David has a Light Phone III, and it's making him wonder a lot of things about technology. So The Verge's Allison Johnson joins the show to talk about the whole trend of minimalist smartphones, and to figure out which features a smartphone absolutely needs, and which ones we could all probably do without.
After that, The Verge's Andy Hawkins takes us through a big weekend in the Tesla Takedown movement, what's happening with Elon Musk's car company, how automakers are responding to impending tariffs, and whether we're wrong to be excited about the new Nissan Leaf.
Finally, The Verge's Jen Tuohy answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about all-seeing cameras in our homes. Which mostly don't exist yet. Mostly.
After that, The Verge's Andy Hawkins takes us through a big weekend in the Tesla Takedown movement, what's happening with Elon Musk's car company, how automakers are responding to impending tariffs, and whether we're wrong to be excited about the new Nissan Leaf.
Finally, The Verge's Jen Tuohy answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about all-seeing cameras in our homes. Which mostly don't exist yet. Mostly.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of automotive tariff coverage.
00:00:05Somehow that's true. Didn't really set out to do that here, and yet sometimes that's what we do.
00:00:11I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here on a very warm afternoon
00:00:16trying to decide how far into the Light Phone 3 life I'm ready to go. So I have the Light Phone
00:00:243. If you don't know about the Light Phone, it's basically this sort of decade-old project from
00:00:29this company called Light trying to figure out what is the least amount of phone a regular person
00:00:35needs. So if you think about it, it's like, okay, you need a phone that makes phone calls,
00:00:39you need a phone that sends text messages, you probably need some kind of navigation.
00:00:42I think in 2025 you need a camera. What else? What do you need that isn't social media,
00:00:48it isn't web browsing, it isn't all the distracting problematic stuff we're actually
00:00:51trying to get rid of on our phones and do less of? What if you could just have a phone that did
00:00:56the essentials and nothing else? I've been using this phone for a while, and it's not all the way
00:01:02there. But it's pretty close, and I think it's close in some really interesting ways. But the
00:01:06thing for me is, I'm just not going to stop using a smartphone. Part of the thing is, I do this for
00:01:12a living, right? I write a newsletter every week about apps. I'm not going to stop using a smartphone
00:01:17anytime soon. But I do like the idea of a nights and weekends phone, or a way that I can just
00:01:24disappear for a few hours. Even if I'm out walking the dog, can I take something with me that isn't
00:01:30my smartphone, but is still a way for me to be able to keep in touch with people who I need to
00:01:35be in touch with? So what I'm trying to figure out is, can I port my SIM card? Does the eSIM swap
00:01:41stuff work? It turns out it's all very complicated, and I think the real reason you can't do this
00:01:45stuff is because of carriers. But I'm pressing along. I'm going to try and figure this out.
00:01:51If you have figured this out, how to have a smartphone and another phone, and you figured
00:01:55that out in a way that actually works for you, I am all ears. I would very much like to hear from
00:02:01you. But anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about on the show today. Although it's a
00:02:05little bit what we're here to talk about on the show today. First thing we're going to do today
00:02:08is I'm going to talk with Allison Johnson about these minimalist smartphones, and we're going to
00:02:12try to figure out together what the right balance of features and chaos and screen time is actually
00:02:19the right set of things. I have a bunch of stuff we're going to go through. We're going to try and
00:02:23figure it out. We're also going to talk to Andy Hawkins about the Tesla takedown protest, which
00:02:29was having a big day this weekend, plus what's going on with the automotive tariffs. This is a
00:02:35sort of strange, uncertain week for the auto industry, and there's a lot to talk through.
00:02:39So we're going to talk through it. Plus, we have a really fun question from the forecast hotline.
00:02:43Lots to do. Lots to get to. But it is like 70 degrees outside, and I still have some testing
00:02:49to do on this thing. So I'm going to go call my mom on the light phone. It's going to be great.
00:02:54This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back.
00:03:00All right, we're back. Allison Johnson's here. Hi, Allison.
00:03:03Hello.
00:03:03I have prepared a whole thing for us, and I have prepared you not at all. Are you ready?
00:03:08It's very exciting. Yes.
00:03:10So I've been using the Light Phone 3 for the last week or so. I have it here. I have a lot
00:03:15of feelings about it. I find this phone deeply fascinating. And the thing that I have been trying
00:03:20to figure out as I've been using this phone is basically what is the least a phone should be
00:03:27able to do in 2025? First, I want to get your overall stance on this kind of theory of a device
00:03:36that you can do some smart things on a phone, but it doesn't run an app store. It doesn't give you
00:03:44a web browser. It doesn't give you everything. It's like the sort of minimum viable smartphone
00:03:49as either a night and weekend phone or a thing for kids, which I know the light phone has become
00:03:53very popular in, or just like, I don't want to spend so much time looking at my phone,
00:03:57so I'm going to buy a different phone. Do you buy this premise at all?
00:04:02I want to. I want to believe in a minimalist phone for every time I've kind of like
00:04:10gone two steps into investigating it as an option, like for me, because I don't want
00:04:1810,000 notifications every day. I would like to exit that existence. It just, it kind of falls
00:04:26apart for me pretty quickly. I used the Barbie phone for like a day and a half, had my phone
00:04:37number on it, and it almost gave me a panic attack. Trying to type text with T9 is horrifying.
00:04:45I know some people kind of think of it like, well, you put up some friction between you and
00:04:51messaging, and maybe that's a way out of constant communication and stuff.
00:04:55For me, I hated it. And I look at something like the light phone, especially that one,
00:05:02it's a beautiful little device. I love the idea of like, I'll just leave the apps behind
00:05:08and go into the world unencumbered. But then I start thinking like, what if
00:05:13I need to call an Uber and get a panic attack again?
00:05:18Okay. What a perfect unintentional segue to the game that I have devised for us.
00:05:23I know.
00:05:24I wrote down a list of, I think it's 35 things, and we are going to go through all 35 of these
00:05:30things, and we are going to decide. The gimmick here is you and I are designing
00:05:35the perfect minimalist smartphone that does all the things it should do and nothing else.
00:05:41And we have free reign. There are no rules. We're not worried about costs. The question is just,
00:05:46what should our phone do and not do? And we're going to run through this list. Some of these
00:05:51I think are really easy. Some I think are really hard. And we're just going to talk through all of
00:05:55them. Does that sound good? I think it's 35 things, so we might be here a while. Okay. These
00:06:02are in no particular order except the order I thought of them. First thing, phone, make phone
00:06:08calls. We're good at this, right? Okay. Easy one. Thing number two, camera. Should this phone have
00:06:13a camera? I think it should. Yeah. Should it be a good camera? One camera, and it can be okay,
00:06:20I think. Okay. So we don't, we're not interested in like, this is not the camera you like spend
00:06:26your day taking pictures of your child. This is like a, it's a camera if you like need to
00:06:30take a picture of the poster and remember it later. Yeah. That's what we're doing here. Yeah.
00:06:34We'll be like, you can have a better camera separately. Right. That's true. If you want a
00:06:39good camera, buy a good camera, I suppose is like part of the point of these phones. Yeah. You can
00:06:44buy a camera. All right. But we're, we're allowing one pretty good camera. Yes. Okay. I'm cool with
00:06:50this. Calculator. Yeah. Yeah. I was really hoping you were going to be like, no, too addictive.
00:06:58Does it run a Tetris like my TI-83 did? That's an important question. Yeah. I mean,
00:07:06do you remember all the games you could install on the TI-83? Oh my God. The calculator is a
00:07:09slippery slope. It really is. It's a gateway app. All right. Well, we're allowing a calculator.
00:07:16Yes. Text messaging, just like basic SMS, RCS text messaging. Yes. Okay. WhatsApp.
00:07:25I like, I'm just hearing Europe call out like, yeah, they need WhatsApp. I feel like,
00:07:32yeah, I feel like you should be able to download a messaging app of your choice. That feels right.
00:07:38All of them. One of them. Oh my gosh. Well, I'm just thinking. This is tricky, right? Because it's
00:07:45like, okay, if we're going to allow you to have WhatsApp, we should probably allow you to have
00:07:48Telegram. But then if you have Telegram, we've just given you an entire social network. Yeah. And
00:07:52like, you can message in Instagram and that's going to come up later, but I don't think we
00:07:57want to give people Instagram. So it's like, this just gets messy. But the reason I included WhatsApp
00:08:01is I think WhatsApp is, it is just so thoroughly like the default messaging app for the world
00:08:06that we kind of have to allow it. Okay. Yeah. I'll just punt the question of other apps,
00:08:13but WhatsApp we need. Yeah. I think I'm actually okay with no other messaging apps. Like we're
00:08:17just going to let WhatsApp win the world. I don't feel great about it, but it's where we are. Okay.
00:08:24I like it. The next one is Snapchat. I actually, I will, I will foreshadow. I struggled harder with
00:08:31Snapchat than maybe any other one on this list. Because Snapchat to many people, including many
00:08:37young people who really benefit from a device like this one is their communication system. It's like,
00:08:44it's chats where they talk to all of their friends. That's the, like lifeline of their life.
00:08:48But then right next to Snapchat, there's Snapchat discover, which has all the problems that we're
00:08:52trying to avoid. It's messy. It feels too close to the thing we're trying to get away from,
00:08:58which is just the scrolling machine. I vote, I vote no Snapchat, but maybe that's because I'm
00:09:05old and I am cranky about Snapchat. Well, I do think we just immediately
00:09:09lost the entire team market with this, with this plan, which is not going to be good for business,
00:09:14but sorry. I think we're, we're good. We're out on Snapchat. Go to WhatsApp. I guess you're
00:09:19welcome Meta. We're just giving you a web browser. Oh, that's tricky. I can.
00:09:28That's so hard. Like, can you imagine walking around and you think of a question you can't
00:09:34look up the answer, but also if we give you a web browser, you kind of have access to everything
00:09:41else. We've just made it very slightly harder. It's Pandora's box. Yeah. Yeah. I like personally,
00:09:47I would be fine with the web browser as the answer to like, do you in an emergency need to
00:09:52call an Uber? Here's a crappy web browser. Type in your, your, you know, credentials.
00:10:01Can I vote for a web browser, but it's like kind of janky.
00:10:06Oh, that's like a, like an e-reader style browser where like you can use it if you need to,
00:10:11but it's going to suck and you're not going to want to.
00:10:14I did check emails on a like first gen Kindle for a while and it was the worst experience of my life.
00:10:22Okay. All right. I'm good with that. I was, I was also thinking maybe we do a web browser, but we
00:10:26only whitelist like 10 domains. So it's like, you can, you can use Wikipedia. You can do,
00:10:34I don't know. You can do Google searches, but you can't like go to most websites.
00:10:40Hmm.
00:10:41This is probably a bad idea, but that was, that was my compromise theory.
00:10:46I feel like I would just rely on like the AI search results from Google a lot.
00:10:51And then I wouldn't like click through to the source material and that could be problematic.
00:10:56Yeah. That's a dangerous game to enforce on people.
00:10:58I vote for full web browser, but it kind of sucks. So you don't want to use it.
00:11:02Like a, like a 2005 era web browser is what we're offering you. All right. I'm good with that. It
00:11:08like won't run any of the web apps you want to do, but it will like show you text on web pages,
00:11:14which is what we're after. Okay. I'm good with that. We're going to call it Netscape Navigator.
00:11:19It's going to be nuts.
00:11:20I love it.
00:11:22Next on the list is Spotify slash whatever music app you want to pick.
00:11:26Ooh, this is where the minimalist phones fall apart for me. Cause I'm like,
00:11:31I don't have physical media anymore.
00:11:34Bless all of you who do. And you held onto that. That's incredible. I just
00:11:39turned my soul over to Spotify. So I'm like a phone that doesn't have Spotify doesn't work
00:11:43for me really. Um, so for me personally, I vote yes for Spotify, but I don't know if that.
00:11:51Yeah. Does it violate the minimalist phone ethos once you invite Spotify in?
00:11:57I don't think it does. Honestly, this one's actually fairly easy for me for the same exact reason. Like
00:12:01Spotify music and podcasts are probably the things I do most often, like measured by time
00:12:08on my phone. And, uh, there's a thing like in talking to the, the light phone folks,
00:12:14they've been thinking like, okay, is there a way we can take, you know, part of the Spotify
00:12:18experience and like, what if you could just sync a playlist? And there was like that mighty device
00:12:23that was the same kind of thing that it would keep one of your playlists in sync. So I think
00:12:26one of your playlists in sync. So I think there might be something there, uh, like give me very
00:12:32simple sort of old school iPod level access to my Spotify library, but nothing else.
00:12:38Like a widget, like just give me a widget where it kind of sucks like searching around for stuff,
00:12:44but you can find it. Yeah. But I agree. I think if you want a phone like this to actually work
00:12:50for people, it's got to have a music app. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the WhatsApp of music apps.
00:12:57Yeah. I had a really funny experience with the light phone three, cause they have a music app,
00:13:00but you have to upload MP3s. Uh, and like you, I just don't have a local music collection anymore.
00:13:06So I was like digging around on my computer to find any MP3 file I could to upload to this thing,
00:13:12just so I could test it out. And I was like, my God, I, I, I have a hard drive full of
00:13:17local music somewhere in this house. And I, for the life of me, couldn't tell you where it is or
00:13:21what's on it. Now, did you have that U2 album that Apple put on everyone's phone? That lives
00:13:28on a phone that I will never touch again and refuse to acknowledge. Okay. That's fair. Maybe
00:13:34that's what we do here is just once a month, our minimalist phone just gives you an album.
00:13:41You better like it. Yeah, exactly. Um, all right. Next on my list is email.
00:13:46This one seems easy. Yeah. Yeah. You need him. I need email. Oh, interesting. I think it's easy.
00:13:53The other way to do a minimalist smartphone, the very first thing we should take away from people
00:13:58is the hell of their email app. Oh God. Yeah. I guess people who don't live so online probably
00:14:07can't be honest. We could both stand to be a little less on that. It would probably be okay.
00:14:13This is what we're trying to do here. I'm trying to think of an email that would like,
00:14:18I would cause real problems for me if I didn't check it in real time.
00:14:24Yeah. Okay. I vote no email. Email sucks. I hate it. I do think the, the, the thing you just did
00:14:31in your brain is what I do with every one of these. I'm like, oh my God, what if something
00:14:37horrible happens and I have to know about it? And it's like, oh, that's almost certainly never
00:14:42going to happen. And phone calls exist. Right. Yeah. I think a useful societal thing is like,
00:14:48if, if something urgent is happening, call me on the phone. Yeah. I'm good. There was,
00:14:52there was a time before email and nobody died. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. Um, all right,
00:15:01good. So no email. We're out on email. Um, some kind of note-taking app. Oh yeah. Either one that
00:15:08we make or your favorite. Yeah. And that could be fun because you know, it's not distracting to
00:15:14take notes. Yeah. Okay. Are we, are we like, are we building our own like minimalist one? Or are
00:15:22we just like, listen up losers. Here's notion on our minimalist phone. Oh my gosh. A notion phone
00:15:29is the whole thing. I'm going to have to contemplate now. Um, people would, people
00:15:33would buy a notion. I would buy a notion phone. Okay. That's another podcast. Um, I think, you
00:15:40know, it could be basic. It could just be like text, put the text in, save it for later. Move
00:15:47on with your life. The only one I'll add to that is, uh, I also want voice notes. So just basic
00:15:52typing. Yeah. Let me, let me talk to my notes. Nothing else. We'll worry about the rest of it
00:15:56when I get back to my computer. Right. But yeah, I agree. You got to have something, um, a read,
00:16:00a dedicated reading app, whether it's like a Kindle or like pocket or whatever, just some
00:16:06place I have to read stuff. Should I be reading things on this device? Yeah, I would like that.
00:16:11Cause then if you, if this is kind of like a secondary device, you could kind of sync that up
00:16:16and then it's there for you. Is this, have we just invented the books, Palma? I mean a little,
00:16:22but I struggled with this one more than I expected to because on the one hand, uh, I,
00:16:28I read a ton on my phone and that's like a thing I'd like to do that I think is mostly an additive
00:16:33activity. And I think that's fine. On the other hand, part of what we're trying to do with this
00:16:36whole genre of phones is get people looking at their screens less. So I'm like, is the answer
00:16:42go by physical books? Because I don't, I don't love that, but I don't know. I'm so torn. Like
00:16:48it's such a screen time debate here, right? Like, is our goal to get you to use your screen time
00:16:52better or is our goal to get you to not look at your screen? What if you can only sync up like,
00:16:59like nutritious meaty articles? Like you can't be reading any crap on your phone.
00:17:06That's fun. Or a book. I don't know. I think we maybe do. It's a reading app,
00:17:11but it's only books. And if you want to read trashy books, that is up to you. But I think
00:17:14like, I like the idea that we are going to like heavily incentivize book reading.
00:17:19Yeah. Yeah. Read books on your minimalist phone. I'm into it.
00:17:23Right. Okay. But it will not be the Kindle app because the Kindle app sucks and we will not
00:17:26put it on our phone. Okay. I have four games for you in a row and we are going to litigate each
00:17:32one. Are you ready? Okay. The first one is the New York times games app. So crossword.
00:17:37Yeah. I was just playing it before we got on here. So yeah.
00:17:44Okay. Sold. I'm into a candy crush.
00:17:47No, no candy crush.
00:17:48Why not?
00:17:50I don't know. It feels wrong. It feels like the, can you read a book versus can you just
00:17:56read any old thing on the internet? Like you, I don't know. I don't want to tell people what to
00:18:04do with their lives.
00:18:05This is the thing. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you said that I've gone back and forth on this a
00:18:08thousand times because on the one hand I'm like, what I'm doing is basically moralizing for you
00:18:13in the form of a smartphone.
00:18:14Yeah.
00:18:15But then on the other hand, that is a little bit the job.
00:18:18Yeah.
00:18:19I think part of the art of the existence of these devices is people like you and me being like, I,
00:18:25I am helpless in front of my phone. Right. And I think, I think many of us are in like very real
00:18:30scientifically provable ways we are losing the battle to our phones. And if, if somebody on
00:18:37the other side can like have my interest in mind in a realer way, maybe that's okay. And so maybe
00:18:42our job is to tell people how to spend their time a little bit here.
00:18:45Yeah. You're kind of buying into like an ethos almost, or like, that's kind of the vibe. I think
00:18:51like you go to the light phone website and it's almost like, you know, the humane shtick without,
00:18:58you know, lasers and AI where it's sort of, it's sort of beautiful and simple. You're like,
00:19:04I would like that in the things that go along with it, which maybe means I can't play candy crush.
00:19:10Um, but I have to, but I can play wordle and that's a choice.
00:19:15Yeah. And I'm, I'm good with that. Yeah. I do feel like I cannot prove this,
00:19:18but I feel like wordle is better for your soul and mind than candy crush.
00:19:23I think so. I think so.
00:19:26If, if anyone has done a study on that, please let me know. I would very much like to hear it.
00:19:29Um, okay. Two more games. And I suspect I will know the answer to both of these based on what
00:19:34you just said about candy crush. Uh, Bellatro is next just because I love Bellatro and I want to
00:19:38play it all the time, but I don't think we should put it on here. I say no. Okay. Having never played
00:19:43it for a second. I say no. Um, you both should because it's awesome and shouldn't because it
00:19:48will ruin your life. It is. I'm, I'm, I'm not exaggerating. It is the only thing I have ever
00:19:54done straight from the minute I sat down on a plane to the minute I got off of the plane.
00:19:58Oh wow. Okay.
00:19:59Just one, it was like a four hour flight and I did it every single second of the flight without
00:20:04putting my phone down and literally we landed and I was like, well, we're here. And it was a
00:20:09real moment of like, Oh, I can't play this game anymore. I'll save it for a flight. I'll try it
00:20:14out when I need it. Sometime when you're like, I can't do anything for eight hours anyway,
00:20:18just play Bellatro. That's great. Uh, and the last one is Fortnite, which I think is
00:20:23an obvious no for the same reasons. Can't have it. Yeah. Okay. All right, good.
00:20:27Moving on. Um, a maps app, Google maps, Apple maps, whichever one you want it to be. That feels
00:20:32like we need that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I would need navigation for sure. All right. Good. Easy.
00:20:38Uh, calendar. This one's a little email-ish to me, right? I see bros and cons.
00:20:43Yeah. Well, I do want to know what day it is. So I vote for a calendar that tells you what day it is.
00:20:50Um, should it sync up to my work calendar is what I would not want.
00:20:58Yeah. Maybe it's just like a, it's like a paper calendar, but in app form where you can like,
00:21:06oh, I like that. Maybe you add stuff to it, but it does it. It's just there. It just sits there.
00:21:12It doesn't just like writing on a paper calendar. You can't do anything with it.
00:21:16It's just, it's just a calendar. Yeah. There was this thing we were chatting about for a minute
00:21:24on Slack that was like, some company is called like paper apps and it's like,
00:21:31everything has come back full circle or it's so cute. It's like they have a golf game or something
00:21:36that you play. Like you get the little notebook and, but I'm like, oh, a notepad is a paper app
00:21:43because that's like how it worked anyway. It gets so dumb so fast, but, um, it's cute. I like it.
00:21:53Yeah. I'm into it. My pitch for this would be that we find some clever way to combine it with
00:21:58the note-taking app so that you can like add stuff to your calendar and know that it will go to your
00:22:03calendar, but you can't actually look at your calendar. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least you can't like
00:22:10interact with your calendar in some way. Right. Cause I think there's something to like knowing
00:22:14your next appointment is fine, but I don't want to be able to like open up and move things around
00:22:20in my calendar on this device. That feels, that feels wrong for what we're trying to do here.
00:22:23Yeah. Like read only. Yeah. And like pretty and not gross.
00:22:30Like maybe only shows me two events at a time. Yeah. Yeah. You may only know two things at a time.
00:22:35Exactly. Um, okay. Next up, uh, some kind of video chat service, FaceTime, Zoom, Meet,
00:22:43all of them or one of them, whatever you want, but something for video chat.
00:22:47I vote no. Really? Yeah. I think you have to talk on the phone or go to your computer.
00:22:57Okay. My, my worry for this strategy would be it's possible that video chat has like crossed the line
00:23:05into it's as important, like it might be as important as phone calls and text messages.
00:23:10Yeah. I don't feel like it's all the way there, but it is, it is, it feels like it's getting
00:23:14closer and closer every day. And so my worry is if we don't allow this, there's just a bunch of
00:23:18people who are like, well, then of course I'm never buying this. Yeah. In the same way that
00:23:21if we don't have WhatsApp, we've just instantly ruled out lots of people for whom this doesn't
00:23:25work anymore. Okay. I don't know about video chat though. I know the other side of the coin
00:23:30is when you ha when you're like, I can't, sorry, I can't video chat you. We can call on the phone.
00:23:37That's kind of a relief. You're like, yeah, you get a little vacation from like doing
00:23:43zooms or Google meets or whatever. So maybe it's a little bit of like, uh, you're,
00:23:49you're choosing this and it's healthier for you. Question. No, I, I actually, I totally agree with
00:23:57that. You've, you've just swayed me. Cause I think, Hey, again, we're talking about a phone.
00:24:01You're not supposed to stare at all day. Yeah. And the, um, we do all spend too much time looking
00:24:06at our own faces and maybe we're not healthy. We're all secretly like looking for a break from
00:24:12that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I mean, no video chat, but maybe, maybe it has a thing where
00:24:18people can like, you can click on a zoom link, but it'll just add you as audio only. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:23I'm trying to like the big question with all of these is like, how do you integrate with all the
00:24:26stuff people actually need to use, but in a less gross way. And I kind of liked the idea of like,
00:24:32it has all the video chat apps, but audio only. Yeah. Yeah. I like that would work for me. Okay.
00:24:38I also, can I just tell you, this is just a random thing, this light phone, beautiful little
00:24:42lovely device. Uh, it's very sharp up here. Oh no. When I hold it against my face to make phone
00:24:47calls, it like kind of hurts my ears after a while. Uh, I really like this phone, but I don't
00:24:52love really long phone calls as a phone. Yeah. Not, not exactly what you're going for. Okay.
00:24:58Anyway. All right. We've got a bunch more. Let's keep going. Um, a few of these, I think are going
00:25:02to be easy. So this will be fun. Uh, a built-in AI chat bot of some kind, Chad, GBT, Claude, Gemini,
00:25:08pick your favorite. This goes back, I think to the same thing as web browsers, which is like,
00:25:11what do you do if you have a question? Yeah. I mean, I vote no. I vote you. If you need your
00:25:19Claude or whatever, put it in the web browser and go talk to it there. Okay. I, I, I agree
00:25:25with you, but I just want to play devil's advocate for one second, because I think there is a case to
00:25:29be made that you could ditch half the other apps we've allowed and replace them all with a pretty
00:25:36good chat bot. Like something that can remember things for me that can take notes down for me,
00:25:41that can find information for me is actually in a certain way, like what we're going for here.
00:25:47Yeah. That's like, we're, we've just like invented the whole premise of AI on phones,
00:25:53where it's like, yeah. Abstract all that away. The chat bot will just take care of it for you.
00:25:58But the reality right now is you ask it to do a math equation instead of having a calculator,
00:26:05rolling the dice, whether that is true, you're going to get the right answer or not.
00:26:09That is true. Maybe when we do this exercise in like four or five years,
00:26:12it'll be really different. But right now the idea of replacing my calculator app with Claude
00:26:18seems terrifying, but I do think you're right. Like spiritually, they're a perfect fit. This
00:26:23idea of like, now I have a device that I don't have to look at all day. And so it can actually
00:26:27like be redesigned around the fact that I don't have to look at all at it all day and I can just
00:26:31talk to it and it does things for me. Sounds awesome. Super duper doesn't work.
00:26:35So somewhere the founders of Humane are just screaming into the void. They're like,
00:26:41we wanted this.
00:26:43They're like, if it had worked, we'd still be here.
00:26:45I know. Yeah. Didn't work.
00:26:49Nope. All right. So we're not allowing that. TikTok, I assume is just a no. We're out on TikTok.
00:26:54No TikTok. No.
00:26:55Okay. CapCut for making videos.
00:26:59Hmm. No, I vote no. But I think like maybe some kind of system where if you record a video with
00:27:06your minimalist phone, it can go somewhere. So you could make it, but I don't know. As soon as
00:27:12you have that knowledge of like, oh, I should record this. It could be a TikTok. It changes
00:27:17your whole like MO when you're out and about. Cause I'm constantly like, I should take a
00:27:23picture of that. It'd be funny on Instagram or whatever. And maybe we want to get away with that
00:27:28away from it. I vote no.
00:27:32Okay. I think I'm out too. And I think there's definitely a,
00:27:36a sort of line in the sand here somewhere where it's like, if this activity on your
00:27:40phone is going to take you longer than X amount of time, it's a, it's a computer task or an iPad
00:27:46task or like when you get home task or whatever. And I think that is like, that's one of the
00:27:51things the light folks have really tried to figure out is like, how long can we make you use this
00:27:56device before actually we're just defeating the whole purpose? And the answer is go use the device
00:28:00that you bought to do things with. And I think there's, there's something, there's something in
00:28:05there. And I think CapCut, you're probably right. Like if you want to spend an hour editing a video,
00:28:08you shouldn't do that on our minimalist phone. You should do it on an iPhone. iPhones will continue
00:28:13to exist until our company takes over the world with minimalist smartphones. All right. I have a
00:28:18few more. Then, then I'm going to let you out of this horrible exercise. Instagram I think is a no,
00:28:23right? We're out on Instagram. The messaging thing is a little tough, but we'll live. Yeah. Look,
00:28:28look at your memes somewhere else. Duolingo. Oh man, I do need my Duolingo. Duolingo is both
00:28:37like incredibly problematic because it's all about streaks and it pesters you all the time
00:28:41and it is like designed to be addictive, but it is also in a certain way, like good for you. Yeah.
00:28:46Oh man, that's a tough one. It's another, yeah. Cause like feasibly I could go through a whole
00:28:54day with this phone. Like it feels like a phone I should be able to go through a whole day with.
00:28:59And if I have to use a streak phrase because I was using my minimalist phone, I'll be pissed.
00:29:07Yeah. I feel like there should be some access to Duolingo, but maybe it can't bother me.
00:29:13Oh, that's okay. That's a good one. Duolingo, but no. Well, I think this phone in general
00:29:17does not allow push notifications. Yeah. Yeah. Except no, no push notifications. It can alert
00:29:22you when someone is calling you on the phone. And I think that's the only notification allowed.
00:29:26Yes. Agreed. Okay. Yeah. Duolingo I think might actually be like the perfect summation of why
00:29:32this is such a hard problem to solve because it is both like, it is so problematic in so many ways,
00:29:38but like you just said, it is, it's, it is like a core part of many people's day-to-day lives and
00:29:43not having it becomes a total non-starter, which again, a kudos to Duolingo for pulling that off
00:29:49with a language learning apps. Good God. But it is, it is a strange thing. All right. YouTube.
00:29:55I think we're, we're definitely not allowing YouTube. No YouTube. I think we just don't
00:30:00want you watching videos on this phone. Like, I think that's fine. Yeah. Read an article
00:30:04or just like, don't look at your phone. Right. That's fine too. I'm envisioning myself. Like
00:30:11I'm trying to fix something in my house on my own, which was a bad idea to start with.
00:30:16But then I'm like, I need to find the YouTube video of however you do this. But if I'm in my
00:30:21house, I can go on a computer. I'm not like out in the world trying to fix, like put up a shelf
00:30:27on someone's wall. Well, we're also allowing the terrible web browser. So it'll play. Yeah. It'll
00:30:32play the YouTube video. It'll look bad. Yes. And maybe it only plays it like eight frames per
00:30:37second, but it. Yeah. In a pinch it works. So I think, I think that as a work around, I don't
00:30:43love, but I can live with. Okay. Yeah. Me too. But I definitely don't think we have a YouTube app
00:30:47that's no, that violates all of our rules. Yeah. Okay. And I think Netflix, same thing. No Netflix.
00:30:52No Netflix. You have plenty of other places to watch Netflix. Don't do it on your phone.
00:30:55Yeah. Watch a TV. Right. Uh, some kind of file storage app, Dropbox, Google drive,
00:31:01pick your favorite. Oh man. I'm just thinking about how annoying the iPhone is to deal with
00:31:08as soon as you need to get a file off of it. And it feels like we fought so hard
00:31:12just to have a files app on the iPhone. I don't want to not have it, but also maybe you don't,
00:31:21maybe you can like sync stuff to Google drive if you have to. Does that make sense?
00:31:28Okay. So you can't like access your Google drive, but you can send something to Google drive.
00:31:32Yeah. Yeah. We can, we can do that with the API. Like, uh, it's you hit a backup button and it
00:31:39goes straight to Google drive, but you can't see all the files in your Google drive. Yeah. All
00:31:43right. I'm good with that. I can work with that. Um, Uber slash Lyft.
00:31:51Yeah. It could be the web browser thing, but, um, I actually think you need something with like
00:32:01real phone level access. That's like an app that is always on that can do the, you know,
00:32:08really fine location stuff. This is one of those that I'm like, I, I don't actually use Uber and
00:32:14Lyft all that often in my day to day, but the idea of not having it as an option feels like
00:32:19a problem. So I think, I think I would need it. I would do. Yeah. It's like a lifeline where I'm
00:32:25like, well, if everything goes south here, and it is, it is kind of, it is a tool you expect to
00:32:34have available to you. And they have a bunch of weird workarounds. Like, I think you can
00:32:37call on the phone and get an Uber. Uh, and they have some of the like chatbot integration stuff,
00:32:42but I think, I think we need the Uber app. I'm okay with that. I think so. Yeah. And that's also
00:32:46not really an app you like hang out in anyway, so I'm not, I'm not super bothered by it. If they
00:32:51like gamify the Uber app, I'll be so annoyed. You know, they want, you know, they want to
00:32:57somebody in there is like, how do we do a lingo? Oh, I had to use a streak freeze on my Uber app.
00:33:04God. Yeah. Nightmare. Dara, if you're listening, that's not a good idea. Don't do that. Please
00:33:09don't do it. All right. I got two more. Uh, Slack slash teams feels like if we're not allowing
00:33:17email, we cannot allow Slack and teams. No, get out of here. Slack and teams. Okay, good. I'm
00:33:23glad we're on the same team. Uh, last one, Venmo slash cash app slash some way to send money.
00:33:29Does this matter? Do we need this? You can web browser that, right? I'm trying to think of like,
00:33:37I, uh, went to a thing this weekend where we like painted these little figurines. It was like
00:33:44called art club and we paid through Venmo. Um, I'm like, I'd want to be able to do that,
00:33:51but yeah, you have the camera, you scan the thing, you log in. I say web browser for this one. Okay.
00:33:58Yeah. That's one you can, you can kind of work around a crappy experience.
00:34:02Yeah. Do we have tap to pay though? Oh, I didn't even have that on the list, but I think we need
00:34:09to, but then you have a whole, do you have a wallet and then do you have the capital one app?
00:34:19I don't know. You just eventually end up recreating the pixel. Like there just is no
00:34:25way to do this without accidentally making a pixel. Yep. It's true. But no, you need tap to
00:34:31pay. I think you need tap to pay. Crap. Yeah. Okay. Here's our tap to pay rule. One credit
00:34:40card. Yeah. You got to pick, you pick one. You can have a transit cards, whatever, but you get
00:34:45one credit card. Yeah. And that feels necessary because otherwise, otherwise you end up down too
00:34:50many weird rabbit holes. Right. And you can like log on to our, our like web portal on your
00:35:00computer to upload your credit card credentials or something, you know, encrypted blah, blah, blah.
00:35:08That'd be great. Our security is top notch on this platform. It's so good. Yeah. Don't even,
00:35:12don't even worry about that. You got it covered. All right. Well, is there, that's my whole list.
00:35:16Is there anything else I forgot if we're building our, our perfect minimalist smartphone,
00:35:21anything else we desperately need that we don't have? We're doing like alarms and stuff, right?
00:35:27That's just like baked into it. Yeah. That, that like the thing shows the time. So it has to kind
00:35:33of do alarms and timers. Like I feel good about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think I could live.
00:35:39I could get through a day with this phone and it wouldn't give me a panic attack too much.
00:35:45Is it weird that that, that actually feels like the bar? I think it's been a really interesting
00:35:51thing. Cause I think like talking to all the folks who make these minimalist phones,
00:35:55they're basically trying to figure out how to make a phone that is so different from all the
00:36:00other things that it doesn't just seem like a worse version of your phone. But actually maybe
00:36:04what we need is just a worse version of our phones. I keep coming back to like a cellular
00:36:11smartwatch is the minimalist phone. And like you put in some earbuds, you've got your,
00:36:18your little like crappy phone on your wrist, you're good to go. And then when you, you know,
00:36:24you can just leave the house without the thing. The only thing is, you know, you don't have the
00:36:28camera, you know, it kind of breaks down pretty quickly to where like, maybe there is room for
00:36:34a thing that's like phone shaped. But yeah, I think for me, that's where I keep
00:36:41getting into this loop with the minimalist phone is like, well, it's going to be missing this or
00:36:46that. That's on the watch that I usually have on anyway. Why wouldn't I just use the watch
00:36:55if I wanted to break from my phone? There have been all these rumors about
00:36:59an Apple watch with a camera being kind of in the labs in Cupertino right now. And I have gone from
00:37:06thinking that is an absurd, ridiculous idea to being like, maybe that's actually the only thing
00:37:11between me and being able to use just my watch for really long stretches of time.
00:37:15Yeah. But how do you take a picture? Do you do?
00:37:19Maybe this is just the, just have a camera on you moment. Like, we invented this thing,
00:37:32actually. It used to not be part of us, like paper apps. Like, yeah, we do just have paper.
00:37:40Yeah, we're pretty good at paper now, it turns out.
00:37:42Yeah. All right. Well, Alison, thank you for doing this with me. If we missed anything,
00:37:48if there's something on your list that you're screaming about that you need in your minimalist
00:37:52smartphone, tell us. The hotline is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. Alison,
00:37:59thank you very much. This is super fun. Thank you. This is great.
00:38:02All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk Tesla.
00:38:06We're going to talk tariffs and we're going to talk about what in the world is happening
00:38:10with cars. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. Andy Hawkins is here.
00:38:17Hello. Hi.
00:38:19How are things?
00:38:21Things are good. We're out here. We're watching these protests, these Tesla protests. I assume
00:38:28that's what I'm here to talk about. In large part, I think I just galaxy brain myself into many
00:38:33corners with all this Tesla stuff. So we're going to do a little bit of that. But let's start with
00:38:37the protests this week because this weekend was it was a big moment in the sort of official Tesla
00:38:43takedown universe of protests like what just sort of walk me through what happened this week.
00:38:48Yeah. So these protests, they started, I guess you could say, two months ago, people sort of
00:38:54showing up outside of Tesla showrooms and at charging stations and registering their opposition
00:39:01to Elon Musk and to Doge and to the sort of ransacking of the federal government. And they
00:39:06grew over time. And we started to see larger and larger crowds in cities all across the country.
00:39:16And and then eventually they decided they needed to get organized. And that was I think that was
00:39:21sort of like the most interesting thing to me was this was very much a bottom up grassroots effort.
00:39:26Very much. There was not really sort of any like national leader to to this, these protests. And
00:39:32they they sort of realized that that was not really sort of a tenable situation. They needed
00:39:36to get organized. So they sort of got together. There's been some various kind of, you know,
00:39:42pro democracy, left leaning progressive groups that have been sort of like involved on the margins,
00:39:48indivisible and a few others. And so they decided to get together
00:39:53and sort of hold a mobilizing effort and targeting this one date, March 29th,
00:39:58which was last Saturday, as sort of their global day of action. They were just like,
00:40:02everybody needs to come out. We need to hit every Tesla location in the country.
00:40:06Let's hit some in Europe as well in Canada and really have like a show of force to see
00:40:11to sort of like send the message that this is like a sustained protest and effort to really
00:40:17send the message that this is the Elon Musk and Doge are, you know, on their hit list,
00:40:22I guess you could say. So Saturday was the day we sent reporters out to as many of these protests
00:40:28as we possibly could. I think we hit almost a dozen of them in London and in New York and New
00:40:34Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Florida, Texas, California. What we saw was sort of like what
00:40:42we've been seeing for the last few months now, which is a lot of clever signs, a lot of allusions
00:40:48to fascism and to Nazism and to, you know, photographs of Musk making his fascist salute
00:40:55at the inauguration. You know, I think an effort largely the overall the broader effort was,
00:41:00you know, to to sort of toxify the Tesla brand and to drive their sales down, which was
00:41:05something that we heard from talking to these protesters.
00:41:07It seems like I think in an effort to make this a moment, the movement seems to have succeeded,
00:41:14right? Like I feel like I saw coverage of this everywhere, that if the goal was to pick a moment
00:41:19to make this a big story, this sort of loose collection of protests, it seems to have worked.
00:41:25Yeah, I mean, they've gotten the attention of the targets of the protests, right? Like Elon Musk
00:41:31and Donald Trump have both come out and made several statements about, you know, sort of
00:41:40not not just a protest. So they've been focusing more on the on the the violent acts and the
00:41:45vandalism, which is understandable from their position that that's what they would be focused
00:41:50on. But what we definitely heard from the protesters was that this was a peaceful movement.
00:41:54This was a nonviolent movement. They do not condone any of the of the vandalism and the
00:41:59arson that's taken place. They see that as something that's separate to their movement.
00:42:05But obviously, I would say on the Musk and the Trump side, there's an effort to tie those things
00:42:09together. And so, you know, that's where we got Trump talking about charges of domestic terrorism,
00:42:14although we have yet to see anyone be charged with domestic terrorism. Yet there have been arrests
00:42:18of people who have been charged with setting fires and defacing Tesla property.
00:42:24But none of these actual terrorism charges quite yet. That may be difficult to actually
00:42:28accomplish. And then you had Musk on Fox last week talking about, you know, going after people
00:42:33who are pushing Tesla propaganda, he said. So it's clear that they have their attention. And I think
00:42:40that that is it's been galvanizing for the protesters. I think that they feel that they're
00:42:44succeeding because they have they have Musk's attention. Well, and it's been really interesting
00:42:49to watch the folks engaged in these protests try to explain what it is that they're protesting,
00:42:55because on the one hand, this is all pointed at Tesla, right? They're going to Tesla showrooms,
00:43:00they're going to Tesla buildings and protesting Tesla. It's called Tesla takedown. Like,
00:43:05that is the thing that they're doing. But it's not about Tesla. This is like very specifically
00:43:10pointed at Elon Musk. And I think a to some extent that has worked, right? Like you mentioned the Fox
00:43:16News interview he did, and he basically goes on TV and is like sort of weepily saying my businesses
00:43:21are struggling like that. I assume that's what these protesters are after, right? Like that.
00:43:25That is the goal is you want you want him to feel it at the end of the process. But I do continue
00:43:29to wonder, is pointing all of this energy at Tesla the right way to get to Elon Musk? Does that
00:43:36seem like it is working for these protesters? Because they're not mad at Tesla nearly in the
00:43:40same way that they're mad at the guy who runs Tesla, right? Or am I am I overstating the Elon
00:43:44Musk? No, no, I don't. I know. I think I think you're right about that. They are mad at Elon
00:43:48Musk. And I think the the the understanding is that Tesla is sort of the unfortunate,
00:43:53you know, byproduct of what they have to do, right? Because his wealth and his power are very
00:43:59much linked to Tesla. His ownership of, you know, around 13% of Tesla stock is sort of what comprises
00:44:07the bulk of his net worth, right? And it's what you know, he's had to sell Tesla stock in order
00:44:11to fund the purchase of Twitter. You know, that's sort of how he leverages his power is through his
00:44:16ownership stake in Tesla. And so, yes, Tesla is sort of just what they have to they have to focus
00:44:22on, right? This is a boycott. It's an effort to drive sales down to convince people to sell their
00:44:28Teslas to make the used market of Tesla, you know, sort of chaotic to and ultimately to affect
00:44:36his ownership and his net worth of the company. I don't think any of the folks that you would
00:44:41encounter out there at these protests would say that they are opposed to the idea of electric cars
00:44:46or the furtherance of electric car sales. And you see some people with signs that say we don't we
00:44:51like electric cars. We just don't like Tesla. Right. And so that that is sort of the the ultimate
00:44:57mission here. It's not to to, I think, to sink the electric car market. But in some ways, obviously,
00:45:03Tesla is a huge chunk of the electric car market. But it is it is specifically about making the
00:45:10Tesla stock price go down and making Elon Musk's net worth and thus his political power diminished.
00:45:16I mean, that's that's the piece of the sort of cognitive dissonance of all of this that just
00:45:20continues to blow my mind. Like my overarching assumption would be that the people protesting
00:45:26outside of Tesla showrooms this weekend were the exact same demographic of people who may have been
00:45:32the optimal Tesla buyer 10 years ago. Like and the cars have not changed. Right. Like it's it's just
00:45:40what they mean in the world has done like a full 180 to the point where like the people who used
00:45:45to walk in and spend money are now protesting outside of the building. And it is like if you
00:45:50want a story of what has happened to American society in 10 years, like there it is, man.
00:45:54Yeah, it's crazy. And they'll point to they'll say, you know, we would have been fully in support of
00:46:00Tesla's mission, right? Like Tesla's mission for a long time was to further the mission of
00:46:06new energy, of clean energy, renewable energy. You know, Musk for a long time talked about,
00:46:12you know, electric cars and battery storage and all of these things as a way to save the world.
00:46:16And I think a lot of those people would have ascribed to that to that mission. But, you know,
00:46:20their argument would be, you know, he changed first. Right. He was the one that got red pilled
00:46:26and bought into all of these Twitter conspiracies and moved to the right and ultimately endorsed
00:46:32Donald Trump and funded his campaign and is now heading this effort to slash the federal
00:46:37government and fire workers and cancel humanitarian aid. So I think a lot of these folks would say,
00:46:42you know, it wasn't wasn't us that changed. We liked Tesla. We liked our cars. But, you know,
00:46:47it's him that changed. And now we have to sort of like respond to that. So, yeah, it is it is
00:46:51an incredibly cognitively dissonant moment, I think, ultimately. And I think a lot of these
00:46:56protesters would would fully admit to that as well. Yeah, it's just it's just strange that it
00:47:01ended up like this. So what what is the sort of metric we're looking at to see if this is working?
00:47:07Obviously, you can look at Tesla stock price. I will just say candidly, I my my increasing
00:47:11belief is that stock prices have nothing to do with anything or completely divorced from reality,
00:47:16especially when it comes to things like Tesla, which have been about other things for a long
00:47:19time. But if you're looking at sort of what what is is this working or is it not? Which direction
00:47:25is Tesla headed? What do we look at? Yeah. So I think this week, especially,
00:47:29we're going to get some new data that's going to, I think, tell a lot about what's been going on in
00:47:34this sort of the present moment. We've already seen signs of it right at the beginning of the
00:47:38year. We saw Tesla report that it had flat sales for the year and that it's, you know, it's delivered.
00:47:44Deliveries were actually going down. And then in the last few months, we started getting some
00:47:48regional data from Europe and from from China about how its sales had dropped. I think in Europe over
00:47:55the last two months, sales were down 45 percent year over year in some markets even more. I think
00:48:00Germany was down like over 70 percent year over year. And now we're going to see the first quarter
00:48:06sales data be reported on Wednesday. Even a lot of the Tesla optimists and the bulls out there are
00:48:13expecting it's going to be a rough number for Tesla. They're assuming that it could be down by
00:48:19as much as nine to 10 percent year over year in terms of the number of vehicles that it produced,
00:48:24but also the ones that it's delivered, which is basically a proxy for for sales. So that's going
00:48:30to be the thing that people are really going to be zeroed in on. It doesn't sound like even Tesla
00:48:35is really optimistic about this delivery report this week. So that should be sort of a real clear
00:48:41signal about how bad this brand image that Tesla has at the moment. The like get rid of Elon Musk
00:48:47energy does seem to be increasing. I don't think it's remotely realistic. Correct me if I'm wrong,
00:48:52but the number of people with some influence who are starting to say things like Tesla needs a CEO
00:48:59who is not Elon Musk, that noise seems to be getting louder. Is there any substance behind
00:49:04any of that as far as you can tell? Yeah, it still seems to be pretty much on the fringe
00:49:07as far as I can tell. Like you've got like investors like Ross Gerber who have been saying,
00:49:12you know, have been sort of like Musk skeptics for a long time saying that he thinks that there
00:49:16needs to be a change at the top. Obviously, he owns some some Tesla stock, but I wouldn't say
00:49:21that it's anything significant to point to, I think, larger problems within the company. And
00:49:27certainly, the board itself hasn't hasn't said anything. I think, you know, Robin Denholm,
00:49:32who was the board chair was in Australia like a week ago. And a lot of reporters tried to sort of,
00:49:37you know, get her corner her and ask her about Tesla, and she just refused to say anything about
00:49:41it. So, you know, the board is still seen as being sort of completely beholden to Musk. I mean,
00:49:46his brothers on the board, James Murdoch's on the board, you know, it's not I wouldn't say it's a
00:49:51Tesla takedown friendly situation. But, you know, and there's still like a lot of people who are
00:49:57saying, you know, like, if you're if you're someone who's optimistic about Tesla's future,
00:50:02don't worry about the current moment. You know, we've got there's lots of things to look at the
00:50:06horizon. There's a new refreshed Model Y that's going to be coming down the pipe. That's Tesla's
00:50:10best selling vehicle was the best selling vehicle in the world last year, or I believe is maybe
00:50:16the year before, I don't know, it was it was a best selling vehicle for sure. And there's a
00:50:21refreshed model that's gonna be coming soon. And then obviously, there's Tesla's claims about AI
00:50:25and robotics and other things that have been sort of the bulk of what people have been using as sort
00:50:31of justification for the insane values that Tesla has been has been enjoying over the years. So it
00:50:37does seem like there's there needs to be more pieces connected, more dots connected before
00:50:42we start to say that Musk is truly in trouble, which I would say he's, he's not at the moment.
00:50:46Okay, it makes me think of like the meta situation where at every shareholder meeting, somebody's
00:50:49like, fire Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark says, No, thank you. And then everybody moves on.
00:50:53Exactly. That's essentially where we are. Yeah. Okay. So to your point on like the Model Y and
00:50:58the AI stuff, and you know, must talks about the cyber cab. And like, there is there's a lot of
00:51:02stuff in some version of the pipeline at Tesla. But I continue to find myself wondering, like,
00:51:08has this company and I'm purely just talking like as a financial animal for Elon Musk's net worth,
00:51:14because I think we have to talk to him about them as two different things, right? Like there's the
00:51:17there's the car company, and there's the stock price, and they are like, totally different
00:51:20things. Does any of that matter anymore? Like part of me wonders now if if the idea of Tesla
00:51:27is so politicized and so directly tied to Elon Musk himself, that nobody nobody cares about the
00:51:32Model Y anymore. I don't like if the Model Y comes out and it is amazing. Is it going to change one
00:51:36person's mind about whether or not they should buy a Tesla right now? I just have a hard time
00:51:39seeing it. Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that, you know, there's some arguments that
00:51:44can be made that Tesla's brand is pretty thoroughly toxic at the at the moment, but it's not clear as
00:51:49to how many people take politics into account when they're out buying a vehicle. And if Tesla is if
00:51:56Tesla is able to actually come out with a with an even lower cost model, which they've said that
00:52:00they plan on doing at some point this year, we're not sure exactly how lower cost that's going to
00:52:04be. Is that going to be like, you know, the sort of the long rumored $25,000 Model Model two that's
00:52:10been talked about? Although I think it's being called the Model Q now. So don't quote me on either
00:52:14of those things. But you know, if they're able to actually achieve this, you know, this, I think
00:52:20would be a very significant achievement for the company, which is a lower, an actual lower cost
00:52:27electric vehicle, some sort of like strip to the bones Model three, and beat all of the other
00:52:32legacy OEMs that are out there, I think you could make the argument that Tesla could see
00:52:37a significant bounce back. There's another thing that I sort of been thinking about in the back of
00:52:41my head, which was, um, do you remember the delete Uber movement? During the first Trump administration
00:52:48when there was a boycott at the JFK airport over like, deportations, and I don't even remember like
00:52:54the specifics, but like Uber wasn't boycotting airport pickups in the same way that like,
00:53:00taxi drivers were. And so everybody got mad at Uber. Plus, like Travis Kalanick was going to
00:53:05be on a board on some sort of panel with a CEO panel with Trump, everyone got mad at Uber. And
00:53:09so there was this hashtag delete Uber moment. Everyone's like, delete Uber, get rid of Uber.
00:53:14You know, we don't need this company anymore. That petered out after like a couple months.
00:53:19And as far as I can tell, Uber's fine right now. It's profitable. Like it's doing well.
00:53:24Like these things like tend to like happen in, you know, fits and starts. And it's not clear to
00:53:30me, like, I'm sure the Tesla takedown people will say, you know, this is, we're here to stay. We're
00:53:34here to, to make, you know, uh, Elon Musk's, you know, life a living hell. And they certainly,
00:53:39it's been working and it's a very different situation than the delete Uber situation in
00:53:43many ways. Like Musk is way more entrenched and embedded in the Trump administration now
00:53:49than Uber ever was. Yeah. This will be an interesting test of, of like humanity's
00:53:53ability to move through new cycles, right? Cause it is, it is generally true in modern times that
00:54:00if you're in trouble, all you have to do is wait and eventually everyone will move on to something
00:54:04else. And, and the lesson learned is like, don't apologize. Just, just wait. And eventually
00:54:09everyone's attention will disappear. This feels like maybe the most extreme test we've ever had
00:54:14of that exact. I mean, I would argue that the Trump there's the Trump example, right? Like
00:54:18there was January 6th in an actual insurrection and like Trump was supposed to be like, you know,
00:54:25banished to the wilderness after all that happened. And yet here we are. So, I mean,
00:54:29if Trump can make a comeback, Musk is, I think, certainly looking at that example, right. Uh,
00:54:35being sort of as close as he is to him, uh, it is seen, you know, like maybe the same could be,
00:54:41can be for me. Why can't, if not him, why not me? Yeah. Fair enough. Um, all right. So one other
00:54:46thing going on in the car industry this week of the many, many, many things going on in the car
00:54:50industry this week, uh, big looming tariffs. If I'm an auto maker, am I just in full 10 out of 10
00:54:58chaos crisis mode right now? Is that where everybody is? It's fully panic mode. I would
00:55:02say for the, for the auto industry, you know, I've, I've been talking with a lot of people
00:55:07at these companies and, and, and smart people, analysts and others who, who sort of,
00:55:11whose job it is to, to, to watch this stuff. And, and they're saying that there's,
00:55:14there's just really no way that, uh, you can avoid passing this cost on to customers. Like
00:55:20these tariffs are going to come down. Um, you know, you can make every, every car in America
00:55:25can suddenly, it can be made in America, but that doesn't mean that the parts that go into the car,
00:55:29uh, are necessarily originate in America. And so, you know, you've got something along the lines of,
00:55:34you know, up to 50% of, of the parts that are inside of car, uh, come from sort of foreign
00:55:40countries, Mexico and Canada, especially are, are, uh, a huge hubs for these parts.
00:55:45Um, so with 40 to 50% of auto parts coming from abroad, there's just really no way that these
00:55:50costs, um, are, are, can be absorbed by the companies that make the, make the vehicles.
00:55:54And so I think a lot of smart people are predicting, you know, something around the
00:55:58lines of five to $10,000, uh, price increases just right out of the gates. Um, when these
00:56:04tariffs go into effect, uh, on April 2nd, uh, that is to say if they go into effect,
00:56:09right, we've been, we've been sort of going back and forth and back and forth on whether Trump is
00:56:13actually going to do this, you know, what can be said to actually dissuade him from putting
00:56:17these tariffs in place. Um, it, it seems like these ones are actually going to come through.
00:56:22Um, but you know, it's, you know, you have to sort of allow for the fact that this is a very
00:56:26unpredictable fluid situation. Uh, yeah, but you know, I, I read today, I was reading a report
00:56:31today that the, uh, somebody, you know, sort of assumed that this is going to add a hundred
00:56:35billion dollars in costs annually to the auto industry. Wow. I mean, this is an incredibly
00:56:42tight margin industry. Um, they cannot absorb these costs. People are going to be paying higher
00:56:48prices for car cuts cars, and there's really just no good reason for it. There's no reason at all
00:56:53why this is happening other than to satisfy Donald Trump's bizarre theories about what tariffs are.
00:57:01He does love a tariff. It's just, it's just, it's honestly, it might be all there is to it.
00:57:05The man just loves the tariff. So if I'm, if I'm an automaker, it seems like the, the short term
00:57:11thing that you do is just immediately raise prices. Right. And I I've, I've been reading
00:57:14similar stuff, right? Like there, and there was one thing that was like, I was quoting somebody,
00:57:19some executive from one of these automakers who was like, yeah, the prices are going to go up
00:57:22and then prices don't go down. So they're just, this all might go away, but the prices stay up
00:57:27because that's what, that's what happens. So that's the like immediate thing. The underneath
00:57:32thing seems to be potentially the, the like long-term goal of the Trump administration
00:57:38is that all of these companies start making huge efforts to move stuff into the United States.
00:57:41Are you, are you hearing rumblings of companies thinking about like, okay, we have to retool
00:57:45everything in order to make this stuff work or prices are just going to go up. That's life moving
00:57:50on. So there, there was already kind of like a, um, a bit of an onshore shoring movement going on
00:57:56during the Biden administration where he was offering all of these incentives, um, and, uh,
00:58:01tax rebate, tax cuts and things like that for companies that were bringing their manufacturing,
00:58:05especially EV and battery manufacturing to the U S a lot of that is still happening.
00:58:10As far as I can tell. I mean, these are huge projects, billion dollar projects that take
00:58:14multiple years to line up all the investors and the partners and the, the land acquisitions and
00:58:20all of these things. Um, so it's just going to take a long time for that to happen, whether or
00:58:24not you start to see companies try to start to, to do the same because of the tariffs,
00:58:29I think you're starting to see some companies sort of repackage old announcements as, as sort
00:58:34of responding to the present moment and presenting them as something new. Uh, but I mean, that's,
00:58:39that said, it's just not something that can be flipped, uh, you know, uh, from, from week to
00:58:44week, you know, this is something, you know, adding, you know, if you, if you take into
00:58:49account just the complexity of supply chains, you know, trying to create new factories, new hubs,
00:58:53this is a four to five to six year timeframe that a lot of these happen and it's happened.
00:58:58So it would just be sort of a massive frustration for the industry, I think,
00:59:02um, to sort of bring all of these supply chains into the United States. And from what I can tell,
00:59:08the idea that you could have a vehicle that is made with 100% U S made parts and labor and
00:59:16manufactured and everything is basically a fantasy at this point. Um, and it's just not something
00:59:21that even if they undertook this massive effort, which would cost them hundreds of billions of
00:59:25dollars and take many, many years, even that is not necessarily going to result in, I think,
00:59:30whatever the sort of fantasy that Trump has in his mind about this, you know, sort of domestic
00:59:36Renaissance in manufacturing. And I would assume that the, the uncertainty of it all is also part
00:59:40of the challenge here that if I'm, if I'm running a car company, like I'm, I'm not actually sure
00:59:45it's smart or prudent right now to say, we're going to make these giant sweeping changes because
00:59:50this is the new normal. Like God only knows what the new normal is.
00:59:55And the thing that I thought was really interesting is a lot of, there was a lot of
00:59:58stories in the last few weeks that are like, Oh, this is great for Tesla, right? Tesla is like one
01:00:02of the most domestic manufacturers that we have. They make all their cars in Texas and California.
01:00:07A lot of their parts are made here in the United States, including their batteries,
01:00:10but even Tesla is exposed to this and they're going to probably, we're going to see prices go
01:00:16up for them as well, which is, you know, on top of already like declining EV incentives you know,
01:00:22less tax breaks, less, you know, less charging incentives. So, you know, I think it's, it's safe
01:00:27to say that everyone is exposed on this, including Tesla, which I think Musk is himself has also said
01:00:33that, you know, we're not going to be unscathed through all this. So it's really just kind of
01:00:38just a, it's a huge head scratcher, I think for everybody, because we were assuming that there
01:00:42was going to be some, at least some carve-outs or maybe some exemptions, but it doesn't appear to be
01:00:46that the case at this stage. Yeah. Well, like you said, we'll see a bunch of that is coming due this
01:00:51week. So we will, we will see one way or another. Exciting times, exciting times. Let's end on a
01:00:57more exciting note. Tell me I'm crazy for being kind of into the new Nissan LEAF. You wrote about
01:01:03this thing and I find the LEAF fascinating. Someday you're going to come on the show and
01:01:06we're going to do the whole story of the Nissan LEAF, which I think is like the weirdest, most
01:01:10interesting sort of footnote in the history of EVs. But there's a new LEAF and it's kind of hot
01:01:15and I'm kind of into it. Yeah, I know. It's the same, right? It was kind of like, similar to me,
01:01:20I got similar vibes from the new Toyota Prius a little bit. Like I was like, oh, they, they took
01:01:24something that was like a big old paperweight that nobody really liked that much, but sold like
01:01:30incredible numbers. Like it did really well, the Nissan LEAF for a long time. And they kind of like
01:01:34sexed it up a little bit, you know, gave it a bit of a glow up and it looked really good.
01:01:38We're still kind of waiting for like the full picture of like what it's going to look like.
01:01:42We don't really have like a lot of the specs, battery range, anything like that. The old
01:01:46LEAF had terrible range. But yeah, it was a pioneer, right? It was out there full for first
01:01:52full like medium range EV to go on sale even before the Tesla Model S. So it was, it kind of
01:02:00like proved the market, I think for a lot of OEMs that this was something that people would actually
01:02:05be interested in buying. And, you know, the rumors that were, was going to be that the Nissan
01:02:11was going to get rid of it for a long time. Nissan's going through a lot of problems right
01:02:14now. Their sales have dropped just dramatically over the last few years or so, especially in
01:02:19some key markets like the U.S. And they tried to merge with Honda late last year. That deal kind
01:02:24of fell apart, although there's some rumblings that they might be trying to get back together
01:02:28again. And then the LEAF was supposed to be on the chopping block, right? Like Nissan's got the Aria,
01:02:32it's got some other EVs in the pipeline that are a little bit more long range and a little bit more
01:02:37sort of like in the form factor that consumers tend to like, which is more sort of like in the
01:02:41SUV crossover space. And now we're seeing the LEAF is going to become a bit of a crossover as well.
01:02:47So it's leaving its old kind of, you know, hatchback in the past looks in the past and
01:02:52is adopting a new look. And yeah, I would say let's, let's do that Nissan LEAF. Let's do it
01:02:57from a Nissan inside of Nissan LEAF. Let's record a whole podcast in a LEAF. And we can talk about
01:03:02the whole history, which is, yeah, it's pretty fascinating. It's, it's, it's, it's been on,
01:03:06it's been a roller coaster ride for the LEAF. Indeed. Yeah. If you get a real picture of this
01:03:11thing from all angles, I'm going to need you to send it to me because I keep looking at this like,
01:03:14kind of like Robin's egg blue thing. And I'm like, yeah, I would buy this car. I'm ready.
01:03:19Let's do this. I'm down. Nice. They got one customer already lined up.
01:03:23All right. Andy, thank you as always. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, David.
01:03:26All right. We're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a
01:03:29question from Vergecast Hotline. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. Let's do a question
01:03:39from the Vergecast Hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can email vergecast at the
01:03:44verge.com. And by the way, it is always super delightful when you call and have a question
01:03:49for a specific person, because then I get to bother that specific person and make them come
01:03:53do that with me, which is what happened today. It's your question. Hey, it's Peter from Brooklyn.
01:03:58This question is for Jen Tuohy. Jen, I'm wondering if there are any smart home companies that are
01:04:04using AI with cameras to analyze what's going on in your home. The example I keep thinking is if I
01:04:12could be like, Alexa, where did I leave the scissors? And it shows me a little video of, oh,
01:04:17yeah, last Thursday, you put them in this drawer. Seems super creepy, but also super like something
01:04:24that they would do. Just curious if anybody's doing it. Thanks. You ask for Jen Tuohy, you get
01:04:31Jen Tuohy. Hi, Jen Tuohy. Hello, happy to be here. Love to be summoned. I just want to say that
01:04:38super creepy and super useful should be the motto of the smart home. That is true. So I had a couple
01:04:46of sort of immediate thoughts that this sparked, but I'm curious where your head went hearing this
01:04:50question. Yeah, I guess the immediate answer is not yet. This is definitely where you can see
01:05:00them going to some extent, especially say you specifically mentioned Alexa and Amazon with its
01:05:05new Alexa Plus and its new multimodal generative AI capabilities. You could see this happening.
01:05:12In fact, at the Amazon event that they had in February, they specifically used cameras to say
01:05:19you could say to Alexa, when did my dog last go for a walk? And it looked through the footage and
01:05:28replied and showed an image of a video of the last time someone had taken the dog out for a walk.
01:05:33I think for this type of very fine grained things, like where did I leave the scissors?
01:05:39That's going to be a bit more of a challenge for Alexa in the current capabilities,
01:05:44unless you have ring cameras stationed everywhere around your house capturing every movement.
01:05:51It definitely wouldn't have the capability yet because another thing that a lot of these,
01:05:55so there are a number of security cameras that are doing this AI search feature where you can
01:06:01search through your camera history just with typing some phrases, but they are very much
01:06:06trained on specific things that you might like to look for. So I think scissors in a drawer might be
01:06:12the level above what they're at now. It's more like cat on the porch or delivery driver approaching
01:06:19door kind of things that they're doing now. So ring has that AI search feature. Google Nest is
01:06:25launching it. It's currently in like a beta program. Arlo actually has an interesting one
01:06:31where you can program your own search query. So you could sort of say, I guess you could set up
01:06:39an Arlo camera in your living room and train it to watch where you put the scissors,
01:06:45but again, it would have to be very specific. You'd have to know what you would want it to
01:06:50look for. It's not going to be able to sort of analyze everything it's seen and look for it
01:06:56that specific yet, but I can see it going there. I'm guessing where you're going, David,
01:07:01would be where I would go with this is it's more likely to come from AI glasses.
01:07:07Like we saw Google demo this, I guess it would have been last year now, was it at IO?
01:07:16This is you now.
01:07:18So this is exactly where my head went. It's called Project Astra from Google. And it is,
01:07:25I don't think it, I think it was glasses. No, it couldn't have been glasses because they're
01:07:28wearing glasses. That doesn't make any sense. Anyway, they left something. Was it glasses?
01:07:32Yeah.
01:07:32Okay. Well then this is bonkers. What are you doing Google? But
01:07:36the demo exactly was that, right? They were just walking around and they had this sort of always on
01:07:41camera and they were like, Oh, where did I leave my glasses? And it directed them back there to
01:07:45where they left their glasses. Notably not shipping. I could say that feature. It's
01:07:51starting to like percolate out in the world. It seems to be a real thing, but it is not.
01:07:56It is not nearly yet what Google showed it to be. But yeah, that, like you said,
01:08:01that is the thing everybody is working on. This idea of like, how do I give myself some sort of
01:08:07consistent awareness of my surroundings and then use that to help me? Which is a really interesting
01:08:13problem, but a really hard one. And it does seem like if your bar is not scissors, but it is like,
01:08:21I don't know, on the level of like people and pets, right? I think about the smart home stuff
01:08:25is like it's comings and goings. I sort of want to know when major events with people and pets
01:08:30are happening in my house. That it seems like these tools are actually getting pretty good at
01:08:34pretty fast, right? Like in theory, the tech is there and it seems like the distance between
01:08:39people and pets and scissors is just like time and camera qualities to some extent.
01:08:45Yeah. Just training the machine learning models on what it is that you want to be identified about
01:08:50or told about. And I think, yeah, right now, because there is the creepy factor with cameras,
01:08:56a lot of this is focused on what's happening outside your home, not so much inside. But with,
01:09:02I mean, if you have cameras inside your home and you want to identify specific people or specific
01:09:08events, you can do that right now. The ring video AI search feature, which I wrote about,
01:09:15I used it to keep track of my cat. Like I would keep losing my cat and I would just type in,
01:09:20cat gray today, and it would show me all the videos that it had captured of my cat walking
01:09:27around the various parts. Your cat just slipping in and out of the wall. Yeah.
01:09:30Although mainly outdoors, because I don't really do cameras inside, but Echo devices have cameras
01:09:35on them. So like the show devices all have cameras on them. So you could see this becoming part of
01:09:41what they offer. Right now though, it's just ring cameras. So those aren't the cameras in the show
01:09:47devices. Nests, same thing. They have indoor and outdoor cameras and also their nest hubs. A few
01:09:53of them have cameras. So yes, I could definitely see this being where they're going. And it's one
01:09:58of the really useful areas of AI that I've, of generative AI I've seen in the smart home to date,
01:10:04getting that kind of fine grained detail about what's happened in your home without you having
01:10:08to scroll through every video and look for, or yeah, try and, because right to date you've had
01:10:14things like person, animal vehicle. So you can filter your video clips to just animal, but then
01:10:20I'd be looking through, if I was looking for my cat, I'm looking through videos of like squirrels
01:10:24and my dog going around in circles and not finding the cat. Whereas now I can just ask it to find me
01:10:29cat and it finds me cat sometimes. It finds me cat. It's pretty good. Yeah. I was thinking about
01:10:36this today. Actually. I, my neighbor had to be out for the day, but he's having luggage delivered.
01:10:43Like the airline lost her luggage. And so they're delivering it. And so she called me this morning
01:10:47and was like, Hey, can you be around in case they need to deliver the luggage? And now I'm like
01:10:53glued to my house in case they come and knock on the door. And I, and I had to leave for a few
01:10:57minutes and I was actually thinking like, Oh, being able to come back and be like, Hey, did,
01:11:00did the mailman come? Like did, did the Alaska airlines people come is like genuinely sincerely
01:11:05useful in a way that I don't have that much smart home stuff, but that was one of the moments where
01:11:10I was like, Oh, I wish I had that. I just rely on like my dog to bark and tell me that there are
01:11:15people at the door. And that's not, it turns out a perfect system. One of the things, the downsides
01:11:21of this type of feature is you are going to have to pay for it. All of these services are included
01:11:25in like the ring subscriptions, the nest subscriptions, but interestingly enough,
01:11:30a couple months ago, a new company launched called Seymour AI, which is S E E M O U R.
01:11:37And it is using, it is able to go through all my ring footage and let me search for it,
01:11:42even if I'm not paying for a subscription. So if you want to just try it out, this is,
01:11:46that's a good way to, to, uh, to start at least. Um, I don't know how they're doing it.
01:11:52Um, and I'm sure ring's aware of it and I'm sure they'll probably charge at some point,
01:11:56but right now you can download the app for free on iOS. And if you have ring cameras,
01:12:00you can, it will search through your footage for you. Um, but again, it's very specific. Like it
01:12:05tells me a lot that it's seen destructive pet, um, activity on my porch, which is normally just
01:12:12my dog walking around. So like, again, they're trained to look for specific things they think
01:12:17you might be interested in. But as you say, as this advances, I think that that gap between,
01:12:22you know, dog, cat, destructive activity, and this is where you left your scissors may, may
01:12:28start to get a lot smaller and, and it could be very useful if you don't mind having cameras in
01:12:33your house. Well, so that's what I was going to say is it seems like to me, the two roadblocks
01:12:37here are a, it is a huge technological leap, right? To go from, I know what a dog looks like
01:12:43to all the things going on, uh, inside of your house is a huge leap. Uh, and like we've seen
01:12:50how hard that is. But then the other thing is I just can't fathom the number of cameras you'd
01:12:55have to have in your house in order to be able to pull that off. It seems like you would need
01:13:00a camera or ideally a couple of cameras essentially on every single square inch of your
01:13:06entire house in order for this system to work. Because even if you have a couple of blind spots,
01:13:10the whole thing kind of falls apart. So I'm like, is this why everyone gets that ring drone camera
01:13:15that can follow them around? Because it solves this problem. I don't know about that. Yeah.
01:13:20But that's only designed to work when you're not in the house. Yeah. That'll change. And also never
01:13:26shipped unlikely to ship at any time in the future if you ask me. So yes, the ring camera,
01:13:34um, the flying drone is, is designed to work when you're not there. So it might not be as useful.
01:13:39I do think, I think Amazon would like us to have screens with cameras in every corner of our room.
01:13:47Ultimately the idea of sort of smart glasses, or I mean, as, as Apple recently, or it's leaked
01:13:54recently that Apple might be putting cameras in your watch, um, more cameras may be on you
01:14:01because again, that's less that there's still a bit of invasion of privacy, but something I talk
01:14:05about a lot in the smart home is it's one thing when you have the cost convenience ratio that
01:14:10you're weighing when you're using technology, you know, a smartphone or a smartwatch or using Gmail
01:14:16and you're willing to give up some privacy for the features that you get. But it's another,
01:14:21when you're in your home and there are other people in the home and you're giving up their
01:14:26privacy as well. So there's a lot more, uh, cost to benefit ratio that has to be factored in there
01:14:31for everyone in the home, not just yourself. So assuming everyone's on board with having cameras
01:14:36in your home, you might be okay, but I think that's unlikely. So I think personal devices
01:14:42are much more likely to, to get us to that position that our callers interested in. Um,
01:14:48especially if it's you, who's left the scissors somewhere. Although in my household,
01:14:52everyone always steals my scissors, so I would need cameras on everyone. I got a pack of five
01:14:57scissors for Christmas because I complain so often about how many people, everyone's stealing my
01:15:02scissors. So I I'm with him on this. I would like to know where my scissors are.
01:15:06How many of the five pairs do you still have? It's now the end of March. Do we still have all five?
01:15:10No, I have half of one.
01:15:11All right. So we need somebody to invent this quickly. If you could get this done for us and
01:15:19for Peter, this would be amazing. Yes. All right. Jen, thank you as always.
01:15:23You're very welcome.
01:15:24All right. That is it for the Verticast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show.
01:15:27And thank you as always for listening. As ever, there is lots more on everything we talked about
01:15:32from my review of the light phone to Alison's coverage of AI and phones, to all of Jen's
01:15:37smart home stuff, to Andy and the team's latest on everything happening with Tesla and the Tesla
01:15:42takedown and tariffs, everything, all of it on the Verge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the
01:15:46show notes, but so much of this stuff is like actively unfolding. Keep it locked on the website.
01:15:52And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, problems, other weird car questions that you
01:15:57think maybe we can answer, please always get in touch. You can email Verticast at the Verge.com.
01:16:02You can call the hotline at 866-VERGE-11. We truly, truly, truly love hearing from you.
01:16:07We've gotten a bunch of really fun questions about border security and how to think about
01:16:12your devices as you move from one place to another, particularly in and out of the U.S.
01:16:16right now. We have some fun stuff coming up on that over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.
01:16:20This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore.
01:16:23Verticast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:16:26I'll be back on Friday with Neal Eye talking about all of the news happening this week,
01:16:30whatever weird stuff is going on with images and chat GPT, presumably some new gadgets.
01:16:35I want to see if he watches the studio on Apple TV, which everybody's into. He was weird about
01:16:40severance, but I'm going to get him into the studio. This is my plan. We'll see you then.
01:16:44Rock and roll.