A Silicon Valley startup called Carbon has introduced the next 3D printing evolution with tech called continuous liquid interface production, or CLIP. The process utilizes a UV-light ray curable liquid and a semi-permeable glass membrane to very quickly form solid objects. This method of 3D printing is hugely fast and produces vastly superior end products: instead of printing rough shapes layer by layer over many hours, CLIP structures are pulled from shallow vats of resin almost like magic. A profile on Carbon and Joseph DeSimone, the genius behind CLIP technology, appears in the latest issue of Gear Patrol Magazine, Issue 17: the Winter Preview. Former Gear Patrol Senior Staff Writer and current Managing Editor of Field Mag, Tanner Bowden, authored the story and joins today to talk about Carbon, CLIP, and the future implications of better 3D printing.
Continuous Liquid Interface Production is the next generation of 3D printing, and is equal parts SciFi and magic.
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Nick Caruso:
This is the Gear Patrol podcast for Friday, November 19th, 2021. I'm Nick Caruso and I am glad you're here because we are focusing this week on a very, very, very cool story about some cutting-edge tech. You've heard of 3D printing. We all have. Well, a Silicon Valley startup called Carbon, which has been around not all that long, just seven or eight years, has introduced the next evolution in 3D printing with tech that's called Continuous Liquid Interface Production, or CLIP for short.
Nick Caruso:
It uses UV light curable liquid that can quickly form solid objects when it's in their machines. And suffice it to say that this method is super, super high quality. It's much, much faster than conventional methods. And like I say, the quality is amazing, it produces vastly superior end products. Instead of printing these rough shapes layer by layer over sometimes many hours, CLIP structures pulled from vats of resin, almost like magic, like a little arm just pulls a shape out of it.
Nick Caruso:
A profile on Carbon and on Joseph DeSimone, who is the genius behind CLIP technology, appears in the latest issue of Gear Patrol Magazine, Issue Seventeen: The Winter Preview, which you can snag via a link below. But here to talk about Carbon, the business, and what CLIP is and the future implications of better 3D printing is the author of that profile, someone you all know and love, former Gear Patrol senior staff writer and current managing editor of Field Mag, Mr. Tanner Bowden. Tanner, welcome back to the pod.
Tanner Bowden:
What an intro! I am honored to be back on the show.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, it feels like coming home for me, so I can only imagine how you feel.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah, same. Same.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, back on the video chat with me. Yeah. So, big intro for sure. But it's a big story and it's full of details. Science is in here, speculation about the future is in here, there's talk about sci-fi movies and television shows. There's also just really, really great story. It had to have been a blast to report, I assume.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah, it was. It was really fun to dig into. I came across Carbon through learning about a specific product that has a piece of it made by Carbon. It was the second or third time I had seen this thing and enough times I was like, "What the heck is this because this is not 3D printing like I've ever seen it before?" Once I saw the first video of the way these 3D printers work, I was just totally blown away.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I think I said the word magic in the intro. It really does feel that way. And we'll get into all the like describing the process and everything, but it is outrageous to watch. You've seen this in person, which we will also talk about. But yeah, I've only seen the videos. It's not like anything you can imagine. I was just looking at a 3D-printed robot arm a couple days ago and it's amazing.
Nick Caruso:
But all those striations and levels on it are very apparent and are structural weaknesses and all that, so a new method is very welcome. But before we get into everything, the details of how that works, who started the company, everything, talk to us about how Carbon recently broke onto the scene. It's a story you begin the story with in the magazine.
Tanner Bowden:
Sure.
Nick Caruso:
It's the nasal swab story. Can you regale us with that?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. We're probably all sick of talking about things like nasal swabs and also things like supply chain shortages. But here we are, we're still talking about those, and that is exactly where Carbon had its recent moment of glory, so to speak. As we all remember, at the beginning of the pandemic in March, in April 2020, there was a huge shortage of a lot of very basic medical supplies, and nasal swabs were among those, the long ones they used to do the deep brain tickling testing.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, the fun one.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah, the fun one. It turned out that there were only two companies in the whole world making these things. One of them was in Italy and one of them was in a very small town in Maine. Both of them apparently have feuded with each other and sued each other a lot of the times. The one in Maine was jointly owned by two cousins and these two guys were also feuding to the point where they weren't talking to each other. Those are the issues you run into when there's only two companies making a thing that lots of people need millions of.
Tanner Bowden:
Carbon was able to essentially identify this as a problem that its technology could solve and round up almost like a Oceans 11 style team of folks from... You had folks from Stanford, folks from a medical supply company elsewhere in the country, and they were essentially able to design a 3D-printable nasal swab over the course of a couple days and then get it into high production in a matter of weeks, which was astounding. Yeah.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. We're experiencing a little bit of a lag here. It sucks. Yeah, no, it is astounding. What's interesting about the swab beyond that drama and the... we didn't get LLB and branded nasals swabs from Maine, is how Carbon went about it. We're not talking about a paper stick with a cotton ball on the end of it. This is an engineered, designed, and printed structure that goes up and pokes your brain, which is really cool. It's this new 3D printing process unlike anything we've seen before.
Nick Caruso:
Carbon's founder, which I believe is the correct term to use for who you refer to as Joe, calls the tech that we are used to seeing in 3D printing as 2D printing because it's just layers of 2D, essentially, material layered to make 3D structures. We've seen these before. There's a digital design uploaded to a computer and then this little nozzle squirts that liquid material into a shape and it takes forever. But the finished products are cool, but they're still very visually obviously layers of plastic. They've got the ridges that I mentioned.
Nick Caruso:
Obviously, it would be really hard to print an absorbent sponge structure that these nasal swabs used. So, that brings us to CLIP, that brings us to Carbon, what they're known for, and what your buddy, Joe, invented with this team. I tried to give you a little break there so that you can gear up and tell us, what is this process? How does it work? Walk us through this in layman's terms, if you can, what we're looking at with Carbon.
Tanner Bowden:
Sure. So yeah, I mean, you just described traditional 3D printing as we've known it for decades, just a layering, an upwards layering of material on material on material. CLIP and the printers that Carbon makes are totally different. They've got a couple that are different sizes. The bigger ones that they're doing serious manufacturing on right now are like the size of refrigerators essentially. You've got an inverted stage essentially that drops down into what just looks like a puddle of goo.
Tanner Bowden:
Depending on what you're printing, it'll be faster or slower depending on how complex the form is. But that stage rises out of the puddle of goo and just pulls the shape, the object, out of it. So fast it just looks like you're... You said magic. It looks like magic that this thing was always in this puddle all along and you just had like a magnet or something rip it out of the puddle. Obviously, there is some serious complex science at work in these machines. CLIP is like the basis of that science, Continuous Liquid Interface Production. To try and put it as simply as I can, you have-
Nick Caruso:
Let's do it.
Tanner Bowden:
>>>The puddle is a material that is UV curable, meaning that when it gets hit with UV light, it dries and solidifies. That is the ingredient you're working with. Oxygen is an element that can prevent that curing from happening. So what Carbon and what Joe DeSimone and a team that he put together at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, they figured out how to use both of these elements to their advantage, how to use oxygen to prevent it from hardening while they're hitting it with the print design and pulling it out of the puddle so that part of it is hardening, but part of it is not hardening at the same time. I don't know how well I'm describing that, but that's what's going on.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I mean, you got to study this for a long time. I had to crash through it. So if anyone doesn't understand this, it's me. But that trues up with what I understand. I know there are some cool elements here. I mean, we'll talk about this video in a second. He does a Ted talk and there's a demonstration where you get to watch this happen. This tank is very shallow. It's... I don't know, several inches deep.
Nick Caruso:
Then I guess there's like a permeable glass membrane on the bottom that lets that oxygen through, but also can do the UV through. So yeah, it's like UV light being targeted into this tank and shaped by oxygen and it just sticks to that stage. It's like an arm, right? And plex, some solid object out of liquid. It's bizarre to watch. It's so, so cool. So I think that was your quick molecular science lesson and I think you did a great job. It can be your new venture, I think, maybe, as like an adjunct young professor.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. I am sure that if Mr. DeSimone was listening to my description, he would probably be shaking his head a little bit.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, he sounds like quite a character actually. Something I like about what I've seen of him and what you've described in this story is that he likes to refer to the film Terminator 2. The bad guy in that is a Terminator robot made out of liquid metal and can reform itself and also to solid objects. He said that's inspiration for how this works visually. He's clearly a nerd, which I love, but he's also definitely a genius and very accomplished. Can I put you on the spot to tell us about some of his background and resume and where he came from?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah, totally. Well, first I'll just say that before I watched that Ted talk and heard he directly references the Terminator, the liquid metal robot, when I first saw the Carbon technology, my head immediately went to, and I mentioned it in the story, to Westworld, which in the intro to Westworld has robotic arms printing ligaments of what become the robotic bison and other creatures in that world. Joe DeSimone saw the Terminator robot and essentially was like, "Let's make this a real technology." The fact that I had a- [crosstalk 00:15:03]
Nick Caruso:
[crosstalk 00:15:02] by the way. We're in trouble now. Joe has damned the human race. But that's cool. It's cool.
Tanner Bowden:
Well, luckily we're still on running shoe soles and nasal swabs for now. But yeah, maybe someday. But anyways, no, Joseph DeSimone is an incredibly talented scientist. He is a material scientist, he's a chemist, he's an inventor. He has over 200 issued patents. He won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation when President Obama was in office. That's the highest award in the country for things like this. He's also one of only 25 people who's been elected to each of the US's National Academies of Sciences.
Tanner Bowden:
So there's National Academies of Sciences, then there's National Academy of Medicine, and there's also one for engineering. He's in all three. That's a very, very limited club right there. But he's like... I don't know. We don't really live in an age, at least I don't think we do, where you have these heroic science figures, like Einstein or like Turing. But I think if that were more of a common thing, he would be right up there. He is right up there.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Well, you had mentioned... I wonder if I can find this quote really fast. It pulls together the sci-fi narrative and everything else. Here it is. "As all good sci-fi stories do, Westworld hinges on our acceptance that the reality it presents is possible in this dimension or another." That's the basis of good sci-fi, it feels believable. It is a trope in sci-fi that someone can see something magic or think of something otherworldly and make it real. He literally did this.
Nick Caruso:
I mean, it's not like a robot running around and making blades and stuff out of his hands, but this is astounding to look at. I referenced this already, a Ted talk he gave a few years back, and it's called, What If 3D Printing Were 100 Times Faster? It's absolutely worth a watch. It's linked below. Everybody should watch it immediately. Can you describe what happens on stage during that talk?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. He goes through describing the science of CLIP and UV-curable chemistry and all this, but far better than I just did a couple minutes ago. But before he does that, he starts out his talk, he's holding an object that came from this process and he says to the crowd, "While I'm talking, we're going to print this thing." I believe he gave in 2015, I'm not positive on that.
Nick Caruso:
[crosstalk 00:18:33]
Tanner Bowden:
But at the time, 3D printing was still in a place where... People in that crowd are probably shaking their heads and wondering if it's actually going to work. And he says that his claim might not... Yeah, crosses his fingers essentially and hopes that it's going to work. Sure enough, as he's talking, explaining all these complex scientific rules and whatnot, he has a smaller version of one of Carbon's 3D printers off to the side pulling this lattice ball out of a puddle of red goop. There's a point in the Ted talk where the thing finishes and the room just erupts with applause because everybody has just seen a miracle.
Nick Caruso:
Right. I mean, what's so, so remarkable about that ball is that it is... What did you say? It's so complex. It's a structure. It's not a solid ball, right?
Tanner Bowden:
Right.
Nick Caruso:
It's like a structure who's exterior surface is a sphere, but it's this mesh, lattice thing like you mentioned. But it's so complex that at that time at least could not be an injection-molded shape. You couldn't mill it. You couldn't drill out this shape. This is literally the only way to produce that shape in 3D and it happens in minutes and it's so wild, it's so cool. And aren't there the things that make the Westworld robots conscious or something, red balls, or am I completely making that up? Is there some element there? Or am I thinking of Minority Report?
Tanner Bowden:
No, there is some element. I don't know if they're red, but there's definitely some element like that.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Maybe that's what he was making. We have a bad habit of specifically referencing sci-fi movies on this podcast and never really bringing it home, so that's probably frustrating to any movie buffs out there. We see this in video, but you visited the facility, Carbon's facilities. What's it like there? Can you walk us through that experience, that space?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. Yeah. So I went and visited. Their headquarters is in Redwood City, California, the Bay Area, Silicon Valley. Their headquarters is not necessarily what I imagined of a Silicon Valley unicorn tech company. It's pretty basic honestly. There's a nice foyer and then a giant room with lots of desks and things. No ping pong tables, no kegerators that I could see. It was ironic, but it used to be a 2D printing place that made billboards. Then after that, it was a Master Lock facility.
Nick Caruso:
Got you.
Tanner Bowden:
They even have a giant vault in there that used to be where they would keep all the master codes for all the locks. In case some customer couldn't get into their thing, Master Lock could troubleshoot it for them. Now that vault apparently was too expensive to get the vault out of there, so now it's just permanently open. It's like a little museum to all the different versions of Carbon's printers.
Tanner Bowden:
You have the first one, which looks like some optometrist machine, the one that was on the Ted stage, which is a smaller one, all the way to the current more like manufacturing, capable models, which I mentioned are like bigger laundry machines or big refrigerator size. Then in the back, they do have actually a manufacturing center there. So they are actually producing parts and products for brands like Adidas, Ford, dentures companies. I mean, in a way, it's a like a pretty typical company headquarters that also just has this little manufacturing room in the back. A big manufacturing room.
Nick Caruso:
Yes. It sounds like it's an office with a little workshop, which is funny to think about where something this revolutionary comes out of. But the vault is so funny. You remember that there's that Trader Joe's in Downtown, Brooklyn, that's made in the bank with the vault that's the organic section or something or wine- [crosstalk 00:23:57]
Tanner Bowden:
Sure. That's one of the cooler Trader Joe's in the country I bet.
Nick Caruso:
Hell yeah. There's another one. I can't believe I'm going to say this on a public forum. There's a J.Crew in South Hampton also built into a bank and the vault is like a... I don't know. I think it's the suiting or something. It's so- [crosstalk 00:24:25]
Tanner Bowden:
Oh, very classy.
Nick Caruso:
Yep. Yep. Okay. Clearly, we're talking about revolutionary tech here. As I've come to understand more about Carbon and its technology, it makes regular "3D printers" that we can all purchase for our tabletops essentially obsolete. It's like old world tech in a way now, which is pretty wild. Did that come up in conversation? Like this is the new wave we've made a generation of equipment obsolete here and a bunch of hobbyists?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. 3D printing as we've known it has been around for a long time, like decades. It blew up in the early 2000s, 2010s because all of a sudden... The dream of 3D printing was always this is going to make manufacturing so much easier, we're going to be able to share files over the internet, everyone's going to be able to print a replacement carburetor for their Toyota at home, stuff like that. The reason it never took off is because of all these flaws that you've already touched on.
Tanner Bowden:
Actually, Phil DeSimone, Joe's son, who gave me the tour of Carbon's facility, he told me that the first time his dad saw a 3D printer, it was a MakerBot which was a very popular one that's pretty easy to use at home. It was like the at-home tinkerers' 3D printer of choice. The quote was that he said it looks like a bunch of mechanical engineers are trying to solve a material science problem. All the flaws with those 3D printers is that it's layer by layer, so there's the striations that you mentioned, which just present a gigantic durability issue.
Tanner Bowden:
So all the stuff that comes out of those machines isn't really good enough to use in a end, for-sale product. Then yeah, it's also just way too slow. It can take a day to print a very small object on some of these machines. But yeah. I mean, Joe DeSimone tackled it from more of a materials point of view and essentially literally turned the process upside down and now we have an entirely new way to do it.
Nick Caruso:
It's really wild. Yeah. I like his zinger better because it sounds more erudite. But I was thinking Carbon makes the MakerBot look like an easy bake oven, just this really simple thing. But yeah, Joe's thinking about the T-1000 Terminator, liquid metal kind of thing. Maybe we could get a carburetor out of a tabletop Carbon printer one of these days. Yeah, you meant mentioned that they make some stuff on the premises.
Nick Caruso:
But Carbon you also mentioned in the story will lease machines, these bigger industrial strength machines for... I mean, you said $25,000 a month and they update the software and all that constantly so companies can use these to actually manufacture stuff. That's a lot of money obviously, but also for what this is, seems like a steal, which... I mean, you're welcome to comment on of course. But I really want to ask you, who is using this tech? Who's leasing these machines? Who has these machines and what are they using them to make?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. The machines start at 25,000 per year, I believe. It's a subscription model of course. Everything's a subscription model these days. But the reason for that is because the company is constantly rolling out software upgrades that can do things like make printing faster, or the company is also continuously developing new resins and materials that can be implemented into these machines.
Tanner Bowden:
So there's upper upgrades like that. Then it beams those upgrades so that machines that someone has had for like a year or two can have all the latest features and things. Essentially just like how your smartphone gets updates and then all of a sudden you can make weird emoji faces that sing and stuff. But that's the basis for the subscription bottle. It also gives the people who are... or the companies rather, who are using the machine access to Carbon's design engine.
Tanner Bowden:
Designing these strange, lattice shapes is very complex. But Carbon has created tools so that engineers and designers can quickly learn how to use this thing and make these forms that were literally impossible to make a year ago, which is why I think it has enlisted a pretty cool variety of types of companies that are taking advantage of its technology. We mentioned Adidas. Adidas has been using this to create a running shoe sole. You have specialized Meta bike saddle.
Tanner Bowden:
Osprey backpacks has a pretty crazy new backpack coming out in February that uses a part made from Carbon. You have hockey and football helmet inserts that are customized to the player's heads. You have car parts, you have a lot more medical supply things like the lattice swabs we talked about. One of the funnier, unexpected ones that I learned about was that it's really good for making dentures because apparently the process for getting 100% accurate denture fit involves on average seven visits to the orthodontist or the dentist.
Tanner Bowden:
Because Carbon is just so accurate and can print a perfect thing in one go, it just makes that process so much easier. But yeah, they have all these examples of prints all scattered throughout their headquarters and they're little... there's teeth all over the place.
Nick Caruso:
Oh, that could be fun. It'd be fun to put those little motors in on the little chattering teeth. Yeah, that's really cool. There's also a... Gosh! Was it the... Now I'm mixing up your story with the video in my head. Caught me off guard. Someone somewhere mentions the idea... I think it was in the video, his Ted talk, mentions this very real use case where a person comes into an emergency room situation and having emergency surgery and need a stent put in.
Nick Caruso:
And instead of grabbing a generic stent for your heart off the shelf, they can just scan what's going on inside you, pop it in the machine, and this thing pulls... Westworld pulls out a custom stent and then goes right in your body and is perfect. That's wild to think about. From the lumbar support on a backpack to something that's life saving and customized, really pretty crazy to wrap your head around.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. What's really cool about that is the material side of it because DeSimone and Carbon in turn are so focused on materials. I'll even add that they hired as CEO a former executive from DuPont. It really is a materials company as much as a 3D printing company. They're working on materials that can print and then dissolve in the body. So maybe that you put that stent in, you never have to take it out. Once you're back and healthy, it just goes away.
Nick Caruso:
That's amazing. That's so cool. I mean, that is something that I wasn't planning to really delve into with you because of time constraints, but now I am going to because you brought it up. And it's materials, right? You made an offhand example of the carburetor or an engine component, which are obviously made of iron or steel or magnesium or whatever. Is there talk of how far they can go with materials? Is there a goal? Are they trying to do some really wild stuff? I assume metals don't work in this situation.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. There were a couple things that when I was there we didn't get too deep into that it seems like there are a little tight-lipped about. I think the crux with the printers, as I understand it, is that it has to be UV curable for the CLIP process to work and have that oxygen element that's preventing the curing while it's extruding from the puddle. So a lot of their materials are like plasticy stuff, all the different variations of plastic that we've known, but they're chemically different. They're making their own materials all the time. I didn't hear talk of metal, but I mean, hell, it wouldn't surprise me if something like that down the road...
Nick Caruso:
Well, certainly there are synthetic metal adjacent or metal competitors, I guess we could say. Carbon fiber is used in those situations. I'm sure they're maybe tight-lipped about maybe some secret stuff in there. Maybe we'll actually get a T-1000 liquid robot man. Who knows?
Tanner Bowden:
I mean, that was the initial dream that kicked the whole thing off.
Nick Caruso:
What's your under-over that Joe is actually a mad scientist and he is trying to develop a human-hunting robots.
Tanner Bowden:
If you've watched the Ted talk, I don't think there's any of that. I mean this in a good way. He's very unassuming. He literally just seems like he's a regular guy. That was my impression.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, that's mine too just from that Ted talk video, is that... I mean, it's so wild to think that that kind of mind is in that kind of person, and really cool. I mean, it's an approachable just dude. Well, I mean, there's a ton here. What about for-future products? Obviously, there's there's current state use cases. I know materials, they may have been a little mum on. But what's your take on the future of the CLIP-produced items, products, and maybe even coming into the hobbyist space? What's the future look like for this stuff?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. It doesn't seem like they're targeting hobbyists. The latest machines are large and their goal is use the technology to manufacture, to make real products that wind up from the printer, they go straight to the shelf, so to speak. There's probably a couple steps in between there, but straight to the shelf. Not a traditional 3D printing where you can't really sell that. But in terms of materials, anything that's currently being made out of plastic or foam...
Tanner Bowden:
CCM and Riddell are using Carbon to make hockey and football helmets and the component that they're printing is essentially the foam part of the helmet. And that's because the lattice structure that the Carbon printers can produce, you can define its density and essentially how much pressure it can withstand in different places on a single print. Whereas a typical football helmet has the same foam or maybe a couple different densities glued together, wrapped around a player's head, Carbon is able to print one that has unique densities directly over the ear, over the top of the head, at the temples.
Tanner Bowden:
So it's like fine-tuning anything that's made out of foam. While I was there, they were telling me how foam has been around since World War II or something and we're just using the same technology almost 100 years later at this point. So that's something that I think is really promising about this. Osprey replacing the lumbar portion of one of their backpacking packs, which would've been made of foam, they're using a Carbon part. They've discovered that it has benefited the design of the pack in unforeseeable ways.
Tanner Bowden:
It grips your coat a little bit better and is subtly more supportive in that way. That's cool. The foam was one that I didn't expect. The plastic replacement is easier to expect, I think, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it pop up in other uses that I'm not even thinking about right now too.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, anything that's plastic and small or relatively small, it's fair game, I suppose. Well, that's very cool. That's also a ton of information and we could go on and on and on, because believe it or not, listeners, there's a lot more to this story. So I'm going to pull the plug on that conversation now and encourage people to check out the story online. It is live in the digital world. I'll also encourage you to pick up your very own hard copy of Gear Patrol Magazine, which is available via a different link below, but it's all down there.
Nick Caruso:
Thanks for indulging me, Tanner. Thanks for the rundown. Thanks for the science lesson. But let's end on a fun note and do an audio version of Gear show and tell, which is basically just tell. As you know very intimately, Gear Patrol publishes a column every day called Today in Gear. It's a roundup of the today's most important product news and releases. I challenged you before we began here to parse through some of the latest Gear announcements out in the ether and wondered what might have caught your eye over the last few days. So you got anything on your radar right now?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Nick Caruso:
[Crosstalk 00:41:57]
Tanner Bowden:
I noticed there were a couple new pocket knives in there. But just to go into waters that I don't normally swim in, I-
Nick Caruso:
Wow!
Tanner Bowden:
... decided to-
Nick Caruso:
[crosstalk 00:42:09]
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. I decided to bring up the Subaru Solterra, which is the EV Subaru, the first EV Subaru that they just debuted in Japan. I think this thing is so cool.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. This is a question that we ponder a lot on the pod and the consumer uptake of EVs and attitude toward EVs and who wants to buy? You live up in Vermont where things can get a little dicey if you don't have the proper vehicle. You're into an EV? You're thinking that could be in your future?
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. When I moved up in 2020, it took me... Well, first of all, I guess that every third car on the road in Vermont is a Subaru.
Nick Caruso:
It's true.
Tanner Bowden:
That sounds like a hyperbole, but I bet you it isn't.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. It's pretty close.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. Three or four months after I moved up here, my old 4runner died and I bought an Outback. I bought a Subaru Outback because it was-
Nick Caruso:
Sure.
Tanner Bowden:
Car shopping, it was the perfect car for what I need; driving up to the ski mountain, as many dirt roads that I need to use as paved roads, hauling gear, camping, all this stuff. The Outback is perfect for me. It's cool to see brands like Rivian obviously is making an adventure EV, but Subaru needs to be making an EV as well.
Nick Caruso:
Right. These are the guys who have to do it. Yeah.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's cool. Vermont also is... I am generalizing, but the type of people who live up here are generally more accepting of eco conscious tech and lifestyle choices. It is the demographic that needs electric vehicles, but needs them to be able to be rugged and all-wheel-drive and all that good stuff.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Are you suggesting that people in Vermont are a little crunchy as they say?
Tanner Bowden:
We're a little crunchy up here.
Nick Caruso:
You're crunchers. Yeah. No, I'm totally down. I've considered many a Subaru and this is pretty exciting, going to be big for them. I want to tell you about something that's on my radar, thanks to Today in Gear in fact. I don't know if you know this. It's a little chilly lately and I've had my mind just zeroed in on blankets lately. I really shouldn't say this, but I'm in a war with my girlfriend over what blankets get to stay and mine are losing.
Nick Caruso:
So I've been thinking about a wool blanket, a really nice, pretty, wool blanket. Would you believe that Pendleton and Snow Peak just teamed up and made one. It's Snow Peak x Pendleton. It's called the Icon Blanket, which we're familiar with. But it comes in these two colorways. Just FYI, anyone listening, I like the darker colorway. But it's this pattern inspired by a traditional Navajo pattern called Mountain Majesty which they wove into textiles in the early part of the 20th century. Something I learned.
Nick Caruso:
And I love it. I love Pendleton. I need to get something that's acceptable to people who are dear to me and this is on the list. Makes me warm just thinking about it, but it also makes my wallet kind of hurt because it's almost 400 bucks. So maybe not right away, but it's so pretty and wonderful I want to crawl under it.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah. I saw that one. That thing is nice. Pendleton blankets are pretty pricey though.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, but worth it. I'll be able to give it to my kids.
Tanner Bowden:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nick Caruso:
I have to have kids then I'll be able to give it to them. I'll give it to a kid. How about that?
Tanner Bowden:
Here you go.
Nick Caruso:
Someday, your kid. Right on. Well, okay. There's only two of us here today, we can't go around the table much more, but that's Gear that's on our radar. We'll link to that stuff below. If anybody listening wants truly... Actually, I'll go into this for a second. When I came on to Gear Patrol years and years and years ago now when all of you people were just a glint in the universe's eye, I was part of the Today in Gear effort in its nascent form and it's developed into this really keen, sharp-on-the-nose kind of coverage.
Nick Caruso:
So if anybody wants that kind of roundup daily, check it out. If you want to never miss some Today in Gear or anything else we publish in Gear Patrol, sign up for the Dispatch, which is our daily newsletter, includes everything we publish. So a little plug there. But oh my gosh! Tanner, you're a veteran. You didn't need to hear all that, you're familiar. And I've taken up a ton of your time today. Thank you for being here virtually and for dropping a mega ton knowledge bomb on us and for this story in the magazine. It's really great. So thanks for coming back.
Tanner Bowden:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Yeah. If what I have said here sounds confusing, I had multiple rounds of revisions and drafts in the print story to make it really easy to understand, so go check out the story.
Nick Caruso:
Definitely. Then after you're done reading it, the video is linked below too, so it's a must watch. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Thanks for tuning in week after week. We love you and appreciate you. Again, if you want any information about anything we talked about, links are below. Hit us up and follow us on social. You can also email us with questions, comments, compliance, jokes, other product recommendations.
Nick Caruso:
You can make more comments about Vermont if you want. You can do that on social or via email. You can hit me up at podcast@gearpatrol.com. Then lastly, if you like the pod, subscribe to it and give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts so we become famous and people listen to us and enjoy the content. Tanner, thank you once again. Glad you're well, happy fall. For Gear Patrol, I'm Nick Caruso, and until next time, take care.