678: Mentoring a Box of Numbers

26:15Objective-C to Swift is too easy, all things considered. What about porting the app to another platform like Android? Hold my beer. Uh, so then later, so now I have a one-to-one recreation of classic same game, the app in question, uh, in Android's Java slash XML. Later, I passed it the Swift version of the project that it had created from the original Objective-C project and instructed it to turn it into an Android project that I could just open in Android Studio and install. So now it just exists on Android. Steve continues, I spent some time cleaning up the project and prepping it for Google Play.

26:49I've tested Google Play distribution internally, at least. I'm still reeling from the fact that this is possible, nevermind viable. I'd tried this conversion process before, perhaps a year ago with the agent feature in chat GPT and got nowhere. There's clearly been a lot of progress made here in a short amount of time. Sticking with Steve, but kind of, you know, on a different subject, Steve writes three apps from zero to functional in a day. This is the biggest change to Xcode and project builder in its entire history dropped on a random Tuesday when the 26.3 beta was released. So Steve went from zero apps to three that were functional in the span of a day.

27:24And then finally from Steve, building one app used 7 % of my weekly codex usage limit. Compare that to a single awful slideshow and keynote using 47 % of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit. Yikes. Before Steve had embarked on this whole like, I'm going to write a bunch of new apps and important things, he had been exploring the AI features in Apple's Creator Studio and complaining bitterly that even just experimenting with it to try out the features was burning through the allocation of free you know free ai things that you get to do with like iwork or whatever like you know give you an outline generate a slideshow or from it or whatever those limits seem really really low um i mean you're not paying a i mean you are paying a subscription creator studio but you're not paying a separate subscription to like whatever models it's using behind the scenes so on one on the one hand i kind of understand how like okay well creator studio you pay a subscription for the software and we give you some piddling amount kind of like, you know, server-side AI type things for free.

28:22But if you want more than that, you had to hook up to an API key or something. On the other hand, comparing this, like I made three entire apps and used 7 % of my$20 a month usage. Like, you know, I don't know if Apple's AI usage prices are going to be like their RAM prices, or maybe that's a bad example these days. But yeah, it seems like Apple should make an adjustment here or charge more money for their creator studio. So we used Steve Trout and Smith as an example of yay AI. There's been a couple of posts that have been making the rounds recently and that several of you had pointed out to us.

28:51That's kind of about like AI dread and fatalism. We're not going to really talk about them right this second, but I wanted to call them to your attention. Again, links in the show notes. We Mourn Our Craft by Nolan Lawson and The Tipping Point by Thomas Ricard. I probably pronounced that wrong, I'm sorry. But there's a couple of like more pessimistic takes on AI and what that means for development and software engineering and so on, which I think are worth your time, whether or not you agree with them. I think it's interesting. And then one or more anonymous people wrote in with regard to AI and productivity and the promise of, you know, oh, all of these people will 10x their productivity versus, you know, scientific studies about it.

29:29So again, I'm just going to kind of hit the high level real fast. The scientific evidence doesn't actually back the idea that AI provides a huge productivity boost. A recent study from Anthropic found that for junior developers on a set task, the time taken to complete a task was not statistically significantly faster, just two minutes, than those who did not use AI tools and their understanding of the output and ability to answer questions on it was actually much worse. Put a link in the show notes. Separately, a randomized controlled trial from mid-2025 found that experienced developers were slower with AI.

29:58Separately, a Microsoft study from 2024 found that for trivial tasks, the users were able to easily describe AI could save some time. But for complex tasks, it was of minimal benefit. So trivial tasks that you can describe to AI quickly, yeah, you save time, but anything kind of complex and not so great. Then a survey from Atlassian found that only 4 % of companies are seeing return on investment on their integration of AI tools. Separately, a study from Berkeley at the California Review Management found that there is no statistically significant relationship between AI adoption and productivity gains.

30:33At Harvard Business Review, there's a study that describes how AI generated slop is actually harming productivity even when it comes to be when it seems to be producing work. Think an increase in the number of PRs to an open source project that in actuality just wastes the maintainer's time. Then finally, MIT's State of AI in Business finds that 95 % of companies are seeing zero returns. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. John, I am happy to go through these links that you compiled, or would you prefer to? How would you like to proceed? It's just some more in the same vein. Some of these links you just read I had also had in the notes ready to go, but we got many of them sent by listeners as well.

31:06This is all, I think, from one listener that we just read this list, by the way. Some more from John. AI-generated code quality and the challenges we all face by mark leveson there were findings for the key findings from five different studies ai assisted poll requests have 1.7 times more issues than human authored poll requests technical debt increases 30 to 41 percent after ai tool adoption cognitive complexity increases 39 percent in agent assisted repos initial velocity gains disappear in the first few months change failure rate is up 30 percent and incidents per poll request is up 23.5%. Then another article, Comprehension Debt, The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code by Armin Shakar.

31:48Comprehension Debt refers to the gap between the code generated by LLMs and a developer's understanding of that code. In this post, we will explore the implications of comprehension debt, its impact on software quality and maintainability, and strategies for mitigating its effects. And then finally from John, Your Brain on ChatGPT, Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks by Natalia Cosmina or something like that and others. Anyways, while LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neuro-linguistic and behavioral levels.

32:22These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning. Okay, fellas, thank you for being patient. What do you got? So that was a lot, and I think it was structured in this way. Steve Trouton-Smith, who's a frequent person cited on the show, is a very skilled, experienced developer on Apple platforms and just a very generally very good coder. So this is not a novice. He's using it. He's having great success. He's porting apps that he had tried to port himself, taken months and not done it. And then he's doing it in five minutes.

32:54So it's not like somebody who is, I wasn't able to do this thing before because I'm not a skilled coder. But now that I have AI, I can. This is a skilled, experienced coder who is fairly productive, does a lot of stuff and is having great success. Then he has ideas for apps and whips them up in two seconds. He's impressed by it. And then we have all the people who are scared about it. And then we have, but how good actually is it? And these people studying it. Oh, so AI, everyone seems to love it and they think it's great, but actually it's not helping productivity. It's hurting it. And all these, you know, all these studies finding that it's not giving a return on investment.

33:25What's the truth? What, you know, how can we square this circle? And I think everything that we just read is the truth. uh the truth is that ai is massively overhyped there's a lot of money behind it forcing your employees to use it which many companies have been doing which blows my mind by the way when you have something that the people like you don't have to force them to do it you know forcing people to use it's like even if you don't want to use ai if you're programmed for this company you're forced to use it because it's going to increase productivity and this that and the other thing it doesn't surprise me that it's not having productivity games and i'm not saying ai is a fad but it reminds me of a lot of the sort of business fads that go around for practices that are good things that are actually good but that become sort of trendy or popular or like mandatory to do and then companies will just force like everybody to do them even though they're good things like you know you pick agile which we always make fun of but all sorts of other sort of good programming practices that are actually good ideas and have longevity about you know ways to architect code or ways to organize people or whatever anytime there is any idea that is actually good in the technology industry it gets overused to the point where people hate it and it causes negative productivity because people feel like they have to use it and ai is like that times a million that's why you see ai in every single product in the world in every feature and you know companies have entire releases where the only directive from the company is whatever you're doing this company i don't care next release you got to have ai something reportedly apple did that look at any product that you see see that all the time so it doesn't shock me that people aren't seeing productivity games on it's not just because oh they're using it wrong it's because it's not all things to all people um and especially when we go to the essay writing and stuff like that as you as you start to stray more into like the other things that llms can do it becomes a lot spotty um on the other hand in the hands of a skilled developer doing specifically the few things that it's actually very good at the value is tremendous like steve strout smith is just one person so it's anecdated or whatever but there's a reason lots of coders are out there saying this is really doing things for me faster better than i was before and as i said in the last episode it really is a skill to learn how to use these things so even steve trout and smith would admit that he's climbing that learning curve of how to actually use this tool productively again my analogy last time was like photoshop um it can massively increase your power as a graphics designer but it's a lot to learn if you've never used a computer before back in the day uh and this seems to be like that um and then finally wrapping all this up as i tried to emphasize last week and continues to be true all right well so does that mean we once we just learn how to use ai at the things that it's good at in a good way and we aren't all forced to use it and the hype you know the bubble bursts and the hype is gone and we figure out what is it actually good for and what is it not good for everything will be fine it'll be smooth sailing no because there's still absolutely the unresolved issue of how is it that these tools came into being and how are the sources of the power that they have drive being uh compensated um i think and maybe this is a unrealistically optimistic view i think it is plausible to have an lm that is as useful as this thing thing steve drought and smith is using to you know be more productive and get more stuff done that is entirely trained in an ethical way in the same way that adobe and photoshop has that their models are trained entirely on licensed images like so they they paid for the images they train the model in the images they put that feature in photoshop i think that is a there's nothing wrong with that you know a lot of people who wrote in with ai feedback were like i'm against ai in all forms because it's just 100 evil i think even they would agree like okay but what about the adobe thing that's fine right they would say no you're you're draining the deserts of all their water or whatever by you it's like you're not it's just it's not you know the energy usage of of the ai feature in photoshop is not significant in the grand scheme of human energy usage and i think they're if they're telling the truth which i believe they are about only training their models on on data that they owned or legally licensed there you go i think it's perfectly fine and i think that is possible for coding agents right now it's not happening because you know even if you have like an mit license open source thing does the mit license say anything about ai training i bet it doesn't because it didn't exist when the mit license was written so even even the most permissive open source license probably doesn't explicitly allow ai training so it's an open question but you can imagine a future in which i know stack overflow is doing this the stack overflow is essentially licensing their data to ai people and i think people are grumpy about that but legally you know probably good ethically whatever i mean stack overflow is dead with ai i I know, but the only asset they have are all their questions that people train the models on.

38:05So they're selling access to those. Yeah, I'm saying let them do whatever they need to survive right now because that's not a good business to be in right now because AI is completely replacing it. I know, but the AI coding agents could not exist at their current level without training on things like Stack Overflow. So get what the getting is good. But also for open source projects, you can imagine a future in which licenses are made that say explicitly things about whether or not AI training is allowed and under what conditions. And if that's the case, I can imagine a future Adobe style coding agent that is entirely trained on licensed code that is, you know, licensed from stack overflow, licensed from open source that explicitly allows us in a license.

38:48and i think what we've shown with current technology is coding agents can be useful productivity boost if you don't think that they are completely replacement for everything and everybody has to use them that's you know like if if you contain the hype and just look at what they're actually good at that is possible now i i grant that's not happening now now people are using these agents and they don't care where they came from just like we don't care where our food came from we just eat it if it tastes good we're happy with it and we don't care that what terrible things happen to get this food to our you know like it's human nature to say it's the Steve Stout and Smith to be excited by the fact that he made three apps in a day and did this porting thing that he could never do before despite months of trying and he gets done in an afternoon as someone who's a technology enthusiast you're going to be excited about that but people have to be you know it's it's important to still remember that just because you're excited about it and did a cool thing doesn't mean every issue involved in this technology has been resolved because you have the good thing that you want um but i'm still hopeful about it because i agree with the promise of it i agree that it can do great things in the right hands in limited circumstances and i think for coding specifically and not the entire universe of the rest of the things that people want ai to do which is apparently mostly talking to it as a therapist which is a whole other ball of wax but anyway for for coding specifically my personal experience has shown me that this is a powerful useful tool that i wish i could access in a in in a much more ethical and also i would add cost effective uh way but even now um yeah like it's that that's the that's the challenge we face and i think like i would try to give this kind of balanced picture of ai last time but people tend to latch on to the part that they either do or don't want to hear about it and the problem is it's a complicated topic like i don't agree with the people who say it's 100 evil and we should stop it in all forms and never pursue it in any way.

40:33I don't think that's the right thing to do. But I do agree with the people who say it still has problems and we should ignore those problems just because it's doing something useful for us. The truth is what we just read, that it's, it is great at certain things. And there are a whole bunch of other problems that are unresolved and it's currently a bubble and it's being overhyped and it's, there's a lot of bad that's going to come from it. But, uh, yeah, it's a, it's a complex topic. I don't know. What do you, what do you guys think? I know we all got a lot of feedback about this. I only saw the feedback that like ATP got and I got, but did you specifically get any feedback you want to address?

41:02A little bit. So earlier today, I got my keyster to properly start working on the iPad layout and call sheet, which has been trashed since call sheet was around. And it's been too long. I should have already taken care of it, but I hadn't yet. And my first cut at this was, all right, let me use the 26.3 beta and let me ask, you know, the Xcode agentic stuff via Claude. and I don't recall what model I was on and I should have paid attention. I didn't think about it. But let me ask it to turn the cast and crew list and call sheet, which right now on iPad is one column, which is awful. It looks terrible.

41:39It should at least be two columns. Maybe, and I have some ideas for maybe something even more advanced than that. But my first cut was, hey, can you just make this two column? And it took a couple of back and forths between me and Xcode, I guess, or Claude, or I don't know how to describe this, how to verbalize this, but took a couple of back and forths and it got it to the point that visually it was exactly what I wanted. And that only took, I don't know, 10 ish minutes, something like that. It really was not long at all, but functionally it was a mess. And, uh, it doesn't, the particulars don't matter, but suffice it to say, like it totally screwed up navigation.

42:14A lot of things were hosed and I've heard rumblings that, uh, that these things don't do too well with Swift UI. And the theory is in part because Swift UI is a moving target in part because it's so new. But one way or another, I can tell you that I was not exceedingly impressed by that experience. And additionally, shoot, now I'm drawing a blank as to what it was, but there's something else I had to do that was much less invasive. Golly, it's really going to drive me nuts because I can't remember what specifically it was, but something in call sheet. And I wanted it to do something. And, oh, I think I needed it to pump or to pipe a date from, you too deep within the object graph.

42:56And the particulars are not that important, but I asked it to do that for me. And it did, but it did it in a very clunky, very immature way. And as I dug into what it was doing and what it had done to figure out, okay, is this really what I would have done? Was I saving myself rote work or am I punting on something that I should really have a think about? And it was quickly obvious to me that, no, I punted on something that I should how to think about. And I could go back and forth and say, no, don't do it that way. Do it this way. Or why did you choose that instead of this and blah, blah, blah.

43:28And I could have done that. And there have been instances in less complicated topics that that's worked out really, really well for me. But in this particular case, it didn't give me the results I wanted. And I ended up for the piping through the object graph, I ended up doing that all by hand. And for the iPad stuff, if I had to put it away because I had other stuff I needed to do, I think I'll probably take another stab at it probably tomorrow. But I get the vibe that I'm going to end up going back and just rolling all of this by hand. Because for this particular use case, I'm not trying to extrapolate to everything under the sun, but for me in CallSheet, it's been okay.

44:13Simple stuff it can handle really well, but anything even vaguely complicated, it's not great. And it's also the learning curve of using the tools, like I said. If you see the people who are more experienced at using these tools, it is actually a fairly complicated skill. And that kind of leads to like the, okay, but like is the time investment in building up that skill and the time required to essentially execute it. Like Steve Trotten-Swith posted, we don't have a link to it, but maybe we can find it for, if you follow the threads, you'll probably see. He posted, what did I have to say to AI to make one of these apps that he made?

44:41And it was 77 different prompts and they were fairly complicated. And it's kind of like one of those things of like, like I said, if you're like mentoring a new employee, it's faster if you just do it yourself. But like, yeah, but I'm mentoring a new employee. Well, you're not mentoring an AI. They're not learning from what you're talking about. Like in general, like the model is the model until they get, you know, it's obviously you got your context window, but that's basically it. So you have to think like, do I want to spend the time mentoring a box of numbers that is just going to be replaced by different boxes of numbers later?

45:08Or do I just want to do it myself? But still, there are targeted instances when used by a skilled practitioner where it can do amazing things that we're not possibly for, which is why people are excited for it. And one thing I'll add to that, by the way, I still haven't let these things touch any of my apps code. Not because my apps code is beautiful or anything, but just because I don't know. I just don't want to or I don't think I need to at this point because I'm not doing – anyway, whatever. But I did find something to do because I'm trying to use the last of my little$100 subscription, which I did cancel, by the way.

45:34Oh, good for you. Yeah. I was trying to – it's going to run out. it's going to expire soon so i'm like well let me just use the last little bits of it here is uh one of the things that i would recommend if you ever want to play with one of these things and you're like well i'm not going to like learn how to be a wrangler and do use a coding agent to write my codes for me because it's complicated or whatever like but if you want to try something uh one of my suggestions would be point it at your code base you have to at least figure out how to give it stern instructions to never to not modify your code at all but it's mostly good about that but it helps to just maybe put in a claude.md or whatever your equivalent is and say don't ever commit anything don't ever modify any files you have read only whatever but uh just simply say this find any bugs in this program um and it will find a bunch of crap that are not bugs um but it will find some actual bugs too even if it's just a typo and a variable name it will find them yeah actually i did that with claude code not with the new beta i did that with like a week ago with claude code and for the most part it was nothing that was that super duper important but it definitely did find some stuff and what and what i did i think i might have said this already apologies if i'm repeating myself but i just cloned the repo somewhere else and so this way yeah then gave it its own little sandbox and let it run amok and i can choose to push that you know to main or i can choose to just leave it on my computer no harm no foul yeah not asking it to fix the bugs you're just saying find them um and like i said it's going to find stuff that's not bugs because it's not that smart right but it will find legit bugs and the thing is you can keep asking it find any more bugs in this program find any more bugs find any performance issues finding concurrency issues find any memory safety issues you phrase it 75 different ways just keep asking it questions and asking it to point you to things and all it's going to say is i think this thing over here is wrong and i think and it's going to be wrong a lot of the time it's going to be pointing to things that are not bugs and which is annoying ask any open source maintainers getting bug reports from ai that are just not bug reports but for your own code i as a programmer value very highly the ability to find even one bug out of like 10 things that it pointed out because hey that's one bug you didn't know about before and when you fix it it's gone and when it when it can't find any more legitimate bugs does that mean there's no more bugs in your program absolutely not there's always more bugs in your program like we're programmers we know there's always more bugs but this is one of the few tools i've ever seen aside from like you know linters and memory safety protect uh checkers and stuff like that like all those things that in Xcode can find like your Swift 6, you know, strict concurrency, finding places where there might be issues.

47:57This is like that. And I highly value tools like that. So I hope these tools find a way to continue to exist in some reasonable form so that they can be used even for that targeted purpose. Really quickly, I know we haven't given Marco a chance to talk and I apologize, but as an example of something that worked out super duper well for me, I think at this point I was using ChatGPT, but for various uninteresting reasons, I was exposed to N8N, like the letter N numeral eight, letter N, which is a workflow like automation thing that you can self-host. And I wanted to have a notification in the morning that would tell me what lamps thing the kids were doing.

48:36So that's, um, shoot, um, uh, library art, music, uh, shoot them, I'm forgotten. Uh, sports, I guess. No P and something else. I forget it. Basically, what special class they have each day. And this is actually a really complicated problem to solve because it's not exposed anywhere by the school system or anything like that. And so I built an N8N, mostly by asking ChatGPT to do stuff, a whole thing that will like go and figure out what is the calendar for the school district? Do they have school today? Is it a half day? Do they have a snow delay? Or are they out because of snow? And based on such and such a like reference date, count forward all the school days from that reference date to figure out, okay, this is day number three, which means Michaela has library and Declan has counseling.

49:22And then send me a push notification at six 45 while we're sitting down to breakfast. So I can ask them, are you excited for library and counseling and so on and so forth? This is dumb. This is very Casey. I get that. You don't need to make fun of me. I am well aware. Honestly, this sounds awesome, right? I'm saying like, I would love this stupid thing. It's a stupid thing because I could never frigging remember what their specials were each day and it's driving me crazy. And so I built this thing, mostly with ChatGPT, that will help me do this and help me figure it out. And so I'm just sitting there at breakfast.

49:51And then, bloop, my phone says, hey, guess what? Declan has counseling or whatever I just said. And Mikhail has library. It doesn't matter. You get the idea. And this is actually, again, very complicated because you're pulling in all these different pieces. And some of that is a testament to N8N, which is very cool and very weird but very cool. But a lot of this was me saying to ChatGPT, hey, I'm targeting N8N. Can you write me a bunch of JavaScript that I'll plug into a node in N8N that will do this thing? And I mostly told it like, you know, this is the step where I need you to parse out the school calendar and tell me, you know, whether or not today is a school day.

50:28Okay. And then the next node is, all right, given that today is a school day, count from this reference date and figure out how many school days there's been. I forget exactly how it works. We get the idea, right? So I'm breaking down the major problem into micro problems and having ChatGPT figured out. and it took some back and forth, but I'll be damned if it didn't work. And it is freaking cool. And it solves a problem for me. So in the one breath, I'll tell you, for call sheet, I've had not great luck for the most part. I had some good moments, but not great luck. But for the Senate and stuff, it was freaking amazing.

50:56And so I don't even know what I think about it right now, leaving aside the ethics, leaving aside the environmental impacts, just as like a tool. I definitely like it, but I'm not sure. I can't figure out how much of this is overblown and how much isn't. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data broker sites online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites.

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53:19So I've said a lot and I apologize, Marco. Please interrupt me, start talking so I don't keep talking for the next two hours. You got it. You can always count on me. All right. So the way John let off earlier is correct. This is all correct in some ways. There was a great interview on Stratechery a few days back with Benedict Evans and Ben Thompson. and uh one of the they were talking about like you know basically will ai replace all of these like sass product companies and their argument and benedict evans argument was no because you know what what most apps really are especially a lot of business apps but like what most apps really are you think about like you know what is something like salesforce so you know it's they're basically like databases with front ends and like that's that's what almost that's a huge amount of software is like a database with a front end a huge amount of other software is basically a spreadsheet but custom and when spreadsheets and databases came out and were made available with the personal computer revolution they were very disruptive to a lot of jobs that came before them ask accountants you know or ask you know rather ask uh calculators or computers what they actually called computers the people who spreadsheets made their job a lot less necessary but also we still have accounts and we still have you know people doing a lot of these jobs and we still have a lot of products that exist that are basically databases or customized spreadsheets despite everyone having access to database tools and spreadsheet tools their argument was basically like you know ai is going to be a component of lots of software but it's not going to replace the need for software.

55:10And I think that's probably correct. It is a little bit different than those in the breadth of the types of problems it covers. And the nature with which it solves them, being kind of non-deterministic is a little bit unusual in the computing world. Let's just say unreliable. And certainly when you're looking at businesses using AI in business roles, one of the biggest challenges is this stuff is constantly changing. And so you can build a business process around calling the ChatGPT API or something. But next month, whatever you built will break because something will change. GPT 5.5 or 6.0 comes out and all of a sudden the integration you built, it works differently and now you have to rebuild it.

55:54And there's going to be a lot of that tumult for a while, for a long time. I think there will always be value in the market for customized software the same way there always has been value for it, even though people have spreadsheets and databases and they can build their own. However, one major difference with AI is we are making the construction of these things even easier than it was before. And I think to software developers, this is probably on the level of, like, the jump when we went from assembly code to compiled code and higher level languages, that was a major jump in programmer productivity.

56:32You can draw a lot of parallels to that. It isn't a perfect analogy, but you can draw a lot of parallels to that kind of jump with AI where I do think that the era of kind of hand customizing really nice code that you're making yourself is going to be commercially in the past. now the same way like you know if you are a custom furniture maker there's still a market for custom furniture and you can you can be a really good woodworker and you can make really nice custom wood furniture for people but most people's furniture is not custom made most people's furniture is you know large scale made by machines and flat packed into boxes at ikea or whatever that made it a lot more affordable for a lot of people, which is good.

57:21But if you were a furniture maker, it's like, well, hmm, the market just got a lot smaller once power tools and automation and factories started taking over that business. The AI revolution here with code generation in particular is that kind of moment for custom software. Now, the good news is most software, most code that most people write is shuffling stuff around in a database or a spreadsheet or something similar. Most code that most people write is really boring and really simple. And that is easy to automate, as we're finding. That is a major shift, but not unreasonable. And certainly the industry can survive that.

58:06It does change things. It's going to keep changing things. But most code that most people write in most apps most of the time is really boring. And that is now much easier to automate. Thank you. the more difficult code is for a little while at least. I mean, maybe forever, but probably not forever. For a little while, more difficult code or more high-level problems will still be generally better done by humans. But that's probably not going to last that long. I mean, we've had these AI tools for basically zero time, and they're already really good. Where are they going to be in five years? We don't know if they're going to plateau like the other uses.

58:45I got some pushback last episode saying that the chat interface had plateaued when it actually is. you can advance not plateaued as in flat line but the rate of advancement is much slower for those things than it is right and and so like i mean what i'm saying about the coding thing is i haven't seen the rate of advancement slowing yet surely it will at some point because unless we have some other advance because these things don't scale forever right but uh but you know the line is still going up and as for your analogy with like uh assembly versus c and stuff a couple things to say on that one uh when we went from like assembly to like higher level languages um that resulted in tremendously more programmers and tremendously more code because it became more accessible doing stuff in assembly is work that is only possible by a much smaller subset of people because it's so fiendishly difficult and unforgiving there's a reason we made higher level languages and when we did things became easier manual memory management is more difficult than not having to do manual memory management.

59:47In the days when we had to do manual memory management in C and you were allocating and freeing everything, there were fewer programmers than there were in the age. Let me jump in right there. You're exactly right, but just in case you're not familiar, I forget that not everyone that listens to this program is a developer. So assembly language is, and John will correct my piss-poor analogy here, but my definition here, but assembly language is basically a hop, skip, and a jump from ones and zeros. Like it is as close as you can get to actually telling the CPU, the processor, I would like you to add these two numbers and put the result in this piece of memory right here.

1:00:22Like it's very low level. And you have to think about a bunch of junk that the three of us don't generally have to think about. And so that's what makes it like you have to be the right kind of weirdo to enjoy assembly development. It's difficult to do complicated things because you're thinking about so much stuff. and every time you can remove things that you have to worry about what has happened is not that like i will now everyone every programmer was an assembly programmer at one point like that was back in the day there were no high level languages there was just assembly or even before that machine code where you're literally writing ones and zeros which i have done and it's not fun um probably had a piece of paper at that point or a punch card or whatever anyway um and it's like oh all these people are going to be out of business because now pascal exists and you can just write words and it's you don't you're not writing assembly instructions and it's like portable across different architectures.

1:01:06And so your skills of knowing this particular CPU assembly code, that's worthless. You're out of a job. There's not going to be any more programmers. Just every time there has been an advancement in the art of programming, it has resulted in us having more programs and more programmers. And I don't think that will be any different with this new tool. We will have more programs and more programmers. It's just that what we call a programmer will be, you know, it's like, well, they're not a programmer. They're just prompting an AI. Well, they're not a programmer. They're just using C. It does all the stuff for you.

1:01:34you don't you have to know where the run they don't even know what the registers are they don't even know what cpu they're running on they don't even know who's allocating memory oh a garbage collector is going to come clean up for you that must be nice like that has always happened in every higher level language now obviously this is different because those are all deterministic advances this is non-deterministic so i'm just saying this is an additional tool in our toolbox in the same way that having like i don't know linters are a tool linters are not a thing that is 100 are 100 accurate and they cite things that aren't actually problems or whatever but We just use them as a tool to try to make programming more accessible and let us do a better job.

1:02:05And as for your furniture analogy, which I think is a good one, but I would say that we have long since been in the age of manufactured furniture before LLMs. Like, forget about LLMs. We went from the handcrafted furniture age into the mass-produced junkie furniture age, probably in the 80s. You're talking about in code, just to be clear. If you've ever worked for a big company and seen the code behind your favorite product, it looks a hell of a lot more like something stapled together in a crappy factory than it does like a handcrafted, beautifully turned solid wood thing made by artists and craftsmen.

1:02:40Like the only place that exists today, forget about AI. The only place that exists today before AI was in small teams in small startups. And even then, only if you're lucky. Any big program does not look like that. Like, maybe it started off as a beautiful hand-turned, you know, hand-assembled carved piece of furniture made by artisans, but it doesn't stay that way. And success makes it look a lot more like, it's like, imagine an IKEA sofa, not IKEA, because I don't want to slam them. Imagine like some mass-produced sofa held together with staples, but it's the size of Manhattan. That's like the program, that's what's running Salesforce right now.

1:03:20um and into that fray you throw one more tool which is this you know llms that can help you out with your coding process or whatever and honestly i don't think it changes the nature of the product it is still a staple together so for the size of manhattan it's just that people aren't manually putting the staples in anymore and who knows maybe if this stuff continues to advance we'll be able to shape that down to something that looks closer to that uh hand assembled piece of furniture but characterizing the pre-llm age as we were all hand making these beautiful turned pieces of things on our lathes is not fair we're even even my dinky little programs are not that and they have like 30 000 lines of code like it's so that's why we programmers are out here are excited by this because again if i can find a tool that will find me one additional bug that it couldn't find before that tool has value to me i think what we will see here is going to be very similar to those other advances you know when those other advances came around when we had higher level languages well you know every time you had programmers i've been one of them you've had programmers who have said i'm going to keep doing it the old way either because i like it better or because i think i can do a better job or there's some you know my code will perform better you know whatever it is and over time all of those advantages for all of those steps memory management uh compiled optimizations or you know assembly optimizations over time all of those advantages have been erased by other benefits or by just the sheer performance of the higher level tools except perhaps that you liking it better because that's up to you yes exactly and you and so that's why i think handwriting all of your code without having ai generate any of it for you is going to be like having a woodworking hobby like you can do it and if you love coding if you love the craft of it if you love the process of it you can still do that but if you want to do this as a job, it's going to become increasingly difficult for you to be competitive and relevant in that world if you're not using these higher level tools.

1:05:22That's been true with all those other advances, and that's going to be true here too. The promise though here is that this is a bigger jump than any of those have been in certain ways. Not in every way, but in certain ways, it's a bigger jump. And so the real promise of AI is not that it's going to replace all of us. Although I do have concerns about, you know, junior level programmers coming up in the industry right now. I think that could be challenging for them, but we'll see, you know, it'll shake out. We have some questions about that in a future episode. So we will talk about that. I know people have sent in a lot of stuff on that.

1:05:55Yeah, and we'll see how that shakes out. I mean, odds are they'll be just using these tools like everyone else. But anyway, what the value here is, is not that we can replace all of the code that we can and should write with AI. It's that we can replace a lot of it and we can have it do a lot of things for us that don't require perfect behavior all the time, that don't require super high skill levels or super high complexity levels yet. We can have it do a ton of tasks that right now either burden us, things like writing tests. Maybe this will actually get me to write tests. Marco's going to bring out the test.

1:06:33Some people like writing tests, you know. Some people like writing code. I love writing code. Anyway, so there's a lot of stuff that right now is a burden to us that AI will be able to take off of our hands. So that's a huge advance right there. And then secondly from that, what John was saying earlier about how as programmer productivity has increased, we've had the need for more programmers. The reason why that's happened is as making software has gotten cheaper, more people have employed it to solve problems that weren't worth doing when it was really expensive. But when it got dramatically cheaper, some of those problems became worth doing with software.

1:07:11Casey just did it with his N8N thing. It was not worth doing if he had to write all that code himself. But now that he has a tool that can help him, suddenly it becomes worth doing. 100%. And now you have a status board and a show bot. And the reason why is because now things that were never worth making before might be worth making. Many of them will be worth making. So first of all, that's great for basically every business and every hobbyist because we can just make stuff now. And as programmers, I don't know a single programmer who loves this craft who doesn't have a bunch of ideas they're never going to get to.

1:07:51now you can get to a bunch of them. And that can be entire products. It can be little things that just help you. Or it can be like, you know, the kind of side apps that help you do your other stuff. I know our friend underscore David Smith wrote about it recently on Mastodon, how he's made side apps to help his business. Like admin control things or tools. Like internal tools to test out ideas, just mini apps to try out ideas for things. Yeah, or just things to kind of help automate something that like no one else but you is going to need this, but you need it. I have tools like that. I have shell scripts I've written to do things.

1:08:25I have so many little tools like that. And what AI can do is also make a lot of those things that just weren't worth making before, all of a sudden worth making. And then finally, the major thing it can do, in addition to those other two major things, another major thing it can do, is it can keep working when you're not. So you can have it, like what John was saying, go find bugs in my app. You can have it do that every night while you're asleep or doing anything else. You can have it. You can assign it a task and be like, hey, go explore these different options for this problem I'm having or this idea I have.

1:09:04Go explore that. And then you can come back the next morning and see what it found and go through it. There's already people who are doing this with great success playing with things like Claude Code. Let me just give it some grunt work because it doesn't care that you're giving it grunt work. You can give it the same grunt work every single night. When it brings you six solutions in the morning, you can say, all six of those suck. Give me six more. And it's not going to get upset or quit because it's not a person. Think about what this opens up. You can have an assistant doing a bunch of grunt work that costs you almost nothing, and you don't have to worry about, like, are they miserable doing this because they're not a person.

1:09:47that's a huge opportunity for people like developers who are going to be able to harness this think of all the different grunt work you can do like and the biggest challenge to using these tools is not you know installing the software it's not paying for the 20 or 100 bucks a month the biggest challenge for existing professionals in the field like us to use these tools is that we won't think of what to ask them to do that's the hardest part we need to add we need to think of things to try to assign them. Young people won't have this problem. As young people come into the industry, they're going to have grown up with these tools.

1:10:25They won't have the preconceived notions of where the walls are that we have. They'll just try a bunch of stuff and a lot of it will work. That's the challenge for people like us, like us elder programmers, is that we need to jump into this world and start getting ideas for what to have them do. By the way, if you want something that can generate a bunch of ideas for you for free, LLMs are really good for that. So you can literally go to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude and you can say, give me 20 ideas for what I can have Claude code or codex or whatever, what I can have it do in my existing code base or a new code base that I am not thinking of.

1:11:01You can literally have it tell you because you know what AI is really good for? Brainstorming. Because AI is a BS generator and that's what brainstorming is, is generating BS. So you can have it tell you how to use it. And you can then at that point say, eh, these don't sound very good. Give me 50 more. And it will happily give you 50 more. And you can keep doing that because it's not human. That's the kind of enabling thoughts that we have to start training ourselves to have if we're not going to get marginalized over time. And again, it's hard for, one of the posts that we mentioned earlier that kind of hit me hard was the morning of our craft that like yeah it does kind of feel like our craft is kind of dead and i do feel like i i have built up all these skills that are rapidly becoming marginalized in large ways i don't feel that at all i don't know we don't know we're not talking about that post but i i understand what the sentiment where it's coming from but like if you've ever seen anyone use these tools to great effect you need every single one of the skills that i've gained as a professional programmer for 25 years like those were all absolutely because if you think they're not give and give one of these tools to someone who's not a programmer and have them build an app and they can do it but it's going to be bad because they don't know like the skills like the skills of the programmer are not knowing what words to type like you learn as you as you advance in your career and you learn multiple languages you eventually learn that yeah it is valuable to be an expert in a particular language or know the details of any particular api but the real skills of a programmer is not at the level of languages or apis or whatever the real skills of a programmer at much higher level of how to organize programs how to how to address complexity how to solve problems uh and yeah the lms can help a little bit with that but humans are just so far so much farther ahead of them at this point so i i don't i understand what they're saying oh i mourn my crap i want to write all my code myself like i i think i feel like the skills that i'm most proud of are not the skills that involve me typing particular API calls.

1:13:02I wanted to call back very quickly to something that Marco said a minute ago, which I think is important and I don't think I was explicit about. And I would like to plus one what Marco said. That N8N thing that I was talking about, I could have done that. There is no freaking chance I would have wasted the time to do it. Even though it would have made me happy, even though it would have been useful, even though I'm more than capable of achieving it, it would have taken me hours. And I just, I don't think I would ever look at that task and be like, yes, this is worth hours of my time rather than doing actual work or things that are actually productive.

1:13:37You know, put the quotes, scare quotes wherever you want. There's no chance I would have done that. And what I think is unquestionably incredibly powerful in freeing, for lack of a better word, about LLMs and the the ability they have to write code specifically is that these sorts of things, those things like underscores doing, like you had said, and this innate end thing and the tier list thing, you absolutely could have written that tier list, John, as you have said previously, but would you have bothered? Eh, probably not. I mean, evidences was that I didn't, even though I, exactly. Even though I disliked the other site, I just kept using the crappy one that was there just because it didn't take any time.

1:14:12Right. And so I think, and you guys have each said this in your own way, but I just really want to plus one it that, That is what's so powerful to me about these LLMs and the agentic coding or vibe coding, whatever you want to call it, this week. I think that's incredibly powerful and incredibly freeing. And I don't think that's limited to professional software developers. But I think that we are, to your point a moment ago, perhaps uniquely good at leveraging them for these sorts of things. I mean, I didn't we didn't address the entire world of things that LLMs can do, but we are in a position to understand to correctly assess how valuable are these tools for doing programming tests.

1:14:47Like that's why I cited Steve Trouton Smith. Like he's not a dummy. He's a good programmer. The more you know about program, like you feel like you can trust his opinion. This tool was useful for him. I don't know how useful it is for other people in other industries or whatever. I feel like there's lots of places that LMs are super terrible and are not going to be helpful at all. But in this narrow, very narrow instance of using it in a particular way for particular things for our profession, we can say that it does useful things. Yeah. And like and, you know, Casey, you were just saying a minute ago, like, you know, whether it's called, you know, vibe coding or agentic coding.

1:15:18Well, in three months, it's just going to be called coding. Yeah, true. True. This is just what coding is. I don't know if it's going to happen in three months. You're very you're very optimistic. I feel like I feel like I'm the Momento Mori guy. you know that's if i'm remembering correctly the person who would walk behind like the uh the emperor of rome or whatever as he goes on his parade and everyone celebrates him and remind him that he's mortal that he's gonna die he's just behind them whispering that that thing i feel like i'm the same way i guess marco said here's the only problems the only problems we have with ai are like uh figuring out what to ask it and all these other things young people who better at it i didn't say that was the only problem with ai to be clear the problems that we were going to have with it but but i just wanted to remind everybody i mean i i feel like we're still even in the uber phase of this where uber had this amazing service where you could get a car to come to you and they were just running at a loss for years and years until they could drive all the taxi companies out of business but actually the money we were paying for an uber ride was not paying for enough to cover the costs of the company and the drivers you remember all those years right and start coming out of those years like now that we've killed the taxi companies we can start turning up the price the prices we're currently paying for this are not covering the costs of the services we are receiving uh now in theory unlike the uber drivers which are kind of intractable there's humans there's cars and well setting aside self-driving um in theory the cost curve on inference and training will go down or whatever we'll see how that goes so there's it's technology they're trying to drive the cost down yada yada but then of course there's the whole ethical legal and moral problem which is how do these things come into being uh by you know consuming all this content without permission and where do the benefits of that go oh they go directly to open ai and not to all the people from whom they took the content uh you know well how is how are all the lawsuits from the new york times and disney and paramount and like we don't know how that's going to go like it's very easy to get caught up into the amazing thing these tools can do for you and forget about uh is this sustainable is this affordable is this ethical will this create a world in which uh the things required to train these models are no longer being produced and it's like a death spiral of disincentivization where everyone just wants to use the models but there's nothing for the models to train on except for the stuff that the models put out and it just gets worse and worse we don't know that is still unsolved despite all these things but the whole point of this whole big thing we keep going around in circles i know people hear this and they hear marco talking they're like marco thinks there's no problems and everyone should love ai and it's gonna doom us all and they're like it's it's all of this it's all the good things and it's all the bad things it's a complicated issue it's not simple i personally think it's not as simple as no one should ever use AI and it's not good for anything.

1:17:50I don't think it's that simple. And it's also not as simple as this is the future. We're all going to be doing this surrender and you'll be happy. I don't think it's that either. It's somewhere in between those extremes and everyone can decide where they think it is. But I think we should be all be working to try to figure out like, that's why I'm, I'm racking my brain thinking, is it possible like these tools are useful? I want to use them. But is it possible to get a tool like this where, where it doesn't destroy the world of open source software for example like is there a way to like can we actually you know licensing the stack overflow stuff legally probably fine ethically maybe the people who contributed who didn't ever foresaw this and so it's not great but like going forward open source can we change the licenses so that people can decide if they want to allow their open source stuff to be used for training if they did that it would make for a model that I think more people will feel comfortable reusing.

1:18:42Or on the macro side of things is, well, nobody cares about how ethical things are. We all buy shoes made by children in third world countries and nobody thinks about it. And I think some people do think about it. And I don't want to reproduce that in another industry. So it's, let's say, it's a complicated issue. In summary, AI is a land of contrast. Well, and again, like, and a lot of those are very valid concerns and questions. My position is simply that, you know, A, there's huge utility to be had. so we can't just write it off. And B, you're not putting the genie back in the bottle. So one thing that I was concerned about was as I was thinking about using these tools myself, I thought, well, I'm not gonna let it near Overcast code because among other things, Overcast code contains pretty sophisticated audio processing algorithms that I've written that took me a year to develop.

1:19:32And I put a lot of work into all the voice boost and smart speed algorithms and everything to make mine work really well and sound really good and be very sophisticated technically. And I thought, I don't want any of these apps to find that and send it to their servers. And no matter what I say, what if they're going to train on that? And then anybody else can make... They absolutely are. And so here's the thing, though. So I thought of that, and I had that concern. I'm not going to let this near my code. But then I realized, like, it's going to be... You can probably already today go to any of these agents or go to any chatbot and say, generate me some Swift code to do this kind of processing on audio and make it sound really good.

1:20:14And what else should I be looking at? What other algorithms or what other techniques should I be using to achieve these things, to make them sound good? And it will generate it for you. I know this because I have done that with other types of algorithms. I have asked ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to generate me code to do some kind of relatively, I even asked it like, here's the kind of problem I'm trying to solve. What algorithms should I be looking at? And it'll give me a nice overview of six different algorithms to solve this problem, what the trade-offs of each ones are, what the performance is, and then I'll say, do you want me to generate this for you in Swift?

1:20:44I'll say, yeah, sure. And then it generates it for me in Swift, and I think there's no way this is going to work. And then I try, and it works. Already, the value of proprietary custom techniques and tricks that you do is plummeting. I should be really upset about that. And on some level, that is kind of a shame. But also, on another level, this other problem I was trying to solve, I just got the answer and I got to move on. That's incredibly powerful that there's all these different algorithms that like, you know, problems that problems that I'm trying to solve, I could have figured out the algorithm to do it the sophisticated way.

1:21:17It would have taken me a day or more. And I might've gotten the algorithm wrong. And I might have had weird bugs as a result, or my, I might do something in a relatively straightforward, naive approach that might have a really efficient algorithm that I'm not going to ever think of or know about, but the AI knows about it. So the AI code is not only giving me the potential to make faster performing code by giving like more sophisticated algorithms to cover more things with fewer bugs, but also it's allowing me to make things faster because I'm not having to implement all of these tricky lines of code myself.

1:21:52I can actually have it generate the really complex, hairy parts of these kinds of things. And then I can move on and I can work on higher value tasks. And so it's taking over some of those really tricky things. It's taking over some of the low end stuff and some of the like shuffling around data code. It's a huge win for programmers. We will be like the people who stand to win the most from using these from using these tools are, as John was saying, experienced good programmers. We stand to win the most here. It's a huge value creator for us so ideally you know once once you are done mourning and i think that's a process that we're all going through once you're done mourning jump in i'm not mourning i'm mourning but i'm also going to jump in i i because i just simply don't believe the argument in that article like i don't think there's there's really that much to mourn but you know anyway i mean it's time for my momentum or thing you were mentioning like considering whether you should uh allow this thing to look at your overcast code and deciding eventually you should just do so it's nice that you got to make that decision it didn't just take the code without your knowledge or consent which is the situation for every other piece of code that's in that model probably you are correct and also it's irrelevant i think it's entirely relevant uh but when people only hear marco's opinion on the show apparently and everything i say doesn't count but anyway oh yeah john let me assure you that could not be further from the truth have you ever read the email i swear to you if you listen to the feedback from last episode everyone was yelling at me about things marco said we are three different people i have a different position on this stuff but it is a complicated issue like i'm saying there's no one simple answer like if that i'm not saying that i don't discount that person's morning articles that's how a lot of people are really feeling like but i the main point i want to get across with all this with all this back and forth all these things is that it actually is complicated and not simply black and white and every time i see someone extreme in either position it just makes me think that they're not interested and They don't know enough about the topic because it actually is fairly complicated.

1:23:55And, you know, it's something that we're all going to have to grapple with. And this is just in the narrow realm of programming, which is a tiny corner of the world of things that people are using chat GPT for. So, yeah, we've got a challenge ahead of us. Hopefully it's not like nuclear weapons, but, you know, maybe it's like the version of that that does not destroy the entire planet. Now, one final note on the AI stuff. and I know this has been going long and I'm sorry, but you also wanted to call out that AI hardware use and the fact that it's slurping up, like these LLM vendors are slurping up all the hardware in the world, has had some real world implications so far in a lot of different ways.

1:24:33But perhaps most recently, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are delayed because of AI-driven RAM and storage shortages and price increases. From Valve, when we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. but the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean that we must revisit our exact shipping schedule in pricing, especially around steam machine and steam frame. This is part of the reason people hate AI because they're like the thing I wanted, isn't going to get here because AI is stealing all the chips to tell people to have a little Eliza bot tell people about their feelings, which is apparently what the vast majority of the millions and millions of people use AI every day are doing with it.

1:25:13And lots of people think that is both a ill, not a good idea and bad for people and a waste of electricity and time and resources and now i can't get my steam machine so again anti-ai sentiment like i get where it comes from like it's not it's not you know it's not frivolous they're not against ai because they're just mean and someone is paying them to be against ai people there's a lot of things you know not in ai's favor especially since it's like you know huge amounts of vc and all the benefits going to the small number of companies and they're doing things in an unsustainable way and when this bubble pops It's going to destroy all our retirement accounts and all that terrible stuff.

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1:28:05we've known for a while that Ferrari is going to be making an EV. I don't think we knew that the interior was going to be designed by love from, which we didn't, we did know that. And we knew it in one of the dumbest ways, which I think I would comment on the show. Like months ago, someone was doing like some Johnny I've interview and they mentioned it in an offhanded manner. The Johnny I was working on a Ferrari steering wheel. And I think it was like a New Yorker story. I think I remember commenting on the show of like, like the fact that that's in this article what are they talking about because the ferrari steering wheels of the time sucked so i'm like that surely can't be a johnny ive thing but did he just out johnny ive and the fact they're working with ferrari or have they already worked with ferrari and i just forgot about it until this came back i'm like oh this is the thing that guy spoiled like a year and a half ago good job dude so this is the ferrari luce i would assume you got it Okay, good.

1:28:55I'm one for a million. But anyway, this is their first EV. And I guess a couple of months back or something like that, they announced a lot of the tech behind it. They showed the whole chassis with nothing, just the chassis, the motors, the battery, but no other part of the car. So now in the last week, we've seen a lot of the cabin, not a full cabin, mind you, but a lot of the interfaces. They were never showing the full cabin. Why would they do that? Right. But we've seen the interfaces, the steering wheel, the center display. Next month, we're going to see a headlight. Right. Wait, you might be serious.

1:29:30Are you serious? No, I'm not serious. Okay. Because the way they've been rolling this out, I didn't know. You can read the little blurb from The Verge. It summarizes it well. All right. So reading from The Verge, Ferrari released the first interior images of the company's first all-electric supercar called the Ferrari Luce, which is light in Italian. This is the second time the Italian automaker has teased the Luce, which was formerly the Electrica, I hope I got that right, without showing us the actual car or even a silhouette. But the interior images should suffice, given the bold-faced name of the designer, Johnny Ive.

1:29:59Ferrari decided to outsource the work of designing the Luce's interior to Ive and his partner, Mark Newsom, who together run the design shop Love From. Ferrari and Love From have been quietly collaborating for five years, and the Luce is the first time we're seeing the results. The tech underpinnings were revealed last year in Italy. The exterior will debut in May of 2026. Well, there's a timeline for you. We'll eventually see the car, but this is the weirdest car rollout I've ever seen. It's still going to show us the chassis, then pieces of the interior, and then in 2026, we'll show you the car.

1:30:30Right. So I would like to just state right up front, I watched a fascinating video by Jordan Golsan from PRDNDL, which is, you know, park reversed, a neutral drive, low. So anyways, I'd not heard of that publication before, but this dude was really good and did like a 20-minute video walking through all the different pieces, which they did in the – what is it? The Transamerica Tower in San Francisco? Somewhere in San Francisco. Yeah, this was basically like the reason you're seeing this. There's a web page of Ferrari, but also Love From did basically press. Like they invited press to come into this room where they show all the things.

1:31:00It's very much like an Apple press event where everything's set up on little tables and stuff. And you can – and you have to talk to the creators. And it's a very Apple-style press event. Right. So Jordan has a video, which I definitely recommend. Also a blog post if you prefer that. Ferrari's website actually is really, really good. And I really enjoyed looking through that. It had a bunch of photos and whatnot. I'm going to come out right out and say it. I'm so sorry, John. I really like it. I think it looks really good. I don't know why you're apologizing to me. But the second I saw this, I knew exactly what I thought of it.

1:31:37But I'm like, well, hold off. Maybe you just have it. And then I watched all the videos and all the things or whatever. And just my opinion got stronger and stronger. And it's, it's founded in, uh, remember we talked about CarPlay Ultra, whatever it's called. The, I think all, I think it was just CarPlay Ultra. We talked about it a lot and trying to figure out what's the deal with this, where Apple takes over all the screens and your car and you have to collaborate with the car vendor and they have a way to customize it or whatever. I'm like, how is this going to work? And do car vendors want their, their car?

1:32:01Like, how are they going to make it look like Aston Martin or like whatever company and stuff. And the pitch for directly from Apple's mouth, of what is the deal with CarPlay Ultra is, we have this product, and if you use this product, the whole idea is we will make something that is a blend of your brand and Apple's brand. So 50-50, I guess, maybe Apple would think, or 51-49 or whatever, but like that's the pitch. The inside of your car with CarPlay Ultra will be half you and half Apple. It'll be our child together. We'll mix our genetic material, right? this Ferrari interior made by love from is half Ferrari and half love from.

1:32:44And I think that's wrong. I think the Ferrari interior should be a hundred percent Ferrari and that a designer should say, we will find a way to make the most Ferrari interior you have ever seen. But when I look at this, I say, this is not a 100 % Ferrari interior. This is a 50 % love from interior. and a 50 % Ferrari interior. And that's not the approach I think that you should take with this interior. And worse, love from is very different from Ferrari in terms of what are the adjectives that you would use to describe that. Like it's not harmonious. This does not look like a Ferrari interior.

1:33:26This looks like an Apple car interior that Ferrari drove by and splashed a bunch of paint over to make it look kind of, and some, and some logos to make it look like Ferrari. And I find that fairly heartbreaking, but I will say though, the chassis and everything you can see, this is a four seat car. So let's be honest, it's probably just going to be some stupid Ferrari SUV that I won't care about, but yeah, probably, but you know, like it's, I it's, it's heartbreaking to me because there's a lot of beautiful design in this and a lot of beautiful work that is like, you look at it. If you're, if you're just familiar with Johnny Ive, uh, you know, like they have so many Apple designers there, You look at this and you're like, yep, nope, they did.

1:34:03That's the thing. That's what Johnny Ive does. There's rounded rectangles. There's beautifully machined parts. There's aluminum. There's glass. There's clever ideas. There's attention to detail. There's all that stuff. It's too damn bad. It doesn't look like a Ferrari interior. I get that. I really do. And I think part of the reason I don't mind that is because I don't have the unabashed love for Ferrari that you do. Not to say that I dislike Ferraris. I mean, they're - And to be clear, recent Ferrari interiors have been terrible, but they've been terrible in a Ferrari way. Well, I mean, to me, it's kind of like if this were a Lamborghini, which I think trades on the fact that it's weird and loud and obnoxious.

1:34:42No, that's the perfect example I was going to do. Lamborghini. Give me some adjectives to describe a Lamborghini, interior or exterior. Loud, obnoxious, angular. Angry, dangerous. Yep, yep. Evil. Maybe. That's Lamborghini's styling and brand. inside of Lamborghinis look like the inside of a freaking Transformer from the Michael Bay Transformer movies the outside looks like them too right that for you like it or hate it that's the Countach for crying out loud that's the brand can you imagine and the Ferrari is not that exact same thing but like this interior has no danger has no menace has no no sexiness to it no no sensual Italian sexy like it's a Ferrari the inside this looks like inside of an electric Fiat With Ferrari logos on it.

1:35:30I'm sorry. I think the reality is between you and me. I think you're not giving it enough credit, but I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis. It definitely does not have that, what is it, Joie de Vivre? I don't speak French. It's the love child of Love From and Ferrari, but Love From's jeans dominated. It does. But I got to tell you, I really think they did a good job with it. Let's leave aside the fact that it's a Ferrari. If you can divorce yourself of that piece of knowledge, I think it's really well done. So the way this works is there's a screen behind the steering wheel, which they're calling the binnacle.

1:36:05I presume that's a common term. I've not heard it in this context before. I just blame love from for coming up with this term. Oh, sure. Binnacle is not a love from term. It is in the car industry. So the binnacle has three gauges, which are their screen. The gauges are screens, but they might. I don't know if this one does or not, but there's other gauges that have physical real-life hands. The center dial has a physical hand. There you go. Dial thing. Yeah, yeah. And then around the three gauges is a screen, but it's all really well integrated. But the point is there's a mixture, at least some modicum, of physicality to it.

1:36:43And then the steering wheel has the flattened bottom, which is John's favorite thing in the world. There are no stalks. The turn signals are, it's a T steering wheel or a three-spoke wheel. The turn signals are inside the spokes that go laterally. Then below those spokes, there's a couple of control pods, if you will. And then on the center, they have basically an iPad, which I don't love that. With very rounded corners. Yes, very rounded corners. I do love that they have a little bar in front of it that you can use as a wrist rest as you're operating the screen. I don't know how I feel about the fact that you can tilt the screen toward or away from the driver.

1:37:27Like I get the idea here, but I don't know if I like it. But in the corner of the screen is a dial, a rounded dial that is separate from the rest of the screen, inset within the screen, and it has physical hands on it. And by default, it can show, I think it's like a stopwatch and there's a couple of buttons on the outside of the screen, physical buttons on the outside of the screen to like start and lap, you know, hit the start, stop and lap buttons if it's a stopwatch. or it can be a clock. And because what's behind these physical hands is another screen. The HVAC controls are in the center screen, but there are a fair amount of physical controls.

1:38:02The center consoles where the gear shift is, which is very interestingly done. And I think the windows might be there or something like that. That's where you insert the key if you so choose. I really think, leaving aside the fact that I don't really think you're wrong, John, that this doesn't exactly scream Ferrari to me. I do think this is really well thought out and looks really, really cool. Yeah, well, I mean, it looks like, I mean, I don't care about Ferrari the way John does, but this looks very much like a designer who idolized Dieter Rams made a car interior. Yeah, very much so. You know, Dieter Rams is a really famous designer for good reason.

1:38:42He's an amazing designer. All those classic mid-century Braun products, that's that level of design. It's a really great style. It has evolved over time to represent. And Johnny Ive, you know, Johnny Ive is a very good designer. But you can see his influences. Like with the Apple Watch, he borrowed a lot from his Patek Philippe Nautilus. With many Apple products, he borrows a lot from Braun and from Dieter Rams. Because it is a really good style. This looks like that. if the logo on the steering wheel was not the Ferrari logo. Just put an Apple logo there. It could be, well, there's too many buttons for it to be Apple.

1:39:24But it could be any other car brand. Like, you know, maybe some modern brand nobody has that much of an opinion about, like Polestar. Like, that could be a Polestar logo, and everybody would be like, okay. No matter what logo you put there, I would have been able to tell you, do you think people who made this are, you know, like Apple's design? And we're like, yeah, these people obviously love everything Apple is doing. would it surprise you to learn that it was actually apple people no it would not surprise well but i mean honestly i i think the more apple like design is like what tesla and rivian do where they try to minimize physical controls and have everything on a small number of screens i don't i don't think so i think a photograph of this interior makes me screams apple to me more than any tesla interior i mean you can certainly see the resemblance but you can also see like okay there's a lot of physical controls they're done they look beautiful but they also the the energy the style the like the like that kind of like you know sex appeal of a high-end sports car that's not this this is nice german design done well by johnny i've like that's that's what that looks like it does not look like italian sports car so i i agree john like i even though i don't care about ferrari lamborghini and even though there are so many references to old ferraris like that's the thing about this like it's like how can you say it doesn't look like a ferrari like that steering wheel is directly ripped out of an old ferrari and those air vents and this and that and like it's uh ferrari's current styling forget about the interiors ferrari's current styling trend is a similar example in that they reference their old stuff like crazy and it's like how can you say this doesn't look like a ferrari let me show you all the elements that reference old classic ferraris it's like yeah but like the whole thing cohesively has to say to me ferrari and i think the exterior is still kind of say ferrari even though i think they're ugly they're going through an ugly phase it's difficult for all of us um but but they they don't look the outside of their cars would never be mistaken for a fiat let's put it that way like you can't just take out the ferrari badge on the outside of like the new testarosa and put on uh a you know like a badge from bmw like no one would believe it like it's it's clearly it's i'm not sure if people identify as ferrari but there's no way in hell they think it was a volkswagen or something like it's it's something whereas this interior is just it's a johnny i've special like and getting to the specifics of this by the way like setting aside oh you're upset doesn't look like ferrari or whatever just in the specifics there's a couple of areas where they did well and where areas where they didn't casey already mentioned uh the physical controls ferrari itself did capacitive controls on its steering wheels for way too long everybody hated it it takes them so long to change it they've like this is this year we're getting rid of physical controls in the steering wheel and they they got rid of the physical start button but they left other capacitive controls it's like no ferrari please just everything physical so finally in 2026 they'll roll out a car which reverts to their previous thing which is like let's give me actual buttons on the steering wheel so that's good i applaud them for that um the clever thing with the dials and the screens lots of other people have done similar things this is obviously the much more expensive much nicer looking johnny eye version of that idea but it's not a bad idea i don't you know i don't fault them for that at all it's interesting and it's fun um casey you talked about the ipad in the middle and i'm with you that i think this shows a decided lack of imagination like oh everything because johnny i was just so obsessed with freaking rounded rectangles and simplicity but like slapping an ipad on the dashboard is surrendering it's like no i'm not surrendering look at all the physical controls look at the handle look at the wrist rest it's like okay but you put an ipad on the dashboard and you now you like it's not like he's not the first person to put physical controls on the bottom of an ipad like ford has done it for crying out loud like lots of manufacturers said oh it's an ipad but there's a physical dial on it it's an ipad but there's physical buttons along the bottom is that is that the peak is that you know that's the best iod we have come up with i know it's a difficult problem but like the you know the ergonomics of a cockpit i i refuse to believe that an ipad with some physical buttons on it that you can tilt is the correct solution to that problem like i do feel like the cockpit like look you're stationary you're in a seat you're not going anywhere it should be possible to make a layout of controls that accommodates a lot of people that you can get at too easily that is not as weird as this and the tilting thing that you mentioned casey one of the problems with tilting is now it becomes slightly if you unless you never move it unless it never moves on its own which i would wonder about now you have slightly more difficult time no look reaching for like the fan up speed or whatever because you have to know what position you last tilted the thing in yeah and those tilt things if the if the johnny ive uh imac uh monitor arm thing uh is any indication they might get loose over time so it's very difficult to pull it off and then go down to the center console their idea for the center console you'll never guess let's make it out of a bunch of rounded rectangles oh my god it's it's rounded like the the binnacle that being a rounded rectangle is probably the biggest sin because it's like for crying out loud like a ferrari would never have a rectilinear rounded rectangle poking up like it does not look sleek or cool or aggressive you're selling me anyway you're selling me on this especially since they don't do anything with those corners they're just there because so it can be a rounded rectangle like make like even bmw which does a bunch of rectangles across his dashboard at least they have sharp corners and look germanic this this is not log italian but then the center console a bunch of rounded rectangles stacked on top of each other and johnny ive's best idea for the center console thing is he doesn't like it when there's a big door that you have to open up so i'm gonna make two other doors guess what johnny a million people have tackled this problem before you can have them open from the side entirely in both directions well there's lots of different ways to do this but the way he chose was that you can open half of each of the round sides of the rounded rectangle but then that like the two when both sides are open there's just this spine down the middle which makes it so you have to like shove your hand down it's like you can never get it fully open there's always it's always the middle of it is always blocked by that thing the shifter arrangements like oh we made it of glass and it's a little thing i feel like ferrari already had a kind of a good idea with its gated shifter like play on the gated shifter but that doesn't really matter that much i guess but like yeah the center console certainly doesn't look like a Ferrari and ergonomically it's nothing special the cup holders poking out there all the time yeah they're beautiful aluminum cup holders but like they're always in your face there's a reason a lot of cars have them tuck away especially sports cars I just like how much space you get for how much space it takes up the way the rear controls look I'm just not impressed from a car design perspective the only thing that's impressive about it is that it it looks like a Johnny beautiful apple type interior and everything is extremely expensive made of beautiful materials I'm sure feels great to you like all that I but this is going to be like a you know three hundred thousand dollar car or something so i'm sure keep going but yeah well maybe 500 but anyway i'm sure i'm sure like yeah the materials better feel good and it's fun to do this as an exercise and the people who made it should be proud of the beautiful thing that they've made but i don't even think it's that great of a car interior in terms of ergonomics i feel like the people who design like the interior of like the sienna or the honda odyssey like those are the best designers in the industry because they find a way to have like insane amounts of storage space and adjustability and cubbies for everything and things to make kids happy in the back seats and everything that is a harder design problem better solved than this granted that's just a bunch of cheap plastics and things that are going to be durable to spills and stuff and it doesn't look as beautiful as this but i feel like being a designer is not just like making something that satisfies the itch that you have in your brain which is essentially when you're johnny out of this stage in his career can afford to do that so good for him but like there's more to design than making a an item that you go to sleep with a smile on your face knowing that you made and it exists in the world it has to solve problems for users and i don't think this is a bad interior but i don't think it solves problems for users in a better way like it's it's not the best in every area than any other control i can think of any other interior i can think of other cars that are better of it in lots of areas setting aside the fashion setting aside the ferrariness just judging it as an ergonomic car interior it does a lot of things right but it does a lot of things in a very uninteresting way and one of the things i thought about this is if you're if you're interested in this type of thing like i love how everything is beautiful and machined and it's like little jewels and stuff like that i have another multi-million dollar car you might be interested in i'll put a link in the show notes to gordon murray talking about uh his selection of knobs and switch gear for his uh ridiculously expensive cars that he makes uh plus some more videos you can see on his channel about i will have timestamp linked to him talking about his knobs and his shift lever and stuff it's totally up johnny ives alley it's like oh we spent this amount of money on this thing because it just had to be just right and we we kept going back and forth until the switches felt just so or whatever if you have a multi-billion dollar car by all means do that but here's the thing about gordon murray's car go look at the videos on the channel and the tours of it it looks like a gordon murray automotive car it looks like there's no mistaking it for any other brand it has him and And his design ethos is through the entire thing.

1:48:18And compare the interior of that car to the interior of this car. Like one of them screams Gordon Murray Automotive. And maybe you don't know what that brand is. But like it is very cohesive. And this one, it seems, I mean, it's kind of interesting that they showed us the interior not inside a car because it really does look like an interior floating around in space waiting to be put into the Apple car or something. You're not wrong. But it isn't even really Apple. like again like yeah i think dietro rams obviously huge influence i think also one thing i didn't think of earlier was leica cameras like this looks a lot like leica style although i will say with these the the influences which you're totally right about like everyone who works there like love like the cameras loves dietro rams but here's the thing at this point in time and in all their careers johnny ive mark newson all those people from apple their footprint on history in terms of design is bigger than all the all of their influences which is very often the case those influences are important to them but the the imprint they have put on the world with like the ipod the imac the iphone ios like that footprint in terms of design influence is bigger than all of their past influences so at this point yes we see all their influences but at this point they are not referencing themselves but they are essentially setting a template for all the designers in the future who are going to be like we're going to look at them and say oh that reminds me of johnny ive's design it's like well you know johnny ive was really inspired by dida rams and like a camera it's like who like they it's it's almost absurd to even talk about their influence at this point because their particular personal tastes and little brain itches are the only things that matter because they have so much money and power it boggles my mind that ferrari even let them do this to their cars because they said we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna contract the best designers in the world and then it's almost like they were intimidated and didn't feel like they could push back and say you're gonna put a rounded rectangle behind this steering wheel and then an ipad on the dashboard and it looks like a fiat like shh it's johnny i've we paid him how many billions of dollars for this look at the books he gave us he gave us a stack of books they're beautifully bound we have to do what he says i'm like oh for our you don't yeah i will say though one of the things that i thought was really interesting which i don't recall having seen before is the rear control panel.

1:50:36So on the back of the center console, there's a screen that kind of mimics the control panel, which they call the iPad. Or, sorry, the iPad that they control. Yeah, exactly. The control panel. But it has on there, like, your current speed, how much power the car is generating, a graph of, like, recent power and recent speed, which I thought was kind of neat. You can see that because they're using Celsius, there's decimals, like animals. But anyways, no, this does look incredible but you've convinced me that this should not be in a ferrari and i take back everything i've said the other thing by the way the toggle switches which is a great idea but they didn't go full physical because they're basically like it's like those dials that turn forever you know as opposed to a dial that has stops on it these are toggle switches where you can press up and press down but essentially like a d-pad where you're going up up down down there's no there's no physical persistence of the switches which is not great because for example every time i do this now i think of this because of all the rants i've had in this program when i'm driving around the winter a couple of my cars have seat heaters in them and i can turn the seat heaters on i turn them on high low or off for me and the passenger and i can also tell whether they're currently high low or off for me and the passenger without looking at them at all because they are physical stateful switches that that rock i don't have to i know where they are they never move and i can tell what position they're in by feeling them through my winter gloves feeling what position they're already in without ever putting my eyes anywhere you cannot do that with any of these controls so that's one thing because they're just you know d-pad type things and the second thing is they're machined aluminum things poking out of the dashboard of a car uh i know they have the little things to present you prevent you from accidentally hitting them like the little little loops of metal kind of like roll bars to prevent someone's knee from accidentally hitting the like the seat temperature up thing or whatever in the back seats and stuff like that uh but you could still accidentally hit them with your knee first of all there's kind of a reason why they don't have those toggle which and second of all god forbid in any kind of accident or something now you have these little metal baggers in the dashboard now you should be belted in airbags and yada yada and a little crash tested and i understand but like there's kind of a reason why car interiors aren't festooned with stiff pieces of metal sticking out of the dashboard johnny and maybe think more about that uh before you design your next car interior like i'm not saying they're a danger but it is it it's a thing that you now have to deal with that you wouldn't have to deal with if they were flat honestly i still think this looks really nice it just doesn't look like a ferrari oh it's a nice car like it's better be for the amount of money they're gonna charge for i would this was nicer than most in tears i've ever seen just it's not again like it's not it doesn't scream ferrari to me but it does look really nice yeah no it's they didn't do a bad job but i just i just kind of disappointed that the world's best designers didn't have any better ideas about it i think the center console they did do a bad job with and i think the ipad in the middle it's a push like it's it's not bad it's not the worst of those scenes but like they they they grab some new problems themselves with the tilting which kind of defeats a bunch of purposes and they didn't come up with anything new oh and the air vents let's talk about the air vents i believe other designers have done the same thing which since the air vents are circular and the uh they have a big circle inside them that tilts and so if you want to close them off the circle goes flat and so no air can get through if you want them totally open the certain circle goes like so that it's just uh you know so it's edge on to you so it blocks the least amount of air that's not a great design for a vent because your only way to reduce the amount of air also involves changing the direction of the air because of the way the vent works you know it's on an angle there's a reason a lot of them have those little louvers because then changing how much air goes through has less influence on the direction but johnny just really wanted it to be a circle inside a tube and so that's what we got and i'm sure they're they're beautiful aluminum pieces multi-part construction they show them screwing them together it's like screwing the like a precision machine fine threads with aluminum glide like i'm sure it's all beautiful but i don't think those air vents are good air vents they don't they're they're better than they're better than having to adjust them on the touchscreen i would give him that like it's not a bad interior i'm just disappointed that he didn't have any better ideas or seemed not to understand what the the scope of the things that you can do in the auto industry in this area and things that people have tried before but maybe he doesn't care maybe it's just like i want them to look like this and i'm sacrificing the flexibility of air adjustments so they look nice yeah i gotta say those air vents really blow john wow oh one thing that one thing they think they're the first people to do and i give them some credit for the key thing ferrari's had these beautiful keys for a long time that they give you a little place to stick in the dashboard lots of cars do that because they want you to put their beautiful key somewhere in the dashboard although sometimes their key is not beautiful ferrari's usually look nice uh this time they did a thing where it's like oh we got the ferrari logo on a key like we have for the past many years and it goes in a little spot on the dashboard but now it sinks into the dashboard and when it sinks into the dashboard the yellow from the ferrari logo leaves the key and enters our little solid glass uh shifty knob thingy how does the yellow leave the key is the is there a screen on the key there is but it's e-ink so it's not draining like it's yellow all the time wow it's yeah it's color e-ink it's yellow all the time because it's yellow e-ink but it takes zero power when it's just yellow all the time and only when you put it into what i assume is a little inductive charging thing in your car it sucks the yellow like that's a total johnny ive ism and it's a cute little thing and i hope the yellow is as bright as it seems in pictures but uh i think that's clever um for you know just like fanciness and i think that you know i don't know if they'll stick with that long term and how long this ink will hold up i think the the uh lacquer painted ferrari keys look nicer than the ink one but they can't make the color to drain out of them.

1:56:09Although I don't know why you'd want the color to drain out of it, but anyway, that's what it does. It blends into your dashboard when it sinks in and puts the color into the tiny shifter knob. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Squarespace, and DeleteMe. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us in atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every week, we have more of us talking. So you're here for a couple hours to hear us talking. You can hear us even more for like 20-ish more minutes every week with an extra topic.

1:56:42This week's topic is going to be on China's ban on electric car door handles, which sounds right up our alley. So we're going to be talking about that. And over time, you can join a list in 8200.fm. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

1:57:34So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. I got a confession to make. I am getting the itch. I bought my Volkswagen Golf R and I took it home on the 30th of August, 2018. Michaela was a wee infant. It has been nearly seven and a half years. I'm starting to get the itch. I love my car. There's nothing wrong with it. I really enjoy driving it. I still love to drive a six speed. I love having three pedals. I have literally never owned a car despite what john thinks that is exclusively mine that has two pedals disclaimers uh i love having a three-pedal car i love my golf r i really really do enjoy it it has barely over 30 000 miles on it in seven and a half years there is no reason to get rid of this car it's been paid off for a long time there's no reason to get rid of this car Thank you.

1:58:54but i'm getting itch and to continue the neutral theme for the bottom half of the show i thought i would do almost a little mini ATP member special actually i didn't even think about it's a mini diamond diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh diamond uh uh diamond uh uh diamond uh diamond uh uh is uh idea uh i could do that okay please do do that i can name that tune in five notes well you already went through the there's nothing wrong with your car or whatever but you're getting the itch and you should probably see a doctor about that but like wow i like i understand i under like you're you look you you're interested you like exciting cars and like you're literally getting the seven-year itch yes i that thought did cross my mind yes the excitement you're not as excited about your car as you used to be and you've always wanted to try an electric car and you got a big dumb suv that is not yours um that that is that does its job and yours is supposed to be the fun little car or whatever and you're looking at the tycan well here's the thing the used ones that you can get i i do agree that because they have depreciated so much you can get a pretty startlingly good deal like i again i think we mention this every time this comes up i wish i had the real number at hand but like what is the average selling price of new cars in the united states of america and it's some shocking number like 50 grand or something i think it's even more than that 48 40 i don't know it's it's somewhere around there someone can look it up it's like in in the neighborhood of 50 grand which is shocking to me because that's close to twice as much as i ever paid for a new car in my entire life but whatever that's just the average average can be misleading you know whatever but you can get a porsche tycan for around that amount of money which is insane because that actual car new costs like three times that much because the electric cars depreciate a lot or whatever but here's the thing those ones that you're getting for 50 grand they're not the good ones okay so what what makes you say i'm not saying you're wrong what makes you say so remember i think i mentioned this on the show when they came out with like the new generation of this car they made it just so much better like because it was like their second it looks the same like on the outside like oh they just changed the exterior or whatever they changed the inside they changed the electrics they changed the the motors the battery they changed everything about it to just be like like their first you know this is their porsche's first ev and they did a pretty good job it was a pretty good car but they learned a lot between their first and second attempt at this and the second one is is just it's kind of like when like i don't know you had a really good intel mac and the m1 comes out and you're like yeah i know it's better but they're both max right it's like yeah they are both max but like if you had to pick one to get like basically my advice would be get the itch after the second generation

2:01:38because that's the car to get for 50 grand not the current one now i know i was going to try to talk you out of it but like for my because i'm such a you know you know with me and my buying computers like well or tvs or is this the one to buy well it's a good tv but like the next one's going to be whatever but the thing is the next one is out like you're in the used market it's not like it's a mystery the second gen one i i think i feel like did they go to 800 volt with the second gen i forget if they did that but they think like it might as well have done the equivalent have gone to 800 from 400 volt to 800 volt architecture which is a big deal in evs but like it's just better in every conceivable way uh and so it's like it's a shame like you know that exists it's there and yeah it's it's out of your price range now or whatever but like what one those are used to get those for 50 gram when the third one comes out because that one is like it's over the m1 threshold it's like went from intel to m1 and yeah the m2 is better but just wait until you get the m1 and then just stick with that for years you'll be fine um and having said all that though like it's not the worst choice in the world for even the first gen one because let's you know it's you'd be your first ev yes there is a better one that exists but it's a really nice car right that's the thing and i like i don't know like i i i sure as hell wouldn't do it for for sure even if i even if someone forced me and said you have to buy uh an ev for fifty thousand dollars you can't you're never going to get a current model one for that so by the previous gen like i would still be upset about it because i would be like oh it's just it's just such a shame but like if that car appeals to you and if you tried it and i don't know if you're going to talk about any of your possible experiences with trying like if if you like it and it seems nice like the whole point of this is this is you doing your hobby it was one of the places where you spend your money to have fun even though it's not the best possible car that could be even though there's a better version of this car even though you better serve to wait yada yada yada like you bought a you bought a freaking oil leaking bmw with the engine that exploded and you got some enjoyment out of that for a while too so who am i to say how you should waste your money on a big car so it's not i'm gonna say it's not the worst no i like the car i like the first gen i like the second gen it's not a bad car there's a lot to recommend it i think the interior is actually better than the portion than the luce interior in lots of ways which uh but and worse than others as well but still like it's it's pretty good but i i would wait and that's setting aside which i'm not even going to address because it leaves entirely up to you is this the time in your life you need another fifty thousand dollar expense or should you put that in your kid's college fund i'm setting that aside we're not worrying about that everyone has their hobbies i buy twelve thousand dollar computers that i don't use the half of the power in case he likes to buy fancy cars let's not all judge each other about what we're doing well hold Hold on.

2:04:15Let's be honest. The fanciest car I ever had, by most definitions, was the exploding BMW, which I'd bought used. And that was$40 ,000. A steal for an engine that eventually exploded. Right. The Golf R, I mean, that's stickered for like$65 ,000 when it was new or something like that. I thought you paid like$40 ,000 for that. That's what I just said. I paid$40 ,000, but it's stickered for$65 ,000. The Golf R, I also paid$40 ,000, which was a good deal for the car at the time. and that was brand new. I mean, these are not, I don't know, $100 ,000 plus$1 ,000 M5s. It was under$100.

2:04:53Anyway, the point is, yes, this is far fancier than any of the things that you've driven on a day-to-day basis. I mean, it's a similar price to your Volvo, though. It's not like it's not, right? Oh, that's adorable, John. Oh, that wasn't that? Oh, dude, the Volvo was more than that? Oh, my God. The Volvo sticker, this is why we leased it. The Volvo sticker was like$85 or something. Don't tell me that. I'm just lowering my opinion of this car. We could almost get an M5 in 2013 for that. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so yeah, I've been building up the Taycan in my mind for the last like six months, thinking this is the thing that I think I want.

2:05:24Because I think, even though I don't want to give up the third pedal, I think I want an electric car. That would give Aeron the ability to drive it, because whether or not she is actually capable of driving a stick, she doesn't think she is, which means effectively she's not. It would be convenient for her to be able to drive it. it is uncomfortably bigger than my car. And I say that only because I worry that I don't have the space in the garage to fit it, like physically fit it in. Yeah. I was going to say, it's a long car. It's a very, it's very, it's very wide. It's longer and wider than your golf.

2:05:57That's for sure. No, that's the problem. The length I have, the length I have, but the width is the problem because as it is right now, you use it, Casey, right? That's what they tell me. The width is the problem because I already have to squeeze the gulf into the garage. Oh, forget it then. Do you have a pole in the middle of it or something? No. So if you walk out of the house, the house is like two to three feet higher up than the floor of the garage because of the crawl space and whatnot. And so there's a staircase, there's a landing. It's not a big landing, but there's a landing and then a short staircase that heads to the front of the garage.

2:06:35So it doesn't come, I'm struggling to verbalize this. If you walk out of the people door and if you were to walk straight out, you'd be walking across the two parking spots of the garage, right? So you walk out of the people door and you swing 90 degrees and there's a short staircase. So it's not like the staircase is going straight out into the middle of the garage. But there's enough there in Aaron's car, as you've noted, is big enough that the two combined make it a little bit tight from a width perspective. I think I could probably do it, but it'd be uncomfortable. But putting that aside for a second.

2:07:07I've shown you pictures of my car in my garage, right? Oh, yes. It's awful. Yes, it's absolutely awful. I think you'd still be like, put it this way. Could you open the driver's side door and get out of it with both cars parked in the garage? I think that's your only test. Don't worry about the passenger side. Just assume no one will be able to get out of that side of the car. Yeah, no, I mean, I think I could do it. It's just it would be a little bit of a tight squeeze. So I've built up the Taycan in my mind for a long time. Because ultimately what I want is an electric car that's fun and that isn't Tesla.

2:07:37And so, and has car play. And that really doesn't leave a lot of options. Like I don't particularly want an SUV. And even if I did, the Rivians are no car play. There's the Hyundai and the Kia, the, what is it? The Ioniq 5N, which is the hot rod version, the Kia EV6 GT. And there's the sedan version of that. It looks like a sedan. Oh, I hate the sedan. I agree with you. Well, I mean, that exists. You're right. It's probably a lower center of gravity than the Bionic 5. Yeah, I mean, and then there's the Mach-E, which there's nothing really wrong with that. It's all just the small SUVs, which are not.

2:08:15Well, right. And that's the thing is I don't really want something that tall. I have nothing against it. It's just not what I want. And so I'm at a loss of what I could get other than a Taycan. I could get the Audi e-tron GT, which is effectively the same car. Yeah, it's effectively the same car. The only other idea I've come up with, and I would like to come back to the Taycan in a minute, But the only other idea I've come up with that a dear friend of mine suggested is, so help me, what about the BMW i4? The sedan. And I floated a trial balloon with Erin on this one, and she gave me a look of death that I have not seen in a long time.

2:08:55Oh, just because of the letters BMW? Because of the letters BMW. Did you tell her it does not have an internal combustion engine? No, I said. No, I said. I mean, also, like, in the List family, multiple brands have had engines explode. That's true. Yeah, but as you think of this one, no engine. Yeah. Just motors. Yeah. Basically sealed motors. I don't know what to do about that. Well, so the i4 is just so much more practical and just so much. Yes. It's like, but it's not as exciting as the Porsche. No. It has better interior space. It is a more practical car. There's so much going for it. I think you could find Taycan's cheaper, though, because i4 is kind of new and the used ones hold their value better.

2:09:31Well, the problem, though, is that the i4, there's two models. What was it? The M40, I think, and then M50. Yeah, and there's also rear-wheel drive versus all-wheel drive as well. Right. And, of course, because of me, I would want the M50, which most of those sticker new. Why? No. Yes. Oh, absolutely, yes. Oh, for God's sake. That's. Why would I not? I mean, come on. I mean, of course you'd want it, but, like, have you driven either one? Like, the base model is fast. so here's the thing it's probably significantly faster than your than your golf i mean it's just it's just not going to feel as sporty as the porsche it's not going to be as sporty it's not and it's not gonna this is it's a it's a four-door sedan yeah but it's also it's a lot smaller well especially width wise yeah which i think will dramatically improve how sporty it feels like you're gonna if you go from a golf to a tycon you're gonna feel like you're driving a boat it's a lot bigger it's a lot longer and wider it's a significant it's a speedboat though the i4 yes the i4 is i would assume probably longer than your car but it's not that much bigger of a vehicle overall i bet it's longer and wider but like it is wider but only just like put it this way do you ever take your kids in the golf uh i used to semi-frequently and then once aaron got the plug-in hybrid she has said to me basically every time we head for the garage why would we take your car and burn gas yeah well that that will continue to be the case with the porsche because those back seats are like your golf's back seats it's such a huge car it's got four seats but they're your golf might have bigger back seats yeah and and also the i4 has like that sloped back roof line that is it the the back seat headroom is not great in the i4 but it's fine for kids and there's way more room in the back of the i4 than than the Porsche yeah and and that's like i really think you should probably go test drive both and see how they both feel have you driven either one I have driven one of them.

2:11:26Oh. So, Monday, I went on a little adventure. And there's an Audi dealer here in town that has a Taycan. They use Taycan on the lot. This particular example, I don't love the fact that it has gold wheels. Oh, my God. Please let it be white. Please let it be white. No, it's not. It's black. And it has gold wheels, which I really, really, really didn't care for. Better than black wheels, but only marginally. That's a look. I think I would agree with that. I hate black wheels so much. I cannot wait for this trend to be over. Please. how many more years i do too this is definitely this is a look this is not a casey look wait what color was it i missed it it's black with gold wheels it's it's like this is like a my cousin vinny look i put a link in slack i don't think i'm gonna put it in the show notes because i'd rather not blow up my spot but uh so i took it for a drive while john is looking at this i took it for a drive i took it for a drive with with a salesperson in the car i know the area in which the dealer is, but I don't know of good driving roads around the dealer.

2:12:23So I said to the saleswoman, you know, just tell me where to go and, and, you know, what do you suggest? And I took like a 10 or 15 minute test drive and I was so excited to give this a shot because like I've said, I really think this is my next car at some point. I finished the test drive and my initial reaction is I hate this car. Why? There were two main reasons. Number one, because of the way the roofline is and the way it slopes in the back, the rear visibility is like a letter slot. It's like a strip. The way people describe Lamborghinis, it's not literally that bad, but it was awful. I don't know.

2:13:07Maybe this makes me a weirdo. I don't know, but I am constantly checking my rearview mirror when I drive because I like to know what's around me. Yes, I'm aware that there are side mirrors as well. But I've got 25, 30 years of driving experience saying that I'm always looking at the rear view mirror and seeing like a little slit out the back. Don't love it. Welcome to sporty cars. I know. I know. I could probably get over that. I think I could. But what I couldn't get over at the time, and I will come back to this, but what I couldn't get over at the time was the transmission. Because this does, folks, have a two-speed transmission.

2:13:42I got in the car. I drove it in whatever mode it was in. I was just trying to get a feel for what does this car feel like. And I believe I was in normal mode because why wouldn't I be? And I can tell you for sure I was not in like Sport or Sport Plus or anything like that. Having looked into this in concert with my dear friend Brian after the fact, it appears to me that generally speaking, the car will in normal mode will only ever really stay in the higher gear and second gear until you call for a whole bunch of power in which case it will downshift and off you go and let me tell you when you ask for a whole bunch of power holy god you get a whole bunch of power and this is true of all electric cars but holy god this thing hauls but what i didn't love was that the transmission felt incredibly lethargic it felt like all right i want the power and in every electric car of overdriven except this one when i say i want the power before i finish the word power i'm already doing illegal amounts of speed with this i say i want the power okay there it comes you know it's almost like a turbocharger because what drive mode were you in do you know i believe i was in normal or standard yeah a lot of that especially in evs a lot of that they tie directly to since they can change everything electronically like the the throttle response and everything it's all the figurey, electronic, when you switch into sporty mode, it might have been a little better.

2:15:07So, that's the thing, and that's what I wanted to come back to, is I think, I think, in Sport Plus, or whatever it is, I might have the terminology wrong, in Sport Plus, I think it will launch in first gear and stay in first gear for a while. And, you know, the hell with, not longevity, with range, that's what I was looking for, the hell with range, we're just going to drive as sporty as possible. And so, it will launch in first gear, eventually shift to second gear, etc., etc. And I did try that very, very briefly at the very end of the test drive but at that point we were almost back at the dealer so it basically doesn't count i hated the transmission and i hated the rear visibility everything else about it i really liked but those are okay so here i i just found a link here's a car 11 miles from you this is a bmw i4 also used similar mileage for 21 000 less Yes, I think you should go test drive one.

2:15:57And I think that is what I should do as well. Now, selling Aaron on this will be challenging, but... The$21 ,000 less will probably make that a little bit easier. The backseat doesn't have an engine and it has a bigger backseat and it's more practical. And the rear visibility will probably still not be as good as your Golf, but it'll be better. And it's not like Porsche is super easy to own long term and inexpensive to service. Oh, yeah, no. So the repair wheels for the Porsche and the regular service will be worse than BMW. No contest. Oh, by far. Sure, but what should, in theory, in theory, what should go wrong?

2:16:31Oh, no, just let's say your brake pads wear out, which is a thing that's known to happen to brake pads. I mean, a lot less so with electric cars, but fair. But still, they don't last forever. Why don't you price that out for your Porsche? Fair. What would that be like? How about you need a new battery for your Porsche? How much could a battery cost? what do you think casey oh i'm sure that's like 50 grand right without without labor everything if you look at a porsche sideways it's thousands of dollars leave your wallet it's worse than being able to be able to use bad porsche is worse porsche stuff is better than me and i will say also just for whatever it's worth and i know i said this before when i like when i first got my ix um and and i look i have had the itch to replace the ix ever since i saw the i4 you just got the ix i know well i'm you just got it i'm halfway through its lease i'm a year and a half okay all right and and the guy around the corner got an i4 and i see it every day and it's like god that's a much sexier car yes it is and and i've been envious of the stupid i4 ever and i literally see it every day because it's right around the corner from my house it's always parked in his driveway and every time like oh and they made it in orange they don't currently but they did so I could get a used one in orange.

2:17:44I'm like, oh, why didn't I do that? One of these days, you're going to see me in an orange i4. But anyway, I don't have infinite patience or willpower. I do have to keep replacing HVAC units, but we'll see. Anyway, but one thing I said about the iX when I got it, and which I stand by, is now having the iX for a year and a half and having had TIFF's i3 now for, what, five years? Something like that? Six years? We've had that for a while now. bmw's electric powertrain is incredibly mature and low drama like and compared to rivian and tesla and any other car any other evs i've heard of people's experiences like i've had experiences with owning rivian and tesla and then the ones that i've heard from you know i've heard people who have hyundai ionics and stuff like that they all have various like drama or immaturity or things that are like a little bit finicky about them they're all way simpler than gas engines but just little things like you know like when when the when the battery is full do you still get regen braking um that like with with tesla you don't with rivian i think they managed a little bit better but i still think there was a difference um how how does it you know how does it perform in bad weather how does it lose charge over time if it's sitting in a parking lot for a while unplugged like if it's at the ferry lot does it lose charge um over you know a week or two BMW's powertrain for BMW's EVs is rock solid and low drama.

2:19:11I am so impressed with it. It always performs exactly the same. There is zero phantom loss on the battery when you're parked. It is just reliable. It is so good that long term, I've never heard anything about how Porsche's is. but long term if you want like good reliable ev powertrain and like better odds of low service needs i think bmw will give you that before porsche will probably i mean they're both they're both very expensive cars just to be clear i think the porsche is better made with better components and performs better but it also costs twice as much to do anything i also i'm not sure i could say that like i mean yeah no i mean maybe not the first gen because it was their first but the second they're they're really good bmws are fine and they're good but like i mean maybe just from watching car rebuilding channels to see what's actually inside them part of the reason staring at a porsche and doing anything to it costs so much money is every single component is just over over engineered well engineered i don't know whereas bmw there's some cost savings happening inside there uh not they don't pass those on to you but they're happening like anyway i i agree the bmw's drivetrains are really good porsches maybe not in the first gen tycan but in the second gen one i mean they're they're aimed for something different the problem with the bm current bmw is people have complaints about that marco obviously doesn't care about is that bmw is supposed to be the ultimate driving machine and they when people think of that they think of like the current gen porsche tycan was like oh this is a driver's car or whatever whereas bmw is merely a really really good ev sedan which is nothing to sneeze at but for the people who really love like the e46 m3 they're like oh that that magic has gone out of bmw and it's nowhere to be found except for maybe in porsches go watch reviews of the i4 people are a big fan of it i've never driven one yet but because i i know as soon as i drive one i know i'm gonna have to buy one so i'm trying not to drive one no it's a good car like it's it's it's it's an especially good ev like like it it does because that's the tricky bit of like trying to figure out how do you make an ev sporty we'll see what porsche does in this area but everyone has who has tried has had difficulty even porsche has had some difficulty getting that formula because evs are heavy sports cars aren't supposed to be heavy how do you make it handle well getting a fast and straight line is not the problem it's just like how does it feel to go does it feel like your golf going around a mountain road like none of these evs will because they weigh a bazillion pounds they're never going to feel like your golf they're never going to be the size of your golf i don't know man direction the tycans felt really freaking good in the oh no i'm not saying it's bad but like this i'm saying porsche's porsche's steering the way that stuff they they have done the best of anybody of making a sporty ev according to all the reviews i've seen to where it feels like just a sporty good car but there's no disguising the weight it's still there like the part where it would show up is if you were on a road where it's so windy that you can't actually go that fast and then having your little nimble golf would feel better than having this big weighty thing but they do a good job of it but like the bmw is much more practical for your life uh and i think it also will be more drama free because if you do ever need to get anything done with it it will cost you slightly less money uh and every part of this car costs less than every part of the Porsche the wheels the tires the headlights the battery the the cap on the filler for the windshield washer fluid like everything everything will cost less than the BMW and the BMW will in turn be twice as much as it is on Hyundai so that's that's the shape of the world yeah I do I do think I need to drive an i4 i'd also like to drive the tycon again now that i know a little bit more you should test drive a second gen one you're not going to buy one but they don't know that test drive a second one do you know what year that began um not too not too far go maybe two or three years ago that the porsche people at the porsche dealer one though no i'm sure they will i'm sure they won't um but no i don't know i just i really thought that the tycon was the right answer and leaving aside Aaron's understandable reluctance to have another Bavarian car in the garage, I'm starting to wonder if maybe the i4 is it.

2:23:13And the thing that's really making this worse for me is out of nowhere. And I think even before my friend Brian had suggested the i4, over the last couple of weeks, for reasons I can't understand or place or put my finger on, I started to really miss my E90, my three series that I used to have. I don't know why. And I think it's a large, a lot of it is because I've forgotten. Well, I've forgotten that I put like 20 grand worth of service into that car, whatever the obscene amount of money was. And it was broken when I sold it. I've been reminiscing about how good, to Marco's point, how good that car was in the rare occasions that it wasn't broken.

2:23:53And I loved that car so very much. And I'm not saying I need to go back to a BMW, but I really did love that car a lot, a lot. And I really want to get something. I think I want to get something new. And I also made another grievous mistake. And I went to Carvana and said, hey, how much is this VIN worth to you? Don't do that. Well, let me ask you, how much do you think my car is worth to Carvana based on how I told them about it? I have no idea what cars are worth. John, any thoughts? Again, it's stickered at$40 ,000 or thereabouts new in late 2018. $28 ,000. Really? Yeah. That's what you're going with?

2:24:39That's what I'm going with,$28 ,000. Because I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it was. I'm trying to find the damn thing. It was$28 ,000 and change, I believe. Where is this email? Now I can't find it. But it's somewhere. I'll have to dig it back up. but I'm pretty sure it was 28. All those car YouTube channels, it's only pay off. But to that end, like I don't particularly want, nor should I spend, want to, nor should I spend 60 grand on a, on a Taycan. But if it's 30 grand or thereabouts, that's a little easier to swallow. Right. So I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. The right answer for the record is what John has said, which is basically drive my car into the ground and be done and not even think about it.

2:25:15It sounds like it's doing pretty good. It is. Slow mileage. It's still working. like you haven't had any problems with it you know you should just think about marco's hvac like you have a problem-free car that you mostly enjoy like no you can enjoy enjoy the and especially for the stick shift thing we didn't really talk about that much but like yeah you want to try an ev and evs are cool and fun but like this is probably your last stick shift car so get the most out of it right i know i know but man it would be nice if you know if i take aaron's car somewhere so like as an example declan had basketball practice tonight and her car was already out and i was like hey i'm just gonna take yours and she was totally chill with it she doesn't care.

2:25:48She's not going anywhere, but it would be nice that she could go somewhere if she wanted to, you know, like where is right the way it was earlier tonight. It was 28 to, I finally found the damn email, $28 ,200. Um, it would have been nice for her to be able to take the Tycon or the I four or what have you out. It could be a fun activity with you. You could, uh, you could restore her confidence in her stick shift skills. And then if she breaks your car, you have an excuse to buy a new one. Yeah, but then it won't be worth 28 to, anyways i don't know knowing me i'll do nothing but i do think that marco is right that i do need to test drive an i4 and i fear i desperately fear that i'm really really going to like it oh that was the other thing i didn't mention about the tycon they don't really do regenerative braking in the way i'm used to anyway in so far as i guess it's it's it's a application the application of the brake pedal they will treat that as the cue to start regenerative braking but i'm used to lift off regenerative braking, where as soon as you lift off the gas, it's...

2:26:49You're sure that's not an adjustment? It could be a setting. I'm not. The way BMW does it, there's the D drive mode is some regeneration, but it won't really slow you down that aggressively. And then if you pull the gear shelf lever down one more time from D, it goes into a mode called B. Oh, that's the exact same way the Volvo is. Yeah. And that's how I drive in B all the time. I wish I could just set it to just go right to that. You can't. So every time I'm doing the double flip down to put it into B, but that is like much more aggressive regen braking. And there are settings, but none of the settings for D will bring it to that same level.

2:27:25How can you not set it? BMW lets you set everything. How would that let it sit? I know. That's not even like a fuel efficiency thing or like, there's no reason. They have settings for everything. Believe me, I looked. There's two settings that my car does not have. One of them is there is no way to set B by default. And there is no way to set D to be as aggressive as B. And the second missing setting is there is no way to disable little alerts that say uneven road surface ahead. Does it know that you live in New York? So, yeah, well, so here it shows those when I'm approaching a railroad crossing.

2:28:02Now, I live on Long Island. I'm there's a railroad crossing going through every town because of Long Island Railroad. There's also uneven road surface everywhere. Well, yeah, but like in the entire state. So as I drive throughout my town doing anything, I'm constantly getting alerts on my dash saying, you know, uneven road service, you know, 0.6 miles ahead or whatever. Constantly. There's no way to turn that off. And the funny thing is there's even a setting for it. It just doesn't work. Like there's a setting to turn that off. You can search for it in the control panel. It's right there. And you turn it off.

2:28:39And you're like, great, it's off. and then the alerts continue because it doesn't actually work. That's frustrating. You're always one software update away from them fixing this. Well, I wonder if you could code that. You know, you could perhaps code the drive mode or whatever. I tried that as well. That apparently doesn't really exist for these modern vehicles anymore. Hmm, that's okay. I did look into that though. Anyway, so what I needed you two to do was tell me absolutely not, do not buy any new cars. And it sounds like you have at best told me, meh. I don't think we had any chance of stopping you from buying a new car.

2:29:10The best I could do is try to make you think about paying for college. This is how much college will cost for Maggie. But that's not working on you, you know? Well, let's just say without blowing, you know, without talking finances too much, let's just say that we do not have enough for all of college, but we have done a very good job of saving so far. For how much college costs today? Well, also true. There is no world in which replacing your car makes financial sense. Certainly not. But we also don't live through our lives only optimizing for one thing. We live our lives to live our lives. And so if you feel responsible about being able to cover your other needs, then I don't think you should feel any shame being a successful working professional in your 40s to buy a new car every seven years.

2:30:00Like that's not that crazy to me because that's something that you care. You're not going to last that much longer. Yeah, you care a lot about that, and it brings you a lot of joy, and you don't go blowing money in other excessive ways. So, like, I don't – well – Oh, come now. I really don't think I'm that bad at all. No, I think, again, like, your finances are up to you and your family, but, like, if things are being taken care of, you should not feel guilt to indulge yourself in your biggest interest in life. Like, that is fine. Now, granted, if you want to optimize only for money, the way to do that is to buy a used Toyota or Honda and run it into the ground.

2:30:46Like, that is the correct option if you're optimizing for value over time. That is by far the correct option. Or not have a car at all and ride your bike everywhere, which will make you live longer, too, if you don't get hit by a car. Yeah, right. Like, that's another option. Like, there's lots of ways to do that. But the fact is you love cars and wanting to buy a used car, a different used car every seven years is not that unreasonable. Although you might want to just double this money just for equity's sake to say, well, this is your fun hobby and you get this much allocated to it. What's the equivalent of Erin's fun hobby that she gets the equal amount allocated to?

2:31:23So whatever you think you're spending, just double it. Well, it's funny you say that because she's just not a material person. So I think that for her, if I said, you know, if I'm going to spend 40, not that this is how we handle our finances. Well, she just feels the burden of being the frugal one to save money for the family, maybe. Try this move. Try saying, hey, honey, I've decided I don't actually need a new car, but we should spend this money on something fun. What do you want to do with it? So now it's not her worrying about spending additional money, but simply getting the money that you already think is going to spend and see what she says.

2:31:53No, that is fair. You've definitely been married. And then you have to say, no, I was just kidding. I'm getting a car. But make sure to tell her your friend Marco just saved you$21 ,000. Yeah, right. Exactly. Here's the thing, honey. Marco saved us$20 ,000, but I'm going to have to buy a BMW now. You can say that I was trying to save you all the money and give it to Erin so she can do whatever she wants with it. She will drive up to New York and kick you square in the nether regions. My goodness. That will be deserved. Truly. She is so anti-BMW. It's ridiculous. I don't really blame her. You got to bring her on the test drive and hope that she falls in love with it.

2:32:24Yeah, for real. So, I don't know. We'll see. I mean, this is mostly all talk. And I mean, how lucky am I that I'm even thinking about, now granted, I'm thinking about used cars, but still, how lucky am I that I get to think about these used cars? So, life could be so much worse. But I don't know what to buy. And the right answer is to not do anything, which is probably what I'll do. Yeah, and the right answer is, if you do want to really consider these cars, go test drive them. Like, look at how much you learned. You were all set in your mind that it was going to be this car. But as soon as you test drove it, it became very clear that there were things about it that you weren't for you.

2:32:56Like, that's, you have, like, I, believe me, I'm guilty of the same thing. Like, you know, here I am looking at the i4 myself. I've never driven one. I've only seen them every day around the corner from my house. Even, you know, yesterday, the initial YouTube previews of the Rivian R2 came out. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And even that, I was like, ooh. And I'm looking at, you know, the R3X as a potential future car for me. Oh, the R3 looks so good, man. Oh, my God, it looks so good. Casey with BMW and you with Rivian, it's like childbirth amnesia like don't you remember don't you remember the reason you got rid of the rivian don't you remember the reason you got rid of the bmw it's like nope the first thing i looked up after i watched those r2 reviews was i wonder if those long island service centers opened up and yes they have so they call everything's different now yeah and the r3x isn't due out for like another year and a half or two years so it you know it would be like by the time my ix lease ends the r3x might be starting to ship maybe and you sure want that one of those first batch of cars from Rivian.

2:33:52Yep. I learned nothing from the first one. It looks so cool. Come on. It does look so freaking cool. It looks very cool.