Ben McKenzie vs. crypto

Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of number go up and also down. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting in my backyard on sprinkler duty. So a thing you've probably already guessed about me given my entire deal. is that I'm not good at keeping plants alive. Um I can't remember how tall the grass is supposed to be when you mow it. I don't exactly know which of my plants is which and how often I'm supposed to water any of them.

But we had some work done on the backyard this weekend. They they put down some sod, they made the backyard bigger. It all looks great. I'm very excited about it. And the guy gave me a speech where he was like, David, you have to water this thing like you would not believe. for the next ten days. So for the next ten days, I I live out here in the backyard just moving sprinklers around. This is apparently what I do now. Anyway, we have a really fun show coming up.

First, we're going to talk to Ben McKenzie, who is an actor and author, and you might know him as Ryan Atwood from the OC. He just made a documentary called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money about kind of his descent into the crypto world and sort of his own descent into madness as a result. It's a really fun documentary with a lot of really interesting reporting and lessons about crypto.

So he came on the show to talk about how he feels about crypto now. Then the Virgis V song is gonna come on and talk about her, I think, 18 month journey testing continuous glucose monitors. And actually kind of her own descent into madness. We're doing descent into madness here on the VergeCast today, while I sit and descend into madness moving sprinklers around.

We also have a really fun hotline, really fun show today. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I'm I'm dead serious. My phone reminder just went off and I have to go move the sprinkler. This is the VergeCast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks, instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way.

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All right, we're back. So a few years ago, Ben McKenzie, who you might know as an actor, he was Ryan in the OC, he was in Southland, he's been in a Batman show, he's been in movies, he's been in lots of stuff. I'm sure you've seen him before. He became sort of an unlikely voice against crypto in the in the pandemic heat of the crypto craze. Ben was one of those people who would tell anyone who was listening, including, you know, television commentators and Congress. Why crypto was escaped.

Um, I will just lay my own cards on the table. I largely think he's correct about that. I think there is a lot of interesting stuff about crypto that became largely irrelevant because of the way that crypto turned into a bunch of ways for people to make a lot of money. So I wanted to have Ben on the show to talk about basically his whole experience with crypto and this documentary he made called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. It's out this week.

If you can go find a theater that's playing it, it's playing in a bunch of big cities. I think it'll probably get released more widely soon. If you can see it, go see it. But even if you don't, I think you'll enjoy this conversation. I wanted to have him on To talk about what it's been like to be down this rabbit hole for so long and what he's learned about what crypto is and how it got to be. I really enjoyed it. I think you will too. Let's get into it. Dan McKenzie, welcome to the VirchCast.

Thank you. Thank you for being here. We're going to talk about crypto and our feelings, which is, I would say, fundamentally what your documentary is about. Um but I had this thought at the very beginning of the documentary, which I think is where I I wanna start, where you sort of as a joke, start like all the way back with the origin of money. And the very first thought I had like ten seconds into the documentary is like, Are we sure the story of crypto is actually a story about money?

And so this is th this is my first question to you. Is the story of crypto actually a story about money? That is a great question. I I'm afraid the answer is both yes and no, in the sense that All money's made up, right? We just like it's just a social construct like government or religion. And we've used there's a very brief like uh graphic sequence after the the initial sort of playful misdirection where we

briefly show you many, many images of different monies that have existed in the past, like feathers or, you know, uh whales' teeth or whatever. Um, and so all money's made up, right? Um But what is money? It's trust. It's it's it's it's a it's a way of running an economy so that, for example, if I give you a dollar bill, you take it from me, not because you trust me, but because you trust that you can use it, because it works.

And that's I think where crypto falls apart. Um crypto says we don't need human trust, we can replace that with computer code. Um you know, we can create this trustless system, uh, and and avoid all that pesky, you know, human interaction and human uh uh uh human relationships. But that's of course nonsense, right? Because if if

money is trust and you're saying it's a trustless car currency, then you're saying uh it's like a governmentless government or religionless religion. The words you're searching for are anarchy and cult. Um it it just fundamentally doesn't make sense. The other answer in terms of like Could it be money is also effectively no, but it's because

Uh the technology sucks. Uh Bitcoin can only do five to seven transactions a second. Uh Vs can do twenty four thousand. So even Sam Bank McFried when I interviewed him said, you know, yes, it doesn't it doesn't work. But don't worry, it will in the future. It will in the future.

So uh so Bitcoin can't do that. Other cryptocurrencies are other blockchains are faster, but uh also you know, are are suffer from from hacks and from um you know, fundamental sort of technological issues'cause the technology behind crypto sucks. and is old. But even more fundamentally, right, the if crypto if money doesn't come from the government, it has to come from somewhere else. And so where does it come from with crypto? They don't like to talk about this, but the answer is corporations.

Uh, it's we're liberty financial in the case of Trump coin, it's even Bitcoin. Um the majority of the Bitcoin that are mined today are mined by multi billion dollar uh Corporations, many of which are publicly traded. Um, so if corporate money seems like a good idea to you, then you should go for crypto. So but th this idea of like it might work But it doesn't yet. It is sort of a running theme of crypto.

Throughout the whole story. And is I think uh part of the reason I like the doc is because I spent a lot of my time covering crypto wrestling with the same thing that I think you're wrestling with, which is that there is something at the beginning of the pitch for crypto that is really compelling. That is like

w we we can agree on a bunch of things, right? That our our current financial system sucks and doesn't benefit everybody equally. That uh there are sending money across borders, which is one of the things you hear about in crypto all the time, everybody will always tell you that, oh, it's really

expensive to send stuff through Western Union, wouldn't it be great if you could just do it with crypto for free? Like in theoretically, yes. Do you have a sort of moment where that tipped for you to being like, okay, I've I've heard your pit. it doesn't it doesn't hold with the thing that you're building on the other side of it. Um

I mean, it's hard to single out one single single moment. It was like a series of revelations to me. Because I approached it with with with good faith in the sense of like, look. Online in the midst of the pandemic, when I found down fell down this rabbit hole, I just ended up on the other side as to as opposed to the people that like bought Bitcoin, like my buddy Dave, who tries to like convince me to buy it earlier.

Um so I'm just on the other side. So I could be wrong. They could be wrong. I could be wrong. Let's find out. I go out into the real world. And immediately I'm meeting guys like Alex Mashenski, who's the running this company called Celsius, that s sure seemed like a fraud, and sure enough was, and he was arrested and ended up in is in jail now.

Um, and so there were obviously a lot of sketchy players, but that doesn't mean that the fundamental thing couldn't work, right? There are sketchy players and all sorts of stuff. Um, I would say one real pivotal moment was when I went to El Salvador. Um it's the only country in the world that was trying to use Bitcoin as real money. And to your point about sending money overseas and the validity of that argument.

Uh El Salvador's economy is is the foundation of it is remittances. Millions of Salvadorans uh who live in this country, who send money home, and it's twenty-five percent of the economy. It's it's it's really the foundation of the economy. Um s and so they built this Bitcoin system and it was like maybe you could just use crypto to to send money home and and avoid the fees. Um so if if crypto was gonna work as money anywhere in the world, it should work in El Salvador.

Like I walk through a market, I try to pay, you know, it's dol it's a dollarized economy. Everything's in cash. These people have like four hundred dollars. They make a average about four hundred dollars a month in in El Salvador. It's an extremely, you know, uh poor economy, relatively speaking. And

I'm asking these merchants like, Can I buy, you know, the the taco and uh or whatever, the pobusa and uh in in Bitcoin? And they look at me like the stupid fucking gringo that I that I am and appear to be. Uh uh and and it just happens over and over and over again. So it was not used as money. It never worked as money. Even the remittance thing didn't work at all. It was two percent of remittances when we started recording. It's even less now. It's less than one percent.

And the reason is because the system doesn't work very well. It's the same thing that plagues crypto more broadly. System doesn't work very well. Um, you know, the value of a crypto can suddenly collapse, you can have trouble getting out of the system. And so people would rather spend they these people do not have money to gamble with. So that was a real revelation to me. Where it's like

Because it just so clearly was a narrative that had been constructed for Westerners. It had been constructed to convince

uh crypto holders and potential crypto holders that know there was a future and it was happening in El Salvador. They were gonna build this beautiful Bitcoin city in eastern uh El Salvador. Go I go there. It's not happening. It was never gonna happen. It's a total griff. Um so I'd say without that was the moment. Um yeah, the story works because it's super simple. Our system sucks, like everyone raises their hand and then they say, uh Bitcoin fixes it.

Um it's just the second part that's the bullshit part. The first part's true. The first part is if crypto serves any function, it's to to to highlight the myriad failures of a regulated system and and and hopefully uh should should encourage us to fix that. Yeah, I mean the the blockchain fixes this is still a meme in tech circles. Like it is? Ever everywhere oh yeah.

Everybody thinks it's a joke. Almost everybody thinks it's a joke. But but the idea of like any problem you can think of, the blockchain fixes this like. F-f-f- Two full years people would just earnestly tell you that. Anything that was wrong with anything, we could just fix with the blockchain.

And one one of the things I've been trying to figure out about crypto forever is that if you could pull it apart, if it might have gone differently. Right. If you could take out the fact that I think from from pretty early on, it was overrun by people. speculating to try and make money. Essentially running grifts, real and unintentional, right? Like there were people

Doing the scams to make money and telling you that they weren't. If you could just take all of those people out of it and try to run this process as like an earnest technological advancement. Could it have worked? And I think I also still land on no, for some of the reasons that you're describing, that like there is something at the base level of this technology that makes it not suited to the thing that everybody is saying that it's suited for.

But I wonder how you feel about that. Like so much of I think your focus has been on like I mean the title of the doc is Everybody's Lying to You for Money, right? What if they weren't? Like what if everyone had been trying their best Could could this have gone differently, or is there something about this thing that we pointed all this energy at that was just never the right thing? I would say no and for a couple of reasons. The first is um Uh when they say they can create a trustless

uh money. When they say they can create a money that doesn't need human trust but only relies on computer code. That itself is a lie. Because computer code doesn't fall from the sky. People write. Computer code. That's how it works. I mean, I guess with AI you could intro a prompt and then the AI writes it, but like for Different set of problems and trust issues. Yeah.

I is running our money. We're fucked anyway. So like let's just be honest with you. But like um And a great example of that point of the fact that the that code is written by people and therefore it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a fallacy to say that you could just create replace people with code is FTX and Sam Bankman Fried. Because the way Sam ran his con, we later learned, was he instructed one of his lieutenants to change the code, the source code inside of FTX.

so that his other company, Alameda, could quote unquote borrow against his customers' assets, um, steal their money. Uh so it was very simple. It was one line, one line of code, and he stole all the money. So um

Uh it's just wrong. It's just incorrect. I I uh on the human level, I think this is the problem with private money. You know, money has to be a public good. Uh that's the only way you can scale the truck.

All of the problems with our financial system, I think, start with our democratic system, the failures of our democratic system. That's just my own personal point of view, is that the reason we have such a fucked up financial system is that our democracy is really failing us here. Our elected representatives do.

quite frankly, uh unfettered capitalism and Citizens United and all this stuff are really ants it beholden to the the tech oligarchs and the the corporate interests and the PACs they're more than they are the people. And if we could change that, uh, then we could

get back the control and the the the system would never work perfectly, no human systems ever do, but it could work much better. But until we address that issue, um, you know, we're left floundering around in the dark and and and because it's so bad it gives certain credence to Bitcoin, right, or to crypto, because it's like, well, the system does suck, so might as well try this other thing, even though it it might it in fact is worse.

The other thing I I wanna talk about is the the sort of culture of crypto and like crypto people that you found.'Cause I think the the what's in it for all the people who made all of the money is I actually think relatively straightforward and y you can feel however you want about all of those people. Um but you ran into a lot of people who didn't make a lot of money and in many cases lost a lot of money and went through a lot of real hardship because of crypto.

but still believed in it. And you went to Bitcoin Miami, which is now like famously just one of the weirdest places on earth was was Bitcoin Miami. Uh and and it is this very specific group of people in a way that like I've spent a lot of time in my life around finance people and I've spent a lot of

time in my life around tech people. And if you smush those things together, you don't get anything like the crypto community. That's great. So like what do you make of this group of people? What was it about crypto that that turned into this sort of bizarre culty atmosphere?

Yeah, I mean look, on uh again, many different ways to answer the question, but one of the things that I found to be true is that crypto is just a get rich quick scheme. So it's as old as time and they've changed the the the um the terms and they've created all these terms that sort of in in in real life are the opposite of what they say they are, right? Currencies that aren't currencies, stable coins that aren't stable, decentralized systems that are actually highly centralized. And

There's about five or six percent of the population that's really into this stuff, if you look at the polling. Um and then there's about eighty percent of the population that's never ever bought crypto, and most of those people are very skeptical of it. In terms of who the people are, I mean, it's dudes. Like it's really, really do that. Lotta dudes. Yeah. I mean I just can't express how much of a schlong fest it is. Like it is like

We posted on on uh Reddit on uh Celsius Reddit uh board to try to talk to victims of the Celsius scam and all dudes responded. Like we didn't have to self it wasn't editing, it was just all guys. And I think that's interesting. You know, I think that's really interesting to guys are more likely to be gamblers. We have a higher risk tolerance, as I say. Um, and crypto is really popular, was really popular amongst young guys.

Uh forty two percent of guys eighteen to twenty nine have bought, used, traded cryptocurrency. Um so almost half. Yeah. At least that was as of a couple of years ago. I don't know what it is now. But um it's a lot. And and that makes sense to me. I mean, I'm I'm a guy, I used to be a young guy many, many years ago. And um

I used to like gambling and and I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to gamble on stuff like crypto. Uh you know, I I don't think you can outlaw it, it's not gonna work. So just I just want investors to be protected. I just want the bad guys not to be making so much money.

Um and if people want to gamble with their money and there's reasonable like re legislation around it and reasonable constraints, then you know, go for it. But I uh other than that, I'm really I'm really uh hesitant to to stereotype folks even anymore because the truth of the matter is that crypto, because it's just a story, it's just a projection of the hopes and dreams.

of the forty million Americans who have purchased cryptocurrency. So it's as unique as those people are. They have their own reasons for doing it. Um, but it's usually they want to make a little more money, and that's not Yeah, that's greed on some level, but it's also failures of our system to provide them with a better way of making money rather than just gambling on this weird stuff. Right. And that's a that's a pretty abject failure on on our part.

Yeah, I mean it it is very funny. Like one of the things I wrote down writing this documentary is are we sure we're not just all mad at capitalism and the American dream? And I think to some extent the answer's yes, right? And I think uh we've spent a lot of time recently on this show and also talking about prediction markets.

Yeah. And the rise of sports betting and this idea of just everything is gambling now. And I think that's all right next to the the kind of stuff that you're talking about. And I I do wonder I don't know how much time you've spent, you know, on on Calci and Polymarket and all of this stuff or or looking at the rise of DraftKings, but

I is all of that connected to you, this idea that like what what if everything was gambling and none of it was real and just sort of like full YOLO nihilism about money in the world? Is all of that sort of together for you or do you think there's something different about what crypto is and what?

I think there's a lot of overlap. Um, you know, the subtitle of the book that I wrote with Jacob Silverman is Cryptocurrency: Casino Capitalism and the Golden Age of Fraud. And Casino Capitalism is this. Um really interesting term that you could sort of go back to like John Maynard Keynes if you wanted to. Uh, but it's the notion of like

Just because you have money doesn't mean you use money in a way that's either smart for you or productive for society. And gambling is fundamentally a zero sum in a Yeah. We sit down at a uh table in Vegas and I might win a hand, you might win a hand, but at the end of the day. My wins are coming out of your pocket and vice versa.

And while we play the game, the casino takes the rake. They take a small piece of money to that's that's that's that's how they keep the lights on in the casino. So could you win a Vegas? Of course. But if you play long enough,

On average, you're losing. Because again, how do they keep the lights on in the casino? And And I think it there is something I think this is a a broader theme in tech right now, but it is I think most obvious it has ever been in crypto, where there are a bunch of people who tell you a tech story while they are just taking money out on the other side.

And I get the sense that that same disconnect drove you crazy the deeper you went down. Everybody's like, Let me tell you this story while I am just pulling money out of your pocket. Hundred percent. They're lying to you for money. They are lying to you for money. And what's different about Wall Street, I mean, look, I'm gonna defend all of Wall Street or all of the financial industry because there's obviously a ton of grifters there too.

Crypto really is fundamentally and gambling is fundamentally different from the stock market because The stock market is a positive sum game. I the money that investors invest uh buy uh Pay for stocks goes To the companies, at least some of it, uh the stock that's issued by the companies, they take that money and they can invest in their companies. They can make more stuff, provide more goods and services, which

Theoretically benefits us all, right? Rising stock price, more stuff to buy. Uh uh, you know, all uh everybody wins. Investors win, company wins, society wins. I'm not saying it's perfect, obviously. There's lots of caveats to that, but like that is how it's supposed to work. That is how it has historically worked overall, right? Um, crypto can't do any of that because it's not a positive sum game. It's a zero sum at best game, really negative sum.

Um by the way, the thing that I should mention is like It's not just the gambling, it's also the crime. There's an enormous amount of crime that's facilitated. Um it's gambling and crime. Those are the only two use cases. So uh Last year, a company a company issued a report, crypto company, uh estimating that I think it was$150 billion of illegal activity was facilitated via cryptocurrency last year in twenty twenty five. 150 billion.

That's a lot of effing crime and that's a crypto company that's making that estimate. So I'm gonna say that's possibly on the low end of the estimation, right? Um, it's a lot of crime. Uh it's everything from I mean, give you just one example. It's Russian oligarch. Selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese via crypto in exchange for uh drones that they can send to Ukraine. It's sh North Korean hackers who steal crypto and have funded half of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

It is an astounding level of crime. And the worst people in the world have benefited from this, including Jeffrey Epstein. Who it was revealed in some of the recent files was a secret funder of Bitcoin development via the MIT Media Lab in 2015. So There's only two things that you're interested in.

You're either trying to get rich'cause you're gambling and whatever, we can argue over that, the the the how much you should be allowed to do that or what the rules should be or whatever. And then there's your criminal. I think it would be a really interesting conversation to have about crypto if

some of the good stuff had come true. Right. Like if what we had done is enable a really interesting cross-border global payments network, then it's like, okay, well, put that next to some of the bad uses of it and let's have a conversation about whether this is a net good or not.

I I wish that is where it had landed. It would have been a much more like robust and interesting conversation about crypto. But ultimately I I do think it landed where you are. It's either it's either a way to gamble your way to make more money, which again, sure, feel how however you want about that. Or it is nefarious and it really those are the mass dominant use cases. And yet, Ben Yes. And yet, the number keeps going up. And this is the Kinda.

But like, you know, in the doc, one of the numbers you say is is 40k. Right. Um, and and it's it's higher than that now. It has been much higher than that. Uh. Why why do you think this thing keeps holding on? Is it is it just too big to fail now? There's too much money in it and too many people to invested to let the thing fall apart? Like If if it is all of the things that you say and we've had this series of scandals, why does the number by and large keep going up?

Well, look at the history, right? Um Crypto was kinda floundering after all these guys were arrested, after all these trials, all these lawsuits got filed. Um and then in the spring summer of 2024, Donald J. Trump, who had as recently as 2021 described Bitcoin as a scam. decided he loved Bitcoin across.

Uh we end the movie on a clip of him talking about this. He says, you know, have fun with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you're playing with. That's a terrible Trump impression, but like As he embraced it. People said, hey, if he wins the presidency, he can do a lot to boost crypto. And so they started betting on it. The price went back up. Sure enough, he won. And the price went way up to$120,000. uh for Bitcoin. Now it's in the sixties, right?

Um so it's actually basically back to where it was at the last high. It was last it's it's almost exactly at the time, which is fascinating because if you allowed it to drop a little further, psychologically, there might be a real hell to pay, right? If it went into fifty, people might really

But somehow it's just managed to stay in the sixties range for quite a while, which is really interesting, especially in a a highly illiquid market controlled by a very small number of whales that hold a vast majority of Bitcoin. But anyway.

Um the reason that this things can last forever is obviously, as I point out, the manipulation of which is come on, man, the deepest of all ironies. The supposedly decentralized thing that's fighting back against the government now needs to kiss the ass of the corrupt. President of the United States who's the most powerful man in the world.

in order to basically carve out their own rules and not have to follow the rules so that they can keep the Ponzi scheme going. And the vast uh percentage of the people that invest in those things, like Trump coin or Melania coin or or or or cumrocket, one of my favorites.

Um, they're gonna lose, right? They're gonna lose. Yeah. Um, it's just how the thing works. Uh so that's the answer. Uh the manias can last a really long time. I mean, Robert Schiller was uh really influential to me, Nobel Prize winning economist, behavioral economist talks about how These manias can last a very, very long time. And sure enough, they have. I mean, Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi's game for for decades. Um, so yeah, it's just we're we're weird people.

What's the term? The the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid? I think there's a lot of that in crypto right now. Yeah. The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solid. John Maynard Keynes. Yeah. Most most um he's a great example too because he, you know, brilliant economist. Um Uh was so ahead of his time in terms of understanding the capabilities of economics beyond This sort of

artificial constraints that have been imposed by sort of gold bugs and people that wanted to stick to the gold standard, things like that. But at the same time was trading, right? Was was was actively investing and lost many times. Uh and ultimately I think was was successful, but really sort of the most brilliant guy in the world.

that that quote comes from experience, right? He knows, you know, even he is uh is able to lose. So that's just the truth of human nature and of economics, which is thought of as this dry mathematical uh uh It's uh profession study, but it really isn't, in my opinion. It's it's it's or it can be, but it's really about human behavior. And humans are not rational. Um we do stupid shit all the time. Uh

All right. Bet McKenzie, congrats on the doc. Thank you so much for being here. This is really fun. Thanks. I really enjoyed it. Alright, we gotta take a break and then V Song is gonna come on and we're gonna talk about the truly wild experience she's had with continuous glucose. We'll be right back. Support for VergeCast comes from granola. Yeah.

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There were folks who for years could never imagine the US carrying out limited strikes on Iran, right? If you go back to the twelve day war, he dropped those bunker busters, right? And you had presidents through multiple administrations who never would have gone to full scale war with Iran, and here they are.

I'm Preet Berara, and this week CNN's Chief National Security Analyst Jim Schubert. Joins me to discuss the Iran War, our fraying alliances, and the rise of Russia and China. The episode is out now. Search and follow stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back. The Verge's senior reviewer V Song is here. Hi V. Hi. We have some science to do today and Thank you so much.

Some gadgets and some feelings, as we are want to do here on the Virtcast. But let's let's start from the very beginning here. What is a CGS? So CGM is something called a continuous glucose monitor. It is a small device with a insty beancy little needle sticking out of it that you inject into a part of your body. And it reads uh your glucose levels. And it's like important to note that it's not your blood glucose levels, it is your interstitial glucose levels.

interstitial fluid is like this fluid that sits between your cells and you can kind of read glucose levels from that. Okay. And my sense is until very recently, the answer to the question, what is a CGM was something you either knew for medical reasons or had no idea about and had never thought about and was not relevant to your life at all. And it seems like this this

product, this category has taken on a much broader relevance. Like really, really recently. What what is happening here? Why have CGM suddenly sort of mainstreamed in a new way? Yeah, so previously if you knew what a CGM was, you likely were a type one diabetic or a person who had a type one diabetic in your family.

It is diabetes tech, uh, s so to speak, because you generally wouldn't have a reason to monitor your glucose levels in real time, which is what this technology does, unless you needed to monitor your insulin levels.

Uh right now it's kind of hitting the main bro like the mainstream much more broadly because in twenty twenty four the FDA cleared them for over-the-counter use. Um they have to be different from the CGMs that uh diabetics use because um, you know, uh type one diabet uh diabetics, they can't produce insulin or they produce such so such little levels of insulin as to be uh not relevant.

Uh, and so they need that to help monitor their insulin levels. Whereas the ones for non diabetics, for people who have pre diabetes, who have people who have type two diabetes who are not reliant on insulin, these CGMs function a bit differently. So, um, yeah. And, you know, once you open it to the wider public, you get people who are hopping onto this trend of metabolism optimizing.

And that has taken the health world, the wellness world and the health tech world by storm over the last couple of years. And, you know, I've kind of been saying it'cause I've seen I've seen it creeping up. But it is like the number one frontier, I think, for wearable technology.

So it seems to me that there are there are sort of two twin things happening here, right? And if if I'm doing the timeline correctly, we have twenty twenty four, the Biden administration, the FDA clears the thing, like you said, for over-the-counter use. m my assumption is not assuming this would become a a wellness influencer phenomenon, but here we are. And then on the flip side you have the Trump administration, which appears to have embraced these things

and and sort of tried to even further extend the things that they can be for. Right? What what is the government doing? Okay, so about uh sometime in the summer, I think June twenty twenty five, uh RFK Junior basically made this huge statement about how wearable technology is going to be a fundamental pillar of the Maha movement. And I remember this. It was about taking control of their health.

And uh in particular within the space of wearable technology, he pointed out CGMs as as something that could help reverse diabetes. And, you know, in the diabetic community the concept of reversing diabetes is a hotly debated one. Um, there's a reason why they say that, but you know, uh we we have a clip and uh I think we should hear it because I did see people complaining, uh

that, you know, why are we bringing the government into this? And there's there's a reason. There's a reason why we're referencing that. Mm. We're about to launch one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history. To encourage Americans to use wearables. It's a way of uh people can take control over their own health. They can take responsibility, they can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates, and a number of other metrics as they eat it.

And they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives. Uh we think that wearables are uh a key to the Maha agenda, making America healthy again and we are gonna uh we my v my vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years. In that particular clip we played, he did say, um, you can take responsibility and see what food is doing to their glucose level.

In order to glucose is not something that right now we can measure non invasively. So, you know, when he says glucose. that that is specifically mentioning CGMs and he called it out um in other statements uh basically about how I have friends who wore CGMs and they reversed their diabetes with that. And then if you look at his Surgeon General nominee pick Casey Means, she is a co-founder of Levels, which is a CGM startup.

And if you've read her book, which I did for research, uh both for a uh yeah. For this story and for uh an optimizer that I wrote recently. She heavily promotes CGM use. Uh she says in her book explicitly You can use a CGM to discover whether your metabolism is functioning. Her whole book and her whole premise is that if you can optimize your metabolism, which she describes as having good energy. Uh you can prevent

Uh, and you know, basically you can prevent cancer, you can prevent any type of disease ranging from acne to uh depression. So, you know, that's her claim. And, you know, um

Whether or not she becomes the Surgeon General is up for debate at the moment. But I think it's very significant that she could be the Surgeon General and she has these relationships with CGM, these thoughts on So like It was a very clear focus because the idea here, they're not saying it explicitly, but the idea here is that every American wears a wearable, every American material. like optimizes their metabolism. So that means non diabetics in in this cohort. So yeah.

Okay, but just to translate all of that to actual humans and to get into your story a little bit here, um I I think the the useful thing to do here is is sort of bifurcate people who medically need this, right? There there are like you said, this is this is diabetes tech. Uh and I think the the question of W how are those people interacting with it and for whom is it useful is is fairly clear in that sense.

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

Yeah, so again I'm gonna bring up Casey Means here. Uh there is a lot of science and thought about uh how your metabolism contributes to chronic disease over a long period of time. it's a complicated uh field and the the pitch is actually somewhat shaky. But if you have good diet and if you have good exercise, we know that is extremely great for preventive health. So the idea is if you are

Um, optimizing your metabolism. If you're staying within a healthy range, you are limiting the amount of inflammation in your body. And again, I'm not a doctor. I am just consuming the the literature on this. I'm

kind of observing how this is being described by various people in in uh the wellness space and the health space. And so the idea is that you don't have these spikes, and that these spikes are contributing to things like inflammation, things like your organs breaking down over time. Um and so if you control it. And if you have data that informs how these foods uh

impact your body and your metabolism, then you can live a longer life. And these these are exactly why you're seeing trends like age scores within wearables. Like whoop gives you a whoop age. I find the whoop age to be incredibly rude. Um I was gonna ask you yours and now I'm not going to

It they said it says I'm five years older than I am and I'm like, that sounds fake. Rude. Um you know, Aura has has these metrics about your cardiovascular age and there is a hyper obsession and fixation right now within wearable tech about your longevity. Like Aura and Woop both have partnerships with like Quest Diagnostics so that you can take regular blood tests and feed it into their uh platform.

So CGMs are directly tied to that. Um Abbott and Withings have a new partnership as of January. Uh Dexcom and Aura have an investment partnership with each other. So it's it's really coming for everyone. They are kind of positioning this as uh not just for diabetics and you know, um It's uh it's a lot. So there are there there's a push to make this as mainstream as I don't know, knowing your VO two max or even like your heart rate or something. Th these things that I think are pretty normal

sort of one tick above regular person biometrics. Like th people want glucose monitoring to be as as mainstream and as part of our lives as that.

Y it it is there's a definite push happening there. So yeah. Yeah. I I wanna hear a bunch about your own journey, but I also want to kind of go back to your motivations for this journey. Is this Something that you're you're interested anyway? Like were you do you have experience with CGMs? Is this a world you knew going in or did you sort of sense the mainstreaming of it and decide to try to figure it out for yourself?

Uh a little bit of all of it, uh just because um my first experience using CGMs on myself was actually in 2023. I tested something called Nutrisense, which used uh one of the Abbott C GMs for diabetics because in twenty twenty three we did not have over the counter devices. I had a really terrible time.

training for a half marathon. I was following all the standards and You know me, I love to self quantify and I love to see what I can improve and I just did not understand why I whiffed it so hard at the New York City a half marathon in twenty twenty three when I was following really kind of science based training regiments, experimentation with fueling. And at the same time I was experiencing a flare up in uh

my PCOS, which is polycystic ovary syndrome. It is a hormonal slash metabolic condition where I do not uh burn calories efficiently. It affects my reproductive system. Uh, it basically means I have way too much testosterone naturally, uh, and also it impacts my metabolism, making me more likely to be insulin resistant.

I have a family history of diabetes. My dad had pretty severe type two diabetes. Um, and it it it it's just a lot of health things that I have been on a journey for a really long time to figure out. So Nutrasense was like, Hey girl. We'll help you lose weight and optimize your athletic uh performance using a CGM. And I was like, Okay.

You know what, I'll give it a whirl. Nut NutriSense has nutritionists evaluate your glucose data and I was basically told, Girl, you're doing everything right. You everything makes sense. You are super great. There's nothing to flag here. And I was like, this is amazing. I ate like crap during this entire uh not like crap, but I wasn't as locked in or dialed in during that testing period. And I'm perfect. Amazing. So a year later when the over the counter devices came out

I was like, okay, I know what to expect going in here. I'll test it for two weeks, see how this works and what the differences are between what I tested in twenty twenty three and what I t quest test it now in twenty twenty four. And oh no, it was different. It was it was not it was not I was even more dialed in at that point in twenty twenty four too because I was like I have somehow gained twenty five pounds.

doing nothing different, which is a hallmark of PCOS. And what was happening was I would test the Dexcomstello and the Abbot Lingo and I would wake up with glucose levels at 110, 115 uh milligrams per deciliter. And what they say is you should be waking up under a hundred, like ninety nine and lower is what it's supposed to be. Because my dad had type two diabetes, I was aware of something called the Dawn phenomenon, which

when you wake up you tend to have uh an increase in glucose'cause it's your liver going, Hey girl, wake up. Time to wake up. Time to have energy for the day. So I was like, oh my God. And it wasn't a one off. It was multiple uh of these CGMs. over a period of several weeks and I freaked out. I was like, oh I've been done in. I have prediabetes I I have to go to the doctor. So I I I went to a doctor um and all of my labs came back normal for blood glucose.

'Cause I I went and I said, Uh look at this data. I I'm concerned, this is a big jump And they're like, Girl, no, you are in like the most optimal zone. Like, chill out. Your liver enzymes are elevated, so Eh. And you're like showing them the app on your phone, being like, No. What if we I'm sure I I I keep I'm one of the most nerdily self quantified people. Around. And so I had years worth of blood test data and being like, no, no, no. As you can see, this trend in my uh liver enzymes.

has always been there. I've been told in the past not to worry about it. It's likely because of other medications or just whatever. I'm the most annoying patient for doctors, by the way. Because I'm like, here's some evidence, madam or sir. Yeah. And um, you know, they were just like, Oh, I can't believe they have non diabetics using this. I guess we can give you an ultrasound if you insist on it. And I'm like

Verily, sir, I do ins I do insist. So I get an ultrasound and they're like, Yeah, you have a mild case of fatty liver disease, lose ten to fifteen percent of your body weight for a starter. Um, and come back to us in a year. I was just like, all right, you know what? Fine, I have all these wearable devices, let's try this. And you know, uh part of me was just like, I'm gonna do everything right. And when the data proves that there's still something wrong with me, we'll have a discussion.

Like sure y y you know, I I I got a little crazed there'cause I felt so invalidated by that experience. Um because something was wrong with me. Help me understand sort of the the day-to-day life of that. Because I think you and I have talked on the show before about uh how you feel about things like as simple as the the streaks for closing your rings on the Apple Watch and the ways in which data collection turns

sort of pernicious and addictive in a way that is really problematic. And it it seems like from the the bits I've heard of this three reporting, which again is like eighteen months long. uh that this became a particularly deep version of that rabbit hole for you. Like what was the the sort of tr when you were like really in the deepest testing phases of this stuff?

What was the sort of day-to-day experience of living with one of these monitors like? So it was a lot of time reviewing data, but it's like you wake up, you pull out the app. There were times where I would only test one CGM at a time and times where I would have two, one in each arm. And so when I had two, one in each arm, it's pulling out an app and then looking at two different apps and trying to understand why the numbers were different.

Um, and then also, you know, going, okay, I can have a controlled experiment where I'm gonna go on a run and see how that spikes it in one glucose monitor versus the other. So I'm pulling up three to four different apps. Looking at my heart rate data, looking at my uh blood glucose data, and then also because nutrition is such a huge part of it, it involves creating a bunch of mini experiments with what you're eating, what time of day you're eating.

So if I eat the same carb heavy meal in the morning, uh in in the in the middle of the day and at night, how does that impact my glucose? If I cut off eating at a certain period of time, how does that impact my glucose? If I go for a walk after I eat. uh a protein heavy meal versus a carb heavy meal. How does that impact the difference? You can drive yourself crazy doing this without even trying very hard.

Oh without even trying hard at all. And then the and then some of these apps themselves, like I will say that, you know, Dexcom, uh, Stello and uh Abbot Lingo, I I talked with all the teams behind these and you know, w w wanted insight into how they developed certain features like the the Stello will alert you to spikes, not in the moment, after a certain period of time as to not spike your anxiety too much.

Uh, whereas the lingo will create a score. Um, so if there is a spike that's act activity related, you won't get a score. But if you spike it and it's food related, you're gonna get a number of of some sort. And so I'm waking up and I'm seeing that overnight on a night where I had not snacked, where I had not um done anything that was bad, like eating ice cream in the middle of the night, n done none of that.

I was waking up with like lingo scores of sixty because I was spiking so hard in the middle of the night and I was just like, What what's happening here? I don't know what what this is, because I had had a baseline of data from twenty twenty three that showed no such behavior like that. Um and the way that I was responding to food compared to the year previous was not the same at all. So um I actually have um these screenshots of how, you know

you know, one one year eating taking a walk and then eating a meal, uh differed in terms of what my glucose response to it was. And you could go insane over that. Like why is this data behaving differently? And there's many reasons why. Uh as as I did research I was finding out that like

If you sleep on your side, that could impact these these readings. Oh uh because it compresses the interstitial fluid. And most of the time that leads to lower than real uh readings. Sometimes it could be higher. So I was like, oh Is it the fact that I'm a side sleeper? Is that impacting why there's a difference between these two devices?

Let me test one in one arm and one in the other because I prim primarily sleep on one side. And then I realized throughout this experiment that I can't account for how I move during the night. I have cats. Is a cat sleeping on me going to affect it? There was no way to like isolate and control for that.

barring booking myself in a hotel and putting a camera, filming me at night and then you know, I I contemplated doing these things and I was like, that's actually insane though. There's no Like the normal person is not going to do that and there's the only other way to do it, and this is what many diabetics do, would to be by a finger prick test and calibrate the CGM that way. And as a non diabetic, is that something I would know to do?

And I I was just like, I don't think the average non-diabetic would know that if they were to buy this device and try and test it organically based solely on the educational articles within the app. So like the TLDR is that I started going to um social events and not eating anything because I was terrified if eating a slice of pizza was gonna spike my glucose.

I couldn't eat cake at friends' birthday parties because oh my god, that's gonna spike my glucose and it's gonna make my metrics look wonky and then what do I do with that? Um I can't do I can't eat carbs unless I'm measuring it. I bought a kitchen scale, I memorized the weight of my plates, I've learned how to scoop rice in such a way that I'm automatically getting a certain uh amount.

And I had studied what that amount of rice would would do. And in some ways it led to healthier things, like I stopped eating pure white rice. I started mixing brown rice with quinoa. Like these are good things for you. These these are things you should do or whatnot. So that was great. But those describe those behaviors I just described to you are like the ha early hallmarks of eating disorders and disordered eating, which are two different things.

But um, you know, my therapist noticed it, my friends noticed it, uh, I had interventions held and I was like, Oh I've become really obsessive in a way that is harming me and that I didn't even realize was harming me. Me as someone who is very aware of the ways that data fatigue can be pernicious.

I had slipped into like I don't know many athletes or women who have not had a period of disordered or uh disordered eating or eating disorders within their lives. It's very common. It's very pervasive. It's very supported by diet culture. I dealt with it as a teen and I worked really hard for decades to have a healthy relationship with food and exercise. And I found that I was just like, Oh

I can just take a forty minute walk after this meal and then I'm allowed to have a piece of cake. And that is not healthy thinking. That's not healthy thinking whatsoever. And if you don't like notice it. If you don't flag it, that can turn into something a lot more dangerous very quickly. Um and I I legitimately had my uh therapist go like, Hey

I've noticed you've been talking about food in a way that you haven't in a really long time, and I just want to investigate why this is happening. And I explained her whole th this whole experiment and she's like, I love your dedication to work, but But can we consider that it's not out of the realm of possibility that you can enjoy a single c slice of cake and see a spike and that's okay. Right. And, you know, yeah.

Well it's it's the that's okay that I think is is also interesting here because i there is I I can just imagine the horrifying sort of causality between I eat this thing and I see the number go up and I know that the number going up is bad.

And actually the answer is vastly more complicated than that. Talking to folks in this industry, is there any sense that We need a better way to represent this data that the the things that we're giving to people who are supposed to review them with their doctor for medical reasons actually are nothing like the things we should be giving to people who are quote unquote optimizing their metabolism.

This was the ultimate question I was trying to find out in the research and uh unfortunately there is Not a good answer. Uh so um we have a lot of data about diabetics. We have no consensus among experts about the data from So I actually interviewed um Nicole Spartanau from uh who had run this study where she took non-diabetic CGM data and gave it to 18 expert endocrinologists who extensively work with CGMs.

I think a lot of healthcare providers don't have experience with with these devices. And you know, I can tell you we just um published a study um surveying endocrinologists who have a ton of experience using this technology in people with diabetes and we sort we gave them um twenty different glucose monitor reports. Sort of

the visual is very similar to what you got you see on the app, um, and ask them, okay, if y if someone came in with this report, would you um suggest they have follow up screening for this? And um w I think we had eighteen different experts that we surveyed and essentially there was no consensus.

In talking to these researchers, they were telling me it could take years, just like several years before we have enough data, enough peer reviewed studies, enough consensus um to have an actual actual actionable advice for people like me. And I I legitimately was losing sleep every night thinking that I had I had I had something wrong with

And so I went to another doctor. I was showing her all my data and eventually what happened was this doctor held my hand and she's like, I'm so proud of you. You clearly take a lot of interest in your health. And I'm here to tell you that your genetics are just crap. and um you need medication because no amount of taking control of your life

as RFK is saying that Americans should do and making appropriate lifestyle changes. You've done it for over a decade and it's not done anything. So I need you to hear me when I say here are three medical prescriptions I'm gonna write for you. Have at. And and throughout all of this I was thinking about like, what does it mean to actually be healthy? And um it's kind of emotional for me because when I started this journey I was in the best.

running fitness of my life, the best cardiovascular fitness of my life. These devices were telling me, you're seven years younger in in your heart. You're you're doing great, girl.

Um, I was I had cut at that point I had cut sixteen minutes off of my four mile time. I was lifting weights, I was gaining muscle, I was feeling great, I was eating healthy. Uh and now that I'm on these medications which for me have come with severe side effects. I have all these wearables telling me, hey girl, I want you to know that your cardio fitness is below average. Um

I want you to know that like you're not doing so hot. But my blood, my blood, my biomarkers, for the first time in my like last 10 years, my cholesterol is is where it should be. I reduced my liver enzymes by 65%. Um I lost a lot of muscle mass. I uh It's it's very conflictive for me because I almost wrecked my relationship with food. And in some ways, you could say this was.

a a resounding success and that I've made a lot of progress with my metabolism. I've lost um at this point maybe twenty six pounds in a very, very short amount of time, I wanna say. And like I don't recommend that actually. Um I've had so many side effects. I can't run. Running is such a huge part of my life and I have no energy to run at this point in time. Uh I can't run more than a mile at a time. It's been a huge loss for me and my mental health as well. And so

Did I become healthier in this process? I think some people would say, Yes, you are uh well on your way to optimizing your metabolism. And it made me think very deeply about the limitations of wearable tech tech. just as, you know, influencers are like optimize your life. Well, is my life optimized? Is what I would posit to all of them. Is it optimized now? I don't know. I I I would I would argue not. I would argue that all.

Optimized for what? Right? Like I I I'm so struck as you're talking about this by you I I just have this visual of V perpetually wearing, you know, between six and four hundred different devices that are measuring different things. And those are actually all measuring different things that are sometimes in opposition to one another that are

going to yell at you to do the thing that they are incentivized to get you to do. Right. And I know you've been getting feedback from people in a lot of different situations. And I'm curious how you feel about the idea of DGMs in particular, but also just this sort of medical grade data collection that we are increasingly giving ourselves, whether that's even a good idea right now.

I have a lot of feelings about it. It actually keeps me awake at night. It really does keep me awake at night. Um,'cause you know And again, a lot of people were asking why we had to talk about the Maha framing at all with regard to CGMs and wearables at large.

And I feel very passionately that we do have to talk about it because when you frame it in this way, that it's good for everyone, I feel something that Where will help has not adequately answered at this point in time is how do you distinguish

between um what is a wellness feature and what is a medical feature. And this is uh this is actually something that's being debated in Washington at this point in time. Politico has reported that um a lot of Washington staffers are wearing whoops and aura rings. Aura is lobbying to have a different classification of device called a digital screener.

Um, and that's just relaxed FDA regulation so that they don't have to go through as rigorous a process as they have been. And there's reasons, there's valid, legitimate reasons for doing that. Having to go through the FDA clearance process can cost millions of dollars. Um, some of these features, these detection screening features could save lives. I mean, we know that the Apple Watch has saved lives, for example, right?

Um it is one of the reasons why the smartwatch didn't just die into oblivion. It's that we have atrial fibrillation. People viewed it as something that was integral to saving their lives. And we have real life stories of that being the case. you could look at my case and say this was an unmitigated uh success because I did finally find an answer to something that had been plaguing me for ten years. I think there's a strong argument to be made that what you actually got was a good doctor. Yeah.

That too. Or, you know, there's a strong argument that, you know, medication is important and can help when genetic deficiencies or gen genetic predispositions are not great for you. Uh, but you know, uh what's happening in Washington with the discussion towards health tech and wearables.

It informs the the the the features that come out. It informs why an AI nutrition uh chat bot in your Garmin app or your ladder strength training app might tell you that you need to eat 135 grams of protein because RFK Jr. has said that there is a war on protein even though there is no scientific evidence proving that.

Like these things are so tightly married together that, you know, we can't talk about one without talk talking about the other. And like I don't think CGMs are bad. I don't think non-diabetics necessarily using CGMs Is inherently valueless. Like um people in my situation where you have a predisposition and something starts feeling not right with you. You wanna learn early about what's happening. I don't think that's necessarily

wrong. I just want us all to be hyper aware of what the cost is. I paid a pretty high cost throughout this experiment. Um, I got to live and see firsthand how type one diabetics live'cause this is life or death for them. It's not life or death for me, at least not in the short term. It is very much in the short term for them a life or death. technology and you know, I've gotten a lot of feedback from type one diabetics who were just like

I hate that they're, you know, marketing this widespread just'cause in the same way that GLPs have been marketed widespread, it makes life harder for us. We have shortages now. And I think that's a valuable conversation to have. Even as other people are saying, well, you know what, GLPs for addicts, for people who have PCOS like me, for people who have metabolic dysfunction like me, for people who have high cholesterol and all of these things, it also dramatically improves their lives.

So there is so many conversations right now that are happening and in my ideal world I would say that there would be medical consensus, maybe people depending on the blood work that their doctor sees, says, Hey, you know, we're up for your physical this year. I can ha get a really good sense about your A one C from this, but how about once a quarter we have you wear it for two weeks and just see

where you're at with certain things if if things are changing. I don't think that there's inherently anything wrong with that. It's the idea of using this every day for everyone, always reviewing the data that I find like maybe is a bit

not the correct approach. I did a lot of research into seeing whether there is clinical evidence that wearables are linked to increased health anxiety and it's inconclusive. There have been a lot of studies done and they're like super great for some people and you know, the only concrete thing I could find in maybe like ten to twelve studies that I reviewed was that it exacerbates symptoms in people who already have eating disorders or disordered eating.

And some people will be like, oh, that's been around forever. Uh, I encourage you to look into the science literature and see how many people have disordered eating, particularly among populations who are attracted to this data like athletes. like female athletes. I I want to point to Alyssa Liu, uh who just won the gold medal for figure skating and how one of the things she said was her condition was if I come back to this sport, no one is going to tell me what to eat and how much of it.

So um I I in writing this really wanted to say we need to have a much more thoughtful Nuanced discussion about how to integrate these tools into our lives so that they remain tools and we don't. live our lives in service to a tool. Like we don't become the tools. We control the tools. Um yeah. So it's I feel very emotional about it because it It's I think um not a clear cut.

Yeah, I agree. Well, I know it's been a journey, um, but thank you for being here and thank you for the the story. I'm I'm I suspect it feels very good to finally have all this reporting out in the world. I cried. I cried because I was like, it's done. It's out there. Um, and you know, I I finally feel like my my my journey is not over because I really gotta get these side effects like under control. Um

But it feels like done enough. And I feel very strongly that if we can continue the conversation and have really smart conversations about it. that maybe we can push these companies to be a little more human and how they create these features.'Cause they they do think about it. They really do do think about it. But the bottom line is profit. So We have to think about that too. True that. All right, V, thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

All right, we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and do a question for the first cast hotline. We'll be right back. When you think of a phone, not a smartphone, but like a telephone, you almost certainly think of one particular device. This boxy thing that sat on your desk, it has a bunch of buttons on it, it has a handset that you pick up, it has a braided cable, you're thinking of a phone called the Western Electric.

Electric 500 and for decades It was absolutely everywhere in American home. It was essentially illegal. This week on Virgin History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history, we're telling the story of the Western Electric Fire. Actually, the story about the ATT monopoly and how it fell apart. All that on Persian history, on YouTube, and wherever you get podcasts.

We're back. Let's do a question from the first cast hotline. Reminder, by the way, we are doing that episode next week. Please call with all of your questions about the verge, about the verge cast, about podcasts, about journalism, about Ney's jackets, whatever you want. We want to hear all of it. The number as always is 866-Virge11. The email is vergecast at the verge.com. I'm DavidPierce.11 on signal.

We're easy to find. Hit us up. For now, we have a question about I don't know how to put this, just gadgets. Gadgets in general. Let's hear. Yeah. random one that I think would be good for the show. How is it that you've gone from kind of the the early Apple like clamshell Mac books, which were beautiful and very colorful and very detailed, um, to kind of a situation where everything is quite bland, um, even some of we're starting to lose the mevels on some things and we're having to skim stuff.

To be able to make it make it fun. Thanks. Okay, I've actually been asking various people a version of this question for a really long time because I I became obsessed with this question of like why aren't there more gas? Right. Like you you go back a long time ago and and even Apple was a company that made a laptop that looked one way and a different laptop that looked completely different, right? Like a a PowerBook and an iBook.

utterly different ideas about what a laptop should be. And then all of a sudden everything converged and we have MacBooks, right? And MacBooks look slightly different, but they're all MacBooks. A MacBook is a MacBook is a MacBook. And everybody has a MacBook and there's a MacBook for everybody. You you go back to like the early days of phones and there were lots of new ideas about phones and lots of different colors and lots of different styles and lots of different

ways that screens would open and rotate. And then we all converged on this one idea. And you go back to like the early days of software and there were lots of ideas about how software looked. And then there have been fewer and fewer and fewer overset. And I think in asking people about why this has happened, I've really come to two answers. The first is just that as something gets sufficiently popular, it becomes very hard to change it.

Um, especially when something is popular and good and people like it, right? Like

Look at the the MacBook is maybe a perfect example of this, right? Apple basically found a design that looks good, it works well, and it serves a lot of purposes. You can make it a little tiny bit thicker and you can put more battery into it. You can put a fan into it to cool it down when that was necessary and useful. And and you can make a big, powerful laptop. Or you can shrink it very slightly, slim it down a little bit, and have a

MacBook Air. You don't need a bunch of new ideas because you have one that kind of more or less works for everybody. Um, this is the answer I find very frustrating, right? Because this is also the answer that leads to every other phone looks like the iPhone. Because once something becomes sort of the image in people's minds, anything you do that is different becomes a huge swing that you have to make people

think differently about, right? Like if if Apple were to introduce the iBook now, uh, it wouldn't work. Like I really earnestly believe that. And so you when you get something like the MacBook Neo, what Apple does is take the rough outline of a MacBook.

Add some nice colors. change a couple of little things, right? Like you you tweak the trackpad to make it a little cheaper. But like that thing is still a MacBook. Nobody is gonna look at that thing and think it's anything other than a MacBook. Whereas if you introduce the iBook, which is this big round, plastic,

sort of transparent thing with a handle, you'd get a lot of people who are like, what on earth is that? And even if it was objectively better, it would still be this huge uphill battle to convince people that it's better because we have all this history with this sort of

lowest common denominator device that people are more or less happy with. It's the same with phones, right? I think this has been a really interesting challenge with foldable phones and going back to flip phones. We just converged on the idea that a phone should look like this. And so every phone looks like this. It's a candy bar phone. You either have something that looks like an iPhone or something that is an iPhone. And those are essentially the two phone ideas in the world, right?

that's not to say there aren't other better ideas. Like there are lots of people out there who long for the idea of a sidekick which had that sort of flippy open screen. There are lots of people who miss their blackberries. There are lots of people Who might actually be really well served by a phone like the LG Wing, which had a screen that flipped horizontally, which

in a certain way actually makes quite a lot of sense. Like if you watch a lot of YouTube on your phone, maybe a screen that just flips horizontally would make a lot of sense. But again, it's just an uphill battle to convince people that they want that thing. to make software and accessories that support that thing and to just push outside of the norm becomes harder and harder and harder.

The other half of that is also that once people become accustomed to a certain kind of advice, they get really annoyed when you change it. Right? Like if if your iPhone suddenly had a screen that flipped upwards, some people would think that's cool and some people would find it incredibly annoying. Uh my favorite example of this always is you look at an app like Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is filled with buttons and ribbons and icons and stuff that like

No one thinks this is good UI. No one, including at Microsoft, thinks this is like good, beautiful, modern software UI to have just a bunch of ribbons and a hundred thousand options in a menu. But the problem is, there are millions of people who have used Microsoft Word essentially as it is professionally for decades.

It it is their livelihood to know where these things are in Microsoft Word. And so if you just move a little button, like somebody at Microsoft ha has said this to us one time and it's been stuck in my mind ever since that Every teeny tiny feature that almost nobody uses inside of Microsoft Word is still used by millions of people. And so if you if you move that,

Even if you move it to a better, simpler, easier place, you have now created a bunch of new work for people to do. And most people don't want to do that. And that's fine. Most people have better things to do than learn where buttons are, right? This is this is the sort of eternal struggle of any designer is you you build something that people like and gravitate to and it becomes sufficiently popular that it actually becomes almost impossible to change.

And so you either have to do what like Google does, which is just endlessly try to invent new things that mostly don't take off, or you just kind of let the thing slowly atrophy over time because you don't want to screw up people's workflow. The beauty of that is neither of those is the correct answer. And almost nobody is good at figuring out how to sort of slowly move people in the right direction without feeling like you're constantly making people learn new things.

And I think this is true with all kinds of software, it's true with all kinds of gadgets. Basically, once we as a as a consumer society land on an idea that works, even if it's not the best idea, it's just something that works and we get comfortable with it, changing that thing becomes very, very So that's all one thing. The other thing, and this is a thing people have told me many times, is

It's much cheaper to make fewer things than it is to make more things. Right. So if you're Apple, again, just to keep picking on the MacBook, you can make a bunch of different kinds of MacBook in roughly the same way with tiny little tweaks to your process and tooling. Pretty inexpensively, right? You have this incredible economy of scale that allows you to make tons and tons of these things and

If you want to make a Neo and all you're changing is like the color and a little bit of the size and a couple of parts, you don't have to like spin up new factories and invent new tools and teach people how to do tons of new things. You just drop a couple of new changes to the process and

you're off and running with a new thing. Whereas if you want to invent an entirely new gadget category or reinvent the way a laptop works entirely, that's going to be enormously expensive. Like literally in dollars expensive. to change your whole manufacturing process. You have to change the packaging process. You have to change the how things like move on truck.

and how they fit into things. Like, think about all the times Apple has redesigned the Mac Pro and the ways that that has been weird both to fit into people's workflows And it has actually been hard for Apple to manufacture because going from we have this rack mounted large thing to we have a trash can, uh

takes a lot of work and energy in how you make the thing, how you move it around the world, how you stock it in stores, how you sell it to people, how they install it. Like these changes are complicated and they're expensive. And so if you're Apple and you're like, well, okay, we can make

either two completely different ideas about laptops that require two completely different processes from beginning to end, or we can make essentially one laptop that gets slightly thicker and slightly thinner and maybe drop in a new part here and there. Uh obviously at some level of scale, the only smart business decision is just to make the one thing. Especially again, if you are not 100% confident that this other new thing is going to be such a gigantic success that it makes all of it worth.

This is this is the challenge. And I think what you see is you see companies take much bigger swings with the first version of something than you do anytime after that. And that's partly for sort of consumer psychological reasons like we were just talking about. But it's also for reasons of like, well, we've built the damn factory. We know how to make this thing.

And it becomes much easier to go from making, you know, a hundred thousand of something to a hundred million of something because it becomes very successful than it was to figure out how to make that first hundred thousand of something. And so you you build these systems, you build these tools, you build these supply chains, and then y you don't wanna blow it up over and over again just in the name of having brand new ideas.

Going all the way back, this is one thing I actually give Apple an enormous amount of credit for. We've talked about this a bunch on the show, but there was this run where Apple announced the iMac G3, the iMac G4, and the iMac G5. And they were three fundamentally different devices.

Uh different designs, different looks, different sort of vibes to them in really interesting ways. But even that was driven by this brand new technology that was flat screen monitors, right? So Apple is actually being forced to make these changes because there is a new technology that they want to put in your product.

So that becomes the forcing function for new devices. If you want some big new thing, you should root for some important new display technology or some wild new idea about how these things can work. That's what makes redesigns happen. And in most spaces, we haven't had that in mobile in a long time. Everything has been just getting sort of steadily better, but we haven't had like a a sort of breakthrough new technology that has made its way into phones.

in a really long time. We haven't had it in laptops either. We've just been on this sort of steady march of progress for a long time. And so there's no forcing function for everybody to say, well, okay, we have to blow up the system anyway. Let's tear this whole thing down and start over. What you have is y you could say we want to spend an enormous amount of money to

try and have a new idea about the iPhone, the most successful product ever, or you could just keep making better iPhones. And like, is that the boring choice? Is it the not the choice I wish they would make? Of course. But It is the obvious choice, and it is the choice almost everybody makes. So if you if you want more exciting gadgets, if you want more gadgets,

root for new technology, root for new displays, root for some breakthrough new, you know, input device like Apple always talks about. What is the thing after the touch screen? If we figure that out, I guarantee you we are set. for a whole new kind of device category that will make all of this feel very fun. Anyway, those are all my thoughts. That's what I've been talking about for a long time.

I hope that helps. If you have any other ideas, if you have other I things that I've missed, or if you think there is a bunch of like fascinating new idea innovation happening in these spaces right now, tell me all about it. I want to hear about it. Eight six six forge one one for cast of the verse dot com.

For now, that's it for the show. Vote for us in the Web East. You have until Thursday to do that. I'm eternally grateful to all of you who have already voted for us. Also, send us questions about the Verge and the VergeCasts. 866-Virge11 is the hotline. VergeCast at the Verge.com is the email.

There's a lot going on right now. It's just it all just keeps happening. You know what I mean? The VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. I will be back with Neil Eye on Friday to talk about presumably more of our weird DIY projects.

Cause I got a lot of feedback on my dumb vibe coding stuff and I have some catching up to do. We got more our news, more AI stuff, all kinds of good stuff. We'll see you then.