Building an autonomous car utopia with Rivian's RJ Scaringe

The stores you guys have are very nice. I just went to the one in Pasadena. They're all very nice. Somebody drove through the Pasadena one. Like a car wrecked through the front glass, yeah. Isn't that wild? Was it a Tesla? No, I don't even know what kind of car it was. Is the future of driving really going to be fully autonomous? This week on Access, we've got RJ Scarrange, the CEO of Rivian. We talk about EV range anxiety, what large driving models actually mean, the importance of car design, and why some people just want their cars to be all black, me included. First, though, Ellison, I talk about what Meta's big metaverse layoff signal and how anthropic is shaking things up in the AI world with the release of clawed coer. Here we go. Ellison, how's it going, man? You recovered from CES? Yeah, you know, as it turns out, I think maybe I wasn't as well as I thought I was to do the interview last week. I was listening on the car ride to work today, and I was like, man, I sound so nasally, even with the Zbiotics, the running theme of the show, I felt okay. But my voice just sounded different, and I feel like yours has two. Oh, it sounded horrible. When you have drink before a recording, which is obviously ill-advised, but we're also trying to be podcast rock stars. So, you know, a couple drinks at the Google Mixer, you got to do that. Not going to bed early in Vegas. You know, when I was first thinking about doing this show with you, I was thinking about how much I used to love Dignation when they would just get trash and do Dignation. Did you ever watch that? Back in the day? No. Kevin Rose and Alex Alderman. I watched Kevin Rose on Tech TV, though. Yeah, that's Tech TV, fanboy. My in-state of this pod is we are in some really cool in-person studio at like 5 p.m. on a Thursday or Friday with a few brusquies or a mess cows. That's like, we've got to get to that point. If our bodies can survive it. Maskel and the Growny is my move. I mean, I'm definitely funnier, but also a lot more likely to cancel myself. I've been getting some good feedback on IRL Ellis, and you brought the heat last week. Is that so? It's almost as if as my job, I charm founders. I like them. I mean, I feel like in some other world, I think of myself in a similar vein as someone who has a lot of interests, tries to bring them together to make great products and help people receive them the right way. I mean, obviously, I don't make software, but I feel like I have a lot in common with them. I definitely don't think I'm as crazy or driven as they are. But I feel like I get them. I get them. Yeah. Well, before we get too far in the episode, we usually do this at the end, but I just wanted to remind everyone that leaving a review, giving us five stars, thumbs up on YouTube, subscribing on YouTube, really matters a lot for a new show like this. We're actually going to be doing an audience survey in the coming weeks as well. So stay tuned for that. This is to help us make money. It's also to help us have good, high quality advertising on the show. It feels true to what we want to do and what we think the audience will care about. So anyway, yeah, it's been really amazing to get some of the early feedback we've gotten on the show and how people are enjoying it and it's already becoming part of people's weekly media diet, which is awesome. But yeah, again, just if you have a second, leave a review, we'll be amazing. And then yeah, we've got RJ, the CEO of Rivian on the show in a little bit, who is the most carcance-looking tech CEO I have ever seen? Yeah, it's pretty impressive what he's done, especially starting it as long ago as he did. I mean, as you hear on the show, I come from Detroit and there have just been so many fake outs with like new startup car companies over the years that always show some interesting new design that kind of looks like a concept car, but it's actually going to be real. It's going to be more tech-centric. I mean, I hate to say, you know, you have to give Tesla credit for being the one to do that first, but yeah, people seem to love their Rivian cars. I saw that they're like number one in owner satisfaction three years in a row, just ahead of BMW, Subaru, and Tesla. So they built something really impressive. Yeah, I can say that as a car guy. Yeah, before we get into that Convo, I am headed to Paris tomorrow for a few days. I'm actually going to see our buddy Anton Martin from Omo, one of your former clients, I believe, who I would say is considered a kind of God tier French consumer product guy. If there are any other tech companies in Paris, I should see people please send them away, but yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I've been in Paris in a minute. And then I'll be in Switzerland the following week for Davos, which is going to be very interesting. And I can't wait to record a podcast with you at like midnight. You just gravitate to power, don't you? I do. Wherever it flows. Yeah. No, I'm doing some live interviews there. Got a lot of great people, Demes from Google, the co-founder of Reflection AI, which I think people will be hearing a lot about, but that's going to be in the sources news letter all next week. So please check that out if you're curious sources.News. But yeah, otherwise, what's what's what's on the doc at this week? First, I want to say, I feel like that is the only circumstance where a fireside chat, as they say, is actually warranted. Oh, yeah. Like a cozy cabin in Davos. Oh, yeah. It can be banned in all other situations, South by and beyond. Yeah. Let's keep it to the cabin's folks. That's the thing about Davos. I've found out is because it's such a small little ski town where, you know, it becomes, you know, the Illuminati IRL, you know, once a year in January and Trump is going this year. So it's going to be even crazier. But apparently, to even have your own hotel room at all is considered like you need to be you need to be ahead of state or like Jensen Wong. I am going to be shacking up with with some other folks. And apparently that's just like, it's interesting to see the packing order and how it translates to such an insular small environment in the mountains in Switzerland. Okay. So I'm picturing it. You're going to you're going to wait in line to go up to Trump. And you're going to have say, Mr. Trump, I have, sorry, Mr. Trump, I have two questions for you. One, what's on your home screen? Two, Claude or chat GPT? What do you personally use? I will not be talking to Trump, but good questions. I guess just like two news items we wanted to touch on before you get into this combo with RJ. We had Alex Himmel for Metta on the pod last week, the head of wearables. And then this week, Metta laid off 10% of employees and reality labs, which is Himmel's group. But it's the metaverse side of the house, the meta side of the house, not Himmel's side, which is glasses, wearables, present, but connected, which I think just signals the shift that they're making to this form factor and not to pat ourselves on the back. But I think caring for Alex is important going to this year because he is definitely one of the most influential and increasingly so people in the space. And I think this move kind of signals that. I don't know, what did you make of it? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's not very many people, but you just kind of don't see it happening. Oh, it is. Oh, geez. They have a shit ton of people in reality labs. It's like 10,000 people. A lot of people keeping it real over there in reality labs. Okay, well, strike that comment. In any event, yeah, I mean, I wanted to ask him last week. We didn't, we didn't get around to it, because we were having fun talking about other things. But it's kind of a funny situation, isn't it? I mean, it's not like meta was positioned per se as a holding company, the way that something like snapping was or proctor and gamble. It's one of those situations where meta is the name on the internet. Hold on, hold on. You can't, I don't, you can't say snap as a holding company. You mean just because of its fact that snapping wasn't a consumer facing company or wasn't supposed to be. All right. Yeah, anyway, let's, let's say alphabet. Let's say alphabet. Meta is not alphabet. It's intended to be a consumer facing company. And the reason you ostensibly change the name is to try and, you know, shed some of the baggage and show the world your new focus, have a new brand to put on the Oculus headsets and the AR headsets. But the name, I mean, it probably doesn't matter because I think most people probably don't know it had anything to do with the metaverse anyway. But it's, it is pretty interesting kind of ironic, you know, to rename your, your world's fastest growing company after something that is so quickly out of fashion, right? Yeah, I mean, the quests that the VR headset stuff is just not working. They're really scaling back all that stuff. Meanwhile, I saw a story that they're trying to double capacity for the glasses with Elisor Laxatica, who's the partner that makes the ray bands and all the, the Oakleys and all of those with them to 20 million units this year up from 10 million. So at the same time, they're seeing this huge inflection with interest in these glasses, which we, again, we talked about all last week with him. We'll check that out if you haven't watched it already. The metaverse side of the house, which, you know, I just, it's just not a thing. I mean, like, you even see this with division pro. I mean, it's just the whole category has floundered for a decade and sure it may have caught on with more niche groups, gamers, team boys, you know, but like, it's, it's just not a thing that these companies hope that would be. And I think meta in particular is realizing that they need to shift towards growth is. Yeah, I mean, and I'm bullish on VR long term. I think as people in tech, everybody wants to be ahead of who's ahead of who's ahead. And that's why we had Google Glass as a little, you know, glass cube on your eyeball 10 years ago. How early that was. I'm bullish on VR eventually, especially once it gets smaller, more immersive. But what I'm not certain of at all is that anybody is ever going to call it the metaverse. I mean, we ask this of, you know, when we had Dave on from Roblox is like, this is, you know, effectively the world's biggest metaverse where people are moving goods and characters and identities between all these different experiences and this and that. And he didn't answer it directly. But yeah, it's interesting to place such a bet like that on a word. And I mean, I get it like half the companies I work with are trying to own a term or coin a new term, something like vibe coding or 10X engineer. That's the ultimate, the ultimate thing I feel like for somebody in tech is to attempt to coin a term. But yeah, I'm not sure how well metaverse worked out. The other big thing this week is clawed. Thanks for that charity laugh. That's true. I mean, if someone who cares too much about words, sorry. It's okay. It's your business. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Speaking of words, how do you feel about clawed co-work? It's a good name, right? Yeah, it's been popping off in my feeds. I mean, people are using it essentially to clean up their downloads folder, I think is the number one use case for clawed code, which is like able to agentically work on your computer and inside Chrome, clearly inevitable this kind of stuff, whether it's agentic in the browser or on your computer, I guess it just has access to files. I mean, I don't know about you. I don't work with too many files these days. So it's a bit less interesting to me. Maybe I just haven't seen the right tweet yet. I think files are a part of it. L-O-M on your machine with file system access is very interesting, especially if it's clawed. But I think the real thing here is this is extending the magic of clawed code, which is obviously totally enraptured. The engineering class and Silicon Valley and I think for a lot of people is AGI. It's just like what clawed code can do to normies who have no idea how coding languages work or even the basic building blocks that you need to even operate something like clawed code. So this is basically cloud code for normies, which they release this week for cloud max subscribers. So this is the higher tier subscription. I assume it's pretty expensive to run this. But it's actually seems like a pretty open ended system in the same way that clawed code is. And I don't know. I've just been seeing like people saying this is as big a deal as the original release of chat GPT that, you know, this is really going to change how a lot of people that are already on the frontier of AI, which I would consider if you're listening to a show like this, you probably are going to get work done. And to me, it signals how anthropic is just so singularly focused on this use case, which is tool use, empowering people in the productivity sense and really going for the, you know, not only just mass enterprise, but the prosumer, quote, unquote, thinking persons AI. Meanwhile, you know, open AI bought torch this healthcare app this week, open AI is going for this mass market, Kleenex for AI and AI for normies market. And you really see the two strategies diverging and going at what they're going at when you see releases like this. And I don't know. Anthropic just is cooking with gas. I mean, if you had told me that anthropic was outshipping open AI on product in January, 2026, you know, just a year ago, I wouldn't have believed you. Yeah. It's also going back to the word choice, pretty specific term they chose to use to brand this thing, Claude co-work. Yeah. And that's pretty different from the others, right? Co-work versus co-pilot versus agent as the term, de jour that everybody seems to be using. It seems like they've built a nice branded texture around this kind of thoughtful style of working that is helping you as opposed to replacing you. So I did appreciate that. Yeah. I just, I may switch to Claude, man. I, you know, open AI and chat has so much of my memory and my context. I mean, we were a couple episodes ago going through like our year wrapped, you know, in chat GPT and it just knows so much about me. But at the same time, I'm increasingly frustrated by the responses it gives, the way it structures things. And then when you use Claude and you use like the newest version of the opus, for example, like it's just so much better. And I'm thinking of just porting over, you know, as much as I can of the context that chat has on me and paying it into Claude. Well, just I'm going to try reverse engineering it and saying, like, tell me everything you know about me, creating a master file and then like some of the key things that I've been putting in on my side on the prompt side. And then just uploading that to Claude and like, oh my God, that's genius, Salis. I mean, you know, that's like natural language file export. I mean, that's been like one of the biggest problems in tech for the last 20 years is that it's like impossible to export or import anything between services, which locks people in. Yeah. Maybe that's a lot of chat.ypt. Hey, I'm breaking up with you. At least for a while, we need a break. Can you give me everything I need to tell Claude in order to get it up to speed on all of my quirks and in favorite writing motifs? Yeah. And you will know, and I think they are still in a code red, but you will know when open AI is really in trouble when they block your ability to get that information out of chat.ypt. Because that is the lock in when all these models are just rapidly progressing and competing with each other. And to be honest, like on the model until you side Anthropic seems to be kicking everyone's ass. It really creates a scary predicament for for chat.ypt. Even though like most people use it, it is again, it's Kleenex AI for most people where the real kind of use, use heavy use comes from, which is like the early adopter crowd, the pro summer. Anthropics really, really doing it, man. I don't know. Do the congressman from West Virginia, Mr. Altman, why aren't you allowing users to export open is literally in your name. I mean, I feel like that's, it's going to be dangerous for them to do that or prevent that. I mean, I feel like historically companies Apple included have made it very hard to export and they've just been able to chalk it up to like, oh, I haven't built that feature yet. I mean, most apps don't have a file export tool. And I don't think it's always, you know, trying to retain your mode. I think it's just like one more thing to build, not a high priority, but if it's actively preventing it from being able to create a portable version of your data or of your identity, I feel like that's a different story and a lot less defensible from a, you know, competition point of view. There's got to be a polymarket on will there be a Senate hearing about AI memory and we should place our bets. There we go or excuse me, a call sheet shout out to Rick. Well, with that, we should probably get to RJ, right? Let's kick it over to ladies and gentlemen, start your engines or wait, can you say that with EV's? Sorry, I had to start your batteries. Press your on buttons. It doesn't require to sound the same. Alright, here we go. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. For a result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. Ready to make anything online make sense? -Hey guys, how's it going? -It's been a minute. I think the last time we saw each other, it was a green room at code like two or three years ago. -Oh wow, yeah, it's been a while. -Do you remember Alex? Or is this just formality just hopped on the podcast? -It's fine. -No, I remember him, yeah. -Tell us his favorite color. -His favorite color? -It's blue. -Black, that's not a color though. -Black's your favorite color? -Look, it's been a rough-- -They're going to kick you out of LA, Alex. -They're going to deport you. -Thanks for doing this, RJ. -Yeah, of course. It's fun to do it. -Yeah, speaking of colors, I saw this chart yesterday sourced from one of those home paint companies that showed the transition of interior paint colors in homes from like beautiful, like knives-out mansion-style reds and greens toward like everything kind of matte and sand, whether it is the millennial gray kitchen or some cars. Have you seen that as well in auto industry? -Like going to softer colors? -Just I guess a bit more conservative take on like, I don't know. Maybe it's on the one hand more naturalistic on the other more blah in some people's minds, or is it cyclical? -Yeah, I think colors move around so much. And I think though in general, we do see like the vast majority of customers always like the gray silvers and whites, and in tears it's like light, like on white or light, light, light, like gray or black color. We've done some interesting colors in both the-- we did a green interior, which is amazing, but the take rate was quite low. -Really? -Yeah. -You think that would be well-received, considering-- -No, no, it was well-received. It's just even people who liked it are like, yeah, that's awesome. I love it. It's so cool and eclectic, but I'm going to go with the black. -What is the Rivian color? Is it yellow? Do you guys have a standard color? -Standard? No, we don't have-- we have like a brand color. We call it Compass Yellow. It's a color of-- you can see it on like on our logo on the sides of the-- of the emblem. There's a little yellow, like accent. That's our Compass Yellow. -Yeah, I was thinking about y'all the other day. I was down in San Diego for a minute, drove by the shop, and then over Thanksgiving I was up at the Peterson Autumn Museum, and got to see the OG Blade Runner spinner, which was pretty sick. I did not get to see the fifth element, a cab or Johnny cab from Total Recall, unfortunately. Have you been to that museum recently here in Illinois? -No, not recently. So what's there right now? A whole bunch of things. I guess it rotates if you really want to see it all. You have to pay to upgrade to the vault, you know, to see the whole whole Jay Leno collection or whatever there is down there. But yeah, it's just making me wonder. I mean, I guess the car designs themselves are so cyclical as well. And I'm from Detroit, so I feel like I'm heavily steeped in concept cars and auto shows. Were there any like old designs that really inspired you guys? -I mean, for me, personally, I've always been inspired by a lot of it, really, Porsche stuff. It's like I grew up loving that. But it didn't really inspire Rivian. It inspired me to love cars, but it didn't inspire me in terms of the form factors of what we ultimately built. I think for us, we found a lot of, like a lot of our inspiration was around wanting to find these balances of things that you don't typically find together. There's just something that's really capable, but also approachable and friendly. You know, it's probably manifesting most clearly in the way we approach the headlight graphics on the car. So to look at the front of our R1S with a quad motor, it has over a thousand horsepower, it can out accelerate any Porsche or any Ferrari, but it looks really nice. It looks really like friendly. You know, in a lot of vehicles that have that kind of performance typically, they start to look like they're like really angry or pissed off. And we always subscribe to the idea that you can simultaneously be really powerful and really capable as a vehicle, but have an approachable look. Yeah, I think it's just endlessly fascinating how cars have faces and give off vibes. Maybe you've seen that old Volkswagen commercial about people who look like their cars and whatnot, but am I like a mega sci-fi nerd? Or have you heard of the designer Sidmead, the concert artist? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I know him. God bless. Okay, I'm so happy we could talk about Sidmead on the call. I think one of the things I love about him and you know, for those who aren't familiar, I mean, Blade Runner is definitely on the dystopian side, but I feel like he's more associated with future utopia, whether it's like the world of mass effect or some of the things you might have seen in like the above space colony of Elysium or otherwise. I love that he's representing. I mean, you don't see this a whole lot in tech where we tend to go straight to the evil dystopia, but maybe in cars, you could portray more of that beautiful bright future. I mean, is that a factor at all or at least staying away from stuff that might can note the wrong ideas? I mean, even with how you portray the autonomous stuff? I mean, it comes back to your question on color. Design language, color, material choices all have, you know, they have it, they reflect a certain tonality and what we find is the design language and design decisions that speak to something that's more calming or more approachable is more consistent with certainly what we want as a brand, but I think culturally and from a societal point of view, a lot of people are drawn to that. Something that feels timeless, it's not too aggressive, not trying too hard. Yeah, and I think as you go like the other end of the spectrum, if you go like very dystopian, it sends a signal about maybe how you see yourself or how you see the world. I mean, clearly a lot of people want to look evil. I feel like whether it's with the black Mercedes Darth Vader helmet look or the Cybertruck's entire vibe in general. Yeah, so this is interesting. So I will tell you guys something that's not that well known, but Rivian offers a black color. Oh, you never see that out. Well, I'm sorry, Alex, but this is the truth. So it sells fairly well. It's not the most popular of our colors, but I've tried since the early days to discontinue that color. And ultimately, keep arriving back at not doing it because there's enough people that want a black SUV. And the reason for it is not that I don't like the color black, it's just that the a black car, especially a black car with black wheels and blacked out trim has a certain tonality that's inconsistent with how we want to feel as a brand. It feels too mean. So we've we still have black a black color, but it's despite my best efforts. And like I had a design and I have this debate all the time. So I was, if you actually go look at our black, I was like, when I agreed to do a black color, it's actually black with some soul. So if you look up close, it's got like a beautiful, bluish, purplish flake in it. And so in the sunlight, it has more depth versus like a pure, like pure black black. So RJ, you're talking to someone who just convinced his wife to get a murdered out XC 90, 2026. They actually brought the black trim to the U.S. for the first time for this model. It was in Europe for a while only. So it looks almost like a Range Rover. And it was our compromise because I wanted a Range Rover. She thought it was, she didn't like it. She wanted the safety stuff with Volvo. And so I was like, okay, the concession is you let me get the murdered out version. So our head of sales, who's who's just an amazing, he's a friend and he's amazing leader within the business. He has black and black. And he has in a matte finish. And it actually looks really awesome. I do agree. It looks super cool. But anytime I'm around him and he shows up at the car. I know you don't like this color. I'm like, no, Gary, I love the color. I just think the tonality is a little, you know, a little edgy. But it's, it's like an internal joke. We talk about this all the time. Colors, colors are such a funny thing. You could go too far. I mean, in the Tesla direction, which like sometimes when I think of Tesla, I think of like Death Star, or like when you look at how they do their events, it's like very leaning into the Blade Runner stuff. Yeah. And I think it's actually, it's a good thing that there's brand diversity. The Tesla brand and the Caribbean brand are so different and manifest so differently across every aspect, whether it's our retail locations, the events we run, the way our products look, you know, design choices to make. And it's good because some customers are going to want that that look. Some customers want our look and the world needs to have some choice. It's clear. You're mindful of the consumer sentiment. And as I'm sure you've read in the headlines, you know, there's so much hesitation and skepticism, essentially, especially across the broader culture of AI and autonomous. How do you think about that as you, as you bring that to market now? I assume you want to do it a little bit differently than the others. I think it's perhaps the, the biggest technology driven societal change we're going to experience, certainly in our generation, but probably in, you know, in the fullness of history, it'll be like a seminal moment in human history. And so, in fact, I'd say there's two, like very unique moments in history that are happening in our life. And this, you know, in our generation, which is the first is the end of the fossil fuel era. And so if you imagine history books a thousand years from now, two thousand years from now, they're going to say humans lived a certain way for tens of thousands of years meaning we couldn't travel long this year. we could only talk to people who are staying next to, we could only eat the things we could gather locally, to suddenly living the way we lived today. And that was built on fossil fuels, and that happened over the last 150 years. And those fossil fuels also had dire effects in the planet. And we switched off those between your 2000 and your 2,100. And that's like where we're alive right now. So that's going to happen in the course of our lifetime. And that's a huge shift. And so that alone is a big deal. And then to say simultaneously, and by coincidence, as that was happening, this other inflection point, which is we created artificial intelligence. And we're like, if this is a 1000 step journey, we're on step two. This is like AI as we define it today is three, maybe four years old. So it's so early. And we've only seen it really manifest at scale through written word images and videos. The existence of AI in the physical world is in the very early stages. And I think one of the first large scale deployments are embodiments of physical AI is going to be autonomous vehicles. And by the way, autonomous vehicles up until 2021, 2022, were not actually built with AI. These were like rules-based planners. These were human described code. These were-- this is not to say they weren't doing-- machines weren't doing things that humans do, but it wasn't doing it through AI's. I think about AI in terms of building a model or a neural net to describe how or to control how vehicles being operated. And so the whole massive shift that we've seen over the last couple of years of AI now completely shifting how we look at designing and building self-driving systems is like we're in the early days. And so I'm super bullish on how fast this is going to roll out. The way I say this all the time is the next three to five years for autonomy are going to look so absolutely different in terms of rate of progress than the last three to five years in terms of autonomy. Like orders plural of magnitude difference in terms of the rate of progress. And we're seeing this firsthand with our own products, just because of some of these big innovations, like transformer-based encoding, which didn't exist, like five years ago. So there's just like a very different playing field. So with that said, I think autonomy is going to be-- like it's going to become as critical to buying a vehicle as having tires in the vehicle. Like the idea of buying a car without the ability to drop your kids at school or drop you at the airport or run to the grocery store and pick up an order. Like the utility of the product will be so much lower that people will be like, why would I want to buy that old thing? It would be like buying a phone that doesn't have Wi-Fi connectivity or the ability to check your email. And so for purely nostalgic reasons, you'll see vehicles that don't have autonomy, but otherwise the vast majority of the mass market will want to have it. And I think that's not 20 years away. It's not 10 years away. I think that's happening in the next three to five years. And so you have that. And then you have AI in the physical world through the lens of robotics. And I think we often look at robotics. And our imagination sort of stops at humanoid, but it's like smart robotics with reasoning capabilities and with dexterous capabilities that rival or beat human dexterous capabilities are going to have many different form factors, just like the physical world has an evolutionary breath to it. Or the biological world is an evolutionary breath to it. I think the world of robotics will have some evolutionary breath to it as well. I'm envisioning pickup truck Rivian with a power arm that loads your two by fours for you. Maybe that was your picturing as well. I think every single task that a human can do today will be able to be done by a robot. Now, is that in five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? That is a little uscler, but certainly, in the fullness of time, in my lifetime, that will be true. Speaking of, I mean, I work with a lot of companies that are automating things that people really don't love, like let's say transcribing an entire interview. But I mean, going back to history, I mean, speaking of the span of history, I mean, driving a car is probably one of the most fun things this has ever been invented, if not arguably the most fun. Yeah, unless you're crossing LA at Rush Hour, but yes. Yeah, yeah, I agree, Alex, yeah. Where do you think it's going to settle with the stuff that people let the car do for them and the stuff that they still want to do? 'Cause I think it just be a shame, you know what I mean? Obviously, there's a lot to talk about with safety and all of these other things, but driving is so fun. Yeah, it is. Look, I'm a huge car enthusiast, so I agree with you. I think in-- Well, it's just tough to balance that, right? Tech companies just want to get rid of everything. I don't know if that's true, but in the foreseeable future, call it in the next decade, maybe even two decades, I think we'll have autonomy or represent a choice. So customers will decide, do I want to drive my car? Or do I want the car to drive me? And depending on your situation, I think everyone will fall into, you know, you may find yourself in both categories, one maybe more than the other, but there'll be times where even for, like, the hardest core driving enthusiasts, as Alex said, like being stuck on Interstate 5 and traffic is not fun. And so you'd rather switch off, be on your phone, watch a movie, read a book, something. You'll see that, and then you're also going to have customers that want to, when you're on PCH, and cruising up the coastline, it's beautiful. You want to feel the car going around the corners. I think I'll have some customers who do that. Where it gets a little bit fuzzy is you move out beyond, call it 10 to 20 years. And this is where, like, a lot of culture and societal elements start to play. But there's no denying that the self-driving vehicle is going to be safer. And so then, how does that get managed and does driving become more of an activity do purely for pleasure, sort of, like riding a horse you would never longer do for functional reasons, but you do it for pleasure, for joy. Speak for yourself, RJ. [LAUGHS] Yeah, I mean, very few people, I should say, are using a horse as their method of transportation now for practical reasons. And I think you haven't been to silver lately, have you? The hipster is around some new shit. So the question is, does it, like, take the United States. Today, we have over 40,000 people die over your traffic accidents. If you could reduce that by two hours of magnitude, if you can make that 100, is that the right decision? But you then, with that view, is the ability to drive. Yeah, it's hard. Insurance rates might decide that, right? I mean, if the insurance companies see that statistically autonomous is just way safer, they underwrite that. And money and economic pressure actually pushes everyone into this future. Do you think that'll work? I think that's going to be one of the driving forces, yeah. I think another big question, which obviously is debated all the time, is what does car ownership look like. So today, I'm just speaking to the United States Global, it's even numbers-- or the ratio is roughly the same-- but the United States are just over 10 trillion miles that could driven every year, which just for a moment, like, soak that in. That's such a big number, 10 trillion miles. And about 99% of those are in assets and vehicles that we own or are household owns, meaning all of rideshare, all of rental represent around 1% of the miles traveling the United States. And so as things like robot taxis become more available, do we see a shift away from owning cars and towards using robot taxis? Our view is you're going to see some, but I don't think car ownership is going to fall off that dramatically in the United States. And so what we think-- we'll like that as we'll see-- robot taxis be a big, very interesting business. But personal level four, like the idea that my car can truly support my household, it can drive my 10-year-old to baseball practice. It can pick up my partner from the airport. It can do all those things. It doesn't just sit waiting for me to drive it. I think that will likely become true. But if you need basic mobility, rideshare on a autonomous robot taxis is going to likely be very, very cheap. And so it'll become the new entry vehicle. Is rather than own a car as an entry car, you say, I'm going to use a rideshare service that has a variable cost that's low, 50 cents a mile, something like that. I smell a fight. RJ, you didn't want to come get me. You sent the car to the airport. Pick up flowers on the way to the airport. There we go. There we go. We'll figure it out. Tech and solve it. RJ, before this interview, I was watching your keynote at Charles recent Autonomous Day in Palo Alto, where you were talking about a lot of this stuff. And I heard you're calling this a large driving model. And I'm wondering, did you come up with that? How many ad agencies were involved? In pointing that term. And what technically is a large driving model? Yeah. So the actual-- the technical teams came up with it. And it's just-- What kind of laugh are we hearing right now? It's just the most honest description of what it is. It's a foundation model. And that's large. We're driving. We're driving. So the team had a bunch of clever ideas. We just decided to keep it simple. - Yeah, maybe it's helpful to give a little context in how self-driving's evolved. So. So self-driving started as a concept with some of the work that like the DARPA E challenge was doing, this is almost a little less than 20 years ago. And the way these early systems were done in self-driving systems up until the early 2020s, including what we launched with as a company, which you now give like characters as these autonomous vehicle 1.0, people say AV 1.0. These systems would have a perception platform, so cameras at a minimum, but likely cameras plus radar and maybe light art depending on the capability of the system. That would perceive everything around the vehicle. It would classify everything, so it would say like that's a car, that's a bike, that's a person, and then it would associate vectors to all those classified objects. So what's the acceleration velocity in X, Y, and Z? And the all that information when they get handed to a planner and the planner would then make a whole series of decisions around how the vehicle should operate. But the planner is like a human written piece of code, and this isn't like one line of code. It's a pretty complex code base that would try to describe, try to codify how to drive a vehicle. Human code, what even is that anymore, come on. Yeah, so that was the way it was done. And then a big shift came along, and you'll hear this called many things, but essentially like, the probably the most commonly referred to way to describe these more 2.0 solutions is an end-to-end approach, where instead of having a rules-based planner that's prescribing how the vehicle operates to have a large parameter, like a big model that you're building that's trained off of a data set of vehicles that are driving. And so this large model is a neural net. It's a foundation model that is learning how to drive through observation of many, many, many billions and billions of driven miles. And so that's what we shifted to. Of course, we're not alone. This is what Tesla's doing. I'd say anybody who's serious about self-driving is now building these end-to-end foundation model-based approaches. And to do that, it requires a few ingredients. You need to control the perception platform, so there's no preprocessing of any of the, you don't want a camera from the third party that classifies objects, you actually want the raw camera signals. You want the raw radar, you want the raw light R if you have it. You want to feed that into a data architecture that allows you to extract interesting events to trigger events. You want to take that offline so it needs to be sent ideally over Wi-Fi to a cloud environment where you can then process it on a lot of GPUs and you start to build weights in a model that and, of course, understand what the model is, it's, it has many, many, many different nuances and observations that can pick up on that essentially determine how the vehicle operates. And that approach, and this is why I said the next three and a half, three to five years are going to be so different, that approach is remarkably different than these AV 1.0 solutions. And so we launched with a, we had a mobile iPhone facing camera, we had some of our own stuff around it, but it was very much a rules-based environment. We started re-engineering the system around a, around an AI-centric approach, a late 2021 or a 2022, but we completely threw away everything, like we didn't use any of the original sensors, any of the original code base. It's a full new platform, we launched it in the middle of 2024. And so it's built a lot, with a lot more similarities to like an LLM, I say similar, this is not the same as LLM, but similarities to an LLM foundation model. And so I think there's going to be more than one, less than five large driving model type foundation models that exist, at least in the Western world in the United States. I think China will have its own set of foundation models for driving. I don't think, I don't think many companies have all the ingredients to do this really well, but it's, it's by far our biggest focus. And so we're quite bullish on it, we, you know, as I said, we think this is going to unlock very high capabilities over the next couple of years. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most, learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability, very 16 plus. How region specific are the models, do you think? I mean, I was just picturing like the difference between training in LA and training in an old European city feels pretty different with a lot higher degree of unpredictability over there. And this is what's so unique about the neural net based approach. In a rules based environment, any difference becomes something you have to tune and calibrate. So if you build a rules based environment and you change the vehicle, or you change the sensors, or you change the environment, like you said, like you go from San Francisco to let's say New York City, it requires a pretty heavy recalibration, localization for the vehicle, for the sensor set changes, in case of some sensor set changes, a lot of it would be like a melt and report. Here, think of it as just like you train your own brain. If you learn to drive in San Francisco, and let's say you had poor vision and you learn to drive without glasses, and I then took you, gave you glasses, so enhanced your perception stack, and maybe even found a way to bolt a radar onto your forehead. And then put you in a different city. You'd still be able to drive, you'd still, you need to pick up some nuances, you'd have to learn those. There's some training, but you'd actually adapt pretty well, and so this skills and the capabilities generalize far more in a neural net based approach, because there's not a fixed rule set that you're following as part of the code base. I think even more importantly, though, is the model continues to work, and all the work that you put into the model continues to work as you change or enhance the perception platform or the compute platform. So imagine, you know, I jokingly said, imagine, put a radar on your forehead, well, imagine not just improving your vision, so let's say your vision increases by 5 to 10X, including low light and bright light performance. You add multiple radars, you add a light R, so very, very long distance visibility, which is great for training your camera perception stack, your equivalent of your eyes. But then imagine you could increase your compute by 10X, and then suddenly, like the patterns you're observing, and all these nuances that your current brain probably wasn't picking up on will suddenly start to see. And so it's really remarkable how with this base, this neural net based approach, the platform just continues to get better as you make hardware improvements, and none of its throw away, as it was in the past, like as it was in the past, you increase your camera capability by 10X, the whole thing has to be redone. It's a whole new platform. Let's keep the AI theme going for a second. I think you guys are having maybe your next, I don't know if it's fair to say, Chatshipy T-Moma, but you've got the R2 coming out this year, right? It's still coming out this year. This is the, yeah, it's just, I'm in Illinois right now, it's just down in the line. So you were just checking it out. It's going to be about what, like 45,000, this is like the real mass market play. Long time coming, I'm drawing the analogy, Chatshipy T-Moma, maybe that's not fair but like, it's a big moment for you guys and I'm wondering how that's going. Yeah, so it's the, maybe the most important thing we've launched to date, it takes all the learnings from R1 of which there's many, you know, that, in my say, all the learnings, all the things we made mistakes on in terms of ramp or in terms of production system design, all the areas we can improve in terms of cost structure, all of that's embedded into one vehicle. And then the price point of it just generates, will generate a scale of demand that's much different than what we have with R1. And you know, so if you look at like the, actually, the closest comparison is Tesla, Tesla prior to Model 3 was not a very high-volume company, they had Model S and the Model X. It wasn't until Model 3 came along that the business really started to thrive in terms of cash flow, you know, in Model 3 Model Y products set. And so for us, that's R2 and then subsequently RR3, which really drive this significant volume and also help rationalize all these really large fixed-cost investments we've made. So we've, you know, very, very large engineering team that's developing vertically in-house, all of our electronics, all of our software, you know, we just spend some time talking about all of our self-driving platform, inclusive of all the in-house perception and compute like we do our own silicon that will launch with R2. We have to see. Bye. very heavy fixed cost base or R&D cost base. And then we have, we're building a big infrastructure for the direct to consumer vertically and rate of business. We have multiple large distribution centers across the country, we have obviously lots of sales locations across the country, lots of service, lots of service infrastructure, like parts distribution warehouses. So we don't use dealers, which means in the front end we have to spend a pretty large sum of money to get all that infrastructure built and then it gets paid for with big structural cost advantages once we get to scale. We don't have to pay a third party, you know, 10 to 15% to sell our products for us, like we would with if we had dealers. - The stores you guys have are very nice. You got a nice one in Venice too. Yeah. - Somebody drove through the Pasadena one, like a car wrecked through the front glass. Yeah. - Oh well. - Now that's a mega Tesla. - Yeah. (laughing) - I bet it was a Tesla, right? - I don't even know what kind of car it was. - I love Riviera. - It's gonna kill you to see all these AI wrapper startups raising like billions valuation with like 100 million ARR and here you are like dealing with like thousands of supply chain parts and have been grinding for, I mean, I don't know how long, how long does revenue is a company? - It's like 16 years old. - 16 years. And I was listening to you on Ben Thompson's pod in December saying, you've refinanced your house to raise the initial counter over the year? So like you have been grinding on this thing. You're in like one of the hardest categories on earth as far as like tech and manufacturing. And I'm curious what you think of when you see all these AI software companies and it's just like, yeah, path to billions of dollars like immediately based on traction but also like a ton of hype and how the space you're in is just way more difficult. And it seems like it's only gotten more difficult, right? - Yeah, it's been difficult, but. - Yeah, wait, it's like I think in time, I mean, I'm so bullish on what we're building that the way I think about it is the likelihood of success is at an all time high. And it's sort of, I compare that to like day one when it was just me refinancing a house and starting like with 100,000 dollars, no employees on team no tech, no, no, no anything to go build a car company. Like at that point, the likelihood of success was quite low, probably near zero. And so if I contrast it with today that the brand is resonating really well, the products are really great. And R2 just moves the needle meaningfully forward. And I think some of the work we're doing in technology, particularly as some of the things we already discussed with our in-house software platforms and a lot of the work we're doing around AI and self-driving is like just puts us in a position that I think as the market share stacks, market share percentages get completely restacked, which I think will happen over the next 10 to 20 years. I think we stand to gain a lot of that. And if we're successful in that, everything takes care of ourselves, like the value of the business, so we'll catch up to that. And I think part of it is, it's a really hard business, it's hard to understand, it's hard to explain, making these multi, like very long, multi-year investments that don't, you don't see the benefit from it for quite some time. It's not something the markets are typically used to backing. So, but I'm having fun. - Speaking of the tech crossover that the auto industry is now feeling, we all know the hardest part of being in tech or tech adjacent is dealing with gadget reviewers who post videos of your products on YouTube. As, you know, the new products come to market, how would you describe the difference between these stalwart car reviewers and the new age gadget influencers who are looking at your car as a big gadget? How are they different? - They tend to focus on different things. - This chassis is awesome. - Yeah, I think I'll look a fun one. That's like what maybe shows the difference in perspective. The very classic car reviewers don't like a lot of the future technology. There was a big hurdle, emotional hurdle of having a multi-touch-based interface versus lots of buttons. And as you put them, like the gadget reviewers can't imagine having something other than a multi-touch. And so. - Powered by Unreal. - Yeah, so it's sort of like, if it's a quote, like Bob Dylan, he can make some of the people happy some of the time. So that's part of the challenge. She can't make all the people happy all the time. Like part of the challenge of a car is you have. If you're developing a vehicle, we've estimated it. Call it somewhere on the order of 30 to 40 million decisions you have to make as a company around the product. And you're gonna make lots and lots of decisions that not everyone's gonna agree with. But the goal of the business is to make those decisions really consistently so the product feels. You know, while there's four, five thousand brains that are working in parallel to develop something as complex as this, you need that many. Otherwise, it would take you too long. If you had one person do it, it'd take you tens of thousands of years, which doesn't work. So you need to have many people work in parallel. And so the goal is to have it feel like one person made every decision. Like it's really consistent. Like the person who designed the trunk was the. Like the same person did the door seal, which was the same person did the bezel around the screen, which is the same person to the UI. Of course, that's not the case. And so as you start to create frameworks for how you make decisions inevitably, there will be people in the chart that want different things. And I always love the question of why don't you do this? And as if we didn't think of some of these alternatives. Like, you know, and of course, like we had to make trade-offs, and nothing's accidental. It's not like, you know, we just like threw a bunch of parts in a bag and shook it and out came a car. Like we made a whole series of very intentional decisions, not every one of which everyone will agree with. - That's why it's fun to be a gadget reviewer as you get to pretend that you're smarter than all the CEOs. - Well, I think part of it is for me, I just got, I had to get comfortable with the fact that, as long as many people like most of the decisions we make, and the products feel really thoughtfully done, I think we're in a good place. I think where you have a challenge is if very few people, like most of the decisions you make, which there have been products and cars that have had that, with the audience that actually likes what was conceived is so narrow. And so that's part of the challenge. And I think sometimes reviewers may more often not fall into the category. If you made everything that they wanted, it'd be a very narrow subset of customers that would buy it. - Oh, that's the classic power user dilemma, right? Me, is there anything more specific that's kind of been, that's been contentious with those folks? Oh, why can't I side load my N64 emulator onto your multimedia interface? - One that I would say we made a decision on, and we were really intentional on it. And I might, you might be wanting, if I were to do it again, I might revisit it. It's interesting, is we have, for the flagship product, we have an R1S, which is a seven-pastrian SUV, as a sister product, the R1T, which is a five-pastry truck. And we did a lot of work studying garages. And the reason it's important to study garages is because if you have an electric car, you're gonna likely want to be able to park it in the garage so you can easily charge it. And do that, the vehicle has to be under a certain length. And so you have a choice as to where do you, like where do you put in that length? If you want to fit in 90% of the garages in the United States. And so we developed a bed, a tailgate on the bed that has a goose neck hinge, so it doesn't hinge down like a normal tailgate, it hinges out. So when the tailgate is open, it's longer than your average truck, which is great for holding like a dirt bike or a motorcycle. But when the tailgate's up, the bed is four and a half feet long, rather than more typically the five feet. So the bed is shorter. And a lot of folks were like, "Why didn't you put a five-foot bed on it?" And we said, "Well, like drive through an neighborhood and tell me who owns a truck." And they're like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "You can know who owns a truck because the trucks don't fit in the garage. They're on the driveway because the beds are long." And so we were very like logical to say, "We want the truck to fit in your garage." So we made the bed, you know, the goose neck hinge. And I say all that and it's like, I could do all that like intellectual argument as to why it's easier if it could park in the garage. You could have the charger in your garage. You don't have to put it out on the outside of your house and all these things. But at the end of the day, it's still like two-inch explanation and probably should just made the five-foot bed and accept that the cars would fit less garages. But as someone who parks my R1T in the garage and it wouldn't fit if we'd had a five-foot bed, I sort of like it still. So it's one of those-- - Tell your social team the 50 top trade-offs with the R1S or whatever you want to do. I mean, for a certain audience, there's like literally nothing more fun than this stuff. You know, with, I mean, with the complexity of the car, I mean, you're like doing the James Cameron thing out here, like somehow trying to like have a single vision with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And yeah, I mean, of course, it's a bummer when the truck looks a little bit funny to some people because of that trade-off. But I do think there's a world where those decisions actually improve the brand because they though show how thoughtful you really are. I mean, it goes back to, you know, the Steve Jobs and Tenigate with the iPhone, just hold it differently or whatever. But like a lot of people are like, fuck yeah. - Fuck yeah. - Oh, differently? - Yeah. - It's not like we just made the video. truck bed, a random length. I'm like, oh, darn it. Everybody else was doing five foot. We did four and a half. Seemed cool. RJ, you brought up charging and I'm glad you did. So your team actually hooked me up with an R1 for the weekend. I want to say it was like a year and a half ago and I took it to Joshua Tree. And it was one of the most stressful trips of my life because you all had not built the charging center in Joshua Tree. Yeah. It was under construction. It sounds like user error to me, Alex. No, like it was just like it's a frantically trying to find a power source at our friend's house that could like charge it with enough mileage to get to the next charging point on the way. That's the worst. I've been in that spot myself. Oh my god. It was horrible. But like the thing was fun. It's held a drive and we took it off roading and all of that. Like that experience was amazing. But the charging experience like almost completely ruined EVs for certainly my wife. For me, like I understand like the infrastructure is getting built out, but I actually have this theory about EV adoption that one of the big gating factors is just how shitty all this charging infrastructure is. And also the fact that like landlords of rental properties are not incentivized by the federal government or anyone, there's no like tax credits to install EV chargers. And like, you know, I would you know, we're renting our house right now. Like I would probably have an EV if my landlord would just put it in. But I'm not going to pay to put it in right now. I think a lot of people, especially with like the shift in millennials, not owning homes and how proper ownership is changing. Like people are really locked out of this category because of the charging infrastructure. And I'm wondering like, is there anything you all are doing specifically on that besides your own, you know, charging stations, do you think anything will change like structurally to fix this? Because to me, this is like this is the thing that is holding it back for me personally. Well, you articulated that well. And I agree with everything you just said, it's this is a really important thing to solve. And so because we so, we so emphatically agree with you, we have created our own charging infrastructure. So we call it the Vivian Adventure Network. Unfortunately, this is an area where there's been like wild under investment in charging infrastructure so much so that like our network is one of the largest in the United States. Tessas is by far the largest. We're about somewhere between four and five percent this has a Tesla's network. And outside of Vivian and Tesla, the all the other networks have frustratingly low uptimes, meaning if you go to the charger, the likelihood that it works can be as low as like 50 percent, which is a real pain. Imagine on a road trip and you found it on the map and you stopped there and it doesn't work. So we have a few things we've done to address it. So one is we're building our own network and that's growing as we speak. And your Joshua Tree trip this year would be amazing because we have this like probably our best charging station is in Joshua Tree. It looks nice. I just drove past it a few months ago. Yeah, it's really cool. It's a very very nice setup. So that's one. The second is we adopted Tesla's, Tesla's charging standard became a they actually made it standard and open and we've adopted that so you can now use Tesla Chargers, which is a big network. And then the third thing we did, which is maybe less obvious, but informs the first thing, is we bought a company called a better out planter. The acronym is often used to describe it ABRP, a better out planter. And it's one of the most popular independent apps for finding chargers. And so when you use it, you can see like the reason we bought it is not just because we think it's a nice app, which it is. It's great. But it gives us really good visibility to where all the worst charging situations are. And so think about it. It's like we can identify the charging deserts, so to speak. Joshua Tree was one of those before. We've now fixed it with our node. And so it allows us to really prioritize how we deploy capital to address these charging gaps that exist within all the driving places you'd want to go, all the place you'd want to drive to. And so that's been great. And so not only that, we have a charging score. So we like rate A, B, C, D, F, like how good is a charger? And you can sort by it, so you can say like I don't want to go to a B or lower charger, because I don't want to deal with the fact that it might not work when I get there. And so that's some of the things we've done. And then when it comes to home charging, of course as we point out, depends on the like where. But in many areas, we're starting to see building codes require building owners to put charging in. Now this isn't DC charges, this is like the super fast charging, it's still level two charging. So like overnight charging is fine. And I think in the in the next couple of years, this will start to shift pretty dramatically. We'll charging will go to something that was a bit of a pain point to through the combination of our network, which is growing, test is network, which is already big. Hopefully a few of these other independent networks growing that charging becomes ubiquitous, DC fast charging for road trips, home charging, apartment building charging, office charging becomes very accessible. And it just sort of disappears. And so like as it is in my life now, like for me, I like I don't even think about it, because I have a charger at the house, I have an apartment that has a charger. We have the CEO of Rivian, I would hope you don't have to. But like even like on my road trip, like like it's only like the truly obscure places that are not covered. And even those most when we're getting covered or have been covered, Rivian eventually networks doing a lot of that. So I think most of the charging deserts are sort of solved. So it's, it is a lot different than it was a year and a half ago. So you should ask us to want to vehicle kind and try it again. Yeah, I should get a quad, ask for a quad, drive it, like you stole it and enjoy it and and Joshua tree. I'm so fascinated by this because usually and tech, the things that users do once a year don't like kind of make or break the product or the perception of it in their mind. I mean, I have a feeling that most people wouldn't actually encounter a ranging side issue very often. Is that is that true? It's very rare. Yeah, we have the data. Right. What is it? Extremely rare that we have a customer actually run out of charge. I mean, that's going to be like pretty frustrating. I mean, to like have that be, I mean, is that still one of the top barriers with getting an EV? I think it's more of a consideration than I would think. What I always say to people is like, try it. Like we have a few ways that people can loan car, like test drive cars. We've like an overnight test program. Big part of that is just like experience how easy it is to charge. But I think in time that starts to fade. But as Alex said, you have one bad experience. It does it does cement an idea into your head and it's like, oh, I don't want to do that. And the stress of like being stranded is high, especially if you're kids or you're hungry or you know, those kinds of things. Well, RJ, I will ask your team for a quad and I will drive it like I saw it. I know you got to go. We appreciate you being on the show and taking the time with us. Good to see you again. And Alex, we'll make sure it's black on black. Oh, it's got to be murdered out. Yeah, it's going to match the whole thing. Black, everything. Dark tension. And that's it for this week's show. I'm realizing now I should have said in the intro, buckle your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen, because that still applies to the EVs for now. Sorry. Don't forget to like, subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. We've got a website with all this stuff, access dot show. And you can find us in video and see how much RJ actually looks like Clark Kent at access pod on YouTube. Again, if you like this episode, please leave a five star review or thumbs up and share it with a friend. It really helps. You could find me at hamburger on Twitter and at meaning dot company for all your storytelling needs. You can find my newsletter at sources.News. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye bye. Vova. Vova. Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise. To a state surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking. Yeah. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at $50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more. 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