Searching for the perfect minimalist smartphone
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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of automotive tariff coverage.

Somehow that's true. Didn't really set out to do that here, and yet sometimes that's what we do. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here on a very warm afternoon trying to decide how far into the Light Phone 3 life I'm ready to go. So I have the Light Phone 3. If you don't know about the Light Phone, it's basically this sort of decade-old project from this company called Light trying to figure out, like, what is the least...

amount of phone a regular person needs. So if you think about it, it's like, okay, you need a phone that makes phone calls. You need a phone that sends text messages. You probably need some kind of navigation. I think in 2025, you need a camera. What else? What do you need that isn't social media? It isn't web browsing. It isn't all the distracting problematic stuff we're actually trying to get rid of on our phones and do less of. What if you could just have a

I've been using this phone for a while, and it's not all the way there, but it's pretty close. And I think it's close in some really interesting ways. But the thing for me is like, I'm just not going to stop using a smartphone. Part of the thing is like, I do this for a living, right? Like I write a newsletter every week about apps. I'm not going to stop using a smartphone anytime soon. But I do like the idea of like a nights and weekends phone or a way that I can just, you

disappear for a few hours. Even if I'm like out walking the dog, can I take something with me that isn't my smartphone, but is still a way for me to be able to keep in touch with people who I need to be in touch with? So what I'm trying to figure out is like, can I port my SIM card? Does the eSIM swap stuff work? It turns out it's all very complicated. And I think the real reason you can't do this stuff is because of carriers.

But I'm pressing along. I'm going to try and figure this out. If you have figured this out, how to have a smartphone and another phone, and you figured that out in a way that actually works for you, I am all ears. I would very much like to hear from you. But anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about on the show today.

Although it's a little bit what we're here to talk about on the show today. First thing we're going to do today is I'm going to talk with Allison Johnson about these minimalist smartphones, and we're going to try to figure out together what the right balance of features and chaos and screen time is actually the right set of things. I have a bunch of stuff we're going to go through. We're going to try and figure it out.

We're also going to talk to Andy Hawkins about the Tesla takedown protest, which was having a big day this weekend. Plus what's going on with the automotive tariffs. This is a sort of strange, uncertain week for the auto industry. And there's a lot to talk through. So we're going to talk through it. Plus, we have a really fun question from the Vergecast hotline. Lots to do, lots to get to. But it is like 70 degrees outside and I still have some testing to do on this thing. So I'm going to go call my mom on the light phone. It's going to be great.

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All right, we're back. Allison Johnson's here. Hi, Allison. Hello. I have prepared a whole thing for us, and I have prepared you not at all. It's very exciting. Are you ready? Yes. So I've been using the Light Phone 3 for the last week or so. I have it here. I have a lot of feelings about it. I find this phone deeply fascinating. And the thing that I have been trying to figure out as I've been using this phone is basically, like, what is the least...

a phone should be able to do in 2025. Like, first, I want to get your sort of overall stance on this kind of theory of a device that you can, like,

do some smart things on a phone, but it doesn't run an app store. It doesn't give you a web browser. It doesn't give you everything. It's like the sort of minimum viable smartphone as a like either a nights and weekend phone or like a thing for kids, which I know the light phone has become very popular in or just like, I don't want to spend so much time looking at my phone. So I'm going to buy a different phone. Do you buy this premise at all? Oh boy. I want to. I want to believe in a minimalist phone.

for

Every time I've kind of like gone two steps into investigating it as an option, like for me, because I don't want 10,000 notifications every day. I would like to exit that existence. It just, it kind of falls apart for me, like pretty quickly. I used the Barbie phone for like a day and a half, like had my phone number on it.

And it almost gave me a panic attack. Like, trying to type text with T9 is horrifying. Like, I know some people kind of think of it like, well, you know, you put up some friction between you and

messaging and maybe that's a way out of like constant communication and stuff for me I hated it um and I I look at something like the light phone like especially that one like it's a beautiful little device I love the idea of like I'll just leave the apps behind and go into the world unencumbered um but then I start thinking like what if I need to call an uber and I get a panic attack again

Okay, what a perfect unintentional segue to the game that I have devised for us. So I wrote down a list of, I think it's 35 things. Oh boy. And we are going to go through all 35 of these things and we are going to decide. The gimmick here is you and I are designing the perfect minimalist smartphone that does all the things it should do and nothing else, right? And we have free reign. There are no rules. We're not worried about costs. The question is just,

what should our phone do and not do? And I'm just, we're going to run through this list. Some of these I think are really easy. Some I think are really hard. And we're just going to talk through all of them. Does that sound good? I love it. All right. I'm just, it's, I think it's 35 things. So we might be here a while. Okay. These are in no particular order except the order I thought of them. First thing, phone. Make phone calls. We're good at this. Easy one. Thing number two, camera. Should this phone have a camera?

I think it should. Yeah. Should it be a good camera? One camera. And it can be okay, I think. Okay. So we're not interested in like, this is not the camera you like spend your day taking pictures of your child. This is like a, it's a camera if you like need to take a picture of the poster and remember it later. Yeah. That's what we're doing here. Yeah. We'll be like, you can have a better camera separately. Right.

Right. That's true. If you want a good camera, buy a good camera, I suppose, is like part of the point of these phones. Yeah, you can buy a camera. All right. But we're allowing one pretty good camera. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I'm cool with this. Calculator. Yeah. Yeah. I was really hoping you were going to be like, no, too addictive. Does it run Tetris like my TI-83 did? That's an important question.

Yeah. I mean, do you remember all the games you could install on the TI-83? Oh, my God. A calculator is a slippery slope. It really is. It's a gateway app. All right. But we're allowing a calculator. Yes. Text messaging, just like basic SMS, RCS text messaging. Yes. Okay. WhatsApp.

I like I'm just hearing Europe call out like, yeah, they need WhatsApp. I feel like you should be able to download a messaging app of your choice. That feels right. All of them. One of them. Oh, my gosh. Well, yeah.

This is tricky, right? Because it's like, okay, if we're going to allow you to have WhatsApp, we should probably allow you to have Telegram. But then if you have Telegram, we've just given you an entire social network. And like, you can message in Instagram and that's going to come up later, but I don't think we want to give people Instagram. So it's like, this just gets messy. But the reason I included WhatsApp is I think WhatsApp is, it is just so thoroughly like the default messaging app for the world that we kind of have to allow it. Okay. Yeah. I'll just punt the question of other apps.

But WhatsApp, we need. Yeah. I think I'm actually OK with no other messaging apps. Like, we're just going to let WhatsApp win the world. Yeah. I don't feel great about it, but it's where we are. OK. I like it. The next one is Snapchat.

Hmm. Hmm. I actually, I will, I will foreshadow, I struggled harder with Snapchat than maybe any other one on this list. Really? Oh. Because Snapchat, to many people, including many young people who would really benefit from a device like this one, is their...

It's true.

I vote no Snapchat, but maybe that's because I'm old and cranky about Snapchat. Well, I do think we just immediately lost the entire teen market with this plan, which is not going to be good for business. Sorry, teens. But okay, I think we're good. We're out on Snapchat. Go to WhatsApp. I guess you're welcome. We're just giving you everything. A web browser. Ooh, that's tricky. I can...

That's so hard. Like, can you imagine walking around and you think of a question you can't look up the answer? But also, if we give you a web browser...

You kind of have access to everything else. It's everything. We just made it very slightly harder. It's Pandora's box. Yeah. Yeah. I like personally, I would be fine with the web browser as the answer to like, do you in an emergency need to call an Uber? Here's a crappy web browser. Type in your credentials. Can I vote for a web browser? But it's like...

Kind of janky. Oh, that's like an e-reader style web browser where you can use it if you need to, but it's going to suck and you're not going to want to. I did check emails on a first-gen Kindle for a while and it was the worst experience of my life.

Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm good with that. I was also thinking maybe we do a web browser, but we only whitelist like 10 domains. So it's like you can use Wikipedia. You can do, I don't know, you can do Google searches, but you can't like go to most websites. This is probably a bad idea, but that was my compromise theory. I feel like I would just rely on like the AI search results from Google a lot.

And then I wouldn't like click through to the source material. And that could be problematic. Yeah, that's a dangerous game to force on people. I vote for full web browser, but it kind of sucks. So you don't want to use it. Like a 2005 era web browser is what we're offering you. All right. I'm good with that. It like won't run any of the web apps you want to do, but it will like show you text on web pages, which is what we're after. Yes.

Okay, I'm good with that. We're going to call it Netscape Navigator. It's going to be nuts. I love it. Next on the list is Spotify slash whatever music app you want to pick. Oh, this is where the minimalist phones fall apart for me because I'm like, I don't have physical media anymore. Bless all of you who do and you held on to that. That's incredible. I just turned my soul over to Spotify. So I'm like a phone that doesn't have Spotify doesn't work for me really. Yeah.

So for me personally, I vote yes for Spotify. But I don't know if that... Does it violate the minimalist phone ethos once you invite Spotify in? I don't think it does, honestly. This one's actually fairly easy for me. For the same exact reason, like, Spotify music and podcasts are probably the things I do most often, like, measured by time on my phone. And...

There's a thing like in talking to the Light Phone folks, they've been thinking like, OK, is there a way we can take, you know, part of the Spotify experience? And like, what if you could just sync a playlist? And there was like that Mighty device that was the same kind of thing that it would keep one of your playlists in sync. So I think there might be something there. Like, give me very simple things.

Sort of old school iPod level access to my Spotify library, but nothing else. Like a widget. Like, just give me a widget where it kind of sucks, like, searching around for stuff, but you can find it. Yeah. But I agree. I think if you want a phone like this to actually work for people, it's got to have a music app.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the WhatsApp of music apps. I had a really funny experience with the Light Phone 3 because they have a music app, but you have to upload MP3s. And like you, I just don't have a local music collection anymore. So I was like digging around on my computer to find any MP3 file I could to upload to this thing just so I could test it out. And I was like, my God, I...

I have a hard drive full of local music somewhere in this house. And I, for the life of me, couldn't tell you where it is or what's on it. Now, did you have that U2 album that Apple put on everyone's phone? That lives on a phone that I will never touch again and refuse to acknowledge. Okay, that's fair. Maybe that's what we do here. It's just once a month, our minimalist phone just

Gives you an album. Yep. And you have to listen to that album for the next one. You better like it. Exactly. All right. Next on my list is email. This one seems easy. Yeah. Yeah. You need email. I need email. Oh, interesting. I think it's easy the other way. I think if we're trying to do a minimalist smartphone, the very first thing we should take away from people is the hell of their email app. Oh, God. Yeah. I guess people who don't live...

So online, probably. And let's be honest, we could both stand to be a little less online. It would probably be okay. This is what we're trying to do here. I'm trying to think of an email that would like, I would cause real problems for me if I didn't check it in real time.

Yeah. Okay. I vote no email. Email sucks. I hate it. I do think the thing you just did in your brain is what I do with every one of these. Yeah. I'm like, oh, my God, what if...

something horrible happens and I have to know about it. And it's like, oh, that's almost certainly never going to happen. And phone calls exist. Right. Yeah. I think a useful societal thing is like if something urgent is happening, call me on the phone. Yeah. I'm good with that. There was a time before email. Nobody died from lack of email. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. All right. Good. So no email. We're out on email. So

Some kind of note-taking app. Oh, yeah. We need that. Either one that we make or your favorite. Yeah. And that could be fun because, you know, it's not distracting to take notes. Yeah. I agree. Okay. Are we building our own minimalist one or are we just like...

Listen up, losers. Here's Notion on our minimalist phone. Oh, my gosh. A Notion phone is the whole thing I'm going to have to contemplate now. People would buy a Notion phone. I would buy a free Notion phone. Okay. That's another podcast. I think, you know, it could be basic. It could just be like text. Put the text in.

Save it for later. Move on with your life. The only one I'll add to that is I also want voice notes. So just basic typing. Let me let me talk to my notes.

Nothing else. We'll worry about the rest of it when I get back to my computer. Right. But yeah, I agree. You got to have something. A dedicated reading app, whether it's like a Kindle or like Pocket or whatever, just some place I have to read stuff. Should I be reading things on this device? Yeah, I would like that because then if this is kind of like a secondary device, you could kind of sync that up and then it's there for you.

Have we just invented the books palma? I mean, a little. But I'm actually, I struggled with this one more than I expected to because on the one hand, I read a ton on my phone. And that's like a thing I'd like to do that I think is mostly an additive activity. And I think that's fine. On the other hand, part of what we're trying to do with this whole genre of phones is get people looking at their screens less. So I'm like, is the answer go by physical books? Because I don't love that.

But I don't know. I'm so torn. Like, it's such a screen time debate here, right? Like, is our goal to get you to use your screen time better or is our goal to get you to not look at your screen? What if you can only sync up like...

nutritious, meaty articles. Like, you can't be reading any crap on your phone or a book. I don't know. That's fun. I think we maybe do, it's a reading app, but it's only books. And if you want to read trashy books, that is up to you. But I think like, I like the idea that we are going to like heavily incentivize book reading. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Read books on your minimalist phone. I'm into it. Right. Okay. But it will not be the Kindle app because the Kindle app sucks and we will not put it on our phone. Yeah. Okay. I have four games for you in a row and we're going to litigate each one. Are you ready? Okay. The first one is the New York Times Games app. So crossword. Yeah. I was just playing it before we got on here. So yeah. Got it. Sold. I'm into Candy Crush.

No, no candy crush. Why not? I don't know. It feels wrong. It feels like the can you read a book versus can you just read any old thing on the internet? I don't want to tell people what to do with their lives. This is the thing. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you said that. I've gone back and forth on this a thousand times because on the one hand, I'm like, what I'm doing is basically moralizing for you in the form of a smartphone. Yeah. But then on the other hand,

That is a little bit the job. Yeah, right. I think part of the existence of these devices is people like you and me being like, I am helpless in front of my phone, right? And I think many of us are in very real, scientifically provable ways. We are losing the battle to our phones. And if somebody on the other side can have my interest in mind in a realer way, maybe that's okay. And so maybe our job is to tell people how to spend their time a little bit.

here. Yeah. You're kind of buying into like an ethos almost or like that's kind of the vibe, I think. Like you go to the Light Phone website and it's almost like, you know, the humane shtick without, you know, lasers and AI where it's sort of beautiful and simple. You're like, I would like that in the things that go along with it, which maybe means I can't play Candy Crush, but I can play Wordle.

Yeah, and I'm good with that. I do feel like I cannot prove this, but I feel like Wordle is better for your soul and mind than Candy Crush. I think so. I think so. If anyone has done a study on that, please let me know. I would very much like to hear it. Okay, two more games, and I suspect I will know the answer to both of these based on what you just said about Candy Crush. Bellatro is next, just because I love Bellatro and I want to play it all the time, but I don't think we should put it on. I say no. Having never played it for a second, I say no. Okay.

You both should because it's awesome and shouldn't because it will ruin your life. It is... I'm...

I'm not exaggerating. It is the only thing I have ever done straight from the minute I sat down on a plane to the minute I got off of the plane. Oh, wow. Just what it was like a four hour flight. And I did it every single second of the flight without putting my phone down. And literally we landed and I was like, well, we're here already. And it was a real moment of like, oh, I can't play this game anymore. Okay. I'll save it for a flight. I'll try it out when I need to fly cross country. Yeah.

Yeah. Sometime when you're like, I can't do anything for eight hours anyway, just play Bellagio. That's great. And the last one is Fortnite, which I think is an obvious no for the same reasons. Can't have it. Yeah. Okay. All right. Good. Moving on. A Maps app. Google Maps, Apple Maps, whichever one you want it to be. That feels like we need that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I would need navigation.

For sure. All right. Good. Easy. Calendar. This one's a little email-ish to me, right? I see bros and cons. Yeah. Well, I do want to know what day it is. So I vote for a calendar that tells you what day it is. Should it sync up to my work calendar is what I would not want.

Yeah, maybe it's just like a paper calendar, but in app form where you can like... Oh, I like that. Maybe you add stuff to it, but it's just there. It just sits there. It doesn't... Just like writing on a paper calendar. You can't do anything with it. Yeah. It's just a calendar. Yeah. There was this thing we were chatting about for a minute on Slack that was like,

Some company is called like paper apps. And it's like, oh, yeah, everything has come back full circle or it's so cute. It's like they have a golf game or something that you play like you get a little notebook. And but I'm like, oh, a notepad is a paper app because that's like how it worked. Anyway, it gets so dumb so fast, but it's cute. I like it. Yeah.

I'm into it. My pitch for this would be that we find some clever way to combine it with the note-taking app so that you can, like, add stuff to your calendar and know that it will go to your calendar, but you can't actually look at your calendar. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least you can't, like, interact with your calendar in some way, right? Right. Because I think there's something to, like, knowing your next appointment is fine, but I don't want to be able to, like...

open up and move things around in my calendar on this device. That feels wrong for what we're trying to do here. Yeah. Like read only. Yeah. And like pretty and not gross. Nice. Like maybe only shows me two events at a time. Yeah, yeah. You may only know two things at a time. Exactly. Okay. Next up, some kind of video chat service. FaceTime, Zoom, Meet. All of them or one of them, whatever you want, but something for video chat.

I vote no. Really? Yeah. I think you have to talk on the phone or go to your computer. Okay. My worry for this strategy would be it's possible that video chat has crossed the line into...

it's as important, like it might be as important as phone calls and text messages. Yeah. I don't feel like it's all the way there, but it is, it is, it feels like it's getting closer and closer every day. And so my worry is if we don't allow this, there's just a bunch of people who are like, well, then of course I'm never buying this. Yeah. In the same way that if we don't have WhatsApp, we've just instantly ruled out lots of people for whom this doesn't work anymore. I don't know about video chat though. I know. The other side of the coin is when you're like, I can't,

Sorry, I can't video chat you. We can call on the phone. That's kind of a relief. You're like, you get a little vacation from like doing Zooms or Google Meets or whatever. So maybe it's a little bit of like you're choosing this and...

It's healthier for you? Question mark. No, I actually, I totally agree with that. You've just swayed me because I think, A, again, we're talking about a phone you're not supposed to stare at all day. Yeah. And B, we do all spend too much time looking at our own faces. Yeah. It's like not healthy. We're all secretly like looking for a break from that.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm in. No video chat. But maybe it has a thing where people can like, you can click on a Zoom link, but it'll just add you as audio only. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to like the big question with all of these is like, how do you integrate with all the stuff people actually need to use, but in a less gross way? Yeah. And I kind of like the idea of like, it has all the video chat apps, but

Audio only. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. That would work for me. Okay. I also, can I just tell you, this is just a random thing. This light phone, beautiful little lovely device. It's very sharp up here. Oh, no. It's when I hold it against my face to make phone calls, it kind of hurts my ears after a while. I really like this phone, but I don't love really long phone calls on it. Hurts as a phone. Yes. Not exactly what you're going for. Anyway, all right. We got a bunch more. Let's keep going. Okay.

A few of these I think are going to be easy. So this will be fun. A built-in AI chatbot of some kind. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, pick your favorite. This goes back, I think, to the same thing as web browsers, which is like, what do you do if you have a question? Yeah. I mean, I vote no. I vote you, if you need your Claude or whatever, put it in the web browser and go talk to it there. Okay. I agree with you, but I just want to play devil's advocate for one second because I think there is a case to be made

that you could ditch half the other apps we've allowed and replace them all with a pretty good chatbot. Like something that can remember things for me, that can take notes down for me, that can find information for me is actually in a certain way like...

what we're going for here. Yeah, that's like where we've just like invented the whole premise of AI on phones, where it's like, yeah, abstract all that away. The chatbot will just take care of it for you. But the reality right now is you ask it to do a math equation instead of having a calculator. Right. Rolling the dice, whether that is true, you're going to get the right answer or not.

That is true. Maybe when we do this exercise in like four or five years, it'll be really different. But right now, the idea of replacing my calculator app with Claude seems terrifying. Yeah, I know. But I do think you're right. Like spiritually, they're a perfect fit.

This idea of like, now I have a device that I don't have to look at all day. And so it can actually be redesigned around the fact that I don't have to look at it all day. And I can just talk to it and it does things for me. Sounds awesome. Super duper doesn't work. So somewhere the founders of Humane are just screaming into the void. They're like, we wanted this. They're like, if it had worked, we'd still be here. I know.

Yeah. Didn't work. Nope. All right. So we're not allowing that. TikTok, I assume is just a no. We're out on TikTok. No TikTok. No, can't have it. Okay. CapCut for making videos. No, I vote no. But I think like maybe some kind of system where if you record a video with your minimalist phone, it can go somewhere. Yeah.

So you could make it. But I don't know. As soon as you have that knowledge of like, oh, I should record this. It could be a TikTok. It changes your whole like MO when you're out and about. Because I'm constantly like, I should take a picture of that. It'd be funny on Instagram or whatever. And maybe we want to get away with that, away from it. I vote no. Okay. I think I'm out too. And I think there's definitely a...

a sort of line in the sand here somewhere where it's like, if this activity on your phone is going to take you longer than X amount of time, it's a computer task or an iPad task or like when you get home task or whatever. And I think that is like, that's one of the things the light folks have really tried to figure out is like how long...

Can we make you use this device before actually we're just defeating the whole purpose? And the answer is go use the device that you bought to do things with. Right. Yeah. And I think there's something in there. And I think CapCut, you're probably right. Like if you want to spend an hour editing a video, you shouldn't do that on our minimalist phone. Yeah, exactly. You should do it on an iPhone. iPhones will continue to exist until our company takes over the world with minimalist smartphones. Yeah, that's going to be great.

All right, I have a few more. Then I'm going to let you out of this horrible exercise. Instagram, I think, is a no, right? We're out on Instagram. The messaging thing is a little tough, but we'll live. Yeah. Look at your memes somewhere else. Duolingo.

Oh, man. I do need my Duolingo. Duolingo is both like incredibly problematic because it's all about streaks and it pesters you all the time and it is like designed to be addictive, but it is also in a certain way like good for you. Yeah. Oh, man. That's a tough one. It's another. Yeah.

Because, like, feasibly, I could go through a whole day with this phone. Like, it feels like a phone I should be able to go through a whole day with. And if I have to use a straight phrase because I was using my minimalist phone, I'll be pissed. Yeah, I feel like there should be some access to Duolingo. But maybe it can't bother me. Oh, that's okay. That's a good one. Duolingo, but no. Well, I think this phone in general does not allow push notifications. Yeah, yeah. Except...

No, no push notifications. It can alert you when someone is calling you on the phone, and I think that's the only notification allowed. Yes, agreed. Okay. Yeah, Duolingo, I think, might actually be, like, the perfect summation of why this is such a hard problem to solve, because it is both, like...

It is so problematic in so many ways. But like you just said, it is like a core part of many people's day-to-day lives. And not having it becomes a total non-starter. Yeah. Which, again, A, kudos to Duolingo for pulling that off with a language learning app. Good God. But it is a strange thing. Yeah. All right. YouTube. I think we're definitely not allowing YouTube. No YouTube. I think we just don't want you watching videos on this phone. Like, I think that's fine. Yeah. Read an article.

Or just like, don't look at your phone. Right. That's fine, too. I'm envisioning myself like I'm trying to fix something in my house on my own, which was a bad idea to start with. But then I'm like, I need to find the YouTube video of however you do this. But if I'm in my house, I can go on a computer. I'm not like out in the world trying to fix, like put up a shelf on someone's wall. Right.

Well, we're also allowing the terrible web browser. So it'll play the YouTube video. It'll look bad. Yes. And maybe it only plays it like eight frames per second. But in a pinch, it works. So I think that is a workaround I don't love, but I can live with. Okay. Yeah, me too. But I definitely don't think we have a YouTube app. No. That violates all of our rules. Yeah. Okay. And I think Netflix, same thing. No Netflix. No Netflix. You have plenty of other places to watch Netflix. Don't do it on your phone. Yeah, watch a TV.

Right. Some kind of file storage app. Dropbox, Google Drive, pick your favorite. Oh, man. I'm just thinking about how annoying the iPhone is to deal with as soon as you need to get a file off of it. And it feels like we fought so hard just to have a files app on the iPhone. I don't want to not have it. But maybe you can like sync stuff to Google Drive if you have to.

Does that make sense? Okay. So you can't like access your Google Drive, but you can send something to Google Drive. Yeah. I'm good with that. We can do that with the API. Okay. Yeah. You hit a backup button and it goes straight to Google Drive, but you can't see all the files in your Google Drive. Yeah. All right. I'm good with that. I can work with that. Uber slash Lyft. It could be the...

web browser thing. But... I actually think you need something with, like, real phone-level access. Yeah. That's, like, an app that is always on that can do the, you know, really fine location stuff. This is one of those that I'm, like...

I don't actually use Uber and Lyft all that often in my day to day, but the idea of not having it as an option feels like a problem. So I think I would need it. I would too. Yeah. It's like a lifeline where I'm like, well, if everything goes south here...

I'll call Uber. Right. And it is a tool you expect to have available to you. And they have a bunch of weird workarounds. Like, I think you can call on the phone and get an Uber. Oh, that's cute. And they have some of the, like, chatbot integration stuff. But I think we need the Uber app. I'm okay with that. Yeah. And that's also not really an app you, like, hang out in anyway. No. So I'm not super bothered by it. If they, like, gamify the Uber app.

I'll be so annoyed. You know they want, you know they want to. Somebody in there is like, how do we Duolingo the Uber app? Oh, I had to use a streak phrase on my Uber app. Yeah, nightmare. Dara, if you're listening, that's not a good idea. Don't do that. Please don't do it. All right, I got two more. Slack slash Teams feels like if we're not allowing email, we cannot allow Slack and Teams. No, get out of here. Slack and Teams.

Okay, good. I'm glad we're on the same team. Last one, Venmo slash Cash App slash some way to send money. Does this matter? Do we need this? You can web browser that, right? I'm trying to think of like, I went to a thing this weekend where we like painted these little figurines. It was like called Art Club and we paid through Venmo.

I'm like, I'd want to be able to do that. But yeah, you have the camera, you scan the thing, you log in. I say web browser for this one. Okay. Yeah. And that's one you can kind of work around a crappy experience. Yeah. Do we have tap to pay though? Oh. Because I want that. I didn't even have that on the list, but I think we need to. But then you have a whole, do you have a wallet? And then do you have the Capital One app? I don't know. Yeah.

You just eventually end up recreating the pixel. Like, there just is no way to do this without accidentally making a pixel. Yep, it's true. But no, you need tap-to-pay. I think you need tap-to-pay, yeah. Okay, here's our tap-to-pay rule. One credit card. Yeah, you gotta pick. You pick one. You can have transit cards, whatever, but you get one credit card. Yeah. That feels necessary. Because otherwise, you end up down too many weird rabbit holes. Right. And you can, like...

log on to our like web portal on your computer to upload your credit card credentials or something, you know, encrypted, blah, blah, blah. It'll be great. Our security is top notch on this platform. Yeah. Don't even don't even worry about that. You've got it covered. All right. Well, that's my whole list. Is there anything else I forgot? If we're building our perfect minimalist smartphone, anything else we desperately need that we don't have?

We're doing like alarms and stuff, right? That's just like baked into it. Yeah, that like the thing shows the time. So it has to kind of do alarms and timers. Like I feel good about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think I could live. I could get through a day with this phone and it wouldn't give me a panic attack.

Too much. Is it weird that that actually feels like the bar? Yeah, right. I'm good with that. I think it's been a really interesting thing because I think, like, talking to all the folks who make these minimalist phones, they're basically...

Trying to figure out how to make a phone that is so different from all the other things that it doesn't just seem like a worse version of your phone. But actually, maybe what we need is just a worse version of our phones. I keep coming back to like a cellular smartwatch is the minimalist phone. And like you put in some earbuds, you've got your little like crappy phone on your wrist. Yeah.

You're good to go. And then when you, you know, you can just leave the house without the thing. The only thing is, you know, you don't have the camera. You know, it kind of breaks down pretty quickly to where like maybe there is room for a thing that's like phone shaped. But yeah, I think for me, that's where I keep...

getting into this loop with the minimalist phone is like, well, it's going to be missing this or that. That's on the watch that I usually have on anyway. Why wouldn't I just use the watch?

If I wanted a break from my phone. There have been all these rumors about an Apple Watch with a camera being kind of in the labs in Cupertino right now. And I have gone from thinking that is an absurd, ridiculous idea to being like, maybe that's actually the only thing between me and being able to use just my watch for really long stretches of time. Yeah. But.

How do you take a picture? Do you do like... Here we go. Say cheese. Yeah. Maybe this is just the just have a camera on you moment. Like... Maybe. We invented this thing, actually. It used to not be part of us. Like paper apps. Like, yeah, we do just have paper settings. Yeah. We're pretty good at paper now, it turns out. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, Allison, thank you for doing this with me. If we missed anything, if there's something on your list that you're screaming about that you need in your minimal smartphone, tell us. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. Allison, thank you very much. This is super fun. Thank you. This is great. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk Tesla. We're going to talk tariffs and we're going to talk about what in the world is happening with cars. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Andy Hawkins is here. Hi, Andy. Hi. How are things? Things are good. You know, it's we're we're out here. We're we're watching these protests, these Tesla protests. I assume that's what I'm here to talk about now. In large part, I think I have.

I just galaxy brain myself into many corners with all this Tesla stuff. So we're going to do a little bit of that. But let's start with the protest this week, because this weekend was it was a big moment in the sort of official Tesla takedown universe of protests. Like what just sort of walk me through what happened this week.

Yeah. So these protests, they started, I guess you could say, two months ago, early February, I think is when we started seeing some of the first ones. People sort of showing up outside of Tesla showrooms and at charging stations and registering their opposition to Elon Musk and to Doge and to the sort of ransacking of the federal government.

And they grew over time, and we started to see larger and larger crowds in cities all across the country. And then eventually they decided they needed to get organized. And I think that was sort of like the most interesting thing to me was this was very much a bottom-up grassroots effort. Very much there was not really sort of any like national leader to these protests whatsoever.

Uh, and they, they sort of realized that that was not really sort of a tenable situation. They needed to get organized. So they sort of got together. There's been some various kind of, you know, um, pro-democracy, uh, left-leaning progressive groups that have been sort of like involved on the margins, uh,

Indivisible and a few others. And so they decided to get together and sort of hold a mobilizing effort and targeting this one date, March 29th, which was last Saturday, as sort of their global day of action. They were just like, everybody needs to come out. We need to hit every Tesla location in the country. Let's hit some in Europe as well, in Canada, and really have like a show of force to sort of like

send the message that this is like a sustained protest and effort to really, you know, send the message that Elon Musk and Doge are on their hit list, I guess you could say. So Saturday was the day we sent reporters out to as many of these protests as we possibly could. I think we hit almost a dozen of them in London and in New York and New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Florida, Texas, California, Florida,

Um, yeah. And, uh, what we saw was sort of, you know, sort of like what we've been seeing for the last, uh, few months now, which is, um, a lot of, uh, clever signs, a lot of illusions to fascism and to Nazism and to, you know, photographs of Musk making his, uh, fascist salute at the inauguration. Uh,

And I think an effort, largely, overall, the broader effort was to sort of toxify the Tesla brand and to drive their sales down, which was something that we heard from talking to these protesters. Right. And it seems like, I think, in an effort to make this a moment, the movement seems to have succeeded, right? I feel like I saw coverage of this everywhere, that if the goal was to

pick a moment to make this a big story, this sort of loose collection of protests. Uh, it seems to have worked. Yeah. I mean, they've gotten the attention of the targets of the protests, right? Like Elon Musk, uh, and Donald Trump, uh, have both, uh, come out and, uh, made several statements, uh,

about not just the protests necessarily. They've been focusing more on the violent acts and the vandalism, which is understandable from their position that that's what they would be focused on. But what we definitely heard from the protesters was that this was a peaceful movement. This was a nonviolent movement. They do not

condone any of the vandalism and the arson that's taken place. They see that as something that's separate to their movement. But obviously, I would say on the Musk and the Trump side, there's an effort to tie those things together. And so, you know, that's where we got Trump talking about charges of domestic terrorism, although we have yet to see anyone be charged with domestic terrorism yet. There have been arrests

of people who have been charged with setting fires and defacing Tesla property. But none of these actual terrorism charges quite yet. That may be difficult to actually accomplish. And then you had Musk on Fox last week talking about, you know, going after people who were pushing Tesla propaganda, he said. So it's clear that they have their attention. And I think that that is, it's been galvanizing for the protesters. I think that they feel that they're succeeding because they have Musk's attention.

Well, and it's been really interesting to watch the folks engaged in these protests try to explain what it is that they're protesting. Because on the one hand, this is all pointed at Tesla, right? They're going to Tesla showrooms. They're going to Tesla buildings and protesting Tesla. It's called Tesla takedown. Like, that is the thing that they're doing. But it's not about Tesla. This is, like, very specifically pointed at Elon Musk. And...

I think, A, to some extent that has worked, right? Like you mentioned the Fox News interview he did, and he basically goes on TV and is like sort of weepily saying my businesses are struggling. Like that, I assume that's what these protesters are after, right? Like that is the goal is you want him to feel it at the end of the process. But I do continue to wonder, is pointing all of this energy at Tesla the right way to get to Elon Musk? Does that...

seem like it is working for these protesters because they're not mad at Tesla nearly in the same way that they're mad at the guy who runs Tesla, right? Or am I overstating the Elon Musk? No, no, I don't. No, I think you're right about that. They are mad at Elon Musk. And I think the understanding is that Tesla is sort of the unfortunate byproduct of what they have to do, right? Because his wealth and his power is

are very much linked to Tesla. His ownership of around 13% of Tesla's stock is sort of what comprises the bulk of his net worth.

And it's what, you know, he's had to sell Tesla stock in order to fund the purchase of Twitter. You know, that's sort of how he leverages his power is through his ownership stake in Tesla. And so, yes, Tesla is sort of just what they have to focus on, right? This is a boycott. It's an effort to drive sales down, to convince people to sell their Teslas.

to make the used market of Tesla sort of chaotic and ultimately to affect his ownership and his net worth of the company. I don't think any of the folks that you would encounter out there at these protests would say that they are opposed to the idea of electric cars or the furtherance of electric car sales. And you see some people with signs that say, we like electric cars, we just don't like Tesla. Right?

And so that is sort of the ultimate mission here. It's not to, I think, to sink the electric car market. But in some ways, obviously, Tesla is a huge chunk of the electric car market. But it is specifically about making the Tesla stock price go down and making Elon Musk's net worth and thus his political power diminished.

I mean, that's the piece of the sort of cognitive dissonance of all of this that just continues to blow my mind. Like, my overarching assumption would be that the people protesting outside of Tesla showrooms this weekend were the exact same demographic of people who may have been the optimal Tesla buyer 10 years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. And the cars have not changed, right? Like it's just what they mean in the world has done like a full 180 to the point where like the people who used to walk in and spend money are now protesting outside of the building. And it is like if you want a story of what has happened to American society in 10 years, like there it is, man.

It's just bizarre. Yeah, it's crazy. And they'll point to they'll say, you know, we would have been fully in support of Tesla's mission, right? Like Tesla's mission for a long time was to further the mission of new energy, clean energy, renewable energy. You know, Musk for a long time talked about, you know, electric cars and battery storage and all these things as a way to save the world. And I think a lot of those people would have ascribed to that mission.

But, you know, their argument would be, you know, he changed first, right? He was the one that got red-pilled and bought into all of these Twitter conspiracies and moved to the right and ultimately endorsed Donald Trump and funded his campaign and is now heading this effort to slash Trump

federal government and fire workers and cancel humanitarian aid. So I think a lot of these folks would say, you know, it wasn't wasn't us that changed. We liked Tesla. We liked our cars. But, you know, it's it's him that changed. And now we have to sort of like respond to that. So, yeah, it is it is an incredibly cognitively dissonant moment. I think all

ultimately, and I think a lot of these protesters would, would, would fully admit to that as well. Yeah. It's, it's just, it's just strange that it ended up like this. Um, so what, what is the sort of metric we're looking at to see if this is working? Obviously you can look at Tesla stock price. Um, I will just say candidly, I, my, my increasing belief is that stock prices have nothing to do with anything or completely divorced from reality. Uh, especially when it comes to things like Tesla, which have been about other things for a long time. Uh,

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

and from China about how its sales had dropped. I think in Europe over the last two months, sales were down 45% year over year. In some markets even more, I think Germany was down like over 70% year over year. And now we're going to see the first quarter sales data be reported on Wednesday. Even a lot of the Tesla optimists and the bulls out there are expecting it's going to be a rough number for Tesla. They're

assuming that it could be down by as much as 9% to 10% year over year in terms of the number of vehicles that it produced, but also the ones that it's delivered, which is basically a proxy for sales. So that's going to be the thing that people are really going to be zeroed in on. It doesn't sound like even Tesla is really optimistic about this delivery report this week. So that should be sort of a real clear signal about how bad this brand image that Tesla has at the moment.

The, like, get rid of Elon Musk energy does seem to be increasing. I don't think it's remotely realistic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the number of people...

people with some influence who are starting to say things like Tesla needs a CEO who is not Elon Musk. That noise seems to be getting louder. Is there any substance behind any of that as far as you can tell? Yeah, it still seems to be pretty much on the fringe as far as I can tell. Like you've got like investors like Ross Gerber who have been saying, you know, have been sort of like Musk skeptics for a long time saying that he thinks that there needs to be a change at the top. Obviously, he owns some Tesla stock, but I wouldn't say that it's anything significant to as a

to point to, I think, larger problems within the company. And certainly the board itself hasn't said anything. I think, you know, Robin Denholm, who was the board chair, was in Australia like a week ago. And a lot of reporters tried to sort of, you know, get her, corner her and ask her about Tesla. She just refused to say anything about it.

So, you know, the board is still seen as being sort of completely beholden to Musk. I mean, his brother's on the board. James Murdoch's on the board. You know, it's not I wouldn't say it's a Tesla takedown friendly situation. But, you know, and there's still like a lot of people who are saying, you know, like,

if you're someone who's optimistic about Tesla's future, don't worry about the current moment. You know, we've got, there's lots of things to look at at the horizon. There's a new refreshed Model Y that's going to be coming down the pipe. That's Tesla's best-selling vehicle, was the best-selling vehicle in the world. And,

There's a refreshed model that's going to be coming soon. And then obviously there's Tesla's claims about AI and robotics and other things that have been sort of the bulk of what people have been using as sort of justification for the insane values that Tesla has been enjoying over the years. So it does seem like there needs to be more pieces connected, more dots connected before we start to say that Musk is truly in trouble, which I would say he's not at the moment.

Okay. It makes me think of like the meta situation where at every shareholder meeting, somebody is like, fire Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark says, no, thank you. And then everybody moves on. Exactly. That's essentially where we are. Yes. To your point on like the Model Y and the AI stuff and, you know, Musk talks about the cyber cab and like there is a lot of stuff in some version of the pipeline at Tesla. Yeah.

But I continue to find myself wondering, like, has this company and I'm purely just talking like as a financial animal for Elon Musk's net worth, because I think you have to talk about them as two different things, right? Like there's the there's the car company and there's the stock price and they are like totally different things. Does any of that matter anymore? Like part of me wonders now if if the idea of Tesla is so politicized and so directly tied to Elon Musk himself, right?

that nobody cares about the Model Y anymore. If the Model Y comes out and it is amazing, is it going to change one person's mind about whether or not they should buy a Tesla right now? I just have a hard time seeing it. Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that, you know...

There's some arguments that can be made that Tesla's brand is pretty thoroughly toxic at the moment, but it's not clear as to how many people take politics into account when they're out buying a vehicle. That's fair. If Tesla is able to actually come out with an even lower-cost model, which they've said that they plan on doing at some point this year, we're not sure exactly how lower-cost that's going to be. Is that going to be the long-rumored $25,000 Model 2 that's been talked about? Although I think it's...

being called the Model Q now. So don't quote me on either of those things. But, you know, if they're able to actually achieve this, I think would be a very significant achievement for the company, which is an actual lower cost electric vehicle, some sort of like

strip to the bones model three and beat all of the other legacy oems that are out there i think you could make the argument that tesla could see um a significant bounce back and then you know there's another thing that i i sort of been thinking about in the back of my head which was um

Do you remember the Delete Uber movement? Yeah, of course. During the first Trump administration when there was a boycott at the JFK airport over deportations. And I don't even remember the specifics, but Uber wasn't boycotting airport pickups in the same way that taxi drivers were. And so...

Everybody got mad at Uber. Plus, like, Travis Kalanick was going to be on some sort of CEO panel with Trump. Everyone got mad at Uber. And so there was this hashtag delete Uber moment. Everyone's like, delete Uber, get rid of Uber. You know, we don't need this company anymore. That petered out after like a couple months. And as far as I can tell, Uber's fine right now. It's profitable. Like, it's doing well. Like, these things, like, tend to, like, happen in, you know, fits and starts.

And it's not clear to me, like I'm sure the Tesla takedown people will say, you know, this is, we're here to stay. We're here to make, you know, Elon Musk's, you know, life a living hell. And they certainly, it's been working. And it's a very different situation than the delete Uber situation in many ways. Like Musk is way more entrenched and embedded in the Trump administration now than Uber ever was. Yeah, this will be an interesting test of like,

humanity's ability to move through news cycles, right? Because it is generally true in modern times that if you're in trouble, all you have to do is wait and eventually everyone will move on to something else. And the lesson learned is like, don't apologize, just wait and eventually everyone's attention will disappear. This feels like maybe the most extreme test we've ever had of that exactness.

I mean, I would argue that there's the Trump example, right? Like, there was January 6th and an actual insurrection. Totally. And, like, Trump was supposed to be, like, you know, banished to the wilderness after all that happened. And yet here we are. So, I mean, if Trump can make a comeback, Musk is, I think, certainly looking at that example, right? Yeah. Being sort of as close as he is to him. And is seeing, you know, like, maybe the same can be for me. If not him, why not me? Yeah.

Fair enough. All right. So one other thing going on in the car industry this week of the many, many, many things going on in the car industry this week, big looming tariffs. If I'm an automaker, am I just in full 10 out of 10 position?

chaos crisis mode right now? Is that where everybody is? It's fully panic mode, I would say, for the auto industry. I've been talking with a lot of people at these companies and smart people, analysts and others whose job it is to watch this stuff. And they're saying that there's just really no way

that you can avoid passing this cost on to customers. Like these tariffs are going to come down. Every car in America can suddenly, it can be made in America, but that doesn't mean that the parts that go into the car are necessarily originate in America. And so, you know, you've got something along the lines of, you know, up to 50% of the parts that are inside a car come from sort of foreign countries. Mexico and Canada especially are huge hubs for these parts.

So with 40 to 50 percent of auto parts coming from abroad, there's just really no way that these costs can be absorbed by the companies that make the vehicles. And so I think a lot of smart people are predicting something around the lines of $5,000 to $10,000 price increases just right out of the gates when these tariffs go into effect.

on April 2nd. That is to say, if they go into effect, right? We've been sort of going back and forth and back and forth on whether Trump is actually going to do this, you know, what can be said to actually dissuade him from putting these tariffs in place. It seems like these ones are actually going to come through, but you have to sort of allow for the fact that this is a very unpredictable, fluid situation.

Yeah, but I read today, I was reading a report today that somebody sort of assumed that this is going to add $100 billion in costs to

Wow.

He does love a tariff. He loves a tariff. Honestly, it might be all there is to it. The man just loves a tariff. So if I'm an automaker, it seems like the short-term thing that you do is just immediately raise prices, right? And I've been reading similar stuff, right? And there was one thing that was like, I was quoting somebody, some executive from one of these automakers who was like, yeah, the prices are going to go up. And then...

Prices don't go down. So they're just... This all might go away, but the prices stay up because that's what happens. So that's the immediate thing. The underneath thing...

seems to be potentially the long-term goal of the Trump administration is that all these companies start making huge efforts to move stuff into the United States. Are you hearing rumblings of companies thinking about like, okay, we have to retool everything in order to make this stuff work or prices are just going to go up? That's life moving on. So there was already kind of like a bit of an onshoring movement going on during the Biden administration where he was offering all of these incentives and

and tax cuts and things like that for companies that were bringing their manufacturing, especially EV and battery manufacturing to the U.S. A lot of that is still happening as far as I can tell. I mean, these are huge projects, billion-dollar projects that take multiple years to line up all the investors and the partners and the land acquisitions and all these things.

So it's just going to take a long time for that to happen. Whether or not you start to see companies try to start to do the same because of the tariffs, I think you're starting to see some companies sort of repackage old announcements as sort of responding to the present moment and presenting them as something new. But that said, it's just not something that can be flipped over.

from week to week. You know, this is something, if you take into account just the complexity of supply chains, you know, trying to create new factories, new hubs, this is a four to five to six year timeframe that a lot of these happen in to happen. So it would just be sort of a massive frustration for the industry, I think, um, to sort of bring all of these supply chains into the United States. And from what I can tell, the idea that you could have a vehicle that is

made with 100% U.S. made parts and labor and manufacturing and everything is basically a fantasy at this point. And it's just not something that even if they undertook this massive effort, which would cost them hundreds of billions of dollars and take many, many years, even that is not necessarily going to result in, I think, whatever the sort of fantasy that Trump has in his mind about this, you know, sort of domestic renaissance in manufacturing.

Right. And I would assume that the uncertainty of it all is also part of the challenge here, that if I'm if I'm running a car company like I'm not actually sure it's smart or prudent right now to say we're going to make these giant sweeping changes because this is the new normal. Like God only knows what the new normal is. And the thing that I thought was really interesting is a lot of there was a lot of stories in the last few weeks that are like, oh, this is great for Tesla.

Tesla is one of the most domestic manufacturers that we have. They make all their cars in Texas and California. A lot of their parts are made here in the United States, including their batteries. But even Tesla is exposed to this, and we're going to see prices go up for them as well, on top of already declining emissions.

ev incentives you know less tax breaks less you know less charging incentives so you know i think it's it's safe to say that everyone is exposed on this including tesla which i think musk is himself has also said that you know we're not going to be unscathed through all this so it's really just kind of um just a it's a huge head scratcher i think for everybody uh because we were assuming that there was going to be some at least some carve outs or maybe some exemptions but it doesn't appear to be that the case at this stage

Yeah. Well, like you said, we'll see a bunch of that is coming due this week. So we will we will see one way or another. Exciting times. Exciting times. Let's let's end on a more exciting note.

Tell me I'm crazy for being kind of into the new Nissan Leaf. You wrote about this thing, and I find the Leaf fascinating. Someday you're going to come on the show and we're going to do the whole story of the Nissan Leaf, which I think is like the weirdest, most interesting sort of footnote in the history of EVs. But there's a new Leaf and it's kind of hot and I'm kind of into it. Yeah, I know. It's the same, right? It was kind of like similar to me. I got similar vibes from the new Toyota Prius a little bit. Like I was like, oh, they took something that was like,

a big old paperweight that nobody really liked that much, but sold like incredible numbers. Like it did really well, the Nissan LEAF for a long time. And they kind of like sexed it up a little bit, gave it a bit of a glow up and it looked really good. We're still kind of waiting for like the full picture of like what it's going to look like. We don't really have a lot of the specs

battery range, anything like that. The old Leaf had terrible range. But yeah, it was a pioneer, right? It was out there. First full, like medium range EV to go on sale even before the Tesla Model S. So it kind of like proved the market, I think, for a lot of OEMs that this was something that people would actually be interested in buying. And the rumors that was going to be that Nissan was going to get rid of it for a long time. Nissan's going through a lot of problems right now. Their sales have dropped significantly.

just dramatically over the last few years or so, especially in some key markets like the US. And they tried to merge with Honda late last year. That deal kind of fell apart, although there's some rumblings that they might be trying to get back together again. And then the Leaf was supposed to be on the chopping block, right? Like Nissan's got the Aria, it's got some other EVs in the pipeline that are a little bit more long range and a little bit more sort of like in the form factor range.

that consumers tend to like which is more sort of like in the suv crossover space and now we're seeing the leaf is going to become a bit of a crossover as well so uh yeah i would say let's let's do that nissan leaf let's do it from a nissan inside of nissan leaf let's record a whole podcast i like that in a leaf and we can talk about the whole history uh which is yeah it's pretty fascinating it's it's been a roller coaster ride for the leaf

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

All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. You can email vergecast at theverge.com. And by the way, it is always super delightful when you call and have a question for a specific person because then I get to bother that specific person and make them come do that with me, which is what happened today to our question.

Hey, it's Peter from Brooklyn. This question is for Jen Toohey. Jen, I'm wondering if there are any smart home companies that are using AI with cameras to analyze what's going on in your home. The example I keep thinking is if I could be like, Alexa, where do I leave the scissors? And it shows me a little video of, oh yeah, last Thursday, you put them in this drawer.

seem super creepy, but also super like something that they would do. Just curious if anybody's doing it. Thanks. You ask for Gentooey, you get Gentooey. Hi, Gentooey. Hello. Happy to be here. Love to be summoned. I just want to say that super creepy and super useful should be the motto of the smart home. That is true.

So I had a couple of sort of immediate thoughts that this sparked, but I'm curious where your head went hearing this question. Yeah, I guess the immediate answer is not yet. This is definitely where you can see...

them going to some extent, especially say you specifically mentioned Alexa and Amazon with its new Alexa Plus and its new multimodal generative AI capabilities. You could see this happening. In fact, at the Amazon event that they had in February, they specifically

specifically used cameras to say, you could say to Alexa, when did my dog last go for a walk? And it looked through the footage and replied and showed an image of or a video of the last time someone had taken the dog out for a walk.

I think for this type of very fine-grained things, like where did I leave the scissors? That's going to be a bit more of a challenge for Alexa in the current capabilities. Unless you have ring cameras stationed everywhere around your house capturing every movement, it definitely wouldn't have the capability yet. Because another thing that a lot of these... So there are a number of security cameras that are doing this AI search feature where you can search through your camera history just with typing some phrases.

but they are very much trained on specific things that you might like to look for. So I think, you know, scissors in a drawer might be the level above what they're at now. It's more like cat on the porch or delivery driver approaching door kind of things that they're doing now. So Ring has that AI search feature. Google Nest is launching it. It's currently in like a beta program. Arlo actually has an interesting one where you can program your own AI

So you could sort of say...

I guess you could set up a camera, an Arlo camera in your living room and train it to watch where you put the scissors. But again, it would have to be very specific. You'd have to know what you would want it to look for. It's not going to be able to sort of analyze everything you've seen. It's seen and look for it that specific yet. But I can see it going there. I think I'm guessing where you're going, David, would be where I would go with this is it's more likely to come from

AI glasses. Like we saw Google demo this. This is so this is exactly where my head went is that it's called Project Astra. That's it from Google. And it is it's the demo exactly was that they were just walking around and they had this sort of always on camera and they're like, oh, where did I leave my glasses? And it directed them back there to where they left their glasses.

Um, notably not shipping. I would say that feature, uh, it's starting to like percolate out in the world. It seems to be a real thing, but it is not, it is not nearly yet what Google showed it to be. Um,

But yeah, like you said, that is the thing everybody is working on. This idea of like, how do I give myself some sort of consistent awareness of my surroundings and then use that to help me? Which is a really interesting problem, but a really hard one. And it does seem like if your bar is not scissors, but it is like...

I don't know, on the level of like people and pets. Right. I think about the smart home stuff is like it's comings and goings. I sort of want to know when major events with people and pets are happening in my house that it seems like these tools are actually getting pretty good at pretty fast. Right. In theory, the tech is there. And it seems like the distance between people and pets and scissors is just like time and camera quality to some extent.

Yeah, just training the machine learning models on what it is that you want to be identified about or told about. And I think, yeah, right now, because there is the creepy factor with cameras, a lot of this is focused on what's happening outside your home, not so much inside. But with, I mean, if you have cameras inside your home and you want to identify specific people or specific events, you

You can do that right now. The Ring Video AI search feature, which I wrote about, I used it to keep track of my cat. Like I would keep losing my cat and I would just type in, you know,

cat gray today and it would show me all the videos that it had captured of my cat walking around the various parts. Your cat just slipping in and out of the wall. Yeah. Although mainly outdoors because I don't really do cameras inside. But Echo devices have cameras on them. So like the show devices all have cameras on them. So you could see this becoming...

part of what they offer. Right now, though, it's just ring cameras. So those aren't the cameras in the show devices. Nests, same thing. They have indoor and outdoor cameras and also their Nest hubs. A few of them have cameras. So yes, I could definitely see this being where they're going. And it's one of the really useful areas of AI, of generative AI, I've seen in the smart home to date.

getting that kind of fine-grained detail about what's happened in your home without you having to scroll through every video and look for or yeah try and because right to date you've had things like person animal vehicle so you can filter your video clips to just animal but then I'd be looking through if I was looking for my cat I'm looking through videos of like squirrels and my dog going around in circles and not finding the cat whereas now I can just ask it to find me cat and

And it finds me cat sometimes. It finds me cat. It's pretty good. Yeah, I was thinking about this today, actually. My neighbor had to be out for the day, but he's having luggage delivered. Like, the airline lost her luggage, and so they're delivering it. And so she called me this morning and was like, hey, can you be around in case they need to deliver the luggage? And no.

now I'm like glued to my house in case they come and knock on the door and I had to leave for a few minutes and I was actually thinking like oh being able to come back and be like hey did the mailman come like did the Alaska Airlines people come is like genuinely sincerely useful in a way that I don't have that much smart home stuff but that was one of the moments where I was like oh I wish I had that I just rely on like my dog to bark and tell me that there are people at the door and that's not it turns out a perfect system well

The downsides of this type of feature is you are going to have to pay for it. All of these services are included in like the Ring subscriptions, the Nest subscriptions. But interestingly enough, a couple months ago, a new company launched called Seymour AI, which is S-E-E-M-O-U-R.

And it is able to go through all my Ring footage and let me search for it, even if I'm not paying for a subscription. So if you want to just try it out, that's a good way to start, at least. I don't know how they're doing it.

And I'm sure Ring's aware of it. And I'm sure they'll probably charge at some point. But right now, you can download the app for free on iOS. And if you have Ring cameras, it will search through your footage for you. But again, it's very specific. Like it tells me a lot that it's seen destructive pet videos.

activity on my porch, which is normally just my dog walking around. So like, again, they're trained to look for specific things they think you might be interested in. But as you say, as this advances, I think that gap between, you know, dog, cat, destructive activity and

this is where you left your scissors may start to get a lot smaller and it could be very useful if you don't mind having cameras in your house. Well, so that's what I was going to say. It seems like to me, the two roadblocks here are, A, it is a huge technological leap, right? To go from, I know what a dog looks like to all the things going on inside of your house is a huge leap. And like, we've seen how hard that is. But then the other thing is, I just can't,

fathom the number of cameras you'd have to have in your house in order to be able to pull that off. It seems like you would need...

a camera or ideally a couple of cameras essentially on every single square inch of your entire house in order for this system to work. Because even if you have a couple of blind spots, the whole thing kind of falls apart. So I'm like, is this why everyone gets that ring drone camera that can follow them around because it solves this problem? I don't know about that. Yeah. OK. But that's only designed to work when you're not in the house. Yeah, that'll change. And also never shipped. Yeah.

unlikely to ship at any time in the future, if you ask me. So yes, the Ring camera, the flying drone is designed to work when you're not there. So it might not be as useful. I think Amazon would like us to have screens with cameras in every corner of our room. It sure would. Ultimately, the idea of smart glasses or, I mean, as...

Apple recently, or it's leaked recently that Apple might be putting cameras in your watch. More cameras maybe on you?

Because again, that's less, there's still a bit of invasion of privacy, but something I talk about a lot in the smart home is it's one thing when you have the cost convenience ratio that you're weighing when you're using technology, you know, a smartphone or a smartwatch or using Gmail and you're willing to give up some privacy for the features that you get. But it's another when you're in your home.

and there are other people in the home, and you're giving up their privacy as well. So there's a lot more cost-to-benefit ratio that has to be factored in there for everyone in the home, not just yourself. So assuming everyone's on board with having cameras in your home, you might be okay, but

I think that's unlikely. So I think personal devices are much more likely to get us to that position that our caller's interested in, especially if it's you who's left the scissors somewhere. Although in my household, everyone always steals my scissors. So I would need cameras on everyone. I got a pack of five scissors for Christmas because I complain so often about how many people, everyone's stealing my scissors. So I'm with him on this. I would like to know where my scissors are.

How many of the five pairs do you still have? It's now the end of March. Do we still have all five? No, I have half of one. I don't know where the rest are. All right. So we need somebody to invent this quickly. If you could get this done for us and for Peter, this would be amazing. Yes. All right, Jen. Thank you as always. You're very welcome.

All right. That is it for the Verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. As ever, there is lots more on everything we talked about from my review of the light phone to Allison's coverage of AI and phones to all of Jen's smart home stuff to Andy and the team's latest on everything happening with Tesla and the Tesla takedown and tariffs, everything, all of it on the Verge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes, but so much of this stuff is like actively unfolding.

Keep it locked on the website. And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, problems, other weird car questions that you think maybe we can answer...

Please always get in touch. You can email Vergecast at TheVerge.com. You can call the hotline at 866-VERGE-11. We truly, truly, truly love hearing from you. We've gotten a bunch of really fun questions about border security and how to think about your devices as you move from one place to another, particularly in and out of the U.S. right now. We have some fun stuff coming up on that over the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned.

This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore. VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'll be back on Friday with Nilay talking about all of the news happening this week, whatever weird stuff is going on with images and chat GPT, presumably some new gadgets. I want to see if he watches The Studio on Apple TV, which everybody's into. He was weird about severance, but I'm going to get him into The Studio. This is my plan. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. ♪