00:00:16 ◼ ► The talk show, after the talk show, maybe your last appearance there, which was quite good,
00:00:31 ◼ ► See, the problem is that I saw you at my show, and my show, I'm in a tube of concentration.
00:00:44 ◼ ► While you're in the lead-up, it's all the adrenaline and focus of the show, and in the aftermath,
00:01:12 ◼ ► I have not gone through every single email I've gotten over the last 10 days yet, but I believe you're the only person to point out the technical corrections from my post, which is so very much appreciated.
00:01:39 ◼ ► That's like my itch I get to scratch, because I'm not blogging on a daily basis anymore.
00:01:59 ◼ ► I mean, this is – I mean, if you're really new here to the podcast, if you're not aware, I'm a James Bond fan.
00:02:10 ◼ ► So, the designer of the James Bond 007 logo is an intersection of my interest that is very rare.
00:02:24 ◼ ► And he seemed to have a really great long life, this documentary that was made about him at the end.
00:02:48 ◼ ► He was interviewed – he's in it at age 101, and people who have watched it have said he's sharp as a tack.
00:02:59 ◼ ► Like, that was sort of some of the commentary in his obituaries is that – and it's not just, oh, he did one thing of renown, the 007 gun logo.
00:03:10 ◼ ► He did a whole bunch of posters from the heyday of Woody Allen's career, like the fantastic poster.
00:03:31 ◼ ► It's almost like the poster is the logo for that movie, and it's so literally iconic that it just feels like it was always there, right?
00:03:42 ◼ ► Because that's a movie from before we were born, and it just feels like one of those movies that – I'm not a huge musical fan, to say the least, but it's a super well-done, famous, renowned movie.
00:03:54 ◼ ► And the logo itself with the fire escape and the dancing figures and the name attached, West Side Story, that is – it's literally a logo and has been used for the musical on Broadway and many other cases, you know?
00:04:05 ◼ ► You know, he had this renowned career, but he wasn't really – you know, he was sort of a –
00:04:11 ◼ ► Saul Bass, I guess, would be the number one person to compare him to from the era as somebody who designed posters and worked with great filmmakers over the years and just really didn't get the acclaim, but didn't really look for the acclaim either, you know?
00:04:37 ◼ ► Yeah, and he started – he was doing pretty well because the thing is that it is a curiosity that he only got $300 one-time fee for the 007 logo and no other royalties or anything like that.
00:04:58 ◼ ► And by the end of the 60s, he had started his own design firm in New York and had 22 people on staff.
00:05:07 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I think one of his 70s posters that stood out to me was the Cabaret poster.
00:05:20 ◼ ► The spaghetti westerns that Sergio Leone made, the Good, the Bad, and – I don't know if he did the Good, the Bad, and Ugly, but he did A Fistful of Dollars and a Few Dollars More, which are some of the – my favorite westerns ever – or movies ever made.
00:05:46 ◼ ► Talk about a logo, too, that from my perception as a kid born in 1973, already into the – as a baby, the Roger Moore era, that logo just felt like it was already part of the universe.
00:06:23 ◼ ► And then, you know, you look at, like, what money looked like in 1850, and you're like, what the fuck is that?
00:06:48 ◼ ► And I mentioned, you know, it was just one of those things where I thought, oh, you know, I at least got a link to this guy's post.
00:06:58 ◼ ► This is why I have a site like Daring Fireball, so I can spend a whole day writing about this.
00:07:04 ◼ ► And I got to scratch an itch that I have literally had to some degree as long as I can remember knowing who and what James Bond are.
00:07:18 ◼ ► I mean, so this is going back to some point in the late 70s as me being six, seven, eight years old.
00:07:26 ◼ ► I don't know if I had seen a James Bond movie in a theater yet, but I know that I had seen them on TV.
00:07:34 ◼ ► And part of my bizarro gift that I sometimes mention on the show that I have an unbelievable ability to tell you what network a TV show was on for most of my life.
00:09:10 ◼ ► And it was all because of the Clint Eastwood movie with the, I forget what the Clint Eastwood
00:09:32 ◼ ► But remember, Eastwood made Every Which Way But Loose, where he played sort of a rowdy tractor-trailer
00:09:46 ◼ ► And then there was a show, oh Christ, I can't even remember what the show was called, but
00:09:52 ◼ ► I know it was on NBC, about a guy who drove a truck, but it wasn't a total ripoff, because
00:10:18 ◼ ► So, part of that, it's not just the shows, I can tell you that when I was a kid, you know
00:10:33 ◼ ► Yeah, it was like my dad would, I think we'd go like at the end of July or the beginning
00:10:38 ◼ ► of August, either last week of July or beginning of August, we would go to Wildwood, New Jersey,
00:10:55 ◼ ► left for the shore, ABC's million dollar movie of the week was an old James Bond movie.
00:11:25 ◼ ► It's the way kids are so in tune to what's truly new, that in like, as like a six-year-old in
00:11:51 ◼ ► And my dad telling me, this is such a great, iconic dad moment where he didn't yell at me.
00:12:37 ◼ ► And it was like every year in the summer, ABC, to fill a Sunday night, would have an old James Bond movie.
00:12:44 ◼ ► But one of the things that I noticed, because I've always had this aptitude to notice logos,
00:12:51 ◼ ► which is how I associate the commercial breaks, because there'd be an ABC logo while you're watching an ABC show.
00:13:00 ◼ ► And I just remember thinking, ever since I can remember, that the way that they make 007 into a gun is cool.
00:13:19 ◼ ► But I remember thinking, but the gun in the logo doesn't look like a gun that James Bond uses.
00:13:25 ◼ ► It's not like that little Walter PPK that he sticks in the holster and fits under his suit.
00:13:30 ◼ ► It's this long-nosed, Luger-looking gun that wouldn't really comfortably fit in a little side holster under your suit jacket.
00:13:46 ◼ ► Turns out it's not—there are pictures of Sean Connery with a Luger-looking gun, but it's not a Luger.
00:14:01 ◼ ► I think the story was that there were some photo shoots being done for promo, and they gave him a Walther LM53, which is like an—it's an air pistol, airsoft gun, I guess you'd call it these days.
00:14:18 ◼ ► It's got the sight at the end of a very long barrel, definitely has an iconic look, and that was, I would guess, the inspiration.
00:14:30 ◼ ► It's hard to, obviously, this far in hindsight, look into, like, exactly when those promo shots were taken and whether Karoff would have had them as a reference, but it seems pretty clear that this was the reference for the logo.
00:14:50 ◼ ► But that picture of Sean Connery or pictures of him holding that gun up by his face are—it's like, oh, yeah, I have seen that.
00:14:59 ◼ ► They're not from the movies, and it's not a prop from any of the movies, but it's like, oh, well, here's a vaguely European-looking gun, right?
00:15:18 ◼ ► These days, now and then, you'll see it, but it used to be every movie that came out, there was always, like, a promotional shoot that went along with it.
00:15:27 ◼ ► There were almost always, like, actors isolated on some sort of background, you know, one or more of the principal actors.
00:15:33 ◼ ► And then, of course, they would use them for a variety of promotional purposes, including graphic design, like putting them on posters or other things.
00:15:44 ◼ ► They'll still do shoots, but they're usually more highly produced and less—almost these head-shoddy-looking things.
00:15:54 ◼ ► It's one of those ones where when you see it, you almost—assuredly, almost everybody would be like, oh, yeah, I think I've seen this, you know?
00:16:05 ◼ ► Maybe he's looking at that gun, and he doesn't know it's not the one from the movie, and so he puts it in.
00:16:33 ◼ ► It looks like—even if it wouldn't fit in a—under the armpit holster or whatever, it just looks like something a guy wearing a tuxedo driving a fancy European car might have.
00:16:51 ◼ ► I don't know, but it was basically the idea was that the prop master who was there for that shoot that day gave him this, because I think they were like, ah, he won't know the difference.
00:17:08 ◼ ► Yeah, that leads me to another—something I haven't brought up with you, but that the other thing that the Luger gun always reminded me of is that—because the handle was like round at the bottom of a Luger, and it always reminded me of whatever the name of the gun is that they based the Han Solo blaster off, like a Mauser or something.
00:17:42 ◼ ► In the Star—no, I know it was some kind of German World War II-era gun, but in the Star Wars universe, it's a DL-44.
00:17:53 ◼ ► What the prop is, I don't know, but it's vaguely Luger-like in terms of having that rounded pistol.
00:18:02 ◼ ► And I just remember as a kid thinking—I loved Han Solo, he's my favorite guy in the movie, and I just remember thinking, god damn, that laser gun is the coolest looking prop I've ever seen.
00:18:14 ◼ ► It is in like the sight, like the seemingly unnecessary sight and like everything about it.
00:18:29 ◼ ► Right, which was part of what made him cool was that the action figure, even—he was the only one.
00:19:18 ◼ ► Like guys like me in Syracusa are like just the perfect age because I was like four when Star Wars came out.
00:19:25 ◼ ► So it's—I was like too young to really understand it, except that it was fucking awesome.
00:19:38 ◼ ► And there was no other movies I'd ever seen more than once because you could only—and I'd know it more and more.
00:19:50 ◼ ► Because in a lot of cases, I mean, especially in those days, there was not really any super picky attention to accuracy.
00:19:58 ◼ ► There was not like these days where they're like, oh, take a mold of the actor's face, laser spin the actor's face.
00:20:11 ◼ ► Well, for example, I think one of the most famous parts of that is that in the—I'll put this in the show notes, I swear.
00:20:18 ◼ ► But if the Luke Skywalker action figure—in the first round of Kenner figures, the lightsabers for the lightsaber, the three lightsaber-wielding characters, Luke, Obi-Wan, and Darth Vader, had the lightsabers embedded in their arms.
00:20:56 ◼ ► I just—and I knew my parents didn't care, so it's not like I sat there and chewed their ear off.
00:21:42 ◼ ► And Luke—because Luke didn't really have a gun until they killed a couple stormtroopers and stole one of his.
00:21:56 ◼ ► And similarly, the James Bond logo having a gun that he didn't really use seemed wrong to me.
00:22:12 ◼ ► But I just remember thinking at, like, age seven or eight, that's not the right gun, but that gun looks so cool.
00:22:22 ◼ ► It totally seemed to me like that's the sort of discussion that the people in charge of James Bond would have.
00:22:43 ◼ ► And then I never researched it before, but while writing that post last week, I went and it was like—and I started looking at the posters.
00:22:52 ◼ ► I wrote this in the article, but it really does seem like the Eon Productions people—the posters, like you said, there was—the movie world in the 60s was just a different place where they just shot weird promotional photos that weren't on set.
00:23:25 ◼ ► I just remember the thing—and so I looked it up, and I'm looking at all these old posters from the 60s, and it's so hard because it's not like there was one golden eye or gold finger poster or one poster for Thunderball.
00:23:41 ◼ ► And, like, the ones in foreign countries look like they hired entirely different designers for some countries.
00:23:52 ◼ ► But it looked like, in the Connery era, they didn't really use the 007 logo that Karif designed religiously.
00:24:08 ◼ ► And then it's bigger and more prominent on Her Majesty's Secret Service, the first one without Sean Connery with George Lazenby taking the role.
00:24:22 ◼ ► Like, I wrote, it's like, oh, before that, they just used Connery's face to say, this is James Bond, right?
00:24:35 ◼ ► And then I believe every single official poster for every movie from On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1969 until now has had the Karif 007 gun logo.
00:24:58 ◼ ► And so I started going back, and they changed it with Timothy Dalton's first role of two, The Living Daylights.
00:25:23 ◼ ► And then I think, you know, it's weird, too, because at least me, and I know you probably watched some of them, I didn't watch most of them until much later.
00:25:45 ◼ ► Oh, let's film the next two back-to-back, where the actors actually look roughly the same.
00:25:59 ◼ ► It was a weird—83 was a weird Bond year because that's the year that Connery went with the rival producers and made Never Say Never Again in the summer.
00:26:28 ◼ ► You know, he even outgrossed Sean Connery, even though he was, I don't know, like 50-something at the point.
00:26:48 ◼ ► And he looks—even at a movie, it's not like, hey, this is like not just a bunch of kids with a camcorder.
00:27:38 ◼ ► I mean, sure, there's all the—Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise money can buy a lot of skincare products.
00:27:47 ◼ ► I do—I will say, like, Tom Cruise, I mean, 63, doing these scenes, and there's—you can defeat a lot of things.
00:27:59 ◼ ► I mean, far better shape than I will—because all the millions that, you know, can buy, that sort of thing.
00:28:11 ◼ ► Like, whatever you think about the man individually or personally or whatever, incredible amount of willpower, clearly.
00:28:16 ◼ ► But I will say, on the most recent movies with him, you can see that the one thing that is undefeated is, like, you cannot defeat, like, the body getting bulkier and boxier.
00:28:35 ◼ ► I have not watched the latest one, the final Reckoning, the last Reckoning, whatever it's called, yet.
00:28:57 ◼ ► But, yeah, it's, like, he's puffier in the face, and you know it's not because he's eating poorly, right?
00:29:26 ◼ ► Well, but then the other thing, I just—I know that I saw that, like, first run, first opening weekend in the theater.
00:29:38 ◼ ► And it's—I wasn't—I would criticize—I'd think of things like, hey, the gun's not right in the logo.
00:29:50 ◼ ► Like, I knew which movies—you know, it's, like, kind of a just pure Ebert and Siskel thumbs up, thumbs down.
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00:33:41 ◼ ► And I think if there's any takeaways, if you want, from that, I think it's sometimes adherence is not always the right call in design.
00:33:57 ◼ ► But the gun is a good case where you're like, I could have made this extremely accurate.
00:34:20 ◼ ► And it's again, the books had been a smash hit for Ian Fleming for a decade before the movies started.
00:34:47 ◼ ► It's you could easily Mandela affect me into thinking that they were always it was always on the cover.
00:35:02 ◼ ► I think I saw somebody which I agree with say it felt like being sucked into an episode of WandaVision.
00:35:23 ◼ ► It felt very much like a through a mirror, darkly version of a product announcement, but where everybody was supposed to be in on a joke, but the joke wasn't evidently obvious.
00:35:44 ◼ ► I know Ben Thompson, my pal on Dithering is really, really adamant about he really misses live events.
00:35:53 ◼ ► He doesn't think Apple does a poor job with their pre filmed ones, but that he just misses the energy of live events.
00:35:59 ◼ ► Even just watching over video and me personally, I miss them because I get to go see the Apple ones and I do think they're more enjoyable to watch in person or I think there's trade offs.
00:36:11 ◼ ► But I also, you know, in the same way that I could see why they used a cooler looking gun for the 007 logo, I can see why Apple prefers sticking with the pre recorded thing.
00:36:39 ◼ ► It doesn't I don't know that I don't think anybody else has the stomach to to put the effort in that Apple does for those pre recorded ones.
00:36:49 ◼ ► That it's because they're they don't make them like, you know, like old, really old TV shows.
00:36:57 ◼ ► When you watch like the honeymooners shows or I Love Lucy from like the 50s, it's they're like stage plays with a camera in front of them.
00:37:06 ◼ ► Like a two dimensional like you you could feel like you were in an audience sitting in a chair in a theater, which is the only other major form of like entertainment.
00:37:35 ◼ ► They sort of I believe I'm pretty sure I don't just believe but kind of know, even though he doesn't personally take credit, that is largely driven by Phil Schiller, who still runs events at Apple in addition to running the App Store.
00:37:49 ◼ ► But let's not just have presenters come on and come into an empty Steve Jobs theater and we'll film it from the or not even empty.
00:37:58 ◼ ► Well, I guess during covid half fill the theater with employees to cheer and clap and just film it like it's an Apple event.
00:38:06 ◼ ► Let's do something if it's going to be different because it's prerecorded, let's do something different and make it more like a TV show or a movie or a documentary or something about these products.
00:38:17 ◼ ► They go every, you know, every I was going to say episode, every event, but it is like episodes.
00:38:46 ◼ ► I think it's like, oh, you know, whatever urge companies have to, oh, we should do what Apple does.
00:38:52 ◼ ► How much time are we going to ask our executives to spend traveling around California or the world to shoot these things?
00:39:01 ◼ ► And so the fact that so many companies have gone back to live ones makes for an interesting contrast.
00:39:14 ◼ ► Like it's CES, 7,000 seat arenas, you know, like Apple used to at Mac World Expo or at WWDC.
00:39:40 ◼ ► I know Google has definitely leaned more into the celebrity angle over the past couple of decades worth of their events.
00:39:56 ◼ ► And then now and then a celebrity or two, especially like Apple TV events and things like that.
00:40:09 ◼ ► I know a little bit more about the decision making process that Apple went through and like the iterations that they went through in their event process.
00:40:17 ◼ ► Obviously, the pandemic was why the 2020 event was the way it was, but then why they didn't go back.
00:40:23 ◼ ► And some of the impetus there was like to get more people involved, to like get more people on stage than they would be able to like get on and off a stage during the event cycle.
00:40:33 ◼ ► So they could get more visibility to different teams that were actually working on things.
00:40:37 ◼ ► But the on the Google side of things, if you look back at their history of events, they've gone through a ton of different formats, like whether it's like more talk show style formats or variety show or music centric or whatever.
00:41:08 ◼ ► And I have some experience in this because we we hosted this award show called The Crunchies and we did it for a few years.
00:41:28 ◼ ► And he was amazing at that because he deeply understood tech, like not from a I'm a techie or I'm a tech person, but from like he got the dynamic, right?
00:41:40 ◼ ► He understood that, hey, yes, these people are building things that are difficult to build.
00:41:48 ◼ ► And he got like the line to walk where you could host an event like that and have it still be an award show where we're like giving awards to rich people.
00:42:06 ◼ ► And like I think the Jimmy Fallon type who just isn't really technically savvy or at least did not display it on this stage and did not or did not have the time, energy or remit to dive deeper and really understand the topics.
00:42:23 ◼ ► Because you could see him making many of those jokes that landed poorly, like saying tensor and clapping, you know, like a seal.
00:42:30 ◼ ► But if he had just made a different joke about it that was more in the know, like it would have worked fine.
00:42:37 ◼ ► Like it wouldn't have been to my personal taste probably still, but it absolutely would not have landed with a thud like it did.
00:42:50 ◼ ► Yeah, I think Victoria Song mentioned it in her write up at The Verge and I heard from somebody else who was there.
00:43:07 ◼ ► But I'm pretty sure if I had asked, I could have gotten in because I've gotten in before.
00:43:11 ◼ ► And I wish I had, especially knowing it was only in New York and I regret it because I really wish I could have seen it first person.
00:43:18 ◼ ► But they literally had an applause sign and they had a warm up just like a real talk show, like a real TV talk show.
00:43:27 ◼ ► They had a warm up comic who came out 10 minutes before the actual show started to warm the crowd up.
00:44:20 ◼ ► Because the press is so cynical and so down, you know, concentrating on this and, you know, and thinking.
00:44:29 ◼ ► I'm here to write about this and try to detect if you're full of shit about any of this.
00:44:39 ◼ ► They're thinking like how I'm here to serve my readers and give them this and they're concentrating.
00:44:50 ◼ ► But a lot of people in the press are that they like it's almost like a religious thing where they feel like it's inappropriate in the press to applaud that you're here to represent.
00:45:07 ◼ ► It's like, you know, especially for things like if somebody says that the new AirPods have twice the range away from the device that they had before and all the Apple employees who are in the crowd start clapping.
00:45:31 ◼ ► But like in the opening part where they talk about somebody whose car went over a cliff and their Apple watch saved their life because it said like it seems like you're in a car accident.
00:46:05 ◼ ► I don't know if we talked about it on like a podcast, but I know we've talked about it privately.
00:46:16 ◼ ► It's still continuing to tilt between what I traditionally think of as the media, which is journalists or columnists or people who are serious about it.
00:46:35 ◼ ► Were you from TV were you from print like the New York Times or Time magazine or Wired magazine or the web or, you know, and then the web.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And then in print, you're trying to pick your soundbites to go around an exclusive interview or glossy.
00:47:28 ◼ ► And it's not just me as having been the up and comer and I have no background in print and no face for television.
00:47:48 ◼ ► And so with some of the people in the media, I never got like a stink eye or like a sharp elbow, but I could sense coldness.
00:48:00 ◼ ► And it was the first time I don't remember if it was a WWDC or a Mac world, but it was definitely at Moscone West.
00:48:08 ◼ ► And the first time that I got that didn't just get a press invitation to watch the keynote, but also got a, hey, we'd like to schedule a briefing with somebody to talk about the keynote after the keynote be like an hour afterwards or something.
00:48:24 ◼ ► And there's a green room off to the side of where the keynote was up on the fourth floor of Moscone.
00:48:31 ◼ ► And the first time I went in there and I felt a little weird and Walt Mossberg said, hey, I really like what you're doing.
00:48:56 ◼ ► He said hello to me and was very, very gracious and then immediately got taken away to go talk to Steve Jobs or something.
00:49:30 ◼ ► But part of what made him good about it is he knew, here, I can write 800 words for The New York Times.
00:49:46 ◼ ► And I keep thinking, you know, and it's just like when you're a kid and you think, hey, when I become a parent, I'm not going to do blank.
00:49:59 ◼ ► And I do think, in a lot of ways, I don't want to be the grumpy old man who's like, get off my lawn, right?
00:50:10 ◼ ► You can wake up every morning and think, I am not going to tell the kids to get off my lawn.
00:50:31 ◼ ► I remember being the younger person in the media pool who'd come up only through the web, only through my own stuff.
00:51:05 ◼ ► But the influencers, like the pure YouTubers, you know, there's like the MKBHDs of the world, who's totally just rock solid aces, maybe the best overall tech reviewer working today.
00:51:32 ◼ ► And those people have a very different approach to being in the media at an Apple event, right?
00:51:39 ◼ ► It is like, yeah, it's, it's a complex topic, too, because you have certainly people and I think people are young people are smart.
00:51:51 ◼ ► But young people are especially media savvy because they've been, they've grown up like kind of surrounded with this.
00:52:14 ◼ ► Like their eyeballs have been pinned back and it's being fed to them from at a very early age.
00:52:20 ◼ ► And I mean this in terms of all kinds of media from a TikTok to an Instagram reel to a Twitter feed or, or whatever they're consuming, their phones are always with them.
00:52:31 ◼ ► We had you and I speak in we, but I'm sure some members of your audience are following the same bucket.
00:52:36 ◼ ► We had time for our brains to absorb information and understand what that was like at a relatively slow pace.
00:52:45 ◼ ► And we had relationships with people that these days, I guess you'd classify them under what we would call parasocial, right?
00:52:52 ◼ ► Like parasocial relationships are relationships with people that you don't personally know, but you build a relationship with them based on exposure to them.
00:53:11 ◼ ► But influencers and people that make content on TikTok or on YouTube, they have these deep parasocial relationships with the chat or with their fans or followers, where those fans or followers feel very, very personally attached to them.
00:53:43 ◼ ► And so when you put somebody like that in a context of an Apple event where there are journalists there, there are people with these strong bodies of fans or group of people that they have these parasocial relationships with.
00:53:58 ◼ ► And in some cases, that can manifest itself as, hey, that parasocial relationship is stronger than their expectation of access.
00:54:07 ◼ ► So like an MKBHD or somebody else who is out there doing journalism level journalism, they just happen to be operating in this space where they have like deep relationships with their viewers that go beyond a brand.
00:54:22 ◼ ► Like, okay, I wrote for TechCrunch and some people know me, but like more, they knew a brand a lot better, right?
00:54:30 ◼ ► Whereas with an influencer, it's like, no, no, what is so-and-so saying about this thing?
00:54:41 ◼ ► This relationship is more important to me between me and these people who have chosen to follow me and therefore enrich me or allow me to keep doing this thing.
00:54:51 ◼ ► And then there are other people where the access is more important because they are churning out old audience.
00:54:57 ◼ ► They don't really care about the audience that would deeply care about this sort of thing.
00:55:00 ◼ ► They only care about the new audience and growing their followership and all that stuff.
00:55:05 ◼ ► And so in order to be in seek of new and growth and all of that things that the platforms emphasize, they have to have access.
00:55:13 ◼ ► And so to them, access to an Apple event and to the hardware and to the people so that they can make these soundbitey things, they can make this content that gets new followers or that captures new audience is more important than actually telling the truth.
00:55:26 ◼ ► When you come up against something where you're like, I'm not really so sure these are good colors.
00:55:31 ◼ ► Well, then you don't get access to the next event and therefore you don't get any new followers.
00:55:35 ◼ ► And so I think it's just like journalism where there is a nuance and subtlety to it as well.
00:55:45 ◼ ► It's just now it's like, what if instead of five major outlets, there were 5,000, right?
00:55:56 ◼ ► And so one thing I'll say that it's very clarifying from what you just said is it's not the medium, although maybe video, right?
00:56:09 ◼ ► I don't know that there's anybody whose primary outlet is TikTok who I would consider a journalist.
00:56:53 ◼ ► And it ties into, if I'm going to make it all about me, you know, the whole kerfuffle this year with the Apple executives not doing my show after WWDC because they're a little prickly about what I wrote about the Apple intelligence stuff, which was always, I never felt it hanging over my head.
00:57:16 ◼ ► And I said this on stage with Neely and Joanna, and I'll get to Neely's, to me, my favorite point of that whole show.
00:57:33 ◼ ► And it was nice when they, without me asking, invited me to have the briefings after the events.
00:57:39 ◼ ► And it is, you've, I've been in, not just been in the keynotes, but been in the briefings with you many times.
00:57:51 ◼ ► And yes, you know, we often don't get the answer you really want to get, but, you know, without a tape recorder running and with an agreement that it's off the, on background, you get a better answer to certain questions.
00:58:28 ◼ ► And Neelai's great summation of that on stage was the less you need their access to them, the more they need you, you know, that they need the verge and that they need, the verge is very prickly about all of these things, right?
00:58:46 ◼ ► Like they're, they've, for a couple of years now, they're very prickly even about the, they won't say Apple said, or Apple spokesperson said, they're going to give the name of the Apple spokesperson, even though the spokespeople do.
00:59:02 ◼ ► The verge is very prickly about that, but because they're prickly and they're good at what they do and they don't need, you know, they're like, we just won't run it if we can't put your name on it.
00:59:14 ◼ ► Then because the verge is the verge, Apple's like, okay, we'll give you a spokesperson whose name you can use to say what we, what the company wants to say.
00:59:23 ◼ ► And that's a good defining line between what side of this is journalism and what's influencing is do, you know, oh man, whose line is it?
00:59:33 ◼ ► I think it's George Orwell who said journalism is printing something that somebody doesn't want printed.
00:59:45 ◼ ► That sort of mindset is journalism and influencing is something different and it absolutely needs the access, right?
00:59:55 ◼ ► Getting cut off from getting invited to the iPhone event in early September is, I mean, it may not be death of your channel, but it's death of your channel when it comes to talking about iPhones.
01:00:06 ◼ ► Yeah, it's so like the way it works for Apple is they get sort of an opportunity to get an end run around critique and just have the products be shown off on their merits.
01:00:16 ◼ ► The way it works for influencers, I guess at the most, at their most craven, which they're just people.
01:00:22 ◼ ► So some of these people are cool people and conscientious people and some of them are not so good.
01:00:27 ◼ ► And like at its most craven, it is very much a, hey, we're just like saying this product exists and we're showing it and we have access to it.
01:00:35 ◼ ► And the fact that we have access to it means we get a view out of you and maybe a follow.
01:00:37 ◼ ► But then at the upper scale, at the most conscientious and most, even if you don't, even if you don't cross the line from like an influencer into a tech columnist that just happens to use YouTube as a medium,
01:00:50 ◼ ► even if you stay below that line, there are influences that are really, they're not covering the products, nor are they even claiming to review them, right?
01:00:57 ◼ ► They're just sort of like in the presence of them and their fans are like interested in seeing them in the presence of those things.
01:02:11 ◼ ► And whatever the new thing was, like, me and you and everybody, The Verge and everybody had
01:02:30 ◼ ► Eastern, and like a day or two before the embargo, there were like all of these YouTubes that came
01:02:43 ◼ ► Showing these iPhones, like, two days before the embargo, saying, hey, this is really cool.
01:03:11 ◼ ► And I think Apple was taken aback because they're like, oh, these people aren't like you.
01:03:16 ◼ ► I don't know that they called them influencers, but they're like, we just had them to our place
01:03:45 ◼ ► And, of course, they made it look like they weren't in a press scrum with 25 or 30 of their
01:04:04 ◼ ► And whoever else was there, 20 feet away from them, shooting a similar video with a pink
01:04:14 ◼ ► But then once I knew that's what happened, and I'm familiar enough with what most of the
01:04:22 ◼ ► And it is like every room looks a little different, and each floor has different lighting and
01:04:29 ◼ ► And they all just sort of spread out as – because it's their instinct, is how do I make my video
01:04:38 ◼ ► If it looks the same as everybody else's, why would they watch mine over somebody else's?
01:04:48 ◼ ► And so their natural abilities at being an influencer and creating content for the influencer audience
01:04:57 ◼ ► But then their videos, for us on the outside, triggered us of, hey, how did this group of
01:05:09 ◼ ► But it started this whole – and anyway, to bring this all back full circle, I feel like
01:05:22 ◼ ► And it's – even at Apple, which is obviously the tech company PR I'm most familiar with,
01:05:28 ◼ ► I'm not saying it feels like I'm talking to an entire PR organization that's optimized for
01:05:47 ◼ ► Like, I just was listening to a podcast today where somebody mentioned that in terms of like
01:05:53 ◼ ► media strategy – not saying this tilted the election or whatever, but Kamala Harris' big,
01:06:02 ◼ ► And it was like a week before the election, Kamala Harris on 60 minutes, and there were
01:06:08 ◼ ► And Donald Trump's big, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this show, I'm going to do
01:06:27 ◼ ► interviews of Harris on 60 Minutes versus Trump talking for three hours nonstop with Joe Rogan
01:06:41 ◼ ► And these – the influencers who hit Apple's radar and make the cut to get invited for this
01:06:52 ◼ ► This is what Apple wants is they want to get their message to a huge audience of people,
01:07:00 ◼ ► And I don't blame them, but it does corrupt the process in a weird way because what I detect – and
01:07:13 ◼ ► I detect it from other companies even more, but I just detect it where – you know this,
01:07:19 ◼ ► like, from being the editor-in-chief at TechCrunch for a long time and writing about this stuff,
01:07:23 ◼ ► is you knew you weren't going to bend to Apple's, oh, we really don't want you to mention that, right?
01:07:35 ◼ ► They kind of like, oh, you know, we'd rather have you not talk about the bend gate with the iPhone 6
01:07:43 ◼ ► Whereas the influencers, they're like, hey, we'd rather not have you talk about this thing
01:08:06 ◼ ► It's not really that important to them either, unless controversy is their brand, right?
01:08:21 ◼ ► And if you're just like, sure, I'll just stick to your talking points, they're like, oh, this is great.
01:08:29 ◼ ► And so I definitely felt implicit stuff over the years, because how could they not be like, oh, please don't.
01:09:08 ◼ ► But it's a very different it's such a different thing for the same PR organization to be dealing with.
01:09:19 ◼ ► Whereas I don't think dealing with TV, print and web meant that the PR people 15 years ago had to have different mentalities.
01:09:29 ◼ ► Whereas now it's a bifurcation and I kind of feel PR needs a very different approach to it.
01:09:36 ◼ ► And to bring this all to where I was going is I can't help but think that the nature of this made by Google event was sort of put together by influencer first people at Google that.
01:10:17 ◼ ► And the applause sign, I don't think that some of the people in the audience thought twice about it, right?
01:10:23 ◼ ► No, honestly, as an influencer, you're used to running your own talk show every day, right?
01:10:29 ◼ ► If it's Twitch or another streaming service, you're talking to chat and you need that, right?
01:10:37 ◼ ► That's how you get either money directly from them in terms of like subscriptions or gifts or long term brand deals based on more followers, right?
01:10:50 ◼ ► Whereas a journalist, you're not, you're very much allergic to that concept of, oh, I'm in the audience of a talk show.
01:11:00 ◼ ► I want to be in a place where I can get information that is closer to the truth than this highly produced scenario.
01:11:07 ◼ ► So I have something weird going on and I can't help but think that that weird Google event is a sort of, I don't think it's a sign of the future.
01:11:16 ◼ ► Cause I don't think they're going to do it again, but maybe like you said, maybe they'll make another stab at it.
01:11:23 ◼ ► I think Google has definitely organically integrated creators in their, into their marketing for a while.
01:11:33 ◼ ► The iPhone 11 release was, and I have some information about this that is non-public, but like the, the nature of it was like, that was basically the year they decided to go at it.
01:12:08 ◼ ► They gave them this, their early access, as you mentioned, a few hours early, 12 hours, whatever it was.
01:12:13 ◼ ► Like the day before they were allowed to post very lightweight, Hey, look at this thing videos, but that was the first year they do it.
01:12:19 ◼ ► And they, they managed like parallel outreach pipelines, journalists and influencers, and they've only gotten more aggressive about it since.
01:12:30 ◼ ► And you, you, like the last iPhone event, there were hundreds of people there that were not journalists.
01:12:43 ◼ ► I don't, I know they have an influencer outreach department, like in their comms department, but I'm not sure if it's, I'm not sure how fleshed out it is.
01:12:53 ◼ ► I'm not intimately familiar with it, but they certainly from external externalities, they clearly do have embraced influencers.
01:13:14 ◼ ► So like for the un-journalists or un-media savvy out there, there's basically tiers of media coverage that you can get.
01:13:25 ◼ ► So earned media, organic media is basically media that happens without you saying you want it to explicitly happen or paying for it.
01:13:38 ◼ ► And then there are other various shades of it, but like those are the main ones that are important to talk about right now.
01:13:43 ◼ ► And so like with an influencer, you're technically getting the ease of paid media, which paid media, anybody will say anything you want as long as you're paying them.
01:14:05 ◼ ► And like with influencers, you can get access to millions of people, millions of viewers with relatively the same kind of level of attention to it.
01:16:06 ◼ ► I can't help but feel that Seth Meyers could have bridged the, look, this is a bunch of geeks
01:16:32 ◼ ► sort of what makes Apple, Apple, where Apple knows how to speak to normal people better than
01:16:53 ◼ ► Because there are celebrities that are generally like very tech savvy and actually care.
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01:20:46 ◼ ► I kind of felt like that was inevitable, but it's ultimately, it's, it's, everybody has their
01:20:57 ◼ ► Somewhere there's somebody who understands all the math in the world, but somewhere, you know,
01:21:15 ◼ ► And it's like, you don't understand saying you want to get in, even, you know, you pinky swear,
01:21:24 ◼ ► And even if we take off the table of debate right now, that good guys only could lead to
01:21:30 ◼ ► bad guys getting in through social engineering or through a bug or through an election, take
01:21:54 ◼ ► And they're like nodding their heads and they're like, yeah, but we're not banning end-to-end
01:22:07 ◼ ► It was clearly like, it is one of those topics that is clearly a non-starter from anybody
01:22:14 ◼ ► who's technically savvy enough to understand it and like theologically like world-breaking.
01:22:21 ◼ ► If you're going to build any sort of backdoor or middleman, it might as well not do it at
01:22:25 ◼ ► And I think the UK was definitely being used as a test case to see, hey, how are liberal
01:22:41 ◼ ► And the argument was like, hey, this is about CSAM and about illegal material and drug deals
01:22:51 ◼ ► I mean, has negotiated furiously behind the scenes and then made some public statements as
01:23:21 ◼ ► And you can't go to the Apple Store and say, everything was on my iPhone and I just dropped
01:23:43 ◼ ► It was like there was no way to keep it and be- And I guess maybe they pulled it before
01:23:47 ◼ ► they had to, to comply with the law, to send a message, but it's like, we have to pull this
01:23:54 ◼ ► And the UK law, and again, the US is, you know, I don't want to just, obviously, there's
01:24:07 ◼ ► Yeah, it almost feels like the rafter in your own eye scenario when we're talking about anybody
01:24:38 ◼ ► Which is this aspect of the snoopers law or whatever the real name of the law is that they
01:24:43 ◼ ► pass where they can hand this request to a company like Apple, like we would like a backdoor
01:25:04 ◼ ► It's a criminal law where like somebody at Apple would, would be liable to be locked up
01:25:15 ◼ ► It was illegal under UK law to even say that the UK was demanding backdoor access to iCloud
01:25:27 ◼ ► Whether you're, whether you have a red MAGA hat that you like to wear or you're a diehard
01:25:36 ◼ ► Either way, the idea of the government telling a company, you can't even say that we're making
01:25:45 ◼ ► And maybe there's some exception somewhere that you agreed, but it just isn't like that
01:25:50 ◼ ► But then the other part about it that was the most breathtaking is what they were asking for
01:25:56 ◼ ► was a worldwide backdoor, not just like for communication between UK citizens and their
01:26:04 ◼ ► iCloud accounts, but it would have given the UK secret service, speaking of throwback earlier
01:26:11 ◼ ► in the podcast, access to anybody's encrypted iCloud communication anywhere in the world, which
01:26:20 ◼ ► Yeah, it is a weird one because it's, it, we're kind of at this place and have been for
01:26:26 ◼ ► It's just like now coming to loggerheads in a lot of ways where you're, you're having an
01:26:31 ◼ ► argument about whether tech companies or governments can establish and set global policy on things
01:26:39 ◼ ► And unfortunately the most popular, most potent argument for tech companies having the most influence
01:26:45 ◼ ► here is that the governments truly don't understand it or don't have the people in place that
01:26:52 ◼ ► And the, either they're ignoring their advisors or ignoring their people, or they do understand
01:26:58 ◼ ► it or have been explained it and they're being facetious and they're, they're pushing an
01:27:03 ◼ ► agenda based on getting reelected or maintaining personal power instead of what is actually best
01:27:10 ◼ ► Or maybe just deliberately setting up the tech companies as scapegoats for any future things.
01:27:17 ◼ ► If a, some kind of widespread CSAM ring pops, you know, like a, the Epstein thing, but like
01:27:24 ◼ ► a new one pops up and it turns out they were all communicating over iMessage or any WhatsApp
01:27:42 ◼ ► And that it having end to end encryption and knowing that the math works out, ultimately
01:28:16 ◼ ► It's not like in this world where so much of our text communications is now end to end encrypted
01:28:22 ◼ ► that the law enforcement around the world no longer gets evidence from people's communications.
01:28:42 ◼ ► And it's, it's a weird one because like on the face of it, if you look at it and examine
01:28:56 ◼ ► So Elliot Carver is like Jonathan price, the villain in that movie, the MacGuffin of that
01:29:01 ◼ ► movie is a GPS encoder that can basically make ships believe that they are in a different
01:29:09 ◼ ► Like tell any ship in the world basically, or any GPS enabled in that case, it was in those
01:29:18 ◼ ► So like 97 GPS was just starting to appear in a lot of places, but it wasn't in everybody's
01:29:28 ◼ ► And so it was like, Oh, what if you had a universal key and you could fool any GPS thing
01:29:34 ◼ ► And what is so silly about it is not the premise that you could do that, which technologically
01:29:40 ◼ ► It is that there, anybody would build a thing like, like they would intentionally build like,
01:29:46 ◼ ► Oh, we're just going to steal this thing that has been built to, and has access to every
01:30:01 ◼ ► We're going to put it in a bolt inside a glass case in a sky, sky rise, and nobody will ever
01:30:25 ◼ ► And it seemed, and again, knock on wood, I mean, who knows what they actually got, but it's
01:30:30 ◼ ► like certain things inevitably, if anything can be exploited and it, and it's valuable, eventually
01:30:38 ◼ ► And it's almost a certainty and the way that it turns out that Chinese spies have infiltrated
01:30:48 ◼ ► This was big news last year, but that they've been able to intercept phone calls and unencrypted
01:30:55 ◼ ► SMS text messages and that, that they've gotten into the not data centers, whatever you want
01:31:01 ◼ ► to call like the, the centralized parts of the cell phone, the telephone network, there's
01:31:10 ◼ ► The fact that that none of that, anything that they did get wouldn't have been gettable if
01:31:20 ◼ ► If you made a FaceTime audio call that is end to end encrypted, well then they'd get nothing.
01:31:29 ◼ ► And you know, even in law enforcement and government and politics are like, yeah, we, I guess we kind
01:31:33 ◼ ► of do want end to end encryption. So I guess sometimes it works out. I don't know. It was
01:31:38 ◼ ► like, but right before it's just by coincidence, but right before, did you see that the brief
01:31:42 ◼ ► item I had on daring fireball last week where I was like, I don't know. I, I feel pretty
01:31:47 ◼ ► pessimistic about the UK government ever getting encryption because they're, they're having a
01:31:52 ◼ ► drought over there. I don't know if you've heard there's, there's the climate is sort of
01:31:55 ◼ ► screwy. Yeah. A little wacky. Yeah. And the UK's national drought group issued advice to citizens
01:32:02 ◼ ► of the UK to how, how the, how individuals in the UK can help with the drought. They can delete
01:32:13 ◼ ► Wait, wait, I swear to God, see this. Why? What's the rationale there? Well, it, uh, we
01:32:22 ◼ ► are, it really helps simple everyday choices such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails
01:32:28 ◼ ► also really helps the collective effort to reduce. And then later on, they have a list of tips
01:32:34 ◼ ► with a bunch of legit tips. Take shorter showers and turn off the tap while you're brushing your
01:32:40 ◼ ► teeth. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. If you, you know, you should brush your teeth for like two
01:32:44 ◼ ► minutes anyway. So why run the water the whole time? So turn it off. And then the, the, one
01:32:49 ◼ ► of the bullet points was delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts
01:32:55 ◼ ► of water to cool their systems. Wow. Wow. I love it. I mean, there is a twisted logic to
01:33:03 ◼ ► it. Theoretically, I mean, if well, okay. Theoretically, this feels like another hour of the podcast.
01:33:09 ◼ ► Right. I thought about the same thing too. And again, it's the way that my, it's the way that
01:33:13 ◼ ► every post on daring fireball, every single one could in theory spiral to 4,000 words, every single
01:33:19 ◼ ► one. Okay. Let's read the numbers. Like how much does steady state store storage need versus active
01:33:27 ◼ ► memory and how often do people access their images and like, you know, like, yeah, let's, let's talk
01:33:33 ◼ ► about this is why I brought it up. But, and I even thought too, all right, let's say you've
01:33:38 ◼ ► got, uh, what, what takes more energy to just leave an old email that you're never going to look at
01:33:45 ◼ ► just leave it in your account. And let's just assume it is stored in a data center in the UK
01:33:53 ◼ ► to just leave it there untouched, never look at it. Or if you delete it, then the server has to do
01:34:01 ◼ ► something. It has to delete it, right? It has to erase it from the storage. And does that consume
01:34:09 ◼ ► more energy? The act of the server deleting and whatever file system actions have to happen,
01:34:16 ◼ ► does that consume more energy than just leaving it there? Because if you just leave it there, the
01:34:23 ◼ ► bits don't change. And then presumably if enough people in the UK deleted enough old email and old
01:34:31 ◼ ► pictures from cloud storage, they could decommission some of the storage on the cloud. And then it's not
01:34:40 ◼ ► even plugged in, right? That that would consume less energy. But just leaving it there versus the act of
01:34:48 ◼ ► doing something with it, like deleting it, does that take more energy? It probably does, at least in the
01:34:53 ◼ ► near term. Yeah. But either way... Let's turn to ChatGPT for a moment. Hold on. We're going to take a ChatGPT
01:34:59 ◼ ► break. 4.0, good ChatGPT, not new ChatGPT. Oh, you're one of those. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, I don't know.
01:35:06 ◼ ► I like them both. I use them both. You just have to be more articulate. I like... 4.0 is a little
01:35:10 ◼ ► better with lazy prompts. And my prompt was very lazy, right? Okay. Its answer is yes. Over the long
01:35:18 ◼ ► term, deleting an old email can reduce energy consumption. And I think it follows the same
01:35:23 ◼ ► logical thought process that you did, which was my process. Okay. Eventually you could decommission
01:35:28 ◼ ► or stop using that. But it says in the short term, deleting an email uses more energy than just
01:35:33 ◼ ► leaving it alone. You have to wake up storage. You have to modify indexes, so CPU cycles for the mail
01:35:38 ◼ ► system. You have to update metadata and sync states. And then like queuing, deletion, journaling,
01:35:45 ◼ ► like all of it, right? And then over time, basically they say the only like savings would be to actually
01:35:54 ◼ ► decommission or lower the amount of storage in the facility. So like the storage is still going to have
01:36:02 ◼ ► power to it. So it's not really going to be using any more or less. It would only be if there was suddenly
01:36:11 ◼ ► Or I guess, and I guess the way that would actually manifest itself, really thinking this through,
01:36:16 ◼ ► which is really fun, is they'll need to add more storage later rather than sooner because there's
01:36:25 ◼ ► free space available on the existing server storage because people deleted their pictures
01:36:32 ◼ ► and emails, right? So that it in the payoff in the future isn't really that they're ever going to
01:36:43 ◼ ► But if enough people were like, well, I'll just keep my 100 most recent photos and throw out the other
01:36:49 ◼ ► 50,000 that they'll need to add storage further in the future. It's just ridiculous. It makes no sense.
01:36:59 ◼ ► You know what it is? I will say at its base level, at its base level, here's what it is. It's used paper
01:37:06 ◼ ► straws, right? No, it's not about the straws, dude, right? It's about the corporations paying lobbyists
01:37:15 ◼ ► to make it so they don't have to do all the stuff that they really should do because the scale is so
01:37:20 ◼ ► off. You would have to have six billion people recycling their paper straws when you could really
01:37:28 ◼ ► just make Exxon not do the stuff that they're doing. You know what I mean? Like it's really putting the
01:37:33 ◼ ► onus on the individual, which is like the worst. It's the worst part of environmentalist thinking
01:37:44 ◼ ► individual responsibility is great, especially from a personal perspective. I have individual
01:37:48 ◼ ► responsibility. I hope you do too, and other people. However, every single amount of effort we put is like
01:37:55 ◼ ► a drop in a literal ocean of effort that is being pushed in the opposite direction because big corporations
01:38:04 ◼ ► have been lobbying for years to not have to do the due diligence and actually do things that are good
01:38:11 ◼ ► Right. If you could split the earth into two multiverses where starting 10 years ago, every single straw,
01:38:21 ◼ ► every single person used across the planet was a paper straw, and in the other one, nobody ever stopped
01:38:29 ◼ ► using plastic straws or giving them out as freely as they did before this became an issue. And then you
01:38:35 ◼ ► came to today, August 2025, and looked at the atmosphere. Would you see any difference whatsoever?
01:38:43 ◼ ► No. I mean, like a couple of molecular, you know, like an omniscient deity could perhaps detect
01:38:52 ◼ ► minor molecular differences, right? But I think most of it would be from the carbon dioxide emissions
01:39:01 ◼ ► of people bitching about paper straws. Yeah, like maybe the straws is the wrong analogy. That was
01:39:08 ◼ ► really like a weird turtle fake out. But you get the idea. It's just like the individual responsibility,
01:39:13 ◼ ► it's so hard to measure. And I think COVID actually showed us how crazy it would have to be the change
01:39:20 ◼ ► in our lifestyle, like an individual's lifestyle. Because we, everybody saw, oh, nature is healing
01:39:24 ◼ ► and all of this stuff. Why? Because literally like every person on the planet stayed home for two
01:39:29 ◼ ► weeks. I mean, that's like, you know, like that's not feasible. Sorry. Right. Like when the people
01:39:34 ◼ ► went out and photographed like the freeways in Los Angeles at four o'clock on a Wednesday,
01:39:39 ◼ ► and they're empty. And it looks like a post-apocalyptic movie where there's just an empty freeway on a sunny
01:39:46 ◼ ► Sunday after weekday in California, Los Angeles. It's like, yeah, the environment got better. Right.
01:39:52 ◼ ► If you could suddenly get rid of every internal combustion engine on the planet and either have
01:39:59 ◼ ► people take mass transit or everybody switches to electric personal vehicles, you'd have a very
01:40:05 ◼ ► measurable effect very quickly. Very quickly. The straws thing is like telling people to delete their old
01:40:12 ◼ ► emails from the cloud server, except at least with the straw thing. It's like, I don't like them either.
01:40:20 ◼ ► And I hate that Trump personally is annoyed by paper straws too. Like I hate, right? I really dislike
01:40:29 ◼ ► this guy so frigging much that when he is, and again, the whole UK thing, I have to admit the Trump
01:40:36 ◼ ► administration did a better job than the Biden administration. The Biden administration was on
01:40:40 ◼ ► the wrong side of this. The Biden administration, I mean, I can put it in the show notes, I guess I'll
01:40:45 ◼ ► make a note here, but the Biden administration, when they found out what the UK was up to,
01:40:50 ◼ ► we're like, Hey, you do yours. Cause they knew the UK would share with them through the sharing
01:40:55 ◼ ► agreement that the UK and Canada and Australia have for secret stuff. They're like, I don't know.
01:41:01 ◼ ► It sounds good to us if we can kind of, yeah, well, we can't get it here. We'll just get the other end
01:41:05 ◼ ► of the conversation. Right. And that there is like a law and that Biden administration officials were
01:41:10 ◼ ► asked by Congress. God bless him. One of my favorite senators, Ron Wyden, I think he's from
01:41:15 ◼ ► Washington or Oregon. I think he's Washington, but whatever. He's very, very good on tech issues and
01:41:20 ◼ ► privacy and encryption and stuff like that. And it was on the committee where they asked them like,
01:41:25 ◼ ► Hey, is there, you know, like they're under an obligation to say when they know that another
01:41:29 ◼ ► country was asking for something that would infringe upon the privacy of the United States.
01:41:34 ◼ ► And the Biden administration was like, yeah, we don't know. I don't think so. It's all good.
01:41:37 ◼ ► Biden administration screwed that up. And the Trump administration was sticking it to the UK on this.
01:41:42 ◼ ► And I kind of feel like, Hey, maybe not for the right reasons. And I know whenever I bring this up,
01:41:48 ◼ ► people are already probably firing an email to me like, Oh my God, the Trump administration would
01:41:52 ◼ ► love to be able to snoop on everybody's email. Don't be surprised if they do ask the same thing,
01:41:57 ◼ ► they just don't want another country to have it. But it's like, I feel like the one factor of
01:42:01 ◼ ► everybody involved from Trump himself to everybody he's surrounded himself now is they're all paranoid
01:42:07 ◼ ► kooks. Right. And so they don't trust conspiracy all the way down. They don't trust each other,
01:42:14 ◼ ► right? Trump doesn't trust anybody else in his administration. He doesn't want them to be able
01:42:18 ◼ ► to snoop on his, his own communications. And none of them do either. Right. Right. That goofy
01:42:24 ◼ ► cash Patel with his googly eyes. I mean, the last thing he wants is somebody reading his text
01:42:29 ◼ ► messages. Anyway, it worked out. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I don't. But anyway, the thing about the
01:42:34 ◼ ► straws, I hate, I hate that I'm on the same side as Trump. But the worst part is you get a shitty
01:42:39 ◼ ► straw that falls apart by the end of your beverage. Yeah, I didn't mean it changes the taste of your
01:42:43 ◼ ► beverage. Whereas if plastic straws, they don't change the taste of your beverage. Any poor sap in the UK
01:42:49 ◼ ► who takes their, if this catches on in the way that, hey, we got to get rid of the straws,
01:42:55 ◼ ► we got to save the dolphins, dolphins are choking on straws or whatever the explanation is, which is
01:42:59 ◼ ► all nonsense. But if somehow this catches on, that you need to help with the drought and the climate
01:43:05 ◼ ► situation by deleting your old cloud storage, then it's heartbreaking because anybody who follows the
01:43:12 ◼ ► advice no longer has cloud storage of their personal photos. Right. Right. Like it does go back to
01:43:19 ◼ ► COVID where billions of people around the planet were like, what do you want me to do? Do you want
01:43:24 ◼ ► me to wear a mask? I'll wear a mask. You want me to stay inside? I'll stay inside. Whatever. I want to
01:43:28 ◼ ► help. There's something, there's a crisis going on. And the same thing with the straws where the whole
01:43:33 ◼ ► reason it took off is that people are like, okay, they say that the plastic straws are bad and there's
01:43:39 ◼ ► obviously bad stuff going on with the climate. So, all right, I'll do what I can. Somebody who takes
01:43:44 ◼ ► their advice on this is deleting their own photos. That's a minor tragedy that like a thousand paper
01:43:53 ◼ ► straws don't amount to. Yeah. And I think they're targeting emails because it's an easy choice of like,
01:43:59 ◼ ► oh, well, do you really read your old emails? No, you can delete those. But you know, you can see it. It's like,
01:44:04 ◼ ► okay, so by that logic, if I use cloud storage, I hate the environment, right? Yes. It's like, okay,
01:44:11 ◼ ► yeah, all right. But it's that personal guilt thing that is really like, I view it as even if people are
01:44:17 ◼ ► well-wishing and it's not pragmatically happening, like actually happening, the framework for thinking
01:44:24 ◼ ► about it is, this is just another way that corporations are able to get away with putting
01:44:29 ◼ ► the onus off of themselves and onto people's guilt. And it's like, all right, oh, I should delete my
01:44:35 ◼ ► old emails, not Google should find a way to make their data centers more efficient, you know? And
01:44:40 ◼ ► which they do, which is fine because it saves them money. So if you can attach money to something,
01:44:45 ◼ ► they'll make it more efficient. But yeah, that's the thing. Any individual deleting their emails
01:44:49 ◼ ► is not going to do anything. Right. I don't think this one is going to take off. I think it's just goofy
01:44:53 ◼ ► and it's not, there's not going to be a rash of people deleting their old photo libraries from
01:44:58 ◼ ► cloud storage, but it does play into the general belief that tech companies are reckless and rather
01:45:06 ◼ ► the tech data centers are overall a drain on the environment, which is true. They are enormous energy
01:45:15 ◼ ► consumers and the energy is the fundamental source of the climate problem, right? Energy is the problem.
01:45:30 ◼ ► like the fundamental problem, like the whole reason the compute isn't the limit. It's the compute per
01:45:38 ◼ ► watt is the limit. And that a lot of these places they they're using every watt that they can get into
01:45:43 ◼ ► the data center. And that's what caps their compute. It's not the performance of the servers. It's the
01:45:50 ◼ ► number of watts that are coming into the facility. And so that's true. And so people think, oh yeah,
01:45:58 ◼ ► I guess it is like I'm part of it too. Cause I have a whole bunch of shit in my iCloud, but that's not it. You have no idea what it is that makes these data centers. So energy expensive, but it is not your personal library of 10,000 photos that you've shot over the last 20 years. Yeah. Oh man. All right. One last sponsor to thank. And it is our good friends at Squarespace and Squarespace.
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01:48:55 ◼ ► More on the legal front. The other thing I definitely wanted to talk about just happened this week was the, I have to laugh, the Massimo Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor dispute.
01:49:16 ◼ ► So 18 months ago, I guess it came to a head. I guess Massimo had lodged their complaint months earlier, but it came to a public head right before Christmas 2023, when the Apple Watch Series 9 was new.
01:49:30 ◼ ► And Massimo had won some sort of judgment from the U.S. It's such a confusing name, the International Trade Commission.
01:49:55 ◼ ► But when the judgment first came, I'd heard of the International Trade Commission, but assumed it was, yeah, NATO or the U.N. or something.
01:50:03 ◼ ► And they sided with Massimo that the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor trampled on a couple of patents that Massimo held.
01:50:22 ◼ ► And Apple got it, at least got it postponed until after Christmas, which is obviously a huge deal for Apple Watch.
01:50:30 ◼ ► You know, but it kicked in either at the end of December or very early January, then 2024.
01:50:36 ◼ ► And from that point forward, the Apple Watches sold in the U.S. were, the hardware was the same, and they still had the blood oxygen sensors.
01:50:45 ◼ ► But from the factory, out of the box, they were running a version of watchOS that in the U.S. disabled the blood oxygen sensors.
01:51:01 ◼ ► And I thought, and as far as I know, everybody else who follows this thought, well, this will last, what, a month?
01:51:06 ◼ ► And then either Tim Cook writes a check or the judge says, ah, well, you know, this appeal is upheld.
01:51:14 ◼ ► That's, this is not, I don't know, somehow this is going to go away in a couple of weeks.
01:51:20 ◼ ► And then a whole new generation of Apple Watches came out last September, and the import ban was still on.
01:51:27 ◼ ► Now, again, they're still imported, obviously, to the United States, but the blood oxygen sensor hasn't been available on an Apple Watch in the U.S.
01:51:40 ◼ ► And the U.S. Customs Office issued a ruling last week based on an idea that Apple, and it's funny, I read it.
01:51:51 ◼ ► It happened, Apple sent five units, five watches to Chicago from China with this workaround in place for a valuation by the Customs Department.
01:52:04 ◼ ► And the way that it works now is it's still the Apple Watch Series 10 or the Ultra 2, but now when you go to the blood oxygen app on your watch and, say, take a reading, it says, okay, hold your arm still like it does everywhere else in the world or on any Apple Watch purchase before December 2023.
01:52:29 ◼ ► And what happens to work around the patent is the sensors are obviously on your wrist on the watch, but then the data goes to your iPhone for processing.
01:52:39 ◼ ► And the result is only displayed in the health app on your iPhone or any other iPad or Mac with a health app.
01:52:49 ◼ ► And the Customs Department sided with Apple that this gets around the Massimo patents because the patents, and I read the rule.
01:53:09 ◼ ► But they point out the patents, and the patents seem to say when you boil them down that the patent is for a device worn on the user that reads via two different lights, like infrared and whatever the other two ways of shining light through the skin.
01:53:29 ◼ ► And non-invasive, doesn't puncture your skin, processes the data on the device worn on the body, and or displays the results on the device.
01:53:41 ◼ ► And so by not processing the data on the device and not displaying the result on the device, it does seem that the patents that Massimo held applied.
01:53:53 ◼ ► And I think Massimo's lawyers own gold themselves because it says in the Customs Ruling that the Massimo lawyers, when Apple first proposed this workaround, only said that we don't think that the patents are limiting that all of the stuff we describe in the preamble of the patent.
01:54:16 ◼ ► Which is that it's a device on them, and it does this, and it processes it on the device, and displays the result on the device.
01:54:28 ◼ ► And the Customs Office or whoever this hearing was for is, well, what if it's not limiting?
01:54:35 ◼ ► And if the interpretation of the patent, and Massimo was like, we just don't think it's limiting.
01:54:41 ◼ ► And the Customs Department went, or Customs and Borders Office, went to the International Trade Commission, the people who made the original decision.
01:54:50 ◼ ► And they said, was your interpretation of these patents that they were limiting or not, based on the description in the preamble?
01:55:04 ◼ ► And I honestly think that based on the patents and Massimo's arguments about the patents, I really don't think, I know how silly this sounds, but I really think it was the right decision.
01:55:20 ◼ ► I mean, as far as I understand it, anyway, and obviously not a lawyer, but yeah, I mean, like the ITC order being, like, reversed, and so Massimo claims, like, ex parte.
01:55:31 ◼ ► Like, basically, hey, you need to let us know that you were reversing this, and they didn't.
01:55:42 ◼ ► Like, this SCT, like, this technology that Massimo basically claims at the center of their patent, it's basically their ability to, like, extract signal from confusing signals that can arrive from venous blood movement and arterial blood movement.
01:55:58 ◼ ► And, like, that patent, which, and forgive me, my memory's a little fuzzy at this point, because I haven't really thought about this patent in a couple years, but I think that's basically what it was.
01:56:06 ◼ ► It was, like, the technology to extract a proper signal from there and to do that on the device, and so Apple is basically saying, hey, we're doing that, but we're doing it off device, so that's where your limiting factor comes in.
01:56:52 ◼ ► I guess this idea that Massimo found out about Apple's workaround solution being okayed when
01:57:23 ◼ ► It's like the way you know this rigmarole where it's like, we'd like to send you something under NDA for nine o'clock tomorrow morning.
01:57:36 ◼ ► And then later today, there will be software updates for the iPhone and watch that do this.
01:57:51 ◼ ► But it's not, I feel like, I think, I don't know if there was any funny business with Massimo not getting a heads up that they got a word.
01:58:13 ◼ ► And it really does seem like they only argued, hey, these patents are not limiting to a combination of all these things.
01:58:24 ◼ ► The whole basis of the import ban was that we read these patents as limiting and no watch does all these things on one device.
01:58:33 ◼ ► I kind of, and I've been in an argument with various people about the meaning of the term patent troll.
01:58:51 ◼ ► But I have been told that these are not the reason that, you know, why hasn't this settled?
01:59:06 ◼ ► But there was some guy, like a blogger, who like 15 years ago took Apple to small claims court because his NVIDIA graphics card and his Mac went bad.
01:59:16 ◼ ► And Apple sent two lawyers out to East Bumblefuck, Kentucky, a small claims court to fight this guy over this.
01:59:25 ◼ ► And in the case, they're like, well, how much would it have cost for you to just replace this card?
01:59:47 ◼ ► And they were obviously spending more money to fight it than it would have been because literally they admitted, oh, no.
02:00:03 ◼ ► If this guy can get his replaced, okay, what if we have to replace millions or tens of millions?
02:00:14 ◼ ► And I know that Massimo is a real company with a bunch of real products, typically in the medical.
02:00:22 ◼ ► Because a patent troll, almost like the prototypical patent troll, does not produce any products of their own, doesn't conduct research, you know, doesn't sell products.
02:00:52 ◼ ► And if you cheat at card games, the worst cheaters are ones who run, like, a whole team full of cheaters.
02:00:58 ◼ ► And it's like organized crime meant to cheat the slot machines in a casino or something like that.
02:01:04 ◼ ► But it's also somebody who mostly plays honestly, but occasionally, like, takes a peek at a card in a home poker game or something like that.
02:01:13 ◼ ► Or, like, one or two hands a night that tries to slip themselves an ace, that's still cheating, even if you play honestly 99% of the time.
02:01:27 ◼ ► Like, they're always registered in East Texas because then the court cases get adjudicated by the crazy Yosemite Sam lawyers in East Texas.
02:01:37 ◼ ► And, you know, like a reporter goes to check out, here's the address of the patent holder, and it's like a closet.
02:01:52 ◼ ► The most famous, probably, that most people would know, or at least people involved in this world, is intellectual ventures, right?
02:02:07 ◼ ► It's, you know, Nathan Mervhold, a Microsoft billionaire, who's like, I think, you know, I love the patent system.
02:02:14 ◼ ► He kind of turned patent system to like a cleaned up version of an organized crime, right?
02:02:20 ◼ ► Like, if most patent trolls are like pickpockets and swindlers on the corner, intellectual ventures was like the savings and loan scandal, right?
02:02:36 ◼ ► And maybe that we need a different term, but it's like, I don't know what to call it, though, if a company like Massimo, who most of their stuff is real products, and they do have real breakthroughs in sensor technology over the decades or however long they've been in business.
02:02:51 ◼ ► But on this particular case, they're trying to assert something that their patents really ought not to allow them to claim to hold exclusivity on.
02:03:02 ◼ ► It really does not seem to me like their patents mean nobody else in the world other than Massimo or Massimo paying licensee can read blood oxygen through the skin.
02:03:26 ◼ ► Like, they're definitely trolling for their recompense here, but are they a capital T troll like an IV?
02:03:32 ◼ ► And, you know, long story short, it's still the U.S. owners of new Apple watches and the people I feel really bad for are anybody who bought a watch before the import ban but got it replaced either under warranty or AppleCare, either because the watch was defective or it got smashed or something.
02:03:53 ◼ ► Even though you bought it before the import ban or you just get, like, the battery replaced, they don't really replace the battery in your Apple watch.
02:04:01 ◼ ► It's like you go in there and they take your watch and send it back and give you somebody else's refurbished Apple watch of the same kind with a brand new battery.
02:04:11 ◼ ► Anything like that, you, after 18 months ago, you get one that doesn't do the blood oxygen reading, which kind of stinks.
02:04:17 ◼ ► I mean, it says that the biggest deal, I mean, if they just said next month at the Apple event, if they just, it turns, again, they wouldn't announce it.
02:04:26 ◼ ► But if after the keynote, everybody's looking at the tech specs in the series 11 Apple watch doesn't have a blood oxygen sensor.
02:04:35 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, in this particular case, people think, well, does that have to do with this Massimo thing?
02:04:39 ◼ ► But would you really think that would affect the sales of Apple watch, the blood oxygen?
02:04:44 ◼ ► This is not a huge deal to why people have an Apple watch, but it's like any one of the sensors, as they go further down the chain of biometric sensing that they can do on your wrist, it all adds up to a better picture of your overall health, right?
02:05:09 ◼ ► And you might want an alert about it and go, it's one of those things that you might get alert about.
02:05:15 ◼ ► And then you're the guy at the beginning of the Apple keynote who's like, yeah, my Apple watch told me I had this.
02:05:21 ◼ ► And I went to the doctor and he said, hey, if your watch hadn't told you that, you'd be dead in a month.
02:05:25 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like you never know, like the confluence of those things gives you things like the dips in blood oxygen level can, along with other signals, not alone, but along with other signals, tell you things like, hey, you're getting sick, right?
02:05:38 ◼ ► Or, you know, your capacity is lowered, which is one of the newer features that they introduced, which I've seen it happen to me.
02:05:47 ◼ ► So it's like it adds up to a fuller picture and a fuller kind of x-ray vision into your health.
02:05:54 ◼ ► And so I think any losses there are certainly ones that Apple does not want to just take on the chin.
02:05:59 ◼ ► They would want to get more, not less capacity there for reading that information, for what they can do from the wrist, which is already quite limited.
02:06:08 ◼ ► So I think they're going to I doubt they're going to give up the ghost on this at any point.
02:06:14 ◼ ► Yeah, I do, too, because I and I really do think that they're probably right that the patents should not be applied to the Apple Watch.
02:06:33 ◼ ► The one thing I want to add to that is and Massimo in their lawsuit did mention specifically that they found it curious that this ruling from Customs and Border Patrol came very shortly after a very high profile visit of Tim Cook at the White House where he gave Trump.
02:06:54 ◼ ► They mentioned this in the law and I don't know if it's in the lawsuit or I guess it's in the lawsuit in comments where they announced that they had they're going to plan to spend.
02:07:03 ◼ ► an extra hundred billion dollars in the US in the coming years on job creation and US manufacturing efforts or blah, blah, blah, and gave him a gold trophy.
02:07:17 ◼ ► It is true that Tim Cook was in the Oval Office just like two weeks ago and did announce that they're spending more money on US manufacturing and job creation, which is in line with Trump's goals.
02:07:36 ◼ ► But I will say reading all the stuff I did on this that I did that all of this was in the works last year, a year ago, like while Biden was president, like the initial Apple, I think, came up with this workaround of doing the processing and not displaying the results on it on the watch a year ago, over a year ago, and and started the chain of events to get the Customs and Border Patrol to ask the ITC.
02:08:08 ◼ ► All of that was a year ago, and it was all set in motion and seemed inevitably coming to this conclusion from what I read.
02:08:17 ◼ ► But, you know, so on the one hand, if it was sparked by somebody else in the Trump administration calling the Customs Department and saying, hey, Tim Apple, he's our friend.
02:08:40 ◼ ► But even if it's not, even this is a totally up and up, which I really do think is the case, having read the details of this report or the ruling from the CBP or whatever.
02:08:52 ◼ ► I really do think it's on the up and up and was entirely adjudicated by the sort of bureaucratic, fair minded, nonpartisan people who you think your whole life have been working at places like the Customs and Border Patrol Office of patent disputes on import bans.
02:09:15 ◼ ► But that's the downside of Tim Cook going to the Oval Office and giving Trump his fucking gold trophy is then even when legitimate things work out in your favor, people look at him and say, that seems fishy to me.
02:09:37 ◼ ► Like, you have created the, at the very least, the optics or planted the seed of that conversation to happen every time you, any one of these things comes down the pike.
02:09:50 ◼ ► And so you can't get mad or upset about it when people assume that your payola is paying off.
02:09:57 ◼ ► It's like, you gave him a gold trophy and then a government agency said, ah, cool, it's fine.
02:10:14 ◼ ► And effectively, even though you don't get to see the results of your blood oxygen test on your wrist, it's a very good workaround from Apple's perspective.
02:10:25 ◼ ► You know, I'm sure they're going to continue petitioning to get the whole thing thrown out so they can just make the U.S.
02:10:30 ◼ ► Apple watches have the same experience worldwide where you can see the fucking number on your wrist instead of having to go to your phone.
02:10:38 ◼ ► But effectively, blood oxygen in particular is not something where people are ordinarily running a test.
02:10:52 ◼ ► Because people do think, I want to test my heart rate right now and I want to see it while I'm exercising.
02:10:59 ◼ ► I want to see what my heart rate's at as I'm on the bike or the spin machine or whatever you're doing.
02:11:04 ◼ ► The blood oxygen thing is just a background reading while you sleep a lot, too, and it just shows up in your health report.
02:11:12 ◼ ► And any kind of drop or a change in the weekly trends or something like that, you'll just get in a notification on your phone and it's fine, right?
02:11:25 ◼ ► It's a little awkward when you actually run the test on your watch that it's like, we're not going to tell you why, but go check in the health app on your phone.
02:11:54 ◼ ► You are blogging, and you're at theobsessor.com, which is, I told you the last time, such a great name.
02:12:08 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm looking forward to continuing on there, just trying to do some essays, and then also doing some just recommendations, little things.
02:12:25 ◼ ► We're basically a workflows company, so we're building workflows that could apply to all kinds of different ways that people work.
02:12:35 ◼ ► I mean, one of the reasons I exited journalism was that I wanted to build products and learn how that happened and work with people that did it on a close basis.
02:12:44 ◼ ► So I spent a lot of my day in linear and Figma and messing around with code, doing a little bit of bytecoding myself or regular coding, mostly simplistic stuff.
02:12:59 ◼ ► That's why I kind of left the writing game, not so much because I didn't like it or it wasn't enjoyable to me.
02:13:06 ◼ ► I just had spent a decade-plus covering people that built stuff and learning very deeply in how these processes worked, and I just really wanted to actually do that process.