Powerful A.I. By 2026? + Uber's C.E.O. on the Robotaxi Future + Casey's TikTok Test

25:17Do you? I hope you never learn. I hope I don't either. Because sometimes I have bad days, Kevin, and I get to scheming. So for this reason, I think that governments, regulators around the world might want to look at this approach and say, hey, instead of trying to regulate this based on how much money AI labs are spending or like how much compute is involved, why don't we look at the harms we're trying to address and say, hey, if you build something that could cause this kind of harm, you have to do X, Y, and Z. Yeah, that makes sense to me. So I think the biggest impact that both the sort of essay that Dario wrote and this responsible scaling policy had on me was not about any of the actual specifics of the idea.

25:53it was purely about the timescales and the urgency. It is one thing to hear a bunch of people telling you that AI is coming and that it's going to be more powerful than you can imagine, sooner than you can imagine. But if you actually start to internalize that and plan for it, it just feels very different. If we are going to get powerful AI sometime in the next, let's call it two to 10 years, you just start making different choices. Yeah, I think it becomes sort of the calculus. I can imagine it affecting what you might want to study in college if you are going to school right now. I have friends who are thinking about leaving their jobs because they think the place where they are working right now will not be able to compete in a world where AI is very widespread.

26:43So, yes, you're absolutely starting to see it creep into the calculus. I don't know kind of what else it could do. You know, there's no real call to action here because you can't really do very much until this world begins to arrive. But I do think psychologically, we want people to at least imagine, as you say, what it would be like to live in this world because I have been surprised at how little discussion this has been getting. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, to me, it feels like we are entering, I wouldn't call it like an AI end game because I think we're closer to the start than the end of this transformation.

27:26But it does feel like something is happening. I'm starting to notice AI's effects in my life more. I'm starting to feel more dependent on it. And I'm also like, I'm kind of having an existential crisis. Like, not a full-blown one, but like typically I'm a guy who likes to plan. I like to strategize. I like to have like a five-year and a 10-year plan. And I've just found that my own certainty about the future and my ability to plan long-term is just way lower than it has been for any time that I can remember. That's interesting. I mean, for myself, I feel like that has always been true. You know, in 1990, I did not know what things were going to look like in 2040.

28:05And I would be really surprised by a lot of things that have happened along the way. But yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty out there. It's scary, but I also like, do you not feel a little bit excited about it? Of course. Look, I love software. I love tools. I want to live in the future. And it's already happening to me. There is a lot of that uncertainty. And like that stuff freaks me out. But like if we could cure cancer, if we could cure depression, if we could cure anxiety, you'd be talking about the greatest advancement to like human well-being. Certainly in decades, maybe that we've ever seen.

28:40Yeah. I mean, I have some priors on this because like my dad died of a very rare form of cancer that was, it was like a sub 1 % type of cancer. And when he got sick, it was like, you know, I read all the clinical trials and it was just like there hadn't been enough people thinking about this specific type of cancer and how to cure it because it was not breast cancer. It was not lung cancer. It was not something that millions of Americans get. And so there just wasn't the kind of brainpower devoted to trying to solve this. Now, it has subsequently, it hasn't been solved, but there are now treatments that are in the pipeline that didn't exist when he was sick.

29:24And I just constantly am wondering, like, if he had gotten sick now instead of when he did, like, maybe he would have lived. And I think that is one of the things that makes me really optimistic about AI is just like, maybe we just do have the brainpower or we will soon have the brainpower to devote, you know, world-class research teams to these things that might not affect millions of people, but that do affect some number of people. Absolutely. I just, I don't know. It really, I got kind of emotional reading this essay because it was just like, you know, obviously it's, you know, I'm not someone who believes all the hype, but I'm like, I assign some non-zero probability to the possibility that he's right, that all this stuff could happen.

30:11And I just find that so much more interesting and fun to think about than like a world where everything goes off the rails. Well, it's just the first time that we've had a truly positive, transformative vision for the world coming out of Silicon Valley in a really long time. In fact, this vision, it's more positive and optimistic than anything that has been like in the presidential campaign. You know, it's like when the presidential candidates talk about the future of this country, it's like, well, you know, we'll give you this tax break, right? Or we'll make this other policy change. Nobody's talking about how they're going to freaking cure cancer.

30:48Yeah. Right? So I think, of course, we're drawn to this kind of discussion because it feels like, you know, there are some people in the world who are taking really, really big swings. And if they connect, then we're all going to benefit. Yeah. Yeah.

31:08When we come back, why Uber has way more autonomous vehicles on the road than it used to.

31:39Well, Casey, one of the biggest developments over the past few months in tech is that self-driving cars now are actually working. Yeah, but this is no longer in the realm of sci-fi. Yes, so we've talked, obviously, about the self-driving cars that you can get in San Francisco now. It used to be two companies, Waymo and Cruise. Now it's just Waymo. And there have also been a bunch of different autonomous vehicle updates from other companies that are involved in the space. And the one that I found most interesting recently was about Uber. Now, as you will remember, Uber used to try to build its own robo-taxis.

32:13They gave that up back in 2020. That was the year they sort of sold off their autonomous driving division to a startup called Aurora after losing just an absolute ton of money on it. But now they are back in the game, and they just recently announced a multi-year partnership with Cruise, the self-driving car company. They also announced an expanded partnership with Waymo, which is going to allow Uber riders to get AVs in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia. They've been operating this service in Phoenix since last year, and that's going to keep expanding. They also announced that self-driving Ubers will be available in Abu Dhabi through a partnership with the Chinese AV company WeRide.

32:56And they've also made a long-term investment in Wave, which is a London-based autonomous driving company. So they are investing really heavily in this, and they're doing it in a different way than they did back when they were trying to build their own self-driving cars. Now they are essentially saying, we want to partner with every company that we can that is making self-driving cars. Yeah, so this is a company that many people take several times a week, Uber, and yet I feel like it sometimes is a bit taken for granted. And while we might just focus on the cars you can get today, they are thinking very long-term about what transportation is going to look like in five or ten years.

33:33And increasingly for them, it seems like autonomous vehicles are a big part of that answer. Yeah, and what I found really interesting, so Tesla had this robo-taxi event last week where Elon Musk talked about how you'll soon be able to hail a self-driving Tesla. And what I found really interesting is that Tesla's share price plummeted after that event, but Uber's stock price rose to an all-time high. So clearly people think that, or at least some investors think that Uber's approach is better here than Tesla's. It's the sort of thing, Kevin, that makes me want to talk to the CEO of Uber. And lucky for you, he's here.

34:05Oh, thank goodness. So today we're going to talk with Uber CEO Dara Khazarshawi. He took over at Uber in 2017 after a bunch of scandals led the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, to step down. He has made the company profitable for the first time in its history, and I think a lot of people think he's been doing a pretty good job over there. and he is leading this charge into autonomous vehicles. And I'm really curious to hear what he makes, not just of Uber's partnership with Waymo, but of sort of the whole self-driving car landscape. Let's bring him in. Let's do it.

34:45Dara Khazarshawi, welcome to Hard Fork. Thank you for having me. So you were previously on the board of the New York Times Company until 2017 when you stepped down right after taking over at Uber. I assume you still have some pull with our bosses, though, because of your years of service. So can you get them to build us a nicer studio? I didn't have pull when I was on the board, and I certainly have zero pull now. I've got negative pull, I think. They're taking revenge on me. Well, since you left the board, they're making all kinds of crazy decisions, like letting us start a podcast and stuff.

35:18Oh, my God. All right, so we are going to talk today about your new partnership with Waymo and the sort of autonomous driving future. I would love to hear the story of how this came together because I think for people who've been following this space for a number of years, this was surprising. Uber and Waymo have not historically had a great relationship. The two companies were - It was a little rocky at first, yes. Embroiled in litigation and lawsuits and trade secret theft and things like that. It was a big deal. And so how did they, did they approach you? Did you approach them? How did this partnership come together?

35:50I guess it's time healing, right? When I came on board, we thought that we wanted to establish a better relationship with Google generally, Waymo generally. And even though we were working on our own self-driving technology, it was always within the context of we were developing our own, but we want to work with third parties as well. One of the disadvantages of developing our own technology was that some of the other players, the Waymos of the World, etc., heard us, but didn't necessarily believe us. It's difficult to work with players that you compete. So one of the first decisions that we made was we can't be in between here.

36:30Either you have to go vertical or you have to go platform strategy. You can't achieve both. And we have to make it better. We either have to do our own thing or we have to do it with partners. Yeah, absolutely. And so that strategic kind of fork became quite apparent to me. And then the second was just what are we good at? Listen, I'll be blunt. We sucked at hardware, right? We tried to apply software principles to hardware. It doesn't work. Hardware is a different pace, different demand in terms of perfection, et cetera. And ultimately, that fork, do we go vertical? And there are very few companies that can do software and hardware.

37:10Well, Apple, Tesla are arguably one of the few in the world. And we decided to make a bet on the platform. And so once we made that bet, we went out and identified who are the leaders. Waymo was a clear leader. First, we had to make peace with them and settle in court, et cetera. We got Google to be a bigger shareholder. And then over a period of time, we built relationships. And, you know, I do think there's a synergy between the two. So it just makes sense, the relationship. And we're very, very excited to, on a forward basis, expand it pretty significantly. So this was, I feel like, maybe your most consequential decision to date as the CEO of this company.

37:52If you believe that AVs are going to become the norm for many people hailing a ride in 10 or 15 years, it's conceivable that they might open up the Waymo app, right? And not the Uber app. Waymo has an app to order cars. I use it fairly regularly, right? So what gave you the confidence that in that world, it will still be Uber that is the app that people are turning to and not Waymo or whatever other apps might have arisen for other AV companies? I think first is that it's not a binary outcome, okay? I think that a Waymo app and an Uber app can coexist. Just we saw it in my old job in the travel business, right?

38:29I ran Expedia and there's this dramatic, is Expedia going to put the hotel chains out of business? Are the hotel chains going to put Expedia out of business? The fact is both thrived. And there's a set of customers who have booked through Expedia. There's a set of customers who books Hotel Direct. And both businesses have grown and interactivity in general has grown. Same thing if you look at food, right? McDonald's has its own app. It's a really good app. It has a loyalty program. Starbucks has its own app. has a loyalty program, yet both are engaging with us through the Uber Eats marketplace.

39:02So my conclusion was that there isn't an either or. I do believe there will be other companies. There'll be cruises and there'll be Wii rides and waves, et cetera. There'll be other companies and self-driving choices. And the person who wants utility, speed, ease, familiarity will choose Uber and both can coexist and both can thrive and both are really going to grow because autonomous will be the future eventually. So tell us more about the partnership with Waymo that is going to take place in Austin and Atlanta. Who is actually paying for the maintenance of the cars? Does Uber have to sort of make sure that there's no, you know, trash left behind in the cars?

39:40Like what is Uber actually doing in addition to just making these rides available through the app? Sure. So I don't want to talk about the economics because they're confidential in terms of the deal. But in those two cities, Waymo will be available exclusively through the Uber app. And we will also be running the fleet operations as well. So depots, recharging, cleaning, if something gets lost, making sure that it gets back to its owner, et cetera. And Waymo will provide the software driver, will obviously provide the hardware, repair the hardware, et cetera. And then we will be doing the upkeep and operating the network, so to speak.

40:18For riders, if you want to get in a Waymo in one of those cities through Uber, is there an option to specifically request a self-driving Waymo? Or is it just kind of chance? Like if the car that's closest to you happens to be a Waymo, that's the one you get? Right now, the experience, for example, in Phoenix is that it's by chance. I think you got one by chance and you can say, yes, I'll do it or not. And I think that's what we're going to start with. but there may be some people who only want Waymos and there are some people who may not want Waymos and we'll solve for that over a period of time.

40:47It could be personalizing preferences or it could be what you're talking about, which is I only want a Waymo. Do the passengers get raided by the self-driving car the way that they would in a human-driven Uber? Not yet, but that's not a bad idea. What about tipping? Like if I get out of a self-driven Uber, is there an option to tip the car if it did a good job? I'm sure we could build that. Why not? Honestly, it would just be... I don't know. I do wonder if people are going to tip machines. I don't think it's likely, but you never know. It sounds crazy, but at some point someone is going to start asking because they're going to realize it's just free margin.

41:20You know, it's like even if only 100 customers do it in a whole year, I don't know. You know, it's just free money. I mean, the good news is tipping 100 % of tips go to drivers now, and we definitely want to keep that. So we like the tipping habits, but whether people will tip machines is TBD. Yeah. And how big are these fleets? I think I read somewhere recently that Waymo has about 700 self-driving cars operating nationwide. How many AVs are we talking about in these cities? We're starting in the hundreds, and then we'll expand from there. I know you don't want to discuss the economics, even though I would love to learn what the split is there.

41:52I'm not going to tell you. But you did recently talk about the margins on autonomous rides being lower than the margins on regular Uber rides for at least a few more years. That's not intuitive to me because in an autonomous ride, you don't have to pay the driver. So you would think the margin would be way higher for Uber. But why would you make less money if you don't have to pay a driver? So generally, our design spec in terms of how we build businesses is any newer business, we're going to operate at a lower margin while we're growing that business. You don't want it to be profitable day one.

42:25And that's my attitude with autonomous, which is, again, get it out there, introduce it to as many people as possible. At a maturity level, generally, if you look at our take rate around the world, it's about 20%. We get 20%, the driver gets 80%. We think that's a model that makes sense for any autonomous partner going forward, and that's what we expect. I kind of don't care, honestly, what the margins are for the next five years. The question is, can I get lots of supply? Can it be absolutely safe? And does that 20-80 split look reasonable going forward? And I think it does. Yeah. I want to ask about Tesla.

43:02You mentioned them a little earlier. They held an event recently where they unveiled their plans for a robo-taxi service. Do you consider Tesla a competitor? Well, they certainly could be, right? If they develop their own AV vehicle and they decide to go direct only through the Tesla app, they would be a competitor. And if they decide to work with us, then we would be a partner as well. And to some extent, again, both can be true. So I don't think it's going to be an either or. I think Elon's vision is pretty compelling, especially like you might have these cyber shepherds or these owners of these fleets, etc.

43:45Those owners, if they want to have maximum earnings on those fleets, will want to put those fleets on Uber. But at this point, it's unknown what his intentions are. There's this big debate that's playing out right now about who has the better AV strategy between Waymo and Tesla in the sense that the Waymos have many, many sensors on them. The vehicles are much more expensive to produce. Tesla is trying to get to full autonomy using only its cameras and software. And Andre Carpathy, the AI researcher, recently said that Tesla was going to be in a better position in the long run because it ultimately just had a software problem, whereas Waymo has a hardware problem, and those are typically harder to solve.

44:30I'm curious if you have a view on this, whether you think one company is likelier to get to a better scale based on the approach that they're taking with their hardware and software. I mean, I think that hardware costs scale down over a period of time. So, sure, Waymo has a hardware problem, but they can solve it. I mean, the history of computing hardware is like the cost come down very, very significantly. The Waymo solution is working right now. So it's not theory, right? And I think the differences are bigger, which is Waymo has more sensors, has cameras, has LiDAR. So there's a certain redundancy there.

45:09Waymo generally has more compute, so to speak. So the inference of that computer is going to be better, right? And Waymo also has a high-definition maps that essentially makes the problem of recognizing what's happening in the real world a much simpler problem. So under Elon's model, the weight that the software has to carry is very, very heavy versus the Waymo and most other player model where you don't have to kind of weigh as much on training and you make the problem much simpler as a compute problem to understand. I think eventually both will get there. But if you had to guess, who's going to get to sort of a viable scale first?

45:52Listen, I think Elon eventually will get to a viable scale, but for the next five years, I bet on Waymo, and we are betting on Waymo. I'll say this. I don't want to get into an autonomous Tesla in the next five years. Somebody else can test that out. I'm not going to be an early adopter of that one. FSD's gotten pretty good. Have you used it recently? I have not used it recently. It's really good. Yeah? All right. Yeah, it's really good. Now, again, for example, the cost of a solid-state LiDAR now is$500,$600, right? So why wouldn't you put that into your sensor stack? It's not that expensive.

46:25And for a fully self-driving, specialized auto, I think that makes a lot of sense to me. Now, Elon has accomplished the unimaginable many, many, many times. So I wouldn't bet against them. Yeah, I don't know. This is always, you know, my secret dream for, you know, obviously you should stay at Uber as long as you want. When you're done with that, I actually do think you should run Tesla. because I think you would be, just as you've done Uber, you'd be willing to make some of the sort of easy compromises, like just put a$500 fricking LiDAR on the thing and we'd go much faster. So anyway, what do you think about that?

46:55I have a full-time job and I'm very happy with it. Thank you. Well, the Tesla board is listening. Just keep this guy in mind. That's all I'm saying. I don't know if the Tesla board listens to you too. Good point. That's true. I made too many ketamine jokes. We're opening up the board meeting with an episode of Hard Fork, everybody. They can learn a lot from this show. what's your best guess for when, say, 50 % of Uber rides in the U.S. will be autonomous? I'd say close to 8 to 10 years is my best guess, but I am sure that'll be wrong. Probably closer to 10. Closer to 10? Okay, interesting. Most people have overestimated.

47:32You know, again, it's a wild guess. The probabilities of your being right are just as much as mine. I'm curious if we can sort of get into a future imagining mode here. Like in the year, whether it's 10 years or 15 years or 20 years from now, when maybe a majority of rides in at least big cities in the U.S. will be autonomous. Do you think that changes the city at all? Like do the roads look different? Are there more cars on the road? Are there fewer cars on the road? What does that even look like? So I think that the cities will have much, much more space to use. Parking often takes up 20, 30 percent of the square miles in a city, for example, and that parking space will be open for living, parks, etc.

48:20So there's no doubt that it will be a better world. You will have greener, cleaner cities and you'll never have to park again, which I think is pretty cool. I'm very curious what you think about the politics of autonomy in transportation. In the early days of Uber, there was a lot of backlash and resistance from taxi drivers. And, you know, they saw Uber as a threat to their livelihoods. There were some, you know, well-publicized cases of sort of sabotage and big protests. Do you anticipate there will be a backlash from either drivers or the public to the spread of AVs as they start to appear in more cities?

48:57I think there could be. And what I'm hoping is that we avoid the backlash by having the proper conversations. Now, historically, society as a whole, we've been able to adjust to job displacement because it does happen gradually. And even in a world where there's greater automation now than ever before, employment rates, etc. are at historically great levels. But the fact is that AI is going to displace jobs. What does that mean? How quickly should we go? How do we think about that? Those are discussions that we're going to have. And if we don't have the discussions, sure, there will be backlash.

49:31There's always backlash against societal change that's significant. Now, we now work with taxis in San Francisco, and taxi drivers who use Uber make more than 20 % more than the ones who don't. So there is a kind of solution space where new technology and established players can win. But I don't know exactly what that looks like. But that calculus does not apply to self-driving. You know, it's not like the Uber driver who's been driving an Uber for 10 years and that's their main source of income can just start driving a self-driving Waymo. You don't need a driver. No, you don't need a driver. It's not just that they have to switch the app they're using.

50:08It's that it threatens to put them out of a job. Well, listen, could they be part of fleet management, cleaning, charging, et cetera? That's a possibility. We are now working with some of our drivers. They're doing AI map labeling and training of AI models, et cetera. So we're expanding the solution set of work, on-demand work that we're offering our drivers because there is part of that work, which is driving maybe going away or the growth in that work is going to slow down at least over the next 10 years. and then we'll look to adjust. But listen, these are issues that are real and I don't have a clean answer for them at this point.

50:47Yeah. You brought up shared rides earlier. And, you know, back in the day, I think when UberX first rolled out shared rides, like I did that a couple of times. And then, you know, I don't know, I like got a raise at my job and I thought, you know, from here on out, I think it's just gonna be me in the car. How popular do you think you can make shared rides? And like, is there anything that you can do to make that more appealing? Well, I think the way that we have to make it more appealing is to reduce the penalty, so to speak, of the shared rides. I think the number one reason why people use Uber is they want to save time.

51:18They want to have their time back. And a shared ride would, you know, you would get about a 30 % decrease in price historically. But there could be a 50 % to 100 % time penalty. We're working now. You might end up sitting next to Casey Newton. That would be cool. That would be amazing. Although I would feel very short. Otherwise, I would have no complaints. But people so far we've heard don't have a problem with company. It really is time. And they don't mind riding with other people. There's a certain sense of satisfaction with riding with other people. But we're now working with both algorithmically and I think also fixing the product.

51:56Previously, you would choose a shared ride and you'd get an upfront discount. So your incentive as a customer is to get the discount, but not to get a shared ride. So we would have customers gaming the system. they get a shared ride at 2 a.m. when they know they're not going to be matched up, etc. Now, you get a smaller discount, and you get a reward, which is a higher discount if you're matched. So part of it is we're not, customers aren't working against this, and we're not working against customers. But we're working on tech, we are reducing the time penalty, which is we avoid these weird routes, etc.

52:27that's going to cost you 50 % of your time or 100 % of your time. Now, in autonomous, if we are the only player that then has the liquidity to introduce shared autonomous into cities that lowers congestion, lowers the price, that's another way in which our marketplace can add value to the ecosystem. Got it. Speaking of shared rides, Uber just released a new airport shuttle service in New York City. It costs$18 a person. You book a seat. It goes on a designated sort of route on a set schedule. I don't have a question. I just wanted to congratulate you on inventing a bus. It's a better bus. You know exactly when it's coming, picking you up.

53:07Like just knowing exactly where your bus is, pick up, knowing what your path is, real time. It just gives a sense of comfort. We think this can be a pretty cool product. And again, is bus going to be hugely profitable for us long term? I don't know. But it will introduce us to a bigger audience to come into the Uber ecosystem. them, and we think it can be good for cities as well. If you're in Miami, by the way, over the weekend, we got buses to the Taylor Swift concert as well, so I'm just saying. Well, I mean, look, it should not be hard to improve on the experience of a city bus. Do you know what I mean?

53:41I like city buses. When was the last time you were on a city bus? Well, I took the train here, so it wasn't a bus, but it was transit. He doesn't take shared, he doesn't take cross. I'm a man of the people. This guy is like... I like to ride public transit. You're an elitist. No, I would love to see a picture of you on a bus sometimes in the past five years. because I'm pretty sure that's never happened. Let me ask you this. I think we can make the experience better. Here's, I've, you know, so far I've resisted giving you any product feedback, Dara, but I have this one thing that I have always wanted to know the explanation for.

54:08It's this. At some point in the past couple of years, you all, when I ordered an Uber, started sending me a push notification saying that the driver was nearby. And I'm the sort of person, when I've ordered an Uber, Dara, I'm going to be there when the driver pulls. I'm not making this person wait, okay? I'm going to respect their time. And what I've learned is when you tell me the driver is nearby, what that means is they're at least three minutes away and they might be two miles away. And what I want to know is why do you send me that notification? We want you to be prepared to not keep the driver waiting.

54:38Maybe we should personalize it. I think that's a good question, which is depending on whether or not you keep the driver waiting. I think that is one of the cool things with AI algos that we can do. At this point, you're right. The experience is not quite optimized. But it's for the driver. It's for the driver. Time is money. And if I were a driver, I would be happy that you were sending that, but you also sent me this notification that says the driver's arriving. And that's when I'm like, okay, it's time to go downstairs. But it sounds like we're making progress on this. I think the algorithm just likes you.

55:08It just wants to have a conversation with you. Yeah, well, Casey has previously talked about how he doesn't like his Uber drivers to talk to him. This is a man who... He doesn't share. Listen, this man likes to coast through life It's in a constant bubble. Here's what I'm saying. If you're on your way to the airport and it's 6.30 in the morning, do you truly want a person you've never met before asking you who you're going to vote for in the election? Is that an experience that anyone enjoys? By the way, I drive, I drove, and reading the rider as to whether they want to have a conversation or not, I was not good at the art of kind of conversation as a driver.

55:45Were you too talkative? Hey, no, no. Hey, how's it going? Are you having a good day? Going to work? And then I just shut up. Yeah. and have a nice day. To me, that's ideal. But I don't know if that's... No, that's perfect. That's going to give you all the information that you need. I'll be your driver any day. This is Casey's real attraction to self-driving cars is that he never has to talk to another human. Look, you can make fun of me all you want. I am not the only person who feels this way. Let me tell you. When I check into a hotel, same thing. Like, did you have a nice day? I'm like, yeah, but where are you coming in from?

56:14Let's not get into it. Yeah, just keep... I would love to see you checking into a hotel. So did you have a nice day? And you're like, well, let me tell you about this board meeting I just went to because the pressure I'm under, you don't want to hear about it. All right. Well, I think we're at time. Dara, thank you so much for coming. Thanks, Dara. Really appreciate it. It was fun. When we come back, well, AI is driving progress and it's driving cars. Now we're going to find out if it can drive Casey insane. He watched 260 TikTok videos and he'll tell you all about it.

56:50Thank you. Well, Casey, aside from all the drama in AI and self-driving cars this week, we also had some news about TikTok. One of the other most powerful AI forces on Earth. No, truly. Yes. I ironically believe that. Yeah, that was not a joke. Yes. So this week we learned about some documents that came to light as part of a lawsuit that is moving through the courts right now. As people will remember, the federal government is still trying to force ByteDance to sell TikTok. but last week 13 states and the district of columbia sued tiktok accusing the company of creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and kevin and this is my favorite part of this story is that kentucky public radio got a hold of these court documents and they had many redactions you know often in these cases the most interesting sort of facts and figures will just be redacted for who knows what reason but the geniuses over at kentucky public radio just copy and pasted everything in the document.

57:48And when they pasted it, everything was totally visible. This keeps happening. I feel like every year or two, we get a story about some failed redaction. Like, is it that hard to redact a document? I'll say this. I hope it always remains this hard to redact a document because I read stuff like this, Kevin, and I'm in heaven. Yes. So they got a hold of these documents. They copied and pasted. They figured out what was behind sort of the black boxes in the redacted materials. And it was pretty juicy. These documents included details like TikTok's knowledge of a high number of underage kids who were stripping for adults on the platform.

58:25The adults were paying them in digital gifts. These documents also claimed that TikTok had adjusted its algorithm to prioritize people they deemed beautiful. And then there was this stat that I know you honed in on, which was that these documents said, based on internal conversations, that TikTok had figured out exactly how many videos it needed to show someone in order to get them hooked on the platform. And that number is 260. 260 is what it takes. You know, it reminds me, this is sort of ancient, but do you remember the commercial in the 80s where they would say, like, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

59:02Yes. To me, this is the sort of 2020s equivalent. How many TikToks do you have to watch until you can't look away ever again? Yes. So this is, according to the company's own research, this is about the tipping point where people start to develop a habit or an addiction of going back to the platform, and they sort of become sticky in the parlance of social media apps. In the disgusting parlance of social media apps, it becomes sticky. Yes. So, Casey, when we heard about this magic number of 260 TikTok videos, you had what I thought was an insane idea. Tell us about it. Well, Kevin, I thought if 260 videos is all it takes, maybe I should watch 260 TikToks.

59:45And here's why. I am an infrequent user of TikTok. I would say once a week, once every two weeks, I'll check in, I'll watch a few videos. And I would say generally enjoy my experience, but not to the point that I come back every day. And so I've always wondered what I'm missing because I know so many folks that can't even have TikTok on their phone because it holds such a power over them. And they feel like the algorithm gets to know them so quickly and so intimately that it can only be explained by magic. So I thought, if I've not been able to have this experience just sort of normally using TikTok, what if I tried to consume 260 TikToks as quickly as I possibly could and just saw what would happen after that?

1:00:33Not all heroes wear capes. Okay. So Casey, you watched 260 TikTok videos last night. Tell me about it. So I did create a new account. So I started fresh. I didn't just reset my algorithm, although that is something that you can do in TikTok. And I decided a couple of things. One is I was not going to follow anyone, like no friends, but also no influencers. No enemies. No enemies. And I also was not going to do any searches, right? A lot of the ways that TikTok will get to know you is if you do a search. And I thought, I want to get the sort of broadest, most mainstream-y experience of TikTok that I can so that I can develop a better sense of how does it sort of walk me down this funnel toward my eventual interest?

1:01:22Whereas if I just follow 10 friends and did like three searches for my favorite subjects, like I probably could have gone there faster. And so do you know the very first thing that TikTok showed me, Kevin? What's that? It showed me a 19-year-old boy flirting with an 18-year-old girl trying to get her phone number. And when I tell you, I could not have been any less interested in this content. It was aggressively straight. Yes. And it was very young and it had nothing to do with me. And it was not my business. And so over the next several hours, this total process, I did about two and a half hours last night, and I did another 30 minutes this morning.

1:02:00And I would like to share, you know, maybe the first nine or 10 things that TikTok showed me. Again, you know, the assumption is it knows basically nothing about me. Yes. And I do think there is something quite revealing about an algorithm that knows nothing throwing spaghetti at you, seeing what will stick, and then just picking up the spaghetti afterwards and saying, well, what is it, you know, that I thought was interesting. So here's what it showed me. Second video, a disturbing 911 call, like a very upsetting sort of domestic violence situation. Skip. Three, two people doing trivia on a diving board and like the person who loses has to jump off the diving board.

1:02:37Okay, fine. Four, just free booted clip of audition for America's Got Talent. five vegetable mukbang so just a guy who had like rows and rows of beautiful multi-colored vegetables in front of them who was just eating them six a comedy skit but it was like running on top of a minecraft video so one of my key takeaways uh after my first six or seven tiktok videos was that it does actually assume that you're quite young right that's why it started out by showing me teenagers. And as I would go through this process, I found that over and over again, instead of just showing me a video, it would show me a video that had been chopped in half.

1:03:18And on top was whatever the sort of core content was. And below would be someone is playing subway surfers. Someone is playing Minecraft or someone is doing those sort of oddly satisfying things. This is a growth hack. I'm combing through a rug or whatever. And it's like, it's literally people trying to hypnotize you, right? It's like if you just see the, oh, someone is trying to smooth something out or someone is playing with slime. They're cutting soap. Have you seen the soap cutting? Yes, soap cutting is huge. And again, there is no content to it. It is just trying to stimulate you on some sort of like lizard brain level.

1:03:54It feels vaguely narcotic. Absolutely. It is like, yes. It is just purely a drug. Video number seven, an ad. Video number eight, a dad who was speaking in Spanish and dancing. I think it was very cute. Now, can I ask you a question? Are you doing anything other than just swiping from one video to the next? Are you liking anything? Are you saving anything? Are you sharing anything? Because all that gets interpreted by the algorithm as like a signal to keep showing you more of that kind of thing. Absolutely. So for the first 25 or so videos, I did not like anything, but because I truly didn't like anything, like nothing was really doing it for me.

1:04:30But my intention was always like, yes, when I see something I like, I'm going to try to reward the algorithm, give it a like, and I will maybe get more like that. So the process goes on and on. And I'm just struck by the absolute weirdness and disconnection of everything in the feed. At first, truly nothing has any relation to anything else. And it sort of feels like you've put your brain into like a Vitamix, you know, where it's like, swipe, here's a clip from friends, swipe, kids complaining about school, swipe, Mickey Mouse has a gun and he's in a video game, right? Those are three videos that I saw in a row.

1:05:08And the effect of it is just like disorienting. Yeah. And I've had this experience when you, when you like go onto YouTube, but you're not logged in, you know, on like a new account. And it's sort of just, it's just showing you sort of a random assortment of things that are popular on YouTube. It does feel very much like they're just firing in a bunch of different directions, hoping that something will stick. And then it can sort of, it can then sort of zoom in on that thing. Yes, absolutely. Now, I will add that in the first 30 or so videos, I saw two things that I thought were like actually disturbing and bad.

1:05:42What were they? Things that should never have been shown to me. Was it a clip from the All In podcast? Yes. Fortunately, it didn't get that bad. But one, there was a clip of a grate in like a busy city and there was air blowing up from the grate. And the TikTok was just women walking over the grate and their skirts blowing up. That seems bad. That's horrible. That was in the first 20 videos that I saw. Wow. It was this video, okay? I guess if you like that video, it says a lot about you, right? But it's like that. The second one, and I truly, I do not even know if we will want to include this on our podcast because I can't even believe that I'm saying that I saw this, but it is true.

1:06:21It was an AI voice of someone telling an erotic story which involved incest, and it was shown over a video of someone making soap. Wow. Like, what? This is dark stuff. This is dark stuff. Now, at what point did you start to wonder if the algorithm had started to pick up on your clues that you were giving it? Well, so I was desperate to find out this question. because I am gay and I wondered when I was going to see the first gay content, like when it was actually just going to show me two gay men who were talking about gay concerns. And it did not happen. Ever? No. It never quite got there. On this morning - In 260 videos.

1:07:06In 260 videos. Now, it did show me queer people. Actually, do you know the first queer person, identifiably queer person that the TikTok algorithm showed me. Are you familiar with the very popular TikTok meme from this year, Very Demure, Very Mindful? Yes. The first queer person I saw on TikTok, thanks to the algorithm, was Jules LeBron in a piece of sponsored content and she was trying to sell me a Lenovo laptop. And that was the queer experience that I got in my romp through the TikTok algorithm. Now, you know, it did eventually show me a couple of queer people. It showed me one TikTok about the singer, Chapel Rhone, who is queer.

1:07:44So I'll count that. And then it showed me a video by Billie Eilish, you know, a queer pop star. And I did like that video. And now Billie Eilish was one of the most famous pop stars in the entire world. I mean, like truly, like on the Mount Rushmore of famous pop stars right now. So it makes a lot of sense to me that TikTok would show me also incredibly popular with teenagers. And so I liked one Billie Eilish video. And then that was when the floodgates opened. and it was like, okay, here's a lot of that. But just from like sort of scrolling, no, we did not get to the gay zone. Now, I did notice the algorithm adapting to me.

1:08:21So something about me was, because again, I was trying to get through a lot of videos in a relatively short amount of time. And TikTok now will often show you three, four, five minute long videos. I frankly did not have the time for that. The longer I scrolled, the shorter the videos were that I got. And I do feel like the content aged up a little bit. it started showing me a category of content that I call people being weird little freaks. You know? It's like somewhat, these are some real examples. A man dressed as the cat in the hat dancing to Sierra's song, Goodies. Okay. There was a man in a horse costume playing the Addams Family theme song on an accordion using a toilet lid for percussion.

1:09:01This is the most important media platform in the world. Yes. hours a day teenagers are staring at this and this is what it is so important we are so screwed yeah you know it figured out that I was more likely to like content about animals than other things so there started to become a lot of dogs doing cute things, cats doing cute things you know other things like that but you know there was also just a lot of like here's a guy going to a store and showing you objects from the store or like here is a guy telling you a long story can I ask you a question Like, was any, in these 260 videos, were there any that you thought like, that is a great video?

1:09:41Um, I don't know if I saw anything truly great. I definitely saw some animal videos that if I showed them to you, you would laugh or you would say that was cute. There was stuff that gave me an emotional response. And I would say particularly as I got to the end of this process, I was seeing stuff that I enjoyed a bit more. But there, I did this morning, I decided to do something, Kevin, because I'd gotten so frustrated with the algorithm. I thought it is time to give the algorithm a piece of data about me. So do you know what I did? What did you do? I searched the word gay. Very subtle. Which like, in fairness, is an insane search query.

1:10:16Because what is TikTok supposed to show me in response? You can show me all sorts of things. But on my like real TikTok account, it just shows me queer creators all the time and they're doing all sorts of things. They're singing, they're dancing, they're telling jokes, they're telling stories. So I was like, I would like to see a little bit of stuff like that. do you know the first clip that came up for me when i searched gay on tiktok to train my algorithm what was it it was a clip from an adult film now like explicit unblurred it was from um and i don't i don't know this i've only read about this but apparently at the start of some adult films before the explicit stuff there will be some sort of story content you know that sort of establishes the premise of the scene.

1:10:54And this was sort of in that vein. But I thought it, if I just sort of said offhanded, you know, oh, TikTok. Yeah. I bet if you, if you just search gay, they'll just like show you like porn. People would say like, it sounds like you're being insane. Like, why would you say that? That's being insane. Obviously they're probably showing you their like most famous queer creator, you know, something like that. No, they literally just showed me porn. so it was like again so much of this process for me was like hearing the things that people say about tiktok assuming that people were sort of exaggerating or being too hard on it and then having the experience myself and saying like oh no like it's actually like that an alternative explanation is that the algorithm is actually really really good and the reason to show you all the videos of people being weird little freaks is because you are actually a weird little freak That's true.

1:11:43I will accept those allegations. I will not fight those allegations. So, okay, you watched 260 videos. You've reached this magic number that is supposed to get people addicted to TikTok. Are you addicted to TikTok? Kevin, I am surprised and frankly delighted to tell you I have never been less addicted to TikTok than I have been after going through this experience. Do you remember back when people would smoke cigarettes a lot? And if a parent caught a child smoking, the thing that they would do is they say, you know what? You're going to smoke this whole pack and I'm going to sit in front of you and you're going to smoke this whole pack of cigarettes.

1:12:17And the accumulated effect of all that stuff that you're breathing into your lungs. By the end of that, the teenager says, dad, I'm never going to smoke again. This is how I feel. It cured your addiction. After watching hundreds of these TikToks. So, okay, you are not a TikTok addict. In fact, it seems like you are less likely to become a TikTok power user than you were before this experiment. I think that's right. Did this experiment change your attitudes about whether TikTok should be banned in the United States? I feel so bad saying it, but I think the answer is yes. Like, not ban it, right?

1:12:51Like, you know, my feelings about that still have much more to do with, like, free speech and, like, freedom of expression. And I think that a ban raises a lot of questions that the United States approach to this issue. It just makes me super uncomfortable with. You can go back through our archive to hear a much longer discussion about that. But if I were a parent of a teen who had just been given their first smartphone, hopefully not any younger than like 14, it would change the way that I talk with them about what TikTok is. And it would change the way that I would check in with them about what they were seeing, right?

1:13:27I would say you are about to see something that is going to make you feel like your mind is in a blender and it is going to try to addict you. And here is how it is going to try to addict you. And I might sit with my child and might do some early searches to try to precede that feed with stuff that was good and would give my child a greater chance of going down some positive rabbit holes and seeing less of some of the more disturbing stuff that I saw there. So if nothing else, like I think it was a good educational exercise for me to go through. And if there is someone in your life, particularly a young person who is spending a lot of time on TikTok, I would encourage that you go through this process yourself because these algorithms are changing all the time.

1:14:09And I think you do want to have a sense of what is it like this very week if you really want to know what it's going to be showing your kid. Yeah. I mean, I will say, you know, I spent a lot of time on TikTok. I don't recall ever getting done with TikTok and being sort of happy and fulfilled with how I spent the time. Like there's a vague sense of like shame about it. There's a vague sense of like, sometimes it like helps me turn my brain off at the end of a stressful day. It's, it has this sort of like, you know, this sort of narcotic effect on, on me. And sometimes it's calming. And sometimes I find things that are funny, but rarely do I come away saying like, that was the best possible use of my time.

1:14:50There is something that happens when you adopt this sort of algorithm first, vertical video, mostly short form, infinite scroll. You put all of those ingredients into a bag and what comes out does have this narcotic effect, as you say. Well, Casey, thank you for exposing your brain to the TikTok algorithm for the sake of journalism. I appreciate you. And, you know, I will be donating it to science when my life ends. People will be studying your brain after you die. I feel fairly confident. I don't know why they'll be studying your brain, but there will be research teams looking at it. Can't wait to hear what y 'all find out.

1:16:05I'll see you next time.

1:16:11Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Kui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com.

1:16:39From the New York Times, you're listening to The Wirecutter Show. Hey, everyone. It's The Wirecutter Show. I'm Kyra Blackwell. I'm Christine Circlissette. And I'm Rosie Guerin. And we work at Wirecutter, the product recommendation site from The New York Times. Each week, we bring you expert advice from our newsroom of 140 journalists who review everyday products that will make your life better. Today's episode of The Wirecutter Show is called The Secret to Better Laundry.

1:17:13Hey, y 'all. It's our very first episode. Hooray! Love it. Our inaugural episode. Should we tell people a little bit about who we are and what we're doing here? Yeah, absolutely. So, Christine, what is Wirecutter? What does Wirecutter do? Well, Wirecutter is a product recommendation service. We're part of the New York Times company. We have about 140 journalists who do rigorous product testing. And what we mean by that is they are very serious about the products they test. What are we talking about here? So I'll give a couple examples. We've done a guide to hiking boots, and for that one, our writers tried out 55 pairs of boots and hiked 1 ,400 miles over seven years.

1:17:50I mean, that's a lot of steps, you know? Another example, this one's kind of wild. We did a review of fire safes, and our writer actually built a room and burned the room with all these fire safes inside of it. I mean, that's the kind of lengths our journalists go to test things. Tried and true service journalism. Absolutely. Committed. And we're also independent, which that means we don't let companies pay us to review their products, and we don't take freebies. Our recommendations are based only on what we really believe is the best stuff. It's a really fun place to work, and I'm excited to introduce listeners here to the amazing people I work with, like Kyra.

1:18:30Hi. Kyra, who are you? So I'm a writer, and I cover all things sleep, and I test mattresses. People find it hilarious because I get to say that I sleep for a living. And I've probably tested about 100 mattresses at this point for work. I've been at Wirecutter for four years, but Christine here has actually been here longer than me. That's right. I'm OG. I've been here 11 years, nearly since the site was started, and I'm an editor. How about you, Rosie? Who am I? Yeah, who are you? I'm the show's executive producer, and I'm kind of going to be your producer's sidekick here to pose the questions that, you know, us normies have.

1:19:10Well, we're so happy to have you here. Aw, thanks, Kyra. So to that end, why are we all here? Let's tell the people. I mean, what are we doing on this show? What's the plan? Look, we get tons of questions from people about problems they encounter or things that they're just trying to hack or solve. And our staff has a lot of expertise to share. Right. So we want to bring all of that to audio every week. We're going to sit down with a Wirecutter journalist and talk through a topic that we think people could use some advice on. We'll give product recommendations like we always do on the site, but this is going to be a lot more than that.

1:19:44We're going to talk through solutions, ideas, hacks, and ways that you can really make your life better. And sometimes we'll even invite outside experts to come on. I love it. And that's why I think today's episode is so good to start with, because it's a problem that we all have. But maybe we don't realize that we have, and I am talking about laundry. Why are you looking at me? No, you're right. I don't think I ever properly learned to do my laundry. I really hope my mom's not listening. Sorry, Mom! Sorry, Mom! Rosie, I'm going to make the confession that I, too, don't think that I know how to do my laundry.

1:20:21I'm in such good company. Yeah, I mean, I'm a lady. I'm a grown lady. You are a lady. Maybe that's why I don't know how to do my laundry, because I'm a lady. Yeah. And someone else should be doing it for me. Yes, yes. The issue with, like, the entire time as an adult, I feel like, is that I've just never really been able to figure out how to get stains out. And so all of my entire family is just always walking around with like something on their clothes. The whole process, I will say, is very intimidating, Kyra. It's a myth. Don't even ask me. I don't know. It's a myth. My mom taught me how to like separate lights from darks.

1:20:54And it's not the 1920s. I feel like we don't need to do that anymore. And that's where I'm at right now. That's a hot take. But there's a lot that I don't know. Yeah. And you know what? That's why I'm really glad we have our special guest today. Because we are Wirecutter, we do happen to have someone on staff whose entire job it is to think about laundry, test laundry solutions, and basically give great advice about laundry. Andrea Barnes is a staff writer and industry expert in all things laundry, and she's going to join us to tell us the best laundry products and how to use them properly. Can't wait.

1:21:29And so listeners know we're going to be dropping links to the guides and products we talk about in this episode and all our episodes right in the show notes. So if you hear us talk about something and want to know more, just head over there.

1:21:44Does Tide live up to the hype? Do we need to use hot water on our dirty clothes? Can anything get cooking oil stains out of my favorite T-shirt? We'll find out in just a minute.

1:22:10We're back with Andrea Barnes. Andrea is Wirecutter's premier expert on big home appliances like dishwashers and washing machines, but we're not even really going to focus on that today. All of her appliance testing has also led her to become our expert on all things laundry. She's written a ton of our most popular guides and articles in the category, like for detergent, washing your tennis shoes, washing things by hand, and stain removal. Hi, Andrea. Hi. It's nice to be here. Nice to see you. So Andrea does a ton of laundry and tests out different washers and dryers and obviously detergents. And the Wirecutter office is this just massive space in Long Island City.

1:22:51You know, there's like weird clothing hanging everywhere that's stained with like egg and lipstick and grass and obviously like lots of detergent all over the place on carts. And I don't know. It's like this weird Willy Wonka's chocolate factory of laundry over there. I want to know what you're doing because I feel really undereducated on the topic. But first, you're testing our laundry IQ today with a quiz so you can judge our baseline on how much or little we might know about what's coming up. It's really like how little we know. We're going to come in humble. Yes, I have a little true-false quiz for you.

1:23:25So question one, true or false, soda water is the best thing to remove a fresh red wine stain. True. I am going to, I was so enthusiastic about that. I love it. So somebody spilled red wine all over me at my wedding, and I was wearing a white wedding dress, and my mom's best friend, who's an amazing lawn dress, she, like, got it out with soda water. She swooped in and she was like, I got this. Yeah, she was like, we are doing this. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that that worked, but I would actually say false according to our testing. Oh, no. I'm sure that soda water can work, but we found that the best thing for fresh red wine stains is actually white wine.

1:24:03What? Oh, wow. So you pour white wine on top of the red wine? Exactly. And it just cancels out? It cancels it out. Well, I mean, I did drink a whole bottle of white wine after that person spilled the red wine on me, and the stain did come out, so it did kind of work. That always works. Radiably for different reasons.

1:24:22All right, question two. What do you got? True or false, a top load washer cleans better than a front load washer. True? No, it's false. Even though they use less water, actually a front load washer is way better at removing stains than a top load washer. Huh. It doesn't have that little thingy in the middle, though. I know. It's really confusing, but it's actually the friction that really makes the front load washer work. It's the friction, not the thingy. Well, who knew? Science. Okay, next. Okay, so you need fabric softener. True or false? False. You are correct. It is false. It's actually just fat that's usually added to the end of a cycle.

1:25:02Ew. Fat? What? Yeah, it's fat. We actually used to use it in college to condition our hair. Oh, my God. I wouldn't say do it now, but it worked really well. The olden times were wild. What? Like, can you just put some Crisco in there or something? I love it. Okay, so the last question. In order to get stains out, you need to wash with hot water. This has to be true. No, it's actually not. What if my cat puked on my bed? Especially cat puke should be washed with cold water. Stop it. Oh, my gosh. Really? Yes, because it has protein in it, and protein needs cold water to be washed out. Wait, so have I just been baking it deeper into my comforter?

1:25:36You may have. Did the smell go away when you did it? More you know, Kyra. I would like to think so, but who knows? I have so many, like, candles lit at all times. I mean, warm water will get it out and friction helps, but, you know, cold water is definitely more efficient. All right. Well, I think Andrea proved our point. We have some laundry tips and knowledge that we need to acquire ASAP. Yeah, I think that's about right. Okay, so let's get into it, Andrea. I want to start with getting a better sense of how you even test something like laundry detergent. Oh, that's a great question. You know, initially when we when I started designing the laundry detergent tests, the idea was to put common stains on T-shirts.

1:26:19I pulled the wire cutter writers and asked them, what are the worst stains you've had? What are the things that have been hardest to remove? And most of them are pretty typical, like lipstick, ink, cooking oil. And we stained all these shirts. we very quickly realized that it's actually very hard to recreate difficult stains. And that most of the stains that you recreate, especially because they're only sitting for a day or two before you wash them, almost everything was pretty easy to wash out. And so when you say recreate, are you taking a bottle of Heinz and just mushing it into some new T-shirt?

1:26:54Totally, exactly. Wow. And so with that in mind, I called one of my sources, who's a former washing machine developer from Whirlpool. And I asked him, what would you do in this situation? Because everything's cleaning out pretty easily. And he said, you've got to call Clorox and get their standardized test. And he described this swatch with 15 different stains on it that are all the same size. And Clorox, of course, was not going to give me that, right? But I did find the place that Clorox buys it from, which is a German company. that has a dealer in Pennsylvania. So to order these swatches, we actually have to email them and give them the credit card information and all this stuff.

1:27:40Like, we can't even do it online. It took forever. But this machine is awesome because it uses the exact same amount of whatever the stain material is, and it presses them down under thousands of pounds of pressure. So you have a standardized stain set. And the stains are pretty typical stains you encounter in daily life. So there's tea, there's mustard, there's something that's called beta carotene, which is more like a carrot or a sweet potato stain. Then there are some that you're not necessarily encountering every day. Like there's one that's used engine oil, which, you know, we joked about going to find a mechanic who would give us oil rags, but this seemed like a better solution.

1:28:21But the idea here is not to remove all of the stain. It's actually really just comparative data. What it does is it shows us how good a laundry detergent or stain remover is by how much stain they remove. So the idea really isn't to see a blank T-shirt or a blank piece of Jersey cotton at the end. It really is to see some stain left. I don't want to turn anybody's stomach, but I'm very, very curious because I think a comment, especially if you have kids, my kids fall and scrape their knees all the time. Blood? Oh, yeah. Yes. I'm afraid to ask. I became very good friends with the butchers at Paisano's on Smith Street in Brooklyn, where they sell both pork and beef blood for different recipes.

1:29:04And I bought, I think we probably, between laundry detergent testing and stain-reover testing, I think I probably bought six quarts of blood. Are you on some sort of list? Probably. I know. I've been wondering about that. Do they know what you want the blood for? I probably just think I'm making a recipe, but I think for testing, we left several T-shirts overnight for three or four days after being stained with blood. That was actually one of the best tests. Like, some things that could get those stains out were good detergents or good stain removers. Yeah, I'm just seeing, like, a Carrie scene at the office.

1:29:44Like, isn't that what they used? That movie actually was about a girl, I think, who was in training to become a detergent tester. That's a little known fact.

1:30:03Something like that I personally, I don't know about the rest of you, but I just use liquid detergent because it's what I buy and that's what I use. And I don't really do anything else. But from reading your work, it sounds like there is a difference between liquid and powder and when you want to use those. So can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. I mean, I think for most people, liquid detergent is probably the best choice. I mean, there are great products on the market, and most people are removing body oils from their clothing. And a lot of people aren't actually removing that many stains from their clothing.

1:30:36I mean, honestly, the water itself does a lot of the work too, right? If you have a job where you're outdoors a lot and you're working a lot with clay or mud or particulate soils is what they would be called, powder detergent is probably a better choice because powder detergent is going to work with those stains better because of the way it's formulated. And also if you just have a lot of stains in your clothes in general, powder detergent's a nice choice because most of them have oxygen bleach or some other sort of non-chlorine bleach built into them. So there's a little bit more stain removing power.

1:31:15And you can use those on all colored fabric? Yes. That's okay? Totally different than chlorine bleach, which is not safe to use on all sorts of fabrics. But oxygen bleach is, it's basically hydrogen peroxide. So you're going to want to test a small part of your clothing to make sure that it can withstand the oxygen bleach. But we have yet to run into something unless it's like a really poorly dyed item that can't be used with oxygen bleach. The most famous oxygen bleach is like OxyClean, right? Yes. And we tested it. We didn't love it in testing. OK. Wow. That guy was lying to me in all those infomercials.

1:31:49One of the great infomercials. Watch how OxyClean unleashes the power of oxygen, making tough stains disappear like magic. OxyClean didn't do great in testing because it takes a really long time to dissolve. It really needs hot water to dissolve. And it took a lot longer to remove stains than other detergents that we tested. Well, OxyClean's not a detergent, but we tested Tide Ultra Oxy, which is a powder Tide with oxygen bleach. And it did a much better job with removing things than OxyClean did. I think I read in one of your guides that, like, the thing that really picks up stains is this thing in it called enzymes.

1:32:29And that's what really, like, eats away at the stains. So you don't really need, like, bleach to get out of stain. No. For most stains, you don't need bleach. I say to use oxygen bleach when it's very specific kinds of stains. Like, basically anything that you would use as a natural dye if you were dyeing your own clothing. So like tea, coffee, fruits, things where the stain really changes the fabric versus just food stains, which are pretty topical and enzymes are really good at getting those. OK, so we can basically just throw out all of our chlorine bleach and we don't need it. No, not for your regular clothes.

1:33:06You don't need chlorine bleach, but it's still a good disinfectant. And oxygen bleach is for the stains that are really set in and kind of changing the color of the fabric, right? Like wine or something? Yes. Soaking in oxygen bleach will get the most stubborn stains out, and it's great for things like wine or tea or coffee that really do soak into the fabric and are very hard to get out. So when you say that those oxygen detergents are basically just hydrogen peroxide, I know there's always a DIY community in everything. When there's a product, there's a DIY product. But why can't you just make your own detergent?

1:33:41I mean, you could if you want to spend a lot of time making something that doesn't work as well. That's like a lot of DIY in general, right? Exactly.

1:33:55You were mentioning when we were talking earlier this phrase that is kind of a shorthand that's sometimes helpful. Is it something like like, likes, likes? Yes. What is this? It's a solvent term. Like, likes, like. So, for example, when you have an oil stain, liquid detergent works really well because the surfactants and liquid detergent behave as an oil, so they are better absorbed into oil stains. So, basically, the best way to look at it is that there's water stains and there's oil stains, right? The solvents that you want to use to get rid of those stains are going to be similar in property.

1:34:35So remember I said that if you're working around a lot of clay or dirt, powder detergent is better. That's why. It's similar, right? So they behave similarly and they absorb with each other better and combine better. So this is why my kids' like muddy, dirty clothing never gets back to like zero because it's just like I'm only using liquid. And so it's not picking up the dirt. Yeah. I mean, you can try pre-treating with a liquid detergent. I find that works really well, but you might just try powder detergent too. It might work. What exactly is the process of pretreating? So pretreating a stain is kind of how it sounds.

1:35:15You really are just putting the stain remover or the laundry detergent on the stain beforehand, and it's usually somewhere between five minutes to 20 minutes before you put it in the washing machine. Got it. For almost every stain, if you have laundry detergent on hand, you probably can just use that for pretreating. we recommend a different stain remover all-purpose stain remover for pre-treating called Amidex but that the reason we recommend that is because it removes other stains that laundry detergent is not always good at getting out so those two are actually makeup and permanent ink but otherwise I would say you can pre-treat with laundry detergent for most stains and then it is a good hack for laundry so I don't know if any of you have ever had like a marinara stain on your shirt and you don't pre-treat it, you throw it in the wash and then you come out.

1:36:04I've never done it. I've never not treated my stains. Not ever. Never have I forgotten. She's lying, Your Honor.

1:36:15Yeah. So, I mean, I will admit to you all that when we were doing laundry detergent testing and one of my sources told me to soak oil stains in warm water and liquid laundry detergent, I was able to get oil stains. You know those dark oil stains you get on colorful fabric? And it'll be like the same. It's just a slightly darker shade. I think my daughter's goal in life is to have every article of clothing have these stains. But I was able to get these stains that had been in three or four washes and dry cycles out from this soaking. So, you know, there are a lot of different things you can do for stain removal.

1:36:53Well, pre-treating is great, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're totally in trouble if you still have stains coming out of the wash later. Got it. So I've heard you mention Tide a couple times. Why, and I think both of the powdered detergent, which is which, what is that again, the one that we like? Tide Ultra Oxy. Tide Ultra Oxy. And then the liquid we like is Tide Free and Gentle. Gentle and free. Gentle and free. Why? Why? Why do we like Tide? Why is Tide such—I mean, like, we're not shilling for Tide. There is no Tide commercial on this podcast. So what's the deal? You know, it's interesting.

1:37:32I really went into testing wanting to not recommend Tide because I had a lot of misconceptions over being allergic to it. And then the more testing that I did and the more research I did, I learned that the ingredient that most people are allergic to in laundry detergent, it's called MI or MCI. It's a chemical preservative. and it's in even quote-unquote natural liquid detergents. Almost all of the ones we tested contain it. And what's interesting is that people perceive that that's what they're allergic to. One, almost all of it's rinsed off by your washing machine. But the other is that it's the same preservative as probably in your shampoo, your shower gel, anything that you're using that needs to be preserved.

1:38:15So that's actually probably what's causing your allergy. I mean, we talked to multiple dermatologists about this. So that said, we partly chose Tide Free and Gentle because it doesn't have that preservative. And so they had all this money and all this R &D to go into creating a laundry detergent that lacks these allergens. It was the combination that had hypoallergenic detergent with the fact that it removed stains so well that made it go out on top. So in the end, Tide just kept—they're doing something really good there. Right. I mean, they have a big budget, right? Yes. They have a big budget to spend on R &D, which is something that we kind of find across categories at Wirecutter that, like, we're kind of sometimes surprised.

1:38:55Yeah. The big companies do come out ahead because they just have so much money. I'm kind of relieved when, like, the big names are actually doing something right because then you can get it anywhere. Like, if you run out, you don't— It's very accessible. Liking niche stuff sucks. It's so true.

1:39:12Okay, so Wirecutter recommends Tide-free and gentle liquid detergent for most laundry. For really stained stuff, dirt stained stuff, Wirecutter recommends Tide Ultra Oxy. And I trust these recommendations, frankly, based off all of the blood testing and stuff we discussed. Ooh, yes. You know what? I think we're learning. We're doing good, guys. Okay, but I do have some like graduate level questions I need to just throw in here. Like about dry cleaning and pods and just more questions about stains. And how to make eco-friendly choices at the laundromat. But first, a break.

1:40:07Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. Today, we're getting a masterclass in laundry tips from Andrea Barnes. Andrea is Wirecutter's staff writer on large appliances and all things laundry. So, so far we've covered some detergent basics, but now we're going to get into some of the nitty-gritty details, literally. Okay, so what if you have really nice or vintage items like cashmere or silk? Do you have to get those dry cleaned? It's really going to depend on the item, but I would say the vast majority of the time, no. First of all, you most likely can use regular detergent, Tide Free and Gentle, on a lot of your dry clean only items if you use a mesh bag and a gentle cycle.

1:40:49I wouldn't do this with something that you really love, but there are a few other options. We recommend a hand wash detergent called Soak, which is really great. And what you can do is actually hand wash your garment and you soak the garment with this detergent, which is called soak, and that's confusing. And it's a no-rinse detergent, so you don't have to handle the clothing for that long, right? So you submerge it for 15 minutes and then you just take the item out and press the water out and it's ready to go. The detergent evaporates really quickly. Wait, and so you don't have to rinse it. So, like, what if you have allergies?

1:41:28Like, isn't there something on it that will? So, that's a great question. The preservative we talked about earlier is not in this hand wash detergent, which is good. And then we interviewed the owner of the detergent company, and they did third-party testing that showed less than, like, 0.00005 % of the residue is left on the— because you also use a tiny amount. Like, we're talking maybe two teaspoons for several gallons. So there's not much left to begin with. I would say that that's ideal for, you know, if you have a cashmere sweater that you've worn a bunch of times and it hasn't really been stained, but you want it freshened up, that would be a great option.

1:42:10If it's something that's really, you got stains all over it or you bought a vintage item as is, what we learned is that the best thing to do is to use pure sodium percarbonate, which is oxygen bleach, and soak for hours. So in that case, we wouldn't use something like Tide because there's builders and fillers in it that you won't necessarily want on your clothing. But pure sodium percarbonate is great for soaking your vintage items. And the product we really like for that in testing is called Restoration. And it's pure oxygen bleach. There's nothing else in it. So OxyClean has fragrance and other fillers in addition to oxygen bleach.

1:42:50And this is just oxygen bleach. How do you test these? How are you testing these vintage? So for this, we did an—I'm not going to give you my keyword search. But— To be honest with you, I don't think I want a keyword search. But I looked for items on eBay that are stained. And we ordered a lot of used linens that looked like they had no hope left. And the craziest part, so we got this huge duvet bag filled with tablecloths and napkins and linens. And they had stains. But the best part slash worst part was that we realized when we opened the bag, when we unzipped it, that the person was definitely a smoker.

1:43:34and it smelled like stale, like cigarettes, like really, yeah. Not a lot of competing bids. They sent it in 20 seconds after we ordered it. They were like, it's at your door, check outside. We were praying you would buy this. So we found this and it was all delicates, like lace and linen. Again, I called a source. This time I called our source, Miki Evans, who's amazing, and she is the assistant wardrobe supervisor at The Notebook, the musical on Broadway. Amazing. And yeah, she's great. And she told me about Restoration, this oxygen bleach product that you can buy for soaking vintage items. So we tried it against, I think, six or seven other oxygen bleaches and this one was by far the best one and we felt because it had no fillers was what I would call the least risky one.

1:44:29Did it take out the cigarette smell? It did. It did. Yeah. And we tested a bunch of hand-washed detergents with this lot of smoky linens. And there were definitely some that did not take the stink out. Was that your keyword search? Smoky linens. Smoky linens. Stinky linens. Sounds like an eyeshadow color. Smoky linens. Yeah. So one thing we actually haven't gotten into is laundry pods. Oh, yeah. We got to talk about laundry pods. We got to talk about the pods. So, Andrea, what's the deal with laundry pods? I initially didn't really want to recommend pods because you can't pre-treat with them. It's so concentrated that it actually doesn't absorb well into stains for pre-treating.

1:45:15So you have to add water and you're dealing with pod films. So all these things make it like not a great choice, in my opinion, for pre-treating. But when we started having paid testers come to the office, and let me just interject. Paid testers are people who are not on our staff that we bring in to test with us. And basically, they're folks who have like a variety of different abilities and body types. And we like to bring them in and get their feedback to get a wider diversity of opinions about the products we're testing. Yes. And some of whom have limited mobility and limited grip strength.

1:45:52I observed very quickly that pods were absolutely 100 % the best option for them when operating either washing machines or dishwashers. And so it made sense to me to make a recommendation for that. Yeah, that does make sense. I actually had a little revelation because I don't have washer or dryer in my unit, but my partner does. And whenever I go over there, it's like I've never done laundry ever in my life. I will just toss a pod in the little compartment that they have in those washer machines. but I've learned recently that you're not supposed to do that. Why is that? It totally depends on the washing machine.

1:46:28But the way the dispenser works is that water goes through the whole thing. And if it's not a very strong stream, it can be very hard for the pod to dissolve. Basically, you need the water to be strong enough to pierce the pod and start everything moving. Got it. Yeah. All right. Doing it wrong. Okay. You talked a little bit earlier about temperature. and you told us earlier that you're actually supposed to be using cold water. But is there any time that you should be using warm water or hot water? I would say hot water only if you're sanitizing something. Like if you had sheets from someone who was sick or if you had— The kids are about to potty train, for instance.

1:47:08Well, see, now, pee stains I would say you could do in cold water because urine is pretty sterile. But like a virus or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I would say hot water is appropriate then. But, you know, one thing people always think, they see blood and they assume, oh, I should wash it in hot water. And that's actually a great way to stain your clothing more. You absolutely need cold water for removing blood. Oil stains need warm water. To kind of melt the fat. Yeah, exactly. Well, the warm water emulsifies it, right? Yeah, and lifts it. What about, like, preserving? I mean, I know because I wash a lot of fabric to sew with, and I know that, like, I sometimes wash stuff in hot water, but I'm wondering, does that do anything to the color long term if you do wash in warm or hot water?

1:47:53Warm and hot water can definitely degrade and fade dyes faster. Since I've switched to doing cold water washing, I don't see fading on my clothing in the same way that I did before. What about odor? I know that you're saying pee is okay, even blood is okay, but I just feel like the warm water will take away that smell. Is that totally wrong? No, that's not wrong, and that's why we recommend what we do, because the liquid detergents we recommend removed odor even in cold water. I see. How do you do the odor testing? Well, first of all, my informal odor removal testing is having a teenage son. Oh, yeah.

1:48:32That'll do it. But formally what we did is we burned bacon and used burned bacon grease, which really smells, like really smells terrible. And we stained T-shirts with it and then had a panel of people decide which ones removed the most and which ones smelled the worst. And in testing, the picks we made all removed that odor really well, if not entirely. Okay, now that we have fully graduated, we almost are at PhD level here with stain fighting. Andrea, I'm curious, you know, if somebody's just really concerned about the environmental impacts of what they're doing in their home and they want to make better choices about their laundry, like, what are the things that they should be doing?

1:49:23That's great. The number one thing I would say to anyone is to wash in cold water when you can. Cold water is just a better choice in terms of energy efficiency. So washing machines have internal heaters that warm the water. And when you wash in hot water, almost all of the energy that's being used in that wash cycle is to heat the water. So when you wash in cold water, you don't use that energy. So that's probably the best thing you can do. I would say air dry when you can. So get a drying rack. Pre-treat stains so that clothing lasts longer. And I would use less detergent. When you say less detergent, how much do you mean?

1:50:08You know, this is, it's interesting. This is a tough question because now so many laundry detergent companies are coming out with hyper-concentrated detergent. But I would say two tablespoons. For like a big load? If it's not heavily stained, yes. You know how they give you those caps with the little measuring thing on top and it's like literally a cup? Yeah. In college, I think I was putting two, two and a half cups. Why is my clothing slimy? Oh, yeah, that is what it would be, huh? Yeah. Yeah, you'll get residue and you just don't need that much. It's just unnecessary. And that is how you get allergies because it'll be right up against your skin.

1:50:47Laundry detergent sheets. No. Okay. They didn't clean well. You might as well just wash with water. Got it. Waste. OK, but what I'm taking from this is that essentially the best things that you can do from a sustainability lens are also kind of just what's good for your laundry in general. It's going to be the stuff that, you know, gets stains out the best. It's the stuff that will keep your clothing nice for longer. And so it's all kind of it kind of it's like what's good for your laundry is good for the environment, too, in that way. Yes, I would agree with that. And that detergent is the Swiss Army knife.

1:51:22Detergent for everything. Use it for everything. Cold water.

1:51:33Andrea, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming. Before we go, we've got one more question, and we're going to ask this of all of our guests. What's one thing that you've recently bought that you really love? It has nothing to do with laundry, but I... She has other interests, guys. No, you're breaking my heart. I bought my husband the Grill Rescue grill brush that's recommended by our kitchen team. And he really loves this grill brush. And because he loves it, I would say it's the coolest thing I've bought recently. Aw, that's really nice. If you like it, I love it. Andrea, thank you so much.

1:52:14This has been so great. Thank you so much for having me.

1:52:23Guys, I feel like there are so many takeaways from this segment. I, for one, am going to go on the hunt for some powdered detergent. Oh, yeah. I actually ordered some on Amazon.com because that's where... Can you repeat that? Amazon.com. I think it's the only place that I could find it. I thought they only sold books. No, that's great. Okay, cool, cool. I think my takeaway was washing cold because apparently I've been baking my cat's puke directly into my bedding. Yeah, I'm just going to win that argument with my husband because he's been doing that. So that's a win. But to that point, I also think like you don't need to hunt around for like eco-friendly detergents necessarily if you're trying to be more, you know, earth friendly.

1:53:07It's really just like energy is kind of the biggest environmental impact. So washing in cold also solves that. Totally. And then like you don't have to go out and hunt for a fancy pretreatment like your laundry detergent that you already have will do just fine. Use what you got. Wash cold. Yeah. That's right. I think that like you really can just get like two detergents essentially, a liquid and a powder, and you're probably like 95 percent of the way there. Perfect. Andrea was a star. She was amazing. I really hope that I can apply this, you know, when I have a machine in my apartment again. I really hope I can get the dirt stains out of my kids' clothes finally.

1:53:42Godspeed, my friends. And that's it for us this week. If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage on laundry detergent or snag the products we recommended today, go to nytimes.com backslash Wirecutter or find a link in the show notes.

1:54:02So if you like the Wirecutter show, which we all hope you do, right? I think people are actually going to listen to this. I hope so. I hope people are listening right now. And if they're listening, maybe they'll follow us. Yeah. Or leave a review, a hopefully nice one. We'll always read the reviews. Even if it's mean, I guess. It also helps other people find the show. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Thank you for listening either way. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Kiel. Editing by Abigail Kiel. Engineering support from Maddie Maciello and Nick Pittman.

1:54:37Today's episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alisha Baitoup, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher and interim general manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. Special thanks to Anil Chithrapu, Paula Schumann, Nina Lassam, Somi Hubbard, Jen Poyant, Jeffrey Miranda, Sam Dahlnick, Julia Bush, and Katie Quinn. Can we rotate who scats each week? Oh, my God.

1:55:18Rosie, you won.