Powerful A.I. By 2026? + Uber's C.E.O. on the Robotaxi Future + Casey's TikTok Test
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let's start the episode today with a little housekeeping. So we've talked on the show the last couple of weeks about the new new york times audio subscription. Uh this is how you can connect your new york times uh subscription on apple podcast and spotify to get full access to every episode of hartford and all of the other shows from the new york times.

Um this subscription is now alive. You may be running into IT if you use those platforms, and you should link your account. I did this week very easy, took me less than a minute, and now I can get all of my favorite shows in the whole back catoche.

We talked about A I slop on the show last week and how hard IT is to sort of understand what's true and what's not true out there on the internet. And after that show, I did actually subscribe to several different publications. And I now pay for several different publications because I was like, if i'm preaching the value of good information out there, I gotta be willing to walk to walk.

You are being the change you want to see in the world. Guess so. If you want to be the change you wish to see in the podcast world, you can subscribe to your tan's audio sub ript. Do IT. So that is our third and final pitch for the new york times audio subscription.

But there is another piece of house keeping this week, which is that after this episode is over, you will hear a segment from a different new york times podcast that i'll play just at the tail end of this episode. It's an episode of the network's newest podcast, the wire cut or show. And let me tell you, this is an episode about laundry.

which might not sound like it's on a traditional wheel house. But i'm going to tell you something. I want to a dinner party recently and a person i'd never met. We got to talk in any said, have you heard the wire t podcast episode about laundry? Because I changed my life and now we're giving that to you for absolutely free.

So please buy a subscription to new york times audio if we sell the most subscriptions, if we sell more than israel. And Michael Barbara, we do get a free concert by the back three place.

And i'll I want IT that way. Casey, you are my fire, you want fire 都 死。

We just got to another email from somebody who said they thought I was bored. I have apparently crazy bold energy. energy.

What do you think is a bald seeming about you?

I think for me, they think of me as a wacky side cake, which is a bold energy, you know I think so.

I don't think I don't associate wai and balls because because i'm thinking jeff, because I I like like I know a lot of like very hard corso.

Do you think that maybe people think that I sound like a sort of tightened of industry plutocrat?

I would not say that the energy of giving of is plutocrat energy.

but I really, because I just fired six thousand people to show that I could.

you did order me .

to come to the office today, and I said, return to office on effect immediately. Know what questions. I'm capture attack columns from the new york times.

I'm casing him from platformer. And this is hard fork this week. Are we reaching the A I N G. A new sa from the CEO of the anthropic has silicon value talking.

Then uber CEO dara kastor shah, he joins us to discuss these companies, is new partnership with way mo and the future of autonomous vehicles. Infinite internal tiktok documents tells exactly how many videos you need to watch to get. And so I did very brave. God help me.

Well, Kevin, the A I race continues to accelerate, and this week the news is coming from anthropic. Now last year, you actually spend some time inside this company, and you called IT, the White hot center of A.

I do. Morison, yes, the headline of my piece called the White center. M, just a click blame. No, reporters don't often write our own headline.

so I just feel the need to clarify their up. But the story does talk about how many of the people you met inside this company seemed strAngely pessimistic about what they were building.

Yeah, he was a very interesting reporting experience because I got invited to spend you know several weeks just basically embedded at anthropic as they were gearing up to launch an update of their chatbot claud and issue expected that they would go in and try to and impress me with how great cloud was and talk about all the amazing things that would allow people to do. And then I got there and he was like, all they wanted to do was talk about how scared they were of and of releasing these systems into the wild. I compared to in the piece to like being a restaurant credit, who shows up IT like a buzz new restaurant, and all anyone wants to talk about his food.

right? And and so for this reason, I was very interested to see over the past week the CEO of anthropic dio oma day write a thirteen thousand word essay about his vision of the future. And in this essay he says that he is not an AI tumor, does not think of himself as one, but actually thinks that the future is quite bright and might be arriving very quickly.

And then shortly after that cabin, the company put out a new policy, which they call a responsible scaling policy, that I thought had some interesting things to say about ways to safely build A I system. So we wanted to talk about this today for a couple reasons. One is that A I C O S have kept telling us recently that major changes are right around the corner.

Sam ulmen recently had a blog post where he said that an artificial super intelligence could be just a few thousand days away. And now here some day is saying that A G I could arrive in twenty six, which check your calender, Kevin, that is in fourteen months. And certainly there is a case that this is just hype.

But even so, there are some very wild claims in here that I do think deserve brother attention. The second reason that we want to talk about this today is that and topic is really the flip side to a story that we've been talking about for the past year here, which is what happened to open an eye during and after sam elements temporary firing as CEO. And a problem was started by a group of people who left OpenAI primarily over safety concerns.

And recently, several more members of open a founding team and their safety research teams have gone over to anthropic. And so in a wake of in and topic is an answer to the question of what would I if OpenAI executive team hadn't spent the past few years following apart IT? And while they are still the underdog compared to open eye, is there a chance that anthropic is the team that builds A G I.

first? So that's what we want to talk about today. But I want to start by just talking about this S A Kevin. What did dario om a day have to say in his sa machines of loving Grace?

yes. So the first thing that struck me is, is he is clearly reacting to this perception, which I may have helps create through my story last year, that that sort of he and anthropic are just tumors, right? That they are just a company that goes around warning about how badly A I could go if you're not careful.

And what he says in this essay that I thought was really interesting and important is, you know, we're going to keep talking about the risks of a this is not him saying, I don't think this stuff is risky. I've been you take IT out of context, and i'm actually an AI optimist. What he says is it's important to have both, right? You can't just be going around warning about the all the time.

You also have to have a positive vision for the future of A I because um that's what not only what inspires and motivates people, but IT IT matters what we do. I thought that was actually the most important thing that he did in this essay was he basically said, look, this could go well or IT could go badly. And whether IT goes well badly is up to us.

This is not some inevitable forced. Sometimes people in the AI industry, they have a habit of talking about AI as if it's just kind of this disembodied force that is just going to you happen to us inevitably, yes. And we either have to sort of like get on the train or get run over by the train. And what dario says is actually different. He says, you know, this is, here's a vision for how this could go well, but it's gonna take some work to get there.

IT also made me realized that for the past couple of years, I have heard much more about how A, I could go wrong than how IT could go right from the A I ceos, right? As much as these guys get knocked for endlessly hyping up their products, they also have, I think, to their credit, spend a lot of time trying to explain the people that this stuff is risky. And so there was something almost counter intuit about darro coming out and saying, wait, let's get really specific about how this could go. Well, totally.

So I think the first thing that's worth pulling out from this essay is the timeline, right? Because, as you said, darro amede is claiming that powerful AI, which is sort of his term, he doesn't like agi.

He thinks that sounds like too size I, but powerful AI, which he sort of defines as like an A I that would be smarter than a nobel prize winner in basically any field, and that IT could basically control tools, go due a bunch of task simultaneously. He called this sort of a country of geniuses in a data center that's of his definition of powerful AI. And he thinks that he could arrive as soon as twenty twenty six.

I think there's a tendency sometimes to be cynical about people with short timeline ines like these like, oh, these guys are just saying this stuff is going to arrive so soon because they need to raise a bunch of money for their A I companies. And you know maybe that is a factor, but I truly believe that at least darom is sincere and serious about this. H, this is not a drill to him. And anthropic is actually making plans, scaling teams and building products as if we are headed into erratically different world very soon, like within the next presidential term.

Yeah and look and topic is raising money right now. And that does give darro motivation to get out there in the markets, start talking about curing cancer, all these amazing things that he thinks that that A I can do at the same time. You know, I I think that we're in a world where the discourse has been a little bit poison by a folks like elon mus.

Who are constantly uh going out into public making bold claims about things that they say are going to happen within six months or a year and then truly just never happen. And our understanding of of dari a based our own conversations with them in of people who work with them is like, he is not that kind of person. This is not somebody who lets his mouth run away with him. And when he says that he thinks this stuff could start to arrive in fourteen months, I actually do give some credibility.

Yeah and and you know, you could argue with the time scales and plenty of smart people disagree about this, but I think it's worth taking this seriously because this is the head of one of the leading A I labs sort of giving you his thoughts on not just what AI is going to change about the world, but when that's going to happen.

And what I liked about this, esa, was that I wasn't trying to sell me a vision of a glorious AI future, right? Dari o says all or sum or none of this might come to pass, but IT was basically a thought experiment. He has this idea in the esa about what he calls the the compressed twenty first century.

ah. He basically says, what if all AI does is allow us to make a hundred years worth of progress in the next ten years in fields like biology? What would that change about the world? I thought there was a really interesting way to frame IT a.

give us some examples, Kevin, of what daro says might happen in this twenty first century.

So what he says in this as is that if we do get what he calls powerful AI relatively soon, that in the sort of decade that follows, that we would expect things like a, the prevention and treatment of basically all natural infectious disease, the elimination of most types of cancer, very h serve good embro screening for genetic diseases that would make IT so that more people didn't die of these sort of heredity things he talks about there being, uh, improved treatment for mental health and other .

elements yeah I mean, and a lot of this comes down to just understanding the human brain, which is an area where we still have a lot to learn. And the idea is, if you have what he calls this country of genius, that just Operating on a server somewhere, and they are able to talk to each other, to dream, to suggest ideas, to give guidance to human scientists and labs, to run experiments, then you have this massive compression effect on all of us, that you get all of these benefits really soon.

And you know, obviously, the headline grabbing stuff is like, you know dari o of things, we're going to cure all cancer and we're going to cure alzheimer's disease. Obvious, those are huge. But there's also kind of the more mundane stuff like do you struggle with anxiety? Do you have other mental health issues that are you like mild ly depressed? It's possible that we will understand the neural circuitry there and be able to develop treatments that would just lead to a general rise in happiness. And that really struck me. Yeah and IT sounds .

when you just describe IT that way, IT sounds sort of utopian and crazy. But what he points out and and what I actually find compelling is like most scientific progress does not happen in a straw line, right? You have these kind of moments where there's a breakthrough that enables a bunch of other breakthrough. And we've seen stuff like this already happened with A I like with alpher fold, which won the freaking nobel Price this year in chemistry, where you don't just have a cure for one specific disease, but you have a way of potentially. Cures for many kinds of diseases all at .

once that there's a part. And I say that I really like really points out that, uh, crisper was something that we could have invented long before we actually did. But essentially no one had noticed the things they needed to notice in order to make that a reality.

Any posits that there are probably hundreds of other things like this right now that just no one has noticed yet. And if you had a bunch of a AI agents working together in a room and they were sufficiently intelligent, they would just notice those things. And we be after the races.

And what I liked about this section of the esa was that I didn't try to claim that there was some, uh, you know, completely novel thing that would be required a to result in the changed world that he envisions, right? All that would need to happen for society to look gradually different. Ten or fifteen years from now in dari o's mine is for that base rate of discovery to accelerate rapidly due to AI.

Now let's take a moment to acknowledge a folks in the audience who might be saying, oh my gosh, will these guys stop IT with the A I hype? They are accepting every premise that these A I C E S will just shovel. They can get enough, and it's irresponsible.

These are just the caster parents, Kevin. They don't know anything. It's not intelligence and it's never gna get any Better than IT is today. And I just want to say, I hear you and I see you and our email address is as reckin show at my time. Second, but I here's a thing you can look at the state of the yard right now. And if you just extra plate what is is happening in twenty twenty four and you assume some rate of progress beyond where we currently are, IT seems likely to me that we do get into a world where you do have these sort of simulated PHD students or maybe simulated super genois, and they are able to realize a lot of these kinds picks out maybe doesn't happen in five, ten years, maybe takes a lot longer than that. But I just wanted to underline like we are not truly living in the world of fantasy, we are just trying to get a few years and a few levels of advancement beyond where we are right now.

Yeah and dario does in this S A make some caveats about things that might constrain the rate of progress in A I like, uh, regulation or clinical trials taking a long time. No, he also talks about the fact that some people may just opt out of this whole thing, like we just may not want anything to do with A I. There might be some political or cultural backlash that slows down the rate of progress um and he says, you know like that could actually constrain this and and we need to think about some ways to .

address that you so that is sort of the sweet of of things that daro things will benefit our lives. You know there's a budget more I know that will help with climate change other issues um but the S A has five parts and there was another part of the S A that really caught my attention.

Kevin IT is a part that lives a little bit more seriously at the risk of this stuff, because any super genius that was sufficiently intelligent to cure cancer could otherwise recap c in the world. So what is his idea for ensuring that? A, A, I always remains a good hands.

So he admitted that he's not like a geopolitics expert. This is not. Um and there Better look a lot of people theorizing about uh, what the politics of advanced I you're onna look like. Darro says that his best guests are currently about how to prevent A I from sort empowering autocrats and dictators is through what he calls an onon strategy. Basically you want a bunch of democracies to kind of come together to secure their supply chain, to serve block adversity from getting access to things like GPU and and semiconductors um and that you could basically bring countries h into this democratic alliance. And as of I saw the the monochord italian regimes from getting access to the but I think this was sort of not that the most fleshed out part .

of the argument yeah well, and I appreciate that he is at least making an effort to come up with ideas for how would you prevent A I from from being misused. But as I was reading the discussion around the blog post, I found this interesting in response from a guy name, max tegmark. Max is a professor at M.

I. T. New studies, machine learning, and he's also the president of something called the future of life institute, which is a certain non profit focused on AI safety. And he really doesn't like this idea of what dario calls the on tone to the group of these, these democracies working together. And he says he doesn't like IT, because IT essentially sets up and accelerates a race.

IT says to the world that essentially, whoever invents super powerful A I first will in forever, right? Because in this view, AI is essentially the final technology that you ever need to invent, because after that, they'll just invent anything else that needs. And he calls that a suicide race and the reason is this um and he has a great quote, honey. Couples know that this is easier to make a human level intelligence than to raise and align, and IT is also easier to make an agi than to figure .

out how to a line to control IT. Wow, ah I never thought .

about like that, thought that I um so Kevin, what do you make up this sort of feeding? Is there a risk there that this effectively serves as a starter pistol that leaves maybe our adversary to start investing more in AI and sort of racing against us and you trigger ing some sort of dispirit? Al.

yeah, I mean, I look, I don't have a problem with china racing us to cure cancer using AI. That's not if they get there first like more power to them um but I think the more serious risk is that they start building the kind of AI that serves chinese interest, right that IT becomes a tool for surveilLance and and control of people rather than some of these more sort of democratic ideals and this is actually something that I I asked darro about back last year when I was spending all that time and anthropic because this is the most common criticism of anthropic is like, well, if you're so worried about A I and all the risks that IT compose like why are you building IT and I I asked me this in his response was he basically said, look, there's this problem of a in A I research of kind of inner training right of the the same technology that are of advanced the state of the art in A I also allows you to advance the state of the art in A I safety right, the same tools that uh that make the language models more capable, also make IT possible to control the behavior of the language models. And so these things kind of go hand in hand. And if you want to compete on the frontier of AI safety, you also have to compete on the frontier of AI capabilities.

Yeah and and I think it's an idea worth considering to me and just sounds like, wow, you are really standing on a knife edge there. If you are saying in order to have any influence over the future, we have to be right at the frontier and maybe even gently advanced the frontier, and yet somehow not accidentally trigger a race where all of a sudden everything gets out of control uh, but I do accept and respect that that is start point.

But isn't that kind of what we observe from the last couple of years of AI progress? Like open a eye, IT got out there with ChatGPT before any of the other labs had released anything similar. And ChatGPT kind of set the tone for all of the products that followed. And so I think the argument from anthropic would be like, yes, we could sort of be way behind the state of the art that would probably make us safer than someone who was actually advancing the state of the art. But then we missed the chance to kind of set the terms of what future AI products from other companies will look like.

So it's sort of like using a soft power in an effort to influence others.

Yeah, the way they put this to me last year was that they wanted instead of there to be a uh, just a race for raw capabilities of AI systems, they wanted there to be a safety race, right, where companies would start competing about whose models were the safest rather than whose models could, you know.

do your math homework Better. So let's talk about the safety race. And the other thing that anthropic did this week to a lay out a future vision for A I. And that was was something that has also kind, the boring name, the responsible scaling policy.

I understand, know this, maybe what was going to come up over drinks at the club, this 呀。 But I think this is something that people should pay a time to do, because it's an example of what you just said. Kevin IT is anthropic trying to use some soft power in the world to say, hey, if we went a little bit more like this, we might be safer.

So talk about what's in responsible scaling policy, the anthropic .

released this week. Well, let's talk about what IT is. The basic idea is just that as large language models gain new abilities, they should be subjected to more scrutiny and they should have more safeguards added to them.

They put this out a year ago, and IT was actually a huge success in this sense. Kevin OpenAI, when on to release its own version of IT and then google deep mind released, is a similar uh, scaling policy as well this spring. So now when proper is coming back just over a year later and they say we are going to make some refinements.

And the most important thing that they say is essentially, we have identified two capabilities that we think would be particularly dangerous. And so if anything that we make displays these capabilities, we are going to add a bunch of new safeguards. The first one of those is if a model can do its own A I research and development, that is gona start ringing a lot of alarm bells.

And they are going to put many more safe ts on IT. And second, if one of these models can meaningful ly assist someone who has a basic tactical background in creating a chemical, biological, ideological or nuclear weapon, then they would add these new sake ards. What are these same parts? While they have a super blog post about IT, you can look at up, but IT includes basic things like taking extra steps to make sure that a foreign adversary can steal the model weights, for example, or otherwise hack into the systems and run away with that.

right? And this is some of IT is similar to things that were proposed by the biden White house in its executive order on AI last year. This is also these are some of the steps that came up uh, in sp ten forty seven, the A I A regulation that was vetoed by governor newsom in california recently. So these are ideas that have been floating out there uh in in the sort of A I safety world for a while. But anthropic s is basically saying we are going to proactively commit to doing this stuff even before a government requires .

us to yeah there's a second thing I like about this. And IT relates to this as b ten forty seven that we talked about on the show, some thing that a lot of folks in silicon valley didn't like about IT. The way that IT tried to identify danger and IT was not because of a specific harm that a model could cause. IT was by saying, well, if a model a caused a certain amount of money to train, right, or if IT is trained with a certain amount of compute, those were the proxies that the government was trying to use to understand why this would be dangerous. And a lot books in silicon valley said, we hate that because that has nothing to do whether these things could cause harm or not. So we are proof is doing here is saying, well, why don't we try to regulate based on the anticipated harm? No, obviously will be bad if you could log onto claude and topics rival ed a ChatGPT and said, hey, help me build a radiological weapon, which is something that I might type in o'clock, because I don't even know the difference between a radiological weapon and a nuclear weapon.

I hope you never learn.

I hope, I hope I don't either, because sometimes, like about this, Kevin and I get to scheming. So for this reason, I think that government's regulators around the world might want to look at this approach, say, hey, instead trying to regulate this based on how much money A I labs are spending, or like how much compute is involved. Why did we look at the harms or trying to address and say, hey, if you build something that could cause this kind of harm.

you have to do extensive yeah, that makes sense to me. So I think the biggest impact that both these are of essay, the dario route and this responsible scaling policy head on me was not about any of the actual specifics of the idea. That was purely about the time scales and the urgency.

IT is one thing to hear a bunch of people telling you that A I is coming and that is going to be more powerful than you can imagine sooner than you can imagine. But if you actually start to internalize that and plan for IT, IT just feels very different. 嗯， if we are going to get powerful AI sometime in the next, let's call, two to ten years, you just start making different choices.

Yeah, I think IT IT becomes sort of the calculus, I can imagine IT affecting what you might want to study in college if you are going to school right now. I have friends who are, uh, you know, thinking about leaving their jobs because they think the place where they are working right now will not be able to compete in a world where A I is very widespread. So yes, you're absolutely starting to see IT creep into the calculus.

Um I don't know kind of what else I could do know that there is no real call to action here because you can really do very much until this world begins to arrive. But I do think psychologically, we want people to at least imagine, as you say, what I would be like to live in this world, because I have been surprised at how little discussion this is. Begetting.

yeah I I totally agree. I I mean to me, IT feels like we are we are entering. I wouldn't all IT IT like an A I N game because I think it's were closer to the start, then the end of this transformation.

But IT does feel like something is happening. I'm starting to notice A S effects in my life more i'm starting to feel more dependent on IT. And i'm also like i'm kind of having an assistant's al crisis like not a full blown one.

But like typically i'm a guy who likes to plan. I like to strategize. I like to have like a five year and a ten year plan.

And i've just found that my own certainty about the future in my ability to plan long term is just way lower than IT has been for any time that I can remember. That's understand. I mean, for myself.

I feel like that has always been true. You know in one thousand nine hundred and ninety, I did not know what things were going to look like in twenty forty and I would be really surprised by a lot of because have happened along the way. Um but yeah, there's a lot of entering other it's scary.

But I also like, do you not feel a little bit excited about IT?

Of course I I look I love software. I love tools. I want to live in the future and it's already happening to me. There is a lot of that uncertainty and like that stuff freaks me out um but like if we could cure cancer, if we could cure to pression, if we could cure anxiety, you'd be talking about the greatest advancement to like human well being certainly a decade it's maybe .

we've ever see. Yeah I mean, I I have some players on this because like my dad died of a very rare form of cancer that um was is like a sub one percent type of cancer and when he got sick I was like, you know I read all the clinically trials and I was just like there hadn't been enough people thinking about this specific type of cancer and how to cure IT because he was not breast cancer IT was not lung cancer IT was not something that millions of americans get and so there just wasn't the kind of brain power devoted to trying to solve this.

Now IT has subsequently IT hasn't been solved, but there are now treatments that are in the pipeline that didn't exist when he was sick. And I just constantly am wondering, like if he had gotten sick now instead of when he did, like maybe he would have lived. And I think that is one of the the things that makes me really optimistic about A I is just like maybe we just do have the brain power or we will soon have the brain power to devote uh, in a world class, uh, research teams to these things that might not affect millions of people, but they do affect some number of people. Absolutely I just I don't know IT IT really um I got of emotional reading as essay because I was just like, you know obviously it's I am not someone who believes all the height but i'm like I I assign some non zero probability to the possibility that that he's right that all this stuff could happen and I just find that so much um more interesting and fun to think about than like a world where everything goes .

off the rails. Well, it's just the first time that we've had a truly positive transformative vision for the world coming out of silicon valley in a really long time. In fact, this vision, it's more positive and optimistic than anything that has spent like in the presidential campaign.

Ah you know it's like when the presidential candidates talk about the future of this country, it's like, well, you know will give you this tax break right? Or will make this other policy change. Nobody y's talking about they're going to freak cure cancer yeah right. So I think of course we're drawn to this kind of discussion because IT feels like you know there are some people in in the world who are taking really, really big swings. And if they connect them in the benefit.

yeah.

When we come back, why uber has way more autonomous vehicles on the road than I used to.

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okay. See, one of the biggest developments over the past few months in tech is that self driving cars now are .

actually working, yes, but this is no longer in the room of yes.

So we've talked obviously about these self driving cars that you can get instant for its esco now used to be two companies, way mo and cruise now is just way o and there have also been on a bunch of different autonomists vehicle updates from other companies that are involved in the space. And the one that I found most interesting recently was about uber. Now as you will remember, uber used to, uh, try to build its own robot taxes.

They gave that a back in. That was the year they sort of sold off there. Uh, alton is driving division to a start up called aurora after losing just an absolute tune of money on IT. But now they are back in the game and they just a recently announced a multiyear partnership with cruise, the self driving car company.

They also announced an expanded partnership with o which is going to allow uber writers to get a VS in Austin, texas and IT land a georgia a they have been Operating the service in phoenix, uh, since last year, and that's going to keep expanding. They also announced that self driving uber will be available in abodeely, a partnership with the chinese AV company we ride. And they're also made a lang term investment in wave, which is a london based autonomists driving company. So they are investing really heavily in this, and they're doing IT in a different way than they did back when they were trying to build their own self driving cars. Now they are essentially saying we want a partner with every company that we can that is making self driving cars.

yeah. So this is a company that many people take several times a week, uber. And yet, I feel like it's sometimes is a bit taken for granted. And while we might just focus on the cars you can get today, they are thinking very long term about what transportation is gona look like in five or ten years. And increasingly for them, IT seems like autonomous vehicles are a big part of that answer.

yeah. And what I found really interesting, so tesla had this robot taxi event last week, or elan must talk about how you'll soon be able to hail a self driving tesla. And what a federally interesting is that tesla share Price, uh, plumbed after that event, but uber stock Price rose to an all time high. So clearly, people think that at least some investors think that uber approaches is Better here than test less.

The sort of thing, Kevin, that makes me want to talk to the C.

E. O. Of uber.

And lucky for you.

he's here. thinness. So today we're onna talk with uber CEO dara cosa shi. He took over at uber in twenty seventeen after a bunch of scandals LED a the founder of uber travis clinic, to step down.

And he has made the company profitable for the first time in its history. And I think a lot of people think he's been doing a pretty good job over there. And he is leading this charge into autonomous vehicles. And i'm really curious to hear what he makes not just of uber partnership with me, but the whole self driving car landscape. Let's let's.

Dark ka shi, welcome hard work.

Thank you for having me.

So you were previously on the board of the new york times company and the twenty seventeen when you step down right after taking over at uber, I assume you still have some poll with our bosses though a because of your years of service. So can you get them to build us an isa studio?

N O I cera, i've got negative for I think there they're .

taking revenge on me.

Well, since you've left the board, they're making all kinds of crazy decisions like letting us start a pod can but right, so we are going to talk today about, uh, your new partnership with O H. And this sort of autonomous in future. I would love to hear the story of how this came together because I think for people who been following the space for a number of years, this was surprising. Uber and o not history ally, had a great relationship.

The two companies .

were in road, in litigation and laws', its and trade secret and things like that. There IT was a big deal. And so how how they did they approach you? Did you approach them? How did this partnership .

come together? I guess it's time healing, right? Um we when I came on board, we saw W T, that we wanted to establish a Better relationship with google generally, lama generally and even though we were working on our own self driving technology, IT was always within the context of we were developing our own, but we want to work with third parties as well.

One of the disappoint tages of developing our own technology was that some of the other players are way most of the world seta heard us but didn't necessarily believe us. It's difficult to work with players that you compete. So one of the first decisions that we made was we can't be between here either you have to go vertical or you have to go platform strategy. You can't um achieve both and we have to make a Better .

to do our own thing or we have to do IT .

with partners. Yeah I absolutely. And so that strategic can fork uh became quite apparent to me.

Uh and then the second was just what are we good at? Listen, we will be blunt, we suck at hardware, right? We try to, uh to apply software principles to hardware.

IT doesn't work. Hardware is different Prices, different demand in terms of professional eta. And ultimately, that fork do we go vertical. And there are very few companies that can do software and hardware well.

Apple tesla are arguably one of the few in in the world um and we decide to make a bit on the platform ah and so once we made that bet, we went out and identified who are the leader's way was a clear leader force. We had to make peace with them and settled in court. Etta, uh, we got good, good to be a bigger shareholder.

Uh and then over a period time, we built relationships. And you know I do think there's a sync, eric, between the two. So IT just makes sense the relationship and we're very, very excited to uh on a forward basis, expand IT pretty significant.

So this was, I feel like, maybe your your most consequential decision to date as the C E O of this company. If you believe that AV are gonna come the norm for many people hAiling a ride in ten or fifteen years, it's conceive a ball that they might open up the way mo APP right, and not the uber APP way. Moo has an APP order cars. I use IT fairly regularly, right? So what give you the confidence that in that world IT will still be uber, uh, that is the APP that people are turning to and not o or whatever other apps might have risen for other AV companies.

Only first is that it's not a binary outcome. okay? I think that a lao APP and uber er APP can coexist. We saw my old job in the travel business, right iran, expedia.

And there's this dramatic is expedia gna put the hotel chains out of business or the hotel chains going to put speed out of business? The fact is both thought and there's a set of customers who books through media. There's a set of customers who books hotel direct.

And both businesses have grown and interactivity in general has grown. Same thing if you look on food, right? McDonald has his own APP.

It's a really good APP has A A loyalty program. Starbucks has its own APP as a loyalty program, yet both are engaging with us through the uber eat marketplace. So my conclusion was that there isn't and either or I do believe there will be other companies.

They'll be cruises and they'll be we rise and waves that there. There be other companies and self driving choices, and the person who wants utility, speed, ease, familiar will chose uber. And both can coexist and both can thrive, and both are really gonna w because authorities will be the future eventually.

So tell us more about the partnership with wo h that is going to take place in Austin and atlantic who is actually paying for the maintenance of the cars? Does uber have to sort make sure that there's no you know trash left behind in the cars? Like what what is uber actually doing in a direction just making these rides available through the APP?

sure. So I don't want to talk about the economy because are confidential uh, in terms of the deal. But in those two cities, wao will be available exclusively through through the uber b, and we will also be running the fleet Operations as well. So depos reach charging cleaning if something gets lost, making sure that IT gets back to its owner, it's eta and amo will provide the software driver, uh will obviously de the hardware repair, the hardware sea. And then we will be doing the upkeep and Operating the .

network for readers. If you want to get in a way more in one of those cities through uber, is there an option to you specifically request a self driving waa? Or is IT kind of chance like like if the car that's closest to you happens to be a way more than the one .

you get right now? The experience, for example, in phoenix is that it's by chance, I think you got one by chance. And you can say, yes, i'll do IT or not.

And I think that's what we're gna start with. But there maybe some people who only want lamos and there are some people who may not want lamos and will saw for that over partial. I could be personism um preferences or could be what you're talking about, which is I only want to away.

Do the passengers get rated by the self driving car the way that they would in?

Not yet.

That's no idea. What about tipping? Like if I get out of a self driven uber do is an option to tip the car.

Did good job. I'm sure we could build that. Why not?

I don't know. I do wonder if people .

are onna tip machines. I don't think it's likely, but you never know this sounds crazy.

But at some point someone is going to start asking because they're onna realize it's just free margin. You know it's like even if only one hundred customers do in the whole year, I it's just free money and .

that the good news is tapping one hundred percent of tips go to driver. We definitely want to keep that. So we like the tipping habit but whether people tip machines as .

DVD yeah and how big are these fleet? I think I read somewhere recently that mo has about seven hundred self driving cars Operating nationwide. How many VS we talking about in these cities?

We're starting in the hundreds, and that will expand from there.

I I know you don't want to discuss the economics, even though I would love to learn what the .

split is there going to tell you.

But you did recently talk about the margins are on autonomous rides being lower than the margins on regular uber rides for at least a few more years. That's not intuitive to me because in an autonomists, right, you don't have to pay the driver. So you would think the margin would be way higher for uber. But why would you make less money if you don't have to pay a drivers?

So generally, our designs back in terms of how we bill businesses is any newer business. We're going to Operate at a lower margin while we're growing that business. You don't want you to be profitable day one.

And that's my attitude with all Thomas, which is, again, get IT out there introduced to as as many people as possible at a majority level. Generally, if you look at or take right around the world is about twenty percent. We get twenty percent, the driver gets eighty percent.

We think that's a model that makes sense for any autonomous partner going fold, and that's that's what we expect. I can't don't care honestly what the margins are for the next five years. The question is, can I get lots of supply? Can I be absolutely safe? And you know, does that twenty eighty split look reasonable going forward?

And I think he does. Yeah, I want to ask about tesla. You mentioned that a little earlier.

They held an event recently where they unveiled there. I'd plans for A A robot taxi service. Do you consider tesla competitor?

Well, they certainly could be right. If they develop their own AV vehicle and they decide to go direct only through the tesla APP, they would be a competitor. And if they decide to work with us, then we would be a partner as well.

And to some thing, again, both can be true. So I don't think it's going to be an either or. I think elon's vision is pretty compelling, especially like you might have these cyber shoppers or these these owners of these fleets. Ta those owners, if they want to have maximum earnings on those fleets, will want to put those fleet on uber. But at this point is unknown what his .

intentions are. There's this big debate that's playing out right now about who has the Better AV strategy between way more and in the sense that the way mos have many, many sensors on that, the vehicles are much more expensive to produce.

Tesla is trying to get to full autonomy using only its cameras um and software eh under a carpathia researcher recently said that tesla was going to be in a Better position in the long run because IT ultimately just had a software problem. Way more has harbour problem. Those are typically heard to solve. I'm curious if you have a view on this whether you think one company is likely or two get to A A Better scale based on the approach that they're taking with the word software.

I mean, I think that hardware costs a scale down over a pretty time. So sure, we now has a hardware problem, but they can solve them. I mean, the history of of computer and hardware like the cost come down very, very significantly, the wave of solutions working right now.

So it's not theory, right? And I think the differences are a bigger, which is way o has more sensors. As camera has has lied or so, there's a certain redone and see there a way more generally has more compute ah, so to speak.

So the inference of that computer is going to be Better, right? And we will also has a high definition maps that essentially makes the problem of recognizing what's happening in the real world a much simpler problem. So under elon's model, the weight that the software has to Carry is very, very heavy vers the way well. And most other player model, where you don't have to kind weigh as much on training and you make the problem much simpler er as a computer prom to to understand. I think eventually both will get there.

But if you have to guess who's who's gna get to part of a viable scale first.

listen, I think I think elan an eventually will get a viable scale. But for the next five years, I bet on away a and we are betting away.

I'll say this, I don't want to get into an autonomous test. L in the next five years i'm to somebody else can test that out. Going to be nearly adopted in the first.

These game pretty good.

Have you used that? I have not used really good. Yeah, yeah.

It's really good. Now, again, the, for example, the cost of a self state lie are announced five hundred, six hundred dollars, right? So why wouldn't you put that into your sensor stack? Is not that expensive.

And for a fully self drive being specialized auto, I think that makes a lot of sense to me. Now, elon is accomplish the uni magine able many, many, many times, so I wouldn't against them. Yeah.

I don't know. This is always, you know, my my secret dream free I you know, obviously, you should say uber, as long as you want when you're on with that, actually do thing you should run tesla because I think you would adjust as you've done uber. You'd be willing to make some of the sort of easy compromises like just put a five hundred dollar a second light on the thing and we go faster.

So I have a full .

time job and i'm very happy.

I thank you. Well, the test, the board is listening.

I don't know the board. Listen to you too.

First, I we're opening .

of the war in with an episode of fork. Everybody.

think about a lot for this show.

What's your best guest for when a fifty percent of uber rides in the U. S. Will be autonomous?

I take close to the eight to ten years is my best guess, but I am sure that will be wrong .

parly ser y .

closer most people .

have .

over estimated ah you know again, it's it's a wild guess, the probabilities of your being ride or just .

as much as mine and curious if we can sort of get into a future imagining mode here, like in the year, whether it's ten years or fifteen years or twenty years from now when maybe a majority of rides, uh, in at least big cities in the U. S. Will be autonomists.

Do you think that changes the city at all? Like, do the roads look different? Are there more cars on the road? Are there fewer cars on the road? What does that even look like?

So I think that the cities will have much, much more space to use. Parking often takes up twenty thirty percent of the square miles in a, in a city, for example, and that parking space will be open for living parts at at or so. There is no doubt that I will be a Better world. You will have Greener, cleaner cities, and you'll never have to park again.

which I think is pretty cool.

I'm very curious what you think about the politics of autonomy in transportation. In the early days of uber, there was a lot of backlash and resistance from taxi drivers and and you know, they saw uber as a threat to their livelihoods. There were well published cases of serve sabotage, big protests. Do you anticipate there will be a backlash from either drivers or the public to the spread of A V, S, as they start to appear in more cities? I there could be.

And what i'm hoping is that we avoid the backlash by having the proper conversations. Now historically, society as a whole, we've been able to adjust to job displacement because IT does happen gradually and even in a world where there's greater automation now than ever before, employment rate, eea or at historically great levels. But the fact is that A I is going to display drop.

What does that mean? How quickly should we go? How do we think about that? Those are discussions that we're gonna have.

And if we don't have the discussions, sure, there will be backache. There is always backlash against societies that significant. Now we now work with taxes and safety skill.

And taxi drivers who use uber make more than twenty percent more than the ones who don't. So there is a kind of solution space where new technology and establish players can win. But I don't know exactly what that looks like.

That calculus is does not apply to his self know it's not like the uber driver who has been driving and uber for ten years, but the main source income can just start driving a self driving. You don't need a drivers. So it's not just that they have to switch the actor using is that IT IT threatens to put .

them out of a job. Well, listen, could they be a part of fleet management, cleaning, charging eta? That's a possibility. We are now working with some of our drivers. They're doing A I map labeling and training of A I models.

Is that a so we're expanding the solution of work on demand, work that were offering our drivers because there is part of that work which is driving maybe going away or the growth in that work is going to slow down at least over the next ten years, and then we will look to adjust. But listen, these these are issues that are real, and I don't have a clean answer for them at this point. Yeah.

you brought up shared rides earlier and you know IT back in the day. I think when uber x first rolled out share rides, like I did that a couple of times and you know, I don't know, I like got a raise of my job and I thought, you know, from here on out and I think this can be me in the car. How popular do you think you can make shared rides? And like, is there anything that you can do to make that more appealing?

Well, I think the way that we have to make a more appealing is to reduce the penalty, so to speak, of the shared rides. I think the number one reason why people use zuber, they want to save time, they want to have their time back and a shared ride. Would you know you would get about thirty percent decrease in Price historically, but there could be a fifty to one hundred percent time penalty. We're working now.

might end up city next.

I would be cool. I have amazing, although I I would feel very short, otherwise I would have no complaint. So far we've her don't have a promote company.

IT really is time and they don't mind writing with other people. There's a certain satisfaction with riding with other people, but we're now working with both algorithmically and I think also fixing the product. A previously, you would choose a shared ride and you get off front discount.

So you're incentive as a customer to get the discount but not to get a shared right. So we would have customers gaining the system. They get a shared ride, two A M when they know they are not to be matched up at a now you ve got a smaller discount and you get a reward, which is a higher discount if you're matched.

So part of IT is we're not customers are working against this and we're not working against customers, but we're working on tech. We are reducing the time penalty, which is we avoid these weird grounds at settle. That's gona cost you fifty percent in your time or one hundred percent of your time. Now in autonomous, if we are the only player that then has a liquidity to introduce shared autonomous into cities about lower congestion, lower the Price that another way in which our marketplace can add value to the ecosystem.

Speaking of shared rides, a uber just released a new airport shuttles service in new york city cause eighteen dollars a person, you book a seat h goes on a designated serve out on a set schedule um I don't have a question. I just wanted to congratulate you on .

and inventing a bus is a Better bus know exactly when it's going picking up, like just knowing exactly where your buses pick up, knowing what your path is real time IT just gives a sense of comfort. We think this can be a pretty cool product and again, is just going to be usually profitable for us long term.

I don't know, but I will introduce us to a bigger audience to come into the uber ecosystem, and we think that can be k up for cities as well. Um if you're miami, by the way, over the weekend, we got buses to the teller swift concert as well. So i'm just same.

Well, I mean, look, IT should not be hard to improve on the experience of a city bus.

Yes, like you know I mean, ah so I like city buses.

What is like you on a city bus? I took the train here I was a.

but the transit is, he is. I like .

to write .

public. I would love to see a picture of you, you on about sometimes in the past five years, pretty. That never happen. Let let me ask .

you make a here. You know.

so far i've resisted giving you any product feedback, but I had this one thing that I have always wanted to know the explanation. For instance, at some point in the past couple years, you all, when I ordered in uber, started sending me a push notification saying that the driver was nearby. And i'm the sort of person when i've voted in uber.

Dr, i'm going to be there when the driver pose. I'm not making this person way, okay. I'm going to respect their time. And what i've learned is when you tell me the driver is nearby, what that means is that at least three minutes away and they might be two miles away. And what I wanna know is why do you seen in the notification we want .

you to be prepared to not keep the driver waiting? Maybe we should personalize IT. I I think that's a that's a good question, which is depending on whether or not you keep the driver waiting, I think that is one of the cool things with A I algos that we can do at this point. You're right. The experience is not quite .

up to it's for the .

driver is the money.

And if I were a driver, I would be happy that you are that but you also notifications as driver arriving. And that's what i'm like OK go down stares but sounds like we're making progress.

And I wont know .

that I my right case is previously .

talked about how he doesn't like a zuber drivers to talk .

to him .

and this .

this is a man who who .

doesn't mean. And what if you on your six thirty in the morning, do you truly want a person you've never met before asking you who you're going to vote .

for in the election? Is that experience in anyone? I drive, I drove and reading the writer as to whether they want to have a conversation or not. I was not good at the art of of conversation as as a.

are you a no up?

Hey, how's a going and you having a good dag going to work? And then I just shut up. Yeah, and have a nice day to me. That idea was, but I don't know if that's no that's perfect.

That's going to .

give you all the .

information cases, real attraction to self driving cars that he never has to talk .

to another human like you can make of all I not person.

let me tell you safety. And like, yes, did you have a nice day? Like, yeah, but where are you coming from? Yeah, just key. I would like to see you checking into hotels.

And did you have a nice day like, well, let me tell you about this board meeting. I just want to because the pressure, I wonder you don't want hear.

right? I think great time, dara. Thank you. So coming. When to quebec, while A I is driving progress and it's driving cars now we're going to find out if I can drive casey insane. He watched two hundred and sixty tiktok videos, and it'll tell you all about IT.

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OK see, aside from all the drama in A I and self driving cars, this week we also had some news about tiktok.

one of the other most powerful AI forces on earth.

No, truly, yes. I ironically believe that yeah.

I was not a joke. yes.

So this week we learned about some documents that came to light as part of a lawsuit ah that is moving through the courts right now. As people will remember, the federal government is still trying to force bite dance to sell tiktok. But last week, thirteen states and the district of columbia suit tiktok, accusing company of creating an intentionally addictive APP that harm children.

A and Kevin, and this is my favorite part of this story, is that kentucky public radio got a hold of these court documents, and they had many reductions, you know, often in these cases, the most interesting sort of facts and figures will just be rejected for, who knows what reason? But the genius is over a kentucky public radio just copy and tasted everything in the document, and when they wasted in, everything was totally visible.

This keeps happening, I feel like every year too, we get a story about some failed reduction. Like, is IT that hard to reduct a document?

I'll say this. I hope IT always remains this hard to reduct A I read stuff like this, Kevin and nine in heaven.

Yes, yes. So they got a hole of these documents. They copied their placed, they figured out what was behind sort of the black boxes in the reduction materials.

And IT was pretty juicy. These documents included details are like tiktok knowledge of a high number of under age kids who were stripping for adults on the platform. The adults were paying them in digital gifts. These documents also claimed the tiktok had adjust its algorithm to prioritize people they deemed beautiful. And then there was this stat that I know you honed on, which was that these documents said, based on internal conversations, that tiktok had figured out exactly how many videos IT needed to show someone in order to get them hooked on the platform. And that number is two hundred and sixty.

Two hundred and sixty is what IT takes. Make me. This is sort of antrim. But you remember the commercial, the ads, where they would say, like, how many likes does IT take to get to the center of a twi pop? This, to me, this is the sort of twenty, twenty equivalent.

How many tiktok do you have to watch until you can look away ever again? yes. So this is according .

to the company's own resource. This is about the tipping point where people to develop a habit or an addiction of going back to the platform, and they sort of become sticky, in the parLance .

of social dia gun s of c.

So casey, when we heard a about this magic number of two hundred and sixty tiktok videos, you had what I thought was an insane idea. Tell us about IT. Well.

Kevin, I thought if two hundred and sixty videos is all IT takes, maybe I should watch two hundred and sixty tiktok and years. Why I am an infrequent user of tiktok, I would say once a week, once every two weeks, i'll check in or watch a few videos. And I would say generally enjoy my experience, but not to the point that I come back every day. And so i've always wondered what I missing because I know so many folks that can even have tiktok on their phone, because that holds such a power over them, and they feel like the algorithm gets to know them so quickly and so intimately that I can only be explained by magic. So I thought, if i've not been able to have this experience just sort of Normally using tiktok, what if I try to consume two hundred and sixty tiktok as quickly as I possibly could and just saw what would happen after that?

Not all heroes wear caps, okay? So casey, you watch two hundred and sixty tiktok videos last night up.

Tell me about IT. So I did create a new account. So I, I, I started fresh. I didn't just reset my algorithm, although that is something you can do in tiktok. And I decided a couple of things. One is, I was not going to follow anyone like no friend, but also no influencers, no enemies, no enemies. And I also was not going to do any searches, write a lot of the ways that tiktok will get to know you as if you do a search.

And I thought I want to get the sort of brodet most mainstreaming experience of tiktok that I can so that I can develop a Better sense of how does IT sort of, uh, walk me down this funnel toward my eventual interest. Whereas if I just follow tand friends and did like three searches for my favorite subjects, like I politically got their faster. And so do you know the very first thing that tiktok shows me heaven with IT showed me a ninety nine year old boy flu with an eighteen year old girl trying to get her phone number.

And when I tell you I could not have been any less interested in this content, IT was aggressively straight and IT was very Young and IT had nothing to do with me and he was not my business. And so over the next several hour, this total process, I did a about two and a half hours last night, and I did another thirty minutes this morning. And I would like to share you maybe the first nine or ten things that tiktok showed me.

I get you know that the assumption is that knows basically nothing about me. yes. And I do think there is something quite revealing about an algorithm knows nothing, throwing spaghetti, seeing what we will stick and then just picking up the spaghetti towards and saying, well, what is IT that I thought was interesting? So here's what IT showed me.

Second video, a disturbing nine, one one called like a very upsetting sort of domestic violence situation. Skip three, two people doing trivia on a diving board. And like the person who lose has to jump off the diving board.

Okay, fine. For just free booted clip of audition for americans. Got talent. Five, vegetable muck, bang. So just a guy who had, like, rose and rose of beautiful multi coloured vegetables in front of them, who is just eating them. Six, a comedy skit, but I was, like, running on top of a minecraft video.

So what are my key takeaway after my first six or seven tiktok videos was that that does actually assume they're quite Young, right? That's why I started out by showing me teenagers. And as I would go through this process, I found that over and over again.

Instead of just showing me a video, IT would show me a video that had been shopped in half. And on top was whatever the sort of core content was, and below would be someone is playing subway surfers, someone is playing mine craft or someone is doing those sort of oddly satisfying things. I'm coming through a rog, whatever.

And it's like it's literally people trying to help notice you, right? It's like if you just see the court, oh, one is trying to smooth. One is playing with huge IT.

Again, there is no content to IT. IT is just trying to stimulate you on some sort of legalizers solution. IT is like, yes, IT is just purely a drug video number seven and ad video number eight. Um a dad who was speaking in spanish and dancing was very cute.

Now can I ask you question, are you are doing anything other than just swiping from one video that to the next? Are you liking anything? Are you saving anything? Are you sharing anything? Because all that gets interpreted by the algorithm, a signal to keep showing you more of that kind of thing?

absolutely. So for the first twenty five or so videos, I did not like anything, but because I truly didn't like anything, like nothing was really doing IT for me. But my intention was always like, yes, when I see something I like, i'm going to try to reward the algorithm given a like, and I will maybe get more like that.

So the process goes on and on, and i'm just struck by the absolute weird and disconnection of everything in the feed at right at first, truly, nothing has any relation to anything else. And IT sort of feels like you ve put your brain until the vitamins s you know where it's like swipe. Here is a clip from friends swipe, kids complaining about school swipe.

Mickey mouse has a gun and he's in a video game. Those are three videos that I saw in a row. And the effect of IT is just like disorient.

Yes, and i've had this experience when you when you like go onto youtube, but you're not logged in. You know I like a new account and it's not is just showing you sort of a random assortment of things that are popular on youtube. IT does feel very much like they are just firing in a bunch of different directions, hoping that something will stick. Yeah, then I can. I can then sort of zo in on that thing.

Yes, absolutely. Now I will add that in the first thirty or so videos, I saw two things that I thought we're like actually disturbing and bad. Like things that never been me was clip from the all.

Unfortunately, I didn't get that back, but when there was a clip of of a great in like a busy city and was air blowing up from the great and the tiktok was just women walking over the great and the skirts blowing up. But that was in the first twenty video that I saw this video. K, um I guess if you like that way says a lot about you, right? But it's like that.

The second one, and I truly I do not even know if we will want to include this our our podcast, because I can't even believe that I was saying that I saw this. But IT is true. IT was an A I voice of someone telling an erotic story which involved insist. And IT was shown over a video of someone making soap.

Well, like what?

This is dark stuff. This is dark stuff. Now at what point did you start to wonder if the .

algorithm has started to pick up on your clues that you are giving IT? Well.

so I was desperate about this question because I am gay. And I wondered when I was going to see the first gay content, like when I was actually just going to show you two gay man were talking about gay concerns. And IT did .

not happen. Ever know?

IT never quite got there at the on of this more in two hundred sixty years, over two or six. Video, now, he did show me queer people actually, you know, the first queer person, identifiably queer person that the tiktok algorithm showed me. Are you familiar with the very popular, uh, tiktok mean from this year? Very premire, very mindful.

yes. The first clear person I saw a on tiktok, thanks to the algorithm, was jewels library in a piece of sponsored content. SHE was trying to sell me elena va laptop, and that that was the clear experience that I got in my rope through the tiktok algorithm.

Now, you know, I did eventually show me a couple of queer people. IT show me one tiktok about singer, chapter one who is queer as all. Count that. And then IT showed me a video by Billy. I lish know A A clear pop star, and I did like that video.

And now Billy elish was one of the most famous poses in the entire, let mean, like, truly like, like on the mount rushmore of famous pop s right now. So IT makes a lot of sense to me, the tiktok, which also incredibly popular teenagers. And so I liked one, the Billy elish video.

And then that was when the four gates open and like, okay, here's a lot of that, but just reform that like sort of scrolling IT did. We did not get to we did not get to the the the game. No, I did notice the algorithm adapting to me.

So something about me was being as, again, I was trying to get through a lot of videos in a relatively short amount of time and take talk. Now we will often show you three, four, five minute log videos. I Frankly did not have the time for that.

The longer I scrolled, the shorter of the videos were that I got. And I do feel like the content aged up a little bit. You know, IT started showing me a category of content that I call people being wear little freak, know, like someone. These are some real examples, a man dressed as the cat in the hat dancing to, uh, sears song goodies. Okay, um there was a man in a horse costume playing the addams family kim song on an accordion, using a toilet lid for percussion.

This is the most important media platform in the war.

Yes, that hours of ten teenagers are sharing at this. We are so screwed. Yeah, you know, I figured out that I was more likely to like contact about animals than other things.

So there would started to become a lot of dogs doing cute things, cats doing two things or other other things like that. But you know, there was also just a lot of, like, here's a guy going to a store and showing new objects from the store. Or like, here is a guy telling you a long story.

I can ask you a question, like was any in these two hundred and sixty videos where there any that you felt like that is a great video?

Um I don't know if I saw anything truly great. I definitely saw some animal videos that if I show them to you, you would laugh when I was cute. There was stuff that the gaming in an emotional response.

And I would say, particularly as I got to the end of this process, I was that I enjoyed a bit more. But there I did this morning. I decided to do something having because i've got so frustrated with the algorithm, I thought IT is typing of the algorithm a piece of data about me.

So do you know what I did? You do? I searched the word gay.

It's like, in fairness, is an instant search query, because what is chick tok supposed to show me in response? Show me all sorts of things on my, like, real tiktok account. IT just shows me new creators all the time.

And they do all sorts of things. They sing in their dancing, they're tell them jokes, their telling stories. So as like, I would like to see a little bit of stuff like that. Do you know the first clip that came up for me when I searched gay on tiktok to train my IT was a clip from an adult film? Now, like explicit, i'm blurred IT was from and I don't know this, i've only read about this.

But apparently at the start of some adult films before the explicit stuff, there will be some sort of story contents that sort of establishes the premise of the scene and this was sort of in that way. But I thought if I just out of set off handed, oh, tiktok, yeah I bet if you if you to surge gay, they'll just like show you like porn. People would say, like that sounds like your being and like, why would you say that? That's being in same.

Obviously, they're proud ly showing you they're like most famous clear creator, you know something like that? No, they show me. So IT was like, again, so much of this process for me was like hearing the things that people say about to talk, assuming that people were sort of exaggerating or being too hard on IT and that having the experience myself and think like, oh no, like it's actually like that. An alternative explanation is that .

the algorithm is actually really, really good. And the reason to show you all the videos of people being weird little freak es, because you are actually a wear little freak.

that's I. I will accept those allegations. I will not fight those allegations.

So, okay, you watch two hundred and sixty videos. You reach this magic number that is supposed to get people addicted to tiktok. Are you addicted to tiktok.

Kevin? I'm i'm surprised and a Frankly delighted to tell you I have never been less addicted to tiktok that I have been after going through this experience. Do you member back when people would smoke cigarettes a lot, and if a parent called a child smoking the thing, smoke this grates and the accumulated, effective, all that stuff that you're breathing in your lungs. By the end of that, the teenager says, dad, i'm never gonna smoke again. This is how I feel addiction .

after watching .

the hundreds of these tiktok.

So, okay, you are not a tiktok ETC. In fact, that seems like you are less likely to become a tiktok power user than you were before this experiment. I did this experiment change your attitudes about whether tiktok we banned in the united states.

I feel so bad, so good, but I think the answer is yes. Like not not bit right. Like um you know my feelings about that still have much more to do with like free speech and like freedom of expression. And I think that bean raised a lot of questions that the united states approach to this issue that just makes me super comfortable with. You can go back through.

I have to hear a lot of discussion that but if I were a parent of a team who had just been given their first smart phone, hopefully not any Younger than like fourteen, um IT would change the way that I talk with them about what to talk is, and I would change the way that I would check in with them about what they were seeing, right? Like I would say, you are about to see something that is going to make you feel like your mind is in a blender and IT is going to try to addict you. And here's how IT is going to try to dict you.

And I might sit with my child and might do some early searches to try to proceed that feed with stuff that was good and would give my child a greater chance of going down some positive rabat holes and seeing less of, you know, some of the more disturbing stuff that I saw there. So if nothing else, like, I think IT was a good educational exercises for me to go through. And if there is someone in your life, particularly a Young person, who is spending a lot of time on tiktok, I would encourage that you go through this process yourself, because these algorithms are changing all the time.

And I think you do want to have a sense of what is IT like this. Very weak. If you really want to know a what this can be shown in your kid.

Yeah, I mean, I will say I I spend a lot of time on tiktok. I don't recall ever getting done with tiktok and being sort of happy and fulfilled with how I spent the time. Like there's a big sense of like shame about IT.

There's a bike sense like sometimes that like helps me turn my brain off at the end of a stressful day. IT has this sort of like, you know, this sort of architect effect on me. And sometimes it's calling, and sometimes I find things that are funny. But rarely do I come away saying like that. That was the best possible use of my time.

There is something that happens when you adopt this sort of algorithm. First, vertical video, mostly short form, infinite scroll, you put all of those ingredients into a bag. And what comes out does have this nkos effect. You say, well, kc.

thank you for exposing your brain to the tiktok algorithm for the sake of journalism. Appreciate you.

And, you know, I will be donating to get to science when my life is.

People will be studying in your brain if you die. I feel really, really come from I don't know why they'll be set your brain, but there will be research teams looking at .

IT can't wait to here what i'll fight out.

Hard fork is produced by witness Jones and Rachel coon were edited by je pot. Today's show was engineered by eliza oxy, original music by maria lizana, sophy ellman, a dianna ROE emotional and depose our audience senator is not globe video production by ryan manning and Chris shot. As always, you can watch the full episode on youtube, at youtube dot com slash hard for special thanks to policeman who ewing tam, Bella hadad and jeff maranda. You can email us at hard fork at N Y times that come.

From the new york times, you're listening to the wire cutters show.

Hey everyone, it's the wire cutters show.

I'm cara black. Well, i'm Christine circuit and i'm rosy gerron, and we work at wirecutters product recommendation site from the new york times.

Each week, we bring you expert advice from our newsrom of one hundred and forty journalists to review everyday products that will make your life Better.

Today's episode of the wirecutters show is called the secret to Better one thing.

Hey, you, it's our very .

first episode, right?

Love IT I an argue episode. Should we tell people .

a little .

bit about who are doing .

is product recommendation service. We are part of the new york times company. We have about one hundred and forty journalists who do rigorous product testing.

And what we mean that is they are very serious about the product. So i'll i'll give a couple of examples. We've done a guide to hiking boots.

And for that, when our writers tried out fifty five pairs of boots and hiked fourteen hundred miles over seven years, I mean, that's a lot of steps. You know, another example, this once kind of wild, we did review of fire safes. And our writer actually built a room and burned the room with all these fire safes inside of IT. I mean, that's the kind of links are journalists go to test things.

try and choose service .

ABS committed. And we're also independent, which um that means we don't let companies pay us to review their products and we don't take free bees. Our recommendations are based only on what we really believe is the best stuff. It's a really fun place work, and i'm excited to introduce listeners here to the amazing people I work with, like cara.

Hi kira, who are you?

So i'm a writer, and I cover all things, sleep, and I test mattresses. People find that hilarious because I got to say that I sleep for a living, and i've probably tested about one hundred matters at this point for work. I've been a wire cutters for four years, but Christine here has actually been here longer than me.

That's right. I'm og. I've been here eleven years. Nearly sends the site started and i'm an editor. How about you, rosie.

whom I yeah who are you and this shows executive producer and i'm kind of going to be your producer side kick here to pose the questions that you know ask norms have well.

we're so happy to have you here.

cara. So to that, and why are we all here? Let's tell the people, I mean, what are we doing on the show?

What's the plan? Look, we get tons of questions from people about problems they encounter or think that they're just trying to hack or solve. And our staff has .

a lot of expertise to share, right? So we want to bring all of that to audio. Every week, we're going to sit down with a wir cutter journalist and talk through a topic that we think people could use.

Medicine will give product recommendations like we always do on the site, but this is going to be a lot more than that. We're going to talk through solutions, ideas, hacks in ways that you can really make your life Better. And sometimes we will even invite outside experts to come on. I love IT.

and that's why I think today's episode is so good to start with because it's a problem that we all have, but maybe we don't realize that we have. And I am talking about laundry.

Why are you going me? No, you're you're right. I don't think I ever properly learn to do my laundry. I really hope my mum's and listening.

rosey, i'm going to make the convention that I too don't think that I know how to do my laundry. It's like, good. Yeah, I mean, i'm a lady. I'm a grown lady. Lady don't know to do. I'm a lady and someone else is is for me yes, issue with like the entire time as an adult, I feel like is that I ve just never really been able to figure out how to get stains out. And so all of my entire family is just always walking around, but like something on their close.

You know how says, I will say, is very intimidating.

Carrot is a math done when asked me.

I don't know. My mom told me how to like separate .

lights from dark. And it's not the one thousand nine hundred and twenties. I feel like we don't need to do that anymore. And that's where right now that's all take.

But there's a lot that I don't know yeah and you know what that's i'm really glad we have our special guest today because we are wire tor. We do happen to have someone on staff whose entire job IT is to think about laundry, test laundry solutions and basically give great advice about laundry Andray. A barns is a staff writer and industry expert in all things laundry. And she's going to join us to tell us the best laundry products and how to use them properly. Can't wait.

And so listeners know we're gonna dropping links to the guides and products we talk about in this episode and all our episodes right in the showut. So if you hear a talk about something and wanna more just head over there.

Does tie live up to the hype? Do we need to use hot water on our dirty clothes? Can anything get cooking or stains out of my favorite t shirt? Will find out in just a minute.

We're back with unda barns. Unda is wirecutters s premier expert on big home appliances like dishwashers and washing machines, but we're not having really gonna focus on that today. All of her appliance testing has also let her to become our expert on all things laundry. She's writing a ton of our most popular guides and articles in the category, like for detergent, washing your tennis shoes, washing things by hand and stain or mobile. Hi, anda.

hi. Nice to bigger.

Nice to see you. So Andrea .

does a ton of laundry and and test out different washers and driers and and an obviously detergent and the wirecutters office, is this just massive space in long island city? You know, there's like a weird clothing hanging everywhere that steam, like egg and lipstick and grass and obvious ly, like lots of detergent all over the place on carts and I don't know it's like this weird really want us chocolate factory of laundry over there. I want to know what you're doing because I feel really uneducated on the topic. But first you're testing our laundry I Q today with a quiz so you can judge our baseline on how much or little we might know about what's coming up.

It's really like how little we know .

we're going to come in humble.

Yes, I have a little true false quiz for you. So question one, true or false? Soda water is the best thing to remove a fresh red wine steam.

true. I am. Gona, I was so this yesterday. So somebody spilled red wine all over me at my wedding, and I was wearing a White wedding dress. And my momma's best friend, who's an amazing long dress SHE like, got IT out with .

solar water.

he was like, I got, yeah. He was like, we are doing this yeah. Well, i'm glad that that works, but I would actually say balls according to our test. Oh, no, i'm sure that so of water can work. But we found that the best thing for fresh red .

wine stands is actually White.

Well, I I mean, I did drink a whole bottle of White wine after that person spill the red wine on me. And the state did come out.

So I did kind work, I believe different reason. Our question to what what do you .

get true or false? The top load washer cleaning Better than a front load washing? true? No, it's false. Even though they use less water. Actually, a front load washer is way Better at removing stands than a top load washer.

Um IT doesn't have that little thing in middle though.

I know it's really confusing, but it's actually the friction that really makes .

the front mode washer work .

the friction of the thing. Yeah, who knew science?

yeah. okay. next. okay.

So you need fabrics.

Softener true or false? You are correct. IT is false. It's actually just fat that usually added to the end of a cycle.

fat? Yeah, it's that we actually used to use IT in college to condition our hair. I wouldn't. They do IT now.

but IT works really well. The older time? Well, absolutely.

okay. So the last question, in order to get stains out, you need to wash with hot water. This has to be true. No, it's actually not.

What if my cat picked on my bed.

especially cat puked, should be washed with a cold water stopping? Oh my god, protein in IT and protein needs cold water to be washed out with.

So have I just been baking a deeper into my computer?

You may have .

go away.

I would like to think so, but who knows? I have so many like candles let at all times.

I mean, more mother will get in. Out in france helps, but you know, cold water is definitely more of a well.

I think under approved our point, we have some laundry y tips and knowledge that we need to acquire a yeah .

I think I think that's about right. okay. So let's get into IT, Andrea. I want to start with getting a Better sense of how you even test something like laundry detergent.

Oh, that's a great question. Uh, you know, initially when we when I started designing the london detroit ent test, the idea was to put common stains on t shirts. I pulled the wirecutters.

Writer is masked them. What are the worst stains you've had? What are the things that the hardest remove? And most of them were pretty typical, like lipstick ank, uh, cooking oil. And we stand all these shirts. We very quickly realized that is actually very hard to recreate difficult stains and that most of the stands that you recreate a especially because you the only sitting for a day or two before we we wash them, almost everything was pretty easy to wash out.

And so when you say recreate, are you taking a butter hines and just motion IT into some teach?

exactly. wow. And so with that in mind, I called one of my sources, who's a former washing machine developer from world pool, and I asked them, what would you do in this situation? Because everything is cleaning out pretty easily.

And he said, you've got ta call chloro x and get their standardized test. And he described this a swatch with fifteen different stands on IT that are all the same size. And I chorus, of course, was not going to give me that right.

So but I did find the place that clorox buys IT from, which is, which is a german company that has a dealer in pennsylvania. So to order these swatches, we actually have to email them and and give them the credit card information, and almost that we can even do IT online. IT took forever, but this machine is awesome because he uses the exact same amount of whatever the stain material is.

And IT presses them down under thousands of pounds of pressure. So you have a standards stain set. And the stains are pretyman al stains you encounter in daily life.

So there's tea, there's muster red. There's something that's called beta carine, which is more like a carrot or a sweet potato stain. Then there are some that you're not necessarily encountering everyday like there's one that's used engine oil with sham.

We joked about going to find a mechanic who would give us oil rags, but this seems like a Better solution. Um but the idea here is not to remove all of the stain is actually really just comparative data. What he does is IT shows us how good on on united turn or stain remover is by how much stain they removed. So the idea really isn't to see a black t shirt or blank piece of jersey kot at the end. That really is to see some stain left.

I don't want to to turn anybody stomach, but I am very, very curious because I think a common, especially you have kids. My kids fall and scrape their knees all the time. Blood, oh yeah.

yes.

So I member.

afraid to, I became very good friends with the butchers at piano on Smith and brookland, where they sell both pork and deef blood for different recipe. And we I bought I think we probably between longer detergent testing and stain river testing. I think I probably I bought six quarts of blood.

Are you on some sort of this?

Everyone today 的。

我 英文 怎么说？

I probably just think i'm making some a recipe. But I think for testing, we left several t shirts over night for three or four days after being stained with blood. That was actually one of the best tests like some things that could get those stands out were good determination or good standard reverse.

I'm seeing like a Carry seen isn't what they used actually .

was about a girl, I think, who was in training to become A. It's a little known fact.

Something like that I purse. I don't know about the rest of you, but I I just use liquid detergent because it's what I buy and that's what I use and I don't really do anything else. But I from reading your work IT sounds like there is a difference between liquid and powder and when you want to use those.

So can you talk a little bit about that? sure. I mean, I think for most people, like in detergent is probably the best choice.

I mean, there are great products on the market and most people are removing body oils from their clothing. And a lot of people aren't actually removing that. Many stands from their clothing. I mean, honestly, the water itself dose a lot of the work too, right?

Um if you have a job where your outdoors a lot and you are working a lot with clay or or mud or particulate soil is what they would be called powder detergents, probably Better choice because powder detergent is going to work with. Those stains matter because of the way it's formulated. And also, if you just have a lot of stands in your close, general powder, detergents and nice choice because most of them have oxygen bleach or some other sort of, uh, non choring bleach built into them. So there's a little bit more stain moving power.

and you can use those on all coloured .

fabric OK totally different than choring. Bleach, which is safety, is on all sorts of fabrics. But oxygen bleaches, it's basically hydron proxy de. So you're going to want to test a small part of your clothing to make sure that I can withstand the oxygen bleach. But we have yet to run into something unless it's like a really poorly died item that can be used with oxygen bleaches .

like the most favorite oxygen beaches like oxy. Clean.

right? yes. And we tested IT. We didn't love IT in testing. okay.

Wow, that I was lying .

to me in .

a when the great .

inertial and make things sap pear like magic oxy clean didn't do greats .

testing because IT takes a really long time to dissolve, IT really needs hot water to dissolve, and IT took a lot longer to to remove stains and other detergents that we test. IT will oxygen s on a detergent, but we have to thin ultravox y, which is a powder tide with oxyde bleach. And I did much Better job with removing things the oxy claimed.

I think I read in one of your guys is that like the thing that really picks up stains is the thing in IT called enzymes. And that's what really like eats a way at the same. So you don't really need like bach together.

No, for most team you don't need bleach. I say to use oxygen bleach when it's very specific kinds of stains, like basically anything that you would use as a natural die if you were making die in your own clothing. So like tea, coffee, uh, fruit, uh, things where the team really changes the fabric yeah verses food stands, which are pretty topical, and enzyme mes are really good at getting those.

okay. So we can basically just throw out all of our chLorine bleach and we don't need IT.

No, not for your regular clothes. You don't mean chLorine bleach, but it's still at .

the disinfectant and oxygen bleach is for the scenes that are really set in and kind of changing the color of the fabric, great.

Like wine or something? yes. So and oxygen leach will get the most stubborn stands out. And it's great for things like wine or tea or coffee that really do soaking into the fabric and are very hard to get out.

So when you say that those like oxyde detergents are basically just hydrogen oxide, I know there's always like A D I Y community and everything when there's a product, there's a DIY product. But um why can't you just make your own deterrence?

I mean, you could if you want to spend a lot of time making something .

that doesn't .

work as well. I like a lot of DIY and 三年。

You are mentioning when we were talking earlier this phrase that is a kind of a short end that sometimes is something like, like, likes.

likes. Yes, what is it's a solvent term? Like, likes, like. So for example, when you have an oil stain, lack of a detergent works really well, because the surfaces ends in liquid detour gent behave as an oil, so they are Better absorbed into oil stains.

So basically, the best way to look at IT is that there is water stands and there's oil stains, right? The solvent that you want to use to get rid of those stains are going to be similar in property. So remember, I said that if you're working around a lot of clay or dirt powder to turn is Better. That's why similar, right? So they behave similarly and they more with each other Better and combine Better.

So this is why my kids, like muddy, dirty clothing, never back to the zero because it's just like i'm only using liquid and so it's not it's not picking up the .

dirt yeah I mean, you can try for treating with with a liquid detergent. I find that works very well, but you might just try powder to try to my work.

What is exactly is the process of pretreated.

So treating a stain is kind of how IT sounds. You really are just putting the stain remover or the longer to trogon on the stain beforehand. Ds, and it's usually somewhere between five minutes to twenty minutes before you put in the washing machine.

And for almost every stain, if you have a laundry detergent on hand, you probably can just use that for pretrail. Uh, we recommend a different stained mover, all purpose stainer mover for pretrail called amedee. But that the reason we recommend that is because IT removes other stands, that long to detergent is not always good at getting out.

So those two were actually makeup and permanent ink, but others SE. I would say you can retreat with laundry ry to torgan for most stains and then IT is a good hack for laundry. So I don't know if any of you've ever had like a amErica staying on your show and you .

don't pretreated you throw the wash, not treated machines. Not ever, never forgotten .

she's lying you on or.

Yeah, so I I mean, I will admit you all that when we were doing later determined testing and one of my sources told me a soaked oil stands in warm water and liquid laundry detergent, I was able to get oil stands. You know, those dark oil stands you get on the colorful fabric and IT all be like the seat. It's just a slightly darker shaded.

What I think my daughters goal in life is to have every article of clothing have this. But I was able to get these stains that had been in three or four washes and dry cycles out from this soaking. So you know, it's there are a lot of different things you can do for a stand removal. Retreating is great, but IT doesn't necessarily mean that you're totally in trouble if you still have a stains coming out of the watch later IT.

So i've heard you mentioned tied a couple times why? And I think both of the the powder deterrent, which is which which is that again, the one that we like a tide ultra oxy, and then the liquid we like is tired, free and gentle, gentle and free. Why, why? Why do we like tide? Why is tide? I really like we're not shelling for tide. There is no tide commercial on the podcast. So what's the deal?

You know, it's interesting. I really went in the testing wanting to not recommend tide because I had a lot of misconceptions over being allergic to IT. And then the more testing that I did and the more research I did, I learned that the ingredient that most people are alerted c to, and laundry detergent, it's called mi or mci.

It's a chemical preservation, and it's then even coron quote natural liquid detergent um almost any all of the ones we test and contain IT. And what's interesting is that people perceive that that's what they're allergic to one almost all of its strains ff by your washing machine. But the other is that it's the same preservation is probably in your shampoo, your your shower gel, anything that you're using that needs be preserved.

So that's actually probably with causing your logy. And we talked in multiple domain logic about this. So that said, we partly choose time free in gentle because IT doesn't have that preservation. And so they had all this money, and all this are deed, to go into creating a london detergent that lack these allergies. IT was the combination of that had hypo allergenic detergent with the fact that IT removed stands so well that made to go out on top, so in the end time, just kept they're doing something really good there.

I mean, they have a big budget, right? Have a big budget to spend on R, N, D, which is something that we kind of find across categories that we are cut that like we're kind of sometimes surprised that the the big companies do come out ahead because they just have so much money.

I'm kind of relieved when like the big names are actually doing something the right because and you can get anywhere like you run out, you liking nish stuff sucks.

Okay, a wirecutters recommends tied free and gentle liquid detergent for most laundry for really saying stuff, dirt, stain stuff, wire. Tt recommends tide ultra oxy. And I trust these recommendations, Frankly, because of all of the blood testing .

and .

stuff we discuss. Know, I think we're learning. We're doing good guy. Okay.

but I do have some like graduate level questions I need you to thrown in here like about dry cleaning and pause and just more questions about stains and .

how to make ecofriendly choices at the london map.

But first a break.

Welcome back to the wires cutter show today. We're getting a master class in laundry tips from Andrea barns. Andrea is wire cutters staff writer on large planes and all things laundry. So so far we've covered some detergent basics, but now we're gonna a get into some of the needy.

greedy details literally. okay. So what if you have a really nice or vintage items like cashmere or silk? Do you have to get those dry lined?

Um it's really going to depend on the item, but I would not say the vast majority of of the time. Now first of all, you most likely can use regular detergent tide friend gentle on a lot of your drakling only ims if you use a mesh bag and and gentle cycle. I couldn't do this with something that you really love, but there are few other options, but we recommend a hand washed detergent called soke, which is really great.

And what you can do is actually hands wash garment. And you soaked the, you soaked the government with this detergent, which is called soap. And that's confusing and it's a no rins detergent, so you don't have to handle the clothing for that long. So I use emerge IT for fifteen minutes and then you just take the item out and press the water out and it's ready to go. The deterrent evaporates really quickly IT.

And so you don't have to run set. So you like what if you have a gies like is there is something on IT that will that's .

a great question. The preserve we talk about earlier is not in this hand wash detergent, which is good. And then we interviewed the owner of the decoration company and they did third party testing that showed less than like points zero zero zero zero.

Five percent of the resident is left on the because you also use a tiny amount like we're talking maybe two teaspoons for several gallons. So there is not much love to begin with. I would say that, that ideal for you know, we think you have a casual sweater ter that you've warned a bunch times and that hasn't really been stained, but you want to fresh them up.

That would be a great option if it's something that's really you you got stains all over IT or you bought a vint them as is. What we learned is that the best thing to do is to use pure sodium per carbonate, which is oxygen bleach and soaked for hours. So in that case, we won't news something like tide because there's builders and fillers and IT that you won't necessarily one on your clothing.

But pure SONY on per carbonate is great for soaking your vintage items. And the product we really like for that in testing is called restoration and it's pure oxygen bleached. There's nothing else in IT. So oxy clean has fragrance and other fillers, in addition the oxygen leach, and this is just oxygen breach.

How do you test this? How are you testing like these these vintage?

So for this we did, and i'm not going to give you my keyword search.

See you, I don't get one.

but uh, I looked for items on ebay that are stains, and we ordered a lot of used linn's that looks like they had no hope left. And the crazy is part. So we got this huge devey bag filled with table class and napkins and linens, and they had stains. But the best part, flash worst part was that we realized when we opened the bag, when we accepted that the person was definitely a smoker and IT was small, like steel, like cigarettes, like really yeah not .

a lot of competing bin. What IT in .

twenty seconds after we ord.

they were like, it's at your door check outside.

We were praying you advise this.

So we found this, and that was all delicate, like this. And linen, again, I called the source. This time I called our source, uh, Mickey Evans, who's amazing.

And SHE is the assistant, more drop supervisor at the notebook, the musical on broadway. And yeah, she's great. And he told me about restoration, this uh, oxygen bleach product that you can buy for of soaking advantage items. So we tried IT against, I think, six or seven other oxygen bleaches. And this one was by far the best one, and we felt, because I had no fillers, was what I would call the least risky one.

Did IT take out the cigarette smell?

IT is, yeah. And we tested a bunch of hand washed chargers with this lot of of smoking winners. And there were definitely in the sum that did not take the stink out was .

at your .

keywords search smokin sounds like an ice shadow color. Luckily in.

So one thing we actually haven't gone .

into is laundry pods. Oh yeah, we got to talk under.

we got to talk about the pods. So under what's the deal with laundry pods? I initially .

didn't really want to recommend pods because you can't pretreated with them. It's so concentrated that IT actually doesn't absorb well in two stains for pretreated. So if you have to add water and you're dealing pon film, so all these things make IT like not a great choice, in my opinion for pretreated. Uh, but when we started having pain testers come to the office and .

let me just interject, you paid testers are people who are not on our staff that we bring in to test with us. And basically, there are folks who have a like A A variety of different abilities and body types and we like to bring them in and get their feedback to to get a wider diversity of opinions about the products.

Were testing, yes, and some of whom have limited mobility and limited grip strength. I observed very quickly, but pods absolutely one hundred percent the best option for them when Operating either uh, washing machines or dishwashers and its so that made sense to me to make a recommendation for that .

yeah that does make sense. I actually had a little because I don't have washed drier in my unit, but my partner does. And whenever I go over there, it's like i've never done laundry ever in my life. I'll just toss a pod in the little compartment that they have in those washing machines. But i've learned recently that you're not supposed to do that.

What is that?

IT totally depends on the washing machine. But the way the dispenser works is that water goes through the whole thing. And if it's not a very strong stream, IT can be very hard for the part that is all. Basically, you need the water to be strong enough to pierce the pin and start and start everything moving. Goa, right?

Do IT.

okay. You talk a little bit earlier about temperature and earlier that you actually want to be using cold butter, but is there any time that you should be using warm water or hot water?

I would say hot water only if you're sanitizing something, like if you had sheet from someone who is sick or if kids are about to party train.

for instance, we'll see now .

peace stain that would say you can do in cold water because you're in his pretty stereo but like a virus or yeah something like that. Yeah exactly. I would say hot water is appropriate then um but you know one thing, people always think they see blood and they assume, oh, I should washing in hot water and that's actually a great way to stain your clothing more. You would absolutely need cold war for removing blood. Oil stains mean warm water .

took kind of milk the fat.

yeah, exactly. Will the warm water mollify? IT right? yeah. Live said.

what about like preserving? I I mean, I know because I wash a lot of fabric to so with and I know that like I sometimes washed stuff in hot water. But i'm wondering, does that do anything to the color long term? If you, if you do wash and warm or hot water.

warm and hot water can definitely degrade and fade dies faster. I since i've switched to doing cold water washing, I don't see fading on my clothing in the same way that I did before.

What about older? Like I just I know that you're saying like p is okay, even blood is okay, but I just feel like the warm water will take away that smell as I totally wrong.

Um no, that's not wrong. And that's why we recommend what we do because the liquid detergents we recommend removed older, even in cold water.

I see.

how do you do order testing?

Well, first, my informal or removal testing is having .

teenage sun do IT. But if formally.

what we did is a we burned bacon and use burned bacon increase, which really smells like, really smells terrible, and we stained t shirts with that, and then had a panel of people decide which ones removed with the most, and which once smell the worst. And in testing the the picks we made all removed that outer really well, if not entirely.

okay. Now that we have fully graduated, we almost are at PHD level here with with stain fighting um under i'm curious you know if if someone y's just really concerned about the environmental impacts of what are doing in their home and they want to make Better choices about their laundry, like what are the things that they should be doing?

Ah that's great. I the number one thing I would say to anyone is to washing cold water when you can. Cold water is just a Better choice in terms of energy efficiency.

So washing machines have internal heaters that warm the water. And when you washing hot water, almost all of the energy that's being used in that wash cycle is to heat the water. So when you washing cold water, you don't use that energy.

So that's that's probably the best thing you can do. I would say air dry when you can, so get a drain rack pre treat stains so that clothing last longer. And I would use less detergent.

When you say less detergent, how much do you mean?

Yeah you know this is it's interesting. This is a tough question because now so many laundry detergent companies are coming out with hyper concentrated detergent. But I wouldn't say two table spins for like a big load if you if it's not heavily stained, yes.

you know how they give you those caps with a little measuring thing on top. And it's like literally .

a cup .

in college I think I was putting two.

two and a half cups. And why is my clothing sliming?

Yeah, that is what I would be. Yeah, yeah.

You'll get resident and you just don't need that much. It's just unnecessary in that is how you get there s will be right up against .

your skin um laundry .

deter ent sheet no, okay, they didn't clean well, you mind as well, just wash with water.

Got IT waste.

okay. But what i'm taking from this is that essentially the best things that you can do from a sustainability lens are also kind of just what's good for your laundry in general. It's gonna be the stuff that let you know get stains out.

The best is the stuff that I will keep your clothing nice for a longer. Um and so it's all of like what's good for your laundry is good for the environment in that way. Yes.

I would agree with that. And the detergent is this with army. I fe the time for everything, cold water.

Under IT. This has been great. Thank you so much for coming. Before we go, we ve got one more question and we're gona ask this of all of our guests. What's one thing that you've recently bought that you really love?

IT has nothing to do with laundry, but I jays other .

interest .

guys no, you you're bringing my heart .

I hope my husband that the girl rescue girl brush that's recommended by our kitchen team and he really loves this glow brush and because he loves that, I would say it's the coolest thing i've .

bought recently. Ah that's really nice. Do you like IT?

I'd love IT.

Thank you so much. This has been so great.

Thank you so much for having me.

Guys, I feel like there are so many takeaway as from the segment. I for one, going to go on the hunt for some powder detergent.

Oh yeah, I I actually ordered some on amazon T.

No, that's great. Okay, cool.

O I think my takeaway was washing cold because apparently i've been baking.

My cats pick directly into my back argument with my husband because he's been doing that. So that's a win. But to that point, I also think like you don't need to hunt around for like eo friendly detergents necessarily. If you're trying to be more earth friendly, it's really just like energy is kind of biggest environment impact. So washington cold also solves that totally.

And then like you don't have to go to hunt for a fancy pretreatment .

ready N I think that like you .

really can just get like two detergent, essentially a liquid and a powder, and you're probably like ninety five percent of the way there.

perfect. Andrew was a star.

He was amazing.

I really hope that I can apply this when I have a machine in my apartment again.

I really hope I can get the dirt stains out of my kids clothes.

Finally, god feed my friends. And that's IT for IT has this week. If you want to find out more about wirecutters coverage on laundry, ed herzen or snack, the products we recommended today got A N Y time stock com back flash where cutter or find a link in the show notes.

So if you like the world Peter show, which we all hope you do, right? Uh, I think people are actually to listen to this.

I hope so. I hope people are listings right now. And if they're listening, maybe we'll follow yeah.

Or leave review a hopeful ly, nice one.

I'll always read the reviews even .

if it's mean I yes.

IT also helps other people find a show.

Yes.

for sure. yeah. Thank you for listening either way.

the wire cutters show is executive produced by rosy gyr ne and produced Abigail kill, editing by Abigail q engineering support from mattia cello and nick pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Daniel ramirez, original music by dan power, marine lizana, alesha b. Youtube, and dan wong, wire cutter deputy publisher and interm general manager is Cliff leaving benz man is wirecutters editor in chief. Special thanks to a nail chetham po poli human, nana asm, so me, hobart je jeffrey maranda, sam dona Julia bush and Kitty queen. Can we rotate whose scats each?

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