Searching for the perfect minimalist smartphone

26:50Yeah, that's like where we've just like invented the whole premise of AI on phones. Where it's like, yeah, abstract all that away. The chatbot will just take care of it for you. But the reality right now is you ask it to do a math equation instead of having a calculator. Right. Rolling the dice, whether you're going to get the right answer or not. That is true. Maybe when we do this exercise in like four or five years, it'll be really different. But right now, the idea of replacing my calculator app with Claude seems terrifying. Yeah, I know. But I do think you're right. Like, spiritually, they're a perfect fit.

27:27This idea of, like, now I have a device that I don't have to look at all day. And so it can actually, like, be redesigned around the fact that I don't have to look at it all day. And I can just talk to it and it does things for me. Sounds awesome. Super duper doesn't work. So somewhere the founders of Humane are just screaming into the void. They're like, we wanted this. They're like, if it had worked, we'd still be here. I know. Yeah. Didn't work. Nope. All right. So we're not allowing that. TikTok, I assume is just a no. We're out on TikTok. No TikTok. No, can't have it. Okay. CapCut for making videos.

28:04No, I vote no. But I think like maybe some kind of system where if you record a video with your minimalist phone, it can go somewhere. You could make it. But I don't know. As soon as you have that knowledge of like, oh, I should record this. It could be a TikTok. It changes your whole like M.O. when you're out and about because I'm constantly like, I should take a picture of that. It'd be funny on Instagram or whatever. And maybe we want to get away with that, away from it. I vote no. No. Okay. I think I'm out too. And I think there's definitely a sort of line in the sand here somewhere where it's like, if this activity on your phone is going to take you longer than X amount of time, it's a computer task or an iPad task or like when you get home task or whatever.

28:52And I think that is like, that's one of the things the light folks have really tried to figure out is like, how long can we make you use this device before actually we're just defeating the whole purpose? And the answer is go use the device that you bought to do things with. Right. Yeah. And I think there's something in there. And I think CapCut, you're probably right. Like if you want to spend an hour editing a video, you shouldn't do that on our minimalist phone. Yeah, exactly. You should do it on an iPhone. iPhones will continue to exist until our company takes over the world with minimalist smartphones.

29:20Yeah. All right. I have a few more. Then I'm going to let you out of this horrible exercise. Instagram, I think, is a no. Right. We're out on Instagram. The messaging thing is a little tough, but we'll live. Yeah. Look at your memes somewhere else. uh duolingo oh man i do need my duolingo duolingo is both like incredibly problematic because it's all about streaks and it pesters you all the time and it is like designed to be addictive but it is also in a certain way like good for you yeah oh man that's a tough one it's another yeah because like feasibly i could go through a whole day with this phone like it feels like a phone I should be able to go through a whole day with.

30:02And if I have to use a straight phrase because I was using my minimalist phone, I'll be pissed. Yeah, I feel like there should be some access to Duolingo, but maybe it can't bother me. Oh, that's OK. That's a good one. Duolingo, but no. Well, I think this phone in general does not allow push notifications. Yeah. Yeah. Except no, no push notifications. It can alert you when someone is calling you on the phone. And I think that's the only notification allowed. Yes, agreed. Okay. Yeah, Duolingo, I think, might actually be like the perfect summation of why this is such a hard problem to solve, because it is both like, it is so problematic in so many ways.

30:41But like you just said, it is it's it is like a core part of many people's day to day lives and not having it becomes a total nonstarter. Yeah. Which again, a kudos to Duolingo for pulling that off with a language learning app. Good God. But it is it is a strange thing. Yeah. All right. YouTube. I think we're definitely not allowing YouTube. No YouTube. I think we just don't want you watching videos on this phone. Like, I think that's fine. Yeah. Read an article. Or just like, don't look at your phone. Right. That's fine, too. I'm envisioning myself like I'm trying to fix something in my house on my own, which was a bad idea to start with.

31:18But then I'm like, I need to find the YouTube video of however you do this. But if I'm in my house, I can go on a computer. I'm not like out in the world trying to fix, like put up a shelf on someone's wall. Well, we're also allowing the terrible web browser. So it'll play. Yeah. It'll play the YouTube video. It'll look bad. Yes. And maybe it only plays it like eight frames per second. But it. Yeah. In a pinch, it works. So I think I think that is a workaround I don't love, but I can live with. OK. Yeah, me too. But I definitely don't think we have a YouTube app. No. That violates all of our rules.

31:52Yeah. Okay. And I think Netflix, same thing. No Netflix. No Netflix. You have plenty of other places to watch Netflix. Don't do it on your phone. Yeah, watch a TV. Right. Some kind of file storage app. Dropbox, Google Drive. Pick your favorite. Oh, man. I'm just thinking about how annoying the iPhone is to deal with as soon as you need to get a file off of it. That's true. And it feels like we fought so hard just to have a files app on the iPhone. I don't want to not have it. But maybe you can like sync stuff to Google Drive if you have to. Does that make sense? Okay. So you can't like access your Google Drive, but you can send something to Google Drive.

32:31I'm good with that. We can do that with the API. Okay. Yeah. Like you hit a backup button and it goes straight to Google Drive, but you can't see all the files in your Google Drive. Yeah. All right. I'm good with that. I can work with that. Uber slash Lyft. it could be the web browser thing but i actually think you need something with like real phone level access that's like an app that is always on that can do the you know really fine location stuff this is one of those that i'm like i i don't actually use uber and lyft all that often in my day-to-day but the idea of not having it as an option feels like a problem so i think i I think I would need it.

33:15I would too. Yeah. It's like a lifeline where I'm like, well, if everything goes south here, I'll call an Uber. Right. And it is a tool you expect to have available to you. And they have a bunch of weird workarounds. Like, I think you can call on the phone and get an Uber. Oh, that's cute. And they have some of the, like, chatbot integration stuff. But I think we need the Uber app. I'm okay with that. Yeah. And that's also not really an app you, like, hang out in anyway. No. So I'm not super bothered by it. If they like gamify the Uber app, I'll be so annoyed. You know they want to. Somebody in there is like, how do we Duolingo the Uber app?

33:51Oh, I had to use a streak phrase on my Uber app. Yeah, nightmare. Dara, if you're listening, that's not a good idea. Don't do that. Please don't do it. All right, I got two more. Slack slash Teams feels like if we're not allowing email, we cannot allow Slack and Teams. No, get out of here. slacking teams. Okay, good. I'm glad we're on the same team. Last one, Venmo slash cash app slash some way to send money. Does this matter? Do we need this? You can web browser that, right? I'm trying to think of like, I went to a thing this weekend where we like painted these little figurines. It was like called Art Club and we paid through Venmo.

34:37I'm like, I'd want to be able to do that. But yeah, you have the camera. You scan the thing. You log in. I say web browser for this one. Okay. Yeah, and that's one you can kind of work around a crappy experience. Yeah. Do we have tap to pay, though? Oh. Because I want that. I didn't even have that on the list, but I think we need to. But then you have a whole, do you have a wallet? And then, do you have the Capital One app? I don't know. You just eventually end up recreating the Pixel. Like there just is no way to do this without accidentally making a pixel. Yep. It's true. But no, you need tap to pay.

35:16I think you need tap to pay. Crap. Yeah. Okay, here's our tap to pay rule. One credit card. Yeah, you got to pick. You pick one. You can have a transit cards, whatever, but you get one credit card. Yeah. That feels necessary. Because otherwise, you end up down too many weird rabbit holes. Right. And you can like log on to our like web portal on your computer to upload your credit card credentials or something, you know, encrypted, blah, blah, blah. It'll be great. Our security is top notch on this platform. Yeah. Don't even worry about that. We've got it covered. All right. Well, that's my whole list.

35:59Is there anything else? I forgot if we're building our perfect minimalist smartphone, anything else we desperately need that we don't have. We're doing like alarms and stuff, right? That's just like baked into a... Yeah, that like the thing shows the time. So it has to kind of do alarms and timers. Like, I feel good about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think I could live. I could get through a day with this phone and it wouldn't give me a panic attack too much. Is it weird that that actually feels like the bar? I'm good with that. I think it's been a really interesting thing because I think like talking to all the folks who make these minimalist phones, they're basically trying to figure out how to make a phone that is so different from all the other things that it doesn't just seem like a worse version of your phone.

36:46But actually, maybe what we need is just a worse version of our phones. I keep coming back to like a cellular smartwatch is the minimalist phone. And like you put in some earbuds, you've got your little like crappy phone on your wrist, you're good to go. And then when you, you know, you can just leave the house without the thing. The only thing is, you know, you don't have the camera. You know, it kind of breaks down pretty quickly to where like maybe there is room for a thing that's like phone shaped. But yeah, I think for me, that's where I keep getting into this loop with the minimalist phone is like, well, it's going to be missing this or that.

37:30That's on the watch that I usually have on anyway. why wouldn't I just use the watch if I wanted a break from my phone? There have been all these rumors about an Apple Watch with a camera being kind of in the labs in Cupertino right now. And I have gone from thinking that is an absurd, ridiculous idea to being like, maybe that's actually the only thing between me and being able to use just my watch for really long stretches of time. Yeah. But how do you take a picture of that? Do you do like one of these? Yeah. Say cheese. Yeah. Maybe this is just the just have a camera on you moment. Like maybe we invented this thing, actually.

38:16It used to not be part of it's like paper apps. Like, yeah, we do just have paper. That exists. Yeah. We're pretty we're pretty good at paper now. It turns out. Yeah. All right. Well, Allison, thank you for doing this with me. If we missed anything, if there's something on your list that you're screaming about that you need in your minimal smartphone, tell us. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. Allison, thank you very much. This is super fun. Thank you. This is great. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk Tesla.

38:50We're going to talk tariffs and we're going to talk about what in the world is happening with cars. We'll be right back.

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42:16All right, we're back. Andy Hawkins is here. Hi, Andy. Hi. How are things? Things are good. You know, we're out here. We're watching these protests, these Tesla protests. I assume that's what I'm here to talk about now. In large part, I think I have, I just galaxy brain myself into many corners with all this Tesla stuff. So we're going to do a little bit of that. But let's start with the protests this week, because this weekend was, it was a big moment in the sort of official Tesla takedown universe of protests. Like what, just sort of walk me through what happened this week. Yeah. So these protests, they started, I guess you could say, two months ago, early February, I think is when we started seeing some of the first ones.

42:59People sort of showing up outside of Tesla showrooms and at charging stations and registering their opposition to Elon Musk and to Doge and to the sort of ransacking of the federal government. and they grew over time. And we started to see larger and larger crowds in cities all across the country. And then eventually they decided they needed to get organized. And I think that was sort of like the most interesting thing to me was this was very much a bottom-up grassroots effort. Very much, there was not really sort of any like national leader to these protests. And they sort of realized that that was not really sort of a tenable situation.

43:40They needed to get organized. So they sort of got together. There's been some various kind of, you know, pro-democracy, left-leaning progressive groups that have been sort of like involved on the margins, Indivisible and a few others. And so they decided to get together and sort of hold a mobilizing effort and targeting this one date, March 29th, which was last Saturday, as sort of their global day of action. They were just like, everybody needs to come out. We need to hit every Tesla location in the country. Let's hit some in Europe as well, in Canada. and really have like a show of force to sort of like send the message that this is like a sustained protest, an effort to really, you know, send the message that Elon Musk and Doge are on their hit list, I guess you could say.

44:24So Saturday was the day we sent reporters out to as many of these protests as we possibly could. I think we hit almost a dozen of them in London and in New York and New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Florida, Texas, California. Yeah, and what we saw was sort of like what we've been seeing for the last few months now, which is a lot of clever signs, a lot of allusions to fascism and to Nazism and to photographs of Musk making his fascist salute at the inauguration. And I think an effort, largely, overall, the broader effort was to sort of toxify the Tesla brand and to drive their sales down, which was something that we heard from talking to these protesters.

45:13Right. And it seems like I think in an effort to make this a moment, the movement seems to have succeeded. Right. Like, I feel like I saw coverage of this everywhere, that if the goal was to pick a moment to make this a big story, this sort of loose collection of protests, it seems to have worked. Yeah, I mean, they've gotten the attention of the targets of the protests, right? Like Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both come out and made several statements about not just the protests necessarily. They've been focusing more on the violent acts and the vandalism, which is understandable from their position that that's what they would be focused on.

45:56But what we definitely heard from the protesters was that this was a peaceful movement. This was a nonviolent movement. They do not condone any of the of the vandalism and the arson that's taken place. They see that as something that's separate to their movement. But obviously, I would say on the Musk and the Trump side, there's an effort to tie those things together. And so, you know, that's where we got Trump talking about charges of domestic terrorism. Although we have yet to see anyone be charged with domestic terrorism, yet there have been arrests of people who have been charged with setting fires and defacing Tesla property.

46:29but none of these actual terrorism charges quite yet that may be difficult to actually accomplish and then you had musk on on fox last week talking about you know going after people who are pushing tesla propaganda he said uh so it's clear that they have their attention and i think that that is uh it's been galvanizing for the protesters i think that they feel that they're succeeding because they have musk's attention well and it's been really interesting to watch the folks engaged in these protests try to explain what it is that they're protesting. Because on the one hand, this is all pointed at Tesla, right?

47:06They're going to Tesla showrooms, they're going to Tesla buildings and protesting Tesla. It's called Tesla takedown. Like that is the thing that they're doing. But it's not about Tesla. This is like very specifically pointed at Elon Musk. And I think, A, to some extent, that has worked, right? Like you mentioned the Fox News interview he did, and he basically goes on TV and is like sort of weepily saying my businesses are struggling. Like that, I assume that's what these protesters are after, right? Like that is the goal is you want him to feel it at the end of the process. But I do continue to wonder, is pointing all of this energy at Tesla the right way to get to Elon Musk?

47:43Does that seem like it is working for these protesters? Because they're not mad at Tesla nearly in the same way that they're mad at the guy who runs Tesla, right? Or am I overstating the Elon Musk? No, no, I don't. No, I think you're right about that. They are mad at Elon Musk. And I think the understanding is that Tesla is sort of the unfortunate byproduct of what they have to do, right? Because his wealth and his power are very much linked to Tesla. His ownership of around 13 % of Tesla stock is sort of what comprises the bulk of his net worth. And it's what he had to sell Tesla stock in order to fund the purchase of Twitter.

48:20That's sort of how he leverages his power is through his ownership stake in Tesla. And so, yes, Tesla is sort of just what they have to focus on, right? This is a boycott. It's an effort to drive sales down, to convince people to sell their Teslas, to make the used market of Tesla sort of chaotic and ultimately to affect his ownership and his net worth of the company. I don't think any of the folks that you would encounter out there at these protests would say that they are opposed to the idea of electric cars or the furtherance of electric car sales. And you see some people with signs that say, we don't – we like electric cars.

48:58We just don't like Tesla, right? And so that is sort of the ultimate mission here. It's not to, I think, to sink the electric car market. But in some ways, obviously, Tesla is a huge chunk of the electric car market. But it is specifically about making the Tesla stock price go down and making Elon Musk's net worth and thus his political power diminished. I mean, that's the piece of the sort of cognitive dissonance of all of this that just continues to blow my mind. Like, my overarching assumption would be that the people protesting outside of Tesla showrooms this weekend were the exact same demographic of people who may have been the optimal Tesla buyer 10 years ago.

49:42like and the and the cars have not changed right like it's it's just the what they mean in the world has done a like a full 180 to the point where like the people who used to walk in and spend money are now protesting outside of the building and it is like if you want a story of what has happened to american society in 10 years like there it is man it's just bizarre yeah it's crazy and they'll point to they'll say you know uh we we would have been fully in support of Tesla's mission, right? Like Tesla's mission for a long time was to further the mission of new energy, clean energy, renewable energy.

50:17You know, Musk for a long time talked about, you know, electric cars and battery storage and all of these things as a way to save the world. And I think a lot of those people would have ascribed to that mission. But, you know, their argument would be, you know, he changed first, right? He was the one that got red pilled and bought into all of these Twitter conspiracies and moved to the right and ultimately endorsed Donald Trump and funded his campaign and is now heading this effort to slash the federal government and fire workers and cancel humanitarian aid. So I think a lot of these folks would say, you know, it wasn't wasn't us that changed.

50:49We liked Tesla. We liked our cars. But, you know, it's it's him that changed. Now we have to sort of like respond to that. So, yeah, it is it is an incredibly cognitively dissonant moment, I think, ultimately. And I think a lot of these protesters would would fully admit to that as well. Yeah, it's just strange that it ended up like this. So what is the sort of metric we're looking at to see if this is working? Obviously, you can look at Tesla stock price. I will just say candidly, my increasing belief is that stock prices have nothing to do with anything or completely divorced from reality, especially when it comes to things like Tesla, which have been about other things for a long time.

51:28But if you're looking at sort of what is, is this working or is it not? Which direction is Tesla headed? What do we look at? Yeah. So I think this week, especially, we're going to get some new data that's going to, I think, tell a lot about what's been going on in the sort of the present moment. We've already seen signs of it, right? At the beginning of the year, we saw Tesla report that it had flat sales for the year and that its deliveries were actually going down. And then in the last few months, we started getting some regional data from Europe and from China about how its sales had dropped.

52:01I think in Europe over the last two months, sales were down 45 % year over year. In some markets, even more. I think Germany was down like over 70 % year over year. And now we're going to see the first quarter sales data be reported on Wednesday. Even a lot of the Tesla optimists and the bulls out there are expecting it's going to be a rough number for Tesla. They're assuming that it could be down by as much as 9 % to 10 % year over year in terms of the number of vehicles that it produced, but also the ones that it's delivered, which is basically a proxy for sales. So that's going to be the thing that people are really going to be zeroed in on.

52:41It doesn't sound like even Tesla is really optimistic about this delivery report this week. So that should be sort of a real clear signal about how bad this brand image that Tesla has at the moment. But the the like get rid of Elon Musk energy does seem to be increasing. I don't think it's remotely realistic. Correct me if I'm wrong. But the the number of people with some influence who are starting to say things like Tesla needs a CEO who is not Elon Musk, that that noise seems to be getting louder. Is there any substance behind any of that as far as you can tell? Yeah, it still seems to be pretty much on the fringe as far as I can tell.

53:17You've got investors like Ross Gerber who have been sort of like must skeptics for a long time, saying that he thinks that there needs to be a change at the top. Obviously, he owns some Tesla stock. But I wouldn't say that it's anything significant to point to, I think, larger problems within the company. And certainly, the board itself hasn't said anything. I think Robin Denholm, who's the board chair, was in Australia like a week ago. and a lot of reporters tried to sort of, you know, get her, corner her and ask her about Tesla and she just refused to say anything about it. So, you know, the board is still seen as being sort of completely beholden to Musk.

53:55I mean, his brother's on the board, James Murdoch's on the board, you know, it's not, I wouldn't say it's a Tesla takedown friendly situation. But, you know, and there's still like a lot of people who are saying, you know, like, if you're someone who's optimistic about Tesla's future, don't worry about the current moment. You know, we've got, there's lots of things to look at at the horizon. There's a new refreshed Model Y that's going to be coming down the pipe. That's Tesla's best-selling vehicle, was the best-selling vehicle in the world. And there's a refreshed model that's going to be coming soon.

54:26And then obviously there's Tesla's claims about AI and robotics and other things that have been sort of the bulk of what people have been using as sort of justification for the insane values that Tesla has been enjoying over the years. So it does seem like there needs to be more pieces connected, more dots connected before we start to say that Musk is truly in trouble, which I would say he's not at the moment. Okay. It makes me think of like the meta situation where at every shareholder meeting, somebody is like, fire Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark says, no, thank you. And then everybody moves on. Exactly.

54:57That's essentially where we are. Yes. To your point on like the Model Y and the AI stuff and, you know, Musk talks about the cyber cab and like there is a lot of stuff in some version of the pipeline at Tesla. But I continue to find myself wondering, like, has this company and I'm purely just talking like as a financial animal for Elon Musk's net worth, because I think you have to talk about them as two different things, right? Like there's the car company and there's the stock price and they are like totally different things. does any of that matter anymore? Like part of me wonders now if the idea of Tesla is so politicized and so directly tied to Elon Musk himself that nobody cares about the Model Y anymore.

55:39I don't, like if the Model Y comes out and it is amazing is it going to change one person's mind about whether or not they should buy a Tesla right now? I just have a hard time seeing it. Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that, you know, there's some arguments that can be made that Tesla's brand is pretty thoroughly toxic at the moment but it's not clear as to how many people take politics into account when they're out buying a vehicle. That's fair. If Tesla is able to actually come out with an even lower-cost model, which they've said that they plan on doing at some point this year, we're not sure exactly how lower-cost that's going to be.

56:11Is that going to be the long-rumored$25 ,000 Model 2 that's been talked about? Although I think it's being called the Model Q now, so don't quote me on either of those things. But if they're able to actually achieve this, I think would be a very significant achievement for the company, which is an actual lower cost electric vehicle, some sort of like stripped to the bones Model 3 and beat all of the other legacy OEMs that are out there. I think you could make the argument that Tesla could see a significant bounce back. And then there's another thing that I sort of been thinking about in the back of my head, which was, do you remember the delete Uber movement?

56:51during the first Trump administration when there was a boycott at the JFK airport over like deportations. And I don't even remember like the specifics, but like Uber wasn't boycotting airport pickups in the same way that like taxi drivers were. And so everybody got mad at Uber. Plus like Travis Kalanick was gonna be on a board on some sort of CEO panel with Trump. Everyone got mad at Uber. And so there was this hashtag delete Uber moment. Everyone's like, delete Uber, get rid of Uber. You know, we don't need this company anymore. that petered out after like a couple months. And as far as I can tell, Uber's fine right now.

57:26It's profitable. Like it's doing well. Like these things like tend to like happen in, you know, fits and starts. And it's not clear to me. Like I'm sure the Tesla takedown people will say, you know, this is, we're here to stay. We're here to make, you know, Elon Musk's, you know, life a living hell. And they certainly, it's been working. And it's a very different situation than the delete Uber situation in many ways. Like, Musk is way more entrenched and embedded in the Trump administration now than Uber ever was. Yeah, this will be an interesting test of, like, humanity's ability to move through news cycles, right?

58:00Because it is generally true in modern times that if you're in trouble, all you have to do is wait. And eventually everyone will move on to something else. And the lesson learned is, like, don't apologize. Just wait. And eventually everyone's attention will disappear. here. This feels like maybe the most extreme test we've ever had of that exact. I mean, I would argue that the Trump, there's the Trump example, right? Like there was January 6th in an actual insurrection. And like Trump was supposed to be like, you know, uh, banished to the wilderness after all that happened. And yet here we are.

58:32So, I mean, if Trump can make a comeback, Musk is, I think, certainly looking at that example, right? Uh, being sort of as close as he is to him uh it is seen you know like maybe the same can be for me why can't if not him why not me yeah fair enough um all right so one other thing going on in the car industry this week of the many many many things going on in the car industry this week uh big looming tariffs uh if i'm an automaker am i just in full 10 out of 10 chaos crisis mode right now is that where everybody is it's fully panic mode i would say for the auto industry i've been talking with a of people at these companies and and smart people analysts and others who sort of whose job it is to watch this stuff and and they're saying that there's there's just really no way that uh you can avoid passing this cost on to customers like these tariffs are going to come down every car in america can suddenly it can be made in america but that doesn't mean that the parts that go into the car uh are necessarily originate in america and so you know you've got something along the lines of up to 50 % of the parts that are inside a car come from foreign countries.

59:41Mexico and Canada especially are huge hubs for these parts. So with 40 % to 50 % of auto parts coming from abroad, there's just really no way that these costs can be absorbed by the companies that make the vehicles. And so I think a lot of smart people are predicting something around the lines of$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 price increases just right out of the gates when these tariffs go into effect on April 2nd. That is to say, if they go into effect, right? We've been sort of going back and forth and back and forth on whether Trump is actually going to do this. You know, what can be said to actually dissuade him from putting these tariffs in place?

1:00:19It seems like these ones are actually going to come through, but you have to sort of allow for the fact that this is a very unpredictable, fluid situation. Yeah, but I read today, I was reading a report today that somebody sort of assumed that this is going to add$100 billion in costs annually to the auto industry. Wow. I mean, this is an incredibly tight margin industry. They cannot absorb these costs. People are going to be paying higher prices for cars. And there's really just no good reason for it. There's no reason at all why this is happening other than to satisfy Donald Trump's bizarre theories about what tariffs are.

1:00:59He does love a tariff. Loves a tariff. It's just, honestly, it might be all there is to it. The man just loves a tariff. So if I'm an automaker, it seems like the short-term thing that you do is just immediately raise prices, right? And I've been reading similar stuff, right? And there was one thing that was like, I was quoting somebody, some executive from one of these automakers who was like, yeah, the prices are going to go up. And then prices don't go down. So they're just this all might go away, but the prices stay up because that's what that's what happened. So that's the like immediate thing.

1:01:30The underneath thing seems to be potentially the like long term goal of the Trump administration is that all these companies start making huge efforts to move stuff into the United States. Are you are you hearing rumblings of companies thinking about like, OK, we have to retool everything in order to make this stuff work or prices are just going to go up. That's life moving on. So there was already kind of like a bit of an onshoring movement going on during the Biden administration where he was offering all of these incentives and tax cuts and things like that for companies that were bringing their manufacturing, especially EV and battery manufacturing to the US.

1:02:04A lot of that is still happening as far as I can tell. I mean, these are huge projects, billion-dollar projects that take multiple years to line up all the investors and the partners and the land acquisitions and all these things. So it's just going to take a long time for that to happen. Whether or not you start to see companies try to start to do the same because of the tariffs, I think you're starting to see some companies sort of repackage old announcements as sort of responding to the present moment and presenting them as something new. But that said, it's just not something that can be flipped from week to week.

1:02:38You know, this is something, if you take into account just the complexity of supply chains, You know, trying to create new factories, new hubs. This is a four to five to six year time frame that a lot of these happen. So it would just be sort of a massive frustration for the industry, I think, to sort of bring all of these supply chains into the United States. And from what I can tell, the idea that you could have a vehicle that is made with 100 % U.S.-made parts and labor and manufacturing and everything is basically a fantasy at this point. And it's just not something that even if they undertook this massive effort, which would cost them hundreds of billions of dollars and take many, many years, even that is not necessarily going to result in, I think, whatever the sort of fantasy that Trump has in his mind about this, you know, sort of domestic renaissance in manufacturing.

1:03:30right and i would assume that the the uncertainty of it all is also part of the challenge here that if i'm if i'm running a car company like i'm i'm not actually sure it's smart or prudent right now to say we're going to make these giant sweeping changes because this is the new normal like god only knows what the new normal is and the thing that i thought was really interesting there's a lot of there was a lot of stories in the last few weeks that are like oh this is great for tesla right tesla is like one of the most domestic manufacturers that we have. They make all their cars in Texas and California.

1:03:59A lot of their parts are made here in the United States, including their batteries. But even Tesla is exposed to this. And they're going to probably, we're going to see prices go up for them as well, which on top of already declining EV incentives, less tax breaks, less charging incentives. So I think it's safe to say that everyone is exposed on this, including Tesla, which I think Musk himself has also said that you know, we're not going to be unscathed through all this. So it's really just kind of just a, it's a huge head scratcher, I think, for everybody. Because we were assuming that there was going to be some, at least some carve outs or maybe some exemptions, but it doesn't appear to be the case at this stage.

1:04:40Yeah. Well, like you said, we'll see a bunch of that is coming due this week. So we will, we will see one way or another. Exciting times. Exciting times. Let's, let's end on a more exciting note. Tell me I'm crazy for being kind of into the new Nissan Leaf. You wrote about this thing, and I find the Leaf fascinating. Someday you're going to come on the show, and we're going to do the whole story of the Nissan Leaf, which I think is the weirdest, most interesting footnote in the history of EVs. But there's a new Leaf, and it's kind of hot, and I'm kind of into it. Yeah, I know. It's the same, right?

1:05:10It was kind of similar to me. I got similar vibes from the new Toyota Prius a little bit. I was like, oh, they took something that was a big old paperweight that nobody really liked that much, but sold incredible numbers. Like it did really well, the Nissan Leaf, for a long time. And they kind of like sexed it up a little bit, you know, gave it a bit of a glow up. And it looked really good. We're still kind of waiting for like the full picture of like what it's going to look like. We don't really have like a lot of the specs, battery range, anything like that. The old Leaf had terrible range. But yeah, it was a pioneer, right?

1:05:43It was out there. First full like medium range EV to go on sale even before the Tesla Model S. so it was it kind of like proved the market i think for a lot of oems that this was something that people would actually be interested in buying and the rumors that was going to be that that nissan was going to get rid of it for a long time nissan's going through a lot of problems right now their sales have dropped uh just dramatically over the last few years or so especially in some key markets like the u.s uh and they tried to merge with honda uh late last year that deal kind of fell apart although there's some rumblings that they might be trying to get back together again.

1:06:20And then the Leaf was supposed to be on the chopping block, right? Nissan's got the Aria, it's got some other EVs in the pipeline that are a little bit more long range and a little bit more in the form factor that consumers tend to like, which is more in the SUV crossover space. And now we're seeing the Leaf is going to become a bit of a crossover as well. So yeah, I would say let's do that Nissan Leaf. Let's do it from inside of Nissan Leaf. Let's record a whole podcast in a in a leaf and we can talk about the whole history, which is, yeah, it's pretty fascinating. It's been a rollercoaster ride for the leaf.

1:06:53Indeed. Yeah, if you get a real picture of this thing from all angles, I'm going to need you to send it to me because I keep looking at this like, kind of like Robin's egg blue thing and I'm like, yeah, I would buy this car. I'm ready. Let's do this. I'm down. Nice. They got one customer already lined up. Yeah, there you go. All right, Andy, thank you as always. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, David. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vertecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:08:51All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can email VergeCast at theverge.com. And by the way, it is always super delightful when you call and have a question for a specific person because then I get to bother that specific person and make them come do that with me, which is what happened today. Let's hear our question. hey it's peter from brooklyn this question's for jen tui jen i'm wondering if there are any smart home companies that are using ai with cameras to analyze what's going on in your home the example i keep thinking is if i could be like alexa where do i leave the scissors and it shows me a little video of oh yeah last thursday you put them in this drawer seems super creepy but also super like something that they would do.

1:09:41Just curious if anybody's doing it. Thanks. You ask for Gentooey, you get Gentooey. Hi, Gentooey. Hello. Happy to be here. Love to be summoned. I just want to say that super creepy and super useful should be the motto of the smart home. That is true. So I had a couple of sort of immediate thoughts that this sparked, but I'm curious where your head went hearing this question. Yeah, I guess the immediate answer is not yet. This is definitely where you can see them going to some extent, especially say you specifically mentioned Alexa and Amazon with its new Alexa Plus and its new multimodal generative AI capabilities.

1:10:25possibilities you could see this happening in fact at the amazon event that they had in february they specifically used cameras to say you could say to alexa when did my dog last go for a walk and it looked through the footage and replied and showed an image of or a video of the last time someone had taken the dog out for a walk i think for this type of very fine-grained things like where did I leave the scissors, that's going to be a bit more of a challenge for Alexa in the current capabilities. Unless you have ring cameras stationed everywhere around your house, capturing every movement, it definitely wouldn't have the capability yet because another thing that a lot of these, so there are a number of security cameras that are doing this AI search feature where you can search through your camera history just with typing some phrases, but they are very much trained on specific things that you might like to look for.

1:11:21So I think, you know, scissors in a drawer might be the level above what they're at now. It's more like cat on the porch or delivery driver approaching door kind of things that they're doing now. So Ring has that AI search feature. Google Nest is launching it. It's currently in like a beta program. Arlo actually has an interesting one where you can program your own. search queries. So you could sort of say, I guess you could set up a camera, an Arlo camera in your living room and train it to watch where you put the scissors. But again, it would have to be very specific. You'd have to know what you would want it to look for.

1:12:02It's not going to be able to sort of analyze everything you've seen. It's seen and look for it that specific yet. But I can see it going there. I think I'm guessing where you're going, David, would be where I would go with this is it's more likely to come from AI glasses. Like we saw Google demo this. So this is exactly where my head went. It's called Project Astra from Google. And the demo exactly was that. They were just walking around and they had this sort of always on camera and they were like, oh, where did I leave my glasses? And it directed them back there to where they left their glasses.

1:12:39Notably not shipping, I would say that feature. it's starting to like percolate out in the world it seems to be a real thing but it is not it is not nearly yet what google showed it to be um but yeah that that like you said that is the thing everybody is working on this idea of like how do i give myself some sort of consistent awareness of my surroundings and then use that to help me uh which is a really interesting problem but a really hard one. And it does seem like if your bar is not scissors, but it is like, I don't know, on the level of like people and pets, right? I think about the smart home stuff is like it's comings and goings.

1:13:17I sort of want to know when major events with people and pets are happening in my house. That it seems like these tools are actually getting pretty good at pretty fast, right? Like in theory, the tech is there and it seems like the distance between people and pets and scissors is just like time and camera qualities to some extent. Yeah, just training the machine learning models on what it is that you want to be identified about or told about. And I think, yeah, right now, because there is the creepy factor with cameras, a lot of this is focused on what's happening outside your home, not so much inside.

1:13:52But with, I mean, if you have cameras inside your home and you want to identify specific people or specific events, you can do that right now. you the ring video ai search feature which i wrote about i used it to track keep track of my cat like i would keep losing my cat and i would just type in you know cat gray today and it would show me all the videos that it had captured of my cat walking around the various parts your cat just slipping in and out of the wall yeah although mainly outdoors because i i don't really do cameras inside but echo devices have cameras on them so like the show devices all have cameras on them.

1:14:30So you could see this becoming part of what they offer. Right now, though, it's just ring cameras. So those aren't the cameras in the show devices. Nest, same thing. They have indoor and outdoor cameras and also their Nest hubs. A few of them have cameras. So yes, I could definitely see this being where they're going. And it's one of the really useful areas of AI that I've, of genitive AI I've seen in the smart home to date, getting that kind of fine-grained detail about what's happened in your home without you having to scroll through every video and look for or, yeah, try and... Because right to date, you've had things like person, animal, vehicle.

1:15:07So you can filter your video clips to just animal. But then I'd be looking through... If I was looking for my cat, I'm looking through videos of like squirrels and my dog going around in circles and not finding the cat. Whereas now I can just ask it to find me cat. And it finds me cat sometimes. It finds me cat is pretty good. Yeah, I was thinking about this today. Actually, I my neighbor had to be out for the day, but he's having luggage delivered like the airline lost her luggage. And so they're delivering it. And so she called me this morning. I was like, hey, can you be around in case they need to deliver the luggage?

1:15:42and now I'm like glued to my house in case they come and knock on the door. And I had to leave for a few minutes and I was actually thinking like, oh, being able to come back and be like, hey, did the mailman come? Like did the Alaska Airlines people come? Is like genuinely, sincerely useful in a way that I don't have that much smart home stuff, but that was one of the moments where I was like, oh, I wish I had that. I just rely on like my dog to bark and tell me that there are people at the door and that's not, it turns out, a perfect system. Well, the downsides of this type of feature is you are going to have to pay for it.

1:16:14All of these services are included in like the Ring subscriptions, the Nest subscriptions. But interestingly enough, a couple months ago, a new company launched called Seemour AI, which is S-E-E-M-O-U-R. And it is able to go through all my Ring footage and let me search for it, even if I'm not paying for a subscription. So if you want to just try it out, that's a good way to start at least. I don't know how they're doing it. And I'm sure Ring's aware of it. And I'm sure they'll probably charge at some point. But right now, you can download the app for free on iOS. And if you have Ring cameras, it will search through your footage for you.

1:16:53But again, it's very specific. Like, it tells me a lot that it's seen destructive pet activity on my porch, which is normally just my dog walking around. So, like, again, they're trained to look for specific things they think you might be interested in. But as you say, as this advances, I think that gap between, you know, dog, cat, destructive activity, and this is where you left your scissors may start to get a lot smaller. And it could be very useful if you don't mind having cameras in your house. Well, so that's what I was going to say. It seems like to me the two roadblocks here are, A, it is a huge technological leap, right, to go from I know what a dog looks like to all the things going on inside of your house.

1:17:36is a huge leap. And like we've seen how hard that is. But then the other thing is, I just can't fathom the number of cameras you'd have to have in your house in order to be able to pull that off. It seems like you would need a camera or ideally a couple of cameras essentially on every single square inch of your entire house in order for this system to work. Because even if you have a couple of blind spots, the whole thing kind of falls apart. So I'm like, is this why everyone gets that ring drone camera that can follow them around? because it solves this problem. I don't know. I did think about that.

1:18:09Yeah? Okay. But that's only designed to work when you're not in the house. Yeah, that'll change. And also never shipped. Unlikely to ship at any time in the future, if you ask me. So, yes, the Ring camera, the flying drone, is designed to work when you're not there, so it might not be as useful. I think Amazon would like us to have screens with cameras in every corner of our room. It sure would, yeah. So ultimately, the idea of smart glasses or, I mean, as Apple recently or it's leaked recently that Apple might be putting cameras in your watch, more cameras may be on you. Because, again, that's less that there's still a bit of invasion of privacy.

1:18:51But something I talk about a lot in the smart home is it's one thing when you have the cost convenience ratio that you're weighing when you're using technology, you know, a smartphone or a smartwatch or using Gmail and you're willing to give up some privacy for the features that you get. But it's another when you're in your home and there are other people in the home and you're giving up their privacy as well. So there's a lot more cost to benefit ratio that has to be factored in there for everyone in the home, not just yourself. So assuming everyone's on board with having cameras in your home, you might be okay.

1:19:25But I think that's unlikely. So I think personal devices are much more likely to get us to that position that our caller's interested in, especially if it's you who's left the scissors somewhere. Although in my household, everyone always steals my scissors. So I would need cameras on everyone. I got a pack of five scissors for Christmas because I complain so often about how many people, everyone's stealing my scissors. So I'm with him on this. I would like to know where my scissors are. How many of the five pairs do you still have? It's now the end of March. Do we still have all five? No, I have half of one.

1:20:01I don't know where the rest are. All right, so we need somebody to invent this quickly. If you could get this done for us and for Peter, this would be amazing. Yes. All right, Jen, thank you as always. You're very welcome. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. and thank you as always for listening. As ever, there is lots more on everything we talked about from my review of the light phone to Allison's coverage of AI and phones to all of Jen's smart home stuff to Andy and the team's latest on everything happening with Tesla and the Tesla takedown and tariffs, everything.

1:20:33All of it on theverge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes, but so much of this stuff is like actively unfolding. Keep it locked on the website. And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, problems, other weird car questions that you think maybe we can answer, please always get in touch. You can email verdcast at theverge.com. You can call the hotline at 866-VERGE-11. We truly, truly, truly love hearing from you. We've gotten a bunch of really fun questions about border security and how to think about your devices as you move from one place to another, particularly in and out of the U.S.

1:21:05right now. We have some fun stuff coming up on that over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore. VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'll be back on Friday with Nilai talking about all of the news happening this week, whatever weird stuff is going on with images and chat GPT, presumably some new gadgets. I want to see if he watches the studio on Apple TV, which everybody's into. He was weird about Severance, but I'm going to get him into the studio. This is my plan. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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