The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Ah, we got so much to talk about, I think.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Yeah, we do.

00:00:04 ◼   ► And here's one.

00:00:05 ◼   ► We have well-prepared notes, which you helped prepare, which I forgot to add the big hack

00:00:10 ◼   ► follow-up to, which is bizarre because it's my baby.

00:00:16 ◼   ► I was going to say, this is your thing.

00:00:18 ◼   ► You have a 50-word asterisk you have to attach to every Bloomberg story.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Bloomberg breaks a lot of news.

00:00:27 ◼   ► So do you have a macro that you insert that in when you're blogging it?

00:00:30 ◼   ► It's not a macro per se, but I have it saved, obviously.

00:00:34 ◼   ► I have to rewrite it now.

00:00:36 ◼   ► I'm dreading the next time Bloomberg does something link-worthy because I have to write

00:00:40 ◼   ► a new footnote because they are not done.

00:00:45 ◼   ► This is the strangest thing.

00:00:47 ◼   ► So I woke up one day, and of course I'm inundated with texts that they've followed up, and I'm

00:00:53 ◼   ► like, "Wow!"

00:00:56 ◼   ► And I'm not hung out to dry on this.

00:00:59 ◼   ► I haven't said, I guarantee you that they're wrong.

00:01:03 ◼   ► My point is, it certainly looks like they're wrong.

00:01:06 ◼   ► Everybody says they're wrong.

00:01:07 ◼   ► They've offered no proof, so they ought to retract it or prove it.

00:01:11 ◼   ► And I thought maybe they've got it, right?

00:01:14 ◼   ► And it's the same two reporters.

00:01:16 ◼   ► So whoa!

00:01:17 ◼   ► And I start reading, and it's like, "This doesn't look like anything?"

00:01:24 ◼   ► And I described it as sophistic—I forget the word—sophistry, horseshit.

00:01:33 ◼   ► And it is, because it creates the illusion of something there being there, and they're

00:01:38 ◼   ► very deft at using official journalistic language and seemingly well-credentialed sources, some

00:01:50 ◼   ► of them on the record even, none of whom with any firsthand knowledge of this.

00:01:55 ◼   ► Well, that's the thing.

00:01:58 ◼   ► It's crazy, in my opinion.

00:02:02 ◼   ► And it really, really seems like they've spun themselves out of—this is my take—that

00:02:07 ◼   ► they've spun themselves out of control to avoid retracting the original story.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I've been trying to figure this out too, because when it first hit, it was so damning, and

00:02:19 ◼   ► I was like, "Okay, well, Bloomberg, because I know a lot of people who work there, and

00:02:23 ◼   ► they're, for the most part, impeccable journalists and are held to extremely high standards and

00:02:27 ◼   ► have very good sourcing."

00:02:28 ◼   ► And so I didn't really have many reasons to doubt what was being reported.

00:02:34 ◼   ► And then more, some of those doubts started to creep in.

00:02:38 ◼   ► When every single company—if one company denies something, and if they do it in kind

00:02:43 ◼   ► of a weaselly way, which is what companies usually do when they don't know exactly

00:02:46 ◼   ► how exposed they may be, they'll deny it, but there will be wiggle room—the denials

00:02:52 ◼   ► were pretty affirmative, right?

00:02:54 ◼   ► There wasn't a lot of wiggle room.

00:02:55 ◼   ► You'd just be like, "This hasn't happened."

00:02:58 ◼   ► And that made my spidey sense go up a little bit first.

00:03:01 ◼   ► And then seeing a lot of security professionals kind of push back and be like, "Are we sure

00:03:04 ◼   ► does this make sense?"

00:03:07 ◼   ► You know, has some questioning.

00:03:09 ◼   ► But in the back of my mind, I was still like, "Okay, but Bloomberg has really, really

00:03:14 ◼   ► good reporters, and they vet things really strongly.

00:03:18 ◼   ► Their standards for publishing, based on my experience with people that I know they're

00:03:23 ◼   ► going to talk to, are going to be higher than at a lot of other places."

00:03:27 ◼   ► So it's this bizarre thing, right?

00:03:33 ◼   ► There are these denials.

00:03:34 ◼   ► There hasn't been a lot of conclusive proof.

00:03:36 ◼   ► There are a lot of security professionals who are calling foul on it.

00:03:42 ◼   ► And then this follow-up story comes up, which substantively you link to a really good takedown

00:03:47 ◼   ► thread from "own all the things" that really kind of supply the fact that, yeah, there

00:03:54 ◼   ► was a lot of nothing in the follow-up.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Well, and it's so—what's the name of the game, Whisper Down the Alley?

00:04:03 ◼   ► Where you have a bunch of kids lined up and—

00:04:06 ◼   ► Yeah, like telephone?

00:04:07 ◼   ► Yeah, telephone.

00:04:08 ◼   ► You write something down, and you tell the first person, and then they're supposed

00:04:11 ◼   ► to whisper it down to the next person.

00:04:14 ◼   ► And then the last person says what they're told, and it's inevitably different.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Even if—I always thought—the thing about that when I was a kid was that there was always

00:04:22 ◼   ► clear—and you knew which kid in your class was going to do it.

00:04:25 ◼   ► Somebody was going to screw it up on purpose.

00:04:27 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:04:28 ◼   ► And it's like, "We're doing sociology here, David, you jerk."

00:04:33 ◼   ► Because he'd have a smirk.

00:04:37 ◼   ► It's like egg freckles, and it's like, "Oh, come on."

00:04:40 ◼   ► But it doesn't work, you know?

00:04:41 ◼   ► And it's all—you know, but everybody—all these sources are saying like, you know, "Well,

00:04:46 ◼   ► you know, in 2016 I got this scary briefing from the FBI about a thing that they heard

00:04:52 ◼   ► that might have happened was Super Micro."

00:04:54 ◼   ► And it's like, nobody is saying, "Yeah, I saw a chip on a Super Micro board."

00:04:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:59 ◼   ► No, I mean, the one thing that does always kind of give me flaws, though—and this is

00:05:04 ◼   ► why it's such an interesting kind of conundrum to me—is that the one kind of thing, I guess,

00:05:09 ◼   ► that they could have in their favor, but they don't have the evidence that happened in

00:05:12 ◼   ► this case, but you know, you have Edward Snowden.

00:05:15 ◼   ► And I think if a lot of us had heard the things that he was claiming, a lot of people would

00:05:22 ◼   ► have said that that was not happening, right?

00:05:26 ◼   ► It seemed like out of a Russian spy novel, right?

00:05:29 ◼   ► Right.

00:05:30 ◼   ► And it was.

00:05:32 ◼   ► So …

00:05:33 ◼   ► We, as a species, are not good with stuff that we think isn't expected, right?

00:05:39 ◼   ► I mean, did you expect to have a pandemic?

00:05:42 ◼   ► And if you did, I mean, and if you did, did you expect it to go this way, right?

00:05:47 ◼   ► Like that's one of the craziest things about the last 11 months is we have had a global

00:05:53 ◼   ► pandemic and it is nothing like anybody's science fiction about how a pandemic would

00:05:58 ◼   ► go.

00:05:59 ◼   ► They either turn into zombies, which is better for the drama, or it's like Stephen King's

00:06:06 ◼   ► The Stand and 95 percent, or plus, 95 percent plus of humanity gets killed.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And there's only a handful of, you know, you're lucky if maybe one out of 20 people

00:06:19 ◼   ► you know survives.

00:06:22 ◼   ► And this was nothing like that.

00:06:23 ◼   ► It was, you know, you just stay home.

00:06:26 ◼   ► But it seemed like this couldn't happen.

00:06:28 ◼   ► And literally a year ago right now, that was sort of my thinking about it, which was irrational.

00:06:34 ◼   ► No, it was really my thinking.

00:06:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:06:38 ◼   ► I was like, "Well, it won't happen here."

00:06:39 ◼   ► I remember I had a podcast with Federico Vitticchi and you know, he was around this time.

00:06:44 ◼   ► I think it might have been a little bit later in February, you know, and Italy got hit hard

00:06:48 ◼   ► already in February.

00:06:52 ◼   ► I don't think it's like, it's not some kind of, you know, America First-ism that

00:06:57 ◼   ► I think America's magic.

00:06:59 ◼   ► It's just the way human nature works where it's like, "Well, you know, these things

00:07:03 ◼   ► happen, you know."

00:07:04 ◼   ► But they don't happen here.

00:07:05 ◼   ► They don't happen here.

00:07:06 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I mean…

00:07:07 ◼   ► And do you think that's what you think with Bloomberg?

00:07:09 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:07:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's very true.

00:07:13 ◼   ► I mean, I'm actually kind of looking.

00:07:15 ◼   ► I was, it was a year ago today, I think, that I was flying back, or I guess technically

00:07:23 ◼   ► it would be tomorrow, but I was on an airplane at this point, that I was flying back from

00:07:26 ◼   ► Australia for what would be my last International Trip of the Year.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And I was originally supposed to go from Australia to Singapore for an event, and the Singapore

00:07:35 ◼   ► event was canceled because they weren't doing events of a certain size, and that country

00:07:40 ◼   ► was taking precautions really strictly.

00:07:42 ◼   ► However, the airlines weren't canceling flights.

00:07:45 ◼   ► So I, to get home without incurring a ton of fees, I flew from Sydney to Singapore.

00:07:53 ◼   ► Then I had like a couple hour layover in the airport, and then I flew from Singapore to

00:07:56 ◼   ► South Korea.

00:07:57 ◼   ► Then I had like a six or seven hour layover where I got like a hotel room in the pod or

00:08:02 ◼   ► whatever in the airport.

00:08:04 ◼   ► And then I flew from South Korea to Seattle.

00:08:07 ◼   ► So I was in the air for like 27 hours.

00:08:10 ◼   ► It was kind of insane.

00:08:11 ◼   ► And that was my last International Trip of the Year.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And even though the Singapore stop of the event I was presenting at was canceled, I

00:08:20 ◼   ► still had scheduled things for Zurich and for Israel and I think some other places and

00:08:27 ◼   ► was expecting that to go forward.

00:08:29 ◼   ► Was not anticipating that, "Oh yeah, the world is going to change and it's going to come

00:08:33 ◼   ► here."

00:08:34 ◼   ► Like, no concept.

00:08:35 ◼   ► No.

00:08:36 ◼   ► Seems unrelated, but I mean, that is sort of how you think about a publication like

00:08:41 ◼   ► Bloomberg.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Yeah, it's true.

00:08:44 ◼   ► And it's the burden and the benefit of the bureaucracy of something that's an institution.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And it's not like reporters for Bloomberg get to just type into the CMS and hit publish

00:08:58 ◼   ► and it pops up.

00:09:02 ◼   ► I remember thinking, I remember being not opposed to, but thinking it wasn't going to

00:09:11 ◼   ► happen that Apple would switch from PowerPC to Intel back in 2005.

00:09:17 ◼   ► And then the rumors picked up a little bit, but it wasn't like this year where it was

00:09:21 ◼   ► like, "Oh, months in advance, everybody knew it was going to happen."

00:09:26 ◼   ► But then like the weekend before WWDC, the Wall Street Journal published a story that

00:09:30 ◼   ► said Apple's going to announce that they're switching the Mac to Intel.

00:09:36 ◼   ► And I had to square those two things in my head that I didn't think it was going to happen

00:09:41 ◼   ► for various reasons, including the fact that I thought...

00:09:45 ◼   ► One of the things that I thought went unsaid at the time was, "Well, wait, if they port

00:09:49 ◼   ► the Mac to standard x86 hardware, then wouldn't that make what we now call Hackintosh is just

00:09:57 ◼   ► run rampant?

00:09:58 ◼   ► Wouldn't that be sort of like the clone days again, even without the clone licensing fees?"

00:10:05 ◼   ► But I had to square my reasons x, y, and z for thinking Apple wouldn't do it with the

00:10:11 ◼   ► fact that the Wall Street Journal said, "Oh, yeah, it's happening."

00:10:14 ◼   ► And I came to the conclusion that, "Well, if the journal says it's happening, it's happening.

00:10:18 ◼   ► Let's wait till Monday in the keynote and see why."

00:10:20 ◼   ► Right, which was the correct thing because...

00:10:28 ◼   ► And I think for a lot of people like that, I wasn't doing what you were doing back in

00:10:32 ◼   ► 2000, what was it, 2005?

00:10:36 ◼   ► I was still in college, but I was watching those things, but I would have made the same

00:10:40 ◼   ► assessment that you did.

00:10:41 ◼   ► I would have been like, "Okay, if the Wall Street Journal is saying this, then this is

00:10:44 ◼   ► true."

00:10:45 ◼   ► Right?

00:10:46 ◼   ► Because that typically is, especially with Apple, like now Apple, the leaks tend to happen

00:10:51 ◼   ► months in advance, but they were much more closely held then.

00:10:55 ◼   ► But if you had a really big outlet, a really well-placed place like the Journal, then you'd

00:11:00 ◼   ► be like, "Okay, my bet is going to be that this is happening because they're not going

00:11:04 ◼   ► to risk their reputation on being wrong about something like this."

00:11:09 ◼   ► And I mean, I think that that is part of, like with the Supermicro story, you know,

00:11:13 ◼   ► part of me is like, "Would Bloomberg risk their reputation for being wrong?"

00:11:18 ◼   ► And I mean, clearly they are.

00:11:21 ◼   ► Clearly they think that they've got it, but I'm not convinced.

00:11:26 ◼   ► You're not convinced.

00:11:27 ◼   ► A lot of other people aren't convinced.

00:11:30 ◼   ► There's a couple of ways, you know, I mean, number one, you never bet the house on any

00:11:34 ◼   ► one report.

00:11:35 ◼   ► Anybody could be wrong, right?

00:11:36 ◼   ► I mean, the most famous example I would say would be Judith Miller's reporting for the

00:11:40 ◼   ► New York Times on The Iraq War, where she said, you know, and again, there's always

00:11:44 ◼   ► the, "Well, how does this news reporter say they know what they say they know?"

00:11:49 ◼   ► And the Wall Street Journal, with the Power PC story said, "According to sources familiar

00:11:56 ◼   ► with the matter."

00:11:57 ◼   ► And somebody at Apple who knew about it blabbed to the Wall Street Journal, whether deliberately

00:12:01 ◼   ► or not, but the Wall Street Journal trusted that person enough to say, "This is good.

00:12:06 ◼   ► Let's go with it."

00:12:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:12:08 ◼   ► And, you know, Judith Miller back in the run up to the Iraq War quoted somebody in the

00:12:12 ◼   ► US National Security apparatus who said, "We know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

00:12:17 ◼   ► We know it.

00:12:18 ◼   ► It's a done deal.

00:12:19 ◼   ► We're going to go in and get them."

00:12:21 ◼   ► And it turned out, well, guess what?

00:12:23 ◼   ► They didn't.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And the New York Times still to this day, I don't think, for a generation won't recover.

00:12:29 ◼   ► There's a lot of people who will never, never...

00:12:31 ◼   ► No, I mean, it was that and Jason Blair happened at the same time or around the same time.

00:12:35 ◼   ► It was kind of that one-two punch.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And Blair being a fabulous is a little bit of a different thing, right?

00:12:42 ◼   ► Oh, I agree.

00:12:43 ◼   ► I think it was just the two happening, completing together, I think.

00:12:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:12:48 ◼   ► That is true because they were so close in proximity where it's like, yeah, you can't

00:12:51 ◼   ► trust the thing.

00:12:52 ◼   ► There were so many people who wanted to say for years you can't trust anything in the

00:12:55 ◼   ► New York Times.

00:12:56 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:12:57 ◼   ► Period.

00:12:58 ◼   ► And then, you know, it was her who, you know, I don't even know, was she an opinion columnist

00:13:02 ◼   ► at that point?

00:13:03 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:13:04 ◼   ► No, she was a news reporter.

00:13:05 ◼   ► She changed beats a lot.

00:13:06 ◼   ► But it was one of those things where she was not well respected.

00:13:09 ◼   ► I read this book, I think it was called Page One Up.

00:13:11 ◼   ► I'm going to find it.

00:13:13 ◼   ► But I read this book that was written about what happened at the New York Times in the

00:13:17 ◼   ► midst of those scandals.

00:13:18 ◼   ► It's really interesting.

00:13:19 ◼   ► And, you know, she had lost a lot of favor in the newsroom, but she had these impeccable

00:13:27 ◼   ► sources, which we now know to be, you know, people like Scooter Libby and Robert Novak

00:13:32 ◼   ► and other people that like were reputable sources.

00:13:35 ◼   ► If somebody like that is telling you these things, I can understand even for someone

00:13:39 ◼   ► like her who my only interaction with her was I was in the green room with her at a

00:13:44 ◼   ► cable network once and she didn't know how to use copy and paste on her iPhone.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Really?

00:13:49 ◼   ► Oh no, this is a great story.

00:13:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:51 ◼   ► I had to show her how to use copy and paste on her iPhone.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And this was like 2014.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:59 ◼   ► That to me says kind of everything you need to know.

00:14:05 ◼   ► But like, you know, she lost a lot of favor in the newsroom, but she had those sources

00:14:10 ◼   ► and they didn't have the proper checks.

00:14:12 ◼   ► And like they went through a really big kind of reckoning, you know, like Howard Raines's

00:14:19 ◼   ► like reign, you know, as, as editor kind of came to an end.

00:14:22 ◼   ► Like they, they had to go through a pretty massive reckoning over that.

00:14:25 ◼   ► And I think you're right.

00:14:26 ◼   ► I think they, I don't know if they, I don't know if I would argue they haven't recovered.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I think there's a certain generation of people who don't even remember that happening, you

00:14:34 ◼   ► know, but I do think it tainted them in a way that even if people don't remember that

00:14:38 ◼   ► happening probably are impacted by that without even realizing it.

00:14:43 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:44 ◼   ► So like if you look at like journalism students today and younger news readers today who were

00:14:48 ◼   ► children and don't remember that, the lasting impact of what that did to the Times's reputation

00:14:54 ◼   ► carries through.

00:14:56 ◼   ► And so they might not even, it's like the, the Devil Wears Prada scene where, uh, you

00:14:59 ◼   ► know, Miranda is telling Andy that, you know, the sweater that she's wearing was, was, you

00:15:05 ◼   ► know, that she thought was, was made with no, you know, decision whatsoever was like

00:15:09 ◼   ► made was a decision that was predetermined for her by everyone in that room.

00:15:12 ◼   ► I feel like it might be that sort of thing where younger news readers don't even understand

00:15:17 ◼   ► why they might have a certain perception, but it does go back to that.

00:15:20 ◼   ► I think you're probably right.

00:15:22 ◼   ► But I mean, I think they've recovered a lot, but it certainly was like an incredibly painful

00:15:27 ◼   ► time for, for the Times.

00:15:30 ◼   ► The question always is if the only source is an unnamed source or even just a named

00:15:35 ◼   ► source, but it's, you have to take the sources name for it.

00:15:39 ◼   ► Where, where do you draw the line on the magnitude of the allegation, whatever you want to call

00:15:46 ◼   ► it, you know what they're saying with, do we need more sources to say the same thing

00:15:52 ◼   ► and where, when do you need to see the actual proof?

00:15:56 ◼   ► Right now?

00:15:57 ◼   ► I know we're mixing some big stories here, but it wasn't practical for the New York Times

00:16:03 ◼   ► to expect to get their eyes on the actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before

00:16:08 ◼   ► the war, right?

00:16:09 ◼   ► That's right.

00:16:10 ◼   ► That literally wasn't possible.

00:16:12 ◼   ► With the Supermicro story, it is not, it wasn't ridiculous to think, given the accusations

00:16:20 ◼   ► of the original 2018 story, that they would want to see one of these compromised motherboards

00:16:26 ◼   ► with a chip or at least talk to a source who would say, yes, I saw one of the boards with

00:16:35 ◼   ► one of these chips and identified that one of these chips was doing this.

00:16:39 ◼   ► And they had neither.

00:16:40 ◼   ► They didn't even have a firsthand source, let alone physical proof.

00:16:45 ◼   ► And one of the things that always stuck out to me as like, okay, we'll see where this

00:16:49 ◼   ► goes and that I can't believe that here we are two and a half years later and still doing

00:16:57 ◼   ► it is that even one of the two reporters on the story, Michael Riley, tweeted like a day

00:17:04 ◼   ► or two after the original story broke, he tweeted, "That's the unique thing about this

00:17:08 ◼   ► attack.

00:17:09 ◼   ► Although the details have been very tightly held, there is physical evidence out there

00:17:13 ◼   ► in the world.

00:17:14 ◼   ► And because of the details are out, it will be hard to keep more from emerging."

00:17:19 ◼   ► And yet no one's been able to follow up.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:22 ◼   ► Which it-

00:17:23 ◼   ► That to me is the biggest thing.

00:17:24 ◼   ► It's not even so much anything else.

00:17:26 ◼   ► It's the fact that there hasn't been any follow up.

00:17:28 ◼   ► Just for any listeners who might be interested, the book I was talking about is called Hard

00:17:32 ◼   ► News, the Scandals at the New York Times and the Future of American Media.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And it's by Seth Mnookin.

00:17:38 ◼   ► It's a good read.

00:17:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the fact there was no follow up, because the thing is, I would expect like

00:17:45 ◼   ► for something like this, even if they got some of the details wrong, which I would expect,

00:17:50 ◼   ► I wouldn't expect everything to be completely correct.

00:17:52 ◼   ► But if parts of it were correct, I would expect that every major investigative publication

00:17:59 ◼   ► on the planet would immediately be putting their own resources into trying to vet this

00:18:03 ◼   ► out more.

00:18:05 ◼   ► And there hasn't been anything.

00:18:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:09 ◼   ► Like you don't have to know how news organizations work to be a savvy, or maybe to be a savvy

00:18:17 ◼   ► news reader you do, but to be a well read news reader.

00:18:24 ◼   ► You don't have to know how movies are really made to enjoy movies.

00:18:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:32 ◼   ► But when something interesting happens, it's good to know how it happens.

00:18:37 ◼   ► And it can help explain why you're reading what you're reading.

00:18:40 ◼   ► And one of the things that happens in the news industry is when somebody comes out with

00:18:44 ◼   ► a scoop, competing news agencies, A, are pissed, because everybody loves the scoops.

00:18:51 ◼   ► They love it.

00:18:52 ◼   ► They're like, "Why didn't I get this?"

00:18:53 ◼   ► Your editor is literally yelling at you and he is saying to you, "Why do they have this

00:18:56 ◼   ► and why don't we?"

00:18:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:59 ◼   ► And if they know who the source is, even if it's an unnamed source, and a lot of times

00:19:03 ◼   ► they do because they're juiced into, they call the source and they're pissed.

00:19:07 ◼   ► And they're like, "Why didn't you tell me this?"

00:19:09 ◼   ► But then the immediate thing they do is they jump on the story too, to follow it up, and

00:19:14 ◼   ► they have to put the, as originally reported by the Washington Post or as originally reported

00:19:19 ◼   ► by whoever, but then what they want to do is add to it.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Right?

00:19:25 ◼   ► So that the Washington Post comes out with a big scoop about X.

00:19:28 ◼   ► The New York Times is mad.

00:19:30 ◼   ► They come out with their follow up.

00:19:32 ◼   ► They have to acknowledge that the first reported in the Washington Post, they don't have to

00:19:36 ◼   ► like legally, they have to as a convention.

00:19:41 ◼   ► But then what they want to do is add original reporting to the story and build on it.

00:19:46 ◼   ► And I know firsthand, I've spoken to people at news organizations who worked on this story.

00:19:52 ◼   ► Like, it is true.

00:19:53 ◼   ► I know firsthand.

00:19:54 ◼   ► I don't know everybody who worked on it, but I know that other major news publications

00:19:59 ◼   ► put reporters on this story because it was so spectacular.

00:20:02 ◼   ► Yes.

00:20:03 ◼   ► No, I know that too.

00:20:04 ◼   ► I know that too.

00:20:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:06 ◼   ► I've never really found anything.

00:20:07 ◼   ► And it is the allegations of the original story, which literally involved the surreptitious

00:20:13 ◼   ► adding of chips to motherboards and super micro server components literally would have

00:20:22 ◼   ► left behind physical evidence that couldn't be erased as opposed to, and this is sort

00:20:27 ◼   ► of where they're sort of walking it back.

00:20:30 ◼   ► And in some ways, this follow-up story last week is a broader allegation about the length

00:20:37 ◼   ► of time and the degree to which super micro servers might have allegedly were compromised

00:20:43 ◼   ► by government hackers from China.

00:20:51 ◼   ► But it also seems to be, was definitely walking back the adding of chips and making more sort

00:20:58 ◼   ► of hand-wavy motions about firmware, which, A, is a lot harder to prove because you can

00:21:08 ◼   ► also, a clever piece of firmware could do its surreptitious business and then overwrite

00:21:14 ◼   ► its naughty bits.

00:21:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:18 ◼   ► No, I mean, we've seen that with SolarWinds, right?

00:21:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Like the SolarWinds hack is actually quite incredible in what it was doing and was a

00:21:25 ◼   ► very difficult thing to uncover because it was purposely not attacking a lot of the,

00:21:32 ◼   ► you know, it was targeting the SolarWinds systems and then those were changing the way

00:21:37 ◼   ► certain updates were issued to the other systems.

00:21:41 ◼   ► But it was a very difficult thing to kind of unravel because of how it was done.

00:21:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:48 ◼   ► So, yeah.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Sorry, go on.

00:21:50 ◼   ► Yeah, well, it's a very casual person.

00:21:51 ◼   ► You can just kind of see how a software attack is both easier to implement and install and

00:22:00 ◼   ► easier to hide.

00:22:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:03 ◼   ► The part of the blockbuster nature of the original 2018 Bloomberg report, the big hack,

00:22:09 ◼   ► was that it was hardware and that the evidence would be out there.

00:22:12 ◼   ► And they weren't saying like, oh, they got like three of these chips on three motherboards

00:22:16 ◼   ► and one went to Apple and one went to this company that was acquired by Amazon and one

00:22:20 ◼   ► went somewhere else.

00:22:21 ◼   ► They said that there were like thousands of them and nobody found any of them, which really,

00:22:26 ◼   ► really, I mean, at this point, it seems absolutely unbelievable that it actually happened.

00:22:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:35 ◼   ► It's just, well, I mean, to me, the thing was actually, it was interesting that they

00:22:39 ◼   ► did actually kind of use the SolarWinds hack, which is real and has been verified, to kind

00:22:45 ◼   ► of bolster this kind of updated and sort of changed claim that this was BIOS code that

00:22:52 ◼   ► was updated.

00:22:53 ◼   ► And yeah, you know what?

00:22:54 ◼   ► That does seem a lot more plausible.

00:22:57 ◼   ► But it's, to me, some of it does feel undercut by the nature of what the earlier reporting

00:23:03 ◼   ► was, which I think is a bad thing because if this did happen, then that's a problem

00:23:08 ◼   ► for everyone, right?

00:23:09 ◼   ► Like that's, I don't want this to be one of the situations where we ignore potential reporting

00:23:16 ◼   ► that there's been malicious activity because the reporting on it was imperfect.

00:23:23 ◼   ► But at the same time, the reporting is imperfect and doesn't seem to really go a long way

00:23:30 ◼   ► to kind of explain itself or make a strong enough case for itself, whether it's because

00:23:36 ◼   ► there are no on the record sources or because the people who are on the record don't have

00:23:41 ◼   ► direct access or knowledge to things.

00:23:43 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a lot of holes.

00:23:45 ◼   ► I mean, and it just, and very specific allegations about Apple and Amazon in particular, which

00:23:53 ◼   ► again, like you said, the two companies denied in no uncertain terms.

00:23:58 ◼   ► I mean, a very-

00:23:59 ◼   ► There were no weasel words.

00:24:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:01 ◼   ► Very unusual statements.

00:24:02 ◼   ► And I know there are so many people, not a majority, but I know there's a number of people

00:24:08 ◼   ► who just disbelieve anything that comes out of official corporate comms if it's to cover,

00:24:13 ◼   ► you know, to deny a negative story.

00:24:16 ◼   ► And that's fine to be skeptical like that, but you have to acknowledge that it was not

00:24:20 ◼   ► the typical weasel words that-

00:24:23 ◼   ► No.

00:24:24 ◼   ► That company, you know, there was no cover your ass aspect to it.

00:24:27 ◼   ► No.

00:24:28 ◼   ► Which to me was the first red flag when they were like unequivocal in the denial and there

00:24:33 ◼   ► weren't those weasel words.

00:24:34 ◼   ► That was when I went, "Okay."

00:24:35 ◼   ► Because you know the lawyers have to go over every single line of that.

00:24:38 ◼   ► And you're talking about two companies that have, you know, at that point they were closing

00:24:42 ◼   ► in on a trillion dollar market share.

00:24:43 ◼   ► Now they're both, you know, Amazon's a trillion and a half and Apple's a $2 trillion company.

00:24:49 ◼   ► These are companies that, you know, if you were to be caught misleading and lying in

00:24:54 ◼   ► any of your official communications this way would have massive, massive consequences.

00:24:59 ◼   ► Like you want to talk about like not just fines, but regulation and all kinds of other

00:25:02 ◼   ► things.

00:25:03 ◼   ► Like this is not something that I could ever see the lawyers signing off on if they didn't

00:25:08 ◼   ► have full faith that what they were saying was accurate.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:14 ◼   ► I was, I read her an interesting piece this week.

00:25:16 ◼   ► All, I mean, just about everything she writes is interesting, but Zaina Tufekci wrote, she

00:25:22 ◼   ► has a substack and she was writing about critical thinking and how to, like her upbringing in

00:25:33 ◼   ► an authoritarian regime, she feels prepared her a lot better for the last year, both in

00:25:38 ◼   ► terms of like, "Oh, okay, this is going to be bad.

00:25:40 ◼   ► We should stock up on X, Y, and Z," long before everybody else made a run on the toilet paper

00:25:45 ◼   ► and stuff.

00:25:46 ◼   ► But also sort of seeing through this sort of authoritarian slanted aspects of the Trump

00:25:55 ◼   ► administration.

00:25:56 ◼   ► And one of the points, just a small point she raised on the critical thinking was when

00:26:01 ◼   ► Trump got COVID and she said, "Oh, he's way sicker than they're saying he is."

00:26:07 ◼   ► And she, you know, she was like, "Oh, of course."

00:26:09 ◼   ► And she was like, she linked to a tweet where somebody was, when his doctors gave a press

00:26:14 ◼   ► conference outdoors and they asked, "Was Trump's oxygen level ever below 90?"

00:26:21 ◼   ► This is the blood oxygen level that your Apple Watch can in fact read now.

00:26:26 ◼   ► And basically, just as a baseline, if you should be above 95, anything like I think

00:26:34 ◼   ► 93 and below, if you have COVID is considered a problem.

00:26:38 ◼   ► And 80s is, anything in the 80s is bad.

00:26:42 ◼   ► So the press asked his doctor, "Was Trump's oxygen ever below 90?"

00:26:46 ◼   ► And his doctor said, "We don't have any recordings here of that."

00:26:51 ◼   ► But was it ever below 90 here or at the White House?

00:26:55 ◼   ► And his doctor said, "No, it was below 94%.

00:26:58 ◼   ► It wasn't down in the low 80s or anything."

00:27:02 ◼   ► And she read into it.

00:27:03 ◼   ► She was like, "Now I read this and I know how to read this."

00:27:06 ◼   ► So when he's, you know, the operative words were his first answer when he said, "We don't

00:27:10 ◼   ► have any recordings here of that."

00:27:13 ◼   ► That means that when he was here, I think this was outside the hospital, they just don't

00:27:17 ◼   ► have recordings of it, but it did drop below 90.

00:27:23 ◼   ► And when he said it was below 94, but it wasn't down in the low 80s, that means it was definitely

00:27:28 ◼   ► in the 80s.

00:27:29 ◼   ► It just wasn't like 81.

00:27:32 ◼   ► And lo and behold, a week ago, it turned out Trump was a lot sicker than they let on when

00:27:38 ◼   ► he had it.

00:27:39 ◼   ► And there's sources who told the New York Times that, yeah, his blood oxygen was like

00:27:42 ◼   ► eight down to like 87.

00:27:44 ◼   ► And that's when they panicked and took him to the hospital.

00:27:47 ◼   ► And it's that that's weasel words, right?

00:27:50 ◼   ► And that's exactly what Amazon and Apple did not do when this came out.

00:27:54 ◼   ► And they weren't blindsided.

00:27:55 ◼   ► That's the other thing too.

00:27:56 ◼   ► When the original Bloomberg big hack story came out, it wasn't like they dropped the

00:28:00 ◼   ► story on Amazon and Apple and knee jerk reaction.

00:28:04 ◼   ► Does anybody know about this?

00:28:05 ◼   ► Nope, nope.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Okay, let's just deny it.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Like it contacted them in advance.

00:28:11 ◼   ► Both companies like and I know I talked to people off the record at Apple who were like,

00:28:15 ◼   ► oh, no, we did like we spent a ton of money and pulled people off real work and tore server

00:28:21 ◼   ► place, you know, firm farms apart looking at this.

00:28:24 ◼   ► We found nothing for weeks.

00:28:27 ◼   ► And the other thing too, these weren't Apple products, right?

00:28:31 ◼   ► It's not like Apple had was saying that like millions of Mac pros or Mac minis weren't

00:28:38 ◼   ► compromised.

00:28:39 ◼   ► These were just internal to Apple servers from this super micro company.

00:28:44 ◼   ► And their denial just wasn't like that at all.

00:28:46 ◼   ► There was nothing to read between the lines.

00:28:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:50 ◼   ► And I don't know the thing and I wonder what your thought is on this.

00:28:54 ◼   ► I don't know much about either, you know, of the reporters on the story.

00:28:57 ◼   ► I think one of them is a cybersecurity reporter, and I'm not sure what the other person's

00:29:04 ◼   ► focus area is.

00:29:06 ◼   ► It seems like that's what he's gone into, but it seems like, you know, they seem more

00:29:12 ◼   ► policy, more like, like, you know, wonk kind of, you know, DC kind of focus people.

00:29:18 ◼   ► And I wonder if this is a similar thing in some cases to the Judy Miller thing.

00:29:24 ◼   ► Now that was sloppy and that shouldn't have been published and they should have had better

00:29:27 ◼   ► betting.

00:29:28 ◼   ► There's a lot of layers to that.

00:29:30 ◼   ► But you know, they some of it couldn't come down to when you're an editor, if you don't

00:29:35 ◼   ► know your subject matter and you trust your author to know it and to get some of those

00:29:39 ◼   ► details.

00:29:40 ◼   ► I wonder if this is one of those cases where these are people who know a lot about government

00:29:46 ◼   ► and have a lot of contacts within government, but don't necessarily know enough about like

00:29:50 ◼   ► actual security and about tech.

00:29:53 ◼   ► I think that's exactly, I mean, because their sources are all national security officials,

00:29:57 ◼   ► you know, quote unquote.

00:29:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:59 ◼   ► And, you know, one guy, they make a big deal.

00:30:01 ◼   ► He was a former Navy SEAL, which again, being a Navy SEAL is very prestigious, very difficult,

00:30:06 ◼   ► upper echelon of the armed forces.

00:30:09 ◼   ► Doesn't necessarily make you an expert on, you know, Chinese supply chain espionage.

00:30:13 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:14 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:15 ◼   ► I mean, and I think that is also worth noting, like there is a difference between cybersecurity

00:30:18 ◼   ► and national security, right?

00:30:20 ◼   ► Like they're both security, but they're different ways.

00:30:22 ◼   ► And so that's the only thing, only way I can kind of try to kind of parse this in my mind

00:30:28 ◼   ► is to see, okay, maybe the reporters really do believe what they're reporting and really

00:30:34 ◼   ► do think the data says what it says, but they don't have the subject matter expertise and

00:30:39 ◼   ► aren't talking to the subject matter experts enough to really be able to ascertain, is

00:30:44 ◼   ► this possible?

00:30:45 ◼   ► Did this happen?

00:30:46 ◼   ► Is this likely?

00:30:48 ◼   ► Because they're coming at it from a different perspective and from a different place.

00:30:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I, yeah, that's what I think happened.

00:30:57 ◼   ► And I also think that, well, why would they go so long without just retracting it?

00:31:02 ◼   ► You know, and A, I think it's just anathema to them that they could have gotten something

00:31:08 ◼   ► so wrong.

00:31:09 ◼   ► And B, I think very cynically, they've looked at what this stinky pile of crap they were

00:31:18 ◼   ► held left holding that was never backed up by any evidence, never backed up by anybody

00:31:24 ◼   ► else's reporting, and looked at it and it's all sort of, well, you can't prove a negative,

00:31:30 ◼   ► right?

00:31:31 ◼   ► Like if I say, guess what, Christina, there's an invisible man who's standing behind you

00:31:37 ◼   ► and he's been there your entire life and you can't see him because he's composed of dark

00:31:42 ◼   ► matter.

00:31:43 ◼   ► I mean, it's, you know, probably I'm crazy, but you can't prove it, right?

00:31:48 ◼   ► You can't prove that there isn't an invisible man from another dimension made of dark matter

00:31:52 ◼   ► who's followed you around everywhere you go for your, you know, it's, you can't prove

00:31:57 ◼   ► that there aren't, just because we haven't found the servers that Apple has that have

00:32:02 ◼   ► these surreptitious microchips in them, you can't prove that they don't exist.

00:32:09 ◼   ► You know, and I think that's what they're hanging their hat on with their refusal to

00:32:12 ◼   ► retract.

00:32:13 ◼   ► Here's what I wrote back when the original report came out, and I feel like it really

00:32:17 ◼   ► stands up.

00:32:18 ◼   ► I see no way around it.

00:32:19 ◼   ► "The Bloomberg's report is significantly wrong, at least as it pertains to Amazon and Apple,

00:32:25 ◼   ► or Apple and Amazon have issued blatantly false denials.

00:32:29 ◼   ► You can perhaps chalk up Apple's denial to it being written by Apple PR.

00:32:33 ◼   ► I don't think this would happen, but hypothetically, this issue could be deemed so sensitive either

00:32:38 ◼   ► within the company or as a national security issue that the people at Apple with knowledge

00:32:41 ◼   ► of the situation lied to Apple PR and then Apple PR issued a false statement.

00:32:46 ◼   ► But in my experience, Apple PR does not lie.

00:32:50 ◼   ► Do they spin the truth in ways that favor the company?

00:32:52 ◼   ► Of course, that's their job, but they don't lie because they understand that one of Apple's

00:32:56 ◼   ► key assets is its credibility.

00:32:59 ◼   ► There's nothing, they'd say nothing before they'd lie, right?

00:33:02 ◼   ► That's the thing that they could have done is just said, "We have no comment on this."

00:33:07 ◼   ► But Apple's CIO signing his name and writing his statement on Amazon's thing, that's Schmidt

00:33:13 ◼   ► signing his name to Amazon's report is more telling.

00:33:16 ◼   ► Presumably no one at Apple or at Amazon would be more familiar with the details of this

00:33:20 ◼   ► breach than Schmidt, and he vouched for it personally.

00:33:24 ◼   ► Anyway, I can't help but think that you're onto something too, that Bloomberg has been

00:33:32 ◼   ► sort of waiting to sort of, "Let's just push this vague thing out there to make it seem

00:33:37 ◼   ► like we were onto..."

00:33:38 ◼   ► Because that's the weird thing about this follow-up.

00:33:42 ◼   ► They acknowledged the old story, but they didn't acknowledge that they're the same two

00:33:45 ◼   ► reporters who wrote it, and they didn't acknowledge that nobody else ever proved it with Amazon

00:33:51 ◼   ► and Apple.

00:33:52 ◼   ► They just said, "Oh yeah, and by the way, two years ago, we said Amazon and Apple were

00:33:55 ◼   ► affected by this, but it turns out we were onto a bigger story," or something like that.

00:34:00 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:34:01 ◼   ► And it's like, it sounds like, "Ooh, this is incredible."

00:34:04 ◼   ► And then you read it and there's even less details.

00:34:08 ◼   ► Now I got to write a new footnote.

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00:35:32 ◼   ► Do you want to stick with the news for now before we get into more analysis?

00:35:38 ◼   ► The Apple car thing, maybe.

00:35:40 ◼   ► What do you think of that?

00:35:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:42 ◼   ► Yeah, let's talk about the Apple car.

00:35:43 ◼   ► There's a lot of news on that.

00:35:45 ◼   ► There is a lot of news on that.

00:35:46 ◼   ► And I'm finally at the point where, you know, I knew that they were working on the project.

00:35:51 ◼   ► It seemed like they had stopped for a while.

00:35:52 ◼   ► It does now seem like it is very much back up and running again.

00:35:56 ◼   ► Forgive the puns.

00:35:58 ◼   ► I liked your piece on what the Volkswagen CEO said, especially because we've talked

00:36:04 ◼   ► before about your love of going after Ed Colligan.

00:36:09 ◼   ► But I'm curious from your perspective, you know, and basically the news is that he kind

00:36:14 ◼   ► of said that he came out and he's not concerned with any of their plans.

00:36:18 ◼   ► There's also been rumors that they might be doing something with Hyundai.

00:36:22 ◼   ► I did not realize that they're not quite the same company, but there's like Hyundai owns

00:36:27 ◼   ► a big portion of IKEA or vice versa.

00:36:30 ◼   ► But anyway, in your home state of Georgia.

00:36:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Interesting.

00:36:35 ◼   ► Interesting.

00:36:36 ◼   ► Although, yeah, I guess that they, I think I remember now that they built plans there

00:36:39 ◼   ► or whatever, but cool.

00:36:41 ◼   ► This is the one thing that I don't get about the Apple car.

00:36:44 ◼   ► And I think at this point it's clear that they're doing something with an automotive.

00:36:47 ◼   ► There are too many leaks and there's too many reports on this.

00:36:51 ◼   ► I tend to agree with your analysis on the Volkswagen CEO.

00:36:55 ◼   ► You know, he's not dismissing them, but he's also, I think it's fair for him to be skeptical.

00:37:00 ◼   ► I don't, I don't know why Apple wants to be in this space.

00:37:05 ◼   ► That's what I can't figure out.

00:37:06 ◼   ► That's a good question.

00:37:07 ◼   ► And I've thought about that from the origins of the rumor.

00:37:11 ◼   ► One thing I remember, and again, you know, put a grain of salt in it because again, this

00:37:15 ◼   ► is like whisper down the alley.

00:37:16 ◼   ► This is like third hand, but from like their first run through of this project, Titan,

00:37:23 ◼   ► where they built it up and sort of specked out a car that they might've, could've maybe

00:37:28 ◼   ► gone to market with.

00:37:30 ◼   ► The story I've heard is that the price tag, it was something like $170,000.

00:37:36 ◼   ► Like it was like the starting price.

00:37:38 ◼   ► And that's where like Tim Cook was like, all right, well we need, we need to reset this.

00:37:42 ◼   ► Let's get, you know, Bob Mansfield in there.

00:37:46 ◼   ► And there was a lot of high level shuffling of priorities and they sort of reset and focused

00:37:54 ◼   ► on the supposedly the core of the project for now on.

00:37:57 ◼   ► Well, let's just get the autonomous stuff down and we'll rethink the car part.

00:38:03 ◼   ► You can't go wrong.

00:38:04 ◼   ► In general, you can't go wrong thinking that, okay, the Apple, Apple's going to make a blank.

00:38:09 ◼   ► They're going to make a digital watch.

00:38:12 ◼   ► How much is it going to cost?

00:38:14 ◼   ► Well, however much you think most digital fitness watches cost, Apple's is going to

00:38:18 ◼   ► cost more.

00:38:19 ◼   ► You can't go wrong, right?

00:38:20 ◼   ► So if they make a car, it's probably going to be expensive compared to regular, you know,

00:38:24 ◼   ► average car.

00:38:25 ◼   ► Sure.

00:38:26 ◼   ► $170,000?

00:38:27 ◼   ► No, that's, that's a lot of money.

00:38:30 ◼   ► Well that's like when you sell a $10,000 digital watch, which didn't work.

00:38:36 ◼   ► By the way, just let me say this.

00:38:37 ◼   ► Nobody should quote me on that $170,000 thing.

00:38:40 ◼   ► That's not even what I heard.

00:38:41 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:38:42 ◼   ► I don't know what the number was, it was really high, but don't even quote me that it was 170,000.

00:38:46 ◼   ► But it was some kind of, you know, back of the envelope math and it was a six figure

00:38:52 ◼   ► number.

00:38:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:54 ◼   ► Well, put aside the edition models, right?

00:38:57 ◼   ► Just forget that that's a wholly separate discussion, I think.

00:39:03 ◼   ► Although it is, in my opinion, sort of embarrassing.

00:39:05 ◼   ► I just wrote about it recently.

00:39:07 ◼   ► Oh, I think it's completely embarrassing.

00:39:09 ◼   ► I think it's one of their biggest failures ever.

00:39:11 ◼   ► I have said this though, I think that one of the smartest and best decisions, like,

00:39:15 ◼   ► the strength that Apple has had is when they pivoted the watch from fashion to fitness.

00:39:20 ◼   ► When they made that pivot in that second year, that saved the watch and made it into the

00:39:26 ◼   ► massive success that it is now.

00:39:28 ◼   ► But the first year it was all about fashion and that was not the right way to go.

00:39:31 ◼   ► Well, they had the fitness there, right?

00:39:34 ◼   ► And they really emphasized at the beginning that they had three, and I think we can tie

00:39:38 ◼   ► this in with the car, but they had three.

00:39:40 ◼   ► They were very clear that they had three models, the sport, the no name stainless steel one,

00:39:47 ◼   ► and the edition.

00:39:48 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:49 ◼   ► And I remember arguing with people, and I'm not saying this just to pick up my being right

00:39:53 ◼   ► points, but there were people who were arguing that the sport ones would cost more than the

00:39:59 ◼   ► no name ones.

00:40:00 ◼   ► They're like, "Oh, the no name one means it's the cheapest and the sport one."

00:40:03 ◼   ► And it's like, "No, I mean, how in the world would the aluminum one cost more?"

00:40:07 ◼   ► Exactly, right.

00:40:08 ◼   ► And they're like, "Yeah, it's ion glass, dude."

00:40:11 ◼   ► And it's like, "No, that's just a fancy way of saying it's glass.

00:40:14 ◼   ► The other one's made of sapphire.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Sapphire's better than glass.

00:40:17 ◼   ► Ion glass is just glass.

00:40:20 ◼   ► They just put a word in front of glass."

00:40:24 ◼   ► It's like, "You don't know what you're talking about."

00:40:27 ◼   ► And then I remember too telling people, I even wrote a thing.

00:40:30 ◼   ► I was like, "The gold ones are going to cost like $10,000."

00:40:34 ◼   ► People are like, "You're out of your mind.

00:40:35 ◼   ► You're going to..."

00:40:36 ◼   ► No, I remember that.

00:40:37 ◼   ► I remember you being right on that.

00:40:38 ◼   ► And you were dead on.

00:40:39 ◼   ► But it was insane.

00:40:40 ◼   ► I was low, if anything, because they went up to like $18,500.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:45 ◼   ► No, it was insane.

00:40:48 ◼   ► And it was completely...

00:40:50 ◼   ► I think that was...

00:40:51 ◼   ► Apple, I think, oftentimes is considered like a Hooper Stick company, and I don't think

00:40:56 ◼   ► that's true.

00:40:57 ◼   ► That, I do think, was like P. Cooper.

00:40:59 ◼   ► Just think that you could sell an $18,000 watch.

00:41:01 ◼   ► It had to be Johnny.

00:41:02 ◼   ► I mean, and I...

00:41:03 ◼   ► Oh, totally.

00:41:04 ◼   ► 100%.

00:41:05 ◼   ► I hate to do that.

00:41:06 ◼   ► I know somebody under the rug who's not even there anymore.

00:41:09 ◼   ► But I mean, it had to be Johnny.

00:41:11 ◼   ► I mean, it doesn't make any sense that it was anybody else.

00:41:14 ◼   ► No, of course it was Johnny, because he's a watch guy, and he'd already done things.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Like, he was making those art installation pieces with Mark, his buddy, his name I can't

00:41:23 ◼   ► think of, last name I can't think of.

00:41:25 ◼   ► They were already doing those sorts of really, really high-end, one-off kinds of things.

00:41:31 ◼   ► They were already doing that kind of design work.

00:41:34 ◼   ► So yeah, that was a completely Johnny thing, I have to think.

00:41:38 ◼   ► But I also do think it was a little bit of kind of a Apple on top of the world thing,

00:41:41 ◼   ► thinking, "Yeah, we can sell $10,000 watches that will be unable to get a software update

00:41:46 ◼   ► in two years."

00:41:47 ◼   ► I do think it's an embarrassment.

00:41:49 ◼   ► I do think it's the, you know...

00:41:52 ◼   ► Even if Apple wants to spin it now and be like, "Oh, we only claim to make a handful,"

00:41:56 ◼   ► no, you productized it.

00:41:59 ◼   ► You made it a part of your promotional thing.

00:42:02 ◼   ► You had an assembly line for it, even if you didn't assemble a lot of them.

00:42:06 ◼   ► You made this askew.

00:42:07 ◼   ► This was not a thing that you made just a couple of variants of for very special people.

00:42:14 ◼   ► This was something that was actually, you had to get an appointment and you had it in

00:42:19 ◼   ► stores.

00:42:20 ◼   ► Like, this was a real thing, and I was completely out of touch with reality, in my opinion.

00:42:26 ◼   ► It stands out to me because, in my opinion, it's a fundamentally dishonest product because

00:42:34 ◼   ► if you buy a $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 or more...

00:42:41 ◼   ► Watches cost a lot, but if you buy a $30,000 Rolex or a Patek, it is likely going to go

00:42:48 ◼   ► up in value.

00:42:50 ◼   ► Absolutely, in recent years, the high-end, fine watch market is skyrocketing.

00:42:57 ◼   ► It's hard to get your hands on a lot of the most popular stainless steel watches from

00:43:02 ◼   ► Rolex and Patek and other companies.

00:43:08 ◼   ► You buy it now, you spend $10,000, you get a Rolex.

00:43:13 ◼   ► Ten years from now, it's probably gone up in value, but at the very least, it is still

00:43:18 ◼   ► just as good a watch as it was ten years before.

00:43:20 ◼   ► Well, that's what I was going to say.

00:43:21 ◼   ► It's going to last forever.

00:43:22 ◼   ► Like, my parents both have, at this point, 20-something-year-old Rolexes that were very

00:43:29 ◼   ► expensive then, and I think my mom even got the face of hers redone or whatever, but they

00:43:36 ◼   ► still work exactly as they did.

00:43:39 ◼   ► They're in fantastic shape, and as you said, my mom's might have even gone up in value.

00:43:46 ◼   ► It's one of those things.

00:43:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:48 ◼   ► You do have to, if you wear it regularly, you do need to get it serviced some number

00:43:51 ◼   ► of years.

00:43:52 ◼   ► But an official Rolex, the place where you bought it, if you buy it from an official

00:43:56 ◼   ► retailer, they'll take gold care of you.

00:44:00 ◼   ► I mean, they'll come in, and if there's damage to it, if there's chips on the glass, on the

00:44:05 ◼   ► sapphire or whatever, they'll ask you, "Do you want it replaced, or do you want to keep

00:44:09 ◼   ► it?"

00:44:10 ◼   ► Because some people want to keep the original, even if it's damaged.

00:44:12 ◼   ► They won't touch it without your permission, but if you do want, they'll replace parts

00:44:17 ◼   ► and it'll work, and you can hand it down to the next generation.

00:44:22 ◼   ► That's what you get at a $10,000, $20,000 watch level.

00:44:26 ◼   ► The Apple Watch, like you said, literally within two years, it wouldn't even...

00:44:30 ◼   ► Literally within two years, it was completely useless.

00:44:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And the first generation Apple Watch, the AKA Series Zero, was kind of crappy technically

00:44:39 ◼   ► too.

00:44:40 ◼   ► It was very much like the first iPad, right?

00:44:41 ◼   ► Not enough RAM, a little bit slow processor.

00:44:45 ◼   ► It was MVP.

00:44:47 ◼   ► I would say it was the worst first generation product.

00:44:49 ◼   ► I would say even the original iPad was a little better.

00:44:52 ◼   ► Oh, no, I agree with that.

00:44:54 ◼   ► I just meant in terms of the guts.

00:44:57 ◼   ► No, I think the iPad was actually a fantastic first generation product.

00:45:02 ◼   ► But yeah, I agree with that.

00:45:03 ◼   ► I think it was probably the worst first generation product.

00:45:05 ◼   ► I think it's the first one and the only one that really comes to mind where they do a

00:45:10 ◼   ► great job.

00:45:11 ◼   ► They're obviously a company of perfectionists, and there's a part of them.

00:45:15 ◼   ► Everybody works at Apple who would love to just go away for 20 years to work on something

00:45:19 ◼   ► and then come out with it, but you can't.

00:45:21 ◼   ► You have to ship, and they're very, very good at shipping.

00:45:24 ◼   ► So you kind of have to ship a little too early because if you don't purposefully ship a little

00:45:29 ◼   ► too early, you're going to ship a little too late, and that's very dangerous.

00:45:33 ◼   ► I think that Apple Watch is the one where they shipped at least a year too early.

00:45:37 ◼   ► And you can't blame them because it was the first product post Steve Jobs.

00:45:43 ◼   ► The company was withering under Wall Street speculation that they'd never have another

00:45:48 ◼   ► product after Steve Jobs.

00:45:50 ◼   ► So you can't blame them for maybe—

00:45:53 ◼   ► And it had been leaked so much, right?

00:45:55 ◼   ► At that point too, it had been leaked so much.

00:45:57 ◼   ► And it was too early.

00:45:58 ◼   ► I felt that too.

00:45:59 ◼   ► I felt like they didn't have the apps ready.

00:46:03 ◼   ► They didn't have the SDK ready.

00:46:04 ◼   ► They didn't have that story done.

00:46:06 ◼   ► And they did—it was released in March, and then it came out in the fall.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And March seemed late, like it seemed to me like they'd wanted to release it the previous

00:46:14 ◼   ► fall, and it just wasn't even there.

00:46:16 ◼   ► And it took until the following fall for it really to be viable.

00:46:22 ◼   ► And yeah, it was too early.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:27 ◼   ► So the Series 1, or Series 2, I guess, right?

00:46:30 ◼   ► Because Series 1 was the sort of—

00:46:33 ◼   ► Retconned.

00:46:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:35 ◼   ► Yeah, they took the guts of the other one but gave it a better processor so you could

00:46:39 ◼   ► actually upgrade it, right?

00:46:41 ◼   ► The Series 0 was so bad that they wouldn't even do the typical Tim Cook era thing of selling

00:46:45 ◼   ► the year-old version at a lower price, right?

00:46:47 ◼   ► It was so slow.

00:46:48 ◼   ► No, exactly, which for me is someone who spent $850 on a watch.

00:46:53 ◼   ► I was pretty angry.

00:46:54 ◼   ► I didn't get another one until a Series 3.

00:46:56 ◼   ► I said it.

00:46:57 ◼   ► I was like, "No, you're not getting my money because I'm mad."

00:47:01 ◼   ► If you spent $400 to $800, $900, I think $1,100 got you the stainless steel one with the

00:47:09 ◼   ► steel link bracelet.

00:47:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I believe so.

00:47:14 ◼   ► Which I bought.

00:47:15 ◼   ► And my link bracelet from my original Series 0 is still impeccable.

00:47:19 ◼   ► No scratches because I got the DLC coating, which is amazing.

00:47:23 ◼   ► So it was proof that they could do a lot of things with watches really, really good.

00:47:28 ◼   ► The thing that wasn't very good was the computer inside.

00:47:31 ◼   ► And I remember—so you spent $400 to $1,000.

00:47:34 ◼   ► Well, you got what you paid for.

00:47:36 ◼   ► You were an early adopter, you bought the first one.

00:47:39 ◼   ► If you spent $15,000 on the gold one, you got ripped off.

00:47:43 ◼   ► 100%.

00:47:44 ◼   ► Like, I would be—even if I had that much money, I would be pissed, I think, honestly.

00:47:49 ◼   ► There'd be no way that I couldn't be.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:52 ◼   ► And I know that there were a lot of people when it—when I said it's going to cost

00:47:55 ◼   ► like $5,000 to $10,000 for gold because that's just what gold, fine gold watches cost.

00:48:01 ◼   ► People are like, "You're nuts.

00:48:02 ◼   ► It's going to be outdated."

00:48:03 ◼   ► And I'm like, "It might be outdated."

00:48:05 ◼   ► I didn't tell them to make a gold watch.

00:48:07 ◼   ► I'm telling you what good gold watches cost.

00:48:10 ◼   ► And then when the prices did come out and I was right, people wrote to me and they're

00:48:14 ◼   ► like, "Hey, good call.

00:48:16 ◼   ► I'll bet what they're going to do is when you buy an edition watch, when they come out

00:48:20 ◼   ► with new ones, you'll be able to take it to the Apple store and turn your Series 0

00:48:23 ◼   ► into a Series 2 and then two years later, you could turn it into a Series 3 and drop

00:48:28 ◼   ► it off and three days later, pick it up and it'll have new guts."

00:48:31 ◼   ► And I was like, "No, computers don't work like that."

00:48:35 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:36 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:37 ◼   ► No, they don't.

00:48:39 ◼   ► And companies have tried.

00:48:40 ◼   ► Like every time they've tried to do those upgrade things, like Samsung tried with their

00:48:43 ◼   ► TVs and whatnot, like they usually abandon it after a couple of years.

00:48:46 ◼   ► It's just not a way that you can really unfortunately make modern electronics.

00:48:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:51 ◼   ► It just doesn't work.

00:48:52 ◼   ► The tolerances are too small.

00:48:53 ◼   ► So yeah, that's what I would just call it fundamentally dishonest.

00:48:57 ◼   ► And everything they've done since to me has corrected it.

00:49:00 ◼   ► Even the ones that they call edition, like the titanium one, which I bought a couple

00:49:05 ◼   ► years ago for the Series 5 and which I love.

00:49:07 ◼   ► The ceramic ones that they came out with, which I think were like, I forget how much

00:49:13 ◼   ► they cost.

00:49:14 ◼   ► They were like $1,000.

00:49:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:16 ◼   ► Maybe 1,500, something like that.

00:49:18 ◼   ► Reasonable as an upper bound for...

00:49:21 ◼   ► And the other thing too is, especially once they got to Series 3, that the technology

00:49:26 ◼   ► of them was good enough that they last for years.

00:49:30 ◼   ► You could use it for three, four, five years, which again does not compare to a mechanical

00:49:35 ◼   ► watch.

00:49:36 ◼   ► No, but it makes you feel...

00:49:37 ◼   ► I mean, but it puts it in line with like a smartphone or an iPad or something else.

00:49:40 ◼   ► You feel like you're still getting value out of it.

00:49:43 ◼   ► I get a fitness credit that's now been expanded to some other things, but I get like a fitness

00:49:47 ◼   ► credit every year through work.

00:49:49 ◼   ► And I've used it to buy a new stainless steel Apple watch every year that I've been at Microsoft.

00:49:54 ◼   ► And I haven't needed to actually upgrade, but I've just done it anyway and then given

00:49:58 ◼   ► my old one to a friend or whatever.

00:50:02 ◼   ► I'm probably not going to do that for the Series 6.

00:50:05 ◼   ► I probably should have just kept the Series 5 to be honest, but I needed to...

00:50:09 ◼   ► It's free money.

00:50:10 ◼   ► I needed to use it.

00:50:11 ◼   ► And this year I'm able to use the money for different things, so I'm more than likely

00:50:16 ◼   ► doing that.

00:50:17 ◼   ► But I feel like I could probably still be using...

00:50:20 ◼   ► They were still, I think until recently, they might even still be selling the Series 3,

00:50:23 ◼   ► right?

00:50:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I think they are.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Yeah, that's their low end price right now.

00:50:28 ◼   ► Right?

00:50:29 ◼   ► So that is to me, and they make that super affordable.

00:50:31 ◼   ► So to me, that is actually, okay, you buy this and you're getting four years out of

00:50:37 ◼   ► it or so.

00:50:38 ◼   ► That's pretty good, especially if you're not spending...

00:50:42 ◼   ► If you're spending $350 for it or something like that and you wear it every day and it's

00:50:46 ◼   ► this thing that's more than just your watch, but it's this health device too that is really

00:50:52 ◼   ► indispensable for a lot of people, I feel like the value point is there.

00:50:55 ◼   ► Because Fitbits and things like that, which aren't that much less expensive when you get

00:50:59 ◼   ► into the higher end, especially if you look at the starting price of the lowest end Apple

00:51:05 ◼   ► watches, people have the same things, where after a few years they need to get another

00:51:09 ◼   ► one.

00:51:10 ◼   ► So I think that's completely fine.

00:51:12 ◼   ► It's just...

00:51:13 ◼   ► And if you are that person who's spending stuff on the Hermes band or wanting to get

00:51:19 ◼   ► one of the ceramic or the titanium ones or whatever the case may be, you go into that

00:51:25 ◼   ► knowing, okay, this is not a forever thing, but I'm paying a premium because I like this

00:51:30 ◼   ► styling or I want this type of band.

00:51:32 ◼   ► Fine.

00:51:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:34 ◼   ► Right now, just look, the Series 3 is the one that starts at $199.

00:51:37 ◼   ► And I think you add 30 bucks to get the bigger size.

00:51:43 ◼   ► And clearly it sticks out a little bit because the Series 4 is when they went to the slightly

00:51:47 ◼   ► different form factor.

00:51:48 ◼   ► And it's obvious what they're going to do come September.

00:51:51 ◼   ► They'll come out with Series 7, the Series 3 goes away, and the Apple Watch SE becomes

00:51:58 ◼   ► that low-end model.

00:51:59 ◼   ► That's what SE means in Apple parlance.

00:52:01 ◼   ► It means a low-end price based on two-year-old technology or 18-month-old technology, and

00:52:07 ◼   ► it sticks around for two to three years at that low-end price.

00:52:13 ◼   ► Like the phone that they call the iPhone SE right now, the iPhone SE 2, that's going to

00:52:18 ◼   ► be here for years.

00:52:21 ◼   ► Because the other SE was here for years.

00:52:23 ◼   ► It was here for years, and I mean, yeah, and people are still sad that that form factor

00:52:28 ◼   ► went away, actually.

00:52:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:30 ◼   ► So, yeah, no, I think that now actually they are in a good place pricing-wise.

00:52:34 ◼   ► But originally, yeah, it was a failure.

00:52:37 ◼   ► But kind of going back to the car, I mean, I guess this is—

00:52:41 ◼   ► Well done.

00:52:42 ◼   ► Well done.

00:52:43 ◼   ► I guess this is sort of like my question, though, is like, you know, you could understand,

00:52:46 ◼   ► like, the rumors were there around like watches, and you could see that there was a lot of

00:52:50 ◼   ► tech happening in the wearable space, and it makes sense for Apple to be there.

00:52:54 ◼   ► And I guess there is a ton of tech happening in the self-driving space, but I still have

00:52:59 ◼   ► a hard time, especially if we're talking about a potentially six-figure plus, like, starting

00:53:05 ◼   ► price.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Like, okay, Tesla does—most of their cars, once you get all in, are going to be around

00:53:12 ◼   ► that.

00:53:13 ◼   ► The same thing is going to be true for, you know, Mercedes or BMW.

00:53:16 ◼   ► But those aren't their only options.

00:53:17 ◼   ► Like, even Tesla now, you know, they have an option.

00:53:20 ◼   ► Obviously, once you spec it out, you're not spending under $50,000.

00:53:23 ◼   ► But, you know, on paper, you can get in for half of what, if we're being very generous,

00:53:29 ◼   ► it seems like would have been your price to get into the Apple car ecosystem.

00:53:35 ◼   ► I just don't understand—I think this is my struggle, is like, not that I don't think

00:53:40 ◼   ► Apple could make a fantastic user interface for a car, and that it wouldn't be an amazing

00:53:45 ◼   ► experience.

00:53:47 ◼   ► I just don't know why Apple as a company wants to be in the car business.

00:53:50 ◼   ► Yeah, let me put it to you this way and see if you agree.

00:53:54 ◼   ► Even the watch is primarily a computer.

00:54:01 ◼   ► And you know, Apple put a lot of work—they've done—I mean, really, as a watch nerd outside

00:54:07 ◼   ► Apple Watch, one of the most amazing things they've done is what they've done with band

00:54:11 ◼   ► designs across the board, from the sport band that is sort of the default band to their

00:54:18 ◼   ► link bracelet and the way that you can just adjust it and take links out with your fingernail

00:54:22 ◼   ► instead of any kind of fancy tools.

00:54:24 ◼   ► The leather stuff, they're really nice bands.

00:54:28 ◼   ► Yeah, they are.

00:54:29 ◼   ► They are.

00:54:30 ◼   ► The only criticism I have is I got the light pink, I guess, what the fancy buckle thing

00:54:37 ◼   ► was.

00:54:38 ◼   ► And that didn't hold up super well.

00:54:41 ◼   ► It got dirty.

00:54:42 ◼   ► I mean, I was able to clean it, but it just was one of those things that was like, "Eh."

00:54:46 ◼   ► It should just wear.

00:54:48 ◼   ► But still, fundamentally, the basic idea of the Apple Watch is it's a tiny computer on

00:54:52 ◼   ► your wrist.

00:54:54 ◼   ► That's the main thing it is.

00:54:55 ◼   ► And the watch parts of it, like buckling and telling the time, are all sort of secondary

00:55:02 ◼   ► to the computer-type parts.

00:55:03 ◼   ► Whereas a car, no matter how much of it is computerized—and Tesla has shown clearly

00:55:10 ◼   ► led the way with putting a big, big computer display as the dashboard interface.

00:55:18 ◼   ► 100%.

00:55:19 ◼   ► You know, so the dashboard console, the whole thing, you could certainly imagine how Apple

00:55:26 ◼   ► would want to design that and would enjoy designing that.

00:55:31 ◼   ► But the main part of the car is not the dashboard, right?

00:55:35 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:36 ◼   ► It's the actual driving of—it's the car car.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:40 ◼   ► And that is the big difference to me with the car, with every other product, both existing

00:55:48 ◼   ► and rumored that Apple's ever made.

00:55:51 ◼   ► All the VR/AR stuff is, to me, exactly like the watch, where it's fundamentally a computer

00:55:58 ◼   ► and secondarily something else.

00:56:01 ◼   ► Even the—especially the one that supposedly is coming first, the $3,000 according to the

00:56:09 ◼   ► information VR headset with two 8K displays, it's a computer.

00:56:14 ◼   ► And so put aside where they're, "Oh my God, $3,000, blah, blah, blah."

00:56:18 ◼   ► It's a computer, and that's exactly what Apple's always made.

00:56:22 ◼   ► They used to be called Apple Computer.

00:56:24 ◼   ► And even the supposedly, after that, AR glasses that you would wear all day that would project

00:56:32 ◼   ► some sort of heads-up display in front of you, it's a computer device.

00:56:36 ◼   ► And fashion second, where whatever the Apple glasses look like, Apple's design prowess

00:56:42 ◼   ► and taste would certainly, you would think, help in that regard in the same way it did

00:56:46 ◼   ► with the watch, where people like wearing the Apple watch and think it looks good on

00:56:51 ◼   ► their wrist.

00:56:52 ◼   ► Car is very different.

00:56:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:56:56 ◼   ► So one idea would be—the cynical idea, why would they do this, is, "Well, there's

00:57:02 ◼   ► a lot of money to be made making cars, so we should make a car."

00:57:08 ◼   ► The nonsensical answer would be that they have one or more ideas to redefine the car

00:57:15 ◼   ► market and think that they're onto something that no one else is thinking about or no one

00:57:23 ◼   ► else could do, they might think, and therefore they're going to do it.

00:57:27 ◼   ► But I don't know what those ideas are.

00:57:30 ◼   ► They're not in my imagination.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:34 ◼   ► I mean, and I guess the hard thing I have to kind of square with it is, yeah, maybe

00:57:38 ◼   ► they feel like they can do something.

00:57:39 ◼   ► But if I look at what Apple's strengths are, and they have many, to be totally candid,

00:57:46 ◼   ► transportation, navigation, not one of them, right?

00:57:49 ◼   ► Like, AI in general, I don't actually think is one of their strengths.

00:57:54 ◼   ► And I don't mean that with disrespect.

00:57:55 ◼   ► It's just that the way that Apple cares about privacy and the things that they put forward

00:58:00 ◼   ► work at a disadvantage to them, I think, with their systems compared to the models from

00:58:05 ◼   ► the other big tech companies.

00:58:08 ◼   ► I think I wrote about that recently with one of my continuing series of goofy instances

00:58:16 ◼   ► with Siri giving nonsensical answers to things.

00:58:19 ◼   ► I mean, the one I just posted the other day was, I said, "Hey, Dingus, remind me to pick

00:58:25 ◼   ► up the dry cleaning Wednesday at three," which in fact was today.

00:58:32 ◼   ► And Siri said a reminder for me at 3 a.m. to pick up the dry cleaning.

00:58:37 ◼   ► And I posted what I said, which was, "Hey, Dingus, pick up the dry cleaning at three."

00:58:45 ◼   ► And I wasn't trying to be obstinate, and I wasn't trying to stress test it.

00:58:51 ◼   ► And, yes, most of the time when I speak to Siri, and I do speak to Siri a lot, it works.

00:58:59 ◼   ► But every time it jumps out in a nonsensical way, it's the needle scratching on a record.

00:59:08 ◼   ► And this one, it makes no sense.

00:59:10 ◼   ► And I know, I think I wrote longer about it.

00:59:14 ◼   ► I think it was Nilay Patel who had the thing about, "Hey, what time is it in London?"

00:59:20 ◼   ► And it gave the time for London, Ontario.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And my explanation of this was, look, the baseline is what would a human assistant do?

00:59:34 ◼   ► And if you had a human assistant who you hired and you said, "Hey, what time...

00:59:40 ◼   ► Can you find out what time it is right now in London?"

00:59:42 ◼   ► And they gave you the time in London, Ontario.

00:59:47 ◼   ► You honestly, and I don't mean this to exaggerate, you would immediately have to think, "I might

00:59:51 ◼   ► have to fire this assistant because this person is too stupid to have the job."

00:59:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:58 ◼   ► No, and the same thing for setting a reminder for you to get your dry cleaning at 3 a.m.

01:00:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:00:04 ◼   ► Here's the funny part about that is there's a clip.

01:00:08 ◼   ► Somebody sent me a clip, and they're like, "Do you remember Mitch Hedberg, the comedian?"

01:00:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:13 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:14 ◼   ► Unfortunately, he died a few years ago.

01:00:15 ◼   ► Sad.

01:00:16 ◼   ► Yeah, sad.

01:00:17 ◼   ► And he was on Letterman.

01:00:19 ◼   ► And I'm not going to do it justice because he's so great, but he said, "I was walking

01:00:22 ◼   ► down the street one night, and there was a dry...

01:00:28 ◼   ► I walked past the...

01:00:29 ◼   ► And literally a dry cleaner, and it was 3 a.m. and they had a sign on the door and it

01:00:34 ◼   ► said, 'Closed.'"

01:00:36 ◼   ► And I'm like, "You don't need to tell me that at 3 a.m.

01:00:39 ◼   ► I know."

01:00:40 ◼   ► And it's like, holy cow.

01:00:43 ◼   ► It wasn't just any business.

01:00:44 ◼   ► It was a dry cleaner.

01:00:45 ◼   ► The time was three.

01:00:48 ◼   ► That's crazy.

01:00:51 ◼   ► You would honestly think about a human being, "This person is mentally insufficient to do

01:00:57 ◼   ► the job as my personal assistant.

01:01:00 ◼   ► How can I trust this person if they're going to make mistakes like this?"

01:01:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:01:05 ◼   ► And again, it's not a joke because they're talking about making a car, right?

01:01:09 ◼   ► This isn't a joke.

01:01:11 ◼   ► I mean, yes, exactly.

01:01:14 ◼   ► And even though Apple Maps has gotten better, it's not as good as Google Maps.

01:01:22 ◼   ► It's not even close.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Well, it's not as good as a taxi driver, right?

01:01:26 ◼   ► No, it's not.

01:01:27 ◼   ► I mean, the baseline is you get into a Lyft or a taxi and you say, "Drive me to 30th Street

01:01:35 ◼   ► Train Station."

01:01:36 ◼   ► You expect to get a reasonable route directly to...

01:01:40 ◼   ► I use Apple Maps and I think it's pretty good.

01:01:45 ◼   ► But is it...

01:01:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I use it too.

01:01:47 ◼   ► Although it did get me stuck on a mountain once, but that's a whole other thing.

01:01:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:51 ◼   ► Is it good enough?

01:01:52 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Is it good enough to drive the car around?

01:01:55 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Well, that's the thing.

01:01:57 ◼   ► If I'm being completely candid, I mean, and I don't drive.

01:02:00 ◼   ► So the idea of a self-driving car actually greatly appeals to me.

01:02:04 ◼   ► And I would even be someone who would be willing to spend a premium on that if there was a

01:02:08 ◼   ► truly self-driving car thing where I didn't have to be behind the wheel at all and do

01:02:11 ◼   ► any of it.

01:02:12 ◼   ► But I'm going to need to have trust in the system, that it's going to get me where I

01:02:16 ◼   ► need to go, that it's going to understand things.

01:02:19 ◼   ► And from a pure navigation standpoint, I don't have that in Apple Maps.

01:02:26 ◼   ► And the sad thing is that I have no doubt that there are people and systems and engineers

01:02:32 ◼   ► at Apple who could make a system that I could have full trust in.

01:02:36 ◼   ► Just like how Siri is different on different devices.

01:02:39 ◼   ► Like I find that it's actually quite good on Apple TV, but it's terrible in a lot of

01:02:43 ◼   ► other places.

01:02:44 ◼   ► It's highly kind of context dependent.

01:02:46 ◼   ► But the problem is that it's always called the same thing.

01:02:49 ◼   ► So if I'm in an Apple car that has Apple Maps in it with its Apple Drive system or whatever,

01:02:59 ◼   ► I'm going to be pretty skeptical that I can trust it to get me from point A to point B

01:03:04 ◼   ► without either taking me the wrong way, you know, that's going to waste me more time,

01:03:10 ◼   ► or worst case scenario, get me stuck on a mountain.

01:03:15 ◼   ► I'll take an aside here and say that I'm deeply skeptical about true self-driving cars,

01:03:21 ◼   ► meaning that you could truly just get in the car, tell the car where to go, and fall asleep

01:03:26 ◼   ► and not be completely cognizant as somebody being the driver cognizant, ready to go.

01:03:33 ◼   ► And furthermore, I'm also very, very skeptical of Tesla style, current Tesla feature availability

01:03:41 ◼   ► of you can mostly trust it.

01:03:44 ◼   ► I actually think that's the worst, to be totally honest.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Right.

01:03:47 ◼   ► Because it gives people, like they feel like they can trust it and they don't take the

01:03:51 ◼   ► precautions that they should.

01:03:54 ◼   ► I'm terrified of getting into car accidents.

01:03:57 ◼   ► I'm perhaps even slightly phobic about it.

01:04:00 ◼   ► I do drive, but I find the current rate of the number of people who get into either deadly

01:04:09 ◼   ► or very, very seriously injured car accidents on a daily basis terrifying.

01:04:14 ◼   ► I typically walk everywhere in Philadelphia.

01:04:18 ◼   ► Every single time I see someone who is obviously on their phone while they're driving a car,

01:04:22 ◼   ► I'm enraged.

01:04:23 ◼   ► I would like to have an entire second police force whose job is to do nothing but identify

01:04:28 ◼   ► people who are on their phone while driving because I'm terrified by it.

01:04:33 ◼   ► Honest to God, I would rather have people drinking and driving than texting and driving

01:04:38 ◼   ► because at least when you're drinking and driving, you're looking at the road and you're

01:04:42 ◼   ► thinking, "Oh, shit, I've had too much to drink."

01:04:45 ◼   ► Honest to God, that's how bad.

01:04:46 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:47 ◼   ► I think you're more impaired.

01:04:48 ◼   ► I don't think, I'm not trying to say you should drink and drive.

01:04:50 ◼   ► I'm saying I think—

01:04:51 ◼   ► No, no, no.

01:04:52 ◼   ► I mean, well, studies have shown that you're right.

01:04:53 ◼   ► I mean, studies have actually shown that maybe not more, but certainly as impaired, texting

01:04:58 ◼   ► and driving has shown that.

01:05:00 ◼   ► So I don't think you're wrong there.

01:05:02 ◼   ► And I'm actually very critical of Tesla's model because it creates this false sense

01:05:07 ◼   ► of trust that you don't have.

01:05:09 ◼   ► You can't possibly keep your attention.

01:05:12 ◼   ► No, no.

01:05:13 ◼   ► And even worse, Tesla claims that they don't promote it, but they do.

01:05:18 ◼   ► There's the wink and the nudge of all the things that you can do.

01:05:22 ◼   ► And that I think is really dangerous because it's the same thing, like the reason that

01:05:25 ◼   ► we have people who text and drive are because people felt like they can multitask and they

01:05:31 ◼   ► can do those things.

01:05:32 ◼   ► And it's become deadly.

01:05:33 ◼   ► And millions and millions of people have died that way.

01:05:36 ◼   ► And I worry—I'm with you, like, look, long-term, I think that we might get to a

01:05:42 ◼   ► point where we get up to really self-driving cars.

01:05:44 ◼   ► I don't know if we'll see it in our lifetimes or not, but I feel like it is a ways off.

01:05:49 ◼   ► But I do have, like, actually, I think that the assisted but we're-so-good-you-can-trust-it-to-be-unassisted

01:05:58 ◼   ► model is the most dangerous thing.

01:06:00 ◼   ► Like, I much more prefer the models of the self-driving technology that require hands

01:06:06 ◼   ► to be on the wheel and that require eyes to be focused on the road and that sort of thing

01:06:13 ◼   ► for the systems to work than what Tesla does.

01:06:17 ◼   ► I really do agree with that.

01:06:19 ◼   ► One time, a couple years ago, I got invited to—I never ended up writing about it, or

01:06:24 ◼   ► at least not much.

01:06:25 ◼   ► I didn't write the feature that I probably should have.

01:06:27 ◼   ► But I got invited to Mercedes—not a headquarters, but they're like—I forget if it was in

01:06:35 ◼   ► San Jose.

01:06:36 ◼   ► Where's Yahoo's headquarters?

01:06:37 ◼   ► Sunnyvale.

01:06:38 ◼   ► Sunnyvale.

01:06:39 ◼   ► I think that's where Mercedes has a big self-driving car installation in Silicon Valley.

01:06:45 ◼   ► And I got invited there in the media to see their self-driving stuff.

01:06:49 ◼   ► And I took a ride in a self-driving Mercedes vehicle.

01:06:54 ◼   ► I was paired up with Mark Bergen, who's at Recode.

01:06:59 ◼   ► And so Mark and I were in the backseat of a Mercedes.

01:07:02 ◼   ► There was a press person in the passenger seat, and then there was one of their engineers

01:07:06 ◼   ► behind the wheel.

01:07:07 ◼   ► And it was very impressive.

01:07:09 ◼   ► I mean, and the car really did do pretty much all the driving.

01:07:14 ◼   ► And we went from the parking lot at their office to out on the highway for a bit and

01:07:19 ◼   ► came back.

01:07:20 ◼   ► And the car did just about everything.

01:07:22 ◼   ► It got confused on the on-ramp to the highway.

01:07:26 ◼   ► It had to go a little bit uphill, and it was right into the sun.

01:07:29 ◼   ► And it just sort of froze up.

01:07:32 ◼   ► And the car braked, like, tended to brake everywhere like a student driver, meaning

01:07:37 ◼   ► that your head would go forward, you know, like, it got stopped short.

01:07:42 ◼   ► But the car really did do the driving, and it was impressive.

01:07:45 ◼   ► But it's just, to not have somebody behind the wheel, forget about it.

01:07:50 ◼   ► And I think that the industry will quickly get to the point where, in theory, you could

01:07:57 ◼   ► have a closed circuit, like your own little city.

01:08:01 ◼   ► And if you banned all human drivers and only allowed cars that were autonomous and talked

01:08:08 ◼   ► to each other, that would work.

01:08:10 ◼   ► I think we'll get there.

01:08:11 ◼   ► I agree.

01:08:12 ◼   ► They could do that today.

01:08:13 ◼   ► The problem is mixing the autonomous cars with the human drivers.

01:08:17 ◼   ► No, I agree with you.

01:08:18 ◼   ► I agree with you.

01:08:19 ◼   ► It's funny.

01:08:20 ◼   ► It was about four years ago now, but I actually made a very similar argument when I was at

01:08:23 ◼   ► the New York Auto Show on a panel about self-driving cars.

01:08:27 ◼   ► And I had to, you know, in front of all these corners, I was like, "I don't have a driver's

01:08:31 ◼   ► license, but let me tell you my thoughts."

01:08:33 ◼   ► And that was kind of exactly my thought, is that it's got to be the mixed thing.

01:08:38 ◼   ► It's going to be really hard to make it truly autonomous and make it work, whereas if you

01:08:43 ◼   ► mandated, you know, it can only be self-driving cars.

01:08:48 ◼   ► And then you have, you know, like IoT run, you know, 5G, you know, whatever, running

01:08:53 ◼   ► like traffic lights and sending other data signals and whatnot to control traffic flow.

01:08:59 ◼   ► I think that could work pretty well.

01:09:02 ◼   ► But the United States is not going to be the best place for that for lots of reasons, but

01:09:08 ◼   ► it's possible we might see it in parts of Asia.

01:09:10 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:09:11 ◼   ► So part of that United States thing, we've learned this lesson over the last year.

01:09:15 ◼   ► Americans tend to be very stubborn.

01:09:20 ◼   ► I was going to say, yeah.

01:09:21 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, look, our independence is our greatest feature and our greatest, like, weakness,

01:09:26 ◼   ► to be totally honest, is our need for autonomy in that way.

01:09:30 ◼   ► So part of the Mercedes thing, it was time well spent, and I was very interested, and

01:09:36 ◼   ► it was a good presentation.

01:09:37 ◼   ► But my question during one of the briefings was, okay, let's say we get to fully, you

01:09:44 ◼   ► know, stage four.

01:09:45 ◼   ► I forget what was, there's like a standard one, two, three, four, and maybe five, but

01:09:50 ◼   ► four or five is like fully autonomous.

01:09:52 ◼   ► It's Kit, right?

01:09:53 ◼   ► It's Kit from Knight Rider.

01:09:54 ◼   ► And you just say, "Kit, take me to the airport."

01:09:59 ◼   ► And you could sit in the backseat and Kit will drive you to the airport.

01:10:05 ◼   ► Even at the like stage below that, where it's like the driver can kind of like, you have

01:10:10 ◼   ► to have a driver, but you can kind of like not pay attention.

01:10:14 ◼   ► And it'll like beep at you if you need to take over and you have a couple seconds.

01:10:18 ◼   ► Even at that stage, my question was, okay, you're in a car and you're behind the wheel,

01:10:25 ◼   ► but the car takes over and you're going somewhere.

01:10:27 ◼   ► Will you be allowed to exceed the speed limit?

01:10:31 ◼   ► And it was, I knew I had a good question because they paused and they said, "No."

01:10:43 ◼   ► That was the whole full answer.

01:10:46 ◼   ► And you know, that is honestly, that alone is not going to fly in the United States.

01:10:52 ◼   ► The idea that you're on a road with a 65 mile an hour speed limit and your car will not

01:10:56 ◼   ► go 66.

01:10:57 ◼   ► Right.

01:10:58 ◼   ► Well, and more to the point, there are places where even if the limit is 65, the flow of

01:11:03 ◼   ► traffic is 75.

01:11:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:11:05 ◼   ► And if you're going 65, it could actually be dangerous.

01:11:08 ◼   ► Like if you're trying to get off the interstate or something, like it could actually be a

01:11:12 ◼   ► problem.

01:11:13 ◼   ► I joke about driving fast on this podcast many times over the years.

01:11:17 ◼   ► And when I do drive, I do like to drive fast on the highway.

01:11:22 ◼   ► But that is true.

01:11:23 ◼   ► And no joke about it, going the speed limit on a lot of highway with good, flowing traffic,

01:11:31 ◼   ► it's dangerous.

01:11:32 ◼   ► It is dangerous to go 65 on a lot of roads or 55 or whatever the speed limit is.

01:11:37 ◼   ► It is.

01:11:39 ◼   ► But the cars won't end for logical reasons.

01:11:41 ◼   ► And presumably, 50, 60 years from now, if we're still driving cars at all, they'll all

01:11:49 ◼   ► be autonomous and they'll be able to go 120 miles an hour because it'll be fantastic.

01:11:54 ◼   ► If you ever see little animations of what cars could do, if every car was autonomous,

01:11:59 ◼   ► the way you'd be able to zip through intersections.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Amazing.

01:12:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:12:04 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it'd be incredible.

01:12:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:06 ◼   ► Well, I mean, I think that's kind of my secondary thing too, aside from maybe some of the logistical

01:12:09 ◼   ► things or whatnot, is like, okay, I maybe get the appeal.

01:12:13 ◼   ► I get the appeal for a lot of companies, not Apple investing in self-driving tech and maybe

01:12:18 ◼   ► investing in the tech where you want to be the brains of what the self-driving cars are

01:12:24 ◼   ► for other people if you're a very strong infrastructure play, right?

01:12:27 ◼   ► Like where your whole thing is you want people using your stuff.

01:12:30 ◼   ► That's typically not Apple's thing, though.

01:12:31 ◼   ► They like to make their own things.

01:12:33 ◼   ► They don't really like to power other people's stuff.

01:12:37 ◼   ► As great as the M1 is and as amazing things that they've done with that, I don't really

01:12:41 ◼   ► ... And Intel is fucked for a lot of reasons, but I don't feel like Apple can take on Intel

01:12:47 ◼   ► in volume, nor would they want to, right?

01:12:51 ◼   ► So I look at the car and I think, okay, so why do this?

01:12:55 ◼   ► This is going to be, we know, a high-price project.

01:13:01 ◼   ► It requires engineering resources and expertise that not just say Apple couldn't hire for

01:13:06 ◼   ► that, but certainly that is not part of their instinctive DNA.

01:13:11 ◼   ► And then I look kind of long-term like, okay, if you're investing in this, it just seems

01:13:15 ◼   ► to me, and I know I must be missing something, but I feel like would it not be better to

01:13:20 ◼   ► be looking at high-speed rail or bullet trains or other types of transportation that way

01:13:27 ◼   ► rather than cars?

01:13:29 ◼   ► Why cars, which seem to be electric, EV aside, globally, it's going to be something that

01:13:38 ◼   ► all predictions seem to indicate is going to be on the decline.

01:13:42 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:43 ◼   ► You know, it is, and again, I can see why they don't get into trains because trains

01:13:49 ◼   ► require the government, right?

01:13:50 ◼   ► You cannot, you can't build the train tracks.

01:13:52 ◼   ► Although Elon Musk has tried to propose building a tunnel between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

01:14:00 ◼   ► You have the hyperloop.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Right, the hyperloop.

01:14:02 ◼   ► Oh, I mean, I love it.

01:14:03 ◼   ► I would too.

01:14:04 ◼   ► I laugh.

01:14:05 ◼   ► Please, I hope he does it.

01:14:08 ◼   ► Seriously, put me in the tube.

01:14:09 ◼   ► I would love that.

01:14:10 ◼   ► That'd be amazing.

01:14:11 ◼   ► I know he's building, I know the rocket ships work.

01:14:14 ◼   ► I mean, so I'm not laughing that it can't be done.

01:14:17 ◼   ► Oh, no, I know.

01:14:18 ◼   ► I know, yeah.

01:14:19 ◼   ► But at least a car is something somebody, they could just sell and you meet the regulatory

01:14:25 ◼   ► requirements and then people can just buy it and they can just drive on the road.

01:14:28 ◼   ► But whatever it is, I guarantee you this.

01:14:30 ◼   ► I mean, however wrong my pessimistic take on true autonomy is, if the rumors are true

01:14:36 ◼   ► that they're looking at starting to build these three, four years from now or even less,

01:14:41 ◼   ► but let's say three, four years from now, there's no way they're going to be autonomous.

01:14:44 ◼   ► I mean, fully autonomous.

01:14:45 ◼   ► No, there's not.

01:14:46 ◼   ► Yeah, no, from a regulatory aside, yeah, they're not.

01:14:49 ◼   ► So whatever their reason for wanting to do it, that's not it.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Like the, you know, what is the, oh, we've got this thing and we're going to redefine

01:14:57 ◼   ► the industry.

01:14:58 ◼   ► It's not autonomy, not full autonomy.

01:15:01 ◼   ► It says me now, you know, but I don't think so.

01:15:05 ◼   ► I don't think it's possible.

01:15:07 ◼   ► And even if it were, it wouldn't be legal.

01:15:09 ◼   ► Right.

01:15:10 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:15:12 ◼   ► It's a very good question and I don't quite get it.

01:15:16 ◼   ► But Volkswagen, they're not afraid.

01:15:18 ◼   ► No, I mean, I do agree with you though, the way that they framed it.

01:15:21 ◼   ► Like, I think that it probably would have been better to be like, we do the typical

01:15:25 ◼   ► bullshit tech, you know, exact thing.

01:15:27 ◼   ► We welcome our competition into the new space when really you're like, holy shit, we're

01:15:31 ◼   ► watching our back.

01:15:32 ◼   ► We don't welcome them, get out of here.

01:15:34 ◼   ► But I also don't feel like this is a Ed Colligan thing where, you know, he says, you know,

01:15:40 ◼   ► PC guys aren't just going to waltz in here.

01:15:42 ◼   ► I do feel like there are a lot of things that are much more difficult about cars and a lot

01:15:47 ◼   ► of things that go counter frankly to Apple's strengths, whereas the phone really spoke

01:15:53 ◼   ► to all of their strengths even before they entered that space, you know.

01:15:59 ◼   ► I would never bet against Apple to be very clear on that.

01:16:01 ◼   ► I would never bet against them.

01:16:02 ◼   ► It's just one of those things where I'm kind of like, why this versus some of the other

01:16:09 ◼   ► areas you could go into.

01:16:10 ◼   ► That's just always my question.

01:16:11 ◼   ► I guess, you know, if we're just going to spitball, wildly spitball, I mean, if they

01:16:15 ◼   ► have some kind of breakthrough that's in totally secret on batteries and electric drive trains,

01:16:23 ◼   ► right?

01:16:24 ◼   ► Like, okay.

01:16:25 ◼   ► Okay.

01:16:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:28 ◼   ► I could see that.

01:16:30 ◼   ► Something like that.

01:16:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:33 ◼   ► I mean, I know right now even like Teslas are super, super heavy because the batteries

01:16:37 ◼   ► are so big and they handle weird.

01:16:39 ◼   ► They're very funny.

01:16:40 ◼   ► You know, I've never driven one, but I know that they accelerate like bad out of hell.

01:16:44 ◼   ► They do.

01:16:45 ◼   ► They accelerate amazingly and then they'd make no noise, which is kind of incredible.

01:16:50 ◼   ► Last thing before we move on to another thing if you want to, but maybe I actually think

01:16:54 ◼   ► that you might be right on the batteries and maybe this would be a way for them to test

01:16:57 ◼   ► their batteries because if they could nail battery tech in something like a car, think

01:17:02 ◼   ► about how that could trickle down into all their other devices.

01:17:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:05 ◼   ► And if it's something that's easier to make big first.

01:17:08 ◼   ► Yes, exactly.

01:17:09 ◼   ► Before it gets shrunk to your pocket, right?

01:17:12 ◼   ► Yes.

01:17:13 ◼   ► So maybe you start with that and then, you know, you kind of do, you know, like a wafer

01:17:17 ◼   ► model sort of thing.

01:17:18 ◼   ► It's like, okay, we nail this and then we can miniaturize it and put it in everything

01:17:22 ◼   ► else.

01:17:23 ◼   ► Here's the other question.

01:17:24 ◼   ► I mean, think about this, this is, I feel like people aren't speculating on it enough,

01:17:29 ◼   ► especially now that people are starting to say, hey, it's like two, three years out,

01:17:34 ◼   ► right?

01:17:35 ◼   ► Is where do they sell the cars?

01:17:37 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:38 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good point.

01:17:40 ◼   ► I have never seen an Apple store that is ready to sell cars.

01:17:45 ◼   ► I mean, some of the flagships, I'm trying to think, I was only in the new San Francisco

01:17:51 ◼   ► flagship once, the one that took over the old Levi's building.

01:17:57 ◼   ► That one's pretty big, you know, Fifth Avenue in New York.

01:17:59 ◼   ► No way, right?

01:18:00 ◼   ► Fifth Avenue in New York.

01:18:01 ◼   ► No, there's no way.

01:18:02 ◼   ► You have to go downstairs.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Exactly, you'd have to go downstairs to show off the car.

01:18:06 ◼   ► I mean, the thing is, is that you could do what Tesla does where, you know, you could

01:18:09 ◼   ► have like the reservations and you could have that thing and you could have delivery.

01:18:12 ◼   ► But yeah, where do people go to see it?

01:18:14 ◼   ► Where do people go to potentially take a test drive?

01:18:17 ◼   ► And Tesla struggled with that too, although they had to walk back, like they originally

01:18:20 ◼   ► were going to close a bunch of their dealerships, or they don't call them dealerships because

01:18:24 ◼   ► there's a legal thing around that, but they're stores, but then they kept some of them open.

01:18:29 ◼   ► There are a number of them.

01:18:30 ◼   ► I'm not sure what their state of opening is, given the pandemic, but in the Seattle

01:18:35 ◼   ► area, there are like a lot of Tesla stores.

01:18:40 ◼   ► I think Bellevue, which is a Seattle suburb, is second only to Palo Alto in terms of numbers

01:18:45 ◼   ► of Teslas sold.

01:18:47 ◼   ► So there are a number of places where people can go get them.

01:18:52 ◼   ► But even that, like I will say Tesla definitely took from Apple and it's much more of an

01:18:56 ◼   ► Apple experience where you go in and you place your order and you see a car, but it's not

01:19:00 ◼   ► like you're going to drive off the lot with it.

01:19:02 ◼   ► And it's, you know, like that's not the experience.

01:19:06 ◼   ► It's not a car dealer.

01:19:07 ◼   ► It's not a car dealer.

01:19:08 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:10 ◼   ► I've been to a Tesla in a mall, the King of Prussian mall here in Philadelphia or the

01:19:14 ◼   ► greater Philadelphia area.

01:19:15 ◼   ► I think they closed though before COVID even, but they used to have a Tesla in the mall

01:19:20 ◼   ► and you know, they had like one car in there and it was mainly like a place where you could

01:19:26 ◼   ► just go and look at one and talk to somebody and then I guess make an appointment to get

01:19:31 ◼   ► a real, you know, test drive a real one.

01:19:33 ◼   ► But it's very strange.

01:19:34 ◼   ► It would be very strange for Apple.

01:19:36 ◼   ► I mean, and on a personal level, me, John Gruber, if they come out with a car, do I

01:19:43 ◼   ► get a review unit?

01:19:45 ◼   ► Like a car would be a crazy thing to get a review unit for.

01:19:49 ◼   ► No, you would get a loan.

01:19:51 ◼   ► You would, they would do it the same way that they do review units for other things.

01:19:54 ◼   ► They would like let you, you would sign out an agreement and you would get it for a week

01:19:57 ◼   ► or 10 days or whatever.

01:20:00 ◼   ► How would I charge it?

01:20:02 ◼   ► Like don't you need, won't you need like some kind of expensive thing in your garage?

01:20:07 ◼   ► I mean, what happens if I don't have a garage?

01:20:09 ◼   ► I happen to have a garage, but do I have room for an extra car?

01:20:14 ◼   ► I'm trying to think.

01:20:15 ◼   ► So, because I used to work at a Gizmodo Media Group and with the Jalopnik guys who would

01:20:20 ◼   ► do a lot of car reviews and those are, you know, most of those guys live in Brooklyn

01:20:23 ◼   ► where they don't have garages or access to any of that stuff and they would review EVs,

01:20:28 ◼   ► although some of those people would live other places.

01:20:30 ◼   ► And yeah, I mean, I think that you would find places where you could either adapt a way

01:20:34 ◼   ► to charge or there'd be a charging station and they might give you like a limited loan.

01:20:38 ◼   ► But yeah, I mean, it was, it was not uncommon where, you know, I had friends who live in

01:20:42 ◼   ► apartments who would be, you know, test driving expensive automobiles in New York City.

01:20:48 ◼   ► So it can be done.

01:20:49 ◼   ► It just is obviously requires a lot more logistics than, you know, shipping somebody a phone

01:20:55 ◼   ► or having a product briefing with a watch.

01:20:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think FedEx drops them off.

01:21:00 ◼   ► No, no.

01:21:01 ◼   ► And the thing too is that you have a much more limited number of like review devices,

01:21:06 ◼   ► right?

01:21:07 ◼   ► Like you can give the whole press corps one is one of those things where you have like

01:21:11 ◼   ► a couple or maybe like two, like one kind of for the coast where people are going to

01:21:15 ◼   ► take turns.

01:21:16 ◼   ► So it would be a lot more limited, I assume.

01:21:19 ◼   ► But yeah, and that even says, does Apple want the press reviews or do they want to do what

01:21:27 ◼   ► they've been doing recently, which is do they want to see the car YouTubers?

01:21:31 ◼   ► Like I could see them doing that, right?

01:21:34 ◼   ► Like it just bypassing the traditional automotive press altogether.

01:21:38 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:21:39 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:40 ◼   ► And it's like, I know that there is an automotive press and I know that the automotive press

01:21:44 ◼   ► reviews cars without buying them.

01:21:46 ◼   ► You know, they, they get the equivalent of, you know, loaners.

01:21:50 ◼   ► What I'm wondering is, will Apple go to the usual Apple reviewers?

01:21:54 ◼   ► Like is it me and the Verge and Matthew Panzareno and Joanna Stern or do they go to the car

01:22:01 ◼   ► people?

01:22:02 ◼   ► Like it just seems...

01:22:03 ◼   ► It seems crazy though, you know, and I guess, I guess it comes down to what is the thing

01:22:07 ◼   ► that they think is special about the car.

01:22:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:22:10 ◼   ► And it probably, I mean, like they would probably go to the Verge.

01:22:13 ◼   ► The Verge has a transportation editor.

01:22:14 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:15 ◼   ► It, you know, Neelay would probably want to review it himself, but you know, I mean, they

01:22:19 ◼   ► would probably go there.

01:22:20 ◼   ► The Wall Street Journal would get one, whether you know, Joanna or their car reviewer would

01:22:24 ◼   ► be up to them.

01:22:25 ◼   ► You and Panzareno, I guess it depends on if they see you as car enthusiasts and influencers

01:22:31 ◼   ► or not, right?

01:22:32 ◼   ► Like...

01:22:33 ◼   ► It's just a crazy thing for me to review.

01:22:35 ◼   ► I agree.

01:22:36 ◼   ► Okay.

01:22:37 ◼   ► But like, but for instance, Marquez, Marquez Brownlee would get one.

01:22:39 ◼   ► Oh, definitely.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:22:41 ◼   ► Like, like he would be number one.

01:22:42 ◼   ► And I actually think that that would probably be, you'd see more of that type of things.

01:22:45 ◼   ► I think that if it were me, if I were Apple and I were trying to, you know, seed review

01:22:50 ◼   ► units for this mythical Apple car, I would be going after the big tech YouTubers who

01:22:56 ◼   ► we all know have Teslas and get them on board.

01:23:01 ◼   ► Honestly.

01:23:02 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:23:03 ◼   ► It's just a fascinating personal aspect to it.

01:23:06 ◼   ► And it's like, and how do I send it back?

01:23:08 ◼   ► How do I get it?

01:23:09 ◼   ► How do you send it back?

01:23:10 ◼   ► How do you give it back to them?

01:23:11 ◼   ► No, totally.

01:23:12 ◼   ► I mean, yeah.

01:23:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:14 ◼   ► I mean, I say this as somebody who I more than one occasion actually had, you know,

01:23:18 ◼   ► companies want me to do potentially car reviews.

01:23:21 ◼   ► And I'm like, I don't have a license.

01:23:23 ◼   ► I can connect with someone else, you know?

01:23:24 ◼   ► Like, oh, come on.

01:23:25 ◼   ► But you can.

01:23:26 ◼   ► I'm like, nope.

01:23:27 ◼   ► I don't want to, even if I did, would genuinely have no interest because like you, I have,

01:23:33 ◼   ► I live in fear of like getting in a car accident.

01:23:35 ◼   ► And to me, the only thing that would be more nightmare inducing than getting in a normal

01:23:39 ◼   ► car accident would be getting in a car accident with a hundred thousand dollar review car

01:23:43 ◼   ► for Apple.

01:23:44 ◼   ► Like that would genuinely be like, that would keep me up at night, like 100%.

01:23:48 ◼   ► Like that would be enough of a panic inducement.

01:23:50 ◼   ► I wouldn't even be able to enjoy it because I'd be so freaked out about like, what happens

01:23:54 ◼   ► if I wrecked this car?

01:23:55 ◼   ► Like, yeah.

01:23:56 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:24:00 ◼   ► My guess is the way they would do it is that they would be a limited number of reviews

01:24:04 ◼   ► just for, you know, for the obvious reason.

01:24:07 ◼   ► And that they would deliver them, you know, like ding dong, they'd show up at the, you

01:24:13 ◼   ► know, where, you know, what's your address?

01:24:15 ◼   ► As somebody would show up, the car is there and, you know, with, with a colleague in another

01:24:22 ◼   ► car to take the person who brought it home.

01:24:24 ◼   ► And then like, you know, two weeks later we're going to come and we'll pick it up.

01:24:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:30 ◼   ► That's, I guess was what they would do.

01:24:32 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:24:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's what they would do.

01:24:34 ◼   ► And they would probably, you know, um, prioritize people who either live places that have charging

01:24:40 ◼   ► stations like in my apartment building.

01:24:42 ◼   ► Um, we have a couple of EV, um, uh, chargers, um, that, that people can use or whatever.

01:24:48 ◼   ► So they would prioritize like people who either live near one that they can go to, to top

01:24:52 ◼   ► up or have their own garage where they can retrofit, you know, or have an adapter or

01:24:56 ◼   ► whatever to use their, their main, you know, like power outlet to charge the, to charge

01:25:01 ◼   ► the thing.

01:25:02 ◼   ► And, you know, and typically it doesn't really make a big difference that I'm in Philadelphia,

01:25:08 ◼   ► which isn't really, you know, a hub for Apple, but I'm close to New York.

01:25:13 ◼   ► But again, shipping anything else Apple has ever made is not that big a deal because it

01:25:19 ◼   ► can always just come FedEx.

01:25:21 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:22 ◼   ► Like the car, like this is going to have to be on a flatbed.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Like this is either going to have to be driven or this is going to have to be on a flatbed

01:25:28 ◼   ► that's going to be delivered to you.

01:25:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:30 ◼   ► Presumably they would have a couple sent to New York, however they send cars.

01:25:34 ◼   ► And then I would guess somebody from New York, somebody from Apple would drive it from New

01:25:37 ◼   ► York to Philadelphia and drop it off at my house.

01:25:40 ◼   ► But I, I don't know.

01:25:41 ◼   ► I mean, that's what I would assume either that or they would have some sort of place

01:25:44 ◼   ► where you would go to pick it up.

01:25:45 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:46 ◼   ► But like what would they do if I lived in a what's like Nebraska?

01:25:50 ◼   ► I probably wouldn't get one.

01:25:51 ◼   ► I guess.

01:25:52 ◼   ► Like you would need to be somebody who'd be super high on their list for you to get one.

01:25:56 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Or else I'd have to agree to like spend a week in California and get a hotel and you

01:26:00 ◼   ► know, drive around the car for a week.

01:26:01 ◼   ► There you go.

01:26:02 ◼   ► That would be it.

01:26:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:04 ◼   ► I mean, it, I'm trying to think like the, the car press is kind of distributed, but

01:26:06 ◼   ► you do have a lot of people in Detroit.

01:26:07 ◼   ► You do have people in New York, obviously people in California.

01:26:11 ◼   ► And and they, they get their cars there.

01:26:14 ◼   ► But I think for people who would be in other places who would want it, yeah, you need to

01:26:18 ◼   ► either make your own arrangements or be somebody who would be deemed so important to review

01:26:25 ◼   ► this that they would be willing to, you know, go through the extra stuff.

01:26:30 ◼   ► It really just, it brings to mind, I mean, I've, I've thought about this.

01:26:33 ◼   ► It just brings to mind what a preposterous thing to own a car is.

01:26:39 ◼   ► Like we just, in America, we just have this car culture and we just.

01:26:42 ◼   ► I mean, this is, this is my point.

01:26:43 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:26:44 ◼   ► I live with someone who loves cars and I don't get it.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And so I think that this underscores my whole like question.

01:26:51 ◼   ► It's like, why are you wanting to get into this space?

01:26:56 ◼   ► Because it is a preposterous notion that you're spending as much as you know, you could on

01:27:02 ◼   ► a house for a depreciating asset.

01:27:04 ◼   ► Well, and it's, again, it's not like watches where you buy a $10,000 Rolex and you could

01:27:09 ◼   ► sell it for 20,000 10 years from now.

01:27:11 ◼   ► You know, you're, you know, as they say, it depreciates the moment you drive it off the

01:27:15 ◼   ► lot.

01:27:16 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:27:17 ◼   ► It's like, it's not going to use whatever its value is.

01:27:18 ◼   ► And that is the other thing.

01:27:19 ◼   ► I mean, let's go with this because I mentioned my son before.

01:27:23 ◼   ► So my son's 17 years old.

01:27:25 ◼   ► The driver, driving age in Pennsylvania is 16.

01:27:28 ◼   ► And when my wife and I turned 16 and we lived in the suburbs, we, I mean, we had already

01:27:34 ◼   ► had our permits because you could get your permit.

01:27:37 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:27:38 ◼   ► It was like three months before you turn 16, you can get your driver's permit.

01:27:41 ◼   ► And it's like three months to the day because the car meant freedom when you live in the

01:27:47 ◼   ► suburbs.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:50 ◼   ► But for your son, we talked about this last show.

01:27:51 ◼   ► Like he doesn't care, right?

01:27:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:27:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:55 ◼   ► So we did bring it up.

01:27:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:57 ◼   ► He's 17 and does not, the last, it's homework he doesn't want.

01:27:59 ◼   ► What does he want to study to take a driver's test?

01:28:02 ◼   ► He doesn't want to drive anywhere.

01:28:03 ◼   ► He lives in the city.

01:28:05 ◼   ► He walks most places he goes.

01:28:06 ◼   ► And once this COVID thing blows over, he'll take, go back to, you know, we, he still hasn't

01:28:12 ◼   ► taken like an Uber by himself, but you know, 17, 18, he will probably by the time this

01:28:17 ◼   ► thing blows over, you know, none of his friends drive.

01:28:20 ◼   ► They don't want to drive.

01:28:21 ◼   ► They don't need to drive.

01:28:22 ◼   ► And an Uber and a Lyft is better.

01:28:23 ◼   ► You don't have to park.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Well, you don't have to park, which parking, depending where you live, it can be extremely

01:28:27 ◼   ► expensive.

01:28:28 ◼   ► I imagine it's pricey in parts of Philadelphia and hard to find and, and, you know, takes

01:28:33 ◼   ► time.

01:28:34 ◼   ► And, and if you have an expensive car then becomes yet another like thing that you are

01:28:38 ◼   ► afraid about because you've got your pricey car out there in the city, right?

01:28:42 ◼   ► Like cars are great in the suburbs, in the cities.

01:28:45 ◼   ► And I'm a city person, so yeah.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Again, like this kind of goes to my question.

01:28:50 ◼   ► Like, I think about all these things and like, I'm like, okay, this, a lot of the car companies

01:28:55 ◼   ► are trying to turn themselves into tech companies, which makes sense because that's where they

01:28:59 ◼   ► feel like they can continue to prosper and sell.

01:29:01 ◼   ► But it's been a trend for the last decade that, you know, kids are getting their driver's

01:29:06 ◼   ► license later and later and are, fewer people are buying cars.

01:29:09 ◼   ► Like that's been a problem for the car industry.

01:29:12 ◼   ► Like Ford has faced that and, and the other big manufacturers have too.

01:29:17 ◼   ► And again, I would never bet against Apple because I feel like Apple is unique in the

01:29:22 ◼   ► vacant inner markets that seem to not make sense and can make things work really well.

01:29:29 ◼   ► It's just like, this just seems like, okay, but all the car companies want to be you.

01:29:35 ◼   ► Why do you want to be a car company?

01:29:38 ◼   ► And I wonder a little bit.

01:29:40 ◼   ► I know lots of people at Apple live in San Francisco, literally in the city and they

01:29:46 ◼   ► take, you know, like the buses down to Cupertino.

01:29:50 ◼   ► And I know that's a big deal in that they, you know, in a way that would have made no

01:29:54 ◼   ► sense 20 years ago, but it makes tons of sense now with ubiquitous cellular networking, you

01:29:59 ◼   ► can actually, you know, start your workday and do be productive.

01:30:03 ◼   ► And people go there and park and spend all day at work and then drive home if they don't,

01:30:09 ◼   ► if they don't live in the city and take the bus and they live, you know, somewhere in

01:30:12 ◼   ► between.

01:30:13 ◼   ► But I can't help but think if there's a little bit of a bias towards car culture there because

01:30:17 ◼   ► Silicon Valley is a place where you drive to go places.

01:30:21 ◼   ► Yeah, you do.

01:30:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

01:30:23 ◼   ► And if does it bias them in a way that I think in ways, lots of little ways, Apple's products

01:30:30 ◼   ► are sort of biased towards California weather.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Right?

01:30:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:35 ◼   ► Like, why doesn't the iPhone show you the temperature on the lock screen?

01:30:40 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:41 ◼   ► Because it's 71 and sunny.

01:30:42 ◼   ► What else?

01:30:43 ◼   ► Right?

01:30:44 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:45 ◼   ► Yeah, no, that's, that's a good, that's a really good point.

01:30:49 ◼   ► Yeah, no, that makes sense.

01:30:51 ◼   ► I mean, it does also and maybe the other thing that could influence them is that if all of

01:30:54 ◼   ► your competitors in the area are interested in this thing, then I'm not saying that like

01:31:00 ◼   ► you're, you have to be follow on, but it's hard to, it would be hard for that not to

01:31:05 ◼   ► be influential in some way, right?

01:31:07 ◼   ► Like, the same way that, you know, everybody's making a microcomputer, you want to get into

01:31:12 ◼   ► that business.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Everybody's making a phone, you want to get into that business.

01:31:16 ◼   ► If everybody around you is investing in all the hiring talent is so competitive around

01:31:21 ◼   ► automotive and about self-driving around AI and all that stuff, maybe that plays a role.

01:31:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:31:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:28 ◼   ► Well, let me take a break and we'll thank our next sponsor.

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01:32:54 ◼   ► Let's talk about Clubhouse before we run out of time.

01:32:59 ◼   ► What are your thoughts on Clubhouse?

01:33:00 ◼   ► I feel like Clubhouse right now is like, as we speak, February 2021, it's still in private.

01:33:09 ◼   ► I wouldn't call it beta.

01:33:10 ◼   ► I mean, it's on the App Store.

01:33:12 ◼   ► It's invite only.

01:33:14 ◼   ► But they seem to be accelerating the invitations to the point now where February 2021 sort

01:33:20 ◼   ► of is the month where Clubhouse went big.

01:33:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I would agree with that.

01:33:24 ◼   ► I mean, I would say maybe January.

01:33:26 ◼   ► No, yeah, I'm trying to think, when was Alon on?

01:33:30 ◼   ► When did he do the Game Stonk thing?

01:33:32 ◼   ► That was its Oprah joins Twitter moment.

01:33:35 ◼   ► Yeah, 2021 to date, January to February.

01:33:38 ◼   ► And I'm sure, in hindsight, there'll be even more people in March and more people in April,

01:33:42 ◼   ► but it's getting big.

01:33:44 ◼   ► A, can you describe what Clubhouse is?

01:33:48 ◼   ► And B, tell me your thoughts about it.

01:33:50 ◼   ► Okay.

01:33:51 ◼   ► So I'll find something that I sent, let me find my tweet that I sent about it because

01:33:55 ◼   ► Steven Sinofsky was annoyed with me, but I stand by it.

01:33:59 ◼   ► Okay.

01:34:01 ◼   ► This was what someone asked me, like two weeks ago.

01:34:03 ◼   ► It says, "What does one do with Clubhouse?"

01:34:05 ◼   ► And then I wrote, "Waste time not working by listening to other people not working,

01:34:10 ◼   ► talking about stuff they claim to be experts in but really aren't, while hoping for celebrities

01:34:14 ◼   ► to show up."

01:34:15 ◼   ► That's pretty, that's pretty tart, but I don't disagree with it.

01:34:22 ◼   ► And I say this as someone who, I've spent a lot of time on Clubhouse.

01:34:25 ◼   ► I've hosted shows on Clubhouse when that was still a beta feature.

01:34:29 ◼   ► I think I joined in April.

01:34:31 ◼   ► I'm not above this, like at all.

01:34:33 ◼   ► I'm just saying like when I use it, it is usually because it's either the end of the

01:34:37 ◼   ► day and there I see one of the many notifications come in that, you know, somebody you're on

01:34:43 ◼   ► and something interesting is going on, or I'm like, you know, kind of trying to avoid

01:34:48 ◼   ► doing actual work and so I tune in in the afternoon and then listen to other people,

01:34:54 ◼   ► you know, who are often doing the same thing.

01:34:56 ◼   ► And then there is that bit of like, "Oh, and maybe someone famous will, you know, pop

01:35:01 ◼   ► in."

01:35:02 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:35:03 ◼   ► I'm being totally honest.

01:35:04 ◼   ► Like for me, that is kind of the appeal.

01:35:06 ◼   ► That's not to say that I don't think there, I think that you can have some real substantive

01:35:10 ◼   ► and interesting conversations and there are some really interesting ways it can be used

01:35:14 ◼   ► and the way that its interest graph is both connected but disconnected from Twitter I

01:35:19 ◼   ► think is interesting.

01:35:22 ◼   ► I was in a room last week and someone's 10-year-old was briefly in the room before that was deemed,

01:35:29 ◼   ► I guess, not okay and we were asking the youth some questions about their use of technology

01:35:36 ◼   ► and, you know, they kind of described it.

01:35:38 ◼   ► They were like, "Oh, it's Discord for adults."

01:35:41 ◼   ► And that's actually not a bad description to be totally honest.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Like it's, you know, kind of Discord's audio groups but, you know, audio channels for adults.

01:35:51 ◼   ► That's not a completely terrible analogy.

01:35:57 ◼   ► I'm trying to still wrap my head around it.

01:35:59 ◼   ► I think they're on, I do think they're on to something.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Oh, totally.

01:36:03 ◼   ► And I also think, and I haven't quite had this feeling about something since Instagram

01:36:10 ◼   ► in 2010.

01:36:12 ◼   ► So I was not on the Instagram beta.

01:36:14 ◼   ► MG Siegler was and he tweeted enough pictures from it.

01:36:19 ◼   ► I definitely kind of was like, "Okay, square pictures, filters."

01:36:25 ◼   ► And then I was just saying on my other podcast Dithering with Ben Thompson, I think the episode

01:36:30 ◼   ► that aired this morning that I remember where I was when I realized Instagram was out of

01:36:35 ◼   ► beta and I could sign up.

01:36:36 ◼   ► I was with my family down in Disney World and I was on a bus going from, I think I even

01:36:43 ◼   ► remember which park we were going to.

01:36:44 ◼   ► We're going from our hotel to the Disney Studios park on the little Disney transportation bus.

01:36:51 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, it's out of beta.

01:36:53 ◼   ► Quick, get Gruber.

01:36:54 ◼   ► Oh, it's still available.

01:36:55 ◼   ► Got it."

01:36:57 ◼   ► Start clicking around.

01:36:58 ◼   ► And within five minutes, because all of a sudden we're at Disney and it's time to have

01:37:02 ◼   ► fun and go on rides and stuff, I was like, "Oh, I get this.

01:37:06 ◼   ► This is great."

01:37:09 ◼   ► And now that is the original Instagram where it was just you post pictures and you see

01:37:13 ◼   ► pictures from the people you follow and you can comment on the pictures and you can apply

01:37:20 ◼   ► these filters that really, at the time, was a great feature because cell phone cameras

01:37:26 ◼   ► were still so crappy.

01:37:28 ◼   ► The filters-

01:37:29 ◼   ► It really added, it was perfect.

01:37:31 ◼   ► In Hipstagram, what was it?

01:37:32 ◼   ► Hipstagram?

01:37:33 ◼   ► Or no, Hipstamatic.

01:37:34 ◼   ► Hipstamatic.

01:37:35 ◼   ► It was awesome.

01:37:36 ◼   ► So it fit with that whole aesthetic that was happening at the time, but it made it easy

01:37:40 ◼   ► to apply.

01:37:41 ◼   ► They didn't take as long as some of the other filter apps did and it really made your photos

01:37:45 ◼   ► look better and added.

01:37:46 ◼   ► I remember when they added the tilt shift feature and it was amazing.

01:37:50 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:37:51 ◼   ► The tilt shift feature was this massive deal because I was like, "Oh my God, I can take

01:37:55 ◼   ► Mr. Rogers' pictures," right?

01:37:56 ◼   ► Like, it's how I felt.

01:37:58 ◼   ► At the time, Hipstamatic took so long.

01:38:00 ◼   ► And I still don't know.

01:38:02 ◼   ► I've never talked to anybody who could explain it.

01:38:04 ◼   ► I don't know if they did it on purpose to fake, but Hipstamatic took so long to apply

01:38:10 ◼   ► filters.

01:38:11 ◼   ► I remember talking to somebody at Apple about it and they're like, "Yeah, it makes no sense

01:38:13 ◼   ► that even if they're using a bad algorithm, it shouldn't take that long."

01:38:17 ◼   ► And it was like, "Yeah, it's crazy."

01:38:18 ◼   ► It was frustrating.

01:38:19 ◼   ► And Instagram let you like, "Oh, this filter?

01:38:22 ◼   ► Nope.

01:38:23 ◼   ► This filter?

01:38:24 ◼   ► No."

01:38:25 ◼   ► Instantly.

01:38:26 ◼   ► And then you'd pick one that made your picture look better and then you'd post it.

01:38:27 ◼   ► And I was like, "I got it."

01:38:29 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, this is going to be huge."

01:38:32 ◼   ► Just a snap judgment.

01:38:33 ◼   ► 100%.

01:38:34 ◼   ► I feel that way about Clubhouse with just a little less certainty because the thing

01:38:39 ◼   ► about Instagram was I knew I wanted to use it.

01:38:42 ◼   ► Whereas with Clubhouse, I'm like, "I get this.

01:38:45 ◼   ► I can see why people really like it.

01:38:47 ◼   ► I don't think this is for me."

01:38:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:38:50 ◼   ► No, I kind of agree with you.

01:38:51 ◼   ► And I'm somebody who like, I go back and forth about my feeling on it.

01:38:57 ◼   ► Do I think that its current valuation is kind of insane?

01:39:00 ◼   ► Yes.

01:39:01 ◼   ► Do I think the concept has massive legs?

01:39:03 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:39:04 ◼   ► I think the other difference is that Instagram came out, there were a couple of other kind

01:39:11 ◼   ► of competitors.

01:39:12 ◼   ► I remember there was like PickPlease, which was available on both iOS and Android that

01:39:16 ◼   ► Dalton Caldwell, who later did app.net did, and that didn't work.

01:39:21 ◼   ► And there were some other kind of attempts at doing similar things, but Instagram was

01:39:25 ◼   ► always where the momentum was.

01:39:28 ◼   ► And I think it's because they had really strong product direction.

01:39:31 ◼   ► I think that always from the beginning, the product direction and the aesthetic and the

01:39:35 ◼   ► usability was key.

01:39:38 ◼   ► It was always product first.

01:39:39 ◼   ► It was always product first.

01:39:41 ◼   ► Clubhouse is one of those things where not that I don't think, where I wonder if it's

01:39:45 ◼   ► going to be more like an Instagram Stories thing, where not Instagram Stories, the Snapchat

01:39:48 ◼   ► Stories things, but you see where I'm going with this, where it's a great idea, but it

01:39:53 ◼   ► could be potentially co-opted and done better by someone else.

01:39:58 ◼   ► I feel like Twitter Spaces could beat it in a way that no one else even had a chance against

01:40:07 ◼   ► Instagram, even though Instagram was iOS only until it was acquired by Facebook.

01:40:12 ◼   ► No one else even had a chance.

01:40:13 ◼   ► It sucked all the oxygen out of the room because it was the best.

01:40:19 ◼   ► I feel like the concept of Clubhouse has a lot of legs.

01:40:21 ◼   ► I just don't know if Clubhouse is going to be the thing or if it'll be whatever Mark

01:40:26 ◼   ► Cuban things that he thinks he's doing or if it'll be Twitter Spaces.

01:40:29 ◼   ► I don't think it'll be Facebook's thing.

01:40:31 ◼   ► I think Facebook's thing will fall flat on its face.

01:40:34 ◼   ► But I do feel like Twitter Spaces could potentially pull the Instagram move and make their review

01:40:43 ◼   ► version of Stories way more successful, even though it's a blatant copy.

01:40:48 ◼   ► It's better.

01:40:52 ◼   ► You just echoed my thoughts exactly, where I feel like either Clubhouse is onto something,

01:40:57 ◼   ► whether it is the thing and Clubhouse becomes a major titan of networking and owns the space,

01:41:06 ◼   ► or is it Snapchat Stories and it just becomes a feature that everybody has and everybody

01:41:12 ◼   ► has these audio group rooms and you can add.

01:41:17 ◼   ► I don't know which way it's going to go.

01:41:20 ◼   ► Either Clubhouse will become the thing for this in the way that Instagram became the

01:41:25 ◼   ► thing for just sharing photos or it's Stories and everybody will have their own implementation

01:41:33 ◼   ► of Clubhouse and Clubhouse is just one of them.

01:41:38 ◼   ► On Dithering Ben and I talked about the way that Periscope and Meerkat were onto something

01:41:44 ◼   ► with live streaming video from your phone, but there is no single home for live streaming

01:41:51 ◼   ► video from your phone.

01:41:53 ◼   ► Everybody just has live streaming on their platforms.

01:41:55 ◼   ► You could do it on YouTube, you could do it on Facebook, you could do it on Citizen.

01:42:01 ◼   ► It's just a feature that you add to anything that has this sort of thing.

01:42:04 ◼   ► I don't know which way it's going to go.

01:42:06 ◼   ► Here's what I see with Clubhouse and I'm not a heavy user, haven't even been there that

01:42:11 ◼   ► long, but I see three types of rooms.

01:42:16 ◼   ► Tell me if you think that I'm either off or if I'm missing something.

01:42:20 ◼   ► I see there's shows.

01:42:23 ◼   ► Ben Thompson was on a show.

01:42:24 ◼   ► There's a show every night called, I forget what it's called now, Big Fun, Big Time, Good

01:42:30 ◼   ► Time, Good Time last night and it's like a late night talk show, really late night for

01:42:36 ◼   ► East Coasters.

01:42:37 ◼   ► It's like 10 to 11 Pacific, but I was up last night and hundreds of people listen.

01:42:43 ◼   ► It's a lot like a podcast except it's live and it was good and I liked listening to my

01:42:50 ◼   ► friend Ben and the questions were good and I liked listening to it, but all I could think

01:42:54 ◼   ► is this is just like a podcast, but with A, the frustration of you have to listen live,

01:43:02 ◼   ► can't pause, you have to be there and tune in, which is a huge problem compared to, it's

01:43:08 ◼   ► like going from having a TiVo to going back to not having a DVR and if you have to go

01:43:14 ◼   ► to the bathroom or your phone rings during a show, you miss the show.

01:43:18 ◼   ► You're screwed, totally.

01:43:20 ◼   ► Which is crazy.

01:43:21 ◼   ► Although I think that's why it works, but sorry, go on.

01:43:24 ◼   ► Well, yeah, because maybe people are willing to say different things, right?

01:43:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:43:28 ◼   ► They're willing to be looser because they're not quite on a permanent record.

01:43:31 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:32 ◼   ► And I get it that that's also, it's not completely unrelated to the popularity of the Stories

01:43:37 ◼   ► feature on all these platforms.

01:43:41 ◼   ► B, worse audio quality.

01:43:43 ◼   ► The audio quality is way worse than the worst podcast I've ever listened to.

01:43:48 ◼   ► They do, technically, they do a great job with crosstalk.

01:43:51 ◼   ► They really are doing some good things, but people are just talking into their phones

01:43:55 ◼   ► and they're using phone microphones and there's a lot of compression.

01:43:58 ◼   ► It's audio.

01:43:59 ◼   ► I had my AirPods Pro on last night and I was like, "This is the worst podcast I've ever

01:44:02 ◼   ► listened to."

01:44:03 ◼   ► I mean, I listen to podcasts where sometimes guests call in on the phone and they patch

01:44:08 ◼   ► them in like the old days on radio and they sound better than Clubhouse.

01:44:14 ◼   ► So the show's thing to me is sort of like live podcasts and yeah, maybe there is a social

01:44:20 ◼   ► psychological angle where there still is room for that because it's not a permanent record,

01:44:25 ◼   ► right?

01:44:26 ◼   ► So there's podcasts with me and you, people will be able to listen to it in years.

01:44:29 ◼   ► We don't know if they're listening to it next week or tomorrow or if they're listening to

01:44:33 ◼   ► it in the year 2030 and they're laughing because they're listening to it while their Apple

01:44:38 ◼   ► car is driving them around, right?

01:44:41 ◼   ► And they're like, "Well, John Gruber and Christina Warren were idiots nine years ago."

01:44:46 ◼   ► And they're sleeping, you know, and they're like going to take a nap in the backseat of

01:44:50 ◼   ► their Apple car.

01:44:52 ◼   ► So there's shows.

01:44:54 ◼   ► Then there's B, there's just like group chats, like seven, eight, nine people.

01:45:00 ◼   ► This is what I've done more of.

01:45:02 ◼   ► Maybe you know them, maybe you don't and there's a topic or something and there's like eight

01:45:06 ◼   ► people and you have a talk and you're just chatting.

01:45:11 ◼   ► I find that personally, it's like I'm on the introvert scale enough where I find it exhausting

01:45:19 ◼   ► and in a way, but I understand that there are other personality types who crave social

01:45:25 ◼   ► interaction and they find it energizing and they love it.

01:45:30 ◼   ► And 2020 is a great year to launch something like that.

01:45:34 ◼   ► 100%.

01:45:35 ◼   ► Because people who crave social interaction have no way to fulfill that.

01:45:42 ◼   ► It's great, but that's definitely not for me.

01:45:45 ◼   ► Do you like talking to new people when you go to a party or do you like talking to your

01:45:49 ◼   ► friends?

01:45:50 ◼   ► I like talking to my friends.

01:45:54 ◼   ► Because I find it exhausting.

01:45:55 ◼   ► I mean, that's sort of the definition of an introvert.

01:46:00 ◼   ► But then in the middle, the ones that I find the most interesting are the ones that are

01:46:05 ◼   ► sort of like a panel discussion at a conference.

01:46:11 ◼   ► And it's different than a podcast because the audience members can participate.

01:46:18 ◼   ► Yes.

01:46:19 ◼   ► Right?

01:46:20 ◼   ► So you get John Gruber and Christina Warren to talk Apple Car on Clubhouse and we could

01:46:29 ◼   ► have a couple hundred people show up and we can pick one at a time through the app to

01:46:34 ◼   ► invite people to ask us questions about what you and I think about Apple Car.

01:46:39 ◼   ► And then for that time, it's me and you and our invited guests from the audience are now

01:46:44 ◼   ► the speakers.

01:46:46 ◼   ► Everybody else is listening and they can ask us questions that maybe you and I didn't think

01:46:50 ◼   ► about and we can answer them.

01:46:53 ◼   ► And then after we talk about it, pick somebody else who has their hand up.

01:46:56 ◼   ► There's like a hand raise feature.

01:46:58 ◼   ► Now that to me is, ooh, that's new.

01:47:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:47:03 ◼   ► No, I agree.

01:47:04 ◼   ► I actually, I totally agree with your three categories.

01:47:08 ◼   ► And my experience, especially early on, was mostly with that third category.

01:47:12 ◼   ► And I agree with you.

01:47:13 ◼   ► I think that's the power because I think that the first two, the first one especially, I

01:47:16 ◼   ► don't really see a whole lot there.

01:47:20 ◼   ► I think at that point, your audio twitch, right?

01:47:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:47:24 ◼   ► Like, I don't know if the platform really lends itself to anything.

01:47:26 ◼   ► I think the second one is interesting and it can be fun.

01:47:29 ◼   ► And I'm somebody who is an extrovert and doesn't mind talking to new people, but it can still

01:47:33 ◼   ► be one of those things where it's going to be kind of dependent on what people you can

01:47:39 ◼   ► gather together.

01:47:41 ◼   ► I don't remember party lines, but I think that that was like a thing.

01:47:45 ◼   ► That's kind of what that seems like, right?

01:47:47 ◼   ► I remember they existed, but it was also, again, I don't even think I considered myself

01:47:51 ◼   ► an introvert at the time.

01:47:53 ◼   ► I think when I was younger, I attributed introvert to shy.

01:47:57 ◼   ► And I'm not shy, obviously.

01:47:58 ◼   ► Right.

01:47:59 ◼   ► I do a podcast, but I do find it exhausting to talk to new people.

01:48:03 ◼   ► I just...

01:48:04 ◼   ► Well, it can be.

01:48:05 ◼   ► Totally.

01:48:06 ◼   ► Whereas I think the third thing, and this is what I think is powerful, is A, as you

01:48:10 ◼   ► said, the fact that you can bring in other people, but also you add this element.

01:48:14 ◼   ► Because I do think the ephemerality is key to this.

01:48:16 ◼   ► I think the fact that you can't listen again, you have to be tuned in live, you have to

01:48:20 ◼   ► be participating, does add something to the experience.

01:48:24 ◼   ► And not only can you bring in listeners, but say we were talking about Apple Car and like

01:48:28 ◼   ► this would never happen.

01:48:29 ◼   ► But like, let's just say, and then some listener came in and it turns out like it was Bob Mansfield.

01:48:35 ◼   ► And Bob Mansfield is a listener and now we can bring him in and he can talk and he can

01:48:39 ◼   ► tell us all the ways that we're wrong.

01:48:42 ◼   ► And that specific example won't happen.

01:48:45 ◼   ► But there have been examples and there have been rooms I've been in, especially like when

01:48:48 ◼   ► it was first kind of starting, you know, like in April or so when I was on it a lot more,

01:48:54 ◼   ► ironically, you know, when there were fewer people on it, where you would see those sorts

01:48:58 ◼   ► of situations happen.

01:48:59 ◼   ► And I've seen that happen time and time again, where you have people who are brought in who

01:49:06 ◼   ► might have a different perspective.

01:49:07 ◼   ► Or again, this is where I get into like the celebrity angle where you have somebody who

01:49:10 ◼   ► like has something to add to it that's really interesting context, who you might even be

01:49:15 ◼   ► talking about or might even be talking around and they can share actual insights and give

01:49:20 ◼   ► actual information in a way that you wouldn't be able to get through a show, right?

01:49:27 ◼   ► Because that's scripted and that's planned and that has like a performative and kind

01:49:31 ◼   ► of PR field to do it.

01:49:32 ◼   ► And that you're not going to get with just a random chat of strangers, but instead you're

01:49:37 ◼   ► having a conversation around a certain topic with a certain set of people and you all of

01:49:43 ◼   ► a sudden have somebody in your audience who's really interesting that you would really love

01:49:46 ◼   ► to hear from and you can pull them up.

01:49:48 ◼   ► And I can't think of any other place where we would have that way to have kind of that

01:49:52 ◼   ► that two way dialogue where you could bring somebody in.

01:49:54 ◼   ► And I do feel like that has a ton of potential.

01:49:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:49:58 ◼   ► And it seems like if it, like I said, like let's just say it's me and you, we're doing

01:50:01 ◼   ► a panel discussion on Apple car conjecture and people can just jump in and we see who

01:50:09 ◼   ► has their hand up.

01:50:10 ◼   ► And if you recognize, holy shit, it's Bob Mansfield or, you know, or, or, you know,

01:50:15 ◼   ► somebody else who you just know has car experience, you know, you know, it's the, the CEO of Volkswagen,

01:50:20 ◼   ► you know?

01:50:21 ◼   ► Yep.

01:50:22 ◼   ► Well, you know, of course you're, you know, you're going to jump that person to the front

01:50:26 ◼   ► to see, you know, what's their question and get their, their feedback.

01:50:31 ◼   ► And yeah, that happens.

01:50:32 ◼   ► And my thinking about this is I, and I've, you know, I've sort of gotten away from speaking

01:50:37 ◼   ► at conferences again, COVID aside.

01:50:42 ◼   ► Just because I find it to be a huge time sink and I just have sort of reevaluated whether

01:50:47 ◼   ► it's, you know, I'm not going to say I'm never going to do it again.

01:50:50 ◼   ► I probably will.

01:50:51 ◼   ► And if anything, post COVID, it's like, oh my God, let me do everything I haven't done

01:50:55 ◼   ► in the last couple of years.

01:50:57 ◼   ► Like but I've, you know, back when I used to go to South by Southwest, I did panel discussions

01:51:03 ◼   ► and I always felt like it was a bit of a cheat, you know, cause it's so much like you don't

01:51:08 ◼   ► do any preparation.

01:51:09 ◼   ► You just, you know, pick a topic.

01:51:10 ◼   ► You show up and you try to entertain people.

01:51:14 ◼   ► And hopefully I always thought I'm better at it maybe than some people because I don't

01:51:19 ◼   ► phone it in.

01:51:20 ◼   ► I'm every moment I've ever been on a panel in front of an audience, no matter how small,

01:51:25 ◼   ► like maybe it was 30 people.

01:51:26 ◼   ► Cause it was the first time I was at South by Southwest, but I was desperately aware.

01:51:31 ◼   ► Like I, you know, you've paid a lot of money to come to this conference and you're giving

01:51:36 ◼   ► me an hour of your time and there's all these other panels you could have been to.