00:01:03 ◼ ► And it's funny, because this is a book, basically, right after we talked last time, I went off on a walk.
00:01:20 ◼ ► And basically, for the last four years, I've been working on this one book, and it's coming out now in two weeks.
00:02:05 ◼ ► Overall, I think the generative stuff, like the photo and video and text generation stuff, is weird and fraught.
00:02:16 ◼ ► But I have a hard time parsing out what is moral or amoral about how this stuff is being used, or how the information's been gleaned, or whatever it's been sucked up from.
00:02:26 ◼ ► It's like obvious, I guess it's been proven that Meta has used a bunch of copyrighted books to train a bunch of their models, right?
00:02:40 ◼ ► And the emails came out that they were more or less, well, we could pay a fortune to license.
00:02:46 ◼ ► Some of these books, but we wouldn't even get as many books as in this pirated trove, or we could just use this pirated trove and deal with the problem later.
00:02:58 ◼ ► Well, and that's what's insane is that I don't even think in the grand scheme of tech it would cost that much money to even license all these books to use.
00:03:05 ◼ ► Like, it'd be whatever, a billion dollars, a couple billion dollars, whatever, just poop that out.
00:03:13 ◼ ► Anyway, it's really weird to me that none of these organizations have been like, hey, what if we made like a really, really above the board thing where everyone was getting compensated properly and yada, yada, all that stuff.
00:03:28 ◼ ► What I do think is profound, and I feel like it's way more morally defensible, is the code generation stuff, just because of all the open source stuff, yada, yada.
00:03:38 ◼ ► And for me, I've been using little drips and drabs of ChatGPT to do a few things, and then I moved over to Anthropics stuff, and I've been using Cloud.
00:03:49 ◼ ► And for me, Cloud Code has been probably one of the most profound computing experiences of my life, using that thing and building software with it.
00:04:03 ◼ ► There's a part of me that's like, what am I giving up by not working through some of these problems on my own or understanding the API interface is better on my own?
00:04:10 ◼ ► But at the same time, I'm building software that, for like my membership program, for example, I built a Twitter clone exactly how I wanted Twitter to be like, because I have all these really strong opinions, like these stupid, these stupid verse-cron text things should act in a certain way.
00:04:26 ◼ ► And I was able to build it in the course of a week or two, and I've been adding features onto it, and it's become this nook of the internet for me.
00:05:00 ◼ ► And there's certain times, like first thing in the morning, you don't want to go into a bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, do, do, do, you know, casino.
00:05:22 ◼ ► I think there are people who could have like a serious meeting in the middle of a noisy cheeseball casino with all the slot machines pinging and ponging and beeping and popping and lights going off all around.
00:06:04 ◼ ► The other thing I don't like about Discord, and I think you, again, I think you'll agree with me.
00:06:14 ◼ ► But to me, every time I like some, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but I'm a member of a couple of things that have discords you get into if you're a member.
00:06:25 ◼ ► And the problem is, even more so than Slack, it feels like when I'm in Discord, I'm in Discord.
00:06:34 ◼ ► I'm not in Craig's Discord, or if I had one, like the Daring Fireball Discord, or whoever else might have one.
00:07:22 ◼ ► If things get more, if older things get replies, the newest reply dictates the expiration date.
00:07:36 ◼ ► You get rid of, I don't know, there's a kind of a, there's sort of a paranoia or like, there's a pathology I think that a lot of us of our generation had around that everything needs to be archived forever on the internet.
00:08:02 ◼ ► And even in the good place, which has been really active, we've got, let's whatever, a few hundred people that post a couple dozen posts a day, maybe a hundred replies a day are going in there.
00:08:26 ◼ ► Actually building it with CloudCode has taught me so much about Flask, which is, I'm doing it on Python, using Flask as kind of the framework.
00:08:34 ◼ ► It's taught me a bunch about Flask, about using SQLite, about all these weird little things, these little quirks.
00:08:39 ◼ ► And the thing is with these, with something like CloudCode, if you don't know what you're doing, it's going to make a bunch of garbage.
00:08:44 ◼ ► So you do have to, you have to know, you have to understand the technical underpinnings of things to guide it.
00:08:51 ◼ ► For me, it just feels like I'm project managing and art directing this thing and all of the kind of hyper detailed API related syntax work I'm offloading to this other party.
00:09:07 ◼ ► There's a lot to unwind there, but I think one of them, and I'm definitely guilty of the, oh, I don't want to delete anything that I've ever put on the internet.
00:09:15 ◼ ► And I've got email that goes back to the nineties, although I, some of it is on hard drives that I don't have plugged in right now.
00:09:30 ◼ ► And I don't know what informed that to me, it's a very Gen X original internet youth mindset.
00:09:39 ◼ ► I definitely don't speak for my generation, but this particular statement probably doesn't either.
00:09:45 ◼ ► But it is something, something all pre-digital media were so precious or, or, or there's so many stories about old films where they were shot on the silver nitrate negatives and they started dissolving and had to be rescaned.
00:10:05 ◼ ► We've lost a bunch of the, the early major Hollywood motion pictures that the actual negatives evaporated or, or disintegrated newspapers were printed on the, or still are printed on cheap paper.
00:10:22 ◼ ► And it's so bananas that I grew up at a time where literally they call it fish wrap, right?
00:10:34 ◼ ► And if you needed to refer back to last week's newspaper, you'd have to like go to the library and they might have, yeah, well maybe like for a couple of weeks or months, they'd still have physical copies.
00:10:53 ◼ ► And I remember doing that for certain like high school reports and certainly in college looking up stuff where, you know, and some dedicated librarian or thousands of them around the world, but at your local library, somebody's job was to shoot the newspaper onto microfilm every, every day or once a week, take a week of newspapers and shoot them onto microfilm.
00:11:25 ◼ ► And that scarcity of historical data where you'd want to be able to look up where so-and-so had done something in 1958 or whatever, and you wish that you could just search for it the way we expect to be able to search for everything today.
00:11:55 ◼ ► That's my mindset is it was so hard to do stuff like that up until the point where everything was digital and could be stored forever in a searchable format that once it became obviously technically possible to do it, therefore, we should do it.
00:12:18 ◼ ► And I think what you're saying and what you've been thinking about for longer than I have is maybe there's some downsides to that mindset.
00:12:30 ◼ ► For some things, I think that's the important distinction to make is there's stuff that should be archived and probably stuff that shouldn't.
00:12:38 ◼ ► But my take is that most social media stuff in aggregate probably doesn't necessarily need to be archived.
00:12:48 ◼ ► Like I remember when Japan had the big earthquake on 311, Twitter was like the repository.
00:12:55 ◼ ► That was where you could kind of re-experience the earthquake in real time for a while.
00:12:59 ◼ ► And I gave a talk where I would show these tweets in real time about how the quake was unfolding.
00:13:06 ◼ ► But again, like how do you tell like in real time what you should be keeping or what you shouldn't be keeping?
00:13:10 ◼ ► Another thing I think our generation grew up with, which maybe the younger generation doesn't experience as much, is we lost data.
00:13:25 ◼ ► But some of the most like potently traumatic were like a hard drive failing and then realizing I lost all my NC art or my BBS settings or whatever, something like that.
00:13:34 ◼ ► So I think there's that element, too, where I mean, I don't know about your backup solutions.
00:13:42 ◼ ► I've got I've got I've got like Syracuse has talked about this, too, where where we definitely have the digital equivalent of what I thought with my grandparents was the food scarcity mindset.
00:13:55 ◼ ► I was going to say, yeah, it's like the Dust Bowl generation of data hoarding or whatever.
00:14:11 ◼ ► And so whenever I'm thinking about should these newsletters be archived or should this stuff online be archived, my archive is to take whatever was the best of that set of things.
00:14:22 ◼ ► So if I do a big walk and I'd make a newsletter out of that, that doesn't need to be archived online because ideally I'm going to take that.
00:14:33 ◼ ► I'm going to put the best version of whatever that was into a book and I'm going to distribute thousands of books around the world.
00:14:39 ◼ ► I kind of see that almost as like my forcing function to get me to really look at what I've made digitally and go, okay, what deserves to kind of live on a little bit longer than the bits might live.
00:14:48 ◼ ► There is, again, not to make it political, but it comes up again and again in politics and government affairs like preservation of communications.
00:14:59 ◼ ► And the current affairs political aspect is this goofy use of signal in the Trump administration for defense stuff.
00:15:10 ◼ ► But there is, and God bless his soul, my pal and dithering co-host, Ben Thompson, when this signal thing first came up, he really threw me off.
00:15:27 ◼ ► And when he took this angle, it really threw me off mid-episode and it wrong-footed me.
00:15:37 ◼ ► But it was an interesting angle and I think, you know, not to put words in his mouth, but basically grown adults right now expect to be able to text each other conveniently on a device they have with them all the time.
00:15:52 ◼ ► And the argument against using signal is, oh, if you're the secretary of defense or you're the secretary of state or any of the people who were in this, they travel with an entourage of professional people.
00:16:07 ◼ ► And if they need to have a secure conversation with other people who are cleared for this stuff, they can set up a, like, I don't know, some kind of temporary secure room with secure communication to other people.
00:16:24 ◼ ► But on the other hand, if you're just a grown-ass adult today, don't you expect to be able to text people?
00:16:30 ◼ ► And again, I'm not defending what they texted and the details of it or adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic or whatever.
00:16:39 ◼ ► But there is sort of a, hey, shouldn't we just be able to talk even if we're not in the same room?
00:16:47 ◼ ► We should be able to have a temporary conversation that's not on the record forever, you know?
00:16:57 ◼ ► That the only way that people should be able to have a conversation that's not recorded forever is to be in the same physical space?
00:17:10 ◼ ► I mean, I think the weirdest thing about that, what was happening there and, like, putting aside whether they should be doing it on Signal or not, is the kind of, because of the leaks, you saw, I guess, the informality of the language around killing was so, that to me is the most depressing part of it.
00:17:34 ◼ ► Like, no one, none of us are in such a position that, like, we should be able to send a really dumb text and be like, YOLO, America first or whatever.
00:17:49 ◼ ► And that there should be, I love, there's this, I forget, listeners can Google it, but there's this thing where someone proposed that the only way a president should be able to send a nuke is that the nuke codes are embedded in a capsule in the chest of someone.
00:18:06 ◼ ► And they have to cut open the chest and dig them out with their hand to get the code so that they have to experience murder viscerally in order to be able to push a button to kill a million people on the other side of the world.
00:18:18 ◼ ► And I think maybe that's part of what feels so uncomfortable about using a chat app and being, using chat language, too, around war.
00:18:33 ◼ ► But it is, there is, there is a certain, and there, there has been for a very long time.
00:18:38 ◼ ► And I, when everybody thought Nixon was the worst president we ever had, there were all sorts of, once you start abstracting human lives and, and making these policy decisions where you're not really thinking, hey, if we send all these bombs to, and drop all these bombs in this country,
00:19:06 ◼ ► And, and you just start thinking about it more like you're playing a game of risk, a board game.
00:19:14 ◼ ► I get the argument that from a strategic viewpoint, that is sort of how you plan a war, but you can lose yourself in the abstraction and lose the humanity of what you're doing.
00:19:25 ◼ ► And just communicating in these terms through a commercial app like Signal on your phone just sort of takes it up a level, right?
00:19:38 ◼ ► It's like the ratchet has moved up a level of flippancy on, on, on a subject matter that no matter who the target of the action is, or how deserving or justified the military action might be.
00:19:56 ◼ ► The tone and the tenor and the nature of the medium itself just feels completely inappropriate.
00:20:03 ◼ ► And when people complain about government inefficiency, I mean, the inefficiency is there for a purpose, right?
00:20:20 ◼ ► And so you want things to kind of go slowly when decisions like this are being made, you know?
00:20:25 ◼ ► It's like there's a, I would say the existence of people with the amounts of money that folks like Musk or Bezos have is a bug in the system, right?
00:20:34 ◼ ► There's an argument to be made that was unforeseeable that people could accumulate that much wealth.
00:20:39 ◼ ► And the reason why you sort of don't want people to have that much wealth is because we are all so fallible.
00:20:43 ◼ ► There's not a single person out there who you can give essentially the ring of power to or whatever, and then they will definitely consistently operate from a good place, right?
00:20:54 ◼ ► And so anyway, it just feels like the government thing too, when you, when you start to get to these kind of really low stakes abstractions, seemingly low stakes on the point, from the point of view of the people doing the texting or whatever, it just, it just starts to veer into a dangerous zone where you're like,
00:21:25 ◼ ► If you are building a B2B software as a service app, at some point, your customers are going to start asking for enterprise features like SAML, authentication, SCIM,
00:21:43 ◼ ► They, they put a note for me who mispronounces everything that they just, if you know what it means, you know, it's called SCIM, SCIM provisioning, role-based access controls, audit trails, et cetera.
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00:23:02 ◼ ► Just go to WorkOS.com and maybe at some point in the signup process, they'll say, where'd you hear about it?
00:23:12 ◼ ► So the coding thing, I want to go back to this, where you've been using, and I've been sticking with chat GPT just because it's like, I don't know where else to go.
00:23:23 ◼ ► And not that I don't know where else to go, but that there's such a plethora of possible solutions.
00:23:29 ◼ ► And I get it that some people think Claude is better at coding, and it might be, but all of it, I feel like there are, well, like everything, there are zealots on both ends.
00:23:41 ◼ ► There are people who are people who are like, this is the future, the whole vibe coding thing.
00:23:53 ◼ ► And there's people on the other side who don't want to say, especially with the programming aspect, I am continuously, each step of the way, and I'm way behind some people, like the people who are just throwing it all in.
00:24:14 ◼ ► But I've been using it more and more for the little script-type things that I write and program, and I'm continuously blown away by it, but I'm also continuously uncomfortable.
00:24:26 ◼ ► Because I've sort of got it in my head from the youngest possible age I can remember, when I first fell in love with computers, that knowing how to program computers is a skill you should be proud of.
00:24:42 ◼ ► And it's something, not that I'm not best known for being a programmer, but I have a computer science degree.
00:24:49 ◼ ► And it's part of my idea of myself, that this is a skill and a mindset that I have, an aptitude that I have, that most people don't have.
00:25:01 ◼ ► I've written about it many, many times on Daring Fireball, and in a particular context of AppleScript in particular, which was this attempt to make, and, you know, HyperCard, which was sort of used a scripting language called HyperTalk that was very similar to AppleScript.
00:25:17 ◼ ► But the idea was to use a more English-like language for computer programming, that that was the problem that was keeping more people.
00:25:27 ◼ ► Like, there was this mindset in the 80s, even into the 90s, more people should be programming.
00:25:36 ◼ ► And it turns out, I think, most people don't really want to program computers or didn't have the aptitude.
00:25:42 ◼ ► And the ability to do it, again, it sounds, I hate to say it, but it made me feel special.
00:25:53 ◼ ► It turns out that these AI things are way better programmers than I have ever been or could be.
00:26:01 ◼ ► I could practice programming for the rest of my life, or I could have devoted my life to it instead of writing, and I'd never be as fast or as good as any of these things are at computer programming.
00:26:12 ◼ ► And it's very strange, because it used to seem like programming was something way fewer people could do, and it was a better sign of intelligence than verbal language.
00:26:35 ◼ ► So I think a lot of people, when the digital photography shift was happening, felt this as well.
00:26:43 ◼ ► I look at Ansel Adams' exposure techniques and metering and all this stuff and kind of digital photography.
00:26:53 ◼ ► So before digital photography, you'd go with your plates, you'd try to meter, you'd try to set things up, try to figure out, calculate, you'd have to do math, basically.
00:27:05 ◼ ► And then it could be weeks later, it could be hours later, it could be whatever, it could be months later that you actually then do the developing, and then you see the result, and you've got a notebook full of little details about what did I do when I was looking at Yosemite's, this thing or that.
00:27:18 ◼ ► And so I think for people who went through that, when digital came around, it was like, oh my God, you're missing out.
00:27:24 ◼ ► You need to kind of struggle through the math of photography, of thinking about exposures like this, yada, yada, yada.
00:27:31 ◼ ► And in the end, did digital photography, well, first of all, it didn't kill film photography.
00:27:36 ◼ ► In fact, film photography now is, it tried to kill film photography, and now film photography is now weirdly stronger than I think it's been in the last 25 years.
00:27:50 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, there's new film cameras coming out, but if you talk to anyone under 30 who is a quote-unquote serious photographer, nobody shoots digital.
00:28:00 ◼ ► Anyway, so I think that's an interesting just tech example of something that sort of made a lot of skills obsolete and yet didn't kill the medium.
00:28:09 ◼ ► Well, don't you think we should take a step further back, though, before photography existed and consider illustration and painting and what film photography did to being a painter or illustrator?
00:28:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and it used to be that there were very few people on the face of the earth who had a permanent likeness of them that they could refer to.
00:28:37 ◼ ► Just one, just one, just one painting or portrait of them at any one age, at age 18 or age 30 or age whatever, just one.
00:28:52 ◼ ► Very few people, you know, up until the advent of photography could say that there was a likeness of them captured on canvas or any other medium.
00:29:10 ◼ ► It's like the power of painting is still present and seen as a special, even more of a special, fine art activity.
00:29:19 ◼ ► I think another example is that despite the fact that our iPhones and the video capabilities of these iPhones are rivaling, to a certain degree, what you would have gotten out of a Hollywood camera 40 years ago or 30 years ago or whatever, like certainly digitally, right?
00:29:37 ◼ ► And the fact that we are not seeing a massive glut of incredible iPhone films suddenly and all these, there's not a thousand Tarantinos out there.
00:29:47 ◼ ► So I think there's just something, I think this speaks less to the availability of tools and making things easier to produce or like lowering the bar to things and more to, I think we have a fundamental issue with education in general.
00:30:06 ◼ ► And so the AI programming stuff to me also doesn't feel like suddenly, okay, now everyone's going to be making their own software.
00:30:18 ◼ ► I've grown up programming, doing technical stuff has always been a part of my identity.
00:30:22 ◼ ► Being able to drop into terminal and know what I'm doing was, yeah, that's like a point of pride.
00:30:25 ◼ ► But I would argue that it's folks like us who can take the most advantage of these tools.
00:30:45 ◼ ► And you kind of like, okay, things as it goes through, and then you can edit in whatever using VS code or NeoVim or whatever.
00:30:52 ◼ ► You're in kind of conversation with this thing in a way that feels really interface wise intuitive.
00:30:56 ◼ ► I think this is just sort of self-evident, but human brains don't work like computers exactly.
00:31:11 ◼ ► And I often say to people, like, I don't know what I would have done for a living 100 years ago or more.
00:31:20 ◼ ► And I've often said there's a part of me for, at some point in the last few hundred years, I might have been a watchmaker.
00:31:27 ◼ ► That there is a sort of algorithmic mindset to the way clocks and watches work that appeals to me very greatly.
00:31:37 ◼ ► I think even though they are not digital devices, and it's part of what I like about wristwatches in today's world, they do sort of work like that, but in a mechanical sense, right?
00:31:50 ◼ ► But it's like if you have a spring that has this much energy and it expands at this rate and this gear turns at this rate, it'll turn this other gear and it'll make this happen and this will happen.
00:32:08 ◼ ► And because most humans' brains don't work that way, computer programming languages just don't seem natural or understandable to most people.
00:32:21 ◼ ► It's a way of computer languages, everyone, even the most friendly ones like Python, I'll just cite as probably the sort of most syntactically pleasing.
00:32:51 ◼ ► But even those languages, you could show the source code to a well-written Python or Ruby program to most people and with good variable names and good class names and subroutine names.
00:33:05 ◼ ► They could kind of follow along in their language-ish, but it's still to be able to write it, you kind of have to put your mind in this mindset.
00:33:14 ◼ ► And these AI systems, because they are computers, it's like, oh, that rigid structure of these languages is so much easier for them than to produce actual just English.
00:33:34 ◼ ► It's just an inversion of what it means to be intelligent that it's very hard for me to come to grips with.
00:33:41 ◼ ► And I still find myself thinking that I should, you can see me here on video, I'm putting dick quotes around should, that I should be writing code myself because it's like good posture and brushing your teeth every morning.
00:33:57 ◼ ► Before you go to bed and flossing once a day and do, you know, you should write your own code.
00:34:19 ◼ ► I wanted a space that was like kind of a community space that I wouldn't have to manage.
00:34:38 ◼ ► It's like, it's like 10,000, maybe not 10,000, but it's like 5,000 lines of code that I just
00:34:46 ◼ ► And but at the same time, there is no normal person who has never dropped into terminal before
00:35:03 ◼ ► What's atrophying in my brain by not doing the kind of grunt work of sitting in the functions,
00:35:08 ◼ ► writing the functions, making sure that I know exactly how everything's moving beneath the
00:35:29 ◼ ► And I, whenever I go to have to edit CSS, I just feel like I'm dropping into my happy place.
00:35:33 ◼ ► And actually I have this aura ring and the biggest thing I found with the aura ring, aside
00:35:37 ◼ ► from the sleep tracking stuff is great, but looking at the stress graphs throughout the
00:35:43 ◼ ► And when you drop into, there's a, there's a range called restorative, which is when your
00:35:47 ◼ ► heart rate drops, your breathing drops, you're not asleep, but you're in this, you're in this
00:36:10 ◼ ► I want to kind of understand what's happening with them so I can comment on them with some
00:36:18 ◼ ► And Claude Code is interesting enough, I think from an interface point of view and how it kind
00:36:37 ◼ ► It feels like this is one of these things where maybe there won't be an infinite number of
00:36:42 ◼ ► them, but it would be bad if, it's just bad for everybody or for society in general if one
00:37:06 ◼ ► And for the definition of AGI that investors care about or that these people who think it
00:37:12 ◼ ► might happen care about, which is what happens if one of these systems becomes smart enough
00:37:17 ◼ ► to be able to make the next version of itself and can do it a thousand or 10,000 times faster
00:37:26 ◼ ► All of a sudden that one system will clearly jump out ahead of everybody else and nobody
00:38:01 ◼ ► I only, here's the thing is I, I said to you, like, I don't even know which one of these
00:38:07 ◼ ► apps to open to use to, Hey, I want to write a script that I have this idea for a program
00:38:15 ◼ ► Even if I just say, I'm going to use chat GPT because I like the Mac app, which is really
00:38:21 ◼ ► the main reason I use chat GPT is that, but I don't know which one of the models to pick
00:39:02 ◼ ► where like somebody like you or me is writing very precise English to direct Claude to do
00:39:12 ◼ ► Like when you're, when you're doing this, you're not just like looking off to the side and you're
00:39:21 ◼ ► being very precise in your instructions of what you want out of it to make, to write the program.
00:39:30 ◼ ► That you could just sort of describe what you want in regular English, which is native to
00:39:47 ◼ ► So I use Alford as my launcher and you know, you can tie scripts into Alford launch things
00:40:07 ◼ ► Like if you have to collaborate with anyone on anything with a, about a text and need edits
00:40:30 ◼ ► There are certain things that are annoying, but I find the benefits are pretty, pretty big.
00:40:34 ◼ ► So anyway, so the other day I was like, what can't I just use the API and in Alford, just
00:40:42 ◼ ► And then the first few characters of a title of one of my Google docs that I know I want
00:40:49 ◼ ► And yeah, in, in three minutes, I had that script built with chat CPT and, but I could see
00:41:04 ◼ ► Giving it in the age of these LLMs, giving it like another breath of like superpower life
00:41:21 ◼ ► And I thought, ah, we're going to talk about so much stuff and I always go long, so I'm
00:41:25 ◼ ► not going to bring it up, but you brought it up, but I'm a launch bar guy, not an Alfred
00:41:38 ◼ ► So Quicksilver was sort of the first like command space, type something, tab into an action.
00:41:44 ◼ ► And I feel like the misconception that so many people who don't use any of these tools use
00:41:52 ◼ ► is they're familiar now with Spotlight, that Spotlight, and again, it's close to 20 years
00:41:57 ◼ ► where it's been built into Mac OS, where you type command space and the name of text and text
00:42:08 ◼ ► And they think of them as launchers and some people call the app category launchers, but
00:42:21 ◼ ► It's, it's that you can have these actions that come built in with Alfred and launch bar and
00:42:27 ◼ ► then the up and comer is Raycast, but you can, and if there's three things that you really
00:42:44 ◼ ► And it's one of those things, again, it comes back to why I hope open AI doesn't dominate
00:42:52 ◼ ► the way Google search has dominated search, where I feel like one of the things that makes
00:42:57 ◼ ► the Mac great is we have three or four of these launcher command space utilities that are all
00:43:04 ◼ ► great. And if one of them went away of launch bar, just if they announced a, we're dropping
00:43:09 ◼ ► support for the next version of Mac OS, you have to move on. I know that I can move to Alfred
00:43:14 ◼ ► or Raycast and I'd be disrupted in some, some way, but overall it's like, how great is it that we have
00:43:23 ◼ ► three or four of these apps that are absolutely terrific and nothing like that is technically
00:43:30 ◼ ► even possible on iPad or iPhone. Yeah. But I, I wrote a, cause I've been, I had him on my show a couple
00:43:38 ◼ ► months ago, Vlad, uh, Prilovic, the founder of Kagi, the search engine. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I use that.
00:43:46 ◼ ► I think you got me onto that. That's been, so you're using it. Yeah. Because of you kind of
00:43:51 ◼ ► saying, Hey, I use it. I started using it a couple of years ago. I've got a Kagi t-shirt that I wear to
00:43:56 ◼ ► bed sometimes. Well, but I, but I launched most of my web searches through launch bar, not Safari,
00:44:04 ◼ ► because I'm, I may not be in Safari at the time. I just want to hit command space K and I'm in Kagi
00:44:10 ◼ ► and start typing my search and launch bar makes it super easy. The way that every browser other than
00:44:18 ◼ ► Safari lets you add a custom search engine with just a sort of a URL with an asterisk as the placeholder
00:44:25 ◼ ► for the search terms. Launch bar does that too. And that's what I've been using for Kagi for years.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And I thought, wow, but I would love to have like auto suggest. So like if I start typing
00:44:35 ◼ ► Craig space M and it fills in Craig mod and maybe the kissa by kissa or something like that.
00:44:43 ◼ ► And I thought, Oh, well I, I, I know launch, I've never written an action and I should have,
00:44:49 ◼ ► I've been using it for 20 years and I love to write scripts and stuff like that. And I was like,
00:44:54 ◼ ► I bet I could use AI to help me. I'll use like open AI or something like that. And it turns out to make
00:45:00 ◼ ► the action. I only needed two lines of JavaScript. So I didn't need AI. It was literally two lines.
00:45:06 ◼ ► And I, then I thought to myself, what I really learned how to make these actions for launch bar.
00:45:11 ◼ ► I found this, the exact same thing. It's like a lot of these little scripts I'm building are so
00:45:16 ◼ ► tiny and easy. I made one the other day. I keep a text file called you're not a piece of shit.md.
00:45:21 ◼ ► Anytime someone sends me a nice message or a nice email, I copy it. And then I add it to the bottom of
00:45:34 ◼ ► which is like nice to see that number grow. But it was always a pain in the ass to open it,
00:45:38 ◼ ► paste it in the bottom, put a couple of spaces, add four dashes. And so I was like, I wonder if I could
00:45:44 ◼ ► just do a quick little Alfred thing. And now I can, I open Alfred, I just type not shit, hit enter,
00:45:50 ◼ ► and it takes whatever's in my clipboard and it pastes it onto the bottom of the text file. And it was
00:45:55 ◼ ► like two of the stupidest, simplest Unix commands ever. It's like PB copy, whatever, less than sign,
00:46:01 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah. Anyway. Yeah. These things aren't complicated, but the AI removes that stupid wall
00:46:10 ◼ ► Yeah. There's like, I don't know, some kind of Unix punctuation command line thing to prepend to a text
00:46:17 ◼ ► file. And then there's a different sequence of characters to append to a text file. And every
00:46:29 ◼ ► why even worry about the fact that you forget it? You can just ask the AI and it'll, it'll come up with
00:46:35 ◼ ► it. And, and, and, and it really is this massive relief. It is, Oh, it's like, here's the memory I
00:46:49 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, going back to your point about like whether one
00:46:55 ◼ ► company will win or not, and we don't want that. I think to me, one of the hopeful lights on the
00:47:00 ◼ ► horizon is the fact that these open models are actually so good that you can, and I have a maxed
00:47:05 ◼ ► out MacBook pro so I can run a lot of these big open models. And I do every now and then I'll,
00:47:11 ◼ ► you know, the old llama thing, get that going, download a model, see how it works on my, on my
00:47:15 ◼ ► local laptop. To me, I think we're getting pretty close to where almost all this programming stuff
00:47:20 ◼ ► that I'm doing now could be done with one of these local models. Certainly all the stuff we're talking
00:47:26 ◼ ► about right now in terms of like shell scripts and little JavaScript things and all that, but also
00:47:31 ◼ ► translation. I mean, all this is language. And the other thing that these models shine with is,
00:47:35 ◼ ► is translation. So I'm constantly going between Japanese and English. And I find that I use it a lot.
00:47:45 ◼ ► dump it into one of these things and I say, Hey, can you make this, make me sound a little
00:47:49 ◼ ► less nudnicky? And then it corrects it. And it reminds me, Oh, that's right. We can use these
00:47:53 ◼ ► verbs and we're doing these formal things. Oh, this is too formal. So I'll dial that back a little,
00:47:57 ◼ ► but anything language related, these things, these models are so powerful with, and I think we're,
00:48:02 ◼ ► we're very, very close. I mean, like a year or two away from most of this stuff running locally
00:48:07 ◼ ► on a maxed out apple chip. And that, that gives me hope that there isn't going to be one dominating
00:48:13 ◼ ► force in the universe. Yeah. All right. Hold that thought. Let me take a break here. Thank our next
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00:48:46 ◼ ► decaffeinated blends as a side project. They have one or two or something like that. Decaf has made it
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00:48:59 ◼ ► coffee. It's, it's probably the single most consistent thing in my entire life, which is that,
00:49:05 ◼ ► and I was trying to think the other day when I wrote my thank you to them, when was the last day
00:49:11 ◼ ► that I did not drink coffee? And even 14 years ago, I had surgery on my hand because I cut a tendon in
00:49:20 ◼ ► a finger, but I had to go to the doctor. I went to the ER the night before and they said, go to this
00:49:26 ◼ ► doctor at Jefferson hospital. And I went there and they got me an appointment first thing in the morning
00:49:31 ◼ ► and it was great. And I went there with coffee in my hand and my surgeon who turned out to be my
00:49:37 ◼ ► surgeon took, he was like, Hey, he's like, what's, what's in this coffee? Do you drink it black? And
00:49:41 ◼ ► I was like, yeah, I just drink black. And he was like, okay, good. Cause we could do cert, you know,
00:49:44 ◼ ► if you haven't had any milk, we could do surgery on you at noon. So even the day I had surgery on my
00:49:49 ◼ ► hand, I had coffee at like eight in the morning. I drink coffee every day. I love caffeinated coffee.
00:49:57 ◼ ► But the other thing is I used to always make coffee. I make a second, like a half size batch in the
00:50:02 ◼ ► afternoons. And I got into my forties and it's sort of started screwing up my sleep and I gave it up.
00:50:10 ◼ ► I really, really enjoy decaf blends. They sent me a couple. They also, in addition to their fully
00:50:17 ◼ ► decaffeinated blends, they have these half to 50% decaffeinated blends, which is what I've been
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00:50:51 ◼ ► I do love cold brew coffee. And also that's sort of like my afternoon jam, like even in the summer,
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00:51:25 ◼ ► more of my jam, but maybe you're a single origin person, but you know, that's 15 styles of regular
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00:52:08 ◼ ► same. I, I, during COVID, I realized I was having panic attacks and I thought it was because of like COVID and the end of the
00:52:14 ◼ ► world, but it was just because I was brewing way more coffee than I normally did. Cause I was stuck at
00:52:18 ◼ ► home. Yeah. And I was bored. Yeah. I was definitely doing it. I was making like a second pot of coffee.
00:52:22 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. So I had to, I, yeah, yeah. I had to module. I had to learn. I was like, Oh my God,
00:52:29 ◼ ► I have a limit now. And again, maybe it's this over 40 thing, but I have a limit of how much caffeine I can
00:52:33 ◼ ► take in a day. But like you, I really love drinking coffee. So actually decaf, I don't think they shipped to
00:52:39 ◼ ► Japan, which is very depressing, but I'm going to try to pick some up. We'll have to look at, we'll
00:52:44 ◼ ► have to look into this world tour, this world tour I'm about to head off on. But I, in general, I love
00:52:48 ◼ ► that decaf coffee is kind of be becoming a, a real thing. People are kind of looking at it again. It's
00:52:54 ◼ ► great. I, I, I, again, the sponsor reads over, but I have to say, I just, I I'm 52 now, but I, I've, I think
00:53:01 ◼ ► I've had before they sponsored, I think I had three cups of decaffeinated coffee in my life.
00:53:09 ◼ ► And I think at least two of them were by mistake where I was like, Hey, is this like decaf? And
00:53:15 ◼ ► they're like, Oh yeah, sorry. And yeah. Whereas decaf's coffee actually tastes really good. So
00:53:26 ◼ ► All right. So to return to what we were talking about before we started talking about decaf,
00:53:31 ◼ ► part of this whole, I don't want to go totally sideways talking about Siri and Apple, but part
00:53:37 ◼ ► of the whole contrempt, whatever we wanted to call the controversy over the last six weeks
00:53:43 ◼ ► of, Hey, some of the stuff Apple promised last year, isn't going to ship this year. And Hey,
00:53:50 ◼ ► Apple's sort of having their, Hey, we, we actually have to do something about the fact that Siri sucks
00:53:57 ◼ ► and everybody can kind of see it now because these other things don't suck. Right. You can
00:54:06 ◼ ► give these plain English commands to these other systems and they understand you and they do their
00:54:15 ◼ ► best. And again, people, they can hallucinate or have you, have you had this with coding where every
00:54:21 ◼ ► once in a while, like I was coding programming something and maybe it's because I personally
00:54:27 ◼ ► lean towards Pearl, which is the language I'm most familiar with. But I was writing a script like a
00:54:33 ◼ ► week ago and chat GPT effectively hallucinated a module, like an open source module that I could use
00:54:42 ◼ ► to do a thing. And I was like, I don't think that exists. Cause I went to CPAN, the comprehensive Pearl
00:54:49 ◼ ► archive, the thing where you download all the open source things. And there was no module with
00:54:55 ◼ ► that name, but the code that it gave me would have been the perfect API for the thing I wanted to do.
00:55:02 ◼ ► And I said, I don't think that exists. And it was like, Oh, you're right. It doesn't exist. Sorry
00:55:06 ◼ ► about that. And it moves on. But again, if you kind of know what you're doing, you'll catch it. Like
00:55:12 ◼ ► you don't just blindly copy and paste, you copy paste, use double check and you figure it out,
00:55:18 ◼ ► you know? Well, and, and with the code, it's instantly verifiable, right? It's like, you try
00:55:22 ◼ ► to run it. It doesn't work. You're like, okay. Right. That's, that's the other thing that's always
00:55:27 ◼ ► been so beautiful to me about computers. Right. And it works or it doesn't. Right. It's, and it's why
00:55:35 ◼ ► using these systems in these early days to write computer programs sort of really works because it
00:55:44 ◼ ► gives you code, then you copy and paste, you make the code. And then does it actually do the thing you
00:55:49 ◼ ► wanted it to do or not? Yeah. Well, look, I think, I think with the series stuff, they are just way
00:55:56 ◼ ► overthinking this and you just create the most bounded, simple set of, of actions within which
00:56:03 ◼ ► you can, you can do things with, with Siri, like all the home kit related stuff. So turning on lights,
00:56:09 ◼ ► turning off lights, setting timers, asking dates, stuff like that. All there's, there's a, there's
00:56:12 ◼ ► like probably a hundred commands for the most basic commands. And you just force the LLM to stay within
00:56:17 ◼ ► those bounds and that's it. And just make those work well. Right. That would, that would 99% of the
00:56:22 ◼ ► way get Siri to a sane place. Right. Right. So that, that to me is really weird. And I was thinking
00:56:28 ◼ ► about it the other day. I was like, I don't think there's a single piece of technology that has created
00:56:33 ◼ ► more aggregate frustration than Siri. Just if you think about the number of people who've sworn at a
00:56:39 ◼ ► device, because like that Larry David thing in the, in whatever the last. Curb your enthusiasm. Yeah.
00:56:45 ◼ ► Last curb season. Where he was trying to get driving directions. It's like, I don't think there's
00:56:54 ◼ ► Apple Siri devices. But we just ran into it here because Amy made a whole bunch of stuff
00:57:00 ◼ ► for our family Easter feast over the weekend. And she was setting timers, multiple timers for
00:57:09 ◼ ► multiple things that she was baking. And at one point she had a cake in the oven and said,
00:57:17 ◼ ► Hey, dingus, how much time is left on the timer? And it said, there is, there are no timers.
00:57:22 ◼ ► Yeah. Or, or my favorite is my favorite is when you ask her how much time is left and then it
00:57:27 ◼ ► cancels the timer. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That might've been what happened. I don't know. But the worst part
00:57:34 ◼ ► is, well, for me, the worst part is her anger goes towards me because I'm not that I made Siri, but I'm
00:57:43 ◼ ► the nerd who brought Siri into our kitchen. Right. And so therefore it's my fault. And the cake turned
00:57:49 ◼ ► out perfect because, but she had to kind of eyeball it from that point forward because she didn't know how
00:57:55 ◼ ► long it had been in. Yeah. And just kind of had to open the oven and sort of stick. Like, I don't know what she was
00:58:01 ◼ ► putting in there like a fork or something to sort of test how done it was, but she was so mad. And I know she tried
00:58:08 ◼ ► to set the timer, right? Well, I mean, there's no doubt that she wouldn't have remembered the moment she put the
00:58:14 ◼ ► raw cake batter into the oven. She definitely set a timer, but it telling her there is no timer. There are no open
00:58:21 ◼ ► timers. And my heart sunk because I was right there. And I was like, oh, I'm in for it now. Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:28 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, in the Wayne Ma information report on Apple putting Siri under Mike Rockwell's leadership,
00:58:36 ◼ ► moving Rockwell from Vision to Siri and having him report directly to Craig Federighi and seemingly
00:58:43 ◼ ► giving him carte blanche to do whatever it takes to make Siri good is one of the nuggets was that
00:58:51 ◼ ► Federighi has apparently instructed his staff that if they need to use open source LLM systems to do what
00:59:00 ◼ ► they want to do it, do whatever it takes. If it includes using open source LLMs, don't worry. Whereas
00:59:08 ◼ ► before that the directive was you can only use Apple's own systems to make Apple's products. Yeah. And
00:59:16 ◼ ► it's sort of a throwaway line in a non-technical article. So I understand why it isn't technical, but
00:59:25 ◼ ► my mind races to, well, what exactly does that mean? And which open source LLMs are you talking about?
00:59:32 ◼ ► And to me, one of the things is sort of based on something you mentioned like half an hour ago,
00:59:38 ◼ ► where it's like the moral or ethical quandaries over how these things were trained, right? So it's not
00:59:45 ◼ ► just like, oh, are we going to include this open source LLM as an executable thing on people's devices,
00:59:53 ◼ ► or is it just something they're using to train their own system on their end? And then the output comes out
01:00:02 ◼ ► of it. And because one of the ways to train new LLMs is to use existing LLMs to provide the training
01:00:16 ◼ ► Yeah, that feels like a weird. Again, I think they're just overthinking this stuff. They don't
01:00:20 ◼ ► need Siri to answer every possible question in the world. It just needs to do basic fundamental stuff
01:00:26 ◼ ► on the device, within the boundaries, within the domain that they know they control. Like this Siri
01:00:32 ◼ ► LLM should be the literal easiest LLM in the world to produce and get working right. And they shouldn't
01:00:38 ◼ ► have to use an open source LLM. And they should be able to train their own and know exactly what's in
01:00:41 ◼ ► the black box. Because that's the other thing is like, these things are such black boxes. You can't
01:00:45 ◼ ► an open source LLM. It's not like you can open up and see where it all came from. So you get into the
01:00:50 ◼ ► ethical issues again there. It's very strange. This mainly to me just makes me feel like there's some
01:00:54 ◼ ► fundamental management issues at Apple now. And maybe we've been feeling it in the cracks of software
01:00:59 ◼ ► for a while. And I think iPadOS is another great example of feels to be like someone is not steering the
01:01:04 ◼ ► ship quite as strongly as it used to be. And I don't want to say like, oh, Steve Jobs is the only
01:01:09 ◼ ► person who can ever do any of this stuff right. But there does seem to be a bit of a mess in taste
01:01:15 ◼ ► around software. Like Apple Music on macOS is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used in my
01:01:22 ◼ ► entire life. I opened it up because I'm an Apple Music subscriber because Spotify didn't come to Japan
01:01:27 ◼ ► until late. And so Apple Music got me first. And nothing brings me less joy than using that app on my
01:01:34 ◼ ► Mac. It just there's so many broken pieces to it. And it drives me nuts. And it just makes me feel
01:01:41 ◼ ► like no one inside of Apple ever uses it or cares about it. Because if anyone did, if anyone who is
01:01:46 ◼ ► an executive there used Apple Music and really, really cared about it, there's no way they could
01:01:53 ◼ ► It's a good example. And it is sort of an interesting, slow boiling frog example where there was never a,
01:02:04 ◼ ► oh, that's the year 2013 where they threw out all the old code and started a new thing. No, it's been this
01:02:13 ◼ ► continuous evolution from iTunes, which used to be Sound Jam before Apple bought it. And you, the original
01:02:21 ◼ ► version of iTunes, you could kind of see some of the Sound Jam roots in there. And it was a great app
01:02:27 ◼ ► that we loved and deservedly so, right? Like when iTunes 1.0 came out, it was such a great app. And
01:02:35 ◼ ► we could quibble about the brushed metal interface as an aesthetic thing. But in terms of...
01:02:46 ◼ ► Yeah, right. Yeah. But it was just a great app. And it was like, oh, but I have 10,000 songs or I have
01:02:54 ◼ ► 20,000 songs. It's like, no, just throw, put them all in your music folder. iTunes will be able to deal
01:03:00 ◼ ► with it. I've never heard of anybody back in the day, 25 years ago, who had too many MP3 files for
01:03:08 ◼ ► iTunes to handle, right? It was great at enormous libraries. It was great at building playlists. It was
01:03:15 ◼ ► great for the common scenario of, I really only listened to the same 100 songs over and over again.
01:03:21 ◼ ► It had the cool visualizations. It had so many cool things and people... And it was scriptable. So nerds
01:03:28 ◼ ► like us could write scripts or LaunchBar or Alfred, which wasn't around at the time, but something like
01:03:34 ◼ ► Alfred or whatever. You could write little commands that would skip to the next song or something like
01:03:40 ◼ ► that. Everything was great. And then it just slowly got worse and worse and worse. And somehow we wound
01:03:49 ◼ ► up here where even just resizing the window feels janky, right? It's like, even when you just resize the
01:03:57 ◼ ► Apple Music app on macOS now, it's like, or just resize the column from the sidebar to the main window.
01:04:04 ◼ ► It's just the way the selection moves around. It's like, all of this feels janky. How did we get
01:04:12 ◼ ► And I do. I feel like it's another example, though, of what we were talking about with open AI and a fear
01:04:20 ◼ ► of, well, what if only one LLM type system takes over and everything else is sort of the equivalent of
01:04:27 ◼ ► what Google is to search. And I feel like Apple is that too tasteful UI. And I kind of feel like an awful
01:04:38 ◼ ► lot of what smart critics of Apple's current software problems, what it boils down to is which
01:04:50 ◼ ► perspective you're looking at. Is this, are these critiques accurate? Is this app janky? Is this
01:04:58 ◼ ► buggy? Yes, yes, yes. This is all correct. But from the other perspective, which is where I think
01:05:05 ◼ ► Apple's leadership looks at it from, is it better than anything else out there? And their answer is
01:05:11 ◼ ► yes. And so therefore, what's the problem? Right? None of this stuff makes me want to switch to Android
01:05:17 ◼ ► at all. And I have an Android phone and I look at it and none of it's better there. The problem is
01:05:27 ◼ ► Yeah. Recently in the last maybe year or so, I've thought more and more about grabbing a framework
01:05:33 ◼ ► laptop and just seeing how that feels to use and throwing Ubuntu on there and just seeing where it is.
01:05:40 ◼ ► Again, to feel like the pain of polish of Mac versus not the polish of Linux or whatever.
01:05:44 ◼ ► But it's the first time in a long time I've felt like maybe, you know, having a system where
01:05:49 ◼ ► everything, especially with LLMs being able to do a lot of the heavy lifting around configuration or
01:05:54 ◼ ► whatever, maybe we are at this moment where Linux and being able to like just super dial in this thing
01:05:59 ◼ ► like a glove made perfectly for your hand as a system might be a closer reality. But yeah,
01:06:05 ◼ ► Apple Music, I mean, when we say like something feels janky, to me it just means that the underpinning
01:06:11 ◼ ► code, like there's a foundational, there's like a bedrock of code that these apps live on top of and
01:06:15 ◼ ► the bedrock is just really wonky. And it feels like there could be sinkholes at any moment. It's like
01:06:21 ◼ ► just moving around the app. Things don't respond reliably or consistently. Play buttons, there's like
01:06:27 ◼ ► three or four play buttons on each screen. It's sort of, it's just so weird. What am I supposed to
01:06:31 ◼ ► click? How do I start this thing? And then if I hit the space bar, is it going to scroll the screen
01:06:35 ◼ ► or is it going to activate pause or play? It's just, there's a certain amount of brittleness to
01:06:39 ◼ ► the software that I don't think existed. Like you were talking about when iTunes was the thing back
01:06:44 ◼ ► in the day. It feels thin in a way. I don't know how else to describe it, but it should feel thick
01:06:51 ◼ ► because it's old and it's been there for a long time, but somehow, somehow it, it now just presents
01:06:58 ◼ ► itself as a thin veneer. Yeah. On top of a web view. Yeah. Basically. And the, the polar opposite
01:07:05 ◼ ► example of software to this is for me, things I still use. I've been using things for, I think,
01:07:10 ◼ ► almost 20 years now, 18 years, 17 years. I love things so much. And I love it because it's like
01:07:16 ◼ ► picking up a beautiful hammer. It's just like the perfectly weighted hammer with the beautifully
01:07:21 ◼ ► worn handle made of some like teak or something, like whatever the perfect hammer handle wood would
01:07:27 ◼ ► be. I don't know what that is, but every time I'm in things, I just feel so swaddled in thickness of
01:07:33 ◼ ► good software. I love it. I just love it. I love cultured code. I wish they made other pieces of
01:07:39 ◼ ► software besides things. Well, I also feel like things is a great example though, of an app that
01:07:46 ◼ ► has been around for a long time and has kept moving forward visually, right? Like things today doesn't
01:07:53 ◼ ► look like things pre iOS seven, but manages the, the right balance between trendy enough, but not going
01:08:03 ◼ ► for fads and staying true to, Oh, we have this concept for how you can manage things that you want
01:08:12 ◼ ► to do. And we'll have projects and folders and a couple of metadata items on a task. You could put a due date
01:08:22 ◼ ► on it and there's a notes field and then that's it. And if you need more than that, go to another, there's a zillion
01:08:30 ◼ ► other task managers to do systems. Or if you want to use ours, here's the way we want to use it. And
01:08:38 ◼ ► 20 years later, they've kind of stuck true to that without, Oh, here's a major new version of things.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And you have to forget everything you knew how to use things before. No, it's very familiar. So somebody
01:08:52 ◼ ► who had been in a coma for the last 12 years and they'd be like, is things still around? And you'd be
01:08:58 ◼ ► like great news. Here it is. They would be like, Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, it does look nicer. Or well,
01:09:05 ◼ ► and weirdly you could say, and it's better. Yeah, it is. It's everything. The feature creep has been
01:09:10 ◼ ► so admirably sort of maintained at a same level. Like there's nothing unneeded in things. Yeah. I think
01:09:18 ◼ ► the biggest controversy in the history of that piece of software is the synchronization code they
01:09:22 ◼ ► built. I remember that maybe a year longer than they thought it was going to take, but it works
01:09:27 ◼ ► perfectly. I don't know. I love it. I love touching it. I want cultured code to remake every Apple app
01:09:32 ◼ ► at this point. Keynote still feels good. Keynote feels amazing. I think it probably feels amazing
01:09:37 ◼ ► because it's been forgotten that it exists there. I don't think there's a, there's many people working
01:09:41 ◼ ► on it, but Keynote is to me still one of the best pieces of software. I think that I've ever used.
01:09:55 ◼ ► but there's the whole Pixelmator is now an Apple product and we don't know what's going to happen.
01:10:02 ◼ ► We don't know for sure. They're going to do something with Pixelmator. I mean, I don't know this.
01:10:07 ◼ ► Nobody's at Apple has told me, but it would be insane if there's not, I mean, maybe they'll change
01:10:12 ◼ ► the name because it's, it's, it is a weird name that I have. Pixelmator. Pixelmator. I have famously
01:10:20 ◼ ► mispronounced it. That talk about a 20 year old gag, but there's also their companion app,
01:10:26 ◼ ► Photomator, Photomator, which is more like a pro version of the photos app that uses your
01:10:36 ◼ ► Apple photos library, but like a dark is actually good. Well, yeah. But is Apple regretting the fact
01:10:45 ◼ ► that they moved away from aperture and are they going to go back to having, okay, there's the photos app
01:10:51 ◼ ► for most people. And here's our pro photos app for people who are more serious and shoot raw photography,
01:11:00 ◼ ► et cetera. Pixelmator though is going to stay around, but in some way, but I've heard that it's
01:11:07 ◼ ► going to be more like a peer or it's in the group with keynote and pages and numbers, not with final
01:11:14 ◼ ► cut, but I'm not quite sure inside Apple where that line is. I'm not sure that line is as demarcated as
01:11:21 ◼ ► we might think. Yeah. I think, I think one of Apple's biggest missteps in software of the last
01:11:29 ◼ ► 15 years or whatever is, is that, that breaking away from here's the true pro tools and here's the less
01:11:35 ◼ ► pro tools. And I think the photos thing and getting rid of aperture, trying to make photos be a place
01:11:41 ◼ ► that you edit photos and do complicated photo editing in feels like a huge failure. And the way the photo
01:11:46 ◼ ► editing tools work in photos too, to me feels really unintuitive. It's a strange interface. It
01:11:51 ◼ ► feels overly complicated. They're like, a lot of times I just want to rotate a photo. Like that's
01:11:56 ◼ ► like a strange thing that the iPhone doesn't get right. Still. It's oftentimes you'll do an overhead
01:12:01 ◼ ► landscape and it'll be in the wrong orientation. And to rotate a photo, you have to click like three or
01:12:06 ◼ ► four buttons to just imagine rotating a photo is probably one of the most used acts out of photo.
01:12:12 ◼ ► They did make a change though, two or three iOS versions ago where the default rotation angle
01:12:19 ◼ ► switched from clockwise to counterclockwise. Right. And by switching, it actually corresponds more to the
01:12:28 ◼ ► mistake you make when you hold your phone. And at least for me, you put the volume buttons up top.
01:12:36 ◼ ► And so for me, for years, it was like three taps to get to rotate. And once I got to the rotate tool,
01:12:43 ◼ ► I had to tap it three times because I had to go one, two, three. So they did fix that, but I do agree.
01:12:50 ◼ ► And again, that feels like the sort of thing that a modern computer should be able to recognize. Like
01:12:56 ◼ ► they should, they should be able to tell when you shot a photo sideways. Right. Absolutely.
01:13:02 ◼ ► Absolutely. Because you know it, right? Like, I feel like we're getting more and more to the point
01:13:07 ◼ ► where anything where a human being can say, oh, that, that photo is sideways. It needs to be rotated
01:13:12 ◼ ► 90 degrees. The computer should know that too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And that's
01:13:18 ◼ ► what I mean by there, there's a, like a weird brittleness to the underpinnings of some of these things
01:13:22 ◼ ► where it's like, why is it not doing that automatically? And then also it's just, I think from an
01:13:26 ◼ ► interface design perspective, as soon as you try to meld pro and not pro activities into the same
01:13:32 ◼ ► space, it just, it doesn't work. And I think separating those out, it makes it easier for
01:13:37 ◼ ► software developers. It makes it easier for users. I mean, it just simplifies in a weird way. Every,
01:13:42 ◼ ► by maintaining my, by maintaining two code bases, it actually makes it easier for everyone because you
01:13:48 ◼ ► know where to go to do the thing you want to do, as opposed to trying to like muddle through
01:13:51 ◼ ► layers and layers of weird complexity. Yeah. Anyway, I'm being overly negative about some
01:13:57 ◼ ► of this Apple stuff, but for the most part, it's great for the most part. It's great, but we love
01:14:01 ◼ ► it. And we are criticizing with, from a loving place of love. Yeah. But I also criticize it more
01:14:08 ◼ ► and more. I feel like I criticize it from a place of fear, which is what if everything at Apple continues
01:14:16 ◼ ► to go south? What are we left with that if we're going to use as tools? Right. And with physical
01:14:22 ◼ ► tools, if you have like a great old set of knives, well, you can just always just take good care of
01:14:29 ◼ ► them, get them sharpened every once in a while. Yep. And even if the knife maker isn't around anymore,
01:14:35 ◼ ► well, you've already got your set of knives, you're good. And computers aren't like that. Like we kind of
01:14:41 ◼ ► need Apple to keep being the Apple we love and keep having that standard. And if their only
01:14:49 ◼ ► perspective inside is, are we better than every other competing platform out there? That's not good
01:14:58 ◼ ► enough, right? That's to me is the thing that Jobs, Steve Jobs always had was Steve Jobs could envision
01:15:05 ◼ ► what this could be. What level could we be at? And he was competing with that sort of platonic ideal of,
01:15:14 ◼ ► hey, we could make a system that works this good. That's who we're competing with, not Microsoft or
01:15:22 ◼ ► Google or whoever else is out there. It's what's the best potential thing I can envision or I could feel
01:15:29 ◼ ► that we could make. And that's what I worried that Apple's sort of losing, that they're losing the,
01:15:34 ◼ ► hey, we should be shooting for the best possible thing we can possibly make. And instead they're just
01:15:40 ◼ ► shooting for, ah, we're still way better than whatever crap Samsung's shipping on their phones. So who
01:15:46 ◼ ► cares? These, screw them. 100%. Yep. All right. Let me take a break here. Thank our next sponsor.
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01:17:42 ◼ ► Boom. And if you work at notion, if you're a notion employee listening, it turns out I'm giving a talk at notion in about two weeks in a couple weeks on May. Uh, what is it? Seven to eight. I think on the five, six, on May 8th in New York City, in the notion offices, I will be giving a talk. So you can tune in virtually or in person. If you're an employee serendipity. I did not know that Craig. How would I?
01:18:10 ◼ ► Uh, let's talk about your book. Impossible. Let's do it. Speaking of May, what day does the book come out? May 6th.
01:18:18 ◼ ► All right. The new book is called Things Become Other Things. Kissa by Kissa was your previous book. And I think that might be when you were on the show the last time.
01:18:28 ◼ ► Yeah. But yeah, we talked about that. Yeah. But that was more or was self published. You did all the work and yeah.
01:18:38 ◼ ► And this is, I don't know how else to say it. And I'm curious what you're thinking is behind going this way. But I mean, this is random house. I mean, this is, yeah, yeah. I got my copy right here.
01:18:49 ◼ ► I don't want to say that a self published book isn't a real book. It is. And it's probably the way I would do it if I were going to put out a book. And I get that that's the way you published your previous stuff. But it is sort of like a thrill for me that one of my pals has a big new random house book coming out. Right. How did this happen?
01:19:10 ◼ ► Yeah. It was a little bit complicated. I did the walk four years ago, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show in the middle of COVID. Did this walk, did a pop up newsletter about the walk, wrote 30, 40, 50,000 words on the walk. And then from that, that was the grist that became this book. I was kind of feeling like I was getting close to finishing it about two years ago. And I ended up going the themes of this book. So Kissa by Kissa, my previous book was about me walking from Tokyo to Kyoto and eating a bunch of pizza toast along the way.
01:19:38 ◼ ► And we kind of talk about Japanese cafe culture, Kissa 10 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was sort of lighthearted, fairly short book, maybe 20,000 words with photos. Very proud of it. We've just gone into our sixth printing, which is insane because the book costs 100 bucks a copy. And so we've, I've sold something like 7,000 copies of that book now, which is just bananas. You don't, that normally doesn't happen with a hundred dollar book. And so that book was its own little thing and it's done really, really well.
01:20:06 ◼ ► This one is a little different. It's still about a big walk in this peninsula of Japan. And you, in reading this, you're getting access to this part of Japan that you'll never be able to visit as a normal person. You just won't be able to talk to these people. Like I can talk to them and you won't be able to go to these villages because you just won't know about them. And they just aren't on the radar.
01:20:25 ◼ ► And so in some ways, this is a book about really the hidden parts of Japan that if you're interested in Japanese culture or what's happening in contemporary Japan today in the kind of the countryside, this book kind of really illuminates that.
01:20:37 ◼ ► But at the same time too, as I was doing the big walk, I was reflecting back on this friendship I had with my best friend from elementary school. And this is someone I hadn't thought about in 25, 30 years.
01:20:47 ◼ ► And so this book is also a letter to this old friend, Brian. And there was something about the themes in this book that to me felt like I wanted to give them a bigger platform than I could do just on my own.
01:21:02 ◼ ► And as successful as a self-published book can be, and you know, I'm doing fine art edition. So again, like, you know, maxes out at, if it does really, really well, 10,000 copies maybe.
01:21:12 ◼ ► And I just thought this story and the themes and honoring the memory of this friendship, this deserves a little bit of a bigger platform.
01:21:20 ◼ ► So I went to New York and I flogged myself beneath the feet of all the big publishers and agents and all this crap.
01:21:27 ◼ ► And everyone kind of rejected me. And finally, then I had this amazing meeting with a random house and that turned into the book deal that this book came out of.
01:21:37 ◼ ► I've got a bookmark. I've got a couple of bookmarks in my copy here, but one of the chapters, it just speaks to me.
01:21:46 ◼ ► And there is, it is so you, because I know you and it's like, well, that sounds like inflammatory or you're shit stirring to make a chapter like that.
01:21:59 ◼ ► Right. And so much of you comes through in the book. I don't want to embarrass you here, but it is a, you know, what's a walking memoir?
01:22:08 ◼ ► It is a memoir, but by making it more about central Japan and the people and the areas that you are documenting with a sort of, you are there, this is what it's like description.
01:22:25 ◼ ► It's really you that's coming through. It's filtered through Craig Mott in a way that, I don't know, it's hard to describe it. It's a good book, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
01:22:42 ◼ ► So there's, there's two film stills that were such a pain in the ass to get the rights to, but we got them. There's a film still from Akira and a film still from Ikiru. And so those are in there. These are a Kurosawa film and, and the classic anime Akira.
01:22:59 ◼ ► It's an interesting type of book though. Fundamentally, if you could only see the pictures or only read it, you'd, you would take the words version. At least I would. It is, it is a written work, not a photo book.
01:23:14 ◼ ► It's not full color. It's black and white offset printing, but the photos come across very well. I, I, I've never, I, I'm, I'm trying to think, and I was looking before you came on the show, like flipping through the, I was going to say hundreds, but maybe, I don't know, however many hundreds of books I have in my office.
01:23:37 ◼ ► I can't think of another book I own. That's quite like it in terms of the mix of photos and prose, but that it's just printed black and white offset printing like this, including full bleed photos, which I couldn't find another book on my shelf that has that.
01:23:54 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, in Random House, one of the reasons why I agreed to do this edition with Random House is because they got it. They really got it. And I, I, I've been looking at PDFs for months or a year almost. And then I finally got the printed final, final, final printed edition about a week ago. And I'm, I'm really delighted by it. I was thinking about the printing quality is going to be lower. I know what the paper type is going to be. It's going to be that rough kind of standard mass market hardcover paper.
01:24:22 ◼ ► And so I redeveloped all of the photos specifically for black and white and for that paper. I think the end result is it is a really special mass market hardcover book. I don't think I also haven't, I haven't seen a book that, that, that works like this either.
01:24:38 ◼ ► And I didn't realize until I got the final copy, like how special it was going to feel. The long and short of it is I'm really proud of how it turned out. And I'm really happy with how the team worked together. The designers over there worked together to kind of put this thing to, to, to slap it together. And the full bleed stuff I think is really unique and it works well. And the photos come across great.
01:24:58 ◼ ► In my opinion, in my opinion, as a person who, who is very, very persnickety about printing and all this stuff, I think for what it is, I think it looks fantastic.
01:25:06 ◼ ► I think that the photos to me are like, uh, when you're eating wings or spicy, like Buffalo wings and you have glass of milk with you, like every couple of wings, you need a sip of milk just to calm your tongue.
01:25:24 ◼ ► The pros is the fire and you turn the page and there's a photo that goes along with it. And it just sort of goes down like a nice sip of cold milk. Like it's not the main thing, but it's very soothing and it wouldn't be the same without it.
01:25:42 ◼ ► But the other thing, I mean, it's partly where the name dithering comes from. I've always had this affinity for black and white printing of photographs. And we were talking earlier about how crappy newspaper printing was by, by necessity, but there was something great in some ways about a great newspaper photo just printed in black and white.
01:26:07 ◼ ► And I remember as in particular, the Philadelphia Inquirer went color before I think the New York Times did. But when the New York Times print edition started printing in color, it kind of broke my heart because, and I get why they did it, that there was this interstitial period of years between the heyday of black and white ink stained fingers, newspapers.
01:26:35 ◼ ► And, oh, I don't read a printed newspaper anymore. I read it on my phone or on my, on my computer. There was a brief period of years where to maintain relevance, they kind of needed to be printing in color, certainly for the advertising. And if you're already paying for the color for everything else, the photos should be color. But to me, they just, I don't know. And again, I guess I'm old and I know like my son, he's 21.
01:27:03 ◼ ► He really does not like black and white movies. He just doesn't. Right. And I guess I get it. But I remember being a very little kid thinking black and white TV shows and movies suck because they're old. Color is cool.
01:27:17 ◼ ► And then I got to be like a teenager and I appreciate, oh, black and white could be really, really cool. Kurosawa. To me, well, he has some color ones too that are great too. But to me, my favorite Kurosawa movies are the black and white ones.
01:27:32 ◼ ► And they're just beautiful. And yet to me, I completely forget their, their black and white by the time I'm two or three minutes into them and black and white printing on kind of crappy paper, where if you really, you know, you don't have to have great eyes or look all that closely.
01:27:49 ◼ ► You can kind of see the half tone dithering of the dots. You can see how it's made, but it speaks to me in a certain way. And there is that sort of newspaper pulpy vibe to the book.
01:28:04 ◼ ► And I don't know. It's quite unlike any, I, again, I can't think of another book that's quite like it.
01:28:09 ◼ ► Yeah. I think it works with the story as well, because, you know, when photos are printed like this, there's no pretentiousness to it. Right.
01:28:17 ◼ ► It's just, this is the bare bones version of printing that we can do for this. And where I come from in the story of me and Brian is one, again, that we come from a place that had absolutely no pretensions, had no sense of elevated culture or anything like that.
01:28:31 ◼ ► So in a weird way, like being printed on paper like this, in this way, feels like the most natural compliment to the story of the book itself. So I think it works. I think it works.
01:28:45 ◼ ► All right. And is there, what's the best place where people can go to, to find out more about it?
01:28:51 ◼ ► I mean, just, if you just search for things become other things, it'll throw you to a...
01:29:00 ◼ ► Well, no, I'm not saying that's the title of the book. I'm saying that if people just search for that, they'll find it.
01:29:08 ◼ ► If you just go to my website, it's going to be the main, big, giant, mega link at the top of the page.
01:29:13 ◼ ► That has... So I'm doing this world tour. I don't know. When is this episode coming out, do you think?
01:29:21 ◼ ► Okay. So if you're listening to this, it's recently come out, then I'm doing a American tour.
01:29:28 ◼ ► I'm going to be doing four events in New York, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, possibly Boston.
01:29:36 ◼ ► I would love, love to see readers come out. We've already sold out most of the events. I just heard a launch event at Rizzoli in Midtown Manhattan. We already have over 200 people signed up for that, which is insane for a book launch event. And I'm just a schmuck. I'm not like Stephen King or something like that.
01:29:55 ◼ ► Everyone's kind of freaking out. So if you want to come, on my homepage, there's the Things Become Other Things page. It has the tour list. There are RSVP links for all the events. Try them out. If it's sold out, just come anyway. We'll squeeze you in. We'll just squeeze you in.
01:30:18 ◼ ► All right. I've got one last sponsor to thank. It's our good friends at Squarespace. And Squarespace is the all-in-one platform where you can build your own presence online. More or less, if you need a website, you can go to Squarespace, and Squarespace will let you create a website.
01:30:35 ◼ ► I could end it right there. That's sort of all you need to know about Squarespace. That's sort of the Squarespace brand. But Squarespace keeps moving things forward. Again, there's an AI angle to everything, and Squarespace definitely has an AI angle.
01:30:52 ◼ ► They call it design intelligence. But they've always had WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get editing for the visual nature of your Squarespace website, where you log in as the admin, and the website you see in the admin interface is the website everyone else sees, except you get the admin tools where you can drag things from the left to the right, or change the font, or change the style, or change the hero image, or something like that.
01:31:19 ◼ ► But now they've added this new thing, design intelligence. It's really, really cool. All the old stuff is there. So you can design your website as traditionally as you want. If you're familiar with Squarespace already, nothing changed. You can keep using it the way you want to. But if you want to use AI, and just sort of say, make this feel more fun, or make it look like this is more for kids, or something like that.
01:31:47 ◼ ► Whatever your art, more or less just becoming an art director, and giving art direction to the design tools, as opposed to doing it yourself, and being the designer. You can just sort of give it art direction, and it actually works. And it's really kind of cool and clever.
01:32:04 ◼ ► They've got all sorts of other stuff built in Squarespace payments is the easiest way to manage payments in one place, and they support everything you'd want to support in a modern payment system, like ACH Direct Debit in the US, Apple Pay, After Pay, Clear Pay, which is sort of like the After Pay in the UK.
01:32:23 ◼ ► All of that stuff is all there. Design intelligence is the new AI stuff. And again, if you don't want to use it, it stays out of your way. If you do want to use it, it's really fun, very clever. Totally give it a try.
01:32:37 ◼ ► Analytics built in, in my opinion, the best analytics dashboard interface I've ever seen for seeing where people are going, how much traffic you're getting, what the sources are for a website.
01:32:48 ◼ ► I wish every analytics interface was as cleverly and clearly designed as Squarespace's.
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01:33:35 ◼ ► Every time I have somebody on who's written a book, I try to get to, because I've never written a book, and I try to get to, how do you write a book?
01:33:49 ◼ ► And when did you know that this was a book and not just like a series of articles for your website?
01:34:00 ◼ ► It's the tooling and where do you actually do the writing and where did you realize this could be a couple of hundred pages that you cut it off neatly and it's a book as opposed to your website, which is an ongoing concern.
01:34:17 ◼ ► You're always, you never stopped writing for your website while you're writing the book.
01:34:48 ◼ ► I've done other things where I've, let me go to 10 weird mid-sized cities around Japan and then I'm going to walk 50K in each city and then I'm going to write about that.
01:34:56 ◼ ► But I do these things, these pop-up newsletters, because I think people are exhausted by newsletters in general.
01:35:05 ◼ ► And so with a pop-up newsletter, I think the real benefit is saying this is only going to last for two weeks or three weeks or four weeks.
01:35:31 ◼ ► And then for me, what's great about it is it just motivates me to write way more than I would in the middle of these things.
01:35:36 ◼ ► Like I said, four years ago when I did my big walk that became Things Become Other Things, I was writing two, three, 4,000 words a day and sending that out with a pop-up newsletter.
01:36:01 ◼ ► And editing photos, writing two, three, 4,000 words, and then putting together a newsletter with photos edited and words.
01:36:25 ◼ ► And then the thing is, you pop out the other end, and you've got essentially a book written, what could be a book.
01:36:47 ◼ ► Because if you said to me, I know the next book I want to write, I think, ah, I would just raise my eyebrows.
01:36:57 ◼ ► And, you know, in doing them, you'll find other things, and you'll change course or whatever.
01:37:11 ◼ ► So, I collect, as I'm walking, I dictate into notes.app, just the notes app, transcriptions.
01:37:19 ◼ ► And I'll dictate thousands of words a day as I'm walking, little notes, snippets of conversation, thoughts, whatever.
01:37:25 ◼ ► And then I'll get to the hotel at the end of the day, and then I'll use that as my jumping-off point to write 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 words.
01:37:44 ◼ ► So, notes.app kind of collects the random thoughts throughout the day, and so I have a bunch of those for each walk.
01:38:19 ◼ ► And what's great about Ulysses is you can, in the sidebar, you can select, say, five chapters in the sidebar.
01:38:36 ◼ ► You could select something in the sidebar, hit Command-A, select all the files, and you've got the entire book in your editor right there.
01:39:16 ◼ ► And it's like I can have that pinned to the top of the folder and it's easy to dump stuff in there.
01:39:23 ◼ ► And then, like with Random House, we had to move into this mode of editing, going back and forth with an editor.
01:39:28 ◼ ► And thankfully, we were able to use Google Docs for that, which to me is a thousand times better than what normal publishers use.
01:39:37 ◼ ► And by the way, all my friends in publishing were like, I can't believe they let you use Google Docs because they all want to use Word files.
01:40:02 ◼ ► Like, Ulysses is one of those apps where I'm like, oh, I could see how I could get into this if I had more than a file to edit.
01:40:24 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, so Microsoft Word didn't enter the equation until the copy editing process.
01:40:38 ◼ ► I have friends who've written books who are very opinionated about software, who make software.
01:40:58 ◼ ► I can't think of any piece of software that's more entrenched in an industry than Word is in the book industry versus how anybody feels about it at a qualitative level.
01:41:12 ◼ ► Like the fact that today we're throwing Word files back and forth still is just psychotic.
01:41:34 ◼ ► To me, the fundamental problem with Google Docs, all of them, not just the actual like word processing docs, but their slide thing.
01:41:48 ◼ ► What people love about it is that you can share it and that it's just a URL you send to somebody and you send them the URL and then they're in.
01:42:06 ◼ ► But the problem to me is that the concept of all of Google's apps like that is all based on Word or the Microsoft Office suite.
01:42:19 ◼ ► And that is an improvement, but it's also an improvement on terrible software to begin with.
01:42:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think the way to approach Google Docs and the way I do it is there's a set of settings you can set and you can establish a kind of typographic baseline.
01:42:51 ◼ ► We were trying to get macOS to do accepting spell correct suggestions all entirely from the keyboard.
01:43:04 ◼ ► Like while you were typing and you got the red underlines, what if you didn't need to reach for the mouse and you could just hit a keyboard shortcut and bring up the spell check menu?
01:43:16 ◼ ► And it was because of Google Docs that got me thinking about that because when you, the cursor's on the misspelt word, it just says a pop-up and you can tab into it and you can tab to get rid of it and tab to accept.
01:43:38 ◼ ► And I don't want to throw any of your other blurbers under the bus, but to me, getting a blurb on the back cover from William Gibson to me was like, I'm so happy for you.
01:43:55 ◼ ► Oh, dude, I've, honestly, that was one of the coolest moments of doing this whole book was getting the email from Molly, who was like, holy shit.
01:44:08 ◼ ► Because, you know, it's like, we knew he had the book and he's like, yeah, yeah, I'll take a look.
01:44:30 ◼ ► And, uh, you know, this random ding dong sends him a book about Japan and to not only get a blurb, but to get such a generous blurb that maybe, maybe you could read the blurb for, for listeners.
01:44:53 ◼ ► Here's the, here's the blurb from William Gibson, which actually is unsurprisingly to me, the perfect synopsis of the book.
01:45:00 ◼ ► Craig Mod takes the reader along on an epic, exquisitely detailed journey on foot through a rural Japan.
01:45:14 ◼ ► I feel like we could leave off the uniquely unforgettable, but I feel like that first sentence, that's the book, right?
01:45:36 ◼ ► And again, yeah, because obviously Gibson's work and in particular books like Pattern Recognition.
01:45:47 ◼ ► To have someone whose work you respect like that, not just read what you've done, which in and of itself is like a big honor to just have someone take the time to read what you made.
01:46:02 ◼ ► To me, there is, it's, you know, novels do it and memoirs can do it, but it's just the written word and it doesn't make that big a difference whether it's fiction or nonfiction or a blur between the two like Hunter S. Thompson.
01:46:18 ◼ ► It is a sense of you are there and somehow, even though it's just prose, it can put in your mind the closest relay of this is what it's like.
01:46:56 ◼ ► Or in my opinion, immersive VR wouldn't capture it in the way that truly well-written prose at a moment in time from a certain perspective, that perspective is relayed to the reader to conveys.
01:47:26 ◼ ► And the other thing is, and it kind of comes full circle to something we talked about earlier, where if social media can be ephemeral and you can just say, hey, this stuff, I toss out my blue sky.
01:47:47 ◼ ► And every seven days, anything that hasn't been commented on, any thread that's seven days old without any mentions, just gets expunged.
01:47:56 ◼ ► And everybody knows that up front, so nobody's losing anything they didn't expect to lose.
01:48:07 ◼ ► Well, and especially, you know, you make thousands of copies, shoot them around the world.
01:48:11 ◼ ► It's highly unlikely that it'll ever be completely erased from the ledger of humanity, too, which is sort of like a weird, there's still nothing in the digital universe that kind of maps to that, right?
01:48:28 ◼ ► But the other weird thing, and it's just such a funny little coincidence, previous episode of the show, I had Glenn Fleischman on, and we were talking about his book, Six Centuries of Text and Printing, or whatever.
01:49:12 ◼ ► Well, not an awkward question, but I assumed because, look, I went into this Random House thing going, okay, I'm going to have no control.
01:49:25 ◼ ► And I actually produced, there's a much longer story to the genesis of this book, but I actually produced a different,
01:49:36 ◼ ► And this was also what was bizarre about the Random House contract is they gave me a provision for a fine art edition.
01:50:04 ◼ ► And then the internal sequencing of images, obviously, I had control over because the images sequencing was important.
01:50:21 ◼ ► But I had no control over the typography, over the type selection, over the way chapter headers are set, or how you have the running headers on the sides of the book with the title and page numbers.
01:50:35 ◼ ► But I liked the designs that were sent to me so much I didn't feel like I needed to have input on it.
01:50:52 ◼ ► There is, I don't know how to describe it, but it's like a certain sense of how much ink is on the page.
01:50:59 ◼ ► And it's like you, when you can read the language that a book is printed in, it's kind of hard to do it.
01:51:10 ◼ ► And I remember when I was learning print design that a lot of people said, you should turn it upside down.
01:51:17 ◼ ► Turn it upside down and flip through it that way so that you can't read it and just sort of look for the balance of that.
01:51:52 ◼ ► And in yours, Bembo is a little lightweight in a very appropriate way because to me the ink is going, is balanced by the number of photos that are there throughout the book.
01:52:06 ◼ ► And it's such an interesting two books that are based on the same family of type from, again, 600 years ago.
01:52:14 ◼ ► And it was probably still all, you know, knock on wood, the humanity still around will still be used 600 years from now.