Inside the global computer crash

Today on the flagship podcast of configuration changes: The Verge's Tom Warren joins the show to to talk about the story and legacy of the CrowdStrike crash. CrowdStrike and Microsoft: all the latest news on the global IT outage Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters What is CrowdStrike, and what happened? CrowdStrike’s faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices, says Microsoft CrowdStrike outage: Photos, videos, and tales of IT workers fixing BSODs Then we talk with The Verge's Victoria Song and Zombies, Run creator Adrian Hon about making exercising fun without making it competitive and awful. Zombies, Run Adrian Hon’s Substack Finally, the Apple Watch will let you rest This walking app let me whack my co-workers with a baseball bat Ignore your fitness tracker and walk to Mordor instead Finally, we answer a hotline question about handheld gadgets for new parents — because there's a lot of time to kill when there's a baby around. Backbone One review: the best mobile gaming controller yet Handheld consoles are the future of gaming Holedown Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of configuration changes. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am in my basement, as always, doing a shipping day. So I'm going on vacation at the end of this week. I'm going to spend two weeks in the outdoors, just like staring at trees and not screens. It's going to be amazing. Can't wait. But what I always try to do before I go on vacation is just like, kind of get stuff together. There's nothing worse than coming home to like mess. So trying to get everything cleaned off, and mostly what that means in my particular line of work, is just shipping things. One of the great things about this job is you accumulate a lot of gadgets. And one of the annoying things about this job is you have to ship them all back. So right now, I have like, I have a bunch of tablets on my desk.

• 0:45David Pierce?

  I have a case for a thing. I don't even know what the thing is. I have, I have a bunch of watch boxes that I have to go back. I see one, two, three, four, five phones that I have to do something with. I have some AR glasses. I have these Amazon Echo Frames. I have a camera and I have a Vision Pro. And I have, oh, that's another phone. So that's six phones. I have the Humane AI pin that I keep meaning to send back. I have two rabbits. They sent me two for some reason. I don't know why. I don't want either one of them. So basically what is going to happen here is I have a very carefully organized thing of packing tape in the utility room over there. And I'm going to spend all day shoving things into boxes. And then I'm going to load my car and as I do four or five times a year,

• 1:31David Pierce?

  I'm going to dump thousands of things into the UPS office all at once. And then it's going to feel like a gigantic weight has lifted off my shoulders. I both hate this and kind of love how it feels at the very end. Anyway, lots to do on The Vergecast today. We are going to talk about the crazy thing that happened on Friday, when thanks to something happening with CrowdStrike and Windows, computers all over the world just went down and broke. And it felt like everything from airlines to banks just fell apart all at once. We're going to talk about what happened, what it means that that can happen, and where we go from here. We're also going to talk about one of my all-time favorite apps called Zombies Run. And we're going to talk about what that app means for fitness

• 2:15David Pierce?

  and what it gets right about how we think about quantifying ourselves and tracking things and gamification and everything that feels toxic and wrong with the way that our devices work now. Why that app feels like none of it. We had a super fun time talking to one of the creators. It's a really good interview. We also have a fun hotline question about handheld gaming, which we've been talking a lot about on this show recently. So lots to get to. All that is coming up in just a second, but I just this second realized that I don't have anywhere near enough actual boxes, which means I have to go, I think to like Home Depot and pay a bunch of money for a bunch of boxes to then pay a bunch of money to ship to someone else. It's a process. Anyway, this is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 3:32David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right. So obviously I should have mentioned this up top. The biggest news happening right now, at least in the United States, is President Joe Biden dropping out of the race for 2024, endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris. It's just pure chaos in the American election season right now, and we're going to spend a lot of time over the next few months covering this. But right now, just didn't feel like the right moment. So we're going to come back to this. We'll probably talk a bunch about it on Friday's show. We're going to talk a lot about politics and policy and all of this for the next several months. Keep an eye on theverge.com. For right now, I want to talk about something that happened on Friday, which is that a lot of the world woke up to computers that didn't work.

• 4:15David Pierce?

  Banks were having trouble. Airlines were having trouble. It felt like all at once, the whole world just kind of crashed. And it turns out this was something that happened because of a company called CrowdStrike on Windows computers. And it has made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings about what it means that we are so reliant on technology and not just technology, but very Specific things from very specific companies. And all of it feels so important and infrastructural, but it all also feels fragile. So I want to talk about what has happened over the last few days, what we've learned and where we might go forward in how we think about computers and how we use them for the most important things going on in the world.

• 4:58David Pierce?

  Tom Warren on our team has been covering all of this all weekend. I think didn't have a weekend by the sounds of things. So we're going to get into it. Hi, Tom.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Hey, good to be back.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  So you have like an IT-ish background a little bit. Is this like the confluence of all of your interests these last few days?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this is like, I'm so glad I got out of IT more than a decade ago, kind of incident. Yeah, definitely.

• 5:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it seems right. So let's rewind back to Friday morning. You're in the UK, I'm in the US. So you woke up a few hours earlier than I did and got online. Like, describe to me the scenes of Friday morning as you were getting up and getting online.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Chaos. So I woke up around about 7:00 AM and I had like a couple of people, one I used to work with and just a good friend who's like very technical. Messaged me saying, have you seen this in Australia? Like what's going on out there? And I was like, huh, what's all this? And I looked at like the Reddit thread. It was like loads of sysadmins complaining. And usually that's a good sign of any sort of major sort of Windows outages or anything related to that. Is Reddit people getting angry? Essentially, it's a good flag. Yeah, so I saw that. And then there's some like media reports out of Australia about banks being affected, supermarkets, airlines, you know, all the usual, the stuff that we've seen.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  But then it started to spread, right? So I turned on like the TV, you know, quarter past seven to watch like Sky News and they weren't running the news. And I was like, hmm, this is weird. And then it came like one of their tech persons had tweeted saying they were offline because of some tech issues. And then it started to like escalate. It was like some of the airports wanting of the initial flights that start around about that time of the day, like 7:00 AM is kind of like the early flights. Of delays and stuff. And I was like, okay, right. I've got to figure out what's going on here. And then obviously we saw the CrowdStrike thing and then it all kind of just started spiraling. Like you just saw more and more. But at the same time, there was a Microsoft Azure cloud outage going on.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  Oh, God, I didn't even know that.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  It wasn't a huge one. Yeah, it wasn't a huge one, but it was kind of small. So it started out with like. Everyone blamed Microsoft basically for this outage to start off.

• 7:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, how quickly did, by the time I was online, CrowdStrike was kind of already in the conversation. It was, there was a lot of like, right when I became aware of the story, it was kind of at that moment where it was like, okay, this is, this is a CrowdStrike thing. We hadn't quite gotten to here's what's going on yet. But how did, how did folks figure out that CrowdStrike was the issue here?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think mainly because on Reddit, the people that were posting, the sysadmins were posting the stuff from CrowdStrike's support, which you obviously had to be a CrowdStrike customer to access. It wasn't available publicly. So then it was like, okay, this is what's actually caused it. It's obviously not a Windows problem because not everyone's waking up with this. It's like a select amount of machines, but enough to obviously be causing a problem. And it obviously, they issued this update, I think it was like around about like 5am UK time. And then I think it was like an hour and 20 minutes or so, near enough, when they pulled it. But that was that time when it was like middle of the afternoon or something in Australia, like the peak time for people to all have their machines on

• 8:12Speaker 02

  with CrowdStrike installed. And they also have quite a big install base there, I guess, in Australia. So they got hit the hardest like initially.

• 8:20David Pierce?

  I think about that with like, you, you see the companies that do maintenance or software updates or whatever, and they always do them. It's, it's almost always overnight in the US, right? So the thing you're describing like 5am UK time, that's middle of the night in the US.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:34David Pierce?

  It had never occurred to me before this, but that's gotta suck if you live in one of these timelines that is like opposite the US and all of these things are happening in the middle of your workday, all the time, over and over again. So like Australia, just getting screwed by software updates left and right here. I never really thought about that before. I'm sorry, Australia.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  I think they got hit the hardest because I think just all the machines were online, right, to get this update. So if, and then obviously the European machines, a lot of these machines will be just, you know, people leave the office, they don't turn them off, for example. These are also critical systems that this is usually installed on, so they're probably pretty much always online. So that's why there was like 8.5 million machines in total affected. We saw some. I feel like there was less in the US affected in terms of like the stuff that we saw in Australia, like the supermarkets and people not being able to get groceries and you know, all those like affecting hospital appointments and stuff. I think there was a little bit less of that in the US.

• 9:28David Pierce?

  The biggest thing that happened in the US, at least anecdotally, was the airline stuff. Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:33David Pierce?

  And then there was the graphs that you could see of the planes in the sky was pretty incredible for a few hours.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Which usually only happens like they grind, they ground sorry, that many flights, usually when there's like something terrible happens, right? Yeah, but that's still ongoing. I think Delta actually said yesterday they're still cancelling flights and cancelling some today. So that's, I think they've been particularly like worse hit than than the other major sort of airlines in the US, but yeah, so that's still, there's still a bit of fallout going on there.

• 10:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. So with a few days of hindsight, it seems like we have a pretty clear sense of what happened. So just back all the way up, like what, what happened here? What broke? And I guess start with who is CrowdStrike, because I think most people reasonably do not and should not have to know.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 10:18David Pierce?

  CrowdStrike is. So like, start all the way at the beginning. What went wrong here?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably the only time you've ever heard of CrowdStrike is, is that they sponsor Mercedes. If you watch Formula One, then maybe.

• 10:27David Pierce?

  Wait, I knew I had heard that name before. That's so funny. Okay.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  That's right. And there was that picture of the Windows machines that had crashed at the Mercedes F1 garage.

• 10:36David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  When they're, when they're doing their testing and it had CrowdStrike on their T-shirts. It's like, it's just perfect. But yeah, on Friday morning, CrowdStrike issued what they call like a content update to their protection system. And CrowdStrike is a third-party security firm that just, think of it basically as antivirus. So she's a lot more sophisticated than that, because obviously cybersecurity these days is, is advanced further. But it's a cloud-based solution that pushes updates to machines that pay for this software. And I think it's around about 50 bucks a machine. So it's not cheap, like to, to protect your, your system with this stuff. So it's usually on critical systems. So that's why you saw such an impact. But yeah.

• 11:18David Pierce?

  And do you mean critical systems in the sense of like? Super secure government computers or just like computers that can't afford to go down? Or I guess both?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, more, more, more computers that can't really afford to go down. Like you see in all the airport screens, we're all Windows machines and they're kind of critical for communications to passengers and stuff. So it's not, not critical in the security side potentially, but more the infrastructure side.

• 11:43David Pierce?

  Got it.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Of, of things. Yeah. And so, yeah, they issued a regular update, uh, uh, I think it was about 5am UK time, around about then. Which is about midnight Eastern. And then all the machines started collecting that update because that is the way that this system is designed so that you get these updates. So you're protected against any emerging threats, right? Like you'll get.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Right. And it's not like a button you have to click on the computer to update. Like this is one thing I think I've, I've heard some folks having trouble understanding, like this is not an update that appears and you click a thing and your computer reboots. This is like, and it's designed to happen in the background all the time, right? Like this is the kind of update CrowdStrike does constantly, if I understand.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does these like, i- i- if not hourly, like daily, you know, like these are pretty frequent updates. So the way that the system works, let's explain that first, is that it runs at the very highest level of Windows. So basically in the kernel, which is like a privileged area of Windows that most apps don't touch or go near. It's like your anti-cheat systems for PC games. Or you'll see this sort of security scanning software is allowed in there and Microsoft allows that. And so they have a driver that runs at the boot of Windows to protect the system. And then they have these content delivery updates that are sort of like the rules and regulations around how this driver functions. And how it detects stuff.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And it's that sort of update, not the driver, that caused the issues. And it was basically a corruption in the update. And then the driver's obviously gone, oh no, what's happening? Crashed and then Windows has gone, oh no, what's happening? Blue screen and then reboot and then it's, keeps doing that every time because it keeps reading that latest content update. And so they, they, they've managed to fix it on some machines because you can keep. Rebooting the machine. And if you're lucky, the network stack will initialize in Windows before CrowdStrike does. And then you get the update or CrowdStrike starts its like scanning. So you get the update, the latest like dictionary definitions essentially before it crashes. So so some have been able to recover from that. I'm not I'm not sure what the percentage is because CrowdStrike haven't really

• 13:51Speaker 02

  sort of detailed that. And they're also working on some sort of other remediation, some mysterious remediation that they've been testing apparently over the last twenty four hours. So maybe get some more details about that. But that's essentially what happened. It was like seventy eight minutes of pushing this faulty update out to machines. And obviously, there's a bunch of them that are virtual machines, there's servers, there's just machines that are always on, like we're talking about the airport and stuff. So they were just sort of grabbed it. If you obviously had a machine that you turned on, once they pulled the bad update, you wouldn't have been affected. But it still hit eight point five million devices, which sounds like a lot as well, and it is. But Microsoft's point is like it's one less than one percent of Windows machines. But but it's the it's the important part of Windows machines.

• 14:35David Pierce?

  Let's talk through that. That's the thing, right? I think it's like the percentage of Microsoft computers that have CrowdStrike is by definition going to be a very important percentage of Microsoft PCs. Right? And those matter a lot that they keep running. So this idea that like, you know, the the Surface Laptop my wife has in her office upstairs didn't crash. It's like, I don't know if that's the victory for Microsoft that we're hoping for.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:00David Pierce?

  But it is useful perspective. It didn't.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:03David Pierce?

  And I think Microsoft is trying desperately to say like, this isn't Windows. Like, we didn't, this is not a Windows problem. We didn't do it.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. But can you imagine if it had been ten percent? Like.

• 15:13David Pierce?

  I know.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  It it could have been like even like a lot, a lot, a lot worse.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  It was obviously very bad, but yeah, I'm just, yeah, it's it could have been really bad. So. And it just kind of shows you like the reliance on this stuff, so.

• 15:28David Pierce?

  You've been tracking kind of the different versions of the fix that have been going on here, because I think.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:33David Pierce?

  Walk me through kind of where we've been, because at the very beginning, if I remember right, one of the big problems was the fix was super manual. You had to like go into every airport kiosk computer, reboot it in safe mode, do a thing, do another thing, and then it would work again. And it's like. Fine for your computer at home, but that doesn't work for every airline and airport and bank around the world. Like, that's just not a good.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:56David Pierce?

  So, but it seems like it even just a few days later, there's a much better track for getting this stuff fixed. So walk me through that a little bit.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of yes and no, because obviously we talked about the reboot thing is what CrowdStrike's been recommended and that's, that's, that's working on some.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  What were you saying, up to 15 times you wrote, right? Just basically keep turning it off and on again?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Apparently you just keep rebooting and that's, that's working for some people. It's not working for everyone. So there's still a lot of manual intervention going on. So you still have the option of doing it manually where you, you'd have to start the machine in safe mode, which requires physical access and a keyboard to, to, to, you know, get this machine to, to go in safe mode. And then you need admin rights to actually delete the faulty file. So there's quite a lot of, you know, a lot of intervention there. It's not like just send an update, click, click a button and an update is, is there. The other option is Microsoft created a recovery tool, um, which can sort of automate that process. But the only problem is a lot of these machines, because they're critical and, and, and they're out sort of in airports and stuff. They, they, they might be locked, locked down by BitLocker, which is disk encryption.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So then that tool can't do that without you having a recovery key, um, which are unique for every machine. And then you have to type this long, it's long. It's like a Windows key, you know, product key that you put in, that sort of length, um, to then allow you access. So there's a lot of, there's still a lot of manual intervention going along. We've, we've seen videos and pictures of like people scaling, um, ladders in airports and stuff, just to literally plug USBs into like these machines. It's just like, it's, uh, yeah, there's a lot that's still going on. So I didn't, I, I'd love to know what the percentage of ones that were fixed by rebooting multiple times versus, you know, man, manual intervention and also just

• 17:41Speaker 02

  do IT admins, just go and just blast this thing away and, and make sure that machine's fixed, moved on to the next, you know, like, it's a choice, isn't it? For, for every business as well. Do you want to sit there trying to reboot it? Or do you just want to fix it in the amount of time that you could have sat there rebooting it sort of 20 times? So I think it's a choice, but yeah, there's some more tools. And then, like we said, CrowdStrike's potentially doing something. I can't remember the exact wording they've put on it, but it's like some. Cloud-based solution that they think they might have got this fixed somehow. But I'm not sure how that's going to work.

• 18:14David Pierce?

  You cover Microsoft for us?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  I feel like over the last seventy two hours, this has gone from being a Microsoft disaster to not really being a Microsoft disaster. This is it's kind of a Microsoft adjacent disaster, I would say. But what is your sense of of what? A, kind of how this looks for Microsoft and B, like if you're Microsoft and you're you're a company that obviously is responsible in some ways for

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:40David Pierce?

  these kinds of crucial machines and the way that these systems work. Is your sense that anything anything changes here? Is this just like a bad thing that happened and we all recover and move on? Or does this feel like it might change things?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like it might change things. I think there's a lot going on here. It's obviously CrowdStrike, which is a third-party vendor. They get privileged access to to be able to to run this software in the way they do.

• 19:03David Pierce?

  Right, which is not normal, we should say. Like, it's a pretty, it's a big thing to give somebody essentially that kind of access.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:09David Pierce?

  It's like being inside of your computer in a very real way.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Microsoft allows it. And I think that there was a statement where Microsoft said that essentially that they have to give this access because of a ruling by the European Commission in two thousand nine, which I think is like, yes, true, but also, you know, they they could, they could possibly do what Apple have done and create create an architecture where they have their own API set and then vendors plug into that. But, yeah, I don't know, I need to look into that more fully to see the legalities on that. But, yes, they do have to keep their kernel open. And it's essentially, it's not necessarily that they have to keep the kernel open, it's just that they can't privilege their own security software over other vendors, seen as anti-competitive.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  And they've tried to lock down Windows a bunch over the years.

• 19:59David Pierce?

  Got it.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  To sort of secure things up. And they always do get accused of being, you know, anti-competitive, whether it's like through really dumb ways like S mode.

• 20:07David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  You know? Some more ways like TPM chips on Windows eleven. But there's always, there's always gonna be a pushback, um, because people see Windows as this open system and they do not like it when Microsoft tries to lock it down. For whatever reasons they might be doing it, but I feel like this might trigger some sort of change. Um, the only thing is that the Mac like way of doing it hasn't been perfect. It actually, sometimes the security software that runs there does cause panic errors on on Mac OS, so. There's no like, perfect way of doing this. Um, and I think Microsoft's kind of stuck in this weird situation where it's like, they kind of should take some of the blame here.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Because should we say if there's a driver that's faulty and it's stopping Windows from booting or or crashing it at boot? Why does Windows not unload that after it's done that like five times or whatever? However long you wanna say, but it should be intelligent enough to be like, something weird's going on here. Cause as as a human, if something was crashing, you'd just stop it, wouldn't you? And be like, let's see what's going on here. Um, but it just allows that behavior to to happen. Um, so I feel like they need to address some of that, um, to to stop this sort of thing happening in the future as well. But again, it's not their update, so that wasn't their fault. Um, but they can help, if you know what I mean, so. Yeah, but I think it's it's gonna trigger a lot of conversations around this.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Um, and it's just interesting because CrowdStrike obviously competes with Microsoft. And Microsoft has its own endpoint stuff like Intune that it sells to customers and competes with CrowdStrike for one of the sales teams. And the CEO of CrowdStrike regularly goes on TV broadcasts and in interviews and bashes Microsoft's security record, uh, which obviously has not been great.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Over the past few years. Um, so it's all, there's a lot of stuff going on here. Um, and and I think there was something about how there was an incident that happened, I think it was in twenty ten. When McAfee sent out an update similar to this and it crashed a bunch of Windows XP machines. And the CrowdStrike CEO was the CTO at McAfee at the time. So it's like, yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of history between security vendors and Microsoft and all this stuff where they they want it to be open. Microsoft's like. Yeah, but you should trust us. And then everyone's like, well, look what's happened. You trust trusted you for the past couple of decades, you know, like, I think there's going to be a lot of conversations around that.

• 22:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting microcosm of both sides of the debate here, right? Because like, if you want to argue for the closed ecosystem, it's so that things like this don't happen. And if you want to argue for the open ecosystem, it's that mostly things like this don't happen, right? Like, yeah, part of what's so interesting about this to me is it's it is, on the one hand, sort of remarkable that like the McAfee thing was in 2010, and this is this year. And these things don't actually happen all that often. And yet, when they do, they literally like set the world on fire, right? Like, it

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's catastrophic.

• 23:03David Pierce?

  Right. And we're so reliant on this stuff now. And I think it comes to a point where, and like you said, nobody is perfect. I don't think there is a version of this that is perfect. And it just makes you wonder like, okay, how do we, how do we even think about our reliance on this stuff? As people, as businesses, as like society, like the fact that a what amounts to like a security update to your computer could prevent you from flying to your vacation is just like a weird thing. Nobody thinks about. And I I have spent now a lot of time thinking about it, and I still don't know how to sort through it because it's not like, get rid of all the computers, pen and paper will fix it is like, that's clearly not the answer.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  But I've seen seen some people tweet like, maybe people should should use endpoints and in like point of sales devices in supermarkets should be iPads, you know, it's like, yeah, but that's that's expensive for supermarkets. They can't afford that.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  Well, and I I don't know that iPads are like famously perfect technology.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, there's there's so many different solutions, but I think, I think really what it should highlight is that these companies like CrowdStrike and Microsoft need to definitely work a lot closer together. Um, rather than being this competitive force against each other. Because it's no good going on TV and bashing your competitors and stuff, and they both do it. So it's like, that, I think, in cybersecurity in general at the moment, there needs to just definitely be a larger focus on the joint customers. Who knows whether that happened, but yeah, the fact that this sort of stuff can take down so much stuff, and it was only less than 1% of Windows machines, that that should be a major red flag. Like, if this was 10% upwards, it would, you know.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Who knows, if it was a Windows update that had done this as well, like, yeah.

• 24:51David Pierce?

  Well, I was just gonna say, like, you talk about nobody's security record is perfect. Like, if this is something Microsoft had pushed, and there's not necessarily a good reason it couldn't have been Microsoft that pushed it. The scale would have been dramatically different. Like, part of what I think, and you've probably seen more of this than I have, but to me, at least, it seems like the question of what went wrong at CrowdStrike that allowed this to happen is gonna be the big question.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Why wasn't it tested, right? Like, that.

• 25:20David Pierce?

  Right, or like, was this the kind of thing that they do a million times a day and so somebody got sloppy? Was this a failure of process? Was this, did it follow the process? And, you know, sometimes bad things happen. Like, that, to me, feels like the kind of core piece of this that we still haven't really seen is like, what? What or who screwed up that this could happen? And is it a thing we can fix? Or is this just like a thing that's gonna happen every once in a while and we have to figure out how to live with it?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think what it created was like a, basically a sort of memory panic. So it was like this file caused the driver to be like, try to write to a part of memory that it shouldn't be. And then Windows is obviously like, no, you can't do that. Let's kill this driver, or the driver crashed and killed Windows with it. I think when it comes to like, this is gonna be obviously a lot of pointing fingers and who takes the blame for it? But I think there's definitely, Windows should do a better job of this. But there's also CrowdStrike should do a better job of testing its update. Like, how has that gone out to 8.5 million devices and not being spotted? Like, why don't they automate that testing or something like that? There's gonna be questions about how that actually happened.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think Microsoft takes probably like, I don't know, 10 to 20% of the blame here or something. And I just hope that they both look at it and come up with a solution that stops this from ever happening again. Because I don't think the solution is rip these guys out of the kernel, because Microsoft doesn't do a ton of innovative stuff with Windows at the moment. So allowing people to have kernel access allows for some of that innovation. And some, like CrowdStrike pushes that security innovation where Microsoft might not take it like Internet Explorer back in the day if we just let Microsoft. To find the web, we wouldn't have had Chrome, we wouldn't have had all that competition. So it's like, I don't want to see it swing one way or the other. I just want to see cooperation, really.

• 27:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  This is never happens again.

• 27:14David Pierce?

  Well, and especially in these moments where these things are not allowed to fail, right? I think part of what was so eye opening, I think, about this whole thing was just realizing how much of the world runs on Windows computers.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:28David Pierce?

  And not, not even different Windows computers, just Windows computers that like the, the signs you see at the mall are just Windows computers. And, and I think.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  You go to an ATM and take out cash, it's probably Windows, yeah.

• 27:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. And so I think to me, th- this question of, okay, we have, we have these operating systems, we have this software. It, do we need to think really differently about the ones that are like modern infrastructure? In a way that isn't just functionally a Windows computer. Like, I don't know, it's just the fact that it's basically just a bunch of like crappy little PC boxes that keep our banks running. Uh, is one of those things I think a lot of people sort of intellectually know, but it's actually probably not how it should work. And I don't know, this is where I get in like way over my head on how all the technology of this actually works, but it does feel like we are at a point where there is a set of computers in the world that just cannot fail.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  And that maybe having them be just computers is not the right way to think about it.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know what the alternative is, but.

• 28:30David Pierce?

  That's the thing, I don't either.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  That's the thing is that they're, they're just cheap, right? It's, it's cheaper for them to, there's, what is the alternative, really? Like, they're not going to go Mac OS, they could do Linux, but then that could be complicated, like it's.

• 28:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, that has its own mess.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like, I don't know, there's no, I think that's the biggest problem is that there is actually a monopoly here, right? Um, at play with, with Windows and it was has been, um, and it's like, there isn't really a good alternative. Um, and the alternatives to, to secure these things are now causing issues. So it's like. Yeah, like where do you where do you stop at this? But I mean, maybe the alternative is Microsoft creates a lockdown version of Windows for these sort of devices. I think they've done similar sort of stuff in the past, but the problem there is that then you get complicated apps that want to do stuff on these. And then you have that the same things like, okay, well, we just need to give them Windows. So.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  And you get to the point where there's only two people on earth and one vendor that know how to service these things. And that causes its own problems. And it's it's a tough thing, but it feels like I wonder if this moment ends up being a kind of a blip on the radar, or if people start to talk seriously about like, okay, how do we make these things work the way that we need them to going forward? And I have no idea what that'll look like, but I think it'll be fascinating to watch.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  And the fragility of this situation just reminds me of like, when I used to be an IT admin, we we literally had like a ticker that would go around in Canary Wharf. And it was powered by spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet. And I'd input data into it myself and maintain it. And if I put in something wrong, it would crash the whole ticker and it'd be like flashing and going crazy. Like that's just, you know, that's just like the perfect example of how you see this stuff out in the world, like the screens at airports, and you just don't realize that usually it's some crappy software and just the most basic stuff powering that thing.

• 30:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Probably from like 10, 20 years ago.

• 30:20David Pierce?

  I just I keep thinking about, for whatever reason, the, I think it was when Oppenheimer was out and there was that picture somebody posted of the IMAX theater with a with a Palm Pilot powering it. Uh, and we went and found somebody who ran the theater and they were like, look, it works. Nobody touches it. It's been there for years. Like, no one understands it. It's just this weird little thing that keeps the plate spinning. So we we we keep it running. And I feel like more of the world works like that than any of us would like it to.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It's all like held together by string. That string started going apart on Friday.

• 30:53David Pierce?

  Exactly. So it seems like most of the worst of this is, if not over, then kind of on the way to recovery.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. I think because if you're an IT admin in a business, you're going to prioritize your the people and systems that matter the most, first of all, and get those back up and running.

• 31:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, there are a lot of people who worked all weekend, I suspect. So to all of you IT folks listening, we we we love you.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a tough one, especially when on Friday, when you think, ah, nice chill Friday to finish the weekend.

• 31:22David Pierce?

  What fallout is left here? What are you keeping an eye on this week?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  I'm definitely keeping an eye on the Delta situation because they seem to be the most impacted by this in terms of airlines, hospitals, because we've seen people not being able to get their appointments and stuff to see, because in schools, I guess as well, though certainly in Europe and the UK, like a lot of kids are out of school now for the summer holidays. So we'll see, it's where there's typically less investment in infrastructure where it kind of matters, like schools and hospitals and stuff where they just don't have the budget. So it'd be interesting to see where those go and where there's still some sort of lingering issues today and tomorrow. But I feel like we'll hear less about this as the week goes on for sure. It's definitely,

• 32:10Speaker 02

  yeah, it's getting better out there.

• 32:12David Pierce?

  In some sense, like, thank God it happened on a Friday and not on like a Tuesday morning, and we would have felt the full effects of this for like a couple of days in the middle of the week. Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  We'll see. Yeah. It's on its way to being fixed now, anyway.

• 32:24David Pierce?

  That's good. Well, yeah, here's, as always, computers are terrifying, fragile things.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  The funniest thing about it, though, was like, one of Microsoft's fixes was like, literally, have you turned it off and on 15 times?

• 32:36David Pierce?

  Unreal.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  So it's the meme coming true.

• 32:38David Pierce?

  It really, like, it is astounding how much of the world is just unplug it and plug it back in again. And it's, I mean, it goes back to the same thing, right? Like, these things are fragile and simple in so, so many ways that we would, like, maybe it's scary that they're that fragile and that simple, but that is, that is where we are.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Definitely is.

• 32:56David Pierce?

  All right, Tom, thank you as always.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  No worries. Thanks for having me.

• 33:00David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back, talk about fitness, but like, in a, in a fun way. We'll be right back.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 33:42David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So Victoria Song at The Verge, we all call her V, has been on the show a few times recently talking about wearables and rest days on the Apple Watch. And one of the things that I've discovered in talking to her over the last couple of months is that she and I have really similar ideas about fitness and the quantified self and the idea of tracking yourself, which mostly is to say we have very conflicted relationships with these things. The idea of having these streaks and leaderboards and you should always be aspiring to be an elite athlete, it's just a lot. And another thing that V and I have in common is that our journey as runners, hers much more successful than mine, started in the same place with an app called Zombies Run.

• 34:25David Pierce?

  So what she and I are going to do at a couple of different points over the rest of the summer is talk about what I've come to sort of tentatively call the super chill exercise system. Basically, she and I have both been exploring ways to exercise more, do better, get in better shape, keep track of how you're doing without all of the stuff that feels gamified and toxic and like it's always pushing you to do more and incentivizing you to go do crazy things when it might hurt you or you're sick. Or like if I just have the Apple Watch yell at me for not closing my rings when I'm sick one more time, I'm going to lose my mind. You know what I mean? So to kick off our discussions about the super chill exercise system, real name pending, we'll see.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  I wanted to talk to the person who made Zombies Run. So Vi and I called up Adrian Han, who is a writer and developer and storyteller, and worked on Zombies Run from the very beginning until very recently. He spent more than a decade writing this game. And Zombies Run, if you've never played it, is, I don't know how to describe it exactly. It's an exercise fitness app that is also narrative. So when you're running, it's tracking you and it's aware of what you're doing, but it weaves a story in. Basically, it's a zombie apocalypse. You're in a place called Able Township and you are a runner. That's your job, right?

• 35:49David Pierce?

  You, you go out into the barren wasteland of the post-apocalyptic world and you do quests. You have to go find something or you have to go rescue somebody or you have to go to another place and learn about something. And it's all incentivizing you to run and be active and be out. But the idea is to make it fun with story, right? You're, you're picking it up every morning to see what happens next, not to not break some streak. This app worked really well for me, just having a thing that pushed me out, that gave me something fun to do while I was running. Sometimes it'll just be like, oh no zombies and you have to run faster. It was awesome. Like I've always been a person who likes sports more than I like just running because in sports, like there's something to do.

• 36:34David Pierce?

  I have a purpose for why I'm moving fast. This felt like that and it, it's kind of like immersive in the way that listening to podcasts is immersive. It sort of distracts you from running while also having you run. The story is great. You get to know the characters. There's just something terrific about this game, but I haven't really seen replicated elsewhere. And Adrian was one of the people who built this thing from the very beginning. So Vi and I called up Adrian to get a sense of how a game like this comes together, why it's hard to do and what it took to really pull it off. And we just started at the beginning. We asked him, basically, you know, over a decade ago, you're thinking about building a fitness game. This is like in the early days of the iPhone.

• 37:19David Pierce?

  Where do you even start?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  I'm Adrian Hon. I ran Six to Start and co-founded it for 17 years. And so we made Zombies Run. I left about three months ago, four months ago. So that's probably the most well-known thing that I've done. Made Zombies Run and also wrote a book critiquing gamification called You've Been Played. So that's fun. So, you know, when we came up with the idea for Zombies Run, it was myself and novelist Naomi Alderman. And I had just kind of like really gotten into running at that time. And I had a Garmin 4Runner 205, 201. So if you remember this, this is a massive, like chunky, it's not a watch.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  I mean, it's like a forearm bracelet and it could track you by GPS. And I got this as a kind of way to make myself run more. And it actually did work because it was cool to see like numbers and to see that I was getting better every, every day, every time I ran. And it had this thing called, I think it was like the virtual racer, virtual runner, which is like what it sounds like. It's like ghost racing in Mario Kart where you're racing against yourself. So you can go and go out for a run and it will show you yourself versus yesterday's self. And it was kind of really cool to see myself like in this very proto gamification thing, getting better each time.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  But then there was a moment where I stopped getting better and I started getting worse. And like my past self started beating myself and I was like, this sucks. This is not motivating anymore because that only works on the way up. Like it doesn't work on the way down or when you plateau or if you're ill. And so then the iPhone came out and then the App Store came out and we had Runkeeper. There were even some smartphone running games, actually. There was one called Cash and Seek made by Korean developer, I think. And the idea is that you would run around your neighborhood and you see a map and there'd be like little treasure there. And it was actually like multiplayer because other people could leave treasure for you.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  And I started playing that and I was like, I actually just don't want to run to these places it's telling me to run to. Cause it's like not very safe or it doesn't look nice.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  And so we started thinking about like, well, how could we make? A good running game uh cuz cuz people are trying to make these running games. I mean, one of the problems of a lot of them actually was you have to look at the screen when you're running. Which I think for people who have not run before, um that sounds cool, like that sounds like a good idea. And if you've ever run, then you you're like, this is not just terrible from a kind of safety point of view. But also if you stop every like two minutes to look at your phone and then start running again. Like, how are you really gonna do that? Like, that that's not really practical. So the idea kind of came from, look, we have this amazing piece of technology, which is like a sort of like handheld computer, which is

• 40:22Speaker 04

  brand new, really. It's got internet connection, it's got GPS, it's got sound, people are used to using their headphones. What can we do of this to make a game? And so that's a lot of constraints, but it was also like really interesting from a game design point of view.

• 40:37David Pierce?

  Well, and I think it somewhere in there, you're also having to make a lot of decisions about like the mechanics of the game, right? Because you're you're talking about, like, I think about all those early games and there were all those early running apps. And a lot of them were just like, track your run, right? Like, there's all there's a subset of people who just like want to know how far they run. But then, like you're saying, there were others that were starting to play with this, like, how do we get you to run more? And this is when everybody was starting to experiment with all these new ways of gamification and leaderboards and all these different things. And I feel like from the very beginning, you kind of went the other direction of a lot of that stuff.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, the the there's a lot of, um, you know, to the extent that they really thought about motivation, I think it was basically competition, right? So it was like, we have a leaderboard and can you get to the top of the leaderboard? So like I was using the Fitbit at the time and everyone was trying to get to the top of the leaderboard. And then the leaderboard would never move each week because you'd have the people who like are in Europe and they walk everywhere. And you have the people in America at the bottom who drive everywhere and and they don't they don't climb. And so it's just like, this is not really motivating anyone, actually.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Another aspect of that, kind of parallel to that, there'd be these territory capture games, where you'd have like, you'd divide the world up into hexagons or squares, and it'd be like, can you go and capture enough space? And that's kind of like a leaderboard where it's just whoever runs the most, you know, or has the most free time wins. And again, for some people, that's really motivating. I don't really think there was anything beyond that, not even kind of exploration. And so we want to do something completely different, which was storytelling, basically. It was like roleplay, which I didn't think had been done before in that aspect. But it really came from the idea that people were already like, listening to podcasts

• 42:23Speaker 04

  and audiobooks when they're running. So we weren't asking people to do anything new. And I think I still have this idea for a game, so feel free to steal it if you want, which was, there's the bit in The Bourne Ultimatum, when Jason Bourne is guiding this person through Waterloo Station. And he's like, okay, turn right now, turn left here. Okay, pause for five seconds, and Bourne goes and murders him. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of like a really, that's a, that's a very like, interesting, like dramatic thing, which is just entirely voice-based, basically. And it's like, oh, we could do something like that, where, where you have this audio story, which is telling you basically to run. And when you're

• 43:05Speaker 04

  running, crucially, you don't look at the screen, you don't tap on anything. So it's not really interactive game, you're just choosing or able to run faster or slower. And the story in the game kind of adapts to that. The zombies came into it, because Naomi, my co-creator, she had just joined this running club. And they'd said, why do you want to run? And some people wanted to lose weight, and other people wanted to get fit. And one woman said she wanted to survive the zombie apocalypse. And, and I was like, oh, yeah, that's funny. But then I was kind of like sick of zombies at that point. This was like 2011, 2012. And we had The Walking Dead, and we had

• 43:49Speaker 04

  You know, twenty eight days later, and I kind of thought zombies were over, which, which was wrong, they're, they're still here. But from a storytelling point of view, and from a gameplay point of view, especially for a running game, that there's actually really nothing better that we found because zombies, everyone knows how they work. You, you just have to kind of move faster than them. But also the great thing with zombies is that most zombies don't actually run. So, you know, your classic zombies, your non twenty eight days later zombies, they um just walk or they shamble. And so that was kind of a really clear thing for us, which was you don't actually have to run in Zombies Run. You can just walk if you want, and the game will not give you a hard time for that.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Like, there is nothing gated in Zombies Run based on your distance or your pace. So if you even want to do it sitting on a couch, you can do that. Like, and some people do it like doing chores or whatever, and the most people do run or jog. And so the crucial thing there was we're not measuring your performance. Like, you can measure your performance, we give you stats and things like that. But actually, we're not rewarding that. In a way, what we're doing is we're saying, we're just gonna make it more fun. Like, you know, we don't want to make it like, we, we don't reward you for doing a run. We want you to be rewarded while running, which is a really important difference. And I think gets to like what makes for good gamification.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Like, good gamification means where you're having fun while you're doing it, not after you've done it, which is really hard to do.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  I actually, this is my, my running journey began with Zombies Run.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Because I, I, you know, I've been running for a long time, but I was not a natural runner in any form. I was the person who was very much like my natural form is a couch potato. You could, you would have to be chasing me, basically, for me to run. But it was a, it was a type of thing where I was like, oh, I have like a metabolic thing, I need to actually run. Running is one of the cheapest ways that you can exercise, but it is quite miserable when you're starting out.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  So, like, I think the thing that really resonates with me here in terms of like just talking about the chillness of things is like actually having fun while you exercise. Because I think with fitness tech and like with the gamification of it. I don't know why, but we just decide to invite so much anxiety into the process like leaderboard. Oh, I feel terrible about myself because I'm not number one. And then if I am number one, I have this intense pressure to stay number one. And so then that's, that's not fun anymore. I've turned the, the exercise into work. And then also, just as you said, like, it really kind of resonated with the whole idea of the virtual runner and you're running against your past self who is better than you.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  I am at that stage because if you do it long enough, if you do it long enough, you are going to plateau. You are gonna have a slump. You're just not, you're just, you age. You know, as you get older, you're not gonna be quite as fast as you were when you were younger. So, um, I think with the game, you want people to keep playing. So how, like, what were some of the things that you tried? That you just realized was like, oh, this is actually making the game less fun or oh, this is making the game more fun.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, people come into it with different like motivations and different expectations. So we did this Kickstarter right at the beginning and there were kind of two strands to it. One was, there's gonna be an amazing story by an amazing storyteller. And for a lot of people, possibly even most people, that's like the big motivation, which is I'll go out for a run. Uh, it, it's kind of told like in first person. So they're talking to you as if you're like, you know, a real person. It's not like an audiobook. It has amazing characters. It's got like cliffhangers at the end of every mission. So, so you kind of wanna know what happens next. Um, and for us, that's a big thing where

• 47:49Speaker 04

  it was always, you know, we want you to get up on a rainy Sunday morning and actually be excited to find out what's gonna happen next. Rather than be like, is there any excuse I can use not to go to run?

• 47:59David Pierce?

  So I just, I just wanna push back on one piece of that, that I think is really interesting that you said, which is the, the idea that you can, like it, it, you could just sit on your couch and play the game and it would still be very fun, right? I think that there's probably some truths to that, but also if that were true, you would have just made a game that you can play sitting on your couch. Right? So and part of the reason I think this is the thing V and I keep talking about is like gamification, when it's like Monopoly, go trying to get your money. I have pretty unconflicted problematic feelings about, but this one is so different, right? Because the thing that you're doing creepy things to incentivize people to do is like ostensibly a good and healthy thing. And so you're in a position of saying like, oh, hey, we built this cool game that people like because it's a game,

• 48:41David Pierce?

  but they also like it because it makes them exercise and because it makes them do a thing that is good for them. And it makes that thing more bearable. Like, does that change the balance of just like, if the goal was to just get more microtransactions from people, you would play it one way. But when it's like, okay, we actually want to have you do something that in moderation, even at greater intervals than you're currently doing it, is a good thing. Like, does that change the way you think about that balance?

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, by trying to design it in the way we did, we left money on the table. Like, you know, we could have had more engagement if we sent people notifications saying you're gonna, everyone in your base is gonna die if you don't give a run tomorrow. Right? I mean, that's what like most games sort of done, you know? Or we would say like, if you go and do like a three mile run now, then you'll get double, like, you know, supplies, right? Duolingo style stuff. And that all the stuff is like really well documented and it does work like in terms of increasing engagement and conversions. But I think that that's the nice thing about owning your own company and having a small company is that you can just say, we're not gonna do that because we don't think that's gonna be a good experience for people in the long term.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  So we would get people saying, oh, but like, can't people just cheat? And it's like, yeah, people can cheat about anything. Like, people can cheat in Dance Dance Revolution, right? You can cheat at Guitar Hero, you can cheat all these things. And it's like, if you're gonna cheat at Dance Dance Revolution, don't play Dance Dance Revolution. Like, no one's making you do that. It doesn't really bother me as a designer because it just shows that you kind of need to do it a little bit differently. And I think that, you know, the other thing is I see is a kind of accessibility mode mostly rather than like people cheating. So. You know, we don't know what situations people are in, uh, in terms of their ability to move. We call it like simulate running when we do this.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  It might be that you uh can't use your legs, you know, then you're going to do another exercise while you're doing this. And so we've had, you know, people say, you know, they'd like it that we offer these options. So having said that, like, most people do actually run, so, so, so it's fine.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a really interesting thing to me because I, it really just hits home with the whole one size does not fit all. But especially with fitness, because we all have different capabilities, as you mentioned, with our bodies. We have different skill levels, different circumstances, but I find, uh, a lot of times I burn out when testing wearables and fitness tech. Because they are just kind of pushing you towards more. Um, and it sometimes does feel like part of this is late stage capitalism, because they need to make money off of this thing. And they need to keep user bases, so they need to get us addicted to these platforms, like keep your streaks going. Sometimes it really does feel like streaks can be insidious, just because like, oh, I know you're getting me addicted to this.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  But actually what my body is saying is I need to rest. I actually feel like it's a tricky thing, right? Because if you want to stay injury free, you can't constantly do more. You do have to take days off and that's good for you as well. So, um, I think the big metric with gamification in fitness is streaks. And I was just curious, like, what your thought process was towards streaks and like, do you have feelings towards it? I hate them personally.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I, I, I hate them. I don't like them. I, I mean, you know, you, you will see people talk about how it motivates them to sort of go and have, if they're doing like nano Rymo, national, you know, novel writing month. It, it's like nice to have a streak where you're writing for thirty days in a row, right? Or you've got like a calendar and you like mark it with an X every time you, you know, do something useful. And so I always kind of think it's about like, how can you get the incentives aligned correctly, right? And so I think that.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  The issue with like fitness is that, you know, you see this with the Apple Watch. You see it with Peloton in particular. There are a lot of stories about Peloton where people were just completely burning out and like really injuring themselves. I just don't think this is like the way to the good health and fitness, actually. A lot of these companies, along with like trying to get you addicted, they're trying to sell this idea of you becoming like a literal elite athlete, like as if like that is like a good thing to be. Like if you want to be an elite athlete, that that's fine, but like it's not really a good idea, frankly, for for most people. Like, you know, most people have got jobs and they've got families and and it's very hard to like maintain that. You know, it can be, it can actually be quite, quite damaging.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  And I see that with a lot of the marketing. I mean, they've changed it a bit now, but like Nike and a lot of these other apps were like made by people who used to be athletes or who who just incredibly fit, right? And so they'd be like, wow, you've got to go and break through the pain barrier. You've got to go and do all this stuff. It's like you don't, you don't actually need to do that. Like you're just saying you have to do that. So I don't, I don't like streaks. It can be done in a way that's like less bad, right? But I think that when I look at the best games and the best apps out there, like Nintendo doesn't like, I mean, Nintendo does actually have streaks in Animal Crossing, but like it's very small. It's really small stuff and it doesn't, it's not punishing at all if you don't, if you don't match it.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Like, you know, there are streaks in some video games, but like you play Elden Ring, you'll play, you know, like Lanyard's as elder. That's not like a streak for playing it two days in a row. They don't need that because it's a really good game, right? And so I think it's just, you know, it's an excuse for not making something that is as targeted or as interesting for people. It's very difficult because, you know, if you're running a company, like I do have a lot of sympathy for people, like we, we didn't take investment when we started and so are like, well, we have very little investment. So they were like really patient and they were not giving us a hard time. You know, people will call us like a lifestyle business, I guess. But it does mean that if you take investment and you kind of have to take investment if you're a startup,

• 54:52Speaker 04

  because otherwise you'll just be outgunned by all the other startups who take investment, right? You don't really have a choice. They need to see the line go up. And one of the easiest ways of getting the line to go up is by adding in streaks, is by adding notifications and making people feel bad about not using it. So, you know, I can blame individual like, you know, designers here, but it's, it's like they're in an arms race.

• 55:16David Pierce?

  It does feel like a much harder bar to set for yourself, though, because essentially what you're describing is that instead of punishing me for not doing the thing that you've already given me, you have to keep giving me new things, which is a lot of work for you. Like, it's much easier to just yell at me for not closing my ring than it is to like, like, you, you, you mentioned Elden Ring. Like, people play Elden Ring because it's a great game. Like, it's really hard to make a great game. And it's much easier to build a mechanic that requires me to open the app every day or my little character dies than it is to keep building a great game for 11 years.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, that, that's, that's really true. Yeah, it's definitely not easy. I mean, when you make a, a, a fitness game that's based around like narrative, you just need to keep on making more narrative, right? And so we turned from being a, a sort of tech company almost into like a content company. And if you open up like Zombies Run or ZRX now, it kind of looks a bit like Netflix. Like, it has these carousels of those and, you know, you can like choose different stories, which is, shows how the company kind of evolved over time from like triangle, these different like gameplay mechanics, some of which worked and some which didn't, into like, okay, what we are doing is we're creating

• 56:28Speaker 04

  a process to try and make as many like consistently good stories as possible, like every week, multiple, multiple stories a week. And so you, we ended up with like writers' rooms and, and just sound designers. And, you know, like it's games as a service, as software as a service. And a lot of companies try and transition from making like a one-off game or one-off tech product into making constant, you know, content. And it's just really difficult to do, especially when you're making like specialized stories that are like. About you running, you know, like that's, that's a different kind of um storytelling. And you know, the team did it really well, but I think that that's actually not something that tech companies are really set up to do.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  It reminds me of Peloton because they too have become a media company without, I think, necessarily intending that.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  So, you know, is, is this just then the challenge of gamifying fitness? Because I, I don't know, like, I don't have an answer, but it's just like, I constantly have to find new ways to motivate myself. Or sometimes just like let myself have permission to be bad at fitness, which is opposite to what all these devices are doing, which is to optimize yourself to be the best version of yourself. I feel like there's conflicting narratives here where like, I think David and I just wanna like be slightly healthier and not cheat ourselves while doing it.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  But then, you know, these watches, these rings, these games, not yours, but some of these games are just like, here's how to be the best version of yourself with metrics and numbers and get you addicted to it. So how do you like?

• 58:11Speaker 04

  I mean, they're sort of creating goals for you that maybe you didn't have when you began, right? Which is like, you know, the, the longest I've ever run is a half marathon. And everyone's like, oh, so why, why don't you do like a marathon? I'm like, why would I do a marathon? I, I don't wanna do a marathon. That, that seems like, that, that seems like a bad time for me. I'm, I love it. I'm glad for you if you've done a marathon. You know, I know someone who did like an ultra marathon, you know, she's great, but like it's, it's not for me. And so I think when you start, you know, these applications, it's all games. It's always like, so what's your goal? And you've just got these like massive goals, right? You know, and like, oh, do I really wanna do that? Or do I just want to do something else? Just be a little bit healthier. So a big part of it is.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  You know, again, I just come back to like, how can we make it fun? How can we make it a little bit more bearable? You know, you mentioned V, that like when you start out running, you know, it was the same for me. It's just horrible. It's like, it's so painful, like sweaty. It's just like, you know, you get a stitch. I just can't like bear it. But then, you know, the thing is, when you've done it a lot, you get good at running. And now I don't need like a game to go running. Like I just go out running to music or podcasts and it's actually pretty easy for me. Right? And so like, can we get people into that situation where they don't need us anymore? Of course, like from a business point of view, you know, you, you want people to keep on playing and, and hopefully you're fun enough.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  But that's where you want to get people to, because it's the same with like a lot of stuff. When you get to a good enough point, it actually becomes way easier to, to maintain it. I do think it's going to be a challenge for a lot of gamified fitness apps, like, because you, you just need to keep on providing the content. Like some of them, you know, will just become basically gym instructor classes like, like Peloton, you know, or like a lot of VR stuff. You know, some of them will just be um, constant competition, like the cycling, you know, things and Strava. And that's fine, you know, like if you like that sort of thing, you should do it. I do think there's still more room for companies, especially there's AR, like becomes more of a thing,

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  to do like even more fun um, ways of making like sports and like competitive sports and cooperative sports. I, I really want to make like a cooperative fitness game. I think it'd be like so fun to do that. So yeah, like I think there's a lot we can do there. Like the kind of original gamified fitness is just playing like soccer. So like, you know, maybe we just do more of that, but I can make it a bit more convenient.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  Are there any fitness apps or just like services out there that you see and you're like, oh, I kind of dig what they're doing? Then because we have seen so many of them just kind of take the same leaderboard and competition approach to it. So is there anyone out there that's doing it in a way that you're like, oh? That that actually seems like that's a cool way for us anxious people out here. I have my list, but like us anxious people out here to actually take a step back and like, build the foundational habits and get to the point where you're saying like you actually don't need it because I too am at the place where I'm like, oh, I'm a week without a run. I feel bad. I need to like actually go out and do it.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  I actually just use like the Apple like fitness app and the health app a lot to go and track my stuff, you know, like particularly things like sleep and like heart rate recovery. So these are like more more kind of technical like things. I don't like have like a third party app that I use to track that, but it is useful because I've noticed it does correlate actually with like when I've got more energy. And I do use I use the platform stuff because it just integrates the best. So if I'm going for a run or for a swim, I just use whatever's on the Apple Watch, which is boring, but I kind of don't want to, I've sort of seen pass a curtain, I guess, for a lot of the stuff. And I kind of a bit, I'm a bit worried

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  about what people would try and do to my experience if I let them, you know, I'm quite vulnerable to gamification. I like I like extending streaks, you know, if you if you let me do it, but even though I know it's not good for me. And so I try and actually stay away from from a lot of that stuff. So going for the more vanilla Apple Watch stuff is is what I tend to stay on.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  Do you think about things like sleep tracking and we're getting to these smart rings and all this stuff and we're getting to a point where there is this kind of like second by second 24 hour long ability to understand how you're doing. And I'm like, somebody is going to make the next version of Zombies Run that is not like an episodic thing that you put on headphones and listen to while you go exercise. It's going to be like a lifestyle game. And part of me wonders if that is super cool or totally dystopian. And and the idea of like, I'm going to get a thing at, you know, 2am that's just like zombies, because it understood that I'm like in the right sleep zone for it. And like, this is coming. We have the data to do this now. And it feels like it's coming. And I can't decide if that's good or bad.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  People keep on trying to do this and we tried to do it with a game called The Walk, which was kind of like an all day, like, you know, walking pedometer kind of thing. And I think in practice, it's quite hard to do because people we found don't really like to be interrupted with like gameplay and story. It's kind of annoying. And so the issue is that like third party developers generally do not have enough contextual information about like what the person is doing to make sure that the interruptions work. But of course, you want to interrupt people like if you're like a line goes up business person. So but

• 1:03:50Speaker 04

  then that usually gets too annoying. So we did try and make like two or three times to go and make these games, which would be kind of ambient. And I think at the point at which using AI or using just more sensors devs have that ability, then you will see more of that stuff. And I think it will actually end up looking really interesting and looking more almost like role playing, right? It'll be like an even richer experience. And I know that people actually want to play these sorts of games where they're kind of more into it. At the same time, I think people probably be a little bit like nervous about what that means because you know that if it's really good, it just actually takes over your life, right? And so do people really want that just to get fit? I don't know.

• 1:04:34David Pierce?

  As you look around this space right now, do you see any other things that feel kind of spiritually similar to Zombies Run? I think about like we've all at The Verge been using this app called Stompers, which is basically it's like a it's a sort of silly pedometer game. And I think it has hooked a lot of people in the same way that it's it's not even accurate, but being accurate is not the point. Like, do you do you see anything that feels like it's sort of doing the same thing, the a similar way?

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  I mean, like, one of the other things which I know V has written about was the whole fantasy hike thing where and like, you know, and like before that, it was just a direct rip off, you know, Lord of the Rings where you're like walking from the Shire to like Mordor. And I think actually at the start, you would just type in like how far you'd walked into like a webpage and then it work it out and it got slightly more more interesting and that's cool. Like, that's a fun thing. People have done various things like that. There's a website or an app called The Beautiful Walk, which was kind of synced up to to your, you know, fitness apps and would do that. Like spiritually, like a lot of the VR stuff and AR stuff, I think is interesting in the sense of,

• 1:05:45Speaker 04

  you know, I come back to, I want people to be having fun when they exercise. And so I used to play like Hollow Point a lot, which was this old

• 1:05:57Speaker 04

  Steam like five game and it was like an archery game. And basically you you were just shooting, you're just shooting at, you know, enemies in virtual reality, you know, arena with archery. And the cool thing was because the arrows kind of like move slowly, then you could dodge them, like you can't dodge bullets in real life, right? But like in Superhot or the other games, you can dodge these. And so you're always just like rolling around the floor and jumping up and down and and like, it's just so energetic in a way that like you could never get me to do that in real life. Like if you told me, okay, go and go and fall over sideways and then go and scramble and roll back and jump up. It's like, no, I'm not doing that. But like you go and put me in VR

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  and there's like arrows coming at me and I'm like shooting people with arrows. I'm like, this is the most fun I've ever had, but I don't have room for it. So I can't play that anymore. So that's kind of the problem, like I think. And I do see like the, you know, Beat Saber and FitXR and things like that. Like, it seems a bit boring to me. You know, I want something a bit more involved than that.

• 1:07:00David Pierce?

  First of all, how dare you?

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  Beat Saber is amazing.

• 1:07:03David Pierce?

  This is, that's, that was outrageous. But no, I, I'm glad you actually mentioned Superhot, because Superhot is one of those games that I found to be like accidentally a surprisingly good workout. It's like time only moves when you do. So I'm doing a ton of like, very deliberate intense movement. And I'm like, I'm sweating at the end. And it's like, all right, this is what I'm going for. This is like a fun thing that made me sweat, not a thing that bullied me into exercising, which feels very different.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  I think when we get the glasses, you know, which we all want, and not the head, you know, the VR headset, this is going to be the way people exercise. It's going to be amazing. Like, it's so cool. But like, it's just not there at the moment. Like, it's just too, like, I don't know, it's like sweaty. Like, I know people do use these things, but it's, it's like, for most people, it's, it doesn't seem to be a good experience. So I think that's gonna be great. I think, you know, make believe and like role play and sports, like, that's one of the best ways of getting fit.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  I think giving my self permission to do the fantasy, fantasy hike to whack my editors with baseball bats and stompers has really just kind of made it easier to be like, oh, it's okay if I'm not so fast. It's okay. You know what? Just give yourself the participation trophy. That's the only real badge that you need. It's okay. Maybe it's because I'm a millennial, but the participation trophy is good enough.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, you know, the way we put it in Zombies Run is as long as you can move faster than a slow shamble, then, you know, you're good for us. So keep on trying things until you find something that's fun. And, and if it's not fun, then it's not just that it's like, oh, well, boo hoo. It's more like if you find something fun, you're going to keep up with it and it's going to work better, like in the long run. And it might be something really weird, which people don't talk about, you know, or it might be kind of a more niche sport, but like you will find something that you like, eventually, and then you should do that. And maybe there's an app for that as well.

• 1:08:56David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna come back, and we're gonna take a question from the first guest, Howard. We'll be right back.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

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• 1:09:40David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's do the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 VERGE11. The email is [email protected]. Send us all your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about handheld games.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  Hey there, this is Keaton from Seattle and I just listened to the handheld episode. And I'm about to have a baby. And so I've been thinking about what am I going to do for the endless hours sitting in a nursery with a child possibly on me? And I've been thinking about a handheld, but I've also kept myself from buying one because I think about the possibility of just using my iPhone with a backbone or my iPad with an Xbox controller. Is there an advantage to having a handheld over that situation? If I've already got something like a Game Pass subscription? Thanks, appreciate it. Bye.

• 1:10:32David Pierce?

  I should say, by the way, before we get started, thank you to everybody who responded about our segment last week about gaming handhelds. I got a ton of good ideas from people. I got a lot of people who just like felt my pain about wanting to play FIFA and not having a good device to do it on. People are mad at EA. I'm also mad at EA. Thank you to everybody who reached out. I have a lot of gadgets to try. I haven't bought anything yet, but I'm committed to answering this question for real at some point very soon and I'll get back in touch. But thank you to everybody who reached out with suggestions and ideas and commiseration. I appreciate it. My answer for this question is actually pretty simple. I just went through this recently and I initially

• 1:11:14David Pierce?

  I just went through this recently. My kid is about a year and a half old at the beginning of 2023. I was in that like, sitting up at night for four hours while a small child sleeps on my lap vibes. And you're like, what do I do with myself? I tried all the things. For a while, I was carrying a switch around with me that I would use in those moments. I had a couple of like tester things. I got one of the slightly sketchy things from Amazon that you can buy that have a million retro games on them. I think the answer is just your phone. And I think this for a couple of reasons. One, and this is the key one, your phone is just there with you all the time. One of the things that happens when you're a new parent is that you just suddenly find yourself frozen to a place

• 1:11:59David Pierce?

  because your child just fell asleep. And you can plan ahead to some extent and say like, okay, I'm going to leave the switch in the room with the chair where I'm probably going to be while the kid is sleeping or whatever. But your phone is just dramatically more likely to be in your pocket, right? And it also has a lot of retro games now especially, which are really great to play. A on silent and B for a couple of minutes at a time when you're in those moments where you're like, I don't know how long I'm going to have to do this. You can just quickly fire up Delta or one of the other emulators. And I played, I would say maybe an alarming amount of like old Mario games. A few minutes at a time with one thumb on the joystick and one thumb on the buttons.

• 1:12:43David Pierce?

  Kind of wrapped my arms around the kid. It was, it's, it's a, it's a scene, but it works. The other thing is it's really malleable, which I like, right? So I have a Backbone controller, which I like very much. And when I was able to sort of plan for it, I would use the Backbone. I would bring the Backbone with me. I would plug it in. I would have the full better controller and that worked great. Works really well with a lot of games on iOS and Android. Highly recommend a Backbone as a sort of addition to all of this. But when you don't have that, you can just use your phone, right? And so having something that you're not stuck because you forgot one piece of it is really helpful. The other piece of it is that you will find yourself needing your phone for all kinds of other things, right?

• 1:13:28David Pierce?

  Maybe you're going to be one of those parents like I was, who has a spreadsheet of like every time your kid eats and sleeps and goes to the bathroom. And having that with you at the same time that you have your like thing you want to play games on. Super helpful if you are the type of parent who is going to be like texting your partner or taking lots of pictures or whatever. Again, your phone just becomes like the center of your baby universe in a very real way. And so not adding another device to the equation is sort of useful. There are good reasons to get a dedicated device. Like I've, I've talked to a lot of people who bought a switch, put like Zelda on it and then left it in the baby's room.

• 1:14:10David Pierce?

  And that becomes the like, I am in the baby's room. This is the thing I'm gonna play. There's something to that. But I think for me, having fewer batteries to worry about having the thing that's probably in my pocket be the thing that works and having kind of the one device to rule them all wound up being really helpful. Also, there are a lot of games that I played that I would call like deeply boring repetitive games that are actually perfect for mobile. Cause you're in this headspace when you have a newborn where you're just exhausted. And you're like, okay, I want to play a game. I don't want to use my brain at all. And I'm going to need to play this game for somewhere between one minute and five hours. Games like Hole Down, which is basically a, it's like reverse snood. You shoot a ball downward and you try to remove

• 1:14:54David Pierce?

  all the stuff down at the bottom. And the further you go down, the more points you get. Endlessly repeatable games. I probably played a hundred hours of that game. And it's a perfect little mobile game. You can play it with one hand, which is another victory given baby's sleep situations. Having something you can do with one hand is pretty helpful. I did a lot of like crosswordy kinds of things when I was like, okay, I actually need to use my brain a little bit. I did a lot of those like Temple Run kind of endless runner games because again, super easy, super repetitive, doesn't require any brain power. Those are the kinds of games that I ended up playing way more than I expected. I was like, oh, I'm gonna play a lot of like fun

• 1:15:37David Pierce?

  old PS2 games because now I have all this time to kill. And I ended up playing like infinite hours of Hole Down. Because it's just what happens in those moments. You're tired. You have one hand to spare while there's a human sleeping on top of you. And that just is what it is. So I think the answer is probably either a switch for the games, or your phone with a backbone, or some other kind of controller. But I would, I would start with your phone because there's a lot of games. It's super easy. It's super accessible and odds are it's going to be right there with you, which is pretty important. I hope that helps. Let me know. And again, I've gotten tons of really good handheld recommendations over the last couple of weeks. And if you have

• 1:16:17David Pierce?

  good ones for me or for Keaton here, please let me know. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from the Microsoft CrowdStrike chaos to V's great reporting on wearables and rest days in the Apple Watch to lots of stuff on gaming handhelds on theverge.com. I'll put some links in the show notes, but also read theverge.com. There is a shocking amount going on right now for it being like late July. So keep an eye on the website. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or gaming handhelds you think I should buy, email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Keep sending us questions. We've got lots more stuff to

• 1:16:59David Pierce?

  talk about this summer. Please keep all of your questions coming. And like I mentioned last week, I want more like teeny tiny weird tech mysteries. So if you have a teeny tiny weird tech mystery, send it to us. Can't wait to hear it. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor, and this episode was edited by Xander Adams. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about more of the Microsoft CrowdStrike mess, some AI news, some new gadgets, and lord only knows what else between now and then. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:17:40Speaker 06

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