The Vergecast discusses two major tech stories: the AI landscape with Anthropic's Claude gaining momentum against OpenAI, and BYD's rise from a Chinese battery company to the world's largest EV manufacturer, surpassing Tesla in global sales.
- Anthropic is building consumer loyalty through better product execution while OpenAI struggles with multiple failed product launches
- Chinese automaker BYD succeeded by controlling the entire supply chain from batteries to manufacturing, enabling dramatically lower costs
- AI companies are pivoting to e-commerce integration with buy buttons as a primary monetization strategy beyond subscriptions
- The global auto industry is experiencing a fundamental shift with Chinese manufacturers achieving both cost advantages and technological innovation
- Screen time debates should focus on content quality rather than device type or time limits
"I have not seen so much hype around just one company since, you know, OpenAI's last hype filled cycle two years ago."
"BYD was able to bring that down to about $6,000 per vehicle. Which then when you have a battery that's that cheap to make, you can start selling vehicles... around like U.S. currency, $10,000, $12,000."
"I think we need to stop thinking about screen time in general... We should talk about screen time in terms of what is on the screen."
"It is essentially financially impossible for them to sell a car here and make money... tariffs are so extremely high. Like they're at about 100%, I think, right now."
"I think it's going to be a big deal for E commerce. I think that affiliate links is a huge way that anyone makes money... And all these AI companies need money desperately."
Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the BYD Dolphin Surf. If that is three words that you've never heard in that order before, don't worry, it's all going to make sense later in this episode. I'm your friend David Peirce, and I have huge news for you, which is that I finally, after I don't know how many hours of trying, got this silly little IKEA button hooked up to my smart home. So now if you're watching this on YouTube, this is going to. It's not gonna look very exciting either way, but let's be honest, now I have a thing where I can just. I can turn two lights off all at once with one press of a button, and then another press of a button turns them back on. This is all I want out of my smart home. And somehow this took a whole lot of work and I had to update my Echo Dot Max and my Eero network, and then I had to do a bunch of weird, insane stuff. I don't think it was worth it at all, but it felt good and I'm glad I accomplished something. This is. This is the smart home road I am somehow going down, and I think it will be the end of me. Anyway, no smart home stuff on today's show. Today we're going to do two things on the show. First, we're going to talk to Hayden Field about some of the AI stuff that's been going on the last couple of weeks while we were out over the holidays, and then while we were at ces, there's been this interesting drumbeat of AI products. I think this is the year we're going to talk about how we actually use AI and what it means in our lives. Hayden's been covering a lot of it, a lot of it has been coming out, so we're going to just try to catch up on all of it kind of all at once. Then we're going to talk to Andy Hawkins about this company, byd, which has come from not necessarily nowhere, but relatively small beginnings to become one of the most important car companies in the world, and as of very recently, the biggest, most successful EV maker on the planet. I don't know a lot about byd, and on this episode, we're going to change that. Plus, we have a really fun hotline question about all the different size screens in your life of fun stuff to get to. But first, I have a terrible news, which is that I have two more of these buttons and now I have to figure out what to do with them. Wish me Luck. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Hayden Field is here. Hi, Hayden.
3:16
Hey. Great to be here.
3:19
So you and I have this problem, which is that like, you have other things to do, but also There is Vergecast AI material to do like every 45 minutes in the world. So it was the holidays. There was a lot going on, lots of like, sort of bits and pieces of what I think are, like, interesting news moments and bigger stories. So I want to play a game with you that we've played before on this show. Um, this game is called Big Deal, Medium Deal, Small Deal. Um, I suspect you can figure out the parameters of this game by the title of the game. Um, and basically what's going to happen is I, I just want to run through a bunch of sort of news stories and moments that have happened and things that have launched over the course of the last several weeks. And I want you to tell me for each one whether it's a big deal, a medium deal, or a small deal. Sound good?
3:21
Love it.
4:13
All right, so the first one I want to do here is a bit of news that happened this week that I think is connected to sort of like the thing that has been all over my social feeds for the last several weeks, which is Claude Code. Anthropic launched something called Cowork, which is kind of a normie version of Claude Code.
4:13
I would say that's the best way to Describe it.
4:30
Yeah. Okay, so let's start with cowork. Big deal, medium deal, small deal.
4:33
I would say like between small and medium. Like it's, I think a lot of people are excited about it. It's been really helpful. I've seen some really cool applications, but at the end of the day it's just, you know, a wrapper. So it's good for ui, it's good for more people to be using the benefits of cloud code, but it's not anything like super crazy. I do think it'll bring it to more people. So between small and medium.
4:37
Okay, what about these sort of big picture Claude code moment that's happening? Big deal, medium deal, small deal.
5:00
I think that's a big deal. I mean, I have not seen so much hype around just one company since, you know, OpenAI's last hype filled cycle two years ago. You know, I think it's just, it's partially hype, but also Anthropic has been at the top of a lot of benchmarks for a long time. And even where other companies are surpassing it anecdotally, a lot of people are sticking with Anthropic because of either the reputation of the company, the fact that they feel it's more safe, or more like the adult in the room, or the fact that they just love Claude code. So I think that, you know, we're seeing a little bit of loyalty emerge here in a way that we haven't seen really before. You know, a lot of times people just switch between models based on what's best at the time, which people are all still doing, obviously. But I've seen more anecdotal evidence than ever before that some people are just sticking with Claude because they like it, they feel a little loyalty to it. They like Claude code, specifically, they like the tone of Claude. There's a lot of things that are kind of just making people gravitate towards Claude in a way that I haven't really seen in the last couple of years in this way, you know.
5:07
Yeah, I think you and I have kind of shared the theory over the last couple of years that Anthropic seem to have a much better and more capable organization for making actual consumer products than OpenAI. And I think, to me, at least, that's really starting to bear out. Right. Like OpenAI is building a lot of stuff. Most of it is not working. We're going to get to some of it in, in this segment, but like, it's out there doing the App Store thing and it's out there doing custom GPTs, and they're. They just launched ChatGPT Health, which we're going to talk about. Like, OpenAI is building a lot of stuff, but the stuff, by and large, other than ChatGPT itself, doesn't really seem to be hitting. But it feels like Anthropic with Claude, with Claude Code. And, like, the reason I bring up cowork is it feels like Anthropic has found something that works, that people like and are gravitating to and actually feel good about in really important ways. And that feels important to me. Like, I just really feel like the product that Claude is becoming kind of as a whole, and within Claude Code in particular, it feels like it has turned some kind of corner that I can't fully name yet, but feels important.
6:20
Yeah, I think that they're building a little bit slower and more intentionally, which has been really helpful because OpenAI's reputation, for better or worse right now, is that they're kind of just like throwing a ton of pancakes at the wall and seeing what sticks. Now, I will say Anthropic is in danger of going there because, you know, OpenAI has been announcing thing after thing, and then usually within a day or two, Anthropic will sometimes announce a similar thing. So with OpenAI's health announcement, they did. Anthropic came out with one a day or two later. So, you know, I think Anthropic has to be careful not to just try to catch up with the competition in every single category and just stick to what they're good at. There's a lot of, like, FOMO in this cycle right now. There's a lot of companies worried that they're going to miss out if they don't go into every single area. And I think it's important to stick with the. Should we do use AI to do this at all and should we use our resources to do this? So hopefully Anthropic, you know, is a little more intentional about that, but for now they're being more intentional than most other companies.
7:27
Totally. Okay, this is a totally random aside. Did you just say throwing pancakes against the wall?
8:27
Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, or maybe the ceiling? Is this a thing people say?
8:32
I have only ever heard spaghetti thrown against the wall, but pancakes against the wall is. Is fantastic.
8:35
Wait, what if. What if I've been misusing this for 10 years? I say this all the time. Okay. Yeah, I always say throwing pancakes in the wall, see what sticks. What if it's spaghetti? Maybe what you can tell I don't cook.
8:41
I'm now very into the idea of this being like a regional dialect of what you're throwing against the wall to see what sticks. Yeah.
8:54
Is this a stick?
9:00
I need everyone to please send us an email and tell us what you throw against the wall to see what sticks. Is it spaghetti? Is it pancakes? Is it something else? Is this like a coke, pop soda thing that. It depends on where you grew up. I'm now obsessed with this and need to know, but we're throwing pancakes against the wall. It's very good. Okay, one more on Anthropic. Actually, before we switch gears here, Mike Krieger, who I think gets a lot credit for being the engine behind this product culture we're talking about. He's the chief product officer, he was at Instagram. He is like a sort of product legend in the tech industry. Got a new job with a Labs team. You wrote a story about this big deal, medium deal, small deal.
9:00
I think it's a medium deal because it's kind of a sign of how much competition is increasing even more than before in AI. I mean, Anthropic is clearly trying to invest a lot in their experimental like bleeding edge stuff and that's why they're bringing Mike to the Labs team. Since mid 2024, it's been about two people and now they're trying to double it in the next six months and they're bringing. Yeah, Mike over. His role is going to revert to just being a member of technical staff. He's no longer going to be in the C suite. They're replacing him with the head of product, but not replacing the CPO title. And yeah, I just think it's going to be really interesting to see what they do. They said that the type of thing they want to build is Claude code skills, other types of features that they've been just kind of experimenting on and engineers have been experimenting with in their free time just on the side. I guess they want that to be kind of a full time role now. Just experimenting, seeing what they can play with. Bringing new stuff out of Claude MCP was actually another example they gave of the type of thing that could come out of this lab.
9:41
It's a really interesting thing to put next to what you were just saying about Anthropic's reputation as being the company that is more thoughtful and more deliberate and more sort of in control of its own product system. Right. Like this kind of thing at OpenAI where they're just like, we're, we're taking our best product maker and putting them into a place where they're just going to make a bunch of stuff and see what happens would make a lot more sense at OpenAI with ChatGPT here, I think it's, it's a really interesting reputational move because even Dario and Daniela Amade have been saying like, we want to be responsible, but also we have to move really, really, really, really fast because all of this stuff is happening. And like it is true that MCP and CLAUDE Code and this kind of stuff is coming out of anthropics sort of organically and they seem to be trying to put some structure around how do we build all this stuff that is working really fast. Like they even said cowork is I think completely built with Claude Code. Like it's clear that anthropic has this sense of like we've built something cool and we need to accelerate it like crazy. How to do that without ruining this sort of reputational advantage you've built over OpenAI strikes me as a big challenge.
10:47
I agree. And I think that that's why I'm kind of getting, I think that they're in danger of kind of the desperation that comes from just having FOMO in the space and going too quickly. You can see that even with the funding announcements they made in the past year. You know, Dario saying, hey, look, we're going to have to now accept this type of funding. We're going to have to accept this type of funding. I know it's controversial, but we have to stay competitive. So you know, I mean, I think right now they have the reputation of being the adults in the room. I don't think that's always warranted. I don't think any company is doing way better than another honestly here. But they do have that reputation and they're doing, you know, clearly people think they're doing everything more intentionally, a little more safely. They are investing more compute in safety, it seems like, than their competitors. But yeah, I mean, I think they do have a danger of losing that reputation if they throw too many pancakes at the wall. So we'll see what happens with labs. But I do think, you know, it's smart to be like, you know, kind of taking these types of projects out of just engineers free time and making them their full time job. So, you know, it's a balance totally.
11:55
So, okay, again, fun reputational segue. Uh, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health. A headline that made me cringe with my whole body from head to toe. Um, big deal, medium deal, small deal.
12:56
Big deal, I think. And the other companies that have followed, um, you know, Anthropic did something of the sort. X started encouraging people to upload their health records into grok. I heard there's just a lot going on there. But yeah, I think it's a big deal because, I mean, data privacy of it all. You know, they say that it's a lot safer, that it's a walled garden, that it's separate from the rest of Chat GPT, that, you know, there are specific safeguards in place. They wouldn't really get into what they are, but they said there are more than typical Chat gbt, you know, but.
13:10
Once again, I mean that, that thing that you just said does not give me comfort. Yeah, they said there are more, but they won't tell us what they are. But they say they're better than chatgpt is not enough to get me comfortable with the idea of encouraging my, of uploading my medical records to ChatGPT.
13:44
Yeah, and the fact like, I mean the memory is separate, you know, there's a lot going on there. I, I personally wouldn't upload mine is all I'd say. I mean, I do see, I see in theory why people would want to. Obviously the medical system is a mess. Like, you know, there's so many doctors that don't take the full picture into account. I just got blood tests last week and I was like, huh. I would love if someone could tell me like how my iron has done over time because I'm like notoriously up and down on my iron levels. Who knows? But I'm not going to be uploading it into ChatGPT, I have to say. I mean, yeah, I was not sold on the privacy measures from the briefing I got. And there's just, I feel like this is a huge can of worms. I mean, you know, medical records are one of the most sensitive types of data you can give anyone and you have to handle them with care. And they say that, you know, they're doing that, but I just, I'm not sold yet.
14:02
Yeah, I'm curious how you think about all of this philosophically because it feels like a particularly high stakes microcosm of a lot of questions around AI right now. Because I remember there was this really beautiful rest of world story several months ago about a woman who was trying to grapple with her mom's kind of ongoing obsession with talking to ChatGPT about her health. And this came with very real upsides. Having she felt like instead of having to make like a multiple day trip to go see a doctor who didn't know her and didn't really have time and she felt like just sort of a cog in a wheel that this person was going through being like, ah, you're fine and kicking him out. She's like, oh, I have something that will listen to me all the time and talks to me and goes back and forth with me and is actually engaged with my health. And it's like, I sort of appreciate that. But then it's like you have this thing that is, is not accurate, is not medically trained, is not a person that is like, I don't know. To me it is like, it's so perfect. Elucidates all of the upsides and downsides of having these chatbots as like characters in our lives. When you point it at healthcare, I.
14:53
Totally agree because we've seen the like over validation and sycophancy that these chatbots can have. So I mean, imagine that effect on someone with health anxiety or just someone without health anxiety that can easily go there. Like, you know, you start saying, oh, well, are you sure there's no problems with my chart or my tests? You know, there's gotta be. I, you know, I'm feeling fatigued, like, look again, there must be something there. It's probably gonna say, oh, you're right. You know what, there is something here. I'm worried about X, Y and Z. I mean, I just think about, I have a lot of friends with health anxiety that like spent so much time on WebMD. And I'm just thinking about how much worse it would have been for them if they had had a tool like this. And I asked OpenAI about this because this is a big problem. I mean, you know, worsening health anxiety, getting people in a spiral. And they said, look, you know, we're trying to present the information in a caring tone without, you know, having a lot of fear based vibes in the response. But I mean, I wasn't really sold on that either. The other thing that I thought was really interesting here is that obviously mental health is a part of Health and OpenAI has been like lambasted for how it's treated people's mental health spirals who are speaking with ChatGPT people have committed suicide and, you know, it's deepened a lot of spirals. And I asked them about this too and they said, well, of course mental health is part of health and we expect this to be part of the picture here. They want people to talk to, you know, ChatGPT Health about their mental health. And they said, you know, they had done more to try to help with that, you know, implemented more types of safeguards. But I mean, it's so soon after all of these problems that we've been discussing for the past year, I just can't see how they would have, you know, fixed a lot of those issues. Issues in so short a time.
16:01
Yeah.
17:46
And there's something to the idea of giving it a name that just makes me feel icky. Right. Because it's one thing to treat this stuff as kind of a non intended behavior of these systems. Right. That, and that's how a lot of these companies have talked about it. Like, no, you shouldn't use it for these things. Even though we recognize that people do. Right. Like these things are not therapists. You shouldn't treat it as such. Gives you at some point leeway to be like, well, we can't help that. Some people are gonna do it anyway. We tell you not to. But if you're gonna have a thing called ChatGPT Health that is specifically built toward this use case, it just is going to feel different to people. You've made this feel like an official, valid use of this tool in a way that I just have a hard time seeing that we're prepared for. Like, I don't know that there's any evidence that we as the users or these platforms know how this is supposed to work yet.
17:47
And it's crazy because one of like the big headline things they announced here was that it's not intended for diagnosis or treatment.
18:39
It's called ChatGPT Health. Like you can't do that.
18:48
Right. I think it's like one of those like kind of disclaimers that you just put on something just so you don't get sued. It's like, yeah, it's all the stuff.
18:51
That, where they're like on cnbc, they're like, this is not investment advice. And they're like, buy Nvidia. It's like, well, what, what is this if it's not investment advice?
18:58
Yeah, I'm like, who's not going to use this for diagnosis? Like, obviously, yeah, they would probably go to a doctor and be like, okay, are you, you know, is this, is this legit? It also reminds me of like, it's the reason I don't have my memory turned on in ChatGPT and I often use it like logged out and I don't give it a name. It's because I think we have a tendency to rely on these things and trust them. The more we talk to Them. It's just human nature. It's like the reason we name our stuffed animals, the reason we name our cars. Like, we love to anthropomorphism, pomorphize things. And so if you name your chatgpt again, like, if I have friends that love to do this, like, if you want to do it and you feel like you can handle it, great. I can't. Like, I have to, like, have a barrier because, you know, I like using these tools. I do use them, but I think there's a danger to like, the type of trust that you inevitably build with something when you kind of give it a. An identity in your brain, you know?
19:05
Yeah, totally. Okay, so a couple more of these and then I'm going to just leave and feel bad about myself for a while. The next thing is, I called this in my notes, the buy button onslaught. We got these sort of dueling announcements. Like you said, everybody just kind of does the same thing within three days of each other. Like everybody is just having the same idea all at the same time. And the big ones here were that Microsoft is going to put buy buttons for things directly into Copilot and Google is going to put buy buttons in Gemini and in AI search results. I have a pretty strong feeling about this one, but I'm curious for you. Big deal, medium deal, small deal.
20:00
I think it's going to be a big deal for E commerce. I think that affiliate links is a huge way that anyone makes money. It's how influencers make money. It's how a lot of media outlets make money. And all these AI companies need money desperately. It's all they can talk about. They need compute, they need money. And they also want to deliver on investor promises. So, I mean, this is one way to do that. They get, you know, a slice of the pie when they recommend something. You can buy something right then and there. Why wouldn't you? It's why Amazon is so popular. So, yeah, I mean, probably a big deal. Honestly, it's. It's kind of going to change the landscape and once again take earnings from other people and companies that have been using that as a big money maker and kind of redirect them towards AI companies.
20:41
Okay, so I think you landed in the right place there, which is good because I actually think this is a big deal, at least in theory. Right. Like, is it possible this won't work.
21:26
At all and it'll go away?
21:36
Maybe. But I do think we've been waiting for ads to show up in these things. We've been Waiting for more ways for them to monetize rather than just trying to get Everybody to pay 20 bucks a month. And the idea that this might do it feels right to me for all the reasons you just said. Right. Like, these things are good at shopping. It's the thing I use Gemini and ChatGPT Atlas for. Weirdly, it just became a thing that I just go to shop for. Like, I needed light bulbs for a chandelier we just bought. And rather than like Google every imaginable kind of light bulb, I uploaded a picture of the light bulb it used in the instructions diagram and was like, what is this and where do I buy it? And it did it in one shot. It found me the light bulb I needed. Like, that's a great use of AI and if they can figure out how to take money out of that transaction, they're going to make a lot of money. This is going to be hugely complicated for retailers, for anyone who sells anything, maybe huge mess. But, like, if I'm an AI company, this is the cleanest, simplest way to make money. And if they can make it work, it actually feels like a big deal.
21:38
I agree with you. It's really changing the landscape.
22:41
My other thought on the buy button thing actually is that I think this is going to be a really interesting UI reckoning, because the idea of just shoving a bunch of buy buttons into the chat experience isn't going to work. Right? Like, we're at this place now where we're already at the edges of text ui, where maybe it can just be a bunch of paragraphs and bullet points. If you're going to do buy buttons, you need a thing that is graphical, right? Like, you need a thing that looks a lot more like shopping than chat. And this, I think, is going to push all of these companies to figure out, like, okay, how do we actually show this stuff to you in more sort of properly tuned ways than just treating everything like a messaging system?
22:44
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's going to be like, you know how there's like the big push towards multimodal voice, et cetera. Now I think we're going to see a little bit more of a push towards just display and graphics, because, you know, I asked it to show me photos of a range of things the other day and it was like, oh, I can't display those. So, yeah, and I was just like, dresses or something. Something normal. So, yeah, I think that we're definitely going to see some expansion there.
23:28
Okay, two more. And to avoid ending on the bleakest one on the list here. Let's just talk about the Grok scandal a little bit here. This is, this is a bigger one than we can do in full here. But the Grok deep fake imagery problem, I want to talk about it in this particular sense because I think it matters in this particular sense. Like, is this thing in a big picture way, a big deal, a medium deal, or a small deal?
23:52
Great question. Yeah, definitely a huge deal. I would say bigger than big because, you know, a lot of people like to say, oh, well, Photoshop, you know, other tools, anyone can do this. Why is it such a big deal that Grok is doing this? Well, it's because it's doing it publicly, it's doing it and we're in a direct thread with the person being deep faked and anyone can see it and you can do it for not only just public figures and celebrities, but anyone that you disagree with. So I think that it's a huge deal. I also think the fact that it was happening to children, minors, I mean, basically across the board, it's a huge bad thing. But the fact that the company didn't do much about it at all until a ton of countries started talking about or banning X also told me a lot. I think a ton of countries started investigating. Nothing really happened. Ton of countries said, oh, we're probably going to ban it. Nothing really happened. A couple countries did say they're going to ban it. Okay, now it looks like X AI is starting to make some changes. So I think it was also kind of a interesting example of how much power people have. You know, a lot of times we feel like we don't have any say in what these platforms do, but we do as a collective. So I think that was kind of a good example of that. And that's also part of why it's a big deal. Not only the fact it was happening and how bad it was, but also the response and what actually ended up making a shift.
24:21
Yeah, yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. And I think that that sort of pace of response that you talk about has been really interesting to watch because I agree with you that my immediate reaction was like, obviously this is reprehensible and awful. Right? Like this shouldn't be happening, this shouldn't be allowed to happen. Liz Lapata wrote a great piece for us about the ways in which, like Tim Cook and Suner Pichai are culpable in this. And I agree with all of did seem for a while like nothing would change and nothing would come of it. Right. And There's a lot of that right now, particularly when Elon Musk is involved. But there was a sense that, like, this platform is. Is already so sort of off the rails and bizarre and it's run by this person who has sort of proven himself untouchable over and over and over again that maybe nothing will happen. But it does feel like some combination of the. The mounting political pressure and the just obvious horrors of it, particularly as it relates to children. It does seem like there are real consequences and that things are going to have to change as a result of those real consequences. Like the nihilist in me says, it'll be a lot of yelling that ultimately doesn't really go anywhere. But like you said, there are starting to be, like, in the uk, this stuff has already started to change because the UK has made and followed through on threats about the platform as a result.
25:52
Definitely. And I mean, the Take It down act that finishes going into effect in May, I think will also have some authority here because right now it's already not allowed. But platforms don't have to really fully figure out how to take these things down until May. So I think we'll see more changes in the next six months. But, yeah, I mean, I think the global response to this has been really interesting and move the needle a little bit. I think the fact that, yeah, like, popular celebrities back when they were minors are seeing this happen and, you know, like, there's just, honestly a bipartisan issue is like child safety. So I think that's kind of why this has happened so quickly, because on both sides of the aisle, while everyone agrees we shouldn't have deep fakes of children, especially, you know, undressed ones, I think everyone can agree on that, honestly.
27:11
Yeah. If anything, you can get too much policy done by saying we have to protect the children. Right. It is one of the few things that everybody agrees on, which is. Which is good. All right, last one. Gmail AI inbox. This is a thing we haven't really talked about on this show, but it is, it is like a surface. Billions of people use all the time and Google is like rewriting a lot of people's email inboxes with AI. Big deal, medium deal, small deal.
28:03
Okay. I don't know how this is like, in the full big picture context, but to me it's a big deal. I think email is the worst, honestly. If I'm like, being honest about, like, the big picture, probably a medium deal, but I think email is like the worst. It's the bane of my existence. It's the worst thing in the world. I truly believe that one of the best uses of AI could be actually fixing email and just keeping track of the actual threads you're responding to. It's probably because we're journalists. You know, it's like I get like 300 emails a day. I give everyone my number because I'm like, please text me because I may miss it in the flood. I think, you know, I would love to have a list. Yeah. What they're suggesting I think is going to be great. I know other people use certain like AI powered email clients that, you know, help them a lot. But I think Google's large influence and just the fact that it's like such a ubiquitous tool, Gmail, them doing something to kind of help move the needle here is going to be at least a medium deal for most people, but a big deal for me.
28:33
Yeah, I sort of land in the same place. I think, I think medium deal is probably the right answer at the end of this because we wrote a couple of stories. Jay Peters covered this and tried it out for us and the comments on his stories were very funny. From a bunch of people who were like, what are you, 72 years old? You still use email? And then a bunch of other people who were like, I have 150,000 unread emails and what I need is Google to be like, here are the two that matter. And I don't know what you're like as an emailer, but I used to be a really religious inbox zero person. I would go through every email. If I had five things in my inbox it would stress me out. And I was like very intense about making sure I was caught up on email. And somewhere like two or three years ago that just collapsed on me. And now I have, I can just look at this. Right Now I have 361 emails in my inbox, which does still make me feel sort of itchy to say 2/3 of these I probably don't need to see and will never see again, but a third of them I should probably reply to. And so the idea of having something that is like a supercharged version of like the Gmail nudges, where it'll just pull a thing up being like, you should reply to this. You got it five days ago. Do you care? That could be very valuable. That said, I think email, just as a thing everybody does all day, is a kind of rapidly dying idea. In part it's Gmail's fault. Like its filters are bad. We all get too much spam. I Think email is just like. It's a surface everyone interacts with, but is less and less important to how people sort of do their lives and communications that. I feel like the idea of this, even a few years ago would have been monumentally huge, and now it feels like it's smaller only because email is smaller.
29:30
Agreed. Yeah. Also, the search sucks too, I have to say. But, yeah, I mean, I think you don't even want to see my inbox. I'm. I can't even tell you the number. You will do it.
31:12
Prove it. Get it right now. Go to your inbox. How many do you have?
31:21
Okay, my personal one. 313. But that's like, I know what they all are. It's like I'm just leaving some unread because, you know, sure. My work. My work. 1. I only open the emails that I actually need to see, so I should. I need to mark all the rest as red, but it's like there's so many that I really just open the ones I need to see and I. I don't look at the rest.
31:24
Say the number.
31:48
I think you're gonna faint.
31:49
Say the number.
31:50
12,000. No.
31:51
Oh, God.
31:55
12,000. Listen, I used to be like you, though. I'm not kidding. I used to be a psycho about being inbox zero. I could not leave the day with even one email in my inbox. But my most viral tweet of my life was me saying, basically, you can choose between, as a journalist, having a life, staying on top of email, and writing, like, good stories. And I truly believe I've chosen having a life and writing good stories. But I can't stand on my email. I do click the ones I need to click, but I'm like, I can't just, like, mark all the rest as read. It's just too crazy. So, yeah, I'm at 12, 000 for the foreseeable future at least. Our emails delete every 90 days.
31:56
Um, once you get this feature and use it, I need you to come back on and talk about it, because everybody gave Jay a bunch of crap. Jay is a person who was like an inbox zero person. He's very organized and very on top of things, and everybody's like, this is not for you. You. You don't need this feature. People with 12, 000 emails in their inbox need this feature. So once you get to try it, I sincerely, I think you and I should both test this, see if it matters, and then we're gonna come back on and litigate the future of email. It's going to be great.
32:30
I can't wait. It's going to be changed my life.
32:54
Yeah. Until then, we will leave it at medium Deal and we will, we will see how it goes. All right. Hayden, thank you for doing this again. There's a lot of AI stuff coming so you will be back a lot. Can't wait for the rest of our lives. But thank you for catching up with me. This was great.
32:56
It's a pleasure.
33:10
See you soon. All right, we got to take a break and we'll be right back.
33:11
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35:50
All right, we're back. Andy Hawkins is here. Hi Andy.
36:03
Hello.
36:05
How tell me about your CES experience. Just before we get into this, it was like CES is such a car show that kind of wasn't a car show this year.
36:07
Yeah, it kind of lost a bit of its car show qualities this year. And I think that that was surprising a little bit, you know, because in years past, the auto announcement have really just dominated the show and this year it was a little bit absent. We got more news from Sony and Honda Zafila. But yeah, for the most part, most of the major car companies stayed away. And I think that that was kind of like reflective of a couple things. The car, the car industry, especially in the US but also in Europe, is kind of going through some doldrums right now with tariffs and rising costs and disappearing incentives. And I think just like a lot of the, the gravity is now being sort of shifted to China, which I think is what we're here to talk about. And China is not much of a presence in the US So it didn't really make sense for China to come to, to see us. Although there was one company and it was Geely. Geely did come to see the movie.
36:14
With Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
37:15
No, although I'm glad that you brought that up because I have lots to say about the movie. Geely. Geely G E E L L Y the parent company of Volvo and Polestar, which are two brands that, that sell in the U.S. they, that company says that they plan on selling a lot more cars, including their Zeekr electric vehicles in the US In a couple years. So that was a really interesting announcement from them.
37:17
Yeah. Okay, so your, your point about China is in fact what I want to talk about. So you and I have talked a bunch about the kind of global dynamics of the car industry and how they've been changing and the ups and downs of EVs. But at the very beginning of this year, a really fascinating thing happened, which is that Tesla officially lost its title as the world's best selling EV maker to a company called BYD out of China. And this, I confess, is a company I have been hearing about for a long time in the United States. We just don't hear that much about Chinese car manufacturers. But BYD seems to have hit this kind of escape velocity and become a really interesting global brand. I know nothing about this company, so I have to assume I'm not the only one. So I have brought you here to explain both what BYD is, why it's so successful, and what it matters. Does that sound good?
37:43
That sounds great.
38:38
Okay, so let's just start this at the very beginning. What is BYD and where did it come from?
38:39
So BYD stands for build your dreams.
38:46
Incredible. I love it already.
38:49
I mean, like, we're off to the races already. It was founded in the 90s as a battery supplier for mobile phone companies, mostly like Motorola and Nokia. And then they decided around the early 2000s that they were going to pivot to become a car company. And at that time, China's car industry was sort of like in its infancy. They had not yet emerged as the dominant car market in the world at that point. So it was, it was like interesting timing that BYD sort of founded its car division in like 2000.
38:50
A very funny pivot. It's like that reminds me of Dyson being like, well, we make fans, we can make cars. It's like, I don't, I don't think it's quite that much that I think.
39:24
Left turn the battery is sort of the thing that kind of like is at the center of this decision and that will become like a lot more important later on.
39:33
But so the company in that sense, it was very prescient of them to make that decision 20 plus years.
39:42
But when they started, they were going to, you know, it was going to be like an internal combustion engine company, right? They, they, they had not yet, you know, sort of centered on EVs at that point, because as we saw globally, EVs were not really a thing in the early 2000s. Like Tesla had not even launched at that point. So they made their first combustion engine vehicle, I think was in 2005. And then they started exploring hybrids around that, around 2. But there was a couple of pivot points for BYD that kind of like set the stage for where they were going to end up. The first was in 2008, which is when Warren Buffett decided to take a 10% ownership stake, injecting about $230 million in the company, which really gave them kind of like a lot of Runway to start making cars in earnest, because the cars that they were making up until that point were not well received. They were kind of considered to be clunkers. And I know that they brought them to a few auto shows in the early 2000s, and I was reading back through some car and driver articles around that time, and they were being pretty merciless in their assessment of these early BYD vehicles. So we got the Warren Buffett investment in 2008. So that really sort of set them on the path. They started making hybrids, and then their first electric vehicle came in 2010. It was the E6. And then another sort of pivot point was in 2016, 16, they hired this guy named Wolfgang Egger, who is a head of design at Audi, I believe, and Alfa Romeo and a bunch of European brands. So they poached this guy from Europe and said, we need a complete redesign, a complete rethink of how we're approaching our cars are getting, you know, slammed in the press. We need to, like, start taking this seriously. So they brought Edgar on, on board, and he sort of, like, oversaw, like, a complete redesign of BYD's vehicles. They started gaining some traction, getting some attention. People started to receive them a lot better. The journalists were receiving them a lot better. And then in 2019, China's auto market was really sort of growing by leaps and bounds, and BYD was sort of riding that wave. And they decided to sort of start to look beyond China, like, what if we started exporting our vehicles elsewhere in the world? And that really began in earnest in 2020, around the same time that Tesla dropped into China, built its factory in that country. And then it was sort of like the EV war was off to the races at that point. Like, you know, Tesla started making cars in China. BYD started making its cars in earnest, its EVs and hybrids as well. And then we had a real competition on our hands. And I think that that sort of was the origins there.
39:48
The timing of all of that is really interesting because on the one hand, BYD timed a couple of things really well, right? It seems like making that decision to say, okay, we want to do great design, we want to be much more thoughtful about making cars that are good. Timed that sort of perfectly, right? As the whole car market was about to go through a really fascinating transition, Both because of EVs and then because of the pandemic. And then there's a lot of geopolitical reasons. Like that was the moment you wanted to make that decision, if you were going to make that decision. The company, I guess, had also been around for what, 22 years at the time. So it's like it both managed to sort of, it seems like cockroach its way through a couple of decades of, of strange times, but then also like be there and be ready. At the moment there was some space for something big and new to happen.
42:34
Yeah, I think that, that's right. And I think a lot of that had to do with the, the industrial policy in China at the time as well, which is when China sort of, you know, of started deciding that, hey, you know, we think that electric vehicles are going to be the future. You know, China was having enormous pollution problems obviously over the course of the last several decades, and they started pivoting hard to new energy vehicles, as they called them. And so that I think BYD really was able to, to take a lot of advantages from, from this sort of industrial policy that was put in place where there's like a lot of heavy subsidies coming down from the Chinese government and also sort of a direction from the, from the, the commun. They wanted to really control the supply chain, which meant not only are we going to be pivoting to these new energy vehicles, but we need to sort of from, well, to wheel, essentially. We need to be able to control everything that goes on, whether it comes to mining the minerals, processing the minerals, making the batteries that would go into the vehicles. They wanted to just sort of have a heavy hand on all of this. And BYD was sort of amongst other Chinese companies as well, was sort of well positioned to, to benefit from that, that policy.
43:24
Got it. Okay. And I think the, the being versus Tesla of it all seems like an important piece of that too. I was reading this story the other day. The New York Times had a big story about this gigantic trade surplus that China has. And it was making the point that one of the things that China has made a point of is what you just said, taking all sort of imports out of the question, right? Like getting, getting lots of imports is not important. We want to replace all of that stuff with, with domestic capability. And I think as this was happening, if I have the history timeline here, right, this was when it was like, Tesla is going to take over the world. It is the most important company. It's going to go into China and just take it over. And this is going to be huge. And it makes a lot of sense that if you are the Chinese government, you want to have a homegrown, domestic, honest to God, competitor to Tesla kind of as quickly as you can. And it seems like BYD was one of the companies for a variety of reasons that was really well set up to do that.
44:39
Yeah, I think so, because I think the way that they went about the sort of like attacking this problem was a lot more strategic than Tesla.
45:33
Right.
45:42
Tesla came into the market and I think that they assumed and they were correct for a while that there would be a lot of demand for their, you know, sort of technologically advanced, well made, well received electric vehicles.
45:42
It's hard to remember back to the phase when everybody thought Teslas were the coolest. I know, like, seriously, it's very funny now because a Tesla, even just as an object you see on the road is such a fraught thing that comes with so many other connotations. But there was a long run where Teslas were just objectively cool and everyone liked them. And it is, it is useful for this conversation to remember that this was.
45:56
That time was not that long ago too. It was very, it was very recent that there was this seriously. And yeah, we're sort of living in a new world now. But yeah, I think that that's absolutely correct. And you know, I think BYD and how they sort of, their strategy was a lot more interesting because they had this legacy already of sort of starting out as a battery manufacturer. So they were able to sort of control the battery supply chain, then also make batteries that had emerged as being a lot better than most of the batteries that were out there. They were cheaper to make. They started out with these lithium phosphate batteries that were a lot cheaper to make. Didn't have as much range as the nickel cobalt magnesium batteries, but they were a lot cheaper. And that allowed them to bring the price down, which we could talk about, which was that BYD was just really sort of just excelled at these low priced models in a way that the European manufacturers that were operating in China and most notably Volkswagen, but also Tesla had not really focused on at the time because it was really expensive to make electric vehicles. Still is. The battery is the most expensive thing that goes into the vehicle. Can add costs around $7,000, $8,000 for companies like Tesla, $13,000 even for companies like Ford and GM. BYD was able to bring that down to about $6,000 per vehicle. Which then when you have a battery that's that cheap to make, you can start selling vehicles. And they did that were around like U.S. currency, $10,000, $12,000. And I think that that really positioned them to grow exponentially, not only in China, but then now we're starting to see how their export business has been building. And there's these. I mean, if I could just. With a quick aside for a personal story. I was in Brazil a couple years ago visiting a close friend of mine and we took a lot of taxis everywhere we went, Ubers. And I was shocked that the vast majority of the vehicles that we took when we were driving around in Rio were BYD vehicles. And it was like my kind of like my introduction, right. I had seen BYD vehicles. I've never driven one myself. We can get to that as well. They're just not really available in the US And I'd never been to China. If the Verge would like to pay to fly me to China, I'd be happy to go. We could go together. It could be a little field trip. But I had not been behind the wheel of a BYD vehicle. And I've suddenly found myself in a lot of BYD vehicles over the course of six days that I was there. And they were extremely comfortable, they handled very smoothly. I talked to a few of the drivers and they talked about how cheap they were to acquire and how inexpensive they were to recharge, and it just like a great vehicle for them. Here in the United States you see a lot of Teslas that are taxis. I just, I think if BYD was able to sell their vehicles here in the US you would suddenly start to see them everywhere just because of how well they're made.
46:17
Okay, first of all, Top Gear style, Andy and David go to China and drive Chinese cars all over the place is 100% a thing we need to manifest into existence. Let's do it. Nilai, if you're listening, and I know that you are car, please consider this a story pitch. The price quality thing is one of the things I want to talk about because you've mentioned to me before on the show that that price thing is a really important piece of what has made Chinese cars successful. That they're able to make particularly these kind of entry level vehicles just as good and much cheaper. And that that ends up being a very powerful tiebreaker. Right? But it also seems like even recently something has changed where that's not the only way these cars are winning anymore. And I think like you and Nilai are perpetually sharing these YouTube and Instagram links of like influencers being blown away by Chinese cars that you can't buy in the United States. Is BYD one of those companies? Like is it starting to do interesting new things in its cars that like are sort of objectively cool other than just we're able to do the basic things cheaper and more efficiently than anybody else?
49:21
Yeah, I think so. They're definitely part of that conversation. And I think that that is the product of the very intense competition that was going on in China. Right. You had companies like byd, but also like Li Auto and Nio and Geely and a lot of other ones that are, are. I mean like I think, I think I read somewhere that there's like over 150 different nameplates in China. Auto, Auto nameplates. Which is just like, that is insane. It's like how I don't. In like the market can't really sustain all of those different brands and you've seen a lot of them, you know, sort of fall by the wayside and there's like an intense price war that's going on right now and BYD is, you know, is suffering, you know, while, while they have taken the crown away from Tesla, they're also kind of suffering domestically because of this intense price war that's been going on.
50:31
Well, that's something even the Chinese government has, has talked about.
51:24
Right.
51:27
That we have to, we have to get away from this incredible race to the bottom that has happened because we have had this explosion in capacity and manufacturing ability and all of these new companies that it has become, they're, they're running towards like being the same business as like Alibaba phone chargers where they're just, you can get anything you want for $4. Is like that's not where you want to go with your car industry.
51:27
Yeah, it's very, the government is, is, is doing what it can to try to cool things off a little bit. But.
51:49
Yeah, but then I look and BYD sells a car that is like over $100,000. So it's not, it's. There's clearly other games to play here.
51:55
There's a whole range you've got sort of like on the high end you've got Your, your Yangwang U7s and U8s which are sort of like their flagship luxury sedans that have like insane performance capabilities, like supercar level, like 1300 horsepower quad motor setups to plus plus point to point driving assistance like Tesla full self driving stuff, long range capabilities. The batteries can just go further than a lot of other competitors in the luxury market and it just offers the interiors are extremely luxurious. People want to use the baked in native software in these vehicles because of how good they are. No one's trying to fork anything to a phone. Projection carplay, Android Auto is not part of the conversation there because everything is just like it's connected to your personal phone, your devices, while also offering a lot more on top of that. And I think again that was part of sort of this competitive landscape that existed in China that sort of like you had to advance, you had to hire all of these software engineers and like BYD and others have poached a lot of people from around the world when it comes to vehicle design, when it comes to software, when it comes to all of these things that sort of are making the cars as desirable as they are. So you've got your Yangwangs at the top competing with your Mercedes and your Audis. And then you've got sort of like your mid tier like the KIN plus the KIN L which are sort of like more compact sedans and SUVs. You've got like the BYD song series which is like compact crossover SUVs that are sort of like in the mass market area. And then you've got on the very low end you've got your Seagulls, which is sort of the one I think that has gotten the most attention internationally, which is like this ultra affordable city car that sells for under $10,000 in China and now that has, that car has made it to Europe where it's being sold as the Dolphin Surf. I love the names of these vehicles, they're so great.
52:01
I like both Seagull and Dolphin Surf.
54:09
Who would want to drive a Dolphin surface Surf? Like, you know, oh, I just need.
54:11
To run to the store. I'll take the Dolphin Surf. Like come on, I'm in.
54:15
That sounds great to me. And then, and you've also got like the Atto 3 which is a, also a very successful export for BYD that's now sort of like you know, storming across Europe and Australia as well as other markets as well. So it's, it's you I think like rather than just sort of like camp out in one of these segments, BYD has sort of spread itself across the entire market, I think in a really smart way that you know, GM previously has sort of been sort of like the model of how you can compete across all of these different markets from, from Chevy to Cadillac. Right. And I think BYD has sort of copied that, but it's executed it in A lot more strategic and successful way.
54:19
I was just going to ask, is there a manufacturer that our audience might be more familiar with that you feel like is the closest analog to what BYD is doing? Is it, is it kind of old school gm?
55:05
Yeah, I really do think that it is. I think it's very much like kind of a GM story in how they have been able to diversify across a majority of segments, but also, you know, sort of like dominate their domestic market and then become like a serious player in these sort of global exported markets as well. So I think that that's sort of in some ways is copying kind of like the GM model from many years ago. I saw a statistic somewhere about how the last time that a company has been able to achieve the growth success and the export success was GM and that was like in the 1950s.
55:16
Oh wow.
55:59
So it hasn't happened since then. And while I think BYD still has a little bit of catching up to do in order to become like a top global leader like Toyota or Volkswagen has become, they're nipping at their heels like it's not going to be too much longer before I think we see a Chinese company like BYD at the top of the list.
56:00
So is BYD kind of the singular breakout star of this huge China automotive push over the last, I mean really couple of decades? But even in the last few years as this has really grown, is BYD the sort of true tip of the spear there?
56:24
Sort of like in the ways that Tesla has emerged over the last few years? If we just ignore the last couple most recent years as sort of like the symbol of US innovation, I think BYD has sort of seen in the same way it's seen as an innovative leader, but also sort of as a, as a symbol of like China's technological self reliance and how they've like vertically integrated to sort of like own the entire supply chain is like a real point of pride I think for people in China. It has like the premium tech allure that Tesla has been able to achieve as well and also sort of like that mass market dominance as well, which Tesla has not been able to do. I mean they have insofar as like the Model Y is obviously one of the best selling vehicles of all time, but they have not been able to capture that extremely low end of around, you know, the Toyota Corollas and the Volkswagen Golfs and things like that. So I think they've really shown sort of like it is kind of like the standard bearer in many ways.
56:40
Yeah, it's funny looking at pictures of the Seagull. It is kind of the car everyone has assumed would come for years now. It's cheap, it's small, it's a hatchback, it's not super exciting or interesting, but it's got a little bit of sort of sci fi future Y design to looks like the sort of workhorse cheap EV that everyone has assumed was going to happen since like the first Leaf. And it just hasn't appeared in the US yet. And it feels like BYD is the one who just shipped the thing.
57:44
Yeah, it's super sharp looking. I mean it just goes to show that you can have a car that is cheap, gets the job done and doesn't look like shit. Right. Like, I think like, you know, the Seagull is just like high bar car. It has like these small little LED lights on it that kind of make it look kind of mad if you're looking at it straight on. Like it kind of looks like an angry car, but it's, you know, it has like these like nice creases along the sides and along the hood and it's blacked out in some part, in some parts that are. It's kind of appealing. It's just, it's fun. It's got some fun lines to it. It just kind of like it cuts an interesting profile in it. I, I really like it. I would love to drive it sometimes.
58:19
Time for sure. So to that point actually, what is between here and BYD coming to the United States? I guess A, is that a thing we want in sort of the biggest possible way of asking that question. And B, it's, it's increasingly everywhere else. Right. It's clear this is not A, we can't make and ship enough cars problem anymore. What are the odds we start to see BYDs on the streets in the US anytime soon?
58:58
I think, I kind of think it's inevitable. I do think that if you look at sort of like the history of the auto industry, like we kind of went through this in like the 70s and 80s, right where the gas crisis led to, you know, sort of a decline in enthusiasm for domestically made vehicles. And that's when your Toyotas and your Hondas first started to appear on U.S. shores. And that really freaked a lot of, of people out in America. If you, if you go back and like look at some of the movies that were made during that time, there's like all these like different like weird Michael Keaton movies about like Japanese car companies coming in, taking over like US Plants and how Much like anxiety that was causing, like American workers especially. I think we're gonna see sort of like another round of that. That said, there are incredibly steep obstacles still lying in BYD's path. Right. It is essentially financially impossible for them to sell a car here and make money. Which is not to say that they still might not do it. It's just tariffs are so extremely high. Like they're at about 100%, I think, right now. So you're talking doubling the cost of what the car.
59:25
And that's been the case for. These are not like new Donald Trump 2025 tariffs. Right. This is like a long standing US policy.
1:00:39
Trump put tariffs in place during his, Biden cranked those tariffs up even higher during his term, and then Trump cranked them up even higher currently. So they've just been going up. On top of that, you know, vehicles obviously need to comply with our own safety standards, nhtsa, epa, all of that kind of stuff. So even if like BYD vehicles and especially like their electric vehicles produce zero tailpipes, they would still need to require EPA certification for like their bad, their battery standards and all those types of things. On top of that, you have the taf, the tariffs, the taxes, and then in addition to all of that, you've got bans on Chinese software in the United States. So this was something that Trump started and Biden finalized during his term in office. And it essentially makes it impossible or illegal to sell a vehicle with software that originates from China in the United States. So they would need to lift, they would need to find some workaround there. That said, there was some interesting news that happened on this front in recent days. Donald Trump was in Detroit recently giving a speech. He got heckled by a worker at Ford and he flipped off that worker and told him to fuck off. But in addition to that, he said he was asked about Chinese brands like BYD and Xiaomi and whether or not he would want to see them being sold in the United States. And he said, sure, sure, let China come in. Which was kind of surprising. And I think his conditions are that they would need to build factories here in the United States and they would need to hire US Workers. But if they want to make their cars here, European car companies do that, South Korean car companies do that, Japanese car companies do that. Why not let China do that as well? I think that that was kind of surprising because obviously he's kind of like all over the place on China in many ways, but they are sort of in the midst of these trade negotiations. So I do think that maybe he's starting to soften on some of those things. And we also saw him recently say that he loves the Kei cars, the tiny little Japanese trucks. So maybe he likes the seagull as well. Let's get Donald Trump behind the wheel of a seagull and see how he feels.
1:00:45
That line about the small cars, by the way, is something that a surprising number of people in and around this space have mentioned to me recently as, like, we may look back on that thing he sort of flippantly said about loving small cars, cars as a sort of fascinating inflection point in the American auto industry. And there's no evidence of that yet, but it is. It's just one of those things that has come up in more conversations with me recently than I expected. I don't know if you've encountered that too, but there is, like, I have that. That put some energy into the small car thing that I think was gone. Yeah, you know, really fascinating.
1:02:57
It's definitely very like, much in the enthusiast space here in the US it has not really broken out much beyond that. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, you know, small cars do not sell in the United States. We've seen dozens of companies try to sort of, you know, market tiny little cars, city cars. You have, you know, like, things like Seat and like, you know, the Mini and all of these other kind of brands that have tried to market small cars in the United States and they have failed because we are just too addicted to giant trucks and SUVs.
1:03:30
Right. Instead we get trucks that you could fit one of those cars in the truck bed of.
1:04:04
Exactly. I think the Hummer ev, when it came out, like, the thing that struck me the most about it was that the battery weighed the same as a Honda Civic. It's just the battery. But that said, there's a lot of things that could sort of happen externally that could lead to a renaissance in small cars. You could have gas prices go up. Obviously, we're in the midst of a bit of an auto loan crisis, like car prices continue to shoot up year after year and people taking out longer, more predatory loans in order to afford these expensive vehicles. And that's going to lead to some sort of, I think, reckoning at some point when it comes time for it. So there's a lot of things that could end up happening. We could go to war with Venezuela and that could cause all sorts of problems in the global oil market. Who knows? These things have happened before in the past and we've seen sort of US interest shoppers, a car buying interest shift to smaller vehicles. It could certainly happen again.
1:04:08
So all of these sort of outward externalities make me think that there is bound to be a just a gray or black market for Chinese vehicles coming into the United States. And I'm frankly already surprised that there aren't car enthusiasts out there driving these things and just sort of hoping nobody notices. So my last question to you Andy, is if I want one and I, I, I will be honest, I do want one. Is it, is it even theoretically possible to get one in the United States right now?
1:05:13
Well, do you have $90,000?
1:05:46
Let's say yes.
1:05:51
Okay then, yeah, let's go man. Rock and roll. I, yeah, I mean like, because yeah, that is like legitimately a $20,000 BYD would cost about $90,000 to import and purchase here in the United States because of all said and done with Tarif. So you're talking like, you know, you're talking like Lamborghini prices for what is essentially a Honda Fit. I don't know if that's a good value proposition, but it's not impossible.
1:05:52
That's either the coolest flex of all time or you should have control of your money taken away from you. I don't know. It's one of those and I couldn't tell you which one.
1:06:22
I mean like something's got to break because like we talked about the influencers. I did this story on the Verge, you know, a couple of months ago about, about US based auto car influencers driving these, these Chinese cars that have been brought here by a company that's owned by one of the Chinese OEMs. Geely owns one of the companies that sort of markets these cars to US influencers specifically so they can start to like start to generate some buzz, right, because they have been eyeing this market for many, many years.
1:06:30
It's totally working by the way, just, just to like, it's very clearly been a successful effort. People want Chinese cars. They are like a lust worthy object in a really funny way.
1:07:02
I'm sure some of it is a little astroturfy. Like there might be some influencers who are getting paid under the table to promote these vehicles but all the ones that I spoke to said that they are like not taking money, they are legit. This is their honest opinion of them. And you know like from, you know, from like Marquez to like all the way down down are, are loving these cars. And you know, it's like that's going to resonate with these viewers, right? When they are like looking at these cars and looking at the tech that's available in them, seeing how cheap they are to purchase for people in China and wondering, why can't we have that? Why am I stuck with this, you know, you know, $85,000 Ford truck when I could be driving around in this sleek, fashionable tech forward Chinese car? And I think that that's going to, that's going to resonate and we'll, we'll have to see what happens. You know, like it's, there's a lot of pieces that still need to fall into place.
1:07:12
Yeah.
1:08:03
But I do think I have to agree with, like, the smart people I've talked to in this industry. It will be inevitable that a Chinese car will eventually be available for sale here in the U.S. interesting.
1:08:04
All right, well, until then, here's what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going to see which one is more expensive. David and Andy Top Gear their way around China or David and Andy sketchily import a BYD car into the United States.
1:08:14
I love this.
1:08:25
And then, and then we pitch it as think of the savings.
1:08:25
You know what I mean?
1:08:28
Like, you're welcome. The Verge. Look at all the money we're saving you.
1:08:29
It's citizen journalism at its finest.
1:08:33
We're just here to help. All right, Andy, thank you. This was very helpful. This was exactly the explainer I needed. Thank you for coming.
1:08:35
No problem. Thanks, David.
1:08:41
All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back.
1:08:42
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1:09:44
All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-Verge 11. The email is vergecasthevirge.com thank you to everybody who's been reaching out with all of this stuff that happened over the holidays. There's been a lot of fun tech supporty kinds of questions that I've been getting in my email and my social inboxes. Please keep them all coming. All the stuff that you went through over the holidays, all the stuff you saw at ces, everything you're thinking about right now, anytime you're just like, hmm, I have feelings about technology. Call the vergecast Holiday hotline. That's what we're here for this week. We have a question from Rob from Texas.
1:10:40
Hey David, it's Rob in Texas. I'm driving back from Oklahoma, visiting my family up there with my 5 year old and 4 year old. Essentially my question is kind of like is a rectangle a square as it relates to kids repurposed iPhones versus iPads. My sister thinks she holds the high ground, thinks my kids are on air, quote their phones way too much. Essentially they've got an iPhone old iPhone X and an iPhone 12. They've been wiped and just have YouTube kids which obviously I don't love but necessity sometimes in Disney plus and she is always on me. Kids are always on their phone. And then of course her kids are really psyched to see technology because they don't have much at home because they're a Little bit of a stricter family. I was like, would you feel better with iPad? She's like, yes, I would. But I think that's just like a. It's an optics thing for her. And I think for many people, that people see kids with their phone and just assume it's like they're on Instagram or social media. Anyway, I just love to hear your thoughts as a technologist and I guess, new parents. Sorry to drag you into the family drama, but I think y' all can put this to rest. Thanks so much. Really appreciate you.
1:11:11
I have a short answer to this and a longer answer to this. The short answer is that I actually think that in many ways, not only are they identical screens, I think there are actually big advantages to giving your kid an iPhone versus an iPad. So the reasons people generally navigate towards iPad over iPhone is iPhones are more expensive. Cell phones in general are more expensive than tablets because they're not primary devices. Tablets tend to be easier to lock down. Right. Like, if I'm just going to give my kid my phone, it's very hard to quickly put in all the parental controls and turn off all the things that I need to turn off. Whereas something like an iPad is not a device that I'm carrying around to do my own stuff anyway. So I can just have it be theirs much more easily, as opposed to, you know, spending another thousand dollars on a phone. But I think an old phone is a terrific thing to use as a kid tablet, especially if it's just like a WI fi connected. Think about it as sort of an ipod touch. I think that's a terrific idea. It's a smaller screen, which has real upsides in terms of not wanting the kids to be sort of too immersed and too engrossed in the content. It's actually easier for them to hold, which means it's going to be easier for them to be able to, like, play games with their thumbs and do things that are interactive as opposed to just sort of holding the screen and staring at it the whole time. It's a thing that's easier for you to manage. Like you said, it's smaller, it's easier to travel with. There's a bigger ecosystem of accessories that you can do all kinds of interesting stuff with. I think in a lot of ways, if I were to travel with my kid, I would rather give them. I have a bin of old phones back here. And I think rather than give them a, you know, big iPad in a huge case, giving them a small phone in a, like, Otterbox case, That's very hard for them to break. Makes a lot of sense to me. The bigger point I think is that I think we need to stop thinking about screen time in general. And this is not an. I'm not inventing this idea. I've just been reading about this a lot and talking to a lot of people about it. And I have become very convicted on this that we talk about screen time in terms of screens and we should stop. We should talk about screen time in terms of what is on the screen. Right. Like there is a meaningful, powerful difference between giving your kid a screen on which they are watching. I don't know. Cocomelon. Not to single out cocomelon, but I think it's emblematic of a very particular kind of content versus giving your kid a screen on which they like read a book, you know what I mean? Those things are qualitatively different. Different despite the fact that they both happen on a screen that your kid holds in their hand. Even the kinds of stuff that we watch, like a thing that my wife and I talk about a lot is I'm less interested in sort of minimizing specific screen time than I am in the kinds of things that we watch. And there's a lot of evidence to back up this thing that if you want your kids to have a better screen time experience rather than giving them the sort of super fast moving stuff where there's quick cuts and lots of colors and everything is very like, like bright and sensory overloading to have sort of slower things or bigger, longer stories. We watch a lot of Disney movies in our house and I think there's something, there's something to the idea that you should be watching a longer story that unfolds over time and has multiple characters and makes you feel things. And do I think that all of that stuff is better than them, like turning off the TV and going and playing outside? Probably not. They should turn off the TV and go play outside more. I feel a lot of, of feelings, including guilt about the screen time that my kids do have. But in general I think the idea that all screen time is created equal and is bad is just wrong. And we're still learning about what this stuff does to kids brains. But one thing I've seen a lot of recently is that there's been this push towards like old TV from the 1980s, like kids shows, you know, the Winnie the poohs and the Mr. Rogers neighborhood and all of these things that were much slower and they feel like, like teeth pullingly slow now even to me I. These are the shows I grew up with and I watch them now and it's like, my God, what? Nothing is happening on this show. And that's, that's good. And that is actually, I think people are starting to see that meaningfully change the way that their kid interacts with the TV and the way that they feel. I've had the experience recently. My kid is really into Spidey and his amazing friends right now, like a lot of kids are. And I see the thing where a show gets really exciting, there's something going on, and he just disappears, right? Like he barely hears me anymore. He doesn't look over when I talk to him. He's just sort of gone inside of the show. And that, that frightens me. And so that kind of thing is the sort of screen time that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. I'm much less worried about the size and shape of the screen that he's on than what he is looking at on the screen. And I think increasingly that is where the conversation is heading and should be heading. All that said said, there are lots of good things kids can be doing on screens. And it is my job and other parents job to be thoughtful about what those things are and what we're giving them and at what pace and in what quantity. All that stuff matters. And all this stuff is complicated. And like, I'm doing a bad job and I assume most other people are doing a bad job. If you're doing a good job, please let me know what you're doing so I can steal all of your ideas. But the way that we think about this stuff just needs to be a lot more nuanced. And so the idea that like you gave your kid your phone, like, yes, if your kid is sitting in the backseat of your car while you drive scrolling on Instagram for hours at a time and they're whatever, four years old, that's bad. I feel pretty comfortable saying that's bad. But inherently, there is nothing worse about the idea of handing them a phone than handing them an iPad. It's what is on the screen, their relationship with it, what's happening in the world, what's happening to them. All of this stuff is like bigger and more complicated than we want it to be. To just say, put here's a limit on screen time and here's how much we're going to do and here's how much we're not going to do. And we will get more careful and more nuanced and more thoughtful about it over time. But for right now, give them an old phone. I think it's fine. I have become totally okay with we need to solve car rides by giving the kids screens, because the job is for all of us to get there without completely losing our minds. And look, it's not like, like my kid is going to be out of the car having, you know, the most intellectually stimulating time. It was like he's sitting in the back of a car. Sitting in the back of a car sucks. Give the kid a screen, let him watch a movie. I don't know. There are bigger fish to fry as far as I'm concerned. So if you want to give him a phone and let them watch a movie while you drive, you have my blessing. That's all. Rob. I hope that helps. And also, if you figure out the real sort of ipod touchiness of it all and how to to take an old phone, get just the right apps on it, do the parental controls and get it set up perfectly. I want you to share your tips because I think a lot of people in the vergecast universe are sitting around with an old phone that should be or could be repurposed for that. And I would like to know how to do it right. So if you've done it, get at me. Vergecastheverge.com 866 version 1.1 I think there's a lot of stuff we can do in this space that we should keep talking about about until then, that's it for the show. Thank you to Hayden and Andy for being here and thank you as always, for listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other things you think my kids should watch, that won't give him that crazy look on his face that he doesn't even seem to be paying attention to me anymore. I want to hear all about them. Email verscastheur.com call 866 verge11 and don't forget, if you subscribe to the Verge, you can get this and all of our podcasts ad free just by going to your account settings. Verge.com subscribe don't you do it. It's a good website. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. Nilai and I will be back on Friday to talk about just all of the AI news that just will not stop happening. It's just gonna be that kind of year, my friends. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
1:12:27