A Vergecast holiday re-run marathon

26:05And that makes a lot of sense because the biggest actual threat to cables is someone accidentally dropping an anchor on them. And so if you are worried about an attack and you make them a secret, you're probably going to increase the number of accidental cable breaks. On the other hand, they are vulnerable. It would be fairly, you know, you don't need a low tech attack. You can just drag an anchor across the ocean floor. In practice, the network is redundant enough. You're still talking about like a really small thing in a big ocean. So it's not quite that easy to attack. It would take a pretty sophisticated antagonist to actually cause a catastrophic cable outage.

26:40So, so far it's been fine, but it is a topic of active debate, I think, in governments. What should we do? How should we protect these cables that are so important. And for the people whose job it is to actually maintain them over time, what is life like? You talked to a bunch of people who are sort of in this industry and in some cases have been for a very long time, right? What's it like to be a sort of superhero keeping the internet running? It's a very strange job. People, you know, when they join, they tend to kind of stumble into it. It's not a very well known industry. And so you You have people who are working as engineers in some other area or, you know, in merchant marines or something like that, geologists in optics, and they sort of stumble into it.

27:23And, you know, if they stay for a bit, they tend to stay for a long time, like decades. A lot of the work is learned on the job. And so people tend to sort of move around between different roles. But it's not an easy job. It's a weird lifestyle. You rotate in and off ships. You're often far from home, out of contact. You know, this is changing now a bit with Starlink. But like when you're on board one of these ships, historically, you're pretty much cut off. You don't have great internet connections. You can't stream things or FaceTime or anything like that. You have the fast internet literally in your hands.

27:59You just can't do anything with it. Right. Exactly. It's a difficult job. Just the lifestyle is hard. But people come to love it because it takes you to very unusual places. It's exciting. and a lot of them have like a real sense of purpose they're maintaining this infrastructure that the modern world runs on even if no one actually knows about it or what they do knowing you as i do i'm i'm confident that at some point in reporting this story you tried to live the cable maintenance life yourself and you're like yes i will live the ship life how close did you get uh not that close i did try you know when i first heard about this industry, it was like, well, I should go on board for a repair and was basically laughed out of the room several times, you know, for various reasons.

28:43The big one was security. It's a secretive industry. They just can't have a journalist hanging out on a cable ship in most cases. And then the other very compelling reason was that they don't know how long they'll be gone. So like, yeah, you can come along, but maybe we'll be gone for a week or two and maybe we'll get called off to another repair and you'll be at sea for months, which is just, you know, hard to really plan around. That's fair. So were you able to get any kind of firsthand glimpse into this life? Yeah. So I ended up going to Japan to talk to people who work at KCS and going aboard the Ocean Link, which was the ship that repaired a lot of the cables in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

29:26And so it was in port for a period of time. I was able to go there and visit the crew and go to tour the ship. What was the ship like? It was fairly big, like 400 foot long, sort of tall working ship. It's from the 90s. It's kind of old at this point, but well-maintained. I'm imagining sort of a big fishing vessel, but instead of like nets and containers, it just has a massive spool of cable. That's basically right. It essentially is a massive spool of cable. Like the middle of it are these, I think, three big empty tanks that are just kind of spindles of wound spare cable. The interior is really empty.

30:06It's kind of like a it's built kind of like an aircraft carrier or something where there's no sort of beams or struts or anything because it's all just you have to string cable out of these tanks to the workstation and then out to the front where there's kind of a rolling pulley kind of thing where it goes over and into the ocean. Got it. So it pulls it up and then you sort of spool from the middle. Boy, what a complicated system. It's counterintuitive how the ship is put together and how it all works, but it makes sense when you're working with a material that is thousands of miles long. It just creates all these weird logistical problems.

30:38Yeah. So you mentioned the Fukushima incident in 2011 in Japan, which was a big part of the story that you wrote, kind of how they repaired and the reaction to all of this. What was it about those repairs that was sort of different? I feel like you found one of the hardest cases you could have to tell this story about what happened in that case. Yeah. So there have been a few major, major cable events. This was one of them. They tend to be earthquakes that caused the most damage. So in this case, there was this very, very large earthquake off the coast of Japan. It sent a large tsunami that caused immense devastation.

31:13And part of that, the tsunami knocked out the Fukushima nuclear reactor, causing a nuclear meltdown. So you have this disaster on top of a disaster. And then you have the other disaster, which is not really well known, but happened at the same time, which is that the earthquake caused all of these submarine avalanches that wrecked the majority of the cables japan uses to connect to north america and the rest of the world and so while the earthquake tsunami recovery was happening while fukushima was you know people were trying to bring fukushima under control the ship had to set out and try to fix these cables as fast as possible while contending with the fact that there may or may not be a cloud of radiation over them so yeah i mean again it just feels like so much of this process is just unknowns on top of unknowns on top of unknowns.

32:00It's just going out and trying to figure out, okay, something happened to these cables. We don't know what or where or what it's going to take or how we're going to fix it. And just bit by bit, they just solve it. Yeah. It's really just, it's very methodical. Like you just got to kind of follow the steps. And so they looked at the cable map, they figured out, okay, based on the timing of these faults, You know, interestingly, a lot of them happened hours after the tsunami, like that night, basically. You have these big debris flows that sort of barrel down these canyons and end up wrecking the cables.

32:34And from the timing of the breaks, they figure out that's probably what happens. The seabed is probably very transformed. They're going to need a lot of spare cable. And typically, you figure out, you know, it's not usually up to the maintenance provider which cables they fix first. It's usually kind of first come, first served from the cable owners. whoever calls in their fault first. But in this case, the cable owners are like, you guys figure it out. Like whatever, whatever cable you can fix, fix it. And so they settled on, you know, the one farthest from Fukushima. Because the other thing is that normally in a big event like this, other ships arrived to help.

33:10But there was so little known about what was happening with Fukushima and no one felt comfortable sending their crews into that. And so they were sort of the only ones doing it for the first, the first period of time. So, and then there was a moment in the Fukushima response where they had pulled the cable up and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, right? Am I right? What happens here? You get the cable up above the ocean, and then you have to figure out what to do. What did they do? Yeah. So this was the first repair. They hooked this cable and they start reeling it in and it's under an unusual amount of tension.

33:43And basically what happens, you know, they start reeling in very, very slowly because every cable has a certain amount of tension. You don't want to exceed it because the cable could snap. And so they're just moving very, very slowly and it takes them nearly a day to get it to the surface. And what they learn when it gets there is that it's just been completely mangled. And what they think happened is some enormous landslide happened. It dragged the cable, it buried it under a bunch of debris, and now they've been slowly pulling it tighter and tighter and tighter until it reaches the surface. Now they can see it.

34:16It's on the front of the ship. It's on the foredeck and it is hooked around one bar with the grapnel and totally stripped and mangled and under a huge amount of tension. So you basically at this point have like a thousands of miles long bungee cord like sitting on your boat. Exactly. Exactly. Attached to a heavy metal hook that if the bungee cord snaps, which is being strained at sort of each wave and swell, it will fly across the ship, kill anyone it hits, smash into the cable control room, just do immense damage. And so the priority becomes, you can't repair a cable under this kind of tension that's this damaged.

34:52They need to get it off the ship. And so they do this sort of complicated, precarious procedure where they hook chains around each side of the cable, swap the grapnel out for a bladed grapnel, lower it back over the bow of the ship while they've evacuated the area. And then once it's under the water, they release the chains, the cable is cut and goes back to the bottom and they start over. That feels like a really interesting test case because, you know, like you said, these cables go back a century, but 2011 is very much like the internet. And as we've learned, you know, catastrophes happen. Things like this happen all the time in lots of places.

35:30That was a particularly bad one, but like earthquakes happen. We just had one in New York. These are things that happen. Were there any sort of lessons learned from that? Do you feel like whatever, 13 years after that, we're in a different era of how we think about undersea cables? Yes and no. I mean, it's interesting to look back on the coverage of 2011. Like a lot of the, when the internet was mentioned, it was usually that, you know, this is remarkable. The internet fared remarkably well. It stayed up. Oh, really? So for all the issues, the internet stayed up in Japan? Yeah. And so you have these reports and people were basically just, you could only use the internet to communicate in the immediate aftermath.

36:07People were sending emails. They were tweeting. People were posting videos. Other telecommunications were cut out, like the terrestrial cables were cut. The cell towers were wrecked. And so they were really reliant on the internet. But you talk to the people who were at the operation centers and on the ships, and it was so much more precarious than people knew. Basically, they had succeeded in rerouting all the traffic over the remaining cables. But if one of those cables had gone down, you would have started to see a real degradation in service. You know, things would have started to drop. It would have been difficult to communicate.

36:40And so it was sort of right on the cusp of being a communications disaster. And the lesson that the industry learned from that is largely around redundancy. There's not like a real geographic reason, unlike the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait or something. There's not a geographic reason why all the cables were in one place there. It was a sort of habit. Like we always put cables there and they always kind of landed at the spot. And so that makes sense. And so you had this, these sort of choke points that then when a landslide comes through, it wrecks a bunch of them. And there's more of an awareness that you need multiple landing points.

37:16But in practice, that doesn't always happen, because it's cheaper to follow new routes or whatever. Yeah. So where does it feel like this industry is right now? Obviously, it's as critical as ever, if not more so. The world relies on this stuff more than we ever have. And I feel like purely anecdotally, I've heard more about undersea cable projects just in the last couple of years, I feel like, than I ever have. And that might just be because I pay attention to companies like Google and Meta, and they're doing a lot of this stuff. But is there energy in this space to increase from 500 cables and 800 ,000 miles to are we going to have more than that or multiples of that over time, do you think?

37:57Like we are in a cable boom right now. There's a lot of new cables going in. Whether that means the net number of cables goes up is a debated topic because the cables are also higher and higher capacity. So some think maybe there'll be fewer cables. They'll just be really, really, really high bandwidth. But there are a lot of new cables going in that's driven by the tech companies primarily, which starting a couple of years ago, decided, you know, rather than purchase bandwidth on these cables, let's have our own cables. And so they started laying their own systems largely between their data centers.

38:33And the reason for that is that they need a ton of capacity to kind of sync all of their data centers around the world to keep these like huge content libraries up to keep their cloud services running. And so they wanted kind of that all under their own umbrella. But that hasn't really spilled over into the maintenance side yet as mostly kind of the installation side. I was going to say, we're still at 22 ships. Yeah, still not a lot of new ships there. And, you know, while the new cables do provide a lot of redundancy, you also don't want, you know, your handful of super high capacity cables to go down because it's difficult to sort of move that traffic over onto other routes.

39:10Yeah. As you were talking to people, did you get a sense that there are new kinds of threats to these cables, too, whether it's some of the ones that have been there a long time getting old and not getting replaced quickly enough or climate change or like the geopolitics of the Internet, which are becoming a bigger and bigger deal all the time? Is there a sense that this could get worse rather than better as we fight about undersea cables? Geopolitics are the big thing. Climate change will make certain things harder. These cables all land on the coastline, which is eroding and sinking. And that will be a problem.

39:43But part of the reason you're also hearing more about cables is the geopolitics around them have become really sensitive. Largely, that has been China-U.S. conflict. You have the U.S. saying we don't want Chinese-owned cables landing in the U.S. And China also denying repair permits for the South China Sea or sort of slowing them down and concerns about routing cables through China's waters or into Hong Kong has caused this kind of reconfiguration of the network. you have alternate routes going through the Philippines or a lot of cables landing in Singapore or China trying to build up its own cable maritime industry so that it doesn't have to rely on the West.

40:30And these changes are making it, it's not necessarily harder, but very different. It's just a period of change in the industry and kind of one that is getting increasing attention from various governments, that more governments are saying, we need to control this infrastructure in some way. So and as you talk to people in this small kind of under talked about and under resourced industry, is the sense that given all of that, it is just change and this is stable and this is how we're going to keep doing things? Or do you run into people who are like, screw all of this, the answer is satellites and we have to get there as quickly as we possibly can?

41:06Or like, is this just what it is and we have to figure out how to do it better? There's a fair amount of concern, I think, about the long term sustainability of the industry. It can't all be satellites. That was the other thing that everyone reminded me of. Satellites can carry like half a percent of the global traffic. It's going to be cables. They're just way more efficient and cheaper to transmit data. There's a sense that they will have to navigate this. I think the industry has been pretty stable for decades. And there's some anxiety about these changes, the big tech companies coming in, governments taking a greater interest, the sort of geopolitical jockeying around cable, cable routes that are just going to be tricky.

41:51I think a lot of the anxiety comes from kind of the market forces involved, like the big tech companies. They have so much buying power, they can drive down prices and so they can negotiate lower rates. And so, well, that means maintenance companies can operate year to year. It maybe means they don't have enough to invest in a new vessel. And so you have this kind of slow degradation, which also means that they have trouble recruiting because no one wants to join this sort of aging fleet. Sure. Yeah, having done this whole process of reporting and sort of understanding how this world works, does it change the way you think about the internet?

42:29Like, I feel like the more I learn about the actual infrastructure of the internet, the more remarkable it seems that any of this ever actually works. And I feel like I got some of that sense from your story that on the one hand, this is this incredibly robust, incredibly impressive group of people working on this thing that we understand and have worked on for a long time. On the other hand, the internet is forever like one wayward anchor away from falling apart. Yeah, it's really it's one of these cases I feel like you hear about every so often, like the ways in which the internet is just sort of this cobbled together apparatus is way less stable than it seems.

43:06This is just sort of an ordinary user. It does depend on just sort of these random people, whether it's like a software engineer who's keeping things running or these people who are really good at, you know, catching Internet cables with hooks in the ocean that, you know, if it weren't for their sort of largely invisible work, the system would fall apart.

43:35Welcome back. For years now, I've been conflicted about these delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats. They are super convenient and they're helpful. And sometimes I don't want to cook or go out. And most of us don't live within walking distance of a million good restaurants. Like, I get it. I get why they're helpful and good. But I also can't shake this idea that actually these services are bad and they're bad for everyone involved. They make your meals more expensive, often more than you know, through sneaky price increases like the menu on Uber Eats. is sometimes just more expensive than the menu at the restaurant.

44:09They also don't pay delivery people enough or offer them the protections or benefits that the people who work there should get. And for the most part, historically speaking, they're not even a very good business for the companies running them. It's hard to make money for anybody, including the restaurants, the drivers, everybody. It just seems bad. So what are we doing here? Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, there was this guy who went viral online because of some posters he had put up around Seattle, saying basically, skip the apps, call me instead, I'll deliver your food. He became kind of a folk hero online.

44:42So we sent our producer, Will Poore, to go see what's going on. This is one of those stories that exists because of a perfect storm type situation. Here's what happened. For years, gig workers here in Seattle, notably delivery drivers, have been pissed at the lousy pay they've been earning in this very expensive city. So in 2022, the city council stepped in and mandated a higher pay rate for app-based delivery workers. It's a good day for gig workers as the city of Seattle's new ordinance takes effect. The new pay scale went into effect this past January, and the apps didn't take the change graciously.

45:19In reaction, apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash began charging customers$5 in what they're calling a local operating fee. That's on top of the service fees and delivery fees that apps routinely charged. to say nothing of tips. And customers are finding their limits. Fewer people are ordering from the apps, gig workers are feeling even more squeezed, and everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else. Food delivery orders plummeting since Seattle implemented new minimum wage requirements for delivery workers a month ago. This kind of battle is playing out in other markets, too. New York City enacted similar rules last year, which the apps have also been fighting tooth and nail.

45:58But there's one thing Seattle has that no one else does. A guy named Tony Isles, who I am trying to literally chase down right now. I always carry, like, a tennis ball in my pocket for, like, the round fluidity of a ball. I just like the idea of, like, when I was in San Francisco, I had a conversation with my buddy. And I was like, do you think shapes have thoughts? And I think I do. I think they do. I think that they influence the way that you think. And I always carry that tennis ball, so I always feel like I have, like, a fluid mind. Tony is telling me this while flying across downtown Seattle on a rented e-bike in the pouring rain.

46:32I'm on my own rental, trying to listen and keep up at the same time. We're weaving in and out of bike lanes, dodging construction, and crashing through puddles that could be potholes. It's chaos, which is partly the setting and partly Tony's fluid mind. In the first 30 minutes or so of peddling, we have talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, China's social credit score, and the Stanford prison experiment. And I haven't asked any of the questions I came to ask. There's this idea called the method of Loki. I don't know if you know what that is. I don't. It's like this way of remembering things verbatim, historically, in, like, these ancient societies.

47:10It was this book that I read. It was called Moonwalking with Einstein. Take a left. Hey, if we get separated for any reason, just go finish your delivery and text me when you're done. I'll find you again, all right? Okay. Oh, because I'm hustling? Well, I just realized that I signed up to do a story about a delivery guy. You're all right, man. I don't know how I expected this to go, but... It's a pleasure meeting you. I gotta up my game here. Tony's backstory is pretty simple. He was driving for Uber Eats when those new fees suddenly killed demand. So at the beginning of February, he decided to go it alone.

47:46He put up some very DIY flyers downtown with an offer. Text him a food order from any restaurant within a couple square miles, and he'll get it to you for five bucks. No taking a cut from restaurants, no service fee, no delivery fee, no local operating fee, just a tip if you're feeling generous. He went viral pretty much instantly. Right now on Cairo 7 Tonight, growing frustrations for Seattle's new food delivery rules. One driver becomes his boss's competitor. Now, just a few weeks later, Tony is a full-on local celebrity. He's all over the news, Reddit, Twitter, slash X, and he says the orders have followed.

48:24The biggest challenge is cadence. He might get five texts all at once and then nothing for a while. So he's trying to figure that out, along with the fame. Has this amount of attention been weird? Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's just like, all of a sudden my opinion matters. And a lot of people are asking me, they're just like, how much money are you making? And I'm like, well, I'm not a monetary guy. I'm not a business-orientated person. But what's interesting is, I feel like I've introduced a solution for a social thing. Tony's social solution goes something like this. Because of apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, yes, delivery has gotten expensive.

49:04But more than that, it's gotten rushed and sloppy and impersonal. It's just bad vibes all the way down, and it's ruining takeout for everyone. It's such a hard position to be in. For who? For everybody, every party that's involved. The restaurants, the city, the people that are working as a deliverer. They're in this terrible, toxic relationship with somebody. Like the restaurant owners and the apps and the drivers and just that whole thing. Well, just think about it. Last time you went into a restaurant and some driver goes in and cuts in front of you And you're just like, what in the world? Like, hey, man, I've been standing here for five minutes.

49:41What's your problem? You know, that person is, they're like, they're hustling, right? So they're going in and they're not thinking about that at all because that's not their psychology. No, they got to keep moving. Right. And from where Tony's standing, the apps are moving in precisely the wrong direction. I think that they, the apps have this kind of misaligned misdirection of where they think the market is and what they're planning for. I think that their whole goal is to, like, send robots to the buildings and, you know, send automated cars. And it's like, OK, well, if that's your solution, then you might bleed for a while, right?

50:15Like, and so it's like, I'm not a monetary guy, but I could tell you how to make it work a little bit better. Tony's whole thing is to strip all the tech and anonymity out of the process and be your friendly neighborhood delivery guy. And he thinks people will actively prefer a more social alternative, even if that care and attention limits him. I'm almost like kind of certain once I get to a certain number of people that order from me, I almost kind of want to cap it to kind of ensure the law of Dunbar. Dunbar's number is another favorite Tony topic. It's a theoretical limit to the number of social relationships any one person can maintain.

50:51You want to cap the number of people that order from you so that you can stop and chat for a couple of minutes, so you can get to know repeat customers. I wouldn't even call them customers. I would just call them my friends or the homies, you know. There you go, yeah. They're literally like, yo, Tony, can you get this for me? And I think that's kind of the thing is like when you try to turn it into a business-to-customer relationship versus a person-to-person relationship, they're not going to be as understanding. Yeah. If I forget your drink right now, someone will be like, Tony, it's fine. Yeah.

51:19You don't have to go back to Chipotle. Totally. But if I forget on Uber Eats, they're going to be like, yo, man, what's going on here? In short, Tony thinks that there is a whole lot more to delivery than speed and cost. But yes, he is cheaper than the competition. And often faster, too. I've never seen anybody run through a Target. I picked up somebody's Target stuff and I was running through the Target. I'm going to run you in real quick. Yeah. I follow Tony as he makes two, maybe three deliveries back to back. Some chicken and a shake from Dave's Hot Chicken. Does it come with a drink or anything?

51:57A salad from a healthy bowl place called Evergreens. I'm honestly not 100 % sure. It was such a blur. But at each pickup and drop-off, Tony lives up to his own pitch. He's courteous, warm, casual, and chatty. So, man, how are you doing today? We pull up to our next destination, a big apartment building. And while we wait in the lobby for Tony's customer, sorry, his homie, to come down, he's recognized by a stranger. You're the guy. Yeah, I am. Nice to meet you. I stop and chat with Tony's homie for a few minutes. He says that he and his roommates have ordered from Tony maybe 10 times in the past month.

52:34I was just scrolling through Reddit one day, and then I saw someone posting a picture of one of his flyers that were posted in the city. And I was like, oh, that's pretty interesting. It's cheaper than DoorDash. So I was like, let me give it a try. And then ever since, it's been me and my roommates go-to. Oh, nice. So you guys are serious regulars at this point. Exactly. Between the three of us type thing. And were you Uber Eats, DoorDash people before that? Yeah, exactly. DoorDash mainly, and then it got expensive, so we're like, let's see what else there is. What's the Tony experience like, and how is it different from the apps?

53:07I think it's a lot nicer because, first of all, all you have to do is just text him. So that's already a lot easier. He's much faster. And it's always nice having a quick conversation with him in the lobby. He always waits. He's fun to talk to. He's a very chill guy. We've had some nice conversations, so it's cool. At the end of the lunch rush, Tony and I sat down at a cafe to talk some more. I went into the story wanting to know whether a guy like Tony can make it. Seattle's minimum wage is almost$20 an hour. So to match that, he'd need four deliveries an hour, not accounting for tips. Which, after seeing him in action, definitely feels doable.

53:44But it is a hustle. In other words, it's still gig work. And Tony's only working the lunch and dinner rushes right now. So after this whole adventure, my question remains, can he make it? It turns out that is Tony's least favorite question. I'm looking at it as like, I just understand people. You know, people, they all have their perspectives. And all I'm trying to be is the glue that glues you in that connective tissue. So that way you can get off Reddit and stop arguing about how much money I'm making. Get off Reddit and stop arguing whether it's going to be financially responsible. I can figure that out on my own.

54:19I get the sense that Tony has become a kind of avatar. Everyone's putting all their thoughts and feelings about the gig economy onto him. I think that's why his story blew up online. If you're frustrated by big, powerful companies making life more annoying, he is the folk hero to root for, which is just way too much for Tony to take on. All of a sudden, like, people are texting me and they're like, you got a great business mind. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And I think that what people are trying to do, they're trying to box me. They're trying to say, Tony fits here. And I think what they're lacking of understanding is, I actually don't fit anywhere.

54:58I'm this round ball that's just rolling down the street. Like the one in your pocket. Exactly, exactly. Tony has no idea whether Tony delivers will make it or what will happen to food delivery more broadly. He just knows that something needs to change. Like, what they tried to do is they tried to put food on a conveyor belt and deliver it like an Amazon package, and it's not going to work. They're winning right now, but at the end of the day, it's not going to work. It's too expensive. They're, like, waiting for things to be solved, and they're hoping. They're hoping that somebody down the line is, like, intelligence is going to hit that S-curve, they're going to be able to plug in the robots, and they're going to be able to do it.

55:38And I'm here to tell you it's not going to work. As cagey as Tony is about his own future, he will say that he's been fielding calls from all over the country. People who have heard his story and want to do what he does. So it's like, all right, well, how can I then be the energizer bunny for some things that we do like and that we do think about? And maybe that I can kind of more positively impact in a different sense. Just giving people the right direction, energizing their buddy, so to speak, giving them the battery to kind of the right mindset. So what does this all reveal about the gig economy?

56:15Well, Tony has clearly tapped into something. And in spite of his grander pronouncements, what he's saying is pretty straightforward. I think that what it represents, I think, personally, is this idea that we don't need the apps. We're so used to apps mediating all of our activities that at this point, what if not apps actually feels revelatory. But it's telling that Tony's customers are more than happy to ditch Uber Eats and DoorDash at the drop of a hat. Or the drop of a new fee. And if big tech companies really do double down on automation and robots, more people might actively seek out more humanity, more idiosyncrasy, more Tony.

57:02Tony himself wants to experiment and meet people and hopefully pay the bills. And if he accidentally starts a revolution along the way, all the better. It would be nice to be known as the guy that was trying to connect us back together. That would be kind of cool. But not in the sense of, like, this was the guy. It was just more like, oh, Tony Isles mentioned this, and we thought it was a good idea, and it worked. And then eventually we reconnected.

57:44Welcome back. For all of the last two weeks, the most popular app in the Apple App Store has been a game emulator called Delta. We've been talking a lot about Delta on this show over the last few weeks, both because it's a huge hit and because it seems like maybe the start of a new era for the App Store. Like in the history books of smartphone apps, there might be a before Delta and an after Delta for lots of reasons. But there's actually nothing even remotely new about Delta. The story of this app is actually a full decade long, and it starts with this guy. I'm Riley Testat, and I'm the founder of Delta.

58:22alt store developer of Delta. Riley has had, as you might expect, a pretty wild few weeks. In the middle of it all, I asked him to come on the show and just tell me the whole Delta story, why he wanted to build an emulator in the first place, how the regulatory and technological world changed around him, and in general, how Delta went from a big hack to a big hit. It starts with Riley in high school, just kind of looking for something to do. I was just back in high school. I think it was my junior year and I just one day came across just like the open source repo for a jailbreak Game Boy Advance simulator GPS phone and I was like oh this is cool this is all the code I can probably just download this and tweak it and then put it on my own phone without having to jailbreak because yeah I've never been a fan of jailbreaking it's just never really appealed to me so I found this code base I hacked out of the way for a couple months put it on my phone.

59:17I put it on a few of my friends' phones. They liked it. And then I uploaded it to GitHub and called it GBA Fryer West and then kind of left it there for a bit. And then people found it on GitHub and started talking about it. And so I was like, oh, there's interest in this kind of thing. So you just made it as sort of a, it sounds like a mix of like a thing that you thought would be useful and just kind of a thing to do. Yeah. I just wanted Pokemon on my phone. I found this. I was like, oh, cool. I can put Pokemon on my phone now. And that's awesome. And that's really all I was thinking at the time.

59:50And then I put on my friend's phones and then we were playing just Pokemon ourselves. And then just completely coincidentally, there was a service that came out around the same time that lets you connect like open source GitHub projects and sign it with Apple's enterprise certificate. Basically, there was a company that had enterprise certificate and you could just connect your GitHub account and then re-sign your apps like that. And so I was like, oh, cool. I'll connect this to GBA for iOS and then people can install it outside the app store. Maybe a few people will download it. And that's basically when I learned, oh, wait, there's a huge demand for this thing.

1:00:22Oh, interesting. I did that. And then within like a week, people were like posting videos about how to install it. There were lots of Reddit posts. And I was like, honestly, caught off guard because at this point, it was still just a project I made for me and my friends like in high school. And so then I was like, okay, there's demand for this thing. Let's take this seriously. Let's like build like a real version of this app. That's not like throwing together, not hacky. And so that's when I got my friend, Paul Thorson on board, also still in high school. And we were like, we're going to do a brand new version of GBA for iOS, GBA for iOS 2.0.

1:00:54We're going to redesign it from the ground up, just build it and make a really polished experience. And so we basically spent all of senior year working on that. And in like halfway through senior year, we released GBA for iOS 2.0. and that's the version that most people know that was a version that you installed for my website you set your date back like 24 hours and you can install it because of the weird bug that allowed enterprise certificates to work that way even if they're expired yeah wait so real quick just pause for a second and explain the enterprise certificate thing to me because i feel like part of the story here is like riley's adventures in figuring out how to install apps on phones Yes, it's slowly getting more and more complicated.

1:01:34So this was the easiest hack. It's just, yeah, as long as I found an enterprise certificate, I could just sign GBA for iOS with it. And literally anyone could just download it from a website on the phone. Super simple. And the idea is basically, it's like, that's the certificate you would use if I'm like a company wanting my employees and no one else to have that app, right? Yeah, the exact same flow. And so it's just, you're not supposed to do it for this reason. And so what Apple normally would do is they would just like revoke the certificate. They'd make it, this is no longer valid and all apps that are signed with it can no longer be installed.

1:02:06And so the bug that I took advantage of was apparently at this time, like an iOS 7, if you just set your date back on your phone by more than an hour, the checks for whether a certificate is valid or not just don't work. They just don't do it. Sure. You did try to install GBA and Apple would have revoked the certificate, but because you set your date back, iOS was fine installing it. And so it was just like a really weird bug that I could take advantage of. because Apple couldn't do anything easily about it. They had to actually fix iOS to address it. They couldn't just be like, okay, nope, turn off certificate.

1:02:39It was about nine months later that they finally addressed it. And then that was when I moved on basically from GBA for iOS is when they, it was like iOS 8.1. They killed the date trick. It was literally on my birthday when it actually happened. And I was like, oh, that's funny. But honestly, at that point, I had just gone to college. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to move on from this whole thing. GBA for iOS is really cool. I wanted to go on to the next thing. Do you know how many people were using GBA for iOS, like at that sort of peak moment before it got shut down? A lot of people, like more than 10 million.

1:03:11Wow. Whoa. Yeah. That's like a zero or two bigger than I thought you were going to say. Yeah, there was a stupid amount of people using GBA for iOS, which is why I was so motivated to do this for this whole time was I just knew that there was a market for this kind of thing that everyone just kind of assumed there wasn't. I'm like, no, GBA got 10 million downloads outside the app store. Like it's just people just really want to do this, like play old games. Yeah. Okay. So you kind of, you're sort of forced to shut down that project a little bit. Was there a moment where you're like, okay, I'm ready to go to war with Apple.

1:03:44Let's fight this to the death and figure out how to get GBA for iOS back. Or when it, when the sort of exploit gets shut down, do you just kind of say, you know what, like you said, I'm going to college anyway. This is just a moment. Let me focus on other things. It was basically that. Yeah. I was like, you know, this is just a sign that I should move on to something else. This was really cool. I'm glad I got to do this. Got a lot of experience. But maybe I'll try to make an app in the App Store next time. That was what I was thinking. I'm like, this is a lot of work to have an app outside the App Store.

1:04:11So then that whole thought process lasted like a few months. And then I got bored and I needed a new app to work on. And so, yeah, Swift had also just been announced like the previous year. And so I was like, oh, you know what? Let me just make another toy app for myself to learn Swift just for me. And, you know, I'll make another emulator. It'll have more systems, but it's just for me. Like, again, it's just like a fun thing I wanted to work on to learn Swift. That was my entire motivation. So you're just run the exact same playbook again without even realizing it. Exactly. I was like, you know, I'm just going to make for fun.

1:04:40Yeah, I know. You'd think I'd learn at some point. Okay. And that's where Delta starts. Yes. And so that's the beginning of Delta. Okay, I'll call it Delta and just build it for fun. And that is what I thought I was going to work on. And then I went to WWDC that year. It was my first time ever at WWDC. What year is this at this point? 2015. Okay. So I go to WWDC and I talk to the app review team, because they have a lab there. And I basically just say, hey, I'm working on this emulator app. Is there any world that it could be approved in the app store? And then they were like, actually, yeah, we'll allow that.

1:05:15You just got to comply with some weird things. Basically, they said I had to submit a list of approved games to them whenever I submitted a version of Delta so that they could just make sure all the games that Delta supports were safe. Like they just didn't want to have like an open pipeline of like games and everything. And so like, okay, fine. That works for me. I'll submit a version of Delta to you. And I'll have like a list of games that you can play. And then every app update, I'll expand it to include more games. And it seemed like that would be something I could do. And so I was really motivated.

1:05:44I'm like, cool, I'm going to get Delta in the app store. And so then I spent the next year, like actually building it for real. I was like, okay, this is now a real app, no longer just for me. I really wanted to be polished. I wanted to be good. I took a lot of my time. I got on my college schedule to be working on it. And then I went to the WWDC next year, and I talked to the same person. And I said, hey, I'm ready to submit. Can I submit it now? And he was just like, so I talked to some people. We can't allow emulators. And that was just all I got. I didn't get a why. It was just like a, we can't allow that.

1:06:21i was just pissed off do you think this person was wrong the first time they told you it would happen or do you think something happened in that year and they changed their mind honestly i don't know it's either one's possible my guess is though that they thought it was okay and then they talked to someone in the year and then maybe they had discussions about it and then they came away basically it's not worth the risk because i think that's what it's been this whole time apple's like it's not worth the risk to allow these emulators there's so much stuff that could open up so i I think they're just like, eh, it's one kid, whatever.

1:06:52We don't need to allow his app in the app store and it'll be fine. And at that point, I mean, I confess I was late to the iOS emulation universe, but it seems it's a weird thing. Like GBA for iOS was huge and then it kind of went away. And so I would assume we're back to like lots of pent up demand. People are very excited about it. So it's not like you're the first person in history to ask Apple this question, I'm sure. But at that point, emulation was just kind of it was sort of nowhere on the iPhone. So I guess for them to say, no, we're going to continue to not allow it is not totally out of character.

1:07:25Exactly. Like, yeah, I wasn't surprised. I was just pissed off. Like, I was just like, I wasted a year of my life working on this because you told me I could release it. That was really just honest feeling. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So what do you, at that moment, you're faced again with this same decision of like, okay, do I just call this a successful project? I learned how to use Swift. Let me just move on with my life. Or do I go the other way? I know the answer, historically speaking. But what is that moment like? Yeah. And this time I was just so pissed off. I was just like, you know, this is not okay.

1:07:57I am going to get this out there somehow. It's just like really what I came to. And at that time, I really didn't know what it would be. But I was like, I just wanted to show Apple that they can't treat developers kind of like this. It was really just like, I was like, you can't treat us like this. You can't tell us one thing and then change your mind the next year because real people are spending real time doing this kind of thing. So I, yeah, I just motivated to just kind of prove them wrong. This is the best I could say. And so, yeah, I was like, I'll figure out a way. So then next project is figure out a way.

1:08:26Like, how do you how do you even start? I just got lucky, honestly. Apple had also just around that time made it so that you can install apps from Xcode for free with a free Apple ID. Like they just changed that rule of right around now so that students could start developing. And so I saw that and I was like, wait, you can install apps for free. If you just have an Apple ID, there's something there. Like I was like, that's all the technical thing I needed. I could make something from that. And so that was just like the beginning of alt store. I was like, okay, I got to do something with this free Apple ID sideloading from Xcode thing that Apple has just announced.

1:09:02And then I was basically just like, took a few years to research that, build it up, find out what would be the most convenient flow. So because, yeah, there are a lot of obstacles with that. It was apps installed this way only could last seven days. You could only have three apps installed at a time, this method. So it was just kind of trying to come up with creative ways to make a lot of these restrictions not as annoying. Like the fact that alt server is a thing was the number one, that alt server just refresh your apps every week in the background. And when I thought of that, that's when I was like, OK, I think there's something here we can at least work with.

1:09:36That's good enough. so when did the first version of alt store like work what was sort of the first version of it that you had that you're like okay this this does the thing that i need it to do uh i think that was 2019 is when i finally like had put together all the pieces into one flow whereas like i had a program on my computer that could install alt store onto my phone and then alt store could send apps to that device or to my computer and then reinstall it and then it was early 2019 i I was like, okay, this can work. Like just seeing it actually work in practice, it was totally janky. Like the UI was horrible, but just like the fact I could press a button on my phone and it would do everything, send it to alt server and install it was just honestly kind of magical.

1:10:18So explain to me why that worked in the sort of infrastructure of Apple's universe. Like why did that system work? Because so the way Apple allows students to test out their apps is they have to have a Mac and they have to be using Xcode and they have to plug their phone into Xcode. And then they have to install an app from Xcode onto the phone. Like you can't just download a file and do it. It's all through Xcode and all through a computer. And so Alt Server is basically replicating everything Xcode does. You can have an app file, but iOS can't install an app file on itself. You have to send it to a computer.

1:10:53And then Alt Server does the same stuff Xcode does behind the scenes to install it back onto the phone, as if you're a developer testing out yourself. Got it. Okay. And you were able to basically build a thing that lets anyone kind of mimic that system for themselves. When I set it up, it was, I wouldn't say it was a lot of work, but it wasn't no work. It's a lot. It's a bit. Yeah. Especially on the Mac, there's the mail plugin for a long time. That was just really, it was confusing to everyone. And I was like, oh, this is too nerdy to try to explain even to people why it matters. But just, yeah, people got through it.

1:11:29Well, so and this is this is I feel like the sort of ongoing story here is you're finding these increasingly complicated ways to do this and continuing discover that there is so much demand for something like Delta that people will jump through basically any hoops that you ask them to jump through in order to do this. Yeah, the biggest thing I was surprised about with alt stores, we need to get your Apple ID and password to like log in with your account. And I was like, wow, we really are just asking people to trust us and give us your Apple ID and password. And I mean, we do everything we can with it.

1:11:59We literally don't touch ourselves. We send it straight to Apple. But I was like, oh, that's a big, scary thing that you really just aren't supposed to give your password to other people. And then, nope, people are still giving us their passwords. They don't care. I'm like, this is cool, but also it makes me nervous for security as a whole that people are just doing this now thinking about it. Oh, for sure. And it puts you in a really interesting position, I would think, as the developer of this to say, okay, what is this thing? Like, am I just building this as sort of a fun side project for people who want to play Pokemon on their phones?

1:12:29Which comes with, I think, one set of security and privacy implications. Like, to some extent, honestly, if you send your Apple ID and password to just a dude, I don't think you have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Like, I think it's a good thing that you were taking care of people's privacy as best you could. But I think for me as the user, I deserve what I'm getting at that point. Right. But then if you're if you're like a company that is that has a terms of service and is set up to make money and you're like, we're in this for the long haul and we're serious about it. I think that changes both the way you have to treat stuff and the way that I can expect you to treat stuff.

1:13:03And it seems like as you were going through this, you were also trying to decide, like, how professionalized do I want this thing to be? Is that fair? That's pretty fair. Because when the first version of AltStore that launched was literally just like a Delta installer. The only app in it was Delta. It could install Delta. And I just knew that was important. But even at that point, I knew I wanted AltStore to be a bigger platform. That was like kind of what motivated. It was like, I didn't want to build a whole other workaround just to install Delta. The fact that I could do it for AltStore and for other apps too made it more appealing to me.

1:13:36I was like, fine, I can do the work and then lots of other apps can take advantage of it. And so it was always the plan to expand beyond Delta, but I just didn't know really what that would look like until probably like a year or so after we launched. And I started, we started actually having some third party apps wanting to be on the store. And then I got a sense of, okay, this is the type of apps people want to install. This is what I got to be dealing with. And yeah, that's helped a lot. So what was that? Like we're going to get into the kind of history moved towards you a little bit aspect of this in just a sec.

1:14:07But I am curious in that moment, the idea of like, I'm going to get my third party app store to be sort of, you know, legitimate in Apple's eyes was completely off the table. Like 2019, 2020, there was just no world in which that was going to happen. But you're like, you're talking about, you know, other apps that want to do this kind of stuff. What were you starting to see? What was kind of the like unifying thesis behind apps that wanted to be part of this thing you were doing? uh i mean at first it was just any app that wasn't allowed in the app store and honestly is still a big appeal today just like for whatever reason that was rejected for whatever type of rule they just couldn't be that store and so then they'd see alt store and then they'd be like oh an alternative there are a lot of emulators like obviously so there's plenty of those there's stuff you can expect like itorrent had like an app and you can be like yeah i can see why apple wouldn't approve it but stuff like that uh utm the virtual machine app just running windows on your ipad really cool not allowed in the app store so it was just like a bunch of different random project or another one i liked what that i think is really cool old os if you've heard of that one no it's so it's like a high schooler just recreated ios 4 in swift ui and so it's just like the whole experience you open the app and it's the home screen from ios 4 you can open all the apps and it looks exactly like it did back in the day oh that's really cool and so it's just like oh a fun little idea that not allowed in the app store so yeah a bunch of stuff like that so i launched alt store and the first year was really great but the first year was also a lot and it was just me working on it at the time and then i honestly was like what am i doing here am i gonna keep with alt store is this ever gonna be a real thing should i just like move on to something else now i was really going trying to figure out what i wanted to do and then it was really at that point i realized what i wanted was i saw basically that the u.s was investigating apple and that the eu was investigating Apple around this time.

1:15:55I was like, you know what? I feel like there is going to be something that happens in the next few years. I want to be ready for that, but I need help. And that's when I basically brought on my partner, Shane Gill, who is my best friend and I've lived with for like 10 years. And I was like, Hey, I need you with this with me. I need to just do it together. I need you to do all the business stuff. And so I can just focus on the programming and then we can make that happen. And at that point we started like making the plans for what Alt stories today or at least an alt store in the eu alt store pal okay so you you actually really were betting on the theory that eventually this was going to be a real thing that you could do and not just sort of a series of ever more elaborate hacks yes yeah by that time i was convinced it would happen just i didn't know when but just at some point in the future that's fair okay so and this was like peak covid if i'm if i'm doing my timing math here correctly everything's weird at this time and you're like well let's let's just go for it everything's weird i'm everyone's reevaluating their lives my original plan was i was like hey shane let's move to new zealand together let's just escape everything let's build this in new zealand because i'm a new zealand citizen so it'd be cool to go home for me but that didn't work out it was too hard to get new zealand during covid yeah understandably so we're in dallas now which is the same thing it's this close yeah it's basically okay so you start building this thing and was the idea we want to build sort of a full app store?

1:17:21Like, was that is it as simple as that? That was the pitch? Yeah, when Shane came on board, that was the full pitch, like, we're gonna build a real app store and show people what life could be like if there are other apps, just like just be the example. And then whenever it was official, be the official, like be an official store. And what was what were developers saying? Were you like reaching out to folks being like, do you want to be part of this? And what were they telling you? Honestly, we didn't need to be reaching out to anyone people were just reaching out to us. like there are a lot of people who just have app ideas that just aren't getting in the app store and just and even i'm like wow there are just so many apps like we're getting like reaching out to us i'm like oh wow that was rejected that was rejected so we just yeah people just reaching out for us yeah and were you having any contact with apple at this point other than you know those two conversations at wbdc was there any inclination that apple was even sort of aware of your existence throughout this process?

1:18:09We did at one point when the EU started investigating stuff, me and Shane sent an email to the executives at Apple basically saying, hey, y 'all, I think the EU may be going too much. And do you like, just to reach out, hey, like we're here and we don't want like a crazy world of sideloading. Do you want to like be on the same page here? And they didn't respond at all. But we were at the time just thinking we don't want a crazy free for all. And that's what it seemed like maybe the EU is going to be. We wanted a more restricted sideloading world where the app store was still the main app store.

1:18:41Why? I really think that's what makes iOS so good for like the vast majority of people. Like it is just so simple that you can get any app that you trust through one store. I think that's really valuable. It's why like so many people I know personally use an iPhone that aren't techies. And so I just always knew that there needed to be a way for sideloading to exist without taking over the app store, taking like so many apps away from it. Okay, so you then are watching the regulation stuff happening. Are you like barreling through all the, you know, DMA white papers and trying to get the deep sense of what's going on?

1:19:13Like, how into this were you as that regulation was happening? Once the DMA was like an actual thing and they were talking about it, oh yeah, we were very much deep in it. And then we were just like, we got to be ready for anything. Because literally until Apple announced what they were doing, we just were like, are we going to be a sideloading tool? Are we going to be a full app store? Are we going to exist at all? like we just had no idea what was going to come next we just knew that there would be some way of installing apps okay and so i guess with that idea you can kind of keep building delta and alt store the way you had been without making too many kind of unchangeable decisions at that point yes we basically were working on like stuff that we knew would be true no matter what like we were building up like the ui for browsing apps and like we were expanding like or building the patreon flow so that people could connect their patreons and and install that because we just knew no matter what that would be good for this world we just didn't go into like the really technical stuff about like the actual installing process it was just basically making the app look as much like a store as it could be yeah that makes sense and at that point how are you thinking about like the business of delta you've been working on this thing for an awfully long time without making any money on it i'm assuming there were conversations about like how do we how do we all get rich from this thing that clearly lots of people want i people do keep asking me but the thing that i've believed in and what shane like shane before he even joined alt store he was the one that convinced me to make a patreon for all this in the first place he was like hey when you're working on delta not so just have a patreon on the side to support yourself because honestly i thought my original plan was to release alt store and delta and then move on something else like just let it exist and let people install it but shane was the one telling me no people want to support creators right now you should just have a patreon that people want to subscribe to and just support future development and so i start i launched alt store with that and it did really well like it has paid for everything ever since i launched started alt store we really believe that's a really important thing that should exist because developers right now you can't sell apps through patreon in the app store and it's just such a really good way i think for creators to build a relationship with their audience.

1:21:22And just people also don't mind spending a few bucks to a person, but they do mind spending a few bucks on an app. Yep. So it's just like very different relationship. And so we're basically just trying to really promote the Patreon idea. Our own income basically is just through the Patreon. We're still selling or having access to our betas for our patrons. And that's worked out pretty well as a way of monetizing Delta, honestly. Okay. Yeah. I mean, even just the idea of thinking of an app developer as a creator in the same way that you think about like a content creator as a creator is really interesting and is totally not how most people perceive it right and i think i think it's coming around a little bit like personally at least i've seen a lot more of the sort of bootstrapped one person app become a thing that people like in a way that i didn't and they like associate the app with the person who makes it yes yeah but i think for most people it's all so faceless right like you just it's just an app that exists i don't know if it's made by one person or ten thousand and i don't care i'm just mad that they're charging me money and and it's interesting to think that like maybe the business model is part of the problem there that because it all just sits in the app store and it is so divorced from personality and people that maybe that's the problem so actually connecting patreon to that is a really interesting way of just changing the way people think about what like an app is and how it gets made yeah exactly and i'm so yeah i'm really excited for that and another nice benefit is we can just have our apps be free and then people just get the betas and but so it means there's no features that are locked behind paywalls like forever it's just a you can wait forever and get it for free or if you just want early access you can donate and i think that's more appealing to people to like when they're trying to support an app versus oh you've locked away a feature and now i can never use it unless i pay it's like yeah that Difference, I think, makes a huge deal.

1:23:12Yeah, no, I totally agree. So, okay, so right before the DMA drops, and I guess, what was it, like, March of this year when Apple put out its third-party app store plans? It was in January, yeah. Okay, so this year, Apple, right before that, what was kind of the status of Delta and Alt Store? It sounds like it's growing, people are using it. Like, how were things? Things were good. We had like at that point, like 4 million users on Alt Store, like just existing. I was like, oh, wow, this is going great. Things are going right at Delta. We had been prioritizing basically a new version of Delta 1.5 to release alongside whatever Apple announced.

1:23:54And so we just like we're working on that. But then basically by January, we're just like, OK, everything is in a good spot. We're ready to go. We just need to know what the hell is happening. and so we were just basically just waiting around to see like okay we can do this we had like the store had been finished by then like all the ui was done delta was ready clip was ready so so you have this thing and you're like this exists we made it it's good we have absolutely no idea what we're about to do with it exactly that is exactly where we were what a strange place to be it was very strange it was yeah just because we're just every day we're like what do we do like we can't move forward in a lot of things.

1:24:33But so it was just a lot of planning and strategizing. Yeah, that makes sense. So then end of January, Apple drops like a million press releases and technical documents about how all this is going to work. What happens to you on that day? What do you do? Well, that was an overwhelming day, like for sure. And the first thing that we try to do is figure out, okay, can we exist at all in this new world? Because yeah, there's all these like restrictions and we're trying to figure out what the hell like alternative marketplaces. And we're like, and so, yes, we spend that whole day basically trying just to parse what Apple's announced.

1:25:06And then we basically are like, okay, we think we can do this. We think we can meet the criteria if we get very creative. Because, yeah, the criteria was like a lot of things. Like, you needed to have, like, the standby letter. We need to have a subsidiary in the EU. And just, like, a bunch of things that we just sat down like, okay, we've got to make all this happen in a month, basically. because we're like okay we have until march 7th was like the dma compliance day right okay let's set up a subsidiary let's get the standby figured out let's build everything because also they announced all the stuff we had to build and it's like okay let's build everything we need to do and then for the next month was like extreme crunch time just like getting everything done shane honestly was incredible he was calling so many countries to figure out where we could incorporate he we finally incorporated in ireland so we have a nice subsidiary in ireland which is great uh he was on talking to banks to get someone to believe in two people who are trying to do something crazy and they need this how hard was that process you're like so we build a game emulator and also other app stores i'm imagining a bunch of banks are just like this is a prank call and hang up a lot did yeah it was so many people just like wouldn't listen to us it was true pure luck that we found one person his name's logan he just like morgan stanley and he was just understood what we were doing and really wanted to go out of his way to help us and i honestly if we had not met logan i don't know if we would have got this all figured out but he was like okay let's do this i believe in y 'all i can work with my bosses we can make it happen that that was a big win getting that one for sure yeah i mean i remember when the news came out thinking that there were like you described a bunch of technical challenges but there were always going to be a bunch of technical challenges right i feel like that you you sort of know going in there's going to be a bunch of weird work you have to do to get this thing to comply with what apple wants but the business challenges of just like the the hoops you had to jump through as an organization seemed like they were designed to keep almost everybody out uh except for the the truest of true believers and maybe just the most stubborn people building this thing yes exactly and and part of me wonders if if going back a few months apple just deeply underestimated your willing to your willingness to pick this fight after so many years of picking this fight you're like i've been through your nonsense before apple oh i i yeah i know they were caught off guard they they told us that they like when we when we end up going to the lab and everything they just said straight up oh we did not expect anyone to be this prepared especially as a two-person team they just did not expect us to be as prepared as we were which that had to feel good oh it did feel good i was like cool but at the same time i was like well then let us launch it was like cool okay that's amazing let us launch we're ready was there any question for a team of two whether to invest all this time on something that at least for now and potentially forever is only going to exist in the eu like there's a lot of people in the eu but there's a lot of people not in the eu also yeah i mean so two parts i'm like one i do think it's going to come outside the eu at some point i think it's a question of time so i yeah i expect to see within a few years it'll expand out to like Japan, United States, eventually.

1:28:19So we viewed this as the beginning of a much longer process for us to expand. But then the other thing was we had nothing to lose. This is literally all we're doing. All our income is working on AltStore or Delta. We're like, well, we might as well just go all the way with it. What else? Why not? Yeah. I mean, I think the long bet, I think, is probably a safe one. Again, it's a question of how long it takes, but I do think you're probably right it also seems like you were in a position where even if it didn't sort of immediately reach a ton of people you were going to get so much notice just because this is such a big thing and such a big change that like i all of a sudden alt store just appeared in so many headlines in like february and march of this year which is like yes that was very very surreal seeing that all of a sudden yeah yeah i mean it's so funny because like explaining alt store to people it's like okay it is this bizarre sort of convoluted experience where you have to set up a server and i'm seeing this in like mainstream news articles i know i'm like oh my god oh my god if my mom asked me what alt story is i'm not going to know how to answer that question for her same i yeah i explained to my friends like don't worry it's just a tool to install apps that's it so okay so then we're almost to the present time but i feel like we still have not gotten to the single wildest part of this whole timeline.

1:29:36Yeah, that's accurate. So you're building the store, things are going well. You launch, I think on launch day, right? March 7th, was it ready to go? No, we were ready. We were all ready to go. And that was the beginning of this frustration. So we were, yeah, we were invited to a lab in Cork for the Apple to help us implement our backend and everything. So like a week long lab for us just to work with Apple engineers to get everything working so then we flew out to cork it was like the week before march 5th so the end of it the end of february we flew out day one i showed up i said okay here's everything we're ready to go can we launch and then they were like oh uh hold on they expected you to show up and be like i'd like to build an app store and instead you show up and you're like i have built an app store they literally i really think they expected everyone to show up with like no code base like to just start from scratch and how to do this and yeah so we show up and we're like here's the entire product store pages, everything you could possibly need, downloading works.

1:30:33And then they were just like, oh, wow. Yeah, just very clear. Yeah, they were not expecting that. And so it basically was then, okay, so Monday, I was like trying to pressure them. Can we launch tomorrow? Can we launch tomorrow? iOS 17.4 is coming out tomorrow. Can we be there? And then it just became clear that this whole process was going to be much longer than we expected for a lot of foreign reasons, basically just legal like giving them documents having them review documents stuff like that so iowa 70 before came out and me and shane were very bummed because we're like we were ready to launch on launch day we were all ready to go and then so that was frustrating so how long did it take before you actually got the thing up and running then i think it was two months later like it was yeah it's april 17th like yeah so yeah from may from march 5th to april 17th was just waiting some month and a half and so we did that and then yeah the reception was immediately just phenomenal people just so excited and but then we also immediately saw which we expected that delta was the main story sure that delta in the app store was the big deal but we had to figure out what to do and we knew that would be the outcome if we released delta in the App Store that Delta would get like its big moments to be everywhere.

1:31:48And we just were like, you know, that's fine. It's free marketing for Alt Store. Everyone just knows about Delta and then they talk about it and then they get it through Alt Store in the EU. So you just glossed past part of it, though. Like the whole Apple suddenly allows emulators in the App Store. You say that as if you expected that to happen. I don't think anybody expected that to happen. Not at all. The most unexpected thing that could have happened. And me and Shane had different reactions at first. Shane was more like, this changes everything. Now we got to think through. And my just reaction was, wow, what validation that Apple had to change the rules to allow emulators because they were threatened by us about to launch with an emulator.

1:32:29Like that to me was like invigorating. I was like, this is, yes, it means we're doing something right. That Apple is literally like doing something I never thought they'd do because it was the only way they could try to make the story not the eu now has the best apps outside the eu has doesn't have the coolest apps and i just knew apple i guess yeah they just couldn't have that story which is also why amuletars are allowed worldwide is my guess is the story just could not have been the eu has better apps than the rest of the world yeah no i i think that's exactly right and it is very hard to argue that this wasn't specifically about delta like i just can't the timing it's too It is all about Delta.

1:33:05We haven't had a direct confirmation from Apple, but our app Delta was being notarized for like five weeks. They changed this rule. It's approved the next day. Oh, wow. It's almost like they were holding it to figure out what they could do about it. Did you get any heads up that they were going to make this change? Nope. Nothing at all. Well, I would guess after that happened, you would have expected it to be big. It sounds like you did expect it to be big. but i feel like it's been it's certainly been bigger than i expected like it is bigger than i expected it's been nuts man it's so validating like i really can't like because yeah we're doing this because we just really believe that people just want to play old nintendo games or old all games we just i think it's just a thing people want to do and for so long everyone just says no that's only for the nerds it's only for like people who know what they're doing and i've just been like you just have to make it accessible that's all it like all you got to do if it's accessible people will know how to do it and they will love it but we're seeing that that is exactly the case and yes so even more people than i thought are enjoying it it is the most surreal thing seeing it not only in the app store but being the top app in the app store for like a long time are you still the number one app in the app store i mean i think last time i checked but yeah since we've launched we've been number one and yeah so surreal like the most like anytime i life, I've never felt more like I actually am dreaming right now.

1:34:30Like I need like pinching myself, like, because it was just too perfect. Like work on this app for 10 years. And then day one in the app store, it's the top. It was just incredible. Has it changed what you think about how to do all of this? I mean, if you had charged $2.99 for Delta, you would have made a crap ton of money by now. Like, have you, are you thinking about the business of all of this differently after it's blown up the way that it guys um i think we want this to be bigger than just like delta and we want this to cause like actual change in like the emulation scene or in the gaming sphere just like we want to make this more accessible for everyone we want people to start talking about it and have real conversations about it without just being like piracy piracy and so a lot of what we're doing is we thought delta to make that change happen we had to like it had to be free had to be everyone had to have it And that's, I think, just what we're focused on really is like, as long as we're making enough to support ourselves.

1:35:26And so we're not in need of more money. But I just think for Dell to have the biggest impact is just make it as fully free and accessible to as many people as possible and let them just start reliving games. Are you worried at all about legal ramifications? I mean, there was obviously the Yuzu thing that happened kind of right before this. It's been a weird moment in the emulation community. Have you heard from any Nintendo lawyers? yeah that came out as we're also like in europe trying to launch this like oh interesting very very relevant to us but i'm not gonna say i'm not nervous about things but i am confident in what we're doing i've learned a lot of what not to do over the past 10 years and i think that we are really trying to show how you can do something like this legal like we're not yuzu we're not emulating a current generation console we're not doing a lot of things that other emulators get in trouble like there's no drm we have to deal with to like for the the game so just the game files ripped from cartridges so we don't have to do anything like that we're doing everything we can to do it right and there was no world that i wouldn't have done this i guess it's a better way like i wouldn't have got this far and not released delta i just had to no i i think that well and i think that's part of why this moment of your story is so interesting because we're at the beginning of this weird new era of apps in the app store and i think a lot of stuff is changing and a lot is going to continue to change.

1:36:49But we're also in a funny way, kind of at the end of your 10 year journey, like this, you, you finally finished the thing. That is what it feels like. It's really weird, but I'm like, wow, it actually happened. Like it got in the app store and yes, it does feel like the culmination of that whole journey, which is very weird. Does that make it feel like I finally got to do it and it worked and it was huge and it was awesome and now i can go do something else i honestly the the fact that delta is doing so well has just motivated me to just want to work on it so much for right now because i've just been working on it in isolation assuming one day it could like be a big deal that i don't know actually seeing everyone playing it right now has made me really motivated to like really focus on it again and also because so much of the past two years has been like a lot priority working on alt store and now that we launched alt store we can just like have some home with Delta again.

1:37:42Like there's just so many fun features I want to add, but I haven't had time to because we had to get AltStore up and running for this deadline. But so I'm looking forward to a lot of that. But I don't know if this is a 10 year thing. I don't know if this is the beginning of like another 10 year adventure. To me, I think it's I'll work on Delta for a bit. And I think I got to finish up what AltStore is like we still have some to do to prove it out. Like we got to get the third party apps on there. We got to build up the platform. And I think that's to me, the next step. It's just making sure that Alt Store is a real app store that people are using and happy with.

1:38:13And then maybe I'll be done. And then you will have resoundingly defeated Apple, which very few people can say. Absolutely. Yeah.

1:38:28Welcome back. For the last few weeks, I've been immersing myself in AI gadgets, the humane AI pin, the Rabbit R1, the MetaSmart glasses, this voice recorder I have called Plod, a bunch of apps, everything I can get my hands on that is like a way to use AI. And the number one question in front of all of these devices in particular, I think, is the same thing. Why isn't this just an app on your phone? Actually, that might be the number two question. Number one is just, is this thing any good? And a lot of them aren't. But let's focus on the phone thing for right now. The Verge's Alison Johnson wrote a piece last week arguing essentially that a smartphone is the perfect AI gadget, that we don't need dedicated devices, we have the dedicated devices.

1:39:10And she ran an experiment to prove it. So, of course, I had to ask her to come on and tell us how it went. Alison, welcome back. Thank you. We usually talk about phones when you come on the show, and this time we're going to talk about phones, but maybe in the weirdest way that we've ever talked about phones, which I'm very excited about. I'm here for it. So let's just start at the beginning here. Tell me about this wearable phone experiment that you devised for yourself. Oh, my gosh. I have never been so glad that I just work in my own house alone. I was just sort of ranting about how, you know, the humane pin reviews came out and I was like, this thing is just an Android phone, like a mid-range Android phone.

1:39:49I was like, I have so many mid-range Android phones. So I just kind of set out to like recreate the capabilities with what I had. And it was surprisingly hard. I tried a flip phone. I had the Motorola Razr Plus and I had it like kind of clamped over the collar of my shirt, you know, like you do. And I got like so far with that, like I could kind of talk to Google Assistant. So wait, so you dangle it over with like what the front screen facing out. Yeah. And then you just sort of like, hey, gee it from there. And I figured because then you have cameras facing forward. You could do Google Lens. That was the thought.

1:40:28It's not very easy to do any of that. Kind of out of the box. Like the flip phones won't let you download the Gemini Assistant, which is strange. So you kind of have to like sideload it. If you try and trigger the Google Assistant with the phone closed and just using a cover screen, it tells you to open up the phone. So it kind of like, I was already not off to a great start. So did you ever find an actual solution with the phone itself? We're going to get to headphones in a minute. Yeah. Foreshadowing. But did you ever find a version of like a wearable phone that actually kind of worked? I did not really.

1:41:07I had, I just ran chat GPT in the kind kind of like talking mode, the conversation mode. And I had that on my shirt and just, but it's just always listening and like waiting for you to say something. So you can't just like go about your day and we had a very pleasant conversation about like the weather or whatever. But yeah, nothing really worked the way I thought it would. Well, this is why I wanted to talk about this because I think you and I have been talking about this for months now. And the question everybody brings up about every single AI gadget is like, why isn't this just an app on my phone?

1:41:41And my thoughts on the subject and why it shouldn't just be an app on your phone are actually becoming increasingly strong and intense. And I feel like I'm more right than I was before. But I am curious, like at a broad level, do you buy that argument? Like, are you also one of the people who is just like, this is all ridiculous. This should just be an app on my phone? I think I'm like 20 % rooting for like a gadget that does these things and 80 % It just feels like realism. Like phones have already solved so many of these problems. Like these little gadgets get hot. They have to connect to the internet.

1:42:21They need cameras. Like checkmark on all of those for phones. Like they did it. Battery life, you know, regular software updates. They got it. And I'm just like, I'm having flashbacks of covering compact digital cameras for years where it was like, you know, oh, these are so much better than your phone. And which is like not even true anymore. But it was like, no, the phone is good enough for most people. And people do not want to carry around two things. That is what we learned from that experiment is if you can carry one thing instead of two things, you will carry one thing. I do agree with that.

1:43:01And that is, I think, maybe the most convincing argument against the AI gadget is just, it's the good enough hypothesis, right? That it's like, I don't need it to be as good. I just don't want to carry and charge and worry about two things. But I think my most strident opinion on this subject is that I think we all have forgotten how annoying it is to use your phone. Like, we've just been doing it for so long that I think it's why I believe in flip phones for the same reason. It's like our phones are these big, chunky things that you balance on top of your pinky to the point where most of us have like divots in our fingers now from trying to hold these things.

1:43:39You have to sort of like worm your thumb around this gigantic screen in order to touch anything. Like from a pure in a vacuum user experience, it's not good. And if your hands are full, you can't do anything. and I spend like an alarming amount of my time with like dog and stroller in one arm and phone in the other like it's just bad and I this idea that okay every time I want to do anything the right user experience is for me to dig into my purse pull out my phone unlock it swipe swipe swipe open an app tap on the app log in do a thing like that's bad and the idea that you can shortcut all of this by just yelling a thing is good.

1:44:20I believe in that. And this is why I liked your experiment so much because it's like, okay, can I make my phone that thing? Which I think is where we get to earbuds. The longer we do this, the more I'm coming to the answer of like, maybe headphones are the problem solver in all of this. Yeah. And this is something our colleague V song has written about is like, with wearable tech, it's so important that it's just like something you want to put on your body and is comfortable and is kind of like socially accepted. And I just come back to earbuds. Like we're just, people just walk around with them.

1:44:55I feel like such an old person being like these kids, they just walk around with their earbuds all the time. But like you have a good transparency mode, you know, and those things could get smarter about the sounds they let in and the sounds they keep out. And then you have this connection to your phone that you can just like summon it when you want it and keep it in your pocket and not have to do the whole dance of like tapping on things. Because I think we've come, we're sort of blind to that. Like we are just so conditioned to like, this is how you get things done on a phone. You take it out, you do all this, you get distracted.

1:45:29And yeah, once you start kind of like conceptualizing not having to do that, it's like, oh yeah, I buy into that vision. But I think we're just gonna be able to do it without touching our phone, but it's still going to be phone. Yes. Well, and that turned out to be sort of the second half of your experience with this phone AI gadget thing, right? You basically went like full pixel. Yeah, I did. I downloaded the Gemini Assistant and switched into it. And there's still weird workarounds you have to do because you can have Gemini Assistant running on the phone. The earbuds are not going to trigger Gemini because they don't talk yet.

1:46:10This is the most Google thing you've ever said. Yeah, seriously. Well, like the Pixel Watch, you can't have Gemini on it yet. So you're like talking to one assistant here. You're talking to a different assistant on the phone. The Google Home in my kitchen is constantly being like, what? So I had to like unplug that. And I kept Gemini like open and running on the phone, which is not an ideal user experience, but had the earbuds in. And my like light bulb moment was I took a picture of this recipe I was making and I was like, look at this and remember it. And I just walked around my kitchen doing things and I would ask it questions like, how long do I put the fish in?

1:46:48How do I chop the vegetables? Just kind of out of order. And like, as I was doing things and it, it got it right all the time. And it was like, oh, this is super helpful. I would be running back to this recipe with like stuff on my fingers, trying to figure it out. And it's like, man, those earbuds. That is maybe the single coolest use of AI I've ever heard, by the way, to take a picture of a recipe and then just pepper the assistant with questions about that recipe as you go. That's very cool. I was super into it. And it's that kind of thing of like, I run out of things to talk about with chat GPT.

1:47:24I'm like, there's only so many like business proposals you can brainstorm. But I'm like, if you give it a little data set of like, I'm doing this thing, help me out. Like it makes so much more sense to me that way. Yeah. Are you a voice assistant person in your day to day? Not at all. I set timers and I asked the weather and like trying to get myself, I'm starting to like realize I can use it a little more, especially if I am using a phone with Gemini on it. Like I asked, but you just, man, you got to keep an eye on it because it'll make up a word or like I was asking it if the bridge they were working on in my neighborhood had reopened and it like got the days backwards.

1:48:07It was like, yes, it's open, but it's opening tomorrow. So you just have to keep an eye on it. But it's like converting me a little bit to more of a voice assistant person, I think. Okay. Yeah. I think one of the big questions I have about this space right now is did voice assistants work because they were a bad idea? or rather did voice assistants not work because they were a bad idea or did they not work because they weren't very good and i think they definitely aren't very good right and i think the siri experience sort of proves that for a lot of people and i think a lot of people's first experience with these things was siri and you ask it to do something and it just fails or it's like here's what i found on the web and you're like well this is useless and then you never really try again and so the first attempt we all had to build that habit it failed spectacularly and And there are a lot of like kids who grew up asking Alexa silly questions and getting silly responses.

1:49:01And that was the thing that worked. So I think the attach rate there has actually been better as a result. But then I come around to, okay, we all bet on this a decade ago. Like the tech industry was like, this is the thing. Conversational interfaces, they're going to change everything. And they super didn't. And now to some extent, we're back in that exact same thing. and the promise is no it was the right idea with the wrong underlying technology and at least my experience so far has been i still see the theory of it but even as i use all these things i'm not i'm using it more i agree with you i've definitely found more reasons to do this stuff particularly with like i really like to use an ai voice notes app to like say my to-do list out loud and they're actually getting pretty good at turning that into just a structured list of stuff i have to do today I feel like a doctor who's like saying all of my charts into my voice recorder and then like something magical happens.

1:49:55It's great. But I still don't feel like I have hit the thing where it just sort of that becomes the main way I use my phone. And what people say when I say that to them is, oh, it's just an interface question. It's because once you have your phone out, why not just use your phone the way that you're used to, which is why they're all excited about these new gadgets. And so I just I don't know. I spin in circles about like, what is the actual sort of roadblock here to this actually becoming real? because it seems like there are a lot of them. Yeah, there's just sort of like a pain versus reward, you know, ratio of like, I feel like it's starting to even out a little bit with the voice assistants, but you still get burned where you're like, and there's nothing worse than like being at the grocery store and being like, I'm going to use the voice assistant.

1:50:39And then it just fails and you have to like, either keep talking to it or like take your phone out. I think once you had that experience, you're like, oh, just use my phone for this. But yeah, I think it's something we can adjust to. And it really has to like, that threshold of public embarrassment or just like frustration has to change. And there's like signals that that will happen, I think. But yeah, it's not proven, I wouldn't say. Yeah. One of my developing theories is that headphones are going to be where a lot of this goes for that reason. It's like, it's a thing you can wear one of in the grocery store and no one will look twice at you.

1:51:21Like we have solved the public weirdness problem of headphones. Sony did that for us 45 years ago. Thank you, Sony. But what I wonder now is like, should you have the AI system that is just purely baked into your headphones? Like one of the conspiracy theories that I have no evidence for, but believe to my soul is that the next AirPods Maxes are going to be local AI devices because they're big and they're heavy and they have a big battery and they can do stuff. But like, if you try to run some of that stuff on AirPods or the Pixel buds, or it's just the battery is going to die in one minute. And there's just, there's literally no place to put the AI stuff.

1:52:00But maybe it's, maybe that's okay. Maybe Bluetooth headphones and your phone in your pocket or purse is enough interface. And it does seem like in your experiment, that's kind of where you landed. Yeah, that kind of proved out. And that didn't solve the camera thing, which is also like an intriguing related, you know, like feature, which the humane pin has the camera and you both like want to look at something and ask a question about it. Or if you want a hands-free way to take pictures, which both are kind of intriguing to me. So, I mean, everybody keeps bringing up the meta Ray-Bans and man, that kind of solves a couple of those problems and doesn't look stupid.

1:52:40True. Do you wear glasses normally? I wear contacts. So I'm, I'm so close to buying these things. I don't know. Really? Yeah. It'd be so good for just like taking pictures, kid running around and I don't know, but another gadget. Do I want another gadget? I hear you. I've been, I've been debating this with some of the folks on our team for a while. Cause I think they're definitely a huge leap better than like having a headset on your face to have the the meta smart glasses and meta is leaning into the fact that we've also solved having glasses on your face is not weird and i don't know what your experience has been but when i wear the meta glasses no one ever looks at me sideways yeah like i got more public notice more sort of weird double takes wearing the humane pin than i ever have wearing the meta glasses by a mile yeah so that's that's a huge victory but i also don't wear glasses normally and i don't want want to start wearing glasses.

1:53:35Like I wear sunglasses when I'm outside and I have mostly replaced my sunglasses with the metaglasses, which I like a lot. But in terms of a sort of always on assistant, like I'm not going to get to work and keep wearing glasses I don't need just to use my assistant. It's a different vibe. Yeah. You have to be ready for that shift. Yeah. Like I are, if we can normalize sunglasses indoors just in order to make AI happen, I'm here for it. This, this works. We'll work on that. But yeah, I do think I have definitely come around to the idea in testing the humane pin and now the rabbit and some of the other stuff that's out there now that actually what we need to figure out is how to put AI into other socially acceptable things that already exist before we try and invent some wholly new thing.

1:54:18Yeah, like the humane pin kind of tries to hide it, but it's sort of like, look at this. This is kind of a cool gadget. I appreciate that the rabbit is just like, this is a thing. It is bright orange. It like practically glows in the dark. I don't know if you had this experience where I walk into a dark room and I'm like, there's the rabbit art. It really does. It sort of screams at you from wherever it is. What do you think about the rabbit? Speaking of experiments you've been doing, you've been testing rabbits AI stuff with some of the other stuff that's out there. How's that gone? It is, boy, that's a tough one.

1:54:55It's a tough one. The battery life is just god awful. Which, you know, as it turns out, is important because I don't, if I just have it in my bag and I go somewhere, I'm like, I'm going to leave it off because the minute I turn it on, it's going to be like draining the battery. So like, A, if there's no battery, it doesn't help you do anything. It's just a cool orange thing. I've seen a couple of moments when I'm like, okay, this is maybe doing a little more than a Gemini. I took a picture of my plant on my desk and it did the typical thing of like, this is a pothos plant, blah, blah, blah. And it kind of like went into the care instructions and it was like, your plant looks happy in its current pot.

1:55:37I'm like, you know, I don't get that assessment from Gemini. It just sort of spits out a bunch of stuff that you like, don't overwater it, don't underwater it. So I don't know. There's something that is a little more like could tune itself to what you're actually doing or looking at that feels like not just Googling something. But I don't want to give this thing too much credit. It is not done that very often. And it kind of fails at basic stuff. Yeah, it's bad. Like, I think we're going to have more to say about it, both on the site and on this podcast. But the RabbitR1 is not good, is a pretty easy takeaway.

1:56:16But I'm curious, you've been testing it against ChatGPT in particular pretty strenuously, right? Are they? My assumption would be that most of these things should come out relatively the same, because it's all kind of pulling from the same backend infrastructure. Have you noticed anything interesting poking at all this stuff? Well, I think that something you mentioned, I think, is that it's running perplexity. So you get a little more like real time info than a chat GPT or the free chat GPT I use that was trained whenever I go. So I can ask it, like, is that bridge open that was closed over the weekend?

1:56:53And I get a real response. So that's interesting. But it's such a strange little creature. It's like very adorable. I think there's an adorable factor. It perks up its little ears when it's listening to you. But TBD on that. Does that do anything for you? actually because i think i have i've definitely had the same experience that i like that the little rabbit on the screen sort of bounces waiting for you to talk and then you ask it a question and it perks up its ears and stops bouncing and when you're playing music it wears headphones and there's a lot of sort of charming little things about it i think and i can't decide if that's what i want or is totally the opposite of what i want from a device like this because you You use Gemini or ChatGPT or Siri or whatever, and it's all very matter of fact, right?

1:57:44Like they are tools to do a job. And actually, every time we've seen these things exhibit personality, it's been in really bad, ugly, problematic ways mostly. And so they've all learned to just sort of shut all that down and just be there to execute whatever they are required to execute and then move on. And part of me is sort of endeared to Rabbit for trying something else. And part of me is also like, well, maybe if it worked but was less cute, I would like it better. And maybe that's what actually matters here. Yeah. Like, there's a cute little animation of the rabbit in a hamster wheel or something when you need to charge it.

1:58:18I'm like, this is adorable, but I'm annoyed that I need to charge this thing again. Like, cute only gets you so far, I think. Yeah. Do you think there's going to be ways to put more of this stuff onto phones in interesting ways? Is the next round of flip phones and foldable phones and smartphones going to have some of the stuff we're seeing in these gadgets? Or are we just going to keep getting phones? Because I just keep thinking about the Razr as you're talking about it. And it's like, what if the external screen of the Razr could run an assistant and could have that outer-facing camera? It kind of has all the hardware it needs to do that.

1:58:52Are we going to get that, do you think? I would like it. I mean, it would be an ideal world where you could kind of choose from your AI assistant and you don't just have to use the one that your operating system baked in. But yeah, then you get into like the tech company is going to let the app makers in, you know, like get into the system the way it would have to, where you don't run into a wall like chat GPT can't change settings on my phone or like put something on my calendar, you know. So I feel like there is a pretty like firm wall on that right now. And that would be interesting. I think that's kind of like Rabbit's, you know, ethos is like, how do we get around that?

1:59:35And the answer is a weird system where you log into stuff and on, I don't know, a virtual computer. Yeah, the answer is largely you can't right now. It turns out. That seems to be not working also. But yeah, it's an interesting question. And my sense would be that's only happening if regulators make it happen, right? It seems to some extent like more powerful than setting your default browser, which you can do. Even more powerful than setting your default search engine, which has only become a thing because of regulatory pressure. And essentially, you could kind of argue it's like allowing you to install another operating system on top of your operating system.

2:00:16Like if you were allowed to let ChatGPT run your phone, that's a pretty big thing for any of these companies to be able to do. I kind of agree that that's how it should shake out. If this tech is going to get better in the way that everybody says it's going to get better, it'll be cool to have options and not just be forced to use better Siri or better Gemini or better ChatGPT or whatever. I don't know that I would bet on that ever being a possibility. Yeah, that does seem like a big question mark. And then you get back to just like, well, what if you could just talk to your operating system while you're walking around the kitchen?

2:00:50It's like not the ideal future that I want. I think I want a future where there's weird gadgets or you can download a virtual assistant that can actually do things for you. So yeah, I think that's why I'm on like team phones because it's the realist of me is like, oh, they're not going to let this stuff happen. I think that's probably right. But I do also remember somebody, I forget who it was, somebody at one of the phone makers years ago was like, we're going to get to a point where the phone in your pocket is basically just a cellular modem. And all the accessories around are going to be connected to that in some way.

2:01:28Your wearables can use that to connect to the internet. Your headphones, you can use that to connect to the internet. Your laptop is going to use that to connect to the internet. But it's going to be less the device you use for everything and more the device that just lets you use everything everywhere. Yeah. And I think that's a really interesting version of the future. And it's kind of what you discovered with this is like, I can just use my phone as a go-between to all these services that exist. And with headphones that I already own, I actually don't need to invent a completely new pipeline for that stuff.

2:01:56I just need a new way to kind of get at that pipeline. Yeah. Yeah. And I've become just an addict for the smartwatch. Like I over the past couple of years, like I never used one before. And now I cannot live without one. It's just like it's the right kind of light interface for when I need to do stuff like I'm out on a walk and I need to pause music or just check a quick notification or a text. And it's like you run into the wall very quickly of like you can't really respond to a text very well or you can thumbs up emoji something. But boy, has that been like that is the point where I'm like, I am so willing to charge this extra thing.

2:02:37And it has its own special charger that I have to bring along when I travel. And like it crosses that threshold of like, yes, I will do all of that because I find it so useful. Yeah, I think smartwatches probably land in the earbuds category of that kind of light input system that really works. Like when I wrote the Humane Pin review, the overwhelming response was, what you're describing is just a better Apple Watch. And I think other than the camera stuff, which is left to be solved, but right now is only kind of somewhat useful anyway, that is true. Like my big regret right now is that I didn't buy a cell connected Apple Watch.

2:03:17Right. And I wish I wish that I had because then I could do all that sort of lightweight stuff you're talking about without needing my phone in my pocket. Yeah. Just leave the house. Can you imagine? I mean, first of all, no, but also it sounds wonderful. The idea of your phone as a thing that lives in your pocket, that it lets everything else connect to the Internet strikes me as much more of the sort of AI gadget future than like these all encompassing new ideas about gadgets. Yeah, I know. It's kind of depressing, but it's also a little bit. Yeah. And it means like all these other companies, Humane, Rabbit, everybody else is like desperately trying to get around your phone, just like you said.

2:03:58And it's like, oh, this maybe keeps the world the way that it is, if that's how we do it more than I would like. But it also just might be inevitable. Yeah. And it's an interesting moment, at least. Boy, is it not dull right now. i know and i'm still thinking about the the camera comparison and cameras never came back no they just like mid-range we found a lot of interesting stuff to do at like the high end and i think about like the fuji series that people really love like i feel like if you want like a good camera your options have never been better but if you want a pretty good camera they don't exist because you have a smartphone yeah you already have it yeah and i wonder maybe that's where we're gonna go with ai stuff and we're a ways away from the ai ai gadgets being any good So maybe we're going to be in a real sort of valley with that stuff for a little while, it feels like.

2:04:47Yeah, we're going to find out. But luckily phones are getting better. So I'll take it. Yeah, yeah. Phones are sticking around, I think. And you've given me yet another reason to buy a flip phone, which is all I really needed from you was more reasons. I took that Motorola out of the closet. I was like, this is so nice. Just shutting it, just shutting it feels good. I'm going to start buying T-shirts with the pocket on the on the breast. And I'm going to fold it out and just stick it right there and chat with it all day. It's going to be amazing. Yeah, it looks super cool. Yeah, I believe that.

2:05:19I bet you made a lot of friends and everybody thought you were super normal and cool all the time. Yeah, I was taking pictures of it for the article and my husband walked into the kitchen and just slowly backed away. I don't understand what's happening here and I'm not going to question it. That's the correct way to react to AI of all sorts. Yeah, probably. Just back away. All right, Allison. Thank you as always. Thank you.

2:06:11of the world, and that actually without paper, without notebooks, we wouldn't have modern capitalism, we wouldn't know nearly as much about history as we do, that actually a lot of the world that we live in is defined by the way that people wrote stuff down and what they wrote stuff down on. He tells a whole history of notebooks all the way through the Renaissance and all the way up to now and even in the future. If you listen to the show, you know that I love note-taking apps. I love thinking about how people write stuff down. I think the systems for all this are fascinating. And this book was like catnip for me.

2:06:46So I asked Roland to come on the show and talk through some of the big ideas in his book and also why notebooks continue to survive in this increasingly digital world. It's a super fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to him. And yes, there is more 12th century history in this episode than most, but we're going to go with it. So to start with Roland, I asked him to quickly recap the case that he makes that paper is a hugely important invention in the history of the world and that without paper, we might not have any of this. Here's what he said to that. yeah permanence is really why um for thousands of years we've had different ways of writing things down as human beings so you go back to you can you can carve on stone you can um make little dents in clay tablets which you then fire and dry out and they're permanent but they are clay tablets so they're not super portable or practical or robust uh then you have papyrus papyrus, the reed product which grows in Egypt.

2:07:52And you can write on that, you can draw on that. But papyrus, it turns out, unless it's actually in an Egyptian tomb, completely dry, with no movement and nothing to disturb it, it will just automatically fall apart. It can't cope with any kind of damp, or it can't really cope with being handled. So papyrus is handy, but it's not permanent. And then you have wax tablets, and these are beautiful things. They're amazing, completely died out in Europe. But for about 2 ,000 years, this is how Europeans retained information, took notes, wrote poems, agreed contracts, bills of sale, whatever, with a layer of wax on wood, which you would then scrape into with a little stylus.

2:08:37Now, obviously, that's not permanent. So it's very useful for being in a poet's notebook, for instance, because you can wipe it over at the end of the day when you finish writing your poem. But for a business record, it's no good at all, because you have to know what you agreed, what you contracted. Then you have parchment, and parchment comes along a little bit later, during the period of the Roman Empire, probably. And that's a really good writing material. It's very tough. It's completely indestructible. and you can write on it beautifully and you can also paint on it if you like. So the illuminated manuscripts, which we see, the book of Kells and so on, these are all on parchment and they're very beautiful.

2:09:17But the problem is when you write on parchment with a pen, the ink sits on the surface and dries, which means you can scrape it off, which means that again, it's not permanent. You can change it, you can affect the record. So it's no good for business. paper turns up in europe around the year 1240 1250 and very quickly a few people realize it's a game changer because anything which is written on paper with ink stays there so you can have a contract you can keep a business record you can do anything legal you can have a deed for instance and you don't have to worry about it being forged yeah and that's important so paper is really important because it's permanent.

2:09:58And that leads to its very, very rapid adoption in the business community in particular. Was that where it started? I was trying to match some of the timelines. And going back through, it seems like if I have the timeline correct, there were two threads. There was kind of the people who use it for business and people who use it for recording things in their own personal lives. But it does seem like business became a real use case for notebooks first. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And the analogy which you can very easily draw is with the modern computer. Yeah, that comes from IBM and it's businesses and governments which have it to begin with for the first, how long?

2:10:4330 years, maybe 40 years. And then you get people using it creatively and then you get people like Jobs thinking, oh, you can have some fun with this thing. You know, you can play games on it, but you can also be seriously creative. so now you have pixar for instance and i don't think anyone at ibm in the 1940s was thinking that pixar was going to happen right looking back it seems inevitable that people would do something like that and it's exactly the same kind of relationship with notebooks you have businesses come to rely on notebooks utterly they use them for everything and therefore notebooks get into everyone's hands particularly in a culture like italy which at the time italy's the richest part of Europe, but it's also where they invent banking, where they invent companies, where they invent accountancy, double entry bookkeeping, limited liability partnerships, futures markets, all of these things which we know and love.

2:11:35And a lot of that you talk about happens not sort of, that doesn't happen and then they put it down in notebooks. Like the existence of those things and notebooks and this new writing permanent technology go hand in hand. Absolutely. You can't do one without the other. But then, of course, so they have to have these notebooks. And once they have to have them in the evening, they take them home and then they do the fun stuff with them. And that's entirely accidental, I think. But, you know, thank God, from our point of view, it's given us all of this interesting literature and art and poetry. Yeah.

2:12:11So I confess I am particularly interested in the fun stuff. So let's start there. I think the first thing I had written down in my notes was like, let's go back to Florence. And there's a word that starts with a Z that I can't pronounce. And my gut tells me it's pronounced Zibaldoni, but I could be wrong. You're dead right. Yeah. You just have to imagine yourself ordering a Zibaldoni in an Italian restaurant and you'll be fine. A type of notebook and also a beautiful croissant-like thing that I will like very much. Tell me what those were. Talk a little bit about kind of how that spread. Okay, back to the restaurant.

2:12:47Zibaldoni seems to have been a word for salad, and that's exactly what it is. So it's a collection of lots of different things jumbled together. Now, this is a time before print. We're talking about about 1300, and it's Florence, and it's a time before print. So if you wanted to have any book or literature or poetry in your house, you had to basically write it down yourself. And therefore, Florence is a very business-like community. They're very entrepreneurial. Everyone's got their own little business. Therefore, everyone's got their business notebooks. They take them home in the evening. And if they hear a poem which they like, or if they hear one of Aesop's fables is very popular, or a bit of Ovid, or a prayer which is particularly resonant to them, or a recipe, Very often they're writing down medicinal cures.

2:13:38Anything you want to keep written down in your house, you just write it down in your Zibaldoni. And it's a very personal notebook, but it's completely unsorted. So it's like a salad in this jumbled up way. And they're brilliant because they're these windows into what Florentine people loved. So we know the poetry they like to read. We know the prayers that they wanted to remember. We know the stories that they like to tell. And we know what they liked to eat when they had a headache. Like, you know, all of this kind of information, because everyone in Florence at this time who could read or write, which was most of them, unusually, they kept a Zibaldoni.

2:14:13And it was a really strange local thing, but it was so fun. I also get the sense that folks back then were reckoning with the same thing people reckon with now, which is like, what do I do with any of this? And this is sort of the eternal question of notebooks, right? Is you write a bunch of stuff down, you collect all this stuff. And as a historical artifact, especially in aggregate, it's very cool. you get a sense of what people were doing in a community. But if I'm a person in Florence in the 1300s keeping one of these, what am I doing with it day to day? What's going to happen to these notebooks?

2:14:46Are they thinking about the grand sweep of history and their responsibility to write this stuff down? What was the point of these notebooks? So the Zimbledon, the only point was fun. They weren't thinking about the grand sweep of history, but they knew that they were a bit precious because they would leave them in their wills. so this is how we know one of the ways we know how many people had them because the wills often survive um and also you see these little dedications in them someone will start their zibaldoni then they'll leave it to their son and then the son will have an argument on the pages of the zibaldoni with his brother saying oh no he dad left it to me actually you know so you have these little bickerings um and you can see that sometimes they pass down three generations and that people maintain them because the handwriting changes.

2:15:31So that's one thing. So Zibaldonia, they're always for fun, but people definitely know that they have a value. The other thing that they also start doing is viewing their family as a kind of business and then keeping what they would call a Libre de Familia, or Ricordanze is the other word for it, where they keep a family record, which is essentially births, deaths, marriages, investments. You know, we bought this house, I invested in this company, my daughter got married, my son died, my grandson was born, he was baptized, etc. And they're very businesslike. You wouldn't call them diaries because there's no emotion in there.

2:16:10There's no happiness or sadness. But they just record the central of most important events of a family's life. And then that would get passed down through the generations as well. But that's more viewing your family in a kind of quite serious business-like way. If you were at a grammar school in the, say, 1500s, 1600s in Europe, you were expected to keep a commonplace book in a very rigorous way. And that was a very formal kind of thing. But that was educational. No one ever really did that for fun because it's such hard work. It's a real effort and it's study. But I think that outside of school, You have people like Leonardo who would just draw all over the place.

2:16:52You have people who doodle. You have people who write very intimate personal diaries, people who write very formal ones, people who write about their relationship with God. You know, there's no hard and fast rules. Okay. And that feels like the thing that lingers most over time is that everybody is perpetually finding new ways to fill up a notebook. Yeah. Kind of more chaotic over time, too. Everybody gets weirder and weirder about notebooks. Da Vinci is an interesting one. You mentioned him, and obviously I would say, you've obviously done more research on this than I have, but I would say Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, probably history's most famous notebooks, fair to say?

2:17:33Yeah, I would say so. Those are the ones, when I was telling people that I was writing history of notebook and they were looking baffled, I would go, you know, Leonardo. You're right. Well, one thing I thought was really interesting in your telling of his story was that he did not seem to imagine that his notebooks would eventually become wildly famous. And the idea that these were for public consumption was kind of a thing that happened much later. The notebooks were very personal and very individual. How did that change come about? Like, at what point did people start writing notebooks, even in some of the styles that you're talking about, thinking about other people?

2:18:12Very, very late in the day, I would say. I think what's interesting, Leonardo's notebooks are fascinating for two reasons, I think, very far apart in time. Firstly, because they're an amazing record of his thoughts, his researches, his explorations, and his personality up to a point. So that period around the year 1500, wow, you know, there was something really incredible going on there. And then basically, they just vanish into aristocrats' libraries, you know, and no one reads them. They probably pull them off the shelf and just look at them as a curiosity. No one studies them at all until the 1890s, when a German guy called Richter goes around Europe, he looks at them all, he transcribes them, he researches, he writes about them.

2:18:58And then for the first time, 400 years nearly after Leonardo dies, people actually realize, oh, he wasn't just a good painter. He was also all of these other kinds of genius as well, because he was just known as a painter up to that point. And then, and I think it is a direct result of the publication of Leonardo's notebooks and people understanding that there's this process behind his genius, then everyone else starts taking their notebooks much more seriously. So Picasso, for instance, he starts painting in the 1890s at exactly the same time or learns how to paint. He's a boy. And he, for instance, took his sketchbooks incredibly seriously.

2:19:39He never gave them away. he never lost them he kept them filed away in boxes in his house in the south of france and they were numbered catalogued ordered he knew that his sketchbooks were really important whereas painters 100 years before him seems to have been a very casual relationship you know or rather they themselves use their notebooks but they had no sense that anyone else would ever find them interesting so um yeah i think there's definitely a change and i think that Leonardo sort of accidentally 400 years after his death prompts it. Yeah. And to the extent, you know, if any kind of well-known writer now will sell their papers to the University of Austin, for instance, you know, collects writer's notebooks and it will pay good money for them.

2:20:28150 years ago, you know, universities were not doing that. They wouldn't have seen the value. Do you think that changes the way we look at those notebooks now? I mean, I think about even go back to Florence. You think about those as an important record of real life in a way that as soon as people become self-conscious that someone else might see their notebooks, it sort of ceases to be a record of real life. It becomes an Instagram version of real life, where everything is maybe subtly self-consciously changed to be for public consumption in a way that uh i don't know like i we we think about notebooks as these intensely private things but as soon as you understand that someone else might see it i wonder if it changes what that thing is oh what's that when it comes to diary writing in particular so the um any number of published diaries you can tell were written with publication in mind uh i write a diary every day and i don't expect that anyone else will ever read it uh and it's certainly never going to be published and And I think you're right, it's more intimate and it's pretty uncensored, unfiltered.

2:21:38But then you have the Tony Blairs of this world whose diaries are published, I think. And that's a completely different kettle of fish. Yeah. And I guess that's okay. Both of those things can exist, but they are very different things. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very definitely. Yeah. Okay. I am really curious about how you as a person in a digital world came to think about notebooks. Because again, there is such a, there's so much about that history that A, feels very modern. Like we're talking about the same kinds of things now. And like you said, using computers for the same kinds of things that people were using notebooks for 800 years ago.

2:22:18But I wonder if you're going through and you have to spend time thinking about the thing itself. And like you said, paper is this crucially important invention. And if we had invented computers in 1200 instead of inventing paper, would it have gone roughly the same way? Or is there something about that thing and that time and that invention that made it different from even everything that came after? I think up to a point, the invention makes the time. You said to me very confidently that we live in a digital world. And of course, you are right. Yeah, we do definitely live in a digital world. We're speaking to each other via a digital link up and surrounded by amazing technology.

2:23:05I would also, if I was being contrarian, say to you, you're living in a notebook world, because capitalism, which gives us all of what we see around us, that for 600 years was entirely based in notebooks. We would call them ledgers or account books, but it was an entirely notebook based system until the first IBM machines. And that was invented at the same time as, or roughly speaking, the same time as the notebook arrives in Europe and sort of in that place in Italy around the year 1300, they invent all of the mechanisms of capitalism. So really, we are in that world as much as we're in the digital world.

2:23:46But yeah, there is definitely a sense of you have an invention, and then it shapes the world that you live in, but in unexpected, surprising, fun, hopefully, ways. No one saw that Twitter was coming 10 years before Twitter arrived. And then suddenly it's everywhere, and then suddenly it's nowhere again, you know. So who knows so okay let's let's fast forward a bunch in history uh to not now but close to now uh and i want to talk about the bullet journal uh and the reason i wanted to start with this is that i feel like you can draw a straight line from that thing in florence 800 years ago to the bullet journal phenomenon of today like like a dead straight line through almost a millennium of time uh how how is that possible like why do you think this this thing this idea of how we want to record our lives in a physical notebook has been so insistently persistent over so many centuries um it's a really great simple minimal tool i think like it with with any kind of technology there's a there's a or any kind of invention there's a real virtue to simplicity you know so your your knife and fork or your chopsticks chopsticks are great because they're minimal yeah you can't once you've pictured them you've invented them once you cannot improve on them and a notebook i think is a lot like that it came to a kind of very quickly it became kind of perfect in terms of it's how practical it was how cheap it was how available it was to everyone and you can't really improve on that as a bit of technology you know because and then people will use it in different ways over history.

2:25:31And bullet journals are, I think, a really good example of how you can take this really simple thing and just use it in a slightly new way and suddenly it opens possibilities for people which they never appreciated before. Like, there are a lot of people who's, genuinely, there are a surprising number of people whose lives have really been improved by doing bullet points to organize their life and it kind of helps them to rationalize things and make proper decisions and act more intentionally and thereby live happier lives. I think I find it constantly incredible how this really simple thing can be reinvented so regularly.

2:26:08But you're right, there is a continuous line all the way through. I think it's just because it's incredibly simple and it doesn't require batteries. It doesn't require system updates. If you drop it, it doesn't break. What was it that was interesting to you about the bullet journal and its history? like why why did that jump out to you as a as a thing worth adding to this history um it was important to me because uh firstly because it was a it was a real thing it was a real trend you know when i was starting to think about the book and it gave me sort of confidence that there was going to be an appetite of people who were interested in this stuff um which is really key in terms of building my confidence and then what was interesting was i never i've never bullet journaled myself i've never done the Ryder Carroll method, but I got his book and then I spoke to him, interviewed him, and he's really thought about it quite deeply.

2:27:00And he's thought about the implications of writing stuff down and of organizing your thoughts on the page and having this notebook which you carry everywhere and which you write everything down on. And that kind of encouraged me to think deeply about it too. You know, he's taken it very seriously for a long time and he's thought about it in a particular way. And I've got a more historical angle and I think about it in different ways but they're completely compatible but the just the fact that he had taken it seriously i found really interesting and and hence giving him a chapter i think was you know kind of fair because he was really about the only person who had written a book about notebooking you know before i did so um and he also had some really interesting things to say about notebooks which aren't bullet journals he was really inspired for instance by um kind of artists uh scrapbooks and sort of collages and sketchbooks, which were sort of more than sketchbooks, which had elements of diary in them.

2:27:57So not pure bullet journal stuff, but stuff which is a really interesting expression of your experience. And Ryder definitely put me onto those things. Why do you think that way of thinking about notebooking and journaling and keeping track of your life lagged so much the business side of things, which, as you chart in the book, got really systematized and really specific. And like we built capitalism on top of these things, double entry accounting became a worldwide phenomenon and people understood how to do it. And there were kind of accepted rules on how to keep these kinds of notebooks. But in people doing it in their own lives, like you said, there have been bits and pieces of this over time.

2:28:41But somebody like Ryder Carroll comes along hundreds of years later and really thinks like, okay, how can I break this thing down into sort of understandable, repeatable pieces? That just happened much later. Why do you think that is? Honestly, I have no idea. There are questions you can't answer. I mean, another big question, which I just have no idea, is why did people start writing diaries? or rather why did they start writing diaries in england in around the year 1570 when they'd never done them anywhere else in the world before i've looked really hard trying to find out what was so special about england at that time which made people start to keep a diary like you would an emotional diary of how they felt about the day's events sorry not very good podcast material i'm making a baffled expression listen to the picture that yeah um i have no idea and i think your my answer to your question is it's a good question i have no idea yeah it's i i have i have a theory and it's based on nothing but it's a theory and i'm gonna i'm gonna give you my theory as a way of asking you another question which i also have i'm here for it i think as especially as we became more enmeshed with digital tools life took on like a new level of informational chaos there is just more stuff coming at us now than there ever has been and that's true in our professional lives but it's also true in our personal lives i think in a in a new way in the last i don't know several decades that there's just more happening around you and to you all the time and we're still reckoning with that as people This question of like, we understand what is going on in the world in a way that we are like evolutionarily not equipped to do.

2:30:35And what do we do with that? All these really interesting questions. But I think one thing that I see all the time is people crave systems. There is this idea that if I can just find a way to make this make sense, everything will be better. And you mentioned the getting things done method in the book also. And I think that speaks to the same thing where it's like there is this swirling mass of stuff in my life. And if you can just tell me where to put it and how, my brain will get quieter. And I think that's meaningful to people. and and again i there there is a definite sort of we are people of our time and technology thing that is all kind of swirling together there but i feel like when i see people who like really love bullet journal what it what it says is like the world is insane and messy but i have made this thing that is like my world and it is beautiful and looks like me and it just feels good and it's why like people get mad at all the bullet journalers who are like spending all of their time organizing their pages and not time getting stuff done.

2:31:37And it's like, no, the organizing the pages is actually the point of the thing as much as anything else. It's taking control. Right. Like making the notebook is the point. And I feel like that was one of the things that just keeps coming up throughout history in your book is like the act of making the thing is as much the point as anything else. Going back and reviewing it is fine. Doing stuff with what you put in it is fine. But the act of making the notebook in the first place is maybe the most important part of the whole process. And I feel like there's so much of that happening right now that we need structure around that more than ever.

2:32:09That's just a theory. That's it. And my answer to that is yes. That's the short answer. Slightly more involved example to sort of back up what you said. So I have a day job and I do this. I write books and talk to people about it. and so the level of inputs into my life in terms of communication and things flying at me from different directions i've got two email addresses i've got the instagram i've got the twitter which i'm switching off shortly but i've got the the facebook i've got um whatsapp on the phone etc etc it just goes on and that's before i'm in a room with anyone actually talking to them face to face.

2:32:53And my way of dealing with this is to write a diary. So at the end of the day, I will put it all down in here, and it's under control, as you say. And I've turned this ephemeral, non-stop flow of craziness, most of which is completely trivial, but has to be managed somehow. And I've just turned it into a calm thing on the page. Yeah, I completely agree. and as to how that makes me feel the analogy i use is it's like having a shower yeah showers are lovely yeah just great i like to have a shower every day but if i can't if i have to go a day without that's fine no one really minds two days without it's you know mentally i start to smell so and that's what i'm like with the diary now i can miss a day yeah i can't miss two days i start to smell mentally.

2:33:47And it really cleans me out. Sort of that process of just dumping it on the page really, really is refreshing and cleansing in that sense. Yeah, I like that a lot. Why do you think we haven't found a way to do that digitally in the way that is satisfying and valuable in the same way that we have in notebooks? Because like, we pretty much do business on computers now. There's not a lot of paper notebooks out there responsible for how capitalism runs anymore. But I think I am someone who has tried every note-taking app on planet Earth. I obsessively use them. I build these systems. And overwhelmingly, the ones that feel the best—and as I talk to people, the answer is you try them all, and you eventually just get a nice notebook and a pen, and you start filling it.

2:34:38And there is something about that that we have not replaced. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on why it has been so hard to replace. I have lots of thoughts. I'm going to give you the deepest one because I think your listener can cope with a sort of high-level bit of neurobiology. So when you write on a notebook page, and they've done this with MRI scans and a very clever way of using multiple MRI scans called voxel-based morphometry. when you can look at multiple brains at once. when you write in a notebook you use different parts of the brain to when you type or when you write something on your phone or your tablet and one of the different parts you use is the hippocampus now this is right in the bottom of the brain and it's your mental map so when you drive to your place of work you're using your hippocampus when you know where the coffee cups are in your kitchen, you're using the hippocampus.

2:35:35Taxi drivers, cab drivers have amazingly well developed hippocampi. It was an early case study in brain plasticity, actually. Right. So this is very interesting. Why do you engage your hippocampus when you're writing in a notebook? And it's because your notebook is a place, right? And it has its own geography. So when you write things on the pages of a notebook, you remember, or I certainly tend to remember, oh, that was on blue somewhere now that was at the back of the notebook that was at the front and i'm thinking about the notebook in quite a different way to how i think about a digital note and what they think the people who research this is that when you scroll or you carry on writing and what you've written on a screen just scrolls up at the top of the page and vanishes off the top of your screen it just vanishes it has no place in the geography of your lived experience unlike stuff which you write down in a notebook page.

2:36:32So I've got my yellow notebook, and I know that if I open it halfway through, roughly speaking, I'm going to find what happened in July. And I can't do that with notes I've made on an iPad, just because my brain hasn't thought about them in that geographic way. So that's one reason why you feel more comfortable and you navigate those notes more happily than you do when they're digital. Other reasons are to do with, I think, the sort of the sensory experience of writing fingers on the page the pen in your hand being a slightly richer experience it's more difficult as well it's very easy to type you can type you could roughly speaking type everything i said to you right now you'd get it all pretty much down you can't do that with a pen and ink you have to filter you have to parse the ideas you have to process them and paraphrase and that gives you a much richer deeper understanding of what you are actually listening to.

2:37:28You can type whatever I say without actually listening to what I'm saying at all. But to write it down, you have to paraphrase it and therefore you have to actually interact with the ideas. So this is why teachers and academics much prefer their students to write notes rather than to type them. So there's a couple of answers. Do you think there's a marriage there that we can make work? I mean, I keep thinking about you start the book with Moleskine, which is probably the first notebook most people think of when they think of notebooks. And Moleskine for years has been building digital tools. And they have a really beautiful calendar app.

2:38:04They have a really interesting journaling system. Like, it's all very good. Nobody cares about it the way that they care about physical Moleskine notebooks. And, you know, there was this phase for a long time of like, maybe we're going to do smart pens where I'll write in a notebook, but it will transcribe it digitally. And now there are things that are like, okay, you can write with a pen, but it's on your iPad and it will recognize the text and make something out of it. And it feels like we're poking at this thing where the act that you're describing, I think is absolutely the best one. But having a notebook that is a bunch of words on a page that sits on my bookshelf waiting for me to do something with it, feels like it's missing something.

2:38:48Like there is a best of both worlds here that I think I desperately want to exist. And I don't know, maybe it just doesn't and can't and won't. But I am curious, do you think we can marry those two things? I'm not going to say never. I've not seen it done yet in a way which I think some people, that sort of the moleskin magic paper, the dotted paper, whatever, they make it work for them and good luck and that's great. And some people also manage to make those kind of posh tablets, The Remarkable Tablets work in a similar way. And again, go you. Personally, I haven't ever managed to. Okay, last thing, and then I will truly let you go.

2:39:30Tell me just briefly about Moleskine and why you start the book with Moleskine. I want to end our podcast with Moleskine. Why is Moleskine so ascendant? What is it about this company and this thing that has made Moleskine the brand, the notebook, the thing in our sort of modern world? It's the complete refinement. She took, and I say she, Maria Segrabondi, who was the woman who conceived the moleskin notebook, who took the very simple basic notebook that we knew, she added to it, she added this little elastic strap, the pocket in the back, the little page at the front saying, if you find this notebook, please return it too.

2:40:11She added all of these things to a very minimal product and she somehow made it seem even more minimal right so and the analogy i make she made it minimal and she made it black and that was the most italian thing you could do it's like pair sole sunglasses prada little black dress um espresso you know that's what they do they make it minimal and black and she did that and somehow she just she tricked us if you like she fooled us and thank god that she did i wouldn't have written this book if it wasn't for moleskins i think because she made us look again at this simple notebook and think of it as something which had some material value that had some material beauty and could be therefore inspiring in a way that your school exercise book couldn't be.

2:40:56So she's, from that point of view, she's my heroine creatively. She's also, for me, a figure of awe because if you look at Moleskine's numbers, the company's numbers through history, that company's profit margin is ridiculous. It's like 43 % profit every year, gross profit. And it's a manufacturing company. No company does that. You know, how did they do it? So I take my hat off to her and I can forget quite easily about all of the ridiculous collaborations with Evernote and Adobe and things like that. Yeah, listen, you got to do some weird stuff. Because the key product is amazing. Yeah. Well, and to that point, actually, one of the things you say kind of as an aside in the book is that there are a million other notebooks that are like they give you ideas and prompts and they put stuff inside and they're like, this one's for your recipes.

2:41:46This one is for your travels. And what actually turns out to be the case is nobody wants that. They want the blank one. and I think that is like as a perfect metaphor for all of this that just carried with me through the whole thing that like you can make it whatever you want you can guss it up and people will want the blank one because then they can do what they want with it and there's something very powerful in that yeah freedom yeah I mean that's the story of the notebook right it is permanence and it's freedom in very real ways lovely yes I'll take that can I have that yeah I'll take that

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2:45:14All right, we're back. So this app Halide, or Halide, again, we're going to figure that out in a minute, has been around for a bunch of years. And it has gone through a lot of changes as the iPhone has gone through a lot of changes. Not only, you know, the tech getting better and the things about the design changing and the lenses moving around and all that stuff. But the whole idea of what the iPhone camera is supposed to do and be feels like it has changed. And the two guys, Ben and Sebastian. Hey, I'm Ben Sandofsky, and I'm co-founder of Lux Optics, and I'm the developer half that works on Halide and Kino and our other fun side projects.

2:45:50I'm Sebastian DeWitt, and I'm the design half of that. So the co-co-founder and designer slash photographer part of it. have been going through all of this and trying to figure out not only how to make a really great camera app, but what kind of camera app people need now, given what the iPhone and other smartphones are becoming. We had a really fun conversation. Neelai and I grabbed Ben and Sebastian, hashed all this out for a long time. Let's hear it. Excellent. All right. And Neelai Patel is also here. Hi, Neelai. I think we should just get them to pronounce Halide over and over You just did the thing that I wanted to do first, which is how is it halide or is it halide?

2:46:29Can we solve this for people in the world right now? You just said halide, Ben. Is this the official correct answer? I alternate because it's based on halogens, right? Oh, God. And so silver halides, halogens, as long as it's not Halide, which is a Middle Eastern name. No, that's what it is now. Well, yeah. Sorry, there was actually someone who worked at The Verge, John Porter. I think he has moved on now, but he once pronounced it on a podcast, Halide. And we sent him a Happy Halliday's Christmas card. And we'll never let him let that down. We continue to do this every year because it's so good.

2:47:02That's very good. Halide or Halide, depending on how fancy you feel. No, no. You guys, this is the worst. We have to pick one. Let's do this right now here on the Versecast. Can we name your app, please? What is your name? On three. One, two. Halide. Halide. Okay, there we go. All right, good. I just want to point out that when we released... I want to point out that you super cheated on Seb Sayan first. He went on two. You never go on two. We're a very good team, actually, when it comes down to it. I just want to close this discourse on names that we were like, when we're building Keynote, no one can mess up that name.

2:47:40And then it was featured in the Keynote from Apple, and they told us we're having trouble because it sounds a lot like Keynote. And so I think every time we build a new app, but just needs to challenge someone. Well, the best part was that I was like, it's actually pronounced Kano. And then they were like, really? And I was like, no. Happy Kino, everybody. That's what we're doing now. Okay, so I think we have a bunch of stuff to talk about and we should just, we've been getting into our feelings on this podcast about what a photo is for years now. And we have invited you two to essentially do the same thing with us.

2:48:12But my first question as we get into this, I want to talk a lot about Process Zero and a lot about what has changed with iPhone photography in particular and all this stuff. But I am desperately curious, like when you guys started building a camera app many years ago at this point, did you know at the time how big a like philosophical exercise it was to build a camera app? I think we think about it as like you add a bunch of filters and buttons, but it's really like you are making decisions about the universe when you build a camera app in a way that I think people are only coming around to. Did you know this all those years ago when you started working on Hallein?

2:48:47So I guess like the origin story, I think like the first code commit for Halide was 2014 for about like one day. It's pronounced Halliday, actually. I'm going to switch three times over. Oh my God. It was all over the place. So for Halliday in 2014, it was like three lines of code and then put away until like 2016. And so I'd say that in 2016, none of this computational photography was happening. It was, to put it simply, a lot of these apps were just wrappers around the APIs that Apple gave you. And it was just a more pretty veneer. And so what we were doing at the time was, and then I connected with Sebastian in 2016, like we were adding a value like focus peaking so that you could actually tell what was in focus.

2:49:35You could dial in manual values. But for the most part, until Apple released RAW up there about, it was that you had no real say on how the final image would look. And what's interesting is I think when it came out, so Halite is now seven years old. It came out in 2017. That's exactly when the iPhone X launched that year. And with the iPhone X, I think Apple started using the word smart HDR for the first time. And they started using that very famous slide where they take one photo and they kind of onion slice it into like 12 of them. and to try to show you like, oh, look, we look, we do a lot of stuff and there's a lot of smart things happening here.

2:50:10And I think that was, you know, around the same thing that the Pixel started, you know, talking, the Pixel team started talking about like the Italian Renaissance and how we can use science to influence things. It was a very early time where people were trying to figure out like how do we get better images out of these tiny sensors? And that's when everything exploded with like night mode and all those kinds of things when it basically turned photography from just taking a snap to like a data science. And it was like, okay, if we actually just use these processors and like do a crazy amount of computation on it we can fundamentally alter the output and we can just we can beat physics we can just cheat it like we can do it's depth of field we can all these things that big cameras can because i have giant lenses and giant sensors we can shoot at night and we can totally take photos with like bokeh it's not real but nobody cares because you're still taking a photo at night you're still taking a photo with what looks like a shallow depth of field uh and so we were kind of emerging at the same time as that all emerging.

2:51:02So and how much control over that stuff do you get? Like, do you look at that in those early days? It's like, Oh, my God, look at this incredible toolkit we suddenly have to play with all of the light that this thing is capturing instead of just doing like a thing at the end of the pipeline? Or is it like, Oh, this is barely photography anymore? What would how do we deal with this? Like, what how do you look at that when those tools start to come available? I'd say like around 2020 is when things started to converge of where things were getting a lot smarter. Also, we had like this existential question of why should our app exist when the first party camera is getting so much better?

2:51:36And fortunately, both Sebastian and I were already shooting raw photography, which in a nutshell means that you're capturing the sensor data as a file, and then you can bring it into a third party app like Lightroom, and you can make different decisions on how you want to process the final image. And so around 2020, it was like, we were starting to see like, wait a minute, like what Apple's doing is great. You tap a button and anyone can get a good photo. Like my parents, who don't know anything about photography, tap a button and they get a photo of their grandchild, right? But if you looked at the underlying sensor, Apple is kind of underselling how much better the hardware was getting.

2:52:11And then over time, the sensors were getting bigger and better. The optics were getting better. And so that's when we started being like, wait a minute, how can we build a feature around this where it stands on its own? One of the questions I have about RAW is what it has come to signify. What is a RAW photo? yeah yeah exactly not not quite that uh but people are like i don't like my iphone 15 camera or i don't like my iphone 14 camera and then you see in the comments on social media people say oh you should shoot raw and my reaction is like that is that's a horrible suggestion but all it really because you're gonna get this giant file and you actually have to process it to a look but what it really means is, oh, there's a way to turn off this processing, right?

2:52:58Even inside of Apple's like pro raw system, you're going to generate a file that lets you turn off this ultra HDR look. And that just means something to people. And the fact that the word is raw, I think is deeply fascinating. Like the word and what it means and what you get are all kind of wrapped up in a mess. But you guys are describing like, we're going to take the sensor data and start making different kinds of images with it. I think we make an effort to say native raw versus pro raw because what Apple calls raw in pro raw is not technically raw. And if you read the comments on a photography website, like a petapixel, I'm sorry, but it'll be just constantly that guy being like, you know, it's not really raw.

2:53:40And like, yeah, yeah, cool. Explain the difference for people who aren't as deep in the weeds as we are. What is Apple's version of pro raw? What is your definition of native raw so technically raw is you have these sensors that have voltage values from light converted to you know these numbers right and then that's it and then you need to run an algorithm to take uh on the sensor there's this bayor filter which are discrete red green and blue values so it needs to kind of mush them up in a blender and it's all like it's like basically like if you were to buy the ingredients of making a cake uh and then the jpeg is the final cake Well, I guess ProRAW is kind of like a half-baked cake.

2:54:21Like you get to pick the frosting. If you like sprinkles, whatever. Raisins, I hate you. But ProRAW is Apple's solution to what you're just talking about, where it felt like you needed a PhD in image processing to take one of these native RAWs and make them approximate anything that Apple has. And that's partly because Apple, when they take a photo, they're actually taking a burst of nine photos and then merging them together. So the concept of having any of these bare underlying values just doesn't exist anymore because it's all going to be squashed together to create smart HDR to reduce noise and do all these effects.

2:54:56I really wish Apple hadn't said ProRAW because it's going to haunt me for the rest of my life explaining this to people. But it's like kind of halfway between the native RAW and the final JPEG. And I think what is a really important thing to say there, because I see a lot of people saying something like, oh, like this is just the same. Like if you just take a raw photo, that in itself is a really fascinating turn of phrase. Because if you say a raw photo, a raw file technically is not a photo yet. So what Ben said, you know, it's like you've got this sensor data, red, green, two green, one blue, one red, subpixel basically to make up the pixels.

2:55:32All the data needs to be combined. You can think of it as kind of a giant spreadsheet that just has all these values of what the sensor caught in that moment in time from one photo, one important, one photo. And that's not a picture. You have to process a native RAW file to get the photo out of it. So per definition, a RAW file has to be processed for it to be displayed on a screen. It actually has too much information to even be displayed on a screen. And so a ProRAW file is essentially already done that step. It has created an image because a lot of the processing that happens on iPhone images requires it to become an RGB image, a bitmap, essentially.

2:56:07And so it's a very deep image with separate information for stuff like what Neil, I mentioned, like the tone mapping, which you now have the tone control for iPhone 16. That's separately stored in the profile game table. So you can now adjust just how much that HDR effect is. You can adjust the white balance completely. You can adjust the amount of sharpening. Noise reduction is something that is baked in per se, and not just because Apple thinks noise shouldn't exist. Like notably native RAW files have a lot of noise because you have a tiny sensor, you're going to have a lot of noise. But if you combine images, you can think of it.

2:56:35If you perfectly combine the same image, noise is different for every frame. So you're going to average out the noise no matter what you do if you're combining images. Behind the scenes, like when we're talking about RAWs, we've been trying to call them digital negatives, which I don't know if that's any better for casual users. But it's the same concept of when you had film photography, you'd have a negative. But then a lot of the work of great photographers would be during the development where you take the negative and print it on paper. You would dodge and burn it to recover the dynamic range, which is now an algorithm that Apple does for you.

2:57:09But like there's really cool videos of like Ansel Adams with some of his majestic landscapes. He's kind of doing like analog photoshopping where he's like, OK, I got to bring back some of the sky values and bump this part up. So this isn't particularly new, but Apple gives you like, okay, you want it on or off or somewhere in between. That's all. You can have any color as long as it's black. Like, yeah. Well, I was just going to say, it's just fascinating to me that a lot of people say, I see all the processing that's happening and maybe sometimes don't even have a word for it. Like, that's kind of like what you're alluding to, Neal, is like people are just like taking photos and then they take a photo with this and they just like prefer it.

2:57:43even though it lacks this absolute like i mean literally the best teams in the world right now in photography are working at google are working at samsung are working at huawei at apple like to make this processing to do all this processing engineering and they work from the silicon up to do like insane innovations and then people because they're like haha i'll download an app and skip all that and get what off sometimes is an objectively worse image if you were to objectively judge image quality. But we find that people, yeah, people just seem to have a current preference for authenticity through imperfection, I think.

2:58:17And that is really interesting. I just keep coming back to this idea that like, and we've talked a bunch about this on the show, that there is this increasingly pervasive feeling among people that their iPhone camera in particular is bad. And I think like, to your point, on any objective measure of quality, it gets better and better and better. And yet people seem to like it less and less at the end. And I like that disconnect is so fascinating to me because, and it goes back to what you were saying about like the iPhone has decided that noise is bad, period, right? Like it noise sucks. Shadows suck.

2:58:53They should not be allowed and we will get rid of them at all costs. And I think like to your point about imperfections, like I think that's right. And I think everybody has sort of ideas about what older photos look like. And there is a thing where like photos can be too good. But I also think as the hardware has gotten better, the software has gotten vastly more opinionated about how a photo is supposed to look in a way that just feels sort of incongruous, right? And like, maybe what's happening now is we're getting some of that choice back where it's like, oh, the hardware is really good. You can do a bunch of stuff with it.

2:59:24here are some options and it seems like maybe that's what you guys have even seen as developers is some of those tools are becoming available to you to make available to other people. And that actually that's what people want now is some choice back with all this great hardware instead of just wild new ideas about shadows. So actually, can I just dial back? I just said that Process Zero is rebranded raw and I can already see a thousand comments on Petapixel. And I thank you for pointing out - Haunted by the comment section on Petapixel. That's what I'm getting. Yeah, no, it's, I think that it, you know, but that's between me and my therapist.

3:00:00Now, the thing is what the value add here is that we do have opinions about, you know, there's a million different ways that we could develop the raw. And what I think with process zeros, we decided we like noise. I have a friend who works in visual effects and he calls noise analog dithering. And you can't remove noise without removing these details because that's what was captured at the time. We have opinions on sharpening. Our images are a little softer by design. And if you look at, you know, you look at analog photography, actually last summer before we really went all in on this, I was shooting with a Canon AE1 on 35 millimeter film.

3:00:38And I was like, oh, it just feels so warm. Like it's it's so flawed, but I love it. The fact that you can't get this crazy HDR in there. And I think the challenge is going to be as we're building out more features and we start, you know, adding the ability like in the future, if you want to recover dynamic range. Okay, at what point do we allow users to make fake looking images? Right. And it's something we'll have to face in the future. That's a big question. And at what point does something become fake looking is like back to big philosophical existential questions about photos, like where to draw that line is super messy.

3:01:13I think one of the things that you're touching on that well, too, is like at some point, these cameras all started looking very similar, right? So you get your photo out of Samsung phone of the Pixel, out of the iPhone. They all look like they boost the shadows way up and there could not be any reduction or clipping of dynamic range. That is just considered data loss. We cannot have any noise. We've all agreed on that. And I think that's simply the result of making a camera for the greatest common denominator. Like this is a camera needs to work for everyone. I think at some point someone was mentioning like, oh, I use my camera for like reading like a serial number on the bottom of like a car or something.

3:01:44Right. Like at that point, like if you don't, if you get an artistic photo that just has like really nice chiaroscura rendering, that's really cool for you. But like this camera literally doesn't work for me anymore. And so that's a really, really difficult position to be in. I often tell people like, wow, I would on the one side, it's a fascinating job to design the camera at Apple. But at the same time, I have to make a camera that works for my one and a half year old daughter and like my 80 year old father and myself, like who is like an incredibly pedantic, annoying photographer that frequents the petapixel comment section.

3:02:13Maybe it's simply the time that like cameras do allow. And this is what AppSkater do, do allow people to like find their own style and shoot in a different way. And you see that now with like the very un-Apple like thing of like adding so much control to like what kind of like final output you get in your image. And maybe that goes down to processing too, because processing, I think people are becoming aware of how many creative decisions are being made for you. And that's fascinating to me because there was one time like in 2020, a year of unprecedented times, if I want to like pull an anecdote where people ran into this because they're all taking photos with their Samsung or pixel or iPhone.

3:02:47And they woke up in San Francisco one day and the entire city was orange, like completely orange because there was a huge wildfire near the place where I live now. And the sun was being filtered through it. and it was all orange and people took a photo with it and the craziest thing happened the camera recognized it as being like oh the white balance is way off we're going to correct for that this doesn't really happen because it's trained on everything that's happened before it and it has it's literally all the smart stuff is based on precedent and we were in 2020 living in unprecedented times and so people started downloading like a camera app like ours to you know like try to correct for that set manual white balance and that i think was like beginning to be the turning point around when people started like exploring options like that and being aware of something like that existing like they were aware that as they took a photo like oh wait it's doing something for me and i don't like that it's doing that and that has become a greater awareness even in like gen z even in people who don't know what a file is they know that processing is a thing and that that increasingly is making decisions for them um to go on a long rant but yeah one question i have and I've talked to you about this ever so slightly, Apple designs the camera as a system.

3:03:59Samsung is a system. Google is a system. You've got the hardware, the lens, and then you've got a processing pipeline to lean on. And they obviously know exactly what's going to happen in their processing pipeline. In the case of Apple, they're designing their own chip as part of that processing pipeline. And it feels like they can make decisions about what they can handle in processing at the expense of what the hardware can do. And if you all are making an app that just pulls the raw data off the sensor, Apple gets to say, well, we know there's going to be some fringing. We know there's going to be some distortion in this lens, but we're going to optimize it to collect all the light we can because our pipeline can fix almost anything except not having the light.

3:04:39Has that come up for you now in the newer versions of the phone where you can see that optimization starting to shift against quality out of the lens, for lack of a better term, in favor of just light collection? Yeah, that was actually one of the craziest things I saw when we started shooting a lot of native RAW again, because for a while I was just like ProRAW maxing, like just shooting on ProRAW all the time. And then I was like, okay, let's go back to native RAW for a second. I noticed that the output was just getting a little worse. Like if I were to objectively look at it, you know, I just take a, again, to clarify, the difference between ProRAW and native RAW is you get RAW sensor data, which you just, I just quickly threw in Lightroom to develop it.

3:05:17Lightroom processes that sensor data and spits it out. there's actually some corrections already baked into that so some of the pipeline does raw data on the apple iphone and some of it then it starts converting it to images so that it can start merging geometric geometric corrections those kind of things um for instance your ultra wide camera will have a lot of corrections because otherwise it looks like a crazy fisheye lens basically right um and then yeah we noticed a few years ago like the main camera especially which is the one that needs to gather the most light you know the camera people use for 99 percent of the time it has more color fringing than it has in the past and we we i think we talked about this in person briefly nila i was like no like the crazy thing that's happening here is they just there's a realization there they're like oh wait it might be color fringing but we can just fix that in the pipeline if we get more light in we can just correct that out and the the smart photographer will make up for what would traditionally be considered a bad the worst photographic lens right if it just it just becomes a data problem essentially um and that is coming up a little bit and i wrote a little bit i just published a review of the iphone 16 yesterday and i wrote like look you gotta get used to processing because gadgets in our phones i can i can see them going in one direction david i i feel like you're like the pixel fold kind of guy but like you're gonna get devices that are thinner and folding and sometimes they fold three ways now in china i hear the devices are folding three ways.

3:06:40It's going that way. We're not going to opt for thicker phones and bigger cameras. And to make cameras work that are smaller and thinner and tinier and fit into very small headsets and Ray-Ban glasses, we're going to need more processing because the sensors, the images aren't going to get any better. That's just physics. So I fully believe that as we go towards slimmer and foldable iPhones or whatever, our output on something like a process zero image is probably going to get objectively worse um that's just the way it is but old-fashioned photography in that way that's just i don't know how long that's going to be around on these kind of devices as they get smarter and smarter because they'll just start relying more on the fact that they're magic hyper-powerful computers and they're not going to rely on the fact that they're good at collecting light because they're just not wait so let me ask you about that let me send you all the way down the existential rabbit hole this is where i live welcome to the basement with me um at the end of this right you're you you the hardware is just there to collect light and everything else happens in the processing stack everything else is an average of values from the past right is that do you see that all the way at the end that it you just spin the dial all the way on the path that we're on and we don't really care if the sensor is any good or the lens is any good as long as we can collect as much massive light as possible see i think that's a great philosophical question because if you come down to it everything you can solve it the way the samsung moon photo situation happens most of the world is completely been captured before and done before if you train a good enough model with a bad enough sensor you can probably take photos of 99.95 of the things out there and they'll be really good so like i don't know that seems kind of like a reality that we're heading towards where the processing is just simply good enough and the reality doesn't the reality of capturing images just needs to correspond to like what the internal logic can cohere together.

3:08:32And I personally, philosophically, find that a really big problem. I want to make a camera that, like if you go to the what is a photo thing, I was talking to Ben about this. I was like, we should probably think about what we consider to be a photo. And to me, it is an image that's generated largely majority at least by photons that you have captured at a moment in space and time. But I'm not sure if that is going to be the case. I think in the future, some cameras, maybe not all of them, but some cameras are going to increasingly rely on data sets of what the world should look like and what images should look like and just use data use light as data not as like a visual aid as much what is halide for all the way at the end of that road like what's what's your job when we get all the way to the end of that well i mean like the invention of the automobile didn't put an end to horses it's just horses were allowed to be this fun thing you gotta look at them and ride them and stuff right but as far utility for every day, you know, people stopped keeping barns, I guess.

3:09:28And I mean, like, look, you know, photography didn't end painting. Painting, the reason people look at paintings is because the amount of skill and craftsmanship that goes into it and being able to work within these constraints. And again, it was really eye-opening last summer shooting analog because there is just something about an analog photo and actually the removal of details, right? Right. And so I don't know if anyone tried to watch one of these high frame rate movies like The Hobbit at 48 frames per second or that HDR Will Smith movie, the one with his clone. What was it called? Gemini Man.

3:10:03There we go. And it was ultra high frame rate HDR. And what ends up happening with movies is when you shoot high frame rate ultra realism, it breaks the magic because your mind isn't able to fill in the details. And it turns out 24 frames per second with a slow shutter, like it feels more dreamlike and you're able to suspend disbelief. Right. And so with photography, there's just something about a photo that is less perfect that feels magical about it. So I think there's always going to be that as an art form. And but as far as something that you're going to just tap a button and get a nice photo, you know, I think that we are smart enough that we're never going to enter that kind of battle with the world's most valuable company.

3:10:44just put your definition in the test photons you collected at a moment in space and time right i buy that that's a pretty good definition app does that count if you're taking nine photos and merging them that that moment is extended to nine captures right yeah so i think so the the thing is like let's say you know and the same thing goes for cleaning up so like let's say use ai cleanup to to erase a part of the photo i still think it's a photo but once you fill that in with the majority of a cleanup feature. So like 50 % or more of the pixels become filled in by a model. I feel like it ceases to be a photo in a meaningful way because it has now been filled in by a data set.

3:11:20You guys are making a tool. It sounds very much like you're focused on the creative and artistic aspects of photography. There's a whole other conversation about, can we trust these images that exist in the world? Have you looked at the various watermarking features from C2PA that say, actually this happened, right? This photo of Donald Trump, it occurred. We're going to mark it. We're going to send it to Getty. Getty's going to know this was real. Those photos were marked at the camera level when they went to Getty. Have you looked at doing that? Is that something you're allowed to do on iOS?

3:11:50That's all bullshit. Am I allowed to swear? Like, if not, like, write down. Okay, good. You are allowed to swear. So, all right. Everything that Adobe's pushing as far as, like, content authenticity is, it's just, it's like DivX and anti-DVD kind of stuff in the 2000s. It's like if you look at it, the ability to just strip the metadata, the fact that you can just point your camera at a screen and take a photo like it's not going to do anything other than convince people to sign up for Creative Cloud and use Adobe products. I don't know. I don't know how much deeper you want to get in that, but I don't think it's a useful use of time.

3:12:26Although they do have a verification feature where I think it does like a signature of like you can I think kind of like see SAM detection, like it'll get a signature of the photo. You can drag and drop it to UI and whoever first posted it, like it'll tell you who did that. That's pretty cool. But the rest of the stuff is just a waste of time. I'm just curious. This is right next to the creative part of how much can I change this or how much data processing can I do is the how much can I trust this? And it feels like both of those are unsolved. Yeah. When we launched process zero, like I thought I was talking to Ben, I was like, can we use the fact that we shoot a JPEG that is the process zero component?

3:13:01and like the raw, the sensor, again, the sensor, single shot raw, Bayer data as sort of a proof of provenance, like a proof like that. There are not a lot of data sets of generative AI, if any, I haven't found any at least, that work on raw files, right? But conceivably, you could totally do it. That's the thing. So it's not a good, you know, it'd be a fig leaf of authenticity. It would be like, look, there is a raw file. You can see that it was actually taken. But, you know, like it's still, it's just such a losing battle. At some point, you philosophically, as a photographer or a camera app maker or both, or esteemed member of photography common sections, you just go through the same existential crisis and you just realize, okay, there's nothing stopping this.

3:13:45And can I just back up to what you're saying about editing photos and where's the line that you're going to draw? So in 2016, there was a famous National Geographic photographer, Steve McCurry. And so he got into hot water because people noticed one of his award-winning photos was actually different on his website because there's like a dude in the background who wasn't in the final award-winning photo. And people started digging into it. And like, basically, he would use what is iOS 18's object removal feature before it existed. He did that equivalent kind of editing. And this was a huge, like, you don't do that if you're actually taking photos.

3:14:21So, and I guess this is also a question for you as journalists, like when you, at what point when you're doing like an interview or you're transcribing, you're pulling quotes, at what point is it okay to remove the likes and the butts? You'll be doing a lot of that with me and thank you. But at what point are you then editorializing what you're trying to capture and telling a story that actually didn't occur? And effectively, you know, everyone has to have that level of journalistic integrity if they want to call it a photo. So David and I are both going to answer on three and we're going to see if we have the same answer.

3:14:54Okay. Actually, I'll let David answer. My quick version of that is that's norms. That's professional norms. That's what you're describing. This guy was a professional photographer. He entered a professional photography contest. He broke the rules. He got kicked out. He got in trouble. You're a journalist. You get a bunch of quotes. You go too sideways. You're over the line, right? Like the journalist club, if it still exists, will get mad at you and your reputation will suffer. If you're a Getty photographer, there's a list of rules of things you're allowed to edit. And most of them are like, you can change exposure.

3:15:29And that's about it, right? You can do some vignetting. If you look at New York Times photos, all they're allowed to do is vignette. So they're all just vignetted to hell and back because that's the only button they get. So like that's professional norms. I don't know what consumer norms are going to be. And what we're seeing is an explosion of consumer photography. and that I think is really challenging. I don't know, David, what's your answer? I think about the same. I mean, there's been a big discussion this year about how people transcribe Donald Trump. There's been all this stuff about sane washing Donald Trump where he'll go on like a nine minute ramble of nonsense and then a reporter will essentially try to make it make sense, which on the one hand is like good, useful journalism.

3:16:12Like here are the words that he was trying to say. On the other hand, it makes somebody who doesn't make any sense makes some sense and i think it's it's a complicated thing like at what point is my job to make something make as much sense as possible so i can help my reader understand and at what point is my job to represent something as it was in all its messiness uh yeah and it's like it i think it is kind of a perfect analogy for what we're trying to do with photography and i i don't have great answers because it's especially when it's messy how un-messy you're supposed to make it is really complicated.

3:16:46And really, the question is, can you make everybody believe in the professional norm? And the answer is obviously no. So I guess the closest that we have around ethics right now is Apple's decision that they're not going to allow fully generative AI in iOS 18. And there was the interview with Gruber where they're talking like, OK, we're going to generate cartoons, but we're not going to generate photorealistic stuff. And so that's nice when you have someone who is, you know, not enabling outright bad actions. Although then you have someone like Google, who's also letting you like, yeah, just change the background, type in what you want.

3:17:22That does like remind me of like that amazing quote that Neelai got from Apple's John McCormack that basically was like, okay, we believe a photo is a thing that really happened, which is still not going as far as saying like a photo is a thing you capture with a camera or is light that is captured. It is a thing that happened, which totally fits in the model of having a generative future where there is a super great apple model that will just basically fill in the blanks if the image data isn't good enough it just needs to confirm that the thing has actually happened so it's like yeah like surely we will continue to have journalistic standards and there will be a few of these things like c2pa to work in their niches but i mean there's no stopping the train that's heading down the tracks of like the absolute apocalypse of like the meaningfulness of photos on the internet.

3:18:07I truly think, if I look at my daughter, she's one and a half years old now. When she's a teenager, I don't think she will believe any single image she sees on the internet. I think the piece that gets lost in a lot of the conversation, I think, is we talk a lot about the really high-stakes photos. And we talk a lot about the photos of a serial number. But I think, Sebastian, to your point, you have a young kid. I think I have a young kid. Neal has young kids. Ben, I don't know. I got one. He's got hand, foot and mouth disease right now. So yeah. Yeah. Good times all around. But I think like, Sebastian, to your point, your kid will probably grow up in a world where they don't believe photos they see on the internet.

3:18:48I think that's probably right. But the question of like, will they believe photos about themselves from when they were kids is the other part of this that I think is like complicated and is such a like normal everyday use case we don't talk about in this context. But the question of like, when I take pictures of my kid, what responsibility, in air quotes, do I have to truth and honesty versus taking a fun picture of my child having fun? I feel like is such a mainstream, every single person use case that we just don't talk about enough because it feels mealy. But I don't know. And as you guys think about how light, people download this stuff in part because they want to make beautiful art that hangs in museums and in part because they want to take better pictures that are kids.

3:19:34And what is the job there in this world? All of my son's photos are in Native Raw, so I can show him the receipts afterwards. He can develop the negatives himself. Exactly. Yeah. No, but that's a really good point. On his 18th birthday, here, son, I've made you some negatives. You know, it's important that every dad has a talk with his son about noise reduction. It's a dangerous world out there, and you need not to be prepared. Yeah. but i mean to that point like some part of me feels like you know we're going to go back and look at um we're going to recognize this era of mobile photography for looking a certain way that's just a fact and we're we're recognizing the first generation of instagram photos by the heavy filters which also means people are going to look at the first generation of instagrammed photos and be like oh these are real there's no generative eye on them because you can see by how bad these filters are this was before the end times of photographic integrity which is fascinating to by the way that those fake sepia filters are going to go down in time as like a symbol of authenticity which at the time were derided as being universally deeply real photos yeah deeply unreal yeah deeply real photos must be real and um i think we we'd love to kind of in a same in a way provide that niche too because we want to offer that extra tool that just gives you a a more authentic shot because it's a bit more true to like what an old-fashioned camera might have captured it has a bit less of that process look going on um but two like i i also believe those photos are more representative of your memories because they they are more like the way you remember a moment like when i added my photos actually i tend to make the sunsets warmer and the cozy times nicer and the time when i walked in tokyo all alone 3 a.m bluer and more cyber punky because that's just the way it felt and i think those aren't perfect representations of reality and that greatest common denominator photography thing is kind of what's making people pull towards that a bit more and maybe also ironically making them pull more towards generative things or more creative ways altering photos because they're deeply unsatisfied with how how perfectly photos represent reality when they're sensing reality around them but not the world that they perceive per se emotionally

3:21:53Welcome back. All right. So I'm in the middle of kind of a gaming dilemma. I've been really a gamer off and on over the course of my life. It's not something that it's kind of a consistent activity, but I'll play a lot for a few months and then kind of put the console away for a few months because whatever things get busy or I get into something else. But then I always come back to games. And really, for me, it's sports games that are the most consistent. Like I play Madden every year. I like the NBA games. 2K is really good. I've been a FIFA player for forever. I like Fortnite. I like games that I can kind of come and go to and play a whole bunch all at once and then leave for a little while and then come back.

3:22:34I also like games that I can play for like 15 minutes at a go. And the challenge I've always had with a game like Elden Ring is I just want to play it for hours. And I feel like it never rewards you for just a couple of minutes of playing at a time in a way that some of these more finite battle royale or like football game sized games really are. So all of this is to say, I'm pretty happy with my gaming setup. I haven't really felt the need to get a PS5 or anything like that. I'm still on a PS4 Pro, it works fine, everything's great. But more recently, I want something new. We've been talking a lot about handheld consoles on this show over the last eight months or so, I would say.

3:23:14And there's just a lot of cool stuff happening. I also travel more than I used to. And I'm back to wanting something I can play on the train or on a plane or in a hotel room when I'm not at home. I also just spend too much time sitting at my desk. Like right now, I'm sitting at my desk, my monitors in front of me, my computer is underneath it, I have a Mac mini that I use for most things. And then right off to the right is my PlayStation. And so having this one space be the place that I sit for work all day and then to play games at night. I just don't like it. And I want something that I can take and sit on the couch while I hang out with the dog or play out in the backyard when the weather's nice.

3:23:52So I'm really into the idea of a handheld console, but I have no idea which one to get. So I enlisted two people to help me figure it out. Sean Hollister and Alex Kranz. They both know this stuff way better than I do. And together, we are going to make a decision about which handheld console I'm going to buy. Let's get into it. Alex Krantz, hello in Texas. Howdy, y 'all. Well, this is what we're going to do here. Sean Hollister, hello. Hi, from the land of gaming handhelds. I have brought you here to do personal tech support for me because that is what the first test is about, is helping David figure out which gadgets he should buy.

3:24:30Good. I'm going to lay out for you my current situation, and then you are going to help me solve my current situation. so my current situation is i have a playstation 4 i've had it for a million years it's fine it plays video games i would like to upgrade but i don't think what i want is a ps5 i think what i want is something handheld and portable because my ps4 like lives next to my computer in my basement and i'm spending too much time sitting in this chair looking at this screen and i would like to have something that can like go out in the world with me and i travel a lot and all these things So I want something that is like primarily but not entirely a portable handheld gadget.

3:25:10I would like to play lots of games. We can talk about which games I do and don't care about. But I have exactly one non-negotiable game, which is FIFA. EA Sports FC is the new name of it. I will call it FIFA until the day I die. I play that game more than I play every other game combined. And I need that game. That's it. That's literally like that is the entirety of where I am. and I want to buy something and I want you to tell me what to buy. Why? Why is that your game? Why is that your game? Because I have an answer for you, but the answer has just been foiled by the fact that you have picked a game, which, and I quote, runs a, this program encountered E11100B during initialization.

3:25:51Error message when you try to run it on a Steam Deck. So I guess I'm not going to tell you to buy a Steam Deck. My worry was this is going to be the shortest Vergecasts in history because I was going to say all that and you were both going to say Steam Deck and then we were going to hang up and move on with our lives. If it were not for this one game that I require, is the world sort of that simple at this particular moment? Yeah. It kind of is. And maybe it won't be in like two weeks. In two weeks or so, is it three weeks? There will be a Windows handheld with a battery that is bigger than any other handheld on the market.

3:26:26And maybe that will solve the issue of Windows handhelds don't have great battery life. That won't solve all the other problems with the Windows handheld. I'm going to say, David, you're on the verge cast. So I feel very comfortable saying you like to tinker. You enjoy a little tinkering. So I do and I don't. I will say what I'm I am willing to tinker. Like if it's a matter of I need to like buy this thing and spend a couple of hours like downloading and tweaking and doing whatever I need to get it set up. Fine. I am not buying a thing with the intention of screwing with it forever. I would like this thing to play video games, and I want to be able to sit down on my couch and be playing video games as quickly as possible.

3:27:07That's actually very important to me. Would you spend those two hours? Hear me out. Would you spend those two hours setting up your Steam Deck to dual boot Windows off of an SD card occasionally with the one non-negotiable game that apparently you must You can get FIFA on the Steam Deck without doing dual boot. I was looking this up. Tell me more. You will need to be comfortable diving into the Linux side of Steam Deck. Okay. And do some tweaking. And also, does it have to be FIFA 24? Yes. Oh, it can't be FIFA 23. Well, no, it actually, what's important is that it's going to be 25 in like six weeks.

3:27:53And it's actually what I need is that one. Do you have to play it online? Because it's the anti-cheat. That's the problem here. EA insisting on its own version of anti-cheat instead of the ones that actually work on the Steam Deck. Yeah, I need to be online. Shit. Well, I feel like the other FIFA games have appeared in Xbox Cloud. And I feel like this one would also appear in Xbox Cloud. That was my next thought. You make a very good point here, which is a thing that I should have said. I don't need to be able to play this game on the first day that it is available. I just need to play it at some point.

3:28:24And what I have discovered about the video game world is that those things are very different. Like when things come to Game Pass and there's stuff that comes to PlayStation's cloud stuff later on that isn't there like day and date when they release. Like the reason I picked this game that matters is because I can just like get lost down this impossible universe with any game that I want. It's all very complicated. But just to tie off the one piece of this, if all I was saying is I want a handheld thing to play games on and I did not give you any specific games. Yeah. Is the answer like the Steam Deck and it's not even close?

3:28:55Yeah. It really is. It really is. The Steam Deck, we're in this moment where all of these other companies are like, we want a piece of that Steam Deck action, but we're going to build it on Windows because gamers tell us that Windows is where all of the games are and they want to just be able to play the games they already own. Which is true. Which is true. But the reality is that the Steam Deck plays Windows games and it plays more of them better than a native Windows system plays Windows games. What is the problem with the native Windows system? Because Windows is built for computers, for laptops and desktops and things you use with a mouse and at least 13 inch display.

3:29:39And then you put that on a seven inch display and instead of a mouse, you have a joystick. Okay, that sounds awful. Now that I'm thinking this through, that sounds like a nightmare. That part's kind of it. You can, if you want to spend your two hours of setup, you can certainly spend 10 minutes of them setting up Steam to launch every time you launch your Windows computer and to launch right into big picture mode. And then you have an interface that's similar to the Steam Deck, but it doesn't have the ability to, like, tweak the handheld very easily so that you get great battery life. The chips won't give you great battery life to begin with because there's all that other overhead for all the other shit you don't need in Windows.

3:30:18Sometimes you'll turn off your Windows system. You'll put it to sleep and you'll turn it back on again and wake it up again. And all of a sudden your app will be gone. And where did it go? I wonder why it isn't full screen anymore. It's this tiny icon on the Windows taskbar. That's not great. Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. It'll have restarted itself. I'm having like netbook flashbacks to 10 years ago as you're describing this. Sometimes for some reason, I can't get it to stop asking for the password when I open one of my Windows game consoles. And so then I have to like, figure out how to get the accessibility keyboard up, which always takes at least five minutes, and then very carefully type in the password, which is super long, because I like to be safe.

3:30:59It's my favorite thing to do. David, you don't want to do that? This is not the most compelling case you've ever made, Alex. But wait, Sean, you alluded to maybe there is something coming that solves this problem for me. Okay. Not most of these problems, but the battery life problem. Asus with the ROG Ally, the ROG Ally, they're going to hop on me. So the ROG Ally came out a year ago as like a Steam Deck, but worse in almost every way, except that it had a better screen, a variable refresh rate screen. It has since been surpassed by the Steam Deck OLED, which has an OLED screen that goes 90 hertz.

3:31:35I'm going to stop getting into the weeds. But they're coming out with a new version of that later this month that will have a doubled battery in it and all kinds of other creature comforts. It'll be more comfortable to hold in the year since they shipped the original ROG Ally. The UI has gotten a little bit better. It's smoother. Like Tom Warren likes his. I think he might prefer that over the Steam Deck. He is a notorious Windows fanboy. That's why he doesn't count. I think it's going to be very possibly the first Windows handheld that I can recommend because they've gotten so many things right, but it fundamentally still runs Windows.

3:32:14And Microsoft has not improved Windows in any meaningful way in the year and a half, two years since Steam Deck came out. They could, though, right? Like we've been hearing a lot of rumors that they're going to introduce some sort of Xbox handheld in the next couple of years. that will very likely run on Windows because technically the Xbox runs on that. There's like the opportunity. I feel like a lot like, remember when AMD was having its big resurgence, NVIDIA was the game GPU. And then AMD was like, we're going to start doing this again. And the difference was NVIDIA actually did software and made the games work really, really well, whereas AMD didn't for at least a year or two.

3:32:50That's where the Windows handhelds are. No one's done those really important software tweaks. So the Steam Deck is better. But Microsoft would have to be like, we're going to ship a different OS on it. We're going to ship a version of Windows that's so stripped down, you don't recognize it as Windows anymore. Look, if it opens EA Origins, then like, I'm fine. EA is one of the Achilles of the Steam Deck. You brought up FIFA. FIFA. EA games will notoriously, particularly if you need online, they will just break on Steam Deck because EA does not give a shit about Valve's handheld. And they'll just like change their stupid mandatory like DRM app all the time.

3:33:26It used to be called Origin. Now it's like EA up. And games will just break there on Steam Deck. But everything else works pretty good. But they do participate in cloud gaming. Most of their stuff is available on the various cloud gaming platforms. And all of those work on the Steam Deck. And you can get them up and running pretty quickly. And then not have to constantly go into the Linux backend to tweak them. Just the one time. Meaning I could do Steam Deck plus Game Pass and solve my problem? Yes. Is this a good idea? Yeah, you could do that. You can stream your Sony PS4 from there so you don't have to sit in front of it to play The Last of Us.

3:34:03Oh, yeah. You can stream your Xbox and your PlayStation and Cloud to the Steam Deck. It does all these things. I'm glad you brought this up because this is a thing I have deeply investigated and have come up with. It is just a terrible nightmare that I will not subject myself to. There are things about remote streaming your own console that are really great. and they immediately fall apart as soon as you get anywhere outside of your house like it just doesn't yeah do you do you need to play thief outside your house i do like for me honestly the the two biggest things i'm trying to solve in switching from this console on my desk to the handheld is i want to play other places in my house than at this desk which is a victory for console streaming and i want to play when i travel in part because i'm addicted to this game and it's set up in such a way that the mechanics are if you don't play every day it's actually kind of like it's a real problem as i'm describing this but this is where i'm at in life and the console streaming thing is great for the first thing like i can i can sit upstairs on my couch and play my ps4 on like an ipad and it actually works passably well total non-starter trying to stream any stuff over the internet i just it's just not even worth it this goes for all streaming yeah all streaming breaks down once you leave your house because you no longer have control over making sure you have a good internet connection.

3:35:21If you're out there like on 5G, if you have a great 5G signal and nobody else in the node is using it right then, yeah, you can have a great streaming experience. But I would sit, I would sit in, you know, a hospital waiting room or out in a cafe and I'd be using that, that Razer device, which could only really do cloud streaming. And I would have a beautiful streaming experience that would drop out five minutes later and be completely unplayable over and over and over again. I had that experience with cloud gaming, with a good cloud gaming service like GeForce Now, great service, this connection would not maintain that.

3:35:53Now, if you're talking about going over to a friend's house, which your friend also has amazing internet at home, and you want to stream from Xbox Cloud there, great. That could work great. I was just assuming that David has a hotspot with him at all time that gives him brilliant internet 90 % of the time. To be honest, I do a lot. It's called an iPad Pro with cell connection, and it's actually an unbelievably great hotspot. The problem is, I'll give you the worst case scenario for my own gaming usage is on an Amtrak train from DC to New York. And at that point, realistically, what I need is games I can play offline, right?

3:36:29Which I think just rules out full reliance on game streaming services. Like, I actually, this is why I'm compelled by the combination of Steam Deck and Game Pass. Like, I can do mostly online stuff. And like, I have, I don't need to be able to play FIFA online while I'm on Amtrak Wi-Fi. That's like not possible in the world that we live in. So I'm fine with that. But I need to be able to do something on that thing when I have crappy connection. And the idea of just having like a brick in my hands when the Wi-Fi is bad feels bad. I do have one other suggestion, and it is actually even more basic than the Steam Deck.

3:37:04And it's a Switch. I'm glad you brought this up. It's like the Steam Deck gives you all of the customization and gives you it's like a Swiss Army knife. the switch is like just a really good k-bar like it's good for one thing and that's playing the games that nintendo is okay with you playing on it and one of those games is is ea sports fc 24 the dumbest name game in soccer but you're still not going to play it online on the amtrak right no but so i have almost landed there except and and kranz i'm glad you brought this up because i want to know what you guys think right now feels like a stupid time to buy a switch it feels like the end of a switch cycle they have already talked about the next one like the switch by all accounts is still very good but this feels like a ridiculous time to buy a switch it is absolutely the end of the switch cycle they're they're delaying it a little bit they're not like they don't want to come out right away and do switch tube they're biding their time uh probably because they want to get some great software lined up for it and i imagine that that software if you want to play Metroid Prime 4 or whatever the next game is that Nintendo does, it probably won't work as well on the current Switch because the current Switch is not only seven years old in terms of its processing power, but also was already weak to begin with.

3:38:20Like when you played Zelda Breath of the Wild on day one on the Switch and you go to the forest where the Master Sword is, like it's choppy. It was choppy then. It was choppy seven years ago, you know? I was like, FIFA will look like a bunch of potatoes are on a big green field. But you'll know what those potatoes are and you'll be able to control all the little potatoes. So like if the control of the potatoes is important and not how they look, the Switch could be enough. Because there's a lot of good deals right now because there's a ton of different ones. Like I just recently picked up the new Zelda one because somebody left it on a plane and I bought it at a thrift store.

3:38:57Have you played the new Zelda yet? I have. So I actually have an OG Switch and it worked great and I loved it very much. And then it got to the point where literally the battery lasts like six minutes. Like it's fine. The thing is seven years old. I got a lot of love out of it. I used it for a long time and it just basically doesn't work anymore. And so now it's just like a pretty yellow thing that sits over there. Do not trade that in because if it's an original Switch that the battery is six minutes, it also means that it is hackable and you can do fun things with it and it is worth money. So.

3:39:28Deal. Okay, well, that's David's side business in selling old gadgets is a whole other thing you and I should do on this show, Sean. So yeah, so I think one of the outcomes I'm afraid of is that the answer is just wait a year because there's going to be a new switch and they might fix Windows and maybe we'll get the Xbox thing. And it feels like in a weird way, we're in like a bad middle zone between good things. No, you need to get the Steam Deck with OLED and just be done and happy. I think what you need to do is you need to unlock a mountain of amazing PC games you've been missing that are incredibly cheap and brilliant and beautiful and run on this handheld with an amazing screen.

3:40:09That's what you need to do. And it's also hackable. Sean, I gave you one game, one game that I need to play. And you're telling me that I can have everything I want except the one game that I need to play. If you want to play Fortnite on there, it doesn't do that either. So unless you're going to stream that. I literally, I almost wrote down that the two games were Fortnite and FIFA. And I decided I can live without Fortnite because there are other good, David has an hour to kill battle royale games out there. I could take or leave Fortnite at this point in my life. I was like, you can just use your iPad.

3:40:38That is true. So let me float another idea by you, which is that I, instead of buying one thing, I buy several things. And I just acknowledge that at least for this next phase of my life, the right thing to do is get a ps5 and a ps portal for my house projects and then i get a steam deck for travel i have just quadrupled the amount of money that this is costing is this the outcome don't do that save your money just get like never ever ever ever ever buy a portal unless you just have zero computer skills if you have none whatsoever if all you do if you like struggle to turn your phone on get the psp portal people love the portal there there are people who love the portal it is selling really well i would never touch one uh except to like to have the knowledge of having touched one uh because the steam deck has an app on it and the app is the PS portal.

3:41:40Yeah, that's... In an app for your Steam Deck, basically. It's called Chiaki. Chiaki for deck, and it works great. Just make sure your PS5 or PS4 has an Ethernet cable plugged into it, or it will not work very well. Okay. Don't get the PS Portal, because that's for, like, that's for people who love to game and don't have a lot of computer skills. And so they're like, okay, I just need to go play right now. And that's great, but, like, you spend a little bit more money, you get the Steam Deck, you spend a little extra your time and you have just way more capability okay all right so let me let me play out this scenario so what's happening here is i i'm going to make sure that my playstation streaming setup is as good as possible i'm going to make sure that i have an ethernet port i'm gonna i'm gonna plug my playstation into the euro gateway and not the euro in the basement i'm gonna i'm gonna make sure that my internet connection for my playstation is as good as possible tbd on whether that's going to be a PS4 or PS5.

3:42:39We're going to see how poor I feel at the end of this episode. But that essentially becomes my dedicated FIFA machine, which is an absurd place to have landed. But again, here we are. If you've already got the PS4, I mean, why not? So that I'm relegating this thing to being my FIFA machine. And then I'm going to download the app you just said for the Steam Deck for when I want to play FIFA. And I'm going to play FIFA on the Steam Deck through my PlayStation, which seems ludicrous, but you're telling me will kind of sort of work as long as I have very good internet. It'll work great. Inside your house.

3:43:09Remote is theoretically possible, but you'll play it in your house, realistically. So that's my solution to the how do I play on my couch instead of in the basement problem. Great. For everything else, I'm just going to broaden my horizons and play less FIFA and play more other games. Is this what you're telling me? This is where I need to land? I feel like you can find a really good FIFA clone, but they all have swords or something. I feel like this exists. Someone's made this game in alpha. So what is ironically possible is that because EA Sports FC is no longer called FIFA, somebody else is making a FIFA game and maybe that FIFA game will be on a Steam Deck, which will solve all of my problems all at once.

3:43:50This is what I'm hoping for. Done. And also you will write about this experience, hopefully, for The Verge, and then EA will start taking care of its shit. Okay, so EA, very large company, makes a lot of very popular games. Is there any hope for EA on the Steam Deck ever? Like, should I have any optimism for that to be a thing? The Steam Deck's very popular. What are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, they just break things willy-nilly and they don't think about it. It's not like they don't want money. Yeah, EA is kind of notorious for being one of the worst companies in the United States. Like, I think when Consumerist existed, it was regularly beating cable companies for being the worst.

3:44:25because they put money ahead of usability frequently. And so they could fix it, but I don't think they have a whole lot of interest because most of their players, the bulk of their audience is on the Switch. It's on the PlayStation. Okay, one other Steam Deck question. The one other thing I forgot to mention is I do want to be able to plug this thing into a large screen and play it. I don't think that's the most common use case for me, but I do want to be able to sit in front of a television and play it like a console as I normally would. And for me with the Switch, I have done that way less than I expected because you have to have such specific hardware to pull that off.

3:45:04And like carrying around the dock is annoying. And I bought the little plug thing and that helped, but then I lost that. And so I want something that is a little easier to turn into like a full-fledged console when I want to. Is the Steam Deck good at that? You're still gonna need a little dongle to mirror things. Dongle or dock? Yeah, you're gonna need a dongle or dock. I think the official one's like, what,$100, Sean? It's less. It's, I want to say$70,$80, something like that. But you can buy much cheaper than that. I'd used like an off-the-shelf, like$35 USB-C hub that had HDMI. That worked.

3:45:36I used docs from like JSAW, J-S-A-U-X. Great company with an alphabet soup name, surprisingly. $40,$50. And those docs do all the things you'd want from a doc. It's really easy once you get one of those things to get it up there. The question is, is your TV like 4K and you're expecting 4K visuals from a console that normally plays at 800 because it's not going to look as good on a big 4K TV? I will say, and Liam or producer can vouch for this, the least VergeCast-y thing about me is I don't care all that much about pixel density. So the idea of playing like at, you know, medium settings and having it work OK is completely fine with me.

3:46:13I just heard Neelai screaming. This is the last time you'll ever hear from me on the Vergecast. But that is where I'm at. And especially with something like this, battery life is much more important to me than getting 10 extra frames per second. And so I think, again, the customizability of the Steam Deck, to be able to dial that up and down as I want it, seems useful. You want a Steam Deck OLED. Like, get the Steam Deck OLED. Every once in a while, you'll plug it into the TV. You'll be like, oh, I did it. This looks kind of shitty. And then you'll unplug it and go back to the really pretty OLED display and be very happy.

3:46:47I do suspect my Switch experience has been that I set it up in such a way that it was going to be really easy to dock. It was going to be great. And then most of the time, I would sit on my couch in front of the TV and just play on my lap. And I would assume the Steam Deck will end up being kind of the same way. Yep. It's so good. We'll watch some shows together with my wife, and I'll have my hand held out and get to do some gaming at the same time. It's great. Okay. Are there any other crazy wildcard possibilities coming that we know of that might win? You mentioned the Rogali-X seems like a possible improvement, if not sort of equal to the Steam Deck.

3:47:24Is there anything else on the horizon that in three months I'm going to be like, oh, this is the one I needed? I don't think so, but there are two very different directions you could go, and I don't have one of them here in front of me. But one of them is a 10.1-inch laptop with, like, keys that actually feel good, full-size SD card reader. You could actually shove the SD card all the way inside. We've got full-size USB-A ports. It has more ports than a MacBook. USB-C ports. There's an Oculink port, HDMI. It is your dock built into it. And then you take these little things off and you've got joysticks, a D-pad, and even this menu button in the center acts like an Xbox button, which for some reason none of the other Windows handhelds have.

3:48:10And this thing is way expensive. I mean, it's twice the price of your Steam Deck. It costs more than any of the other handhelds, but it doubles as a laptop that has the power of one of those other gaming handhelds and a decent-sized battery, all this stuff. But Sean, how is it to play? It is a laptop first and a game handheld second. It's such a perfect gadget because that is both the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I want it so bad. Yeah, right? It's beautiful. It's like, what if instead of the touch bar, we just put a PlayStation controller in pieces? Like, I love it. I can't get over the boss mode.

3:48:49Like, you got this thing and you're like, no, I can't show my gamepad at work. Let's take this little metal. Let's take this little slip of metal out of the back of the thing and drop it on top. Boss mode. It's a physical boss mode. Yeah. OK. Moving on from that. OK. So your other possibility is you could embrace you could embrace software piracy and you could buy one of these things, which looks like a Game Boy Advance SP. This is the Enberneck thing, but actually just comes with thousands of pirated games. and so you could play all your Game Boy Advance and PlayStation games on this. Maybe you'd delete the pirated games first and dump your own ROMs or something like that.

3:49:29As I always do. As you do, yes. I feel like Anabricks already gonna get wrecked for you just saying, yeah, it comes with all of the pirated games on it. Every time Sean talks about one of these, there was, I think you did a TikTok, Sean, talking about the new Anabricks thing and every single comment was like, Sean, be cool, man. Stop telling people about me. Give me my free game. It really was. TikTok shop. is all over this thing. It's been snitched on enough. Just to illustrate, though, that the EA FIFA game is not a Steam Deck problem. The top comment on EA Sports FC 24 is EA FC 24 not launching on PC after anti-cheat back to EA.

3:50:08So it's not a Steam Deck thing so much as it is an EA doesn't care thing. Interesting. Okay. So it truly is. EA is like, there are ways you could get around the rules that we have so we're just taking our ball and going home yep that doesn't feel like it's getting better anytime soon that that does not give me hope for the for improvements coming here which also means listen there's there's a lot of sports games this means i can't play anymore but now i'm gonna have to get into like cool nerd games it's gonna be great you can play them streaming that's true steam deck plus game pass i think is starting to feel like the realist answer i have here you'll have halo and fifa like you will be the the hit of every frat party you go to okay last question and then and then we have to go uh-huh am i stupid for buying a steam deck right now in the same way that i might be stupid for buying a switch right now where are we in the steam deck cycle we're fine right we're mid yeah we're mid cycle we're not late yet the thing that The thing that Valve needs, they've told us, like told me to my face.

3:51:10What they need to see is they need to see a major improvement in performance without sacrificing battery life from a chip manufacturer before they start building the next true Steam Deck. And I've heard this from other companies, too, like Asus with the ROG LIX. They were like, we don't think we can get it right now, so we're going to ship the ROG LIX with the same chip. And I don't think Qualcomm has changed that calculus at all with the Snapdragon. And even if it has, we're a ways away from that actually appearing inside of a product. Yeah, I think we're probably a good, we're at least a year out.

3:51:44I think you'll have one beautiful, blissful year before you get FOMO, at least. Okay. And that's, I mean, honestly, in gadget world, that's all you can ask for. It's like a year is an eternity in gadget world. I mean, listen, I've made it this far into the PS5 cycle without upgrading. It turns out I can manage my FOMO on this one. I am so impressed. Thank you. That's actually the other question I should ask. Am I being ridiculous? Should I just buy a PS5 and move on with my life? Ooh. I mean, if you have infinite money, yes. If I buy a PS5, I almost certainly will end up buying a Portal. And I hate myself for it, but it will probably happen.

3:52:23Then I say don't, because I want to save you from the Portal. You could buy a used Steam Deck LCD for the price of a Portal and also have a portal built into it with an app. Oh, well, that's very compelling. But PS5, like, if you do love that I'm sitting on my couch with my 4K OLED TV experience, it's hard to beat the PS5 for that. I'm playing Spider-Man 2 on it right now, and just a gorgeous new OLED panel that was deep discounted recently. And wow, the pop of that city, the lights at night, it's really something. Yeah, and I do love that, but I think I am increasingly coming around to like having a thing with me is more important than the sort of very best possible experience i would love to have both but i don't think you can really have both right now in the world we live in and if you if you really want to have that thing with you i don't think there's anything that beats the steam deck there's just so much you can now take with you that you can't the same way through the windows handhelds you can't really with android all right well we have ended where we began uh which i find very frustrating but also sort of telling i'm gonna buy a steam deck yeah i probably should have bought a steam deck a really long time ago uh i'm gonna buy a steam deck and i i will start yelling loudly at ea i will report back i'm so excited for you everybody's excited about the ea though do you have any immediate setup tips before we talk again i will have purchased a steam deck what what should i do immediately out of the box with my brand new steam deck oled i have so many nerdy suggestions i don't want nerdy suggestions sean i say this with love i want to i want to get to like playing games well as quickly and seamlessly as possible like i am worried about the steam deck because i'm worried it's so fidgety and finicky that i'm going to spend my whole life goofing with the joysticks and not playing games so steam deck has this like on the steam deck they have compatibility for games and you can also see it on the steam software so like you can just go download steam ahead of time find some games you like make sure they're compatible and then it'll be just out of the box ready to go anything that's like yellow or red, you'll have to mess with a little bit.

3:54:25That's where you have to start tweaking things. Like I try to play Crusader Kings on it. Don't. That's it's not for the Steam Deck. It's terrible. There's even a tab in the store where you can just like only show me games that work well with the Steam Deck. And for the most part, they do. Yeah. And it's a lot of stuff, right? Like it's a ton of stuff. The ones that don't is stuff that's like Mass Effect, which is an EA game. So you know why it doesn't work well. I will say the other game in my life that I have loved with my whole heart the way that I have loved FIFA with my whole heart is Portal.

3:54:56And the idea of having a Steam thing that will let me play the Portal games forever is very exciting. And it will just straight out of the box, you'll be off to the races having a great time. Yeah, it really is so easy to just get going on the Steam Deck, provided you already own games. Elden Ring plays well there. Ori and the Will of the Wisps, if you haven't played that yet, play that on the DecoLid. Oh my god, it looks brilliant on the DecoLid. That game is made for HDR. Persona 5. Have you played any Persona games? Bits and pieces, but never super deeply. Okay. Get Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal, whichever one is better for your budget.

3:55:33Play that on Steam Deck. It's epic. We could spend the rest. You've spent another hour talking about games to play on. Yeah, I was about to say, have you played Final Fantasy Remake yet? Like, beautiful on Steam Deck. Okay. All right. My list is long and none of them are the only game that I need it. But, you know, we're doing the best we can here. You can get FIFA 23 fairly easily on the Steam Deck. Okay, that might help. Maybe that's like my gateway drug out of being obsessed with FIFA. I'll just play old games enough to satiate me and then go play better games. You get Ted Lasso in that one.

3:56:06You'll be fine. All right. Thank you both. This was very helpful. I'm going to go spend a bunch of money. Great.

3:56:19it. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Alex Kranz is on a break, but for our first segment, Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop is right. Hey, Charlie. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. We have a lot of AI, music, copyright to talk about. There's some lawsuits. As always, Drake is involved. That just seems to be the way of the world. There's a bunch of new phone events coming that just got announced we should talk about. There are new party speakers from Ultimate Ears. That's very important to me. And we've got a lightning round. We've got a full show before the 4th of July. This is America's technology podcast.

3:56:55But before we begin, I have to issue a correction. There are some words that I only read and I never say out loud. Ooh, which one is it? There are lots of those words, tons of them. I was a small, nerdy child in the middle of Wisconsin who read a lot of books that the other children in Wisconsin were not interested in. Just a whole universe of vocabulary words. What is your main one from when you were a kid? That you were 26 and all of a sudden... I feel like Chameleon is the classic of the genre. Oh, that's a good one. Where half the people in the world grew up thinking it was Chameleon. For me, it was learning that Hermione's name is Hermione and not Hermian.

3:57:36Oh, that's good. however many books i read before i saw the movie did you guys have these that you grew up with um i still way late i still don't know whether it's dearth or darth and i don't want to find out fair enough don't email us about it don't tell me don't i don't and i don't know if it means a lot or not enough on switched on pop we have an ongoing uncertainty about whether it is homage or homage that's good we have been written many emails that it's both and so we've refused to use the word from now on uh niche and niche very confusing both acceptable also have been told it's both so there's a lot of these yeah one of them in recent times is risk five which is i would say not a thing that comes up in casual conversation for anyone even the people who are working on risk five.

3:58:31Pryant just walked around the office saying risk five. I said it was risk V the other day. All right. I'm sorry. I mean, this is your correction. You got one on me. I apologize. I don't know what kind of slash dot nerds are reading it out loud. I mean, you're my people and you're listening and you know, like we have a bond here. You're listening to a podcast in which the word is said out loud. And you, the audience know that I've mispronounced. There's something special there. precious i want to protect it i'm just saying we are the only people who know how do you know they're right and that you aren't now also also good question charlie am i being gaslit by an internet conspiracy i would also like to posit that with all roman numerals the the letter and the number are both correct like when the iphone 10 came out and it was the iphone x it was the iphone x i don't care what anyone said i got a lot of crap for that and it was the iphone x because it was it was the iphone and then the letter x you call it whatever you want i i submit that both should be allowed at all times so i would i i support this in theory it's super bowl unless it's more than one letter then well no but super bowl xl like they obviously were a kite for it right yeah they did a thing that's your moment but i was one of those slash dot nerds who was like it's mac os 10 so i'm sorry like i you know even though it's not it's osx anyway that's your correction i'm just telling you what we what we share as a group is special and i'm sorry that i pushed the boundary of it but i'm also saying no one says these words out loud it's just not a thing that happens and i feel nothing all right xcx has entered the chat what is the what is xcx in numbers it isn't a real one isn't c in roman numeral c is 100 so that would be 100 it would be 90 and then 10 more and it's just charlie c i think i don't know how roman numerals work um uh speaking of uh things that are bad math ai um That's true.

4:00:42That's good. That's good. Big week in the AI landscape. A weird week for me emotionally. I'll explain why in a second. The major labels have sued two AI companies that you may or may not have heard of, UDO and Suno. These are classic Silicon Valley names. We should all be proud. They're music companies. They're AI music companies. UDO is the company whose tool was used to make BBL Drizzy. We'll have Charlie explain that entire chain of events. And then Suno has a deal with Microsoft. It's in Copilot and you can ask it to generate music in Copilot. How would you train an AI tool to make music, you might ask, as did the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America?

4:01:22And the answer is you just put a bunch of music in them and you train the model on a bunch of music, including what appears to be a remarkable amount of the recording industry's music, not just music that's out in the world. The companies are sued. There's a lawsuit that RAA is mad. The RAA is already mad. They say that they asked the companies what was used to train the models. The companies, Suno deflected and said their training data was confidential business information. It's fine. UDO made the same statements. And then Suno also said, our stuff is transformative and designed to generate completely new outputs, not memorize and regurgitate preexisting content.

4:02:04We'll get to that in a second because that is actually a very funny claim based on what you can do. The RAA put tracks in lawsuit, which we will listen to. It straightforwardly can just make Johnny be good in a song called Prancing Queen, which is deeply hilarious. uh there's just a part of this where these companies knew that what they were doing was training on copyrighted work and they kind of assumed that they would get away with it or at least be able to like pay the money and move on can i ask a can i ask a very possibly dumb framing question about this uh because i want we're going to get into the weeds of like a very specific music case but a lot of what you just described the sort of basic outlines of like how these companies trained their data and what they're being accused of doing and who's mad feels identical to me to every other conversation we've had about these ai models right like it seems to me that if you change uh johnny b good and suno to the new york times and chat gpt we're functionally talking about the same thing so like i want to get into the deep into this in in weird ways but like is there something different about the fact that we're doing this with music than the fact the way we've been doing this with like the web for the last year or so?

4:03:21Yes. And it's that the music industry is organized and aggressive when it comes to protecting its rights. So the difference is lawyers. The difference is lawyers. And also the history of music and the internet is lawyers. Like the reason I'm so conflicted about this is that I went and became a copyright lawyer because Napster came out when I was in college and I was radicalized because I thought everyone I'm a stupid, which is what should happen when software comes out when you're in college. I'm assuming there are some kids out there today who are radicalized by the presence of new software. But that – for me, it was Napster.

4:03:59I went off and became a copyright attorney. I sucked at it. I don't ever want anyone to think I was good at this. As a practicing attorney, I was garbage. But the thing I did was I worked at a law firm that defended other college kids who got sued for using Kazaa against the RIAA. And the RIAA was suing college kids and actually suing the universities to get the IP address of the college kids on their networks who are using the tools and then identifying the college students and suing the college students. It was my roommate's computer. It wasn't me. I swear. It's just like a lot, right? That's just a lot.

4:04:30Like the universities are caving and not protecting their students. All this stuff is happening. And they were running this program at Breakeven. They just wanted$5 ,000 settlement so everyone would be scared and stop doing it. And they won. That worked. Sort of. Now we're back to it, right? But like the movie industry is not quite as good. It's stopping the piracy as the music industry was. And they ran that program to kind of shut it down and chill Napster and Grokster and Kazan and all the other ones. They ran Grokster all the way up to the Supreme Court. That decision is 20 years old now, the RAA versus Grokster.

4:05:03Great. Then they did the iTunes store and they got deals with Steve Jobs and then other music stores. And then they did Spotify and Apple Music and streaming. And all along the way, they have been extraordinarily litigious and extraordinarily protective of their copyrights because people have an emotional connection to music that they can trade on. This is true in a way that even Hollywood doesn't. Like when Disney is like, we must protect the copyright to the Avengers, people are like, go fuck yourself. Like in a way that the music industry, when it's like you're stealing music, you are making it so artists don't get paid.

4:05:34There's an emotional resonance that argument tends to have. Charlie, I'm curious how you see that changing over time. But they've been good at it and they've run the playbook over and over and over again. Music is also a closed ecosystem of like four big companies. And so you see things like interpolation where an artist uses a bit of a song from another artist and fans get mad and then writing credits get distributed and money flows inside of a closed ecosystem. None of that is true about the web. None of that is true about the media. So if you are a writer at a media company, nothing. Like no one cares.

4:06:11Like there's not some big apparatus designed to make it seem like your work is emotionally resonant and should be protected in the way that the music industry does. So I think that's a huge difference here. The other difference, and this is where I really try – I'm very curious for your take here, is that the outputs of these systems are just the songs, right? And the lawsuits are about training, right? All copyright lawsuit – all copyright is dumb. like it's a dumb legal system because it just regulates copies and so they're like you made a copy to do this thing and you didn't have the permission to do the thing with the copy that you made so copyright infringement weird all computers do is make copies we've talked about this so many times in the show so they're not talking about the outputs but I think the outputs are so convincing like in order to get to the thing can just make Johnny B.

4:07:05Goode it is obvious that you made a copy of Johnny B. Goode Charlie, what do you think? I feel like the music industry is the one place that copyright becomes part of public conversation in a very frequent way. People talk about when Pharrell is borrowing from Marvin Gaye. People talk about when Stairway to Heaven might have been copied by another song. People constantly are debating in social media. Hey, you kind of sound like you borrowed this other person's thing. They should get a credit on it. There's no thing in journalism where someone's like, hey, you know, Neil, I kind of use someone else's text.

4:07:41Maybe we should give David some extra credit on that piece that Neil plagiarized. I'm sorry. I'm obviously not accusing you. I do that all the time. I don't think specifically Neil does that all the time. I have God mode Google Docs access and I just lift everybody's copy left and right. There's just no other creative industry where there's this level of actual infringement that happens that then there is this internal litigious system where these major players are constantly trading credits back and forth. And the public is in on it, often debating whether or not the artist that they stan is making original work.

4:08:17This is part of popular discourse, and it happens in music. So it's really different when the music industry is going after AI than if the New York Times is because I've just never been in a circumstance where I'm talking about that article was completely lifted from this other article. But we constantly talk about is so-and-so writing their own songs. Right. I'll give you a dumb example from movies. The movie The Dark Knight is basically an interpolation of the movie Heat, except for Batman. Yeah. Right. Like many of the shots are the same. Christopher Nolan is out there being like, Heat is the greatest Cops and Robbers movie ever made.

4:08:51I just wanted to make Heat, but with Batman. And then you watch both movies. They're like, oh, shit. Dude just made Heat with Batman. And that's great. And I think everyone's like, this is the best. This is so cool. And then you get to, I don't know, Miley Cyrus is writing Flowers, which the lyrics just reference Bruno Mars. Bruno Mars. And people are like, should she have to pay Bruno Mars? It's like, why? Why? why like the melodies aren't like they she's just saying some of the same words right but the expectation is that there should be some economic exchange of value well and i would i would think then that the existence of that exchange of value is also how you get to something like this right where it's it's not just everybody's sort of yelling and then nothing ever happens it's that we actually have a system by which this gets solved right where where we have people get songwriting credits and then they get paid for it and there's like the music industry has built ways for all of this to work and like you said is very good at picking fights with those who do not play inside of that system and so like now i'm just thinking okay the difference between the music industry and uh the the others who are fighting against open ai and others like just groups of authors or whatever is not only does the music industry have a system by which it understands how everybody is supposed to get paid that has existed for a long time and everybody kind of sort of understands but also is able to marshal that whole system against anyone who wants to exist outside of that and part of what we've been saying forever is like all the money is on the side of the ai companies like who who is going to be able to run a lawsuit against google all the way to the end uh and there probably aren't that many creative industries other than the music industry that might be able to do it they've done it before yeah they have one major concession we wouldn't have content id if not for music labels going after youtube right and they and the music labels have gone after youtube right universal this is where drake gets involved there's fake drake that we've we've talked about endlessly on the show shout out to laser bong a song that has been just aggressively censored from a every major platform boy does tiktok not want electronic music about bongs on its platform sue about that record labels like you want to talk about government censorship yeah all right the chinese government is like no bongs for american teens just saying it um the piece of that puzzle that's super interesting to me is universal was mad about fake drake they went to spotify apple they said don't have these don't have this song and spotify and apple control the catalogs and their music service they could pull down YouTube is open access, right?

4:11:30So anyone can upload anything. And then there is content ID and they have these other copyright management systems on YouTube. But it's not the same catalog control where you can just delete the song the way that Spotify and Apple Music can just delete the song. So they had to come up with some other system. And YouTube did give the concessions, right? They put out a list of like AI principles they would work on about safety, about this other stuff. And a lot of it was we're going to work directly with Universal and the rest of the music industry to figure out what tools are valuable and what tools aren't.

4:11:56And even to allow some creators to like do some of this AI music generation because we think it's cool. And then obviously we'll figure out how to pay them. This is implicit. If you're like co-announcing that tool with universal music, universal music is going to get paid. Yes. Like the heat death of the universe could occur and Lucian Grange, the CEO of universal music, would get paid. Like he's good at it. Yes. These two companies did not do that. There's a quote from one of the VCs in Suno, a Rolling Stone profile from March. He just says to Rolling Stone, if we had deals with the labels when the company got started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it.

4:12:30I think they needed to make this product without the constraints. Wild thing to say out loud. Incredible thing to say out loud. He said the quiet thing out loud because behind all of this, they haven't ever really quite publicly admitted that they are using copyrighted works. They've talked around that in every way they possibly can without denying it. And this is sort of like the big – yeah, this is the smoking gun. Right. And then the other smoking gun, and this is probably just listen to some of this music, is the output of the models themselves, which is, I mean, let's listen to it and we can talk about it.

4:13:04David, take us through it. Okay, I have brought some sound. Thank you to Andrew and Liam for getting all of this together. We have three examples, and I will just roll through all three. Stop me when you have feelings about this. uh the first thing we'll do is uh this is just titled real chuck berry so let's just listen to this verse by the way and this is all fair use no copyright infringement intended all right youtube all right go ahead

4:13:36sure

4:13:43all right that's enough stop before the robot sensors arrive great song i can confirm All right. That is it. If you don't know that song, one, go watch Back to the Future. Incredible movie that you should just watch. And two, like stop, go get cultured. Johnny B. Good, Chuck Berry. Yeah. Founder of rock and roll. One of them. Yeah. And now we have a song from Udeo, which is not called Johnny B. Good, but just listen. But he can play and get power just like a ring in a bell. Go, go. Go, Johnny, go. Go. Go Johnny, go Go Go Johnny, go Go Go Johnny, go So that one is not a copyright infringement Just on its face You can't You can't copyright the AI work Okay, so that's one Next we have I just want to ask Charlie A hard question, Charlie's a professor of music At NYU, I believe, right?

4:14:43Yes All right, professor, let's say you didn't have Johnny B. Good in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of rock and roll that is built on Johnny B. Good. Could you back your way into Johnny B. Good? Monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare, right? Is that the theory here? Do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of rock and roll? It's a really good question because if you look at this era of music where R &B, rock and roll are sort of like rockabilly are all kind of one entity, the music is drawing on 12-bar blues, a very standard song structure.

4:15:22They're often in the same keys that play well on guitar. They're using a lot of the same kind of guitar licks. They're mostly using pentatonic scales. They're using a lot of the same language. And you might think, yeah, you could just sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words, let's be clear. The copy is worse. It does not sound nearly as good as the real Johnny B. Goode. You could never get to that same place without having heard that Johnny B. Goode. I feel confident. And if these two songs, one being a real song and the other being nobody owns the copyright and it's made by an AI, if there were a copyright case made against the copy, it would definitively lose.

4:16:05i i have the many of these cases many of these music copyright cases are not clear they're often fought over eight notes sometimes six notes sometimes a general feel in the case of blurred lines and i got to give it up this is a direct copy of the rhythm and the words and most of the melodies so no you had to have heard this song in order to uh make johnny be good twice by the way If you want more on eight notes and how complicated it is, Charlie and I did an entire episode of Decoder pulling that apart. We'll link that in the show notes somewhere. But let's move on. Let's listen to the next one.

4:16:39It's very good. All right. Next up, we have James Brown. First, real James Brown. Wow! I feel good. I knew that I wouldn't. I feel good. I knew that I wouldn't. I mean, the classic. An old timer. another one where if you're listening to the virtual chest and you've never heard this like i don't know what you're doing yeah go listen to switch song yeah exactly you need it very badly go to school and then come on come on home and now we have ai james brown wow i feel good i knew that i would not so good okay so this one i actually think is very fun because it it is a little it's like a little tiny bit further away from it in the way that The first one just is Johnny B.

4:17:35Good, but worse. This one is like one tiny tick further away from being just the thing. This is a lounge band with pretension where everyone's like, just play it the way that – can you stop it? All right. Like we get it. You thought you had something. I have one question about this, and it actually felt the same way about Johnny B. Good. The way these models work, right, is you ingest a bunch of data into them. They set a bunch of model weights and then they like statistically make the next bit, right? They're just sort of like assembling the thing around the prompt, which means they're kind of just assembling ones and zeros to make a sound wave here, which is pretty wild if you think about it.

4:18:15Like that makes sense with words, right? What is statistically the next word in the sentence around this prompt? When you get to like what are the ones and zeros of a sound file and you get to statistically here are the next ones and zeros, that's pretty weird. It's actually a pretty weird way to make an audio recording. And the thing that strikes me about these, this one in particular, but the other one a little bit, the instruments don't sound real at all to me. Those horns sound so fake. Not like synthesizer fake. No. But almost exactly like what you would expect if you asked a computer to statistically produce a horn section.

4:18:50Like it's almost – play it again. Just listen to it. It's so weird. Wow! I feel good. I knew that I would not.

4:19:02Do you hear how weird and thin it is? I knew that I would not. So good. So good. It doesn't sound like an ensemble of horns. It sounds like this weird synthesized thing where the beginning of the sound and the end of the sound is exactly lined up. The sound is, yeah, there's this artifacting quality to it. But this is like the Pope's jacket version of sound. Yes. It's like you got it close, but all the lines are wrong. Why does he have seven fingers? Right. It's a statistical approximation of a hand. Right. But as expressed as a horn section, which is really weird, like just on its face. And you can, you know, people are like, it'll get better and blah, blah, blah.

4:19:43But like you can to me, you can hear a meaningful difference once you know what you're listening for. And it's like, oh, this is a fake instrument. And it's not a fake instrument the way its synthesizer is a fake instrument. It's just fake. Like it doesn't make any sense. Over the top of all of it right now, I don't know if this is a solvable problem. I imagine it probably is, is that everything sounds kind of grainy. There's this top-level hiss kind of over the entire recording of any AI output. It sounds maybe equivalent to, Neelai, those files that you were not downloading in college. but like the really low bit rate mp3s when mp3s were actually noticeably worse yeah that's what these sound like all of them have this artificial sheen on top that sound very lo-fi yeah in addition to artificial instruments just a side note i can't listen to the song in between days by the cure without mentally inserting the weird compression artifacts at the high end because i listened to a shit mp3 of that song so many times that the symbols are just forever distorted in my brain There's literally a plug-in and guitar pedal called Lossy that is made to recreate the sound of early 2000s MP3s.

4:20:56That's very good. So if you need it, I can run it for Lossy. It's just the elder millennial button, basically. So that's the sound. Yeah. Talk about the actual music here. Is this – would Johnny be good. You're like, that's straight cop-air infringement. This is weird, right? It's like slant rhyme. What do you think? I think that it's the exact same rhythms. I'd have to look at the notes. I think they're quite close. They're the exact if they're in a different key, but they're like the same intervals moving in the same direction at the exact same time. That would almost certainly lose in court.

4:21:30If these were again, it should be clear. The companies are not being sued for the output. yep but these outputs if you were to try to make a case i'm sure a judge would rule in favor of the james brown estate because it is the same line well it's more or less the same it's an interpolation of the line there's slightly different words but it's the same rhythms same melody that almost always is going to uh that's always always going to win and here the the output is proof of the input right they're they're not suing for the output but the output it seems unusually important here in that respect that it's it's like if if udo is doing the thing that it claimed to be doing which is which is transforming stuff into other stuff uh we have a very different kind of fair use case but reading through the raa's lawsuit like the thing they did over and over and over was just go reproduce songs that exist in the world uh yeah and that's how we're fighting about training like i went through and pulled a bunch of the prompts that they used to get songs we did the same thing they're so funny they're so funny like to get uh to get the green day song i think it was american idiot the prompt is pop punk american alternative rock california 2004 rob cavallo perfect uh to get and that produced a pastiche of american idiot yes amazing to get my girl by the temptations it was my tempting 1964 girl smoky sing hits fill soul pop got my girl by the temptations uh this one you'll enjoy neil i uh to get all i want for christmas is you by mariah carey my prompt is mariah carey but with a space between each letter so that it's not because presumably these things are trained to throw out artist names uh so it's m space a space all the way through the name contemporary holiday grammy award-winning american singer-songwriter remarkable vocal range that produced all i want for christmas is you uh i mean so what they're proving is that it's in set by the argument in response that i'm sure we're going to hear because this is the argument opening i made about the times lawsuit was one no human prompts like this and b these prompts are so weird they represent a hack of our system which is remarkable uh but i'm confident based on how open ai replied to the times that that is what these companies will reply there is one very good one uh that the prompt was create a song by an artist that rhymes with truce string bean that produced a bruce springsteen song that's very good fantastic so that question i asked charlie about the do you if you have the entire history of rock and roll do you need the first song right or do you need chuck berry okay maybe you don't maybe you do right like i think this third example is the funniest example because i can't figure how you would get to this without specifically one thing go ahead david i'm glad you agree because i left this for last for precisely this reason so here is uh i won't even spoil it here's the real one yeah okay right everybody's heard it a million times that's our boy that's our boy jd the longest lasting digital career that i never expected to happen and and here here is the ai i just want to say this was created by a prompt on Udeo.

4:24:39This is, in theory, a completely synthetic new work of art. Oh,

4:24:49it's so good. It does sound like a Jason Derulo song. Like, my critique of does this sound like real music aside? It's even got the little, like, vocal riff at the end. Like, it's right on point. Like, does Jason Derulo sound like synthetic music? That's your problem. So this one's interesting, though, because, you know, you've talked a lot about the issue that likeness is not copyrightable. Right. Yeah. And so there's a question of like if we're going back to this hypothetical, there is no suit that's suing over this particular Jason Derulo riff. Someone could just I could say Jason Derulo on a song probably.

4:25:24And it's not you can't copyright that. So you wait. Hold on. Hold on. This is weird. So we have this fight the last time with the Metro Boomin song. So Metro Boomin's producer tag was the copyrightable expression in the fake Drake song. If it's exactly the recording of the tag, though, right? Because the issue was that they actually kept in the sample of the producer tag and reproducing a recording. You can copyright that. So we could start every episode of The Verge Cast with Neelai singing Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo. And we will. I think he probably would have a lot of issues, a lot of nasty letters written to you.

4:26:04I'm saying in terms of ways to boost this podcast profile after 13 years, Jason Derulo suing us is high on my list. That's wonderful. But this definitely proves that you had to have had access. There is no monkeys in the back writing Shakespeare that ends up on Jason Derulo. It just doesn't happen. It's not possible. I don't know. I think if you took the worst impulses of the music industry and fed them into an AI, you might produce Jason Derulo. This one's also important, though, because everything else we've heard has been written by artists pre-Copyright Act of 1974 and probably also reflects some of maybe who the lawyers are writing these cases because we're talking about the cases reference Frank Sinatra, right?

4:26:51And to bring in Bruce Springsteen. Right, it's like Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Chuck Berry. The early ones are all Chuck Berry, like The Temptations. Are you getting it like the judges are old? I'm saying everyone – yeah. And that's actually potentially very advantageous in knowing the judge and who you might go in front of. But then to show that also they're taking all the latest music as well. We're bringing in Jason Derulo. Yes. Judge, have you heard – your honor, are you familiar with Jason Derulo? I want to bring Jason Derulo into the courtroom. Jason Derulo. By the way, another total side note.

4:27:23There's an incredible Katie Notopolis piece about hardcore Jason Derulo stans and what their stan culture is like that I will dig up and put in the show notes. Oh, my gosh. That sounds fun. It is truly one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet. Just because, A, it exists and, B, because Katie is good at finding things like that that exist. Have you all tried running these prompts, by the way? No. Have you? Yeah. You can go to Udio and to Suno and you can run the prompts that these lawsuits are alleging. And you don't get the same songs, obviously, but like if you write make a jazz crooner song about New York, baritone voice, you will definitely get it's Frank Sinatra.

4:28:00There's just like there's no other song. I don't think that that really is hacking the systems. It's really easy. The other thing I get a lot, by the way, are random prompt. Hey, that sounds strangely like Crazy Town by Butterfly. my prompt was actually i tried to make a rap about american founder thomas jefferson crazy town yeah sorry thank you butterfly if there's a band called butterfly that had a song called crazy town that would be perfect in another universe so i do i'm sure there is i tried to i tried i did try to uh hack these systems a little bit and i wrote i want you to write a rap about american founder thomas jefferson about not throwing away his shot nasal male rapper boom bap and what i got was basically Butterfly by Crazy Town.

4:28:46Just like total random. Yeah. Oh, no. Tom Jeff never slept Crafting constitution Slave owner by day Freedom writer by night Hypocrisy thick But the pen game type Oh god Visionary eyes Dreams like fireworks Built in nature But the boots got quirks Creeks run red History people endless But DJ's legacy Straight up contentious Monadella Dallas I'm sorry I'm sorry for listening to this We should talk to you There really is Butterfly by Crazy Town I think it's also a little bit of What was that song? Superman? Yes oh wow who's superman by uh i'll be your kryptonite or whatever that was a kryptonite yeah kryptonite three doors down is that who it's down it is by three doors down it's got a little bit of that it's just you can so easily hear references that are not even the thing that you prompt and i just i have to say that if you right now if you go to the home page of udo the two most popular tracks are exact soundalikes of Eminem and Snoop Dogg.

4:29:48So people are doing this. People are trying to make soundalikes. So the argument from all these companies is, look, training is fair use. And that's the argument for OpenAI. That's the argument for Google. It's the argument for Suno and UDO. The organization of these cases is different because the plaintiffs are different, right? The New York Times is situated differently than the major labels. People have different emotional relationships with different kinds of work. But this is the argument. Like when Google eventually goes and sues OpenAI for training on YouTube, the weirdness of that argument is Google telling OpenAI that training on YouTube is not fair.

4:30:25Like that's what's going to happen here. It's all the same argument. It's all kind of in a circle. Wait, so Google can do it and it's fair use, but Suno and Udio cannot do it because it's not fair use. This is the trap the industry has set for itself. And our giant consolidated. What's that line? It's all the same VCs in all different directions. Kind of like the music business. That's true. There's that line, though. It's like, you have to be perfect every time, and I just have to get through once. Yeah. It's like, I don't remember exactly what it is. That's like the hacker creed, right? Like, you have to stop me every time.

4:30:57All I have to do is I just have to get through once. Yeah. And that feels like the copyright situation for AI right now. This is a house of cards. And maybe the Times will win. Maybe the record labels will win. Maybe Sarah Silverman will win. Like there are so many of these. Maybe Google and OpenAI reach an agreement about training on YouTube and then a bunch of YouTube creators sue and maybe they win. Like you can just game it out a hundred different ways. At some point, someone is going to win a lawsuit that says training is not fair use. Yeah. The fair use argument here I feel like is notable.

4:31:35I feel like it's quite different than what the New York Times can claim because part of fair use is, for example, the effect on the potential market, right? And with New York Times, they're going to have to argue, well, you're using our articles and other people are taking that and creating text and putting it on other pseudo journalistic sites, right? I'm pretty sure the Times is suing for both the output and the training. I see. Okay. So I think these cases are all different. This is what I mean. Like the strategy for one doesn't work for all of them in the same way. In the case of music, the marketplace argument, like is it going to affect the marketplace?

4:32:13I think they have a very strong argument here. I think the RIA has a very strong argument. They're basically saying, Suno and Udeo, you are charging users money to make songs that you are allowing them to upload to the exact same place where we also have all of our songs, the Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera. And so you are actually changing the marketplace for music, having used all of this output. But is that not part of the argument you're saying? I think we have to find out how that shakes out. Right. Like, I don't know. They got to get assigned a judge, right? Like, right now what they've done is they put out a complaint in a press release.

4:32:51There hasn't been a reply to that complaint or an answer. They haven't been assigned a judge. Like, they haven't done any discussion. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. and we certainly don't know where they're going to put their focus. But that part where copyright law is just about making copies and in the history of computing, every single copy has been litigated down to, again, I bring it up. I think I bring it up every time. MAI versus peak systems. You go look it up. This is, are you a third-party software seller allowed to load software into a computer's memory without permission? Crazy.

4:33:25A crazy court case. Can you put a disk in a computer and load software from the disk to the hard drive without my permission? Got litigated. And they lost. Crazy. They lost. And then we had to get all the way through caching. Are ephemeral copies on your ISP's network equipment or those copies that should be litigated? This is copyright. It's dumb. Like it is a very dumb rationale. But it litigates the creation of copies. So here it's, did you have permission to make a copy to train your model of all these songs? And every time we didn't have permission, by the way, we want the statutory maximum of$150 ,000.

4:34:03Which essentially ends up being a pretend amount of money. It's got to be bigger than the US GDP. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Did you have permission to copy every song in the world? And if you didn't, every song in the world times$150 ,000 is what we're asking for. I'm going to run this. If you didn't have that permission, can we do an analysis that says that use is fair use? Right? So fair use is what's called an affirmative defense to copyright infringement where you admit it. Like, I did it. But under this other rationale, that's fine. And so that's like the winding path here is, well, first, they won't even cop to having made the copies, which is why the music industry is putting out, well, here's just Johnny B.

4:34:42Goode. Like, you can't output Johnny B. Goode unless you copy Johnny B. Goode on the front end, right? OK. So first we got to get them to cop to making the copies at all, which they claim is proprietary business information. Sure. Then it's was that copy allowed? They obviously didn't have permission. This is why they're in a lawsuit. And then it's is it fair use? And then we run the analysis. And the analysis is like the purpose and character of the use, the amount of the use, the nature of the use. And then the last factor is the effect on the market. On the output side, I think the market argument is really strong.

4:35:16Right, right. Right. So the question is, does this case – this is something I actually don't understand. Maybe you can explain with your copyright law degree. Is there like some wall between the input and the output in this argument that says – well, there's no marketplace for – You know that emoji that's like this with the hands? The hands are up? Like I'm just that emoji right now. I don't know. Because I was trying to say, oh, well, there's a clear change in the marketplace for songs, which are all outputs. But it sounds like we don't know what the responses are going to be. But they could say, well, there isn't currently a marketplace for training data in this kind of way.

4:35:47And so it's not affecting that marketplace. But if you – there will never be a market if you just set the rate at zero. Right. Right. So if you're like, I want really high-quality music for my high-quality music AI program, I'm going to go pay a bunch of artists. But then these guys come along and steal it. But you've actually preemptively destroyed the market. You've never allowed that market to set some rates. And I've heard from publishers who are taking the deals with OpenAI. Disclosure, Vox Media has a content licensing deal with OpenAI. I've heard from other publishers, not our company, that one of the reasons they've taken these deals is to create that market, right?

4:36:25So that the Times can go to court and say this has an effect on the market. Look at this market. Look at the money that's moving around. And so some of these publishers are playing kind of a strategic game to say we should create a market to help that factor along. I think that's fascinating. But I don't think that the AI company – I think they thought they could just buy forgiveness. And what's crazy to me is when it was Napster or YouTube or Google Search even, buying forgiveness worked because people liked the companies. They liked the products. They liked the experiences they were having. And here people – I mean I'm – if you're listening to this and you have a very different view of this, let me know.

4:37:06But our audience is pretty loud with us that they don't like these companies and they perceive this as a moral problem. And I think that's just a very different position for them all to be in. Which brings us to your moral quandary. It seems like you flipped sides from 20 years ago. Yeah. The idea that I'm sitting here being like the RIAA has a point is crazy. It's bananas. And Sarah Jong and I have been all day every day slacking. Who have we become? This is like the horseshoe theory of copyright law politics. It's weird, man. And I think one of the pieces of the puzzle – and I'm curious how you see this in the music industry itself, Charlie.

4:37:45One of the pieces of the puzzle here is that the internet just blew the bottom out of the music industry. Like there's no way to be like a middle class musician anymore. There's no guaranteed way to make money. You're like you're playing the same algorithmic game as everyone else. You're beholden to some labels. You don't have any power as an individual against these platforms. So now this next group of people who's come and taken your work for free and is going to extract value from you, well, sure. Like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's kind of the vibe. But I'm wondering if you see that reflected in the actual music industry.

4:38:20Absolutely. I mean the public perception here is so different than what was happening back in the Napster era. Back in the Napster era, the labels were enemy number one. Selling out to labels was a big – You know, they were the worst players. Today, I actually think they've done a very effective job of using their proxy, Spotify, and let Spotify be the enemy. And everyone's like, Sony Music? Who are they? Like Warner, UMG? Like, they have labeled deals. But they're not the topic of conversation of who's really screwing who. Now, they basically help set the rates of what gets paid out in streaming.

4:38:51And it's the distributors now that really are taking all the heat. And so they're actually in a better, I think, place of public perception. in terms of within the music industry, I see songwriters, producers, fans totally freaked out about what's going on. When you go and scan through a lot of the YouTube comments of some of these AI songs, the sentiment is we are screwed. Music is over. I give up. I am not learning an instrument. It is not the future is bright. We're going to create new, beautiful music. Like my creativity is going to blossom. I think that there is a real existential fear that exists within all of the AI world.

4:39:34But you're getting into like our human emotions and the beautiful creative output. Hopefully beautiful. I mean, listen, how you feel about poppy is like whatever. Jason Derulo. Don't bring Jason into this. We got to get Derulo on the poppy. I don't know. We really do. That's obviously like reading through the RAA's lawsuit. Like that is they talk about the creativity and human emotions at all. uh but is the is the end of this just they're trying to get checks in the same way that there are a lot of folks out there just trying to get checks like well because part of me like i think obviously that's the answer but also part of me wonders if the labels are feeling the same way that you do which is that oh this is not just a thing we need to make money off of tomorrow this is like an existential crisis for our business down the road or if they're like whatever this is just a new turn we have to make sure we get paid this is an existential crisis because they are already losing market share to people who are not on major labels.

4:40:25Major label listening is down as an overall share of all listening. It's still a lot of it. It's still the majority of listening. So they recognize that flooding the streamers with more and more independent music has not necessarily been good for their business. And with more flooding, it's just going to bring everything down to everything that's valueless entirely. If you own music and it gets played a lot on streaming, there's a lot of money in it. Like there's billions and billions and billions of dollars in streaming. How it's distributed is not always fair. And people get upset about this, but they very much need to figure out how to, how to enter and participate in this marketplace.

4:41:02And I think kind of like a content ID system, they want to figure out how to properly license. You want to use Jason Derulo's voice? Jason Derulo says yes. And it costs this. And now we've got Jason Derulo copies and that's okay. So by the way, of all of the artists who would let his voice get deepfaked to make like commercials. Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo. I'm not even saying – I've talked a lot of Jason Derulo-related-ish on this episode. I'm aware of it. I just know that he is a commercial mastermind. Yes. That man is going to make a bag no matter what happens. Yes. Friend of the pod, Blake Reed, he's a professor at Colorado Law, teaches copyright at telecom, all this stuff.

4:41:37He wrote me a note last week or the week before and he said something really smart that I've been thinking about. It's related to what you're saying, David. Copyright law is like an economic system. We create scarcity and then we can charge money for things because you're not allowed to just freely copy them. So if you do something bad in the world of copyright law, the answer is you pay money and you fix it. And you even out the economic problem that you've created. Olivia Rodrigo might have sung four notes of a Taylor Swift song. The answer is Taylor Swift gets a writing credit and then some money flows to Taylor Swift.

4:42:12And that is the end of that story. And it's just an economic problem that you've solved by redistributing money. AI is a moral problem. This is the thing Blake pointed out to me. It's like the money doesn't solve the perceived moral issue here. So the labels might get paid. They might find some business model that lets them license the music into perpetuity or whatever. But the thing you're seeing in the YouTube comments, the thing our audience is feeling, the thing I think a lot of artists are feeling, does not get solved by money. It's like another problem. And so you see these deals come up and get signed and whatever, and everyone's like, eh, it's still pretty icky.

4:42:46Right? And there's something there that I think is important. I haven't quite puzzled it out. I actually want to do something with that idea. If you have further thoughts, let me know what you think about it. But that gap is the gap. We can move a bunch of money around. Like the VCs and Hollywood and the Recording Industry Association of America, God bless them. They will move the money around. Lucian Grange will get paid. Is that going to solve the other problem? Right? And I think that's really hard. Well, there's two things that musicians need to not fear. One is that because the output of all of these models cannot be copyrighted, this music is kind of in this weird limbo space.

4:43:25Like maybe it's going to definitely find some streams, but it probably won't be synced on television and film because no TV producer is going to want to have a song where they don't really understand the rights associated with that song. and if they have the right to it? And does it also secretly contain a vocal sample of James Brown that has been stolen? So nobody wants to, any rights holder doesn't want to use this music that can't be used in a weird way. So I think composers and people who are putting stuff on TV and film, I think that there's still very much a business for them until these much bigger legal issues get sorted out.

4:43:59The other places that music is about human connection, and I don't say this in some like wishy-washy way, it's like there is no fandom for Olivia Rodrigo without an Olivia Rodrigo. Like you need the person. The time that the music industry tried to create like an avatar, racially, strangely coded. What was that guy's name? It was terrible. They tried to do like their NFT avatar pop star. And it was an utter failure, both because it was completely racist and because why would we develop a relationship to this thing? And so the fandom side, the pop stardom side of pop music, I don't think is ever going to go away.

4:44:34What about Hatsune Mikko? Right. Right. She's like the cartoon character. I just learned that she's officially codenamed CVO1. Yeah, there are these Avatar characters that are finding some fandoms online. Yes, that's going to happen. I still just like, that's not Olivia. That's not Taylor. That's not Gaga. I'm sorry. It's just different. All right, we got to end it. They're not Jason Derulo. They're not Jason Derulo.

4:45:06Welcome back. Do you remember when you first heard about podcasts? If you've been listening to this show, The Vergecast, since 2011, maybe it was that. Or if you were a listener of the Engadget podcast before even that, maybe that's where you got into it. Or really, to be way less self-absorbed and much more realistic about it, maybe it was Serial in 2014 that turned you and, frankly, millions of other people onto the idea of radio on demand. end. That's when podcasts became a thing. But I'd bet that for most people, the farthest possible distance back you could go would be this moment in 2005, when Steve Jobs got on stage at WWDC.

4:45:49And before he announced that Apple was switching to using Intel chips, and before he said that Leopard would be the next version of macOS, he explained to a lot of people why they were about to start seeing podcasts in iTunes. As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now. And podcasting, of course, is a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting. And what is podcasting? It's been described a lot of different ways. One way has been TiVo for radio. You can download radio shows and listen to them on your computer or put them on your iPod anytime you want. So it's just like television programs on TiVo.

4:46:23And that's true. Another way it's been described is Wayne's World for radio, which means that anyone Everyone without much capital investment can make a podcast, put it on a server and get a worldwide audience for their radio show. And that's true, too. We see it as the hottest thing going in radio. A fun fact from that one, by the way, Jobs talked about how there were 8000 podcasts available at that time in 2005. And that was a huge number. He was really excited about it. Now that number is somewhere between three and five million podcasts. Lots changed. Anyway, a lot of people credit Jobs with mainstreaming both the word and the concept of podcasts, which is probably at least a little true.

4:47:07Podcast was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2005. It beat out, in case you're wondering, bird flu, reggaeton, life hack, a whole bunch of other stuff. But Jobs didn't create the concept or the word. The concept, I think, is one of those two that is trickiest to figure out. Technically, you could argue that the idea of a podcast is just like radio, and we've had that around forever. But I think you can make a pretty good case that the thing we now know as a podcast became a thing in about 2003, and it involved a guy named Chris Lydon. It was a very exciting coincidence for me. For one thing, I had been ignominiously bumped out of a wonderful job in public radio and looking for something new.

4:47:51Charlie Nessen at Berkman Center said, come and think with us. Dave Weiner arrived a few weeks later, and he said, well, Charlie told me David Weiner was coming. Charles Nessen, by the way, was the creator of the Berkman Kline Center for Internet and Society, which was kind of an early internet think tank at Harvard that actually still does a lot of really interesting digital work. Dave Weiner is one of the internet's earliest and longest tenured bloggers. His blog just turned 30 last week. He's also a key creator of RSS, which is the technology that spreads feeds of content around the internet.

4:48:25And he's just a guy who cares a lot about web publishing standards. At the time, if you wanted to start a blog, calling Dave Weiner was like calling Gordon Ramsey for tips on how to open a restaurant. And Chris Lydon, hit him up. I wrote to Dave Weiner saying, six months ago, I couldn't spell blog. Now I want to be one. And we went through the blog cycle very, very quickly. But then he said, you know radio, I know programming. What the world needs is an MP3 file that can go worldwide instantly. I said, sounds good to me. And we got to work. It only took, oh, a couple of months, I'd say. And he said, I think we got it.

4:49:04I said, now what day? He said, well, that's obvious. You're going to do a conversation with me and we're going to put it out. And we did. Leiden and Weiner ended up publishing that conversation in July of 2003. And I just want to play you the first 30 seconds or so of it, which I found, by the way, thanks to James Cridland over at podnews.net. He did a great whole big thing on the History of the Word podcast, and we're actually going to talk to him about the future of podcasts later in the show. Anyway, here it is. Dave Weiner, I feel like a new immigrant in this blogger world where you're a kind of founding father.

4:49:36Walk me around it. And I'm not talking about the technology. I want to know what kind of democratic experiment this blog idea really amounts to. Well, gosh, it changes all the time. I mean, when we first started doing this, it was just a bunch of people sort of writing hello world and being amazed that it was possible to do that. And then the next step was recognition of other people and say, wow, there's somebody else doing this. And learning how to communicate. And gosh, I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, it is what you make of it. Everybody brings something different to it and different set of expectations.

4:50:20And everybody molds it to be whatever it means to them. They don't call what they're doing there a podcast. But I mean, that's a podcast right there. Like it's two dudes talking tech. It's all very meta. The sound quality is good, but kind of messy. That's all the hallmarks of podcasts all in one place. And I think the thing that Weiner says at the very end, it is what you make of it, turned out to be more prescient than maybe either of them realized at the time. But still, they weren't calling it a podcast. Nobody was. They were calling these things audio blogs, if they were calling them anything.

4:50:54There were a handful of them out there, but none of them were podcasts. Until Ben Hammersley showed up. Ben, I should say right up front, is not exactly psyched that he is part of this particular slice of podcast history. It's a fucking bane of my life. Because there's absolutely no honor in the origin story, right? That, you know, when I die, I want to be remembered for, I don't know, a 20-year project or something, or saving orphans from a burning building, or something like that, rather than a word that was invented in a sort of deadline frenzy that I didn't even realize I was doing until a few months later.

4:51:36In 2004, Ben was working on some early RSS and publishing tech and was also writing about the burgeoning tech industry for The Guardian. And in February of 2004, he published a piece called Audible Revolution, all about the cool stuff people were doing online with audio. At the time, there were people building software that could automatically record radio streams over the Internet and make them available for listening later. The iPod, obviously, was everywhere, and people were also building software to take all those streams that you had downloaded and put them onto your iPod. One step at a time, all of this stuff was starting to come together.

4:52:12Ben actually interviewed Chris Lydon for the piece that he wrote, and Lydon talked about how audio over the web was going to change people's relationships with their audience. It was going to democratize media. They had all these big, high-minded ideas about what audio might do. But it's right there in the second paragraph of the story that Ben Hammersley does the thing. Actually, let me just read you the first two paragraphs. With the benefit of hindsight, it all seems quite obvious. MP3 players, like Apple's iPod, in many pockets, audio production software cheap or free, and weblogging, an established part of the internet.

4:52:46All the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audio blogging? Podcasting? Guerrilla media? There it is. That. almost everyone agrees, is the first published use of the word podcasting. It's a big moment. Of course, Ben had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he wrote that word. The Guardian at the time was a print-first paper, as in you wrote for the paper and you had a print deadline when the physical printing presses would run at six o 'clock. And if you missed that deadline, the words weren't going to go onto the page. and that meant that every day the sort of working rhythm was that there was this big rush to get everything done by quarter to six or whatever.

4:53:34And I'd written this article and about 5.30 or so, just before the print deadline, I get an email from my editor saying, we've put it on the page and it's very nice, but it's kind of a line short and it doesn't look very good on the page. You know, the text hasn't gone green in the typesetting program. Can you write me another sentence? Just to pad it out, right? Just to make it fit beautifully on the printed page. And so I wrote an extra sentence and emailed it over. And the sentence is this sort of like mildly meaningless sentence of, but what do we call this new phenomenon? And then I sort of invented three words and put them in there and then sent it off.

4:54:12And then I went to the pub. Look, on the one hand, thank God we call it podcasting and not guerrilla media-ing. You know what I mean? But Ben doesn't even remember how he came up with podcasts. Everyone now says it's a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, which is what Steve Jobs said in that clip earlier. And Ben basically just said, yeah, that seems reasonable enough. But he doesn't even remember coming up with it. He also, at the time, had no idea, truly no idea what he had done. And it was only a few months later that I got emails from the Oxford English Dictionary saying, where do you find this word?

4:54:49we're trying to find an earlier citation for it than your piece and we can't where did you get it and i you know pulled it out the back of my head on a deadline panic i had no idea and i looked on all of the rss related development mailing lists and so on which which is what the place where it would have been and i couldn't find any trace of it either and so i said well clearly i just must have made it up and then i said great because it's word of the year and then you know and then it became the thing that Apple took on and that's what they called their app and that's what it became known as and, you know, the rest is history.

4:55:26Ben made very clear several times when we talked that he didn't invent the idea of a podcast and nor does he deserve credit for what podcasts eventually became. But all these years later, he does seem to kind of like the word he came up with. It's got that nice plosive P. You can use it as a noun or a verb pretty easily. it's a good useful word that way. But also that within it there are context clues that normies could understand. So, you know, the iPod was the biggest thing in the world at that time. That's where the pod bit comes from. And although it was super fiddly at the beginning to take these podcasts and put them onto your iPod, pretty rapidly some software came out there and made that simpler.

4:56:10And then soon after that, Apple made it possible within iTunes. And to say it's kind of like TiVo for radio that you listen to on your MP3 player is a pretty good sentence in 2002, 2003. to sort of not necessarily just hugely techie circles or even like super early adopters, but to sort of whoever comes after the early adopters, those people, they can understand it. And so I think it becomes one of those things where, A, it's a fun word to say, but also it kind of has meaning within it that somebody who's used to new technologies can kind of understand straight away. And it becomes a self-evidently good idea, right?

4:57:01And then when you have a few years later, you have these very successful, professionally made podcasts which take full advantage or start to take full advantage of the fact that they're at liberty to use as much space or as little space as they need, as much time, as little time, different episode lengths, all that sort of thing, that people started exploring that and being able to self-commission and make programs that were something you would never, ever have heard before on regular broadcast radio, then suddenly it becomes its own thing very rapidly and people start to see the value of it hugely tied in with the coolest gadget on the market at the time.

4:57:41So I think it sort of catches that lightning of all of those different things happening at the same time. Most people do seem to agree that Ben coined the term podcast, or at least used it first. But there is one other person in the equation who definitely deserves credit. That's Danny Gregoire, who's a software engineer who used the word in an email to a list of folks working on and with an app called iPodder. iPodder was one of those things that could automatically take recorded audio and put it on your iPod. The list at the time was brand new, and iPodder was an app started by a guy named Adam Curry, who had an audio blog of his own at the time called Daily Source Code.

4:58:20Adam was a longtime radio guy. He'd also been an MTV VJ for years, and he'd also been an early internet entrepreneur. And for years at this point, he had been chatting with Dave Weiner and others about the whole concept of putting audio files in RSS. But Adam was one of the very first people to have kind of a whole vision of how this on-demand internet radio thing should actually work. Now, it was end of 2003 when a friend of mine said, look at this cool thing I have. I said, what do you have? And it was the iPod. And I looked at this iPod, and it was like, literally like lightning bolts because it looked, I don't have any, it looked exactly like this transistor radio my grandmother had given me when I was seven years old.

4:59:07This little Sony transistor radio, nine-volt battery. I'm like, yeah, you can call this a digital Walkman or whatever you want. But this to me was a radio receiver. And right away I'm like, oh, let's hook it up to this RSS thing. So again, with my very poor scripting skills, I tried to rig this together with AppleScript. And then Kevin Marks, who I think worked at, I don't know if he worked at Google, he worked in Silicon Valley somewhere. He basically said, oh, here's the script that you need. And boom, I was like, okay, it works. So I could create a blog post and then this little script will be looking to find a new item in my blog post with a file attached to it.

4:59:47It would download the file because you still had to sync your iPod back in the day to your computer. And so it would trigger an update. And then in the morning you'd walk in and there would be your iPod with, as the album would be basically, we didn't have the name podcasting yet. It would be, you know, kind of the blog name or the, you know, the show name, and then it would have these episodes under it. And I immediately started to just get the word out there because I needed software developers who could create this for real. That thing he's describing, that script, was iPodder. It would watch RSS feeds for audio files, it would download them, sync them to your iPod, and you're done.

5:00:26That's just a podcasting app, right? Adam Curry made a podcasting app. That's all it was. And in fact, his show, Daily Source Code, was in part a podcast for its own sake, you know, know, entertainment and content and whatever. But it was also in part sort of an ongoing beta test of how all of this podcasting technology stuff might really work. So I'd like, okay, I have an audience. It's these guys and a couple of gals at the time who develop software. How do I keep them engaged in this process? Well, I need to give them content every single day. And it has to be about the stuff they're doing, which is programming.

5:01:05What do you do in programming? You create source code. So I did it every single day for a long time. And I missed one from time to time and they became more spaced out over time, but we kept daily source code. And I would literally talk about the developments they had done the previous day. So they needed something to test on. There were no programs. So they needed something daily that sounded like a show that they could use so we could figure out, well, where did show notes go? And, you know, when someone first subscribes to a feed, do you give them the most recent one? Do you download all of the archives, all of this stuff?

5:01:44And so I know from my radio background, when you talk about people on the radio, it makes them feel good. So when I was talking about Andrew Grumet And, you know, the guys at iPod or X and, you know, one was in Australia and the other one was in, I don't know, somewhere in Vienna, that motivates you. And so it was both a feedback loop because I was the ultimate user, both from the content creation side and from the listener side. So you can hear this flywheel going at this point. The programmers are making podcasts. They're listening to each other's podcasts. They're building better software for listening to and making those podcasts.

5:02:21They're making new stuff to test it. and round and round and round it goes. And a lot of that conversation was happening on the iPod or Dev email list, which is where we come back to Danny Gregoire. In September of 2004, he wrote to the iPod or Dev list that he could imagine a world in which people would want to be able to subscribe to one of these audio programs and get access to older stuff. He didn't know whether to call that older stuff posts or episodes or shows. He actually suggested calling them pods or sodes, which I'm very glad did not catch on. And he thought they might want an easier way to go through the archives.

5:02:58But then he wrote this. I guess one could argue that this is simply an RSS slash server side issue and that the podcaster, yes, I like making up words, should be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds of old sodes by month, year, season, etc. He kind of made up podcasts again. Dave Weiner and others have over the years given Gregoire credit for, if not making it up, at least making the term podcast a thing. Adam Curry, in particular, is pretty forceful about it. And for my money, Danny Gregoire is the one who showed up with that name. I know Ben Hammersley feels he invented it. He used the word a long time before that, but I'd never heard it.

5:03:39So Danny showed up with podcasts. It made a lot of sense because we We were doing this on the iPod, and so it was obvious where it came from. However it came into be, Weiner and Curry both bought into the Word immediately and did a lot of work promoting the Word podcast once it had been sort of unofficially decided on. As usual, there is no clear story about who did exactly what, who knew what, when, where the Word came from, and if anyone is singularly responsible. I don't know that it matters, to be honest, but I do know this. After Gregoire's email to the iPodder group, the word podcast caught on really fast.

5:04:16I think the first podcast to ever refer to itself as a podcast was probably Dave Slusher on Evil Genius Chronicles, which had been around in blog form for a couple of years and was becoming an audio blog at the time. Three days after Gregoire's email, in September of 2004, like all good early podcasts, Slusher spends a long time talking about how all this newfangled technology works for making and downloading audio, talking about his servers and BitTorrents and bills and all this stuff. And then he talks about what he calls it. And I saw somebody. Somebody has registered podcasting.net. And I saw Podcaster or Podcaster.net.

5:04:59And I saw Podcaster as a user agent hitting my RSS feed. I went and looked at it, and right now it's just a coming soon page. But I'm going to pay attention to that. I want to see who's got that and what they're doing. But that term, I think they've coined the term. So iPod platform just doesn't spring from the tongue. But what I'm doing right here and what Adam's doing and what Dave Weiner is doing and what IT Conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term. I am using that from here on out. So I am a podcaster, and they are podcasters, and I am podcasting right now. and you listen to my podcast.

5:05:35Fucking A. Think about how quickly that changed. A few months after Ben Hammersley haphazardly wrote the word in a story, a few days after Danny Gregoire brought it up to that super influential mailing list, podcasts were being called podcasts. One really fun thing about listening to some of the podcasts from this era is hearing these podcast hosts actually reckon with the idea of being podcast hosts. Like, here's a clip from a show called The Dawn and Drew Show, also from September of 2004. This is their very first episode, and you can hear them kind of trying on the term for size. All right, now.

5:06:12Wait, what is podcasting? We're broadcasting to pod devices, which an iPod would be an MP3 player. But we don't have an iPod. Well, that's why we're podcasting. It's been, the term has been coined. And, uh. Is someone going to give us one for free? It was. Dear Inker Nut, please give me a pod. Because Drew has like a little machine, this little tiny thing that he puts music in, and I don't have one. It's a Lyra from RCA. But see now, that would technically be considered a pod in this regard. I think we should crawl inside of pods to do this. I have some right here. Let me unzip it. Get out of my pod.

5:06:57Oh shit, there's someone in there. At this moment, it has still only been a few days since the word podcast hit that mailing list. And already it's just the accepted term. They're broadcasting to pod devices. They're podcasts. That is how quickly it happened. And now, for better or for worse, 20 years later, they're still podcasts.

5:07:23It's VergeCast. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Trans is here. Hi, I'm your friend that really misses Microsoft's Windows. The HoloLens people are so mad at me. They're like, how did you do this whole review? And you never mentioned HoloLens, the thing that invented spatial compute. And it's true. Microsoft invented a number of these words with no regard for what they meant. They're like, HoloLens is mixed reality. That means augmented reality. This VR headset and Windows, that's Windows mixed reality. Like just anything. All the words meant the same thing. And I have done some very cool HoloLens demos in my life.

5:08:03I put on a HoloLens and I changed a spark plug on an ATV in the basement of a Microsoft building. And it guided me. Yeah. It put arrows like go to this drawer, open this drawer. I don't know if any of that was real or if it was totally state. Whatever. It was awesome. I was like this is definitely the future of changing spark plugs on an ATV. As long as the room is set out exactly right and the computer knows where all the parts are. like this is how we should change spark plugs. Which, by the way, if you set up the room exactly right, you know where all the parts are, you no longer need the computer to change the spark plugs.

5:08:34Because you put the spark plugs where they go. But whatever. You outsource that. But they were like, imagine a mechanic on an airline. And now I'm like, man, I wish Boeing had bought more HoloLenses. They're also in Seattle. Just putting that out there, Microsoft. The problem with the HoloLens. Oh, and I did a very cool demo. Microsoft, one of the few companies in VR that has ever solved co-location. So I wore a HoloLens and someone else was wearing a HoloLens. And we were looking at the same thing at the same time. And, like, I would interact with – it was like a model of something. And I would interact with it and they would spin it the other way.

5:09:12And no one else – as far as I can know, no other company is on a commercial scale. I don't think the Quest headsets can do that. The Vision Pro can't do it. Okay, that's cool then. Right. So it's all credit to HoloLens. The HoloLens is a gigantic failure, which is why I didn't mention it. It failed as a product. The person who was leading the project got forced out of Microsoft for sexual misconduct allegations. They did a bunch of layoffs on the team. They've reorganized their hardware portfolio. And they say, quote, and this is a real quote, we'll make a next version of HoloLens when the time is right.

5:09:47Oh, there you go. Is it right? No. you know what they're gonna do they're gonna make a bunch of ai stuff and print money instead of being like you can change a spark plug with our glasses on oh i'll never be able to change a spark plug though yeah anyway so shout out to the hololens people hololens also objectively the coolest product name in this entire category oh yeah no question hololens kicks ass it's good it's a good name and the first one was cool and the second one was even better from what i'm told i never tried the second one and you know if if you have the perfect spark plug setup are you that thing kicked ass are you saying you you don't fondly remember the acer a h1 0 1 d b e y windows mixed reality headset that had a good name that's a good ring say it slower slower but addie and i just decided what the words would mean in our review we made a sidebar we're like this is what mixed reality means and this is augmented reality means and that he was like you know this is a flip of how microsoft wanted it and it's like i don't care like i'm putting my foot in the ground and this is what we're saying uh anyhow so that shout out to the hololens people i feel you it was a cool demo did any magically people get at you the magically people were just happy to be mentioned right like your product is a true ar product optical ar that has fatal compromises in it and no one should buy it they're like oh Oh, my God.

5:11:13Finally, the validation we deserve. Some people, I will say two things. Some people are basically called the top on two technologies in this review. I said camera-based pass-through might be a dead end. I feel that it might be a dead end. And I said hand and eye tracking. There's a part of it that's valuable for some things, but it's also a dead end. It cannot be the primary input. And I heard from people who have been working on this who have shipped. Wait, sorry. Real quick. We should just say, by the way, this is your review of the Vision Pro, which went up this week. We talked a bunch about it on Tuesday.

5:11:46If you haven't been living inside of Neelai's brain for the last week or so, he's talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which we just got to so fast. I was going to say, let's go. No, this is right. I woke up. I use this app called Sleep Cycle. It's my alarm clock. And yesterday I woke up and it basically congratulated me on finally getting some sleep. Oh, boy. It was like, good job. You've got 400 % more sleep last night than you've been getting. And I was like, this is a disaster. So yeah, I'm wired. Now I've got too much sleep, but the amount of caffeine. I've basically only eaten Cinnamon Toast Crunch this week.

5:12:24It's bad. All of it's bad. The inside of your mouth after that much Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Well, I didn't eat it all in one go. Yeah, but it's cumulative. It's cumulative in that each bowl is 25 grams of sugar. Oh my God. We'll miss cereal. I'm just like, the crash is going to be bad. We're not buying this anymore. But I would get home and be like, what can I eat? You know, like fast. Cereal. Cereal. And I was like, this cereal. Anyhow, yes, the Vision Pro review. The two things in my review that were like the big ideas that I didn't overly highlight is the Vision Pro is the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand-eye tracking they've ever seen.

5:13:05And I was like, it might have inadvertently proved that these are deadheads. and I have heard from people who have shipped millions of devices with camera passer and who have invested millions upon billions of dollars into hand and eye tracking and they were like you have a point about camera pass through it's good for what it's good for and like it's not a dead end if you use it right but Apple's trying to make it do too much which I thought was really interesting feedback that's fair because it is like on the on the quest three it's useful in spots right it's like the i'm playing a vr game and i like double tap on the headset and it opens up so i can like see what's around me or whether i just kicked my dog or whatever but it's not like you don't you don't live in the pass-through and so for that i think pass-through works fine apple is like default state is pass-through and i think i think that might be where it's pushing too hard there's a really cool app uh that jen two we posted on the site where it's uh shortcuts yeah and you can put the shortcuts all around your house so you get all these shortcuts by your tv and all this stuff and that's really cool it's like oh but to use that you have to word this all the time right so not no longer useful so it this is the argument this is a simulator of what apple really wants but they're like look camera pass through has its uses but if you try to pretend it's ar you're going to run into the problem we agree with you there and then the note about eye tracking and this person has spent a lot of money on eye tracking in their life um was you are overloading an input channel by trying to use it for output which is fascinating.

5:14:32Wait, explain. So your eyes are an input channel. So you're used to taking in a lot of information with your eyes or an input channel and then you overload it by trying to use it as an output channel to control the device. Oh, that's smart. And so the feedback was you hit on something that this industry has been talking about for a long time which is you can't overload your input channels as output channels and you'll run into this problem with eye tracking because you have to look at what you want to look at and you have to look at what you want to control instead of what you're looking at. Yeah, because historically Basically, eye tracking was just to, like, enhance it.

5:15:02So, like, if you kind of glanced to one side, the camera would move so you'd see whatever was over there. Yeah, that's foveated rendering. Right, yeah. And it didn't really – But that's to save processor cycles. Right. But, no, it also made it a smoother experience. It made it, like, less, oh, I'm just staring at some screens. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you get some blurry – Yeah, like, it made it a nice experience. And even when you do it just on a regular laptop screen, I did a – I reviewed way too many Toby laptops once upon a time. It was really useful because you could just kind of look at things and it would pop up and make it a little brighter and make it a little easier.

5:15:36But like anytime I would try to like control the computer with it, I was like, oh, I hate this. Yeah. Because I'd like glance at my watch and my character would just start running around in circles. Yeah. And this is overloading an input channel as output. So when you use it in the way you're describing for foveated rendering, for highlights, right, that make it a little brighter, you're enhancing the input channel. Right. When you use an output channel, you might overload yourself. So this person was like, yeah, in the history of eye tracking, this is a thing that we understand. And then they said I had it wrong on hand tracking.

5:16:05Oh. The industry believes in hand tracking. They're going to get it right because it is the most natural way of doing things. And there's a lot of work being done. I keep pointing out. It's a computer that's always watching hands. And the Vision – regardless of that joke, the Vision Pro does misregister a lot of hand input. Also cannot differentiate between your hands and someone else's hands. also you personally look really goofy doing it in the office it was so good hold on so if you're just sitting at your desk on the vision pro i can just stick my hands in front of your face and start literally typing on your keyboard sure can or you can just put your hand in front and click your fingers together and register click i'm gonna do this to you so much when i see you i can't wait assuming that i'm wearing the headset what a good prank it's a good prank You're screwed with people.

5:16:51Like when I say the thing is lonely, it does not contemplate anyone else being around you who is not on their best behavior, which is all the time. All other people are not on their best behavior. Is it just assuming that like the pass through will suddenly pop on and you'll see David being like, yoink. I assume that's the noise that David's going to make. That's what I do when I type, yeah. The only AR feature is in it. Specifically, it recognizes David Peterson and makes that sound. uh so anyway i thought this is all really interesting feedback because people who have been working on this stuff for a long time were like we liked your review here are the things we think you got right right and wrong and the camera base pass through as a replacement for true ar feels directionally correct to me right this it might be the ceiling for that eye tracking they're like yeah you know people are going to react to it differently we'll see this is the first big eye tracking at scale that will happen.

5:17:45And then they're like, you're just wrong in eye tracking. The fact that it just misregisters input to me is, again, people are going to, by the time you're listening to this, people will have them. By the way, iJustine has already worn a Vision Pro in a Cybertruck. Just immediately. Yes. Like, as soon as the embargo lifted, she was walking out. I mean, she's funny as hell, so I appreciate that she did that. But some other kind of YouTuber, not iJustine, who's wonderful, some other kind of YouTuber is going to do the actual thing with the Cybertruck and the Vision Pro and the clock is just ticking.

5:18:16Unsafe. Don't do that. Don't do it. They're not going to listen to us. They're doing it for the views, man. Don't do it for the clicks. Do something else cool. So we'll see. I'm excited for people to actually get their hands on this outside of just experiencing other people's experiences. And I'm very curious to see how people react to hand and eye tracking in particular. yeah also if you got one uh as you're hearing this on friday the second it's the day this stuff is coming out if you got one call us and tell us about it uh well this will be a super fun thing to do on the hotline for the next few weeks i just want to hear people's experiences yeah with the vision pro tell us what you're doing tell us what's cool tell us what sucks give us give us your like 60 second review of the vision pro literally whenever you want call the hotline send us emails yeah vergecast the verge.com i'm dying to know you can tell me tell them tell me I'm wrong.

5:19:02Whatever you want. I'm dying to know how you feel about this product because it is new. And that's what's exciting about it, which leads me into the score. So a lot of people have asked me about the score. And I will tell you, and David in particular will tell you, that I drove myself crazy trying to give this thing a score after I'd written the review. Confirmed. Bonkers. Like, because I'm the one who says World of No Sevens, and I gave it a seven. It's like. so if you don't know world of no sevens the thing i say all the time which is you the seven is just the default score it is milk toast and so if you say world of no sevens it forces you to make a very hard choice between six and eight and i am the person who says this and i definitely gave this thing a seven and i tortured myself over that seven and you got it wrong and david thinks i should have given it i tend to agree with i was genuinely shocked because i i didn't participate in the review, but we did the Vergecast.

5:19:58And so I went as soon as it posted and I click and I scrolled down and I saw that seven and I was like, but it felt like a six in the Vergecast that we recorded. This is interesting. Yeah. And I said on the Vergecast, and I have to own this, inconsistent input system is a full point deduction. And at that moment in time, and this is a hundred percent true, the score that was entered into our little score database was a six. Oh. And I said that knowing that I'd already typed the six into that database. What pushed you back up to a seven? I had a conversation with Viren and Becca. In particular, Becca, our wonderful video directors, who made this whole review with me and used it a lot in the course of that review.

5:20:39And they reminded me that it was really fun. So it lost a point for inconsistency, gained a point because it's fun as hell. It lost a point for inconsistency. But Viren was – we were in it. We were like we opened up our own how we rate page and like read our own definitions of the numbers. Like you're in an office with people for hours upon hours arguing with the dumbest thing. Like you just like fall down the rabbit hole completely. We discussed bringing back decimals, which we got rid of a couple of years ago. Like the whole thing.

5:21:13And Viren's line was we need a number that means fantastic but useless. because that he's like this is fantastic i have no idea why i want to use what about the number that says it's 3500 do you know how many you want fun buy a nintendo switch and you'll have 3200 left isn't that cool so look like i say i was at six for a long time yeah it was a six i swear to you it was a six and back it was like but you have had like the thing you are doing you were constantly talking about this thing that you keep coming back to like I'm lonely in here is because you're having fun and you want other people to have fun with you which is not how I feel about the meta quest which is like this is fun like I'm swinging a bat around like there's not a point where I'm like look at this thing that you is wild that I want you to see like the art gallery of web pages that I made in our cafe it's like this is great like nothing else can do that right now the meta quest can sort of do it but they're kind of shaped like this is like perfectly locked in place windows and you can just leave the room and come back that's your point is it was fun it was a full point deduction for the stuff i complained about and it it earned its way back into the seven zone because it's not an eight yeah yeah i was gonna say it was never an eight it was there was no point was this thing getting an eight did it ever go to five so i was texting with dan seaford yes wonderful reviews that are uh number one dex fan in the world dan seaford traitor dan just left the verge so he was not part of this review we wish him well on his new journey in life it's going to be really fun for him um but Dan texted me after the review and was like, seven, huh?

5:22:46And I was like, dude. And literally people were jumping out of the woodwork to quote Dan at me throughout this process. Because Dan's quote is, you never regret giving something a lower score. Ever. Like if you just instinctively pick the lower score and it's five years from now, you won't have regretted it. You might be like, ah, I gave that stupid thing an eight. Why did I do that? You'll never be like, I judge it too harshly. Like literally. I'm like walking down the street and people like, you know what Dan would say? It's like haunting me. And I will say that's not that's not a like judgment decision.

5:23:19That's not saying like we reflexively hate products. That is like a decade of hard worn experience. Yeah. And this is the mistake that you made, Neelai, is you got sucked in by the thing being fun. Like that's a stupid reason. It's just a stupid reason. Like this is a thirty five hundred dollar computer. You don't judge your MacBook on whether it's fun. you judge it on whether it does the things it is supposed to do and this fundamentally doesn't it there are a lot of things that it is supposed to do that it either doesn't do or doesn't do very well and it is 3500 like i take the criticism and i i look i knew what i was buying i was buying a bunch of people telling me that i did given a high score including david on this very podcast i knew how this vergas would start today when i gave it that seven you did but wait i just i just want to point at the tension of this which i think is both the tension you felt in reviewing this and the reason we all think the vision pro is so interesting is that it is objectively cool and new and interesting right like the joanna stern a friend of the walsh journal made a video and there's a moment in it where she sets two timers and puts them over two different things on her stove like that kicks ass it's so small and so silly but it's so cool and people really responded to it that is not a reason to buy a$3 ,500 product or to wear a headset on your face all day but she said right but it is cool it is undeniably cool the shortcuts thing you're talking about is like undeniably cool and I want to live in a world where that is part of my life I will not wear the headset and I will not buy the headset in order to get that thing but like that's that tension right where you have these moments where you're like oh this is it like they they did it this is it and then you have to weigh that against what is this thing I have on my face what does that mean for like my life is this worth the cost and you even said in the review right we we review things not just based on like what they might be someday but what the thing is in the box but that is so but that's not that's not what got it to seven that's my rule it's a good rule it's the right rule but it's it's so hard to do especially in this case because a apple has a longer history of being right about these things than most so like most of the time you genuinely should not assume this thing will ever get better for any reason because most of the time it doesn't with apple it usually does and so you have to believe that more than with most companies but then also it's 3 500 okay so here's how i've been that price thing also wait on my mind another good argument for sex if it's a phone review and even in phone reviews now it's like you're just reviewing iphones for people who buy iphones you're very rarely writing a review for somebody with an Android phone except for like blunt curiosity if the camera is good or bad.

5:26:05My assumption going into this was that I was not writing buying advice. The people who are buying the Vision Pro are buying the Vision Pro, whether or not I think it's good or bad. So what was that score speaking to? So the score was like, okay, like however many they sold, 80 ,000, 120 ,000. The vast majority of people are going to try this thing on. And my guess is after a while, they're like, yeah, it's seven. And like that is where that came from, right? Is it kind of works a lot of time, but oh man, sometimes I have really good time. Like that exact thing, the reason it's World of No 7s, that is why I got there.

5:26:35Because sometimes you're like, oh, this is great. And then sometimes you're like, I'm looking at the – right? And like that is like a real challenge in there. It's not broken. The last Apple product I gave a 6 to was the Apple Studio display whose webcam basically shipped in unusable state. And I was like, this is 6 because this display technology, the panel is fine. but the backlight technology is steam powered and this camera is effectively broken six and that was what twelve hundred dollars thirteen hundred dollars sixteen hundred dollars sixteen hundred i should have given that a five yeah you should have that's what i was about to say you scored that thing too high yeah all right maybe i'm just wrong but i will say a bunch of people pointed out the similarities between what this thing is and what the original apple watch was which i think is really interesting because you give both a seven uh and i think you were right about the Apple Watch and wrong about this.

5:27:27And I've been trying to figure out what it is. Interesting. I know what it is. Wait, wait. I want to hear what David's theories. I have two theories. One is$3 ,500. And the other is I think the first Apple Watch got the form factor almost right and hadn't quite figured out the use case. But it was like still a nice thing to where I got furious at the first Apple Watch because it didn't tell the time. The screen wasn't on all the time like how dare you will watch if you don't tell me the time when i look at you but it like the the thing was there right it was close enough to being what the thing should be and it already did some of the things you would want it to so it was like that felt closer to me than this in which the thing itself is nowhere near what it's supposed to be nope not even close and so that's where it loses me like i deduct a full point for absolutely no one thinks this is what this is supposed to look like yeah i will say i feel very vindicated by the modern rereading of the apple watch reviews guy got raked over the coals for giving that thing a bad score yeah it holds up it really does and i was like this thing is a i believe i used the word bobble i was like this thing is a bobble and you will buy it if you and if you buy it you will like it because people like bobbles but it is not fashion it is technology that looks like fashion and they need to figure out what it's for and it took them three generations to get there and they totally rebooted the software and i was like no one will ever and like for a long time people were like you were just unnecessarily harsh and this time but literally our screenshots comparing my two reviews being like oh this is the same exact thing you know the only thing i will remind everyone of is one i was right i'll always remind you no but two the the path wasn't set when the thing was launched right so being like this thing happened to the apple watch means it will happen to the other thing they had to adjust right and actually the review is like it adjusts them like they take the feedback from the market from the customers from the reviewers and they like make decisions based on it and one of the big decisions they had to make along the way was we are totally rebooting watch os to make the interface different to completely decrease our reliance on third-party apps in an app store you're just telling me your watch review should have been a six but also apple with the apple watch and this is true of a lot of apple things right apple starts by getting the hardware pretty close to right and the software is further away alex will be joining dan sievert in the world beyond yeah can we just re-review every apple product we've ever done right now let's just rescore them all i get a lot yeah the watch hardware was very close and then the question is how do we make this thing into what it ought to be inside of this box and Apple usually gets the box right.

5:30:12In this case, neither one of them is right. Yeah. Well, like the watch shipped to people and they could use it and they could set it up and they didn't have issues with it. And lots of people bought one. Wait. Famously, Karl Lagerfeld could not set his up and wore it around. Do you not know about this? This is like an old Verges joke. Karl Lagerfeld was photographed. You know, they gave it to all the fashion people. They photographed Karl Lagerfeld proudly wearing it with the setup screen on the face. and that's like we call it we started calling it lagerfelding where you're just like wearing a dead apple watch just as a as a fashion accessory that's awesome but again that was another reason to give it a seven because it was like a fashion thing not necessarily a good one but it was fashion and this is just like such a developer kit that i keep them like i keep thinking about that a lot like it feels like such a developer kit they just won't say it man there was a story in vanity fair A beautifully photographed story in Vanity Fair.

5:31:06It was. Stunning. A photographed story in Vanity Fair. Tim Cook is wearing the headset. He's blinking. Did you notice this? His eyes are closed. His googly eyes on the front of the headset are closed. He's blinking in the photo. That's very funny. It's fantastic. They should put that on the website. Anyhow, there's a story in Vanity Fair, and it is, I mean, honestly, a story could be from 10 years ago. I know Nick Bilton, who wrote it. Nick is a very nice guy. I've had a taco at a party at his house before. Like he's a very nice guy. But it could have been written 10 years ago about VR. Right.

5:31:39Right. Like the line is like Tim Cook saw himself on the moon. He knew it was the future. Like that line has been written about Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer. Yeah. You could have just like done find and replace Magic Leap for every time they say Vision Pro in that review. Yeah. Do you remember Magic Leap? Was it Wired that ran the story where Roni Bromitz was like, I'm hacking the GPU of your brain? Yep. Like we've just been here, man. And so I think Apple can't say it's a developer kit. They can't place themselves in the long line of companies that have been doing this for a long – they have to say it's finished, which is why they have to have entertainment.

5:32:20And they have to do this. James Cameron is in that Mani Fair piece quoted as saying this will change everything. And it's like, dude, you have done more scuba diving VR than anybody. I have been thinking about that quote specifically more than anything else that's come out of this whole situation because James Cameron is like not generally a guy. I was going to say he's not generally a guy prone to hyperbole, but he did once declare himself king of the world. I don't know if that was hyperbole at some point. At that moment in time. Yeah. But when it comes to like technology, he's not usually a guy prone to hyperbole.

5:32:51And so when he's like, no, this changes everything. And he's specifically talking about the display technology, which sounds really, really incredible. I was like, is there something there? Like, have we missed something that James Cameron is seeing and that we're not besides, like, the inside of the headset? It is legitimately amazing display technology. I have nothing but admiration for how hard it was to build those displays. They are genuinely amazing. Right. They are available apparently on the market. The same person who told me that hand tracking being something he believed in was like, you know, Meta could have bought those.

5:33:21Like, that was a thing that Meta had the opportunity to buy. but Meta's version of that headset would have been even more expensive because Meta doesn't have M1 chips or M2 chips. They would have had to go and buy chips with more power and more battery and they're like, we can't go this way. So Apple uniquely was able to make use of these displays which are, again, an engineering marvel. But James, they're just better than what you have now. They're just linearly better than the thing you have now. yeah and that if you're james cameron like you should be able to see like this is the step like this is the step change that changes at all is like not the thing i really want to like sit him down and be like did they just like cherry pick your quotes here they run apple tv plus man i know like i need i just need to know more from jim jim call me i know you listen to verge cast he does yeah we'll talk about the the sub too jim was the guy i told me about meta he's the source if you're listening tim cook that's not true at all not even like the slightest bit true uh A little bit.

5:34:22It's by the time you listen to this, it is will be out. I'm sure some of you are driving your cars wearing it right now. Stop it. Pull over to the side of the road. Apple today, a little bit more. Apple announced along with the launch of the Vision Pro 600 apps will be at launch, which seems like a good number. It's a lot for a new platform. It's a good number. Is it? I think so. I mean, it's fine. It's some apps, but like this is the company that spends a lot of time talking about hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of apps. 600 is good. I'm going to point out, I once got really roasted for complaining about how few games launched with the Nintendo Switch.

5:35:03Yeah. Granted, I did say it when Zelda came out and it was one of the best games ever made. But like here's the 600 apps. 600 is impressive. 600 is great. 600 is Vision Pro built for spatial computing. It's also going to have all the iPad stuff. Yeah. One million apps, 600 vision pro apps. Sure. Which I will just point out is 999 ,000. 900. 600. 999 ,000. 400. 400. 400. Yeah. No, that's 100. That's a million. Yep. Okay. I'm going to do this math right. Math. Please leave this in. No, do not leave this in. Leave it in. Everyone's going to find Dan if we leave this in. All right. All right. All right.

5:35:42Which I'll just point out is$999 ,400 iPad apps. That's a lot of iPad apps. That's a lot of iPad apps. Anyway, 600 is not bad if it's the right 600. But I'll just point out, among the 600 they announced, compatible apps from top cable services, including Charter Spectrum, Comcast, Xfinity, Cox Contour, Sling TV, and Verizon Fios. Yeah. That's what I want. If you're rocking the Verizon Fios app in space, like, what are you doing, man?

5:36:17Paying your bills. If you buy the space computer and take it out of its little marshmallow and put it on your head, you're like, let's open the Charter Spectrum app. What are you doing, man? Well, you got to pay your bills so you can keep downloading stuff. That is the funniest. And obviously you're trying to point out. Entertainment. It's entertainment. It's not Netflix. It's fine. You know what those apps stream in? 480p that they lie is 720p. That is the lowest bitrate video you can get, which is hilarious to me because this is all buried in the review. I should quick post on this side just to break it out.

5:36:52It will not support VR video on YouTube. It's like won't do it. Right. And they're like because the VR video on YouTube is too low quality. Apple. So it doesn't have a YouTube app. And if you go try to watch some 360 video on YouTube, it just won't work. The end. Can I say one more Weedsy thing and then we can break out of this? Go. Yeah. It's very Weedsy, but people asked us this question a lot and I didn't know the answer when we did the old episode. How does it smell? How does it smell? Okay. It smells like the future, obviously. The faintest whiff of roasted marshmallows. People asked about the Mac display sharing and I finally know how it works, which is very complicated.

5:37:32It is basically a 27-inch studio display or iMac display. So you tell your Mac you're sharing to it. Your Mac imagines a 27-inch 5K display. It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, which is a perfect 2-to-1 scale. That's how a 27-inch iMac works by default. You cannot change it. So a 27-inch iMac display, you can run it at other resolutions, and it'll be fine. This one, it gives you a low-resolution warning. So it wants to run at this 2-to-1 scale. Then it takes that 5K display and sends it as a 4K video stream to the Vision Pro, which you can then resize it well. So it is not pixel perfect at all.

5:38:09It looks great. I have no complaints about how it looks. But the thing that is happening is that it is imagining a 5K display that a Mac knows how to run at because that is the 27-inch iMac, the 27-inch studio display. It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, but if you're running something 4K, it has enough pixels to just do it because it's a 5K display. But then the thing that is happening is streaming at 4K to the Vision Pro. so it compresses that and it makes a smaller it sounds both technologically cool and also like i just hate it from in the same way i hate when people say yeah this is uh 720p streaming yeah when it's secretly 480 yeah or if they're like this is hd and it's 720 lies just putting that out there uh anyway everyone asked me that question and i that is the answer and so it It is correct that they keep calling it a 4K Mac display.

5:39:02It's actually a 5K Mac display, but it's actually running at 2560 by 1440. And whatever, it looks fine. And you'll use it unless you need pixel perfect accuracy. In which case, take your face computer off and just look at your screen. There we go. Six out of ten.

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5:40:4920 years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California announced that it was time to rethink the car. Thank you very much for a nice introduction. He argued that gasoline and other petroleum fuels were polluting the air and keeping us hooked on foreign oil. California was ready to get serious about a post-petroleum future. And the best technology to get it there was hydrogen. We will not just dream about the hydrogen highway. We will not just dream about the hydrogen fueling stations. We will not just dream about the hydrogen cars. We will build it. This was 2004, years before Tesla got everyone jazzed about battery-powered electric cars.

5:41:31Batteries were promising, but another technology was farther along. Hydrogen fuel cells could power an electric motor using only hydrogen gas. The cars produced no emissions or byproducts except pure water. Governor Schwarzenegger got very excited about fuel cells, and he proposed an elaborate hydrogen highway to support them. The government would help fund a network of fuel stations, which would encourage automakers to build cars. More cars would lead to more stations. And by 2010, the plan went, every Californian would have access to hydrogen fuel. From there, advocates predicted a nationwide expansion.

5:42:13It could spell the end of the petroleum era in America. That is not what happened. San Jose, Snell Avenue, under maintenance. Oh, offline? Since this morning at 1050, the station is offline for repairing. 20 years later, I found myself driving across California in a fuel cell car, a Toyota Mirai. Rolling again. I was there to find out what became of that grand green vision of the future. We are 23 minutes away from the closest station. Today, there are hydrogen-powered cars you can buy in California, and some stations to fill them up at. But the statewide network never materialized, let alone a national one.

5:43:02And those stations are failing. Maybe one pump worked for months at a time. Sometimes none of them worked. The cost of fuel is skyrocketing. $36 a kilo. It's insane. And car sales are plummeting. I'm trying to take it back to Toyota. The hydrogen experiment is teetering on the brink. Right now, the auto industry is making this huge seismic shift to battery-powered cars. Why not hydrogen? Why didn't that version of history win out? Who's still fighting for hydrogen today? And what's happening to the thousands of drivers still sticking it out with their cars? This all felt like a lot of questions that only a road trip could answer.

5:43:47So in June, I roped in fellow producer Andrew and our video director Alex. The three of us flew to San Francisco, rented a Mirai on Turo, and charted a course from the Bay Area to Los Angeles along whatever was left of the hydrogen highway. Here to here, we are going there.

5:44:24We picked up our Mirai in the parking lot of a mini-golf course outside San Jose, just south of San Francisco. It's a very ordinary-looking sedan. If it weren't for the little fuel cell badge on the back, you wouldn't know there was anything unusual about it.

5:44:43Under the hood, a Mirai and a Tesla are surprisingly similar. They're both powered by electric motors, and a fuel cell is basically a battery. Just instead of pumping in electricity to store and use later, you're pumping in hydrogen to react with oxygen and generate electricity on the fly. In other words, a Mirai's hydrogen tank and a Tesla's battery are just two different ways of storing energy until it's needed to power the car. Oh, there's one other difference. The fuel cell creates a decent amount of water as a byproduct. In the Mirai, it's almost a cup per mile traveled. So the car does need to pee.

5:45:28As the Mirai drives, it occasionally shoots water out a little hole underneath the car. You can also make it pee on command by hitting a button on the dashboard. Yeah, go ahead and start the car. The remote is in the middle, you saw it? The remote. The guy we rented from, Salman, gave us a quick tour of the car. It's a luxury car. It drives beautiful, actually. Once you drive this, you'll feel it. The Mirai has a classy interior and a flashy nav system with a gazillion cameras. The only oddity is this hump in the back row of seats. The main hydrogen tank sits underneath it. It makes sitting in the middle kind of awkward.

5:46:06Salman told us we'd love the car, but he wasn't sure about our travel plans. When I came to know you were in LA, I was like, wait a second. I was a little uncomfortable. The problem is most of the fuel stations in California are clustered around the Bay Area and Los Angeles. There's just one pump on Interstate 5 in between. It's at a place called Harris Ranch. We kind of need to refuel there. The drive to LA is about 325 miles, which is right at the max range of this car. But we also need luck. Because apparently, hydrogen stations just don't work sometimes. There's always a credit card issue sometimes.

5:46:46The card system is down. Sometimes the pump itself is down. Sometimes there is not enough hydrogen. Which makes our stop at Harris Ranch very high stakes. If that pump is down, then you're stuck. You've never driven down to... No, not yet. Yeah, I didn't want to take a chance yet. Not exactly a pep talk. Oh, and there was one other FYI, the price of hydrogen. Two years ago, it used to cost like$50 or$60 to fill the whole tank. Yeah. Right now it's like$180,$190 to fill the tank. So that is killing everybody right now. $180 to fill up a sedan. Yeah, I don't think we budgeted enough money for the fuel for this trip.

5:47:26So that's why I got disappointed. I said, you know what, I'll just put on Tiro and live with it like that. And with that, there was nothing left to do but hit the road. Excited and suddenly very nervous. Turn right, then your destination will be on the left. Thank you, Siri. Our first goal was to visit as many fuel stations as we could find in the Bay Area. On paper, there are about 17. But according to the Station Finder apps we downloaded, lots of them were offline or under some kind of maintenance. All right, we're coming up on it. I never know. You never know what kind of gas station it's going to be.

5:48:01Almost all the stations here are operated by a startup called First Element Fuel. but they're co-located at Chevron or Shell or other gas stations. First Element leases the space from station owners. The pumps themselves are bright blue with these eye-catching awnings. Some of them are slotted right in between gas pumps. Others are set apart in their own little pads and parking lots. Well, let's try to figure this out. The mechanics of filling up a hydrogen tank are familiar enough. Insert a credit card, select fuel, connect pump to car, hang out for five minutes. But unlike gasoline, these pumps are moving around a compressed, freezing cold gas.

5:48:44So there are locks and sensors to keep everything safe and reliable. The nozzle is a heavy metal cylinder with a collar that keeps the hose in place. It's all a bit of a learning curve. It says hide the yellow mark. I don't see a yellow mark, but I think pulling this sleeve down locks it. So we just push it in and then lock it. Oh! There it goes, the yellow. Okay, we're filling up. We tried fueling at most of the stations we visited, and we always got fuel, but we hit a glitch or two in just about every part of the process. The screens are both wigging out a little bit, but it seems like it's fine.

5:49:28I don't know what door sensor means, but... Oh, I think it timed out or something. I gotta run my cart again. One constant struggle, the nozzle kept sticking to the car after we were done filling. I hate that. I hate yanking that hard on anything. But that was just our experience. We also talked with every Mirai driver we ran into. Hey, excuse me. Do you have time while you feel to chat with us for our story? And their stories were more extreme. This is the third station we are right now. We came. Oh, you tried to go to two others? Yeah, there's one station in Sunnyvale, one in San Jose, and this is one in Cupertino.

5:50:12Half of the time, these don't work here. Yeah. So they're either out of gas or there's the problem with the mission. And even sometimes it shows you to insert card. When you insert the card, it says transaction canceled, and it doesn't give you anything out. It just doesn't work? No, it just doesn't work. Menadeep and Rupesh have been driving their Mirai for about four months, which for them has been a non-stop hunt for working stations. I had no idea just how frequently they run out of fuel or glitch or lose pressure and can't fill tanks completely. And it's always a pressure on you mentally because you never know which one's gonna work, which one's not gonna work.

5:50:48Fuel has been so hard to find that these guys have been stretching every kilogram. That's how hydrogen is measured. When they drive, they accelerate and brake carefully. They avoid air conditioning because it uses more fuel. And when the car says it still has 100 miles left in the tank, they look for a station. Boy, so you have to really think about how you're driving the car. You have to focus on the road and also on your mileage. Yeah, yeah. Manatee bought the car because of a huge incentive from Toyota. Every new or certified used Mirai comes with a$15 ,000 preloaded fuel card. Toyota told us it's there to absorb any volatility in fuel prices.

5:51:30And that's not the only big promotion out there. So this car I got for$15 ,000? Hard to beat, right? Rebecca said she went shopping for a battery electric car, but she couldn't find anything for less than$40 ,000. But then, a Toyota dealership offered her that killer deal on a 2022 Mirai with only 23 ,000 miles on it. Toyota's also been offering big discounts on new Mirais. Earlier this year, you could get$40 ,000 off some models. That's a 60 % discount. That's it. I'm paying a fortune in hydrogen, but it'll take something like 13 years. I did my math. Okay. It'll take 13 years before this vehicle will cost me more than if I were to buy a 40 ,000-something electric vehicle.

5:52:19Rebecca loves her Mirai, so she's content for now. I'm going to stick with my Mirai as long as I'm in California. Menadeep and Rupesh, not so much. I don't think, to be very honest with you, after the gas card is finished, it's not worth maintaining this car. Manadeep left us with some words of caution about our trip, which, believe me, we took to heart when we said goodbye to the bay and headed south for Los Angeles. No AC, go easy on the pedal. Yeah. Always know where the next station is. Call the stations. Stick to the speed limit. Stick to the speed limit. If possible, go below the speed limit.

5:52:58Try to be in the rightmost lane. This is not the road trip that we were looking forward to having. I'm really sorry for spoiling your road trip.

5:53:11We could start with the windows down. Also, how fast do you think I should drive? We should play with the settings on the car to see. It tells you how efficiently you're driving. On the road to LA, I had a lot of downtime to think about everything I'd seen. And most of my questions boiled down to, how did we get here? Which you can think about in two ways. There's the big broad version. How did hydrogen cars start out so promising but stumble so badly? And then there's the more specific, why is it so hard to get fuel for your car? So as we cruise down I-5, let's start with the big how did we get here.

5:53:52For that, I called up Keith Wipke. He's an industry veteran from the National Renewable Energy Lab. You did come to the right person. I've been involved in hydrogen technologies for over 20 years. Keith took me all the way back to 2004 again. Back then, fewer people were talking about climate change the way we all are today. But California had a smog problem. They had the worst air quality, especially in the Los Angeles basin. And so they had a strong driver to clean up local air quality. Battery electric cars existed, but they were not the obvious air apparent to gasoline. In fact, as a storage medium to power a car, batteries kind of sucked.

5:54:32Batteries were not good at the time. It was lead-acid batteries, and nickel-metal hydride was the up-and-coming thing, which of course is what Toyota launched their Prius hybrid with, was nickel-metal hydride batteries. That was a challenge for batteries at the time, 80, 90-mile range, very heavy, a lot of compromises on the vehicle itself to get reasonable performance. So hydrogen kind of was being born into that era. Meanwhile, hydrogen was showing a lot of promise. You could get all the emissions benefits of a battery electric car without the battery. Plus, fueling was a faster and more familiar process for drivers.

5:55:11It looked like a great successor to gasoline. And California got on board. I'm going to encourage the building of a hydrogen highway to take us to the environmental future. The original plan called for at least 150 stations by 2010, but that never happened. Around 10 demo stations came and went, which were co-funded by a federal program. Everyone learned a lot, but it was an R &D exercise. By the end of the decade, lots of people were asking, where is this hydrogen highway? But in 2013, California reset and recommitted. It put up$20 million a year for stations, and between 2015 and 2020, at least 37 new stations came online.

5:55:58I do think that I and a lot of other people thought it was just going to be a bunch of dominoes falling. That the hydrogen stations were going to go 50, 100, 200 stations in California. The Northeast market would launch and take off there. and then people like me in Colorado would maybe get a backbone across interstates, and we would be able to drive a hydrogen car as part of our daily commute. The car companies played their part too. In 2008, Honda began leasing a fuel cell sedan called the Clarity. Toyota made a big splash with the Mirai in 2015. This isn't just another car. This is an opportunity to really make a difference.

5:56:41The name we've given to our new car is Mirai, which in Japanese means future. The other fuel cell car you can buy today, the Hyundai Nexo, hit the U.S. in 2018. So I've seen and witnessed various launches. And for me, each one of them felt like, OK, this is it. Now we just need more of that car. We need more fueling stations. And then we see the other companies launch. OK, that's further validation that this is going in the right direction.

5:57:14The fuel cell market has come a long way in 20 years. But along the way, something else happened, too. Batteries got good. Good enough to power cars. And in the race to replace gasoline, batteries had some big advantages over hydrogen. I called up The Verge's transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, to explain. And he started with the fact that we already have a power grid. With EV charging, it's pretty simple. You install the charging station, you plug it into the grid, and barring any software problems or anything else like that, it's good to go. It should work. That was a huge advantage in the early days of battery EVs.

5:57:53Drivers could just plug in at home. It's a different story with hydrogen. There needs to be a supply chain. You need to truck the hydrogen in for where it's being produced to the filling stations, fill up those tanks at the filling stations, And then once the hydrogen has been depleted, the whole process starts all over again. Now, granted, it's taken years for a public EV charging network to mature. In fact, it's been a mess of competing standards and flaky charging ports. But it's getting better. And the reason reveals another huge difference between hydrogen and batteries. The hydrogen car industry, as it were, didn't have a Tesla.

5:58:33Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elon Musk! Tesla hit the scene in 2008 with the$100 ,000 Roadster, and it has utterly defined the battery electric business ever since. Over the past 15 years, its cars have steadily gotten cheaper and more ubiquitous. And along the way, it also built a huge charging network, which is so good that pretty much every other automaker in the U.S. is now signing on to Tesla's standard. We're getting the entire industry realizing that Tesla has the best charging network, they have the best chargers, the most reliable. We're all going to just end up using Teslas, as we probably could have realized a lot sooner.

5:59:15In other words, say what you will about Elon Musk, and on this podcast we surely do, but Tesla gets a lot of credit for dragging the battery electric market into existence, which is something that hydrogen just never had. There was no Tesla startup company that was out there innovating, taking its lumps, losing millions and millions of dollars in the process, but also generating lots of buzz, generating lots of hype and speculation amongst investors and on Wall Street and the government as well. And sort of proving eventually, ultimately, that there was going to be this huge untapped market for battery electric vehicles.

5:59:56In the end, the numbers tell the story. Battery electric cars and charging stations exploded across the country. Today, there are roughly 43 ,000 public charging ports in California alone, whereas hydrogen seems to be backsliding. There still is this plan that exists, like state grants to companies to build out stations. The only problem is the companies that have agreed to do so are now backtracking on those plans. Like, for example, Shell said that it was going to create a huge network of hydrogen stations in the state. But then they saw sort of like the writing on the wall and decided to start backing out of that plan.

6:00:35They declined a$40 million state grant to build like an extra 50 stations. And then they went ahead and just closed practically all of their stations in California. Gotcha. So basically, there's money out there and there just aren't takers for it right now. There's a pretty strong belief right now and sort of in California and elsewhere that battery electric vehicles, they won. Hydrogen could have surpassed EVs at some point, but over the last 15 or 20 years, it's very clear that battery electric vehicles are the preferred alternate technology for private vehicles. And hydrogen is kind of becoming a bit of a footnote.

6:01:15So there's the big picture. How do we get here? But that doesn't fully explain what we saw. Glitchy stations, the price of fuel, the shortages. To understand those problems, I needed to talk to First Element, the company that runs almost three quarters of the stations in California. So I called up one of the co-founders, Shane Stevens, who was pretty candid with me. We've been doing some, I would say, field testing on customers to get this equipment kind of commercial ready to where it needs to be. And it's, you know, we didn't mean to do that, right? But we've sort of were forced into that situation because as we started operating these stations, we just uncorked all sorts of issues that needed to be addressed.

6:01:57Here's what happened. Back in 2013, the year California announced new funding for hydrogen stations, Shane was working at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine. He watched the wave of interest in hydrogen build again, and he saw an opportunity on the fueling side of things. So that same year, he and two partners founded First Element. From there, we actually got some initial financing from Toyota and Honda, and we were able to leverage that private financing and go get California state grants. We won 19 stations, and we were able to develop the initial network of hydrogen stations.

6:02:33First Element made a big push right out of the gates, and it got around 15 stations up and running by the end of 2016. That speed was a calculated risk. They built more, smaller, cheaper stations to prove out the network and encourage automakers to start selling cars. And the plan worked a little too well. The cars came more quickly, the stations were overwhelmed more quickly, and the customers drove the cars more than we anticipated early on. What became obvious to us is that this technology for hydrogen stations was actually not really ready for prime time commercially. The equipment that we're using in the field today, it hasn't gone through sort of hours of testing to make sure the robustness is there, to make sure that, you know, little design kinks or design flaws have been worked out.

6:03:20And then when it's used, you know, regularly every day on hundreds of customers, all of a sudden you start to see that it maybe doesn't hold up as well because it's never been tested under those conditions. Which lines up with our experience at the pumps. Lots of little quirks and rough edges. We had a lot of hiccups on uptime. We had performance issues. We had logistics issues on supplying the fuel, and we actually had a lot of fuel runouts to the station. First Element has spent years trying to fix that first big mistake. Its newer stations are bigger, more expensive, and more robust. They can store more fuel and dispense more at a time.

6:03:57They actually store hydrogen as a liquid now rather than a gas, which has been a lot easier. And, you know, the reliability is getting much better. than what it was as well. I don't think we're all the way where we could be, but we're now at a point where we see a commercially viable product. That also tracks with what we saw. We just had fewer hiccups using the newer stations, and drivers told us they were more reliable. But those older, flimsier stations are still there. They account for nearly half the overall network, and they're not going anywhere. We've invested quite a bit of money into permanent infrastructure that's in the ground, To upgrade the station is not really an option.

6:04:38And the other thing is we don't want to leave customers hanging that may be depending on that station, even if it's an older generation. So drivers are stuck with temperamental hardware and First Element is stuck maintaining it. So right now we're charging considerably more for hydrogen than what we'd like to be and what we think we should be. And that's not the only cause of expensive fuel. First Element and others have had a hard time competing for hydrogen against much bigger industries like oil refining and agriculture. There just isn't enough to go around. There have also been supply chain problems and other market issues.

6:05:14The war in Ukraine is even playing a role. So prices have been spiking, and not enough hydrogen is making it to drivers. But unfortunately, that's the reality of the landscape today. First Element is now staring down the barrel of a vicious cycle. The more the fuel network struggles, the less viable the cars look. It's the exact opposite of what they were trying to do by opening all those stations in the first place. Our transportation editor, Andy, said it best. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like enmeshed in like the worst chicken and egg scenario that you could possibly imagine. You know, like people aren't going to buy hydrogen cars because there's just there's no way to fuel them.

6:05:53right? And then you're not going to have anyone building any fueling stations because so few people own the hydrogen cars. So you're just kind of like trapped in this limbo state. It's just not making it the right kind of argument to people who are out shopping for these types of vehicles.

6:06:12We got to take a short break. We'll be right back.

6:06:23Because I was the one I had in the charging case all day. Oh, okay. It's 4 o 'clock. We've been driving for about three hours, and we're somewhere in central California. Our tank is half empty, and it's time to start looking for Harris Ranch, our hydrogen oasis. So far, we see a lot of parched farmland. Andrew, what is your weather app telling you? See, right now it says 70. Oh, I just don't have service right now. Okay, now updated weather. What you got? Palinga 101. Excessive heat warning until 8 o 'clock tonight. A few more miles of nothing, and then an exit sign. There it is. You see it? Oh, Harris Ranch.

6:07:10All right. Harris Ranch is perfectly spaced between San Francisco and L.A., so it's a waypoint for all kinds of drivers. There's a Shell gas station, and what is currently the largest bank of Tesla superchargers in the world. Over the years, though, the owners of Harris Ranch have made it a destination unto itself. They've built a massive Spanish hacienda-style hotel, multiple restaurants, and the only gift shop I've ever seen with a butcher counter. All right, there's the Shell station. We drive past all of this. Past palm trees, past a barbecue pit slash convenience store, past an under-construction RV park, and there, off on a lonely plot of concrete, is one first element hydrogen pump.

6:07:58This is a very weird place. There's a couple flies in the car. Well, should we gas up? Let's do it. We pull up to the pump, get out, and my god the heat. Ugh. It just hits you. Better not take seven tries to get hydrated. The buttons are hot. F***. Unfortunately, the pump doesn't care how hot we are. Alright, it's done. That doesn't feel like a full tank's worth but we'll see when we turn the car back on. Please seek attendant. We got fuel. I don't think there's an attendant here. I hope I didn't just break it for everybody else. Did you get a full tank? Well, let's see.

6:08:53236 miles. No, we didn't get a full tank. We start the process all over again. This time, the pin pad freezes, then gives us an input error. But then it resets and fuel starts flowing. Dispenser is... Okay, we're getting more hydrogen. We finally get our full tank, but then the nozzle gets stuck to the car. Again, 101 degrees, no shade, dwindling patience. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

6:09:25Look, I know I'm harping a lot on these finicky pumps, and I know normal gas stations don't work perfectly either, but it's shocking how much trouble we've had in just a couple days of driving. And it's not hard to imagine frustrations like these dragging down the whole idea of hydrogen. Anyway, the nozzle finally comes free. We retreat to a picnic table under a tree and wait for other fuel cell drivers to show up.

6:09:56We wait for an hour, two hours, three hours. We watch cars come and go from the Shell station, the Tesla chargers, the convenience store. We get dinner at the barbecue pit, and we eat it while staring across the parking lot at the pump. We dub this, of course, the stakeout. It's a nice break from the road and the heat, but we are beat, and I am pretty sick of loitering at gas stations.

6:10:26Finally, around 8 p.m., as dusk is falling... Is that a Mirai? I sprint over like a lunatic. The driver, Billy, is happy to chat, and he wants to know if the pump is working. Did you guys just fill up? It was earlier today. No, we've been here for a few hours. Have you seen anybody else? Nope. Oh, really? No, no one else. Do you see people when you stop here? Sometimes, sometimes. But yeah, you don't really see that many people. It's, you know, Harry's age. Billy lives in L.A., and he's gone up to San Francisco a few times. He even tips us off to a second route. There's a station in Santa Barbara, a couple hours up the coast from L.A.

6:11:09It's far enough north that from there, you can get all the way up to San Jose along Highway 101, as long as you drive conservatively and don't hit any detours. It's a more scenic drive. But does it feel a little scary? At the same time, yeah, you get a little bit anxious, because by the time you get to the next station, you have like 50 miles left. You have to plan it out. If you don't plan it out, it becomes a nightmare. Yeah. Have you never run out of gas? Almost, almost. But, I mean, Toyota gives you the service where you can, they'll tow it for free. Yes, that is another real perk that Toyota offers, free towing.

6:11:48I have not used that at all. Yeah. So, luckily, I've not come with it. And that was the end of the stakeout. Billy filled up and left, it was fully dark out, and we were wiped. So we called it quits and found our hotel. The next morning, we shoved off for LA.

6:12:24The Hydrogen Highway

6:12:37pretty controversial. You have this supposedly green fuel that's actually made in a very, in a not very green way. Justine Kalma covers all things energy and climate here at The Verge. I called her up somewhere along I-5. I wasn't driving. So tell me why this does not make sense for cars. Why should we not be in this hydrogen fuel cell car right now? Okay, so there are a lot of reasons. So first of all, the majority of the hydrogen that we have today, even though it doesn't emit carbon dioxide, you know, when it's used to power a car in a fuel cell, that hydrogen was most likely made from gas.

6:13:1795 % of the hydrogen made today comes from a process called steam methane reforming, which produces carbon dioxide emissions. It also depends on a supply chain that tends to leak methane. Those are two gases we're desperately trying to keep out of the atmosphere right now. Methane is a greenhouse gas pollutant that is even more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide. And so a majority of hydrogen today is what you call gray hydrogen. Meaning basically dirty. Now, there is such a thing as green hydrogen, fuel that's clean and climate-friendly. So the way that green hydrogen is made is typically using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

6:14:07Right now, electrolyzers are pretty expensive. And green hydrogen is something like four times the cost of gray hydrogen right now. So costs have to come way down. To be fair, lots of power that's used to charge batteries isn't green either. About 60 % of the electricity in the U.S. comes from gas and coal. And to pull off a clean battery electric future, we're going to need a lot more green energy and big upgrades to the grid. None of that is going to be easy or cheap. But even in an ideal future that's flush with green electricity, hydrogen is still less efficient. A passenger your vehicle can much more easily plug into the grid and run on a battery that you juice up with renewable energy.

6:14:55So with hydrogen, you're adding another step to that, right? You're basically using renewable electricity to create the hydrogen to then run the vehicle versus you could also just run the vehicle on renewable electricity in the first place. So if the question is where do we spend the hydrogen we're making, the answer might be things that are harder to plug into the power grid. There's more hype around it for industrial uses, for aviation, for shipping, because it's much harder to get a plane off the ground or to have a ship that is battery powered. Passenger vehicles are just so low down on the list.

6:15:42What did it say, turn right? Turn right.

6:15:50After another long stretch of Highway 5, we pulled into LA. Alright, here's the palm trees. 1 ,000 feet. Turn right onto San Fernando Mission Boulevard. We were excited to check out the scene. There are more fuel cell cars and stations here than anywhere else in the state. But we'd also read about a months-long hydrogen shortage. And our fuel map showed a lot of offline stations. I see it. It's glowing, those blue awnings. Oh, it's nice looking. Are those? A little futuristic looking. They're a little snazzier. We found lots of fuel cell drivers really quickly. And, well, here's your vibe check.

6:16:29It's been awful, to be completely honest. I'm trying to trade it in for a regular car, like a gasoline car. We bought this with the idea of saving the earth or whatever, and, of course, saving for the gas, but never happened. Have you ever run out? Oh, of course. Yeah. You get towed? You get towed. We heard lots of familiar things. Love for the cars, frustration around fueling, flaky stations, brutal prices, range anxiety, regrets. We also saw one Hyundai Nexo. The owner, Tigran, actually solved a mystery for us. He told us why fuel nozzles kept sticking to our car. So I've been standing here for five minutes trying to yank it off.

6:17:11Yeah. And sometimes it just... Okay, like right now is a good example. Okay, this has happened to me. So it gets like really cold. Like you could tell there's like ice. Oh, okay. So that's, it is just like freezing. It turns out that the more the pumps get used, the colder the hardware gets from all the cooled hydrogen moving through. So the nozzle can freeze to the car. Oh, wow. It's, yeah, my finger almost stuck to it. So that was actually not bad. It took about 10 seconds. But other times I've literally waited five minutes for it to loosen up. We thought we were pulling on that handle wrong or something.

6:17:47We thought there was some trick that we didn't know, and it's the freezing. It's just the freezing, yeah. I later realized that Shane from First Element had warned me about this. I even found a video from Toyota about it. At times, the nozzle may become temporarily frozen and unable to disconnect from the vehicle for several minutes. Do not try to remove it forcibly, or you could cause damage to the nozzle, vehicle, or dispenser. Shane had told me the problem was largely resolved, which doesn't seem to be the case. I met people here. They're like, oh, I carry a bottle of water with me, and I just kind of pour a little bit.

6:18:22Just loosen it up a bit. Do not pour water or spray chemicals on the nozzle. All in all, Tigran is at the end of his rope. Does it feel like you're just in this kind of pilot program? Yes. Yeah. But it wasn't sold like that. When I got it, it was like, oh, you just go to, it's like filling up your gas at a regular station. You just go put it in and you're done. And when it's working, it's fine. That's generally true. But most days it doesn't just work. So what do you think you're going to do with the car long term? The resale value is very bad. Oh, God, you're just really stuck. Yep. I looked to trade it in for a Tesla and Tesla's like, we'll give you$10 ,000.

6:19:03I owe$30 ,000 on it. That feeling of a bait-and-switch, we've heard that a lot. One Mirai driver, Denise, says the dealer misled him about the value of the car. At the time of closing, they told me the actual value, this car was about$23 ,000. After it closed, they told me its actual value is$7 ,000. What happened? So I think what they do, they try to factor in the fact that they give you a fuel card for$15 ,000. Oh, they consider that part of the value of the car? Part of the deal. Gotcha. Okay, so now the resale value of the car is not what you thought it was. No, it's not what I thought it was.

6:19:43I asked Toyota about this, and they declined to comment on it. But they did confirm that the fuel cards are not transferable. Altogether, these stories started to paint a picture about how these cars were sold to lots of people. Over and over, drivers told us that they were shopping for a battery electric car, But someone, a friend, a salesman, the internet, talked them into a Mirai. It was a new, zero-emission, luxury car. It's like driving a Lexus or BMW. And it was priced like a Toyota Camry. It was a win-win. Except it wasn't. Here's one more Mirai driver, Jonathan. What do you think you're going to do with it long-term?

6:20:22Get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I will. But I do like the newer models. Don't get me wrong, they're very beautiful. but it doesn't matter what model of the car comes out. It's just this. Yeah, if you can't drive it. Talking to these drivers made me think back to a very clarifying moment at Harris Ranch. During our stakeout, we got bored and wandered over to the Tesla area. And after hours spent listening to fuel cell drivers talk about hanging in there, meeting Tesla owners was a shock. Where are you coming from? Where are you going to? We live in Matika, and we're headed to Anaheim to go to Disneyland.

6:21:01Super reliable and super easy to get charging everywhere. Yeah. So I'm excited, yeah. Road trips are amazing when you have a Tesla and you have the whole thing. They were all just so unburdened. That's the best end state for any new technology. You forget about it and just use it. And right now, hydrogen just isn't there.

6:21:28After everything we saw on this trip, there's one player I can't quite figure out. Toyota. Why is Toyota still so committed to the Mirai? In the first half of this year, about 322 fuel cell cars were sold in California. Total. For reference, during that same period, maybe 200 ,000 battery EVs were sold. In California alone. And yet, Toyota is still marketing Mirais and pushing them at huge discounts. During the Paris Olympics this summer, Toyota provided 500 Mirais to shuttle around athletes and bolster the green credentials of the Olympics, which actually upset a lot of environmentalists. So what's Toyota's angle here?

6:22:15I spoke with Craig Scott, the general manager of Fuel Cell Solutions. Craig said that hydrogen has been a big hedge. It's back to the foundational things of what are we trying to accomplish or trying to remove carbon to the tailpipe? And the only way to do that really in a complete way, in a zero emission way, is there are two competing technologies, batteries and fuel cells. And so we wanted to make sure we had a good foothold in both. Toyota continues to hedge more than most major automakers. It made hybrids a huge success with the Prius, but it's dragged its feet on full battery EVs. Today, the company sells just one battery-powered Toyota and one model Lexus, compared to more than a dozen hybrids.

6:22:59And the Mirai. Critics have spent years dinging Toyota for this, and the company does have a lot more battery models in the works. But it hasn't abandoned the Mirai. I put this question to our transportation editor, Andy. Why is Toyota sticking with the Mirai? He's mystified too, but he argued that it's not just about the Mirai. These companies have this technology. They want to use it in some way. They spent a lot of money, they've invested in it, and they want to get something out of it. So they're all sort of casting about and looking for ways in which this fuel source can be useful for future applications.

6:23:35Toyota is working on powering buses, trucks, and trains with its fuel cells. It's developing stationary generators. And Honda, Hyundai, and other companies are doing similar work. First Element is investing in truck refueling. This is what our environment reporter Justine was talking about. There are other places that fuel cells might make more sense. It's the next step in that hedge. If any of those industries go all in on hydrogen, Toyota and others will be there. And the Mirai? Its success or failure might not matter so much.

6:24:14This is the big one. We gotta see what the final price tag is. It's the end of our road trip, and we're at a gas station back in the Bay Area. Our rental was not point-to-point, so after we were done in LA, we had to turn around and drive back across California. We ended up taking the more scenic high-risk, high-reward route along the 101, the route Billy from Harris Ranch told us about. It gave us one last hit of range anxiety. If the first station is out of order for any reason, then it's another 10 miles to the next station. Which we have budgeted in. Yep. And if that's out of order, it's another 10 miles.

6:24:56So I could see this getting a little hairy, but so far, we're okay. We pulled into San Jose with 40 miles left in the tank. All in, we put about 875 miles on the car in a little more than three days. We also had to return the Mirai with a full tank, so we were treated to one last shock. 120 bucks? 130? What do we think? It's got to be more than the most. Okay. 4.605 kilograms, $165.78. That's a big finish for the road trip. If we'd been driving, say, a Toyota Camry, we'd have spent about$30 on gas. Road trip complete. It's a good dealable souvenir. The most expensive tank I've ever purchased.

6:25:54In the back of my head throughout this story, I've thought a lot about Laserdiscs, of all things, the failed competitor to DVDs. I've wondered, is that what this is? Is this just an alternate history story? A why the world went this way instead of that way kind of thing? After taking this trip, I don't think that's quite right. Batteries won, but I think that there's still some part of the future that's up for grabs. Hydrogen is still more portable than batteries, and it's a much faster way to move energy around. And there are still lots of hydrogen believers out there. California is funding new stations.

6:26:34First Element alone is trying to build 34 more right now. Honda just launched a plug-in battery-slash-fuel-cell hybrid car. The federal government is pouring money into green hydrogen production. My point is, that if-you-build-it-they-will-come energy is still out there. So, fuel cells may yet find their niche. Maybe the hydrogen highway will be full of semi-trucks. Or maybe it'll be a hydrogen waterway, or an airway. I don't know. Here's one last thing that I do know. In spite of everything, it was weirdly fun to be part of the fuel cell club. Most of the drivers I talked to were so open and honest and helpful, it was great to swap tips and stories with everybody.

6:27:18I got the sense there was a community here, even if it was based on shared grievance. That's probably not the way that Toyota or First Element wants drivers bonding, but I got a kick out of it. Case in point, after we filled up at the final gas station, I happened to see another Mirai driver wandering from pump to pump, looking at all the little screens. I asked him what was up, and he said he couldn't get his pump to work. The screen was frozen. I told him the pump we used was fine, and he pulled over to that one. And just like that, I was a fuel cell driver too.

6:27:59All right, that is it for the VergeCast today, and for this year. Happy end of 2024. everybody. Thanks to you, frankly, for listening to all of this. If you got to the end, send me an email and tell me you got to the end. And I will I don't know what I'll do, but I'll love you forever for it. Thank you to everyone who listens to the show ever. And thank you so much for being part of this community. Doing this is so much more fun because we get to do it with you guys. And we are so grateful for everyone who listens to the show and tells us you listen to the show and has ideas. We love it. As always, if you have thoughts, questions or feelings or anything else that you think we should put in even longer Vergecast next year, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com.

6:28:39Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. The show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're going to be off for the next couple of weeks and then we will be back at CES. Come see us live. Come listen to the show. Hope you have a wonderful holiday season. See you soon. Rock and roll. do