The Vergecast - Tesla Cybertruck first ride, Elon Musk's bad tweets trial, and Google's founders leaving

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

2:00- Tesla Cybertruck first ride: inside Elon Musk’s electric pickup truck 23:55 - Ford’s Mustang Mach-E is an electric SUV with up to 300 miles of range 30:30 - No, e-bikes aren’t cheating 37:03 - Elon Musk tries to explain Twitter in ‘pedo guy’ defamation case 1:00:55 - Paul’s weekly segment “In the apocalypse, we don’t need space bars” 1:03:23 - Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquish control of Alphabet to CEO Sundar Pichai 1:19:05 - Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 865 flagship is here — without integrated 5G Other links: Tesla Cybertruck will get up to 500 miles of range and start at $39,900 Elon Musk explains why Tesla’s Cybertruck windows smashed during presentation Elon Musk promises Cybertruck vs. Ford F-150 rematch after controversy Google’s third era Larry Page is the tech world’s Dr. Manhattan The rise, disappearance, and retirement of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 865 promises 5G, camera, and gaming improvements In 2020, Qualcomm’s slower chips may be more important than its best ones Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765 chip could usher in the first affordable 5G phones Emotonal Baggage: Inside the toxic work environment at Away The dark side of electronic waste recycling Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, we have billionaires doing weird billionaire things. We've got the cyber truck from Elon Musk. We've got his trial about his bad tweets. We also have the founders of Google leaving and a little bit of Qualcomm at the end. 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. Prompt 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 Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure. 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. Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Vergecast. I am Deider Bone, not Eli Patel.

He is out this week. But that's okay because I am joined by a bunch of other people. Paul Miller is still here. Hello. Hey, I also have Casey Newton. What's up, fam? and Andy Hawkins. Hey now.

How's it going? Good. So we have got a bunch of stuff. We haven't done a, you know, Vergecast chat show in a few weeks because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Instead, we had the pirate radio episodes. And if you skipped over them, shame on you. Go back and listen to them.

They are amazing. But here today, right now, I think we've got three weeks worth of news and we're not going to hit all of it. I'm sorry. But we are going to talk cyber truck basically the whole time. Just kidding. We'll do some other stuff. We could.

talk about cyber truck the whole time. It's that interesting. And it's interesting to me, a person who does not care about trucks. Okay. So, I need two numbers. A scale of one to ten, one being, what the hell God know, 10 being, actually, yes, this is amazing design. I want your first number to be your first reaction and your second number to be how you feel about it right now. Go. My first reaction was like, was not numerical because it scrambled my brain. I don't think it was real. And within about 24 hours, I moved all the way to a 10. I'm a cyber truck stand. Wow.

Andy? I give it two heavy metal balls smashing into windows. I was like a three and I'm a hard nine now, I would say. Really? Everyone has sort of come around on this thing. I'm not.

I still think it's ugly. Okay. Here's my main thing. Like, I can't remember the last time I saw an interesting vehicle that wasn't in a TV show or a movie, right? like there's just been nothing that has actually caught my attention. And, you know, obviously they have to make this thing and ship it and it has to, you know, be a safe way of transporting people around.

But if it accomplishes that, I actually think this will be an iconic vehicle of the 2020s. I mean, it already is. It's like it's going to hit DeLorean status in terms of like. Yeah. Yeah, but what happened to the DeLorean? Well, this is what I was trying to get. It went back to the future after reaching a certain. number of gigawatts, 80 miles per hour.

Let's back way up. I'm sure that if you're listening to the show, you know that Elon Musk got on stage and announced the cyber truck, his long-awaited pickup truck. It is, I don't know, the fifth Tesla model that has been announced. There's two roadsters. There's the semi-truck. There's the model S, the model three, the model X, the model Y. If you're new to the Vergecast, something that we'll sometimes do is we'll just name all of the products that a company makes. So that was that segment for this week.

Let's not forget. Elon was trying to spell out sexy with the names of his cards. Yeah. Well, and also just using the word cyber for the cyber truck, like he's really... He watched that, like, first demo of the CD Project Red game, you know, that came out next year, like, Cyberpunk 2077. He's like, I want this, but as a truck. Right. Well, there's already a great video that came up with inserting the cyber truck into the N64 GoldenEye game,

where it's sort of like kind of like pixelated naked. just fits in perfectly with like that 90s era masterpiece. Besides it's an electric pickup truck, what is the big selling point of the cyber trucking? Like, what is Tesla trying to do with this thing and how is it trying to differentiate it? I mean, clearly, he was trying to sell it as this sort of like post-apocalyptic dystopian vehicle that we could all be driving around in as like the society crumbles down around us, which is arguably a pretty cool concept when you think about it. But I think it's also, you know, at a higher level, it's

Tesla realizing that the pickup truck market is gigantic in the United States, and that's something that Tesla clearly wants a piece of, and whether or not this is going to be the thing that actually competes with things like the Ford F-150, which, let's just be realistic, Ford sold 900,000 Ford have 150s last year. Oh, my God. It's a number one vehicle in America, and Elon wants to compete with that. Is this the car to do it? I don't know.

Right. The F-150 is the most popular car, and that was my narrative going into this. I was not watching any of the teasers or anything. So I assumed he's gunned him for the, he's going for the king. And instead, he made, like, car fan fiction for me. Like, personally. A guy who does not have a car, it does not want a car. Well, okay, so number one, if you're trying to make a car for the apocalypse or the post-apocalypse, maybe don't make a car that depends heavily on an international half-built-out network of chargers and the electrical grid. I do think it should have had like a hand-crank generator in like in the back if they were really going to commit to that bit. Yeah. I think it's just like, you know, this is a market where like people are very entrenched in the trucks that they buy. Somebody buys an F-150, 10 years later, they buy another F-150, and then 10 years after that, they buy another one. And I think he needed something that was radical and different enough to sort of like shake the cobwebs out of people's brains when it comes to pickup trucks.

And I think that that maybe was maybe some of the motivating factor behind this. But it's just sort of like it's going to take something a little bit better to do that. It's not that great of a deal, I think, at the long term. If you just sort of look at the prices that are being offered for the three different models, people can get cheaper trucks with better towing capacity and all the sort of other things that matter for truck buyers in some of the more established brand. So I think if you just sort of look beyond like the crazy design and Elon and the bulletproof siding and the supposed shatterproof glass that shattered easily. There's really not too much there, and I think that maybe they might have to do some

rejiggering on this thing before it actually comes out in two years. Right. Well, assuming that he gets it done in two years. So talk to me about truck stuff, because you just said it doesn't have the towing capacity of much cheaper trucks, but isn't, like, one of the big selling points of an electric vehicle is that it has all that torque, and it's also heavy, and it can just, it is able to do the kind of truck stuff that you would want a truck to do? Totally. Amazing torque at the zero to 60 times that this thing was posting are pretty incredible.

They were talking about for the triple motor all-wheel drive version, which just has an astonishing 500 miles of range. 14,000 pound towing capacity and zero to 60 in under 2.9 seconds. That's insane specs right there. And he wants 70,000 for that. That sounds good on paper, but how it's going to actually come out in reality, I think, is really going to be sort of, the key thing to watch because they've done towing tests with the Model X. And as soon as you start towing stuff with that thing, it loses like 50% of its battery power. So you're talking about a scenario where you're driving this thing around and all of a sudden you're towing your boat or your camper or your flatbed, whatever.

And all of a sudden, you have to stop every two hours to totally recharge your cyber truck. Plus, this thing is just not designed to fit the current supercharger network, too. I mean, they just didn't built the Supercharger Network with this kind of thing in mind. This is a giant truck. It's like two and a half feet longer than most trucks on the market today. It's like, it's crazy long. It's not going to fit in people's garages or like in their driveways even. It's just kind of like.

So Sean O'Kane, our reporter, was at the event, covered it for us. They did an excellent job doing a video. Everyone should go check it out. It's an incredible video on our site. And his reaction, initially, in taking a ride in the thing, it was like, God, there's so much room in this thing. It's really, like, so roomy. I mean, that's because it is, like, insanely long.

It's like, so I wrote this down. It's 232 inches long, which is two and a half feet longer than a Chevy Tahoe. And a Chevy Tahoe is a giant truck. It's like, oh, my God. It's like four feet longer than a Model 3. It's just kind of like, I just don't understand who this is supposed to be for, really. I think it is my kind of like master chief. Well, it's for me.

I mean, I want a ridiculous truck. First of all, I already have it a great idea for a viral video. You guys ready for this? Okay. So we're going to get one of these cyber trucks, and then we're just going to try to parallel park it throughout San Francisco on various hills. Just like that for 12 minutes.

Come on. That's going on the front page of YouTube.com any day of the week. It's got, well, it'll theoretically probably have the smart summon feature that Tesla rolled out recently where you can summon your vehicle autonomously to come to you in a parking lot, so that's going to really scare the hell out of some, like, grandmother in like a Costco parking lot.

I can't wait to see that video, too. See, like, Philo, I didn't even know what could do that. Everything I hear about this truck, I want the truck more. I got rid of my car this year. I didn't think I would ever have a car again. Now, all I can think about is getting a cyber truck. Do you want a cyber truck because if it, you know, you hit a pedestrian, they're definitely dead

instead of probably dead? Well, I mean, that's, you know, I mean, part of that X or two and a half feet is can it move a body? And the answer is yes. I've got like a theory on truck buyers. I'd like to run it by you all. Just get some feedback. I feel like there's three main types of truck buyers.

There is a person who literally needs to like pull horses around or like a stump out of the ground, right? Yeah. Then there's the person who needs like a dependable thing that has like a truck, a trunk that you don't mind getting dirty, you know? Sure. I think that's probably the most popular usage of a truck is someone who's just, they drive it to work and they put their tools in the back or that kind of thing.

And then there's someone who wants, yeah, wants to move bodies or like wants the literal largest thing on the road so that no matter what they, if they hit a house, the house moves. You know, that kind of mindset. It's, you know, it's the macho-looking toy for rich people. I think that that's, I think that it's the last, that last one that you mentioned, Paul, that's really going to appeal to people. It's not going to be the F-150 killer. It's not going to be the Chevy Tahoe killer.

It's going to appeal to people who, like, maybe we're thinking about buying, like, a Mercedes G-Wagon or something like that. Like a really rich-looking kind of, like, SUV or truck that they can, like, drive around in and feel macho. It's the 2021 version of the Hummer, is what you're saying? Yes. Yes. It definitely has old-school Hummer vibes, doesn't it? Yeah. But see, the Hummer always, like, seemed ridiculous in a bad way to me, and, like, cyber truck seems ridiculous in a good way.

I don't know. Is it because it's called Cybertruck? That's a huge part of it. Yeah, it does help a lot. I mean, it has personality, and personality goes a long way. And then, okay, he claims that they made a four-wheeler to go with it. Yeah, an ATV. Was it really like a completely brand-new Tesla ATV?

Or was this like a not a flamethrower situation where they just like rebadged something? Yeah, we don't have a lot of information on this ATV. They've released no, no specs on it, no details really. Yeah. It just kind of like appeared at the very end because Elon Musk is known for pulling things out of his sleeve at these splashy events and they needed something to, I think, to come out at the very end to sort of compliment the truck. But yeah, you know, ATV. That's cool. Yeah, why not?

Sure. Has anybody mounted a flamethrower to Cybertruck yet? Oh, I think they're, after they listen to this podcast, they certainly will. Just like if they ever make a sequel to Mad Max Fury Road, it'll 100% begin with like a fleet of cyber trucks with flame throwers. on them like cresting a hill. And it's going to be amazing. Speaking of how big this thing is, if, after you watch Shano Cain's video, go find Simone Geertz's video, she made a, she calls it Trucla.

She made a pickup truck out of a Model 3. So she, against Tesla's wishes, drove it to the cyber truck unveil and like parked it on the street next to where they were like doing the test drives. And so you see the cyber truck go by what is essentially a Model 3. And it looks like you could fit three Model 3 inside it. or one model nine. It's like what could have been if they had gone

like maybe in a more like reasonable direction instead of fulfilling Elon Musk's blade runner inspired fantasies? Here's my question. Let's say they had just done like the Tesla version of the Ford F150. They just like made a Ford F150 that I don't know looked vaguely different

because it had an electric battery. Would all of the chatter have been like oh like Elon Musk is a secret genius? he's really going to steal the thunder of the 4-150, or, which I think is more likely, would we all be sitting around being like, look at this boring truck, what a missed opportunity. Why doesn't anyone ever make cool vehicles anymore?

I don't think so, because when the Model 3 came out, it wasn't, like, on the surface, revolutionary. It was sort of, like, what was going on underneath that was really kind of, like, amazing about that car. And I still think it's, like, maybe the most important, it's still the most important electric car. And maybe a lot of car people think it's the most, important car period to have ever been released.

Just because it's a great, it's got great specs, it's got a great price. It's just like, you know, it makes you feel things when you drive it. It's got all this cool tech inside. It just sort of checks all these boxes. And it didn't have this wildly polarizing design. You know, it was pretty, you know, it looked like a Tesla. It looked like a, you know, a little bit maybe in line with the Model S and the Model X, obviously. This is just so far beyond anything.

else that the company itself is doing that, yes, it feeds into this notion of Elon Musk as this, like, evil genius of type, you know, where his, obviously his Twitter account is getting him into huge amounts of trouble these days. More to come on that. But, you know, it just, it didn't seem like it fit with, like, the company's overall lineup that already existed. And so it just kind of, like, threw everyone for a loop. I mean, you look at Simone, you mentioned Simone Garrets. You look at her video, you should just look at her face when the thing is revealed on stage. And I feel like that, like, these are people that love Tesla and, like, really admire what he's been doing and have, like, a lot of respect for, you know, maybe they don't like Elon Musk as a person,

but they feel like the company itself is involved in a very, you know, noble project and their products are really cool and people want them. This is the thing that, like, really is dividing Tesla fans, which is really kind of shocking. So here's what I love about the design of the truck. I love that it's not, doesn't look like a knockoff Ford F-150. I love that it's different. But I'm having a difficult time identifying, like, yes, finally, we should make cars look different because they have different drive trains and so you can change the shape of a car now. And did you need to make this particular shape?

Right? Like, something else that maybe I might have liked better. And Musk has always said that this is sort of like, this is his favorite car that Vessel has made. And there seems to be this implication that this is like just his. his secret vanity project that he's been working on for a really long time, which, like, that's fine. You can do that.

And you're a billionaire dude. You can do whatever you want, basically. You have the money to do it. It just doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the thing that changes Tesla or changes the truck market even. They might, he said this, too. This might not sell at all. And we might have to do a more standard-looking pickup, something that's a little bit more

normal for people, you know, for the normies out there who love their trucks. In which case, like, whatever number of them they do make will instantly become the most, like, valuable cars on the secondary market part he'd ever made. Yeah. Do you think that there was a moment when, like, he saw the first one roll off the production line and he just was like, like, went absolutely mad with power and was like, there's nothing that I can't do? Like, look what I made people make for me and it exists now. Oh, yes. I honestly feel that, like, lightning started to strike in the sky and dark clouds. gathered over his head as he like, you know, lifted his hands into the air and, you know,

cyber truck, cometh. So we're, we're two years out, a year and a half out to this thing, actually, his claim? Yeah, they said the end of 2021 for the first two models and not until 2022 for that, that tri-motor version. So, yeah. Do you think he could pull this off? I mean, he's still, I guess he's technically no longer in production hell with the model three. It will all depend on the gigafactories that they have under production right now

because the Fremont factory is at capacity. They don't have the space to make anything else, but Model 3 is really at this point. Barely Model S and X is anymore. They don't have room to make the Model Y, which is the next vehicle they have coming out. They definitely don't have room to make the semi-truck. So it will depend on the factories that they have under construction in Shanghai, and they just announced they're going to be building a new one in Berlin. So, yeah, it'll all depend on those.

Well, I can't wait. You're going to buy one? No, listen, I know I said I was going to buy one. It's a $100 deposit, Casey. Come on, do it. I honestly don't have $70,000 for a car right now, nor do I have really anywhere to park. It's going to buy a parking garage. I do have $100.

I'm not about these pre-order schemes, though. I don't like that. But I'm sincerely so glad that he made this thing as putting it out in the world. Like there's like, look at how bored you have been with most smartphones over the past three years, right? It's like, like, if nothing else, I hope this inspires designers of other gadgets to be like, what if we went 20% crazier than we were planning to? Like, that's what I want to see. And this was the, this, like, it busted out beyond like our little world of like tech and design nerds just like talking about this stuff. I mean, like, I was just talking to Paul about this.

This was like a topic of a conversation at my Thanksgiving dinner table this year where, like, my mother-in-law was like, does it have carpeting inside? It looks really nice. I think I want one. Does it have carpeting inside? That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah. Man.

I imagine it's all like black, like dominatrix leather inside. For me, what makes it, what converted it from a three to a nine is that I, I love sci-fi. and I've seen a lot of sci-fi. And it kind of bugs me when I see sci-fi cars because I know that under the hood is like a Toyota Corolla. And then somebody put a lot of paper mache on top of it. And so it was cool to see like, I mean, I don't know all the ends and outs of the car,

but at least I'm being sold that it's like an exoskeleton. It's utilitarian, like that this is what the future has to look like. And I know it's not true. It doesn't have to look like that. And you could just put a regular metal skin on a frame and probably get just as good or better performance. I don't even know. But it felt like a marriage of this car is actually a functional thing.

And it also looks like it really looks like this. It's not just dressed up to look like that. It also looks like it's going to just chew up pedestrians underneath it. I mean, like the thing with all those sharp angles and stuff, I mean, there's been a lot of people to note that it's unlikely that this car would be approved in the EU because of like they have very strict like pedestrian safety regulations. And this doesn't sort of meet the design criteria to meet approval. So like, I mean, in the U.S. we don't care.

You know, thousands of people die every year and car accidents. What if for the EU version they had a rule where the cyber truck could never stop honking? I just want to see. So if you imagine F-150 is full, full polygons, like the highest resolution level of detail truck, right? Yeah. And then you scrub that down all the way to, like, the truck that's like, you know, 10 miles off in the distance in the video game. You know, it's just a few polygons, just a suggestion of a truck, right? Yeah.

And that's what the cyber truck is. If you scrubbed that polygon scrubber, like one or two notches up, I think that would make it a 10. And possibly, in a sense, it'd make it a little range. maybe just slightly less pedestrian deaths. I don't really know really how to solve that problem, but just throw that up. I mean, you need a crumple zone. Like, cars need crumple zones in order to absorb impact from the crashes that they encounter. And this truck does not appear to have a crumple zone.

So it's sort of like, I mean, it's not, again, it's not like a requirement in some, in the places like the U.S., but it's nice to have. You know what happened? Elon Musk was in the hot tub and somebody got high and asked, why don't they make the whole airplane out of the stuff that they make the black boxes out of? And he's like, I have a great idea for a truck.

I mean, like, yeah, but you know, if it actually held up to that kind of scrutiny, I mean, they were like, he's like, check out this armor-resistant glass and it broke, like, right away. And that became the thing that everyone talked about afterwards.

And then afterwards, he's like, oh, we shouldn't have hit it with the sledgehammer because that compromised the integrity of the armor-plated glass. But it's just kind of like, why do we need these like bulletproof? Like, I guess maybe if you're some sort of like, you know, like a billionaire,

that's the kind of thing you go for. But to me, this is like that moment was just such a great example of the accidental genius of Elon Musk. Like, because on one hand, like the fact that it broke just led to like, you know, so much coverage. right. Everybody showed that clip. Like, how can you not? But at the end of the day, it costs them nothing

because if you tell the average consumer, oh, are you willing to buy this truck, even though the window glass might break if you throw a rock through it? Most people would be like, yeah, it was a risk I'm willing to take. You know? So it was just like the whole thing was genius.

I bowed to this person. Wow. Amazing. Okay. What about the Ford Mustang Machi? This is what I was just going to say. The entire electric car conversation has been nonstop Tesla for years. Years and years and years, but at the Eliotto show and then just like in general watching other like electric car announcement, it seems like finally we're going to have more adoption of electric vehicles from the other car makers in a real way instead of a half-assed way.

Am I too optimistic by thinking that when I look at this Mustang Maki and be like, okay, now they're finally in the game? No, I think absolutely not. I think you're absolutely right. I think Ford's back in the game. Porsche is definitely in the game with the Taekon. We did a first drive with that recently. And again, go check it out. The video's on the verge.

It's amazing. Sean did an incredible job in Viren. But, you know, these are two cars that the Taekon obviously came out earlier. And the Machi is not going to be coming out until a couple years from now. But still, on paper, it looks fantastic. The price is right. the specs are really good. These are things that EV people that are interested in EVs are really looking at.

Plus, these are two automakers portion and Ford both, where you can still get a really nice tax break from the government because it still exists for those two companies. So that's $7,500 off your sticker price right there. Tesla doesn't have that anymore. And that's something that really helped that company early on in the early days. but now the playing field is going to be something more level, I think, for them. And I think Ford is a nameplate that people know. The Mustang especially, there's a lot of grumbling about Ford putting the Mustang name on this thing. They could have called it any number of ridiculous car names, but they chose Mustang.

That's their most recognizable brand name. And they want to really go with something that can compete in the market against Tesla. So not a sports car This is a crossover And it looks good I think it looks I mean like it's got some weird Design styling to it But I think overall I think it's

And we'd have to obviously drive it first But I think on the surface it looks pretty good Yeah it's actually a shame that noted Mustang enthusiast Nealai Patel is out this week It's tough It's tough I initially was like this I went on the same journey with this car

That I sort of went with the cyber truck Just on a much smaller scale I initially was like, this looks dumb. Why they call this a Mustang. All of these things were mistakes. And I don't know. I've come around. I actually think that I don't have strong feelings about what a Mustang is other than wanting to make jokes about it to troll Neli, which is not nice of me.

But it's a thing that I do. But, you know, I think that they needed to put a brand on it that drove interest and attention. And if they had just called it a fusion, we would not be, we would not care. Yeah, again, this is like another kind of good troll. because if the chatter that your product generates is a bunch of Neanderthals saying, no, you can't make the Ford Mustang a progressive vehicle that will save the world.

Those are the exact right enemies that you want, right? Yeah, absolutely. So I saw the story when it hit the verge, immediately forgot what the car looked like because, you know, my standard is now a cyber truck. Pulled it up again, and it's a very nice car. It also blends totally into the background. Like, this car will drive by you and you will not, like, turn your head to the left.

Not everybody wants to make a statement when they drive around. Most people don't want to make a statement. Maybe Tesla people probably do. But most people are just looking for something that's going to get them from point A to point B. And maybe we'll save them a little bit of money in the long term. And obviously, if you look at things like, you know, sort of the cost of ownership over the total cost of ownership for EVs, It's much better than cars with internal combustion engines. You're saving up to $1,500 to maybe $2,000 a year on gas there.

So it's going to look good. And that's going to be the thing that's going to real speak to people. And if the point is to shift from polluting cars to non-polluting cars, from emission spouting vehicles to zero emission vehicles, we need cars with recognizable, trusted nameplates. And I think that that's what Ford is going for here. and I think it's a good mainstream rival to Tesla.

I think that should be welcomed. And I'm sure Elon Musk welcomes that too. His whole point was to shift the entire industry over to this, and it looks like it's finally happening. Can I ask a really dumb question? Sure. Do all of these cars use different ports to charge? Yeah, so there's like, it's a little unclear.

I mean, obviously Tesla has its proprietary supercharger network. And they've done a really good job at sort of building that out. And that's definitely an advantage they have over a lot of other companies. Yeah, you couldn't take your Mustang over there and plug it into a supercharger. Maybe there would need to be some sort of, I don't know, what would you call it? A dongle? Yeah. But no, there's electrify America.

There's a number of other companies that are owned by automakers that are building out charging networks. that are now coming online. It's still very much a work in progress, and it needs to get faster and better in order to speed this adoption up, because that is the number one concern for people is where do I charge this thing? Maybe I don't have a garage.

You know, I have range anxiety. What am I going to do? And if you don't see out in the world in your community and the places where you travel the most frequently, EV charging networks in the same way that you see gas stations, then you're not going to be convinced enough

to switch over. Right. But, like, if everybody is using a different plug, it's just going to take, you know, if there's four kinds of plugs, it's going to take four times as long, right? Yeah. It's a, it's an issue. It's an issue. And I think that it's something that the automakers need to, like, sit down and figure out because the point should not be to shut out Mustang mock E owners from Tesla's supercharging network. Even though Tesla arguably could say we spent all of this money.

investing in this thing, why should we let other car companies' customers come and use it? But again, it doesn't really speak to the higher purpose that you're trying to achieve. So, okay, the reason I'm not buying any of these electric cars is I don't have a charger in my garage and my apartment. So what I want to do is buy an electric bike. And apparently that's going to be okay for me to do because they're coming back to, well, I mean, I could buy one anytime I want, but some of these bikes are coming back to New York and San Francisco, like the rent-a-bike stuff?

Yeah, the bike shares are coming back. So the ones in San Francisco and New York are both owned by Lyft. Lyft bought this company Motivate a couple years ago, and they were on both the bike shares. They released the electric bikes earlier in the year and hit a bit of a snag. There was some battery fires.

There was some breaking problems. That was the other viral video I wanted to make, by the way, was a Lyft bike catching on fire while I was riding it. But timing didn't work out. What if it caught on fire in the back of the cyber truck while you were parallel parking the cyber truck? Oh, boy. Say hello to go in Megafi.

That would be the most metal video ever. It's just Casey, his hair aflames. It would look amazing. No, but so yeah, they finally figure out these problems that they were having lifted with its e-bikes. And they're bringing them back. They're coming back. And I'm very excited. I feel like it's very good.

I'm an e-bike evangelist. I love them. I ride them to work every day. It's like changed the way. I get around in New York. And I think it's a positive step for cities to be taking because it's going to shift more people out of cars, hopefully, out of Uber and lifts, and onto electric bikes because they're great and they make you feel like a superhero. And I'm all for them. Well, and apparently you also still managed to get exercise from them.

You do. You had a good article about that. You do. They are not cheating. They feel like cheating because there is like some degree of effortlessness. effortlessness involved. But yeah, they've done studies that show that you still sort of enter into that kind of that zone that you're looking for of like vigorous physical activity, especially amongst

mountain bike users when they use electric mountain bikes. So yeah, it's really kind of fascinating that like even though you feel like you're not doing as much physical activity, you're not sweating as much, you're still doing the right stuff for your heart. and it's a positive thing and I think more people should use them. Why did New York, I don't know as much about San Francisco,

but why did New York have this war on electric bikes? So yeah, they have a ban specifically on throttle electric bikes, the bikes where you have like a little button or a knob that you turn and the bike goes without you having to use the pedal. And it's just something that's been in the books for a long time. It's a little bit backwards, in my opinion, and they've been using it to sort of unfairly discriminate against a lot of food delivery workers,

a lot of many of whom are undocumented immigrants. It's kind of like a kind of a discriminatory thing. And they've proposed to change the law, to legalize them. But the scooters are kind of mucking up the legislative process because the city doesn't know how it wants the scooters to come in quite yet. Even though like other cities like San Francisco and many others have sort of figured out how to like, manage the scooters. New York doesn't quite realize that they can just sort of pick up what San Francisco is doing and do the same thing. And so it's kind of leading to the whole thing being kind of like drug down and installed. And yeah, it sucks. But I think they'll figure it out

eventually. I don't know. I mean, the main thing I want is just more more lanes for all of these vehicles, bikes especially. I used to commute via bike in Minneapolis. And I was too scared to do it in San Francisco, just because it just felt like there just wasn't enough. They've gotten better, but it's still nowhere where it should be. Yeah, ideally, the more people you have using these vehicles, and that's why the scooters, I feel like, are a net positive because they would, they're just going to have, as the city sees more people using them, it will hopefully make the decision that there needs to be more protective infrastructure, protected bike lanes, more parking, more, you know, separation

between bike and scooter users and cars so that people can feel more confident and not have to fear for their lives and fear of being crushed under the wheels of Elon Musk's cyber truck when they want a bike to work. So, yeah, if there's a good way to keep the cyber truck separate from the cyber scooters, I'm all for it. Let's do it. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance in burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories,

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That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. All right. So what's going to happen is earlier today I talked to Liz Lapato, as we are recording this, is at the Elon Musk trial for his tweet about the cave diver calling him a pedo guy. Some are calling it the cyber trial. It is wild.

By the time you listen to this, it might even be over. Who knows? But I talk to Liz about the things that are going out in there. So we're going to listen to that chat. But before we get there, Andy, you have a story coming next week I wanted to ask you about. You wrote around in Waymo again? I did. So Waymo, the self-driving subsidiary spun out of Google a couple years ago.

They've been testing their self-driving vehicles in the Phoenix area for a number of years now. And they gave me a ride in one of their fully driverless cars just the other day. It was great. I'm going to have a story coming up about that next week. It's really important, I think, because this is really the only company right now to be testing cars with no one behind the steering wheel on public roads. There's a lot of sort of caveats to that, which are interesting. but it is, I think, kind of like, the future that we're talking about when we're talking about driverless cars. This is actually happening.

I rode in one. It was surreal. All right. Well, keep an eye out for that. And here's Liz. All right, Liz. You are in L.A., right? Yeah, for my sons.

I know. So, okay, you are, this is the trial for Elon Musk over his pito guy, or is a pedo guy tweet. Can you just, like, give us the broad sense of. like what this trial is about and why you're there. Yeah, I will say that pedo guy, which is how I pronounce it, has seen a wide variety of pronunciations. So Pido guy is also a thing that I have heard in the courtroom this week. Yeah, so basically what happened, I'm going to try to summarize this like sort of convoluted thing as essentially as I can is that you might remember last year there was this Thai soccer team with their coach who got lost in a cave system in Thailand.

It was like a big international media kerfuffle. A bunch of people around the world organized to help rescue these kids, which they did successfully, thankfully. But as part of this, Elon Musk got involved. Primarily, it seems, because people on Twitter were asking him to get involved. So he was like, sure, we'll build a mini-sub. And he was in contact with the head of the dive team who actually did rescue the kids. Yeah. And, you know, the testimony I heard was that the sub was.

was considered potentially as a plan B, because plan A, the way they actually got the kids out had never been done before. They were going to sedate the kids, take them underwater. They weren't sure if it was going to succeed or if this would be too much for the kids who'd been in this cave for a while. Yeah. Like, frankly, pretty weak. So, you know, it was a lot happening very fast. And anyway, Musk makes this sub with SpaceX engineers over the course of a couple of days and then brings it to Thailand and leaves. And one of the guys who was initially involved, in the rescue, a guy named Vernon Unsworth, who was very involved at the very beginning because he knows this cave system probably better than most anyone.

At least that was the testimony I heard from the head of the dive team. But he was giving an interview with CNN where he was asked about the minisub, and he said it was a publicity stunt and that he didn't think it was ever going to work. Which, by the way, was like in terms of like uninformed opinions, especially on Twitter, which is whatever. It was kind of like the default opinion. Like, sure, Elon, you can do anything, but maybe this one you shouldn't try and solve right now. Maybe just leave this one to the experts. But like the super fans were like, yeah, go do it. And like nobody really knew. But it seems like a cave diver who has been like diving in those caves who knows how the logistics of like going

into a cave works might know. I don't know. Well, there's that. It's also the fact that like the Financial Times had also said something pretty similar before. which we heard testimony about. So it's not like he was like out on a limb here or he was alone. But for whatever reason, this really irritated Elon Musk, who sent out a series of tweets where he said that Unsworth was suss for living in Thailand, and then called him pedigai, and then replied to someone who was like, this is in poor taste,

like, I bet you a sign dollar, it's true. And then replied to someone, else and said, don't you think it's weird, he hasn't sued me yet? So then he gets sued? Right. Actually, as it happens when he said that, Lynn Wood, who is the lawyer who is in the courtroom this week, was like, hey, by the way, I've already sent you a letter saying that I plan to file litigation.

Here's a copy. It's dated August 6th. Right. All this happens, the trial has begun. And if I've learned anything about the way that high-profile trials go from watching like tech trials, the thing that I think it's about ends up not being the thing that necessarily happens in the courtroom because, like, the legal terms end up being on some, you know, arcane thing or some specific legal question in a way that, like, you wouldn't expect just

from the original lawsuit. So looking at how they set up and talk to the jury and are like making their arguments, what is each side of this case, like, what are they pinning their case on? Well, so it seems like the question is whether Musk was recklessly negligent when he sent those tweets. And I'm not a lawyer, but this is my understanding of the case. So, like, you know, sorry to the lawyers who are listening to this. I don't have a lot of grief. But from the opening statements, it seems pretty clear that what the plaintiff is doing is saying, hey, Vernon Unsworth was called a pedophile by Elon Musk.

And this was reported by the national media. I think they said there was something like 490 stories about it. That seems low. I don't know what date range they're looking at, right? Because like we've been writing about this for at least a year now. Like, fine. So whatever. So that's their argument.

And he's been called a pedophile. He's been smeared. And that, you know, at this time when he should have been celebrating his heroic role in the rescue. And to be very clear, everyone in the court agrees that Vernon Unsworth is a hero, including the judge, including Elon Musk, everyone. You know, he has instead been dealing with this. And the defense is arguing, you know, this is not, this is not

an accusation, it's an insult, this was a fight between men, like, you know, literally, literally that phrase was used. Like, this was shit talking. You know, Musk wasn't like trying to make a statement of fact when he called him

Petto guy, which was a thing that we litigated for quite some time in the courtroom on Tuesday and Wednesday, what the meaning of pedigai was understood to be. The thing that happened, well, so everyone should know, we're recording this Thursday morning before Liz goes into Thursday's day of trial. You'll probably be listening to this on Friday or sometime over the weekend. So there is a very real chance that by the time you hear our voices, this thing will either be completely done or at least like the trial period will already be over,

right? That's right. We're expecting to send the case to the jury either at the end of today or the beginning of tomorrow, the beginning of tomorrow being Friday. But I would just like to note for our longtime listeners that this is a fine tradition from the old days of this week in Elon, where inevitably I am like several days behind whatever is going on because so much is going on that other news has occurred. So there's a few different legal things to pick apart. And then we have to talk about some of like the insane things that actually happened in the room and the insane things that somebody said.

So one of the things that I would like as a person who, who loves language for this entire thing to hinge on is whether pedo guy is a statement or an insult, whether it's the same thing as calling somebody a motherfucker. Most people, when you call somebody a motherfucker, aren't literally implying that you perform that act, or if he's actually making an accusation that he was a pedophile. And it's surprising to me that that is not a bigger part of the case. Like, I figured the entire defense would rest on that. I would have thought so, too.

Just for a little bit of background, one of my sins that has landed me in L.A. is that I was a philosophy major in college, and I studied speech act theory for a while. And I have been absolutely fascinated by this whole thing, particularly around the nature of speech, sort of separately from the actual details of the case. And so, like, if we think about insults, there's, like, think about an insult like asshole, right? Like, that's, like, one of the insults that actually has more research on it. Sure, okay. So that's why I'm using it. But if you were to call me an asshole, this would be understood very clearly as being an insult.

It might even be true. I mean, some people are assholes. I might be one of them who can say. You're not. Just for the record. Thank you. I appreciate that. But, you know, it's very clearly an insult.

It's very clearly not defamatory. Like, there's no smear involved. Like, that is a very clear-cut case. Whereas if you move to Petto Guy, at least in my use, like, Musk has testified that it is, it is known through the English-speaking world to mean creepy old man, and that has not, that's not my experience. It might be his if he's, like, hanging out in, like, weird corners of Reddit and Twitter, but I don't, I would agree with you that it's not, like, the default experience.

No, it's not. So I don't, I don't know about that. Again, I would be nice to have a linguist to, like, speak to it. But I do know that it is way less clear cut than asshole. Yeah. So that's part of the case. But the other part of the case is Musk's state of mind when he made what I'm going to refer to as the doubling down tweets, specifically the one where he says, don't you think it's strange, he hasn't sued me yet.

Because at this point, Musk had hired a private investigator. not directly, but through an employee, who it turned out was a con man and had been feeding him bad information. The private investigator was a con man, not the employee, right? That's right, that's right. To be clear, I assume the employee was the con man

because he goes by brick house. I was like, that can't be a real human. Well, that's not his name, although I love it. I've been just like, I've had, she's a brick house stuck in my head all day. It's bad. But so this employee has used this pseudonym to book travel and other things for for Musk because privacy is important when you're dealing with a celebrity. Fine.

But anyway, so the conman PI sent a bunch of false information indicating that Unsworth was a pedophile. None of this is true to be super clear. And I'm not going to repeat the details of the accusations because I think they're gross. But at this point, that was the information, the bad information, the wrong information. Musk had in mind when he doubled down and said, don't you think it's weird? He hasn't sued me. So, okay, so the defense is this is an argument among men, which is just, come on, what are you doing? Like, this isn't pistols at dawn. And then there's also, can you just please explain the J-D-D-D-R-D-D-R-D-E-R-T? I prefer to think it's pronounced jort, but it's, it's, his lawyer created an acronym called J-D-A-R-T, right?

Yeah, it's pronounced J-D-D-R-T. That's too bad. Listen. It's not the weirdest thing I've heard in court. Not the weirdest thing I've heard in court this week. But so, okay, so Alex Spiro, who is Musk's attorney. He's the head of the legal team. He's represented Jay-Z. He's actually genuinely kind of a scary dude.

Like, just imagine, like, Miles Teller, but, like, a lawyer, like that kind of, like, very type A energy and, like, intensity. Right. So he says, oh, you know, this is Jade Art. These were joking, deleted, apologized for responsive tweets. And, you know, you have a gallery full of journalists, all of us who immediately were like, this is, this is silly. But the argument seems to be from the defense that Musk's state of mind when he sent the initial tweets was that he was just trying to insult somebody who he felt had insulted him. There were a couple of things that Unsworth said in the CNN interview that were pointed to specifically as much.

Musk responding to. That's what the responsive is about, the R and Jade Art. So what Unsworth had said wrongly was that Musk had been asked to leave after visiting the caves, which he hadn't. But the reason that Unsworth thought this is because one of the things that the people on the ground knew was that on the rescue days, the only people who were allowed into the cave, were the actual rescuers, the cave divers. So Elon watches this interview. He testified two or three times. He apparently saw it on Twitter. Yeah. Where else? And he fires off these tweets. He says they were off the cuff. He does a Google search beforehand and discovers an article that says that the place where Unsworth lived

is known as a hotbed of child sex trafficking. So this is mistake number one, just for our audience, because I think that it is useful to know what not to do. Don't use a Google search in lieu of actual research. Yeah. Don't do it. Like, there are databases that can help you. They're more specialized. They're, like, use the Google to get to the database and then do the research.

But then, too, so based on this, he's like, ah, yeah, this will be an effective insult, and then fires off the tweets. Okay. So, hopefully, I don't know, did Jade Art land with the jury? I don't know if you could see the jury, but, like, I have to imagine they're like, uh, what? They didn't, their expressions didn't change. I mean, like, the thing that I have noticed.

with the jury, they've been very attentive, is that they have mostly not really reacted. Like, they've laughed at a couple of things that are, I think, inherently funny. But mostly they've just been, they've just been, like, observing. I think it seems like they're taking their job really seriously. So that's nice. But there are times where they do seem to be growing bored, usually when the lawyers were fighting with each other and nobody is testifying. Yeah, fair.

Okay, so there's a bunch of, like, convoluted parts of the story, especially when you get into the timeline of, you know, what? when the private investigator said the thing to Musk or when he found out about, you know, the lawsuit, et cetera, et cetera, there's a whole situation with justballs.com that I don't understand why it's relevant. Okay. So this goes back to our friend James Brickhouse, aka Jared Birchell. And so as we're discovering, like, as we're talking about the pseudonym, this email is

shown to the court, which, frankly, like, predates this entire trial, all of them. controversy, whatever. And it is under the Brickhouse pseudonym, and it is an offer to buy the website, justballs.com, which for research purposes I have visited, it is under construction, and there are a series of related searches there to baseball. Great. So just balls. Why is this relevant? Because what the defense is attempting to do is establish that the pseudonym was not created specifically for dealing with the PI. Oh, okay. Great.

So, okay, is that the weirdest thing you heard in the court? Because that is awfully strange. Oh, man. God, weirdest. I'm struggling to rank them. Because a lot of the, like, a lot of the moments that were really funny on the first day of the trial were like,

okay, so here is the deal with judges, period. It is one, that they're a little older. And two, this is more relevant. They spend all day in court talking to people instead of being terminally online like the rest of us. Great. And so the first day in court was a bunch of explaining online to people who are maybe not online, including the judge.

There was confusion about what direction one should read an email thread in and confusion about what direction one should read a Twitter thread in, which I had never thought about the fact that they go in opposite directions, but if you don't do those things on a fairly routine basis, I can certainly see how it would be confusing. Yeah. And I don't know the level of the jury's onlineness. I don't know if they are, you know, committed shit posters or they have never touched a computer in their lives or what.

But I would imagine that they are probably not as online as maybe you and I are. And maybe people who spend all day in front of a computer are. Man. Okay. So there's a lot of hilarious things. There's a lot of strange things. things, but the most emotionally affecting thing to me was the piece you put up after Wednesday's day of testimony, where it seems like Unsworth is like genuinely, genuinely broken up about this.

And maybe he's performing for the court a little bit, but just reading what you've written about it, it really seems like all jokes aside, this is not a thing that is light and easy for him. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, separately from whether the question of whether what Musk said about was defamatory. It was clearly incredibly hurtful. So I just want to like I want to give you a little sense of like why

I am convinced of this because and it's it's going to be relevant in a second but the courtroom layout is that the I am sitting in the gallery and I am facing the judge. So that's the front and the back. And then between the two of us there are two tables facing each other.

The plaintiff's table and the defense's table and then behind the plaintiff's table is the jury. So the jury can see the defense but the jury, the Unsworth's back and his lawyer's backs are to the jury. Okay. So as Musk was testifying on Wednesday, and we were having this discussion about the various degrees of seriousness

involved in pedo, pedo guy and pedophile, I was watching Unsworth, who, to my knowledge, I didn't see him at all. My view was blocked on Tuesday, so I don't know what he was doing then. But on Wednesday, I had a clear view of him, and he seemed like really unhaping. happy with this conversation, like visibly unhappy, was shifting in his chair, was sort of like his mouth was working, he was like puffing out his cheeks. He looked miserable, man. And then,

and then he got up on the stage, or the stand, and said that he felt, he felt dirtied, he felt ashamed, he felt that he had been smeared for life. And because I had watched him, you know, having this sort of emotional reaction where the jury couldn't see it, that to me felt incredibly believable. Yeah. Well, and regardless of where this ends up, if you want to talk about the, you know, the speech act of an insult versus a defamation, if you want to talk about the exact timeline of what Musk knew and when did he know it, it really does seem like the joke of never tweet is actually really serious when you are a big public figure. Like, I am careful myself with my, you know, Pidly follower count and my you know minor internet fame about saying anything that might be

hurtful to somebody it just seems incredibly reckless for somebody as famous as Elon Musk to just be throwing stuff out there you know never tweet is not like to me this is not a joke it's just good advice advice I am literally never going to take but it is good advice and like I was like you know like part of the fun of this for me um the moments that were fun we're like listening to people read tweets aloud or like seeing them like presented on a big screen. And like I was thinking about like tweets I'd done and like I would definitely love to see my cat's screen, like my cat tweets about how great my cat is on a big screen and like have a judge read them. But most of the rest of my tweets, no. Tweet's blown up on poster board and like Congress are in trial just like, you know,

five feet wide are never not funny. It's true. Because they're so far out of context, right? Like it's, I mean, we were within the context of no context these days. But, yeah, I mean, to me, like, that was really a message. Like, you know, message one, like, do research the right way. And message two, don't tweet. But, yeah, I mean, that was, that was, to me, like, the headline here. Like, this is not the first time that Elon Musk has gotten in trouble because of his Twitter account. Oh, are you suggesting that maybe he shouldn't have said he was going to take Tesla or private?

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I don't, like, personally, if I were a public figure, I probably also would not leave Twitter, but I would engage somebody who had my password that I personally did not have, who could serve as a choke point for my bad tweets, and, like, say, like, are you sure you want to do this? Because one of the things that seems very clear to me from my own Twitter usage is that it's a pretty impulsive place. Yeah. You know, it's like a seething mass of id.

And just having somebody, like, having to tell somebody what you want to tweet is usually a pretty good sounding board for whether it's a good tweet or not. And, like, not being able to access your own Twitter account seems like a net positive. Yeah. If you're embarrassed to, like, say to somebody, I would like you to tweet this, then you shouldn't tweet it. Yeah. So if you are listening to this and you're a public figure, that is my advice.

you, like, you don't necessarily have to delete your Twitter account, although, like, you could. Like, that would probably be the smartest thing you could do, but, like, maybe just, like, have an intermediary to make sure that you don't say dumb shit publicly. Yeah. Don't say dumb shit publicly is probably a pretty good place to wrap up. So, Liz, I'm going to let you go, cover the rest of the trial. Good luck. And, you know, don't jade art if you get back on Twitter.

I'll do my best not to. Honestly, like, I can't wait to start tweeting about my cat again. Support 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. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming

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A-ha moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis, with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes.

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Yes. Every single week. Without fail, we introduce the segment the exact same way, which is we talk about its consistency, and we never forget about it, we never screw it up, because it always has the exact same name. Actually, I've been thinking about taking a week off each year in honor of Cybertruck. But other than that, yes. It's always been called and will continue to be called in the apocalypse. We don't need space bars. And this is just, I mean, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is.

This is a cyber deck. It's a Raspberry Pi cyberdeck. And it's very hard to describe. So just imagine that you're in a William Gibson novel and you also have a Raspberry Pi. And you need to, it's a waterproof case with a screen and some hardware switches that look really cool and kind of retro. And then a super impractical keyboard in the front. But it's, you know, real mechanical switches and stuff. But there's no space bar.

I've been looking at the layout of this keyboard. This is a super custom project that somebody, it's basically a piece of art that is, is like, what would a rugged laptop look like in the apocalypse when, you know, you're driving your cyber truck and then you need to like whip up, like a post-apocalyptic email to your tribe.

And so you whip out your, your cyber deck and you, you type it up on this Raspberry Pi cyber deck. And it just, I just don't know why. I really like those fancy keyboards where you put all the keys in a grid, you know, and you use kind of like cords to like get at all the extra functions and stuff. But there's just no spacebar in here.

I just don't know how you type without a space bar. It's not like there's no room in the cyber deck. I think you could ask any MacBook keys of what it's like to type by the spacebar. You can figure it out. Fair. Yeah. This thing actually looks really dope. I want to know what the switches are for.

So it looks like a big plastic Pelican case and you like snap it open. Yeah, I mean, you can switch on and off the display. So if you're just running the pie as like a server, you can turn off the display. You can switch the power source up. And then it's got like GPIO breakouts. Just looks so cool.

It's just, you know, it's like it's alternate history tech, but it's real working project based on a Raspberry Pi. I don't know how to transition this to the founders of Google leaving, but I just, that's just happening. Casey Newton, tell us what's going on because Sergey and Larry

just surprised us on a Tuesday afternoon just sort of out of nowhere. Well, I mean, I think it's possible that they heard about this new raspberry pie and they thought

we've got to start hacking on this thing. This is the future. No, so there we were, you know, sitting at our internet brain stations, minding our own business.

And then word comes down the transom on the official Google blog that Larry and Sergey who started their company 21, years ago. Famously, in Susan Wigiske's garage. Well, they started in a dorm. Yes, and they expanded. Yes. They expanded into the garage. Well, they've decided that they have had enough and that they are now going to merely be board members who retain total control over the company.

So Google, of course, has dual-class stock, and Larry and Sergey, you know, can kind of still decide what happens. But day-to-day, the person running it will be Sundar Pachai, who, they elevated from running Android to running Google in 2015 once they sort of reorganized the whole company so that it had an umbrella company over it called Alphabet and now Sundar will be running Alphabet as well and so that is what happened. I have, I need to talk about Alphabet for quite a while

but the just, if you're not familiar, dual class stock and Google is actually a pioneer in this shenanigan. There's two kinds of stock that you get on to Google you can own regular plebe stock, or you can own super special like I'm in charge stock. And they created this two class system. So they maintain 51% or whatever it is, control of the company. They can do whatever they want. And they can do whatever they want at the company and nobody can say no to them.

Not the board, not Sundar, not anybody. And you might be saying, well, what would they do with that? Well, for example, they might set up part of alphabet called Other Betts, a division of the company that managed to lose $941 million in the previous quarter. Yeah. Which is a thing that actually happened. They also can say, well, you know, we actually, we don't run YouTube. We run Alphabet, which has Google as a division, and then YouTube is a division of Google. And that's just too far down the chain for us to have to report on financials for that.

So we don't know how much money YouTube makes. Right. And this has, like, been a huge frustration on the part of financial analysts for a while because YouTube is obviously one of the biggest companies in the entire world, and we know almost nothing about its financial performance. Yeah. So why now? Why did – so they're not going away. They're still going to be employees of the company, I'm told. They're still board members.

They just don't want to manage anymore. But honestly, they could have done this a year and a half ago, and nobody would have batted an eye at it. They could have done it when they split out alphabet in the first place. Like, why now? So there are some competing theories about this, and we should say that all of these are 100% in the realm of speculation. We don't really have any reporting on this. Many people have noted that this is a rough. time for Google across a lot of dimensions.

One, there are ongoing antitrust investigations into the company around the world. There are also other investigations related to data privacy and other issues. Larry and Sergey famously hated kind of interacting with the government in any way. Some people have speculated that they might have just wanted to avoid that. I mean, Larry Page literally proposed like on stage at a massive Google event that he, wanted to start his own island where there would be no laws of regulations to stop him from making weird things. He's kind of doing that too in Toronto.

Yeah. Yeah. Sidewalk labs. Yeah. So, you know, there is that theory. Another theory is that they're very worried about an ongoing investigation that Google's or Alphabet's board is currently conducting into the shameful history in Google's C-suite of top executives, including both.

with Larry and Sergey dating their subordinates. Right. The fact that they did this is on the record. We know that it happened. Some of the details are pretty bad. And so you can imagine when this report comes out, there could be a lot of internal unrest at Google seeking their ouster. Right.

Well, and there's already internal unrest at Google right now. Lots of employees starting in some ways with this history, with the revelation of Andy Rubin's payout, there was a huge Google walkout. There had been some agitation up to. that point, but there's just a lot of organizing and a lot of fighting with management right now. And I think that that is the third major reason that people are speculating is that there is this really large contingent of Googlers that is very unhappy about the way that the

company has been managed with regard to the treatment of workers, with regard to payouts to, you know, men who have had credible charges of sexual misconduct. And, you know, they have shown no interest in trying to quell those storms. Yeah. Have they been doing a bad job, would you say? Have they been doing a bad job? Yes. Honestly, what has Alphabet done that is worth a damn since 2015 when this thing happened?

I feel like if I, you know, through partial ingenuity, partial timing, partial luck founded a trillion-dollar company, I would probably have done exactly what they did in terms of like, okay, this is up and running, but it's really just ads. So I'm going to go and invent weird stuff and maybe something will land and then I'll have like a second act and that'll be great. I totally get that. But that doesn't seem to have been like a really great strategy. Well, I mean, what's not clear is that they took much of an active role in these projects. Like, you know, there are stories about them like wandering around the project loon offices like looking at their balloons. Like Sergei was very interested in the autonomous vehicles for a long time. So, you know, they have checked in.

but it's not like they're out there, you know, giving TED talks or writing blog posts or really engaging on the issues around these other bets in any meaningful way. And so from the outside, it really does just look like they disappeared. Well, the other thing that always rubbed me the wrong way is Alphabet fundamentally felt dishonest from the start. It was never, oh, we're forming this umbrella company, Google is a part of it. We're going to do a bunch of other amazing stuff. But it was always just Google. And the rest of this other corporate structure and these corporate shenanigans and they're in charge of Alphabet.

And there's a, you know, a group of CEOs running a bunch of different companies that are all, you know, co-equal with Google was never, it was always just Google. And everybody knew it. Yeah. I mean, I'm sympathetic to the idea that if you had a like financial engine that was throwing off more cash than almost anything in history, but that it was also an internet business. and so just as subject to being disrupted as any other internet business, you would invest an insane amount in research and development and in stuff that looks totally unrelated to the place where you had made your bones. I think in retrospect, we will probably feel pretty good about their investment

in what became Waymo. For example, Waymo may not be the winning autonomous vehicle company, and Andy reports on this all the time, but they really ceded a lot of that research. They made some of the big early advances, and, you know, they're going to be relatively early to the market. And maybe that becomes a huge business for them, right? And it's also the sort of thing where if only one of those other bets pays off in a Google-level way, then the whole thing was arguably worth it. Okay.

But for every way mode, then you make something like Kitty Hawk, which is this flying car startup that Larry Page has been funding. And apparently there was a great story that kind of flew under the radar on Forbes that came out last week. how they are returning deposits for the very first vehicle that they were planning on manufacturing because it looks like they're probably not going to end up actually making it. It's this thing called the flyer, which is sort of like this personal flying device that you can use over, you know, bodies of water. And it looked like a lot of fun when they put out the first video. And now it's like, you know, it's this typical thing, this, you know, walking back the high expectations of this flying car project that they were. we're starting on the path of. So, you know, yeah, I agree. It's, it's, you know, you got to,

diversify as much as you possibly can, but you got to be smart about how you do that, too. Well, I think that the whole reason of making Alphabet the umbrella company was so that they could still be in charge and not have anybody ask them why they weren't giving up their 51% control. Because a much more natural way to do it is just have Google Ventures, like, fund a bunch of companies on the side and they run some of those companies, the end, right? That's like, that makes it way more sense to me. And now we have the situation where, Sundar Pachai is running Google and also Google's parent company at the same time. Fine. It's all one company anyway. That's how I feel about it. But I am going to be very curious to see what he and Ruth Parat, the CFO, start doing with those other bets.

Are they going to start just like holding these other, you know, random alphabet companies to account to, you know, put up or shut up or are they going to continue to let them sort of do what they do? Well, here's where it gets interesting because if you've heard one thing about, about Sundar Pichai, it's probably that he's very nice. Yeah. And it's because, like, he is. Because it's literally true. It's very true. And so it's hard to imagine him transforming into the corporate grim reaper, right?

Right. Some people believe that Ruth Pratt actually already has been that, that Reaper in a lot of ways. And so maybe she will sort of be empowered to go swing the scythe and get rid of, I don't know, Verily or Calico or, you know, some of these other divisions that they're spinning up now. but I don't know. I've read some interesting analysis over the past day or so that has said this is the most likely outcome of Google being run by Sundar is that he is going to focus on the core money-making businesses, which are Google and YouTube, to the, you know, at the expense of everything else. And if that happens, then this is going to be actually a really significant deal and a kind of significant re-transformation of Google. You know, there was a lot of what I thought was really dumb tech punditry.

out there in the aftermath of this move where people are like, it doesn't matter, this was basically the case anyway. It's like, no, like the people protecting seven of Alphabet's divisions don't work there anymore. Well, but they're still around and they're still going to give advice on things that they're

passionate about or whatever the line was. So there is the question of, like, is nothing changing because they're still going to be their like, you know, exercising soft power in some way? Are they like, what's the, they're going to be like, you know, the advisor behind the king, right? Right.

the power behind the throne. Yeah. But at the end of the day, we don't know because they have essentially been living on Mars for the past five years. Yeah. I mean, my senses, I put this in my piece, like Sundar got to where he is, not just by being a nice guy, but his job was making good products and taking things that were essentially in beta and making, like finalizing them and then putting him out the door. He made Chrome out of nothing that Google didn't even, like Larry Page didn't even really want to make a browser. And he's like, no, no, this is really good. And, you know, off to the races.

He did the same thing with Gmail, G Suite. Like, he professionalized all of their consumer apps, so to speak. And so if he sees the potential to, like, make any of those alphabet things real, I think that he could definitely pull it off. But I think that right now there's more than enough to deal with, with all the regulation, all of the employee unrest, some of which is very well justified, all of the crap that's happening. on YouTube.

Now is not a great time for Sundarpa Chida all of a sudden have a whole lot more crap on his plate. Right. I mean, if you're a tech founder right now, I think leaving on your own terms is probably way more preferred than getting kicked to the curb

as some other examples we've seen in recent history. Yeah. It is interesting that now Microsoft and Apple and Google, all three are run by like trusted lieutenants who had a track history of executing well and not being, you know, wild and angry and crazy and weird.

And they've really been pretty successful, right? Like, Sachin Adela had like turned around Microsoft in a really impressive way. Tim Cook has been a pretty steady hand at the wheel. And, you know, and I think like, you know, as somebody who is at least somewhat skeptical of him, like he managed to launch very successful products that I don't think Steve Jobs was, you know, aware of or were, you know, in a still pretty embryonic stage. And that was not, you know, know, a given when Steve Jobs died. Sooner Pichai has been a steady hand at the wheel for Google. The financial performance this year has been really good.

The stock price is up. So, yeah, it is interesting that three of our biggest tech giants are run by these kind of heirs to the founders. Yeah. I have nothing else to say about Google. I mean, I do, but I'm going to let it go. The nice thing is that they only announced one new messaging app this week alongside this.

So, I mean, good on them. Is that photos? Photos messaging? Yeah. Google Photos messenger. Which actually, like, jokes aside is a really good idea because sharing photos and Google photos before was a nightmare. It was just awful. It's a, I do, I do, you bringing up Microsoft really made me think, like, what are the things that Microsoft?

So Google and Microsoft both have a cloud component, and they both have, like, a cloud office component. And you really get the sensation that Microsoft thinks of those as very important and strategic. for the future of their company. And Google has thought of them as, it'd be nice if we were successful at this, you know? Yeah, I think they actually do want our, do you think it's more critical for their future. Google really does want to diversify its revenue streams outside advertising.

This is, but they actually need to commit harder. And I think that for Google to commit harder, like say for hardware, for example, for Google to actually commit on hardware, I would have to actually commit real, like, lose a ton of money, marketing resources. to its products.

And then if it flopped, it looks really bad. But they do want to make money off of stuff other than ads. And in the cloud stuff in particular, that's just like, that's a big whiff for them. They like, they've had bad management. They didn't know how to like sell to companies. They didn't have the right sales teams and, you know, on and on and on. So they've actually rebooted that again in like the past year and a half. So I think you're right that it's not core to them and like that doesn't feel existential

to them. But I think the five-year view is that if Google, Google is still making 98% of its money off ads, then it's going to be in trouble. Well, and then that would be interesting to see if a future of Google is to, instead of losing $500 million on some crazy project, you know, lose $500 million on trying to win at docs, you know?

Right. That would be kind of wild. God, I would love it if Google just said, we've decided to invest an additional $500 million into docs. And then maybe it would, default to a blank 8.5 by 12 sheet of paper in the year 2019 every time you started a new document. Maybe you would work on the iPad. Dieter, please don't get crazy.

We only have $500 million to work with here. Okay? You're nuts. All right. We've run pretty long in the last couple of minutes. Paul, what the hell is going on in Hawaii with Qualcomm? Qualcomm's done it again. They said that they couldn't make another flagship.

Where will they go from here with the 850? Well, they made the 865. What? Yeah, I know. It's pretty wild. Some people thought they would go to 856, and they just blew right by it. That's right. It's such a leap this year.

So they're claiming about a 25% improvement. A lot of horsepower seems available for the camera, which is pretty exciting. They say they could capture 8K at 30 frames per second, which is pretty wild. notably the 5G modem is not built in my understanding is there's no modem built into the 865 at all which means that you know you'll get this processor you need to go get a modem and most people are just going to go get the modem that Qualcomm sells that works with it which is a 5G

modem right it is a better 5G this year so they're upgrading that and notably with better support for like lower my big thing I really want T-Mobile 600 megahertz networks is just to be the best thing ever. Because I'm having real problems with my Verizon coverage lately where it's because especially it's like I'm in a building and I don't have Wi-Fi and Verizon's networks just doesn't want to find me inside of the building.

And it's like, well, why am I paying you? You know, I'm not supposed to use my phone while I'm driving, you know. So like I'm usually inside of buildings, you know. And if I don't get coverage from you while I'm inside. You know, so I really like the idea of 600 megahertz. So I wish T-Mobile the best of luck. And so the new 5G modem should be better with that stuff. Yeah, T-Mobile's network is deployed.

I think the only phone that works on it, you can start buying tomorrow, I think it is, or today when you're listening to this, it's the one plus seven something pro McLaren special edition 5G or whatever. We're going to be out and testing it streets in New York. We've got one. So stay tuned for that, or it might be up by the time you listen to this. the 865 seems fine. I'm more excited that the mid-range is getting better because I think that

we're going to be getting to a place where you can get a good phone and not feel bad about having the second-tier processor. Yeah, so the 765 is the new mid-range. It does have built-in 5G. And I, yeah, I'm super, I'm super in. Like, I don't need, thankfully, you know, I don't need to capture 8K at 30 frames per second.

So, like, thankfully, I get to make a choice in the next year or two. to buy a phone with hopefully better battery life and good wireless. And I don't think that I just don't feel like I need these flagships anymore. But, you know, obviously they're still pushing it and they're still improving the speed. Qualcomm also announced new Windows arm 8C and 7C. But I didn't know this, but there's no 8CX laptops shipping yet. The only real one that was announced is a Samsung and they just haven't, they just like haven't released it.

It's in the same warehouse where they keep all the Bixby speakers. You know, they just haven't thought to like, oh, yeah, we should put these in stores yet. So, yeah, the only, the SQ1 has shipped, which is a variant of the 8cx. But, yeah, Qualcomm's shipping new arm windows laptops before anybody's bought a single one of their previous generation. Seems weird to me. I don't know. That, friends, is the entirety of the Verge cast. Before I let you go, I want to plug a bunch of stuff because this has actually been just a gangbusters week at the Verge.

In addition to the stories where we talked about, Zoe Schiffer posted an amazing feature on Away, the suitcase maker and just the horrific culture that happened in there. You got to read these slack logs. You heard Addie on the Vergecast before. She had a great piece on how to find the truth on the internet. Colin Letcher had an amazing piece on a caper involving tracking e-waste across the globe using a hidden GPS unit. You know, we talked about Liz on Elon. And then we had just a ton of great features about the 25th anniversary of the PlayStation. that Andrew Webster put together with basically the whole staff.

So you should go check all that stuff out. We'll put some links in the show notes. And there are other podcasts from the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which we are the flagship, by the way, that you should go listen to. One in particular I think you'll like is Reset with Ariel de Ham Ross. It comes out three or so times a week, and it is really close looks at the biggest stories that are happening that day. So go check that out.

I am on Twitter. I am at Backlon. Nealai is Reckles of Meathouse. We've out here. Casey is Casey Newton. Andy is Andy Jayhawk. That's right. Hey, and Paul is Future Paul.

Thanks for listening. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Cybertruck forever.