Apple’s headset, Humane’s weird demo, and the pretty Prius

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Andrew Hawkins discuss what's happening in the world of EVs and where that industry is headed. Also: more Apple headset rumors and whatever the heck that Humane demo was last week. Further reading: Apple’s AR/VR Headset Plans: iPad Apps, Fitness+, Sports Viewing, Gaming, Music - Bloomberg Apple’s mixed reality headset could connect to a battery pack that looks like the iPhone’s Humane’s wearable screenless AI assistant leaks in first demo clips Apple is reportedly building a paid AI health coach Should we trust Apple with mental health data? 2023 Toyota Prius review: EV reality check GM is ending Chevy Bolt EV and EUV production at the end of the year GM killed the Chevy Bolt — and the dream of a small, affordable EV GM, Hyundai announce EV battery plants for the US Honda’s making a bigger electric SUV to follow the Prologue — due 2025 Tesla’s carbon footprint is finally coming into focus, and it’s bigger than the company let on in the past Cruise continues to burn GM’s cash as robotaxis expand to daylight hours Amazon shuts down Halo division and discontinues all devices Disney sues Florida for ‘government retaliation’ in escalating feud y Apple is reportedly developing its own journaling app for the iPhone Dyson Zone review: an absurd pair of air purifying ANC headphones Come see a screening of Blackberry with us! Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, flagship podcast of violating TikTok's community guidelines with laser bong songs. I'll explain later. Yeah, it's just in general.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  I just want you all to know, I thought that would be like a worldwide phenomenon. And Mr. Content Moderation over here.

• 1:40Alex Cranz?

  TikTok disagreed.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  I might, I, look, I put out an angry letter to Rand Paul, who I think will understand where I'm coming from. I think the Chinese government is censoring the bong talk. That's what I got for you. Uh, but on our website, which we control, Alex was free to publish as many photographs as laser bong as she wanted.

• 1:56Alex Cranz?

  As many as I want, and I did. It was great.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  That's the power of the open web. Please listen to our episode about activity.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  They'll let us play it there. The future of laser bomb journalism on activity pub. Anyway, we got a huge show. Uh, we gotta talk a lot about Apple's headset. There's just a lot of rumors. It feels like they've added up and it's something worth talking about. Andy Hawkins is going to join us. We're gonna talk about what's going on in the EV world. Actually, quite a lot of news there. Computers and cars crashing into each other. We had a lightning round. Elon's lawyers claim that he has been deep faked in a lawsuit, saying something that I personally saw him say. So I desperately want to talk about that, which is very funny. There's just a lot going on. It's a big week of tech news. Kind of a big one. Oh, we have to talk about Humane.

• 2:41David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, Humane. I've been waiting a week to talk about Humane because this happened like right after we recorded the podcast last week. And I have watched these leaked videos from Ted 100 million times. Should we just do that first? Should we just talk about Humane?

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Should I? Can I just issue the Sam Sheffer disclaimer?

• 2:57David Pierce?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  Please do. Sam Sheffer, who many listeners know, once worked at The Verge, manned the hype desk on this very show. A legend of the of The Verge cast's history. Sam Sheffer, left to go do YouTube, had a successful YouTube career, and now works at Humane, this startup led by a bunch of ex-Apple designers, that is making a product. I love Sam. I love Sam with all of my heart. And I want you to know that I'm saying this, and I want you to know that I love Sam with all of my heart.

• 3:27David Pierce?

  And now for 30 minutes, we're gonna say mean things about the product that you're making.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  Because I think that shit is fake as hell. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, okay. So let's just rewind really fast. So, uh, like you said, Humane is this company. They've been around for a while. They've raised a ton of money. They're super buzzy. They've been talking about how they're gonna launch a thing, but they've never actually said anything about what they're working on. There was that leaked slide deck that we talked about in the show a while ago that John Gruber got, uh, talking about they were like doing a thing with a camera. But then Imran Chowdhury, the, the, one of the co-founders, got on stage at TED and did a demo of the thing. Neil, I suspect you've watched this as many times, if not more times than I have. Do you want to describe this demo for us?

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  So there's just some weirdness. This is, you know how like last week we were talking about how AI Drake was all fishy? Let me just tell you how fast I can bring everything back to AI Drake. The circumstances of the release of these videos was super fishy, right?

• 4:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  So he's giving a TED Talk, what TED was last week. I think it says a lot about where TED has arrived in the world that basically no one knew TED was happening. And a new product was effectively launched there and no one knew anything about it. Weird, just a weird situation all around, right? Then these videos leak out through various journalists and people who have been following humane, who knows? But they're not like cellphone videos from the crowd. They're clips of the TED video.

• 4:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Leaked, which is super weird, like the shots, like.

• 4:48David Pierce?

  They have camera cuts, they have over the shoulder cameras, like it's, it's, it is the official video.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Right, there's one camera that's showing at one point, and we'll, we'll talk about this, like the, it's a projector that's in his shirt pocket. It's projecting on his hand, they have that angle. So this is just confusing, like what are these videos? Where did they come from? Who decided where they would be cut?

• 5:09Alex Cranz?

  Maybe they were just like sitting up in the lighting, like in the lights above hovering, waiting. Maybe they're just very committed to journalism.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  Maybe they're just huge Grateful Dead fans and like any Deadheads, they went and plugged into the board directly. Whatever, but just like the provenance of these videos.

• 5:28Alex Cranz?

  Is wonky.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Is just, it's unclear, right?

• 5:31David Pierce?

  Yeah. And then there was one of them that floated around and then there were a bunch more that came out right after. So it was, yeah, it, like, if you were going to do this strategically, this is almost exactly how you would have done it, right?

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  Right, and, and my point is not, I don't, I, I don't think the videos are like deep fakes. I'm just saying, we are, whenever this sort of thing happens and no one is telling you about the provenance of the videos, my assumption as a journalist, especially lately, is like, I'm gonna assume the most skeptical version of events.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  Right, which is the company has leaked these videos.

• 6:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 6:04Alex Cranz?

  Well, what's wild is this is also an onstage demo, which notoriously are not actually always working. Like even when they say they're working, they're not really working. They're usually pretty fake, there's a lot of theater involved there. So for them to be like, yeah, we leaked these videos, I'm doing big air quotes here if you're listening, guys. I'm trying to like emphasize that with my voice, but we leaked these videos and like, I don't believe it.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, so we should, but it's a week now and like we haven't seen the full TED video. Right, and TED holds itself out, quasi journalistic, like, just show, just show us the whole thing. Yeah. Right. It's these weird clips. Like, that part is strange to me. And then, Alex, here's what you are saying.

• 6:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  Which is like, okay, so even if you discount all the strangeness of where these videos came from, and like, why they came out the way they came out the way, what they're showing isn't stuff that works. Right. What they're showing is like, in a vision of how it would work.

• 6:58Alex Cranz?

  It's like that original Google Glass demo.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's like, you, you just sort of poke at it. You're like, did this actually do what he's saying it's doing? And then it, like, everything just gets real wonky. David, you want to walk us through the demos?

• 7:10David Pierce?

  Sure. Yeah. So if you haven't seen these videos, and I encourage you to go watch them, they're fascinating. Um, basically, he's, he's wearing a jacket that I think is custom made for this purpose. Uh, and it has a, it has a little breast pocket into which he has put some kind of like rectangular device. Uh, it looks like, I just keep thinking of like, one of those old flip cameras when it, when it is, when I was looking at this. And there's a little, looks like camera and projector thing up at the top, sort of peeking out of his pocket. Uh, and he's interacting with that thing throughout the whole demo. So he'll, he'll talk to it, or he'll press it to do something. Uh, at one point, he takes a phone call and he projects who's calling onto his hand by kind of holding up his hand.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  Does he, does he do that?

• 7:52Alex Cranz?

  To interact with the projection, too.

• 7:54David Pierce?

  All of this is, this is ostensibly what the demo was. I would, I, if, if I were a betting man, I would bet an awful lot of money that very little of that was a real demo. But that is beside the point. This is all the stuff that he did. So he took a phone call, um, he used it to take a picture of, it was like a candy bar or something that he was holding up, saying, you know, is this good for me? And it was like, no, you're, you know, intolerant to such and such food, so you shouldn't eat this. And he says, I'm going to anyway. And it says, enjoy. Uh, it does English to French translation in his own voice, which to me is the part that is just straight up, there's not a chance that was a real demo. And the idea is that it is this like, personal assistant. He uses it to catch him up on the emails and stuff that he missed that day, just by talking to it. So it's like this little-

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  That's the one where I was like, no, it's fake.

• 8:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't actually believe any of those demos were like 100% real. The timing of the phone call was slightly off in a way that sounded pre-recorded and like he missed his beat once, but that's the idea. It's this little sort of assistant that like lives in your pocket that can, you can interact with in a bunch of different ways with touch and sound and projector and images and all that different stuff. Uh, and they've talked a lot about being like a revolutionary AI first device. And that appears to be the device. Yeah. I don't believe any of it is real, but that seems to be. At least if you take it as like.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  The messenger of being like, here's what I saw. And I'm like, none of it was real.

• 9:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, their pitch is like, your phone sucks. You're distracted by it. Put this little projector in your breast pocket because of course you always have a breast pocket. And then it will talk to you all day. And when you get a phone call, you can hold your hand out in front of you and it will tell you who's calling. More or less, this is the pitch. And then you won't be using your phone. You will be connected to the world finally.

• 9:35Alex Cranz?

  Do you know what the first flaw in it is?

• 9:37Nilay Patel?

  People love their phones.

• 9:39Alex Cranz?

  The idea that everyone has a breast pocket.

• 9:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Alex Cranz?

  And is gonna put it in there.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  From a slightly different position.

• 9:44Alex Cranz?

  I came at it from a different, I'm like, most people don't have breast pockets. And there's a whole lot of people who, when they do have them, that's not gonna lie flat. It's gonna lie at a little bit of an angle.

• 9:53David Pierce?

  The reason this isn't a problem is because I bet you $50.

• 9:57Alex Cranz?

  It's fake.

• 9:58David Pierce?

  No, that Humane is going to have, they're going to try to do with lanyards what Apple did with watch bands. Which is like, make them a cool thing to wear around your neck. So you're gonna have your little assistant just straight, I swear to God, this is gonna be a thing. I would, I, I'm so convinced that I'm right. Uh, they're gonna try and make it like a fashion accessory to have around your neck at all times.

• 10:18Alex Cranz?

  Didn't Google try to do that with like a little camera that never came out eventually?

• 10:22David Pierce?

  Clips.

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  The clips.

• 10:24Alex Cranz?

  The clips, yeah. There's like, you're gonna wear it around your neck and take photos all day. And it was stupid.

• 10:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll do. Cable Eclipse was like the ultimate and you have the right idea, five years too early, and also no one trusts you because you're Google. Where I was like, we're gonna, here's what we're gonna do. It's a camera that's on all the time, sending data to Google. And it's like, wait, I don't like that. But now you're like, I just need someone to edit my camera roll together and like five AI startups are there for you. Anyway, uh, Humane. So it, we'll just focus on the things they showed us in the demo. The things, if you are very skeptical, the things the company wanted us to see, right? Oh, I like that. That's a good framing. Right. And like, maybe this was all leaked by accident. Maybe these are the world's greatest journal. They just haven't, we just don't know the providence and no one's talking

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  about it. And it's weird what they have. So my assumption is that this is what the company wants us to see. And I like some of the journalists who reported on the stuff. If they would like to correct me, they're more than welcome to correct me. I'm wide open to it. But this is what I got right now. I think this is what the company wants us to see. Okay. He receives a phone call. And I just encourage you to watch that clip in particular, because Imran saying, that's my wife, is one of the funniest tech demo moments of all times. It is the slowest growl. That's my wife. Like, it's incredible. Why is he doing that? Like, the whole thing is so weird. And then his voice immediately changes when he was like talking. It's amazing. So he, he's in the middle of a sentence,

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  the phone starts ringing. It's a phone, right? It's just like, what does it need to do to receive a phone call? It's connected to a phone network. Okay, does it have a 5G radio in it? Does it have 5G data? No, because it's fake. Well, I don't know. But like, just like, I haven't even gotten past the first thing. Like, here, here's this escalating series. What's its battery life? If it's connected to a 5G network all the time. If it doesn't have a screen, what? How do you dial? 5G data network. Right. Like, do you just like yell numbers at it in the middle of the day? Very confusing. Okay. So that's like, all weird. How do you, how do you fill out your address book? Is there, is there an app on your Mac that syncs with your contacts? And then to the little projector you've got in your breast pocket? It syncs with iTunes, actually.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  Who knows? Like, I haven't even gotten past, he received a phone call. And like the series of questions that you have to ask about this device are spiraling out of control. And if the answer to any of those questions is there's an app on his phone in his pocket, the device is a failure.

• 13:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 13:03Alex Cranz?

  Well, he's gonna say it's like AI, right? It's all AI.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  AI what? He's gotta get a phone call.

• 13:08Alex Cranz?

  It's AI.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  He's just like yelling it mid journey, connect me to AT&T.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  What AI are you like? He's gotta get a phone call. And the phone, the thing, if it's connected to a phone network, it's a phone. It has to know.

• 13:23David Pierce?

  That it's his wife.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Cause he like looks at his hand and it says her name on it. So there's a contact list somewhere. Who is assembling your contact list? Is it the same one that's on your Mac? And are you, do you edit it on a phone? Because you've got a phone in your pocket and this thing, the point of this thing is gone. Okay. So I haven't even got past, it's a phone call. Now I'm like, there's UI on his hand. He holds up his hand, it projects Bethany's name on it. This is co-founder, also a former Apple designer. And there's like call UI at the bottom, like answer, hang up, whatever. And he doesn't interact with it.

• 13:56David Pierce?

  He doesn't do anything. Yeah.

• 13:58Alex Cranz?

  Cause it's AI.

• 13:59David Pierce?

  Did you have the thought as he was doing it? Like what if it like, it's coming out, if he doesn't put his hand up to intercept the projector and there's like a wall across the street, would it have just projected Bethany's name and phone number like a hundred feet wide on the wall?

• 14:12Alex Cranz?

  People just answering it across the street, just slapping that button.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  So that's weird. Right? And then he like has this little thing and like, as David said, if you watch it, you notice the beats of the conversation. I think this is why he was talking so slow. Right? He's like hitting his marks for what it seems like a pre-recorded demo loop. So then he's like, all right, goodbye. She's like, good luck on stage. And then it just hangs up. And it's like, he didn't, he didn't say hang up. Did she hang up and it knows? Like we've all been in that moment, right? Where the other person hangs up and you don't know if your phone hung up and like, whatever. It's like, okay, it's over. What?

• 14:46Alex Cranz?

  In the future, AI will read your mind and know when you're ready to hang up. Come on, this is just table stakes.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  So like I was saying, just that little bit of he got a phone call and it showed him some caller ID information and then he answered the phone. It just contains 50,000 questions.

• 15:04David Pierce?

  The phone, the phone was answered. He didn't answer the phone. The phone was answered.

• 15:09Alex Cranz?

  The AI answered the phone.

• 15:10David Pierce?

  The phone suddenly was answered.

• 15:12Alex Cranz?

  It made the call.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  I just, I just like, just that, does it have a Qualcomm chip in it? Like, what, what is the Vergecast if not the show that's like, all right, you showed me your concept of the future, like, you know, Qualcomm, like, is like a mid-range Qualcomm chip? Is that, is that what we float now?

• 15:28Alex Cranz?

  636 in there.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  How much RAM is in this motherfucker? Let's get into it, like.

• 15:35Alex Cranz?

  No onboard storage.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the, what was the other demo? The other demo was the recognizing the food.

• 15:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, he held up the bar and was like, can I eat this? And it went through the ingredients or whatever and told him what he was intolerant to. That is a totally plausible demo. There are things out there that can do that. They use your phone camera to do it. But like, that is a thing, that's technology that exists, which like, not to immediately get out of the demos here, there was nothing in this demo that you couldn't do substantially more easily with a smartphone. Like, if I had just been standing next to him on stage with an iPhone, I could have done every single one of the things he did quicker and better and more effectively. Yeah.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  Wait, but so let me ask you this. So the, the, the food thing, I, I'm an inveterate food logger. I, I've been doing it for a long time. Um, okay, did he scan the barcode? Did it use like visual recognition? What's the phrase?

• 16:28David Pierce?

  It looked like the, I think what the idea was, was that it was using some kind of image recognition to figure out what it was. It didn't look like he scanned the barcode.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so then it's gotta get a database. Is it using the Lose It database? Is it using the Weight Watchers database? Is it like, which one is it? The Live Strong database? Is, are the databases accurate? What if the database is wrong?

• 16:48David Pierce?

  Can I eat this?

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  About it having peanuts in it? And he dies, like, what? Like 50,000 questions about what that means. Like the Lusit database, all these databases are populated with a bunch of user data, right? Is it right or wrong? Like, the demo he gave is actually a pretty high stakes demo. Can I eat this is a very high stakes question.

• 17:08David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  Did Humane sit around logging everything in the grocery store to make their own database? Do they have a, do they have a deal?

• 17:16David Pierce?

  And that's one of the things about screens, right? Is that like, a useful thing about the, can I eat this question is, you can then like, Google the ingredients and get more information that way. And there are lots of ways to fact check this conversation that you're having with your device. Whereas in that case, he's just like, can I eat this? And it's like, you shouldn't. And he's like, I'm gonna. And it just says, okay. It's like, I don't know that that's a full interaction. Yeah.

• 17:41Nilay Patel?

  It's not.

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  Okay, but like, it wasn't about peanuts, right? It was like, about milk solids. It was, it was going like, yeah, something like that. Like, it was, it was going a little bit more complex than he could have just read the label.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Alex Cranz?

  Right?

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  He could have just read the label. You know what's better at optical image recognition than a weird phone without a screen is you, the person with the dietary restrictions.

• 18:05Alex Cranz?

  And some people can't read labels, that's true. Like, there's a lot of reasons they might not be able to, but he could, he seemed to be able to.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just saying that you just like, look at these demos. You're like, oh, there's an escalating series of questions that absolutely make it clear that these demos were like, pre-programmed, like on rails. So in the last one, is the one where I'm just gonna pre-apologize to everyone because I'm gonna go nuts. He asked it, he's like, imagine you've been in meetings all day, and you come out, you just want to catch up. And he's like, what did I miss?

• 18:35David Pierce?

  This is Nilay's dream.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, this person moved a meeting here, this person wants to come to that meeting, and this person is coming to dinner. And he's like, that's from email, that's from Messenger, that's from calendar invites. And I ask you now, on the Vergecast this day, this Friday, is this shit on iMessage?

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking about? What? Like, I mean, what messages? Where are they coming from? Have you looked at anyone's email inbox in 2023? You you've managed to sort through that absolute shit show and get Tom moved his meeting an hour? Like,

• 19:08Alex Cranz?

  It's an incredible AI.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  Does it have an IMAP client? Do you write a mail client for your weird phone without a screen? How does it do with Outlook? Does it know about multiple mail? Like, I can just keep going here. Does it know the difference between your work and your personal calendars? Do you know how many meetings I get invited to that I intend to go to that I never answer yes to the invite on? Does it know? Like, I do. This is stuff screens are good at.

• 19:33Alex Cranz?

  I was like, some people.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know the answer to that question very well, actually. Do you, does the AI know that I prefer my calendar to be kind of at a Heisenbergian state of uncertainty?

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Am I there or not? Schrodinger's meeting invite is my entire situation. Like, just imagine the infrastructure you need to build to get to. I read all of your emails and saw all of your messages and all of your calendar invites. And I summed it up into three of the most important items. And I can do that consistently and accurately and without a display for you to check whether I got it right. The amount of blind trust you need to pull that off is absolutely beyond. Like, the people who might be able to do that are the people who already have personal assistants.

• 20:17Alex Cranz?

  It was like he was trying to do the mother of all demos, but really, really, really, really, really, really badly. Like, he was, it felt kind of like he was trying to do like an AI version of the mother of all demos, which was this one that was in the 60s. And that's where we first saw like the mouse. That's where we first saw the GUI and all of this stuff that like became standard for computers 20 years later. And it felt like, okay, we're gonna do that. We're gonna show you the capabilities of AI working in tandem with our little breast projector thing.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Alex Cranz?

  And then he did it badly all the way through. Because instead of being honest and just being like, here's what we envision, because this is clearly not real. He was like, My wife's calling. Hold on, I gotta answer this.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  Just please, everyone, we'll just stop it here. The device doesn't exist. Sam, I love you. Just listen to the man say, "That's my wife."

• 21:07David Pierce?

  Sam, if it exists and you want to come demo it on the Vergecast, call me. I'd be, I would love to have you.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Humane, absolutely invited to come show us this thing.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  I hope I'm wrong. Like, this, this just as a, as a, as a UI thing is so fascinating that I, like, as somebody who spends way too much of my time just like explaining what things look like on screens, it would be so much more fun to be able to write about this kind of world in which all of this stuff exists, except it doesn't, and it won't for a while. So either, either Humane is like six or seven leaps beyond everyone else in everything, which seems unlikely, or this demo was fake. It's one of those two things.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  And here's what I'm pointing out. Apple, for all of its many, many faults, you know, whatever, it shows you real products working, and then it sells them to you. And it doesn't do anything before it can do that, which is why we should talk about that.

• 22:00David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, which is a real good segue into the thing that might prove that theory wrong.

• 22:07Alex Cranz?

  Mark Gurman's piece on it was very good this week about this new headset.

• 22:10David Pierce?

  It was really good, and he's done a bunch of really good reporting, and it was kind of the first time I feel like I understand what this thing is going to be, which I thought was really interesting, and I think it, even Apple is not sure what it's gonna be. We've talked much on the show about all the ways Apple, even internally, is concerned about launching it now. There are big questions about what it's gonna be for in the killer app, and is $3,000 a ridiculous price point for something like this? The answer to that is yes. Like, is this terrible timing as everybody's souring on the metaverse? Like, all this stuff. But yeah, Alex, I agree, and we'll, we'll link Mark's thing in the show notes. It's really good and lays out a lot of this stuff. But in prep for this, I, I made a list of everything we think we know about the Apple headset. Can I just read you this list?

• 22:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes, please do.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to hear this list.

• 22:55David Pierce?

  Putting it all in one place was actually very instructive. Okay, this is all in some semblance of order. So it's gonna, we think it's gonna be called either the Reality Pro or the Reality One. Those are the things Apple's trademarked. I would bet Reality Pro is the name. I think both are very bad names, but that's okay. It's gonna run software called XR OS. Eh, fine.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  Or Reality OS.

• 23:17David Pierce?

  Or Reality OS has been, those are the two names that have been floated out. Uh, we think it's gonna look like kind of an oversized pair of ski goggles. Uh, inside, it's gonna have two 4K displays, presumably one on each eye, uh, and an M2 chip. It's gonna have a thing called the reality dial, which is the thing I am most excited about. Uh, where you'll be able to basically dial between sort of full augmented reality, so you can see the world and full like immersive virtual reality. You'll literally be able to control how much of reality you see, which absolutely kicks ass. It's gonna connect to AirPods, but there will also be a built-in speaker. Again, these are all things we think we know. All of this could turn out to be wrong. Um, it's gonna have hand control, eye control, Siri control, and potentially be able to be used by keyboard announcer even a touchscreen.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 24:01David Pierce?

  You might be able to use it as, as an external monitor for your Mac, which is terrific.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  Um, I love this.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  It's gonna be powered by a battery pack that is connected to a long cable and goes in your pocket. Um, it, that battery pack will have two, or sorry, the, the headset will have two ports on it. One USB C for data input and output, and one is the charger that goes to that battery pack. Uh, oddly, iPad apps seem to be where Apple is mostly focused. Uh, it's gonna run a lot of iPad apps by default, including a lot of Apple's own apps. Uh, but also developers are being encouraged to like work with their iPad apps to make apps. Uh, which is weird.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  No one's ever heard this pitch from Apple before.

• 24:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, right?

• 24:42Alex Cranz?

  Do you think it's because iPads are also the place where like they have the most different types of screens?

• 24:47David Pierce?

  That's my guess, yeah. It's, it's already the most sort of vectorized thing that they have. And so the ability to take like an iPad app and make it much bigger in your view seems like it would be much simpler than anything else. So yeah, I think.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I have a much more cynical read on that, on that situation. Vastly more cynical read on that. The iPad is the closest thing to a powerful computer that is also a totally closed ecosystem. So they can't pick Mac apps because they would inherit all of the openness of the Mac, which they are forced to just contend with.

• 25:17David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, definitely not Mac apps.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  The iPad, they're like, I don't know, like. We control, it's closed. Like, we just won a big antitrust lawsuit about it.

• 25:26Alex Cranz?

  And they just go with it instead of iOS because?

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. They can run an App Store on this device the same way as whatever and they can pull. I'm saying it's cynical and now that I'm saying it, I'm like, oh, this just makes sense.

• 25:38David Pierce?

  It's just straightforwardly correct. Yeah, there's no, there's no way Apple is gonna be like, oh, download unsigned apps to your reality pro headset.

• 25:47Alex Cranz?

  You can use Steam with this thing. It'll be fine.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  What you want is malware and augmented reality.

• 25:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:54David Pierce?

  Okay, let me, let me just keep going. I have a few more things. So the, the, like, looking at things seems to be the big idea here. There, there's gonna be potentially a meditation app. There's gonna be a fitness plus app in VR, which makes a lot of sense. There's gonna be a portal for watching sports in virtual reality. It was one of the things that Gorman said. There's gonna be ways to read books, which I think is the all time worst idea. There's gonna be ways to watch movies. There's gonna be, they're working with directors like Jon Favreau to make content. It's a lot of-

• 26:27Alex Cranz?

  It'll only play at night.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  It's a lot of what sounds like it's going to be, you put on a headset and all the screens seem to be very big. That seems to be the kind of thrust of a lot of this stuff. And obviously, there's a lot of other AR stuff that Apple's been doing that you can see on the iPhone, the iPad. But as far as like, new things to do, it sounds very much like the first idea Apple has is basically you put on this thing and it's a giant screen in front of your face on which you can do iPad things. It's just an iPad floating in midair in front of you.

• 26:57Alex Cranz?

  And that's because they don't actually know what people would want to do in AR on this thing, right?

• 27:03David Pierce?

  One of the things that Mark Gorman wrote is that Apple is doing, is basically just gonna put it out and say, you know, developers have always made these things more than what they are. Go forth. And he compared it to the Apple Watch, which I think is like a hilarious rewriting of history because Apple had very clear ideas about what the Apple Watch was for and was just dead wrong about all of them.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  So I think the thing that Apple learned-

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  I, by the way, I feel so vindicated about our early coverage of the Apple Watch by this retelling of history where they're like, here's what we did. We like threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, then figured out what the users wanted, then we made it great. It's like, no, you told us that we were gonna send heartbeats to each other. Like super a lot.

• 27:41Alex Cranz?

  The heartbeats.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  You you definitely that was a like Bono was like what I'm gonna do is send my heartbeat to a marathon runner in Kenya using the digital crown like it was bonkers. The whole thing is bonkers. I will just I will bring you back again to Tim Cook saying the digital crown was an input device on par with the mouse and the click wheel and multi-touch.

• 28:05David Pierce?

  Are you excited to add the reality dial?

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  Apple got it wrong.

• 28:08David Pierce?

  The reality dial is the next one.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  The reality dial?

• 28:11Alex Cranz?

  It really is.

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you have to you have to you have to give Apple like a lot of credit for being like, whatever, we're calling it reality. But so if what they've learned from this experience is that they can more confidently just admit that they're throwing spaghetti at the wall, great, especially because, you know, the first watch was a consumer product. It was meant to be a hit and it took three generations before they completely redid watch OS and they like they just like figured it out, right? And I think with the watch four had the bigger screen and watch OS had been redone. And that's when it became like a really great product and like, I love it, whatever. This thing is starting at thousands upon thousands of dollars as a developer kit with an external battery pack you got to like keep in your pocket. I think they have a lot more room to say spaghetti at the wall, like early adopters, go nuts.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  Tell us what the consumer version of this product should be. And like a lot of Apple fans will go on that ride. But if you just look at that list and it was a long list, that's the meta quest. It can do it can it is much clunkier, much worse to doing all of those things. But like, it's kind of like an accessory for your laptop and it's a big screen and there's a little workout stuff like, oh yeah, that's that's what meta has been doing for.

• 29:18Alex Cranz?

  But no, no dial.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  No dial.

• 29:21Alex Cranz?

  That's the game changer. That's like the crown.

• 29:24David Pierce?

  No, you're kind of well, to some extent, you are kind of right because I think one of the things that Apple has been saying all along is that Apple does not believe in the idea that you're going to put on a headset like this and sort of disappear into another world all day. And so that's sort of something like the reality dial actually becomes really important, right? Where it's like, it is a thing you can use while also interacting with actual things around you, like the fact that I can't, you know, sit here and use. My Quest 2 and also type on my computer keyboard because I literally can't see it is a problem. And Apple is like pushing towards starting to solve that. So I think you're right that like the reality dial is actually one of the things that makes it meaningfully different. But the other thing is, uh, Apple seems to be much less invested in this idea

• 30:08David Pierce?

  that there should be entirely new user behaviors than Meta. Like Meta is really into the, into the whole metaverse thing, right? There's like, it's a new space with new rules. You're gonna have avatars, you're gonna run around. And Apple is just kind of like, here's a really gigantic computer monitor for your face. Uh, and that's like, it's something.

• 30:28Alex Cranz?

  That's what Microsoft did, right? Like when Microsoft first went into the kind of mixed reality space, they released all those headsets with like Acer and all those other companies. And they're like, yeah, you can just use it as a really big weird monitor for your computer. And it sucked because the displays were all really bad. And I mean, it was cool that you could have like a dinosaur in your virtual office, but that was it. Otherwise it was trash. And this at least, this at least-

• 30:52David Pierce?

  Which couldn't do anything, right? Like the upside that Apple has with, with the iPad ecosystem is it, it will just by default be able to do more stuff.

• 31:01Alex Cranz?

  Do you think they're gonna?

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, well.

• 31:04David Pierce?

  Am I gonna wanna do that stuff is a different question.

• 31:06Alex Cranz?

  Put you in theater mode?

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  Will it? Like how many, can you imagine wearing this headset and being like, all right, let's do a slide over?

• 31:14Alex Cranz?

  I just, I-

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Let me just activate stage manager.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  It's like a nerd inferno.

• 31:19Alex Cranz?

  Well, I wonder do they, do they figure out the whole giant display thing? Cause they're really like, right now, anytime somebody's like, you're gonna do a giant display. If it's Netflix, they put a bunch of dinky little like virtual chairs, like a couch. So it's like, oh, you're in your-

• 31:36David Pierce?

  Theater. It's like, I don't want to.

• 31:37Alex Cranz?

  And it's like, no, I just wanna watch the movie real big. Like, like I really hope they, they don't try to make fake environments for me to know aren't real.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Alex, I-

• 31:48Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no. Maybe they'll be nicer. No, they won't. They're gonna be real bad.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's it's gonna be the corny, cuz that's what sells. Like, it's like, every now and again, the entire history of technology can be explained by what you can demo on Today Show.

• 32:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what can you put on the local news? And it's putting the local news anchor in the headset. And they're like, it's like, I'm in a movie theater. And like, and then, you know, the years pass and everyone's like, I don't wanna be here dumb fake movie theater. I just want a big screen. And all of that drops away, like, all of the baggage of the old metaphor drops away.

• 32:25Alex Cranz?

  That's what I'm saying. We've already done the big dumb movie theater thing.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  No, no.

• 32:28Alex Cranz?

  But Apple's never done it.

• 32:29Nilay Patel?

  Every time there's a new thing, you've gotta, you got, you re-inherit all the baggage. You, you, you have to put, you, you just, you have to put Al Roker in the movie theater. There's no choice.

• 32:39Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna do the weather in it.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  If you are making a bet this big and you're gonna go market this product, Al Roker's gonna be in the movie theater. And that's like, that's just how you have to sell it to all these people. You gotta like, give them the metaphor they understand. And then, for poor Apple, they have to answer a million questions about the metaverse that they have no interest in engaging with. And so, like, how are they gonna, how are they gonna differentiate their products? Like, you know, like, Meta had earnings yesterday, and they're like, did better, and analysts are happy, blah, blah, blah. And Mark Zuckerberg is on the call being like, I'm still burning the money on the metaverse. You've gotten the wrong impression about how committed to the metaverse I am. Like, it's more money than you think, and it's gonna keep going up. And everyone's like, yeah, but you, you like, added way more ads to Instagram reels, so we're fine with you for now.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but like, Apple does not want the metaverse. They want you to run iPad apps and wear a headset.

• 33:30Alex Cranz?

  Which is why they shouldn't have the theater.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, the iPad app ecosystem is not like a raging success.

• 33:35Alex Cranz?

  It's real bad.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  And all the same questions that you have about iPads, like, what if I just wanna send somebody a file? Like, is this thing gonna fight me until I die? And like, take it off and use my Mac?

• 33:46Alex Cranz?

  Can you think of how intrusive those notifications, like an airdrop notification in VR would be? That is the first thing I'm doing.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  If I, if, if I ever see anybody wearing one of these headsets on a plane, I'm sending, I'm airdropping them a sloth, like, immediately.

• 34:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, just immediately.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  Zero quads.

• 34:03Alex Cranz?

  Just watching people rip them off their head, ah. Beautiful.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just a sloth holding. Do you know about this? We used to have a thing called air slothing where the verge team had a picture of a sloth as an astronaut that we just sent. It was very good.

• 34:15Alex Cranz?

  I did actually know about this. It was very good.

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. It's coming up real soon. We're all expecting it at W W C.

• 34:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, the rumors continue to be that that is when it's going to be. And I think at this point, it's gone back and forth a bunch of different times, but now seems to be pretty securely coming to the point where I think it would be a pretty big surprise if it doesn't happen. Like last year, it was kind of like, this thing has been rumored since like 2021, it was supposed to launch was the, I mean, quote unquote, supposed to launch. But last year it was like, okay, there's a, there's an outside chance that we're going to start to see it. But this year I will be genuinely actively surprised if we don't see this headset in some way.

• 34:53Alex Cranz?

  The only reason I don't want it to launch this year is I want to make Neil and I take all of the different comparative headsets with him and just be sitting there in the audience with them. And then when they say, yeah, and they're like, no, we're not doing this. You're like, take all your little headsets off.

• 35:09Alex Cranz?

  That's the only reason.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I will say I've been using the P S V R two like quite a bit. I'm still playing a bunch of Grand Prix. It's like very relaxing. And when you wear a headset a lot, like they are physical products. Like I don't know how the the lenses get smudgy. They're, I have to clean them every time I use this headset. I'm not sure why, but it's, you're just like handling the thing. It's, there's like an element of Apple liking things to be nice that goes away when you're like, now it's on my face.

• 35:37Alex Cranz?

  If they figure out how to keep things you put on your face, not keep them from getting dirty.

• 35:42David Pierce?

  I see how that's possible.

• 35:43Alex Cranz?

  That's just changes the whole eyeglasses game.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  The one thing I will say that's much more positive of P S V R two, I've been a Quest two person for quite a while. Pretty low res screen. I think people have a bunch of appropriate skepticism about, well, if I'm looking at iPad app and the V R headset, why wouldn't look at an iPad as butter screen, blah, blah. P S V R two, pretty high res screen. It's like, you know, you're like playing games. You're like reading text. Like this is fine.

• 36:10Alex Cranz?

  You don't feel like that.

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  It's not great.

• 36:12Alex Cranz?

  Because the problem with the Quest two is you can see the pixels and it's like really, really noticeable and it's kind of.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  And with the Quest Pro too, I think Addie in her review pointed out like this is whatever, like I don't know, everything. PSVR 2 is the first one I've ever used. I'm like, oh,

• 36:26Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Like it's fine. And like a little HDR-y, it's not like perfect, but it's there. And then you're like, oh, it's because everything, every ounce of cost in this thing is the display. And there's a long cable to a gigantic GPU with a monster power supply on the ground.

• 36:43Alex Cranz?

  Just roaring behind you.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  That's why this is good. Yeah. So we'll see. I mean, this thing's gonna be really expensive.

• 36:48David Pierce?

  There's a pretty big gap between like, I don't mind reading the menus in order to get to my game. And I'm going to like, sit here and do, you know, computery work things on it all day.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, uh, not to interrupt you, but the, the thing is like, when you get to the game, the game's pretty kinetic. It's like a driving game. So if things are like a little out of focus or heads, that's like, it doesn't matter. Like you can't focus on anything long enough to know. But like, when you're in the menus, if the thing's a little off axis, or it's not set up right, like the edges of the, the display are instantly blurry, which is not tenable for doing computer.

• 37:20David Pierce?

  Like it hurts after a while.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  Eight hours.

• 37:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, to some extent, I think the, I'm, I thought I was gonna think the whole battery in your pocket thing was like a ridiculous horrible idea and will never work. I'm actually increasingly fine with it. It actually sort of makes sense structurally that that's how that would work.

• 37:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, it takes all the weight off. That was the big complaint about the, the Quest Pro, right? Was that there was so much weight.

• 37:42David Pierce?

  Right. If it can be very light and tethered to the thing, like that actually, that sort of tracks for me. I could see that. Uh, but

• 37:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  The two hour battery life, I think is gonna be another thing that people ask a lot of questions about. But I wonder if there is even a use case for which you would want to spend more than two consecutive hours in a device like this. And I'm not sure we've discovered what it is yet.

• 38:01Alex Cranz?

  Look, you just want to do back to back to back to back fitness plus workouts. It's Thanksgiving. You don't want to talk to family. You're like, I gotta go work out for three hours.

• 38:12David Pierce?

  And just turn the reality dial all the way down. Just go get yoked.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. All right. We should take a break. We're gonna be back with Andy Hawkins. We'll be right back.

• 38:27Speaker 04

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• 38:57Speaker 05

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• 39:37Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Andy Hawkins here. Hello. Talk about the wild world of cars and software. Two things that I think we're going to look back on as a mistake combining cars and software. We're going to be 80 years old. Not individual things that we got wrong, but together. Yeah, the worst sandwich.

• 39:55Alex Cranz?

  You can't rant about CarPlay today, though.

• 39:58Nilay Patel?

  Peanut butter and ham. That's cars and software. Oh, God. No.

• 40:02Alex Cranz?

  I need that.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  That's not kosher.

• 40:04Alex Cranz?

  If you heat the peanut butter up like a little coating.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  Calm down. It's not kosher at all. Liam, do we have laser bong on a soundboard this week? That's a no.

• 40:15David Pierce?

  No, Liam, the answer is no.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  Do it, Liam, play it. I tried to upload laser bongs to TikTok so many times. And at the end of it, our, our poor social media team was like, if you do it again, we're gonna get banned from TikTok. And I was like, it might be worth it. Anyhow, we're here, we're here, Andy's here. There's a lot of car news this week. When I say cars and computers, a lot of like, what if the inside of the car was a shopping mall? And you pushed a button to pay us more money while you're driving? And just very odd, don't you think?

• 40:47Speaker 06

  It's not great, I think, for people in the world to have too many, I think, car companies trying to slip their hands into our wallets and purses and trying to extract more capital from their customer base. I just, in general, am kind of anti that, squeezing customers for more money. And yet, they continue to go on and do, do this exact thing. Because obviously, they're going to do that. They want more money. They don't want, you know, to lose their customers at the point of sale. They want to continue to extract more and more money from them. And I just think that, you know, this was always going to be the obvious result of, I think, like you said, merging software with the cars, making cars, you know, sort of updatable,

• 41:31Speaker 06

  constantly, continuously updatable computers. It was going to be an inevitability that they were going to try to charge us for every last little thing. From seat heaters to steering wheel heaters to more acceleration for your car. It's just.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  That's the one, it's the Mercedes one today where it's like, the car, the EQS 450, it costs like $150,000, right?

• 41:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, 125.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  And that's the base model. I mean, come on, what are we?

• 41:57Speaker 06

  Sorry.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  That's the peasant model.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  I had no idea that you were already optioning up.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, of course. Are you kidding me? Do you think, do you think I'm just rolling through the configurator without hitting buttons? Sorry, nicely optioned, it's above 125. And then it's what, to add 90 horsepower? No, it's add 80 horsepower to pay 90 bucks a month or 2,000 dollars? A month? I do like the idea that you have some, like, consumer optionality there. You're like, you know, this month, I don't need the juice.

• 42:24Alex Cranz?

  If you're like gunning it through a red light, through a green light, not a red light, never run red lights. If you're gunning it through a green light at 12 a.m., would it just like kick back in the middle?

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  The middle of the billing cycle?

• 42:39Speaker 06

  That's a really good question. We gotta test this.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we gotta, does anybody have $125,000? We'll only buy the base model.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  Let me go check my budget really quick to see if this would allow for the purchase of an EQS.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  This is why we gotta do it is to floor it during the billing cycle change.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  That's great. I've never been more excited about a review idea in my entire life.

• 43:03Speaker 06

  But don't forget, these companies, they can be shamed into backtracking and backpedaling on these decisions. BMW was shamed into backpedaling on the decision to charge people a monthly fee for access to CarPlay and Android Auto. So don't put it past the ability of the customer base to locate the shame center in these.

• 43:24Alex Cranz?

  But is the Mercedes customer really the type to shame for something being too expensive? Aren't they the type who is like, make it more expensive?

• 43:33David Pierce?

  LeBron James would not pay $8 for Twitter Blue. Like, rich people are cheap. Like, that's how you get to be rich, is by being cheap.

• 43:40Speaker 06

  He's the spokesperson for the Hummer EV too, so it's not like he's expressly frugal when it comes to his.

• 43:47David Pierce?

  I saw that one for free that way.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  If you paid me to drive a Hummer EV and then gave me a Hummer EV, I'd be like, the Hummer EV is great.

• 43:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, of course.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  LeBron's got it figured out. He hasn't paid a dime to experience the Hummer EV. But so the weird thing, Alex, is the pricing here is either it's a monthly fee, which is just very funny, or you can just pay flat. It's like $19.50 flat out. So like somewhere, someone's doing the math on how many times they're gonna gun it. And they're like, well, if I gun it once a month. For for 200 months. Like this is gonna even like, I don't, what are they thinking? It's utterly bizarre, but it's great. 20 minutes. Sorry.

• 44:25Speaker 06

  How much more acceleration do you need? I mean, like, if you've driven one EV, you've probably driven them all as sort of an experience that I've I've had over the last few years. They all kind of accelerate at the same pace, which is very quick, obviously, because it's an electric motor and it just immediately you're you're right out of the right out of the gate. You're going fast. And I just, I'm curious, like, especially for Mercedes customers, like, that's not, that doesn't seem to be like a customer base that like really is like desiring this like extra boost.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  It depends on what kind of Mercedes customer you are. Like, they do make a lot of very fast cars and that's fine. Like, the new AMG C63 is like a hybrid, like F1-inspired hybrid. Like, great, that's that.

• 45:09Alex Cranz?

  But the really expensive ones are like for chauffeurs, right? Like the chauffeur driving.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  The S-Class, and that's what this is. And I, if you're, if you're driving a car and pull over, Google what the EQS 450 looks like and be like, should this go fast? And the answer is no. Like, this thing should ooze down the road as luxuriously as possible. It looks kind of like a, like a lazy whale, you know?

• 45:31Alex Cranz?

  That's why it's like even weirder that they would charge the, like, for each month. Like, the chauffeur's like, oh, man, this month I really need that extra. Like, I know who's gonna be in the back. They're gonna want to feel that power, so I'm gonna pay for it this month.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  The, the most luxurious cars in the world that are designed for people in the backseat, but your Bentley's, your Rolls Royces, often holaciously fast for no reason.

• 45:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  And I, I don't know what, why that is, but it's always been true.

• 45:54Alex Cranz?

  To get to the airport. Like, you gotta.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the only cars that weren't that way for a minute were Cadillacs. Like, if you got into like an old Cadillac limo, you're like, oh, boy, I don't know if we're gonna get where we're going. But this is nice.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  See, this is why I think BMW has the right mind of this. We just ran in a review of the i7 and there's a lot of ridiculous things about the i7, but the, the most ridiculous is that it has a dropdown 36-inch screen for the back, for just the, the back passengers, for the, for the rear passengers only. Like, you could watch, like, you know, all of your favorite, you know, John Wick movies while being chauffeured around on beautiful, you know, 4K. And it's just like, that's, see, that's the kind of feature that I want if I am a rich aristocrat who is being chauffeured around town. I don't need the boost. I want, give me the screen. Give me the giant screen.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's all very good. The the future of cars definitely looks like all of these companies are like, what's the richest company in the world? They're like, it's Apple. Where does Apple make all of its money? Taking 30% of all transactions on the phone. How do we make the car more like that? And that is just where they're headed.

• 47:01Alex Cranz?

  We got to shame them out of that.

• 47:03Speaker 06

  I mean, that's that's fundamentally sort of what's at the crux of why GM is is restricting access to carpooling and for its future EVs is because they see that market potential. They see that that that total market addressable market. And they're like, that's, we want that. We want all of that. We don't want to share space with Apple and Android, despite the fact that the vast majority of our customers want to use their phones in the car, want to project the screens into the car. Forget that. Forget that sentimentality. We are going to lock them into our system because it's worked for the phone companies. Why shouldn't it work for us? We have a captive audience. You're in the car. You're not going anywhere else. Why can't we have that money?

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  The problem is I'm in the backseat of your car with a phone.

• 47:45David Pierce?

  I have a question about this because I was thinking about this coming in. There's like, we've talked a bunch about the TV business on this show. And it's basically what happened in the TV business is like the hardware of selling a TV stopped being a good business. You can't make anybody selling people a screen that they watch things on. So they all had to find other ways to make money. And that's why they do all the weird intrusive stuff and try to sell you streaming services and all that stuff. Did that happen with cars? Like for so long, you could just sell me a car. And that was like a pretty good way to make money by like making cars and selling them to humans. Is that not a good business anymore? Like, why are all these companies trying to be software companies? Just make cars. I don't like, what changed here? I genuinely don't know.

• 48:21Speaker 06

  Have you read about the the car business over the last 20 years? It wasn't like exactly like smooth sailing. You know, they were.

• 48:29David Pierce?

  I mean, fair.

• 48:30Speaker 06

  You know, they're, they operate extremely tight margins. You know, it's incredibly expensive to make cars. And, you know, they had to, they've been bailed out many times over the course of history. I I think, yeah, I think that that is sort of like what's going on here is that like, you know, they're they're subject to the ebbs and flows of the economy. And so they need to have more revenue. They need to identify additional revenue streams, especially now when the pivot to electrification is costing them so. So much money. I mean, this is just billions and billions of dollars that they are just lighting on fire in order to pivot to electric. And, and you know, while selling all of the gas cars, continuing to sell all the gas cars, and that's funding the whole project.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  So we should, we should talk about that. But the other answer to your question, David, is a lot of them are selling fewer vastly more expensive cars. Right? Like, that's been the solution to the problem that Andy's identifying is they're like, all right, it's going to be $100,000 pickup trucks. And the audience is like, yes, it turns out that's what we've always wanted. And so you, you see the cars are getting wildly more expensive because they haven't figured out this other revenue stream that, that the TV industry figured out, that Apple and Google figured out, like, we can make money after, after the sale. And for TVs, that subsidizes the cost of TV. That's why you can get a cheap TV. Cause there's, you're buying an entire business model. When you buy a car, you're still buying a car. They haven't figured out this business model.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  So the way they've responded is by just saying, all right, cars, cars are going to go from $25,000 to $60,000 on average. Like over the course of a decade, and we're going to sell more $100,000 cars than ever. It is crazy to me how many new cars come out that you can just option to 100K in the blink of an eye.

• 50:12Alex Cranz?

  Well, more people are leasing too now, right? Like, like that's one of the ways they found this revenue stream is, okay, we're going to make leasing really, really attractive. So then we get monthly payment from you. And some people are paying like $400 a month. Other people are paying like a thousand dollars a month. So they can drive those $100,000 cars and look really cool and hopefully afford that.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Actually BMW once told me that they sell every BMW three times. So they lease it first, they buy it back, they sell it as certified pre-owned, they get it back and they sell it as used.

• 50:38Speaker 06

  And they tried subscription too. They tried to say, hey, uh, we have leasing, we have obviously retail business, but maybe you could subscribe to a BMW instead and get a new, different BMW every month? Maybe that would work. And no, no, it doesn't.

• 50:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, cause then everybody around them saw that there was a BMW driver and they're like, oh no. And all those people were like, oh wait, I don't actually want to be a BMW driver. Never mind.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  You'd be surprised.

• 51:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's the downside of BMW is you have to be a person who drives a BMW.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  David saying that as somebody who lives in the DC area where BMW drivers are the rudest in the entire world.

• 51:11Alex Cranz?

  That's all BMW drivers.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  No, it's particularly bad in DC.

• 51:15Alex Cranz?

  Is it?

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Like you're a baby government lawyer with a three series. You are a dick. That's just the way it is.

• 51:22David Pierce?

  At some point, we're going to talk about how it is like unofficially illegal to stop for pedestrians in this town. And I just absolutely do not understand it. If somebody is standing in the crosswalk, you can't stop.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  Just wear BMW swag. Stop it. For all we know, people are in their BMWs right now, just barreling towards our house, David.

• 51:42David Pierce?

  I have one more question on this, and then I want to talk about the Prius, because I think the Prius is very interesting. Which is, I'm assuming the next turn of this, like, let's say, in the best case scenario, we figure out the software thing, the like, everybody sort of gets used to the idea that there's going to be some kind of like software tax you pay to the car company for infotainment system. I'm assuming the next turn of that is not, and then cars get cheaper again, like TVs did. I'm assuming it's just, this is just a new cost associated with owning a car, along with all of the other costs associated with owning a car, right?

• 52:09Speaker 06

  Well, there is an argument that some of the company, I mean, you can buy into this as much as you want, and I don't think it's really been borne out or proven yet, but there is the argument that with over the air software updates, that people will be going into the, also with electrification, people will be going to the dealers less, going to the service centers less, there'll be less maintenance that's needed. And when things break, the company can just push an update and potentially fix whatever the problem is, as long as it's obviously a software problem. Once you get into, you know, all of sort of the moving parts, which is the majority of what goes on inside of a car. I wonder how much that argument actually bears weight, but that is an argument that the companies are making.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a bad one. So let's, David, I want to talk about the Prius ID2. We were talking about how much money the companies are spending on electrification, and that's part of the news this week, right? GM and Hyundai both announced plans to build plants for batteries in the United States, different plants, and it's a lot of infrastructure that's getting built here. GM killed the Chevy Bolt, which was built on its old platform, so it can focus on its new Ultium platform. We're hearing a lot about what Tesla's carbon footprint overall is. It feels like the, boy, we're spending a lot of money to electrify story, kind of like hit ahead this week.

• 53:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's just a ridiculous amount of money that's being pumped into this. And you know, I think the obviously the tax incentives that the government passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act is having a much bigger effect, I think, on a lot of this than I think people originally anticipated. But yeah, the the expansion of the of the capital projects, the, you know, more models being brought out, previous generation models being phased out. I do. And I think sales are up like, you know, Ford has said that it expects to sell like 150,000 EVs this year. And Tesla's margins are getting a little bit slimmer, too, which is, I think, a really interesting byproduct of all this. They've been slashing prices. They cut prices like five times since January, which is an insane amount of time

• 54:05Speaker 06

  to slash prices. And yet their margins are still shrinking like every quarter. So it's it's it's clear that like, the market is getting more diversified. There's more cars that are coming out, more factories are coming online. And yeah, it's just like, you know, we're all we're all in the boat now. We're all heading towards that big electric future that we've been promised for such a long time.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  Yet it's still impossible to buy an electric car.

• 54:31Speaker 06

  And yet, yes, if you're actually shopping for one of these cars, leasing is probably the best option right now, because there is a loophole, whereas the cars that are not eligible for the tax credit, the 7500 tax credit, are eligible through lease. So you can get a Hyundai, you can get a Kia, you can get all these cars that are not made in North America, and still get that incentive if you lease.

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  That's an amazing loophole. That should be the title of the podcast episode. We've identified a tax loophole. We should do that. That should be the title of every episode.

• 54:58Speaker 06

  We would triple the audience.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So if all the investment is going in now, right? So we're building the battery plants, we're shutting down the existing lines, we can spin up the Silverado EV lines. When's the payoff?

• 55:11Speaker 06

  So I think the payoff comes when it becomes profitable because right now all of these companies are losing money on this project, on these projects and it's the ICE cars that are, that are supplementing all of the, the insane investments that are going into this. So I think once that flips, once you see the electric business actually in, in the black and the ICE business are, are starting to sort of recede and fade into the, into the, into the mist, then that's, I guess, what is the payoff. But I, you know, that's, you know, not till 2030, 2040 even. Ooh. It also depends a lot on, you know, how, how much they can continue, how much these companies, which are all publicly traded companies and have shareholders and have

• 55:52Speaker 06

  people that are invested in them, can continue to sort of make the argument to their investors that yes, this is all going to be worth it in the end. But, you know, I think the sales numbers are backing it up. It was like 8% sales were EVs last year and this year we're on track for like 12%. I mean, that's like an incredible jump, I think, for, for the US.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  It is kind of incredible that Tesla's feeling the heat enough to cut prices.

• 56:14Speaker 06

  Nine, if nine times, or wait, no, five times, five times. Yeah. And Musk is definitely under a lot of pressure. He, he basically said in his earnings call last week that he doesn't care about margins anymore. He's like, he's all about volume. Volume is, is now the, you know, it used to be a margin, a margin business and now we're a volume business. And so it's an interesting pivot, I think, on his part. Maybe his mind is somewhere else these days. I don't, I don't really know. I can't, I can't speak to that.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  One of the things you've been saying over and over, Neelai, for like forever on this show is that the like, the truism about Tesla is they will always sell every car that they make. Is that cracking? Like this thing where there is like essentially infinite demand for Teslas and people will keep buying however many they make until some unforeseen moment in the future. Like is, is if I'm Tesla, am I nervous that that moment has arrived? Because like Ford and Rivian and others are starting to figure out how to ship stuff?

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and I will, here's what I'll say about Tesla. Tesla has been a monopoly and we just haven't called it that. If you wanted to buy an electric car, your choices were a Tesla or some ugly garbage.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  A Chevy Volt.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just true. And it's like, if what you wanted was a good, reliable electric car with meaningful range, you had one choice in the market. And you see what a tiny little bit of competition in any market will do. We talk about this all the time in the Verchess. Tesla is facing the tiniest amount of competition. Ford is like, here's 15 Mustang Mach-E's. And Tesla's like, we gotta lower prices. Right? Ford is like, we can ship five F-150 Lightning. And Tesla's like, we gotta lower prices again. And then we're gonna recall all of them. Yeah. VW put out the, what, the ID.4? I mean, the thing is like a shoe. It's slow and boring and the software is bad and Tesla's cutting prices. It's like not even great competition.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  And all the things that people love about Tesla, the software updates, the goofy weirdness of being able to like fart with the horn, Elon generally, that was all just along for the ride of it effectively being the monopoly player in the market for electric cars.

• 58:20Speaker 06

  And I think it says a lot too, that when they had the master plan event recently, cars kind of like were almost an afterthought to the whole thing. It was, you know, it was a very ambitious, very sort of broad and, you know, you know, like sort of blue sky rainbows kind of, kind of vision for the future, sustainable energy and all this stuff. It sounded great, but cars barely kind of factored into the whole thing. It was more about energy storage and supply chain and all of these other things that were sort of like under the surface of how Tesla works. So I think it's kind of interesting that, and obviously the Cybertruck is supposed to come out later this year, but he's basically seeded the electric truck market to Ford and Rivian. And I think you're gonna see Chevy's gonna be coming up.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  Rivian is like, we've shipped five trucks. Some of them don't work.

• 59:07Speaker 06

  But that's the market. That's the whole electric truck market. It's five trucks.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was just saying like, there's a big market and people want them and Chevy's gonna have the Silverado and Ram made all the noise about the revolution and it's like basically the same truck with like an electric drivetrain. Very funny. I just think like our friend Sean O'Kane, ex Verge reporter Sean O'Kane, now Bloomberg, forever in our hearts as an expat. He noticed that the latest Tesla filing with the SEC, they've now included the line, one of our goals is to increase awareness of the brand, which is like the ever so subtlest hint to advertising, which they have never had to do. And I just, again, I just keep coming back to this, like, they've sold every Tesla they've ever made. Their problem was making enough cars, because they were the only provider of cars. And they're still basically the only provider of electric cars. I don't think that's like the end of the world for them.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  But competition changes things dramatically and quickly. And even the slightest bit of competition has made Tesla so much more reactive to the market than it's had to be. Like, the Model 3 looks old. Like, just, it's looked the same for a long time. We're expecting a refresh. Andy, there's been some weird leaked renders of like new Model 3s. I think we kind of buy them, don't buy them. But even the refresh kind of looks the same as what we've seen for a long time. And you see every other carmaker has to like dramatically change how the cars look every so often, just to keep interest up.

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  And we haven't even talked about the China situation. I mean, that's like a podcast unto itself. But yeah, I mean, Tesla's, I think, really feeling the heat in China because that country's EV industry is just booming. They are just producing, like, the Shanghai Auto Show just happened, and it was all Chinese makes. It was, you didn't see barely anything else from any other company. And Tesla's really counting on the Chinese market as a way to sort of, I think, really kind of fund the entire operation. And they're struggling there, too. So I think that that's, it's not-

• 1:01:00Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't, China not, like, not a huge fan of Elon's?

• 1:01:04Speaker 06

  Well-

• 1:01:04Alex Cranz?

  Did I make that up?

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  No, I think I think they are because they let him uh uh open his own factory without a a state owned partner, uh which they have not done for any other uh uh US based car company. They all have to, any of them that want to go into China have to have to have a joint venture with with a Chinese company and and Tesla was allowed to go in uh solo.

• 1:01:25Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so we keep talking about the Teslas and the electric cars and everything, but what about the hybrids? Because Prius just had a new refresh that came out and that was like the original electric car for a lot of people. Like that came out, what, 2002, 2003? And everybody's like, I have to have one. That was the original Tesla, right? Like, you remember, everybody in Hollywood was like, this is the car to drive. Forget my BMW or my hundred thousand dollar Mercedes. I just want to drive my beautiful, ugly, ugly, ugly Prius.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  And they

• 1:01:53David Pierce?

  And then Uber and Lyft ruined that for everybody.

• 1:01:55Alex Cranz?

  Everyone.

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  Well, I think Toyota did a did a smart thing and they made it actually look halfway decent this time around. Uh, I think, you know, Steve Yuan did a review for us, uh, and he had a lot of fun with it. And he was very honest about the Prius and sort of its place in modern culture today. And just as an aside, every time I say anything bad about big trucks and SUVs online, on Twitter, on The Verge, I always get a torrent of hate mail from the big truck and SUV uh lobby. And um, they always find a way to include the Prius as a um, as an insult. It's always used as like, I bet you enjoy driving your Prius. It still occupies this place. And I think a lot of people's brain as like

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  the the the vehicle of choice for the media liberal effete

• 1:02:45Alex Cranz?

  Granola.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly. Granola, latte sipping, New York Times reading, Prius driving. I think it's so funny.

• 1:02:52Alex Cranz?

  They were low first.

• 1:02:52Speaker 06

  It's amazing to me that it has sustained over decades as this like, you know, albatross, uh, I think in a lot of ways. But uh, yeah, I think the new one looks pretty sweet. It's not any faster than uh, the previous generation models. I think this is the fifth um, that Toyota has come out with. And the mileage is a lot better. The hybrid motor is a lot better. And I think it's interesting, too, because Toyota is Really come out and said, we are sinking a lot of our of our reputation on hybrids. We're going to go electric eventually, but they are not being as aggressive about it. And they're posturing as GM and Ford and a lot of these other companies. They've said, you know, we think that hybrids and also hydrogen has a potential to play,

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  has a role to play in sort of this massive shift that's taking place. And I think the Prius has sort of been, they're proof positive of that. The Prius is still very popular.

• 1:03:44Alex Cranz?

  Why do they do that though? Like, because you're right, everybody else is all in on electric and just kind of like, and hybrids exist, forget them, we don't like them. Like, are hybrids just, the margin is too bad on them or what?

• 1:03:57David Pierce?

  But isn't the answer just that people have to buy cars right now? Like, I just feel like, even what we were talking about, right? Like, we're at this phase where electric cars have been like just around the corner for so long. And now just around the corner is like, you know, somewhere between one and 15 years from now, it's going to be really easy for you to buy an electric car. And somewhere between one and 50 years from now, the electrical grid will be able to handle all of that and the range will be better. And it's like, some people need to buy cars that like get them to work right now.

• 1:04:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but hybrids.

• 1:04:27David Pierce?

  I've just hit this point where like hybrids are the answer. Like, why aren't we talking more about hybrids? Like, in this world that we live in, we have the thing between where we've been and where we're going, and it's hybrids. And the fact that we just jumped straight to electric seems crazier and crazier to me.

• 1:04:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, so wait, I can answer this question because I now own a plug-in hybrid. And having a car with two drivetrains is a very confusing situation. I think the Prius is a really great hybrid because it's like a series hybrid in the city. It's what, 56 on a highway, it's like 54? Like, it's, the Prius was designed to mostly run on battery and the engine kind of helps the battery along. Most of the other hybrids on the market are like, there's one or the other. And sometimes you have them both going. But when you're done with the battery, you just have an engine that gets 22 to the gallon, which is basically my Jeep.

• 1:05:15Alex Cranz?

  Why do they do that when the Prius has been doing this very well for 20 years?

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  Because until recently, the Prius looked like a reject athletic shoe.

• 1:05:27Alex Cranz?

  Right, but like.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  And is notably very slow.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:05:31Alex Cranz?

  Okay, it's a slow.

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  Slow.

• 1:05:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  And even the new one is still kind of slow. I think they made it sipier. They definitely made it look a lot better. It looks super cool now.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Nilay Patel?

  And I think 54 to the gallon is going to be extremely compelling to a lot of people. But these automakers are competing in markets where, like we said, like you sit, you're sitting in the back of the car. For some reason, you still want it to be fast.

• 1:05:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like the sort of the, the architecture of the Prius is designed to be slow and efficient. And all the plug-in hybrids are designed to, even Toyota's other hybrids, like their mild hybrids and the Sequoia and all their other new cars. They're like mild hybrids that make you accelerate really fast and then the gas engine turns on.

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  The, the RAV4 Prime has been like, I think, one of the more popular cars on, on sale for the last couple of years. To the point that like the, the dealer markups were almost like a 100%.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  Yes, during the pandemic, during the pandemic, RAV4 Primes are going for like a hundred grand.

• 1:06:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you would actually like make money when you bought one.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's pretty good. We should have just set up a RAV4 Prime flipping business. I don't know what we're doing on this show.

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  I think one of our coworkers almost did that.

• 1:06:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, Andy told me about a guy who was flipping Wrangler plug-in Wranglers, right?

• 1:06:42Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was, uh, it doesn't seem like it's completely above board, but I'm sure it's working out great, great for him right now. I mean, Jeep's another one where they're, they're definitely going all in on the four by E. Like, that's like, you know, their, their brand and it's, you know, uh, their, their way into like the market. And you can claim, you can claim to be, you can still claim to be environmental and that you're doing all this stuff to reduce carbon emissions. You can appeal to that segment of the car buying public, but you don't have to worry about doing too much with infrastructure. And you don't have to worry too much about, you know, the, the, the upfront capital costs that like GM and Ford are, are, are currently finding is way more expensive than they ever thought.

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, GM's making like four, building four battery plants. I think Stellantis is only building like one. So.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  That sounds like Stellantis.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  It's just sort of like.

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  Five cars.

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's just kind of.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Stellantis is on the we forked Android and we'll do it ourselves path in all things. Like everyone's like, what's a good thing we should do? Should we use Google services? And Stellantis is always like, no, we're going to make our own Android. And everyone's like, should we build our own cool batteries? And Stellantis is like, no. That's the company. Just as a general rule, everyone's like, we should do something good. And scientists are like, hmm, Fiat. You know, it's like.

• 1:07:59Alex Cranz?

  I kind of want to go back to the hybrids just real quick because you guys know more about this than I do. So the right now, there's basically like two kinds of ways to do the hybrid. There's the Prius way, which means you really integrate the drivetrains, but it goes really slow. And then there's the other way where it's just two drivetrains and it switches over. And that's just generally kind of a crappy experience.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a little blurrier than that, but yeah, that's, that's more, more like my most, like the Jeep four by E is the way they're designed to be used. Is you drive around the battery until the battery is dead and then the engine turns on.

• 1:08:30Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  And it's just a very different way of thinking about it. And the way it's, it's use case and the way that we use it are that like mostly we drive to school and the grocery store. And we do that trip every single day and we can make those trips on battery power. And then if we ever have to go anywhere, we've got an engine to like handle the distance. And so it's like, it's like a fine trade off.

• 1:08:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. But like, what is it? Is it just physically impossible to make the Prius go fast? Or that that kind of drivetrain go fast?

• 1:08:59Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I'm have to Google, can you make a Prius go fast? Of all the things I've ever Googled, I'm actually shocked I've never Googled this.

• 1:09:06Speaker 06

  I'm sure there's some sick resto mods out there of the original Prius.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay, the first answer highlighted, literally like people have Googled this so much that there's a featured Google snippet with a highlight.

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. And the highlight is technically yes, but probably not in the way that you might like to add horsepower to a Prius.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  This is like strap another car to the front of your Prius.

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  What you do is you pull out the engine and you put a V8 in it. Your Prius will go.

• 1:09:42Alex Cranz?

  Just motor.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  But no, I mean, it's smart, though, right? Because like David was saying, psychologically, I think, as a planet, we are not quite there yet. We're not quite ready to go all in on electric, despite the fact that electric cars have existed for the last, you know, decade plus. You know, we're still, we're still waiting for that kind of like magic, you know, a car to come along with all the perfect infrastructure and all the, all the right requirements and everything, what it needs for everything that they, that they, that they have in their lives. And so the hybrid is a great bridge, I think, between the two worlds.

• 1:10:14Alex Cranz?

  And it's usually like 20,000 more.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  It's just very obvious that this is a much more, this is the most complicated car we've ever owned. It's like, it has had to go in, we, we bought it in what, October? It's had to go in three times for software updates just to manage the transition between gas and battery.

• 1:10:30Alex Cranz?

  Is it just because Jeep sucks, though?

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's like a, almost 100% chance that it's because Jeep sucks. But it's very pretty. It's like a Tamagotchi. You have to care for the Android system every day. It has, you know, meters in the dashboard. It's great. It's super fast. Andy, the next time you get angry truck owners in your email, send them to me and I'll point out that, one, my actual truck is probably bigger and faster than theirs, and two, that my hybrid is probably also faster than their truck. And we can just take it from there.

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  That, that'll work.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  I do, I, I think this Prius is great. If, if it, I think we're going to see big markups on it, but I do think it's a sign of the transition. And then there's like other weird, I don't know if y'all saw the Lincoln Nautilus that came out this week. It has an incredible interior. It has like a wraparound array of screens in front of the driver, in addition to all the other screens. And like, I'm not sure what they're supposed to be. Like, it's like a NORAD command center. It's like, it's very confusing why all the screens are there. And it has a hybrid, but then like Lincoln's product managers are like, but it's not a plug-in hybrid because the Lincoln owner does not want that. So it's.

• 1:11:32Speaker 06

  How did they determine that, though? I'm so curious about like, you know, where, how, how do you, you can't talk somebody into plugging their car in? I don't understand.

• 1:11:40Alex Cranz?

  Lincoln's aren't primarily like, they're like town cars. They're, they're mainly for chauffeurs and, and Uber drivers and nobody wants them.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Why does the chauffeur need like an array of screens? You have to like, look at this. It's so many screens.

• 1:11:51Alex Cranz?

  Do you see the Uber drivers now? They've got like four phones.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  You can run the Uber app, the Lyft app, another right here.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like let them do all their apps in one spot.

• 1:12:00David Pierce?

  In the, in this car, I'm looking at the marketing materials for this car and there is a whole screen that looks, I don't know, like it's about 12 inches wide in the middle of the dash that just shows the weather.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:12:13Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:12:14David Pierce?

  Why? I am in the car, I can see out the windshield, I can open the window, I have so many ways to understand what the weather is.

• 1:12:21Alex Cranz?

  But sometimes you wanna know what the temperature is.

• 1:12:23David Pierce?

  A large screen in the middle of the dashboard.

• 1:12:24Alex Cranz?

  Don't you just wanna like know in your soul what the temperature is outside?

• 1:12:28David Pierce?

  No, I just wanna plug in my phone and use CarPlay and not think about this anymore. That's what I want.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if you, to Andy's point, if you think your buyer needs this many finicky touchscreens.

• 1:12:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  You don't think they're ready to plug the car in? Like, what, where is the disconnect here?

• 1:12:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 06

  I mean, this also speaks to why the average sales price is, is at the ridiculous level that it is today, $50,000 or something like that for, you know, for a new car. You know, it's, a lot of, all that money is going mostly towards feature bloat, I feel. Like, it's just screens and too many features, stuff that most people don't want or need and haven't asked for. I think if you look at the vast majority of surveys that have been conducted over the last, independent surveys over the last like five years or so, most people are just like, my car will not stop yelling at me all the time. Everything is beeping at me and I don't know what's happening. People don't like that.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would not say the user experience of the, the average modern car is great.

• 1:13:30David Pierce?

  I can't stop looking at the pictures of this Lincoln Nautilus. I cannot stop looking at pictures. So I just, I just, one last thing that I have to say on this and then I will stop looking at pictures of the Lincoln Nautilus.

• 1:13:39Nilay Patel?

  It's so much. And also, it's a 48 inch screen in, I don't know what you might call it, the dash, the four dash?

• 1:13:48Alex Cranz?

  Where do the airbags come out?

• 1:13:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they come out of the, the, the post dash.

• 1:13:53Alex Cranz?

  It's so.

• 1:13:54David Pierce?

  It's just Siri saying, oh no, you've been in an accident. It's fine.

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  But no, so. The main infotainment system, if you just look at it, look at the bezels on that screen.

• 1:14:02David Pierce?

  Oh my God, I know. And, and look what's on that screen, it just repeats the stuff on the other dash.

• 1:14:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08David Pierce?

  I can see my nav twice, I can see what song I'm playing twice.

• 1:14:11Nilay Patel?

  That's where they stuck, no, no, that's where they stuck CarPlay. They're like, you idiots want your dumb CarPlay, here's a dumb screen for it and then big screen.

• 1:14:19David Pierce?

  From 1996.

• 1:14:21Speaker 06

  The big one's gonna be running, uh, C4, 5?

• 1:14:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27David Pierce?

  Like even the car company doesn't know what I'm gonna want to put on this screen. So they're just like, do you want bigger nav? That could be fine. Here's the weather. Like, this is nothing.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Speaker 06

  I was, I saw the Volkswagen ID.7 last week and it had one of the, um, the air vents that are controlled through the touchscreen. You have to like tap a circle and move the circle around in order to get the air to hit you in the exact same way. You know, sort of similar to like the Model 3. Uh, and just it, it worked so bad. It was so terrible.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  Wait, is this CarPlay?

• 1:15:03Alex Cranz?

  Could be, it could be. Is this secretly the first for the new CarPlay?

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  So confused. Look at this thing. It looks exactly like CarPlay, right? And then the, the big curved screen on what I will now insistently call the four dash is the same things. But if this was the first thing with the new CarPlay, it would have been huge and noisy. Did Lincoln fake CarPlay? We should cut all this out because this is nonsense.

• 1:15:32David Pierce?

  This is nonsense, but this isn't CarPlay.

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay. But do you see what I mean? It looks like CarPlay, but it's not CarPlay. But you look at this and you're like, this is what Apple wanted to do with CarPlay.

• 1:15:41Speaker 06

  Put it on every screen.

• 1:15:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 1:15:44Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just saying, look at this picture and that center stack screen.

• 1:15:48Speaker 06

  Where's the picture?

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  That's like fake CarPlay. It's like sync, but it's been made to look like CarPlay.

• 1:15:53David Pierce?

  Is Apple's whole, yeah.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  So I think Lincoln faked a fake CarPlay.

• 1:15:57Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:15:58Nilay Patel?

  I think that picture is not CarPlay. Anyway, nonsensical. Let's just like wrap this up.

• 1:16:03David Pierce?

  So Andy, we have to let you go here in a minute because you have better things to do than keep talking to us about touchscreens. But, uh, the one other car news thing I thought was interesting this week was this cruise. Was it an earnings report as part of GM that cruise continues to just burn money? And it feels like we, there were all these Lyft layoffs and we're in this moment of like the ride sharing industry is very much under threat. Cruise can't make any money. Like, all of this feels like it is sort of collapsing in real time. Like, all of the dreams of how we were going to get around feel like they are dying all at the same time.

• 1:16:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Cruise is GM's autonomous robotaxi division and they reported or GM reported that they burned or lost like $561 million in the first quarter of this year.

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  On $30 million of revenue.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  Which is an insane.

• 1:16:53David Pierce?

  $30 million of revenue.

• 1:16:54Speaker 06

  Most of that revenue is just from interest, I think, on, you know, other, unlike operating expenses. It was like not from customers that pay for the service. I mean, they do have a few customers. They do like a thousand rides a day, which is like, you know, what Uber does in like Kansas City, I think. So it's a little bit unclear as to like when this is supposed to. They've said a billion dollars in revenue by 2025, which is two years from now. That's gonna be.

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  How?

• 1:17:20Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 1:17:20Alex Cranz?

  Are they taking all the Chevy Bolts?

• 1:17:22Speaker 06

  They're gonna be, they're gonna be replacing the Chevy Bolts with the Origin, which is their steering wheelless and pedalless shuttle that is in production right now in their factory in Lordstown. And it's, they're still all in. They're still all in. Their big announcement was we can, Cruise now can operate driverless during the daytime. Hooray!

• 1:17:45Alex Cranz?

  Yay.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  It was exclusively at night for the last, the last year.

• 1:17:50David Pierce?

  Is that true?

• 1:17:50Speaker 06

  And now they're finally allowed. They're finally allowed to operate during daytime hours when all of the people actually need the service. So.

• 1:17:58Alex Cranz?

  Why does, why does the government allow the new ones to come out with no steering wheels? Isn't that like a requirement right now?

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  So they can get an exemption from the, the rules that require them to have steering wheels. They're looking to get that. Amazon has already starting to produce its, its also steering wheelless autonomous shuttle through Zooks. And they've said that they don't need an exemption. They're actually just going over the government and just like go.

• 1:18:22Alex Cranz?

  They're just gonna ignore it.

• 1:18:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're ignoring the rule. They're saying we've self-certified. We don't need steering wheels because we checked it out and it's cool.

• 1:18:31Alex Cranz?

  Can't the government come back and just slap them upside the head?

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  And they said, you did what? And they said, we did this. And the government said, hang on. And Amazon said, no, it's cool. Trust us. And that's sort of like where things are at the moment. I don't, I don't know if there, there might, there could potentially be a recall. There's only like, you know, a handful of these cars and I don't think

• 1:18:50Alex Cranz?

  They operate in Seattle?

• 1:18:51Speaker 06

  Uh, no, they're in the, they're in the Bay Area too, but I don't think that they're actually on public roads yet. They're just making, they're just making them.

• 1:18:58Alex Cranz?

  They're just doing it.

• 1:18:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're just going for it.

• 1:19:01Alex Cranz?

  Just gonna be for the airport.

• 1:19:02Speaker 06

  I mean, all of this is on a hope and a prayer. The whole autonomous stuff, I mean, we already see it's they're they're they're in the trough. Things are not going well. Argo shut down. Waymo had a bunch of layoffs. And yeah, David, you just mentioned like the ride hail industry as a whole, the one that actually has human drivers is is going through a bit of a rough patch. Lyft just laid off like, you know, another, you know, 2,000 people. So it's, you know, it's it's rough out there. And yet they still seem to think that people want to use these cars and they'll want to share them too. They think carpooling is going to come back, even though that was a failure the last time around, even before the pandemic wasn't working out for anybody.

• 1:19:39Alex Cranz?

  They keep forgetting that people drink like like they if you're carpooling.

• 1:19:44Speaker 06

  Go on.

• 1:19:45Alex Cranz?

  If you're carpooling and you hop into a car and you're like, oh, I'm gonna sit next to the stranger. Oh, the stranger next to me is drunk and about to vomit. That's and there's no like driver to be like, hey, that guy just puked in the back. Like, that was what made Lyft and Uber so popular initially was because it was a bunch of young people taking it after drinking.

• 1:20:03Speaker 06

  Boobying in the back of Uber.

• 1:20:04Alex Cranz?

  And like poor, poor, sad Uber driver being like, now I've got to go hose out the back. That's why they all have the River Mask.

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  I will say one time when Max was very young, she puked in the back of an Uber and the driver like it was like as though nothing had happened. Like, he was just so used to the notion that there'd be vomit in the back of his car. I felt so, but we we left him a huge tip, but just the sort of like resignededness.

• 1:20:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just.

• 1:20:26Nilay Patel?

  Where he's like, all right, well, I'm gonna get out my puke kit and like handle this again.

• 1:20:29Speaker 06

  And wouldn't you have felt so much better about it if there was just a robot driving in that car? And then you would have been like, yes, puke, puke all you want. It doesn't matter.

• 1:20:36Alex Cranz?

  That's what happened with with Car2Go. Because you remember, you remember Car2Go? There were the little, there were these little smart cars that were very popular in like New York City.

• 1:20:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Alex Cranz?

  Only weed dealers used them and like me, right after the weed dealer used it.

• 1:20:49Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:20:50Alex Cranz?

  So I hop in and go, oh.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  That's why it smelled, right, Alex?

• 1:20:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was not me.

• 1:20:54Speaker 06

  It was not you.

• 1:20:54Alex Cranz?

  Don't don't smoke and drive.

• 1:20:55Nilay Patel?

  Can we play the laser bomb song? Can we send Andy out with the laser bomb song, please?

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  It's gonna be my walkout.

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't be clear about what this is.

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  It's gonna be my WWE walkout music. Laser bomb.

• 1:21:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. Andy, thank you so much, man.

• 1:21:16Speaker 07

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• 1:22:02Speaker 08

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• 1:22:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Alex, how's that laser bong?

• 1:22:37Alex Cranz?

  I'm doing great. I'm just fly, Ben.

• 1:22:41Nilay Patel?

  Flying.

• 1:22:42Alex Cranz?

  Just woo.

• 1:22:43Nilay Patel?

  Fishing with a rake. Is that... That's not right. Duck hunting with a rake. That's the sentence, because you're so high. It's a long story.

• 1:22:50Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I just got it.

• 1:22:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:52Alex Cranz?

  I am very sober. I swear.

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  That's how we know. Like, we... I just say weird Texas idioms about being stoned. We'll see if Alex gets... All right, we are well on our way to going over, so we're gonna have a lightning lightning round. Alex, you wanna go first?

• 1:23:09Alex Cranz?

  Okay, Disney's back at it again.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  I love it.

• 1:23:11Alex Cranz?

  And I love it. I'm so happy. So to recap, there was the big, you can't say gay in school. You can't teach gay stuff in school. That was like the Ron DeSantis bill. Disney, at the time, Bob Chapek was in charge and he spoke out and he said-

• 1:23:24Nilay Patel?

  Bob Two.

• 1:23:25Alex Cranz?

  Bob Two. Bob Chapek was in charge and he said, hey, this is not great. We have a lot of like gay cast members. That's what they call their employees at the parks. We have a lot of like gay people that just work here and-

• 1:23:37Nilay Patel?

  Are you aware that we make musicals, good sir?

• 1:23:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Hello. Uh, we have all of Pixar. That's pretty gay sometimes. And so they spoke out against it. Ron DeSantis was like, okay, I'm gonna destroy you. And like said it very publicly and loudly. So part of this was also that Disney World has its own like special monetary zone in Florida that they kind of run along with a board ostensibly like voted in people, but it was really kind of Disney's people. Ron DeSantis was like, I'm gonna get rid of all of Disney's people and put all of my friends in and like actual friends. So it was like people who donated to his campaign and really hate gay people. Other people who donated to his campaign and probably feel whatever about gay people. So he puts all these people in, only for them to realize that the previous

• 1:24:24Alex Cranz?

  board has absolutely screwed them over, ceded a whole bunch of the power to Disney. And Ron DeSantis was like, I'm going to destroy Disney. And then decided to start enacting like more punitive stuff, specifically new taxes that were gonna affect people going to the parks and people trying to drive over to the parks, like new tollways, stuff like that. Because there's now actual monetary harm for what Ron DeSantis is doing, Disney was like, okay, well, we're just gonna sue you because you're using the government to inhibit our speech, which is like absolutely true, right? Like Disney sucks in a lot of cases, but in this case, they don't suck. And Ron DeSantis is like, yeah, I'm gonna

• 1:25:04Alex Cranz?

  be as cartoonishly villainous as possible and then be shocked when like Disney's enormous lawyers come in and just slap.

• 1:25:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's pretty good. Like the whole situation is pretty good.

• 1:25:15Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god, I love it.

• 1:25:16Nilay Patel?

  I will say that if only this had a little bit of copyright law in it, it would be like a perfect Neelai story.

• 1:25:20Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's gonna happen at some point.

• 1:25:22Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be there.

• 1:25:23Alex Cranz?

  Just do wait. It's coming.

• 1:25:24David Pierce?

  Ron DeSantis is gonna do something with Mickey Mouse and it's gonna happen. I don't know what he's gonna do with Mickey, but it's coming.

• 1:25:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  No, it's if you will recall, like I got there, I got to Chicago so fast.

• 1:25:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Nilay Patel?

  If you recall, when Disney first came out against Don't Say Gay Bill, for extremely valid reasons of many of our employees and customers like are gay. And like, this is a totally valid way to live your life. Their response from the right was, hey, we should get rid of Disney's copyrights.

• 1:25:55Alex Cranz?

  That's.

• 1:25:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, it was just like, it was a weird knee jerk. It was crazy. And I was like, I'm the person who's been fighting against like, the overwhelming maximalization of copyrights for so long. And now, oh, this is how we're gonna do it?

• 1:26:09Nilay Patel?

  Fuck.

• 1:26:10Alex Cranz?

  Public domain Mickey.

• 1:26:13Nilay Patel?

  But now it's like, it's just come down to like, really basic. I read the complaint. It's like very basic elements of contract law, like, we signed a contract with the government and the new government's like, we don't like it. So we passed a law to undo a contract. Like, there's a thousand years of English common law that says you can't do that.

• 1:26:30Alex Cranz?

  Like, the lawyers, Disney's lawyers must have been just so excited this whole time. They're like, we're not even gonna do anything. We're just gonna sit back and wait.

• 1:26:37Nilay Patel?

  It really seems, can you imagine if you were on the old board and you wrote? So their argument is, they put out notices and like print newspapers. So they were having these meetings, these public meetings, they passed this. Can you imagine walking out of the last one of those meetings? I mean, like, did we just, did they just, they didn't?

• 1:26:55Alex Cranz?

  That, that board knew.

• 1:26:55Nilay Patel?

  He didn't, no one? All right. Like, it was just happens. And then you just have to sit on it until the new board is impaneled and they go to their first meeting and they're like, they did what? Like, just imagine being the lawyers who pulled off this scheme for Disney. Like, it's just very good.

• 1:27:12Alex Cranz?

  I hope they got a lot of stock options.

• 1:27:14Nilay Patel?

  And then obviously they've been sitting on this complaint in their back pocket.

• 1:27:16Alex Cranz?

  Just waiting.

• 1:27:17Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're gonna like do some stuff and Disney's like, all right, you did the thing. Like, here's our lawsuit. And it turns out, across the board, the government of the United States, state, local, federal, has less well-paid lawyers than Disney.

• 1:27:29David Pierce?

  Probably true of almost anyone you were to pit against.

• 1:27:32Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I love it. It's, it's, it's.

• 1:27:34Alex Cranz?

  Isn't Ron DeSantis a lawyer? Didn't he go to law school?

• 1:27:38Nilay Patel?

  Did he?

• 1:27:39Alex Cranz?

  Not very well.

• 1:27:40Nilay Patel?

  Is he, is he reading the public notices section of the Orlando Sentinel? He certainly is not. Uh, it's very good. All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:27:48David Pierce?

  Listen, if there's ever been a reason for that local newspapers need to survive, there's the code run right there. I love that.

• 1:27:55David Pierce?

  So mine is, uh, Amazon killed its Halo division, discontinued a bunch of Halo devices, the Halo band, the Halo view. It shipped all this stuff. I think like, I mean, honestly, you could convince me this was like 45 years ago, but I think this was like 2020. Uh, they launched this fitness tracker, the Halo band, all this fanfare. They were like, we're doing this cool stuff. Do you remember that its thing was it could monitor your tone? When you were speaking to other people?

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17David Pierce?

  There was like crazy uproar because it was, this was like the worst idea of all time.

• 1:28:22Alex Cranz?

  Tone police for ladies. That's what everyone wants.

• 1:28:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, like literally. And then they had the one that was like, it could generate a, like a 3D image of your body to measure your body fat, which is awful.

• 1:28:32Alex Cranz?

  That's what everyone wants when they're trying to lose weight.

• 1:28:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Alex Cranz?

  It's like, show me everything. Zoom in, please. Like, sure.

• 1:28:40David Pierce?

  And then try to sell me clothes on Amazon. Yeah.

• 1:28:44Alex Cranz?

  Like, Amazon just did not think that through.

• 1:28:47Nilay Patel?

  Especially from Amazon. What I really want is Amazon to look at my body and be like, mm, can we tighten it up a little bit?

• 1:28:54Alex Cranz?

  Like, I've always wanted to be judged by Amazon Prime.

• 1:28:58David Pierce?

  And then next time I'm shopping, it's like, maybe, maybe size up one.

• 1:29:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you ever think, was this ever related to the fact that Bezos got super swole along the way?

• 1:29:06Alex Cranz?

  God, he's so swole now. Like, he's got people who works him out while he sleeps.

• 1:29:09Nilay Patel?

  There was a time when like Bezos was not a yoke.

• 1:29:12David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:29:13Alex Cranz?

  He should have just been like, I use the Halo band. He would have been alive, but would have been better than Humane's.

• 1:29:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What he actually used was the power of being divorced.

• 1:29:22David Pierce?

  True Halo band.

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  Like he like found it.

• 1:29:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm wearing it to divorce.

• 1:29:30Alex Cranz?

  I've never met a divorced person that doesn't get swole.

• 1:29:33David Pierce?

  Oh, it's a move.

• 1:29:33Nilay Patel?

  The new one enters the scene and suddenly you swole.

• 1:29:38David Pierce?

  The true best thing about this was so when when the Halo came out, the company everybody identified as like totally screwed by this was Whoop, which is another one of the like trying to do really sophisticated stuff about fitness and activity. And so Will Ahmed, the CEO of Whoop, is just having like a field day with the fact that this is shutting down. And Whoop has been very, he's just on Twitter, just like dragging Amazon everywhere he can. And my favorite one was there's this tweet from, I believe, yesterday, where he quote tweeted his own tweet from 2021, where Whoop was printing onto every one of its circuit boards, the phrase, "Don't bother copying us, we will win", which was directly a message to Amazon about the Halo.

• 1:30:18David Pierce?

  So he quote tweets, he quote tweets that with a picture of the CNBC tweet announcing Amazon shutting down Halo with the peace sign emoji. And then has spent the last 24 hours just retweeting everybody who says mean things about Amazon Halo. And it is truly terrific.

• 1:30:35Alex Cranz?

  That's a legend.

• 1:30:36David Pierce?

  And I really, I've never been, I've never liked Whoop more than I do at this particular moment in time.

• 1:30:41Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I want to go get a Whoop band right now.

• 1:30:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're killing it.

• 1:30:43Alex Cranz?

  Like, yes, do it.

• 1:30:45Nilay Patel?

  It's the year of efficiency at all these companies. And did anyone ever think the Halo group was gonna make it?

• 1:30:51Alex Cranz?

  No one did.

• 1:30:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:53Alex Cranz?

  I don't think they even, like, they were looking for jobs as they were designing it, probably.

• 1:30:58Nilay Patel?

  They're like writing back on the Whoop boards, like, we're not copying you, but here's my number.

• 1:31:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's mine. Mine is maybe my favorite piece of news. It's so silly. So Tesla's in a bunch of lawsuits about full self-driving. One of them, there was a fatal crash, very sad, the person died. They're suing Tesla. And as part of the lawsuit, they're saying, we got to enter all these statements that Elon Musk made about full self-driving being safe. Right. He's representing to people that the thing is safe. The thing is not safe. It crashed, killed their client. Here they say Tesla's argument is that Elon should not be deposed in this case about these statements because they might be deep fakes. This is true. You know, like he gets deep faked a lot. We don't know what these statements are. We don't know where they came from. It's actually like, yeah, in a normal circumstance, you're like, all right, it's the AI time. Like, we're doing this. Maybe it's deep faked. It's true.

• 1:31:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, he gets deep faked a lot. Yeah. If you're the Pope, like, at any moment, you might be wearing a puffer jacket. I can't get enough of AI Biden rapping Ice Spice. Like, it's a real problem. Except this specific statement, which is a Model S and a Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person right now. That's the statement. He said it at the Code Conference in 2016. He said it to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in a room with 400 people in it, many of whom, including me, were live blocking it. There's like, you just go watch, you go on YouTube and watch it.

• 1:32:22Alex Cranz?

  Well, I mean, are you sure he wasn't a deep fake? Maybe he sent the robot out.

• 1:32:25Nilay Patel?

  I was just like, I'm, you know, you watch, like, Casey and Dieter and Lauren Gooden and I are just like sitting there, like, looking at him say this.

• 1:32:33Alex Cranz?

  Just hanging out.

• 1:32:35Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what? Like, we got all the way to, like, the judge in a trial having to issue an order about deep fakes. And no one was like, have you seen the YouTube video of him obviously saying this?

• 1:32:48David Pierce?

  And he's also been tweeting about how great it is for, like, a decade.

• 1:32:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's, there's like dozens of pieces of evidence that he said this.

• 1:32:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. But this is just inevitably going to be the most fascinating Supreme Court case of all time, right? Like, we're, deep fakes are, like, beelining to the Supreme Court now. This feels, this feels right. Like, the 2023 story is Elon Musk litigating deep fakes at the Supreme Court. Like, that's where this has to end.

• 1:33:10Nilay Patel?

  The argument is Musk cannot recall details about the claims and that, quote, like, many public figures, he is the subject of many deep fake videos and audio recordings supporting to show him saying and doing things he never actually said or did. And it's like, yeah, that's true. But this is a video from 2016 where 400 people in a room heard you answer this question.

• 1:33:30Alex Cranz?

  I love he's just trying to be like, maybe everything is fake. Maybe every time you see me, I'm fake. And therefore I shouldn't be held accountable for anything. I'm like, that's a bold, legal, like.

• 1:33:41Nilay Patel?

  So the judge didn't buy it.

• 1:33:44Alex Cranz?

  Shock.

• 1:33:45Nilay Patel?

  By the way, you can just go on, go on, go on Verge TikTok. You can see the video we made of him saying it. And me looking at him saying it.

• 1:33:53David Pierce?

  Maybe.

• 1:33:53Alex Cranz?

  Were you also deep faked? Yeah.

• 1:33:55Nilay Patel?

  Who knows at any moment. That was the same code where Josh Tapolsky asked him if we were living in a simulation and he was like, yes. And then he was like, but I swore a blood oath to my brother to never talk about this in a hot tub, which is just an incredible answer.

• 1:34:09Alex Cranz?

  That is all absolutely going to come back in this court trial.

• 1:34:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, that absolves him of all of this.

• 1:34:14Nilay Patel?

  That was a legendary.

• 1:34:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he was like, that was a simulation of.

• 1:34:17David Pierce?

  He can't be held responsible.

• 1:34:19Nilay Patel?

  That code in 2016, I, I remember it was just like a very good code conference. And as somebody who's now co-hosting this conference, that's like the high watermark that I'm aiming to hit again. But you just go watch it. Like he's saying it. Anyway, the judge says, Tesla's position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deep fakes, his public statements are immune from scrutiny. In other words, Mr. Musk and others in his position can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for recorded statements being a deep fake to avoid taking ownership for what they actually did say and do. So the judge at least is not buying it.

• 1:34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50Nilay Patel?

  But I would just point out that having to get all the way here, video of him saying it is absolutely bonkers.

• 1:34:58Alex Cranz?

  I just, that's my favorite part of this is like he and his lawyers were like, yeah, it's fine. We, we can bluff our way through this.

• 1:35:05Nilay Patel?

  It's ballsy. It's just very much like, uh.

• 1:35:08Alex Cranz?

  That's fake, Your Honor.

• 1:35:09Nilay Patel?

  Like every article is like, he said this at code. Like here's a link to the video. It's like, it's not even like a bootleg video. It's just like on the Recode channel. Like it's our channel.

• 1:35:19Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have to go like testify that it's real, that you witnessed it.

• 1:35:23Nilay Patel?

  I was there.

• 1:35:23David Pierce?

  Your honor, Musk is gonna buy code for $44 billion just to get out of this.

• 1:35:28Nilay Patel?

  Elon, you know, look, it's my first year hosting and I'm not sure if I have the authority to make such a deal, but I will sell you code for 44 billion.

• 1:35:35Alex Cranz?

  Make the check out to Neelai Patel.

• 1:35:37Nilay Patel?

  You're the singular solution I trust. All right. Uh, I gotta go because I don't know first stuff. This might be my last day at Fox Media.

• 1:35:45Alex Cranz?

  You just sold code.

• 1:35:48Alex Cranz?

  Right. He's already writing it up right now.

• 1:35:51Nilay Patel?

  Neelai sells code to Elon Musk, immediately fired.

• 1:35:56Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be a great conference. I hope you all.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast. The site was amazing this week. Please go check it out. We've been like quick posting a lot more. We've been mixing it up in the comments. Like it's like the end of the social web era. Endless amount to say there. Ben Smith, the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News is gonna be a decoder next week. We're gonna talk all about it and his book Traffic about BuzzFeed and whatever. All that's on my mind. It just occurs to me more and more people are coming directly to our homepage and we are mixing it up in comments with folks. So if you wanna like hang out with us during the week, just we're there. Just like hang out with us. It's great. It's a good time. Uh, what else do we need to plug?

• 1:36:30David Pierce?

  Everybody should also go read V Song's story about the Dyson Zone, which is a truly delightful story and also hands down the funniest set of pictures we've put on our website in a long time. Uh, the Dyson Zone is a ridiculous thing that does not need to exist, but it's wonderful.

• 1:36:45Alex Cranz?

  Neelai convinced her last week that she actually liked it.

• 1:36:47Nilay Patel?

  She loves it.

• 1:36:47Alex Cranz?

  And watching her, watching her realize she liked it in real time, priceless.

• 1:36:52Nilay Patel?

  I know a lot of people who purport to hate things they actually love.

• 1:36:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was me and the Apple Watch.

• 1:36:57Nilay Patel?

  And, uh, V was like, the way that she was talking about it, I was like, nah, you need to, you gotta turn this around, V. Let's be honest.

• 1:37:05Nilay Patel?

  It's great. David, it says, go big David on next Wednesday's show. What does that mean?

• 1:37:09David Pierce?

  Go big David. That's what my dad used to say to me before Little League games. Go big. So next Wednesday's show, um, we like accidentally built this very cool episode about like the future of making movies. Uh, we have a whole thing about the BlackBerry movie, which is coming out. I talked to a bunch of directors about how to make a movie entirely on screens, which was really fun. And, uh, Andrew Mariner, our producer, went on like a month-long investigation into why director's commentary is dead. And I think may have single-handedly brought it back. Uh, it's an incredibly fun episode and one of my favorites he's done in a while. So come back for that next week.

• 1:37:41Nilay Patel?

  And last thing, speaking of movies, if you're in New York next week, we're doing a sneak preview showing of the BlackBerry movie.

• 1:37:48Alex Cranz?

  Oh, cool. It's good.

• 1:37:49David Pierce?

  It's really good.

• 1:37:49Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be real fun. I'm gonna interview the director afterwards. It's like a hundred people. We'll have a post on the site, but we'd love to see you there. It's really fun. They agreed to do it with us. Uh, kind of a whim. It's gonna be really cool. Uh, come check it out if you're new. That's May 4th. Okay. That's it. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:38:10Speaker 09

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:38:45Speaker 10

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• 1:39:23Speaker 11

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.