Welcome to the Burge Cast, the flagship podcast of Whoop Doops. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here redoing my brick for the first time in forever. So I have this brick that I bought forever ago, and it's basically just this little gray rectangle that you tap your phone against to make your phone less bad. You can set it so that it turns off all your social media apps, whatever you want. I had a really good run going of not having Threads and Blue Sky and Twitter and YouTube and TikTok and everything else on my phone, and then they all came back onto my phone. So the brick is what is saving me from it. Basically now, from the beginning of the workday until after my kids go to bed, my phone tries to stay bricked.
And this thing mostly lives right behind me, but sometimes has to go upstairs with me because sometimes I need to unbrick and I'm too lazy and it might be defeating the purpose. But we're trying. Anyway, we're going to do two things on the show today. First, we're going to talk to Mia Sato about her story on the clip economy and the ways in which clips from shows and podcasts and everything have become a content form unto themselves. Then V-Song is going to come on and talk about this device that I'm wearing right now, the Fitbit Air, which she and I have both been testing and have lots of thoughts about. We also have a really fun hotline question about smart glasses. Lots to get to. Going to be a really great episode. But I'm going to go unbreak my phone and watch TikTok for like 40 to 60 minutes and then we'll be right back. This is the Verge Cast. See you in a sec.
So far, you might actually think the phone call is coming from inside the house. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system. Computers are getting smarter, Silicon Valley's getting weirder, and AI is taking over. At least that's what everyone keeps telling us. Welcome to Machine Gods, a new NPR podcast that will be your field guide to the AI-powered future. We're veteran tech journalists with front row seats to the industry. And twice a week, we'll make sure you get smarter about AI, so you know what's real, what's hype, and what might come next. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hi, David. So you are occasionally tasked with figuring out why things on our feeds are on our feeds. Would you say that's a reasonable? Yes. Yes. It's like, what is behind the feed? Who are the people putting the stuff on your feed? And in this case, you uncovered somewhere between like an industrial complex and a sort of broad conspiracy theory about clips, which just rule the Internet now. Yeah. Yeah. And it came from the fact that like I am I hear myself.
talking to people about stuff i saw online and it's like did you see the clip of that thing or oh i saw the clip of it or i didn't watch a video but i did watch the clips and i was like what the what the hell are clips what what is going on so okay this is actually where i want to start because the idea of clips as a thing is not at all a new phenomenon right the idea of i have a long thing i'm going to take a shorter version of that thing and post it on the internet is like internet 101 people have been doing this since time immemorial uh people like youtube grew up on clips of snl right like this is just a thing everybody has done but it does feel like something has change about the way that clips work or maybe just the percentage of them that appear on people's feeds? What is the sort of change in the way that clips exist on the internet that you've observed even really in the last months? I think the change is that clips have become industrialized. It is now a whole, not just ecosystem, but a business strategy. And in some cases, the reason a business exists, and I think that is what has been really surprising, is that this thing that we're all used to consuming online suddenly has tons of businesses spun up around it. And people who say they at least make their living, companies that say they're
bringing in millions of dollars monthly from brands, hiring them to fill the internet with short videos. And so that feels really like the shift. And it's really interesting because I think, you know, this has been something that has been maybe happening covertly for a while, but just in the last six months or so, people are kind of getting hip to it. And we can talk about why that is and what made that so. But you peel back a layer and you're like, holy crap, there's a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to put clips online. Yeah, I do think a real fascinating trend on the internet right now is all of the things that people thought were in some way organic turn out to be incredibly not organic. Totally.
To me, it was like the 2016 election was the first sort of really sort of globally eye-opening moment of this. It's like, oh, all these people posting their political beliefs in one way or another. This is actually vastly more organized and vastly more bought and paid for than you realize. And it feels like that observation has just sort of pierced every little tiny bit of the internet over the last decade. But when it comes to clips, maybe the easiest way to explain it is like, let's just run down an example of this. So we make a podcast. It's called The Verge Cast. People may have- We're on it. I don't know. It's very good. I like it a lot. It involves a lot of staring into a webcam sitting in my basement. It's good times. Let's say we were going to make a clip.
You said something super cool and exciting that we think everyone's going to see. It's going to go mega viral. How do we engage in the clipping industrial complex? Where would we start? Well...
I think there are a couple ways to do it, and they are all weirder than the last. So one way would be for us to hire, to go to one of these clipping platforms and say, we want your clippers to make a bunch of content from this. Here's the full podcast episode, and we don't really care what you pull as long as you pull something from this hour-long talk or this five-minute talk or whatever. But switch it up a little so you don't get dinged by the platforms. The job goes live on one of these clipping platforms.
I cannot emphasize enough that literally anyone can sign up to be a clipper. I have multiple clipping platform accounts now because I just like to keep track of what's going on. And so you make an account, you connect your social media platforms or accounts that you control, and then you submit clips according to the guidelines. And they're either accepted or rejected. And if they're accepted, then, you know, they go out on your platform and you can get paid based on how many views the clip gets. Typically, the payment is like up to a couple bucks per thousand views. And there's often like...
you need to hit a certain number of views to start getting the payout. But think about how many, just like in that example, how many jobs are cut out. Like you don't longer have to hire a freelance video editor, right? And like contract them to make Vergecast clips. You can just put the job out on like a platform that essentially is acting like Fiverr or Upwork or something and have like teenagers around the world make clips of it. And you don't have to pay until you get the views. That's, I think, also the really big thing. So yeah, these clips are going up on like anonymous meme pages. If you ever see an account that says like fan page, I am not impersonating anyone.
They probably are clipping because that's the thing that people put in their bio. You see those everywhere. Yeah, yeah. That's so interesting. So these videos then show up like in every corner on random accounts, which is really weird. That's a departure from like a brand promoting its own clips. Right. So this is one of the things I've actually struggled to figure out about this economy. So in this, you and I, we record a podcast and we upload this video and we say, you know, don't use any clips where, you know, Mia says something horribly politically incorrect as she is want to do from time to time. And they go and they make a bunch of clips selecting what they think is like the most likely 90 seconds to go viral. They post it.
But importantly, they are posting this as if it is organic content, right? They're not saying this is not a VergeCast account. This is not paid for by the VergeCast. This is not sponsored by the VergeCast. This is designed to look and feel like a completely organic, what would ultimately be like illegal copyright stealing version of this. This is the part of this that breaks my brain. It's like, what is the point of this? Other than maybe I'm overthinking it. And the point of this is just to get your stuff out there and just to get as many people to see you as possible, because that's the only goal that actually matters in the world in which we live.
But am I missing something here? No, you should start a clipping company because I think that's exactly what the vibe is right now. And so one thing is like there are a bunch of these clipping platforms that you can hire to then subcontract the clips. And like they have connections to the clippers actually doing the edits. Some of the platforms and some of the campaigns do require a disclosure. So, you know, and the ones that are more like above board or like legit, I would say, do have like you need to put that it's sponsored in the caption because we don't want to we don't want the FTC on our doorstep. Some will say like there's like a partnership hashtag that's like, you know, so-and-so partner or whatever. But others.
nothing. There's nothing that makes it look like an ad. There's nothing to indicate that it was paid for or that the account posting it is getting benefits in some way. And, you know, the weird thing, a lot of the clips that I saw... And not all of them, but a lot of them have like hundreds of thousands of views, but super, super low engagement. And so when you look at it that way, yes, the only goal is that it is coming across as many feeds as possible. You see my face. You see my face. You see me talking. You don't even have to watch it, but you see, right, what the studio looks like. You kind of know the tone of it. And views are the metric that these accounts are getting paid in. And, you know, in the era of short-form video, view basically is an impression how many times it came out. It has no like watch requirement or engagement requirement. So, yeah, it is like I've kind of described it as like.
you're kind of brute forcing the algorithm where you just push out a ton of content to see what hits, only pay for what does. And beyond that, it's like, who knows if they even know the podcasting, but they will see the video somewhere somehow. I want you to explain the example of Clavicular, who I think maybe is, and I'm so sorry to make you do this, but I think as reprehensible as I find Clavicular's whole thing, that is maybe the version of this campaign that seems to have run most successfully in terms of actually finding the way to accrue that attention back to the person in a sort of straightforward monetizable way. Clavicular ran a clipping campaign that turned him into a mainstream celebrity. Seems like a very real thing that just happened, right? Yes, yes. His come up is like pretty wild. And the point that I make in this clipping piece that I wrote is that you don't even have to know anything about Clavicular beyond the clips that you've seen. Because most people are not watching his streams. For like a month, he was doing this thing where he was like, it was like a stream-a-thon. Like the concept was he would be streaming 24-7 for 30 days. He didn't make it that long. But sometimes I would just like at random times during the day drop into the stream. And often there were like a few thousand people watching, right? Like nowhere near, this would not even register as like a notable.
person in any other world. Just like another dude on Twitch. Yeah, but because the clips went so viral and there were so many of them, I think he had upwards of almost 2,000 clippers making videos for him. Yeah, the number you had in your story was he posted almost 70,000 clips in two months. Yeah, yeah. Which is just an unfathomable number to me. Right, right. And it obviously benefited his profile. That's the way that people first know about him. But then I think the thing with Clavicular too was he had a very savvy PR team who would get him in GQ and get him in the New York Times and get him on 16 Minutes, which feels like crazy to say now. So there were different elements that went into his...
But the clips were like the main way that people engaged with him or heard about him in the first place. And then everything is downstream from that. So, yeah, people talk about clipping as like sort of, to use like a marketing term, the top of the funnel. Ambient awareness, general like recognition, name recognition. And then you kind of build on it later to like get people on the stream or get people to go to his events or whatever else. What I wonder for you going through all of this is like there's one way to look at this that is just kind of how the game is played, right? The algorithms run the world. This is just the newest way to gain the algorithm. There's another version of this that feels really particularly sort of gross and crass.
Not illegal, but just shady. And I think you ran into some people in the course of reporting this story who can't decide how they feel about it either. What's your read? Is this just how the game is played today? Or is there something different and worse about the clipping economy? Well, the weird thing is, you know, a lot of marketing folks or people who like do this type of social content will say, you just have to do this. This is the way to get your name out there. This is just the game. And you're already late if you're not doing it.
There's that. And then I have to balance it with the fact that when I went to get comment from a bunch of different companies and personalities, nobody wants to talk. Nobody wants to say, yes, we hired clippers and this is just the game. A lot of brands, I think, are trying to distance themselves from this practice while also saying that it's not that big of a deal. And I think those two things are at odds with one another. I have my own theories about why nobody wants to talk about it. One being, it does feel kind of weird. It feels risky to admit publicly that you pay accounts run by 18-year-olds to blast your clips out. That part is weird. And it's kind of surprising how...
like really big names and brands are posting these campaigns or their marketing teams are posting them or an ad agency is doing it for them. But at the same time, like don't want to talk about it at all. I think they know that users or people on social media, if they found out that all this stuff was paid for, they might feel kind of icky about it. And I think there's also like kind of questionable disclosure practices going around. Like some people are better at it than others, but you don't want to like associate yourself with unpaid ads really. So I personally, like I think.
If you want to legitimize this as just a way to reach people, you got to talk. You have to tell me why you're doing it. And nobody wants to. And I think that's kind of funny. It is funny. And it makes me think about, you know, we've been through versions of this cycle before, right? And I think one that immediately jumps to mind for me is when integrated brand deals first started to become a thing. And there was this question of, at the very beginning, all of these celebrities were really going out of their way to not make it seem like these things were paid for, right? That it was supposed to be just Kim Kardashian organically loving your product and making a whole video about how terrific it was. Not advertising. How could it possibly be advertising? Kim Kardashian just loves this product. And then over time...
That flipped completely. Right now, we're in the bag economy and everybody is proudly getting brand deals. And the idea of getting paid a lot of money to hawk somebody else's product is no longer a thing you have to be worried about. It's actually a thing to be proud of. In that world, which is very much the world we live in, right, where now and then you go on TikTok and everybody is hawking stuff on the TikTok shop. And there's just no, there's no shame in any of it. And we've completely lost the sort of ironic detachment between I'm being authentic and I'm selling you something. Those two things just coexist in people's minds now. So the fact that I'm paying a bunch of people to post clips in the hopes that you'll see it feels different to people just throws me. Like if you were just to psychoanalyze this industry a little bit, why do you think this feels different to people?
There's one thing to partner with an influencer who feels aligned with your brand, right? You can handpick where your content ends up and make sure that the person is brand safe and that they are aligned and whatever. But it is different when clips that you've paid for are showing up on meme accounts that are anonymous that also post other unsavory clips and other weird non-paid content. And that is where these clips are going. It's really bizarre. And it's kind of like you can't control that part, right? This isn't like a person you have.
some sort of written agreement with. And, you know, the weird thing I think is like a lot of the clips are routed through companies that are like... kind of sketchy, I have to say. Some of them, again, are more legit than others. But, you know, there is an example in my piece where one company was really trying to distance themselves from this clipping campaign. And I'm like, why? Why? Why is this? And I mean, I think it's just it's weird because like we're really in the social media era where a follower doesn't mean what it used to. Even influencers are like they're still a part of this, obviously, but it's less about appearing on their page and reaching their audiences as it is like just reaching an audience generally. Right. And I think.
What is different is it's like a fire hose right now. We're just spraying our clips literally all over the Internet to see what hits. And it doesn't really matter who the messenger of that is because the account that's posting it is anonymous anyway. Right. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I think like Kim Kardashian is not taking your I'll pay you a dollar for every thousand views deal. So you kind of structurally have to run this thing at incredible volume through a bunch of accounts that you have no control over. And kind of that plausible deniability is actually probably really useful. Yeah. In the sense where it's like if I'm just if I took the same amount of money and just ran it as an ad on TikTok so that you just saw my ad.
A, it hits really differently for people because it doesn't feel as organic. And B, my return actually probably goes way down. So that actually, like, everybody sort of benefits from this being a little more detached. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the rates are like...
not that good. You know, like a video editor who's been hired by a podcast, you know, on a contract to make their videos, they don't get paid based on the performance. At least most of them don't. And I think it does create sort of like a race to the bottom. And that might be why brands don't want to associate with it because it is kind of like, you know, cheapening what they're producing. It also suggests like a lot of these people don't really care where their messages are appearing. And I would say that that's kind of in line with the last like five years of social media, really. The concept of brand safety in a lot of ways has gone out the window.
Agreed. That makes a lot of sense. What do the platforms think about this? On the one hand, I think you can make a very clear case that this is the world these platforms created, right? The way that their algorithms work, the way that they've devalued followers, the way that everything is now driven by the individual video rather than the channel or anything like that, that like, this is the world that they wanted. Do TikTok and Instagram hate this?
They'll say one thing, but then the clips keep getting views. And that's kind of like the, you know, something I'd like to write about later, where especially Meta really wants new stuff. They want original content. They don't want you to screenshot something from Pinterest and put it on Instagram. They don't want you to download a TikTok and re-upload it. They want work. Which for a long time is all Reels was. 100%. Downloaded, re-uploaded.
In fact, I think a lot of it still is. But at least publicly, Meta has introduced these rules on Instagram and Facebook where they're like, if you post re-uploaded stuff, we won't recommend you, which is the only kind of like the only way to get in front of people. Going back to what we were talking about, like the death of the follower. It doesn't matter if someone follows you. It matters if you're getting recommended to other people. So Meta does have really specific rules that they say they enforce that would seem to be exactly targeting clipping.
Clipping farms. So like one of them is, you know, you can't just upload a video where all you did was change the border or like speed up the clip, which is like I'm sure something you've seen before or like add like a low effort caption. Like that's not enough to make it original. But look on Instagram and it's filled with videos like that with lots of lots of reach. And so that is a tangle that I would like to hear someone at the company unravel because it's like these this content is clearly repetitive. It's clearly pulling from the same thing that the account didn't create. Right. Someone else created that podcast. So why?
Why is it still on the platform and why does it have tons of views? Yeah. And especially in a time where the platforms have, like you said, essentially complete control over who sees what. Because just because I've signed up to see your content does not mean I'm going to see your content. So in theory, this whole system, which is run by a bunch of accounts with relatively low followers and relatively low engagement that is finding me because of the algorithm, could just be shut off. Like that's a relationship that exists at the mercy of the platforms. And wasn't it relatively recently that Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, made a video about how they're going to start to be very aggressive in downranking this exact kind of thing? So they say.
Like, I feel like they've been talking about this in increasingly intense terms over time, but sort of like, I don't know, Adam Oster is like, now we're serious. Yeah. I mean, I think the problem is like, there's a question of does Instagram care what kind of watch time they're getting? What kind of engagement? Because on one hand, you know, very like cynically, why would Instagram care whether you're watching good stuff or junk or like watching something re-uploaded, right? It's not as long as, and that's kind of the argument that a lot of the clipping companies have said, which is like, we give them something beneficial. We keep people on their platform. So why would they downrank our content, our Clippers content? And yeah, I'm kind of like,
Agree. But at the same time, you have people like Adam Mosseri and the Instagram comms team saying, you know, we want original content. We want you to make things just for Instagram. And that's a lot to ask. And I think the other thing is, like, the Clippers feel like they're in this very rich tradition of content really rapidly adjusting to what the algorithm wants in that moment. And if anyone knows better, you know, that that is not a good way to live.
the media industry. We've done this a lot of times and it's sort of like hilarious to me that we're doing a pivot to video again because it feels like we just did this. But to me, it kind of feels like a risky bet because as you said, like the fire hose can just be turned off, right? The money machine can just turn off one day and then what do you do? Yeah. I mean, it does seem like the move historically would be to say we're going to leave all of this stuff. We're going to keep putting in front of people and what we're going to turn off is the monetization, which is the thing about the clip economy that really gets me because they're not trying to monetize these videos. Right. This is the thing that sort of blows my mind is.
If what you're saying is, you know, I'm taking a bunch of clips of a movie that I shouldn't and I'm putting them up and I'm going to make the ad revenue. Clearly bad. Clearly stoppable. Actually, everyone has an incentive to stop you from doing that. But if you're taking a bunch of things that I am actually paying you to post, you're posting them, you're not monetizing them. And there's such a giant army of them. To some extent, it's like AI slop, right? Where at some point, the volume of it just feels so high that even if you try to stop them, I'm not sure that you can. Yeah. Yeah. I actually have been thinking kind of about like.
all the human-generated slop that we put out there. And I actually do think some of these clippers are using like AI editing tools to pump these out. But, you know, the contemporary recommendation algorithm really makes people act in a way that we would associate with bots. So like, you know, one thing, one like hallmark of like botted activity or like botted accounts is like they post really, really rapidly a lot about one topic and then never revisit it after a couple of days, right? Like you kind of put a swarm of bots on, you know, whatever topic. And that's how humans post right now because...
all of the recommendations are, you know, kind of like topic-based. And a lot of these platforms have tools that say, hey, this topic is trending. Why don't you make content about it? Even if it has nothing to do with what you normally make. And so I think a lot about like how the systems right now incentivize really spammy behavior. And you don't need AI at all to act that way, right? Humans are doing plenty of that themselves. So yeah, it is really strange. And I think probably a net bad for everyone. I don't know. Like sometimes I learn about things through clips, but...
you don't get the full thing that way. And, you know, the whole point of my piece was like, when we're over-indexing on clips like this, what is the point of even making the full thing if nobody is ever going to go look at it and they're just going to watch you through clips that may or may not be paid for? Like, that's a really weird way to promote your work on the internet. I mean, you keep hearing these stories about influencers who are basically going to sets that are dressed up to look like podcast studios and making clips of podcasts without ever making the podcast. And on the one hand...
whatever people have gone to sets that have things that look like private jets and taken photos of private jets. Like this is just how the game is played. On the other hand, making a fake podcast just to make the clips feel so dystopian to me in a way that I can't quite get past. It's perfect. It really is. I promise if you're watching this in a clip, we actually do make a whole podcast and you'll like it. Go listen to it or watch it. It seems to me that the next phase of this.
is that it becomes legitimized and even more industrialized, right? That what we're going to get is a bunch of new companies doing this at bigger scale and more loudly and with accounts that you're more aware of that the shame will go away and this will just become a part of the whole ecosystem. Do you see that coming with Clips? I mean, it's that or the platforms decide we don't need this anymore and then the entire bottom falls out. And I think that is like a bad place to be if you are someone who makes a show or a podcast or writes stories that you need people to see. And so that's why I'm like pretty skeptical of the future of marketing as Clips because
We've heard that about a lot of different tactics that just one day you wake up and they stop working. And I also think, I mean, I don't know how fast that sort of adoption will happen if, again, nobody wants to talk about it and be honest with the fact that they're using clippers. I don't even, like, think that that's... it's not even half bad an idea, you know what I mean? To like leverage meme accounts that pump your stuff out. But it's all the other like kind of sort of sketchy things around it that make it for, I find the argument that like this is a future kind of weird and like unproven. And I think the Clippers have not quite figured out how to take something from a clip to downloading the full podcast. Like that is a jump that nobody has figured out yet, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, on any spectrum of legitimacy, nobody has figured that out yet. And that remains kind of the ongoing problem with a lot of this stuff, which is why it makes sense.
That you would just say, well, we're going to spend some money to just put my face in front of you. Because that's, you having seen my face is something. What is it? Is it valuable? Yeah. Great question. But it is something. It's something. It's the awareness economy in some weird, strange way. And that is worth it at some scale in a way that I'm still deeply uncomfortable with. But it feels like this is just the game everybody's playing right now. Yeah. Yeah. It's also like, you know, part of the platforms are both.
enabling mass awareness and then stifling deeper engagement. Like this is a problem on every single social platform that you use to promote your work. It's either X stifles links. TikTok doesn't allow you to link anything at all unless it's like TikTok shop, right? Like these are all issues that we know what would work. If you let me link my article in my TikTok, people would click it probably, or at least more would than they do now. But the platform that's not in there.
incentive structure to allow for that. So it feels really like a weird, the clipping feels like a work around that, but without actually solving the core problem. Yeah, I agree. It does feel like there is a fight coming where the platforms are either going to say, we can't monetize this, so get it out of here, or they're going to say, oh great, free content, and just let the floodgates open. And I wouldn't even know how to handicap which of those it's going to be, but it's going to be very interesting. At what point does Meta be like, well, we don't want you to do that anymore, so we're going to make it so you can't. And then what happens to the clippers?
Yeah. Won't someone think of the Clippers? Won't someone think of the Clippers? Mia, thank you as always. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Fitbit Air. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. The Verge's senior reviewer, V-Song, is here. Hi, V. Hello. You are in California doing Google I.O. things. How many wearables do you have on you? I feel like every time you come on the show, I need a count of the wearables you have. I have four on me currently. Four feels like a sort of mean median number, kind of right down the middle of the situation. I have five with me. One of them's not charged. But I have two smart rings and two wrist-based wearables. Well, the one on your one wrist is the one I most want to talk about, which is the Fitbit Air. I have one too.
I'm wearing the orange and sort of khaki colored Steph Curry band, mostly out of loyalty to Steph Curry, but also because I got three bands from Google. I got a weird ribbed one. I got a sort of fake leather one, and I hate them both very much. And so I have the Steph Curry band, and that's the one I've been wearing. What did you get? What's been your choice so far? Okay. So I just want to preface this by saying that after Google I.O. keynote, I did chase down Rishi Chandra, who is in charge of Fitbit and the health initiatives. And I did talk at your offer about 15 minutes about why this color, which is called lavender, is not lavender and is in fact.
Periwinkle. Reporters are a super fun group. Everyone watching and listening should know this. We're a delight to be around all the time. Listen, I have a hyperfixation on the color purple. It is my delightful little quirk. And we had a 15-minute conversation about this. And I've brought visual aids to help prove why I am, in fact, correct. I'm sorry, podcast listeners, but I have a lilac shirt on. I have my lavender flush shade 04 from the House of Her blusher. I have my carry-on Luca duffel, which is in lavender. I have my baboon-to-the-moon backpack, which is in the color iced lavender. And I have, thanks to Gemini, which I will screen record this so that people can watch this on the podcast video version on YouTube, I have this Gemini request of a...
a actual shade palette hex thing where I can compare lavender, lavender blue, which is a color, by the way, periwinkle, cornflower blue, and lilac. And I also just did the more sensible thing of asking Gemini, what color is this picture of my wrist, this band? And I just want to read to you what Gemini said, which is based on the colors we just looked at, that watch band is a textbook match for periwinkle. And then it goes into reasons why. So I just want to say...
Yeah, this is the level of journalistic integrity that I bring to a very pointless fact. Is that the word we would use? Is this journalistic integrity or is this V's particular brand of insanity? Both. Yeah, this is what we do here, I suppose. So the Air, I think, is a device that has gotten more interest and excitement than your average fitness tracker. Would you say that's true? This thing has been like kind of halfway leaked a bunch and then it came out and there was a sense of like, OK, it has no screen. It's $99. It has no subscription. There's something about this that was very appealing to lots of people. Why do you think the idea of this caught?
I think that a lot of it, there's like multiple reasons why, but a lot of it that I think can be traced back to some reader requests that I've actually gotten over the last couple of years, which we did a Vergecast outline about it, like I think two years ago, is like, where have all the fitness bands gone? Because there was a shift in time with wearables where we went kind of all in on the smartwatch for various reasons. And, you know, the pebbles went to the side, the fitness bands of yore that were affordable and fairly basic. gave way to more complicated pixel watches and Apple watches and all of those things due in part to their advanced health tech features. And so Whoop, in their absence, kind of gained a lot of traction. The Oura Ring gained a lot of traction precisely because there's no display. There are minimal notifications or haptic reactions.
pretty robust data that gets tracked. And so, you know, there have been a number of whoop-doops in the last year or so. There's one from Amazfit, Amazfit, however we're pronouncing that, that I've gotten a lot of questions about from our subscribers and readers. And so when the Fitbit error came out, I think you saw a lot of people just go like, it's a whoop-doop. I have a theory about that. But they go, oh, it's a whoop-doop and it's $99 and you don't have to pay whoops ridiculous yearly subscription.
I want to know your whoop theory because I actually don't think this thing is a whoop doop at all. And I think a big part of the reason it is enticing is that it does a bunch of things very differently from whoop. Like whoop never appealed to me particularly because whoop tries really hard to do a bunch of sort of proprietary stuff, right? Like whoop is for like capital A athletes who do capital F fitness stuff, right? And it has scores and it keeps track of everything. And I think...
Many more people than are currently being served want something that gives you just like a rough sense of how you're doing, right? This is why the like 10,000 steps a day thing has been so sticky for so long, despite just being essentially a made-up number that means nothing. It is like, it's something to do, right? That doesn't become like your whole personality. Everyone who has a whoop is defined by their whoop. And to all of you, please know that I love you and I don't want to talk about your whoop. But there's something about that that just all of these devices, whether it's the Garmins or anything else, and I think at least with smartwatches, you can buy a smartwatch to do other things and have some of the fitness stuff be a sort of secondary feature for that kind of stuff.
But there really hasn't been anything like this that isn't enormously expensive, doesn't churn out mountains of data that probably don't mean anything to you, and just sort of helps you do a little better, frankly, since the first run of Fitbits. This is a category that just essentially died. The casual fitness tracker thing has not existed for a long time. Yeah. Like, my theory kind of dovetails with your theory in that I think people have been calling this a Whoop Doop. One, because Whoop Doop is just a fun thing to say. It's really fun to say. I would definitely grant that. Whoop Doop. Yeah. But the more that I learned about this product and since having worn it, the more that I think this is Fitbit returning to its roots. Because the fundamental audience for the Fitbit Air is a very different one, to your point, than the audience for the Whoop. Like, Whoop, and to an extent, Aura in recent years, has kind of catered to this idea of optimization and body hacking. You know, you're going to ask...
and get a ton of metrics with a ton of different scores. And you're going to try and be the most optimal version of yourself. And the Fitbit Air is not really concerned with that. In large part, I think this is in many ways kind of returning to Fitbit's roots. Like if you think back to the OG Fitbits, which were tiny little sensor pendant things that you could pop out of different wrists. That's the same thing as this. It's very simple. This doesn't have a display, which the earliest Fitbits kind of did so that you could see very, very minimal data on them. I actually don't mind that this is not having a display of any kind that are haptic alerts. There is like a LED indicator light.
I kind of like that. I don't have to think about it. It's just on. I have opinions about the various bands. To your point, I don't really like the modern, elegant one because I have fairly petite wrists. And if my wrists were just slightly wider or slightly smaller, rather, this would be slightly too wide for me. But, you know, that is something to consider if you have bird wrists. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. But I think what I like about this is that it is meant for gen pop people. It is meant to contextualize your health in kind of a digestible way. That is not...
the hyper health maxing, fitness maxing, biohacking crowd. Because, you know, you can get a whoop and its AI is going to tell you, hey, your range, your labs are within range. But if we want it to get to like a slightly better place, you should do this, this, this, and this. And that's going to be your most maximal self. Like it told me lie to up his testosterone by 10 times, which is like.
That's useful to know for just my day-to-day life going forward. Thank you for that. We had a big laugh about that because we recently got a Whoop. And I was just like, no one wants that. And he's like, no, no, I know that no one wants that. But that's not something that this particular device is going to do. And something that differentiates the Fitbit Air from Whoop and a lot of different trackers right now is Google Health. It's like the Fitbit app.
It's gone, right? Google Health is here. It's been in beta preview since October, I think. And there's a bunch of new features that are coming out. They had a lot of feedback. They're implementing that feedback. And it's a brand new world. And they chose to pair that with this particular simple fitness tracker band thing. And the innovation is not really in the hardware. The innovation is in the fact that this comes with an AI coach. It's a lot. It's a lot. And I'm actually curious as to what your...
experience with the AI Health Coach has been because it's like a huge feature of this particular device. It is. I've had the most fascinating several days with this thing. So as we're recording this, I've had it on for a week and I'm at 19% battery, in case you're wondering, which is awesome. Like immediately I like this thing more than my Apple Watch because I don't have to charge it every day. I have to say, I really like the Google Health app. I think rebranding it from Fitbit to Google Health was really stupid because I think Fitbit is a really good brand that a lot of people like and anything with Google on it comes with a lot of data complications that Google just doesn't need. Frankly, it's just weird to decide to do that.
The app is nice. It's simple and clean and straightforward. And it tells me like how many steps I've taken, which is not enough today and calorie burn and it has a sleep score. And like it does this sort of very basic at a glance, how are you doing kind of thing. But I.
I put this thing on, wore it for a couple of days, was like, oh, cool, this would be a fun time to like try out a new exercise regimen, see how it goes. And then immediately got like debilitatingly sick. I got this like hideous stomach bug from my three-year-old that turned into like severe dehydration. I ended up in ER. It was a whole thing. And throughout all of this, just decided I'm just going to feed every bit of information I have into the Google Health Gemini AI coach and just see how it goes. And I actually, it deserves credit for me going to the ER because it at some point got like incredibly alarmed by, I was like, here's what my temperature is. Here's what you know about me. Like what fluids do I need? And it was literally like, you don't need fluids. You need a doctor.
I was like, all right, fine. So I went to the doctor. But going through all of this, it's been really much more aggressive than things like this normally are. Like, I think I'm used to companies like Google and thinking really differently about these very personal things, right? Like Google has this phrase, your money and your life. And it treats those things really differently than it treats other things. So the idea is if you're...
doing even Google searches for things about finance or things about your health, that the bar for quality needs to be much higher on that stuff. But in this, it's like my AI coach just like got in it. It's like, it is just happily telling me what to do. It's telling me all the information it has about me. It kind of yells at me when I don't get enough sleep. Like it's actually really instructive in a way that I did not expect. Like this is hands down the best experience I have had with an AI fitness coach. You've tried many more of them than I have. So I'm curious your perspective. I would actually agree with that. It's funny because I did have my initial experience in October and I had a lot of...
It was too easy to bully. Back then, I wrote about it in Optimizer. And there was just a lot that I wasn't necessarily pleased with. Some features were missing, like cycle tracking, important for me. And then there were just like no real abilities to kind of customize the way that I want. You can customize the different widgets that are there now. But also my health, like to your point, my health changed quite a bit. And we talked about it when I did the CGM feature and on the Vergecast then. But a lot of my health needs have changed in the last six months or so. And so coming back to it, the fact that I can upload all of my...
medical records on there, the fact that I can talk to it about my medications and how they are affecting me and how they are affecting my training plan. It's actually been incredibly informative in terms of things that I need to do and how I need to think about my nutrition, my protein goals, my hydration, and a lot of the side effects that I've been having. And I am always going to caution people, and there's a lot of disclaimers within the Google Health app that this is not medical advice. AI can make mistakes. That AI health is best used as a tool in between doctor visits that you...
absolutely do have to fact check everything, which one thing I do like is that whenever I have been asking these deeper queries about medical conditions that I have, there are source links that I can then tap into. And I was like, oh, my God, if I had this 10 years ago, I think I would have had a much easier time advocating for myself at various doctor's appointments and having much more fruitful and productive conversations with my doctors. I would feel more collaborative in my health care. So I have had a by and large positive experience with the revamped Google Health app. There are many things that I think need to evolve over time.
Because I do stress test these things and I did run up against certain things where it's like, haha, I can't handle that. Give me an example. What hasn't worked? One of the updates now is that you can upload lab results. And the sad fact of the U.S. health care system is that not every doctor works in a system that has agreed to share these lab results. So this has clear the same thing as your airport for identification security where you can kind of upload your records. So I uploaded records starting from 2016 into Google Health. But I switched doctors because I have had.
dissatisfactory experiences with various doctors. And my most recent doctor, who I am having a much more positive experience with, her clinic has not learned to share these lab results with these systems. And so I was like, can I take a screenshot and just share my most recent lab results with you? And I was like, I cannot process screenshots in this way. So I had to manually type last night all of my lab results into the Google Health Advisor and proofread my lab results. And then it was like, hey, we've processed all your lab results. Do you want to get an interpretation? And then it kind of forgot.
that I had manually entered the last six months of lab results that I have. And I had to remind it that it did that. So, you know, that's some friction that is there. You should be able to share screenshots of your own data if that's what you want to do. You're obviously not the normal user of any of these devices. And I think for some combination of like wanting to do good journalism and also just the pure nihilism that comes with doing the job long enough, I'm sure you are sort of loosely holding on to your medical records at this point, right? What do you think, how should people approach this?
thing from that respect. I've even had this question just myself sitting here the last few days being like, should I tell it the temperature I just got? You shouldn't lie to your doctor is one of the truisms of life. What is your current stance on how honest and what kind of stuff we should be adding into these systems? Even, like you said, I think we've both had positive experiences by doing that. Should we still be reluctant to give up some of this data?
I think it's a healthy instinct to have. And I think HIPAA, which is the health data privacy law that we currently have, I've said this for a long time, it's not fully adequate for wearable technology. It's definitely not fully adequate for the AI health era that we are in right now. I think it is very healthy to have skepticism with that. I will say that...
Part of the conditions for Google's acquiring of Fitbit is that Fitbit data does have to stay siloed and away from Google advertising. That was the condition of that merger. It is something that they have to uphold legally, which is a good thing, but I am not going to chastise anyone who is skeptical of that. I think that is a healthy instinct, usually with health. And something that I'm going to say is that you really have to weigh the pros and cons. I think if you want to keep your data privacy and kind of exercise that to the furthest extreme, wearables are not for you because HIPAA is not adequate.
There's leakiness. But we are seeing a huge narrative about personal agency with health and personalized health. These are things that I am seeing from almost every health tech company in the last couple of months. And to that point, a lot of that is because our healthcare system is broken. And there are a lot of people out there with chronic illnesses, suffering with my own chronic illness. We ran a story recently about how a journalist with POTS and other fatigue illnesses have kind of been hacking their fitness trackers to more serve their needs. So, you know, people are doing this already. People are going to Reddit for advice, which is also just not...
ideal. But, you know, I do have been in the PMOS subreddits just looking for information because what was available to me was not sufficient. And if you are struggling with your health and you are finding that the healthcare system is not something that you can easily navigate, that you are struggling with... I can't say that this is not a useful tool because I have found it to be useful. And I have also found it to be doo-doo. It is kind of a wild west out there. But, you know, I've had a lot of Verge readers write in as beta testers of this particular app saying, you know, I don't like everything. It's not perfect. But of all the ones I've tested, I found most value out of it. And the thing I will say is that your mileage is going to vary. It is going to depend on you being engaged, interacting with it, feeding it information. There is so much trial and error. So it's really how much are you willing to do here? How much time are you willing to spend to?
share all of this data. There's something in the hardware-software combination here that I actually think is sort of the beginning of something really powerful, right? Because what it has is, I feel like all of these other AI coaches, at least the ones that I've experienced, get one tiny bit of information from you. Like, I did this thing. You don't know anything else about me, but you know that I did this thing. And based on that one thing, you have to make just a giant series of assumptions about every other thing about my life or ask me for an unbelievable amount of information. Or you get things like the Whoop that are very focused on a specific kind of information about a specific kind of thing. This to me is the most sort of general purpose.
data collection engine in this space that I've really seen. I think Apple does a good job of this, but is less interested in sort of packaging it and giving it back to you. Like Apple does the sleep scores and stuff, but at least in my experience with Apple Health, it's not particularly like proactive in telling me how I'm doing. It's much more conservative. And that's like, I previously spoke.
It is the safest call in some ways because, you know, I recently had a really great conversation with Apple for the 50th anniversary package we did where I was talking about their philosophy towards health. And one of their philosophies is that they're not going to tell you what to do. So they're going to give you some tools, but they're not going to tell you what to do with that. And Google here is kind of splitting the difference where they're not necessarily going to be telling you what to do in the way that Whoop does or even the way that Aura necessarily does. It's really funny because all of these wearable and health tech companies have their different, like, AI personality profiles and how proactive they're going to be and what they're going to tell you. Like, Whoop is very much like...
Brian Johnson, we're going to be the maxed version of ourselves. And that can be a really intense experience for a lot of people. The Whoop age score is my villain origin story, quite frankly. It says I'm 42. Everyone knows you're only 41. Everyone knows I'm only 41 and a half years old. What my age is, we'll never know. But, you know, Aura has a different kind of...
much more casual but vaguely biohacky, especially in recent years, feel to it. Apple is very much like, here's data. We're not going to tell you what to do. But when we do compile scores, it's going to be done in this very intentional, conservative way because we don't want to kind of wade into this quagmire of nonsense. And then Google is.
kind of splitting the difference in what I think is a very interesting way. I'm very curious to see how it's going to evolve over time. I've been told that they're going to take a lot of feedback into consideration and a lot of iterating. So, you know, I'm very, very curious to see how that's going to go because AI health is here, whether you like it or not. Personalized health is a goal that all of these wearable tech companies are barreling towards. Whether or not that holds why, it's an immense challenge to do personalized health, right? For sure. But again, to your point, I think if you put it next to...
sort of other better courses of managing your own health. There are obviously better ways to do it. There are, you can do the reading yourself. You can have an army of doctors. You can like, there are clearly better ways to do this. But also most people just go on WebMD and Reddit, right? Like to your point about Apple, like people actually want to be told what to do. And oftentimes people are not capable of reading the data for themselves and are happy to be given some kind of instruction. And I think the thing that frankly surprised me the most about Google Health is how willing it is to just tell you what to do. And some of it's really obvious, right? Like a lot of it is like prioritized rest and hydration. It's like, oh, thanks Google. Great job, everybody. Like that's nothing. But it is at least.
giving sort of a clear, concise answer to questions most of the time. And so I think Google, whether it will correctly strike that middle ground is hard to know. And what I do know is that with any attempts to find that middle ground are going to come spectacular failures. And it's going to get a lot of things wrong. And it's going to give people really bad advice. And you should never take anything it says as gospel truth.
period. But I think that middle is the right place to be with a device like this, which is why I found this whole experience so compelling. It feels like it's trying to serve me in the way that is sort of automatic by just collecting this stuff on my wrist with a thing that I don't think about and then give it back to me in a way that is packaged and useful and not just a bunch of numbers. And for me, as somebody who doesn't want to think about this a lot, that feels right to me. Yeah, I very much agree with you. And I think the only thing I would add is that I really want to emphasize for anyone who's curious that this is a tool and it's not meant to sublimate a doctor. It's just kind of something that you use maybe in between doctor's visits, but it is something that is going to help you kind of coordinate your care with a doctor and maybe give you more information to ask the right questions at your doctor appointment. I genuinely feel like that's how you should be thinking about it, going into using it. And if you do it that way, I think you can have a fairly decent experience.
All right, do you have a minute to stick around and do a hotline question with me? Oh, of course. Okay, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Do a hotline.
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All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love hearing all of your questions. And going forward, we're going to have lots more room to do more of your questions on the show. So keep them all coming. I'm especially interested in like weird, tiny mysteries that we can help you solve. Just strange things happening in your tech world that we can help you fix. I want to hear all of them. For now, V, this is a question for you. And it's about smart glasses. And it comes from Stevie.
The question says, there's one smart glasses feature and only one I desperately want and I don't ever hear talked about. I would pay $100 or $150 extra on a pair of expensive, quality, attractive eyewear if they had the Find My iOS network baked in. I always lose or misplace things, so a seamlessly integrated Find My network connection would open up the whole luxury glasses market to me as a consumer. V, I have two questions on this. One, is this a thing you're hearing about in the wind at all? The, like, use these to find lost things, which I actually think is a terrifically good idea. And two, is there anything we can do to help Stevie here? It's so funny because I believe this is something that I heard.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think that's something that they're thinking about with Android XR. There was a demo of Project Astra like a year or two ago that one of the things was you're wearing the glasses and you're like, where did I leave? I forget what it was. I think it might have been a pair of glasses. We're like, where did I leave my glasses? It remembers from the camera stuff that it saw where they were and can sort of walk you back to them. But that was like a science project demo. I assume that's nowhere near real. It's not a thing that I've had demoed for me. It's things that while I've had demos that.
the representatives have said, like, this is a thing that's on our mind and that we're working on. And I do believe that this was something that was, that I talked about, like, a couple of days ago when I had my Android, my latest of, I've been having Android XR demos for almost two years at this point. So I believe that my latest demo, this was something that we were talking about. It is a challenging thing in terms of technology to implement, like, easily. I think it is something that might be easier to do from, like, a multimodal. To your point, I took a picture. Can you remember where I put something?
based on the things that I saw thing. It would require the AI to be good, which is another, you know, that is a hurdle. You know, I was impressed by a lot of the Android XR things that I saw that are in the pipeline. Wink, wink. Because the Warby Parker and Gentle Monster glasses are coming out are audio only. There are no displays there. Though Google does have prototypes that have a binocular display, as I did get to see kind of ideas of what that will look like in Android XR. I do think Meta should be a little worried because Meta AI is doo-doo.
It's bad. It's not good. So at some point, Stevie, I think this could be a thing. There are technical challenges and like the approach that they're working on, which is why you haven't heard a lot of people talking about it with smart glasses right now. We're in a kind of an odd year for smart glasses in that the momentum is here. Big tech is telling you it's happening. Big tech is telling you that it's AI as the major killer use case. Nobody can agree on what to call this technology. We've moved away from smart glasses to AI glasses.
IO is any indicator. Intelligent eyewear is what Google has landed on. Oh, no. Oh, that sucks. No. Smart glasses is fine. Let's just do... We got it right the first time, guys. Let's just do smart glasses. Let's just do smart glasses. It's fine. We did smartphone. We'll do smart glasses. Everybody will understand it. We can all move on with our lives. This is my stance. But, you know, of course, none of the people in the space are agreeing with me here. But, you know, so like there's a lot of technical challenges here. I think we're going to see a lot more interesting stuff in 2027 based on a lot of the reporting I've done and conversations I've been having. But...
I unfortunately, Stevie, I think it's going to be a couple of years before this is like a legitimate feature or use case. Yeah, I will say, though, and I'm curious your thoughts on this. One of the reasons I picked this question to do is the more I thought about it, the more I'm like, this is an awesome idea. I just think about my own experience, right? Like I lost my wallet a few weeks ago because I literally left it on the top of my car because I was putting my kids in the back of the car and put my wallet up there while I was like getting the kids in the car to have a free hand and then left it up there and it fell off and my wallet was gone. And I constantly am leaving my keys in the car recently because if I put them in the middle.
in like by the center console, I'll find them. But if I put them in the little like, I don't know, coin holder on the door, I will never ever look there. There is a 0% chance I will find them if that's where I put my keys. But having a thing that could just like scan around me and remind me if I've gotten out of the car without my keys, or if I can't find the remote in the living room, just do the little like augmented reality bursts to show me where the remote is. Like that's not the reason you would wear glasses all day, but it feels like the kind of thing that would come up a lot.
in the sort of day-to-day use of glasses, right? And like, we've talked about this a bunch. The only way they're gonna get glasses to work is if you're gonna use them all day. And I think the answer is not one thing that you do all day. It's gonna have to be a million things that you do sometimes that all sort of add up to something much bigger. And this feels like something that belongs on that for me. Like, I would end up using a feature like this damn near every day. But is it possible that I'm just like a lunatic who can't stop using things? Like, is that just me? No, there are many people, like, I mean, ADHD people of the world unite. My spouse is someone who would use this every single, like, they were looking for a thing for...
I want to say a whole week. And it was in that exact coin holder in the door space that you're talking about. I don't understand. It doesn't make sense. It just couldn't find it. And we have a very vertical house with four floors. They were averaging 100 flights of stairs climbed a day looking for this thing that was in our car. So to your point, I do think this is a thing that a lot of people would find useful. And we could do a whole other verge cast on the state of smart glasses and all the challenges for 24 seven wear. Or you could just read the blog that I recently wrote on the verge.com about a lot of those issues. But I think.
The main issue right now is that smart glasses, functionally right now, are a sometimes device. They are not a real 24-7 device. This would be a really great use case, but finding the killer use case that will convince people that this is worth the societal conversation about sacrificing your privacy, we don't have that yet. What we have are a bunch of small sometimes use cases that if you cobble maybe 70 of them together, we could come up with an actual reason to wear these all day. But this is like one of the more compelling ones.
Yeah, it is one of the things where I think every person can go like, oh, yeah, that would be super useful. But is this one thing going to be enough for me to risk getting punched in the face? I'm suspicious of Stevie's argument that they would spend 100 or 150 extra dollars just for this feature. I hope somebody built it for you. Just the same, Stevie. V, thank you for hanging out. It's great to see you. Good luck getting back to California.
All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to V and Mia for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. Also, keep sending in questions. We love hearing from you. You can always send us email, vergecast at verge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. 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. We will be back on Friday with just oh so much more news because boy, is it ever developer season. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
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