Tri-Fold Phones and Orion Glasses: Welcome to the Future?

41:22Years ago. And even them like, you hear it reading electric connection between your muscles or whatever. And no matter what company that is, you're like, all right. Okay. I don't think I used it for 10, 15 minutes maybe. I can't think of a single time it didn't correctly trigger the thing I was trying to do. According to them, they feel like they can progress that technology to the point where they can recognize your handwriting solely by monitoring the different electrical paths running through your forearm which is that to me seems insane that is crazy yeah that is what it did to me seemed insane yeah it already did i was really impressed so it is it did have a little haptic feedback it's like the size of a smartwatch band it would tap the back of your wrist as you did inputs so it sort of confirmed that you were doing what you were doing but yeah it's literally pinch your finger in midair behind your back totally out of view of the glasses and it would pick it up because it's reading the electrical inputs through your wrist really impressive wait can i ask a question yeah so the the information flow i'm assuming would go from the wristband to the puck to the glasses the wristband is actually also directly connected to the glasses this time via bluetooth i thought the wristband was connected to the puck via bluetooth and the glasses were connected to the puck via wi-fi yeah but they have i mean there's a ton of custom silicon in here to make all the sensors work there's a ton of like they split up the batteries in the different parts of the arm of the band to keep it better balanced the whole thing weighs under 100 grams under 50 grams no no these are the 50 grams they said they're standard they want to be under 50 for glasses and that but this was under 100 oh was or they said that these were no no my bad so yeah it's they're super super cool so i here's the three things that they let me do with the glasses because you might be wondering okay you have this crazy tech it does something with your input cool what do you actually do with it the software is not even done yet it's not really a full os but i did three things one was a sort of a regular multitasking experience like sitting on a couch open up a window watch some instagram reels open up a browser watched a hot ones episode way way way way yes exactly you heard that right yep there is an instagram app for a device that does not exist and not the ipad honestly i love the level of petty that's so funny adam let's talk we actually we walked we were walking to jack in the box as californians do and we walked past we were just walking and i noticed on the map it said instagram hq and we all looked at the building and then could see the meta headquarters and we're like that is a lean building that is a smaller building so maybe i do believe them relatively speaking smaller than the meta hq um but yeah no i these were windows floating in the air in front of me tracked over my actual environment so i was looking at the actual couch and the actual people around me but then right in between them there was a translucent like browser window with a hot ones episode playing that i was watching and no one could see what i was watching because it just looks like i'm wearing glasses and there's some little glints of purple every now and then but you really can't see or hear unless you have the volume all the way up what i'm actually doing how did it look did it look like a screen or was it like a weird projection thing or it the thing that it reminded me i mean i don't think you've ever seen this but it had sort of looked similar to the samsung transparent micro led displays with a much lower resolution oh i have seen those but It also had a similar fraying around the edges to those spinning transparent displays.

44:58Do you know what I'm talking about? Like the single band of LEDs that spin so fast and form a continuous. Like that is honestly the display technology that I would compare it most to visually. Yeah. Okay. There was some chat from Meta about how, you know, these are internal. So we knew we could have actually doubled the resolution at the expense of thermals, but we didn't. You could tell it was pretty low resolution. but just in general the fact that I was moving windows around I was multitasking I was just with natural input sort of dragging things around resizing windows in a very similar way honestly to vision pro like it had similar ui elements like close window x's and like grab the tab at the bottom move the window I'll have a screen recording that I think will be in the main video as well so you can see sort of what I saw when I was doing this the second thing that I tried was looking at a bunch of ingredients on a table and asking Meta's AI to tell me something that I could make with them.

45:55A very contrived demo, if I'm being honest. Like, it's a bag of dates that said DATES in all caps on it. Like, how hard could that be? But what I found interesting was it looked at all the things and then it dropped a pin, a little glowing pin, on each of those things. And so I moved my head around and I looked around the room and I looked back and each of those was glowing. and tracked in real time. I thought that was super cool. And then it would tell me, yeah, you can make a smoothie, which, yeah, no sh**. That's what you're supposed to do with these things. It's always a smoothie or an omelet.

46:24Yeah, you can make an omelet, trust me. Drink omelet. The last, but I think that was most impressive to me because of the tracking. Like the dots were tracked over the objects, which is cool. The last thing was games, actually. They built a couple games, which is cool. One of them was like a head-tracked space fighter, like 3d asteroids 3d asteroids game it was kind of like in a tunnel so you would move your head around and actually dodge things i'm sure you looked real dumb like this with glasses on or no one can see what you're doing but you're playing a game and the other was actually a multiplayer game this it kind of broke my brain i i it was super low res it was super low fidelity but just the fact that you could do it so easily uh it was amazing to me two people with the orion glasses on at once.

47:12Both stare at a QR code in the room. That QR code becomes the placement lock for where the game appears. So that's all you have to do. Imagine, like I've been talking about this with the Vision Pro, there's no shared experiences in quite the same way. You don't share the same virtual space in Vision Pro, but this is in your real physical space. There's a QR code, look at the table, you enter the shared space with that person, the game pops up, and it's Pong. And your your hand is tracked to the paddle and you just play 3D Pong back and forth in this little tunnel. I already have so many questions.

47:48So simple of a concept. It's low res, like you can just break it easily by turning your head too fast. Like if your hand's not close enough, you can miss. Like you could get out of the immersion of it, but the fact that in 10 seconds you could set it up and share this invisible game that no one else in the room can see, that to me was like, oh, there's something here. This is really cool, the fact that you can do this at all. But go ahead. What questions? I have all the answers. So two sets of Orion glasses, right? Yep. Each with their own puck or connected to the same puck? Each with their own puck.

48:20Each with their own puck. Okay. Next question. When you're playing Pong, is there like a Z axis? Yes. Yes. There is. So imagine like a rectangular prism between me and you, and the ball is like bouncing across in through the prism to you, and then you hit it back, and it bounces across to me, and I just hit it back to you. can it go up like on the y-axis yes yeah damn yeah it's pretty cool it's a pretty fun game yeah so they're they're kind of explaining like the typical imagined scenarios for shared gaming like they brought up chess a lot and it turns out chess isn't a great example because there's all these little pieces and they're that board has to be flat and it kind of doesn't really work that well you kind of want it to be like vertical in front of the two players what about life-size chess um or even vertical chess like you could just flip the board vertical i think it'd be easier but like i think adam's talking about harry potter not me i didn't even think of that but yes that they just kind of made these sort of retro feeling games because the nostalgia is most uh universal and just looks and fits with the resolution the best probably also definitely yeah yeah i'm super down for any arcade style games like that in ar that'd be sick yeah i want to play pac-man on that i think you're running away from pac-man oh my god i think one cool thing we learned in the pong demo which was when ellis went to play against marquez first they did a really cool so there's multiple ways to interact with the classes the the best way is with the wristband and what it does is it has eye tracking so that's how you're selecting things and then you're using your hand motions to select to bring up menus to scroll with this cool like quarter flip like if you're flipping a coin on your hand that's how you scroll that's the gesture but if you want there's also is hand gestures and the calibration needed is like you can hand off a pair of glasses to someone without doing a full calibration and still have fairly accurate uh controls so like ellis took a pair of glasses didn't calibrate wasn't wearing the wrist strap and just through hand movement and the eye tracking which comes from the side one thing i found interesting and never thought about is eye tracking on ar glasses is so much harder because in vr they can essentially put the camera lenses directly in front of your eyes.

50:34You can't do that when it's a clear pass-through. So they need to come from the side. And they were, I thought they were pretty accurate. You know, one of the things we asked them was like, if you, the quests do all the hand tracking stuff and there's this EMG bracelet is not a part of that. So why did you feel the need to add like a second sensor when the hand, there are more gestures, but they're not like crazy complicated gestures. And one of the, they brought up a bunch of reasons why they like having like a multimodal experience for that. But one of the things they brought up is in the final product form of this, you should just be able to take off your glasses, put them on someone else, and they should have the experience.

51:11Like they should, you don't need to take off the wristband. You don't need to like googly eyes around, like just you're in. Do they mean like way down the line or they mean the consumer version that's coming in a couple of years? No comment. I think it's a general goal, but it was the first time i ever put the smart glasses on i did go through an eye tracking calibration um but it seemed to be not like super necessary like i think it would still work because it's still going to be those sensors on each side just looking at your eyeball but i think that was just for maximum accuracy but yeah the idea is yeah you can just hand someone the glasses they can see what you see and you can just use your hands and just jump right in and the benefit of the sorry the wristband is hand tracking always needs to be in front of you right the wristband lets you do things like super discreetly essentially so you don't have to be the person what these are supposed to be things you wear in the everyday world it's a little stranger when you're in the grocery store and all the things you have to do are touched out in front of you you could essentially use this wristband in your pocket if you wanted to and it would still trigger the the different controls yeah it's fun that would look so much weirder with okay yeah pockets in the grocery store.

52:22I'm just trying to say it's, but it's true. I actually walked out of the room and we had lunch and the entire time I had the wristband on and totally forgot. And then I walked back in and they were like, we have to put the band back on you. I was like, I've had it on this whole time. We should explain that. It's just, it's like a slightly thicker band. Oh, okay. Yep. Wait, so what's to stop them from using that wristband with these meta Ray-Ban glasses i think in general this this wristband this input device has the most applicable use for them i think that this is i mean there is no visual component to these so you're not really controlling anything but i think in general they imagine a variety of form factors in the future that the wristband could be useful for the orion being one of them maybe something with like a small heads-up display in the future kind of like google asked but more natural looking could also exist and this wristband could control any of them so i thought i thought it was really cool and yeah that that mind-blowing fact ellis of like theoretically we can read the electrical impulses through your wrist so accurately that you could just write not even holding a pen just right in midair and we can pick up what you're writing that's that's like science fiction to me They also said the same works with typing, which you need both hands.

53:40Yeah. And also people type differently. I'm realizing so that that'd be hard. I want to try that so bad. All of those things were theoretical things. They didn't even mention if they were or weren't working on that. But it was just like, this is the type of technology and how much room for potential there is for it. And if I'm being honest, like seeing how well it worked with just a few basic functions was really impressive. Yeah. That's like one step away from mind reading. Because if it's just reading nerve impulse, we're five steps away from WALL-E. If you just put that same technology on the temples, by the way, I Googled it.

54:17It's temples or arms for the thing on the glasses that goes over your ear. But if you put that same sensor technology just on those temples, you don't even need to move your hands. I thought you meant insert it into your temple. So it reads your brain? It's reading the neural impulse, like the electrical signals. So that's the difference. there's different paths that the electrical signals take. I think what we picture like neural link is like literally like reading brain activity and that's one thing. But I think you can, the tendons are like skin deep. They're like basically right underneath your skin.

54:48And you have one per finger. Yeah, it's really, it's like piano strings in your arm where like if you use different fingers, it's a very distinct pattern of things that are happening with the muscles in your wrist. So I think that's why it made the most sense. It's like, okay, if I have a gesture like this, that really fire, that looks the same every time to the input device, I think. Can we talk about materials for a little bit? Oh, yeah. They were really stoked on the material sciences advances they made in this. And I'll be real, don't know a lot about material science. But one thing I thought was really interesting that they brought up was that, you know, we got two eyes.

55:25Surprise, surprise. Some of us. Very true. Most of us have two eyes. and uh we combine those images to get you know stereoscopic vision and on a vr headset that that's less of a big deal because you can make it a little heavier you can make it this big solid thing and it's very easy to keep both lenses fixed in like the exact same position on your eyes glasses on the other hand are much thinner you can't put steel plates in them they will flex a little bit and the problem is is that when you have these wave guides in front of your eyes if the glasses flex even a little bit you begin to see double your brain like yeah merge the images anymore and so they were very stoked on the magnesium frame that they built for these uh because if i do you remember it was five microns like that the margin for error between the two sides it was something incredibly small like a few microns yeah where if you did torque them torque them heavily, they wouldn't work very well.

56:27So they had to get that rigid, like super rigid. And then they were also very excited to be like, you know, magnesium, it's really hard to make glossy. So they're actually naturally matte black. Also thermally, they needed to do it. I believe. They said like, because they had this version that was a clear plastic. So you could see inside it and they were like, thermally, the battery life would be like half on this one than the other one because of heat dissipation. The magnesium frame was part structural, part heat sink because of its thermal properties. So interesting there. I learned a new word during that briefing, arc minutes.

57:03Thank you for explaining. It's a radial measurement, I believe. It's a 60th of a degree. Okay. It's very funny because Ellis was like, how specific does it have to be like one 100th of a millimeter? And he was like five arc minutes and all of us were like, what? What? Well, then he was like, when you reverse the trigonometry to the tangent, that equates to about five microns. And then I was like... I was going to say, I'm pretty sure you have heard that before, because that's like trig stuff, but you just forgot it. I have. Unless you're working on AR glasses. Hilariously, I barely showed up to trigonometry class and then kicked calculus's ass.

57:41But trigonometry wasn't that much into that one. Arc minutes is one of those things that you'll remember for like two months for the test. and then after the test you will never need that again unless you work for meta so yeah i think that was super cool i think the carbon the silicon carbide wave guides is the other part of the equation um it kind of brings me to the last major point about these glasses which is kind of what you started with which is okay they're not ready yet they are not ready for regular customers yet and that comes in the form of one the silicon carbide there is no supply chain for this there is no optimization process it's an extremely conductive uh extremely clear when pure but very difficult to grow uh substance just like all of the what they're doing with it is in order to get this wider field of view you need it to be super super pure and clear uh and glass doesn't quite in its current stage get that good i think it was less of that glass doesn't get clear enough it's that glass in the refraction element of it can take in light and create like prism rainbows and then that affects yeah the what you're seeing because you're bending the light so much through this stuff anyway the cost of these lenses is insane and i think the total cost uh boz told me would be somewhere in the 20 to 25 000 range because these are such low volume it's not a shock that it's expensive but like we're not trying to sell people$25 ,000 AR glasses right now that's the first thing the second thing is uh two hour ish battery life roughly and we could see it and feel it run down it was getting warm on our faces the puck in our back pocket was like slowly getting warmer but in general like that's another thing it's not ready for the public with a two or three hour battery life and so all these things combined made it make perfect sense that okay they're not going to ship this to people but they still want something out of the level of r &d that they got to get to this point so they've packaged it in this really cool way they'll make some number of them maybe a few hundred or a few thousand and they will use it to work on it iterate it and keep it up for the next few generations i think they're years away from this actually being done but it is amazing to see that it's possible to get this close to the dream yeah i i think like if i had to have my wish list and this is being like super picky wish list of this being a good consumer, a really good consumer product.

1:00:08Yeah. It needs to be thinner both on the... temples and the actual glass frames themselves. as well thinner and lighter yeah battery life definitely needs to be more i i he boss did a great job of explaining this he doesn't see on this replacing a phone but rather being another accompanying a phone but i think that would mean it has to do a good job of the majority of the time you're outside to be active so two hour battery life is way too low um my super nitpicky the 70 degree field of view was like really good but if you placed a window and then kind of moved your head you would see it cut out and that just kind of breaks immersion yeah um i think that's like it probably would be fine with 70 degree field of view the vertical field of view was annoying for me i didn't seem to hit that when i was playing pong i felt like i could never see the top of the whole thing yeah really yeah yeah i think the pong was the most vertically stretched thing that we did yeah i think i when i had three windows side by side that's when i got to the left and right edges of the field of view and it would get cut off but yeah i think that's those are all on my wish list as well higher resolution higher resolution the other thing yeah just because fidelity is everything in my world and i would love to see it in crisp 4k if i could um and yeah i think in general just just thinner and lighter i think boz when you interviewed him said he would like the price to be equal to a phone and i think that's totally reasonable if not i think it could be higher yeah the the question when we think of all these things being better is how much better higher resolution how much higher double triple maybe thinner and lighter okay how much thinner lighter because we are packing everything into these glasses today uh to get to like 100 grams how much thinner and lighter and then to your point like how much more field of view how much cheaper do we do we really want them to be those are all questions that they have to answer as a Those are all trade-offs that they'll have to make to try to engineer their way down to maybe something that could ship someday.

1:02:19These sound cool to me, but it also seems to me like this was a big recruitment demo. They're like, look at this cool stuff we're working on. Come help us build the future. Because they're not selling these. Yeah, one line that stuck out to me that I think actually has a lot of weight behind it that they kind of just skimmed by. but they said you know everybody starts off wanting to make glasses and then ends up just making a headset just because it's like the physics it's just impossible you just make a headset and so you see all these headsets out there and you can see every company's ambition to someday either shrink the headset down or like get to this ar glasses thing but the fact that they actually have made it and you know it's a thing that exists yeah maybe it's maybe not something you can buy but it's a thing that exists is already a pretty monumental step i think which is pretty cool that we're witnessing so yeah i think uh i think stay tuned for the full video which goes over all our thoughts the hands-on you can see what i saw when i was demoing them all that footage hopefully you're gonna see how many times i lost and hopefully as many points as possible pong and me winning uh um but yeah the whole time we're playing like every time one of us would do like a sick point would be like mariah use that one mariah use that one yeah i did play boz and he smoked me in pong obviously he's he's gotta not smoke you those are an advantage he hasn't he's played it way more than i have um but it it is it is actually pretty fun nice so my final thoughts meta ray-bang clear glasses are the best clear tech product i think i've ever seen yeah i want I am in love with these.

1:03:57They're so good. Carl Pay somewhere is like furiously working on them. Yeah, well, Carl Pay, step it up. I also feel the need to say, as someone who's done a lot of clowning on these spectacles, there were many times when I was in Meta HQ where I would see an employee and I'd be like, oh, cool, Ray-Bans. And I'd be like, those have camera work. Wait a second. I got fooled multiple times by these. So I think I may have to eat my words. I think that's the reason why I have the extra critique of those glasses need to be smaller is because these are proving to be really impressive and mistaken as glasses, which is the end goal.

1:04:43Yeah. Possibly the funniest moment of me working here was coming down to the hotel lobby and seeing Marquez wearing these and I'd never seen him wear glasses before. and I was just like, whoa. Marquez got LASIK so he can wear tech glasses later. Marquez goes, what are you laughing at? If you rewind far back enough on the YouTube channel's history, you will find videos of me wearing glasses. It's only for like a month. The very first video I ever made, I took them off 10 seconds of the video. Really? Yeah. It's pretty... Continuous. It's very glary when there's a screen in front of you. Anyway, we got a lot more from that video.

1:05:19Check it out. Get subscribed. make sure you watch out for that but we got a little more to talk about including the tesla robotaxi event so in any case we should get to trivia trivia it's so cool to be over here for this oh yeah everyone except for ellis because ellis knows the answer uh i just dropped a picture into your doc could one of you describe this for me wait did you ever watch top gear uk no because this is actually i'm almost positive a trivia question i did on really really nice this is a three-wheeler great minds i'm just like a decade later oh well this looks like a yeah describe what was the um what was that like one of the first honda um evs the motor compacto no the one that had the uh oh the insight was it the insight i don't it was the insight where it had like the cover over the back wheel google it for aerodynamics google it yeah oh Was it not the Insight?

1:06:16It was the Insight. Let's go, baby. I feel like this looks like the Honda Insight got stung by a bee. But it's a two-door and it's got this little sleek... Honda Insight's a two-door Mercedes, huh? This is a 2005 Mercedes-Benz concept car. Dude, 2005. It looks like one. It was inspired by an animal. What kind of animal? And is it faster than the slow-load? How specific are we going to get? because I was going to say like a... Well, don't say it. Don't say it. But I will accept a very broad answer to animals. Okay, sure. Because I was going to give a category. You can get two points if you give me the exact animal.

1:06:55I'll give you the kingdom phylum genus order. You will get 10 points. I will give you how many legs it has. Genius and species. How many legs. All right. We'll talk Tesla Robotaxi after the break. Be right back.

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1:09:16All right, we're back. This time we're talking Tesla Robotaxi. Now here's the thing. Here's the fun part about this section of the podcast. The Tesla Robotaxi event is Thursday night. I'm going to go out there and point cameras at this thing and check it out. This podcast comes out Friday. So you already know by the time the podcast comes out exactly what got announced, what was shown on stage and what actually happened but this is being recorded on wednesday so right now all the people you're looking at and listening to have no idea what the robo taxi is or what's going to happen and we're still going to nail these predictions and we're just going to try to figure it out in real time just kind of guess so i'm actually i've been on the fence about should i even go to this event like what what is it what is a robo taxi event what is the point Like what's happening here?

1:10:05And the conclusion I've come to is, okay, it's Tesla. It's famously very ambitious with their announcements. And I would say every time I've gone to a Tesla event, it has at least been thought provoking in some way because their announcement isn't just a new product. It's, it often comes with all this baggage of like, this is the category that we are defining here. The, I went to the Cybertruck event years ago and it was like, this product might not ship for years but they are kind of actively trying to redefine electric trucks i remember going to the model y event and and coming away thinking this could be the most important electric vehicle period i remember the model 3 event as they went through that production hell and figuring out what a high volume low cost ev actually is and so this is another new tesla vehicle, I believe.

1:11:00And then we kind of don't know anything else other than Wee Robot. Exactly. Which is a reference to a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov. It is. Where a technology professor type person, I haven't actually read this. I just sort of know about it. I read it. Oh, it's really good. We'll explain. Don't remember it. It's a scientific doctor who I believe works for the government explaining a bunch of stuff to a reporter. So I think that is kind of what they're referencing. Oh, yeah, that's the book, I believe. Yes. In that process, he's saying a bunch of short stories. Yeah. And one of them is the robot.

1:11:39And there's also a Will Smith movie. If I've seen the Will Smith movie, does that count as knowing a little bit about this? I don't think. But was that I, robot? Yeah. Or is that I, robot? That's I, robot. Oh. And the invitation to this event is we comma robot. So I assume. You comma robot? Us comma robots. Which a big part of that book, I believe, is like the laws of robotics. So this will be interesting because they're naming it after that event. Or not event. They're naming the event after the book, I mean. Can we kind of open this with like Tesla has mentioned cars being autonomous taxis before?

1:12:13Yes. And so that's what my biggest wonder here. I know you put some things out that are like potential rumors of what's coming out. But before we even get to that, I think what's interesting is there have been times where Tesla has said that like you can buy your car with full self-driving, drive it when you're using it. And then when you are not using it, it can go out and like ride share people and make you money, make you money in the background. But that is said this before. And that is just your regular car, like a Model 3. Yes. So when I see RoboTaxi event, I feel like that is either, are we just going to announce that this can happen now and it's the same car?

1:12:51We don't see anything new. Or are we going to see a new car which kind of defeats the old purpose or one of the purposes of purchasing one of those cars? You know, Mark Zuckerberg once said, if we don't invent the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. So maybe this is that. Maybe they're just trying to kill their own idea. They're killing their own idea. Maybe. Maybe. But yeah, so I feel I'm assuming this is going to be something more along the lines of Waymo, of like a dedicated robo-taxi. But I just find it funny that previously your Model 3 was just supposed to do this. Yes. Yes. I think that irony will be heavy through the entire presentation, or at least through the lenses of those who have heard those promises before.

1:13:34But I agree with you. I do think this will be a dedicated autonomous vehicle whose only purpose is to do what Waymo does now, which is to do ride sharing and taxi services and things like that. Important note, at least in this great state of California. This great state? No, Ellis is always in California. Yeah, I think he's at this great state. Am I in California right now? We were yesterday. I think technically we were today. No, we were in the, anyway, that aside, technically in California, they cannot do what Waymo does because in order to operate an autonomous vehicle in the great state of California, you need specific permits to do that.

1:14:13Tesla has not even applied for those permits. Why'd you put air quotes around the great state of California? I did not. Don't you dare. In fact, if I could have spoken with an underline and a bold, I wouldn't put it past them to save that for after the announcement. OK, because I think this is a very much this is what we plan to do type of announcement, which, hey, let's be real. It's Tesla. They've done that before where they announce something and then this thing doesn't actually come out or happen for many years. um i'm generally this is this would be my prediction this is what i think they're going to do is they're going to roll a new vehicle on stage and i think based on a couple of elon tweets of him saying like oh we have to push it back we need to redesign the front of it a little bit like it will look a little bit different from the existing model so they're going to roll a new looking vehicle on stage and then they're going to go look at the inside there's no steering wheel know why because it doesn't need one and here's all the capabilities based on where we think our tech will be very soon.

1:15:17He'll be like, it's feature complete. It just needs to get approved. He'll say that. I bet he'll say that. And we'll get to this point where it could theoretically with enough compute like drive around, charge itself and do all these things that it should do. There will be some layer of economic upside to it being electric and just making you money passively. Hey, you should own a fleet of these things. They'll do all of that song and dance and then they'll end with you can get a ride in this thing and the only reason i think they'll do that is because when i signed uh my agreement i signed a waiver to go to this event and near the bottom of the waiver was you uh you could go on a ride in a thing and you will not sue us if that goes wrong it does seem though because the event is on the warner bros discovery lot it is so there can be no other cars uh well it would be literally illegal for them to do it on public roads in california which is why they won't yeah so that's what i think is going to happen and then i think they will also probably mention like oh yeah you can smart summon you can use autopilot on our regular cars and there's all sorts of other great updates coming to our regular cars but this will be the robo taxi where if you're in any number of these places maybe maybe anywhere maybe just u.s who knows uh then you'll be able to yeah i have a question for you go for it because you said something that i had not thought about in all of this which is how do you think they will charge themselves or will they be on the new jersey model where someone has to come and plug them in that one is for you there's a couple yeah there's a couple possible answers possible answer number one is they just hire a bunch of people and when a robo taxi pulls up they just plug it in manually possible option number two have you seen the old clips of the mechanical charge plug so if you go back far enough this is a decade plus old there is a old video from the tesla factory of a articulating snake-like charger that just like wakes up finds the charge plug and plugs itself in and then it whispers you should eat this apple it is a strange visual and this does not exist anywhere in the real world now, but that could be another thing that they bring back.

1:17:38I don't know. Okay. So yeah, that's a good question. We don't know. Will the Tesla app just become Uber then? I think they'll probably have to have another app. A separate app entirely. Either another app or like another section of the app, or you call one. Or they'll fold it into X and just make it the WeChat of America. Jesus, as much as you might be joking, that's honestly what he wants. Cool. What's the Tesla subscription? uh i don't know what it's called like tesla plus it's to get the like it's like better it's for streaming it's for like all the data that goes i thought it was also cheaper rates on tesla chargers or something uh tesla connectivity packages premium you get navigation live traffic sentry mode satellite maps video streaming karaoke music uh internet browser and why did i think there was one we talked about a while ago that was changing or guaranteeing you like better prices on charging i think that's just if you have a tesla and a tesla oh or is that if you're a non-tesla and you're using the tesla charging network okay yeah i was wondering if somehow the uh ride share would be put into that i i do think it would be a separate app as well and a way better name the tesla plus yes um also waymo charges by a technician plugging it in okay so i would assume it would be similar if we're thinking this is like a tesla run on the streets of whatever city they would probably have another lot with technicians in it that would plug them in there's also a few really nascent technologies that i think are mostly being tested in china that involve battery swaps where you you pull onto a bay and it actually takes out the battery puts it into a charging bay and then replaces it with a full battery that's been charging that's a thing with motorcycles in other countries yeah weirdly enough this is also a thing that tesla has also done a video announcement of where they drove up a model i don't know what model it was but they drove up a tesla onto some station it did a battery swap and they also had like a gas car filling up with gas next to it and then i think if i'm remembering this correctly they had the electric car finished doing the battery swap drive away the crowd cheered and then another electric car drove up and initiated another battery swap and also finished it before the tank of gas was done damn but it was also like a six minute tank of gas so i'm not even sure how to process that also apologies i just looked it up it is not a nascent technology there are 11 000 of these stations for scooters in taiwan for scooters okay for scooters so yeah there are a whole bunch of random things from tesla's past that they could bring back, including full self-driving, including motorized chargers, including battery swaps.

1:20:27I think the smart thing to do is probably just look at what Waymo already does, which is, okay, they operate in a small place. They have lots of these things where technicians can look over them every night and they charge and they take off every morning. They beep at 3 o 'clock in the morning. They beep all night and annoy people, but at least they have a hub and maybe that's the model. i think one other thing similar to waymo i wouldn't be surprised by here is seeing it with a bunch of extra sensors on top similar to way this is the interesting thing yes tesla tesla famously doesn't like that at all well they don't like sensors okay at all and that's like if you watch their ai day if you watch any like of the last couple years of tesla's presentations they're like not only do we try to do cameras for as much as possible we've literally gotten rid of other perfectly useful sensors in the cars exactly no more ultrasonic sensors for parking everything is visual there's a hilarious tesla press release that i think i linked somewhere in the script where they're like we've gotten rid of ultrasonic sensors we're only doing what they call tesla vision which is like um and this is better they're like this is so much better it's better in testing that being said because we've disabled it you won't have summon or smart summon or it might be like very very limited now yeah so it is better and you just can't do this stuff you paid for i I would not be surprised if they were like, we needed to do this for these taxis or just kind of forget that they said that and never reference it at all.

1:21:56And see a swarm of sensors on top of a Tesla. Waymo and Cruise both use these, both use specifically LiDAR. And also, you know, when these things were getting phased out in 2021, 2022, the LiDAR manufacturing ecosystem was very different. Now there's hundreds, if not several hundred suppliers of LiDAR. It's something that's a lot cheaper to implement now. I think that the Tesla believers argument or devil's advocate would be that the ceiling is higher for vision based on AI. So they view LiDAR and ultrasonic as a crutch. And if you drive around with, you know, combining all the sensor data, which kind of is just noise to the visual systems, then that might work better in the short term.

1:22:42Actually, it does work better in the short term. but in the future you can do more and do better with just compute trained better and better i mean ai's been getting amazing lately you know if the first generation is the rabbit r1 think of like the 10th generation maybe that could drive itself i think that's that's the argument is the ceiling is higher for just vision that is tbd you know elon in the past has described lidar as a clutch excuse me a crutch for evs like like you're going to rely on the sensor and and not you know but But having just been to meta and then saying like having a multimodal sensor experience using these two different kind of sensors to error correct each other, they seem to feel really confident in that.

1:23:22And obviously AR glasses and a car. Exactly the same. Exactly the same. No differences. No notes. But yeah, so that's another thing I'm really curious about is if they're going to double back on this and be like, look, it's cheaper now. our ai is good enough to do like a real multi-modal system where we can factor these things in equally without relying on lidar as a as a crutch i think if they do put lidar in they just pull the apple move of like we never said it was bad look at how good this thing is now they'll have some ignore it completely i think the most famous example for me has been like i went from a model s that did have ultrasonic to not using it and it just got way better worse in the rain way worse than the rain autopilot in the rain with ultrasonic sensors that can see straight through the rain was fine visual relying on cameras pouring rain can't see the road as well do you have summon slash smart summon in any of your tesla vision only uh no no now i only currently have a cyber truck i don't have my model s anymore i believe that the the model s that is shipping now does not have any of these features right because i said that and i am quoting directly from a press release, but as soon as I said that, I was like, someone with a Tesla is going to be like, well, I have those features.

1:24:42They may have updated to include some of them now, but again, the truth is that they had to remove them at first while they worked on it. And I'm reading directly from Tesla's website, so you can't be mad. Yeah. The Wild Robot is a good movie. Okay, last question I have for you guys is, what do you think the price of something like this is? Is that even a question? Did they even say this on stage? For the... A price tag for a RoboTaxi? I think it's just, i'm assuming it's just going to be a direct waymo competitor where it's not a price for the car it's a price for the ride share aspect there guys i just went down a really dark rabbit hole because you guys mentioned earlier like having a fleet of these things for your business is like an enterprise yeah good idea i really think it's a good idea um there's also rumors that they're going to talk about optimus at this event optimus is what they call their bipedal robot prime uh what happens when you use the same app to get a fleet of optimuses well optimus is not anywhere near shipping contrary to what some executives have said but the idea of commanding a fleet of humanoid robots for the right price is uh that's some serious irobot stuff right there i i'm referring to a will smith movie this okay i haven't seen that movie oh but i'm taking your word for it if you google i robot right now you will see what looks like a fleet of humanoid robots that's how i was no other way to describe the scenes from that movie other than a fleet of human you should really watch that movie it's really it's pretty it's a great i'll add it to my list it's fun it's right up my alley yep this is it yep marquette yep uh-huh yeah wow when you're right you're right yeah so i i the things that came to mind for me were like the tesla semi truck i don't even remember if they announced a price for it but they definitely had a big talk about like cost of operation per mile and of course if you're just speaking to people who are going to get a fleet of these that's me that's music to their ears they just want to hear i will save money over the current fleet that i use um maybe it'll be like that maybe they don't get a price maybe we do have a price maybe it's like hey if you want to buy six of these and operate them in a little corner of your town and a little franchise a little robo taxi business maybe that's a thing i don't know oh so i think they'll sell them to like taxi dispatchers that's what i imagine i mean they keep using the word robo taxi so maybe i think we're just gonna see testing in select cities as a ride share that would be the safe thing to do it's okay you just you convinced me that's not what they're doing yeah that's so this time well i'm sure i feel like that's definitely what they're gonna do for like the foreseeable future but like they definitely have like a five ten year plan for what they want this to be they definitely want it everywhere yeah because that would be the if they're if they're intellectually really consistent through the past couple years of what they've been trying to do then the benefit of being a vision is that it can be anywhere it doesn't have to be in pre-mapped cities doesn't have to be in select locations full self-driving works on any street in any place so that's if they if they want to be consistent with that then this could launch anywhere at any time there are laws wow that's good I did not exactly like the sound button right there which is probably a great place to end it before we end we do owe someone a thank you because a lot of these predictions were informed by some really great reporting by Dana Hall, Cara Carlson and Edward Ludlow at Bloomberg so thank you guys for your diligent work shout out to Bloomberg shout out to me reading the fine print and the invitation a little insight as well shout out to reading Elon's posts on Twitter it's really painful but I made it through got some insight there yeah that's it there's a lot more coming up there's this event there's maybe an M4 Mac event coming up soon as far as we know there's maybe some other exciting future announcements and videos so just stay tuned for it all it's all going to be on waveform baby that's why we're here we're ending the year hot I think it's cold usually well speaking of cold I'm going to try to end my cold streak in trivia.

1:28:44You got a point last time, no? Yeah, you got a point last week. Oh, I did? Yeah. Oh, well, this would really end my... This would be like a hot streak then. Starting a hot streak. Ellis, do you want to read your question? Yeah, you mind if I do it from over here? Yeah. God, this is so cool. I know. I get to, like, look at you in your face. Well, we do that enough anyway. Well, I have to, like, turn this way, which is a little annoying. Um, you guys, last week, or two weeks ago maybe, Marquez admitted to us that he is quite the aficionado of knowing animal top speeds you know well when you said that i assumed you meant like the really fast ones right so i did try to throw you a little curveball here oh you did no i've this is i have to think about if listeners are confused by the way that episode comes out on october 28th be ready wait oh they haven't heard that one yet right but they'll get it later hilarious yeah anyway that is so funny um question number one guys uh what animal has a faster top speed the leopard tortoise or the slow loris i've never even heard of a loris it's a lemur i think huh could be wrong it is unfortunately like one of maybe not one of the most, but it's a extremely popular illegal pet that is generally like really terrible how they take them out of their natural habitats.

1:30:14Oh, that's not good. Is that like a sugar glider kind of thing? Probably, yeah. What do you got? Alright, we pick separate things. Kaz, what did you put? I wrote the slow loris. And that is correct. That is the faster animal. And if you can see this little diagram I drew down here, this doesn't make any sense. I'll explain it. I believe that the leopard tortoise is named for the way that the shell looks, not how fast it is. I think that's why it's called the leopard tortoise. Yes. The slow loris, I could not find a world record top speed for, but it was averaging about 1.2 miles per hour. The leopard tortoise, I did find a world record recorded speed for in Guinness.

1:30:59that was 0.6 miles per hour. You give that some of Miles' pre-workout and some smelling salts, I think we're pushing 1.7. And Marquez was correct, by the way. It's because of the pattern on its shell or carapace. I think I was thinking of those turtles that run really fast sometimes, not a tortoise. Have you ever seen that one that's like on the sidewalk and the guy walks up to it and it just darts back into the water? I haven't seen that, but I have seen that awesome video of the guy who gave his pet turtle a Tectex skateboard. that he puts under his belly and the confidence this turtle has now that it can go really fast.

1:31:34It's like dog and this cat. I need to watch that. It's pretty cute. Question two, Adam. All right, quick update on the score. Marquez now with 19. Yo, let's go. Turn this franchise around. Andrew and David both tied with 22. David, by the way, did we mention he's not in this week because he's watching the robot movie over and over and over again? Yeah, we listened to you guys. You really lit us up for that one. So we told him to go home. We told him to go back to the movie theater and just watch that movie over and over and over again until he agrees with you. That'll be the first hour of next week is him talking about what he learned from that.

1:32:11And apologizing profusely. Next question. So the 2005 Mercedes-Benz Bionic concept car was inspired by what animal?

1:32:26you will get one point for the kind of animal and you will get another point for the actual animal, like the God-given name.

1:32:38God.

1:32:42If I say the specific name of it and that's wrong, but it is in the same category of animal, do I get that? Yeah, you get the point. All right, flip them and read. What do you got? oh that's a good one so we both wrote something in the water marine animals what did you write i wrote an orca orca damn i could see that though and not a whale orcas are whales yeah but i'm saying it's also not a whale oh no it's not well i wrote a fish but um it is a fish i'm glad it's a fish because it kind of looks like a fish i vacillated between different fish i ended up landing on a stingray nope it's a box fish a box fish yeah what is a box oh i see it oh yeah okay yeah it kind of it kind of tracks that's weird that like why why why that fish it's not like a particularly aerodynamic fish maybe it is though hydrodynamic hydrodynamic okay yeah yeah shout out to the shout out to the mercedes box fish car yeah wait what's it called again the bionic the bionic it's just a concept car so it probably well it definitely was never yeah never came out yeah interesting well i'm glad i'm glad i got any points one of the points i got 19 oh i got it oh sick okay i'll take that oh that's huge it's amazing with a come from behind okay don't call it a comeback well that hey like i said it's busy time it's techtober lots more coming up lots more events lots more videos get subscribed if you haven't already uh david will be back in that chair ellis maybe as long as he thinks about what he did yeah so many of you guys think david and i are the same person david yes how you're constantly in two different chairs you like wild robot that i haven't seen i do it i want to see it so bad yeah me too it looks awesome well next week David will have seen many more times and Ellis will be back in that chair and also we will know what happened at the RoboTax event so stay tuned we'll catch you guys next week.

1:34:51Peace. Waveform is brought to you by Adam. Damn. You do it. Waveform was produced by Adam Malina and Ellis Rowan. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music is made by Vane. who so bingo

1:35:30all right one last story before we start adam when we were in the when we got to the airport marquez hadn't had lunch so he went to wendy's and ellis brandon and i are standing in line marquez sits down and eats his food and ellis like ellis was watching him and said like in perfect harmony with the boarding he essentially finishes his last bite stands up in one motion throws it like crumples up his wrappers throws it out walks to where the It was literally like I watched the nugget hit his tongue and as soon as it touches they go, all right, we're going to begin boarding for this flight to San Francisco.

1:36:09Marquez gets up, trash, doesn't miss a step, walks straight to the gate and on. And I was just like, this bro is so optimized. It's crazy. Not one wasted fry.