The Vergecast - The Slate Truck is a whole new kind of car

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Sometimes you want more tech in your life — and sometimes you want a lot less. This episode is all about less. First, Tim Stevens joins the show to talk about his story about the Slate Truck, an ultra-minimal electric vehicle that has almost no features to speak of and yet still promises to reinvent the way we think about cars. After that, Casey Johnston tells us about her journey in managing her screen time. She has tips for how to get the most problematic apps of your phone, is a big proponent of a factory reset, and has seen first-hand what happens when you look at your devices just a little less. Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!) about whether there's a MacBook Air equivalent in the Windows world. The answer surprised us, and it might surprise you too. Further reading: The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen Is this the antidote to America’s truck bloat problem? From TechCrunch: Inside the EV startup secretly backed by Jeff Bezos Around the Next Bend on Substack Slate is the American truck scene's Ctrl+Alt+Del moment From She's a Beast: The DIY Dumbphone Method Casey's book: A Physical Education Framework Laptop 13 (2025) review: getting better with age Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of trucks that have no stereos and no paint and like no features of any kind. And I still want it very, very, very badly. I'm your friend David Pierce. And right now I'm doing some headphone testing. So I have a blue set of AirPods Max that frankly, I just hadn't used AirPods Max in a while. So I picked up a pair. Don't tell anybody, but I have every intention for returning these to the Apple Store. But just wanted to try them out for a while.

And then I got these. They're called the Pickin' S. and they are just the most incredible, blatant AirPods Max knockoff you've ever seen in your entire life. I am fascinated by these things. The AirPods Max are $500. These are like $50. And I'm going to have a lot more to say about these

because I actually think there's a really interesting story behind these headphones and the TikTok shop and the way that we buy and find electronics now. But I will tell you, these sound a lot better than a 10th is good. as the AirPods Max. More on that to come. Anyway, on this show, we're going to do two things today. First, we're going to talk about the Slate Truck, which launched last week. It is one of the most interesting new vehicles we've seen in a very long time. Tim Stevens wrote about it for us. He's

going to come on the show. We're going to talk about it. After that, I'm going to talk to Casey Johnston, who writes a newsletter called She's a Beast, about how to use my phone less. I have been on this slow journey to try and downgrade my screen time a little bit. Not because I think phones are inherently bad and that looking at screens is inherently bad, but just because I find myself like picking up my phone to look at TikTok while I walk to the bathroom six feet away. And that just doesn't seem quite right. So Casey has some really interesting ideas. We're going to talk about all of that. We also have a really fun hotline question about laptops that caused a sort of small existential crisis among a bunch of us. Lots to get to. This is a really fun show. Uh, it's a really fun show.

This is like extremely up my alley, all of this stuff. It's been very fun. All of that is coming up in just a second. But I just realized I have like six pairs of headphones connected to my phone now. And I have to walk the dog, which means I have to go solve a bunch of Bluetooth problems in order to listen to podcasts while I walk. I'm going to figure that out. We'll be right back.

This is the Vergecast. I'll see in a second. 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.

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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 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. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion?

If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Tim Stevens is here. Tim, welcome to the Vergecast. Hey, David. Thanks for having me.

Tim, you are a freelance tech and auto writer. You and I have been tech blogger enemies. for many years. A frenemies, I'd like to say. A frenemies is good. I'm good with frenemies. You also write a newsletter called Around the Next Bend. But last week, you wrote a story for us about, I honestly think I have been thinking about

this a lot. I think I can say this without hyperbole. The most interesting car I have seen in years. Yeah, I would totally agree. And I think what makes it interesting is how bare bones, how basic it is. And what's also interesting is how well it's resonating, given how little it, actually has and does if that's not saying too much. Totally. So, yeah, I want to talk about there's kind of the car, the company, and why everyone

is into this. But let's just talk about the car first. So describe the slate truck to me. So the slate truck is basically an attempt to kind of reboot what a car could be. It is a very, very basic machine on many levels, starting with the paint, for example. There is no paint. It's basically made of molded plastic. All the body work is, which has a lot of benefits. If it's scratches. It doesn't matter because there's no paint layer to scratch off. So it's just going to stay the same color. But it was designed, interestingly, to be a great surface for receiving vinyl wraps, which is a very common thing that people are doing these days. You can get it in any color you want to. You just kind of DIY it. It is an electric truck, seats too. It is not like a king cab kind of thing where you can have comfortable seating in the back. But interestingly, if you do need seating for more people, you can buy an upgrade kit, which basically bolts a couple of seats in the bed and turns it into. an SUV. You can probably catch the theme here is customization. That's a big thing for sure.

It's fully electric, rear drive, relatively small battery between 150 and 230 miles of range, depending upon which configuration that you go with. Fairly low power. You're not looking at, you know, a crazy sort of 60 times or anything like that. It doesn't have a lot of towing capacity, about a thousand pounds there. Payload, I think, is about

1,500 pounds, which is comparable to something like a Ford Maverick. So, you know, you're looking at a kind of bare-bones EV, but the The really interesting things, I think, is what it doesn't have. Again, doesn't have paint, does not have a touchscreen, doesn't even have a car stereo of any kind. It doesn't have power windows. You've got to crank the windows down in a very old school kind of way.

And so it is, again, a very bare-bones machine, which I think makes it very compelling because the biggest story, of course, is that they want this thing to cost less than $20,000 after federal incentives, which means the full price of the thing is probably on the order of $25 to $2,700. How much do you think the story here starts with price? Like, can you work backwards from we wanted to get this thing to be $19,99 and sort of tell the rest of the story? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think the price is definitely something that they had in mind when they were beginning this company about three years ago and they started in the initial designs. And to get such a radically low price on an EV in, you know, the current state of the world, the current state of the economy requires, you know, you make some drastic cuts like power windows, for example, or touch. screens or radios, but it also really required the team, the designers at Slade Auto, to come up with a way of not only cutting back on features in the vehicle, but also cutting back on the production, the development, and the design cost of the things. So, for example, we're talking about the lack of paint being an advantage potentially if you have something that gets scratched, that kind of thing.

But it's also a huge advantage from a production standpoint, because if you're creating aluminum body panels or steel body panels, that requires these massive stamping machines that are like, three stories tall, they cost millions of dollars. But if you're injected molding plastic, you can basically do that in any kind of building. You can do that in your apartment if you want to. And the fact that it's not painted means that they don't need a paint shop. And paint shops are incredibly expensive too. So those two things right there make this company, you know, makes them getting off the ground much easier. And it again takes huge amounts of cost out of the design and development of a vehicle like this. So when you look at a lot of the changes, a lot of

things that are missing. They have obviously an impact in terms of the cost of the vehicle itself, but they also have a huge impact on the ability for the company to get to production quickly and cheaply, which again then just factors into keeping the cost by the vehicle low. So does that feel disingenuous to you at all? Like I look at this thing and it's like, okay, it's, it's $20,000. Great. I would like my car to have a stereo. That seems like a reasonable thing to ask for in a car. You have to pay more money to put your kids in the backseat, right? So I think, is this, is this sort of a bit that this company is doing to be able to say we're selling a truck under $20,000, which I think for a lot of reasons we should talk

about is a meaningful thing to be able to say? Yeah, for sure. Or is this a real sort of honest to God, just different and interesting approach to how you even think about making a car. Yeah, you can definitely take a look at this from the cynical or the optimistic approach from the cynical approach. You know, this is the low-cost airline approach of EVs where even if you want a sandwich, then you got to pay extra for it. That's $10 for a tree. table. Right. If you want to be able to put both your feet on the seat in front of you, you've got to pay extra

for that kind of thing. You can definitely look at it in that way, and I think that there is some truth to that as well. But, you know, in the time that I spent speaking with the executives and the designers and everything else, they do genuinely feel kind of emotionally attached to this idea of rebooting motoring and creating something that is attainable by everybody. So I think you can come out of from two different ways, but I think what I like the idea here is that you've got one truck in one spec.

This isn't an upsell kind of thing. You can get a stereo if you want to. They'll sell you an upgrade kit for that. They'll sell you upgrade kits for all sorts of things on the thing if you want to. But unlike a lot of EV startups, like a Lucid or even Tesla in the early days where you had to buy their new EV in like this super souped up package with all the options and it costs twice as much as it was supposed to. This is just going to be a bare bones thing to begin with. And then you just add on the things that you want to. And I think the other interesting thing is that a lot of this is really, I don't want to say open source, but it's going to be pretty easy for a lot of people to do this.

this on the row. You'll be able to 3D print components if you want to put that in there. You can mount your own Bluetooth speaker if you don't want to use theirs. It's not the kind of thing where you're going to be forced down an upgrade path with huge high premiums on there. You can kind of do this stuff as you want to, and you can do it as you can afford to as well. So if you can only afford the truck up front, but you want to add that stereo system down the road 12 months later after you save it some money, you can do that. And I like that approach. Why do you think it's a pickup truck? I think a lot of the sort of sensibility you described strikes me as making a lot more sense if you were making something that

looked like a Nissan leaf or like a really cool scooter, right? Like we've seen all these things where people are basically like, what have I just built a thing with two wheels and some wild ideas around it and maybe that's the future? Like so much of what you're talking about feels like it suits that better than like what people have in their mind when they think of pickup truck. Yeah, that's a good question, David. I think for one thing, it is cheaper.

You know, you've only got half the interior to worry about it. That saves some money there too. I think from a pure, you know, if you go to that concept again of something that is, that she can wear into. Part of the idea here is something that evolves with you and that gets better with age. I looked at one of their design boards at one point and had this picture of a shark on there

that was covered in scars. And the shark was old and beat up, but it looked cool as hell. And that was part of what they wanted, the aesthetic of this vehicle to be, that it gets better looking with time, like an old pair of blue jeans, like a leather wallet, that kind of thing.

And I think that that concept works better with a truck than with a car, simply because we're used to trucks being at jobs. you know, hauling mulch and lumber and that kind of thing. But whether, again, that could be an optimistic or pessimistic thing. Did that concept come about because they decided to have a truck and they wanted to come up with a good way to spin it? Or is that really part of the concept of the vehicle to begin with and that you could go either way? But the other thing is I think that this functionally makes a lot of sense for a lot of people the idea of I think a lot of people would love to have a small truck that they can go get some mulch, they can go get some lumber.

Or they can even put their muddy dog in the back that they want to without getting it all of the interior. And I think that that makes sense too, but also the idea that you can then convert it into an SUV, which is the most popular category of vehicles right now without too much effort, means that this could have enough flexibility to work even if you don't want a truck. But I'm curious to see what the uptick is and how many people actually decide to get the SUV kit for it. Okay. How much are you a truck guy in general? I know you wrote in the story that you, like many people, find ridiculous how enormous and tall trucks have become. But are you like on the slide just driving around in your F-150 yelling at people at the window? Like you're not a truck guy generally?

I've on trucks. I've spent years living with trucks. I think trucks are great. I would love to actually have a truck, but I have too many vehicles as it is right now. The truck doesn't quite fit in there. But I think one of the main things that stopped me from getting a truck is that there aren't many small, cheap options like this anymore. You know, it used to be that you could go buy a really basic Toyota T-100 or a Nissan Frontier for, you know, you know, under $20,000 and have a basic truck that sat to people, had a manual transmission

and crank windows. And I can't tell you the number of people who have been asking me, when is Ford going to bring back something like the old Ranger in the 90s, which a lot of people loved, which was very much that kind of truck. But it was still cool because it had like flare sides and cool graphics and stuff like that. And so what I would love to have would be something like a K truck, which is the small Japanese trucks that a lot of folks are importing, which are unfortunately, basically not legal here in New York State right now, which is preventing me from getting one. Something super basic that I could beat the hell out of, that I could take to Home Depot and put a bunch of papers in the back and not care if it scratches up to paint. If I could buy something like that for cheap, I probably would have one. So that's why I'm personally excited about a slate.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time in trucks. I've done a lot of chowling and hauling and that kind of thing. And so I respect them. But I think the big problem right now with the consumer truck industry in the United States is that these trucks are just gotten simply too big. If you look at something like a Silverado, 2,500, around 3,500, you could literally put a sixth grader standing in front of that truck and the person in the driver's seat could not see that child. Just because of the height of the hood, these things are unnecessarily large and they're hugely expensive with the average price of $60,000 in the U.S. And that I think is too much. And so I hope that Slate is a huge success and that makes these other truck companies think, well, maybe it's time for us to deliver something small and cheap as well. So the analogy that that makes me think of, and you are a perfect person to litigate this analogy with me, is the people who want small smartphones. And I think we've been on this inexorable march to bigger, more expensive smartphones for a decade.

And there has always been this group of people who is like, no, I want the iPhone 4. I want something that fits in my hand. These things are preposterous. And yet, every bit of available evidence suggests that would be. actually want when they vote with their dollars is the big smartphones. And I have to assume that the same is true in the trucking industry, which is why they keep making bigger, taller trucks. So is Slate like the iPhone SE and that it is like sort of adorable but not real for most people? Or is there something different going on here? Yeah, it's a great analogy. Obviously,

consumer demand is what has pushed the truck industry to where it is today. It's not like, you know, RAM and Chevy and Ford are forcing these giant trucks down the throats of anybody. People aspire to own a bigger, better, faster, more powerful truck, and so people go out and buy them. I think that's happening on the smartphone world as well, but I am sure you as well know, a lot of folks are still hanging on to their older iPhones because they don't want something that's too big. And I think the problem in the smartphone industry is that, you know, nobody else can release an iPhone.

Only Apple can. So if Apple decides that big phones are what's it and they're not going to make small phones anymore, nobody else can do that. On the Android side, obviously it's different, but a lot of folks are very tied into the Apple ecosystem and that are going to go anywhere. On the auto side, it's a very different story. There are really, there are ecosystems as such, but they're not nearly as powerful as, you know, as Apple or Android or something like that. So for someone to switch brands, for someone to have a conquest and go from one brand to another.

It's not that big of a deal. Especially it's easy with the slate because, you know, there's no software really to worry about anyway. So it's kind of a new, it's Greenfield territory. And that I think is the biggest question for me is, are people really going to put their money where their mouth is? You know, like I said, people have been asking me, when is Ford going to make a small ranger again? When is someone going to bring out a cheap frontier or a cheap Tacoma? And this is their time to put their money forward and say this is what I actually want. The interest in the article has been huge, and that's encouraging.

But we also saw a huge interest around the cyber truck when that was unveiled. And that obviously has not landed quite so well. So I'm curious to see how this lands when it does ship hopefully toward the end of next year. Okay, yeah, we're going to come back to that because I've heard that phrase so many times. that I've come to not believe it. But we're going to go back to that. The last thing I'm trying to figure out about the truck is Slate seems to imagine kind of the ecosystem of a car very differently from your average company. What was your sense of how they're thinking about it in terms of like, okay, I do want to add a stereo?

Is that something Slate is going to make? Is that something that they're imagining I can just like walk to Best Buy and Buy? Am I going to do the repairs on the car myself, which is a thing? I think an executive hinted to you as part of their plan. Like the sort of car world is enormous and much bigger than just the car that you own, right? Is Slate trying to fit into that or sort of reimagine that? Yeah, Slate is really rapidly or radically, I should say, embracing the DIY mentality, both in terms of right to repair and also in terms of customization.

So, you know, again, it starts on the outside with these vinyl wrap kits that Slate will offer, but they'll also make it pretty easy to do your own with templates, that kind of thing. So customizing the look should be more easy than any other vehicle out there. But when it comes to customize the interior, there are provisions in there for connecting USB devices, power for speakers, that kind of thing. So you can pretty easily bring your own devices there or they have said that they will offer some upgrade kits as well to bring speakers into the vehicle. But I think the idea by and large is for you to be doing this work yourself or to work with some kind of an aftermarket installer if you want to. but they're going to be creating something that they call Slate University, which is basically like a big online fact, a knowledge-based kind of thing

where you can look up information on how to install speakers in your vehicle, how to do a vinyl wrap, and even how to do some repairers. So, for example, if your mirror breaks and that's covered by warranty, instead of you having to go to a shop to replace that mirror, they want to basically send you a new mirror and tell you how to install it. Interesting. Which on one hand, it feels kind of basic to some degree, like shouldn't someone do that for me?

But also, on the other hand, it sounds a lot nicer for me to just go out in my driveway and take off the old mirror and pop on a new one. Rather than driving it down to the dealership, dropping it off in the morning, maybe getting a courtesy car or maybe just spending four hours sitting in the waiting room, reading Gulf Digest for four hours, waiting for this thing to get done that I could have done myself in five minutes. So I think, again, there's an optimistic and a pessimistic way of looking at this. I personally am someone who likes to work on my cars. and to have a company that is going to be actively supporting me doing that is quite novel. Most companies don't want you to do that because their dealers make so much money on aftermarket service and sell support that they don't really want to cut that off. It's funny. Part of the reason I ask is I had the experience you described literally on Friday, like just a few days ago. I had to drop my car off and they were like, oh, it's a pretty simple thing to fix.

The problem is we don't have this one gasket that we need. And I was like, well, can I just go to like AutoZone and buy the gasket and bring it? to you? And he was like, no, if it doesn't come from this specific place, it's not covered in your warranty. And then it's technically an out-of-warranty repair. So they sent me home, and now I have to go back and do this whole process again later this week, just so they can put a gasket that looks like every other gasket on my car. And so there is, there is something about that that I would love to break apart, even though the idea of sort of encouraging everyone to try and fix their own car has some pretty obvious scary downsides. Right. And they've said very

clearly to me that anything that is dangerous will not be allowed to be done to yourself. So anything involving the high voltage system, for example, if you want to get the larger battery pack, it's actually going to be a second battery pack that you'll install in the vehicle. But you won't be doing that yourself because, A, it's going to be incredibly heavy, but B, at that point, you'll be interfacing with the vehicle's high voltage system. So that kind of thing, you'll have to take it to somewhere else to have done. But upgrades and minor repairs, things like that, they want you to do yourself. And I think that that, again, a lot of folks will find very empowering and to have the support to do so.

And I can only imagine what the, you know, the user group. groups are going to be like, I'm big in the 3D printing community as well, or I should say I'm quite actively involved in it. And it's really interesting to see the kind of support and help that you see when people are trying to figure out how to get a new filament to print on their new printer and the kind of advice that they get. And I'm really looking forward to seeing that kind of approach brought to a car because it's not the kind of thing that you typically see. Right. Yeah. What's your sense of how mainstream an idea like that really is? Because I actually think the 3D printing community is kind of a good way to look at this, right?

where lots of people have 3D printing. It is more accessible than ever. It's more useful than ever. But it's not, there was a time many years ago when you and I were covering tech and everybody was like, we're all going to have 3D printers in our house. And that didn't pan out. And there's something about this idea that seems like

it's obviously going to appeal to a specific kind of, you know, raspberry pie owning tinkerer who sort of enjoys the process of all of this stuff and thinks that putting the mirror on their car is fun and doing the vinyl wraps is fun and interesting. And there are a lot of those people, but there's a much bigger group of people that has traditionally not wanted to do those things. Is Slate after those people? I think so for sure, yeah.

As you said, I think the maker community is really going to resonate with this vehicle. I think that's some of the biggest excitement I've seen online so far for the vehicle is in that community. But for sure, Slate wants to deliver a fully functional vehicle. It may be limited in function in terms of many other vehicles, but it's the kind of thing that you'll be able to drive and use without having to do anything to it if you don't want to. And then it's just going to be up to you if you want to learn how to do these other things or pay someone else to do these things for you to do the upgrades and that kind of thing. So for sure, it'll be a fully functional vehicle. And Slate for sure definitely wants to be targeting. You know,

they want anybody who's right now stuck in a six or seven year car payment cycle on a vehicle that is going to be, you know, maybe not even driveable by the time their loan is up. They want someone to have an affordable, practical option that's far better for them on the daily, even if they're not, you know, a 3D print enthusiast, that kind of thing. So for sure they want to target that audience, but whether or not this car resonates with that audience, that I think is a big question. Yeah. The like pickup truck, DIY sort of enthusiast world is just fascinating. And we've just never seen somebody try to kind of do all of that at once. And I think part of the reason I am so interested in this truck is it is like speaking my language in so many specific ways. Yeah, yeah, mine too.

And yet I'm just, it's just hard to see who is really going to resonate with it. Let's talk about the company a little bit because I think its timing is fascinating. But obviously, this truck has been in the process longer than Trump's tariff regulations have been happening. So the idea of like, we spun up an American manufacturer to make cars is like true, but not sufficient, right? So tell me a little bit about this company. Where did Slate Auto come from? Yeah. This is part of what I had to be a little bit cage you on because I don't know all the details yet in terms.

I've asked a lot of questions in funding and that kind of thing. And certainly, you know, there's been a lot of reports out there that have some interesting information out there. But from what I can say, you know, the company's been in development for about three years now. CEO is Chris Barman, who's a former executive at Fiat Chrysler. And so she was there for a long time. And now she is taking over things. Lead designer is Tisha Johnson, who was at Volvo.

She headed up Volvo's interior design for a long time. So they've got some very talented people who are behind this. And this, you know, the idea was definitely fundamentally to create this local vehicle from the beginning. So this is something that they kind of stumbled into the impression that I've gotten and said this was really the idea from the beginning. Okay. So they started with not like we want to build a new company, but they started with like we want to build this car. That's my impression. Yeah. And then so the company, I believe, is actually headquartered in Michigan, but they have a design studio in the L.A. area. So I think the majority of the work is happening in Michigan.

In terms of production, the indications are that they'll be producing a vehicle in Indiana, the exact details of that have not been disclosed yet. But again, the advantages of the production we're talking about earlier of injection molding versus stamping, that kind of means that they can have a relatively small footprint and basic factory compared to what, you know, if you look at the Tesla-Fremont facility, for example, that thing is a massive sprawling thing. Slates beginning, investments should be a lot lower and their factors should be a lot simpler and smaller than that. And then when it comes to funding, obviously, you know, there's a lot of talk about Jeff Bezos being involved. I asked rather pointedly, you know, is this.

a facet of Amazon is a spinoff of Amazon. Are we going to see these with Amazon stickers on them doing deliveries? Will you be able to go on Amazon.com and buy them? And they downplayed that quite a bit. This is definitely not officially part of Amazon. But when I asked them, will you be able to buy these on Amazon? They kind of shrug those shoulders and said, who knows, maybe. So don't think of this as an Amazon subsidiary, but there may be some family ties in there due to Jeff Bezos's involvement, if that makes sense. Yeah, our old friend Sean O'Kane has done some very good reporting on this at TechCrunch. Excellent.

We'll link to all that in the show notes. In fact, he had a new report that just dropped, I think, two days ago on that factory. So he's got some more details there as well, which given the strength of the reporting so far, I think sounds legit to me. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll put that in the show notes for sure. What do you make of the timing? This company's been, I would say, in sort of remarkable secret for three years, as you described. Why do you think it's coming out now, especially with a car, it's not planning to ship for, you know, a year and change?

Yeah, it's impressive. of how quiet they've been. When I learned about Slate, I was invited to go see this thing and I had no idea what it was, so I kind of went on faith of some of the people who I knew were at this company,

but I knew nothing about it. And to be able to keep, you know, it's hard enough for a car company to keep a new model secret for that long, but to keep an entire company secret for that long, it's quite impressive. And this is a pretty unusual looking vehicle, right? Like in person, it's not,

you're not going to mistake it for something else pretty quickly. Right. Yeah, I talked to them about that, and they actually have not done any open road testing on the vehicle at all, which is part of how they did that. Because otherwise, yeah, we would have seen, I think people would have speculated that it was a new, you know, 40V or something like that if it had to come out. But anyhow, so that was part of how they managed to do that.

But I think the timing now makes sense because, you know, it takes four, five, six years to develop a new vehicle. You want to get some interest in it in time to get some careers going for them to get an idea of what the demand is going to be like. And where the demand is going to be, you know, they need to come up with fulfillment centers, delivery centers and service centers for these vehicles. And so they didn't need to know where to centralize those things. So I think that gives them enough runway to figure out what they need to do from a logistics standpoint, which is another huge part of this, you know, launching a new car company that can be very complicated. Well, and just on the logistics piece, it seems like the logistics piece is where a lot of these sort of would-be car startups get screwed up. Exactly. Right.

And I think, do you have a sense of what Slate maybe has learned or is trying to do differently? I mean, it seems like, again, to your point about the manufacturing, just making the thing easy. easier to make goes a really long way. Because if there's one thing we've learned over the last 20 years of EVs, it's that they're hard and expensive to make and that that is the thing that will kill you. Is it as simple as that, that that's their move to try and do better here? No, there's a whole lot of interesting stuff going on the delivery fulfillment and service and support side as well. So direct sales, for one thing, which is probably not a surprise at this point. But that does add a lot of complication. There are different rules in different states in terms

of what you can and cannot do for delivery centers. It's pretty restrictive in many states in the U.S. There's a very good chance that you won't be able to go around the corner to a Slate store as such and pick up your vehicle. Chances are you probably going to be driving a fair distance or Slate has said that they will deliver them to you. But interestingly, from a service standpoint, they're actually partnering with some nationwide service center or service centers to do all the warranty work on their vehicles. They haven't said exactly which one it is, but it'll think of something like a Mining Key, you know, your local muffler shop, that kind of thing. It'll be something like that where you'll be able to take your vehicle to get a service.

And they said that they've got basically the entire country covered, or they will have the entire country covered on day one, which is interesting and very different, again, than what we've seen before. And then, you know, from a logistic standpoint, not having dealerships means that they get the full cost of the vehicle. There's no dealership taking a cut. Same thing with accessory sales. You'll be getting those directly from the company. Typically, a dealership would take a cut of that as well if you're buying accessories, options, that kind of thing. So again, that just helps their margins, which helps them get to that low price point. Okay.

What, how would you handicap the odds of this thing actually hitting the road in late 2026? I think we've been burned by this many times. And even, I think there's even a question of like, is any of this real, right? I think I'm actually pretty willing to give this the benefit of it out in part because I want to. And in part because it actually a thing that they've done is make it make a car that's easy to make, which I find very compelling. and also like I'm more willing to bet on the existence of this thing than your average $120,000 new, you know, roadster competitor. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I, I'm quite bullish. But I was, if I were in a position where I had not seen the thing, if I had not talked to the executives, if I had not been to some of the facilities to see these things, I would probably be extremely skeptical myself because we've been burned by, you know, your Aptorres, your canoes, that kind of thing over the years, Viskers, even. And so there's a lot of reason for skepticism here. And I think that that's fair, especially, you know, we're talking about even if it is a relatively affordable car, it's still going to be a big investment for people. And so it makes sense to be

skeptical about where you put your money. And so for that reason, I think that's fair. But having seen the vehicle, having sat in the vehicle, having talked to these executives, having really looked deeply at how they've engineered, not just the vehicle, but the company to support this short runway, quick path to profitability. I think that they are in a much better shape when it comes to launching a new EV brand than just about anybody out there. And they haven't had to go to extremely questionable lengths to get funding to continue to give them the money that they need to. So the only question mark in my eye is what is the consumer reaction going to be. Obviously, it's been very positive so far. But again, we've seen that with other EVs in the past.

It haven't gone very far. So if the demand is there, I give the company a good chance of success. But as you alluded to before, Trump tariffs and everything else going on right now, EV subsidies are very much a question mark hanging over the current state of the industry. There are definitely some roadblocks to overcome, but I would say we're probably looking at 80 to 90% success chance of them actually getting a vehicle to production, I would say, which to me is quite high given the I'll take that, yeah. But in terms of the long-term success of the company at that point, I think it's anybody's guess after that. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I mean, is there a 90% chance we're all going to be here in 18 months? Who knows? So I'll take it.

Yeah, me too. Last thing, and then I'm going to let you go, is the car nice? Like, you've touched it, you've sat in it. I'm so, there's so much about this that is designed to be, you know, minimalist and cheap and straightforward, but it also, like, the whole thing falls apart if it's not, like, fun to sit inside and drive, right? Is it fun to sit inside? I have not driven the car yet, and I think that that must be a caveat. But in terms of actually getting in the vehicle, it is actually quite nice.

Yeah, the interior is extremely basic, as you can imagine, but it's comfortable. I am fairly tall at six feet, but I have a short leg. which means I sit very tall, which means I often have a hard time fitting into a lot of cars in terms of headroom. I had no issue at all. You know, there's no sunroof here, so that helps. But I had plenty of headroom in there. And even I got to sit in one of the SUV configurations of the vehicle. And I was shocked that I was actually okay getting in the second row as well.

It was a little bit clumsy to get in there. But once I was in there, it was pretty comfortable, which was quite surprising to me. So from an overall room comfort standpoint, that was fine. And even things like the bed, for example, the truck bed is extremely low. which modern trucks, F-150, Silveradoes, the bed height is kind of at chest level almost. If you're loading hay bales in there, that kind of thing, that's very awkward. But yeah, I'm quite comfortable in the truck,

but the big question is driving. That changes everything, and I have no idea what's like to drive yet. In fact, most people of sleight don't either because they haven't done any open road testing. Right. And presumably now that it's out there, part of the point of getting it out there, I would assume, is to be able to start putting this thing on the road. Yeah, they've got a lot of miles ahead of them in cold weather testing,

hot weather testing, all sorts of towing conditions. to publish a towing rating in the U.S. requires a lot of regimented testing at grade, at high temperatures, that kind of thing. So they've got a lot of work ahead of them over this next 18 months or so. But yeah, I think from where they're at right now, things are, things are looking quite good.

I'm excited. I confess I am in absolutely no way a truck guy. Like I live in a townhome in the suburbs of D.C. Like no one needs a pickup truck less than I do, but I have spent a lot of time looking at this thing over the last few days, being like, I could buy this car. It seems cool.

I think it solves a lot of problems or it offers a lot of aspirational hope for a lot of people who don't want the burden of a giant truck sitting around, but who would like the ability to go to go to Yarsale or go to an antique shop, to get that kind of stuff and not to worry about the logistics of renting a truck or borrowing a truck. And I think it'll find home for a lot of people. I hope it does. And there does seem to be a thing where people want a car to believe in in a sort of real, like, human moral way.

And this seems to have hit that note pretty well. for a lot of people. Right. I think most people right now, if you're car shopping, you kind of pick a car that matches your personality, and as we're seeing certain brands are changing their personality rather dramatically. And so I think people have seen that that can have a negative impact if you've already owned the car that no longer suits your personality. The idea with Slate is that you can change the car's personality to match yours. You can even go so far as to change the lighting patterns on the nose, which is really kind of like the identification mark of the vehicles really that knows. Slate will let you change anything on there that you want to. So I think this will be something that people can

really fine personal ownership and commitment to. I love it. All right. Well, when you drive it, you're coming back. We're going to talk about it. Sounds very good. I look forward to. Tim Stevens, thank you so much. Thanks, David. All right, we've got to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about how to use your phone a little less, because I think we could all stand to use our phone a little less. We'll be right back.

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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 back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies,

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So I was going to try and, like, introduce you and explain what you do, and then I realized I don't know how to introduce what you do. So before we get into all the phone stuff, just tell the people which are up to these days. Yes, I'm Casey Johnston. and I'm a writer and editor and author. I have written about tech and health and science my whole career, started out as a tech blogger, which is how I know David.

And I have a book coming out next month called A Physical Education. That is about my experience getting into lifting weights, the science and psychology, thereof. And I write a newsletter called She's a Beast. That's about health, strength, body stuff, food stuff, all that good stuff. See, that's, I started describing she's a beast and basically did the same thing. I just started saying words. So I'm glad to know that that is the official explanation for what she's a beast is. It's difficult to sum up something. I cover a lot of ground, but it's just like, I promise it's good. So just, you know, see for yourself if you like it. Don't rely on my description.

Just check it out. I like it. And then if it's for you, you'll know when you see it. So I trust you. All right. So the. reason I have brought you here today is because I think you have done as like thoughtful and complete a sort of excision of your smartphone from your life as anyone I've seen and I just want to talk through a bunch of the process and what has actually worked for you and all of this.

But I just let's rewind a little. You've been writing about this for months now. But like was there an impetus where you were like, I am looking at my phone too much? I need to quit it with the screen time. Was there like a thing that happened? I don't know if there was a particular event, but I was getting to a point in the fall of 2023, early 2024, where I just felt like I have no control over how much time goes into this

thing. Like, it's just disappearing down the hole of my phone screen. And I actually started pulling out old phones. Like, do you save phones ever? Oh, sure. Yeah. I know some people just like get they do like the swap program but i like every once in a while in a cycle i will keep one and not resell it because i break my phones often also like break crack the screen and then and then you're out of phone so started pulling out my old phones being like is there some sort of like solution and going backwards somehow and i was of course reading every every article that ever came out that was like i went back to a flip phone and like here's how it went because I was just like dreaming of having a more, a better handle on this situation.

And at one point I popped my SIM card into an iPhone 4S. And it was just like, this is so small and so cute. And it's so much, it's like the screen, the phones are unmanageably large now. And when I put this, the SIM card in, it was like, there was something that didn't work. I think phone calls didn't work. But it could message and it could do maps. And I had no apps installed on it. And I was like, this is sort of ideal.

Like, the key seems to be stepping back. And I noticed that in every flip phone article where people go back to like T9 texting, like, they go all the way back. The main things that they miss are group messaging and like the sort of convenience of messages that sync across your devices and the mapping. You know, there's no substitute for Google Maps. You have to like draw yourself a map. So I was like, what if I made a version? of sort of like make my phone as dumb as I can. Retain those two important things because it's like the thing that prevents us from going all the way back to flip phones is basically like those two things occasionally like Uber stuff like that.

Right. It does strike me. It's such a slippery slope though. And like because I think I've been through this too where it's like, okay, the first thing I'm going to do is just delete all of my apps. Right. And it's like, okay, well then I'm going to, I need a couple. And then it's like, oh, crap, I'm going to travel. So I'll put Uber back.

And then it's like, oh, well, I should probably put ticket master back because I'm going to a concert in a couple of weeks. And then all of a sudden, like, 10 days later, all I've done is like a bunch more work to reinstall most of the apps that I already had. And I feel like the thing that is like alluring about going back to a piece of junk phone is that it prevents you from doing that. There is this idea that like if you don't want to use your phone so much, just don't use your phone so much. Just like be disciplined, you jackass, right? Like be a better person and it'll all be fine. And I feel like this is a thing you think about in another part of your life. a lot. And I feel like you seem to have brought some of that to your phone, where it's like you

just, you have a phone that could be more, and you just sort of stared at it one day and you were like, I will not let you do it. Right. I mean, it's difficult because the technology has insinuated itself in so many ways, even to the point of, you know, in this article that I wrote, it's like, it's our clock. Like how many times, we have these stats about like, like, people pick up their phones 100 times a day, 200 times a day, whatever. But how many of those times am I just trying to see what time it is? Like, I'm not even necessarily always going to the well wanting to go on the social media apps. I just want to find out what time it is. But it's like I go to look at the time and then I have a notification for Instagram. So I check that out. And then I'm

scrolling the feed and then I'm liking things. And then I switch to another app and I'm scrolling that feed and it just sort of like becomes this waterfall situation. And it all got started because I just wanted to know what time it was. So I think I realized the questions that I wanted to ask are like, what are the essential functions? What am I trying to do with this thing? Which of the things are unique offerings to the smartphone is another important question? Mapping technology that is in your pocket. That is a thing that I think that it would be difficult to excise from our lives at this point. But like the clock is not in there. The clock doesn't have to be in there. The clock could be a watch, you know. So there's sort of like trying to back up and figure out what is truly additive

about the smartphone versus where has it inserted itself that it doesn't need to be was a crucial question for me in this. Was that line pretty obvious for you as you went through it? I think so. I think honestly, the browser app is on the line where it's like probably 80% of the time I'm in the phone's browser. I don't need to be. And I'm just sort of like indulging a curiosity or like logging into my email. But sometimes I do need it because it's like, oh, I'm at a concert and I was emailed with the tickets and I didn't print them out and now I need to go into my email and get the tickets. So. I have to kind of hold the line at that point and be like, oh, I could reinstall like an email app and have the whole thing on there. But I try to keep a lot of my activity that used to be through apps in the browser. And then at least you are not setting yourself up for notifications in any way. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, the browser is an interesting one to me because I think the argument for it in a lot of cases is just it's just a little more friction. Like it's a little more annoying to look at social media in a browser than it is in an app and that that's probably a good thing.

And I think I buy that, but I also, at least in my own life, have discovered that I am perfectly willing to put up with that friction in order to stare at Twitter on my phone. Like, I was like, oh, I could use the app or I could use the web app. And then once I'm logged into the web app, it's not so much more work that I can just, I'm just going to go do it. And so I've struggled with the same thing of like the browser is, it does make my phone worse, but I'm not convinced it makes me use my phone any less. But then without it, I'm like, I feel lost, whether that's real or not. I don't know. But I feel, I feel bad about it. I still try what I used to do pre-phone wipe, which is what I did, delete.

I just did a factory reset on my phone and then tried to be like super, super, super discerning about what I reinstalled and even like deleted everything. everything that came on, because it now comes with a ton of stuff. Yeah. And just tried to move it all away or delete the apps or whatever. What I used to do was I try and hide the apps in the other apps. Oh, sure. Like if I used an app too much, I would just like, hold it down, drag it like 10 screens away and plop it there and be like, okay, now I can't find it. And then at least you have to make yourself do like a hilarious amount of work to go open the app.

That counts for something. I like that. Or you search, but like that's cheating. Yeah, I like, I think you should turn all that stuff like. off. Tell me about the factory reset thing, because that's one thing you recommend that I have not seen other people who have done this experience recommend. So why wipe the thing and start over? Yes. So another problem I had was I would be like, I'm too involved with apps. There are too many apps. They're doing notifications. I can't turn them all off because I don't even, it's like you don't even realize you're getting the notifications and they pop up and they go away and you're like,

who bothered me? I can't even remember. So I would try and delete apps. one by one. But I had so many apps and then deleting them one by one did not work because every time I would be going through and be like, oh, do I really need to get rid of this? Like, it's not doing anything. It's not hurting me. And then it would, you know, that would repeat for most of the apps. And I would only delete like five of them. And it just took so long. So I was like, I just need to start over and let go of all of my archaic apps. apps that don't work anymore, as well as the ones that are bothering me, but I'm having trouble articulating. Like, I needed to, I needed tabularaza, just like, go back to zero and let things

come back into my life as needed and being careful about what I let back in. That's scary because also, there will be apps that have, like, data in them and you're not sure if you, like, got everything out. So I did, you want to do an emergency backup just in case you do realize, oh, shoot, I do have that app that I need things from and I didn't get everything out of it. The one that you really need to be careful about with this is if you have an authenticator app. Oh, yeah. Make sure you figure out how you're going to set it up on your new phone because it can, you can just get stuck, I think, with all of your accounts. So that's a big one. But, But everything else, most things now are through the cloud.

Like you have an account through the app and you just log back into your account with whatever the app is and then everything you have is there. One of the things you wrote that has stuck with me the most is you like went out of your way to make your phone worse, which I think is really interesting. Because like for me, the thing I've always tried to do is like I put a picture of my kid on my home screen as like a reminder that I should be looking at my kid. And it's like, this is, this is more important than my phone. And you're like, no, no, screw that. Make it like black and stupid so that you don't want to look at it at all. You made this switch from like, my phone is this sort of like charming companion that I have that reminds me of things to like this thing is stupid and boring and I hate it. Yes.

And that that shifting that mindset actually ends up being really useful, which I had never thought about. But now, and people say this with like making your phone gray scale so that you don't want to look at it and stuff. And like, I have sort of mixed feelings about that. It like kind of works, but it also just makes everything kind of more annoying. without much upside in a lot of ways. But the idea of like, what if I just made my phone worse actually strikes me as really compelling. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, the Grayskill thing never really connected for me either. I definitely tried it at some point when people first discovered it when it was like a assistive technology thing maybe. So I remember that. And it was like, this doesn't really do anything. But yeah, some of these things come to me, like as I'm writing or just like in the middle of doing this. I think when I set up this phone again, I was just like, sure, whatever, default home screen, whatever you do. And then I realized, oh, the phone is really trying to

endear itself to you with these like serving you memories through the photos app. And like the, you know, my husband has a, his home screen rotates through photos that are, I think are maybe curated by the photos app and they're always so cute. It's like our baby, our cat, or a dog, the two of us, like, and it's, the way I put it in my article was, don't let it wear the skins of your loved ones, because it's like, it is trying to manipulate you. They know what they're doing when they, when they make the phone screen able to be all of your most cherished memories, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Put those somewhere else, I think is a useful place to be.

And speaking of, you, another thing you advocated for, and this is a thing I want to talk through a little bit, because this is something I've been sort of intermittently trying, is like you set yourself up a second device. And I think if I have this right, you set up a device that is like always plugged in or like has a place that it lives. And if you want to do some of this other stuff, you have to go to that place to do those things. Is that, am I characterizing that right? Yes, that's correct. I mean, so the ideal second device, I think, is a, is an old former phone, ideally one that has like no battery life left anymore.

So that you have to keep it plugged in. See, mine is actually, I keep it at my desk, which you would think is bad, but it really, the phone is so useless. See, now it's dead because it wasn't plugged in. But you have a second device. This is an iPhone 11, maybe. And you put all of your problematic apps on there. So for me, one of my big hesitations in going off social media was this is part of my my job, like I work in media, I post on Twitter, I post on Instagram, I have a lot of followers.

How will anyone know about what I do if I don't post? So it was very scary to let go of both my ability to post when I felt like I needed to and also to be able to scroll the feeds in order to see what other people are doing and like how I got to be on the trends and all these things. So what would happen when I would try and delete, say, Instagram from my regular phone is that eventually I would be like, oh, well, I got to re-download it because I have to like message this person. And I'll just, you know, I'll just put it back on my phone and log back in. And then you don't want to delete it again. So what I did was put all of the problem apps on a different phone. And that made it so if I had some sort of Instagram task

that I thought I had to do, I would have to sit down. in the phone spot with my phone that only works, I mean, because I has no SIM card, it only works on Wi-Fi. And it would be a sort of discrete task in a location on a specific device. And what ended up happening was that I just sort of stopped posting. Like, it completely did away for me the temptation. Because most of the scrolling I did, I think honestly was not, I do a lot of scrolling at home. but removing it from the couch where I usually do it, or like in bed before I go to bed or when I wake up in the morning, and having it be in a specific somewhat uncomfortable location or a location where, like, at my desk, I'm usually kind of busy doing other stuff. that broke the pattern for me at least.

And I was never really tempted to reinstall Instagram when I knew it was already installed and logged in and everything on this phone that's like usually only 10 to 40 feet away from wherever I am in my house because my house isn't that big. So I was able to just offload that little piece of like mental weight

onto this other device. Yeah, that's really smart. And now the result has been that I barely use this phone at all. Which is, I would argue, the correct outcome. I've tried offloading all that stuff to an iPad at various points, which works. I've heard of people doing the tablet, yeah. It works for everything except social media apps because social media, like those apps are trash on iPads, which is a problem. I've also tried to do it on my computer, which kind of works and sort of applies to that same, like, it's in a place thing.

But I really like the idea of just having a problem phone that, like, lives far away from where I normally am. when I or and that's, I like this lot. But the social media thing is one of the things I wanted to ask you about because I feel like the through line of a lot of the stuff you've written about this is that kind of quitting your phone and quitting social media, I think are kind of the same thing in your experience or at least like fed each other in a really interesting way. Like if you quit social media, have you effectively quit your phone? Well, it's like what do you do on your phone that is problematic and addictive? that's not social media. You could, one could do, you know, I don't know, you could be really invested in like clash of clans or something.

If you're like spending a lot of money and like a lot of hours and trying to accumulate resources on there. But that's not the problem I have. I think for me they're pretty one to one. What draws you in is on your phone is the question? For me it was a lot of social media, but it wasn't always. Sometimes what draws me in is like, New York Times push alert, which they treat very irresponsibly. Sometimes it's really breaking news.

Every C-list actor who dies. Yeah. Sometimes it's breaking news and sometimes it's like a recipe. And it's like, okay, come on. And I'm susceptible to the recipe, you know? So this is like how they get you is that you turn on the push alerts because what if I miss something? What if breaking? news happens and I am not aware of it. And then you have to leave them on and then you're getting the recipes and you're getting the breaking news. So it's like, I think part of what had to be let go was the notion of like, if there's breaking news, I will find out in a way that's not like going to ultimately hamper me in my life. Like, what could I find out from my phone that I need to know right the second that I won't find out eventually. And that was difficult for me coming from a news

background, as I'm sure you also feel, where it's like you feel like you got to know everything as soon as possible because you got to like come up with your takes or whatever. And not everyone's in that position. And I'm not in that position anymore. I think we've gotten to the point where we feel like, well, if we can know as soon as possible, we should. And that is not true at all. And I think I've tried to encourage more people lately to at least consider trying, seeing what it's like, if you don't find out about everything right away. It feels problematic to encourage people to know less in our world right now. And I understand the objections to that. But I think you should feel encouraged to control that flow a little bit more. And you might not realize how much you will still know, how much you will still be apprised of what's going on without feeling like you need to be like an open, just like lying back and letting everything like wash over you constantly.

Which I think is pretty clearly, A, and not necessary for most people and be not healthy. Like it just overwhelmingly the feeling I get is that like the thing where we all feel like we need to know everything immediately all the time. It's just bad. Like, it's just unhealthy in ways that I think we're only beginning to fully understand. Right, right. It's like you can take seriously all of the data that's come out on this and the research. It's like there have not been a lot of redeeming studies, science about screens and, like, social media. And I think we can, you know, even what I'm describing is not like throwing the entire thing in the trash and like living in the woods.

It's like you're still in the world and you're still going to get information, but you're allowed to control that relationship. You should feel empowered to control it a little bit more. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. How long did that adjustment take for you? Because I think the struggle I've had candidly is like I will try these things. I'll run the experiment and it feels really bad for three days and like weird. And I'm like, okay, I'm not actually solving any problems here, am I? this is just maybe I'm not doing anything better here. I'll just go back to installing all my

apps so it'll be fine and like somehow I end up on Reddit again. You know what I mean? So I'm like what did it take for you to kind of get through that first hurdle? Was there even that first hurdle? Yeah. There definitely was a hurdle. I remember in the first few days like so many moments of experiencing some like mild discomfort of I'm not being entertained right now. I'm like in the line at the grocery store or I'm like, you know, I was, I think I was at a basketball game and nothing was happening in the basketball game and was like, well, I'm going to pull up my phone and scroll Instagram. Oh, wait. It's not there. Did you do a lot of picking up your phone and realizing you had picked it up for absolutely no reason? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was pulling it out and looking at it

and opening it and being like, there's nothing here. Yeah. Those are the moments I feel like a true lunatic where I'm like, I, this is for nothing. I just, this is a pure, like, addictive response that I just had. to grab my phone that didn't make a noise and has nothing for me. But I'm just looking at it now. Yep. Oh, yeah. It feels bad. And it's also like, there's the pit of like, well, what am I going to do now?

I have nothing to do. Which is like, we used to live, like you and I are old enough to remember, you know, there are people who have not lived in a world. This makes me feel so sad and crazy. There are people who are like adults. full adults now who have never lived in a world without smartphones. Right. Yeah. We're both in our 90s now. Yeah. We are 100 years old and we remember the telegraph. So it's like, you know, this has been a lot of change for us. But we remember being, you know, if you were, if you had nothing to do, you just sat there, you know, which feels silly to say. Or you just sort of watched what was going on around you. So that was part of my like rehabilitation too was like, I mean, especially for me, I work from home. So I have a lot of control over my schedule and like where I go in a way.

But that also means that I'm not even like in the world that much. So when I get to be out in the world, I try to be like, you know what? I'm out in the world. Be in the world. Don't be on your phone. What do you do when you're waiting in line at the grocery store now? I look around. I watch people, you know.

See, this is the problem. I honestly, this is going to really make me sound like a terrible person, but I hate that answer. Like, there's just something about that that is like, there's so many things where I'm like, okay, I'm like, I should be hanging out with my family instead of looking at my phone. Fully agree. I should be driving instead of looking at my phone. Fully, right? Like, there's a million things where I think it's like an unequivocally good thing. But then I'm like, is it, is it okay to look at my phone while I'm standing in line at Starbucks? Like, intellectually no, but like also, yes, I don't know. And this is, this is where I'm like, okay, well, I'll just keep this one app on my phone

just to look at while I'm in line at the grocery store. And then the whole thing falls apart. So it's like maybe you do just have to draw the line somewhere past in line at the grocery store. But I don't know. Like it's so boring waiting in line. Well, we solved that problem. I think, yes. So part of the problem is like you're just like, I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored.

What do I do if I'm bored? I need, I can't be bored. And but I think you do need to be bored. I think I found like, even just doing a couple sessions of pre-deleting everything from my phone, where I would be like, I'm going to just like, hard line, put my phone down, go outside without my phone and just sit there and just sit there and just like try and be without my phone for like 30 minutes. And be without anything. Don't don't be entertained, you know? And I would do that. And at first it would be like,

you know, something could be happening on my phone right now and I don't know about it. And this is very uncomfortable. But then after I sat there for 10, 15 minutes and then we get to like 45 minutes, it'd be like, okay, I'm having like literally so many thoughts. You kind of forget what it's like. Yeah. I'm thinking of so many things. Having, for me, having ideas is huge. I need ideas. My business thrives on ideas, you know, having so many ideas. And it sounds stupid. But like, that's sort of the point is that it's not supposed to, even. sound awesome or like legible even to anyone but me. I'm just like having an experience. I'm in my own head thinking about stuff. Like I think we need that time to sort of like, it's almost like what sleep does for us where it's like we need time to sort of like let the thoughts tumble. It's like a what are those things? Like a rock like a rock tumbler. It's sort of we're putting the raw craggy rocks in and smoothing them out just by.

giving them time to roll around in there. And I think we need that some time to just sort of let our eyes go out of focus and just have that time. So that was like a useful experiment, I think, at one point was to allow myself in a comfortable place. Like I was in my own home, not in a grocery line. I feel like you're describing like your first acid trip where you're like I had, I had a spiritual guy. It's like not, honestly, not that different from from that. where it's like, oh, there are your brain, there's so much going on in there. And you don't realize because you're always trying to push it down with everything that's going on in your phone. That, I don't know, there were just, it was like I had a backlog of stuff to sort of percolate.

That's how it felt. I was like, oh, I have so much to think about that I haven't gotten a chance to think about. And like, how am I going to, I don't know, do this thing or what should I, how should I approach this topic? or, oh, I forgot this person said this thing to me. That was crazy. What really did I think about that? Because it happened sort of in passing and I didn't have time to sort of process it. So I recall that feeling pretty vividly. So I think if you are interested in experimenting with this, that might be a good thing to try is like put your phone away, separate yourself from it for, you don't have to do a really big length of time. You could do like 15 minutes or something and just sort of. give yourself a little space and see what happens, see what comes from that. Yeah, that's a good one. How long did it take before you stopped checking your phone when nothing was going on? Okay, good question. I think it was, three days sounds kind of like a good, that feels about right in terms of like how long it took to stop like pulling it out of my pocket

as a reflex. But I think I can, like just because it makes you feel so dumb to do so. But I think I still felt that discomfort and urge of like I'm I'm like bored and I wish I had something to do and I have nothing to do. And that took a little longer. I don't know. I think I still feel that way sometimes. So it is like a kind of boundary you have to have with yourself in a way. Like when we have there's just always, we're so used to having a lever to pull to. entertain us and take us out of ourselves. So it's kind of like an active, ongoing negotiation.

I can tell you from my life experience that I've gotten a lot out of trying to be more deliberate about those types of patterns. It is a pattern that is deserving of your like attention and energy, I think. I think if you do give yourself the space to stay with yourself, in those moments, you will find it pays off. You know, if you love using your phone and you don't have an unhealthy relationship with it, then it's like, fine, go be yourself. This is for me who has an unhealthy relationship with it and for anyone else who does, who wants it to be different, you know?

Yeah, which is that's, I am also very much one of those people. Yeah, I think for me, it's, it's, the factory reset thing is very compelling, that I'm like, maybe it's just, I'm just going to do a full start over. and just see how far I could get. And that feels like, because the next phase in my own journey, I've like, I've hit the point now where I charge my phone in a room that is in my bedroom, which is itself a victory. Like good, good first step, very much enjoying that. Very good.

And the next step was like, what if I just delete all of my apps? And now I'm like, never mind. I'm just going to factory reset my phone and start from there. Because I think it'll feel better that way. What else have you tried? I think I saw you tried the light phone, maybe? I've tried the light phone. That one's tricky because for like a bunch of wireless carrier reasons, I can't.

just like put my number on the phone and then I message or break and it would be a whole thing. So I can't fully commit to the light phone life even though I think it's actually, it's like very close to being. Yeah. See, this is the problem is that they're all just like a little bit off in significant ways. It's like two apps away from being the right thing for me, but those two apps turn out to be very important. I think that for me, it's actually very funny. So I, I am perpetually like needing to test new phones. And as you were talking about the second phone idea, I'm like, oh, I'm going to keep the iPhone as my like normal phone. And then I'm going to just like cycle in Android phones as my like problem apps phone.

Okay. And this actually solves a bunch of like work problems for me. Okay, good. Well, also, meaning I just like take Instagram off of my phone and put it somewhere else. There you are. The thing I just like an hour before we got on here bought the brick. I don't know if you've seen this. The thing.

So it's like a little NFC device and you tap your phone on it and it locks you out of everything except the apps that you've decided or allowed and you have to go back to it to unlock it. Okay. And I think there's like there's something very powerful in that to me that it's like, have you ever been to the concert where you get like the, the yonder case that they put your phone in? I've heard of this or they have them for like schools now, I think too, right? Yeah. So I got, the only time I've had it happen was at a John Malaney show for some reason. John Malaney, like didn't want us to record him doing his stand up. Oh, right. Yes. And so they put it in the bag and I was sitting there holding the bag. And at first I was like mad at the bag. But by the end of the concert, And I was like, this is great.

Like, I have a thing that actively prevents me. Like, a person has to allow me to use my phone again. And there was something wonderful about that. So I'm like, how can I outsource this challenge a little bit? And that's the next thing on my list. So we'll see how that one goes for me. Okay. The brick, I'm going to have to look into this.

Yeah, I've, like, opened the page for the light phone and, like, the books, various books devices so many times being like, is this the answer? And I think ultimately I was like, it just isn't or I think it will have issues along the lines of like maps maps don't work or you can't transfer your phone number or something and then that's always that's such a killer it's or like with a flip phone too it's like I would love to just have a flip phone again but then it breaks too many things about how we live our lives now I feel like all right I got to let you go here but plug your book and then we're going to go oh yes okay so I have a book coming out next

month it's called a physical education please buy it's really good if you've ever thought about like if you've if you've ever hated your relationship with exercise or food or your body, this book is for you, I promise. It will be very, it will be satisfying to read, I think, in a lot of ways for somebody like that, which might be a lot of your listeners or so I hope. It's, I suspect so. Yeah. We'll put the link in the show notes.

Casey, thank you. This is so much fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. We've got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast, It's about laptops, and it is causing me a lot of feelings.

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Let's begin. Welcome back. All right, let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866, Verge11. You can email Vergecast to theverge.com. We love all of your questions. Antonio Di Benedetto is here to help me with this one.

Hi, Antonio. Hello. I have a question for you that I think seems easy, but is going to be sneakily complicated and may take us a very long time to come to an answer. It's from our email. Let me just read it.

It comes from Sir Rob. It says, I'm usually the gadget recommendation guy amongst my friends and family, and I am also a Mac user. The MacBook Air has been my go-to laptop recommendation for years, but some of my friends insist on having Windows. I was wondering if there's any consensus at the verge about what the go-to rock-solid Windows laptop recommendation is. Is it Surface?

Is it whatever Dell is calling their XPS line now? Is it an HPNV? Is it semi-souce? I have no idea. Antonio, I also have no idea. I realize this reading this email. I literally don't know even where to start with this question. So you're here to help.

Let's help Sarab here. Yeah, I'm happy to help. It's unfortunately a more complicated answer than it should be, but the good news is there are a lot of good answers. It's just that there's no good answer for like everyone like there is with the MacBook care. No, I reject this premise. We're not doing this. No, no, no, no. You can't do the thing where you're like, okay, I'm going to ask you a thousand follow-up questions. We have to arrive at an answer at the end of this. And I think this is a useful exercise, honestly, because for a long time, it was just the XPS 13, right? Would you agree with that? That for a bunch of years, it was like if you just want a very good Windows laptop and I don't have to ask you any follow-up questions, it's probably the XPS 13. I think for a while it was. And then they ruined the keyboard. And I think a keyboard is kind of important for a laptop. because it's kind of like one of the main ways you use it. What is Dell doing? Yeah. When you say ruin the keyboard, what do you mean? All right.

So it may come down to taste. I know some people may be fine with it, but they use what they call like a latticeless keyboard. It's basically a keyboard, but it's like gapless, right, between the keys. And it looks very nice. And then you touch it and it feels awful. And I make so many more typos.

I use the XPS 13 a ton. And I was not happy to, give it such a bad review, but I just found that the keyboard was just a nightmare. But that's, that, that used to be a really good go-to option. Now, maybe, maybe Dell will recover itself once it, you know, starts releasing them under like Dell Pro Premium Plus Max, whatever. If we can, I'll ignore the names when the laptops deliver, you know, what they used to deliver. Yeah, that's, you can get away with having stupid names when you have good laptops. So the answer right now, I think, is not the XPS 13. I will say, a useful thing to do is probably go see if.

if you can type on one in a store. And it is, because there are probably people who will not hate this keyboard. I agree with you. I think the gapless keyboards in general, I find unusable, but it's like, if it works for you, fine, knock yourself out.

What else even might go on the list of like just sort of default recommendation laptops right now? Okay. So I know you're not going to like this, but I come up with three. Okay. And the reason there are three is because, see, in the Mac world,

it's obviously easy. It's M-chips all around, right? and as like David, you always say, like, buy the best thing you can afford, and it'll last you however long. So I think a lot of Windows laptops are competitive and good in that $1,300 range.

And I think it really comes down to your use case based on the chips that are in there. For example, the Microsoft Surface laptop 7th edition or just Surface Laptop 7, if you want to just call it that for shorthand. That's Microsoft's answer to the MacBook Gare. it is a very MacBook Air like Windows laptop. Comes in some nice colors even.

It's very thin and light. It's got a Snapdragon X processor. That's a blessing and a curse because the blessing is that you get MacBook Air levels of battery life, standby time, and that's one of the MacBook Air's strongest points. But with the Snapdragon X, you're also running Windows on Arm, which is so much more fine than it used to be, but it's not like, You can just give this to anyone and it's going to just work for every use case. There are some apps that may not be compatible.

There are, of course, games that are not compatible. I know if anyone's hearing this, like, oh, like who's gaming on a thin and light laptop? But you know what? Thinand light laptops can do a little light gaming, just like a MacBook Air can do a little very, very light gaming. And there is something to the, like, it will just run all the things that I need it to run. Right. Exactly. To some extent, the thing for me with the service laptop is I think if it's not the right thing for you,

you probably already know. If that makes sense, like there's this gigantically long, long tail of software that will not work well on that computer. But like if you just, if you just want to like run a browser most of the time,

which I think is frankly what most people do on most of their computers, it's going to be fine. So I think that one is an interesting one for me where I think most people will sort of self-select in or out of that. But it also kills me that Windows on Arm is like, it's so close,

but it's not there yet. It's so close. But yeah, then, okay. So another option with an AMD chip. I just reviewed this, the new framework laptop 13, the new model with the Risen A.I. 300 series chips. This is, I'd say, the most charming laptop around. It's also a very, very good laptop.

And it may seem daunting to recommend this as someone because it's repairable, it's modular. You know, you can get it as a DIY edition, which I do. recommend to people if you, you know, feel comfortable, like, putting it together. But you're not, I mean, you're just plugging in the RAM and, like, putting in the SSD and that's been, like, attaching a couple things. It's really, really simple. I had it. I took like 20 minutes to do that or less. It took longer to install windows, but you can get it as a pre-built, uh, for a little more money. And it comes ready to go. There's no window, the windows is already installed. And yeah, it's a no nonsense, uh, laptop. It's very good. It's very MacBook Air like, but the coolest thing. This is so

cool. You pick the ports, right? You get four ports and you pick the expansion cards that you want for it. You can do all four USBC. You can do two USBC, an HTML and a USBA. You can do a microSD if you want. You can do an Ethernet jack. Like that's so cool. You don't get that. I mean, the Ethernet port kind of sticks out because it's, you know, that's a thin and light laptop. But you don't normally get that on a thin on a laptop. You normally like a beefy gaming laptop to get an Ethernet jack. And that can be kind of helpful. Battery life is like not the best, but it's pretty good. I think you can get through a day of work and maybe if you work it a little too hard, you might have to, you know, keep it juiced up, but I know a lot of people do work plugged in anyway. And yeah, it's just, it's a very good laptop.

It's also just so freaking cool to pick your ports. You can even do some customizations, like have a translucent bezel that you can install and it's like it's magnetic. It just like drops in and out. Very cool. Okay. So I did not expect to find that a compelling possibility here, but I like that a lot. So what's your third one? Okay, so my third one is the Acer Swift 14 AI. It's not the prettiest laptop. It's not the quality overall is quite fine.

It's nothing that's really going to blow you away like a MacBook Air or even like the surface. But it's a very function over form laptop. The screen is just okay. It's a 1920 by 1200p screen. Nothing special there. But what it is nice about this is the balance of performance and the ports.

You get two USBC and two USBA and an HTML out on a 14-inch laptop that's pretty small, pretty compact. Again, not as compact as a MacBook Air, but it's a thin and light, and the lunar-like chip gets the job done. You can do pretty much everything you need with it. It's a good performer. It doesn't benchmark as high as AMD stuff, but it doesn't last quite as long battery life-wise as Snapdragon. But it's kind of a Goldie-Lox. It's kind of just the right balance. Actually, Lunar Light can do some decent gaming for integrated graphics, not counting like Strix Halo, which is like a different beast for integrated graphics.

But yeah, that's a solid all-rounder, happy medium, and a decent laptop. I just Googled this, by the way, and it is the most boring laptop I've ever seen in my life. And I kind of mean that as a compliment, right? Like, I've... Yeah, it's not compelling. I've come around to, like, I don't actually need my laptop to be, like, thrilling and have new ideas about how things should look. like just give me a decent looking set of ports and a body that doesn't feel like it's about to fall apart and and we're cool. And I think for a long time, Acer failed the make it not feel like it's about to fall apart test.

But it sounds like this one's a little better. They've learned how to make a solid thing even if they don't know how to design anything. Yeah, again, it's not attractive, but it's kind of just fine all around. Decent keyboard, decent trackpad, you know, and those things are important. of course. And then if you can spend a little more, check out the Asus, Aser, but Asus Zenbook S14. We've reviewed the 16-inch version, which had the Ryzen AI chip, which is an awesome machine, but much pricier. But the Zenbook S-14 comes to the Lunar Lake chip from Intel, and it's much more spelt and very nice-looking, a lot more of a design object than especially the Acer. And you get an OLED screen.

that's a really nice panel to look at. So if you can spend a little more and you still want that happy medium with a lunar-like chip, then yeah, send by gas 14. Okay. This is a good list. I snuck in a fourth, sorry.

No, this is a really good list. And I think both speaks to how sort of interesting the Windows landscape is right now, but also how very confusing the Windows landscape is right now. Because you're probably right that there are a bunch of like chip reasons,

actually, that it's really hard to have one single pat answer. to this question. There's just so much up in the air about sort of which of these configurations is the correct Windows path forward. And my guess is we'll have a much clearer sense of that in like 18 months than we do right now, but especially with Qualcomm and the co-pilot plus PC universe, that all just feels very new and interesting, but not quite finished yet. But we asked for one answer. I think I know which of the four, I, if, like, if I'm standing in a store and I'm like, just buy this one and leave me alone.

To me, I think the answer is actually the framework laptop. It is the easiest to like undo the decision if you've made it. You can just like put in new ports. It'll upgrade over time. It'll last a long time. People really love it. I haven't used the keyboard on the new ones in a while, but I keep hearing good things.

Like, this is a terrific computer. Would we be crazy to just call that the sort of MacBook era of the Windows ecosystem for very different reasons? But it does feel like if I'm just going to give you a computer, I'm pretty confident you're going to like, that feels like a good place to start. Yeah, I think it's, I'm fine with saying that. It's, the framework is a great laptop.

And yeah, it's just, the keyboard is good. It's a little, the key feel is a little spongier than I like, but it's great to type on. Trackpad is, I think, good, but, you know, it feels a little cheaper than some other track pads. It's not the fanciness that, you know, Apple has, in my opinion, Apple has the best track pads. The haptic track pads from Apple are,

really still the best. As long as you don't mind that it doesn't physically click. I've gotten used to it over the years. I'm fine with it. Yeah, the framework laptop is a good all-rounder. And again, just picking the ports is so cool.

And having something that you can feasibly get repaired or repair yourself more easily and replace. I mean, you can upgrade the RAM. You can upgrade your SSD later. You can, yeah, change your mind on the ports.

You can bring an extra port with you. That's just kind of weird. You know, like it's, you can't do that anywhere else. So, mind it being the recommendation, even if it's got a little asterisk of like, you may have to do some little bit of a weird pick, but it's a cool ass laptop. All right. Antonio, thank you. Appreciate it.

So Rob, I hope that helped. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always for listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, other features on the slate truck that you would like to see, please tell us about everything. I truly, there has not been a thing I have been as fascinated by as the slate truck in particular in a long time. Email, vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866, verge 1-1. Also, I'm running a bunch of experiments on myself about how to use my phone less. So if you have a tip or a trick or a gadget or an app that has really worked for you in managing your screen time, I want to hear all about it.

Send us an email. Call the hotline. Hit us up. This show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast. network. Nielai and I will be back on Friday to talk about OpenAI and the trials going on. I'm going to be in court a bit this week for the Google trial.

Lauren Feiner's in court for the meta trial. We have lots to talk about lots going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.