Pod Insights The Vergecast A quest for the best headphone mics About this episode On this episode of The Vergecast, we kick off Hot Girl Vergecast Summer with a classic Vergecast segment: the mic test. Guest host Victoria Song is joined by Vergecast producers Andru Marino and Erick Gomez to see how the Nothing Headphone 1, Sony WH-1000XM6, Apple AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort Ultra hold up against what’s possibly the noisiest street in Brooklyn.
After that, Victoria is joined by Ladder CEO Greg Stewart to talk about what it takes to build a successful strength training app — especially for people just starting out. As it turns out, it’s quite challenging, between curating playlists, accommodating users’ different access to equipment, skill levels, and preferences for coaching styles. (And maybe, some occasional beef with Peloton?)
Lastly, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected] ) about AI fitness summaries, whether people actually like them, what’s frustrating about them, and what scenarios they might actually be useful for.
Want to learn more about the topics in this episode? Here are some handy dandy links for your reference:
Nothing Headphone 1 review
Sony WH-1000XM6 hands-on
Apple AirPods Max review
Bose QuietComfort Ultra review
A lazy person’s guide to getting into shape
Ladder isn’t done trolling Peloton
The unbearable obviousness of AI fitness summaries
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Transcript 11,475 words · 12 speakers
0:03 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of Hot Girl Vergecast Summer, the flagship podcast where the hot girls of The Verge replace our stinky old men for a summer. No, we love you. We love you. You're not stinky and you're not old. But anyway, I'm your friend Victoria Song and I'm filling in this week for David Pierce now that he's officially on parental leave. I'll be your guest host for the next two weeks and then I will be handing it off to another one of my beautiful colleagues. It's gonna be a really fun summer and I think you guys are totally gonna have a blast with us. But today, the itinerary for today's show is we are gonna be testing out the mics from a bunch
0:45 Speaker 00 of different over your headphones and I'm bringing in our producers Andru Moreno and Eric Gomez to help me out with that because they are the audio kings and I'm just the wearable lady. You know what? That's not true. I test a bunch of fitness headphones, so I'm an audio queen in my own right. And then, you know, once we're done with the microphone test, we're gonna talk to the CEO of a strength training app called Ladder. And the reason why is because it turns out it's very difficult to build a strength training app. Trust me, I've tested dozens cardio apps, really easy strength training. For whatever reason, it's a lot more challenging. Anywho, I really enjoy Ladder, so I wanted
1:26 Speaker 00 to get him on and to talk about the challenges of making one that's actually pretty good. And once we're done with that, we are going to take a question from the Vergecast hotline. So, you know, all that coming up today and more. But first, I wanna know what you're gonna listen to on these over your headphones, once we figure out which one is the winner from this mic test. I personally will be listening to the entire soundtrack of K-pop Demon Hunters because I was not expecting it to rock as hard as it does, but it does. Let me know if you watch this movie, what your favorite song from it is and why it's "Take Down" because that song is chef's kiss. Don't come at me if you like soda pop. Anywho, we'll be right back.
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3:45 Speaker 00 And we're back. So, one of the most signature Vergecast segments is the in-the-field microphone test. And in the past, we've tested microphones from consumer electronics like earbuds, laptops, smart glasses, the whole shebang. So now, let's do over-the-ear headphones. So, audio quality, obviously a huge top concern when you're buying over-the-ear headphones, but we often forget to think about microphone quality, aka how you're going to sound when you talk to people over the phone on these headphones. So, to test this, we sent our good friend Andru Marino into the field with a bunch of new over-the-ear headphones. And to help me out, we have our producer Eric Gomez. How you doing, Eric?
4:27 Speaker 05 Good, V. How you doing?
4:29 Speaker 00 I'm good. And how are you doing, Andrew?
4:32 Speaker 06 Hi V, I'm good. I'm out in, uh, deep in Brooklyn on a street corner. It's one that I take phone calls a lot from, so I think this is a good place to do headphone tests.
4:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, I can definitely hear all the cars behind you.
4:46 Speaker 05 It's pretty noisy.
4:48 Speaker 00 Which is peak New York City vibes. So which headphones are we gonna test first?
4:54 Speaker 06 Okay, so we have four headphones today. We're gonna do the AirPods Max, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra, the Sony WH1000XM6s, and the new Nothing Headphone 1, just was announced this, uh, on July 1st. So we'll get to try all those out in this field. Let's start with maybe the Nothing one, so we can hear them right off the bat.
5:20 Speaker 00 Love to hear what Nothing has in store. Is it something? Is it nothing? We'll find out.
5:27 Speaker 06 Okay, now I'm wearing the Nothing Headphone 1. Look at, look at this interesting design. Okay, how do I sound out in the field now?
5:36 Speaker 00 You sound not too bad. I can't hear the giant garbage truck that was behind you, or any of the hustle and bustle. Your voice sounds a little, I don't know, compressed, a little like muffled. Not the worst, but also clearly, you're clearly on a pair of something. Yeah.
5:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
5:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, uh, it's doing a great job of cancelling out all the noise behind you. Uh, when you were on your MacBook microphone before, you could hear everything, and now it's completely cancelling out all the, the noise. And, uh, it's doing actually a good job of, um, separating your voice, uh, from the, the background noise. However, yeah, like V said, it is kind of, uh, kind of compressing your voice a little bit, modulating a little bit, but at least we could hear you.
6:23 Speaker 06 Oh, okay, so, so there's like, uh, some sirens that just went off while you were talking. Did you hear any of that?
6:29 Speaker 00 Not, not a single thing. So that's pretty cool.
6:32 Speaker 06 That's pretty good. Um, okay, so we have to say that we did a test of this before.
6:40 Speaker 06 Uh, earlier this week and I wore the headphones backwards and it sounded horrible and you could not understand anything I was saying. Is that correct?
6:49 Speaker 00 It was garbage.
6:50 Speaker 05 That's correct.
6:50 Speaker 00 Absolute garbage. Like it was just super underwater. You could only hear part of every third word. It was, it was, it was not great.
6:59 Speaker 06 Okay.
7:05 Speaker 00 You sound awful.
7:06 Speaker 05 God.
7:07 Speaker 00 Oh my God.
7:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, let me just turn these around and actually see if they sound bad when I wear them wrong.
7:14 Speaker 05 Sure.
7:18 Speaker 06 Okay, how do I sound?
7:19 Speaker 00 You sound awful.
7:20 Speaker 06 Okay.
7:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, really bad.
7:22 Speaker 00 It's kind of funny because I think lots of people don't always check whether they're wearing the right and the left uh, ear cup in the right direction. So this is a, one of those things where it's like if you have these headphones and someone tells you they can't hear shit, uh, you might be wearing them the wrong way.
7:40 Speaker 06 Yeah. So I noticed the reason why this happens is because the way they fold down. And then when you take them out of the case, the right is on your left hand and the left is on your right hand. So then when you pick them up, you have to turn them and then put them on, which is very confusing. And I think that's why I got mixed up there, but I'm glad to hear now that we wore them correctly, they sound better.
8:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, totally. We could totally have a conversation right now, despite all the the traffic going on behind you, you coming in pretty, pretty clear. Um, I'm actually pretty impressed.
8:12 Speaker 00 You're truly unintelligible when you wear it the wrong way versus
8:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:16 Speaker 00 you know, pretty decent when you have it on the right way. So that's kind of nuts. And like, these are three ninety-nine, uh, two ninety-nine, not three ninety-nine. I think the design looks pretty neat from afar. I don't know how you feel about it up close and how does it feel on your head?
8:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, I feel a little silly wearing them outside. They look, make me look like a robot. Um, like with these like designs on here.
8:38 Speaker 05 That really got that cyborg look going on right now.
8:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, but I do really like the buttons. Uh, on the back, there's like this nice cool scrolling wheel thing and then there's a little paddle switch that you can like skip songs and stuff. And I guess there's a button up over here on the side. That you can like assign to your voice assistant if you want to do that.
8:59 Speaker 00 No.
9:00 Speaker 06 It's a pretty cool design, but it's a little silly. I like the black version. Those actually look a lot cooler than these ones. I think these stick out a lot more.
9:08 Speaker 05 The sign is definitely very divisive, for sure.
9:11 Speaker 00 It's a fashion statement.
9:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:12 Speaker 00 Good if you love making a fashion statement. Maybe not so great if you're in a boardroom. I don't, unless you have a fellow boardroom full of AI bots, which I don't know. We live in a dystopia. That could be true.
9:26 Speaker 06 It's common.
9:26 Speaker 00 Uh, anywho, shall we move on to the next pair of headphones?
9:30 Speaker 06 Yeah. Which one should we try next?
9:32 Speaker 00 Uh, let's do the Sonys. Those are, those are also relatively new too.
9:35 Speaker 06 Okay, cool. Okay, currently talking from the Sony WH1000 XM6s. I've said this model number enough that I know what they're called now.
9:45 Speaker 00 The Sony alphabet soup. I don't know. You sound pretty good. The, the noise again, can't hear anything behind you. Your voice is pretty clear.
9:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's actually pretty remarkable. Continuing to be impressed by these headphones and their ability to cancel out so much background noise and traffic noise. I think your voice is slightly less compressed and modulated, so it's a little more natural sounding. But yeah, you're, you're coming in pretty, pretty clear.
10:14 Speaker 06 Wearing these, it sounds like I'm in a room.
10:19 Speaker 06 I hear more of the sounds outside though than I did in the last one, but it makes it sound like the sounds are in a box. I don't know if that makes sense.
10:29 Speaker 05 It's kind of interesting you say that because your voice is coming across as if you're in a small space and it's kind of like you're getting some reflections off a wall or something as if it's a like, like a visa, like a boardroom or a small phone booth or something. So it's, it's adding a little bit to your voice to make it a little bit more natural sounding, which is pretty interesting.
10:49 Speaker 06 Interesting. Okay. So these use six mics for a voice pickup compared to four in the last time. There's 12 mics total on these. So I, I thought that was interesting. So these are pretty, I mean, Sony is such an audio focused company, so it makes sense.
11:06 Speaker 00 All right, cool. So that's the Sonys. We got those. Uh, let's do the AirPods Max next.
11:12 Speaker 05 Okay.
11:13 Speaker 06 All right. Now I'm calling from the Apple AirPods Max. How do I sound here?
11:18 Speaker 00 You know what's surprising is how much more I hear of your surroundings. There was like, um, one of those big ass, I don't know, was it a bus? Was it a truck at some point? It, it, you know, like it sounded like an old man going, definitely heard that, uh, in the background. Uh, voice wise, um, I think it's okay, but maybe not the most amazing. Not as good as the Sonys or the Nothings that we've heard so far. I can definitely hear that truck behind you though.
11:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, you're coming in a little muffled. I think these are letting in more of the natural ambiance of whatever's going on behind you. But at the same time, it's also cutting into your voice. So you kind of sound like you're on a Zoom call, like that kind of underwater type of, uh, effect that you get sometimes from like low fidelity audio over the internet.
12:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, I found this, uh, in our last test, like a lot more background noise came through. And maybe my voice sounded a little more realistic, but it also just took in everything else.
12:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's, it's not as compressed as the Sonys or the Nothings, but you sound a little thin. I guess is the best way to describe it.
12:27 Speaker 06 Sure, sure.
12:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:28 Speaker 00 I guess if you want someone to know that you're outside, this is what you want. But you know, you don't want to sound horrible on the call, but you want to say, oh God, oh God, someone's breaking and they need to oil those brakes.
12:41 Speaker 06 Oh, wow. You heard that? Okay.
12:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, definitely. It was completely silent for the last two headphones, but I can definitely hear what's going on outside with you right now.
12:52 Speaker 06 There are three microphones for voice pickup with eight microphones for active noise cancellation. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Heard all that.
13:00 Speaker 00 And it's, it's interesting because this is, I think, the most expensive pair of, of headphones that we have i- in this test. They're $5.49. So the, the others, like the Nothings were $2.99 and the Sonys were $4.49. So you're paying the most to hear trucks behind you when you're outside.
13:21 Speaker 06 Do you hear any of the wind noises? It's getting pretty.
13:24 Speaker 00 Yes.
13:24 Speaker 05 A little bit, yeah. You get some of that rustling, yeah.
13:26 Speaker 06 I would say that Apple's AirPods Pro, the earbud ones, I think they sound great for voice calls. I use those all the time for voice calls. So it's funny, like if you were to pick. These over the earbuds. I would pick the earbud just because like you get so much more use out of them because the voice cords are better. That's my opinion though.
13:48 Speaker 00 I mean, you don't get as much of a fashion statement as you do with the Max like I definitely feel. They are, they, they're a very specific look. I see people in New York City all the time on the subway wearing them. So I guess it's a matter of what you're looking for, but cool. Now we're on to our final pick, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra. Let's see how those do.
14:11 Speaker 06 All right, now I'm calling on the Bose QuietComfort Ultra. How do I sound? What do you hear? What do you don't hear?
14:18 Speaker 00 You know, when you were talking, I could hear the stuff around you a lot more.
14:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:25 Speaker 00 Than when you're not talking, it sounds a lot damper.
14:29 Speaker 00 Although now I do hear those police sirens going by. I do hear the sirens going by. Uh, and you sound a little compressed, but not awful. You're intelligible. A little bit like you're in an echo chamber underwater, a little bit.
14:43 Speaker 06 So these did the best in our previous test. Okay. Yeah. You hear this siren going by here?
14:50 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. Oh, defo.
14:53 Speaker 05 It, it's interesting. I think it's like, it's bringing it, it's bringing up the noise floor every time you speak. And then once you stop talking, it, it kind of dampens it down a little bit more.
15:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, I noticed this before too.
15:05 Speaker 00 Wow, God.
15:08 Speaker 06 Sorry.
15:08 Speaker 00 Wow. No, it's, it's accurate, but I do think it's going to depend on what context you're using these headphones and like how much you want other people to know where you are. I don't want anyone to know anything about where I am at any given point in time. I want to be like a mystery. Enigmatic. Uh, so that's not something that I would love personally. But you are intelligible on the call. You do kind of sound like you're like, if, if you had a swimming pool and you got rid of all the water and you're kind of standing in the swimming pool, there's a little bit of that effect going on, I think.
15:41 Speaker 06 Oh, echoey, yeah.
15:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's, it's a little reverb-y. It's adding some kind of processing to the voice where it's kind of letting it ring a little bit more than it would normally or naturally. Um, and it's, it's, yeah, I'm picking up the birds, uh, as well. I'm not picking up any low end at all, just really high frequency, uh, noises. Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, that makes sense.
16:04 Speaker 00 You've got some yappy birds near you.
16:06 Speaker 06 Okay, so. What do you, what do you think? Who wins?
16:09 Speaker 00 I think my number one pick would be the Sonys, actually.
16:13 Speaker 06 Okay, for votes' cause.
16:16 Speaker 06 Yeah. What do you think?
16:18 Speaker 05 I was gonna say the same thing. It, I think it's a close tie, or at least a very tight race between the Sonys and the Nothings. I think it would be Sony number one, Nothing number two, the Bose number three, and AirPods Max number four.
16:33 Speaker 06 Let me put them on one more time. We'll just say goodbye. Okay, and then here I'm back on the Nothings, just to compare it to them. Still sound pretty good, or still easy to hear me. Second place, you're gonna say?
16:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm still gonna say, I think, second place, just because you're a little loud and a little more compressed sounding to my ear, at least, than you were on the Sonys, but it's, it's a lot closer than it was on our last test when the Nothings were...
17:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, I, I think we are just coming to realize, you know, that these headphones, for the most part, do a pretty good job of cancelling out background noise. You know, some better than others, and that's always gonna add a little bit of color and compression to your voice, but, you know, as long as we're able to hear you, I think that's a good trade-off.
17:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
17:23 Speaker 05 You know, because otherwise, you're not gonna wanna wear these and take a call, because you're always gonna have complaints from other people saying that they can't hear you, or if you can, you know, go to a quieter space, you know, you can confidently go out with the, you know, with the Sonys or the Nothing headphones, and take a call and not worry about it at all, pretty much.
17:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I think another thing we were saying is just the scenarios that you're in, because they might perform slightly differently. I think you sounded like you were in the apiary section, where all the birds were yapping in the zoo, a little bit, when you added in, like, outdoor noise with the Bose. So I think it's important to think about where you're gonna be using these headphones, when, you know, Prime Day, Prime Day is happening, right? So, uh... Yeah, I was gonna go buy myself a pair of bows, but maybe I'll get a pair of the Sony's just because I think they did better all around. Oh, wow. Now I have to think hard. I don't like having to think hard. That's very rude.
18:21 Speaker 06 For voice calls, the Sony beat out, but for sound quality, um, I'm always going back to the AirPods Max between those four. Yeah.
18:31 Speaker 00 I do think.
18:31 Speaker 06 The voice calls don't sound great. Yeah.
18:33 Speaker 00 No, the voice calls on the AirPods Max, I think were, I agree with Eric. I think they were the worst. So that's, hmm, maybe the real thing is that you could never just have one pair.
18:46 Speaker 06 I know. And that's they make, yeah, that's what they want you. They want you to buy multiple headphones. Got my AirPods Pro for my voice calls. Got my AirPods Max for my music listening. It's, it's messed up.
19:00 Speaker 05 That's how they get you.
19:01 Speaker 00 That's how they get you. That's how they get you. Anyway, that was great. Thank you, Eric, for having some beautiful, audio-inspired, informed takes besides me just going like, and thank you, Andrew, for braving a very busy street in Brooklyn.
19:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, no problem. Thanks for doing that. It was fun.
19:20 Speaker 00 That was our mic test, and we're gonna take a break. And when we're back, I'm talking with the Ladder CEO about what it takes to build a strength training app.
19:31 Speaker 02 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.
19:40 Speaker 03 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.
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21:03 Speaker 00 So we're back and you know, I test all the wearables and fitness tech at The Verge and I gotta tell you, I've tested a million of them and it is really hard to find something that I personally feel like gets strength training down pat. And I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've tested a million of them. I it's it's probably close hundreds at the very least. And strength training is just so hard to get down pat. And I think Ladder of all the apps that I've tried has definitely gotten the closest to the point where I almost feel like I enjoy lifting weights, which if you've read my reviews, you know how much I hate lifting weights. Like, I know it's good for me, but I hate it.
21:43 Speaker 00 In any case, I wanted to call up CEO Greg Stewart and have him tell me why this app is actually good at this. So here's that. I really wanted to talk to you about Ladder because, you know, personally speaking, I have always struggled with strength training. We have like approximately 40,000 running and cardio apps. Why is strength training so hard to get right?
22:12 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think I think to start, it's not just strength training. It's delivering workouts or programming through an app experience. And I think if you look at the spectrum of apps and content, it's really designed as a library of almost scattered, random workouts, which you have to navigate yourself. And it's really hard to figure out the right style, what your programming should look like versus your goals, how to start a new modality like strength training. And so people will gravitate towards what they're comfortable with or what they know. And a lot of times that leans to cardio, which is great. All movement is great, but it doesn't really.
22:54 Speaker 08 Help you start a new consistent routine versus completing a workout, any workout in a particular day. There's lots of resources out there, but it's hard to find one source of truth. What we invented was a system and that system's been designed to do two things. To get you the desired outcomes and body composition that comes with teaching you the movements and programming to get there and to keep you excited and having fun, which is motivation, which becomes consistency. When we designed the experience, we, we looked at personal training and personal training
23:37 Speaker 08 from our perspective is the best way to get into strength training, to get into fitness, to maintain a consistent routine. But it's really hard to get access to that. It's really expensive. It's hard from a timing perspective. It's just not really accessible for most people. But the anchors of personal training were super interesting and relevant to us. And how we saw that really three kind of core pillars. Programming, so you know what to do. It's designed by an expert. It's demystifying strength training. So no matter what style you're looking for or level of strength training you're coming in with. Coaching, so you've got someone there to guide you through each workout, someone to answer your questions and accountability.
24:19 Speaker 08 So really trying to replicate the feeling of having a coach there.
24:25 Speaker 00 Our listeners who may not know what the ladder experience is like, can you give them a quick rundown of what ladder looks like for them?
24:35 Speaker 08 Yep, absolutely. So again, it starts with our core goal of giving you a plan and demystifying strength training for beginners or, or any level. And for us, it starts with bringing on the best coaches, true experts in strength coaching and the specific modality that they represent, which we test before they join the company. So for the consumer, we spend a lot of time constantly tweaking, maybe what you experienced, this matching algorithm to make sure that we're asking you the right questions, understanding who you are, what you're solving for, where you're coming from a fitness perspective, beginner or advanced, and mapping you to the right program based on all those inputs. We have a wide range of programs, we call
25:20 Speaker 08 them teams. Some are geared towards folks who are new to strength training, others are geared to those that are advanced. Coaches represent personas and personalities, and we use that to match to the right user who's coming in. In the app itself, like, we're over emphasizing real coaching and proper form. So the value prop is we give you a plan. We remove all the guesswork that comes with strength training. You have movement videos featuring your coach who's performing each exercise. We make it really easy to review and preview those moments before you get started. But you can think about it as a system. It isn't just a basket of content and you're choosing your own adventure. We're figuring out who you are. We're mapping you to the right program. That
26:03 Speaker 08 program is called a team. That team has a coach. That coach is actually programming workouts every week that are progressive so that every day you're looking to work out, you know exactly what you should be doing and you can have confidence that they're building on top of each other and actually purposely designed by an expert that is in line with the goals that you're solving for.
26:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, I want to touch on like a lot of what you talked about there because one of my biggest struggles, like I'm in the fitness tech space, I work out, I know how important like conditioning and strength training and mobility work is, but you know, there's, it's just so hard to be like, oh, I'm a runner. Let me Google or ask ChatGPT what the best program for me is. Oh, no, I have to look up the proper form. Oh, no, I have to think about, do I have access to a gym? Do I have home equipment?
26:58 Speaker 08 Yep.
26:59 Speaker 00 Oh, I'm injured. I don't have that equipment. What can I swap it out for? What's a modifier? The way that Ladder does it, when I first tried it, I was like, oh. This makes sense. This is like a lot easier for me now because you can swap out a move that you don't like. That made me much more likely to stick with it. So I was wondering, like, how do you get those concepts into an app? Like, how do you develop that process? Because I was like, oh, I didn't even know that was something I wanted. Even the concept of training blocks. For people who've never used Ladder, you have six-week training blocks.
27:42 Speaker 00 That was something I struggled with when I was trying to do this all on my own, saving money, not going to get a personal trainer in person. So just would love to touch on those aspects.
27:55 Speaker 08 Yeah, on the blocks, if you were to hire a personal trainer, they would think about increments of time that you're working towards. So it wouldn't just be a random Monday workout. They would say, all right, over the next six or eight weeks or 12 weeks, we're going to work on developing something very specific. And your workouts are going to build to that. And we use the strength series to create a similar experience. They have specific goals that you're working on. It has a beginning and an end. So it doesn't feel like this never-ending experience or never-ending road. Like, you have a moment in time, a very specific thing that you're focused on, which is different at each team. And you're doing it alongside a whole bunch of people who are going through the same thing as you.
28:41 Speaker 08 When we think about launching a new team or even managing our teams, we're hyper-focused on the persona, the person, that is relevant to that team. And we work backwards based on what we're learning from that quiz. So we have millions of people going through that quiz, where we help you match to a program. But we also use that quiz to figure out what are the gaps in personas or training styles that aren't well-served by our current coaching roster? And we're in a fortunate position where we don't have to go launch new coaches and teams to grow. We'll launch a new coach and team when it's very clear that there's an underserved persona,
29:24 Speaker 08 so someone very specific, some more goals, training style, that isn't currently met by our coaches. So we have like a very specific person in mind when we're working with our coaches, and their programming reflects that. So upfront, when we're working with a coach, whether it's launching a new team or constantly iterating, it's very, very clear, where is this person working out? What equipment do they have access to? Where are they on their fitness journey? How many days a week are they working out? Do they need more motivation? Or they're looking for technical form and training advice? And if you go across our teams, they're extremely different.
30:05 Speaker 08 I think the fact that we didn't launch Ladder with like one core face that represented the brand, like you'll see in a lot of other fitness products. We created this concept of Ladder, and under Ladder lives teams, and teams are a wide range of personas. If you go to Limitless with Coach Kelly, that's an advanced gym goer. That's a woman who's going to the gym five or six days a week, knows exactly how to navigate around equipment and machines, and is looking for expert programming and a coach who really understands the technical fundamentals and is going to convey that in their programming. If you join a line, it has a yoga-infused influence. So someone who might not be coming from a ton of strength training experience wants
30:50 Speaker 08 to incorporate that, but wants to have some of the familiarity and benefits of incorporating a yoga routine. So we're very, very particular on the person that these coaches are serving within these teams, and we're constantly working with that to make sure that our assumptions are correct and that we have the right person in mind, and we're using our data to inform that process. So for us, it comes from not having a blanketed view of, this is just workouts and a fitness consumer. It's who is this person? Where are they coming from? What are they solving for? What equipment do they have? Where are they training? And then building a team around that.
31:29 Speaker 00 You know, this this new era of fitness apps, it kind of sort of feels like your mini content media production companies and that comes with its own challenges like, um, you know, one of the core tenets of strength training is you kind of have to do the same few movements over and over again with heavier weights to progress. It's very easy to get bored when you're doing that. So like, how do you keep that interesting? Obviously, the the the trainers, they're they're thinking about that, too. They're putting that in. And then, you know, how do you make the decision of do we go for curated playlists that our instructors create?
32:12 Speaker 00 Or do we go for your own music, which I I deeply appreciate the ability to listen to my own playlist on Ladder like love Apple Fitness Plus, love Peloton, but sometimes I'm like, your guys' music taste and mine don't align. You guys have no K-pop playlists and I need straight kids to to really get pumping. So like, how do you think about the media side of that and the content production?
32:40 Speaker 08 Yeah, the the music side was a almost an accidental discovery. So when we launched the app in 2020, we had very little money. We couldn't go invest in content that was only couldn't purchase licenses. We just didn't have any resources to think about solving music and doing it in a way that was like legal and compliant with the laws of ownership. So we just couldn't solve that. But like, from our perspective, we were like, I don't know, when you go to the gym, are you listening to the music in the background? Or do you have your headphones on? And are you picking it? And is it a personal decision? And for us, it was it was personal, but we we launched just having no other option,
33:24 Speaker 08 but giving the option of an integration with Spotify and Apple Music so that it's clean to go, you know, pick your music. And then integrating the experience so that the music is ducking down when voiceovers are happening, when the coach is talking and just making it feel like it's purposeful and how the two systems are talking to each other. What we learned really quickly early on was that that was a core value prop for people. If you go to our App Store reviews, and we've got 75,000 written App Store reviews, it's like a third of them will reference playing their own music. And so it became a differentiator, one that was like better for the business. But it became a differentiator because we learned that like people actually who are consuming our content wants to be picking their own music.
34:08 Speaker 08 Uh, and using their own apps and their own services that they're already paying for. And so like that, that has been, uh, true from the beginning, but we kind of fell backwards into it, not having a ton of other options.
34:21 Speaker 00 We love a happy accident and kind of along that line. Were there features that you thought would work and then didn't? And then vice versa, were there features that you were like, this will never work? And then it did.
34:36 Speaker 08 Sort of like the whole thing has been a game of like extreme iteration. Like we spend a lot of time listening to our members, both uh, unprovoked feedback that's coming in, surveys, constantly surveying the team and platform level. And like listening for what people want. So when we make a big bet on a core product feature, it's pretty directly informed from the user. Building a ladder journal was a clear example of that. People were tracking rep and weights outside of the app. They wanted an integrated experience. Modifications is another great example. People were modifying on their own, but they were making up the modification or asking in team chat, which is basically a big group chat inside all of these programs.
35:20 Speaker 08 Not a great experience, but people were screaming at us for these features. And so when we hear it that loudly and we go make a huge bet, we're, we're extremely confident that it's going to be well received. And we've got a beta group of 2,000 members and we're getting feedback through this whole process and we're learning what we got right and what we, what we got wrong. There were some features early on that we weren't sure how important they would be. One of those was a one-to-one chat. We had a one-to-one chat in, in the app that was just part of the, the membership. And because of that, we had a expensive price. So when we launched, we were 60 bucks a month and wasn't meant to be like chat with your coach as a buddy, more like an on-star button where you had a very specific thing.
36:04 Speaker 08 You needed a modification, you have an injury, you're asking about the programming and the coach can give you a response. And when we first launched the, the app, most of our users were coming from the audiences, the social audiences of our early coaches and they had, you know, 10, 20,000 followers on Instagram. And that person who was following them knew that coach, knew the style, had all the context. That coach was their hero. And yeah, they were really excited to be able to talk to that coach. And they valued chatting one to one. When we started growing and investing in growth and growing outside of our coaches' audience, what we learned through a whole bunch of work was, one, the price was way too expensive. Like, people were anchoring to their content subscription apps. They're thinking about Spotify and Netflix.
36:47 Speaker 08 And we were multiples of that. So the price value equation was completely out of whack. And we learned that most people weren't willing to pay extra for this chat feature. On the flip side of that, like the cheer, the cheers feature that we thought was pretty cool early, early on, where you open up the app, you're on the home screen, you can see avatars of members who are in their workout with a ring that shows how far they are into the workout. And you can send them a cheer. And it's just kind of a fun, gamified experience. That feature has become unbelievably important to retention. And we've spent a ton of time looking at, you know, what is the minimum number of cheers per workout that leads to longer term retention?
37:30 Speaker 08 Or what is, when you come into the welcome workout, your first workout of ladder, like, how many cheers, like, actually are impactful? And we've, like, correlated this to retention. So that feature is on the home screen for a reason. It might feel a little different when you come in there, but it's really, really important and really powerful. And it brings, you know, kind of the atmosphere and feeling of being on a team and doing it with other people who are like you. So certainly have had features that have outperformed what we would have guessed on the impact that they would drive to our membership.
38:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's like a really good segue. It's like you're reading my mind. But I wanted to talk about gamifying and community. Because one thing I noticed is, okay, so. I am not the most social person while working out. I'm very much lone wolf. Leave me alone. I tried the run clubs and I'm the type of runner and I'm like, don't talk to me. I'm gonna go at my pace, all that sort of stuff. So I was so surprised to see how much I was lurking in the team chats and being like, oh, I don't participate much in them. But I'm like, oh, here's Monday morning. Here's, here's Nicole's little message. Let me see what everyone else is saying. Oh, like that feels, that feels nice. And then to your point, the cheers. Sometimes, you know, Nicole loves a plank.
38:46 Speaker 00 I do not, but I try. And when I'm, when I'm struggling in, in the plank, sometimes someone will send a cheer and I'm like, oh, that's nice. I can't let this random person down. Let me, let me, let me hold out an extra 10 seconds in the plank. And I was so surprised to see how that actually impacted me. So, you know, but that's kind of the positive side of gamifying. There are other kind of more mixed, I have complicated feelings about streaks, for example, and getting really mentally fixated and obsessive about streaks to the point where I get injured, where I don't take the rest in. So how, how, how do you think about an approach?
39:27 Speaker 00 The gamified features so that you keep people engaged, you, you do keep them feeling positive, but you don't overload them and you make their mental health worse in some cases.
39:39 Speaker 08 Yeah, every feature we design, and so like, this is true, everything you've seen in the app is all aimed at helping to keep you consistent with your workouts. So they're not just random features to be there. They're there because they have some correlation to motivation or correlation to, to workouts. Streak mapped well to our value prop of helping you stay consistent with a plan and rewarding consistency. But we made changes to streaks based on some of the points that you just made. When we first launched the app, Our user was on the more advanced end of strength training. That's changed as we've grown and added new modalities and found fits with a broader basket of users.
40:22 Speaker 08 But our streak was four workouts per week, which we learned pretty quickly was not realistic for many of our members. And so it was like this, it was having the opposite effect. It was not motivational. It was like, well, I can't do that, so I don't really care about this and I'm constantly underperforming. And so that was a, that was an important insight and we, we changed the streak based on feedback from members and watching what was happening. And we moved it to three. And we had a core group of people that said like, you're making this softer and easier. But for the most part, most folks were excited about it and, and thought that it made a ton of sense. And actually was now a motivational feature. Fast forward to last month, we launched streak freeze because we know that life gets in the way.
41:05 Speaker 08 And we would get support tickets, folks saying, hey, I got married this week. I had a death in my family. I had a 53 week streak and I lost it or anything you could do. And we would help them and we would repair the streak, like we would, we would repair it. And streak freeze was introduced to help solve some of these motivational elements or deter defeat. When it's just not possible to, to reach the goal from a consistency perspective.
41:31 Speaker 00 Cool. And then, you know, just getting on the, the sense of quitting, like, how do you get people back on the horse? Cause I think that's a, that's a problem that a lot of fitness tech, wearable tech, basically my entire beat is, is like obsessed with is, is just never getting you to quit. How do we get people to stick with it? Because behavioral change is really hard. Like I'm, I'm dedicated to fitness and even I have like months long slumps where I'm like, ooh, I'm not doing as much as I should be. So how do you get people back on the horse? How do you approach that challenge?
42:04 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think like making sure the experience is fun and motivated has been core from our to our product from the beginning. So whether that's you're on a routine and we're trying to keep you excited for the next workout, all of those experience and levers are designed to keep you going. I think one, you have to get results, right? It has to prove that it's working and we need to tell you that it's working. And that doesn't mean that the scale is changing. It could, it could mean you feel better. It could mean that things are happening to your mood that are driving outcomes that are positive to your life. So we use these features to reinforce that, hey, you just hit a PR, like that's a new accomplishment for you. We celebrate badges,
42:47 Speaker 08 micro wins that aren't about the actual outcome, but that you did, you did something hard. All of those are motivating and helpful, I think, to stay excited, even though weekly drop. So our workouts are new every week. They're progressive, but no two workouts have ever been the same. And so even that is really unique versus other, other apps in our space. We work with our coaches on programming, looking at the data every single week. It's informing what's happening the next week. But that element of surprise and variability, or what are we doing this week, is a real motivator for folks. So we, we use that as a moment. We call it the drop. We release workouts on Sunday evening. It's the highest moment engagement of the week. People come into the app to see what
43:31 Speaker 08 the workouts for the week will look like. There's anticipation and fun. If you, again, you look at our app store reviews, because we, we always trust the words of our members, what they'll say is like, I'm having way more fun than I would have expected, or I'm way more motivated than I thought I was. When people are falling off, like we have moments that are like natural reentry points that we use to bring you back in. And the strength series is a big, a big part of that. Maybe you fell off or reset the first strength series of the year. Well, we have another one coming and we'll use that moment, those two weeks in between, to try to pull you back in and get you excited and say it's, it's now a great time to restart. Like you're not behind. We're all starting together
44:12 Speaker 08 tomorrow. And that, that is really effective. I mean, if you look at everyone who has left our app or turned our app, almost a third have come back.
44:20 Speaker 00 Oh, that's pretty wild.
44:21 Speaker 08 It's a really important motion from the company side, which is like, hey, maybe it wasn't the right time for you. Like, I understand, but we're gonna try to bring you back in and get you completing workouts again and trying to help you stay consistent, getting to the goals that you're looking to achieve.
44:36 Speaker 00 I guess one thing I wanted to ask was, um, what's next for Ladder? Obviously, you're iterating, you're thinking, do you ever feel like you get to a point where you're like, hey, we've, we've got a pretty cool formula? Or, or is it just a case where everyone has ideas all the time and it's fine tuning?
44:55 Speaker 08 It never stops, um, it, it, which is a good thing. Like there, we, we have more things that we know we need to build than time and resources, which is a good problem that we're, that we're solving. There are some like big, exciting projects that are, that are jumping out at us from our members' words. Like, we built the Ladder Journal. The Ladder Journal helps you track reps and weights. We now have 200 million data points from our members that have been inserted into that journal. And now we want to figure out, how do we take all that data and then help tell you what to do? Not just looking backwards at what you did, but what weight you should pick up, when you should push harder, when you're getting close to a PR.
45:37 Speaker 08 Let's use all of this information, just like a coach who would be standing with you and saying these things, reacting and watching. Let's use that information and help customize the experience even more, giving you perspective on what to do next. That's at the user level, not just at the, at the team level. So there's a lot of opportunity on Ladder Journal and using all this incredible information that we have to make the experience better and more, more personal. There's a lot of exciting things on community that we're excited about. People want private tribes or small groups, whether that's opting into a smaller group. It could be women in New York who go to the gym. It could be you started on a team or a program at the same time,
46:21 Speaker 08 but creating a micro experience which is even more relevant to the people who are in that group with you, not degrading team chat, but additive to the experience. So there's a whole bunch of things we're excited about on the community side now that it's growing and there are people coming to the app who know of other people, their friends, and there isn't really a great way to go find them and have a shared experience. You can imagine, you know, a lot of our members have a text group with their workout buddies where they're talking about progress and they're sharing what's going on. That stuff should be in the app, especially as you have more and more people who are using Ladder. We should create an ability to let you challenge your friends
47:01 Speaker 08 or cheer on your friends away or aside from the team or agnostic to what team you are on. So we're really excited about about those components. And the third like big, big chunk from our perspective that we're we're on learn mode right now is on nutrition. Our members are screaming at us to think about nutrition and think about how do you consolidate this experience into one? Because if you think about it, it's really one consumer with one goal or one problem. So they're looking to lose weight or put on muscle mass. That goal has inputs and outputs. Outputs are workout or physical activity, what's coming out of your body as a result of the workouts that you're doing.
47:45 Speaker 08 And inputs is food and diet and nutrition. And those two things have to work together to get to the outcome that you're solving for.
47:54 Speaker 00 Cool. And, you know, so I gotta ask, you know, I'm a wearables reviewer. I test a lot of this stuff. Everybody is adding in a ton of AI, AI summaries, AI chatbot coaches. What's your take on that?
48:10 Speaker 08 AI in general has been central to our team and how we work for a long time. Like, we have 20x this business over the last couple of years, and our team is roughly the same size. So we're 40 people, including all of our coaches who are full-time teammates with us. So it's a very small team for the work that we're doing. And the reason is, we've used AI to 10x every individual. And so we don't have many people or any who are managing folks as a job, but they're using AI to amplify the work that they're doing. We use AI a lot with our coaches in a variety of ways. Like, team chat, some of our teams have 100,000 people in them.
48:53 Speaker 08 And it's not a good use of time for the coach to read thousands of messages to understand what's happening in team chat. What's the temperament? What questions are people asking? Where are people getting stuck? And so we've created tools on the backend that let them very quickly ingest all the content from the day, understand the mood and the temperament, identify top questions, members who have questions that have never been responded to. And we help the coach prioritize what to say and when using tools like that. So it's very much integrated from a workflow perspective. I think over the next year or so, you'll start to see it driving more personalization in the experience itself. The Ladder Journal, for example, that will all be powered by AI,
49:38 Speaker 08 which is, we have all this information. How do we help use it to tell you or help you know what to do next? If we enter nutrition, it'll be a very similar approach. And you can imagine, long-term, like, we had that coach chat, that one-to-one I talked about in the beginning. There's probably an opportunity to have a companion in the app that knows everything from a fitness and food perspective and is able to interact with you on a one-to-one basis to help you get closer to your goals. So I would say, chapter one for us is workflow and using these tools to deliver a better experience with the team that we have. And chapter two will be using it to improve the experience, but personalize, not degrading the team atmosphere,
50:20 Speaker 08 but using all of this data and information to help give it back to you in a way that's consumable and helps navigate, you know, what the next thing should be that you're solving for.
50:31 Speaker 00 Very cool. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat.
50:34 Speaker 08 Of course. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.
50:37 Speaker 00 Yeah. All right, so we're going to take a quick break. And then after that, we've got a question from the Vergecast hotline.
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52:22 Speaker 00 All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. And the email is [email protected] . Very, very, very easy email. Anyway, we love all your questions, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. And this week, we have an email about AI fitness insights, which this is a follow-up conversation to one that David and I had before he abandoned us for, you know, fatherhood again. The rudeness. Anyway, the email is from Kevin from San Diego and it says, "I have two questions/ prompts related to your recent discussion of Apple Fitness Buddy, or whatever it is called, and other AI and fitness tracker offerings.
53:07 Speaker 00 For background, I'm a very happy Whoop user. Ooh, I got the Whoop on right now. It's my favorite wearable I've ever used. Having said that, I don't find their AI coach useful and agree with David and V's takes. My questions are the optimistic: Does some set of users out there enjoy these and why? What prompts are they putting in and what are we missing out on? And the cynical: Do the companies themselves, Whoop or Garmin, Apple, even see these are good? Or if you gave them the truth serum, would they just admit that they suck? And they just have to offer one because everyone else does." Ooh, ooh, goodness. Kevin from San Diego. Very spicy, a very spicy email.
53:48 Speaker 00 And it's a really well timed email because I actually just wrote up a story on The Verge called "The Unbearable Obviousness of AI Fitness Insights", callback to one of my favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And you know what? Let's take the optimistic question and the cynical question. Because do some set of users out there enjoy these and why? So when I was doing research for that story, I actually reached out to Aura, I reached out to Strava, and I reached out to Whoop to say like, you know, what's the feedback that you've gotten from people using this? Because I personally, I like to go on the subreddits for these companies
54:32 Speaker 00 and read the discourse anytime I get a really stupid AI fitness summary. And you know, as you can imagine, what the companies told me was that, yeah, people actually really like it. But the numbers that they gave me, and it's in the article which we'll put in the show notes, they were kind of, let's just say there was some words that were doing heavy lifting. I think, you know, they were like, they use them weekly. Okay, like of the weekly users who decided to give feedback. Well, you know, the decided to give feedback is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
55:12 Speaker 00 But I do think that if you have people who are enjoying these very milquetoast summaries, they are going to be the beginners. They're going to be people who are very new to fitness, who don't necessarily have the foundational knowledge of like what makes a good habit, what are good nutritional things to think about, how does rest interplay with your diet and nutrition. So for those people, they might bring insights that are, you know, not really insights, but they're there in the app and they're convenient and easily summarized. So maybe as for what prompts they're putting in, well, that depends because there's two types of AI fitness features. And one of them are these just very blanket, regurgitated AI summaries.
55:57 Speaker 00 There's no prompts being put into those. But some like Aura and Whoop actually have chatbots that you can somewhat interact with. There's generally little prompts that they like pre-filled out prompts that you can do. Um, I don't necessarily think we're missing out. I found that you can get a decent response if you spend a lot of time talking to this chatbot. It's like you got, I had to train the Aura chatbot quite a bit by like kind of taking its non-existent AI hand and going like, okay, I've had a very stressful week. I think my glucose is up because I'm really stressed out. Is that a factor that affects glucose? Also, I got injured. Also, I did this. Also, I did that. And then the answers that it gives to me are a little more tailored to that specific
56:41 Speaker 00 situation, but it's still stuff that I could have found on Google and/or through common sense. In that respect, I think the people who do enjoy them again are those who just don't, they're coming into this fitness journey completely new, completely fresh. They don't have the basic. Know how that you might have as as someone who is a extensive whoop user because let's be real, the whoop user set, they're generally very experienced athletes or they're very comfortable with these concepts of rest and recovery and how that plays into fitness where you play up or play down the the intensity based on the amount of strain
57:23 Speaker 00 you've taken on. And so let's get to the cynical part of Kevin's question where it says, do the companies themselves even see these are good? Or if we gave them a truth serum, would they admit they suck? Well, I've made it my personal mission to ask the CEOs of all these companies when I interview them, you know, let's be real here. And the media training absolutely kicks on and they I don't blame them at all for that. They they absolutely have to kind of sell this because let's be real, they do have to offer this because this is what investors want to see from them at this point in time with the AI zeitgeist. But but but but but I'm going to give them a little credit because the problem with AI
58:08 Speaker 00 fitness and with wearables at large is that you are generating a huge amount of data. I've been testing this this particular category or beat for close to a decade now. I have close to a decade's worth of personal data amassed across several different platforms. And I'm pretty adept at looking at it, understanding my baseline and pulling out insights naturally. But even I need help from time to time to contextualize what it is that I'm seeing. And I can't crunch those numbers all by myself. So theoretically, if we could have an AI that was saying something along the lines of, you know, I'm going to use my personal life,
58:51 Speaker 00 for example, I ate it recently while on a run. I just completely I was overly optimistic about what my body could handle after taking a break because I had a crazy last two months. Um, so I'm coming off of a prolonged training break where I was mostly doing maintenance. And I was like, yeah, you know, it's, it's hot outside and I'm gonna do my heat acclimation training with a 3.25 mile run because that is so easy for me. It's so easy for me when I'm, uh, I, I, I'm on the top of my game. I can do a 3.25 mile run in my sleep in the history of my running history. But in the last two months, you know, 3.25 is actually a bit more when you're putting
59:32 Speaker 00 it in the context that it was, uh, 88 degrees and I hadn't done a proper heat acclimatizing, uh, training regimen for two weeks. It takes about two weeks for your body to get used to the new heat and humidity when you switch seasons. So I ate it. I absolutely ate it. And that's despite the fact that I had all the hydration that I needed with me, that I was prepped and I went at an early time of day. I completely ate it. I have, you could see this bandage that I have on my hand. Um, uh, and what I would have wanted from these AI to be like, hey, girl, you had real bad sleep the last two months and your training was extremely reduced. You've probably lost some fitness and given the 10 years of history we have on you, you
1:00:15 Speaker 00 tend to come back from prolonged breaks way too ambitious and have a ton of self-reported injuries from doing all that. See, I know that because I can sit back and reflect on my patterns and where I went wrong. The AI was just like, wow, you had a real intense run. Good job. And that was across multiple platforms. And I was like, okay, so you not only could not synthesize the insight that I wanted from my years of data, you just basically gave me a book report that was the equivalent of a fourth grader who decided not to do the assignment and read the summary on Wikipedia. And it reads like that. You know, so I think that's kind of the state of where AI fitness summaries are at.
1:00:58 Speaker 00 They're there because they are trying to solve a very real problem, which is data without context doesn't mean much, but they're not as good as you are. Once you've learned your own context and your own patterns and reflected on all of that, they're not as good as you are at knowing yourself. So that's just where we're at now. They're going to pursue it. I keep, you know, looking at them going eh eh eh, raising my eyebrow, and they keep going like, their eyes are frozen and they, I know they're being held captive by their capitalist investors and I understand it's the little dance that we do, but there is a time and place for them. If you're a textual learner and maybe the charts that are right there with the same exact information, but for some reason you see it regurgitated
1:01:42 Speaker 00 in a little sentence, maybe that's more digestive for you. I'm not saying that there's absolutely no purpose for it, but for the vast majority of people looking for these features, wanting to have those insights, we're just not there yet. We just aren't. So yeah, that's it. Thanks for your question, Kevin. It was a really good one. I got to have my little monologue. And that's it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's a whole lot more stuff from this conversation at theverge.com. We'll put links in the show notes, but also read theverge.com. Find your bylines. You're very smart people. You know how to do that. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, you can always email us at [email protected]
1:02:24 Speaker 00 or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show and we do a hotline question every week, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Moreno, all very excellent guys. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of Vox Media Podcast Network. Jake will be back on Friday to discuss all the news from this week, but that's not Hot Girl Vergecast summer. Anywho, goodbye.
1:03:05 Speaker 09 Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.
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