Samsung foldable software, eye-scanning orbs, and the future of the arcade

24:53Yeah, and like we were talking about with Good Lock, like we said on the show before, Samsung software makes the Fold phone feel like a PC that you shove in your pocket with all of the good and bad that comes along with that. So if you want a portable computer, the Fold 5 is going to do all of that stuff just as well as the Fold 4 did. So if you don't have one already, sure, you're getting a slightly refined experience this year. but if it didn't like really like if you weren't sold by that pitch a year ago i don't think the fold 5 is going to change anything in that matter that's fair allison have you noticed anything that feels different in actually using the thing no it's feels very much like using the fold 4 um i mean just coming from the pixel fold more recently i do notice that it's quite a bit lighter than the pixel fold which the fold for was lighter also so i'm appreciating that the kind of like yeah there's more like drag and drop options you can kind of like there's a two-handed copy and paste which didn't work the first three times i tried it but i finally got it working wait explain what what is a two-handed copy and is this is this a good thing so the the you have a a picture in the like Samsung gallery app and you can do that like long press on a person and it'll cut it out thing.

26:14I see. Sure. And then you can, you can leave that finger there and grab another app, open another app with your other hand and it'll just like drag and drop the image to the new app and voila. I don't know, but like Dan said, that's going to come to that older fold phones soon-ish. They never say. So yeah, there's really not much here if you have a Fold 4. If you were sort of on the fence before and this year's the year to buy a foldable for some reason, like, yeah, get the Fold 5. That's nice, but that's about it. It is interesting how quickly the Fold in particular seems to have settled into the, like it's very mature and now just gets slightly better every year thing.

27:03And maybe there are more sort of big turns to have, but it feels like with, you know, regular smartphones, it took a lot longer to get to the like, we know what this thing is and it's just going to sort of slowly improve over time phase. And Samsung is already there. I mean, I think Samsung thinks Samsung is there. Fair. There are absolutely a list of things that I would love for them to address on the Fold 4 that they did not on the Fold 5. Tell us the list, Dan. That's what we're here for. All right. So this doesn't matter as much to me, but it matters to the vast majority of people. The camera is exactly the same.

27:34And the camera we know is not as good as the cameras that you can get on other phones for half the price. They did nothing there to improve that. So, like, that could have been an improvement. They did make it a little bit lighter. It's 10 grams lighter. Two nickels, as Allison says. That's great, but it's also, like, barely perceptible. and we've seen phones from China, from Honor and Huawei and Xiaomi and other brands that are noticeably lighter, like 40 grams lighter. They're thinner. They are more pocketable and portable. Would have loved to see improvements there. It's great that they fixed the hinge, but it's still kind of a chunky, thick phone.

28:10The outside cover display is a big blocker for a lot of people in that it is still weird and narrow and awkward. It's still a TV remote. Yeah, it's still a TV remote. I kind of understand why Samsung is using that. And we've talked about this in the past of like, when you open the phone, the screen experience is better because it matches your apps better and things like that. And that kind of dictates the cover's geometry and dimensions. But again, we've seen phones from China that have a portrait-oriented inside display, but have larger outside displays that are wider and more normal aspect ratios and are easier to use.

28:46So I would have loved to seen Samsung make some progress or forward momentum there. They still are not dust resistant. I know Allison just wrote a piece on the site that it looks like they are exploring ways to make them dust resistant, but they're still the same level of dust resistance as before. They still have the same kind of like construction on the inside of the screen panels and cover and like screen protectors and things like that. So you have to be careful with these and things like that. So like there's a lot of progress. And I think what I would like to see is more experiments and more innovation from Samsung that we're not.

29:22They've kind of like settled into this. We're going to make very tiny tweaks to this formula because we screwed it up the first year and are very scared of screwing it up again. And so that's kind of like what we're getting. But another example, you still can't put the S Pen in the phone. You have to buy a case to hold the S Pen and it's like external and they made the S Pen smaller and they came up with a new case designed to like hold it and stuff like that. It's great and all. Put a silo in the phone that you can put the S-Pen in. There's so many things that they could be doing, but they are just either planning them out over a 10-year period and doing one at a time, or they just feel like it's not worth the time.

29:57So I don't know. The last point is it's still$1 ,800. Yep. And that is the biggest turnoff to everybody that you talk about about this phone. They didn't move the price budget anywhere. There were rumors that it was going to be more expensive because of inflation and what have you. and they kept the price the same, which is great, but still$1 ,800 or$2 ,000 if you upgrade the storage or whatever it is, is still like just completely non-starter for very massive amounts of people. So like, why couldn't we get it to 1 ,500 or 1 ,400 or closer to 1 ,000, whatever? Well, and this goes back to why I think the flip continues to be the more interesting of the two phones at the moment, partly because they just did more to it this year, but also because I think even in the early days of these foreign factors where there's not some sort of instant killer app that's like, if you buy a Z Flip, you can do this, this, and this that you just straight up can't do on your normal Galaxy phone.

30:52It's an interesting tiebreaker, right? And like kind of what you're talking about, Alison, it lets you do different stuff different ways. It gives you these kinds of new ideas about when your phone should work and how you interact with it and all this stuff. And if that appeals to you, terrific. You have to make what seems to be relatively small camera trade-offs. and there is the dustproof issue, but you get something in exchange for that for about the same price. The Fold comes with all of those trade-offs and another$800 or$900 in cost. And that's just tough. And so I think the thing we're at right now is it seems like the Flip 5 is a phone that a lot of people might actually stand in the store and think about buying instead of the S27000 or whatever we're going to get next.

31:37And I think that's really exciting. And it feels like, Allison, you and I have both written that this is kind of the moment for flip phones. And it seems like the flip five genuinely has a shot to be kind of the first real one for a lot of people. Yeah. I had some friends over this weekend and the phone was on the table. And generally my friends are extremely uninterested in whatever phone I'm reviewing. But they were kind of like, what is this? You know, tell me more. And I think the reaction is totally different if I have the Z Fold out. It just sort of has, I think, instantly someone who's not super into tech or phones is like, oh, I can tell that's not for me.

32:17That looks pretty intense. But the flip form factor is it's familiar. We had flip phones back in the day. We kind of know what that is. And you can see immediately, like I'm showing them the widgets on the cover screen and how I open the daycare app to sign my kid out without flipping the phone open and oohs and ahs from the crowd. Yeah. No, I agree. I think you're going to have to keep us posted on how your reviews come because I wonder if there are big, messy things left to be discovered. Because we are like all these apps have to figure out how this is going to work. Samsung has to figure out how people are going to use it.

32:55And like, as all the flip and fold phones get more popular, we're just going to discover new ways in which they're still early and broken. I think it's going to be fascinating. Yeah, I'm excited. All right. Well, thank you both. I am confident that we will have more reasons to talk about flips and folds in the next few months. So we'll be back soon. But thank you both. Thank you. Thanks. All right. We got to take a break and then we are going to come back with a little bit of an investigation into the present and future of arcade games. We'll be right back.

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36:13That is amazing. The game is sort of dumb, and watching other people play it on TikTok is definitely dumb. But I had this phase where I was watching a surprising amount of it. This fell right off of the pusher. There was a massive tower of quarters sitting inside the coin pusher. I'm going to turn this$5 bill into$20 by winning it on the edge of this coin pusher. There's just something about seeing the quarters teetering over the edge that is surprisingly riveting, at least for me. I lose a whole bunch. Anyway, the TikTok algorithm pretty quickly decided that I must love arcade games, which isn't untrue.

36:53I do like arcade games. I especially used to play that old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side-scroller one all the time, but it's been a few years since I was in an arcade at all. But I started seeing these videos all the time, just of people hanging out at Dave & Buster's trying to hack the games to get more tickets. Yo, today we show you guys how to get a new Women and Dave and Buster's tickets with the boy. You already know. Let's get it. Or just straight up cheating. There's a lot of TikTok videos of just people cheating. Like there's one I saw where this guy is just climbing into the machine where you throw the ball to knock the clowns over and just knocking all the clowns over with his hands.

37:29This dude out here really cheating. I guess that's fun. I also came across a lot of people claiming to have tricks to get you enough tickets to get a PS5. and one guy who calls himself the Arcade Goat, who says he got 10 Oculus Quests just from playing arcade games. Tip, play games of Phil, not luck. In watching all of these videos, I started noticing games I recognized. Not arcade games I recognized, but games I know because they're on my phone. Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crossy Road. I saw console games like Halo and Mario Kart 2. This all seemed really strange to me. Why would I go all the way to an arcade to pay a bunch of money to play games I already have on my phone?

38:17Is it just for the tickets? Like, are people making these games so that people will play these games just to get a PS5? That seems strange. Is it just fun that it's louder and not in my house and they serve beer? It's all very confusing to me. So one afternoon, I went to the arcadiest arcade I could think of. the Dave & Buster's location in Times Square in New York City, where I would only go for journalism. All right, the Dave & Buster's here is located on the third floor. So I'm on an escalator going up to Applebee's and then Dave & Buster's. This is actually one of the biggest and in a lot of ways most popular arcades in New York City.

38:54You can go to places like Barcade where they are really focused on retro stuff. But this is just all about gaming. So here we go. Eventually, I made it past the Applebee's, past all the tourists, got upstairs to D &B's, waited for my turn, and went in and had a look around. Alright, I made it into the arcade, and I already cannot believe how many games I recognize from console games and even just pop culture. Like, there's Tomb Raider and Star Trek and Jurassic World and all that kind of stuff. But especially from mobile. There's a Crossy Road game. There's a Flappy Bird game that they call Dave and Buster's Floppy Tickets, even though it's just straight up Flappy Bird.

39:30Love that. There's a Mario Kart game that is one of those arcade games with the chairs and the steering wheel and you actually drive. There's Candy Crush. You can just stand here and play Candy Crush. And it is precisely the same game I would play on my phone, except the screen is bigger and the room is louder and it feels more exciting somehow. After that, I did a couple more laps. I played some Crossy Road and some Mario Kart Arcade GP, and then I played more Mario Kart. And then after that, I think I played more Mario Kart. Alright, as expected, Mario Kart in an arcade is amazing. It makes me want to get one of those big$10 ,000 racing simulator kits, but not play Gran Turismo or any cool games.

40:09Just go hard into Mario Kart. It's also maybe the most popular game in this entire arcade. It's either that or the air hockey, but there is a long line for Mario Kart. And I keep winning, so they keep letting me back, but I figured I'd give somebody else a chance. It's not that there are no older school arcade games left anymore. Dave & Buster still has Skee-Ball and the Papa Shot Basketball one and a new and kind of high def Space Invaders and Pac-Man and a bunch of those racing games where you just sit in the seat and grab the steering wheel. I will say, though, there's a lot less pinball, a lot less of the side-scrolling games like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one that I loved and the Simpsons and that X-Men one that everybody used to play.

40:55most of that is just not here anymore. And the real truth is the arcade as it used to be is mostly dead in general. We don't need to go too far into all of that, but the arcade as a place you used to go and hang out was a staple of American life for like decades. A huge portion of the gaming world as we know it now wouldn't exist without arcades. And now all we're left with is Dave & Busters and a bunch of bar arcade things and not much else. The reason why that happened is pretty obvious, right? It's that we all started playing games at home on consoles and then on our phones. And why would I go all the way to an arcade and pay money just to play the same game I can play as long as I want for free in my living room?

41:41All of that is all the more reason I'm fascinated by these mobile games in the arcade. If Dave & Buster's and all these other arcades are having trouble convincing people to come out and play games at all, wouldn't it be the worst idea ever to make those games the same games you can already play on your phone? It's like, come pay us money to play the game you got for free already seems like the worst pitch of all time. And I think the best example of all those games in Dave & Buster's is probably Angry Birds.

42:13Angry Birds in general is one of those totally unavoidable franchises. You can play a million different versions of it on every imaginable screen and surface. You can buy Angry Birds cereal. You can get plush toys. There was an Angry Birds movie and like a million other things I have very deliberately ignored over the years. So what's it doing in an arcade asking for my money? To answer that question, I called up the people who made that game. I am Drew Krauss. I am the COO, and I run development here at ICE. And I'm Josh Krause. I run our home arcade game sales, marketing, and advertising here at ICE.

42:49ICE makes a lot of arcade games, including a bunch you probably know, like the one where you throw the ball and try to knock the clowns over that everybody on TikTok likes to cheat at, or the air hockey game that they have called Extreme Air FX. The company actually started with bubble hockey, which is apparently still super popular in arcades. And more recently, they also made a game called Angry Birds Arcade.

43:14The Krauses told me that the whole mobile games to arcade trend has actually been happening for a while. And the reason is honestly pretty simple. You know, no variety. It gets you to walk up to it no matter what. So that's a huge, huge plus. Now, a lot of the arcades like it because it brings licensed brands to their location. A big facility like a Dave & Buster's, who has 160 across the country, they have movie studios coming to them saying, hey, Ghostbusters 19 is coming out. Can you guys do a Ghostbusters game? I mean, that's how Ghostbusters, we're talking to Sony and looking at products, and then Sony's talking to Dave & Buster's all of a sudden, hey, I like Ghostbusters.

43:54Hey, we're doing a Ghostbusters. Let's do a Ghostbusters game. Sometimes it falls into place like that. So if you're trying to make games that will make people walk up to them, Angry Birds was a pretty easy win. It's one of the biggest games ever. So when Ice reached out to Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds, Drew said they started talking about an Angry Birds arcade game with one really specific question in mind. How do we build something you can't do at home? So I start to bring in physical attributes like, hey, what would Angry Birds be even better if it was Angry Birds Plus, right? So, all right, I actually want to launch a physical ball 10 feet across the room and hit a touchscreen monitor.

44:34And to me, that's where my brain starts going to. That mechanic he's describing is actually how Angry Birds Arcade works. You walk up to the game, you grab that mechanical slingshot in two hands, and then you aim and launch these pool ball sized balls with birds painted on them at the huge screen. When it hits the screen, the pigs go flying. Or at least, if you're any good, that's what happens. The best thing I can compare it to is like one of those golf simulators where you see people smack the ball into a screen, which then simulates where it goes and how far. It's like that. It's really fun and genuinely does feel different from swiping my finger on the screen.

45:16ISIS Drew Krauss told me that making these on-screen games more physical like that is a huge part of the job. You know, when you asked, hey, I saw a bunch of these games just show up in the arcade on a giant screen. I'm going to say 90 % of those, they lasted for about 60 to 90 days. Lasted as far as they made money. Okay, you play it once. Oh, this is the same thing I have on my phone, just giant. It gets old real quick. The other part of the job for anyone making arcade games is to make sure the game is not only fun, but fun to play over and over. Arcades want games that you'll play for a minute and then pay to play again, not pay once and play forever or pay once and then immediately leave.

45:55Repeatability is the thing. That also means making games easy for people to figure out in the first place, because as Drew said, people expect to just walk up and start playing, especially a game they've seen before. When you're home on your phone, you can lose a hundred times and not get frustrated. You go into an arcade and, oh, I know what Doodle Jump is. I never played it. You go play it in the arcade and you've got to figure out puzzles. You're putting a dollar in. You're not happy. You know, sometimes you have to teach them how to play, as opposed to expecting everybody to walk up to it and play.

46:27So it took me and Ice a while to learn some of those nuances when we take what we think is easy, bring the app to the market. That means basically two things, as far as I can tell. Making the game skill-based as much as possible, so you're not just playing a slot machine every time you step up, and giving people tickets for their successes. That's how you get people to keep playing. Speaking of Doodle Jump, by the way, that's another game Ice worked on. Drew told me that at first they had a ball, kind of like golden tea, to move things back and forth, but it landed on this big yellow joystick, which you slide from left to right to move your character as it jumps between things.

47:04That's the physical object, kind of like the slingshot in Angry Birds. Again, it's super simple. Maybe too simple for me, actually. I'm not sure I'd spend a ton of money on doodle jump in an arcade, but it's actually been a huge hit for ice.

47:22Anyway, with all of this in mind about physicality and big screens and all this different stuff, I went back out to a different arcade to see if I could make sense of all these games in a new way. All right, it's been a few weeks and now I'm at a different arcade. This is the Fredericksburg Funland in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And after talking to some of the folks who make these games, I'm starting to see the mechanics they talk about everywhere. Fruit Ninja is here. It's called Fruit Ninja FX, and it's basically you just stand in front of a large screen and swipe on it the way you would in Fruit Ninja.

47:54And that's all fun and good, but the best ones of these games, and the ones I'm seeing the most people play, are the ones where they make it physical in some way. There's one game where all you do is try to explode something and launch someone out of a cannon and they made this very cool lever that actually feels like you're pressing it and it's different than it would feel if you were just playing it on your phone even a really big version of your phone there's a space invaders game which is like from a million years old video game but it's this huge screen and you actually sit there in a seat with a blaster it takes the same mechanic it's just these eight bit aliens coming at you but it feels bigger and cooler and different because it has this physical mechanic to it.

48:36This is the kind of thing I think about as we move all of the online digital screen-based culture into the world. How do you make this stuff more than just bigger screens, but actually make it physical? Also, fun fact, the most popular thing here, again, is Mario Kart GP. But the one other one I want to talk about is Guitar Hero. This is the other one I keep seeing at all these arcades. And it might actually be the best earliest example of this that I can think of. It's a video game. It's a thing that happens on a screen, but your controller is part of the game. You don't just touch or press buttons.

49:09You're actually playing guitar and it works at home for the same reason it works in an arcade. It just feels like you're doing something, even though all you're doing ultimately is playing a game on a screen. It's very cool. I'm now seeing this absolutely everywhere I go. I love it. I really did think a lot about Guitar Hero through this whole process. And Dance Dance Revolution also, and really everything Nintendo has done since the Wii. The gaming industry has been exploring ideas about how to make controllers more than controllers for a long time, and how to bring your body into the equation more and more.

49:44That's what the Kinect was, right? That's what the PS Move is, all these different ideas. And as VR gaming continues to become a thing, we're going to get entirely new explorations of that idea. Mobile games, I think maybe more than most, need a lot of help figuring that out. So many of the games we play now, whether it's Angry Birds and Cut the Rope or more complicated things like Clash of Clans and Subway Surfers, they were built on swiping and tapping. But that's never been the most fun or immersive way to play these games. Even just looking at the App Store's top charts right now, it's fun to imagine how a game like Alto's Odyssey or even something like Fortnite or Roblox might go way beyond screens and controllers and just sitting at my TV.

50:26It won't work for everything, but I suspect the next turn for a lot of these games is going to be back toward the physical in that way. Figuring out how to build new mechanics and new control systems and new ways to bring more than just your finger into the game. Think about something like the Apple Vision Pro headset. I can basically guarantee you that there will be angry birds for the Vision Pro at some point. But it'll be a huge bummer if all that is is a big screen you tap to do stuff. That just feels unambitious. Feels like not enough. I don't really think arcades are gonna become what they once were.

51:02Playing games at home or on my phone is just too fun and too easy for me to venture back out every time I wanna play Angry Birds. But there's some part of me that kinda hopes I'm wrong. That physical gaming spaces do become a big thing again and bring people back together in the real world, even to do screen-based things. Drew Krauss is obviously biased towards that perspective, since, you know, he makes arcade games, but I like the way he thinks about bringing together the best of both worlds. Let's stay in the reality, and if we can make you throw a ball instead of flicking on your phone, I think we won, right?

51:36I'm just trying to bring people back to being a kid and playing with physical stuff again by adding in cool apps, cool ideas, and video, right? I think I agree with that. And I think it's going to be fascinating to see what it looks like to bring the best of our screens out into the world more. Think about headsets. Are we going to use headsets to bring technology with us more places? Or are we going to use them as ways to be home and be in our own worlds more often? I don't know. I know I'm looking forward to getting screens out more because I know I own Mario Kart at home, and yet I spent objectively an upsetting amount of money playing Mario Kart GP at both Dave & Buster's and at Funland.

52:16I don't know, the chair and the steering wheel and the loud crowd just do something for me, you know? I don't think I can get that at home.

52:29All right, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna talk crypto. But not the crypto you're probably thinking of. We'll be right back.

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55:24Welcome back. So if you've been following crypto over the last couple of years, WorldCoin is probably one of the companies you've heard the most about. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, who's one of the founders of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT and GPT-4 and obviously is a big deal just because it's related to Sam. But it also has really big ideas about not just creating a currency, but for helping identify all the humans in the world and universal basic income and all this big sort of heady futurist stuff. Even if you don't know about WorldCoin, I bet you've heard about the orb, which is the big metal ball that WorldCoin wants to use to scan your irises to verify you're human.

56:05This all sounds insane, even as I'm saying it out loud. And I feel obligated here to give you a thousand disclaimers about the risks of investing in crypto and the huge environmental implications of the blockchain and the many, many, many, many scams that have come through this space. And actually, you know what, let's just get started and we can get to all of that. Alex Heath recently became our foremost WorldCoin expert. He's here now. Let's talk about it. Hi, Alex. Hey, David. We're going to talk about WorldCoin because you just had a very interesting experience with WorldCoin. How would you put WorldCoin as a thing in kind of the broader crypto landscape?

56:40It's not Bitcoin in the sense that it's just a thing that people buy and sell to make money, but it's not not Bitcoin. Like, how do you think about WorldCoin in that space? Yeah, I would say to understand WorldCoin, you have to really understand Sam Altman. Okay. So he's the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, obviously. And his stated goal with OpenAI is to build artificial general intelligence, AGI. And the thinking here is that AGI will eventually happen. And when it does, machines will be smarter, more capable than humans. AIs, for example, are already starting to evade CAPTCHAs. but the thinking that is eventually they're going to run the world for us or maybe over us is the dystopian view of that.

57:23And so in that future theoretical world run by AGI, you know, to borrow from Westworld, you kind of need to know who is a human and who is a host. And so I would actually describe WorldCoin, and we can talk about the crypto aspect of it, but in totality, WorldCoin is in a way an antidote to what Sam Holtman is building with his other company, OpenAI. And he's not running WorldCoin day to day, but he's the co-founder, kind of public face of it. He's been tweeting about the lines people are forming to get their eyes scanned and kind of using his clout to advance the project. So, you know, he also, Altman, is a huge fan of this idea of universal basic income.

58:05I've heard him talk about this in interviews. He uses this example of, you know, eventually we have these AGI controlled robots and they're doing solar power farming on our behalves in mines. They're running things for us. Basically, humans won't need to work as much. They'll make our homes for us. They'll do everything for us. And so in a future world like that, maybe you do want some kind of universal basic income. The problem with that, obviously, is governments may not like that. UBI has never worked to date at scale in the modern world. It's actually funny, you know, researching this, I found out that UBI actually dates back to the Romans and Julius Caesar.

58:43So it was something that happened a long time ago. So yeah, the goal really simply is to scan every eyeball on earth so that you can then distribute world coin, the token, and eventually down the road in some kind of theoretical future, that token will be used for some kind of universal basic income. Now, this sounds like the kind of pitch that I can totally imagine some venture capitalists falling in love with as they're walking through the Presidio in San Francisco. But, you know, the criticism is that it's a solution in search of a problem. But that's in a nutshell, kind of the philosophy behind WorldCoin and what Altman is doing.

59:21Yeah, to me, this just strikes me as like a series of solutions in search of a problem. And I think to some extent, I actually don't want to like litigate WorldCoin because it's sort of in this crazy world that if everything were different, this might be useful and necessary. And that's all fine and good. I do think the question of how currency and the identification thing fit together is really interesting because the pushback on this has been basically a lot of people are being asked to give their iris scans to this company. And in exchange, they're getting some amount of this currency. And then it's like, fast forward a bunch of years, this becomes a very important currency could be super interesting.

59:58Who knows? We'll save that for another day. The thing on the ground is that there are a lot of people who are like, there's this sort of meaningless, not staked to anything money that is just being passed around in an exchange. You're taking a huge amount of my data in order to verify that I'm a person because of the other tools that you've made, which are getting so good so fast that you're now solving the problem you've created with a new creation that creates its own problems. And I just, I get like twisted into knots trying to figure out even like which part of this to sort of be annoyed by.

1:00:30Yeah, there is a lot to be potentially annoyed by, a lot to be skeptical of. I think the people at WorldCoin and the parent company, which is called Tools for Humanity, of course, have high-minded intentions here. I guess maybe it's helpful to rewind just a little bit. Up until last week, WorldCoin was not out in the world. It wasn't a token that you could access at all. And what WorldCoin had been doing for the last couple of years is going around mostly in poorer countries outside of the U.S. and Europe, though they did quite a bit of this in Europe as well. But particularly in Africa, parts of India, they would go out and send contractors to basically convince people in villages, people who maybe just got a smartphone for the first time, to have their eyes scanned in exchange for some tether or some Bitcoin or a nominal amount of money.

1:01:22And they claim that over 2 million people have already scanned with the orb. And now with the token out, importantly, it's not available in the US for reasons we can talk about or in China. So the whole world aspect of that is kind of defeated on day one. But now that the token is out, basically all those people had IOUs in the form of you're going to get the token at some point and now it's out. And to the idea of it being a currency, it's actually a horrible currency because it behaves like a security. And that's, I think, why it's not available in the U.S. is the SEC and regulators here in the U.S.

1:01:57have started cracking down on crypto quite a bit. We've seen a lot of lawsuits, stuff going on with Coinbase that's still ongoing. and there's this whole debate about, you know, should these tokens be regulated like securities, which come with important disclosures that right now the crypto economy does not have. If you're thinking about this as a currency, A, it can't be used for anything right now. So it just exists in the world app when you get it airdropped if you're not in the US. So it's not really good currency in that respect that they plan to eventually let people send it back and forth.

1:02:27It also fluctuates like crazy, the price of it, because it behaves like a speculative asset. So immediately this became one of the 10 most valuable crypto tokens in the world the week it launched. The app, the world app was the number one downloaded app on iOS and Android in Kenya, where a lot of people had already been doing signups pre-launch. There's just a lot of pain that's going to happen here with normal people who are doing this because they want some kind of magic bean. And then they realize the price of that bean is not going to be what it was when they signed up. And we've seen this time and time again with crypto projects.

1:03:03And I think that's been the harshest criticism I've seen of the way that they're structuring the actual token so far. And I think that's fair. I mean, I think if you're trying to build a utility, if you're trying to build something that everyone in the world is theoretically going to have one day, I don't really understand the way they've rolled it out initially. Yeah, that's fair. And I think one of the things I've wondered about this project the whole time has been to what extent WorldCoin would be as kind of interesting and big as it is if Sam Altman weren't involved. Because obviously, in the world of AGI, there are very few people who have done more and put their money where their mouth is more often than Sam Altman.

1:03:42Like, guy has a history of being right. And some of the stuff we're talking about, I think, is sort of specific to WorldCoin, right? Like the underlying tech, the iris scanning stuff, all of which we're about to get into, that is different. But some of these like big, long-term promises that they're making about, you know, banking the unbanked and helping create one single global financial system. Like that's what everybody in the crypto industry has been saying for a long time. And I think you've been obviously following this and Sam for a while, like, is a lot of the hype here just that Sam is kind of the Midas of this industry and everything he touches seems to work and people want to be along for the ride?

1:04:19Yeah, absolutely. You know, he's been going around the world on behalf of OpenAI over the past several months, meeting with regulators, holding talks in different countries. And he's been mentioning WorldCoin. He's been helping to hype it. I saw him tweet a, God, what is it, X, a photo now of him in Europe finally getting scanned himself a month or two ago. So yeah, the halo of Altman around this is certainly helping. You know, this is also like a company that's raised a lot of money. Like we should note they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz. I should note one of their earliest investors was actually Sam Bankman-Fried, believe it or not, which, you know, obviously that's a problem, but they've moved on from that.

1:04:59And yeah, they have a lot of money and it's not a nonprofit either. So, you know, there is a business here somewhere, you know, investors in the project have told me that the kind of initial business plan is to create a kind of API iBusiness is for other companies to be able to access the world IDs so that they can verify that someone is who they say they are theoretically. So like Okta, for example, I think just in Germany has already rolled out world ID as a way that you can authenticate. So yeah, I guess like right now, yes, the project is technically only like two weeks old at this point, but world ID and world coin can't really be used for much of anything except hoping that world coins price continues to go up.

1:05:43Right. And that's where it becomes like Bitcoin. So, okay, there are a million disclaimers and a million questions. And generally, I think most crypto stuff is nonsense. And to all of that, we will just leave aside for now. Because I think, if nothing else, this is a show about weird technology and how it makes us feel. And you just experienced this thing. You have seen the orb. This thing's been out for a while. Like you said, it's been kind of out in the world, but it hasn't sort of officially been launched. And now it is officially launched. and you got to try it. So tell me about it. Like what happened?

1:06:14How did this happen? Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone? I'm okay so far. We'll see if there's any drones around my house afterwards here. Yeah. So I guess it was the day after the token launch, I'd been following World Coin kind of leading up to this, but not super in depth, but I was kind of reading up on it. And then I saw that they weren't making the token available in the U S but they were still doing orb scans in a handful of cities. And I just went online to their website. It was like booking through Calendly or something. Like I looked for like two hours out on the very same day and there were a ton of appointments at multiple locations in LA.

1:06:50So I booked one for about an hour out. I got in my car, drove across town to West Hollywood here in Los Angeles to this nondescript co-working space to get my eyeball scanned by Sam Altman's orb. Before we get started, do you have any questions about the project or the order? No, I was reading that your biometrics don't leave the device. So, that is correct. However, when you accept the terms of service, there will be a third optional thing where you can keep your iris image stored in their database. Okay. You don't have to. Okay. And the only benefit of it is if they do an update that requires you to like, that changes their algorithm for hashing your iris image iris code you'd have to rescan oh okay so it's a convenience thing you don't want it stored then yes it will be used on the orb to hash and that will delete your image it was kind of funny because it's a co-working space right so there's a bunch of like people there kind of working around different desks just kind of like plugging away like normal and then in the very center you've just got this like frankly kind of weird dystopian looking shiny metallic orb.

1:08:00It looks like HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey. Just sitting there, it's about a foot tall with a guy behind it who's the orb operator, so to speak. So the, oh, okay. Now's the time. Okay. All right.

1:08:19So yeah, now it should be verifying you on the cloud. Make sure that you didn't try to sign up twice and trick us. Okay. And then you get a sticker and you get a badge and then you're done. Okay. You know, I guess the weirdest part of all of this is that my orb operator didn't ask who I was, didn't ask me to confirm my appointment time or even my email or anything like that. He never knew my name. He just walked me through the process and I was scanned and gone within five minutes. Wait, what? I know. Yeah, that's the reaction. I was like, what? But that's kind of the point. The point of this technology is that WorldCoin and other companies that use their API one day don't need to actually know who you are.

1:08:59They just need to know that you're a human being. And so through a kind of complicated process, I won't go super in-depth on here. Basically what happens is the orb scans your eye, makes some little noises, and then it creates this hash of numbers tied to your iris scan that theoretically is not supposed to leave the orb, but helps them assign you a world ID. And then there's a corresponding code that's then eventually put on this Ethereum based blockchain that corresponds to your iris hash. But because of fancy cryptography technology, there's no way of linking the two. Basically, it's like just having a code saying, I am real according to the orb.

1:09:40My operator for the orb was, of course, a guy who said he works in Web3, but he wasn't a WorldCoin employee. They're using contractors and paying them per scan to do this. So he tried to answer some of my questions, but couldn't really answer all of them. Do you work at WorldCoin? I'm a community specialist. I don't work full-time. I actually, I work in Web3 full-time, but this is just my fun little... Oh, cool. Yeah, I saw the token launch. Are people coming in Like for mainly to get the token? So in the U.S., you don't get tokens. Oh, yeah. So you won't get tokens. So it's basically just to have your ID.

1:10:17It's just to have your ID. Like, I guess maybe they think if they're like, they do early engagement, maybe in the future there might be a drop. Like nothing official has been announced like that. Oh, wow. You're making me feel a lot of feelings I did not expect to feel right now. But I think the thing that I had not fully processed about WorldCoin until you just explained that is that WorldCoin doesn't care who you are. It just cares that you're a person. That's right. Which I had not really thought about. Like, I've been thinking about WorldID as like a sort of blockchain identity system, right?

1:10:48That eventually they'd be like, we're going to get rid of your physical passport and exchange it for something on the blockchain. And part of me just like wants to give that two middle fingers. But they're not doing that. They're going one step like much higher in the abstraction layer. They're just saying this is a person and we can now sufficiently convincingly say this is a person. And that's the goal here. That's it. Yeah, that's literally the only goal. And that now, you know, the fact that you have been verified by an orb is theoretically provable on a blockchain and other companies can know this and use that identity layer for their services.

1:11:26Did this whole thing seem legit to you? Like You're in a co-working space. It's just like a contract person. We've read all these stories about the people who are in malls doing iris scanning. This strikes me as the kind of thing that you'd see in a sci-fi movie, and they would be in the top floor of a huge skyscraper, and there would be people in white lab coats doing this. This is so different from that. Yeah, it's very bottoms-up, community-organized. Obviously, these people are getting paid to do these scans, but they're really just enthusiasts. Like my operator said he worked in the Web3 space, of course, and that he was just interested in the technology and that most of the people that he's scanned were coming in kind of just because they thought it was like a cool idea.

1:12:10Maybe they saw Sam Altman tweet about it. He did say that a fair number, like maybe a quarter, 20 percent of people were asking, where are my tokens, even though they're not available in the US. There's certainly like people are token farming. There's already been reports of people buying world IDs on the dark web so that they can then get the tokens associated with that world ID. So this is by no means a fail-proof system. But yeah, that's what they're doing at a high level. And they're doing it with flair. This orb was designed by Thomas Meyerhofer, who was Johnny Ives' first designer hire at Apple.

1:12:44And they've hired a lot of big names across the tech industry. So, yeah, it's definitely this kind of weird sci-fi thing meets reality, but definitely did not feel as like high stakes as I thought it would when I walked in. Yeah, it's really interesting. What is your sense of what they're trying to do with the hardware? Because I kind of see it a bunch of ways. On the one hand, you have this thing that they would want to make seem as normal and unscary as possible if they could just like point their phone at you and make it seem every day that that would be great. On the other hand, they seem to have leaned into this very futuristic idea.

1:13:19It's this big, shiny object. Like you said, it looks like HAL 9000. It just looks like a robot. And I can't imagine that was not intentional. Like, what did you make of the actual hardware itself? Yeah, I mean, it's designed to look like an eye, like you're looking into an eyeball, which is pretty creepy. But it was like super fast. It made some cute noises. And over time, I think what's interesting is that Tools for Humanity, the parent company, says they want to open source the design of the orbs and let other people make them and distribute them. So it becomes this like kind of decentralized thing on top of the blockchain aspect of this.

1:13:57Sounds pretty problematic because what happens when some kind of vendor installs malware or like something into the orb that isn't, you know, to spec and there's a huge data leakage or something? But for now, it's all designed and operated and maintained by WorldCoin. These are very expensive devices. I think they cost like$5 ,000 plus each to build. But yeah, eventually the goal is that the whole company moves towards this DAO model, a decentralized autonomous organization where not only are the orbs able to be operated by other people and made by other people, but the WorldCoin itself can be used to vote on how governance works and how the company operates.

1:14:36So they want to move to this foundation model that would also govern the orbs. They haven't done that yet. I think that's another pretty fair criticism of doing this right now is it's kind of putting the car before the horse on what a lot of they're trying to do. But I also see the other side. You know, investors are telling me, like, look, they got to start somewhere. This is a chicken and egg problem. How else you can incentivize people to scan their eyes in this, frankly, kind of creepy thing? So, yeah, that's kind of where it stands now. Okay. And what do you get as a person who has now had your irises scanned?

1:15:06You got a sticker, which is like rad. I love a sticker. And you have an app that I guess like says you're human. Like what, how has your life changed now that you've had your irises scanned? Yeah, I've got my unique human sticker. And then I've got in the world app that says I'm verified. I'm anonymous, but I'm verified with an orb. It says when I was verified. And at some point in the future, I guess because I'm in the US, I probably won't get the world coins. But at some point in the future, this ID I may be able to use to log in somewhere, I guess, would be the most immediate implication of having it.

1:15:41But for now, it's just just this little virtual badge. That is I mean, one of the things that is very funny to me about WorldCoin is there's a version of its story that if you play out the future in one direction, it is this like huge society shaping thing. If you go all the way out into universal basic income and AGI and we end up in this totally different place than we are now, something like WorldCoin could be really interesting and really important. I would say in a much more sort of immediate and plausible worldview, it's just like a fancy login system. Like, it's very funny to me that it's integrating with Okta because it's just Okta.

1:16:16Like, in a lot of ways, it's like, this is a person who would like to log into a website. And it just has cooler technology hardware than, like, my Apple Watch Okta Verify app. Yeah. Or you could be more cynical and say it's actually just a pump and dump scheme. So 25 % of all WorldCoins are held by the company and its investors. And they have not been able to sell any of that yet. They're in a lockup. So a bunch of WorldCoin is going to get dumped in a year or so, most likely. And retail, again, has been the case. And so many of these crypto stories will be left holding the bag. I think what's clear in the short term is the only reason to own WorldCoin is because you think the price will go up.

1:16:58But in the long run, if you buy this UBI thing and you buy AI may one day rule the world, you may want to have it. But it comes back to what I was saying originally, like this is a solution in search of a problem. And I think whatever happens, I guess I find the idea behind WorldCoin to be deeply unsettling because it suggests a future in which humans are indistinguishable from machines. And I know we've had that in sci-fi. You know, I love Westworld as much as the next person. But the idea that, you know, Sam Altman, one of the leaders in this space, is actively building towards this future that he thinks is definitely going to happen is pretty unsettling.

1:17:38And I think, you know, we as a society may be having bigger conversations about this in the coming years. I think that's right. I think the thing that gives me immediate hope is that this launch happened at a very funny time, which is right around the same time that OpenAI ditched its project for figuring out what text was created by AI because it didn't work. And I just think we're at this funny phase now where like it keeps making me think of I watch a lot of HGTV. and there was this whole run of hgtv shows where it was like regular people learn how to flip houses and then there was a whole other run of hgtv shows that were regular people tried to flip their houses and screwed them up so badly that they had to call in professionals and now that's what that show is about there's just literally a show called like help i wrecked my house and it's just like that's the phase of ai that i think we're heading into where it was like okay ai got out of control we're going to build tools to fix the AI.

1:18:32Those aren't going to work. So we're going to, we're going to bring in people to fix the AI, but then we're going to use the AI to beat people. And it's just like, we're like caught in this loop forever. And it just sort of seems like Sam Altman is going to be the one sitting on every side of it, just like laughing hysterically as he makes billions and billions of dollars. So to some extent, like, you know, kudos to Sam Altman for getting it, like coming and going. I mean, yeah, there's nothing like building the problem and the antidote and being able to profit off of both, right? Seriously. Altman is such an important aspect of this, as we've been saying, you know, the fact that it's not launching in the US as he's really wooing regulators going to DC, meeting with President Biden about AI stuff recently, for example, you know, a lot of this is wrapped up in him and his how he's perceived.

1:19:16And it makes sense to me now a little bit more why he's been the super vocal voice talking to regulators saying we need safety around AI. Guess what? but he's got a solution, right? He's got a for-profit solution to the problem. And so, yeah, we've been hearing a lot about ChatGPT in the broader world and society. I do think we'll start hearing more about WorldCoin in the coming months as Altman starts talking about it more and using his platform. So stay tuned. And you're listening to this episode, you're getting kind of the early look at I think something that everyone else is going to be talking about.

1:19:50All right, Alex, appreciate you stopping by as always. And this time, thank you, especially for scanning your eyes for journalism. If you do end up needing new eyes, by the way, let us know, because that's like truly excellent Vergecast material. So keep us posted. You can read more about Alex's experience with the orb in Command Line, his excellent newsletter, which you can sign up for at theverge.com slash newsletters. All right, one more thing to do, and then we're going to get out of here. Let's answer a question from the Vergecast hotline.

1:20:21as a reminder the hotline number is 866 verge 11 please call and ask us all your deepest darkest weirdest tech questions we love them all you can also email vergecast at the verge.com send us a voice memo whatever makes you happy we love hearing your questions for this one i brought in v song hi v hey what's up i have not played you this question i just i gave you like a vague sense of what's coming. So let's let me just play the question. I think you'll be ready for this. But I'm excited to see where we go. Because I also have this question. Here we go. Hey, guys, it's Mark again. And I had a question about wearables or particularly wearables without screens, because I have a pretty, well, I think they're like, it's a cool little G-Shock slash vintage Casio watch collection.

1:21:08And I really enjoy wearing them. But I also would really love to get a lot of the health tracking and sleep tracking features of something like an Apple Watch or whatever Samsung's rolling out these days. And so I tried an Apple Watch for a little bit. I just don't really care for a screen on my wrist, being honest with you. I already feel like the notifications on my phone are a little bit too much, so I'd rather avoid that on my wrist too. But I also would really like to track my health stuff. So I'm wondering, are there any wearables without a screen these days, something kind of closer to like the Fitbit Flex that used to exist, RIP, or also anything that's like not, frankly, what I think is kind of expensive, like the Oura Ring.

1:21:51Anyways, thanks for the help. Bye. Okay, you're making the face that made me want to do this question. It's bleak, dude. It's bleak. Like when you said something not as expensive as the Oura Ring, I was like, uh-oh. because that is basically what I think fits 99 % of what Mark's asking for, because it's going to get you really great clinically, I don't want to say validated, but clinically tested. Sleep tracking, like they just, I've been on calls with them and they just told me how like their sleep tracking is, I want to say around 75, 79 % corresponds to polysomnography, which is the gold standard.

1:22:30So if you want really accurate sleep tracking, The Oura Ring is one of the best options for it. It's not invasive in the sense that you never get a single notification from this on your body. The only problem with that is it can run out of battery. And then you're like, oh, I missed two nights because I missed that one notification on my phone that says charge this thing up. So that's the one thing with that. The other one would be Whoop. And Whoop is still kind of expensive. Yeah. And Whoop also picks it. It has such a different idea about what to measure and what you care about that. I've always had a hard time recommending it to people because it's like like Mark wants step tracking and sleep tracking fundamentally.

1:23:15Right. All the other stuff is well and good, but that's fundamentally what it wants. And Whoop has this very different picture of how you should measure health. And if that works for you, it makes a lot of sense. It's really interested in recovery and lots of different ideas about how to sort of track exertion. And that's all fine and good, but it's not step tracking and sleep tracking. Well, it is sleep tracking because the sleep tracking kind of feeds into their recovery metrics. That's true. It's not really going to help you so much on the step tracking part of it. It's really geared towards people who have, you know, ambitious training regimens and who really care about their HRV and they want to check their exertion and want to be at optimal like priming.

1:23:55uh that's those are the two that are like the most well-known screenless devices the other one would have been the amazon halo but that's kaput because they also went this screenless route there is the fitbit inspire 3 which has the most like not even a screen screen because it's just it's it's basically kind of like the fitbit flex a little bit it's it's got a oled screen now so it's not as the monochrome LCD as it used to be. But, you know, it's really not going to tell you much because it's a tiny little screen and you're not really going to be looking through notifications on that. So that is an option if you don't mind double wristing as I do.

1:24:39But, you know, there is a couple of smart rings that are coming out. I've got a sizing kit for one, so I'm going to be testing that. And if that's an option, that'll be cool. But the problem with smart rings is that they all kind of cost around the amount that the Oura Ring does. There's not really a, what I would call a super affordable option for screen lists at the moment because they're being, like the people developing the screen list tech at the moment are the ones who are really invested in research and that sort of stuff. So you're gonna get people who are like, hey, you want a subscription so you can fund our research?

1:25:17And the answer is always, no, I don't want the subscription. But if you're looking into like cost effectiveness, Whoop recently lowered their subscription prices. So if you want to lock yourself in there for a long time, you can get a lower monthly subscription and the hardware is quote unquote free. You know, they say that it's never free. It's just built into a much higher monthly subscription. So if you want to, and you know, I believe they have like year long commitments. So that's kind of not my favorite thing. But yeah, so the Oura Ring is still, unfortunately, I think your best bet unless you're willing to cobble together multiple devices to just like jerry-rig something.

1:26:00I unfortunately don't think that that's really great. But if sleep tracking is your number one thing, there are actually a number of sleep tracking apps on your phone that are pretty good. There's Sleep Cycle. I like Rise, Rise Science, which is, that does have a yearly subscription. but I believe it's like$60. And if you really get on top of that sleep habit, then it's not really gonna be a forever thing. Rise is interesting because it takes into account your circadian rhythms. And based on like your phone crocking you in your sleep, it'll be like, oh, okay, this is your sleep need. This is your sleep debt.

1:26:39Like these are the times of the day where you should plan high intensity activity. And these are the ones where you should do like lower intensity because your energy is going to dip. And I've been doing that for, I want to say six, seven months now. It's interesting. After a while, I don't pay attention to it anymore. So that's kind of the trap with sleep tracking apps. So I feel really bad, Mark, because I have very unsatisfying answers for you. But yeah, I do think the aura ring is like 99 % of what he's looking for, except for price, which is always the issue with the aura ring. That's exactly where I landed too, is I did a bunch of research and landed on the aura is kind of the only answer.

1:27:15And that's really the last thing I'm curious about from you before we let you go here is I think what it seems like has happened is the whole market for people like Mark has disappeared, right? For a while we had, you could buy a thing that looked more or less like a bracelet. Like the original Jawbone is still my favorite wearable of all time. It was that nice sort of, it was like a little too snap bracelet looking, but it just like fit around your wrist. It looked much less like technology and more like a thing you might actually want to wear on purpose, which was great. and then there were the fitbit trackers that you could clip to things those were cool like we had this run of things that weren't smart watches and all of those have died in favor of either smart watches on one end that's kind of the mainstream idea or the like capital s scientific tools that are very expensive and designed for people who want to do like clinical studies on themselves and it seems like the middle ground is just gone is that ever going to come back like my argument would be that we've pushed too many people towards smartwatches, including a lot of people who actually don't want smartwatches, and that maybe there is room in the middle, but maybe I'm crazy.

1:28:20No, you're not crazy. You're 100 % correct. So what ended up happening is one, Google bought Fitbit, and that kind of killed the middle market. Fitbit smartwatches are blah, especially with the latest generation. But I still think that the Inspire 3 is quite good. And I believe with the Inspire 3, you can pop out the main unit and you can stick it in like different accessories. So that's one option. Garmin makes a single fitness band at the moment, which actually may be more up Mark's alley. Now that I think about it, the only issue is that Garmin sleep tracking kind of sucks. So that's actually the worst part about a Garmin is that it's sleep tracking is, I think, not good.

1:29:04it's good enough to do your like recovery metrics because that's pulling on different things like heart rate variation but in terms of like you wanting to sleep better it's not very helpful and even that the the vivo smart falls into that same it's a smaller screen but it's still a screen category it's still a screen so um months ago um i was reviewing amazfit's amazfit i still don't know how to pronounce it um amaze fits band seven it is a 50 fitness tracker and it if you want to throw back to all the different uh mid-range fitness bands of yesteryear that's a really great option it has a lot of the health tracking features uh the sleep tracking is all right the battery life is pretty good it's not a looker it's fairly you know i want i don't want to say chintzy, but it's not the best looking device.

1:29:56It's very utilitarian. The only issue I've seen with recommending this to people is that people are like, well, it's a Chinese company and Chinese company is going to have my health data. No, thank you. To which, you know, the problem is, is that Fitbit started dying off because these Chinese company like Xiaomi and Amazfit, they basically came in and was like, hey, what if we sold you these fitness bands for not$100 like Fitbit's asking for, but somewhere between$20 to$50. And it's largely going to get you a good portion of the experience. So that just kind of cannibalized the whole market. I had a reader ask me the other day, why didn't Samsung update its fitness bands?

1:30:38And I was like, honey, they have not updated these since the last time I went to IFA, which I think was like 2019, 2018, 2019, maybe even 2017. Like it was a really, really long time ago. So I too, you know, I might, I might end up blogging this, but like, I too have wondered where the fitness bands have gone. And I get a lot of questions like those from Mark and I feel really bad that I'm like, well, if you got built a time machine and traveled back to 2014, I have some options for you there. But all of those options have since lost support because the companies went under as well. So you are kind of stuck with smartwatches, which I do think is tragic because not everyone wants a smartwatch.

1:31:21I even take smartwatch free days once in a while to maintain my own sanity. So it's, I really feel for Mark, but you know, they're, you know, thinking about it, I do have a sleep tracker buying guide or sleep tech buying guide, which if sleep is really your main thing, there are non-invasive, non-contact sleep options. The Nest Hub is one. It'll track you via radar. the Wythings sleep mat I believe it's called is like a$100 sleep mat that you stick under your mattress and it can read your heart rate and all of that stuff so that's kind of cool I have an eight sleep pod pro cover which is not cheap that is even more expensive than the Oura Ring but it does offer temperature cooling so you know yeah either if you really want to avoid the screens and sleep track you're gonna have to go with like six different devices at which point is kind of going to add up to the cost of an aura ring.

1:32:16So, you know, I am going to say right now, your best option is the aura ring until more people like you start complaining that screens are ruining their lives. And then we can get our more simple fitness tracker blast from the past fans back, which, you know, I would actually be really happy about. I miss the old Fitbit days sometimes. All right, that is it for the VertiCast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from sleep tracking buying guides to world coin orb experiences on theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, read the website.

1:32:55Leave us a comment on the post about this episode. We'd love to hear everything you think. And we do answer at least one hotline question every episode, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about probably more Samsung, the latest going on with the X sign on top of the Twitter building, and lots more. See you then. Rock and roll.

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