[00:00:00] The vast majority of us cannot impact the larger world. But if everybody does their little bit, that all adds up. It cascades and hopefully makes the world a better place overall in the end. This is the Techsploder podcast, conversations with tech
[00:00:17] professionals about being human in a binary world. Episode 11, Sam Abuelsamid. Techsploder is made possible by the financial support of our patrons like Phyllis Hauser. If you like what you hear, head on over to patreon.com slash Jason Howell
[00:00:34] to support the show directly and thank you for making independent podcasting possible. Hello and welcome to the Techsploder podcast. I'm Jason Howell, happy to kick on another episode of this podcast. I love doing this show. Sorry about the lack of episode last week.
[00:00:53] I had to take the week off, had to get caught up after the trip to Italy. And then, of course, got COVID right afterwards. So my apologies, but we're getting back on that hamster wheel and we're going forward. Starting with today's guest, Sam Abuelsamid.
[00:01:09] Sam is just an awesome guy. I've had the pleasure to work with many times over the last handful of years. Principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights. Sam is a career car guy. I'll put that in air quotes with a mechanical engineering background
[00:01:25] prior to working as an analyst at Guidehouse. He worked on product and technology communications for Ford, as well as for GM also helped develop advanced electronic control systems and embedded software for vehicles. Super smart guy. He's also a frequent contributor to Twits, the tech guys,
[00:01:47] co-hosts the fabulous Will Bearings podcast every week. Also, senior contributor to Forbes so you can read his written work on Forbes if you search for his name. So let's get right to it. My conversation with Sam Abuelsamid.
[00:02:02] Sam Abuelsamid, it is so good to get you on text floater. Thank you for coming on today. My pleasure, Jason. I was just I've been anxiously awaiting the email and you want to come on. I'm glad to be here. It's a great show. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that.
[00:02:18] You know, your path and my path crossed a lot when I was working at Twitter as did actually a lot of people that I had to reaching out to for this show. But super often because of tech news today and tech news weekly,
[00:02:36] and then you got pulled into the the Twitter universe, which was awesome. And I've just and then, of course, beyond that, you ended up doing kind of recurring appearances on the tech guy, right? You got super intertwined. Yeah.
[00:02:52] And I'm still doing that with Leo and Micah doing that once a month, doing a car tech segment on there. So that's amazing. I love it. I love it. Well, I'm really I say all this to say that it's been a while since we've
[00:03:06] had the chance to podcast because I haven't been at Twitter for a while, haven't been doing automotive stories necessarily like we were doing on TNW. And so so selfishly, I'm really happy to get the chance to catch up with you.
[00:03:19] Well, and I'm glad to be here to have a chance to talk with you again, because like you said, it's been a while since we've chatted. So yeah, I'll be back here with you. Yeah. So so for those who, you know, obviously at the top of the show,
[00:03:31] I kind of do a little bit of like a like a bio run through and everything. Some people kind of know a little bit about you, but you work so deeply in a facet of technology that I will fully admit I respect and I feel
[00:03:47] like very clueless about that. I'm one of those boys that didn't grow up with like a father that like guided me towards the automotive world. I it's like I missed that aspect of my life. And I'm super curious to know how you ended up there.
[00:04:06] It sounds like that wasn't your story. That I think I was just making an assumption. I did not come from a car family. You know, we there were no car people in my family growing up. My dad worked in a steel mill. He was a metallurgist.
[00:04:23] And so I mean, there's a slight car connection there because a lot of the steel from the mill that he worked in went with went to automakers and went to Ford and General Motors and to Chrysler. So they, you know, so there was a slight connection.
[00:04:37] But my parents were not into cars at all. You know, and initially even I wasn't, you know, when I was young, I was actually more into airplanes and cars. Really? Yeah. I built model airplanes and I wanted to be a pilot and and design airplanes.
[00:04:53] And I thought that was the coolest thing. And then I think when I was about 12 years old, I think, yeah, I was at the grocery store with one of my parents and I picked up a copy of Road and Track. This was 1978.
[00:05:08] I distinctly remember that very first issue that I read. It was from middle of 1978 and they had the Ferrari 308 on the cover. And inside was a report on the Long Beach Grand Prix Formula One race. And I read that thing from cover to cover.
[00:05:26] And from then on, it was all cars all the time for me. What was it about that? Like if you if you had no like interest or inkling about the automotive world when you were that age and then suddenly that magazine kind of came across
[00:05:40] your eyes, like what was it about that that was so appealing? You know, they always had great writing in there. Great storytelling, you know, you know, and it wasn't just, you know, your typical road test.
[00:05:53] I mean, they did road tests, but they they did a lot of features and they've kind of gone back to that. The magazine has a few years ago kind of really returned to its roots. But, you know, they would have columnists like Peter Egan,
[00:06:08] who just he was just an amazing storyteller about things that involved cars. But, you know, almost kind of on the periphery of the story. And it just it captured my imagination. And I guess even before that, you know, the, you know, I wasn't really into cars yet.
[00:06:30] But I remember there was a family friend of ours that had a 1970 Mustang Mach 1. And that, you know, that was my that was the first car I kind of fell in love with. I've always been a fan of Mustangs ever since, which, you know,
[00:06:45] if you're watching the video, you might notice the poster over my shoulder here. It's hanging in my office. That's an impression. Yeah. You know, and it, you know, I got into that. And then when I got into high school, when I was picking my classes,
[00:07:00] I signed up for auto mechanics. You know, I wanted to learn how to work on cars because I basically no idea at that point. And I went in and I took auto mechanics through all four years in high school and then went on to study engineering, mechanical engineering.
[00:07:15] I went to what was then known as GMI, now Kettering University. But it originated in 1919 as the General Motors Institute. It was an engineering school set up in Flint, Michigan by General Motors to train engineers to work at General Motors.
[00:07:32] And, you know, what when I by the early 80s, it had separated from GM. And it was an independent school, but I studied mechanical engineering there and worked at GM as a co-op student. And then when I graduated in 1990, I went to work in the auto industry
[00:07:49] full time and I've been in the auto industry ever since in various capacities, 17 years as an engineer, several about four or five years as a full time automotive journalist spent a couple of years on the dark side doing PR for a couple of automakers.
[00:08:06] And then for the last 10 years, I've been primarily an automotive technology analyst working for that. When I started it was Navigant Research. It's now Guidehouse Insights. And and also doing journalism, automotive journalism on the side,
[00:08:23] continuing to do that with the podcast of wheel bearings and writing for a variety of publications over that time. So, you know, just sort of sort of kind of busy. Just a little bit. Unlike you, my kids are grown and out of the house.
[00:08:41] My wife and I are empty nesters. It's just us and the two dogs. And, you know, I, you know what they say about idle hands, whatever. Yeah, for sure. You know, so, you know, I like to keep my hands busy, you know, typing away the keyboard
[00:08:54] or taking photos or talking about about cars or, you know, the transportation and technology and how it all fits in with everything we do in life. Yes, yes, indeed. Well, and you said, you know, transportation and technology, which is kind
[00:09:11] of like perfect kind of summary of the two worlds that it seems like from my perspective that you live, that you're entrenched in on a professional level, of course. But I have to imagine, you know, there's a there's obviously a passion
[00:09:26] that's driving that when you go back to when you were younger and like, like what came first, your interest in the technology side of all of this? Or actually, you know, that magazine, you know, cars and suddenly that sent you down a road.
[00:09:43] Was technology a part of that story prior to all of that? I would say it's more so curiosity about things and how things work. You know, so I was, you know, I was always into science, you know,
[00:09:56] before it was even technology is just about science, you know, learning how stuff works. You know, and I think the kind of the definition I like is that, you know, science is about figuring out how the universe works, how everything works.
[00:10:12] Technology is about applying those principles we've figured out from science to solving problems. And so, you know, it started with the science and then evolved into, OK, what can we do with this now? And, you know, for me that was around around cars, you know,
[00:10:32] how do engines work? How do all these mechanisms work? And, you know, how does the whole thing come together? How do you build them? You know, I've worked in the manufacturing side. I've worked in product development and, you know, and now as an analyst,
[00:10:46] you know, kind of looking at it at a much higher level of, you know, what are the latest technologies and how can how can they be applied? And what what are the things that are actually likely to succeed in the marketplace?
[00:11:04] You know, and that, you know, what how can we how can we use this stuff to solve some of the problems that we have, whether it's, you know, societal problems like road safety, you know, keeping people safer, safer or,
[00:11:16] you know, giving giving people the ability to get around, you know, providing mobility for people who can't drive or even, you know, not not even just for those who can't drive, but but also, you know, to make mobility easier for everyone.
[00:11:32] So, you know, so we don't actually need as many cars on the road because that's part of the problem is we in a lot of places, we have too many cars on the road. Yeah, indeed. And that number is only increasing.
[00:11:44] Although now we have technology that, you know, promises, I say promises because I don't I don't know you could tell me whether it actually delivers on the promises, but promises to address some of, you know, the challenges that we've faced over the, you know, the decades of
[00:12:03] relying on, you know, the standard kind of model of what we see as a vehicle. Now we've got these electric vehicles that are rechargeable and, you know, we can power them off our solar. That's what we have here. We have solar panels that power our electric vehicle.
[00:12:19] And I mean, we're told that this addresses a lot of these problems in your view, does it like, like, are we heading in a good direction? Are we just creating problems in a different facet, different kind of direction? Yes. Both. All of the above.
[00:12:35] You know, I mean, there's no silver bullet to the challenges that we're trying to solve and, you know, there's a lot of challenges we're trying to solve. You know, one of them is emissions, you know, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, but other emissions as well.
[00:12:50] You know, for the last 130 years, for most of that time, we've burned liquid fuels in engines to make machines move and to get us around. And, you know, while that is, you know, in terms of, you know, how much,
[00:13:07] how much work you can get out of a relative of a surprisingly small machine, you know, it's a remarkably efficient and powered dense device that can do so much. But, you know, from pulling oil out of the ground to what the exhaust
[00:13:24] that comes out of the tailpipe when you burn that oil and also refining it and everything else along the way, you know, that has created problems, you know, I mean, things contributing to things like smog, but also greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
[00:13:41] And going electric is in many ways better. You know, you get rid of the tailpipe emissions. So you don't have any of that. Electric propulsion systems are a lot more efficient. It takes a lot less or a lot less of the energy that goes in
[00:14:02] is wasted along the way. So a lot more of the energy you put into an EV is turned into actual motion of the vehicle, you know, whereas with with an internal combustion engine, the best internal combustion engines convert about 40 percent of the energy
[00:14:21] in a gallon of gasoline into motion. Whereas with an EV, you know, it's like 90 percent. So, you know, there are a lot more efficient electricity is generally a lot cheaper. And so there's a lot of advantages there. Downside is you need batteries.
[00:14:40] Batteries are not very power dense or energy dense compared to gasoline. And, you know, the materials that it takes to manufacture the batteries are in some cases problematic, things like cobalt that's being mined in Central Africa. Or even lithium, you know, lithium is actually remarkably
[00:15:04] abundant material all across the planet. But right now, most of the lithium that we use for batteries is coming from places like South America and Australia. It's being shipped to China for processing and then shipped to battery production plants in North America and Europe and elsewhere in Asia.
[00:15:22] And along the way, you know, as you're digging up the lithium or extracting the lithium and then shipping it, you know, tens of thousands of miles around the world, that's adding emissions. So, oh, come 100 percent. So it's it's not perfect.
[00:15:38] You know, and one of the things that we're doing is, you know, getting more of the production of all of this stuff where we can get it localized so we don't have to ship it all over the place.
[00:15:50] Build, extract, get the materials, build the vehicles, where we're going to use them. And so, you know, you take a lot out of that that whole life cycle. And then at the end of life, recycle it. You know, so lots, lots of interesting opportunities for improvement. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:16:09] I know this is this is hardly related, but you but you you mentioned. What well, OK, what comes to mind for me from what you were talking about? As as I was listening to you talk,
[00:16:22] I was kind of thinking about my trip to Italy of all things and the fact that I went clear over, you know, to a completely different part of the world. And I guess it just never really occurred to me that the vehicles
[00:16:37] that I take for granted being here in the US, a lot of those those have to be actually shipped over to a place like Italy. And that, you know, like you said, a lot of those those emissions and all of the energy that's required to make that happen.
[00:16:52] One thing that struck me while I was in Italy was the amount of vehicles that like I had never even heard of the automotive makers before. And it was just I just hadn't really considered that like, you know,
[00:17:03] even I feel like I saw some sort of electric vehicle there. And I was just like, man, I've never even heard of this auto manufacturer and yet here it is. And I truly wonder like how big of a deal is this over there?
[00:17:17] And yet here in the US, you know, such a close-minded perspective. But I've not heard of that. Are you aware of some I'm sure you are of some of these manufacturers that here in the US were just completely clueless to it.
[00:17:28] But they're they're rocking it, you know, over in markets overseas. And, you know, primarily in Italy, the need for the vehicles is that they be very small like there were some places they didn't have a small vehicle. You couldn't go F one fifties in Rome.
[00:17:43] No, I didn't I don't know that I saw any trucks really. At our time there, there was just like no large, large vehicles. Yeah, no, you know, I mean, one of the things, you know, about Europe, you know, for for many decades,
[00:17:56] fuel has always been much more expensive there. Everywhere you go in Europe, you know, on the order of, you know, seven to nine dollars a gallon. I mean, even going back to the 1980s and 1990s.
[00:18:10] So that's one of the reasons why people have tended to drive much more fuel efficient vehicles there because fuel was much more expensive. Plus, you know, in Europe, you know, most of the big bigger cities in Europe,
[00:18:25] you know, are hundreds of years old and their road systems were not built around vehicles, around cars. They were built, you know, the road systems were built centuries before anybody conceived of an automobile. And so they tend to be that was very apparent.
[00:18:47] There were some places like, OK, obviously this was this was built for something much smaller than anything we consider which is why you see cars like the Fiat Cinquecento and and there were certain areas where we were going so steep downhill and such like like razor
[00:19:05] sharp turns that the only way a vehicle, a tiny vehicle, no less, could get down it was to go nose down and then go nose in and then reverse the next the next cutback. There was just no way to do the turns.
[00:19:20] And that's just that's just normal, you know, because it's a very different environment. Yeah. And there's there's a bunch of brands, there's a bunch of European brands that are you know, still popular, have popularity in Europe that have had no presence here.
[00:19:38] Some of many of them are parts of the same companies that sell vehicles here. So I see that makes sense. You know, like VW has nine different car brands, Volkswagen group, most of which are not sold here. You know, we get Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche here.
[00:19:55] But we don't get, you know, Seat and Coupre and Skoda here. You know, those are sold in Europe. Stellantis, you know, which owns it owns the Chrysler brands, you know, Ram and Jeep and Dodge.
[00:20:10] Now, you know, and they sell some Alfa Romeo's and they sell some Fiat 500s here, but in Italy in particular, you know, Fiat and Alfa Romeo and Lancia are much more popular than they are in other regions.
[00:20:25] You know, brands like Opel and Vauxhall, which are also part of Stellantis now used to be part of General Motors or parts to Lantus now. You know, those have never been sold here. But some of the some of the cars they build have been sold here,
[00:20:38] but under US brands, like for a while, they were selling some Opel models here under the Saturn brand before the Saturn brand went away. So it's you know, it's an interesting mix. And the other thing you do see a lot more of in Europe is Chinese brands,
[00:20:53] which we don't have any of here. You know, the Chinese brands have really started to make inroads in the European market in the last five years, especially the EVs. So brands like BYD and you know, Xiaopeng and NEO, you know, are sold in a variety of European countries
[00:21:15] now. And so I'm not surprised that you saw brands that you've never heard of before. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm not in retrospect. I'm deep in this stuff. So I, you know, for sure. But it would be silly for me to assume that I wouldn't.
[00:21:31] But it just hadn't even crossed my mind until I was there. I was like, man, so I mean, and it wasn't just like a few. It was like, man, so many of these vehicles, like I've never seen in person.
[00:21:41] I've just seen online because they just aren't driving the streets in the US. So when you as as, you know, a professional in the automotive industry for as many years as you have been and a fan of technology, I imagine, you know, part of
[00:21:58] why you do what you do is because you not only love the automotive world, but you also love the technology that drives it. And more and more we're seeing technology in a big way influence the automotive industry now more than ever, I think. When you see vehicles from,
[00:22:16] you know, from China that are doing EVs and stuff are from from kind of like a personal perspective, not necessarily I guess maybe from an analyst perspective. But I'm curious to know like how what are the things that you, Sam,
[00:22:31] see out of what some of those companies are doing that you wish you had here in the US? Is there anything that they're doing that's really pushing the boundaries? They're like, OK, we don't see that here yet. I wish that we would.
[00:22:43] Well, one thing is more affordable EVs. Yeah, well, that's China and China, you know, they have the Chinese market has a very different outlook on Chinese consumers of a very different outlook on what they want from a vehicle. And so you see a combination of that and also,
[00:23:05] you know, there's there's some interaction between a lot of Chinese automakers and various levels of Chinese government. You know, so there's there's some subsidies there. A lot of the companies that, you know, they're operating in China still don't actually make money. They're still losing money.
[00:23:23] You know, they're start their relative startups, but they're still losing money. But they're they're selling a lot of really interesting cars. Like when back in 2007, the first year that I covered the Detroit Auto Show as a journalist, three Chinese brands showed their cars at the Detroit Auto Show.
[00:23:43] And, you know, they were down in the basement of the convention center. And we all went down there and looked at them and had a good laugh. It's like, yeah, this these stuff they're showing.
[00:23:54] You know, in particular, there was one there was this little coop from a company called Geely, which, you know, would had was nowhere near kind of the quality and design and features and functionality that American consumers have come to expect. Three years later, 2010, Geely bought Volvo from Ford.
[00:24:18] And, you know, Ford, you know, after the financial meltdown, Ford was divesting all of their non-core stuff. They sold off Volvo to Geely. And it was almost like a reverse takeover by Volvo because Geely took
[00:24:32] the designers and the engineers from Volvo and those guys, those guys from Sweden, they taught the rest of Geely. This is how you design and build vehicles of all kinds. And the transformation in Geely over the last 14 years since they bought Volvo is just remarkable.
[00:24:53] You know, Geely has a bunch of different brands now. You know, some that they've bought, some they've invested in, some that they've created from from scratch like Zeker and Lincoln Co. And you look at the vehicles that come out of the Geely group today in 2024 versus
[00:25:13] what they were building in 20 in 2007 as like night and day. You'd never guess this was the same company. It's just it's remarkable what they've done. These are some of the most most attractive, most advanced, best driving, highest quality vehicles you will find anywhere.
[00:25:32] And some of them are also very affordable. BYD is another one. You know, they started off building batteries and buses. And, you know, they built cars now and they built some really amazing cars. And they have they have one that's a little compact EV that's got about
[00:25:51] 200 ish mile range that called the Seagull that sells in China starting at $11,500. And, you know, I mean, you get the cheapest new cars you can buy in the US now or about twice that or about 20. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:09] And this is why the auto industry is kind of panicked right now. You know, now granted, you know, the Seagull and its current form would not pass all US safety regulations, you know, crash test regulations and things like that. But it's still a very nice little car.
[00:26:25] And for a lot of people, you know, it would be a great solution, you know, as an urban commuter car if you live in a city, you know, it's not it's not as small as some of what you saw in in Italy probably.
[00:26:39] But, you know, it's a fairly compact car. But in a place like San Francisco, you know, where there's a lot of tight streets and it's hard to park, it would be perfect in a place like that.
[00:26:50] And, you know, if you could get a car like that, you know, for 15 or $20,000 without tax credits, I think a lot of people would buy them. Yeah, it really seems like the technology as technology has increased
[00:27:06] in the vehicles that we're seeing and, you know, and people have warmed up to the idea of the electric vehicles taking a while to get here. But it seems like that technology in infusion has carried with it the
[00:27:20] like almost the luxury, the idea that is, oh, well, that's a luxury vehicle. That's a step up that you're going to have to pay more if you want that. And I mean, I think I think there are outliers to that. That's that's been my impression of it anyways.
[00:27:33] And that seems to go counter to that. I mean, that's incredible. You look at stuff like the B Y D seal, you know, and this, you know, you sit in it, it feels like a very premium car.
[00:27:45] And this is a car that starts, you know, roughly about twenty two, twenty three thousand dollars in China. And it's a midsize sedan. You know, it's about it's a it's a competitor for the Tesla Model 3. And similar in size to the Model 3 is very attractive.
[00:28:01] The interior is much nicer than anything that Tesla builds in terms of the materials that fit and finish. You know, it feels like a much more expensive car than a Model 3. And yet it's significantly cheaper.
[00:28:14] And, you know, that's that's the kind of thing that the rest of the world needs to learn from. It's like, how are they doing this? It's funny. A few weeks ago, I was a there's a company here in not far from me here in Livonia, Michigan, held Kersoft.
[00:28:29] And they do engineering services and benchmarking and teardowns. So they buy they bring in vehicles and they tear them down right down to every individual part, and they analyze those. And, you know, one of the interesting things that they do,
[00:28:45] they have a basically a high energy CT scanner that is large enough to put an entire vehicle into. And they they put they put a vehicle in there and they take I think was it about roughly 15 million images
[00:29:03] and they generate a full 3D model and all the the part drawings of every individual part and, you know, as part of the scan, you know, it can figure out, you know, based on the density of the different parts. What is the material that's used?
[00:29:20] And so before they even touch it, they can create a complete digital twin of that vehicle. And, you know, they sell that to their their clients, you know, automakers and suppliers sell that sell that data.
[00:29:33] And, you know, then then then they take it and start tearing it apart and looking at all of these individual pieces and figuring out how much does this part cost, how much does this part cost? And, you know, looking at the design and engineering of how everything went
[00:29:48] together to figure out what it costs to build and try to understand how are they able to manufacture these vehicles so relatively inexpensively? And that's I think that's a really interesting area of this business is, you know, just the benchmarking and trying to analyze what
[00:30:07] what are what are the competitors? How are the competitors doing what they're doing? Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Wow. That's I mean that many photos. I almost think that AI could probably help a little bit with the analysis aspect of that too.
[00:30:21] Yeah. And they do use some some AI, you know, in terms of compositing it all together, you know, so they scan it from all different directions, you know, 360 degree view all around the vehicle, you know, and right into the
[00:30:35] depths of the vehicle so they have a full digital twin of every single part in that car. And they do use AI, you know, as part of that analysis process to try and make sense of it. Yeah. Everybody does these days. If you're not, you're behind apparently.
[00:30:53] We got to take a quick break when we come back. I want to kind of talk to you a little bit about maybe less about the industry and a little more about kind of like what what motivates you on a human level
[00:31:04] in the world of tech and automotive that's coming up in a second. All right, Sam. So would you consider yourself an early adopter? Like I think a lot of us in the tech tech world, you know,
[00:31:17] we're passionate about tech so it's it's pretty easy for us to fall into the early adopter camp. But sometimes, yeah, definitely, definitely sometimes, you know, I don't I don't feel a compulsion to go out and buy every new thing. Yeah.
[00:31:34] You know, but, you know, like I was, you know, I was a relatively early adopter of smartphones, I had a couple of palm trios and then I bought the the OG Droid, you know, the OG Droid. I think I still I still have one sitting here somewhere.
[00:31:49] I'm going to get my in the drawer beside me here. On the thing back there somewhere hidden. So, you know, I was back there. You know, I wasn't I didn't get a G1, but I got the next Android phone, the second Android phone.
[00:32:02] So what motivated you to go Android and not iOS? Because at the same time, you know, because I guess it wasn't iOS at the time. It was just iPhone. But yeah, probably for the same reason that for most of my computing life,
[00:32:14] I've also been a Windows user because I like to tinker. You know, and I like to be able to tweak things. You know, I do it with my cars. I do it with my computers. You know, I do it with my devices.
[00:32:26] And I want I try to figure out, OK, how can this be useful for me? How can how can this enhance whatever it is I'm doing? Or just, you know, sometimes just tinker just to learn, you know,
[00:32:40] just like, you know, you hear the stories of people and their kid, you know, taking apart a watch to try and figure out how it works. You know, I like to play with stuff and try to understand, you know,
[00:32:51] what else can I do with this besides with the manufacturer intended? You know, how can it be useful to me? I've got several Raspberry Pi's around me right now. I've got one that runs my Plex server, another one running Pi whole and
[00:33:04] another one that runs an open VPN server so that my daughter can log into our network to watch Netflix, you know, even though she does not live in this household anymore. Dang, yeah, that's great. So, you know, I like to do stuff and, you know,
[00:33:23] either build stuff or fix things or, you know, like, you know, around the house, you know, I've all I've always for all for most of the basic repairs, you know, like a lot of electrical stuff, plumbing, you know, painting, carpentry, you know,
[00:33:44] over, you know, for the last 30 plus years or 30 30ish years of home ownership. You know, I've done most of that stuff myself, you know, occasionally for bigger jobs, you know, I'll hire a professional to do it.
[00:33:58] Like when I got an EV charger installed, you know, I had an electrician come and do that, but for you really wanted to do it. Yeah, but wanted to be able to. No, I could have. I could have done it, but I decided that, you know,
[00:34:13] I really didn't want to risk my house burning down. You know, fair enough, fair enough. But, you know, I've always been, you know, somebody that likes to do stuff like I built our deck out in the back of the house by myself from scratch. So that's amazing.
[00:34:29] It's, you know, going Android versus iPhone, you know, I knew the iPhone was way more locked down. I knew Android was something, you know, and for a time, I was also experimenting with installing, you know, nightlies of various, you know, open source Android distributions.
[00:34:53] You know, so I've done as if you didn't have a million other things to do that. That was not like an insignificant amount of time to do that sort of thing. Oh, I know. Truly out of passion. Yeah. I mean, I didn't. I didn't do it every night.
[00:35:06] You know, I would do it, you know, maybe weekly or every other week or something like that. Yeah. So not still that hardcore, but, you know, enough that, you know, I wanted to experiment with things and see what it was like to, you know,
[00:35:21] trying some different features out that you couldn't get in standard Android. Yeah. Or OK. Other things. So then obviously, and, you know, when I was at Twitter and we were doing all that Android, we'd had you on as a guest.
[00:35:35] So obviously you have, you know, a total, you know, alliance with it with Android and you are the car guy. I'm putting that in air quotes here. So when you take a look at like using your Android device in your car,
[00:35:52] I mean, man, things have really gotten a lot better in recent years. But I feel like there for a long time, Apple really had had the better car experience. You think things have kind of leveled out as far as your perspective on what you
[00:36:09] choose to do or what they have, what they support in the car? Yeah, I think, you know, there's not a lot of difference between car play and Android Auto these days. Yeah, yeah, they're pretty matured. But even, you know, even from a functional standpoint,
[00:36:24] even early on, there wasn't a lot of functional difference. The interface that Apple had was generally a little nicer, little cleaner to use. But the functionality, you know, and this, you know, this was kind of, you know, the iPhone versus Android thing right from right from
[00:36:39] the beginning, you know, Android was always less pretty, but had had interesting functionality that you couldn't necessarily get on an iPhone for a long time. And over over time, you know, the two have converged each has taken features
[00:36:53] from the other and now there's not a lot of difference between the two. But yeah, I mean, we've used we've used Android Auto. You know, my wife's current car, a 2017 Honda Civic, you know, we bought that new in 17 and it had Android Auto.
[00:37:09] It was one of the relatively early vehicles that came with Android Auto. And she has used that in that car from day one from the time we drove it off the lot, you know, was drove, set it up before we even drove off the lot.
[00:37:23] And, you know, she was driving home in that and I was driving home in my car. And, you know, she was using Android Auto from from the beginning. And, you know, it's over the last couple of years, it started to get a little flaky
[00:37:36] as far as, you know, dropping out on a more and more frequent basis. And actually, I just just a couple of months ago, I got her a wireless Android Auto adapter. Oh, there you go. Which one did you pick up? Did you do there was the wireless?
[00:37:53] Not that one. It's a newer one. I've had one. I heard about it on one of the podcasts that it's not the one that Ron's got. Yeah, he has that. I think he has the wireless. Yeah, I think there's another one by Motorola if I'm not mistaken.
[00:38:07] It can be Motorola's got what it was actually a whole bunch of the one on Amazon now. So I picked up one of those and you probably have to be careful on Amazon now. There's somebody, you know, what's
[00:38:18] what's like Chinese manufacturers and the others that populate a lot of the Amazon kind of stock once they catch wind of a new category. It's all yeah, suddenly and this one year 30 of them. The funny thing is, you know, I it arrived.
[00:38:34] I went out in the garage and plugged it in and my wife was doing something with her phone and so I set it up with my phone and it worked great right off the bat. No problem at all.
[00:38:47] Soon as I tried to take mine off and hook hers up, everything went haywire. I just I could not get it to connect to recognize her phone. And ultimately, I ended up having to do a factory reset on her
[00:39:03] infotainment system and and then set everything up from scratch again with her phone. And and then it worked fine and it's worked fine ever since. And and I also put in a wireless charging pad and one of the cubby
[00:39:18] in the center console so that she can still have it charged without without having it plugged in. So, you know, it was a little flaky, you know, and it's something again, this is one of the it's one of those weird things
[00:39:30] that most people they would probably try what I did and they would give up and send it back to Amazon and ask for a refund. You know, I being as stubborn as I can be sometimes. I persist as I am going to figure this out.
[00:39:46] Yes, I know that there's a way to make this work. And you know, I wasted a couple of hours, you know, but I enjoyed it. You know, so we also. Yeah, no, I totally am right there with you on the same.
[00:40:02] I think also and tell me if this is you sometimes is that I also just kind of like let it slide like I probably let it slide more than anyone else. It's almost like I'm especially in the world of like Android and mobile and
[00:40:18] technology at this point, I've experienced so much technology in my life and I feel comfortable enough in it that I if it's imperfect, some people would lose their patience and like you say, ship it back or never use it again or whatever.
[00:40:34] I tend to kind of let things slide probably more than most people and just like, yeah, you know what? Technology is imperfect. Yeah, it's great for so many things and it's not always going to work and whatever.
[00:40:47] And I just yeah, just keep plugging away at it and try and make it a little better and a little better until until it passes the spousal approval test. Yeah, there you go. That's a big test.
[00:40:57] Yeah, well, especially I mean, it's one thing if it's in my car, you know? It's another thing entirely. I mean, my wife likes tech. She uses tech. She's not she's not a geek, but you know, she you know,
[00:41:08] she uses technology and has a pretty reasonably good understanding of it for somebody who's not a technical person. And, you know, and like she uses a Chromebook and she's also got an iPad and she's used Android. You know, we got we got our back in 2009.
[00:41:27] I bought two OG droids, one for her, one for me. And, you know, we've been using Android ever since and both of my kids still use the iPhone as well. So, you know, but, you know, when it comes to something like, you know,
[00:41:42] just wanting to listen to her podcasts in the car, you know, she's not. She's not going to tolerate it being flaky. Yes. And so, you know, whatever solution I came up with had to be fairly stable. And it took me a little while, but I got there.
[00:41:57] Right, right. Yeah, no, I completely completely hear you. And I would say my experience with my wife and technology is very similar with the kids, though, like my kids now, my oldest is now 14.
[00:42:11] And as much as this has been an Android household since they could be as far back as they could remember, it was not enough to overcome the green. The pressure, the like, I think the the social pressure of the fact that,
[00:42:28] you know, all of her friends have an iPhone and she does not. That's a real hard mountain to get over. You know, I hear that, you know, and it's it's it's, you know, it's tough being a kid, you know, in this kind of environment.
[00:42:43] And, you know, and my kids are my kids are adults, you know, and, you know, I I see, you know, even, you know, like they're 32 and 29. And, you know, I see that not so much, you know, the kind of peer pressure
[00:42:58] you know that your daughters are feeling right now. But certainly, you know, they're very aware of the world that we live in. And, you know, I I feel really bad for them having to to grow up and go through,
[00:43:14] you know, live their life in, you know, seeing what's going on, you know, both in terms of climate change and the politics of everything that's happening. You know, it's it's it hurts, you know, as a parent to see them having to deal with that.
[00:43:31] I mean, I'm I'm old enough to, you know, I'm on the downhill side of life. But, you know, they should be they should be in their prime right now. And, you know, the I see the pain that they feel from from the world we live
[00:43:48] in, you know, in what I do, you know, it's in some ways it seems it's almost kind of trivial, but, you know, I'm I'm at least trying to do my part for my little corner of the world, you know, to try and make things better, you know,
[00:44:08] both in terms of reducing energy use for transportation, making it safer, you know, making it more convenient for people, making it more accessible and affordable. And that's that's kind of what drives me in what I do as an analyst.
[00:44:22] And, you know, the things that I work on, the companies that I work with to try to help them to make the world at least one little part of the world a little
[00:44:33] bit better. And I think if we all did that, you know, and try to have some impact in the areas that we can, you know, we most, you know, the vast majority of us cannot impact the larger world.
[00:44:47] But if everybody does their little bit, that all adds up, you know, it's it's cascades and hopefully makes the world a better place overall in the end. Yeah, for our kids who are going to have to carry the carry the flag, carry the torch, we're long gone.
[00:45:02] Absolutely, I totally agree. Before we wrap things up, one question that I have for you is, so you have your technology identity, you have your automotive identity. If neither of those things existed, if you're if you didn't have a passion
[00:45:22] in tech or cars, if those two things didn't exist and maybe it maybe it's the maybe it's what you were talking about at the very beginning. Maybe it's being a pilot or being involved in aviation to some degree.
[00:45:34] But what would be your passion if neither of those things existed? Do you think what would you be doing now? What would be photography? Oh, right on. I do this is something I didn't know about you. Yeah, like, do you spend a good amount of your time
[00:45:48] photography on the side? Is that kind of your project? I have, again, since I was a kid, you know, when I was in in grade school, I learned when I was probably about 11 or 12. About the time I was getting into cars, I also learned, you know,
[00:46:04] how to do darkroom work, how to, you know, how to process film and the old school way. Yeah, the old school way with all the chemicals. You know, yeah, it's cool. I know I have that experience too. Yeah, it's fun being in an actual dark room.
[00:46:18] Yeah, I'm sad for anyone who's who's really into photography and doesn't have had the chance to do that experience. Yeah, to really get hands on with it. And, you know, I did that, you know, through, you know, at least all
[00:46:32] through high school, you spent, you know, spent a lot of time in the dark room and out and about taking photos. And for probably through college, I get kind of fell away from photography.
[00:46:47] And then, you know, once I was out and working a couple of years after that, I started to get back into it a bit. You know, I still had my camera. You know, in fact, I still have the the 35 millimeter SLR that I got when I was
[00:47:02] 14 years old and it's an interesting thing. I don't know if you follow photography at all, but you're familiar with Fujifilm, right? Yes. So the camera that is in the next room over here is from Fuji. But back in the days when Fuji cameras actually used film,
[00:47:22] they were called Fujika. They were not Fujifilm. They were Fujika. It's a Japanese company. And now they're called Fujifilm, but they haven't used film in like 25 years. So they went ahead and put the word in there. That was good enough. Yeah.
[00:47:39] Well, you know, the first couple of digital cameras I got, Fuji film cameras. And, you know, so I've used a bunch of Fuji cameras over the years. I don't currently use any, but, you know, I still have those those earliest digital cameras I got.
[00:47:53] I think the first one I bought was in like 99. And that's digital photography in 99. That was a rough era. It was it was cool because you didn't have it before. One-pattery megapixels was amazing in 1999. Totally. So back then, it was probably 99.
[00:48:10] I worked for a company in San Francisco, kind of a local rental company called Metro Rent and it was dealing with all of the, you know, it was essentially it was it was a online kind of directory for people to or a rental listing service, essentially.
[00:48:27] And part of my job was to walk around San Francisco with then the high tech Sony Mavica, I think is what it was. Yeah. The one with the that had the thing that took the whole side that took the floppy disk in the side,
[00:48:42] three and a quarter inch floppy disk. And oh man, like I still have some pictures of that in my Google Photos library. And I just remember at the time that being so magical that you could take these pictures and boom, you've got them on there.
[00:48:56] And, you know, but it was never quite as good as the real thing. Now, I mean, now it's just an entire universe of difference from the quality that we had then versus what we get now on a phone or a tiny little Mabinar one probably has better pictures.
[00:49:14] A pro here. You know, the crazy how far we've come. The photos I get off my Pixel 8 Pro are just remarkable. But I also still use a bigger camera with, you know, and like, you know, sometimes weekend mornings, I will go out and walk around the woods shooting
[00:49:34] birds and other critters. That's great. Yes. And so yeah. And, you know, part of it was part of my job. I get press cars to drive every week. So I'm driving different cars every week and photograph all the cars I drive. I was going to say that's great.
[00:49:50] Those are great subject matter for really high quality photos. Yeah, people would really appreciate that. You know, people who really love love the love cars and stuff like that would geek out on that sort of stuff.
[00:50:05] Yeah. And, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was in Portland for the Formula E race there. And, you know, I got got my press credentials and took my good camera. And, you know, I shot a lot of photos there. You know, got some great shots.
[00:50:19] So yeah, photography would be the other besides writing, you know, photography is the other thing that I'm really into. Amazing. Oh, that's so cool. I'm happy I asked that question. Sam, I don't want to keep you much longer because I've already kept you
[00:50:35] longer than I told you I was going to. But I really appreciate you. I've always really appreciated working with you in the podcast world. And I've just I've learned so much about the automotive world, which,
[00:50:49] you know, like I said, I haven't been too familiar with so many pieces of it. Yet I continue to learn through the work that you do with Guidehouse and, you know, the podcasts that you're doing and everything. So thank you for doing what you do.
[00:51:01] Well, thank you, Jason. And, you know, I also have learned a lot, you know, from listening to podcasts over the last, was it 18, 19 years now? No, actually almost 20 years. It's just 20 years. Yeah. I started listening to podcasts in the fall of 2004.
[00:51:18] You know, started with the Daily Source Code and Don and Drew and Dave Winers podcast in those days and then got in on Leo and and, you know, been listening to all kinds of stuff. And there have actually been a lot of things that I've learned
[00:51:34] over the years that from various kinds of podcasts that that I've actually put to use and, you know, if you have time, quick, quick little story. You know, in 2009, company I was working with,
[00:51:48] we were doing, you know, and this was in the wake of the the financial meltdown and automakers were scaling back on doing their media drive programs. And so they wanted to and, you know, for a lot of their events, they wanted to start webcasting.
[00:52:03] This was very early, you know, in, you know, in doing, you know, live streams of events. And, you know, so we were working with a few companies and, you know, one of the one we did, we did a project with Hyundai
[00:52:18] when they were launching the Sonata, the Sonata in 2009. And their CEO at the time, John Kraftcheck, they wanted to do this was the event was in La Jolla. And it was at, he was at Torrey Pines.
[00:52:35] So they had, they were going to do the presentation for a bunch of media on the car before they went out to drive the car. But they wanted to start off with having John drive and stream from the car
[00:52:49] and drive the Sonata from about five, ten minutes away and talk about the car while he was driving it to the event. So from stuff that I had heard on the tech guy and other podcasts, I knew about sling boxes and then receivers and and little pencil cams.
[00:53:10] And this is before, you know, GoPros were a popular thing. And I, I, you know, they had asked, you know, can you do this? And so I started doing some research, figure out how can we do this? And so this is one of my my little tinkering projects.
[00:53:25] So it came up, I came up with a solution where we got two. And at the time, you know, 4G was still not around. So they had the 3G modem sticks, you know, the Verizon had a couple of little travel routers and with USB ports on them.
[00:53:44] And we got the couple of these pencil cams and we had one of them pointed at John driving the other one pointing through the front windshield. And we had a tricaster and so I had the setup in the
[00:54:02] in the car with the two 3G modems, the travel routers, the cameras and two sling boxes in the car that were taking the signal from the cameras, going into the sling box into and then into the router to stream it back
[00:54:19] to the hotel where I was sitting behind the tricaster and I had two sling receivers sitting on top of the tricaster, going into the end of the tricaster to stream this out to the world and also to the people in the room.
[00:54:33] And I still have I have the video of it somewhere. I'll find it and if I can find it, I'll send it to you so you can see it. But that was an example of something I learned. I learned about most of these technologies from listening to podcasts,
[00:54:46] listening to tech podcasts and then figured out, OK, how can I put these pieces together, put this puzzle together to solve this problem? And that's what I talked about at the beginning of this. You know, it's like science, you know, how do things work?
[00:54:59] And then technology is about how do you take the scientific principles and apply them to solving real world problems? Yep. Yeah. Yes, indeed. As yours as you're saying all of that, I'm just I'm picturing 2009, 2010, right about the time that I ended up getting the job at Twitter.
[00:55:19] And I just I remember that that period because live streaming for like mobile live streaming was a thing that we all wanted to do and was Cape was possible, but it was a multi kind of piece of equipment sort of thing.
[00:55:36] And it's just crazy how far we've come because now you can do exactly that with like a phone and a web browser that switches the video. It's just it's a phone on a mountain, you know, turn it on and go YouTube live. You know, go.
[00:55:52] You go and yeah, but you had to go through the pain of the multiple sling boxes and tricasters and all that stuff to get to where we are now. That's beauty technology. That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for being here with me, Sam.
[00:56:06] Where do you want people to go to follow your work? Kind of wheel bearings. People should definitely check out the podcast. So, you know, if you're interested in any kind of market research on emerging technologies, particularly related to energy at guidehouseinsights.com, that's the company I work for.
[00:56:24] And we cover besides transportation and mobility, we cover a bunch of other areas like smart cities and built infrastructure and utilities. And then for the other stuff, go to wheel bearings.media and listen to Roberto Baldwin and Nicole Wakelin and I ramble on about cars every week.
[00:56:44] That is that is a dream team, in my opinion. Sam, you're awesome. Thank you for taking time with me today. This is a lot of fun. I appreciate it. And thanks for having me, Jason. So great to catch up with you.
[00:56:53] Huge thank you to Sam for joining me for this episode of TextBotor Podcast. I love getting the opportunity to get to know my friends just a little bit more and I didn't know that about his interest in photography. That's really cool.
[00:57:06] You, dear listener or viewer, can support this show directly on Patreon. I certainly would appreciate it. It enables the show to continue and all the work that I'm doing right now. Patreon.com slash Jason Howell. There you get ad free shows, early access to videos, a discord community
[00:57:25] and exclusive patrons only pre-premier live stream every week. So every week when this episode of the TextBotor Podcast premieres on YouTube 30 minutes prior, I open up live stream just for patrons. You can be a part of that and a whole lot more. So definitely check it out.
[00:57:43] You also get the opportunity to become an executive producer and you can go ahead and put that on your resume. I won't mind Jeffrey Maricini, John Cuny, Katie Lake, Bill Rudder. I salute you. You're all awesome. Thank you for your deep, deep support.
[00:57:58] And TextBotor Podcast premieres every Thursday. Right now it's kind of up in the air because I'm switching it from Friday to Thursday. So apologies on the switcheroo. Fridays were becoming a really big challenge because, you know, I got kids
[00:58:11] and there's lots of things around what they have going. So expected to move to Thursdays. I don't have the time locked in yet, but I guarantee I will let you know once I do probably next week, I'll have that time picked.
[00:58:22] And you can find it, you know, on the YouTube channel, TextBotor YouTube channel, so just go to youtube.com slash at TextBloater and you will find new episodes there. Don't forget to like, rate, review, subscribe.
[00:58:37] The four key things that help me continue to do these shows and to grow them. It's really important. And you can find everything you need to know about this show and everything I'm up to at TextBotor.com. Thanks again to Sam. Thanks to you for watching and listening.
[00:58:51] And we'll see you next time. I'm Jason Howell. See you next week on another episode of the TextBotor Podcast. Bye everybody.