00:00:04 ◼ ► I don't know if my completely irregular sort of two or three times a month podcast schedule is perfect for the Trump era or the worst for the Trump era.
00:00:59 ◼ ► But, you know, and our fastest turnaround time is, I don't know, it's like 24 hours is pretty much.
00:01:47 ◼ ► But it really, but it really would have, I don't know if it would have rendered the episode
00:01:59 ◼ ► Like at one point when we were doing, when Marci and I were doing Shift Happens, his big book
00:02:13 ◼ ► And then this time around, like I did the book last year and I printed it in Canada, how comics
00:02:37 ◼ ► And it's just part of my life where I wish I didn't have to know all this international
00:02:46 ◼ ► But I think that my irregular couple times a month schedule has actually worked out well
00:03:07 ◼ ► I think for seven months of the year while I'm on Daylight Savings Times, we're exactly,
00:03:27 ◼ ► But we've been doing the show for five years and we have the same schedule where we record,
00:03:32 ◼ ► at least from my perspective and from an American perspective, in the evening Eastern time.
00:03:48 ◼ ► We're so worried every episode when we talk about this stuff that it's rendered moot by a late night true social.
00:03:57 ◼ ► And then, yeah, it's, you know, Apple airlifting iPhones out of India, whatever it was, a billion dollars or multi-billion dollars, which is smart.
00:04:12 ◼ ► So there's an issue when the normal order of things, when tariffs are implemented, there's a schedule and time and so forth.
00:04:39 ◼ ► It left port and it's not yet admitted to U.S. customs, but the paperwork was filed before it left port because they have to know before it goes that it's going to rot where it's going to rot.
00:04:57 ◼ ► So there may be, I think the way it worked out, there might be stuff at sea now that is under 45% tariff, 100% tariff, 125% tariff.
00:05:46 ◼ ► So there was a small book publisher that started to go fund me because they said, we have books in China.
00:05:52 ◼ ► And our book printer just said they need to get 45% surcharge from us to cover tariffs.
00:06:10 ◼ ► Because it turns out that books are exempt under the IEPA Act of 1977 that delegated tariff authority from Congress to the president.
00:06:19 ◼ ► For national emergencies specifically includes books and CDs and all kinds of stuff like that.
00:06:24 ◼ ► So ostensibly, all books and other things coming in from China are subject to a 7.5% tariff set in 2018 by law, but not set under these rules.
00:06:37 ◼ ► So this publisher was like, I've got books on a boat from China right now because How Comics Were Made book got acquired by a publisher.
00:07:23 ◼ ► And they said, we think the title, the salespeople think the title should be How Comics Are Made
00:07:28 ◼ ► because they think it's more active, even though it's about history, but it's also about the present.
00:07:37 ◼ ► And they're like, the publisher said, we think a green cover would look better than your sort of pale buff cover.
00:07:55 ◼ ► So on the cover, on the cover, we've got a couple, it's a, it's a sequence of color separations of a panel.
00:08:02 ◼ ► So I don't have the Hobbes, but I have Calvin and, you know, they had asked Bill Watterson, Bill Watterson said, sure.
00:08:06 ◼ ► So whatever the publisher wants, like they didn't ask me to change anything substantive.
00:08:09 ◼ ► Of all the notes that a creative person, filmmaker, book writer, bookmaker, I mean, I don't want to say author,
00:08:26 ◼ ► But of all the ways that you can get notes from corporate, I would say changing were to are is pretty good, right?
00:09:02 ◼ ► We had to get in touch with Michael Chabon who wrote the forward and say, hey, you referenced the title in your forward.
00:09:13 ◼ ► And, and I, I'm again, this sounds like I'm, you got Chabon to write a forward to your book.
00:09:28 ◼ ► But it was like one of the very first emails from a reader where, when I saw the name in my email client, I was like electrified.
00:09:46 ◼ ► And my third thought is always when I encounter somebody who shares the name with a famous person is don't make a, don't make a thing about it.
00:09:59 ◼ ► And I was like, oh, and I don't know, went right back to square one where I was like, holy shit.
00:10:06 ◼ ► It's, it's, but it is a funny email to write because you do, you don't want to touch a word.
00:10:47 ◼ ► It's often like very micro, but when you're somebody like, well, I really, it's not just
00:10:51 ◼ ► like I've seen this person in a movie and I admire their acting or I saw that screenplay.
00:11:04 ◼ ► The short story is, so the publisher printed in China because they could deliver a $40 cover
00:11:12 ◼ ► Some of the parameters I chose were a little more expensive and I printed it in Canada so
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00:12:51 ◼ ► And so it's already got the context of the note you're working on, all of the notes in your Notion system right there.
00:12:59 ◼ ► And it just sort of becomes more invisible than switching context between, oh, now I'm in Notion, now I'm using AI.
00:13:14 ◼ ► Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion send less emails.
00:13:35 ◼ ► Either way, it works grammatically if it depends on whether you're using it as a, what, a collective noun, Glenn?
00:13:48 ◼ ► Well, it said less, my notes said less email and I verbally botched it and said emails, turned it into the collective noun, in which case less became wrong.
00:14:00 ◼ ► But either way, you will send, you'll spend less time in your email client, which I think we all want to do.
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00:14:58 ◼ ► And when you use that link, they'll know you came from here and that you're supporting the show.
00:15:07 ◼ ► One of my favorite posts in recent weeks was when I did the napkin math on how many iPhones can fit on an airplane.
00:15:17 ◼ ► You messed me up because I'm preparing a quiz show for The Incomparable and I was going to use that.
00:15:29 ◼ ► And I don't know, like if somebody had come to me as the interviewee getting the interview trick question, would I have thought to use weight or not?
00:15:41 ◼ ► I'd like to think I would, but I parlayed off a tweet by Ryan Jones, who's this, I forget his title, but he's more or less in charge of Flighty, the great flight app.
00:16:02 ◼ ► Because, well, because you know that the weight limit of a Boeing 747, F747 or B747, I forget the name, but it's presuming that Apple was able to book the biggest freight plane, which is whatever Boeing's biggest 747 freight plane is.
00:16:21 ◼ ► So, in theory, the most number of iPhones they could possibly pack on is multiply the weight of an iPhone in a package by the, you know, and fit it into the weight limit.
00:16:33 ◼ ► And if the answer is wrong, if the volume takes up too much space, then you know it's fewer.
00:16:38 ◼ ► But in terms of this mental exercise, erring on the side of the higher number is more fair or more interesting to the argument of, well, just how many iPhones is that?
00:16:51 ◼ ► Because it was the India Times that reported that Apple hurried up and got five fully loaded planes of iPhones out of India ahead of the tariffs.
00:17:00 ◼ ► Funny, I would have tried to figure out the density per square or cubic centimeter of an iPhone in a box and then contrasted that to the plane only because I had to do this with our Subaru.
00:17:13 ◼ ► We were moving some pavers from a second-use place, and I was like, wait a minute, what's our carrying capacity?
00:17:18 ◼ ► I was looking up, it's like, we can hold 2,500 pounds or whatever it is, and each paver is 40 pounds.
00:17:38 ◼ ► And at one point, the U.S. Postal Service offered a flat rate box where you could put up to 60 pounds in this size.
00:18:03 ◼ ► And so, at one point, the Postal Service, U.S. Postal Office, had a flat rate box where they said, flat rate up to whatever pounds, 60 pounds or something.
00:18:11 ◼ ► And someone said, by volume, if you put the densest thing that exists into it that we can get that's stable, you can't fill up that box.
00:18:19 ◼ ► So, like, there's no way to put, like, you can't put more than 60 pounds in because nothing weighs more than that that would fit in it.
00:18:29 ◼ ► It's why, and I'm not endorsing that type of interview question as the way to interview somebody for a job, but it's why those questions are good.
00:18:40 ◼ ► And they're not looking for a specific answer that they want you to silently sit there with a scratch pad and a pen and say $350,000.
00:18:56 ◼ ► But I remember at one point, and I'm going to botch the details of this, but there's an interesting difference in the movie Goldfinger from Ian Fleming's novel Goldfinger.
00:19:08 ◼ ► Where in the movie, by the way, spoiler, but I think for a 1964 movie, if you haven't seen it yet, time's up.
00:19:18 ◼ ► But in the movie, there's this idea that Goldfinger wants to rob Fort Knox, that this is a man who's obsessed with gold, and it turns out his whole plot is a feint.
00:19:31 ◼ ► And what he really wants to do, I think it's like set off a nuclear bomb inside Fort Knox to irradiate all of the gold, which would make all that gold deadly for 400 years or whatever the half-life is.
00:19:50 ◼ ► But the plot was that he wanted to trick the authorities into thinking he was robbing it, but he wasn't.
00:19:58 ◼ ► He was going to set off a bomb and wasn't even going to be there, but then all of that gold would be off the market, and then the gold he already held would go up in value.
00:20:18 ◼ ► But it really was this sort of weight-type issue where the weight of all the gold in Fort Knox.
00:20:39 ◼ ► It's like in the novel, like 50 trucks show up and take all the gold out of Fort Knox, and instead, by weight, it would have been like, I don't know, just like a factor of like 100 off.
00:21:01 ◼ ► This came up, I was watching a quiz show where they had celebrities and comedians and other folks on.
00:21:18 ◼ ► He's the guy, he's a producer who became a presenter, a game show presenter on Pointless, and then is now one of the most successful writers in England writing crime novels, gentle crime novels.
00:21:29 ◼ ► So there's a round where they ask, it's called Distinctly Average, and they split the team.
00:21:33 ◼ ► There's four people, and they split into two teams of two, and each person has to separately guess a number, and then they average the two for the team's answer.
00:21:40 ◼ ► And it's always hilarious, but one of the questions was, and I knew the answer to this, is how many Earths can fit into the sun?
00:21:56 ◼ ► And some people are saying, I think the answers were in like the thousands to tens of thousands.
00:22:02 ◼ ► Unless you know the numbers, you will never imagine the sun could hold a million plus Earths.
00:22:08 ◼ ► I used to, see, when I was in high school, I was obsessed with that sort of mathematics.
00:22:14 ◼ ► And what I want to say, and again, I could be off easily by a factor of 10, but I want to say that the diameter of the sun is a thousand times the diameter of the Earth.
00:22:29 ◼ ► So you could fit a thousand Earths just like equator to equator through the center of the sun, but therefore, and I want to say in my head that the volume would therefore be like a thousand times a thousand, you know?
00:22:44 ◼ ► I've got real-time news for it, the sun's diameter is 109 times larger than the Earth's diameter.
00:22:54 ◼ ► Yeah, so you square that, you square that, and you take time, and divide by the circumference or whatever, I can remember that, it's pi r squared, right?
00:23:04 ◼ ► So you get the, so it's, but it's, it's also like, when would you ever be called upon to estimate?
00:23:10 ◼ ► So that's the thing, it's like gold, like, well, there's gold there, we know gold's heavy.
00:23:17 ◼ ► I guess that makes more sense that it's 100 times, 100 times the diameter than 1,000, yeah, that makes more sense, but, so I knew it was something like that, but a million, that's-
00:23:28 ◼ ► Well, but I really enjoyed that, but it did make me think of the Goldfinger idea, and I guess that, I think that's why they changed the movie, that in between, because the books had come out in the 50s,
00:23:40 ◼ ► and there were some complaints from the fans, like, hey, this doesn't, even by the, the loosey-goosey realism standards of every James Bond original novel, this doesn't even make sense, and they're like, hey, wouldn't it be funny, and then we could trick all the fans who've already read the book, who come into the movie, and they'll get, they'll get a big surprise halfway through that he doesn't even want to rob the thing, but it, but somebody moved all the gold into Fort Knox, right?
00:24:12 ◼ ► I believe, but, you know, actually, as I think about it, it's even smarter, because isn't, gold is fungible for the most part, so if you stole all the gold, let's say you could just airlift all the gold out of Fort Knox and add it to your old holdings,
00:24:24 ◼ ► it would still be worth the same amount as your holdings would if you had destroyed all the rest of the gold, more or less, maybe.
00:24:31 ◼ ► I mean, there's so many that your remaining gold would be more value, but if you owned all the gold in the world, ostensibly gold might have the same value as if you couldn't get access to all the gold in Fort Knox.
00:24:42 ◼ ► I'm not sure it was the, either in the book or the movie, I'm not sure it was the best hatched plan.
00:24:51 ◼ ► Well, the other really funny part in Goldfinger is there's a part where he, Goldfinger, has invited all of the top mafia bosses from North America to, I think it's like Kentucky, wherever he, I don't know why he's got a lair in Kentucky, but there's horse races and mint juleps.
00:25:11 ◼ ► And he's got this elaborate, really elaborate, three-dimensional map, like a model train type thing, to show Fort Knox and explain the plot, and explains this whole thing to all the mobsters, and then turns on the poison gas and gases them all and kills them.
00:25:33 ◼ ► Obviously, you know why it was to explain to us, the audience, what the actual plot was, but why in the world would he make this, like, intricate, super expensive, super detailed, three-dimensional model, and if he knew he was just going to poison gas these guys?
00:26:06 ◼ ► There's a joke about that map in the first Austin Powers movie, which is Robert, I'm forgetting his name, the guy who plays-
00:26:26 ◼ ► It really did make me think of the Goldfinger plot when I worked out this math, or we collectively on the internet worked out this math of how many iPhones can fit on a giant plane.
00:27:29 ◼ ► Yeah, but although there's a lot of, they sell a lot of the lower end models in some markets.
00:27:43 ◼ ► But then it works out that that's in a typical April in the U.S., that's about 12 days of stock.
00:27:53 ◼ ► And so you can simultaneously think about, I find it so fascinating in a nerdy way that you can, like, really think about, like, if me and you, Glenn,
00:28:06 ◼ ► if we, our job is, they give me and you a couple of hand pallet lifters, and we have to unload 350,000 iPhones from a plane.
00:28:35 ◼ ► Like, I don't even think it's worth doing the math on how many fit on a freight boat because it's effectively infinite.
00:28:41 ◼ ► But it really speaks to that sort of gold finger, how did they even get the gold into Fort Knox, just the logistical complexity of just moving finished iPhones from China and India, but mostly China, about 90% are made there, to wherever else they're going in the world, including moving a couple million of them a week to America.
00:29:09 ◼ ► So, like, if they were just bricks, and I joked about this with Ben Thompson, and he was like, yeah, but that happens to some people.
00:29:16 ◼ ► Like, when you order new iPhones, and there's always, every year there's a couple of horror stories, or somebody, the UPS drops off your new phone, and you open it up, and it's just a brick inside.
00:29:26 ◼ ► But if you were really just moving bricks that weighed as much as an iPhone and were the same volume as an iPhone new in box from China to America, that many of them, nonstop, 365 days a year, that's just like an enormous logistical problem.
00:29:47 ◼ ► Just almost unfathomable that there's that many iPhones moving around the world all the time.
00:30:07 ◼ ► Well, Arthur, I think it's much more than a billion now all time, although I'm not sure in the installed base, right, of iPhones and iPads.
00:30:35 ◼ ► Because I've heard reading reports that some boats are just hovering out at sea, like they're going to hold them out there for a while and see if the tariff situation resolves before they go into port, unless the at sea thing has been solved, which I think it has for some stuff.
00:30:53 ◼ ► The ocean is vast, or the oceans are vast, I should say, and they're just so utterly, utterly full of boats, which have hundreds to thousands or maybe even more now than the super ones, whatever those are called, not super max, the super.
00:31:13 ◼ ► We've already talked, like, if you just imagine five fully loaded, big, big, big body 747 freight planes, full of them, is about 12 days of stock.
00:31:28 ◼ ► And I guess at the moment, it was actually less than that, because by all reports since I wrote about this, but there's no confirmation, Apple's always secretive about sales.
00:31:38 ◼ ► But off the record, comments from people who work in Apple stores, you know, to me, to other people who write sites like this, I think Jason Snell told me he got a note from somebody that their sales at the height of this tariff panic in the stores were like two or three times normal volume.
00:31:57 ◼ ► Like, our sales goal for the day, I don't know, April 2nd, was supposed to be like 50 iPhones was our sales goal, and they sold 150.
00:32:09 ◼ ► Like, we sold 125% more than usual, or we only sold 75% of our goal or 50% of our goal.
00:32:16 ◼ ► There's some fluctuations, I don't know, rainy day, bad weather, or something's coming up that every parent in town wants to get new phones to get a better camera, so sales go up.
00:32:28 ◼ ► But two or three times the normal volume just doesn't happen for days-long stretches, but it did ahead of these tariffs.
00:32:39 ◼ ► But it's weird because it's a difference between a shortage and then an unknown set of price increases, and people have been joking about the NPM repository, you know, that has all the dependencies for code.
00:32:50 ◼ ► And there's the classic XKCD, which shows the whole sort of Jenga-like structure, and there's like one little thing, it's like, one guy maintains this.
00:32:57 ◼ ► It turns out, well, if we don't have a specific kind of rare earth magnet from China, you can't make a car, and they've cut that off.
00:33:05 ◼ ► Or, I don't know, it turns out there's some widget, like I'm reading about stuff, the Canadian-American-Mexican car integration system is now, it's like one unit now.
00:33:20 ◼ ► They make, the steel is more efficient here, they bring it somewhere else to be machined, they bring it back.
00:33:24 ◼ ► Sometimes stuff is shipped to China for completion and then brought back in, and it's all made efficient because of standardization of ocean freight, because of the standard tariff structure and all that.
00:33:42 ◼ ► Boeing makes its planes in this triple, or the Dreamliner famously is made in, I think, as three major countries involved.
00:33:52 ◼ ► I read a thing, I'll see, I just jotted a note to myself, see if I can find it for the show notes.
00:33:58 ◼ ► But there was a thing I read at the height of this tariff nonsense where it was, like, looking back at the peak of the supply chain lockup in COVID.
00:34:11 ◼ ► And that we have, just by bizarre coincidence, because these two causes are totally unrelated, right?
00:34:23 ◼ ► And this one is, I don't know, hopefully, once every 250 years, madman, tyrant, president of the United States.
00:34:33 ◼ ► But the story from a couple years ago was that once the chips froze up, and everybody knows that, like, the cars were a big side effect of the chip freeze up, because everything in a car now runs on chips, right?
00:34:48 ◼ ► There's, like, I forget the ridiculous number, but it's, like, 500 computer chips go into a new Ford, because instead of building a completely mechanical system to unlock the car door, there's a dedicated computer.
00:35:02 ◼ ► You hit a button to unlock the car door, and there's a computer in the driver's side door that unlocks the door.
00:35:18 ◼ ► And the chips weren't coming out of Taiwan and China and everywhere else, and so the cars couldn't be made.
00:35:24 ◼ ► There was no way to send the cars off the assembly line, because they're waiting on chips.
00:35:29 ◼ ► And a side effect of that is that there was less leather being made for the cars that come with leather seats.
00:35:40 ◼ ► So they stopped slaughtering the horses or pigs or whatever they're using to get the leather to make the car seats,
00:35:54 ◼ ► But a byproduct of the animals that are killed to make the leather car seats was the gelatin from, like, the horses and pigs or whatever.
00:36:04 ◼ ► And the number one consumer of cheap gelatin was like the companies that make gummy bears.
00:36:10 ◼ ► And so all of a sudden, because car makers can't get computer chips, there's no gummy bears left in the stores.
00:36:17 ◼ ► Like, and it was like somebody did like this case study where it wasn't like hypothetical.
00:36:35 ◼ ► It's only cost effective when the animal's already been killed to get the skin to make the leather seats.
00:36:40 ◼ ► That that's, at that point, it's like, oh, and now it's cheap to get the gelatin out of the dead horse or whatever.
00:37:06 ◼ ► One of the reasons that Gutenberg needed to print his Bible on paper is he printed such a huge edition that if it had been cows, they would have needed, I forget the number, like 60,000 cows to print the edition he did on paper.
00:37:27 ◼ ► So that was actually a limiting factor was we just can't source 60,000, I mean, it was one of them.
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00:39:59 ◼ ► Before we move on, we've got other things to talk about, but the one thing that this whole tariff and iPhones on a plane thing has clarified for me, like I think I had a gut feeling and it turns out my gut feeling was right, but I'd never bothered.
00:40:17 ◼ ► I was very lazy thinking it through where for a number of years before this whole thing with Trump and the tariffs, it's, it seemed like Apple has been ever more precariously dependent upon China specifically for the iPhone.
00:40:34 ◼ ► And they've been making moves, especially in India, they've been producing or assembling iPhones in Brazil too, for a while, but India seems like plan B or maybe there's a plan C and D and E too.
00:40:50 ◼ ► And they're making other products in Vietnam, like apparently all or most like AirPods come out of Vietnam, but for iPhone in particular, India's plan B, but it's only at 10%.
00:41:02 ◼ ► And partly, I think everybody realizes it, that Taiwan is physically threatened by China, who claims it's part of China and their ostensible independence is a crime against the People's Republic of China.
00:41:17 ◼ ► And occasionally they, we call it saber rattling, but it's, it's more scary than that because it's weapons, modern weapons of major war are a lot scarier than sabers, but they'll conduct military exercises off the coast or in the Taiwan Strait.
00:41:33 ◼ ► They fly planes over and the threat had been, or it still is a threat, but it's what if China decides to pull the trigger and invade Taiwan to take it by force?
00:41:44 ◼ ► What happens, for me personally, my friend and co-host of Dithering, Ben Thompson lives there.
00:41:50 ◼ ► So there's a very personal aspect of it to me, but trying to be a little more objective and Apple pundit-like, there's the question of, hey, that kind of would screw Apple, right?
00:42:01 ◼ ► It's, A, presumably if China did something like that, we would, again, who knows what would happen now that Trump's in, but with a normal president, that would be like what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine, where there's sanctions and all of a sudden all economic business with the country gets cut off until this situation gets resolved in a fair way.
00:42:25 ◼ ► And when you're Apple and 55% or 60% of your revenue comes from selling iPhones and 90% of your iPhones are assembled in China, that's a problem.
00:42:37 ◼ ► And when all of your silicon, all of your chips come out of TSMC in Taiwan, which would be blockaded by China, that's, I guess, an even bigger problem.
00:42:48 ◼ ► Because no matter where you're assembling them, right, you can't even assemble 10% of them in India without the chips that can only be made in Taiwan.
00:42:58 ◼ ► So how would somebody as smart as Tim Cook have gotten into the situation where Apple is so dependent on something like this?
00:43:05 ◼ ► And the way that I've sort of, this has forced me to sort of work through is there's no other way that the iPhone is as popular as it has been for the last 15 years than doing what Tim Cook did.
00:43:20 ◼ ► Like, I think at some point there was a guy, I'll put a link to it, he's just started blogging again, but he was young at the time.
00:43:30 ◼ ► So I'll call him a kid, but he's no longer a kid because it was 15 years ago, Matt Richman.
00:43:34 ◼ ► But he was the first person who I remember pointing out sometime around the iPhone 4S that the iPhone, the second generation iPhone, the 3G, sold more than the original.
00:43:57 ◼ ► And for a number of years, the growth of the iPhone was so almost unfathomable that each new generation didn't just become the best-selling generation.
00:44:19 ◼ ► But I think when that was happening, and people famously remember in the original iPhone keynote, Steve Jobs, his goal was like 18 months from now, we're hoping to have 1% of the cell phone market.
00:44:35 ◼ ► We'd like to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, or I think was the goal because it was going to come out in the middle of 2007.
00:44:43 ◼ ► By the end of 2008, we would like to have 1% of the cell phone market, which would be about 10 million phones, which they hit, but not by a lot.
00:44:52 ◼ ► With that first generation and half a year of 3G sales, they sold like, I don't know, 15 or 20 million or something like that.
00:45:23 ◼ ► And in those go-go growth years, there was no way that they could have kept up with demand, no way, other than making them in China.
00:45:32 ◼ ► There was no way to make them in any other country, not in India, not in Vietnam, not in Brazil, certainly not in America, right?
00:45:52 ◼ ► But there's no way to make as many as they made, continuing to sell them at the prices they were selling, which people were willing to pay, other than ramping up production in China, where the physical production capabilities scale the way that, like, cloud services like AWS can scale.
00:46:16 ◼ ► Where, like, build your new online cloud startup on AWS, and if you get 10x the traffic that you anticipated, you click a couple buttons and you've got 10x the database servers and the automatic replication of, and you can just scale like that.
00:46:37 ◼ ► I mean, it involved building new buildings and having China bring in thousands, tens and tens and tens of thousands of new employees to work in the factories, but they could do that.
00:46:50 ◼ ► There's nowhere else in the world where that could have happened, and that's how you wind up here.
00:46:53 ◼ ► They could have decided, we don't want to be that dependent on China, but then if they had decided that, they would have sold orders of magnitude fewer iPhones.
00:47:02 ◼ ► But this is also an outgrowth of decades of American and, to some extent, European policy, which is, there's détente, right?
00:47:09 ◼ ► You're at a distance, things are stable, and there's entente, we'll use my French here, entente, which is where you're engaged.
00:47:15 ◼ ► And so, America was in détente for a long time, and you had the Cold War in Russia, then the wall comes down, and then what do you do?
00:48:22 ◼ ► It serves world interests that China is deeply embedded in the world economy and has every
00:48:26 ◼ ► reason to not want to disrupt that because it would disrupt their own economy to such an
00:48:54 ◼ ► But even today, I was reading just the other day where people are talking about suppliers
00:48:58 ◼ ► where companies from China have, like, spun up entirely new operations in Vietnam, in other
00:49:05 ◼ ► In six to eight weeks, they've built factories and operations that might have taken a year
00:49:11 ◼ ► And let's forget about regulation and safety and whatever might go into that, not to insult
00:49:21 ◼ ► Do you remember there was one summer or so when everyone had those fire – the things that
00:49:27 ◼ ► And they would break in half and the things you would ride on with, like, two feet, right?
00:49:34 ◼ ► But there was, like, a year or two in which, like, what would happen is what I was reading
00:49:56 ◼ ► And then all of those companies were, great, we're just going to shut down for a few weeks
00:50:00 ◼ ► and we're going to retool into something comparable because there's always a demand for
00:50:13 ◼ ► I've learned a lot over the last, just month, really, just sort of learning things I probably
00:50:20 ◼ ► I didn't have, like, a deep misconception about the difference between traditional American
00:50:32 ◼ ► But just one profound difference is that in America, in the 20th century, the way we think
00:50:38 ◼ ► of a factory is you build a factory to make, if you're going to make screws, you build a
00:50:51 ◼ ► And if the market for screws dries up, no pun intended, I didn't pick it for this, but you're
00:50:56 ◼ ► Whereas China has built up this whole sort of modular architecture for factories, where
00:51:04 ◼ ► a factory could be making skateboards one month and hoverboards the next month and making screws
00:51:17 ◼ ► Bunny Huang wrote a book about, like, how to contract for stuff to be made in, I think it
00:51:28 ◼ ► And anyway, I read a book he wrote about it, and he's like, you're contracting with somebody,
00:51:32 ◼ ► but then they're contracting with subcontractors who might contract with subcontractors, and
00:51:36 ◼ ► there might be, like, 50 different guys with a couple of, what do you call those, drill
00:51:41 ◼ ► presses and things in different places, and they're all working to a spec, and they have
00:51:49 ◼ ► I think that's changed, because I think there's more automation and more robotics being used.
00:52:00 ◼ ► But it's still, they are, the Chinese economy, the Chinese manufacturing economy is absolutely
00:52:06 ◼ ► They are, and also they have a, they don't have a command economy per se, but there is also
00:52:28 ◼ ► It really does come back to, like you said, with the, I think this is where you're going
00:52:33 ◼ ► with the whole entendre thing, where a lot of this was just built on, hey, we should engage
00:52:42 ◼ ► Even whatever deep, deep philosophical differences we have with them culturally and government-wise
00:52:50 ◼ ► and authoritarianism-wise, giving them a taste of open market capitalism will move them in
00:53:16 ◼ ► Not, not everybody, but for the most part, there was bipartisan agreement that this would
00:53:30 ◼ ► But they are a more open and capitalistic society today than they were when Bill Clinton was president
00:53:42 ◼ ► But then there's this huge rural-urban divide, and people in the rural economies have imploded.
00:53:51 ◼ ► I mean, it's such a, it's a country of contrast, as they say about many countries, but it's
00:53:58 ◼ ► You're like, well, why would, you know, it's a good question that comes up is China still
00:54:13 ◼ ► So China is moving to solar power because it's very profitable for them to, for the companies
00:54:34 ◼ ► I mean, he keeps succeeding, and he's like the second or third richest person on the planet.
00:54:58 ◼ ► It's probably about 10 years old now, but he was visiting China, and it was like a Facebook,
00:55:02 ◼ ► at the time the company was still Facebook, like a PR picture, like Zuck saying, I'm going
00:55:19 ◼ ► idea, like, let's just, let's put out a photo of Zuck going for a jog while he's on his trip
00:55:25 ◼ ► But when you go outside and the air is so thick that it looks sepia-toned, you've got to go
00:56:06 ◼ ► And the sensor I had would say the, the count, particle count was like 500 or something.
00:56:12 ◼ ► And even inside our house, even with filters running like crazy, it was still like 30 or
00:56:21 ◼ ► So they, I mean, so China has lots of problems that they are capable of solving, but it turns,
00:56:26 ◼ ► I think it turns out that capitalism does not magically produce democracy, which is what
00:56:34 ◼ ► The more people get a taste of this rich, sweet honey of capitalism, they will naturally overthrow
00:56:43 ◼ ► We've discovered there are ways to engage in capitalism that let you have the trappings
00:56:50 ◼ ► of it, have the profits from it, and yet not change any kind, anything with the political
00:56:56 ◼ ► I think there's something, something, something there where the cause and effect was yada
00:57:16 ◼ ► And then America gets founded and it's like, boom, we've got a big democracy here, over here
00:57:27 ◼ ► And you see this, by the 20th century, you see this correlation where there are democratic
00:57:33 ◼ ► nations and they are capitalist to some degree and it's very, you know, it's all a sort of
00:57:52 ◼ ► I think there is probably one from, if you can put a really respectable democracy in place,
00:58:00 ◼ ► capitalism is the economic system that flows out of that to some degree, but I don't think
00:58:07 ◼ ► And I don't think anybody really foresaw that, oh, you could still be a completely totalitarian,
00:58:13 ◼ ► completely closed communist system and still participate in the world's capitalist economic
00:58:24 ◼ ► Well, I think at a time when billionaires were essentially unthinkable, I think it was hard
00:58:36 ◼ ► We'd had the, I'm going to forget the name of the, the, the tariff, not the tariff act,
00:58:43 ◼ ► Well, we had all, we had all the work to break up trusts in the United States and to prevent
00:59:07 ◼ ► But, but it's, but, you know, so it, and it's also, I think we also, we sometimes overlook
00:59:12 ◼ ► the, without getting through a political theory show is like the impact of colonialism is India
00:59:22 ◼ ► Again, this is hard because big country, a lot of political views, but there are specific
00:59:26 ◼ ► things that by any measure are anti-democratic that happen routinely in India, but it's still
00:59:31 ◼ ► nominally and still in many ways effectively a democracy and Modi could potentially one day
00:59:42 ◼ ► Well, not to listen to how he describes himself, but maybe, but, but, but so, but I think if
00:59:47 ◼ ► you have a country like India that was, that was pillaged and rampaged, you know, all these
00:59:51 ◼ ► countries in Africa that were taking advantage of their natural resources, the people in poverty
00:59:55 ◼ ► education, China was beaten around by all these imperial forces, the English and so forth.
01:00:00 ◼ ► And then in Japan, in Japan of all things, being an imperial power that, that inflicted
01:00:13 ◼ ► And you're like, no, no, just use the same kind of system that all the people who invaded
01:00:26 ◼ ► And some people think that's all you should have to do, but in reality, I think there's
01:00:30 ◼ ► still generations to work through, you know, what, what these, what these political and economic
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01:03:10 ◼ ► So when I set up my blue sky and got a custom domain, I didn't want to use daring fireball.
01:04:22 ◼ ► But at the time, it was early on, and it was unclear to me how federated the whole blue sky thing.
01:04:49 ◼ ► But everybody just calls it blue sky, which makes, and I think is sort of why it's more popular, because it's easier to understand.
01:04:56 ◼ ► Just go to your favorite search engine, type blue sky, you go to blue sky, you just create an account, and there you are.
01:05:11 ◼ ► I mean, I loved that Mastodon became a thing, because I thought for many years we should see what, I was hoping that something federated would happen, so we could see.
01:05:26 ◼ ► And it wasn't really, it sort of was, because each Usenet server could kind of choose which other Usenet servers it linked to, and you could, but like, that was the closest thing.
01:05:36 ◼ ► So I loved Mastodon, I loved the Fediverse, because the Fediverse has a lot of itches that are being scratched that don't need 10 million or 100 million people.
01:05:51 ◼ ► You wrote about that recently, too, is that you just go to a place and you sign up, and you go to Blue Sky, and you sign up.
01:06:05 ◼ ► And if it goes bad in the future, because it is not, I guess at some level, Jack Dorsey still is a funder behind it.
01:06:29 ◼ ► I have a friend here in Seattle, I can say this because it was on the press release, he is a personal investor in Blue Sky.
01:06:34 ◼ ► And I was like, oh, I trust it more if you're investing in it, Joe, because that was a good sign when they did a recent round of investing.
01:06:41 ◼ ► Yeah, but say what you want about Dorsey, who I think is, I mean, I've met him a couple of times and I've known him since before Twitter was even a thing.
01:06:57 ◼ ► I mean, but, you know, he's into the crypto and what's the thing he's more interested in is called Nostradamus or Noster, which is named after Nostradamus.
01:07:17 ◼ ► And it's like, and you're like, and if you haven't heard of it and you're like, if you really are thinking, well, who's the sort of person who thinks the answer to a Twitter-like network is to base it on crypto?
01:07:33 ◼ ► And so it's great that it exists because it's like a whole place for those people to go and just stay off all the other networks that the rest of us use, right?
01:07:49 ◼ ► But it's just, he was like, we're all, everyone who disclaims moderation, it feels like they've never been a victim of what happens.
01:07:58 ◼ ► I mean, we can see, this is actually really great right now because if you want to understand what an unmoderated, mostly unmoderated social network looks like, we go to formerly known as Twitter.
01:08:12 ◼ ► And you can see blue sky, which has essentially, it's not exactly opt in, but their moderation is relatively light and they make it so you can choose which moderation services you belong to.
01:08:24 ◼ ► And ultimately when it, if their federation grows, then you could be on unmoderated blue sky like servers and that would be fine.
01:08:32 ◼ ► So it is a form of the like unfettered free speech, but with controls that let people start from a position of having some power over it.
01:08:40 ◼ ► And again, I like, if I could only use one of these things just by like a, I don't know, too many parking tickets are speeding for me, speeding tickets.
01:08:54 ◼ ► I would pick Mastodon just because it's where my audience is and people who I would consider friends and where I get like the best and most direct reader feedback.
01:09:07 ◼ ► It is, it's not the same as Twitter was at, at its best years, which I would define as maybe like 2010 to 2014 or so, or maybe even a little earlier, but there were a couple of like a five year period there where it really felt like I, I had like the best feedback mechanism for public comments on daring fireball all on Twitter.
01:09:43 ◼ ► It never felt like anybody was trying to occasionally somebody would try to, some kind of scammer would try to horn their way in and then I just blocked that person and they'd be done.
01:09:51 ◼ ► But Mastodon is that for me, it's just the highest signal to noise, but it's, it is mostly for Apple tech nerdy type stuff.
01:10:11 ◼ ► Man, it's partially by choice of who I follow on Mastodon, but I also don't think that action is there.
01:10:30 ◼ ► I like that my, my, my crowd is computer nerdy, but it's such a turnoff because it's so confusing.
01:10:39 ◼ ► The whole concept is so hard to explain and so confusing and okay, how do I get started?
01:10:50 ◼ ► I wrote an article when Mastodon started to first power up when like November, 2022 when Musk bought Twitter.
01:11:01 ◼ ► Anyway, so I wrote a piece for tidbits, which is mostly folks like us, like people between about 40 and 80 who have been using computers for a while.
01:11:19 ◼ ► But then I think probably a year later, like Mastodon Social, you just go to Mastodon Social and sign up there.
01:12:15 ◼ ► It's like the latest version of Sequoia broke the ability to set your screen desktop color
01:12:39 ◼ ► Overall, because my social experience is sort of bifurcated now, primarily across Mastodon
01:13:20 ◼ ► And if you go there and see that I have that blue check, they gave me the blue check back.
01:13:29 ◼ ► I never paid for a blue check in the old days because they gave me one for being who I am long ago.
01:13:39 ◼ ► If Blue Sky said, we have a $20 a year subscription that we're offering and you get nothing for it,
01:13:57 ◼ ► It's very easy to use your domain name as your username on Blue Sky, which is very cool.
01:14:07 ◼ ► It's like you go into your domain registrar and set up a certain record that Blue Sky can check.
01:14:13 ◼ ► And you just put a little token of strings there and you putting those token of strings there proves that you, the person who control has access to this current Blue Sky accounts settings on Blue Sky, also have access to the domain name records for that domain.
01:14:39 ◼ ► There's another way I think you can put, like, if you don't have the DNS access or it's too confusing, you can put, like, a secret file at the level of the domain.
01:14:51 ◼ ► And, oh, by the way, you know how Blue Sky, the only way it's made money until its recent spate of T-shirt sales for that T-shirt that she's wearing is domain names.
01:15:03 ◼ ► And they're making a little money off it, but then they made a lot of money off T-shirts.
01:15:07 ◼ ► Anyway, but I will say, I'll just go back to Jack, and I do think his heart's in the right place, and I do think it's kind of fascinating that Blue Sky really directly, not, like, indirectly, is directly spun off from Twitter, like, old Twitter.
01:15:21 ◼ ► That was, the name Blue Sky comes from, like, a Blue Sky project of, like, Twitter circa 2016 or 17.
01:15:36 ◼ ► And from people who were in the mine grinding out the daily, day-to-day operations of Twitter circa 2016, 17, 18, somewhere around there, like, what would those people wish had been done differently from the inception of the network?
01:15:54 ◼ ► That's where they came up with the AT protocol and Blue Sky, and it's really, you know.
01:16:00 ◼ ► If you uncouple his, some of his ideas, his political ideology and moderation from it, the nature of it is great, and I'm really glad he did it.
01:16:24 ◼ ► It's like a little more, you know, you can't, you don't really pet that dog, but you go and run around with it a lot.
01:16:36 ◼ ► I spend probably far too much time on Blue Sky, and it's probably three to one Blue Sky to Mastodon these days.
01:16:45 ◼ ► The reason, though, is interesting, and it's creating all these projects these days, and part of it is where do I find the people interested in what I'm doing?
01:16:53 ◼ ► Because I'm kind of always hustling a little bit, trying not to be hypey or exhausting to people, but I am a little.
01:17:00 ◼ ► And without algorithms on either side, I've gotten used to the idea, you have to kind of talk about what you're doing much more than I'm comfortable with, because otherwise people just don't see it, right?
01:17:10 ◼ ► So there's a podcast I listen to that's for cartoonists, for webcomics artists, others, called Comic Lab, by my friend Dave Kellett and his good buddy, Brad Geigar.
01:17:21 ◼ ► And they, I listened to this since it started, because Brad's a friend, but it's so useful for creators.
01:17:27 ◼ ► And they routinely do Kickstarters where they raise tens of thousands, over $100,000 for a collection of comics or a book.
01:17:37 ◼ ► And Dave recently did a very successful campaign for a book of dog cartoons from his regular Sheldon comic series.
01:18:01 ◼ ► And Mastodon was, I think he's using Mastodon maybe a little bit, but he wasn't even, he didn't even use Instagram.
01:18:06 ◼ ► Instagram does not perform for artists, cartoonists anymore, or creators, because of how they work.
01:18:14 ◼ ► So to some extent, that shapes my usage is I have friends in Mastodon, so I go there and I chat and I keep up with stuff and I post my projects.
01:18:21 ◼ ► At Blue Sky, I'm a little more, I don't want to say mercenary, but I'm definitely there for the political conversation, but also to say, hey, here's the thing I'm working on that maybe you might care about.
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01:20:51 ◼ ► And it's yet another successful one for you, where you've done a new version of your book, Six Centuries of Type and Printing.
01:21:08 ◼ ► My wife was touched by what you wrote about, how I write, which was, I'm touched by it, too.
01:21:21 ◼ ► But it's interesting because there's that thing, like, we get a little jaded about, like, somebody writes about something and do people, are people reading blogs, people taking action?
01:22:02 ◼ ► If I'm doing it as close to it as possible, I don't know how to pronounce the Polish letters in it.
01:22:20 ◼ ► So he, and I think I linked to the Shift Happens, which is, it's a whole coffee table style book about history of keyboard.
01:22:30 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a couple of volumes, but just an exquisite, years-long, deep dive, wonderfully well-photographed and deeply-researched book into the history of keyboards.
01:22:45 ◼ ► And then, I think, at the beginning of the year, around January or so, a couple months ago, he had this whole web, wonderful, splendid, interactive, sort of like the Steve Jobs book, Make Something Wonderful.
01:23:09 ◼ ► They printed up a bunch of them and gave them to employees at Apple and Love From and other things.
01:23:33 ◼ ► I've probably told it on the podcast before, where somebody, a woman gets married, and her husband says, why do you cut the ends off the ham when you cook it?
01:23:52 ◼ ► And so the reason the book is this dimension is because we designed the Tiny Type Museum case, the woodworker I work with, we designed it backwards from the flat rate, large size of the postal box.
01:24:26 ◼ ► If I paid, if I didn't pay the flat rate price, it would have gone from $20 a ship to like $45 or something per unit.
01:24:34 ◼ ► It's exactly like how the gummy bears disappeared because they couldn't get computer chips to make Ford cars.
01:24:43 ◼ ► But Marcin crafted, he didn't just write and he didn't just photograph, but then he crafted this wonderful interactive webpage.
01:24:51 ◼ ► with this sort of booklet length exodus about the Gorton typeface, which also, you know, you can see where he got into it because Gorton was, or it still is, the typeface on a ton of mid-20th century classic keyboards, typewriters.
01:25:37 ◼ ► He captured a lot of the beauty and it's so utilitarian, but then it gets used sometimes for gorgeous purposes.
01:25:54 ◼ ► My dad got a job in display advertising at a weekly newspaper in Eugene, Oregon, like I think during the recession of 79 or 80.
01:26:09 ◼ ► So it's probably like Times and Palatino, although I'm saying that wrong, though, because Palatino was big later in the phototype days.
01:26:16 ◼ ► I don't know what the biggest font was, but it feels like it's Times was the one I remember.
01:26:31 ◼ ► So I'm five, six years old, and we used to do most of our grocery shopping at a chain grocery store called Pathmark, sort of regional in the Northeast.
01:26:57 ◼ ► And my son inherited it to some degree, where just as a digression, one time when he was, I don't know, like a little over a year old, we were traveling somewhere and we went to some kind of, it wasn't like Outback Steakhouse, but Longhorn, Longhorn Steakhouse, which is like an Outback.
01:27:29 ◼ ► But I had been taking him to Starbucks in a Baby Bjorn on a regular basis for a while, and he pointed to the Starbucks logo on the card.
01:27:41 ◼ ► And I forget what he said, but he, you know, he recognized, he recognized the Starbucks logo in a totally different context in a restaurant.
01:27:50 ◼ ► Like I just, and I thought it was so, the weird, one of the weird things about Pathmark is they had two house brands.
01:28:15 ◼ ► And they still had like a red and blue diagonal stripe or something that sort of told you like it's part of the Pathmark family brand.
01:28:31 ◼ ► But I kind of, even at like the age of like six or seven, got that it was the perfect, I didn't even know the word font at the time.
01:28:57 ◼ ► And that it was, and I just remember, and I remember thinking that Helvetica was like, before I knew what it was named.
01:29:22 ◼ ► Like, I've learned all the intricacies and the different ways that other sans serifs and grotesques can be designed.
01:29:35 ◼ ► But at the time, it just looked like this is what the complete lack of style on a font would look like.
01:29:43 ◼ ► Yeah, but although it's, there's something, there's like a style and it's lack of style.
01:29:50 ◼ ► And it still has personality, but the personality feels like it's derived from the context instead of from the typeface.
01:30:19 ◼ ► It was some very plain sans serif face, so likely Helvetica or a knockoff prototype version of it in the early 80s, late 70s.
01:30:35 ◼ ► So anything that Otto picks out, it just says, I think one of the cans just says food on it in a can.
01:31:00 ◼ ► I will do my best to get this image as the album arc for this section of the show right now.
01:31:30 ◼ ► The one that I actually fell in love with, the first type I fell in love with was Albertus, which remains a favorite to this day.
01:31:40 ◼ ► And I, as a senior project, I did a rendition of it as a digital font because it hadn't been well digitized yet.
01:32:14 ◼ ► I guess the other one that I can remember, again, not knowing the name of it, but knowing, oh, that's that typeface.
01:32:59 ◼ ► But Universe famously, I think, was the first face with numbers, maybe, instead of using weights or something like that.
01:33:10 ◼ ► Anyway, so I got off the, so the Kickstarter, one thing I did with this Kickstarter, this is how we go, was I tried a bunch of new things because Kickstarter, Kickstarter is, they've been around now for, well, since 2009 is when they had their first public campaign.
01:33:23 ◼ ► And they've had periods where I felt they were really moribund, like no features introduced, they're still just churning away, and then they'll release spates all at once.
01:33:31 ◼ ► So since I did the How Comics Were Made, so I worked with Marcin on his project, we did that in February, March of 2023.
01:33:39 ◼ ► I did How Comics Were Made in February of last year, and then this campaign started in March of this year.
01:33:44 ◼ ► They launched, I think there's five new things that they added, and I tried all of them on this campaign.
01:33:50 ◼ ► And they're all little subtle things, like you can have a secret URL for secret tiers for people.
01:33:59 ◼ ► Yeah, so if you've got subscribers or something like that, like a membership thing, you could say, this is just for you guys, and please don't share this URL.
01:34:08 ◼ ► But you guys can get it, you guys can get the $50 tier for $25 because you're already a member or something, or something like that, or something new.
01:34:22 ◼ ► And then there's, you can feature products, they've just added, they added late pledges more than a year ago.
01:34:28 ◼ ► John, since yesterday when the campaign ended, quote unquote, it's another $4,000 has come in in late pledges.
01:34:34 ◼ ► Because people, so as soon as the campaign ends, it sort of turns into a pre-order store, but it's all in their system.
01:34:41 ◼ ► And then they're now offering, there's a backer kit and pledge manager from KickTrack are both post-campaign tools for doing, giving people add-ons, collecting addresses, collecting tax and things.
01:35:31 ◼ ► It's just, it's been transformational for people in the arts, for films that have been made.
01:35:36 ◼ ► So there's the big ones like Brandon Sanderson will raise $14 million for a special edition, which is awesome.
01:35:44 ◼ ► He's not sitting there, I mean, maybe counting his money in one part, but he has a huge operation and people love his work.
01:35:49 ◼ ► But then there's folks who go out and raise like, I don't know, $500 and it works just as well.
01:35:53 ◼ ► And because it's a flat fee, it's not like you're getting soaked and there's a people at the top are only paying 0.5%.
01:36:02 ◼ ► And it's, I used to have this joke I would tell when I gave a talk and I'd say, I was trained as a typesetter and now I'm a journalist.
01:36:10 ◼ ► And then at some point, people stop laughing because they're like, oh, I'm really sorry.
01:36:16 ◼ ► And so now I'm like, I gave up on journalism and went into the lucrative, lucrative field of the history of printing.
01:36:22 ◼ ► And it's turned out this is actually, I'm having a much better time doing more interesting things.
01:36:26 ◼ ► People are much more engaged with what I do, more interested in it now that I'm writing about the history of comics and printing and type than anything I've ever done in my career.
01:36:35 ◼ ► I described in my write-up for this book, but I described the first edition, which came as part of the Tiny Type Museum as Fleischman's rather preposterously elaborate Tiny Type Museum at Time Council.
01:36:56 ◼ ► You commissioned a woodmaker to make tiny little, I mean, how many of those did you sell?
01:37:12 ◼ ► I kept two, one for each of my children to inherit so that they can retire one day when hopes that.
01:37:20 ◼ ► But it really looks like, and I will absolutely put a link in the show notes, and it is also absolutely not the sort of thing 99.999% of people would have any interest in owning.
01:37:45 ◼ ► The highest concentration of people who own Tiny Type Museums are listeners to this show without giving it away.
01:38:02 ◼ ► It's got, like, the person I worked with, Anna, had to get this special rabbit cutter to put in these biscuits because she needed tinier ones.
01:38:13 ◼ ► It's ammonia-stained wood, which goes deeper into the wood, so if it's marked, the stain, because stain is only surface.
01:38:19 ◼ ► So she consulted one of her, she was actually getting a certificate in woodworking to study, like, advanced study.
01:38:24 ◼ ► And one of her teachers who'd been making stuff for 50 years, he's like, oh, what you want with oak is you want ammonia.
01:38:33 ◼ ► Anyway, so I patterned this after it being, like, a wunderkammer, a cabinet of wonder, because I thought I'd gone to a bunch of printing museums and type museums, like the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Wisconsin, and I thought, it is so fun to get your hands on this stuff.
01:38:48 ◼ ► So this is, like, a little box, like a micro museum, and it's got matrices, molds that were used to make type.
01:38:58 ◼ ► There's modern wood type, one made by laser, one made by hand using a pantograph cutter with a motor.
01:39:04 ◼ ► At the Hamilton Museum, there's some historic flong, which is a paper-like printing mold.
01:39:35 ◼ ► But the idea was, I commissioned, so I commissioned this woodworker, so we worked together on the design of that.
01:39:43 ◼ ► There's a guy who was making modern, he's using historical processes to cut and cure and varnish wood, and then uses a laser cutter to do the final step.
01:39:57 ◼ ► And there's type that was set at the Bixler's Type Foundry in Scaniatly's, New York, if I'm pronouncing that close to right.
01:40:04 ◼ ► So it was also, I kind of wanted to disperse the money that came in to pay craftspeople and to pay people who'd collected stuff and held onto it for whatever reason, they didn't know why, and then pull it together into 100 sets that would be dispersed widely so that this information would be preserved over time, too.
01:40:39 ◼ ► I'm not going to set it all by hand because there's not enough time in the world to do that.
01:40:43 ◼ ► And I'd met this guy in London when I was researching a book called London Kerning in 2017.
01:40:48 ◼ ► This guy, Phil Abel, who runs a shop called Hand and Eye, and he had sold his monotype composition equipment to somebody who'd worked for him.
01:41:03 ◼ ► Nick runs a foundry called Ephra Press and has now helped establish a nonprofit that used to be at the University of York called Thin Ice Press, which is very exciting.
01:41:11 ◼ ► And they have a museum because somebody came to me at the end of the museum sales and said, I want to buy some and donate.
01:41:20 ◼ ► So the Grolier Club, University of San Francisco State, rather, and the Thin Ice Press at University of York have them.
01:41:55 ◼ ► And then he does limited pressings and Phil prints the letterpress album covers and liner notes for him.
01:42:16 ◼ ► We're literally watching Brexit, wondering if we won't be able to ship the pages to Germany.
01:42:21 ◼ ► So in the end, it's typeset in hot metal in North Yorkshire, printed in London, bound near the Black Forest in Germany,
01:42:29 ◼ ► then shipped in the height of the pandemic in April 2020, 27 boxes wind up from DHL on my doorstep, blocking the door.
01:42:39 ◼ ► So if it's not, if it's letterpress, but it's not typeset with hot metal by hand, how exactly was it produced?
01:42:47 ◼ ► Well, no, this is letterpress, but the hot metal, the monotype hot metal system is fed.
01:42:53 ◼ ► The guy who created the monotype system had consulted with Hollerith, who created the 1890 population counting census.
01:43:04 ◼ ► Well, this other guy founded monotype and used paper tape, punch paper tape to capture keystrokes so that you'd take it to a compositing device that actually would read the paper tape like a player piano and cast individual pieces of type in solid columns with all the spacing.
01:43:54 ◼ ► There's ones where the metrics, the font width, or the character widths are almost identical to the original monotype metal Bembo that he had.
01:44:02 ◼ ► So I could typeset it and he could then compose it and the results looked almost identical.
01:44:19 ◼ ► But you used InDesign and a specific version of digitized Bembo that gets you the pages, you know, each line and the justification.
01:44:43 ◼ ► There's a bunch of solenoids that push out little levers that simulate paper tape in the composition.
01:44:55 ◼ ► I mean, if you had explained to me that somehow this was the output of the digitized Bembo, I'd be shocked because there is something about it that says this is old.
01:45:06 ◼ ► Like, it feels the print quality is, and I'm talking about this book from the Tiny Type Museum, and the new edition will be the output of the digital font?
01:45:32 ◼ ► So I didn't scan the pages, because I could have done that and reproduced it as a facsimile edition, but this will be a digitally typeset offset edition, but it'll be bound in the same way.
01:45:45 ◼ ► The letterpress inks are a little darker than lithography inks, and they hold a little more ink in each little impression.
01:45:58 ◼ ► And it's, you know, it's not that one's even better or worse, but it just feels older to me.
01:46:02 ◼ ► And I associate it with when I learned to read and learned about printing and technology and everything, that, oh, this is why older books look different.
01:46:13 ◼ ► Like, in a certain specific way that a physically older book, you know, not, you know, and that a new edition of, let's say, The Great Gatsby, a new edition doesn't have that old look.
01:46:25 ◼ ► It's because it's printed with different technology and that the ink traps in different ways and stuff like that.
01:46:31 ◼ ► It's just, this is something, Eric Spiekermann created a very complicated, what he calls digital letterpress system.
01:46:37 ◼ ► He used, so there's a kind of printing called flexography, which is when you're printing on a, it dates way back.
01:46:50 ◼ ► So, like, paper takes ink and forms of cardboard do, but you're printing on plastic or glass or whatever.
01:46:58 ◼ ► And several decades ago, 3M or somebody invented a plate made of a polymer, a polymer resin that hardens when it's exposed to light.
01:47:09 ◼ ► So, it's kind of like how plates are made for printing today, except it's rubbery and thick.
01:47:18 ◼ ► And there's these plate cutters you use that cost a lot of money and you feed digital output.
01:47:29 ◼ ► This is how letterpress has survived in modern times, is a lot of letterpress printers don't set type or very little type at all.
01:47:40 ◼ ► So, like, the Martha Stewart invitation style with that very deep impression, where, you know, you can feel the paper and feel the back of it.
01:47:50 ◼ ► So, Eric Spiekerman modified a 60,000-euro system that's meant to cut kind of coarse, you know, these kinds of plates to cut precisely and well enough for letterpress.
01:48:05 ◼ ► And he worked with colleagues he had, which have a – I forgot the press name is, like, you know, Dare Typewriter.
01:48:12 ◼ ► And so he's printed books with them because he wanted – he didn't want the impression like a deepness.
01:48:53 ◼ ► Because I was selling it for roughly $150 because it was – like I said, it was printed in North London.
01:49:04 ◼ ► I think the detail you just went into helps explain to somebody why it would have to sell for like $150.
01:49:17 ◼ ► So from a textual and visual standpoint, I thought, you know, I could do an offset edition.
01:49:23 ◼ ► And so they're going to bind it in – essentially, they're going to bind it, the endpapers.
01:49:38 ◼ ► It's funny that it's taken you this number of years to do this, though, just because it is – I am so reminded of it.
01:49:50 ◼ ► And I knew a lot of it, but I didn't – it's like an encapsulation of everything I knew about printing plus all sorts of new stuff that I hadn't – didn't know before.
01:49:59 ◼ ► And it's such a little, like, everything you've ever wanted to know about printing but no more.
01:50:11 ◼ ► And that's – like, that whole Ben Franklin angle, right, where it's – like, Ben Franklin was such a nerd.
01:50:21 ◼ ► But that's why he got into printing, you know, that it's like that's probably what I would have been doing if I were alive 300 years ago.
01:50:29 ◼ ► Yeah, and he did some printing innovations, too, and then his son or nephew took over the printing office.
01:50:35 ◼ ► It was a book I reviewed about printing history where the Sons of Liberty – this is during the Revolution or before the Revolution.
01:50:41 ◼ ► There's a loyalist printer, and the Sons of Liberty rush into his shop with hammers, and they beat all of his presses to death.
01:51:06 ◼ ► But, yeah, you know, I asked Mark Sheen for a quote for the campaign, and he said, you should tell people the book is concise.
01:51:18 ◼ ► So you get the bite-sized stuff with detail as opposed to – I mean, I've read 500-page books about the history of small-sized printing presses in the 19th century.
01:51:31 ◼ ► One of my favorite stories – and I might be – I'm going to go off the top of my head and not do the research here.
01:51:37 ◼ ► But one of my favorite Ben Franklin stories was Franklin was a big fan of William Caslin's fonts.
01:51:45 ◼ ► And he had a client who swore up and down that the only good fonts out of England were Baskerville's.
01:51:51 ◼ ► And so Franklin printed up a sheet of Caslin type but omitted putting that it was Caslin's type and said, well, all right, well, you want Baskerville?
01:52:03 ◼ ► And the guy looked at it after telling him up and down that Caslin's type was terrible.
01:52:15 ◼ ► You know, there are people who think they have – the client who thinks they have an opinion about the font or the color or whatever.
01:52:24 ◼ ► And if you just tell them that they're getting what they want but it's what you know they should have, then they're happy.
01:52:30 ◼ ► Yeah, the colonies had – I mean, not to get – again, not to get too deep from the history.
01:52:33 ◼ ► Like, they had real trouble getting type for decades because there wasn't a type foundry operation in America.
01:52:41 ◼ ► I read a very interesting book, again, for the academics about the history of stereotyping or printing from full cast plates in America that I did not realize quite how much there was a trade in stereotype.
01:52:54 ◼ ► Then you'd make a mold and you'd make plates from it and you'd print from the plates to preserve your type, which was expensive and rare.
01:53:02 ◼ ► And so the plates would get more and more worn and other publishers would then print their editions and they got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
01:53:11 ◼ ► Like, there's a letter from Melville, from Herman Melville, where he's writing his publisher who's going out of business and says,
01:53:16 ◼ ► I can't get the, you know, $29 together to buy the plates for OMU or whatever the book is.
01:53:26 ◼ ► It's like someone saying, well, we're just going to shred all those, you know, we're going to take your digital files and throw them in the trash because you don't have the money for us to email them to you.
01:53:35 ◼ ► Or the way that, like, when we were kids, or at least when I was a kid, we'd have to reuse our floppy disks because we couldn't afford to buy more floppy disks.
01:53:42 ◼ ► And you'd have to decide which files, either your own files that you'd written or which games that would say, oh, I guess I don't play that anymore.
01:54:04 ◼ ► That what we commonly call a stereotype, he's a stereotypical car salesman, comes out of the phrase from printing.
01:54:13 ◼ ► Yeah, there's stereotype and cliche and typecasting are all kind of from nearly the same era.
01:54:19 ◼ ► Stereotype, we know when it was coined because there's a guy, Fermin Didot, who was part of a family of printers in France.
01:54:25 ◼ ► He used a form of stereotyping in, I think it was 1795 or 6, and in the introduction to it, it's a book of logarithms, which were hugely important for certain kinds of, like, military uses and shipping and so forth.
01:54:42 ◼ ► Babbage came up with a system of punching type molds that is incredible, I didn't know existed, that was basically to punch logarithmic tables.
01:54:51 ◼ ► So in the introduction to this book on logarithms, Didot writes, you know, I've made these and I'm calling them stereos and tipos, which is Greek for, like, basically hard impression or hard form.
01:55:06 ◼ ► And in France, though, in France, they didn't call them stereotypes, they called them cliché, because the sound of them being printed was cliché, cliché, cliché, cliché.
01:55:18 ◼ ► So the way that both stereotypes, in plain English, stereotype and cliché are sort of referencing the same sort of mental concept.
01:55:33 ◼ ► But it's like a hard plate that you put on a press and you would repeat print many, many times from.
01:55:39 ◼ ► In some ways, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it really, it was the first mass production of anything, right?
01:56:00 ◼ ► Late 1700s, they start to have the metallurgy and capability to do certain kinds of things repetitively.
01:56:06 ◼ ► Yeah, but it was before that, but it was before that where they could, you know, after Gutenberg, in the West at least, where you could print hundreds of copies of the same thing.
01:56:23 ◼ ► I mean, you could make fab, like, there are ways to weave and do things like that, which were very manuals.
01:56:27 ◼ ► You know, like, the press was probably, even though it involved a lot of manual effort until the 1800s, was probably the...
01:56:34 ◼ ► I mean, people could pull, I think, what was it, a couple hundred sheets an hour, but a sheet was a big folio.
01:57:04 ◼ ► And, you know, I guess all of your plates or your pint glasses were roughly the same, but each one was handmade.
01:57:25 ◼ ► I think one of the greatest inventions of the 1800s that are related to printing is called electrotyping, which is 3D photocopying in the 1830s.
01:57:36 ◼ ► These, not researchers, you wouldn't have researchers doing this, but it's like, I don't know who the people is like.
01:58:04 ◼ ► You'd make a wax casting, pull it off, coat the interior with graphite, and then suspend it in an electrochemical bath with a...
01:58:18 ◼ ► You'd clip a clip to the copper into the mold, and the copper would migrate over time with the electrical force to the acid to the mold.
01:58:38 ◼ ► And then people realized it could be used to copy type and to make plates for printing and so forth, too.
01:58:59 ◼ ► I think more people know this, but that the, again, the tiny type museum was sort of a tiny, miniscule reproduction of it.
01:59:13 ◼ ► Like, there's a big one for the letter E and a somewhat big one for A and maybe a small one for Q because it's not used that much.
01:59:22 ◼ ► But there were two cases, one with the lowercase versions of the letters and an uppercase with the capital letters.
01:59:32 ◼ ► Yeah, and they were located, the uppercase was located above in the, because a type center was sitting at a tilted, on a seat at a tilted top.
01:59:43 ◼ ► So you'd pull out the lowercase because you're putting it lower because it had the common lowercase letters.
01:59:54 ◼ ► And then in the 1850s, I think it's by then, the California case layout gets designed because people are going to California with type.
02:00:06 ◼ ► But I have walked into so many houses in Seattle and I'll look up on the wall and there is a drawer of type hanging with lots of little stuffing because it's got compartments.
02:00:28 ◼ ► But, you know, there was the U.S. Department of Labor to go back to politics in a full circle is promoting that they're going to try to have more coal mining jobs.
02:00:42 ◼ ► My mom's dad, my grandfather, was a coal miner, you know, quit school after completed the eighth grade to go work in a coal mine and then died at the age of 70 of black lung disease.
02:00:54 ◼ ► You know, like it's I come from a family, a coal miner, and I often think of it like when I want to complain about my job, like, oh, you know, my wrist hurts or whatever.
02:01:02 ◼ ► And it's like, well, think of my grandfather and how proud he'd be that I have this job that I've made for myself and I get to use my mind and my education and, you know, and I'm not breathing in stuff that's going to give me black lung disease.
02:01:17 ◼ ► But to tie it in with this, one of the things I just reread in your six centuries of type and printing is that typesetters.
02:01:24 ◼ ► Now, this is the job where there's like a manuscript, a book, say, you know, to be printed.
02:01:30 ◼ ► The job is you sit in front of these cases of letters that are cast in lead and it's like the word is next and you grab an N and an E and an X and a T and you put them together and you start assembling a line of type and then you get the next word and you get like learning to type.
02:01:50 ◼ ► That's what they're called out of the box very fast and you go real fast and you, you know, get paid by how many lines of type you put together and that the average at some point in like the 1800s, these are called the job was typesetting.
02:02:04 ◼ ► And it was even when you got fast at it, you only got maybe like a half page of type out a day.
02:02:21 ◼ ► And, you know, and obviously, you know, it's little pieces of lead and you need to make sure you're getting the right ones and proofreading and there's daylight and you can have some windows, but the long hours, if you're working 12 hours a day and you're on the Northeast, you know, big parts of the year, there's only, you know, six, seven, eight hours of daylight a day.
02:02:39 ◼ ► So you're working by gaslight and it turns out that the average age of a typesetter when they died was like 28.
02:02:49 ◼ ► Well, they often, you don't think that that would be like coal mining, like a job that puts you in an early grave, but it was.
02:03:04 ◼ ► And so the typesetters, they would eat at their desks, you know, they would, they would lick their fingers to pull type out because it was easy to pull it out.
02:03:16 ◼ ► A lot of them when electric lights came out, cause they guttered or they flickered and they chose to use kerosene lighting, which asphyxiated them slowly.
02:03:24 ◼ ► They were responsible for typesetting, but also distribution, which was taking the type apart and putting it back in its cubbies.
02:03:30 ◼ ► So they might typeset for eight hours, but then they spend two hours distributing, which they were not paid for.
02:03:37 ◼ ► Then they would go out and drink and they would work six days a week and maybe sleep on a Sunday, maybe.
02:03:50 ◼ ► These stats I got, by the way, these are stats from a book called the swifts, which is an academic press, which is also where I found out about typesetting races.
02:03:57 ◼ ► I think it was by, after the line of types invented, which is a metal or a hot metal system where you just type at a keyboard and, and molds fall down and it casts.
02:04:14 ◼ ► The average death eight raises within a few decades after the line of type to like 43, which are 48.
02:04:32 ◼ ► I mean, I'm just trying to imagine I have, there's a great book called a collation of facts related
02:04:47 ◼ ► It's full of photos with these met photos, sorry, illustrations, line art of men with magnificent facial hair.
02:05:00 ◼ ► I walk in and I said, those images on your wall, those are from a collation of facts related
02:05:11 ◼ ► Well, anyway, thankfully, putting out a second edition of six centuries of type and printing
02:06:23 ◼ ► They can tell the age because as they pull out core sample in a garbage dump, when you get
02:07:16 ◼ ► And I'll try to see what else I can sneak into the book with the extra, the unit cost goes
02:07:48 ◼ ► You took the time to make what could have been a much thicker book shorter by making it concise.