The Vergecast - Samsung foldable software, eye-scanning orbs, and the future of the arcade

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of texting on the outside screen:  03:28 - The Verge’s David Pierce chats with Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert about the software design of Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5.  32:54 - David takes a trip to the Dave & Busters to find out why the games on your phone ended up in your local arcade. 49:48 - Alex Heath joins the show to discuss his experience getting his eye scanned by an orb from Worldcoin, a crypto startup co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. 1:14:45 - Our hotline question of the week about wearables without screens. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of texting on the outside screen. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am doing a little belated digital spring cleaning. Normally, every few months, I try to back up all my important documents, put all my photos on an external hard drive that I keep in a safe, clean up my computer, all that good stuff. This year, I've done a bad job of keeping on top of all that. So in my spare moments this week, I'm trying to catch up. Today's project is to clean up some of the old stuff in my downloads folder.

Actually, should we just do this together? You want to hear what's in here? This is sort of terrifying. Let's see. Okay, we go to date added, and we go to oldest first. First thing I have is a bunch of PDFs of boring minutes from FCC meetings for some reason. Not really sure what that's about. I have screenshots from a Slack redesign.

I have a bunch of receipts from food that I don't think I actually care about at all. I have a photo of a weird thing that Starbucks did where they made. made a thing that looks like, I think they were Galaxy Bud's headphones case, but it looks like a latte. Sure. I have a picture of that meme that says, you know, I'm not reading all that, but I'm happy for you or sorry, that happened. I have that picture here somewhere.

I guess I used that. I have a bunch of photos of apps that I can't even identify as I'm sitting here. Oh, one of them is the weather app for iPad OS. I have audio of my baby's first heartbeat. That's nice. I'll keep that. I have a bunch of pictures of the Lego NES system for, you know, obvious reasons. A lot of old pictures.

I have a bunch of UPS labels that I for sure don't need anymore. This is the point, right? This is why I need to do this more than once a year because otherwise I go back and I'm like, why do I have a four megabyte image of a Kindle cover just chilling on my computer? Do some spring cleaning, folks. It helps. Anyway, we have a great show coming up for you today. We're going to dig back into the new Samsung phones, the Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5, and try to figure out what they can actually do that makes them special and see if, as a result, you might need more flip and fold in your life.

Then we're going to talk about arcades and how it happened that the games on your phone ended up in your local arcade. This is the thing I've been wondering about for a while, and we finally, I think, got to the bottom of it. And finally, we're going to talk about WorldCoin, one of the most ambitious, bizarre, and frankly interesting crypto things you've ever. seen. All that's coming up in just a sec, but first, I have to do my number one favorite ritual in all of the digital spring cleaning process, which is just to select everything in my downloads folder that's either a screenshot, a zip file, or more than a year old, and just delete it all. Feels so good, y'all, and I have never regretted it once. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct 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 else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for 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.

Tap in with us. Welcome back. So we talked on the show last week about the new Samsung phone. the Z Flip 5 and the Z Fold 5. But I want to dig back into them, especially now that we've had a chance to actually try the phones a bit. Because I continue to think the most interesting question about these phones is just, what do they actually add to your life?

This is true of all Flip phones and foldable phones, by the way. Does having a small screen that folds into a big screen meaningfully actually change what you can do with your phone and how you do it? What about a phone that folds closed? Does that do anything? So much of Samsung's efforts with the Z-Flip and the Z-Fold series, especially on the software side, have been about trying to find answers to that question. And I think every year it gets a little bit closer. So I want to see what's actually happened this year and whether we think Samsung's really getting there.

And as always, when we're talking about this stuff, there are just two people in the world I really need here with me. The Verges Allison Johnson and Dan Seaford. Hi, Allison. Hello. Dan, hello. Hello. Hello. My flip and fold people.

This is what has happened. This is what we have come to, and it makes me very happy that any time I want to litigate flip and fold phones, I have to do it with the two of you. So, Alison, you have these phones now, correct? I was on vacation last week. I listened to the podcast. You seem devastated that you did not have the phones yet. There was a devastating 48 hours where I did not have the phones and I was supposed to, but

it's resolved. I have them all as well. Okay. I'm very happy to hear this. Dan, did you get the phones this year? I do not. I'm living vicariously through Allison's experience. Samsung, how could you?

That's what we're going to do here. We're going to spend the next 30 minutes talking about why Samsung didn't send you a review unit, Stan. This is going to be great. In all fairness to Samsung, I did get a pile of tablets this morning. One of which is, if I remember correctly, 40 to 60 inches in screen size. Did you hang it on the wall? Okay, so y'all did a segment, Allison, last week, about the phones. and we got a bunch of responses from people saying,

talk more about how these things work, which I actually think is interesting and very instructive, because especially with flip and foldable phones, we're still in the like, what are these things for phase? And Samsung, as we've talked about, is deeper down the, what are these things for road than just about anybody

and has some truly wild ideas. But I wanted to get back into this idea of, are these things meaningfully different? Do they change the way that you experience? and use and interact with your phone, is it worth right now like the extra cost, but also the tradeoffs that you make in order to get one of these over the candy bar phones

we've all spent with the last decade? So let's start with the flip, because I think this year that seems to be the most interesting one and also the place where Samsung pushed the hardest on the software. Alison, let's talk about the outside screen first because as we have talked about, these big outside screens make a big difference. And in this case, it seems like just poking around

and looking at videos, This thing Samsung did, I think it's called the flex window where you can basically like swipe through a bunch of widgets on the outside and you have this sort of big almost smartwatchy looking thing that you can mess around with. What's been your impression so far? How does it feel? It's great. And I'm going to compare it to the Motorola Razor because that's kind of the only reference I have. But my quick take is that I like how Samsung is handling widgets, the widgets that they have. that you swipe through on the cover screen are just way better,

like way more informative. You've got like weather in your calendar and set a quick timer. There's more ways to interact with them and view them. You can like pinch and zoom out and you'll see them all kind of in a tile interface. So that's that's one point for Samsung here. And this is, I wanna preface like,

this is like sicko territory of like using flip phones. Running full apps, I'm liking better on the Motorola phone. And they're both kind of like, they both put the option to run like a full app on the cover screen kind of out of sight because it's maybe not a great idea. No, it's objectively, no baby involved. It's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it. But it's surprisingly, like Samsung kind of puts it at more of an arm's length. Like you can add Google Maps and messaging. like without jumping through too many hoops.

It's in the labs feature. But if you want to do anything beyond that, you have to go to the Galaxy store. Where everyone goes from time to time. Yeah. You have to download Goodlock. And then you have to download like a specific module for Goodlock to enable a launcher for the cover screen. I just want to jump in and say, if you are a sicko, goodlock is like your favorite best friend ever.

Like, Goodlock is the reason to create the stupid Samsung account to get to the stupid Samsung store and download it, especially if, like, you really want to, like, do anything with your Samsung device. I think that people that make Good Lock modules and stuff are all a bunch of, like, really nerdy Samsung engineers that just want to do weird stuff with this hardware. And that is like, that is your path to do that. So, keep going, Allison. I just want to say, good luck is a lot of fun. Well, and I will say to that point, actually, one of the things that is, that is, like, that seems to have happened with this round of these phones is that Samsung is pushing more towards the thing it's gotten better at with the galaxies over the years, which is like giving you

lots to do, but only sort of showing you the easy stuff. Or like for years, my experience is always I would get Samsung's newest phone. It would boot up. I would log in with my Google account. And then it would present me 1,000 options. And I had to make a decision about every one of those 1,000 options. And they eventually got to the point where they're like, okay, there's still a thousand options. And if you want to do stuff, there's more stuff to do on a Samsung phone than basically anybody else. But they've done a much better job of saying, here are the things we want to sort of put in front of you. And then here are the things we want to let you find. And I feel like Goodlock is a perfect example of like, it's great that that exists. I think it's awesome that

that exists. That absolutely is not a thing that most people should even need to know exists. Yeah. And they won't find it either. Like to know about. goodlock means that you have to have been told about good luck right right either through a blog or your friend or sure you typed into google how do i do this on my samsung phone exactly yeah i just think it's interesting that Motorola like doesn't make it that hard there's sort of an apps panel for the cover screen and then you you go in and you enable every app individually and it gives you a warning or something it's like this might be a dumb idea but it's much more like permissive. And there are certain apps I think are pretty good and like helpful to have on the

cover screen like Google Maps, which you want to glance at some directions. Like I'm the worst when I get out of like, not in Seattle, but like out of a subway stop. I'm like, I have no idea which direction I need to be going. And that's when you just kind of like glance at Google Maps. I'm curious. I assume that both Motorola and Samsung have like a widget to like play pause and skip your music tracks that's playing. But can you run, I guess you can force like Spotify to run if you wanted to like browse to a different playlist or something like that. Is that like a thing that is like feasible or doable or even a good experience if you do that? So questionable whether it's a good experience. So the way Motorola does it, there's a Spotify widget like specifically it's broken

like most of the time. So it's not very helpful. You know, They both give you the media player, like, pause or fast forward, whatever happens to be playing. Yeah, if you want to browse Spotify or do anything beyond that, and the Samsung phone, you've got to do the good luck thing. And then I was just looking through it and like I got to pop up about some new Spotify feature. I was like, well, this is blocking the whole screen. And I need to quit this app now. So not great on either. I suspect that stuff will get better.

And I do think one of the interesting questions developers are going to have to ask is, like, what is our outside screen experience going to be? Because you can just run the full app thing as a useful hack. But if these phones are going to get popular, and they're not there yet, but if they are going to get there over time, Spotify is going to have to figure out, like, what is the closed screen experience? I don't think Spotify's ever going to figure that out. It may not. I think Samsung's going to have to figure that out. And then, like, Samsung is going to have to be like, we reformatted your app. to fit this screen. Because I think that what's going to happen is the same thing that we saw

with Android tablets forever and ever. Is that like the companies are not going to really invest a lot in the app experience for the different sized screens that are not phone shaped and phone size, but Samsung will do the legwork to like allow you to run a window or allow you to split the screen in different ways or make use of the larger screen or in this case the smaller screen in a way that is more practical and more useful. And I would be, I would not be surprised if we don't see like Spotify widget by Samsung that like, you know, kind of addresses those problems because Spotify won't do it or Amazon won't do it or whatever, you know, name your app developer. I think widgets. It's the year of the widget. I think. Let's just have more. Let's keep going

with widgets. I'm into it. And so one one more thing on the Google Maps thing, because I was watching a video in which they were all excited about Google Maps navigation on the outside screen. And it made me think, so if I have a flip phone and I open up my phone, or I guess I take my phone out of my pocket and I'm like, I need to navigate home. Am I going to open up the phone, type it in, start the navigation, and close it and then like dock it to the thing in my car. Am I going to leave it open? Like, I don't know what the correct phone behavior is anymore. And it feels very weird in that sense. It's like to close my phone and then look at navigation seems weird, even though that's possible. And then it's like if I want to add a stop, should I open my phone?

Should I leave my phone closed? Does it not matter? Is this too many options? Like, I don't know. It just feels weird. I've definitely had those moments where I was, you try and do too many things on the cover screen and you're like, oh, okay, I've pushed it too far. This is like one too many things. It's just not a comfortable experience.

Yeah, I find myself when I'm starting navigation. or whatnot, you know, opening the phone, doing the, like, fiddly stuff. And then I think if I was driving with it, I would keep it open. But if I'm walking, then I close it, put in my pocket. And that's when I'm like, I might need to glance at something or check, you know, respond to a text message. It's sort of like a choose-your-own adventure. And I think there's, if you're going to buy a flip phone right now, I think you need a little bit of that kind of sense of adventure or, like, you're sort of excited about figuring those things out.

You can use it and just out of the box just have like a fine experience with widgets. But I think like the people who are going to get the most out of it are kind of like, ooh, I have options. I can do this on the cover screen or the inside screen or run a app. Can you take a call on the cover screen? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it goes automatically to the speaker phone.

Okay. So you're not holding half of a phone up to the side of your face. I don't answer the phone. Yeah, it's just all robocust. What's the truth? I know with the Flip 5, one of the Samsung's things is a new hinge. Is this hinge any more one-handable, flickable than we've seen in the past? I hate doing that.

I don't know. No, because that's the, like, done right, that's the best part. I don't enjoy it. Like, you got to get your, I'm already putting my nails like under the screen in a way that I don't like. And I wouldn't say it's any better or worse. It's the same. And I don't recommend it.

I think we've talked about this before. But we need a button that you push a button on the side and you got the spring loaded action. Yes. Like, you know, one of those switchblade combs. Give me the thing he has in the matrix. That is the answer. That is the correct answer. I totally agree.

We should get off of the outside screen here in a sec. But customization is the other thing that Samsung made a big deal about being able to change the and move the widgets around and have it look like your thing. And obviously, like, this is, this is the lock screen of this phone in a super real way. Have you been playing around with it? What kind of cool stuff have you discovered? I went pretty intense with it. Yeah. Like, I've got, like, the font. I've got a cute picture of my kid. I turn. There are a lot of options. And yeah, you can, you can treat it as like, first of all, there's an always on display. So that's a option you don't get on the Motorola. And you get little app, you know, icons for your notifications.

You can turn on the battery percentage or turn that off. Yeah, it's pretty customizable and flexible. And you get to a point where you're like, which of these background colors goes best with this photo of my kid wearing sunglasses in a funny way. And I went down the rabbit hole this weekend. So I'm very pleased. Are you all big lock screen customizers in general? Yeah, I am. I get into. do it? I believe that. Dan, what about you? Yes, but I view it from the lens of productivity. I'm like, no, there are no kids on my lock screen. More widgets. What are the most useful widgets and what is the wallpaper that signifies I'm in work mode now? So that's kind of how I do it.

I know with Samsung and I know with Android 14, they added a bunch of like wallpaper lock screen customizations that I've not really played with a bunch, but at least on an iPhone, what I'm done is set up a bunch of different ones that tie into the focus mode that I'm using at the current moment and then it switches. And so my weekend one has kids. The weekday one doesn't. Dan Seaford loves his kids, but only on the weekends. That's the takeaway. No, my customization has been, I have discovered it is actually very powerful to not have app icons accessible to me. So all the customization I've done now is mostly on my home screen, which is just I have one that I hit at the end of the workday that just makes it much harder for me to open Slack. And I've just

discovered that even that tiny little bit of friction goes a very long way. So I've become a big believer in that kind of customization, but only really in the last like six months. All right, Allison, before we switch to the fold, anything else on the flip that you've noticed in terms of like how you use it? I saw the, everybody's doing the new gesture where you can like flick a thing up to the top screen so you can do stuff on the bottom screen. How does that work? You know, I go right for the camera and that's a thing I like on this form factor on the flip phones and I'm just enjoying the hell out of it like you can you can do so many things you can make it like a little like a little view camera where you're you've got it folded in half and you're looking at the image on the

bottom you can record video like I like that Becca pointed that out in our hands on you can kind of flip it like a camcorder all those things are they're not new but they're still here and I'm still enjoying them. And one question we've gotten a bunch is the transition from the different modes. If you're using something with it closed or you have it flipped around in one of the viewing modes and then you open up the phone to use it like a normal phone, how does, how do all those transitions work? I'm not noticing like, I think Samsung treats the two screens as two different sort of

experiences more than Motorola. Like if you're doing something on the cover screen and you open the phone, you're like, this is frustrating. I need to open the phone and do it. It'll open that app or whatever you were working on. But something, I think the Motorola phone does a little better is if you're like in Google Maps and you set up navigation and you close the phone, Motorola will give you a little icon that's like, do you want to open this on the cover screen? And Samsung is just kind of like you're done. Interesting.

Case closed. Yeah, I feel like in both directions, I would want some continuity there. And it's like back to the Spotify thing, right? if I start playing Spotify and I close my phone, I feel like the correct thing to do would be pop up Spotify controls on the outside screen. Yeah. Or at least ask me if that's a thing that I want. Yeah. It might give you media controls at that point.

I think the default behavior is to just like the screen goes dark. You're done. So when you close your phone, Samsung is like you are finished. Yeah. I think that's what I like most of the time because I know with the folding the fold and like the pixel fold and stuff like that, there are some people who like to close it and then continue. what they're doing when it's closed. If I'm closing the device, I'm probably putting it down or putting it in my pocket or putting it in a bag or something like that. Like, that is my signification that or signifier that, like, I'm done doing what I'm doing. And if there's music playing in the background,

it'll continue to play. That's fine. But I don't want it to, like, light up again or throw something at me unless I pick up the phone again with intention to, like, keep using it. You know what gesture I love to that end is on the flip five. If you have it closed and you get a phone call, you silence it by putting your hand over it, kind of like you do on the watch where you just like cover it with your hand and it shuts down. I think that should be like a universal gesture for all things, right? Like, talk to the hand. Literally.

Like, that is a way of just saying sort of, I am finished. Like, I love so much. It's a power move. It really is. Yeah. I love it. It's like no more out of you. Yeah.

Like whatever you're doing, just stop it. Exactly. So, all right, let's talk about the fold a little bit. Dan, I'm particularly curious for you as the fold. sicko of our little family here. Anything in the fold five that blows your mind? It seems like the big upgrade here this year was The Hinge. Was there any software stuff we're excited about? So Allison can confirm, but I believe that there are two software features, both of which are going to be coming to the four and maybe the three and the two or whatever. The first one is you get

on the task bar at the bottom, which is like a permanent strip of your apps. You get another slot for a recent app. So instead of like two or three, it's now up to four, maybe five. now, which is cool. I will just say the fact that you led with that as the first software feature is not super excited. The other software feature that I'm aware of is if you are organizing your home screen, you can now like tap and hold and pick up an app and then use another finger to like swipe to a different screen and then drop the app, which you've been able to do on an iPhone or an

iPad and it makes it a lot easier to like kind of organize your home screen. Samsung's now added that. Otherwise, it's got a new hinge. Yeah. I'm going to be like perfectly blunt here. I think that Samsung should have done so much more this year than it did. It needed to do the hinge. Like that was a necessary thing.

They needed to finally get rid of the gap and they did that. And I'm happy that they did. And they made it ever so slightly lighter or whatever. But the processor upgrade is just your standard Qualcomm chip bump. I don't think anybody really had any performance issues with the four. So like, are you going to notice any difference in the five? No. The camera's exactly the same.

The screens are basically exactly the same. The software is almost identical. and it's going to be backported to the older devices. So at least for people that already have a fold four, even with Samsung's incredible trade-in promotions, it's really hard to justify buying a fold five. And I own a fold four and I have no intention to buy a fold five. And it's really interesting that this is the year

when Samsung finally has some competition and it's done maybe its most iterative update to the phone ever. And all of the updates have been really iterative, but this one is most iterative. So I was really hoping Samsung would do more kind of, of knowing that Google had the pixel fold. We all knew Google was working on the pixel fold for like two years. Like that's, it's not a surprise.

But on the software front, Samsung is still a mile ahead of Google, right? And we talked about this with a pixel fold. Like the Z Fold's ability to move apps around is so much better than anything on any other Android large screen device. And in a lot of ways, it's better than the iPad. Like, it's very good at letting you move a bunch of things around on the screen and put apps where you want them to go. And like it seems a little clunky in spots, but like it's very powerful. Yeah. And like we were talking about with Goodlock, like we said on the show before,

Samsung software makes the fold phone feel like a PC that you shove in your pocket with all of the like good and bad that comes along with that. So if you want a portable computer, like the Fold 5 is going to do all of that stuff just as well as the Fold 4 did. So like if you don't have one already, sure, you're getting a slightly refined experience this year. But if you're If it didn't, like, really, like, if you weren't sold by that pitch a year ago, I don't think the Fold 5 is going to change anything in that matter. That's fair. Allison, have you noticed anything that feels different in actually using the thing?

No, it feels very much like using the Fold 4. I mean, just coming from the Pixel Fold more recently, I do notice that it's quite a bit lighter than the pixel fold, which the Fold 4 was lighter also. So I'm appreciating that. The kind of like, yeah, there's more like drag and drop options. You can kind of like there's a two-handed copy and paste, which didn't work the first three times. I tried it, but I finally got it working. Wait, explain what is a two-handed copy?

Is this a good thing? So the, you have a picture in the like Samsung Gallery app and you can do that like long press on a person and it'll cut it out thing. I see. Sure. And then you can leave that finger there and grab another app, open another app with your other hand. And it'll just like drag and drop the image to the new app. And voila. I don't know.

But like Dan said, that's going to come to that older fold phones soon-ish. They never say. So yeah, there's really not much here. If you have a fold-for, if you were sort of on the fence before. and this year's the year to buy a foldable for some reason. Like, yeah, get to fold five. That's nice. But that's about it.

It is interesting how quickly the fold in particular seems to have settled into the, like, it's very mature and now just get slightly better every year thing. And maybe there are more sort of big turns to have. But it feels like with, you know, regular smartphones, it took a lot longer to get to the, like, we know what this thing is and it's just going to sort of slowly improve over time phase. and Samsung is already there. I mean, I think Samsung thinks Samsung is there. Fair.

There are absolutely a list of things that I would have loved for them to address on the fold four that they did not on the fold five. Tell us the list, Dan. That's what we're here for. All right. So this doesn't matter as much to me, but it matters to the vast majority of people. The camera is exactly the same. And the camera we know is not as good as the cameras that you can get on other phones

for half the price. They did nothing there to improve that. So that could have been an improvement. It did make it a little bit lighter. It's 10 grams lighter, two nickels, as Allison says. That's great, but it's also like barely perceptible. And we've seen phones from China, from Honor and Huawei and and Xiaomi and other brands that are noticeably lighter, like 40 grams lighter.

They're thinner. They are more pocketable and portable. I would have loved to see improvements there. It's great that they fix the hinge, but it's still kind of a chunky, thick phone. The outside cover display is a big blocker for a lot of people. that it is still weird and narrow and awkward. It's still a TV remote.

Yeah, it's still a TV remote. I kind of understand why Samsung is using that, and we've talked about this in the past, of when you open the phone, the screen experience is better because it matches your apps better and things like that, and that kind of dictates the covers geometry and dimensions.

But again, we've seen phones from China that have a portrait-oriented inside display, but have larger outside displays that are wider and more normal aspect ratios and are easier to use. So I would have loved to see Samsung make some progress or forward momentum there. They still are not dust-resistant. I know Allison just wrote a piece on the site that it looks like they are exploring ways to make them dust-resistant, but they're still the same level of dust-resistance as before.

They still have the same kind of like construction on the inside of the screen panels and cover and like screen protectors and things like that. so you have to be careful with these and things like that. So, like, there's a lot of progress. And I think what I would like to see is more experiment and more innovation from Samsung that were not. They've kind of, like, settled into this. We're going to make very tiny tweaks to this formula because we screwed it up the first

year and are very scared of screwing it up again. And so that's kind of like what we're getting. But another example, you still can't put the S-Pen in the phone. You have to buy a case to hold the S-pen, and it's like external. And they made the S-Pen smaller. and they came up with a new case design to, like, hold it and stuff like, that's great and all. Put a silo in the phone that you can put the S-Pen in. Like, there's, like, so many things that they could be doing, but they are just, like, either

planning them out over a 10-year period and doing one at a time, or they're just, they just feel like it's not worth the time. So, I don't know. The last point is, it's still $1,800. Yep. And that is the biggest turnoff to everybody that you talk about about this phone. They didn't move the price budget anywhere. There were rumors that it was going to be more expensive because of inflation and, you

and what have you. And they kept the price the same, which is great, but still $1,800 or $2,000 if you upgrade the storage or whatever it is, is still like just completely non-starter for very massive amounts of people. So like, why couldn't we get it to $1,500 or $1,000 or closer to $1,000, whatever? Well, and this goes back to why I think the flip continues to be the more interesting of the two phones at the moment, partly because they just did more to it this year, but also because I think even in the early days of these foreign factors where there's not, some sort of instant killer app that's like if you if you buy a Z flip you can do this this and this that you just straight up can't do on your normal galaxy phone it's an interesting tiebreaker right

and like kind of what you're talking about alison that it lets you do different stuff different ways it gives you these kinds of new ideas about when your phone should work and how you interact with it and all this stuff and if that appeals to you terrific you have to make what seems to be relatively small camera tradeoffs and there is the dustproof issue but you get something in exchange for that for about the same price. The fold comes with all of those tradeoffs and another $800 or $900 in cost. And that's just tough. And so I think the thing we're at right now is it seems like the Flip 5 is a phone that a lot of people might actually stand in the store and think about buying instead of the S-27,000 or whatever we're going to get next. And I think

that's really exciting. And it feels like, Alison, you and I have both written that, like, this is kind of the moment for flip phones. And it seems like the flip five genuinely has a shot to be kind of the first real one for a lot of people. Yeah. I had some friends over this weekend and the phone was on the table. And generally, my friends are extremely uninterested in whatever phone I'm reviewing. But they were kind of like, what is this? You know, tell me more.

And I think their reaction is totally different. If I have the Z fold out, it just sort of has, I think, instantly. someone who's not super into tech or phones is like, oh, I can tell that's not for me. That looks pretty intense. But the flip form factor is it's familiar. We had flip phones back in the day. We kind of know what that is. And you can see immediately, like I'm showing them the widgets on the cover screen

and how I open the daycare app to sign my kid out without flipping the phone open and ooze and ahs from the crowd. Yeah, no, I agree. I think you're going to have to keep us posted on how your reviews come because I wonder if there are big, messy things left to be discovered. Because we are like, all these apps have to figure out how this is going to work. Samsung has to figure out how people are going to use it. And like, as all the flip and fold phones get more popular, we're just going to discover new ways in which they're still early and broken. I think it's going to be fascinating. Yeah, I'm excited.

All right. Well, thank you both. I am confident that we will have more reasons to talk about. flips and folds in the next few months. So we'll be back soon. But thank you both. Thank you. Thanks.

All right, we got to take a break, and then we are going to come back with a little bit of an investigation into the present and future of arcade games. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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Have you ever seen those videos on TikTok of people playing that arcade game? I don't know what it's called, but it's the one where you just put the quarters in and then you try to use that quarter to push a bunch of other quarters off the edge. Leave a lock on the video for that win right there. That is amazing.

The game is sort of dumb. And watching other people play on TikTok is definitely dumb. But I had this phase where I was watching a surprising amount of it. This fell right off of the pusher. There was a massive tower of quarters sitting inside the coin pusher. I had to turn this $5 bill into 20 by winning it on the edge of this coin pushing. There's just something about seeing the quarters like teetering over the edge that is surprisingly riveting, at least for me.

Anyway, the TikTok algorithm pretty quickly decided. that I must love arcade games, which isn't untrue. I do like arcade games. I especially used to play that old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's side-scroller one all the time, but it's been a few years since I was in an arcade at all. But I started seeing these videos all the time, just of people hanging out at Daven Busters trying to hack the games to get more tickets. Yo, today will we show you guys how to get on the women and Daven Buster's tickets with the boy?

You already know, let's get it. Or just straight up cheating. There's a lot of TikTok videos of just people cheating. Like there's one I saw where this guy is just climbing into the machine where you throw the ball to knock the clowns over and just knocking all the clowns over with his hands. This dude out here really cheating. I guess that's fun.

I also came across a lot of people claiming to have tricks to get you enough tickets to get a PS5 and one guy who calls himself the arcade goat who says he got 10 Oculus quests just from playing arcade games. Tip, play games and feel. In watching all of these videos, I started noticing games I recognized. Not arcade games I recognized, but games I know because they're on my phone. Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crossy Road.

I saw console games like Halo and Mario Kart too. This all seemed really strange to me. Why would I go all the way to an arcade to pay a bunch of money to play games I already have on my phone? Is it just for the tickets? Like, are people making these games so that people will play these games, just to get a PS5? That seems strange. Is it just fun that it's louder and not in my house and they serve beer?

It's all very confusing to me. So one afternoon, I went to the arcadiest arcade I could think of, the Daven Busters location in Times Square in New York City, where I would only go for journalism. All right, the Daven Busters here is located on the third floor. So I'm on an escalator going up to Applebee's and then Daven Busters. This is actually one of the biggest, and in a lot of it, most popular arcades in New York City.

You can go to places like Barcade where they are really focused on retro stuff, but this is just all about gaming. So here we go. Eventually I made it past the Applebee's, past all the tourists, got upstairs to D&Bs, waited for my turn, and went in and had a look around. All right, I made it into the arcade, and I already cannot believe how many games I recognize from console games and even just pop culture, like there's Tomb Raider and Star Trek and Jurassic World and all that kind of stuff.

but especially from mobile. There's a crossy road game. There's a Flappy Bird game that they call Dave and Buster's floppy tickets, even though it's just straight up Flappy Bird. Love that. There's a Mario Kart game that is one of those arcade games with the chairs and the steering wheel and you actually drive. There's Candy Crush.

You can just stand here and play Candy Crush. And it is precisely the same game I would play on my phone, except the screen is bigger and the room is louder and it feels more exciting somehow. After that, I did a couple more laps. I played some Crossy Road and some Mario Kart Arcade GP, and then I played more Mario Kart, and then after that I think I played more Mario Kart. All right, as expected,

Mario Kart in an arcade is amazing. It makes me want to get one of those big $10,000 racing simulator kits, but not play Grand Terezmo or any cool games. Just go hard into Mario Kart. It's also maybe the most popular game in this entire arcade. It's either that or the air hockey, but there is a long line for Mario Kart. And I keep winning, so they keep letting me back, but I figured I'd give somebody else a chance.

It's not that there are no older school arcade games left anymore. David & Buster still has ski ball and the pop-a-shot basketball one and a new and kind of high-deaf space invaders and Pac-Man and a bunch of those racing games where you just sit in the seat and grab the steering wheel. I will say, though, there's a lot less pinball, a lot less of the side-scrolling games like the teenage mutiny. Ninja Turtles one that I loved, and the Simpsons and that X-Men one that everybody used to play. Most of that is just not here anymore. And the real truth is the arcade, as it used to be, is mostly dead in general. We don't need to go too far into all of that, but the arcade as a place you used to go and hang out was a staple of American life for, like, decades.

A huge portion of the gaming world, as we know it now, wouldn't exist without arcades. And now all we're left with is Dave and Busters and a bunch of bar arcade things and not much else. The reason why that happened is pretty obvious, right? It's that we all started playing games at home on consoles and then on our phones. And why would I go all the way to an arcade and pay money just to play the same game I can play as long as I want for free in my living room? All of that is all the more reason I'm fascinated by these mobile games in the arcade. If Dave and Busters and all these other arcades are having trouble convincing people to come out and play games at all, wouldn't it be the worst idea ever to make those games the same games you can already play on your phone? It's like, come pay us money to play the game you got for free already seems like the worst pitch of all time.

And I think the best example of all those games in Dave and Busters is probably Angry Birds. Angry Birds in general is one of those totally unavoidable franchises. You can play a million different versions of it on every imaginable screen and surface. You can buy Angry Birds cereal. You can get plush toys. There was an Angry Birds movie. And like a million other things I have very deliberately ignored over the years. So what's it doing in an arcade asking for my money?

To answer that question, I called up the people who made that game. I am Drew Krauss. I am the C-O-O and I run development here at ICE. And I'm Josh Krauss. I run our home arcade game sales, marketing and average. here at ICE? Ice makes a lot of arcade games, including a bunch you probably know, like the one where you throw the ball and try to knock the clowns over that everybody on TikTok likes to cheat at, or the air hockey game that they have called Extreme Air FX. The company actually started with

bubble hockey, which is apparently still super popular in arcades. And more recently, they also made a game called Angry Birds Arcade. The Krauss has told me that the whole mobile games to arcade trend has actually been happening for a while. And the reason is honestly pretty simple. You know, no variety. It gets you to walk up to it no matter what. So that's a huge, huge plus. Now, a lot of the arcades like it

because it brings licensed brands to their location. A big facility like a Dave & Busters who has 160 across the country, you know, they have movie studios coming to them saying, hey, Ghostbusters 19 is coming out. Can you guys do a Ghostbusters game? I mean, that's how Ghostbusters, you know, we're talking to Sony and looking at products

and then Sony's talking to Dave and Busters all of a sudden, hey, I like Ghostbusters. Hey, we're doing a Ghostbusters. Let's do a Ghostbusters game. It just sometimes it falls in a place like that. So if you're trying to make games that will make people walk up to them, Angry Birds was a pretty easy win. It's one of the biggest games ever. So when Ice reached out to Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds, Drew said they started talking about an Angry Birds arcade game with one really specific question in mind. How do we build something you can't do?

at home. So I start to bring in physical attributes like, hey, what would Angry Birds be even better if it was Angry Birds Plus, right? So, all right, I actually want to launch a physical ball 10 feet across the room and hit a touchscreen monitor. And to me, that's where my brain starts going to. That mechanic he's describing is actually how Angry Birds Arcade works. You walk up to the game, you grab that mechanical slingshot in two hands, and then you aim and launch these pool ball-sized balls with birds painted on them at the huge screen. When it hits the screen, the pigs go flying. Or at least, if you're any good, that's what happens.

The best thing I can compare it to is like one of those golf simulators where you see people smack the ball into a screen, which then simulates where it goes and how far. It's like that. It's really fun and genuinely does feel different from swiping my finger on the screen. Ice's Drew Krauss told me that making these on-screen screen games more physical like that is a huge part of the job. You know, when you asked, hey, I saw a bunch of these games just show up in the arcade on a

giant screen, I'm going to say 90% of those, they lasted for about 60 to 90 days, lasted as far as they made money. Okay, you play it once. Oh, this is the same thing I have in my phone, just giant. It gets old real quick. The other part of the job for anyone making arcade games is to make sure the game is not only fun, but fun to play over and over. arcades want games that you'll play for a minute and then pay to play again, not pay once and play forever, or pay once and then immediately leave.

Repeatability is the thing. That also means making games easy for people to figure out in the first place, because as Drew said, people expect to just walk up and start playing, especially a game they've seen before. When you're home on your phone, you can lose a hundred times not get frustrated. You go into an arcade and, oh, I know what doodle jump is, I've never played it. You go play it in the arcade and you've got to figure out puzzles, you're putting a dollar in, you're not happy. You know, sometimes you have to teach them how to play, opposed to expecting everybody can walk up to it in place. So it took me and I say a while to learn some of those nuances when we take what we think is easy, bring the app to the market. That means basically two things, as far as I can tell.

Making the game skill-based as much as possible, so you're not just playing a slot machine every time you step up, and giving people tickets for. their successes. That's how you get people to keep playing. Speaking of doodle jump, by the way, that's another game I've worked on. Drew told me that at first they had a ball, kind of like golden tea to move things back and forth, but it landed on this big yellow joystick, which you slide from left to right to move your character as it jumps between things. That's the physical object, kind of like the slingshot in Angry Birds. Again, it's super simple. Maybe too simple for me, actually. I'm not sure I'd spend a ton of money on doodle jump in an arcade, but it's a little bit. it's actually been a huge hit for ice.

Anyway, with all of this in mind about physicality and big screens and all this different stuff, I went back out to a different arcade to see if I could make sense of all these games in a new way. All right, it's been a few weeks, and now I'm at a different arcade. This is the Fredericksburg Funland in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And after talking to some of the folks who make these games, I'm starting to see the mechanics they talk about everywhere. Fruit Ninja is here. It's called Fruit Ninja FX.

And it's basically you just stand in front of a large screen and swipe on it the way you would in Fruit Ninja. And that's all fun and good. But the best ones of these games and the ones I'm seeing the most people play are the ones where they make it physical in some way. There's one game where all you do is try to explode something and launch someone out of a cannon. And they made this very cool lever that actually feels like you're pressing it. And it's different than it would feel if you were just playing it on your phone, even a really big version of your phone. There's a space invaders game, which is like from a million years old video game, but it's this huge screen and you actually sit there in a seat with a blaster.

It takes the same mechanic. It's just these eight-bit aliens coming at you, but it feels bigger and cooler and different because it has this physical mechanic to it. This is the kind of thing I think about as we move all of the online digital screen-based culture into the world. How do you make this stuff more than just bigger screens but actually make it physical, Also, fun fact, the most popular thing here, again, is Mario Kart GP. But the one other one I want to talk about is Guitar Hero.

This is the other one I keep seeing at all these arcades. And it might actually be the best earliest example of this that I can think of. It's a video game. It's a thing that happens on a screen. But your controller is part of the game. You don't just touch or press buttons. You're actually playing guitar. And it works at home for the same reason it works in an arcade.

It just feels like you're doing something. even though all you're doing ultimately is playing a game on a screen. It's very cool. I'm now seeing this absolutely everywhere I go. I love it. I really did think a lot about Guitar Hero through this whole process. And Dance Dance Revolution also. And really everything Nintendo has done since the Wii.

The gaming industry has been exploring ideas about how to make controllers more than controllers for a long time and how to bring your body into the equation more and more. That's what the connect was, right? That's what the PSMove is. all these different ideas. And as VR gaming continues to become a thing, we're going to get entirely new explorations of that idea. Mobile games, I think, maybe more than most, need a lot of help figuring that out. So many of the games we play now, whether it's angry birds and

cut the rope or more complicated things like Clash of Clans and subway surfers, they were built on swiping and tapping. But that's never been the most fun or immersive way to play these games. Even just looking at the App Store's top charts right now, it's fun to imagine. It's how a game like Alto's Odyssey or even something like Fortnite or Roblox might go way beyond screens and controllers and just sitting at my TV. It won't work for everything, but I suspect the next turn for a lot of these games is going to be back toward the physical in that way, figuring out how to build new mechanics and new control systems and new ways to bring more than just your finger into the game.

Think about something like the Apple Vision Pro headset. I can basically guarantee you that there will be a... Angry Birds for the Vision Pro at some point. But it'll be a huge bummer if all that is is a big screen you tap to do stuff. That just feels unambitious, feels like not enough. I don't really think arcades are going to become what they once were. Playing games at home or on my phone is just too fun and too easy for me to venture back out every time I want to play Angry Birds.

But there's some part of me that kind of hopes I'm wrong, that physical gaming spaces do become a big thing again and bring people back together. in the real world, even to do screen-based things. Drew Krause is obviously biased towards that perspective, since, you know, he makes arcade games, but I like the way he thinks about bringing together the best of both worlds. Let's stay in the reality. And if we can make you throw a ball instead of flicking on your phone, I think we won. Right.

I'm just trying to bring people back to being a kid and playing with physical stuff again by adding in cool apps, cool ideas, and video, right? I think I agree with that. And I think it's going to be fascinating to see what it looks like to bring the best of our screens out into the world more. Think about headsets. Are we going to use headsets to bring technology with us more places? Or are we going to use them as ways to be home and be in our own worlds more often? I don't know.

I know I'm looking forward to getting screens out more because I know I own Mario Kart at home. And yet I spent objectively an upsetting amount of money playing Mario Kart GP at both Dave and Bussers and at Funland. I don't know, the chair and the steering wheel and the loud crowd just do something for me, you know? I don't think I can get that at home. All right, we've got to take a break, and then we're going to talk crypto.

But not the crypto you're probably thinking of. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. So if you've been following crypto over the last couple of years, world coin is probably one of the companies you've heard the most. about. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, who's one of the founders of OpenAI, which makes chat GPT and GPT4, and obviously is a big deal just because it's related to Sam. But it also

has really big ideas about not just creating a currency, but for helping identify all the humans in the world and universal basic income and all this big sort of heady futurist stuff. Even if you don't know about WorldCoin, I bet you've heard about the orb, which is the big metal ball that WorldCoin wants to use to scan your irises to verify your human. This all sounds insane, even as I'm saying it out loud. And I feel obligated here to give you a thousand disclaimers about the risks of investing in crypto and the huge environmental implications of the blockchain and the many, many, many, many, many scams that have come through this space.

And actually, you know what, let's just get started and we can get to all of that. Alex Heath recently became our foremost WorldCoin expert. He's here now. Let's talk about it. Hi, Alex. Hey, David. We're going to talk about WorldCoyne because you just had a very interesting experience with WorldCoyne. How would you put WorldCoyn as a thing in kind of the broader crypto landscape? It's not Bitcoin in the sense that it's just a thing that people buy and sell to make money, but it's not not Bitcoin.

How do you think about WorldCoin in that space? Yeah, I would say to understand WorldCoin, you have to really understand Sam Altman. Okay. So he's the CEO of OpenAI, which makes Jack. GPT, obviously. And his stated goal with OpenAI is to build artificial general intelligence, AGI. And the thinking here is that AGI will eventually happen. And when it does, machines will be smarter, more capable than humans. AIs, for example, are already starting to evade CAPTCs, but the thinking that is eventually they're going to run the world for us or maybe over us is the

dystopian view of that. And so in that future theoretical world run by AGI, you know, to borrow from Westworld, you kind of need to know who is a human and who is a host. And so I would actually describe WorldCoin, and we can talk about the crypto aspect of it. But in totality, WorldCoin is in a way an antidote to what Sam Haltman is building with his other company, OpenAI. And he's not running WorldCoin day to day, but he's the co-founder, kind of public face of it. He's been tweeting about the lines. People are forming to get their eyes scanned and kind of using his clout to advance. the project. So, you know, he also, Altman, is a huge fan of this idea of universal basic income.

I've heard him talk about this in interviews. He uses this example of, you know, eventually we have these AGI controlled robots and they're doing solar power farming on our behalfs and mines. They're running things for us. Basically, humans won't need to work as much. They'll make our homes for us. They'll do everything for us. And so in a future world like that, maybe you do want some kind of universal basic income. The problem with that, obviously, is governments may not like that. UBI has never worked to date at scale in the modern world. It's actually funny, you know, researching this. I found out that UBI actually dates back to the Romans and Julius Caesar. So it was something that happened a long time ago. So yeah, the goal really simply is to scan every

eyeball on earth so that you can then distribute world coin the token and eventually down the road in some kind of theoretical future, that token will be used for some kind of universal basic income. Now, this sounds like the kind of pitch that I can totally imagine some venture capitalists falling in love with as they're walking through the Presidio in San Francisco. But, you know, the criticism is that it's a solution in search of a problem. But that's at a nutshell, kind of the philosophy behind World Coin and what Altman is doing. Yeah, to me, this just strikes me as like a series of solutions in search of a problem. problem. And I think to some extent, I actually don't want to, like, litigate WorldCoin because it's,

it's sort of in this crazy world that if everything were different, this might be useful and necessary. And that's all fine and good. I do think the question of how currency and the identification thing fit together is really interesting, because the pushback on this has been basically a lot of people are being asked to give their iris scans to this company. And in exchange, they're getting some amount of this currency. And then it's like, fast forward a bunch of years, this becomes very important currency. Could be super interesting. Who knows? We'll save that for another day. The thing on the ground is that there are a lot of people who are like, there's this sort of meaningless, not staked to anything, money that is just being passed around in an exchange

you're taking a huge amount of my data in order to verify that I'm a person because of the other tools that you've made, which are getting so good, so fast, that you're now solving the problem you've created with a new creation that creates its own problems. And I just, I get like twisted into not trying to figure out even like which part of this to sort of be annoyed by. Yeah, there is a lot to be potentially annoyed by a lot to be skeptical of. I think the people at WorldCoin and the parent company, which is called Tools for Humanity, of course, have high-minded intentions here. I guess maybe it's helpful to rewind just a little bit. Up until last week, WorldCoin was not out in the world. It wasn't a token that you could access at all. And what WorldCoin had been doing

for the last couple years is going around mostly in poorer countries outside of the U.S. and Europe, though they did quite a bit of this in Europe as well, but particularly in Africa, parts of India, they would go out and send contractors to basically convince people in villages, people who maybe just got a smartphone for the first time, to have their eyes scanned in exchange for, you know, some tether or some Bitcoin or a nominal. amount of money. And they claim that over 2 million people have already scanned with the orb. And now with the token out, importantly, it's not available in the U.S. for reasons we can talk about, or in China. So the whole world aspect of that is kind of defeated on day one. But now that the

token is out, basically all those people had IOUs in the form of you're going to get the token at some point, and now it's out. And to the idea of it being a currency, it's actually a horrible currency because it behaves like a security. And that's, I think, why it's not available in the U.S. is the SEC and regulators here in the U.S. have started cracking down on crypto quite a bit. We've seen a lot of lawsuits, stuff going on with Coinbase that's still ongoing. And there's this whole debate about, you know, should these tokens be regulated like securities, which come with important disclosures that right now the crypto economy does not have. If you're thinking about this as a currency, A, it can't be used for anything right now.

So it just exists in the World app when you get it air dropped if you're not in the U.S. So it's not really good currency in that respect that they plan to eventually let people send it back and forth. It also fluctuates like crazy, the price of it, because it behaves like a speculative asset. So immediately this became one of the 10 most valuable crypto tokens in the world. The week it launched, the app, the world app was the number one downloaded app on iOS and Android in Kenya, where a lot of people had already been doing signups pre-launch. there's just a lot of pain that's going to happen here with normal people who are doing this because they want some kind of magic bean, and then they realize the price of that bean is not going to be what it was when they signed up. And we've seen this time and time again with crypto projects. And I think that's been the harshest criticism I've seen of the way that they're structuring the actual token so far. And I think that's fair. I mean, I think if you're trying to build a utility, if you're trying to build something that everyone in the world, is theoretically going to have one day. I don't really understand the way they've rolled it out

initially. Yeah, that's fair. And I think one of the things I've wondered about this project the whole time has been, to what extent World Coin would be as kind of interesting and big as it is if Sam Altman weren't involved? Because obviously, in the world of AGI, there are very few people who have done more and put their money where their mouth is more often than Sam Altman. Like, Guy has a history of being right. And some of the stuff we're talking about, I think, think it's sort of specific to World Coin, right? Like the underlying tech, the iris scanning stuff, all of which we're about to get into, that is different. But some of these like big long-term promises that they're making about, you know, banking the unbanked and helping create one single global

financial system. Like that's what everybody in the crypto industry has been saying for a long time. And I think you've been obviously following this and Sam for a while. Like is a lot of the hype here just that Sam is kind of the mightest of this industry and every. thing he touches seems to work and people want to be along for the ride? Yeah, absolutely. You know, he's been going around the world on behalf of OpenAI over the past several months, meeting with regulators, holding talks in different countries. And he's been mentioning WorldCoin. He's been helping to hype it. I saw him tweet a, God, what is it, X, a photo now of him in Europe, finally getting scanned himself a month or two ago. So yeah, the halo of Altman around this is

certainly helping. You know, this is also like a company that's raised a lot of money. Like, We should note they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Andresen Horowitz. I should note one of their earliest investors was actually Sam Bankman-Fried, believe it or not. Which, you know, obviously that's a problem, but they've moved on from that. And yeah, they have a lot of money and it's not a nonprofit either. So, you know, there is a business here somewhere. You know, investors in the project have told me that the kind of initial business plan is to create a kind of API business is for other companies to be able to access the world IDs so that. that they can verify that someone is who they say they are theoretically. So like Octa, for example,

I think just in Germany, has already rolled out World ID as a way that you can authenticate. So yeah, I guess like right now, yes, the project is technically only like two weeks old at this point, but World ID and World Coin can't really be used for much of anything except hoping that World Coin's price continues to go up. Right. And that's where it becomes like Bitcoin. So, okay, There are a million disclaimers and a million questions, and generally, I think most crypto stuff is nonsense. And to all of that, we will just leave aside for now. Because I think if nothing else, this is a show about weird technology and how it makes us feel. And you just experienced this thing. You have seen the orb. This thing's been out for a while, like you said, it's been kind of out in the world, but it hasn't sort of officially been launched. And now it is officially launched. And you got to try it. So tell me about it. Like, what happened? How did this happen? Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone? I'm okay so far. We'll see if there's any drones around my house afterwards here. Yeah, so I guess it was the day after the token launch. I'd been following WorldCoin kind of leading up to this, but not super in depth, but I was kind of reading up on it.

And then I saw that they weren't making the token available in the U.S., but they were still doing orb scans in a handful of cities. And I just went online to their website. It was like booking through Calendly or something. Like, I looked for like two hours out on the very same day, and there were a ton of appointments at multiple locations in L.A. So I booked one for about an hour out. I got on my car, drove across town to West Hollywood here in Los Angeles, to this nondescript co-working space to get my eyeball scanned by Sam Alton's warp. Yeah. Before we get started, do you have any questions about the project or the ORB or anything? No, I was reading that, like, your biometrics don't leave the device.

Right? So, that is correct. However, when you accept the terms of service, there'll be a third optional thing where you can keep your iris image stored in their databases. Okay. You don't have to. Okay. And the only benefit of it is if they do an update that requires you to like, that changes their algorithm for hashing your iris image. Uh-huh.

Iris code, you'd have to rescan. Oh, okay. So it's a convenience thing. Oh, okay. If you don't want it stored, then yes, it will be used on the orb to hash. that will be treated. It was kind of funny because it's a co-working space, right? So there's a bunch of like people there kind of working around different desks,

just kind of like plugging away like normal. And then in the very center, you've just got this like, frankly, kind of weird, dystopian-looking, shiny, metallic orb. It looks like Howl 9,000 from Space Odyssey. Just sitting there, it's about a foot tall with a guy behind it, who's the orb operator, so to speak. So the, oh.

Oh, okay. Now's the time. Okay. This is your moment. All right. Yeah, now it should be verifying you on the cloud. Make sure that you didn't try to sign up twice and trick us. Okay.

And then you get a sticker and you get a badge and then you're done. Okay. You know, I guess the weirdest part of all of this is that my orb operator didn't ask who I was, didn't ask me to confirm my appointment time or even my email or anything like that. He never knew my name. He just walked me through the process and I was. scanned and gone within five minutes. Wait, what?

I know, yeah, that's the reaction. It's like, what? But that's kind of the point. The point of this technology is that WorldCoyne and other companies that use their API one day don't need to actually know who you are. They just need to know that you're a human being. And so through a kind of complicated process, I won't go super in depth on here. Basically, what happens is the orb scans your eye, makes some little noises, and then it

creates this hash of numbers tied to your iris scan that theoretically is not supposed to leave the orb but helps them assign you a world ID. And then there's a corresponding code that's then eventually put on this Ethereum-based blockchain that corresponds to your iris hash. But because of fancy cryptography technology, there's no way of linking the two. Basically, it's like just having a code saying, I am real according to the orb. My operator for the orb was, of course, a guy who said he works in Web3, but he wasn't a WorldCoin employee. You know, they're using contractors and paying them per scan to do this. So he tried to answer some of my questions, but couldn't really answer all of them.

Do you work at WorldCoin? I'm a community specialist. Oh, okay. I don't work full-time. I actually, I work in Web 3 full-time, but this is just my, like, fun little. Oh, cool. I saw, yeah, I saw the token launch. Are people coming in, like, for mainly to get the token?

So in the U.S., you don't get tokens. Oh, yeah, so you won't get tokens. So it's basically just to have your ID. It's just to have your ID. Like, I guess maybe they think if they're, like, they do early engagement, maybe in the future, there might be on a drop. Like, nothing official's been announced like that. Oh, wow. You're making me feel a lot of feelings I did not expect to feel right now.

But I think the thing that I had not fully processed about WorldCoin until you just explained that is that WorldCoin is that WorldCoin doesn't care who you are. It just cares that you are. you're a person. That's right. Which I had not really thought about. Like I've been thinking about World Idea as like a sort of blockchain identity system, right? That eventually they'd be like, we're going to get rid of your physical passport and exchange it for something on the blockchain. And part of me just like wants to give that two middle fingers.

But they're not doing that. They're going one step like much higher in the abstraction layer. They're just saying this is a person and we can now sufficiently convincingly say this is a person. And that's the goal here. That's it. Yeah. That's literally the only goal. And that now, you know, the fact that you have been verified by an orb is theoretically provable on a blockchain.

And other companies can know this and use that identity layer for their services. Did this whole thing seem legit to you? Like, you're in a, you're in a co-working space. It's just like a contract person. We've read all these stories about the people who are like in malls doing iris scanning. This strikes me is the kind of thing that you'd see in a sci-fi movie and they would be in like, the top floor of a huge skyscraper and there would be like people in white lab codes doing this. This is so different from that.

Yeah. It's very bottoms up community organized. Like obviously these people are getting paid to do these scans, but they're really just enthusiasts. Like my operator said he worked in the Web 3 space, of course, and that he was just interested in the technology. And that most of the people that he's scanned were coming in kind of just because they thought it was like a cool idea. Maybe they saw Sam Altman tweet about it. He did say that a fair number, like maybe a quarter, 20% of people were asking, where are my tokens, even though they're not available in the U.S. There's certainly like people are token farming.

There's already been reports of people buying world IDs on like the dark web so that they can then get the tokens associated with that world ID. So this is by no means of fail proof system. But yeah, that's what they're doing at a high level. And they're doing it with flair. You know, like this orb was designed by Thomas. Meyerhofer, who was Johnny Ives' first designer hire at Apple. And, you know, they've hired a lot of, you know, big names across the tech industry. So yeah, it's definitely this kind of weird sci-fi thing meets reality, but definitely did not feel as like high stakes as I thought it would

when I walked in. Yeah, it's really interesting. What is your sense of what they're trying to do with the hardware? Because I kind of see it a bunch of ways. On the one hand, you have this thing that they would want to make seem as normal and unscary as possible if they could just like, point their phone at you and make it seem every day that that would be great. On the other hand, they seem to have leaned into this very futuristic idea. It's this big, shiny object. Like you said, it looks like Hal 9,000. It just looks like a robot. And I can't imagine that was not intentional. Like, what did you make of the actual hardware itself? Yeah, I mean, it's designed to look like an eye, like you're looking into an eyeball, which is pretty creepy. But it was like super fast. It made some cute noises.

And over time, I think what's interesting is that tools for humanity, the parent company, says they want to open source the design of the orbs and let other people make them and distribute them. So it becomes this like kind of decentralized thing on top of the blockchain aspect of this. Sounds pretty problematic because what happens when some kind of vendor installs malware or like something into the orb that isn't, you know, to spec and there's a huge data leakage or something. But for now, it's all designed and operated and maintained by WorldCoyne. These are very expensive devices. I think that costs like 5,000 plus each to build. But yeah, eventually the goal is that the whole company moves towards this Dowel model, a decentralized autonomous organization, where not only are the Orb's able to be operated by other people and made by other people,

but the WorldCoin itself can be used to vote on how governance works and how the company operates. So they want to move to this foundation model that would also govern the orbs. They haven't done that yet. I think that's another pretty fair criticism of doing this right now is it's kind of putting the car before the horse on what a lot of they're trying to do. But I also see the other side. You know, investors are telling me like, look, they got to start somewhere. This is a chicken and egg problem. How else you can incentivize people to scan their eyes in this, frankly, kind of creepy thing?

So, yeah, that's kind of where it stands now. Okay. And what do you get as a person who has now had your irises scan? You got a sticker, which is like, rad. I love a sticker. And you have an app that, I guess, like, says you're human. Like, what, how is your life changed now that you've had your irises scanned? Yeah, I've got my unique human sticker.

And then I've got in the world app that says, I'm verified. I'm anonymous, but I'm verified with an orb. It says when I was verified. And at some point in the future, I guess because I'm in the U.S., I probably won't get the world coins. But at some point in the future, this ID I may be able to use to, log in somewhere, I guess, would be the most immediate implication of having it. But for now, it's just this little virtual badge. That is, I mean, one of the things that is very funny to me

about WorldCoin is there's a version of its story that if you play out the future in one direction, it is this like huge society shaping thing, right? Like if you go all the way out into universal basic income and AGI and we end up in this totally different place than we are now, something like WorldCoin could be really interesting and really important. I would say in a much more sort of immediate and plausible worldview, it's just like a fancy login system. Like it's very funny to me that it's integrating with Octa because it's just Octa. Like in a lot of ways, it's like this is a person who would like to log into a website.

And it just has cooler technology hardware than like my Apple Watch Octa Verify app. Yeah. Or you could be more cynical and say it's actually just a pump and dump scheme. So 25% of all world coins are held by the company. and its investors, and they have not been able to sell any of that yet. They're in a lockup. So a bunch of World Coin is going to get dumped, you know, in a year or so, most likely. And, you know, retail again, like has been the case. And so many of these crypto stories will be left holding the bag. Yeah. I think what's clear in the short term is the only reason to own World Coin is because

you think the price will go up. But in the long run, if you buy this UBI thing and you buy AI may one day rule the world, you may want to have it. But it comes back to what I was saying originally, like this is a solution in search of a problem. And I think whatever happens, I guess I find the idea behind WorldCoyne to be deeply unsettling because it suggests a future in which humans are indistinguishable from machines. And I know we've had that in sci-fi. You know, I love Westworld as much as the next person. But the idea that, you know, Sam Altman, one of the leaders in this space, is actively building towards this future that he thinks is definitely going to happen is pretty unsettling. And I think, you know, we as a society may be having bigger conversations about this

in the coming years. I think that's right. I think the thing that gives me immediate hope is that this launch happened at a very funny time, which is right around the same time that OpenAI ditched its project for figuring out what text was created by AI because it didn't work. And I just think we're at this funny phase now where like it keeps making me think of I watch a lot of HGTV and there was this whole run of HGTV shows where it was like regular people learn how to flip houses and then there was a whole other run of HGTV shows that were regular people tried to flip their houses and screwed them up so badly that they had to call in professionals and now that's what that show is about there's just literally a show called like help I wrecked my house

and it's just like that's the phase of AI that I think we're heading into where it was like okay AI got out of control we're going to build. tools to fix the AI. Those aren't going to work. So we're going to bring in people to fix the AI, but then we're going to use the AI to beat people. And it's just like we're like caught in this loop forever. And it just sort of seems like Sam Altman is going to be the one sitting on every side of it just like laughing hysterically as he makes billions and billions of dollars. Yeah. So to some extent, like, you know, kudos to Sam Altman for getting it like coming and going. I mean, yeah, there's nothing like building the problem and the antidote and being able to

profit off of both, right? Seriously. is such an important aspect of this, as we've been saying, you know, the fact that it's not launching the U.S. as he's really wooing regulators going to D.C., meeting with President Biden about AI stuff recently, for example, you know, a lot of this is wrapped up in him and how he's perceived. And it makes sense to me now a little bit more why he's been this super vocal voice talking to regulators saying we need safety around AI. Guess what? He's got a solution, right? He's got a for-profit solution to the problem. And so, yeah, we've been hearing a lot about chat GPT in the broader world and society. I do think we'll start hearing more about WorldCoin in the coming months

as Altman starts talking about it more and using his platform. So stay tuned. And you're listening to this episode. You're getting kind of the early look at I think something that everyone else is going to be talking about. All right. Alex, appreciate you stopping by as always. And this time, thank you especially for scanning your eyes for journalism. If you do end up needing new eyes, by the way, let us know because that's like truly excellent Vergecast material. So keep us posted. You can read more about Alex's experience with the orb in command line, his excellent newsletter, which you can sign up for at theverge.com slash newsletters.

All right, one more thing to do, and then we're going to get out of here. Let's answer a question from the Vergecast hotline. As a reminder, the hotline number is 866 Verge 1-1. Please call and ask us all your deepest, darkest, weirdest tech questions. We love them all. You can also email at vergecast to theverge.com, send us a voice memo, whatever makes you happy. We love hearing our questions. For this one, I brought in V-song.

Hi, V. Hey, what's that? I have not played you this question. I just gave you like a vague sense of what's coming. So let me just play the question. I think you'll be ready for this. But I'm excited to see where we go because I also have this question. Here we go.

Hey, guys. It's Mark again. And I had a question about wearables or particularly wearables. without screens because I have a pretty, well, I think they're listening to a cool little G-shocks slash a vintage Cassia watch collection, and I really enjoy wearing them. But I also would really love to get a lot of the health tracking and sleep tracking features of something like an Apple Watch or whatever Samsung's will all now these days. And so I tried an Apple Watch for a little bit. I just don't really care for a screen on my wrist. I'm being honest with you. I already feel like

the notifications on my phone are a little bit too much. So I'd rather avoid that on my wrist too. But I also would really like to track my help stuff. So I'm wondering, are there any wearables without a screen these days? Something kind of closer to like the Fitbit flex that used to exist, RIP, or also anything that's like not, frankly, what I think is kind of expensive, like the aura ring. Anyways, thanks for the help. Bye.

Okay. You're making the face that made me want to do this question. It's bleak, dude. It's bleak. Like when you said something not as expensive as the aura ring, I was like, uh-oh. Because that is basically what I think fits 99% of what Mark's asking for because it's going to get you really great clinically. I don't want to say validated, but clinically tested. Sleep tracking.

Like they just, I've been on calls with them and they just told me how like their sleep tracking is, I want to say, around 75, 79% corresponds. to polysumography, which is the cold standard. So if you want really accurate sleep tracking, the aura ring is one of the best options for it. It's not invasive in the sense that you never get a single notification from this on your body. Like the only problem with that is it can run out of battery and then you're like, oh, I miss two nights because I missed that one notification on my phone that says charge this thing up. Yeah.

So that's the one thing with that. The other one would be whoop. And whoop is still kind of expensive. Yeah. And whoop also picks it has such a different idea about what to measure and what you care about that I've always had a hard time recommending it to people because it's like, like, Mark wants step tracking and sleep tracking fundamentally. Right? All the other stuff is well and good, but that's fundamentally what it wants.

And whoop has this very different picture of how you should measure health. And if that works for you, it makes a lot of sense. It's really interested in recovery and lots of different ideas about how. how to sort of track exertion. That's all fine and good, but it's not step tracking and sleep tracking. Well, it is sleep tracking because the sleep tracking kind of feeds into their recovery metrics. That's true. It's not really going to help you so much on the step tracking part of it.

It's really geared towards people who have, you know, ambitious training regimens and who really care about their HRV and they want to check their exertion and want to be at optimal, like, priming. Those are the two that are like the most well-known screenless devices. The other one would have finned the Amazon Halo, but that's kaput because they also went the screenless route. There is the Fitbit Inspire 3, which has the most like not even a screen screen because it's just, it's basically kind of like the Fitbit flex a little bit.

It's got an OLED screen now. so it's not as the monochrome LCD as it used to be. But, you know, it's really not going to tell you much because it's a tiny little screen and you're not really going to be looking through notifications on that. So that is an option if you don't mind double-ristening as I do. But, you know, there is a couple of smart rings that are coming out. I've got a sizing kit for one. So I'm going to be testing that.

And if that's an option, that'll be cool. But the problem with smart rings is that they all kind of cost around the amount that the aura ring does. There's not really a, what I would call a super affordable option for screenless at the moment because the people developing, the screenless tech at the moment

are the ones who are really invested in research and that sort of stuff. So you're going to get people who are like, hey, you want a subscription so you can fund our research. And the answer is always, no, I don't want the subscription. But if you're looking into like cost-effective,

We've recently lowered their subscription prices. So if you want to lock yourself in there for a long time, you can get a lower monthly subscription and the hardware is quote, unquote, free. You know, they say that it's never free. It's just built into a much higher monthly subscription. So if you want to, and you know, I believe they have like a year-long commitment. So that's kind of not my favorite thing. But yeah, so the or ring is still, unfortunately, I think you're best. bet unless you're willing to cobble together multiple devices to just like jerry rig something. I unfortunately don't think that that's really great. But if sleep tracking is your number one thing, there are actually a number of sleep tracking apps on your phone that are pretty good. There's sleep cycle. I like RISE, RISE science, which is that does have a yearly subscription, but I believe it's like $60. And if you really get on top of that sleep habit, then it's not really going to be a forever

thing. Rise is interesting because it takes into account your circadian rhythms. And based on like your phone cropping you in your sleep, it'll be like, oh, okay, this is your sleep need. This is your sleep debt. Like these are the times of the day where you should plan high intensity activity. And these are the ones where you should do like lower intensity because your energy is going a dip. And I've been doing that for, I want to say, six, seven months now. It's interesting.

After a while, I don't pay attention to it anymore. So that's kind of the trap with sleep tracking apps. So I feel really bad, Mark, because I have very unsatisfying answers for you. But yeah, I do think the aura ring is like 99% of what he's looking for, except for price, which is always the issue with the aura ring. That's exactly where I landed too, is I did a bunch of research and landed on the aura is kind of the only answer. And that's really the last thing I'm curious about. out from you before we let you go here is I think what it seems like has happened is the whole market for people like Mark has disappeared, right? For a while we had, you could buy a thing that looked more or less like a bracelet. Like the original jawbone is still my favorite wearable of all

time. It was that nice sort of, it was like a little too snap bracelet looking, but it just like fit around your wrist. It looked much less like technology and more like a thing you might actually want to wear on purpose, which was great. And then there were the Fitbit trackers that you clip to things, those were cool. Like, we had this run of things that weren't smartwatches. And all of those have died in favor of either smartwatches on one end, that's kind of the mainstream idea, or the like capital S scientific tools that are very expensive and designed for people who want to do like clinical studies on themselves. And it seems like the middle ground is just gone. Is that ever going to come back? Like, my argument would be that

we've pushed too many people towards smart watches, including a lot of people who actually don't want smartwatches and that maybe there is room in the middle, but maybe I'm crazy. No, you're not crazy. You're 100% correct. So what ended up happening is one, Google bought Fitbit and that kind of killed the middle market. Fitbit smart watches are blah, especially with the latest generation, but I still think that the Inspire 3 is quite good.

And I believe with the Inspire 3, you can pop out the main unit and you can stick it in like different accessories. So that's one option. Garmin makes a single fitness band at the moment, which actually may be more up Mark's alley, now that I think about it, the only issues that Garmin sleep tracking kind of sucks. So that's actually the worst part about a Garmin

is that it's sleep tracking is, I think, not good. It's good enough to do your recovery metrics because that's pulling on different things like heart rate variation, but in terms of, like, you wanting to sleep better, it's not very helpful. And even that, the Vivo Smart falls into that same. It's a smaller screen, but it's still a screen category. It's still a screen.

So months ago, I was reviewing AmazFids Fids. I still don't know how to pronounce it. AmazFits Band 7. It is a $50 fitness tracker. And if you want to throw back to all the different mid-range fitness bands of yesteryear, that's a really great option. It has a lot of the health tracking feature. the sleep tracking is all right.

The battery life is pretty good. It's not a looker. It's fairly, you know, I don't want to say chintzy, but it's not the best looking device. It's very utilitarian. The only issue I've seen with recommending this to people is that people are like, well, it's a Chinese company and Chinese company is going to have my health data. No thank you.

To which, you know, the problem is, is that FitFit started dying off because these Chinese company like Xiaomi. and a MosFit, they basically came in and was like, hey, what if we sold you these fitness bands for not $100 like FitBit's asking for, but somewhere between $20 to $50, and it's largely going to get you a good portion of the experience. So that just kind of cannibalized the whole market. You know, I had a reader asked me the other day, why didn't Samsung update the, the, it's fitness bands. And I was like, honey, they have not updated these since the last time I went to EFO, which I think was like 2019,

past 2018, 2019, maybe even 2017. Like, it was a really, really long time ago. So I, too,

you know, I might end up blogging this, but like I too have wondered where the fitness bands have gone. And I get a lot of questions, like those from Mark. And I feel really bad. Then I'm like,

well, if you got built a time machine and traveled back to 2014, I have some options for you there. But all of those options have since lost support because the companies went under, as well. So you are kind of stuck with smartwatches, which I do think is tragic because not everyone

wants a smart watch. I even take smart watch free days once in a while to maintain my own sanity. So it's, I really feel for Mark, but, you know, there, you know, thinking about it, I do have a sleep tracker buying guide or sleep tech buying guide, which if sleep is really your main thing, there are non-invasive, non-contact sleep options. The Nest Hub is one. It'll track you via radar The Wything's sleep mat, I believe it's called, is like a $100 sleep mat that you stick under your mattress. And it can read your heart rate and all of that stuff. So that's kind of cool. I have an eight sleep pod pro cover, which is not cheap.

That is even more expensive than the aura ring. But it does offer temperature cooling. So, you know, if you really want to avoid the screens and sleep track, you're going to have to go with like six different devices, at which point is kind of going to add up to the cost of an aura ring. So, you know, I am going to say right now your best option is the aura ring until more people like you start complaining that screens are ruining their lives. And then we can get our more simple fitness tracker blast from the past fans back, which, you know, I would actually be really happy about. I miss the old Fitbit days sometimes. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show.

And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from sleep tracking buying guides to WorldCoin orb experiences on the verge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, read the website. Leave us a comment on the post about this episode. We'd love to hear everything you think. And we do answer at least one hotline question every episode, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about probably more Samsung, the latest going on with the X sign on top of the Twitter building, and lots more.

See you then. Rock and roll.