TRASHFUTURE - Gear Shift in Bio feat. Victoria Scott
Episode Date: May 8, 2024For this week’s free episode, it’s Riley, Hussein, and November with special guest and friend of the show Victoria Scott (@mikurubaeahina) in a discussion about Tesla’s recent earnings call, its... recall of its non-warhead-equipped ramming missile / bad looking truck combination, and US car manufacturers hoovering up immense amounts of personal data to be used for… insurance? Law enforcement snitching? Formal identification of when your bisexual friend has the aux cord? It’s not looking good. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* See us live in London on May 29th with special guest Nish Kumar! Get tickets here: https://bigbellycomedy.club/event/trashfuture-presents-liz-truss-presents-ten-years-to-save-the-west-ft-nish-kumar/ *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to the Freakonomics Podcast, the podcast where we talk about how the economy
is freaky.
We've got some counterfactuals and some counterintuitive conclusions to draw from those for me.
Yeah, absolutely.
We're so glad that you're big fans of the Freakonomics podcast, and today we're gonna
be debunking a few rumors in the media.
If you're not Freakonomics people like us, you may think that Boeing is just systematically
killing whistleblowers because another Boeing whistleblower just died after a short mysterious
illness.
However...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the thing is, right, you gotta think about confounding factors, right.
It turns out that, like, being a whistleblower is extremely bad for your health, but not
for the obvious reason.
Like, it could be any number of things.
Being a whistleblower, very very stressful, you know?
And stress, as we know, leads to heart conditions, things of this nature.
RILEY Mental health?
ALICE Yeah, mental health.
Sometimes you just die, basically.
If you were a whistleblower, for unrelated reasons to the company killing you, you become
a bit like a guinea pig and you can walk wrong and fracture your entire skull.
RILEY Yeah, well also, the other thing a lot of
people are thinking of is like, okay, there is a salience bias, right?
Because everyone's expecting Boeing to kill whistleblowers.
Like, oh yeah, every time you hear about a Boeing whistleblower dying, you assume Boeing
did it.
Yeah, it's the news media make a bigger thing out of it, you know, because they're looking
for a story.
And here at Freakonomics, we like to propose, what if, Freakonomics podcast, the podcast
for the economy is freaky, we like to propose, what if there are just so many problems at Boeing that their whistleblowers are dying at a natural rate, there are just
a lot of them as a base level?
What if that?
ALICE LAUGHS.
ALICE Yeah, there are so many Boeing whistleblowers
out there that the regular kind of actuarial tables are getting them into a news cycle
basis.
RILEY If you have that many whistleblowers, the rate of just sudden aneurysm, or, head
just did that, is gonna be what it is for the normal population.
ALICE It's like JFK witnesses, y'know?
There's like, fucking hundreds of thousands of them.
Of course a bunch of them are gonna die, y'know?
LARRIE No.
I just think it's very funny that the implication of this is that there are a bunch of guys
who look like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, but who are just, like, collecting skulls,
much like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
ALICE I mean, listen, Boeing, they've fully just killed another guy, I guess.
Irrespective of our belief about whether or not whistleblowing reduces you to one hit
point.
Cause another guy just died, of like, I dunno, I don't know what they got him with this time,
I think it was some kind of infection or something, which like, excellent work Agent 47, now make
your way to an exit.
But like, yeah, this is a thing, right, if you start whistleblowing, you are bowing to
die.
LORENZO Hi everybody, welcome, welcome, just kidding.
It's not the Freakonomics podcast, the podcast by The Economy is Freaky, it's TF.
It is, it's TF, and it is-
We have to do that for our listeners who don't have secure attachment styles, and they're
like, oh no.
Oh no, they changed?
They're doing a different one now?
No, it's TF.
Well, we still believe The Economy is Freaky, just in different ways.
I'm always willing to get freaky with the economy.
It is Riley, it's November, it's Hussein, and to those of you thinking that Milo has
whistleblown on Boeing and has died, he is back from his holiday, he'll be back...
Yeah, we made absolutely certain to send him back from Australia on an airbus, and as such
he has made it safely to his destination and will be returning to broadcasting soon.
I do like the idea that it's like, he flew the only safely to his destination and will be returning to podcasting soon.
I do like the idea that it's like, he flew the only Boeing 737 Max that was willing to
do a direct flight from Australia.
Couldn't have anything on there.
And we are also very happy to welcome back returning champion and car aficionado, Victoria
Scott.
Victoria, how's it going?
Hey, thanks for having me.
It's going pretty good.
Yeah, we are going to be talking a little bit about
I think an update on an episode we did a while ago.
Is it about cars?
Yes, it is about cars.
It's updated in a little episode we did a little while ago about planes.
No, no. Where we looked at the data collection that cars
could conceivably undertake about you, what those companies could do with it, and go back to, I think, a little bit of a
discussion of what companies are doing with it, because there's been a sort of, there
have been several exposés, whether from the New York Times, which, as we'll discuss, had
its own problems, or even like the Mozilla Foundation, which is looking at data privacy, about, the car
companies are doing everything that we said they would be doing last time we talked to
Victoria.
ALICE I hate when we're vindicated by history.
RILEY Yeah, it sucks.
And also, as luck would have it, Tesla just had their earnings call, so we'll be going
through some of the highlights of the future of the car industry.
Actually, if Milo does die, we are I think gonna be able to get one of the Tesla Optimus
robots to replace him.
ALICE If Milo does die after the fact, like a Boeing
737 lands on his flat.
RILEY Yeah, he is back now, he's fine.
ALICE Milo gets off the plane and goes, wow, that
was a great Airbus flight, however, I have information that will lead to a decrease in the stock price of Boeing.
RILEY Anyway.
Before we get to the discussion of Elon, cars, surveillance, and so on, I think it is definitely
worth talking about the protests going on across American universities.
ALICE Yeah, there's some news, and there's some
news from Britain as well.
The two terrible genders here.
RILEY The way I wanna talk about it is, looking
across the Atlantic, and looking at British commentators and politicians, also looking
across the Atlantic, and what are they seeing.
ALICE Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, on this podcast
we try to avoid doing a surfeit of American
news because you can get that stuff already, and we don't wanna be like, oh, America, the
one country that there is.
So we wanna talk about it when it's important, and this is one of those times because...
Wait, what?
Not only is this stuff important, but also, everyone in our country is now being like,
oh, we should do...
You see the Americans doing the rising
tide of fascism?
We should get on that.
We should hitch that to our rising tide of fascism.
RILEY Yes.
So, for a little bit of background, we are talking about the wave of student occupations
at primarily elite universities in the US and Canada, where the occupations have largely
similar goals, which is to get their institutions
to divest from companies that are actively supporting the Israeli government's actions
in Gaza. And they are being opposed in much the same way, for example, by either by principled
free speech warriors who are saying that everybody should go to university to come into contact
with ideas that they don't
like, which is why, I dunno, fucking Dave Rubin or Barry Weiss, or whoever, should always
be allowed to come in-
Yeah, Stephen Crowder can post up with a thing to be like, change my mind, or whatever.
Come into your dorm room and just start yelling at you, right?
Yeah, why Chyarajchuk should be able to dox you, as an individual university student,
is because university is a place for, like, uncomfortable ideas and free speech.
Until now.
Until like, a few days ago.
Yeah.
Opposed by them in the realm of sort of rhetoric, television, and so on.
And then opposed by a combination of the state security forces and people who have been what
you could call, I dunno, stochastically deputized?
Yeah, I have some thoughts about those guys specifically, but we'll get to that.
ZACH And if you wanted to draw a connection between
what's going on over there, which is again, acts of violence meted out by the state, and
acts of violence meted out by people who have been deputized by politicians in the media,
basically. The mass protest movements that are going on here, in addition to protests against Gaza, are people who are trying to stop their friends, neighbors,
family members, get kidnapped by the state and taken to Rwanda. And again, it
is the same people who look over to the United States and cheer on the
brave police officers or frat boys or whatever.
Yeah, well, that was those sort of borderline
pornographic, in some ways more pornographic than some pornography, male article, with
a lot of photos of female protestors getting arrested and stuff.
That's like, check out how Texas deals with woke protestors, the Met Police should do
this but they won't because they're scared and woke. RILEY And I wonder if those same impulses will be
turned not just to street protests against Israel, but also protests of companies like
Elbit, or protests at UK universities where students also want divestment from complicity
and genocide.
ALICE Yeah.
I mean, the thing that struck me was, I saw Arizona State University invented the American
shivihah, right?
They had these frat boys, and at UNC Chapel Hill this happened as well, a few other places,
where they had just like random fraternity bros acting as kind of like, fry corps, acting
as like a militia, right?
And then in Los Angeles, UCLA, the LAPD and UCLA security just stood back while a bunch
of pro-Israel protesters stormed and beat the shit out of the whole encampment and the
whole protest.
And this kind of...
Obviously this is another terrifying notch towards A24's Alex Garland Civil War, right?
Once you start having these non-state actors do this.
So I think that coming to the United States, or coming back to the United States, is grim
in its own way.
But like, yeah, it's hard not to imagine that it won't try and make its way over here as
well.
I wouldn't be surprised if...
Well, I mean, this is gonna happen anyway because Prevent was sort of already doing
this to begin with. Whether it becomes sort of more militarised, I'm not this is gonna happen anyway because, like, Prevent was sort of already doing this to begin with.
Whether it becomes sort of more militarized, I'm not sure, only because of the state of
the British police, may sort of...
We've sort of seen the videos from the US where it's full on riot gear and police kind
of manhandling protesters at the very least, but also kind of inflicting them with pretty
heavy types of weaponry,
right?
ALICE They shot a guy in the head with a 40mm grenade.
RILEY Oh, I didn't even see that.
ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Got like six stitches.
RILEY But like, whether the British police sort of get to that point, I'm not sure, but
it won't be out of any sort of moral reason more than just like, uh, we don't get paid
enough to do this.
ALICE Well, this is why it's a great sort of opportunity
for the, like, Range Rover mums and Britain firsts of this country, is because we don't
have any cops left.
RILEY This is sort of where I feel like it's kind
of pushing up, because, like, as we've sort of seen in various instances to do with the
protests already, but even, especially with climate protesting, for example, where quite often
it's not, you know, and you've had respectable commentators who haven't said things like,
you know, oh, the police should do more. But they're like, no, the police aren't going to
do enough to solve the problem. And so we have to kind of, you know, so if citizens go and,
you know, seize the control and they sort of take matters into their own hands, we have
no choice but to support them. But what does that fucking mean? It means Range Rover mums
smashing into people. It means vigilantism. It means...
Statue defenders. It means the sort of coked up mobs of statue defenders egging each other
on to go and bash them heads.
Yeah, and it means Tommy Robinson goons deciding deciding that this is... And they've already decided
that these are protests against people that we don't like generally. And so at this point,
what I imagine is the case is they're seeing stuff in the US where it's like, oh no, you
can... I imagine these groups look at the violence in the US and they're sort of like, oh, this is kind of like a reasonable
and rational response. And what they can also perceive at the same time is that there is
more tolerance for this to happen. And so I think there's actually more worry and more concern,
at least in this country, but also I guess in parts of Europe too. But it won't be like police brutality, but it'll be this sort of like pernicious combination of like
street vigilante groups that are already sort of inflicting violence. But then governments,
and especially the incoming government with like, or like what will be the incoming government
with like the BAF majority to be like, well, what, you know, we can sort of use this excuse
to sort of expand, prevent, to kind of tackle all forms of extremism.
And so as a result, you do end up with like a situation where you have increased surveillance,
increased violence, and it achieves the same goals, even if it is like less structurally
organized than it would be in the US.
So that's sort of my, my sort of perception of it.
It's increased violence that sort of that is meted out in ways that are unpredictable.
I think that's the end. I mean, if you want to talk about like, if you want to look at
how how that's done, right, you can say Baroness Fox of Buckley in the House of Lords said
the global student movement is coming to the UK and levels of anti-Semitism are routine
and normalized and UK campuses, essentially saying saying, again, for the crime of saying we don't want anything to do with Israel
because of what it is doing, right? Because that makes some people uncomfortable.
The constant equivalence being drawn of the extreme levels of danger mean that it's like
they're a state of exception, I would suggest, is being evoked, that has
successfully been evoked in the states.
About, again, disorder, and the claim that peaceful protests are not disorderly, and
occupation is the same as violence.
RILEY Joe Biden literally said today, like, dissent
is not disorder.
ALICE Which is, not to think too hard about A24's
Civil War, but that is a line that could have come out of the, like the repressive three-term Nick Offerman president's mouth, y'know?
RILEY Yeah. And, y'know, we already have had a sort
of huge crackdown, a huge expression of state violence against students here, which was
the student movement in 2010-2011, against the original mandate of austerity. Right?
This is where the British police had kettling.
This is where students were charged with horses.
They already had a sort of student movement broken by the police here once, but in that
time there wasn't this level of, I'd say, stochastic incitement.
And it's not just incitement as well, it's stochastic rewarding.
Right? term stochastic incitement. And it's not just incitement as well, it's stochastic rewarding, right? Because those same, the frat boy fry core, those same guys are now, there's a GoFundMe
written in sort of Reddit elite Beerspeak to get, to buy some ales for these bastards.
They raised like $400,000.
Yeah, well it's got 10,000 of which from friend of the show Bill Ackman,
Yeah, well it's got ten thousand of which from friend of the show Bill Ackman. And another only two hundred and fifty from Doug Sifu, who runs a much larger hedge fund.
So you wonder what's going on in Virtue.
ALICE This is very very bad news, but it also reflects
to me, I think, a degree of disjunction amongst, like, elites, right?
It's a case of masks slipping a bit, right?
I think a lot about this, you see this a lot with, like, whenever there's protests that
seriously threaten any number of regimes, you end up with plain clothes mobs of just
random guys who can be held to be politically reliable and reactionary.
Football fans are a big one, frat boys in this case I guess.
The one that I always think of is during the Egyptian revolution, when they were kind of
running out of riot cops, for a while they just sent in random guys with sticks on camelback
into Taro Square, and for some reason I'm just reminded of that again right now.
It's like...
TORRESPIECE Not to make everything about vehicles, but the whole Range Rover.
I was trying to find who it was.
There was some congressman, and it was a Cotton-esque type, I don't remember who exactly, but one
of the more extreme Republican congressmen was literally saying, posted clips of one of
the protests that we'd had here, where they had blocked a freeway, and was like, alright,
time for you to take matters into your own hands.
That was literally the tweet he made about it.
It was just...
ALICE All these people fully want people to drive
into protestors.
Yeah.
ZACH And that's when we have the NYPD with siege
towers.
We have a very heavily militarized police.
I'm always positive things could get worse.
It's America.
But even with that level of intense repression, they're
still foaming at them. Like actively sitting congressmen are still foaming at the mouth.
Like get involved, please go run over some people. That brand new pickup truck you just
bought. Yeah. It would look great smeared with blood.
Again, this is a very common refrain for radio personalities, which I just won't name, in
the UK, like right wing radio personalities. to again say, call for these mass summary executions by deputised members
of the public, of people who inconvenience them or make them uncomfortable.
ALICE Yeah, to have this, particularly in radio,
like talk radio, the kind of thing that you listen to when you're driving, right, along
with Sunak's attempt with this anti-ULOS thing to weld together this reactionary motorist block?
It really does seem like one of the key ways of getting you to become more right-wing is
driving.
And also we are against anything that would offer you any alternative but driving.
I'm just built different, baby.
You know, it's like, what are these things actually disrupting, right?
It's disrupting things like, marches in London disrupt people's routes to work, sit-ins in
Colombia disrupt, at Colombia, disrupt commencement.
The things that they are disrupting are, you need to choose to sort of find them and zero
in on them.
They are relatively minor levels of disruption that are provoking the government into like
sort of quite extreme, like all levels of government even, like municipal, state and
federal in the states that would also sort of provoke sort of similar, have in the past
provoke similar reactions here and I think are likely to in future, especially, and I
go back to what I alluded to at the beginning, that there is a new brand of disruptive protest in the UK that's aimed at stopping mass deportation.
ALICE It's not new.
RILEY There is, let's just say, it's not new, we've
seen it before, but it is going to become more common now.
ALICE It's gonna become more common and more urgent
as you try and do more mass deportations.
RILEY That's what I mean.
Yeah, there are more mass deportations, so there'll be more stopping...
It's the Freakonomics podcast again!
ALICE Yeah, we did a sort of confounding factor,
and now everywhere is cameo history.
RILEY Yeah, so there are going to be more people,
and again, I don't see what is stopping that same tendency that you can see being deployed
at universities across the US and Canada right now, from being deployed, again, not just
here against protesters in solidarity with Gaza, but also at people who are stopping
home office vans. It's like, hey, you all wanted the country to be
cleaned of capital T them. Well, look, all those blue-haired, pathetic, terrifying,
gendered Hamas supporters are all out there. We've been basically telling you
that they're the enemy within forever,
that they will never be like you, that we kind of, no one who's in charge or powerful
really, wink wink, thinks they should be there.
So why don't you just see what happens, try and move a few,
maybe take it a little bit further.
And again, because of the prevalence of cocaine, seriously,
because of this high prevalence of coke in British reactionary
lad pub guys, I'm pretty certain that the first guy in a fucking Fred Perry polo shirt
who throws a punch is going to have just come out from a bathroom sniffing.
ALICE Yeah, of course.
I mean, that's what all the statue defenders were.
Because there were no, in fact, blue Hamas-supporting statue...
Defacers.
Vandals around, yeah.
They just kind of, like, got pissed, did coke, and kind of got in a fight with the police
for a bit.
They did it again on St. George's Day.
Fantastic.
They love doing it!
You mentioned earlier in November, like, dysfunction, right?
I think, just, flitting back and forth between America and the UK.
In both cases it's like, pushing on a kind of very extreme, very self-harming policy
prescription that a very small number of the elites have decided is the last redoubt.
They can only do this.
Right?
You go back a couple of years and dump Rwanda, the Rwanda plan on people, and they would
have correctly identified it as Nazi shit, and the same conservative MPs who are now
doing it would have been like, oh well, we need to do sensible conservatism, that's like
for our shit, y'know?
M- But the elite dysfunction, you can go even one step further, you can look at institutionally,
right?
Going back to the university nature of the US protest, what happened in the 1990s when
so there was going to be a globalized economy that was going to require basically managers
and no one to do much, everything in the US and the UK became a university.
Every technical college became a university.
There were universities everywhere.
Everyone had a degree all of a sudden.
And this thing that seemed like it was going to be really, really
important for elite reproduction, of some way, turned out, I think, to be much more
important as some combination of real estate investment fund, hedge fund, sports franchise
in some cases, social club.
ALICE We had the perfect bourgeois university in a few cases, because in more than a few universities what they did was they just closed
the campus, so that there were no students, no faculty, and the only people around were
administrators and cops.
In which case the whole thing works frictionlessly, like, it makes its investments, it maybe has
like a kind of frat house next to it, and then no one is troubled by having
to do anything like award degrees.
RILEY It's almost as though they are a new type of
thing that emerged from a larval stage, where for a while they...
Like, it's an organization for training priests that, due to the requirements of the global
market, has slowly turned into a hedge fund with a sports team, basically. The idea that
the hedge fund with the sports team must be defended is it shows how like how
little room there is left for any kind of dissent. I mean you know I think you
wouldn't be wrong to remember like the protests of the 1960s as well before the
university became kind of modern university became what it is against the Vietnam War sort of a huge student movement big government crackdown crackdowns again also by like deputized
Conservative students and student organizations as well. Well, I mean as a Kent State alum
Hmm, it was pretty hard to escape like imagery and and memorials for the students were killed in in May in 1970
And the thing that always killed in May of 1970.
And the thing that always shocked me learning about that was that it pulled well.
The National Guard shooting, which for the record, half the students they killed were not actually even involved.
They were standing in the distance, just kind of like, wow, that's crazy over there.
And then they were dead like 30 seconds later, which I always found just kind of like interesting
that that action
pulled at like 75% two days later of people supporting the National Guard. Nobody ever
gotten any trouble for it. It actually was kind of, you know, I think that killed a lot
of the protest movement because all of a sudden people were dying. And it's something that
like, as I've been seeing imagery of, you know, snipers on rooftops trained at American
students, it's genuinely kind of concerning because it was very much real, like the same thing with Columbia, right? Like they talk about how the Vietnam War protests,
they called in the NYPD and it was a huge mistake and it damaged the university's reputation for
decades and they were in the wrong. And then they're doing it again on like the 54th anniversary of
this, right? Like there's just, there's zero, zero ability to even recognize the exact same things
happening. It's not even like history repeating itself. It's just the exact same thing that they have been talking to their students about the entire time they've
been at school. And they're like, wow, completely oblivious to it.
Look at it from the point of view of empire as well, right?
I'm already depressed enough.
But from the point of view of American empire, you're combating significant internal dissent against an Imperial
outing that you think is worthwhile for your own ends.
In this case...
ALICE And here's the thing, it's a much less defensible
one on that basis.
Not to be like, oh, you should take Empire's side, right, but to take their worldview for
a minute, the Vietnam War, criminal though it was, you can still make the bloodlust Kissinger case
of like, what we're doing here is we're containing communism, and if the blood comes up to my
ankles doing it, fine.
With this, it's like, even by that kind of own imperial logic, it's so much more self-sabotaging
to keep rising Israel a blank check, because the only thing you're doing with it is, like, harming yourself.
Even more obviously.
RILEY Part of me wonders if this is a long-running
Biden plot.
ALICE Comrade Biden.
RILEY To murder real politics as revenge on Kissinger
because he personally hated him.
ALICE I mean...
RILEY That's why I think the opposition seems sort
of so kind of cludged together and ham-handed,
why it's being made on the grounds of, like, people-students' feelings.
Right?
ALICE The thing is, the university is a place where
you should have to experience difficult ideas and the cut and thrust of rigorous debate
as long as you aren't a Zionist.
And in that case you have to be absolutely protected in all of your feelings.
Yes, exactly.
And it feels utterly... an utterly incoherent set of thrashes from a political tendency,
whatever it is, that doesn't seem to have much of a plan left, other than just continue
doing what it is currently doing.
ALICE I genuinely, every time something like this
happens, any time there's a movement, particularly in the US, less so in the UK because it's
more dismal, but like, whether it's now or the summer of 2020, it feels like everything
is half a step from outright collapse.
And you wonder, what does it take for this thing to keep maintaining itself?
At what point is inertia just gonna take over it, y'know?
RILEY Well, not universities, clearly.
ALICE Yeah, apparently not.
ZACH As somebody who lives here, I also have had
many sleepless nights wondering those exact same things.
RILEY Well, I think we probably leave that segment
on that note.
I'd like to talk cars.
ZACH Oh Oh hell yeah.
ALICE I do think that to end the thing we should
say that, like, obviously the kids, and not just kids, but both student occupations and
anti-deportation protests are obviously 100% in the right, and this is something that you
can and should be involved with, even at risk to yourself, if you can manage it.
Absolutely.
So, I wanna talk Tesla.
I've heard of these.
They had their earnings call.
Now, Victoria.
Yes?
Is it good when China invents the exact car you make, but it works and is much cheaper?
Is that a good thing in your car company?
Analyst suggests no.
So, I have another question for you, Victoria.
Is it good where if you make a car that's really expensive, is it good that if you push
down too hard on the accelerator that you die?
This famously has never caused any problems for car companies.
Doing some, like, freakonomics on this, and
being like, it turns out that a lot of American consumers don't like to die. Contra, like
all of the other things we know about them.
ZACH So, this is of course referring to Tesla's
Cy- the Tesla Cybertruck, having to be recalled en masse, because if you push too hard down
in the accelerator, it slips off and then
wedges in a crack in the panelling.
ALICE How do you not test for this?
How do you not know that this might happen ahead of time?
ZACH Look, posts got really long, okay?
And now they're like ten thousand words.
So who has time?
ALICE The sort of quality control person who should
be checking that the accelerator doesn't kill you, is for work being forced
to read a Bill Ackman essay.
STANLEY To be fair also, any automotive journalist
will tell you that first year cars are generally not a great idea to hop in and buy, because
they're always still working out the kinks.
And usually the kinks are like, oh, there's a slightly higher rate of transmission failure
in these first year cars, or the turbos sometimes have oil seals fail. Generally speaking, it's not the car accelerator gets stuck to a hundred
percent full throttle in a 800 horsepower pickup truck that weighs 7,000 pounds and
it flings itself in an elementary school at full speed. But you know, it's difficult.
It's difficult to make cars.
Apparently, yeah.
Yeah. Look, it turns out in 1982 Beirut, the
suicide bomber was just driving an early Cybertruck.
ALICE Yeah, he was driving an early Cybertruck and
trying to charge his Samsung Galaxy tablet.
RILEY Fuck me. So, basically, this is all great.
So last week, Tesla recorded their biggest sales drop in 12 years. Their shares were down 25% before the earnings call because of the Cybertruck and BYD cars.
So, I ask you, what did Elon Musk do on this earnings call?
He riffed.
Oh, of course he did.
Don't forget that, so it's crucial to understand in the US, one of the main reasons that Tesla's
been able to establish itself as such a front runner in the EV space
is because of the supercharger network, right?
Like EV charging in the US is an absolute nightmare.
There is, like I have been getting EVs to test recently.
I had a Kia and then I had a BMW and they're both electric.
And I live in a shitty apartment building in Seattle,
so I have to go find chargers.
90% of the ones I find are either dismantled
for the copper inside of them or they don't work at all.
This is kind of like the distributed charging network.
There's a bunch of different companies that do this.
None of them have been able to keep them working.
The only ones that reliably work,
generally speaking, are Tesla superchargers,
or that's been the case for the past decade,
which have been until about 10 minutes ago
exclusively for Teslas.
So one of the things that, of course, as you know, Victoria, maybe Nova and Hussein, you
don't know, that Elon Musk did is he looked at the importance of the Tesla Supercharger
Network for maintaining a Tesla's market dominance in the US in the face of a wave of possible
cheap imports from China and said, I'm going to
fire everyone who works on this.
Yes.
Oh cool.
And he fired 500 people.
Everybody.
Everybody, the entire division is now liquidated.
Bye bye, superchargers.
That's some like, kind of late stage Austrian king decision making.
To be like...
I have some additional context on, which I think is interesting.
I can't draw any lines here because I like my job, but I can at least point out that
there are dots.
Interestingly, the Biden admin came down pretty hard on Musk last year and said like, hey,
you need to open this up because we're not giving you tax rebates.
We're not giving you infrastructure funding if you keep this relegated
to just Teslas. So Musk said, okay, fine, we'll slowly open up the supercharger network
to other makes and models of EVs. And basically the entire automotive industry overnight adopted
what is now called the North American Charging Standard or NACS, which is the Tesla style
plug. All of they open sourced it, this design, and they said everybody should
use it, they can all use their superchargers. And then as soon as basically every single
car company that sells EVs in America has been like, alright, we'll switch to Nax, he
was like, oh, sorry, I fired all those guys. Which I just think is incredibly humorous
timing.
It's extremely petulant timing.
Yeah. Well, I'm really excited for...
You know, because we've sort of seen this at Twitter, right?
In terms of, you know, the sort of mass firings because everyone at Tesla's gone woke, right?
And so I'm very curious to find out what the pussy in bio but for Tesla's gonna be like.
You know, I'm very excited for the Tesla internal computer system to just be kind of filled with porn bots and
there's no way to even get it to go into vertical, or no way to get it to our horizontal stream.
ALICE Yeah, I can't change gear because the entire
screen on which the gear change is is filled with porn bots. My pussy in first gear. He then fired the entire... I think my pussy's in neutral, to be honest.
He then fired the entire public policy team, which is also an interesting choice to make.
He doesn't like running Tesla for a guy who has made it his entire deal.
I genuinely think buying Twitter has made him one of the most miserable people
on Earth, and I'm really glad about that.
I always remember, right, is that it was, I believe, it was a Tesla report from around
the time after he purchased it, where one of the risks was that Elon, cause you have
to state risks in any sort of forward-looking financial statement. Oh yeah, one of our risks
is that Elon is obsessed with running Twitter, and he won't
leave.
But, he also then fired the entire public policy team before announcing that RoboTaxis
are finally coming.
They've been coming for a while, but they're finally actually coming.
In six months.
Or something.
ALICE Haven't he announced this like five times?
RILEY Yeah, but then when he announced this, the stock
price of Tesla went back up 12.5%.
Old reliable.
I mean, I think the first four times he missed a deadline on full self-driving or on robot
taxis or whatever, would have given me as a sort of canny investor the hint that maybe
he wasn't serious this time, but you never know.
He says, it's like some combination of Airbnb and Uber.
That's right, 2017 tech writing, where stuff is the Airbnb of this or the Uber of that,
or the Tinder of XYZ, is back.
Fully, fully almost just called him a slur.
Um...
Airbnb and Uber, meaning that there'll be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself
and operates in the fleet, and then there'll be a bunch of cars that are owned by the end
user, saying that the fleet would grow to include several tens of millions of vehicles
by the end of the decade.
Also it's like, basically, a friend of ours, Tom Walker, has been doing a stream recently
where he plays Grand Theft Auto, if you don't know, you should check him out, Tom Walker.
It's really funny, yeah.
SEAN Yeah, he plays Grand Theft Auto V, but with
the vehicle speed turned up 5000%.
ALICE Grand Theft Auto IV, fake fan.
SEAN Four.
Excuse me.
Grand Theft Auto IV, but with the vehicle speed turned up to 5000%.
I am suggesting that possibly Elon Musk has seen Tom Walker's stream and has just said, hey, we can make this a reality.
Let's have our impossible to control constantly breaking down, shitty cars that burst into flame when you look at them wrong.
Let's have them whizzing around cities, not all of which are gonna be grids by the way, not all of them are Phoenix, Arizona.
Some of them are Boston, some of them New York, some of them are San Francisco. Anyway, let's have that happening.
It's like a kind of non-warheaded missile barrage.
All the time.
ALICE I mean, this is efficiency, right?
Is that, like, if you are a kind of student protestor now, you don't even have to have
a person run a truck over you.
You can just have, like, a kind of AI, allegedly, do it.
ZACH One thing that grabbed analyst attention
during the call was the status of the Tesla humanoid
robot Optimus.
Sorry, Victoria, I know this isn't technically a car.
Oh, I forget, another fucking bullshit thing he announced as a kind of semi-joke.
We are able to do simple factory tasks in the lab.
I do think we will have Optimus, in limited production in the factory itself, doing useful
tasks by the end of the year, and we may be able to sell sell externally by the end of the next year. This is just a guess." I'm astonished
that the price moved on this, but what do I know.
Yeah, I mean, like, does he have access to some kind of, like, secret horse whisperer
voice for markets? Like, I don't understand why people take anything that he says seriously.
It's all the ketamine.
As I've said before, I think Optimus will be more valuable than everything else combined,
because if you have a sentient humanoid robot-
He says this about every fucking thing!
Every single bullshit idea he has, he says this, and he hands the market a sugar lump,
and he like, whispers something and it's here, and all of these people who are supposed to
be the smart money go, yeah, fuck it, okay, I guess we're doing this now, sentient robots.
RILEY All you need to do is combine Optimus with
a Tesla, and then you've got Knight Rider.
And then Knight Rider can go around being deputized.
ALICE Motherfucker, you said we were gonna go to Mars!
And then we were gonna have full self-driving, and then the Neuralink was gonna let us, I
don't know, post from our brains, like, oh my god.
RILEY Also, I like that he says, a sentient robot.
ALICE Yeah, made sentient now, don't ask how-
RILEY We've solved the hard problem of consciousness.
Turns out it was just Elon Musk calling it sentient.
That is able to navigate reality, and do tasks at request, there is no meaningful limit to
the size of the economy."
ALICE Isn't this the robot that was just a guy in a suit last time we saw it?
ZACH Yes. Interest rates are too high to talk on your earnings call like this.
ZACH Just to check back in, I just wanna like, do you remember the Tesla Semi?
ALICE Yeah, I do.
ZACH Okay. Yeah, they were gonna have, according to Elon Musk in 2018, they were gonna have, according to Elon Musk in like 2018, they were gonna
have 50,000 of them on the road by this year.
Currently Pepsi, one of the only buyers, has 36 of the 100 trucks they ordered in 2017.
It's beautiful.
I mean, listen, they're gonna be able to build those so much faster when they have Ascension
robot.
Exactly. Yeah, I was just curious, I thought I'd check to build those so much faster when they have a sentient robot. Exactly.
Yeah, I was just curious, so I thought I'd check back in, this is a Reuters story from
two weeks ago.
So.
The fact that they're running behind schedule is concerning, said a shareholder advocate
at a firm that owns Pepsi shares.
How do you take fucking Pepsi for a ride like this?
Like, I don't understand it.
He also threw out several other half-baked and entirely impossible ideas, my favorite
of which, and again, like, it is very fun when Elon just riffs on an earnings call,
and then like, the various sea level executives below him have to pretend that they knew what
he was talking about and it's a good and reasonable idea, and this one, he was like, alright,
Amazon Web Services, they have a lot of compute, clustered in different areas, that's then
connected to the internet.
Tesla's, that's a lot of compute as well, clustered variously around the country.
ALICE Oh, Christ.
Okay, yeah, so not only is the fucking gear change full of porn bots, but it's also doing
like the Seti at Home program as well.
Lying cookie clicker on my fucking Model S.
It's also running some other dickheads website.
Yeah, it's, uh, hey, someone's watching Challengers on my Tesla!
My Tesla's streaming Challengers, what the hell?
Every day we get a little bit closer to the Sandra Bullock thriller movie The Net, in
which they hack her car.
Pretty soon you will be able to do this, y'know?
The iPad the gear change lives on is gonna be a huge vulnerability now, cause it's gonna
have a pipe of other people's data coming through it.
They said, there's certainly going to be some hours left for charging and cleaning and maintenance
in the world, but you can do a lot of other workloads, said Tesla's director of autopilot
software. He says basically AI companies have batched workloads and send a bunch
of documents through neural networks and it takes a lot of compute to work through.
Now we've already paid for this compute in the cars.
It might be wise to let them and not let them be buying a lot of expensive
machinery and leaving them idle.
It goes to the same thing where it's like you've made a car with a big computer
in it and now you're like, okay, I guess full self-driving
But if that's impossible because of the way that cities and towns and stuff work, I guess what's the next Amazon Web Services?
But wait data centers buy power at industrial not retail rates and they tend to be in jurisdictions with low power prices
What if we passed all of that cost on to you, the consumer, and now your Tesla that is in
your driveway is also leeching power off you?
What if it's doing fucking Bitcoin mining while it's plugged in and charging?
And by the way, all of it's connected via...
You know how data centers aren't connected via 5G?
You know how they're connected with cables?
What if it all just came from like one, like your house?
What if your house was like one one millionth of a data center?
What if we took all the stuff that makes a data center work and get rid of it?
Yeah, what if we took all the stuff about it that makes other people money and we put
it in your car?
It's actually interesting, because I did a story recently on how, like, the amount of
data that cars have to process to do even
mild self-driving. So there's different levels of autonomy. Level three is the current highest
say, but it's actually attained. That's Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
In Mercedes-Benz drive pilot, which allows you to drive without your hands on the wheel,
without looking at the road at speeds of up to 37 miles an hour on clearly marked highways
when it is sunny outside and not raining and it is stop and go traffic. Clearly, like such limited tiny circumstances. It generates 34
gigabytes of data per minute of driving.
Cool.
Intel has estimated that the average self-driving car when those become a reality, if they ever
do, would generate 4,000 gigs of driving data per day. That is $350,000 a year in server space at current storage
rates.
Just a side truck, but the bed is entirely full of cheap one gigabyte hard drives.
If every car on earth were self-driving, it would require four orders of magnitude more
computing power than every single data center Facebook owns. I've got a roof rack full of SD cards.
As roughly the electrical capacity and output of the country of Argentina.
Basically what we're saying is it's a race as to what will kill you first, the battery
overheating or the hard drives overheating.
Hitting a bump into racing six weeks worth of my driving history habits.
Yeah, it's also because also then the question of course becomes rightly.
These are these companies are incredibly hungry for data and soon there's going to be probably more than they can store.
Victoria, this is a stat that I think you you uncovered, which is that an ordinary
non self driving car generates about 25 gigabytes of data per what? Per hour?
Per hour. Yeah.
Chevy Volt that Washington Post dug into probably seven years ago at this point.
That's probably conservative.
And you know, a full cell, a quote unquote self-driving car generates data not just
about it's about the inside of the car generates data not just about the inside
of the car, but a lot about the outside of the car, the world outside the car.
And again, we also know that when given access to the opportunity to surveil, car companies
are very very excited to do it.
ALICE Yeah, I hope you're prepared for everything
that your car is feeding into itself driving to be tipped into a big bin marked comps.
Hey, but maybe we can use that to teach Optimus, the humanoid robot, how to love.
Yeah, I mean, that's actually a question I have for you, Victoria, when you're done having
a little chuckle.
Sorry, that one just hit me good.
Anyway.
If we generate that much data, like, yeah, there's an enormous amount of power that goes into getting it,
analyzing it, and acting on it. A huge amount of electricity. In your view, how much of
it would realistically be kept by whom and for what reason?
So that's a great question that no one in the industry can really give you a definitive
answer on because there's... At least in the US, right? I'm speaking just about here. We
have very weak data privacy laws.
California's the only one who's got basically anything,
everybody else, it's kind of like,
yeah, do whatever you want.
And it doesn't actually take much.
And I think that's the thing that people forget
is that the assumption is that,
oh, it's tracked me everywhere I go.
We can identify people.
And there was a study in 2013
that was published in Nature
that showed that if you have
four spatiotemporal data points, so GPS coordinate and a timestamp within a data set, you can uniquely
identify about 95% of people. So it takes a tiny amount of data about where you've been and when
you were there to actually put together the dots and say, okay, this is this person. And there's
not really all of that data,
all of the information that your car is collecting
about you, where you've been, how fast you were going,
how hard you braked, when you leave,
what times you commute to work,
when you go to the grocery store,
if you're speeding on the highway at night,
that all becomes significantly less valuable
if you anonymize it.
So even if you tried to data scrub it,
then it becomes worth a lot less money.
And so with the rules in place to stop you from distributing really uniquely identifiable
data, no one's gonna do it.
RILEY And a lot of the places that that data seems
to go, sort of going from self-driving cars to cars as they currently are, a lot of that
data seems to go to insurance companies at the moment, and law enforcement, essentially.
ALICE Yeah.
And the two people can most easily make use of it, right?
RILEY And my understanding, there's this New York
Times article that came out recently that opens about a guy, they must have realized
this when they wrote it, named Ken Dahl.
Um, Ken Dahl, who, again, is surprised by his car insurance, because it um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, Ken Doll found his insurance premiums jumping, and the reason why is that his car collected
a huge amount of information from him, that they then transmit that information to Lexis
Nexus, a data broker, erstwhile legal search repository.
ALICE Yeah, I was gonna say, the search engine you
use in law school, why is that now doing Minority Report shit on Barbie's
husband?
Like, what?
Well, don't worry about it.
I kind of am worrying about it, I remember using Lexus Nexus, when did it get into the
Minority Report business?
When it was bought by a company called Rolex, I believe.
This would've been right after they fired all their legal stuff, right?
Like...
ZACH I don't know.
But...
ALICE It's cool how like, these companies work, I think.
ZACH But, so LexusNexus, as far as I understand
it, Victoria, please correct me if I'm wrong, is the car company collects a huge amount
of information.
They can collect information not just about your driving, but about your political beliefs,
your immigration status. They can collect information about just about your driving, but about your political beliefs, your immigration status.
They can collect information about your sexual orientation.
ALICE Just whatever, like, you know, the number of
people in the car and their gender, who has the orcs at what time, who was playing boy
genius, transgender, identity, predator drone, espatched.
RILEY Also, they can disclose your sexual orientation, sexual activity, again, immigration status.
ALICE Sexual activity?
If this car is rocking, you will be reported to the fucking authorities.
RILEY If this car is rocking, then you can expect
to pay 5% more on your premiums next year.
So then that information goes from the car to the car company to the data broker.
The data broker then creates a report based on that all that information from that car company
and then a number of other factors like if you drive another car for example would all go into
the same report and then in your agreement with your insurance company when you apply for insurance
they're allowed to pull any third party report that they want on you to make a risk-based decision.
ALICE Can I just say how funny it is that particularly
in the UK, car insurance is rapidly becoming, like, unaffordable to normal people for normal
cars, despite the fact that the insurance industry apparently has access to the fucking
panopticon.
Like, genuinely, we're in such
a state of societal fraying, that your insurer is like, oh sorry, your car is like, your
regular-ass normal car is uninsurable, unless you surround it with kind of landmines. But
by the way, we do know everything about you now.
RILEY So, what they said, by the way, was, uh, Lexus
Nexus to analyze that driving data to create a risk score. And this is a quote from the New York Times for insurers to
use as one factor of many to create personalized insurance coverage.
I love that. This is the Lexus Nexus spokesman, Dean Carney,
said this from the top of the Ferris wheel.
He said, he said this while smoking a cigarette he picked up from the ground.
And so that appears to be the structure, right?
You get a personalized risk score.
Is that about the size of it, Victoria?
Yeah, I mean, I think that basically I did a story about this a while ago
where I reached out to a bunch of car companies and most of them didn't even
really know what they were collecting.
Some of them are partnered with companies that do traffic analysis
and so that's kind of like a less evil use of this to be like, oh, you know, if we added another
lane here, we could reduce traffic at 5 p.m. in Houston, Texas or whatever. But a lot of it is,
you know, here we've got a giant vat of data about where all of our customers have driven and how
they've used their cars. And if a police, if a, you know, police office calls us up and it's like,
hey, we think this car was used in a crime, they'll be like, oh sure.
Yeah, here you go. There are a few, you know, Kia specifically was like,
we won't share any location data unless we're shown a warrant.
Others were a lot more mealy mouthed about it, but that's, you know,
that's pretty much the size of it.
It's like this data can be used for basically anything and it can go from your
insurance rates go up. This started as all voluntary collection stuff. There was
there were a lot of car insurance companies in the US that started selling these little
OBD-II port things you'd put in. It would give you a discount on your car insurance
if it determined you were safe. And of course with that invasion of privacy, they were like,
well, we could just do this further and just like kind of sneak it in with a bunch of other
stuff that you hit accept on so you can drive the car.
It's like let's get rid of the discount element of that and just make it mandatory. Yes. What if we flipped it?
Yeah, and you say right this is started as voluntary now
it's either you get it through terms and conditions that you know don't understand when you like accept because as you say you don't
accept them you can't drive the car or it's's through, again, and this is so insulting,
gamified apps that are just like, oh, hey, you're a seatbelt superhero or whatever. You get a little badge on your phone and in exchange, the insurance company knows if you get
roadhead, basically. Yeah. Well, and I mean, they know if you start putting this together with other
information, it's like, oh, this person looked up abortion legality in their state and then drove to a state, bordering
state where it was legal and their car told us about it.
We could subpoena that in a court case and then all of a sudden, here, your car's just
snitched on you and now you're going to prison forever because you'd gotten abortion if you
lived in a repressive state like, I don't know, Idaho or something.
Although it's not just in the states as well. Europe has quite strong data
protection but it's very very weakly enforced and so a lot of these cars are
also just collecting all that information also in Europe.
That's my fault because I keep hitting accept when they ask me about the cookies.
Sorry. We talked about this one company, Blue Sky, a few episodes ago
that's like is a thing that you can that can look at you and diagnose a mental health condition, apparently.
But also it has Blue Sky Automotive, where they are creating CCTV-
I get in my car, turn the keys, and it's like, you are bipolar.
Yeah!
Kind of.
But it would also, conceivably, under these same kinds of regimes, tell your insurance
company, oh yeah, November turned on the car while bipolar, she's no longer a good risk,
we can no longer write her, brick the machine, brick the car.
ALICE I think I already brick the car every time
I get into it.
JUSTIN Come on!
How else I guess my question is, it seems, this is sort of back to Victoria, that there
is this profusion of ways that car companies trick people into getting involved.
It's like it doesn't have to always be legislated.
Like the EU legislates this like cameras for safety, right?
Or quote unquote safety.
But like when you look at the American car companies, it's either sometimes it's an app, sometimes it's terms and conditions, sometimes it's nothing.
Sometimes you turn off OnStar and it just stays
on anyways, snitching to the insurance company. Yeah. It just seems like there is nothing they
won't try to get to just get all this information from you. There's just no laws to stop them. And
it's a ton of money. I mean, you know, it's not if you look at the New York Times article, I think
GM had said they made, you know, single millions of dollars. So it's not a lot at this point. But
if you look at one of the vehicles, I think was very fascinating that I did a first drive for
recently was I drove Chevy's Blazer EV. This is their basically mass market introduction to
the Ultium platform, which is their electric car underpinnings for sort of the rest of the 21st
century. And in that car, they got rid of Apple CarPlay entirely.
Then they said, you have to use our Android-based Google system. They have Google built in,
which does a couple of things for them, right? They give you eight free years, but then after
that to have a navigation system to have your car work at all, you need to pay them a subscription
fee. So you lock people into eternally paying for features. This is not relegated to solely
infotainment systems.
If you look at Mercedes Benz, they are currently charging subscriptions or several thousand
dollar unlock fees to get faster acceleration out of your EQ series EVs because they can
pay while that Tesla actually began this a while ago.
They would sell cars and had bigger battery packs and then lock down that functionality
until you paid for a long range extension.
RILEY I was gonna say, this is...
ALICE My car DLC.
RILEY Basically, like, the main thing Elon Musk actually
invented, which again, it's great business, is locking down bits of the car and making
you subscribe to get the whole thing.
That's the real innovation.
ALICE I wasn't expecting that one of the actual consumer rights causes of our time would be
embodied by losing to Bethesda on the horse armor DLC for the Elder Scrolls Oblivion.
ZACH LAUGHS
ZACH Yeah, but I mean, the Blazer review was interesting,
because also what that does is, now Google is locked into your car.
Now Google gets access to a shocking amount of your driving data as well.
So it's not just GM that has it.
It's Google that's got it.
They can tie that into your greater Google profile.
And then, you know, Maps is already tracking over where you go.
Now it's like, oh, they park their car here.
They drive, they drove through a Planned Parenthood
a week after they went to a strip club.
I don't know.
You start to put together incredibly detailed profiles
on people, and this seems to be the way
that people are moving just because it is lucrative.
I mean, I don't even think it's a nanny,
state, big brother thing at its core.
I think it's just money.
Like, there's not that many more places,
especially with EVs, right? Because the whole main pitch of EVs to consumers was you have
fewer moving parts and you will need to be at the shop less often. You never get oil
changes. You use your brakes a lot less. The only thing you really need to get a bunch
of still is tires. And so you look at how car dealerships work in America and they are
primarily maintenance,
that's where they make the majority of their money, usually, rather than sales.
And so...
ALICE They created a whole class of American landed gentry off of this, we've talked about
this with Patrick Wyman.
ZACH Yeah, and so, you know, you have to figure
out ways to induce recurring revenue streams.
ALICE Yeah, if you don't have that, the dealership
owner's son isn't gonna be able to storm the capital. ZACH Exactly! ALICE At January 6th, too. ZACH January 12th, if you will. ALICE Yeah, if you don't have that, the dealership owner's son isn't gonna be able to storm the capital.
ZACH Exactly!
ALICE January 6th, too.
ZACH January 12th, if you will.
ALICE Yeah.
ZACH But, like, that... I think that, if you look
at it from that perspective, it's just like, these... it's just a byproduct of locking
down more of the experience so that you can control more of the car longer down the road
and continue to profit off of it.
It's just subscription model automobiles.
BMW did a thing where they locked down heated seats, you had to pay a subscription fee for
it.
And I thought that people were going to storm their headquarters.
They were furious.
It's not widely liked, but it seems to be seeping into all corners of the industry.
It's all horse armor, top to bottom. ZACH It's the, the model really, is the model that we've seen over and over again expand
everywhere it can, which is, make something worse whilst spying on you, to create new
revenue streams by either chopping up old ones into newer ones, and then giving you
the same product but piecemeal and for a larger amount of money. Well, at the same time, you know, selling pictures of your ass to like,
whoever will buy it, to LexisNexis. Anyway,
I think that's probably all the time we have for today, but Victoria,
I want to thank you for once again, coming on the show.
Of course. It's my pleasure. I hope that it was useful to hear about.
Yeah.
This industry.
Absolutely. Plug the book.
Yes. Oh, yeah.
Book, book.
I wrote a book recently.
It is coming out at the end of this month.
It is called We Deserve This.
It is a trans femme fashion lookbook with an automotive theme.
I have worked two and a half years on it.
I'm very excited.
It's like loosely car themed.
It's mostly about like trans pride.
Yes. And it's really good.
So do check out that book.
Also, it is Thursday, which means this is the free episode,
which means I have to remind you that there is a live show
to Between the Bridges in London.
We have Nish Kumar coming on.
We are gonna be reading the Liz Truss book,
10 Years to Save the West.
And because it's a month away,
we now only have nine years and 11 months to save the West, so we really need to get going.
As well, there is, of course, Left On Red, there's Britnology, there's a $10 tier of
both of those.
November and I were thinking about reading a not Aubrey Maturin book for this upcoming
month, $10 Left On Red, and then decided to read-
I lost it for like, a day.
A full day, and then you called me and you're like, I don't wanna read this shit,
can we read another Aubrey Maturin book?
Yes.
Yes we can.
HMS Surprise is coming as the next bonus episode.
Yes, that's right.
And also, there's the bonus episode, you know all about it, $5 a month, you get a second
one of these every week.
However, I am told that some of you think that the bonus
episode this week is going to be the 2023 Direct-to-Netflix Kevin Hart Vehicle Lift.
And I'm gonna tell you-
Do people not fucking listen? We told you a number of times that we were never going
to talk about the Kevin Hart Direct-to-Netflix Vehicle Lift.
So you know what- And if our word isn't good enough for you.
Yeah.
So, just fucking stop it, alright?
It's not happening!
I'm gonna be very clear about this, alright, you are in trouble, right?
Yeah, you should trust us, because there's no one more trustworthy than a podcaster.
Absolutely.
Especially not this week.
Would we lift your trust like that?
We would not. Okay, alright, alright, alright. Thank you very much again to Victoria. Bye not this week. Would we lift your trust like that? We would not.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
All right.
Thank you very much again to Victoria.
Bye everybody.
Bye.