Stuffed Animals Gone Wild

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When I was a little kid, I had one stuffed animal that I loved more than all the rest.

I adored it so much, I could never part with it.

Even as I I got older.

I'm a little sheepish about all the places that I loved it.

Summer camp, college, the many apartments I lived in in my 20s, all until it found a new owner.

This is Alley.

It was my mom's favorite stuffy, Willis.

And it's an allele that

used to be white, but she favors it so much it turned gray.

That's my seven-year-old daughter.

The other day, I asked her to go through a bag full of her stuffed animals, which she calls stuffies, and tell me about each of them.

Oh,

this is Cowie, my favorite stuffy.

It's one black and it's a cow.

I begged mommy for him.

At first glance, her stuffed animal collection is full of familiar, adorable classics.

Your cats, your dogs, your bears.

This one, its name is Barry.

It's a dog and it's very like bad.

Sorry, its name is Barry, but it's a dog.

Yeah, it's a dog.

But she also has a number of stuffed animals that are relatively unusual.

Or at least not your classic cuddlies.

Tell me who this was.

Sometimes Michu.

It's a axolado, and it's gray.

How do you explain its name to people?

So I say, I point to myself and say, me, and then I pretend I'm chewing food.

And I say, Michu.

Michu the axolotl is a palm-sized plush toy with a dark gray body, facial features about as realistic as a smiley face, and black fringe on the side of its head.

They have like these three like big bumps together on their head.

I think those are their ears.

And what do you know about axolotls?

They um like live in a body of water and they're like a type of lizard I think.

An axolotl is in fact a type of amphibian and more specifically a type of salamander which credit where it's due does look a lot like a lizard.

I know when I was a kid I had absolutely never heard of one, but I think it's safe to say that is not the case for the young people of today.

Good morning, everybody.

We got baby axolotls on the way.

Allow me to introduce you to the axolotl.

You can actually see the itty-bitty bones.

These are some of the thousands of TikTok starring axolotls swishing around in their tanks.

It's estimated there are a million axolotls being kept as pets, and they pop up all over the place.

Hi, I'm Whitney, and I'm in Girl Scouts Troop 2187.

And our themed for this year for cookies is axolotl.

In 2020 and 21, they were introduced in Fortnite Minecraft and Roblox, video games particularly popular with the tween and teen set.

And axolotl backpacks, keychains, pajamas, paper plates, mugs, lockets, Legos, and t-shirts that say, I ask a lot of questions, are widely available.

I mean, seriously, like, I can understand if you have a dog, but I mean, look at this face.

The trendiness of the axolotl is fascinating to me.

How and why did it ever break out?

But the axolotl is doubly fascinating to me because it's also part of a bigger trend.

It's not the only or the first unusual creature to become inescapable.

Do you think you would like to meet an axolotl?

Yes.

Do you know any other funny animals that you would like to meet?

Narwhals.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Axolotls, Narwhals, llamas, sloths.

Every few years, it seems like American kids and parents collectively decide they cannot get enough of a creature that makes teddy bears seem impossibly quaint.

In today's episode, we're going to swim after the axolotl.

Follow it as it takes us to some far-flung and unexpected places in order to understand how it came to rule the stuffed animal kingdom.

And though the answer absolutely has to do with parents eager to please their children at the gift shop, it's bigger than that.

Because the technologically supercharged and insatiable hunger for novelty bound up with the axolotl,

well, that has to do with all of us.

So today on decodering, what's behind the rise of the axolotl?

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So I started to actively wonder about oddball stuffies.

It creatures, if you will, because of Michu, the axolotl, my daughter's toy.

A toy company had quite physically made Michu happen.

They'd manufactured it.

Had toy companies made axolotls happen?

Were they responsible for this bigger trend?

To find out, I reached out to Elaine Coleus.

She's creative director at Focomonis Puppets.

We're a very small plush company that produces puppets.

Focomonis has been around for nearly 50 years.

They sell their relatively realistic wares at upscale toy shops and specialty retailers, and they make hundreds of different kinds of animals, including, of course, since 2020, an axolotl.

I think it might be our number one volume seller.

In fact, we've introduced a different version because the original one did so well.

When Folkmanus was founded in 1976 by Judy Folkmanis, a scientist turned puppeteer, they sold a turtle, a raccoon, a beaver, and a skunk.

And they had a mantra when it came to picking new animals.

The bottom line was always,

do people know what it is?

Because there's fabulous animals, but if people don't know what they are, they're not going to relate and we're not going to make the sale.

And so we do not neglect our

regular animals.

You know, in the industry, bears, bunnies, and dogs are like a slam dunk.

But Folkman's has always been a little quirky, too, while still adhering to their mantra.

In the 1980s, we made a cockroach puppet.

I mean, really, who wants a cockroach puppet?

However, it did answer that question of, does anybody know what it is?

Well, of course,

everybody knows what a cockroach is.

They might not necessarily want one, but they know what it is.

And following that, we made a giant mosquito that was during the West Nile virus scare in the early 90s.

They were strong sellers at the time.

Like who was buying them?

Well, I have to tell you, Dave Letterman was a fan and I believe both of them made an appearance on his show.

I think we might have had an exterminator that bought a bunch as premium gifts.

Whether making cockroaches or bunnies, Folkmanis has never plucked an animal out of nowhere and tried to make it happen.

They don't want to be late, but they can't just declare what the hot animal will be.

Instead, they assess what potential customers already know about and react to what's happening in the world, trampolining off the news of the day.

And that's not just true of Folkmanus.

That's actually exactly how we got the most iconic stuffed animal of all.

Today's the day the teddy bears have their pick.

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt had an infamous run-in with a black bear.

The details details of what actually happened between Roosevelt and the bear have long since slipped into the a factual haze of legend.

But the incident did inspire a political cartoon that in turn inspired a Brooklyn toy maker who began selling Teddy's bear.

Picnic time for teddy bears.

The little teddy bears are having a lovely time today.

Early teddy bears were hand-sewn and by modern standards pretty stiff.

In the decades that followed, toy bears and other animals got cuter, softer, and mass-produced as technology allowed.

By the 1980s, when children's merchandise in general exploded, the teddy bear had a lot of company.

Those lonely pal puppies really need to be rescued.

Pound puppy, I'm so glad to find you.

But toy businesses needed customers to know the animals they were selling.

And Elaine says that's still true.

What's changed is that the internet has exposed us to a lot more animals and given us a lot more ways to measure that exposure.

So what happened, I think it was back around 2015, we had a new designer, a millennial, and she really wanted to make a slow loris.

At the time, Judy Folkmanis, the founder of the company, was still alive.

And Judy said,

but nobody knows what they are.

What Judy had not seen, but the millennial designer had, were the extremely viral videos of a slow Loris, an endangered South Asian primate, nonchalantly having its armpits scratched.

And this designer went back to her computer and printed out a bunch of Google charts.

hits and you know how many searches were being done and came back and said well look people know what they are now.

That was probably the first puppet we did solely based on internet notoriety.

The Slow Loris was released in 2016.

It was actually a bit of a soft seller itself, but it opened up a whole new world for the company.

Instead of looking in research books, now they could look online.

The next year, she produced the narwhal, and that was

because in 2009,

there was the narwhal song.

Narwhals, narwhals swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion.

This fun, silly song on the internet.

So kids all of a sudden knew what a narwhal was.

It was the unicorn of the sea.

It made it mysterious and interesting.

Whereas 30 years ago, we wouldn't have made a narwhal because people didn't know what it was.

The viral song is just part of the immense amount of activity there's been around the narwhal, another animal I barely heard of as a child that's become a real kid's it creature.

And Folkmanus is the sales to prove it.

Their narwhal puppet became a top seller.

So a few years later, when the same designer proposed the axolotl, she had credibility.

I mean, nobody on our creative team really knew what an axolotl was, but she showed that it had such a strong viral presence that we couldn't really go wrong.

As Elaine said, the axolotl became their highest volume seller.

So how did axolotls get that strong viral presence?

How did they become animals kids and parents and retailers recognize?

When we come back, we turn to the real axolotl and how it slithered into the spotlight.

Hey, I'm Candace Lem and I'm Kate Lindsay and we're the hosts of ICYMI Slate's podcast about internet culture.

On a recent episode, we had to talk about a certain somebody's tweets, and that somebody happens to be my governor, Gavin Newsome.

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There is a very concrete reason the axolotl was, until relatively recently, a little-known animal.

And that's because in the wild, it only exists in one place.

Ela Jolote Mexicano, solamente están sochimilco.

Diana Lauravasquez-Mendoza is a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

She works with and studies axolotls who make their home in just one ecosystem, Lake Xochimilco, which is a semi-rural district in the southern part of Mexico City.

Diana grew up in the greater Mexico City area herself.

She never heard of axolotls until she started working with them as an adult, a growing awareness that mirrors her country's own.

In 2021, the axolotl started appearing on the Mexican 50 peso bill.

But with the help of a translator, Diana explained to me that axolotls have thrived in the region for millennia and that their name comes out of Aztec legend.

Inside the mythology of the time, the axolot was associated with a deity.

Sholot was his name.

The story story is beautiful.

Shalot is condemned and decides to escape, and he goes into the water and turns into an axol.

The Aztecs also practiced a specific method of agriculture on plots called chinampas that are particularly axolotl-friendly.

This technique continued into the modern era, but it goes back a thousand years and it turned Lake Zochimilco into a series of verdant canals where green, brown, blackish-gray axolotls thrived.

So that is why it's very important.

This species of axolot is closely tied with humanity because it shares a space and its habitat.

Axolotls were still thriving in the 1860s when a French naturalist came to Mexico and transported 34 of them to Paris, where they proved very capable of breeding in captivity.

By the 1870s, they they were in every country in Europe.

But still for the longest time, very few people knew about axolotls other than scientists.

And sometimes not even them.

And when I first picked to work on them 18 years ago, even though I thought I knew a lot about salmoners, I really also hadn't known that much about axolotls, right?

Dr.

Jessica Witted is a professor at Harvard, where she runs a research lab that houses over 3,000 axolotls.

And she sees plenty of reasons why they have captured the public's imagination.

Starting with the most obvious thing an axolotl has going for it.

They're absolutely adorable.

So an axolotl looks almost like a cartoon character.

Their most prominent feature probably is their big frilly gills.

And the gills almost look like hair.

There's three giant ones on either side and they have little fronds coming off of them.

Those gills are what my daughter mistook for ears.

And they have a really wide mouth that gives the appearance of them smiling all the time.

Some people actually find the smile and the axolotl more generally a little unsettling.

They're ugly cute.

And I think they're not being so obvious, not furry and cuddly and blatantly adorable, is part of their appeal.

You have to put in a little effort to appreciate them.

And that can make them feel like they're just for you.

Though they do have this one undeniably popular characteristic.

In the wild, axolotls are muddy-colored, but in captivity, they can have much brighter shades.

There's so many different mutant axolotls.

The most famous one is the white mutant.

So they have a pinkish-whitish color.

It's this pink axolotl that shows up everywhere on social media, on merchandise.

The color is exactly the same hue as like a princess's dress.

And this is not the axolotl's only connection to childhood tales.

They have like this Peter Pan aspect to them where they never grow up.

Axolotls skip the last step of typical salamander development.

Instead of becoming adults who live on land, they stay juveniles, which means they keep their adorable big-headed proportions and flashy exterior gills.

This has a word scientifically.

It's called neotiny.

I think there's like this like instinctual appreciation of that idea because, you know, it's fun to be a kid forever.

So axolotls are cute, pink, and childlike.

But no one thought to capitalize on these extremely commercial qualities until the 2000s.

Because that's when the axolotl became much more broadly known.

Thanks in large part to its incredible superpower.

It's, I think, one of the greatest biological mysteries still standing.

After an amputation, every single axolotl will spontaneously regenerate a limb.

Special cells in an axolotl's skin start communicating with its internal tissues, and a bump starts to appear where the leg used to be.

And so it's like a little bud that forms and you can see it with the naked eye and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually you can literally see it starting to morph into fingers, digits.

And it's not just its limbs.

An axolatl can grow back its tail, including parts of its spinal cord.

It can grow back parts of its brain and a large chunk of its heart.

And research into these capabilities has exploded because of what it all means for us, humans.

One of the things that a lot of people want to know is like, what are the cells that do this and where do they come from?

And of course, then they are also wondering, do we have these cells?

Over the past 10 to 15 years, Jessica has noticed lay people becoming more aware of and intrigued by the axolotl's abilities.

So I think axolotls kind of hit the stage in popular culture at the same time that people in general who are not scientists got interested in stem cells and interested in regenerative biology.

Today we're talking about a weird-looking Mexican water monster that can regrow limbs.

Axolotls are also incredible healers and their genetics could hold the secret to healing humans inside and out.

And so, you know, axolotls are sort of a poster child for that kind of thing.

But axolotls have become the poster child for something else too.

So what's interesting about them is that

coming into the center stage is unfortunately coincident with their decline in the wild.

The iconic axolotl, or in Spanish, ajolote, is in danger of going extinct.

As axolotls have become ubiquitous all over the world, in captivity as pets, as viral content, and plush toys, their numbers have been plummeting in their home, in the wild, in Lake Zochimilco, their one native habitat.

They were declared endangered in 2006.

And if the rapid extinction of an animal population sounds like an odd source for a kid's craze, well, my own daughter is a perfect example of how this particular pipeline is functioning.

How do you think you knew what an axolotl was?

So my friend in Spanish class was like, you're talking about pet you couldn't have, pet you could have.

And she's like,

I think you can have an axolotl.

So then she typed it up and showed pictures.

The teacher showed you some pictures.

Yeah.

How'd your friend know what an axolotl was?

Her sister was like doing like, I think this project and the teacher was giving everyone animals.

Oh, so her big sister had a project about axolotls.

She had a project about endangered animals and her animals axolotls.

So many kids are having encounters like this.

So many adults too.

And as people all over the globe have taken notice of this ugly, cute, ancient and newfangled, endangered yet regenerating creature and talked about them and posted about them and bought items featuring them and their glorious gills.

They have created an axolotl feedback loop.

But this feedback loop, it's not just happening with axolotls.

When we come back, we're going to put the axolotl into a larger context because the seemingly insatiable need for novelty driving their popularity

is way bigger than just them.

So earlier in this episode, I spoke with Elaine Coleus, who told us how her small company started making puppets out of previously little-known animals, like the axolotl, one at a time.

So it wasn't until the internet viral sensations, memes, silly songs that we were able to latch on to these really esoteric, obscure animals that all of a sudden everybody knows what they are.

But Elaine's company Folkmanas is small and bespoke.

They don't hire research groups or data scientists or flood the zone.

I wanted to talk to a company that does exactly those things.

We have 39 axolotls we've created.

There's I think 83 or 89 variations on those axolotls, meaning like they have different expressions, different poses, different materials.

We have a lot of fun with axolotls.

Gerhard Runken is the executive vice president of global brand and marketing for Jazzwares, a large toy company that owns, among other brands, squishmallows.

Hello with the squishmallows.

Squishmallows are soft, slightly egg-shaped plush toys that are strangely, satisfyingly squishy, like a softer version of a stress ball.

They are extremely popular with kids and college kids, and they even have collectors.

Over 100 million have been sold.

Each one comes with a name, personality, and some defining traits.

Archie the axolotl, for example, the company's first and best-selling axolotl, is a pink, soccer-loving, sign-language-using amphibian who was recently included in a McDonald's Happy Meal.

But the thing you find out talking to Gerhart is that despite the scale of their investment in the axolotl, all 39 of them, it's just one of the viral creatures.

They are clocking at all times.

Like a more recent example, even than the axolotl that's blowing up, is the capybara, right?

Capybaras are like everywhere.

We have one.

Ligion, the capybara squishmallow, is a feisty Aries and excellent dinner party host who makes female-based documentary shorts.

She's brown, egg-shaped, and despite being a member of the largest rodent species in existence, She's not that unusual as far as squishmallows go.

Like when you look at the popularity of mushrooms, cows, and Bigfoot, it's just shockingly interesting because like a cow's been around forever, but like our cows, I mean, they're gone in a flash.

And same with mushrooms, like Malcolm the Mushroom.

He hits the shelf, gone.

And then the Bigfoot, who knew that, you know, a Bigfoot is going to be that sought after.

Mushrooms, cows, Bigfoot.

This is very far from the teddy bear, but not as far away as this.

We just launched a Gouda cheese squishmallow and it's like on fire.

Like, I mean, people absolutely love it.

The definition of a stuffy has exploded beyond animals to cheese and mushrooms.

And I swear to God, a lobster roll named Lerono.

I think individuality has really become paramount.

It's almost like consumers had no choice and they were looking for alternatives and where to go.

If a parent wants to buy something unique for their kid, there are 3,000 different squishmallows to choose from, which is a lot of alternatives.

And then there are the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other stuffed animals and toys and consumer goods that are available, all at the press of a button.

The paradox of this moment is that the oddest stuffies, the axolotls and the capybaras and the little goudas of the world, are more easily accessible than any stuffed bear or bunny or dog of the past ever was.

So to find something truly novel then, whether it's a stuffed animal or just about any other consumer good, you have to go further, farther, stranger, pricklier, uglier, only to land on something that won't stay novel for very long.

This was really brought home to me as I was combing through a master list of squishmallows assembled on a fan wiki.

There are all these choices, but they're not quite as unique as they first seem.

39 of them are axolotls.

Even more are narwhals.

Even more are llamas.

And then there are the unicorn varieties, which include llama corns, llama unicorns, and pegacorns, flying unicorns, and llama pegacorns, and a catacorn, and a hippocorn, and a koala corn, a foxicorn, a doggy corn, a corgi corn, candy corn, and corn, as in corn on the cob.

Consumers may like what's new.

They may prize individuality.

They may want the unique.

But if everyone wants the unique, is it really so unique?

Or do we all just end up with minor tweaks on the same axolotls and narwhals and llamas and unicorns, which fundamentally are all just stuffies anyway?

And all of this really reminds me of something.

Something besides the experience of purchasing just about anything these days.

This may sound like a stretch at first, but it's another area where where choices have exploded and adults have gravitated to the unexpected, bestowing upon our children individualizing amulets that are sort of maybe all the same.

I'm talking about baby names.

Names are a part of everything, and I get a lot of unusual questions, but this is the first one about axolotls.

Laura Wattenberg is the author of the baby name wizard books.

I reached out to her because when I first noticed how popular unexpected stuffies had become, it it instantly reminded me of names because parents have been giving our children increasingly esoteric ones, at least in comparison to the past.

Once upon a time, back in the beginning, there were no baby name trends.

Laura's talking about like the 1400s.

There were times in England in past centuries when John and Mary alone accounted for a quarter of the population.

Names really meant something different then.

They didn't express anything unique about you, and you didn't have the assumption that you were the only one with a name.

This started to change during the Industrial Revolution when new technologies like the railroad and newspapers were exposing people to just a lot more names.

People were moving to cities and encountering people from all over the country or all over the world and new names came into being, name trends came into being.

That's why today we hear Edna and Bertha and Agnes and pin those to a different generation than Jessica and Ashley.

There was another big flowering of names starting in the late 1960s when all sorts of cultural norms were being turned on their head.

Even if I didn't know anything about what happened in the U.S.

in the 1960s, just from looking at baby names, I would know that everything had changed.

Parents put more of a premium on self-expression and choosing unusual names.

Until that time, there was no such thing as black and white names, for instance.

Laura is referring here to how black and white parents in America had historically selected similar names for their children.

But that changed to a certain extent after the civil rights and black power movements inspired black parents to be creative and free in the names they selected for their kids, beholden in no way to white conventions.

But though the menu of possible names was growing, there were still powerful trends around individual ones.

It's how names like Jason and Jessica and Jennifer and Heather could be so associated with children of the 1980s.

And then the menu got longer.

There was yet one more revolution starting around the mid-90s with the collapse of the big three television networks that were keeping us all thinking of the same thing at the same time and the rise of the internet, where we became used to having usernames that were unique in the system.

So since the 90s, parents have been putting huge pressure on themselves to choose names that are fashion forward and make an impact.

One of the most infamous instances of this happened in 2004.

When we were first pregnant, her daddy said,

if it's a girl, I think her name should be Apple.

This is Gwyneth Paltrow on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

And I just, it sounded so sweet and it conjures such a lovely picture for me.

And then she was born and it became like an international outrage.

For a while, celebrities seem to be trying to one-up each other with outrageous monikers, including Surrey and North and Pilot Inspector.

And many parents have followed their example, if not quite so dramatically.

I think parents feel they're giving their children an advantage by helping them stand out.

It's like they're trying to find prime shelf space on the life marketplace.

But like all the stuffies jockeying for actual shelf space, there is something funny about how selecting a unique name has played out in practice.

For most of the last generation, a third of American boys received a name ending in the letter N.

Whether it was a traditional name like Aaron or Ethan or Sebastian or a completely made-up name, somehow all of America decided on the same sound for boys.

This is not happening consciously.

You like what you like.

And then lo and behold, it turns out what you like is the illusion that you're not like everyone else.

And whether it's stuffed animals or names, it really is an illusion.

Our tastes feel completely individual.

We think, I just happen to be the kind of person who prefers uncommon names, but it turns out that is the one thing we all have in common.

As a generation, we want to be nothing like one another.

That's the trend.

So instead of David or Michael snuggling their teddy bear, it's Hudson and Jaden and Jameson and Mason and Jackson and Colton, all wearing narwhal pajamas, all reading llama books, all clutching axolotl stuffies.

I asked Laura why she thought this was.

Not why we don't want to be the same.

Why we want to be different.

And I think that the more

at sea we feel, instead of grabbing onto one another to feel a sense of community, we're trying to reassure ourselves that we're okay in ourselves.

I know reassurance was not on my mind when I bought my daughter Michu.

It was not a prize moment for me.

I was just trying to end a tantrum.

But now Michu lives in her room and in her play and in her imaginative life, this black axolotl stuffy modeled on an animal who is dying in the real world.

And when I think about that, the idea that we might be trying to reassure ourselves about something doesn't seem so far-fetched.

In effect, así como el colote al

This is Diana Laura Vasquez-Mendoza again.

She's part of a team overseen by Dr.

Luis Zambrano trying to conserve the wild axolotl, which desperately needs it.

Since the 1990s, the number of axolotls in Zochimilco has fallen from 6,000 per square mile to just 36 back in 2014.

They expect that number has only gone down since.

This decline is because Lake Zochimilco, the wild axolatl's home, has been buffeted by pollution, urbanization, tourism, and invasive species.

Diana works closely with farmers to help clean it, one agricultural plot at a time.

For the axolotl to live, we have to care about the habitat also.

So far, they've reclaimed altogether about five kilometers of Lake Zochimilco for the axolotls.

Diana, of course, has seen the booming popularity of these creatures, and though she appreciates the attention, that isn't all she sees.

It is evident that there is a culture of love for the axola worldwide.

Everyone loves it,

everyone recognizes it.

But when you go to Xochimilco, you don't see that love, you don't see that hair

that hasn't equated to actually conservating the axolotl.

Think about all the people all over the world enamored with axolotls.

Think about how much axolotl stuff they may have bought, products that cannot be helping the environment, even if they're keeping axolotls front of mind.

Think about how all the axolotl stuffies are rubbing shoulders with the polar bear stuffies and the panda bear stuffies.

And they might all soon be like the dinosaur stuffies, totems to extinct creatures that live on in our imaginations, which is better than living on nowhere, but not actually better than being alive.

Think about what a stuffy is supposed to do, how the ones kids love the most make them feel safe.

And then think about kids all over the world falling asleep, safeguarded by creatures we can't save.

Who wouldn't want something different?

For the axolotls and for us.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by me.

It was produced by Katie Shepard.

It was edited by Evan Chung.

We produced Decodering with Max Friedman.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

Thank you to our translator, Ezequiel Andino, as well as Luis Zambrano, Kelly Garnier, and Alejandra Escobar.

And if you'd like to help the wild Axolotl, well, the link on our show page, the conservation project Diana works for, and that's accepting donations.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

If you're a fan of the show, I would also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering and all the the other Slate podcasts without any ads.

You also get unlimited access to Slate's website.

Member support is crucial to our work, so please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

See you in two weeks.

Listen.

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The sound of captivating electric performance.

Dynamic drive.

And the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

This is electric performance, redefined.

The fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

Yo, this is important, man.

My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pacebreakers, the ones with all the pockets.

Well, I just got back from vacation, and I think I left them in my hotel room.

And dude, I need to replace these shorts.

I wear them like every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.

Could you send me the link to where you got them?

Thanks, bro.

Talk soon.

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