The Vergecast - How Lego’s Smart Brick works

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

January brings two things in Vergecast-land: CES, and New Years' Resolutions. We start this episode with a dive into the story of this year's biggest tech show, the Lego Smart Brick, which is either a clever way of thinking about creativity or the end of creativity as we know it. Sean Hollister explains how the Smart Brick works, and how Lego can make sure it ends the right way. Then, Platformer's Casey Newton discusses his productivity system, his adventures in Claude Code, and how you too can make yourself a little more productive this year — with or without AI. Further reading: Lego announces Smart Brick, the ‘most significant evolution’ in 50 years Lego’s Smart Bricks aren’t just an experiment I played with the Lego Smart Brick From Platformer: The project that turned me into a Claude Code believer From Platformer: What I learned about productivity this year Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast, of rolling your own MCP server and running Claude Code to do absolutely everything in your entire life. Is that possible? Is it a thing a real person can do? Who's to say? But it seems like a cool future, and I'm ready to get into it. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I just got home from CES, where we saw tons of gadgets. Thank you to everybody who came out for the live show last week. Thank you to everybody who has written in and sent us all the cool stuff that you saw in Vegas. CES is a blast. But now I'm home, and it's time for my favorite annual tradition of detangling all of the junk that got stuck in my bag over the course of CES. I come home with SD cards full of pictures I need to offload. I come home with just like a bunch of weird

swag that I don't remember picking up, but just like things from booths that end up in my backpack. I don't know. I have a lot of stickers. Do you want stickers? I have nowhere to put stickers. CES is like full chaos and then I try to come home and just clean a little bit. And it's like now the year starts. I always think of CES is not like the beginning of a new year, but the end of last year. Now I come home and we start it all over. And here we are very excited about it. Today on the show, we're going to talk a little bit about CES. We're going to follow up with Sean Hollister about the Lego smart brick,

which I think was pretty undeniably the story of CES and certainly the device of CES. But there's something interesting going on with what Lego is up to and what this thing means that we're just going to dive into more. Then Casey Newton, our friend and the editor of Platformer, is going to come on the show and we're going to talk productivity. He is one of my favorite people to talk to about to-do lists and note-taking apps and all kinds of stuff about how we try to be more useful and get more stuff done without making ourselves crazy. We're going to talk about that. We've a really fun hotline question coming up. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, do you know that feeling when you just have too much crap on your desk and you're like, I got to get rid of all of this or I'm going to lose my mind?

That's where I am right now. I'm going to clean up. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on Duck, taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone

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All right, we're back. Sean Hollister is here. Hi, Sean. I'm here. How is your CES? survive? Are you feeling okay? It was exhausting, but like every year, almost every single year, I'm not sick yet. I'll be sick this next week, not the week I was there. That sounds right. It's like, it's just a slow, I was thinking of it as like, I used to always get sick after finals

in college where it was like you go and go and go and then the minute your body relaxes, it's like, oh, God, this is awful. And I feel like that's, that's the mode I'm heading into for the rest of January. And I'm very excited about it. So you were all over, I think, what was undeniably and kind of surprisingly the story of CES, which was the Lego smart brick. So I feel personally and professionally obligated here to spend some time talking about the smart brick. Were you surprised that this, A, existed and B, became the phenomenon that it was? I want to get into what it is in a minute, but like, did you know this thing was coming? All the diehard Lego fans knew this was coming because they released this thing in some markets two years ago. In 2024, they piloted this thing

in some undisclosed location in the world with a Lego City set and they're like, hey, look, we've got a smart brick to a very small audience that they could publicly test it in that market. And so there were patents, there were like drawings of these X-Wing fighters blasting way with Lego bricks.

They were all over the internet, but it's part of like this fairly small community of Lego leak fans that know about this. And so when I got there, I knew it was going to be there for sure because Lego never comes to see. So if they were going to trot something out, it had to be this brick that already leaked.

What I was surprised was that it was good. Yeah, okay, so let's back up a little. What is a smart brick? A smart brick is, for the first time, a Lego piece of electronics that is actually shaped like a normal Lego brick. If you know Lego sizes, it's two by four. It has two studs, one direction on the top.

It has four studs, the other direction. and it is a brick, meaning it is one of the tall things. It is not a thin, you know, plate. And within that, there is a lot of tiny computing going on. There's a custom ASIC chip so that it can run all kinds of different programs. The programs come on NFC tiles. So this is, you know, your tap to pay, your credit card at the store. This is that technology baked into a two-by-two flat tile of Lego with the NFC tag in there.

you put that on top of the brick or you bring the tag near the brick and all of a sudden this smart brick starts running a different program. And that program means it can be an X-wing fighter, all sorts of things. So this is like a stupidly pedantic way of asking this question. But I think I didn't understand what you just said until just now. So the smart brick is always the same thing. There is only smart brick, right? It has all the stuff, all the thing. There's just one version of the thing.

And then you basically decide what it does. with this NFC card. So I could, I'd buy 10 smart bricks and then I can use each one of those 10 to be 10 different things depending on like the NFC tag that I tap to it. Exactly. Each one of these bricks. And it took me, I saw the thing and it took me a couple days to get my head around that too, that the brick is not an X-wing brick.

It is like the Lego Mario figure. This is the animal. People are like, oh, they're just doing Lego Mario again. And the Lego Mario figure was a. giant brick of a figure that was Mario or Peach or Luigi, giant brick of a figure that was only ever Mario or Luigi or Peach, whatever it looked like. Which I would say, like, in a very real way, it sort of violates the entire spirit of Lego. Yes.

And so people are like, you're doing this all over again. Now you're going to have an X-wing brick here. But no, it's just a two-by-four brick, like the two-by-four bricks you've been using for ages to build Lego. It's the most common brick. The one that started Lego, basically, was this brick. But now it is semi-transparent and inside of it is all of this computing. And so it is the computer chip. It is the NFC reader.

It is a color sensor. It is a inertial IMU sensors like in your smartphone so it can detect a direction and position. But also it is a Bluetooth mesh network. So if you have multiple bricks near each other, not only does it know that there are bricks somewhere nearby. It knows exactly where they are in relation to the other brick. It knows that it is this number of centimeters away. It knows which direction it is pointed. It knows whether it is pointed at one another

or away from each other or any combination of things in 3D space. There's a lot going on here. We've not seen not only in Lego, but in tiny computers this size that talk to each other. Interesting. Okay, so this thing has been relatively controversial

for a couple of reasons I want to get into, but I will say what you just described to me spiritually seems very Lego, that actually what this is is not some defined thing that does some defined thing, that it is just sort of a bundle of stuff that you can in theory do lots of different things with. Like that, that feels at a very high level kind of right to me.

Does it hit you the same way? It does. And like 90, I'm like 90% there. I'm like 90% to, this is just going to be part of the Lego system where you can take things and you can reconstruct them and all kinds of configurations. The 10% where I'm not is,

the Lego company isn't saying that you can program this brick yourself. They're saying that like the Lego Mario sets, there will be these predefined NFC tiles. And when you bring your brick next to it or you put the tile on top of it, it will do still a fairly small number of relatively predetermined things. And the predetermined things can be so specific that there is some merit to adults saying, why the heck is Lego like taking away the creativity? Like what?

What are some of the things they've said out loud that you can do? One of the most attention-grabbing things you can do with this, what the Lego Star Wars set is, you can sit the emperor down on his throne, in the throne room on the Death Star. And when he sits down, he'll, like, activate the smart brick behind him on the back of his throne, and it will play the Imperial March. Not the Emperor's theme, mind you, but the Imperial March.

Okay, this theme. You know it. Okay, it'll play this. And I'm like, well, I can just do that with my mouth. You'll have the X-wing and you'll make the blast sound. I can do that with my mouth. A lot of adults are seeing this. Like, why do we need that?

But some of them are not nearly so predetermined. Even in the Star Wars realm, there is a canteen-a-band set. Do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-do-d---------------. Okay. So you put the brick. onto the canina and you push a little lever back and forth, which rocks the brick back and forth, and it also spins, you know, the canteen of players

and they kind of like they're playing their saxophones, their sci-fi saxophones, and it will speed up and slow down the sounds that they are making to the speed that you are rocking. And if you place mini-figures, like, you put Darth Vader on there, he'll, like, start to do some spoken word to, like, sing along with the song or something like that. And so that is a more of a creative experience.

It's still relatively predetermined, but it's still like you are controlling this. This is something where we actually smarts. It's not just it plays us in when you drop it on a panel. So I feel like what you just described is kind of the whole debate around Lego in general right now. Because I think the Lego that you and I grew up with, at least the Lego that I grew up with, was just a big bucket of tiles that you could just do whatever you want with. Right. Like I just had it. I, we bought some Lego sets, but even those eventually just went into the bucket, right? And it was just, yeah, you go build stuff. I have a huge bin, a huge rubber mate. Yeah. And that was the beauty of it. But like Lego both sort of culturally and like very much as a business has leaned into these more expensive, more intricate, more detailed. It's like it's like modeling almost now where you're actually doing the huge number of steps required to build an $850 million. and Falcon or these huge intricate sets.

Like, that's what Lego is now. And people hate that on exactly the same terms that they hate what you just described, right? Like, this is just the Lego question. It's not a new argument. I mean, you could argue that it goes all the way back to the nice. Yes, my first Lego set was a blue bucket and you tilted it outside, you tilted it upside down and out poured two by four bricks like this. I had a red bucket.

Red bucket. And all you could do was recombine these into various shapes. And they started developing more and more specialized elements as you go. Now, what Lego fans who love specialized elements will say is they can be repurposed as all kinds of different things. Your Lego hot dog. It looks like a little hot dog. You can put it in a bun and it's a Lego hot dog. And so you don't need to build a Lego hot dog because they've done it for you.

But that same hot dog is also the stem of a flower. There's a Lego frog piece. Everybody loves the frog piece. It's this tiny frog and you can put it on plants. but if you take lots of these pink frogs and you stick them onto a bonsai tree, as Lego the company, the Lego group itself has done, they are the Sakura flower petals popping out of this thing. There's also a brown one, a brown frog at the back of my castle,

right underneath where the king is going to take a shit. It just drops down there and it's just a black lump of poop. You turn the frog around, look, it's a perfect lump of poop. What can I say? So LEGO's argument, the argument has been that these specialized pieces aren't as specialized as they seem because they can be repurposed in all kinds of ways. And that goes back to the 90s when they developed a, I spoke to the creator of this one, they developed a video camera for the Lego space sets. And it looks like one of those old school camcorders. You put it on your shoulder.

Like the local news looking lens. Yeah, the local news. Yeah, exactly one of those. And they found what kids immediately did. And also some of the set designers inside Lego did was they turned it around and made it into a blaster rifle. And so that was one of the first Lego guns, one of the first Lego blasters, you flip it around one way, it looks like a video camera. That was very, that was in the 90s. And people have been debating that ever since.

The other thing they've been debating ever since is when you build a set that is supposed to look like something, a spaceship, a castle. do you leave it together forever on your shelf or does it go into that bin to be recombined by your kids, by adults, into new kinds of things? And I have sets from my childhood that I do leave together forever that I do not want my kids to pull apart because once they go into that bin, they're going to get, pieces of them are going to get damaged. There's some like fragile, like long, translucent green, like laser beam kind of pieces. and I've seen what happens to those. Those get bent, they get knocked in half. It's not great. All kinds of translucent pieces get scratched.

So my stuff doesn't all go back into the bin. Some of the diehard saying, no, everything should be taken apart when you're done with it. Other folks are like things should stay together. And so once, as the sets get pricier and pricier and pricier and pricier, now they cost 650, 850 for a millennium falcon. People are saying, oh, well, now we're being incentivized to keep them together in this one form forever, because it's so expensive and it's so time-consuming to rebuild. I don't know. It's been around forever this argument. Yeah. I mean, and I think to some extent there is a bit of a like do whatever you want thing, right? Like, I know people who put together the thousand piece puzzles and then like

keep them together and frame them on the wall. And I know other people who put them back in the box and we're like, well, we did that and then never again. And I think that's kind of the way this is supposed to work. But I think the thing that is different about the smart brick to me is that it feels like this question of should it eventually be user programmable is like the question because the thing that works about Lego bricks is I think a thing that Lego has cleverly been very good about is like there are not fundamentally lots of different kinds of Legos, right? Like you can kind of put everything in the bucket and most of it will fit together. It's not like they had some brand new standard that they invented three years ago that now all the old ones don't work.

Yeah, yeah. You don't get that with software. You just don't. Right. Like the idea that everyone is going to be able to use this. All the pieces are going to go together. This is going to be super workable. And all you have to do is just stick the thing on top of the thing. It's going to be fine. You and I've used enough software to know that that is an impossible goal. It's a good and valuable goal to make perfect, flawless, usable software. But you just can't do it. And so if I'm Lego, I'm torn in this thing where it's like, okay, we want this to be open and programmable and sort of in the spirit of build and rebuild and make everything, whatever you want it to be. But also, we need a thing that works. And doing both of those things, I would

say is like damn near impossible. And so I wonder where Lego is going to decide to land here. I asked him a bit about this. I asked Tom Donaldson, who's one of their SVPs of like a creative play lab. You'd call him a head of innovation over at Lego. But he's that kind of a guy. Sure. And so he says that he knows people will want these bricks to be programmable, user programable, that you can develop your own stuff. I mean, our comments just dropped that instantly. Oh, yeah. He wasn't trying to like pretend. And that wasn't a thing. And he told me that this isn't where they wanted to start. Okay. And he suggested it to me that before they, what's the quote? Before we get to a plan like that is the quote. He wants to figure out how to make it very safe and hack resistant and so on. And like I appreciated that he's like, maybe this is going to happen to me because I really wanted to happen. I want them to be programmed. But I don't want to have to rely on Lego to build each new set of tiles and programs for this and that I have to.

to buy them all and make it a kind of collect them all thing. But, you know, but Lego might want that for profit's sake. I figure, I figure maybe they're going to see what kinds of legs it has. First, see how much money they can make off the collect them all mentality before they allow something to want that like that happen. Because I don't buy the argument that this needs to be hack resistant or something like that. There's no internet connection here. Right.

These bricks, they couldn't possibly, with. the kind of battery they have in here, managed to have some kind of persistent connection to the internet. The only thing that you're going to be hacking them to do is not pay Lego money for things. So possibly that's what they mean by hack resistant. The idea that they need to be safe, I don't buy that at all. But yeah, I could say maybe they want to protect their profits. They don't want people to, like folks did with the Lego Dimensions. So there was this game in 2015. Lego Dimensions, I don't know if you remember this, but it was a video. game where all kinds of Lego when brand worlds could meet. You have Sonic the Hedgehog jumping into this Lego dimensions, you know, multiverse. And then you have Doctor Who and Sonic the Hedgehog will say to Dr. Who, the Doctor, you named a screwdriver after me because it's a Sonic screwdriver and Sonic. Anyhow. So that those kinds of things happen there. Maybe those kinds of collaborations will happen here too with the smart bricks. But what happened was each of these NFC figurines, you could drop onto.

the platform and have them magically appear in the video game, people figured out that NFC tags are fairly easy to read, fairly easy to clone. So you could just buy a stack of NFC tags off Amazon, use your Android smartphone to program them to be all the things, and then you didn't have to pay Lego and their toy makers, all that money. You didn't have to do that necessarily.

People set up the flipper zero, so it can just like, oh, yeah, cycle the next thing. Okay, tap attack. Okay, now I've got all of that stuff, going. I don't think that's the reason Lego Dimensions wasn't a huge success, but I could see them wanting to be a little cautious of that. But if we're just looking at this as like, what is the best experience for people who want to play? That thing you just described strikes me as the best possible outcome, right? Like, yes, let's get every kid of Flipper Zero and let them do weird

stuff with their life. I'm serious. Like, I think this is a good thing. And that is the kind of, I think we live in this world now where like, I don't know, I read all of this thinking about my three-year-old kid who was like just getting into Legos. And he, the competition is not like with Legos or better versions of his imagination in Legos. The competition is with like Spidey and his amazing friends sitting on the couch watching television or playing with Legos. And I think this this like small gesture towards how do we make it a little more exciting

and a little more interactive in order to get you doing the work with your hands and playing with things like, I think I'm good making that trade. Right. And I think there's a whole generation of kids who has been raised on like Minecraft and Roblox and a whole generation of parents who would be thrilled if those games required doing more things with your hands. And so Lego trying to find a reasonable middle ground there feels right to me. And like let's raise a bunch of kids to be like low stakes hardware hackers. Like hell yeah. They were saying they were saying so many of the right things there for for parents who are worried about screen time. Like how they've very, very like decidedly made sure this didn't have any screen. screens in it because there were like designs floated for computer bricks with little screens, things like that. I've actually covered some of them on the verge. And how it doesn't have AI in it. They were like, no, there was no AI in this product and so on and so forth. They talked a lot about, you know, how they how the play that they have designed here was very, very inspired by watching kids do various things with the bricks. Like these bricks are smart enough that you could have it. So theoretically, you could. have it so that when the X-wing fighter is pointed directly at the Darth Vader's tie fighter and you press the button right then what it is with a certain range since it knows the orientation since it knows the range that might be the only time that it hits with its blaster but they were like no kids don't play like this we're watching kids play with this they like they point their stuff

in all directions and they still want it to be able to the blasters be able to hit one another so what we're going to do instead if we're going to have it like keep score so that it like it can be fair to the kids to know how many times they blasted versus how many times. they were hit. And then, you know, they showed the X-wing, they showed me the X-wing, like, diving into the ground turret and just knocking it over. They're like, yeah, kids do this. They just knock one Lego set over with another set. They don't want to have to keep blasting it

until it explodes. Sometimes they'll just be like to knock it over, and they want that to register as an explosion. And so it does in the set. So they were saying a lot of the right things. But even so, I've heard so many commenters who are like, I get how it works, and I still think this is wrong. I still think this is like overriding and taking away from kids imaginations. I showed my wife. I stuck her in a

VR headset and I let her watch a 15 minute demo of exactly how the break works. I let her watch the entire demo. You're a true monster, Sean. I did. I did. And she watched the whole thing. She's like, wow, it's awesome to be there and get the whole demo like I was there in person at CES, which by the way, I might put on the verge. And yet at the end of it, she was still like, I don't think I need to buy my kids this. So they may still have an uphill battle on their hands. Yeah. Yeah, I do think there is something that just immediately strikes you as, again, like, where we started at the beginning of this, sort of against the spirit of the whole thing. And that I think what you were just describing about sort of the power and specificity of the thing, again, feels to me like kind of this whole

question, right? Where I think, to me, at least, there's no question that just from a pure technology level, the smart brick is kind of remarkable. Like, you kept going back. And and kept discovering new things that this brick can do, including some pretty incredible sort of self-awareness features that this thing has. Like, it's a really impressive little tiny piece of technology. It reminds me sort of a raspberry pie, right? And that it's just like, here's just a bundle of stuff. And now we have to figure out what to do with it.

And I think that from Lego's perspective is the thing, right? Because it's what powers do you give people? What do you force upon them? Which I think is what people are reacting to. this sense that like I'm going to go to Target and instead of buying something I can imagine, I'm going to be buying a set of features one at a time that Lego is then going to, you know, charge me $10 a month or two because everybody knows how this goes over time. I agree that would suck.

And I think it is a perfectly plausible outcome that I'm going to have to buy 20 smart bricks if I want to do 20 things and that that will feel bad and Lego should feel bad. But I also think there's a world where this is the right kind of thing for Lego to have done. I think they made so many right decisions here. One of the ones that I think is the most key to convincing, like, long-term Lego fans, is the color sensor in this brick. And this certainly isn't the first time a brick has had a color since. I mean, Lego robots have had them for many years.

You'd, like, point it down at the ground with your Lego robot. And so when it runs over a certain kind of color, you can be like, oh, yeah, you should stop the robot moving before it goes over the river that you've built or something like that. But in the X-Wing and Tie Fighter sets, for example, when you press a button to blast with your tie fighter, that is not putting a smart tag near a brick to be like, hey, look, it's a tap-to-pay interaction. It's not that.

Instead, what you are doing is you are raising a little red flap over the color sensor. And so that is using a traditional plastic brick that is red to be like, that is the fire thing to do. And when you put a blue tile over this color sensor on the end of your, fuel pump, then it starts the refueling sound and little mini-game thing with the brick. So it's like, okay, now I'm refueling my X-wing. These are regular Lego bricks that are interacting with the smart bricks. Not something you have to pay extra for, nothing, no NFC, it's just color.

And so there are many colors of Lego brick. You can have each one of those colors theoretically do a different thing when it interacts with the brick on whatever you build. And I love that that works. I also love that the bricks don't need to detect. anything other than a tile to know what kind of a set it's in. So that X-wing tile, the sounds it makes, the blaster sounds it makes are not like Star Wars blaster sounds. They are not like, obviously, this is Star Wars and nothing else. So I can take that tile and I can stick it on

any of the Lego ships I have ever built. And now they can be a interactive, blasting minigame, kind of a flying spaceship with these interactions because it now knows that it's a spaceship, not specifically an X-Wing. Any of my spaceships can now be an interactive spaceship if I drop the brick and that tile on them. So the play with traditional bricks is important. And I hope they emphasize that throughout and do a lot more with that. Yeah. That's a good.

I mean, again, that stuff feels right. I think there is there is a thing where, uh, Lego has gotten the benefit of the doubt for a long time by being a company sort of invested in the right thing. And then a lot of people who've watched a lot of tech companies lose the benefit of the doubt for perfectly valid reasons that it's like we just all have to look at Lego and be like, don't screw this up. I know how you can screw this up to make money for yourselves. And you have to just not do it, Lego. And if you don't, it might be awesome. That's it. It really will be. Yeah. I'm excited about it. For me personally, personally, I just want things to make noises. Like, they sound so stupid, but I've never been a person who is like flying the thing around making the noises, but I'm like happy to play with them otherwise. And I just, if they would make the noise for me so that I don't have to make the noise for my three-year-old, is it, is it that you're an adult or were you not making the noises back then? I was never making the noises. I like, I'm good at dialogue. Like you want to give me like a long scene of all the characters talking to each other.

I got you. But then it's like, do we need the ship to make noise? That's never been my thing. So if we could just solve that and I can get back to like the warring battles of speeches between the emperor and Luke, then then we're good. That's all I mean. Excellent. Excellent. You should type out some dialogue for us for my battle team with my kids. It'll be great. We can do that.

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and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. So it's the beginning of a new year, and I think now is a good time to talk productivity.

This is when everybody's doing New Year's resolutions. This is when everybody is trying to figure out new systems to be a little more productive and a little less nuts and just make everything make a little more sense. So I'm going to bring on Casey Newton, the editor of Platformer, and my former colleague, I get the verge, who is one of my favorite people to talk to about this stuff. Like me, Casey is always trying new apps and trying new systems and doing weird stuff just to try and make his digital life make a little more sense. And over the last couple of years, actually, as far as I understand, Casey has done less of that because he's found things that have started to work. So he's going to come on the show and he's going to tell me all the stuff that he's doing that works. And I'm going to tell him about all of the new apps that I've been trying that are making me crazier than ever. It's going to be very fun. I'm very excited about it. Let's get into it. Casey Newton, welcome back to the Vergecast. Great to be here, David. It's been a minute. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you. I'm excited for a new year to begin and to get things done. Are you like a New Year's person? Do you like do the like January 1st reset and try to become a better Casey every 12 months? I really am. Like for over a decade now, I've woken up on New Year's Day. I've gotten a big coffee.

I've sat down with a journal. I've like looked back on the year that was. And I've said, like, what, what are sort of the big things I'm going after this year? And I have to say, I credit it with, like, actually getting a lot of things done over the last decade. So, yeah, New Year's is really maybe my favorite time of year. Okay, that's awesome. So actually, let's just talk through that process first because I have, I would say, never once done successfully the thing that you just described. And I aspire to be the kind of person who does that thing.

So, like, like, literally walk me through that process that you do every year. You get a big cup of coffee. That's step one. Number one, a big cup of coffee. I mostly would do this in day one, the Mac journaling app that's so great. I keep a journal just kind of as a daily practice, which I think maybe we'll get into later. But this one, you know, 10 years or so ago, I started calling this the annual board meeting with myself. And it would sort of be like, okay, self, like, let's take a look back at the past four quarters. You know, I would usually have some things that I was trying to get done that year. So I would just kind of go bit by bit and say like, okay, like, Did we eat less sugar last year? Absolutely not. Okay, so we're going to give that one a thumbs down. But, you know, I want to, like, launch my own business this year.

And, like, I did that, right? So it's kind of cool because, like, I'm not really a big believer in resolutions. Like, I'm not really someone who believes that you can just, like, use willpower to deliver you into the life of your dreams. Yeah. But I do think if there are two or three things that are big that you want to get done, in a year, if you write those down and look at that list a lot, you will increase your odds of getting those things done. Yeah, it's like, what is the less woo-woo version of manifesting?

You know, it's like, whatever that is, I think it's real. Yeah. Maybe it's just actually manifesting. Maybe they've been right all along. All right. So you, for years, were the other person I know who I could convince to try any note-taking app or to-do list app or calendar app. We would just send each other links to increasingly niche products and we would both throw our entire lives into them for two weeks and try them. And you have stopped being this kind of person

and I have brought you here to yell at you about it because it's very upsetting. Well, I don't know how true that is because if you texted me at any point or if I just saw it in installer, which I read every Saturday morning, it's my favorite time of the week. If you're just like, there's a great new note-taking app,

I will actually just go like download it immediately and see what all the fuss is about. But I have made a resolution this year that I think I have, found the system that best served my needs. And so I am trying to stick with that system. But am I something to try, you know, a few things here and there probably. I buy it. So, all right. So the system is what I want to talk about because I think I both want to talk about the system and I think the newest addition to the system, which is that you've sort of built a

system that shows itself to you all the time, which I think is really interesting. But let's just, let's just back this all the way down. Like, walk me through kind of the Casey Newton productivity system as it exists right now. Let me begin by saying that I think step one of designing a productivity system is trying to figure out your goal, right? That might sound very simple, but different people have very different needs, which is why I think we actually have so much productivity software. Because so many builders out there think this thing is not actually specific enough to what I want, so I'm going to build my own thing. And we all benefit from, you know, being able to try those visions. So what do I need in?

my life. Well, I want a journal. I have just found that if I can wake up in the morning with that cup of coffee and sit down and just kind of clear my brain and say, here's what I did last night. Here is the story that I'm working on today. Here is the thing that is stressing me out. If I can just write that down in a series of bullet points, it just makes me much calmer and happier throughout the day. A few years ago, David, as you know, we saw the rise of these apps that just created a daily note for you. And I just love this approach so much because you wake up every day and it's a blank slate and you can just start and you can clear your head. So that is step one of my system. So this is the, what's the book?

I think it's The Artist's Way. Do you know this book? Yes. By, I think the woman's name I think is Julia Cameron. And her whole theory is the morning pages, right? Where it's basically just like sit down and just write out literally every single thing that is inside of your brain until there's nothing inside of your brain anymore. It sounds like that is very much like the system you've adopted here. It is. And, you know, the real, like, hardcore artist way people was say you have to do it in long hand. Like, it has to be, you know, like on a legal pad or whatever. And I'm just like, that would drive me inside. I can type so fat. I actually can empty my brain in like 25 minutes. If I had to do it in long hand, it would take me three and a half hours. I would just, I'd be like, my brain's empty. I don't care. I'm over it. Absolutely. Okay. So that is phase, phase one of my, my system here. And you do this every day. The first thing you do when you wake up.

up or sit down to work or whatever is just brain dump into some place. Have I missed a day here or there? Sure. But for the most part, like, yes, I do do this. And in particular, like, if I'm on vacation, for example, like, then I go extra hard at doing this because I want to remember like every cool thing that I, you know, did when I was cruising around Tokyo or whatever. So that's step one. Step two is I need a simple task management system. Now, imagine there are some folks listening to this podcast who have very intricate task management systems. If you are a person who has a lot of recurring tasks in your life, for example, you might need one of these like Ferrari systems, like an Omni Focus or something. I have found in my life that To Doist is probably like the best of the available options for me.

But recently, Capacities, which is the app that I use to write my journal in, added this simple task list functionality. And so now what I do, David, is I use the template for this daily note where I have my journal, and I can put in a live query of any open task that I've added to capacities. I can also add tasks right there. To me, this goes hand in hand with writing a journal. You sort of finish your journal entry, and you remember, oh, I got to reorder those contacts, right? I have to, like, check in with my colleague about this thing. I'm just going to put it right here in my daily note, which I know I'm going to be coming back to. So candidly, I've been sort of flip-flopping a bit between to-doist and this,

but for a lot of those, like, just kind of jog your memory type of task that you want to make sure that you see, or it's something that like you're dragging your feet on because it's like so tedious, I found the capacities is a great place to put it. So that way, phase two of the system, I have my to-dos, right underneath my journal, and we got a stew going. Okay. So this makes it seem like most of your day-to-day life lives in. inside of capacities at this point. It's the thing that I am flipping back and forth from the most

because I am a writer. And so what I really need my productivity system to do above and beyond just reminding me what tasks I'm doing is to help me make sense of things. Like that is a big part of what I see as like my job in the world. I try to make sense of what is happening. And capacities, it just turns out, has a bunch of features that I've been able to use to do that. Yeah. So let's talk about some of those because I think I mentioned the sort of showing the system back to you thing. And I think you and I both had a very similar moment with Notion, I think at some point last year, of starting to use notions agents to actually sort of poke around inside of the databases that you were making. And there's something remarkable in that. That it's like, I can just pour stuff into this that I think is interesting

and then ask this database of things that I think is interesting questions and that there's something very powerful about that. And this is like the big, new idea in productivity, right? Like the idea that you should just have a place with all your stuff and then AI's job is to help you find and summarize and make sense of and make connections between all of that stuff. But the thing you found in capacities feels slightly different than that and maybe less abstract. Like what is the system? Yes. The thing that I've been doing is a little bit different. So, you know, I have a kind of loosely defined beat. I'm very interested in like the intersection of social networks and democracy.

I'm increasingly interested with how both of those things intersect with AI. So every morning, as I'm, you know, looking at my journal, I'm also looking at one of my favorite websites, TechMeme, a news aggregator that has all the day's biggest headlines in tech. And they have a site that just sort of lists all of their, the links that they've uploaded to the site in chronological order. You should know that I was going to sort of ADRNU saying, Theverge.com right there.

Just, that's fine. Shout out to TechMeme, but, you know, it's okay. I go to the verge.com every single day as well. I love the verge, and I'm constantly adding stuff into my database from the verge as well. But I'll cruise through tech meme and I'll literally just copy paste into my daily note. It's like, okay, huge new meta scandal, great. Huge new X scandal, great. And then after I paste it in all the links, I'll just tag them, right? So it's like, you know, meta and croc. I can also do like a slightly more conceptual tag. So like as we're recording this, a lot of people are really concerned about this AI bubble that we're in.

So sometimes I just see a story that I think, that's a bubble story. You know, this is a story about us being in a bubble. I'll just link bubbles, right? And then over time, this just starts to like accumulate into something kind of interesting, right? I can like, if meta is in the news or I'm writing a column, I can just jog my memory just by clicking on that meta tag. And I'm like, what's been going on with them recently? I've been doing this for five-ish months now.

I can't tell you how many times just by. like clicking on that tag, I'm reminded of something that I'd already forgotten. Like, it's so powerful to just be able to, like, quickly go back to those, um, those, those headlines and summon those things. So, wait, let me just pause on that really fast because I think one of the things I hear from people who get into this space is the, the inevitable mistake that everybody makes is putting way too much stuff into their system, right? And you're like, it's the thing everybody does with like read wise and all of these kind of highlights and stuff that the idea is, You should just put absolutely everything that you encounter on the internet into the system in some way.

And then it will sort of magically make sense of itself. And everybody overindexes on that and then goes, oh my God, I have this giant database full of stuff I only kind of tangentially care about. What is any of this actually doing for me? And then you delete it all and start over. What are you actually putting into the system? Is it just like a bunch of links that you read and think are interesting every day? Are you downloading tech meme into capacities every day? like what is the right balance for you there?

So there's like, there's a more personal answer and there's a more professional answer. Okay. For just the system and capacities, I'm just saving things that like kind of, I don't know, like strike my curiosity as I am browsing. Like I said, there's just kind of a handful of like big overarching narratives

that are taking place in tech at any given time. There are like a few of those that I'm interested in. And I'm just looking for stuff where I'm like, I want to keep tabs on this. Like, for example, as we're recording this, prediction markets are on the rise. And I think they're mostly horrible, right? But like every day,

I just see two or three more stories about them that kind of speak to the fact that they're being used for insider trading and like sort of other unsavory behavior. So I just want to have like a running list of those. And it might be the case that they never materialize into anything. But I now just have it set up.

With like one click, I can see everything that ever interested me about prediction markets. So, you know, I do try to be judicious. Like, there's a lot of tech meme headlines I'm not saving into this daily note. It has to be something where I think I may want to revisit this at some point. I will also say I am probably saving too much. Like, I could definitely save less than I do. But the second thing that I would say to your question, though, David, is like, you can't just save the links. There has to be the actual thinking step. And so, like, that actually is the next step of my system and where I think I've actually

started to move into something, maybe a little bit more unique. What is that thing? So, last year I read a blog post by a guy named Andy Matushak. I've cited his work a bunch when I write about productivity. I think he's one of the most interesting thinkers in the world when it comes to this stuff. But he had this idea called blips. And blips are kind of like spiritually similar to this practice that I had been doing of saving links.

Like for him, it was sort of anything that might eventually, turn into something more. What do I mean by something more? Well, maybe it turns into a blog post. Maybe it turns into like a project around the house. Maybe it turns into a Halloween costume. You know, like, who knows? But he found that there would be all these little like threads in his life. And he could like write them down somewhere. But like that wasn't enough, you know, because of the point that you made, David. Like we're always just sort of writing down little ideas and they always just sort of disappear into the ether. And so Andy works on an app where, just as like a proof of concept,

this is not available in the app store, where you could write down these ideas, and then whenever you opened the app again, it would resurface them to you with like maybe a question. Like, you know, have you thought about this recently? What does this idea remind you of? Is this maybe connected to this other thing? And so him and a friend were basically working on this

just as like a fun project between the two of them. And I saw this and I got so jealous. I was like, this is like a thing that I want, right? Like, so like, can I build my own version of it? So a cool thing about capacities is, and very nerdy apologies, but you can create custom object types, right? So like they have, you know, like templates for like a book, for example, or a person. So like the person object type has form fields where you can put in an email address and a phone number, right? You can also create your own.

And so I just created one called Blips. There was just basically like a plain vanilla object type. but I thought this is where I'm going to store all of the ideas like the ones that Andy is writing about, including, for example, we're in an AI bubble, right? And so in each of these blips, I will go in and as new stories appear, or as I just read other things or have thoughts, I can open that blip and I can write down a quick sentence or two and just kind of flesh it out into something more. Like an example I'll give you is that last year there was just this amazing run of like meta scandals that people mostly ignored by the way. You know, but it was like, you know, the chat bots are like having sensual role play with children and almost 10% of the company's revenue comes from scams.

Like just ludicrous stuff. And also they had like rewritten their, you know, content policies to allow all this hate speech. And so I just started this blip like that was basically called like meta is in mind. moral free fall, which is like an idea that is not really captured by any other like system I have. Like I didn't really want like a tag for it. I wanted like a place where I could flesh that idea out. And so I started doing that. And then as these new scandals would pop up, I would just be like, okay, I need to orient myself. Like just remind me the other stuff that has come out about this company this year. Boom, I can go into my blip and I can see it. So that's the basic architecture of it.

but then, of course, I had to set up another step to make sure that I would actually see these things. And that step goes into your daily note, right? Like, this is the thing where it's just occasionally showing you some of those things in the note. This is sort of the grand finale of my productivity system. You know, this is the prestige, I think I would say, if I were a magician.

But using capacities, I created a live query for these blips, and I said, just show me five of these at random. And so every day I've written in my journal. I've added my links. I've added a to-do or two. And then I get down to my blips and I'll see something that's like, actually, let me just like look right now. I'll just see what's on my note today. I have one called OpenAI is a weird company. This is interesting. This was a and this was a column that I wrote. And it was just like about all the weird things that happened at Open AI, sort of like after Sam Altman got fired and he like got brought back. And I would just sort of ask. And I would just sort of ask. And I would just sort of. add to those. I actually think increasingly they become a more normal company. That was a column that I wrote recently. I was like sort of like the weird era is over. So I probably need to like retire this blip because it served its purpose. I have another one though called online dating reshape society in invisible ways. I've always thought this. I've never written the column. I'm still kind of like gathering string about it. And there's not that much in it. But you know,

I do have a dating tag. And basically as stories pop up on tech meme about dating, I just tag. I just tag them. And like, if I open up that blip right now, I can see that, uh, there was a story about how dating apps are, are sort of like pivoting to Asia because like Americans are totally fatigued by, by dating. So as I look at these, I don't see anything that belongs in this blip, but now at least I've like revisited it and I've reminded myself that this is something that I care about. And this is such a like classic productivity thing. Like people call it space repetition. there, like, it is a thing in the sort of learning in academic fields that works, right? Like, have something that is periodically shown to you again is a very powerful way to learn

and retain information. Yeah, and again, like, I have an objective that keeps me magnetized to this system, which is that I write three columns a week. So I am always desperate for something to write about. And so I need just a lot of input to, like, stoke the fires of my brain and give me, I ideas to do something. And before I built the system, I'm like just relying on like the ram in my brain. One of the reasons I wanted to have you describe it is I do think it works even if you're not sort of forcibly putting that all into some output three times a week. Like I think about a lot of people

come into a year like this with some vague desire, right? Like I want to I want to lose weight. I want to learn piano. I want to, I don't know, go to the moon. Like whatever. And I think a thing that I've discovered is that along the way to one of those things, you encounter all of this information, right? Like, one of mine a few years ago was, I want to learn music theory. My great shame of high school is like, I'm a perfectly serviceable singer, but I can't cite read at all because I just never really learned music theory. And so I didn't make the cool choir because I couldn't cite read. And so ever since as an adult, I've been like, I want to actually properly learn music theory and how to cite read. And I would sort of in fits and starts, go, like, find resources and do stuff and

explore things and then immediately forget all of it and forget where it was and never find it again. And I slowly started building a library of like, this is a video I watched about this thing. I read this thing about this thing. I should read this thing about this thing, even though I never do. And very slowly started to build something that is actually like a useful resource for me and then eventually can share with other people if I want to, but it's also just every time I encounter something related to this thing, even if I'm not actively doing it right now, putting it somewhere that I know where it is and can go back to it winds up being really valuable. And I think it's just a hard behavior to do, which is why I think the way that you've done it, which is basically make that capture step really simple, is really smart. Because if I spent an hour, like, beautifully curating a Google Doc with this, I've wasted that hour. But just to pour stuff into this and be like, show it to me sometimes. It strikes me as really useful for almost anything.

I really like your example, because I think it does speak to how this system can be used by folks who are not doing my exact job. Like, what? I have done inside my journal, basically, is to add a space repetition module that helps me with a thing that I care about. You might care about something different. Like, it would be cool if your journal had a site reading music module in it somehow. I bet you could probably hack something together. Honestly, they would, like, be pretty cool. So yeah, if there's something in your life that's like a skill that you're working on or like a problem that you're trying to solve, or like you just know in like April you want like a really cool Halloween costume and you want you don't want to sort of leave it to the last minute. I think you can put one of these like blip like

systems together and just let it jog your memory a little. I mean like heck like put a Christmas list on it like in April and just like you know and look at it in July and think oh yeah I think I actually know like what I want to get like for this special person this year. So yeah it's like you want to, like, create these systems that just, like, give your, like, bring your, like, brain a helping hand. I think if I can just, like, use metaphors. Yeah, and I think that is also kind of the answer to the next question I was going to ask you, which is what is more valuable to you about having all of this in your capacities as opposed to just, like, going and doing a tech meme search twice a week? But I think that's the answer, right? There is a certain amount of

work that you've already done that comes back to you every time you look at the list. That's at least my experience with that stuff. This has been one of the big productivity lessons that I feel like I've learned over the past like 20 or so years that I have been focused on is that I am always just wanting to develop automated systems that like do the thinking for me. And that's why I keep striking out is because I'm trying to prevent myself from having to do the actually valuable part. And like as I feel like I have been refining the system, I have been having to like protect the valuable thing. Like you have to create the opportunity to think and to write and to like say what is in your head. Because if you're going, if you're

skipping that system, like you don't actually have a productivity system. You just have a list of stuff. Yeah. I mean, and I think that is kind of the holy grail problem that frankly so far I've had no luck with. And I'm curious how it's felt to you. Because I think about you and I have both used tools like Mem in the past. We've both used Notion with its AI stuff. There is just this run of AI tools that the promise is not just all the stuff you described, but it's actually one sort of big giant intellectual leap beyond, which is actually we will make unexpected connections for you. You put all this stuff in and we will make the magic happen for you. And I will tell you, I have never once had that moment of that being like, oh, you saved this thing, but then you saved this

thing that you thought was unrelated. But David, it's not. That has not. That has never. never happened to me. Has it ever happened to you? Like what, what are the, what are the conditions by which you're able to make that happen? So you're, you're mostly right that the tools we have today generally don't do this, except that I have absolutely taken two stories, um, that are interesting to me and shown them to a chat bot like chat GPT and say, do you think these things are related? And sometimes it just gives you absolute nonsense. But sometimes it will identify like a similarity there or help you flesh something out. You know, this happened to me recently.

It was a couple months ago, and I wanted to write about another one of these meta scandals from their year of moral freefall. And it had to do with scams. And so I was like talking with a chatbot about it. And I was like, oh, by the way, do you know that there's actually an active lawsuit about this? And there was actually just like a ruling last week. I was like, thank you.

Like this is what I want out of an AI tool. It was like, I had not heard. This was not a lawsuit that it hit tech meme wound up being like super pertinent to what I was writing about. So I do think LLMs can do that. That's fair. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just a really interesting delineation there, right? Between or it's like, what is what is me thinking? What is me thinking with assistance and what is me not thinking anymore?

And I think we're all at a point where no one knows where that line is and we're all over all sides of it. And it's like, I think so much of the AI chaos is that we have not, no one has yet drawn those lines in a way that makes any sense. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think that that line changes a lot as the models get more powerful. Like, you know, I am someone who likes using software, period. And so like, of course I am enthusiastically using AI systems. Like some of them like truly feel miraculous to me. But yes, I have also gone too far. And I have found myself in that moment of like, I am absolutely. asking this thing to do all of the thinking for me. Like this feels horrible. So yeah, I'm trying to stay away from that. Real quick, before I let you go here, I also want to talk about Claude Code. Yes.

Because you and I noticed the same thing, which is that everybody spent their holiday seasons, and by everybody, I mean all the nerds who live near you in San Francisco, spent their holiday seasons hacking around on Claude Code. And that I think if you were to pick a single tool that is the most exciting thing in AI right now in terms of like actual honest to God product market fit doing all the stuff that we have been promised about AI. I think it's Claude Code. Just real quick, catch me up on your own experience.

You wrote a thing about making your website with Claude Code. How did that go? What was it like? I've had this Squarespace site forever. The hosting is now up to like almost $200 a year. It's basically just a business card. There was a time that I like spent hours wrestling with like Squarespace templates. Never could really get anything.

that I felt like was particularly cool. So I thought for my first real cloud code experiment, just by myself, I'm going to just type into this box, hey, make me a new website. Like, give it kind of like a fun cyberpunk aesthetic. You know, I wanted to like promote my newsletter, promote my podcast, go for it. And David, I swear to God, like in less than an hour,

I had a website that made me so happy that like not only did it like complete the task, but it was so thrilling to me what did it have done that I immediately started to brainstorming like, what else can I do with this website? And so like a day later, I put a blog on it. Like, there are a bunch of new, like, just fun widgets. It's like, here's the last song I listen to on Spotify. Here's like the book that I'm reading. Here's the weather in San Francisco. Just this morning, somebody was like, hey, like, my website is like kind of in a dark mode. And my, my, my, one of, you know, somebody who follows me was like, it would be really great if

your website had a light mode. And so I was like, uh, Claude, can you make a light mode? And, you know, sure enough, it coded up in like eight or nine minutes. So now you can go to my website, C-Newton.org, and it will just respect your system settings, and you'll either see the light version or the dark version. I've been making websites for more than 20 years. It has always been hard for me. I am not a technical person, okay?

It has always been a struggle. And I have been so jealous of people with these websites that have these animations and these cool UI effects and, you know, like it turns your mouse cursor into something else. I have that website now. I did not write a single line of code. I have no idea how anything that you see on my website is happening, but I can tell you I made the most important parts of it in an hour without even really trying.

Holy shit. How does it feel that you don't know how it works? This is the thing I struggle with with a lot of this. I don't pretend to understand how WordPress works, which is where my own personal website is. But A, there are lots of professional people who do. And B, I could sort of like Google around. and figured out, and I'm probably not the first person to ever have this problem, and fundamentally we're all sitting on top of, like, a very similar code base.

You've built something that might, in theory, be completely unrecognizable to anyone who has ever written code in history. And neither you nor they know. Does that feel weird that this thing is so opaque? Here's a thing. I think we know. We know how HTML works. We know how CSS works. Whatever you're looking out on my website, it's HTML and CSS. It happens to be, you know, conveyed in a way that I could never, like, recreate myself. Now, listen, if I were like coding the like, you know, critical infrastructure for like the United States nuclear arsenal, then like, yeah, I would want to get real specific about like how the various things work. But like to me, this is just like an exercise in creative expression, right? Like, I mean, like this is the stuff that like got me into tech in the first place. I wanted to express myself. I want to stake out like a little patch of land on the internet and like interact with other people. Right. So like AI truly has like. brought me back all the way full circle to the very first thing I did when I got to college in 1998, which was to make a website. But like, it is just, it feels so much more fun now because,

and I cannot say this enough, you just type in the box what you want and then it does it. Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, the funniest thing to me about Claude Code is I think we're at a moment now where part of the problem is that it doesn't seem like it ought to be able to do what it can. And like that thing you just said where you just type a couple of sentences and it will probably do something passable, I think is real. And I think that's relatively newly real. Yeah. But it feels like it can't possibly be true. And so like I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've had experiences where I'm reluctant to try something because it's like, well, there's no way that's going to work. And learning that A, I should just try and be the penalty for not trying or for trying is pretty low. Even if it gets it wrong. Like it's fine. I've, I've, I've, I'm nowhere. That change is so meaningful in figuring out like, I can just ask this system to do something. And it, It will probably do it in a relatively functional way. That's wild. Young people are going to be so good at this because they get to start with it fresh. We had the horrible experience of using Siri and Alexa, which is a decade-long story of nothing ever working the way that you hoped it would.

Like there's a reason why we have no confidence that any of these things work. It's because they did it. So, yeah, it's like the thrill of using this stuff right now is just finding how many cases it does work. I did one more project I would love to tell you about because I did it today. Please. I went into Cloud Code today and I said, I would like you to explore every article I've ever written in Platformer. And then I would like to be able to query it, like just sort of ask questions. I want to say, like, show me everything I've ever written about the meta oversight board.

Or like, what have I said in the past about GROC and get like a good answer to that question? And David, it made it in 10 minutes. And now I can just go into the terminal on my Mac and I write Platformer. and then I just ask whatever question I have and it looks across more than 800 stories that I've written over the past five years. Like, dreams are coming true in the terminal, people, in 2026. Yeah.

So do you have other ideas? Like, as you've been playing with it, has your brain opened and you have a long list of cloud code projects coming for your own productivity life? Part of me is wondering, like, what can I build in platformer that might be useful or might just like sort of look cooler? There's a bunch of like Fediverse.

related stuff that I haven't done because I haven't wanted to touch it. But now I feel like I actually probably just could have Claude Code, like, you know, complete the process of like federating platformer and, you know, like setting up some accounts. All right, well, as you come up with them, you're going to have to, maybe we should do this again in 12 months and you should, you should I would love to keep us up to date on all the stuff you're doing. All right, Casey, I have actually like ironically, a bunch of new apps that you should try. But we'll talk about that some other time. Wait, I'm very excited. You know I love to try an app. I know. You do love to try an app.

And right now I'm trying to-do list apps that I think you will find fascinating. So I'll send you some links. But we'll talk to. Please do send them to me. I want to ruin my life. Sounds good. Thanks, buddy. All right, we've got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and take a question for the podcast hotline.

We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into text. to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that.

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Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better,

that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the, elected officials and what it means to the people. So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. That's not a priority.

That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, you can call 866 Verge11. You can email Vergecast at the verge.com. We absolutely love hearing from you. There's always a break at the end of the year where we don't get that many calls,

don't get that many emails. everybody's like, you know, doing stuff and hanging out with their families. I miss all of you terribly. Please call with all of your tuck cushions. What weird stuff did you get over the holidays that you can't figure out how to use or set up? We want to hear all about it. Keep them all coming. Send us emails. Send us phone calls.

This week, we have an email. And it comes from Jacob in Slovakia. Jacob says, I recently started reading a bit more and picked up my old pocketbook 626. Even though it's more than 10 years old, I don't see a reason to upgrade. Since you guys at Verge are such e-reader connoisseurs, what are the reasons to upgrade? Some killer feature if I don't care about comic books? Thank you and have a great holidays. I love this question because I think e-readers are one of the most fascinating types of device.

Because what you do if you're a company that makes lots of devices is you are sort of relentlessly designing reasons for people to upgrade, right? You have to do a bunch of sort of straightforward things. Chips get better, cameras get better, software gets better, you can do all of this stuff. But you run the risk in a strange way. If you make your product too good, you cost yourself a lot of money and you cause yourself a bunch of problems because you've made a project that is so good that people don't need to upgrade. This is a problem the iPad has had over the years where people keep their iPad for like five, seven plus years. This is a problem Kindles have had for a very long time. To be clear, when I say problem, I mean problem for the people who worry about the sales numbers at these companies.

This is the best possible technology outcome. And I think a thing I worry about right now with a lot of technology is that what you have is a lot of companies building things that don't last anymore in order to make them, quote unquote, technology, right? Like your smart fridge is not going to last as long as your dumb fridge did because it requires a bunch of software that needs updating. It requires a bunch of chips that are going to go away. That stuff is bad. Products that last a long time are good. And I think e-readers in a lot of ways are one of the products that has been most successfully built to last a really long time. in large part that's because an e-reader doesn't need to do that much, right?

Like have a decent screen, battery lasts a long time. It's not a particularly technologically intensive thing. So even really old chips are going to turn the pages on your book pretty quickly. So these things last a long time. The story of having a decade-old e-reader is not unusual. I know a lot of people who do. I would say in general, with your e-reader, if you are happy with it and it still works, you don't need to upgrade. It's a reading experience thing.

it's like not a huge change, even going from the oldest generation you can possibly think of to the very newest one. That said, if you buy a new one after having a 10-year-old pocketbook 626, which is actually kind of a cool thing,

it has some physical buttons. I didn't know about this one. It's a fun one to look up. It's also called the Touch Lux 3, which, you know, sure. There are a bunch of upgrades that you will get moving up in time from one of those older devices. The big one is the screen.

E-ink technology. has still not gotten to where, you know, you would hope that it would be, which is like unbelievably high resolution, perfect color, incredibly fast, all this smoothness, like just as good as OLED, we're nowhere near there. But since the device that you're using, Jacob, which was 212 dots per inch, we've gone up to 300, which doesn't sound like a huge increase, but is. And just the actual sharpness of the letters has gotten meaningfully better. It ironically hasn't gotten meaningfully better in a number of years.

We've been at 300 for, I think, a decade now, and there is not a huge reason to go vastly further than that. But 300 is a nice number. And it is noticeably sharper than what you've been using so far. So that's one upgrade you'll feel. Another is that instead of having a micro-USB port, it'll have a USB port, which is also a big deal. At least for me, the biggest challenge with Kindles for forever was that I either had to remember to bring a separate charger, even just on the off chance that they died, right?

Like, these batteries last a long time, but they do die eventually. and you would run the risk of, okay, it dies, and I just don't have the charger with me because it's the only thing I own that has a micro-usp charger. So if you get, say, a new Kindle, they all have USBC. That's a really nice, just quality of life upgrade. It just becomes much easier to charge the device when you do need to. You get more storage 16 gigs instead of 8,

which is frankly kind of whatever. More storage is good. Another reason to upgrade is that you might get Bluetooth audio so you can wear headphones and listen to audiobooks with some of these devices. That's a nice thing and a reason to have more storage. storage, but I think that's a relatively niche e-reader use case. The other thing that I would say, and I think this is the one that actually matters, is just speed.

I've talked to people even who had, say, five-year-old Kindles who got the latest paperwhite, and the just sheer speed and, like, smoothness of it feels like a gigantic upgrade. You feel the page turns differently. It actually sort of feels like it's moving with your finger instead of, like, you tap, and then you wait, and then it registers, and then it turns. There is something to the kind of immediacy and dynamism of these new devices that feels a lot better. Again, does that meaningfully change the sort of minute-to-minute reading experience? No, but it is also the sort of thing that once you try it, it becomes very hard to go back.

So as with so many gadgets, I don't recommend trying a new one if you're committed to sticking with your 10-year-old one, right? Because you will notice all of the little tiny increases in even just basic things like chip and display tech. technology that make it feel better to use. So I think one of the cool things about e-readers is that, let's say you hold on to it for a decade, even though there haven't been a lot of sort of device-to-device massive changes, add them all up and it becomes something meaningful. So I think if you were to buy a new device, either like a cobaltler color or what you get from Amazon these days with the Kindles or even like a books device, it's going to feel

better. It will be a noticeable upgrade. It will be sharper. it will be faster. The apps will work better. If you do something like a books device, you can also run other Android apps, which brings a whole new kind of life to this E-ink world that you've been in for a while. So it will be better. But if you pull out a device that is 10 years old and you say you are perfectly happy with it and you said in your email, I don't see a reason to upgrade, don't upgrade. You just don't need it. And you should consider

it an enormous victory that this decade-plus old device still works, still has all the stuff you need and still just does the job it is supposed to do. There's not enough of that in tech, and there are too many things that feel like they are slowly dying, or quickly dying, frankly, in many cases, and you can look around your house and it starts to feel like a lot of things are going to be out of date very quickly. Hold on to the ones that aren't. So keep that pocketbook 626 as long as you possibly can. And then when it breaks or dies or the software goes out of date or the DRM falls apart such that there are things you can't read anymore, go buy a new one and know that it will feel like a great update.

I hope that helps. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you, as always, for watching and listening. Thank you to Sean and thank you to Casey for being here. Tremendously fun episode. It's very fun to be back. We're back in normal Vergecast season. Like I said at the top, this is the new year, and we're back at it.

Glad to be here with all of you. 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 to catch up on all the stuff that's been happening. There's been all this crazy open AI news. that Neil and I haven't even talked about. So much going on. Lots to catch up on.

We will see you on Friday. Rock and roll.