678: Mentoring a Box of Numbers

Marco, I have to ask you, what is the temperature in the building that you're in right now? Because all I know is I see in the pre-show, in our internal show notes, Marco's HVAC update, and I'm scared for you. Oh, no. So I mentioned my HVAC or HVAC. I never know which one. I've heard both. I have both problems in past shows because basically all of last summer, I didn't have reliable air conditioning at the beach. That is also our heat all winter long in that house. We don't drain the water because we go there all the time in the winter, so it has to be kept from freezing. So my solution last winter, when it first broke last February, like a year ago February, my solution was I'm just going to bring a bunch of space heaters in and just run them on low all the time. I have like a nice, you know, the nice safe oil radiator kind. So it's not like a safety risk. It's certainly not an efficient use of electricity or money. Well, you've got the solar panels. Doesn't that help? It helps, but, I mean, it's a lot of power. Like, it offsets it, but it doesn't cover the whole thing by any means. Especially if you have snow covering the panels. Yeah, exactly. So over the course of the last few months, we occasionally get listeners asking, hey, whatever happened to that project? Because I believe the last update I gave you was probably in the fall. Basically all spring, summer, and fall, I had a parade of different service people come out and try to figure out what the heck was wrong with my systems. What ended up happening was, in short, nothing good. The service person who spent the most time with it, and these are people, they were like calling tech support from the manufacturer and trying to decode all these codes, and they're hooking up all sorts of diagnostic equipment, and nobody could figure out what the problem was. eventually this person recommended a major kind of servicing reinstallation like disassembling a bunch of things cleaning them out testing all the lines again doing the vacuum all this like a ton of work and listeners i i don't know how much a new honda accord costs today but i think i probably could have bought one for the amount of money uh that i had to spend on this and then at the end of it, he said, I still can't get it working right. I recommend full replacement. And I'm like, you know, godsmack, but I'm like, well, I mean, what else can I do? I called like some of the previous people and I kind of ran it by. I'm like, hey, I have this guy telling me this. Does that sound right to you? Because you've also seen the system. And They also said, I hate to say it, but yeah. So I'm like, crap. So I told the guy, all right, fine. Make me a proposal. Let's see what you got for a full replacement. And then he ghosted me completely. That was October. And I called back a couple times. And I talked to his secretary, oh, he's working on it. He's working on it. Ghosted me. Never called me back. never got my proposal. I, needless to say, am not thrilled with having worked with this guy at this point, having given him a lot of money for a system that was still broken. But fortunately, one of the other service providers I'd worked with at the beach, who was very busy in the summer, was a lot less busy in the winter. And so I got him on the job now. And he has replaced my upstairs unit. We're still waiting on the downstairs unit to come in from the manufacturer. The upstairs one is replaced. Downstairs is still space heaters. Which brings us to this past few weeks. The upstairs unit, again, it works fine. You know, it's holding temperatures. It's a brand new unit. And I said, you know what? I'm tired of all these comps. Get me a simple unit. So we have a Daikin or Daikin. I don't know how the brand is pronounced. We have a Daikin system that's just like the most cheap, simple thing because everything out there is cheap, simple Daikin systems. And when they break, everyone out there knows how to service them, and they're easily serviced and replaced. Is this a Northeastern thing? Because I don't think I've ever seen them around here. It's all like train and a couple other things around here. They're very popular for split unit systems. They're not that common for central systems yet. I see. This is a central system. How do you spell the name of the company? D-A-I-K-I-N. As far as I can tell, they seem to have a really good sales network because every HVAC tech out here wears Daikin shirts. They have a Daikin sticker on their car. They have the best parties. Right, right. They're obviously doing a lot of sales outreach. But, you know, their stuff is everywhere. Everyone has to service it. It's simple. It doesn't seem like it's super high quality, but it's also not that expensive. And at the beach, that's kind of what you want because, like, it's such a harsh environment. Nothing out there lasts very long. Yeah, if it's consumable, it's going to rot out anyway in a few years. Right. So if you're only going to get five to ten years out of something like this, it's best to have it be reasonably serviceable and replaceable. So anyway, so I've been using space heaters downstairs, new system upstairs. And then we have this massive cold freeze this winter. And so I've been relying on my Yolink sensors. Yes, yes. My house is filled with Yolink sensors. I can see the temperatures everywhere. I have one outside so I can correlate what's going on inside to what's going on outside so I can tell when the system is working right. I have water sensors everywhere for water leaks at every, under every sink trap, under every toilet valve, and a couple of, you know, next to the fridge, like in case that leaks, like next to the ice maker, and, you know, a couple of, like, floor locations, water leak sensors everywhere. So I'm going through this freeze, and I'm watching my, and, you know, we have, like, the house is lifted, because it's the beach, so it's, like, it's on stilts, and the water main, you know, There's a challenge when you have a lifted house with no basement under it. How do you insulate the water main and the sewer main that have to come in and out of the ground to go to the house? So we have this, like, boxed-out closet that goes around them, and there's a heater inside that closet that keeps it, you know, 50 degrees or whatever. And, of course, sensor in there. So I've been monitoring that. And, like, during the worst of the freezes, that water main closet got down to, like, 36 degrees. I was watching it. I'm like, oh, God. And meanwhile, the bay is frozen. There's no ferry service. So the only – and I don't have a driving permit anymore, so I don't live there anymore. So the only way I can get there if I need to do something is I can, like, bum a ride from someone during the day if they happen to be driving their truck on for, you know, if they're a contractor or something. Like, I know a few people, so I can, like, I can ask for rides. But it's hard to get there, and it's not fast to get there. and the answer often, you know, the answer, if I want to go there on Saturday, the answer is, too bad, you're going on Monday. Anyway, I'm watching these sensors go down on these, like, you know, super freezing Saturday nights. I'm like, oh, God, getting tense. And, like, I know a couple of people out there, if I really had to, I could call them to go over there and, like, change something if I really had to. But, like, you know, you also don't want to call a friend to go over to your house when it's five degrees with 40-mile-an-hour winds if you really don't have to. Like, ideally, you don't need that. Anyway, so I made it through all the deep freezes. I thought, yesterday, I get a water leak alert from Yolink in an outdoor utility closet that houses the water heater and, like, the water filter and a couple of air handlers. I know there's a water filter attachment there that leaks sometimes, so an occasional false alarm there is common. So I'm like, ah, it's probably fine. And then I got the water leak alert again. Uh-oh. And I'm like, hmm, that's weird. Let me check. And I have one camera that is mounted right below that, like looking out on my front stoop to see when teenagers are walking up to my stairs. And peeing. And peeing, yeah. Well, they don't pee on those. They pee at the other side. Oh, my bad. This is where teenagers get off the beach and use my foot wash. Oh, lovely. And just flood my entire front patio with water and sand. It's delightful. You're really selling Fire Island well. It's uninhabitable in the winter. Even if you wanted to be there, you can't get there. People treat private property like their own public utilities. You're really doing a bang-up job of selling me on Fire Island. That's part of its charm, too. Yeah. So anyway, after the couple of water leak alerts, I check my camera that's there, and it's raining. Oh, hmm. That's not because it's not raining. But it's raining at that camera. Oh! Oh, I misunderstood. Oh, no. That's what I'm going to guess. If your water heater is in there, that's probably rotted out and it's just failed. So, I called a friend. I'm like, I can't get there until Friday, really. So, I'm like, all right, I called a friend. He went up and opened the closet. And sure enough, there's some pipe that ruptured. And this has never been a problem before. But because the downstairs HVAC system is not running, That closet, which has the air handlers in it, is not being warmed up by it. So a pipe froze in there and ruptured. He turns it off. I'll know in a couple days quite how bad it is. I'm going to send a plumber over there in the morning. But I have a leak. It rained all over my front patio all day long. Thanks to Yolink for alerting me to it. My next step is I think I'm going to look into their various options for water main shutoffs. I really want to get one for our house just on principle, but they're surprisingly expensive. Yeah, they're about $300. Well, the fanciest ones actually stop the water. The less fancy ones turn a valve that you already have that stops the water. Those are still a couple hundred dollars. Yeah, exactly. The very fancy ones literally have the valve inside them and will turn off the water. Yeah. I almost ordered it today, but I wanted to go there, like, measure and make sure, like, my valve. Because it says, like, your valve has to, like, move fairly freely, you know, because it can't, it doesn't have that much pressure it can apply. That's why you need the, what do you call it, the ball cock valve. We get a lot of leverage with the big lever. Yeah, so anyway, thanks, Yolink. Yolink has been awesome for this. Like, and we also, because we have the restaurant now, the restaurant has an apartment above it. And so I've also been able to monitor that apartment. Like, you know, staff stays there in the summertime. but that's yet another property to manage and I've been able to monitor that and make sure that's been not freezing during these coldest nights and so it's been remarkable having Yolink in my life so thank you John for bringing Yolink to us yes very much so for anybody who missed the whole deal with Yolink it's this family of these sensors that use a radio protocol called LoRa that is much much much lower power and higher range than Wi-Fi And it's not based on thread. It's a whole different thing. So basically you have these very inexpensive sensors that run on like AA batteries or a button battery and last like two years or a year on that battery life. And because it's super low frequency, it goes through walls, fridges, you know, like lots of things that other things that might have signal problems going through. It goes right through them. And it also has extremely long range. Now, the canonical example for me is I have a contact sensor on my mailbox, as we've spoken about many times. And granted, my mailbox is, I don't know, 10, 15 meters from the house or yards, if you will. It's not that far, but I have one of these sensors, you know, inside a metal box, and it's beaming the open and close signal all the way into the house. And I've understood that in perfect conditions, like basically almost outdoors or outdoors, these things can go upwards of like a mile, they can work astonishingly long ways in really good conditions. Yeah, so they're great. And so I have Yoling sensors all over the restaurant. I have them all over my house. And I can monitor things, get alerted for things like, hey, like this fridge is above temperature. Like something's wrong. Go check it. And there's the water leak sensors are now everywhere. And they work. They work really well. And so and they're cheap. Like, the other sensor is maybe $20 or $30, depending on what kind of sensor it is. So you can have, and there's no, like, subscription or anything, so you can have a whole bunch of them. And, you know, their app is what you'd expect. It's not a good app. No, it's not great, but it works. However, there's really robust home assistant integrations if you're one of those dorks like me. And you do need to get a hub, which is, like, $40 or $50. $20, $30. Yeah, you can get a set with, like, a hub and a couple of temperature monitors for, like, $50 or $60. Like, it's not anything, you know, burdensome, really, in this world. And compared to, like, you know, I've had, like, the EVE home sensors before that, the EVE Airs. Those are, like, $70 each, and they don't work as well. I can tell you that from experience, they don't work as well. And, you know, they have, like, smart outlets and stuff, too. Like, you know, they have a whole family of smart stuff. And it all is, like, cheap but functional. And reliable. Thanks for Yolink for sponsoring this show. No, they didn't sponsor, but they should. At this point, I'm happy to sponsor them because they have saved me a lot of anguish. Well, that's the thing is I was moaning just a moment ago about how I don't want to put a $300 valve on my water supply. The flip side of that is I've lived having part of your house underwater, and that's a lot more expensive than $300. So it is on the to-do list at some point to get either the, you know, have a plumber come out and weld in or whatever, you know, one of the fancy, fancy versions, or maybe one of the ones that just sits on the valve and, you know, twists it shut on its own. But I really do need to look into this one way or another. There's also, and the way it works is, you know, you can obviously remote control your water main when you have one of these, but also they have integrations where, like, if you have a leak detected, it can automatically turn it off. And that kind of thing also has insurance implications. Some insurance companies will require that you have those in certain high-risk situations, or sometimes you might be able to get a discount on something if you have that. So that's worth looking into if that's relevant to you. All right, we have some news. We recorded and released a new member special, and perhaps more exciting than anything else, I remembered to talk about it. So gold star in cookie for me. We have a new member special, ATP Insider After Apple. John, what does that mean? It's a little bit difficult to explain, but we were kind of musing on a world without Apple in a couple of different hypothetical scenarios. In the beginning, we tried to explain, well, why are we talking about this topic now? You know, is this a declaration that we're abandoning Apple? No, that's not what it is. Except for Marco. Maybe for Marco. Well, we did a couple of hypotheticals, like what if Apple had never existed, alternate history type of thing, or what if Apple at some point in our future, when we're still alive, ceases to exist, and we're exploring what would we do in terms of tech? What platforms would we use? What things would we miss? What things would we be looking for? And obviously, in that discussion, we inevitably end up talking about our history and how we got where we are, especially since both Marco and Casey are fairly new to the Apple platform from my perspective. So we get to hear a lot of backstory on that as well. So there you go. ATP Insider after Apple. Chosen mostly for the alliteration, let's be honest, but I think it's a pretty good title. Agreed. Yeah, this one was fun. We went into a bunch of random places, as the three of us would want to do. but I really enjoyed it. There's a lot of history there, both personal history and general history. I think you'll really enjoy it. If you are not a member and this or any of the other, many other member specials are wetting your whistle or striking your fancy, you can go to atp.fm slash join and for not an altogether terribly large amount of money, you can get all of the member specials. You can do what John suggests, which Marco and I do not agree with, and you can be a member for a month and then download everything and then cancel your membership. We do make that very easy. But you're not going to do that. You're going to become a member and stick with us because you like us. And so you can go to hp.fm slash join. John, remind me for the 800th time, if people wanted to see what member specials were available, what is the URL for that? Specials? hp.fm slash specials. There you go. And so you can check out all of the different member specials. There's a bunch of them at this point. I don't remember the count, but there's been a lot. And there's a separate feed for them, too. Like when you become a member, you get a dedicated feed that just has the specials. So if you just want to go back through the specials one by one, you don't have to hunt them down on the other feeds. They're in all the other feeds, too, but there's a dedicated feed adjuster specials if you want. So we appreciate all of the members that make this show possible, and we really would love it if you'd check out these member specials. We have a lot of fun doing them, and we get to go a little bit off the beaten path, and I really enjoy that, too. All right, let's do some follow-up, and let's start with Unix Corner. We were talking last week about Robert Tate's micro-LED, quote-unquote, TV review video, where he basically installed a stadium monitor in his house. And during that, the display had a pixel pitch of 0.9 millimeters. And in the video, Robert said, and this was transcribed, transposed, transcribed by John, the general rule for pixel density is that if you multiply the pixel pitch by 10, that will give you the viewing distance in feet where individual pixels are indistinguishable. John, apparently, you said, the general rule is if you multiply the pixel pitch by 10, you get the distance where you can't see the pixels anymore. So 0.9 millimeters means about nine feet away. John, where did you go wrong there? I don't think I really went that wrong, but some people were confused by it and thought it was hilarious that I was mixing these units together into the, you know, like people are going to think my pronunciation of hilarious is also hilarious. It is. It's millimeters and feet, and then 0.9 millimeters times 10 does not equal nine feet. It doesn't equal nine meters. It doesn't even, I mean, you know, what are you talking about? I omitted the words in feet. What I should have said is the words in feet after distance. If you multiply the pixel pitch by 10, you get the distance in feet, where you can't see the pixels anymore. This is not my rule. This is directly from the video, which is just a rule of thumb for theater people. Apparently, that math works out. I think it was perfectly clear because I gave the example. So for 0.9 millimeters, that means nine feet away. But my bad for not putting the words in feet in there. And as I say here in the notes, a lot of listeners are now very unit sensitive, thanks to Casey. Here it is. I'm trying to be inclusive, and no good deed goes unpunished. Speaking of member specials, a little while ago, I think it was a couple months ago, we did HP Movie Club War Games, and this is kind of apropos because the whole of the Internet, and that is not a complaint. I'm glad that you all did. The whole of the Internet sent us a YouTube video from Dave's Garage where he bought basically one of the display units, I don't know how to describe this, that generated those screens in the bunker, those, like, those, I don't know, how can I verbalize this? Well, so, I mean, what we're talking about is in the movie War Games and the big room with all the screens that show, like, the lines with the missiles exploding and stuff. Those are the screens we're talking about. It's like, how did they do that back in 1980-whatever when this was made? Well, they did it with the thing you're going to see on Dave's Garage channel. It's a vector display. And, of course, it's very tiny, and it's monochrome. So how do they do those big things? This is not really about how they made the movie, but just my understanding is that they got these little vector displays. They filmed them with a film camera, and they filmed different images with different color filters in front of the monochrome screen. So they got a red pass and a blue pass and a green pass, whatever, whatever colors they use. Like you see colors in the movie. That's just because they put different images, and they filmed it with a film camera, and then they put that film together, and then they projected onto projection screens, and then they filmed the projection screens with the movie cameras. So it's quite a ways to go, but, you know, without computers that can do graphics that big. But anyway, the vector display itself is like, I don't know, it's like seven inches diagonal or something. It's a tiny, it looks like a nice little screen, practically. But vector displays are really cool, and getting it up and running is really cool. That's really what the video is about, is. So I bought one of these War Games displays on YouTube. Again, they're not War Games displays for their use of the movie. How do I get it to do literally anything? And it was a fun video. It was very well done. And, you know, the Dave fellow was like, I'm not a developer. But let me tell you about the low-level programming I had to do in the communication protocol I had to work through in order to get this worked. It was very impressive. We are sponsored by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your growing business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain name, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. So Squarespace is an amazing website hosting platform to host your business. And they've, for years, offered amazing features to host businesses that sell physical or digital goods. Well, they've also, in recent years, broadened their offering to also give you everything you need to offer services and get paid for your services all in one place. From consultations to events or experiences, you can showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract new clients and grow your business. And then you can get paid on time and easily with professional on-brand invoices and online payments. Plus, you can streamline your workflow with built-in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools and so much more. They have everything you will need to make your business succeed. Things like SEO tools, analytics, email campaigns, and, of course, the scales to so many different kinds of businesses. Again, physical goods, digital goods, things like services, and if you're a consultant, as they mentioned earlier. But even things like, you know, if you sell content, if you sell a private podcast or newsletters or e-books, you can do all of that with Squarespace and so much more. And you don't need to be a nerd. There's no coding. There's nothing like that. It's super easy. So if somebody comes to you and you are a nerd and they're like, hey, can you help me with my website? You can send them to Squarespace and then they don't need your help. It's amazing. See for yourself by starting a free trial at squarespace.com slash ATP. You can build the whole thing in trial mode and see how it works for you. When you're ready to sign up, go back there, squarespace.com slash ATP, and use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP for 10% off. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. All right, we're going to talk about AI for a few minutes. This is still part of follow-up. We're going to do this a little bit in a funky way. What we're going to do is I'm going to introduce a couple things, and John, I think you would like to say a couple things. But then I'm going to plow through like a whole bunch of stuff and there'll be a bunch of links in the show notes. And we're going to try. We're going to try to get through all of the stuff that I need to get through to like set the stage. And then we'll I'll let you two loose to have a conversation about it. But bear with us for a minute, because it really requires a whole bunch of foundation before we can really have a conversation about it. So first and foremost, on behalf of all three of us, we all apologize. Genuinely, we all apologize for not having disclosed past or future sponsorships from AI companies. I like to think we do a pretty good job of this. We try really hard to do a good job of this. But we 100% whiffed on this one. And so that is our bad. And the offending parties have been sacked. But we should note that Google Gemini has been a past sponsor. Anthropic has been a past sponsor, will be a future sponsor. and genuinely, I hope I don't come across as sarcastic, we really are sorry that we didn't say that. Yeah, and again, I think our batting average is really high. And IKC is like 99% of the time is always going to do it. I think part of the reason that it didn't even occur to me for these sponsors is kind of like if we had to say, by the way, Apple, past sponsor of the show. Of course, Apple has never sponsored the show. But we talk about Apple so much. Like these big companies, like Google obviously is in the league with Apple, and now like Anthropic and OpenAI, like they're such big companies. It's like, well, they don't sponsor. Our sponsors are small companies that want to get their message out. We're not doing ads for Google, but we did. We did do it for Google. And the same thing for Anthropic. Now these companies have hojillions of dollars in their advertising. So obviously if you listen to the show, you would hear that they're sponsors. And even if you're a member, you can look in our show notes, and you will see in the show notes who our sponsors are. But we do try very, very hard. Anytime we bring up a sponsor, Casey will say, and blah, blah, blah, former sponsor, blah, blah, blah, former or a future sponsor. We try to do that pretty much all the time. Obviously, we're not going to say that every time we mention them within an episode, but we do try to, like, the first time they're brought up or whatever, mention it. And we didn't do it for Google Anthropic. And I have to say, going forward, it's going to be difficult to remember to do it every time we bring up AI-type things because it's like Google. We talk about Google all the time. But anyway, we continue to try, just to remind you, because not everyone has listened to every episode. And why did we tell you this? We're telling you this so you can add whatever grains of salt you want to add to our opinions. Some people will believe, well, you had one Google Gemini ad on a past episode, therefore everything you say about Google is bought and paid for by Google. If you want to believe that, you should believe that. Other people will say, I'm going to knock off 0.02% from everything you say because the anthropics brought ads on your show. Whatever you want, however many grains of salt you want to add to our opinion, you do that. But we have to tell you so that you know to either add grains of salt or not add grains of salt. Obviously, we all think, as humans all think, I'm not influenced by them having ads or whatever. and I think that's mostly true, but you know, it's always very difficult to say that's why we want the audience to know. Indeed. So with that in mind, I wanted to first highlight some stuff from a friend of the show, Steve Trouton-Smith. Steve has been on a bit of a journey with regard to Codex and Xcode and has a bunch of different tweets on Mastodon about it, and there's a thread about it. John has pulled out some highlights that I'm going to read. Again, we tried to cut this down to the bare minimum, but there's a lot here. And it is worth looking into if you haven't seen these tweets. It is fascinating. And the short answer before we even get into this is Steve Trouten-Smith is excited by and doing things that he thinks is good with AI products. So with that in mind, Steve says, I had long since rewritten an app that he was working on in Swift. So this was only a contrived test of Xcode's new agentic programming support. But it did in five minutes what took me months of on-again, off-again effort and preparation. Objective-C to Swift is too easy, all things considered. What about porting the app to another platform, like Android? Hold my beer. So then later, so now I have a one-to-one recreation of classic same game, the app in question, in Android's Java slash XML. Later, I passed it the Swift version of the project that it had created from the original Objective-C project and instructed it to turn it into an Android project that I could just open in Android Studio and install. So now it just exists on Android. Steve continues, I've spent some time cleaning up the project and prepping it for Google Play. I've tested Google Play distribution internally, at least. I'm still reeling from the fact that this is possible, never mind viable. I'd tried this conversion process before, perhaps a year ago, with the agent feature on chat GPT and got nowhere. There's clearly been a lot of progress made here in a short amount of time. Sticking with Steve, but kind of, you know, on a different subject, Steve writes, Three apps, from zero to functional in a day. This is the biggest change to Xcode and Project Builder in its entire history, dropped on a random Tuesday when the 26.3 beta was released. So Steve went from zero apps to three that were functional in the span of a day. And then finally from Steve, building one app used 7% of my weekly codex usage limit. Compare that to a single awful slideshow and keynote using 47% of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit. Yikes. Yeah, before Steve had embarked on this whole, like, I'm going to write a bunch of new apps and important things, he had been exploring the AI features in Apple's Creator Studio and complaining bitterly that even just experimenting with it to try out the features was burning through the allocation of free, you know, free AI things that you get to do with, like, iWork or whatever, like, you know, give you an outline, generate a slideshow from it or whatever. Those limits seem really, really low. I mean, you're not paying a – I mean, you are paying a subscription to a Creator Studio, but you're not paying a separate subscription to, like, whatever models it's using behind the scenes. So on the one hand, I kind of understand how, like, okay, well, Creator Studio, you pay a subscription for the software, and we give you some piddling amount of, like, you know, server-side AI type things for free, but if you want more than that, you have to hook up to an API key or something. On the other hand, comparing this, like, I made three entire apps and used 7% of my $20 a month usage. Like, you know, I don't know if Apple's AI usage prices are going to be like their RAM prices, or maybe that's a bad example these days, but it seems like Apple should make an adjustment here or charge more money for their creator studio. So we used Steve Trout and Samantha as an example of yay AI. There's been a couple of posts that have been making the rounds recently and that several of you had pointed out to us. That's kind of about like AI dread and fatalism. We're not going to really talk about them right this second, but I wanted to call them to your attention. Again, links in the show notes. We Mourn Our Craft by Nolan Lawson and The Tipping Point by Thomas Ricard. I probably pronounced that wrong. I'm sorry. But there's a couple of like more pessimistic takes on AI and what that means for the development and software engineering and so on, which I think are worth your time, whether or not you agree with them. I think it's interesting. And then some one or more anonymous people wrote in with regard to AI and productivity and the promise of, you know, all of these people will 10x their productivity versus, you know, scientific studies about it. So again, I'm just going to kind of hit the high level real fast. The scientific evidence doesn't actually back the idea that AI provides a huge productivity boost. A recent study from Anthropic found that for junior developers on a set task, the time taken to complete a task was not statistically significantly faster, just two minutes, than those who did not use AI tools. And their understanding of the output and ability to answer questions on it was actually much worse. I'll put a link in the show notes. Separately, a randomized controlled trial from mid-2025 found that experienced developers were slower with AI. Separately, a Microsoft study from 2024 found that for trivial tasks, the users were able to easily describe AI could save some time. But for complex tasks, it was of minimal benefit. So trivial tasks that you can describe to AI quickly, yeah, you save time. But anything kind of complex, not so great. Then a survey from Atlassian found that only 4% of companies are seeing return on investment on their integration of AI tools. Separately, a study from Berkeley at the California Review Management found that there is no statistically significant relationship between AI adoption and productivity gains. At Harvard Business Review, there's a study that describes how AI-generated slop is actually harming productivity even when it seems to be producing work. Think an increase in the number of PRs to an open source project in actuality just wastes the maintainer's time. Then finally, MIT's State of AI in Business finds that 95% of companies are seeing zero returns. cool cool cool cool cool cool cool john i am happy to go through these links that you compiled or would you prefer to how would you like you can it's just some more in the same vein i had some some of these links you just read i had also had in the notes ready to go but we got many of them sent by listeners as well this is all i think from one listener that we just read this list by the way all right and so some more from john ai generated code quality and the challenges we all face by mark levison there were findings for the key findings from five different studies AI-assisted poll requests have 1.7 times more issues than human-authored poll requests. Technical debt increases 30% to 41% after AI tool adoption. Cognitive complexity increases 39% in agent-assisted repos. Initial velocity gains disappear in the first few months. Change failure rate is up 30%, and incidence per poll request is up 23.5%. Then another article, Comprehension Debt, The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code by Armin Shakar. comprehension debt refers to the gap between the code generated by LLMs and a developer's understanding of that code. In this post, we will explore the implications of comprehension debt, its impact on software quality and maintainability, and strategies for mitigating its effects. And then finally from John, your brain on chat GPT, accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI system for essay writing tasks by Natalia Cosmina, Cosmina, Cosmina, or something like that, and others. Anyways, while LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neuro-linguistic and behavioral levels. These results raised concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscored the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning. Okay, fellas, thank you for being patient. What do you got? So that was a lot, and I think it was structured in this way. Steve Trouten-Smith, who's a frequent person cited on the show, is a very skilled, experienced developer on Apple platforms and just a very generally very good coder. So this is not a novice. He's using it. He's having great success. He's porting apps that he had tried to port himself, taken months and not done it, and then he's doing it in five minutes. So it's not like somebody who is, I wasn't able to do this thing before because I'm not a skilled coder, but now that I have AI, I can. This is a skilled, experienced coder who is fairly productive, does a lot of stuff, and is having great success. Then he has ideas for apps and whips them up in two seconds. He's impressed by it. And then we have all the people who are scared about it, and then we have, but how good actually is it? and these people studying it. Oh, so AI, everyone seems to love it and think it's great, but actually it's not helping productivity. It's hurting it, and all these studies finding that it's not giving a return on investment. What's the truth? How can we square this circle? And I think everything that we just read is the truth. The truth is that AI is massively overhyped. There's a lot of money behind it, forcing your employees to use it, which many companies have been doing, which blows my mind. By the way, when you have something that people like, You don't have to force them to do it. You know, forcing people to use it. It's like, even if you don't want to use AI, if you're programmed for this company, you're forced to use it because it's going to increase productivity and this, that, and the other thing. It doesn't surprise me that it's not having productivity gains. And I'm not saying AI is a fad, but it reminds me of a lot of the sort of business fads that go around for practices that are good, things that are actually good, but that become sort of trendy or popular or, like, mandatory to do, and then companies will just force like everybody to do them, even though they're good things like, you know, pick Agile, which we always make fun of, but all sorts of other sort of good programming practices that are actually good ideas and have longevity about, you know, ways to architect code or ways to organize people or whatever. Anytime there is any idea that it's actually good in the technology industry, it gets overused to the point where people hate it and it causes negative productivity because people feel like they have to use it. And AI is like that times a million. That's why you see AI in every single product in the world and every feature. And, you know, companies have entire releases where the only directive from the company is whatever you're doing in this company, I don't care. Next release, you've got to have AI something. Reportedly, Apple did that. Look at any product that you see. Still at all the time. So it doesn't shock me that people aren't seeing productivity games. It's not just because, oh, they're using it wrong. It's because it's not all things to all people. And especially when we go into the essay writing and stuff like that. As you start to stray more into, like, the other things that LLMs can do, it becomes a lot spotty. On the other hand, in the hands of a skilled developer doing specifically the few things that it's actually very good at, the value is tremendous. Like, Steve Trouton-Smith is just one person, so it's anecdated or whatever, but there's a reason lots of coders are out there saying this is really doing things for me faster, better than I was before. And as I said in the last episode, it really is a skill to learn how to use these things. So even Steve Trouton-Smith would admit that he's climbing that learning curve of how to actually use this tool productively. Again, my analogy last time was like Photoshop. It can massively increase your power as a graphics designer, but it's a lot to learn if you've never used a computer before back in the day. And this seems to be like that. And then finally, wrapping all this up, as I tried to emphasize last week and continues to be true. All right. Well, so does that mean once we just learn how to use AI, the things that it's good at in a good way, and we aren't all forced to use it and the hype, you know, the bubble bursts and the hype is gone and we figure out what is it actually good for and what is it not good for, everything will be fine. It will be smooth sailing. No, because there's still absolutely the unresolved issue of how is it that these tools came into being and how are the sources of the power that they have drive being compensated. I think, and maybe this is an unrealistically optimistic view, I think it is plausible to have an LLM that is as useful as the thing Steve Troutensmith is using to, you know, be more productive and get more stuff done that is entirely trained in an ethical way. In the same way that Adobe and Photoshop has that their models are trained entirely on licensed images. Like, so they paid for the images. They train them out on the images. They put that feature in Photoshop. I think that is a there's nothing wrong with that. You know, a lot of people who wrote in with AI feedback were like, I'm against AI in all forms because it's just 100 percent evil. I think even they would agree like, OK, well, what about the Adobe thing? That's fine, right? They would say, no, you're draining the deserts of all their water or whatever. It's like you're not. It's just not, you know, the energy usage of the AI feature in Photoshop is not significant in the grand scheme of human energy usage. And I think if they're telling the truth, which I believe they are, about only training their models on data that they owned or legally licensed, there you go. I think it's perfectly fine. And I think that is possible for coding agents. right now it's not happening because you know even if you have like an MIT licensed open source thing does the MIT license say anything about AI training I bet it doesn't because it didn't exist when the MIT license was written so even even the most permissive open source license probably doesn't explicitly allow AI training so it's an open question but you can imagine a future in which I know Stack Overflow is doing this and Stack Overflow is essentially licensing their data to AI people and I think people are grumpy about that but legally you know probably good ethically whatever. I mean, Stack Overflow is dead with AI. I know, but the only asset they have are all their questions that people train the models on, so they're selling access to those. Yeah, I'm saying let them do whatever they need to survive right now, because that's not a good place, that's not a good business to be in right now, because AI is completely replacing it. I know, but the AI coding agents could not exist at their current level without training on things like Stack Overflow, so get what beginning is good. But also for open source projects you can imagine a future in which licenses are made that say explicitly things about whether or not AI training is allowed and under what conditions And if that the case I can imagine a future Adobe coding agent that is entirely trained on licensed code that is you know licensed from SAC overflow licensed from open source that explicitly allows us in a license and I think what we've shown with current technology is coding agents can be useful productivity boost if you don't think that they are completely replacement for everything and everybody has to use them. It's, you know, like if you contain the hype and just look at what they're actually good at, that is possible. Now, I grant that's not happening now. Now, people are using these agents and they don't care where they came from. Just like we don't care where our food came from. We just eat it. If it tastes good, we're happy with it. And we don't care that what terrible things happen to get this food to our, you know, like it's human nature to say, Steve Trouton's meant to be excited by the fact that he made three apps in a day and did this porting thing that he could never do before despite months of trying, and he gets it done in an afternoon, as someone who's a technology enthusiast, you're going to be excited about that. But people have to be, you know, it's important to still remember that just because you're excited about it and it did a cool thing doesn't mean every issue involved in this technology has been resolved because you have the good thing that you want. But I'm still hopeful about it because I agree with the promise of it. I agree that it can do great things in the right hands in limited circumstances. And I think for coding specifically and not the entire universe of the rest of the things that people want AI to do, which is apparently mostly talking to it as a therapist, which is a whole other ball of wax. But anyway, for coding specifically, my personal experience has shown me that this is a powerful, useful tool that I wish I could access in a much more ethical and also, I would add, cost effective way. But even now, yeah, like it's that's the that's the challenge we face. And I think like I would try to give this kind of balanced picture of AI last time. But people tend to latch on to the part that they either do or don't want to hear about it. And the problem is it's a complicated topic. Like I don't agree with the people who say it's 100 percent evil and we should stop it in all forms and never pursue it in any way. I don't think that's the right thing to do. But I do agree with the people who say it's those problems and we should ignore those problems just because it's doing something useful for us. The truth is what we just read, that it is great at certain things, and there are a whole bunch of other problems that are unresolved, and it's currently a bubble, and it's being overhyped, and there's a lot of bad that's going to come from it. But, you know, it's a complex topic. I don't know. What do you guys think? I know we all got a lot of feedback about this. I only saw the feedback that, like, ATP got and I got, but did you specifically get any feedback you want to address? A little bit. So earlier today I got my keyster to properly start working on the iPad layout and CallSheet, which has been trash since CallSheet was around. And it's been too long. I should have already taken care of it, but I hadn't yet. And my first cut at this was, all right, let me use the 26.3 beta, and let me ask the Xcode agentic stuff via Claude. And I don't recall what model I was on, and I should have paid attention. I didn't think about it. But let me ask it to turn the cast and crew list in CallSheet, which right now on iPad is one column, which is awful. It looks terrible. It should at least be two columns. And I have some ideas for maybe something even more advanced than that. But my first cut was, hey, can you just make this two column? And it took a couple of back and forths between me and Xcode, I guess, or Claude, or I don't know how to describe this, how to verbalize this. But it took a couple of back and forths, and it got it to the point that visually it was exactly what I wanted. And that only took, I don't know, 10-ish minutes, something like that. It really was not long at all. But functionally, it was a mess. and the particulars don't matter, but suffice it to say, like it totally screwed up navigation. A lot of things were hosed and I've heard rumblings that these things don't do too well with SwiftUI and the theory is in part because SwiftUI is a moving target in part because it's so new. But one way or another, I can tell you that I was not exceedingly impressed by that experience. And additionally, shoot, now I'm drawing a blank as to what it was, but there's something else I had to do that was much less invasive. Golly, I'm just really going to drive me nuts because I can't remember what specifically it was. It was something in call sheet. And I wanted it to do something. And, oh, I think I needed it to pump or to pipe a date from, you know, like high up in the object graph to deep within the object graph. And the particulars are not that important, but I asked it to do that for me. And it did, but it did in a very clunky, very immature way. and as I dug into what it was doing and what it had done to figure out, okay, is this really what I would have done? Is this, was I saving myself rote work or was I, or am I punting on something that I should really have a think about? And it was quickly obvious to me that, no, I punted on something that I should have had a think about. And I could go back and forth and say, no, don't do it that way, do it this way. Or why did you choose that instead of this and blah, blah, blah. And I could have done that. And there have been instances in less complicated topics that that's worked out really, really well for me. But in this particular case, it didn't give me the results I wanted, and I ended up, for the piping through the object graph, I ended up doing that all by hand. And for the iPad stuff, I had to put it away because I had other stuff I needed to do. I think I'll probably take another stab at it probably tomorrow, but I get the vibe that I'm going to end up going back and just rolling all of this by hand. because for this particular use case, I'm not trying to extrapolate to everything under the sun, but for me in CallSheet, it's been okay. Like simple stuff it can handle really well, but anything even vaguely complicated, it's not great. And it's also the learning curve of using the tools, like I said. If you see the people who are more experienced at using these tools, it is actually a fairly complicated skill. And that kind of leads to like the, okay, but like is the time investment in building up that skill and the time required to essentially execute it. Like Steve Troutman, so it's posted. We don't have a link to it, but maybe we can find it for – if you follow the threads, you'll probably see. He posted, what did I have to say to AI to make one of these apps that he made? And it was 77 different prompts, and they were fairly complicated. And it's kind of like one of those things of, like I said, if you're, like, mentoring a new employee, it's faster if you just do it yourself. But, like, yeah, but I'm mentoring a new employee. Well, you're not mentoring an AI. They're not learning from what you're talking about. Like, in general, like, the model is the model until, like, you know, it's obviously you've got your context window, but that's basically it. so you have to think like do i want to spend the time mentoring a box of numbers that is going to be replaced by different boxes of numbers later um or do i just want to do it myself but still like the there are there are targeted instances when used by a skilled practitioner where it can do amazing things that we're not possibly for which is why people are excited for it and one thing i'll add to that by the way i still haven't let these things touch any of my apps code not because my apps code is beautiful or anything but just because i don't i don't know i just don't want to or i don't i don't think i need to at this point because i'm not doing anyway whatever but i did find something to do because I'm trying to use the last of my little $100 subscription, which I did cancel, by the way. Oh, good for you. Yeah. I was trying to use it. It's going to run out. It's going to expire soon. So I'm like, well, let me just use the last little bits of it. Here is one of the things that I would recommend. If you ever want to play with one of these things and you're like, well, I'm not going to learn how to be a Wrangler and use a coding agent to write my codes for me because it's complicated or whatever. But if you want to try something, one of my suggestions would be point it at your code base. You have to at least figure out how to give it stern instructions to not modify your code at all, but it's mostly good about that, but it helps to just maybe put in a quad.md or whatever your equivalent is and say, don't ever commit anything, don't ever modify any files, you have read-only, whatever. But just simply say this, find any bugs in this program. And it will find a bunch of crap that are not bugs, but it will find some actual bugs too, even if it's just a typo and a variable name, it will find them. Yeah, actually, I did that with quad code, not with the new beta. I did that like a week ago with quad code, And for the most part, it was nothing that was that super-duper important, but it definitely did find some stuff. And what I did, I think I might have said this already. Apologies if I'm repeating myself, but I just cloned the repo somewhere else. And so this way, yeah, it gave it its own little sandbox and let it run amok. And I can choose to push that, you know, to main, or I can choose to just leave it on my computer, no harm, no foul. Yeah, not asking it to fix the bugs. You're just saying find them. And like I said, it's going to find stuff that's not bugs because it's not that smart, right? but it will find legit bugs. And the thing is, you can keep asking it. Find any more bugs in this program. Find any more bugs. Find any performance issues. Find any concurrence issues. Find any memory safety issues. You phrase it 75 different ways. Just keep asking it questions and asking it to point you to things. And all it's going to say is, I think this thing over here is wrong. And it's going to be wrong a lot of the time. It's going to be pointing to things that are not bugs, which is annoying. Ask any open source maintainers getting bug reports from AI that are just not bug reports. But for your own code, I, as a programmer, value very highly the ability to find even one bug out of, like, ten things that it pointed out. Because, hey, that's one bug you didn't know about before. And when you fix it, it's gone. And when it can't find any more legitimate bugs, does that mean there's no more bugs in your program? Absolutely not. There's always more bugs in your program. Like, we're programmers. We know there's always more bugs. But this is one of the few tools I've ever seen, aside from, like, you know, linters and memory safety checkers and stuff like that. Like, all those things that are in Xcode can find, like, your Swift 6, you know, strict concurrency, finding places where there might be issues. This is like that, and I highly value tools like that. So I hope these tools find a way to continue to exist in some reasonable form so that they can be used even for that targeted purpose. Really quickly, I know we haven't given Marco a chance to talk, and I apologize, But as an example of something that worked out super duper well for me, I think at this point I was using ChatGPT. But for various uninteresting reasons, I was exposed to N8N, like the letter N, numeral 8, letter N, which is a workflow, like automation thing that you can self-host. And I wanted to have a notification in the morning that would tell me what lamps thing the kids were doing. That's library, art, music, sports, I guess. No, PE and something else. I forget. Basically, what special class we have each day. And this is actually a really complicated problem to solve because it's not exposed anywhere by the school system or anything like that. And so I built an N8N, mostly by asking ChatGPT to do stuff, a whole thing that will, like, go and figure out what is the calendar for the school district. Do they have school today? Is it a half day? Do they have a snow delay? Or are they out because of snow? And based on such and such a, like, reference date, count forward all the school days from that reference date to figure out, okay, this is day number three, which means Michaela has library and Declan has counseling. and then send me a push notification at 645 while we're sitting down to breakfast so I can ask them, are you excited for library and counseling and so on and so forth. This is dumb. This is very Casey. I get that. You don't need to make fun of me. I am well aware. Honestly, this sounds awesome. Right? I'm saying like, it's a stupid thing. It's a stupid thing because I could never frigging remember what their specials were each day. And it's driving me crazy. And so I built this thing, mostly with ChatGPT, that will help me do this and help me figure it out. And so I'm just sitting there at breakfast. And then bloop, my phone says, hey, guess what? Declan has counseling or whatever I just said, and Mikhail has library. It doesn't matter. You get the idea. And this is actually, again, very complicated because you're pulling in all these different pieces, and some of that is a testament to N8N, which is very cool and very weird but very cool. But a lot of this was me saying to ChatGPT, hey, I'm targeting N8N. Can you write me a bunch of JavaScript that I'll plug into a node in N8N that will do this thing? And I mostly told it like, you know, this is the step where I need you to parse out the school calendar and tell me, you know, whether or not today is a school day. Okay. And then the next note is, all right, given that today is a school day, count from this reference date and figure out how many school days there's been. I forget exactly how it works. We get the idea, right? So I'm breaking down the major problem into micro problems and having ChatGPT figured out. And it took some back and forth. But I'll be damned if it didn't work. And it is freaking cool. and it solves a problem for me. So in the one breath, I'll tell you, for Call Sheet, I've had not great luck for the most part. I had some good moments, but not great luck. But for this N8M stuff, it was freaking amazing. And so I don't even know what I think about it right now. Leaving aside the ethics, leaving aside the environmental impacts, just as like a tool, I definitely like it, but I'm not sure, I can't figure out how much of this is overblown and how much isn't. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Delete.me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data broker sites online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete.me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. So here's what these are. These are these sites that, like, when you search in a search engine for somebody's name, that's all the sites that tell you, like, get their address, get their phone number, all these sites that will basically sell people's information to anybody who comes by looking for it. There's hundreds of these sites out there, and they all have some kind of, like, offset or takedown procedure, but they're all different, and they make them kind of hard to find, and so you as an individual would never stand a chance at getting your stuff off of a meaningful number of these sites. And new ones, of course, are popping up all the time, so even if you somehow did all hundreds of them out there, you'd need to constantly monitor and keep doing it for new ones. So Delete.me is a service that does that for you. So they do all the hard work of figuring out all the data brokers that they can find out there, figuring out their opt-out and takedown procedures, and automating it for you. So that way, you can just sign up for Delete Me. You tell them what information you want to be removed, whether it's like your stuff, your family stuff, everything, and then they will go and automatically take it down from all the different data broker sites they know about. And as new sites come up, they'll take it down from them too. So you don't have to keep monitoring it. They do it all for you. They'll send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what they found and what they were able to take down. so it works for you constantly, monitoring and removing the personal info you don't want on these data brokers. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash ATP and enter code ATP at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash ATP, code ATP Thanks to Delete Me for sponsoring our show So I've said a lot and I apologize, Marco Please interrupt me, start talking so I don't keep talking for the next two hours You got it, you can always count on me So the way John let off earlier is correct This is all correct in some ways There was a great interview on Stratechery a few days back with Benedict Evans and Ben Thompson. And they were talking about basically will AI replace all of these SaaS product companies. And their argument and Benedict Evans' argument was no because what most apps really are, especially a lot of business apps, but what most apps really are, you think about what is something like Salesforce. So, you know, they're basically like databases with front ends. And, like, that's what almost, a huge amount of software is, like, a database with a front end. A huge amount of other software is basically a spreadsheet, but custom. And when spreadsheets and databases came out and were made available with the personal computer revolution, they were very disruptive to a lot of jobs that came before them. Ask accountants, or rather ask calculators, or computers, what were they actually called computers? The people who spreadsheets made their job a lot less necessary. But also we still have accountants, and we still have people doing a lot of these jobs, and we still have a lot of products that exist that are basically databases or customized spreadsheets despite everyone having access to database tools and spreadsheet tools. Their argument was basically like, you know, AI is going to be a component of lots of software, but it's not going to replace the need for software. And I think that's probably correct. It is a little bit different than those in, like, the breadth of the types of problems it covers and the nature with which it solves them, you know, being kind of non-deterministic is a little bit unusual in the computing world. Let's just say unreliable. And certainly, when you're looking at businesses using AI in business roles, one of the biggest challenges is this stuff is constantly changing. And so you can build a business process around calling the ChatGPT API or something. But next month, whatever you built will break because something will change. GPT 5.5 or 6.0 comes out, and all of a sudden the integration you built, it works differently, and now you have to rebuild it. and there's going to be a lot of that tumult for a while, for a long time. I think there will always be value in the market for customized software the same way there always has been value for it, even though people have spreadsheets and databases and they can build their own. However, one major difference with AI is we are making the construction of these things even easier than it was before. And I think to software developers, this is probably on the level of like the jump when we went from assembly code to compiled code and higher level languages that was a major jump in programmer productivity you can draw a lot of parallels to that it isn't a perfect analogy but you can draw a lot of parallels to that kind of jump with AI where I do think that the era of kind of hand customizing really nice code that you're making yourself is going to be you know commercially in the past Now, the same way, like, you know, if you are a custom furniture maker, there's still a market for custom furniture. And you can be a really good woodworker, and you can make really nice custom wood furniture for people. But most people's furniture is not custom made. Most people's furniture is, you know, large-scale made by machines and flat-packed into boxes at Ikea or whatever. That made it a lot more affordable for a lot of people, which is good. But if you were a furniture maker, it's like, well, hmm, the market just got a lot smaller once that once, you know, power tools and automation and factories started taking over that business. You know, the AI revolution here with code generation in particular is that kind of moment for custom software. Now, the good news is most software, most code that most people write is shuffling stuff around in a database or a spreadsheet or something similar. most code that most people write is really boring and really simple. And that is easy to automate, as we're finding. That is a major shift, but not unreasonable. And certainly the industry can survive that. It does change things. It's going to keep changing things. But most code that most people write in most apps most of the time is really boring, and that is now much easier to automate. the more difficult code is for a little while at least, I mean, maybe forever, but probably not forever, for a little while, more difficult code or more high-level problems will still be generally better done by humans. But that's probably not going to last that long. I mean, we've had these ad tools for basically zero time, and they're already really good. Where are they going to be in five years? We don't know if they're going to plateau like the other uses. I got some pushback last episode saying that like the chat interface had plateau, but it actually is a continue to advance. Not plateaued as in flatline, but the rate of advancement is much slower for those things than it is. Right. And so, like, I mean, what I'm saying about the coding thing is I haven't seen the rate of advancement slowing yet. Surely it will at some point because unless we have some other advance because these things don't scale forever. Right. But but, you know, the line is still going up. And as for your analogy with like assembly versus C and stuff, a couple of things on that. One, when we went from, like, assembly to, like, higher-level languages, that resulted in tremendously more programmers and tremendously more code because it became more accessible. Doing stuff in assembly is work that is only possible by a much smaller subset of people because it's so fiendishly difficult and unforgiving. There's a reason we made higher-level languages, and when we did, things became easier. Manual memory management is more difficult than not having to do manual memory management. In the days when we had to do manual memory management in C and you were allocating and freeing everything, there were fewer programmers. Let me jump in. Let me jump in right there. You're exactly right. But just in case you're not familiar, I forget that not everyone that listens to this program is a developer. So assembly language is, and John will correct my piss-poor analogy here, but my definition here, but assembly language is basically a hop, skip, and a jump from ones and zeros. Like, it is as close as you can get to actually telling the CPU, the processor, I would like you to add these two numbers and put the result in this piece of memory right here. Like, it's very low level. And you have to think about a bunch of junk that the three of us don't generally have to think about. And so that's what makes it, like, you have to be the right kind of weirdo to enjoy assembly development. It's difficult to do complicated things because you're thinking about so much stuff. And every time you can remove things that you have to worry about, But what has happened is not that, like, well, now, every programmer was an assembly programmer at one point. Like, that was, back in the day, there were no high-level languages. There was just assembly or even before that machine code where you're literally writing ones and zeros, which I have done and it's not fun. Probably had a piece of paper at that point or a punch card. Anyway, and it's like, oh, all these people are going to be out of business because now Pascal exists and you can write words and you're not writing assembly instructions and it's, like, portable across different architectures. And so your skills of knowing this particular CPU assembly code, that's worthless. You're out of a job. There's not going to be any more programmers. Just every time there has been an advancement in the art of programming, it has resulted in us having more programs and more programmers. And I don't think that will be any different with this new tool. We will have more programs and more programmers. It's just that what we call a programmer will be, you know, it's like, well, they're not a programmer. They're just prompting an AI. Well, they're not a programmer. They're just using C. It does all the stuff for you. You don't even have to know where the – they don't even know what the registers are. They don't even know what CPU they're running on. They don't even know who's allocating memory. Oh, a garbage collector is going to come clean up for you. That must be nice. That has always happened in every higher-level language. Now, obviously, this is different because those are all deterministic advances. This is non-deterministic. So I'm just saying this is an additional tool in our toolbox in the same way that having, like, I don't know, linters are a tool. Linters are not a thing that are 100% accurate and they cite things that aren't actually problems or whatever. but you just use them as a tool to try to make programming more accessible and let us do a better job. And as for your furniture analogy, which I think is a good one, but I would say that we have long since been in the age of manufactured furniture with four LLMs. Like, forget about LLMs. We went from the handcrafted furniture age into the mass-produced junkie furniture age probably in the 80s. You're talking about in code, just to be clear. If you've ever worked for a big company and seen the code behind your favorite product, It looks a hell of a lot more like something stapled together in a crappy factory than it does like a handcrafted, beautifully turned, solid wood thing made by artists and craftsmen. Like the only place that exists today, forget about AI. The only place that exists today before AI was in small teams in small startups. And even then, only if you're lucky. Any big program does not look like that. Like, maybe it started off as a beautiful hand-turned, you know, hand-assembled carved piece of furniture made by artisans, but it doesn't stay that way. And success makes it look a lot more like – it's like – imagine an IKEA sofa – not IKEA because I don't want to slam them. Imagine, like, some mass-produced sofa held together with staples, but it's the size of Manhattan. That's like the program – that's what's running Salesforce right now. And into that fray, you throw one more tool, which is this, you know, LLMs that can help you out with your coating process or whatever. And honestly, I don't think it changes the nature of the product. It is still a stapled together sofa the size of Manhattan. It's just that people aren't manually putting the staples in anymore. And who knows? Maybe if this stuff continues to advance, we'll be able to shake that down to something that looks closer to that hand assembled piece of furniture. But characterizing the pre-LLM age as we were all hand making these beautiful turned pieces of things on our lathes is not fair. Even my dinky little programs are not that, and they have like 30,000 lines of code. That's why we programmers out here are excited by this, because, again, if I can find a tool that will find me one additional bug that it couldn't find before, that tool has value to me. I think what we will see here is going to be very similar to those other advances. When those other advances came around, when we had higher-level languages, Well, you know, every time you had programmers, I've been one of them, you had programmers who have said, I'm going to keep doing it the old way, either because I like it better or because I think I can do a better job or there's some, you know, my code will perform better or, you know, whatever it is. And over time, all of those advantages for all of those steps, memory management, compiled optimizations or, you know, assembly optimizations, over time, all of those advantages have been erased by other benefits or by just the sheer performance of the higher level tools. Except perhaps that you liking it better because that's up to you. Yes, exactly. And so that's why I think handwriting all of your code without having AI generate any of it for you is going to be like having a woodworking hobby. Like, you can do it, and if you love coding, if you love the craft of it, if you love the process of it, you can still do that. But if you want to do this as a job, it's going to become increasingly difficult for you to be competitive and relevant in that world if you're not using these higher-level tools. That's been true with all those other advances, and that's going to be true here, too. The promise, though, here is that this is a bigger jump than any of those have been in certain ways. Not in every way, but in certain ways, it's a bigger jump. And so the real promise of AI is not that it's going to replace all of us, although I do have concerns about junior-level programmers coming up in the industry right now. I think that could be challenging for them, but we'll see. It'll shake out. We have some questions about that in a future episode, so we will talk about that. I know people have sent in a lot of stuff on that. Yeah, and we'll see how that shakes out. I mean, odds are they'll be just using these tools like everyone else. But anyway, what the value here is, is not that we can replace all of the code that we can and should write with AI. It's that we can replace a lot of it, and we can have it do a lot of things for us that don't require perfect behavior all the time, that don't require super high skill levels or super high complexity levels yet. We can have it do a ton of tasks that, right now, either burden us, things like writing tests. Maybe this will actually get me to write tests. Marco's going to bring out the tests. Some people like writing tests, you know. Some people like writing code. I love writing code. Anyway, so there's a lot of stuff that right now is a burden to us that AI will be able to take off of our hands. So that's a huge advance right there. And then secondly from that, which I was saying earlier about how, you know, as programmer productivity has increased, we've had the need for more programmers. The reason why that's happened is as making software has gotten cheaper, more people have employed it to solve problems that weren't worth doing when it was really expensive. But when it got dramatically cheaper, some of those problems became worth doing with software. In case you just did it with an N8N thing. It was not worth doing if you had to write all that code himself. Now that he has a tool that can help him, suddenly it becomes worth doing. 100%. And now you have a status board and a show bot. And the reason why is because now things that were never worth making before might be worth making. Many of them will be worth making. So first of all, that's great for basically every business and every hobbyist because we can just make stuff now. And as programmers, I don't know a single programmer who loves this craft, who doesn't have a bunch of ideas they're never going to get to. now you can get to a bunch of them. And that can be entire products. It can be little things that just help you. Or it can be, like, you know, the kind of side apps that help you do your other stuff. I know our friend underscore David Smith wrote about it recently on Mastodon, how he's made side apps to help his business, like admin control things. Like internal tools to test out ideas, just mini apps to try out ideas for things. Yeah, or just things to kind of help automate something that, like, no one else but you is going to need this, but you need it. You know, I have tools like that. I have, like, you know, like, shelf scripts I've written to do things. Like, I have so many little tools like that. And what AI can do is also make a lot of those things that just weren't worth making before, all of a sudden, worth making. And then finally, the major thing it can do, in addition to those other two major things, another major thing it can do is it can keep working when you're not. So you can have it, like what John was saying, Go find bugs in my app. You can have it do that every night while you're asleep or doing anything else. You can have it. You can assign it a task and be like, hey, go explore, you know, these different options for this problem I'm having or this idea I have. Go explore that, and then you can come back the next morning and see what it found and go through it. There's already people who are doing this with great success, playing with things like Cloud Code. Let me just give it some grunt work because it doesn't care that you're giving it grunt work. You can give it the same grunt work every single night. When it brings you six solutions in the morning, you can say, all six of those suck. Give me six more. And it's not going to get upset or quit because it's not a person. Think about what this opens up. You can have an assistant doing a bunch of grunt work that costs you almost nothing, and you don't have to worry about, like, are they miserable doing this because they're not a person. That's a huge opportunity for people like developers who are going to be able to harness this. Think of all the different grunt work you can do. And the biggest challenge to using these tools is not installing the software. It's not paying for the $20 or $100 a month. The biggest challenge for existing professionals in the field like us to use these tools is that we won't think of what to ask them to do. That's the hardest part. We need to think of things to try to assign them. Young people won't have this problem. As young people come into the industry, they're going to have grown up with these tools. They won't have the preconceived notions of where the walls are that we have. They'll just try a bunch of stuff, and a lot of it will work. That's the challenge for people like us, like us elder programmers. We need to jump into this world and start getting ideas for what to have them do. By the way, if you want something that can generate a bunch of ideas for you for free, LLMs are really good for that. So you can literally go to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, and you can say, give me 20 ideas for what I can have, Claude code or codex or whatever, what I can have it do in my existing code base or a new code base that I am not thinking of. You can literally have it tell you, because you know what AI is really good for? Brainstorming. Because AI is a BS generator, and that's what brainstorming is, is generating BS. so you can have it tell you how to use it. And you can then at that point say, eh, these don't sound very good. Give me 50 more. And it will happily give you 50 more. And you can keep doing that because it's not human. Like, that's the kind of enabling thoughts that we have to start training ourselves to have if we're not going to get marginalized over time. And again, like, it's hard for, like, you know, one of the posts that we mentioned earlier that kind of hit me hard was the morning of our craft. That like, yeah, it does kind of feel like our craft is kind of dead. And I do feel like I have built up all these skills that are rapidly becoming marginalized in large ways. I don't feel that at all. I don't know. We're not talking about that post, but I understand the sentiment where it's coming from. But like, if you've ever seen anyone use these tools to great effect, you need every single one of the skills that I've gained as a professional programmer for 25 years. Like, those were all absolutely, because if you think they're not, give one of these tools to someone who's not a programmer and have them build an app, and they can do it, but it's going to be bad because they don't know, like, the skills of the programmer are not knowing what words to type. Like, as you advance in your career and you learn multiple languages, you eventually learn that, yeah, it is valuable to be an expert in a particular language or know the details of any particular API, but the real skills of a programmer is not at the level of languages or APIs or whatever, the real skills of a programmer, at a much higher level of how to organize programs, how to address complexity, how to solve problems. And, yeah, the LMs can help a little bit with that, but humans are just so much farther ahead of them at this point. So I don't understand what they're saying. I mourn my crap out when I write all my code myself. I feel like the skills that I'm most proud of are not the skills that involve me typing particular API calls. I wanted to call back very quickly to something that Marco said a minute ago, which I think is important and I don't think I was explicit about and I would like to plus one what Marco said. That N8N thing that I was talking about, I could have done that. There is no freaking chance I would have wasted the time to do it. Even though it would have made me happy, even though it would have been useful, even though I'm more than capable of achieving it, it would have taken me hours. and I just, I don't think I would ever look at that task and be like, yes, this is worth hours of my time rather than doing actual work or things that are actually productive, you know, put the quotes, scare quotes wherever you want. There's no chance I would have done that and what I think is unquestionably incredibly powerful in freeing, for lack of a better word, about LLMs and the ability they have to write code specifically is that these sorts of things, those things like underscores doing, like you had said, and this neat end thing and the tier list thing. You absolutely could have written that tier list, John, as you have said previously, but would you have bothered? Eh, probably not. I mean, evidence was that I didn't, even though I disliked the other site. I just kept using the crappy one that was there just because it didn't take any time. Right. And so I think, and you guys have each said this in your own way, but I just really want to plus one it that that is what's so powerful to me about these LLMs and the agentic coding or vibe coding, whatever you want to call it, this week. I think that's incredibly powerful and incredibly freeing. And I don't think that's limited to professional software developers, but I think that we are, to your point a moment ago, perhaps uniquely good at leveraging them for these sorts of things. Well, I mean, we didn't address the entire world of things that LLMs can do, but we are in a position to understand, to correctly assess how valuable are these tools for doing programming tests. Like, that's why I decided to see Trouton Smith. Like, he's not a dummy. He's a good programmer. The more you know about programming, like, I feel like you can trust his opinion, this tool was useful for him. I don't know how useful it is for other people in other industries or whatever. I feel like there's lots of places that are super terrible and are not going to be helpful at all. But in this narrow, very narrow instance of using it in a particular way for particular things for our profession, we can say that it does useful things. Yeah. And, you know, Casey, you were just saying a minute ago, like, you know, whether it's called, you know, Vibe Coding or Agenda Coding. Well, in three months, it's just going to be called Coding. Yeah, true. This is just what coding is. I don't know if that's going to happen in three months. You're very optimistic that's pessimistic. And I feel like I'm the Momento Mori guy. If I'm remembering correctly, the person who would walk behind the emperor of Rome or whatever as he goes on his parade and everyone celebrates him and reminds him that he's mortal, that he's going to die. He's just behind them whispering that thing. I feel like I'm the same way, as Marco said. Here's the only problems. The only problems we have with AI are figuring out what to ask it and all these other things. Young people who get around it. I didn't say that was the only problem with AI, to be clear. Well, the problems that we were going to have with it, but I just wanted to remind everybody. I mean, I feel like we're still even in the Uber phase of this, where Uber had this amazing service where you could get a car to come to you, and they were just running at a loss for years and years until they could drive all the taxi companies out of business. But actually, the money we were paying for an Uber ride was not paying for enough to cover the costs of the company and the drivers. You remember all those years, right? And start coming out of those years. Like, now that we've killed the taxi companies, we can start turning up the price. the prices we're currently paying for this are not covering the costs of the services we are receiving. Now, in theory, unlike the Uber drivers, which are kind of intractable, there's humans, there's cars, and well, setting aside self-driving, in theory, the cost curve on inference and training will go down or whatever. We'll see how that goes. So it's technology, they're trying to drive the cost down, yada, yada. But then, of course, there's the whole ethical, legal, and moral problem, which is how do these things come into being by, you know, consuming all this content without permission? And where do the benefits of that go? Oh, they go directly to open AI and not to all the people from whom they took the content. You know well how are all the lawsuits from the New York Times and Disney and Paramount and like we don know how that going to go Like it very easy to get caught up into the amazing thing these tools can do for you and forget about Is this sustainable? Is this affordable? Is this ethical? Will this create a world in which the things required to train these models are no longer being produced? And it's like a death spiral of disincentivization where everyone just wants to use the models, but there's nothing for the models to train on except for the stuff that the models put out, and it just gets worse and worse. We don't know. That is still unsolved. Despite all these things, but the whole point of this whole big thing, we keep going around in circles. I know people hear this, and they hear Marco talking. They're like, Marco thinks there's no problems, and everyone should love AI, and it's going to doom us all. And they're like, it's all of this. It's all the good things, and it's all the bad things. It's a complicated issue. It's not simple. I personally think it's not as simple as no one should ever use AI, and it's not good for anything. I don't think it's that simple. and it's also not as simple as this is the future, we're all going to be doing this surrender and you'll be happy I don't think it's that either it's somewhere in between those extremes and everyone can decide where they think it is but I think we should all be working to try to figure out that's why I'm racking my brain thinking, is it possible these tools are useful, I want to use them but is it possible to get a tool like this where it doesn't destroy the world of open source software is there a way to Like, can we actually, you know, licensing the Stack Overflow stuff? Legally, probably fine. Ethically, maybe the people who contributed who never foresaw this, and so it's not great. But, like, going forward, open source, can we change the licenses so that people can decide if they want to allow their open source stuff to be used for training? If they did that, it would make for a model that I think more people would feel comfortable using. Or on the macro side of things is, well, nobody cares about how ethical things are. We all buy shoes made by children in third world countries and nobody thinks about it. And I think some people do think about it. And I don't want to reproduce that in another industry. So it's a complicated issue. In summary, AI is a line of contrast. Well, and again, like a lot of those are very valid concerns and questions. My position is simply that, you know, A, there's huge utility to be had. So we can't just write it off. And B, you're not putting the genie back in the bottle. So one thing that I was concerned about was as I was thinking about using these tools myself, I thought, well, I'm not going to let it near Overcast Code because, among other things, Overcast Code contains pretty sophisticated audio processing algorithms that I've written that took me a year to develop. and I put a lot of work into all the voice boost and smart speed algorithms and everything to make mine work really well and sound really good and be very sophisticated technically. And I thought, I don't want any of these apps to find that and send it to their servers. And no matter what I say, what if they're going to train on that? And then anybody else can make... They absolutely are. And so here's the thing, though. So I thought of that, and I had that concern. I'm not going to let this near my code. But then I realized, like, it's going to be, you can probably already today go to any of these agents or go to any chatbot and say, generate me some Swift code to do, you know, this kind of processing on audio and make it sound really good, and what else should I be looking at? What other algorithms or what other techniques should I be using to achieve these things to make them sound good? And it will generate it for you. I know this because I have done that with other types of algorithms. I have asked ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to generate me code to do some kind of relatively, I even asked it, like, here's the kind of problem I'm trying to solve. What algorithm should I be looking at? And it'll give me a nice overview of six different algorithms to solve this problem, what the tradeoffs of each ones are, what the performance is, and then I'll say, do you want me to generate this for you in Swift? I'll say, yeah, sure, and then it generates it for me in Swift, and I think there's no way this is going to work, and I try and it works. already the value of like proprietary custom techniques and tricks that you do is plummeting i should be really upset about that and on some level that is kind of a shame but also on another level this other problem i was trying to solve i just got the answer and i have to move on that's incredibly powerful that there's all these different algorithms that like you know problems that problems that i'm trying to solve i could have figured out the algorithm to do it the sophisticated way, it would have taken me a day or more, and I might have gotten the algorithm wrong, and I might have had weird bugs as a result, or I might do something in a relatively straightforward, naive approach that might have a really efficient algorithm that I'm not going to ever think of or know about, but the AI knows about it. So the AI code is not only giving me the potential to make faster performing code by giving more sophisticated algorithms that cover more things with fewer bugs, but also it's allowing me to make things faster because I'm not having to implement all of these tricky lines of code myself. I can actually have it generate the really complex, hairy parts of these kinds of things, and then I can move on and I can work on higher value tasks. And so it's taking over some of those really tricky things. It's taking over some of the low-end stuff and some of the shuffling around data code. It's a huge win for programmers. We will be, like, The people who stand to win the most from using these tools are, as John was saying, experienced, good programmers. We stand to win the most here. It's a huge value creator for us. So ideally, once you are done mourning, and I think that's a process that we're all going through, once you're done mourning, jump in. I'm not mourning. I'm mourning, but I'm also going to jump in. I just simply don't believe the argument in that article. I don't think there's really that much to mourn. Anyway, it's time for my momentum or thing you were mentioning, considering whether you should allow this thing to look at your request code and deciding eventually you should just do so. It's nice that you got to make that decision and didn't just take the code without your knowledge or consent, which is the situation for every other piece of code that's in that model, probably. You are correct, and also it's irrelevant. I think it's entirely relevant, but when people only hear Marco's opinion on the show apparently and everything I say doesn't count but anyway John, I love you for you that could not be further from the truth. Have you ever read the email? I swear to you if you listen to the feedback from last episode everyone was yelling at me about things Marco said. We are three different people. I have a different position on this stuff but it is a complicated issue like I'm saying there's no one simple answer like if I'm not saying that I don't discount that person's morning articles. That's how a lot of people are really feeling like but the main point I want to get across with all this back and forth, is that it actually is complicated and not simply black and white. And every time I see someone extreme in either position, it just makes me think that they're not interested. They don't know enough about the topic because it actually is fairly complicated. And it's something that we're all going to have to grapple with. And this is just a narrow realm of programming, which is a tiny corner of the world of things that people are using ChatGPT for. So, yeah, we've got a challenge ahead of us. Hopefully it's not like nuclear weapons, but, you know, maybe it's like the version of that that does not destroy the entire planet. Now, one final note on the AI stuff, and I know this has been going long, and I'm sorry, but you also wanted to call out that AI hardware use and the fact that it's slurping up, like these LLM vendors are slurping up all the hardware in the world, has had some real-world implications so far in a lot of different ways, but perhaps most recently, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are delayed because of AI-driven RAM and storage shortages and price increases. From Valve, when we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. Limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean that we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing, especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame. This is part of the reason people hate AI, because they're like, the thing I wanted isn't going to get here because AI is stealing all the chips to tell people, to have a little Elizabot tell people about their feelings, which is apparently what the vast majority of the millions and millions of people who use AI every day are doing with it. And lots of people think that is both not a good idea and bad for people and a waste of electricity and time and resources, and now I can't get my steam machine. So, again, anti-AI sentiment. Like, I get where it comes from. Like, it's not, you know, it's not frivolous. They're not against AI because they're just mean and someone is paying them to be against AI. There's a lot of things, you know, not in AI's favor, especially since it's like, you know, huge amounts of VC and all the benefits going to be small number of companies. And they're doing things in an unsustainable way. And when this bubble pops, it's going to destroy all our retirement accounts and all that terrible stuff. And yet none of that negates the fact that it actually can do some useful things in the tiny subset of stuff. And I think we as a people should find a way to extract the good while avoiding as much of the bad as we can. We are sponsored this week by Quince. A well-built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. And that's what Quince does best. Premium materials, thoughtful design, and everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on, even as the weather shifts. Quince has the everyday essentials that you'll love and with quality that lasts. There are organic cotton sweaters, polos for every occasion. You know I love a good polo. Lighter jackets that keep you warm in the changing season. The list goes on. Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middle people. So you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season. Plus, and this is my favorite part, they only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. So recently, Quince sent me a couple of pieces. They sent, actually for Michaela, they sent an organic cotton long sleeve fit and flare pocket dress, which has not only a couple of pockets, but it also has these adorable little like two-tone hearts all over it. Michaela genuinely loves this dress. And then for me, they sent comfort stretch traveler five pocket pants slim cut. And I love these things by genuine sheer coincidence. I was wearing them earlier today because we'll probably talk about it on the show, but I needed to look a little fancier for something. and I wanted to have something that you could dress up. And these pants very much look dressy but feel casual, if that makes sense, which is a compliment, let me assure you. They're a little bit stretchy and they fit really nicely and I feel like I look good in them and that's probably the best thing of all, right? Because if you feel like you look good, then other people will probably think that too. So what are you going to do? You're going to refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Quince is now available in Canada as well. That's quince.com. Free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com. Thank you to Quince for sponsoring the show. We've known for a while that Ferrari is going to be making an EV. I don't think we knew that the interior was going to be designed by Love From, which you know. We did know that, and we knew it in one of the dumbest ways, which I think we commented on this show. Like, months ago, someone was doing, like, some Johnny Ive interview, and they mentioned in an offhanded manner that Johnny Ive was working on a Ferrari steering wheel. And I think it was, like, a New Yorker story. I remember commenting on the show, like, the fact that that's in this article, what are they talking about? Because the Ferrari steering wheels of the time sucked. So I'm like, that surely can't be a Johnny Ive thing. But did he just out Johnny Ive and the fact they're working with Ferrari? Or have they already worked with Ferrari? And I just forgot about it until this came back. I'm like, oh, this is the thing that guy spoiled like a year and a half ago. Good job, dude. So this is the Ferrari Luce, I would assume. You got it. Okay, good. I'm one for a million. But anyway, this is their first EV. And I guess a couple of months back or something like that, they announced a lot of the tech behind it. They show up like the whole chassis with nothing, just like the chassis, the motors, the battery, but no other part of the car. So now in last week, we've seen a lot of the cabin, not a full cabin, mind you, but a lot of like the full cabin. Why would they do that? Right. But we've seen the interfaces, the steering wheel, the center display. Next month, we're going to see a headlight. Right. Wait, you might be serious. Are you serious? No, I'm not. OK, the way they've been rolling this. You can read that. Read the little blurb from the verge. It summarizes it well. All right, so reading from The Verge, Ferrari released the first interior images of the company's first all-electric supercar called the Ferrari Luce, which is light in Italian. This is the second time the Italian automaker has teased the Luce, which was formerly the Electrica, I hope I got that right, without showing us the actual car or even a silhouette, but the interior images should suffice given the bold-faced name of the designer, Johnny Ive. Ferrari decided to outsource the work of designing Luce's interior to Ive and his partner Mark Newsom, who together run the design shop Lovefront. Ferrari and Lovefram have been quietly collaborating for five years, and Luce is the first time we're seeing the results. The tech underpinnings were revealed last year in Italy. The exterior will debut in May of 2026. Well, there's a timeline for you. We'll eventually see the car, but this is the weirdest car rollout I've ever seen. They're going to show us the chassis, then pieces of the interior, and then in 2026 we'll show you the car. Right. So I would like to just state right up front, And I watched a fascinating video by Jordan Golson from PRDNDL, which is, you know, park reverse, a neutral drive, low. Anyways, I'd not heard of that publication before, but this dude was really good and did like a 20-minute video walking through all different pieces, which they did in the, what is it, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco, somewhere in San Francisco. Yeah, this was basically like the reason you're seeing this. There's a web page of Ferrari, but also Love From did basically press. Like they invited press to come into this room where they show all the things. It's very much like an Apple press event where everything's set up on little tables and stuff, and you have to talk to the creators. It's a very Apple-style press event. Right, and so Jordan has a video, which I definitely recommend, also a blog post if you prefer that. Ferrari's website actually is really, really good, and I really enjoyed looking through that. It had a bunch of photos and whatnot. I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm so sorry, John. I really like it. I think it looks really good. you're apologizing to me but like like here the second i saw this i i knew exactly what i thought of it but i'm like well hold off maybe you just have it and then i watched all the videos and all the things or whatever and just my opinion got stronger and stronger and it's it's founded in uh remember we talked about carplay ultra whatever it's called the i think all yeah i think it was just carplay ultra we talked about it a lot and trying to figure out what's the deal with this where apple takes over all the screens in your car and you have to collaborate with the car vendor and they have a way to customize it or whatever. I'm like, how is this going to work? And do car vendors want their car? Like, how are they going to make it look like Aston Martin or, like, whatever company and stuff? And the pitch directly from Apple's mouth of what is the deal with CarPlay Ultra is, we have this product, and if you use this product, the whole idea is we will make something that is a blend of your brand and Apple's brand. So 50-50, I guess, maybe Apple would think, or 51-49 or whatever, but, like, that's the pitch. The inside of your car with Carprey Ultra will be half you and half Apple. It'll be our child together. We'll mix our genetic material. Right? This Ferrari interior made by Love From is half Ferrari and half Love From. And I think that's wrong. I think the Ferrari interior should be 100% Ferrari. and that a designer should say, we will find a way to make the most Ferrari interior you have ever seen. But when I look at this, I say, this is not a 100% Ferrari interior. This is a 50% Love From interior and a 50% Ferrari interior. And that's not the approach I think that you should take with this interior. And worse, Love From is very different from Ferrari in terms of what are the adjectives that you would use to describe that. Like, it's not harmonious. This does not look like a Ferrari interior. This looks like an Apple car interior that Ferrari drove by and splashed a bunch of paint over to make it look kind of, and some logos to make it look like Ferrari. And I find that fairly heartbreaking. But I will say, though, the chassis and everything, you can see this is a four-seat car, so let's be honest. It's probably just going to be some stupid Ferrari SUV that I won't care about. but yeah probably but you know like it's i it's it's heartbreaking to me because there's a lot of beautiful design in this and a lot of beautiful work that is like you look at it if you're if you're just familiar with johnny ive uh you know like they have so many apple designers there you look at this and you're like yep nope they did that's the thing that's what johnny ive does there's rounded rectangles beautifully machined parts there's aluminum there's glass there's clever ideas there's attention to detail there's there's all that stuff it's too damn bad it doesn't look like a Ferrari interior. I get that. I really do. And I think part of the reason I don't mind that is because I don't have the unabashed love for Ferrari that you do. Not to say that I dislike Ferraris. I mean, and to be clear, recent Ferrari interiors have been terrible, but they've been terrible in a Ferrari way. Well, I mean, to me, it's kind of like if this were a Lamborghini, which I think trades on the fact that it's weird and loud and obnoxious. No, that's the perfect example I was going to do. Lamborghini. Give me some adjectives to describe a Lamborghini, interior or exterior. Loud, obnoxious, angular, you know. Angry, dangerous. Yep, yep. Evil. Maybe. That's Lamborghini's styling and brand. Inside of Lamborghini's look like the inside of a freaking Transformer from the Michael Bay Transformer movies. The outside looks like them too, right? That, for you, like it or hate it, that's the Countach, for crying out loud. That's the brand. Can you imagine, and Ferrari is not that exact same thing, but, like, this interior has no danger, has no menace, has no sexiness to it, no sensual Italian sexiness. Like, it's a Ferrari. This looks like an inside of an electric Fiat with Ferrari logos on it. I'm sorry. I think the reality is between you and me. I think you're not giving it enough credit, but I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis. it definitely does not have that what is it show out of eve i don't speak right but it's a love child of love from and ferrari but yeah love from jeans domicile it does but i gotta tell you i really think they did a good job with it it let's leave aside the fact that it's a ferrari if if you can divorce yourself of that piece of knowledge i think it's really well done so the way this works is there's a screen behind the steering wheel which they're calling the binnacle i presume that's a common term. I've not heard it in this context before. I just blame Love From for coming up with these terms. Oh, sure. Binacle is not a Love From term. It's in the car industry. So the Binacle has three gauges which are, they're screen, the gauges are screens, but they might that, I don't know if this one does or not, but there's other gauges that have physical, real-life hands. The center dial has a physical hand. There you go. Yeah, yeah, and then around the three gauges is a screen, but it's all really well integrated. But the point is there's a mixture, at least some modicum of physicality to it. And then the steering wheel has the flattened bottom, which is John's favorite thing in the world. There are no stalks. The turn signals are, it's a T steering wheel or a three-spoke wheel. The turn signals are inside the spokes that go laterally. Then below those spokes, there's a couple of control pods, if you will. And then on the center, they have basically an iPad, which I don't love that. With very rounded corners. Yes, very rounded corners. I do love that they have a little bar in front of it that you can use as a wrist rest as you're operating the screen. I don't know how I feel about the fact that you can tilt the screen toward or away from the driver. Like, I get the idea here, but I don't know if I like it. But in the corner of the screen is a dial, a rounded dial that is separate from the rest of the screen, inset within the screen, and it has physical hands on it. And by default, it can show, I think it's like a stopwatch and there's a couple of buttons on the outside of the screen, physical buttons on the outside of the screen to like start and lap, you know, hit the start, stop and lap buttons if it's a stopwatch. Or it can be a clock. And because what's behind these physical hands is another screen. The HVAC controls are on the center screen, but there are a fair amount of physical controls. The center console is where the gear shift is, which is very interestingly done, and I think the windows might be there or something like that. That's where you insert the key if you so choose. I really think, leaving aside the fact that I don't really think you're wrong, John, that this doesn't exactly scream Ferrari to me, I do think this is really well thought out and looks really, really cool. Yeah, well, I mean, it looks like, I mean, I don't care about Ferrari the way John does, but like, this looks very much like a designer who idolized Dieter Rams made a car interior. Yeah, very much so. You know, Dieter Rams was a really, is a really famous designer for good reason. He's an amazing designer. Like, all those classic mid-century Braun products, like, that's that level of design. Like, it's a really great style. It has evolved over time to represent, like, and Johnny Ive, you know, Johnny Ive's a very good designer. But you can see his influences. Like, with the Apple Watch, he borrowed a lot from his Patek Philippe Nautilus. With many Apple products, he borrows a lot from Braun and from Dieter Rams. Like, because it is a really good style. This looks like that. if the logo on the steering wheel was not the Ferrari logo. Just put an Apple logo there. It could be, well, there's too many buttons for it to be Apple. But it could be any other car brand. Like, you know, maybe some modern brand nobody has that much of an opinion about, like Polestar. Like, that could be a Polestar logo, and everybody would be like, okay. No matter what logo you put there, I would have been able to tell you, do you think people who made this are, you know, like Apple's design? I'd be like, yeah, these people obviously love everything Apple is doing. Would it surprise you to learn that it was actually Apple people? No, it would not surprise me. Well, but, I mean, honestly, I think the more Apple-like design is like what Tesla and Rivian do, where they try to minimize physical controls and have everything on a small number of screens. I don't think so. I think a photograph of this interior screams Apple to me more than any Tesla interior. I mean, you can certainly see the resemblance, but you can also see, like, okay, there's a lot of physical controls. They're done. They look beautiful. But they also, the energy, the style, the kind of sex appeal of a high-end sports car, that's not this. This is nice German design done well by Johnny Ive. That's what that looks like. It does not look like Italian sports car. So I agree, John. Even though I don't care about Ferrari and Lamborghini. And even though there are so many references to old Ferraris, like, that's the thing about this. Like, it's like, how can you say it doesn't look like a Ferrari? Like, that steering wheel is directly ripped out of an old Ferrari, and those air vents, and this and that. And, like, Ferrari's current styling, forget about the interiors, Ferrari's current styling trend is a similar example in that they reference their old stuff like crazy. And it's like, how can you say this doesn't look like a Ferrari? Let me show you all the elements that reference old classic Ferraris. It's like, yeah, but, like, the whole thing cohesively has to say to me Ferrari. And I think the X-Series still kind of say Ferrari, even though I think they're ugly. They're going through an ugly phase. It's difficult to fail all of us. But they don't look. The outside of their cars would never be mistaken for a Fiat. Let's put it that way. Like, you can't just take out the Ferrari badge on the outside of, like, the new Tessa Rosa and put on a, you know, like a badge from BMW. Like, no one would believe it. Like, it's clearly, it's, I'm not sure people identify as Ferrari, but there's no way in hell they'd think it was a Volkswagen or something. Like, it's something. Whereas this interior is just, it's a Johnny F special. Like, and getting to the specifics of this, by the way, like setting aside, oh, you're upset, doesn't look like Ferrari or whatever. Just in the specifics, there's a couple of areas where they did well and areas where they didn't. Casey already mentioned the physical controls. Ferrari itself did capacitive controls on its steering wheels for way too long. Everybody hated it. It takes them so long to change it. They're like, this year we're getting rid of physical controls in the steering wheel. And they got rid of the physical start button, but they left other capacitive controls. It's like, no, for right, please. Just everything physical. So finally, in 2026, they'll roll out a car, which reverts to their previous thing, which is like, let me give me actual buttons on the steering wheel. So that's good. I applaud them for that. The clever thing with the dials and the screens, lots of other people have done similar things. This is obviously the much more expensive, much nicer looking Johnny I version of that idea. But it's not a bad idea. I don't, you know, I don't fault them for that at all. It's interesting and it's fun. Casey you talked about the iPad in the middle and I'm with you that I think this shows a decided lack of imagination like oh everything Johnny I was just so obsessed with freaking rounded rectangles and simplicity but like slapping an iPad on the dashboard is surrendering it's like no I'm not surrendering look at all the physical controls look at the handle look at the wrist rest it's like okay but you put an iPad on the dashboard and you know you like it's not like he's not the first person to put physical controls on the bottom of an iPad like Ford has done it for crying out loud Like lots of manufacturers said, oh, it's an iPad, but there's a physical dial on it. It's an iPad, but there's physical buttons along the bottom. Is that the peak? Is that, you know, that's the best IOD we have to come up with? I know it's a difficult problem, but like the ergonomics of a cockpit, I refuse to believe that an iPad with some physical buttons on it that you can tilt is the correct solution to that problem. Like I do feel like the cockpit, like look, you're stationary. You're in a seat. You're not going anywhere. it should be possible to make a layout of controls that accommodates a lot of people that you can get at too easily that is not as weird as this. And the tilting thing that you mentioned, Casey, one of the problems with tilting is now it becomes, unless you never move it, unless it never moves on its own, which I would wonder about, now you have a slightly more difficult time no-look reaching for the fan up speed or whatever because you have to know which position you last tilted the thing in. Yeah, and those tilt things, if the Johnny I have a iMac monitor arm thing is any indication, they might get loose over time, so it's very difficult to pull that off. And then go down to the center console. Their idea for the center console, you'll never guess. Let's make it out of a bunch of rounded rectangles. Oh, my God. It's rounded, like the binnacle. That being a rounded rectangle is probably the biggest sin because it's like, for crying out loud, like a Ferrari would never have a rectilinear rounded rectangle poking up. Like it does not look sleek or cool or aggressive in any way. You're selling me on this. Especially if they don't do anything with those corners. They're just there so it can be a rounded rectangle. Like even BMW, which does a bunch of rectangles across the dashboard, at least they have sharp corners that look Germanic. This does not look Italian. But then the center console, a bunch of rounded rectangles stacked on top of each other, and Johnny Ives' best idea for the center console thing is he doesn't like it when there's a big door that you have to open up. So I'm going to make two other doors. Guess what, Johnny? A million people have tackled this problem before. You can have them open from the side entirely in both directions. There's lots of different ways to do this, but the way he chose was that you can open half of each of the sides of the rounded rectangle, but then when both sides are open, there's just this spine down the middle, which makes it so you have to shove your hand down. You can never get it fully open. And there's always, it's always, the middle of it is always blocked by that thing. The shifter arrangement's like, oh, we made it of glass and it's a little thing. I feel like Ferrari already had kind of a good idea with its gated shifter, like play on the gated shifter. But that doesn't really matter that much, I guess. But like, you know, the center console certainly doesn't look like a Ferrari. And ergonomically, it's nothing special. The cup holders poking out there all the time. Yeah, they're beautiful aluminum cup holders, but like they're always in your face. There's a reason a lot of cars have them tuck away, especially sports cars. I just like how much space you get for how much space it takes up. the way the rear controls look. I'm just not impressed from a car design perspective. The only thing that's impressive about it is that it looks like a Johnny, a beautiful Apple type interior and everything is extremely expensive, made of beautiful materials. I'm sure it feels great to you. Like all of that. But this is going to be like a, you know, $300,000 car or something. So I'm sure keep going. Well, maybe 500. But anyway, I'm sure, I'm sure like, yeah, the materials better feel good. And it's fun to do this as an exercise. And the people who made it should be proud of the beautiful thing that they've made. But I don't even think it's that great of a car interior in terms of ergonomics. I feel like the people who design, like, the interior of, like, the Toyota Sienna or the Honda Odyssey, like, those are the best designers in the industry because they find a way to have, like, insane amounts of storage space and adjustability and cubbies for everything and things that make kids happy in the back seats and everything. That is a harder design problem, better solved than this. Granted, that's just a bunch of cheap plastics and things that are going to be durable to spills and stuff, and it doesn't look as beautiful as this. but I feel like being a designer is not just like making something that satisfies the itch that you have in your brain, which is essentially when you're Johnny Ivan stage in his career can afford to do that. So good for him. But like, there's more to design than making a, an item that you go to sleep with a smile on your face, knowing that you made it that exists in the world. It has to solve problems for users. And I don't think this is a bad interior, but I don't think it solves problems for users in a better way. Like if it's not the best in every area, than any other control. I can think of any other interior. I can think of other cars that are better of it in lots of areas. Setting aside the fashion, setting aside the Ferrari-ness, just judging it as an ergonomic car interior. It does a lot of things right, but it does a lot of things in a very uninteresting way. And one of the things I thought about this is if you're interested in this type of thing, like I love how everything is beautiful and machined and like little jewels and stuff like that, I have another multimillion-dollar car you might be interested in. I'll put a link in the show notes to Gordon Murray talking about his selection of knobs and switch gear for his ridiculously expensive cars that he makes, plus some more videos you can see on his channel about it. We'll have a timestamp link to him talking about his knobs and his shift lever and stuff. It's totally up Johnny Izzalli. It's like, oh, we spent this amount of money on this thing because it just had to be just right, and we kept going back and forth until the switches felt just so or whatever. If you have a multibillion-dollar car, by all means do that. But here's the thing about Gordon Murray's car. Go look at the videos on the channel and the tours of it. it looks like a Gordon Murray automotive car. It looks like there's no mistaking it for any other brand. It has him and his, like his design ethos is through the entire thing and compare the interior of that car to the interior of this car. Like one of them screams Gordon Murray automotive. And maybe you don't know what that brand is or like, like it is very cohesive. And this one, it seems, I mean, it's kind of interesting that they showed us the interior, not inside a car. because it really does look like an interior floating around in space waiting to be put into the Apple car or something. You're not wrong. But it isn't even really Apple. Like, again, like, yeah, I think Dieter Ram's obviously a huge influence. I think also one thing I didn't think of earlier was Leica cameras. Like, this looks a lot like Leica style. Although I will say with the influences, which you're totally right about, like everyone who works there, like, love Leica cameras, loves Dieter Ram. But here's the thing. At this point in time and in all their careers, Johnny Ive, Mark Newsome, all those people from Apple, their footprint on history in terms of design is bigger than all of their influences, which is very often the case. Those influences are important to them, but the imprint they have put on the world with like the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone, iOS, like that footprint in terms of design influence is bigger than all of their past influences. So at this point, yes, we see all their influence, but at this point they are not referencing themselves, but they are essentially setting a template for all the designers in the future who are going to be like, we're going to look at them and say, oh, that reminds me of Johnny Ives design. And it's like, well, you know, Johnny I was really inspired by Dieter Rams and Leica Camden. It's like, who? Like, it's almost absurd to even talk about their influence at this point because their particular personal tastes and little brain itches are the only things that matter because they have so much money and power. It boggles my mind that Ferrari even let them do this to their cars because they said, we're going to contract the best designers in the world. And then it's almost like they were intimidated and didn't feel like they could push back and say, you're going to put a rounded rectangle behind this steering wheel and then an iPad on the dashboard and it looks like a Fiat. Like, shh, it's Johnny Ive. We paid him how many billions of dollars for this? Look at the books he gave us. He gave us a stack of books. They're beautifully bound. We have to do what he says. I'm like, oh, for all you don't. Yeah, I will say, though, one of the things that I thought was really interesting, which I don't recall having seen before, is the rear control panel. So on the back of the center console, There's a screen that kind of mimics the control panel, which they call the iPad. Or, sorry, the iPad that they control. We call the iPad. Yeah, exactly, the control panel. But it has on there, like, your current speed, how much power the car is generating, a graph of, like, recent power and recent speed, which I thought was kind of neat. You can see that because they're using Celsius, there's decimals, like animals. Oh, okay. But anyways, no, this does look incredible, but you've convinced me that this should not be in a Ferrari, and I take back everything I've said. The other thing, by the way, the toggle switches, which is a great idea, but they didn't go full physical because they're basically like, it's like those dials that turn forever, you know, as opposed to a dial that has stops on it. These are toggle switches where you can press up and press down, but essentially like a D-pad where you're going up, up, down, down. There's no physical persistence of the switches, which is not great because, for example, every time I do this now, I think of this because of all the rants I've had in this program. When I'm driving around in the winter, a couple of my cars have seat heaters in them, and I can turn the seat teachers on, turn them on high, low, or off for me and the passenger, and I can also tell whether they're currently high, low, or off for me and the passenger without looking at them at all because they are physical, stateful switches that rock. I don't have to, I know where they are, they never move, and I can tell what position they're in by feeling them through my winter gloves, feeling what position they're already in without ever putting my eyes anywhere. You cannot do that with any of these controls. So that's one thing because they're just, you know, D-pad type things. And the second thing is they're machined aluminum things poking out of the dash part of a car. I know they have the little things that prevent you from accidentally hitting them, like the little loops of metal, kind of like roll bars, to prevent someone's knee from accidentally hitting the, like, the seat temperature up thing or whatever in the back seats and stuff like that. But you could still accidentally hit them with your knee, first of all. There's kind of a reason why they don't have those toggles. And second of all, God forbid, in any kind of accidents or something, now you have these little metal baggers in the dashboard. Now, you should be belted in airbags and yada yada and a little crash tested, and I understand, but, like, there's kind of a reason why car interiors aren't festooned with stiff pieces of metal sticking out of the dashboard, Johnny. And maybe think more about that before you design your next car interior. Like, I'm not saying they're a danger, but it's a thing that you now have to deal with that you wouldn't have to deal with if they were flat. honestly, I still think this looks really nice. It just doesn't look like a Ferrari. Oh, it's a nice car. Like, it better be for the amount of money they're going to charge for. But, like, I would, this was nicer than most interiors I've ever seen. Just, it's not, again, like, it's not, it doesn't scream Ferrari to me, but it does look really nice. Yeah, no, it's, they didn't do a bad job, but I just kind of disappointed that the world's best designers didn't have any better ideas about it. I think the central console they did do a bad job with, and I think the iPad in the middle, it's a push. Like, it's not bad. It's not the worst of those things, but, like, they grab some new problems themselves with the tilting, which kind of defeats a bunch of purposes, and they didn't come up with anything new. Oh, and the air vents. Let's talk about the air vents. I believe other designers have done the same thing, which says the air vents are circular, and they have a big circle inside them that tilts. And so if you want to close them off, the circle goes flat, and so no air can get through. If you want them to totally open, the circle goes, like, so there's just, you know, so it's edge-on to you, so it blocks the least amount of air. That's not a great design for a vent because your only way to reduce the amount of air also involves changing the direction of the air because of the way the vent works. You know, it's on an angle. There's a reason a lot of them have those little louvers because then changing how much air goes through has less influence on the direction. But Johnny just really wanted it to be a circle inside a tube. And so that's what we got. And I'm sure they're beautiful aluminum pieces. Multipart construction. They show them screwing them together. It's like screwing the like a precision machine, fine threads with aluminum glide. Like, I'm sure it's all beautiful, but I don't think those air vents are good air vents. They don't. They're better than they're better than having to adjust them on a touchscreen. I would give him that like it's not a bad interior. I'm just disappointed that he didn't have any better ideas or seemed not to understand what the scope of the things that you can do in the auto industry in this area and things that people have tried before. But maybe he doesn't care. Maybe it's just like, I want them to look like this and I'm sacrificing the flexibility of air adjustments so they look nice. Yeah, I got to say those air vents really blow, John. Wow. One thing that one thing they think they're the first people to do and I give them some credit for the key thing. Ferraris had these beautiful keys for a long time that they give you little places like in the dashboard. Lots of cars do that because they want you to put their beautiful key somewhere in the dashboard. Although sometimes their key is not beautiful. Ferraris usually look nice. This time they did a thing where it's like, oh, we got the Ferrari logo on a key like we have for the past many years. And it goes in a little spot in the dashboard. But now it sinks into the dashboard. And when it sinks into the dashboard, the yellow from the Ferrari logo leaves the key and enters our little solid glass shifting knob thingy. How does the yellow leave the key Is there a screen on the key There is but it e so it not draining like it yellow all the time wow it yeah it color e it yellow all the time because it yellow e-ink but it takes zero power when it's just yellow all the time and only when you put it into what i assume is a little inductive charging thing in your car it sucks the yellow like that's the total johnny ive is them and it's a cute little thing and i hope the yellow is as bright as it seems in pictures, but I think that's clever for, you know, just like fanciness. And I think that, you know, I don't know if they'll stick with that long term and how long this ink will hold up. I think the lacquer painted Ferrari keys look nicer than the ink one, but they can't make the color drain out of them. Although I don't know why you want the color to drain out of it, but anyway, that's what it does. It blends into your dashboard when it sinks in and puts the color into the tiny shift or not. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Squarespace, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every week, we have more of us talking. So you're here for a couple hours to hear us talking. You can hear us even more for like 20-ish more minutes every week with an extra topic. This week's topic is going to be on China's ban on electric car door handles, which sounds right up our alley. So we're going to be talking about that. And over time, you can join us in at www.hp.fm.com. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At T-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey List, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-R-A-C-U-S-A-T-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S. Accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. I got a confession to make. I am getting the itch. And I bought my Volkswagen Golf R and I took it home on the 30th of August, 2018. Michaela was a wee infant. It has been nearly seven and a half years. I'm starting to get the itch. I love my car. There's nothing wrong with it. I really enjoy driving it. I still love to drive a six-speed. I love having three pedals. I have literally never owned a car, despite what John thinks. that is exclusively mine that has two pedals. I love having a three-pedal car. I love my Golf R. I really, really do enjoy it. It has barely over 30,000 miles on it in seven and a half years. There is no reason to get rid of this car. It's been paid off for a long time. There's no reason to get rid of this car. But I'm getting itch. And to continue the neutral theme for the bottom half of the show, I thought I would do almost a little mini ATP member special actually I didn't even think about it this way until just now a mini Diamond Dogs convinced me that getting a Taycan which is the Porsche electric car a used one to be clear convinced me that's a dumb idea I could do that okay please do that I can name that tune in five notes well you already went through the there's nothing wrong with your car or whatever but you're getting the itch and you should probably see a doctor about that. Wow. Like, I understand. You're interested. You like exciting cars, and you're literally getting the seven-year itch. Yes. That thought made me cross my mind. The excitement. You're not as excited about your car as you used to be, and you've always wanted to try an electric car, and you've got a big, dumb SUV that is not yours. All right. That does its job, and yours is supposed to be the fun little car or whatever, and you're looking at the Taycan. Well, here's the thing. The used ones that you can get, I do agree that because they have depreciated so much, you can get a pretty startlingly good deal. Again, I think we mention this every time this comes up. I wish I had the real number at hand. But what is the average selling price of new cars in the United States of America? And it's some shocking number, like $50,000 or something. I think it'd be more than that. $48,000? I don't know. It's somewhere around there. Someone can look it up. It's in the neighborhood of $50,000, which is shocking to me because that's close to twice as much as I ever paid a new car in my entire life. But whatever. That's just the average. average can be misleading, whatever. But you can get a Porsche Taycan for around that amount of money, which is insane because that actual car new costs like three times that much because electric cars depreciate a lot or whatever. But here's the thing. Those ones that you're getting for $50,000, they're not the good ones. What makes you say? I'm not saying you're wrong. What makes you say? Remember, I think I mentioned this on the show. When they came out with the new generation of this car, they made it just so much better. Like, cause it was like their second, it looks the same, like on the outside, like, Oh, they just changed the exterior or whatever. They changed the inside. They changed the electrics. They changed the motors, the battery. They changed everything about it to just be like, like their first, you know, this is the Porsche's first EV. And they did a pretty good job. It was a pretty good car, but they learned a lot between their first and second attempt at this. And the second one is, is just, it's kind of like when like, I don't know, you had a really good Intel Mac and the M1 comes out and you're like, yeah, I know it's better. but they're both Macs, right? It's like, yeah, they are both Macs. But, like, if you had to pick one to get, like, basically my advice would be get the itch after the second generation. Because that's the car to get for 50 grand, not the current one. Now, I know I was going to try to talk you out of it, but, like, for my – because I'm such a, you know, you know, with me and my buying computers, like, well, are TVs or whatever. Is this the one to buy? Well, it's a good TV, but, like, the next one's going to be whatever. But the thing is, the next one is out. like you're in the used market it's not like it's a mystery the second gen i i think they feel like did they go to 800 volt with the second gen i forget if they did that but they think like they might as well have done the equivalent of gone to 800 for 400 volt 800 volt architecture which is a big deal in evs but like it's just better in every conceivable way uh and so it's like it's a shame that like you know that exists it's there and yeah it's out of your price range now or whatever but like what one those are used to get those are 50 grand when the third one comes out because that one is like it's over the m1 threshold it's like went from intel to m1 and yeah the m2 is better but just wait until you get the M1 and then just stick with that for years. You'll be fine. And having said all that though, like it's not the worst choice in the world for even the first gen one. Cause let's, you know, it's, you'd be your first EV. Yes. There is a better one that exists, but it's a really nice car. Right. That's the thing. And I like, I don't know. Like I, I, I sure as hell wouldn't do it for, for sure. Even if I, even if someone forced me and said, you have to buy an EV for $50,000, you're never going to get a current model one for that, so buy the previous gen. Like, I would still be upset about it because I would be like, oh, it's just such a shame. But, like, if that car appeals to you and if you tried it, and I don't know if you're going to talk about any of your possible experiences with trying it, but, like, if you like it and it seems nice, like, the whole point of this is this is you doing your hobby. It was one of the places where you spend your money to have fun, even though it's not the best possible car that could be, even though there's a better version of this car, even though you better serve to wait, yada, yada, yada. Like, you bought a freaking oil-leaking BMW with an engine that exploded, and you got some enjoyment out of that for a while, too. So who am I to say how you should waste your money on a big car? So I'm going to say it's not the worst. I like the car. I like the first gen. I like the second gen. It's not a bad car. There's a lot to recommend it. I think the interior is actually better than the Porsche interior in lots of ways. and worse than others as well. But still, it's pretty good, but I would wait. And that's setting aside, which I'm not even going to address because it's entirely up to you. Is this the time in your life you need another $50,000 expense? I'm sure you put that in your kid's college fund. I'm setting that aside. We're not worrying about that. Everyone has their hobbies. I buy $12,000 computers that I don't use half of the power in. Casey likes to buy fancy cars. Let's not all judge each other about what we're doing. Well, hold on. Let's be honest. The fanciest car I ever had, by most definitions, was the exploding BMW, which I bought used, and that was $40,000. The steel for an engine that eventually exploded. Right? The Golf R, I mean, that stickered for like $65,000 when it was new or something like that. The Golf R. I thought you had like $40,000 for that. That's what I just said. I paid $40,000, but it stickered for $65,000. Yeah, yeah. The Golf R, I also paid $40,000, which was a good deal for the car at the time, and that was brand new. I mean, these are not, I don't know, $100,000 plus $1,000 M5s. it was under 100 anyway the point is like yes this is far fancier than any of the things that you've driven on a day-to-day I mean it's a similar price to your Volvo though it's not like it's not right oh that's adorable John the Volvo was more than that oh my god the Volvo sticker this is why we leased it the Volvo sticker was like 85% don't tell me that just lowering my opinion I could almost get an M5 in 2013 for that anyway so yeah I've been I've been building up the Taycan in my mind for the last, like, six months, thinking this is the thing that I think I want. Because I think, even though I don't want to give up the third pedal, I think I want an electric car. That would give Erin the ability to drive it, because whether or not she is actually capable of driving a stick, she doesn't think she is, which means effectively she's not. It would be convenient for her to be able to drive it. It is uncomfortably bigger than my car, And I say that only because I worry that I don't have the space in the garage to fit it, like physically fit it in. Yeah, I was going to say, it's a long car. It's a very, it's very wide. It's longer and wider than your golf. That's for sure. That's the problem. The length I have, the length I have, but the width is the problem because as it is right now. That's how you use it, Casey. Right? That's what they tell me. The width is the problem because I already have to squeeze the golf into the garage. Oh, forget it then. Do you have a pole in the middle of it or something? No. So if you walk out of the house, the house is like two to three feet higher up than the floor of the garage because of the crawl space and whatnot. And so there's a staircase. There's a landing. It's not a big landing, but there's a landing and then a short staircase that heads to the front of the garage. So it doesn't come – I'm struggling to verbalize this. if you walk out of the people door and if you were to walk straight out, you'd be walking across the two parking spots of the garage, right? So you walk out of the people door and you swing 90 degrees and there's a short staircase. So it's not like the staircase is going straight out into the middle of the garage, but there's enough there in Aaron's car, as you've noted, is big enough that the two combined make it a little bit tight from a width perspective. I think I could probably do it, but it'd be uncomfortable. But putting that aside for a second. I've shown you pictures of my car in my garage, right? Yes, it's awful. Yes, it's absolutely awful. I think you'd still be, like, put it this way. Could you open the driver's side door and get out of it with both cars parked in the garage? I think it's your only test. Don't worry about the passenger side. Just assume no one will be able to get out of that side of the car. Yeah, no, I mean, I think I could do it. It's just it would be a little bit of a tight squeeze. But so I've built up the Taycan in my mind for a long time. And because ultimately what I want is an electric car that's fun and that isn't Tesla. And so it has car play. And that really doesn't leave a lot of options. I don't particularly want an SUV. And even if I did, the Rivians are no car play. There's the Hyundai and the Kia. What is it? The Ioniq 5N, which is the hot rod version, the Kia EV6 GT. And there's the sedan version of that. It looks like a sedan. Oh, I hate the sedan. I agree with you. Well, I mean, that exists. You're right. It's probably a lower center of gravity than the Bionic 5. Yeah, I mean, and then there's the Mach-E, which there's nothing really wrong with that. It's all just the small SUVs, which are not. Well, right, and that's the thing is I don't really want something that tall. I have nothing against it. It's just not what I want. And so I'm at a loss of what I could get other than a Taycan. I could get the Audi e-tron GT, which is effectively the same car. Yeah, it's effectively the same car. The only other idea I've come up with, and I would like to come back to the Taycan in a minute, But the only other idea I've come up with that a dear friend of mine suggested is, so help me, what about the BMW i4? The sedan. And I floated a trial balloon with Erin on this one, and she gave me a look of death that I have not seen in a long time. Oh, just because of the letters BMW? Because of the letters BMW. Did you tell her it does not have an internal combustion engine? No, no, no. I mean, also, in the List family, multiple brands have had engines explode. That's true. Yeah, but there's just the thing with this one. No engine. Yeah. Just motors. Yeah. Basically sealed motors. I don't know what to do about that. Well, so the i4 is just so much more practical and just so much. But it's not as exciting as the Porsche. No. It has better interior space. It is a more practical car. There's so much going for it. I think you could find Taycans cheaper, though, because the i4 is kind of new, and the used ones hold their value better. Well, the problem, though, is that the i4, there's two models. What is that? M40, I think, and then M50. Yeah, and there's also rear-wheel drive versus all-wheel drive as well. Right. And, of course, because of me, I would want the M50, which most of those sticker new. Why? No. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Oh, for God's sake. That's. Why would I not? I mean, come on. I mean, of course you'd want it, but, like, have you driven either one? I'm like, the base model is fast. So here's the thing. It's probably significantly faster than your golf. I mean, it's just not going to feel as sporty as the Porsche. It's not going to be as sporty. It's a four-door sedan. Yeah, but it's also, it's a lot smaller. Well, especially width-wise. Yeah, which I think will dramatically improve how sporty it feels. Like, if you go from a Golf to a Taycan, you're going to feel like you're driving a boat. It's a lot bigger. It's a lot longer and wider. It's a significant... Significant. It's the speedboat, though. The i4, yes. The i4 is, I would assume, probably longer than your car, but it's not that much bigger of a vehicle overall. I bet it's longer and wider. It is wider, but only just. Put it this way. Do you ever take your kids in the golf? I used to semi-frequently, and then once Erin got the plug-in hybrid, she has said to me basically every time we head for the garage, why would we take your car and burn gas? That will continue to be the case with the Porsche, because those back seats are like your Golf's back seats. It's such a huge car. It's got four seats, but your Golf might have bigger back seats. Yeah, and also the i4 has that sloped back roof line. The back seat headroom is not great in the i4. But it's fine for kids, and there's way more room in the back of the i4 than the Porsche. Yeah, and I really think you should probably go test drive both and see how they both feel. Have you driven either one? And I have driven one of them. Oh. So Monday, I went on a little adventure. And there's an Audi dealer here in town that has a Taycan. They use Taycan on the lot. This particular example, I don't love the fact that it has gold wheels. Oh, my God. Please let it be white. Please let it be white. No, it's not. It's black. And it has gold wheels, which I really, really, really didn't care for. Better than black wheels, but only marginally. That's a lot. I think I would agree with that. I hate black wheels so much. I do, too. I cannot wait for this trend to be over. Please. How many more years? I do, too. This is definitely, this is a look, this is not a Casey look. Wait, what color was it? I missed it. It's black with gold wheels. It's like, this is like a My Cousin Vinny look. I put a Lincoln's black. I don't think I'm going to put it in the show notes because I'd rather not blow up my spot. So I took it for a drive while John is looking at this. I took it for a drive. I took it for a drive with a salesperson in the car. I know the area in which the dealer is, but I don't know of good driving roads around the dealers. So I said to the saleswoman, you know, just tell me where to go and, you know, what do you suggest? And I took like a 10 or 15 minute test drive. And I was so excited to give this a shot because, like I said, I really think this is my next car at some point. I finished the test drive and my initial reaction is, I hate this car. Why? There were two main reasons. Number one, because of the way the roof line is and the way it slopes in the back, the rear visibility is like a letter slot. You know, it's like a strip, like the way people describe Lamborghinis. It's not literally that bad, but it was awful. And I don't know, maybe this makes me a weirdo. I don't know. But I am constantly checking my rear view mirror when I drive because I like to know what's around me. And, yes, I'm aware that there are side mirrors as well. But I've got 25, 30 years of driving experience saying that I'm always looking at the rear view mirror and seeing like a little slit out the back. Don't love it. Welcome to Sporty Cars. I know, I know. I could probably get over that. I think I could. But what I couldn't get over at the time, and I will come back to this, but what I couldn't get over at the time was the transmission. Because this does, folks, have a two-speed transmission. I got in the car. I drove it in whatever mode it was in. I was just trying to get a feel for what does this car feel like. and I believe I was in normal mode because why wouldn't I be? And I can tell you for sure I was not in like Sport or Sport Plus or anything like that. Having looked into this in concert with my dear friend Brian after the fact, it appears to me that generally speaking, the car will, in normal mode, will only ever really stay in the higher gear, in second gear, until you call for a whole bunch of power, in which case it will downshift and off you go. And let me tell you, when you ask for a whole bunch of power, holy God, you get a whole bunch of power. And this is true of all electric cars, but holy God, this thing hauls. But what I didn't love was that the transmission felt incredibly lethargic. It felt like, all right, I want the power. And in every electric car I've ever driven, except this one, when I say I want the power, before I finish the word power, I'm already doing illegal amounts of speed. With this, I say, I want the power. okay there it comes you know it's almost like a turbocharger what drive mode were you in do you know I believe I was in normal or standard especially in EVs a lot of that they tie directly since they can change everything electronically like the throttle response and everything it's all figuring electronic especially in the sporty mode it might have been better so that's the thing and that's what I wanted to come back to is I think in sport plus or whatever it is I might have the terminology wrong in Sport Plus, I think it will launch in first gear and stay in first gear for a while. And, you know, the hell with, not longevity, with range, that's what I was looking for, the hell with range, we're just going to drive as sporty as possible. And so it will launch in first gear, eventually shift to second gear, et cetera, et cetera. And I did try that very, very briefly at the very end of the test drive, but at that point we were almost back at the dealer, so it basically doesn't count. I hated the transmission, and I hated the rear visibility. Everything else about it I really liked. Okay, so here, I just found a link. Here's a car 11 miles from you. This is a BMW i4, also used, similar mileage, for $21,000 less. I think you should go test drive one. And I think that is what I should do as well. Now, selling Aaron on this will be challenging, but... The $21,000 less will probably make that a little bit easier. It doesn't have an engine, and it has a bigger backseat, and it's more practical. and the rear visibility will probably still not be as good as your Golf, but it'll be better. No. And it's not like Porsche is super easy to own long-term and inexpensive to service. Oh, yeah, no. The repair risk of the Porsche and the regular service will be worse than BMW. No contest. Oh, by far. Sure, but what should, in theory, in theory, what should go wrong? Oh, no, just say your brake pads wear out, which is a thing that's known to happen to brake pads. I mean, a lot less so with electric cars, but fair. But still, they don't last forever. Why don't you price that out for your Porsche? What would that be like? How about you need a new battery for your Porsche? How much could a battery cost? What do you think, Casey? Oh, I'm sure that's like 50 grand right there. Without labor. If you look at a Porsche sideways, thousands of dollars leave your wallet. It's worse than BMW. BMW is bad. Porsche is worse. Porsche stuff is better than BMW, though. And I will say also, just for whatever it's worth, and I know I said this before when I first got my iX, and look, I have had the itch to replace the iX ever since I saw the i4. You just got the iX! You just got it! I'm halfway through its lease. I'm a year and a half there. Okay. All right, and the guy around the corner got an i4 and I see it every day and it's like, God, that's a much sexier color. Yeah. And I've been envious of the stupid i4 ever since. And I literally see it every day because it's right around the corner from my house and it's always parked in his driveway. and every time like oh and they made it in orange they don't currently but they did so i could get a used one in orange i'm like oh why didn't i do that oh so one of these days you're gonna see me in an orange i4 but anyway i don't have infinite um patience or willpower i do have to keep replacing hvac units but we'll see anyway um but one thing i one thing i said about the ix when i got it and which i stand by is you know now having the ix for a year and a half and having had tiff's i3 now for what five years something like that six years we've had it for a while now bmw's electric powertrain is incredibly mature and low drama like and compared to rivian and tesla and any other car any other evs i've heard of people's experiences like i've had experiences with owning rivian and tesla and then the ones that i've heard from you know i've heard people who have Hyundai Ionics and stuff like that, they all have various drama or immaturity or things that are a little bit finicky about them. They're all way simpler than gas engines, but just little things like when the battery is full, do you still get regen braking? With Tesla, you don't. With Rivian, I think they managed it a little bit better, but I still think there was a difference. How does it perform in bad weather? How does it lose charge over time if it's sitting in a parking lot for a while unplugged? Like, if it's at the ferry lot, does it lose charge over, you know, a week or two? BMW's powertrain for the BMW's EVs is rock solid and low drama. I am so impressed with it. It is, it always performs exactly the same. There is zero phantom loss on the battery when you're parked. Like, it is just reliable. It is so good that long term, I I've never heard anything about how Porsche's is, but long-term, if you want good, reliable EV powertrain and better odds of low service needs, I think BMW will give you that before Porsche will, probably. I mean, they're both very expensive cars, just to be clear. I think the Porsche is better made with better components and performance better, but it also costs twice as much to do anything. I'm not sure I could say that. I mean, maybe not the first gen, because it was the first, but the second-gen one, they're really good. BMWs are fine, and they're good, but, like, maybe it's just from watching car rebuilding channels to see what's actually inside them. Part of the reason staring at a Porsche and doing anything to it costs so much money is every single component is just over-engineered, well-engineered. I don't know. Whereas BMW, there's some cost savings happening inside there. They don't pass those on to you, but they're happening. Anyway, I agree that BMW's drivetrain is really good. And Porsche's maybe not in the first gen Taycan, but in the second gen one. I mean, they're aimed for something different. The problem with the current BMWs, people have complaints about that Mark obviously doesn't care about, is that BMW is supposed to be the ultimate driving machine. And when people think of that, they think of like the current gen Porsche Taycan. It's like, oh, this is a driver's car or whatever, whereas BMW is merely a really, really good EV sedan, which is nothing to sneeze at. But for the people who really love like the E46 M3, they're like, oh, that magic has gone out of BMW. and it's nowhere to be found except for maybe in Porsches. Go watch reviews of the i4. People are a big fan of it. I've never driven one yet, but as soon as I drive one, I know I'm going to have to buy one, so I'm trying not to drive one. No, it's a good car. It's an especially good EV. That's the tricky bit of trying to figure out how do you make an EV sporty. We'll see what Porsche does in this area, but everyone who has tried has had difficulty. Even Porsche has had some difficulty getting that formula because EVs are heavy. Sports cars aren't supposed to be heavy. How do you make it handle well? Getting it fast in a straight line is not the problem. It's just like, how does it feel to go? Does it feel like you're golf going around a mountain road? Like, none of these EVs will because they weigh a bazillion pounds. They're never going to feel like you're golf. They're never going to be the size of your golf. They're never going to change the direction. I don't know, man. The Taycans felt really tricking good. I don't know. I'm not saying it's bad. But like I was saying, Porsche is steering the way that stuff. They have done the best of anybody of making a sporty EV, according to all the reviews I've seen, where it feels like just a sporty good car. But there's no disguising the weight. It's still there. The part where it would show up is if you were on a road where it's so windy that you can't actually go that fast, and then having your little nimble golf would feel better than having this big weighty thing. But they do a good job of it. But the BMW is much more practical for your life, and I think it also will be more drama-free because if you do ever need to get anything done with it, it will cost you slightly less money. And every part of this car costs less than every part of the Porsche. The wheels, the tires, the headlights, the battery, the cap on the filler for the windshield washer fluid, like everything, everything will cost less than the BMW, and the BMW will in turn be twice as much as it is on Hyundai. So that's the shape of the world. Yeah, I do think I need to drive an i4. I'd also like to drive the Taycan again now that I know a little bit more. You should test drive a second-gen one. You're not going to buy one, but they don't know that. Test drive a second-gen one. Do you know what year that began? Not too far ago, maybe two or three years ago. The people at the Porsche dealer will know. I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will. But no, I don't know. I really thought that the Taycan was the right answer. And leaving aside Aaron's understandable reluctance to have another Bavarian car in the garage, I'm starting to wonder if maybe the i4 is it and the thing that's really making this worse for me is out of nowhere and I think even before my friend Brian had suggested the i4 over the last couple of weeks for reasons I can't understand or place or put my finger on I started to really miss my e90 my my free series that I used to have I don't know why and I think it's a large A lot of it is because I've forgotten that I put like 20 grand worth of service into that car, whatever the obscene amount of money was, and it was broken when I sold it. I have been reminiscing about how good, to Marco's point, how good that car was in the rare occasions that it wasn't broken. And I loved that car so very much. And I'm not saying I need to go back to a BMW, but I really did love that car a lot, a lot. And I'm really – I really want to get something – I think I want to get something new. And I also made another grievous mistake, and I went to Carvana and said, hey, how much is this VIN worth to you? Don't do that. Well, let me ask you, how much do you think my car is worth to Carvana based on how I told them about it? I have no idea what cars are worth. John, any thoughts? Again, it's tickered at $40,000 or thereabouts new in late 2018. $28,000. Really? Yeah. That's what you're going with? That's what I'm going with, $28,000. Because I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it was. I'm trying to find the damn thing. It was $28,000 and change, I believe. Where is this email? Now I can't find it. But it's somewhere. I'll have to dig it back up. But I'm pretty sure it was $28,000. All those car YouTube channels. It's not like payoffs. But to that end, like, I don't particularly want nor should I spend, want to nor should I spend $60,000 on a Taycan. But if it's $30,000 or thereabouts, that's a little easier to swallow, right? So I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. The right answer for the record is what John has said, which is basically drive my car into the ground and not even think about it. I mean, it sounds like it's doing pretty good. It is. It's low mileage. It's still working. Like, you haven't had any problems with it. You know, you should just think about Marco's HVAC. Like, you have a problem-free car that you mostly enjoy. No, you are right. You can enjoy, especially for the stick shift thing. We didn't really talk about that much. But, like, yeah, you want to try an EV and EVs are cool and fun. But, like, this is probably your last stick shift car. So get the most out of it, right? I know. I know. But, man, it would be nice if, you know, if I take Erin's car somewhere. So, like, as an example, Declan had basketball practice tonight and her car was already out. And I was like, hey, I'm just going to take yours. And she was totally chill with it. She doesn't care. She's not going anywhere. but it would be nice that she could go somewhere if she wanted to, you know, like whereas right the way it was earlier tonight, it was 28-2. I finally found the damn email, $28,200. It would have been nice for her to be able to take the Tycon or the I-4 or what have you out. It could be a fun activity where you could restore her confidence and her stick shift skills and then she breaks your car, you have an excuse to buy a new one. Yeah, but then it won't be worth 28-2. anyways I don't know knowing me I'll do nothing but I do think that Marco's right that I do need to test drive an i4 and I fear I desperately fear that I'm really really going to like it oh that was the other thing I didn't mention about the Taycan they don't really do regenerative braking in the way I'm used to anyway in so far as I guess it's it's it's a application the application of the brake pedal they will treat that as the cue to start regenerative braking but I'm used to lift off regenerative braking, where as soon as you lift off the gas, it's... You said that's not an adjustment? It could be a setting. I'm not. Like, the way BMW does it, like, there's, like, the D drive mode is some regeneration, but it won't really slow you down that aggressively. And then if you, like, pull the gear self-lever down one more time from D, it goes into a mode called B. Oh, that's the exact same way the Volvo is. Yeah, and that's how... I drive in B all the time. I wish I could just set it to just go right to that. You can't. So every time I'm doing the double flip down to put it into B, but that is, like, much more aggressive regen braking. And there are settings, but none of the settings for D will bring it to that same level. How can you not set it? BMW, let's just set everything. How would that let it be? I know. That's not even, like, a fuel efficiency thing. There's no reason. They have settings for everything. Believe me, I looked. There's two settings that my car does not have. One of them is there is no way to set B by default, and there is no way to set D to be as aggressive as B, And the second missing setting is there is no way to disable little alerts that say uneven road surface ahead. Does it know that you live in New York? So, yeah, well, so here it shows those when I'm approaching a railroad crossing. Now, I live on Long Island. I'm there's a railroad crossing going through every town because of Long Island Railroad. There's also uneven road surface everywhere. Well, yeah, but like in the entire state. So as I drive throughout my town doing anything, I'm constantly getting alerts on my dash saying, you know, uneven road service, you know, 0.6 miles ahead or whatever. Constantly. There's no way to turn that off. And the funny thing is there's even a setting for it. It just doesn't work. Like, there's a setting to turn that off. You can search for it in the control panel. And it's right there. And you turn it off. And you're like, great, it's off. and then the alerts continue because it doesn't actually work. That's frustrating. You're always one software update away from them fixing this. I wonder if you could code that. You could perhaps code the drive mode. I tried that as well. That apparently doesn't really exist for these modern vehicles anymore. I did look into that, though. Anyway, so what I needed you two to do was tell me absolutely not, do not buy any new cars, and it sounds like you have at best told me, meh. I don't think we have any chance of stopping you from buying a new car. The best I could do is try to make you think about paying for college. This is how much college will cost for Maggie. But if that's not working on you, you know. Well, let's just say without blowing, you know, without talking finances too much, let's just say that we do not have enough for all of college, but we have done a very good job of saving so far. For how much college costs today? Well, also true. There is no world in which replacing your car makes financial sense. Certainly not. But we also don't live through our lives only optimizing for one thing. We live our lives to live our lives. And so if you feel responsible about being able to cover your other needs, then I don't think you should feel any shame being a successful working professional in your 40s to buy a new car every seven years. Like, that's not that crazy to me because that's something that you care. Your 40s aren't going to last that much longer. Yeah, you care a lot about that, and it brings you a lot of joy, and you don't go blowing money in other excessive ways. So, like, I don't, well. Oh, come now. I really don't think I'm that bad at all. No, I think, again, like, your finances are up to you and your family, but, like, if things are being taken care of, you should not feel guilt to indulge yourself in your biggest interest in life. Like, that is fine. Now, granted, if you want to optimize only for money, the way to do that is to buy a used Toyota or Honda and run it into the ground. That is the correct option if you're optimizing for value over time. That is by far the correct option. Or not have a car at all and ride your bike everywhere, which will make you a little longer, too, if you don't get hit by a car. Yeah, right. That's another option. There's lots of ways to do that. And so like, but, but, you know, the fact is you love cars and wanting to buy a used car, a different used car every seven years is not that unreasonable. Although you might want to just double this money, you know, just for equity's sake to say, well, this is your fun hobby and you get this much allocated to it. What's the equivalent of Aaron's fun hobby that you get the equal amount allocated to? So whatever you think you're spending, just double it. Well, you know, it's funny you say that because she's just not a material person. So I think that for her, if I said, you know, if I'm going to spend 40, and not that this is how we handle our finances. Well, she just feels the burden of being the frugal one to save money for the family, maybe. Try this move. Try this move. Try saying, hey, honey, I've decided I don't actually need a new car, but we should spend this money on something fun. What do you want to do with it? So now it's not her worrying about spending additional money, but simply getting the money that you already think is going to spend and see what she says. No, that is fair. You've definitely been married. And then you have to say, no, I was just kidding. many of you. But make sure to tell her your friend Marco just saved you $21,000. Yeah, right, exactly. Here's the thing, honey. Marco saved us $20,000, but I'm going to have to buy a BMW now. You're going to say that I was trying to save you all the money and give it to Erin so she can do whatever she wants with it. She will drive up to New York and kick you square in the nether regions. My goodness. That will be deserved. Truly. She's so anti-BMW. It's ridiculous. I don't really blame her. You've got to bring her on the test drive and hope that she falls in love with it. Yeah, for real. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, this is mostly all talk. And I mean, how lucky am I that I'm even thinking about now? Granted, I'm thinking about used cars. But how lucky am I that I get to think about these used cars? So life could be so much worse, but I don't know what to buy. And the right answer is to not do anything, which is probably what I'll do. And the right answer is if you do want to really consider these cars, go test drive them. Like, look at how much you learned. You were all set in your mind. It was going to be this car. But as soon as you test drove it, it became very clear that there were things about that that you weren't for you. Like, that's, you have, like, I, I believe you, I'm guilty of the same thing. Like, you know, I'm, here I am looking at the i4 myself. I've never driven one. I've only seen them every day around the corner from my house. Even, you know, yesterday, the, um, the initial YouTube previews of the Rivian R2 came out. Oh, yes. And even then, I was like, ooh. And I'm looking at, you know, the R3X as a potential future car for me. Oh, the R3 looks so good, man. Oh, my God. It looks so good. Casey with BMW and you with Rivian, it's like childbirth amnesia. Like, don't you remember the reason you got rid of the Rivian? Don't you remember the reason you got rid of the BMW? It's like, nope. The first thing I looked up after I watched those R2 reviews was, I wonder if those Long Island service centers opened up. And yes, they have. So everything's different now. And the R3X isn't due out for like another year and a half or two years. So, you know, it would be like by the time my IX lease ends, the R3X might be starting to ship, maybe. And you sure want that one of those first batch of cars from Rivian. Yep, I learned nothing from the first one. It looks so cool. Come on. It does look so freaking cool. It looks very cool.