The Vergecast - A quest for the best headphone mics

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

On this episode of The Vergecast, we kick off Hot Girl Vergecast Summer with a classic Vergecast segment: the mic test. Guest host Victoria Song is joined by Vergecast producers Andru Marino and Erick Gomez to see how the Nothing Headphone 1, Sony WH-1000XM6, Apple AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort Ultra hold up against what’s possibly the noisiest street in Brooklyn. After that, Victoria is joined by Ladder CEO Greg Stewart to talk about what it takes to build a successful strength training app — especially for people just starting out. As it turns out, it’s quite challenging, between curating playlists, accommodating users’ different access to equipment, skill levels, and preferences for coaching styles. (And maybe, some occasional beef with Peloton?) Lastly, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]) about AI fitness summaries, whether people actually like them, what’s frustrating about them, and what scenarios they might actually be useful for. Want to learn more about the topics in this episode? Here are some handy dandy links for your reference: Nothing Headphone 1 review Sony WH-1000XM6 hands-on Apple AirPods Max review Bose QuietComfort Ultra review A lazy person’s guide to getting into shape Ladder isn’t done trolling Peloton The unbearable obviousness of AI fitness summaries Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of Hot Girl Vergecast Summer, the flagship podcast where the hot girls of The Verge replace our stinky old men for a summer. No, we love you. We love you. We're not stinky and you're not old. But anyway, I'm your friend Victoria's Song and I'm filling in this week for David Pierce now that he's officially on parental leave. I'll be your guest host for the next two weeks. and then I will be handing it off to another one of my beautiful colleagues. It's going to be a really fun summer, and I think you guys are totally going to have a blast with us. But today, the itinerary for today's show is we are going to be testing out the mics from a bunch of different over-your headphones, and I'm bringing in our producers, Andrew Marino, and Erica Gomez to help me out with that, because they are the audio kings, and I'm just the wearable lady. You know what? That's not true. I test a bunch of fitness headphones, so I'm an audio queen in my own right.

And then, you know, once we're done with a microphone test, we're going to talk to the CEO of a strength training app called Ladder. And the reason why is because it turns out it's very difficult to build the strength training app. Trust me, I've tested dozens. Cardio apps, really easy strength training. For whatever reason, it's a lot more challenging. Anywho, I really enjoy Ladder. So I wanted to get him on and to talk about the challenges of making one that's actually pretty good. And once we're done with that, we are going to take a question from the Vergecast hotline.

So, you know, all that coming up today and more, but first, I want to know what you're going to listen to on these over-your headphones once we figure out which one is the winner from this mic test. I personally will be listening to the entire soundtrack of K-pop Demon Hunters because I was not expecting it to rock as hard as it does, but it does. Let me know if you watch this movie, your favorite song from it is and why it's takedown because that song is chef's kiss. Don't come at me if you like soda pop. Anywho, we'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

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And we're back. So one of the most signature Vergecast segments is the In-the-Field microphone test. And in the past, we've tested microphones from consumer electronics like earbuds, laptops, smart glasses, the whole shebang. So now let's do over-the-ear headphones. So audio quality, obviously a huge top concern when you're buying over-the-ear headphones, but we often forget to think about microphone quality, aka how you're going to sound when you talk to people over the phone on these headphones. So to test this, we sent our good friend Andrew Marino into the field with a bunch of new over-ear headphones.

And to help me out, we have our producer, Eric Gomez. How you doing, Eric? Good, V, how are you doing? I'm good. And how are you doing, Andrew? Hi, V. I'm good. I'm out in deep in Brooklyn on a street corner. It's one that I take phone calls a lot from. So I think this is a good place to do headphone tests. Yeah, I can definitely hear all the cars behind you. It's pretty noisy. Which is peak New York City vibes. So which headphones are we going to test first? Okay, so we have four headphones today. We're going to do the AirPods Max, the Bose Quiet, Quiet, Comfer, Ultra. the Sony W.H. 1000 XM6s and the new nothing headphone one just was announced this on July 1st. So we'll get to try all those out in this field.

Let's start with maybe the nothing one so we can hear them right after bat. Love to hear what nothing has in store. Is it something? Is it nothing? We'll find out. Okay, now I'm wearing the nothing headphone one. I'll get this interesting design. Okay, how do I sound out in the field now? You sound not too bad. I can't hear the giant garbage truck that was behind you or any of the hustle and bustle.

Your voice sounds a little, I don't know, compressed, a little like muffled. Not the worst, but also clearly, you're clearly on a pair of something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's doing a great job of canceling out all the noise. behind you. When you were on your

MacBook microphone before, you could hear everything, and now it's completely cancelling out all the noise. And it's doing actually a good job of separating your voice from the background noise. However, yeah, like me said, it is kind of

compressing your voice a little bit, madulating a little bit, but at least we could hear you. Oh, okay. So there's like some sirens that just went off while you were talking. Did you hear any of that? Not a single. thing. Wow.

Okay. That's pretty cool. That's pretty good. Okay. So we have to say that we did a test of this before earlier this week. And I wore the headphones backwards. And it sounded horrible and you could not understand anything I was saying. Is that correct?

It was garbage. That was an absolute garbage. Like it was just super underwater. You could only hear part of every third word. It was not great. Okay. You sound awful. Oh, my God.

Yeah, let me just turn these around and actually see if they sound bad when I wear them long. Sure. Okay, how do I sound? You sound awful. Yeah, really bad. It's kind of funny because I think lots of people don't always check whether they're wearing the right and the left ear cup in the right direction. So this is one of those things where it's like if you have these headphones and someone tells you they can't hear shit, you might be wearing them the wrong way. Yeah. So I noticed the reason why this happens is because the way they fold down and then when you take them out of the case, the right is on your left hand and the left is on your right hand.

So then when you pick them up, you have to turn them and then put them on, which is very confusing. and I think that's why I got mixed up there. But I'm glad to hear now that we bore them correctly, they sound better. Yeah, totally. We could totally have a conversation right now, despite all the traffic going on behind you, you're coming in pretty, pretty clear. I'm actually pretty impressed. Truly unintelligible when you wear it the wrong way versus, you know,

pretty decent when you have it on the right way. So that's kind of nuts. And like these are $3.99, $2.99, not $3.99. I think the design looks pretty neat. from afar. I don't know how you feel about it up close and how does it feel on your head. Yeah, I feel a little silly worrying them outside. They make me look

like a robot like with these like designs on here. Definitely got that cyborg look going on right now. Yeah. But I do really like the buttons on the back. There's like this nice cool scrolly wheel thing and there's a little paddle switch

that you can like skip songs and stuff and I guess there's a button over here on the side that you can like a sign to your voice assistant if you want to do that too. It's a pretty cool design, but it's a little silly. I like the black version. Those actually look a lot cooler than

these ones. I think these stick out a lot more. The design is definitely very divisive for sure. It's a fashion statement. Good if you love making a fashion statement. Maybe not so great if you're in a boardroom. Unless you have a fellow boardroom full of AI bots,

which I don't know. We live in a dystopia. That could be true. common. Anywho, shall we move on to the next pair of headphones? Yeah, which one should we try next? Let's do the Sonys. Those are also relatively new, too. Okay, cool. Okay, currently talking from the Sony, WH-1000 XM-6s. I've said this model number enough that I know what they're called now. The Sony Alphabet Soup. I don't know. You sound pretty good. The noise, again, can't hear anything behind you. Your voice is pretty clear. Yeah, it's actually pretty remarkable. Remarkable, continuing to be impressed by these headphones and their ability to cancel out so much background noise and traffic noise.

I think your voice is slightly less compress and modulated, so it's a little more natural sounding. But yeah, you're coming in pretty clear. Wearing these, it sounds like I'm in a room. I hear more of the sounds outside, though, than I did in the last one, but it makes it sound like the same. sounds are in a box. I don't know if that makes sense. It's kind of interesting you say that because your voice is coming across as if you're in a small space and it's kind of like you're getting some reflections off a wall or something as if it's like a visa, like a boardroom or a small phone booth or something. So it's adding a little bit to your voice to make it a little bit more natural sounding, which is pretty interesting. Interesting. Okay. So these use six mics for a voice pickup compared to four.

in the last time. There's 12 mics total on these. So I thought that was interesting. So these are pretty, I mean, Sony's such an audio focus company, so it makes sense. All right, cool. So that's the Sony's. We got those. Let's do the AirPods Max next.

Okay. All right, now I'm calling from the Apple AirPods Max. How do I sound here? You know what's surprising is how much more I hear of your surroundings. There was like one of those big ass that was a bus, was it a truck at some point.

You know, like it sounded like an old man going, definitely heard that in the background. Voice-wise, I think it's okay, but maybe not

the most amazing, not as good as the Sony's or the nothings that we've heard so far. I can definitely hear that truck behind you, though. Yeah, you're coming in

a little muffled. I think these are letting in more of the natural ambience of whatever's going on behind you, but at the same time, it's also cutting into your voice.

So you kind of sound like you're on a Zoom call, like that kind of underwater type of effect that you get sometimes from the low-fidelity audio over the internet. Yeah, I found this in our last test, like a lot more background noise came through. And maybe my voice sounded a little more realistic, but it also just took in everything else. Yeah, it's not as compressed as the Sony's or the nothings,

but you sound a little thin, I guess, is the best way to describe it. Sure, sure. Okay. Yeah. I guess if you want someone to know that you're outside, this is what you want. But, you know, you don't want to sound horrible on the call, but you want to say, oh, God. Oh, God, someone's breaking and they need to oil those brakes.

Oh, wow. You heard that. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. It was completely silent for the last two headphones, but I can definitely hear what's going on outside. Okay. Yeah.

There are three microphones for voice pickup with eight microphones for action. if noise cancellation. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. It heard all that. And it's interesting because this is, I think, the most expensive pair of headphones that we have in this test. They're 549.

So the others, like the nothings were $2.99 and the Sonys were $4.49. So you were paying the most to hear trucks behind you when you're outside. Do you hear any of the wind noise? It's getting pretty easy. Yes. A little bit, yeah. Yeah. get some of that wrestling.

I would say that Apple's AirPods pro, the earbud ones, I think they sound great for voice calls. I use those all the time for voice calls. So it's funny, like, if you were to pick these over the earbuds, I would pick the earbuds just because, like, you get so much more use on them because the voice calls are better. That's my opinion. I mean, you don't get as much of a fashion statement as you do with the Macs.

I definitely feel they are, they are, They're a very specific look. I see people in New York City all the time on the subway wearing them. So I guess it's a matter of what you're looking for. But cool. Now we're on to our final pick, the Bowes Quiet Comfort Ultra. Let's see how those do. All right.

Now I'm calling on the Bowes Quiet Comfort Ultra. How do I sound? What do you hear? What do you don't hear? You know, when you were talking, I could hear the stuff around you a lot more. Yeah. then when you're not talking, it sounds a lot damper. Although now I do hear those police sirens going by.

I do hear the sirens going by. And you sound a little compressed, but not awful. You're intelligible, a little bit like you're in an echo chamber underwater, a little bit. So these did the best in our previous test. Okay, yeah, you hear this siren going by here. Oh, yeah. Oh, defo. it's interesting

I think it's like it's bringing up the noise floor every time you speak and then once you stop talking it kind of dampens it down a little bit more yeah I noticed this before too oh god sorry

wow no it's it's accurate but I do think it's gonna depend on what context you're using these headphones and like how much you want other people to know where you are I don't want anyone to know anything about where I am at any given point in time. I want to be like a mystery enigmatic. So that's not something that I would love personally.

But you are intelligible on the call. You do kind of sound like you're like if you had a swimming pool and you got rid of all the water and you were kind of standing in the swimming pool, there's a little bit of that effect going on, I think. Oh, echoey, yeah. Yeah, it's a little reverby. It's adding some kind of processing to the voice where it's kind of letting it ring a little bit more than would normally or naturally. Yeah. And it's, yeah, I'm picking up the birds as well. Yeah.

I'm not picking up any low end at all. Just really high frequency. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. You got some yappy birds near you. Okay, so what do you think? Who wins? I think my number one pick would be the Sonys, actually.

Okay, for voice calls. I was going to say the same thing. I think it's a close, tie or at least a very tight race between the Sonys and the nothings. I think it would be Sony number one, nothing number two, DeBose number three, and AirPods Max number four. Let me put them on one more time. We'll just say goodbye.

Okay, and then I'm back on the nothings. Just to compare it. Still sound pretty good or still easy to hear me. Second place, you're going to say? Yeah, I'm still going to say, I think, second place just because you're a little loud, and a little more compressed sounding to my ear, at least, than you were on the Sony's. But it's a lot closer than it was.

On our last test when the nothings were... Yeah, I think we are just coming to realize, you know, that these headphones, for the most part, do a pretty good job of canceling out background noise, you know, some better than others. And that's always going to add a little bit of color and compression to your voice. But, you know, as long as we're able to hear you,

I think that's a good trade-off. Yeah. You know, because otherwise you're not going to want to wear these and take a call because they're always going to have complaints from other people saying that they can't hear you or if you can, you know, go to a quieter space. You know, you can confidently go out with the, you know, with the Sony's or the nothing headphones and take a call and not worry about it at all, pretty much. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think another thing we were saying is just the scenarios that you're in because they might perform slightly differently. I think you sounded like you were in the, apiary section where all the birds were yapping in the zoo a little bit when you added in like outdoor noise with the bows. So I think it's important to think about where you're going to be using these headphones when, you know, prime day. Prime day is happening, right? So, yeah, I was going to go by myself a pair of bows, but maybe I'll get a pair of the Sonys just because I think they did better all around. Oh, wow. Now I have to think hard. I don't like having to think hard. That's very rude.

voice calls, the Sony beat out. But for sound quality, I'm always going back to the AirPods Max between those four. Yeah. But the voice calls don't sound great. Yeah. No, the voice calls on the AirPods Max, I think we're, I agree with Eric. I think they were the worst. So that's, hmm, maybe the real thing is that you could never just have one pair of those. I know. And that's they make, yeah, that's what they want you. They want you to buy multiple headphones. Got my AirPods Pro for my voice calls. I got my AirPods Max for my music listening. It's messed up.

That's how they get you. That's how they get you. That's how they get you. That was great. Thank you, Eric, for having some beautiful audio-inspired, informed intakes besides me just going like, and thank you, Andrew, for braving a very busy street in Brooklyn. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for doing that.

It was fun. That was our mic test. So we're going to take a break, and when we're back, I'm talking with the latter CEO about what it takes to build a strength training app. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and. and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages,

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You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace, where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies,

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and it is really hard to find something that I personally feel like gets strength training down pat. And I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've tested a million of them. It's probably close, hundreds at the very least. And strength training is just so hard to get down pat. And I think latter of all the apps that I've tried has definitely gotten the closest to the point where I almost feel like I enjoy lifting weights, which if you've read my reviews, you know how much I hate lifting weights. Like, I know it's good for me, but I hate it. In any case, I wanted to call up CEO Greg Stewart and have him tell me why this app is actually good at this. So here's that.

I really wanted to talk to you about ladder because, you know, personally speaking, I have always struggled with strength training. We have, like, approximately 40,000 running and cardio apps. Why is strength training so hard to get? it right? Yeah, I think to start, it's not just straight training, it's delivering workouts or programming through an app experience. And I think if you look at the spectrum of apps and content, it's really designed as a library of almost scattered random workouts, which you have to navigate yourself. And it's really hard to figure out the right style, what your programming should look like versus your goals, how to start a new modality like strain training. And so people will gravitate

towards what they're comfortable with or what they know. And a lot of times that leans to cardio, which is great. All movement is great. But it doesn't really help you start a new, consistent routine versus completing a workout, any workout in a particular day. And there's lots of resources out there, but it's hard to find one sources. the truths. What we invented was a system, and that system's been designed to do two things, to get you the desired outcomes and body composition that comes with teaching you the movements and programming to get there, and to keep you excited and having fun, which is motivation, which becomes consistency. When we designed the experience, we looked at personal training,

and personal training from our perspective is the best way to get into training, to get into fitness, to maintain a consistent routine. But it's really hard to get access to that. It's really expensive. It's hard from a timing perspective. It's just not really accessible for most people. But the anchors of personal training were super interesting and relevant to us. And how we saw that really three kind of core pillars, programming.

So you know what that. to do. It's designed by an expert. It's demystifying strength training. So no matter what style you're looking for or level of strength training you're coming in with. Coaching, so you've got someone there to guide you through each workout, someone to answer your questions, and accountability. So really trying to replicate the feeling of having a coach there. Are listeners who may not know what the latter experience is like? Can you give them a quick rundown of what ladder looks like for them. Yep, absolutely.

So again, it starts with our core role of giving you a plan and demystifying strength training for beginners or any level. And for us, it starts of bringing on the best coaches, true experts in strength coaching and the specific modality that they represent, which we test before they join the company.

So for the consumer, we spent a lot of time constantly tweaking maybe what you experienced, this matching algorithm to make sure that we're asking you the right questions, understanding who you are, what you're solving for, where you're coming from a fitness perspective, beginner or advance, and mapping you to the right program based on all those inputs. We have a wide range of programs, we call them teams. Some are geared towards folks who are new to strength training, others are geared to those are advanced, coaches represent personas and personalities, and we use that to match to the right user who's coming in.

In the app itself, we're overemphasizing real coaching and proper form. So the value prop is we give you a plan. We remove all the guesswork that comes with strength training. You have movement videos featuring your coach who's performing each exercise. We make it really easy to review and preview those moments before you get started. But you can think about it as a system. It isn't just a basket of content and you're choosing your own adventure. We're figuring out who you are.

We're mapping each of the right program. That program is called a team. That team has a coach. That coach is actually programming workouts every week that are progressive so that every day you're looking to work out, you know exactly what you should be doing. And you can have confidence that they're building on top of each other and actually purposely designed by an expert that is in line with the goals that you're solving for. Yeah, I want to touch on a lot of what you talked about there because one of my biggest

struggles, like, I'm in the fitness tech space, I work out, I know how important, like, conditioning and strength training and mobility work is, but, you know, it's just so hard to be like, oh, I'm a runner, let me Google or ask ChatGPT what the best program for me is. I don't know, I have to look up for the proper form. Oh, no, I have to think about, do I have access to a gym? Do I have home equipment? Yep. Oh, I'm injured.

I don't have that equipment. What can I swap it out for? What's a modifier? The way that ladder does it, when I first tried it, I was like, oh, this makes sense. This is like a lot easier for me now because you can swap out a move that you don't like that made me much more likely to stick with. So I was wondering, like, how do you get those concepts into an app? Like, how do you develop that process? Because I was like, oh, I didn't even know that was something I wanted.

Even the concept of training blocks for people who've never used ladder, you have six-week training blocks. That was something I struggled with when I was trying to do this all on my own, saving money, not going to get a personal trainer in person. So just would love to touch on those aspects. Yeah, on the blocks, if you were to hire a personal trainer, they would think about increments of time that you're working towards. So it wouldn't just be a random Monday workout.

They would say, all right, over the next six or eight weeks or 12 weeks, we're going to work on developing something very specific. And your workouts are going to build to that. And we use the strength series to create a similar experience. they have specific goals that you're working on. It has a beginning and an end. So it doesn't feel like this never-ending experience or never-ending road.

Like you have a moment in time, a very specific thing that you're focused on, which is different at each team, and you're doing it alongside a whole bunch of people who are going through the same thing as you. When we think about launching a new team or even managing our teams, we're hyper-focused on the persona,

the person that is relevant to that team. And we work backwards based on what we're learning from that quiz. So we have millions of people going through that quiz where we help you match to a program. But we also use that quiz to figure out what are the gaps in personas or training styles that aren't well served by our current coaching roster. And we're in a fortunate position where we don't have to go launch new coaches and teams to grow. will launch a new coach and team when it's very clear

that there's an underserved persona, so someone very specific, similar goals, training style that isn't currently met by our coaches. So we have like a very specific person mind when we're working with our coaches and their programming reflects that.

So up front, when we're working with a coach, whether it's launching a new team or constantly iterating, it's very, very clear where is this person, working out. What equipment do they have access to? Where are they on their fitness journey? How many days a week are they working out? Do they need more motivation or they're looking for technical form and

training advice? And if you go across our teams, they're extremely different. I think the fact that we didn't launch ladder with like one core face that represented the brand like you'll see in a lot of other fitness products. We created this concept of ladder, under ladder, teams, and teams are a wide range of personas. If you go to Limitless with Coach Kelly, that's an advanced gym goer. That's a woman who's going to the gym five or six days a week, knows exactly how to navigate around equipment and machines,

and is looking for expert programming and a coach who really understands the technical fundamentals and is going to convey that in their programming. If you join a line, it has a yoga-infused influence. So someone who might not be coming from a ton of strength training experience wants to incorporate that, but wants to have some of the familiarity and benefits of incorporating a yoga routine. So we're very, very particular on the person that these coaches are serving within these teams. And we're constantly working with that to make sure that our assumptions are correct

and that we have the right person in mind and we're using our data to inform that process. So for us, it comes from not, not. having a blanketed view of this is just workouts and a fitness consumer. It's who is this person? Where are they coming from? What are they solving for? What equipment do they have? Where are they training? And then building a team around that. You know, this new era of fitness apps, it kind of sort of feels like your mini content media production companies. And that comes with its own challenges. Like, you know, one of the core tenets of strength training is you kind of have to do the same few movements over and over again with heavier weights to progress. It's very

easy to get bored when you're doing that. So like how do you keep that interesting? Obviously the trainers, they're thinking about that too. They're putting that in. And then, you know, how do you make the decision of do we go for curated playlists that our instructors create? Or do we go for your own music, which I deeply appreciate the ability to listen to my own playlist on ladder. Like, love Apple Fitness Plus, love Peloton, but sometimes I'm like, your guys' music taste and mine don't align. You guys have no K-pop playlist, and I need straight kids to really get pumping. So, like, how do you think about the media side of that and the content production? Yeah, the music side was almost an accidental.

discovery. So when we launched the app in 2020, we had very little money. We couldn't go invest in content that was on. We couldn't purchase licenses. We just didn't have any resources to think about solving music and doing it in a way that was like legal and compliant with the laws of ownership. So like we just couldn't solve that. But like from our perspective, we were like, I don't know, when you go to the gym, are you listening to the music in the background, or do you have your headphones on and are you picking it? And is it a personal decision? And for us, it was personal, but we launched just having no other option, but giving the option of an integration with Spotify and Apple Music so that it's clean to go, you know, pick your music. And then integrating the experience so that the music is ducking down when voiceovers are happening when the coach is talking and just making it feel like it's purposeful and how the two systems. are talking to each other. What we learned really quickly early on was that that was a core value prop for people.

If you go to our app store reviews and we've got 75,000 written app store reviews, it's like a third of them will reference playing their own music. And so it became a differentiator, one that was like better for the business, but it became a differentiator because we learned that like people actually

who are consuming our content wants to be picking their own music and using their own apps and their own services that they're already paying for. And so, like, that has been true from the beginning, but we kind of fell backwards into it, not having a ton of other options. We love a happy accident.

And kind of along that line, were there features that you thought would work and then didn't? And then vice versa, were there features that you were like, this will never work, and then it did? Sort of. Like, the whole thing has been a game of, like, extreme iteration.

We spend a lot of time listening to our members, both the unprovoked feedback that's coming in, surveys, constantly surveying the team and platform level, and listening for what people want. So when we make a big bet

on a core product feature, it's pretty directly informed from the user. Building a latter journal was a clear example of that. People were tracking rep and weights outside of the app. They wanted an integrated experience. modifications is another great example.

People were modifying on their own, but they were making up the modification or asking in team chat, which is basically a big group chat inside all of these programs. Not a great experience, but people were screaming at us for these features. And so when we hear it that loudly and we go make a huge bet, we're extremely confident that it's going to be well received. And we've got a beta group of 2,000 members and we're getting feedback through this whole process and we're learning what we got right. and what we got wrong.

There were some features early on that we weren't sure how important they would be. One of those was a one-to-one chat. We had a one-to-one chat in the app that was just part of the membership. And because of that, we had an expensive price. So when we launched, we were 60 bucks a month. I wasn't meant to be like chat with your coach as a buddy,

more like a non-star button where you had a very specific thing. You needed a modification. You have an injury. You're asking you all the programming. And the coach can give you, a response. And when we first launched the app, most of our users were coming from the audiences, the social audiences of our early coaches. And they had 10, 20,000 followers on Instagram. And that person who was following them knew that coach, knew the style, had all the context, that coach was

their hero. And yeah, they were really excited to be able to talk to that coach. And they valued chatty one-to-one. When we started growing and investing growth and growing outside of our coaches audience, what we learned through a whole bunch of work was, one, the price was way too expensive. Like, people were anchoring to their content subscription apps. So they're thinking about Spotify and Netflix, and we were multiples of that. So the price value equation was completely out of whack. And we learned that most people weren't willing to pay extra for this chat feature. On the flip side of that, like the Cheers feature that we thought was pretty cool early on, where you open up the app, you're on the home screen, you can see avatars of members who are

in their workout with a ring that shows how far they are into the workout, and you can send them a cheer. And it's just kind of a fun game-five experience. That feature has become unbelievably important to retention. And we've spent a ton of time looking at, you know, what is the minimum number of cheers per workout that leads to longer-term retention? Or what is when you come into the welcome workout, your first workout of ladder, like how many cheers actually are impactful? And we've correlated this to retention. So that feature is on the home screen for a reason. It might feel a little different when you come in there, but it's really, really important and really powerful. And it brings kind of the atmosphere and feeling of being on a team and doing it with other people who are like you.

So certainly have had features that have outperformed what we would have guessed on the impact that they would drive to our membership. Yeah, that's like a really good segue. It's like you're reading my mind. But I wanted to talk about gamifying and community because one thing I noticed is, okay, so I am not the most social person while working out. I'm very much lone wolf. Leave me alone.

I tried the run clubs and I'm the type of runner and I'm like, don't talk to me. I'm going to go at my pace, all that sort of stuff. So I was so surprised to see how much I was lurking in the team chats and being like, Oh, I don't participate much in them. But I'm like, oh, here's Monday morning. Here's, here's Nicole's little message. Let me see what everyone else is saying. Oh, like that feels, that feels nice. And then to your point, the cheers, sometimes, you know, Nicole loves a plank. I do not, but I try. And when I'm struggling in the plank, sometimes someone will send a cheer. And I'm like, oh, that's nice. I can't let this random person down. Let me, let me hold out an extra 10 seconds in the plank. And I was so surprised. prize to see how that actually impacted me. So, you know, but that's kind of the positive side of gamifying. There are other kind of more mixed. I have complicated feelings about streaks, for example, and getting really mentally fixated and obsessive about streaks to the point where I get injured, where I don't take the rest in. So how do you think about an approach the gamified feature so that

You keep people engaged. You do keep them feeling positive, but you don't overload them and you make their mental health worse in some cases. Yeah, every feature we designed. And so this is true. Everything you've seen in the app is all aimed at helping to keep you consistent with your workouts. So they're not just random features to be there. They're there because they have some correlation to motivation or correlation to workouts. Streak mapped well to our value prop of helping.

you stay consistent with a plan and rewarding consistency, but we made changes to streaks based on some of the points that you just made. When we first launched the app, our user was on the more advanced end of strength training. That's changed as we've grown and added new modalities and found fits with a broader basket of users. But our streak was four workouts per week, which we learned pretty quickly was not realistic for many of our members. And so, So it was like this, it was having the opposite effect. It was not motivational. It was like, well, I can't do that, so I don't really care about this.

And I'm constantly underperforming. And so that was an important insight, and we changed this week based on feedback for our members and watching what was happening, and we moved it to three. And we had a core group of people that said, like, you're making this software and easier. But for the most part, most folks were excited about it and thought that it made a ton of sense and actually was now a motivational feature. Fast forward to last month, we launched streak freeze because we know that life gets in the way. And we would get support tickets, folks saying, hey, I got married this week.

I had a death in my family. I had a 53-week streak, and I lost it. Is there anything you could do? And we would help them and we would repair the streak. Like, we would repair it. And streak freeze was introduced to help solve some of these motivational elements or deter defeat when it's just not possible to reach the goal from a consistency perspective.

Cool. And then, you know, just getting on the sense of quitting, like, how do you get people back on the horse? Because I think that's a problem that a lot of fitness tech, wearable tech, basically my entire beat is, like, obsessed with, is just never getting you to quit. How do we get people to stick with it?

Because behavioral change is really hard. Like, I'm dedicated to fitness. And even I have like months long slumps where I'm like, ooh, I'm not doing as much as I should be. So how do you get people back on the horse? How do you approach that challenge? Yeah, I think like making sure the experience is fun and motivated has been core to our product from the beginning. So whether that's your honor routine and we're trying to keep you excited for the next workout, all of those experience and levers are designed to keep you going.

I think one, like you have to get results, right? It has to prove that it's working. And we need to tell you that it's working. And that doesn't mean that the scale is changing. It could mean you feel better. It could mean that things are happening to your mood that are driving outcomes that are positive to your life. So we use these features to reinforce that, hey, you just hit a PR. Like that's a new accomplishment for you.

We celebrate badges, micro wins that aren't about the actual outcome, but that you did. You did something hard. All of those are motivating in. helpful, I think, to stay excited. Even though weekly drop. So our workouts are new every week. They're progressive, but no two workouts have ever been the same. And so even that is really unique versus other other apps in our space. We work with our coaches on programming, looking at the data every single week. It's informing what's happening the next week. But that element of surprise and variability or what are we doing this week is a real motivator for folks.

So we use that as a moment. We call it the drop. We release workouts on Sunday evening. It's the highest moment engagement of the week. People come into the app to see what the workouts for the week will look like. There's anticipation and fun. Again, if you look at our apps for reviews because we always trust the words of our members, what they'll say is, like, I'm having way more fun than I would have expected,

or I'm way more motivated than I thought I was. when people are falling off, we have moments that are like natural reentry points that we use to bring you back in. And the strength series is a big part of that. Maybe you fell off for reset the first strength series of the year. Well, we have another one coming. And we'll use that moment, those two weeks in between,

to try to pull you back in and get you excited and say, it's now a great time to restart. Like, you're not behind. We're all starting together tomorrow. And that is really effective. I mean, if you look at everyone who has left our app or turned our app, almost a third have come back. Oh, that's pretty wild. It's a really important motion from the company side, which is like, hey, maybe it wasn't the right time for you.

Like, I understand. But we're going to try to bring you back in and get you completing workouts again and trying to help you stay consistent and getting to the goals that you're looking to achieve. I guess one thing I wanted to ask was what's next for ladder. Obviously, you're iterating, you're thinking, do you ever feel like you get to a point where you're like, like, hey, we've got a pretty cool formula, or is it just a case where everyone has ideas all the time and it's fine-tuning? It never stops, which is a good thing. We have more things that we know we need to build than time and resources, which is a good problem that we're solving. There are some big, exciting projects that are jumping out at us from our members' words.

Like we built the latter journal. The latter journal helps you track reps and weights. We now have 200 million data points from our members that have been inserted into that journal. And now we want to figure out how do we take all that data and then help tell you what to do, not just looking backwards at what you did, but what weight you should pick up, when you should push harder, when you're getting close to a PR. Let's use all of this information, just like a coach who would be standing with you and saying these things, reacting and watching, let's use that information and help customize the experience even more,

giving you perspective on what to do next that's at the user level, not just at the team level. So there's a lot of opportunity on Ladder Journal and using all this incredible information that we have to make the experience better and more personal. There's a lot of exciting things on community that we're excited about. People want private tribes or small groups, whether that's opting in. into a smaller group. It could be women in New York who go to the gym. It could be you started on a team or a program at the same time, but creating a micro experience, which is even more relevance to the people who are in that group with you, not degrading team chat, but additive to the experience. So there's a whole bunch of things we're excited about on the community side now that it's growing and there are people coming to the app who know of other people, they're friends, and there isn't really a great way to go find. them and have a shared experience. You can imagine, you know, a lot of our members have a text group with their workout buddies where they're talking about progress and they're sharing what's

going on. That stuff should be in the app, especially as you have more and more people who are using ladder. We should create an ability to let you challenge your friends or cheer on your friends away or aside from the team or agnostic to what team you are on. So we're really excited about those components. And the third, like, big, big chunk. from our perspective that we're on learn mode right now is on nutrition. Our members are screaming at us to think about nutrition and think about how do you consolidate this experience into one? Because if you think about it, it's really one consumer with one goal or one problem.

So they're looking to lose weight or put on muscle mass. That goal has inputs and outputs. Outputs are workout or physical activity, what's coming out of your body, as a result of the workouts that you're doing. And inputs is food and diet and nutrition. And those two things have to work together to get to the outcome that you're solving for. Cool. And, you know, so I got to ask, you know, I'm a wearables reviewer.

I test a lot of this stuff. Everybody's adding in a ton of AI, AI summaries, AI chatbot coaches. What's your take on that? AI in general has been central to our team and how we work for a long time. Like we have 20x this business over the last couple of years, and our team is roughly the same size. So we're 40 people, including all of our coaches who are full-time teammates with us. So it's a very small team for the work they're doing. And the reason is we've used AI to 10x every individual.

And so we don't have many people or any who are managing. folks as a job, but they're using AI to amplify the work that they're doing. We use AI a lot with our coaches in a variety of ways. Like Team Chat, some of our teams have 100,000 people in them, and it's not a good use of time for the coach to read thousands of messages to understand what's happening in Team Chat. What's the temperament? What questions are people asking? Where are people getting stuck? And so we've created tools on the back end that let them very quickly ingest all the content from the day, understand the mood and the temperament, identify top questions, members who have questions that have never been responded to, and we help the coach prioritize

what to say and when using tools like that. So it's very much integrated from a workflow perspective. I think over the next year or so, you'll start to see it driving more personalization in the experience itself. The latter journal, for example, that will all be powered by AI, which is we have all this information, how do we help use it to tell you or help you know what to do next? If we enter nutrition, it will be a very similar approach. And you can imagine long term, like we had that coach chat, that one to one I talked about in the beginning, there's probably an opportunity to have a companion in the app that knows everything from a fitness and food perspective and is able to interact with you on a one-to-one basis to help you get closer to your goals.

So I would say chapter one for us is a workflow and using these tools to deliver a better experience with the team that we have. And chapter two will be using it to improve the experience, but personalize not degrading the team atmosphere, but using all this data and information to help give it back to you in a way that's consumable and helps navigate, you know, what the next thing should be that you're solving for. Very cool. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat. Of course. Thanks for having me.

It was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Yeah. All right, so we're going to take a quick break, and then after that, we've got a question from the Vergecast hotline. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation.

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And this week, we have an email about AI Fitness Insights, which this is a follow-up conversation to one that David and I had before he abandoned us for, you know, fatherhood again. The rudeness. Anyway, the email is from Kevin from San Diego, and it says, I have two questions slash prompts related to your recent discussion of Apple Fitness Buddy or whatever it is called and other AI and fitness tracker offerings. For background, I'm a very happy whoop user. Ooh, I got the whoop on right now. It's my favorite wearable I've ever used.

Having said that, I don't find their AI coach useful and agree with David NV's takes. My questions are the optimistic. Does some set of users out there enjoy these and why? What prompts are they putting in and what are we missing? out on and the cynical, do the companies themselves, whoop, or a garment apple, even see these are good? Or if you gave them the truth serum, would they just admit that they suck? And they just have to offer one because everyone else does. Ooh. Ooh. Goodness. Kevin from San Diego. Very spicy. A very spicy email. And it's a really well-timed email because I actually just wrote up a story on the

verge called the unbearable obviousness of AI Fitness Insights. Callback to one of my favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And you know what? Let's take the optimistic question and the cynical question, because do some set of users out there enjoy these and why? So when I was doing research for that story, I actually reached out to ORA. I reached out to Strava. And I reached out to Boop to say, like, you know, what's the feedback that you've

gotten from people using this because I personally, I like to go on the subreddits for these companies and read the discourse anytime I get a really stupid AI fitness summary. And, you know, as you can imagine what the companies told me was that, yeah, people actually really like it. But the numbers that they gave me, and it's in the article, which we'll put in the show notes, They were kind of, let's just say there was some words that were doing heavy lifting. I think, you know, they were like, they use them weekly. Okay.

Like, of the weekly users who decided to give feedback, well, you know, the decided to give feedback is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. But I do think that if you have people who are enjoying these very milk toast summaries, they are going to be the beginners. They're going to be people who are very new to. fitness who don't necessarily have the foundational knowledge of like what makes a good habit, what are good nutritional things to think about, how does rest interplay with your diet and nutrition. So for those people, they might bring insights that are, you know, not really insights, but they're

there in the app and they're convenient and easily summarized. So maybe as for what prompts they're putting in, well, that depends because there's two types of AI fitness. features and one of them are these just very blanket regurgitated AI summaries. There's no prompts being put into those. But some like ORA and Woop actually have chatbots that you can somewhat interact with. There's generally little prompts that they like pre-filled out prompts that you can do. I don't necessarily think we're missing out. I found that you can get a decent response. If you spend a lot of time talking to this chat bot, it's like you got I had to train the ORA chat bot quite a bit by like kind of taking its non-existent AI hand and going like, okay, I've had a

very stressful week. I think my glucose is up because I'm really stressed out. Is that a factor that affects glucose? Also, I got injured. Also, I did this. Also, I did that. And then the answers that it gives to me are a little more tailored to that specific situation, but it's still stuff that I could have found on Google and or through common sense. In that respect, I think the people who do enjoy them again, are those who just don't, they're coming into this fitness journey completely new, completely fresh. They don't have the basic know-how that you might have as someone who is an extensive whoop user, because let's be real, the group user set, they're generally very experienced athletes or they're very comfortable with these concepts of rest and recovery

and how that plays into fitness where you play up or play down the intensity. based on the amount of strain you've taken on. And so let's get to the cynical part of Kevin's question where it says, do the companies themselves even see these are good? Or if we gave them a truth serum, would they admit they suck? Well, I've made it my personal mission to ask the CEOs of all these companies when I interview them. You know, let's be real here. And the media training absolutely kicks on.

And I don't blame them at all for that. They absolutely have to kind of sell this because, let's be real, they do have to offer this because this is what investors want to see from them at this point in time with the AI zeitgeist. But, but, but, but, but, I'm going to give them a little credit because the problem with AI fitness and with wearables at large is that you are generating a huge amount of data. I've been testing this particular category or beat for close. to a decade now, I have close to a decade's worth of personal data amassed across several different platforms. And I'm pretty adept at looking at it, understanding my baseline, and pulling out

insights naturally. But even I need help from time to time to contextualize what it is that I'm seeing. And I can't crunch those numbers all by myself. So theoretically, if we could have an AI that was saying something along the lines of, you know, I'm going to use my personal life, for example. I ate it recently while on a run. I just completely, I was overly optimistic about what my body could handle after taking a break because I had a crazy last two months. So I'm coming off of a prolonged training break where I was mostly doing maintenance and I was like, yeah, you know, it's hot outside and I'm going to do my heat acclamation training with a 3.25 mile run because that is so. easy for me. It's so easy for me when I'm on the top of my game. I can do a 3.25 mile run in my sleep in the history of my running history. But in the last two months, you know, 3.25 is actually a bit more when you're putting it in the context that it was 88 degrees and I hadn't done

a proper heat, acclimatizing training regimen for two weeks. It takes about two weeks for your body to get used to the new heat and humidity when you switch seasons. So I ate it. I had absolutely ate it, and that's despite the fact that I had all the hydration that I needed with me, that I was prepped, and I went at an early time of day. I completely ate it. You could see this bandage that I have on my hand. And what I would have wanted from these AI to be like, hey girl, you had real bad sleep the last two months. And your training was extremely reduced. You've probably lost some fitness. And given the 10 years of history we have on you, you tend to come back from prolonged breaks way too ambitious and have a ton of self-reported injuries from doing all that.

See, I know that because I can sit back and reflect on my patterns and where I went wrong. The AI was just like, wow, you had a real intense run. Good job. And I was across multiple platforms. And I was like, okay, so you not only could not synthesize the insight that I wanted from my years of data, You just basically gave me a book report that was the equivalent of a fourth grader who decided not to do the assignment and read the summary on Wikipedia, and it reads like that. You know, so I think that's kind of the state of where AI fitness summaries are at. They're there because they are trying to solve a very real problem, which is data without context doesn't mean much.

But they're not as good as you are. Once you've learned your own context and your own patterns and reflected on all of that, they're not as good as you are at knowing yourself. So that's just where we're at now. They're going to pursue it. I keep looking at them and raising my eyebrow. And they keep going like their eyes are frozen and I know they're being held captive by their capitalist investors.

And I understand it's the little dance that we do. But there is a time and place for them. if you're a textual learner and maybe the charts that are right there with the same exact information, but for some reason you see it regurgitated in a little sentence, maybe that's more digestive for you. I'm not saying that there's absolutely no purpose for it, but for the vast majority of people looking for these features, wanting to have those insights, we're just not there yet.

We just aren't. So yeah, that's it. Thanks for your question, Kevin. It was a really good one. I got to have my little monologue. And that's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's a whole lot more stuff from this conversation at theverge.com.

We'll put links in the show notes, but also read theverge.com. Find our bylines. You're very smart people. You know how to do that. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, you can always email us at Vergecast at Theverge.com or keep calling the hotline, 866, Verge 11. We love hearing from you. Send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show,

and we do a hotline question every week, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. All very excellent guys. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of Vox Media Podcast Network. Jake will be back on Friday to discuss all the news from this week, but that's not Hot Girl Verge cast summer. Anywhoo. Goodbye.