A Vergecast holiday re-run marathon
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Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of really, really, really long podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am on vacation. We are releasing this episode on Christmas Eve, December 24th, and so I hope you are also on vacation. I hope everybody gets to have a restful, relaxing end of the year. It has been a bonkers year in just so, so, so many ways, and I hope everybody gets a chance to wind down a little and

Because 2025 also seems like it's going to be pretty bonkers. But we'll get back to that. For this episode, we want to do something we've never done before. This might be a horrible idea. Everybody might hate this. We might never do it again. But I just wanted to do it just in case. So we've published a lot of stuff over the course of this year. And we're also not publishing anything for the next couple of weeks because we're off. Everybody's off. Things are pretty slow in the news world anyway. So this is usually a time we just take a couple of weeks off.

But we've also heard from a lot of folks who travel a lot during this time of year and would like to have something on in the background, maybe so you don't have to talk to your family or an excuse to wear headphones so that you don't have to talk to your family.

Lots of things going on. So what we did was we went back through this whole year of Verge Casts and we found a whole bunch of things that, frankly, we just really liked. We've published a lot of stuff this year. Some of it, I think, is really good. Some of it less so. But some of it, I think, is really good. And some of it is also pretty timely and newsy and makes less sense now than it did, you know, three or six or nine months ago.

But some of the stuff I think we've done kind of holds up and is still interesting and evergreen and worthwhile. So we compiled a lot of it. I think it's like six hours of it into just a bit of a clip episode of some of our favorite stuff that we've made this year. To be clear, if you've been listening to the Verge cast all year, there is nothing, not one second of new stuff in this episode.

absolute no hard feelings. If you don't listen, you won't miss anything. Totally fine. This is just if you want more Vertcast, more background noise, or just frankly, something to listen to. Because sometimes we all need something to listen to. And I guess I think of this as like,

You know, I've seen every episode of The Office 50 times and I still like it. So maybe you'll like hearing some cool Verge cast stuff again. I don't know. Again, this is just an experiment. I would love to know what you think. I think there's something to this like clip showy thing because we make a lot of this stuff. I've seen podcasts do like reruns of their best ofs and I've always really enjoyed that.

But if you have ideas on how we can do this better next year, please let me know. Vergecast at TheVerge.com. I'm also David at TheVerge.com. Hit me up. We'd love to hear from you. But for the next six hours.

We're just going to play you some of our favorite Verge cast stuff. Some of this now is going to be wildly out of date. We tried to pick things that are pretty evergreen and still pretty interesting and relevant, but you'll hear some details, some numbers, some facts and figures. I mean, we talk about the vision pro when we did the review, that was 11 months ago, like lots has changed, but it was still a fun conversation. And I think a lot of it still holds up and is still interesting. So we're going to play that for you at some point here too, two more notes. And then we're going to get into it. One,

There are no chapters in this podcast. And please understand that this is both the perfect, perfect episode to have chapters for. And because our platform does not allow it, we don't have it. There are timestamps in the show description. I think a lot of platforms will let you click on those timestamps to jump. That's the best thing we can do. We'll also put kind of the table of contents of all the stuff that's going to be in here. So you can jump around if you'd like to.

I promise we are working on chapters. It is the thing we want the most. I know it's the thing you want the most.

We're going to keep working on it. Thing number two, like I said, we are off for the rest of the year and we will be back at CES. And if you are going to be at CES in January, you should come see us January 8th, which is Wednesday at CES at the Brooklyn Bowl on the Link Promenade. It's like right in the middle of the strip. The Verge cast is free. We'll put a link in the show notes. You can come hang out, eat, drink, make dumb jokes about technology with us. We would absolutely love to see you.

Very much looking forward to that and looking forward to seeing all of you. So that's enough preamble. Let's get into it. Here are, I think it's 11, 10 or 11, many, many hours of our favorite VergeCast things that we've done this year. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and we will see you in a couple of weeks. Here we go. Welcome back.

Over the last few years, one of those ongoing news stories that always makes me stop and think is whenever a company, usually Google or Meta recently, announces that they're starting a project to build a cable between countries or continents or across the ocean. Like in 2022, both those companies announced these big plans to build cables pretty much all the way around the African continent.

The diagrams of them alone are mind-blowing. Just imagine you were sort of loosely tracing your way around Africa three or four times all the way around. That's what it looks like. Thousands of miles of cable underneath the ocean hitting land at these various points all around Africa. And increasingly, this is what the whole world looks like. The whole internet is just right there underneath the ocean all over the world.

The Verge's Josh Jezza has been reporting on these cables for months, and he's found himself inside a whole huge industry that really nobody ever knows or talks about, which is the folks tasked with laying and just as important, maintaining and fixing these undersea cables. If you're hearing this on Tuesday as this podcast goes live, his story just also went up. We might have actually beaten him by a couple

of hours. So keep an eye on theverge.com. So we figured we'd have him on the show to talk about it and explain this whole under the sea world to us. Josh Jezza, welcome back to the Verge cast. Thank you. You have spent however many months at sea learning about the weird machinations of the internet. Yes, unfortunately in port, but

But I guess it's still technically the C. Yeah, it's good enough. So I want to like talk through this big story that you've been working on and just published for us. But I also want to kind of explain the infrastructure of the internet in a way that I think you're now sort of uniquely set up to do. And my sense is what you've discovered, if we're just going to

start from the very beginning is that like, yes, in fact, the internet is just a series of tubes. Absolutely. It is a series of tubes. I was surprised at actually how tube-like they are. Like you imagine, at least I imagine, I feel like a lot of people imagine kind of big pipes at the bottom of the ocean, but it's actually just little

garden hose with tubes running between continents. They have some fiber optic cables in the middle, basically just strands of glass that lasers pulsing through encode data. And that is how data travels around the world. So give me kind of the big picture way to think about this infrastructure. Like, I know it's lots of very long cables, but like how how sort of big and sprawling is the undersea cable universe?

It's huge. There are 500 or so cables around the world. Right.

around 800,000 miles of cabling, often going through between sort of big population centers. So you have a lot going from UK, Western Europe to New York, New Jersey. On the other side, you have various parts of California going to Japan or other locations in Asia. And that is how, you know, you think about these big global networks, you are, even if you're not

always like if two people in America and the US are emailing, they're probably just on terrestrial cables. But the second you're accessing data that's overseas in some capacity, if you're watching YouTube videos that are

were posted from somewhere overseas. It's cached locally in a data center, but it got there using an undersea cable from some other data center somewhere. And if you, of course, Zoom or email or whatever with someone overseas, it's going through one of these cables. Right. Yeah. How would you think about in the sort of day-to-day life of a normal person, how important are these cables, do you think?

I would say they're very important, but they might not be directly accessing them every day. If you're on a big continent like North America, you're largely traveling over a terrestrial network, but services you interact with are dependent on these cables. So you have like big global platforms like YouTube and TikTok. That content is reaching you like the last mile is going to be terrestrial, but it got

to North America using a subsea cable. A lot of financial data, any kind of international transfer is happening on a subsea cable. Anytime you call customer service and you're talking to someone overseas, that's on a subsea cable. And then you have kind of the bits of...

The internet you have, you might look at a website, it might seem like it's local, but you have software libraries and various things that could be stored somewhere else that it's calling on, and you don't necessarily know where it's coming from. So I would say every day you're doing something that maybe on a secondary, tertiary level relies on these cables. Got it. Okay. And undersea cables, if I understand correctly, are not like a new infrastructure.

internet-y idea, right? The idea of having a cable that connects the United States to Europe and Europe to Africa and Africa to Asia or whatever. We know how to do this at this point, right? Yeah. One of the surprising things to me in doing this story is how little this has changed over the years. And I'm not just talking like the decades of the internet, but like a lot of these companies trace their lineages back to the telegraph era. And a

you lay cables, you repair cables pretty much how you did in the 19th century. Yeah, we're talking like mid-1800s, right? When the telegraph was starting to kind of move around the world. Yeah, you read these accounts of the early telegraph people and it's quite a lot of it's trial by error. It's quite exciting as people, they don't really know how electricity works. They don't really know what the bottom of the ocean looks like. And they're just sort of setting out being like, well, we strung a cable over through the

English Channel, like, why not do the ocean? And it goes terribly for several decades before they eventually figure out how to do it. Okay, so today, what does it take to keep all these important garden hoses safe and working?

So they're breaking all the time. They break 200 times a year. It's like every other day a cable breaks. So we have 500 cables and 200 of them break every year. Right. Yeah. They get 200 breaks. Sometimes they're on the same cable. It's complicated. But yeah, basically a good chunk of them are breaking. There's enough redundancy in the system that data can be routed around on alternate paths.

So you don't really notice. But, you know, if they if 200 cables were to stay broken, you would notice things, very bad things would happen. So, yeah, these breaks happen all the time, 200 times a year. And when one breaks, traffic is rerouted along alternate paths. And while that's happening, one of this small band of ships will sail out with some spare cable and fix the break. You know, as the Internet has become more important, there was a report that was

was interesting a couple years ago that talks about how

Cables have not become more vulnerable in recent years. It's just that our dependence on them has grown exponentially. So say in the 90s, there's a massive break. Some things break. It's not bad. You might not notice in your day-to-day life. Now everything breaks. Banks stop working. Companies can't function. Supply chains break. Websites don't load. We rely on it for everything. But the industry that prepares it, keeps things running, is basically the same.

This is sort of handled by private companies that have a bunch of contracts with cable owners and they have this arrangement that is sort of, you know, days back, half a century maybe, where everyone kind of pays into an organizing body that has a couple of ships that stand by and repair any cables that break in a big zone. And like the zone is the Atlantic Ocean. It's big.

Big, big zone. Yeah. So how do these cables break? Overwhelmingly, it's people break them. Specifically, fishing vessels break a lot of cables. You have these dredging nets, trawl fishing. They scrape these big hooks across the bottom of the sea with a net and...

they snap cables all the time. So it's not like a targeted attack on the cable. It's just sort of this gets caught up in the fishing net and snaps kind of thing. Yeah. There's been hardly any proven hostile attacks on a cable. It's almost all just sort of accidental damage. You have a fishing vessel, you have like a ship drags its anchor in the wrong place, things like that. And then you have natural disasters. You have like

landslides under the ocean, basically earthquakes, volcanoes, weird currents, things like that. And then, you know, if there have been cable breaks that people suspect could maybe be from a malicious actor, but it's never really been proven, then

The one case I've seen cited was like during World War I when various, the UK and Germany sort of sent people ashore to cut telegraph cables with axes. Other than that, there hasn't really been any documented cases of attack on a cable. World War I, a lot of fights over TikTok in World War I from what I remember. So you mentioned the maintenance industry here. What does this industry look like? This feels like...

this incredibly important, gigantic job

Like, is this a huge teaming industry of huge teaming multinational corporations fixing the internet? It's really not. It's actually quite a small industry, like ballpark, maybe a thousand or so people in the direct sort of maritime side of maintenance. For all 800,000 miles of undersea cables. That's right. So you have, there's about 70 cable ships in the world, but most of them mostly do installations, which pays better. You have like 20...

two or so dedicated maintenance vessels and they're stationed around the world, you know, a handful per ocean basically. And their job is to, you know, like firefighters stand ready 24 hours a day to sail out within 24 hours of being notified of a cable fault. So they belong to these consortiums. They, you know, maybe a couple of different maintenance providers are

have a ship in a given ocean and they cover the whole area. And if you're a cable owner, you call the maintenance provider and say, hey, I have a cable broken, send the ship out and

They send a ship out to fix the cable. That's basically how it works. Wow. It's like an adventure story every time. They're like, we have to go explore the depths of the ocean to find a broken garden hose and figure out what to do with it. It really is like drop everything. We go to a random place in the middle of the ocean often. Wow. 22 ships strikes me as not a lot of ships.

So they have done it.

with 22 ships. Okay, fair. I guess, yeah, the internet still works. We're still here. Okay. I think the concern is that a lot of these ships are getting pretty old. They're like several decades old. There's not a lot of money coming into the industry. And if there were to be a big event, like a big earthquake or a deliberate attack on a cable choke point or something like that, then you could have a real disruption. So the ships are really this critical component of the internet.

that so far have been able to keep things running. But it's pretty lean. If there were a major event, it would be challenging, I think, in some cases for them to do the job. Okay. And who are these people? Is this like a, is this a sort of manual labor kind of job on a ship? Is this like a incredibly technically complicated job on a ship? Like who are these folks doing this work on these ships? It's both manual labor and very...

You have a mix of you have crew who are sort of seafarers and run the ship. And then you have cable engineers who kind of come from all kinds of different backgrounds. But the job requires you have to be quite good at geometry and angles and forces and sort of ocean engineering stuff to do.

know how to, you know, pull up a cable from several miles to the bottom of the ocean without things snapping. You're dealing with these big metal hooks that are used to catch the cables. High tensions. It's like quite physically demanding work.

And then at its heart, it's these various technical tasks that involved with figuring out where the fault is, splicing the fibers, which is just ultra precise work that's done. You know, you're fusing two strands of glass end to end with as perfect as you can get a connection. And that stuff is it's you know, it's like neurotypical.

It's extremely delicate. And you have to do it on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Right. Yeah. On a rocking ship that is in the middle of the ocean. This is like everything possible on incredibly hard mode at all times. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. You see the workshops and it's just like in the belly of a ship.

sort of surrounded by tarps. It's really not, you know, it's not this precision factory that you would want to be doing this work in. So now I can't help imagining the like montage action scene of everybody snapping into action, one of these things happening. So like walk me through the process a little bit. I'm in port in some...

centrally located city somewhere waiting for a call. I get a call from... I'm assuming it's like Google and Meta who seem to be the companies that own more and more of these cables over time? They own a lot of the cables. A lot of the newly built cables are coming from the big tech companies, Google and Meta primarily. And then you have cables that are owned by dozens, sometimes ISPs and telecom companies and things. Got it. Okay. And so...

Each cable will have someone who's in charge of maintenance and, you know, they'll get a message from their network operations center saying, hey, we've got a cable down here.

Here's what we know about it. That person will then call someone at the repair organization. They can be public or private, but it's one of these consortiums usually. I was really hoping there would be like a big red button on somebody's desk that's like cable down and the alarms start going off in the ship somewhere. Yeah, there are alarms and big red warnings, but then it's a lot of people calling people around the world at weird hours. So they call someone on the maintenance side. That person then calls the ship and

and says, you know, get ready. We're going to need X miles of spare cable for this cable system. We think it's here. We think this cut it. Whatever information they have. And then they kind of plan out what the repair is going to look like. Okay. And what does a repair normally look like? Like, walk me through a little bit of what it would look like actually on the boat trying to do the repair. Yeah. So...

The first thing you do is you need to locate where the fault is approximately. And that's done on either end of the cable. Basically, you have people in the landing station on either end of the cable. So on opposite sides of the ocean, shoot a laser down there and it hits the brake, reflects back. And the time it takes to come back will tell you pretty much where along the cable the brake is. So like wherever the signal dies, that's the point you send them to? Exactly. Okay. Okay.

And so you sail out to there with a certain amount of spare cable in your ship and a bunch of these big hooks that are called grapnels. Which I googled, by the way, and they just straight up look like Batman's grappling hooks. Like, that's just what they are. It's exactly what they are. And there's a bunch of different kinds. You have, like, multi-grapnel things. You have ones with giant arms and blades, depending on what...

what the ocean bottom looks like, whether it's muddy or rocky or what. Cables are laid with such little slack on the seabed that you can't just hook it and pull it to the surface. It's too hot. So the first thing you need to do is you need to cut the cable somewhere near where it's broken using one of these grapnels, but one with a big blade in the middle. So you drag this blade across where you think the cable path is.

And then you turn around with one of these grapnels and catch one end of the cable, pull it to the surface, attach it to a buoy, go back to the other side, catch the other side of the cable, and then you're done.

bring it to the surface, and then you do the splicing. So you splice like a piece of spare cable to that end, go back to the other side that's attached to the buoy, splice it to that end, and then test it. And you should have a working cable that then you have to lower back down to the ocean floor. So it's basically like you're fishing for cables on the ocean floor, right? Like how do they know if they've caught one? That's exactly right. Like,

like fishing based on just the tug on the line. In this case, you have this enormous metal hook that you're dragging along the ocean floor. And as that's happening, someone is in the bridge watching this one dial called the tension meter and watching it waver back and forth. And one of the interesting things about it is it's an analog dial. It's not an ultra precise digital readout

because you want that kind of fuzziness to be able to judge intuitively what's happening. Is tension rising or falling? Is it rising and falling vast or slow that you can't get from a bunch of numbers jumping around? And so you're watching this dial and if it's moving up slowly, kind of wavering, maybe you're going through some mud. If it jerks up quick

Maybe you hit a rock and what you want is this slow increase, slow, steady increase in intention that shows you've hooked this cable and you're dragging it along the ocean floor. And that's when you know it's time to reel it in. Interesting. Man, that's such an inexact science. But that's like you just described like an art form more than a piece of sort of data analysis. Yeah.

It really is one of the engineers I was talking to in Japan. It really is this act of reading what's happening on the ocean floor, imagining based on this dial. "Oh, I'm going over a trench. I've hit a rock."

That's wild. And how long does that process take? Like days to weeks to months, even if it's hard to find the cable. Everything here is at just a massive scale. So like if you're in deep water, the garden hose is several miles down. And just the act of like lowering it down to the ocean floor and hauling it up can take nearly a day because it's so deep. And then so each step of this process takes several days, weeks.

splicing the cable takes about a day it's just incredibly time consuming and then so it's like if

If you don't catch the cable on first try, then several more days to try again. And it adds up. Pretty soon you're out of sea for weeks. It just keeps reminding me of one of those movies where there's the one shark that they're trying to catch. And they're like, we think we found it. It's over here. And then they go and they don't get it. And it's like, oh, okay, well, we think we know where it'll be next. And it is this sort of perpetual cat and mouse game that you're playing with this thing, trying to get it into your arms. And then you can do something with it.

Yeah, it's remarkable how little visibility they have onto the ocean floor and what's happening down there. You know, there are times when people are doing, you know,

a dozen passes back and forth being like well that wasn't there maybe it's a mile that way and let's try over here and that's that's nuts why don't we know better this is one of the things i found myself wondering reading your story is i feel like i could make a solid argument that the location of these cables should be like closely held state secrets that no one knows that

because they're so important to the way that the world works that they should be, you know, it should be like the bunkers where the president goes. Like you just, it just should be all classified information. On the other side, I can imagine a world in which we should do much more work to have much better knowledge of how these things work and where they are and what's going on with them because they're so important and because laying them and fixing them needs to happen so quickly. But it seems like we're in sort of a weird middle between those two things. We're like, we kind of know

but not really. Yeah, it's a trade-off. So you can go and you can see telegeography, track cables, you can see kind of broadly where they are in the ocean. If you're like a

A sea captain, you get charts that have cable areas marks, you know, with some degree of precision. And that makes a lot of sense because the biggest actual threat to cables is someone accidentally dropping an anchor on them. And so if you are worried about an attack and you make the most secret, you're probably going to increase the number of accidental cable breaks. On the other hand, they are vulnerable. It would be fairly easy.

You know, you don't need a low tech attack. You can just drag an anchor across the ocean floor. In practice, the network is redundant enough. You're still talking about like a really small thing in a big ocean. So it's not quite that easy to attack. It would take a pretty sophisticated antagonist to actually cause a catastrophic cable outage. So, so far it's been fine, but it is a topic of active debate.

I think, in governments, what should we do? How should we protect these cables that are so important? And for the people whose job it is to actually maintain them over time, what is life like? You talk to a bunch of people who are sort of in this industry and in some cases have been for a very long time, right? What's it like to be a sort of superhero keeping the internet running? It's a very strange job. People, you know, when they join, they tend to kind of stumble into it. It's not

a very well-known industry. And so you have people who are working as cable engineers in some other area or, you know, in merchant marines or something like that, geologists in optics, and they sort of stumble into it. And, you know, if they, if they stay for a bit, they tend to stay for a long time, like decades. A lot of the work is earned on, learned on the job. And so people tend to sort of move around between different roles, but it's not

an easy job. It's a weird lifestyle. You rotate in and off ships. You're often far from home, out of contact. This is changing now a bit with Starlink, but when you're on board one of these ships, historically, you're pretty much cut off. You don't

have great internet connections. You can't stream things or FaceTime or anything like that. You have the fast internet literally in your hands. You just can't do anything with it. Right. Exactly. It's a difficult job. Just the lifestyle is hard, but people come to love it because it takes you to very unusual places. It's exciting. And

A lot of them have like a real sense of purpose. They're maintaining this infrastructure that the modern world runs on, even if no one actually knows about it or what they do. Knowing you as I do, I'm confident that at some point in reporting this story, you tried to live the cable maintenance life yourself. And you're like, yes, I will live the ship life. How close did you get? Not that close. I did try. You know, when I first heard about this industry, I was like, well,

I should go on board for a repair and was basically laughed out of several times, you know, for various reasons. The big one was security. It's a it's a secretive industry. They just can't have a journalist hanging out on a cable ship in most cases. And then the other very compelling reason was that they don't know how long they'll be gone. So like, yeah, you can come along, but maybe we'll be gone for a week or two and maybe we'll get called off to another repair and you'll be at sea for months, which is just hard to really.

That's fair. So were you were you able to get any kind of firsthand glimpse into this life? Yeah. So I ended up going to Japan to talk to people who work at KCS and going aboard the Ocean Link, which was the ship that repaired a lot of the cables in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

And so it was in port for a period of time. And I was able to go there and visit the crew and get a tour of the ship. What was the ship like? It was fairly big, like 400 foot long, sort of tall, working ship. It's from the 90s. It's kind of old at this point, but well maintained.

I'm imagining sort of a big fishing vessel, but instead of like nets and containers, it just has a massive spool of cable. That's basically right. It essentially is a massive spool of cable. Like the middle of it are these...

I think three big empty tanks that are just kind of spindles of wound spare cable. The interior is really empty. It's kind of like a, it's built kind of like an aircraft carrier or something where there's no sort of beams or struts or anything because it's all just, you have to string cable out of these tanks to the workstation and then out to the front where there's kind of a rolling, uh,

pulley kind of thing where it goes over and into the ocean. Got it. So it pulls it up and then you sort of spool from the middle. Boy, what a complicated system. It's counterintuitive how the ship is put together and how it all works, but that makes sense when you're working with a material that is thousands of miles long. It just creates all these weird logistical problems. Yeah. So you mentioned the Fukushima incident in 2011 in Japan, which was a big part of the story that you wrote.

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

And part of that, the tsunami knocked out the Fukushima nuclear reactor, causing a nuclear meltdown. So you have this disaster on top of a disaster. And then you have the other disaster, which is not really well known, but happened at the same time, which is that the earthquake caused all of these submarine avalanches that wrecked the majority of the cables Japan uses to connect to North America and the rest of the world. And so while the earthquake

tsunami recovery was happening while Fukushima was, you know, people were trying to bring Fukushima under control. Um,

The ship had to set out and try to fix these cables as fast as possible while contending with the fact that there may or may not be a cloud of radiation over them. So, yeah, I mean, again, it just feels like so much of this process is just unknowns on top of unknowns on top of unknowns. It's just going out and trying to figure out, OK, something happened to these cables. We don't know what or where or what it's going to take or how we're going to fix it. And just bit by bit, they just solve it.

Yeah, it's really just, it's very methodical. Like you just got to kind of follow the steps. And so they looked at the cable map, they figured out, okay, based on the timing of these faults, you know, interestingly, a lot of them happened hours after the tsunami, like that night, basically. You have these big debris flows that sort of barrel down these canyons and end up wrecking the cables. And from the timing of the breaks, they figure out that's probably what happened last night.

The seabed is probably very transformed. They're going to need a lot of spare cable. And typically you figure out, you know, it's not usually up to the maintenance provider which cables they fix first. It's usually kind of first come first served from the cable owners, whoever calls in their fault first. But in this case, the cable owners are like, you guys figure it out. Whatever cable you can fix, fix it. And so they settled on

You know, the one farthest from Fukushima, because the other thing is that normally in a big event like this, other ships arrive to help. But there was so little known about what was happening with Fukushima. No one felt comfortable sending their crews into that. And so they were sort of the only ones doing it for the first the first period of time. So and then there was a moment in the Fukushima response where they had pulled the cable up.

And then couldn't figure out what to do with it. Right. What happens here? You get the cable up above the ocean and then you have to figure out what to do. What did they do? Yeah. So this was the first repair. They hooked this cable and they start reeling it in and it's under an unusual amount of tension. And basically what happens, you know, they start reeling in very, very slowly because every cable has a certain amount of tension. You don't want to exceed it because the cable could snap.

And so they're just moving very, very slowly and it takes them nearly a day to get it to the surface. And what they learn when it gets there is that it's just been completely mangled. And what they think happened is some enormous landslide happened. It dragged the cable, it buried it under a bunch of debris, and now they've been slowly pulling it tighter and tighter and tighter until it reaches the surface again.

Now, they can see it. It's on the front of the ship. It's on the foredeck. And it is hooked around one bar with a grapnel and totally stripped and mangled and under a huge amount of tension. So you basically at this point have like a thousands of miles long bungee cord like sitting on your boat.

Exactly. Exactly. Attached to a heavy metal hook that if the bungee cord snaps, which is being strained at sort of each wave and swell, it will fly across the ship, kill anyone it hits, smash into the cable control room, just do immense damage. And so the priority becomes you can't repair a cable under this kind of tension that's this damaged. They need to get it off the ship. And so they do this sort of complicated, precarious procedure where they hook

chains around each side of the cable, swap the grapnel out for a bladed grapnel, lower it back over the bow of the ship while they've evacuated the area. And then once it's under the water, they release the chains, the cable is cut and goes back to the bottom and they start over.

That feels like a really interesting test case. Because, you know, like you said, these cables go back a century. But 2011 is very much like the internet. And as we've learned, you know, catastrophes happen. Things like this happen all the time in lots of places. That was a particularly bad one. But like earthquakes happen. We just had one in New York. Like these are things that happened. Did that, were there any sort of lessons learned from that? Like, do you feel like whatever, 13 years after that?

were in a different era of how we think about undersea cables? Yes and no. I mean, it's interesting to look back on the coverage of 2011. Like a lot of the when the Internet was mentioned, it was usually that, you know, this is remarkable. The Internet fared remarkably well. It stayed up. Oh, really? So for all the for all the issues, the Internet stayed up in Japan. Yeah. And so you have these reports and people were basically jostling.

Just you could only use the Internet to communicate in the immediate aftermath. People were sending emails. They were tweeting. People were posting videos. Other telecommunications were cut out, like the terrestrial cables were cut. The cell towers were wrecked. And so they were really reliant on the Internet. But you talk to the people who are at the operation centers and on the ships and.

And it was so much more precarious than people knew. Basically, they had succeeded in rerouting all the traffic over the remaining cables. But if one of those cables had gone down, you would have started to see a real degradation in service. Things would have started to drop. It would have been difficult to communicate. And so it was sort of right on the cusp of being a communications disaster. Yeah.

And the lesson that the industry learned from that is largely around redundancy. There's not like a real geographic reason, unlike the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait or something. There's not a geographic reason why all the cables were in one place there. It was a sort of habit like we'd always...

always put cables there and they always kind of landed at the spot. And so that makes sense. And so you had this, these sort of choke points that then when a landslide comes through, it wrecks a bunch of them. And there's more of an awareness that you need multiple landing points, but in practice that doesn't always happen because it's cheaper to follow noon routes or whatever. Yeah. So where, where does it feel like this industry is right now? Obviously it's

As critical as ever, if not more so. Like, the world relies on this stuff more than we ever have. And I feel like, purely anecdotally, I've heard more about...

undersea cable projects just in the last couple of years, I feel like than I ever have. And that might just be because I pay attention to companies like Google and Meta, and they're doing a lot of this stuff. But is there, is there energy in this space to increase from, you know, 500 cables and 800,000 miles to are we going to have more than that or multiples of that over

over time, do you think? We are in a cable boom right now. There's a lot of new cables going in. Whether that means the net number of cables goes up is a debated topic because the cables are also higher and higher capacity. So some think maybe there'll be fewer of cables. They'll just be really, really, really high bandwidth. But

But there are a lot of new cables going in that's driven by the tech companies primarily, which starting a couple of years ago decided, you know, rather than purchase bandwidth on these cables, let's have our own cables. And so they started laying their own systems largely between their data centers. And the reason for that is that they need a ton of capacity to kind of sync all of their data centers around the world to keep these like huge content libraries up to keep their cloud services running. And so they want to

just kind of that all under their own umbrella. But that hasn't really spilled over into the maintenance side yet. It's mostly kind of the installation side. I was going to say, are we still at, we're still at 22 ships? Yeah, still not a lot of new ships there. And, you know, while the new cables do provide a lot of redundancy, you also don't want, you know, your handful of super high capacity cables to go down because it's

it's difficult to sort of move that traffic over onto other routes. Yeah. As you were talking to people, did you get a sense that there are new kinds of threats to these cables too, whether it's some of the ones that have been there a long time getting old and not getting replaced quickly enough or climate change or like the geopolitics of the internet, which are becoming a bigger and bigger deal all the time? Is there a sense that this could get

worse rather than better as we fight about undersea cables? Geopolitics are the big thing. Climate change will make certain things harder. These cables all land on

coastline, which is eroding and sinking. And that will be a problem. But part of the reason you're also hearing more about cables is the geopolitics around them have become really sensitive. Largely, that has been China-U.S. conflict. You have the U.S. saying we don't want Chinese-owned cables landing in the U.S. And China also denying repair permits for the South China Sea or sort of slowing them down.

And concerns about routing cables through China's waters or into Hong Kong has caused this kind of reconfiguration of the network. You have alternate routes going through the Philippines or a lot of cables landing in Singapore or China trying to build up its own cable maritime industry so that it doesn't have to rely on the West. And these changes are making it...

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

screw all of this, the answer is satellites and we have to get there as quickly as we possibly can? Or like, is this just what it is and we have to figure out how to do it better? There's a fair amount of concern, I think, about the long-term sustainability of the industry. It can't all be satellites. That was the other thing that everyone reminded me of. Satellites can carry like half a percent of the global traffic. It's going to be cables. They're just way more efficient and cheaper to transport.

transmit data. There's a sense that they will have to navigate this. I think the industry has been pretty stable for decades, and there's some anxiety about these changes, the big tech companies coming in, governments taking a greater interest, the sort of geopolitical jockeying around cable routes that are just going to be tricky, I think. A lot of the

anxiety comes from kind of the market forces involved. Like the big tech companies, they have so much buying power, they can drive down prices and so they can negotiate lower rates. And so, well, that means maintenance companies can operate year to year. It maybe means they don't have enough to invest in a new vessel. And so you have this kind of slow degradation, which also means that they have trouble recruiting because no one wants to join this sort of aging fleet.

Sure. Yeah. Having done this whole process of reporting and sort of understanding how this world works, does it change the way you think about the internet? Like, I feel like the more I learn about the actual infrastructure of the internet, the

the more remarkable it seems that any of this ever actually works. And I feel like I got some of that sense from your story that on the one hand, this is this incredibly robust, incredibly impressive group of people working on this thing that we understand and have worked on for a long time. On the other hand, the internet is forever like one wayward anchor away from falling apart. Yeah, it's really it's one of these cases, I feel like you hear about every so often, like,

The ways in which the Internet is just sort of this cobbled together apparatus is way less stable than than it seems. This is sort of an ordinary user. It does depend on just sort of these these random people, whether it's like a software engineer who's keeping things running or.

These people who are really good at, you know, catching internet cables with hooks in the ocean that, you know, if it weren't for their sort of largely invisible work, the system would fall apart. ♪

Welcome back.

They make your meals more expensive, often more than you know, through sneaky price increases. Like the menu on Uber Eats is sometimes just more expensive than the menu at the restaurant. They also don't pay delivery people enough or offer them the protections or benefits that the people who work there should get. And for the most part, historically speaking, they're not even a very good business for the companies running them. It's hard to make money for anybody.

Including the restaurants, the drivers, everybody. It just seems bad. So what are we doing here? Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, there was this guy who went viral online because of some posters he had put up around Seattle saying basically, skip the apps, call me instead, I'll deliver your food. He became kind of a folk hero online. So we sent our producer, Will Poore, to go see what's going on. This is one of those stories that exists because of a perfect storm type situation. Here's what happened.

For years, gig workers here in Seattle, notably delivery drivers, have been pissed at the lousy pay they've been earning in this very expensive city. So in 2022, the city council stepped in and mandated a higher pay rate for app-based delivery workers. It's a good idea.

It's a good day for gig workers as the city of Seattle's new ordinance takes effect. The new pay scale went into effect this past January, and the apps didn't take the change graciously. In reaction, apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash began charging customers $5 in what they're calling a local operating fee.

That's on top of the service fees and delivery fees that apps routinely charge, to say nothing of tips. And customers are finding their limits. Fewer people are ordering from the apps, gig workers are feeling even more squeezed, and everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else.

Food delivery orders plummeting since Seattle implemented new minimum wage requirements for delivery workers a month ago. This kind of battle is playing out in other markets, too. New York City enacted similar rules last year, which the apps have also been fighting tooth and nail. But there's one thing Seattle has that no one else does. A guy named Tony Iles, who I am trying to literally chase down right now.

I always carry like a tennis ball in my pocket for like the round fluidity of a ball. I just like the idea of like when I was in San Francisco, I had a conversation with my buddy and I was like, do you think shapes have thoughts? And I think I do. I think they do. I think that they influence the way that you think. And I, I always carry that tennis ball. So I always feel like I have like a fluid mind.

Tony is telling me this while flying across downtown Seattle on a rented e-bike in the pouring rain. I'm on my own rental, trying to listen and keep up at the same time. We're weaving in and out of bike lanes, dodging construction, and crashing through puddles that could be potholes.

It's chaos, which is partly the setting and partly Tony's fluid mind. In the first 30 minutes or so of pedaling, we have talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, China's social credit score, and the Stanford prison experiment.

And I haven't asked any of the questions I came to ask. There's this idea called the method of Loki. I don't know if you know what that is. I don't. It's like this way of remembering things verbatim historically in like these ancient societies. It was asked this, this book that I read, it was called a moonwalking with Einstein. Uh, take a left.

Hey, if we get separated for any reason, just go finish your delivery and text me when you're done. I'll find you again, alright? Okay. Oh, because I'm hustling? Well, I just realized that I signed up to do a story about a delivery guy. You're alright, man. I don't know how I expected this to go, but... It's a pleasure meeting you. I gotta up my game here. Tony's backstory is pretty simple.

He was driving for Uber Eats when those new fees suddenly killed demand. So at the beginning of February, he decided to go it alone. He put up some very DIY flyers downtown with an offer.

Text him a food order from any restaurant within a couple square miles, and he'll get it to you for five bucks. No taking a cut from restaurants, no service fee, no delivery fee, no local operating fee. Just a tip if you're feeling generous. He went viral pretty much instantly. Right now on Cairo 7 Tonight, growing frustrations for Seattle's new food delivery rules. One driver becomes his boss's competitor. Now, just a few weeks later, Tony is a full-on local celebrity.

He's all over the news, Reddit, Twitter, Slash X, and he says the orders have followed. The biggest challenge is cadence. He might get five texts all at once and then nothing for a while. So he's trying to figure that out, along with the fame. Has this amount of attention been weird? Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's just like, all of a sudden my opinion matters.

And a lot of people are asking me, they're just like, how much money are you making? And I'm like, right. I'm like, well, I'm not a monetary guy, not a business orientated person. But what's interesting is, is like, I feel like I've introduced a solution for like a social thing.

Tony's social solution goes something like this. Because of apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, yes, delivery has gotten expensive. But more than that, it's gotten rushed and sloppy and impersonal. It's just bad vibes all the way down, and it's ruining takeout for everyone.

It's such a hard position to be in. For who? For everybody, every party that's involved. The restaurants, the city, the people that are working as a deliverer. They're in this terrible, toxic relationship with somebody. Like the restaurant owners and the apps and the drivers and just like that whole thing. Well, just like think about it. Last time you went into a restaurant and some driver goes in and is like...

cuts in front of you and you're just like, what in the world? Like, hey man, I've been standing here for five minutes. What's your problem? You know, that person is, they're like, they're hustling, right? So they're going in and they're not thinking about that at all because that's not their psychology. No, they got to keep moving. Right. And from where Tony's standing, the apps are moving in precisely the wrong direction.

I think that they, the apps have this kind of misaligned misdirection of where they think the market is and what they're planning for. I think that their whole goal is to like send robots to the buildings and, you know, send automated cars and it's like,

Okay, well, if that's your solution, then you might bleed for a while, right? And so it's like, I'm not a monetary guy, but I could tell you how to make it work a little bit better. Tony's whole thing is to strip all the tech and anonymity out of the process and be your friendly neighborhood delivery guy. And he thinks people will actively prefer a more social alternative, even if that care and attention limits him. I'm almost like kind of certain once I get to a certain number of people that order from me, I almost kind of want to cap it.

to kind of ensure the law of Dunbar. Dunbar's number is another favorite Tony topic. It's a theoretical limit to the number of social relationships any one person can maintain. You want to cap the number of people that order from you so that you can stop and chat for a couple of minutes, so you can get to know repeat customers. I wouldn't even call them customers. I would just call them my friends or the homies, you know? There you go.

- Oh yeah. - They're literally like, "Yo Tony, can you get this for me?" And I think that's kind of the thing is like when you try to turn it into a business to customer relationship versus a person to person relationship, they're not gonna be as understanding. - Yeah. - If I forget your drink right now, someone will be like, "Tony, it's fine." - Yeah. - You don't have to go back to Chipotle. - Totally. - But if I forget on Uber Eats,

They're going to be like, yo, man, what's going on here? In short, Tony thinks that there is a whole lot more to delivery than speed and cost. But yes, he is cheaper than the competition. And often faster, too. I've never seen anybody run through a Target. I picked up somebody's Target stuff and I was running through the Target. I'm going to run here real quick. Yeah. I follow Tony as he makes two, maybe three deliveries back to back. Some chicken and a shake from Dave's Hot Chicken. Does it come with a drink or anything?

A salad from a healthy bowl place called Evergreens. I'm honestly not 100% sure. It was such a blur.

But at each pick-up and drop-off, Tony lives up to his own pitch. He's courteous, warm, casual, and chatty. So, man, how are you doing today? We pull up to our next destination, a big apartment building. And while we wait in the lobby for Tony's customer, sorry, his homie, to come down, he's recognized by a stranger. You're the guy. Thank you. Yeah, I am. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

I stop and chat with Tony's homie for a few minutes. He says that he and his roommates have ordered from Tony maybe 10 times in the past month. I was just scrolling through Reddit one day, and then I saw someone posting a... They posted a picture of one of his flyers that were posted, like, in the city. And I was like, oh, that's pretty interesting. It's cheaper than DoorDash. So I was like, let me give it a try. And then ever since, it's like...

been me and my roommates like go to. Oh, nice. So you guys are like serious regulars at this point. Between the three of us type thing. And were you Uber Eats, DoorDash people before that? Yeah, exactly. DoorDash mainly. And then it was just like got expenses. So we're like, let's see what else there is. What's the like the Tony experience like and how is it different from the apps

I think it's a lot nicer because first of all, all you have to do is just like text him. So that's already a lot easier. He's much faster. And it's always nice like having a quick conversation with him in like the lobby. He always waits. He's fun to talk to. He's a very chill guy. Like we've had some nice conversations. It's cool.

At the end of the lunch rush, Tony and I sat down at a cafe to talk some more. I went into the story wanting to know whether a guy like Tony can make it. Seattle's minimum wage is almost $20 an hour. So to match that, he'd need four deliveries an hour, not accounting for tips. Which, after seeing him in action, definitely feels doable. But it is a hustle. In other words, it's still gig work. And Tony's only working the lunch and dinner rushes right now.

So after this whole adventure, my question remains, can he make it? It turns out that is Tony's least favorite question. I'm looking at it as like, I just understand people. You know, people, they all have their perspectives. And all I'm trying to be is the glue that glues you in that connective tissue. So that way you can get off Reddit and stop arguing about how much money I'm making. Get off Reddit and stop arguing whether it's going to be financially responsible. I can figure that out on my own.

I get the sense that Tony has become a kind of avatar. Everyone's putting all their thoughts and feelings about the gig economy onto him. I think that's why his story blew up online. If you're frustrated by big, powerful companies making life more annoying, he is the folk hero to root for, which is just way too much for Tony to take on.

All of a sudden, like, people are texting me and they're like, you got a great business mind. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And I think that what people are trying to do, they're trying to box me. They're trying to say, Tony fits here. And I think what they're lacking of understanding is, is like, I actually don't fit anywhere. I'm this like round ball that's just rolling down the street. Like the one in your pocket. That's exactly, exactly.

Tony has no idea whether Tony Delivers will make it, or what will happen to food delivery more broadly. He just knows that something needs to change. Like, what they tried to do is they tried to put food on a conveyor belt and deliver it like an Amazon package, and it's not going to work. They're winning right now, but at the end of the day, it's not going to work.

It's too expensive. They're like waiting for things to be solved. And they're hoping, they're hoping that somebody down the line is like, intelligence is going to hit that S curve. They're going to be able to plug in the robots and they're going to, they're going to be able to do it. And I'm here to tell you, it's not going to work.

As cagey as Tony is about his own future, he will say that he's been fielding calls from all over the country, people who have heard his story and want to do what he does. So it's like, all right, well, how can I then be the Energizer Bunny for some things that we do like and that we do think about and maybe that I can kind of more positively impact in a different sense? Just giving people the right direction.

energizing their buddy, so to speak, giving them the battery to kind of the right mindset.

So what does this all reveal about the gig economy? Well, Tony has clearly tapped into something. And in spite of his grander pronouncements, what he's saying is pretty straightforward. I think that what it represents, I think personally, is like this idea that we don't need the apps. We're so used to apps mediating all of our activities that at this point, what if not apps actually feels revelatory?

But it's telling that Tony's customers are more than happy to ditch Uber Eats and DoorDash at the drop of a hat. Or the drop of a new fee. And if big tech companies really do double down on automation and robots, more people might actively seek out more humanity, more idiosyncrasy, more Tony. Tony himself wants to experiment and meet people and hopefully pay the bills. And if he accidentally starts a revolution along the way...

all the better. It would be nice to be known as the guy that was trying to connect us back together. That would be kind of cool. But not in the sense of, like, this was the guy. It was just more like, oh, like, this Tony Iles mentioned this, and we thought it was, like, a good idea, and it worked, and then, like, eventually, like, we reconnected. ♪

Welcome back. For all of the last two weeks, the most popular app in the Apple App Store has been a game emulator called Delta. We've been talking a lot about Delta on this show over the last few weeks, both because it's a huge hit and because it seems like maybe the start of a new era for the App Store. Like in the history books of smartphone apps, there might be a before Delta and an after Delta for lots of reasons. But

But there's actually nothing even remotely new about Delta. The story of this app is actually a full decade long. And it starts with this guy. I'm Riley Testut, and I'm the founder of AltStore, developer of Delta. Riley has had, as you might expect, a pretty wild few weeks. In the middle of it all, I asked him to come on the show and just tell me the whole Delta story. Why he wanted to build an emulator in the first place, how the regulatory and technological world changed around him, and...

in general, how Delta went from a big hack to a big hit. It starts with Riley in high school, just kind of looking for something to do. I was just back in high school. I think it was my junior year. And I just one day came across just like the open source repo for a jailbreak Game Boy Advance emulator, GPS phone. And I was like,

I was like, oh, this is cool. This is all the code. I can probably just download this and tweak it and then put it on my own phone without having to jailbreak. Because, yeah, I've never been a fan of jailbreaking. It's just never really appealed to me. So I found this code base. I hacked out of the way for a couple months, put it on my phone. I put it on a few of my friends' phones. They liked it. And then I uploaded it to GitHub and called it GBA for iOS and then kind of left it there for a bit. And then...

people found it on GitHub and started talking about it. And so I was like, oh, there's interest in this kind of thing. So you just made it as sort of a, it sounds like a mix of like a thing that you thought would be useful and just kind of a thing to do. Yeah, I just wanted Pokemon on my phone. That was literally, I found this. I was like, oh, cool. I can put Pokemon on my phone now. And that's awesome. And that's really all I was thinking at the time. And then I put on my friend's phones and then we were playing just Pokemon ourselves.

And then just completely coincidentally, there was a service that came out around the same time that lets you connect like open source GitHub projects and sign it with Apple's enterprise certificate. Basically, there's a company that had enterprise certificate and you could just connect your GitHub account and then resign your apps like that. And so I was like, oh, cool. I'll connect this to GBA for iOS and then people can install it outside the app store. Maybe a few people will download it.

And that's basically when I learned, oh, wait, there's a huge demand for this thing. Oh, interesting. I did that. And then within like a week, people were like posting videos about how to install it. There were lots of Reddit posts. And I was like, honestly, caught off guard because at this point, it was still just a project I made for me and my friends like in high school. And so then I was like, OK, there's demand for this thing.

let's take this seriously. Let's build a real version of this app that's not thrown together, not hacky. And so that's when I got my friend Paul Thorson on board, also still in high school. And we were like, we're going to do a brand new version of GBA FryOS, GBA FryOS 2.0. We're going to redesign it from the ground up, just build it and make a really polished experience. And so we basically spent all of senior year working on that.

And in like halfway through senior year, we released GBA for iOS 2.0. And that's the version that most people know. That was the version that you installed for my website. You set your date back like 24 hours and you can install it because of a weird bug that allowed enterprise certificates to work that way, even if they're expired. Yeah, wait, so real quick, just pause for a second and explain the enterprise certificate thing to me. Because I feel like...

Part of the story here is like Riley's adventures in figuring out how to install apps on phones. Yes. It's slowly getting more and more complicated. So this was the easiest hack. It's just, yeah. As long as I found an enterprise certificate, I could just sign GBA FireWise with it. And literally anyone could just download it from a website on the phone. Super simple. And the idea is basically it's like that's the certificate you would use if I'm like a company wanting my employees and no one else to have that app. Right.

Yeah, the exact same flow. And so it's just, you're not supposed to do it for this reason. And so what Apple normally would do is they would just like revoke the certificate. They'd make it, this is no longer valid and all apps that are signed with it can no longer be installed. And so the bug that I took advantage of was apparently at this time, like in iOS 7, if you just set your date back on your phone by more than an hour, the checks for whether a certificate is valid or not just don't work. They just don't do it. Sure. Yeah.

You did try to install GBA and Apple would have revoked the certificate. But because you set your date back, iOS was fine installing it. And so it was just like a really weird bug that I could take advantage of because Apple couldn't do anything easily about it. They had to actually fix iOS to address it. They couldn't just be like, OK, no, turn off certificate. It was about nine months later that they finally addressed it.

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

Um, a lot of people like more than 10 million. Wow. Whoa. Yeah. That's like a zero or two bigger than I thought you were going to say. Yeah. There was a stupid amount of people using GBA FireWise, which is why I was so motivated to do this for this whole time was I just knew that there was a market for this kind of thing that everyone just kind of assumed there wasn't. I'm like, no, GBA got 10 million downloads outside the app store.

Like, it's just people just really want to do this, like play old games. Yeah. Okay. So you kind of you're sort of forced to shut down that project a little bit. Was there a moment where you're like, okay, I'm ready to go to war with Apple. Let's fight this to the death and figure out how to get GBA for iOS back. Or when it when the sort of exploit gets shut down, do you just kind of say, you know what?

But like you said, I'm going to college anyway. This is just a moment. Let me focus on other things. It was basically that. Yeah, I was like, you know, this is just a sign that I should move on to something else. This is really cool. I'm glad I got to do this. Got a lot of experience. But maybe I'll try to make an app in the App Store next time. That was what I was thinking. I'm like, this is a lot of work to have an app outside the App Store. So then that whole thought process lasted like a few months. And then I got bored and I needed a new app to work on. And so, yeah, Swift had also just been announced like the previous year. And so I was like, oh, you know what?

Let me just make another toy app for myself to learn Swift just for me. And you know, I'll make another emulator. It'll have more systems, but it's just for me. Like, again, like, it's just like a fun thing I wanted to work on to learn Swift. That was like my entire motivation. So you're just run the exact same playbook again without even realizing it. Exactly. I was like, you know, I'm just going to make for fun. Yeah, I know. You'd think I'd learn by some point.

Okay. So, and that's where Delta starts. Yes. And so that's the beginning of Delta was like, okay, I'll call it Delta and just build it for fun. And that is what I thought I was going to work on. And then I went to WWDC that year. It was my first time ever at WWDC. What year is this at this point? 2015. Okay. So I go to WWDC and I talked to the app review team, like, cause they have like a lab there. And I basically just say, Hey, I'm working on this emulator app.

Is there any world that it could be approved in the App Store? And then they were like, actually, yeah, we'll allow that. You just got to comply with some weird things. Basically, they said I had to submit a list of approved games to them whenever I submitted a version of Delta so that they could just make sure all the games that Delta supports were safe.

Like they just didn't want to have like an open pipeline of like games and everything. And so like, okay, fine. That works for me. I'll submit a version of Delta to you and I'll have like a white list of games that you can play. And then every app update, I'll expand it to include more games and

And it seemed like that would be something I could do. And so I was really motivated. I'm like, cool, I'm going to get Delta in the app store. And so then I spent the next year, like actually building it for real. I was like, okay, this is now a real app. No longer just for me. I like really want it to be polished. I want it to be good. I took a lot of my time. I got on my college schedule to be working on it. And then I went to the WWDC next year and I talked to the same person and I said, hey, I'm ready to submit. Can I submit it now? And he was just like,

So I talked to some people. We can't allow emulators. And that was just all I got. I didn't get a why. It was just like a...

We can't allow that. I was just pissed off. Do you think this person was wrong the first time they told you it would happen? Or do you think something happened in that year and they changed their mind? Honestly, I don't know. It's either one's possible. My guess is though that they thought it was okay. And then they talk to someone in the year and then maybe they had discussions about it and

And then they came away basically like, it's not worth the risk. Because I think that's what it's been this whole time. Apple's just like, it's not worth the risk to allow these emulators. There's so much stuff that could open up. So I think they're just like, eh, it's one kid, whatever. We don't need to allow his app in the app store and it'll be fine. And at that point, I mean, I confess I was late to the iOS emulation universe, but it seems it's a weird thing. Like GBA for iOS was huge and then it kind of went away. Yeah.

And so I would assume we're back to like lots of pent up demand. People are very excited about it. So it's not like you're the first person in history to ask Apple this question, I'm sure. But at that point, emulation was just kind of it was sort of nowhere on the iPhone. So I guess for them to say, no, we're going to continue to not allow it is not totally out of character. Exactly.

Exactly. Like, yeah, I wasn't surprised. I was just pissed off. Like, I was just like, I wasted a year of my life working on this. And because you told me I could release it. That was really dishonest feeling. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So what do you at that moment, you're faced again with this same decision of like, okay, do I just call this a successful project? I learned how to use Swift. Let me just move on with my life.

Or do I go the other way? I know the answer, historically speaking. But what is that moment like? Yeah. And this time I was just so pissed off. I was just like, you know, this is not okay. I am going to get this out there somehow. It's just like really what I came to. And at that time, I really didn't know what it would be. But I was just like...

I just wanted to show Apple that they can't treat developers kind of like this. It was really just like, I was like, you can't treat us like this. You can't tell us one thing and then change your mind the next year because real people are spending real time doing this kind of thing. So I, yeah, I just motivated to just kind of prove them wrong. This is the best I could say. And so, yeah, I was like, I'll figure out a way. So then next project is figure out a way. Like, how do you, how do you even start? I just got lucky, honestly. Apple had also just around that time made it so that you can install

apps from Xcode for free with a free Apple ID. Like they just changed that rule of right around now so that students could start developing. And so I saw that and I was like, wait, you can install apps for free if you just have an Apple ID? There's something there. Like I was like, that's all the technical thing I needed to know. I could make something from that. And so that was just like...

Like the beginning of alt store was like, okay, I got to do something with this free Apple ID sideloading from Xcode thing that Apple has just announced. And then I was basically just like, took a few years to research that, build it up, find out what would be the most convenient flow. Because yeah, there are a lot of obstacles with that. It was apps installed this way only could last seven days. You could only have three apps installed at a time, this method. So it was just like kind of trying to come up with

creative ways to make a lot of these restrictions not as annoying. Like the fact that alt server is a thing was the number one, that alt server could just refresh your apps every week in the background. And when I thought of that, that's when I was like, okay, I think there's something here we can at least work with that's good enough. So when did the first version of alt store like work? What was sort of the first version of it that you had that you're like, okay, this does the thing that I need it to do? I think that was

2019 is when I finally like had put together all the pieces into one flow. Whereas like I had a program on my computer that could install AltStore onto my phone and then AltStore could send apps to that device or to my computer and then reinstall it. And then,

It was early 2019. I was like, okay, this can work. Like just seeing it actually work in practice. It was totally janky. Like the UI was horrible, but just like the fact I could press a button on my phone and it would do everything, send it to alt server and install it was just honestly kind of magical. So explain to me why that worked in the sort of infrastructure of Apple's universe. Like why did that system work? Because.

because so the way Apple allows students to test out their apps is they have to have a Mac and they have to be using Xcode and they have to plug their phone into Xcode. And then they have to install an app from Xcode onto the phone. Like you can't just download a file and do it. It's all through Xcode and all through a computer. And so alt server is basically replicating everything Xcode does. You can have an app file, but

iOS can't install an app file on itself. You have to send it to a computer and then alt server does the same stuff Xcode does behind the scenes to install it back onto the phone as if you're a developer testing out yourself. Got it. Okay. And you were able to basically build a thing that lets anyone kind of mimic that system for themselves. When I set it up, it was, I wouldn't say it was a lot of work, but it wasn't no work.

Yeah, it's a lot. It's a bit. Yeah. Especially on the Mac, there's the mail plugin for a long time. That was just really, yeah, it's confusing to everyone. And I was like, oh, this is too nerdy to try to explain even to people why it matters. But just, yeah, people got through it.

Well, so and this is this is I feel like the sort of ongoing story here is you're finding these increasingly complicated ways to do this and continuing discover that there is so much demand for something like Delta that people will jump through basically any hoops that you ask them to jump through in order to do that.

Yeah. The biggest thing I was surprised about with alt stores, we need to get your Apple ID and password to like log in with your account. And I was like, wow, we really are just asking people to trust us and give us your Apple ID and password. And I mean, we do everything we can with it. We literally don't touch ourselves. We send it straight to Apple. But I was like, oh, that's a big, scary thing that you really just aren't supposed to give your password around to people. And then, nope.

nope, people are still giving us their passwords. They don't care. I'm like, this is cool, but also makes me nervous for security as a whole that people are just doing this, not thinking about it. Oh, for sure. And it puts you in a really interesting position, I would think, as the developer of this to say, okay, what is this thing? Like, am I just building this as sort of a fun side project for people who want to play Pokemon on their phones, which comes with, I think, one set of

like security and privacy implications. Like to some extent, honestly, if you send your Apple ID and password to just a dude, I don't think you have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Like I think it's a good thing that you were taking care of people's

privacy as best you could. But I think for me as the user, I deserve what I'm getting at that point, right? But then if you're like a company that has a terms of service and is set up to make money and you're like, we're in this for the long haul and we're serious about it, I think that changes both the way you have to treat stuff and the way that I can expect you to treat stuff. And it seems like as you were going through this, you were also trying to decide...

Like how professionalized do I want this thing to be? Is that fair? That's pretty fair. Because when the first version of AltStore that launched was literally just like a Delta installer. The only app in it was Delta. It could install Delta. And I just knew that was important. But even at that point, I knew I wanted AltStore to be a bigger platform. That was like kind of what motivated me. It was like,

I didn't want to build a whole nother workaround just to install Delta. The fact that I could do it for AltStore and for other apps too made it more appealing to me. I was like, fine, I can do the work and then lots of other apps can take advantage of it. And so it was always the plan to expand beyond Delta, but I just didn't know really what that would look like until...

probably like a year or so after we launched and I started, we started actually having some third party apps wanting to be on the store. And then I got a sense of, okay, this is the type of apps people wanted install. This is what I got to be dealing with. And yeah, that's helped a lot. So what, what was that? Like, we're going to get into the kind of history moved towards you a little bit aspect of this in just a sec, but I am curious in that moment, the idea of like, I'm going to get my third party app store to be sort of

you know, legitimate in Apple's eyes was completely off the table. Like 2019, 2020, there was just no world in which that was going to happen. But you're like, you're talking about, you know, other apps that want to do this kind of stuff. What were you starting to see? What was kind of the, the like unifying thesis behind apps that wanted to be part of this thing you were doing?

I mean, at first it was just any app that wasn't allowed in the App Store. And honestly, it's still a big appeal today. It's just like, for whatever reason that was rejected for whatever type of rule, they just couldn't be App Store. And so then they'd see Alt Store and then they'd be like, oh, an alternative. There are a lot of emulators, like obviously. So there are plenty of those. There's stuff you can expect, like iTorrent had like an app

And you can be like, yeah, I can see why Apple wouldn't approve it, but stuff like that. UTM, the virtual machine app, just running Windows on your iPad. Really cool. Not on the App Store. So it was just like a bunch of different random project or another one I liked that I

I think it's really cool. Old OS, if you've heard of that one. It's like a high schooler just recreated iOS 4 in SwiftUI. And so it's just like the whole experience. You open the app and it's the home screen from iOS 4. You can open all the apps and it looks exactly like it did back in the day. Oh, that's awesome. And it's really cool. And so it's just like, oh, a fun little idea that's not allowed in the App Store. So yeah, a bunch of stuff like that.

So I launched AltStore and the first year was really great, but the first year was also a lot and it was just me working on it at the time. And then I honestly was like, what am I doing here? Am I going to keep with AltStore? Is this ever going to be a real thing? Should I just like move on to something else now? I was really going, trying to figure out what I want to do. And then it was really at that point I realized what I wanted was I saw basically that the US was investigating Apple and that the EU was investigating Apple around this time. And I was like, you know what?

I feel like there is going to be something that happens in the next few years. I want to be ready for that, but I need help. And that's when I basically brought on my partner, Shane Gill, who is my best friend and I've lived with for like 10 years. And I was like, hey, I need you with this with me. I need to just do it together. I need you to do all the business stuff. And so I can just focus on the programming and then we can make that happen. And at that point, we started like making the plans for what AltStore is today, or at least an AltStore in the EU, AltStorePal. Okay.

So you actually really were betting on the theory that eventually this was going to be a real thing that you could do and not just sort of a series of ever more elaborate hacks. Yes. By that time, I was convinced it would happen. I didn't know when, but just at some point in the future. That's fair. Okay. And this was like...

peak COVID if I'm doing my timing math here correctly. Everything's weird at this time. And you're like, well, let's just go for it. Everything's weird. Everyone's reevaluating their lives. My original plan was, I was like, hey, Shane, let's move to New Zealand together. Let's just escape everything. Let's build this in New Zealand because I'm a New Zealand citizen. So it'd be cool to go home for me. But that didn't work out. It was too hard to get New Zealand during COVID. Yeah, understandably. So we're in Dallas now.

Which is the same thing. It's this close. Yeah, it's basically the same. Okay. So you start building this thing. And was the idea we want to build sort of a full app store? Like, was that, is it as simple as that? That was the pitch? Yeah. When Shane came on board, that was the full pitch. Like, we're going to build a real app store and show people what life could be like if there are other apps. Just like, just be the example. And then whenever it was official, be the official, like be an official store.

And what were developers saying? Were you reaching out to folks being like, do you want to be part of this? And what were they telling you? Honestly, we didn't need to be reaching out to anyone. People were just reaching out to us. There are a lot of people who just have app ideas that just aren't getting in the app store. And even I'm like, wow, there are just so many apps that are reaching out to us. I'm like, oh, wow, that was rejected. That was rejected. So...

We've just, yeah, people just reaching out for us. Yeah. And were you having any contact with Apple at this point? Other than, you know, those two conversations at WWDC, was there any inclination that Apple was even sort of aware of your existence throughout this process? We did at one point when the EU started investigating stuff, me and Shane sent an email to the executives of Apple basically saying, hey, y'all, I think the EU may be going too much. And

Do you like, we just reach out, hey, like we're here and we don't want like a crazy world of sideloading. Do you want to like be on the same page here? And they didn't respond at all. But we were at the time just thinking we don't want a crazy free-for-all. And that's what it seemed like maybe the EU was going to be. We wanted a more restricted sideloading world where the app store was...

was still the main app store. Why? I really think that's what makes iOS so good for like the vast majority of people. Like it is just so simple that you can get any app that you trust through one store. I think that's really valuable. It's why like so many people I know personally use an iPhone that aren't techies. And so I just always knew that there needed to be a way for siloed into exist without taking over the app store, taking like so many apps away from it.

Okay, so you then are watching the regulation stuff happening. Are you like barreling through all the, you know, DMA white papers and trying to get the deep sense of what's going on? Like how into this were you as that regulation was happening? Once the DMA was like an actual thing and they were talking about it, oh yeah, we were very much deep in it. And then we were just like,

We got to be ready for anything. Because literally until Apple announced what they were doing, we just were like, are we going to be a sideloading tool? Are we going to be a full app store? Are we going to exist at all? Like, we just had no idea what was going to come next. We just knew that...

There would be some way of installing apps. Okay. And so I guess with that idea, you can kind of keep building Delta and AltStore the way you had been without making too many kind of unchangeable decisions at that point. Yes. We basically were working on stuff that we knew would be true no matter what. We were building up the UI for browsing apps, and we were expanding...

building the Patreon flow so that people could connect their Patreons and install that. Because we just knew no matter what, that would be good for this world. We just didn't go into the really technical stuff about the actual installing process. It was just basically making the app look as much like a store.

as it could be. Yeah, that makes sense. And at that point, how are you thinking about like the business of Delta? You've been working on this thing for an awfully long time without making any money on it. I'm assuming there were conversations about like, how do we, how do we all get rich from this thing that clearly lots of people want? People do keep asking me, but the thing that I've believed in and what Shane, like Shane, before he even joined AltStore, he was the one that convinced me to make a Patreon for all this in the first place.

he was like, hey, when you're working on Delta and AltStore, just have a Patreon on the side to support yourself. Because honestly, I thought my original plan was to release AltStore and Delta and then move on to something else. Just let it exist and let people install it. But Shane was the one telling me, no, people want to support creators right now. You should just have a Patreon that people want to subscribe to and just support future development. And so I launched AltStore with that and it did really well. Like it

has paid for everything ever since I launched started Alt Store we really believe that's a really important thing that should exist because developers right now you can't sell apps through Patreon in the App Store and

And it's just such a really good way, I think, for creators to build a relationship with their audience. And just people also don't mind spending a few bucks to a person, but they do mind spending a few bucks on an app. Yep. So it's just like very different relationship. And so we're basically just trying to really promote the Patreon idea. Our own income basically is just through the Patreon. We're still selling or having access to our betas for our patrons. And that's worked out pretty well as a way of monetizing Delta, honestly. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, even just the idea of thinking of an app developer as a creator in the same way that you think about like a content creator as a creator is really interesting and is totally not how most people perceive it. Right. And I think, I think it's coming around a little bit, like personally, at least I've seen a lot more.

of this sort of bootstrapped one person app become a thing that people like in a way that I didn't. And they like associate the app with the person who makes it. But I think for most people, it's all so faceless, right? Like you just, it's just an app that exists. I don't know if it's made by one person or 10,000 and I don't care. I'm just mad that they're charging me money. And it's interesting to think that like maybe the business model is part of the problem there that because it all just sits in the app store and it is so divorced from

and people that maybe that's the problem. So actually connecting Patreon to that is a really interesting way of just changing the way people think about what like an app is and how it gets made. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I'm really excited for that. And another nice benefit is

we can just have our apps be free and then people just get the betas. And so it means there's no features that are locked behind paywalls like forever. It's just you can wait forever and get it for free. Or if you just want early access, you can donate. And I think that's more appealing to people to like when they're trying to support an app versus, oh, you've locked away a feature and now I can never use it unless I pay.

It's like, yeah, that difference, I think, makes a huge deal. Yeah, no, I totally agree. So, OK, so right before the DMA drops and I guess what was it like March of this year when Apple put out its third party app store plans? It was in January. Yeah.

Okay, so this year, Apple, right before that, what was kind of the status of Delta and Alt Store? It sounds like it's growing. People are using it. Like, how were things? Things were good. We had, like, at that point, like, 4 million users on Alt Store, like, just existing. I was like, oh, wow, this is going great. Things are going great at Delta. We had been prioritizing basically a new version of Delta, 1.5, to release alongside Delta.

whatever apple announced and so we just like we're working on that but then basically by january we're just like okay everything's in a good spot we're ready to go we just need to know what the hell is happening and so we're just basically just waiting around to see like okay we can do this we have like the store had been finished by then like all the ui was done delta was ready clip was ready it's

So you have this thing and you're like, this exists. We made it. It's good. We have absolutely no idea what we're about to do with it. Exactly. That is exactly where we were. What a strange place to be. It was very strange. It was, yeah, because every day we're like, what do we do? Like, we can't move forward on a lot of things. But so it was just a lot of planning and strategizing. Yeah, it makes sense. So then end of January, Apple drops like a million press releases and technical documents about how all this is going to work. What happens to you on that day? What do you do?

Wow. That was an overwhelming day, like for sure. And the first thing that we try to do is figure out, okay,

Can we exist at all in this new world? Because, yeah, there's all these like restrictions and we're trying to figure out what the hell like an alternative marketplace is. And so, yes, we spend that whole day basically trying just to parse what Apple's announced. And then we basically are like, OK, we think we can do this. We think we can meet the criteria if we get very creative. Because, yeah, the criteria is like a lot of things like.

You needed to have the standby letter. We need to have a subsidiary in the EU. And just a bunch of things that we just sat down, like, okay, we've got to make all this happen in a month, basically. Because we're like, okay, we have until March 7th was the DMA compliance day. We're like, okay, let's set up a subsidiary. Let's get the standby figured out. Let's build everything. Because also they announced all the stuff we had to build. Yeah.

And it's like, okay, let's build everything we need to do. And then for the next month was like extreme crunch time, just like getting everything done. Shane honestly was incredible. He was calling so many countries to figure out where we could incorporate. We finally incorporated in Ireland. So we have a nice subsidiary in Ireland, which is great. He was on talking to banks to get...

someone to believe in two people who are trying to do something crazy and they need this how hard was that process you're like so we build a game emulator and also other app stores i'm imagining a bunch of banks are just like this is a prank call and hang up a lot did yeah it was so many people just like wouldn't listen to us it was true pure luck that we found one person low his name's logan he just let morgan stanley and he was just understood what we were doing

and really wanted to go out of his way to help us. And I honestly think if we had not met Logan, I don't know if we would have got this all figured out. But he was like, okay, let's do this. I believe in y'all. I can work with my bosses. We can make it happen. That was a big win, getting that one for sure. Yeah, I mean, I remember when the news came out

thinking that there were, like you described, a bunch of technical challenges, but there were always going to be a bunch of technical challenges, right? I feel like that you sort of know going in, there's going to be a bunch of weird work you have to do to get this thing to comply with what Apple wants. But the business challenges of just like the hoops you had to jump through as an organization seemed like they were designed to keep almost everybody out.

Except for the truest of true believers and maybe just the most stubborn people building this thing. Yes, exactly. And part of me wonders if going back a few months, Apple just deeply underestimated your willingness to pick this fight. After so many years of picking this fight, you're like, I've been through your nonsense before, Apple. Oh, yeah. I know they were caught off guard. They told us that. They were.

When we ended up going to the lab and everything, they just said straight up, oh, we did not expect anyone to be this prepared, especially as a two person team. They just did not expect us to be as prepared as we were, which I had to feel good. Oh, it did feel good. I was like, cool. But at the same time, I was like, well, then let us launch. It was like, cool. Okay, that's amazing. Let us launch.

We're ready. Was there any question for a team of two whether to invest all this time on something that, at least for now and potentially forever, is only going to exist in the EU? Like, there's a lot of people in the EU, but there's a lot of people not in the EU also. Yeah. I mean, so two parts of it. One, I do think it's going to come outside the EU at some point. I think it's just a question of time. So...

I expected to see within a few years, it'll expand out to Japan, United States eventually. So we viewed this as the beginning of a much longer process. Let's expand. But then the other thing was like, we had nothing to lose. This is literally all we're doing. All our income is working on AltStore or Delta. We're like, well, we might as well just go all the way with it. Like, what else? Like, why not? Yeah, I mean, I think the long bet...

That I think is probably a safe one. Again, it's a question of how long it takes, but I do think you're probably right. It also seems like you were in a position where

Even if it didn't sort of immediately reach a ton of people, you were going to get so much notice just because this is such a big thing and such a big change that like... All of a sudden, Alt Store just appeared in so many headlines in like February and March of this year, which is like... Yes, that was very, very surreal seeing that all of a sudden. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny because like explaining Alt Store to people, it's like, okay, it is this...

sort of convoluted experience where you have to set up a server. And I'm seeing this in like mainstream news articles. I know, I'm like, oh my God. It's like, oh my God, if my mom asked me what AltStory is, I'm not going to know how to answer that question for her. Same. Yeah, I explained to my friends, I'm like, eh, don't worry about it. It's just a tool to install apps. That's it.

So, okay. So then we're almost to the present time, but I feel like we still have not gotten to the single wildest part of this whole timeline. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. So you're building the store. Things are going well. You launch, I think on launch day, right? March 7th. Was it ready to go? No, we were ready. We were all ready to go. And that was the beginning of like this frustration. So we were, yeah, we were invited to a lab.

in Cork for the Apple to like help us implement our backend and everything. So like a week long lab for us just to work with Apple engineers to get everything working. So then we flew out to Cork. It was like the week before March 5th. So the end of it, the end of February, we flew out day one. I showed up. I said, okay, here's everything. We're ready to go. Can we launch? And then they were like, oh,

Hold on. They expected you to show up and be like, I'd like to build an app store. And instead you show up and you're like, I have built an app store. I really think they expected everyone to show up with no code base, to just start from scratch on how to do this. And yeah, so we show up and we're like, here's the entire product. It has store pages, it has everything you could possibly need, downloading works.

And then they were just like, oh, wow. Yeah, just very clearly, they were not expecting that. And so it basically was then, okay, so Monday I was like trying to pressure them. Can we launch tomorrow? Can we launch tomorrow? iOS 17.4 is coming out tomorrow. Can we be there? And then it just became clear that this whole process was going to be much longer than we expected for a lot of foreign reasons. Like basically just legal, like giving them documents, having them review documents, and

Stuff like that. So, iOS 17 before came out, and me and Shane were very bummed. Because we were like, we were ready to launch on launch day. We were all ready to go. And then, ugh. So, that was frustrating. So, how long did it take before you actually got the thing up and running? Then I think it was...

two months later. Like, yeah, it was April 17th. Like, yeah. So, yeah, from March 5th to April 17th was just waiting. So, a month and a half. And so, we did that and then, yeah, the reception was immediately just phenomenal. People just...

So excited. And but then we also immediately saw, which we expected, that Delta was the main story. Sure. That Delta in the App Store was the big deal. But we had to figure out what to do. And we knew that would be the outcome. If we released Delta in the App Store, that Delta would get like its big moment to be

to be everywhere. And we just were like, you know what? That's fine. It's free marketing for AltStore. Everyone just knows about Delta and then they talk about it and then they get it through AltStore in the EU. So you just glossed past part of it though. Like the whole Apple suddenly allows emulators in the App Store. Yeah. You say that as if you expected that to happen. I don't think anybody expected that to happen. Not at all. It

The most unexpected thing that could have happened. And me and Shane had different reactions at first. Shane was more like, this changes everything. Now we got to think through. And my just reaction was, wow, what validation that Apple had to change the rules to allow emulators because they were threatened by us about to launch with an emulator. Like that to me was like invigorating. I was like, this is, yes, it means we're doing something right. That Apple is literally like,

doing something I never thought they'd do because it was the only way they could try to make the story not... The EU now has the best apps. Outside the EU doesn't have the coolest apps. And I just knew Apple... Yeah, they just couldn't have that story, which is also why amateurs are allowed worldwide, is my guess. The story just could not have been that the EU has better apps than the rest of the world.

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And it is very hard to argue that this wasn't specifically about Delta. Like, I just can't. The timing, it's too... It is all about Delta. We haven't had a direct confirmation from Apple, but our app Delta was being notarized for like five weeks. They changed this rule. It's approved the next day. Oh, wow. It's almost like they were holding it to figure out what they could do about it. Did you get any heads up that they were going to make this change? Nope, nothing at all.

Well, and I would guess after that happened, you would have expected it to be big. It sounds like you did expect it to be big. But I feel like it's been it's certainly been bigger than I expected. Like it is bigger than I expected. It's been nuts, man. It's so validating. Like, I really can't like...

Because, yeah, we're doing this because we just really believe that people just want to play old Nintendo games. Or old games. I think it's just a thing people want to do, and for so long, everyone just says, no, that's only for the nerds. It's only for people who know what they're doing. And

I've just been like, you just have to make it accessible. That's all you got to do. If it's accessible, people will know how to do it and they will love it. We're seeing that that is exactly the case. And yes, so even more people than I thought are enjoying it. It is the most surreal thing, seeing it not only in the app store, but...

Being the top app in the App Store for like a long time. Are you still the number one app in the App Store? I mean, I think last time I checked. But yeah, since we've launched, we've been number one. And yeah, so surreal. Like the most like any time in my life, I've never felt more like I actually am dreaming right now. Like I need like pinching myself like because it was just too perfect. Like work on this app for 10 years. And then day one in the App Store, it's the top. It was just incredible.

Has it changed what you think about how to do all of this? I mean, if you had charged $2.99 for Delta, you would have made a crap ton of money by now. Are you thinking about the business of all of this differently after it's blown up the way that it has? I think we want this to be bigger than just Delta. And we want this to cause actual change in the emulation scene or in the gaming sphere. Just like,

We want to make this more accessible for everyone. We want people to start talking about it and have real conversations about it without just being like piracy, piracy. And so a lot of what we're doing is we thought Delta to make that change happen. We had to like it had to be free, had to be everyone had to have it. And that's I think just what we're focused on really is like as long as we're making we're making enough to support ourselves. And so we're not in need of more money. But I just think for Delta to have the biggest impact.

is just make it as fully free and accessible to as many people as possible and let them just start reliving games. Are you worried at all about legal ramifications? I mean, there was obviously the Yuzu thing that happened kind of right before this. It's been a weird moment in the emulation community. Have you heard from any Nintendo lawyers? Yeah, that came out as we're also like in Europe trying to launch this. Interesting.

Very, very relevant to us. But I'm not going to say I'm not nervous about things, but I am confident in what we're doing. I've learned a lot of what not to do over the past 10 years. And I think that we are really trying to show how you can do something like this legally. We're not Yuzu. We're not emulating a current generation console. We're not doing a lot of things that...

other emulators get in trouble. There's no DRM we have to deal with for the game. So just the game files ripped from cartridges. So we don't have to do anything like that. We're doing everything we can to do it right. And there was no world that I wouldn't have done this. I guess it's a better way. I wouldn't have got this far and not released Delta.

I just had to. No, I think that's part of why this moment of your story is so interesting because we're at the beginning of this weird new era of apps in the App Store. And I think a lot of stuff is changing and a lot is going to continue to change. But we're also, in a funny way, kind of at the end...

end of your 10 year journey like the this you you finally finished the thing that that is what it feels like it's really weird but I'm like wow it actually happened like it got in the app store and yes it does feel like the culmination of that whole journey

which is very weird. Does that make it feel like I finally got to do it and it worked and it was huge and it was awesome and now I can go do something else? I honestly, the fact that Delta's doing so well has just motivated me to just want to work on it so much for right now because I've just been working on it

in isolation assuming one day it could like be a big deal that I don't know actually seeing everyone play it right now has made me really motivated to like really focus on it again and also because so much of the past two years has been like a priority working on alt store and now that we launched alt store we can

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

It's just making sure the alt store is a real app store that people are using and happy with. And then maybe I'll be done. And then you will have resoundingly defeated Apple, which very few people can say. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Welcome back. For the last few weeks, I've been immersing myself in AI gadgets. The Humane AI pin, the Rabbit R1, the MetaSmart glasses, this voice recorder I have called Plod, a bunch of apps, everything I can get my hands on that is like a way to use AI. And the number one question in front of all of these devices in particular, I think, is the same thing. Why isn't this just an app on your phone? Actually, that might be the number two

number two question. Number one is just, is this thing any good? And a lot of them aren't. But let's focus on the phone thing for right now. The Verge's Allison Johnson wrote a piece last week arguing essentially that a smartphone is the perfect AI gadget, that we don't need dedicated devices, we have the dedicated devices. And she ran an experiment to prove it. So of course, I had to ask her to come on and tell us how it went.

Allison, welcome back. Thank you. We usually talk about phones when you come on the show, and this time we're going to talk about phones, but maybe in the weirdest way that we've ever talked about phones, which I'm very excited about. I'm here for it. So let's just start at the beginning here. Tell me about this wearable phone experiment that you devised for yourself. Oh.

Oh my gosh. I have never been so glad that I just work in my own house alone. I was just sort of ranting about how, you know, the humane pin reviews came out and I was like, this thing is just an Android phone, like a mid-range Android phone. I was like, I have so many mid-range Android phones. So I just kind of set out to like recreate the capabilities with what I had. And it was surprisingly hard. I tried a flip phone. I had the Motorola Razr Plus and I had it like

Yeah.

That was the thought. It's not very easy to do any of that. Kind of out of the box, like the flip phones won't let you download the Gemini assistant, which is strange. So you kind of have to like sideload it. If you try and trigger the Google assistant with the phone closed and just using the cover screen, it tells you to open up the phone. So it kind of like, I was already not off to a great start. So did you ever find...

an actual solution with the phone itself. We're going to get to headphones in a minute.

Yeah. Foreshadowing. But did you ever find a version of like a wearable phone that actually kind of worked? I did not really. I had I just ran chat GPT in the kind of like talking mode with the conversation mode. And I had that on my shirt and just but it's just always listening and like waiting for you to say something. So you can't just like go about your day and we had a very pleasant conversation about like.

The weather, whatever. But yeah, nothing really worked the way I thought it would. Well, this is why I wanted to talk about this, because I think you and I have been talking about this for months now. And the question everybody brings up about every single AI gadget is like, why isn't this just an app on my phone? And my thoughts on the subject and why it shouldn't just be an app on your phone are actually becoming increasingly strong.

strong and intense. And I feel like I'm more right than I was before. But I am curious, like at a broad level, do you buy that argument? Like, are you also one of the people who is just like, this is all ridiculous. This should just be an app on my phone. I think I'm like 20% rooting for like a gadget that does these things and 80% just it just feels like realism is

like phones have already solved so many of these problems. Like these little gadgets get hot. They have to connect to the internet. They need cameras, like check Mark on all of those for phones. Like they did it battery life, you know, regular software updates. I got it. And I'm just like, I'm having flashbacks of covering phones,

compact digital cameras for years where it was like, you know, oh, these are so much better than your phone and which is like not even true anymore. But it was like, no, the phone is good enough for most people and people do not want to carry around two things. That is what we learned from that experiment is if you can carry one thing instead of two things, you will carry one thing. I do agree with that. And that is, I think, maybe the most

convincing argument against the AI gadget is just it's it's the good enough hypothesis right that it's like I don't need it to be as good I just don't want to carry and charge and worry about two things but I think my most strident opinion on this subject is that I think we all have forgotten how annoying it is to use your phone like we've just been doing it for so long that I think it's why I believe in flip phones for the same reason it's like our phones are these

big, chunky things that you balance on top of your pinky to the point where most of us have like divots in our fingers now from trying to hold these things. You have to sort of like worm your thumb around this gigantic screen in order to touch anything. Like from a pure in a vacuum user experience, it's not good. And if your hands are full, you can't do anything. And it's

I spend like an alarming amount of my time with like dog and stroller in one arm and phone in the other. Like it's just bad. And I, this idea that, okay, every time I want to do anything, the right user experience is for me to dig into my purse, pull out my phone, unlock it, swipe, swipe, swipe, open an app,

tap on the app, log in, do a thing. Like that's bad. And the idea that you can shortcut all of this by just yelling a thing is good. I believe in that. And this is why I liked your experiment so much because it's like, okay, can I make my phone that thing? Which I think is where we get to earbuds. The longer we do this, the more I'm coming to the answer of like, maybe headphones are the problem solver in all of this. Yeah. And this is something that our colleague V Song has written about is like, yeah,

With wearable tech, it's so important that it's just like something you want to put on your body and is comfortable and is kind of like socially accepted. And I just come back to earbuds. Like we're just people just walk around with them. I feel like such an old person being like these kids, they just walk around with their earbuds all the time. But like you have a good transparency mode.

You know, and those things could get smarter about the sounds they let in and the sounds they keep out. And then you have this connection to your phone that you can just like summon it when you want it and keep it in your pocket and not have to do the whole dance of like.

tapping on things. Cause I think we've come, we're sort of blind to that. Like we are just so conditioned to like, this is how you get things done on a phone. You take it out, you do all this, you get distracted. And yeah, once you start kind of like conceptualizing not having to do that, it's like, oh yeah, I, I buy into that vision. And I, but I think we're just going to be able to do it without touching our phone, but it's still going to be phone. Right.

Yes. And well, that turned out to be sort of the second half of your experience with with this phone AI gadget thing. Right. You you basically went like full pixel. Yeah, I did. Like I downloaded the Gemini assistant and switched into it. And there's still like weird workarounds you have to do because you can have Gemini assistant running on the phone. The earbuds are not going to trigger Gemini because they're they don't talk yet.

This is the most Google thing you've ever said. Yeah, seriously. Well, like the Pixel Watch, you can't have Gemini on it yet. So you're like talking to one assistant here. You're talking to a different assistant on the phone. The Google Home in my kitchen is constantly being like, what? So I had to like,

unplugged that and I kept Gemini like open and running on the phone, which is not an ideal user experience, but had the earbuds in. And my like light bulb moment was I took a picture of this recipe I was making and I was like, look at this and remember it. And I just walked around my kitchen doing things. And I would ask it questions like, how long do I put the fish in? How do I chop the vegetables? Just kind of out of order. And like, as I was doing things and it

It got it right all the time. And it was like, oh, this is super helpful. I would be running back to this recipe with like stuff on my fingers trying to figure it out. And it's like, man, those earbuds.

That is maybe the single coolest use of AI I've ever heard, by the way, to take a picture of a recipe and then just pepper the assistant with questions about that recipe as you go. That's very cool. I was super into it. And it's that kind of thing of like, I run out of things to talk about with chat GPT. I'm like, there's only so many like business proposals you can brainstorm. But I'm like, if you give it a little data set of like,

I'm doing this thing. Help me out. Like it makes so much more sense to me that way. Yeah. Are you a voice assistant person in your day to day? Not at all. I set timers and I ask the weather and like trying to get myself. I'm starting to like realize I can use it a little more, especially if I am using a phone with Gemini on it. Like I ask, but you just, man, you got to keep an eye on it because it'll make up a word or like,

I was asking if the bridge they were working on in my neighborhood had reopened and it like got the days backwards. It was like, yes, it's open, but it's opening tomorrow. So you just have to keep an eye on it. But it's it's like converting me a little bit to more of a voice assistant person, I think. OK. Yeah. I think one of the big questions I have about this space right now is did voice assistants work differently?

because they were a bad idea or rather did voice assistants not work because they were a bad idea or did they not work because they weren't very good? And I think they definitely aren't very good, right? And I think the Siri experience sort of proves that for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people's first experience with these things was Siri and you ask it to do something and it just fails or it's like, here's what I found on the web. And you're like, well, this is useless. And then you never really try again. And so the first attempt we all had to build that habit was

it failed spectacularly. And there are a lot of like kids who grew up asking Alexa silly questions and getting silly responses. And that was the thing that worked. So I think the attach rate there has actually been better as a result. But then I come around to, okay, we all bet on this a decade ago. Like the tech industry was like, this is the thing, conversational interfaces, they're going to change everything. And they super didn't. And now to some extent, we're back in that exact same thing. And the

Mm-hmm.

I agree with you. I've definitely found more reasons to do this stuff, particularly with like, I really like to use an AI voice notes app to like say my to do list out loud. And they're actually getting pretty good at turning that into just a structured list of stuff I have to do today. I feel like a doctor who's like saying all of my charts into my voice recorder and then like something magical happens. It's great. But I still don't feel like I have hit

the thing where it just sort of that becomes the main way I use my phone. And what people say when I say that to them is, oh, it's just an interface question. It's because once you have your phone out, why not just use your phone the way that you're used to, which is why they're all excited about these new gadgets. And so I just, I don't know, I spin in circles about like, what is the actual sort of roadblock here to this actually becoming real? Because it seems like there are a lot of them.

Yeah. There's just sort of like a pain versus reward, you know, ratio of like,

I feel like it's starting to even out a little bit with the voice assistants, but you still get burned where you're like, there's nothing worse than like being at the grocery store and being like, I'm going to use the voice assistant. And then it just fails and you have to like either keep talking to it or like take your phone out. I think once you had that experience, you're like, oh, just use my phone for this. But yeah, I think it's something we can do.

adjust to. And it really has to like that threshold of public embarrassment or just like frustration has to change. And there's like signals that that will happen, I think. But yeah, it's not proven, I wouldn't say. Yeah. One of my

Yeah.

But what I wonder now is, should you have the AI system that is just purely baked into your headphones? One of the conspiracy theories that I have no evidence for, but believe to my soul, is that the next AirPods Maxes are going to be local AI devices. Because they're big, and they're heavy, and they have a big battery, and they can do stuff. But if you try to run some of that stuff on AirPods or the Pixel Buds, the battery's going to die in one minute, and there's literally no place to put...

Yeah. But maybe it's maybe that's OK. Maybe Bluetooth headphones and your phone in your pocket or purse is enough interface. And it does seem like in your experiment, that's kind of where you landed. Yeah, that that kind of proved out. And that didn't solve the camera thing, which is also like an intriguing related, you know, like feature, which the humane pin has the camera and we're both like, what?

want to look at something and ask a question about it, or if you want a hands-free way to take pictures, which both are kind of intriguing to me. So, I mean, everybody keeps bringing up the meta Ray-Bans and man, that kind of solves a couple of those problems and doesn't look stupid. True. Do you wear glasses normally? I wear contacts. So...

I'm so close to buying these things. I don't know. Yeah, it would be so good for just like taking pictures of a kid running around. And I don't know. But another gadget. Do I want another gadget? I hear you. I've been debating this with some of the folks on our team for a while because I think they're definitely a huge leap better than like

having a headset on your face to have the MetaSmart glasses. And Meta is leaning into the fact that we've also solved having glasses on your face is not weird. And I don't know what your experience has been, but when I wear the Meta glasses, no one ever looks at me sideways. Like I got more public attention

notice more sort of weird double takes wearing the humane pin than I ever have wearing the meta glasses by a mile. So that's, that's a huge victory, but I also don't wear glasses normally and I don't want to start wearing glasses. Like I wear sunglasses when I'm outside and I have mostly replaced my sunglasses with the meta glasses, which I like a lot. But in terms of a sort of always on assistant, like I'm not going to get to work wearing

and keep wearing glasses I don't need just to use my assistant. It's a different vibe. Yeah, you have to be ready for that shift. Yeah. If we can normalize sunglasses indoors just in order to make AI happen, I'm here for it. This works. We'll work on that. But yeah, I do think I have definitely come around to the idea in testing the humane pin and now the rabbit and some of the other stuff that's out there now that actually what we need to figure out is how to put AI into other socially acceptable things that already exist and

before we try and invent some wholly new thing. Yeah, like the humane pin kind of tries to hide it, but it's sort of like, look at this. This is kind of a cool gadget. I appreciate that the rabbit is just like, this is a thing. It is bright orange. It like practically glows in the dark. I don't know if you've had this experience where I walk into a dark room and I'm like, there's the rabbit arm. Yeah.

It really does. It sort of screams at you from wherever it is. What do you think about the rabbit? Speaking of experiments you've been doing, you've been testing rabbits AI stuff with some of the other stuff that's out there. How's that gone? It is, boy.

That's a tough one. The battery life is just god-awful, which, as it turns out, is important. If I just have it in my bag and I go somewhere, I'm like, I'm going to leave it off because the minute I turn it on, it's going to be like...

draining the battery. So like, A, if there's no battery, it doesn't help you do anything. It's just a cool orange thing. I've seen a couple of moments when I'm like, okay, this is maybe doing a little more than a Gemini. I took a picture of my plant on my desk and it did the typical thing of like, this is a pothos plant, blah, blah, blah. And it kind of like went into the care instructions and it was like, your plant looks happy in its current

pot. I'm like, you know, I don't get that assessment from Gemini. It just sort of spits out a bunch of stuff at you. Like, don't overwater it. Don't underwater it. So I don't know. There's like something that is a little more like could tune itself to like what you're actually doing or looking at that feels like not just Googling something. But I don't want to give this thing too much credit. It is not done that very often. And it kind of feels that way.

basic stuff. Yeah, it's bad. Like, I think we're going to have more to say about it, both on the site and on this podcast. But the RabbitR one is not good, is a pretty easy takeaway. But I'm curious, you've been testing it against ChatGPT in particular pretty strenuously, right? Are they... My assumption would be that most of these things should come out relatively the same because it's all kind of pulling from the same backend infrastructure. Have you noticed anything different?

poking at all this stuff? Well, I think that something you mentioned, I think, is that it's running perplexity. Yeah.

So you get a little more like real time info than a chat GPT or the free chat GPT I use that was trained whenever I go. So I can ask it like, is that bridge open? That was closed over the weekend and I get a real response. So that's interesting, but it's such a strange little thing.

Strange little creature. It's like very adorable. I think there's an adorable factor. It perks up its little ears when it's listening to you. But TBD on that. Does that do anything for you? Actually, because I think I've definitely had the same experience. I like that the little rabbit on the screen sort of bounces waiting for you to talk. And then you ask it a question and it perks up its ears and stops bouncing. And when you're playing music, it wears headphones. And there's a lot of sort of

charming little things about it, I think. And I can't decide if that's what I want or is totally the opposite of what I want from a device like this. Because you use Gemini or ChatGPT or Siri or whatever, and it's all very matter-of-fact, right? Like, they are tools to do a job. And actually...

Every time we've seen these things exhibit personality, it's been in really bad, ugly, problematic ways mostly. And so they've all learned to just sort of shut all that down and just be there to execute whatever they are required to execute and then move on. And part of me is sort of endeared to Rabbit for trying something else. And part of me is also like, well, maybe if it worked but was less cute, I would like it better.

And maybe that's what actually matters here. Yeah. Like there's a cute little animation of the rabbit in a hamster wheel or something when you need to charge it. I'm like, this is adorable, but I'm annoyed that I need to charge this thing again. Like cute only gets you so far, I think. Yeah. Do you think there's going to be ways to put

more of this stuff onto phones in interesting ways like is is the next round of flip phones and foldable phones and smart phones gonna have some of the stuff we're seeing in these gadgets or are we just gonna keep getting phones because like i just keep thinking about the razor as you're talking about it it's like what if the external screen of the razor could run an assistant and could have that outer facing camera like it kind of has all the hardware it needs to

do that. Are we going to get that, do you think? I would like it. I mean, it would be an ideal world where you could kind of choose from your AI assistant and you don't just have to use the one that your operating system baked in. Fair. But yeah, then you get into like the tech company is going to let the app makers in, you know, like get into the system the way it would have to where you don't run into a wall like ChatGPT can't

change settings on my phone or like put something on my calendar, you know? So I feel like there is a pretty like firm wall on that right now. And that would be interesting. I think that's kind of like Rabbit's, you know, ethos is like, how do we get around that? And it

the answer is a weird system where you log into stuff and on, I don't know, a virtual computer. Yeah, the answer is largely you can't right now. It turns out. That seems to be not working also. But yeah, it's an interesting question. And my sense would be

That's only happening if regulators make it happen, right? It seems to some extent like more powerful than setting your default browser, which you can do even more powerful than setting your default search engine, which has only become a thing because of regulatory pressure. And essentially, you could kind of argue it's like allowing you to install another operating system on top of your operating system.

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

well, what if you could just talk to your operating system while you're walking around the kitchen? It's like not the ideal future that I want. I think I want a future where there's weird gadgets or you can download a virtual assistant that can actually do things for you. Yeah, I think that's why I'm on like team phones because it's the realist in me is like, oh,

They're not going to let this stuff happen. I think that's probably right. But I do also remember somebody... I forget who it was. Somebody at one of the phone makers years ago was like, we're going to get to a point where the phone in your pocket is basically just a cellular modem. And all the accessories around...

are going to be connected to that in some way. Your wearable is going to use that to connect to the internet. Your headphones are going to use that to connect to the internet. Your laptop is going to use that to connect to the internet. But it's going to be less the device you use for everything and more the device that just lets you use everything everywhere.

And I think that's a really interesting version of the future. And it's kind of what you discovered with this is like, I can just use my phone as a go between to all these services that exist. And with headphones that I already own, I actually don't need to invent a completely new pipeline for that stuff. I just need a new way to kind of get at that pipeline.

Yeah. And I've become just an addict for the smartwatch. Like I over the past couple of years, like I never used one before and now I cannot live without one. It's just like it's the right kind of light interface for when I need to do stuff like I'm out on a walk and I need to pause music or just check a quick.

notification or a text and it's like you run into the wall very quickly of like you can't really respond to a text very well or you can thumbs up emoji something right but boy has that been like that is the point where i'm like i am so willing to charge this extra thing and it has its own special charger that i have to bring along when i travel and like it it's

Yeah, I think smartwatches probably land in the earbuds category of that kind of light input system that really works. Like when I wrote the Humane Pen review, the overwhelming response was, what you're describing is just a better Apple Watch. Right.

And I think other than the camera stuff, which is left to be solved, but right now is only kind of somewhat useful anyway. That is true. Like my big regret right now is that I didn't buy a cell connected Apple watch. Right. And I wish I wish that I had because then I could do all that sort of lightweight stuff you're talking about without needing my phone in my pocket. Yeah. Just leave the house. Can you imagine? Yeah.

I mean, first of all, no. But also, it sounds wonderful. The idea of your phone as a thing that lives in your pocket, that it lets everything else connect to the Internet.

That strikes me as much more of the sort of AI gadget future than like these all-encompassing new ideas about gadgets. Yeah, I know. It's kind of depressing, but it's also, I think, true. It is a little bit. Yeah. And it means like all these other companies, Humane, Rabbit, everybody else is like desperately trying to get around your phone, just like you said. And it's like, oh, this maybe keeps the world the way that it is if that's how we do it more than I would like, but...

it also just might be inevitable. Yeah. And it's an interesting moment, at least. Boy, is it not dull right now. I know. And I'm still thinking about the camera comparison and cameras never came back. No. They just like mid range. We found a lot of interesting stuff to do at like the high end. And I think about like the Fuji series that people really love. Like, I feel like if you want like a good camera,

your options have never been better. But if you want a pretty good camera, they don't exist because you have a smartphone. Yeah, you already have it. Yeah. And I wonder, maybe that's where we're going to go with AI stuff. And we're a ways away from the AI gadgets being any good. So maybe we're going to be in a real sort of valley with that stuff for a little while, it feels like. Yeah, we're going to find out. But luckily, phones are getting better. So I'll take that. Yeah, yeah.

Phones are sticking around, I think. And you've given me yet another reason to buy a flip phone, which is all I really needed from you was more reasons. I took that Motorola out of the closet. I was like, this is so nice. Just shutting it, just shutting it feels good.

I'm going to start buying t-shirts with the pocket on the breast and I'm going to fold it out and just stick it right there and chat with it all day. It's going to be amazing. Yeah, it looks super cool. Yeah, I believe that. I bet you made a lot of friends and everybody thought you were super normal and cool all the time. Yeah, I was taking pictures of it for the article and my husband walked into the kitchen and just slowly backed away. I don't understand what's happening here and I'm not going to question it.

That's the correct way to react to AI of all sorts. Yeah, probably. Just back away. All right, Allison, thank you as always. Thank you. Welcome back. So a few weeks ago, I started reading this book called The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It's by a guy named Roland Allen, and it traces like a thousand years of history of how people write on paper.

He makes this big case that paper is this incredibly critical invention in the history of the world and that actually without paper, without notebooks, we wouldn't have modern capitalism. We wouldn't know nearly as much about history as we do. That actually a lot of the world that we live in is defined by the way that people wrote stuff down and what they wrote stuff down on.

He tells a whole history of notebooks all the way through the Renaissance and all the way up to now and even in the future.

If you listen to the show, you know that I love note-taking apps. I love thinking about how people write stuff down. I think the systems for all this are fascinating. And this book was like catnip for me. So I asked Roland to come on the show and talk through some of the big ideas in his book and also why notebooks continue to survive in this increasingly digital world. It's a super fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to him. And yes, there is more...

12th century history in this episode than most, but we're going to go with it. So to start with Roland, I asked him to quickly recap the case that he makes that paper is a hugely important invention in the history of the world and that without paper, we might not have any of this. Here's what he said to that.

Yeah, permanence is really why. For thousands of years, we've had different ways of writing things down as human beings. So you go back to, you can carve on stone. You can make little dents in clay tablets, which you then fire and dry out, and they're permanent, but they are clay tablets. So they're not super portable or practical or robust. Then you have papyrus, the reed product, which grows in Egypt,

And you can write on that, you can draw on that. But papyrus, it turns out, unless it's actually in an Egyptian tomb, completely dry, with no movement and nothing to disturb it, it will just automatically fall apart. It can't cope with any kind of damp, or it can't really cope with being handled. So papyrus is handy, but it's not permanent.

And then you have wax tablets. And these are beautiful things. They're amazing, completely died out in Europe. But for about 2000 years, this is how Europeans retained information, took notes, wrote poems, agreed contracts, bills of sale, whatever, with a layer of wax on wood, which you would then scrape into with a little stylus. Now, obviously, that's not permanent.

So it's very useful for being in a poet's notebook, for instance, because you can wipe it over at the end of the day when you finish writing your poem. But for a business record, it's no good at all because, you know, you have to know what you agreed, what you contracted.

Then you have parchment, and parchment comes along a little bit later during the period of the Roman Empire probably, and that's a really good writing material. It's very tough, it's completely indestructible, and you can write on it beautifully, and you can also paint on it if you like. So the illuminated manuscripts which we see, the Book of Kells and so on, these are all on parchment, and they're very beautiful. But the problem is when you write on parchment with a pen, the ink sits on the surface and dries.

which means you can scrape it off, which means that, again, it's not permanent. You can change it. You can affect the record. So it's no good for business. Paper turns up in Europe around the year 1240, 1250, 1250.

And very quickly, a few people realize it's a game changer because anything which is written on paper with ink stays there. So you can have a contract, you can keep a business record, you can do anything legal, you can have a deed, for instance, and you don't have to worry about it being forged.

Yeah. And that's important. So paper is really important because it's permanent. And that leads to its very, very rapid adoption in the business community in particular. Was that where it started? I was trying to match some of the timelines and going back through, it seems like

If I have the timeline correct, there were two threads. There was kind of the people who use it for business and people who use it for recording things in their own personal lives. But it does seem like business became a real use case for notebooks first. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And the analogy which you can very easily draw is with the modern computer. Yeah, that comes from IBM. Yeah.

And it's businesses and governments which have it to begin with for the first, how long, 30 years, maybe 40 years. And then you get people using it creatively. And then you get people like Jobs thinking, oh, you can have some fun with this thing. You know, you can play games on it, but you can also be seriously creative. So now you have Pixar, for instance. And I don't think anyone at IBM in the 1940s was thinking that Pixar was going to happen. Looking back, it seems inevitable.

that people would do something like that. And it's exactly the same kind of relationship with notebooks. You have businesses come to rely on notebooks utterly. They use them for everything. And therefore, notebooks get into everyone's hands, particularly in a culture like Italy, which at the time, Italy is the richest part of Europe, but it's also where they invent banking, where they invent companies, where they invent...

accountancy, double entry bookkeeping, limited liability partnerships, futures markets, all of these things which we know and love. And a lot of that you talk about happens not sort of it. That doesn't happen. And then they put it down in notebooks like the existence of those things and notebooks and this new writing permanent technology go hand in hand. Absolutely. You can't do one without the other.

But then, of course, so they have to have these notebooks. And once they have to have them in the evening, they take them home and then they do the fun stuff with them. And that's entirely accidental, I think.

But, you know, thank God from our point of view, it's given us all of this interesting literature and art and poetry. Yeah. So I confess I am particularly interested in the fun stuff. So let's start there. I think the first thing I had written down in my notes was like, let's go back to Florence. And there's a word that starts with a Z that I can't pronounce. And it was it was it might my gut tells me it's pronounced Zibaldoni, but I could be wrong.

You're dead right. Yeah. You just have to imagine yourself ordering a Zibaldoni in an Italian restaurant and you'll be fine. A type of notebook and also a beautiful croissant like thing that I will like very much. Tell me what those were. Talk a little bit about kind of how that spread. Okay. Back to the restaurant. Zibaldoni seems to have been a word for salad and that's exactly what it is. So it's a collection of lots of different things jumbled together.

Now, this is a time before print. We're talking about 1300 and it's Florence and it's a time before print. So if you wanted to have any book or literature or poetry in your house, you had to basically write it down yourself. Yeah. And therefore, Florence is a very business-like community. They're very entrepreneurial. Everyone's got their own little business. Therefore, everyone's got their business notebooks. They take them home in the evening and

And if they hear a poem which they like, or if they hear one of Aesop's fables is very popular, or a bit of Ovid, or a prayer which is particularly resonant to them, or a recipe, very often they're writing down medicinal cures. Anything you want to keep written down in your house, you just write it down in your Zibeldoni. And it's a very personal notebook, but it's completely unsorted, so it's like a salad in this jumbled up way.

And they're brilliant because they're these windows into what Florentine people loved. So we know the poetry they like to read. We know the prayers that they wanted to remember. We know the stories that they like to tell. And we know what they liked to eat when they had a headache. All of this kind of information, because everyone in Florence at this time who could read or write, which was most of them, unusually,

They kept a Zubaldoni. And it was a really strange local thing, but it was so fun. I also get the sense that folks back then were reckoning with the same thing people reckon with now, which is like, what do I do with any of this? And this is sort of the eternal question of notebooks, right? Is you write a bunch of stuff down, you collect all this stuff. And as a historical artifact, especially in aggregate, it's very cool, right? You get a sense of what people were doing then.

in a community. But if I'm a person in Florence in the 1300s keeping one of these, what am I doing with it day to day? What's going to happen to these notebooks? Are they thinking about like the grand sweep of history and their responsibility to write this stuff down? Like what was the point of these notebooks? So the only point was fun.

They weren't thinking about the grand sweep of history, but they knew that they were a bit precious because they would leave them in their wills. So this is how we know, one of the ways we know how many people had them because the wills often survive.

um and also you see these little dedications and then someone will start their zibeldone then they'll leave it to their son and then the son will have an argument on the pages of the zibeldone with his brother saying oh no he dad left it to me actually you know so you have these little bickerings um and you can see that sometimes they pass down three generations and that people maintain them because the handwriting changes um so that's one thing so zibeldone a

They're always for fun, but people definitely know that they have a value. The other thing that they also start doing is viewing their family as a kind of business and then keeping what they would call a libre de familia family.

Oh, well, ricordanza is the other word for it, where they keep a family record, which is essentially births, deaths, marriages, investments. You know, we bought this house. I invested in this company. My daughter got married. My son died. My grandson was born. He was baptized, etc.,

And they're very businesslike. You wouldn't call them diaries because there's no emotion in there. There's no happiness or sadness. But they just record the central, most important events of a family's life. And then that would get passed down through the generations as well. But that's more viewing your family in a kind of quite serious businesslike way. If you were at a grammar school in...

the say 1500 1600s in Europe you were expected to keep a commonplace book in a very rigorous way and that was a very formal kind of thing but that was educational you know that wasn't no one ever really did that for fun because it's such hard work yeah it's a real effort and it's study

But I think that outside of school, you have people like Leonardo who would just draw all over the place. You have people who doodle. You have people who write very intimate personal diaries, people who write very formal ones, people who write about their relationship with God. You know, there's no hard and fast rules. Okay. And that feels like

the thing that lingers most over time is that everybody is perpetually finding new ways to fill up a notebook. Kind of more chaotic over time, too. Everybody gets weirder and weirder about notebooks. Da Vinci is an interesting one. You mentioned him, and obviously I would say

And you've obviously done more research on this than I have, but I would say Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, probably history's most famous notebooks. Fair to say? Yeah, I would say so. Those are the ones when I was telling people that I was writing history of notebook and they were looking baffled, I would go, you know, Leonardo. Well, one thing I thought was really interesting in your telling of his story was that he was

did not seem to imagine that his notebooks would eventually become wildly famous. And the idea that these were for public consumption was kind of a thing that happened much later. The notebooks were very personal and very individual. How did that change come about? Like, at what point did people start writing notebooks, even in some of the styles that you're talking about, thinking about other people?

Very, very late in the day, I would say. I think what's interesting, Leonardo's notebooks are fascinating for two reasons, I think. Very far apart in time. Firstly, because they're an amazing record of his thoughts, his researches, his explorations, and his personality up to a point. So that period around the year 1500, wow, you know, there was something really incredible going on there. And then, basically...

They just vanish into aristocrats' libraries, you know. And no one reads them. They probably pull them off the shelf and just look at them as a curiosity. No one studies them at all until the 1890s when a German guy called Richter goes around Europe. He looks at them all. He transcribes them. He researches. He writes about them. And then for the first time, 400 years nearly after Leonardo dies...

People actually realized, oh, he wasn't just a good painter. He was also all of these other kinds of genius as well, because he was just known as a painter up to that point. And then, and I think it is a direct result of the publication of Leonardo's notebooks,

and people understanding that there's this process behind his genius, then everyone else starts taking their notebooks much more seriously. So Picasso, for instance, he starts painting in the 1890s at exactly the same time, or learns how to paint, he's a boy.

And he, for instance, took his sketchbooks incredibly seriously. He never gave them away. He never lost them. He kept them filed away in boxes in his house in the south of France. And they were numbered, catalogued, ordered. He knew that his sketchbooks were really important. Whereas painters 100 years before him seems to have been a very casual relationship. Or rather, they themselves used their notebooks, but they had no sense that anyone else would ever find them interesting. So...

Yeah, I think there's definitely a change. And I think that Leonardo sort of accidentally 400 years after his death prompts it. Yeah. And to the extent, you know, if any kind of well-known writer now will sell their papers to the University of the University of Austin, for instance, you know, collects writers notebooks and it will pay good money for them.

A hundred and fifty years ago, you know, universities were not doing that. They wouldn't have seen the value. Do you think that changes the way we look at those notebooks now? I mean, I think about even go back to Florence, like you think about those as an important record of real life in a way that as soon as people become self-conscious that someone else might see their notebooks, they're going to see their notebooks.

it sort of ceases to be a record of real life. It becomes an Instagram version of real life where everything is maybe subtly, self-consciously changed to be for public consumption in a way that

I don't know. We think about notebooks as these intensely private things, but as soon as you understand that someone else might see it, I wonder if it changes what that thing is. Oh, when it comes to diary writing in particular. So any number of published diaries you can tell were written with publication in mind. I write a diary every day and I don't expect that anyone else will ever read it. And it's certainly never going to be published. And I think you're right. It's more intimate and it's

You know, it's pretty uncensored, unfiltered. But then you have the Tony Blairs of this world whose diaries are published, I think. And that's a completely different kettle of fish. Yeah. And I guess that's OK. Both of those things can exist, but they are very different things. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very definitely. Yeah. OK. I am really curious about how you as a person in a digital world think.

came to think about notebooks. Because again, there is such a, there's so much about that history that A, feels very modern. Like we're talking about the same kinds of things now. And like you said, using computers for the same kinds of things that people were using notebooks for 800 years ago. But I wonder if you're going through and you have to spend time thinking about

the thing itself and and like you said paper is this crucially important invention and if we had invented computers in 1200 instead of inventing paper would it have gone roughly the same way or is there something about that thing and that time and that invention that made it different from even everything that came after i think up to a point the invention makes the time

You said to me very confidently that we live in a digital world. And of course, you are right. Yeah, we do definitely live in a digital world. We're speaking to each other via a digital link up and surrounded by amazing technology.

I would also, if I was being contrarian, say to you, you're living in a notebook world because capitalism, which gives us all of what we see around us, that for 600 years was entirely based in notebooks. We would call them ledgers or account books, but it was an entirely notebook-based system until the first IBM machines. So,

And that was invented at the same time as, or roughly speaking, the same time as the notebook arrives in Europe and sort of in that place in Italy around the year 1300. They invent all of the mechanisms of capitalism. So really we are in that world as much as we're in the digital world. But yeah, there is definitely a sense of you have an invention and then it shapes everything.

world that you live in, but in unexpected, surprising, fun, hopefully, ways. No one saw that Twitter was coming 10 years before Twitter arrived. And then suddenly it's everywhere and then suddenly it's nowhere again, you know, so who knows? So, okay, let's fast forward a bunch in history to...

Not now, but close to now. And I want to talk about the bullet journal. And the reason I wanted to start with the Zibaldoni is that I feel like you can draw a straight line from that thing in Florence 800 years ago to the bullet journal phenomenon of today.

Like a dead straight line through almost a millennium of time. How is that possible? Like, why do you think this thing, this idea of how we want to record our lives in a physical notebook has been so insistently persistent? Yeah.

over so many centuries? It's a really great, simple, minimal tool. I think with any kind of technology or any kind of invention, there's a real virtue to simplicity. So your knife and fork or your chopsticks. Chopsticks are great because they're minimal. Once you've pictured them, you've invented them once, you cannot improve on them. And a notebook, I think, is a lot like that. It came to a kind of, very quickly, it became...

kind of perfect in terms of how practical it was, how cheap it was, how available it was to everyone.

And you can't really improve on that as a bit of technology, you know, because, and then people will use it in different ways over history. And bullet journals are, I think, a really good example of how you can take this really simple thing and just use it in a slightly new way. And suddenly it opens possibilities for people which they never appreciated before. Like there are a lot of people who's genuinely, there are a surprising number of people whose lives have really been improved by,

doing bullet points to organize their life. And it kind of helps them to rationalize things and make proper decisions and act more intentionally and thereby live happier lives. I think I find it constantly incredible how this really simple thing can be reinvented so regularly. But you're right, there is a continuous line all the way through. I think it's just because it's incredibly simple and it doesn't require batteries. It doesn't require system updates. It's, you know, if you drop it, it doesn't break.

What was it that was interesting to you about the bullet journal and its history? Like, why did that jump out to you as a thing worth adding to this history? It was important to me because, firstly, because it was a real thing. It was a real trend, you know, when I was starting to think about the book. And it gave me sort of confidence that there was going to be an appetite of people who were interested in this stuff, which is very key in terms of building my confidence.

And then what was interesting was I've never bullet journaled myself. I've never done the Ryder Carroll method. But I got his book and then I spoke to him, interviewed him. And he's really thought about it quite deeply. And he's thought about the implications of writing stuff down and of organizing your thoughts on the page and having this notebook which you carry everywhere and which you write everything down on.

And that kind of encouraged me to think deeply about it too. You know, he's taken it very seriously for a long time. And he's thought about it in a particular way. And I've got a more historical angle and I think about it in different ways, but they're completely compatible. But just the fact that he had taken it seriously, I found really interesting. And hence giving him a chapter, I think, was kind of fair because he was really about the only person who had written a book about

you know, before I did. So, and he also had some really interesting things to say about notebooks which aren't bullet journals. He was really inspired, for instance, by

kind of artists' scrapbooks and sort of collages and sketchbooks, which were sort of more than sketchbooks, which had elements of diary in them. So not pure bullet journal stuff, but stuff which is a really interesting expression of your experience. And Ryder definitely put me onto those things. Why do you think that way of thinking about notebooking and journaling and keeping track of your life changed?

lagged so much the business side of things, which as you chart in the book, got really systematized and really specific. And like we built capitalism on top of these things, right? Like double entry accounting became a worldwide phenomenon and people understood how to do it. And there were kind of accepted rules on how to keep these kinds of notebooks. But in people doing it in their own lives, like you said, there have been bits and pieces of this over time. But, uh,

Honestly, I have no idea.

There are questions you can't answer. I mean, another big question, which I just have no idea, is why did people start writing diaries? Or rather, why did they start writing diaries in England in around the year 1570?

When they'd never done them anywhere else in the world before. I've looked really hard trying to find out what was so special about England at that time, which made people start to keep a diary like you would an emotional diary of how they felt about the day's events.

Sorry, not very good podcast material. I'm making a baffled expression. Listen to the picture of that. I have no idea. And I think my answer to your question is, it's a good question. I have no idea. Yeah. I have a theory, and it's based on nothing, but it's a theory. And I'm going to give you my theory as a way of asking you another question, which I also have about this. I'm here for it. I think...

As especially as we became more enmeshed with digital tools, life took on like a new level of informational chaos. There is just more stuff coming at us now than there ever has been. And that's true in our professional lives, but it's also true in our personal lives, I think, in a in a new way now.

in the last, I don't know, several decades, that there's just more happening around you and to you all the time. And we're still reckoning with that as people, right? This question of like, we understand what is going on in the world in a way that we are like evolutionarily not equipped to do. And what do we do with that? All these really interesting questions. But I think one thing that I see all the time is people crave systems. There is this idea that if I can just find a way to

make this make sense, everything will be better. Right. And I think, and you mentioned the getting things done method in the book also. And I think that speaks to the same thing where it's like, there is this swirling mass of stuff in my life. And if you can just tell me where to put it and how, my brain will get quieter. And I think that's meaningful to people. And again, there is a definite

Sort of we are people of our time and technology thing that is all kind of swirling together there. But I feel like when I see people who like really love bullet journal, what it what it says is like the world is insane and messy. But I have made this thing that is like my world and it is beautiful and looks like me.

And it just feels good. And it's why like people get mad at all the bullet journalers who are like spending all of their time organizing their pages and not time getting stuff done. And it's like, no, the organizing the pages is actually the point of the thing as much as anything else. It's like taking control. Right. Like making the notebook is the point. And I feel like that was one of the things that just keeps coming up throughout history in your book is like the act of making the thing.

It's as much the point as anything else. Going back and reviewing it is fine. Doing stuff with what you put in it is fine. But the act of making the notebook in the first place is maybe the most important part of the whole process. And I feel like there's so much of that happening right now that we need structure around that more than ever. That's just a theory.

That's it. And my answer to that is yes. That's the short answer. Slightly, slightly more involved example to sort of back up what you said. So I have a day job and I do this. I write books and talk to people about it. And so the level of inputs into my life in terms of communication and things flying at me from different directions, I've got

got two email addresses. I've got the Instagram, I've got the Twitter, which I'm switching off shortly, but I've got the Facebook, I've got WhatsApp on the phone, etc, etc. It just goes on. And that's before I'm in a room with anyone actually talking to them face to face. And my way of dealing with this is to write a diary. Yeah. So at the end of the day, I will put it all down in here. And

And it's under control, as you say. And I've turned this ephemeral, non-stop flow of craziness, most of which is completely trivial but has to be managed somehow. And I've just turned it into a calm thing on the page. Yeah, I completely agree. And as to how that makes me feel, the analogy I...

use is it's like having a shower yeah showers are lovely yeah just great i like to have a shower every day but if i can't if i have to go a day without that's fine no one really minds i'm

Two days without, it's, you know, mentally I start to smell. And that's what I'm like with the diary. I can miss a day. I can't miss two days. I start to smell mentally. And it really cleans me out. Sort of that process of just dumping it on the page really, really is refreshing and cleansing in that sense. Yeah, I like that a lot. Why do you think we haven't found a way to do that digitally in the way that is satisfying and valuable to

In the same way that we have in notebooks, because like we pretty much do business on computers now. There's not a lot of paper notebooks out there responsible for how capitalism runs anymore. But I think I am someone who has tried every note taking app on planet Earth. I obsessively use them. I build these systems and.

overwhelmingly the ones that feel the best. And as I talk to people, the answer is you try them all and you eventually just get a nice notebook and a pen and you start filling it. And there is something about that that we have not replaced. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on why it has been so hard to replace. I have lots of thoughts. I'm going to give you the deepest one because I think your listener can cope with a sort of high level bit of neurobiology. So

When you write on a notebook page, and they've done this with MRI scans and a very clever way of using multiple MRI scans called voxel-based morphometry, when you can look at multiple brains at once. When you write in a notebook, you use different parts of the brain to when you type or when you write something on your phone or your tablet. And one of the different parts you use is the hippocampus. Now this is right in the bottom of the brain and it's your mental map.

So when you drive to your place of work, you're using your hippocampus. When you know where the coffee cups are in your kitchen, you're using the hippocampus. Taxi drivers, cab drivers have amazingly well-developed hippocampi. It was an early case study in brain plasticity, actually. Right, so this is very interesting. Why do you engage your hippocampus when you're writing in a notebook? And it's because your notebook is a place, right?

right and it has its own geography so when you write things on the pages of a notebook you remember or i certainly tend to remember oh that was on the left hand side at the top oh that was i wrote that in blue somewhere now that was at the back of the notebook that was at the front and i'm thinking about the notebook in quite a different way to how i think about a digital note and what they think the people who research this

is that when you scroll or you carry on writing and what you've written on a screen just scrolls up at the top of the page and vanishes off the top of your screen it just vanishes it has no place in the geography of your lived experience unlike stuff which you write down in a notebook page so i've got my yellow notebook and i know that if i open it halfway through roughly speaking i'm going to find what happened in july and i can't do that with notes i've made on an ipad

just because my brain hasn't thought about them in that geographic way. So that's one reason.

Why? You feel more comfortable and you navigate those notes more happily than you do when they're digital. Other reasons are to do with, I think, the sort of the sensory experience of writing fingers on the page, the pen in your hand, being a slightly richer experience. It's more difficult as well. It's very easy to type. You can type. You could, roughly speaking, type everything I said to you right now.

You'd get it all pretty much down. You can't do that with a pen and ink. You have to filter, you have to parse the ideas, you have to process them and paraphrase. And that gives you a much richer, deeper understanding of what you are actually listening to. You can type whatever I say without actually listening to what I'm saying at all. But to write it down, you have to paraphrase it and therefore you have to actually interact with the ideas.

So this is why teachers and academics much prefer their students to write notes rather than to type them.

So there's a couple of answers. Do you think there's a marriage there that we can make work? I mean, I keep thinking about you. You start the book with Moleskine, which is probably the first notebook most people think of when they think of notebooks. And Moleskine for years has been building digital tools. And they have they have a really beautiful calendar app. They have a really interesting journaling system. Like, it's all very good.

Nobody cares about it the way that they care about physical moleskin notebooks. And, you know, there was this phase for a long time of like, maybe we're going to do smart pens where I'll write in a notebook, but it will transcribe it digitally. And now there are things where like, OK, you can write with a pen, but it's on your iPad and it will recognize the text and make something out of it. And it feels like we're poking at this thing where the act that you're describing, I think, is absolutely the best one.

But having a notebook that is a bunch of words on a page that sits on my bookshelf waiting for me to do something with it feels like it's missing something. Like there is a best of both worlds here that I think I desperately want to exist. And I don't know, maybe it just doesn't and can't and won't. But I am curious, do you think we can marry those two things? Yeah.

I'm not going to say never, but I've not seen it done yet in a way, which I think some people that sort of the moleskin magic paper, the dotted paper, whatever they make it work for them and, and good luck. And that's great. And some people also managed to make those kind of posh tablets, the, um, the remarkable tablets work in, in a similar way. And again, go you, um, personally, I haven't ever managed to. Okay. Last thing. And then I will truly let you go. Uh,

Tell me just briefly about Moleskine and why you start the book with Moleskine. I want to end our podcast with Moleskine. Why is Moleskine so ascendant? What is it about this company and this thing that has made Moleskine the brand, the notebook, the thing in our sort of modern world?

It's the complete refinement. She took, and I say she, Maria Segrabondi, who was the woman who conceived the Moleskine notebook, who took the very simple basic notebook that we knew, she added to it, she added this little elastic strap, the pocket in the back, the little page at the front saying, if you find this notebook, please return it to me.

She added all of these things to a very minimal product and she somehow made it seem even more minimal. So, and the analogy I make, she made, she made it minimal and she made it black. And that was the most Italian thing you could do. It's like Persol sunglasses, Prada, little black dress, um, espresso, you know, that's what they do. They make it minimal and black. And she did that. And somehow she just, she tricked us. If you like, she fooled us.

And thank God that she did. I wouldn't have written this book if it wasn't for Moleskine's, I think, because she made us look again at this simple notebook and think of it as something which had some material value, that had some material beauty, and could be therefore inspiring in a way that your school exercise book couldn't be. So she's, from that point of view, she's my heroine creatively. She's also, for me, a figure of awe, because if you look at Moleskine's numbers, the company's numbers through history,

That company's profit margin is ridiculous. It's like 43% profit every year, gross profit. And it's a manufacturing company. No company does that. You know, how did they do it? So I take my hat off to her and I can forget quite easily about all of the ridiculous collaborations with Evernote and Adobe and things like that. Yeah.

Yeah, listen, you got to do some weird stuff. Because the key product is amazing. Yeah. Well, and to that point, actually, one of the things you say kind of as an aside in the book is that there are a million other notebooks that are like, they give you ideas and prompts and they put stuff inside and they're like, this one's for your recipes. This one is for your travels. And what actually turns out to be the case is nobody wants that. They want the blank one.

And I think that is like as a perfect metaphor for all of this, that just carries with me through the whole thing that like you can you can make it whatever you want. You can gussie it up and people will want the blank one because then they can do what they want with it. And there's something very powerful in that. Yeah. Freedom. Yeah. I mean, that's the story of the notebook, right? It is permanence and it's freedom in very real ways. Lovely. Yes. I'll take that. Can I can I have that? Yeah, I'll take that.

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All right, we're back. So this app, Halide, or Halide, again, we're going to figure that out in a minute, has been around for a bunch of years, and it has gone through a lot of changes as the iPhone has gone through a lot of changes. Not only, you know, the tech getting better and the things about the design changing and the lenses moving around and all that stuff, but it's also been around for a bunch of years.

But the whole idea of what the iPhone camera is supposed to do and be feels like it has changed. And the two guys, Ben and Sebastian. Hey, I'm Ben Sandofsky, and I'm co-founder of Lux Optics, and I'm the developer half that works on Halide and Kino and our other fun side projects. I'm Sebastian DeWitt, and I'm the design half of that. So the co-co-founder and designer slash photographer part of it.

have been going through all of this and trying to figure out not only how to make a really great camera app, but what kind of camera app people need now, given what the iPhone and other smartphones are becoming. We had a really fun conversation. Nilay and I grabbed Ben and Sebastian, hashed all this out for a long time. Let's hear it. Excellent. All right. And Nilay Patel is also here. Hi, Nilay. I think we should just get them to pronounce Halide. Halide.

Over and over again.

I alternate because it's based on halogens, right? Oh, God. And silver halides, halogens, as long as it's not Halide, which is a Middle Eastern name. No, that's what it is now. Well, yeah. Sorry, there was actually someone who worked at The Verge, John Porter. I think he has moved on now, but he once pronounced it on a podcast, Haliday, and we sent him a Happy Holidays Christmas card, and we'll never let him live that down. We continue to do this every year because it's so good. That's very good.

That's very good. Halide or Halide, depending on how fancy you feel. No, no. You guys, this is the worst. We have to pick one. Let's do this right now here on the Verge cast. Can we name your app, please? What is your name? On three. One, two. Halide. Halide. Okay, there we go. All right, good. I just want to point out that when we released... I want to point out that you super cheated on Seb saying first. He went on two. You never go on two. Yeah.

We're a very good team, actually, when it comes down to it. I just want to close this discourse on names that we were like, when we're building Kino, no one can mess up that name. And then it was featured in the keynote from Apple. And they told us we're having trouble because it sounds a lot like keynote. And so I think every time we build a new app, it just needs to challenge someone. Well, the best part was that I was like, it's actually pronounced Kino.

And then they were like, really? And I was like, no. Happy Kino, everybody. That's what we're doing now. Okay, so I think we have a bunch of stuff to talk about. And we should just, we've been getting into our feelings on this podcast about what a photo is for years now. And we have invited you two to essentially do the same thing with us. But my first question as we get into this, I want to talk a lot about Process Zero and a lot about what has changed with iPhone photography in particular and all this stuff.

But I am desperately curious, like when you guys started building a camera app many years ago at this point,

Did you know at the time how big a philosophical exercise it was to build a camera app? I think we think about it as like you add a bunch of filters and buttons, but it's really like you are making decisions about the universe when you build a camera app in a way that I think people are only coming around to. Did you know this all those years ago when you started working on Halide? So I guess like the origin story...

I think like the first code commit for Halide was 2014 for about like one day. It's pronounced Halide, actually. I'm going to switch three times over. Oh my God. It's all over the place. So for Halide, in 2014, it was like three lines of code and then put away until like 2016. And so I'd say that in 2016, none of this computational photography was happening. It was...

To put it simply, a lot of these apps were just wrappers around the APIs that Apple gave you, and it was just a more pretty veneer. And so what we were doing at the time was, and then I connected with Sebastian in 2016, like we were adding value like focus peaking so that you could actually tell what was in focus. You could dial in manual values. But for the most part, until Apple released RAW up there about, it was that you had no real say on how the final image would look. Mm.

And what is interesting is I think when it came out, so Halide is now seven years old. It came out in 2017. That's exactly when the iPhone X launched that year. And with the iPhone X, I think Apple started using the word smart HDR for the first time. And they kind of, they started using that very famous slide where they take one photo and they kind of onion slice it into like 12 of them to try to show you like, oh, look, we look

We do a lot of stuff and there's a lot of smart things happening here. And I think that was, you know, around the same time that the Pixel started, you know, talking, the Pixel team started talking about like the Italian Renaissance and how we can use science to influence things. It was a very early time where people were trying to figure out like how do we get better images out of these tiny sensors? And that's when everything exploded with like night mode and all those kind of things when it

It basically turned photography from just taking a snap to like a data science. And it was like, okay, if we actually just use these processors and like do a crazy amount of computation on it, we can fundamentally alter the output and we can just, we can beat physics. We can just cheat it. Like we can do depth of field. We can all these things that big cameras can because they have giant lenses and giant sensors. We can shoot at night and we can totally take photos with like bokeh. It's not real, but nobody cares because you're still taking a photo at night. You're still taking a photo with what looks like a shallow depth of field.

And so we were kind of emerging at the same time as that all emerging. And how much control over that stuff do you get? Like, do you look at that in those early days as like, oh my God, look at this incredible toolkit we suddenly have to play with all of the light that this thing is capturing instead of just doing like a thing at the end of the pipeline? Or is it like, oh, this is barely photography anymore. Yeah.

How do we deal with this? How do you look at that when those tools start to come available? I'd say around 2020 is when things started to converge of where things were getting a lot smarter. Also, we had this existential question of why should our app exist when the first-party camera is getting so much better? And fortunately, both Sebastian and I were already shooting raw photography, which is

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

underselling like how much better the hardware was getting. And then over time, the sensors were getting bigger and better. The optics were getting better. And so that's when we started being like, wait a minute, like how can we build a feature around this where it stands on its own? One of the questions I have about raw is what,

It has come to signify. What is a raw photo? Yeah, not quite that. But people are like, I don't like my iPhone 15 camera or I don't like my iPhone 14 camera. And then you see in the comments on social media, people say, oh, you should shoot raw. And my reaction is like that is that's a horrible suggestion. But all it really because you're going to get this giant file and you actually have to process it to a look like.

But what it really means is, oh, there's a way to turn off this processing. Even inside of Apple's pro-raw system, you're going to generate a file that lets you turn off this ultra-HDR look. And that just means something to people. And the fact that the word is raw, I think, is deeply fascinating. The word and what it means and what you get are all kind of wrapped up in a mess. But you guys are describing...

Like, we're going to take the sensor data and start making different kinds of images with it. I think we make an effort to say native raw versus pro raw because what Apple calls native

raw in pro raw is not technically raw and if you read the comments on a photography website like petapixel i'm sorry but it'll be just constantly that guy being like you know it's not really raw and like yeah yeah cool awesome difference for people who aren't as deep in the weeds as we are what what is apple's version of pro raw what is your definition native so technically raw is is

You have these sensors that have voltage values from light converted to, you know, these numbers, right? And then that's it. And then you need to run an algorithm to take on the sensor. There's this Bayer filter, which are discrete red, green, and blue values. So it needs to kind of mush them up in a blender. And it's all like, it's like basically like if you were to buy the ingredients of making a cake and then the JPEG is the final cake.

Well, I guess ProRAW is kind of like a half-baked cake. Like, you get to pick the frosting. If you like sprinkles, whatever. Raisins, I hate you. But ProRAW is Apple's solution to what you're just talking about, where it felt like you needed a PhD in image processing to take one of these native RAWs and make them a

approximate anything that Apple has. And that's partly because Apple, when they take a photo, they're actually taking a burst of nine photos and then merging them together. So the concept of having any of these bare underlying values just doesn't exist anymore because it's all going to be squashed together to create smart HDR to reduce noise and do all these effects.

I really wish Apple hadn't said ProRAW because it's going to haunt me for the rest of my life explaining this to people. But it's like kind of halfway between the native RAW and the final JPEG. And I think what is a really important thing to say there, because I see a lot of people saying something like,

Oh, like this is just the same. Like if you just take a raw photo that that in itself is a really fascinating turn of phrase, because if you say a raw photo, a raw file technically is not a photo yet. So what Ben said, you know, it's like you got this sensor data, red, green, two green, two, one blue, one red sub pixel, basically to make up the pixels. All the data needs to be combined. You can think of it as kind of a giant spreadsheet. There's just like has all these values of what the sensor caught in that moment in time from one photo, one important one photo.

And that's not a picture. Like you have to process a native RAW file to get the photo out of it. So per definition, a RAW file has to be processed for it to be displayed on a screen. It actually has too much information to even be displayed on a screen. And so a ProRAW file is essentially already done that step. It has created an image because a lot of the processing that happens on iPhone images is

requires it to become an RGB image, a bitmap, essentially. And so it's a very deep image with separate information for stuff like what Neil and I mentioned, like the tone mapping, which you now have the tone control for iPhone 16. That's separately stored in the profile gain table. So you can now adjust just how much that HDR effect is. You can adjust the white balance completely. You can adjust the amount of sharpening. Noise reduction is something that is baked in per se, and not just because

Apple thinks noise shouldn't exist. Like notably, native RAW files have a lot of noise because you have a tiny sensor. You can have a lot of noise. But if you combine images, you can think of it. If you perfectly combine the same image, noise is different for every frame. So you're going to average out the noise no matter what you do if you're combining images. Behind the scenes, like when we're talking about RAWs, we've been trying to call them digital negatives.

Which I don't know if that's any better for casual users, but it's the same concept of when you had film photography, you would have a negative. But then a lot of the work of great photographers would be during the development where you would take the negative and print it on paper. You would dodge and burn it to recover the dynamic range, which is now an algorithm that Apple does for you. But like there's really cool videos of like Ansel Adams with some of his photos.

majestic landscapes, he's kind of doing like analog photoshopping where he's like, okay, I got to bring back some of the sky values and bump this part up. So this isn't particularly new, but Apple gives you like, okay, you want it on or off or somewhere in between. That's all. You can have any colors as long as it's black. Like, yeah. Well, I was just going to say, it's just fascinating to me that a lot of people say, I see all the processing that's happening and maybe sometimes don't even have a word for it. Like that's kind of like what you're alluding to, Nila, is like,

People are just like taking photos and then they take a photo with this and they just like prefer it, even though it lacks this absolute like, I mean, literally the best teams in the world right now in photography are working at Google or working at Samsung and working at Huawei, at Apple, like to make this processing, to do all this processing engineering. And they work from the silicon up to do like insane innovations. And then people,

Because you're like, haha, I'll download an app and skip all that and get what sometimes is an objectively worse image if you were to objectively judge image quality. But we find that people, yeah, people just seem to have a current preference for authenticity through imperfection, I think. And that is really interesting. I just keep coming back to this idea that like, and we've talked a bunch about this on the show, that there is this increasingly pervasive feeling of

among people that their iPhone camera in particular is bad. And I think, like, to your point, on any objective measure of quality, it gets better and better and better. And yet people seem to like it less and less at the end. And I like that disconnect is so fascinating to me because and it goes back to what you're saying about like, the iPhone has decided that noise is bad.

Period. Right. Like noise sucks. Shadows suck. They should not be allowed and we will get rid of them at all costs. And I think like to your point about imperfections, like I think that's right. And I think everybody has sort of ideas about what older photos look like. And there is a thing where like photos can be too good. But I also think as the hardware has gotten better, the software has gotten vastly more opinionated about how a photo is supposed to look.

in a way that just feels sort of incongruous, right? And like maybe what's happening now is we're getting some of that choice back where it's like, oh, the hardware is really good. You can do a bunch of stuff with it. Here are some options. And it seems like maybe

maybe that's what you guys have even seen as developers is some of those tools are becoming available to you to make available to other people. And that actually, that's what people want now is some choice back with all this great hardware instead of just wild new ideas about shadows. So actually, can I just dial back? I just said that

Process Zero is rebranded raw, and I can already see a thousand comments on Petapixel. And I thank you for pointing out... Haunted by the comment section on Petapixel. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah, no, it's... I think that it, you know... But that's between me and my therapist. Now, the thing...

What the value add here is that we do have opinions about, you know, there's a million different ways that we could develop the raw. And what I think with process zero is we decided we like noise. I have a friend who works in visual effects and he calls noise analog dithering.

And you can't remove noise without removing these details because that's what was captured at the time. We have opinions on sharpening. Our images are a little softer by design. And if you look at, you know, you look at analog photography, actually last summer before we really went all in on this

I was shooting with a Canon AE-1 on 35 millimeter film. And I was like, oh, it just feels so warm. Like it's so flawed, but I love it. The fact that you can't get this crazy HDR in there. And I think the challenge is going to be as we're building out more features and we start, you know, adding the ability, like in the future, if you want to recover dynamic range, okay, at what point do we allow users to make fake looking images, right? And it's something we'll have to face in the future. Yeah.

That's a big question. And at what point does something become fake looking is like back to big philosophical existential questions about photos, like where to draw that line is super messy. I think one of the things that you're touching on that well, too, is like.

at some point, these cameras all started looking very similar, right? So you get your photo out of Samsung phone, of the Pixel, out of the iPhone, they all look like they boost the shadows way up and there could not be any reduction or clipping of dynamic range. That is just considered data loss. We cannot have any noise. We've all agreed on that. And I think that's simply the result of making a camera for the greatest common denominator. Like,

Like this is a camera that needs to work for everyone. I think at some point someone was mentioning like, oh, I use my camera for like reading like a serial number on the bottom of like a car or something, right? Like at that point, like if you don't, if you get an artistic photo that just has like really nice Chiroscuro rendering, that's really cool for you. But like this camera literally doesn't work for me anymore. And so that's a really, really difficult position to be in. I often tell people like,

Well, I would on the one side, it's a fascinating job to design the camera at Apple. But at the same time, I have to make a camera that works for my one and a half year old daughter and like my 80 year old father and myself, like who is like an incredibly pedantic, annoying photographer that frequents the petapixel comment section. Maybe it's simply the time that like cameras do allow. And this is what AppSkater to do allow people to like find their own style and shoot in a different way. And you see that now with like.

very un-Apple like thing of like adding so much control to like what kind of like final output you get in your image and maybe that goes down to processing too because processing I

I think people are becoming aware of how many creative decisions are being made for you. And that's fascinating to me because there was one time, like in 2020, a year of unprecedented times, if I want to like pull an anecdote, where people ran into this because they were all taking photos with their Samsung or Pixel or iPhone. And they woke up in San Francisco one day and the entire city was orange, like completely orange, because there was a huge wildfire near the place where I live now. And the sun was being filtered through it. And it was all orange. And people took a photo with it.

And the craziest thing happened. The camera recognized it as being like, oh, the white balance is way off. We're going to correct for that. This doesn't really happen because it's trained on everything that's happened before it. And it has, it's literally all the smart stuff is based on precedent. And we were in 2020 living in unprecedented times. And so people started downloading like a camera app like ours to, you know, like try to correct for that set manual white balance.

And that I think was like beginning to be the turning point around when people started like exploring options like that and being aware of something like that existing, like they were aware that as they took a photo, like, oh wait, it's doing something for me. And I don't like that it's doing that.

And that has become a greater awareness, even in like Gen Z, even in people who don't know what a file is. They know that processing is a thing and that that increasingly is making decisions for them to go out on a run. One question I have, and I've talked to you about this ever so slightly, Sam, is

Apple designs the camera as a system. Samsung is a system. Google is a system. You've got the hardware, the lens, and then you've got a processing pipeline to lean on. And they obviously know exactly what's going to happen in their processing pipeline. In the case of Apple, they're designing their own chip as part of that processing pipeline. And it feels like they can make decisions about what they can handle in processing at the expense of what the hardware can do. And if you all are making an app that just pulls the raw data off the sensor and

Apple gets to say, well, we know there's going to be some fringing. We know there's going to be some distortion in this lens, but we're going to optimize it to collect all the light we can because our pipeline can fix almost anything except not having the light. Has that come up for you now in the newer versions of the phone where you can see that optimization starting to shift against quality out of the lens, for lack of a better term, in favor of just light collection? Yeah. Yeah.

And that was actually one of the craziest things I saw when we started shooting a lot of native RAW again, because for a while I was just like ProRAW maxing, like just shooting on ProRAW all the time. And then I was like, okay, let's go back to native RAW for a second. I noticed that the output was just getting a little...

was just getting a little worse like if i were to objectively look at it you know i just take this again to clarify the difference between pro and native raws you get raw sensor data which you just i just quickly throw in lightroom to develop it bedroom processes that sensor data and spits it out there's actually some corrections already baked into that so some of the pipeline does raw data on the apple iphone and some of it then it starts converting its images so they can start merging geometric geometry corrections those kind of things

For instance, your ultra-wide camera will have a lot of corrections because otherwise it looks like a crazy fisheye lens, basically. And then, yeah, we noticed a few years ago, the main camera especially, which is the one that needs to gather the most light, the camera people use for 99% of the time, it has more color fringing than it has in the past. And I think we talked about this in person briefly, Nili. I was like, no, the crazy thing that's happening here is there's a realization there. They're like, oh, wait.

It might be color fringing, but we can just fix that in the pipeline. If we get more light in, we can just correct that out. And the smart photographer will make up for what would traditionally be considered a bad, the worst photographic lens, right? It just becomes a data problem, essentially. And that is coming up a little bit. And I wrote a little bit. I just published a review of the iPhone 16 yesterday. And I wrote like,

Look, you've got to get used to processing because gadgets in our phones, I can see them going in one direction. David, I feel like you're the pixel fold kind of guy, but you're going to get devices that are thinner and folding, and sometimes they fold three ways now. In China here, the devices are folding three ways. It's going that way. We're not going to opt for thicker phones and bigger cameras.

And to make cameras work that are smaller and thinner and tinier and fit into like very small headsets and Ray-Ban glasses, we're going to need more processing because the sensors, the images aren't going to get any better. That's just physics. So I fully believe that, you know, as we go towards slimmer and foldable iPhones or whatever, you

Our output on something like a process zero image is probably going to get objectively worse. That's just the way it is. But old fashioned photography in that way, that's just I don't know how long that's going to be around on these kind of devices as they get smarter and smarter because they'll just start relying more on the fact that they're magic, hyper powerful computers. And they're not going to rely on the fact that they're good at collecting light because they're just not. Wait.

Wait, so let me ask you about that. Let me send you all the way down the existential rabbit hole. This is where I live. Welcome to the basement with me. At the end of this, right, the hardware is just there to collect light and everything else happens in the processing stack. Everything else is an average of values from the past, right? Do you see that all the way at the end? Yeah.

You just spin the dial all the way on the path that we're on, and we don't really care if the sensor is any good or the lens is any good as long as we can collect as much massive light as possible. See, I think that's a great philosophical question because if you come down to it, you can solve it the way the Samsung moon photo situation happens. Most of the world has completely been captured before and done before. If you train a good enough model with a bad enough sensor, you can probably take photos of 99.95% of the things out there, and they'll be really good. So, like...

I don't know. That seems kind of like a reality that we're heading towards where the processing is just simply good enough and the reality doesn't. The reality of capturing images just needs to correspond to like what the internal logic can cohere together. And I personally philosophically find that a really big problem. I want to make a camera that...

Like if you go to the, what is a photo thing? I was talking to Ben about this. I was like, we should probably think about what we consider to be a photo. And to me, it is an image that's generated largely majority, at least by photons that you have captured at a moment in space and time. But I'm not sure if that is going to be the case. I think in the future, some cameras, maybe not all of them, but some cameras are going to increasingly rely on data sets of what the world should look like and what images should look like. And just use data, use light as data, not as like,

visual aid as much. What is Halide for all the way at the end of that road? Like, what's your job when we get all the way to the end of that?

Well, I mean, like the invention of the automobile didn't put an end to horses. It's just horses were allowed to be this fun thing. You had to look at them and ride them and stuff. Right. But as far as utility for every day, you know, people stopped keeping barns, I guess. And I mean, like, look, you know, photography didn't end painting, painting. The reason people look at paintings is because the amount of skill and craftsmanship that goes into it and being able to work within these constraints.

And again, it was really eye-opening last summer shooting analog because there is just something about an analog photo and actually the removal of details, right? And so I don't know if anyone tried to watch one of these high frame rate movies like The Hobbit at 48 frames per second or that HDR Will Smith movie, the one with his clone. What was it called?

Gemini Man. There we go. Yeah.

And so with photography, there's just something about a photo that is less perfect that feels magical about it. So I think there's always going to be that as an art form. But as far as something that you're going to just tap a button and get a nice photo, you know, I think that we are smart enough that we're never going to enter that kind of battle with the world's most valuable company. Let me say this. Just to put your definition in the test. Photons you collected in a moment in space and time. Right.

I buy that. That's a pretty good definition. Does that count if you're taking nine photos and merging them? That moment has extended to nine captures, right? Yeah. So I think so. The thing is, like, let's say...

And the same thing goes for cleaning up. Let's say you use AI cleanup to erase a part of the photo. I still think it's a photo. But once you fill that in with the majority of a cleanup feature, so like 50% or more of the pixels become filled in by a model, I feel like it ceases to be a photo in a meaningful way because it has now been filled in by a data set.

You guys are making a tool, it sounds very much like you're focused on the creative and artistic aspects of photography. There's a whole other conversation about can we trust these images that exist in the world? Have you looked at...

The various watermarking features from C2PA that say, actually, this happened, right? This photo of Donald Trump, it occurred. We're going to mark it. We're going to send it to Getty. Getty is going to know this is real. Those photos were marked at the camera level when they went to Getty. Have you looked at doing that? Is that something you're allowed to do on iOS?

That's all bullshit. Am I allowed to swear? Like, if not, like write down. Okay, good. You are allowed to swear. So, all right. Everything that Adobe is pushing as far as like content authenticity is, it's just, it's like,

DivX and anti-DVD kind of stuff in the 2000s. It's like if you look at it, the ability to just strip the metadata, the fact that you can just point your camera at a screen and take a photo, like it's not going to do anything other than convince people to sign up for Creative Cloud and use Adobe products.

I don't know. I don't know how much deeper you want to get in that, but I don't think it's a useful use of time. Although they do have a verification feature where I think it does like a signature of like you can, I think kind of like see SAM detection, like it'll get a signature of a photo. You can drag and drop it to UI and whoever first posted it, like it'll tell you who did that. That's pretty cool. But the rest of the stuff is just a waste of time. Yeah.

I'm just curious. This is right next to the creative part of how much can I change this or how much data processing can I do is the how much can I trust this? And it feels like both of those are unsolved. Yeah, when we launched Process Zero, like I thought I was talking to Ben, I was like, can we use the fact that we shoot a JPEG that is the Process Zero component and like the raw the sensor again, the sensor single shot raw Bayer data as sort of a proof of provenance, like a proof like that.

There are not a lot of data sets of generative AI, if any, I haven't found any at least, that work on raw files, right? But conceivably, you could totally do it. That's the thing. So it's not a good, you know, it'd be a fig leaf of authenticity. It would be like, look, there is a raw file. You can see that it was actually taken, right?

But, you know, like it's still it's just such a losing battle. At some point you philosophically as a photographer or camera app maker or both or esteemed member of photography common sections, you just go through the same existential crisis and you just realize, OK, there's nothing stopping this.

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

Before it existed, he did that equivalent kind of editing. And this was a huge like you don't do that if you're actually taking photos. So I guess this is also a question for you as journalists. Like when you at what point when you're doing like an interview or you're transcribing, you're pulling quotes. At what point is it OK to remove the likes and the butts?

You'll be doing a lot of that with me, and thank you. But at what point are you then editorializing what you're trying to capture and telling a story that actually didn't occur? And effectively, you know, everyone has to have that level of journalistic integrity if they want to call it a photo.

So David and I are both going to answer on three, and we're going to see if we have the same answer. Okay. Actually, I'll let David answer. My quick version of that is that's norms. That's professional norms. That's what you're describing. This guy was a professional photographer. He entered a professional photography contest. He broke the rules. He got kicked out. They got in trouble. You're a journalist. You get a bunch of quotes. You go two sideways.

You're over the line, right? Like the journalist club, if it still exists, we'll get mad at you and your reputation will suffer. If you're a Getty photographer, there's a list of rules of things you're allowed to edit. And most of them are like, you can change exposure and that's about it, right? You can do some vignetting. If you look at New York Times photos, all they're allowed to do is vignette. So they're all just vignetted to hell and back because that's the only button they get.

So, like, that's professional norms. I don't know what consumer norms are going to be. And what we're seeing is an explosion of consumer photography. And that, I think, is really challenging. I don't know. David, what's your answer? I think about the same. I mean, there's been a big discussion this year about how people transcribe Donald Trump. There's been all this stuff about sane-washing Donald Trump, where he'll go on, like, a nine-minute...

of nonsense and then a reporter will essentially try to make it make sense, which on the one hand is like good, useful journalism. Like here are the words that he was trying to say. On the other hand, it makes somebody who doesn't make any sense make some sense. And I think it's a complicated thing. Like at what point is my job to make something make as much sense as possible so I can help my reader understand? And at what point is my job to represent something as it was, right?

In all its messiness. Yeah. And it's like, I think it is kind of a perfect analogy for what we're trying to do with photography. And I don't have great answers. Because it's, especially when it's messy, how un-messy you're supposed to make it is really complicated. And really, the question is, can you make everybody believe in the professional norm? And the answer is just like, obviously no. So...

I guess the closest that we have around ethics right now is Apple's decision that they're not going to allow fully generative AI in iOS 18. And there was the interview with Gruber where they're talking like, OK, we're going to generate cartoons, but we're not going to generate photorealistic stuff. And so that's nice when you have someone who is, you know, not

enabling outright bad actions. Although then you have someone like Google, who's also letting you like, yeah, just change the background, type in what you want. That does like remind me of like that amazing quote that Nelai got from Apple's John McCormack that basically was like, okay, we believe a photo is a thing that really happened, which is still not going as far as saying like a photo is a thing you capture with a camera or is light that is captured. It is a thing that happened, which totally fits in the model of having a generative future where

There is a super great Apple model that will just basically fill in the blanks if the image data isn't good enough. It just needs to confirm that a thing has actually happened. So it's like, yeah, like, surely we will continue to have journalistic standards and there will be a few of these things like C2PA to work in their niches, but...

I mean, there's no stopping the train that's heading down the tracks of like the absolute apocalypse of like what the meaning, the meaningfulness of photos on the internet. I truly think if I look at my daughter, she's one and a half years old now when she's a teenager, I don't think she will believe any single image she sees on the internet.

I think the piece of this that gets lost in a lot of this conversation, I think, is like we talk a lot about the sort of really high stakes photos and we talk a lot about like the photos of a serial number. Right. But I think like Sebastian, to your point, you have a young kid. I think I have a young kid. Neal has young kids. Ben, I don't know. I got one. He's got hand, foot and mouth disease right now. So, yeah. Yeah.

Uh, good times all around. Uh, but I think like Sebastian, to your point, your kid will probably grow up in a world where they don't believe photos they see on the internet. I think that's probably right. But the question of like, will they believe photos about themselves from when they were kids is, is the other part of this that I think is like complicated and is, is such a like normal everyday use case. We don't talk about in this context, but the question of like, when I, when I take pictures of my kid, um,

what responsibility, in air quotes, do I have to truth and honesty versus taking a fun picture of my child having fun, I feel like is such a mainstream, every single person use case that we just don't talk about enough because it feels mealy. But I don't know. And as you guys think about how people download this stuff in part because they want to make beautiful art that hangs in museums and in part because they want to take better pictures that are kids. And

And like, what is the job there in this world? All of my son's photos are in native raw. So I can show him the receipts afterwards. He can develop the negatives himself. Exactly. Yeah. No, but that's a really good point. On his 18th birthday, here son, I've made you some negatives. You know, it's important that every dad has a talk with his son about noise reduction. It's a dangerous world out there and you know how to be prepared. Yeah. Yeah.

But I mean, to that point, like some part of me feels like, you know, we're going to go back and look at, we're going to recognize this era of mobile photography for looking a certain way. That's just a fact. And we're recognizing the first generation of Instagram photos by the heavy filters and

which also means people are going to look at the first generation of Instagram photos and be like, oh, these are real. There's no generative. And then because you can see by how bad these filters are, this was before the end times of photographic integrity, which is fascinating to me, by the way, that those fake sepia filters are going to go down in time as like a symbol of authenticity, which at the time were derided as being universally deeply real photos. Yeah. Deeply unreal. Yeah. Deeply real photos must be real. And I think we, we,

we'd love to kind of in the same way, in a way provide that niche too, because we want to offer that extra tool that just gives you a, a more authentic shot because it's a bit more true to like what an old fashioned camera might've captured. It has a bit less of that process look going on. Um,

But two, I also believe those photos are more representative of your memories because they are more like the way you remember a moment. When I edit my photos, actually, I tend to make the sunsets warmer and the cozy times nicer and the time when I walked in Tokyo alone at 3 a.m. bluer and more cyberpunk-y because that's just the way it felt. And I think those aren't perfect representations of reality. And that greatest common denominator photography thing is kind of what's

Welcome back.

All right. So I'm in the middle of kind of a gaming dilemma. I've been really a gamer off and on over the course of my life. It's not something that it's kind of a consistent activity, but I'll play a lot for a few months and then kind of put the console away for a few months because whatever things get busy or I get into something else. But then I always come back to games. And really, for me, it's sports games that are the most

consistent. Like I play Madden every year. I like the NBA games. 2K is really good. I've been a FIFA player for forever. I like Fortnite. I like games that I can kind of come and go to and play a whole bunch all at once and then leave for a little while and then come back. I also like games that I can play for like 15 minutes at a go. And the challenge I've always had with a game like Elden Ring is I just want to play it forever.

And I feel like it never rewards you for just a couple of minutes of playing at a time in a way that some of these more finite battle royale or like football game sized games really are. So all of this is to say I'm pretty happy with my gaming setup. I haven't really felt the need to get a PS5 or anything like that. I'm still on a PS4 Pro. It works fine. Everything's great. But more recently, I want something new.

new. We've been talking a lot about handheld consoles on this show over the last eight months or so, I would say. And there's just a lot of cool stuff happening. I also travel more than I used to, and I'm back to wanting something I can play on the train or on a plane or in a hotel room when I'm not

at home. I also just spend too much time sitting at my desk. Like right now, I'm sitting at my desk, my monitor's in front of me, my computer is underneath it. I have a Mac mini that I use for most things. And then right off to the right is my PlayStation. And so having this one space be the place that I sit

for work all day and then to play games at night. I just don't like it. And I want something that I can take and sit on the couch while I hang out with the dog or play out in the backyard when the weather's nice. So I'm really into the idea of a handheld console, but I have no idea which one to get. So I enlisted two people to help me figure it out. Sean Hollister and Alex Kranz. They both know this stuff way better than I do. And to

together we are going to make a decision about which handheld console I'm going to buy. Let's get into it. Alex Krantz, hello in Texas. Howdy, y'all.

This is what we're going to do here. Sean Hollister, hello. Hi, from the land of gaming handhelds. I have brought you here to do personal tech support for me because that is what the first test is about, is helping David figure out which gadgets he should buy. I'm going to lay out for you my current situation, and then you are going to help me solve my current situation. So my current situation is I have a PlayStation 4.

I've had it for a million years. It's fine. It plays video games. I would like to upgrade, but I don't think what I want is a PS5. I think what I want is something handheld and portable because my PS4 like lives next to my computer in my basement and I'm spending too much time sitting in this chair looking at this screen. And I would like to have something that can like go out in the world with me and I travel a lot and all these things. So I want something that is like primarily but not entirely a portable handheld PC.

gadget. I would like to play lots of games. We can talk about which games I do and don't care about, but I have exactly one non-negotiable game, which is FIFA. EA Sports FC is the new name of it. I will call it FIFA until the day I die. I play that game more than I play every other game combined, and I need that game. That's it. That's literally like, that is the entirety of where I am. And

I want to buy something and I want you to tell me what to buy. Why? Why is that your game? Why is that your game? Because I have an answer for you. But the answer has just been foiled by the fact that you have picked a game which, and I quote, runs a this program encountered E11100B during initialization. Okay. Error message when you try to run it on a Steam deck.

So I guess I'm not going to tell you to buy a Steam Deck. My worry was this is going to be the shortest Verge cast in history because I was going to say all that and you were both going to say Steam Deck and then we were going to hang up and move on with our lives. If it were not for this one game that I require, is the world sort of that simple at this particular moment? Yeah.

It kind of is. And maybe it won't be in like two weeks. In two weeks or so, is it three weeks? There will be a Windows handheld with a battery that is bigger than any other handheld on the market. And maybe that will solve the issue of Windows handhelds don't have great battery life. That won't solve all the other problems with the Windows handheld. I'm going to say, David, you're on the Verge cast. So I feel very comfortable saying you like to tinker.

You enjoy a little tinkering. So I do and I don't. I will say what I'm I am willing to tinker. Like if it's a matter of I need to like buy this thing and spend a couple of hours like downloading and tweaking and doing whatever I need to get it set up. Fine. I am not buying a thing with the intention of screwing with it forever. I would like this thing to play video games and I want to be able to sit down on my couch and be playing video games as quickly as possible. That's actually very important to me.

to me. Would you spend those two hours? Hear me out. Would you spend those two hours in

Setting up your Steam Deck to dual boot Windows off of an SD card occasionally with the one non-negotiable game that apparently you must have. You can get FIFA on the Steam Deck without doing dual boot. I was looking this up. Tell me more. You will need to be comfortable diving into the Linux side of Steam Deck. Okay. And do some tweaking. And also, does it have to be FIFA?

FIFA 24. Yes. Oh, it can't be FIFA 23. Well, no, it actually what's important is that it's going to be 25 in like six weeks. And it's actually what I need is that one. Do you have to play it online? Because the anti-cheat, that's that's the problem here. EA insisting on its own version of anti-cheat instead of the ones that actually work on the Steam Deck.

Yeah, I need to be online. Shit. Well, I feel like the other FIFA games have appeared in Xbox Cloud, and I feel like this one would also appear in Xbox Cloud. That was my next thought. You make a very good point here, which is a thing that I should have said. I don't need to be able to play this game on the first day that it is available.

I just need to play it at some point. Yeah. And what I have discovered about the video game world is that those things are very different. Like when things come to Game Pass and there's stuff that comes to PlayStation's cloud stuff later on that isn't there like day and date when they release. Like the reason I picked this game that matters is because I can just like get lost down this impossible universe with any game that I want. And it's all very complicated. But just just to tie off the one piece of this, if if all I was saying is I want

a handheld thing to play games on, and I did not give you any specific games. Yeah. Is the answer like the Steam Deck and it's not even close? Yeah. It really is. It really is. The Steam Deck, we're in this moment where...

All of these other companies are like, we want a piece of that Steam Deck action, but we're going to build it on Windows because gamers tell us that Windows is where all of the games are and they want to just be able to play the games they already own. Which is true. Which is true. But the reality is that the Steam Deck plays Windows games and it plays more of them better than a native Windows system plays Windows games. What is the problem with the native Windows system? Because...

Windows is built for computers, for laptops and desktops and things you use with a mouse and at least 13 inch display. And then you put that on a seven inch display and instead of a mouse, you have a joystick.

Okay, that sounds awful. Now that I'm thinking this through, that sounds like a nightmare. That part's kind of it. You can, if you want to spend your two hours of setup, you can certainly spend 10 minutes of them setting up Steam to launch every time you launch your Windows computer, and to launch right into big picture mode. And then you have an interface that's similar to the Steam Deck, but...

But it doesn't have the ability to like tweak the handheld very easily so that you get great battery life. The chips won't give you great battery life to begin with because there's all that other overhead for all the other shit you don't need in Windows. Sometimes you'll turn off your Windows system. You'll put it to sleep and you'll turn it back on again and wake it up again. And all of a sudden your app will be gone. Where did it go? I wonder why it isn't full screen anymore. It's this tiny icon on the Windows taskbar. That's not great.

Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. It'll have restarted itself. I'm having like netbook flashbacks to 10 years ago as you're describing this. Sometimes for some reason I can't get it to stop asking for the password when I open one of my Windows game consoles. And so then I have to like figure out how to get the accessibility keyboard up, which always takes at least five minutes.

And then very carefully type in the password, which is super long because I like to be safe. It's it's my favorite thing to do. David, you don't want to do that. This is not the most compelling case you've ever made. But wait, Sean, you you alluded to maybe there is something coming that solves this problem for me. OK, not most of these problems, but the battery life battery life problem is.

Asus with the ROG Ally. The ROG Ally. They're going to hop on me. So the ROG Ally came out a year ago as like a Steam Deck, but worse in almost every way, except that it had a better screen, a variable refresh rate screen. It has since been surpassed by the Steam Deck OLED, which has an OLED screen that goes 90 hertz. I'm going to stop getting into the weeds. But they're coming out with a new version of that later this month that will have a doubled screen.

battery in it and all kinds of other creature comforts it'll be more comfortable to hold in the year since they shipped the original rog ally the ui has gotten a little bit better it's smoother like tom warren likes his i think he might prefer that over the steam deck he is a notorious windows fan boy that's why he doesn't count i i think it's going to be very possibly

the first Windows handheld that I can recommend because they've gotten so many things right, but it fundamentally still runs Windows. And Microsoft has not improved Windows in any meaningful way in the year and a half, two years since Steam Deck came out. They could, though, right? Like we've been hearing a lot of rumors that they're going to introduce some sort of Xbox handheld in the next couple of years that will very likely run on Windows because technically the Xbox runs on that. There's like the opportunity. I feel like a lot like...

Remember when AMD was having its big resurgence, NVIDIA was the game GPU. And then AMD was like, we're going to start doing this again. And the difference was NVIDIA actually did software and made the games work really, really well, whereas AMD didn't for at least a year or two. That's where the Windows handhelds are. No one's done those really important software tweaks. So the Steam Deck is better.

But Microsoft would have to be like, we're going to ship a different OS on it. We're going to ship a version of Windows that's so stripped down, you don't recognize it as Windows anymore. Look, if it opens EA Origins, then like, I'm fine. EA is one of the Achilles of the Steam Deck. You brought up

FIFA. FIFA. EA Games will notoriously, particularly if you need online, they will just break on Steam Deck because EA does not give a shit about Valve's handheld. And they'll just like change their stupid mandatory like DRM app all the time. It used to be called Origin. Now it's like EA app. And games will just break there on Steam Deck. But everything else works pretty good. But they do participate in cloud gaming. Most of their stuff is available on the various cloud gaming platforms. Yeah.

And all of those work on the Steam Deck. And you can get them up and running pretty quickly and then not have to constantly go into the Linux backend to tweak them. Just the one time. Meaning I could do Steam Deck plus Game Pass and solve my problem? Yes. Is this a good idea? Yeah, you could do that. You could stream your Sony PS4 from there so you don't have to sit in front of it to play The Last of Us. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

You can stream your Xbox and your PlayStation and cloud to the Steam Deck. It does all these things. I'm glad you brought this up because this is a thing I have deeply investigated and have come up with is just a terrible nightmare that I will not subject myself to. There are things about remote streaming your own console that are really great, and they immediately fall apart as soon as you get

anywhere outside of your house. Like it just doesn't. Do you need to play Thief outside your house? I do. Like for me, honestly, the two biggest things I'm trying to solve in switching from this console on my desk to the handheld is I want to play other places in my house than at this desk, which is a victory for console streaming. And I want to play when I travel.

In part because I'm addicted to this game and it's set up in such a way that the mechanics are, if you don't play every day, it's actually kind of like, it's a real problem as I'm describing this, but this is where I'm at in life. And the console streaming thing is great for the first thing. Like I can sit upstairs on my couch and play my PS4 on like an iPad. And it actually works passably well. Total non-starter trying to stream any stuff over the internet. I just, it's just not even worth it.

This goes for all streaming. Yeah, I agree with that. All streaming breaks down once you leave your house because you no longer have control over making sure you have a good internet connection. If you're out there on 5G, if you have a great 5G signal and nobody else in the node is using it right then, yeah, you could have a great streaming experience. But I would sit in a hospital waiting room or out in a cafe, and I'd be using that Razer device, which could only really do cloud streaming, and I wouldn't...

I would have a beautiful streaming experience that would drop out five minutes later and be completely unplayable. Over and over and over again, I had that experience with cloud gaming, with a good cloud gaming service like GeForce Now. Great service. This connection would not maintain that. Now, if you're talking about going over to a friend's house...

which your friend also has amazing internet at home and you want to stream from Xbox cloud. They're great. That could, that could, that could work great. I was just assuming that David has like a hotspot with him at all time that gives him brilliant internet, like 90% of the time. To be honest, I do a lot. It's called, it's called an iPad pro with cell connection. And it's actually like an unbelievably great hotspot.

The problem is I'll give you the worst case scenario for my own gaming usage is on an Amtrak train from DC to New York. And at that point, realistically, what I need is games I can play offline. Right. Which I think just rules out full reliance on game streaming services. Like I actually this is why I'm compelled by the combination of Steam Deck and

And Game Pass, like I can do mostly online stuff. And like I have I don't need to be able to play FIFA online while I'm on Amtrak Wi-Fi. That's like not possible in the world that we live in. So I'm fine with that. But I need to be able to do something on that thing when I have crappy connection. And the idea of just having like a brick in my hands when the Wi-Fi is bad feels bad.

I do have one other suggestion, and it is actually even more basic than the Steam Deck, and it's a switch. I'm glad you brought this up. Mm-hmm.

It's like the Steam Deck gives you all of the customization and gives you, it's like a Swiss Army knife. The Switch is like just a really good K-bar. Like, it's good for one thing, and that's playing the games that Nintendo is okay with you playing on it. And one of those games is EA Sports FC 24, the dumbest name game in soccer. But you're still not going to play it online on Amtrak, right? No, but so I have almost landed there except, and

And Kranz, I'm glad you brought this up because I want to know what you guys think. Right now feels like a stupid time to buy a Switch. It feels like the end of a Switch cycle. They have already talked about the next one. Like the Switch, by all accounts, is still very good. But this feels like a ridiculous time to buy a Switch. It is absolutely the end of the Switch cycle. They're delaying it a little bit. They're not like they don't want to come out right away and do Switch 2. They're biding their time, probably because they want to get some great software lined up for it.

And I imagine that that software, if you want to play Metroid Prime 4 or whatever the next game is that Nintendo does, it probably won't work as well on the current Switch because the current Switch is not only seven years old in terms of its processing power, but also was already weak to begin with. Like when you played Zelda Breath of the Wild on day one on the Switch and you go to the forest where the Master Sword is like.

It was choppy then. It was choppy seven years ago, you know? I was like, FIFA will look like a bunch of potatoes are on a big green field. But you'll know what those potatoes are and you'll be able to control all the little potatoes. So like, if the control of the potatoes is important and not how they look, the Switch could be an option. Because there's a lot of good deals right now because there's a ton of different ones. Like, I just recently picked up

the new Zelda one because somebody left it on a plane and I bought it at a thrift store. Have you played the new Zelda yet? I have. So I actually have an OG Switch and it worked great and I loved it very much. And then it got to the point where literally the battery lasts like six minutes. Like it's fine. The thing is seven years old. I got a lot of love out of it. I used it for a long time and it just basically doesn't work anymore.

And so now it's just like a pretty yellow thing that sits over there. Do not trade that in because if it's an original switch that the battery is six minutes, it also means that it is hackable and you can do fun things with it and it is worth money. So I deal. Okay. Well, that's David's side business in selling old gadgets is a whole other thing you and I should do on this show, Sean.

So, yeah. So I think one of the outcomes I'm afraid of is that the answer is just wait a year because there's going to be a new Switch and they might fix Windows and maybe we'll get the Xbox thing. And it feels like in a weird way, we're in like a bad middle zone between good things. No, you need to get the Steam Deck with OLED and just be done and happy. I think what you need to do is you need to unlock. You need to unlock a mountain of

of amazing PC games you've been missing that are incredibly cheap and brilliant and beautiful and run on this handheld with an amazing screen. That's what you need to do. And it's also hackable. Sean, I gave you one game, one game that I need to play. And you're telling me that I can have everything I want except the one game that I need to play. If you want to play Fortnite on there, it doesn't do that either.

So, unless you're going to stream that. I literally, I almost wrote down that the two games were Fortnite and FIFA. And I decided I can live without Fortnite. Because there are other good...

David has an hour to kill battle royale games out there. I could take or leave Fortnite at this point in my life. I was like, you can just use your iPad. That is true. So let me float another idea by you, which is that instead of buying one thing, I buy several things. And I just acknowledge that at least for this next phase of my life, the right thing to do is get a PS5 and a PS Portal

for my house projects and then I get a Steam Deck for travel. I have just quadrupled the amount of money that this is costing. Is this the outcome? Don't do that!

Save your money. Just get like never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy a portal unless you just have zero computer skills. If you have none whatsoever, if all you do, if you like struggle to turn your phone on, get the PSP portal. People love the portal. There are people who love the portal. It is selling really well. I would never touch one except to like to have the knowledge of having touched one. But

because the Steam Deck has an app on it, and the app is the PS Portal. Yeah, that's... In an app for your Steam Deck, basically. Yeah.

It's called Chiaki. Chiaki for deck. And it works great. Just make sure your PS5 or PS4 has an Ethernet cable plugged into it or it will not work very well. Okay. Don't get the PS Portal because that's for people who love to game and don't have a lot of computer skills. And so they're like, okay, I just need to go play right now. And that's great. But you spend a little bit more money. You get the Steam Deck. Yeah.

You spend a little extra time and you have just way more capability. Okay. All right. So let me, let me play out this scenario. So what's happening here is I'm going to make sure that my PlayStation streaming setup is as good as possible. I'm going to make sure that I have an ethernet port. I'm going to, I'm going to plug my PlayStation into the Eero gateway and not the Eero in the basement. I'm going to, I'm going to make sure that,

My internet connection for my PlayStation is as good as possible. TBD on whether that's going to be a PS4 or PS5. We're going to see how poor I feel at the end of this episode. But that essentially becomes my dedicated FIFA machine, which is an absurd place to have landed. But again, here we are. If you've already got the PS4, I mean, why not? So I'm relegating this thing to being my FIFA machine. And then I'm going to download the app you just said for the Steam Deck.

for when I want to play FIFA and I'm going to play FIFA on the Steam Deck through my PlayStation, which seems ludicrous, but you're telling me will kind of sort of work as long as I have very good internet. It'll work great. Inside your house. Remote is theoretically possible, but you'll play it in your house, realistically. So that's my solution to the how do I play on my couch instead of in the basement problem. Great.

For everything else, I'm just going to broaden my horizons and play less FIFA and play more other games. Is this what you're telling me? This is where I need to land? I feel like you can find a really good FIFA clone, but they all have swords or something. I don't know.

I feel like this exists. Someone's made this game in alpha. So what is ironically possible is that because EA Sports FC is no longer called FIFA, somebody else is making a FIFA game and maybe that FIFA game will be on the Steam Deck, which will solve all of my problems all at once. This is what I'm hoping for. Done. And also you will write about this experience, hopefully, for The Verge. And then EA will start taking care of its shit. Yeah.

Okay, so EA, very large company, makes a lot of very popular games. Is there any hope for EA on the Steam Deck ever? Like, should I have any optimism for that to be a thing? The Steam Deck's very popular. What are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, they just break things willy-nilly and they don't think about it. It's not like they don't want money. Yeah, EA is kind of notorious for being one of the worst companies in the United States. Like, I think when Consumerist existed, it was regularly beating cable companies for being the worst. Oh, boy.

because they just they put money ahead of usability frequently and so they could fix it but i don't think they have a whole lot of interest because most of their players the bulk of their audience is not as you know it's on the switch it's on the playstation okay one other steam deck question the the one other thing i forgot to mention is i do want to be able to plug this thing into a large screen and play it i don't think that's like the most common use case for me but

I do want to be able to sit in front of a television and play it like a console as I normally would. And for me with the Switch, I have done that way less than I expected because you have to have such specific hardware to pull that off. And like carrying around the dock is annoying. And I bought the little plug thing and that helped, but then I lost that. And so I want something that is a little easier to turn into like a full-fledged console when I want to. Is the Steam Deck good at that? You're still going to need a little dongle. Okay.

To mirror things. Dongle or dock. Yeah, you're going to need a dongle or dock. I think the official one's like, what, $100, Sean? It's less. It's, I want to say $70, $80, something like that. But you can buy much cheaper than that. I'd use like an off-the-shelf, like $35 USB-C hub that had HDMI. That worked.

I used docs from like JSAW, J-S-A-U-X. Great company with an alphabet soup name, surprisingly. 40, 50 bucks. And those docs do all the things you'd want from a doc. It's really easy once you get one of those things to get it up there. The question is, is your TV like 4K and you're expecting 4K visuals from a console that normally plays at 800? Because it's not going to look

as good on a big 4K TV? I will say, and Liam or producer can vouch for this, the least Vergecast-y thing about me is I don't care all that much about pixel density. So the idea of playing like at, you know, medium settings and having it work okay is completely fine with me.

I just heard Nilay screaming. This is the last time you'll ever hear from me on the Verge cast. But that is that is where I'm at. And especially with something like this, like battery life is much more important to me than like getting 10 extra frames per second. And so I think, again, the customizability of the Steam Deck to be able to like dial that up and down as I want it.

seems useful. You want a Steam Deck OLED. Like, you get the Steam Deck OLED, every once in a while you'll plug it into the TV. You'll be like, oh, I did it. This looks kind of shitty. And then you'll unplug it and go back to the really pretty OLED display and be very happy. I do suspect my Switch experience has been that I set it up in such a way that it was going to be really easy to dock. It was going to be great. And then most of the time I would sit on my couch in front of the TV and just play on my lap. And I would assume the Steam Deck will end up being kind of the same way.

Yep. It's so good. We'll watch some shows together with my wife, and I'll have my hand held out and get to do some gaming at the same time. It's great. Okay.

Okay. Are there any other crazy wildcard possibilities coming that we know of that might win? You mentioned the Rog Alley X seems like a possible improvement, if not sort of equal to the Steam Deck. Is there anything else on the horizon that in three months I'm going to be like, oh, this is the one I needed? I don't think so, but there are two very different directions you could go, and I don't have one of them here in front of me. But one of them is...

A 10.1-inch laptop with, like, keys that actually feel good. Full-size SD card reader. You could actually shove the SD card all the way inside. We've got full-size USB-A ports. It has more ports than a MacBook. USB-C ports. There's an Oculink port, HDMI. It is your dock built into it. And then you take these little things off.

And you got joysticks and D-pad. And even this menu button in the center acts like an Xbox button, which for some reason none of the other Windows handhelds have.

And this thing is way expensive. I mean, it's twice the price of your Steam Deck. It costs more than any of the other handhelds. But it doubles as a laptop that has the power of one of those other gaming handhelds. And a decent-sized battery, all this stuff. But, Sean, how is it to play? It is a laptop first. Yeah.

And a game handheld second. It's such a perfect gadget because that is both the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I want it so bad. Yeah, right? It's beautiful. It's like, what if instead of the touch bar, we just put a PlayStation controller in pieces? Like, I love it.

I can't get over the boss mode. Like you got this thing and you're like, no, I can't show my gamepad at work. Let's take this little metal. Let's take this little slip of metal out of the back of the thing and drop it on top. Boss mode. It's a physical boss mode. Yeah. Okay. Moving on from that. Okay. So your other possibility is you could embrace software piracy.

And you could buy one of these things, which looks like a Game Boy Advance SP. This is the Enverdek thing. But actually just comes with thousands of pirated games.

And so you could play all your Game Boy Advance and PlayStation games on this. Maybe you'd delete the pirated games first and dump your own ROMs or something like that. As I always do. As you do. Yes. I feel like Anabrick's already going to get wrecked for you just saying, yeah, it comes with all of the pirated games on it. Every time Sean talks about one of these, there was, I think you did a TikTok, Sean, talking about the new Anabrick thing. Yeah.

Every single comment was like, Sean, be cool, man. Stop telling people about me. Give me my free game. It really was. TikTok shop is all over those things. Like, it's been snitched on enough. Just to illustrate, though, that the EA, the EA FIFA game is not a Steam Deck problem. The top comment on EA Sports FC 24 is EA FC 24 not launching on PC after anti-cheat back to EA app.

So it's not a Steam Deck thing so much as it is an EA doesn't care thing. Interesting. Okay. So it truly is EA is like, there are ways you could get around the rules that we have. So we're just taking our ball and going home. Yep. That doesn't feel like it's getting better anytime soon. That does not give me hope for improvements coming here.

Which also means, listen, there's a lot of sports games this means I can't play anymore. But now I'm going to have to get into, like, cool nerd games. It's going to be great. You can play them streaming. That's true. Steam Deck plus Game Pass, I think, is starting to feel like the realist answer I have here. You'll have Halo and FIFA. Like, you will be the hit of every frat party you go to. Okay. Last question.

And then we have to go. Am I stupid for buying a Steam Deck right now in the same way that I might be stupid for buying a Switch right now? Where are we in the Steam Deck cycle? We're fine, right? We're mid, yeah. We're mid-cycle. We're not late yet. The thing that Valve needs, they've told us, like, told me to my face, the

What they need to see is they need to see a major improvement in performance without sacrificing battery life from a chip manufacturer before they start building the next true Steam Deck. And I've heard this from other companies, too, like Asus with the ROG Ally X. They were like, we don't think we can get it right now, so we're going to ship the ROG Ally X with the same chip.

And I don't think Qualcomm has changed that calculus at all with the Snapdragon. And even if it has, we're a ways away from that actually appearing inside of a product. Yeah, I think we're probably a good—we're at least a year out. I think you'll have one beautiful, blissful year before you get FOMO. At least!

Okay. And that's, I mean, honestly, in gadget world, that's all you can ask for. It's like a year is an eternity in gadget world. I mean, listen, I've made it this far into the PS5 cycle without upgrading. Like, it turns out I can manage my FOMO on this one. I am so impressed. Thank you. That's actually the other question I should ask. It's like, am I being ridiculous? Should I just buy a PS5 and move on with my life? Ooh.

I mean, if you have infinite money, yes. If I buy a PS5, I almost certainly will end up buying a Portal. And I hate myself for it, but it will probably happen.

Then I say don't because I want to save you from the portal. You could buy a used Steam Deck LCD for the price of a portal and also have a portal built into it with an app. Oh, well, that's very compelling. But PS5, like, if you do love that I'm sitting on my couch with my 4K OLED TV experience, it's hard to beat the PS5 for that. I'm playing Spider-Man 2 on it right now on just a gorgeous new OLED panel that was deep discounted recently. And wow, the pop.

of that city, the lights at night. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's really something. Yeah. And I, and I do love that, but I think I am increasingly coming around to like having a thing with me is more important than the sort of very best possible experience. I would love to have both, but I don't think you can really have both right now in the world we live in. And if you, if you really want to have that thing with you, I don't think there's anything that beats the steam deck.

There's just so much you can now take with you that you can't the same way through the windows handhelds. You can't really with Android. All right. Well, we have ended where we began, which I find very frustrating, but also sort of telling. I'm going to buy a Steam Deck. Yeah. I probably should have bought a Steam Deck a really long time ago. I'm going to buy a Steam Deck and I will start yelling loudly at EA. I will report back.

I'm so excited for you. Everybody's excited about the EA, though. Do you have any immediate setup tips? Before we talk again, I will have purchased a Steam Deck. What should I do immediately out of the box with my brand new Steam Deck OLED? I have so many nerdy suggestions. I don't want nerdy suggestions, Sean. I say this with love. I want to get to...

playing games well as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Like I am worried about the Steam Deck because I'm worried it's so fidgety and finicky that I'm going to spend my whole life goofing with the joysticks and not playing games. So Steam Deck has this, like on the Steam Deck, they have compatibility for games and you can also see it on the Steam software. So like you can just go download Steam ahead of time, find some games you like, make sure they're compatible, and then it'll be just out of the box, ready to go. Anything that's like yellow or red, you've

you'll have to mess with a little bit. That's where you have to start tweaking things. Like, I try to play Crusader Kings on it. Don't. It's not for the Steam Deck. It's terrible. There's even a tab in the store where you can just, like, only show me games that work well with the Steam Deck. And for the most part, they do. Yeah, and it's a lot of stuff, right? Like, it's a ton of stuff. The ones that don't is stuff that's, like, Mass Effect, which is...

an EA game. So you know why it doesn't work well. I will say the other game in my life that I have loved with my whole heart, the way that I have loved FIFA with my whole heart is Portal. And the idea of having a Steam thing that will let me play the Portal games forever is very exciting. And it will just straight out of the box. You'll be, you'll be off to the races, having a great time. Yeah. It really is so easy to just get going on the Steam deck, provided you already own games. Elden Ring plays well there. Uh,

Ori and the Will of the Wisps, if you haven't played that yet, play that on the DecoLed. Oh my God, it looks brilliant on the DecoLed. That game is made for HDR. Um,

Persona 5. Have you played any Persona games? Bits and pieces, but never, never super deeply. Okay. Get Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal, whichever one is better for your budget. Play that on Steam Deck. It's, it's, it's epic. We could, we could spend the rest, spend another hour talking about games to play on. Yeah, I was about to say, have you played Final Fantasy Remake yet? Like,

Beautiful on the Steam Deck. All right. My list is long and none of them are the only game that I needed. But, you know, we're doing the best we can here. You can get FIFA 23 fairly easily on the Steam Deck. Okay. That might help. Maybe that's like my gateway drug out of being obsessed with FIFA. I'll just play old games enough to satiate me and then go play better games. You get Ted Lasso in that one. You'll be fine. Exactly.

All right. Thank you both. This was very helpful. I'm going to go spend a bunch of money. Great. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Kranz is on a break. But for our first segment, Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop is joining us. Hey, Charlie. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. We have a lot of AI, music, copyright to talk about. There's some lawsuits. As always...

Drake is involved. It just seems to be the way of the world. There's a bunch of new phone events coming that just got announced we talked about. There are new party speakers from Ultimate Ears. That's very important to me. And we've got a lightning round. We've got a full show before the 4th of July. This is America's technology podcast. But before we begin, I have to issue a correction. There are some words that I only read.

And I never say out loud. Ooh, which one is it? There are lots of those words. Tons of them. I was a small, nerdy child in the middle of Wisconsin. Yeah.

who read a lot of books that the other children in Wisconsin were not interested in discussing. Just a whole universe of vocabulary words. What is like your main one from when you were a kid that you, you were like 26 and all of this, I feel like chameleon is like the classic, right? Where like half the people in the world grew up thinking it was Chamaleon. For me, I was learning that Hermione's name is Hermione and not Hermione as I called her for however many books I read before I saw the movies. Did you guys have these that you grew up with?

I still don't know whether it's dearth or Darth, and I don't want to find out. Fair enough. Don't email us about it. Don't tell me. And I don't know if it means a lot or not enough.

On Switched on Pop, we have an ongoing uncertainty about whether it is homage or homage. We have been written many emails that it's both. And so we've refused to use the word from now on out. Niche and niche, very confusing. Both acceptable. Also have been told it's both. So there's a lot of these. Yeah. One of them in recent times is Risk 5.

Which is, I would say, not a thing that comes up in casual conversation for anyone. Even the people who are working on RISC-V. Pryant just walked around the office saying RISC-V. I said it was RISC-V the other day, all right? I'm sorry. This is your correction. You got one on me. I apologize. I don't know what kind of Slashdot nerds are reading it out loud.

I mean, you're my people and you're listening and you know, like we have a bond here. You're listening to a podcast in which the word is said out loud and you, the audience know that I've mispronounced. There's something special there. Precious. I want to protect it. I'm just saying, I'm,

We are the only people who know. How do you know they're right and that you aren't now spreading the truth? Also a good question, Charlie. Am I being gaslit by an internet conspiracy? I would also like to posit that with all Roman numerals, the letter and the number are both correct. Like when the iPhone X came out and it was the iPhone X, it was the iPhone X. I don't care what anyone said about it.

I got a lot of crap for that, and it was the iPhone X because it was the iPhone and then the letter X. You call it whatever you want. I submit that both should be allowed at all times. So I would – I support this in theory. It's Super Bowl XL. Unless it's more than one letter. Well, no, but Super Bowl XL, like they were hyped for it, right? Yeah, they did a thing. That's your moment. But I was one of those Slashdot nerds who was like, it's Mac OS X. So I'm sorry. Like I – you know? Even though it's not, it's OS X.

Anyway, that's your correction. I'm just telling you what we share as a group is special. And I'm sorry that I pushed the boundary of it. But I'm also saying no one says these words out loud. It's just not a thing that happens. And I feel nothing. CharlieXCX has entered the chat. What is XCX in numbers? It isn't a real one.

Isn't C in Roman numeral? C is 100, so that would be 100. It would be 90 and then 10 more. I don't think Latin allows you to put them in this order. It's just Charlie C, I think. I don't know how Roman numerals work. Speaking of things that are bad at math, AI. That's true. That's good. That's good. Big week in the AI landscape.

A weird week for me emotionally. I'll explain why in a second. The major labels have sued two AI companies that you may or may not have heard of, Udeo and Suno. These are classic Silicon Valley names. We should all be proud. They're music companies. They're AI music companies. Udeo is the company whose tool was used to make BBL Drizzy. We'll have Charlie explain that entire chain of events. And then Suno has a deal with Microsoft. It's in Copilot, and you can ask it to generate music in Copilot.

How would you train an AI tool to make music, you might ask, as did the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America. And the answer is you just put a bunch of music in them.

You train the model on a bunch of music, including what appears to be a remarkable amount of the recording industry's music, not just music that's out in the world. The companies are sued. There's a lawsuit. The RIAA is mad. The RIAA is already mad. They say that they asked the companies what was used to train the models. The companies, Suno deflected and said their training data was confidential business information.

Fine. UDO made the same statements, and then Suno also said, our stuff is transformative and designed to generate completely new outputs, not memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. We'll get to that in a second, because that is actually a very funny claim based on what you can do. The RWA put tracks in Lawsuit, which we will listen to. It straightforwardly can just make Johnny be good in a song called Prancing Queen, which is deeply hilarious. There's just a part of this...

Where these companies knew that what they were doing was training on copyrighted work. And they kind of assumed that they would get away with it or at least be able to pay the money and move on. Can I ask a very possibly dumb framing question about this? Because we're going to get into the weeds of a very specific music case. But a lot of what you just described, the sort of basic outlines of how these companies trained their data and what they're being accused of doing and who's mad...

feels identical to me to every other conversation we've had about these ai models right like it seems to me that if you change uh johnny be good and suno to the new york times and chat gpt we're functionally talking about the same thing so like i want to get into the deep into this in in weird ways but like is there something different about the fact that we're doing this with music than the fact the way we've been doing this with like the web for the last year or so

Yes. And it's that the music industry is organized and aggressive when it comes to protecting its rights. So the difference is lawyers. The difference is lawyers. And also the history of music and the internet is lawyers. Like the reason I'm so conflicted about this is that I went and became a copyright lawyer because Napster came out when I was in college and I was radicalized because I thought everyone was stupid. Yeah.

Which is what should happen when software comes out when you're in college. I'm assuming there are some kids out there today who are radicalized by the presence of new software. But for me, it was Napster. I went off and became a copyright attorney. I sucked at it. I don't ever want anyone to think I was good at this. As a practicing attorney, I was garbage.

But the thing I did was I worked at a law firm that defended other college kids who got sued for using Kazaa against the RIAA. And the RIAA was suing college kids and actually suing the universities to get the IP address of the college kids on their networks who were using the tools and then identifying the college students and suing the college students. It was my roommate's computer. It wasn't me. I swear. It's just like a lot, right? That's just a lot. Like the universities are caving and not protecting their students. All this stuff is happening. Yeah.

And they were running this program at breakeven. They just wanted $5,000 settlement so everyone would be scared and stop doing it. And they won. That worked sort of. Now we're back to it, right? But like the movie industry is not quite as good at stopping the piracy as the music industry was. And they ran that program to kind of shut it down and chill Napster and Grokster and Kazan, all the other ones. They ran Grokster all the way up to the Supreme Court. That decision is 20 years old now, the RAA versus Grokster. Yeah.

Great. Then they did the iTunes store and they got deals with Steve Jobs and then other music stores and then they did Spotify and Apple Music and streaming. And all along the way, they have been extraordinarily litigious and extraordinarily protective of their copyrights because people have an emotional connection to music that they can trade on. This is true in a way that even Hollywood doesn't.

Like when Disney's like, we must protect the copyright to the Avengers. People are like, go fuck yourself. Like, right. In a way that the music industry, when it's like you're stealing music, you are making it. So artists don't get paid. There's an emotional resonance that argument tends to have. Charlie, I'm curious how you, how you see that changing over time, but yeah,

They've been good at it and they've run the playbook over and over and over again music is also a closed ecosystem of like four big companies and so you see things like interpolation where an artist uses a Bit of a song from another artist and fans get mad and then writing credits get distributed and money flows inside of a closed ecosystem None of that is true about the web. None of that is true about the media so if you're like our writer at a media company or

Like no one cares. Like there's not some big apparatus designed to make it seem like your work is emotionally resonant and should be protected in the way that the music industry does. So I think that's a huge difference here. The other difference, and this is where I really try to – I'm very curious for your take here, is that the outputs of these systems are just the songs. Right.

Right. And the lawsuits are about training. Right. All copyright lawsuit, all copyright is dumb. Like it's a dumb legal system because it just regulates copies. And so you made a copy to do this thing and you didn't have the permission to do the thing with the copy that you made. So copyright infringement. Weird. All computers do is make copies. We've talked about this so many times in the show.

So they're not talking about the outputs. But I think the outputs are so convincing. Like, in order to get to the thing can just make Johnny be good, it is obvious that you made a copy of Johnny be good. Charlie, what do you think, man? I feel like the music industry is the one place that copyright becomes part of public conversation in a very frequent way. People talk about when Pharrell is borrowing from Marvin Gaye. People talk about when Stairway to Heaven might be a

might have been copied by another song. People constantly are debating in social media, hey, you kind of sound like you borrowed this other person's thing. They should get a credit on it. There's no thing in journalism where someone's like, hey, you know, Neelai kind of used someone else's text. Maybe we should give David some extra credit on that piece that Neelai plagiarized. I'm sorry. I'm obviously not accusing you. I do that all the time. This is hypothetical. To me specifically, Neelai does that all the time. I have God mode Google Docs access and I just lift everybody's copy left and right.

There's just no other creative industry where there's this level of actual infringement that happens that then there is this internal litigious system where these major players are constantly trading credits back and forth and the public is in on it, often debating whether or not they're right.

The artists that they stan is making original work. This is part of popular discourse and it happens in music. So it's really different when the music industry is going after AI than if the New York Times is. Because I've just never been in a circumstance where I'm talking about that article was completely lifted from this other article. But we constantly talk about is so-and-so writing their own songs? Right. I'll give you a dumb example from movies. The movie The Dark Knight is great.

an interpolation of the movie Heat except with Batman. Yeah. Right? Like many of the shots are the same. Christopher Nolan is out there being like Heat is the greatest cops and robbers movie ever made. Like I just wanted to make Heat but with Batman and then you like watch both movies like oh shit like dude just made Heat with Batman. Yeah. And that's great and I think everyone's like this is the best like this is so cool.

And then you get to, I don't know, Miley Cyrus is writing Flowers, which the lyrics just reference Bruno Mars. Bruno Mars. And people are like, should she have to pay Bruno Mars? It's like, why? Why?

Like the melodies aren't – like she's just saying some of the same words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the expectation is that there should be some economic exchange of value. Well, and I would think then that the existence of that exchange of value is also how you get to something like this, right? Where it's not just –

everybody's sort of yelling and then nothing ever happens. It's that we actually have a system by which this gets solved, right? Where, where we have people get songwriting credits and then they get paid for it. And there's like, the music industry has built ways for all of this to work. And like you said, is very good at picking fights with those who do not play inside of that system. And so like, now I'm just thinking, okay, the difference between the music industry and, um,

the others who are fighting against open AI and others like just groups of authors or whatever is not only does the music industry have a system by which it understands how everybody is supposed to get paid that has existed for a long time and everybody kind of sort of understands.

But also is able to marshal that whole system against anyone who wants to exist outside of that. And part of what we've been saying forever is like all the money is on the side of the AI companies. Like who is going to be able to run a lawsuit against Google all the way to the end? And there probably aren't that many creative industries other than the music industry that might be able to do it. They've done it before. Yeah. And they have...

major concessions, we wouldn't have content ID if not for music labels going after YouTube. Right. And the music labels have gone after YouTube, right? Universal, this is where Drake gets involved. There's fake Drake that we've talked about endlessly on the show. Shout out to Laserbong, a song that has been just aggressively censored from every major platform. Boy, does TikTok not want electronic music about bongs on its platform. Sue about that, record labels. Like,

You want to talk about government censorship. Yeah. All right. The Chinese government is like no bongs for American teens. Just saying it. The piece of that puzzle that's super interesting to me is Universal was mad about fake Drake. They went to Spotify, Apple. They said, don't have these, don't have the song and Spotify and Apple control the catalogs and their music service. They could pull down. YouTube is open access, right? So anyone can upload anything. And then there is continuity and they have these other copyright management systems on YouTube. Yeah.

But it's not the same catalog control where you can just delete the song the way that Spotify and Apple Music could just delete the song. So they had to come up with some other system. And YouTube did give the concessions, right? They put out a list of like AI principles they would work on about safety, about this other stuff. And a lot of it was we're going to work directly with Universal and the rest of the music industry to figure out what tools are valuable and what tools aren't. And even to allow some creators to like do some of this AI music generation because we think it's cool. And then obviously we'll figure out how to pay them.

This is implicit if you're like co-announcing that tool with Universal Music.

Universal Music is going to get paid. Yes. Like the heat death of the universe could occur and Lucien Grange, the CEO of Universal Music, would get paid. Like he's good at it. Yes. These two companies did not do that. There's a quote from one of the VCs in Suno, a Rolling Stone profile from March. He just says to Rolling Stone, if we had deals with the labels when the company got started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.

Wild thing to say out loud. Incredible thing to say out loud. They said the quiet thing out loud. Because behind all of this, they haven't ever really quite publicly admitted that they are using copyrighted works. They've talked around that in every way they possibly can without denying it. And this is sort of like the big – yeah, this is the smoking gun. Right. And then the other smoking gun – and this is the part we should just listen to some of this music – is the output of the models themselves, which is –

I mean, let's listen to it and we can talk about it. David, take us through it. Okay, I have brought some sound. Thank you to Andrew and Liam for getting all of this together. We have three examples, and I will just roll through all three together.

Stop me when you have feelings about this. The first thing we'll do is this is just titled Real Chuck Berry. So let's just listen to this first. And this is all fair use. No copyright infringement intended. All right, YouTube. All right, go ahead. That's enough. Stop it before the robot sensors arrive. Great song. I can confirm. That is it. If you don't know that song, one, go watch Back to the Future.

incredible movie that you should just watch and to like stop go get cultured johnny be good chuck berry yeah rock and roll one of them yeah and now we have a song from udio which is not called johnny be good but just listen so i mean

So that one is not a copyright infringement just on its face. You can't. You can't copyright the AI work. Yeah. Okay. So that's one. Next, we have a James Brown. I just want to ask Charlie a hard question. Charlie is a professor of music at NYU, I believe, right? Yes. All right. Professor.

Let's say you didn't have Johnny B. Goode in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of rock and roll that is built on Johnny B. Goode. Could you back your way into Johnny B. Goode? Monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare, right? Is that the theory here? Do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of rock and roll? It's a really good question because if you look at this era of music where R&B –

rock and roll are sort of like rockabilly are all kind of one entity the music is drawing on 12 bar blues a very standard song structure they're often in the same keys that play well on guitar they're using a lot of the same kind of guitar licks they're mostly using pentatonic scales they're using a lot of the same language and you might think yeah you could just sort of back into that

But the precise rhythms, the exact words. Let's be clear. The copy is worse. It does not sound nearly as good as the real Johnny B. Goode. You could never get to that same place without having heard that Johnny B. Goode. I feel confident. And if these two songs, one being a real song and the other being nobody owns the copyright and it's made by an AI, if there were a copyright case made against Johnny

The copy, it would definitively lose. Many of these cases, many of these music copyright cases are not clear. They're often fought over eight notes, sometimes six notes, sometimes a general feel in the case of blurred lines and I got to give it up. This is a direct failure.

of the rhythm and the words and most of the melodies. So, no, you had to have heard this song in order to make Johnny be good twice. By the way, if you want more on Eight Notes and how complicated it is, Charlie and I did an entire episode of Decoder pulling that apart. We'll link that in the show notes somewhere. But let's move on. Let's listen to the next one. That's very good. All right, next up we have James Brown. First, real James Brown.

I feel good. I knew that I would not. I feel good. I knew that I would not. I mean, the classic. An all-timer. Another one where if you're listening to the Verge Chess and you've never heard this song, like, I don't know what you're doing. Go listen to Switch Song Pop. Yeah, exactly. You need it very badly. Go to school and then come on home. And now we have A.I. James Brown. Whoa!

Spicy. Spicy.

So good. Okay. So this one, I actually think is very fun because it, it is a little, it's like a little tiny bit further away from it in the way that the first one just is Johnny be good, but worse. This one is like one tiny. Yeah. This is further away from being just the thing. This is a lounge band with pretension where everyone's like, just play, just play it the way that, can you stop it? All right. Like we get it. You, you, you thought you had something. I have one question about this and it,

I actually felt the same way about Johnny B. Goode. The way these models work, right, is you ingest a bunch of data into them. They set a bunch of model weights and then they like statistically make the next bit, right? They're just sort of like assembling the thing around the prompt, which means they're kind of just assembling ones and zeros to make a sound wave here, which is pretty wild if you think about it. Like,

That makes sense with words, right? What is statistically the next word in the sentence around this prompt? When you get to like what are the ones and zeros of a sound file and you get to statistically here are the next ones and zeros, that's pretty weird. It's actually a pretty weird way to make an audio recording. And the thing that strikes me about these, this one in particular but the other one a little bit.

The instruments don't sound real at all to me. Those horns sound so fake. Not like synthesizer fake. No. But almost exactly like what you would expect if you asked a computer to statistically produce a horn section. Like it's almost – play it again. Just listen to it. It's so weird. Do you hear how like weird and thin it is? So good.

So good. It doesn't sound like an ensemble of horns. It sounds like this weird synthesized thing where the beginning of the sound and the end of the sound is exactly lined up. The sound is, yeah, there's this artifacting quality to it. This is like the Pope's jacket version of sound. Yes. It's like you got it close, but all the lines are wrong.

Why does he have seven fingers? Right. It's a statistical approximation of a hand, right? But as expressed as a horn section, which is really weird. Like just on its face and you can – people are like, it will get better and blah, blah, blah. But like you can – to me, you can hear a meaningful difference once you know what you're listening for.

And it's like, oh, this is a fake instrument. And it's not a fake instrument the way a synthesizer is a fake instrument. It's just fake. Like it doesn't make any sense. Over the top of all of it right now, I don't know if this is a solvable problem. I imagine it probably is, is that everything sounds kind of grainy. There's a top-level hiss.

It's kind of over the entire recording of any AI output. It sounds maybe equivalent to, Nilay, those files that you were not downloading in college. But like the really low bit rate MP3s when MP3s were actually noticeably worse. That's what these sound like. All of them have this artificial sheen on top that sound very lo-fi.

Yeah. In addition to artificial instruments. Just a side note, I can't listen to the song In Between Days by The Cure without mentally inserting the...

weird compression artifacts at the high end because I listened to a shit mp3 of that song so many times that the symbols are just forever distorted in my brain there's literally a plug-in and guitar pedal called lossy that is made to recreate the sound of early 2000s mp3s that's very good so if you need it I can run it's just the elder millennial button

So that's the sound. Yeah. Talk about the actual music here. Is this right? We're trying to be good. You're like, that's straight copyright infringement. This is weird, right? It's like slam rhyme. What do you think?

I think that it's the exact same rhythms. I'd have to look at the notes. I think they're quite close. They're the exact if they're in, maybe they're in a different key, but they're like the same intervals moving in the same direction at the exact same time. That would almost certainly lose in court. If these were again, it should be clear.

The AI companies are not being sued for the output. But these outputs, if you were to try to make a case, I'm sure a judge would rule in favor of the James Brown estate because it is the same line. Well, it's more or less the same. It's an interpolation of the line. There's slightly different words, but it's the same rhythms, same melody that almost always is going to –

That's always going to win. And here the output is proof of the input. They're not suing for the output, but the output seems unusually important here in that respect. It's like if...

if UDO is doing the thing that it claimed to be doing, which is, which is transforming stuff into other stuff. Uh, we have a very different kind of fair use case, but reading through the RAs lawsuit, like the thing they did over and over and over was just go reproduce songs that exist in the world. Uh, and that's how we're fighting about training. Like I went through and pulled a bunch of the prompts that they use to get songs. We did the same thing. They're so funny. They're so funny. Like to get,

uh, to get the green day song. I think it was American idiot. The prompt is pop punk, American alternative rock, California, 2004, Rob Cavallo. Perfect. Uh, and that produced a pastiche of American idiot. Yes. Amazing to get my girl by the temptations. It was my tempting 1964 girls. Smokey sing hits, fill soul pop, got my girl by the temptations. Uh, this one you'll enjoy Nili, uh, to get all I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey.

The prompt is Mariah Carey, but with a space between each letter so that it's not. Because presumably these things are trained to throw out artist names. So it's M space, A space, all the way through the name. Contemporary R&B holiday Grammy award winning American singer songwriter, remarkable vocal range. That produced All I Want for Christmas is You.

I mean, there's a million of these. So what they're proving is that it's inset. By the way, the argument in response that I'm sure we're going to hear because this is the argument opening I made about the Times lawsuit was one, no human prompts like this. And B, these prompts are so weird. They represent a hack of our system, which is remarkable. Yeah.

But I'm confident based on how openly I replied to the Times that that is what these companies will reply to. There is one very good one that the prompt was, create a song by an artist that rhymes with true string bean that produced a Bruce Springsteen song. That's very good. It's fantastic. So that question I asked Charlie about the – if you have the entire history of rock and roll, do you need the first song, right? Or do you need Chuck Berry? Yeah.

Okay. Maybe you don't. Maybe you do. Right? Like, I think this third example is the funniest example because I can't figure how you would get to this without specifically one thing. Go ahead, David. I'm glad you agree because I left this for last for precisely this reason. So here is, I won't even spoil it. Here's the real one. Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo. That is all for the boys. Yeah. Okay. Right? Everybody's heard it a million times. That's our boy. That's our boy, JD. Okay.

The longest lasting digital career that I never expected to happen. And here, here is the AI. I just want to say this was created by a prompt on Udio. This is in theory, a completely synthetic new work of art. Oh, it's so good.

It does sound like a Jason Derulo song. Like my critique of does this sound like real music aside. It's even got the little like vocal riff at the end. Like it's right on point. Like does Jason Derulo sound like synthetic music? That's your problem.

This one's interesting, though, because, you know, you've talked a lot about the issue that likeness is not copyrightable. Right. Yeah. And so there's a question of like if we're going back to this hypothetical, there is no suit that's suing over this particular Jason Derulo riff.

Someone could just – I could say Jason Derulo on a song probably and it's not – you can't copyright that. So you wait. Hold on. Hold on. This is weird. Didn't we have this fight the last time with the Metro Boomin tag?

If it's exactly the recording of the tag, though, right? Because the issue was that they actually kept in the sample of the producer tag and reproducing a recording. You can copyright that. So we can start every episode of The Verge cast with Ne-Li singing Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo.

And we will. I think he probably would have a lot of issues, a lot of nasty. I'm saying in terms of ways to boost this podcast profile after 13 years, Jason Derulo suing us is high on my list. That's wonderful. But this definitely proves like you had to have asked.

There is no monkeys in the back writing Shakespeare that ends up on Jason Derulo. It just doesn't happen. It's not possible. I don't know. I think if you took the worst impulses of the music industry and fed them into an AI, you might produce Jason Derulo. This one's also important, though, because everything else we've heard has been written by artists pre-copyright act of 1974. Yeah.

And probably also reflects some of maybe who the lawyers are writing these, you know, these cases, because, you know, we're talking about the cases reference Frank Sinatra. Right. Right.

And to bring in Bruce Springsteen. Right, it's like Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Chuck Berry. The early ones are all Chuck Berry, The Temptations, Frank Sinatra. Are you getting it like the judges are old? I'm saying everyone, yeah. And that's actually potentially very advantageous in knowing the judge and who you might go in front of. But then to show that also they're taking all the latest music as well. We're bringing in Jason Derulo, yes. Judge, have you heard, Your Honor, are you familiar with Jason Derulo? I want to bring Jason Derulo into the courtroom. Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo.

By the way, another total side note, there's an incredible Katie and Adipolis piece about hardcore Jason Derulo stans and what their stan culture is like that I will dig up and put in the show notes. Oh my gosh, that sounds fun. It is truly one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet. Just because A, it exists, and B, because Katie is good at finding things like that that exist. Have you all tried running these prompts, by the way?

No, have you? Yeah, you can go to Udio and to Suno and you can run the prompts that these lawsuits are alleging. And you don't get the same songs, obviously. But if you write, make a jazz crooner song about New York, baritone voice, you will definitely get... It's Frank Sinatra. There's just no other song but Frank Sinatra. I don't think that that really is hacking the systems. It's really easy. The other thing I get a lot, by the way, are...

Random prompt, hey, that sounds strangely like Crazy Town by Butterfly. My prompt was actually I tried to make a rap about American founder Thomas Jefferson. Butterfly by Crazy Town. Yeah, sorry. Thank you. Butterfly by Crazy Town. If there was a band called Butterfly that had a song called Crazy Town, that would be perfect. In another universe. I'm sure there is. I tried to – I did try to –

hack these systems a little bit and I wrote I want you to write a rap about American founder Thomas Jefferson about not throwing away his shot nasal male rapper boom bap and what I got was basically butterfly by crazy town just like total random yeah oh no

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for listening to this. There really is Butterfly by Crazy Town. I think it's also a little bit of, what was that song? Superman? Yes. Oh, wow. Who's Superman by?

I'll be your kryptonite or whatever. That was a kryptonite. Yeah. Kryptonite three doors down. Is that who it's by? It is by three doors down. It's got a little bit of that. It's just, you can so easily hear references that are not even the thing that you prompt. And I just, I have to say that if you right now, if you go to the homepage of UDO, the two most popular tracks are exact sound of likes of Eminem and Snoop Dogg. So people are doing this. Like people are trying to make sound of likes. Yeah.

So the argument from all these companies is, look, training is fair use. And that's the argument for OpenAI. That's the argument for Google. It's the argument for Suno and UDO. The organization of these cases is different because the plaintiffs are different, right? The New York Times is situated differently than the major labels. People have different emotional relationships with different kinds of work. But this is the argument. Like when Google eventually goes and sues OpenAI for training on YouTube –

the weirdness of that argument is Google telling open AI, the training on YouTube. It's not fair. Like that's, what's going to happen here. Hmm.

It's all the same argument. It's all kind of in a circle. Wait, so Google can do it and it's fair use, but Suno and Udio cannot do it because it's not fair use. This is the trap the industry has set for itself. What's that line? Yeah, right. It's like it's all the same VCs in all different directions. Kind of like the music business. That's true. There's that line, though. It's like you have to be perfect every time and I just have to get through once.

Yeah. It's like, I can't, I don't remember exactly what it is. That's what's like the hacker creed, right? Like you have to stop me every time. All I have to do is I just have to get through once. Yeah. And that is, that feels like the copyright situation for AI right now. This is a house of cards and maybe, maybe the times will win. Maybe, maybe,

The record labels will win. Maybe Sarah Silverman will win. Like there are so many of these. Maybe Google and OpenAI reach an agreement about training on YouTube and then a bunch of YouTube creators sue and maybe they win. Like you can just game it out a hundred different ways. At some point, someone is going to win a lawsuit that says training is not fair use. Yeah. Yeah.

The fair use argument here, I feel like is notable. I feel like it's quite different than what the New York Times can claim because part of fair use is, for example, the effect on the potential market. Right. And with New York Times, they're going to have to argue, well, you know, you're using our articles and.

Other people are taking that and creating text and putting it on other pseudo-journalistic sites, right? I'm pretty sure the Times is suing for both the output and the training. I see. Okay. I think these cases are all different. This is what I mean. The strategy for one doesn't work for all of them in the same way. Right. In the case of music, the marketplace argument, is it going to affect the marketplace? Yes.

I think they have a very strong argument here. I think the RIA has a very strong argument. They're basically saying, Suno and Udio, you are charging users money to make songs that you are allowing them to upload to the exact same place where we also have all of our songs, Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera. And so you are actually changing the marketplace for music, having used all of this output.

But is that not part of the argument you're saying? I think we have to find out how that shakes out. Right. Like, I don't know. They got to get assigned a judge, right? Like, right now what they've done is they put out a complaint in a press release. There hasn't been a reply to that complaint or an answer. They haven't been assigned a judge. Like, they haven't done any discussion. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. And we certainly don't know where they're going to put their focus. But that –

Part where copyright law is just about making copies and in the history of computing, every single copy has been litigated down to – again, I bring it up. I think I bring it up every time. MAI versus peak systems. You go look it up. This is are you, a third-party software seller, allowed to load software into a computer's memory without permission?

Crazy. A crazy court case. Can you put a disk in a computer and load software from the disk to the hard drive without my permission? Got litigated. And they lost. Crazy. They lost. And then we had to get all the way through caching. Are ephemeral copies on your ISP's network equipment? Are those copies that should be litigated?

This is copyright law. It's dumb. Like it is a very dumb rationale, but it litigates the creation of copies. So here it's, did you have permission to,

to make a copy to train your model of all these songs. And every time you didn't have permission, by the way, we want the statutory maximum of $150,000. Which essentially ends up being a pretend amount of money. It's got to be bigger than the US GDP. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Did you have permission to copy every song in the world? And if you didn't, every song in the world times $150,000 is what we're asking for. I'm going to run this. If you didn't have that permission, can we do an analysis that says that use is fair use?

So fair use is what's called an affirmative defense to copyright infringement where you admit it. Like I did it. But under this other rationale, that's fine. And so that's like the winding path here is – well, first, they won't even cop to having made the copies, which is why the music industry is putting out – well, here's just Johnny B. Goode. Like you can't output Johnny B. Goode unless you copy Johnny B. Goode on the front end, right?

Okay. So first we got to get them to cop to making the copies at all, which they claim is proprietary business information. Sure. Then it's, was that copy allowed? They obviously didn't have permission. This is why they're in a lawsuit. And then it's, is it fair use? And then we run the analysis.

And the analysis is like the purpose and character of the use, the amount of the use, the nature of the use, and then the last factor is the effect on the market. On the output side, I think the market argument is really strong. Right, right. So the question is, does this case – this is something I actually don't understand. Maybe you can explain with your copyright law degree. Is there like some wall between the input and the output in this argument that says –

Well, there's no marketplace for – You know that emoji that's like this with the hands? Yeah. The hands are up? Like I'm just that emoji right now. I don't know. Because I was trying to say, oh, well, there's a clear change in the marketplace for songs, which are all outputs. But it sounds like we don't know what the responses are going to be. But they could say, well, there isn't currently a marketplace for training data in this kind of way. And so it's not affecting that marketplace. But if you – there will never be a market if you just set the rate at zero. Right. Yeah.

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

Right? So that the Times can go to court and say this has an effect on the market. Look at this market. Look at the money that's moving around. And so some of these publishers are playing kind of a strategic game to say we should create a market to help that factor along. I think that's fascinating. But I don't think that the AI company – I think they thought they could just buy Forgiveness. Right?

And what's crazy to me is when it was Napster or YouTube or Google search, even buying forgiveness worked because people liked the companies. They liked the products. They liked the experiences they were having. And here people, I mean, I'm, if you're listening to this and you have a very different view of this, let me know. But our audience is pretty loud with us that they don't like these companies and they don't, they, they perceive this as a moral problem.

And I think that's just a very different position for them all to be in. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Which brings us to your moral quandary. It seems like you flipped sides from 20 years ago. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Yeah. The idea that I'm sitting here being like the RIAA has a point is crazy. Like it's bananas. And Sarah Jong and I have been like all day, every day, like slacking. Like who have we become? You know, this is like the horseshoe theory of copyright law politics. Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

It's weird, man. And I think one of the pieces of the puzzle – and I'm curious how you see this in the music industry itself, Charlie. One of the pieces of the puzzle here is that the internet just blew the bottom out of the music industry. Like there's no –

There's no way to be like a middle class musician anymore. There's no guaranteed way to make money. You're like, you're playing the same algorithmic game as everyone else. You're beholden to some labels. You don't have any power as an individual against these platforms. So now this next group of people who's come and taken your work for free and is going to extract value from you. Well, sure. Like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's kind of a vibe, but,

But I'm wondering if you see that reflected in the actual music industry. Absolutely. I mean, the public perception here is so different than what was happening back in the Napster era. Back in the Napster era, the labels were enemy number one.

selling out to labels was a big, you know, they were the worst players. Today, I actually think they've done a very effective job of using their proxy, Spotify, and let Spotify be the enemy. And everyone's like, Sony Music? Who are they? Like, Warner? UMG? Like, they have label deals. But they are not the topic of conversation of who's really screwing who.

Now, they basically help set the rates of what gets paid out in streaming. And it's the distributors now that really are taking all the heat. And so they're actually in a better place of public perception in terms of within the music industry. I see songwriters, producers, fans totally freaked out about what's going on. When you go and scan through a lot of the YouTube comments of some of these AI songs, the sentiment is,

We are screwed. Music is over. I give up. I am not learning an instrument. Like it's sort of – it is not – the future is bright. We're going to create new beautiful music. Like my creativity is going to blossom. I think that there is a real existential fear that exists within all of the AI world. But you're getting into like our human emotions and the beautiful creative output, hopefully beautiful. I mean, how?

How you feel about pop music, whatever. Jason Derulo. Don't bring Jason into this. We gotta get Derulo on the podcast. I don't know what we're doing. We really do. That's obviously like reading through the RIA's lawsuit, like that is, they talk about the creativity and human emotions and all. But is the end of this just...

they're trying to get checks in the same way that there are a lot of folks out there just trying to get checks. Like, well, because part of me, like, I think obviously that's the answer, but also part of me wonders if the labels are feeling the same way that you do, which is that, oh, this is not just a thing we need to make money off of tomorrow. This is like an existential crisis for our business down the road. Or if they're like, whatever, this is just a new turn. We have to make sure we get.

paid. This is an existential crisis because they are already losing market share to, uh, you know, people who are not on major labels, but major label, uh, listening is down, right? As an overall share of all listening, it's still a lot of it. So the majority of listening, uh,

So they recognize that flooding the streamers with more and more independent music has not necessarily been good for their business. And with more flooding, it's just going to bring everything down to everything is valueless entirely. If you own music and it gets played a lot on streaming –

And there's a lot of money in it. Like there's billions and billions and billions of dollars in streaming. How it's distributed is not always fair. And people get upset about this. But they very much need to figure out how to enter and participate in this marketplace. And I think kind of like a content ID system, they want to figure out how to properly license. You want to use Jason Derulo's voice? Jason Derulo says yes. And it costs this. And now we've got Jason Derulo copies and that's okay. So by the way, of all of the artists who would let his voice get deepfaked to make commercials? Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo.

I'm not even saying – I've talked a lot of Jason Derulo related-ish on this episode. I'm aware of it. I just know that he is a commercial mastermind. Yes. That man is going to make a bag no matter what happens. Yes. Friend of the pod, Blake Reed, he's a professor at Colorado Law, teaches copyright at Telecom, all this stuff. He wrote me a note last week or the week before and he said something really smart that I've been thinking about. It's related to what you're saying, David. Yeah.

Copyright law is like an economic system. We create scarcity and then we can charge money for things because you're not allowed to just freely copy them. So if you do something bad in the world of copyright law, the answer is you pay money and you fix it and you even out the economic problem that you've created. Right?

Olivia Rodrigo might have sung four notes of a Taylor Swift song. The answer is Taylor Swift gets a writing credit and then some money flows to Taylor Swift and that is the end of that story. And it's just an economic problem that you've solved by redistributing money. AI is a moral problem. This is the thing Blake pointed out to me. It's like the money doesn't solve the perceived moral issue here. So the labels might get paid. They might find some business model that lets them license the music into perpetuity or whatever.

But the thing you're seeing in the YouTube comments, the thing our audience is feeling, the thing I think a lot of artists are feeling, does not get solved by money. It's like another problem. And so you see these deals come up and get signed and whatever, and everyone's like, eh, it's still pretty icky. And there's something there that I think is important. I haven't quite puzzled it out. I actually want to do something with that idea. If you have further thoughts, let me know what you think about it. But that gap is the gap.

Right. We can move a bunch of money around like the VCs and Hollywood and Recording Industry Association of America. God bless them. They will move the money around. Lucien Grange will get paid.

Is that going to solve the other problem? Right. And that's I think that's really hard. Well, there's two things that musicians need to not fear. One is that because the output of all of these models cannot be copyrighted, this music is kind of in this weird limbo space. Like maybe it's going to we'll definitely find some streams, but it probably won't be synced on television and film.

Because no TV producer is going to want to have a song where they don't really understand the rights associated with that song and if they have the right to it. And does it also secretly contain a vocal sample of James Brown that has been stolen? So nobody wants to – any rights holder doesn't want to use this music that can't be used in a weird way. So I think composers and people who are putting stuff on TV and film, I think there's still very much a business for them until these much bigger –

legal issues get sorted out. The other place is that music is about human connection, and I don't say this in some wishy-washy way. It's like, there is no fandom for Olivia Rodrigo without an Olivia Rodrigo. You need the person. The time that the music industry tried to create an avatar

racially strangely coded what was that guy's name it was terrible they tried to do like their NFT avatar pop star and it was an utter failure both because it was completely racist and because why would we develop a relationship to this thing and so the fandom side the pop stardom side of pop music I don't think is ever going to go away what about Hatsune Miku right she's like the cartoon character

I just learned that she's officially codenamed CVO1. Yeah, there are these avatar characters that are finding some fandoms online. Yes, that's going to happen. I still just like – that doesn't – that's not Olivia. That's not Taylor. That's not Gaga. I'm sorry. It's just different. All right. We got to end it. They're not Jason Derulo. They're not Jason Derulo. Welcome back.

Do you remember when you first heard about podcasts? If you've been listening to this show, The Verge Cast, since 2011, maybe it was that. Or if you were a listener of the Engadget podcast before even that, maybe that's where you got into it. Or really, to be way less self-absorbed and much more realistic about it,

Maybe it was Serial in 2014 that turned you and, frankly, millions of other people onto the idea of radio on demand. That's when podcasts became a thing.

But I'd bet that for most people, the farthest possible distance back you could go would be this moment in 2005 when Steve Jobs got on stage at WWDC. And before he announced that Apple was switching to using Intel chips and before he said that Leopard would be the next version of Mac OS, he explained to a lot of people why they were about to start seeing podcasts in iTunes.

As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now. And podcasting, of course, is a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting. And what is podcasting? It's been described a lot of different ways. One way has been TiVo for radio. You can download radio shows and listen to them on your computer or put them on your iPod anytime you want. So it's just like television programs on TiVo. And that's true. Another way it's been described is Wayne's World for radio.

which means that anyone without much capital investment can make a podcast, put it on a server, and get a worldwide audience for their radio show. And that's true, too. We see it as the hottest thing going in radio. A fun fact from that one, by the way. Jobs talked about how there were 8,000 podcasts available at that time in 2005, and that was a huge number. He was really excited about it. Now, that number is somewhere between 3 and 5 million podcasts.

Lots changed. Anyway, a lot of people credit Jobs with mainstreaming both the word and the concept of podcasts, which is probably at least a little true. Podcast was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2005. It beat out, in case you're wondering, bird flu, reggaeton, life hack, whole bunch of other stuff. But Jobs didn't create the concept or the word. The concept, I think, is the one of those two that is trickiest to figure out.

Technically, you could argue that the idea of a podcast is just like radio. And we've had that around forever.

But I think you can make a pretty good case that the thing we now know as a podcast became a thing in about 2003, and it involved a guy named Chris Leiden. It was a very exciting coincidence for me. For one thing, I had been ignominiously bumped out of a wonderful job in public radio and looking for something new. Charlie Nesson at Berkman Center said, come and think with us. Dave Weiner arrived a few weeks later and said,

He said, well, Charlie told me David Weiner was coming. Charles Nessen, by the way, was the creator of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, which was kind of an early Internet think tank at Harvard that actually still does a lot of really interesting digital work.

Dave Weiner is one of the internet's earliest and longest tenured bloggers. His blog just turned 30 last week. He's also a key creator of RSS, which is the technology that spreads feeds of content around the internet. And he's just a guy who cares a lot about web publishing standards. At the time, if you wanted to start a blog, calling Dave Weiner was like calling Gordon Ramsey for tips on how to open a restaurant. And Chris Leiden hit him up. I wrote to Dave Weiner saying, uh,

six months ago I couldn't spell blog, now I want to be one. And we went through the blog cycle very, very quickly. But then he said, you know radio, I know programming. What the world needs is an MP3 file that can go worldwide instantly. I said, sounds good to me. And we got to work. It only took, oh, a couple of months, I'd say. And he said, I think we got it. I said, now what, Dave? He said, well, that's obvious. You're going to do a conversation with me and we're going to put it out. And we did.

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

Walk me around it. And I'm not talking about the technology. I want to know what kind of democratic experiment this blog idea really amounts to.

Well, gosh, it changes all the time. I mean, when we first started doing this, it was just a bunch of people sort of writing hello world and being amazed that it was possible to do that. And then the next step was recognition of other people and say, wow, there's somebody else doing this and learning how to communicate and, you

Gosh, I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, it is what you make of it. Everybody brings something different to it and different set of expectations and everybody molds it to be whatever it means to them. They don't call what they're doing there a podcast, but I mean, that's a podcast right there. Like it's two dudes talking tech. It's all very meta. The sound quality is good, but kind of messy. That's all the hallmarks of podcasts all in one place.

And I think the thing that Weiner says at the very end, it is what you make of it, turned out to be more prescient than maybe either of them realized at the time. But still, they weren't calling it a podcast. Nobody was. They were calling these things audio blogs, if they were calling them anything. There were a handful of them out there

But none of them were podcasts until Ben Hammersley showed up. Ben, I should say right up front, is not exactly psyched that he is part of this particular slice of podcast history. Fucking pain in my life. Because there's absolutely no honor in the origin story, right? That, you know, when I die, I want to be remembered for, I don't know,

a 20-year project or something, or saving orphans from a burning building, or something like that, rather than a word that was invented in a sort of deadline frenzy that I didn't even realize I was doing until a few months later.

In 2004, Ben was working on some early RSS and publishing tech and was also writing about the burgeoning tech industry for The Guardian. And in February of 2004, he published a piece called Audible Revolution, all about the cool stuff people were doing online with audio.

At the time, there were people building software that could automatically record radio streams over the internet and make them available for listening later. The iPod, obviously, was everywhere, and people were also building software to take all those streams that you had downloaded and put them onto your iPod. One step at a time, all of this stuff was starting to come together.

Ben actually interviewed Chris Lydon for the piece that he wrote, and Lydon talked about how audio over the web was going to change people's relationships with their audience. It was going to democratize media. They had all these big, high-minded ideas about what audio might do. But it's right there in the second paragraph of the story that Ben Hammersley does the thing. Actually, let me just read you the first two paragraphs.

With the benefit of hindsight, it all seems quite obvious. MP3 players, like Apple's iPod, in many pockets, audio production software cheap or free, and weblogging, an established part of the internet. All the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? Guerrilla media? There it is. That, almost everyone agrees, is the first published use of the word podcasting. It's a big moment.

Of course, Ben had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he wrote that word. The Guardian at the time was a print-first paper, as in you wrote for the paper and you had a print deadline when the physical printing presses would run at six o'clock. And if you missed that deadline, the words weren't going to go onto the page. And that meant that every day, the sort of working rhythm was that there was this big rush to get everything done by then.

quarter to six or whatever. And I'd written this article and about 5.30 or so, you know, just before the print deadline, I get an email from my editor saying, we've put it on the page and it's very nice, but it's kind of a line short and it doesn't look very good on the page. You know, the text hasn't gone green in the typesetting program. Can you write me another sentence?

just to pad it out, right? Just to make it fit beautifully on the printed page. And so I wrote an extra sentence and emailed it over. And the sentence is this sort of like mildly meaningless sentence of, but what do we call this new phenomenon? And then I sort of invented three words and put them in there and then sent it off. And then I went to the pub.

Look, on the one hand, thank God we call it podcasting and not guerrilla media-ing, you know what I mean? But Ben doesn't even remember how he came up with podcasts. Everyone now says it's a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, which is what Steve Jobs said in that clip earlier. And Ben basically just said, yeah, that seems reasonable enough. But he doesn't even remember coming up with it. He also, at the time, had no idea that

Truly no idea what he had done. And it was only a few months later that I got emails from the Oxford English Dictionary saying, where did you find this word? We're trying to find an earlier citation for it than your piece, and we can't. Where did you get it? And I, you know, pulled it out of the back of my head on a deadline panic. I had no idea. And I looked on all of the RSS-related development mailing lists and so on, which is the place where it would have been.

And I couldn't find any trace of it either. And so I said, well, clearly, I just must have made it up. And then he said, great, because it's word of the year. And then, you know, and then it became the thing that Apple took on. And that's what they called their app. And that's what it became known as. And, you know, the rest is history. Ben made very clear several times when we talked that he didn't invent the idea of a podcast, and nor does he deserve credit for what podcasts eventually became.

But all these years later, he does seem to kind of like the word he came up with. It's got that nice plosive P. You can use it as a noun or a verb pretty easily. It's a good, useful word that way. But also that within it, there are context clues that normies could understand. So, you know, the iPod was the biggest thing in the world at that time. That's where the pod bit comes from. And although it was super fiddly at the beginning to take these podcasts and put them onto your iPod,

Pretty rapidly, some software came out that made that simpler. And then soon after that, Apple made it possible within iTunes. And to say it's kind of like TiVo for radio that you listen to on your MP3 player is a pretty good sentence in 2002, 2003. Yeah. Right? To sort of not necessarily just hugely techie circles or even like super early adopters, but to sort of, you know, the...

Whoever comes after the early adopters, those people, they can understand it. And so I think it becomes one of those things where it's a fun word to say, but also it kind of has meaning within it that somebody who's used to new technologies can kind of understand straight away. And it becomes a self-evidently good idea, right? Yeah.

And then when you have a few years later, you have these very successful, professionally made podcasts which take full advantage or start to take full advantage of the fact that they're at liberty to use as much space or as little space as they need, as much time, as little time, different episode lengths, all that sort of thing, that people started exploring that and being able to self-commission and make programs that were something you would never, ever have heard before on regular broadcast radio. Then,

then suddenly becomes its own thing very rapidly and people start to see the value of it hugely tied in with the coolest gadget on the market at the time. So I think it sort of catches that lightning of all of those different things happening at the same time.

Most people do seem to agree that Ben coined the term podcast, or at least used it first. But there is one other person in the equation who definitely deserves credit. That's Danny Gregoire, who's a software engineer who used the word in an email to a list of folks working on and with an app called iPodder. iPodder was one of those things that could automatically take recorded audio and put it on your iPod.

The list at the time was brand new, and iPotter was an app started by a guy named Adam Curry, who had an audio blog of his own at the time called Daily Source Code.

Adam was a longtime radio guy. He'd also been an MTV VJ for years, and he'd also been an early internet entrepreneur. And for years at this point, he had been chatting with Dave Weiner and others about the whole concept of putting audio files in RSS. But Adam was one of the very first people to have kind of a whole vision of how this on-demand internet radio thing should actually work. Now, it was end of 2003.

when a friend of mine said, look at this cool thing I have. I said, what do you have? And it was the iPod. And I looked at this iPod and it was like, literally like lightning bolts because it looked like,

I don't have any. It looked exactly like this transistor radio my grandmother had given me when I was seven years old. This little Sony transistor radio, nine-volt battery. I'm like, yeah, you can call this a digital Walkman or whatever you want. But this, to me, was a radio receiver. And right away, I'm like, oh, let's hook it up to the

to this RSS thing. So again, with my very poor scripting skills, I tried to rig this together with Apple Script. And then Kevin Marks, who I think worked at, I don't know if he worked at Google, he worked in Silicon Valley somewhere. He basically said, oh, here's the script that you need. And boom, I was like, okay, it works. So I could create a blog post and then this little script will be looking to find a new item in my blog post with a file attached to it. It would download the file and

Because you still had to sync your iPod back in the day to your computer. And so it would trigger an update. And then in the morning, you'd walk in and there would be your iPod as the album would be basically. We didn't have the name podcasting yet. It would be kind of the blog name or the show name. And then it would have these episodes under it. And I immediately started to just.

Get the word out there because I needed software developers who could create this for real. That thing he's describing, that script, was iPod-er. It would watch RSS feeds for audio files, it would download them, sync them to your iPod, and you're done.

That's just a podcasting app, right? Adam Curry made a podcasting app. That's all it was. And in fact, his show, Daily Source Code, was in part a podcast for its own sake, you know, entertainment and content and whatever. But it was also in part sort of an ongoing beta test of how all of this podcasting technology stuff might really work.

So I'd like, okay, I have an audience. It's these guys and a couple of gals at the time who develop software. How do I keep them engaged in this process? Well, I need to give them content every single day. And it has to be about the stuff they're doing, which is programming. What do you do in programming? You create source code.

So I did it every single day for a long time. And I missed one from time to time and they became more spaced out over time, but we kept daily source code. And I would literally talk about the developments they had done the previous day. So they needed something to test on. There were no programs. So they needed something daily that sounded like a show that they could use so we could figure out, well,

where did show notes go? And, you know, when someone first subscribes to a feed, do you,

Give them the most recent one. Do you download all of the archives, all of this stuff? And so I know from my radio background, when you talk about people on the radio, it makes them feel good. So when I was talking about Andrew Grumet and, you know, the guys at iPod or X and, you know, one was in Australia and the other one was in, I don't know, somewhere in Vienna, you

That motivates you. And so it was both a feedback loop because I was the ultimate user, both from the content creation side and from the listener side. So you can hear this flywheel going at this point. The programmers are making podcasts. They're listening to each other's podcasts. They're building better software for listening to and making those podcasts. They're making new stuff to test it. And round and round and round it goes. And a lot of that conversation was happening on the iPod or dev email list.

which is where we come back to Danny Gregoire. In September of 2004, he wrote to the iPod or dev list that he could imagine a world in which people would want to be able to subscribe to one of these audio programs and get access to older stuff. He didn't know whether to call that older stuff posts or episodes or shows. He actually suggested calling them pods or soads, which I'm very glad did not catch on. And he thought they might want an easier way to go through the archives. But then he wrote this.

I guess one could argue that this is simply an RSS slash server side issue and that the podcaster, yes, I like making up words, should be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds of old soads by month, year, season, etc. He kind of made up podcasts again. Dave Weiner and others have over the years given Gregoire credit for, if not making it up, at least making the term podcast a thing. Adam Curry in particular is pretty forceful about it.

And for my money, Danny Gregoire is the one who showed up with that name. I know Ben Hammersley feels he invented it. He used the word a long time before that, but I'd never heard it. So Danny showed up with podcasts. It made a lot of sense because we were doing this on the iPod. And so it was obvious where it came from.

However it came into be, Weiner and Curry both bought into the word immediately and did a lot of work promoting the word podcast once it had been sort of unofficially decided on.

As usual, there is no clear story about who did exactly what, who knew what, when, where the word came from, and if anyone is singularly responsible. I don't know that it matters, to be honest. But I do know this. After Gregoire's email to the iPodder group, the word podcast caught on really fast. I think the first podcast to ever refer to itself as a podcast was probably Dave Slusher on Evil Genius Chronicles, which had been around in blog form for a couple of years and was becoming an audio blog at the time.

Three days after Gregor's email in September of 2004, like all good early podcasts, Slusher spends a long time talking about how all this newfangled technology works for making and downloading audio, talking about his servers and bit torrents and bills and all this stuff. And then he talks about what he calls it. And so and I saw somebody there's somebody has registered podcasting dot net.

and I saw Podcaster.net, and I saw Podcaster as a user agent hitting my RSS feed. And I went and looked at it, and right now it's just a coming soon page, but I'm going to pay attention to that. I want to see who's got that and what they're doing. But that term, I think they've coined the term.

So iPod platform just doesn't spring from the tongue. But what I'm doing right here and what Adam's doing and what Dave Weiner is doing and what IT Conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term. I am using that from here on out. So I am a podcaster. And they are podcasters. And I am podcasting right now. And you listen to my podcast. Fucking A.

Think about how quickly that changed. A few months after Ben Hammersley haphazardly wrote the word in a story, a few days after Danny Gregoire brought it up to that super influential mailing list, podcasts were being called podcasts.

One really fun thing about listening to some of the podcasts from this era is hearing these podcast hosts actually reckon with the idea of being podcast hosts. Like, here's a clip from a show called The Dawn and Drew Show, also from September of 2004. This is their very first episode, and you can hear them kind of trying on the term for size. All right, now. Wait, what is podcasting?

We're broadcasting to pod devices, which an iPod would be an MP3 player. But we don't have an iPod. Well, that's why we're podcasting. The term has been coined. Is someone going to give us one for free? I wish.

Dear Inca nut, please give me a pod. Because Drew has like a little machine, this little tiny thing that he puts music in. And I don't have one. It's a Lyra from RCA. But see now, that would technically be considered a pod in this regard. I think we should crawl inside of pods to do this.

I have some right here. Let me unzip it. Get out of my pod. Oh shit, there's someone in there. At this moment, it has still only been a few days since the word podcast hit that mailing list. And already it's just the accepted term. They're broadcasting to pod devices. They're podcasts. That is how quickly it happened. And now, for better or for worse, 20 years later, they're still podcasts. ♪

It's the First Cast. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Trans is here. Hi. I'm your friend that really misses Microsoft's Windows. The HoloLens people are so mad at me. Yeah.

They're like, how did you do this whole review and you never mentioned HoloLens, the thing that invented spatial computing? And it's true. Microsoft invented a number of these words with no regard for what they meant. They're like, HoloLens is mixed reality. That means augmented reality. This VR headset in Windows, that's Windows mixed reality. Like just anything. All the words meant the same thing. And I have done some very cool HoloLens demos in my life. I put on a HoloLens headset.

And I changed a spark plug on an ATV in the basement of a Microsoft building. And it guided me. Yeah. It put arrows like go to this drawer, open this drawer. I don't know if any of that was real or if it was totally state. Whatever. It was awesome. I was like this is definitely the future of changing spark plugs on an ATV. As long as the room is set out exactly right and the computer knows where all the parts are. Like this is how we should change spark plugs.

Which, by the way, if you set up the room exactly right, you know where all the parts are. You no longer need the computer to change the spark plug. Because you put the spark plugs where they go. But whatever. You outsource that. But they were like, imagine a mechanic on an airline. And now I'm like, man, I wish Billing had bought more HoloLenses. They're also in Seattle.

Just putting that out there, Microsoft. The problem with the HoloLens – oh, and I did a very cool demo. Microsoft, one of the few companies in VR that has ever solved co-location. So I wore a HoloLens and someone else was wearing a HoloLens and we were looking at the same thing at the same time. And like I would interact with – it was like a model of something. And I would interact with it and they would spin it the other way.

And no one else, as far as I know, no other company is on a commercial scale. I don't think the Quest headsets can do that. The Vision Pro can't do it. Okay, that's cool then. Right. So all credit to HoloLens. The HoloLens is a gigantic failure, which is why I didn't mention it.

It failed as a product. The person who was leading the project got forced out of Microsoft for sexual misconduct allegations. They did a bunch of layoffs on the team. They've reorganized their hardware portfolio and they say, quote, and this is a real quote, we'll make a next version of the HoloLens when the time is right. Oh, there you – is it right? No. No.

You know what they're going to do? They're going to make a bunch of AI stuff and print money instead of being like, you can change a spark plug with our glasses on. Oh, I'll never be able to change a spark plug though. Yeah. Anyway, so shout out to the HoloLens people. HoloLens also objectively the coolest product name in this entire category. Oh yeah. No question. HoloLens kicks ass. It's good. It's a good name. And the first one was cool. And the second one was even better from what I'm told. I never tried the second one. And you know, if...

If you have the perfect spark plug setup, that thing kicked ass. Are you saying you don't fondly remember the Acer AH101DBEY Windows Mixed Reality Headset? That had a good name. That's a good ring. Say it again. Say it slower. Slower. But Addy and I just decided what the words would mean in our review. We made a sidebar. We're like, this is what mixed reality means and this is what augmented reality means. And then Addy was like, you know, this is a flip of how Microsoft wanted it. And it's like, I don't care.

Like I'm putting my foot in the ground and this is what we're saying. Anyhow, shout out to the HoloLens people. I feel you. It was a cool demo. Did any Magic Leap people get at you? The Magic Leap people were just happy to be mentioned. Yeah.

Right? Like your product is a true AR product, optical AR that has fatal compromises in it and no one should buy it. They're like, oh my God, finally. The validation we deserve. Some people, I will say two things. Some people, I basically called the top on two technologies in this review. I said camera-based pass-through might be a dead end. I feel that it might be a dead end. And I said hand and eye tracking doesn't.

There's a part of it that's valuable for some things, but it's also a dead end. It cannot be the primary input. And I heard from people who've been working on this who have shipped. Wait, sorry, real quick. We should just say, by the way, this is your review of the Vision Pro, which went up this week. We talked a bunch about it on Tuesday. Yeah, yeah. If you haven't been living inside of Nilay's brain for the last week or so, he's talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which we just got to so fast. Yeah.

I was going to say, let's start over. No, this is right. I woke up. I use this app called Sleep Cycle as my alarm clock. And yesterday I woke up and it basically congratulated me on finally getting some sleep. Oh, boy. It was like, good job. You've got 400% more sleep last night than you've been getting. And I was like, this is a disaster. So, yeah, I'm wired. Now I've got too much sleep, but the amount of caffeine. I've basically only eaten Cinnamon Toast Crunch this week.

It's bad. All of it's bad. The inside of your mouth after that much cinnamon toast crunch. Well, I didn't eat it all in one go. Yeah, but it's cumulative. It's cumulative in that each bowl is 25 grams of sugar. Oh, my God. We'll miss you. I'm just like, the crash is going to be bad. We're not buying this anymore. I would get home and be like, what can I eat? You know, like fast. Cereal. Cereal. And I was like, this cereal. Anyhow, yes, Vision Pro Review.

I heard that the two things in my review that were like the big ideas that I didn't overly highlight is the Vision Pro is the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand-eye tracking they've ever seen. And I was like, it might have inadvertently proved that these are deadheads. And I have heard from people who have shipped millions of devices with camera pass-through and who have invested millions upon billions of dollars into hand-eye tracking. And they were like, you have a point about camera pass-through.

It's good for what it's good for. And like, it's not a dead end if you use it right, but Apple is trying to make it do too much, which I thought was really interesting feedback. That's fair. Cause,

Because it is like on the Quest 3, it's useful in spots, right? It's like I'm playing a VR game and I double tap on the headset and it opens up so I can see what's around me or whether I just kicked my dog or whatever. But it's not like you don't live in the pass-through. And so for that, I think pass-through works fine. Apple is like default state is pass-through. And I think that might be where it's pushing too hard. There's a really cool app.

that Gen 2 posted on the site where it's shortcuts. Yeah. And you can put the shortcuts all around your house so you get all these shortcuts by your TV and all this stuff. And that's really cool. It's like, oh, but to use that you have to word this all the time. Right. So no longer useful. So this is the argument. This is a simulator of what Apple really wants. But they're like, look, camera pass-through has its uses.

But if you try to pretend it's AR, you're going to run into the problem. We agree with you there. And then the note about eye tracking, and this person has spent a lot of money on eye tracking in their life, was you are overloading an input channel by trying to use it for output.

Which is fascinating. Wait, explain. So your eyes are an input channel. So you're used to taking in a lot of information with your eyes. They're an input channel. And then you overload it by trying to use it as an output channel to control the device. Oh, that's smart. And so the feedback was you hit on something that this industry has been talking about for a long time. Hmm.

Which is you can't overload your input channels as output channels. And you'll run into this problem with eye tracking because you have to look at what you want to look at. And you have to look at what you want to control instead of what you're looking at. Yeah, because historically eye tracking was just to like enhance it. So like if you kind of glance to one side, the camera would move. So you'd see what was ever whatever was over there. Yeah, that's like that's foveated rendering. Right. Yeah. And it didn't really. That's to save processor cycles.

Right. But no, it also made it a smoother experience. It made it like less, oh, I'm just staring at some screen. Oh, yeah. So you get some blurry. Yeah. Like it made it a nice experience. And even when you do it just on a regular laptop screen, I did a bit of, I reviewed way too many Tobii laptops once upon a time. It was really useful because you could just kind of look at things and it would pop up and make it a little brighter and make it a little easier. But like anytime I would try to like

control the computer with it. I was like, oh, I hate this. Yeah. Because I'd like glance at my watch and my character just start running around in circles. Yeah. And this is overloading an input channel as output. So when you use it in the way you're describing for foveated rendering, for highlights, right, that make it a little brighter, you're enhancing the input channel. Right.

When you use an output channel, you might overload yourself. So this person was like, yeah, in the history of eye tracking, this is a thing that we understand. And then they said I had it wrong on hand tracking. Oh. The industry believes in hand tracking. They're going to get it right because it is the most natural way of doing things. And there's a lot of work being done. I keep pointing out. It's a computer. It's always watching hands. And the Vision, regardless of that joke, the Vision Pro does misregister a lot of hand input. Also cannot differentiate between your hands and someone else's hands.

Also, you personally look really goofy doing it in the office. It was so good. Hold on. So if you're just sitting at your desk on the Vision Pro, I can just stick my hands in front of your face and start literally typing on your keyboard? Sure can. Or you can just put your hand in front and click your fingers together and it'll register a click. I'm going to do this to you so much when I see you.

I can't wait. Assuming that I'm wearing the headset. What a good prank. It's a good prank. You screw people like when I say the thing is lonely. It does not contemplate anyone else being around you who is not on their best behavior, which is all the time. All other people are not on their best behavior. Is it just assuming that like the pass through will suddenly pop on and you'll see David being like, yoink, yoink.

I assume that's the noise David's going to make. That's what I do when I type, yeah. The only AR feature is in it. Specifically, it recognizes David Peterson and makes that sound. So anyway, I thought this was all really interesting feedback because people who have been working on this stuff for a long time were like, we liked your review. Here are the things we think you got right and wrong. And the camera-based pass-through as a replacement for true AR is

feels directionally correct to me, right? This might be the ceiling for that. Eye tracking, they're like, yeah, people are going to react to it differently. We'll see. This is the first big eye tracking at scale that will happen. And then they're like, you're just wrong on eye tracking. So we'll see. The fact that like it just misregisters input to me is, again, people are going to, by the time you're listening to this, people will have them. By the way, iJustine has already worn a Vision Pro in a Cybertruck. Just immediately. Yes.

Like as soon as the embargo lifted, she was walking out. I mean, she's funny as hell. So like I appreciate that she did that. But like some other kind of YouTuber, not I, Justine, who is wonderful. Some other kind of YouTuber is going to do the actual thing with the Cybertruck and the Vision Pro. And the clock is just ticking. Unsafe. Don't do that. Don't do it. They're not going to listen to us. They're doing it for the views, man. Don't do it for the clicks. Do something else cool. So we'll see. I'm excited for people to actually get their hands on this outside of just experiencing other people's experiences. Yeah.

Uh, and I'm, I'm very curious to see how people react to hand and eye tracking in particular. Yeah. Also, if you got one, uh, as you're hearing this on Friday, the second, it's the day this stuff is coming out. If you got one,

Call us and tell us about it. This will be a super fun thing to do on the hotline for the next few weeks. I just want to hear people's experiences with the Vision Pro. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what's cool. Tell us what sucks. Give us your 60-second review of the Vision Pro literally whenever you want. Call the hotline. Send us emails. Yeah. Vergecastsattheverge.com. I'm dying to know. Tell me I'm wrong. Whatever you want. I'm dying to know how you feel about this product because it is new, and that's what's exciting about it, which leads me to...

Into the score. So a lot of people have asked me about the score. And I will tell you, and David in particular will tell you, that I drove myself crazy trying to give this thing a score after I'd written the review. Yes. Confirmed. Bonkers. Because I'm the one who says World of No Sevens.

And I gave it a seven. So if you don't know, World of No Sevens is a thing I say all the time, which is seven is just the default score. It is milk toast. And so if you say World of No Sevens, it forces you to make a very hard choice between six and eight. And I am the person who says this, and I definitely gave this thing a seven.

And I tortured myself over that seven. And you got it wrong. And David thinks I should have given it a seven. You got it wrong. I tend to agree with – I was genuinely shocked because I didn't participate in the review, but we did the Verge cast. And so I went as soon as it posted and I click and I scroll down and I saw that seven and I was like –

But we, it felt like a six in the Verge cast that we recorded. This is interesting. Yeah. And I sat on the Verge cast and I have to own this. Yeah. Inconsistent input system is a full point deduction. And at that moment in time, and I, this is a hundred percent true.

The score that was entered into our little score database was a six. Oh. And I said that knowing that I'd already typed the six into that database. What pushed you back up to a seven? I had a conversation with Viren and Becca, in particular Becca, our wonderful video directors who made this whole review with me and used it a lot in the course of that review. And they reminded me that it was really fun.

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

Viren's line was, we need a number that means fantastic but useless. Because he's like, this is fantastic. I have no idea why I want to use this. What about the number that says it's $3,500? Ha ha ha!

Do you know how many, you want fun, buy a Nintendo Switch and you'll have $3,200 left. Isn't that cool? So look, like I say, I was at six for a long time. Yeah. It was a six. I swear to you, it was a six. And Becky was like, but you have had like the thing you are doing, you are constantly talking about this thing that you keep coming back to like, I'm lonely in here is because you're having fun and you want other people to have fun with you, which is not how I feel about the meta quest.

Which is like, this is fun. Like, I'm swinging a bat around. Like, there's not a point where I'm like, look at this thing that is wild that I want you to see. Like, the art gallery of webpages that I made in our cafe. It's like, this is great. Like, nothing else can do that right now. The meta quest can sort of do it, but they're kind of shaky. Like, this is like perfectly locked in place windows and you can just leave the room and come back.

That's your point. It was fun. It was a full point deduction for the stuff I complained about, and it earned its way back into the seven zone.

Because it's not an 8. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say it was never an 8. There was no point was this thing getting an 8. Did it ever go to 5? So I was texting with Dan Seifert. Yes. Wonderful reviews that are number one Dex fan in the world, Dan Seifert. Traitor. Dan just left The Verge, so he was not part of this review. We wish him well on his new journey in life. It's going to be really fun for him. But Dan texted me after the review and was like, 7, huh? And I was like, dude. Yeah.

And, like, literally, people are jumping out of the woodwork to quote Dan at me throughout this process. Because Dan's quote is, you never regret giving something a lower score. Ever. Like, if you just instinctively pick the lower score and you won't—it's five years from now, you won't have regretted it. You might be like, ah, I gave that stupid thing an eight. Why did I do that? Yeah. But you'll never be like, I judged it too harshly. Like, literally. I'm, like, walking down the street and people are like, you know what Dan would say? Yeah.

It's like haunting me. And I will say that's not, that's not a like judgment decision. That's not saying like we reflexively hate products. That is like a decade of hard worn experience. Yeah. And this is the mistake that you made. Nilay is you got sucked in by the thing being fun. Like that's a stupid reason. It's just a stupid reason. Like this is a $3,500 computer. You don't judge your Mac book on whether it's fun.

You judge it on whether it does the things it is supposed to do. And this fundamentally doesn't. There are a lot of things that it is supposed to do that it either doesn't do or doesn't do very well. And it is $3,500. I take the criticism and I look, I knew what I was buying. I was buying a bunch of people telling me,

that I did give it a high score, including David on this very podcast. I knew how this Vert Chats would start today when I gave it that seven. You did. But wait, I just want to point at the tension of this, which I think is both the tension you felt in reviewing this and the reason we all think the Vision Pro is so interesting is that it is objectively cool and new and interesting, right? Like the Joanna Stern, our friend of the Wall Street Journal, made a video and there's a moment in it where she sets two timers and puts them over two different things on her stove. Like,

Like that kicks ass. It's so small and so silly, but it's so cool. And people really responded to it. That is not a reason to buy a $3,500 product or to wear a headset on your face all day. But she said, right. But it is cool. It is undeniably cool. The shortcuts thing you're talking about is like,

undeniably cool. And I want to live in a world where that is part of my life. I will not wear the headset and I will not buy the headset in order to get that thing. But like, that's that tension, right? Where you have these moments where you're like, Oh, this is it. Like they, they did it. This is it. And then you have to weigh that against what is this thing I have on my face? What does that mean for like my life? Is this worth the cost? And you even said in the review, right? We, we review things not just based on like what they might be someday, but

But what the thing is in the box, but that is so that's not that's not what got it to seven. That's my rule. It's a good rule. It's the right rule. But it's it's so hard to do, especially in this case, because a Apple has a longer history of being right about these things than most.

So like most of the time, you genuinely should not assume this thing will ever get better for any reason because most of the time it doesn't. With Apple, it usually does. And so you have to believe that more than with most companies. But then also, it's $3,500. Okay, so here's how I've been – that price thing. Also weighed on my mind. Another good argument for sex. It's a phone review. And even in phone reviews now, it's like you're just reviewing iPhones for people who buy iPhones.

You're very rarely writing a review for somebody with an Android phone except for like blunt curiosity if the camera is good or bad. My assumption going into this was that I was not writing buying advice. The people who are buying the Vision Pro are buying the Vision Pro whether or not I think it's good or bad. So what was that score speaking to? So the score was like, OK, like however many they sold, 80,000, 120,000.

The vast majority of people are going to try this thing on. And my guess is after a while, they're like, yeah, it's seven. And like, that is where that came from. Right. Is it kind of works a little time, but oh man, sometimes I have really good time. Like that, that exact thing. The reason it's world of no sevens is the, that is why I got there. Cause sometimes you're like, oh, this is great. And then sometimes you're like, I'm looking at the, look at the right. And like, that is like a real challenge in there.

It's not broken. The last Apple product I gave a six to was the Apple Studio Display, whose webcam basically shipped in unusable state. Right. And I was like, this is six because this display technology, the panel is fine, but the backlight technology is steam powered and this camera is effectively broken. Six. And that was what, $1,200, $1,300? $1,600. $1,600. I should have given that a five. Yeah, you should have. That's what I was about to say. You scored that thing too high. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Maybe I'm just wrong. But I will say a bunch of people pointed out the similarities between what this thing is and what the original Apple Watch was, which I think is really interesting because you gave both a seven. And I think you were right about the Apple Watch and wrong about this. And I've been trying to figure out what it is. Interesting. I know what it is. Wait, wait. I want to hear what David's theory is. I have two theories. One is $3,500. And the other is I think the first Apple Watch got the form factor almost right.

And hadn't quite figured out the use case. But it was like still a nice thing to where I got furious at the first Apple Watch because it didn't tell the time. The screen wasn't on all the time. Like how are you a watch if you don't tell me the time when I look at you? But it like...

The thing was there, right? It was close enough to being what the thing should be. And it already did some of the things you would want it to. So it was like that felt closer to me than this in which the thing itself is nowhere near what it's supposed to be. Nope. Not even close. And so that's where...

it loses me. Like I deduct a full point for absolutely no one thinks this is what this is supposed to look like. Yeah. I will say I feel very vindicated by the modern rereading of the Apple watch reviews. Guy got raked over the coals for giving that thing a bad score. Yeah. It holds up. It really does. And I was like, this thing is a, I believe I use the word bobble. I was like, this thing is a bobble and you will buy it. If you, and if you buy it, you will like it because people like baubles, but it is not,

It is technology that looks like fashion, and they need to figure out what it's for. And it took them three generations to get there. And they totally rebooted the software. And I was like, no one will ever – and like for a long time, people were like, you were just unnecessarily harsh. And this time, like literally there are screenshots comparing my two reviews being like, oh, this is the same exact thing. And the only thing I will remind everyone of is, one, I was right. I don't always remind you that. No, but two –

The path wasn't set when the thing was launched, right? So being like, this thing happened to the Apple Watch means it will happen to the other thing. They had to adjust. Right. And actually the review is like,

It adjusts them like they take the feedback from the market, from the customers, from the reviewers, and they like make decisions based on it. And one of the big decisions they had to make along the way was we are totally rebooting watch OS to make the interface different, to completely decrease our reliance on third party apps in an app store. You're just telling me your watch review should have been a six.

But also Apple with the Apple Watch. And this is true of a lot of Apple things, right? Apple starts by getting the hardware pretty close to right. And the software is further away. Alex will be joining Dan Sievert in the world beyond.

Yeah, can we just re-review every Apple product we've ever done right now? Let's just re-score them all. The watch hardware was very close. And then the question is, how do we make this thing into what it ought to be inside of this box? And Apple usually gets the box right. In this case, neither one of them is right. Yeah. Well, like, the watch...

ship to people and they could use it and they could set it up and they didn't have issues with it. And lots of people bought one. Wait, famously, Karl Lagerfeld could not set his up and wore it around. Do you not know about this? This is like an old Verchess joke. Karl Lagerfeld was photographed. You know, they gave it to all the fashion people. Yeah. They photographed Karl Lagerfeld proudly wearing it with the setup screen on the face. Yeah.

And that's like we call it we started calling it Lagerfelding where you're just like wearing a dead Apple watch just as a as a fashion accessory. But again, that was another reason to give it a seven because it was like a fashion thing, not necessarily a good one, but it was fashion. And this is just like such a developer kit that I keep them like I keep thinking about that a lot. Like it feels like such a developer kit. They just won't say it, man. There was a story in Vanity Fair. A beautifully photographed story in Vanity Fair. It was stunning.

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

could have been written 10 years ago about VR. Right. Right. Like the line is like Tim Cook saw himself on the moon. He knew it was the future. Like that line has been written about Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer. Yeah. You could have just like done find and replace magic leap for every time they say vision pro in that room. Yeah. Do you remember a magic leap?

Was it Wired that ran the story where Roni Bromovitz was like, I'm hacking the GPU of your brain? Yep. Like, we've just been here, man. And so I think Apple can't say it's a developer kit. They can't.

place themselves in the long line of companies that have been doing this for a long... They have to say it's finished, which is why they have to have entertainment. And they have to do this. James Cameron is in that Mani Fair piece, quoted as saying, this will change everything. And it's like, dude, you have done more scuba diving VR than anybody. I have been thinking about that quote specifically more than anything else that's come out of this whole situation. Because James Cameron is not generally a guy...

I was going to say he's not generally a guy prone to hyperbole, but he did once declare himself king of the world. I don't know if that was hyperbole at some point. At that moment in time. Yeah. But when it comes to like technology, he's not usually a guy prone to hyperbole. And so when he's like, no, this changes everything. And he's specifically talking about the display technology, which sounds really, really incredible. Yeah.

I was like, is there something there? Like, have we missed something that James Cameron is seeing that we're not besides like the inside of the headset? It is legitimately amazing display. I have nothing but admiration for how hard it was to build those displays. They are genuinely amazing. Yeah. Right. They are available apparently on the market. The same person who told me that hand tracking being something I believed in was like, you know, Meta could have bought those. Like they, that was a thing that Meta had the opportunity to buy, but Meta's version of that headset would have been even more expensive than

Because Meta doesn't have M1 chips or M2 chips. They would have had to go and buy chips with more power and more battery. And they're like, we can't go this way. Right. So Apple uniquely was able to make use of these displays, which are, again, an engineering marvel. But, like, James, they're just better than what you have now. Right? They're just, like, linearly better than the thing you have now. Yeah. And that, if you're James Cameron, like, you should be able to see, like...

This is the step change that changes it all is not the thing. I really want to sit him down and be like, did they just cherry pick your quotes here? They run Apple TV Plus, man. I know. I just need to know more from Jim. Jim, call me. I know you listen to Vergecast. He does. Yeah. We'll talk about the sub too. Jim was the guy who told me about Meta. He's the source. Yeah.

If you're listening, Tim Cook. That's not true at all. Not even like the slightest bit true. A little bit. By the time you're listening to this, it will be out. I'm sure some of you are driving your cars wearing it right now. Stop it. Pull over to the side of the road. Apple today, a little bit more. Apple announced along with the launch of Vision Pro, 600 apps will be at launch, which seems like a good number. It's a lot. For a new platform, it's a good number. Is it?

I think so. I mean, it's fine. It's some apps. But like this is the company that spends a lot of time talking about hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of apps. 600 is good. I'm going to point out I once got really roasted for complaining about how few games launched with the Nintendo Switch. Yeah. Granted, I did say it when Zelda came out and it was one of the best games ever made. Yeah.

But like here's the 600 apps. 600 is impressive. 600 is great. 600 is Vision Pro like built for spatial computing. It's also going to have all the iPad stuff. Yeah. One million apps, 600 Vision Pro apps. Sure. Which I will just point out is 999,000. 900. 600. 999,000. 400. 400. 400. Yeah. No, that's 100. That's a million. Yep. Okay. I'm going to do this math right. Okay.

Please leave this in. No, do not leave this in. Leave it in. Everyone's going to find Dan if we leave this in. All right. Which I'll just point out is nine hundred ninety nine thousand four hundred. That's a lot. That's a lot. Anyway, among this, it's six hundred is not bad if it's the right six hundred. But I'll just point out among the six hundred they announced.

Compatible apps from top cable services, including Charter Spectrum, Comcast Xfinity, Cox Contour, Sling TV, and Verizon Fios. Yeah! That's what I want. If you're rocking the Verizon Fios app in space, like, what are you doing, man? Paying your bills. If you buy the space computer and take it out of its little marshmallow and put it on your head, you're like, let's open the Charter Spectrum app.

What are you doing, man? Well, you got to pay your bill so you can keep downloading stuff. That is the funniest. And that obviously you're trying to point out like. Entertainment. It's entertainment. It's not Netflix. It's fine. Do you know what those apps stream in? 480p that they lie is 720p. That is the lowest bit rate video you can get, which is hilarious to me because this is all buried in the review. I should quick post on the side just to break it out. It will not support VR video on YouTube.

It just won't do it. Right. And they're like, because the VR video on YouTube is too low quality. Apple. So it doesn't have a YouTube app. And if you go try to watch them 360 video on YouTube, it just won't work. The end. Can I say one more Weedsy thing and then we can break out of this?

Go. Yeah. It's very weedsy, but people asked us this question a lot, and I didn't know the answer when we did the old episode. How does it smell? How does it smell? Okay. It smells like the future, obviously. The faintest whiff of roasted marshmallows. People asked about the Mac display sharing, and I finally know how it works, which is very complicated. It is basically a 27-inch studio display or iMac display.

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

No. So it is not pixel perfect at all. It looks great. I have no complaints about how it looks. But the thing that is happening is that it is imagining a 5K display that a Mac knows how to run at because that is the 27-inch iMac, the 27-inch studio display. It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440. But if you're running something 4K, it has enough pixels to just do it because it's a 5K display. But then the thing that is happening is streaming at 4K to the Vision Pro.

So it compresses that and it makes us smaller. It sounds both technologically cool and also like I just hate it in the same way I hate when people say, yeah, this is 720p streaming when it's secretly 480. Yeah. Or if they're like, this is HD and it's 720. Lies.

Just putting that out there. Anyway, everyone asked me that question, and that is the answer. And so it is correct that they keep calling it a 4K Mac display. It's actually a 5K Mac display, but it's actually running at 2560 by 1440, and whatever, it looks fine, and you'll use it unless you need pixel-perfect accuracy, in which case take your face computer off and just look at your screen. There we go. Six out of ten.

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Twenty years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California announced that it was time to rethink the car. Thank you very much for a nice introduction. He argued that gasoline and other petroleum fuels were polluting the air and keeping us hooked on foreign oil.

California was ready to get serious about a post-petroleum future. And the best technology to get it there was hydrogen. We will not just dream about the hydrogen highway. We will not just dream about the hydrogen fueling stations. We will not just dream about the hydrogen cars. We will build it.

This was 2004, years before Tesla got everyone jazzed about battery-powered electric cars. Batteries were promising, but another technology was farther along.

hydrogen fuel cells could power an electric motor using only hydrogen gas. The cars produced no emissions or byproducts except pure water. Governor Schwarzenegger got very excited about fuel cells, and he proposed an elaborate hydrogen highway to support them.

The government would help fund a network of fuel stations, which would encourage automakers to build cars. More cars would lead to more stations. And by 2010, the plan went, every Californian would have access to hydrogen fuel. From there, advocates predicted a nationwide expansion. It could spell the end of the petroleum era in America.

That is not what happened. San Jose, Snell Avenue, under maintenance. Oh, offline? Since this morning at 1050, the station is offline for repair.

Twenty years later, I found myself driving across California in a fuel cell car, a Toyota Mirai. Rolling again. I was there to find out what became of that grand green vision of the future. We are 23 minutes away from the closest station. Today, there are hydrogen-powered cars you can buy in California, and some stations to fill them up at. But the statewide network never materialized.

let alone a national one. And those stations are failing. Maybe one pump worked for months at a time. Sometimes none of them worked. The cost of fuel is skyrocketing. $36 a kilo, it's insane. And car sales are plummeting. I am trying to take it back to Toyota. The hydrogen experiment is teetering on the brink.

Right now, the auto industry is making this huge seismic shift to battery-powered cars. Why not hydrogen? Why didn't that version of history win out? Who's still fighting for hydrogen today? And what's happening to the thousands of drivers still sticking it out with their cars?

This all felt like a lot of questions that only a road trip could answer. So in June, I roped in fellow producer Andrew and our video director Alex. The three of us flew to San Francisco, rented a Mirai on Turo, and charted a course from the Bay Area to Los Angeles along whatever was left of the hydrogen highway. Here to here. We are going there. Yep.

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

Under the hood, a Mirai and a Tesla are surprisingly similar. They're both powered by electric motors, and a fuel cell is basically a battery. Just instead of pumping in electricity to store and use later, you're pumping in hydrogen to react with oxygen and generate electricity on the fly. In other words, a Mirai's hydrogen tank and a Tesla's battery are just two different ways of storing energy until it's needed to power the car.

Oh, there's one other difference. The fuel cell creates a decent amount of water as a byproduct. In the Mirai, it's almost a cup per mile traveled. So the car does need to... pee. As the Mirai drives, it occasionally shoots water out a little hole underneath the car. You can also make it pee on command by hitting a button on the dashboard. Yeah, go ahead and start the car.

The guy we rented from, Salman, gave us a quick tour of the car. The Mirai has a classy interior and a flashy nav system with a gazillion cameras. The only oddity is this hump in the back row of seats. The main hydrogen tank sits underneath it. It makes sitting in the middle kind of awkward.

Salman told us we'd love the car, but he wasn't sure about our travel plans. When I came to know you were in LA, I was like, wait a second. I was a little uncomfortable. The problem is most of the fuel stations in California are clustered around the Bay Area and Los Angeles. There's just one pump on Interstate 5 in between. It's at a place called Harris Ranch. We kind of need to refuel there.

The drive to L.A. is about 325 miles, which is right at the max range of this car.

But we also need luck. Because apparently, hydrogen stations just don't work sometimes. There's always a credit card issue sometimes. The card system is down sometimes. The pump itself is down. Sometimes there is not enough hydrogen. Which makes our stop at Harris Ranch very high stakes. If that pump is down, then you're stuck. You've never driven down to... No, not yet. I didn't want to take a chance yet. Not exactly a pep talk.

Oh, and there was one other FYI, the price of hydrogen. Two years ago, it used to cost like $50 or $60 to fill the whole tank. Yeah. Right now, it's like $180, $190 to fill the tank. So that is killing everybody right now. $180 to fill up a sedan. Yeah, I don't think we budgeted enough money for the fuel for this trip. Yeah, so that's why I got disappointed. I said, you know what, I'll just put on Tiro and live with it like that.

And with that, there was nothing left to do but hit the road. Excited and suddenly very nervous. Turn right, then your destination will be on the left. Thank you, Siri. Our first goal was to visit as many fuel stations as we could find in the Bay Area. On paper, there are about 17. But according to the Station Finder apps we downloaded, lots of them were offline or under some kind of maintenance. All right, we're

All right, we're coming up on it. I never know, you never know what kind of gas station it's going to be. Almost all the stations here are operated by a startup called First Element Fuel, but they're co-located at Chevron or Shell or other gas stations. First Element leases the space from station owners. The pumps themselves are bright blue with these eye-catching awnings. Some of them are slotted right in between gas pumps. Others are set apart in their own little pads and parking lots. Well, let's try to figure this out.

The mechanics of filling up a hydrogen tank are familiar enough. Insert a credit card, select fuel, connect pump to car, hang out for five minutes. But unlike gasoline, these pumps are moving around a compressed, freezing cold gas. So there are locks and sensors to keep everything safe and reliable. The nozzle is a heavy metal cylinder with a collar that keeps the hose in place. It's all a bit of a learning curve.

It says, uh, hide the yellow mark. I don't see a yellow mark, but I think pulling this sleeve down locks it. So we just push it in and then lock it. Oh, okay. We're filling up.

We tried fueling at most of the stations we visited, and we always got fuel, but we hit a glitch or two in just about every part of the process. The screens are both wigging out a little bit, but it seems like it's fine. I don't know what door sensor means, but... Oh, I think it timed out or something. I gotta run my cart again. One constant struggle: the nozzle kept sticking to the car after we were done filling.

I hate that. I hate yanking that hard on anything. But that was just our experience. We also talked with every Mirai driver we ran into. Hey, excuse me. Do you have time while you feel to chat with us for our story?

And their stories were more extreme.

Menedype and Rupesh have been driving their Mirai for about four months, which for them has been a nonstop hunt for working stations. I had no idea just how frequently they run out of fuel or glitch or lose pressure and can't fill tanks completely. And it's always a pressure on you mentally because you never know which one's going to work, which one's not going to work.

Fuel has been so hard to find that these guys have been stretching every kilogram. That's how hydrogen is measured. When they drive, they accelerate and brake carefully. They avoid air conditioning because it uses more fuel. And when the car says it still has 100 miles left in the tank, they look for a station. Boy, so you have to really think about how you're driving the car. You have to focus on the road and also on your mileage here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Manatee bought the car because of a huge incentive from Toyota. Every new or certified used Mirai comes with a $15,000 preloaded fuel card. Toyota told us it's there to absorb any volatility in fuel prices. And that's not the only big promotion out there. So this car I got for $15,000, hard to beat, right? Yeah.

Rebecca said she went shopping for a battery electric car, but she couldn't find anything for less than $40,000. But then, a Toyota dealership offered her that killer deal on a 2022 Mirai with only 23,000 miles on it. Toyota's also been offering big discounts on new Mirais. Earlier this year, you could get $40,000 off some models. That's a 60% discount.

That's it. I'm paying a fortune in hydrogen, but it'll take something like 13 years. I did my math. Okay. It'll take 13 years before this vehicle will cost me more than if I were to buy a 40,000-something electric vehicle. Rebecca loves her Mirai, so she's content for now. I'm going to stick with my Mirai as long as I'm in California. Menedip and Rupesh...

Not so much. I don't think, to be very honest with you, after the gas cut is finished, it's not worth maintaining this car. Menadeep left us with some words of caution about our trip, which, believe me, we took to heart when we said goodbye to the bay and headed south for Los Angeles.

No AC, go easy on the pedal, always know where the next station is, call the stations. Stick to the speed limit. If possible, go below the speed limit, try to be in the rightmost lane. This is not the road trip that we were looking forward to having, you know. I'm really sorry for spoiling your road trip.

We could start with the windows down. Also, how fast do you think I should drive? We should play with the settings on the car to see. It tells you how efficiently you're driving.

On the road to L.A., I had a lot of downtime to think about everything I'd seen. And most of my questions boiled down to, how did we get here? Which you can think about in two ways. There's the big broad version. How did hydrogen cars start out so promising but stumble so badly? And then there's the more specific, why is it so hard to get fuel for your car?

So as we cruise down I-5, let's start with the big how did we get here. For that, I called up Keith Wipke. He's an industry veteran from the National Renewable Energy Lab. You did come to the right person. I've been involved in hydrogen technologies for over 20 years. Keith took me all the way back to 2004 again. Back then, fewer people were talking about climate change the way we all are today. But California had a smog problem.

They had the worst air quality, especially in the Los Angeles basin. And so they had a strong driver to clean up local air quality. Battery electric cars existed, but they were not the obvious heir apparent to gasoline. In fact, as a storage medium to power a car, batteries kind of sucked.

Batteries were not good at the time. It was lead-acid batteries and nickel metal hydride was the up-and-coming thing, which of course is what Toyota launched their Prius hybrid with, was nickel metal hydride batteries. That was a challenge for batteries at the time, 80, 90 mile range, very heavy, a lot of compromises on the vehicle itself to get reasonable performance. So hydrogen kind of was being born into that era.

Meanwhile, hydrogen was showing a lot of promise. You could get all the emissions benefits of a battery electric car without the battery. Plus, fueling was a faster and more familiar process for drivers. It looked like a great successor to gasoline. And California got on board. I'm going to encourage the building of a hydrogen highway to take us to the environmental future.

The original plan called for at least 150 stations by 2010, but that never happened. Around 10 demo stations came and went, which were co-funded by a federal program. Everyone learned a lot, but it was an R&D exercise. By the end of the decade, lots of people were asking, where is this hydrogen highway?

But in 2013, California reset and recommitted. It put up $20 million a year for stations, and between 2015 and 2020, at least 37 new stations came online.

I do think that I and a lot of other people thought it was just going to be a bunch of dominoes falling, that the hydrogen stations were going to go 50, 100, 200 stations in California. The Northeast market would launch and take off there. And then people like me in Colorado would maybe get a backbone across interstates and we would be able to drive a hydrogen car as part of our daily commute.

The car companies played their part, too. In 2008, Honda began leasing a fuel cell sedan called the Clarity. Toyota made a big splash with the Mirai in 2015. This isn't just another car. This is an opportunity to really make a difference. The name we've given to our new car is Mirai, which in Japanese means future.

The other fuel cell car you can buy today, the Hyundai Nexo, hit the U.S. in 2018. So I've seen and witnessed various launches, and for me, each one of them felt like, okay, this is it. Now we just need more of that car. We need more fueling stations. And then we see the other companies launch. Okay, that's further validation that this is going in the right direction.

The fuel cell market has come a long way in 20 years. But along the way, something else happened too. Batteries got good. Good enough to power cars. And in the race to replace gasoline, batteries had some big advantages over hydrogen. I called up The Verge's transportation editor Andy Hawkins to explain. And he started with the fact that we already have a power grid.

With EV charging, it's pretty simple. You install the charging station, you plug it into the grid, and barring any software problems or anything else like that, it's good to go. It should work. That was a huge advantage in the early days of battery EVs. Drivers could just plug in at home.

It's a different story with hydrogen. There needs to be a supply chain. You need to truck the hydrogen in for where it's being produced to the filling stations, fill up those tanks at the filling stations. And then once the hydrogen has been depleted, the whole process starts all over again.

Now, granted, it's taken years for a public EV charging network to mature. In fact, it's been a mess of competing standards and flaky charging ports. But it's getting better. And the reason reveals another huge difference between hydrogen and batteries. The hydrogen car industry, as it were, didn't have a Tesla. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elon Musk!

Tesla hit the scene in 2008 with the $100,000 Roadster, and it has utterly defined the battery electric business ever since. Over the past 15 years, its cars have steadily gotten cheaper and more ubiquitous. And along the way, it also built a huge charging network.

Which is so good that pretty much every other automaker in the U.S. is now signing on to Tesla's standard. We're getting the entire industry realizing that Tesla has the best charging network. They have the best chargers, the most reliable. We're all going to just end up using Tesla's as we probably could have realized a lot sooner. In other words, say what you will about Elon Musk. And on this podcast, we surely do. But Tesla gets a lot of credit for dragging the battery electric market into existence.

which is something that hydrogen just never had.

There was no Tesla startup company that was out there innovating, taking its lumps, losing millions and millions of dollars in the process, but also generating lots of buzz, generating lots of hype and speculation amongst investors and on Wall Street and the government as well, and sort of proving eventually, ultimately, that there was going to be this huge untapped market for battery electric vehicles.

In the end, the numbers tell the story. Battery electric cars and charging stations exploded across the country.

Today, there are roughly 43,000 public charging ports in California alone, whereas hydrogen seems to be backsliding. There still is this plan that exists, like state grants to companies to build out stations. The only problem is the companies that have agreed to do so are now backtracking on those plans. Like, for example, Shell said that it was going to create a huge network of hydrogen stations in the state. But then they saw sort of like the writing on the wall and said,

decided to start backing out of that plan. They declined a $40 million state grant to build like an extra 50 stations. And then they went ahead and just closed practically all of their stations in California. Gotcha. So basically there's money out there and there just aren't takers for it right now.

There's a pretty strong belief right now and sort of in California and elsewhere that battery electric vehicles, they won. Hydrogen could have, you know, surpassed EVs at some point. But over the last like 15 or 20 years, it's very clear that battery electric vehicles are the preferred alternate technology for private vehicles. And hydrogen is kind of becoming a bit of a footnote. So there's the big picture. How do we get here?

But that doesn't fully explain what we saw. Glitchy stations, the price of fuel, the shortages. To understand those problems, I needed to talk to First Element, the company that runs almost three quarters of the stations in California. So I called up one of the co-founders, Shane Stevens, who was pretty candid with me.

Here's what happened.

Back in 2013, the year California announced new funding for hydrogen stations, Shane was working at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine. He watched the wave of interest in hydrogen build again, and he saw an opportunity on the fueling side of things.

So that same year, he and two partners founded First Element. From there, we actually got some initial financing from Toyota and Honda, and we were able to leverage that private financing and go get California state grants. We won 19 stations, and we were able to develop the initial network of hydrogen stations. First Element made a big push right out of the gates, and it got around 15 stations up and running by the end of 2016.

That speed was a calculated risk. They built more, smaller, cheaper stations to prove out the network and encourage automakers to start selling cars. And the plan worked a little too well. The cars came more quickly, the stations were overwhelmed more quickly, and the customers drove the cars more than we anticipated early on. What became obvious to us is that this technology for hydrogen stations was actually not really ready for prime time commercially. The

The equipment that we're using in the field today, it hasn't gone through sort of hours of testing to make sure the robustness is there, to make sure that little design kinks or design flaws have been worked out. And then when it's used regularly every day on hundreds of customers,

all of a sudden you start to see that it maybe doesn't hold up as well because it's never been tested under those conditions. Which lines up with our experience at the pumps. Lots of little quirks and rough edges. We had a lot of hiccups on uptime. We had performance issues. We had logistics issues on supplying the fuel, and we actually had a lot of fuel runouts to the station. First Element has spent years trying to fix that first big mistake.

Its newer stations are bigger, more expensive, and more robust. They can store more fuel and dispense more at a time. They actually store hydrogen as a liquid now rather than a gas, which has been a lot easier. And, you know, the reliability is getting much better than what it was as well. I don't think we're all the way where we could be, but we're now at a point where we see a commercially viable product.

That also tracks with what we saw. We just had fewer hiccups using the newer stations, and drivers told us they were more reliable. But those older, flimsier stations are still there. They account for nearly half the overall network, and they're not going anywhere.

We've invested quite a bit of money into permanent infrastructure that's in the ground. To upgrade the station is not really an option. And the other thing is we don't want to leave customers hanging that may be depending on that station, even if it's an older generation. So drivers are stuck with temperamental hardware and First Element is stuck maintaining it.

So right now we're charging considerably more for hydrogen than what we'd like to be and what we think we should be. And that's not the only cause of expensive fuel. First Element and others have had a hard time competing for hydrogen against much bigger industries like oil refining and agriculture.

There just isn't enough to go around. There have also been supply chain problems and other market issues. The war in Ukraine is even playing a role. So prices have been spiking, and not enough hydrogen is making it to drivers. But unfortunately, that's the reality of the landscape today. First Element is now staring down the barrel of a vicious cycle —

The more the fuel network struggles, the less viable the cars look. It's the exact opposite of what they were trying to do by opening all those stations in the first place. Our transportation editor, Andy, said it best. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like enmeshed in like the worst chicken and egg scenario that you could possibly imagine. You know, like...

People aren't going to buy hydrogen cars because there's just there's no way to fuel them. Right. And then you're not going to have anyone building any fueling stations because so few people own the hydrogen cars. So you're just kind of like trapped in this limbo state. It's just not making the right kind of argument to people who are out shopping for these types of vehicles. We got to take a short break. We'll be right back.

Because that was the one I had in the foot in the charging case all day. Oh, okay. It's four o'clock. We've been driving for about three hours, and we're somewhere in central California. Our tank is half empty, and it's time to start looking for Harris Ranch, our hydrogen oasis. So far, we see a lot of parched farmland. Andrew, what is your weather app telling you? See, right now it says 70 degrees.

Oh, I just don't have service right now. Okay, now updated weather. Kalinga 101. Excessive heat warning until 8 o'clock tonight. A few more miles of nothing, and then an exit sign. There it is. You see it? Oh, Harris Ranch. All right.

Harris Ranch is perfectly spaced between San Francisco and L.A., so it's a waypoint for all kinds of drivers. There's a Shell gas station and what is currently the largest bank of Tesla superchargers in the world. Over the years, though, the owners of Harris Ranch have made it a destination unto itself. They've built a massive Spanish hacienda-style hotel, multiple restaurants, and the only gift shop I've ever seen with a butcher counter. All right.

All right, there's the Shell station. We drive past all of this. Past palm trees, past a barbecue pit slash convenience store, past an under-construction RV park, and there, off on a lonely plot of concrete, is one first-element hydrogen pump. This is a very weird place. There's a couple flies in the car. Well, should we gas up? Let's do it.

We pull up to the pump, get out, and my god, the heat. It just hits you. Better not take seven tries to get hydrated. The buttons are hot! Unfortunately, the pump doesn't care how hot we are. Alright, it's done. That doesn't feel like a full tank's worth, but we'll see when we turn the car back on. Please seek attendant.

We got fuel. I don't think there's an attendant here. I hope I didn't just break it for everybody else. Did you get a full tank? Well, let's see. 236 miles. No. We didn't get a full tank. We start the process all over again. This time, the pin pad freezes, then gives us an input error, but then it resets and fuel starts flowing. Dispenser is... Okay. We're getting more hydrogen.

We finally get our full tank, but then the nozzle gets stuck to the car. Again, 101 degrees, no shade, dwindling patience. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Look, I know I'm harping a lot on these finicky pumps, and I know normal gas stations don't work perfectly either, but it's shocking how much trouble we've had in just a couple days of driving. And it's not hard to imagine frustrations like these dragging down the whole idea of hydrogen.

Anyway, the nozzle finally comes free. We retreat to a picnic table under a tree and wait for other fuel cell drivers to show up. We wait for an hour, two hours, three hours. We watch cars come and go from the Shell station, the Tesla chargers, the convenience store. We get dinner at the barbecue pit and we eat it while staring across the parking lot of the pump.

We dub this, of course, the "steakout." It's a nice break from the road and the heat, but we are beat. And I am pretty sick of loitering at gas stations. Finally, around 8pm, as dusk is falling... Is that a Mirai? I sprint over like a lunatic.

The driver, Billy, is happy to chat, and he wants to know if the pump is working. Did you guys just fill up? It was earlier today. No, we've been here for a few hours. Have you seen anybody else? Nope. Oh, really? No, no one else. Do you ever, do you see people when you stop here? Uh, sometimes, sometimes. Yeah. But yeah, it's...

You don't really see that many people. It's, you know, hair's age. Billy lives in L.A., and he's gone up to San Francisco a few times. He even tips us off to a second route. There's a station in Santa Barbara a couple hours up the coast from L.A. It's far enough north that from there, you can get all the way up to San Jose along Highway 101.

As long as you drive conservatively and don't hit any detours. It's a more scenic drive. But does it feel a little scary? At the same time, yeah, you get a little bit anxious because by the time you get to the next station, you have like 50 miles left. You have to plan it out. If you don't plan it out, it becomes a nightmare. Yeah. Have you never run out of gas? Almost, almost. But I mean, Toyota gives you the service where you can, they'll tow it for free.

Yes, that is another real perk that Toyota offers. Free towing. I have not used that at all. Yeah. So luckily, I did not go with it. And that was the end of the stakeout. Billy filled up and left. It was fully dark out, and we were wiped. So we called it quits and found our hotel. The next morning, we shoved off for L.A.,

Cruising through a very hot and dry central California, it was hard not to think about the broader environmental mission behind this car. The hydrogen highway might have been created to fight smog, but today it's promoted more as a tool to fight climate change. And in that light, hydrogen is pretty controversial.

You have this supposedly green fuel that's actually made in a very, in a not very green way. Justine Kalma covers all things energy and climate here at The Verge. I called her up somewhere along I-5. I wasn't driving. So tell me why this does not make sense for cars. Why should we not be in this hydrogen fuel cell car right now?

Okay, so there are a lot of reasons. So first of all, the majority of the hydrogen that we have today, even though it doesn't emit carbon dioxide, you know, when it's used to power a car in a fuel cell, that hydrogen was most likely made from gas. 95% of the hydrogen made today comes from a process called steam methane reforming.

which produces carbon dioxide emissions. It also depends on a supply chain that tends to leak methane. Those are two gases we're desperately trying to keep out of the atmosphere right now. Methane is a greenhouse gas pollutant that is even more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide. And so a majority of hydrogen today is what you call gray hydrogen. Meaning basically dirty.

Now, there is such a thing as green hydrogen, fuel that's clean and climate friendly. So the way that green hydrogen is made is typically using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Right now, electrolyzers are pretty expensive. And green hydrogen is something like four times the cost of gray hydrogen right now. So costs have to come way down.

To be fair, lots of power that's used to charge batteries isn't green either. About 60% of the electricity in the U.S. comes from gas and coal. And to pull off a clean battery electric future, we're going to need a lot more green energy and big upgrades to the grid. None of that is going to be easy or cheap. But even in an ideal future that's flush with green electricity, hydrogen is still less efficient.

A passenger vehicle can much more easily plug into the grid and run on a battery that you juice up with renewable energy. So with hydrogen, you're adding another step to that, right? You're basically using renewable electricity to create the hydrogen to then run the vehicle versus you could also just run the vehicle on renewable electricity in the first place,

So if the question is where do we spend the hydrogen we're making, the answer might be things that are harder to plug into the power grid. There's more hype around it for industrial uses, for aviation, for shipping, because it's much harder to get a plane off the ground or to have a ship that is battery powered. Passenger vehicles are just so low down on the list.

What did it say? Turn right? Turn right. After another long stretch of Highway 5, we pulled into L.A. All right, here's the palm trees. 1,000 feet. Turn right onto San Fernando Mission Boulevard.

We were excited to check out the scene. There are more fuel cell cars and stations here than anywhere else in the state. But we'd also read about a months-long hydrogen shortage, and our fuel map showed a lot of offline stations. I see it. It's glowing those blue awnings. Oh, it's nice looking. Are those... A little futuristic looking. They're a little snazzier. We found lots of fuel cell drivers really quickly. And, well, here's your vibe check.

It's been awful, to be completely honest. I'm trying to trade it in for a regular car, like a gasoline car. We bought this with the idea of saving the earth or whatever, and of course, saving for the gas, but it never happened. Have you ever run out? Oh, of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You get towed? You get towed.

We heard lots of familiar things. Love for the cars, frustration around fueling, flaky stations, brutal prices, range anxiety, regrets. We also saw one Hyundai Nexo. The owner, Tigran, actually solved a mystery for us. He told us why fuel nozzles kept sticking to our car. So I've been standing here for five minutes trying to yank it off. Yeah. And sometimes it just...

Okay. Like, right now is a good example. Okay, this has happened to me. So it gets, like, really cold. Like, you can tell there's, like, ice. Oh, okay. So that's... It is just, like... Yeah. ...freezing. It turns out that the more the pumps get used, the colder the hardware gets from all the cooled hydrogen moving through. So the nozzle can freeze to the car. Oh, wow. It's... Yeah, my finger almost stuck to it. So that was actually not bad. It took about...

10 seconds. But other times I've literally sat, waited five minutes for it to loosen up. We thought we were pulling on that handle wrong or something. We thought there was some trick that we didn't know, and it's the freezing. It's just the freezing, yeah. I later realized that Shane from First Element had warned me about this. I even found a video from Toyota about it. At times, the nozzle may become temporarily frozen and unable to disconnect from the vehicle for several minutes.

Shane had told me the problem was largely resolved, which doesn't seem to be the case. I met people here. They're like, oh, I carry a bottle of water with me and I just kind of pour a little bit just to loosen it up a bit.

All in all, Tigran is at the end of his rope. Does it feel like you're just in this kind of pilot program? Yes. Yeah. But it wasn't sold like that. When I got it, it was like, oh, you just go to... It's like filling up your gas at a regular station. You just go put it in and you're done. And when it's working, it's fine. That's generally true. But most days it doesn't just work. So what do you think you're going to do with the car long term? The resale value is very bad. Yeah.

Oh, God, you're just really stuck. Yep. I looked to trade it in for a Tesla, and Tesla's like, we'll give you $10,000. Yeah. I owe $30,000 on it. That feeling of a bait-and-switch? We've heard that a lot. One Mirai driver, Denise, says the dealer misled him about the value of the car.

What happened?

the fact that they give you a fuel card for $15,000. Oh, they consider that part of the value of the car? Yeah, they consider that part of the deal. Gotcha. Okay, so now the resale value of the car is not what you thought it was. No, it's not what I thought it was. I asked Toyota about this, and they declined to comment on it. But they did confirm that the fuel cards are not transferable. Altogether, these stories started to paint a picture about how these cars were sold to lots of people.

Over and over, drivers told us that they were shopping for a battery electric car. But someone, a friend, a salesman, the internet, talked them into a Mirai. It was a new, zero-emission, luxury car. It's like driving a Lexus or BMW.

And it was priced like a Toyota Camry. It was a win-win. Except it wasn't. Here's one more Mirai driver, Jonathan. What do you think you're going to do with it long term? Get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I will. But I do like the newer models. Don't get me wrong, they're very beautiful, but it doesn't matter what model of the car comes out. It's just this. Yeah, if you can't drive it. If you can't drive it.

Talking to these drivers made me think back to a very clarifying moment at Harris Ranch. During our stakeout, we got bored and wandered over to the Tesla area. And after hours spent listening to fuel cell drivers talk about hanging in there, meeting Tesla owners was a shock.

Where are you coming from? Where are you going to? We live in Manteca. We're headed to Anaheim to go to Disneyland. Super reliable and super easy to get charging everywhere. Yeah. I'm excited. Yeah. Road trips are amazing when you have a Tesla and you have the whole thing. They were all just so unburdened. That's the best end state for any new technology. You forget about it and just use it. And right now, hydrogen just isn't there.

After everything we saw on this trip, there's one player I can't quite figure out. Toyota. Why is Toyota still so committed to the Mirai? In the first half of this year, about 322 fuel cell cars were sold in California. Total. For reference, during that same period, maybe 200,000 battery EVs were sold. In California alone.

And yet, Toyota is still marketing Mirais and pushing them at huge discounts. During the Paris Olympics this summer, Toyota provided 500 Mirais to shuttle around athletes and bolster the green credentials of the Olympics, which actually upset a lot of environmentalists. So what's Toyota's angle here? I spoke with Craig Scott, the general manager of Fuel Cell Solutions. Craig said that hydrogen has been a big hedge.

It's back to the foundational things of what are we trying to accomplish, which hundred move carbon to the tailpipe. And the only way to do that really in a complete way, in a zero emission way is, you know, there are two competing technologies, batteries and fuel cells. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure we had a good foothold in both.

Toyota continues to hedge more than most major automakers. It made hybrids a huge success with the Prius, but it's dragged its feet on full-battery EVs. Today, the company sells just one battery-powered Toyota and one model Alexis, compared to more than a dozen hybrids. And the Mirai. Critics have spent years dinging Toyota for this, and the company does have a lot more battery models in the works. But it hasn't abandoned the Mirai.

I put this question to our transportation editor, Andy. Why is Toyota sticking with the Mirai? He's mystified too, but he argued that it's not just about the Mirai. These companies have this technology. They want to use it in some way. They spent a lot of money. They've invested in it and they want to get something out of it. So they're all sort of casting about and looking for ways in which this fuel source can be useful for future applications.

Toyota is working on powering buses, trucks, and trains with its fuel cells. It's developing stationary generators. And Honda, Hyundai, and other companies are doing similar work. First Element is investing in truck refueling. This is what our environment reporter Justine was talking about. There are other places that fuel cells might make more sense.

It's the next step in that hedge. If any of those industries go all in on hydrogen, Toyota and others will be there. And the Mirai? Its success or failure might not matter so much. This is the big one. We gotta see what the final price tag is.

It's the end of our road trip, and we're at a gas station back in the Bay Area. Our rental was not point-to-point, so after we were done in LA, we had to turn around and drive back across California. We ended up taking the more scenic, high-risk, high-reward route along the 101, the route Billy from Harris Ranch told us about. It gave us one last hit of range anxiety.

If the first station is out of order for any reason, then it's another 10 miles to the next station. Which we have budgeted in. Yep. And if that's out of order, it's another 10 miles. So, like, I could see this getting a little hairy, but so far...

We're okay. We pulled into San Jose with 40 miles left in the tank. All in, we put about 875 miles on the car in a little more than three days. We also had to return the Mirai with a full tank, so we were treated to one last shock. 120 bucks? 130? What do we think? It's got to be more than the most. Okay. 4.605 kilograms.

$165.78. That's a big finish for the road trip. If we'd been driving, say, a Toyota Camry, we'd have spent about $30 on gas. Road trip complete. It's a good dealable souvenir. The most expensive tank I've ever purchased.

In the back of my head throughout this story, I've thought a lot about Laserdiscs of all things, the failed competitor to DVDs. I've wondered, is that what this is? Is this just an alternate history story? A "why the world went this way instead of that way" kind of thing? After taking this trip, I don't think that's quite right. Batteries won, but I think that there's still some part of the future that's up for grabs.

Hydrogen is still more portable than batteries, and it's a much faster way to move energy around.

And there are still lots of hydrogen believers out there. California is funding new stations. First Element alone is trying to build 34 more right now. Honda just launched a plug-in battery/fuel cell hybrid car. The federal government is pouring money into green hydrogen production. My point is that "if you build it, they will come" energy is still out there.

So, fuel cells may yet find their niche. Maybe the hydrogen highway will be full of semi-trucks. Or maybe it'll be a hydrogen waterway. Or an airway. I don't know.

Here's one last thing that I do know. In spite of everything, it was weirdly fun to be part of the Fuel Cell Club. Most of the drivers I talked to were so open and honest and helpful, it was great to swap tips and stories with everybody. I got the sense there was a community here, even if it was based on shared grievance. That's probably not the way that Toyota or First Element wants drivers bonding, but I got a kick out of it. Case in point,

After we filled up at the final gas station, I happened to see another Mirai driver wandering from pump to pump looking at all the little screens. I asked him what was up, and he said he couldn't get his pump to work. The screen was frozen. I told him the pump we used was fine, and he pulled over to that one. And just like that, I was a fuel cell driver too.

All right, that is it for the Verge cast today and for this year. Happy end of 2024, everybody. Thanks to you, frankly, for listening to all of this. If you got to the end, send me an email and tell me you got to the end and I will, I don't know what I'll do, but I'll love you forever for it. Thank you to everyone who listens to this show ever. And thank you so much for being part of this community. Doing this is so much more fun because we get to do it with you guys. And we are so grateful for everyone who listens to the show and tells us you listen to the show and has ideas for

We love it. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, or feelings, or anything else that you think we should put in even longer VergeCast next year, you can always email us at VergeCast at TheVerge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. The show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're going to be off for the next couple of weeks, and then we will be back at CES. Come see us live. Come listen to the show. Hope you have a wonderful holiday season.

See you soon. Rock and roll.

Thank you.

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