The Vergecast - DoorDash, Uber Eats... and Tony

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of scaled EV production: 02:50 - Verge producer Will Poor tags along with a former Uber Eats driver who ditched the delivery apps and is trying to start a one-man gig work revolution. This Seattle Delivery Person Is Breaking Free of the Apps https://tonydelivers.co/ 18:54- The Verge's David Pierce and Andrew Hawkins discuss Rivian's new vehicles they announced last week, and what it will take for the company to compete with Tesla. Rivian R2, R3, and R3X launch event: the EV company’s more affordable SUVs are here Rivian’s CEO talks R2 and R3 launch, and why he has ‘complete certainty’ EVs will win  Rivian R2 revealed: a $45,000 electric off-roader for the masses Rivian owners now have access to Tesla Superchargers Rivian surprises with R3 and R3X electric SUVs   54:37 - David and Allison Johnson answer a question from The Vergecast Hotline about foldable phones. Google Pixel Fold review: closing the gap Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 review: a little better is just good enough 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of ScaleDV production. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in the park walking my dog, but also doing some headphone testing. So I discovered a month or so ago that I was wearing headphones too often, and it was actually making my ears itch. And I had switched from like the AirPods Pro, Sony LinkBud style that actually shove into your ear to just a normal pair of AirPods that just kind of hangs there. But even that wasn't solving my whole problem.

So now I'm on this weird quest for what I guess I would call non-headphone headphones. I'm trying to find something that doesn't go in my ear, but will still play music and won't annoy everyone around me. So I've been testing smart glasses like the stuff you get from meta or Amazon. I've been testing things like these, the shocks headphones, their bone conduction headphones, they just like send sound through your cheekbone instead of your ear. It's all sort of fascinating. I'm not sure any of it is as good as what I left behind, but at least my ears don't itch anymore. So we're making in progress.

Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We are going to do two things. First, we're going to tell a delivery story. Will Poor went out on the streets of Seattle and met a guy who is taking on Uber Eats and DoorDash and this whole crazy delivery industry all by himself. Super fun. You're going to like it. Then we're going to talk about Rivian, which just launched two new cars that people are very excited about. But in the process of that, I discovered I don't really understand anything about this company or why we think it might,

win because there's really no evidence to suggest that it's going to. So we're going to get into that. We're going to answer a question from the hotline, all kinds of fun stuff. But first, I just got the notification that these batteries are about to die, which means it's the end of the dog walk. This is the verge cast. We'll see you in a sec. 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. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually

builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. All right. I made it home. Everything's charging. I have to say I like the bone conduction headphones so far, although the shocks ones that I was wearing were pretty expensive.

And I also bought another pair from a brand I can't pronounce that is just like a bunch of consonants in a row on Amazon for like a sixth of the price. And they look basically identical. So we'll have to see if you really get what you pay for there. Anyway, let's get into the show. For years now, I've been conflicted about these delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats. They are super convenient and they're helpful. and sometimes I don't want to cook or go out, and most of us don't live within walking distance of a million good restaurants.

Like, I get it. I get why they're helpful and good. But I also can't shake this idea that actually these services are bad, and they're bad for everyone involved. They make your meals more expensive, often more than you know through sneaky price increases, like the menu on Uber Eats is sometimes just more expensive than the menu at the restaurant.

They also don't pay delivery people enough, or offer them the protections or pay. benefits that the people who work there should get. And for the most part, historically speaking, they're not even a very good business for the companies running them. It's hard to make money for anybody, including the restaurants, the drivers, everybody. It just seems bad. So what are we doing here?

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, there was this guy who went viral online because of some posters he had put up around Seattle saying, basically, skip the apps, call me instead, I'll deliver your food. He became kind of a folk hero online. So we sent our producer, Willpour, to go see what's going on. This is one of those stories that exists because of a perfect storm type situation. Here's what happened. For years, gig workers here in Seattle, notably delivery drivers, have been pissed at the lousy pay they've been earning in this very expensive city.

So in 2022, the city council stepped in and mandated a higher pay rate for app-based delivery workers. It's a good day for gig workers as the city of Seattle's new ordinance takes a third. The new pay scale went into effect this past January, and the apps didn't take the change graciously. In reaction, apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash began charging customers $5 in what they're calling a local operating fee. That's on top of the service fees and delivery fees that apps routinely charged to say nothing of tips. And customers are finding their limits. Fewer people are ordering from the apps, gig workers are feeling even more squeezed, and everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else.

Food delivery orders plummeting since Seattle implemented new minimum wage requirements for delivery workers a month ago. This kind of battle is playing out in other markets, too. New York City enacted similar rules last year, which the apps have also been fighting tooth and nail. But there's one thing Seattle has that no one else does. A guy named Tony Isles, who I am trying to literally chase down right now. I always carry like a tennis ball in my pocket for like the round fluidity of a ball. I just like the idea of like, when I was in San Francisco, I had a conversation with my buddy, and I was like, do you think shapes have thoughts?

And I think it do. I think they do. I think that they influence the way that you think. And I always carry that tennis ball, so I always feel like I have like a fluid mind. Tony is telling me this while flying across downtown Seattle on a rented e-bike in the pouring rain. I'm on my own rental trying to listen and keep up at the same time. We're weaving in and out of bike lanes, dodging construction, and crashing through puddles that could pot holes. It's chaos, which is partly the setting and partly Tony's fluid mind. In the first

30 minutes or so of peddling, we have talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, China's social credit score, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. And I haven't asked any of the questions I came to ask. There's this idea called The Method of Loki. I don't know if you know what that is. I don't. It's like this way of remembering things verbatim historically in these ancient societies. It was asked this book that I read. It was called Moonwalking with Einstein. Take a left. Hey, if we get separated for any reason, just go finish your delivery and text me when you're done. I'll find you again, all right? Okay. Oh, because I'm hustling? Well, I just realized that I signed up to do a story about a delivery guy. You're all right, man. I don't know how I expected

this to go, but... It's a pleasure meeting you. I got a up my game here. Tony's backstory is Pretty simple. He was driving for Uber Eats when those new fees suddenly killed demand. So at the beginning of February, he decided to go it alone. He put up some very DIY flyers downtown with an offer. Text him a food order from any restaurant within a couple square miles, and he'll get it to you for five bucks. No taking a cut from restaurants, no service fee, no delivery fee, no local operating fee, just a tip if you're feeling generous. He went viral pretty much instantly. Right now on Cairo 7 tonight, growing frustrations for Seattle's new food delivery rules. One driver becomes his boss's competitor. Now, just a few weeks later, Tony is a full-on

local celebrity. He's all over the news, Reddit, Twitter slash X, and he says the orders have followed. The biggest challenge is cadence. He might get five texts all at once and then nothing for a while. So he's trying to figure that out, along with the fame. Has this amount of attention been weird? Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's just like, all of a sudden, my opinion matters. A lot of people are asking me, they're just like, how much money are you making? And I'm like, right, right. I'm like, well, I'm not a monetary guy.

I'm not a business-oriented person. But what's interesting is, is like, I feel like I've introduced a solution for like a social thing. Tony's social solution goes something like this. Because of apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, yes, delivery has gotten expensive. But more than that, it's gotten rushed and sloppy and impersonal. It's just bad vibes all the way down, and it's ruining takeout for everyone. It's such a hard position to be in. For who?

For everybody, every party that's involved, the restaurants, the city, the people that are working as a deliverer. They're in this terrible toxic relationship with somebody. Like the restaurant owners and the apps and the apps and the drivers and just like that whole thing. Well, just like think about it. Last time you went into a restaurant and some driver goes in and is like cuts in front of you and you're just like, what in the world? Like, hey, man, I'm standing here for five minutes. What's your problem? You know, that person is, they're like, they're hustling, right? So they're going in and they're not thinking about that at all because that's not their psychology. No, they got to keep moving. Right.

And from where Tony's standing, the apps are moving in precisely the wrong direction. I think that they, the apps have this kind of misaligned misdirection of where they think the market is and what. what they're planning for it. I think that their whole goal is to like send robots to the buildings and, you know, send automated cars. And it's like, okay, well, if that's your solution, then you might bleed for a while, right? And so it's like, I'm not a monetary guy, but I can tell you how to make it work a little bit better. Tony's whole thing is to strip all the tech and anonymity out of the process and be your friendly neighborhood delivery guy. And he thinks people will actively prefer a more social alternative, even if that care and attention limits him.

I'm almost like kind of certain, once I get to a certain number of people that order from me, I almost kind of want to cap it to kind of ensure the law of Dunbar. Dunbar's number is another favorite Tony topic. It's a theoretical limit to the number of social relationships any one person can maintain. You want to cap the number of people that order from you so that you can stop and chat for a couple of minutes, so you can get to know, repeat customers. I wouldn't even call them customers. I'll just call them my friends, the homies, you know?

There you go, yeah. They're literally like, yo, Tony, can you get this for me? And I think that's kind of the thing is, is like, when you try to turn it into a business to customer relationship versus a person-to-person relationship, they're not going to be as understanding. Yeah. If I forget your drink right now, someone will be like, Tony, it's fine. Yeah.

You don't have to go back to Chipotle. Totally. But if I forget on Uber Eats, they're going to be like, yo, man, what's going on here? In short, Tony thinks that there is a whole. lot more to delivery than speed and cost. But yes, he is cheaper than the competition, and often faster, too. I've never seen anybody to be run through a target. I picked up somebody's target stuff and I was running through the target. I'm going to run here real quick. I follow Tony as he makes two, maybe three deliveries back to back. Some chicken and a shake from

Dave's hot chicken. Does it come with a drink or anything? Yeah, let me get the... A salad from a healthy bowl place called Evergreens. I'm honestly not 100% sure. It was such a blur. But at each pick up and drop off, Tony lives up to his own pitch. He's courteous, warm, casual, and chatty. So I'm man, how you doing today? We pull up to our next destination, a big apartment building.

And while we wait in the lobby for Tony's customer, sorry, his homie, to come down, he's recognized by a stranger. You're the guy. Yeah, I am. Nice to meet you. I stop and chat with Tony's homie for a few minutes. He says that he and his roommates have ordered from Tony maybe 10 times in the past month. I was just scrolling through Reddit one day, and then I saw someone posting a, they posted a picture of one of his flyers that were posted like in the city.

And I was like, oh, it's pretty interesting. It's cheaper than DoorDash. So I was like, let me give it a try. And then ever since it's like been, me and my roommates I go to. Oh, nice. So you guys are like serious regulars at this point. Like between the three of us type thing. And were you Uber Eats, DoorDash people before that? Yeah, exactly.

DoorDash mainly, and then it was just like got expensive, so we're like, let's see what else there is. What's the, like, the Tony experience like, and how is it different from the apps? I think it's a lot nicer because first of all he all he has to do is just, like, text him. So that's already a lot easier. He's much faster. And it's always nice, like, having, like, a quick conversation with him. And, like, the lobby, he always waits. He's fun to talk to.

He's a very chill guy. Like, we've had some nice conversations. This is cool. At the end of the lunch rush, Tony and I sat down at a cafe to talk some more. I went into the story wanting to know whether a guy like Tony can make it. Seattle's minimum wage is almost $20 an hour. So to match that, he'd need four deliveries an hour not accounting for tips, which after seeing him in action definitely feels doable, but it is a hustle.

In other words, it's still gig work. And Tony's only working the lunch and dinner rushes right now. So after this whole adventure, my question remains, can he make it? It turns out that is Tony's least favorite question. I'm looking at it as like, I just understand people. You know, people, they all have their perspectives, and all I'm trying to be is the glue that glues you in that connective tissue. So that way you can get off Reddit and stop arguing about how much money I'm making.

Get off Reddit and stop arguing whether it's going to be financially responsible. I can figure that out on my own. I get the sense that Tony has become a kind of avatar. Everyone's putting all their thoughts and feelings about the gigacom onto him. I think that's why his story blew up online. If you're frustrated by big powerful companies making life more annoying, he is the folk hero to root for, which is just way too much for Tony to take on. All of a sudden, like, people are texting me and they're like, you got a great business mind. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And I think that what people are trying to do,

they're trying to box me. They're trying to say, Tony fits here. And I think what they're lacking of understanding is, it's like, I actually don't fit anywhere. I'm this, like, round ball that's just rolling down the street. Like the one in your pocket? Exactly, exactly. Tony has no idea whether Tony delivers will make it, or what will happen to food delivery more broadly. He just knows that something needs to change.

Like, what they tried to do is they tried to put food on a conveyor belt and deliver it like an Amazon package, and it's not going to work. They're winning right now, but at the end of the day, it's not going to work. It's too expensive. They're, like, waiting for things to be solved, and they're hoping. They're hoping that somebody down the line is, like, intelligence is going to hit that S-curve. They're going to be able to plug in the robots, and they're going to be able to do it. And I'm here to tell you it's not going to work.

As KG as Tony is about his own future, he will say that he's been fielding calls from all over the country. People who have heard his story and want to do what he does. So it's like, all right, well, how can I then be the Energizer Bunny for some things that we do like and that we do think about, and maybe that I can kind of more positively impact in a different sense. Just giving people the right direction, energizing their buddy, so to speak, giving them the battery to kind of the right mindset. So what does this all reveal about the gig economy? Well, Tony has clearly tapped into something, and in spite of his grander pronouncements, what he's saying is pretty straightforward. I think that what it represents, I think, that what it represents,

personally is like this idea that we don't need the apps. We're so used to apps mediating all of our activities that at this point, what if not apps, actually feels revelatory. But it's telling that Tony's customers are more than happy to ditch Uber Eats and DoorDash at the drop of a hat, or the drop of a new fee. And if big tech companies really do double down on automation and robots, more people might be actively seek out more humanity, more idiosyncrasy, more Tony. Tony himself wants to experiment and meet people and hopefully pay the bills. And if he accidentally starts a revolution along the way, all the better.

It would be nice to be known as the guy that was trying to connect us back together. It would be kind of cool. But not in like the sense of like, this was the guy. It was just more like, oh, like this Tony Isles mentioned this. And we thought it was like a good idea and it worked. and then eventually, like, we reconnected. Thanks again, Will. We got to take a quick break,

and we'll be right back to talk about cars. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that.

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Let me introduce you to R2. The cars look great, actually, and people got particularly excited about the R3. R2's sibling, which we call R3. which is a little crossover-style EV coming someday. But I couldn't stop thinking during this event. Like, who even is Rivian? Over the last few years, this company has been set up as one of the most exciting companies in the car industry

and a real, genuine Tesla rival. But from everything I hear and read, it is very much still a startup. It doesn't make that many cars. It's bleeding money, and it's not lighting up the sales charts. So what gives here? Is Rivian really the golden child we sometimes make it out to be? I asked the Verges Andy Hawkins to come on and help us understand where Rivian came from,

why it's so well-liked, and whether it really has a shot to win, like Tesla-level win. Andy Hawkins, welcome back to the Vergecast. Hey, how's it going? I'm confused. Where did this company come from and how did it become kind of the one that we talked to next to Tesla? Yeah, so I think the most interesting thing about Rivian was that it was a secret for a very long time. The company was actually, I think, founded in like 2008, but it didn't come out of stealth, as they say, until around 2017, 2018.

That's a long time. Yeah, which is, I think, a much longer time to be sort of secretive than I think your average company that's in the stealth mode. So that was kind of interesting right out of the gate. And then secondly, they had a very compelling proposition right away, which was that, you know, we're going to make electric vehicles, only electric vehicles. they're going to be adventure themed. They're going to be for off-roading, for camping, for exploring nature.

And it's going to have a very distinctive design language. And so if you look at sort of the first couple products that the company introduced several years ago, the R1T truck and the R1S SUV, they're both very similar looking to each other. And they have this kind of design that is very friendly. It has kind of a cute face with big oval headlights that kind of look like eyes with a light bar. that kind of runs across the middle of the grill. It just has like kind of a very friendly, approachable design to them. And also, I think the products themselves were very clearly meant to slot into those segments

in the auto industry today that are the most popular. Pickup trucks and large three row SUVs. So I think a lot of people saw this company as a very serious contender that they weren't some sort of vanity play. They were going to try to actually compete with some of the, legacy auto makers as well as Tesla. And I think a lot of people were very compelled by the image, by the optimism and the friendliness that the company was trying to put out there. And so I think that those are the couple of reasons why a lot of people are very interested in Ruby and you hear a lot of people talking about them today.

Okay. So part of why I've always thought this company was odd is that some of what you just described is kind of the playbook in this space, right? This is what a bunch of these companies have tried to do is go for the kind of most obvious segments of this. thing, but also to kind of like sell you this beautiful vision of a better electric future of cars, which I think all of these companies have sort of spent a decade doing is like making grand promises about how everything's going to be electrified, so you might as well go along for the ride. But I feel like from the jump when Rivian came out, we put Rivian up in the kind of stratosphere of like one of the serious players in a way that I feel like we don't talk about Polestar that way. We don't talk about lucid that way. We don't talk about kind of this other

handful of companies that are actually, you know, out there producing cars in some volume. But Rivian from the beginning was like held up next to Tesla as kind of one of the great promises of the electric car. Why? You know, I don't know if that's true exactly. Okay. If I could just push back a little bit. Please. I do think that they were, they generated a lot of excitement and a lot of people were very interested in them. And I think that the company's founder and CEO, RJ Scouringe, presents sort of like a very interesting figure in contrast to Elon Musk.

He was a lot more polished, not so prone to any racist rants on social media platforms or what have you. Sure. And just seemed like, you know, sort of like a very trustworthy, serious business guy who had like a definite vision for the company,

which is not to say that the company, I think, was immediately elevated to the same status as Tesla. Because I think the fact, the fact remains, you know, they're a low volume company. They only sell several tens of thousands of vehicles every year as compared to Tesla, which sells over a million cars every year, or even the legacy automakers, which sell millions upon millions of cars. And so, you know, it's, I think there was a lot of excitement. And I think through that haze of excitement, I think that people could

make the assumption that this was like a company that was on par at the same level as the rest of the industry or even some of the upstarts like Tesla. But I think that the reality of the situation was they only make a few vehicles every year. They only had two models that were available to consumers, plus an electric delivery van, which was only available to Amazon exclusively for a while, but is now supposedly going to be sold to some other companies as well. That was a big deal, right? Amazon made a lot of noise about buying a lot of trucks from Rivian.

That was going to be a big thing. It was a huge deal. And I think that that was one of the things. Amazon's backing their investment in the company, their commitment to buying 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivarin, plus an investment from Ford as well, gave a lot of people the impression that this was going to be the next big electric car company, when in reality they were going to confront a lot of the same challenges as Tesla, and even as the legacy automakers are really confronting at the moment, too. And if anything, it was going to be a lot tougher for Rivian,

because as a new player, as a what they call pure play EV, a company that only makes EV electric vehicles and not any hybrids or internal combustion vehicles. So they have no other revenue to fall back on if the market dips, which it is now, and I assume we're going to talk about, they're going to take it square in the chin. And I think that that's playing out. There's a lot of excitement still about the company. There's a lot of promise, but a lot of questions in the future is a little cloudy, I would say. Okay. Yeah, I am curious how the message from Rivian has changed over the years. Because like you're talking about, I think if you rewind to even 2017, there was this sense that, like, We're going to have EVs. They're going to be everywhere, and they're going to be everywhere soon. And everybody was talking about self-driving was going to be the thing. We were going to have the Uber fleets of self-driving cars. And by now, the whole world was going to be different. And obviously, that is extremely not what happened.

Yeah, I'm getting PTSD just from you saying all of this. Do you remember when 2020 was going to be the year of the fleet of Uber robot taxis? Like, that was the year they all gave us. It's insane in retrospect. But I think if I'm rivet, Like you've sort of built up this story over time about what you're doing and why it's important. But I know we recently talked to RJ, the CEO, after the most recent launch, which I want to talk about, there's a sense that they're just trying to still sort of beat that same drum, that they're

like, this is coming, it's going to work, everything's going to be fine. And I feel like we haven't done that yet. So like, should we keep believing this guy that this is going to come true? Great question. Answer, I don't know. So two things. I think that obviously electric vehicles are not poised to take over all personal transportation in the next week or so.

But by 2020, they will. Exactly. I still have hopes for 2020. No, but it's not coming quite as quickly as we thought it was, which is not to say that it won't come eventually. And I think a lot of the serious people that are operating this business, a lot of the automakers, the people whose jobs it is who get paid lots of money to make these types of predictions, are saying that electric vehicles are still the future, despite a slowdown in sales growth

and a lot of investment pullback from some of the major companies. Factories are getting stalled. Even Rivian is putting a pause on its plan to build a $5 billion factory in Georgia as sort of a reflection of this kind of the reality we're facing today. And that's because of a lot of different reasons. I think first and foremost, the industry kind of put all its eggs in one basket and rushed maybe a little bit too quickly towards this goal, not realizing that both both the charging infrastructure was not going to keep a pace with their own desires to sell electric vehicles,

but also that consumers were not going to be as eager to make the switch as they thought they would be. And that's because of a lot of reasons. The charging is not that great. The prices are still really too high for a lot of people. Politics have kind of reared their ugly head and have complicated a lot of this for some folks. So it's just looking a lot messier and it's maybe going to take a little bit longer than people thought it was. But that's not to say that eventually the majority of cars that are sold in this country and other countries will be electric. We're already seeing it in some countries in the world.

China has been making a lot of progress in pushing up the volume of EVs. Europe is, I think, a little bit further behind, but they're making a lot of progress as well. Norway. Norway is this country where you would think, because of how cold it is, that nobody wants to buy EVs because EVs don't run well in the cold. But yet, I think over half the vehicles sold in the country are electric. Tesla does very well there. Good for Norway. Yeah.

That's right. They're showing us the way, the Norway. So I think it's just going to take a little bit longer. Customers are showing a lot of preferences for hybrids, for example. They want to be eased in this hot bath that's being drawn for them by the auto industry. They don't want to just jump right in. That's a terrible image. You can feel free to edit that out.

I don't know why. It's good. It's a little gross in the way that all of these should be. I think that feels right. So anyway, so amidst all of this, you have Rivian, a small company with a lot of buzz, trying to do its best. And it's struggling. I mentioned the factory.

They're losing a lot of money. You know, their cash pile is dwindling. So they have to make what's called a volume play. They need to say, okay, we need to start selling a lot of cars. The cars that they have right now, the truck and the SUV are very expensive. They're over $70, $75,000. You can get up to $80,000, $80,000 with options. That's just too expensive for most people to afford.

So they need to make a play for that middle segment, which is why we got the R2 reveal, a $45,000 mid-sized SUV that can go over 300 miles on a single charge and accelerate from zero to 60 and under three seconds, allegedly. So I think that that's why the R2 is a very important car for Rivian. It's their play at the mass market. They're saying we need to start selling more cars to more people, and here is the product that's going to be the one to do it. Yeah, the R2 strikes me as maybe more than just an important car for Rivian, like an important

car for this whole industry right now. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but there's really not a ton out there in kind of this price range and this sort of specific level of coolness. Like, we were talking before we started recording about Hyundai and Kia. And I actually think what those companies are doing in this space is really interesting. But I also think fundamentally the people who want a car like this are maybe more likely than most to be looking at these cool new brands. I notice rivians on the road. Like the the amount of rivians that I'm aware of relative to the amount of rivians that exist is so much higher than any

other car on the road right now. Do you know what I mean? It's very distinctive. It really, it draws attention to itself, for sure. Right. And I think that's really powerful and important. And if you can do that with a car that many people can actually afford, that seems like a potentially huge deal. But then there are two questions where, one, is this actually something lots of those people want. And then two, can Rivian actually get around to making enough of them to make a difference? And I do feel like those are both still pretty open questions, right? Absolutely. You know, the fact that the car is not going to go into production until early 2026, I think, is also going to be an issue. I mean, that's a, that might as well be 2,000 years from now,

you know, and we might have self-driving by then. Exactly. So whether or not, like, you know, the R2 is still generating excitement then is, I think, you know, very much an open question. But that's not to say that people were very excited. At least the people, people in my very narrow view of social media, very excited about this car. Lots of people that were kind of tripping over themselves to praise it. They loved how it looked. They liked the specs. They liked the price. But, you know, it's, like I said, it's going to be up to the consumers as to whether or not it actually turns out to be a popular one. And whether or not Rivian can survive long enough to actually put it into production, which is going to be a huge challenge for the company.

Yeah. What's been the read on the R1T and the R1S so far? Are they generally, they're very cool, When I see them, I like them. But what is the kind of broad consensus on whether these are actually good cars? Yeah, no, people really love them. They have a very dedicated fan base. It's very different than the Tesla fan base. It's very interesting. If you go on to Reddit and some of the message boards and listen to, you know, sort of like what people talk about,

and they talk about the cars that all that differently. There's obviously less focus on RJ Scouringe, the CEO, as some sort of Lord and Savior, which contrasts very much with what Tesla does. Which I'm assuming RJ is pretty happy. I'm sure he is. I'm sure he is. But yeah, these are well-loved cars, the people who own them, love them. I think the software experience leaves a little bit lacking, but that's typical across the industry right now. The car industry as a whole is kind of fumbling the ball when it comes to software. The cars do not have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, which is not a very popular decision.

And a lot of the owners would love to see phone projection brought into their cars. But that said, the cars themselves are very delightful, but they're expensive, as I mentioned before. And so the segment of the population that actually owns these vehicles is still very small. You notice them. They're very noticeable. But still, I mean, like, you know, your eyes glaze over the Toyota Highlanders and the, you know, the Ravours and the Honda pilots because there are just so many of them, whereas the Rivian stand out, which I think, you know, is a good selling point, but I think it kind of obscures how actually small the population of people who own these vehicles actually is. Oh, for sure. I'm pretty sure there's just one in my neighborhood, but I just notice it every single time I see it. So I'm like, God, there's a lot.

lot of Rivians out there. It does seem like to your point about Tesla, I think there's a thing that Rivian did kind of accidentally really well. It seems like, which is it grew right as Tesla, I think, was peaking in people's minds as like a cool company that was going to save the world and be good for it. And every time I hear RJ talk, you get the sense that he is trying to still be optimistic and happy and like tell you about a better world in increasing distance from what people perceive about Elon Musk in particular, right? And Tesla, for better and for worse, has always been super attached to Elon Musk. So it feels like if I'm Rivian or frankly any of these other companies, like all the people who believe in the mission but are falling out of love with Elon Musk for

one reason or another are looking for somewhere to go and care about and put their money in and put their fandom in. Those people are getable. Those people are all getable. Do you think they are the other thing that I wondered is like, are we just going to get past that and these are just going to go back to being cars. Well, yeah, I mean, something interesting that RJ said in our interview with Abigail Bassett, the writer who interviewed him for us, was that, you know, he was very impressed with what Tesla has been able to do, but that new cars that are electric sold each year has just reached about 8 to 9 percent. And what he was interested in was going after that 90 percent that are still not buying electric vehicles. I mean, that's, you know, that's the obvious

line that he's going to deliver, of course, which helps sort of sell the prospect of the R2 as this mass market volume play that they are hoping it will be. But yeah, I think that he needs a Model 3. And Rivian is looking for a Tesla Model 3 moment, I think, with the R2 here. Because, you know, Tesla for a long time, there was no guarantee that that company was going to succeed. In fact, they very nearly failed many times, especially during the Model 3 ramp up. Yeah, Tesla was just as precarious as Rivian is now. If not more so, absolutely. And, you know, it was only because of the car's popularity and the company's ability to get it out in the numbers that it did, which started slow and then eventually ramped up to a pretty steady clip that people were starting to actually get their vehicles, most likely at the expense of Tesla's employees who have numerous of them have sued the company for many, many problems that they've had.

But, yeah, that prospect, I think, is still up there on top of the hill. And I think Rivian sees it up there and it needs to get up to that moment where they're starting to produce cars at a steady clip and people are loving them and buying them, which is, I think, given the current situation around EV sales and the sales growth slowdown is why things are as complicated for the company. So, yeah, I think he wants to get to that Tesla moment. What's most interesting to me about the image that he's projecting and how RJ talks about the company, especially just in the words that he used. is during these events is they may aspire to be like Tesla, but I think they would rather be more like Apple. The way that they talk and the way that they present their products and the way that people talk about their products feels more like Apple than Tesla, which is optimism and the design is very friendly. And RJ is out there literally talking about one more thing in revealing

the R3 and the R3X, which is the classic Steve Jobs line, although Elon stole it as well, I think, a couple times, but that's, you know, that's all Apple. So, you know, there's been lots of talk. Should Apple buy Rivian? Apple's own car project ended. I was going to say, being Apple and cars might not be the thing to shoot for here. Right. So I think a lot of people sort of see like a possible synergistic moment here. Like, oh, you need a car apple? Here's a struggling car company that would slot perfectly in with your line of products. I don't know if RJ or Tim Cook are talking or whether or not that would be appealing to them at all. But, you know, there's That certainly doesn't stop the talk that's out there.

Yeah. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. And it does make me wonder if somewhere RJ is sitting around being like, do I need a little more of a God complex if I'm going to make any of this work? Like you get the sense that too much God complex, bad. But maybe you need a little bit. Like if you don't believe it, how is anybody else going to? Right. Exactly.

Just a little bit of confidence. That's all it takes. That's what I tell you all the time. Just a little bit of God complex, Andy. And everything will be fine. But so I think this moment is so interesting to me for exactly the reason you're describing. right there's the R2 and I think I also want to know what you think about the R3 because it was the it was the one more thing the sneaky little thing that kind of got everybody really excited like

my favorite thing about the R3 reveal was everybody posting pictures of SUVs from the 90s that look exactly like the R3 but then everybody being like yeah I don't care I still want it and like there is something about this space that people still like feel real feelings about even though they're becoming these sort of increasingly mainstream family car Like, well, yeah, and especially because if you look at some of the design that's out there today and just the the vast majority of cars that people buy, it's, it's, there's very little that distinguishes one car from the next. They've all, I think it's like the industry has all just sort of settled on this kind of shape of a car, this kind of SUV crossover shape that is the most popular amongst all the cars. And it kind of has scrubbed out a lot of the, the things that made like cars unique and interesting to people. There's just very little to different. one brand from the other. I mean, you, like, yes, you can probably notice, you know, a BMW grill is different from a Ford, from a, you know, and the shape of a, of a Mercedes is a little bit different than maybe, you know, an Audi. But in the end of it, I think if you

sort of did like a blind taste test with like a bunch of people, I think that they would have some difficulty distinguishing one car from the next, which is, I think, a lot of why you see some excitement around Rivian, because there is something that's distinctive about it. there is something that's kind of, especially with the R3 that's very retro futuristic, right? It has like this kind of a hatchback shape that is very reminiscent of like, you know, 70s era VW golfs or I saw some people talking about the Latina Niva, which I was not overly familiar with. I'm not like a huge car guy, so I don't really go too deep into like the lore.

But like the Latina Niva, I was, I've been like reading lots of articles because I'm fascinated now by this like little legendary Russian office. off-road hatchback that is, like, fascinating. And it does look a lot like, like the R3X, especially. So I think that that was appealing to people, especially if you sort of look at all of our products. Our phones look the same. Our cars look the same. Our laptops all generally look the same. Our TVs all look the same. So you just want something that's out there that gives you a sense that, like, you know, I'm attaching myself. I'm making this consumer choice that gives me a little bit of an elevate, you know, distinguishes me from my neighbor or somebody

else. And I think the Rivian kind of offers that to people, which is why they get so worked up about it. Totally. And I'm just looking at a picture of the R3 right now. And you're right, and I hadn't really thought about this, that it walks that middle really well, where like some of the electric cars we've seen really for a decade now are all trying to look like they're from like a thousand years in the future. And even there's a Hyundai dealership just down the street for me. And literally every time like an Ionic 5 comes by, it's like, oh, look, a spaceship. Like you just, you built a spaceship that now just sits in my neighbor's garage. Like, cool, fine.

Some people want that. Lots of people want a car. And it turns out like it's okay that it can look like a car, but also like it's five years from the future, not 5,000. And I think like what you're talking about with Rivian, where they're just like we took a thing people are familiar with and like and just kind of like jazzed it up a little bit is like maybe exactly what people want. Yeah, I think people were especially eager to see some, some angles brought back in.

to the EV design because a common critique that you'll hear is that all the EVs look like jelly beans. So true. It's very much what the Teslas look like. And I think you're now just now starting to see some pushback against that. I think you're seeing it from Rivian. There's another company called Scout Motors that's going to be coming on the scene pretty soon. They're owned by Volkswagen.

It's also an old like 70s, 80s era off-road brand that's being revived and brought and made into an all-electric brand. And, you know, Ford has talked about, you know, maybe electrifying the Bronco. So, you know, I think you're going to start to see some differentiation in sort of like what these cars look like. And Rivian needs to get out there before everyone else because pretty soon that space is going to get super crowded, especially the mid-sized SUV space. I think we've got our fair share of crossovers.

We've seen them all, the Mustang Machi, the Model Y, the Volkswagen ID4, the Ionic, the Kia. and now we need to start seeing something that's a little bit roomier, but also just something different that looks different, that gives somebody the idea that, like, okay, this is not just the same jelly bean that I've become used to in Evie's. I will never unsee the jelly bean now, and I feel like I hate you for that. Like, I can't stop thinking about jelly beans that I can picture them in my head now.

But it does seem like what that puts Rivian up for is a very consequential next, like, three years. because also, like you were saying a minute ago, every other car company has been promising to do this kind of stuff over the next few years. So this idea that, you know, Rivian was early and had some good ideas and made a cool car that a lot of people like, and now it needs to figure out how to make lots of them.

Like, I think to me, at least, one of the lessons we've really learned over the last couple years is just how far ahead Tesla was. Rivian strikes me as not nearly that far ahead. And in fact, is kind of at a moment where, like, it needs the R2 to work in a, a pretty big way or else it's going to have a pretty big hole to dig out of, right? Am I being too pessimistic about its chances there?

Not at all. I mean, the staff that jumped out to me the most, was that I think in its most recent earnings filing, the company said that it loses $47,000 for every vehicle that it sells. Good Lord. So to give you a sense of how unprofitable things are for R-Vian right now, that's the price of the R2. That's, you know, basically how much they're planning on charging for this new vehicle. Wow. Which, you know, just goes to show, you know, sort of like how crucial it's going to be for them.

Their cash pile is dwindling. They're running out of money. They have this factory plan is on pause. You know, they did not sell as many vehicles as they thought they were going to. I think it was around $57,000 last year. And this year, they're saying that it's going to stay pretty flat. They're going to sell basically the same that they did last year, which is not something that investors see a lot of confidence in. Obviously, they want to see growth.

This company and a company that sells the same number of views. vehicles that it sold last year is not really exhibiting growth in the way that I think a lot of people would like to see. Is that because Rivian can't make enough to satisfy demand, or is it because maybe everybody who wants the stuff that Rivian is already making has one? So for a while, they were supply constrained. They were not able to make as many as people wanted. And now they are demand constrained because not as many people can afford the vehicles as they would like because they are expensive, the ones that they sell now, the R1S and the R1T. So yeah, it's kind of, it's been flipped on them and they're running into these problems. And it's not just riveting.

All the companies are sort of in this weird liminal space right now where they need to make more vehicles. They want to sell more vehicles, but people don't want to buy as many as they thought they were because the prices are still too high. The used market still is mostly Tesla, the vast majority of the EVs that are up for sale that are used are Teslas. And those are, you know, those are on the used Tesla. That's 21,000, 22,000. That's pretty attractive. And Tesla keeps cutting its own prices, which is also driving other companies to cut prices

as well, which reduces margins and makes things more difficult in terms of trying to eke out a profit. But the company does say that it will be profitable in the fourth quarter of this year, whether that's, you know, EBITDA profitable or operation lead, whether they have free cash flow. it's not exactly clear quite yet. But they say that by pausing this plan to build a factory, which was going to obviously expand their ability to make more cars, they're going to be able to get the R2 out the door

faster because they're going to make it at their factory in Illinois. And that's going to be able to reach customers faster, which they say was going to increase their chances of kicking that revenue stream up and getting flowing a lot faster and improving their financial situation. So, yeah, we'll have to see. So they know they need. to be in the game here. If they do a Tesla and like promise a thing in two years that ships in five years, like they're probably dead in the water. Yeah. And they've already confronted a lot of

issues around wait times and software issues. I mean, it's, you know, you can set your clock to it in terms of like these companies and the same problems that they're running into. You would think, you know, seeing the Tesla playbook, you know, you would also see the tradeoffs and the pitfalls that were along the way. But it's the same thing there. I mean, they had a problem with their software was bricking the cars for a little while. They had to push a software update. I do think that the R2 in particular, that was the, this is their going to be their model three.

This is the one that they think is going to be the high volume seller. The R3 is going to be the icing on the cake. You know, that's going to be like the fun little cousin to the R2, but that's going to be the real play that's that they hope is going to be the one that takes over the streets and transforms them from a small company to hopefully one that's successful and has a future ahead of it. Okay. Fair enough.

Does it seem like there's any other company kind of of Rivian's size and prestige that might just totally eat its lunch? Yeah. Polestar, they're a performance brand. People who like to go vroom, room really fast, like the Polestar, which is cool. They're cool cars. They're really cool. They're also kind of Apple-ish in a way. They're all white.

And they have, even though it's Google's Android software native, there's just something that's very Apple about Polestar. But Polestar seems to, to your point, have no particular interest in like they're not trying to. be Toyota. Yeah, no, I don't think so. They're trying to be Mercedes. They're trying to be Audi. That's, you know, and that's, that's fine. There's a lot of money to be made in that segment as well. I think the one, what they have to be worried about is Ford and Jeep. And I mentioned Scout as well, but I don't think Scout really has, we don't really know what they're going to be yet. But I do think Jeep in particular, given sort of the similarities and the overlap in the customers that are interested in these cars in Rivian's vehicles, has the potential to eat Rivian's

lunch as you put it. So and Jeep has said that they are coming out, you know, with all-electric, there's going to be an all-electric rangerke. There's going to be an all-electric Grand Cherokee. They're coming. Also, I think if Subaru got off its ass and actually made some good, some good EVs, that could hurt as well because I see some overlap in customers there. But Subaru is sort of in the same camp as Toyota. They're kind of dragging a little bit on the EV rollout. So Rivian still has a possibility here. And I do think that they could have a first, move or advantage if they can get the R2 out in the time frame that they said that they will. Yeah. And as we've learned, there's nothing like an existential threat to your company to get you

to actually ship your car. It's very motivating, I've heard. I'm not experienced it myself, but yes. And then, yeah, but then like the China question kind of looms over all of this, right? Like, will China eventually be able to sell its cheap electric vehicles in the United States? Is a huge question. Elon Musk has said himself, that would be a devastating blow to the auto, to the EV industry in the United States. And BYD in particular, China's biggest automaker has said that they're going to start building a factory in Mexico, which is right on our doorstep. So, you know, the tariff situation is still very unfriendly to Chinese-made EVs.

Obviously, the policy situation, you know, is very bad for them. It would be very expensive for them to try to sell. But, you know, it's still an open possibility. Fair enough. So it's going to be in a big couple of years. I feel like we've been saying for 10 years it's going to be a big couple of a couple of years. But this one feels, this one feels real. Yes, it does feel, I mean, like, I think like we're starting to see a lot of pieces fall into play. All of the automakers are jumping

on the Tesla charging bandwagon. They're all going to start using superchargers. They're giving out adapters to their customers. They're going to have the Tesla port built in natively on the vehicle themselves. The R2, for example, it's going to be the first Rivian vehicle to have the Tesla NACS charging port in the vehicle. So those vehicles will be able to charge at Tesla supercharger stations. That's going to be huge as we start to see that get adopted widespread. And then you've got the incentive that are available. The federal EB tax credit can now be taken at the dealership. You go into a dealership. You're like, I want to buy an electric vehicle. Does it meet these criteria? Do I meet the criteria? If so, yes, great, you get a $7,500 discount right at the point of sale. That's going to be huge,

big incentive, I think, for a lot of people to buy electric cars. And I think more of these mass market cars, It's more of these volume players like the R2. I think the Chevy Blazer went through a bit of a software issue, but now is back and available for sale, as well as the Chevy Equinox EV is going to be coming out. These are common, normal, everyday vehicles that most people can afford. And if they are sold at a price point that car buyers think is right for them, I think you're going to really start to see things shoot up in terms of sales growth. Fair enough.

So, yeah, we're going to get a real answer on Rivian here, one way or another pretty quickly, whether this company is like a neat brand that has sold a good story about itself or is a real power player. And it makes me feel better to know that that's coming because I've come into this being like, do we know anything about whether Riffian is actually going to work? And I think the answer is we don't, but we're about to. Yeah. And I think that, you know, they have a lot of smart people that work for them. And it seems like they have a lot of interesting partnerships.

But yeah, there's a lot that's still up in the air. I think that it'll be a really interesting year for them and for the rest of the industry. Totally. I do love the headlights. I am normally a gigantic antagonist to all weird ideas about headlights because they're just all the worst. And the Mustang thing where the turn signal goes awful. I hate it all. Rivian did a good job.

So for that reason alone, I hope it works. The oval speaks to your need for rounded, you know, symmetry. It just feels right. It just feels nice. It's like it's smiling at me. Happy little face, smiling at you. All right. Andy, thank you as always.

Appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, David. All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we'll be back with the Vergecast Hotline. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something.

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Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning.

And we assessed that individual. they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people,

all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. We're back. Let's get to the hotline.

As always, the number is 866-Vorge-1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. Before we get into this one, first of all, thank you to everybody who called and emailed about TikTok. You had awesome feedback. It was great to hear from you. I promise. Neely, Alex, and I are all still friends.

We're going to get to a bunch of your feedback on Friday, I think. I want to give all that stuff a few more days to play out just because there's a lot happening really fast. and one of the things we talked about last week was the huge lack of information that we have, and we're starting to get more information. So we're going to get to all of that on Friday, so stay tuned. For now, we have a question from Terry. Hi, this is Terry in Philadelphia, and I'm preparing for a professional exam, and every time I do, I become obsessed about a particular piece of technology,

thinking that if I buy one more gadget, that will make the stress of this thing that will define the arc of my life, or at least with my salary raises this year, just kind of go away. That current obsession are folding phones. I am a massive man with hands that can just hold an entire country ham. So it feels like a folding phone would be perfect for the fact that I seemingly have the hands of a steel worker despite being an actuary. And one of the thing that gets me is whenever I read a review and one of the dings is his expense is how to interpret the fact that I'm now like, a year out from the Fold 5 and the Pixel Fold, and I can get them all used for like $800 off. Do I just effectively add one point to the Verge review score?

How do you factor in the fact that stuff gets cheaper when you're interpreting the review on a review site? Any insight would be great. Love the show. Stay classy. All right. This is one of my favorite and one of the most relatable questions we've gotten on the verge cast in a long time.

Alison Johnson's here to help me answer. Hi, Allison. Hello. Do we love Terry? I feel like we love Terry. I feel like the thing where I'm like, I have a big project to do, let me buy a gadget that will solve all of my problems is extremely, extremely relatable. I feel seen.

Yeah. Like this planner is going to do everything for me. I have brought you here because I think there are two questions inside of this question, both of which I want to talk about. One is for our massive man friend Terry. with huge country ham hands, is a foldable phone the right call? That's question number one. And then question number two, which I want to get to, is how do you think about price in a

review like that? And how should we think about price of these things over time as they inevitably come down? But let's just start with the beginning thing. The foldable phone question, is a foldable phone going to solve all of Terry's problems forever for the rest of his life? Yes, Terry. I have great news. All you need to do is spend upwards of $800 on again.

No, I think there's something there. I think that's fair to think that you have a phone that's like normal size when you want to do something kind of fiddly or you just want more screen space, open it up and you have like almost a tablet. So I think that's real. I think Terry is is on the right track. I'm curious what your experience has been with foldable phones in terms of like the productivity they enable. Because for me, I've used most of my foldable experiences with a pixel fold at this point. And what I have found is that as a thing for just more screen real estate, whether it's like I have a PDF that isn't, you know, scaling well to my phone or whatever, or a thing I want to actually mark up with a pen. Foldable phones, awesome.

The thing that has not worked for me that I have found very frustrating is I hoped that typing would be better on a foldable phone because you can do the split keyboard thing and sort of type with two thumbs on a bigger screen and it would be better. I have not found that to be the case at all. But I'm curious what your experience has been. Like, what do you get from the bigger screen that way? Yeah. For me, it is the productivity stuff. And like the scenario I keep coming back to is like, I just hate tabbing around between apps. And you just always end up doing it.

I'm like planning dinner with friends and you're in a little chat app. You got to switch to Google Maps. You got to look at a PDF of the restaurant's menu. The foldable phones let you. you put two things on the screen at once and like hold two thoughts in your head at one time. I so appreciate them for that. I will occasionally indulge in like a game that's like fun on a bigger screen. But for me, it's definitely the like, oh, I can just like breathe and like put all these things out or like I have Spotify in a little window and do a lingo. It's just like a little bit

more of a computer experience than a phone experience. I agree. Typing is weird. It feels strange. Yeah, I keep thinking I'm going to get used to it, but I haven't. But you're totally right. The two apps side by side thing, especially for something like research and note taking is really useful. Just for me, being able to have like the browser on one side and a Google Doc or my notes app or whatever on the other is amazing. And I never noticed how annoying it is to constantly switch between apps on my iPhone as I have after using the pixel fold a bunch. So I'm with you. So, okay, Terry, you should buy it.

It's going to be amazing. Let's talk about prices. Because I think you were on this show when all this stuff first came out. And I think we more or less agree $1,800 is a ludicrous amount of money to pay for a phone. Like if you want to and you have the money, go with God, right? But $1,800 is a tremendous amount of money. But these things are now a year or in the Galaxy Folds case, sometimes a couple of years old. The prices are coming way down. Does that make you think differently about them?

This is the question I ask myself every day. Just even when you consider when one of these phones comes out, especially Samsung, will, they'll throw a new phone at you if you trade something in or if you sign up on your carriers, you promise to pay them thousands of dollars over the next three years. They'll throw a phone at you. So what does a phone really cost? Is it a question. I think there is kind of a calculus as, you know, when you get to like a year out, the prices will kind of come down sometimes. I think foldables have been a little more stubborn. But the thing to kind of balance that with is always like, what do we think is coming out next? Is it's going to be a big year, like a big leap forward this year? I would argue that the Galaxy Z-fold four to five, like not much change

there. And if you were looking at a at a Z Fold 4 and skip the 5, that probably would have been a good call. I think there's some interesting things coming up this year where the pixel fold looks like it might get a little thinner and kind of a less like rectangular shape where it's like real kind of squat and wide. Sort of maybe something like the One Plus Open, which I think has the best format of like when it's closed and when it's open. So all that's to say, I don't know. I don't know how you can think about the price. You do want to factor in like the years of security updates and the OS updates that your promise like you, if you're buying a model that's a year out of date, you have to minus one year on all those things. Those are, you know, I want to keep that in mind.

But I would kind of keep an ear to the ground on like what's coming up and then see what the deals are now and just don't forget that when the new phone comes out, you can usually do pretty well. Yeah, it's a tricky one because I think my go-to advice on all technology for a long time has been by the most expensive, best, newest thing you can afford and then keep it as long as humanly possible. And that, that advice I mostly stand by, except that I obviously recognize that many people can't, for whatever reason, afford the best and biggest and newest thing, right?

And I think particularly with foldable phones, that's really complicated because there isn't, like you're saying, that sort of graceful scaling that happens where, like, if you want to buy an iPhone 13 in this the year 2024, I think that's a perfectly valid thing to do. It's not what I would do because of my aforementioned belief in buying the new thing and the keeping it forever. But the iPhone 13 is a really good phone. There is no version of that three years ago in foldable phones. And they're getting better so much faster and they're so not yet mature that. And like as soon as you brought up the pixel fold, I'm like, uh, I just think about how much better like the pixel watch got from one to two. Like the fold, Google has a long history of making like kind of ne first things and then pretty good second things. And so even at $1,000 like, are you going to buy that phone?

And then in six months be like, uh, I should have just bought the $1,800 one because it's dramatically better. Or should you've waited six more months after that? But then at that point you're waiting for the full. It's like, it's just a forever. It's like a hamster wheel. Yeah, it really is. But I'm curious for you as a reviewer. Like, this is something I've struggled with over the years in reviewing products is how much to think about what they cost. And I think sometimes it's really obvious, right? Like we, I made a big show of yelling $3,500 a lot when we talked about the Vision Pro. But in terms of like, as you're reviewing a phone, a foldable phone or even just, you know, the most other kind of $1,000-ish phones, do you spend a lot of time thinking about the price as you're reviewing it? I do. Kind of trying to bear in mind, like the way that most people buy phones, especially in this country, is, looks very different that, you know, nobody's walking into Verizon and just putting a thousand dollars on the table. So that kind of figures in. But, you know, even when that's the case, like, you have a whole lot of capital with, like, if you're ready to switch to a new wireless carrier, you can, like, easily get a thousand dollar phone out of that.

So like just the just kind of keeping in mind the weight of that that, you know, anybody's potentially putting down on one of these devices. And I do think of them as they're kind of a moment in time, the review. So I bear in mind like the prices of the other things out there. And they may be discounted. They may have some special deal going. But I think I come back to the MSRP a lot as kind of an. apples to apples, like gut check of, you know, this costs this amount of money for real and this one costs this.

Or is that a good deal? And there's just a lot of like 4D chests going on and in my mind somewhere, but it all has to kind of come out in a way that hopefully makes sense to people. Yeah. I was used to try to think about like, okay, if you gave this to me as a gift and it was free, would I like it? And that's kind of one version of the question. And then the other one is, is it worth the cost?

And the problem with phones is they exist literally on every single part of the spectrum between the two things. It's so complicated. Yes. In a way that, like, I pretty much know what an iPad costs, right? Like, you just have no idea what your next phone is going to cost in the strangest way. But okay, let's answer a couple of quick questions here for Terry and then we're going to get out of here. Question number one is, should Terry just buy an iPad? Ooh.

Well. Is that the better idea? I, you know, there's something to that. I'm sort of coming around to this idea of like, wouldn't it be nice to have more gadgets that are just good at doing the thing that you want them to do? Like, we've just spent, I know. We've spent a lot of time, like, cramming as many things as we can into a phone. And, like, that's fun. But sometimes, like, we were both looking at this, like, standalone voice recorder today, which is, like, what a novel idea. Your phone can do that. But anyway, that's a long way. to say, like, that's an option. And if the kinds of things he wants to do with it are just

better on a tablet, then, you know, think about a tablet. Yeah. I've been debating this ever since I first heard Terry's question. And I think the thing I've come around to is the question is, do you need to have it in your pocket? Right. Because Terry's like, I'm a big guy, big hands. If the answer is like, I want to carry this thing around with me all the time, foldable phone. Because like, you can tell yourself you're going to carry an iPad with you all the time. I have told myself that many times. It's just never true. The idea that I'm just going to have it with me all the time, not true. But if you're like, I'm mostly at home and I want a thing that I can like sit with for my reading and research or whatever, I think the iPad's the better

advice. The other thing is, if Terry wants a foldable phone, which one would you recommend right now? And the thing for Terry is Terry does care about the price. But we are here to tell Terry, all things considered, here is the one we think you should buy. What do you think the answer is right now. Yeah. Like my general pick right now is the Samsung is the Galaxy Z Fold 5. I think they're just kind of, they kind of had a head start and they've figured out a couple more things, you know, with the durability and with the software that I think Google and One Plus, those are really the only two other options in the U.S. They're still kind of figuring out. I say that with the asterisk of like the Z Fold 5 form factor might not be Terry's favorite because we're really the one.

when it's closed, it has that long, narrow kind of remote control shape. It's not as bad as it once was. But if you're if you're not enjoying the experience of typing on like a normal slab smartphone, this is going to feel a little more cramped. Like the keyboard on the front, the cover screen is just a little more narrow. So for that reason, I would steer them towards the pixel fold. And I would hold off on that one maybe because we might get a new one pretty soon. So that was like, three answers in one. Okay. That's fair. I will see. The only part of that I disagree with is I do have a hard time telling someone right now to buy a pixel fold because I think the odds of there being one

that is dramatically better very soon. Yeah. I think it's pretty high. Yeah. I do think the good news is, Terry, if you can wait two months, three months, Google I.O. is in June and historically speaking, we are virtually guaranteed to hear about whatever thing they're making around then sometime, even if it doesn't come out until the fall. So you'll at least have kind of a hint about what's coming. But I think I'm with you that if you want to buy a phone that is both a year old and likely to still be good for a while, it seems like Samsung is probably the safest choice. Yeah. Even if it does feel like a TV remote. It does. It's going to solve all of Terry's problems. I'm pretty sure. There we go. Terry, good luck on all of your endeavors with your

foldable phone. I hope that helped. Alison, thank you as always. Thank you. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about on the verge.com, especially the Rivian stuff. We had a lot of really good coverage, including that conversation with RJ Escarange, the CEO. We'll put some links in the show notes, but, you know, theverge.com. It's a website. We love it. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other cars you want Rivian to make, you can always email us at Vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline.

6-6-V-1-1. We love hearing from you. Also, keep sending TikTok thoughts. This is all happening really fast. We really want to know what you think, and I suspect we're going to talk about it a whole bunch again on Friday. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about presumably TikTok, some AI gadgets and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.