The Vergecast - Diving into Apple’s Liquid Glass

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

It’s time. The public betas for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and more are finally out for everyone to try. Jake Kastrenakes, Vee Song, and Antonio G. Di Benedetto give their takes on Apple’s Liquid Glass design language after two months of living with it. Antonio shares his experiences with macOS and the upgraded Spotlight, and Vee dives into the ups and downs of watchOS’s AI fitness coach. Then, Andy Hawkins and Eater's Matthew Kang talk about Tesla’s rough quarter, the new Tesla Diner, and what Epic Bacon has to do with it all. Finally, the Thunder Round returns, and we all learn what Labubus are. Further reading: ⁠Apple releases public betas of its new software updates with Liquid Glass⁠ How to install the iOS 26 public beta The biggest changes coming to your iPhone with iOS 26 ⁠Liquid Glass is fine, I guess⁠ ⁠Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign is shaping up to be a snoozer on Macs⁠ You can actually multitask on an iPad now and it’s the best new feature in 15 years watchOS 26 preview: a subtler take on AI ⁠Apple launches $20 subscription service to protect your gadgets⁠ Tesla’s earnings hit a new low, with largest revenue drop in years Elon Musk finally admits the new, more affordable Tesla is just a stripped down Model Y Undeterred by limits, Elon Musk plots a big robotaxi expansion Everything Eater Editors Ate at the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles The Full Tesla Diner Menu, Revealed The Tesla Diner Will Track When Guests Are Nearby to Prepare Their Orders Inside the New Tesla Diner in Los Angeles Anti-Elon Musk protesters are coming for Tesla’s new diner Faraday Future is back with another wild EV that probably will never get made Amazon buys Bee AI Jake: AppleCare One is a good deal, but not for everyone Uber’s making it easier for women riders and drivers to find each other The frenzied, gamified chase for Labubus 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

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of making things translucent, then a little less translucent,

then a little more translucent again. I'm Jay Castranakis, executive editor of The Verge. Neil Patel, David Pierce, those guys aren't here. They're at home. They're at home. They have newborns. They're taking some time off on parental leave. They'll be back later this year.

Today, we've got a really fun show. later on, Verge Transportation editor Andy Hawkins is going to join us, and Eater L.A. editor Matthew Kang is going to come on, and we're going to be talking about Tesla and the new Tesla diner. I thought this was a joke when they announced it. It is a real thing. They really announced this and launched a diner. Then the Thunder round is back, new and improved, as always.

But first, it's a big Apple week, so we've got to talk about Apple. We've got two Verge reviewers here to talk about it. In the studio with me, V-Song. Hello. And we've got Antonio D. Benedetto. Hello. So breaking news, like an hour ago, right before we recorded this, Apple launched the public betas for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26.

I think like everything except Vision OS. No, everything is 26. Everything is 26 now. You can now download them. You can try them out. Maybe don't if it's like your primary device. but if you got an extra iPad lying around, this is its moment. So big features across the board, there's Liquid Glass, the brand new design style

that is across all the new operating systems. There's new games app. There are lots of power user features, particularly on the Mac and the iPad. So V, Antonio, both of you have been testing these for a while because you've been in the developer beta. I just got my hands on with these because, okay, I got banned from the developer beta. Did you know that you can get kicked out of the developer? I did not know.

What did you do? I didn't think I did anything. So this is like new-ish, right? Apple used to require you to like pay $100 or something to get in the developer program if you wanted to get the developer betas. And a lot of people were like, yeah, sure. But recently, you've been able to like get in for free, which is great, right? Anybody can just get the developer beta if they really want to.

However, you have to fill out an application, right? There's like, you have to find some weird web pages. I know you both went through this, but you've got to find the right webpage. You've got to go to the application. And then it says, like, putting your information to apply. And I was like, yeah, sure, I've put into my information on a million forms on the web every single day. So I'm like, Jake, okay, here's my address. Turns out, if you do not precisely enter this information, Apple compares it to your Apple ID.

And they're like, no, no, no, this is not correct. This is privacy and security. Shut down. Oh, good. Down and out. You're done. One chance. One chance.

And you're booted. Your ban for life. I think so. I googled this. There's a bunch of people on Reddit who were just like, yeah, man, I tried, I tried contacting that. I've sent so many emails. Nobody responds.

There's nothing you can do. You just got to make a new Apple ID. You're just like, you're stuck. Oh, my God. That's, wow. The EU has to get involved, obviously. That's the solution. If Fortnite can go back on the app store, then you can get the developer made it again.

There's got to be a way. I should be able to lie on my developer application. Wow. I think it is inappropriate. that they enforced that I answer my name correctly. Did you spell your name wrong? I guess I, okay, I mean, yes. I think in fact, that is what happened.

And look, they got me there. I could have spelled my name better. But I didn't know they were checking. That's a little unhinged. Yeah, it's a little unhinged. That's honestly, that's like extremely apple of them to be like. Jack Castronachis strikes again. You have to do this precisely our way.

or you're not worthy of the developer beta. I wasn't worthy, you two were. That's, I'm sorry. So as to worthy fellows in Apple's eyes, you know, right, they announced liquid glass, they announced new operating systems at WWC, start of June. You've both been testing these in different forms, different devices for the past two months.

Liquid glass was like, you know, controversial. Liquid ass. How are we feeling two months in? Liquid ass. I do not. Well, okay, I have a more nuanced take rather than just it's all ass, which is it's ass on the iPhone. But it's okay on the watch and on Mac. Interesting.

It's okay on those platforms. And I think my problem with the phone, which I shall bring out now, because you were asking me earlier to take a little gander at it. And I can't read anything. I just can't read anything. Look at this. Look at this. So it's just, if you have any sort of background and any sort of background that is not like a solid thing or an ombra gradient, it's just so hard to read. And I think it's most visible in the messages app and in the music app because in the music app there's like this little bar at the bottom.

And if you're trying to read the name of the song that's playing with the album art is in the background, can't see shit. it's just how am I supposed to read this? How am I supposed to do anything about this? And in the messages app, if you don't like make the button outline something that you toggle on and the accessibility setting, it just blends into everything. And then, you know, I have, I have garbage eyes, so I just can't see anything and I can't read anything. And I don't want to shame you here, but that, that font is already blown up. That font, that's not a small font. It's not a small font.

I do, I have the big phone to blow up my font as large as it can. And like, if you're in studio, you could sit over there and you could read all my messages. I got nothing to hide. But, like, I need that so that I can read. And it's just so I had to turn on all the accessibility settings, which turns down the transparency, in which case there's no point in me having liquid glass on my phone. Does that get it to a usable place? It gets it to a usable place because it's much frostier. It's no longer liquid glass.

It's frosted class. But they've been changing it over the course of the betas, right? Like they made it like more frosted. And now I think in the most recent one it is glassier again. It's glassier again. I was like, has it gotten better for you? No,

not not. Well, there's like this new kind of effect where when you bring up the notifications, it darkens a little bit. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then you can like see it slightly better.

I saw it and I was like, listen, I already have my text blown up, blown up so that everyone can read it from Jupiter. Like, just just help a girl out. Help a girl out. Help a very, very blind as a bad girl out. Like, it's not, it's, I just can't read it that well. It's, it's all right when I talk to people who are also tech nerds.

And they've, so like our old merchandising guy, Parker, I chat with him every once in a while. And he, like, as soon as he's like, oh, you got the beta. Okay, I put a wallpaper up in our chat. And like, so there's like a wallpaper in our messages chat. and like it changes the readability of it so that I can read it a bit better. And, you know, in that one chat, everything is fine. But all of my other friends and my family is just like, oh, good Lord. It's very funny.

Do you have to optimize around it? Yeah, you really do. Antonio, is it like as extreme on the Mac? No, I feel bad, actually, that it's that bad on the phone and I'm not looking for it. So I kind of held off on installing it on my phone this time because I had a pretty bad experience last year with when Sequoia was in developer preview, absolutely wrecking my phone. But on the Mac side, it's kind of fine. It's just, it's like, I don't really particularly like it.

I mean, I called it a bit of a snoozer in my write-up on it, but it's just whatever, because there's so much more room on a bigger display that it's just kind of innocuous. It's like, okay, every time I look at like another MacBook error that I have on the side that I was still on Sequoia and I was looking one to one. I'm like, I just like that better. I think that looks cleaner and nicer. But then, you know, once you stare at liquid glass long enough,

especially on a 13-inch, 15-inch screen, a laptop, or, you know, a big monitor like I'm looking at right now, it's kind of whatever, because it's kind of tucked away. You know, it's in corners. It's in, you know, they move the widgets over to the desktop. You can still undo that, but it's on the desktop. And it's like, kind of, it's in the top left corner. Your menu bar is, well, it's invisible now, you can undo that too.

The dock is tucked to the bottom. And, you know, control center is, I never use control center. I use it. On a Mac? Yeah, I do use it. What's the point? Shortcuts. Like, they added little shortcuts in there that I was like, oh, I can scrape record a little easier.

That's nice. But I did get really angry because they changed the, like, the little icons in the control center for Bluetooth and all of a sudden, I couldn't access my Bluetooth devices easily. And I was just like, this is obscene. And then I went to edit. And I was like, oh, I could just put that back. That's fine. So, yeah.

See, but that's the advantage of a desktop operating system and why usually these things are like not such a big deal. Because there's so many different ways you can do all of this stuff. Right. I have like in this hop right in my corner, I can go to control center, but I have another Bluetooth like drop-down menu with one click. That actually has more controls. and, you know, the widgets are on the desktop now, but you still have the option to push them back to the old way. So, you know, that's the thing is I think, like, with an iPhone, iOS,

iPodOS, like those kinds of smaller screens and touch interfaces, you're limited in the way you have to use it. When Jay first, when Jay Peters first posted that picture of the, when the Delta launched day one and it was a control center swiped down on his iPhone, that screenshot like horrified me. I thought it was just so like hard to parse and it was just so busy. And I'm like, okay, the Windows Vista jokes and memes are true. There's something to that.

Like Microsoft can go ahead and, you know, try to own them like they tried. It's, but on a Mac, it's like, eh, it's fine. I don't like it, but it can kind of ignore it. And just, you know, it's just, I think the usual way of these changes is that we'll kind of just get used to them. It's like it's kind of a war of attrition. I think eventually we just adjust. Absolutely not. I will hate this forever.

Okay. Oh no, I'll still dislike it. I'll still look back at Sequoia. I mean like, that was better just the way a lot of us look back at freaking snow leopard. Like that was really great. You know, but I just think that like you just kind of get used to it. Again, on a desktop OS especially. You know, on a desktop to your point, like the larger screen, I think gives you more space to deal with the horrible transparency of it.

It's not necessarily going to be. be as bad, especially if you have multiple monitors, which many of us nerds do. Also on an even smaller screen than a phone, if you have Apple Watch, like you can see a little bit of the liquid glass and the numbers there or like in the passcode. It's so not noticeable that I don't care that it's on the watch at all. But on my phone, on my phone, a device that I am on far too often every day that has a ton of information and that, you know, what I realized from this experience is that, like, I'm using it to primarily read. Like, I'm reading my notifications. I'm reading my messages. I'm reading Theverge.com every day. And, you know, when you're going

through things, when notifications pop up, it's just a mess. Well, it's interesting. Like, I think another point of this is system UI is just so much more prevalent on a phone versus on a laptop or or a Mac like Antonio was saying. And so it's interesting because, like, Liquid Glass doesn't really get spread throughout third-party apps. Like, it's in the music app and you're like, this is really annoying and ugly. Yeah. But, like, if you're using Chrome on the desktop, I don't know, like, in full screen,

like, where is Liquid Glass? It's nowhere. Whereas on the iPhone, you, like, cannot avoid it. You can't. So, okay, here's my feeling. It's a little chaotic, and I love it, and I want more chaos in our lives. I think we should embrace, like, a slightly unpolished, imperfect, messy design.

Jake, I feel like you're chaotic evil on the D&D chart. Listen, is it a little hard to read? Absolutely. Is it like maybe a little, you know, not the most cutting edge thing, right? Is it something that like Windows did with Arrow like a decade or more ago? Yeah, of course, of course. Like, is this going to look dated at some point very soon? Like, problem.

But you know what? Go for it. I like it. It's weird. It's cool. I remember when iOS 7 came out, they were just like, right, like pedal to the ground, right? They're like, we're going all the way. It's going to be ridiculous.

I was looking at old, like, you know, beta 1 for iOS 7. There are some buttons, and it's like, it says like swipe. And I'm like, I don't even know where to swipe. Like, it's just like there's no button on it. It's just a big thing that says swat. And it's like, I don't know what to do with this. But it's like, it's opinionated. And I kind of love these like immediate post-redesign moments where you're like, this is a mess.

It's not perfect. But like they're trying something. This is sort of like the purest version of the idea. And it's a problem because like this is going out to millions of people. And it has to work for all of them. And so like you can't have major accessibility problems, which like making everything transparent is. It's a major accessibility issue. Yeah.

But like, I don't know. I don't know. I want a little, like, you're showing me these things and it's like, I can't really read this. And I'm like, yeah, man, let's scroll around a little bit. Keep on swiping. Eventually, you'll be able to read it. Is it opinionated, though, or is it just more on the chaotic side? I can't, like, I know what, I probably shouldn't, like, theorize or a conspiracy theorized.

But to me, it just feels like they are, like, Apple, they being the designers, like, but Apple as a whole is kind of. of just trying to distract from, I can't shake this feeling that they're trying to distract from like, oh, don't mind how Apple intelligence is kind of meh. And ignore that, you know, that new theory we talked about and even had an advertisement featuring a celebrity and paid a lot of money for that. Refrained about that liquid glass. It's just, and then they're just trying to fine tune it. I just, this is just speculation, but I just feel like they are like going a little seat of their pants here. Whereas I think,

iOS 7, I think, was it had something to say. It was initially a little off the mark. And they course corrected and, you know, they made that, made what they tweaked what they had to say. Here, I feel like they're just like tweaking for like, we got to make this work. We got to like jam this round peg into a square hole. Well, like the other thing is that liquid glass originates from famously the most successful Apple hardware of all time the vision from. And so like when you have liquid glass on the Vision Pro, it makes sense. You are in a mixed reality headset. You need to see through the menu to see what's around you in, I know I understand that most people have not had the horror or the pleasure or the privilege of wearing this gigantic, very heavy headset

on their face and looking around. Like, it makes sense in Vision OS because you need to see through the menu. I do not need to see through the menu on my phone. I need there to be a frosted glass there so that, like, there is contrast and I can read things because there are many things on top of each other. Like, I don't need to see through my phone. Like, maybe if I am going to put my tinfoil conspiracy hat on, maybe, you know, sometimes I'm like, yeah, I would like to see this carefully curated, picked iPhone wallpaper that I chose for my home screen.

I can't really see it most of the time. Maybe that's the thought behind liquid glass and the transparency. Having experienced the chaos, no, I was wrong. I was wrong. I should have a much more boring home wallpaper and a fancy lock screen and leave it at that because for me, readability is the most important thing. I at least appreciate that I can turn some of this off in the accessibility settings, but I wish it was easier to find in the accessibility settings. Because you got to go, you think there'd be like a liquid glass settings menu so you could adjust. You can't.

You have to go through the accessibility settings. accessibility settings and then guess which one. I think they need the opposite of an accessibility menu. There needs to be an option to just ramp it way up. Everything is see-through, like weird, twisted, warping glass effects everywhere. That's what I want from this. In a way, they almost do in that. So one of the thing that came to the Mac for this is the appearance and theming options

that were last year, I believe, on the iPhone. Right. So you could pick, you can make your widgets, your icons. all, like, tinted colors. So you have dark mode, and I put, to check out the write-up I did on it, I put a bunch of comparison screenshots showing what it looks like and all these different coats of paint.

And you can pick dark mode, light mode as of the whole OS. You can have, like, your widgets be default, dark, and tinted, and then tinted can be light or dark, right? Talk about chaos. It's a little confusing. And when you put everything on clear, it's like, yeah, there's glassy icons everywhere. and some stuff just looks ugly.

I think that they could, I think Apple could solve this a bit, or at least remedy this, by just giving you some shortcut themeing options within liquid glass in the appearance menu. I think if they, like, made it where it's like this, here, like click this and you get this nice little combination that's going to magnify the liquid glass effect

or tone it down. And in there should maybe even just be an off. And that could activate, you know, some of the accessibility features that could, Because I think if you turn off, there's an accessibility option called reduced transparency. And if you activate that, it's great. It kills, but it kills so much of the look. Like, that was initially the only way, yes, but again, we're talking on the Mac side where it's like, you know, it's passable, maybe.

But if in the first developer beta, that was, reduced transparency accessibility option was the only way you could have your menu bar filled in again. So the menu bar is the top band at the top of macOS, where your file edit view history, all that stuff is, and your icons on the top right. And it's also where on a MacBook or modern MacBooks, that's where the notch is. Right. So they were hiding the notch by having that filled in with the background. They turned the menu bar invisible, fully invisible, which now kind of accentuates the notch. It's not that big of a deal really. Again, I just, I noticed it for like a half hour.

And I'm like, all right, whatever, it's fine. And now I'm like, now they, they didn't backtrack, but they gave the option to fill that in again, kind of the old way. Or you go with the new default. The new default is invisible. Before you had to do the reduced transparency, but it would kill like everything just to get your menu bar back. So in that same way, I think they could just add in some options and some presets. And I hate that I'm kind of in a way like thinking, like I'm actually envisioning like the Windows 11 theme menu, which I know I don't want to really, you know, say, oh, hard. over to Microsoft where they're the bastion of no but but I just think that they could with a little

more direction because like they have these pretty you know screenshots or samples on when they announced liquid glass and announced the update that show all this cool like monotone you know color combo very aesthetic options you can change your folder icon colors to and tint everything it's really hard to make that look good and if you put the time into it sure you can make something maybe kind of cool or interesting and different. I just think they could guide people a little more with some fun presets or something. And yeah, let's turn an option to turn the glass up,

turn the glass down. That feels real. Like, I actually think that it's kind of surprising to me, but if you look at iOS versus Android, in a lot of ways, iOS has gotten way more customizable in terms of letting users change the look of it, at least the average user, right? You can go crazy on Android if you really want to.

But, you know, I think iOS, by default, has way more theme. options than my pixel does. But the pixel does try to do that thing where it picks out a few colors for you to make things a little bit easier. It just isn't as enforced across the operating system as Apple has it. We should talk more about the Mac, though, because I do think the Mac had some of the biggest changes in this release of operating systems, right? Obviously, Liquid Glass is the most notable one, but there's some pretty big upgrades to Spotlight in particular that I think power users are pretty excited by or maybe like pissed about because it's like just duplicating

what a lot of them are using Raycast for. Yeah. Are you Raycast people? I was an Alfred person. Alfred. Which is not as like real old school. So I know Raycast is better, but like I kind of got rid of Alfred after a while. And using Spotlight, it's fine.

It's not. It's okay. Like I haven't really felt super engaged by it. Like, I've tried to use it a couple times, and I'm like, I don't understand what, I'll just go back to this later. And then you don't go back to it because ADHD. But, yeah, it's there. It can be useful. I don't know, Antonio.

Like, how have you found it? Yeah. So I think the spotlight changes are actually, in general, all positive. They're welcome changes. I was not a Raycast user. I knew I was new of Raycast, but I just never used Spotlight that much. so I never thought I had much interest in it. But, you know, now I think the new change to spotlight act as a nice on-ramp into that,

whether you want to go into that world of, you know, crazy, you know, button combos for all kinds of stuff you can shortcut. But it's like, it's Raycast Light, basically. And it makes sense for it to be more approachable. You know, if you go with like the keyboard commands, you can build this new muscle memory to do things faster. You know, on a Windows machine, I hit the Windows key. type it, start typing in an app and quickly open it. And I'm kind of used to that. You can always, you've been able to for a while, like, use Spotlight in the same way. But now you can do a little further with it. The biggest thing for me is a clipboard history, right?

You can actually, for like the shortcut is you get command in space and then just command in number four. And boom, you've got clipboard history. And it's for the last about eight hours that you can recopy anything that you copied before. It could be a file. It could be, you know, just a little snippet of text. It's smart enough to know that if you copied, like, a password in a password field, it won't populate that. But if you copied that password out of plain text, I tested this just to make sure you should not do it to put passwords in plain text, obviously.

But then it won't know, and it doesn't, it doesn't like cross-reference it to your passwords. So, yeah, it'll just be there. But that's why it's only an eight-hour limit. For those power users, you can have a clipboard history that's like months long if you want to. And you can like pin things. So like if you, I don't know, like always send a canned message to people or someone like that or like are putting like, I don't know, your address to your shipping address to people pretty often or something like that. You can pin it there and you just have it ready to go. That leads to all kinds of or it can lead all kinds of privacy concerns.

Then again, if someone's on your laptop and it's unlocked, they probably have access to all kinds of things. But no, I think overall the spotlight changes are nice. I mean, you can go a little deeper. You can use it with shortcuts and, like, tap into certain Apple intelligence actions as well. That's, again, like, a little more extra power user stuff. I've never been, like, a shortcut sicko. Like, the people that I've seen that are using it are, they're really into it. And I think I think that's just going to help them.

If they're not already in that, like, Raycast, there are other options, too. But, like, you know, I'm just using that as one example. But if they're already in that world, like, they may be. just don't even need, you know, less integration. But overall, I think the spotlight changes are nice. I think I want to see, I want to see Apple grow this and make it better slowly and make it where that's that more approachable on ramp. And yeah, there's going to be those guardrails like that eight hour time limit. I wouldn't mind them raising that a little bit, maybe 18 hours, 24 hours. But yeah, I think overall spotlight, good. So I, I've bounced off Alfred and Raycast probably

100 times. Like, I, right, like they feel like they should be for me. Like, in my browser, I have all kinds of quick search commands to, like, you know, quickly search like The Verge or Wikipedia or all kinds of other websites. I find them like, I could not live without them, right? But the idea of having, like, one toolbar that shortcuts across my PC, like, I don't know. It's honestly, so much of my computing is just in my browser that I don't quite understand what the use is. I just, like, haven't been able to tap into it.

And I am sort of hoping that maybe these spotlight changes, you know, give me a little bit more of that power without all the complexity. Again, those apps seem great. But it just requires you to rewire your brain. Yes. And the older I get, the harder that is. Like the harder it is, the more time it takes. And I just go like, what was that command that I just programmed three hours ago again? And I will forget because I'm switching to a different platform and a different system.

So I think we sometimes have a verified problem. But if you're using the same system and you're using the same programs, like, I think it's a little more lending itself to that process. And I also think there's like sort of different, you know, when you're choosing something that has such a different way of interacting with it, it just like takes a minute. I use ARC browser every single day now. And I like could not be organized without it. I also bounced off of it like five times. And when I first use it, I'm like, no serious person can use this browser. Right.

like this is for people who do not do work, which I don't know, you know, listen, come at me. But, you know, it is one of those things where it's like, actually, maybe you just do need a little bit of an on-ramp. So it does not sound like this is the death of Raycast by any means. And if anything, it sounds like this is like maybe team people to understand that there's more potential there. That feels like it was probably like the single biggest thing. I think what? There's the games app. I don't know if anybody's using that.

There's a new phone app on the Mac. Okay, the phone app. Are you hyped for the phone app? Okay. It's so stupid and I'm showing like the most suburban dad energy right now. But like to like it's just, it was stupid how super helpful it is to just like make calls to doctors offices and like my town about like some documentation I had to submit or whatever. It was like it just helped me a little bit to be like, oh, I should, I could just do that right now like while I'm still while I'm working and kind of multitask that as opposed to usually.

I'm terrible about making those annoying calls. And it's like, I put it off and I put it off. And next thing I know, it's five o'clock and all those kinds of places are closed. So it's not a big deal really. But yeah, the phone app, it operates just like the iOS phone app. It's totally fine. And it's just effective. And even just like while I'm typing and just doing other stuff, just to like sum it up and make a quick call. And I'm just, I'm not even like putting on headphones, earbuds, anything. I'm just like just talking to my laptop and like does a good job handling the sound, not having echoes.

No one's ever complained of like, can't hear you. They're perfectly clear. So yeah, phone app seemed so innocuous, but it's good. I mean, legitimately, why didn't they have this forever? Right? Like this is like, it's like not exciting, but it is so functional. They had FaceTime for a while, but like FaceTime, I don't know. I've always had problems switching FaceTime calls from my phone to my watch to my, to my Mac.

So I'm happy to hear that the phone app isn't as bad as that. So yeah. And you can even listen to your voicemails on it too. Again, it's for people, this, again, it's one of those things like, if it's for people like us where it's like, if you're on a computer all day, it's just kind of handy to have that stuff right there without, without having to stop what you're doing and pick up your phone to do something on the side, which just leads to other distractions.

And so, yeah, I welcome the phone app. the games app is just I don't know why it exists it's there it lets you look at the games that you play and then you think about how you spend your time

which I spent a lot of time in the Sudoku app apparently so it's kind of and on MacOS the games app it actually was it was pulling games I downloaded from Steam but it was hit or mid

like you could almost use it as a launcher for all of your games but how many games do you play on your Mac, unfortunately. It's just, come on. It's, that's just the reality of gaming happen on the Mac. They're going to make it happen. Ray tracing. It's so aspirational. I want them to. I actually, I genuinely want them to. Like, when I reviewed the most recent like M4 Max MacBook Pro, I'm just like, I'm sorry, I have to say, like, the elephant in the room is like, it would be so nice for someone who's like creative, like people I work with, like photographers I work with that buy these kinds of like heavy-duty

Max for like a Mac Studio or a MacBook Pro, like, they would like to actually play games on them. And it's like, but ultimately like they're just, it's just still not enough. If they, if Apple could really get their get their stuff together with like a proton layer like setup, like I know they have their game toolkit, but it's not a porting toolkit, but it's not fully there. Obviously, you need developers to, you know, sign on. But like, I don't know, man, just try with more developers than like Hadeo Kajima and like Capcom and I guess now CD Project Red again cool cyberpunk on the Mac cool

but you know again so the games app is just like It's rough when Nintendo beats you to cyberpunk That's that could not have foreseen that Okay V I want to make sure I ask you about watchOS 26 There's a new fitness coach what is this so you know Apple intelligence right at at Dub They were just like, it's on our ecosystem of devices. Because, you know, watch got left out last year.

You know, didn't have Apple Intelligence on the watch last year. Now they're like, yo, Apple Intelligence is on the watch this year and workout buddy. I don't know if, I don't know if that's like a threat or an upgrade. It's a thing. It is, yes. It is a thing. So like in the keynote and the sizzle reel for workout buddy, you see this woman and she's running and the workout buddy's just like, nice crushed the pace and you know the the thing that happened to my phone in real time while I was in

that watching the keynote was people going like am I going to hate this am I going to hate the what's going on it am I going to get yelled at by an AI you're not going to get yelled at by an AI it's actually kind of like not really there for a lot of workouts it's so the the thing that's is it is this like Spotify's AI DJ where every once in a while it's just like yo V good pace. Kind of. And you're like, oh, like, I didn't need this, but. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

So basically the AI elements of it, you do need to have an iPhone that is capable of Apple intelligence, which is why I needed two iPhones to basically test this beta. Vee games to office today. And she's like, got a light day, only two phones on me. Only two phones on me? And only two watches on you. Only two watches on me. Well, there's only one for each wrist, but, you know, I have been carrying around three

phones for the last couple of weeks, like a psycho, because I needed my main iPhone is a 14 ProVax, does not have the Apple intelligence features. Therefore, I could not test Workout Buddy on the watch that was paired to that. I needed my iPhone 16, which was paired to a different Apple watch, just to test Workout Buddy. So that's my dedication to all of you. But Workout Buddy basically has three voices that are trained on the Apple Fitness Plus trainer's voices. So you can choose your version of peppy, a peppy voice in your ear. And then when you go on an equivalent, or like not an equivalent, when you go on an eligible workout, you're going to get a little summary at the beginning where it's just like, hey, V, you're about to go on an outdoor walk.

That's great. Love that for you. You are kind of ahead where you would be at this time of day for your rings in terms of closing it. Go and crush it. And then depending on the workout that you're doing, you may get motivational tidbits in the actual workout itself. So if you're going on a walk, you're going to hear shit. But if you're on a run, on a run at the mile pace, it's like, you crush that mile and insert pace here. You were listening to straight kids when that happened. Love that for you. Keep going. And then if you hit a PR or a milestone, like that was your hundredth mile of the year. Love that for you.

And that happens. And then at the end of the, the workout, you basically get a, you did great. You totally closed your ring. And I love this for you. And that's workout buddy.

This feels like, like upbeat and pleasant, but not helpful. Is that like? It's okay. Like, this is exactly how I feel about Spotify DJ, where I'm like,

I don't know why this AI voice is talking to me. This is just a playlist. But it's actually, there's less music. But like, okay, it's fun. It's fun. I'm like, I did just listen to that song. Yeah, no, Apple told me that the idea was to bring more delight and motivation into the workout. Yeah.

Because let's face it, working out kind of sucks. Like, it just does. Listen, I've never wanted an AI therapist, but while I'm working out is the time. I've never, I'm never happy when I'm working out. And if somebody could work through that with me, I think that might. It's not the worst thing in the world. It can be a little chatty. You do have the option to turn it off.

Is it better than other, you know, workout apps that have had voices like telling you to pick up the pace or to do whatever? Not particularly, but it does have more of your historical data. What I wish it would do was it'd be like, hey, you're going pretty fast on this first mile that you have planned out right now. It is 86 degrees out with 92% humidity. Slow down, girl, you're fine. Like, that's what I would love from that. And it's not an AI chatbot. It's not any of that sort of thing.

So this is the thing. It's just so it's like not even V1. It's like V0, right? None of them actually have the data yet to tell you the smart thing. Yeah. Or like the really smart thing. It's just like one or like one and a half turns short of where I would like really find it helpful and useful.

But as far as like a motivational thing goes, it's fine. Can you talk to it? No, you can't talk back to it. So like that's the, that's kind of like the disconnect where you. You know, like, is it actually AI? Well, yes, but not in the way that you're probably thinking, but pretty on par for where fitness AI is in general at this point. But they, like, marketed this as the big marquee thing of watchOS 26.

What I think the real star of watchOS 26 is is the wrist flick and or the flippy flip. Because we have the pinchy pinch coined by the verge, Dan Seafurt, for the double tap, which is the gesture that lets you just, like, go through the widget menus. If you wake up, there we go in this watch, wake up. So you can double pinch and you can go through all that stuff. Now you have the flippy flip or the wrist flick where you just dismiss stuff. So if you have notifications that come in and you're just busy, you can just go like that and it'll dismiss it for you. So you can.

That's actually like legitimately huge. So like with a software update, like add like an entire new like button effectively. Like that's great. Because you're out and about you got you got. You got stuff going on. You're like, I can't take this. Boom. It's gone.

You're like, whoo, love that. Love that. And then the other thing is the smart stack now has a little icon. So the smart stack is like, I bring up this little widget menu. There's all these widgets. It'll surface the most relevant thing to you in that moment. And there's a little icon. So when I was taking a picture for the thing, it was like a little icon of my camera.

So I could bring up the remote, the camera remote on this thing. And can I tell you something? I think liquid glass looks all right on the watch. It does. It does. It's fine on the watch. Watch. It's on the phone. Because again, you don't notice it.

Yeah, it's just so indiscreet. It's so interesting because Liquid Glass is like the big splashy feature that everybody's paying attention to. But there are so many actual, like, powerful functional updates. And the one we haven't talked about yet is on the iPad where you can now have free floating windows, right? It's not the weird stage manager thing anymore where Apple will control the windows for you, which I think is like very delightful that they spent years building this alternate multitasking. system because they're like we cannot the people can't handle windows windows are too much for them we have to control the windows for them and finally finally they're just like all right let's see what

happens let's go crazy it's great and they have there's a mouse there's a mouse pointer on the iPad now before that this they were like you can have a circle you get like mouse that doesn't exist a pointer no I think it's you know because it's really funny because this is the thing that everyone has wanted for iPad to be more like a Mac because of, you know, there's always someone who's like, oh, I want to use my iPad as a Mac because I don't actually want to buy a Mac because money and price points and whatever reason. And they finally gave it to us. And I was just like, I still don't know if this is going to work, but I love that it's there.

The thing that drives me crazy is I think that Apple's like hardware innovation has leaned so heavily on the iPhone iPad side of the house and the Mac has lagged behind in some ways. Not talking about the processors, but like the functional extra features, right? If you look at the iPad Pro, right, you've got this great front facing camera. You've got face ID. You've got all these rear cameras with LiD. I don't even want this. And I think the operating system is just very lovely to use in a lot of ways. It has a touchscreen. But the problem is that the iPad software has not allowed you to use it like a laptop, right? So every time that I'm looking and saying, I need to buy a new main computer, it's always going to be a Mac for me, right? Because it just

can do things in a regular way for all tasks. And the iPad is like maybe finally getting there. And we'll see, right? There are still limitations. It's funny. I like plugged my iPad into my monitor slash dock last night. And it's like, oh, the wireless mouse doesn't work because it docked through the monitor. And it's like, look, these are like, you know, minor extraneous things, right? But, you know, the iPad is finally getting background tasks. It finally has windowing. And it's like, okay, maybe I can actually use this as a computer. And it's really nice to see the power of the Mac increasingly coming to the iPad so that you have an option if you are somebody who like me is like a big hardware nerd and like wants to get all the cool features.

Give the people what they want. That's just what they should do. And if people have been wanting this for iPad OS for ages, at this point. So, yay. Give them windowing on an iPad and give them a touchscreen Mac and then people will be, I mean, the buttons for years, the buttons on the Mac have gotten more and more touch-looking, touch-friendly and liquid glasses just even furthering that. Again, look at that control center on Tahoe. You know, so this could, maybe, maybe that there's very, very slowly converging.

Yeah. People will be happy. Antonio, it'll take 10 more years probably, but maybe. It's so funny. Todd Hathleton wrote for our website about iPadOS 26 beta, and he talks about the stoplight buttons in the corner. And he's like, yeah, when my finger gets close to the tiny button on the iPad, it just gets bigger. And then I can touch it. And he's like, Apple has no excuses to not just put a touchscreen on the Mac. Like, they solved it.

Like, it's easy. It's doable. They figured it out. Like, let's make it happen. Give the people what they want. Give them what they want. We'll get there. We'll get there someday. All right, we've got to take a break.

Antonio, thanks for joining us for this segment. When we get back, we'll have Verge Transportation Editor, Andy Hawkins, and EderL.A.'s Matthew Kang to join us to talk about Elon Musk. Starting a restaurant? He started a restaurant. Sure. We'll be back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. We've got some new people in the studio. Joining me in V is Verge Transportation Editor, Andy Hawkins. Hello.

And joining us from LA, Eater's lead editor for Southern California, Matthew Kang. Hey, how are you? Good. Thanks for joining us. I'm really excited to talk about this. This is sort of a surprising one, right? So Tesla, it's had a weird week, right? They just had their largest revenue drop in years, which is not like great news to share. And the same week, they announced that they opened a restaurant, which is like maybe not what their investors are asking.

for, maybe not what their customers are asking for. But is, you know, more positive news? I guess, Andy, like, what is the state of Tesla? Because I feel like it has been very, like, frantic since Musk stopped doing Doge and went back to work, right? There's been the robo taxi. There's the diner in a how. Yes.

But how are things over there? It's been a crazy half year for this company. But no, yeah, the diner announcement was very. interestingly timed, I want to say. Like, I feel like it opened right before this earnings. I don't want to suggest that it was strategically done this way, but it certainly seems to have been intended to like kind of like overshadow the incredibly bad news in this earnings report, right?

Like you have this shiny new diner that's opening up. And, you know, I can't wait to hear what Matthew has to say about it. But it's just like, you know, the timing right on the heels, right before this horrible earnings report It just seems really convenient, is all I'll say to start out with. But yeah, no, terrible earnings report. Third consecutive drop in revenue, in earnings, and sales. And it's getting worse. Why are they falling apart?

Because I thought these cars are wildly popular. No, they're not. They are not. I have a car guy for a spouse, and they are not well put together. That's a whole other issue. That's a whole other issue. The quality of Tesla's vehicles has been a lot. long like simmering problem for that. But the problems the company is currently facing have,

you know, everything to do with sort of the Elon of it all, as we like to say on staff, right? Like, you know, he came out in support of Trump last year. He spent $300 million to get him elected. Then he took over Doge and he made some fascist hand gestures and, you know, everything that's been going on up until this point. And then we saw the Tesla take down protests and, you know, sort of a very concerted effort by people who are very, you know, concerned about the direction this country is going in. And they decided it to, you know, organize around protesting Tesla, boycotting, trying to, you know, basically make the brand toxic.

And I would say that they have been successful in that, as, you know, as we've seen in these earnings. So, you know, Tesla, right now, they're in what's called double digit territory where they are down, the revenues down double digits. their profits are down double digits, and their sales are down double digits. And that's just not a good place to be for a company like that. This is really nerdy, but there's this thing in your story that you kept talking about where they have this regulatory credits problem that seems to be sort of one of Elon's own

making too, which is, can you tell me like what are these credits and what is about to fall apart here? Yeah, the credit situation is really fascinating because it's really an under-discussed aspect of Tesla's success over the years. So we have, you know, in the United States, something called the CAFE standards, where automakers need to meet a certain threshold for emissions sort of across their fleet, right? And so the idea is that, you know, if you increase emission standards, cars get used less gasoline, emit less carbon emissions, less pollution, and we're better off as a society. And so for many, many years, Tesla is an exclusively electric vehicle company, has no emissions across its fleet. So they were earning these, they were able to sell these credits that they were earning from the government to other automakers that have more of a mix of gas burning vehicles and electric vehicles, mostly gas burning vehicles.

So they would sell their credits to companies like Ford and GM and Dodge and Chrysler and all these other ones. And that was a huge, huge, huge source of revenue for the company. One that has not, you know, you think of Tesla as a successful company based solely on the fact that they make these electric cars that people like, well, actually, they, they, I think for the past decade alone, had been earning around $11 billion from regulatory credit sales. 11 billion? 11 billion. And last year it was like $2.5 billion, which made up almost 50% of the company's overall net income or profit, essentially. So half of their profit came from the sale of these regulatory credits.

That's about to go away because Donald Trump and the Republicans decided that this is not a good thing anymore and they're going to get rid of it. It's just so rough where it really does. feel like so much of Tesla's challenge right now is of Elon's own making, right? He made cars that people like, and then he made people not, at least he made the people who really like electric cars, right, a good chunk of that segment, not like him. And then he helped elect the people who are going to get rid of the money flowing to environmental causes. And so, you know, now he's just got to be an automaker and compete on that.

And like, it really cannot be under-emphasized. the amount of a face plant that this is for something. This is a historic level face plant for a human being. Like to spend $300 million to get one guy elected and have that guy come into office doing exactly what he said he was going to do during the campaign, which was eliminate all these incentives and credits and all of these things. And have that be such a negative effect weighing down your own company. And that is the primary source of his wealth, popularity, you know, his status.

his reputation. I mean, you know, SpaceX and whatnot. But Tesla is really like, that's the money bags for him. So I will say, like the one thing that you can't knock Elon for is his ability to do maybe like too many things at once.

Not always, you know, to their full potential. The Robo Taxi rollout has started. But at the same time, right, this week he launched the Tesla diner, which Matthew, you actually went there. Matthew, can you give me like a, like what is this diner?

This is a real restaurant. Like, he's serious about this. It's not just some pop-up. Oh, no. This restaurant was sort of based on a diner model, like car hop, sonic, that kind of thing. And he announced it actually was announced in like 2018. So back then, certainly, we're like, oh, this is, this restaurant is vapor aware and we're never going to see it. And so seven years later, they announced that he was partnering with a very competitive.

restaurant tour and a well-known L.A. chef. And it opened, basically surprise open. They didn't invite anyone in. They didn't do any, like, media, nothing. And so Monday morning, I schlepped out to Hollywood and beheld this two-story kind of rounded. It looks like you're at Tomorrowland in Disneyland kind of a thing. And there's like robots serving popcorn and they have screens where you order. And at the end of the day, it's just like it's diner.

They have burgers and fries and pie shakes, like just kind of like just real normal food. It is shockingly basic considering it's a Tesla product. There are also like 80 charging stations next to it. So I guess the idea is that it's going to be a model of an amenity for charging stations that could potentially open all around the world. That's kind of the innovation here is that, you know, he has long talked about, you know, the fact that, like, you know, charging stations in America, especially the supercharger stations, they're kind of like in the middle of nowhere. Often they're in, you know, big box store,

parking lots or, you know, along highways. And they're not, they're not real destinations. And I think he was trying to go forward with this is, you know, you have to plug in your car. And usually it takes like 20 or 30 minutes for you to get like a decent amount of charge. Why not get something to eat? Why not, you know, mingle with other Tesla owners? Like the idea behind it seems pretty That's actually a pretty good idea because I went on a road trip in one of the fully electric BMWs around the holiday season and trying to find a charger that would work got increasingly dicey. Oh yeah. As we were going, it's just like, oh, I guess we can go to this mall and there was a line at the mall of all of these Teslas trying to get the thing. And it's like, well, we have 23% charge left on this BMW.

are we going to find we got down to 7% we got down to 7% at a wah-wah and this Wawa had only one working charging station so I could we were we hungry by the time we got to the Wawa yeah so I could see this working but at the same time no just big no I've done that I've sat in the Walmart parking lot for a couple of hours while on a road trip and it's Like, it's not the most fun. It is, but like, this sort of makes sense, right? You can do this in LA. It feels hard to imagine this existing on the side of, like, the PA turnpike.

And, like, you know, this is like a destination. It's so interesting. All the photos I've seen of the Tesla dinosaur far, every single parking spot has a cyber truck. Yeah. Which I can't tell if they just, like, parked them there. Or if it's just every cyber truck owner in L.A., like an alarm went off. And they're like, here, now, go.

They got notifications on their infotainment screen. Well, there is, Matthew, you're telling me there is some, like, special feature where if you have a Tesla, you can, like, roll up and it will, like, auto order for you? Not quite. So basically, probably in a car industry first, you could place your order on your car screen. It doesn't matter where you are. Like, I could be home. I live in Torrance, like 30 miles away from the restaurant.

If I pull up the app, the diner app on my screen, then it will look. exactly like the screen that you would see in the restaurant, like to order food and drinks or whatever. And I think we're pretty used to ordering food that way now because, you know, they want to get rid of staff at the counter to take your order. And all you need to do is put your order in and I guess your payment stuff is already in there because of your charging. And when you cross like a geo fence, as they've called it, like it's like 0.6 miles,

about 15 minutes in L.A. that could take forever. but you know, 0.6 miles, once you approach the diner, then they'll get a notification to like start making your food. And then once you, I guess, park in a, if you park in the lot and you start charging your car, you'll get an option like, hey, do you want to get your food in your car or do you want to come in the restaurant? Something like that. It hasn't actually launched yet. I don't think it works in the way that they've quite intended. But I think this feature was supposed to be one of the more important aspects of the diner. that does like lend to the idea of like this is sort of this amenity for charging, which is so interesting.

I think like you hear there's a restaurant, you see these photos of like the interior looks lovely, right? It looks like this like, you know, retrofuturist. And I guess like other non-Tesla EV owners can charge there if they have adapters or if they have cars that have supercharger ports on them. I refuse to have the adapter. I don't think that some of these like menu features would work on the BMW for example. But it does sort of speak to like this future that Tesla has a. where you can just do all these things seamlessly and it's all integrated. All your information is right there.

I do think that if it ends up actually working would be a pretty cool thing. Okay. But my big thing is how was the food, Matthew? This is a diner. That's the most important question. You know, like restaurants, sometimes you go to a restaurant for the vibe. I will not be going to a Tesla diner for the vibe. I will be there because I need to charge a car and I'm hungry.

So of those two components, how is the food? Because I looked at the menu, epic bacon, $12, $12, $1, $13 for a hot dog in this economy. I mean, I don't think the, first of all, the food, you know, I'll just, let me just preface all of this by saying, you cannot imagine the amount of hatred and like negative feedback that I have gotten, like just covering this restaurant. like people are so upset. And if you look at the eater, Instagram comments, there is an incredible amount of, I guess, anger,

just the fact that we're covering it. Like we should have just passed on it or something like that. But, I mean, there were hundreds of people waiting in line for it to open. Some people waited hours. It's a 24-7 restaurant so that you could, you know, the birth of a new 24-7 restaurant in any big city is kind of a big deal now, given where, you know, costs and labor are. So either way, like, we were going to cover this restaurant.

And of course, we approached it with as much, you know, knowing who Elon is and what he's done and everything that the company represents. At the end of the day, we're like, look, they hired Bill Chait, who is a prolific L.A. restaurant who's behind Republic and Bestia and Tartine. And he's very competent as an operator. I've known him for a while. And they hired Eric Greenspan, who's, you know, I think claim to fame. He opened a grilled cheese restaurant like 10 years ago. in L.A., but he also was the chef behind a bunch of ghost kitchens like the Mr. Beastburger. And he was like, when I saw Greenspan there, he was like, oh, this is, this line's nothing.

We served 10,000 people when Mr. Beesburger opened. And I was kind of like, well, Mr. Beastburger is kind of dead now. And Mr. Beast, the guy, like, is suing the company for, it just like, it was a disaster, right? So I'm thinking, okay, is this going to be a disaster? We order the food. We take it upstairs. We paid for everything. No special treatment other than did get to kind of skip a food places in line to expedite our reporting.

And honestly, the food is fine. It tastes like sort of slightly better than Shake Shack, slightly better than, you know, regular fast food. Is it, it's probably better than Denny's. You know, it's better than your, like, average roadside spot. And I think that's probably because, look, everyone's all hands on deck. It's the first day it's open. As we all know, restaurants are a tough thing to operate day. and day out, and especially 24-7.

And so do I think it's going to maintain that quality five, eight months from now, you know, two years from now? I have no idea, and I'm very skeptical of that. But on day one, they were making good food. The burger was not amazing. It was kind of dry on the edges. The tuna melt was fantastic. We all loved it.

It was like heavy and dill and, like, well-toasted. They're all served in, like, these cyber truck happy meal boxes that, like, You just ruined it. No. That's like, yeah, I think that's kind of a negative. But, you know, they're going with the theme. Also, the, all the silverware, or the utensils are like these wooden pieces that look like they're like chiseled out of a cyber truck, you know, frame or something. And, you know, you take a bite.

Like, they're trying to reinvent utensils. And I'm like, oh my God. Okay. Not everything is being reinvented. But, like, I think, you know, that they have, for. breakfast. You know, they have actual breakfast items. They had biscuits with red gravy and biscuits were fantastic. You have an organic egg. All the, all the ingredients is another aspect. They say that they're sourcing everything within a Tesla range, like one single range of a Tesla car.

So everything is sourced within like 300 miles, which, you know, like there's something to be said about that. Like most diners probably cannot say that they source their items from, you know, within 300 miles. And so there's like this sliver of like sustainability and like, okay, good quality. That sounds kind of woke to me. It's, yeah, that's why they minimize it. It's like buried on the bottom of the menu. Yeah, epic bacon is the headline.

The heritage farm that it comes from is not, not mentioned as much. I talked to Bill Chate and he was like, Elon himself came in a week and a half ago and personally tried everything. He's like, if it's going to be on the menu, it has to be epic. And I was like, how do you make every single? menu item epic how do you make like you know a hot dog epic or a broker epic but the epic logo is only on the bacon and the bacon well i think it was a matter of preparation it has the potential to be epic it was certainly four thick slices of like well smoked like high quality bacon like

it you know just maybe that day it was off but i i think for 12 bucks honestly i i would pay that that's three dollars per piece of bacon But that's what food costs now. I don't know what you... How did they prepare this bacon? Epically. Like food costs... It's not cheap to make, you know, well-sourced food.

And I think that they're doing a good job of presenting people with decent quality, like, well-prepared food at a reasonable price. And what's interesting is all the, like, they don't accept gratuities. Like the company is actually paying all the gratuities. for service staff. So if you go there, like the level of service you get is incredibly nice.

Like everyone's very jolly and happy and, and like attentive. And I don't know if that's because it's the first day again or like if it's a thing that I think a seasoned restaurant tour is like, hey,

we're going to approach this professionally and as well done as possible. You have to go back at 3 a.m. to see if it's still the same level. Yeah, you go to the middle of the night to see if they'll still be happy. But at the end of the day, I think it is a bona fide restaurant.

It is worth covering. It was worth, you know, for us to go and see what it was like. Do I expect that I'll be there frequently? I don't think so. But I was honestly shocked by the number of quote unquote, like Tesla fans that live in Los Angeles, that despite all of the Elon, you know, hatred and vitriol, like I think people were there. They were, they showed up and they were, they were pretty happy. So, I mean, that's what it is. is kind of the key point because I think Wired had a good story about this too where they talked to some of these folks. And a lot of them were Tesla owners who didn't like Elon Musk. And it was kind of like getting to your point about how this is, you know, the people that they typically used to sell to a lot for many years were coastal liberal types, progressives who, you know, want to save the environment. And those people hate Elon Musk now. But it seems like they can, you know, they're doing some sort of mental, you know, sort of calculation to kind of separate the, you know,

things and you know they can still be supportive of the brand or you know still love their car while also still holding their you know political opinions about him so my my question is right like you know you know Matthew you went you had this nice experience I think right a ton of people showed up can they scale this right can you scale like a a you know fancy diner chain that only goes to a couple of like what is the end goal here I don't know if you're sourcing within a one charge range of a of a Tesla, right? Because there are some places, you know, California has a lot of farms, but there are places out there where corn sweat is an issue in the Midwest, where temperatures are awful because the corn is raising humidity. So like, I don't know.

Like, if you're going to have the same gimmick across the entire nation, I don't know how that is. I mean, even just charging infrastructure is hard. So, like, right, like getting the charging infrastructure and the food infrastructure and finding a place where it makes sense for Tesla owners or EV owners? I am curious,

do you get the sense that Bill Chait and the team over there are preparing to do more? Are they like, we've got this one, we will see what happens? That's a great question.

I certainly have my doubts about that. Like how much can you replicate this? You're in the middle of Hollywood. There's all the resources, labor, you know, demand for a hundred, almost 100 charging

stations. But like I've, I've taken road trips. I actually own a Tesla. And I have taken it. I hate it as a road trip car because I have to charge all the time. And I've charged in the middle of the desert on the way to Vegas, just nothing to do. I wonder, okay, if they open one in Barstow, right? There's like a hundred Tesla chargers in Barstow scattered about. It's, it's the main city between L.A. and Las Vegas. I think they can source, depending on what they're menu looks like. Is it going to be as ambitious as the Hollywood one with like 30 menu items? Maybe not. But if they have a burger and a hot dog and fries and shakes, uh, I mean, what more do you really need? And can you do that? Look, there are gas station restaurants all around the country and they serve, you know, basically reheated frozen pizza and hot dogs on those like steel rollers. And they make it work. Uh, and I think it's certainly possible. I think their intention is to open. I think many of them. I'm opening a restaurant as they probably realize is very difficult given the regulatory situations of each place that you're doing it. But other countries are different.

Like if they, I don't know, like, I just came back from South Korea. I didn't know this. You could open any restaurant in South Korea and in Seoul. And there's no permitting. You just like open. You just like build stuff and then you open and then you're open for business and you serve people. Like if they had that ease in other locations around the world, then they could probably open more of these diners. and make them, you know, these kind of like destinations.

Restaurants are, they're, they're places that people talk about. You know, they're not like, it's kind of like the Apple store, right? I mean, when the first couple Apple stores came out, they're like, oh, how many of these are going to open? And now they're ubiquitous, right? So it took a generation. I think these diners could be a place where it makes Tesla continue to be relevant and separates themselves from other carmakers and, you know, gives again a place for people

to engage with the brand. And so do I think, I think it's actually smart. And I think it's interesting that they opened it in California, in, in Los Angeles, a place that obviously has very mixed feelings politically about its CEO. I'm like, why did they open in Texas? Why did they open in Florida or whatever? Like in places that might be more receptive. But I think they're also trying to make a statement by putting it in Hollywood,

putting it in a major world city and making a statement that way. They're definitely going to attract protesters. I spoke to an organizer who has been part of the Tesla Tate Down movement, and they're planning on coming out the Saturday, and he says that the intention is to keep coming out, you know, they're going to keep at it. You know, their mission is to continue to protest the company. They don't care that he stepped away from Doge and yada, yada, yada, their intention, they see, they've been seeing success, obviously, in the earnings report.

and I think that they want to continue that. And something like a diner is so much more impactful in the moment. Like there are customers who are trying to show up and have a pleasant meal. Yeah. And you are going to disrupt their ability to do good business. Yeah. Nobody's going to want to walk past them. It's hard not to see this also as maybe an attempt at some brand rehabilitation by Tesla, right, to like kind of say, you know, we're more than just the guy making the salute.

You know, at Trump's inauguration, we're also, you know, we got these fun. robots that are serving popcorn and, you know, we're going to the, to Mars and all these other things. They've got like a movie screen. The huge, the die, okay, so the drive-in screens are gigantic and they're right in front of an apartment buildings with balconies that have just had their views completely blocked. And I am so curious to hear what the people who live in these buildings. Think about this. Free movies. From the back?

Okay, maybe not from that. Never mind. But, you know. I got to know who you got to track down some of these people who. who live in these buildings and find out what they think because I got to know. I mean, that was what I immediately thought about. I think that in most, first of all, you don't live in like Hollywood for quiet and comfort. That's a good point.

You know, nobody is forcing you to live there. Granted, there are, again, ginormous billboard-sized screens pointing at your balcony now, and that's probably very annoying. I do think that I actually was trying to find out what time they turn off. There's probably like a mandated time. Oh, yeah. I think it's 11 p.m. Yeah, I think it's 11.

That wasn't confirmed. I actually wrote that, like, kind of like, but it wasn't confirmed. I'm pretty sure that's like, we don't have billboards going 24-7 here unlike New York. New York City. Yeah, baby. Number one. So, yeah, it's certainly very annoying and it's comical. I think when you go there, it would make sense to behold the whole facility, like in the middle of the desert or in the middle of a cornfield or something.

But like it's it's in the middle of Hollywood. There are a lot of buildings. You can. It's, it's just like jarring because I'm like, why do they have to do these ginormous screens? So there's a little bit of it. I think the whole, what I'm learning now is that I guess the project is Franz von Holeshausen. Yeah. Lead designer of Tesla.

He's a lead designer of Tesla. And like I was, I think what I've been told now, and this is not confirmed, but like, he lives in Los Angeles. The Tesla design center is based. in Hawthorne in Los Angeles. And I think that's probably why the first location was here. It's really like, if you think about where the company split up, there's like production in Fremont in Northern California and offices and whatnot. That's kind of where they started.

But then now they're like to sort of move the headquarters to Texas and to Austin. But like I think at the end of the day for this project, it's really a Tesla design project. It's like a way for them to like, it's like the flexing part of the company. It's not quite the nuts and bolts like making batter. and boring stuff like that. This is the sexy thing. And so, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's a, it's an attention getter.

And I think, yeah, people will protest it. There's ginormous screens. But I don't know, it's L.A. Like, we're kind of like used to crazy stuff happening and then we're going to move on and find out what else. I mean, over like six months, people would be like, yeah, there it is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know.

If nothing else, Elon knows how to get attention. and the diner is certainly effective in that. Matthew, thank you for coming by. We've got to take a break. When we get back, V and Andy are going to take on the Thunder Round. Stay tuned. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast.

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That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back with the Thunder Round. There it is. That's right. For those who have missed it, I am on a power trip with Nilai and David gone. The lightning round, it's done, it's gone. I'm over it.

That's so old news. News. Here's my problem with it. I don't know if you guys have listened to the Vergecast a lot. I hope you have. That's very good. They never get through all the stories. And so I have given Eric Gomez, our producer, the power of thunder. He will, I don't know what the term. Rain it down upon us. It's not crashing. He'll do a Thor. He will do a Thor move. There we go. He channels Thor and tells us politely to move along. So is what we're going to do, five stories, five minutes. He's going to, a little rolling thunder when we need to move along, and then it's going to crash down or something. We're still fearing this out. The thunder round is new and improved. It will continue to improve as time goes on.

All right. First story, let's roll. Andy, it's over to you. All right. So my first story is the return of Faraday Future, kind of. a Faraday Future, a electric vehicle company that we've covered for a very long time, a company most associated with the term vaporware, I think you can say. They are one of those companies that, you know, promised the moon.

You know, super fast electric vehicles and all this, you know, sort of like interlocking media and all these things, and it never really panned out. And they were back. They introduced a new vehicle called the FX. I'm sorry, the sub-brand. sub-brand called the FX. And this new vehicle is the FX Super 1, and it's basically just like

a luxury minivan, but it has something that's distinctive about it. It has a face. So instead of a grill, in place of a grill, there is a digital screen on the front of the vehicle that projects like an AI-generated face.

So you can put like a smiley face on there. You can put like, you know... I'm sorry, I scrolled past this image in your story. And I thought, I was like, Oh, this is one of those things where, like, you know, they're like covering it up so we don't see. Yes. But no, that's a screen. No, yeah.

It's a legit screen. Oh, my God. Like a full on display. Like, we have to, you know, get, you know, our TV reviewers on this immediately because this is going to be the next big TV. I'm assuming. Can you watch, like, Top Gun on this? You can watch Top Chef on it. Oh, my God.

Right in front of the minivan. Obviously, this is a terrible idea because what you think about if you're driving a vehicle, what often happens is the front of your vehicle, it's, it's, you know, the front of your vehicle, It's very dirty. It gets covered in bugs that gets chipped. Pebbles and rocks and other things, you know, fly up in the face of it. It's not something that you can ever really keep completely blemished free. So the idea of having a cracked screen with broken pixels all over it sounds insane to me. It's called Front AI Communications ecosystem, face.

Yeah, so this is also like another thing that Faraday Future is always very good at, which is giving things terrible brand names. So, yeah, the F face is an acronym that stands for front AI communication ecosystem. And you, if you're a business, you can project your logo on it. If you're an artist, you can project your illustrations on it. Again, I cannot stress this enough. This will never ship. What happens if you get into a car crash, too, when you break your, can you imagine how much that would cost?

It does a frown. Yeah, it does an ouchy face, right? It tells you his pain level. I have a question about, I thought minivans were like not cool anymore. Well, so if you talk to like auto riders, they all love minivans. They feel like it's a very practical vehicle that has fallen out of favor with the public. As our SUVs have become larger and more hulking and bigger and, you know, sort of all those things. You know, the minivan has been sort of like left to the side to molder.

like, you know, the Chrysler Pacifica is like the only like U.S.-based minivan anymore. There's still like, you know, a few. There's like your Honda odysseys and your IKEA minivans. But for the most part, minivan sales have plunged. So if you're a company that is swearing you're going to make a car and going to make money on that car, but you've never made a car, why are you going to minivan first? It's really, it boggles the mind, but that's been sort of. of like the theme with Faraday Future over the years is that they just, they don't do things that make sense.

This is a company that has been in existence since 2014 has spent $3 billion to ship 12 cars. Oh, you know, that's a great return in on investment. That's all, that's, it's all gone to like investors and like influencers, basically. This is not a real company. It's, if anything, it's just a, you know, it's a way to like light a huge pile of cash on fire. It's a grift. You know what?

I respect it. I respect the grift. We need more grifting in our minivan industry. I do think if they are going to make up a car that they're not really going to ship, I think they could have thought bigger. I think not like physically bigger. The minivan is already quite large. I think they have a TV on the front and that's where it ends, right?

They have these little reclining chairs in the back with really poorly photoshopped bottle of wine. It's a champagne glass. It's so poorly. I just learned that there are cars in China that can jump. Oh, yeah. The B.D. The B.D. Listen.

If you're going to make a fake car, like, promise me the moon. China, very, very ahead of us in the cars that jump race. As soon as jumping cars make it to the U.S., I'm never leaving my house. I mean, we need those in New York of all the potholes. You need a car that can jump over the potholes. I don't think Americans are responsible enough for this. I'm really sorry. No.

I mean, I still. you know, just as you like chaos with liquid glass, I want chaos on the highways. You want road warriors. I want road. You're full on. You're like ready to go madmagn. I'm ready to go. Yeah.

What a beautiful. Twisted metal. Okay. The, you've got some news for us. Yes, Amazon has bought B-A-I. And B-A-I is this wearable that I tested. This is B-B-E-E-E. Not not, okay, B-E-E.

Like buzz-b-b-b-b-b-b-b. So, yeah, no, B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B. I wrote that review. It's basically like this little Fitbit type thing and it listens to you always. And it's basically supposed to be your AI memory. And it wrote fan fiction about my life. It recorded some very embarrassing moments like when I went and I had a particularly healthy bowel movement. And I looked back and I went, oh shit.

And then it said, V said, oh shit. In this transcript and it was making these like to-do list. It was truly dystopian. Good God. It has so, it learned so much about you that is incorrect and correct at the same time. And now Amazon has bought it. Okay, you've just instantly turned me off of everything about this. Like, I just always listening, but on you.

Like, what? No. Yeah, this is like this new class of AI wearables where it's just like listening and we'll create transcriptions. And this takes it a bit further because it'll, it'll, the promise is that like, Oh, that thing you said you were going to do that you forgot to do, it's in a to-do list that it created because it's listening to you all the time, all the time, all the time. I feel like that's the thing that most people say that they don't want from their technology. Given the sort of the prominence of the various conspiracy theories about people's phones listening to them and how that makes people feel. Like, why would you actively buy something that does that?

You know, because I really do think there's a forgetful contingent among us and, like, people who want these, like, notes taken. But, like, this thing couldn't tell that I was not a Philadelphia school teacher working at Abbott Elementary. So it was telling me things like, get ready your classroom for the septa strike. And those were just, like, things that were populating my to-do list. But, you know, to your point, Amazon got into a bunch of trouble a number of years back because the echo was listening to everything. And, you know, like, I've spoken with the people who've made B. They, like, when I wrote my review, they were like, oh, privacy is at the forefront. And I'm just like, well, we don't know how much Amazon bought B4.

But this is the big first, like, this is the first big tech company that's buying these always listening AI devices. Yeah. This is like a very confusing acquisition to me. Like, I understand that there are a lot of tech companies looking at AI being like, we got to do an AI gadget. We got to do an AI gadget. We've got to do something. And it does seem like the current idea is just like, oh, I'll just listen to you all the time. So like, okay, I'll give that to them even though I think it's not the right idea and seems unpleasant.

But this, the hardware and the software of this fundamentally don't seem very good, right? Like, Amazon could just make this themselves. Why do they need to buy this? It's just a little, it's just a little thing around your wrist with a microphone. It's a little thing around. Or you could wear it as like a clip. I wore it mostly as a pendant because I have limited wrist real estate. at any given point in time.

But yeah, I think it's just the concept of what they're doing. You know, they're saying Alexa Plus is going to be agentic, and they call B something that's about to be agentic. I don't, there's like this aspect of you talking and it automatically adding things to a to-do list, which, you know, I went on the New Jersey Transit bus, and it was just like, you've got a patient in Louisiana that's about to die. Make sure to check in on them. And I was like, what?

No. What does? Either someone was watching like a medical drama on this bus and I didn't hear it or I just violated someone's HIPAA rights. I don't know. But I just feel that my conspiracy hat theory is that this has something to do with Alexa Plus. Amazon clearly wants to put Alexa on your wrist, right? They've been trying to put it on your face in your microwaves in so many different ways. I just feel like they're like, what if we put Alexa in it?

And what if it's listening at all times? And it can control your to-do list. and then it can control your, like, shopping cart. So, like, it kind of makes sense to me, but it also makes me just go, like, oh, no. It's coming for you. Oh, no. B-by-V in, like, 20 years is just going to be, like, Alexa writing fan fiction about my life and all the things that it misinterprets. Like, you should have seen the transfix it had when I was watching severance.

Oh, honestly. Severance from my life. And it was just like, oh, the numbers are important and mysterious. How does it even. tell you, like it doesn't have a speaker, right? You have to check another app. Yeah, there's a companion app. It just collects all the stuff.

It has like fact tinder, so it'll learn stuff about you and you have to verify things. Oh, my God. You swipe whether it is accurately surveilling you. Yes. That's disturbing. It's, I got a lot of really funny fact tenders, which you can check my B by V review. And you can see that it thought that I knew someone named Kendra Montesia, because I was listening to the Kendrick album.

Well, okay, room for improvement. Good luck to Amazon with that one. And right under the... We did it. We did it. Almost got there. Okay. I've got one for you.

This week, Apple launched a new service called AppleCare One. Apple, I think, if you guys have been paying attention to their earnings, they love services. They love recurring revenue, right? And they're turning everything into a subscription. Who does a subscription? I do. I do. This is actually, I mean, we have a own subscription service.

If not a recurring subscription. To the VIX. To P.E. Yeah. So Apple service, you pay $20 a month. And they'll offer, you know, warranty, extended warranty protection coverage for, I think like any three of your Apple gadgets. And there's some restrictions.

And it's the max is three. Max is three. You can add more for $6 each. No. And I think. Maybe the deal starts getting weird. So it's very interesting because some people, it's $20 flat. Some people, if you're the kind of person who wants a warranty, are going to make out.

Do you know how much the warranty is on a Vision Pro if you're paying by month? A lot. It is $25. So you're immediately saving $5 a month and covering two other gadgets if you're a vision pro person. And listen, if you're a Vision Pro person who's like throwing this thing around town. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you want it because like when I had my first Vision Pro demos, they were like, you have to pick it up a specific way because it attaches by magnets.

Like the different, the light seal is attached by magnets. So if you're not careful, and then that glass screen is going to go and then that's $3,500 down the whole. But not if you have, if you're saving $5 on this Apple One. You still got to pay. You still got to pay the service fee. So, okay, it is less of a deal if you're covering cheaper. gadgets, right? It was just your phone, your laptop, your AirPods, you're like maybe breaking even. Here's my question, though, do, are either of you, like, extended warranty people? Because I'm

always like, I'm out taking it. Like, I didn't for a long time. And then Butterfingers v. McGee, uh, dropped her phone, three phones in a row, cracked the screens. And I was like, oh no. And I tried to go. I'm like, fix screen please. And they were like, no, you don't have a warranty. So for a number of years, I did. but it has since expired. See, that would do it. That would do it. I'm always like, I'm going to take this risk.

Because with Apple in particular, like, you've got to pay for the warranty and then you got to pay for the service on top of that. And I'm like, I gamble this. I let my extended warranty expire. So when I went to replace the battery on my 14 Pro Max, I was like, three battery, please. And they're like, it's expired. So $100, please. I was like, I have a question about the warranties.

as, as, you know, we have these, you know, right to repair, there's the right to repair movement, right? And there's states that are adopting laws around right to repair. And Apple and the other tech companies are pushing back against it. I'm curious to see if we get like sort of widespread right to repair approvals, you know, maybe even like on a national level, like, what that would mean for like a warranty or like long term. Because if you, if you're suddenly you're like, you know, you can like update your battery. you can update your screen over the years. Like, you know, maybe that warranty becomes a lot more useful or a lot more valuable to have. If you can, like, do these things to your phone that people typically haven't done.

Or I guess, like, alternatively, I wonder if those things are really effective, right? Like, maybe you don't need it because you can actually go kind of anywhere to get a fixed. Yeah, it's like a third party or, yeah. Whereas right now, like, third party repairs with Apple, like, it's very limited. You have to go to the authorized repair that thing. And it's like, eh. They really have a lot of control over it. I my my worst I guess like Apple like you know failure to have coverage story was I had the first Apple watch and I was like working out one day and then it was just like I'm done it just like I don't do it like we had a good time and that's it was only like it was not very old and so I went to the Apple store and I'm like I think like maybe we can just like you know reinstall the OS and they're like I don't know we got we got to send this thing off and it's out of warranty I'm like okay

I sent it off, see how much it would cost. And they got back to me, they're like, you can buy a new Apple watch. And I'm like, well, that's, that was, we had a good, we had a good run. I mean, that's ultimately what they want you to do. They just want you to keep buying new products. The watches in particularly are really hard to repair anyway. So anytime anything breaks, they're basically going to be like, how would you like a new watch? Yeah.

That's the thing. I don't think these devices would look the same if we had some, you know, some sort of widespread repairability, you know, like mandate. That's very real. Like I think, you know, if you look at the fair phone, actually, it is getting a lot nicer looking, but I do think a lot of these are pairable gadgets. Like, they gotta, you know, they gotta make their tradeoffs. They got to make their trade offs. They chunky. And some of them will, they do it and they look nice. And I think like Apple, like they're not going to make that trade, which, you know, they want to give you a reason to keep paying them money, right? That's great for them. I'm going to keep taking the risk.

I don't think I'm excited up for this. But Vision Pro. early adopters. Yeah. If you have the expensive this is your moment. It seems like it might be a worthwhile thing to sign up for.

I just think you have to math it out. Yes. Very real. Very real. Okay. Andy. Yes.

What have you got for us? All right. Next one is that Uber announced that it was rolling out a new feature that it's had in a lot of other countries, but now it's going to be coming

to the U.S. It's a driver preference and a rider preference feature for women. So if you are a woman who uses Uber, and you would prefer to ride with a woman driver. You can set that preference now in the Uber app. Hell yes.

Vice versa, a driver, if you're a woman who drives for Uber, and you'd want to prefer to have women passengers, you could set that preference as well. Uber acknowledges this is likely to increase wait times because as of today, the vast majority of Uber drivers are men. It's something like three to one. But it does seem like, you know, they rolled this out in Saudi Arabia many years ago. It was very popular.

And then they brought it to other countries in Europe and Asia. And now it's coming to the U.S. It's going to be in Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Francisco. And then they're going to try to roll it out across the rest of the country after that. I would love if you could make it so that after a certain time of day, you could switch who you want driving you. Because I have had some dicey Uber drivers in the past. You are not alone. I have had some dicey Uber drivers in the past.

Like I've, you know, also had situations where like our Uber was stuck in traffic and then I got a phone call because they're like, you've been stuck in traffic. Are you safe? Are you going to be like unalived? And I was like, oh, that happened to me recently, actually. And I was like, oh, well, that makes me feel slightly better, but also not at the same time. And I will say that I think road rage is less common in the New York City area when I've had women drivers. Oh, yeah. Just the GWV pissing.

No, yeah. Statistically, women are safer drivers than men in a lot of, a lot of cities and countries. Yeah, it's, you know, I think what it does is it speaks to a larger problem that Uber's been having and Lyft as well and just really anyone in the ride hail taxi business, which is that assaults, sexual assaults, harassment, violence, still a big problem in this industry. I think in its last report that was released in 2024 Uber Safety Report covering the years of 2021 and 2022, there were 2,717 incidents of serious sexual assault and misconduct in its vehicles. This is either drivers assaulting passengers, passengers assaulting drivers. That's down from the previous period, but still a big problem for the company, and they're trying to make things safer overall. like for people. I do you wonder if on a long enough timeline, this could actually increase the number of women who are driving for Uber? I think it could. Right? Because now there is a specific

audience for them and they're going to presumably have a safer driving. I cannot in memory, you know, remember having a woman driving Uber that I've got. Yeah. I've had a lot. I've had a few too. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But no, it is, it is certainly the case that for women who drive for Uber, you know, we ran a feature in 2022, which I would encourage you to read. It is a extremely tough read. But we, the reporter who's, who's name, hold on me, see.

Anna Betts, she wrote the story. This is a great story. She interviewed like a dozen women who drive for Uber and Lyft. And the stories that they told were horrifying, horrified. Just, you know, I'm sorry to say, but men are terrible. in many, many contexts, and one of which is in an Uber vehicle. So, you know, she talked to these women, you know, and you can't imagine, or it's easy to imagine why more women don't drive for these services

because of how horrible these experiences are. So I do think it could have the knock-on effect of getting more women to sign up to drive. The hope is that it's just still a good enough experience in the meantime. Because, like, I mean, honestly, the wait times are rough in general. sometimes. Yeah. And if you have to wait for one of a subset of drivers. I wish it could be just like, yes, that's my preference.

But if there are none within a time period. Okay. They do let you. I'll accept a man. Yeah. They say that you can, as you're hailing the ride, you can say, I'd like this to be a woman. And that's also the case that Uber, you have to verify your identity. So they're making sure that men are not like falsely impersonating to, you know, to, you know,

So they're not, you know, and if something like that happens, they encourage people to report it to Uber and they'll kick them off the app, essentially. But, yeah, they are, if they say that if you see the wait time and it's like, you know, an hour until your car comes versus, you know, two minutes for Joe the driver to swing by. Sometimes you'll take that risk because my last Uber driver, I will say, I do feel like a female Uber driver would have a better smelling Uber because the last Uber I got into the man. I got in and I was like he clearly crop dusted right before I got it and this is not good. This is the most scatological verge cast I've ever

made. No, but I think it's also what it speaks to that's interesting to me just to wrap it up is that, you know, Uber thought since the beginning that this like five star system was going to be the end all be all. You rate the driver, they rate you and this is going to weed out all of like the bad apples. Clearly that has not worked out

at all. And if anything, it has offered more opportunities for predators and other people who you know, commit these types of violence to continue to do so. So, you know, hopefully as they continue to tweak these features, we can see some more safety in the system. All right. D.

You've got one last story to wrap us up. La boo-boo. Hell yeah. Let's go, baby. Let's go into Labibu's. So, Mia wrote a really great just write-up of how hard it is to get a Labubu. And how these little freaky-ass toys

have gotten so popular in the last few months. And And, you know, I'm not saying that I wanted a Lububu, but having read this and watched the social video, I definitely do not have it in me to get a Labubu. Can I just ask you really, really quick? I refused, refused to learn what a Labubu is for the longest time. What is a Labu? A Lubu is a creepy little doll that has these little ears and they're fuzzy on the outside and they have these little angry, toothy

grins. They're part of the subsect of thing that, like the Japanese term for it is Kimo Kauai, which is like ugly cute. So they're ugly, but they're kind of cute. And they're just the next collectible craze. People are going crazy

for them. Like blind boxes, if you've ever had a blind box, which is like a little box that you go at like these little stores. That seems to be the thing that is really driving the crazy. Yeah, yeah. The mystery of it. It's a mystery of it. It's a little box, you can get one of X amounts of figurines, you open it, and you're like, oh, what a surprise. And then it, like, triggers into this primal collective urge that you got to get them all,

like a Pokemon. So people are just going nuts over these Labuboos to the point where they're so hard. And it's like artificial scarcity, right? So they're so hard to get. There's Labubu drops, and people are just trying to get these Labubuos. But they're also... That was the thing that floored me watching Mia's video. Right.

The drop aspect. There's like a drop and you have to, like, go into this app and you can't... It was so many times. It was gamified. Yeah. But, you know, a point that I really liked was that some people just don't care, so they get lafoufus. And lafoufus are the dupes. They're like the knockoffs.

So now, like, I see these TikToks all the time. People are like, that's not a la-booboo. That's a la-foo. And they're like, don't insult my la-boo. That's a la-booboo. It's not a la-foo. And I just have been like, what the hell are these things? What are these?

So now we have a 3D printed Labibu in our office? I did see this and it was beautiful. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. It's gold. It's there. We're not worshipping it. We're not worshipping it.

It's not a new idol in the office. But to be clear, we were jealous. And so, yeah, we made a, we knocked her off our own. We had to. Because Mia did get a Laboooooooo. It's going to take two months to get the Labibu. I do not understand fundamentally. Like, what is this mechanism to buy them?

Why do you have to keep tapping things? It's just to try. This seems like worse than buying concert tickets. Like, at least with concert tickets, you go in and you're like, I'm going to find out instantly the bots got them all. I don't be upset, but like at least it will be over quickly. And this seems like you spend like hours like tapping your phone screen. I will not be.

That's a little much for me. But like just as like an observer of the human condition, the Laboooooooooooo has just been like, what the? Wow. I went to a stray kids concert in June. and like my bias, which is like your favorite member, he was up there, Felix, and he had a blue Labubu on him. I was like, they got you too?

They got Felix? Felix got a Labubu now? Oh my God. And I was like, I guess I got to look up what a Labubu is for real. Well, you know who has a blue Lubu to flip? Mia. Mia has a blue Labubu now. But I don't want a Labibu.

My other, my bestie, her parents went to the Louvre in France. And apparently they were selling a full Labubu. as artist blind box set. Oh, my God. And so it's like Labubu's indifferent, like a Van Gogo Labuobu, a starry night Labuobu. And she, I went over to her house and she just had them all displayed. And I was like, when did you get into Labuboos?

And her parents were like, we had to get them because they were at the Louvre. And I was like, they have Labuboos at the Louvre. I just want to describe the, I'm looking at watching me as video right now. And it looks like a pentagram, like appears on the screen and is like swirling. They've summoned the Labubu. And now you've got these stores saying that they're not going to sell them because they think that they're satanic. Lafufu. That's the Lafufu.

I don't know. It's also just really fun to say, Labubu, Lafou, La Gugu, La Voooooooo. We're like, I don't know, two weeks away from something like truly horrific happening, I feel, with this trend. Either that or they're going to be like the hot new Halloween costume in October. I mean, it's slightly better than the sunny angels, which are like the naked babies that come. I'm with cupid, like, cuby maid. I'm old enough to remember the beanie baby. Yes.

Cray's. My grandmother got sucked into that. And when she passed away, we inherited her beanie baby collection, which was literally a trunk full of these things. That's what this is. The boobos are the le Beanie babies of 2020. Okay. I thought they were maybe like the TikTok version of Funko Pops. They are.

They're like, yeah, there's an element to that. They're definitely, they look more like Funko Pops. Yeah. Especially if they're doing like different versions of them, like a starry night one. Like that's the Funko model. You're like, I'm going to do this branded one for like each character. Yeah. It's going to happen.

I like that there are dupes though. I feel like that that is a sign of a culture that is like evolving. They also have lore. There's like the booboes have boyfriends and there's a moccoco. And there's like a whole lore. I went into it and I went like, I'm too old for this shit. But I appreciate that it's that. There. V, I'm going to need you to chase this down, report back next week.

We got to know, are the Libu's Satanic? Are they corrupting our children? Will somebody put a mic in them and make them into AI gadgets? Oh, that's enough. That's the future. That's it for the Thunder Round. And that's it for the Verge cast. We are off next week. Miasato will host Tuesday's episode when we come back on August 5th. If you like what we do here, the best way to support us is to buy a subscription to the Verge. Go to Theverge.com. We actually just had a really big update to the website.

If you make an account, you can now sign up and follow specific topics and authors. These two, good starting points. Me, you know, take it or leave it. It's all right. It's all right. Please check that out. Let us know what you think. If you have questions or want to contact us, can you email us at Vergecast at theverge.com or give us a call.

866, Verge 11. The Vergecast is a production of... The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. We'll see you next week.