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Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Roid Rage. I'm your friend David Pierce and on today's show we're going to talk to the Veres Victoria Song who recently went to Las Vegas to go to the enhanced games. Everybody calls the enhanced games the steroid Olympics, which is not a completely wrong description, but the idea of giving athletes all of the possible biological and medical advantages they have and then seeing what happens is just deeply fascinating. V had a wild time. We're gonna get into it. I'm very excited. But first, here's a look at everything happening on The Verge today. It's 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026.
Supernatural, everybody's favorite VR fitness game, appears to have a new lease on life. A few months ago, when Meta laid off big chunks of its metaverse and VR teams, it seemed like Supernatural was just kind of being left to die. But now, my colleague Victoria Song reports that it's being spun off as an independent company called Supernatural Health. And importantly, it's going to be run by the original founders and coaches of Supernatural. This is a huge win for Supernatural moms, for VR fitness fans, for VR fans in general, and frankly for me, who now has a reason to turn on My Quest for the first time in, I don't know, a year. Big win. Google put out a big blog post
today laying out its commitment to solving some of the water problems created by data centers. It said that it plans to replenish more water than it uses by 2030. It said it will invest in local water infrastructure where it has data centers. It says it will find other water sources. And it will just be honest and transparent about its water use. Google is just one of the companies grappling with this giant backlash against data centers. And at least in part that backlash is about water usage and these other environmental concerns. Google seems to hope that other companies will match this commitment and follow its lead here and that this might make people feel better about having
data centers in their communities. I'm not so sure any of that is going to work and frankly I would argue there are much bigger problems here than water usage, but we'll see. Google also published the specs and guidelines for people to make their own straps, cases, and other accessories for the new Fitbit Air, the $99 fitness tracker people are really excited about. I've already been seeing people build ways to combine the Air with a watch. So, you can have a watch on top and the Air on the bottom and get the best of both worlds. Very excited to see where this little modular fitness tracker goes. I think it's going to be very cool. You can read about all of this and much more at the verge.com.
That's it. That's 90 seconds on the Verge for June 3rd. All right, now let's talk steroid Olympics. The Verge is V Song is here. Hi V. Hello. Back from Vegas. You survived a turn at the Enhanced Games. How are you feeling enhanced? How do you feel these days? I decided to come to this uh podcast as unenhanced as possible just as a reset. So, I have glasses, which I don't know if those count as an enhancement. And one of my ubiquitous smart watches is on the charger.
Uh, so this is about as unenhanced as I get. So, not including the several injections you're currently getting as we record this, but we'll leave those to the side. Offscreen, just I'm I'm emotionally roided up. How's that? There we go. That counts. Let's let's get some of that out now. So let's let's just start at the very beginning here. What is the enhanced games? Where did this thing come from? Okay, so in 2023, Aaron Duza, a famous tech entrepreneur, basically came out and he's like, "What if Olympics but with performing enhancing drugs?" Yeah.
Yeah. And there was a lot of think pieces at the time about what that meant for uh ethics and sports, you know, forget ethics and games, ethics in sports. Sure. And I think in 2025 they were just like, "Hey guys, you remember when we said pro- doping or the steroid Olympics, yeah, we're actually gonna do it." And then last weekend over Memorial Day weekend, the inaugural enhanced games happened where uh about I believe 42 athletes, four of which were unenhanced and the rest of whom were doping in some shape, way or form, uh got together at this makeshift stadium in what was formerly a barren lot in the backyard of the Hilton Las Vegas Resorts
hotel got together and did some sports and tried to break a bunch of world records because the prize money was up to $1 million if they broke a world record. I'm trying to figure out how much this is a sporting event. How much this is a scientific thing. There is some honest to god science being done here it seems. And how much of this is just a bit to some extent, right? Like Donald Trump Jr. is a backer of this. Peter Teal is a backer of this. There is a very specific kind of person who feels drawn to this event. And so I'm trying to figure out to what extent this idea of what if we did sports, but you were allowed to
flaunt all of the rules of what you can and cannot put in your body. If you just take it at that level, as a sports fan, there's actually something really interesting about that, right? Really complicated. We should get into all the reasons that's complicated, but like this thing as an organization, if I give you the spectrum between like honest to god sporting event, um, grifter bit and we'll put sort of genuine science right in the middle. Where does the enhanced games actually belong, do you think? I have been mulling this over for again probably the roughly 48 to 72 hours since it uh ended. And I think the unsatisfactory answer is that there's a little bit of everything in there. Um, so one of the things that was really
striking to me is that, you know, I've written about it before in Optimizer, but that I have this theory called the uh wellness grifter playbook. Um, and that's where again you take a broad medically true fact and you put it next to a misleading assertion and in the process to boost your own credibility to sell something like a supplement or whatever your silver bullet cure is, you discredit an institution or like established institutional things that the average person is supposed to trust and at some point along the way you profit. Okay. And the enhanced games does bits and pieces of this, but in ways that are unexpected because the institutions that they're kind of throwing shade on is not
medical institutions. It's not doctors like throughout everything. And you know, we're always looking as journalists for are they lying to us? Are they trying to pull the wool over our eyes and all of that? I spoke to the CEO, Maxillian Martin, uh who is a character. I spoke to their um chief uh medical officer or like the head of their independent medical commission uh Dr. Guido Pelis who is um a really respected uh elite sports cardiologist who has worked with both FIFA and Manchester United FC for my soccer heads out there. Um and Christian Anger Meyer who is a biotech entrepreneur with ties
to the Trump family, Peter Teal and all of those people. Every single one of them has been like don't like look at what's happening in the world right now where people are getting gray market peptides from China and injecting them into themselves irresponsibly um without the uh medical supervision that's necessary. And I basically came at them at every single possible angle, forwards, sideways, the other sideways, upside down, diagonal, to kind of really get a sense if I felt that they didn't believe in medical supervision, and I did not get that. Interesting. I talked to several of the athletes that's like and these are elite athletes mostly past their prime but you know we're talking Olympic medal winners James Manus um uh Benjamin Proud there
were so many there uh there even was uh Thor Bjornson who played Gregor the mountain clane in Game of Thrones he was also at the event so um you know talking to several of these athletes who were absolutely ready to talk to press all of them were just like no we worked with doctors. We're doing we really care about the science and there is an affiliated institutional review board approved clinical study that is not done yet because it will take 5 years for this study to be complete. Sure. So there is a lot of science going on. These people were tested out the wazoo. We're talking MRIs, CT scans, uh metabolic panels. Uh I was told that if they were not able to pass a medical screening that they would not be allowed to dope.
Wait, hold on. that make that sentence make sense to me. If they didn't pass a medical screening, they weren't allowed to dope. This I think is like there is a core uh misunderstanding of what the enhanced games is trying to do that I think is wrapped up in that sentence, right? Because there's one way to look at this that is just like what if everything was allowed, right? Like if you're an athlete, there are a tremendous number of things you are simply not allowed to put in your body. Some of which are very safe to put in your body, some of which are very unsafe to put in your body. like the these things are unbelievably heavily regulated. It seems to me the enhanced games are not let's just take
the top off of the regulation and do whatever you want and let's see what happens. It's actually aggressively regulated just in a slightly different direction like what is your understanding of kind of the rules of the road for the enhanced games in that sense? So right like when you say every performance-enhancing drug is allowed you would expect that hello BPC57 is on the table. TB500, everyone's going to be on a Wolverine stack voided up to the gills. And actually, that's not the case. Um, they are only allowing FDA approved drugs that happen to be used in a performance-enhancing context that is often banned by uh organizations like the World Anti-Doping Agency, the US Anti-Doping Agency, the IOC. So,
like testosterone is a very simple example of that, right? Testosterone is allowed. Some anabolic steroids are allowed. Um something called EPO which regulates your uh red blood cell uh production so that you can take in more oxygen. That is allowed. Um the sorts of things that if you're like an NBA player, you immediately get suspended for having an elevated testosterone level. But understanding how to elevate your testosterone level is a thing we have established science on. So this is just saying we are going to allow you to use that established science to give yourself whatever advantage it gets you.
Yes. Um also athletes don't necessarily control how much they get to take. Um when I talked to Dr. Pis he was like we're not maxing them out on steroids. There is a specific period of time that they are allowed to dope under uh close medical supervision. They have to be healthy enough to dope. So, let's say if they had um you know, their markers were showing that they could be put at health risks, they would not be allowed to take a certain amount. And the amounts that they're taking, they're not like, "Let's go maximum." Yeah.
Um it's more like they're allowed to take a certain amount and then they'll work with their coaches and they'll work with the doctors to see if it's making an improvement. And some of the examples that were given were like in a trial run that they did of this last year and you can see before and after pictures of James Manus where what he looked like when he was an Olympic athlete winning three Olympic gold medals. He looks like a typical swimmer very live very swimly uh and then what he looked like when he first started enhancements and it was a little more broad what he was taking at that time. And the man let's just say he's bulging. you can see his veins from Jupiter like uh he can't fit into the
polyurethane suit which are banned and that they allowed them to use. So there's like a lot of things happening here about what they are and aren't allowed to use that's different from traditional sporting um events and actually he roided up too hard. He flew too close to the sun and he started to sink in the water and he actually got slower. So that's what they did last year. Um, you when I saw what James Magerson looked like this time, he was still kind of like hurrah bigger than he was during his prime, but not as like frightening to look at. I mean, I could still see his veins and his like his veins popping from underneath his whoop band, but and cuz he was wearing a whoop band. That's in my notes. Uh, but he was not like
the Hulk, which is what he was last year. And you know, that was something Dr. told me that they saw that several athletes were actually responding a little too well to the testosterone and bulking up a little too heavily so that they dialed them back. But like at the games itself, it's not that every athlete was actually forced to dope. Of the 42 athletes, four decided to compete unenhanced. So they are clean and they did that for various reasons. Uh but a lot of it was so that they could compete in the Olympics. They have Olympic aspirations and if you don't you're basically because these other professional sporting leagues are just like well if you go to the enhanced games guess what you're banned you can't
compete with clean athletes. Um, so you know there were uh we were told by enhance that there actually were USADA and um I think the World Aquatics Association officials there testing the clean athletes to make sure that they stayed cleanest and supposedly they arrived unannounced but they were like yeah we support that please test them please prove that they are clean. Um, so that was Hunter Armstrong who was a swimmer. Uh, another swimmer whose name I am forgetting right now, but uh, Tristan Evelyn and Fred Curley. Those were the four unenhanced athletes. And three out of four of them won their races over the doped athletes. I'm so torn on how to feel about the fact that
the clean athletes mostly beat the crap out of the enhanced athletes and the fact that the single greatest success came from a swimmer wearing a suit that has been banned for like 15 years. So, I think like I'm I'm always fascinated by the sort of uh march of illegal running shoes. Like we actually know how to make people run faster and it's it's with shoes. We know how to make shoes that make people run faster to the point where there are shoes that are banned for marathons, which is just a bananas thing to think about. It seems very clear to me that for all of the science, for all of the doping, for all of the stuff going on, maybe we actually don't have any idea how to make a person swim faster, right? And I think about
like your example of James Mannus who like went from guy who looks like a swimmer to super yolked dude with all available science and drugs to him and got worse that it's like maybe we actually don't know how to enhance people in this way. But then these are largely, like you said, past their prime athletes who weren't swimming as fast as they were. And maybe, and this is, I think, a thing you heard from a bunch of the athletes that just the fact that they were able to get in there and feel competitive again was a huge win. And that's the part of me that actually finds this whole thing sort of endearing that it's like these athletes are these are people who train for, you know, all of their lives, hit this teeny tiny
window of peak performance, and if we can use science and these drugs to widen that window a little bit, that there's actually something very cool about it. So, I don't know, peel all of this apart for me. What do you make of the actual performance of these enhanced athletes? Do we know anything about how to enhance athletes? uh a lot of what we do know is kind of in the shadows, right? Uh because it's not allowed, but uh and I this is such a hard thing to verify. You know, not every athlete who competes in the Olympics is squeaky clean. We do know because there have been doping scandals, right, that there are some un unfair advantages happening and that's absolutely not great for the people who
are honest and show up and are following the rules, right? So, one of the narratives that enhanced his pedaling is like, listen, we all know everybody's doing it, right? Let's do it transparently, safely, under medical supervision. This is a harm. This is what we call a harm reduction argument. And there again, there are flaws to that argument right there because you know you could justify anything by saying let's let's just do it transparently then. But you know there is a nugget of truth there that they are hitting on. And so like if you can find out what the safe things are, if you can study them a little bit more, you can have a
theoretically you can have a more open discussion about like well you know maybe athletes could benefit from recovery. What surprised me was that a lot of the athletes what they said was the most uh notable change for them was that they recovered faster. like they could do more efficient workouts more times in a row instead of like doing a really hard workout and feeling like dog [__] for 3 days after a lot of these athletes. Okay, so when we're talking about the metrics that we're judging this particular event by, a lot of people are like, "Oh, they only broke one world record." Haha. The unenhanced athletes were uh better than the enhanced ones. Haha. You have athletes in a very wide age range
happening here and very wide time frames of how long has it been since they retired and actually competed competitively. Like Megan Romano was one of the athletes who participated. She was the first female I think to agree to participate and she was retired for eight years before coming back. And another thing is most of them only doped for eight weeks. So that's a very small time period for them to be doping. And again under very close monitoring because people are questioning how strict uh it was and whether some of these people were you know there's a lot of questions people have because for one enhance has not been great about communicating its narrative and some of the things. So a lot of journalists we
were talking amongst ourselves and being like hey did you know this did you know that like that's not what was said before this is kind of weird. Um, and so like there's a lot of just confusion I think as to like what is actually happening and also let's talk about optimizing. Let's talk about personal best performances. One of the questions that went in is like is this a failure if you don't break a bunch of world records? And the CEO was like no because what also is great is if you have a bunch of athletes past their primes making personal bests also a success to us. I kind of agree with that. And on that front, you had, I believe, 12 athletes past their prime who set 14 personal
bests. Like you do have people who have been retired for a long time who came back for a short period of time for this level of training and they did set their own personal records. Um there were two races where people came very close to breaking the world record but like we're just a bit short. And I have to bring up Elude Kipchig uh here who's a really famous marathon or one of the all-time greats of marathon running. Um and there was a there was an experiment that he did where he ran a sub two-hour marathon. And if you're not a runner, sub two is just like kind of the threshold where you're just like holy moly sub 2 Jesus Christ. And for that attempt, he had like pacers running in a V formation to stop the wind. It was the
flattest possible course. Everything was tuned to give him the best possible chance of smashing that, you know, that barrier, that 2hour barrier mark temperature. All of those things were highly optimized. At the enhanced games, it was 95 freaking degrees. I was dying. I was absolutely dying. People in the stands were dying. Um, it was open air. There was no shade. This was not indoors. It was not temper temperature controlled. And they put the weightlifting events in the beginning of the day where everyone was just like and I will say a lot of the weightlifterss they looked like they were in pain. They didn't look like they were comfortable and several of them DNFED which meant they could not finish their events.
Um I don't know the reasons why they couldn't do that. It wasn't explained. It just came over the kind of the loudspeaker where they're like and such athlete will not be attempting their second and third lift. And you know I'm not a sports reporter. Um, I kind of look at sports tangentially as it relates to wearables and all of that stuff, but I was like, is that normal? Is it normal for them to change the clean and jerk to a clean and press mid event? And like some of that I can tell you is not normal. DNFing something like that not completely out of character because for something like that, you're like the whole goal is to push yourself to your absolute limit for one second and if you can't like the risk of overextending
is really huge. But I It's so funny to me that like for all of the stuff that we figured out and all the stuff that we've solved, they forgot to do indoors. It's like we have air conditioning friends. We've we've fixed this one, too. We know how to solve this. We have like air conditioning. We have temperature control. Yeah. You can't dope your way past it's real hot, guys. Turns out, what is your sense of the size of the ambition of this thing for the next few years? Because even the way they're talking to you about it, this like we think it's cool that past their prime
athletes are setting personal bests, that's not how you get to mainstream sports success. Nobody cares about a bunch of 42-year-old swimmers doing a good job. Like, they just don't, right? Like either this thing is going to need to be so powerful and so impressive that it is actually a leap beyond and we're we're looking at this as the enhanced games, not the old people games. Uh this is like there's a senior tour for golf that is like fun and cool and it's like oh isn't it sweet that he's 78 and playing golf. Um do you know who watches that is essentially nobody?
Right. So it's like is that the future of the enhanced games or are they do they actually in their heart of hearts want to be the great this is the set of greatest athletes on earth period the end. Like that's how they framed it at the beginning that these people are going to be so impressive that we're going to have to reckon with what we do to our bodies. Isn't this going to be unbelievable? Um this first round obviously did not achieve that. Is your sense that they still think they can? I am very confused as to what their ultimate goal is to be quite frank because the games the sports business of the games is not the primary or only way that they plan to make money. There is actually a lot of criticism that the sports aspect of it is a giant
marketing. Uh this is where it gets grippy, isn't it? This is a giant marketing scheme because what they do have is a direct to consumer teleaalth program where you Oh, so it gets grippy real fast. Yeah. So, okay. Again, but you know there's nuance here. There is nuance here where um basically they're selling things like GHKCU. They're selling things like Tessa Morlin. Uh I believe it's Tessa Morlin. It might be the other one. There's a lot of peptides out there, David. And so they're selling some peptides, uh including GLP-1 agonists, micro doed versions of GLP-1 agonist, uh
testosterone replacement, uh hormone replacement therapies, and just good old supplements that don't require prescription. That all of those things are being sold on their website. And some of those were actually not available to athletes. Uh, I think someone said, well, it's like, well, you know, a copper peptide for your skin isn't going to make you swim faster, so that's why the athletes aren't taking that, but we are selling it to consumers. What they're selling is the idea of enhancing, quote unquote, enhancing, which in a more common parlance is biohacking. They are trying to make biohacking a mainstream movement. And so, in that respect, they're like, look at what these athletes can do under medical supervision with legal enhancements. and
then we're going to sell that to you, too. So, look at what they can do. Now, what if you did that? What if you had a personalized goal for personalized health and medicine that you can come to us for? And for everyone who says we're doing a grift, guess what? We're going to do the same medical rigor. You're going to have to go consult with a doctor. You're going to have to go get blood tests. we're only going to give you one month's amount at a time and you have to do consistent follow-ups and screenings and whatnot to do it safely and legally. And I was like, huh, interesting cuz that sounds responsible, but what if you don't make a lot of money? Are you going to then continue to do that? Because what you're doing is
you're introducing friction into a tellaalth uh platform, which seems like antithetical, right? Because tellahalth is supposed to reduce friction and that's one of the main complaints about tellahalth uh things like trim rx or his and hers and row is that are you actually getting the appropriate medical care to get these GLP1s or are you just doing it and using it indiscriminately in a compounded are you like taking advantage of the compounding system for some people yes it's it is to help with accessibility and for some people yeah they might be abusing these substances that are originally meant for medical conditions. So that's why there's a lot of controversy like if you look at the discourse around
GLP1s right now, you can kind of just like apply some of that to the enhanced games and be like, you know, on paper what they are saying sounds responsible. It sounds um above board. And I'm telling you, I think I have a pretty good [__] meter when I'm talking to these people. They are so like golden retriever puppy dog earnest talking to me. Even though I'm just like, "Are you putting on a bit for me? Are you doing a show? Are you?" And I asked Max Martin and Christian Anger Meyer, um, are you enhanced? Do you take the stuff yourselves? And they're like, "Of course. How could we advocate for athletes taking this if we don't do it
ourselves?" And so their CEO is 29, by the way. He looks like the type of person a looks maxer would be like. That guy. Yes, him. Uh, very chiseled jaw, very like conventionally handsome in a way that I was just like, that's very upsetting because now I don't know if people are going to focus on the science like they should be. Um, and you have these athletes with these incredible bodies and like these incredible aesthetics going, I enhanced and I feel great. I enhanced and I feel a certain way. And so, you know, they can talk about the science all they want with journalists like me, asking really tough questions, trying to detect where the [__] is, where the dangers are, trying to give like a really fair,
balanced, nuanced discussion with people like our broadcast listeners who do care about that sort of thing. And then there's just the people who are just watching and being like, "Oh, they're all roided up and they [__] suck." And then so you get a very weird telephone game happening between what they're saying and how it's perceived. And that was my biggest concern going into these games going like how are they broadcasting this? And that is a like we could spend another 3,000word feature about how this game games was broadcast because who was in attendance? This was not a game that you could buy tickets to. The audience was mostly a the athletes friends and family. a small cadra of credentialed media about 250 media people in total spanning 75
publications across the globe and a [__] ton of influencers. I mean just they were you didn't see them on the broadcast but they were in the corners where I could see them from my station just in the corners everywhere making content. Oh, James Magnus, how do you feel about this? Oh, I feel great. And just like watching this online, I'm just like the what is happening? Because if you watch the social media coverage of it versus what the press have been writing, the games were a success. The games were an unmititigated disaster. Both of these narratives are competing. I do want to say, I think the athletes had a [__] great time because there's no downside for so many of these
athletes to join because, you know, we talk about the $1 million prize a lot. What I realized when I was sitting there in the games, because they're telling you how much each of these athletes is taking home, is that if you finish dead last, if you finish dead last, you're still taking home a minimum of $20,000. By comparison, let's let's let's talk about what you win for a gold medal at the Olympics, $37.5,000, right? The swimmer that I think caused a lot of shock waves or like sent a lot of shock waves through that community was Ben Proud. He won a silver medal in the Paris Olympics. So, not that long ago. And he basically is like, "What good did it do me? I'm struggling
financially. Uh, this is a chance for me to not be a social media influencer." Well, kind of, cuz he has to do all these media appearances, which he gets paid for, but he's like, "He doesn't have to be a sports swimming influencer anymore. He can just have sort of a second career and live comfortably." He won one of his events. He took he didn't break a world record but he took home $250,000 for what a minute of swimming sure in front of people. So for the athletes it's very compelling and I think it raises a huge question about how do we compensate professional amateur athletes. It's actually extremely expensive and financially draining to be an Olympian. Uh and if you don't get an endorsement deal from the Olympics
what have you put your life on the line for? Right? So, I think that is a very valid and true thing that kind of lends the enhanced games a sort of credibility even though there are a lot of things that we should be critical about, right? That's kind of the grift playbook right there where you're just like, "Oh, there's some dissonance happening here because how do we think about those things? How do how are we thoughtful about those things?" But again, all of that only works once. It works once and then it works if people care. Yes. And this is the thing I think like they're the fact that they're on a 5-year journey here is really interesting.
They have to be for safety reasons because they've doped these people. So that 5-year clinical study is to make sure that if side effects happen with these athletes after the fact that it can get caught. A lot of people are saying this was a one oneanddone stunt. They're not saying that. The athletes are like can't wait to do this again next year. They have plans to do it yearly. this event that I saw, they have plans to do that yearly. They said they have plans to expand into other sports like cycling, which that would be something, right? Um, and they plan to have this direct to consumer business where if enough people buy into it, uh, maybe that gambit pays off for them. At the same time,
look at their stock price right now. It's gone after the initial games partly because the uh coverage of it has been like, "Oh, you only broke one world record." And even that, we don't know if we trust that you broke the world record. But I will tell you, Christian Golam, who uh won that, he took home a $1 million check. That man is Listen, I am so in favor of everybody else getting Peter Teal's money. So that's all fine. Yeah. But like I Yeah. To me, this thing has not yet remotely tipped from this is a science experiment happening in real time to like this is in some really fascinating way sports, right? Like this is not sports. This is stickick. Uh and it's maybe science, but it's not it's
not yet sports. And for them to try to do the thing they want to do, I think it has to be sports. It does. I just don't I don't see it yet. But I will say they replaced the kiss cam with a flex cam and there were hella jacked people in that audience. I'm I'm fully in favor of a flex cam. It was just a lot of people going like and I was like oh my god. Also when I left the event there was this lady going who wants sexy water? And she just had these bottles and she's like sexy water. And I was like what the [__] is sexy water? And again, I was like, I need to go to my hotel room and I need to emotionally process everything I've seen. So, I kind of ran away at that point. I was like,
get me out of here. Get me out of Vegas. Should always run away from sexy water. If there's one thing I believe, it's that you should always run away from sexy water. Yeah. Like, no good comes of that. No, no good comes of sexy water. Just drink regular water. All right, V. Thank you for being here. right, thanks again to V for being here. Before we get out of here, new Verdcast thing to tell you about. So, we've always tried to do a lot of your feedback on the show through the hotline, through our email, and now that we're doing a daily show, the goal is to do even more of that. So, most of the time, once a week, usually on Wednesdays, we're going to do a whole
episode of your questions. Sometimes it'll be one that we talk about for the whole show. Sometimes we'll bring somebody on and answer a bunch in a row, but we want to have all of the hotline questions kind of talking to each other. So, Travis Laruk, our producer, is here. Travis, welcome. Travis is here. Uh, we last week on the show, we asked people to send us uh thoughts on the Ferrari Luche, right? And we uh talked about our currently unnamed company that we are now part of. Um, and you dear God, I hope have brought us some thoughts on all of this from you. Sure thing. Okay, we have some suggestions for what our new company name should be.
Okay, good. All right, first suggest. I'm just going to run these by you. You can give me a thumbs up, thumbs down, or a thumb sideways. Okay. Uh, first one, unsponsored for flavor. Too many words. The problem is how many dots between unsponsored and flavor? There's no dots in this suggestion. Then we're immediate. No. Uh, a few people suggested flagship media. Oh, I like that. It's not a bad idea. I like that a lot. Like that's that to the point where I'm like, if that's not taken, we I'm I'm buying some domain names today.
Uh, unfortunately, Flagship Media is taken. Your trusted partner in digital innovation, creative excellence, and online growth. Uh, a uh a listener named Scott suggested at the real FCC. tricky trademark, but I like just the real FCC as our company name. The Real FCC Incorporated is pretty good. I'm into it. Some more suggestions. Uh these all came from uh one listener named uh Thomas. Uh we've got Voice Media. Listen, we did that already.
We've got box media. So Box Media is according to about half the people in my life where I have been working all of this time anyway. So, uh, Box Media and Fox Media both strong contenders cuz just no change. Uh, voice box media. Not bad. A suggestion I also had. Populi Media. No. See, listen again. We've we've done the Latin thing. No one knows where we work. Let's real words only from now on. Um, this is also the problem with I'm realizing the real FCC. People like, "Oh, where do you work?" Oh, I work at the Real FCC. Like, what? Sorry. It's like my Instagram handle is I'm David Pierce. Unbelievable mistake.
Uh, and let me just give you uh real websites media. That's actually pretty good. Real websites. Real websites only. All right. Through the power of a new technology called Montage, I have compiled list. Also a good company name by the way. Montage Media. Honestly, it's not bad. Keep going. Yeah. So, I've compiled our uh listeners defense of the Ferrari Luche, which I would say the overall theme is that if this wasn't a Ferrari, it would be a much more appealing car. Interesting. Okay. All right. Let's It wasn't called a Ferrari. Okay. Here we go. I don't think the Ferrari Luche looks that bad. It still doesn't look like a Ferrari, but it looks like a pretty cool car.
I think it looks great. I don't love the blue color, but whatever in red and yellow, I think it looks amazing. I would have loved this as, you know, a $75,000 Apple car. As an objective car without a badge associated with it or a price for that matter, I think it's actually a pretty nice car and like say it cost 50 grand, I'd probably be okay with that. Actually, I think the problem with it is that like none of the things in this car actually cost as much as they're charging for it. And so, by virtue of it being just like artificially inflated price for the brand kind of takes away the value of it. I think that they're trying to actually make a futuristic car that is different. It's profound. It's
It's not like what a Ferrari is. And that's the point. Is it a sexy twoperson coupe? No, it's not. It's the sexiest fiveperson sedan. If they wanted to make a twoerson sexy car, they would have done that and they didn't. So, there you go. Okay. I would say these are all very bland defenses. like to start your defense with it's not that bad is not I do agree with the idea and I think thinking back to last week I think I overstated my feeling about how annoying it is that they swung so hard in a different direction right like I think and Ferrari has spent a lot of time saying this that they very deliberately didn't make a thing that looks like a Ferrari and I think in a vacuum that's cool like everybody should try new things we
should not settle on what a car looks like and then never change it ever again. I just don't think this is it. And I think there are ways to make something that feels like a Ferrari if you're Ferrari. A reminder that Ferrari made this. It's not like it's not somebody doing a Ferrari impression. It's Ferrari. Like be the thing that you are. I will say the more I look at the interior, the more I'm into it. Like the experience of sitting behind the wheel of this car, I think will be sick. Oh yeah. Uh the experience of standing next to it and walking up to it less sick. I The main defense though that drives me nuts is everybody being like, "If it were $50,000, I would like Sure.
Sure. If every car was a tenth the price, I would like it more than I do." But look, I'm glad there are people who like it. I do agree it looks way better in red. I think it's very weird that they spend all the time talking about it in blue cuz I think in red I'm kind of on the yellow, but the red is pretty nice looking. So, it's it's okay. Maybe I'll come around. I'm glad that there are people out there who like it. And if you can find one for $50,000, I'll buy it today. If you could give me one for free, I'll take it. Exactly. You hear that? Ferrari. I'm willing to throw the ethics policy under the bus for a free car.
Nobody tell Neil lie. When people are like, "How did David and Travis get Ferraris?" Nobody tell Neil. Uh, all right. That's it. So again, the plan is to do this every week. We I we want to keep talking about the stuff that we've been talking about. Um next week's hotline episode is going to be next Wednesday and it's going to be ideally WWDC. WWDC is on Monday. And as all of that stuff is happening, if you have questions or thoughts or things you want us to talk about, send us emails first of.com. Call the hotline 86611 and we're going to probably have an episode's worth of stuff to follow up
on. We're going to do a live stream on Monday right after the event ends and then we'll follow up on everything on the hotline on Wednesday. Uh, and if you continue to think I'm wrong about the Ferrari Luch, please keep calling. Travis, we'll keep making montages. I can't guarantee you that. And with that, from the studio in New York City, we're going to get out of here. The Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. The show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefir, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Lassio. We will see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.
