How clips ate the internet

22:20David Pierce:Which for a long time is all Reels was. A hundred percent. Downloaded, re-uploaded TikTok. In fact, I think a lot of it still is. But at least publicly, Meta has introduced these rules on Instagram and Facebook where they're like, if you post re-uploaded stuff, we won't recommend you, which is the only kind of like the only way to get in front of people. Going back to what we were talking about, like the death of the follower. It doesn't matter if someone follows you. It matters if you're getting recommended to other people. Right.

23:17filled with videos like that with lots of lots of reach um and so that is a tangle that i would like to hear someone at the company unravel um because it's like these this content is clearly repetitive it's clearly pulling from the same thing that the account didn't create right someone else created that podcast so why why is it still on the platform and why does it have tons of views

23:42David Pierce:yeah and especially in a time where the platforms have like you said essentially complete control over who sees what. Because if just because I've signed up to see your content does not mean I'm going to see your content. So in theory, this whole system, which is run by a bunch of accounts with relatively low followers and relatively low engagement that is finding me because of the algorithm, could just be shut off. Like that's a relationship that exists at the mercy of the platforms. And wasn't it relatively recently that Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, made a video about how they're going to start to be very aggressive in downranking this exact kind of thing.

24:20So they say.

24:21David Pierce:Like, I feel like they've been talking about this in increasingly intense terms over time, but sort of like, I don't know, Adam Oster was like, now we're serious. Yeah. I mean, I think the problem is like, there's a question of does Instagram care what kind of watch time they're getting? What kind of engagement? Because on one hand, And, you know, very like cynically, why would Instagram care whether you're watching good stuff or junk or like watching something re-uploaded, right? It's not as long as and that's kind of the argument that a lot of the clipping companies have said, which is like we give them something beneficial.

24:58We keep people on their platform. So why would they downrank our content, our Clippers content? And, yeah, I can kind of like agree.

25:07David Pierce:Yeah. But at the same time, you have people like Adam Mosseri and the Instagram comms team saying, you know, we want original content. We want you to make things just for Instagram. And that's a lot to ask. And I think the other thing is like the Clippers feel like they're in this very rich tradition of content really rapidly adjusting to what the algorithm wants in that moment. And if anyone knows better, you know, that that is not a good way to live. It's the media industry. We've done this a lot of times. And it's sort of like hilarious to me that we're doing a pivot to video again because it feels like we just did this.

25:47But to me, it kind of feels like a risky bet because, as you said, like the fire hose can just be turned off. Right. The money machine could just turn off one day. And then what do you do? Yeah.

25:59David Pierce:I mean, it does seem like the move historically would be to say we're going to leave all of this stuff. We're going to keep putting in front of people. And what we're going to turn off is the monetization, which is the thing about the clip economy that really gets me because they're not trying to monetize these videos. Right. Right. Like this. This is the thing that sort of blows my mind is if what you're saying is, you know, I'm making I'm taking a bunch of clips of a movie that I shouldn't and I'm putting them up and I'm going to make the ad revenue. Clearly bad. Clearly stoppable. Actually, everyone has an incentive to stop you from doing that.

26:31Yeah.

26:32David Pierce:But if you're taking a bunch of things that I am actually paying you to post, you're posting them. You're not monetizing them. And there's such a giant army of them. To some extent, it's like AI slop, right? Where at some point, the volume of it just feels so high that even if you try to stop them, I'm not sure that you can. Yeah. Yeah. I actually have been thinking kind of about like all the human generated slop that we put out there. And I actually do think some of these clippers are using like AI editing tools to pump these out. But, you know, the contemporary recommendation algorithm really makes people act in a way that we would associate with bots.

27:17So, like, you know, one thing, one like hallmark of like botted activity or like botted accounts is like they post really, really rapidly a lot about one topic and then never revisit it after a couple of days. Right. Like you kind of put a swarm of bots on, you know, whatever topic. And that's how humans post right now, because all of the recommendations are, you know, kind of like topic based. And a lot of these platforms have tools that say, hey, this topic is trending. Why don't you make content about it, even if it has nothing to do with what you normally make? And so I think a lot about like how the systems right now incentivize really spammy behavior.

27:59And you don't need AI at all to act that way. Right. Humans are doing plenty of that themselves. So, yeah, it is really is really strange. And I think probably a net bad for everyone. I don't know. Like, sometimes I learn about things through clips, but you don't get the full thing that way.

28:21David Pierce:Right. And, you know, the whole point of my piece was like, when we're over-indexing on clips like this, what is the point of even making the full thing? If nobody is ever going to go look at it and they're just going to watch you through clips that may or may not be paid for. Like, that's a really weird way to promote your work on the Internet. I mean, you keep hearing these stories about influencers who are basically going to sets that are dressed up to look like podcast studios and making clips of podcasts without ever making the podcast. And on the one hand, whatever, people have gone to sets that have things that look like private jets and taken photos of private jets.

28:57David Pierce:Like, this is just how the game is played. On the other hand, making a fake podcast just to make the clips feels so dystopian to me in a way that I can't quite get past. It's perfect. It really is. I promise if you're watching this in a clip, we actually do make a whole podcast and you'll like it. Go listen to it or watch it. It seems to me that the next phase of this is that it becomes legitimized and even more industrialized, right? That what we're going to get is a bunch of new companies doing this at bigger scale and more loudly and with accounts that you're more aware of that the shame will go away and this will just become a part of the whole ecosystem.

29:37David Pierce:Do you see that coming with clips? I mean, it's that or the platforms decide we don't need this anymore. And then the entire bottom falls out. And I think that is like a bad place to be if you are someone who makes a show or a podcast or writes stories that you need people to see. And so that's why I'm like pretty skeptical of the future of marketing is clips because we've heard that about a lot of different tactics that just one day you wake up and they stop working. And I also think, I mean, I don't know how fast that sort of adoption will happen if, again, nobody wants to talk about it and be honest with the fact that they're using clippers.

30:19I don't even, like, think that that's, it's not even half bad an idea. You know what I mean? To, like, leverage meme accounts that pump your stuff out. But it's all the other like kind of sort of sketchy things around it that make it for – I find the argument that like this is a future kind of weird and like unproven. And I think the Clippers have not quite figured out how to take something from a clip to downloading the full podcast. Like that is a jump that nobody has figured out yet, I don't think.

30:54David Pierce:Yeah. I mean on any spectrum of legitimacy, nobody has figured that out yet. And that remains kind of the ongoing problem with a lot of this stuff, which is why it makes sense that you would just say, well, we're going to spend some money to just put my face in front of you. Because that's you. You having seen my face is something. Yeah. What is it? Is it valuable? Yeah. Great question. But it is it is something. It's something. It's the awareness economy in some weird, strange way. And that is worth it at some scale in a way that I'm still deeply uncomfortable with, but it feels like this is just the game everybody's playing right now.

31:29Yeah, yeah. It's also like, you know, part of the platforms are both enabling mass awareness and then stifling deeper engagement. Like this is a problem on every single social platform that you use to promote your work. It's either X stifles links. TikTok doesn't allow you to link anything at all. unless it's like TikTok shop, right? Like these are all issues that we know what would work. If you let me link my article in my TikTok, people would click it probably, or at least more would than they do now. But the platforms that's not in their incentive structure to allow for that. So it feels really like a weird, the clipping feels like a work around that, but without like actually solving the core problem.

32:23David Pierce:Yeah, I agree. It does feel like there is a fight coming where the platforms are either going to say, we can't monetize this, so get it out of here. Or they're going to say, oh, great, free content and just let the floodgates open. And I wouldn't even know how to handicap which of those it's going to be. But it's going to be very interesting. At what point does Meta be like, well, we don't want you to do that anymore. So we're going to make it so you can't. And then what happens to the Clippers? Yeah. Won't someone think of the Clippers? Won't someone think of the Clippers? Mia, thank you as always.

32:56David Pierce:Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the Fitbit Air. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or running a physical shop, you already know how hard it can be to get noticed. Most of the time, you're just waiting, hoping that someone finds your listing or walks through the door. But Whatnot works differently. It's a live shopping marketplace where people can buy, sell, and connect around the things they care about. Sellers can go live, show products in real time, answer questions, and make sales on the spot.

33:35David Pierce:From beauty and collectibles to electronics, luxury fashion, and even cookies, sellers are building real businesses on the platform. Buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. Not just browsing, but bidding, buying, and coming back again and again. And their data shows that across WhatNot, the number of sellers making over$1 million a year has doubled. This isn't a side hustle. It's a real path to building real connections with buyers and creating something that lasts. Download the WhatNot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search W-H-A-T-N-O-T WhatNot in the App Store and start scoring amazing deals.

34:22David Pierce:Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

35:01David Pierce:Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60 % of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from Klaviyo. There are only so many hours in a day. And Klaviyo's two powerful AI agents can make sure your team spends them on big things.

35:48David Pierce:The first Klaviyo AI agent turns your marketing ideas into reality instantly. Describe what you want. A holiday campaign, a VIP re-engagement series, and Klaviyo builds it instantly. Email, SMS, and push, all coordinated, on-brand, grounded in 14 years of Klaviyo marketing data. Nothing goes live without your say-so. The other Klaviyo AI agent keeps your customers happy at any hour. Brand trained to answer questions, make product recommendations, and handle orders and returns. No hold music. Marketing that launches instantly. Support that never sleeps. Join more than 193 ,000 brands, including Away, Patrick Ta, and Dollar Shave Club.

36:30David Pierce:Already growing with Klaviyo, the autonomous B2C CRM. Get started at klaviyo.com.

37:05David Pierce:of mean mean median number kind of right right down the middle v situation i have five with me

37:10Victoria Song:one of them's not charged but i have two um smart rings and two uh wrist-based wearables

37:17David Pierce:but well the one on your one wrist is the one i most want to talk about which is the fitbit air uh i have one too um i'm wearing the the orange and sort of khaki colored steph curry band um mostly out of loyalty to Steph Curry, but also because I got three bands from Google. I got a weird ribbed one. I got a sort of fake leather one, and I hate them both very much. And so I have the Steph Curry band, and that's the one I've been wearing. What did you get? What's been your choice so far?

37:51Victoria Song:Okay. So I just want to preface this by saying that after Google I.O. keynote, I did chase down Rishi Chandra, who is in charge of Fitbit and the health initiatives. And I did talk as ear off for about 15 minutes about why this color, which is called lavender, is not lavender and is, in fact, periwinkle.

38:11David Pierce:Reporters are a super fun group. Everyone watching and listening should know this. We're a delight to be around all the time.

38:17Victoria Song:Listen, I have a hyperfixation on the color purple. It is my delightful little quirk. And we had a 15-minute conversation about this. And I've brought visual aids to help prove why I am, in fact, correct, such as my, I'm sorry, podcast listeners, but I have a lilac shirt on. I have my lavender flush shade 04 from the House of Her blusher. I have my carry-on Luca duffel, which is in lavender. I have my baboon to the moon backpack, which is in the color iced lavender. And I have, thanks to Gemini, which I will screen record this so that people can watch this on the podcast video version on YouTube.

38:58Victoria Song:I have this Gemini request of a actual shade palette hex thing where I can compare lavender, lavender blue, which is a color, by the way, periwinkle, cornflower blue, and lilac. And I also just did the more sensible thing of asking Gemini, what color is this picture of my wrist, this band? And I just want to read to you what Gemini said, which is based on the colors we just looked at, that watch band is a textbook match for periwinkle. And then it goes into reasons why. So I just want to say, yeah, this is the level of journalistic integrity that I bring to a very pointless fact.

39:43David Pierce:Is that the word we would use? Is this journalistic integrity or is this V's particular brand of insanity? Or are those? Both. Yeah, this is what we do here, I suppose. So the Air, I think, is a device that has gotten more interest and excitement than your average fitness tracker. Would you say that's true? This thing has been like kind of halfway leaked a bunch and then it came out and there was this sense of like, okay, it has no screen. It's$99. It has no subscription. There's something about this that was very appealing to lots of people. Why do you think the idea of this caught?

40:18Victoria Song:I think that a lot of it, there's like multiple reasons why, but a lot of it that I think can be traced back to some reader requests that I've actually gotten over the last couple of years, which we did a Vergecast hotline about it like I think two years ago. It's like, where have all the fitness bands gone? Because there was a shift in time with wearables where we went kind of all in on the smartwatch for various reasons. And, you know, the pebbles went to the side. The fitness bands of yore that were affordable and fairly basic gave way to more complicated pixel watches and Apple watches and all of those things due in part to their advanced health tech features.

41:00Victoria Song:And so Whoop, in their absence, kind of gained a lot of traction. The Oura Ring gained a lot of traction precisely because there's no display. there are minimal notifications or haptic reactions and pretty robust data that gets tracked. And so, you know, there have been a number of whoop-doops in the last year or so. There's one from Amazfit, however we're pronouncing that, that I've gotten a lot of questions about from our subscribers and readers. And so when the Fitbit Air came out, I think you saw a lot of people just go like, it's a whoop-doop. I have a theory about that. But they go, oh, it's a Whoop dupe and it's$99 and you don't have to pay Whoop's ridiculous yearly subscription.

41:45David Pierce:I want to know your Whoop theory because I actually don't think this thing is a Whoop dupe at all. And I think a big part of the reason it is enticing is that it does a bunch of things very differently from Whoop. Like, Whoop never appealed to me particularly because Whoop tries really hard to do a bunch of sort of proprietary stuff, right? Like, Whoop is for like capital A athletes who do capital F fitness stuff, right? And it has scores and it keeps track of everything. And I think many more people than are currently being served want something that gives you just like a rough sense of how you're doing, right?

42:18David Pierce:This is why the like 10 ,000 steps a day thing has been so sticky for so long, despite just being essentially a made up number that means nothing. It is like, it's something to do, right? That doesn't become like your whole personality. Everyone who has a whoop is defined by their whoop. And to all of you, please know that I love you and I don't want to talk about your whoop. But there's something about that that just all of these devices, whether it's the Garmins or anything else, and I think at least with smartwatches, you can buy a smartwatch to do other things and have some of the fitness stuff be a sort of secondary feature for that kind of stuff.

42:53David Pierce:But there really hasn't been anything like this that isn't enormously expensive, doesn't churn out mountains of data that probably don't mean anything to you, and just sort of helps you do a little better. frankly since like the first run of fitbits right like this is a category that just essentially died the like casual fitness tracker thing has not existed for a long time yeah uh like my theory

43:17Victoria Song:kind of dovetails with your theory and that um i think people have been calling this a whoop doop one because whoop doop is just a fun thing it's really fun to say i will definitely grant that whoop doop yeah uh but the more that i learned about this product and since having worn it the more that I think this is Fitbit returning to its roots. Because the fundamental audience for the Fitbit Air is a very different one, to your point, than the audience for the Whoop. Like, Whoop, and to an extent, Aura in recent years, has kind of catered to this idea of optimization and body hacking. You know, you're going to ask and get a ton of metrics with a ton of different scores, and you're going to try and be the most optimal version of yourself.

44:02Victoria Song:And the Fitbit Air is not really concerned with that. In large part, I think this is in many ways kind of returning to Fitbit's roots. Like if you think back to the OG Fitbits, which were tiny little sensor pendant things that you could pop out of different wrists. That's the same thing as this. It's very simple. This doesn't have a display, which the earliest Fitbits kind of did so that you could see very, very minimal data on them. I actually don't mind that this is not having a display of any kind. There are haptic alerts. There is like a LED indicator light. I kind of like that. I don't have to think about it.

44:40Victoria Song:It's just on. I have opinions about the various bands. To your point, I don't really like the modern elegant one because I have fairly petite wrists. And if my wrists were just slightly wider or slightly smaller, rather, this would be slightly too wide for me. But, you know, that is something to consider if you have bird wrists. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. But I think what I like about this is that it is meant for gen pop people. It is meant to contextualize your health in kind of a digestible way that is not the hyper health maxing, fitness maxing, biohacking crowd. Because, you know, You can get a whoop and its AI is going to tell you, hey, your range, your labs are within range.

45:30Victoria Song:But if we want it to get to a slightly better place, you should do this, this, this, and this. And that's going to be your most maximal self. It told Nilay to up his testosterone by 10 times, which is like.

45:45David Pierce:That's useful to know for just my day-to-day life going forward. Thank you for that.

45:50Victoria Song:We had a big laugh about that because I recently got a whoop and I was just like, no one wants that. And he's like, no, no, I know that no one wants that. But that's not something that this particular device is going to do. And something that differentiates the Fitbit Air from whoop and a lot of different trackers right now is Google Health. It's like the Fitbit app. Rip. It's gone, right? Google Health is here. It's been in beta preview for since October, I think. And there's a bunch of new features that are coming out. They had a lot of feedback. They're implementing that feedback. And it's a brand new world.

46:33Victoria Song:And they chose to pair that with this particular simple fitness tracker band thing. And the innovation is not really in the hardware. The innovation is in the fact that this comes with an AI coach. Right. It's a lot. It's a lot. And I'm actually curious as to like what your experience with the AI Health Coach has been because it's like a huge feature of this particular device.

47:02David Pierce:It is. Can I actually – I've had the most fascinating several days with this thing. So I – as we're recording this, I've had it on for a week. And I'm at 19 % battery, in case you're wondering, which is awesome. Like immediately I like this thing more than my Apple Watch because I don't have to charge it every day. I have to say I really like the Google Health app. I think rebranding it from Fitbit to Google Health was really stupid because I think Fitbit is a really good brand that a lot of people like. And anything with Google on it comes with a lot of data complications that Google just doesn't need.

47:34David Pierce:Frankly, it's just weird to decide to do that. But the app is nice. It's simple and clean and straightforward. And it tells me like how many steps I've taken, which is not enough today and calorie burn. And it has a sleep score. And like it does this sort of very basic at a glance. How are you doing kind of thing? But I put this thing on, wore it for a couple of days, was like, oh, cool. This would be a fun time to like try out a new exercise regimen, see how it goes. And then immediately got like debilitatingly sick. I got this like hideous stomach bug from my three-year-old that turned into like severe dehydration.

48:11David Pierce:I ended up in ER. It was a whole thing. And throughout all of this just decided I'm just going to feed every bit of information I have into into the Google Health Gemini AI coach and just see how it goes. And I actually it deserves credit for me going to the ER because it at some point got like incredibly alarmed by I was like, here's what my temperature is. here's what you know about me uh like what fluids do i need and it was literally like you don't need fluids you need a doctor it's like all right fine i'll go to the doctor so i went to the doctor um but going through all of this it's it's been really much more aggressive than things like this normally are like i think um i'm used to companies like google thinking really differently about these very personal things right like google has this phrase your money in your life and it treats those things really differently than it treats other things.

49:02So the idea is if you're doing even Google searches

49:05David Pierce:for things about finance or things about your health, the bar for quality needs to be much higher on that stuff. But in this, it's like my AI coach just like got in it. It's like, it is just happily telling me what to do. It's telling me all the information it has about me. It kind of yells at me when I don't get enough sleep. Like it's actually really instructive in a way that I did not expect. Like this is hands down the best experience I have had with an AI fitness coach. You've tried many more of them than I have. So I'm curious your perspective too.

49:36Victoria Song:I would actually agree with that. It's funny because I did have my initial experience in October and I had a lot of – it was too easy to bully. Back then I wrote about it in Optimizer and there was just a lot that I wasn't necessarily pleased with. Some features were missing, like cycle tracking, important for me. And then there were just, like, no real abilities to kind of customize the way that I want. You can customize the different widgets that are there now. But also my health, like, to your point, my health changed quite a bit. And we talked about it when I did the CGM feature and on the Vergecast then.

50:18Victoria Song:But a lot of my health needs have changed in the last six months or so. And so coming back to it, the fact that I can upload all of my medical records on there, the fact that I can talk to it about my medications and how they are affecting me and how they are affecting my training plan. it's actually been incredibly informative in terms of like things that I need to do and how I need to think about my nutrition, my protein goals, my hydration, and a lot of the side effects that I've been having. And I am always going to caution people. And there's a lot of like disclaimers within the Google Health app that this is not medical advice.

51:02Victoria Song:AI can make mistakes. that AI health is best used as a tool in between doctor visits that you absolutely do have to fact check everything, which one thing I do like is that whenever I have been asking these deeper queries about medical conditions that I have, there are source links that I can then tap into. And I was like, oh my God, if I had this 10 years ago, I think I would have had a much easier time advocating for myself at various doctor's appointments and having much more fruitful and productive conversations with my doctors. I would feel more collaborative in my health care. So I have had a, by and large, positive experience with the revamped Google Health app.

51:46Victoria Song:There are many things that I think need to evolve over time because I do stress test these things, and I did run up against certain things where it's like, ha-ha, I can't handle that.

51:59David Pierce:Give me an example. What hasn't worked?

52:01Victoria Song:One of the updates now is that you can upload lab results. And the sad fact of the U.S. healthcare system is that not every doctor works in a system that has agreed to share these lab results. So this has clear the same thing as your airport for identification security where you can kind of upload your records. So I uploaded records starting from 2016 into Google Health. But I switched doctors because I have had dissatisfactory experiences with various doctors. And my most recent doctor, who I am having a much more positive experience with, her clinic has not learned to share these lab results with these systems.

52:50Victoria Song:And so I was like, can I take a screenshot and just share my most recent lab results with you? And I was like, I cannot process screenshots in this way. So I had to manually type last night all of my lab results into the Google Health Advisor and, you know, proofread my lab results. And then, you know, it was like, hey, we've processed all your lab results. Do you want to, like, get an interpretation? And then it kind of forgot that I had manually entered the last six months of lab results that I have. And I had to remind it that it did that. So, you know, that's some friction that is there. You should be able to share screenshots of your own data if that's what you want to do.

53:33David Pierce:You're obviously not the normal user of any of these devices. And I think for some combination of like wanting to do good journalism and also just the pure nihilism that comes with doing this job long enough, all of you, I'm sure you have like, you are sort of loosely holding on to your medical records at this point, right? Like this, what do you think, how should people approach this thing in from that respect? I've even had this question just myself sitting here the last few days being like, should I tell it the temperature I just got? Like how, you know, you shouldn't lie to your doctor is one of the like truisms of life.

54:12David Pierce:what is your sort of current stance on how honest and what kind of stuff we should be adding into these systems even like you said and i think we've both had positive experiences by doing that should we still be reluctant to give up some of this data um i think it's a healthy instinct to

54:32Victoria Song:have and i think you know hipaa which is the health data privacy law that we currently have I've said this for a long time. It's not fully adequate for wearable technology. It's definitely not fully adequate for the AI health era that we are in right now. I think it is very healthy to have skepticism with that. I will say that part of the conditions for Google's acquiring of Fitbit is that Fitbit data does have to stay siloed and away from Google advertising. That was the condition of that merger. It is something that they have to uphold legally, which is a good thing, but I am not going to chastise anyone who is skeptical of that.

55:14Victoria Song:I think that is a healthy instinct. Usually with health and something that I'm going to say is that you really have to weigh the pros and cons. I think if you want to keep your data privacy and kind of exercise that to the furthest extreme, wearables are not for you. Because HIPAA is not adequate. There's leakiness. But we are seeing a huge narrative about personal agency with health and personalized health. These are things that I am seeing from almost every health tech company in the last couple of months. And to that point, a lot of that is because our health care system is broken. And there are a lot of people out there with chronic illnesses, suffering with my own chronic illness.

56:00Victoria Song:We ran a story recently about how a journalist with POTS and other fatigue illnesses have kind of been hacking their fitness trackers to more serve their needs. So, you know, people are doing this already. People are going to Reddit for advice, which is also just not ideal. But, you know, I, I, too, I, too have been in the PMAS subreddits just looking for information because what was available to me was not sufficient. sufficient. And if you are struggling with your health and you are finding that the healthcare system is not something that you can easily navigate, that you're struggling with, I can't say that this is not a useful tool because I have found it to be useful.

56:52Victoria Song:And I have also found it to be doo-doo. It is kind of a wild west out there. But I've had a lot of readers write in as beta testers of this particular app saying, you know, I don't like everything. It's not perfect. But of all of the ones I've tested, I found most value out of it. And the thing I will say is that your mileage is going to vary. It is going to depend on you being engaged, interacting with it, feeding it information. There is so much trial and error. So it's really how How much are you willing to do here? How much time are you willing to spend to share all of this data?

57:31David Pierce:There's something in the hardware software combination here that I actually think is sort of the beginning of something really powerful. Right. Because what it has is I feel like all of these other AI coaches, at least the ones that I've experienced, get one tiny bit of information from you. Like I did this thing. You don't know anything else about me, but you know that I did this thing. And based on that one thing, you have to make just a giant series of assumptions about every other thing about my life or ask me for an unbelievable amount of information. Or you get things like the Whoop that are very focused on a specific kind of information about a specific kind of thing.

58:06David Pierce:This to me is the most sort of general purpose data collection engine in this space that I've really seen. I think Apple does a good job of this, but is less interested in sort of packaging it and giving it back to you. Like Apple does the sleep scores and stuff, but at least in my experience with Apple Health, it's not particularly like proactive in telling me how I'm doing.

58:25Victoria Song:It's much more conservative. And that's like I recently spoke. It is the safest call in some ways because, you know, I recently had a really great conversation with Apple for the 50th anniversary package we did where I was talking about their philosophy towards health. And one of their philosophies is that they are not going to tell you what to do. So they're going to give you some tools, but they're not going to tell you what to do with that. And Google here is kind of splitting the difference where they're not necessarily going to be telling you what to do in the way that Whoop does or even the way that Aura necessarily does.

59:01Victoria Song:It's really funny because all of these wearable and health tech companies have their different AI personality profiles and how proactive they're going to be and what they're going to tell you. Like, Whoop is very much like Brian Johnson. We're going to be the maxed version of ourselves. And that can be a really intense experience for a lot of people. The Whoop age score is my villain origin story, quite frankly. It says I'm 42. Everyone knows you're only 41. Everyone knows I'm only 41 and a half years old. What my age is, we'll never know. But, you know, Aura has a different kind of much more casual but vaguely biohacky, especially in recent years, feel to it.

59:49Victoria Song:Apple is very much like, here's data. We're not going to tell you what to do. But when we do compile scores, it's going to be done in this very intentional, conservative way because we don't want to kind of wade into this quagmire of nonsense. And then Google is kind of splitting the difference in what I think is a very interesting way. I'm very curious to see how it's going to evolve over time. I've been told that they're going to take a lot of feedback into consideration and a lot of iterating. So, you know, I'm very, very curious to see how that's going to go because AI health is here whether you like it or not.

1:00:27Victoria Song:personalized health is a goal that all of these wearable tech companies are barreling towards, whether or not that holds what it's, it's, it's, it's just an immense challenge to do personalized health. Right. For sure.

1:00:40David Pierce:But again, like to your point, I think if you put it next to sort of other better courses of managing your own health, there are obviously better ways to do it. There are, you, you can do the reading yourself. You can have an army of doctors. You can like, there are clearly better ways to do this. But also most people just go on WebMD and Reddit, right? Like to your point about Apple, like people actually want to be told what to do. And oftentimes people are not capable of reading the data for themselves and are happy to be given some kind of instruction. And I think the thing that frankly surprised me the most about Google Health is how willing it is to just tell you what to do.

1:01:14David Pierce:And some of it's really obvious, right? Like a lot of it is like prioritize rest and hydration. And it's like, oh, thanks, Google. great job everybody like that's nothing but but it is at least giving sort of a a clear concise answer to questions most of the time and so i think i think google whether it will correctly strike that middle ground is is hard to know and what i do know is that with any attempt to find that middle ground are going to come like spectacular failures and it's going to get a lot of things wrong and it's going to give people really bad advice and you should never take anything it says is gospel truth, period.

1:01:49David Pierce:But like, I think I think that middle is the right place to be with a device like this, which is why I have found this whole experience so compelling. It's like it feels like it's trying to serve me in the way that is sort of automatic by just collecting this stuff on my wrist with a thing that I don't think about and then give it back to me in a way that is packaged and useful and not just a bunch of numbers. And like for me, as somebody who doesn't want to think about this a lot, that feels right to me.

1:02:14Victoria Song:Yeah, I very much agree with you. And I think the only thing I would add is that I really want to emphasize for anyone who's curious that this is a tool and it's not meant to sublimate a doctor. It's just kind of something that you use maybe in between doctor's visits, but it is something that is going to help you kind of coordinate your care with a doctor and maybe give you more information to ask the right questions at your doctor appointment. I genuinely feel like that's how you should be thinking about it, going into using it. And if you do it that way, I think you can have a fairly decent experience.

1:02:56David Pierce:All right. Do you have a minute to stick around and do a hotline question with me? Oh, of course. Okay, rad. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Do a hotline. Support for this show comes from Superhuman. AI tools are everywhere right now, but a lot of them end up creating more work instead of less. You bounce between tabs, rewrite the same thing five different ways, and spend more time prompting the AI than actually getting things done. Superhuman wants to change that. Superhuman is an AI productivity suite designed to work where you already work. It brings together the intelligence of Grammarly, Coda, and Superhuman Mail into one connected system that helps you write more clearly, move faster, and stay focused on what actually matters.

1:03:40David Pierce:Think of it like an AI-powered team working alongside you throughout the day. Instead of opening a separate chatbot window every time you need help, Superhuman is built directly into your workflow, whether responding to emails, organizing ideas, collaborating on documents, or managing projects. It's AI that works where you work, however you work. You can unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster.

1:04:26David Pierce:With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your.com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan.

1:05:11David Pierce:That's framer.com slash verge for 30 % off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the$1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-Pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work.

1:05:56David Pierce:All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love hearing all of your questions. And going forward, we're going to have lots more room to do more of your questions on the show. So keep them all coming. I'm especially interested in like weird, tiny mysteries that we can help you solve. Just strange things happening in your tech world that we can help you fix. I want to hear all of them. For now, V, this is a question for you. And it's about smart glasses. And it comes from Stevie. The question says, there's one smart glasses feature and only one I desperately want.

1:06:30David Pierce:And I don't ever hear talked about. I would pay$100 or$150 extra on a pair of expensive, quality, attractive eyewear if they had the Find My iOS network baked in. I always lose or misplace things, so a seamlessly integrated Find My network connection would open up the whole luxury glasses market to me as a consumer. V, I have two questions on this. One, is this a thing you're hearing about in the wind at all? The, like, use these to find lost things, which I actually think is a terrifically good idea. and two, is there anything we can do to help CV here?

1:07:06Victoria Song:It's so funny because I believe this is something that I heard at IO. Oh yeah? Yeah, just I think that's something that they're thinking about with Android XR.

1:07:19David Pierce:Well, there was that demo of Project Astra like a year or two ago that one of the things was you're wearing the glasses and you're like, where did I leave? I forget what it was. I think it might have been a pair of glasses where like, where did I leave my glasses? And it remembers from the camera stuff that it saw where they were and can sort of walk you back to them. But that was like a science project demo. I assume that's nowhere near real.

1:07:42Victoria Song:It's not a thing that I've had demoed for me. It's things that while I've had demos that the representatives have said, like, this is a thing that's on our mind and that we're working on. And I do believe that this was something that I talked about a couple of days ago when I had my latest of – I've been having Android XR demos for almost two years at this point. So I believe that my latest demo, this was something that we were talking about. It is a challenging thing in terms of technology to implement easily. Like easily. I think it is something that might be easier to do from like a multimodal.

1:08:22Victoria Song:I, to your point, I took a picture. Can you remember where I put something based on the things that I saw thing? It would require the AI to be good, which is another, you know, that is a hurdle. Well, you know, I was impressed by a lot of the Android XR things that I saw that are in the pipeline. Wink, wink. Because the Warpy Parker and Gentle Monster glasses that are coming out are audio only. There are no displays there. Though Google does have prototypes that have a binocular display. And I did get to see kind of ideas of what that will look like in Android XR. I do think Meta should be a little worried because Meta AI is doo-doo.

1:09:10It's bad.

1:09:13Victoria Song:It's not good. So at some point, Stevie, I think this could be a thing. There are technical challenges in the approach that they're working on, which is why you haven't heard a lot of people talking about it with smart glasses right now. We're in a kind of an odd year for smart glasses in that the momentum is here. Big tech is telling you it's happening. Big tech is telling you that it's AI as the major killer use case. Nobody can agree on what to call this technology. We've moved away from smart glasses to AI glasses. And if IO is any indicator, intelligent eyewear is what Google has landed on.

1:09:57Victoria Song:Oh, that sucks.

1:09:58David Pierce:No. Yeah. Smart glasses is fine. Let's just do we got it right the first time, guys. Let's just do smart glasses. Let's just do smart glasses. It's fine. We did smartphone. We'll do smart glasses. Everybody, everybody will understand it. We can all move on with our lives.

1:10:13Victoria Song:This is my this is my stance. But, you know, of course, none of the people in the space are agreeing with me here. But, you know, so like there's a lot of technical challenges here. I think we're going to see a lot more interesting stuff in 2027 based on a lot of the reporting I've done and conversations I've been having. But I unfortunately, Stevie, I think it's going to be a couple of years before this is like a legitimate feature or use case.

1:10:42David Pierce:Yeah, I will say, though, and I'm curious your thoughts on this. One of the reasons I picked this question to do is the more I thought about it, the more I'm like, this is an awesome idea. I just think about my own experience, right? Like I lost my wallet a few weeks ago because I literally left it on the top of my car because I was putting my kids in the back of the car and put my wallet up there while I was like getting the kids in the car just so I'd have a free hand and then left it up there and it fell off and my wallet was gone. And I constantly am leaving my keys in the car recently because if I put them in the middle in like by the center console, I'll find them.

1:11:19David Pierce:But if I put them in the little like, I don't know, coin holder on the door, I will never, ever look there. There is a 0 % chance I will find them if that's where I put my keys. But having a thing that could just like scan around me and remind me if I've gotten out of the car without my keys or if I can't find the remote in the living room, just do the little like augmented reality bursts to show me where the remote is. Like, that's not the reason you would wear glasses all day, but it feels like the kind of thing that would come up a lot in the sort of day to day use of glasses. Right. And like we've talked about this a bunch.

1:11:54David Pierce:The only way they're going to get glasses to work is if you're going to use them all day. And I think the answer is not one thing that you do all day. It's going to have to be a million things that you do sometimes that all sort of add up to something much bigger. And this feels like something that belongs on that for me. Like I would end up using a feature like this damn near every day. But is it possible that I'm just like a lunatic who can't stop losing things? Like, is that just me?

1:12:18Victoria Song:No, there are many people like, I mean, ADHD people of the world unite. My spouse is someone who would use this every single, like they were looking for a thing for, I want to say a whole week. And it was in that exact coin holder in the door space that you're talking about. It's where things go to die. I don't understand how it doesn't make sense. It just, like, couldn't find it. And we have a very vertical house with four floors. They were averaging 100 flights of stairs climbed a day looking for this thing that was in our car door. Oh, that's rough. So, to your point, I do think this is a thing that a lot of people would find useful.

1:12:59Victoria Song:And we could do a whole other Vergecast on the state of smart glasses and all the challenges for 24-7 wear. Or you could just read the blog that I recently wrote on TheVerge.com about a lot of those issues. But I think the main issue right now is that smart glasses, functionally right now, are a sometimes device. They are not a real 24-7 device. This would be a really great use case, but finding the killer use case that will convince people that this is worth the societal conversation about sacrificing your privacy. We don't have that yet. What we have are a bunch of small sometimes use cases that if you cobble maybe 70 of them together, we could come up with an actual reason to wear these all day.

1:13:50Victoria Song:But this is like one of the more compelling ones. Like, yeah, it is one of the things where I think every person can go like, oh, yeah, that wouldn't be super useful. But is this one thing going to be enough for me to risk getting punched in the face? Right.

1:14:07David Pierce:I'm suspicious of Stevie's argument that they would spend 100 or 150 extra dollars just for this feature. But I hope somebody builds it for you just the same, Stevie. V, thank you for hanging out. It's great to see you. Good luck getting back to California. All right. That's it for the show. thank you to V and Mia for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening. Also, keep sending in questions. We love hearing from you. You can always send us email vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:14:37David Pierce:The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday with just oh so much more news because boy, is it ever developer season. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.