0:00:00Glenn, happy holidays. Happy holidays to you.
0:00:02Was Philadelphia an ice storm extravaganza like Seattle? No, you know what?
0:00:07We, it was cold ice cold. I mean, really. I mean, and again,
0:00:11I don't even want to complain cause I know the temperature. Yeah. Uh,
0:00:15basically I don't want to complain. It got really cold,
0:00:18but we avoided all of the precipitation or, you know,
0:00:22other than like a little bit of rain,
0:00:23but I didn't even have to salt our sidewalks.
0:00:25So given how much terrible precipitation, snow, ice,
0:00:29whatever has hit everybody over the last week, I don't want to complain.
0:00:34Yeah. We got, we got coded on the Friday before Christmas,
0:00:37Seattle turned into a,
0:00:39just a solid sheet of unbroken ice across the entire city.
0:00:42Like we'd been put under some kind of acrylic layer.
0:00:46And if you didn't have to go out, I was talking to,
0:00:49I had a medical appointment yesterday and I was talking to all the medical
0:00:51staff and I was like, do you have to go out? And they're like, I was,
0:00:54I was supposed to come in and I was getting the car ready.
0:00:56And then they're like, don't come in. And the doctor I had is like, well,
0:00:58I wasn't going to go in, but a patient needed me and he's from the Northeast.
0:01:02So we drove very carefully and we met at the hospital. Oh, I'm sorry.
0:01:05I saw a thing and again,
0:01:07Philadelphia does not get by far and away the worst winter weather,
0:01:12but it's, you know, we, we definitely, you know, get icy roads.
0:01:15And I saw that with the weather nationwide that like a surging
0:01:20Google trend was how to drive on icy roads.
0:01:24Don't. Yes, exactly.
0:01:27I lived in Maine for two winters, two winters in one summer,
0:01:31which is the wrong way to do it.
0:01:33And the trick is in climates that get a lot of bad weather, typically, you know,
0:01:37you know, you get the snow and it gets packed down and you drive on snow and you
0:01:40have snow tires, you have chains in your car if you need them.
0:01:42And it's the ice that gets you and people are like, well,
0:01:45if I can drive on snow, I can drive on ice. No, you can't drive on ice.
0:01:48That's don't know. No, it's like tip number one. Don't tip number two.
0:01:53Seriously. Don't tip number three, seriously leave your car where it is.
0:01:57You know, if you're worried about the battery,
0:02:00start the car up and just leave it in park for five minutes to warm it up and,
0:02:04and then just turn it off and go back inside. And number four, if you really,
0:02:08really have to go somewhere that the only secret to driving on ice is
0:02:13to go like an inch a minute. Oh, there is no,
0:02:18you don't the traction. Oh, there's,
0:02:20we have a Subaru and I noticed the first time this year it was,
0:02:23is a gift from my in-laws when they stopped driving and I was like,
0:02:26what is that X button X mode button? I don't know what this does.
0:02:29And I look it up and it's like, Oh,
0:02:31it engages every kind of mode to improve traction and low gear and all at one
0:02:36separate tire function. And I'm like, Oh, I didn't even know we,
0:02:40this it's like X mode is really like ice and bad hill mode. I'm like, okay,
0:02:46well next time we'll press the button. I guess, I don't know if you want to,
0:02:49if you want to treat and no one was hurt every time we have ice in Seattle,
0:02:53you just type in like queen and ice or something like that into,
0:02:57and that's our tallest Hill in Seattle. And there's one very steep Hill.
0:03:01That's the counterbalance Hill where they used to run a cable car and they had a
0:03:04counterbalance that's still present underneath,
0:03:07even though there's no cable cars and people, you know, we're like, well,
0:03:09it's just, it's not that bad. And then you go,
0:03:11it's like if you were curling with cars and this was happening all the time,
0:03:16all over queen Anne and people were like, Oh, Nope, they're either,
0:03:18they'd be shooting it out the window. Oh no, they, Oh,
0:03:22now it's going down and the person in the car would just slide sideways and
0:03:25bumper car. And Oh anyway, we got through it.
0:03:29Well, I hope everybody out there is all right.
0:03:31One thing that I feel certain is guaranteed given the quantity of people is
0:03:36that there's no doubt in my mind that there are numerous people who will be
0:03:41listening to this episode,
0:03:42hearing your and my voices who were hit by the Southwest airlines.
0:03:47I don't even know what to call it. Collapse fiasco.
0:03:51I'm fascinated by it because I'm always interested in the way systems break
0:03:56down. Yes.
0:04:00And I'm always interested in companies that are customer focused,
0:04:05you know, and, and I am, I am a fan. I, you know,
0:04:10I wrote about it briefly yesterday or the day before. I,
0:04:13I like Southwest airlines a lot. I don't fly them.
0:04:16I used to fly them as my primary airline and in the early days of doing daring
0:04:21fireball professionally,
0:04:23it was really the difference between me being able to afford to go to all of
0:04:29these various Apple events that I went to and not,
0:04:33it was like around the mid two thousands, 2006,
0:04:372007 that that era early days of DF,
0:04:40me doing it professionally Southwest had super low flight.
0:04:44I mean just unbelievably lower cost flights than any other airline from Philly
0:04:49to the Bay area, to Austin for South by Southwest.
0:04:53Oh yeah. And a couple other places.
0:04:55One of the things that they had done was that they had,
0:04:58it reminds me of Apple.
0:05:00Remember when Apple locked in the flash memory prices?
0:05:05It was like in the, in the iPod era. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
0:05:09And it was like everywhere they had prices that were ridiculous compared to
0:05:13everyone else cause they'd bought up all the capacity, right?
0:05:15Or a huge amount of capacity.
0:05:17It was like a maybe the move that secured Tim Cook as the future leader of the
0:05:22company.
0:05:23Oh yeah. Right. And then they kind of did it again with the iPad too when it was
0:05:26released.
0:05:27That was I think why that price differential was so huge as they had secured a
0:05:31massive amount of expense or not expensive at parts that when you buy them on
0:05:35the open market or we're much higher. Yeah. But like 15 ish years ago,
0:05:40Southwest did something similar with fuel prices where they had locked in like a
0:05:45longterm contract on jet fuel and,
0:05:49and the prices skyrocketed.
0:05:50But Southwest uniquely had locked in these low prices and for a couple of years
0:05:55it was just like night and day, many,
0:05:59many hundreds of dollars to fly coast to coast from Philly to the Bay area
0:06:03versus, you know,
0:06:04I remember getting like $129 coast to coast flights, you know,
0:06:07on Southwest and,
0:06:09and flying Southwest is not like flying what you think of as a budget airline.
0:06:14Right. It's, you know, it's different.
0:06:20They have the weird rule that throws everybody off. I think they still do it.
0:06:24It's been a while since I flew Southwest where you don't get a reserved seat and
0:06:29you sort of bored like, I don't know,
0:06:31like getting on a bus or actually Amtrak has started doing reserved seats,
0:06:36which I actually really like, but more or less, you know,
0:06:39it's like you get like a boarding group number and first on first choice of
0:06:44seats and you just sit wherever it, there's an open seat.
0:06:49And they figured out that by doing it that way,
0:06:53they actually fill the plane faster than if there are reserved seats.
0:06:57And that was the number one reason why they did it that way.
0:07:00And it throws everybody who's used to other airlines off,
0:07:03but once you get used to it, it's, it works out.
0:07:05There's often the single biggest hiccup is like, Oh, you know,
0:07:10and then the flight attendants will come on the PA system and say,
0:07:13there's like a mother and a young child. And there's only like two middle seats,
0:07:1710 rows apart that are open. Would any,
0:07:21would anybody be willing to move their seats?
0:07:24So this mother and young child can board together. Whereas, you know, and again,
0:07:28well, I'm a rotten person, Glenn. I never raised my hand,
0:07:32but I gotcha. God'll get you John. Well, but you know, it's, but you're, see,
0:07:36this is, this is that I don't think Southwest,
0:07:39some other airlines are much worse about this, right?
0:07:40In which they sort of pit our personal and are like our generous and selfless
0:07:45interests against each other and Southwest from what I've,
0:07:48I've never flown Southwest.
0:07:49They don't really service the areas that I go to from Seattle or they're not the
0:07:53best deal.
0:07:53I can always get Alaska is often our kind of airline for lower cost and certain
0:07:58routes and Alaska has nonstop to a lot of places really affordably.
0:08:01So we're really lucky in our hub,
0:08:02but Southwest doesn't seem to put everybody into like a prisoner's dilemma or a
0:08:07Hobson's choice or any of the other scenarios they, so when you get that,
0:08:11you know, Hey, could somebody move? Because we have, you know, that situation,
0:08:14that's like a minority of the time, right? It's not,
0:08:17you're not constantly feeling like you can't get your bags. Like, you know,
0:08:20I just flew to,
0:08:22my kid did a very long European trip bumming around Europe recently and I joined
0:08:26him for the last two weeks. I was in central Europe for a couple of weeks in
0:08:28November, December, and just flying these long haul, you know,
0:08:31the like two segments, they used miles both ways and they're, you know,
0:08:35you got on the plane, like it feels like there's like freight car storage above
0:08:39you. They're like, we might not have room for all the bags. I'm like, what the deal,
0:08:42you, what are you doing?
0:08:44It's like you could put several people up there and you're like, well,
0:08:47if you don't get on first, if you're not in the boarding,
0:08:48this ticket class doesn't include a carry on bag this bigger and you're not
0:08:52here. And I'm like, Oh, just, you know, you're trying to make every dollar.
0:08:56And all you're doing is making everybody, you know,
0:08:58the airlines are determined and maybe Southwest before this excluded to make
0:09:03everyone feel about them like the cable companies and telephone companies.
0:09:06And I'm like, come on, you could be, you could be better,
0:09:09but they're so eager to get it to scrape every dollar out. I don't know.
0:09:12Well, Southwest,
0:09:13so you've probably read all these great accounts from people who have airline
0:09:16system experience and it's like South.
0:09:19I thought the best description I read was Southwest. This is,
0:09:22I think the a seat you were listening to that seat 31 B it was that Southwest is
0:09:26a, is a, you know, it's national airline,
0:09:28but it likes to pretend it's kind of a regional point to point airline when it
0:09:33suits them because they want to argue that they don't have the same,
0:09:36they shouldn't be subject to the same rules as the mainline. Yeah. No airlines,
0:09:40like a United or something. And it's like, no, they really are.
0:09:43And this is when it breaks down because their system is designed on a knife's
0:09:47edge and the knife cut through it.
0:09:48Yeah, it's, it's really, I mean, and again,
0:09:51they are a customer focused airline, you know,
0:09:54and maybe by the standards of overall customer
0:09:59focused companies period,
0:10:01even the best airline in the United States is actually not that great, but, but,
0:10:07but given the state of U S air travel, Southwest,
0:10:11in my opinion is an excellent company, but it, it, it's like a,
0:10:15I don't know,
0:10:16some kind of worst case scenario where everything that could go wrong for
0:10:20Southwest went wrong and they had a crew
0:10:25at certain airports stranded who couldn't get to where they needed to go
0:10:30and get into an airport hotel. Right.
0:10:32Cause Southwest doesn't have other arrangements with hotels.
0:10:34They couldn't get them rested in time to redeploy them. Right. And you know,
0:10:38for, for good reason, you know, there are,
0:10:40are rules about how much rest, you know, airline staff, you know,
0:10:45pilots and flight attendants need, you know, before they can work.
0:10:48And they had planes at other airports, you know, but, but no crew.
0:10:53So they had planes at certain airports, crew at other airports,
0:10:56and no way to catch up, which is just so strange.
0:11:01It doesn't think like something that could happen, but it did. And to me,
0:11:06the most telling fact was that yesterday, Wednesday,
0:11:1199% of all canceled flights in America were Southwest flights.
0:11:16Yup. And they're still at 50% when we record this.
0:11:20And they're about, they claim on December 30th,
0:11:22there'll be back to essentially full operation, you know,
0:11:26unless some of the post-it notes fall off the wall where they've been tracking
0:11:29flights. Right. And it's, you know, and it's one of those things where I,
0:11:33I always remember this phrase, I forget who I learned it from,
0:11:35but better necessarily implies different, right?
0:11:40That to be better, you have to be different. And it's,
0:11:45it's such a good phrase to keep in mind because human nature is to
0:11:49eschew differences, right?
0:11:51We tend as humans to
0:11:55avoid things that are weird or different. And, you know,
0:11:59we could go on and on about how that sort of was the,
0:12:02the problem Apple faced with the Mac for decades, right? Was that, ah,
0:12:07the Mac is too different and it, it was different and that's what made it better.
0:12:12But people are like, ah, I don't want something that I'm not used to.
0:12:15And Southwest is sort of like that for an airline where it's like, ah,
0:12:19it's weird. You don't get a reserved seat.
0:12:22They don't participate in any of these cross airline things where,
0:12:26where like worst case scenario,
0:12:28you're flying United and something bad happens and they don't have
0:12:33airplanes.
0:12:34It's like United can somehow work something out with American and maybe stick
0:12:38you on an American flight. If there's like an empty seat,
0:12:42and you don't even have to pay. And because they have some kind of,
0:12:45I don't know what they call it, like a partner.
0:12:47I learned the term it's called an interline agreement. I just,
0:12:50now you learn something new when things belt down.
0:12:52There you go. Interline agreement. Southwest has no interline agreements.
0:12:57And you know,
0:13:00in some ways that served them well over the decades because it's made them
0:13:04different. But then something like this happens and they're like,
0:13:07and they're telling these poor customers and I'm again,
0:13:11again, I'm sure that some of them are out there listening to us talk about it.
0:13:14And, and my,
0:13:15to me,
0:13:16I am not phobic in the least bit about airplane crashes because I
0:13:21truly, I, for whatever reason,
0:13:24the way my brain works,
0:13:26I've completely internalized the statistical
0:13:31truth that the safest way to get from point a to point B is in an
0:13:35airplane. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not worried about that. To me,
0:13:39my phobia whenever I travel air travel is exactly what happened
0:13:44to people trying to travel on Southwest this week,
0:13:47which is you get to the airport, you go through security,
0:13:51and now you're on the other end of security and flights start getting canceled.
0:13:55And there's a six hour line, literally six,
0:13:59six hour line to talk to somebody at the desk. And what,
0:14:04what do you do?
0:14:04You're waiting. Yeah. You're stuck. You know,
0:14:06I'll tell you my worst airplane thing.
0:14:08And this happened to me once is although not as bad as some of the incidents you
0:14:11heard a few years ago is when they put you on the plane,
0:14:14they take you out and then they're like,
0:14:15we're delayed and you're on the plane for hours. Then they're like,
0:14:18you know, you can't get up and use the bathroom. They're like, all right,
0:14:20we're going to let you use the bathroom. They're like, okay,
0:14:21all the bathrooms are now closed and you're like, and, and we can't, oh,
0:14:25and there's no gate for us to go back to. Right. Like some kind of,
0:14:27and then that happened.
0:14:28There were a few planes that happened to a few years ago and that that's when
0:14:31the department of transportation pushed out a bunch of new, like it was,
0:14:34it took that impetus to put out new rules and penalties and, and things. I,
0:14:38I also expect what Southwest has been doing, I think along the way, like, you know,
0:14:42despite this meltdown, you and I know, and I think all the listeners know,
0:14:46unlike some organizations and companies,
0:14:48nothing they're doing here is malicious or in the interest of making more money.
0:14:52In fact, they would be delighted to not be in this situation.
0:14:54There's nothing good about this for them and they didn't do it intentionally.
0:14:58Although they put out some nasty note to their workers a few days ago that may
0:15:02have had an impact where they're like, people are taking too much,
0:15:04too many fake days off or something. And that, you know, soured the pot,
0:15:08I think for what's coming on. But, but that said,
0:15:11every statement they've made is like, they literally put on their website,
0:15:15this is unacceptable or this is, you know, they, in their public statements,
0:15:19they've said, what we're doing is wrong and bad. And I'm like, all right,
0:15:21well that is kind of disarming. And they've told everyone who's asked,
0:15:24we're going to pay you back.
0:15:26And so it doesn't help when you had to spend 48 hours in an airport and miss
0:15:29Christmas. The money doesn't help, but you're not going to be monitored.
0:15:32If you had a book, an airline, like some people are like,
0:15:34I had to spend a thousand dollars to rebook on United.
0:15:36We rented a car and we spent $700 and we drove and we had to put it air,
0:15:40whatever.
0:15:40And Southwest so far has been saying we're going to pay you back for all the
0:15:44expense you incurred. I just gonna have to send a lot of receipts.
0:15:47So it's a hassle, but they're not like, well, this isn't our problem.
0:15:50The historic thing and ice, blah, blah. They're not trying to play that game.
0:15:53And if they do this well, I mean, some people are complaining already.
0:15:57They're having trouble with refunds cause the airport plane airlines still
0:15:59melted down. But if they do this well,
0:16:01they come out of it and they put it cause they're going to have to push out like
0:16:05all their flyers. They're gonna have to push out vouchers to everybody.
0:16:07They're going to have to pay them back. They're going to have to have fair sales.
0:16:11It's going to take them years to reestablish and they're all gonna have to
0:16:14promise like we're going to rebuild our system, you know,
0:16:16and rebuild relationships with all of their employees who have been all abused
0:16:20in different ways.
0:16:21And all the gate agents who've been screamed at by people have been stuck in
0:16:25airports for 48 hours. There's no excuse for doing it.
0:16:27Cause not the gate agents problem,
0:16:28but people are going to do it cause they lost it there. They haven't slept.
0:16:32So anyway, there's years of rebuilding, but so far I'm like,
0:16:35I can't think of another company that has been as objectively like, yeah,
0:16:39this is our fault at Southwest when something during the meltdown part,
0:16:43not during the face saving part later.
0:16:45Yeah. Yeah. I think they're doing an okay job with the crisis management,
0:16:49you know, and, and you know,
0:16:51thankfully nobody has actually gotten hurt because of this. So,
0:16:54so maybe it's not the best analogy,
0:16:56but of course the gold standard is the Tylenol recall back in the
0:17:01eighties where there was what, what was the, as I recall the, the basic,
0:17:05it really was true. What it was like some, some lunatic never caught,
0:17:10right? Never, never. I forgot that part. I was looking it up recently. Yep.
0:17:13They like injected cyanide into some tablets or replaced some tablets with
0:17:18cyanide, but it was like a handful at a handful of stores, right?
0:17:22It was very limited. They absolutely knew the serial numbers or whatever,
0:17:27you know, whatever the numbers were.
0:17:29And it was a certain tablet from a certain factory and then they,
0:17:32they could have just recalled just, just the laced packages.
0:17:37And instead their CEO at the time was like, Nope,
0:17:40let's every single thing with the name Tylenol in it,
0:17:44whether it's cough syrup or, or tablets or whatever, if it says Tylenol,
0:17:49everything comes off the shelves, everything gets destroyed.
0:17:51And we'll start over from scratch and guarantee that this will never happen
0:17:56again. And that's when they rolled out the tamper proof caps too,
0:17:59or the flute seal. That was part of that operation. I think as they retooled,
0:18:03they took months, I think there was no Tylenol.
0:18:06You can only get generic or whatever on the market. And then they, right.
0:18:09But there was, there was, there was speculation when it first happened. And,
0:18:14you know, and that, you know, it really wasn't, it wasn't like an urban legend.
0:18:17There really were a limited small number of Tylenol packages that had cyanide
0:18:22from a lunatic.
0:18:23And there was a lot of speculation that this would be the end of the brand,
0:18:26that they would have to shut down. Nobody's ever going to buy it again.
0:18:29And instead because they reacted so strongly and so
0:18:34everything to put everybody's mind at ease by, by literally taking everything,
0:18:39whether they knew that it couldn't possibly have been involved with the same guy
0:18:43or not everything off the shelves, like within six months,
0:18:46their brand trust numbers were actually higher than before the incident,
0:18:51which is crazy. I don't know that that's going to happen with Southwest.
0:18:54Honestly, I, I, this is going to take to me,
0:18:57this is going to take some time because if you do the math and I did the math and
0:19:02I was like, just the back of the envelope math, I was like, wait,
0:19:04that's too many people that can't be right. But Southwest,
0:19:08part of their gimmick or,
0:19:10or their operational excellence is that they only fly one type of airplane
0:19:14Boeing 737.
0:19:15Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it much simpler for, right.
0:19:18That's one of their things. If you don't like that plane, don't.
0:19:20Yeah. Yeah. If you don't like a Boeing. Yeah.
0:19:23And they have slightly different seating arrangements where there's like always
0:19:27the it's, they, they don't have first class or business class,
0:19:31but what they have are very generously spaced exit rows,
0:19:35which is, you know, if you fly Southwest, that's like,
0:19:37that's like the in demand seats,
0:19:40including one on every plane that doesn't have a front,
0:19:44a seat in front of it. So you can really stretch your legs out.
0:19:46There's like one seat with no, no seat in front of it in the exit row.
0:19:50Sometimes it's on the left, sometimes it's on the right,
0:19:53but it has all of their planes are Boeing 737.
0:19:56So like the engine parts are all interchangeable and
0:20:01the, the number of seats is identical.
0:20:04So any Southwest flight can fly any, any,
0:20:08any Southwest plane can stop, can fly any Southwest flight.
0:20:12And it's part of their general operational excellence where they,
0:20:17you know,
0:20:17tend to lead the industry and on-time departures and arrivals and stuff like
0:20:21that. I forget where I was going with it.
0:20:23It's the homogenization of the right, right.
0:20:26There's where I was going with it is that I,
0:20:31I think that people are going to be a little bit slower to forgive
0:20:36the people who were affected. Cause if you do the back,
0:20:39the back of the envelope math,
0:20:40which is where I was going is there's 143 seats on a Southwest flight. Oh,
0:20:44I see. Okay. And they tend to fly.
0:20:47They also tend to lead the industry in how full their planes are,
0:20:51which is how they're so efficient. So 2000 and they, this week,
0:20:56they've averaged more than 2000 canceled flights a day. Cancel not. Oh,
0:21:00I see. Yeah. Yeah. So you were talking,
0:21:02do the math 2000 times 140 is like 330,000.
0:21:07So 330,000 passengers a day with canceled flights for like,
0:21:12I really thought about the numbers.
0:21:13So a million plus people this week or a million passengers easily. It's easily,
0:21:17it's easy to, yeah.
0:21:19Easy to figure out that there's a million people and there just isn't that much
0:21:23surplus.
0:21:24Even if you can squeeze people onto United and American and Alaska and whatever
0:21:29other airlines, there's just no way to,
0:21:30there's no way to put a million people on onto otherwise booked planes. So I,
0:21:35I think it's going to be a while before Southwest recovers, but you know,
0:21:39I wouldn't bet against them because I do think that fundamentally it's a company
0:21:43that is customer focused. So we shall see.
0:21:46It's it's fun to fly different airlines because you get to see,
0:21:50get to see how they perform. And I flew Lufthansa. This is again, under my,
0:21:54you know, United partners. So I used to use miles and I got the, you know,
0:21:57the coach Lufthansa experience is honestly better than most, you know,
0:22:02it's, it's not quite business class, but it's, it ain't too shabby for their
0:22:06long haul flights. So it was kind of funny. I was like, Oh yeah, that's right.
0:22:10You can run a really profitable airline that, that is,
0:22:13it's really sharp in the air too. So I don't know. It's, I think, you know,
0:22:17actually there's,
0:22:18I think there's the biggest change that I think in airlines is that the new
0:22:22seats are so thin compared to those old bulky ones.
0:22:25And I think they're generally more comfortable too.
0:22:27And they didn't give us all the room back in, you know, in knee space.
0:22:31But I think I feel like the newest planes,
0:22:34even in the worst coast sections are more comfortable than some of the better
0:22:38planes in the, you know, 20, 30 years ago. I don't know. I don't,
0:22:41maybe it's just me. I really,
0:22:42my behind falls asleep and my back goes wonky on longer flights.
0:22:47And I managed to get through, you know,
0:22:48like 14 hours in one direction and 12 and the other pretty with two segments.
0:22:52So, yeah, I, I know I agree with that. I think when you,
0:22:55when you first board a plane and you, you sort of look around and,
0:22:59and you can quickly discern, was this plane recently renovated?
0:23:03Or is it, are these seats like 30 years old?
0:23:06A new plane definitely is more comfortable. No, there's something,
0:23:09there's something to the, the seat technology that they've, you know, they've,
0:23:13they, you know, they, they, they squeeze every inch out of the leg space,
0:23:18but by making the seat a little thinner,
0:23:21they kind of gain back an inch or two and an inch.
0:23:24Cause you gotta be a certain depth, right?
0:23:26You're always going to have to be back in the seat a little bit.
0:23:28So I can like cross my legs and coach and I flew my first 737 Max's on a
0:23:33trip to Ohio in October. And I was like, huh, it's like 737 Max. Like, well,
0:23:38they've been flying enough of them long enough. I'm not going to worry about it.
0:23:40It was still like, all right, first time out on one of these is the planes are fine.
0:23:44It didn't, I didn't have any, any worries,
0:23:46but it was just kind of funny to suddenly be like, Oh yeah,
0:23:48that was that thing, wasn't it? Before the pandemic. Yeah.
0:23:52That was the thing everybody was talking about. Oh, geez. All right. Anyway,
0:23:55let me take a break here.
0:23:56Thank our first sponsors are good friends at Linode go to L I N O D E.com/the
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0:26:13Linode.com/the talk show a little bit of news.
0:26:18It's surprising to me a little bit how news Apple newsy December has been.
0:26:23Usually it's pretty quiet, but two pieces that sort of seem related to me,
0:26:28related to Apple Silicon, for lack of a better catch all term.
0:26:33Mark Gurman had an excellent report in the,
0:26:37at Bloomberg on the Mac Pro, which is the obvious,
0:26:42we all know this, this isn't speculation or rumor.
0:26:45When Apple announced the move to Apple Silicon at WWDC
0:26:502020,
0:26:51Tim Cook said that this transition will be complete by the end of 2022.
0:26:56And it turns out it's not because of one, one Mac,
0:27:02the Mac Pro, which is the only one that is still only on Intel.
0:27:05It's part of the backstory is this spring
0:27:10when Apple unveiled the Mac studio, which is a new form factor.
0:27:15I think one of the big stories of 2022,
0:27:17cause it's a form factor that Mac Pro Mac users
0:27:22have been dreaming about for, I think literally decades,
0:27:27you know, certainly since the G4 Cube,
0:27:29which was the last sort of attempt at a sort of
0:27:34small form factor, bigger than a mini,
0:27:38but pro spec features Mac when they unveiled it,
0:27:43John Ternus in their pre filmed event said this, you know, you know,
0:27:47we've got one more Mac to go, the Mac Pro, he even mentioned it,
0:27:51that, you know, the Mac Pro is still coming this, you know,
0:27:55more or less, I think to emphasize that
0:27:58however well spec the Mac studio is, and it is very well specced.
0:28:05It is not the Mac Pro on Apple Silicon.
0:28:08And I think that if Ternus hadn't said that in their event,
0:28:12a reasonable conclusion for everybody outside Apple would be, Oh,
0:28:17maybe the Mac Pro brand is dead. And in the Apple Silicon era,
0:28:21the Mac studio is the Mac Pro.
0:28:23This is the beefiest Mac desktop you're going to be able to buy.
0:28:28So deal with it. Let's, you know, let's treat it that way. But they didn't,
0:28:33they came out and said the Mac Pro is still coming. And the Gurman report,
0:28:37I don't know how best to summarize it,
0:28:39but basically is that they ran into that.
0:28:44They had planned to have an M one based something, something, you know,
0:28:48like something like a double M one ultra,
0:28:52like two ultras attached together.
0:28:55And that would be the foundation of the Mac Pro and it didn't happen.
0:28:59And now who knows?
0:29:01Although it makes, I mean, it made sense. I would have been shocked.
0:29:05It would have, well,
0:29:06it would have been interesting cause I would have been shocked if they'd release
0:29:09an M one based Mac Pro because we all knew an M, you know,
0:29:12we all knew there's another number coming right.
0:29:15And we know that another number is going to represent an evolution of, you know,
0:29:18what they learned in the first one. And it's well as you know,
0:29:22as you've discussed many times,
0:29:23I think you were one of the best people writing about technology who talks about
0:29:28lead time because everybody who reports in the space is always like, well,
0:29:32Apple made a sudden change. And you're like, look,
0:29:33let's back that out to eight months ago when they had a design it, test it and,
0:29:38or whatever, or sometimes 14 months or two years.
0:29:40So the M two was well underway when the M one shipped,
0:29:44like it was deeply figuring out, you know,
0:29:46from the early stages of M one production. So, you know,
0:29:49you're in that standpoint,
0:29:50you're a product manager or Tim cook or whatever level the company,
0:29:52these kinds of decisions are being talked about to percolate up.
0:29:56And I would imagine you'd be hard pressed to say, well,
0:29:58let's just do an M one version cause we could do it. Be like, we said two years,
0:30:01we got some leeway. The M two is, you know,
0:30:04X percent more efficient on that and this, we figured out this other problem.
0:30:07Let's, we need the double M two ultra or whatever we're going to do.
0:30:10That's going to be the pro chip and everybody like, Oh, okay, we'll get,
0:30:14you know, the studio will ship that's on the horizon.
0:30:17That's going to fill a certain amount of demand and we're going to kind of prime
0:30:20the pump and we're going to, and unlike Apple's usual moves,
0:30:23we're going to tell people at the event. Right. And so it,
0:30:26I think it all makes logical sense except that they could not apparently produce
0:30:29the M two they wanted to. Right. That seems like, I mean,
0:30:32it seems like fundamentally there was an issue with, with production,
0:30:36like actually getting it into manufacturing, into the fab.
0:30:40The M here's I'm quoting from Gurman's report.
0:30:43The M two ultra chip is destined to have some serious specifications for
0:30:46professional users, including up to 24 CPU cores,
0:30:4976 graphic cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192
0:30:54gigabytes of memory. All right. I'm going to stop there and just say, that's,
0:30:59that's a lot of Ram, but,
0:31:03but with the current Mac pro, the,
0:31:06the last Intel based Mac pro it's a terabyte of memory,
0:31:11I believe. Yeah, it was a huge, right. Cause they were very careful about that.
0:31:14Right. Right. Speaking of that after the lawsuit. So if you,
0:31:18but they claim and the M series is supposed to be so much more memory efficient
0:31:23though, I mean, I think that's part of the argument, right?
0:31:24Well, I don't know it, but it is a weird downgrade, right? It's, it's, you know,
0:31:30literally like one fifth of the Ram at the maximum end.
0:31:34And I realize there are very few people who have memory needs like
0:31:39that, but if you really do need that much memory, you need the memory, right?
0:31:43There are some people in scientific computing and who are doing certain things
0:31:47who are memory constrained at a terabyte, right? You know,
0:31:51at the extreme end, you're always going to find outliers like that.
0:31:55And if you're already happy to have a terabyte,
0:31:59if you wish you could have more than a terabyte maxing out at 192 gigabytes is
0:32:04a serious downgrade,
0:32:05no matter how efficient apple silicon is overall versus the Intel platform.
0:32:10All right. Continuing from Gurman's report, which is the,
0:32:14the M two ultra would be the equivalent of the high end chip.
0:32:18That's currently in the the Mac studio, right?
0:32:21What he's calling in again,
0:32:23he's not saying that this would be the marketing name,
0:32:26but maybe it would be the M two extreme would be two M two ultra is put
0:32:30together in the way that the M one ultra is two M one maxes put
0:32:35together. Right? So M one ultra is two M one maxes.
0:32:40Gurman is saying that their original plan was to have an M something extreme,
0:32:45which would be two M whatever ultras,
0:32:48the M two extreme would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores,
0:32:53152 graphics cores. But here's the bad news. The company is likely likely,
0:32:58that's a very key likely scrapped that higher end configuration,
0:33:03which may disappoint apple's most demanding users, blah, blah, blah.
0:33:06There's a thing hidden in here too is all of the M excuse me,
0:33:11all the M one chips to date have only on like a sock like system on
0:33:16a chip memory. Right? Right. So this,
0:33:18to get 192 gigabytes even you would have to,
0:33:21you they can put that on the same die. That's going to be external memory.
0:33:24So conceivably some higher end ones, if those shipped, those would have,
0:33:29you know, so it's, I'm right there, right? Is that that would all have to,
0:33:32there'd have to be some amount of external memory or not. Maybe with 192,
0:33:36maybe not. But it feels like you start to get, are they,
0:33:39they're still in the four nanometer process size. So how big would a die?
0:33:43I'm already thinking how big the die is with 24 CPU is to 76 graphic cores.
0:33:48You know, you start to get, I don't know. I mean there are limits, right?
0:33:51There's limits and yield issues and manufacturer issues.
0:33:54And I wonder if that's not like I'm an expert in this topic.
0:33:57I've studied it in part, but I'm not a chip maker. But I know there are,
0:34:00that's where they start to get into problem areas if they can achieve the right
0:34:04yield.
0:34:05And we saw a little bit of that with the M one and M two where some of their low
0:34:08end chips that don't achieve the, the,
0:34:10the testing get sold as the seven CPU or, or other GPU and so forth.
0:34:15So they're, they already approached that with some, you know,
0:34:18some end of what they're doing.
0:34:19Yeah. To me, it's one of the most exciting,
0:34:22even though I'm definitely not going to buy one, I have no,
0:34:24no reason to get a Mac pro. I don't even need the Mac studio.
0:34:28I'm very happy with my maxed out,
0:34:30no pun intended and one Mac book pro as my one and only main Mac.
0:34:37But as an observer, I'm super,
0:34:40super excited to see what the Mac pro story is.
0:34:44It's gotta be coming in 2023. And I don't know, maybe I,
0:34:49this, this is not informed speculation at all.
0:34:52No little birdies have told me this,
0:34:54but I've just had it in my head that for the given the Mac studio,
0:34:58once we saw the Mac studio and how beefed up it was,
0:35:01but the Mac studio is still based on the idea
0:35:06that whatever it is you order, it's all soldered onto the board.
0:35:11So if you know, however much Ram you want to get,
0:35:14you have to order it when you order your Mac studio.
0:35:17So my thinking is that, well, what if, is there a way,
0:35:22is that feasible that they could do a Mac pro that has a
0:35:27bigger chassis so that it's expandable and friendly to an
0:35:32enthusiast, you know, like,
0:35:33like Mac pros over the years typically have been where you can open it up.
0:35:37And this would be the one and only Mac that in addition to having
0:35:43X amount of Ram soldered onto the systems on a
0:35:48chip and to get that unified memory performance
0:35:53advantage where the same Ram is used by the graphics system as is used by the
0:35:58CPU system.
0:35:59But what if there was also another area where you could just put
0:36:04regular Ram chips in?
0:36:06So if you,
0:36:07what you really want to do is just max out the Ram and you
0:36:11don't really need massive amounts of parallel CPU or GPU
0:36:16processing,
0:36:17it's really just Ram that you just want to put all this in Ram that they could
0:36:22have the, the main Ram,
0:36:24which is the Ram that's on the unified memory architecture that is soldered onto
0:36:28the boards.
0:36:29But then there's another level of Ram that's expandable and it would only be
0:36:33used in cases where you're doing a computational
0:36:38task that literally takes hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of Ram,
0:36:42if it's available.
0:36:44And that secondary Ram wouldn't perform quite as well as the
0:36:49unified memory,
0:36:50but it's better than not having the Ram at all, right?
0:36:55It's sort of like treating the unified memory that's on
0:37:00the systems on a chip as sort of like a cash, you know,
0:37:04like in CPU terms and the, the rest of the Ram,
0:37:08if you add it is just there. I don't know.
0:37:11I don't know if that's feasible or not, but it sounds to me like,
0:37:15what is the point of still having the Mac pro if it's not expandable? If,
0:37:19if this one product is not expandable in that way,
0:37:23even if no other Mac hardware has user expandable memory.
0:37:28Well, and yeah, and I mean, even from the storage standpoint, you know,
0:37:32Apple became allergic to slots. They like, they like jacks, not slot.
0:37:36And which is an int, which I'm sorry, it sounds obscene way of saying,
0:37:40but the, which is weird because in a,
0:37:43in a Thunderbolt world and a PCI-E world and a got it a word like
0:37:47M2 connectors for SSD world or so running
0:37:52over NVME trying to get all my acronyms in there in that world.
0:37:57The difference between a port and a slot aren't the same as they used to be,
0:38:02but because it used to be slots were faster and ports were slower, more or less,
0:38:06right? Not uniformly, but it's kind of the thing you want to direct memory access.
0:38:09You had to go to a slot inside something that you did a wide, you know,
0:38:13multi pin card that went in for maximum parallel pin access at once for these
0:38:18wide data paths. So that's kind of one area that is sort of funny.
0:38:22And the other is that, you know, Apple's obsession with the sock,
0:38:25I understand it because they brought, you know,
0:38:27it reduces your cost of manufacture enormously, reduces the failure rate.
0:38:31Like there's incredible it's savings.
0:38:34And it's also as a user standpoint thing like this issue keeps coming up.
0:38:37This is a little sidebar,
0:38:38but I think it's relevant to the whole is I get email regularly at the Mac 911
0:38:42email at Mac world about people with questions about like booting off external
0:38:46drives with external volumes with an M1 or M2. And I have to remind people,
0:38:50I'm like, remember if your internal drive dies on an M1 or M2,
0:38:55your machine will not work.
0:38:56There's no way because of policy management issues and it's part of the
0:38:59security features. This is still, I think,
0:39:01relatively less known because SSDs are generally very reliable.
0:39:06Apple, you know,
0:39:07typically buys the most reliable ones and they do burn in and all the rest.
0:39:11So it's very, very unlikely now between the sock and the SSD,
0:39:16the odds of getting a Mac that dies,
0:39:17like I would love to know the hard failure rate in like three months and a year
0:39:21on max now that aren't like a power supply issue. I've got to believe it's very,
0:39:25very low. And it's also Apple doesn't have to source out memory, right?
0:39:29It's got all these advantages. They're doing it in the dye and it's all great,
0:39:33but it does seem to be, you know, that they kind of contracted into that.
0:39:37And I feel like there's this great opportunity though,
0:39:40cause there's still a lot of work being done in slot based products.
0:39:43And there was a big movement at one point, which I think has died about the eGPU,
0:39:47you know, that was a port based thing. But there's, I don't know,
0:39:49I may maybe we're evolved past that.
0:39:52Maybe you don't need external or you know,
0:39:54slot based graphics cards or slot based memory anymore.
0:39:58But I think your argument is good.
0:39:59I don't see how Apple would put a terabyte on a die.
0:40:01I was misspeaking a little bit here though.
0:40:03192 gigabyte Ram on an Apple M whatever chip is not that ridiculous cause they're
0:40:08putting 128 gigs on some on the M one ultra.
0:40:14You can configure it to 128 gigs so they can do that today.
0:40:18So 192 is not, you know, bizarre, but I think you're right. I mean,
0:40:22there is a point which you can't get up to a terabyte or two terabyte for memory
0:40:26bound issues. But, and I also think it's a correct too,
0:40:29is there's going to be memory intent or sorry, yeah,
0:40:31memory intensive applications and drive intensive applications.
0:40:35And some of those will be CPU bound and some won't be the same way.
0:40:39The CPU won't be waiting for memory or it's the delay is,
0:40:43is not as a big a deal as being able to have all the adjustable memory available.
0:40:47So it feels like there's a space for that.
0:40:50How many people do you think need a Mac pro in the world now with them in the
0:40:55Mac studio, you know, in with that out in the market,
0:40:59I felt like that really shaved the edge off a lot of potential Mac pro buyers
0:41:04into fairly high end applications.
0:41:06But these are also going to be incredibly lucrative, you know, high, high dollar,
0:41:11high margin machines. So Apple has a motivation to do it.
0:41:14I, you know, that's a good question. And I do think, you know,
0:41:16listening to various other podcasts where people talk about it and you know, I,
0:41:20I, it comes up all the time is why does Apple even bother? Right?
0:41:25Maybe, maybe there won't be a Mac pro or maybe the Mac pro will just be the Mac
0:41:29studio in a bigger chassis and you get it just for putting additional
0:41:34internal SSDs inside. You know,
0:41:36I wouldn't be shocked if that's what happens, but I don't think so.
0:41:41And I think the reason why isn't that it makes business sense that there are so
0:41:45many people who need something above and beyond the Mac studio,
0:41:49that it really makes great business sense in and of itself.
0:41:53But I think it's similar. And I, I know I've made this analogy before,
0:41:58but it's sort of like why car car makers get into formula one,
0:42:03right? Why do Mercedes and Porsche and Honda and companies like that fund
0:42:09formula one racing teams and build this technology because it,
0:42:14there's a trickle down effect where pressing being at the
0:42:19forefront of what is
0:42:21theoretically possible today in raw compute power is
0:42:28not a bad advantage to have for
0:42:32what will trickle down to literally to iPhones three, four years from now.
0:42:38Right. And, and I think that's been true for car makers, right? And it's not,
0:42:43and the advantage,
0:42:44the difference is with car makers getting into like making F1
0:42:49race cars, it's just for the sport of it ultimately, right?
0:42:53You're just making it.
0:42:54Whereas making the equivalent of an F1 race car
0:42:59desktop computer is actually practical for the
0:43:04handful of top tier compute users. You know,
0:43:08whether you're doing special effects for major motion pictures at
0:43:138k resolution or scientific simulations for, you know,
0:43:17to go back to the Southwest thing,
0:43:19you're an airplane engineer Boeing,
0:43:21and you're running complex aerospace engineering simulations on a new
0:43:26wing design for an airplane. And,
0:43:28and you need as much CPU as much parallelism,
0:43:33as much Ram as the fastest IO possible, you can't get enough.
0:43:38You know, you're, you're nowhere near, you're,
0:43:40you're still waiting for the computer for whatever it is that you do.
0:43:44I think that there is an advantage to Apple being in that game
0:43:49and being there that will trickle down a handful of years down
0:43:54the road to the mass market products that truly fund
0:43:59the company. I really do believe that that's true.
0:44:02And I think they believe it.
0:44:03And I also think Apple itself has many,
0:44:07many people who need that sort of computer.
0:44:10Yeah. I think you bring up a superb,
0:44:14like other end of the telescope thing too, is the M1,
0:44:17the initial M1 chip is the most powerful thing Apple made the wrong way up,
0:44:21right? Like they released the lowest end possible chip in this series,
0:44:26but it was such an outperforming chip.
0:44:28And usually Apple is trickling down technology. They've,
0:44:32they've developed for more sophisticated purposes and they have versions that
0:44:35are meant for more consumer level ones. Right? Right. So the M1 is,
0:44:38is was a buildup operation and they're still building up.
0:44:42So I think that's right. As you get a cycle that through and we're seeing,
0:44:45you know, the original M1s are falling off the plate. Eventually they'll move.
0:44:49I would imagine they're going to move entirely to M2s unless there's a cost
0:44:53reason to retain it. But the M1s are such good.
0:44:55The machines that are M1 based are, have such good performance.
0:44:59They're not like they're outdated. They're just a little slower.
0:45:01And that's the amazing thing. So maybe you have to wait,
0:45:03they come up with the M3 and then you lose the M1 generation.
0:45:06But I don't know if that's totally new for Apple,
0:45:09but I don't feel like they would build a new machine around the slowest possible
0:45:13chip in that new architecture. And in this case,
0:45:15the slowest possible chip was so fast,
0:45:18had so many savings that it made sense for them to shift over there and then
0:45:22gradually ratchet all their models up. So, but yeah, I mean if they only sell,
0:45:26I think that argument is also valid to the Formula 1,
0:45:291 because Apple has to be aspirational. It has to have products that people want
0:45:33to buy and sometimes they're going to go into purchasing and say,
0:45:35I need a $40,000 machine. And they're going to say,
0:45:38you can have a $10,000 one. We all right,
0:45:40we'll get $10,000 and what now and we'll put more money in the budget next year.
0:45:44But the fact that the $40,000 machine exists may give them more leverage to buy
0:45:48a cheaper, cheaper one. And there's,
0:45:50we also see all the time that when you have more computational power available
0:45:54on a kind of in a desktop environment,
0:45:56you start doing more sophisticated things that couldn't be done because they
0:45:59required supercomputers.
0:46:00So part of the AI revolution has been that neural networking could be done on
0:46:06with originally with specialized graphic cards and then less and less requiring
0:46:10that as computers, just the basic computational, you know,
0:46:14central chips or the socks have improved. You can do incredible AI stuff.
0:46:18And Apple devotes parts of its chip to this specific activity without having to
0:46:22have machines that are so tricked out that they're unaffordable.
0:46:25So as you get,
0:46:27if you have a Mac pro that's an M two extreme based or whatever it is,
0:46:31or an M three or whatever the next thing is,
0:46:32that's going to provoke more research that will allow, you know,
0:46:36open up new fields of research or so it'll open up new areas that researchers
0:46:39will buy these machines specifically for because they have the capability on the
0:46:43desktop to perform that kind of computation. Yeah.
0:46:47The other story along the Apple Silicon line,
0:46:50and this was published on December 23rd by Wayne Ma
0:46:55at the information, which is paywalled excellent publication,
0:46:58very expensive though. It's like 400 bucks a year. And every time I think, Hey,
0:47:03it's a lot of money. Maybe I'll unsubscribe.
0:47:04Then they drop a story like this that is right in my wheelhouse. And I'm like,
0:47:09all right, I'll keep my subscription. But this is the messy soap opera back,
0:47:13but, but,
0:47:14but messy soap opera that affects a multi-trillion dollar company or a trillion
0:47:17dollar company. It's so tricky. Quoting from Wayne Ma's story inside Apple's war
0:47:22for chip talent. And a lot of this comes down to, and this is a fact, I mean,
0:47:26it's not speculation, but,
0:47:28and I don't think it's surprising given the success of the Apple Silicon
0:47:34entire division that an awful lot of talented people have left Apple,
0:47:39either to start their own startups doing chip design,
0:47:43or they've been poached by Qualcomm or Intel or other companies, you know,
0:47:47but that, you know,
0:47:48it's the way it goes when one company has tremendous success in a certain area,
0:47:52the talented engineers in that division become the
0:47:57target of intense bidding from competitors,
0:48:01right? That's, that's the way the market works,
0:48:04but Apple has had some level of brain drain from their chip division. Now,
0:48:08is it so much that the division is in trouble because
0:48:13they've lost so much talent or is it that they have so much talent that they had
0:48:17talent to spare and they can still continue to lead the industry? Who knows?
0:48:21We'll, you know, we'll find out soon enough,
0:48:23but I guess stories like this are sort of, you know,
0:48:26certainly the information story to me is written with
0:48:31the overall takeaway point that maybe Apple's
0:48:35Silicon advantage is regressing to the mean and, you know,
0:48:40which is it's what happens, whether it's sports, right? You know,
0:48:44the Chicago Bulls are no longer the six time champions they were when Michael
0:48:49Jordan and Scottie Pippen were playing 25 years ago. You know, it's,
0:48:52things ebb and flow.
0:48:55And even when you have a decade long run of tremendous
0:48:59success, it tends not to last forever. Nothing,
0:49:04you know, nobody, especially in Silicon, you know, even Intel,
0:49:08the mighty Intel no longer is,
0:49:10it was once unthinkable to think that Intel would be so far behind the state of
0:49:15the art in chip performance, but here we are today and they are,
0:49:19but maybe they'll come back.
0:49:20We used to all be on MySpace also.
0:49:22And it's sad to think that the saddest thing that the same pattern happens,
0:49:27right? I mean, Intel had so many stubbles,
0:49:29they like lost the mobile chip market like four times, three times,
0:49:33at least X scale and a bunch of other stuff and a bet on the wrong wireless
0:49:36technology.
0:49:37And sold their stake in what do you call it? The arm, right?
0:49:41Yeah, exactly. I tell you, here's the passing of a moment.
0:49:43I have had a website registered Y max, Y max news,
0:49:48dot blog.com or Y max net news.com or something.
0:49:51I've actually forgotten the name for 20 years because I had my wifi networking
0:49:56news site and then I launched some ancillary blogs with less news,
0:49:59like cellular and public safety and so forth.
0:50:01And those never got that much traction, but the Y max one did for a bit when,
0:50:05and I was like,
0:50:06I got a renewal notice and I'm like, why am I still paying for Y max news?
0:50:10In 2022, I got to give it up. So I gave it up this year.
0:50:14All right, let me read this story. The,
0:50:16basically the gist of Wayne Ma's story is that the a 16
0:50:21chip that is only available today in the eighth app,
0:50:24iPhone 14 pro models, right? Infamously this year,
0:50:28the non pro iPhone fourteens are still using
0:50:34the a 15 chips from last year's iPhones.
0:50:38Although the iPhone 14 non pro have the
0:50:43better version of the a 15 that was in the eight,
0:50:46the iPhone 13 pro has trickled down to the
0:50:51regular non pro iPhone 14.
0:50:53And that was a little baffling. I remember at the time everyone was trying to
0:50:55assess that out. All right. But for the a 16, here's quoting from Wayne Ma,
0:51:00Apple planned a generational leap for the graphics processor in the latest
0:51:04version of the tie in smartphones, the iPhone 14 pro,
0:51:07but engineers were too ambitious with adding new features and early prototypes
0:51:12drew more power than what the company had expected based on software
0:51:16simulations that could hurt battery life, make the device too hot,
0:51:20according to two people, blah, blah, blah,
0:51:22obviously because Apple discovered the mistake late in development,
0:51:27it had to base the graphics processor in its iPhone 14 pro line,
0:51:31largely on the design of the chip that went into last year's iPhone model.
0:51:36According to four people familiar with the matter,
0:51:38those people described the snafu,
0:51:41which hasn't been previously reported as unprecedented in the group's history.
0:51:46The iPhone 14 pro models,
0:51:48which went on sale in September showed only small gains, blah, blah, blah.
0:51:51One of the features, let me see if I can find it here in his story.
0:51:54One of the features that was supposedly set and had
0:51:59to be cut from apparently according to his report was hardware based
0:52:04ray tracing. One of the, one of the,
0:52:07one of the features that Apple had to cut from the iPhone 14 pros graphics
0:52:11processor was ray tracing a computer,
0:52:13computer lighting a technique that brings an extra level of realism to games.
0:52:17A lack of big improvements in chips can make upgrading, blah, blah, blah.
0:52:20I have heard this from friends. I have,
0:52:22I stay informed in the games world through
0:52:27my son who is a legit gaming enthusiast and some friends who
0:52:31are have both feet in that industry. And I,
0:52:35before this story in the information came out, that was something that I,
0:52:40friends and my son had both put onto my radar,
0:52:44which is that the state of the art and graphics,
0:52:46one of the next things to look for 2023 2024 is built in ray
0:52:51tracing support. And I've seen some demos, you know, like,
0:52:56Oh,
0:52:56here's this certain game with hardware based ray tracing on versus off.
0:53:00And it's like, you know, the way all these modern 3d games look is so good.
0:53:05It's like, so the, the before, as it were,
0:53:09it still looks really good,
0:53:11but then you look at the after with hardware based ray tracing and it is like
0:53:16a real step towards photo realism. And
0:53:20I mean, they've done non real time ray chasing has been a feature of computer
0:53:24animation for 30 years, maybe longer than that without question.
0:53:28But like, what's the speed, you know, you're running at, I don't know.
0:53:30So one time it's probably a hundred or 200 times real time. Right. So,
0:53:34Oh, even slower than that.
0:53:36Cause I remember being at Drexel in the nineties when I was studying computer
0:53:39science and there was, I remember every year the graduate students, you know,
0:53:43their thesis projects, you know, would, would be there.
0:53:47And you know, a lot of, a lot of stuff that you could do for a thesis in computer
0:53:52science is it's just purely mathematical. There's nothing to look at,
0:53:57but there in the mid nineties, ray tracing was huge. And there were definitely,
0:54:01every year there were a couple of, you know,
0:54:03graduate students whose thesis is, were in the ray tracing realm.
0:54:08And therefore they had really cool demos or printed output.
0:54:12Like look at this thing that, you know, the software they wrote wrote,
0:54:16but you could watch it run on like what at the time were these,
0:54:20we had a bunch of sun workstations in the computer science department that were
0:54:24more or less, you had to be a grad student to get access to,
0:54:26and you could watch them work. And it was like pixel by pixel by P you know,
0:54:32like it was,
0:54:34it made like the image writer dot matrix printer seemed like it,
0:54:38it output stuff fast, right? Ray tracing a single frame,
0:54:42super duper slow toy story. Of course, the first breakthrough feature film.
0:54:47Yeah. Yeah.
0:54:48It's like when you and you look at the original toy story and how
0:54:53low fidelity it is compared to the modern Pixar films and other, you know,
0:54:583d animated movies of that kind,
0:55:00but you talk to the Pixar or hear the Pixar people talk about how
0:55:05long it took to render a frame.
0:55:10It's been a thing in computer science graphics for a while.
0:55:13It's the new frontier. It's,
0:55:16it makes total sense to me that that would have been,
0:55:19it was slated to be an iPhone 14 pro feature this year and got cut.
0:55:24Cause it's definitely not, they're very, very interesting to me that, you know,
0:55:29just the basic story that the,
0:55:31the a 16 graphics were supposed to be a lot better than they were,
0:55:35or then they actually turned out to be now they're not bad. I actually like,
0:55:39you know, is geek bench metal,
0:55:42the best benchmark. I don't know,
0:55:45but it's certainly the easiest way to compare.
0:55:49It looks like the a 16 is about seven or 8% faster at
0:55:55graphics than the a 15 from a year ago. So, you know, nothing to sneeze at.
0:55:59It's, you know, not a bad year over year improvement, but not groundbreaking.
0:56:04And the other thing, here's the thing,
0:56:06and you hinted at this a couple of minutes ago, neither,
0:56:10my main frustration with both Wayne Ma story and the information and Gurman story
0:56:15in Bloomberg about the Mac pro is that there's no dates of when
0:56:20these internal crises were determined.
0:56:23When did Apple determine that, Oh,
0:56:27this design for the ACE a 14 or a 16 chip
0:56:31is going to take up way too much heat and energy.
0:56:36When was this a year ago?
0:56:38A year ago, two years ago.
0:56:40By your math and thinking, I got to believe this was,
0:56:43was it like two years before the iPhone 14 pro shipped? I, I would have,
0:56:48I mean, I don't know enough about, I don't know enough about the cycles,
0:56:51but I would have a hard time believing that they went into production and the
0:56:55chip. No, I mean, yeah, it's cause they need the,
0:56:59the amount of time for each of those stages is too long.
0:57:01So maybe it was 18 months ahead of the iPhone 14 pro shipping,
0:57:06but that sounds,
0:57:07that sounds really tight in terms of like scaling up the fab to get to the
0:57:13yields you need and then integrating. I don't see, I just don't,
0:57:16I don't believe it. So it could have been two years, right? I mean,
0:57:18let's say outside is 18 months, but it could have been two years,
0:57:21maybe more, but, but maybe more.
0:57:23But I think the lay person reading these stories would think that these were
0:57:26issues that came up like a year ago, January of 2022 or something.
0:57:31And it's really frustrating to me and I'm not disputing their reporting.
0:57:35I believe, you know,
0:57:37but both Gurman and Wayne Ma and the information in Bloomberg are certainly
0:57:40reputable. I, all my complaints about Bloomberg's, the big hack story,
0:57:44which is why the reason I complain about it is it's,
0:57:47it's so exceptional for never been repeated since then that they've done
0:57:51something that boneheaded, right? It's, you know, if it were,
0:57:55if that sort of fiasco were par for the course for Bloomberg,
0:58:00nobody would listen to Bloomberg reports.
0:58:02It's the fact that they're overall so credible,
0:58:05but with the sources they have to me, they should be able to have dates.
0:58:09And I would just love to know when these decisions were made, because to me,
0:58:13it's one of the most fascinating things about Apple is how long their hardware
0:58:18lead times are and, and how secretive it is for whatever
0:58:23reason. One of the holiest of Holy secrets that they have,
0:58:27they do not talk about these timelines of how,
0:58:31how far in advance and they, they don't want, they don't want to disabuse,
0:58:36the notion that they can make last minute decisions, even though I know they can't,
0:58:40everybody who's involved knows they can't. Right. I remember,
0:58:44I forget his name, but back when it was one of the first,
0:58:49truly, wow, I'm, I'm, this is unbelievable.
0:58:52I can't believe that I'm one of the media people here for the
0:58:57antenna gate.
0:58:58I went to the West when you went to the anechoic room and that whole thing,
0:59:01right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And their lead, you know, it was, I don't know,
0:59:06a hundred people from the media were invited on the, you know,
0:59:09a day in advance to go to the press conference, you know,
0:59:12and Steve jobs was there fresh off, you know,
0:59:15curtailed vacation in Hawaii and they played the Jonathan Mann story.
0:59:20If you don't like it, take it back or something like that. Remember that?
0:59:23Yeah. It was great. It was one of his great, his viral moments.
0:59:27It's the press conference itself was by far and away the most interesting press
0:59:31event I've ever attended at Apple. But then I was part of,
0:59:35maybe there were like a dozen of us who got like this backstage tour of their
0:59:40anechoic chambers and to see some of these places where they've tested their
0:59:44antenna designs. And it was about a dozen of us in the media.
0:59:49The tour was led by their lead cellular antenna
0:59:54engineer. I don't remember his name off the top of my head,
0:59:57but, but he was doing the talking,
0:59:58but with us were Phil Schiller and Katie cotton
1:00:03as, as our escort, but nobody else from Apple.
1:00:06It was the only three people from Apple, this engineer,
1:00:09Phil and Katie. And at one point, you know,
1:00:14and they were encouraging questions and we'd seen these things.
1:00:17And after one of the chambers, you know,
1:00:19there were smaller ones and bigger ones that super freaky. If you've, you know,
1:00:23again,
1:00:24a Ruben Caballero or Caballero senior that's about his name. I remember his name.
1:00:29You'd hear, I mean,
1:00:29cause those people's names are rarely uttered in public also with their titles.
1:00:33So yes.
1:00:34Yep. Ruben Caballero. That was him. And he was charming and delightful. And,
1:00:38and, but you could tell he wasn't practiced at this because,
1:00:42because up until that point,
1:00:44his work had been utterly secret and they're like, okay, Ruben, we need,
1:00:48we're going to invite a dozen people to the media. Can you explain what you do?
1:00:54And you know, if you've never been in one of these anechoic chambers,
1:00:57it is super freaky. It, it, it, you just can't believe it.
1:01:00And some of them were very big, you know, where, where, you know,
1:01:04five or six of us could go in at the same time, you know,
1:01:06and have plenty of room,
1:01:07but you would open your mouth and talk to one another and you could hardly hear
1:01:11each other. Oh, it's, it's so freaky.
1:01:14You're just in this room with these foam walls in this weird sort of pyramid
1:01:18shape and you're,
1:01:20you're two or three feet away from anybody else and you'd talk at a normal
1:01:24volume and the sound from your voice just disappears.
1:01:28It was super freaky, very interesting, all sorts of interesting information.
1:01:32But one of the people in the press asked something about like, well,
1:01:35when did you start working on this external antenna design?
1:01:40Cause that was the whole thing with the iPhone four.
1:01:42And Ruben Caballero, he started to answer,
1:01:47and I think he said something to the effect of like two years.
1:01:49And as soon as he started this, it was something like that.
1:01:52I have it in my notebook somewhere,
1:01:54but Phil Schiller jumped in immediately and was like,
1:01:58we're not going to talk about timelines. And it wasn't he, you know,
1:02:01and Phil was Phil and it was very smooth, but I noticed it.
1:02:05And he was just like, we're not going to talk about timelines. And,
1:02:08and Ruben immediately, like I could see it on his face. He was like, Oh yeah,
1:02:13I wasn't supposed to talk about timelines. And it wasn't the word, you know,
1:02:16he didn't spill state secrets all, you know, the,
1:02:20the gist of what he gave away was that they'd started working on the iPhone
1:02:24four's external antenna design around when the iPhone three came out, right?
1:02:32Three. And then a year later was three GS and two years later was the iPhone
1:02:37four.
1:02:37So it was like one year after the original iPhone was when they were like looking
1:02:44at down the road, where do we want to be two years ago?
1:02:47What if we do this flat back flat front flat sides and we'll move the antenna
1:02:52outside the frame. And that way we'll solve this whole,
1:02:57because if you think back to the first three iPhones,
1:03:00the first iPhone had this gorgeous aluminum back,
1:03:03but then to fit the antennas,
1:03:05the bottom inch or so on the back was black plastic.
1:03:08And it was sort of a weird transition, still a beautiful device,
1:03:12but they had this problem where all the antennas had to be behind plastic,
1:03:17not the aluminum. And then to solve that, you know, to, to work around that,
1:03:21the three, the three G and the three GS had all plastic backs,
1:03:26which were more antenna friendly, but not as nice a device.
1:03:31And so, you know, two years,
1:03:34but Phil Schiller did not want people to know that re it was very,
1:03:38very clear again, wasn't uncomfortable. It wasn't like,
1:03:41I'm sure Ruben did not get reprimanded afterwards or was in trouble.
1:03:46Did not want that to come out.
1:03:48I'm so curious about that with these Silicon issues. I am so interested.
1:03:53Yeah, it's, I think, yeah, I mean, that's the looking back thing.
1:03:58And I think, I mean, the article,
1:04:00the information article is notable too because it's trying to tie together.
1:04:04Wayne Ma is trying to tie together. And again, I think the timeline would help,
1:04:07but I, I, maybe he just can't because it would reveal sources too. Right.
1:04:11You know, right. At the time, but he's, he's trying to tie together, you know,
1:04:14the,
1:04:14the leadership of this division within Apple is being painted with the same kind
1:04:18of it's the same kind of discussion usually here reserved for female company
1:04:23leaders and politicians who are difficult to deal with. Like Amy Klobuchar,
1:04:27she was getting covered.
1:04:28She made her staff wash a comb and yelled at him because he didn't bring a fork
1:04:32on the plane is the famous one. Right. And I'm like,
1:04:34so this fellow Johnny's Ruggie is the Apple exec who's documented here as the
1:04:38head of the that's the semi division.
1:04:40So make an actor division and it's like, well,
1:04:42he's really brusque and this and he won't hire people. And I'm like, yeah, it's,
1:04:46I mean, I would hate to be, I,
1:04:48I'm just trying to imagine how you hire people in one of the most rarefied
1:04:51industries for the best company making Silicon in the world.
1:04:56So how much of this is,
1:04:58this is a really difficult space and the guy's a little prickly and he's hiring,
1:05:03you know,
1:05:03it's just a very difficult place to hire into and to keep people because they're
1:05:07extremely valuable. There's a lot of money flowing around.
1:05:10And they're talking about on this Exodus of Apple employees and it's like, well,
1:05:13maybe he's not the best boss. I don't know. And maybe it could be,
1:05:16that might be one factor.
1:05:18Maybe people aren't given enough opportunities for advancement or whatever,
1:05:21but it's also,
1:05:22you got to think about the salaries that are being offered to people to jump
1:05:25ship to these startups because there's so many, I mean,
1:05:28there's so many billions and billions of dollars,
1:05:30trillions ultimately involved in these spaces. So, and you know,
1:05:34in acquisitions too is the next company, some of these spinoffs that,
1:05:37where everyone's mad that they Apple people went off to join these or start
1:05:41these other companies or join them, they could be the next Apple acquisition for,
1:05:45you know, half a billion dollars or a billion dollars or more.
1:05:47And we don't know that either. So it's kind of a, again,
1:05:50I think the reporting seems solid, but I'm kind of like, well, maybe is it,
1:05:54you know,
1:05:55one former junior Apple employee was told he needed to get Srouji's permission
1:05:58before he could participate in a hackathon.
1:06:00So he abandoned the request given the effort approval would take. And I'm like,
1:06:03well, that okay. But that doesn't seem that unreasonable.
1:06:06You're working in one of the most secretive aspects.
1:06:08So maybe you'd reveal a technique honestly,
1:06:10that you learned that they don't want to know. So I don't know.
1:06:13There's a little bit of that in there where I'm like, this is,
1:06:15this is kind of inside baseball management stuff and,
1:06:19and, and whatever. But if it's harming that division, it's an issue.
1:06:23I suppose shareholders might be interested or, or what have you,
1:06:26and they need to figure out how to retain and encourage talent.
1:06:29I think the other part of the article though,
1:06:31that I think I'm more so than the drama part is the,
1:06:34I mentioned smile inches in passing. It's this thing about, you know,
1:06:37it's kind of like the end of time coming, right?
1:06:39Wait Moore's law has been remarkably accurate.
1:06:42And it's the fact that it was so vaguely formulated. It's not perfect line,
1:06:46but it's pretty good. And we're hitting the end, you know,
1:06:48they're going down to three nanometer processes and then two nanometers.
1:06:52And there's this new nano sheet technology to keep current from leaking across
1:06:57transistors and so forth. But it's sort of, there's just a lot of noise and that's,
1:07:00you know, 20, 25, I guess is when we're going to see maybe two nanometer process
1:07:04chips. So we're getting down to the smaller and smaller size with more and more
1:07:07limits that are just, you know,
1:07:09you started getting down to quantum effects and all of this stuff.
1:07:12There's a point at which they won't be able to make smaller chips with the
1:07:15current like approach that has essentially been unbroken with modifications and
1:07:20compensations for the history of the Silicon industry. So what happens then?
1:07:26And that's not that many years away. So there is an issue.
1:07:29You were talking about reversion of the mean, but then there's also like,
1:07:32what is the next thing? It's all in the lab, I'm sure.
1:07:35And research universities and R and D deep within sealed vaults inside Intel and
1:07:40arm and others. But what happens after 2025? What's the next big breakthrough?
1:07:47And I don't, I don't know what that is.
1:07:48I'm not sure there is one that's going to have the same kind of gains that have
1:07:51been happening consistently for this many years.
1:07:54Yeah. I, it's interesting to see where that goes. The one,
1:07:58the one area where I do see it coming,
1:08:00I don't have any guesses as to how high end compute for what we consider personal
1:08:05computers continues going forward and personal computers,
1:08:13meaning Macs, iPads, iPhones,
1:08:16things that have a user interface and run apps. And you,
1:08:20you can kind of think of I'm using this as a computer, right?
1:08:24When you use your iPhone, maybe most people don't think of it as a computer,
1:08:29but you and I know, and the people who listen to the show know it's a computer.
1:08:32How does that keep going forward in the face of these physical limitations at the
1:08:37atomic literally getting close to the atomic level of, of, you know,
1:08:41how the processes can continue improving? I don't know.
1:08:45I don't know enough about it,
1:08:46but the one area where I can see that is continuing to advance the,
1:08:51continuing to advance at a remark at the same remarkable clip that computers
1:08:56have kept getting better and more exciting my entire life, right?
1:09:03Ever ever since I first realized that a computer was a thing and became
1:09:06infatuated by the idea in the seventies as a little kid with video games is the
1:09:12miniaturization and the computerization of everything.
1:09:20AirPods would be my primary example where you literally could not make AirPods
1:09:2510 years ago. There's the,
1:09:28the Silicon did not exist because they run as they're too little computers.
1:09:33There's a computer in your left ear and a computer in your right ear.
1:09:36And the Silicon didn't exist 10 years ago.
1:09:41It really wasn't possible. I mean, maybe in theory, 10 years ago,
1:09:45but certainly 15 years ago,
1:09:47there was no way to make anything like an AirPod because the chips didn't exist.
1:09:51And that's the direction. And again,
1:09:55I'm such a fan of my AirPod pros. I just knew it's one of the rare devices that
1:10:00I continue not to take for granted. And I just keep thinking, my God,
1:10:04these things are astonishingly amazing and I can hardly even feel them in my ear.
1:10:09They're so lightweight. But obviously all this stuff,
1:10:14everybody's thinking about AR glasses and you know, beyond VR goggles,
1:10:19but to get to the point where you could just wear regular eyeglasses that look
1:10:23like normal eyeglasses and you keep them on all day and they're not heavy,
1:10:27they're just as comfortable as regular glasses,
1:10:30but they actually are computers and you know,
1:10:33projecting some kind of heads up display in front of you at all times and
1:10:37listening to you. Obviously having AirPod style,
1:10:42super lightweight chips with very long battery life is part of that.
1:10:47And who knows how many untold,
1:10:51I was going to say dozens, but hundreds of other type areas,
1:10:55tiny little chips like that can come from.
1:10:57And Apple is obviously very interested in that sort of direction for the future
1:11:02for hardware, you know, and their Silicon team is key, right?
1:11:06The Apple's Silicon prowess is so central to the AirPod success.
1:11:12Story and will be central to their hopeful success in areas like AR and VR and
1:11:17who knows, you know, what else? Or Apple watch is another great example, right?
1:11:24Oh yeah. Goodness. Right. Yeah.
1:11:26I'd love you to go back and claim chowder what people said when Apple bought PA
1:11:29semi. I think you've done it before. It is, it is. People were like,
1:11:32why would Apple get into Silicon? How can they compete with that? You know,
1:11:35and you know, that's,
1:11:37that was the beginning of the end for Intel's ability to lead the industry.
1:11:41Although maybe it's,
1:11:42there's some talk about maybe where they're at now is a better place,
1:11:45but it just seemed impossible at a computer manufacturer,
1:11:48especially one at Apple size at that time,
1:11:50despite them already throwing off tens of billions of dollars in cash a year,
1:11:54they were still relatively small.
1:11:56And the fact that they've been able to custom engineer chips that have produced
1:12:01those kinds of gains, but, and I think it's like this, it's to several points,
1:12:05right?
1:12:06Not only do they have,
1:12:07were they able to make a better mobile chip and then,
1:12:10and then integrate system on a chip design that makes for even better efficiency
1:12:15and not only are they able to create the M one and produce a chip that is that,
1:12:20I mean, it is hilarious.
1:12:21Your site's one of the better places to find these comparisons,
1:12:24but to see the people who are in the non Apple world,
1:12:26try to justify that the M one or two is not as good as it claims by looking at
1:12:31windows, laptops and Linux, whatever. It's just so funny. You're like, no,
1:12:34I'm sorry, you're going to have to change your worldview. I was, I never,
1:12:37when the M one came out, I really didn't believe it.
1:12:40I actually had to own a machine before I truly accepted what a change it was.
1:12:44And I'm like all in an Apple. I've been using Apple products since 1985. I'm not,
1:12:48I'm not even dubious. And I was telling her, okay, this,
1:12:51this is more of a game changer than I thought. But so it's not only that,
1:12:54but it's also that they can produce these micro chips that, you know,
1:12:58these tiny microchips, I should say, that allow them to do these, you know,
1:13:02to do the air pods. And that's what the glasses, if Apple releases glasses,
1:13:06you can imagine it's going to have the I've style thing of like,
1:13:09we've packed in the battery into the stems and like the, you know,
1:13:13all the custom circuitry. So you're going to wear a pair of maybe slightly chunky,
1:13:16but very stylish, a black, you know, black glasses. And then the frame is going to
1:13:21be a hundred percent full of electronics or something, right.
1:13:24With induction charging in the stems or whatever.
1:13:27Yeah. I'm,
1:13:29I'm guessing that they're just going to stuff little tiny thin batteries all
1:13:33throughout the glass.
1:13:34Absolutely. Every, every corner, every edge. And then the,
1:13:38the lenses I assume will be multi-lens or multi-layer LCD panels
1:13:43interlaced with other kinds of probably more exotic stuff that get managed by
1:13:48the microcomputers and the multiple computers probably running it. But you know,
1:13:52then you're like, well, where do you put the processor? It's like, well,
1:13:55they'll have designed some new chip form factor probably to stick the package in
1:13:58the right spot.
1:13:59With like a regular pair of eyeglasses.
1:14:01It's like if you sit on your glasses or something and break the arm off,
1:14:05you know, and it's like, oh,
1:14:07you go back to your eyeglass place and you pay a nominal fee. It's like,
1:14:10I'm sure with the Apple glasses, it might look like a normal pair of glasses,
1:14:13but it'll be like,
1:14:14it's like when you break the back of your iPhone and it's like how many
1:14:18hundred dollars? And it's like, if you just break the side off your Apple
1:14:21glasses, it'll, you know, it'll be like, oh, $250 just for the arm. It's like,
1:14:26oh yeah, well there's all sorts of stuff in there. Apple's been prepping us with
1:14:29the changes to Apple care though, where they're like, oh,
1:14:31well now we're including an incident for this much. Oh, well accidents are
1:14:35included. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're gonna have to,
1:14:37Apple glasses are going to have to have a very generous Apple care plan,
1:14:40at least the early days to get people to go in on it. Yeah. Anyway,
1:14:44before we leave the subject, that the thing,
1:14:45one of the things I'm looking forward to 2023 is to me,
1:14:50Apple is very clearly a company of annual patterns and we
1:14:55still don't know what their pattern is for Apple Silicon max, right?
1:15:00It's we've only gotten a second generation device.
1:15:04The only ones that we have are the Mac book air and the
1:15:08low end non pro 13 inch Mac book pro,
1:15:13you know, the Mac book air in a, in a thicker chassis.
1:15:16What is the pattern for the rest of Apple Silicon?
1:15:19Because the one device we know is on an annual schedule is the iPhone, right?
1:15:23Every year, every September, there's a new iPhone and a new generation of a,
1:15:27a series chips, but everything else,
1:15:30including the iPad is seemingly more like an 18 month schedule, right?
1:15:35So iPads, all iPads, none of them get update,
1:15:39updated annually, even though they've been on Apple Silicon forever.
1:15:43And it just, it,
1:15:45the thing that makes it seem unusual to me is that they're going
1:15:51with this numbered M one M two integer pattern.
1:15:55But I think that there will be max that skip generations,
1:16:01right? That maybe, you know,
1:16:04there won't be a Mac book pro that gets every single M
1:16:09generation, you know, that at some point it's going to skip a generation.
1:16:13Who knows? And obviously the Mac pro obviously skipped the M one
1:16:18generation and
1:16:20well, think about what you said earlier too, is that you don't need a Mac pro.
1:16:23You've got a Mac book pro, right? This is your, and I,
1:16:26I asked this question to people from time to time is, is what is the end of
1:16:30upgrades, right? It's like my, I have an, uh, M one,
1:16:34like first generation Mac book air with 16 gigs of Ram.
1:16:38And I only have a half a gigabyte, sorry, half a terabyte rather.
1:16:42I think a terabyte of storage on it. And I wish it just seemed like too much
1:16:47money at the time to get a terabyte, but between iCloud and other things,
1:16:50I make it work. So the only thing I'm short on is storage.
1:16:53The only thing that would probably get me to upgrade,
1:16:55I don't know when I will stop using my M one Mac book air because I don't,
1:17:00I actually, for the first time in the history of owning laptops,
1:17:03I don't need a faster one. Everything I need to do, I can do it the speed.
1:17:07I need to do it more or less.
1:17:08And I've done things like layout or work with giant InDesign files on it where
1:17:13it's been essentially full speed, like real time, very little lag.
1:17:17And that was even before Apple had fully transitioned to native,
1:17:20native Apple Silicon code. So this is my question is like,
1:17:24maybe Apple doesn't have to be on the same kind of cycle for many of the
1:17:28machines because it's got, it's not terminal models, but the models are,
1:17:32you know, what if they don't, if it's good enough for a couple of years,
1:17:36and maybe people, I mean,
1:17:38I don't think Apple wants people to own their computers necessarily for five to
1:17:41seven years.
1:17:42But you look at the history of how of ownership and kind of the support number
1:17:46support years Apple's put it in Mac OS.
1:17:48And it's like maybe we are going to see that lengthening that reduces their
1:17:52revenue from max, except that they're expanding the Mac audience all the time.
1:17:56And they still have, you know,
1:17:58a hundred million people who need to upgrade to M machines who haven't yet.
1:18:02So it feels like they could probably not worry as much about the speed of
1:18:07revision of max and just keep focusing on why you should get the latest one.
1:18:11If you have a machine that's, you know, three to seven years out of cycle.
1:18:15Yeah, I think so too.
1:18:16And I think they're very comfortable with the idea that PCs,
1:18:19when the Mac is their PC as a, as a, uh,
1:18:24you know,
1:18:25literally 40 year old category that that a four or five year
1:18:29upgrade cycle is fine, especially since they've,
1:18:32they've held the line on prices, right? Where the,
1:18:36the low end Mac book air is still nine 99,
1:18:40even as the rest of the industry is sort of
1:18:44filtered down to these three and $400 low end laptops,
1:18:49Apple holding the line at a thousand dollars and selling most of these, you know,
1:18:53the, the 14 and 16 inch Mac book pros start at $2,000
1:18:58effectively. And really the, the configurations most people are buying,
1:19:02I think are closer to $3,000,
1:19:03which in today's PC world is very expensive, you know? And, and I think that
1:19:09they're just fine selling.
1:19:10They're very happy to sell you a $2,800 Mac book pro that you won't,
1:19:14that you won't even think about upgrading for four years, you know,
1:19:17with a 30 something percent margin. So they're like, that's fine.
1:19:20We paid our money off you. And then, and this is the growth of this.
1:19:23This is what I get. You got to bring this up, right?
1:19:25We forget to do this sometimes that Apple is a services company now.
1:19:28And of course they care less.
1:19:30They have shifted enough people over to buying from the Mac app store. And,
1:19:34you know, I'm ponying out that whatever the Apple one subscription is, I don't,
1:19:37I don't know what it costs because it's less than it costs before for me to
1:19:40buy all those things separately. And my family gets everything.
1:19:43Some on family sharing. So they they're getting, I don't know,
1:19:46$400 a year for me for Apple one. And I'm super happy about it.
1:19:51I don't have any complaint about the price for the services provided. Yeah,
1:19:55I agree. I do. I do agree. All right,
1:19:57let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor.
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1:21:37What else do we got? We've got, uh, I want to talk,
1:21:43speaking of password security. Oh man.
1:21:45Last pass has had,
1:21:48I would say a week that would make Southwest airlines seem like they've had a
1:21:53good, a good week.
1:21:54Yeah. Holy cow. You know, it's funny.
1:21:58There's one of these things of like where you list off, well,
1:22:00what password managers do people use? And it's like, well,
1:22:02you'll be like, I always one password, you know,
1:22:04there's a built in one in iCloud key chain.
1:22:07You can use that and all of Apple products, but it's not, you know,
1:22:09it's not good outside the ecosystem. Like, well there's, you know, last pass,
1:22:12there's dash lane, there's, you start listing off others, right?
1:22:14But last pass has always been kind of in that list and I don't know that it's
1:22:18going to be in that list anymore. Like I don't think,
1:22:20I don't think it should be. And I think there's a lot of reasons why it,
1:22:23it's not because they were hacked. That's bad.
1:22:26They made a number of operational mistakes that they've admitted some of clearly.
1:22:30But the problem is I think, I think it is embarrassing to have master password
1:22:35based security as your only line of defense in 2022 or maybe in 2015.
1:22:41Right. And this is what's come out.
1:22:44And I didn't realize this cause I haven't used last pass and I haven't looked at
1:22:47their security for a while when I was,
1:22:49since I was doing kind of more technical encryption looks and last pass,
1:22:54you know, so every other, so I shouldn't say every other,
1:22:57all the major password and secret management services out there you're likely to
1:23:02use. And I will cite again, Apple's iCloud,
1:23:04key chain operation and one password in particular because I know those more,
1:23:08more in depth. I know there are others like this that are more specialized.
1:23:11People call it bit warden,
1:23:13which is an open source project that has not needs more apparently outside
1:23:17auditing. They need to raise money to do certain things for more assurance.
1:23:20But again, it's an option that's designed around this.
1:23:22You need to have device based key material mix into anything so that if you're
1:23:27archive is in a cloud storage environment and it's compromised that without
1:23:31access to the devices and the ability to unlock a device.
1:23:35So it's a physical proximity attack typically unless you're a sophisticated
1:23:39nation state actor who could remotely install expensive one time use zero days
1:23:44to crack your phone and extract device keys,
1:23:48which isn't even possible in a secure enclave environment in most circumstances.
1:23:53Right. Blah, blah, blah.
1:23:54It's long list of things that you're still secure, right?
1:23:56So if you're one password vault, if one password had a massive,
1:23:59massive attack,
1:24:00some horrible thing happened and all of their cloud stored vaults that they sync
1:24:04for users and give access to through web apps were stolen.
1:24:07There is zero risk that anyone's material would ever be decrypted because you
1:24:11must have the secret keys that are device stored. Right. And that's that.
1:24:15If all of your,
1:24:16if Apple had an iCloud breach and all of its end to end security information,
1:24:20including iCloud key chains were stolen and somebody had a billion years to work
1:24:24on it,
1:24:25they're not going to decrypt it because you need the keys stored only in secure
1:24:28enclave and all of your Apple devices. It's absolutely, you know,
1:24:31unless there was some exploit we don't know about and the design would be very
1:24:35difficult to deal with with last pass. If somebody steals your last pass vault,
1:24:39which bazillion were just lost and can guess through brute force,
1:24:43your your master password, it's totally decrypted and that's it. Boom.
1:24:45That's the story.
1:24:47Yeah. That's a great summary.
1:24:48And the problem with that is that the,
1:24:54I think, and I read a lot about this this week,
1:24:57but I think the problem is that with, with all of these vaults, I mean,
1:25:02I guess millions, I don't, I'm not quite sure how many customers they have,
1:25:05but you know, all of them, you know, the vaults are lost or,
1:25:09or have been taken,
1:25:10but they are secured by the user's own master password.
1:25:15Right. So it is computationally unfeasible for anybody in possession of all of
1:25:24those vaults to decrypt, certainly all of them,
1:25:27but even to mass attack all of these stored vaults.
1:25:32But if they wanted to target specific users,
1:25:36it's computationally feasible to,
1:25:40and especially, you know,
1:25:43if some of these users don't have super long, super secure master passwords,
1:25:48you know, it doesn't,
1:25:49or if the master password was secured by the previous, this whole thing, you know,
1:25:53some listeners will get this and some won't, and it's a deep cryptographic thing,
1:25:57but it's like the number of rounds of hashing you do on a, on a password.
1:26:00So you type in your password, you type in John Gruber rocks, right? And it gets,
1:26:05that's not a good password. Don't use it. Folks has to be longer,
1:26:07has to be longer and random.
1:26:08But I do appreciate the sentiment. So if that was your password, I do.
1:26:12I think I thank you for selecting it, but go change it.
1:26:15So you type that in and then the hashing algorithm, the way hash works,
1:26:21it's a one way cryptographic function.
1:26:23So you put in one thing and the thing that comes up the other end is essentially
1:26:27deterministically manipulated,
1:26:29but you can't reverse it without an enormous asymmetrical amount of computational
1:26:33power. So you do that once. That can be really strong.
1:26:35That's how Shaw two and these other things use for certain kinds of pastures
1:26:39storage work. But you could also, if you want to increase the difficulty,
1:26:42you can use something, use an iterative routine.
1:26:44So instead of just hashing it once you hash it, you know,
1:26:475,000 times, a hundred thousand times, 200,000 times, and each iterative,
1:26:51I should say the shot to algorithm includes that as part of it.
1:26:54The number of hashing operations that occur, but it's part of an algorithm,
1:26:57right? So one password has this approach. Last pass,
1:27:00others have their approaches and you can wind up if you haven't updated,
1:27:05people have been finding as they look through their settings at last pass that
1:27:09they are set to, you know, 5,000 iterations where last pass now,
1:27:13I think the current setting is like a hundred thousand and 100 iterations and
1:27:195,000 is much easier to crack than the a hundred thousand.
1:27:23And you can set it higher even. So there's,
1:27:24there's the master password length and complexity. There's the,
1:27:28so the amount of entropy in it, right? So how hard is it to crack?
1:27:31There's the sort of social engineering guessability. And then there's the,
1:27:35the, the, even if you have a really good password, your master password,
1:27:39if it hasn't been iterated a sufficient number of times,
1:27:42it can also be trivial. And John, you saw this, I didn't know this.
1:27:47They don't encrypt the URLs in your password storage.
1:27:51Yeah, that's that is going to leak. So if you're asking, so you say that,
1:27:56what you said is valid. It's, they have some information,
1:27:59an account information leaked.
1:28:01So it's possible that a cracker would be able to match up a user with a vault
1:28:05either through some leaked metadata about the account or failing that through
1:28:10looking at URLs because some of those URLs are going to contain encoded
1:28:13information about your user ID at an account because the URL is improperly
1:28:18anonymized in the way that any given site,
1:28:21you have a thousand passwords and some sites will encode your username into it
1:28:25conceivably or maybe your email address. So in a different circumstance,
1:28:29if everything in the vault were encrypted and no metadata were available in an
1:28:33unencrypted form, then the vaults might still be fairly useless to other people,
1:28:38even the ones that are weakly protected because it might be impossible for a
1:28:41cracker to know which ones were weakly protected.
1:28:45So they'd have to go through a lot of work even to figure out which ones they
1:28:48could start to crack. But that's not the case.
1:28:51Anyway, bad news for LastPass. I, I,
1:28:56I don't know about you. I, you know, in terms of what I use,
1:29:00I honestly have mostly overwhelmingly,
1:29:04I would say rely on iCloud key chain and I,
1:29:09I've trusted it for numerous years and it over one of the things I did last year
1:29:14in 2022 was I moved most,
1:29:19almost all of my two factor authentication codes. Like when you get those, Oh,
1:29:24as a second factor,
1:29:26go to Google authenticator or authy or any number of,
1:29:30you know, there's an open protocol for generating these things.
1:29:33And then once a minute you get a new six digit code and you,
1:29:39you need to enter the current minutes,
1:29:42six digit code for this account as your second factor to get in.
1:29:46I moved most of those to iCloud key chain,
1:29:49which started supporting those over a year ago. And
1:29:53I couldn't be happier.
1:29:55And I know that there's a lot of people out there who don't,
1:29:58a one reason not to go all in with I call key chain is if you have cross
1:30:04platform work needs.
1:30:05If you use windows regularly or you want to use Android regularly or need to,
1:30:10or just want to maintain your ability to,
1:30:18to do that in the future. And you know,
1:30:20you obviously can back out of iCloud key chain and switch from iCloud key chain
1:30:25to one password or something else that's cross platform in the future.
1:30:29But if you've already,
1:30:32if you're already have all your two factor codes in authy or Google authenticator
1:30:37and want to keep them there,
1:30:39not because you think it's the best interface for them or the most convenient,
1:30:42but because you like the idea that that's a cross platform way to do it.
1:30:46I totally get that. But me personally,
1:30:50I'm so all in on the Apple ecosystem,
1:30:53including Safari as my main browser,
1:30:57that the integration with iCloud key chain is just phenomenal.
1:31:02And I know that there's a lot of people who hear Apple and cloud based syncing
1:31:07and think it's always a disaster. And you know, I, I, I've been,
1:31:14this is not my first rodeo. You know, I've,
1:31:17I've seen Apple's struggles with cloud based syncing firsthand over a long
1:31:22number of years.
1:31:23I will say as somebody who's been at pretty much all in on iCloud key chain for
1:31:29years, the syncing with iCloud key chain is as good as any syncing.
1:31:33I've seen for any product anywhere. And I, you know, I,
1:31:38I'm not personally vouching that they're never going to have a sync problem,
1:31:41you know, that would be catastrophic for people.
1:31:44And for my very most important accounts,
1:31:47I've got saved codes printed out and stored in a safe location.
1:31:53And you know, uh, uh,
1:31:57and iCloud key chain catastrophe would be very, very annoying to me.
1:32:01And there I might have a problem.
1:32:03There might be some accounts that where I'm not really,
1:32:05I haven't thought it through and I might be locked out and need,
1:32:09I don't know what I would, you know,
1:32:10but for the ones that I'm most concerned about, I know that I could recover,
1:32:15even if I lost access to iCloud key chain with recovery codes, et cetera.
1:32:19And I've never needed to.
1:32:21And the integration with Safari and all the things that I've been doing,
1:32:26the things I would want my password manager to do, I couldn't be happier.
1:32:31And I, you know, I know a couple of the people who work on that team at Apple.
1:32:35I think it is for lack of a better term, one of Apple's a teams,
1:32:39I think they take it with the utmost care and it's,
1:32:45you know, it's one of Apple's a teams working on that.
1:32:48And it just keeps getting better. I don't know. What do you, what do you use?
1:32:51I've been moving. I've used offie for, for my, what are they?
1:32:55T O T P S time-based one time passwords, right?
1:32:59And I've used that for years because that was the best Google authenticator was a
1:33:03mess because it would, you know, you'd have a restore your phony,
1:33:05it was all your code that was the worst, whatever. And so I,
1:33:08at some point I found offie and a Twilio owns it now.
1:33:11I don't know if they made it and it's a great, it's free for that purpose.
1:33:15There's other stuff they sell,
1:33:16but they don't market you and it sinks securely and it's available.
1:33:20There's a Mac app that came out. It's not great, but it's fine.
1:33:23So I used offie for years and years and then as soon as the, I guess,
1:33:27Apple calls it, you know, verification codes or something.
1:33:29When that rolled out with Monterey and iOS, iPad,
1:33:32iOS 15 I was documenting it of course,
1:33:34cause I read a book about iPad and iOS security and Mac security for the take
1:33:38control series. And I thought, Oh, this is actually really, really well implemented.
1:33:43It's best when you're using Safari on a Mac and it's best when you're doing kind
1:33:47of anything in an app that's correctly integrated or in Safari on iOS and iPad
1:33:51iOS devices. But you know, the cross platform thing,
1:33:54you can just go on your iPhone, you just go to settings, passwords,
1:33:58search on the thing and it shows you the verification code. So,
1:34:02and I've had that issue. I mean,
1:34:03occasionally there's some Safari integration issues where you can't edit the
1:34:07list of websites to which a verification code applies.
1:34:11So I've had some cases in which a site verifies on one site,
1:34:14but then when you log in it has a different sub domain.
1:34:16So occasionally I've had to go and be like, all right,
1:34:19I've got to go to passwords in Mac OS and bring this up.
1:34:22It doesn't give me the auto-fill touch ID option. I confess,
1:34:26and I know I'm not the only person. I have a Mac mini and I bought a, uh,
1:34:30a magic keyboard with touch ID almost well first to test cause I write about
1:34:36these things. So I needed to own one and now I keep it attached all the time,
1:34:40even though it's not my primary keyboard because I use touch ID on my Mac all
1:34:44the time and it's such a delight compared to passwords or reducing security
1:34:49levels that you know,
1:34:50I'm using touch ID on my non laptop Mac for that purpose. I know Mac,
1:34:55iMac users have had that option all along, but I specifically bought it.
1:34:59But I think the feature works really well. I think it's,
1:35:01I think the way it's presented, especially in like an in browser is good.
1:35:04I have never, I've never had,
1:35:06you said that and I'm thinking of all the iCloud sync problems I've had with
1:35:10things like photos or calendar events,
1:35:12things where I've had to go and do weird, you know,
1:35:14resets and were have had no explanation why things were wrong for weeks.
1:35:18I've never, that I can recall, have an iCloud key chain sync issue.
1:35:23And I think it's got a different pathway.
1:35:25So I'm sure the data is backed up at iCloud in this secured fashion.
1:35:29But my belief is, I remember this is in the security document or not,
1:35:33the iCloud security document.
1:35:34I believe that it's kind of a push to your devices as opposed to like a sync
1:35:39where it kind of accumulates it and then your devices kind of pole and whatever.
1:35:43I think iCloud key chain items are essentially device to device synced with
1:35:48iCloud as the conduit. And maybe describing that wrong,
1:35:51but it does seem like it is more,
1:35:52more rapidly done and more accurately done than any thing else I've ever had
1:35:56trouble with on iCloud.
1:35:57Yeah, I, I, that's, you know, everybody's experience is anecdotal, right?
1:36:02But yeah, but some things to me sync better than others.
1:36:06I also find that Apple notes has been the modern era of Apple notes ever since
1:36:11they moved past I map as the backend sinking,
1:36:16which was terrible to be honest. I mean,
1:36:18I kind of understand why they did it because it was sort of a shortcut to get
1:36:22sinking of some sort. But when,
1:36:25when they switched to a native iCloud set of APIs for sinking your notes,
1:36:30it's been rock solid for me. I mean, really, really good.
1:36:36I kind of get the feeling, you know, in a very obvious way,
1:36:39the way that you would think, Hey,
1:36:40I would kind of hope that the iCloud key chain team is extra careful and is
1:36:45there, you know, puts an even higher priority on not making mistakes,
1:36:52even at the expense of moving slower year over year. Right. So,
1:36:59yeah, you know, it's fewer new features move slower, but instead of,
1:37:05you know, take the old carpenters adage of measure twice, cut once.
1:37:08Maybe with something like iCloud cloud key chain,
1:37:11you measure 10 times and cut once.
1:37:13I learned something amazing about Russia a few decades ago from a Russian friend
1:37:17at the time. I said, measure twice, cut once. He said, Oh, he said, in Russia,
1:37:21we say measure seven times and cut once. And I said, Oh wow.
1:37:24He said everything is sevens. And I was like, that taught me a lot.
1:37:27The other thing is, you know, this is the neat feature, right?
1:37:29Is that because it's integrated and this is probably why you do this.
1:37:32It's why I'm doing it now as well as I trust, I trust what Apple's doing.
1:37:36I believe their security documentation.
1:37:37I haven't had negative experiences and iCloud key chain has worked solidly for
1:37:41me all these years for regular passwords.
1:37:44I've been using one password for many years also, and I still,
1:37:46I use them both in different, slightly different ways, kind of integrated.
1:37:50But it's the,
1:37:51it shows you the QR code when you're doing the two factor enrollment and you
1:37:55hold down, you know,
1:37:57you press and hold on it on a touch device or you right click on it in Safari.
1:38:01And it says, add as verification code. And that's your setup. I mean, come on.
1:38:05That's, that's the kind of frictionless integration you want. And you're like,
1:38:09well, why wouldn't I do that? Because now I'm there. There's issues.
1:38:12People worry about out of band issues as well. Like, is this protected enough?
1:38:16The classic one that comes up that I get contacted by people about regularly and
1:38:21I've documented in my books is that when you do two factor, I mean,
1:38:25it's funny that Apple isn't, hasn't adopted TOTPs for its own site.
1:38:28It's using its own proprietary but very high security system that is kind of a
1:38:33two step authentication in order to get a number. Right.
1:38:36But when you do a login with a regular username and password,
1:38:40and then it gives you the prompt and it's like, Hey, prove who you are here.
1:38:45You need to enter this TOTP. Is this your location? And then what your device,
1:38:48one of your devices, you enter the code, right? All that's good.
1:38:50You want to trust this device. People have said to me, well,
1:38:53why should I trust entering a code into the same browser?
1:38:57Like if I'm on my machine or that the machine is on,
1:38:59so I'm on a browser on my Mac and the Mac produces the code that Apple sent.
1:39:04And it's like, because it's not in the same band path,
1:39:06I'm not on my browser and the browser is presenting me my code.
1:39:10I'm on the browser and a separate Apple system that is device again,
1:39:15device locked like this is your Apple ID account logged into that Mac through a
1:39:19verified connection that you've already done two factor authentication on for
1:39:23iCloud and Apple ID on your system.
1:39:26That pathway is being used exclusively over secure transport to present that
1:39:31code to you. So it's trustworthy because it's not in browser.
1:39:35And that's the same thing for the verification code.
1:39:38You're in Safari and your verification codes in Safari,
1:39:41but there's not a pathway where a website can pull that verification code out as
1:39:45essentially separate sandbox entities that don't talk to each other.
1:39:49Yeah. You're the one who explained this to me a few years ago and I'll always
1:39:53appreciate it. And I'm still not sure I entirely understand it to be honest,
1:39:57but I trust it at this point,
1:39:58but I'll bet everybody listening to the show has had family members say to them,
1:40:03how, how does this make sense when I'm logging in? I'm on my, I'm on this,
1:40:08I'm on, I'm on my Mac book and I'm logging into an Apple website.
1:40:12And to confirm I am who I am,
1:40:15it's the same Mac book saying, is this a login that you want to approve?
1:40:20But it's, it is, I guess the other, the flip side of the coin is that it is the,
1:40:25the sort of counterintuitive way that,
1:40:29that Apple's privacy initiatives are often in conflict with security
1:40:34initiatives. And where I'm going with that is that the browser is so private
1:40:40that the browser doesn't tell the website, this is a known,
1:40:46this is the device I'm on, right? This unique identifier,
1:40:50for this Mac book. No,
1:40:52that you don't want your browser to give a unique identifier for your hardware
1:40:57to any website, whether it's Apple's or Google's. But so like you said,
1:41:01it's out of band of the communication of your browser to apple.com.
1:41:06But when Apple says, okay,
1:41:09we'll send a ping to all of your known devices that we trust and that you've
1:41:13vouched for,
1:41:14which includes the Mac book you're on to verify that this is right,
1:41:18then you can just do it right on your Mac book. And once you understand that,
1:41:21that it's sort of an entirely different communication channel between apple,
1:41:26you know, it's your browser is not your device,
1:41:31but that confirmation is your device saying, yes,
1:41:34this trusted device is saying that this is okay.
1:41:37It's because the browser to, to regular people, right?
1:41:41The browser and your operating system appear to be monolithic.
1:41:44They're all right. Same thing. Apple doesn't trust the browser.
1:41:47But it trusts your device. So it's weird when it's like, well,
1:41:50if you don't trust my browser, why are you trusting this? It's like, ah,
1:41:53they're really, the browser's untrustworthy. So you could be phished.
1:41:56And the thing to remember is it's not the Safari or any other browser,
1:42:01whatever, but it's not Safari prompting you with that map that says,
1:42:06oh, there's a login from somewhere. That's the system doing it,
1:42:10which is out of it.
1:42:11This is with advanced data protection, right? The newest thing,
1:42:15which I think is super cool.
1:42:16I assumed when I saw the first press release about it, oh,
1:42:19you won't be able to access your data on iCloud.com anymore because it's all
1:42:23going to be ended and encrypted. But no, Apple will let you do it. I don't know.
1:42:28I've turned over a test account. I turned ADP on it so I could test it.
1:42:31And you go to the website, iCloud.com and says, Hey, all your data,
1:42:35except your email contacts and calendar entries are protected by ADP.
1:42:39Do you want to access it? And if you say yes,
1:42:42it does push to one of your devices that lets you enter a key that they have
1:42:46then allows it to decrypt temporarily within the browser,
1:42:51the data that sent from iCloud. So the data is still encrypted at iCloud.
1:42:56It's sent to your browser,
1:42:57cached in your browser and decrypting your browser with that temporary key.
1:43:01And that is very clever. That's what one password does. For instance,
1:43:04with when you use one password.com to access your end to end encrypted stuff,
1:43:09it's never receiving the password. All the password access,
1:43:13all the password interaction is local to your browser cache.
1:43:16So it's never transmitted. And so I thought, you know, so that I knew,
1:43:19one password was doing that,
1:43:20but so Apple has found that trustworthy enough apparently that they're willing
1:43:24to let you do that. So if you enable ADP, which I think is, you know,
1:43:28there's plus pros and cons,
1:43:30but it's could be very good as just an extra level of privacy and security.
1:43:33Then you are not excluded from using iCloud.com for data for those newly
1:43:38protected categories, which is cool.
1:43:41But counterintuitive.
1:43:43Yeah. And, and you could also, I don't, did you notice this little,
1:43:45there's like a little switch too.
1:43:47You can also now if you choose whether or not you have ADP and turned on,
1:43:51you can separately choose in, in iOS six, let's do all the numbers, right?
1:43:55It's Mac, MacOS 13.4, 13.1 Ventura,
1:43:59Iowa's 16.2 iPad was 16.2.
1:44:02So you have an option for ADP in the U S or you're at any of those versions
1:44:06worldwide.
1:44:07You can now disable iCloud.com access for your account.
1:44:11And that's separate from ADP.
1:44:14Yeah. It's a little subtle thing. I noticed it. I was like, wait, what is this?
1:44:17And it's so you can have the normal encryption where some of your stuff is
1:44:20encrypted at rest and some end to end like it is for almost everybody today.
1:44:24And you're like,
1:44:25I don't want to expose a phishing risk or any other risk to iCloud.com so I'm
1:44:30just going to turn that off. And if you turn it off, you can turn it back on.
1:44:33But if you can only do that from devices, you can't do it from a website.
1:44:36So it's a, it's a different security choice, but it's an interesting one.
1:44:40Yeah. It doesn't disable any sinking either.
1:44:42Yeah.
1:44:43And the one thing I can think of that that would do is it puts your device
1:44:48security in front of everything, right? So all of your Apple devices have,
1:44:52you know, face ID or a passcode or your Mac has a password and touch ID,
1:44:57but there's no way to get into anything without getting into the device first.
1:45:03Whereas iCloud,
1:45:05you can use a Apple ID and a password and then a phone number.
1:45:10You can have use your backup because Apple is still letting you do backup SMS
1:45:14and automated voice calls. So if somebody were to, I mean, it's, you know,
1:45:17it's a lot of steps, but if someone were to hijack a SIM, for instance,
1:45:21at a cell phone company,
1:45:22then they'd still,
1:45:23they might be able to crack your iCloud through iCloud.com access.
1:45:27But with this method, someone could,
1:45:30I mean, they could log into certain services without a device because they can
1:45:35still use an SMS method, but it wouldn't provide them the same amount of control.
1:45:38Yeah. I think that, you know,
1:45:40for most people I certainly have,
1:45:41I'm going to leave iCloud.com access for me on and I think for most people
1:45:46that's right, but you can, you know,
1:45:47it's not too hard to squint your eyes and see how it's more secure to just turn
1:45:51that off if you're genuinely paranoid or if you actually suspect that you're
1:45:56more likely to be attacked.
1:45:59Apple's now doing this tiered thing. You've got lockdown mode at the top.
1:46:02You've got the new iMessage feature that'll roll out this year that warns you of
1:46:06potential that there are people have intercepted or they have sniffers in the
1:46:09middle of an iMessage conversation.
1:46:11There's iMessage out of band confirmation for identity coming in 2023.
1:46:15That's the top. Then you have ADP below that.
1:46:18And then below that is iCloud.com access on or off.
1:46:22And below that is fundamental at rest device based security with some elements
1:46:27for iCloud syncing being end to end encrypted besides those data parts.
1:46:30So it's a good, good layer of cake that's been built now.
1:46:33It still makes me laugh thinking back to the original iPhone and it was just
1:46:39slide to unlock. Yes. Oh, wait, no password. No passcode, right?
1:46:44Well, you could set a password, I believe, right? But it wasn't,
1:46:47it wasn't part of the golden. This is the way,
1:46:50this is the way we intend you to use the device.
1:46:53And I certainly didn't have a passcode on my iPhone for a couple of years.
1:46:56No, cause slide to unlock was way too cool. It was. And then,
1:47:01but once you slid to unlock, you just had all my email, had all your messages.
1:47:05Sure. All right.
1:47:07Let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor of the day.
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1:49:03well, let me talk about this.
1:49:05I want to talk a little bit about Twitter and Mastodon because I know people are
1:49:09tired of talking about Twitter and Musk. I'm tired of it too, but it's so,
1:49:12it's fascinating. Here, parlaying off our security discussion.
1:49:18So I've been a Twitter blue subscriber for most of the year.
1:49:22I think it came out earlier in 2022 is a $3 a month product that I pay happily
1:49:27paid for to get the top articles feature.
1:49:30I like the being able to have 30 seconds to revert your thing before it went
1:49:36out.
1:49:37I forgot that that was, I did not realize that was a Twitter blue feature,
1:49:41even though, so it's like,
1:49:43I still do most of my Twitter use from tweet bot,
1:49:47so I don't in the third party doesn't have it,
1:49:49but I use the first party app enough that I, you know,
1:49:53I've seen that feature editing tweets is only a Twitter blue feature.
1:49:58The top articles feature is it's like nuzzle used to be,
1:50:01but basically it's a very simple concept. And, and to me,
1:50:06Twitter is at its best when its features are very easily explained.
1:50:11But the basic idea is all the people who you follow you,
1:50:15the people you've chosen to follow it. If,
1:50:18if a number of the people you follow have all tweeted links to the same article
1:50:23that becomes one of the top articles of the day.
1:50:27And you can just go to this page or tab in the app and just see
1:50:31the articles across the web that are the most linked
1:50:37to by the people you choose to follow on Twitter.
1:50:40And then they have a second tab,
1:50:41which is sort of the second order version of that,
1:50:46where the people who you follow,
1:50:49who they follow their top articles.
1:50:52And they had Twitter had that relationship with paywall publication. Yeah.
1:50:56So many things you could read through Twitter blue. Yeah.
1:50:59You would have needed a subscription. So yeah,
1:51:01it was my favorite thing since nuzzle also is the closest thing.
1:51:03And nuzzle to me was a little bit better at
1:51:07populating the list and nuzzle.
1:51:12One reason for me as a news junkie is that with nuzzle, you could set it to like,
1:51:16three hours instead of 24 hours.
1:51:18Twitter's version is a little bit simpler and it's just,
1:51:21you don't get that kind of granularity,
1:51:23but more than made up for the fact that Twitter,
1:51:27unlike nuzzle has these partnership deals with a lot of websites where you can
1:51:32burst through paywalls and read,
1:51:34read these articles without being a subscriber. Great feature.
1:51:38I went through this thing. It seems like this is,
1:51:41I don't know if it's Apple's fault or Twitter's fault, but I,
1:51:44I paid for it through the iOS app.
1:51:46So it was going through my iCloud or iTunes account, whatever you want to call
1:51:50it to 99 a month. And I don't know,
1:51:54earlier in December I started getting some kind of error.
1:51:59It was inconsistent and it was something,
1:52:01something that my payment method had expired and it didn't
1:52:05make any sense to me because I knew that my iCloud,
1:52:09I knew that my iTunes credit card was not expired.
1:52:13It's the credit card I have on my iCloud account is, or iTunes account,
1:52:17whatever you want to call it.
1:52:18It's actually an Apple card and I know that the expiration date is,
1:52:22I don't know, a year or two in the future,
1:52:24but if any card is going to give me a proper warning when it
1:52:29expires, it's an Apple card. Right. Uh,
1:52:32but I think what really happened is that now that under Elon Musk,
1:52:37the new Twitter blue, which includes verification check Mark,
1:52:42which I, I have, but I didn't even ask for,
1:52:45and I honestly don't care about, I honestly,
1:52:48you could take away the blue check Mark on my at Gruber account and I really
1:52:52don't care. That's not why I'm, I want to pay for it.
1:52:55But I think what happened is now that the new version of Twitter blue is
1:52:59$8 a month.
1:53:00If you pay Twitter directly on their website and $11 a month through the app
1:53:05to account for the 30% cut that Apple takes. And for a while,
1:53:10it seemed like maybe they'd grandfathered in those of us who'd been paying $3 a
1:53:15month. But I think they, I think they wanted, I think they messily very,
1:53:20can you believe it under Elon Musk that something was slapdash and haphazard
1:53:25and not entirely, but I think that basically they,
1:53:30they wanted to cut all of us off who were paying $3 a month and make us pay
1:53:34eight or $11 a month.
1:53:36But the error message was about the payment credentials being expired,
1:53:41which they probably just dumped all the tokens,
1:53:44the receipt tokens from their database and let it just error out to annoy people
1:53:48like us. I, I let mine lapse before that a little bit before that.
1:53:53Well, I'm so,
1:53:54but I'm so keen on the top articles feature that I wanted to resubscribe.
1:53:59I was like, okay, I'll resubscribe. I don't know if you saw this.
1:54:02I tweeted it the other day, but they won't let me, they won't let me sign up.
1:54:07I want to give Twitter $11 a month cause I'd actually would rather pay for it
1:54:11through iTunes and no better control, better control. I'll pay,
1:54:15I'll pay three more dollars a month knowing that I can cancel at any time
1:54:20through iTunes than to, especially at this point,
1:54:23trust Twitter with my credit card and a recurring subscription.
1:54:26I would like to pay $11 a month to them for this and they won't let me
1:54:31because the phone number I have associated with my Twitter account is from an
1:54:36unsupported carrier. And now what that means now,
1:54:39the carrier in question is Google voice. Oh, Oh now,
1:54:44and I tweeted about it and people are like, well,
1:54:46that's like a security thing cause lots of scammers sign up for Google voices
1:54:49free. You get a phone number for free and crying out.
1:54:53But the reason I use a Google voice account,
1:54:56I use this Google voice account for any,
1:55:00pretty much anything that only supports SMS as a second factor,
1:55:05which is actually not very secure and not, not, you know,
1:55:08yeah. Cause you can get the codes via email, right? Well, and you can also log in.
1:55:12And I, and I do think carriers, you know,
1:55:15especially the big ones like Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile have,
1:55:20I think it certainly anecdotally,
1:55:23it seems like SIM hijacking is less of a thing that they've, you know,
1:55:28but I still don't trust I'm on Verizon. I've been on Verizon for a while.
1:55:31I don't,
1:55:32I trust Google with my main Google account security way more than I
1:55:37trust Verizon and way more than I trust somebody. I think,
1:55:41I honestly don't see how it's feasible that somebody could hijack my Google
1:55:46account.
1:55:46And whereas I don't necessarily trust that somebody who specifically wanted to
1:55:51target me, John Gruber, the daring fireball guy who has, you know,
1:55:56300,000 followers on Twitter, somebody could go into a Verizon store and say,
1:56:01I'm John Gruber and I, you know, this is my phone number and you know,
1:56:04it's not that hard to get my personal cell phone number. I lost my, you know,
1:56:08I need a new SIM card.
1:56:09I trust Google more than I trust Verizon with that even though I more or less
1:56:13trust Verizon, but I,
1:56:14All the carriers put ID, the possibility,
1:56:18but not requirement for an ID code to protect that.
1:56:20And so if you don't have an ID code set on your, your wireless account,
1:56:25then that's possible. Although they're having stories of people,
1:56:27also social engineering around the requirement for an ID.
1:56:31But I think that's why the incidents has gone down. It's also cause you know,
1:56:34Bitcoin is worth less. So people have less interest in hacking most people.
1:56:38But I think the ID thing was enough of a deterrent that it became less low
1:56:42hanging fruit. But I think also if you went in with a,
1:56:44someone went in with a faked bill and a faked ID and said they were John Gruber
1:56:49and had your phone number, they might still be able to talk somebody into it.
1:56:51That's not, not implausible.
1:56:54I just feel safer with my Google account. I do, you know,
1:56:57I have lots of complaints about Google's overall customer experience,
1:56:59but I think Google's account security is top notch. And if you have to,
1:57:03if I have to use SMS as a second factor,
1:57:06I always use my Google voice account if possible.
1:57:09And I do have my Google voice account set up to forward all text
1:57:14messages to my main email. So
1:57:18when I do, when, when they do text me, quote unquote,
1:57:23text me a, a six digit code,
1:57:26all I have to do is look at my email and it's right there. And you know,
1:57:31it's just as easy as checking it from an SMS message, super frustrating.
1:57:35And it's so funny because it's one of the times where I've run into the,
1:57:39and I hate to, I tried never to use the word fan boy,
1:57:43but I can't think of a better term. The,
1:57:45the Elon Musk fan boys who took the, well,
1:57:49of course they don't allow Google voice. It's, you know,
1:57:52it's keeps the scammers out. Well then how come I use my Google voice number,
1:57:57with everything else with no problem and I'm not hacked.
1:58:01And I, to me, it's just, it's just a sign of slips,
1:58:06slipshottedness at, at Twitter. Very frustrating to me.
1:58:10You know, John,
1:58:10I didn't see your tweet cause I haven't been using Twitter since November 20th.
1:58:13That's I ain't going,
1:58:14I ain't going back unless there's some big changes over there. And you know me,
1:58:18I have like Twitter poisoning. Like you could,
1:58:20you could take a blood sample from me and I'm above 0.08 Twitter percentage at
1:58:24any given Twitter C or something.
1:58:26We're active alcohol content and I just, I just, you know,
1:58:29I just said I can't be on this service. I mean,
1:58:32I left Facebook when I felt like they were enabling genocide and I left a couple
1:58:36of years ago. I was like, that's it. And I miss people.
1:58:39I miss Twitter as a social mechanism and,
1:58:42but I'm benefiting from the fact that there's a land of refugees that's polite
1:58:46and kind and every everything is chirping birds and rainbows for this minute.
1:58:50And the mastodon and the Fediverse have been pretty good.
1:58:53And I'll give you one stat, which is, I had almost 29,000 followers on Twitter,
1:58:57which I have no idea why because my Twitter handle has never really been
1:59:01associated with any media property. So it is all organic. Like somehow,
1:59:05I feel like I've amassed it by putting peas in a pile on a table until they get
1:59:10rid of that pile. It gets really big one at a time. But I was like, this is great.
1:59:13You know, so when I do a project or something, I can announce it.
1:59:15And I get a little uptake from Twitter. It's been great for Kickstarter. It's,
1:59:18you know,
1:59:19it's always like I'm looking for a place for good conversation to learn about
1:59:22things, to hear voices I don't hear otherwise,
1:59:24to hear some major political and intellectual figures discuss stuff where they're
1:59:29talking more freely and, you know, and for, you know, to,
1:59:32to talk to colleagues and friends and so forth. Right. So, and, but,
1:59:35but also projects have always been an important part of it.
1:59:37So now over at at Mastodon after, I don't know,
1:59:40six months of being a pretty good user over there and scraping my Twitter feeds
1:59:44to follow people on Mastodon. I have over 7,000 followers on Mastodon,
1:59:49or about 25%. And for me, that's a lot because they're,
1:59:52A, they're all real people. It's not bots and it's not random.
1:59:55People are making a much more intentional effort to follow people. And so the,
1:59:58so there's great conversation there.
2:00:00And I really enjoying this burgeoning community and worried at what point it
2:00:04becomes untenable or moderation becomes an issue or balkanization or other
2:00:09things.
2:00:09But the real test will be the next time I launch a project and does anything
2:00:13happen? Do I launch something there? And on Twitter,
2:00:15it would have been like a third of the,
2:00:16of the purchases or interest or whatever come from Twitter.
2:00:21And with Mastodon it's like, you know, one person out of a thousand or something.
2:00:24Does a project fail because I'm not on Twitter anymore? So that, you know,
2:00:28that's like my professional concern,
2:00:31but personally I'm really enjoying being in a mellower place right now.
2:00:34For the record, I just looked it up, Glenn, your Twitter account,
2:00:39which is I guess you, we could call it hibernating, right?
2:00:42It's exactly which, and again, the Darth, I don't pass judgment.
2:00:47I really don't on anybody who deleted their Twitter account, you know?
2:00:52No, I, but if you asked my advice personally, I would say,
2:00:57just,
2:00:58just stop using it and let your old tweets stay there for,
2:01:02Oh, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, I totally agree. I don't want to,
2:01:06Elon could be a temporary phenomenon and I don't want to give up on Twitter
2:01:11because it's been valued professionally, personally, intellectually, artistically.
2:01:15It's been an incredible thing over its lifetime for me.
2:01:18And so I don't want to give up on Twitter as a thing.
2:01:22So people are talking about deleting it and what's been good is over a Mastodon,
2:01:25if somebody says, Oh, I'm deleting my Twitter. People are like, don't do it.
2:01:27Just put a thing, tell people where to find you and leave it in Amber.
2:01:32Make it read only for yourself. But if you delete it,
2:01:34then your handle frees up and your history is lost. And you know, you're not,
2:01:38you're not helping Elon by keeping an active account that you're not using if
2:01:42that's your concern,
2:01:43but you're helping yourself by making sure you're not giving up your identity
2:01:47and your, and what you've said and all the rest of it.
2:01:49Yeah. And as much as most of us has spent most of the last 16 years,
2:01:53more or less dicking or just, just screwing around on Twitter.
2:01:57Some of our tweets are worth referencing, you know, and it's good to keep up.
2:02:02Again, no, if, if you're, you know, I, I, I keep saying,
2:02:06I'm not passing judgment. I guess I am mildly where I would,
2:02:09I would prefer people to leave their Twitter accounts up and just stop using
2:02:14them. But I do, I,
2:02:15I'm not mad at you if you deleted your account because I get it,
2:02:18but I was going to make fun of you for how many tweets you posted.
2:02:23I looked it up and the Glen F Twitter account finished, or, you know,
2:02:27if it is finished, at least on hiatus with 117,447
2:02:32tweets.
2:02:33No, sorry. Sorry, John. There's a missing piece,
2:02:35which is I deleted all my tweets from before 2018.
2:02:37Oh, then no wonder it makes sense.
2:02:40Yeah. There's like a half a million. And the reason was people were, yeah,
2:02:43so I'm honest about that. I've posted times.
2:02:46I first did below it before 2018 and later before 2019 because I used to use
2:02:51Twitter more like IRC, right? Especially the early days.
2:02:54And then there was that you remember there's an extended point where anything
2:02:57you said was being used, was being harvested by,
2:03:00and especially with gamer gate and other stuff. There was a point where I'm like,
2:03:04I am just going to get rid of it because otherwise I have to go through a half a
2:03:08million tweets and figure out if there's something that can be misconstrued or,
2:03:11you know, this is what happened to not to defend.
2:03:13I don't want to read open bean dad gate, but that's what happened to John Roderick.
2:03:17It's not that John Roderick was starving his child.
2:03:20He was telling a funny story and people went, Oh, this guy's a terrible father.
2:03:24Let's make him the main character today and went insane. And it was, you know,
2:03:27he's a storyteller. A but B people went back to find old bad tweets.
2:03:32And what they found was he said things sarcastically that out of context sounded
2:03:36like he was horrible and he's, he's not a horrible person. I don't, you know,
2:03:40I mean, we all know people in comedies, a Seattleite,
2:03:42it's he said things that maybe were too in a particular way.
2:03:46If you read them sounded more negative than they were,
2:03:48but they're absolutely in keeping with this sort of sarcastic tone.
2:03:52So if you read them in sequence, you'd be like, Oh, this is a joke. I get it.
2:03:55That's funny. He's making fun of those people. So at some point I'm like,
2:03:58I do not need to spend the rest of my life dealing with things that I said in an
2:04:02unguarded fashion. So I'm just going to delete them all. So I probably had,
2:04:06like I said, at least half a million tweets that aren't on that number.
2:04:09So this, that, thank God, because I looked it up my, my,
2:04:13my account with, and I've never, I've never done a mass deletion.
2:04:17I'm at 85,048 tweets. And I was like, wait, I'm in the ballpark of Glenn.
2:04:21Why am I making fun of him? Yeah. All right.
2:04:24No, I did a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood when I hit 500,000 and raised a few
2:04:27thousand dollars from somebody. And I let someone, I was like,
2:04:30you can be my 500,000th tweet. Tell me what to tell to tweet.
2:04:34And then I think they didn't or something, but they still did any of the money.
2:04:37So that was, that was, there was a point when I hit that number.
2:04:39I've been, I signed up for Mastodon in 2018.
2:04:43I've been talking about it the last few episodes of the show,
2:04:45but the more I'm using it,
2:04:48the more happy I am with it.
2:04:50And the more I'm like my skepticism is fading away and all the better.
2:04:55The ivory beta, right?
2:04:57I do have the ivory beta from TapBots.
2:05:00I mean, I just got in recently and I,
2:05:03I've been using different Mastodon clients like Mammoth and the Mastodon,
2:05:07the branded one and the, you know, and the website interface and all that.
2:05:10And I got ivory and I was like, Oh yeah. I mean, no, those are terrible.
2:05:14They weren't really meant for this kind of volume. And,
2:05:16and there's all kinds of things that, you know,
2:05:19Mastodon is evolving super rapidly. It's open source. There's people, you know,
2:05:22working on checking in a bazillion new features and ideas and improving things.
2:05:26So it's going to evolve super fast,
2:05:28but these apps evolve less rapidly than the code base. So that said,
2:05:32I started using ivory and I'm like, Oh yeah,
2:05:35this is the warm hot tub that I've been looking for instead of the ice cold
2:05:39bath.
2:05:40I do not mean to, I, and I get it.
2:05:42I don't know if they've filled up the entire 10,000 test flight
2:05:47capability yet, but I know that when TapBots opened it up,
2:05:51I think it was a couple of days before Christmas,
2:05:53they opened up like another thousand slots and they said when they were going to
2:05:57do it. And I think the thousand slots seriously went like 15 seconds. Yeah.
2:06:01I think they have multiple, I don't know if they can permission.
2:06:04I think they have multiple 10,000 slot things are doing something and they,
2:06:09I think it was 10,014. No, that must not be right. It must be a thousand,
2:06:13but it, you know, it's an out, it's a 0.1 alpha folks. It's not, it's, well,
2:06:18they're doing it, but they're, they're,
2:06:19they're rapidly progressing towards something that I think that they can ship as
2:06:22a 1.0. It's very, I think it's surprisingly close. And I,
2:06:26and I think, you know, I,
2:06:30maybe I'll have the TapBot guys on.
2:06:32I would actually be enjoyable for me to talk about this with them.
2:06:34But I think though that years ago they abstracted
2:06:39out the Twitter specific-ness of Tweetbots in the app.
2:06:43Remember app.net, which was ahead of the app.net. I did too.
2:06:47And it was ahead of its time,
2:06:49but in anticipation of app.net possibly becoming a thing,
2:06:53Tweetbots architecture was sort of abstracted away from being,
2:06:59assuming that it was Twitter specific.
2:07:02And that obviously was to their benefit to prepare for making a
2:07:07Mastodon client. They can't,
2:07:09my understanding of the Twitter PI rules is that
2:07:14any third party Twitter client,
2:07:17and everybody knows from years ago that Twitter has gotten as of 2018,
2:07:22kind of funny about third party clients. And I, I'm still not,
2:07:26even with Elon Musk,
2:07:27I'm not entirely convinced that they're going to,
2:07:30I wouldn't be surprised if by the time this episode airs, if you know,
2:07:33somebody kicks the plug out of the wall on the API server, right?
2:07:37But I, they can't,
2:07:39the rules of the Twitter API for third party clients is that you're not allowed
2:07:44to integrate with others competing services.
2:07:47So a Tweetbot or Twitterrific can't build in
2:07:52Mastodon support in the same app because that's a vice.
2:07:55So they have to make a separate app as opposed to the
2:08:00actual Fediverse of Mastodon and anything else that uses these open
2:08:05protocols, right? Which, you know, Mastodon is truly in the spirit of the open web.
2:08:10And if there's or like Matt and Reese's micro dot blog,
2:08:14which is not Mastodon, but which uses and talks to the same API's.
2:08:19So micro dot blog, if you're logged in,
2:08:21you can follow people on a Mastodon site and get them into your micro dot blog
2:08:26feed.
2:08:27I saw a chart the other day. Someone's like, look,
2:08:29if you want to know what the Fediverse is,
2:08:30and reason reason some of us keep harping on about it is, you know,
2:08:33the Fediverse is not Mastodon,
2:08:34but by that we don't just mean that there's something like Mastodon is too
2:08:38limiting or it's a name of a project. They said,
2:08:41here's what it really looks like.
2:08:42And they posted one of those things that are usually horrifying because they're
2:08:45like, here's what the the ad services universe looks like.
2:08:48And there's 4,700 companies occupying niches. Instead,
2:08:52this was like 50 projects all kind of,
2:08:55and they're all open source and some may have commercial aspect,
2:08:58but they're all, you know,
2:08:59they're all basically people trying to make this thing happen in different ways.
2:09:02And so, you know, Matt and Reese's microblog.org is in there and microblog,
2:09:05I'm sorry, I just said this thing wrong. Anyway,
2:09:07my commitment and recess thing is in there and Mastodon, but then they were like,
2:09:10again, like 48 other things, not all of which were about microblogging.
2:09:14Some are different aspects of services interaction and how they all kind of fit.
2:09:18And I was like, Oh, this is,
2:09:20this is going to be exciting because we haven't even scratched the surface of a
2:09:24mass usage in any one of those areas.
2:09:27So this could actually cause a blossoming of all of these related Fediverse
2:09:30things that we haven't even, you know,
2:09:32haven't even risen to consciousness because we're not switching over from a
2:09:35failing or faltering, whatever you want to call it, you know,
2:09:38major social network. They have all different purposes.
2:09:41Yeah. The note that I jotted to myself a day or two ago in anticipation of
2:09:46talking to you about it is that what's occurred to me,
2:09:48the more I'm using ivory and Mastodon and less
2:09:53using tweet bot and Twitter is that Mastodon
2:09:57just has the feeling of being a frontier. And,
2:10:03and I'm suddenly recalling now deep in middle age,
2:10:07how comfortable I am on the frontier of, of,
2:10:11of new things like this. Right. Yeah. You know,
2:10:14and going all the way back to getting on the internet
2:10:19at the very beginning in the days when usenet was the thing,
2:10:23you know, it, I didn't,
2:10:25the whole thing seems so new that it didn't even occur to me to think of it as a
2:10:30frontier because it was so obviously a frontier and BBSs, right.
2:10:34Which weren't really connected to the internet, but it,
2:10:37it all felt new and exciting and,
2:10:40and things were happening where it's like, Oh man, all of a sudden,
2:10:44a 14,
2:10:45four modem is actually something I can afford.
2:10:48And now I can download binaries at a reasonable speed from the BBS.
2:10:53And it doesn't take, you know,
2:10:55four hours to just download an app or a game or something that somebody shared.
2:11:00And just the, I don't know,
2:11:02it's exciting and fun to be somewhere where it's fluid
2:11:08and new and changing and evolving rapidly.
2:11:13And so far, everybody is just,
2:11:18it, it, it's just a good community spirit.
2:11:21Yeah. I, it's, it's not, I mean,
2:11:23it's resistant to a certain kind of jerk or
2:11:28troll. It's not immune to it obviously because of the instant based distribution.
2:11:32And because moderators,
2:11:34because they're not beholden to shareholders or other interests,
2:11:37they're sort of beholden to the users that they host or to nobody.
2:11:41They can make these independent decisions.
2:11:43And that's the fear of balkanization is moderation is a hard problem.
2:11:47It's very hard at scale. It's very easy to piss people off.
2:11:51And it's also extremely easy to take positions that are at odds with,
2:11:55you know,
2:11:56some or most of the people on the instance you're running. So that's,
2:11:59I know that's a big fear if you read, you know,
2:12:00you read tech dirt like I do, I'm sure. And Mike Masnick just, I mean,
2:12:03he and his colleagues there write tremendously good things about why moderation
2:12:08scale is difficult and their fears about that relative to Mastodon plus some
2:12:13liability issues. EFF has written a great roundup of things.
2:12:16EFF about if you're a Mastodon, I'm saying EFF anyway, there's a,
2:12:20there's a good article floating around now. I'm being erratic about if you're,
2:12:24if you're a Mastodon host,
2:12:26what it means for you in terms of making sure you comply with the MCA.
2:12:29If you run an instance that is and have other people on it,
2:12:32like how you comply with the MCA rules and which are relatively easy to comply
2:12:36with. But if you don't, you could wind up in a pickle if somebody, you know,
2:12:40wanted to post something that could be problematic and someone can't reach you
2:12:44and so forth. So there are some risks, but I think, you know, this is,
2:12:49you've seen this, I'm sure the last week or so there's been a quote,
2:12:52tweet turmoil raging on Mastodon because Mastodon does not offer a quote,
2:12:57tweet function, a quote, toot function or whatever we're going to call it.
2:13:00This was my next topic. My, my final thing to ask you about. So explain,
2:13:06explain to people who aren't sure what the controversy is.
2:13:08So, so on Twitter, when Twitter news quote tweeting,
2:13:11before quote tweet existed as a thing on Twitter, people did it vernacularly.
2:13:15You would copy a URL and you'd say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
2:13:17my opinion and paste it in, or you just paste in the URL sometimes. I mean,
2:13:21I had a, sorry, there was a retweet feature for a long time. So retweet,
2:13:25you just select it.
2:13:26But if you wanted to comment on or add an image or do anything,
2:13:29you would just make a new message and paste in the Twitter URL.
2:13:32And depending on your client or whatever,
2:13:34it would show the previous URL in line.
2:13:36Then Twitter created that as an actual feature.
2:13:38So you could quote tweet and it would sort of structurally support it.
2:13:42But it was designed in such a way that even people who like, you couldn't,
2:13:45you couldn't quote, tweet restricted accounts,
2:13:47but there were other ways in which like if you were blocked from seeing somebody,
2:13:50you could see there a quoted tweet version of it and there were abuse vectors
2:13:55and so forth. There's a, the huge debate raging is,
2:13:58so Mastodon has not been designed with a quote tweet feature.
2:14:01And that's partly because, you know,
2:14:03each Mastodon message is essentially hosted on the instance on which you're
2:14:08located. And there's like 4,000 Mastodon instances now,
2:14:11at least or last time I checked. So, you know, when you're retweeting something,
2:14:15it's all centralized. When you're re-masted, you're re,
2:14:18you're re boosting something or whatever you would call it in the Mastodon world.
2:14:21It's a question of how they gets drawn in and, and structured.
2:14:24So there's apparently some code in the Mastodon project that would enable a form
2:14:29of re boosting and it's not rolled out. And there's a structural issue,
2:14:33which is that some people maintain that retweeting is a very,
2:14:37or sort of quote tweeting, I should say specifically has,
2:14:40is an easy way to brigade people and people who are,
2:14:42and so it's not like it's exclusively by any means used for that purpose,
2:14:46but people feel like it's a very easy way to point a lot of people at somebody
2:14:50who said something and create main characters of the day. Like the main,
2:14:54you know, quote Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day, I love his stuff.
2:14:58He's got a podcast, Content Minds. And, and when he talks about Twitter,
2:15:02the main character of the day or the internet's main, you know,
2:15:05main character, whatever, that is a flaw of Twitter, not a feature, right?
2:15:09We shouldn't have a Bean Dab. We shouldn't have a Has She Landed,
2:15:11Has Justine Landed yet?
2:15:12Like all these things typically target people with the wrong kind of attention.
2:15:16It's rarely solitary. It's almost always an exaggerated character, whatever.
2:15:21So Mastodon is not designed with that feature yet. It's possible to add it.
2:15:25It could be added.
2:15:25And the raging debate is whether Mastodon is failing as a service,
2:15:31even though it's still, you know,
2:15:32just getting all this usage is a few years old because it isn't offering quote
2:15:35tweeting and whether there's a backlash where people are like,
2:15:38we never want to add it or it has to be in such a way that an instance could
2:15:43turn it off so that somebody at another instance couldn't quote tweet someone an
2:15:47instance that had it disabled or it should be disabled on a message by message
2:15:51basis. So I think this is, the great part is this is vibrant,
2:15:54excellent discussion about abuse vectors and whether this could cause problems.
2:15:58And the downside is like, Oh God,
2:16:00we have our first like conversation that takes over the whole timeline.
2:16:03So I've been muting people selectively for like three days, right?
2:16:07This is built in muting and features Mastodon was designed with muting and
2:16:10blocking features that are really good. And I'm like,
2:16:12if people are going on and on about quote tweeting, I'm like,
2:16:15I'm going to mute them for three days and see if the fever passes because I
2:16:18don't care about it enough that I want every other message of my timeline to be
2:16:22talking about quote tweet. So at some level Mastodon has survived,
2:16:26has succeeded in becoming a mass medium because everyone is talking about the
2:16:30same thing. Yeah, it's,
2:16:33I'm of the opinion that don't think quote tweeting is
2:16:37inherently problematic as a vector for,
2:16:41as you said, brigading.
2:16:42But I appreciate the fact
2:16:47that the Mastodon at a community level is being,
2:16:52the community is evolving from a conservative
2:16:57viewpoint on those issues. So I,
2:17:00I think that quote tweeting should be a Mastodon feature.
2:17:04I think it's too useful.
2:17:05I think the idea that it's inherently problematic in terms of the way
2:17:10that it can lead to pile-ons and dunking is overstayed,
2:17:14but I appreciate that they're,
2:17:16they're going from a let's be careful viewpoint going forward.
2:17:20And the reason though, I think it's futile to not have it
2:17:24is it's that, that line from Jurassic park,
2:17:30you know, that life will find a way, you know, like, like,
2:17:33like with the idea that, Oh, we're only going to have female dinosaurs.
2:17:37So therefore there will be no breeding out in the wild and, ah, you know,
2:17:40life finds a way something's going to happen and people find a way. Right.
2:17:45And it's the way that Twitter itself evolved, where even,
2:17:48even mentions at,
2:17:50at username mentions were a, a,
2:17:54an idiom that the users on Twitter came up with that did nothing
2:17:59in the API APIs. They weren't even hot links, you know, originally,
2:18:03it was just became a convention that Twitter users had,
2:18:07where I would say at Glen F and say something in response to a
2:18:12tweet of yours.
2:18:13And then the third party clients would pick up on those things through a search
2:18:18just for the string. It wasn't a magical feature.
2:18:21And retweeting started like that all sorts of almost everything on Twitter,
2:18:27yeah. Hashtags is probably the,
2:18:30maybe the best example where it wasn't a built-in feature of Twitter at all.
2:18:35It was just, well,
2:18:36here's something that you can do because it's just text in a tweet,
2:18:40just use the pound sign and put a string,
2:18:44a unique string of characters that is human readable after it.
2:18:47And then third party clients could do it. So without quote, tweeting,
2:18:52Mastodon clients would evolve to do it anyway. And I saw,
2:18:56I even saw in the discussion people are having where there's clients that are
2:19:00talking about doing things.
2:19:01And I think there's already people outside of the actual client software who
2:19:06ginned up their own solutions with scripting or shortcuts,
2:19:10where you take a screenshot of the tweet,
2:19:13you want to quote tweet and a link to
2:19:17the, or not tweet, but to whatever they call them, right?
2:19:21A Mastodon post, take a screenshot of it,
2:19:24get the URL that points to the original and then pre-populate a new
2:19:28post from your account with the URL to the original and a screenshot of the
2:19:33original. And then you can do your quote,
2:19:36tweeting and it's effectively a quote, you know,
2:19:38people are going to find a way to quote, tweet,
2:19:40whether it's a built-in function or not, but if they make it a built-in function,
2:19:44then they can do things like what you mentioned, where you could say,
2:19:49I would like to make this tweet unquote tweetable, because I don't,
2:19:53I don't want to hear from people about it.
2:19:54I realize that what I'm about to say people might think is controversial because
2:19:58you know, whatever the issue is, or I, you know, or you just don't want,
2:20:01you just don't want to be bothered with it. You could just say,
2:20:04make this one unquote tweetable,
2:20:06but as long as quote tweeting is a built-in feature,
2:20:09then there's not going to be any demand to build those work around features to
2:20:13get around it.
2:20:14I totally agree.
2:20:15And you saw Twitter even evolve where they were like,
2:20:17you could set who can reply to this tweet,
2:20:20which I thought was a great feature and underutilized. So, I mean,
2:20:23I love the idea. I love the idea that there's that massed on is coming out.
2:20:27I think structurally they're coming at it from a position of having learned from
2:20:31gamer gate and learn from Twitter and learn from mass abuse attacks.
2:20:34So the system as a whole seems to be designed for least harm
2:20:39as its starting point.
2:20:41And so anything that's added has to be fit within that framework. And so if,
2:20:44you know,
2:20:45maybe there's going to be six months of conversation about quote boosting or
2:20:48whatever, or maybe there'll be three weeks of it, but when it rolls out,
2:20:52I'm much more confident with it that it'll be a consensus driven thing that has
2:20:56more options. So like, even when you post a message in massed on,
2:21:00there's the quote, the content warning link,
2:21:02which some people just treat like a subject line, which is also fine.
2:21:05Some people ignore, there's a lot of debates about how that gets used. You know,
2:21:08should it be used to warn about racism or is racism something we should talk
2:21:11about openly without content warnings? You know, this is an interesting debate.
2:21:15It's good one to have. It's good one to expose.
2:21:17There's the sort of four levels of post visibility.
2:21:20You can post something that doesn't get indexed or isn't listed.
2:21:24And there's like a lot of really,
2:21:26or even you add an image and it presents you with this ability to even in the
2:21:31native, you know, the, the website based client, the web app,
2:21:33you can click and extract text through OCR from the image you've uploaded.
2:21:38So if you're posting a screenshot and I've been trying to really obsessively put
2:21:42at least some text into every image I post because it's a cultural norm among
2:21:47the early Western adopters.
2:21:49But I also think I like to do anything in which accessibility is incorporated by
2:21:53design. I want to support and uphold it. And it also, I think it makes you,
2:21:57I think it makes things better for everyone if you use accessibility features.
2:22:02So yeah, I mean, I think the community as it stands,
2:22:05even with millions of people onboarding has still vibrant but not seemingly
2:22:09horrible debates about the direction of it,
2:22:11but the direction will be set by people involved in an open source project that
2:22:15is, you know, it's got aspects of, you know, some people making decisions,
2:22:19but also a lot of consensus driven thing. And what's not underlying it is a,
2:22:23we have to increase engagement. We need more people posting every day.
2:22:26We need to squeeze more ads in. I don't think we've had anything like that.
2:22:30Maybe ever. That's really been driven in entirely by community needs,
2:22:34except maybe usenet. I mean, that's the last thing that's really like this,
2:22:37isn't it? Yeah, I think so. And I, you know,
2:22:39I was just reading how usenet is still a thing and you know, it, in fact,
2:22:44it's growing in some ways. I mean, it, it, I don't know.
2:22:48It's just a Mastodon is so clearly of the spirit of the open web.
2:22:52And it, it thrilling to me to see it take off.
2:22:56And I'm happy to say that my skepticism,
2:22:59my initial skepticism that it was going to be able to work or scale, um,
2:23:04it, you know, is wrong. I've never, I'm,
2:23:06it's one of those things where I'm happy to be wrong about,
2:23:08I hope it stays that way. I kind of feel,
2:23:11and this is one of those things that I hope doesn't sound elitist,
2:23:14but I kind of feel is fundamentally true that maybe having a
2:23:18slightly higher bar to sign up and get
2:23:23started compared to Twitter is for the better for,
2:23:28for those of us who are happy to step over that bar,
2:23:31that one service for
2:23:34300 million people like Twitter is, is two, you know,
2:23:40it's actually not good to be on a platform with 300 million other people.
2:23:44Well, someone could start an unfederated Mastodon that was instance that was,
2:23:48or not unfederated, but it could be loosely federated. Someone could have a,
2:23:51you know, not only fans, that's the porn thing. I'm sorry. What's the,
2:23:53what's the celebrity things, right? There's some celebrity services,
2:23:57but they could not, what's the one where you call in people,
2:24:00you can get a custom message, a custom video from somebody. Oh, what is that?
2:24:04Oh, that's a different kind of custom video. It's something I forgot,
2:24:09but that kind of thing, you know,
2:24:10someone could set up a Mastodon instance that's meant for a lot of people as very
2:24:15easy onboarding and it's designed to be a distributor of news and celebrity
2:24:20information and the celebrities all go there to post stuff because it's safe and
2:24:23maybe it's federated, but it's federated unit or actually,
2:24:26so celebrities tweets go out, but people are members of it,
2:24:29aren't federated out to the rest.
2:24:30So you could have 10 million people on a,
2:24:33on a server someplace doing mostly read only where,
2:24:36which is what most Twitter usage, I mean, of 300 million users on Twitter, you know,
2:24:40you've seen those big head long tail curves,
2:24:41a tiny fraction posts more than like a message a year.
2:24:44And most people use it in most people use Twitter in a way that you and I have
2:24:49no, you know, most people it's a reading mechanism.
2:24:52It's a reading medium with very little conversation and Mastodon is very much a
2:24:57conversation medium and the early people are very much talking.
2:25:00So that could evolve too for sure.
2:25:02Cameo is what you're thinking.
2:25:04Cameo. Thank you. Yeah.
2:25:06I was very, I was very, I have not paid for a cameos from anybody,
2:25:10but when Rudy Giuliani was on, I was very,
2:25:12I was very tempted to get, get, get,
2:25:15get some Rudy messages to a bunch of my friends.
2:25:17You don't want to get a Danny DeVito message for your birthday. Are you sure?
2:25:20No, I want to say I want to send other people, Rudy Giuliani.
2:25:23Oh, that's interesting.
2:25:24But anyway, that's about it for me. Tell me about shift happens. And I,
2:25:28you got this in the show notes. So tell me about this.
2:25:30Oh, I just were like, oh, this is a, this is a book.
2:25:33Marching Wishery is is the author of this this tome,
2:25:36it's 1200 page two volume book set with a third extra
2:25:41volume that he started working on in 2016.
2:25:44It's about the history of keyboards from typewriters to like the present day.
2:25:48Boring. I have no interest whatsoever. Keep me away from this.
2:25:53Duh.
2:25:53Nobody listings a show has any interest in keyboards or typewriters.
2:25:57Absolutely aware of it. And yeah, it is, it's going to be catnip for a lot of people.
2:26:01But so marching started on this in 2016 is kind of a outgrowth of some
2:26:06essays he's writing at medium. And then he wandered in by accident.
2:26:10He was on the wrong day in the wrong place and he wandered into a museum that
2:26:14should have been closed in Spain and then did not speak the language.
2:26:19People there were speaking Catalan. It doesn't speak Spanish or Catalan.
2:26:22And he got finally got pushed upstairs and it was the most glorious collection
2:26:26of typewriters in the world just about.
2:26:28And this led him on this journey to write this book.
2:26:30And so a couple of years after that, I'd been, I'd met him on Twitter and I'm like,
2:26:34Hey, you got an editor for this book? Cause I I'm literally looking at this.
2:26:37Sounds great, whatever. So for, for five years plus,
2:26:41I've been involved with him on this editing and development journey and he's
2:26:45been at it for seven and it's going to be great.
2:26:47We're going to go to Kickstarter in February and he's got a site up at
2:26:51shifthappens.site just launched literally today while we're recording this.
2:26:56We're just getting it finished. And John, let me tell you,
2:26:58getting a book printed like this is a Kickstarter project and then we'll do
2:27:01pre-orders after if we reach the goal and it'll ship in like August,
2:27:04September of this year.
2:27:06Like the book is pretty close and we kind of need to go over the top.
2:27:08But it started like almost 400,000 words.
2:27:12We got it down to under 300,000. There are so many great stories in this thing.
2:27:16We're like, all right, so a year ago we've been getting printing bids.
2:27:19We're sort of going onto it and then everything went out of control, right?
2:27:23Everyone's experienced this,
2:27:24but like shipping containers from China went up to like $25,000 up from like
2:27:295,000 and paper prices go through the roof and inflation is whatever.
2:27:32This is before Russia invades Ukraine, right? And we're like, God,
2:27:36you're going to have to delay this a year because the supply chain is so crazy.
2:27:38I'm not sure if we, if we raise the money in February or March, 2022,
2:27:42if we could ship it in the same calendar year and you know,
2:27:45from both holiday sales issues and tax reasons,
2:27:48you kind of want your revenue and your expense to be in the same calendar year.
2:27:52If you're a cash based business, which most businesses are anyhow.
2:27:56So that's the Ukraine invades or Ukraine is invaded and so forth.
2:27:59But at one point in this last year, a few months ago, we're like, okay,
2:28:02so if we order the paper from this factory in Gmund, Germany on,
2:28:06on Lake Gmund, the Gmundze,
2:28:09then we'll get it shipped over land into a container and then have it loaded on
2:28:15boats and shipped to Maine where we need to, we were,
2:28:19we were really going to order like tens of thousands of pounds of paper from
2:28:24Germany and have it shipped over the Atlantic at one point.
2:28:26And fortunately we were able to find a very good domestic U S paper that was
2:28:31close enough, but holy cow, it has been hilarious logistics part.
2:28:36So we finally have like a printer, we have a paper, we have a bid that works.
2:28:40We have,
2:28:40we've just got a press test with images printed to test profiles and they're
2:28:47using stochastic screening, which is the new hotness. Everyone does this now.
2:28:51Half tone screening is, is a thing of the past, John.
2:28:55Does it make you feel old? Yes.
2:28:56Stochastic screening is so amazing. I mean, it's been in use for years,
2:29:01but it's gotten better and better. And we got some samples a year ago.
2:29:04This one press up in Canada was like, first they were, they said, Oh,
2:29:07we print such and such. I'm like, Oh, I have a bunch of those.
2:29:09Cause I like that. And second,
2:29:11they send a samples and I'm looking under a loop at like 10 X magnification and
2:29:15I'm like, this cannot be, they're, they're printing green, but this is CMYK.
2:29:19Why does it look so good in the alignment? The registration is so perfect.
2:29:23So with stochastic screening, it's, you know, it's like dithering.
2:29:26It's like really good algorithmic dithering,
2:29:29but at a level where you're like at thousands of an inch dots, it's like,
2:29:34you know, the finest, almost finest laser writer or a laser output dots. Right?
2:29:38So when you have fine type,
2:29:40like you have the letters in a shop window or letters on a, on a,
2:29:44someone's typing a letter and you have a picture of a typewriter, you can zoom,
2:29:47and this is half tone.
2:29:48You can zoom in and you can actually read the words on the typewrited letter
2:29:53and like an image that's like three by three inches.
2:29:56And the typewriter is a fraction of that. So the screening is,
2:29:59this is not limited to the printer we're using, but it is like,
2:30:03it is like a digital revolution in the sense of like when we went from, you know,
2:30:07wax and knives to, to desktop publishing and,
2:30:11and early desktop publishing was sort of crummy, but it was fine. It was good.
2:30:14It was good enough.
2:30:15Stochastic screening is such a leap for me as someone I co-wrote some of the
2:30:20editions of real world scanning and half tones, as you may recall.
2:30:24We had a little bit about stochastic screening in the second and third editions.
2:30:27And I'm like, Oh my God, it is. It's like, you're not, you're not like, Oh,
2:30:31are we going to get a moiré? And Oh,
2:30:32are they using open rosettes at a 90 degree? And you're like,
2:30:35you just send the images with the profile to the printer.
2:30:38And we got them back in printed form off the press. They did one signature.
2:30:42So 16 pages aside and folded it for us to look at.
2:30:45And we're going to use these as we'll be sending some of these out to people and,
2:30:49and you look at it and you're like,
2:30:50this looks as good as it looks on screen because you're not dealing the half tone
2:30:54dots. It's not that they're super fine. They just don't exist. Anyway,
2:30:58it's one of the most it's, so it's, I'm excited about it with this book.
2:31:01It's not like a,
2:31:02it's not super new so people who've been getting stuff printed listing this will
2:31:05be like, Glenn has lost his mind.
2:31:07I was using stochastic screening 10 years ago and it was great then,
2:31:10but it's exciting to be involved with a project.
2:31:12Well, I think every time you're on the show,
2:31:14some of the people think you lost your mind, Glenn. Well, that's for sure.
2:31:16Well, you know that I'm going to order the damn thing and you know, I'll be,
2:31:20I'll be up for a Kickstarter link come February. But in the meantime,
2:31:25people can go to shift shift. Don't forget the F that's right.
2:31:29Shift happens dot site and get the, get the preview. But I,
2:31:33this is a great, I just a great story. Oh, sorry. Oh, well,
2:31:35I just suspect that there's a lot of people listening who are going to be
2:31:38intrigued.
2:31:39I think, yeah, I think there's a, we think we know our audience and it doesn't,
2:31:43the book doesn't pander, but like at the last minute, just a few weeks ago,
2:31:46I get an email from Marcin and he's like,
2:31:48I just discovered a Nobel prize winning physicist got obsessed about using lasers
2:31:53to erase typos off typewriters. And I'm like, what?
2:31:56And so he had a rewrite a chapter about, it's just,
2:32:00the story is insane. But the great part is he's like,
2:32:03I want to get a picture of this thing. And we're like, well,
2:32:05can we get the picture? Like, well, what if we contact?
2:32:08So he was able to go to the institution that had the documents,
2:32:11get original materials. So he's doing, you know, real research.
2:32:15But in another case there was some photo he was trying to get and I'm like,
2:32:18well, that guy's dead. But you know,
2:32:20maybe this person who knew him is the estate is the, it's the,
2:32:23we call it the executor of his estate.
2:32:25So Marcin's like he emails that guy and that person puts him in touch with the
2:32:28fellow's daughter and gets permission to use this wonderful photo in the book
2:32:32that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to use.
2:32:34But it's that kind of process where like, you're just, he's,
2:32:37he's going to have some stuff in there that's never been seen before,
2:32:39but there's also these, just these stories where you're like,
2:32:42this couldn't have happened. Like, no,
2:32:44this is a real thing related to typewriters or a keyboard and it's,
2:32:47it's a hoot.
2:32:48Well, I look forward to it. I thank you for your time.
2:32:51I hope you have a good rest of the holiday week. Let me,
2:32:54Happy new year. Yeah. Let me give a shout out here to our sponsors. One last,
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2:33:21credit. Thanks, Glenn. Happy new year. Thank you. Happy new year to you.