The Slate Truck is a whole new kind of car
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Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of trucks that have no stereos and no paint and like no features of any kind. And I still want it very, very, very badly. I'm your friend David Pierce. And right now I'm doing some headphone testing. So I have a blue set of AirPods Max that frankly, I just hadn't used AirPods Max in a while. So I picked up a pair. Don't

Don't tell anybody, but I have every intention of returning these to the Apple store, but just wanted to try them out for a while. And then I got these. They're called the Picken F5s, and they are just the most incredible, blatant AirPods Max knockoff you've ever seen in your entire life.

I am fascinated by these things. The AirPods Max are $500. These are like $50. And I'm gonna have a lot more to say about these because I actually think there's a really interesting story behind these headphones and the TikTok shop and the way that we buy and find electronics now. But I will tell you,

These sound a lot better than a tenth as good as the AirPods Max. More on that to come. Anyway, on this show, we're going to do two things today. First, we are going to talk about the Slate truck, which launched last week. It is one of the most interesting new vehicles we've seen in a very long time. Tim Stevens wrote about it for us. He's going to come on the show. We're going to talk about it. After that...

I'm going to talk to Casey Johnston, who writes a newsletter called She's a Beast, about how to use my phone less. I have been on this slow journey to try and downgrade my screen time a little bit. Not because I think phones are inherently bad and that looking at screens is inherently bad, but just because I find myself like picking up my phone to look at TikTok while I walk to the bathroom six feet away. And that just doesn't seem quite right. So I'm

Casey has some really interesting ideas. We're going to talk about all of that. We also have a really fun hotline question about laptops that caused a sort of small existential crisis among a bunch of us. Lots to get to. This is a really fun show.

This is like extremely up my alley, all of this stuff. It's been very fun. All of that is coming up in just a second. But I just realized I have like six pairs of headphones connected to my phone now and I have to walk the dog, which means I have to go solve a bunch of Bluetooth problems in order to listen to podcasts while I walk. I'm going to figure that out. We'll be right back. This is The Verge Cast. I'll see you in a sec.

Thank you.

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Hi, I'm Dave, one of the product leads on Google Gemini. We just launched Gemini Canvas. It's my new go-to for real-time collaboration with Gemini. Write docs, edit code, get feedback, iterate, all in one new interactive space from a blank slate to a built-out prototype. My favorite part? Ask Gemini to leave feedback and suggestions just like you would with a teammate. Check it out for free at gemini.google.com.

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Welcome back. Tim Stevens is here. Tim, welcome to the VergeCast. Hey, David. Thanks for having me. Tim, you are a freelance tech and auto writer. You and I have been tech blogger enemies for many years. Frenemies, I'd like to say. Frenemies is good. I'm good with frenemies. You also write a newsletter called Around the Next Bend. But last week, you wrote a story for us about... I honestly think... I have been thinking about this a lot. I think I can say this without hyperbole. The most interesting car...

I have seen in years. Yeah, I would totally agree. And I think what makes it interesting is how bare bones, how basic it is. And what's also interesting is how well it's resonating, given how little it actually has and does, if that's not saying too much. So, yeah, I want to talk about there's kind of the car, the company and why everyone is into this. But let's just talk about the car first. So describe the slate truck to me.

So the slate truck is basically an attempt to kind of reboot what a car could be. It is a very, very basic machine on many levels, starting with the paint, for example. There is no paint. It's basically made of molded plastic. All the body work is, which has a lot of benefits. If it scratches, it doesn't matter because there's no paint layer to scratch off. So it's just going to

stay the same color. But it was designed, interestingly, to be a great surface for receiving vinyl wraps, which is a very common thing that people are doing these days. You can get it in any color you want to. You just got to kind of DIY it. It is an electric truck, seats two. It is not like a king cab kind of thing where you can have comfortable seating in the back. But interestingly, if you do need seating for more people, you can buy an upgrade kit, which basically bolts a couple of seats in the bed and turns it into...

An SUV, you can probably catch the theme here is customization. That's a big thing for sure. It's fully electric, rear drive, relatively small battery between 150 and 230 miles of range, depending upon which configuration that you go with. Fairly low power. You're not looking at, you know, crazy sort of 60 times or anything like that. It doesn't have a lot of towing capacity, about 1,000 pounds there. Payload, I think, is about 1,500 pounds, which is comparable to something like a Ford Maverick.

So, you know, you're looking at a kind of bare-bones EV, but the really interesting things, I think, is what it doesn't have. Again, it doesn't have paint. It does not have a touchscreen. It doesn't even have a car stereo of any kind. It doesn't have power windows. You've got to crank the windows down in a very old-school kind of way. And so it is, again, a very bare-bones machine, which I think makes it very compelling because the biggest story, of course, is that they want this thing to cost less than $20,000 after federal incentives, which...

which means the full price of the thing is probably on the order of $2,500 to $2,700. How much do you think the story here starts with price? Like, can you work backwards from we wanted to get this thing to be $19,999 and sort of tell the rest of the story? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think the price is definitely something that they had in mind when they were beginning this company about three years ago when they started in the initial designs.

And to get such a radically low price on an EV in the current state of the world, the current state of the economy requires, you know, you make some drastic cuts like power windows, for example, or touchscreens or radios. But it also really required the team, the designers at Slate Auto to come up with a way of

not only cutting back on features in the vehicle, but also cutting back on the production, the development and the design costs of the thing. So for example, you know, we're talking about the lack of paint being an advantage, potentially, if you have something that gets scratched, that kind of thing. But it's also a huge advantage from a production standpoint, because if you're creating aluminum body panels, or steel body panels, that requires these massive stamping machines that are like three stories tall, they cost millions of dollars. But if

But if you're injecting molding plastic, you can basically do that in any kind of building. You can do that in your apartment if you want to. And the fact that it's not painted means that they don't need a paint shop. And paint shops are incredibly expensive, too. So those two things right there make this company, you know, makes them getting off the ground much easier. And it, again, takes huge amounts of cost out of the design and development of a vehicle like this. So when you look at a lot of the changes, a lot of things are missing, they have obviously an impact in terms of the cost of the vehicle itself.

But they also have a huge impact on the ability for the company to get to production quickly and cheaply, which again then just factors into keeping the cost of the vehicle low. So does that feel disingenuous to you at all? Like I look at this thing and it's like, okay, it's $20,000. Great.

I would like my car to have a stereo. That seems like a reasonable thing to ask for in a car. You have to pay more money to put your kids in the backseat, right? So I think, is this sort of a bit that this company is doing to be able to say we're selling a truck under $20,000, which I think for a lot of reasons we should talk about is a meaningful thing to be able to say. Yeah, for sure. Or is this a real sort of honest to God, just different...

and interesting approach to how you even think about making a car. Yeah, you can definitely take a look at this from the cynical or the optimistic approach. From the cynical approach, you know, this is the low-cost airline approach of EVs where even if you want a sandwich, then you got to pay extra for it. It's $10 for a tray table. Right. If you want to be able to put both your feet on the seat in front of you, you got to pay extra for that kind of thing. You can definitely look at it in that way. And I think that there is some truth to that as well. But, you know,

You know, in the time that I've spent speaking with the executives and the designers and everything else, they do genuinely feel kind of emotionally attached to this idea of rebooting motoring and creating something that is attainable by everybody. So I think you can come at it from two different ways. But I think what I like the idea here is that you've got one truck in one spec. This isn't an upsell kind of thing. You can get a stereo if you want to. They'll sell you an upgrade kit for that. They'll sell you upgrade kits for all sorts of things on the thing if you want to.

But unlike a lot of EV startups like Elucid or even Tesla in the early days where you had to buy their new EV in like this super souped up package with all the options and it cost twice as much as it was supposed to, this is just going to be a bare bones thing to begin with. And then you just add on the things that you want to. And I think the other interesting thing is that a lot of this is really...

I don't want to say open source, but it's going to be pretty easy for a lot of people to do this on their own. You'll be able to 3D print components if you want to put that in there. You can mount your own Bluetooth speaker if you don't want to use theirs. It's not the kind of thing where you're going to be forced down an upgrade path with huge high premiums on there. You can kind of do this stuff as you want to, and you can do it as you can afford to as well. So if you can only afford the truck up front, but you want to add that stereo system down the road 12 months later after you save up some money, you can do that. And I like that approach.

Why do you think it's a pickup truck? I think a lot of this sort of sensibility you described strikes me as making a lot more sense if you were making something that looked like a Nissan Leaf or like a really cool scooter, right? Like we've seen all these things where people are basically like, what if I just built a thing with two wheels and some wild ideas around it and maybe that's the future? Like so much of what you're talking about feels like it suits that better than like what people have in their mind when they think of pickup truck. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good question, David. I think for one thing, it is cheaper. You know, you've only got half the interior to worry about, so that saves some money there too. I think from a pure, you know, if you go to that concept again of something that is, that you can wear into, part of the idea here is something that...

evolves with you and that gets better with age. You know, I looked at one of their design boards at one point. It had this picture of a shark on there that was covered in scars. And the shark was old and beat up, but it looked cool as hell. And that was part of what they wanted the aesthetic of this vehicle to be, that it gets better looking with time, like an old pair of blue jeans, like a leather wallet, that kind of thing. And I think that that concept works better with a truck than with a car.

Simply because we're used to trucks being at job sites, you know, hauling mulch and lumber and that kind of thing. But whether, again, that could be an optimistic or pessimistic thing. Did that concept come about because they decided to have a truck and they wanted to come up with a good way to spin it? Or is that really part of the concept of the vehicle to begin with? And that you could go either way. But the other thing is, I think that this functionally makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. The idea of, I think a lot of people would love to have a small truck that they can go get some mulch, they can go get some lumber.

Or they can even put their muddy dog in the back if they want to without getting it all over the interior. And I think that makes sense, too. But also the idea that you can then convert it into an SUV, which is the most popular category of vehicles right now without too much effort, means that this could have enough flexibility to work even if you don't want a truck. But I'm curious to see what the uptick is and how many people actually decide to get the SUV kit for it. Okay. How much are you a truck guy in general? I know you wrote in the story that you, like many people, find...

ridiculous how enormous and tall trucks have become. But are you like on the slide just driving around in your F-150 yelling at people out the window? Like you're not a truck guy generally? I've owned trucks. I've spent years living with trucks. I think trucks are great. I would love to actually have a truck, but I have too many vehicles as it is right now. The truck doesn't quite fit in there. But I think one of the main things that stopped me from getting a truck is that there aren't many small, cheap options like this anymore. You know, it used to be that you could go buy

a really basic Toyota T100 or a Nissan Frontier for, you know, under $20,000 and have a basic truck that sat two people, had a manual transmission and crank windows. And I can't tell you the number of people who have been asking me, when is Ford going to bring back something like the old Ranger in the 90s, which a lot of people loved, which was very much that kind of truck, but it was still cool because it had like flare sides and cool graphics and stuff like that. And so what I would love to have would be something like a K truck, which is,

the small Japanese trucks that a lot of folks are importing, which are unfortunately basically not legal here in New York State right now, which is preventing me from getting one. Something super basic that I could beat the hell out of, that I could take to Home Depot and put a bunch of papers in the back and not care if it scratches up the paint.

If I could buy something like that for cheap, I probably would have one. So that's why I'm personally excited about a Slate. Yeah, I spend a lot of time in trucks. I've done a lot of towing and hauling and that kind of thing. And so I respect them. But I think the big problem right now with the consumer truck industry in the United States is that these trucks are just gotten simply too big. If you look at something like Silverado 2500,

around $3,500. You could literally put a sixth grader standing in front of that truck and the person in the driver's seat could not see that child. Just because of the height of the hood, these things are unnecessarily large and they're hugely expensive with the average price of $60,000 in the U.S.,

And that, I think, is too much. And so I hope that Slate is a huge success and that makes these other truck companies think, well, maybe it's time for us to deliver something small and cheap as well. So the analogy that that makes me think of – and you are a perfect person to litigate this analogy with me –

is the people who want small smartphones. And I think we've been on this inexorable march to bigger, more expensive smartphones for a decade. And there has always been this group of people who is like, no, I want the iPhone 4. I want something that fits in my hand. These things are preposterous. And yet...

Every bit of available evidence suggests that what people actually want when they vote with their dollars is the big smartphones. And I have to assume that the same is true in the trucking industry, which is why they keep making bigger, taller trucks. So is Slate like the iPhone SE in that it is sort of adorable but not real for most people? Or is there something different going on here? Yeah, it's a great analogy. Obviously, consumer demand is what has pushed the truck industry to where it is today. It's not like, you know...

Ram and Chevy and Ford are forcing these giant trucks down the throats of anybody. People aspire to own a bigger, better, faster, more powerful truck. And so people go out and buy them. I think that's happening on the smartphone world as well. But I am sure you as well know a lot of folks are still hanging on to their older iPhones because they don't want something that's too big. And I think the problem in the smartphone industry is that

you know, nobody else can release an iPhone. Only Apple can. So if Apple decides that big phones are what's it and they're not going to make small phones anymore, nobody else can do that. On the Android side, obviously it's different, but a lot of folks are very tied into the Apple ecosystem and they're not going to go anywhere. On the auto side, it's a very different story. There are really, there are ecosystems as such, but they're not nearly as powerful as, you know, as Apple or Android or something like that. So,

For someone to switch brands, for someone to have a conquest and go from one brand to another, it's not that big of a deal. Especially it's easy with the slate because there's no software really to worry about anyway. So it's kind of a new – it's greenfield territory. And that I think is the biggest question for me is are people really –

going to put their money where their mouth is you know like i said people have been asking me when is ford going to make a small ranger again when is someone could bring out a cheap frontier or a cheap tacoma and uh this is their time to put their money forward and say this is what i actually want uh the interest in the article has been huge and that's encouraging um but we also saw huge interest around the cyber truck when that was unveiled and that obviously has not landed quite so well so i'm curious to see how how this lands when it does ship uh hopefully toward the end of next year okay yeah we're

We're going to come back to that because I've heard that phrase so many times that I've come to not believe it. But we're going to come back to that. The last thing I'm trying to figure out about the truck is Slate seems to imagine kind of the ecosystem of a car very differently from your average company. What was your sense of how they're thinking about it in terms of like, okay, I do want to add a stereo. Is that something...

Slate is going to make? Is that something that they're imagining? I can just like walk to Best Buy and buy. Am I going to am I going to do the repairs on the car myself, which is a thing I think an executive hinted to you as part of their plan, like the sort of car world is enormous and much bigger than just the car that you own. Right. Is Slate trying to fit into that or sort of reimagine that?

Yeah, Slate is really rapidly or radically, I should say, embracing the DIY mentality, both in terms of right to repair and also in terms of customization. So, you know, again, it starts on the outside with these vinyl wrap kits that Slate will offer, but they'll also make it pretty easy to do your own wood templates, that kind of thing.

So customizing the look should be more easy than any other vehicle out there. When it comes to customizing the interior, there are provisions in there for connecting USB devices, power for speakers, that kind of thing. So you can pretty easily bring your own devices there or they have said that they will offer some upgrade kits as well to bring speakers into the vehicle. But I think the idea by and large is for...

you to be doing this work yourself or to work with some kind of an aftermarket installer if you want to. But they're going to be creating something that they call Slate University, which is basically like a big online fact, a knowledge-based kind of thing where you can look up information on how to install speakers in your vehicle, how to do a vinyl wrap, and even how to do some repairs. So for example,

If your mirror breaks and that's covered by warranty, instead of you having to go to a shop to replace that mirror, they want to basically send you a new mirror and tell you how to install it. Which on one hand, it feels kind of basic to some degree, like shouldn't someone do that for me? But also on the other hand, it sounds a lot nicer for me to just go out

in my driveway and take off the old mirror and pop on a new one, rather than driving it down to the dealership, dropping it off in the morning, maybe getting a courtesy car or maybe just spending four hours sitting in the waiting room, reading Golf Digest for four hours, waiting for this thing to get done that I could have done myself in five minutes. So I think, again, there's an optimistic and a pessimistic way of looking at this. I personally am someone who likes to work on my cars.

And to have a company that is going to be actively supporting me doing that is quite novel. Most companies don't want you to do that because their dealers make so much money on aftermarket service and sales support that they don't really want to cut that off. It's funny. Part of the reason I ask is I had this, I had the experience you described literally before.

On Friday, like just a few days ago, I had to drop my car off and they were like, oh, it's a pretty simple thing to fix. The problem is we don't have this one gasket that we need. And I was like, well, can I just go to like AutoZone and buy the gasket and bring it to you? And he was like, no, if it doesn't come from this specific place, it's not covered in your warranty. And then it's technically an out of warranty repair. So they sent me home and now I have to go back and do this whole process again later this week just so they can put a gasket that looks like every other gasket on my car. And so there is...

There is something about that that I would love to break apart, even though the idea of sort of encouraging everyone to try and fix their own car has some pretty obvious reasons.

scary downsides. Right. And they've said very clearly to me that anything that is dangerous will not be allowed to be done. So anything involving the high voltage system, for example, if you want to get the larger battery pack, it's actually going to be a second battery pack that you'll install in the vehicle. But you won't be doing that yourself because A, it's going to be incredibly heavy. But B, at that point, you'll be interfacing with the vehicle's high voltage system. So that kind of thing, you'll have to take it to somewhere else to have done. But

upgrades and minor repairs, things like that they want you to do yourself. And I think that that, again, a lot of folks will find very empowering and to have the support to do so. And I can only imagine what the user groups are going to be like. I'm big in the 3D printing community as well, or I should say I'm quite actively involved in it. And it's really interesting to see the kind of support and help that you see when people are trying to figure out how to get a new filament to print on a new printer and the kind of advice that they get. And I'm really looking forward to seeing that kind of approach brought to a car because it's not the kind of thing that you typically see.

Right. Yeah. What's your sense of how mainstream an idea like that really is? Because I actually think that the 3D printing community is kind of a good way to look at this, right? Where lots of people have 3D printing. It is more accessible than ever. It's more useful than ever. But it's not. There was a time many years ago when you and I were covering tech and it was like, we're all going to have 3D printers in our house. That didn't pan out. And there's something about this idea that seems like

It's obviously going to appeal to a specific kind of, you know, Raspberry Pi owning tinkerer who sort of enjoys the process of all of this stuff and thinks that putting the mirror on their car is fun and doing the vinyl wraps is fun and interesting. And there are a lot of those people, but there's a much bigger group of people that has traditionally not wanted to do those things. Is Slate after those people? I don't know.

I think so, for sure. Yeah. As you said, I think the maker community is really going to resonate with this vehicle. And I think that's some of the biggest excitement I've seen online so far for the vehicle is in that community. But for sure, Slate wants to deliver a fully functional vehicle. It may be limited in function in terms of many other vehicles, but it's the kind of thing that you'll be able to drive and use without having to do anything to it if you don't want to. And then it's just going to be up to you if you want to learn how to do these other things or pay someone else to do these things for you to do the upgrades and that kind of thing.

So for sure, it'll be a fully functional vehicle. And Slate for sure definitely wants to be targeting, you know, they want anybody who's right now stuck in a six or seven year car payment cycle on a vehicle that is going to be, you know, maybe not even drivable by the time their loan is up. They want someone to have an affordable, practical option that's far better for them on a daily, even if they're not.

you know, a 3D print enthusiast, that kind of thing. So for sure, they want to target that audience, but whether or not this car resonates with that audience, that I think is the big question. Yeah. It's the, the like pickup truck, DIY, uh,

sort of enthusiast world is, is just fascinating. And we've just never seen somebody try to kind of do all of that at once. And I think part of the reason I am so interested in this truck is it is, it is like speaking my language in so many specific ways. Yeah. Yeah. Mine too. And yet I'm just, it's, it's just hard to see who is really going to resonate with it. Um, let's talk about the company a little bit because I think it's, it's timing is fascinating. Um, but obviously, um,

this truck has been in the process longer than Trump's tariff regulations have been happening. So the idea of like, we spun up an American manufacturer to make cars is like true, but not sufficient, right? So tell me a little bit about this company. Where did Slade Auto come from? Yeah, this is...

Part of what I had to be a little bit cagey on because I don't know all the details yet in terms – I've asked a lot of questions in terms of funding and that kind of thing. And certainly, you know, there have been a lot of reports out there that have some interesting information out there. But from what I can say, you know, the company's been in development for about three years now. CEO is Chris Barman, who's a former executive at Fiat Chrysler. And so she was there for a long time. And now she is taking over things.

Lead designer is Tisha Johnson, who was at Volvo. She headed up Volvo's interior design for a long time. So they've got some very talented people who are behind this. And the idea was definitely fundamentally to create this low-cost vehicle from the beginning. So this is something that they kind of stumbled into. The impression that I've gotten is that this was really the idea from the beginning.

Okay. So they started with not like, we want to build a new company, but they started with like, we want to build this car. That's my impression. Yeah. And then, so the company I believe is actually headquartered in Michigan, but they have a design studio in the LA area. Um, so I think the majority of the work is happening in Michigan in terms of production. Uh,

The indications are that they'll be producing the vehicle in Indiana. The exact details of that have not been disclosed yet. But again, the advantages of the production we were talking about earlier, injection molding versus stamping, that means that they can have a relatively small footprint and basic factory compared to what, you know, if you look at the Tesla Fremont facility, for example, that thing is a massive sprawling thing. Slates beginning early.

should be a lot lower and their factors should be a lot simpler and smaller than that. And then when it comes to funding, obviously, you know, there's a lot of talk about Jeff Bezos being involved. I asked rather pointedly, you know, is this...

a facet of Amazon? Is this a spinoff of Amazon? Are we going to see these with Amazon stickers on them doing deliveries? Will you be able to go on Amazon.com and buy them? And they downplayed that quite a bit. This is definitely not officially part of Amazon. But when I asked them, will you be able to buy these on Amazon? They kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, who knows, maybe. So, you know, don't think of this as an Amazon subsidiary, but there may be some family ties in there due to Jeff Bezos' involvement, if that makes sense. Okay.

Yeah, our old friend Sean O'Kane has done some very good reporting on this at TechCrunch. We'll link to all that in the show notes. In fact, he had a new report that just dropped, I think, two days ago on that factory. So he's got some more details there as well, which given the strength of the reporting so far, I think sounds legit to me. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll put that in the show notes for sure. What do you make of the timing? This company's been, I would say, in sort of remarkable secret for three years, as you described. Why do you think it's coming out now, especially with a car that's not planning to ship for a year and change?

Yeah, it's impressive how quiet they've been. When I learned about Slate, I was invited to go see this thing and I had no idea what it was. So I kind of went on faith of some of the people who I knew were at this company, but I knew nothing about it. And to be able to keep, you know, it's hard enough for a car company to keep a new model secret for that long, but to keep an entire company secret for that long, it's quite impressive.

And this is a pretty unusual looking vehicle, right? Like in person, it's not, you're not going to mistake it for something else pretty quickly. Right. Yeah. I talked to them about that and they actually have not done any open road testing on the vehicle at all, which is part of how they did that. Because otherwise, yeah, we would have seen...

I think people would have speculated that it was a new, you know, 40 V or something like that if it had come out. But anyhow, so that was part of how they managed to do that. But I think the timing now makes sense because, you know, it takes four, five, six years to develop a new vehicle. You want to get some interest in it in time to get some careers going for them to get an idea of what the demand is going to be like and where the demand is going to be. You know, they need to come up with fulfillment centers, delivery centers, and service centers for these vehicles. Um,

And so they need to know where to, you know, centralize those things. So I think that gives them enough runway to figure out what they need to do from a logistics standpoint, which is another huge part of this, you know, launching a new car company that can be very complicated. Well, and just on the logistics piece, it seems like the logistics piece is where a lot of these sort of would-be car startups get screwed up. Exactly. Right. And I think, do you have a sense of...

what Slate maybe has learned or is trying to do differently. I mean, it seems like, again, to your point about the manufacturing, just making the thing easier to make goes a really long way because if there's one thing we've learned over the last 20 years of EVs, it's that...

they're hard and expensive to make and that that is the thing that will kill you. Is it as simple as that, that that's their move to try and do better here? No, there's a whole lot of interesting stuff going on on the delivery fulfillment and service and support side as well. So direct sales for one thing, which is probably not a surprise at this point, but that does add a lot of complication. There are different rules in different states in terms of what you can and cannot do for delivery centers. It's pretty restrictive in

In many states in the U.S., there's a very good chance that you won't be able to go around the corner to a Slate store as such and pick up your vehicle. Chances are you're probably going to be driving a fair distance or Slate has said that they will deliver them to you. But interestingly, from a service standpoint, they're actually partnering with

some nationwide service center or service centers to do all the warranty work on their vehicles. They haven't said exactly which one it is, but I'll think of something like a Meineke, you know, your local muffler shop, that kind of thing. It'll be something like that where you'll be able to take your vehicle to get a service. And they said that they've got basically the entire country covered or they will have the entire country covered on day one, which is interesting and very different again than what we've seen before. And then, you know,

you know, from a logistics standpoint, not having dealerships means that they get the full cost of the vehicle. There's no dealership taking a cut. Same thing with accessory sales. You'll be getting those directly from the company. Typically, a dealership would take a cut of that as well if you're buying accessories, options, that kind of thing. So again, that just helps their margins, which helps them get to that low price point. Okay. How would you handicap the odds of this thing actually hitting the road in late 2026? I think we've been burned by this many times. And even, I think there's even a question of like,

Is any of this real? Right. I think I'm actually pretty willing to give this the benefit of the doubt in part because I want to and in part because it actually a thing that they've done is make it make a car that's easy to make, which I find very compelling. And also, like, I'm more willing to bet on the existence of this thing than your average person.

hundred and twenty thousand dollar new, you know, roadster competitor. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I I'm quite bullish, but I was if I were in a position where I had not seen the thing, if I had not talked to the executives, if I had not been to some of the facilities to see these things, I would probably be extremely skeptical myself because we've been burned by, you know, your Apteras, your canoes, that kind of thing over the years, Viskers even.

And so there's a lot of reason for skepticism here. And I think that that's fair, especially, you know, we're talking about even if it is a relatively affordable car, it's still going to be a big investment for people. And so it makes sense to be skeptical about where you put your money. And so for that reason, I think that's fair. But having seen the vehicle, having sat in the vehicle, having talked to these executives,

Having really looked deeply at how they've engineered not just the vehicle, but the company to support this short runway, quick path to profitability, I think that they are in a much better shape

shape when it comes to launching a new EV brand than just about anybody out there. And they haven't had to go to extremely questionable lengths to get funding to continue to give them the money that they need to. So the only question mark in my eye is what is the consumer reaction going to be? Obviously, it's been very positive so far. But again, we've seen that with other EVs in the past that haven't gone very far. So if the demand is there, I give the company a

a good chance of success. But as you alluded to before, Trump tariffs and everything else going on right now, EV subsidies are very much a question mark hanging over the current state of the industry. There are definitely some roadblocks to overcome, but I would say we're probably looking at a

80 to 90% success chance of them actually getting a vehicle to production, I would say, which to me is quite high given the... I'll take that, yeah. Yeah. But in terms of the long-term success of the company at that point, I think it's anybody's guess after that. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. I mean, is there a 90% chance we're all going to be here in 18 months? Who knows? So I'll take it. Yeah, me too. Last thing, and then I'm going to let you go. Is the car nice? Like you've touched it, you've sat in it.

I'm so there's so much about this that is designed to be, you know, minimalist and cheap and straightforward. But it also like the whole thing falls apart if it's not like fun to sit inside and drive. Right. Is it fun to sit inside? I have not driven a car yet. And I think that that must be a caveat. But in terms of actually getting in the vehicle, it is actually quite nice. Yeah. The interior is extremely basic, as you can imagine, but it's comfortable. I am.

Fairly tall at six feet, but I have short legs, which means I sit very tall, which means I often have a hard time fitting into a lot of cars in terms of headroom. I had no issue at all. You know, there's no sunroof here, so that helps. But I had plenty of headroom in there. And even I got to sit in one of the SUV configurations of the vehicle.

And I was shocked that I was actually okay getting in the second row as well. It was a little bit clumsy to get in there, but once I was in there, I was pretty comfortable, which was quite surprising to me. So from an overall room comfort standpoint, that was fine. And even things like the bed, for example, the truck bed is extremely low, which modern trucks, F-150, Silverados, the bed height is kind of at chest level almost. If you're loading hay bales in there, that kind of thing, that's very awkward. But yeah, I'm quite comfortable in the truck, but the big question is driving. That changes everything. And

And I have no idea what it's like to drive yet. In fact, most people that sleep don't either because they haven't done any open road testing. And presumably now that it's out there.

Part of the point of getting it out there, I would assume, is to be able to start putting this thing on the road. Yeah, they've got a lot of miles ahead of them in cold weather testing, hot weather testing, all sorts of towing conditions. You know, to publish a towing rating in the U.S. requires a lot of regimented testing at grade, at high temperatures, that kind of thing. So they've got a lot of work ahead of them over this next 18 months or so. But yeah, I think from where they're at right now, things are looking quite good. I'm excited. I confess I am in...

I'm absolutely no way a truck guy. Like I live in I live in a townhome in in the suburbs of DC. Like no one needs a pickup truck less than I do. But I have spent a lot of time looking at this thing over the last few days being like, I could buy this car.

It seems cool. I think it solves a lot of problems or it offers a lot of aspirational hope for a lot of people who don't want the burden of a giant truck sitting around, but who would like the ability to go, you know, to go to Yarsteele, to go to an antique shop, to get that kind of stuff and not have to worry about the logistics of renting a truck or borrowing a truck. And I think it'll find a home for a lot of people. I hope it does.

And there does seem to be a thing where people want a car to believe in, in a sort of real human moral way. And this seems to have hit that note pretty well for a lot of people. Right. I think most people right now, if you're car shopping, you kind of pick a car that matches your personality. And as we're seeing, certain brands are changing their personality rather dramatically. And so I think people have seen that that can have a negative impact if you've already owned a car that no longer suits your personality. The idea with Slate is that...

You can change the car's personality to match yours. You can even go so far as to change the lighting patterns on the nose, which is really kind of like the identification mark of the vehicle is really that nose. And Slate will let you change anything on there that you want to. So I think this will be something that people can really find personal ownership and commitment to. I love it. All right. Well, when you drive it, you're coming back. We're going to talk about it. Sounds very good. I look forward to it. Tim Stevens, thank you so much. Thanks, David.

All right, we got to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and talk about how to use your phone a little less because I think we could all stand to use our phone a little less. We'll be right back.

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Casey Johnston, welcome to the Verge cast. Thank you for having me. So I was going to try and introduce you and explain what you do, and then I realized I don't know how to introduce what you do. So before we get into all the phone stuff, just tell the people what you're up to these days. Yes, I'm Casey Johnston, and I'm a writer and editor and author. I have written about tech and health and science my whole career. Started out as a tech blogger, which is how I know David, and

I have a book coming out next month called A Physical Education that is about my experience getting into lifting weights, the science and psychology thereof. And I write a newsletter called She's a Beast that's about

Health, strength, body stuff, food stuff, all that good stuff. See, that's I started describing she's a beast and basically did the same thing. I just started saying words. So I'm glad to know that that is the official explanation for what she's a beast is. It's it's difficult to sum up something. I cover a lot of ground, but it's just like I promise it's good. So just, you know.

See it for yourself if you like it. Don't rely on my description. Just check it out. I like it. And then if it's for you, you'll know when you see it. So I trust you. All right. So the reason I have brought you here today is because I think you have done as thoughtful and complete a sort of excision of your smartphone from your life as anyone I've seen. And I just want to talk through...

a bunch of the like process and what has actually worked for you and all of this. But I just, let's, let's rewind a little. You've been writing about this for months now, but like,

Was there an impetus where you were like, I am looking at my phone too much. I need to I need to quit it with the screen time. Was there like a thing that happened? I don't know if there was a particular event, but I was getting to a point in the fall of 2023, early 2024, where I just felt like I have no control over how much time goes into this thing. Like it's just disappearing down the hole of my phone screen. And.

And I actually started pulling out old phones. Like, do you save phones ever? Oh, sure. Yeah. I know some people just like get they do like the swap program. But I like every once in a while in a cycle, I will keep one and not resell it because I break my phones often also like break, crack the screen and then and then you're out of phone. So I started pulling out my old phones being like

Is there some sort of like solution and going backwards somehow? And I was, of course, reading every article that ever came out that was like, I went back to a flip phone and like, here's how it went. Because I was just like dreaming of having a more...

a better handle on this situation. And at one point, I popped my SIM card into an iPhone 4S, and it was just like, this is so small and so cute. And it's so much... It's like the screen... The phones are unmanageably large now. And when I put the SIM card in, it was like, there's something that didn't work. I think phone calls didn't work, but it could message and it could do maps. And

And I had no apps installed on it. And I was like, this is sort of ideal. Like the key seems to be stepping back. And I noticed that in every flip phone article where people go back to like T9 texting, like they go all the way back. The main things that they miss are phone.

group messaging and like the sort of convenience of messages that sync across your devices and the mapping, you know, there's no substitute for Google Maps. You have to draw yourself a map. So I was like, what if I made a version of sort of like make my phone as dumb as I can retain those two important things? Because it's like the thing that prevents us from going all the way back to flip phones is basically like those two things occasionally like

Uber stuff like that. Right. It does strike me. It's such a slippery slope, though. And like, because I think I've been through this, too, where it's like, OK, the first thing I'm going to do is just delete all of my apps. Right. And it's like, OK, well, then I'm going to I need I need a couple. And then it's like, oh, crap, I'm going to travel. So I'll put Uber back. And then it's like, oh, well,

I should probably put Ticketmaster back because I'm going to a concert in a couple of weeks. And then all of a sudden, like 10 days later, all I've done is like a bunch more work to reinstall most of the apps that I already had. And I feel like the thing that is like alluring about going back to a

piece of junk phone is that it prevents you from doing that. There is this idea that like, if you don't want to use your phone so much, just don't use your phone so much. Just like be disciplined, you jackass, right? Like be a better person and it'll all be fine. And I feel like this is a thing you think about in another part of your life a lot. And I feel like you seem to have brought some of that to your phone where it's like you just, you have a phone that could be more and you just sort of stared at it one day and you were like, I will not let you do it. Right. I mean,

It's difficult because the technology has insinuated itself in so many ways, even to the point of, you know, in this article that I wrote, it's like, it's our clock. Like, how many times... We have these stats about, like, people pick up their phones 100 times a day, 200 times a day, whatever. But how many of those times am I just trying to see what time it is? Like, I'm not even necessarily...

always going to the well wanting to go on the social media apps. I just want to find out what time it is. But it's like I go to look at the time and then I have a notification for Instagram. So I check that out and then I'm scrolling the feed and then I'm liking things and then I switch to another app and I'm scrolling that feed and it just sort of like becomes this waterfall situation. And it all got started because I just wanted to know what time it was. So

I think I realized the questions that I wanted to ask are like, what are the essential functions? What am I trying to do with this thing? Which of the things are unique offerings to the smartphone is another important question. Mapping technology that is in your pocket, that is a thing that I think that

It would be difficult to excise from our lives at this point. But like the clock is not in there. The clock doesn't have to be in there. The clock could be a watch, you know. So there's sort of like trying to back up

and figure out what is truly additive about the smartphone versus where has it inserted itself that it doesn't need to be was a crucial question for me in this. Was that line pretty obvious for you as you went through it? I think so. I think, honestly, the browser app is...

is on the line where it's like probably 80% of the time I'm in the phone's browser. I don't need to be. And I'm just sort of like indulging a curiosity or like logging into my email. But sometimes I do need it because it's like, oh, I'm

I'm at a concert and I was emailed the tickets and I didn't print them out. And now I need to go into my email and get the tickets. So I have to kind of hold the line at that point and be like, oh, I could reinstall like an email app and have the whole thing on there. But I try to keep a lot of my activity that used to be through apps in the browser. And then at least you are not

setting yourself up for notifications in any way. That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, the browser is an interesting one to me because I think the...

Yeah.

I was like, oh, I could use the app or I could use the web app. And then once I'm logged into the web app, it's not so much more work that I can just I'm just going to go do it. And so I've struggled with the same thing of like the browser is it does make my phone worse, but I'm not convinced it makes me use my phone any less. But then without it, I'm like, I feel lost whether that's real or not. I don't know. But I feel I feel bad about it. I still try what I used to do pre phone wipe, which is what I did. Delete.

I just did a factory reset on my phone and then tried to be like super, super, super discerning about what I reinstalled and even like deleted everything that came out because it now comes with a ton of stuff. Yeah. And just tried to move it all away or delete the apps or whatever. What I used to do was try and hide the apps in the other apps. Oh, sure. Like if I used an app too much, I would just like hold it down, drag it like 10 screens away and plop it there and be like, okay, now I can't find it.

And then at least you have to make yourself do like a hilarious amount of work to go open the app. That counts for something. I like that. Or you search, but like that's...

That's cheating. Yeah, I think you should turn all that stuff off. Tell me about the factory reset thing, because that's one thing you recommend that I have not seen other people who have done this experience recommend. So why wipe the thing and start over? Yes. So another problem I had was I would be like, I'm too involved with apps. There are too many apps. They're doing notifications. I can't turn them all off because I don't even it's like you don't even.

realize you're getting the notifications and they pop up and they go away and you're like, who bothered me? I can't even remember. So I would try and delete apps one by one, but I had so many apps and then deleting them one by one did not work because every time I would be going through and be like, oh, do I really need to get rid of this? Like it's not doing anything. It's not hurting me. And then it would, you know, that would repeat for most of the apps and I would only delete like five of them.

And it just took so long. So I was like, I just need to start over and let go of all of my archaic apps that don't work anymore, as well as the ones that are bothering me, but I'm having trouble articulating. Like, I needed to... I needed tabula rasa, just like go back to zero and let things come back into my life as needed and being careful about what I let back in. That's scary because also...

There will be apps that have data in them and you're not sure if you got everything out. So you want to do an emergency backup just in case you do realize, oh, shoot, I do have that app that I need things from and I didn't get everything out of it.

The one that you really need to be careful about with this is if you have an authenticator app. Oh, yeah. Make sure you figure out how you're going to set it up on your new phone because it can you can just get stuck, I think, with all of your accounts.

So that's a big one. But everything else, most things now are through the cloud. Like you have an account through the app and you just like log back into your account with whatever the app is and then everything you have is there. One of the things you wrote that has stuck with me the most is you like went out of your way to make your phone work.

worse, which I think is really interesting because like for me, the thing I've always tried to do is like I put a picture of my kid on my home screen as like a reminder that I should be looking at my kid. And it's like this is this is more important than my phone. And you're like, no, no, screw that. Make it like black and stupid so that you don't want to look at it at all. You made this switch from like my phone is this sort of like charming companion that I have that reminds me of things to like this thing is stupid and boring and I hate it. Yes. And that that

Shifting that mindset actually ends up being really useful, which I had never thought about. But now and people say this with like making your phone grayscale so that you don't want to look at it and stuff. And like I have sort of mixed feelings about that. It like kind of works, but it also just makes everything kind of more annoying without much upside in a lot of ways. But the idea of like, what if I just made my phone worse?

actually strikes me as really compelling. Okay. Yeah. I, yeah, the grayscale thing never really connected for me either. I definitely tried it at some point when people first discovered it, when it was like a assistive technology thing, maybe. Mm-hmm.

So I remember that and it was like, this doesn't really do anything. But yeah, some of these things come to me like as I'm writing or just like in the middle of doing this. I think when I set up this phone again, I was just like, sure, whatever, default home screen, whatever you do. And then I realized, oh, no.

the phone is really trying to endear itself to you with these like serving you memories through the photos app. And like the, you know, my husband has a, his home screen rotates through photos that are, I think are maybe curated by the photos app. And they're always so cute. It's like our baby, our cat, our dog, the two of us, like, and it's the way I put it in my article was don't let it wear the skins of your loved ones. Cause it's like,

It is trying to manipulate you. They know what they're doing when they make the phone screen able to be all of your most cherished memories, you know? Yeah, yeah. Put those somewhere else, I think is a useful place to be. And speaking of, another thing you advocated for, and this is a thing I want to talk through a little bit because this is something I've been sort of intermittently trying, is like you set yourself up a second device. And I think if I have this right, you set up a device that is like,

always plugged in or like has a has a place that it lives. And if you want to do some of this other stuff, you have to go to that place to do those things. Is that am I characterizing that right? Yes, that's correct. I mean, so the ideal second device, I think, is a is an old former phone that

Ideally, one that has no battery life left anymore so that you have to keep it plugged in. See, mine is actually... I keep it at my desk, which you would think is bad, but it really... The phone is so useless. See, now it's dead because it wasn't plugged in. But you have a second device...

This is an iPhone 11, maybe. And you put all of your problematic apps on there. So for me, one of my big hesitations in going off social media was this is part of my job. Like I work in media. I post on Twitter. I post on Instagram. I have a lot of followers. How will anyone know about what I do if I don't post? Right.

So it was very scary to let go of both my ability to post when I felt like I needed to and also to be able to scroll the feeds in order to see what other people are doing and like how I got to be on the trends and all these things. So what would happen when I would try and delete, say, Instagram from my regular phone?

is that eventually I would be like, oh, well, I got to redownload it because I have to message this person. And I'll just put it back on my phone and log back in. And then you don't want to delete it again. So what I did was put all of the problem apps on a different phone. And that made it so if I had some sort of Instagram task that I thought I had to do, I would have to sit down

in the phone spot with my phone that only works, I mean, because it has no SIM card, it only works on Wi-Fi. And it would be a sort of discrete task in a location on a specific device. And what ended up happening was that I just sort of stopped posting. Like, it completely did away for me the temptation. Because most of the scrolling I did, I think, honestly, was not

I do a lot of scrolling at home, but removing it from the couch where I usually do it or like in bed before I go to bed or when I wake up in the morning and having it be in a specific, somewhat uncomfortable location or a location where like at my desk, I'm usually kind of busy doing other stuff. That broke the pattern for me, at least.

And I was never really tempted to reinstall Instagram when I knew it was already installed and logged in and everything on this phone that's like usually only 10 to 40 feet away from wherever I am in my house because my house isn't that big. So I was able to just...

offload that little piece of like mental weight onto this other device. Yeah, that's really smart. And now the result has been that I barely use this phone at all. Which is, I would argue, the correct outcome. I've tried offloading all that stuff to...

an iPad at various points, which works. I've heard of people doing the tablet. Yeah. It works for everything except social media apps, because social media, like those apps are trash on iPads, which is a problem. I've also tried to do it on my computer, which kind of works and sort of applies to that same like it's in a place thing. But I really like the idea of just having a having a problem phone that like lives far away from where I normally am when

Yes.

that is problematic and addictive that's not social media. You could, one could do, you know, I don't know, you could be really invested in like Clash of Clans or something if you're like spending a lot of money and like a lot of hours and trying to accumulate resources on there. But that's not the problem I have. I think for me, they're pretty one-to-one.

What draws you in is on your phone is the question. For me, it was a lot of social media, but it wasn't always. Sometimes what draws me in is like a New York Times push alert, which they treat very irresponsibly. Sometimes it's really breaking news. Every C-list actor who dies. Yeah. Sometimes it's breaking news and sometimes it's like a recipe and it's like, okay, come on. And I'm susceptible to the recipe, you know? So...

This is like how they get you is that you turn on the push alerts because what if I miss something? What if breaking news happens and I'm not aware of it? And then you have to leave them on and then you're getting the recipes and you're getting the breaking news. So it's like, I think part of what had to be let go was the notion of like, if there's breaking news, I will find out.

in a way that's not like gonna ultimately hamper me in my life. Like, what could I find out from my phone that I need to know right this second that I won't find out eventually? And that was difficult for me coming from a news background as I'm sure you also feel where it's like,

You feel like you got to know everything as soon as possible because you got to like come up with your takes or whatever. And not everyone's in that position. And I'm not in that position anymore. I think we've gotten to the point where we feel like, well, if we can know as soon as possible, we should. And that is not true at all. And I think I've tried to encourage more people lately to at least consider trying, seeing what it's like.

If you don't find out about everything right away, it feels problematic to encourage people to know less in our world right now. And I understand the objections to that. But I think you should feel encouraged to control that flow a little bit more. And you might not realize how much you will still know, how much you will still be apprised of what's going on without feeling like you need to be like an open person.

Just like lying back and letting everything like wash over you constantly. Which I think is pretty clearly A, not necessary for most people and B, not healthy. Like it just overwhelmingly the feeling I get is that like the thing where we all feel like we need to know everything immediately all the time. It's just it's just bad. Like it's just unhealthy in ways that I think we're only beginning to fully understand. Right. Right. It's like you can take seriously everything.

all of the data that's come out on this and the research, it's like, there have not been a lot of redeeming studies, science about screens and like social media. And I think we can, you know, even what I'm describing is not like throwing the entire thing in the trash and like living in the woods. Like you're still in the, in the world and you're still going to get information, but you're allowed to control that relationship. You should feel empowered to, um,

control it a little bit more. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. How long did that adjustment take for you? Because I think the struggle I've had, candidly, is like, I will try these things, I'll run the experiment, and it feels really bad for three days and weird. And I'm like, okay, I'm not actually solving any problems here, am I? Maybe this is just

Maybe I'm not doing anything better here. I'll just go back to installing all my apps. It'll be fine. And like somehow I end up on Reddit again. You know what I mean? So I'm like, what what did it take for you to kind of get through that first hurdle? Was there even that first hurdle? Yeah. Yeah.

Um, there definitely was a hurdle. I remember in the first few days, like so many moments of experiencing some like mild discomfort of I'm not being entertained right now. I'm like in the line at the grocery store or I'm like, you know, I was I think I was at a basketball game and nothing was happening in the basketball game. And I was like, well, I'm gonna pull up my phone and scroll Instagram. Oh, wait.

it's not there. Did you do a lot of picking up your phone and realizing you had picked it up for absolutely no reason? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was pulling it out and looking at it and opening it and being like, there's nothing here. Yeah. Those are the moments I feel like a true lunatic where I'm like, I this is for nothing. I just this is a pure, like addictive response that I just had to grab my phone that didn't make a noise and has nothing for me. But I'm just looking at it now. Yep. Oh, yeah. It feels bad. And it's also like,

There's the pit of like, well, what am I going to do now? I have nothing to do, which is like we used to live like you and I are old enough to remember. You know, there are people who have not lived in a world. This makes me feel so sad and crazy. There are people who are like.

adults, full adults now who have never lived in a world without smartphones. Right. Yeah. We're both in our 90s now. Yeah. We are 100 years old and we remember the telegraph. So it's like, you know, this has been a lot of change for us. But seriously, we remember being, you know, if you were if you had nothing to do, you just sat there, you know, which feels silly to say, or you just sort of watched what was going on around you. So that was part of my like rehabilitation, too, was like,

I mean, especially for me, I work from home, so I have a lot of control over my schedule and like where I go in a way. But that also means that I'm not even like in the world that much. So when I get to be out in the world, I try to be like, you know what? I'm out in the world. Be in the world. Don't be on your phone. What do you do when you're waiting in line at the grocery store now?

I look around. I watch people, you know. See, this is the problem. I honestly, this is going to really make me sound like a terrible person, but I hate that answer. Like, there's just something about that that is like, there's so many things where I'm like, okay, I'm like, I should be hanging out with my family instead of looking at my phone.

I fully agree. I should be driving instead of looking at my phone. Fully agree. Right. Like there's a million things where I think it is like an unequivocally good thing. But then I'm like, is it is it OK to look at my phone while I'm standing in line at Starbucks? Like intellectually, no. But like also, yes. I don't know. And this is this is where I'm like, OK, well, I'll just keep this one app on my phone just to look at while I'm in line at the grocery store. And then the whole thing falls apart. So it's like maybe you do just have to draw the line somewhere past in line at the grocery store. But.

I don't know. Like, it's so boring waiting in line. Well, we solved that problem. I think, yes. So part of the problem is like, you're just like, I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm bored. What do I do if I'm bored? I need, I need, I can't be bored. And, but I think you do need to be bored. I think I found like even just doing a couple sessions of pre-deleting everything from my phone where I would be like, I'm going to just like

hard line, put my phone down, go outside without my phone and just sit there and just sit there and just like try and be without my phone for like 30 minutes and be without anything. Don't be entertained, you know? And I would do that. And at first it would be like,

you know, something could be happening on my phone right now and I don't know about it. And this is very uncomfortable. But then after I sat there for 10, 15 minutes and then we get to like 45 minutes, it'd be like, okay, I'm having like literally so many thoughts. You kind of forget what it's like. Yeah. I'm thinking of so many things. For me, having ideas is huge. I need ideas. My business thrives on ideas, you know, having so many ideas.

And it sounds stupid, but that's sort of the point is that it's not supposed to either sound awesome or legible even to anyone but me. I'm just having an experience. I'm in my own head.

thinking about stuff. Like, I think we need that time to sort of like, it's almost like what sleep does for us, where it's like, we need time to sort of like let the thoughts tumble. It's like a, what are those things? Like a rock tumbler. It's sort of, we're putting the raw craggy rocks in and smoothing them out just by giving them time to roll around in there. And I think we need that, some time to just sort of let our eyes go out of focus and just...

have that time. So that was like a useful experiment, I think, at one point was to allow myself in a comfortable place. Like I was in my own home, not in a grocery line. I feel like you're describing like your first acid trip where you're like, I had a spiritual guy. Honestly, not that different from that, where it's like, oh, there are your brain. There's so much going on in there. And you don't realize because you're always trying to like push it down with everything that's going on in your phone.

that, I don't know, there were just, it was like I had a backlog of stuff to sort of percolate. That's how it felt. I was like, oh, I have so much to think about that I haven't gotten a chance to think about. Like, how am I going to, I don't know, do this thing or what should I, how should I approach this like topic or, oh, I forgot this person said this thing to me. That was crazy. What really did I think about that? Because it happened sort of in passing and I didn't have time to sort of process it. So,

I recall that feeling pretty, pretty vividly. So I think if you like are interested in experimenting with this, that might be a good thing to try is like put your phone away, separate yourself from it for you don't have to do a really length, big length of time. You could do like 15 minutes or something and just sort of.

Give yourself a little space and see what happens. See what comes from that. Yeah, that's a good one. How long did it take before you stopped checking your phone when nothing was going on? Okay, good question. I think it was three days sounds kind of like a good... That feels about right in terms of how long it took to stop pulling it out of my pocket as a reflex.

But I think I can like just because it makes you feel so dumb to do so. But I think I still felt that discomfort and urge of like I'm I'm like bored and I wish I had something to do and I have nothing to do. And that took a little longer. I don't know. I think I still feel that way sometimes. So it is like.

a kind of boundary you have to have with yourself in a way. Like when we have, there's just always, we're so used to having a lever to pull to entertain us and take us out of ourselves. So it's kind of like an active, ongoing negotiation. I can tell you from my life experience that I've gotten a lot out of trying to

Be more deliberate about those types of patterns. It is a pattern that is deserving of your attention and energy, I think. I think if you do give yourself the space to stay with yourself in those moments, you will find it pays off. If you love using your phone and you don't have an unhealthy relationship with it, then it's like, fine, go be yourself. This is for me who...

has an unhealthy relationship with it. And for anyone else who does, who wants it to be different, you know? Yeah. Which is, that's, I am also very much one of those people. Yeah, I think for me, it's, the factory reset thing is very compelling that I'm like, maybe it's just, I'm just going to do a full start over

and just see how far I could get. And that feels like, because the next phase in my own journey, I've like, I've hit the point now where I charge my phone in a room that isn't my bedroom, which is itself a victory. Like good, good first step. Very much enjoying that. Very good. And the next step was like, what if I just delete

all of my apps. And now I'm like, never mind. I'm just going to factory reset my phone and start from there because I think it'll feel better that way. What else have you tried? I think I saw you tried the light phone, maybe. I've tried the light phone. That one's tricky because for like a bunch of wireless carrier reasons, I can't just like put my number on the phone and then iMessage would break and it would be a whole thing. So I can't.

fully commit to the light phone life, even though I think it's actually, it's like very close to being. Yeah. See, this is the problem is that they're all just like a little bit off in significant ways. It's like two apps away from being the right thing for me, but those two apps turn out to be very important. Um,

I think that for me, it's actually very funny. So I am perpetually like needing to test new phones. And as you were talking about the second phone idea, I'm like, oh, I'm going to keep the iPhone as my like normal phone. And then I'm going to just like cycle in Android phones as my like problem apps phone. And this actually solves a bunch of like work problems for me. Okay, good. While also meaning I just like take Instagram off of my phone and put it somewhere else. There you go. The thing I just like an hour before we got

on here bought the brick. I don't know if you've seen this, the thing. So it's like a little NFC device and you tap your phone on it and it locks you out of everything except the apps that you've decided are allowed and you have to go back to it to unlock it. And I think there's like there's something very powerful in that to me that it's like, have you ever been to the concert where you get like the yonder case that they put your phone in? I've heard of this or they have them for like schools now, I think, too, right?

Yeah. So I got I the only time I've had it happen was at a John Mulaney show for some reason. John Mulaney didn't want us to record him doing. Oh, right. Yes. And so they put it in the bag and I was sitting there holding the bag. And at first I was like mad at the bag. But by the end of the concert, I was like, this is great. Like I have a thing that actively prevents me like a person has to allow me to use my phone again. And there was something wonderful about that. So I'm like, how can I outsource this thing?

challenge a little bit. And that's the next thing on my list. So we'll see how that one goes for me. Okay, the brick. I'm going to have to look into this. Yeah, I've opened the page for the Light Phone and the various books devices so many times being like, is this the answer? And I think ultimately I was like, it just isn't or I think it will have issues along the lines of maps. Maps don't work or

You can't transfer your phone number or something. And then that's always... That's such a killer. Or like with a flip phone, too. It's like, I would love to just have a flip phone again, but then...

It breaks too many things about how we live our lives now, I feel like. All right, I gotta let you go here, but plug your book and then we're gonna go. Oh, yes. Okay, so I have a book coming out next month. It's called A Physical Education. Please buy it. It's really good. If you've ever thought about like, if you've ever hated your relationship with exercise or food or your body, this book is for you, I promise. It will be very, it will be satisfying to read, I think, in a lot of ways for somebody who's

like that, which might be a lot of your listeners or so I hope. I suspect so. Yeah. We'll put the link in the show notes. Casey, thank you. This is so much fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline. It's about laptops and it is causing me a lot of feelings. We'll get into it. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. All right, let's get to a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can email VergeCast to TheVerge.com. We love all of your questions. Antonio DiBenedetto is here to help me with this one. Hi, Antonio. Hello. I have a question for you that I think seems easy but is going to be sneakily complicated and may take us a very long time to come to an answer. It's from our email. Let me just read it. It comes from Sir Robb.

It says, I'm usually the gadget recommendation guy amongst my friends and family, and I am also a Mac user. The MacBook Air has been my go-to laptop recommendation for years, but some of my friends insist on having Windows. I was wondering if there's any consensus at The Verge about what the go-to rock-solid Windows laptop recommendation is. Is it Surface? Is it whatever Dell is calling their XPS line now? Is it an HP Envy? Is it Semisus? I have no idea.

Antonio, I also have no idea. I realize this reading this email, I literally don't know even where to start with this question. So you're here to help. Let's help Sirab here. Yeah, I'm happy to help. It's unfortunately a more complicated question

than it should be. But the good news is there are a lot of good answers. It's just that there's no good answer for everyone like there is with the MacBook Air. No, I reject this premise. We're not doing this. No, no, no, no, no. You can't do the thing where you're like, okay, I'm going to ask you a thousand follow-up questions. We have to arrive at an answer at the end of this. And I think this is a useful exercise, honestly, because...

For a long time, it was just the XPS 13, right? Like, would you agree with that? That for a bunch of years, it was like, if you just want a very good Windows laptop and I don't have to ask you any follow-up questions, it's probably the XPS 13. I think for a while it was, and then they ruined the keyboard. And I think a keyboard is kind of important for a laptop because it's kind of like one of the main ways you use it. What is Dell doing? Yeah. When you say ruin the keyboard, what do you mean? Uh.

All right. So it may come down to taste. I know some people may be fine with it, but they use what they call like a lattice-less keyboard. It's basically a keyboard that's like gapless, right? Between the keys. And it looks very nice. And then you touch it and it feels awful. And I make so many more typos. I use the XPS 13 a ton. And I was not happy to give it such a bad review, but I just found that the keyboard was just a nightmare. But

But that used to be a really good go-to option. Now, maybe Dell will recover itself once it starts releasing them under Dell Pro Premium Plus Max, whatever. I'll ignore the names when the laptops deliver what they used to deliver. Yeah, you can get away with having stupid names when you have good laptops. So the answer right now, I think, is not the XPS 13. I will say...

A useful thing to do is probably go see if you can like type on one in a store. And it is because there are probably people who will not hate this keyboard. I agree with you. I think the gapless keyboards in general, I find unusable. But it's like if it works for you, fine, knock yourself out. What else even might go on the list of like...

just sort of default recommendation laptops right now. Okay. So I know you're not going to like this, but I, I, I come up with three. Okay. And the reason there are three is because see in the Mac world, it's obviously easy. It's M chips all around. Right. And as like Dave, you always say like, buy the best thing you can afford and it'll last you however long. So I think a lot of windows laptops are competitive and good in that thousand to $1,300 range. Okay.

And I think it really comes down to your use case based on the chips that are in there. For example, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition, or just Surface Laptop 7 if you want to call it that for shorthand, that's Microsoft's answer to the MacBook Air. It is a very MacBook Air-like Windows laptop. Comes in some nice colors even. It's very thin and light. It's got a Snapdragon X processor. That's a blessing and a curse because the blessing is that you get MacBook Air levels of battlegrounds.

battery life, standby time. And that's one of the MacBook Air's strongest points. But with the Snapdragon X, you're running Windows on ARM, which is so much more fine than it used to be. But it's not like you can just give this to anyone and it's going to just work for every use case. There are some apps that may not be compatible. There are, of course, games that are not compatible. I know

if anyone's hearing this like, oh, like who's gaming on a thin and light laptop? You know what? Thin and light laptops can do a little light gaming just like a MacBook Air can do a little very, very light gaming. And there is something to the, like it will just run all the things that I need it to run, right? Like, and I think to some extent, the thing for me with the Surface laptop is I think if it's not the right thing for you, you probably already know. If that makes sense, like there's this gigantically long, long tail of software that will not work well on that computer. Right.

But like if you just if you just want to like run a browser most of the time, which I think is frankly what most people do on most of their computers, it's going to be fine. So I think that one is an interesting one for me where I think most people will sort of self-select in or out of that. But it also kills me that Windows on ARM is like it's so close, but it's not there yet. It's so close.

But yeah, then, okay. So another option with an AMD chip, I just reviewed this, the new Framework Laptop 13, the new model with the Ryzen AI 300 series chips. This is, I'd say, the most charming laptop around. It's also a very, very good laptop. And it may seem daunting to recommend this to someone because...

It's repairable, it's modular, you can get it as a DIY edition, which I do recommend to people if you feel comfortable putting it together. But you're not, I mean, you're just plugging in the RAM and putting in the SSD and

And that's been like attaching a couple of things. It's really, really simple. I had it. I took like 20 minutes to do that or less. It took longer to install Windows, but you can get it as a prebuilt for a little more money and it comes ready to go. There's no window. The Windows is already installed. And yeah, it's a no nonsense laptop. It's very good. It's very MacBook Air like. But the coolest thing. This is so cool. You pick something.

the ports, right? You get four ports and you pick the expansion cards that you want for it. You can do all four USB-C. You can do two USB-C, an HDMI and a USB-A. You can do a micro SD if you want. You can do an ethernet.

jack. Like that's so cool. And you don't get that. I mean, Ethernet port kind of sticks out because it's, you know, it's a thin and light laptop, but you don't normally get that on a thin and light laptop. You normally need like a beefy gaming laptop to get an Ethernet jack. And that can be kind of helpful. Battery life is like not the best, but it's pretty good. I think you can get through a day of work and maybe if you work a little too hard, you might have to, you know, keep it juiced up. But I know a lot of people do work plugged in anyway. And yeah, it's just

It's a very good laptop. It's also just so freaking cool to pick your ports. You can even do some customizations, like have a translucent bezel that you can install. And it's like, it's magnetic. It just like drops in and out. Very cool. Okay. So I did not expect to find that

A compelling possibility here, but I like that a lot. So what's your third one? Okay, so my third one is the Acer Swift 14 AI. It's not the prettiest laptop. The quality overall is quite fine. It's nothing that's really going to blow you away like a MacBook Air or even like the Surface. But it's a very function over form laptop.

The screen is just okay. It's a 1920 by 1200p screen. Nothing special there. But what is nice about this is the balance of performance and the ports. You get two USB-C and two USB-A and an HDMI out on a 14-inch laptop that's pretty small, pretty compact. Again, not as compact as a MacBook Air, but it's a thin and light, and the Lunar Lake chip gets the job done. You can do pretty much everything you need with it. It's a good performer.

It doesn't benchmark as high as AMD stuff, but it doesn't last quite as long battery life wise as Snapdragon. But it's kind of a Goldilocks. It's kind of just the right balance. And actually, Lunar Light can do some decent gaming for integrated graphics, not counting like Strix Halo, which is like a different beast for integrated graphics. But yeah, that's a solid all-arounder.

happy medium and a decent laptop. I just Googled this, by the way, and it is the most boring laptop I've ever seen in my life. And I kind of mean that as a compliment, right? Like I've... Yeah, it's not compelling. I've come around to like, I don't actually need my laptop to be like thrilling and have new ideas about how things should look. Like...

Just give me a decent looking set of ports and a body that doesn't feel like it's about to fall apart and we're cool. And I think for a long time, Acer failed the make it not feel like it's about to fall apart test. But it sounds like this one's a little better. They've learned how to make a solid thing, even if they don't know how to design anything yet.

Yeah, it's again, it's not attractive, but it's kind of just fine all around. Decent keyboard, decent trackpad, you know, and those things are important, of course.

And then if you can spend a little more, check out the Asus, not Acer, but Asus ZenBook S14. We've reviewed the 16-inch version, which had the Ryzen AI chip, which is an awesome machine, but much pricier. But the ZenBook S14 comes with a Lunar Lake chip from Intel, and it's much more svelte and very nice looking, a lot more of a

design object than especially the Acer. And you get an OLED screen. That's a really nice panel to look at. So if you can spend a little more and you still want that happy medium with a Lunar Lake chip, then yeah, ZenBook S14. Okay. This is a good list. I snuck in a fourth. Sorry. No, this is a really good list. And I think both speaks to how sort of interesting the Windows landscape is right now, but also how very confusing the Windows landscape is right now. Because you're probably right that

There are a bunch of like chip reasons, actually, that it's really hard to have one single pat answer to this question. There's just so much up in the air about sort of which of these configurations is the correct Windows path forward. And my guess is we'll have a much clearer sense of that in like 18 months than we do right now. But especially with Qualcomm and the Copilot plus PC universe, that all just feels very new and interesting, but not quite finished yet. But

We asked for one answer. I think I know which of the four I if like if I'm standing in a store and I'm like, just buy this one and leave me alone. To me, I think I think the answer is actually the framework laptop. It is the easiest to like undo the decision. If you've made it, you can just like put in new ports. It'll upgrade over time. It'll last a long time. People really love it. I haven't used the keyboard on the new ones in a while, but I keep hearing good things like this is a terrific computer.

Would we be crazy to just call that the sort of MacBook Air of the Windows ecosystem? For very different reasons, but it does feel like if I'm just going to give you a computer I'm pretty confident you're going to like, that feels like a good place to start.

Yeah, I think it's, I'm fine with saying that. It's, the framework is a great laptop. And yeah, it's just, the keyboard is good. It's a little, the key feels a little spongier than I like, but it's great to type on. Trackpad is, I think, good, but, you know, it feels a little cheaper than some other trackpads. It's not the fanciness that, you know, Apple has. In my opinion, Apple has the best trackpads, the haptic trackpads.

from Apple are really still the best. As long as you don't mind that it doesn't physically click. I've gotten used to it over the years. I'm fine with it. Yeah, the Framework laptop is a good all-rounder. And again, just picking the ports is so cool and having something that you can feasibly get repaired or repair yourself more easily and replace. I mean, you can upgrade the RAM. You can upgrade your SSD later. You can, yeah, change your mind on the ports. You can bring an extra port with you. That's just kind of weird. You know, like it's

You can't do that anywhere else. So yeah, I don't mind it being the recommendation, even if it's got a little asterisk of like, you may have to do some IT or maybe some little bit of a weird pick, but it's a cool ass laptop. All right. Antonio, thank you. Appreciate it. So Rob, I hope that helped.

All right. That is it for the Verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, other features on the slate truck that you would like to see, please tell us about everything. I truly there has not been a thing I have been as fascinated by as the slate truck in particular in a long time.

email vergecastattheverge.com, call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Also, I'm running a bunch of experiments on myself about how to use my phone less. So if you have a tip or a trick or a gadget or an app that has really worked for you in managing your screen time, I want to hear all about it. Send us an email, call the hotline, hit us up.

This show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nila and I will be back on Friday to talk about OpenAI and the trials going on. I'm going to be in court a bit this week for the Google trial. Lauren Feiner's in court for the Meta trial. We have lots to talk about, lots going on. We will see you then. Rock and roll. ♪