00:00:00 ◼ ► Somehow Apple Notes, which has been rock solid for me for years, is not syncing from my Mac to
00:00:06 ◼ ► anything else. That's why I had to disappear. And so I actually printed it out. I had a weird one the
00:00:14 ◼ ► other day where I realized I'm hopelessly dependent on being able to copy something from my computer
00:00:20 ◼ ► and paste it on my phone or copy something on my phone and paste it to my computer. And it stopped
00:00:25 ◼ ► working. I realized I had no idea how to do anything anymore. I've had that exact same thing,
00:00:34 ◼ ► the continuity feature, which also to me has gotten way more rock solid in the years since
00:00:40 ◼ ► they introduced it. But because it's gotten more rock solid, whenever it does break, I'm the same
00:00:46 ◼ ► way. I'm lost. I'm like, "Wait, how do I do this?" Yeah. And then I started doing incantations.
00:00:53 ◼ ► I found a terminal command on a forum from five years ago. Maybe that worked. Or maybe it was
00:00:58 ◼ ► just the fact that I restarted my computer. It's one or the other. But it's back. I think I need
00:01:03 ◼ ► like a functional human being. I think I need to restart my computer. What else was what was my
00:01:07 ◼ ► other reason? I had a Oh, I know what my other reason problem is. It might be good fodder for
00:01:11 ◼ ► the show. I took a ton of photos at Thanksgiving, and just family, nephews, nieces and nephews and
00:01:20 ◼ ► my parents and typical family stuff. And I took a bunch of them with a third party camera, my Rico
00:01:29 ◼ ► GR3, which I love and has me taking more photos like my number one tip. This is my number one tip
00:01:35 ◼ ► is having gone a couple years shooting almost all my personal photos with my iPhone instead of a
00:01:41 ◼ ► camera. The biggest change since I bought this Rico GR3, I think in March of this year, is I
00:01:49 ◼ ► take way more photos than I do when I use my phone, like at a family event. Like really? Yeah, it's
00:01:55 ◼ ► like some combination of battery anxiety with my phone and not wanting to have my phone out and
00:02:05 ◼ ► having just a dedicated I don't know, maybe it's just me. I don't know if it applies to other
00:02:13 ◼ ► people. But literally just having an actual little point and shoot camera. I take just way more. I
00:02:21 ◼ ► mean, like I took hundreds of photos at Thanksgiving, and I never would never ever would have
00:02:26 ◼ ► taken hundreds if I was only using my phone. I don't know why that is. But I feel like it's it's
00:02:31 ◼ ► the opposite for most people, you give them a phone, they start just firing off shots and
00:02:34 ◼ ► assuming that Google Photos or Apple Photos or whatever, we'll just figure it out for them.
00:02:40 ◼ ► It could be me. I don't know. But anyway, what happened is over the weekend, then I was like,
00:02:45 ◼ ► don't do that. I don't want to do the stupid thing. And just have all these hundreds of
00:02:48 ◼ ► photos sitting in my photo library and never go through them and share them with my family. I was
00:02:53 ◼ ► like, I'm going to take a couple hours Friday, Saturday, triage all these photos, get all the
00:02:58 ◼ ► good pics, share them with my family, blah, blah, blah. And I also had hadn't used Apple Photos
00:03:08 ◼ ► de duplicate feature. I don't even know when it came out. But I was like, you know what,
00:03:12 ◼ ► I should do this. And it found for some reason, a different assortment of duplicates on different
00:03:17 ◼ ► devices. Like my iPad had a couple but my Mac had a bunch of them 80 of them or something and I'm
00:03:23 ◼ ► like eyeballing them and they all I scrolled through the whole list. They all looked good.
00:03:36 ◼ ► And the other problem I had, I don't know which one caused this and which one didn't. The other
00:03:42 ◼ ► thing was I wanted to move a bunch of photos to an album. And it wouldn't let me move them to an
00:03:46 ◼ ► album. Because a bunch of them it said were unsaved. And I don't know, I didn't know what
00:03:52 ◼ ► that meant. What what do you mean save a photo and Apple Photos like the whole thing and photos.
00:03:57 ◼ ► But what it meant was they were ones from like messages that, you know what I mean? And it's
00:04:04 ◼ ► a weren't in your library. They weren't in my library there. Yeah. But I said, yes, save them.
00:04:09 ◼ ► And I think that's the main problem. I said, Yeah, sure, save them all. And then I went to my
00:04:16 ◼ ► recents and my recent album in Apple Photos only had three, the three most recent photos I had
00:04:25 ◼ ► taken. And then it was just random photos from the last 15 years in a random order. And I thought,
00:04:33 ◼ ► Oh, my God, something I did here. And I was using dark room, which I love, because it's sort of like
00:04:40 ◼ ► Lightroom. But in it uses your Apple Photos library as your library. I was like, something I did here,
00:04:46 ◼ ► jumbled all 50,000 of my photos into a random order. And there was nothing I could do to fix
00:04:56 ◼ ► it. And I was like, Oh, but what it was, was those photos I saved from messages are deemed recent,
00:05:07 ◼ ► because it recent doesn't go by the date on the photos, it goes by when you added them to your
00:05:13 ◼ ► library. And so once I scrolled, like 388 photos down into my library, boom, there's the other
00:05:21 ◼ ► 50,000 all in chronological order. But 380 photos or so was enough that I scrolled, scrolled,
00:05:29 ◼ ► scrolled, scrolled, scrolled and decided my entire library was a, oh, my God, entirely out of
00:05:34 ◼ ► chronological order. And I was like, I'm going back to film and I'm just going to start putting
00:05:43 ◼ ► my theory is that the Apple library is untouchable, right? Because it's, that's the most photos, it's
00:05:49 ◼ ► all the, I mean, I, I can't say that I have a good photo management technique. I just have a very
00:05:54 ◼ ► strong opinion about it. So there's the Apple library, which is untouchable, just leave it
00:05:57 ◼ ► alone. Don't touch it. It's the most brittle of all of them. I find the Google library is everything
00:06:02 ◼ ► goes into it. All the, all the photos from everywhere we're going to it. And then I have
00:06:06 ◼ ► Lightroom, which is where all my full resolution DSLR and mirrorless photos go. And that is just
00:06:13 ◼ ► going to be a cost that I carry forever. Right? The thing about Lightroom, I think I saw you
00:06:18 ◼ ► posting with us on threads the other day. The AI denoise in Lightroom is it has re jiggered my
00:06:25 ◼ ► relationship with my cameras, right? Because it is so good. It is. And I'm like the world's leading
00:06:32 ◼ ► practitioner of what is a photo hand-wringing and I'm just like, whatever, denoise it, just have at
00:06:38 ◼ ► it, just invent some pixels, make it look good. My ancient D 7,500, my Nikon D 7,500, which I love,
00:06:45 ◼ ► which is, I want to say it's 2014. It's old. This camera is ancient. I just took it to Disney world,
00:06:51 ◼ ► you know, with a big, fun lens on it, but it Lightroom just remade this camera. I'm using
00:06:57 ◼ ► it in places that it was not usable before in ISOs that frankly, I didn't even know why they enabled
00:07:03 ◼ ► them on this. Like they were unusable. And now I'm just like firing away with this thing. And I
00:07:07 ◼ ► realized that the thing about iPhone photography is that you get so used to how much noise reduction
00:07:14 ◼ ► it does and how good at it it is that when your other cameras can't do it because the processing
00:07:21 ◼ ► isn't there, you're like, oh, this camera isn't good. When really it's, you're just used to the
00:07:26 ◼ ► amount of processing that's happening. And so I added Lightroom to the mix and it's like my old
00:07:32 ◼ ► cameras are just back in the game, old lenses, old cameras. The camera that I've outgunned,
00:07:40 ◼ ► I think it's time to upgrade. When my daughter was born, I bought it Sony RX100 Mark IV.
00:07:51 ◼ ► this thing has been everywhere. It's lived in my pocket for five years. And I think that one,
00:07:56 ◼ ► I'm past the range of its capabilities. Like I run into its limitations more than I'm happy with the
00:08:02 ◼ ► photos it takes. So I think that one it's time to upgrade, but my old Nikon plus Lightroom,
00:08:08 ◼ ► it would be hard to convince me to buy a new camera at this point, at least in that size.
00:08:15 ◼ ► but I used and loved Lightroom for years and never really abandoned it. What I did was I packed up
00:08:24 ◼ ► an iMac that was on my desk when I was getting my office completely renovated and then never unpacked
00:08:32 ◼ ► it because I switched full time to a MacBook Pro. And so I still have Lightroom and I've got like
00:08:43 ◼ ► Darrell Bock Lightroom Classic. This is from before the Adobe Cloud era. And one of the things
00:08:48 ◼ ► that gives you peace of mind about Lightroom is at least Lightroom Classic, it organizes your photos
00:08:53 ◼ ► in the file system. So like worst case scenario, as long as you can read the disk that it's on,
00:09:00 ◼ ► and there's no version of Lightroom in the future that runs on whatever computer hardware you have,
00:09:05 ◼ ► you've still just got all the original images there and you lose like your Lightroom edits if
00:09:10 ◼ ► you haven't exported them or something like that. But that's not a bad worst case scenario where
00:09:15 ◼ ► your original images off the camera are all safe and sound, chronologically organized into year,
00:09:22 ◼ ► month, day, full folders in a library, which is awesome. But that thing about the de-noising,
00:09:27 ◼ ► I was like somebody else, I forget who posted it. I'll see if I can find it and put it in the
00:09:30 ◼ ► show notes. But somebody on threads was just more or less saying that the new AI powered de-noise in
00:09:37 ◼ ► Lightroom turned this and it was like, I don't know, he was shooting it like ISO 25,000 or
00:09:43 ◼ ► something in that range. And it was like a picture of some animal at nighttime in the dark, and it
00:09:48 ◼ ► turned it into this. And it's, it looks like the cover of Natural Geographic. It is like, absolutely
00:09:54 ◼ ► insane. It's insane. I will say I think that's a good example. And I know you're right that you are
00:10:01 ◼ ► sort of the leader of what is a photo philosophical debate. I would say that falls clearly on the side
00:10:15 ◼ ► No, if you look at it, I have some photos from this trip to Disney. They're just in the dark,
00:10:20 ◼ ► where someone's hair is, it's just a mess of pixels. And your brain is, okay, there should
00:10:25 ◼ ► be some hair. And then Lightroom is like, here it is. And you're like, that is not contained.
00:10:31 ◼ ► Right. You just have enough information in Adobe Firefly to be like, okay, here's what some fringes
00:10:38 ◼ ► of hair looks like. We can do it. And it's the same as the Google best take feature where it's
00:10:45 ◼ ► like, am I really lying? Like the hair wasn't in place, like whatever. Like the camera doesn't have
00:10:51 ◼ ► enough data for me to conclusively say that my hair was frizzy. But Lightroom is like, you know
00:10:57 ◼ ► what, let's put it there. Maybe that's on the blurry edge of acceptable. And I think most people
00:11:02 ◼ ► with family photographs, they don't care. But it's still kind of like, every time I hit the button,
00:11:07 ◼ ► and I don't even, I don't even hit that button one by one anymore. I hit, I select all in batch
00:11:13 ◼ ► process, all of the photos off this camera before I begin editing. And it's like the GPU in my M1 Pro
00:11:20 ◼ ► is pegged for an hour. And then I come back and I finish the edits. And I'm like, first of all,
00:11:25 ◼ ► it's like awesome to peg your GPU. It's like the most, if you're a computer nerd, you're like,
00:11:30 ◼ ► I'm working now, but you're not doing it. You're just like waiting. But then you come back,
00:11:50 ◼ ► a moment of reality from the perspective of the lens of the camera at a certain moment in time?
00:12:01 ◼ ► And if the answer is yes, then I think you're on the, this is still a photo side of it. And yes,
00:12:10 ◼ ► filling in fine details like hair, like strands of hair are so small that the individual
00:12:18 ◼ ► pixels of noise would interfere with what they were. And therefore it has to be filled in and
00:12:25 ◼ ► it's literally filling some content in that the image didn't originally contain it, but it still
00:12:40 ◼ ► call it? The best take, which is a cool feature. Like I wrote on daring fireball about it. Like
00:12:47 ◼ ► I find this feature highly questionable and I know that I would use it. Right. Yeah. And this
00:12:54 ◼ ► is how I feel about Lightroom. It's I think it's on the safer side of the line, but you know,
00:12:59 ◼ ► there was a time in the culture where Turner movies, colorizing, black classic films caused
00:13:06 ◼ ► a great deal of hand wringing about the sanctity of art. And we are just, just imagine trying to
00:13:13 ◼ ► tell a teenager, we used to worry about colorizing black and white that was gone. Right? Like we are
00:13:18 ◼ ► fully past it. My line is like, did this happen? If you cannot confidently say about a photograph
00:13:27 ◼ ► that that thing happened, we're probably a little too far and we should recalibrate. And I know a
00:13:33 ◼ ► lot of people are trying to recalibrate in various different ways. It does seem the best take is a
00:13:37 ◼ ► great example of this. I have received for many people, the argument, well, something like it
00:13:49 ◼ ► And it's, it's only going to move forward from here. Right? It's like we're nowhere near
00:13:56 ◼ ► at the end point of these features. Xiaomi has the Xiaomi 14. Let me see it. Let me make sure
00:14:04 ◼ ► I'm correct. Make sure it's the 14. Yep. Okay. So the Xiaomi 14 just came out and it's a launch
00:14:13 ◼ ► event, which is very much like an Apple keynote. They demoed a feature in the camera where you just
00:14:17 ◼ ► feed it some photos and then you say, make a photo of me standing on a mountain and it just does it.
00:14:23 ◼ ► And that's the camera. And it's not, this is not like the science fiction hypothetical. This is
00:14:32 ◼ ► Well, that's it is something and it is cool, but it's not photography. Right? I mean, there's also
00:14:42 ◼ ► things, features like that, which I, I, I know that there were probably people, I was too young
00:14:51 ◼ ► and therefore too, Oh, this is nothing but cool. And I refuse to, to even read anybody's down saying
00:14:59 ◼ ► or downplaying of it. Like when Photoshop first became a thing, you could do all sorts of things
00:15:16 ◼ ► Stalin era in the Soviet union, where they would erase people who had been erased from the, the,
00:15:22 ◼ ► the poet Bureau from photos, you know, and the Dodge and burn feature in Photoshop is named after
00:15:31 ◼ ► an actual physical technique that you would use in the dark room when you were developing film.
00:15:38 ◼ ► It's all cool, but it does. I don't know. I, and, and, and, and you come from you, you, you lead
00:15:46 ◼ ► a publication that has actual photos that your staff takes and that therefore you guys need rules
00:16:00 ◼ ► that same way you have rules. Most places have rules about datelines. You can't claim to be
00:16:11 ◼ ► nature to the conversation on what is a photo because people bring it up as a known as ever
00:16:18 ◼ ► considered the problem before when in reality, right. People have been considering the problem
00:16:27 ◼ ► especially the big photography organizations like Getty or AFP or what have you, they have very
00:16:32 ◼ ► restrictive rules about editing. The best example I can give you is if you look at the New York
00:16:37 ◼ ► Times, New York Times basically can't do any editing. And that the house style for the New
00:16:42 ◼ ► York Times whenever they want to get arty is they just vignette the hell out of their photos.
00:16:46 ◼ ► And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And you're like, oh, this is the only knob you have.
00:16:51 ◼ ► Let's go for it. Just, just turn it up like vignetting. You can go read the guidelines.
00:16:56 ◼ ► They're all basically the same. And then remove dust and scratches and all this other stuff.
00:17:00 ◼ ► But you can't actually edit the photo. Right. And you can crop, which shows you the fact that
00:17:11 ◼ ► Right. And for some of them, you can't crop in a way that changes the image of the photo.
00:17:17 ◼ ► Or that is even if you're a license, if you're a licensee, so like the Verge has a Getty license,
00:17:23 ◼ ► and our Getty license has restrictions in it. They do not want us to use their photos in a way that
00:17:32 ◼ ► as this stuff goes to consumers, and it's Google has best take, you can't drop. There's 200 years of
00:17:41 ◼ ► AFP photo licensing restrictions under the camera app of your Pixel 8. Like, that's, that's just not
00:17:49 ◼ ► realistic, right? You can't expect anybody to learn that stuff or even understand why that
00:17:52 ◼ ► stuff is being imposed. So you got to come up with something else. And I think that's the moment
00:17:57 ◼ ► we're in where the companies have to decide what restrictions are they're going to place on the
00:18:03 ◼ ► tools, the platforms that distribute the stuff like Instagram, YouTube, or decide what restrictions
00:18:08 ◼ ► or labels are gonna put on the stuff. And then we have to decide what is acceptable as a culture.
00:18:13 ◼ ► And all of that stuff is in, I wouldn't even say tension. It's like that they're not close enough
00:18:18 ◼ ► to each other to be in tension yet. The table's just flipped and we're all just looking at all
00:18:21 ◼ ► the shit in the air. And it's like, I know what the Verge is going to write about for the next 10
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00:21:16 ◼ ► talk about maybe we should get the iPhone 15 talk out of the way. This is sort of our annual
00:21:20 ◼ ► tradition. It is we're very late. We're late. We're really late. It's been out for a while.
00:21:26 ◼ ► I'm curious. What's your takeaway? I mean, we could I don't know if we should breeze through
00:21:31 ◼ ► this or if we have a lot to say. I am now in a dual USB-C lightning household. So my takeaway
00:21:41 ◼ ► is I got to upgrade my wife and daughter to USB-C iOS devices posthaste because it is very annoying
00:21:48 ◼ ► right now. And I think that's probably what Apple is worried about. Yeah. But once you do it,
00:21:53 ◼ ► it is incredible that I just have one cable for my laptop and my iPad and my phone and my earbuds.
00:22:00 ◼ ► And I don't know why they resisted it for this long. Because from a user experience point of view,
00:22:05 ◼ ► vastly superior to having multiple cables and chargers. Like I don't I don't I understand why
00:22:12 ◼ ► they held off. And I understand that they felt pushed into it. And there's a bit of resistance
00:22:17 ◼ ► there. But it is actually like a sparse superior user experience to just have one cable for all
00:22:23 ◼ ► stuff. I do think in hindsight now that we've waited, I do think that the USB-C transition
00:22:29 ◼ ► story is both a the sort of most obvious angle for this year's iPhones. And oftentimes the most
00:22:36 ◼ ► obvious angle is sort of a dumb angle that I don't find interesting our audience doesn't find
00:22:41 ◼ ► interesting. But this year, I feel like it actually is. And it's for exactly the reasons you said,
00:22:46 ◼ ► like, why did it take them so long. And I know that the cynical take has always been that it
00:22:54 ◼ ► was about money and that the lightning port somehow made them gazinga dollars every year
00:23:02 ◼ ► with licensing for the made for iPhone program and selling lightning cables and stuff like that.
00:23:07 ◼ ► And I mean, I don't have their balance sheets. I mean, I can't prove it. But talking to people
00:23:14 ◼ ► at Apple off the record. That wasn't it. It's Apple almost never and you know, this Apple
00:23:22 ◼ ► executives almost never explain themselves, right? It's it's I always think of that scene from there
00:23:29 ◼ ► will be blood where Daniel Day Lewis is character says I hate to explain myself. Apple is like that.
00:23:35 ◼ ► If it's not in the keynote, or in the marketing materials on apple.com, they don't want to explain
00:23:41 ◼ ► why they did x, right? They just don't want to talk. They just it's just part of their culture.
00:23:47 ◼ ► But sometimes they'll say no, right? I won't say why. But they all categorically I was told
00:23:56 ◼ ► that the money they made from licensing, made for iPhone stuff for the lightning port, or selling
00:24:09 ◼ ► that used to be a big deal. But it really was an iPod era thing. Like in the iPod era, it was a
00:24:17 ◼ ► significant amount of money and everybody still to this day. In fact, more and more like when you
00:24:23 ◼ ► check into a hotel and they still have a 30 pin adapter on the alarm clock. It's Oh my God, how
00:24:29 ◼ ► old is this alarm clock? Back then that that stuff was a big deal. That's not the reason I really
00:24:36 ◼ ► think it best my best theory is that they were reluctant to change because they the iPhone is so
00:24:44 ◼ ► popular with literally like a billion users around the world that they just didn't want to risk
00:24:50 ◼ ► pissing people off and that however frustrating it was for people who just wanted to go USB C for
00:24:57 ◼ ► everything. It's not infuriating when they didn't switch for the iPhone 12 or 13 or 14. It's just
00:25:06 ◼ ► frustrating. Whereas switching could risk infuriating people. And I feel like they just
00:25:12 ◼ ► sort of were gun shy about it. That's, yeah, I think that's it. I think that's real. I don't
00:25:20 ◼ ► think that's not real. Right. You don't want to piss off your customers. I think that the money
00:25:24 ◼ ► piece is negligible by Apple standards is still a huge amount of money. Right. So if you want to run
00:25:32 ◼ ► around funding, like negligible by Apple standards is enough to fund one movie on Apple TV plus,
00:25:45 ◼ ► especially when your sales are kind of sideways and it's like a weird time. I think that no,
00:25:50 ◼ ► Tim Cook is many things. He's excellent at making money, right? Like he's an amazing business person
00:25:57 ◼ ► and there's no reason that he's going to incur cost to switch to USB C while turning off the
00:26:03 ◼ ► revenue associated with the old port, unless he has to. And I think with the iPad, they had to,
00:26:10 ◼ ► in order to make the iPad a credible laptop replacement, which is where they needed it to go.
00:26:20 ◼ ► They had to enable faster USB speeds, faster charging and ecosystem of device, all this stuff.
00:26:33 ◼ ► is like it charges your phone. Maybe it connects to your car. So they didn't need it for the longest
00:26:38 ◼ ► time until they were made to do it. So I don't want to say it was the money. They needed all
00:26:42 ◼ ► the money and they're being greedy. I think it's a much more raw, instinctual business decision.
00:26:47 ◼ ► Why would I turn off some money for any reason? And it's like, it's hard to fault any business
00:26:54 ◼ ► for looking at it that way. Yeah, it does seem now here we are on the cusp of December and it
00:27:08 ◼ ► there's nowhere near as much consternation or, hey, this is a money grab play. There was when
00:27:16 ◼ ► they switched the iPhone from the 30 pin connector to lightning with the iPhone 5, I believe was the
00:27:24 ◼ ► first one with lightning, which even people in my family, my extended family at least thought was
00:27:30 ◼ ► a money grab like, oh, and it's don't you see how much better this port is? I mean, well,
00:27:35 ◼ ► because you don't have to buy Apple's cable with lightning. You go buy Apple's cable with USB-C.
00:27:39 ◼ ► You're like anywhere. Right. And there's one of these cables floating around. Right. Well,
00:27:43 ◼ ► and the other thing though, about the money is I really don't think made for iPhone with lightning
00:27:48 ◼ ► has been a moneymaker. Even I just don't think I don't even know what products it would be. What
00:27:53 ◼ ► products shipped with lightning ports anymore. Very, very few. Every single third party cable.
00:27:59 ◼ ► I yeah, but I got even I've talked to people who make from companies that sell their own
00:28:06 ◼ ► lightning cables. And they said like the licensing fee really was even by the standards of the
00:28:24 ◼ ► And they sell their own USB-C cables for $29. Right. Which are ridiculous. Right. Yeah. So
00:28:29 ◼ ► they still have that going on. I just think that they were a little conservative about it. But
00:28:34 ◼ ► I will say it with just two people in the house at the moment, because my son's in college,
00:28:48 ◼ ► didn't show up until I think early November, it was a long time. And so there was like a six week
00:28:55 ◼ ► period where I had an iPhone with a USB-C port and she did not and it really, we don't have that many
00:29:02 ◼ ► cables around the house. I mean, if it was up to me, we'd have all sorts of cables all over the
00:29:07 ◼ ► place. She's more in charge of where we're allowed to have permanent standing cables. And it did it
00:29:13 ◼ ► did interfere with it. And now now that she's got one, the one device we have left between us that
00:29:20 ◼ ► still is lightning is her, I guess, first gen AirPods Pro or maybe they're second, I don't even
00:29:26 ◼ ► know which gen they are. But because they're not brand new, they have a lightning thing on the case.
00:29:32 ◼ ► And it's where is she going to charge these. And so now it's my job to just sort of babysit her
00:29:38 ◼ ► AirPods and every once in a while, take them to my office or somewhere and charge them or do they
00:29:43 ◼ ► not? That's the one before the wireless charging or there were there is wireless charging, but
00:29:48 ◼ ► we don't have a magsafe puck. Again, I don't have permission to have a permanent magsafe
00:29:54 ◼ ► puck in the kitchen. Just for it because it would be there just for her AirPods because otherwise,
00:29:59 ◼ ► why would you use my god, I get dude, you got to get on Amazon, you got to start looking at the
00:30:03 ◼ ► alphabet soup brands. There's a thing out there that can hold all this stuff. Like I walk in the
00:30:08 ◼ ► door, I like throw my keys in the thing, I put my AirPods in the thing, it all looks nice. But it's
00:30:18 ◼ ► Right. That's what's it? Amazon alphabet soup. But anyway, I think that's been successful. I think
00:30:24 ◼ ► that the I still do I at this point, I still appreciate how much lighter the phone is than
00:30:31 ◼ ► the stainless steel ones that they've been selling for years. And I as someone who prefers to go
00:30:36 ◼ ► caseless, I know it seems so superficial. But I so much prefer the way that it feels in my hand
00:30:50 ◼ ► The matte finish of the titanium and the rounded, chamfered edges, whatever you want to call them,
00:30:56 ◼ ► are so much more pleasant in hand. It's it's now just in my case to make sure you're not
00:31:05 ◼ ► To me, I think it's fascinating that they're marketing this thing as titanium. It is the
00:31:11 ◼ ► point of the marketing. Right. It is it is the first word out of all the celebrities lips when
00:31:16 ◼ ► they like iPhone 15 Pro titanium. And it's like, most people have in a case, what you're going to
00:31:21 ◼ ► notice is that it's lighter. Yeah, which is great. I agree with you. But it's interesting that you
00:31:27 ◼ ► and a few people who are, frankly, insane, who don't have cases, are the only people that will
00:31:33 ◼ ► ever actually touch the phone. Well, I think that's always I think that's, it's long been
00:31:39 ◼ ► fascinating to me. I did a poll on Mastodon. And my audience, of course, is out landishly unlike
00:31:45 ◼ ► the general population. But I did a poll, I don't know, sometime over the summer, people who follow
00:31:51 ◼ ► me on Mastodon, do you put your iPhone in a case? And I think I put it in the show notes, but off
00:31:56 ◼ ► the top of my head. My questions were, do you use an Apple branded case, a third party case or no
00:32:02 ◼ ► case at all? And it was like, I think roughly one third, one third, one third, which blew me away. I
00:32:10 ◼ ► didn't even think amongst my audience that one third of people don't use a case. Because in
00:32:15 ◼ ► reality, it's got to be like, I don't know, 95% of people at least keep their phones in a case.
00:32:22 ◼ ► But I've always thought that part of the reason why is because the phones are so nice uncased.
00:32:29 ◼ ► It's like, even though people like take it out of the most people, unbox their brand new iPhone,
00:32:50 ◼ ► and they never see it again, until they take it out of the case to trade it in for a new phone
00:32:55 ◼ ► in two or three years. Yeah, but it's the fact that they know that inside the case is this
00:33:07 ◼ ► if in some alternate universe iPhones were sort of G shock, Casio G shock style devices that are
00:33:18 ◼ ► sort of a rugged plasticy shell, that's what the device actually is. I don't think people would
00:33:25 ◼ ► care about putting them in cases they wouldn't care if they get scratched up. It's and their
00:33:29 ◼ ► ads for years during the stainless steel era, always way over emphasized how shiny the stainless
00:33:37 ◼ ► steel is. Right? I mean, yes, they were they were it was like jewelry photography, not consumer
00:33:43 ◼ ► electronics photography to sort of emphasize the difference between the iPhone Pro models and the
00:33:49 ◼ ► iPhone non pro models. Yeah, I mean, I the again, this one, I think it's really interesting that
00:33:55 ◼ ► we're leaning into the material and not the camera or the action button or any of the features of the
00:34:00 ◼ ► phone. And I think it's still a little bit of a remnant of the sort of Johnny Ive fashion era.
00:34:08 ◼ ► Like it still permeates Apple a little bit when they do the big mass consumer marketing. These
00:34:14 ◼ ► are fashion items or cultural objects, all this stuff. I mean, right next to that is they're
00:34:18 ◼ ► showing the Olivia Rodrigo commercials where they're shooting it right like they are emphasizing
00:34:23 ◼ ► the technical capabilities there. But even that is about a cultural product, right? It's not the
00:34:28 ◼ ► music video. It's not really about the phone. Like you wouldn't walk away from that ad. Being like,
00:34:35 ◼ ► I know a lot about the phone, what you know is this phone was used to make this really awesome
00:34:44 ◼ ► emphasizing the material is, it's of the same category. Right? Here's a here's a very luxury
00:34:51 ◼ ► item. At this point, we're we're, we are in the middle of covering gigantic trials. It seems like
00:34:57 ◼ ► the entire tech world is literally on trial all the time right now. And we have this window
00:35:03 ◼ ► because of DOJ versus Google, which is all about Apple's deal with Google to have Google as default
00:35:09 ◼ ► search, and then Epic versus Google, which is all about Google's contractual relationships with
00:35:14 ◼ ► various parties who make the phones make the apps. We have this window into how all these deals are
00:35:19 ◼ ► made. And you're like, Oh, the iPhone really is dominant. The world warps around this product.
00:35:33 ◼ ► But the brand halo of looking at how cool the thing I own is, is like important to maintain.
00:35:40 ◼ ► It's fascinating to watch Apple market a new phone, which is, I mean, I think it's very similar
00:35:46 ◼ ► to the outgoing phone minus USB-C, even the camera, like, they're right on top of each other.
00:35:50 ◼ ► Like the longer zoom, obviously performs a little better in low light. There's there's the
00:35:54 ◼ ► incremental stuff. But pound for pound, they're like very similar. And there's, in my opinion,
00:36:01 ◼ ► there's really no way for a 15 year old product for that not to be true. Right. And every once in
00:36:08 ◼ ► a while, there will be some sort of breakthrough. I mean, the best example I can possibly think of,
00:36:15 ◼ ► because it's almost a canonical example would be the Mac in 2020. At age, let me think here 36.
00:36:25 ◼ ► Yeah, 36 year old platform, moving to Apple Silicon was a holy shit, this is like years
00:36:34 ◼ ► of difference. If you bought like a late or in the middle of 2020, bought the last generation
00:36:42 ◼ ► of an Intel MacBook of any model, compared to what you would get in the end of November,
00:36:49 ◼ ► when Apple Silicon and the first M1 chips debuted, it was like, wow, these are, it's a chasm chasm
00:36:58 ◼ ► between these two products. That's very rare for an established product. And the iPhone at 15. It's
00:37:04 ◼ ► just you can't, you just can't reasonably expect anything like that on a regular basis, right?
00:37:11 ◼ ► There really isn't a practical difference between the iPhone 14 and 15. In almost any regard,
00:37:19 ◼ ► other than the USB C and the difference between the titanium and steel. And yeah, and for the
00:37:26 ◼ ► people who put them in a kit that I put it in my review. It's like the nice thing about the
00:37:30 ◼ ► titanium versus steel thing is even if you are in the vast majority of people who keep your phone in
00:37:35 ◼ ► a case all the time, you still enjoy the benefits of the weight reduction. Yeah, which is which is
00:37:40 ◼ ► not nothing. No, it's very meaningful. Here's the thing they could do. They could steal from
00:37:44 ◼ ► car world. So there are these long running car models in the world. And every now and again,
00:37:50 ◼ ► they're like, we're bringing it back. Here's a Mustang from the sixties again, here's a new
00:37:55 ◼ ► beetle. And you're like, will they ever just do the iPhone four again? Like if they put, if the
00:38:00 ◼ ► iPhone 16 was just the iPhone four design, but bigger for our time of bigger screens, I feel like
00:38:07 ◼ ► yeah, I'm definitely buying that. Zero questions asked. I would buy an iPhone four. I would buy an
00:38:13 ◼ ► iPhone 16 sized iPhone four. Man, that was a pretty cool design too. It was easily the best one.
00:38:30 ◼ ► retro nostalgic value, I'd give I'd give it to the iPhone four four s style because it was a little
00:38:36 ◼ ► bit more iconic or stood out a little bit it was a little bit it was it wasn't like the iPhones that
00:38:46 ◼ ► introduced. I think he said it looks like a beautiful old Leica camera. Like it was introduced
00:38:51 ◼ ► with a bit of retro to it. But I just want to be look at other things. Yeah. Other things that run
00:38:57 ◼ ► for this amount of time. There's always at some point, a callback to the past is a reset. And you
00:39:03 ◼ ► build from there. Cars are I think are probably the best example of this. But it happens in
00:39:08 ◼ ► watches. It happens in fashion. It has not yet happened in technology design, which seems to be
00:39:14 ◼ ► ever pushing forwards towards canonical examples of what a laptop is or a phone. But you could just
00:39:22 ◼ ► you could totally see how you would rewind it. You could get somewhere if they put out a
00:39:26 ◼ ► titanium power rook g4. Like I'd buy tomorrow zero questions asked. I would buy that thing.
00:39:36 ◼ ► Yeah, something that really looked like the old one, but just had modern bezels around the screen
00:39:40 ◼ ► and stuff like that. But tomorrow, if you're listening, tomorrow. I also do think it does
00:39:48 ◼ ► seem like broadly across industries. Design has gotten homogenized in the last decade, or decade
00:40:00 ◼ ► and a half, right? Like you really it is it is extremely difficult to identify a cell phone at a
00:40:07 ◼ ► glance. These days. They all look like iPhones, right? I mean, they all have retful screens,
00:40:14 ◼ ► round corners, same dimensions. It's, it's very hard. Cars, I think, I think have never ever in
00:40:22 ◼ ► the entire 120 years of the auto industry have never looked more all the same. Yeah. And I don't
00:40:32 ◼ ► like it. And the more I see details about it, the less I like it. But I do have to give Tesla credit
00:40:38 ◼ ► for the Cybertruck being wholly unlike anything else that's ever been made, right? The only thing
00:40:45 ◼ ► I can think of that that has any DNA to would be like, well, what if the DeLorean Motor Company had
00:40:51 ◼ ► been a had been a success? And then they expanded to the point where instead of just making a
00:40:58 ◼ ► sports car, they'd made a pickup truck? Well, I guess that's what it would look like, right?
00:41:03 ◼ ► Yeah. And there does seem to be concern. I don't know how well it's going to sell. But it certainly
00:41:08 ◼ ► seems like just in the broad market of people who might buy a pickup truck or an electric truck,
00:41:15 ◼ ► people at least are interested in the Cybertruck. And there's certainly no mistaking which car it
00:41:21 ◼ ► is that when that drives by no one is going to go, Hey, what is that? Was that a Ford? No.
00:41:25 ◼ ► Yeah, it's true. I mean, look, most cars, cars have like a packaging problem. Phones all look
00:41:32 ◼ ► the same. And they work the same, because the manufacturers are desperate to get you to switch.
00:41:41 ◼ ► again, in these interminable trials, which are very fun to cover, by the way, there's just a
00:41:45 ◼ ► lot of them at once. And the Google like the DOJ one went for 11 weeks. So it's like trial overload,
00:41:50 ◼ ► but you learn a lot. We're learning a lot. And you learn that the you think switching costs is
00:41:57 ◼ ► some like esoteric tech nerd term. And in reality, all these companies are thinking about all the
00:42:03 ◼ ► time. They want to prevent churn, they want to acquire customers, they're like trying to get
00:42:06 ◼ ► market share. And so phones have collapsed. Particularly the central innovation of the iPhone
00:42:12 ◼ ► at the beginning, with Steve Jobs saying all these buttons, you could get them out the way,
00:42:22 ◼ ► really, we've now reached a point where it is fully taken a backseat to the software design.
00:42:28 ◼ ► And then the software design because they want to reduce switching costs is all just sort of
00:42:31 ◼ ► converging on some some iOS Android middle point, right? iOS steal some stuff from Android every
00:42:38 ◼ ► year and Android steal some stuff from iOS. And that's the way it goes. But there is that
00:42:42 ◼ ► convergence. So it is homogenous. Cars is like a is a packaging problem. Particularly as you move
00:42:49 ◼ ► to EVs, and you basically have a big battery and some motors at the wheels. Everyone's what shape
00:42:54 ◼ ► should this be? And those are the cars that are interesting, right? The new Hyundai's and new Kia's,
00:42:59 ◼ ► they're just like out there. Those are some of the most interestingly designed cars that there are.
00:43:04 ◼ ► And then the Cybertruck is like, what if it was a triangle? Why not? I am very curious about two
00:43:12 ◼ ► things with the Cybertruck. One is what you said, will anybody buy it? Right? There's lots of
00:43:16 ◼ ► reservations. We'll see how it goes. I think pickup truck owners notoriously brand loyal.
00:43:22 ◼ ► If there's one thing about the Cybertruck that makes them happy, they're just going to flip back.
00:43:28 ◼ ► If there's one thing about the Cybertruck that makes them unhappy, they're just going to flip
00:43:31 ◼ ► back. That's how that's going to go. And then the second thing, which I will now bring to your
00:43:36 ◼ ► audience, the Verticast audience knows I'm obsessed with this. I have been told that the
00:43:41 ◼ ► wiper is actually two wiper blades in a row. And I have been begging for, well, I guess we'll find
00:43:48 ◼ ► out on Thursday because the launch event's on Thursday. But I have been begging for someone to
00:43:52 ◼ ► just lift this thing up because they're all over the place now and just tell me if it's two wiper
00:43:56 ◼ ► blades in a row. I'm pretty sure they figured it out now and they're just making one gigantic
00:44:03 ◼ ► custom wiper. But I have definitely seen somewhere it's two wipers in a row. And I'm like, of all of
00:44:10 ◼ ► the design problems to resolve in the world, the windshield wiper was like high on Tesla's list
00:44:18 ◼ ► with this truck. I do think that even certainly even more so than your dominance atop what is
00:44:25 ◼ ► a photo. I think how many rubber blades are on the cyber truck wiper has got to be where you
00:44:38 ◼ ► Neil. Every now and again, you're like, oh, this is my brand. And my brand is being obsessed with
00:44:41 ◼ ► this wiper because it is, I mean, one, it's hilarious. Like, it's just deeply funny. And
00:44:45 ◼ ► the stakes are so low, like who cares? But two, it's so emblematic of this entire vehicle and
00:44:52 ◼ ► Elon Musk's entire moment where he is so convinced that he's smarter than every other person in the
00:44:59 ◼ ► world that he had to reinvent the wiper blade. And it's, no, you didn't. You really did not.
00:45:05 ◼ ► You could have put two wipers in the front of your truck. Well, it would have been fine.
00:45:09 ◼ ► I think a better example, well, maybe not a better example, but another very similar example is the
00:45:15 ◼ ► goofy yoke steering wheel on some of the Tesla models, which is terrible. I'm sorry. I mean,
00:45:21 ◼ ► I don't, I've never driven one with it, but I've, I just know it's terrible. And I've never seen
00:45:26 ◼ ► anybody who really has opinions about cars who thinks that that's a good design for a steering
00:45:31 ◼ ► wheel, but it does look cooler. That's why Knight Rider had a yoke instead of a steering wheel,
00:45:36 ◼ ► right? Yeah. I mean, it definitely looks cooler. That's the only thing it has going for it,
00:45:42 ◼ ► but ergonomically, it is a terrible design for a steering device for a car. A wheel is what you
00:45:48 ◼ ► want. Then they put that there. I mean, they're not shy about this because they thought that you
00:45:53 ◼ ► wouldn't be driving. Right. So like, why not make it look cool? And that doesn't work well enough.
00:45:58 ◼ ► Right. Or maybe never will. Maybe never will. Right. I can't tell you how many emails I've
00:46:03 ◼ ► gotten from people. I, you probably have too, but people who've worked on the problem in my case,
00:46:08 ◼ ► for a company that isn't yet selling cars who, who genuinely believe, and it's not speaking for the,
00:46:16 ◼ ► for the company, but as a personal engineering level, don't believe full self-driving will ever
00:46:22 ◼ ► be a thing within our lifetimes that it's that difficult, especially given the realistic
00:46:28 ◼ ► constraint that they have to be introduced alongside 99% of cars being driven by humans.
00:46:36 ◼ ► If you could magically say, we're going to make human driven cars illegal, starting in two years,
00:46:45 ◼ ► and the only cars allowed on the road will be self-driving cars, then it's theoretically
00:46:51 ◼ ► possible. I think everybody would agree to have some sort of way that cars would communicate with
00:46:56 ◼ ► each other and it would all be safe and would probably work. But even then there are problems
00:47:03 ◼ ► that are just extremely difficult to, to solve. Yeah. But it was a weird thing for them to bank on
00:47:11 ◼ ► with the industrial design of the steering wheel, the goal wings on the, was it the model Y or
00:47:17 ◼ ► the access Falcon wing doors. Yeah. The Falcon people love them, but they break and they leak
00:47:23 ◼ ► and it's fun. They're terrible in a parking lot because they require space that a door that opens
00:47:28 ◼ ► from the side doesn't necessarily need to get in certain parking lots where, where the spots are
00:47:40 ◼ ► they look cool. They do look cool. I mean, look, some people love their Teslas and I know people
00:47:48 ◼ ► who are horrified by Elon Musk and they would like to switch from a Tesla and they're like,
00:47:53 ◼ ► I can't, the tech in this car is too good. I know other people who are like, I can't believe I fell
00:47:58 ◼ ► for full self-driving. I paid $15,000 this feature and it's never going to work. Right. Remember,
00:48:07 ◼ ► doing robotaxis for you. Yeah. Making money. People believed him. Yeah. In a way that I think
00:48:13 ◼ ► people are starting to get wise. We'll see how the Cybertruck event goes. They're only supposed
00:48:18 ◼ ► to give away 10 of them. I'm assuming they're going to be like heavily NDA. But the reality is
00:48:23 ◼ ► he's now competing in the fiercest part of the American car market. The one with the most brand
00:48:30 ◼ ► loyalty to most of them, the most opinions. Right. With a very expensive product that is
00:48:35 ◼ ► basically a low poly render of a real car. And we'll just, we'll just see. I think this on top
00:48:41 ◼ ► of the Twitter stuff, which is a disaster, I won't post there anymore. And I know a lot of my
00:48:46 ◼ ► journalist friends won't post there anymore. And like brands are quitting and you, you couple the
00:48:50 ◼ ► like, is this product that you sort of bet a chunk of the company's future on any good with also
00:48:57 ◼ ► people are repulsed by the CEO who is just posting openly racist memes now. Yeah. I want, well, can
00:49:04 ◼ ► they continue to attract talent? Right? Like, maybe this is how Apple actually does ship that car.
00:49:09 ◼ ► Because all the good people at Tesla are like, we just need a new place to go work. Right.
00:49:13 ◼ ► I wonder, I have to say as a somebody married to a woman who's not at all tech obsessed, but is
00:49:31 ◼ ► opinions about Elon Musk until the Twitter thing happened. She'd heard of him. And she,
00:49:35 ◼ ► I think she had a vague idea that he was sort of a jackass, or like an attention whore, but really
00:49:42 ◼ ► didn't have strong opinions. There is 0% chance that I could convince my wife for us to get a
00:49:47 ◼ ► Tesla. There's no way I might as well ask her to buy a car with swastikas painted on it at this
00:49:52 ◼ ► point. Oh, but he gets, you know, it's really the best driving car. It's like, there's no way she's,
00:49:58 ◼ ► I mean, to her, that's practically that's on the spectrum of what the Tesla brand stands for at
00:50:11 ◼ ► And sometimes like the product is just good enough that it wins over the brand. But that
00:50:15 ◼ ► is not forever. Right. By the way, one thing I'll point out a totally different car related subject.
00:50:21 ◼ ► It's November 28th when we're recording this. Apple has what 32 days, 33 days to ship carplay,
00:50:30 ◼ ► the full carplay that they announced the WWDC last year, this year. It's never going to happen.
00:50:34 ◼ ► It's never, I've talked to so many car CEOs on decoder. I've talked to people who make other car
00:50:41 ◼ ► entertainment systems. I asked them this question, would you ever hand over your car to Apple in this
00:50:46 ◼ ► way? And it's just deafening silence. Right? I learned a lot about this. And you you'll remember
00:50:52 ◼ ► this because actually, I think you are the one of the first people to reach out to me with some
00:50:56 ◼ ► corrections where there was a story a couple months ago where Porsche came out with a new
00:51:03 ◼ ► second sort of like a screen in front of the passenger seat in some of their cars. Yeah. And
00:51:10 ◼ ► I mistakenly thought it might be and they were like, it wasn't like, hey, we're shipping this.
00:51:15 ◼ ► It was like Porsche pre announcing. This is coming. And so I thought, oh, because it's coming
00:51:21 ◼ ► like next year, early next year. This must be the first and I knew that that the whole Porsche group
00:51:28 ◼ ► has been pretty pro carplay, right? The whole Volkswagen company or whatever, I guess. Who is
00:51:35 ◼ ► it? Is it Volkswagen or Porsche who really owns it? I guess it's Porsche who owns the whole group,
00:51:39 ◼ ► but that they've been pretty carplay friendly all along. I thought, oh, this is the first
00:51:44 ◼ ► carplay to announcement. And you're like, no, that's not carplay too. And and then I looked
00:51:48 ◼ ► and of course, I should have known better. There's tons of verge coverage about it. It's just an
00:51:53 ◼ ► extra screen. And then a couple people who own Porsches are like that, that second screen isn't
00:51:57 ◼ ► even new. And it's totally stupid. And every single person, every single No, every single
00:52:04 ◼ ► person who reached out to me who owns a Porsche who has the screen said, I paid extra for it. And
00:52:10 ◼ ► I it's the only thing I regret about my purchase. Because and they're like, hey, this and when you
00:52:15 ◼ ► pay extra for something from Porsche, it's a lot. I don't know what the add on is. But you know,
00:52:21 ◼ ► yeah, I mean, you there's you can get it in black or you can get it in the good black. And it's Oh,
00:52:26 ◼ ► I want the good black paint. And they're like, well, that's an extra $10,000. Ah, geez.
00:52:40 ◼ ► 22, when the Apple announced it and the gist of it. I got too distracted by the idea that it was
00:52:48 ◼ ► more adaptive to irregular shaped displays, which sounds super useful in the design of a dashboard.
00:52:59 ◼ ► But I think what you can hit on there and what I missed and I see why it might be a non starter
00:53:06 ◼ ► is in addition to that technical detail, which is very cool. And I'm sure car makers would embrace
00:53:13 ◼ ► it. The whole point of carplay to really is to put the whole computer experience for the whole car
00:53:18 ◼ ► in carplace hands, right? It's it's no longer just show me some media stuff from my iPhone,
00:53:26 ◼ ► or let me use my iPhone to show maps from whichever map app I want, which is a great feature,
00:53:31 ◼ ► right? That's one of the great benefits of the carplay Android auto present of cars where you
00:53:40 ◼ ► get a choice in your mapping. And you don't even have to pay if you're using Apple Maps or Google
00:53:45 ◼ ► Maps, as opposed to you have to use your car makers brand of maps and pay your car maker
00:53:54 ◼ ► $45 a month for the privilege. And it's shittier compared to what you would get on your phone
00:54:00 ◼ ► anyway. That's great. But the idea that they're going to put their brand and their control over
00:54:06 ◼ ► the whole thing in anybody else's hands, and I think they're right, honestly, it almost seems
00:54:11 ◼ ► foolish, especially and it gets to the heart of the whole question of Apple's dual position of,
00:54:20 ◼ ► okay, they make one of the two major platforms for getting your phone to drive your on screen
00:54:26 ◼ ► content, right? There's Android and there's iPhone, and that's it. But also, it's the biggest open
00:54:33 ◼ ► secret in the entire history of Apple, I'd say even more so than the headset was until they
00:54:39 ◼ ► announced it a couple months ago, that Apple has an incredibly large division working on making
00:54:47 ◼ ► an Apple branded car, right? So there, I mean, I don't know that they would do it even if if Apple
00:54:55 ◼ ► totally announced if Tim Cook just they just said, we had this whole project Titan, and we're
00:55:03 ◼ ► shutting it down. And then it's just all in the open. And all of these people with expertise in
00:55:08 ◼ ► the area are all on the market and can go to work at Tesla or Ford or whoever else wants to hire
00:55:15 ◼ ► them. Even then, I don't know that car makers would want to put that much control into another
00:55:21 ◼ ► company's hands. But given that Apple is still seemingly working on making competing products,
00:55:28 ◼ ► I don't know, I don't get it. Why would you hand it and you need your phone, right? This is like,
00:55:34 ◼ ► the problem for every car maker is one they know their future, especially as things go electric,
00:55:40 ◼ ► is they're not going to be able to differentiate on engines anymore performance, the cars are going
00:55:45 ◼ ► to be fast and quiet, right? They might be able to differentiate on range, differentiate on the
00:55:50 ◼ ► experience inside the car. And you are already seeing that in huge ways. I love Doug DeMuro
00:55:55 ◼ ► videos, Doug's a good guy, you should go watch them. They're all just about the buttons you can
00:56:00 ◼ ► push inside the car. That's how the cars are being differentiated. Now is look at all the
00:56:04 ◼ ► cup holders and buttons and weird like quirks and features, right? And then he you watch every
00:56:09 ◼ ► single one of these videos, and I've talked to Doug about this a number of times, Doug and every
00:56:13 ◼ ► other car viewer on YouTube, they wave at the screen, and they say it runs carplay and Android
00:56:17 ◼ ► Auto. Yeah, and they just move on. They're done with that. And that is if you are a car maker,
00:56:24 ◼ ► that is death. What is happening is Doug DeMuro is casting a spell on you, that you will die soon,
00:56:31 ◼ ► because you are no longer in control of where all the most interesting features of the future of
00:56:36 ◼ ► cars will happen. And so GM dropping carplay, probably a huge short term mistake for GM.
00:56:46 ◼ ► we need to escalate buyers to think that our software is good. Is that going to happen?
00:56:52 ◼ ► I have no idea. But it is an amount of self esteem that the car industry has not had about making
00:56:59 ◼ ► software save Tesla in forever. Right. And Rivian, right? And Rivian is brand new. Right.
00:57:14 ◼ ► You can see the newer car makers have figured this out. The older car makers are not going to just
00:57:21 ◼ ► hand this over to Apple and die, which is I think what would happen. We started this whole
00:57:26 ◼ ► conversation by saying all cars kind of look the same and design is dead. If you're driving around
00:57:30 ◼ ► in a bunch of bubbly crossover SUVs that are all running carplay, like how are you going to
00:57:36 ◼ ► advertise these cars? But how are you going to market any differentiation? So there's some huge
00:57:42 ◼ ► tension there that's going to get resolved. I don't know in which way. And I think some car
00:57:48 ◼ ► makers are running towards Apple basically. And most of them are running towards Google.
00:57:56 ◼ ► And they're saying, we're going to let Android Automotive, which is Google's OS for cars,
00:58:06 ◼ ► and run in the car. We're going to bet on this because we think the power of Google's overall
00:58:11 ◼ ► ecosystem and cars will bring us an app platform and all the other stuff that we need. And that's
00:58:24 ◼ ► Right. But with carplay support, most of the cars that have carplay support are running on Android.
00:58:30 ◼ ► Yeah. It's utterly crazy. Right. But at some point they're going to, I think they're all inevitably
00:58:46 ◼ ► I don't know about that. I think keeping it so that you can at least get the content from your
00:58:50 ◼ ► phone, like media content and maps content onto your screen just makes people happy. I thought
00:58:56 ◼ ► it was so funny because it's so seldom happens. But Joanna Stern, our mutual dear friend had
00:59:03 ◼ ► the CEO of Ford on stage at one of the Wall Street Journal's events over the summer. And when she
00:59:09 ◼ ► asked him about the GM decision to drop carplay, he laughed. And you really just don't see CEOs
00:59:17 ◼ ► laughing at their competitors very often. And maybe long-term even they'll move in that direction,
00:59:23 ◼ ► but in the near term, it seems, man, that is a disaster. And the backstory on that is just how
00:59:29 ◼ ► many people when they go into a dealer to buy a car have carplay and it's a stat Apple has bragged
00:59:36 ◼ ► about. And it was so eye popping. I think you and I might've even been together when they first
00:59:42 ◼ ► popped like at that first WWDC, the one we're talking about where they announced carplay too.
00:59:47 ◼ ► And when they announced how many US new car buyers demand have carplay as a non-negotiable feature
00:59:54 ◼ ► they want. I forget what the number was, but it's, I don't know, it's 80% or I don't know,
00:59:59 ◼ ► some ridiculous number. And we were like, that can't be true. And they were like, well, it's
01:00:04 ◼ ► a new car buyers, not car buyers, right? And so new car buyers by definition are more affluent.
01:00:11 ◼ ► It's because they're more, way more expensive than used cars. And you listen to them and it's,
01:00:17 ◼ ► huh, that does make sense. And then you look into it. And it's like other people say the same thing.
01:00:21 ◼ ► And people people wrote into me and they're like, yeah, I work at a car dealer. And yes,
01:00:26 ◼ ► that's the how many people come in and say I need, they won't look at a car without carplay.
01:00:34 ◼ ► holdouts for a long time. And they actually they had to cave right the market just demanded carplay
01:00:38 ◼ ► from them. I'm just saying if you are, if you are a carmaker, if you are any kind of device maker,
01:00:45 ◼ ► turning over the core user interface of your product to another company is not a good idea.
01:00:51 ◼ ► No. Well, it's just think about it just from the maps perspective, right? And I agree with you. I
01:00:56 ◼ ► love I, I'm, I have like Tom Tom map, we have a new gene, and has whatever maps Tom Tom or whatever.
01:01:02 ◼ ► And it's this is horrible. But if you are selling an EV to people, and you needed to be able to plan
01:01:09 ◼ ► a route or do charging, or self driving, you actually need control of the map, you need
01:01:17 ◼ ► control of the navigation interface of the car, right? And you've got to wait for Apple to give
01:01:23 ◼ ► it to you. That's you can't hand your future off like that. And I, I really do think this is the
01:01:28 ◼ ► central tension. Apple had a great idea with carplay to although I think we talked about this
01:01:32 ◼ ► last year, maybe the design of it, like just what they were showing on the screens was asinine.
01:01:46 ◼ ► designers, obviously. But you there's no wonder no one's taken it up. You cannot hand over
01:01:52 ◼ ► everything the future of your business to a company, like you said, that might be building
01:01:57 ◼ ► a car of its own. Well, and the other factor too, that I've wondered about, and really,
01:02:07 ◼ ► is well, wait a second, even if a car maker totally bought in to Apple's spiel and said,
01:02:17 ◼ ► Okay, we're going to embrace carplay to as soon as we can, we're going to put our engineering team
01:02:23 ◼ ► onto it and say this is a high priority, we would like to ship these in the first possible model
01:02:28 ◼ ► year. It only works if the customer has an iPhone, right? That's the only way that you get carplay
01:02:35 ◼ ► to so the car needs to do all of that stuff in its built in interface anyway, right? Because it's
01:02:41 ◼ ► like stuff like like how much how much energy is left in the battery if it's an electric vehicle,
01:02:47 ◼ ► right? That's obviously that's essential information. If it's presented through carplay to
01:02:53 ◼ ► when you you're using carplay to there still needs to be a way when for people who don't own
01:02:58 ◼ ► an iPhone or if you just even if you do own an iPhone, but you get in the car without your phone
01:03:03 ◼ ► with you. Yeah, it needs to still be there. So it effectively doubles the work. It's like you need
01:03:11 ◼ ► to have a built in interface for everything. And then you need to redesign everything to work with
01:03:16 ◼ ► carplay to that makes no sense. Honestly, it just and the other thing that it's just sort of ironic,
01:03:22 ◼ ► almost it's Horace Deju coined it as the the cook doctrine. But it was one of the maybe the first
01:03:30 ◼ ► time that Tim or maybe the second time that he was acting CEO while Steve Jobs was out on medical
01:03:35 ◼ ► leave, but it was in hindsight, obviously sort of laying the groundwork for Tim Cook, who up until
01:03:42 ◼ ► that point had sort of been a behind the scenes figure at Apple, and mainly known for his presence
01:03:49 ◼ ► on the quarterly analyst calls not at keynotes or product wise, but he sort of had to in his
01:03:57 ◼ ► prepared statement like a effectively a doctrine and read it and it was part of it was I'll put
01:04:05 ◼ ► the link to the show notes where where Horace transcribed it but the part that sticks out is
01:04:11 ◼ ► we believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
01:04:20 ◼ ► That is essentially just that it that explains why they pursued Apple silicon when they could have
01:04:29 ◼ ► easily stayed on Intel forever. Because then they you know, while the Mac platform was on Intel,
01:04:37 ◼ ► they it was at worst, technically under the hood, architecturally the same as every other
01:04:44 ◼ ► PC out there. And so they could compete solely on the design of the cases, the quality of the
01:04:50 ◼ ► displays, and of course, the software versus Windows, but so essential that they deemed it
01:04:57 ◼ ► worthwhile to pursue their own architecture, right? That if you apply that doctrine as a car
01:05:05 ◼ ► maker, controlling the interface to the car on the screen to be deemed a primary technology behind
01:05:14 ◼ ► the products that you make. Right? Yeah. No, without question. It is that I'm glad you brought
01:05:20 ◼ ► this up because it's the thing that's always been on my mind when I hear about the future of cars is
01:05:24 ◼ ► if you seed control of the software, you've lost the product, right? Especially with EVs like it
01:05:31 ◼ ► is like a traditional carmaker is really good at building gasoline engines, controlling explosions,
01:05:40 ◼ ► moving fuel, right? An engine is a big air pump. It's that is a very complicated mechanical
01:05:45 ◼ ► engineering problem. And I'm not saying EVs are not, but they're different in a meaningful way.
01:05:59 ◼ ► just left with the experiences you can have in the car. And boy, if you don't have control of
01:06:05 ◼ ► the screen, are you limited in what you can do? Like you're down to cup holders. You're down to
01:06:09 ◼ ► basically coupled. Well, you say cup holders when we took Jonas, we took my son, we drove him up to
01:06:15 ◼ ► Boston for his sophomore year of college at the end of August. And I rented a Jeep Wagoneer, which
01:06:22 ◼ ► is their big ass, but DNA via blood and truly one of the ugliest cars ever. Oh, it is it was
01:06:28 ◼ ► hideously ugly. And it's ridiculous. It's so big. It is so big that as we were driving, I noticed
01:06:34 ◼ ► that I could as an of course, I passed a lot of cars because I drive fast. But as we would pass
01:06:40 ◼ ► minivans, I could see their sunroof. I'm so high up that I'm looking that's really down on a
01:06:48 ◼ ► minivan. But there was some question I had about the Wagoneer and I thought I know that the best
01:06:54 ◼ ► way to find an answer to this is Oh, I know what it was. I couldn't find the the USB C port that
01:07:02 ◼ ► I would want to use to plug my phone into CarPlay. So I didn't have to use Bluetooth. And it was it.
01:07:08 ◼ ► I just couldn't find it. And so I looked at a YouTube video and the YouTube video was about
01:07:14 ◼ ► the fact that the Wagoneer has 18 USB ports. And they were celebrating. This is so awesome.
01:07:21 ◼ ► Look at this. It doesn't matter where you're sitting. You've got you can charge to every
01:07:25 ◼ ► single seat in this car can have two devices charging backseat, middle seat, middle seat,
01:07:32 ◼ ► even the middle seat. There's like here is a USB port just for somebody sitting in the middle seat
01:07:42 ◼ ► Why not? So my Jeep does also has a second screen in the front passenger. And I have all these
01:07:49 ◼ ► dreams that my wife will drive and I'll plug my phone in over HDMI and stream and it's not just
01:07:55 ◼ ► gonna hold my phone. Like I did it once. And I was like, Wait, why am I not just holding my phone?
01:08:00 ◼ ► And the only other thing you can do is put the map up on it. But it's only the built in map.
01:08:05 ◼ ► So we have the screen that we never use. And that is I'm telling you, this is existential for car
01:08:10 ◼ ► makers. Yeah, no doubt about it faces. And the sooner they recognize that, I mean, and it to me,
01:08:22 ◼ ► almost exemplifies the verge. What is it that the verge covers is the fact that everything is
01:08:32 ◼ ► becoming a computer, everything's a computer, and it's only going to accelerate right. I mean,
01:08:37 ◼ ► my favorite example is that our headphones are computers now, right? Little our airport,
01:08:47 ◼ ► the same thing. They're just little independent computers that fit in your ear. That's all
01:08:52 ◼ ► everything is a computer. And car makers who don't recognize that they're just big multi ton,
01:08:58 ◼ ► fast moving computers. They're out there. They're missing the point. That's all they are. They're
01:09:04 ◼ ► just big people transporting computers. Yeah, they fail. There's an infinite car makers love
01:09:11 ◼ ► car CEOs love being on decoder. They like talking about it. They want to talk to a tech audience
01:09:17 ◼ ► about how they know they are rolling computers now. And there's a big split. There's the car part
01:09:23 ◼ ► where they're basically integrating hundreds, if not thousands of little custom microcontrollers
01:09:30 ◼ ► from different suppliers that control the windshield wipers and the body control module.
01:09:34 ◼ ► All of that stuff is now moving to unified platforms. And that was initially the big Tesla
01:09:41 ◼ ► innovation. It is the Rivian innovation, right? That they've, they've unified the compute
01:09:46 ◼ ► architecture of the entire car so that your brake lights are running on the same compute stack as
01:09:52 ◼ ► whatever else. That is not true in most cars today yet in a way that it's true. That's why Tesla can
01:09:58 ◼ ► do over there updates. And then there's the infotainment experience, which is what most
01:10:03 ◼ ► people think when the car is a computer. So these things are happening in parallel. The car makers
01:10:09 ◼ ► have very quickly moved on the unify all of the architecture of the car piece because they all
01:10:17 ◼ ► have the same problem. So the suppliers are getting ahead of it, right? Cause they're just responding
01:10:22 ◼ ► to like market demand basically from all these car makers. So they're figuring it out over there,
01:10:28 ◼ ► make good touch screen computers continues to allude virtually every company that is not Apple
01:10:35 ◼ ► or Samsung's mobile division. Google, right? There's a handful of companies that are like,
01:10:40 ◼ ► we're good at touch screen, mobile computers and car makers as of yet save Tesla are not among them.
01:10:51 ◼ ► keep bringing up Rivian's a teeny tiny company. Right. That's exactly why Lucid is potentially
01:10:56 ◼ ► good at this too. Right. But like, right there, they are just different. Well, and it's yeah,
01:11:02 ◼ ► cause there's currently there. So you just, you don't buy a Rivian. You get on a years long list
01:11:07 ◼ ► to buy a Rivian. You can at least one now. Do you have to get on a list? I don't know. And they will
01:11:13 ◼ ► allow you to lease a Rivian. So they're really nice vehicles that you're on a list. It's just
01:11:18 ◼ ► a list of people who make 95,000 dollars that are currently, they're currently made in such small
01:11:24 ◼ ► quantities that there's just no way to extrapolate what it means to the industry. Like you had
01:11:29 ◼ ► mentioned earlier that pickup truck buyers are infamously brand loyal and Rivian can sell their
01:11:37 ◼ ► pickup trucks as fast as they can make them. But there's such a small quantity that it doesn't,
01:11:43 ◼ ► it doesn't give us any clue as to whether the majority of pickup truck buyers are willing to
01:11:52 ◼ ► switch to brands like Rivian or Tesla or something like that. It's just, it's just too much of a
01:11:57 ◼ ► rounding error at this point as much as I, and I wish them luck because I love their design and,
01:12:02 ◼ ► and I hope they succeed and thrive, but it's just too hard to, to draw any conclusions from their
01:12:09 ◼ ► small quantity. Yeah. The first job that chat GPT is going to take in the auto industry is the
01:12:13 ◼ ► person who writes the press release at Ford every year saying the F-150 is the best selling vehicle.
01:12:17 ◼ ► They have written that press release for 40 years. Just let the robot do it, man. It's going to be
01:12:23 ◼ ► fine. It just sounds it's to me hearing that phrase makes me think of NFL football because
01:12:39 ◼ ► commercial, the best selling pickup truck in America. Oh, sorry. This is totally inside
01:12:45 ◼ ► baseball. I think your audience will appreciate it. So, you know, the built Ford tough plate.
01:12:50 ◼ ► Yeah. A friend of the ad industry, that plate was real. That was a real thing that they dropped
01:12:55 ◼ ► to get that sound and that effect. And there, apparently there had been discussions about
01:13:00 ◼ ► redoing it, updated, make sure, then they got to make another place. And then there was like,
01:13:06 ◼ ► I don't know. I don't know where they landed. I just know that there was some conversation
01:13:19 ◼ ► Yeah. I would just say it's the cyber truck wiper. And did they drop a giant metal plate in the Ford
01:13:24 ◼ ► ad? These are the car stories that I am chasing at the verge.com. All right, let me take a break
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01:16:42 ◼ ► purchase. Drink trade.com/the talk show. It's funny what podcasts I don't do you do the reads
01:16:52 ◼ ► for decoder or no, usually the decoder ones are often they're pre recorded, but they we are we
01:16:58 ◼ ► are precious journalists, my friend. The well, I'm a one man show. So I don't have the opportunity.
01:17:05 ◼ ► But I was listening to Bill Simmons podcast this week. And you can tell what they require where
01:17:11 ◼ ► they're like, you have to say this this many times or this paragraph must be read verbatim.
01:17:16 ◼ ► He had a spot from McDonald's. And at the end, he had to say copyright 2023 McDonald's Corporation.
01:17:24 ◼ ► And it's like, no way. I swear to God, somebody at McDonald's, some lawyer at McDonald's needs
01:17:32 ◼ ► to be fired. Because you don't need you don't need to state a copyright in a radio ad or a
01:17:41 ◼ ► podcast ad. It's like, what are you doing? We might as well parlay this into talking about decoder you.
01:17:48 ◼ ► I mean, it makes me sick. To be honest, the guests you've had and let's just start with the big one.
01:17:54 ◼ ► You had fucking Obama. Yeah, on the show. My wife thought it was really cool. That was the coolest
01:18:00 ◼ ► she's ever thought I've been. That's great. How did that come about? I highly recommend it. And
01:18:05 ◼ ► it was for it was the topic and it was good that you had a topic because I mean, again, I mean,
01:18:10 ◼ ► you know me, I'm I'll keep you here for three hours. I keep Obama Yeah, I mean, you could go
01:18:15 ◼ ► for three weeks talking to that guy. But it was about the AI regulations that the Biden
01:18:22 ◼ ► I don't want to sound like I'm bragging at this point. There is more incoming to decoder than
01:18:28 ◼ ► outgoing, which is really fascinating. See, I took over the show from Kara Swisher. This was recode
01:18:35 ◼ ► decode. It was our old feed and she went to the Times and, and I'm a confident man. I think people
01:18:42 ◼ ► acknowledge I have no lack of self confidence. But you know, it's like a daunting thing to take over
01:18:47 ◼ ► Kara Swisher. So in the beginning, there's like lots of like, what are we gonna do? How do we not
01:18:51 ◼ ► turn the audience and we've just gotten the show to the point where I think it's understandable
01:18:58 ◼ ► enough what's going to happen and what we're going to talk about and how it's going to work
01:19:01 ◼ ► that I think a lot of people want to be on it. I always describe it as it's a game that CEOs
01:19:07 ◼ ► can plausibly win. Most of the episodes should be a tie. That's how I feel about it. But most CEOs,
01:19:14 ◼ ► most executives, most ex presidents are pretty type A. They would like to be challenged and they
01:19:19 ◼ ► would like to, they would like to win. I feel the same way. So decoder is set up that way.
01:19:23 ◼ ► It's not over, it's not contentious. Sometimes it can be, but it's set up to be challenging.
01:19:30 ◼ ► And so there's just, we do get a lot of incoming. And I think with Obama in particular,
01:19:36 ◼ ► the one that we did was actually our second attempt at it. The first one had been just a
01:19:41 ◼ ► couple of weeks prior. He had been set to open a big social media department at Harvard. There
01:19:47 ◼ ► was a big fancy launch event. He was going to be on stage and we were going to do decoder right after
01:19:51 ◼ ► and talk about content moderation. He's really big on it. He thinks that we should rethink how social
01:19:57 ◼ ► networks impact democracy. This is a big point of it. It's in that interview because I was obviously
01:20:02 ◼ ► very well prepped for that interview. And then he had what they called COVID like symptoms, so he
01:20:06 ◼ ► had to cancel. So I was like, "Oh, this is never going to happen." I left and everyone was riding
01:20:12 ◼ ► high and my team was all around me. They were all dressed up and they all looked sad. And then the
01:20:17 ◼ ► AI thing was happening and his team called back and said, "He really wants to talk to you about
01:20:21 ◼ ► this stuff." And I think, again, I just come back to that first piece of it. I'm good at whatever
01:20:27 ◼ ► the things I'm going to talk about are. There are very few places where you can sit in the weeds of
01:20:32 ◼ ► content moderation and get into it and be challenged and have it still be accessible to
01:20:37 ◼ ► the audience. I want decoder to be that show where I always joke that the tagline of the entire
01:20:42 ◼ ► verge is, "It's fun to be smart." And it's fun. So he came back and we talked about AI a little bit,
01:20:47 ◼ ► but really what I wanted to talk to him about was how are we going to regulate social networks when
01:21:09 ◼ ► I can open Lightroom or Photoshop and confidently, with a lot of effort, make an image that looks
01:21:16 ◼ ► convincing that is a lie. And the government really can't regulate me out of doing that.
01:21:20 ◼ ► And they can't regulate Photoshop out of doing that. If I push a button that says, "Generate
01:21:30 ◼ ► regulate Adobe when you push that button and not the other button. That's, to me, it's just like a
01:21:36 ◼ ► wild point in history. There's only two other places where I can think of where that happens.
01:21:43 ◼ ► One, you cannot Photoshop a dollar bill. You can't do it. You can try to scan into Photoshop. Maybe
01:21:49 ◼ ► you can edit it. You try to print it. At some point, it's like, "No, we just don't allow this
01:21:54 ◼ ► to happen. Stop it." And then the second is obviously child pornography. It's like speech that
01:21:59 ◼ ► most platforms, we accept some amount of automated content recognition and integration with the
01:22:03 ◼ ► police and everybody understands why. That's it. But now with AI, because the volume of deception
01:22:09 ◼ ► can be so high, there is a real conversation about, "Okay, should we regulate the tools or
01:22:15 ◼ ► the distributors?" And I think Obama, he's a big nerd and he just wanted to talk about it
01:22:21 ◼ ► with somebody who was already in the weeds. And I'm a huge nerd and I was excited to do that.
01:22:27 ◼ ► I don't know why people come to us, but that's my belief is that the show is challenging and
01:22:33 ◼ ► people are drawn to it. It was a great interview. And I'm about as pro-Joe Biden as anybody I know.
01:22:44 ◼ ► I really like him and I actually, I think he's doing a great job as president. But yet at the
01:22:49 ◼ ► same time, I watched your interview with Obama and I'm like, "Christ, I miss that guy."
01:22:58 ◼ ► Both of those things can be true, right? I can totally think Joe Biden is doing a very good job
01:23:05 ◼ ► as president and I'm very proud of a lot of the decisions or most of the decisions he made.
01:23:11 ◼ ► In fact, I might even politically align more with Joe Biden personally than Barack Obama on certain
01:23:18 ◼ ► issues, right? Like I'm very, my politics very much aligned with Joe Biden's. But yet at the
01:23:22 ◼ ► same time, even me as a very pro-Biden person, he's not Barack Obama, right? He's not. He just isn't.
01:23:43 ◼ ► intellect, open-mindedness, knowledge, humility, right? Like he has an enormous amount of humility
01:23:53 ◼ ► Well, let me offer you one tiny… I'll give you actually two tiny counterpoints to this.
01:23:59 ◼ ► At Decoder, we interview a whole lot of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Everyone needs
01:24:04 ◼ ► to know how to pronounce my name. So the way that I have learned to get around telling people how to
01:24:10 ◼ ► pronounce my name is I ask them how to pronounce their name. And then that has evolved into,
01:24:15 ◼ ► and tell me what title you'd like to use. And I'll tell you this after two years now we've been doing
01:24:20 ◼ ► this, academics really give a shit about what title. Like you ask that question, you get like
01:24:25 ◼ ► a 10-minute response, all the endowments say whatever. CEOs are like, "Whatever." Barack
01:24:30 ◼ ► Obama looked at me and said, "Everyone knows who I am." Just flatly that's what he said. It was an
01:24:35 ◼ ► incredible… I was like, "All right, my shtick is not working here, whatever, but at least I said
01:24:39 ◼ ► my name to him." And then as he was leaving, and this just blew my mind, we had been talking about
01:24:48 ◼ ► the First Amendment and writing some laws. And there's this very famous Supreme Court case
01:24:53 ◼ ► called Red Lion that says the government can regulate broadcasters because they use public
01:24:57 ◼ ► airwaves. This is why the FCC could find CBS for the Janet Jackson thing, but they can't
01:25:03 ◼ ► regulate what happens on the internet. CBS uses the public airwaves. So it's like, you got to
01:25:07 ◼ ► find something. How are you going to regulate the internet without somebody like this? And he just
01:25:12 ◼ ► looked at me and he's like, "Yeah, you just got to figure it out. You'll figure it out." And he
01:25:16 ◼ ► just left. And I was like, "Oh, you used to be the most powerful person in the world." Your brain is
01:25:21 ◼ ► like, "Why are you bothering me with this problem? Come up with four solutions and I'll pick one."
01:25:30 ◼ ► you're reminded, he's very aware that he's one of the most famous people in world history,
01:25:52 ◼ ► Joe; And left and right, the feedback was, "Boy, we miss that guy." There are Trump voters who
01:25:57 ◼ ► listen to Decoder, they often write me emails telling me how stupid I am. That's all fine.
01:26:01 ◼ ► But the overwhelming feedback was, "I wish we had a politician who could sit in the problem,"
01:26:07 ◼ ► right? Who was obviously engaged in the problem, had done their research. I'm not saying, I don't
01:26:12 ◼ ► know if Joe Biden has. I know that when Kamala Harris talks about it, it doesn't sound like it.
01:26:20 ◼ ► Pete; Right. It's all make-believe to him. It's all pro-wrestling. I've thought that since before
01:26:26 ◼ ► he was even elected in 2016, and I think it's only gotten exacerbated as he's gotten older,
01:26:32 ◼ ► gotten more crazy, is clearly losing his marbles in some way. He just thinks the whole world is
01:26:41 ◼ ► pro-wrestling and that there's, you just, whoever yells the loudest wins, and it's no different on
01:26:46 ◼ ► technical issues, even when there's very, very firm technical evidence. It doesn't matter at all.
01:26:53 ◼ ► You just know, though, there's no way Joe Biden can talk like Obama does about this issue. He
01:26:59 ◼ ► just isn't. And I don't, he is who he is, and I think he might be the first to admit it. Maybe
01:27:03 ◼ ► not, because, dude, I miss that guy. Also, you dressed better than Obama, and he called you out
01:27:10 ◼ ► on it at the beginning of the interview. So, again, this is like two rounds. So, the first
01:27:14 ◼ ► time I didn't wear a tie. And then I watched, we did an emergency interview with Larry Lessig as a
01:27:21 ◼ ► villain. Thank you, Professor Lessig. That was a great conversation. I encourage you to go listen
01:27:24 ◼ ► to it. And I was watching the clips of that. I was like, I can't be looking like that. And I
01:27:30 ◼ ► was dressed nicely. And so, the second time I wore a tie, and he walked in, he was like, what are you
01:27:34 ◼ ► Pete Lausen>> You didn't need to wear a tie. That's what he said. Oh, man. It was a really
01:27:40 ◼ ► good interview, though. And the other thing, too, and again, it is weird. I don't want to turn this
01:27:45 ◼ ► into a whole thing about the next year's presidential election, but it is, and people are
01:27:50 ◼ ► coming around to this, where because of Fox News, there's this whole narrative that Joe Biden at 81
01:27:57 ◼ ► is too old, as though Trump isn't 77, right? Which is, you know, same ballpark, right? It's the same
01:28:05 ◼ ► four-year window. And quite frankly, there's always on the right wing, too. There's this,
01:28:11 ◼ ► especially driven by Trump, there's this whole thing of projection, right? Just, and it's, it's
01:28:17 ◼ ► almost cartoonish in the way that it's like introductory psychology 101 for college sophomores.
01:28:25 ◼ ► What is projection? The examples from Trump are like, couldn't be more almost laughable, right?
01:28:32 ◼ ► So what do they accuse Joe Biden of? Corruption. This is the guy who owned a hotel three blocks
01:28:38 ◼ ► from the White House while he was president of the United States. So the age thing is totally
01:28:51 ◼ ► I'm a big Joe Biden supporter. I'm going to be voting for him next year, no matter what,
01:28:55 ◼ ► at this point. I mean, there's, what else? That's what the choice is. But I will happily admit,
01:29:06 ◼ ► too demanding. I think 77 is too old. But the idea that one of them is too old and not the other
01:29:22 ◼ ► Yeah, he's doing all right. He's living his best life. There was a moment in that interview where
01:29:27 ◼ ► I was like, you're an author. What do you think about Chatzavu and copyright? And he just goes,
01:29:30 ◼ ► Michelle and I have done very well. And it's like, all right, you're doing great. We had our first
01:29:35 ◼ ► sort of election planning meeting, the Verge team. How are we going to do this this year? And it was
01:29:41 ◼ ► the first, eventually it's exciting. Election year is always exciting for journalists. You get to go
01:29:45 ◼ ► out and there's lots of stuff happening. But you start from the perspective of these two guys are
01:29:56 ◼ ► administrations or platforms or fundamental beliefs about America. Vibes. Vibes. And one of
01:30:04 ◼ ► them is evil. It's autocratic in a way that scares me. The Verge is like, we don't have to pretend to
01:30:13 ◼ ► be a newspaper. We just say it. And once you start from that premise, we can just say it out loud.
01:30:18 ◼ ► It's weird that Trump is talking about doing the things that he's talking about doing, which are
01:30:24 ◼ ► very autocratic. It's weird that Republicans seem to love speech regulations lately. For all Elon
01:30:30 ◼ ► Musk talks about being a free speech absolutist, he's the one suing his critics right now.
01:30:34 ◼ ► That's weird. And so you just start from this place of what is this election? It's not about
01:30:42 ◼ ► these men who are old and what they say about their policies is rarely perfectly accurate.
01:30:55 ◼ ► and then the Biden administration clarifies what he says. It's just because he's off the cuff or
01:31:09 ◼ ► election is about. Do you want one that operates, that is respectful of its citizens? Or do you want
01:31:14 ◼ ► one that's crazy? And if you're a tech publication, what are we going to ask them what their
01:31:19 ◼ ► differences on TikTok are? This is almost like a nonsensical place to begin. And we kept going. We
01:31:26 ◼ ► got excited about it because there's actually real differences. The service we do to the audience is
01:31:31 ◼ ► motivating and all this stuff. But I was thinking about this coming out of the Obama interview,
01:31:37 ◼ ► because that election was about him as a person. He was the captivating political leader. He
01:31:44 ◼ ► represented all of the things. And this election in particular is the opposite of that. These are
01:31:51 ◼ ► just stand-ins, they're cardboard cutouts of Democrats and Republicans, and they're both
01:31:57 ◼ ► very old. And if they ever debate, I think it will just go down as the moment millions of young
01:32:04 ◼ ► Americans decided to run for office. I think everyone's reaction to it has to be, we cannot
01:32:12 ◼ ► hand over the operation to the country to an ever-increasing number of older people. We young
01:32:18 ◼ ► people have to go do it. It's bizarre. It's just some sort of fluke of who won primaries and who
01:32:30 ◼ ► ran out of terms to run for with the limit of two terms. I mean, if there weren't a term limit,
01:32:37 ◼ ► Bill Clinton, obviously, in my opinion, would have easily won reelection in 2000. I mean,
01:33:11 ◼ ► Leibovitz I always think when I think about what had happened, what would have been different if
01:33:32 ◼ ► Gore had won in 2000? To me, it all comes down to whether they would have headed off 9/11. And I
01:33:41 ◼ ► sort of think they would not have. And I know that people on the liberal left-leaning side love to
01:33:49 ◼ ► over-index on the fact that—and this is a fact—that when the Bush people were coming in,
01:34:07 ◼ ► "We think the number one priority is Al Qaeda." And the Bush people were like, "Vat! Nope,
01:34:14 ◼ ► it's Saddam." And that—it proved very prescient that in the year 2000, the last year, the Clinton
01:34:21 ◼ ► administration, their national security people really thought that Al Qaeda was going to be a
01:34:26 ◼ ► problem. And Al Qaeda had already tried to bomb the World Trade Center, right? They set off like
01:34:30 ◼ ► a truck bomb that just wasn't explosive enough to bring the buildings down. And so there's some
01:34:36 ◼ ► chance that a Gore administration would have been more focused on Al Qaeda in the first half of 2001
01:34:43 ◼ ► and maybe would have covered it. But it was such a sneak attack and so deviously played the policies
01:34:55 ◼ ► of airlines in the case of a hijacking against them. Such a pure jujitsu move. And it's funny,
01:35:01 ◼ ► too, because I was watching like documentaries, like, I forget, there were a couple of them. But
01:35:05 ◼ ► like in the 60s and 70s, like, airline hijackings were like super commonplace. And I know if you're
01:35:19 ◼ ► quote unquote hijacked by like activists. And they never crashed the planes. They'd say,
01:35:26 ◼ ► "We want you to land and we want you to free political prisoners from such and such country
01:35:30 ◼ ► or whatever." And it was just sort of like a hassle. People didn't get killed. The planes
01:35:40 ◼ ► if you ever get hijacked, here's what you do. Just listen to the guys, do what they tell you to do.
01:35:44 ◼ ► If they tell you to land, call air traffic control, say we're being hijacked, we're going to land
01:35:49 ◼ ► at the nearest airport or wherever they want you to land. Just do what they say, because then
01:35:54 ◼ ► nobody gets hurt." And, you know, playing that against us, that was the whole key to their plan
01:35:59 ◼ ► was like, "They're just going to let us do what we want. We'll take the cockpit and then we'll fly
01:36:03 ◼ ► the planes into the..." I think it would have happened. I think that what the Republicans would
01:36:08 ◼ ► have done to Gore would have led us to today's level of partisanship. Partisanship doesn't even
01:36:15 ◼ ► do justice. And Trump himself, like you said, where his rhetoric has gone, he's literally
01:36:21 ◼ ► saying things, calling his political enemies within the United States vermin, right? It's
01:36:26 ◼ ► like this coded Nazi language, explicitly saying over and over in his new stump speech that
01:36:33 ◼ ► our enemies outside the country aren't an issue. It's the enemies within the country are the issue.
01:36:39 ◼ ► I think that if Gore had been in the White House when 9/11 happened, which I think is more likely
01:36:45 ◼ ► than not to have happened probably on the same day, I think instead of getting behind him as
01:36:51 ◼ ► a country like the Democrats did behind Bush at first, I think they would have gone thermonuclear
01:36:57 ◼ ► and blamed it on Gore. And it's very hard to predict what would have happened after that.
01:37:15 ◼ ► Trevor Burrus Yeah. Like I said, every now and again, I wonder what's happening on that timeline.
01:37:27 ◼ ► it was, I don't know, like a 10-second interaction. I mean, I had no idea who I was. I never know at an
01:37:33 ◼ ► Apple event whether somebody will know me. And I thought, as I shook his hand, "Well, he is an
01:37:39 ◼ ► Apple board member, and I'm pretty well known as an Apple media person." So there's a chance he'd
01:37:45 ◼ ► be like, "Ah, John, I've always wanted to meet you." You know, which is what happened the first
01:37:50 ◼ ► time I met Steve Jobs. You know, it was like, he knew who I was. And I was blown away. And I'm like,
01:37:54 ◼ ► "Ah, well." Or Schiller, same thing for, I met Schiller before I met any other higher level
01:37:58 ◼ ► executive. And he obviously read my website. And I was like, "Ah." So I thought there was a chance,
01:38:03 ◼ ► he obviously didn't. The man's head is enormous. I mean, like, I take a seven and a half hat size.
01:38:12 ◼ ► Al Gore must take like a size nine. I mean, it's like the size of a basketball. But you really,
01:38:21 ◼ ► Steven: Well, he did the Inconvenient Truth, right? I mean, he had his moment. He's older.
01:38:28 ◼ ► I'm not, let's see how old he is. He might be younger than either, he's certainly younger than
01:38:43 ◼ ► how weird it is that we've got these two really old candidates. Bill Clinton, I think, is younger
01:39:01 ◼ ► for sure. Although I guess if he does, if he does it like Trump, he could just keep the seat on the
01:39:05 ◼ ► board, right? I don't know. Let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor of the
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01:41:16 ◼ ► to Squarespace for their continuing support of the show. You've had a bunch of other guests. You
01:41:36 ◼ ► Steven; I thought the Panzareno interview was really interesting because it was sort of like
01:41:41 ◼ ► peers, right? Like you as the editor-in-chief of The Verge, Panzareno is the decade-long
01:41:46 ◼ ► editor at TechCrunch. I know both of you. I'm in between you. You're both regular guests on my show
01:41:53 ◼ ► here. We're pals at events. It's sort of like the way that it's not a zero-sum game, right? Like
01:41:59 ◼ ► TechCrunch and The Verge could both do good work and it's better for the web as opposed to a sort
01:42:06 ◼ ► of old-timey, you know, the two editors of newspapers in the same town hate each other,
01:42:20 ◼ ► is really important to me. I keep joking that The Verge is the last website that exists. We
01:42:26 ◼ ► care about it. We talk about it. We're trying to build it all the time. Everyone else in publishing
01:42:31 ◼ ► is kind of like they're decided to be content suppliers to a big platform one way or the other
01:42:37 ◼ ► for pennies. I just think that sucks. Matt and I, our careers are in a similar arc. That conversation
01:42:45 ◼ ► is really fun because we've just faced so many of the same pressures and so many of the same ways.
01:42:52 ◼ ► And in particular, I quit the corporate owners that he worked for for a long time at AOL.
01:42:56 ◼ ► It was just like sometimes only a handful of people know what the hell you're talking about.
01:43:05 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, the other similarity too, though, is that both of you never stop producing or just
01:43:11 ◼ ► writing your own stuff, right? Or you host a show now. You're not just the editor at The Verge.
01:43:17 ◼ ► You're one of the leading writers and your drive to continue writing and doing your own podcast is
01:43:34 ◼ ► particular kind of cheesy on. There's a Steve Jobs clip where he talks about hiring managers
01:43:43 ◼ ► It's a great clip. I watch it once a month. And he's like, literally, it's Steve Jobs using the
01:43:50 ◼ ► word bozos, which is like all you want in life. And he's like, we tried to hire a bunch of
01:43:54 ◼ ► professional managers and they were horrible. They didn't know how to do anything. And if you're a
01:43:59 ◼ ► great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from? And I
01:44:17 ◼ ► I have no credibility. And maybe there's a lot of other editors who are great, who don't do it
01:44:23 ◼ ► every day and they retain the credibility with their SaaS. There are lots of different ways to
01:44:27 ◼ ► do everything. For me, I'm always afraid that if I let up for one day, everyone will know that I
01:44:34 ◼ ► have no idea what I'm talking about. I need the proof. And I also think the verge is small. It's
01:44:39 ◼ ► a big fish in a little pond, but you hold us up next to our competitors, like the times or the
01:44:45 ◼ ► poster, the other things that we have to go up against. And we need to punch way above our weight.
01:44:51 ◼ ► To me, part of it is if I don't do the work, then I am in no position to push the staff as hard
01:45:03 ◼ ► When did the redesign of the verge happen? Were you on my show afterwards or did it happen
01:45:37 ◼ ► huge, significant redesign of a very popular website. And all anybody could bitch about
01:45:42 ◼ ► were the fonts for certain of the page elements. And you guys tweaked them. And it's I think it's
01:45:47 ◼ ► very, very readable. But the biggest thing, it's not the specifics of the design or the branding
01:46:01 ◼ ► And so you're so right. It's just, every now and again, I have to say it out loud, right?
01:46:08 ◼ ► But you make a website, you should go to it, right? And if I do something like post link on
01:46:15 ◼ ► threads or mastodon with a link to the verge, or me personally, my weird thing where I run a website
01:46:21 ◼ ► where I spend a lot of time linking to articles at other websites, I know when I link to the verge,
01:46:27 ◼ ► that everybody can read it. And yeah, okay, you guys have a couple of paid newsletters now. But
01:46:32 ◼ ► for like news coverage, you just go there. And you can read the article and there's no paywall.
01:46:39 ◼ ► And when you scroll down, it doesn't cover the article up with a pitch to subscribe to a
01:46:45 ◼ ► newsletter or podcast or something like that. It's that the average website from most publishers
01:46:53 ◼ ► is so bad and getting worse, that to have a website that did a major redesign and went in
01:47:02 ◼ ► the other direction to make it more bloggy, you know, and you guys have like these short
01:47:08 ◼ ► form link posts now that you put on the homepage. And it's been I think, as a reader of the verge,
01:47:15 ◼ ► a grand success. As you know, fun. Yeah, again, it's it was super duper. I thought the verge
01:47:33 ◼ ► But you if all you guys learned was one nugget of new information, then you've got a format now
01:47:41 ◼ ► where you could post an update with just that nugget of information. And you didn't have to
01:47:45 ◼ ► write 700 word article about it. If it was 50 words worth of news on this ongoing saga,
01:47:54 ◼ ► then there's a 50 word link on the front page. So I when I say most publishers have turned
01:48:04 ◼ ► reason most publisher websites are bad is because most media companies have just given up on making
01:48:10 ◼ ► software. So they just buy other people's software. Right. And I'll just the stereotypical examples,
01:48:24 ◼ ► that they're gone. No one remembers anything about it. And that's where you're publishing into.
01:48:28 ◼ ► And then you bought a bunch of ad tech from some other people. And then you've got a newsletter
01:48:37 ◼ ► if you do this pop up. And then you kind of just get to the screenshots that people share
01:48:42 ◼ ► bad websites. And you're like, if you just take one step back, you're like, yep, that's a bad user
01:48:46 ◼ ► experience. He takes one step back to why it's Oh, there's 45 different pieces of software designed
01:48:53 ◼ ► to optimize 45 different business goals here. And no one is in charge of this. Right. And that is
01:48:59 ◼ ► that is just to be clear. This is not like a hot take. And this is just reality. Most people know
01:49:04 ◼ ► this. But because everyone's given up on making their own software, no one has any ability to fix
01:49:09 ◼ ► it. There's no one to talk to. And nobody can really explain how the page is ultimately rendered.
01:49:15 ◼ ► Really? It's like crazy. Right. And so I but so what I look at is when I say suppliers, right,
01:49:22 ◼ ► they've done that they've got them on the web. And then the only meaningful source of traffic to most
01:49:28 ◼ ► websites anymore at scale is Google. So everything is like this festival of SEO optimization,
01:49:35 ◼ ► which is weird and bad for the web. And I'm going to say this, and some Google executive is going
01:49:40 ◼ ► to jump out of a bush the next time I walk outside my house and say, that's not what the guidelines
01:49:44 ◼ ► say, which is literally all they can say while pointing to their 10,000 pages of SEO guidelines.
01:49:49 ◼ ► It's a very confusing and you're like, Oh, this is why everything got long and padded out. And
01:49:55 ◼ ► you can't just post an update. Because people believe in their heart, that sending 50 words
01:50:01 ◼ ► of new information onto a web page is bad for your Google ranking. And so we have to build this
01:50:07 ◼ ► article page. And the SEO consultants will do all this and it's this sucks. It should not be easier
01:50:14 ◼ ► to tweet than it is to post to the website that I run that pays me money. And so that's where all
01:50:19 ◼ ► that came from. And we are just baby stepping our way. We have the live streams now, which like when
01:50:24 ◼ ► we do Apple live logging, they're like basically in real time, we have a very special tool that we
01:50:29 ◼ ► use called Norcon live center for that. And then we have this, you know, then there's articles. And
01:50:32 ◼ ► then in the middle, we're doing these story streams, which are like slow life logs. Like
01:50:37 ◼ ► they're just a middle speed of updates that happened throughout the day. We're doing all
01:50:40 ◼ ► the trial coverage in there. Cause it's about right. No one wants to read a real time transcription
01:50:44 ◼ ► of a trial. Well, no, it does not seem like that's what anybody wants. No. So we have a middle speed
01:50:50 ◼ ► and it's because we control our product. Despite I mean, you know this cause you're an actual lawyer,
01:50:56 ◼ ► but despite what TV and movie dramas would have you believe courtrooms are very boring places
01:51:02 ◼ ► that person that proceed at very slow pace. And everybody who's ever served jury duty knows this.
01:51:10 ◼ ► You say you don't even have to be a lawyer. All you have to do is actually get, Oh, actually me,
01:51:14 ◼ ► I've never been picked for a jury because I have a wife who's a criminal defense attorney.
01:51:24 ◼ ► and this has been my go-to. I thought that all you had to do was say you're, you're a lawyer.
01:51:29 ◼ ► And then the last time I got picked, I was like cruising to the end and the case settled right
01:51:32 ◼ ► before the impairment was. So we are, we're doing great. My wife is a criminal defense attorney is
01:51:37 ◼ ► a good way to get out. And then if that doesn't do it, and the last time I got had jury duty,
01:51:42 ◼ ► they asked me, would you be, or there's a questionnaire and I, and one of the questions is,
01:51:48 ◼ ► are you less likely to believe the testimony of a police officer? And I checked yes. And then they
01:51:55 ◼ ► called me out. They said, juror number 37. And I said, yes. And they said, you answered that you
01:51:59 ◼ ► would be less likely to believe the testimony of a police officer. Why? And I said, well, I, I believe
01:52:06 ◼ ► that police officers, once they've arrested somebody will say whatever it takes to convict
01:52:10 ◼ ► that person. And then they say, juror number 37, you are dismissed. And I left. And I, I look
01:52:18 ◼ ► forward to living a long, healthy life. And I, at some point when I'm retired, I look forward to
01:52:25 ◼ ► hang out on the jury. I look forward to making up for lost time as, and serving my civic duty
01:52:32 ◼ ► proudly as a member of juries. And then I might perhaps answer that question in a way that is
01:52:38 ◼ ► actually, it would actually be less, but that's actually honest for me. I actually, you can hook
01:52:43 ◼ ► me up to a polygraph and assuming you believe polygraphs actually produce actual results that
01:52:49 ◼ ► are accurate, I actually do believe police officers say whatever it takes to convict whoever it is
01:52:54 ◼ ► they arrested for a crime. I actually believe that. But it's a good way to, good way to get
01:53:00 ◼ ► out of jury duty if it's a criminal case. What else do we have on the agenda for the show?
01:53:05 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Okay. I'll just, I'll add this. The thing that we're going to do with the redesign
01:53:10 ◼ ► where we're going to, we're going to get there is we are somehow, some way going to federate
01:53:16 ◼ ► the site with ActivityPub. It seems very obvious that that's what we should do with Quickposts.
01:53:20 ◼ ► So we started with this, you should be able to post the website as quickly as any social
01:53:24 ◼ ► platform. We added, we should be able to line up all those posts in order so we can do slow
01:53:29 ◼ ► live logs. And we're going to get to those posts should natively go to other platforms so you can
01:53:35 ◼ ► follow one of our writers while they are working for us, for ourselves. And somehow your likes and
01:53:42 ◼ ► comments on other platforms should come back to us and add value back to us. I don't know how any
01:53:48 ◼ ► of that's going to work. I just know that that is a newer and more interesting set of problems to
01:53:57 ◼ ► **Scott Benner** But it's so, I want to come back to that and it's a perfect segue into something
01:54:01 ◼ ► else I want to talk about, which is where social media is going with Threads and Mastodon and Blue
01:54:06 ◼ ► Sky and the husk of remains of Twitter. But before we move on, I just think that the core point of
01:54:14 ◼ ► that though is still just what a tremendous, who would have thought it's a competitive advantage
01:54:20 ◼ ► for sites like The Verge and mine that people can just go to them and read, right? It's a huge
01:54:28 ◼ ► competitive advantage at this point. And because so much is locked away, like more stuff, a higher
01:54:36 ◼ ► percentage of professional content that's published on the web today is inaccessible to most people
01:54:42 ◼ ► than ever before. The web, the open web where you can just go to trust that anybody can go to the
01:54:47 ◼ ► URL and without any kind of shenanigans about deleting your cookies or your site history or
01:54:52 ◼ ► whatever, or opening a private window so that it doesn't read your cookies so you can reset the
01:54:57 ◼ ► counter of the paywall or whatever. It that it's actually like it was supposed to be where if you
01:55:05 ◼ ► tell the browser open this URL, it shows you the contents of the URL. It's become a competitive
01:55:18 ◼ ► competition no one wants to acknowledge. Well, I and I think at scale on TikTok, I desperately worry
01:55:23 ◼ ► about it because at the moment, it's more or less my entire income. Yeah, and that stuff waxes and
01:55:29 ◼ ► wanes. And I don't think the advertising products on the web like you run a very bespoke advertising
01:55:35 ◼ ► product for a set of marketers that no one trusts you and that you can do that for us, which we need
01:55:41 ◼ ► big brand advertisers, right? And that's not my side of the house at all. That's someone else's
01:55:46 ◼ ► problem. I just see the stress on their faces. And so I think we got to invent some new products.
01:55:52 ◼ ► Otherwise, we're going to lose all of this. All of the dollars are going to go to TikTok and Instagram,
01:55:56 ◼ ► right? And you can feel how that way you can feel about that however you want. But those dollars
01:56:03 ◼ ► are not been going back into making journalism. Right. And so when you're saying there's this
01:56:13 ◼ ► for the first time in a long time, asked to be paid what their work is worth, which is a thing
01:56:20 ◼ ► that in no other industry is controversial, but is always controversial when you're like,
01:56:24 ◼ ► you have to pay to read this article. Right. As though it's like an accessibility problem,
01:56:29 ◼ ► right? Like, we're like, I literally the other day, I linked to something that was a paywall.
01:56:33 ◼ ► And someone said, Can you put a warning on this? And I was like, No, you're fine. You're you're
01:56:38 ◼ ► going to be fine. You saw paywall, you didn't get to read the thing. Fine, right? Some people are
01:56:43 ◼ ► going to pay. And that for us, we have big free homepage that actually sends out a meaningful
01:56:49 ◼ ► amount of traffic, our role in the ecosystem, I come back to the ecosystem, our role is to curate
01:56:54 ◼ ► the stuff that we think is worth looking at some which includes stuff worth paying for. Could I get
01:56:59 ◼ ► to a place where we send out enough traffic, that we can strike some business arrangements and let
01:57:05 ◼ ► people read the stuff? I would love to get that we didn't we I don't I can't walk into a meeting at
01:57:10 ◼ ► the New York Times, right? Like let my links through. May we work hard enough, like maybe
01:57:14 ◼ ► we can get there. But I there's just something about paying for journalism that has gone so far
01:57:22 ◼ ► out of the mainstream culture, that I think this response is actually healthy. Maybe the pendulum
01:57:29 ◼ ► has swung too far. Right? entirely possible. But it can't be that all of journalism is the New York
01:57:37 ◼ ► Times. And then tick talkers yelling at the New York Times. That's a dangerous place for us to
01:57:43 ◼ ► land. Yeah. And so I'm excited for a bunch of these, the worker owned models that are popping
01:57:47 ◼ ► up for a four media is the best new tech site in years. Yep, that's great. There. There shouldn't
01:57:52 ◼ ► be an argument of whether defector they should give all their stuff away for free. You should
01:57:56 ◼ ► obviously pay them if you want to read their stuff. And it's just weird that journalism,
01:58:01 ◼ ► right? Because at the end of the day, it's about facts and the facts are not copyrightable. You
01:58:05 ◼ ► just end up in this weird knot where no one thinks the response to Spotify existing is saying it's
01:58:13 ◼ ► immoral to have a paywall on Spotify. We just don't think about anything else that way.
01:58:17 ◼ ► Yeah. You mentioned publishing bird stuff through activity pub. And it's occurred to me that it's
01:58:23 ◼ ► the right way because I've been looking at this and it's ever since the Twitter hegemony over
01:58:30 ◼ ► short form text. Social media died when Musk bought the site a year ago and it and Mastodon
01:58:38 ◼ ► at least for my audience and probably the verge audience to it became relevant. I know Mastodon
01:58:44 ◼ ► has been around since I don't know 2017 or something like that. I know I signed up somehow
01:58:48 ◼ ► for some reason due to some Twitter fiasco in 2018 for my account. But now threads is a thing. Blue
01:58:58 ◼ ► Sky is I don't know. I wouldn't want to bet on Blue Sky lasting at this point. But it seems like
01:59:04 ◼ ► there's a culture there. And my homemade I'm, you know, again, one person show, but I'm responsible
01:59:11 ◼ ► for the auto Twitter posting bot that used to post to the daring fireball articles to Twitter.
01:59:16 ◼ ► And I know I could fix it in an afternoon. And I haven't made like a protest decision. Like I'm out,
01:59:23 ◼ ► I'm off Twitter. I'm not going to use it anymore. But it's like my sort of on the fenced ness
01:59:37 ◼ ► Oh, we're in the same place. Right? People ask us why we are still auto posting Twitter. I'm like,
01:59:46 ◼ ► I, I think I'm going to fix it for me because part of me, I just bothers me that I, but
01:59:53 ◼ ► but looking at it, and I've been mucking about with that script because I added mastodon. So
02:00:00 ◼ ► there's there's a mastodon daring fireball at mastodon that social account that auto gets the
02:00:06 ◼ ► same content that used to go to the Twitter during fireball account. And I'm thinking there is no
02:00:11 ◼ ► threads API yet. But I had Gabe Rivera from tech meme on on the show the previous episode, and
02:00:17 ◼ ► he's leading the charge for really, really hoping that threads ads posting API, yeah, for tech memes
02:00:23 ◼ ► purposes. And if it did, I would immediately if the day that they open it up, I would spend the
02:00:28 ◼ ► time to add to to get during fireball content on the threads. But it doesn't make sense to be
02:00:36 ◼ ► to have, oh, here's this path that goes to post to Twitter. And then here's this path that goes
02:00:43 ◼ ► to post to mastodon. And here's a path to go to the post to threads. And I'm getting enough requests
02:00:48 ◼ ► for blue sky. Here's a fourth pad now now that the every time there's a new article, there's these
02:00:54 ◼ ► four paths for 40. What you're describing, like abstractly, I'm sure you think this is bananas.
02:00:59 ◼ ► And I'm sure your listeners think this has been as the entire publishing industry did this for
02:01:05 ◼ ► the weird proprietary formats like Google AMP and Facebook and star articles, right and snapshot
02:01:10 ◼ ► discovery did this already. And they did it more manually with video, right all over the place.
02:01:18 ◼ ► They're like, we're gonna make a video and then we're gonna do a square and we're gonna cut it
02:01:20 ◼ ► rectangle, then we're gonna manually upload it to all these fucking platform, the media industry is
02:01:25 ◼ ► and I am a member of it. And I like my job a lot. The media industry is stupid, just fully stupid.
02:01:33 ◼ ► And it will always choose what I describe as unscalable media shit over smart tech shit,
02:01:39 ◼ ► right. And you can see the tech industry is like really good at sustainable high margin businesses.
02:01:44 ◼ ► And the media industry is not and all activity pub represents for me is an opportunity to just
02:01:52 ◼ ► rest some control back over how we distribute our content. Like it's if you want to follow me,
02:02:00 ◼ ► you should follow me on my server that I that pays me money to work at right. And that's fine.
02:02:06 ◼ ► And maybe it'll show up in threads. And if you want to hit like there, maybe it'll show up on
02:02:10 ◼ ► my platform. And I should be able to follow john Gruber on my platform. It seems very obvious how
02:02:15 ◼ ► this should work. Right. And I think everyone wants threads to be this like one for one drop
02:02:20 ◼ ► in replacement for Twitter. And maybe it will be and maybe it won't be like who knows it's going
02:02:25 ◼ ► to take time. But what it also represents is a huge tech company, loudly saying they're going
02:02:32 ◼ ► to support Federation and activity pub over and over again. They're not they keep talking about
02:02:36 ◼ ► it. They're gonna do it. They have to do it to open up in Europe, it seems. Yeah, you just have
02:02:41 ◼ ► this moment where there's a nascent technology standard. There's a groundswell of support.
02:02:45 ◼ ► There's identifiable consumer benefits from it in business benefits in a way that crypto did not
02:02:53 ◼ ► have any of those things. We'll just put those things next to each other. Like, of course,
02:02:58 ◼ ► we should try to build some stuff. This is the time to build some stuff. A lot of it will crash
02:03:01 ◼ ► and burn, right? But at least it will be like interesting and new, rather than All right, I
02:03:09 ◼ ► we're gonna watch 500 Mr. Beast videos reverse engineer them into optimizing the YouTube
02:03:14 ◼ ► algorithm. And then that is the future of that stupid. We got to all stop doing that. Yeah,
02:03:18 ◼ ► you don't do that. But I know but my commercial media world does that right. instinctively and
02:03:24 ◼ ► I would rather spend I spent time with our product team today at the verge, just talking about,
02:03:44 ◼ ► future? I mean, that's the sweet spot for the during firewall audience. But like, that's it,
02:03:49 ◼ ► like, that's what we got to do. It's competition is generally good, and almost some having some
02:03:56 ◼ ► competition almost always makes any market better. And it's unfortunate, though, that most things
02:04:03 ◼ ► tend to dwindle to very few competitors, right? In the long ago history of TV, there were three
02:04:10 ◼ ► major networks in the United States, ABC, NBC, CBS, and it's sure as shit was better than if
02:04:15 ◼ ► there was only one. But it wasn't enough, right? But it was better. Twitter being the only relevant
02:04:23 ◼ ► short form text first social network was a bad idea. It's just always it before Elon Musk,
02:04:32 ◼ ► right? It's better that we have choices now like Mastodon, which is truly open, and you can
02:04:38 ◼ ► federate with truly micro sized. I mean, I know people who run their own personal server,
02:04:45 ◼ ► and they're the only user at their domain. That seems like too much work to me. But, you know,
02:04:57 ◼ ► things are better. And this drives some of my friends nuts that I overall, I think the effect
02:05:04 ◼ ► of Elon Musk buying Twitter has been good for this form of social media. I think it has been terrible
02:05:11 ◼ ► for Twitter itself. Yeah. And potentially democracy. And well, I don't hit maybe because
02:05:18 ◼ ► Twitter continues to be the number one instance of this sort of thing. But if it weren't for the fact
02:05:34 ◼ ► would exist. I'm first in line as a critic of meta as a company overall and continue to be in other
02:05:41 ◼ ► ways. But the world is a better place with threads than it was before threads existed. I mean, I
02:05:49 ◼ ► really firmly believe it. It's a really good product. And it's opened it up. And Mastodon,
02:05:54 ◼ ► which did exist for five or six years beforehand, exploded in popularity by Mastodon's previous,
02:06:03 ◼ ► I mean, Mastodon usage remains tiny compared to threads or Twitter, but it's a thousand fold
02:06:09 ◼ ► increase over where Mastodon was before Elon Musk bought Twitter. And the world is a better place
02:06:14 ◼ ► with Mastodon much more popular than it was before. And it's Mastodon's popularity that
02:06:32 ◼ ► I do too, right? It would be worse, I guess, if this had happened a year later, if now is when
02:06:38 ◼ ► Elon had bought Twitter, but it would have been better if he'd bought it a year earlier. Yeah,
02:06:47 ◼ ► Yeah. We're doing a big package on just the thing that was Twitter. It's dead now, right?
02:06:55 ◼ ► It is. They changed the name. I feel very comfortable saying Twitter is dead now. Whatever
02:06:58 ◼ ► it is, is called X. My contribution to it, which I'd have to finish writing this evening,
02:07:03 ◼ ► is just talking about how for a decade, the default answer for every question in the media
02:07:09 ◼ ► was a tweet. Literally any problem. Their site went down, tweet about it. The reporters will
02:07:14 ◼ ► tweet the news instead of posting to the website. A candidate makes a gaffe on the campaign trail,
02:07:21 ◼ ► Everything. It was just the default answer. Like, how do we communicate? And it was like a
02:07:26 ◼ ► weird answer. It was a weird answer for a weird audience. And Twitter is always the smallest,
02:07:31 ◼ ► but it had the most elite audience. It was just a weird platform. And I am also the same way as you.
02:07:41 ◼ ► should be important. What I would put next to it is, I think the flood of AI content that is
02:07:54 ◼ ► the incentives of SEO are so crazy, the web itself, there's just not a lot of innovation
02:08:06 ◼ ► There's a lot of cool toys on the web, but the make content and publish it on the internet has
02:08:12 ◼ ► all moved somewhere else. It's all moved to some platform or the other. Mostly in video.
02:08:16 ◼ ► If you were starting today, you were starting Darren Fireball, or I was starting The Verge,
02:08:21 ◼ ► today as young people, not as Chris. But as young, if we were starting, we would almost certainly
02:08:27 ◼ ► start on TikTok. We would almost certainly start on YouTube. That's wild. I'm a writer at heart.
02:08:37 ◼ ► There's not a set of incentives that would make me start a blog today. That's bad. That is a
02:08:44 ◼ ► doom loop for the web. It is a doom loop for Google. Especially as the web gets polluted
02:08:58 ◼ ► The thing at the center of every media answer is gone. The biggest referral traffic on the web is
02:09:04 ◼ ► something is going to happen to it. We should build some new shit to our specifications
02:09:10 ◼ ► and come up with some new habits. Maybe it'll be Activity Club. Maybe it'll be Threats. I don't
02:09:15 ◼ ► know. But chasing the old goals, I think, is doomed. I think we're going to watch a lot of
02:09:22 ◼ ► media companies literally kill themselves because they fail to see that this is not just challenge,
02:09:28 ◼ ► but also opportunity. Just yesterday, Sports Illustrated got caught publishing AI-generated
02:09:41 ◼ ► they didn't even do it themselves. No. This is what I mean about other people's software.
02:09:45 ◼ ► They contracted an affiliate marketing company that uses ML to generate spam affiliate bullshit.
02:10:02 ◼ ► This was uncovered by Maggie Harrison at Futurism. But she wrote, "This is my favorite paragraph I
02:10:08 ◼ ► block quoted of these AI." Well, the part that's scandalous about it, too, is that they were
02:10:17 ◼ ► passing these as off as real people. And they used AI-generated headshots. So, they made up names
02:10:35 ◼ ► said, "The AI author's writing often sounds like it was written by an alien." One Ortiz article,
02:10:41 ◼ ► for instance, warns that volleyball, quote, "can be a little tricky to get into, especially without
02:10:48 ◼ ► an actual ball to practice with." It doesn't make any sense. What do you mean, "volleyball's
02:10:54 ◼ ► tricky to get into without a ball"? Right? It's a nonsense sentence. It's like you wouldn't even—a
02:11:06 ◼ ► I'll give you another one. So, that's really bad, right? That's as bad as it gets. A major American
02:11:12 ◼ ► cultural institution, Sports Illustrated, contracted an outside SEO chum vendor, which then
02:11:19 ◼ ► did something that looks like AI fraud. And Sports Illustrated published this without a second
02:11:25 ◼ ► thought. And look, the business goals here are not opaque. They wanted some traffic because they
02:11:31 ◼ ► thought they might sell some volleyballs and make some pennies. This is not a complicated thing.
02:11:37 ◼ ► Okay, you can go and look for coupon codes. I just bought a Solo Stove, so I was Googling for
02:11:45 ◼ ► Solo Stove coupon codes. I'm not going to call them out. It's a lot of our competitors have entire
02:11:51 ◼ ► coupon websites embedded in their websites to search for coupon codes, because they get
02:11:56 ◼ ► fractions of a penny. CNET, which is a storied brand, right? Literally—I mean, we have reported
02:12:04 ◼ ► on this several times—has an entire underlying automated mortgage rate content division,
02:12:10 ◼ ► where it just publishes today's mortgage rates. Why is CNET publishing mortgage rates today?
02:12:21 ◼ ► It started, I don't know, 10 years ago with the rash of what time is the Super Bowl articles,
02:12:27 ◼ ► right? It was like all these sites that had nothing to do with sports or with television
02:12:32 ◼ ► would have an article somebody wrote about telling you what channel and which Sunday and what time
02:12:39 ◼ ► the Super Bowl starts. And it's all just SEO nonsense. But you're right. I think Google is
02:12:46 ◼ ► at a crisis point. And with their core product search, they've always had—to me, it's obvious
02:12:54 ◼ ► that you don't need inside information. Google has done better as the web got bigger, because
02:13:01 ◼ ► they can deal with the scale of it better than any of their competitors could, right? It was a
02:13:07 ◼ ► natural moat that as the web got bigger and more content got posted to the web, and it's
02:13:16 ◼ ► you know, and as more audio gets posted to the web with podcasts and with videos, all of that stuff
02:13:21 ◼ ► is harder to index or spider. And the bigger it got, the better it was for Google. A bigger web
02:13:27 ◼ ► is good for Google. But now the web can literally grow to infinite size. Like we have that—AI
02:14:16 ◼ ► and I don't think that they can. Like as far as I can tell, OpenAI had one tool for a minute
02:14:23 ◼ ► that was supposed to detect AI-generated text, and they pulled it because it was so inaccurate.
02:14:44 ◼ ► old articles, like just turning them into 404s, and not because they were expensive to host,
02:14:55 ◼ ► to cull little visited articles from their archive, which is insane from—I'm not a librarian, but—
02:15:08 ◼ ► into your house. You're going to leap through a window and tell you that's not what the guidelines
02:15:12 ◼ ► say. The gap between the received wisdom about SEO and what Google thinks people should do
02:15:27 ◼ ► angrier than anyone has ever been at us for some of our coverage. We just did the big article about
02:15:33 ◼ ► the culture of SEO professionals, and just the fury directed at us. And you really unpack it.
02:15:40 ◼ ► I was very sympathetic to it. It was a bunch of people staring at the asteroid, freaking out.
02:15:59 ◼ ► It was just wonderful in terms of getting to know the personalities of the industry and sort of
02:16:04 ◼ ► how we got here. But I really am with you. I just don't see how—I don't think Google is set up to
02:16:10 ◼ ► do what we would want our leading search engine to do, which is to separate actual quality content.
02:16:21 ◼ ► And again, it doesn't have to be. I'm not religious about it. I mean, if AI can generate
02:16:26 ◼ ► actual good content, okay. It's like the bartender in the cantina in Star Wars. We don't serve their
02:16:35 ◼ ► thought it spoke to some sort of myth building that there's a resentment in the working class
02:16:43 ◼ ► in that universe towards droids, right? Which, you know, we're seeing now with AI, right? There's
02:16:49 ◼ ► resentment towards AI taking people's jobs. And I get it, you know? I mean, I don't know if it's
02:16:54 ◼ ► going to take my job. It could. I don't know. But at some level, beyond the concerns about people
02:17:04 ◼ ► having their livelihoods disrupted, what we really just want as users is I type a query in a search
02:17:13 ◼ ► engine and I get high-quality results that are true, right? That are actually giving me what I
02:17:19 ◼ ► wanted and I can trust these results are actually accurate and truthful. I don't think Google is set
02:17:26 ◼ ► up to deal with it. I almost feel like the way that these AI language models work is specifically
02:17:40 ◼ ► the sort of thing that Google's spidering doesn't detect or notice. It just sails right through. And
02:17:47 ◼ ► there's just going to be, however big the web is, there's literally, it's effectively infinite how
02:17:52 ◼ ► much AI can write. They're never going to tire. They write a thousand times faster than a human
02:17:59 ◼ ► does. So I just bought a new refrigerator. So I just did a search just to test what's better,
02:18:04 ◼ ► LG or GE refrigerators. And I'm sure people listening to this have furious opinions about
02:18:09 ◼ ► this. This is where I learned people have very strong opinions about not this question,
02:18:13 ◼ ► but just appliance brands in general. So here's what Google said. LG refrigerators are generally
02:18:18 ◼ ► considered to be more energy efficient and have better smart features. GE refrigerators are
02:18:21 ◼ ► generally considered to be more liable, have a better selection and more affordable. And then
02:18:25 ◼ ► you click the little dropdown. All of its sources are from upsee.com, which is just an SEO spam
02:18:42 ◼ ► like it's an extended warranty company. They did this as content marketing because people Google
02:18:47 ◼ ► this and then you might buy a warranty from upsee. You can see how they're going to, the person who
02:18:52 ◼ ► wrote this, their job is gone. Right. Chat GPT will write the next version of this article and
02:18:57 ◼ ► Google won't know. Right. So then Chat GPT is going to write an article based on what it has
02:19:02 ◼ ► already scraped from the web, feed it back into Google, whose AI is going to re summarize that
02:19:10 ◼ ► The other thing is that it's almost like there's some sort of irony in that Google is famous for
02:19:17 ◼ ► conducting AB tests, like the infamous one where they tested 29 shades of blue for a thing, and
02:19:22 ◼ ► then just pick the shade of blue that, that seemingly led to the most clicks or something
02:19:27 ◼ ► like that. But AI can run these, forget about AB tests. They can run like A to Z 1000 tests and just
02:19:37 ◼ ► publish a thousand articles about refrigerators and let Google figure out which one it wants to
02:19:42 ◼ ► send people to in a way that human labor would never be able to scale to that level cost
02:19:48 ◼ ► effectively. Right. If you're only going to make pennies for the thing, you can't afford to pay
02:20:00 ◼ ► Trenton Larkin Yeah, again, I I'm with you. I think there are uses for AI, I will tell you that
02:20:07 ◼ ► of all the people at the verge, I'm the only person who is confidently published AI generated
02:20:11 ◼ ► SEO spam onto the website. In the best printer article, I just wanted to see what would happen.
02:20:27 ◼ ► laser printer. And it was like, literally the genesis of this article was I was on a zoom call,
02:20:31 ◼ ► and everyone was at home and everyone had the same printer. And I was like, what are we doing?
02:20:34 ◼ ► Let's just see what happens. And is a joke as like, you know, needs to hit the SEO page limit,
02:20:41 ◼ ► or the SEO word count, which, again, a Google executive is about to leap out of a bush and tell
02:20:45 ◼ ► me that it's not like I don't say but whatever. So I just like to hear some chat GBT garbage to put
02:20:50 ◼ ► on the page. By the way, this page ranked it was like number one for best printer for a while.
02:20:55 ◼ ► We sold a number of printers, I'm told by the affiliate commerce team, whatever. The point is,
02:21:05 ◼ ► at me. I certainly did not get a viral outrage cycle, which would have driven even more printer
02:21:09 ◼ ► sales. Right. But it's if you're just honest, we just don't lie to people, we had to come up with
02:21:14 ◼ ► editorial guidelines or an AI usage for our various editorial teams of the company. And
02:21:19 ◼ ► they asked me for my advice. I was like, the only guideline is don't lie. Right? If you're
02:21:25 ◼ ► just honest with people about the tools you're using, they will very often go along for the ride
02:21:29 ◼ ► with you. Right. Right. If you lie to them, and you tell them that volleyball is hard without a
02:21:39 ◼ ► or that this person exists. Yeah. A baseline lie. Yeah. Right. And I look, I don't I don't know if
02:21:46 ◼ ► it has been good or bad. I think personally, it, it generates c plus content at best to my eyes.
02:21:57 ◼ ► It can't have new ideas. This is our competitive advantage. We're just, I'm just going to keep
02:22:01 ◼ ► having new ideas until I stop. And then I'll, I promise to disappear. But for the web at large,
02:22:07 ◼ ► the number of people that want to spam the web with content in order to get some clicks from
02:22:11 ◼ ► Google search in order to convert into some clicks onto affiliate links, that number is infinite.
02:22:18 ◼ ► Right. They are going to keep running that game forever. And Google has to figure it out.
02:22:21 ◼ ► Right. Or they have to pivot search in some huge and meaningful way to only trusted sources,
02:22:28 ◼ ► which I don't think they can do. Yeah. And it's turning, it's turning the web against itself,
02:22:33 ◼ ► where there's no cost of goods or effectively none, right? Serving another page view. So in
02:22:39 ◼ ► the paper era, paper is prohibitively expensive. It really, even newsprint, the pulpiest, cheapest
02:22:47 ◼ ► paper that you can possibly print things on, which is why newspapers were printed on it.
02:22:52 ◼ ► It's extremely expensive. Like the printing operations of a major newspaper or even a local
02:22:57 ◼ ► newspaper, which are largely closing, it's incredibly expensive. All that junk that get
02:23:03 ◼ ► put through my mailbox every day, all of these paper catalogs is incredibly expensive for those
02:23:08 ◼ ► companies to produce. And it's thankfully that it is because otherwise if it was like the web,
02:23:19 ◼ ► Yeah. TV, there's only so many channels on cable. And prior to cable, there were only 13
02:23:27 ◼ ► wavelengths for over the air transmission that could be picked up. It was limited. And the fact
02:23:33 ◼ ► that there is no limit like that on the web means that it can really be an infinite fire hose. It's
02:23:38 ◼ ► an enormous problem. You know, where there's also no limit is YouTube, where I just searched LG
02:23:44 ◼ ► versus GE refrigerator. And I will tell you this thumbnail is incredible. The title is what's the
02:23:50 ◼ ► best fridge to brought to buy the truth will surprise you. The word surprises in all caps.
02:23:54 ◼ ► This video is 24 minutes long and has 3 million views. And it's like, is that better than a web
02:24:02 ◼ ► page? I don't even get the same person provides the same information. I hate how much of how to
02:24:09 ◼ ► blank how to fix blank is now a YouTube video. And it's convenient when it really does have a
02:24:14 ◼ ► visual component of you want to look for a thing under your sink that looks like this. And that's
02:24:20 ◼ ► the thing that you need to twist or whatever. But it's that it may it makes me so mad when
02:24:26 ◼ ► how to video of three steps is a seven minute YouTube video. Yeah, it's in fear. Now a YouTube
02:24:32 ◼ ► executive is going to leap out of the way to tell me that that's not what the guidelines say.
02:24:38 ◼ ► I know right where I didn't know the limit. But I you can backwards engineer what it is by looking
02:24:46 ◼ ► at the length of all those how to videos and you often get a second ad break if you hit 10 or more
02:24:50 ◼ ► minutes, which explains a lot of things. By the way, I really encourage everyone to just Google
02:24:54 ◼ ► LG versus GE refrigerator and look just look at the thumbnails. It is. Do it on YouTube. Yeah,
02:25:15 ◼ ► Nilay for coming back on the show. And thank you for your time and your continuing good work.
02:25:19 ◼ ► See you next year. I'm sure at some event or another and I look forward to having you back
02:25:23 ◼ ► on the show. I will thank our three sponsors of the day. We had Squarespace where you could build
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