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

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

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 [e-mail] 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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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Vergecast. Flagship podcast of violating TikTok's community guidelines with Lasirong songs.

I'll explain later. It's just in general. I just want you all to know. I thought that would be like a worldwide phenomenon. And Mr. Content moderation over here. TikTok disagreed. 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 a bong talk. That's what I got for you. But on our website, which we control, Alex was free to publish as many photographs of laser bombs as you want. As many as I want,

and I did. It was great. That's the power of the open web. Please listen to our episode about Activity Pub. But let us play it there. The future of laser bomb journalism

on Activity Pub. Anyway, we've got a huge show. We got to talk a lot about Apple's headset. There's just like a lot of rumors. It feels like they've added up and there's something worth talking about. Andy Hawkins is going to join us.

We're going to 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 got 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. 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? Yeah. Yeah. Can I just issue the Sam Schaeffer disclaimer? Oh, sure. Please do. Sam Schaeffer, who many listeners know,

once worked at the Verge, manned the hype desk on this very show. A legend of the Verge cast's history. Sam Schaeffer left to go do YouTube at a successful YouTube career. It 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. And now for 30 minutes, we're going to say mean things about the product that you're making. Because I think that shit is fake as hell. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

Yeah, wait. Okay, so let's just rewind really fast. So like you said, humanismist 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 going to launch a thing. But they've never actually say,

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 talking about they were like doing a thing with a camera. But then Imran Chowdry, one of the co-founders, got on stage at TED and did a demo of the thing. Neelai, 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? So there's just some weirdness.

You know how last week we were talking about AI Drake was all fishy? Yeah. 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? 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've been falling humane, who knows. But they're not like cell phone videos from the crowd. They're clips of the TED. video. Yeah. Which is super weird.

Like the shots, like, they have camera cuts. They have over the shoulder cameras. Like, it's, it is the official video. Right. There's one camera that's showing at one point, and we'll talk about this, like, 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? 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. Maybe they're just huge Grateful Dead fans and like any deadheads,

they went and plugged into the board directly. Like whatever, but just like the provenance of these videos is wonky. It's unclear. 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, like if you were going to do this strategically, this is almost exactly how you would have done it. Right. Right.

And my point is not, I don't. I don't think the videos are deep fakes. I'm just saying 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 going to assume the most skeptical version of events. Yeah. Right. Which is the company has leaked these videos.

Right. 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 to guys. I'm trying to like emphasize that with my voice. But we leaked these videos and like, I don't believe it. Well, so we should have to believe it. But it's for a week now and like we haven't seen the full Ted video. Right. And Ted holds itself out of quasi-journalistic. Like, just show us the whole thing.

Yeah. Right. Instead of these weird clips. Like that part is strange to me. And then Alex, here's what you are saying. Yeah. 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. It's like that original Google Glass demo. Yeah. And it's like you just sort of poke at it. You're like, did this actually do what he's saying it's doing? And then everything just gets real won't. David, do you want to walk us through the demos?

Sure. Yeah. So if you haven't seen these videos and I encourage you to go watch them, they're fascinating. Basically, he's wearing a jacket that I think is custom made for this purpose. And it has a little breast pocket into which he has put some kind of like rectangular device. It looks like I just keep thinking of like one of those old flip cameras 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. And he's interacting with that thing throughout the whole demo. So he'll talk to it or he'll press it to do something at one.

point he takes a phone call and he projects who's calling onto his hand by kind of holding up his hand. Does he do that? To interact with the projection. All of this is, this is ostensibly what the demo was. I would, 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 phone call. 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 intolerant to such and such food, so you shouldn't eat this. And he says, I'm going to anyway. And it says enjoy. 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. That's the one where I was like, no, that's fake. Yeah, 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 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. And they've talked a lot about being like a revolutionary AI first device. And that appears to be the device. I don't believe any of it is real. But that seems to be. At least if you take it as like, here's what I saw. And I'm like, None of it was real. Yeah. 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. Do you know what the first flaw in it is?

People love their phones. The idea that everyone has a breast pocket. Yeah. And it's going to put it in. I came out from a slightly different position. I came out of 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 going to lie flat.

It's going to lie at a little bit of an angle. The reason this isn't a problem is because I bet you $50. It's fake. No, that Humane is going to have, they're going to try to do with lanyards what Apple did with watchbands, which is like make them a cool thing to wear around your neck. So you're going to have your little assistant just straight. I swear to God, this is going to be a thing. I'm so convinced that I'm right.

They're going to try and make it like a fashion accessory to have around your neck at all times. Didn't Google try to do that with like a little camera that never came out eventually? Clips. The clips. Yeah. The clips, yeah. It was like you're going to wear it around your neck and take photos all day. And it was stupid. Yeah, it was.

And then we'll do. Google Clips was like the ultimate in you have the right idea five years too early. And also no one trusts you because you're Google. Yeah. Whereas like, we're going to, here's what we're going to do. a camera that's on all the time sending data to Google. And it's a 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

startup set up for you. Anyway, humane. So it, well, 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 worlds greatest journal. They just haven't, we just don't know the. Providence and no one's talking 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's like talking to his right. It's amazing. So he's in the middle of a sentence. 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, just. just like, I haven't even gotten past the first thing. Right. Like, 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 do you dial? You dialed?

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 fill out your address book? 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 on your land. It sinks with iTunes, actually.

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. Yes. Right? Oh, 100%. Right. It's going to say it's like AI, right? It's all AI. AI. What? He's got to get a phone call. It's AI.

He's just like yelling at mid-journey. Connect me to 18. What AI are you? Like, he's got to get a phone call. And the phone, the thing, if it's connected to phone network, it's a phone, it has to know that it's his wife. Because 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. He doesn't do anything. Yeah. And also, did you have the thought as he was doing it? Like, what if 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 100 feet wide?

the wall. People just answering it across the street, just slapping that button. 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 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? In the future, AI will read your mind and know when you're ready to hang up. Come on. This is just table stakes. So I just say, 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. The phone was answered. He didn't answer the phone. The phone was answered. The phone entered the phone. The phone suddenly was answered. It made the call. I just like, just that,

does it have a Qualcomm chip in it? Like, what is the Vergecast, if not the show that's like, all right, you showed me your concept of the future? Like, you know, in the Qualcomm? Like, it's like a mid-range Qualcomm ship. Is that we float that? It's a 636 in there.

How much RAM is in this motherfucker? Let's get into it. Like, what are you doing? No onboard storage. And then what was the other demo? The other demo was the, recognizing the food. Yeah.

He held up the bar and was like, can I eat this? And it went through the ingredients or whatever and told him when he was in Tongar 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. Wait, but so let me ask you this. So the food thing, I'm an inveterate food logger. I've been doing it for a long time. Okay.

Did he scan the barcode? Did it use like visual recognition? What's the phrase? 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 it. So it was a reading a label. Okay. So then it's got to get a database.

Is it using the losing a loser? It database? Is it using the Weight Watcher's database? Is it like, which one is it? The Livestrong database? Is it accurate? What if the database is wrong? Can I eat this? About it having peanuts in it? And he dies. Like, what? Like, 50,000 questions about what that means. Yeah. Like the Loseit 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. Right. Did Humane sit around logging everything in the grocery store to make their own database? Do they have a deal? 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 going to. And it just says, okay. It's like, I don't know that that's a full interaction. Yeah.

It's not. Okay, but like it wasn't about peanuts, right? It was like about milk solids. It was going like a, yeah, something like that. Like, it was going a little bit more complex than he could have just read the label. Yeah. Right? Like, 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. 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. 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 going to pre-apologized everyone because I'm going to go nuts. He asked it, he's like, imagine you've been in meetings all day and you come out and you just want to catch up and he's like, what did I miss? This is Neely's dream. 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 I message? What are you talking about? What? I mean, what messages? Where are they coming from? Have you looked at anyone's email inbox in 2023?

You've managed to sort through that absolute shit show and get Tom moved his meeting an hour? Like, it's an incredible AI. 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? 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? I do. This is stuff screens are good at. I know the answer to that question very well. Does the AI know that I prefer my calendar to be kind of at a Heisenbergian state of uncertainty? Am I there or not? Schrodinger's meeting invite is my entire situation.

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 assistance. It was like he was trying to do the mother of all demos, but really, really, really, really, really badly. 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. That's where we first saw like the mouse. That's where we first all the GUI and all of the stuff that like became standard for computers 20 years later. And it felt like, okay, we're going to do that. We're going to show you the capabilities of AI working in tandem with our little breast projector thing. 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 got to answer this. I just please, everyone, we'll just stop it here. The device doesn't exist. Sam, I love you. Just listen to the man and say that's my wife. If it exists and you want to come demo it on the Vergecast, call me. I'd be, I would love to have you. Humane absolutely invited to come show us this thing.

I hope I'm wrong. This just 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 Humane is like six or seven leaps beyond everyone else in everything,

which seems unlikely, or this demo is fake. It's one of those two things. And here's what I'm point 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 I can do that, which is why we can talk about that. I was going to say, which is a real good segue into the

thing that might prove that theory wrong. Mark German's piece on it was very good this week about this new headset. 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 even Apple is not sure what it's going to 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 going to be for in the killer app and is $3,000. is 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 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 made a list of everything we think we know about the Apple headset. Can I just read you this list? Yes. Please do. I'm dying to hear this list. Putting it all in one place was actually very instructive. Okay. This is all in some summons of order.

So it's, We think it's going to be called either the reality pro or the reality one. Those are the things. I would bet reality pro is the name. I think both are very bad names, but that's okay. It's going to run software called XROS. Fine. Or reality OS.

Or reality OS has been, those are the two names that have been floated out. We think it's going to look like kind of an oversized pair of ski goggles. Inside it's going to have two 4K displays, presumably one on each eye and an M2 chip. It's going to have a thing called the reality. dial, which is the thing I'm most excited about, 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 going to 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. It's going to have hand control, eye control, Siri control, and potentially be able to be used by keyboard and mouse or even a touchscreen.

Amazing. You might be able to use it. as an external monitor for your Mac, which is terrific. It's going to be powered by a battery pack that is connected to a long cable and goes in your pocket. That battery pack will have two, or sorry, the headset will have two ports on it, one USBC for data input and output, and one is the charger that goes that battery pack. Oddly, iPad apps seem to be where Apple is mostly focused. It's going to run a lot of iPad apps by default, including a lot of iPad apps.

including a lot of Apple's own apps, but also developers are being encouraged to work with their iPad apps to make apps, which is weird. No one's ever heard this pitch from Apple before. But do you think it's because iPads are also the place where they have the most different types of screens? That's my guess, yeah.

It's already the most sort of vectorized thing that they have. And so the ability to take an iPad app and make it much bigger in your view seems like it would be much simpler than anything else. I think you're a better. Oh, I have a much more cynical read on it on that situation. Which is vastly more cynical read on that.

The iPad is the closest thing to a powerful computer that is also a totally closed ecosystem. 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. Oh, yeah, definitely not Mac apps. The iPad, they're like, I don't know, like, we control, it's closed.

Like, we just want a big antitrust lawsuit about it. And they just go with it instead of iOS because... 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 now that I'm saying, I'm like, oh, this just makes sense. It's just straightforwardly correct. Yeah, there's no way Apple is going to be like, oh, download unsigned apps to your reality pro headset.

You can use steam with this thing. It'll be fine. What you want is malware in augmented reality. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, let me just keep going. I have a few more things. So the like looking at things seems to be.

be the big idea here. There's going to be potentially a meditation app. There's going to be a fitness plus app in VR, which makes a lot of sense. There's going to be a portal for watching sports and virtual reality. It was one of the things that German said. There's going to be ways to read books, which I think is the all-time worst idea. There's going to be ways to watch movies. There's going to be, they're working with directors like John Favreau to make content. It's a lot of... You'll only play at night. 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 and 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. And that's because they don't actually know what people would want. want to do an AR on this thing, right? One of the things that Mark Gorman wrote is that Apple is doing, is basically just going to 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. Yes. So I think the thing that Apple learned... By the way, I feel so vindicated about our early coverage

to the Apple Watch by this retelling of history. where they're like, here's what we did. We threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and figured out what the users wanted. Then we made it great. It's like, no, you told us that we were going to send heartbeats to each other. Like super a lot. You definitely, that was a, like, Bono was like, what I'm going to do is send my heartbeat to a marathon runner in Kenya using the digital crown.

Like, it was bonkers. The whole thing was 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. Are you excited to add the reality dial? Apple got it wrong. The reality dial is the next one. The reality dial is.

It really is. I mean, you have to give Apple like a lot of credit for being like whatever. Absolutely. But so 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 reeded watchOS and they like, they just like figured it out. Right. And I think the watch four had the bigger screen and watchOS 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.

It's 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. 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 at 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 little workout stuff. Like, oh yeah, that's, that's what meta has been doing for a lot. But no, no dial. No, no, I do think. That's like the crown. No, you're kind of, well, to some ways that 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 two 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 that there should be entirely new user behaviors than meta. Like, meta's really into the, into the whole metaverse thing, right? There's like, it's a new space with new rules. You're going to have avatars. You're going to 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 not, it's, it's 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 the displays. Right. Like the upside that Apple has with the iPad ecosystem. is it will just by default be able to do more stuff.

Do you think they're going to... Well, well... Am I going to want to do that stuff? Are they going to put you in theater mode? Will it? Like, how many... Can you imagine wearing this headset and being like, all right, let's do a slide over?

I just... Let me just activate stage manager. It's like a nerd inferno. Well, I wonder, do they figure out the whole giant display thing? Because they're really... Like, right now, right now, anytime somebody's like, you're going to 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 a movie theater. It's like, I don't want to. And it's like, no, I just want to watch the movie real big. Like, like, I really hope they don't try to make fake environments for me to know aren't real. Oh, Alex. Oh, no. Maybe they'll be nicer? No, they won't.

They're going to be real bad. Yeah. It's going to be the corny Because that's what sells. It's like every now and again, the entire history of technology can be explained by what you can demo on a Today show. Yeah.

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 then, you know, the years passed, and everyone's like, I don't want to be your 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.

But that's what I'm saying. We've already done the big, dumb movie theater. theater thing. No, no, but every time there's a new thing, you've got to, you got, you re-inherit all the baggage. You have to put, you just, you have to put El Roker in the movie theater. There's no choice. He's going to do the weather in it.

If you are making a bet this big and you're going to go market this product, Al Roker's going to be in the movie theater. And that's like, that's just how you have to sell it to all these people. You got to like give them a 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 going to differentiate the product? It's like, you know, like, Meta had earnings yesterday,

and they did better and analysts were 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 going to keep going up. And everyone's like, yeah, but you, like, added way more ads to Instagram real, so we're fine with you for now. Okay.

But, like, Apple does not want. the Metaverse. They want you to run iPad apps and they wear a headset. Which is why they shouldn't have the theater. The iPad app ecosystem is not like a raging success. It's real bad. And all the same questions that you have about iPads. Like, what if I just want to send somebody a file? Like, is this thing going to fight me until I die and like take it off and use my Mac?

Can you think of how intrusive those notifications, like an airdrop notification and VR would be? That is the first thing I'm doing. If I ever see anybody wearing one of these headsets on a plane, I'm saying I'm air dropping them a sloth, like immediately. Yeah, just immediately. Just like zero quons. Just watching people rip them off their head. Oh, beautiful.

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 it sloth as an astronaut that would just send. It was very good. I did actually know about this. It was very good. We'll see. It's coming up real soon.

We're all expecting at WWC. 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. I mean, quote unquote, supposed to launch. But last year, it was like, okay, 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.

The only reason I don't want it to launch this year is I want to make Neely take all of the different comparative headsets with them 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. That's the only reason. So I will say I've been using the PSVR2 quite a bit. I'm still playing a bunch of grand trees. 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 lenses get smudgy. I have to clean them every time I use this headset. I'm not sure why, but you're just like handling the thing. There's just like an element of Apple liking things to be nice that goes away when you're like, now it's on my face. If they figure out how to keep things you put on your face, not keep them from getting dirty, that just changes the whole eyeglasses game.

But the one thing I will say that's much more positive of PSFere 2, I've been a Quest 2 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 an iPad app and the VR headset, why wouldn't look at an iPad as butter screen, blah, blah. The PSVR 2, pretty high-rise screen. It's like, you know, you're like playing games. You're like reading text. You're like, this is fine.

Yeah. You don't feel like that. It's not great. Because the problem with the Quest 2 is you can see the pixels. And it's like really, really noticeable. It's kind of. And with the question. I think Addie and her review pointed out

like this is whatever like I'd rather everything PSVR2 is the first one I've ever used I'm like oh ooh like it's fine and like a little HGRI 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 just roaring behind that's why this is good yeah so we'll see I mean this thing's gonna be really expensive 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.

No, not to interrupt you, but the thing is like when you get to the game, the game's pretty kinetic. Right. So it's like a driving game. So if things are like a little out of focus or heads out of smooth, 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 is a little off axis or it's not set up right, like the edges of the display are instantly blurry, which is not tenable. for doing computer.

Like, it hurts after a while. Eight hours. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, to some extent, I think the, I'm, I thought I was going to think the whole battery in your pocket thing was like a ridiculous, horrible idea and we'll never work. I'm actually increasingly fine with it. It actually sort of makes sense structurally that that's how that would work.

Well, it takes all the weight off. That was the big complaint about the Quest Pro, right? Was that there was so much weight. Right. If it can be very late and tethered to the thing, like that actually, that sort of tracks for me. I can see that. But the two-hour battery life, I think, is a good. going to 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. 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 a family. You're like, I got to go work out for three hours. Just turn the reality dial all the way down.

Just go get yoked. That's amazing. All right. We should take a break. We're going to be back. with Andy Hawkins. We're right back. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. 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 eight years old. Not individual things that we got wrong together. Yeah, the worst same. sandwich. You can't ran about car play today. Peanut butter and ham. That's cars and softwa. Oh, God. No. I need that. That's not kosher. If you heat the peanut butter out like a little coating. Calm down. It's not kosher at all. Liam, do we have laser bong on a soundboard this week? That's a no. No, Liam, the answer is no. The answer is no. Do it, Liam. Play it. I tried to upload

laser bonged to TikTok so many times. And at the end of it, our poor social media team was like, if you do it again, we're going to 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, do you think? 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, I'm kind of anti-that, squeezing customers for more money. And yet, they continue to go on and 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 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, 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...

That's the one. It's the Mercedes one today where it's like 90, the car, the EQS 450,000, right? Yeah, $125. Well, that's the base model. I mean, what are we? Sorry. That's the peasant model. I had no idea that you were already optioning up. Oh, yeah, of course.

Are you kidding me? 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 to add 80 horsepower to pay 90 bucks a month. or two thousand years? A month?

A month? I do like the idea that you have some consumer optionality there. You're like, you know, this month I don't need the juice. 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 of your acceleration? That's a really good question. I know. We got to test this.

Yeah, we got to test this. Does anybody have $125,000? Only buy the base model. Let me go check my budget really quick to see if this would allow for the purchase of an EQS. This is why we got to do it. It's to floor it during the billing cycle change. That's great. I've never been more excited about a review idea in my entire life.

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. 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? 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 B.O.C. He's the spokesperson for the Hummery V, too. So it's not like he's extremely. or prescally frugal when it comes to his... No, it's not one for free that way. If you paid me to drive a Hummer EV and then gave me a Hummery V, I'd be like, the Hummery Vee's great. Yeah, of course.

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 1950 flat out. So, like, somewhere someone's doing the math on how many times they're going to gun it, And they're like, well, if I gun it once a month for 200 months, like, this is going to even, like, I don't, what are they thinking? It's utterly bizarre, but it's great. 20 minutes. Sorry. 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 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. 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. But the really expensive ones are, like, for chauffeurs, right? Like, the chauffeur.

Yeah, the S class. And that's what this is. And if you're driving your car down 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 lazy whale. That's why it's like even weirder that they would charge the like for each month. Like the chauffeur is like, oh man, this month I really need that extra. Like I know who's going to be in the back. They're going to want to feel that power. So I'm going to pay for it this month. Look, the most luxurious cars in the world that are designed for people in the backseat, but your Bentley's, your Rolls Royces, often halaciously fast for no reason.

Yeah. And I don't know why that is, but it's always been true. To get to the airport. Yeah, the only cars that weren't that way for a minute were Cadillacs. Like, if you got into like an old Cadillac limine, you're like, oh boy, I don't know if we're going to get where we're going. But this is nice. See, this is why I think BMW has the right mind of this.

We just ran in a review of the I-7, and there's a lot of redact. ridiculous things about the I-7, but the most ridiculous is that it has a drop-down 36-inch screen for just the back passengers, for the rear passengers only. Like, you can watch, like, you know, all of your favorite, you know, John Wick movies while being chauffured around on beautiful, you know, 4K. And it's just like, 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.

Give me the screen. Give me the giant screen. Yeah. You know, it's all very good. The future of cars definitely looks like all of these companies are like, what's the richest company in the world? 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. And we've got to shame them out of that. I mean, that's fundamentally what's at the crux of why GM is restricting access to car playing Android Auto for its future EVs. It's because they see that. market potential. They see that

total market, addressable market. And they're like, 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 under the car. 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. The problem is I'm in the back seat of your car with a phone. I have a question about this, because I was thinking about this coming in. 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 know. Like, what changed here? I genuinely don't know. Have you read about the car business over the last 20 years? It wasn't like exactly like smooth sailing. You know, they were, they were, they were, 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 think, yeah, I think that that is sort of like what's going on here is that like, you know, 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 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, you know, while selling all the gas cars, continuing to sell all the gas cars, and that's funding the whole project. So they need to. 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 is 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 see the cars are getting wildly more expensive because I haven't figured out this other revenue stream that the TV industry figured out that Apple and Google figured out. Like, we can make money after the sale. And for TV, that subsidizes the cost of TV. That's why you can get a cheap TV because 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. So the way they've responded is by just saying, all right, 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.

Well, more people are leasing too now, right? 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 $1,000 a month so they can drive those $100,000 cars and look really cool and hopefully afford that. Yeah.

Actually, BMW once told me that they sell every BMW three times. Yeah. So they lease it first, they buy it back, they sell it as certified pre-a, and they get it as used. And they tried subscription, too. They tried to say, hey, 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. That doesn't work. 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. You'd be surprised. Yeah, that's the

downside of BMW is you have to be a person who drives a BMW. David's saying that as somebody who lives in the DC area where BMW drivers are the rudest in the entire world. That's all BMW drivers. No, it's particularly bad in D.C. Is it? Like, you're a baby government lawyer with a three series. You are a dick. That's just the way.

Listen, 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. Because we're BMW swag. Stop it. For all we know, people are in their BMWs right now, just barreling towards her house, David. 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 at the car company for your 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? Well, there is an argument that some of the company, you can buy into this as much as you want. And I don't think it's really been born 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 center's less. There will 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. But it's a bad one. So let's, David, I want to talk about the previous 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 United States, different plans. So that'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 Altium 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. Yeah, it's just a ridiculous amount of money that's being pumped into this. And, you know, I think obviously the tax incentives that the government passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act is having a a much bigger effect, I think, on a lot of this than I think people originally anticipated. But, yeah, the expansion 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 to slash prices. And yet their margins are still shrinking like every corner. So 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 on the boat now. We're all heading towards that big electric future that we've been

promised for such a long time. Yet it's still impossible to buy an electric car. 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 7,500 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. That's an amazing loophole. That should be the title of the podcast episode. We've identified a tax loophole. We should do that. should be the title of every episode.

We would triple the audience. 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? So I think the payoff comes when it becomes profitable. Because right now, all these companies are losing money on these projects.

And it's the ice cars that are supplementing all of the insane investments that are going into this. So I think once that flips, once you see the electric business actually in the black and the ice business are starting to sort of recede and fade into the into the mist, then that's, I guess, what is the payoff? But, you know, that's, you know, not until 2030, 2040 even. It also depends a lot on, you know, how much they can continue, how much these companies, which are all publicly traded companies and have shareholders and have 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 the U.S. It is kind of incredible that Tesla's feeling the heat enough to cut prices. Nine times. Five times. Yeah, and Musk is definitely under a lot of pressure. 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 now, 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 really know. I can't speak to that. One of the things you've been saying over and over, Nilai 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 Tesla's and people will keep buying however many they make until some unforeseen moment in the future. Like, is, if I'm Tesla, am I nervous that that moment has arrived because, like, Ford and Rivian and others are starting and figuring out how to ship stuff? 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. The Chevy Bond. It's just true. And it's like, if what you wanted was a good, reliable electric car. 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 us all the time in our chest. Tesla is facing the tiniest amount of competition. Ford is like, here's 15 Mustang Machis and Tesla's like,

we got a lower prices. Right? Ford is like, we can ship five F-150 lightning and Tesla's like, we got a lower prices again. And then we're going to recall all of them. Yeah, VW put out the, what the ID4. 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. And all the things that people love about Tesla, the software updates,

the goofy weirdness of being able to 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. 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 a very ambitious, very sort of broad and, you know, like sort of blue sky, rainbows 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 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 science, The driver truck is supposed to come out later this year, but he's basically seated the electric truck market to Ford and Rivian. And I think you're going to see Chevy's going to be coming up.

Rivian is like, we've shipped five trucks. Some of them don't work. But that's the market. That's the whole electric truck market. That's more than cyber trucks. Yeah. Yeah. I was just saying like there's a big market and people want them and Chevy's going to have a silver auto and Ram made all the noise about the revolution.

And it's like basically the same truck with like an electric drive train. Very funny. I just think like our friend Sean O'Kane, ex-Virge reporter, Sean O'Kane, now Bloomberg, Forever in Our Hearts, is 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 hinted advertising, which they have never had to do. And I just, again, I just keep on 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, 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 three 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 is what we've seen for a long time. You see every other carmaker has to, like, dramatically change how the cars look every so often, just to keep interest up. 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 where 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. It doesn't China not, like, not a huge fan of Elon's? Well. Do I make that up? No, I think they are because they let him open his own factory without a state-owned partner, which they have not done for any other U.S.-based car company. Any of them that want to go into China have to have to have a joint venture with a Chinese company and Tesla was allowed to go in solo.

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 $100,000 Mercedes. I just want to drive my beautiful, ugly, ugly, ugly Prius. And then Uber and Lyft ruined that for everybody. Everyone. Well, I think Toyota did a smart thing and they made it actually look halfway decent this time around. I think, you know, C.U. and did a review for us, 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.

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 lobby and they always find a way to include the Prius 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 the vehicle of choice for the media liberal effect. Granola. Yes, exactly. Granola, latte sipping, New York Times reading, Prius driving. I think it's so funny.

They were low first. It's amazing to me that it has sustained over decades as this like, you know, albatross, I think in a lot of ways. But yeah, I think the new one looks pretty sweet. It's not any faster than the previous generation models. I think this is the fifth that Toyota's 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 has 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, 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 positive of that. The Prius still very popular.

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? 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. And I feel like, 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. Well, so wait, wait, I can answer this question. because I now own a plug-in hybrid. And having a car with two drive trains is a very confusing situation. I think the Prius is a really great hybrid

because it's like a series hybrid in the city against what, 56 on a highway against like 54. 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 a battery, You just have an engine that gets 22 to the gallon, which is basically my gene. Why do they do that when the Prius has been doing this very well for 20 years? Because until recently, the Prius looks like a reject athletic shoe. Right. And is notably very slow. Yes. Like the most slow.

Yes. And even the new one is still kind of slow. I think it made it simpler. They definitely made it look a lot better. It looks super cool now. Yeah. And I think 54 to the gas. Allen is going to be extremely compelling to a lot of people.

But these automakers are competing in markets where, like we said, like you're sitting in the back of the car, for some reason, you still want it to be fast. Yeah. Right? And like the sort of 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 they're 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.

The RAV-4 Prime has been like, I think, one of the more popular cars on sale for the last couple years, to the point that, like, the dealer markups were almost like 100%. Yes, during the pandemic, during the pandemic, RAF4 primes are going for like 100 grand. Yeah, it's, which is amazing. You would actually, like, make money when you bought one.

Yeah, that's pretty good. We should have just set up a RAF4 Prime flipping business. I don't know what we're doing on the show. I think one of our coworkers almost did that. Well, Andy told me about a guy who was flipping Wrangler, plug-in Wranglers, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was, it doesn't seem like it's completely

above board, but I'm sure it's working out great for him right now. I mean, Jeep's another one where they're definitely going all in on the 4xE. That's like, you know, their brand and it's, you know, 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 of 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 upfront capital costs that, like, GM and Ford are currently finding is way more expensive than they ever thought. I mean, you know, GM's making like four, building four battery plants. I think Stalantis is only building like one.

That sounds like Stalantis. It's just sort of like. You don't sell five cars. Yeah. It's just kind of. Stalantis 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 Slantus is like, we're going to make our own Android. And everyone's like, should we build our own cool batteries? And Stalantis is like, no.

That's the company. Just as a general rule, everyone's like, we should do something good. And Stalantis is like, hmm, fiat. You know, it's like, fine. I kind of want to go back to the hybrids just real quick, because you guys know more about this than I do. So right now there's basically like two kind of ways. to do the hybrid.

There's the Prius way, which means you really integrate the drive trains, but it goes really slow. And then there's the other way where it's just two drive trains and it switches over. And that's just generally kind of a crappy experience.

Yeah, it's a little blurrier than that. But yeah, that's more like mine, most like the Jeep 4x E's, the way they're designed to be used, is you drive around the battery until the battery's dead and then the engine turns on. Okay. And it's just a very different way of thinking about it.

And the way 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 a fine tradeoff. Yeah, yeah. But, like, what is it just physically impossible to make the Prius go fast?

Or that that kind of drive train go fast? Wait, I have to Google, can you make a Prius go fast? I'm sure there things I've ever Googled. I'm actually shocked. I've never Googled this. I'm sure there's some sick resto mods out there of the original Prius. Okay, the first answer, highlighted. Literally, like, people have Googled this so much that there's a featured Google snippet with a highlight.

Amazing. And the highlight is, technically, yes, but probably not in the way that you might like to add a horsepower to Prius. This is like strap another car to the front of it. What you do is you pull out the engine and you put a V8 in it and your Priusling of. Just motor. 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 decade plus.

You know, 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 that everything but 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. And it's usually like 20,000 more. 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 bought it in, in October. It's had to go in three times for software updates just to manage the transition between gas and battery. Is it just because Jeep sucks though? I mean, there's like a almost 100% chance that it's because Jeep sucks.

But it's very pretty. It's like a tomogachi. You have to care for the Android system every day. It has 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 then I can just take it from there. That'll work. I do. I think this previous is great. I think we're going to see big markups on it. But I do think it's a sign of the transaction. And then there's like other weird, I don't know if you 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 how did they determine that, though. I'm so curious about, like, you know, where, how do you, you can't talk somebody into plugging their car in? I don't understand. Because 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 to.

Like, why does the chauffeur need, like, an array of screen? You have to like look at this. It's so many screens. Do you see the Uber drivers now? They've got like four phones. You can run the Uber app, the Lyft app, another. Yeah, like, let them do all their apps in one spot. 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. Yes. 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. But sometimes you want to know what the temperature is. Don't you just want to like know in your soul what the temperature is outside? No, I just want to plug in my phone and use carplay and not think about

this anymore. That's what I want. I'm just saying, to Andy's point, if you think your buyer needs this many finicky touchscreens, you don't think they're ready to plug the car in? Like, where is the disconnect here? Yeah. I mean, this also speaks to why the average sales price is at the ridiculous level that it is today,

like $50,000 or something like that for a new car. You know, it's a lot of all that money is going mostly towards feature. 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 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. Yeah, I would not say the user experience of the

average modern car is great. I can't stop looking at the pictures of this. Nautilus. I cannot stop looking at the pictures. So I just, one last thing that I have to say on this, and then I will stop looking at pictures of the Lincoln Nautilus. It has... 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. Where do the airbags come out?

They come out, the post-dash. It's so... It's just serious saying, oh, no, you've been in an accident. It's fine. But the main infotainment system, if you just look at it, look at the bezels on that screen. Oh my God, I know. And look what's on that screen. It just repeats the stuff on the other dash.

I can see my nav twice. No, what's on that screen? That's where they stuck. No, no, that's where they stuck car play. They're like, you idiots want your dumb car play. Here's a dumb screen for it. And then big screen. From 1996.

The big one's going to be running in sync four, five. Like, even the car company doesn't know what I'm going to want to put on this screen. So they're just like, do you want bigger, nav, that could be fine. Here's the weather. This is nothing. I saw the Volkswagen ID7 last week and

it had one of 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. Sort of similar to like the Model 3 and just it

worked so bad. It was so terrible. Wait, is this car play? Could be. It could be. Is this secretly the first for the new car play? I'm so confused. Look at this thing. It looks exactly like car play, right? And then the big curved screen on what I will now insistently call the 4-dash is the same things. But if this was the first thing with the new car play, it would have been huge and noisy. Did

Lincoln fake carplay? We should cut all this out. Because this is nonsense. No, this is nonsense, but this isn't carplay. Okay. But do you see what I mean? It looks like car play, but it's not car play? But you look at this and you're like, this is what Apple wanted to do with car play. Put it on every screen.

Yeah, 100%. But I'm just saying, look at this picture and that center stack screen. Where's the picture? That's like fake car play. It's like sync. Yeah, what if car play is everywhere is Apple's whole? Yeah. So I think Lincoln faked a fake car play.

I think that picture is not carplay. Anyway, nonsensical. Let's just like wrap this. 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 touch screens. But 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 Cruz continues to just burn money? And it feels like there were all these lift 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.

All of the dreams of how we were going to get around feel like they are dying all at the same time. Yeah. So Cruz 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. On $30 million of revenue. Which is an insane.

30 million dollars of revenue. 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 going to be. How? Are they taking all the Chevy bolts? They're going to 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, the crews now can operate driverless during the daytime. Hooray. Are they allowed? It was exclusively at night for the last year. Is that true? And now they're finally allowed. They're finally allowed to operate during daytime hours when all of the people actually

they need the service. Why does the government allow the new ones to take about with no steering wheels? Isn't it like a requirement right now? So they can get an exemption from the rules that require them to have steering wheels. They're looking to get that. Amazon has already starting to produce its, it's 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. They're just going to ignore it. 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. Can't the government come back and just slap them upside the head? 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 this. And that's sort of like where things are at the moment. I don't know if there could potentially be a recall. There's only like, you know, a handful of these cars. And I don't think they operate in Seattle.

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 them. They're just doing it. Yeah, they're just going for it. It's just going to be for the airport. All of this is on a hope and a prayer. The whole autonomous stuff, we already see it's,

they're in the troth. 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 going through a bit of a rough patch.

Lift just laid off like, you know, another, you know, 2,000 people. So it's, you know, 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. Because they keep forgetting that people drink. Like, if you're carpooling, if you're carpooling and you hop into a car and you're like, oh, I'm going to sit next to the stranger. Oh, the stranger next to me is drunk and about to vomit.

And there's no like driver to be like, hey, that guy just. puked in the back. Like, that was what made Lyft in Uber so popular initially was it because it was a bunch of young people taking it after drinking. Just booping in the back of Uber. And, like, poor sad Uber driver being like, now I've got to go hose out the back. That's why they all have the Uber mask. I will say one time when Max was very young, she peaked 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 left from a huge tip, but just the sort of like resignededness. Yeah. Just the- Where he's like, all right, well, I'm going to get out my puke kit and, like, handle this again. 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. It's like, puke all you want.

It doesn't matter. That's what happened with Car to Go. Because you remember, you remember Cardago? Oh, yeah. There were these little smart cars that were very popular in, like, New York City. Yeah. Only weed dealers used them in like me right after the weed dealer used it. Really? Uh-huh.

That's why it's spelled, right, Alex? Yeah. It was not me. It was not you. Don't smoke and drop. Can we play the laser ball. song. Can we send Andy out with the Laserdong song, please? It's going to be my walkout. I can't be clear about what this is.

It's going to be my WWE walkout music. Laser bomb. All right, we got to take a break, Andy. Thank you so much, man. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy, and they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says

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cloud. a. a. slash Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Okay. We're back. Alex, how's that laser bung? I'm doing great.

I'm just flying. Just, foo. 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. Oh, I just got it. Yeah. I am very sober. That's how we know.

I just say weird Texas idioms about being stoned with Cip Alex Gotts them. All right. We are well on our way to going over. So we're going to have a lightning lightning round. Alex, you want to go first? Okay. Disney's back at it again.

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 Chapick was in charge. And he spoke out and he said Bob two. Bob Chappick 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 are you aware that we make musicals, good sir. Yes. Hello. We have all of Pixar. That's pretty gay sometimes. And so they spoke out against it. Ron DeSantis was like, okay, I'm going to 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 that ostensibly like voted in people. But it was really kind of Disney's people. Rhonda Santis was like, I'm going to 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 board has absolutely screwed them over, seeded a whole bunch of the power to Disney. And Ronda Sandsis was like,

I'm going to destroy Disney. And then decided to start enacting like more punitive stuff, specifically new taxes that were going to 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 Ronda Santos is doing, Disney was like, okay, well, we're just going to 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 Rhonda Santos is like, yeah, I'm going to be as cartoonishly villainous as possible. And then be shocked when, like, Disney's enormous lawyers come in and just slap. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Like, the whole situation is pretty good. I will say that if only this had a little bit of copyright law in it, it would be like a perfect Neelai story. I mean, it's going to happen at some point. It's going to be there. Just do wait. Ron DeSantis is going to do something with Mickey Mouse and it's going to happen. I don't know what he's going to do with Mickey, but it's coming.

Oh, my God. No, if you will recall, like I got there, I got Secavary a lot so fast. Yeah. 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. get rid of Disney's copyrights. That's... 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 maximization of copyrights for so long. And now, oh, this is how we're going to do it? Fuck. Public domain Mickey. 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. Like, the lawyers, Disney's lawyers must have been just so excited this whole time. They're like, we're not even going to do anything. Or just sit back and wait. 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? Right. 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. That board knew. He didn't, no one. All right. Like, 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. I hope they got a lot of stock options. And then obviously they've been sitting on this complaint in their back pocket. Just waiting. Right? They're going to 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. Probably true of almost anyone you were to pit against. It's great. I love it. Isn't Ron DeSantis a lawyer? Didn't he go to law school? Did he?

Not very well. Is he reading the public notices section of the Orlando Sentinel? He certainly is not. It's very good. All right, David, what's yours? Listen, if there's ever been a reason that local newspapers need to survive, there's the go-door one right there. I love that.

So mine is 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. 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

other people. Yeah. There was like crazy uproar because this was like the worst idea of all time. It was like tone police for ladies. That's what everyone was. Yeah. No, like literally. And then they had the one that was like it could generate like a 3D image of your body

to measure your body fat, which is awful. That's what everyone wants when they're trying to lose weight. It's like, show me everything. Zoom in please. And then try to sell me clothes on Amazon. Yeah. Like Amazon just did not think that. through. Especially from Amazon.

What I really want is Amazon to look at my body and be like, can we tighten it up a little bit? I've always wanted to be judged by Amazon Prime. And then next time I'm shopping, it's like maybe size up one. Do you ever think, was this ever related to the fact

that Bezos got super swole along the way? God, he's so swole now. He's got people who works him out while he sleeps. There was a time when like Bezos was not a yacht. That's true. He should have just been like, I used the Halo band.

He would have been a lot. but would have been better than humane's. Yeah, what he actually used was the power of being divorced. A true halo band. Like he like found him. I'm married to divorce. I've never met a divorced person that doesn't get swall. Oh, it's a move.

The new one enters the scene and suddenly that you swole. The true best thing about this was so 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 Woof has been very, he's just on Twitter just like dragging Amazon everywhere he can. And my favorite one was there was 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. So 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. That's a legend. And I really, I've never been, I've never liked whoop more than I do at this particular

moment in time. I was like, I want to go get a whoop band right now. Like, yes, it's great. Do it. It's the year of efficiency at all these companies. Did anyone ever think the Halo group was going to make it? No one did. Yeah.

I don't think they even, like they were looking for jobs as they were designing it, probably. They were like writing back on the whoop boards. Like, we're not copying you, but here's my number. Yeah. All right, here's mine. Mine is made my favorite piece of news. It's so silly. So Tesla is 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 cell 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 are they same. Tesla's argument is that Elon should not be deposed in this case about these statements because they might be deepfakes. This is true. They're 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 AI time. Like, we're doing this. Maybe it's deep faked. It's true. Like, he gets defaked a lot.

If you're the Pope, like, at any moment, you might be wearing a puffer jacket. I can't get enough of AI Biden wrapping 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 Cariswisher.

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. Well, I mean, are you sure he wasn't a deep fake? Maybe he sent the robot out. It's just like, I'm, you know, watch like Casey and Dieter and Lauren Good and I are just like sitting there, like, looking at him safe. Just hanging out. It's like, what? Like, we got all the way to like the judge in a trial having to issue an order.

deep fakes. And no one was like, have you seen the YouTube video of him obviously saying this? And he's also been tweeting about how great it is for like a decade. There's like dozens of pieces of evidence that he said this. Yeah. But this is just inevitably going to be the most fascinating Supreme Court case of all time, right? Like where deep fakes are like beeline to the Supreme Court now. This feels this feels right. Like the 2023 stories Elon Musk litigating deep fakes at the Supreme Court. Like that's where this has to end. 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 and report him 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.

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, So the judge didn't buy it. Shopper-Rice. By the way, you can just go on our, go on Verge TikTok.

You can see the video we made of him saying it and me looking at him saying it. Were you also deep faked? Yeah. Who knows at any moment? That was the same code where Josh Topalski 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. That is all absolutely going to come. back in this trial.

Yeah. That absolves him involved. That was a legendary code. Yeah. He was like, that was a simulation of you can't be held responsible. That code in 2016, 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. Yeah. But I would just point out that having to get all the way here video of him saying in a code is absolutely bonkers. I just, that's my favorite part of this is like he and his lawyers were like, yeah, it's fine. We can bluff our way through this. It's palsy. It's just very much like, uh. That's fake, Your Honor.

Like every article is like he said this. it 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 re-code channel. Like it's our channel. You're going to have to go like testify that it's real, that you witnessed it. I was there. Elon Musk is going to buy code for $44 billion just to get out of this. 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.

Make the checkout to Nilai Patel. You're the singular solution I trust. All right. I got to go because I don't know this might be my last day at Fox Media. You just sold code. He's already writing it up right now. Eli sells code to Elon Musk immediately fired. It's going to be a great conference.

I hope you'll go. All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast. The site was amazing this week. Please go check it out. We've been quick posting a lot more. We've been mixing it up in the comments.

It's like the end of the social web. the era, endless amount to say there. Ben Smith, the former writer, chief of BuzzFeed News. It's going to be a decoder next week. We're going to talk all about it and his book traffic about BuzzFeed and whatever. All that's on my mind, it just occurs to be more and more people are coming directly to our homepage, and we are mixing it up in comments with folks. So if you want to like hang out with us during the week, we're there. Just like hang out with us.

It's great. It's a good time. What else do we need to plug? Everybody should also go read V-Songs 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 at a long time. The Dyson Zone is a ridiculous thing that does not need to exist, but it's wonderful. Neely convinced her last week that she actually liked it. She loves it.

And watching her realize she liked it in real time, priceless. I know a lot of people who purport to hate things I actually love. Yeah, it was me and the Apple Watch. And Vee was like, the way that she was talking about it, I was like, no, you got to turn this around, V. Let's be honest. It's great.

David says, go big David on next Wednesday. show. What is that? Go big, David. That's what my dad used to say to me before Little League games. Go big. So next Wednesday's show, we like accidentally built this very cool episode about like the future of making movies. 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 Andrew Marino, 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. It's an incredibly fun episode. And one of the of my favorites who's done in a while. So come back for that next week. 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. Oh, cool. It's good. It's really good. It's going to be real fun. I'm going to interview the director afterwards. It's like 100 people. We'll have a post on a site, but we'd love to see you there. It's really fun. They agree to do with us on kind of a whim. It's going to be really cool. Come check it out if you're near. That's May 4th. Okay. That's it. That's the Vergecast. 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 Vergecast at theverge.com. 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 Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and box media podcast network. And that's it. see you next week.