The geek's guide to running faster

Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of using AI to run really, really, really fast. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am in New York. I believe it's called Podcast 2 in our office in downtown New York, a room I have literally never been in before in my life, I don't think. But it's nice in here. It's a podcast studio. So I'm here. We are here making Season 2 of Version History. We're having a ton of fun making these episodes and I cannot wait for you to hear them. But none of that is what we're here to talk about today. Today, we are here to talk about two things. First, I'm going to interview Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of The Atlantic and my old boss back when I used to work at Wired, about a book that he wrote about running and more specifically what he's like as a runner. We've talked a lot about exercise on this podcast and he does it real differently. So we're going to talk about it. Then I'm going to talk to The Verge's John Higgins. He's our new AV reviewer and he has a lot of thoughts about TVs and this is a big week in the world of TVs for lots of us buying them and changing them and watching them. So we're going to talk TVs. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I have to figure out how to steal all those fake plants out of this room. Wish me luck. This is The Verge cast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group, the global beauty leader, defining the future of beauty through science and technology. L'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for every moment. With long lasting battery life and built in intelligence, you can stay focused on what matters most. Dell Technologies, built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PCs. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks, instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. So the conversation I'm about to have is with Nick Thompson, who is, like I said, the CEO of the Atlantic. He used to be the editor-in-chief of Wired. He worked at the New Yorker. He is maybe even more than all of those things, the fastest person I know in real life. He once told me, and I think he'd probably deny saying this, when he was about to run the New York Marathon, I said, oh, cool, I'm going to be there. When should I look for you? And he was like, well, there's the group of people who might win. And then there's going to be a small gap, and then there's going to be me. And he said this completely just nonchalant about how fast he was as a runner. And that was true. That's where he was. So that's Nick. And we've talked a lot on this show about how to approach exercise and how to think about workout technology and how to integrate it in your life in a way that is helpful and functional and makes sense. Nick thinks about this stuff differently. Nick is trying to be fast, and Nick is trying to win, and Nick is willing to do anything and everything to be very fast. He also just wrote this really lovely book called The Running Ground, A Father, A Son, and the Simplest of Sports. It's a terrific book. It's about running. It's about what running means. It's about the process of running. I didn't want to ask him about that stuff so much as I wanted to ask him about all of the crazy gear that he uses to run. So I invited Nick on to talk about running and technology and how to be a person in the world and also a psychotic runner. We had a really fun time, and there's actually, if you're a person who wants to run fast, there's a lot in here for you. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Let's get into it. Nick Thompson, welcome to The Vergecast. David, it is amazing to see you. This is very exciting. I've been my boss two different times. You are not currently with my boss, but I do make a podcast with my current boss. So this feels very natural to me at this point. So I brought you here. You wrote this book. It's wonderful. I was saying to you just before we started recording, this is not a kind of book that is on a subject that I care deeply about. I think running is like punishment. I grew up playing team sports, for which if you did something wrong, you had to run. So the idea of running, being nice and fun, it's just outrageous to me. But I enjoyed every page of this book and I think people should read it. But I've brought you here mostly to talk about you as a runner, because I think we talk a lot about the quantified self and exercise and what it means to have a good relationship with technology and your body and the outdoors. And I feel like you are a perfect person trying to navigate all of this all at once. I just want to talk about it. There's a bunch of this in the book, but I want to talk about more of it even than just that. Is that done right? Sounds awesome. Okay. So I want to, this may be the wrong place to start, but the philosophical question that kept coming up to me throughout this whole book is you think of running as this sort of transcendent, beautiful thing that you do to be away from screens, to be outdoors, to process your thoughts, to just sort of be and you track every second of every run that you do in Strava. And you are this incredibly meticulous, super optimized runner. How can it possibly be both of those things at the same time? You have two different modes. And so I have many different modes when I run. I do have optimization mode and I do have spiritual mode. And so when I'm running out in the woods or I'm running a mountain, I'm not actually tracking my heart rate. I'm not tracking my cadence. I'm not worrying too much about what time it is. In fact, I've run races where I've literally turned my watch off where I'm running in the mountains. When I'm running on the roads and I'm trying to get fast, I'm tracking my heart rate. I'm tracking everything. I'm comparing it to previous workouts. And so, you know, there's this interesting thing in running where sometimes even in the same race or even in the same mile, you want to like associate, you want to really lock in, you want to understand what's happening in your body, you want to get, you know, okay, how my breathing, like how does that feel? My breathing efficiently? Am I moving efficiently? Where is the pain? Like where are my hips centered underneath my head? What is my cadence? What is my heart rate? What is my body temperature? And there are other times, like maybe even 30 seconds after that where you just let yourself go and you're like, I'm not thinking about any of that. Like I'm like releasing my mind and I'm just circling above Nick and watching him run. And I go back and forth between these modes. So I want to, let's talk like gear all the way at the end of the spectrum here. When you're in like peak training mode and you want to know every single bit of information about yourself, what's on your body while you're running? So I'll give you a hierarchy. So I'm wearing a Garmin watch because absolutely essential and it's incredible, right? And it's like, you know, you can use it to navigate home, you can use it to measure pace, you can have pace per mile, you can have average pace, you can have cadence, you can have every single data field you want. It's like hyper optimized, hyper organized, that essential. I wear a Corus armband and I wear it. This is important on my upper arm or my bicep because if you wear it on your wrist, heart rate monitor on your wrist is inaccurate because your wrist is moving, there's bone, you know, it's very confusing for the heart rate to like, for the wrist to be going like this. And so you get inaccurate readings. And so people get, oh my God, I can't track my heart rate. You're wearing it in the wrong place. So that's essential. I wear a core temperature monitor to tell me my body temperature, kind of useful, maybe not so useful, right? I don't look at it that much, but I started to use it this year because heat adaptability is really important. And I'm trying to get more data and learn from that. Sometimes I wear a stride power meter on my shoe. I don't track that in races. I use that to determine which shoes I should wear in a race. So before a race, I'll go to a track and I'll take like four pairs of shoes and I'll try to see which shoes I can wear that require the least power in the lowest heart rate to run a given pace. So I'll go out, let's say like it's a before 50 mile race and I know I'm going to run 640s. I'll go to the track and I'll run two miles and pair A, two miles and pair B, two miles and pair C, two miles and pair D. I'll then track what was my heart rate, what was my power output while I ran and then that will determine which shoes I wear in the race. Because every shoe is, and what I really should do is like wear it on a particular course or the surface, but you can't really do it on a road because then people will steal your shoes, right? So you have to do it like... Like we're doing this pile of really expensive shoes just sitting here. It's like a new balanced prototype right here. Woohoo, right? So I do it on a track, which isn't perfect. And then I also have a sensor that I can wear on my... It's a running dynamics pod and I'll wear it on my waist sometimes and I'll wear it more when I'm like coming back from an injury, but it'll tell you like what your cadence was, it'll tell you what you are, how much time you spend in the air and it'll tell you what I like is did I land on my left and right sides equally? But really essentially the only two things, like you could take away every single thing except for my heart rate monitor, my watch and I'd be fine. Why those two? So the watch just because it's got everything in the heart rate monitor, you know the last six years I run... I'm tracking my heart rate every time. So if I'm running a marathon, I know that my heart rate should be at mile five, my heart rate should be roughly 130, right? At mile 15, it should be roughly 140. At mile 23, it should be roughly 150, right? And my best races are that and if I'm like off that track and a 50 mile race, I know that if my heart rate goes above 130 in the first 25 miles, I'm cooked, right? I can't do that. I have enough data from enough races and I can see like where I've performed precisely what my heart rate should be. And so in the last New York marathon, I was tracking my heart rate. My heart rate was fine because my cardiovascular system was good. It was just I couldn't breathe. So like my heart rate data looks amazing, right? I ran like a reasonably fast marathon at like an average heart rate of like 117, which is nothing. But that's because the rest of me was just garbage. There. So the data collection of all of this and then the sort of putting together all of the data into insights is part of what really interests me because I think a thing that I've experienced and that we hear about all the time is we all have these tools that generate an increasing amount of data and they give me numbers. And the question of what those numbers actually mean, A, and then B, what I'm supposed to do about them is massively complicated, right? Like we talk about this with sleep scores all the time. Like a thing that tells me I didn't sleep very well is actually of pretty minimum value because I'm sort of aware of when I do and don't sleep well already. But I feel like you've crossed the chasm into like, you know what to do with this spreadsheet that comes off of your body every single time you go for a run. Is that just an unbelievable amount of time doing this that got you here? Like how did you learn to make sense of all this data? You know, that it's such a great question, David. The challenge is to like learn what data matters and what data doesn't. And there's lots of data that doesn't. Like my Garmin, I love my Garmin, devote my Garmin. It has all kinds of crap data. Like I don't know what the Trimp score even means. I don't follow my Trimp score, right? And so the trick is knowing what's right and what's wrong. And it's not like absolute faith in all the data. And I got there in part by experimenting a lot, paying attention a lot, building these spreadsheets, tracking these things, and then having smart people advising me. You know, Strava's is amazing historical artifact. It also like stores the weather, it stores the wind, right? So you can adjust for that. And but there are other parts of Strava's AI is the worst, you know. Blazing fast intervals out. I mean, just like worst sycophantic useless information, right? You learn what is good, what is bad. Tell me about one of the experiments. Like when you go out to be like, I'm going to discover a new thing about myself as a runner. What does that look like? Usually it's trying something new. So the way I train, which is pretty interesting, is my theory of pain is that your brain has a thermostat. And it's taking in all of these inputs. And it's determining whether it's scared based on those inputs. So it's measuring your body temperature. It's measuring your heart rate. It's measuring, you know, hydrogen ion buildup and all that stuff. It's building like gastric distress, right? And there's like a hundred systems in your body. And if any of them is feeling a level of stress that it hasn't felt before, your brain's thermostat kicks in and it starts sending pain signals. Maybe they are maybe elsewhere, right? And pain is, it is physical, it is real, but it's also psychological. And so the way I train is I try to stress all of those signals more in the process of building up, then they'll be stressed on race day, right? So I'll run when I'm dehydrated, right? I'll run when I like, I will go have a big meal. I'll go eat like a bunch of Indian food, right? And then I'll go run 10 miles, right? Just so my body knows what it's like. Like, I don't quite know what I'm simulating, but it's not a good thing that I'm simulating, right? I did an experiment the other day where it was the day, I was, the day my whoops score was two, not one. And I was like, you know what? I feel like garbage, like my head is pounding, right? Like I feel horrible, but I'm going to go run, not because I'm a psychopath and I'm addicted to running or maybe 20% because of that. Because it's a little bit of that. A little bit of that. But I was like, there's going to be real physiological benefits to running when I feel so terribly because when else can you simulate the last 10 miles of a 50 mile? Like you can't do that just on a Tuesday morning in Prospect Park. You can do that on a day you wake up with a whoops score of two out of 100. And so I was like, I'm just going to like make my brain remember what it's like to run with a pounding headache. And you know, that's not the way most people train, but I think it's actually a pretty good way to train. Like most people are like, we're going to, I'm going to optimize all the details. I'm going to run like the best time of day, you know, and I'm going to run in like the best clothes and I'm going to run the right amount of hydration, the right amount of food. And I'm like, I'm going to try to get everything wrong and then go do it. Interesting. How far do you think you can get on that kind of thing by yourself? I mean, there's this big sort of turn in the book when you start training with Mikey and you start training with like people who do this all day, every day for a living. And like the vocabulary you use to describe your running changes at that moment. Right. And so it's very clear that like, I'm now with people who think about this differently. I'm going to learn how to think about it differently. But I'm curious, do you think you could have gotten some or all of the way to the same kinds of things with this process you're describing? It's so interesting, right? Like when I've had someone else tracking me, I've succeeded like 95% of the time. When I've done it myself, I've succeeded like 25% of the time. Like there's just a huge delta. And it's weird because I'm doing the exact same workouts and like, I had a coach tracking me, but we would like email once every two weeks. But there's something about having someone else really supervising you and telling you what to do and telling you to back off, even if it's just a simple text message or telling you to hammer a little hard or telling you that these workouts matter the most. There's something about having that person there that really has made a difference to me. Do you think that is just about the like external person that is out there? I mean, I'm trying to think like, there's lots of people who will join these sort of online accountability clubs, right? One of my favorite examples is students who get on and do their homework with somebody else on Zoom. And you just sit there quietly. It's just a forcing function to make you do something. It sounds like just that idea, even at its most base level, is very powerful for you. I think so. And I wonder whether it's, you know, my problem is never that I won't do something, right? If I don't have someone who's holding me accountable, I like, I won't do the workouts. You're not an unmotivated person. I've learned this about you over time. But the problem is that I might do too many workouts, right? Like I might like, I might do what's called a double threshold, where you do workout the morning, you do workout in the afternoon. And if I know the coach is checking my schedule, like I probably won't do the double threshold. And so it's like, it's like having the person on to do your homework, but what they're actually accountable for is making you go to bed at 11. So I do think that makes a big difference. I do think just having someone, you know, who you know is going to look at what workouts you did that week and just say, hey, go hard or go easier is pretty useful. What do you make of technology solutions to that? I think about like the workout buddy that's now on the Apple Watch and everybody has their own versions of these things that are trying to be sort of lightly prescriptive with technology about how you can do this stuff. Do you, is there something in that for you? There might be, you know, I've created a custom GPT where I've uploaded my running goals and I'll like upload my diet, I like ask it lots of questions. You know, I'll say this is the workout I did, what pace do you think I should run? You know, I uploaded a whole bunch of data, including my, you know, HRV heart rate, whoops scores before the York marathon, asked it for advice. So I have like a custom GPT that's a good coach or that's a decent coach, but it doesn't match actual coaches. And then a lot of these workout buddies, they're just, they're like kind of smarmy and annoying and sick of phantic and like, no one's quite got the personality, right? Like, I don't want, I like, it's like what I said about Strava AI, like I do not want like, saccharine encouragement. That's like not what I need. Yeah. You know, I need, I need like, if Strava AI was like, hey, that's a workout you've done seven times, right? Like that's your second to worst one, but like it was kind of windy out and like you had a hard last couple of days, I would take two days, like that would be useful, but that's not what you got. No. Instead it's like, you go girl, great job. And you're like, this is, thank you. This is like, we've accomplished nothing. Right. Yeah. Tell me about this custom GPT. Give me, give me all the, all the details of this thing. Like, how did you set this thing up? Yeah, I just, I said, okay, so, you know, here's, I set it up when I was trying to set the American record in the 50 mile. I had this big race in April and I probably set up in January and I was like, this is my goal. This is what I've run before. These are my pieces. Every day I would upload my food. This is what I ate. This is what I did. It would tell me like, do this, do that. It would tell me like, eat more of this. I'd be like, I'm feeling this way. It would say, okay, it looks like you, I don't know, maybe make sure you have some L-situline, right? And I would tell it like, what supplements I take, you know, would analyze, like, okay, what's how many, how many grams of L-situline should I be taking? I'd ask it like, what I should do on the road. I'd tell it like, you know, I'm going to be in a hilly course. Like, how do I do this? So I would ask it for advice on like making sure I ran proper cangens. It was great. And it's like, super smart AI had helped guide me and almost got it. But I didn't get it right. Yeah. And what did it tell you or give you or do for you that was surprising? It was just, I mean, it was, the nutrition stuff was awesome, right? It's understanding of like, what you need to eat and like, actually, you know, there's this moment where I was like, you know, I had my hematocrit levels measured and I don't even know what that is, but I believe you. So hematocrit and hemoglobin are basically measures of, you know, something in the blood that allows you to carry oxygen. You want that number to be as high as possible, right? And so like the reason cyclists, blood dope, is they're trying to increase their hematocrit and hemoglobin levels. Like the reason you train at altitude is to increase your hematocrit and hemoglobin levels. The reason you do saunas is that your body like, moves blood to the skin in order to cool you, the blood in your core compensates by increasing its hematocrit levels so you can carry more oxygen to the muscles, right? So it's this measure of this thing you really want. And mine was in like, that's 30th percentile, right? And it's partly genetic. It's partly because I've been, you know, haven't eaten red meat since I was 10. You know, who knows why it is, I live at sea level. So the dietary advice, like this is how you increase your hematocrit. This is what you should eat. This is when you should take iron supplements. Like, it was great, right? Like it knows so much about nutrition. You know, I didn't get my hematocrit levels tested, but given how well I ran in that race, probably the best race in my life, like, you know, did something. I am curious, like when you go into something like that, even as you're setting up this custom GPT, like you, you think about AI at a bunch of levels in your life, like you were on decoder not that long ago, talking about deals you're making professionally with open AI to think about how do we, how do we make this stuff work as a publishing industry? Like this is a thing that is on your mind. What do you go into building this custom GPT thinking? Like I am going to take this thing as gospel truth because it has all the data about me or like, let's just, let's just see what this idiot computer knows or somewhere in between. I mean, as with anything, the less you know about a topic, the more valuable it is. So, sure. Like that's why the nutrition was so useful. Like I know a bit about new, so what AI has, it has infinite knowledge about nutrition. And like I have minimal or little, right, or medium, right? Sure. On like workout paces, it doesn't know. Like I'm better at the workout paces. Like it can't structure a workout for me. And also like I find its tone so annoying, like, okay, well, why don't you try seven by a thousand and then four by like shut them? Yeah. You know? And so it was like, I don't, I know enough about AI to know where it's helpful and to know where it's useless. And I also know that it's going to tell me like, if I, if you ask it about any supplement, it will tell you to take it, right? Like, yes. You know, like here are 400 supplements, which should I take? It'll give you all 400, right? Or if you ask it, yes or no, should I take it? But if you give it, like, what I would do is I would say, like, give me a hierarchy, right? Of these eight things, which is the number one most important or like, okay, during the race of these six options, how would you rank them? Right? And then you, you can use it in a way to get the most out of it. So like my view of AI is incredible tool, amazing tool, super fast, super useful, figure out where it's helpful, figure out how to prompt it, figure out how to get the best out of it, and also know that it's going to have weaknesses and it's going to annoy you. So as you think about all this stuff, where is your tolerance between like, building a thing that works and then doing the thing that works over and over and over and over again, not in like a superstitious way, but in like a, this is the stuff that I know works, I'm going to keep doing it way, versus like relentlessly experimenting to try and get better. Oh, such a good question. So what I do with every race is I, I write down what are the things I did that were new, right? And so before every race, you do like, during the training cycle, you do like five or 10 things that are new, right? Like maybe you do double thresholds, maybe you, you know, so before like Warmark, which was my 50 mile race, I experimented a lot with using a sauna, right? Like I used a sauna, you know, basically to increase my hematocritin hemoglobin levels, turned out work great. Like I wore a new pair of shoes. I wore the Puma fast R threes, like they won the, they won my little track test. Those things were great, right? I did a lot of weekend doubles, where I would do like 20 miles on Saturday, 20 miles on Saturday, right? And so what's interesting is that there's a psychological bias or a bias where you have a race and the race worked out well, and you did 10 things differently during training. So you assume all 10 were right, whereas actually, like it might have been the case that two were right and eight were neutral or like, who knows? So then you do the next race and you do those 10 plus you add some other ones, right? And then you determine like what worked and what didn't work. And over time, you figure out the systems. And so over time, I've basically realized that my body can handle 70 miles a week. And if I go more than that, I run 75 or 80, like I get injured. Not always, it's not like immediate, and I might get injured at 70, but that's like the threshold, right? And I've learned that over a bunch of races. I've learned like here are things that are good to do, early here are things to do late. But to your question, essentially with every race, I add in a couple of new things and I think about, right? So like, I was really worried about the hematocritin hemoglobin stuff. So how do I increase it? What can I do? Like, can I spend some time at altitude, right? And you know, for the next race, like clearly what I need to do is not get a respiratory infection. That would help. That would help. We get a race. I mean, is that like, one of the sort of central tensions in the book is how you avoid letting all of this like bleed into the rest of your life. And you're like, I am a very particular kind of insane person in this part of my life. And I want to not be this particular kind of insane person in everything else. But everything you've just described is like, just wants this one obsession to be the only thing that you care about because it'll make you better at everything else. Well, except you block it out, right? So, you know, like this is, this is the hardest challenge, which is, I love running. It's so fun, right? Like, I like being fast. Yeah, this is where you lose me. I do. I'm with you on being fast is fun, but I don't want to run enough to be fast. Well, right. But like, also, if I devoted my whole life to running, right? And like, it's all I did, right? And I like optimized every variable. And I like, got as good as I could do. Like, what would be my annual income? It would be like 2,500 bucks, right? Like, you got to get like 50 bucks for coming at like winning the master's race at the like Dashford Donuts. You know, I don't know, like I'm not like 10 turkey trots, everything's giving. Part of the reason I ask is, one of the things we've talked about a bunch on the show is the problematic, like streak type things that you get with a lot of these things. And the Apple Watch ring closing stuff and the way that all of these tech tools in particular try to incentivize you, they're basically like engagement hacking metrics, which is so dangerous for a lot of these things, and also just like makes you feel bad. And there's this sense of like, I, it goes back to this sort of like transcendence versus optimization thing. You're like, I want to do this well, and I want to be good at it. But I'm also a whole person outside of this app. Yeah. And that's just a really hard balance to strike, I think, both like on your devices and just like as a human in the world. Yeah, you have to remember, you wrote a great piece at Wired when I was there is like, turn off all your notifications now, all of them, right? I remember what the headline was, but it was like, basically that it was like, just don't screw around. Like, it's not like you should keep some and not others. Like you should actually just turn them all off, right? Which is great advice, you know, and I like tell my kids like, you know, okay, you can have a phone, but just no notifications, right? Like that stuff is garbage, right? It's evil. And, you know, with running, you have to make sure that you don't get addicted, that you don't get pulled in, that there's not something that like, you're too obsessed with like a variable, you're too obsessed with how many miles a week did I run? Did I run more than this person? Where am I in my like club ranking? Where am I on the strawberry ranking? Did I get the segment that I lose the segment, right? You just let you got to let that stuff go. And sometimes it can be motivating, but if you don't have a balance in all of that, you're you're cooked. Yeah. Is there anything you found on that front that does work for you? The motivational tools or the notifications telling you to get back at it? Like, is there anything that actually has helped you? No, none of it. Really? There's not a single notification or tool. I mean, the thing that I like, Strava segments are great, right? And like, if you need motivation to go and you know, I often like, I say that I have like a very stoic attitude, but like the notion of like one of those old ancient stoics going out, like trying to win the Strava segment for fastest time up Grandley Mountain, right? Like, but that's cool. It's fun. It's like fun to like race past versions of yourself. And it's fun to race, you know, other people on different days. And you can't you lose it. You can't get too upset. But it's cool. It's like a good way. If I need to work out on, if I've traveled to a new place, I need to work out and need some motivation. Maybe I'll look and like, okay, there's a two mile segment here. I'm going to try to win it. Okay. That counts. I like that. Yeah. All right. So I need to like go here in a few minutes, but I do I have one just big broad technology question for you before we go. Please, please catch me up on shoe technology. This is this is a thing that I would say I come to like once a year when somebody makes a shoe that is like so fast, it's illegal. But you, you I know pay close attention to this. What's the newest thing in fast shoes? So there are a couple of new things in fast shoes. One is like, like gigantic stack height, right? And so like the amount of like the between the ground and your heel, right? And that's where like some shoes basically, you look like platform shoes, but like Nike has the new has these like, you know, incredible shoes with gigantic stack height that have been ruled like the have been ruled like illegal in races. But they're wonderful for recovery, right? And they take a lot of pressure off your knees and I use them in it's called the Romero premium is the one with the gigantic stack. And I like them for recovery. If like my legs hurt, I have a little tendonitis, my knee will go out in the premiums. You know, there's some weird things, right? You have that giant stack height. The weirdest thing to me is like running through a puddle, right? Because you, you don't know where your foot is, you know, and they're actually, they're hard on like corners, right? And so you wouldn't want to run them, you want to wouldn't want to run them in like a course where you're like a lot of S's. But if you're running just like flat down a road, they're amazing. So that's something. And then the, you know, shoe technology basically stayed the same from like 1970 until 2015, where the only difference is it really matters how light your shoe is, right? If you think of your foot as a pendulum, like an extra, extra mass at your center of gravity means very little, right? So if you're carrying weight, like if you're carrying like a pouch or bag, you put it at your center mass around your waist, you're fine. You put extra weight on your head, you put extra weight on your feet, and it's a real burden to efficiency, right? And so, right, like running is essentially power output multiplied by efficiency divided by mass. And so if you are like changing your ability to move efficiently, that's the second variable. If you're increasing your mass, that's the third variable. We always only focus on the first one, which is your power output, right? Your ability to like put force into the ground or pull you forward. So anyway, back to shoes, lighter shoes have always been better. What happened and what Nike figured out, now everybody else has figured out is that you can make, there always was a trade off between like cushion and mass, right? It used to be you needed more cushion in order to get more protection, but that meant more mass. And so like you get incredibly light material, you started with airplane insulation, you get incredibly light material in the shoe, and you get a lot of support without a lot of mass. And so now people are playing with different variables. So, you know, there's also the other thing people figured out is you put a little spoon in the front of the shoe and it like kind of increases your Achilles rebound. And the initial designs had the like spoon kind of straight on and now it seems like maybe like spoon slightly angled. And so I think that was what Puma did with their new R3s, which had been the shoes that have tested really well in the lab. So anyway, everybody has different kinds of what are called super shoes, which are super light shoes with spoons in them. And you know, so somebody like me, what you want to do is you want to like, and here's the other thing that's so important that people don't get. We all move through space differently, and we all race on different surfaces. And like every shoe responds differently, like their shoes that are probably better for Nick on asphalt, but worse on concrete and ones that are better on concrete and worse on asphalt, like, are they good on a track? Are they good in sand? Are they good like on corners? And so, you know, the trick is to identify whatever your goal is, identify the surface and like the amount of cornering you have and then test a bunch of shoes. It's not like there's one shoe that's the best. It's like, you know, it seems like, like Nike has these shoes, the Alpha flies, right? And they're super interesting, right? So they had the vapor flies, vapor flies made everybody faster than they came out the Alpha flies, Alpha flies have this big stack height. And two things, one, it turned out that like some people got much faster and other people didn't affect at all. Like I actually am significantly slower in the Alpha flies than the vapor flies. Who the hell knows why other people? It's the opposite. Secondly, women do better and respond better in the Alpha flies than men do. Like why is that, right? We don't know, you know, something about, well, women are a little smaller, they're a little lighter, right? Like their mass is like different, the hip angle is different, right? You know, so, okay, so if there's a difference between women and men, well, there's probably a difference between Nick and David too, right? And so, it's very particular and I don't think you can figure out what shoe is best for you until you try it out. And is this the sort of thing that eventually ends up in like a pair of shoes that regular people buy at Foot Locker or like elite running shoes always going to be their very own thing, what their very own needs. I think there are elements of it. Like I think that the insulation, like the foam, right? Like lighter shoes are better for everybody, for everything, right? You really don't want a spoon in a shoe you walk around because it feels so weird. Okay, there's stuff like, you know, there are days where I like, you know, like I've got to go to the grocery store. It's like, hey, go to the grocery store, we need to get some potatoes. And like I look and I don't want to walk upstairs because I'm tired and like my wife needs potatoes in like 15 minutes. And so I like have to walk to the grocery store and the super shoes, which are the only things that are there. And it's like, well, it's weird. So it's like trying to walk around in the shoes that clip into bikes and you just end up sort of totally or it's like towing. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, in some ways, it's like ice skates, actually, right? It's just like it's so bizarre. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. All right, actual last thing. And then I'm like, yeah, do you run with headphones? I, well, so this gets back to the very first thing we talked about depends on the mode. Like, I had a few, if I'm in, I'm just like running to work, I'm running a nine minute mile, who cares? Like this morning? Yeah, I'm running headphones and I'm listening to whatever podcast I'm listening to, I'm listening to an audiobook. Okay. If I'm out on a country road, hell no, never. I'm like listening to the bluebirds, I'm listening to the sky, I'm releasing my mind. If I'm going to work out, and this is where I differ from people, no way in hell, no chance, because what I'm trying to learn is I'm trying to learn about moving my body through space at five minutes and 30 seconds per mile or six minutes per mile. And there's like neurological things that are happening, they're physiological things that happen. Now remember, I'm trying to train my brain, I'm trying to get my brain to get used to it. If my brain is like listening to hip hop, it's not learning, right? It's not like the signals aren't processing. And so you're interrupting the whole thing you're trying to do, right? You go out there. One of the things about training hard, you know, when you, when I trained for a marathon, if you were to add up, like in a 12 week cycle, all the time where I'm going hard, which is probably where I get like 75% of the benefits, it's like eight hours. It's not that hard, right? Because you're out there and you're like, I'm going to run six by a thousand meters. That's all I'm going to do. That's 18 minutes, 19 minutes. Like it's not a lot of time, but the whole benefit is in those 19 minutes. And if you're listening to music in those 19 minutes, what are you doing? That's crazy. Like you lose a little bit of like, of what's what the point is. And so, but there's bound to be science that says music can help you run faster. Like there are people who talk about matching the BPMs of their running pace. Like it's, there's something to the other side of that. No, there's potentially, this is a step beyond me. There is a theory that if you can match your cadence to your heart rate, it does something about like backflow of blood to your heart, right? And like there are like elite runners who believe this. And so they try to run at the exact cadence of their heart rate in order to, it's not about what the, how much blood your body pumps out, but it's about like, minimize the amount of blood that like is absorbed back in or something like that. I guess theoretically you could listen to like a metronome at like 180 or whatever it is and like do better with that. That's psychotic behavior. I think it's possible. Running with nothing is bananas. Running with a metronome is like a, that's a, that's a level I cannot, I cannot broker that. Okay. But to your theory, David, so I, if you, if I went out there, okay, let's say I'm doing three by a mile and I'm listening to like the most motivational music ever, right? Maybe I run the first one a little faster because I kind of block some of the pain signals, but I'm going to run the second one slower. I'm going to run the third one slower. And not only that, I'm going to have learned less in the first one than I would have if I hadn't had it on. I'm like going to, I'm going to have absorbed the signals. It's like studying, you know, you want to, you know, if you're just like, I don't know, you're just like doing stuff, maybe the, maybe the, maybe the music blocks out other stuff. But when I'm, when I'm running, I'm training, you know, no chance. Fair enough. I like it. All right. Well, Nick, congrats on the book. It's really great. Thank you, David. There's so much more in it than we just talked about. So people should read it. I'll put the link in the show notes. Thanks, Nick. All right. Awesome. Thanks. Thank you again to Nick for being here. Read the book, The Running Ground, A Father, A Son, and The Simplest Of Sports. It's very good. Like I said to Nick, I don't care at all about running. Really enjoyed the book. We're going to come right back and we're going to talk about TVs, which ones you should buy, how you should use them, and what settings you need to turn off right away as soon as you get home for the holidays this week. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from one password. It's easy to assume that being small means flying under the radar. But the reality is, is that small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors. Cyber criminals know that leading teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. One password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure. They provide turnkey solutions that can be rolled out in hours, whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. One password is designed to meet small teams where they are. But it's also built to grow with your company. However complex your security needs may get, one password will stay with you every step of the way. 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Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. 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. John Higgins, welcome to the Vergecast. Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here for the first time. I know this is huge. This is your audition, so don't blow it, John. Okay. I'll do my best. I've brought you here because we're running this episode on the week of Thanksgiving, which means two things are about to happen. One, a lot of people are about to go home and hang out with their families and try to solve various tech problems for their families. Two, is it about to be Black Friday, which is the time to buy a television. One of these things that we're about to talk about is purely self-serving for me, because I am currently in the market for Black Friday television, but I think so are lots of people. I have brought a bunch of what I hope are broadly useful questions, and we're just going to plow through them. Does that sound good? Let's do it. Okay. Let's just start with the most obvious one, which is, what is motion smoothing and why do people need to turn it off? Okay. Motion smoothing is trying to fix a problem that we've had since LCD TVs have been released. It wasn't as much of an issue. It wasn't really an issue at all with CRTs, but because of the way that newer TVs display images, we need a way to make it look smoother. What happens is, with the new displays, is it's called a sample and hold. So CRTs used to paint displays, right? That's how they would work. And by the time it got to the bottom, it went back to the top and it painted the next frame. But because of that, it wasn't holding the entire frame on screen at one time. But that's what new TVs do. Because of that image being there, our brains want it to move. So because we have a frame and then a frame and there's nothing, there's no break in between, our eyes, our brains are like, wait, but there should be some sort of motion happening. It's fast enough that it sort of tricks our brain. It's the flicker fusion threshold, if I remember the term correctly. So motion smoothing is trying to correct that with film stuff. It just doesn't do it super successfully. We're also, we want to see film the way we've seen film for our lives, which is at 24 frames per second. When we go to the movies, that's basically what's happening. So when we see something that's 24 frames per second forced to be into a 60 frames per second, it's why it looks like video. It's why it looks like soap operas. The soap opera effect is what a lot of people call it. So it just looks unnatural to a lot of people. Some people don't care. Right. And I just feel like the sort of thing that if you don't notice it, go with God. Do you know what I mean? It's not. I mean, Tom Cruise might be out here yelling at people to turn off motion smoothing, but it feels like if you don't register it as a problem, you're fine. But if you look at your TV and you're like, there is something slightly wrong here. It's probably motion smoothing. Right. And then you, I think I have said in the past that the better alternative is something called filmmaker mode. Give me the brief rundown on what that is. So filmmaker mode came out a few years ago. The idea was that you could put your TV into filmmaker mode and you would get what the creator intended. Right. We hear that term all the time. You know, the creator's intent. And that's what the purpose was. And basically what it did is it just turned off processing. It turned off motion smoothing. It turned off, you know, upscaling enhancement. It just, it turns off a lot of stuff and just displays the image. The interesting thing I've actually been noticing recently though is filmmaker mode now on some TVs has motion smoothing enabled. What? It's a very slight one. It might be called like film enhancement or something like that. But yeah, so filmmaker mode, I mean, I recommend that anybody, you just put on filmmaker mode and it will probably make your TV look better. But you're still gonna, you might see a weird little look to the motion. And if so, it means that there's a very slight motion smoothing happening. And you'll still need to dig into those menus to turn it off or your parents menus when you're home for Thanksgiving to turn it off. Got it. Because it's still there. But for the most part, that's the best way to try and negate it. Okay. That makes sense. So that actually leads me to my next question, which is what is a good set of instructions to give people for like, I take my TV out of the box, I plug it in, I turn it on, what should I do? Is it as simple as go find the filmmaker mode, turn it on and see how that. That's one of the, yeah, basically that's the first thing I would recommend you do. Get through the setup and sign into your Google or Roku or fire or whatever. And then go into picture settings and change to filmmaker mode or there are a few places, a few TVs that don't have filmmaker mode. So you might want to do like cinema or movie. Those are generally going to be the most accurate. Most TVs ship in a low power or energy saving mode nowadays. Some still ship in standard, but they want to meet eco requirements. And so they ship in eco modes. Those are generally changing the brightness of the TV as you watch it. Those are very cool. So whites look blue. So you kind of want to, if you want an accurate picture, you want to switch it to hopefully filmmaker, but if not that cinema, movie, sometimes or theater. TCL uses theater sometimes. Or if you see ISF modes, those are generally accurate. But that's the first thing you should do. And that will, it will look warm. It will look a little red at first. But I guarantee you it's more accurate and you'll get used to it and you'll like it. It will just look more realistic. The greens will look, of the grass will look like grass. So what about people who, I mean, I think like you were saying before, this is the kind of thing that is really geared toward specific types of things shot a specific kind of way. And that mostly pertains to like what we watch on television. But I also like, I watch a lot of sports. I play video games on my TV. Like, is it, are TVs good enough now at sort of smartly adapting to what you're doing? Or do I need to go in and like develop a bunch of presets that I can switch between every time I change activities? Well, for like gaming, you're generally going to want the gaming mode primarily because it's going to give you the lowest input lag, which is also because it's switching off extra processing that it doesn't need. Sure. Because that's what's slowing you down. Is it the most accurate color wise? No, it's not going to be. I personally like to go, like I'll switch over to filmmaker mode. I'll look at what the settings are, particularly color temperature, which will usually be on a scale of warm to cool. And then I'll look at, I'll just take that setting and switch back to game mode and change the color temperature to that. So it looks redder, but you know, a lot of people like the more bluish tint, especially for gaming. And there's extra things with gaming that can help you see better in the shadows, you know, raising that shadow detail level a little bit, which it's not accurate, but if it keeps you from getting killed, it's worth it. I do like the idea of playing games and just immediately cranking like brightness and contrast to a hundred. And I'm like, I can see in the dark, baby, let's go. I mean, I've seen people do it. I believe it. Okay, I think that's super helpful. In terms of like the TVs themselves, I think we can sort of argue until we're blue in the face about like the full price range of televisions. But I'm curious, like for you as you're looking at just sort of TVs in general right now, what specs do you feel like matter the most? Like what should somebody care most about for how they should spend their money? I hate specs because manufacturers lie or fudge the truth a little bit. Lies good. I'm good to lie. Okay, they lie. Like contrast ratio is the most it's the it's useless. It's absolutely used, especially when you look at OLEDs because well, and really LED TVs now too, black parts of the screen, they just turn off the pixels. So your contrast ratio is technically infinity through the roof. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, so it's just it's useless in my mind, even with like projectors, it's not really all that accurate. I mean, you want obviously a 4k TV, forget about AKs for probably ever. So wait, real quick on that. My general assumption about four versus 8k is that 8k is better, but is it such a like plateau of diminishing returns that it's probably not worth the extra cost unless you're buying like a gigantic TV you intend to stand three inches away from? That's really the only way you really see all that much difference. And also there's like eight videos on YouTube that you can watch, right? I mean, right, it's just there's nothing out there to watch in 8k and there won't be for a really long time. And right now the only one you can get is Samsung. I mean, people are stopped, they've stopped making 8k TVs because they're just not selling. So is there a spec that you're like, make sure it says this thing on the box before you buy the TV? So if you like watching movies, I keep an eye on brightness. You want over a thousand nits, which is most major, you know, mid-range and up TVs. In fact, they're doing 5,000 nits at this point for some of them, which is not super necessary at this point. Maybe a future proven. Yeah, it's wild. But you're also looking at like small little specular highlights that are hitting that if they're hitting that. But the content isn't hitting that generally. But that's a whole other issue. So if you're watching a lot of movies, I would say you want good brightness, especially if you're in a bright room and you also use it during the day because you want to counteract the sun or any lights you have on in the living room. I'd look for HDR formats like Dolby Vision or HDR10 Plus, particularly those of the dynamic HDR formats. Dolby Vision is more prevalent, although HDR10 Plus has increased particularly this year being added to like Disney Plus and stuff like that. Beyond that, you know, you want, if you're gaming, you want a high refresh rate. You know, if you're on consoles, you're going to want that 120. Even though the TV might say it's 120, it doesn't mean that all of the HDMI inputs are 120. Some might be 60. So careful about that. And then if you're doing, if you're hooking up your PC, then you might want 144, 165 to get that benefit. Beyond that, not really. TVs are a lot, they're getting really similar. Yeah, it seems like that. And actually, that's a thing that I have started to look at more and more because I think, like Neil, I spend a lot of time on this show making fun of me for my television choices because he's like, what if I spent many thousands of dollars on a television and I'm like, I found one on sale on Amazon for $98 and it's 4K. Like, I don't understand the problem. But it does seem like this, like, $98 is probably too little. But I do wonder, like, do you have a rubric in your head for like, whether it's a particular set or just a price point of like, here is kind of the bare minimum good TV you can get? Like, are you just out of your mind if you try to get a good TV for like anything under $500? So like, I don't know what the number is, but like, do you have a sort of baseline? You can get 400, especially during sales, Black Friday sales or Super Bowl sales. Those are going to be the times to do it. And you can get a 65 inch TV for 400 bucks. That, I mean, is it the best thing in the world? No. Is it great? Yeah, I mean, you can get a good TV for 400 bucks for sure. The who's doing it the best in that range? Like, what brand would you send me to first? It's a toss up between TCL and High Sense, really. I this year, I kind of prefer the TCL sets. So the UM6K, the High Sense U6, both of them are excellent purchases for that price, five, four, 500 bucks. And I mean, I haven't looked at the 55 inch within the past week or so, but I know the 65s are around four, 450. So you're going to be even less for a 55 inch if you want. And you're getting decent brightness, you're getting great HDR support. They have, both of them are going to have Google TV, which runs quickly and has all of the apps. I mean, you need to let them know your blood type and everything, but it's Google. That's part of the course now. They know it anyway. So yeah, I would go with the sort of low end, quantum dot TCL and High Sense TVs. That's sort of like my low insignia should be thrown off a cliff. Any of these like real bargain brands that are $98 for a 4K TV. My whole view is you're buying something that will hopefully last you at least a few years, four or five, sometimes longer, price it out over how much you're spending over the years and the cheaper sets will fail quicker and they won't look as good. And it's just, I don't necessarily think it's worth skimping in something that you're going to use that often. I mean, I like that you put it that way because that is kind of exactly how I think about it where I'm like, I realistically kind of going all the way up the quality curve does nothing for me. I'm the guy who can't tell a difference between like a $25 bottle of wine and a $250 bottle of wine. So I'm going to buy the $25 bottle of wine. But what I don't want is something that either sucks or will break. And sucks, you can suss out pretty fast. But there is a quality way in which you get what you pay for up to a certain point and then that starts to play us out too. So I think that price point seems right to me and TCL and HighSense are both companies that are like thrilled to give you giant deals around the holidays. So I'm optimistic for everybody on that one. You mentioned Google TVs. Let's talk about that right now because one of the things I wondered, you use all the interfaces. What's your favorite? If you were with no other information about what other gadgets I use or anything else, what do you think just out of the box? What's your favorite to use smart TV interface right now? Built in. Yeah. Google TV. Mine too. I would not have expected this to be the case, but I think you're right. It's been now for the past couple of years. It used to be Roku. I was diehard Roku. But it's also a lot harder to find built in Roku. Yeah. So they came out with TVs a few years ago and I think when they did that, the companies they were partnered with might not have been too happy about that fact and made a switch over to Google TV. And so it's almost impossible to find a Roku TV unless it's made by Roku. Right. Like TCL and HighSense have switched to Google. Sony uses Google. And it's just, it works better than the other ones. For me at this point, it's the home screen. Google just does a better job of like collating a bunch of stuff you might want to watch in one place than anybody else right now. Yeah. I'm not a huge fan of the ads and the suggested content stuff. I kind of generally turn that off on my own TVs if I can. I obviously have to test out how it works when I'm testing a TV. But I'm just, I'm not a fan of them thinking I'm gonna want to watch something. Honestly, I myself, we use Apple TV. Okay. Yeah. Don't end up using the built-in stuff. Yeah. I just, there's something about turning on an interface just to get to another interface. Oh, for sure. That just like, in principle drives me crazy. Well, but what you can do is when you, you can go into your TV settings and instead of having it open up on the home page, you can open it to the last used HDMI. Oh, that's right. And so when you start off your TV, every time you start it up, it goes to your Apple TV or it goes to your whatever stick you have plugged in to an HDMI that you prefer. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. Because that's a great way to get around WebOS and Tizen for LG and Samsung. On that note, do dumb TVs exist anymore? Like, is this just, can you, can you find a TV that doesn't have any of that stuff anymore? I mean, yeah, but then you're getting into the, you know, $100 4K TVs. You know, I think like Westinghouse makes some dumb TVs. And I understand the allure for it, but in order to get a dumb TV, you are getting a bad TV. It's just there aren't any well made dumb TVs. Yeah, the advice I give to people is if you, if you really want to do that, just skip all the setup and then just like block your TV from your wireless network. Like that's what I did. I have a TV with a, I have a Roku TV that is slow and bad and drives me crazy. So I just don't let it connect to the internet and I use the Google TV streamer and it works fine. Yeah, or get a projector that doesn't have a built-in OS. All right, we're gonna come back and talk about that sometime. There is, my wife is desperate for us to just get rid of all of our televisions and go full projector. She loses this dream every time I tell her what this dream costs, but it is a dream. But at some point I want to talk about projectors because I think they are like sneakily interesting technology. I'm a big projector fan just to put it out there. All right, we're gonna come back and do this because there is a lot to do here. But my last question is the me question and this is like sincerely the situation that I'm in. My living room only works if it's set up in such a way that you put the TV over the fireplace and I have a great philosophical aversion to putting a TV over the fireplace. Like I hate it, John. I hate it as much as you do. I know this. There's a reason there's a subreddit against it. I know, but the living room doesn't work any other way. And the good news is the fireplace is relatively low. So it's like, it's like, I think I saw something that the average TV is mounted like 42 inches off. We're gonna mount it like 45. So it's not like, it's not horrible, but it's a little high. But the compromise has been in order to not look like a family who has a TV above our fireplace, we're gonna get a frame TV so that it mostly just sort of blends in and doesn't sort of scream television above the fireplace. So my question to you is, should I buy a frame TV? If I ask Neelai, he'll give me like a 45 minute speech that ends in, I don't know, yes, definitely do it. So I'm asking you, you're the expert. Should I buy the frame TV or something like it? Yeah, I notice you're asking this when Neelai is not here. Yeah, I can't ask this to Neelai anymore. I know the speech, I can't do it anymore. Okay. So the frame TV and its ilk, you know, High Sense has their own version, TCL has a version, are not good TVs. Okay. How not good? This is actually an interesting question because this is a relatively well known wrap on frame TVs. Yeah. Like, I think people mostly understand that they are not good, but are we talking like not as good as what they cost or just not good? They, if you want to watch a movie that it's not a great experience. Okay. That's tough to hear. Well, the reason, so there are design elements that are important for making these TVs, right? You want them to be thin, you want them to be able to be close to the wall. In order for that to happen, they use edge lit technology. So instead of there being a backlight directly behind the LCDs, it's shooting light in from the sides and the top and the bottom. So you're not going to have a consistent panel look, especially in blacks. And you're not, you know, there aren't dimming so you can't control pinpoint control all areas of the screen. So your black levels are not going to be good for that reason is number one. Also, they're not going to be good because they have a matte finish because they need the artwork to look like artwork and not like a glossy screen. That's like a feature of the thing. Yeah. It's a feature and it's an understandable feature. And honestly, the edge lit is understandable too because if you're looking at art, you don't want it blinding you. So you don't want the direct light. You want the light coming in from the sides. It softens it a little bit and it also, so it allows it to be a little thin. It softens the light. The matte also softens the light a little bit, which also means you're not getting as bright an image. It's the, with the less expensive ones being the high sense and the TCL, you are not getting a very bright image even when it's turned all the way up. And that's just the way it is. But even with the frame, it's not super bright in comparison to other TVs. Will it hold up in a relatively bright room? Yeah, sure. But there's just a lot of drawbacks. The viewing angles are not great and stuff washes out pretty quickly, like especially on the TCL. Really, the viewing angle is not good. Is there any room for these to get better or is this just an inherent problem to this kind of product? I mean, could they? Sure. But I don't know if the companies are going to put the effort in to make them better TVs. Right. When the people that are buying them are buying them to be TVs. I have a great friend. I mean, that's the thing that I always says that is true is what you actually want is not a television. Yeah. Just don't buy a TV. You want something that will display art. And you know, they do a pretty decent job doing that. Even, well, that's not generous enough. They do a good job, especially like the frame does a good job. Do I think the frame pro is worth it? That's a really tough sell. Okay. But even the frame is pretty expensive. The high sense is pretty good. I actually have it in my living room right now, as well as the TCL, which I would not recommend buying. If you want to turn off the lights and have a real good movie experience, get something else. Please get something else. It's just not worth it. Get a nice TV that has a screen saver that will display art. Right. Maybe somebody should just start making really beautiful frames that just go around regular televisions. And then I can be like, what do you mean this is a frame TV? You know what? Gaslight my family. The frames that they go around are interesting too. Because they still kind of look like a TV with just a bigger frame. You know, or they're like ostentatious. The frame has this really frilly gold frame that you can get around it. And I'm like, I don't live in the Oval Office, so this is not for me. That's very fair. All right. Well, you've like accidentally successfully convinced me even more that maybe a projector is the answer. So we're going to have to come back and do that shortly here. But until then, John, thank you for doing this. This is great. I'm excited to have you back. We get a lot of TV questions and feedback. And I think as you know, this is a tricky thing to like figure out how to shop for and manage. And it's a big purchase in people's lives. So we're going to have to keep doing this. But until then, we're going to take a break and then we'll be back. John, thanks a lot. Thank you for having me. Be right back. Support for this show comes from Upwork. 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Indeed.com slash Fox Business. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. Welcome back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. You can come yell at me in this podcast studio that I'm sitting in. We love hearing from you. Get at us with everything. For this one, I want to do some follow-up to a question we took a couple of weeks ago, which was essentially saying, what are the best reasonably cheap earbuds I can buy? Do I go with the alphabet soup stuff that exists all over Amazon? Do I just buy AirPods and live with them? And I asked you for your recommendations and I got tons of them and I will put links to a bunch of them in the show notes because I got a lot of really good ones. But I want to call out two things in particular. One is a company called Earfun, which is not quite Amazon alphabet soup, but not that far away from it. But I heard over and over from a bunch of you that you really like their earbuds, that they're relatively cheap, relatively good, have pretty good noise cancellation, that if you want something kind of AirPods-y for a lot less than a pair of AirPods, Earfun. I believe at least last I checked, that was also the Wirecutter at the New York Times, their recommendation for the best cheap earbuds. So by and large, people seem to like these and that's a good brand to start with. The other one surprised me and I want to start just by reading an email. This comes from Sean. Sean says, the easiest recommendation for wireless earbuds ever, the CMF Buds 2 Plus. They're on Amazon right now for $69 bonus. They're literally what I use to mow my lawn with. IP68 rating, you can wear them while mowing the lawn and sweat isn't a problem. The ANC is pretty good and has an adaptive mode enough to drown out my gas mower. I also just wore them for the first time on a plane, no issues there either. The Nothing X app, it's a nothing sub brand, is amazing unless you customize everything better that is amazing. So yeah, just buy these. I heard versions of this over and over from people the last couple of weeks and I think the main thing that I came away from this thinking is that people love, love, love, love, nothing's headphones. So there's nothing, the company that makes like the nothing phone and that kind of stuff. Carl pays the CEO, he's been on the show. I think that company is fascinating and I think their earbuds in general are probably the best products they make. They have the ear, they have the ear A, they have a line under the Nothing brand, but then there's the CMF brand, which is this kind of design-y less expensive sub brand of the company. It's very confusing. It's like a startup within a startup. I don't totally understand why they're doing it this way, but that doesn't matter. CMF stuff has consistently been much better than it kind of has any right to be. There's a CMF phone, which had some really clever accessories and you could actually like snap off the whole back plate. Really good Android phone for not that much money. The CMF buds have been pretty good all along. This is just a company that makes a series of good products at relatively affordable prices. And so if I were to send you at one company for like, I just want a good set of headphones without spending like Apple level or Samsung level or even Google level in some cases, money, it's probably nothing. This is the company I heard about by far the most from anybody. Even I expected a lot of people to say like, by last generation Sony earbuds, which I did hear from a few folks and those are generally very good. Sony revs its headphones so often that you can get a pair that is even like two or three generations old that is still likely to be pretty new and pretty good, but nothing, the hands down winner of my call for ideas about what good headphones to buy. So to our first caller, Sean, to everybody listening to everybody who wrote in to everybody who called, thank you, this has been super helpful. Like I said, I'll put a bunch more ideas and links into the show notes for this episode, because I did get a lot of recommendations and wanted to share as much as I can. But if you're looking for a pair of headphones, and it's about to be Black Friday, so it's a good time to be doing so start with nothing that seems to be the right answer. I hope that helps. All right, that's it for the show for today. Thank you to everybody who is on and thank you as always for watching and listening. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kieffer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back here on The Vergecast next Tuesday. We have a lot of fun stuff planned. We got some wild like year-end stuff coming up. We're going to have to see how all of our predictions from last year went. It's going to be a ton of fun. Have a great holiday. We'll see you soon. Rock and roll.