Torrenters are building epic media collections

All around the internet, groups of media fans are hunting for and curating some of the best movie, music, and TV collections anywhere. And they're doing it all via BitTorrent. Verge contributor and Lowpass writer Janko Roettgers takes us into the world of private torrent trackers, where some people are saving culture and some people are just in it for the flicks. Torrent Underground We’re also on video! Check us out on YouTube. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Torrents Return01:20 Private Trackers Explained04:04 Rules Ratios And Leechers05:56 The Prestige Ladder10:00 Bounties And Salinger12:55 Piracy Ethics Today17:16 Streaming Backlash19:45 What Private Really Means22:12 Anti Piracy Crackdowns25:44 Why People Do It27:14 Is BitTorrent Growing28:45 Curation Beats Algorithms31:51 Enough Phone Kickstarter33:50 Phone Prices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:41David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of U-Torrent. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about torrents. A thing I don't know if you thought I would ever say again in the year 2026, but it turns out, not only is BitTorrent alive and well, there's actually a whole community of people on torrents you might not know about. They live in these things called private trackers, which are something along the lines of like group chats or subreddits for people who are uploading and downloading files to one another. Yanko Rutgers, who writes a great newsletter called Lowpass and is also a frequent contributor to The Verge, wrote us a big story about these private tracker communities and what they mean and what they look like in a world full of streaming and full of just wildly complicated media discovery.

• 2:26David Pierce?

  Let's get into it. Yanko Rutgers, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  Glad to be here.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  You have found a very funny beat at The Verge. You write about a lot of stuff for us, but one of the beats that you're on is people doing semi-illegal or extremely illegal media sharing on the internet. And you're back with another installment of the people pirating stuff on the internet story. So I wanna, I wanna get into this because you describe a world that I didn't even know existed or had never even thought might exist until this story. So just tell me a little bit about what the world of private trackers in the torrent world looks like. What is a private tracker in the first place?

• 3:10Speaker 04

  I mean, it's all part of this broader BitTorrent ecosystem. And earlier this year, I wrote a story for you all about 25 years of BitTorrent. So that file sharing protocol and apps and whatever was invented 25 years ago this year. And soon after, that was like the heydays of piracy and wars around piracy when like shortly after Napster had shut down.

• 3:35David Pierce?

  BitTorrent was kind of the last one, right? It was after the eras of Napster and Kazaa and all that stuff. It was sort of BitTorrent was the last

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 3:41David Pierce?

  true hurrah of that era, and then it kind of ended.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  It came out at about the same time or at the tail end of it, and then it got really popular because it was sort of more resilient, thought of as more resilient also was just gave people a chance to organize their own sites and communities. So it was not one company running everything, which was smart for that company because it came with less legal strings attached, but also allowed people to just do their own sites. And initially, all the sites were basically public and things like the Pirate Bay, where millions of people would go and download all their things, that everything they wanted, movies, TV shows, whatever. But those obviously were also very prone to be taken down. Pirate Bay got raided, a bunch of other sites got knocked off the internet over the

• 4:27Speaker 04

  years and still happens to this day. And so as a response to that, people started doing these more private communities where you had to basically make an account initially. That was, that was all there was. You could only access it with, you had an account, so kind of like a web forum or something like that.

• 4:45David Pierce?

  Whereas the Pirate Bay, it just like lists a bunch of things. You click a link and it starts downloading the file.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. I mean, you can make an account or you could make an account too. I haven't looked at it in a, in a, quite a while, actually, I have to admit. But you could make an account to be on the forums essentially or something. But everybody can also use it. Anybody could use it without registering. And for these private trackers, it was make an account at first. And then they started to be more restricted and be like, well, we don't want everybody to make an account or maybe you want to only have 40,000 registered members and then we shut it down. So these private communities emerged and part of that was to shield themselves from law enforcement. But I think also they realized that they could just be more curated if they were only

• 5:33Speaker 04

  admitting people who are really interested in it and if they were like sort of fostering communities and, and people that knew each other or knew each other in that context anyway. So all these private torrent trackers came up and basically these are sites where you register, you become a member, and then you have to follow a set of rules. And a lot of that is like about making sure that people upload as much content as they download, so people don't just like profit off other people's generosity essentially.

• 6:02David Pierce?

  What was it called? You were, you were a leech, right? If you downloaded and didn't upload, wasn't that the term?

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, leecher or something like that, yes.

• 6:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  And leeching. And so there's these ratios. And some of that was actually like, not to get too far into the weeds there, but some of that was built into BitTorrent from the very beginning, where they always tried to like make the protocol about you have to download. If you download, if you upload stuff too, you can download things faster. But that was only by file. And so these communities made it about like all the entire catalog and really forced people to contribute, encourage people to contribute. And that has helped them to become like these really interesting ecosystems and little communities that have tons of stuff and rare things. And not only do they list them once, but with peer-to-peer, it's all on a server.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  So if people go offline, it's not there anymore. And by forcing people to contribute, they're making sure that these files are always available essentially.

• 7:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think the, my immediate reaction on hearing private torrenting was just, okay, people are trying to make it harder for people to find these people illegally downloading Avengers movies, right? That's like, that's the, and I'm sure that is a real use case, but you, you seem to have found a lot of people who are approaching this as almost a, like a group of people who might otherwise be hanging out on Letterboxd together, that have sort of similar content interests and are looking for the same kinds of things together. Like, give me some examples of what you saw of what these communities are actually building into their libraries.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think people have like different motivations and they sort of shift also over time. I think there is some allure to this because it's, it's like a private club or it's like I compare it to a speakeasy, right? It's like this thing you hear about and it sounds really exciting, but you can't immediately get access to it. So you're trying hard, you're trying to find your way in. And there's also different levels to it. Some of them are really restrictive, but really well-known as being like these ultimate movie sharing communities. And so people try for years to get in there. And so I talked to some folks, they were like, well, I could have never started up there. They would have never given me a chance as a newbie. So I started in a different community and worked my way up and started to gain a reputation and so forth.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  And so it's like this game almost like where you like get, work on your reputation and you kind of work your way up. And somebody, one of the people that I talked to for this story compared to video games, actually, where you have to really slog and really like work on like getting your credits and getting your gold or whatever, right? To, to maybe put years of, of work in it to like gain a certain status or gain a certain level. And these communities are in many ways the same way. And sort of like, sometimes that even takes over and like the content itself becomes less interesting to some people. We're like, well, I joined this, I don't know, audiobook community, but I didn't really care about audiobooks. It was all about getting into this other community. It was like this long ploy or something like that, right?

• 9:02David Pierce?

  So this begs the question, what is at the top of the list? Like you, is it, is this sort of apex private torrent tracker just somebody's flawlessly curated, high-def version of every movie that ever existed? And it's just like this known thing that no one can get into what everybody wants? Like, what is the best club in this space? Do you have any idea?

• 9:24Speaker 04

  I mean, I think that that varies, but there are some, some movie trackers for sure that are sort of very elusive and exclusive, I think. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they kept a number of active users. And so then there, it's hard to get into there or like maybe they only.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Open their doors like once a year or something like that. So some of those, like, some people I talked to were like, I still haven't been able to get access to that. I've been doing this for two years or something like that, right?

• 9:55David Pierce?

  And This makes me think there was a, I had a boss years ago who, uh, this is such a dumb example. I don't know why this just occurred to me, but I had a boss years ago who joined a Rolex club, which is just exactly what it sounds like. And it was basically a bunch of people who all had nice watches. And the price of admission was you had to have a Rolex no one else in the club had. And you would, you would bring your Rolex and everybody basically put it in a pot and just wore each other's watches all the time. And so you end up in this place of like, oh, I can have, I can have access to, you know, 12 fancy watches for the price of one fancy watch. And it was, it was like, the, the work was to figure out, okay, how do I get one that is unique and interesting,

• 10:40David Pierce?

  such that other people want it, that it's of, of relative value, but it's not the same one somebody else has. And you have to be able to get in this club, but also bring something unique to it. And it feels like you, you encountered a bunch of people on adventures to do this very thing about like, how do I contribute something to this tracker that is not already here? And in doing so, raise my standard, like this is a big part of these communities, right? They're, they're actually hunting for the stuff in the trackers.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  It, it's almost a side effect of it then for that Rolex club. Somehow that Rolex club becomes also sort of a repository or library for anybody who studies Rolexes, right?

• 11:18David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  So you could go back and like, if you really want to have a, a good take at, at what's popular in the Rolex world, that's probably the best place to go to. And in a, in a similar way, these private torrent trackers are also becoming these repositories of culture, or repositories of movies and TV shows and whatnot. And some of that is actually purposefully fostered by them. So, uh, there's these things where people, uh, ask for certain things to be uploaded. And then people can contribute, uh, credits to it.

• 11:49David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, wait, can you, can you tell the JD Salinger story? This is one of my favorite anecdotes from, that you found in your reporting. Can you explain that one?

• 11:55Speaker 04

  That one has been reported on before because it was a couple of, a bunch of years ago. But JD Salinger, reclusive author, didn't publish anything for decades before the end of his life.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  And there had always been this, uh, this one story that people were really interested in. The ocean full of bowling balls, I think is the title. And I don't butcher this right now.

• 12:17David Pierce?

  A very JD Salinger title.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Yes. And so he had written it and people knew about it. And there was one copy in a university library, but you couldn't like, it wasn't, he didn't allow it to be published. And the university like honored that by saying you cannot go and you cannot copy it. You can read it here, but you cannot copy it. And so somebody on, on one of the, uh, track, private trackers put out this call and say, I want this story. And anybody who uploads it gets like a lot of upload credit for it. And then other people like contributed to it. And I think at some point that pool that you could gain by being the first upload, there was like six terabytes of credit.

• 12:58David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Which is a lot of, that's, that's a lot of, even today, that's a lot of media, right?

• 13:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  Um, and so people came up with all these crazy schemes where they're like, well, if we go to this library and, you know, just memorize sentence by sentence or come back every day or something like that. I don't know everybody, anybody ever actually attempted it, but it was one of those things that were people floating as an idea of solving it. And then sometime, like a couple of months after this call came out, somebody actually found a copy on eBay. Cause it had turned out through whatever channels, somebody in the UK had found this story and two others unpublished and published like a print run of 25 copies. And one of those 25 copies, a decade later also showed up on eBay.

• 13:43David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  And one of those private, uh, tracker users found that copy, bought it, scanned it, uploaded, and suddenly it spread everywhere. And, um, the irony of it is that they never were able to, to, uh, get that credit, those six terabytes, because it got so popular so quickly and there was so much media attention to it too, that the tracker, uh, admins actually shut it down and deleted it. But to this day, the, the story is out there essentially. And it's, it's a really interesting, it's, it's the most popular example, but there's also other examples where people are like interested in a niche movie maybe, and then put, put a lot of effort in finding it or other things.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  And it's, it's an interesting, uh, interesting way of preserving culture, especially at a time when so much gets, gets lost essentially these days, right? With like lost movies and so forth.

• 14:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, you, you talked to a few people who framed it exactly that way as kind of an archival tool for the good of humanity. They're like, I am, I am doing important work to preserve culture. And I just, I just, I'm sure it is possible to believe that and also do this, but like, it's worth remembering, these people are still fundamentally pirating and enabling the mass piracy of all of this content. Like this stuff is illegally being redistributed over and over and over and over again. How do these people reckon with that fact? That this is all for all the other good you, you are doing and for all of the ways that you're, you know, perfectly curating and preserving all this stuff, you are still pirating every single bit of it all the time?

• 15:16Speaker 04

  I think that was one of the most surprising things, uh, for me when reporting this story, that people actually had surprisingly nuanced takes on that. Where people, multiple people I talked to were actually kind of conflicted about this. Or like, well, I am stealing and I have to admit it could harm people. And so, you know, some told me that, oh, they're trying to, if they really like something, they're buying the book and then they may be giving it away or something because they already have the digital copy. Or they like to buy video games instead of pirating them and, and stuff that they really care about. But others were also like, well, I'm a pirate. This is what I do. Which I, you know, it's, it's, it's honest, refreshingly honest in a way, right?

• 16:01Speaker 04

  I think like, I've written about piracy in the past quite a bit too, during that actually hey days of peer to peer, back like 10, 15, 20 years ago even. And back then there was a whole lot of like thinking about, well, it's like the, taking the fight to the man. And you know, there was this recording artists were coming out and saying, we're getting treated badly. And then people were like, see, they deserve it. We're just like stealing from the record labels. I didn't hear as much of that anymore. It was more people either knew that it was problematic and admitted that, or they knew it and also just didn't care and, and admitted that part essentially.

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• 19:39David Pierce?

  That feeling that you're talking about this, you know, damn the man, I'm gonna go pirate thing is everywhere now. And you, you've covered this a bunch too, that streaming services are getting more expensive. It's getting harder and harder to find stuff that you wanna watch because all of the business deals going on are making it harder and harder to find things on the streaming services that you pay for. And I think there are a lot of people, I know for sure there are a lot of people who over the last few years have looked at all of this and said, this system no longer exists in order for me to be able to watch the things that I want. They exist to screw me out of as much money as possible so that David Ellison can keep getting rich. And there is a real like high and mighty piracy thing happening again where people are, it's not even nihilism.

• 20:24David Pierce?

  It's like a true sticking it to the man ethos. And you covered this some when you wrote about the, the new illegal streaming box business that's out there. There are a lot of people who are like, yeah, I don't care. These people are not here for me. They're my enemy anyway. Screw them. I'm gonna pirate. There's none of that in this space, at least there's just at least so much less of it. There are so many fewer people who seems to just be trying to screw over the fat cats in the media business.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm sure that exists too, and maybe I just didn't encounter those people as much. But I do think there's also, it's, it's very different types of people that you're talking about. The people who buy these streaming boxes and actually spend quite a bit of money on them are people who are maybe not as tech savvy. Right? So they are, and they're also not always hundred percent sure about the legal situation. And it's like, it can get confusing if you're not into the, into this matter. It's like something shows up on my TV and it looks legal. Why wouldn't it be legal? If I believe it's strong enough, you know, there's like, obviously people also like, you know, willful ignorance is a thing for sure in that space.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  But, but it's, it's easy enough for, for people who are not tech savvy and are new to the space to sort of like fall into that trap and don't know exactly what's going on. Whereas if for people who go into this private piracy communities, I think it's very clear and it's very obvious to them what's happening there. You can't really like say, oh, I didn't know this stuff was illegal. It's, it's right there. It's basically saying it like the things are called, I mean, that's not a private world, but if something is called the pirate bay, then it's probably piracy.

• 22:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, no one is unclear what you're doing when you go to the pirate bay, I don't think. Um, to that end, actually, when these, these trackers talk about being private, obviously they're, they're access gated in that sense. But are they, are they deliberately making themselves, you know, hard to find on the internet? Is it, are there, you, you link to in your story, a tracker of private torrent trackers, which is just like, does that defeat the purpose completely of having these things be private enterprises? What does private mean in this particular case?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  I mean, first of all, like so from a legal perspective and starting at the beginning again, where people try to just shield themselves from law enforcement. It's not a perfect thing and by any matter, because once you're in that community, once the community is sort of infiltrated, if you wanna use like crazy warfare words or whatever, then it's actually fairly easy to see like who's sharing what. And that's the whole point of keeping track of, of, of your media or at least sort of your activity in those, in those spheres, right? So it's not anonymized private file sharing by any means. It's actually quite the opposite.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Um, but, uh, private, they do often keep a low profile in terms of like, when you go to these websites and you don't exactly know what's going on, there's maybe a logo and a login field and that's it. And it doesn't really explain, they don't advertise themselves actively. And the reason that these, so I, I link to this dashboard and made sure that this is not something that people can find or just click through and then register. There's no links on there. But, uh, the reason that these things exist is that a lot of these trackers use shared infrastructure or a shared code basis.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  So there's people who have come up with dedicated scripts and environments, basically almost like you can, you can download software and then start your own thing. Don't recommend that, of course, but you could in theory do that because there's ready-made solutions for that. And once you have those, then you also, the people who are in the space to make this software know who uses that software and so forth. So there's like, there's ways for people within that community to find each other and find themselves and get a general sense of the broader ecosystem. But the same is obviously true also for people who try to, uh, fight piracy.

• 24:35David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah. What, what do the anti-piracy people make of these private trackers? Are they, are they targeting it in the same way that they've gone after things like the pirate bay over time?

• 24:45Speaker 04

  I, I think they are targeting it in some ways. I think anti-piracy enforcement has changed over the years significantly. So back again, back in the days when, when BitTorrent started, they would sue all these companies because the companies would run, uh, file sharing software and, uh, also have millions of users. Uh, so Napster, Kuzo and so forth. That was fairly easy targets. Once that shifted to models that were more distributed like BitTorrent, we have software, but the company has no idea what anybody is doing with this software. It got a little harder and so then they started to crack down on these big torrent sites.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  I think in the years since it has shifted more towards enforcement against end users, but with the twist where they are like now doing sort of mass enforcement. So in the US for a long time, it was these types of things where people, when they use file sharing, maybe get a notice from their ISP that says, you were found to have stopped doing that or we have to kick you off or something like that. In Europe in particular, because of some of the laws over there, people started to do this where you basically actually get a letter from a law firm right away. And it says, we found you have pirated, you, you IP address was associated with these three movies or whatever. Pay us 500 bucks or we will take you to court.

• 26:07David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  And that almost became like a money machine on its own. Because if you do that tens of thousands of times, that can bring quite in, quite a bit of, of money, obviously. And there has been some pushback against that. There has been like, but, but it still exists, especially in Europe. And to a degree, I think people have tried in the US as well, varying levels of success. But so enforcement has shifted, um, especially when it comes to individual rights holders. I think the big organizations like the, uh, Motion Picture Association and they have like an anti-piracy organization, it's called ACE, I think. They still try to go after some of these communities.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  I, I talked to a person, a spokesperson from the MPA and they actually said, you know, it's harder for these private tracker communities. It takes more effort, but anonymity doesn't hundred percent exist. There's always like, oh, there's oftentimes there's a weak link. So they can crack down on it and it does happen. So some of these trackers get like busted. Sometimes servers get like, uh, taken down as parts of raids and so forth. Um, so it's, it's not impenetrable by any means.

• 27:20David Pierce?

  I mean, to your point about the, the JD Salinger one, right? Like you, you definitely get to the point with something like this where attention is the enemy. And actually, the more you can just remain out of sight, the easier time you're gonna have continuing to be around.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  And I did have, as I was looking for people to talk to, somebody was like, you know, uh, I could tell you a lot, but rather not. And I, I actually wish you wouldn't write this story. But, you know, uh, I obviously gave people who I talked to, uh, anybody appearing in the stories on a pseudonym because otherwise they wouldn't have talked to me. Um, and we don't identify these communities. I also didn't think that was as interesting to like write about any of particular community. I thought it was more interesting to write about the motivations and what, why people are doing this. That was really the, the, the passing thing for me, like, why are you putting so much effort into this?

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Why are you sharing 3,000 files at a time that you don't actually care about? Just to like, you know, improve your ratio or something like that.

• 28:26David Pierce?

  Do you think, did you come to the conclusion that it's just kind of for the, the love of the game and the, the sport of it all? That is what people are enjoying?

• 28:33Speaker 04

  I think that's one factor and that's, I think a big factor for sure. People obviously also pirate stuff and, and, and actually watch it and actually consume it. So that's part of it too. And, and then there's like, you know, people who are into certain types of content and as like trackers for seventies B-movies or whatever, stuff that you actually can't legally find easily. And I talked to a guy in, in Pakistan who said, well, the legal market is just like much smaller here and legal services like streaming services is much less accessible. So there's, there's, there's, I think a wide variety

• 29:12Speaker 04

  of reasons, but for people who are long enough in this space, part of this like, uh, the game becomes a, a growing part of the motivation, I think.

• 29:23David Pierce?

  Totally. Especially as you get to the bounties and stuff like you, you can see how that kind of thing would inspire somebody who is very interested in maintaining the metadata of their movie collection to participate in doing that at a much broader scale. That makes total sense to me. Did you get the sense that this is a growing phenomenon right now? Obviously these trackers have been around for a long time. This is like you mentioned, BitTorrent is 25 years old. I- is there any sort of renewed interest in this space as a result of streaming getting more expensive and stuff like that?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  I think there's a renewed interest in BitTorrent in general. So when I did a story about 25 years of BitTorrent, uh, earlier this year, I talked to some people who are more like involved in sort of the infrastructure for public trackers. Uh, and they said, yeah, we definitely seeing people like coming back out of the woodworks because streaming is getting too, too expensive for them. And they remember that back in the day, they used to get stuff for free this way. So they're revisiting that. I do not know if these private communities necessarily are getting a lot bigger, but they have definitely sustained themselves over a long period of time, like over 20 years essentially. Not, not individual sites, even though some individual sites are also quite, quite, uh, have been around

• 30:38Speaker 04

  for quite a while. But so the, the broader scene has like had an impressive staying power essentially, even though legal streaming has taken off a lot through those years.

• 30:50David Pierce?

  Is it mostly a movies and TV show phenomenon?

• 30:53Speaker 04

  I think there's, uh, music too. There is very dedicated, uh, trackers, e-learning or, or something like that. And so there's niches, but I think movies obviously are like one of the biggest draws, movies and TV shows, yeah.

• 31:08David Pierce?

  It's so funny to think about this as not just a repository of movie files, but as a like discovery and curation mechanism. Like in, in some ways, a lot of what you're describing is the stuff that the internet no longer does a very good job of, which is just showing you good stuff. And so you join this thing and it's like, okay, I'm in, I'm in one for action movies from the 1980s. Because actually a bunch of people who also like action movies from the 1980s are the right people to tell me about action movies from the 1980s. And the, the community aspect of that is just as important as the movie files. And it's, it's fascinating to me that those two things have come back together. We tried to split them apart and in fact, they have just come back together in, in slightly sketchy ways.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  Earlier you made that comparison to Letterboxd because I think there is an interest and a return in more, um, human curated experiences, like algorithms work to a degree for, for, for, for media discovery. And we all, you know, listen to Spotify on, on shuffle every now and then, I think. But people are also starting to appreciate again sort of expert knowledge and, and, and crowd work on certain things. And you could go even broader and say, that's why communities like Reddit are doing well, right? Where there's like really niche, human curated communities around the most random subjects, but really enthusiastic people in them. And also like a little bit of gamified part

• 32:34Speaker 04

  of there too, right? Where people are like in it for the gold or whatever.

• 32:38David Pierce?

  Totally. It's, yeah, this honestly, I worry about how much fun I think I would have in one of these communities. And I'm like, I need to not join one of these trackers because it will, it will take over my life. It'll be a real problem. All right, Yanko, thank you for coming on. It's great to see you. Appreciate it.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Sure. Always.

• 32:54Speaker 02

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  What will you Canva today? What will you brainstorm, collaborate on, present today? What will you resize, post, edit, imagine? What will you research, test, switch and finally have the courage to pitch? You got this. What will you visualize, design, brand, animate, create, generate? What will you translate, pour your heart into, or have a laugh doing? Whatever you want to make is possible. So what will you Canva today?

• 35:21David Pierce?

  All right. Before we go, I have one more thing to tell you about. It's a Kickstarter project called The Enough Phone, which I find just completely fascinating. So the Enough Phone idea is essentially what if your phone was not like a minimalist dumb phone, flip phone, let's go back to the way things were in the, you know, late 1990s, but also not an iPhone Duo or an iPhone Pro Max. The, the theory is what if there actually is something in the middle that works? And this is a thing we've covered a lot on the show. This is a thing we've, we've tried to figure out that middle ground many, many times over. And I think the team behind The Enough Phone has some really interesting ideas. The thing I find most fascinating is the main thesis is about the size of the phone. The, the

• 36:05David Pierce?

  things you can litigate about what size a phone is supposed to be just never ceased to blow my mind. But as phones get bigger and bigger, Enough's theory is that phones should be 5.3 inches. That's the display size that they're going for. I encourage you to go look at the pictures of this phone because it is hilarious how small 5.3 inches appears to be in the modern context. Everything now is like a six up to seven inches. You open up the Duo and it's like eight inches. I mean, it's, stuff gets crazy now. 5.3 inches is their theory. You also get a 3500 milliamp hour user replaceable battery. You get a MediaTek chipset. You get a 50 megapixel Sony sensor. You get eight gigs of RAM. All of these things are made to be just, and I hate to use this given the name of the phone,

• 36:50David Pierce?

  but enough, right? No more than you need. No giant overhead capacity of power that you'll never use. No wild thing that's going to only matter to pros in the camera. Just exactly the right amount of phone. Uh, this thing is on Kickstarter. It's doing very well. I encourage you to go check it out. But here's the thing that just most blows my mind. This phone costs $599. It's cheaper now. If you buy it through Kickstarter, they're doing some, some entry pricing stuff, but the main price of this phone is going to be $599. And to me, that is the story of what is happening in the phone business right now. You cannot sell a cheap phone. It's essentially impossible. RAM prices being what they are, $599 for something with eight gigs of RAM is frankly about as cheap as

• 37:34David Pierce?

  you can reasonably expect a phone to be. Um, the founders of this thing don't want it to cost what it costs. One of them told Allison Johnson on our team, we don't want to be charging as much as we are, but as a startup, you can only do so much. That's just true. That's not a line. That just is what it is, especially when you're a startup and all you can do is basically at this point, call a company in China and just cross your fingers that they have RAM to sell you and then accept the price that they offer you. This is what it is. So my guess is when they started this project, the plan was for this phone to be like a couple hundred dollars cheaper. And the idea of what if we give you less phone for less money, I think is really compelling and is going to mean a lot to people. And there are a lot of people who don't want to spend seven, eight, nine,

• 38:17David Pierce?

  10, 11 hundred dollars on a phone because they don't need all of the stuff that that phone does. And getting a pretty good phone that is the right size, does all the stuff it needs to, for a lot less money with a lot less overhead, sounds great. And the thing I worry about, and the thing we talk a lot about on this show is I'm just not sure that's possible. We are already seeing the absolute death of cheap phones all around the world. The idea of these phones that used to cost one or $200, sometimes even cheaper in places like India, where it's crucially important to have phones that cheap for lots and lots of people. Those phones are just dying. These companies literally cannot afford to make them anymore. And we're seeing it creep the price up of these other things too. The light phone is more expensive than it was going to be because of Ramageddon.

• 39:01David Pierce?

  All of these prices are going up and I worry that only companies like Apple, which can either afford to eat into their own margins to keep prices down, or can just raise the prices on their customers because their customers have real price flexibility, they'll be okay and no one else will. I hope The Enough Phone works. There's some things about it I don't love. I actually would argue 5.3 inches is like a little too small for a phone in this day and time. But a lot of people are really excited about this phone. I think that team is up to something really interesting. Um, lots of caveats with any Kickstarter. If you back it, do it with eyes wide open that projects like this are hard and they fail all the time and you should spend your money wisely. But it's worth checking out. And I think this ongoing question of how much phone is the exact right amount of phone

• 39:46David Pierce?

  continues to be the right one for everybody to be asking. So go check it out. Let me know what you think the correct screen size is. I would love to hear it. As a reminder, the best way to reach out to us about that and everything else is to call The Vergecast hotline, 866 VERGE11. You can also send us an email, [email protected]. We love hearing from you about phone screen sizes, which we hear from you a lot about actually, and everything else. 866 VERGE11, [email protected]. We love hearing from you. As ever, the best way to support everything we're up to here at The Verge is to subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of The Enough Phone and all of the other phones and everything else at any screen

• 40:27David Pierce?

  size. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Darchuk. See you tomorrow. Rock and roll.

• 40:42Speaker 01

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