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The Cult of the Cybertruck with Maya Vinokour | The Nation Podcast · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the nation podcast, where we take you behind the scenes of our biggest stories with the journalists who wrote them.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm DD Guttenblan, Special Correspondent for the nation.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps no single object embodies our dystopian oligarchal, ugly present more than the Tesla cyber truck.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Hawking spacecraft come tank that Elon Musk has foisted on the world.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cyber truck is ugly to look at, unsafe to drive, and judging from its anemic sales unwanted by most of the public.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has been described as an even bigger flopped in the infamous Ford Edsel.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as writer Maya Vinaker discovered, none of that seems to matter to the cyber trucks most loyal fans.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: in what was the Cybertruck, a piece for our November issue, vinegar journey deep into the heart of the small but fierce Cybertruck cult, and found a group of people, or more accurately men, eager to defend the car against all enemies domestic and foreign.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're delighted to have my of vinegar on to discuss what the Cybertruck is, was, and what it represents.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to start by asking you perhaps unusual question for the nation, which is about your automobile genealogy.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'll illustrate what I mean by starting with mine so that listeners know where I'm coming from.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: My first car was a 1962 MGA, which I bought a half interest in in a long time ago when I got my driver's license.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was followed by a 1966 Volkswagen bus, and that was followed by a 1974 Ford Impala with a brief detour to England where I had a Morris Traveller, then a 1965 Volvo 544, and then a 1988 Toyota Land Cruiser.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of these cars were bought new,
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the newest one that I bought was the Toyota, which was 10 years old when I bought it and which by the way I'm still driving and my only new car purchase was in 2005 Toyota Prius, which my X-Wife is still driving, so that's me and cars, now you.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have a much less exciting and storied past with cars because after getting my driver's license, when I was 16, like a normal person, then I didn't drive for many, many years.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I lived in cities where I didn't need a car.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we actually only got the first car that I have owned and driven as an adult is our family Subaru.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: so which like we bought it during the pandemic.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in many ways, I am exactly the wrong kind of person to write this piece because I know I'm not a gear head.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm apparently a competent driver to be honest.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah so and I think actually that was you know in many ways like this is one of the this is one of the reasons why I could never truly understand the cyber truck.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I could never, I could never hope to, to really get it in the way that it's the people who really love it do.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yet, something obviously drew you to the topic, what was that?
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's just, it's such a sign of the times.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's just something about it that really,
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: is it encapsulates so much about our present moment for me.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just the the garishness, the what to me again is a like car new seam like very impractical features like the fact that you can't really see out the back.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: very effectively if the irrigate is closed.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that like whatever it's lost people just obsess over it and that the obsession goes beyond just like the normal kinds of fandoms that we might be used to into like hate speech violence.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean I have a long history of
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is true that people come to, and by people, maybe I do mean men, although I don't think of it that way, but maybe I should, come to irrationally fierce relationships with their vehicles.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let's let me be like really crudely Freudian for a minute, and posit that it's because men have external genitalia, that the existence of a steel exoskeleton makes us feel safer,
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's funny because like you would think, you know, if you have external genitalia, like, what more do you need?
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, why have more, more stuff on top?
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you would think you could send a subtle or message.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because you're going around exposed to the world.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, maybe that makes sense, but I mean, you would want an exoskeleton that actually kept things out.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And or like was less flammable.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the thesis where I've been a fall off on the road.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, when you talked about irrational attachment, I was reflecting on the fact that, you know, as it is not only a good lefty, but, you know, a long-time nation person, I'm very well aware that it was in our pages that Ralph Nader first wrote unsafe at any speed, his scathing indictment of the Chevy Corps of Air.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, if you go to, for example, Cambridge, Massachusetts or any other hive of, you know, self-styled independent thinkers, you're allowed to find a fair number of vintage courveurs and fabulous condition, being driven around by people whose politics are a lot closer to
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: but you had an interesting approach to why people fall in love or why men fall in love, particularly with the cyber truck.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: You described it as a bingo card of stereotypically masculine once in fear.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So tell me what you meant by that.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, um, it just, you kind of hit the nail on the head with the explosion, external genitalia thing that you just said, I just, I think that it really conveys this kind of invile ability and invincibility in the face of
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: unpredictable terrifying obstacles.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, this is a car that at least visually it really looks like you could run over your enemies.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: You could escape a bunch of zombies.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: You could be on another planet.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can be in any environment.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can wait.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can, it looks like it's a really good protection against everything that might come at you.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it also is, it's not protecting you in a subtle way.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: that really signals to others like back off.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so like it just combines, it combines everything that people seem to be afraid of, especially now, with really aggressive signaling.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, like one thing that I've noticed since writing this is that I've become very attuned to the types of, not just to the types of cars that people drive, but to the types of things that they put on to the surfaces of their cars.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like maybe you've seen this around like many times,
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: will have there's a specific bumper sticker that Jeep owners get that says you wouldn't get it.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a Jeep thing.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like why have you put this on your Jeep?
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very like we already we see that you have a Jeep.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It says Jeep right on it.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also want song Mercedes where the license plate was S class and it's like again.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like people really want to really want to double down.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: They really want to say like I belong to a particular kind of group.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: My purchasing of this car is my way of signaling belonging to a group.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, and I think that's, you know, the article is a brilliant exploration and you clearly had fun while being appalled, getting to know these Tesla owners or these cybercar cyber truck owners.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, the group think thing is very interesting.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: First of all, what do you say to these people, how do you get them to talk to you?
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I did not, I, I did very little to get them to talk to me and I said, I said, I said it how it was.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I said, like, I was writing about the, I said, I said what to me, what seemed like a very innocuous kind of thing, which is I'm a writer and I'm writing about this phenomenon that has gone clearly, like clearly it's gone beyond just like this is just a car.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell me a little bit about that, and immediately people were infuriated by the idea that I would be writing about the culture of the cyber truck as opposed to the nuts and bolts of the cyber truck or the innovation and the quick acceleration or whatever.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, I don't know what any of these people would be like in real life.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the thing.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, everybody, you know, on the internet, nobody knows your dog, etc.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So maybe they're perfectly nice people in real life.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But online, they were very, they were much like the cyber truck itself.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like they were quick to bristle.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they had many, many memes that they really wanted me to see urgently and, you know, they were, they were mad.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what were the memes designed to get you to do?
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: were they designed to change your mind or they were not they were they were just like that you know the Jeep bumper sticker they were not designed to make me change my mind because also I didn't tell them I I wasn't you know I didn't go in there saying this car you guys love really sucks Why don't you tell me about that I went and deemed like I I
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I didn't enjoy driving it, but that doesn't mean that somebody else couldn't.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm wondering, like, what makes owning this car worth it to you?
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why is it cool for you to own this car?
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they weren't even, they didn't believe that I was sincerely interested in that question.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the memes were designed to, to get me to go away, I think.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, let's drill down a little bit.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I do want to get to the, you know, this, we try to provide a reader service here at the nation.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to get to the driver's road and track portion of the, of the experience.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, let's do it.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you're in the cyber truck.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you notice as you're trying to get into the cyber truck?
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because you wrote a little bit about that.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I did, yeah, well, so the cyber truck can raise up really high to protect you from enemies, but it can also go down like pretty low.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it can be depending on like where you left the suspension, it can be hard to get into.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a very tall person.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I felt, I felt the way that I always feel when I'm getting into a gigantic geoggle, which is that I'm like, you know, I'm entering with the hall of the mountain king or something.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's just intimidating off the bat.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Isn't there also a problem with the door handle?
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, yeah, I mean, so, okay, so at the dealership, right?
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't, it because normally if you own the cyber truck, then you could use your phone to get into it, which I think is, itself strikes me of being, like, there are so many things that can go wrong there.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, but so you can use your app to get in.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that you can also have like a card, like kind of a hotel key card to get in,
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the dealership, you couldn't just pull the handle and come in.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: You had to go, you had to get his app correctly, bossurized, then he had to put it up to the door or whatever she wanted to camera.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then you have to press the handle because it's not a normal.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The handles are flat against the car in that way that Tesla has been doing for years.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when you're opening the door, it's not easy.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you have to, you have to clamber in, so yeah, you're already like, you really have to want to get into the cyber truck.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, as it's older, as it's older, yeah, you're user.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to really want to get in there to get in.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So where did you actually pass drive at Maya?
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I test her of it in twice once in meat packing, until see and once in Brooklyn.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in Chelsea there just isn't space to really like get going with the cyber truck.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You drive around the block.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: and then you return to the dealership and you just I mean it's very it's like it's horrible to drive it in New York because the streets are narrow people are walking every which way and and it just and they hate you they hate you although nobody I mean it's like you're like right around the Tesla dealership maybe there's maybe you're less likely to encounter somebody who is not expecting to see a Tesla Cybershop right at that moment
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Brooklyn, so you can drive around on the cobblestones, but you can also, which is what we did, you can go into the highway and travel to the IKEA parking lot.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that was how I drove.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Either way, you're allowed to, you're allowed to think it for real test drive where they don't send someone with you.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But again, because I'm not, I don't feel confident behind the wheel, like, or giant car.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I both times I ask someone to come with me and I think if I hadn't, I would have been very confused.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you're driving, you said you don't have a ton of driving experience, but how does it occur to driving a normal car?
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, there's just so much, there are so many more options.
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are so many things that so many more things that you could minutely customize.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some of which don't really don't have nothing to do with driving.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like you could, you could make the entire interior of the car low purple if you wanted to.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'd have moved lighting.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know you can you can turn on whatever music as usual, but there's just like there's a lot of stuff that you that you can that you can customize to make your experience like a very specific way and I didn't need to do that certainly I wouldn't need to do that for test drive and I'm not sure I would need to do it as as if I owned one and I actually I found that
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just I just longed for knobs and longed for knobs and dials.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to be able to just control stuff with touch with touch and not on a big screen that I found enormously distracting.
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I got the sense that it kind of forces you to look at the screen rather than out the window or out the window.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does force you to look at the screen.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will say that this is a common complaint as I understand it about the car of today is that it offers very little in the way of conventional knobs and dials.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's just there's been a movement toward like putting everything on a single touch screen.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think Tesla was doing this.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: on the earlier side, just offloading all functionality into this gigantic iPad that is all that you can look at.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it really, because like, most things are controlled from the screen, you have to look at it kind of a lot.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because the visibility around the car is not the best, so as I wrote, there's no real
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you have to look at the screen to understand what's going on around you.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: The car is equipped with, I think, six cameras around its perimeter.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a cross between an eye pad, a Bachelor of Pad, or a Trish.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yes, it's like if you, if you like, it's like a tour bus or like the back of a limo, like a fancy limo where there's drinks and things or lights or whatever, you know.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet my sense is, and this is not scientific, it's purely anecdotal, I've probably seen half a dozen different cyber trucks being driven.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In every case except one that I can recall, there was only one person in them, so it's not like this is the car that you get for your chauffeur to drive you.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, it doesn't seem like that at all because the whole point is supposed to be that the driving experience itself is supposed to be so incredible that you wouldn't outsource it to your chauffeur and plus it's supposed to be self-driving in scare quotes.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, scare quotes is exactly the word you described a more remind me of and maybe you could give a little more detail about this poor person who who was trusting the self-driving feature and therefore got killed.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there's at least one person where according to the reports, like this person collided with a tractor trailer.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the guy driving the tractor trailer later said that somebody who's on the scene reported seeing that the sky was like watching Harry Potter on his phone or something while he was
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: instead of driving because he was relying on full-self driving.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So-called full-self driving.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, the same person had recorded.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were like doing a series of like YouTube recordings, documenting their experience with their Cybertruck.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: until they died.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, until they died.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like it's really, it's really sad and really horrible.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think people think that full self-driving really works and I think that they believe that they can do something other than watch the road when they're in the cyber truck.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's just not true.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, there's, I, I, I got that it's not just the, uh,
• 18:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla that has increasingly automated driver-assist things, other cars seem to be having it.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, as listeners who were called for my automobile genealogy, none of my cars is monitoring enough to have any of that stuff, but I gather that if you get a new car, you're more likely to get it.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Tesla sells you this self-driving thing, it has an asterisk after it.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called, I got to really kick out of this.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called wholesale driving in parentheses supervised.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they really want to emphasize the owner's manual and all of their marketing copy really emphasizes that the feeling you get when you read it is that someone's like really wanting to like really wanting to like enter the fray and like somebody is holding them back.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they really want to go, oh, it's totally autonomous.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does all the work for you.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's somebody behind them being like, no, no, yeah, a lawyer.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Being like, you're sorry, you can't say that.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's very like, it's full self-driving, but you can never stop paying attention to the road.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can, it may never stop.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It may not react to traffic lights.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: the way that you would expect something that's being described as autonomous will do.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It just, well, it like it could do surprising things and you can never actually leave it unsupervised in the way that you could if it were truly full self-driving.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm told that there are now these self-driving taxis, San Francisco, and they're testing Yeah, we most, right?
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and maybe maybe that will work.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I really don't know.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's one thing to opt out of driving a Tesla.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's another thing to opt out of crossing the street in San Francisco or New York.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: that's right and like you can't that's right that's that's the problem right like and that's why you know when the cyber truck gets like a five star safety rating from the national highway traffic safety administration you have to wonder like what is that based on if you you it's exactly right like a as a pedestrian you really want to stay all the way away from a cyber truck if possible yeah there's another um i mean uh
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the many joys of your pieces, the linguistic bit and your attention to the Tesla language.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, they have this function now.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I read this as their language, but maybe this is just you with your tongue and your cheek, so please enlighten me.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have something called actually smart summon.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, they really call it that that is not I would love like it of course it's fun to invest stupid acronyms but like that is that is just a true thing about how they describe this function that I don't think works.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe there's been a lot of evidence is the, you know, evocative ASS and what is it supposed to do?
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is supposed.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is actually, like, genuinely cool if it existed for real.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's supposed to be a function where if you, um, you parked your car somewhere and you don't know where you left it, you can activate something in your phone and your car will autonomously make its way to you.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wrote this in the piece like as somebody who constantly forgets where she parked, I would greatly, greatly benefit from such a thing.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: If, if it existed, I spent the night before the election in 2016 walking the streets of Manchester, New Hampshire.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been going there to cover Trump's last rally and having no idea where I'd left by go.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so they can imagine that there's like so many situations where that would be incredibly useful.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that the choice of acronym is very like, you know, Musk called his cuts organization doge, right, like the department.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, I think it's just all, it's like all, yeah, it's all in in joke.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how much of an in joke it is to call something ass, but maybe a must perspective it's funny.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really funny.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the best.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's the best kind of humor.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I guess I don't have a whole lot of enthusiasm for defending Elon Musk and I will say that when they announced the cyber truck and I first read the announcement You know before we knew that Musk had any politics other than being an enthusiast of electric cars
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought, oh, an electric truck, that could be cool, and then they released the drawings and it just looks so hostile, you know?
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is, it is hostile, it's net, I think it's net to look hostile.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, I mean, I thought like if I was in Mad Max, this is the sort of thing that I would appeal to me.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: If it's the Bulletproof Windows really worked, but as you reminded us, when they first tested them by throwing metal balls of them, they shattered.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they shattered, yeah.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say that I think there's at least one video out there of somebody shooting a gun at the side of the truck and it'd be really expecting it to be Bulletproof and it's just not.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, I didn't know where we go with that except to note that when Tesla's sales were slumping because of Dosh Trump said he was going to buy one.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's there's a phrase you use that I really like which is you call it a paradigmatic consumer object because it perfects the art of expensive disappointment.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I went on and packed that phrase, expensive disappointment.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what you mean by that and how we respond to that, not just with the cyber truck, but as consumers more generally.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, again, this is like, this is one of the things that makes the cyber truck really stand out to me as something that represents our time, because so many things are expensive and just appointments, you know, like this is, I think this is an experience that all of us are familiar with where you, you, I don't know.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's just me, naively imagining that a high price is an indicator of quality still, and that just is not the case anymore.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, it seems like often things are priced for hype.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not priced for really any other purpose.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: If we believe
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the idea of prices as signals like they tell us something about the value of the underlying good, like something has gone wrong there because they don't they don't signal anything of use to the consumer high prices I mean.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah it's just it's just like it's to be able to say like I paid a huge amount of money for thing X even if thing X does not it doesn't do even the
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you go on to say, in a country run by scam artists, all its illusion of autonomy and control.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, there's a way in which I suppose that's the point of the Cybertruck, is that it exposes our delusions as both consumers and political actors.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it really, it really like a, you know, going back to the, the, like the bingo card metaphor, like it just appeals to people's desire to feel protected and to feel impervious because the way that things are going, we're all more and more vulnerable instead and it kind of doesn't matter.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, on the level of the like,
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure that there was a lot of like thinking about who the target market was for the cyber truck because Elon Musk, according to one book said that he didn't care if they sold.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the type of person who would buy a cyber truck maybe that's like a luxury good, right?
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's priced quite high, but it's not priced so high that somebody who isn't going, you know, somebody who's going to use like in the market for a big powerful truck.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: could spend that amount of money on it, but it just speaks to the need to be protected, to be invincible, to be powerful, to be free, to be autonomous in some way, but it's coming at this moment when those forms of protection are less available than ever.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Autonomy is less available than ever, true autonomy.
• 26:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, that's really interesting because, you know, you
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: if you invest a significant amount of money in a purchase that's tied to your identity and that purchase turns out to be disappointing rather than acknowledge that you just dig in deeper, you know, whether it's the cyber truck or, I don't know, a pair of, you know, really expensive designer high heels that are supposed to render your irresistible or whether it's
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, a fancy designer suit or whatever, you know, whatever people spend a lot of money on and then turns out not to change their lives in the way that they're going to, you know, or whether it's
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, whatever that treatment is, this is radio, so people can't see my extremely high forehead.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever that treatment is that's supposed to grow hair and you know, man pay for it and they use it for years and they have just as much hair as they started but they're still paying for it because they're invested in the idea that they're doing something, I guess.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you could extend it even further to like any type of personal investment that you make monetary or otherwise into something that's connected to your identity.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You it's but it's not just I mean like.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, I'm like somewhat making fun of some of these people, but in another way I'm saying, like, you know, we are then they are us.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's, again, this is an experience that's familiar to everybody where you really, you really want something to work and you really put a lot of yourself into it.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then even when it fails in some way, it's impossible to disconnect whether because of some costs.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: or just because now your identity is synonymous with this thing, this is how cults work famously, right?
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: To admit to admit that failure is what it feels like it would destroy your entire person because it's sort of somehow like all interconnected now.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's interesting because it's as you illustrate, so beautifully it's, in many ways, just a more extreme example of extremely,
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: common experiences and delusions.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, a certain kind of man will buy a cyber truck, but on the other hand, if you get on the road and you look at the people in Volvo XC90s or Toyota land cruisers or people in Chelsea in Manhattan and enormous range rovers,
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they're all partaking of a certain level of pedestrian murdering delusions about being safe because they're high up and they're surrounded by expensive metal.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, and does that, I mean, it's more extreme in the cyber truck.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, bits of the cyber truck fall off.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it renders, it renders its pre-tensity ability with a more comical budget.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I mean, and if we like return to Freud, then everything that we're doing is just like trying to resist the death drive or like everything we're doing is just because we're like afraid of our mortality and like maybe if we have something with 16 airbag that has like tracerous ups like something outside like that will keep us safe.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: prevent us from dying.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's all, you asked, you know, like, what is interesting about the cyber truck, and like, especially now that I've revealed on air that I don't really know anything about cars at all, and it's because it connects to this phenomenon, the contemporary reality, which is that, like, so many people are obsessed with extending their lives in one way or another.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of like evangelism or the sort of like religious fervor that is connected to living forever.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the cyber-tracks speaks to that too, right?
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I can maybe I can stay safe until full self-driving is truly online.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I won't have to engage in the risky activity that is driving a car anymore.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm also maybe I can stay safe until I can fully download myself into the club.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, that's right, because that's right, until the singularity.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because there are two trends that kind of exacerbate each other.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one is sort of the individualist approach to safety and protection.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's not like we're going to be safe by coming together, mutual aid.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: forming a association and changing society, people who buy cyber trucks presumably think of those as crazy crackpot ideas, and then there's also the, like, we're training over more and more of the messy business of life to, you know, autonomous machines, whether they're cars or the AI and our phone.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's something deeply upsetting about both of these to me.
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, but deeply upsetting is these topics are your peace and the nation in the November issue is deeply entertaining as well and that is a really tough act to pull off.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, thanks so much for coming to the nation podcast.
• 32:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a delightful to talk to you.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks a lot.