A new report from Ford says that most customers buying its new electric Lighting F-150 will be first-time EV buyers–we'll discuss whether or not we've reached the EV inflection point. Then, Martian ketchup and the urgent need for a more resilient coffee bean variety... did you know that your favorite drinkable drug is in danger and that Heinz is prepping for space-based farming? Then, Netflix Games comes to mobile Apple devices. What is Netflix Games, and will real gamers be interested in the service? Lastly, we each share products on our individual radars at the moment.
Have we passed the "EV inflection point?" Will the coffee bean crisis kill your caffeine supply? Who is Netflix Games made for?
Episode Navigation:
03:06 – Ford F-150 Lightning: Are We Long-Last at an "EV Inflection Point"?
17:13 – The Coffee Bean Crisis: Why Cups of Joe Could Cost $20 Soon
37:08 – Netflix Games: Will Hardcore Gamers Go For It?
Featured and Related:
Nick Caruso:
This is the Gear Patrol podcast for Friday, November 12th, 2021. I'm Nick Caruso, and I am glad you're here. It is the time of year when leaves are falling and temps are dropping, but product news, it just keeps popping up.
JD DiGiovanni:
I like that.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah? Poorly delivered, but there we go. Case in point though, three stories we're going to talk about today. Electric vehicles first up. A new report from Ford says that must customers buying its new electric version of the F150, the Lightning, will be first time EV buyers. And we'll discuss whether or not we've reached an EV inflection point. Then martian ketchup and the urgent need for a more resilient coffee bean variety. Did you know that your favorite drinkable drug is in danger and that Heinz is prepping for space based farming? We'll get into that to. And lastly, Netflix Games comes to mobile Apple devices. So we'll talk briefly about what Netflix games is, and then whether real, true tried and true gamers will be interested in the service. And then we'll wrap up with a little bit of show and tell of our favorite gear from the last week. So, oh boy, there's a ton to discuss. And with me to do just that is Platforms editor JC DiGiovanni. Hello, JD.
JD DiGiovanni:
Hey there.
Nick Caruso:
Hey, hey. Also on the airways this week. Editor Will Price, Price, Price.
Will Price:
What's up, Nick?
Nick Caruso:
Hey. Thank you both for joining and happy today, I don't like to ruin the continuity for listeners, but it is the day we're recording, which will remain a mystery to everyone. What's the latest? We're all in the same bureau here in New York, it's a little gloomy, it's fall, November. You got any updates for us guys?
Will Price:
It gets dark at, I think 5:16 is my official count, full dark, not just a little dark, full dark. So you're screwed if you like going on a post work run, unless are okay with running at night. And I hate that. So if you live in the Southeast or anywhere where you're not absolutely pulverized by time change and shorter days or what have you, just count your lucky stars because it really is a pile of garbage.
Nick Caruso:
Wow.
Will Price:
That's all I got.
Nick Caruso:
Bright and sunny. Geez. Yeah, you could light up a dark winter night with that kind of attitude, Will. JP, you have to have something optimistic.
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah, I was just in California for a week and I came back the night of the time change, so I was jet lagged and then I got this weird hour situation moving around, very strange. But here we are, it's getting dark already as we record.
Nick Caruso:
So let's move on. Okay, first up today, EVs. It seems like people are talking about EVs nonstop. Everybody always talks them, I always talk about them, we talk about them on this podcast all the time, and who among us has not suffered Tesla fatigue? But ubiquitous as they seem, in the consumer landscape, EVs are still a relatively small category in the automotive space. Like not a humongous number of people are buying them. However, it' growing rapidly, and to wit, Ford just shared the results of this survey that was taken by people that have reserved the Lightning F150 that's coming out. They resurrected the name, the most appropriate name for an electric pickup ever. And the survey indicates that 79% of the respondents, these are people buying the Lightning, for those people this will be their first electric vehicle. And this goes to my mind beyond anecdotal evidence that EVs are gathering steam, if you'll pardon the overlap of power methods. So JD, I want to go to you first because I feel like we've got an opinion brewing here. Do you think stats like this or just other evidence, whatever your feeling is, indicate that the sort of EV inflection point, when EVs inevitably become the automotive standard, have we reached that? Are we careening toward that future now without possibility of stopping?
JD DiGiovanni:
We're definitely headed that way. I think that seems to be pretty clear. Rivian went public this week, and they're now valued more than Ford or General Motors and they've now shipped like how many cars? The market is clearly seeing an upside for electric vehicles. And I think they lost like over a billion dollars putting together their actual production facility, so they're not anywhere close to making money, they're losing crazy amounts of money. But it's so clear that the market sees this as a huge potential, because the possibility of growth in the kind of estimation of the market as a whole is very likely and upside is very big. So I think it would be a pretty surprising thing if we didn't end up going to near ubiquitous electric car use. I think it is a really interesting question to think about, okay, what is the metric for this is the point? This is the place or the [crosstalk 00:06:02]? What was that turning point? I think it's already happened, we're there. Elon Musk is the most wealthy man in the world, in large part because he owns Tels and you have these electric car makers that are very nascent but still being valued at billions of dollars.
JD DiGiovanni:
So I think we're there. I think that you could probably try to scare up some other ways to measure it though that's not just consumer sentiment. But when will people stop caring when it's expensive to buy gas? That's probably the next question. Because gas prices are pretty high right now and everyone's pretty pissed off about it, as you would be. And I think that when we get to a place where that is no longer as big of a pocketbook issue for a lot of Americans, I think is when we'll be in a completely different sphere. But as far as tipping points, I think we're there.
Nick Caruso:
Okay, interesting. I want to amend what I said. Obviously we're definitely going to have an all electric future or mostly electric, but that point does feel like it's now or has definitely passed. Will, what do you think? Do you have an opinion on this matter?
Will Price:
My perspective is kind of colored in a way like someone who's sort of removed from the car shopping market for the past five or six years since I moved to New York City. I only recently got a car again and I don't drive it all the time, I drive it when I need to. So I've watched passively, but not followed strictly speaking. The conversation sort of reminds me of how I thought about, I think 2007 is when the iPhone iPod touch was released, and how quickly the conversation went from like, "Oh, look how fun it is to swipe through you album covers," which was the coolest thing, you're hanging out with your friends at school or talking to somebody, you're not even doing anything else, you're just going back and forth. And you had to upload your album covers, because otherwise it's just like you're going through gray boxes. Anyways, how quickly we went from that to just, I pulled this up, let me look, in 2012, so five years after it came out, there were a billion smart phones. And then in 2013, smart phones officially outnumbered all other phone types. So it took six years for the smart phone to become something that was going to happen, like JD kind of mentioned. Like we know this is going to happen. But it took six years from release to like this is officially the dominant type of product in this massive, massive category.
Will Price:
So when I think of cars, talk about a product, it's like however many times larger more and difficult to build, and I'm not going to get into the complex engineering feats to make an electric car perform to the standard or better than the standard of an internal combustion engine, but I'm curious to see, what I'm more curious of is how long it takes to get to that point where people are like, "Oh, you drive a gas car? There's gas in that?" What movie is that, I'm about to reference I, Robot again.
Nick Caruso:
You are. We always, we do we always do this Will?
Will Price:
Yeah, it's my fault. In I, Robot, one of the scientists comments on Will Smith's, I think it's his motorcycle, and she says, "Is their gas in this?" And she's like taken aback. And every time I watch that movie I think, good point. There's going to be a moment where I'm going to go home and hang out with my dad who's working on some 2005 Mustang in his garage and I'm going say, "Can't believe you'll drive this, there's gasoline in there." So I'm more interested to when we get to that switch because I do agree with you guys that it is inevitable at this point. The amount of money and people and minds and what have you pushing us toward this, it feels like it's just something that' going to happen rather than whether it could happen.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, and at the risk of digging up a somewhat stale topic, it's very obvious to say too, but we would be much further into the era of EV if the infrastructure was there. I think cities are a prime example of where electric cars could be of use, and we just don't have the charging around to live with one in small Brooklyn streets, for instance. But you're talking about used cars, buying cars, all that stuff. One of the biggest problems with EVs has always been range anxiety. Range anxiety was kind of like the Y2K of EV future is like this will be the scariest thing you've ever dealt with in your life. You will be stranded when your car bricks on a highway and there will be no one to save you, no one can hear you scream. And I think that's still part of it, that's obviously a big, big selling point for more and more improved versions of electric cars. But are there other things that we're starting to wonder? This is a long way of saying that the other thing is like, how are we thinking about electric cars now? Are we thinking about them in a different way? And I feel like maybe we're starting to see them as just like normal cars, and that range anxiety is just a normal part of ownership now and not so much a specter in the distance.
Will Price:
It's interesting. I was thinking about how my own view of electric vehicles had changed. And I think if you had told me about an F150 that was full electric five years ago when I was driving around all the time, I would have thought it's kind of like when vegetarian food first started becoming popular, the chefs were like hell bent on making vegetarian food that looked like traditional meat food. So like broccoli in a hot dog bun or something, it's like you're trying to force something. But it's funny now, when I was reading stories of the Lightning, I didn't think that at all. So I don't know if it's something like a moment where the light goes on and you're like, "Oh, there's not a series difference," or not, but for me, it's sort of been a gradual just understanding over time I guess that it's not just going to be like a one off thing, this is something that's going to populate the future for the foreseeable stretch of time.
JD DiGiovanni:
It's almost like an unanswerable question about how the culture regards a car and when that changed. Because it's always going to be kind of different for everybody, you'll probably have a consensus. But I remember in college studying history and there was this joke that all these different history professors would like to argue about when something really started and whoever could push it back the furthest was the king, the person who could have a semi-decent argue about it. It's like, "Well, WWII actually started in 18, something."
Nick Caruso:
Oh my gosh, that is like the nerdiest thing. I love that. That's cool.
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah, it's great. But I'm sure you could do the same thing with this game. But it definitely does feel like it's something in the past couple of years that's just something clicked. But then again, we are all a kind of homogenous group, being a bunch of folks living in Brooklyn. So who knows? There's probably some different perspectives out there.
Nick Caruso:
No, you people are nothing like me. If anybody has an opinion about it, has anybody listening, has your opinion or your feelings about EVs changed recently? Are you suddenly finding yourself thinking about them or cross-shopping them? And that's a question I had sort of soft pitched to you guys. Let's say hypothetically you are going to buy a new car, are you cross-shopping internal combustion with electric? Are you even thinking about gas cars anymore? What's your thought on that? How much has it pervaded your paradigm?
JD DiGiovanni:
I'm so far out of the car market, but the one thing I do know is that there are a lot of pretty good tax incentives to get an EV, so I think it would definitely factor in in terms of just thinking about overall cost. Though, I don't know, there is some part of me that wants to be the guy 10 years ago buying Pokemon cards because he knew it would pop off. So maybe I'd get that really rare internal combustion engine, keep it nice and minty until I sell it in like 2060.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Will Price:
There you go. I was thinking, I recently came upon a life event that would earn me a garage for the first time in my adult, well my own garage, potentially moving into a house, we'll see. And I was thinking, as one does, I was thinking too far into the future and I was like my ideal garage setup would be an EV and then a motorcycle, like a proper internal combustion motorcycle so I can have that little flare or that taste of something that really probably for all intents and purposes it's not really necessary at all, but I just want it and I need to have it. So for me, if I'm going to buy a full size vehicle, or I should say a new full size vehicle, I don't see a reason, especially just considering where we live, to not go EV. So cross-shopping, not so much, I would EV first and then some swanky motorcycle a couple years down the line.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, I can see you in a Tesla and one of those choppers with the handle bars that you have to extend your arms.
Will Price:
You can, you can see that. Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment.
Nick Caruso:
I don't know, I could go on about this forever. But good points all around. And I don't know, EV inflection point, we're probably in the middle of it. It really is, you eluded to history, learning about history and such JD, and usually you can't actually see the area you're in to some degree at least. So well let's just keep moving along down the road, silently perhaps. Next up we have a different sort of worse kind of trend, which is the growing, no pun intended, didn't even realize that one, the growing need for alternative crops. So coffee beans are in danger. The very long story short, and I know Will you'll specifically correct me if I get any of this wrong, is that the overwhelming amount of coffee is made using two types of beans, both of which can be grown only on a thin strip of the planet in the Southern hemisphere. And a few factors like worsening climate conditions and this rampant fungus situation that's going on and just some farming practices in general are making bean farming very difficult and making successful coffee crops hard to come by.
Nick Caruso:
But scientists have found this new bean variety that's heartier and very similar to the current go-to beans, but it's a race against time. Coffee prices have already begun to spike. It's a whole thing. And then there's a related story that JD actually shared with the company. With the company, with Gear Patrol, [inaudible 00:18:34] to everybody, from Heinz, who just announced Marz edition ketchup, and that's Marz with a Z. It's made from tomatoes that have been grown on Earth but in martian conditions, synthetic conditions. Anyway, the trend here is that crops are in danger or will be and there are efforts underway to find alternative growing methods and totally alternative crops. So Will, you are our resident coffee encyclopedia person, encyclopedia Brown, if you will, and I wonder can you weigh in on how bad the coffee bean situation is and your take on all this?
Will Price:
Yeah, it's pretty ugly. Like you said, there's like 100 and, I can't remember how many 100, nearly 200 types of coffee plants in the world, but only two are used with some extreme exceptions. Only two are used for production for people to use, that's arabica and robusta. And the former, arabica, is typically considered the better coffee. Lighter, more flavorfuL, a little less bitter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And robusta has always been, according to its name might imply, it's a tougher coffee, it withstands the elements a little better, it can live through a little bit more, it's a little more of a shorter, stockier plant. The issue, when you were explaining the issue, Nick, you kind of have to go through all these hoops to explain the genetics of the coffee plant and farming practices and there's also this thing called rust leaf which is like a fungal disease that destroys the plants. And then there's also issues of supply chain caused by the pandemic. There's all these things.
Will Price:
The end result, unless dramatic change happens in the next five to 10 years, would be the average cup of coffee at your [inaudible 00:20:49] spot or the average bag of coffee, and this goes for everything from Folgers to Starbucks to a specialty grade roaster, will be dramatically increased. Just this year, I think the number I have in front of me is right, just this year arabic beans are up in price by something like 43%. And that's not just because of the issues that we talked about, it's also because of logistic and shipping issues due to COVID. But the numbers are only going up, and the companies that make this coffee and produce it, roast it, sell it, et cetera, they're only going to bear that cost for so long. I don't think we're terribly far away from cups of coffee costing seven, eight, nine, 10 dollars and then all the way up at some point, especially for the higher end stuff, 15, 20 dollars a cup. People will think that that's obscene, but almost all data points to us heading in that direction, unless there's some great silver bullet found, which right now it doesn't seem like that's likely. We'll see though.
Nick Caruso:
You don't think this new, this new bean isn't a silver beanut?
Will Price:
It's interesting. I think a lot of times people like me and other media outlets, it's nice to see some positive news in the space and big stories are written up on the subject, but the reality is there's so little money that goes into research into the coffee plant and all these issues that we're talking about. And then even less money into implementing this at the farm level. And people forget that the farm level in the coffee world is often in parts of the world that are maybe not inaccessible but less accessible than, say, when we're talking about like monoculture corn or rice or whatever. So maybe this recently found plant, which I believe is supposed to have nice, light flavor, kind of similar to arabica but also be a little sturdier in regards to like I think it can live in higher temperature climate, I can't remember the exact specifics. That could be a silver bullet in some cases, but everything I know about the space and in coffee research is that there are a lot of issues in getting from the science of this solves some problems to getting plants in the ground, growing coffee, and at a scale large enough to make a serious, serious difference.
Will Price:
Honestly, it's a pretty hard subject to read on because it's hard to find news that is unequivocally good, is what I would say.
JD DiGiovanni:
The one bit that I found interesting about this stenophylla plant was from James Hoffman, the YouTube creator, he did a whole video on this. In general, his content on coffee, if you're interested in coffee, is really very excellent, very accessible. Kind of breaks down a lot of the stuff that otherwise can feel a bit hard to wrap your head around about coffee very well. And he dove into this in particular and actually cut some roasted stenophylla and the thing that I found really encouraging about it to kind of try to look more on that sunny side of things is just it tasted good. And in addition to being resilient, tasting good. People will always talk about their altruistic goals, but ultimately folks tend to be just more self serving, and it just kind of it is what it is. And so, so long as the product at the center that's being offered is good, I do have some hope that this variety of the plant could end up being more popular and stave off incredibly expensive cups of coffee. But like you said, where these plants are grown, it's not somewhere off the I-95 in California. They're hard to access places in the world. And I don't know, it seems like a big question mark, but it is kind of exciting to see that there is maybe some road that is worth traveling.
Will Price:
Yeah, there was another a few years ago sort of the buzzier option was something called an F1 hybrid, which is a plant that they were going to basically create. Where they created traits of a bunch of different coffees. And like you said, I remember in discussions with some of the researchers who had worked on the project or talking about even the people who were cloning the plant, the baseline was that the coffee needed to taste good, as you said. There's a reason that we only drink two of the 175 whatever coffee plant varieties is because only two of them are really palatable for what people expect out of coffee. So if this third one can extend the range at which we can produce the plant and it also sort of checks the box of like this doesn't taste like a pile of nothing, that is huge for sure. I would like to see it happen.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, that figure you mentioned about the horror of very, very high priced coffee cups, cups of coffee, Will, is staggering. I hadn't really absorbed that so much. I try to purchase individual cups of coffee kind of rarely, for the millennial avocado toast situation. But just this morning I got a cold brew, five and a half bucks. And that seems steep already. Get my fix for three or four times more, that sucks.
Will Price:
The sort of paradox of this topic is that like right now, like right now, the very present, and then the last couple years, there really hasn't been a better time to be a coffee nerd, like someone who jut really likes drinking good coffee, just because of the absolute wealth of really, really, really talented coffee roasters, and also more very good coffee being grown and grown for quality rather than volume, and that coffee finding its way all over the planet. And there's a ton of reasons why that's the case, but right now you can get your hands on so much good coffee that is such high quality. I typically buy my coffee in like two or three bags at a time from a roaster I haven't tried before or something, and 19 to 23 dollars a bag for me, for how much these farms are investing, how much these roasters are testing and retesting and hitting the right roast profiles, doing all the work, 19 to 23 dollars a bag isn't bad. But that's projected to move up very, very, very quickly. So I'm cherishing it for as long as it lasts.
Nick Caruso:
That's really wild. Sorry JD.
JD DiGiovanni:
Maybe we'll all just get a lot more used to drinking some gnarly robusta with a whole lot of oat milk or whatever we've decided in 2028 is the thing we want to put into our coffee instead of whole milk.
Nick Caruso:
We're going to be flavoring water with coffee extract and the brewing, like putting Adderall through our coffee machines or something just to keep it [crosstalk 00:28:43]
Will Price:
You know what I was thinking is like I can see maybe we do reach the point where coffee is inaccessible as an every morning thing, at least decent coffee, so you reach the point where you go to a coffee shop and it's almost like a wine shop and it's treated like something, right now I know a lot of people who make pour over on the weekends, so maybe you have your nice coffee reserved only for Saturday and the rest of the week you're drinking, like you said, some brutal like dust Folgers that you have to blend into something percent milk, I don't know. But I could see that and who know? Maybe that would be fun.
JD DiGiovanni:
I definitely think that whatever form it's going to take, I think some kind of café drink has got to stick around. Michael Pollan was doing this, he's kind of around media promoting his book, This is Your Mind on Plants, earlier this year. And the bit that everyone loved to hear and talk about was coffee. And he has essentially this theory of the plant and theory of the history of the plant that it's not that we industrialized as a country or industrialization took place and we started drinking more coffee, it was that we started drinking coffee and we became industrialized. It literally changed the way that we thought and acted and participated in society. And I do think it's just kind of worth putting a pin in that. You can agree or disagree, I think reasonably people can on that theory of it. But it isn't just this thing that people who like to drink coffee in the morning don't want to spend 20 dollars not to get a headache anymore. The coffee plant has a pretty profound, important place in Western, not just Western, but modern culture in general. And the idea that it could go away is actually pretty astounding.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I just always think of coffee in the same sort of cognitive breath as for like the East India Company, that spice trade, they're all interwoven and that's like human history, not to mention the only reason that I can show up with a smile on my face to our 9:30AM all hands meeting every week. Yeah, it's wild. And that also brings to mind anecdotes about depression era people having to reuse tea bags, that kind of thing. That's a horrific idea of the future.
Will Price:
I kind of like the discussion of the future of relationships to work and work in general, it's like in that same book that JD reference, the Pollan book, he talks about the, I'm probably going to say this wrong, the psilocybin mushrooms and micro-dosing and that as an activity that there's like fairly convincing or at least suggestive research that there's a lot of positives to be taken from it. And there's a lot of shifting that had gone on in work culture even before COVID, but now that COVID has hit and sort of in some ways will permanently reshape how we work, maybe there's a discussion to be had about the stimulant of the post-industrialized United States. Because in some respects it is a pretty byzantine system we have set up right now, like wake up like, "Oh gosh, I need my injection of caffeine before I can function." It's not the most wholesome relationship to a food. [crosstalk 00:32:30]
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, I'm totally bought into this lifestyle. I will go to bed sometimes and be like, "Oh my god, I can't believe it's only Tuesday night, whatever, what a long week. At least I get to have coffee when I wake up. The next time I'm conscious, at least I get to have coffee." It's a really sick feeling, but it's how I operate. So we haven't even talked about the martian ketchup, which I'm not sure we really need to too much. But another question came to mind that I shared with you guys I guess yesterday that we're kind of naturally getting toward here, is like so coffee going to be really rare. If scientists somewhere are able to synthetically reproduce a coffee bean, in a way like we do with impossible meat and such, is that something that you think would be accepted? Or would that just be a drug?
Will Price:
If we take the discussion we're having to its logical end point of like proper natural coffee being this ultra-expensive almost luxury, then I don't see any reason why an affordable synthetic version would not be adopted, so long as it reaches some benchmark of it's not un-pleasurable to consume. We've made fun of people who love Folgers or something, but at the end of the day, you can put a little bit of cream in Folgers and it's not that offensive. So if it hits that, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't do what it needs to do.
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah I know a lot of folks who have concerns about genetically modified food and everything else and aesthetic responses to it, man I'm all about it. It's good. We should be able to, if you can turn up the food dial and make sure that we have enough of what we need, it's a good thing. All these other kind of concerns aside, I don't know. There kind of comes the question of how we're distributing it, which has always been the problem. But so long as there's enough, it's all good by me. I'll drink some space coffee, I'll eat some space ketchup.
Will Price:
On the next episode of Gear Patrol the Podcast is a discussion of localization of supply chain distribution and how it relates to the movie AI.
JD DiGiovanni:
I, Robot.
Will Price:
I, Robot.
Nick Caruso:
I, Robot.
JD DiGiovanni:
I don't even try to do that, I just get on this podcast and all the sudden I'm just feeling, honestly I might re-watch it tonight.
Nick Caruso:
I need to get Will Smith on this podcast. And we can have you, two Wills. We can get the other Will, motoring Will, and just the Wills can talk about AI or whatever it is. And I, Robot. You mentioned, I'm really going on a tangent here with this fake coffee thing, but it's almost like a bathtub gin kind of thing. And it makes me think, do you guys watch Succession? Are you Succession watchers?
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah.
Will Price:
I haven't seen it.
Nick Caruso:
It's incredible. Hopefully listeners are interested enough to remember in the most recent episode the toilet wine conversation where you have to burp the bag of toilet wine. I can't wait to do that every morning as I'm making my pour over methamphetamine, I have to burp my, whatever it is. Okay, maybe I had too much coffee today, maybe I'm the problem. But yeah, so we're not going to have time to really touch on the martian ketchup, but it is a really interesting story that is obviously going to be linked below. People should definitely look at that. It's interesting, it's the idea that we can simulate over environments and hopefully whenever Elon takes us up there, have something to eat, or at least put on our fake broccoli hot dogs, or whatever you were talking about Will.
Nick Caruso:
So third story of our three main headlines is, well it's game time, that's what it's about. Netflix Games is now available on iPhones and iPads, in addition to android devices where it's been available for a little while. And I wanted to included this story, not so much to parse apart this announcement for iOS devices, but to more discuss the intersection of streaming and gaming a little more conceptually. Will, I know you're a storied gamer. JD, I'm actually not sure about you. I like video games a lot, and I think the concept of like a Netflix of gaming is smart too. But this is not really what I would picture that being. The available titles we're talking about with Netflix games are more lighter fare, they're mobile games more or less, not like console games, not famous ones like GTA or Call of Duty or whatever. So obviously a lot of bias in this question because of that, but I'm wondering what your opinions are on that. Like JD, do you think that Netflix Games is a step toward that model? Or is this something else entirely or is this something attractive at all? Or just don't answer my question and say whatever you want.
JD DiGiovanni:
I have so many options, man, this is great. Yeah, I don't know. I was reading about this and it was like, "This fells like it's aimed at me in particular. [crosstalk 00:38:55] type of person."
Nick Caruso:
Oh, really?
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to buy a game console. I didn't have them growing up. I did play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for a period of time and became way too invested. And so I've pretty much just said I'll never do anything other than casual gaming, and I won't allow myself to buy anything that would make it easier. So if it's coming with Netflix, then I guess I can mess around with it. But it seems kind of fun, it's nice to like not have to, you can still game and not feel like you have to buy into things, buy into the infrastructure of it like a PC or a console and like 60 dollar tripe A titles. You can get on and goof around and kind of log out in the same way that I watched Seinfeld.
Will Price:
Just like Seinfeld.
Nick Caruso:
Will, what about you? You game, you're a game guy, right?
Will Price:
Yeah, I do play a lot of video games. For some context, I have a computer that I made for playing games, I obviously have an Xbox One, I play probably too many, I'm like the polar opposite of JD who has a very healthy mindset when it comes to things that perhaps take up too much of your time.
Nick Caruso:
Well, I would also invite you to weigh in on the story we're discussions.
Will Price:
Oh, right, that's what we're here for.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, what do you think? You have consoles, but are you interested in mobile gaming?
Will Price:
Yeah, mobile gaming is like a massive market so I understand why they would crack that first, just from a business perspective. One thing that did strike me as odd, well maybe not that odd, but when I think of mobile gaming, and this isn't necessary the end all be all truth, but a pretty significant percentage of people playing games on their phones are kids, especially kids playing on their parents iPads or cell phones, whatever. But Netflix Games is actually disabled on kid's profile on Netflix, which I thought was, it's probably for the best, it seems like the responsible choice, and I'm sure that kids that are born into iPads and iPhones nowadays can navigate their way around the kids profiles to their parents profiles. But I did think that was odd, because my first thought was my nephew and niece stealing my brother and laws iPad and going and running in the basement and playing the Stranger Things game and getting way too scared and having nightmares. That's immediately what I thought.
Will Price:
For me though, it's not super interesting. It's kind of like a really, really mild form of cloud based gaming in a way. And for me, a closer thing to the Netflix of games, I'm sure that analogy has been used by 100 different people at this point, is something like Xbox Game Pass, which is a service that you pay whatever dollars a month, I don't remember what it is anymore, and you have access to a massive games library and you can download those games onto your console or onto your PC and play them as much as you want, as little as you want, and then uninstall them. And you can have as many as you want or as few as you want. And for that, you do need, as JD said, sort of the infrastructure to play games, a computer or a console. But that is much closer to something that is the Netflix of games than what Netflix is actually doing itself.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I was remiss in not talking about those systems, because I've used them before, the sort of subscription service so to speak. But I really just want to have a smart TV and plug in a controller and just have a vast library that I can call up on a whim and not have to download and not have to do all sorts of other crap.
Will Price:
Yeah, I think that, especially if you want are those higher end, more triple A games, like you mentioned Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty of Battlefield or any of them, is I think that's a pretty far distance away, just because cloud based gaming requires absolutely massive server side and hardware side investment. Because basically what it's going to be doing is like if you were to have a smart TV and you wanted to play Call of Duty on it but you didn't want to have the console and you didn't want to download anything, it would require a computer somewhere in some massive computer server farm to be running an image of that game and feeding it into your TV without so much latency as to ruin the gaming experience. So you would have to have incredibly strong internet connection. It's a lot of hardware and a lot of infrastructure that doesn't currently exist. But that is like yeah, the golden future as you're saying. I don't see that happening. There's a few small companies, or they're not small, there's a few smaller companies that are investing in moving in that direction, but for now it doesn't seem like a huge priority.
Nick Caruso:
That's because we're using those servers for NFTs.
Will Price:
That's right.
Nick Caruso:
Is that right?
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah, exactly.
Nick Caruso:
Well, okay. Fine, you talked me off the ledge. I'll just have to wait for the far future when I can't have caffeine and I can have video games.
Will Price:
On demand. Do you remember GameFly, by the way?
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, GameFly. That was like a delivery mail.
Will Price:
It was literally the Netflix of games when Netflix mailed to you DVDs. They would mail you games but you could only have I think two at a time. And if you didn't return the previous one, it wouldn't even let you check out another one. I had it for like a month, and my dad got so mad at me because I racked up like hundreds of dollars in replacement or late fee, I can't remember what the fees were. But it's a scar on our relationship to this day.
Nick Caruso:
My parents still have a DVD subscription on Netflix, they still get DVDs.
Will Price:
Can we do a Q&A with them on the site? That's a remarkable fact, actually.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, I'll let Eric know. Okay, cool. Let's wrap up major headlines there and move on. I can hear ice clinking around in a glass Will, it sounds like you're getting ready for [inaudible 00:45:26] dinner cocktails, which are the last segment of the podcast. Which is something we haven't done in a while, we're just kind of straight up going to talk about some cool new products. We love to have longer conversations about the ideas behind recent product news like we've been doing fair listeners. But what about new products that we just think are super cool? So we're going to quickly go around the room, just kind of mention some things that we've loved recently in the last several days, something that caught our eye, and we'll drop the links below. Will, do you want to begin?
Will Price:
Yeah. I think this came out, it started rolling out in the US beginning of November but the news is really more recent, is Jack Daniels Coy Hill High Proof. It's a single barrel limited time product, it's only going to be released this year, at least right now that's what we know. It was sort of a startling thing to read in my inbox. So it's called Coy Hill High Proof, the high proof being like the operant part of the name. The bottles clock between 137, that is the low end, and 148 proof. So if you drank alcohol by volume, 148 proof is like 69% alcohol. Is that right? No, it's 79% alcohol. Oh my god, I'm not good at math. Anyways, you guys get what I'm saying. It's an absolutely massive amount of alcohol. Just for context, the TTB or the alcohol and tobacco tax and trade something or other bureau, their legal limit for proof in the bottle for bourbon whiskey, which Tennessee whiskey technically is by legal standers, is 160 proof. So this is 12 proof points off the legal limit for what bourbon can be. We're nearing like 151 Bacardi levels of alcohol.
Will Price:
So I have a feeling that this will be, I've actually been sipping it through this podcast, not the 148, that was not sampled 148, but it drinks hot. It's also the highest proof ever in a Jack Daniels [inaudible 00:47:52], it's a fascinating, like the most extreme variant of high proof whiskey I've ever had.
Nick Caruso:
That's wild. You mentioned that your ice is melting quickly, maybe that's why, higher proof?
Will Price:
I have no idea. But legitimately I don't know if I would have an open flame around if I had the 148 proof. Also I have a pretty, pretty good idea that if people who get their hands on a 148 proof bottles, I bet you that will sell for in questionably legal markets for way, way, way more market than it's selling at retail. People will obsess over this, I can almost guarantee it.
Nick Caruso:
Interesting. So people got to get on it. And some day when you hop that motorcycle in your dream garage, someone's going to say, "Hey, is there gasoline in that thing?" And you're going to say, "No, would you believe Jack Daniels?"
Will Price:
That wraps it up, I think.
Nick Caruso:
Yep, we can just call it quits there. Or we can ask JD what's on his product radar right now.
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah, I think something came out this week I thought was pretty cool was Tudor redesigned their Pelagos in concert with the French Navy, Marine Nationale. They're so fancy, they even got fancy names for the military, I love it. But yeah, they slimmed down the profile of the watch a bit, the case is still made out of titanium, the removed the helium escape valve, and actually reduced its water resistance by about 300 meters, which is kind of interesting. But I guess most of the operations that these combat, I don't even know what the correct term is but I'm sure I'd get scolded for not getting it right, but these tough people who are fighting professionally, most of it's in comparatively shallower water, so it's not that necessary. But I think from a pure design perspective, they actually updated the bezel and put on kind of a new type face. And it just looks really sharp. It's an attractive looking watch. And it comes with a couple of straps, they're kind of NATO style, they removed spring bars so you can't actually put on a bracelet, or it has to be a kind of strap, you kind of snake through it like NATO style.
JD DiGiovanni:
But for essentially a high end Swiss watch, which is what these are, we've talked about watch prices on this show before, but it's like 3900 dollars. And it's expensive, it's a very expensive thing, I want to be clear, I know this, but compared to what is out there, it's a pretty good deal for a pretty handsome watch, in my opinion. So that really caught my eye, I thought it was a cool release that they kind of dropped, and it really came out of nowhere, so it was pretty neat.
Will Price:
Can you believe [inaudible 00:50:49] thinks 3900 dollars is a good deal for a watch? These guys. These guys.
Nick Caruso:
I'm going to write in.
Will Price:
Send the mail to Nick.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, honestly I love getting mail, so that'd be nice. And I haven't been threatened yet this week. So do you guys want to hear mine?
JD DiGiovanni:
Yeah.
Will Price:
Yeah.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah? Okay. So this sort of drafts off the earlier conversation about EVs, and there's this product, it's not actually out yet but it's just been announced, called ZipCharge, and it is literally a suitcase sized power bank for electric cars. So this combats that range anxiety I was talking about. It's a British startup, it was announced at the climate summit that's going on right now. There are going to be a couple different capacities. And the basic thing is that like at 30 minutes you can take this thing out of your trunk, plug it into your car, and get like 20, 40 miles of range. Let me see, shipments begin a year from now and pricing isn't totally clear yet. You're going to be able to buy these outright, but so far only like a monthly lease program has been revealed and it's about 70 bucks in the United States. And I think this is cool from a very specific perspective, because a big part of me wants to be a little cynical and say this is kind of like the same thing but having to buy a case for my thousand dollar phone. It's like I have an electric car, I should just be able to keep going. But now I have to keep a suitcase in part of the trunk to make sure that I don't run out of juice in the desert.
Nick Caruso:
But it's a niche market, it's a market that's going to be needed, and no doubt, like it's really pretty too. I think that's maybe what attracted me so much is that the design is really kind of lovely.
Will Price:
They should have packaged it like, what is the first Fast and the Furious move when all the guys just constantly tapping the NOS tanks or whatever? Just put all the machinery inside of a NOS tank, and then everybody who things it's like dweeby to get in your car and get your little electro-suitcase and plug it in, immediately you have Vin Diesel energy about you. I think that's the move. That's free consulting.
Nick Caruso:
That's good, Will. Yeah, I like the idea of shaping this after something like the lantern from the shitty Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie and he had to recharge himself.
Will Price:
That was the worst. I think he even hates that movie. Anyways.
Nick Caruso:
I'm sure there's something in, what is your movie, Will?
Will Price:
Fast and the Furious, come on.
Nick Caruso:
No, Artificial ...
Will Price:
Oh, I, Robot.
Nick Caruso:
I, Robot.
Will Price:
If this was the I, Robot version of these batteries they'd come to life and take over and Will Smith would have to say some pithy lines and wear some cool Chuck Taylors and save the world, so [crosstalk 00:54:10]
JD DiGiovanni:
He does have cool Chuck Taylors.
Will Price:
That's in the next episode, we'll talk about Converse All Stars and talk about Chuck Taylors.
Nick Caruso:
Okay. Yeah, you're writing it for me. I like it. Well, good. There you have it. Three products on our individual radars and collective radars and everybody's radar, whatever, it's three products we love. If you want more quick hit product news, we, meaning Gear Patrol, publish a round up of the best new gear in a daily column called Today in Gear. If you're listening to this, you're probably familiar, but we linked it below. And if you sign up for the Dispatch, which is our newsletter, comes out every day, you will always see Today in Gear right up toward the top. So there's a lot more like this quick hit stuff and I encourage you to check it out. Fellas, it's time to be donezo for the episode. We've had a successful, nice long chit chat, and I want to invite everyone to check out links below to everything we just talked about, follow us on social media, email us at podcast@gearpatrol.com, with all the ire that JD just engendered in you with his cheap watch recommendation. And subscribe to the pod too, rate it five stars on Apple Podcasts. And I will be your friend for life, unless you threaten me in an email. JD and Will, thank you so much for your time and your undying friendship.
JD DiGiovanni:
You're welcome, Nick.
Will Price:
Thank you.
JD DiGiovanni:
I was going to say you're welcome, it's now pitch black in my office.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, it has been quite interesting watching the light literally fade from all of our video screens here. The sunsets on an ungrateful world. Anyway, thank you all for listening. Thank you for joining. And until next time, take care.