris Ranch. We kinda need to refuel there. The drive to LA is about 325 miles, which is right at the max range of this car. But we also need luck, because apparently, hydrogen stations just don't work sometimes.

• 5:46:15Speaker 31

  There is always a credit card issue sometimes. The card system is down. Sometimes the pump itself is down. Sometimes there is not enough hydrogen.

• 5:46:22Speaker 05

  Which makes our stop at Harris Ranch very high stakes.

• 5:46:26Speaker 31

  If that pump is down.

• 5:46:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:46:28Speaker 31

  Then, you know, you're stuck.

• 5:46:30Speaker 05

  You've never driven down to...

• 5:46:31Speaker 31

  No, not yet. Yeah, I didn't want to take a chance yet.

• 5:46:34Speaker 05

  Not exactly a pep talk. Oh, and there was one other FYI: the price of hydrogen.

• 5:46:40Speaker 31

  Two years ago, it used to cost like $50 or $60 to fill the whole tank.

• 5:46:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:46:45Speaker 31

  Right now, it's like $180, $190 to fill the tank. So that is killing everybody right now.

• 5:46:50Speaker 05

  $180 to fill up a sedan. Yeah, I don't think we budgeted enough money for the fuel for this trip.

• 5:46:56Speaker 31

  Yeah, so that's why I got disappointed. I said, you know what, I'll just put on TiVo.

• 5:47:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:47:00Speaker 31

  And live with it like that.

• 5:47:02Speaker 05

  And with that, there was nothing left to do but hit the road. Excited and suddenly very nervous.

• 5:47:11Speaker 05

  Thank you, Siri. Our first goal was to visit as many fuel stations as we could find in the Bay Area. On paper, there are about 17, but according to the Station Finder apps we downloaded, lots of them were offline or under some kind of maintenance. All right, we're coming up on it. I never know. You never know what kind of gas station it's gonna be. Almost all the stations here are operated by a startup called First Element Fuel, but they're co-located at Chevron or Shell or other gas stations. First Element leases the space from station owners. The pumps themselves are bright blue with these eye-catching awnings. Some of them are slotted right in between gas pumps. Others are set apart in their own little pads and parking lots.

• 5:47:56Speaker 05

  Well, let's try to figure this out.

• 5:47:59Speaker 05

  The mechanics of filling up a hydrogen tank are familiar enough. Insert a credit card, select fuel, connect pump to car, hang out for five minutes. But unlike gasoline, these pumps are moving around a compressed, freezing cold gas. So there are locks and sensors to keep everything safe and reliable. The nozzle is a heavy metal cylinder with a collar that keeps the hose in place. It's all a bit of a learning curve. It says, "Hide the yellow mark." I don't see a yellow mark, but I think pulling this sleeve down locks it. So we just push it in and then lock it? Ooh! There it goes, the yellow. Okay, we're filling up.

• 5:48:45Speaker 05

  We tried fueling at most of the stations we visited, and we always got fuel, but we hit a glitch or two in just about every part of the process. The screens are both wigging out a little bit, but it seems like it's fine.

• 5:49:00Speaker 05

  I don't know what "door sensor" means, but... Oh, I think it timed out or something. I gotta run my card again. One constant struggle: the nozzle kept sticking to the car after we were done filling. I hate that. I hate yanking that hard on anything.

• 5:49:20Speaker 05

  But that was just our experience. We also talked with every Marai driver we ran into. Hey, excuse me, do you have time while you fuel to chat with us for our story? And their stories were more extreme.

• 5:49:34Speaker 11

  This is the third station we are right now. We came. Oh, you tried to go to two others? Yeah, there's one station in Sunnywell, one in San Jose, and this is one in Cupertino. Half the time, these don't work here. Yeah. So they're either out of gas, or there's a problem with the machine. And even sometimes, it shows you to insert card. When you insert the card, it says "transaction cancelled," and it doesn't give you anything out. It just doesn't work? No, it just doesn't work.

• 5:49:57Speaker 05

  Menadeep and Rupesh have been driving their Marai for about four months, which for them has been a non-stop hunt for working stations. I had no idea just how frequently they run out of fuel, or glitch, or lose pressure and can't fill tanks completely.

• 5:50:13Speaker 11

  And it's always a pressure on you mentally, because you never know which one's gonna work, which one's not gonna work.

• 5:50:19Speaker 05

  Fuel has been so hard to find that these guys have been stretching every kilogram. That's how hydrogen is measured. When they drive, they accelerate and brake carefully. They avoid air conditioning because it uses more fuel. And when the car says it still has 100 miles left in the tank, they look for a station. Boy, so you have to really think about how you're driving the car.

• 5:50:42Speaker 11

  You have to focus on the road and also on your mileage here.

• 5:50:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Manadeep bought the car because of a huge incentive from Toyota. Every new or certified used Murai comes with a $15,000 preloaded fuel card. Toyota told us it's there to absorb any volatility in fuel prices. And that's not the only big promotion out there.

• 5:51:03Speaker 32

  So this car I got for $15,000? Hard to beat, right?

• 5:51:09Speaker 05

  Rebecca said she went shopping for a battery electric car, but she couldn't find anything for less than $40,000. But then, a Toyota dealership offered her that killer deal on a 2022 Murai with only 23,000 miles on it. Toyota's also been offering big discounts on Numaris. Earlier this year, you could get $40,000 off some models. That's a 60% discount.

• 5:51:33Speaker 32

  That's it. I'm paying a fortune in hydrogen, but it'll take something like 13 years. I did my math.

• 5:51:40Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:51:41Speaker 32

  It'll take 13 years before this vehicle will cost me more than if I were to buy a $40,000 something electric vehicle.

• 5:51:50Speaker 05

  Rebecca loves her Murai, so she's content for now.

• 5:51:54Speaker 32

  I'm gonna stick with my Murai as long as I'm in California.

• 5:51:59Speaker 05

  Manadeep and Rupesh, not so much.

• 5:52:02Speaker 11

  I don't think, to be very honest with you, after the gas card is finished, it's not worth maintaining this car.

• 5:52:07Speaker 05

  Manadeep left us with some words of caution about our trip, which, believe me, we took to heart when we said goodbye to the bay and headed south for Los Angeles. No AC, go easy on the pedal.

• 5:52:20Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 5:52:20Speaker 05

  Always know where the next station is.

• 5:52:22Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 5:52:23Speaker 05

  Call the stations. Stick closer to the speed limit. Stick to the speed limit.

• 5:52:26Speaker 11

  If possible, go below the speed limit to try to be in the rightmost lane.

• 5:52:30Speaker 05

  This is not the road trip that we were looking forward to having, you know?

• 5:52:35Speaker 11

  I'm really sorry for spoiling your road trip.

• 5:52:41Speaker 05

  We could start with the windows down. Windows down. Also, how fast do you think I should drive? We should play with the settings on the car to see. It tells you how efficiently you're driving.

• 5:52:54Speaker 05

  On the road to LA, I had a lot of downtime to think about everything I'd seen. And most of my questions boiled down to, how did we get here? Which you can think about in two ways. There's the big broad version. How did hydrogen cars start out so promising but stumble so badly? And then there's the more specific, why is it so hard to get fuel for your car? So, as we cruise down I-5, let's start with the big how did we get here? For that, I called up Keith Whipke. He's an industry veteran from the National Renewable Energy Lab.

• 5:53:28Speaker 33

  You did come to the right person. I've been involved in hydrogen technologies for over 20 years.

• 5:53:34Speaker 05

  Keith took me all the way back to 2004 again. Back then, fewer people were talking about climate change the way we all are today. But California had a smog problem.

• 5:53:44Speaker 33

  They had the worst air quality, especially in the Los Angeles basin. And so they had a strong driver to clean up local air quality.

• 5:53:52Speaker 05

  Battery electric cars existed, but they were not the obvious air apparent to gasoline. In fact, as a storage medium to power a car, batteries kind of sucked.

• 5:54:02Speaker 33

  Batteries were not good at the time. It was lead-acid batteries. And nickel metal hybrid was the up and coming thing, which of course is what Toyota launched their Prius hybrid with, was nickel metal hybrid batteries. That was a challenge for batteries at the time. 80, 90 mile range, a very heavy, a lot of compromises on the vehicle itself to get reasonable performance. So hydrogen kind of was being born into that era.

• 5:54:29Speaker 05

  Meanwhile, hydrogen was showing a lot of promise. You could get all the emissions benefits of a battery electric car without the battery. Plus, fueling was a faster and more familiar process for drivers. It looked like a great successor to gasoline. And California got on board.

• 5:54:46Speaker 08

  I'm going to encourage the building of a hydrogen highway to take us to the environmental future.

• 5:54:54Speaker 05

  The original plan called for at least 150 stations by 2010, but that never happened. Around 10 demo stations came and went, which were co-funded by a federal program. Everyone learned a lot, but it was an R&D exercise. By the end of the decade, lots of people were asking, "Where is this hydrogen highway?" But in 2013, California reset and recommitted. It put up $20 million a year for stations. And between 2015 and 2020, at least 37 new stations came online.

• 5:55:28Speaker 33

  I do think that I and a lot of other people thought it was just going to be a bunch of dominos falling, that the hydrogen stations were going to go 50, 100, 200 stations in California. The Northeast market would launch and take off there. And then people like me in Colorado would maybe get a backbone across interstates and we would be able to drive a hydrogen car as part of our daily commute.

• 5:55:54Speaker 05

  The car companies played their part, too. In 2008, Honda began leasing a fuel cell sedan called the Clarity. Toyota made a big splash with the Murai in 2015.

• 5:56:04Speaker 34

  This isn't just another car. This is an opportunity to really make a difference. The name we've given to our new car is "Mirai", which in Japanese means "future".

• 5:56:19Speaker 05

  The other fuel cell car you can buy today, the Hyundai Nexo, hit the US in 2018.

• 5:56:25Speaker 33

  So I've seen and witnessed various launches. And for me, each one of them felt like, "Okay, this is it. Now we just need more of that car. We need more fueling stations." And then we see the other companies launch. Okay, that's further validation that this is going in the right direction.

• 5:56:45Speaker 05

  The fuel cell market has come a long way in 20 years. But along the way, something else happened, too. Batteries got good, good enough to power cars. And in the race to replace gasoline, batteries had some big advantages over hydrogen. I called up The Verge's transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, to explain. And he started with the fact that we already have a power grid.

• 5:57:10Speaker 35

  With EV charging, it's pretty simple. You install the charging station, you plug it into the grid. And barring any software problems or anything else like that, it's good to go. It should work.

• 5:57:20Speaker 05

  That was a huge advantage in the early days of battery EVs. Drivers could just plug in at home.

• 5:57:26Speaker 35

  It's a different story with hydrogen. There needs to be a supply chain. You need to truck the hydrogen in for where it's being produced to the filling stations, fill up those tanks at the filling stations. And then, once the hydrogen has been depleted, the whole process starts all over again.

• 5:57:42Speaker 05

  Now, granted, it's taken years for a public EV charging network to mature. In fact, it's been a mess of competing standards and flaky charging ports. But it's getting better. And the reason reveals another huge difference between hydrogen and batteries.

• 5:57:59Speaker 35

  The hydrogen car industry, as it were, didn't have a Tesla. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elon Musk.

• 5:58:09Speaker 05

  Tesla hit the scene in 2008 with the $100,000 Roadster. And it has utterly defined the battery electric business ever since. Over the past 15 years, its cars have steadily gotten cheaper and more ubiquitous. And along the way, it also built a huge charging network, which is so good that pretty much every other automaker in the US is now signing on to Tesla's standard.

• 5:58:34Speaker 35

  We're getting the entire industry realizing that Tesla has the best charging network. They have the best chargers, the most reliable. We're all going to just end up using Teslas, as we probably could have realized a lot sooner.

• 5:58:45Speaker 05

  In other words, say what you will about Elon Musk, and on this podcast, we surely do. But Tesla gets a lot of credit. For dragging the battery electric market into existence, which is something that hydrogen just never had.

• 5:59:00Speaker 35

  There was no Tesla startup company that was out there innovating, taking its lumps, losing millions and millions of dollars in the process, but also generating lots of buzz, generating lots of hype and speculation amongst investors and on Wall Street and the government as well, and sort of proving eventually, ultimately, that there was going to be this huge untapped market for battery electric vehicles.

• 5:59:27Speaker 05

  In the end, the numbers tell the story. Battery electric cars and charging stations exploded across the country. Today, there are roughly 43,000 public charging ports in California alone, whereas hydrogen seems to be backsliding.

• 5:59:43Speaker 35

  There still is this plan that exists, like state grants, to companies to build out stations. The only problem is the companies that have agreed to do so are now backtracking on those plans. Like, for example, Shell said that it was going to create a huge network of hydrogen stations in the state. But then they saw sort of like the writing on the wall and decided to start backing out of that plan. They declined a $40 million state grant to build like an extra 50 stations. And then they went ahead and just closed practically all of their stations in California.

• 6:00:15Speaker 05

  Gotcha. So basically, there's money out there and there just aren't takers for it right now.

• 6:00:19Speaker 35

  There's a pretty strong belief right now and sort of in California and elsewhere that battery electric vehicles, they won. Hydrogen could have surpassed EVs at some point, but over the last like 15 or 20 years, it's very clear that battery electric vehicles are the preferred alternate technology for private vehicles. And hydrogen is kind of becoming a bit of a footnote.

• 6:00:46Speaker 05

  So there's the big picture. How do we get here? But that doesn't fully explain what we saw. Glitchy stations, the price of fuel, the shortages. To understand those problems, I needed to talk to First Element, the company that runs almost three quarters of the stations in California. So I called up one of the co-founders, Shane Stevens, who was pretty candid with me.

• 6:01:10Speaker 36

  We've been doing some, I would say, field testing on customers to get this equipment kind of commercial ready to where it needs to be, right? And it's, you know, we didn't mean to do that, right? But we've sort of were forced into that situation because as we started operating these stations, we just uncorked all sorts of issues that needed to be addressed.

• 6:01:28Speaker 05

  Here's what happened. Back in 2013, the year California announced new funding for hydrogen stations, Shane was working at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine. He watched the wave of interest in hydrogen build again, and he saw an opportunity on the fueling side of things. So that same year, he and two partners founded First Element.

• 6:01:48Speaker 36

  From there, we actually got some initial financing from Toyota and Honda, and we were able to leverage that private financing and go get California state grants. We won 19 stations and we were able to develop the initial network of hydrogen stations.

• 6:02:03Speaker 05

  First Element made a big push right out of the gates, and it got around 15 stations up and running by the end of 2016. That speed was a calculated risk. They built more, smaller, cheaper stations to prove out the network and encourage automakers to start selling cars. And the plan worked a little too well.

• 6:02:24Speaker 36

  The cars came more quickly. The stations were overwhelmed more quickly, and the customers drove the cars more than we anticipated early on. What became obvious to us is that this technology for hydrogen stations was actually not really ready for prime time commercially. The equipment that we're using in the field today, it hasn't gone through sort of hours of testing to make sure the robustness is there, to make sure that, you know, little design kinks or design flaws have been worked out. And then when it's used, you know, regularly every day. Hundreds of customers. All of a sudden, you start to see that it maybe doesn't hold up as well because it's never been tested under those conditions.

• 6:03:02Speaker 05

  Which lines up with our experience at the pumps. Lots of little quirks and rough edges.

• 6:03:07Speaker 36

  We had a lot of hiccups on uptime. We had performance issues. We had logistics issues on supplying the fuel and we actually had a lot of fuel runouts to the station.

• 6:03:16Speaker 05

  First Element has spent years trying to fix that first big mistake. Its newer stations are bigger, more expensive and more robust. They can store more fuel and dispense more at a time. They actually store hydrogen as a liquid now rather than a gas, which has been a lot easier.

• 6:03:33Speaker 36

  And you know, the reliability is getting much better than what it was as well. I don't think we're all the way where we could be, but we're now at a point where we see a commercially viable product.

• 6:03:45Speaker 05

  That also tracks with what we saw. We just had fewer hiccups using the newer stations and drivers told us they were more reliable. But those older, flimsier stations are still there. They account for nearly half the overall network and they're not going anywhere.

• 6:04:01Speaker 36

  We've invested quite a bit of money into permanent infrastructure that's in the ground. To upgrade the station is not really an option. And the other thing is we don't want to leave customers hanging that may be depending on that station, even if it's an older generation.

• 6:04:16Speaker 05

  So drivers are stuck with temperamental hardware and First Element is stuck maintaining it.

• 6:04:22Speaker 36

  So right now we're charging considerably more for hydrogen than what we'd like to be and what we think we should be.

• 6:04:28Speaker 05

  And that's not the only cause of expensive fuel. First Element and others have had a hard time competing for hydrogen against much bigger industries like oil refining and agriculture. There just isn't enough to go around. There have also been supply chain problems and other market issues. The war in Ukraine is even playing a role. So prices have been spiking and not enough hydrogen is making it to drivers.

• 6:04:53Speaker 36

  But unfortunately, that's the reality of the landscape today.

• 6:04:56Speaker 05

  First Element is now staring down the barrel of a vicious cycle. The more the fuel network struggles, the less viable the cars look. It's the exact opposite of what they were trying to do by opening all those stations in the first place. Our transportation editor, Andy, said it best.

• 6:05:13Speaker 35

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like enmeshed in like the worst chicken and egg scenario that you could possibly imagine, you know, like, people aren't going to buy hydrogen cars because there's just, there's nowhere to fuel them, right? And then you're not going to have anyone building any fueling stations because so few people own the hydrogen cars. So you're just kind of like trapped in this limbo state. It's just not making the right kind of argument to people who are out shopping for these types of vehicles.

• 6:05:43Speaker 05

  We gotta take a short break. We'll be right back.

• 6:05:54Speaker 08

  Because I was the one who had to foot the charging case all day? Oh, okay.

• 6:05:59Speaker 05

  It's 4 o'clock. We've been driving for about three hours and we're somewhere in central California. Our tank is half-empty and it's time to start looking for Harris Ranch, our hydrogen oasis. So far, we see a lot of parched farmland. Andrew, what is your weather app telling you?

• 6:06:20Speaker 08

  See, right now it says 70. Oh, I just don't have service right now. Okay, now, updated weather, Kalanga 101, excessive heat warning until 8 o'clock tonight.

• 6:06:33Speaker 05

  A few more miles of nothing and then an exit sign.

• 6:06:36Speaker 08

  There it is.

• 6:06:37Speaker 05

  You see it? Oh, Harris Ranch. All right. Harris Ranch is perfectly spaced between San Francisco and LA, so it's a waypoint for all kinds of drivers. There's a Shell gas station and what is currently the largest bank of Tesla superchargers in the world. Over the years, though, the owners of Harris Ranch have made it a destination unto itself. They've built a massive Spanish hacienda-style hotel, multiple restaurants, and the only gift shop I've ever seen with a butcher counter. All right, there's the Shell station. We drive past all of this, past palm trees, past a barbecue pit slash convenience

• 6:07:19Speaker 05

  store, past an under-construction RV park, and there, off on a lonely plot of concrete, is one First Element hydrogen pump. This is a very weird place.

• 6:07:32Speaker 08

  There's a couple of flies in the car.

• 6:07:35Speaker 05

  Well, should we gas up?

• 6:07:37Speaker 08

  Let's do it.

• 6:07:39Speaker 05

  We pull up to the pump, get out, and my god, the heat. Ah, it just hits you. Better not take seven tries.

• 6:07:52Speaker 05

  To get hydrogen. The buttons are hot.

• 6:07:56Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, the pump doesn't care how hot we are. Alright, it's done. That doesn't feel like a full tank's worth, but we'll see when we turn the car back on. Please seek attendant. We got fuel. I don't think there's an attendant here. I hope I didn't just break it for everybody else.

• 6:08:17Speaker 21

  Did you get a full tank?

• 6:08:19Speaker 05

  Well, let's see.

• 6:08:23Speaker 05

  236 miles. No, we didn't get a full tank. We start the process all over again. This time, the pin pad freezes, then gives us an input error. But then it resets and fuel starts flowing. Dispenser is... okay, we're getting more hydrogen. We finally get our full tank, but then the nozzle gets stuck to the car. Again, 101 degrees, no shade, dwindling patience. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

• 6:08:56Speaker 05

  Look, I know I'm harping a lot on these finicky pumps. And I know normal gas stations don't work perfectly either. But it's shocking how much trouble we've had in just a couple days of driving. And it's not hard to imagine frustrations like these dragging down the whole idea of hydrogen.

• 6:09:15Speaker 05

  Anyway, the nozzle finally comes free. We retreat to a picnic table under a tree and wait for other fuel cell drivers to show up.

• 6:09:27Speaker 05

  We wait for an hour, two hours, three hours. We watch cars come and go from the Shell station, the Tesla chargers, the convenience store. We get dinner at the barbecue pit, and we eat it while staring across the parking lot of the pump. We dub this, of course, the stakeout. It's a nice break from the road and the heat, but we are beat. And I am pretty sick of loitering at gas stations.

• 6:09:56Speaker 05

  Finally, around 8:00 PM, as dusk is falling. Is that a marai? I sprint over like a lunatic. The driver, Billy, is happy to chat. And he wants to know if the pump is working.

• 6:10:09Speaker 37

  Did you guys just fill up?

• 6:10:11Speaker 05

  It was earlier today. No, we've been here for a few hours.

• 6:10:14Speaker 37

  Have you seen anybody else?

• 6:10:15Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 6:10:16Speaker 37

  Oh, really?

• 6:10:16Speaker 05

  No, no one else. Do you ever, do you see people when you stop here?

• 6:10:20Speaker 37

  Uh, sometimes, sometimes.

• 6:10:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:10:23Speaker 37

  But yeah, it's...

• 6:10:26Speaker 37

  You don't really see that many people. It's, you know, hair is ancient.

• 6:10:29Speaker 05

  Billy lives in LA, and he's gone up to San Francisco a few times. He even tips us off to a second route. There's a station in Santa Barbara, a couple hours up the coast from LA. It's far enough north that, from there, you can get all the way up to San Jose along Highway 101, as long as you drive conservatively and don't hit any detours.

• 6:10:50Speaker 37

  It's more scenic driving.

• 6:10:51Speaker 05

  But does it feel like a little scary?

• 6:10:54Speaker 37

  At the same time, you, yeah, you get a little bit anxious because by the time you get to the next station, you have like 50 miles left. You have to plan it out. If you don't plan it out, it becomes a nightmare.

• 6:11:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. Have you never run out of gas?

• 6:11:06Speaker 37

  Uh, almost, almost. But, I mean, Toyota gives you the service where you can, uh, they'll tow it for free.

• 6:11:15Speaker 05

  Yes, that is another real perk that Toyota offers: free towing.

• 6:11:19Speaker 37

  I have not used that at all.

• 6:11:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:11:21Speaker 37

  So luckily.

• 6:11:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:11:23Speaker 37

  Not going with it.

• 6:11:25Speaker 05

  And that was the end of the stakeout. Billy filled up and left. It was fully dark out, and we were wiped. So, we called it quits and found our hotel. The next morning, we shoved off for LA.

• 6:11:48Speaker 05

  Cruising through a very hot and dry central California, it was hard not to think about the broader environmental mission behind this car. The hydrogen highway might have been created to fight smog, but today it's promoted more as a tool to fight climate change. And in that light, hydrogen is pretty controversial.

• 6:12:09Speaker 38

  You have this supposedly green fuel that's actually made in a very, in a not very green way.

• 6:12:16Speaker 05

  Justine Kalma covers all things energy and climate here at The Verge. I called her up somewhere along I-5. I wasn't driving. So tell me why this does not make sense for cars. Why should we not be in this hydrogen fuel cell car right now?

• 6:12:30Speaker 38

  Okay, so there are a lot of reasons. So first of all, the majority of the hydrogen that we have today, even though it doesn't emit carbon dioxide, you know, when it's, it's used to power a car in a fuel cell, that hydrogen was most likely made from gas.

• 6:12:48Speaker 05

  95% of the hydrogen made today comes from a process called steam methane reforming, which produces carbon dioxide emissions. It also depends on a supply chain that tends to leak methane. Those are two gases we're desperately trying to keep out of the atmosphere right now.

• 6:13:05Speaker 38

  Methane is a greenhouse gas pollutant that is even more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide. And so a majority of hydrogen today is, is what you call gray hydrogen.

• 6:13:19Speaker 05

  Meaning basically dirty. Now, there is such a thing as green hydrogen, fuel that's clean and climate friendly.

• 6:13:26Speaker 38

  So the way that green hydrogen is made is typically using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Right now, electrolyzers are pretty expensive and green hydrogen is something like four times the cost of gray hydrogen right now. So costs have to come way down.

• 6:13:49Speaker 05

  To be fair, lots of power that's used to charge batteries isn't green either. About 60% of the electricity in the US comes from gas and coal. And to pull off a clean battery electric future, we're going to need a lot more green energy and big upgrades to the grid. None of that is going to be easy or cheap. But even in an ideal future that's flush with green electricity, hydrogen is still less efficient.

• 6:14:17Speaker 38

  A passenger vehicle can much more easily plug into the grid and run on a battery that you juice up with renewable energy. So with hydrogen, you're adding another step to that, right? You're basically using renewable electricity to create the hydrogen to then run the vehicle versus you could also just run the vehicle on renewable electricity in the first place.

• 6:14:43Speaker 05

  So if the question is where do we spend the hydrogen we're making? The answer might be things that are harder to plug into the power grid.

• 6:14:51Speaker 38

  There's more hype around it for industrial uses, for aviation, for shipping, because it's much harder to get a plane off the ground or to have a ship that is battery-powered. Passenger vehicles are just so low down on the list.

• 6:15:13Speaker 25

  What does it say? Turn right?

• 6:15:14Speaker 05

  Turn right.

• 6:15:21Speaker 05

  After another long stretch of Highway 5, we pulled into LA.

• 6:15:25Speaker 25

  All right, here's the palm trees.

• 6:15:31Speaker 05

  We were excited to check out the scene. There are more fuel cell cars and stations here than anywhere else in the state. But we'd also read about a month's long hydrogen shortage, and our fuel map showed a lot of offline stations. I see it. It's glowing, those blue awnings.

• 6:15:47Speaker 25

  It's nice looking.

• 6:15:48Speaker 05

  Are those little futuristic looking? They're a little snazzier. We found lots of fuel cell drivers really quickly. And well, here's your vibe check.

• 6:16:00Speaker 39

  It's been awful, to be completely honest. I'm trying to trade it in for a regular car, like a gasoline car.

• 6:16:07Speaker 08

  We bought this with the idea of saving the earth or whatever, and of course, saving for the gas, but it never happened.

• 6:16:14Speaker 05

  Have you ever run out? Of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You get towed or? Get towed. We heard lots of familiar things. Love for the cars, frustration around fueling, flaky stations, brutal prices, range anxiety, regrets. We also saw one Hyundai Nexo. The owner, Tigran, actually solved a mystery for us. He told us why fuel nozzles kept sticking to our car.

• 6:16:39Speaker 30

  So I've been standing here for five minutes trying to yank it off.

• 6:16:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:16:42Speaker 30

  And sometimes it just...

• 6:16:45Speaker 30

  Okay, like right now is a good example. Okay, this has happened to me. So it gets like really cold, like you could tell there's like ice. Oh, okay, so that's, it is just like freezing.

• 6:16:55Speaker 05

  It turns out that the more the pumps get used, the colder the hardware gets from all the cooled hydrogen moving through. So the nozzle can freeze to the car.

• 6:17:03Speaker 30

  Oh wow, it's, yeah, my finger must have stuck to it. Not bad, it took about 10 seconds, but other times I've literally sat, waited five minutes for it to loosen up, but. Oh, we thought we were pulling on that handle wrong or something. We thought there was some trick that we didn't know, and it's the freezing. It's just the freezing, yeah.

• 6:17:22Speaker 05

  I later realized that Shane from First Element had warned me about this. I even found a video from Toyota about it.

• 6:17:29Speaker 10

  At times, the nozzle may become temporarily frozen and unable to disconnect from the vehicle for several minutes. Do not try to remove it forcibly, or you could cause damage to the nozzle, vehicle, or dispenser.

• 6:17:43Speaker 05

  Shane had told me the problem was largely resolved, which doesn't seem to be the case.

• 6:17:48Speaker 30

  I met people here, they're like, "Oh, I carry a bottle of water with me and I just kind of pour a little bit, just loosening it up a bit."

• 6:17:55Speaker 10

  Do not pour water or spray chemicals on the nozzle.

• 6:17:59Speaker 05

  All in all, Tigran is at the end of his rope.

• 6:18:02Speaker 30

  Does it feel like you're just in this kind of pilot program? Yes. Yeah. But it wasn't sold like that. When I got it, it was like, oh, you just go to, it's like filling up your gas at a regular station. Right. You just go, put it in, and you're done. Yeah. And when it's working, it's fine, that's generally true, but most days it doesn't just work. So what do you think you're gonna do with the car long-term? Um, the resale value's very bad. Oh god, you're just really stuck. Yep. I looked to trade it in for a Tesla, and Tesla's like, "We'll give you 10,000." Yeah. I owe 30 on it.

• 6:18:35Speaker 05

  That feeling of a bait and switch? We've heard that a lot. One Murai driver, Denise, says the dealer misled him about the value of the car.

• 6:18:44Speaker 39

  At the time of closing, they told me the actual value, this car was at 20, about 23,000.

• 6:18:50Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 6:18:51Speaker 39

  After I closed, they told me its actual value is $7,000.

• 6:18:55Speaker 05

  What happened?

• 6:18:56Speaker 39

  So I think what they do, they try to factor in the fact that they give you a fuel card for $15,000.

• 6:19:02Speaker 05

  Oh, they consider that part of the value of the car?

• 6:19:06Speaker 39

  Yeah, they consider that part of the deal.

• 6:19:07Speaker 05

  Gotcha. Okay, so now the resale value of the car is not what you thought it was?

• 6:19:11Speaker 39

  No, it's not what I thought it was.

• 6:19:14Speaker 05

  I asked Toyota about this, and they declined to comment on it. But they did confirm that the fuel cards are not transferable. Altogether, these stories started to paint a picture about how these cars were sold to lots of people. Over and over, drivers told us that they were shopping for a battery electric car, but someone, a friend, a salesman, the internet, talked them into a Murai. It was a new, zero-emission, luxury car. It's like driving a Lexus or BMW. And it was priced like a Toyota Camry. It was a win-win, except it wasn't. Here's one more Murai driver, Jonathan. What do you think you're gonna do with it long-term?

• 6:19:53Speaker 08

  Get rid of it?

• 6:19:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:19:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I will. But I do like the newer models. Don't get me wrong, they're very beautiful, but it doesn't matter what model of the car comes out, it's just this.

• 6:20:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you can't drive it.

• 6:20:05Speaker 08

  You can't drive it.

• 6:20:08Speaker 05

  Talking to these drivers made me think back to a very clarifying moment at Harris Ranch. During our stakeout, we got bored and wandered over to the Tesla area. And after hours spent listening to fuel cell drivers talk about hanging in there, meeting Tesla owners was a shock. Where are you coming from, where are you going to?

• 6:20:28Speaker 14

  We live in Metica, and we're headed to Anaheim to go to Disneyland.

• 6:20:31Speaker 13

  Super reliable and super easy to get charging everywhere.

• 6:20:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:20:37Speaker 13

  I'm excited, yeah. Road trips are amazing when you have a Tesla and you have the whole thing.

• 6:20:43Speaker 05

  They were all just so unburdened. That's the best end state for any new technology. You forget about it and just use it. And right now, hydrogen just isn't there.

• 6:20:59Speaker 05

  After everything we saw on this trip, there's one player I can't quite figure out: Toyota. Why is Toyota still so committed to the Murai? In the first half of this year, about 322 fuel cell cars were sold in California, total. For reference, during that same period, maybe 200,000 battery EVs were sold, in California alone. And yet, Toyota is still marketing Murais and pushing them at huge discounts. During the Paris Olympics this summer, Toyota provided 500 Murais to shuttle around athletes and bolster the green credentials of the Olympics,

• 6:21:40Speaker 05

  which actually upset a lot of environmentalists. So what's Toyota's angle here? I spoke with Craig Scott, the general manager of Fuel Cell Solutions. Craig said that hydrogen has been a big hedge.

• 6:21:54Speaker 40

  It's back to the foundational things of what are we trying to accomplish, which under move carbon to the tailpipe. And the only way to do that, really, in a complete way, in a zero emission way is, you know, there are two competing technologies, batteries and fuel cells. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure we had a good foothold in both.

• 6:22:12Speaker 05

  Toyota continues to hedge more than most major automakers. It made hybrids a huge success with the Prius, but it's dragged its feet on full battery EVs. Today, the company sells just one battery-powered Toyota and one model Lexus, compared to more than a dozen hybrids. And the Murai. Critics have spent years dinging Toyota for this, and the company does have a lot more battery models in the works, but it hasn't abandoned the Murai. I put this question to our transportation editor, Andy. Why is Toyota sticking with the Murai? He's mystified too, but he argued that it's not just about the Murai.

• 6:22:50Speaker 35

  These companies have this technology. They want to use it in some way. They spent a lot of money. They've invested in it, and they want to get something out of it. So they're all sort of casting about and looking for ways in which this fuel source can be useful for future applications.

• 6:23:06Speaker 05

  Empowering buses, trucks and trains with its fuel cells. It's developing stationary generators. And Honda, Hyundai and other companies are doing similar work. First Element is investing in truck refueling. This is what our environment reporter Justine was talking about. There are other places that fuel cells might make more sense. It's the next step in that hedge. If any of those industries go all in on hydrogen, Toyota and others will be there. And the Mirai? Its success or failure might not matter so much.

• 6:23:45Speaker 05

  This is the big, this is the big one. We gotta see what the final price tag is. It's the end of our road trip and we're at a gas station back in the Bay Area. Our rental was not point to point. So after we were done in LA, we had to turn around and drive back across California. We ended up taking the more scenic, high risk, high reward route along the 101, the route Billy from Harris Ranch told us about. It gave us one last hit of range anxiety. If the, the first station is out of order for any reason, then it's another 10 miles to the next station. Which we have budgeted in. Yep. And if that's out of order, it's another 10 miles. So it like,

• 6:24:27Speaker 05

  I could see this getting a little hairy, but so far, we're okay. We pulled into San Jose with 40 miles left in the tank. All in, we put about 875 miles on the car in a little more than three days. We also had to return the Mirai with a full tank. So we were treated to one last shock. 120 bucks? 130? What do we think? It's gotta be more than the most. Okay. 4.605 kilograms, $165.78. That's a big finish for the road trip. If we'd been driving, say, a Toyota Camry, we'd have spent about 30 bucks on gas. Road trip complete. It's a good, uh, doable souvenir.

• 6:25:13Speaker 05

  The most expensive tank I've ever purchased.

• 6:25:25Speaker 05

  In the back of my head throughout this story, I've thought a lot about LaserDiscs of all things, the failed competitor to DVDs. I've wondered, is that what this is? Is this just an alternate history story? A why the world went this way instead of that way kind of thing? After taking this trip, I don't think that's quite right. Batteries won, but I think that there's still some part of the future that's up for grabs. Hydrogen is still more portable than batteries, and it's a much faster way to move energy around. And there are still lots of hydrogen believers out there. California is funding new stations. First Element alone is trying to build 34 more right now.

• 6:26:08Speaker 05

  Honda just launched a plug-in battery/fuel cell hybrid car. The federal government is pouring money into green hydrogen production. My point is, that "if you build it, they will come" energy is still out there. So, fuel cells may yet find their niche. Maybe the hydrogen highway will be full of semi-trucks. Or maybe it'll be a hydrogen waterway, or an airway. I don't know. Here's one last thing that I do know. In spite of everything, it was weirdly fun to be part of the fuel cell club. Most of the drivers I talked to were so open and honest and helpful, it was great to swap tips and stories with everybody. I got the sense there was a community here,

• 6:26:52Speaker 05

  even if it was based on shared grievance. That's probably not the way that Toyota or First Element wants drivers bonding, but I got a kick out of it. Case in point. After we filled up at the final gas station, I happened to see another Marai driver wandering from pump to pump, looking at all the little screens. I asked him what was up, and he said he couldn't get his pump to work. The screen was frozen. I told him the pump we used was fine, and he pulled over to that one. And just like that, I was a fuel cell driver too.

• 6:27:30David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for the Vergecast today and for this year. Happy end of 2024, everybody. Thanks to you, frankly, for listening to all of this. If you got to the end, send me an email and tell me you got to the end. And I will, I don't know what I'll do, but I'll love you forever for it. Thank you to everyone who listens to this show ever. And thank you so much for being part of this community. Doing this is so much more fun because we get to do it with you guys. And we are so grateful for everyone who listens to the show and tells us you listen to the show and has ideas. We love it. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, or feelings, or anything else that you think we should put in even longer Vergecast next year, you can always email us at [email protected], call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you.

• 6:28:13David Pierce?

  The show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're going to be off for the next couple of weeks, and then we will be back at CES. Come see us live. Come listen to the show. Hope you have a wonderful holiday season. See you soon. Rock and roll.