Ben McKenzie vs. crypto

29:11All right, we're back. The Verge's senior reviewer of V song is here. Hi, V. Hi. We have some science to do today. So much science. And some gadgets and some feelings as we want to do here on the Verge cast. But let's start from the very beginning here. What is a CGM?

29:27Victoria Song:So CGM is something called a continuous glucose monitor. It is a small device with a eensy-beensy little needle sticking out of it that you inject into a part of your body. And it reads your glucose levels. And it's important to note that it's not your blood glucose levels. It is your interstitial glucose levels. Interstitial fluid is like this fluid that sits between your cells. and you can kind of read glucose levels from that. Okay. And my sense is until very recently, the answer to the question, what is a CGM? was something you either knew for medical reasons or had no idea about it and had never thought about it and was not relevant to your life at all.

30:09And it seems like this product, this category has taken on a much broader relevance, like really, really recently. What is happening here? Why have CGMs suddenly sort of mainstreamed in a new way?

30:23Victoria Song:Yeah, so previously, if you knew what a CGM was, you likely were a type 1 diabetic or a person who had a type 1 diabetic in your family. It is diabetes tech, so to speak, because you generally wouldn't have a reason to monitor your glucose levels in real time, which is what this technology does, unless you needed to monitor your insulin levels. right now it's kind of hitting the main broad like the mainstream much more broadly because in 2024 the FDA cleared them for over-the-counter use they have to be different from the CGMs that diabetics use because you know type 1 diabetics they can't produce insulin or they produce such little levels of insulin as to be not relevant.

31:19Victoria Song:And so they need that to help monitor their insulin levels. Whereas the ones for non-diabetics, for people who have prediabetes, who have people who have type 2 diabetes, who are not reliant on insulin, these CGMs function a bit differently. So, yeah. And, you know, once you open it to the wider public, you get people who are hopping onto this trend of metabolism optimizing, and that has taken the health world, the wellness world, and the health tech world by storm over the last couple of years. And, you know, I've kind of been saying it because I've seen it creeping up, but it is like the number one frontier, I think, for wearable technology.

32:05So it seems to me that there are sort of two twin things happening here, right? And if I'm doing the timeline correctly, we have 2024, the Biden administration, the FDA clears this thing, like you said, for over-the-counter use. My assumption is not assuming this would become a wellness influencer phenomenon, but here we are. And then on the flip side, you have the Trump administration, which appears to have embraced these things and sort of tried to even further extend the things that they can be for, right? What is the government doing here?

32:36Victoria Song:Okay, so about sometime in the summer, I think June 2025, RFK Jr. basically made this huge statement about how wearable technology is going to be a fundamental pillar of the Maha movement. I remember this. It was about taking control of their health. And in particular, within the space of wearable technology, he pointed out CGMs as something that could help reverse diabetes. And, you know, in the diabetic community, the concept of reversing diabetes is a hotly debated one. there's a reason why they say that but you know we have a clip and I think we should hear it because I did see people complaining that you know why are we bringing the government into this and there's there's a reason there's a reason why we're referencing that yeah all right let's hear this clip we're about to launch one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history to encourage Americans to use wearables.

33:42It's a way of people can take control of their own health. They can take responsibility. They can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates, and a number of other metrics as they eat it. And they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives. We think that wearables are a key to the Maha agenda of making America healthy again. And we are going to, my vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.

34:19Victoria Song:In that particular clip we played, he did say you can take responsibility and see what food is doing to their glucose levels. In order to, glucose is not something that right now we can measure non-invasively. So, you know, when he says glucose levels, that is specifically mentioning CGMs. And he called it out in other statements, basically, about how I have friends who were CGMs and they reversed their diabetes with that. And then if you look at his Surgeon General nominee pick, Casey Means, she is a co-founder of Levels, which is a CGM startup. And if you've read her book, which I did for research, both for this story and for an optimizer that I wrote recently, she heavily promotes CGM use.

35:12Victoria Song:And she says in her book explicitly, you can use a CGM to discover whether your metabolism is functioning. Her whole book and her whole premise is that if you can optimize your metabolism, which she describes as having good energy, you can prevent and, you know, basically you can prevent cancer. You can prevent any type of disease ranging from acne to depression. So, you know, that's her claim. And, you know, whether or not she becomes the Surgeon General is up for debate at the moment. But I think it's very significant that she could be the Surgeon General. And she has these relationships with CGM, these thoughts on metabolism optimization.

36:01Victoria Song:So like it was a very clear focus because the idea here, they're not saying it explicitly, but the idea here is that every American wears a wearable. Every American like optimizes their metabolism. So that means non-diabetics in this cohort. So, yeah. Okay. But just to translate all of that to actual humans and to get into your story a little bit here. I think the useful thing to do here is sort of bifurcate people who medically need this, right? There are, like you said, this is diabetes tech. And I think that the question of how are those people interacting with it and for whom is it useful is fairly clear in that sense.

36:43On the other side, if you're not diabetic, not worried about becoming diabetic, this is still being pitched to you. And I mean you broadly, but also you, V Song, a person who has since spent a lot of time wearing one of these things. When you say optimizing your metabolism or why people should be tracking their glucose, what is the pitch here? Yeah.

37:09Victoria Song:So again, I'm going to bring up Casey Means here. There is a lot of science and thought about how your metabolism contributes to chronic disease over a long period of time. It's a complicated field and the pitch is actually somewhat shaky. But if you have good diet and if you have good exercise, we know that is extremely great for preventive health. So the idea is if you are optimizing your metabolism, if you're staying within a healthy range, you are limiting the amount of inflammation in your body. And again, I'm not a doctor. I am just consuming the literature on this. I'm kind of observing how this is being described by various people in the wellness space and the health space.

37:56Victoria Song:And so the idea is that you don't have these spikes and that these spikes are contributing to things like inflammation, things like your organs breaking down over time. And so if you control it and if you have data that informs how these foods impact your body and your metabolism, then you can live a longer life. And these are exactly why you're seeing trends like age scores within wearables. Like Whoop gives you a Whoop age. I find the Whoop age to be incredibly rude. I was going to ask you yours, and now I'm not going to. It says I'm five years older than I am, and I'm like, that sounds fake.

38:38Victoria Song:Rude. You know, Aura has these metrics about your cardiovascular age, And there is a hyper obsession and fixation right now within wearable tech about your longevity. Like Aura and Whoop both have partnerships with like Quest Diagnostics so that you can take regular blood tests and feed it into their platform. So CGMs are directly tied to that. Abbott and Withings have a new partnership as of January. Dexcom and Aura have an investment partnership with each other. So it's really coming for everyone. They are kind of positioning this as not just for diabetics. And, you know, it's a lot. So there's a push to make this as mainstream as, I don't know, knowing your VO2 max or even like your heart rate or something.

39:37These things that I think are pretty normal, sort of one tick above regular person biometrics. People want glucose monitoring to be as mainstream and as part of our lives as that kind of stuff, it seems like.

39:52Victoria Song:There's a definite push happening there. So, yeah. I want to hear a bunch about your own journey, but I also want to kind of go back to your motivations for this journey. Is this something that you're interested anyway? Like, do you have experience with CGMs? Is this a world you knew going in or did you sort of sense the mainstreaming of it and decide to try to figure it out for yourself? A little bit of all of it, just because my first experience using CGMs on myself was actually in 2023. I tested something called NutriSense, which used one of the Abbott CGMs for diabetics because in 2023, we did not have over-the-counter devices.

40:33Victoria Song:I had a really terrible time training for a half marathon. I was following all the standards and, you know, me, I love to self quantify and I love to see what I can improve. And I just did not understand why I whiffed it so hard at the New York City half marathon in 2023 when I was following really kind of science based training regiments, experimentation with fueling. And at the same time, I was experiencing a flare-up in my PCOS, which is polycystic ovary syndrome. It is a hormonal slash metabolic condition where I do not burn calories efficiently. It affects my reproductive system. It basically means I have way too much testosterone naturally.

41:24Victoria Song:and also it impacts my metabolism, making me more likely to be insulin resistant. I have a family history of diabetes. My dad had pretty severe type 2 diabetes. And it's just a lot of health things that I have been on a journey for a really long time to figure out. So NutriSense was like, hey girl, we'll help you lose weight and optimize your athletic performance using a CGM. And I was like, okay, you know what? I'll give it a whirl. NutriSense has nutritionists evaluate your glucose data. And I was basically told, girl, you're doing everything right. Everything makes sense. You are super great.

42:07Victoria Song:There's nothing to flag here. And I was like, this is amazing. I ate like crap during this entire, not like crap, but I wasn't as locked in or dialed in during that testing period. And I'm perfect. Amazing. So a year later, when the over-the-counter devices came out, I was like, okay, I know what to expect going in here. I'll test it for two weeks, see how this works and what the differences are between what I tested in 2023 and what I test it now in 2024. And, oh, no, it was different. It was not – I was even more dialed in at that point in 2024 too because I was like I have somehow gained 25 pounds doing nothing different, which is a hallmark of PCOS.

42:51Victoria Song:And what was happening was I would test the Dexcom Stelo and the Abbott Lingo and I would wake up with glucose levels at 110, 115 milligrams per deciliter. and what they say is you should be waking up under 100 like 99 and lower is what it's supposed to be because my dad had type 2 diabetes i was aware of something called the dawn phenomenon which when you wake up you tend to have uh an increase in glucose because it's your liver going hey girl wake up time to wake up time to have energy for the day so i was like oh my god and it wasn't a one-off. It was multiple of these CGMs over a period of several weeks.

43:32Victoria Song:And I freaked out. I was like, oh, my genetics, I've been done in. I have prediabetes. I have to go to the doctor. So I went to a doctor and all of my labs came back normal for blood glucose because I went and I said, look at this data. I'm concerned. This is a big jump. And they're like, girl, no, you are in like the most optimal zone like chill out your liver enzymes are elevated so and you're like showing them the app on your phone being like no no i actually i had years of like i'm sure i i keep i'm one of the most nerdily self-quantified people uh around and so i had years worth of blood test data i'm being like no no as you can see this trend in my uh liver enzymes has always been there i've been told in the past not to worry about it.

44:21Victoria Song:It's likely because of other medications or just whatever. I'm the most annoying patient for doctors, by the way, because I'm like, here's some evidence, madam or sir. And, you know, they were just like, I can't believe they have non-diabetics using this. I guess we can give you an ultrasound if you insist on it. And I'm like, verily, sir, I do insist. And so I get an ultrasound and they're like, yeah, you have a mild case of fatty liver disease, lose 10 to 15 percent of your body weight for a starter and come back to us in a year. I was just like, all right, you know what? Fine. I have all these wearable devices.

44:58Victoria Song:Let's try this. And, you know, part of me was just like, I'm going to do everything right. And when the data proves that there's still something wrong with me, we'll have a discussion. Like, you know, I got a little crazed there because I felt so invalidated by that experience. Well, actually, on that point, help me understand sort of the day to day life of that, because I think you and I have talked on the show before about how you feel about things like as simple as the streaks for closing your rings on the Apple Watch and the ways in which data collection turns sort of pernicious and addictive in a way that is really problematic.

45:36And it seems like from the bits I've heard of this through your reporting, which again is like 18 months long, that this became a particularly deep version of that rabbit hole for you. Like, what was the sort of when you were like really in the deepest testing phases of this stuff? What was the sort of day to day experience of living with one of these monitors like?

45:59Victoria Song:So it was a lot of time reviewing data, but it's like you wake up, you pull out the apps. there were times where I would only test one CGM at a time and times where I would have two, one in each arm. And so when I had two, one in each arm, it's pulling out an app and then looking at two different apps and trying to understand why the numbers were different. And then also, you know, going, okay, I can have a controlled experiment where I'm going to go on a run and see how that spikes it in one glucose monitor versus the other. So I'm pulling up three to four different apps, looking at my heart rate data, looking at my blood glucose data.

46:38Victoria Song:And then also because nutrition is such a huge part of it, it involves creating a bunch of mini experiments with what you're eating, what time of day you're eating. So if I eat the same carb heavy meal in the morning, in the middle of the day and at night, how does that impact my glucose? If I cut off eating at a certain period of time, how does that impact my glucose? If I go for a walk after I eat a protein-heavy meal versus a carb-heavy meal, how does that impact the difference? Oh, you could drive yourself crazy doing this without even trying very hard. Oh, without even trying hard at all.

47:14Victoria Song:And then some of these apps themselves, like I will say that Dexcom, Stello, and Abbott Lingo, I talked with all the teams behind these and wanted in insight into how they developed certain features like the the stelo will alert you to spikes not in the moment after a certain period of time as to not spike your anxiety too much whereas the lingo will create a score so if there is a spike that's activity related you won't get a score but if you spike it and it's food related you're gonna get a number of some sort and so i'm waking up and I'm seeing that overnight on a night where I had not snacked, where I had not done anything that was bad, like eating ice cream in the middle of the night, done none of that.

48:03Victoria Song:I was waking up with like lingo scores of 60 because I was spiking so hard in the middle of the night. And I was just like, what's happening here? I don't know what this is because I had had a baseline of data from 2023 that showed no such behavior like that. And the way that I was responding to food compared to the year previous was not the same at all. So I actually have these screenshots of how, you know, one year eating, taking a walk and then eating a meal differed in terms of what my glucose response to it was. And you could go insane over that. Like, Why is this data behaving differently?

48:46Victoria Song:And there's many reasons why. As I did research, I was finding out that, like, if you sleep on your side, that could impact these readings. Oh, wow. Because it compresses the interstitial fluid. And most of the time that leads to lower than real readings. Sometimes it could be higher. So I was like, oh, is it the fact that I'm a side sleeper? Is that impacting why there's a difference between these two devices? Let me test one in one arm and one in the other because I primarily sleep on one side. And then I realized throughout this experiment that I can't account for how I move during the night.

49:23Victoria Song:I have cats. Is a cat sleeping on me going to affect it? There was no way to like isolate and control for that. Barring booking myself in a hotel and putting a camera, filming me at night. And then, you know, I contemplated doing these things. And I was like, that's actually insane, though. There's no like the normal person is not going to do that. And there's the only other way to do it. And this is what many diabetics do, would to be by a finger prick test and calibrate the CGM that way. And as a non-diabetic, is that something I would know to do? And I was just like, I don't think the average non-diabetic would know that if they were to buy this device and try and test it organically based solely on the educational articles within the app.

50:08Victoria Song:So like the TLDR is that I started going to social events and not eating anything because I was terrified if eating a slice of pizza was going to spike my glucose. I couldn't eat cake at friends' birthday parties because, oh my God, that's going to spike my glucose and it's going to make my metrics look wonky. And then what do I do with that? I can't do I can't eat carbs unless I'm measuring it. I bought a kitchen scale. I memorized the weight of my plates. I learned how to scoop rice in such a way that I'm automatically getting a certain amount. And I had studied what that amount of rice would do.

50:45Victoria Song:And in some ways, it led to healthier things. Like I stopped eating pure white rice. I started mixing brown rice with quinoa. Like these are good things for you. These are things you should do or whatnot. So that was great. But those behaviors I just described to you are like the early hallmarks of eating disorders and disordered eating, which are two different things. But, you know, my therapist noticed it. My friends noticed it. I had interventions held and I was like, oh, I've become really obsessive in a way that is harming me and that I didn't even realize was harming me. Me, someone who is very aware of the ways that data fatigue can be pernicious, I had slipped into, like, I don't know many athletes or women who have not had a period of disordered or disordered eating or eating disorders within their lives.

51:38Victoria Song:It's very common. It's very pervasive. It's very supported by diet culture. I dealt with it as a teen, and I worked really hard for decades to have a healthy relationship with food and exercise. And I found that I was just like, oh, I can just take a 40 minute walk after this meal and then I'm allowed to have a piece of cake. And that is not healthy thinking. That's not healthy thinking whatsoever. And if you don't like notice it, if you don't flag it, that can turn into something a lot more dangerous very quickly. and I legitimately had my therapist go like, hey, I've noticed you've been talking about food in a way that you haven't in a really long time.

52:21Victoria Song:And I just want to investigate why this is happening. And I explained to her this whole experiment and she's like, I love your dedication to work, but can we consider that it's not out of the realm of possibility that you can enjoy a single slice of cake and see a spike and that's okay. Right. And, you know, yeah. Well, it's the that's okay that I think is also interesting here because there is, I can just imagine the horrifying sort of causality between I eat this thing and I see the number go up and I know that the number going up is bad. And actually the answer is vastly more complicated than that.

53:01But talking to folks in this industry, is there any sense that we need a better way to represent this data, that the things that we're giving to people who are supposed to review them with their doctor for medical reasons actually are nothing like the things we should be giving to people who are, quote unquote, optimizing their metabolism?

53:18Victoria Song:This was the ultimate question I was trying to find out in the research. And unfortunately, there is not a good answer. So we have a lot of data about diabetics. We have no consensus among experts about the data from non-diabetics. So I actually interviewed Nicole Spartanow, who had run this study, where she took non-diabetic CGM data and gave it to 18 expert endocrinologists who extensively work with CGMs. I think a lot of health care providers don't have experience with these devices. And, you know, I can tell you, we just published a study surveying endocrinologists who have a ton of experience using this technology in people with diabetes.

54:08and we gave them 20 different glucose monitor reports. Sort of the visual is very similar to what you see on the app and asked them, okay, if someone came in with this report, would you suggest they have follow-up screening for this? And I think we had 18 different experts that we surveyed and essentially there was no consensus.

54:38Victoria Song:In talking to these researchers, they were telling me it could take years, just like several years before we have enough data, enough peer-reviewed studies, enough consensus to have an actual actionable advice for people like me. And I legitimately was losing sleep every night thinking that I had something wrong with me. And so I went to another doctor. I was showing her all my data. And eventually what happened was this doctor held my hand and she's like, I'm so proud of you. You clearly take a lot of interest in your health. And I'm here to tell you that your genetics are just crap. And you need medication because no amount of taking control of your life, as RFK is saying that Americans should do, and making appropriate lifestyle changes.

55:26Victoria Song:You've done it for over a decade and it's not done anything. So I need you to hear me when I say, here are three medical prescriptions I'm going to write for you. Have at. And throughout all of this, I was thinking about like, what does it mean to actually be healthy? And it's kind of emotional for me because when I started this journey, I was in the best running fitness of my life, the best cardiovascular fitness of my life. These devices were telling me, you're seven years younger in your heart. You're doing great, girl. I was, at that point, I had cut 16 minutes off of my four-mile time. I was lifting weights.

56:03Victoria Song:I was gaining muscle. I was feeling great. I was eating healthy. And now that I'm on these medications, which for me have come with severe side effects, I have all these wearables telling me, hey, girl, I want you to know that your cardio fitness is below average. I want you to know that you're not doing so hot but my biomarkers for the first time in my last 10 years my cholesterol is where it should be I reduced my liver enzymes by 65 % I lost a lot of muscle mass it's very conflictive for me because I almost wrecked my relationship with food and in some ways you could say this was a resounding success and that I've made a lot of progress with my metabolism.

56:51Victoria Song:I've lost at this point, maybe 26 pounds in a very, very short amount of time, I want to say. And like, I don't recommend that actually. I've had so many side effects. I can't run. Running is such a huge part of my life and I have no energy to run at this point in time. I can't run more than a mile at a time. It's been a huge loss for me and my mental health as well. And so did I become healthier in this process? I think some people would say, yes, you are well on your way to optimizing your metabolism. And it made me think very deeply about the limitations of wearable tech, just as, you know, influencers are like, optimize your life.

57:32Victoria Song:Well, is my life optimized? Is what I would posit to all of them. Is it optimized now? I don't know. I would argue not. I would argue it's not optimized. And is it optimized for what, right? Like I'm so struck as you're talking about this by you, I just have this visual of V perpetually wearing, you know, between six and 400 different devices that are measuring different things. And those are actually all measuring different things that are sometimes in opposition to one another that are going to yell at you to do the thing that they are incentivized to get you to do, right? And I know you've been getting feedback from people in a lot of different situations.

58:10And I'm curious how you feel about the idea of CGMs in particular, but also just this sort of medical grade data collection that we are increasingly giving ourselves, whether that's even a good idea right now.

58:28Victoria Song:I have a lot of feelings about it. It actually keeps me awake at night. It really does keep me awake at night. Because, you know, and again, a lot of people were asking why we had to talk about the Maha framing at all with regard to CGMs and wearables at large. And I feel very passionately that we do have to talk about it because when you frame it in this way that it's good for everyone, I feel something that wearable health has not adequately answered at this point in time is how do you distinguish between what is a wellness feature and what is a medical feature? And this is actually something that's being debated in Washington at this point in time.

59:15Victoria Song:Politico has reported that a lot of Washington staffers are wearing whoops and aura rings. Aura is lobbying to have a different classification of device called a digital screener. And that's just relaxed FDA regulation so that they don't have to go through as rigorous a process as they have been. And there's reasons, there's valid, legitimate reasons for doing that. Having to go through the FDA clearance process can cost millions of dollars. Some of these features, these detection screening features could save lives. I mean, we know that the Apple Watch has saved lives, for example, right? It is one of the reasons why the smartwatch didn't just die into oblivion.

59:59Victoria Song:It's that we have atrial fibrillation. People viewed it as something that was integral to saving their lives. And we have real life stories of that being the case. You could look at my case and say this was an unmitigated success because I did finally find an answer to something that had been plaguing me for 10 years. I think there's a strong argument to be made that what you actually got was a good doctor, for the record. That too. Or, you know, there's a strong argument that, you know, medication is important and can help when genetic deficiencies or genetic predispositions are not great for you.

1:00:35Victoria Song:but you know what's happening in Washington with the discussion towards health tech and wearables it informs the the the features that come out it informs why an AI nutrition chat bot in your Garmin app or your ladder strength training app might tell you that you need to eat 135 grams of protein because RFK Jr. has said that there is a war on protein even though there is no scientific evidence proving that. Like these things are so tightly married together that, you know, we can't talk about one without talking about the other. And like, I don't think CGMs are bad. I don't think non-diabetics necessarily using CGMs is inherently valueless.

1:01:23Victoria Song:Like people in my situation where you have a predisposition and something starts feeling not right with you. You want to learn early about what's happening. I don't think that's necessarily wrong. I just want us all to be hyper aware of what the cost is. I paid a pretty high cost throughout this experiment. I got to live and see firsthand how type one diabetics live because this is life or death for them. It's not life or death for me, at least not in the short term. It is very much in the short term for them, a life or death technology. And I've gotten a lot of feedback from type 1 diabetics who are just like, I hate that they're, you know, marketing this widespread just because in the same way that GLPs have been marketed widespread, it makes life harder for us.

1:02:10Victoria Song:We have shortages now. And I think that's a valuable conversation to have, even as other people are saying, well, you know what, GLPs for addicts, for people who have PCOS like me, for people who have metabolic dysfunction like me, for people who have high cholesterol and all of these things, it also dramatically improves their lives. So there is so many conversations right now that are happening. And in my ideal world, I would say that there would be medical consensus. Maybe people, if depending on the blood work that their doctor sees, says, hey, you know, we're up for your physical this year.

1:02:44Victoria Song:I can get a really good sense about your A1C from this, but how about once a quarter, we have you wear it for two weeks and just see where you're at with certain things, if things are changing. I don't think that there's inherently anything wrong with that. It's the idea of using this every day for everyone, always reviewing the data that I find like maybe is a bit not the correct approach. I did a lot of research into seeing whether there is clinical evidence that wearables are linked to increased health anxiety, and it's inconclusive. There have been a lot of studies done, and they're like super great for some people.

1:03:20Victoria Song:And, you know, the only concrete thing I could find in maybe like 10 to 12 studies that I reviewed was that it exacerbates symptoms in people who already have eating disorders or disordered eating. And some people will be like, oh, that's been around forever. However, I encourage you to look into the science literature and see how many people have disordered eating, particularly among populations who are attracted to this data like athletes, like female athletes. I want to point to Alyssa Liu, who just won the gold medal for figure skating and how one of the things she said was her condition was, if I come back to this sport, no one is going to tell me what to eat and how much of it.

1:04:03Victoria Song:So I, in writing this, really wanted to say we need to have a much more thoughtful, nuanced discussion about how to integrate these tools into our lives so that they remain tools and we don't live our lives in service to a tool. Like we don't become the tools. We control the tools. Yeah. So it's I feel very emotional about it because it's it's I think not a clear cut thing. Yeah, I agree. Well, I know it's been a journey, but thank you for being here and thank you for the story. I suspect it feels very good to finally have all this reporting out in the world. I cried. I cried because I was like, it's done.

1:04:54Victoria Song:It's out there. And, you know, I finally feel like my journey is not over because I really got to get these side effects like under control. But it feels like done enough. And I feel very strongly that if we can continue the conversation and have really smart conversations about it, that maybe we can push these companies to be a little more human. And how they create these features. Because they do think about it. They really do think about it. But the bottom line is profit. So we have to think about that too. True that. All right, V, thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

1:05:34All right, we got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and do a question for the VergeCast Hotline. We'll be right back.

1:05:44We're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast Hotline. Reminder, by the way, we are doing that episode next week. Please call with all of your questions about The Verge, about The Vergecast, about podcasts, about journalism, about Neelize jackets, whatever you want. We want to hear all of it. The number, as always, is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecastattheverge.com. I'm davidpierce.11 on Signal. We're easy to find. Hit us up. For now, we have a question about, I don't know how to put this, just gadgets. Gadgets in general. Let's hear it. Hi, Beck. just a really random one that I think would be good for the show.

1:06:20How is it that we have gone from kind of the early Apple clamshell Macbooks, which were beautiful and very colorful and very detailed to kind of the situation where everything is quite planned, even we're starting to lose the bevels on something and we're having to skin stuff to be able to make it make it fun thanks okay i've actually been asking various people a version of this question for a really long time because i became obsessed with this question of like why aren't there more gadgets right like you go back a long time ago and and even apple was a company that made a laptop that looked one way and a different laptop that looked completely different, right?

1:07:09Like a PowerBook and an iBook, utterly different ideas about what a laptop should be. And then all of a sudden everything converged and we have MacBooks, right? And MacBooks look slightly different, but they're all MacBooks. A MacBook is a MacBook is a MacBook. And everybody has a MacBook and there's a MacBook for everybody. You go back to like the early days of phones and there were lots of new ideas about phones and lots of different colors and lots of different styles and lots of different ways that screens would open and rotate. And then we all converged on this one idea. And you go back to like the early days of software, and there were lots of ideas about how software looked.

1:07:43And then there have been fewer and fewer and fewer over since. And I think in asking people about why this has happened, I've really come to two answers. The first is just that as something gets sufficiently popular, it becomes very hard to change it at all, especially when something is popular and good and people like it. Right. Like look at the MacBook is maybe a perfect example of this. Right. Apple basically found a design that looks good. It works well and it serves a lot of purposes. You can make it a little tiny bit thicker and you can put more battery into it. You can put a fan into it to cool it down when that was necessary and useful.

1:08:22And you can make a big, powerful laptop. Or you can shrink it very slightly, slim it down a little bit, and have a MacBook Air. You don't need a bunch of new ideas because you have one that kind of more or less works for everybody. This is the answer I find very frustrating, right? Because this is also the answer that leads to every other phone looks like the iPhone. because once something becomes sort of the image in people's minds, anything you do that is different becomes a huge swing that you have to make people think differently about, right? Like if Apple were to introduce the iBook now, it wouldn't work.

1:09:04Like I really earnestly believe that. And so when you get something like the MacBook Neo, what Apple does is take the rough outline of a MacBook, add some nice colors, change a couple of little things, right? Like you tweak the trackpad to make it a little cheaper. But like that thing is still a MacBook. Nobody is going to look at that thing and think it's anything other than a MacBook. Whereas if you introduce the iBook, which is this big, round, plastic, sort of transparent thing with a handle, you'd get a lot of people who are like, what on earth is that? And even if it was objectively better, it would still be this huge uphill battle to convince people that it's better because we have all this history with this sort of lowest common denominator device that people are more or less happy with.

1:09:48It's the same with phones, right? I think this has been a really interesting challenge with foldable phones and going back to flip phones. We just converged on the idea that a phone should look like this. And so every phone looks like this. It's a candy bar phone. You either have something that looks like an iPhone or something that is an iPhone. And those are essentially the two phone ideas in the world right now. That's not to say there aren't other better ideas. There are lots of people out there who long for the idea of a sidekick, which had that sort of flippy open screen. There are lots of people who miss their BlackBerrys.

1:10:18There are lots of people who might actually be really well served by a phone like the LG Wing, which had a screen that flipped horizontally, which in a certain way actually makes quite a lot of sense. Like if you watch a lot of YouTube on your phone, maybe a screen that just flips horizontally would make a lot of sense. But again, it's just an uphill battle to convince people that they want that thing, to make software and accessories that support that thing, and to just push outside of the norm becomes harder and harder and harder. The other half of that is also that once people become accustomed to a certain kind of advice, they get really annoyed when you change it, right?

1:10:54Like if your iPhone suddenly had a screen that flipped upwards, some people would think that's cool, and some people would find it incredibly annoying. My favorite example of this always is you look at an app like Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is filled with buttons and ribbons and icons and stuff that like no one thinks this is good UI. No one, including at Microsoft, thinks this is like good, beautiful, modern software UI to have just a bunch of ribbons and 100 ,000 options in a menu. But the problem is there are millions of people who have used Microsoft Word essentially as it is professionally for decades.

1:11:34It is their livelihood to know where these things are in Microsoft Word. And so if you just move a little button, like somebody at Microsoft has said this to us one time, and it's been stuck in my mind ever since, that every teeny tiny feature that almost nobody uses inside of Microsoft Word is still used by millions of people. And so if you move that, even if you move it to a better, simpler, easier place, you have now created a bunch of new work for people to do. And most people don't want to do that work. And that's fine. Most people have better things to do than learn where buttons are, right?

1:12:04This is the sort of eternal struggle of any designer is you build something that people like and gravitate to, and it becomes sufficiently popular that it actually becomes almost impossible to change. And so you either have to do what like Google does, which is just endlessly try to invent new things that mostly don't take off. Or you just kind of let the thing slowly atrophy over time because you don't want to screw up people's workflows. The beauty of that is neither of those is the correct answer. And almost nobody is good at figuring out how to sort of slowly move people in the right direction without feeling like you're constantly making people learn new things.

1:12:41And I think this is true with all kinds of software. It's true with all kinds of gadgets. basically once we as a consumer society land on an idea that works, even if it's not the best idea, it's just something that works and we get comfortable with it, changing that thing becomes very, very hard. So that's all one thing. The other thing, and this is the thing people have told me many times, is it's much cheaper to make fewer things than it is to make more things, right so if you're apple again just to keep picking on the macbook you can make a bunch of different kinds of macbook in roughly the same way with tiny little tweaks to your process and tooling pretty inexpensively right you have this incredible economy of scale that allows you to make tons and tons of these things and if you want to make a neo and all you're changing is like the color and a little bit of the size and a couple of parts you don't have to like spin up new factories and invent new tools and teach people how to do tons of new things.

1:13:40You just drop a couple of new changes to the process and you're off and running with a new thing. Whereas if you want to invent an entirely new gadget category or reinvent the way a laptop works entirely, that's going to be enormously expensive, like literally in dollars expensive to change your whole manufacturing process. You have to change the packaging process. You have to change how things like move on trucks and how they fit into things. Like think about all the times Apple has redesigned the Mac Pro and the ways that that has been weird both to fit into people's workflows. And it has actually been hard for Apple to manufacture because going from we have this rack mounted large thing to we have a trash can takes a lot of work and energy in how you make the thing, how you move it around the world, how you stock it in stores, how you sell it to people, how they install it.

1:14:30Like these changes are complicated and they're expensive. And so if you're Apple and you're like, well, OK, we can make either two completely different ideas about laptops that require two completely different processes from beginning to end, or we can make essentially one laptop that gets slightly thicker and slightly thinner and maybe drop in a new part here and there. obviously at some level of scale the only smart business decision is just to make the one thing especially again if you are not 100 confident that this other new thing is going to be such a gigantic success that it makes all of it worth it this is this is the challenge and i think what you see is you see companies take much bigger swings with the first version of something than you do anytime after that and that's partly for sort of consumer psychological reasons like we you're talking about.

1:15:20But it's also for reasons of like, well, we've built the damn factory. We know how to make this thing. And it becomes much easier to go from making, you know, a hundred thousand of something to a hundred million of something because it becomes very successful than it was to figure out how to make that first hundred thousand of something. And so you build these systems, you build these tools, you build these supply chains, and then you don't want to blow it up over and over again, just in the name of having brand new ideas. going all the way back. This is one thing I actually give Apple an enormous amount of credit for.

1:15:52We've talked about this a bunch on the show, but there was this run where Apple announced the iMac G3, the iMac G4 and the iMac G5. And they were three fundamentally different devices, different designs, different looks, different sort of vibes to them in really interesting ways. But even that was driven by this brand new technology that was flat screen monitors, right? So Apple is actually being forced to make these changes because there is a new technology that they want to put in your products. So that becomes the forcing function for new devices. If you want some big new thing, you should root for some important new display technology or some wild new idea about how these things can work.

1:16:32That's what makes redesigns happen. And in most spaces, we haven't had that in mobile in a long time. Everything has been just getting sort of steadily better, but we haven't had like a sort of breakthrough new technology that has made its way into phones in a really long time. We haven't had it in laptops either. We've just been on this sort of steady march of progress for a long time. And so there's no forcing function for everybody to say, well, okay, we have to blow up the system anyway. Let's tear this whole thing down and start over. What you have is you could say, we want to spend an enormous amount of money to try and have a new idea about the iPhone, the most successful product ever, or you could just keep making better iPhones.

1:17:11And like, is that the boring choice? Is it not the choice I wish they would make? Of course, but it is the obvious choice and it is the choice almost everybody makes. So if you if you want more exciting gadgets, if you want more gadgets, root for new technology, root for new displays, root for some breakthrough new, you know, input device like Apple always talks about. What is the thing after the touchscreen? If we figure that out, I guarantee to you, we are set for a whole new kind of device category that will make all of this feel very fun again. Anyway, those are all my thoughts. That's what I've been talking about for a long time.

1:17:47I hope that helps. If you have any other ideas, if you have other things that I've missed, or if you think there is a bunch of like fascinating new idea innovation happening in these spaces right now, tell me all about it. I want to hear about it. 866-VERGE11, vergecastoftheverge.com. For now, that's it for the show. Vote for us in the webbies. You have until Thursday to do that. I'm eternally grateful to all of you who have already voted for us. Also, send us questions about The Verge and The Verge Cast. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. There's a lot going on right now.

1:18:16It's just, it all just keeps happening. You know what I mean? The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. I will be back with Neel Eye on Friday to talk about presumably more of our weird DIY projects because I got a lot of feedback on my dumb vibe coding stuff, and I have some catching up to do. We got more news, more AI stuff, all kinds of good stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.