00:00:00 ◼ ► Steven Robles, welcome to the talk show, and please, please, please tell me how to pronounce
00:00:15 ◼ ► And because I'm going to admit to you something that is probably in the decades of your life
00:00:20 ◼ ► completely expected, which is that in my head, I'd been pronouncing your surname Robles.
00:00:51 ◼ ► We figured out at a recent Apple event that Jason and I have exactly the same briefcase.
00:01:04 ◼ ► I realized when I was on your show, I believe you as the host introduced yourself and Jason,
00:01:33 ◼ ► Well, while we're talking about it, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show,
00:01:37 ◼ ► A, because I thought we got along swimmingly when I was on your show, but B, just in the last,
00:01:53 ◼ ► It's something I've thought about for a while, but a variety of things have made it possible,
00:01:58 ◼ ► like my shortcuts community, and people have really been responding to my videos, and the
00:02:06 ◼ ► I'm going to take issue right away with the title of your episode of your YouTube show where
00:02:20 ◼ ► Let me tell you, running your own independent media, I don't know if you've figured it out
00:02:28 ◼ ► People who say YouTube is passive income don't do YouTube, at least not the YouTube that I
00:02:38 ◼ ► That video was one of them, and so YouTube allows me to test out two or three titles at
00:02:43 ◼ ► a time, including two or three thumbnails, and so that actually won out out of the few options
00:03:09 ◼ ► One thumbnail said three years later, and one thumbnail said going solo, and going solo
00:03:21 ◼ ► Well, I think you should have called it a day job, because it is most definitely a job, but
00:03:25 ◼ ► congratulations having gone through this transition myself at this point a long time ago.
00:03:53 ◼ ► John Syracuse said he didn't quit his day job until what, like three years ago, four years
00:03:57 ◼ ► I forget how long it's been at this point, but it's, I don't know, four years at the most,
00:04:10 ◼ ► today, that you've done, in the last two weeks, you've published 11 videos on your channel.
00:04:21 ◼ ► I mean, not a lot like it's too much, but I mean, well, maybe you are a natural-born YouTuber.
00:04:44 ◼ ► So, a lot of times, the work is before the video, and the video is just me explaining what
00:04:50 ◼ ► I did, and then maybe covering news, maybe trying out an AI browser, whatever it may be.
00:04:55 ◼ ► But my style of content and the systems I have in place, it allows me to turn it around pretty
00:05:00 ◼ ► I do think it's like a professional, not a midlife crisis, but like a midlife reflection,
00:05:14 ◼ ► The previous episode of the show before you was with Dan Fromer, who's writing The New Consumer,
00:05:19 ◼ ► which is a paid newsletter in the style of Ben Thompson's Stratechery, which sort of trailblazed
00:05:31 ◼ ► For all of my griping about sub-stack as a sort of a trap for independent writers, I'd give
00:05:45 ◼ ► Overall, to date, sub-stack has been a net positive for the world, I mean, without any question.
00:05:53 ◼ ► My concerns are about what will happen, and I think it's almost inevitable, because I've
00:05:59 ◼ ► been doing this long enough where anytime something centralized gets put in the middle like that,
00:06:07 ◼ ► I mean, Christ, even Blogspot, it went away, and Google's literally got all the money in
00:06:12 ◼ ► So, it's not like there aren't new writers, or older writers making the shift from working
00:06:20 ◼ ► for a publication, like Philip Bump left the Washington Post and now is writing at sub-stack.
00:06:25 ◼ ► Paul Krugman left the New York Times and now is writing on his own website that's at sub-stack.
00:06:37 ◼ ► I mean, that's just, and it's the way, it's like the whole 20th century has been crammed
00:06:45 ◼ ► into 20 years of the 21st century, where the transition from print to radio, which would
00:06:53 ◼ ► be podcasting in our era, to TV, and then TV becomes the dominant nature, and the TV of today
00:07:04 ◼ ► There's a lot of competition, trying to enter the tech space when I did, which really put
00:07:11 ◼ ► So many already there, with millions of subscribers, obviously have huge ones like MKBHD, Snazzy Labs
00:07:21 ◼ ► But I did think I could bring something a little different, and I didn't know if it was going to
00:07:26 ◼ ► work or not. But the one thing that I've done for years, and what I enjoy doing, is teaching.
00:07:31 ◼ ► I enjoy teaching about things. I enjoy showing people how to use their devices, their technology,
00:07:37 ◼ ► and people have said I can explain things pretty well. And so while there's also lots of explainer
00:07:41 ◼ ► channels out there, I do think just there's lots of writers, there's lots of speakers, there's lots
00:07:47 ◼ ► of podcasters. There's still room if you are unique or bring something slightly different to the
00:07:52 ◼ ► table. And so that's what I've tried to do. And also the shortcuts area is a lot of creators doing
00:07:58 ◼ ► shortcuts and automation. I just am so obsessed with them. I don't know what it is. The part of me is I love
00:08:03 ◼ ► tinkering. I love troubleshooting. And so it kind of scratches all those itches at once. And the audience
00:08:08 ◼ ► has just really responded to it. And I love making the videos. They enjoy watching them. And so yeah, I've just
00:08:13 ◼ ► kind of be able to create a wedge for myself. That's great. You're very you are good. It's not
00:08:18 ◼ ► just that people say you're good at explaining or teaching or however you want to call it. But it is
00:08:23 ◼ ► your it does seem to come naturally to you. And it's definitely part of the appeal. But when I think about
00:08:28 ◼ ► the changing indie media landscape, and I think about, hey, if I were 20 years younger, or more, I'd probably
00:08:36 ◼ ► have to pursue this on YouTube, rather than in writing, or at least more, at least partly, maybe
00:08:43 ◼ ► like the way that I have podcasting on the side of my writing, it would have to be YouTube or something.
00:08:48 ◼ ► And I think, man, it would be so the thing that would get me is how slow it would be that you can
00:08:56 ◼ ► only do so much. And then I see you publish 11 videos in two weeks. And I'm like, well, maybe,
00:09:03 ◼ ► Well, it's funny, I try to write periodically. And if I could go back in time, I would have
00:09:09 ◼ ► started writing way before and actually kept with it. But for some reason, for me, it takes me longer
00:09:15 ◼ ► to write an article than it does to make a video. And any of the few things I've tried to write in the
00:09:20 ◼ ► last couple years, just to do it, it just takes me so long. And it never feels right to me. I'll read
00:09:26 ◼ ► it back to myself. I don't like how it sounds. Whereas when I make a video, and I'm speaking
00:09:32 ◼ ► extemporaneously, I don't script anything, I'm just talking. It comes together faster for me for
00:09:37 ◼ ► whatever reason. And it is a double edged sword, like you're saying the media, because as a writer,
00:09:41 ◼ ► you can put it on your website, it's your content, no algorithm, you're not beholden to between you and
00:09:47 ◼ ► the audience, which is kind of like podcasting as well. Whereas obviously, on YouTube, it's all about
00:09:53 ◼ ► the algorithm. And so while that algorithm has allowed me to be discovered by 1000s of people,
00:09:58 ◼ ► it can also turn. And so there is a part of the new media that if you want to make a go of this,
00:10:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's the thing I keep going back to. And you've you've sort of made my point for me,
00:10:20 ◼ ► which is that ultimately, when as new technology becomes available, new forms of media become
00:10:29 ◼ ► available. And I forget who I was just talking about this with. But like, when I first started
00:10:35 ◼ ► podcasting, when Dan Benjamin, I started the very first version of the talk show, which I think was in
00:10:42 ◼ ► 2006. I was listening, just publishing hour long mp3 files with more compression than we use now. I
00:10:53 ◼ ► think we used 64 megabits per second. And I think I don't even know what my show is it now. I don't
00:11:00 ◼ ► think it really matters. But I think for voice at 128, it's hard to tell the difference. But just
00:11:05 ◼ ► publishing the mp3s was a real technical challenge and a real concern cost wise. And there weren't any
00:11:12 ◼ ► kind of hosting services. And I even forget what we did. I think we used S3 or something. But it was
00:11:19 ◼ ► like, and we had no sponsors. There was the idea of I had already just started taking sponsorships on
00:11:27 ◼ ► Daring Fireball. And that was considered new. And there were people, I swear, it was like a common
00:11:34 ◼ ► thing that when I first started doing sponsorships on Daring Fireball, there were people who were upset
00:11:42 ◼ ► about it, and would say it's not a blog anymore, because a blog doesn't have ads. And I would write
00:11:49 ◼ ► back and say, Okay, thanks for your time. Yeah, well, okay, then it's not a blog. I never really liked
00:11:54 ◼ ► that word anyway, whatever. And I get it that there's always like, we're still living in the golden age of
00:12:01 ◼ ► the AI chatbots, right, where none of them have ads. And the free versions are just sort of like there's
00:12:06 ◼ ► limits on like the free version of chat GPT, and etc. usage limits to kind of spur you to upgrade to the
00:12:12 ◼ ► $15 a month or more plans. But you can use them for free get an enormous amount out of them. And you
00:12:19 ◼ ► don't see or hear any ads ever. That's going to come to an end. Ben Thompson is all over all up
00:12:26 ◼ ► open AI's case that they've got to look how long Netflix took before they had an ad based tier.
00:12:31 ◼ ► But it's coming. And every it happens to everything. And hopefully it won't ruin the experience. But
00:12:38 ◼ ► with podcasts in 2006, it was crazy to think about asking somebody to sponsor the episode. And so we
00:12:45 ◼ ► just sort of ate the cost of the hosting. I mean, it was just crazy. So the idea of shipping video,
00:12:51 ◼ ► it was ridiculous, it was hard enough to ship just mp3 audio, video is ridiculous. And that's
00:12:58 ◼ ► sort of like when YouTube, even before Google bought them, it was just sort of like too good to be true.
00:13:03 ◼ ► How can this be possible that they're saying you could just upload any video you want? And they'll
00:13:09 ◼ ► process it a little and ship a pretty usable version. And that's it. And as many people can watch it as
00:13:16 ◼ ► possible. And they're like, Yeah, that distribution is unmatched. Obviously, YouTube has become a
00:13:23 ◼ ► behemoth. It's just that's where everybody is. And that's something where podcasting still doesn't have
00:13:29 ◼ ► that. And, you know, writing, I don't know how a writer would be discovered today. I guess you have
00:13:36 ◼ ► to have another avenue. You have to be Jay Klaus uses this analogy. He's a create, he's creator
00:13:42 ◼ ► science podcast. And he says there's relationship platforms and discovery platforms, discovery being
00:13:47 ◼ ► social media, things like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, then our relationship platforms that don't have an
00:13:52 ◼ ► algorithm. And it's like podcasting email newsletters, or having a personal website and blog. And you
00:13:59 ◼ ► really want to get people to that relationship platform, because that's where you can either have paid
00:14:03 ◼ ► communities or you sponsorships will pay even more for that kind of thing. But you can't just
00:14:08 ◼ ► do that only because there's no discovery mechanism built in. And that's the thing that YouTube is the
00:14:16 ◼ ► best at right now. And that's why I put my energy into it, because you get discovery, and you get
00:14:21 ◼ ► monetization. And it's more discovery than relationship. But there's a little bit of relationship
00:14:27 ◼ ► platform in there, because there is a comment section, there are subscribers, people do put on
00:14:33 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, now it's trivial to publish video, right? As you're saying, you just shoot it and
00:14:39 ◼ ► our phones shoot remarkably good video. So everybody's got a good enough to shoot a pretty
00:14:47 ◼ ► good looking YouTube video in their pocket camera. And at that point, the people who are meant and have a
00:14:54 ◼ ► natural inclination to that form of media, get drawn to it and do it right. And it's like, I've always said, it's as
00:15:03 ◼ ► as much as I do enjoy this podcast and dithering, and as much as this podcast and dithering are definitely
00:15:11 ◼ ► combined, probably a little over 50% of my income. I'll never ever not think of myself as anything but a writer
00:15:19 ◼ ► who podcasts. It's just, it's not just because that's what I did first. It's just who I am and what I think I'm
00:15:25 ◼ ► better at. And people find the media that they're meant for. And I think, again, 11 videos in two weeks, I think you've
00:15:34 ◼ ► Well, thank you. And I don't know if you saw Casey Neistat's video about AI slop, but he has a
00:15:41 ◼ ► He has a good portion where he talks about the democratization of video and how the bar has just
00:15:46 ◼ ► been lowered and lowered over the years as far as access to the tools to make the video. And now with
00:15:51 ◼ ► AI generated video, the bar is on the floor, because you have to do is type text into an app, and it will
00:15:56 ◼ ► generate the video. And there's concern there, there's going to be even more content going forward,
00:16:02 ◼ ► most likely. There's lots of faceless YouTube channels where it's just AI voice and AI imagery,
00:16:07 ◼ ► and we'll still get hundreds of thousands of views. And so that is the competition. But I am betting on
00:16:12 ◼ ► that the audience, that human beings will still want and resonate with real people on the other side of
00:16:20 ◼ ► the camera. That even as there's even more AI slop and more content out there, that people will seek
00:16:26 ◼ ► out the trusted voices and stick with them even more into the future. And there's varying feelings
00:16:33 ◼ ► about the creator economy. I hear Neil Patel on the Vergecast, and he'll say, it's like HSN, and it's
00:16:39 ◼ ► going to collapse or whatever. And there is a part of that that maybe is true with influencers and
00:16:43 ◼ ► affiliate stuff, which I do as well. But I'm still betting on it, if you provide something of value
00:16:54 ◼ ► that in the future, they'll still go to the real flesh and blood people that are creating that content.
00:17:00 ◼ ► Yeah, I just saw I just looked it up to double check that it was the right word, but the
00:17:05 ◼ ► Cambridge Dictionary's word of the year for 2025 is parasocial, which is it's sort of the phenomenon
00:17:13 ◼ ► phenomenon that people feel like they know these people they don't know. Meghan Markle and Prince
00:17:19 ◼ ► Harry, celebrities embody it at the mass scale. And then you work your way down to totally not
00:17:28 ◼ ► celebrity creators like me and you and Ben Thompson and Neelai and even Joanna Stern at the Wall Street
00:17:38 ◼ ► Journal. And it's where we're, we're more known than most people, right? Like most people. How many
00:17:48 ◼ ► followers are there on your YouTube channel? I think it was like 187k 183k, I think 183k. That's 183,000
00:17:57 ◼ ► people who at least know who Steven is, right? I mean, a varying degrees of fandom, right? It's
00:18:04 ◼ ► sure. Most people, there's only dozens of people who know who they are. That's just the nature of
00:18:09 ◼ ► humanity since the dawn of time. So it's all a little bit unusual. But that it is a phenomenon
00:18:16 ◼ ► that you get when you find your favorite podcasts or YouTube channels or blogs or newsletters to follow,
00:18:23 ◼ ► and you follow them for a while. And there is a singular voice behind the writing or a voice on the
00:18:31 ◼ ► podcast or a face on the videos. It's also part of human nature to feel like you're getting to know
00:18:38 ◼ ► them, right? It is a real phenomenon. And I don't think I'm being naive and thinking that
00:18:47 ◼ ► AI is definitely going to shake this up. It's already shaking this up, and it's going to continue
00:18:53 ◼ ► to. But I do think that it's mostly, again, famous last words, we'll see. But I do think it's mostly
00:19:02 ◼ ► taking away what was human slop work, for lack of a better term, right? There are these AI-generated
00:19:13 ◼ ► blogs now, and you can kind of tell, right? There was that whole thing with the Tua, the unofficial Apple
00:19:19 ◼ ► weblog where I forget the guy's name. But the ham-fisted mistake he made, I had Christina Warren
00:19:24 ◼ ► on the show after it happened, where he had reused the actual names of the actual humans who used to
00:19:32 ◼ ► write for the unofficial Apple weblog, like Christina, and was reusing their names and rewriting their old
00:19:39 ◼ ► articles by AI with their bylines still attached, which really... And then it was a huge kerfuffle,
00:19:46 ◼ ► rightly so. And then it went away because he just changed them to made-up names and made-up pictures.
00:19:52 ◼ ► And it's still there. I don't know why. I don't know who would ever read it. But there have been
00:19:57 ◼ ► blogs that are just... Where they just pay 15 bucks a post or some ridiculously paltry sum
00:20:03 ◼ ► that were human-generated. And if that's where AI takes over, I mean, it's... I guess in some sense,
00:20:10 ◼ ► it was better that people who wanted to write for a living could get their foot in the door with
00:20:15 ◼ ► something like that. And if they had some talent, maybe use it as a stepping stone to move up. But
00:20:20 ◼ ► I think for the most part, it's not hurting people who really have something worth following.
00:20:27 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think that the parasocial was the word of the year this year, but I feel like I've been
00:20:31 ◼ ► hearing that in podcasting for the last two decades. I've been listening to people like yourself and
00:20:47 ◼ ► I followed them from Engadget to This Is My Next to The Verge. And then when I met them at
00:20:52 ◼ ► DubDub and met you there as well for the first time, that was surreal for me. And so I think the
00:20:58 ◼ ► parasocial thing, for those of us in a little podcast sphere that listen to podcasts pre-serial,
00:21:03 ◼ ► I think we kind of understood that dynamic and at least got it. And so now I think it's almost
00:21:09 ◼ ► mainstream. Yeah, parasocial relationship with creators. And I think you see on Instagram and TikTok
00:21:15 ◼ ► that there's accounts where there's a face, it's an AI-generated face. A lot of times it's like
00:21:20 ◼ ► female imagery in these posts, and it has hundreds of thousands of followers and lots of views.
00:21:25 ◼ ► But I think if someone has the option in the future to go to their news, to go to learn something,
00:21:33 ◼ ► to go to be entertained, and they have the choice between someone who looks like a real human being,
00:21:40 ◼ ► sounds like a real human being, but is not one, and another human being, but that's real, and will
00:21:46 ◼ ► watch them, I think they're going to choose the real person. And that remains to be seen. It's not
00:21:52 ◼ ► as good. It's not that good yet. It's not indistinguishable. But when it is, I'm betting on people choosing
00:21:59 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think the other difference, too, is that regular readership, regular following type
00:22:04 ◼ ► thing, right? And TikTok exemplifies the opposite approach, right? Where people open TikTok and you
00:22:10 ◼ ► don't really, it's not, oh, these are my favorite TikTokers every time. And here's the update. You just
00:22:16 ◼ ► thumb your way through and you see whatever the algorithm thinks is for you today. And it's,
00:22:23 ◼ ► it's obviously successful in that people spend a lot of number, an almost frightening number of
00:22:29 ◼ ► aggregate hours every day thumbing their way through TikTok. But I don't think it makes people
00:22:36 ◼ ► say, yeah, this is my favorite part of the day. My favorite media consumption today was the time I
00:22:41 ◼ ► spent going through TikTok while I waited in line at the supermarket to check out. Like, they might do it,
00:22:47 ◼ ► it might be something they like, but they don't say, they don't think about it the way they think,
00:22:51 ◼ ► hey, that was a real banger of an episode of ATP today that I listened to. I really enjoyed that.
00:22:57 ◼ ► I'll take a counterpoint to the TikTok thing just a little bit, though, because there are characters
00:23:02 ◼ ► on TikTok. There's a couple of Mario and Bryn. They have millions of followers. And if you look at the
00:23:08 ◼ ► comments, people are like, hey, mom and dad. And it's like in this joking way. But I do think there's
00:23:14 ◼ ► that parasocial affinity to it. And I don't know if you're familiar with this TikTok account.
00:23:18 ◼ ► This was a high schooler. His name is Davis Big Dog. His whole TikTok account is literally
00:23:25 ◼ ► ranking and rating school lunches. And his videos, I kid you not, hundreds of thousands of views each.
00:23:33 ◼ ► He just sits there, he'll talk about either the chicken nuggets or the burrito. And he got 700,000
00:23:40 ◼ ► followers in a couple weeks. And it was this weird thing where you see famous people in the comments
00:23:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I shouldn't be too dismissive of TikTok celebrity. But it's not the nature of the medium.
00:23:56 ◼ ► Will that audience move somewhere else is the question. If somehow TikTok shut down tomorrow,
00:24:05 ◼ ► And as much as I tend to be knee-jerk dismissive towards TikTok, I salute it in terms of... I mean,
00:24:20 ◼ ► All right. But still, the fact that there is now a medium that allows a ninth grader to publish their own
00:24:29 ◼ ► TV show, effectively, what we used to call a TV show, and have an audience of hundreds of thousands
00:24:41 ◼ ► when I was in ninth grade, it was kind of cool if somebody, you knew somebody who owned a camcorder
00:24:48 ◼ ► and you could record yourself on video and put it on TV for you and your friends to see.
00:24:57 ◼ ► Exactly. Yeah. And I think you... I remember going to department stores or like a Best Buy or
00:25:05 ◼ ► something in that era. I guess it wasn't even Best Buy. But when they'd have a video camera hooked up
00:25:09 ◼ ► with a live feed to a TV, people would stop and catch themselves and then just sit there and wave.
00:25:20 ◼ ► No, everybody did it because it was like you didn't think of yourself as ever possibly being
00:25:26 ◼ ► on TV. And if something happened where like the local TV news stopped you because, I don't know,
00:25:33 ◼ ► some newsworthy thing happened in your town and that Channel 4 News stopped and talked to you,
00:25:39 ◼ ► you'd call everybody you knew. Everybody. You'd run home, open up your phone book or your black book
00:25:45 ◼ ► and start calling everybody in your family, every friend you have and say, I might be on
00:25:49 ◼ ► Channel 4 News for 10 seconds tonight. That's what you would do because it was so amazing.
00:25:55 ◼ ► And now a kid can just put his phone in front of him and review the chicken nuggets at the school
00:26:04 ◼ ► It is awesome. But as you will, you would see on TikTok, not every kid in high school who's
00:26:10 ◼ ► reviewing his school lunch will blow up like that. Right. And I do think it's because there's still a
00:26:15 ◼ ► baseline thing. The human response to something, someone, how someone's talking or presents
00:26:21 ◼ ► themselves. And, and for that kid, like he's not even that he's not being funny. Like when he reviews
00:26:25 ◼ ► the school lunch, he's not making jokes. He's not like doing anything outlandish. He's literally just
00:26:37 ◼ ► it touches this weird thing where it's like the most authentic. It also touches nostalgia,
00:26:42 ◼ ► people, high school nostalgia, people thinking back to the nineties or whatever. But it's also,
00:26:47 ◼ ► this is like the most real it gets. This kid is just in a school lunchroom talking to a phone
00:26:52 ◼ ► and that realness, for lack of a better word, I think is what people respond to on TikTok,
00:27:07 ◼ ► And then just a kid, totally serious, totally deadpan, no jokes, no sticks, just honest to God,
00:27:16 ◼ ► That's it. It's, and it's hilarious. I mean, I'll watch a couple of my wife's episodes. I don't know.
00:27:21 ◼ ► And then we'll try to predict, oh, was he going to rate this? Is he going to be a five or six?
00:27:28 ◼ ► He literally said, he'll say exactly that. He was like, the line was kind of long. These
00:27:32 ◼ ► tater tots are freezing, but it's just deadpan. It's great. So that's out there. That's stuff's
00:27:39 ◼ ► is exclusively sponsored by our good friends at Uncommon Goods. Hey, the countdown is on. That's
00:27:46 ◼ ► why they've booked an exclusive sponsorship. The holiday shopping season is officially here and
00:27:51 ◼ ► uncommon goods takes the stress out of giving gifts, buying gifts with thousands of unique,
00:27:57 ◼ ► high quality finds that you won't see anywhere else. Don't wait. The most meaningful gifts get
00:28:02 ◼ ► scooped up fast. They might sell out. And now's the perfect time to cross names off your list.
00:28:07 ◼ ► Don't be like me, me, John Gruber, notorious gift buying procrastinator who starts buying gifts when
00:28:16 ◼ ► it's November or December 20-something. Don't do it. Get it out of the way now. I'm going to start
00:28:22 ◼ ► buying some gifts on November 20-something instead of December 20-something this year. I swear to God,
00:28:28 ◼ ► an uncommon goods has you handled. They've got products that are high quality, unique all over
00:28:34 ◼ ► the place, often handmade in the U.S. And many are crafted by independent artists and small businesses
00:28:40 ◼ ► making every gift feel meaningful and truly one of a kind. One of my favorite things, I pointed
00:28:44 ◼ ► out the last time they sponsored the show a couple years ago, my wife bought me this. Turns out she
00:28:48 ◼ ► got it from uncommon goods a couple years ago, but it sits at my desk. It is just a literal F bomb.
00:28:55 ◼ ► It is just a little, I don't know what metal it's made out of, but it's like the old classic Mac
00:29:00 ◼ ► error alert bomb, just a spherical bomb with a fuse coming out of it, but a metal letter F on front of
00:29:08 ◼ ► it. And nice and heavy, real heavy, but it's a perfect paperweight and just absolutely, I can't
00:29:14 ◼ ► think of a better desk trinket for a writer who likes using the actual F word than me. They've got
00:29:21 ◼ ► all sorts of fun stuff like that at Uncommon Goods. Something for everyone, from moms and dads, kids and
00:29:27 ◼ ► teens, F bomb loving writers like me, book lovers, history buffs, diehard football fans, foodies, they have
00:29:34 ◼ ► stuff for you. And when you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent
00:29:39 ◼ ► businesses. Many of their handcrafted product products are made in small batches. So shop now
00:29:45 ◼ ► before they sell out this holiday season. And with every purchase you make at Uncommon Goods, they give
00:29:51 ◼ ► back a dollar to a nonprofit partner of your choice. They've donated more than $3.1 million to date as of
00:30:01 ◼ ► this writing. So don't wait. Cross some of the names off your shopping list before the rush and
00:30:07 ◼ ► get 15% off your next gift by going to uncommon goods.com slash talk show. That's uncommon goods.com
00:30:17 ◼ ► slash talk show for 15% off uncommon goods. We are all out of the ordinary. All right. One of your most
00:30:26 ◼ ► recent videos about shortcuts you write and post about shortcuts all the time. Tell me why you love
00:30:31 ◼ ► shortcuts. You know, I use the workflow app before with shortcuts and then Apple acquired it. And at
00:30:38 ◼ ► first it was just little things. I could do the home ETA where I can estimate my travel time home
00:30:45 ◼ ► automatically text it to my wife. I just thought that was so cool that I could just do that automatically.
00:30:50 ◼ ► And as they become more and more powerful, it's just amazing to me what they can do. And now with Apple
00:30:55 ◼ ► intelligence, it feels like the possibilities are endless. But I think I love I love building things. I love
00:31:01 ◼ ► Legos when I was a kid. I love troubleshooting. I like figuring out like, can this work? How can it work? How can I
00:31:07 ◼ ► adjust it? And then guys like Federico Vitici and Matthew Castanelli inspired me to be like, okay, this stuff is
00:31:13 ◼ ► powerful. And I think more people should use it. And I think that's where I really wanted to start
00:31:19 ◼ ► sharing these in videos and in other places. Because anytime I showed someone a shortcut that
00:31:24 ◼ ► applied to them personally, it blew their mind and they would use it. And they would be like, oh, yeah,
00:31:29 ◼ ► this is going to be amazing. And the difficult part of shortcuts is if you just open the app on your
00:31:33 ◼ ► iPhone and you've never used one, nothing's tailored to you. You're not sure how to use it.
00:31:38 ◼ ► And that's why my whole business now, most of it is just tailoring shortcuts a little bit
00:31:44 ◼ ► differently to every single person. And that's the magic of it is you can make it super personal.
00:31:48 ◼ ► It can apply to your workflow. And that's why I love it. It's just it feels like magic.
00:31:59 ◼ ► An idea as it was when it was a third party app. And it's, I remember when I first really explored it,
00:32:07 ◼ ► I remember hearing about it and thinking because I thought I was so familiar with all of the
00:32:23 ◼ ► ah, that's got to be an exaggeration. And then I like started, I actually downloaded it and started
00:32:28 ◼ ► trying it. And it was kind of amazing how much it could do on its own before it had any official
00:32:34 ◼ ► support from Apple. Just, I think back then, mostly because so many apps had exposed the,
00:32:50 ◼ ► That's where I was heading, where a bunch of apps had figured, well, apps can't communicate with each
00:32:55 ◼ ► other. But the one thing you could do is register. Like if you, I'm going to, I'm going to botch the
00:33:01 ◼ ► actual URL for it, but like the drafts app for notes had like a custom, it's like X dash drafts
00:33:08 ◼ ► colon. And then there's like a custom URL scheme. So instead of HTTP or mail to, or one of the standard
00:33:16 ◼ ► internet protocols, an app can register its own custom protocol. And then other apps could say to
00:33:23 ◼ ► the system just open this URL, but it's a drafts URL and the drafts URL could be something like a create
00:33:31 ◼ ► new draft command or a get draft command where the parameter is the idea of a draft. And then you could
00:33:38 ◼ ► get the text of a draft back into another app and workflow just put like a nice user interface on top of
00:33:48 ◼ ► all this. And it was so useful. And then Apple did something that I think surprised just about everybody
00:33:55 ◼ ► because it seemed like they had no interest in automation anymore, right? They had no, seeming no interest in
00:34:01 ◼ ► bringing automation to iOS at all. And it seemed like their interest in automation on the Mac had completely
00:34:07 ◼ ► stagnated. It's since the first decade of the 2000s. The Apple script was there and it wasn't going away because
00:34:15 ◼ ► people rely on it, but they were done adding new things. Automator, which was the new way of creating
00:34:22 ◼ ► automation on the Mac sort of also stagnated. It didn't go away. It's still there to this day, but
00:34:29 ◼ ► doesn't get new things. And then all of a sudden they, Apple bought shortcut or workflow, turned it into
00:34:35 ◼ ► shortcuts and then added functionality system wide and brought it to all three of the major platforms,
00:34:43 ◼ ► Mac, iPad, and iOS. And a surprising number of workflows work across all three, especially the Mac versus iOS divide.
00:34:52 ◼ ► You can even put something in a shortcut to say, if the shortcut's running on a Mac, do this. And if it's on an iPhone,
00:34:58 ◼ ► Yep. Do you feel like you're programming? This is my question to everybody who's into shortcuts.
00:35:08 ◼ ► That revealed to me how much of a developer I am not. And so I'm not programming. I understand the idea of
00:35:16 ◼ ► building a shortcut is basically programming. The moment I put a repeat with each action in the
00:35:22 ◼ ► shortcut, I think, okay, well that's, yeah, that I understand that that's programming, but I don't know.
00:35:28 ◼ ► It doesn't feel like that to me. It feels more like building blocks. It feels like the Duplo to,
00:35:34 ◼ ► Yeah. See, I, my analogy that I often go to though, is I think you're, you're underselling
00:35:39 ◼ ► yourself is I think that either whether it's Apple script or automator or now shortcuts,
00:35:45 ◼ ► that's the Lego and that the real development is more like custom injection molding. It's,
00:35:52 ◼ ► it's making this sort of toy that you get at the toy store in a blister pack that doesn't have
00:35:57 ◼ ► bricks that you can take apart. It's pre-made and in a way that like, if you buy a plastic toy or metal
00:36:08 ◼ ► could be metal because it's toys can be made out of metal and Legos aren't, you can get a toy that is a
00:36:14 ◼ ► perfectly articulated one to 15 scale car that looks exactly like the real size car that it is.
00:36:22 ◼ ► And a Lego version of that car is never going to look realistic because it's made even as however
00:36:28 ◼ ► many cheaty pieces that the kit comes with to make it look like it, that aren't little rectangles,
00:36:34 ◼ ► it still looks like it's a thing out of rectangles. But on the other hand, sometimes the Lego version
00:36:41 ◼ ► engenders more affinity. Like you look at you're like, I know that's not realistic, but I actually
00:36:46 ◼ ► like this better than a realistic looking car because I know I could take it apart. And it was
00:37:02 ◼ ► I pulled Apple scripts from different people and copy and pasted stuff from Stack Exchange and
00:37:07 ◼ ► just never like really understood it all. But for some reason, just the shortcuts interface,
00:37:12 ◼ ► the easy to see here's the variable, here's one action to another, it allows me to build a lot of
00:37:19 ◼ ► stuff. And now with ChatGPT and using APIs and shortcuts, that opens up a whole new world. And that's
00:37:26 ◼ ► something I'd never knew JSON before. The only coding I've ever done is like HTML and a little
00:37:31 ◼ ► CSS back in the day. That's my total coding extent. I have a music degree is what I joke about. That's
00:37:37 ◼ ► zero experience in any of this. But I can ask ChatGPT, I can say, hey, here's an API, look at the
00:37:43 ◼ ► documentation. How can I call this API? And what do I put in the shortcut? And a lot of times I'll
00:37:50 ◼ ► literally just screenshot the shortcut action, get contents from URL, give it a ChatGPT and say,
00:37:56 ◼ ► what do I put in these fields? And if it doesn't work, I'll do it again. I'll say, here's a
00:38:01 ◼ ► screenshot. It didn't work. This is what happened. Tell me something else to try. And I don't know if
00:38:06 ◼ ► ChatGPT actually knows what to do or not, but eventually we figure it out. And so me and my custom
00:38:20 ◼ ► the whole point of getting a computer was you get a computer, turn it on in the back and a couple
00:38:26 ◼ ► seconds later, because it only took a couple seconds, even though the computers were so slow,
00:38:30 ◼ ► but they were so primitive that there was nothing really to boot. And then you'd start typing a
00:38:35 ◼ ► computer program or you'd load one that you'd written from disk. And the idea was you'd get a
00:38:41 ◼ ► computer to program a computer. And Apple, you know, it's a world move towards graphical user
00:38:47 ◼ ► interfaces and a Mac. Apple came out with HyperCard famously, and people of my generation, HyperCard
00:38:53 ◼ ► occupies this unique part in our hall of fame of great apps that never really made it, didn't last.
00:38:59 ◼ ► But the whole point was, hey, let's make this more approachable. And even Apple was pushing
00:39:05 ◼ ► to users the idea of you too can program a computer. That's the whole reason behind the history. And it
00:39:14 ◼ ► didn't take long, I think, for most people to agree that the syntax of Apple script, the language was a
00:39:20 ◼ ► mistake. The fact that it looks once it's compiled and actually works looks so much like English is cool.
00:39:26 ◼ ► But the actual writing of it doesn't follow English at all. And the proof of the pudding is with the GPTs of
00:39:34 ◼ ► today, where you can just type English to them. And they understand it, they parse it and give you a
00:39:43 ◼ ► response. But the whole idea behind it, though, was to encourage more just regular people who think I can't
00:39:50 ◼ ► write programs in C or back then Pascal or in today, Swift or whatever JavaScript, whatever language you
00:39:57 ◼ ► want to, to talk, I don't that doesn't work for my brain. But you have things you'd like to build for
00:40:04 ◼ ► yourself. Here's a way that you can do them. And I feel like Apple, even though they are the company
00:40:09 ◼ ► that's made shortcuts, they're updating it every year. I don't detect any loss of enthusiasm from Apple
00:40:14 ◼ ► for it. But I don't think they push it as much. I think it all comes from the community from people
00:40:21 ◼ ► like you and Matthew Cassinelli. It comes from the community and me to some degree to encouraging
00:40:30 ◼ ► people to try these things to get keyboard maestro for your Mac and make something you can fix these
00:40:36 ◼ ► little UI irritations yourself or build the thing you've always wanted. I just think the number of
00:40:43 ◼ ► people out there who think they can't write their own programs, but could be writing their own
00:40:47 ◼ ► shortcuts is, is this gap to be filled. It's not everyone, right? The idea that everyone could or
00:40:54 ◼ ► wants to do this is definitely not true. But there's this gap between the number of people who are doing
00:41:01 ◼ ► it, and the number of people who should be doing it. So yeah, there's two things. One, the personalization
00:41:08 ◼ ► is where it really matters with shortcuts. And Apple has the gallery tab in the shortcuts app.
00:41:15 ◼ ► They do put new shortcuts in there a lot. There's a bunch of Apple intelligence ones in there since
00:41:20 ◼ ► iOS 26. And they're cool. You know, it's like make a gif. Here's a daily NASA photo, all this kind of
00:41:26 ◼ ► stuff. But it's not going to resonate with most people visiting it, right to say that's a shortcut that I can
00:41:31 ◼ ► change a little thing here and there. And now it's immediately applicable to me and I'll use it all
00:41:35 ◼ ► the time. So while it's great to have, I think why people watch my videos is because I basically what
00:41:42 ◼ ► I'm doing recently is taking all the requests that I get and making shortcuts tailor made for people.
00:41:47 ◼ ► But what that does is after seeing so many people begin to think, oh, that's how I can customize this
00:41:54 ◼ ► for myself or how I can accomplish this task. But the second part is that what Matthew tells me all
00:41:59 ◼ ► the time, if someone can download a shortcut made for them, they'll do that 100% of the time rather
00:42:04 ◼ ► than make it themselves. And so and that's something I've been pushing a little more on Instagram recently.
00:42:09 ◼ ► And I'll just share a shortcut. I'll just show a shortcut that I think is going to resonate with
00:42:13 ◼ ► people. I do the thing where comment and I'll send you a link to download it. And it's been exploding.
00:42:18 ◼ ► There's a couple million views just on a couple reels that are showing off a shortcut. And so once people
00:42:23 ◼ ► see what is possible, and they can get it easily just by downloading it from a link, people respond to it.
00:42:29 ◼ ► I do think it's interesting. And the other thing that I think is interesting is because shortcuts isn't
00:42:35 ◼ ► a typed out programming language, you just drag and drop these blocks that function as tokens, like the tokens
00:42:44 ◼ ► in a programming language, but it is more visual. It is very well suited to video in a way that actual typed out
00:42:51 ◼ ► programming languages like Swift or JavaScript aren't, right? You just don't see many videos where people are like,
00:42:57 ◼ ► here's how you here's how to learn something in JavaScript. You do there's I shouldn't say you don't. But it's not.
00:43:04 ◼ ► I think when you watch a video about somebody programming in JavaScript, you're like, this should be a blog post so I can
00:43:09 ◼ ► copy and paste it. I'd rather read it. There's a moment to every time I run a shortcut. I mean, this happens
00:43:16 ◼ ► just when I'm making them by myself, when the shortcut actually works, and you see it either flip over to
00:43:21 ◼ ► notes, and it actually puts everything there that you expected, or it correctly identifies an image and tells
00:43:27 ◼ ► you what's in a document, whatever it is, there's that moment. I don't know if it's dopamine or serotonin or
00:43:31 ◼ ► whatever. But there's like that constant hit of it worked. And it's going to work again, the next time I use it.
00:43:36 ◼ ► And I think that's the other thing people get when I do my videos of 15 or 18 shortcuts. I just show it
00:43:41 ◼ ► running, you know, I mean, like a 20 minute video, but I'm literally just telling you what it's doing,
00:43:45 ◼ ► pressing play, and we're all just going to watch it together. But there's something kind of cool about
00:43:50 ◼ ► look, it just flipped over to Apple notes. And it just took this audio file transcribed it summarized it
00:43:55 ◼ ► and all you did was press play. And it's it's I don't know, it's fun to watch. Yeah. The other thing too,
00:44:00 ◼ ► that is so interesting is that you can do things now with like the, the Apple intelligence blocks, and it's so your
00:44:07 ◼ ► options are, yeah, you can run on device, you can run private cloud compute, and you could ask chat GPT, right?
00:44:18 ◼ ► Those are the three in escalating order of power. And just like, I watched a video, I wish I knew who it
00:44:27 ◼ ► was, because I didn't bookmark it. But it was like on threads or somewhere yesterday. And I watched a
00:44:31 ◼ ► video showing how to make a shortcut, where I do all my screenshots to the clipboard, I don't even
00:44:37 ◼ ► remember, I think I remapped the keyboard shortcut that puts a screenshot on the desktop as a file,
00:44:43 ◼ ► I just always take them as to the pasteboard and then paste them somewhere. It's just for years and
00:44:50 ◼ ► years. But I guess most people take screenshots, and they go to the desktop, and it's called like
00:44:54 ◼ ► screenshot, Safari date. And she wrote a shortcut that just and it's like the way that you can set up an
00:45:02 ◼ ► automation to watch a folder, and it has it watches her desktop. And when a new image appears,
00:45:08 ◼ ► if it starts with the word screenshot, send it to chat GPT, create a brief summary up to 40 characters
00:45:16 ◼ ► of what's in the screenshot, and then rename the file to that description. And that's it. That's the
00:45:22 ◼ ► whole it's like, it's like a three step shortcut. And then she showed it. And it gives these screenshots
00:45:27 ◼ ► amazingly apt names, because she's like, I have 12 screenshots on my desktop, I can't remember what
00:45:33 ◼ ► the hell they are. And now they have regular names. And it's like, Oh, that's really brilliant. But if
00:45:38 ◼ ► you think about how would you have done that five years ago, before these AI systems exist, it would
00:45:45 ◼ ► be like, Oh, well, you'd have to hire somebody to write this complex image analysis. I mean, and probably
00:45:53 ◼ ► Yeah, the Apple intelligence action is like the sleeper hit. I mean, it's what I've been making
00:45:58 ◼ ► videos about since iOS 26 came out, and even since back to dub dub. But it's so powerful. One, it's way
00:46:04 ◼ ► better than the built in chat GPT action that you get in shortcuts, because that will often fail. Chat
00:46:10 ◼ ► GPT wants you to open the app and then go back to shortcuts. So just using the chat GPT extension of the
00:46:15 ◼ ► Apple intelligence models action is way better. But it can do it can do crazy things. Like in a recent
00:46:20 ◼ ► video I showed, I saved a bunch of famous music albums artwork in a folder. And the names were
00:46:27 ◼ ► just gibberish. Like they're just numbers and letters. And so I just created a shortcut that
00:46:31 ◼ ► allowed me to select multiple files. It sent each image to the use models action using chat GPT. And
00:46:37 ◼ ► it says identify this music album, and rename the file the actual album name. And it did it. It does it
00:46:44 ◼ ► every time. Crazy stuff. So just like that kind of renaming someone requested the other day in my
00:46:48 ◼ ► community. She says, I've taken a bunch of photos of artwork. And I want to put it on my website. But
00:46:54 ◼ ► I have 1000s of photos. And I want to identify images that are high resolution, that don't have
00:47:00 ◼ ► anything obstructing the artwork, and another criteria. And so I was able to make a shortcut that
00:47:04 ◼ ► says, listen, you can select 1000 files, run this shortcut, and it will each one will go through that
00:47:10 ◼ ► Apple intelligence action, it can see the resolution, or I can do an action that says if it's greater than 1000
00:47:17 ◼ ► pixels wide, then do this, Apple intelligence can see, is there something blocking it? Is this image
00:47:22 ◼ ► croppable, and then rename all of that and put it in another folder. And just that kind of again, it's very
00:47:28 ◼ ► personal to what that person needed, right? But it's so powerful what it can do in bulk, it blows my mind.
00:47:34 ◼ ► Yeah, it brings personal computing back to the roots from the 80s and 90s of, yeah, get a computer and you
00:47:41 ◼ ► can build right little things that do false, just scratch your personal itch. And that the Apple
00:47:48 ◼ ► intelligent blocks really do like my one of my big complaints about shortcuts for years was that there
00:47:55 ◼ ► was no escape hatch to a scripting language automator has automator, you has these blocks that are a lot
00:48:03 ◼ ► like shortcuts where it's just like an action block, hey, take a file, you can just like a block that
00:48:07 ◼ ► would resize files. So if you take files as input, automator as a block that says resize these images
00:48:14 ◼ ► to 50% of their size, and then pass them on to the next step. But the next step in automator could be
00:48:21 ◼ ► a script, which could be Apple script could be I think JavaScript, but it could be any of the shell
00:48:27 ◼ ► scripting languages, like Perl, Python, Ruby, that come or at times came with Mac OS 10, or just a
00:48:34 ◼ ► literally like a bash shell script. And so you had this escape hatch and shortcuts didn't have anything
00:48:41 ◼ ► including JavaScript. But now it's got an escape hatch that's even better, which is that you can just have a step
00:48:47 ◼ ► in there that's an Apple intelligence action, and instead of a finicky programming language that you can make a
00:48:52 ◼ ► bug or something, you just give it a plain text description, like you just did about looking for images that are of a
00:48:58 ◼ ► certain size. And if it's not that size, don't worry about it. And then do this. And you think, well, this probably
00:49:04 ◼ ► isn't going to work. And then you run it, and it works. And it's like, this is amazing. And so you can put
00:49:10 ◼ ► these action steps in that are so just specific to your needs, and just describe them in plain English,
00:49:22 ◼ ► When even before, like if I wanted to do an API call to the movie database, before the Apple
00:49:29 ◼ ► intelligence actions, I would do a bunch of get dictionary from this, get this dictionary value,
00:49:34 ◼ ► match this text in the result, all this kind of stuff. And now I can literally just do an API call using
00:49:40 ◼ ► the get contents of URL action, and then put an Apple intelligence action right after and say,
00:49:44 ◼ ► from this data, give me the latest 10 movies that just came out. And also give me the URL for their
00:49:51 ◼ ► trailer. Like something that simple that might have been dozens of actions before Apple intelligence,
00:49:56 ◼ ► allows me to just do that with an API call. And it's way more accessible for me and many other people.
00:50:01 ◼ ► And I want to, if I could, I want to share a Rube Goldberg machine I have set up with shortcuts.
00:50:06 ◼ ► I was on the Vergecast, and I didn't share it there because I thought it might be a little technical,
00:50:10 ◼ ► but I'll share it with you. So the Mac automations are now a thing where you can automate folder
00:50:16 ◼ ► And so one of the things I do semi-often, and I can't share this on YouTube because it's against
00:50:21 ◼ ► the community guidelines or whatever, is sometimes I want to download a video. Sometimes I want to
00:50:26 ◼ ► download a video, and I want to put it on my Plex server. It's something I want to do. I want to be
00:50:30 ◼ ► able to do this from my iPhone, which is very difficult. So from my iPhone with two taps, I can
00:50:37 ◼ ► be looking at a video. It could be a social media clip. It could be a YouTube video. I share that video
00:50:41 ◼ ► to Transloader. It's an app, and it goes from my iPhone to Transloader on a Mac Mini that I have at
00:50:47 ◼ ► home. And Transloader on that Mac Mini hands off that URL to an app called Downy. And Downy is, I think,
00:50:56 ◼ ► just the best app for downloading anything. So it can download the video file. It could be an Instagram
00:51:00 ◼ ► reel. It could be a YouTube video. So it downloads that file to the desktop of that Mac Mini. And now that
00:51:05 ◼ ► I have the raw video file on my desktop, I can run a shortcut. And using the Mac automations,
00:51:11 ◼ ► now with Apple Intelligence, I can say, transcribe this file, or maybe encode it as an audio first,
00:51:17 ◼ ► transcribe it, summarize it, create an Apple note with a title, with a summary, the full transcript.
00:51:24 ◼ ► And now in a few seconds, after sharing it from my phone, I have an Apple note with a summary and
00:51:29 ◼ ► transcript. But then I can have Apple Intelligence shortcut, or I could just have the shortcuts automation
00:51:34 ◼ ► move that file to my Plex server. And now I can watch that video in Plex, all from just a couple
00:51:44 ◼ ► Just by sending the URL for the original version of it, just kickstarting it with just the URL that
00:51:50 ◼ ► points to the video on social media or YouTube, throw the URL into this Rube Goldberg contraption,
00:51:56 ◼ ► and out comes the Apple note with the summary, the transcript, and a link. There's a link to it in
00:52:03 ◼ ► the note. I typically do a link back, like the original link, I'll put that back. And then the
00:52:08 ◼ ► video itself is on Plex. And you can watch it from anywhere you can watch Plex. And YouTube doesn't
00:52:13 ◼ ► like people talking about the fact that you can get a video out of YouTube with Downey. I just linked to
00:52:20 ◼ ► Downey a couple weeks ago or months ago on Dairy Carbill. Absolutely terrific app. And one of my favorite genres of
00:52:28 ◼ ► Mac app, especially in the Mac OS X era, it wasn't so much of a thing in the classic Mac era, because it didn't have a
00:52:36 ◼ ► command line. But with the whole, the fact that Mac OS X has in terminal a whole Unix system, and so many
00:52:44 ◼ ► useful commands built in before you even download anything from Homebrew or anywhere else, where you
00:52:50 ◼ ► just have an app that does things you could do at the command line, but it just does them in a much nicer
00:52:56 ◼ ► Mac style in the same way that yeah, you could just use Emacs or VI, or you could get like a real text
00:53:03 ◼ ► editor like BB edit or use text edit or something and not be confused. Downey is a terrific, terrific
00:53:09 ◼ ► app that does what what is YouTube DL or DL YouTube, I forget. There's yeah, there's but there was a forked
00:53:17 ◼ ► version before. Anyway, just get Downey instead. It's a terrific, terrific app. It really is. And the
00:53:23 ◼ ► developer keeps it up to date. And it's well worth every penny. And it just it also Downey makes it really
00:53:30 ◼ ► easy to download a video. If you want a copy of the video as a file from Safari or whatever your
00:53:36 ◼ ► browser is as you're watching, you could just say anything at it. Yeah, if you're on like a news
00:53:40 ◼ ► website, and there's a video that you want to grab. And he's always updating it because websites and
00:53:45 ◼ ► YouTube are trying to like, not allow for that kind of downloading. But but the developer, I believe,
00:53:50 ◼ ► Charlie Monroe. Yeah, he is always updating it. And it always works for me. And so that's my Rube Goldberg
00:53:56 ◼ ► machine. It's almost like you're paying Charlie for two things. You're paying him a for the work he's
00:54:00 ◼ ► already done to make this very well made very Mac ass Mac app. But then you're also paying one time for
00:54:06 ◼ ► the app. But for his continuing service of playing the cat and mouse game for you to keep Downey ahead of
00:54:13 ◼ ► it. Whereas if you were doing it on your own from the command line, you're the one who's got to keep
00:54:17 ◼ ► up to updating the software in your tool chain and staying abreast of the latest tricks and tips and
00:54:23 ◼ ► mouse traps to avoid in the cat and mouse game. It's not just paid for Downey and let Charlie do it for
00:54:29 ◼ ► everybody. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Before I let you go to speaking of AI and speaking of podcasts and
00:54:36 ◼ ► independent media, Apple podcasts is adding a is going to add AI generated chapters to podcasts. And I think
00:54:44 ◼ ► this is very important to note for shows that don't include chapters on their own, which is a big thing
00:54:51 ◼ ► to because my show has had chapters for many years. Most nerd shows do. And I think most non nerd shows,
00:55:00 ◼ ► which is most shows doomed. Marco, Marco Armand always says it's the Germans who complain about the lack of
00:55:08 ◼ ► chapters. Well, our audience loves chapters, too. But, you know, creators can still opt out completely
00:55:14 ◼ ► from the auto generated chapters. And that's why I'm curious to see when this launches with 26.2,
00:55:21 ◼ ► what the big shows like Smart Lists and even some shows like the Verge cast who they don't have
00:55:27 ◼ ► chapters. Will they allow the auto generated chapters and will Apple generate a chapter that says sponsors
00:55:32 ◼ ► or ad break because I don't imagine the big shows want that to make it easier to skip the ads. So I'm
00:55:40 ◼ ► curious which are going to opt out. We I've done it for years. And my thinking as always, and it's never
00:55:48 ◼ ► served me honestly, I know it sounds too good to be true, but it's served me well my entire career
00:55:54 ◼ ► is the golden rule do for my readers and listeners what I would done unto me as the reader and listener
00:56:01 ◼ ► of other forms of media. And part of that is don't treat them like idiots. So we do put chapters in for
00:56:09 ◼ ► the ads in the show. Yeah, because we figure your adults and you're going to figure it out. And you
00:56:15 ◼ ► know, which part is me talking about a sponsor anyway. And it's my job as the guy reading the sponsor
00:56:21 ◼ ► things to try to keep them interesting and moving along and hopefully make you want to listen to
00:56:27 ◼ ► them. So yeah, I do that. But you're exactly right that I think others are going to see that if they
00:56:33 ◼ ► think, oh, we'll try it. And then they see that it's going to label the breaks and they're going to be
00:56:37 ◼ ► like, no, because they're not thinking golden rule. They think the opposite. They think our ads are special.
00:56:45 ◼ ► And while they themselves might skip ads in some of the podcasts they listen to, they think, but our ads
00:56:51 ◼ ► we don't want anybody to skip. And if we don't have chapters that identify them, people won't skip
00:56:57 ◼ ► because they don't know about the 30 second forward button that's in every single podcast app ever made.
00:57:05 ◼ ► Right? It's ridiculous. What do you think people are going to do if you don't make chapter marks for
00:57:10 ◼ ► the sponsors that they're just going to be like, duh? Maybe if you're washing dishes and you can't get
00:57:16 ◼ ► that's when you're forced to listen or if you're driving or whatever. But curious to the
00:57:21 ◼ ► the time to link part of the chapters, which is another part of the feature. So this is a thing
00:57:27 ◼ ► where, you know, Apple's going to allow you to put links either by plain timestamps in the description
00:57:34 ◼ ► of an episode or linking a chapter using the ID3 tags in MP3 and you can link stuff and those links will appear on the now playing screen in Apple Podcasts.
00:57:48 ◼ ► You will not be able to put a link to daringfireball.net and have that link show up in the transcript or the thing.
00:57:56 ◼ ► And that, it feels not great to me because that's been an RSS and podcast standard for years where creators could link a chapter.
00:58:04 ◼ ► Apps like Pocket Cast and Overcast allow users to tap those links and actually go to those things.
00:58:10 ◼ ► And Apple is going to surface those links, but again, only for Apple TV shows, Apple books, Apple news, Apple services, Apple apps, things like that.
00:58:19 ◼ ► And that part, I don't know, that doesn't feel great to me, but it feels a lot like Instagram, right?
00:58:28 ◼ ► And which I think there's a whole generation of people of kids who don't even realize that that that that's frustrating, right?
00:58:37 ◼ ► Because the whole idea is that the only place Instagram allows you to place a link to the web is one link in your bio.
00:58:43 ◼ ► And so there's this whole cottage industry of link in bio services where you can put it like if you publish an article every day, then you put them on your link in bio page and your link.
00:58:57 ◼ ► It sounds like I'm saying like Abe Lincoln, like Lincoln bio, like the Lincoln lawyer show.
00:59:02 ◼ ► But no, it's link in bio where you have one link that points to a page that points to all the things you want to rather than just pointing to the things you want to.
00:59:13 ◼ ► And the idea, it's very transparent that Instagram just doesn't want you to leave Instagram.
00:59:30 ◼ ► There's a whole industry like many, many chat is the thing that I use on Instagram, which is a service that if you,
00:59:38 ◼ ► if someone comments a specific word like shortcut, that the service many chat will automatically send a DM with a link to the person.
00:59:47 ◼ ► And so my Instagram DMs, there's literally thousands of people in there that I have no idea who they are because they commented shortcut to get a shortcut.
01:00:04 ◼ ► And for Apple doing this on Apple Podcasts, it's just, it's the first time it feels a little bit like there was an open standard for something.
01:00:11 ◼ ► And rather than not just support it, Apple is supporting it, but only when it serves their content as it's linked to their stuff as Apple Podcasts and books and stuff.
01:00:21 ◼ ► And so that's, I just wanted to raise a flag to say Apple's been a great arbiter for podcasts for the past two decades.
01:00:29 ◼ ► And they've honored all the open standards, maybe not adopted all of them quickly, but they've honored the open standards.
01:00:39 ◼ ► And they've always honored the spirit of the open web, which podcasts are, in my opinion, the one form of internet media that stayed the truest for the longest to the ideals of the web.
01:00:53 ◼ ► Even the actual use the web in a web browser is, to me, further away from the original ideal than podcasts are, because so much of what you see on the web today is locked behind a paywall.
01:01:06 ◼ ► And I'm not, I'm not even, I'm not denouncing it as a trend overall, but it's, there's clearly, it's just, but it is contrary.
01:01:16 ◼ ► Because I'm glad the publications large and small that are making a living or making a successful business based on paywalling their content, that it's working.
01:01:27 ◼ ► I'm glad, but it's undeniably, it might be good for the media ecosystem, but it's bad for the web itself.
01:01:34 ◼ ► And it's against the idea of the web, whereas the idea with podcasts, where all you have to know is this RSS feed, and you just read the RSS feed, and the RSS feed contains a list of episodes, and the episodes have descriptions, and a link to a file that's in an open format, like MP3, that you can just download, and then you can play.
01:01:53 ◼ ► And that's why I could build a ton of shortcuts around RSS feeds, because it's so open.
01:01:58 ◼ ► And that's, that's the other thing is, when it comes to podcasting, I'm curious, you're, you're feeling about what is Apple's responsibility might be a strong word, but like in the podcast industry, because they have fallen as far as where do people consume podcasts.
01:02:13 ◼ ► It's now YouTube one, Spotify is second, and the video part of those platforms obviously is a huge deal.
01:02:20 ◼ ► Spotify allows me to upload an entire video episode for free to the podcast, and people can watch my show or listen to it seamlessly in the Spotify app.
01:02:30 ◼ ► And so, I wish Apple would adopt a little bit more, and I understand that it's probably not a revenue motivation, because it's not going to be, it's not going to bring a ton of money.
01:02:41 ◼ ► If they can add video for creators in Apple Podcasts, I don't know if there's going to be an influx of creators that makes it worthwhile, but it felt like they were the one big player championing the openness of RSS,
01:02:53 ◼ ► and I don't want them to stop, because I want RSS to keep going, and for podcasting to still be based on that, rather than the closed algorithmic platforms that we have.
01:03:01 ◼ ► It's weird for me, and I know Marco talks about it, and it's even more direct for the ATP guys, because Marco literally is the guy making Overcast, but it's also true for me that I forget that I haven't looked at my numbers in a while,
01:03:15 ◼ ► But I think it's 60 to 70% of the listeners of this show are using Overcast, but number two is Apple Podcasts, so it is the second most, and that's very unusual, most certainly Apple-focused podcasts, Apple Podcasts is the biggest, and Apple Podcasts is still the third biggest platform for podcasts, after YouTube and Spotify, overall, for any podcast of any genre, or whatever.
01:03:39 ◼ ► But I feel like I'd be more motivated to care if it was number one for my show, but I do care, but literally, I guess, a third of the people listening to me and you talk right now are using Apple Podcasts, and Spotify and YouTube, because I'm not on YouTube, are not factors for me.
01:03:58 ◼ ► I think I'm on Spotify, I don't even know, I know dithering is somehow, but I don't even care, honestly, which is weird, and it's just me being me.
01:04:04 ◼ ► I think the best thing for Apple, even though they don't make money from it, and they did try, or they are trying, there's ways for people to have a paid members-only podcast through Apple Podcasts, but I don't know anybody doing that.
01:04:30 ◼ ► I adopted it immediately, because at the time when the feature came out, I think it was 2021, I was hosting the Apple Insider Podcast.
01:04:43 ◼ ► Now, way more people buy the subscriber version of the show directly on Apple Podcasts, then go to our memberful site and sign up there.
01:04:57 ◼ ► It's in the app they're already using, and our listenership is like 56% Apple Podcasts, and then Overcast is like 40-something percent or whatever.
01:05:06 ◼ ► But it creates a higher free trial to actual conversion, those higher conversions when we offer that subscription to Apple Podcasts.
01:05:31 ◼ ► But I think Apple Podcasts, if it was a good experience on Android, actually might be something that wins over part of that audience.
01:05:39 ◼ ► Like, if you have an Apple-focused podcast, it's not too ridiculous to say we'll do the paid-only version through Apple Podcasts.
01:05:52 ◼ ► And they're asking, what Apple's asking is do it in addition to Memberful or Substack or however else you might be making.
01:06:00 ◼ ► And adding a second leg to the stool of ways that you take subscribers' money, it can be additive, but it's a multiplier complexity-wise.
01:06:16 ◼ ► Because now you've got – if you have two ways to subscribe, it's more than twice the work to manage the overall membership and to say, hey, we want to sell T-shirts and we want to give members a discount because they're members.
01:06:32 ◼ ► It's more than twice the work now because you've got two entirely different sets of them.
01:06:37 ◼ ► And Apple's, of course, always has more privacy restrictions and you probably can't even get a list of their emails or anything.
01:06:43 ◼ ► I know you can't get their emails, of course, but it's hard to let them take advantage of the fact that they're subscribed to you in Apple Podcasts and get $5 off a T-shirt on your site.
01:07:01 ◼ ► Why wouldn't I tell everybody to just go through Memberful where I've only got one database of users and I can just click a button in Shopify and give them a discount?
01:07:12 ◼ ► And those are the kind of creator tools that I hope Apple builds in, like to communicate to those subscribers.
01:07:18 ◼ ► Like we gave away pins and I offered it to our paid subscribers, but I can only offer it to those through Memberful because I have no way to communicate to those in Apple Podcasts.
01:07:30 ◼ ► And so the only way I could think of – because the other thing is in the subscriber, if someone pays to subscribe to an Apple Podcasts show, the show notes are still visible publicly.
01:07:41 ◼ ► So if you don't pay to support Primary Tech on Apple Podcasts, you can still go to our bonus episode and you can't listen, but you could see the whole episode description.
01:07:54 ◼ ► So the only thing we could think to do was, listen, at the end of our bonus episode, I'm going to say some magic words.
01:08:01 ◼ ► And I said, just DM me with those words and I'll know you pay to listen to the show and I'll give you access to our Discord.
01:08:11 ◼ ► So I do think ultimately bottom line, I think it's the best thing that's happened for Apple was related to Podcasts.
01:08:17 ◼ ► A, because no matter how well those subscriber things were going to work, it was never going to matter to Apple's bottom line.
01:08:22 ◼ ► So they're never going to drive meaningful revenue to Apple through Podcasts, no matter what they do.
01:08:28 ◼ ► But what they can do is get a little spiteful and have somebody who gets their dander up.
01:08:35 ◼ ► And Spotify is one of those companies based on the way that Spotify is a constant thorn in their side in the EU with regard to DMA mandate requests and stuff like that.
01:08:46 ◼ ► And so I think Spotify's rise in the degree to which right now I don't think anybody dominates, including even YouTube in podcasts.
01:08:58 ◼ ► I still think that's one of the things that's so healthy and web-like about podcasts overall.
01:09:02 ◼ ► The fact that Spotify counts as number two is the most listened to stream or mechanism for podcasts is a good attention getter for Apple in a way that YouTube isn't.
01:09:13 ◼ ► Because YouTube, because Apple and Google are sort of, if anything, getting more and more back together, like with the rumor that Google's Gemini might power the next version of Apple intelligence and stuff.
01:09:23 ◼ ► And that they're sort of, after the whole going to war over Android thing, have sort of come back into, oh, these are Google things, these are Apple things, and we get along very well together.
01:09:38 ◼ ► And so I think the best thing to happen to think about Apple still being a champion of podcasts as an open medium is the rise of Spotify, who clearly doesn't want them to be an open medium, would love to be to podcast what YouTube is to video.
01:10:06 ◼ ► And in the last couple years, he has switched his listening habits to Spotify, which I don't even pay for Spotify Premium.
01:10:21 ◼ ► And I'm like, especially younger generation who are developing habits for how to consume this content now, they are developing that habit to go to Spotify.
01:10:31 ◼ ► And maybe YouTube, those latest stats, I think James Cridland shared this on PodNews, that, like, 80% of people who watch podcasts on YouTube also listen in a podcast apps in addition to watching it on YouTube.
01:11:02 ◼ ► But they could do what Spotify does, which is allow creators to turn on ads, put in a timestamp and say, yeah, just put ads in my podcast, do the revenue share between Apple and the creators.
01:11:13 ◼ ► And they can create that monetization mechanism that Spotify has right now, both for video and audio.
01:11:20 ◼ ► And going back to the origins of this topic, I just think that it's a perfect scenario for AI to analyze the episodes and do smart things with them.
01:11:34 ◼ ► And I think that Apple is thinking about such things is, I think if this gets, if it doesn't get rejected, like you said, that the big creators of the big podcasts, like, there's the one notion of the big popular podcasts that come from these big platform studios or podcast studios.
01:12:04 ◼ ► And I think a lot of us have been assuming that they don't have chapters because they don't care about chapters.
01:12:15 ◼ ► And so what if, so that they won't care if Apple adds them automatically through AI, but what if they do care and they don't have podcasts because they don't, they don't have chapters because they don't want chapters and they opt out.
01:12:34 ◼ ► And then this feature is sort of, it won't be for not because there's dozens of, there are hundreds, thousands, I guess, thousands of little podcasts that don't have chapters who won't opt out.
01:12:47 ◼ ► And if the chapters that come out of AI are half intelligent, it'll still be a benefit to the user experience, but it won't be the, oh, this is really cool.
01:12:56 ◼ ► Now I have chapters in these big podcasts from like the New York times that never had them before.
01:13:04 ◼ ► But if it does, and they're actually pretty good, I think that's Apple leading the way on a really cool feature because chapters are great.
01:13:12 ◼ ► It has really been frustrating to me that some of my favorite podcasts have never had them.
01:13:16 ◼ ► And I know you and Ben Thompson, I think, talked about chapters and if you would ever put them in dithering recently.
01:13:22 ◼ ► But the thing there is, and people might not realize this and ask why dithering doesn't have it.
01:13:28 ◼ ► But if you do paid podcasts, I pay the Verge subscription, and so I get the ad-free versions of their shows.
01:13:38 ◼ ► Apple doesn't have, you might add that feed to the Apple podcast app, but Apple is not doing the AI-generated chapters and the time links and the transcripts for those paid podcasts.
01:14:12 ◼ ► It's part of the reason I'm so happy to do it is that I just don't worry about the details.
01:14:37 ◼ ► But in terms of the technical back-end, like the episode titles, I'm not even involved in the chat that makes them.
01:14:44 ◼ ► Yeah, and because I'm not doing the editing and I've opted out of it, and by the way, it's our friend Brad Ellis, icon designer and designer extraordinaire, who's done the actual artwork for every episode of Dithering.
01:15:01 ◼ ► If it were up to me, yes or no, we'd already have human-generated chapters because, you know, we usually have two or three segments per show.
01:15:14 ◼ ► I honestly feel like, you know, it's up to the user, to me, whether they're going to do it in the same way that if I could opt out of reader mode in web browsers, I wouldn't.
01:15:26 ◼ ► If you want to use reader mode to read Daring Fireball because you don't like the colors and the font size or whatever, that's up to you.
01:15:35 ◼ ► And so my thinking is if you want to use auto-generated, as long as they're identified, which Apple's going to do, as long as it says Apple Podcasts generated these chapters and it's very clear in the interface that your client generated them, not us, that would be fine with me.
01:16:05 ◼ ► And so, yeah, that's—because I think it's—it makes even the listening a visual experience.
01:16:13 ◼ ► If someone has CarPlay and they're listening and we say something because I do video version for our show as well as audio, and those who are listening, if I call something or if I draw attention to it, I can have the chapter artwork change.
01:16:26 ◼ ► And you can even do something called silent chapters, which is changing the artwork outside of a chapter marker so just the image could change.
01:16:36 ◼ ► Any show that has chapters, sometimes I'll just look at them to see what are they talking—what are they going to talk about?
01:16:42 ◼ ► I love doing chapters for our own show with the custom chapter artwork and art and all that kind of stuff.
01:16:52 ◼ ► Yeah, we don't use it often on this show, but sometimes we'll do it if you're talking about a screenshot or something.
01:17:05 ◼ ► But in the middle of it, if we're talking about a screenshot of something, you put it a little invisible chapter in where the album art changes to that screenshot, and anybody who looks at their phone or whatever their podcast player is at that time, they'll see the thing that we're talking about.
01:17:20 ◼ ► Or if you said, if I was talking about some accident I was in and I have a horrible, horrible scar on my arm, I might put in a chapter art of a photo of the scar on my arm.
01:17:43 ◼ ► Everybody just look up Stephen Robles on YouTube, but the actual channel name is at Beard FM.
01:17:53 ◼ ► We didn't talk about this, but I never knew what to brand it, and I eventually just branded it my name.
01:18:04 ◼ ► And let's face it, Google is in charge of YouTube, and that's what they want you to do.
01:18:12 ◼ ► And Primary Technology, your podcast that I was lucky enough to be a guest on in recent months with Jason Aiton.