00:00:11 ◼ ► It's true. I told you. I told you a text message. It's much harder to book being on your podcast
00:00:18 ◼ ► than it is to be booked on The Tonight Show. I'll actually tell you, they rescheduled on me once, I
00:00:27 ◼ ► think. Yes, we were booked for the day before. And then I got pushed, which I can now see in
00:00:34 ◼ ► hindsight, I was pushed for Matthew McConaughey and Haim, you know, the band Haim. They were on
00:00:40 ◼ ► the night before. And then, so I was supposed to be on the 14th. They moved me. I said, totally
00:00:45 ◼ ► understand. Then when I actually saw what aired that night, I was like, totally understand. I
00:00:49 ◼ ► mean, obviously it was going to be totally fine no matter what. But I think I was rescheduled for
00:00:59 ◼ ► But I don't know who I was pushed for on this show, but I am sure to like those other celebrities, it
00:01:06 ◼ ► I thought that segment was great. It's a classic bit. You get a tech person out and you say,
00:01:12 ◼ ► "Here's some tech products for the holiday season. You got a funny host who's going to demo them
00:01:22 ◼ ► It's actually so much easier to be on something like this versus like hosting something, right?
00:01:27 ◼ ► Because you don't have to be funny. The host is the funny one. Like Jimmy Fallon is the funny one.
00:01:33 ◼ ► There's nothing I can say or do that's like, going to be funnier. So it just kind of tried to be
00:01:38 ◼ ► Right. Like no matter what happens, he can make it funny. Like the robot follow you around thing
00:01:43 ◼ ► could have completely failed, and he could have made it funny. In fact, often that is what makes
00:01:49 ◼ ► Yeah, in rehearsal it failed every time. So I was actually visibly very excited during the segment,
00:01:55 ◼ ► which might have been a little bit hard if everything had like gone really well. In the
00:01:59 ◼ ► rehearsals, I would have had to kind of like fake it, but that was genuine happiness that it was
00:02:05 ◼ ► There was also you Instagrammed before you were in the green room, and Jimmy Fallon popped in to
00:02:13 ◼ ► say, "Hey, this is gonna be great. We're gonna have a great fun," but sort of gave you a weird look.
00:02:17 ◼ ► And I was like, "That's why, you know, you it's nice that he pops in so that you're not just meeting
00:02:22 ◼ ► him for the first time on stage, you know, cool your nerves, you know, get get on the same page,
00:02:27 ◼ ► get the vibe going. But why do you give her a look?" And then you turn to the mirror after he
00:02:37 ◼ ► In partnership with Facebook/meta. Yeah, yeah, no, I realized in hindsight, I probably should have
00:02:46 ◼ ► like tagged it that it was recorded with that, but most people picked up on it with the mirror
00:02:50 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, but then it came out on the show as a surprise. Was that a legit surprise to him on the
00:02:57 ◼ ► show that that you had taken footage of him when he popped in? He seemed genuinely surprised.
00:03:01 ◼ ► He was genuinely surprised. We did tell him like before we aired, right, like that that this is what
00:03:08 ◼ ► was gonna happen. But when he walked in, it was pretty, pretty much a surprise. I know that he
00:03:13 ◼ ► asked me, I don't know if it actually ended up airing, but it's like, is that legal? Yeah, that
00:03:21 ◼ ► Um, because I actually what was cut was a little bit of a longer answer about consent and what
00:03:27 ◼ ► Facebook or meta says about, oh, there's the light. And there's the gesture for lifting up your hand
00:03:32 ◼ ► to your temple that should signal to people that you're recording, which I don't really think is
00:03:36 ◼ ► much of a signal to people. But all of that kind of got cut. But yeah, it was it was fun. It was
00:03:42 ◼ ► definitely I mean, I had a ton of fun. He is so nice and genuinely interested in tech, which is
00:03:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, the true story was like, he said it in the beginning of this segment, which was, you
00:03:57 ◼ ► know, nice TF to me, but he said he had reached out, he saw my iOS 15 video in September, one night
00:04:03 ◼ ► just got this random message from him on on Twitter. And he had a question about the background
00:04:09 ◼ ► sounds, you know, the background sounds, features and accessibility feature and iOS 15. And he was
00:04:15 ◼ ► like, I I followed your instructions. It's not working. Where do I find this? And it's I mean,
00:04:20 ◼ ► common question. It's kind of buried in the control center when you enable it. And so I just
00:04:24 ◼ ► walked him through it. And he was like, thank you. And he was like, that'll be my last tech question.
00:04:27 ◼ ► I'm like, No, it won't be and next thing I know, his Booker was reaching out. So it was awesome.
00:04:33 ◼ ► The other thing I thought, and he he mentioned it when he did, I got it unless I'm forgetting, the
00:04:40 ◼ ► three products you demoed were the Ray-Ban stories, then the robot, which we will get to last,
00:04:48 ◼ ► even though that was second, and then the latest version Oculus Rift, and he played a played a
00:04:52 ◼ ► game. When he put the Oculus on, you know, he mentioned that he has a big head, you know, like,
00:04:57 ◼ ► like a large head, which is actually, you know, I think you know, this is actually like,
00:05:03 ◼ ► like a weird thing, but it's very true of people who are successful, like, actors and TV
00:05:08 ◼ ► personalities. And then you meet them in real life. And you're like, boy, that guy has big head,
00:05:13 ◼ ► like Humphrey Bogart apparently had a head the size of a basketball. Just interesting, but I
00:05:19 ◼ ► thought, you know what, those Ray-Ban glasses looked better on him than they've looked in a
00:05:26 ◼ ► lot of the reviews that I've seen, you know, because they they are slightly I think they're
00:05:30 ◼ ► slightly larger than typical Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Well, you're saying is he looked better in them
00:05:35 ◼ ► than I did, which is fine. It's true. They're big on my face. Well, but they I think that,
00:05:50 ◼ ► they're one side. I think they're one size fits all. Yeah, I think they are. Yeah. I'm looking up
00:06:05 ◼ ► Well, I mean, that'll obviously change, right? Everything gets smaller over time, right? I mean,
00:06:10 ◼ ► we can go back to the 1987 Wall Street where the cell phones were the size of a brick, you know,
00:06:18 ◼ ► but it was super cool that the guy had a cell phone in his car. I mean, yeah. And also, I will say,
00:06:23 ◼ ► like, I, as this was the premise of my review back in September, I wore those things for a week and
00:06:28 ◼ ► a half. And nobody knew that they were weird sunglasses with a camera in it. Nobody. Unless
00:06:34 ◼ ► I told them. And unless I was like, specifically recording them and up and close to them. No one
00:06:40 ◼ ► had any idea that those were had cameras in it or were any sort of smart glasses. Right. Because
00:06:45 ◼ ► they look, they definitely look, you know, I'm not, they look much, much closer to standard Wayfarers
00:06:56 ◼ ► what, what the hell is that? Right. Or like the Snapchat spectacles, even the ones now,
00:07:02 ◼ ► like they designed them and actually for that Ray Ban review, I spoke to Snapchat about that or Snap,
00:07:12 ◼ ► like, what is going on with them? Like, you kind of look like a little like, bug head with the
00:07:16 ◼ ► little, like circular, it's like they have circular rings around the cameras. I, you know, we,
00:07:23 ◼ ► it's funny going back as Google Glass, if I recall correctly, was around 2013, 2012 or so when it was
00:07:32 ◼ ► a thing. And, you know, the reactions were all over the place. The phrase glass holes, it's,
00:07:39 ◼ ► I mean, exploded in, it was way, the term glass holes was way more popular than Google Glass ever,
00:07:45 ◼ ► ever was as a product. But there were defenders of the weird look who, you know, at Google or people
00:07:55 ◼ ► who just liked them who were saying, well, that's, they did this on purpose, you know, they're not,
00:07:59 ◼ ► they don't look that bad and they're lightweight. And we kind of wanted people who at least have any
00:08:06 ◼ ► awareness of Google Glass to know when they're conversing with somebody who's wearing them
00:08:14 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that's a, I, and that did have one camera, but I think with this,
00:08:22 ◼ ► the creep part of it is that they do look so similar and their main, they do look so similar
00:08:31 ◼ ► to the originals and like what are typical Ray-Bans and like the main thing that these do
00:08:37 ◼ ► is have, is they have cameras, right? Like that's the main thing about them. And I actually keep
00:08:41 ◼ ► wondering like, why didn't they just do the speaker and the microphone? And because the cameras are
00:08:49 ◼ ► like, eh, like, I don't know. I'm just like, it's, whereas, you know, Bose has these, these glasses
00:08:54 ◼ ► with just the, they're basically like AirPods in the glasses, right? And they're, people like them,
00:08:58 ◼ ► they really like them. They like them for running. They like them for like walking the dog. And,
00:09:01 ◼ ► I just wonder, do they just do that for this? And then, and even when you talk to the executives at
00:09:06 ◼ ► Facebook or Ray-Bans, people say, oh, the best, one of the best uses of this is listening to music
00:09:10 ◼ ► and doing your phone calls. And okay, so maybe just like didn't, you didn't have the cameras,
00:09:16 ◼ ► like these wouldn't be as creepy at people. It is, it does make me think though, like the curmudgeon
00:09:21 ◼ ► in me wants to still be aghast at ubiquitous cameras recording everything. But the realist
00:09:34 ◼ ► in me realizes that this is the way the world has gone, you know, like they're, you know,
00:09:39 ◼ ► and they're on homes, they're on, and you know, and it's not like we as tech critics should,
00:09:45 ◼ ► should just ignore it. And when something happens, like the Amazon doorbell thing where they worked
00:09:52 ◼ ► out deals with the local police in places to like share footage with them and have like a program
00:09:58 ◼ ► where the police encourage people in the neighborhood to get it, not necessarily shady.
00:10:07 ◼ ► but from another perspective, it's like a civil liberties nightmare, right? But people have,
00:10:13 ◼ ► you're allowed to put your own security camera on your building, and now they're everywhere. We had,
00:10:19 ◼ ► we had a, like a, it was just like the weirdest story a couple months ago, but across the street
00:10:27 ◼ ► from our house, a young woman just got sucker punched at like 9 30. You know, she's walking
00:10:34 ◼ ► one way on the sidewalk. Another guy who's sort of like a known neighborhood wild person,
00:10:58 ◼ ► No, definitely not. But if you look at like Philly's Reddit, which is to me a much better
00:11:09 ◼ ► flails around with his arms out, almost like a dance move. But in this case, he was just walking
00:11:14 ◼ ► past this young woman and just punched her as they passed on the sidewalk. And we, one of our
00:11:22 ◼ ► neighboring buildings had it on a security camera, and I was like, oh yeah, good luck catching this
00:11:28 ◼ ► guy. And it's like, no, because the security cameras, it's like, you know, I don't know if
00:11:33 ◼ ► it's 4K, but it doesn't look like the grainy 480p security footage. And it was at nighttime, so
00:11:40 ◼ ► I thought when I heard they have it on camera, it's like, ah, nobody's going to see anything,
00:11:56 ◼ ► you know, the victim, she stayed anonymous, you know, I probably would too. But people who knew
00:12:01 ◼ ► who the guy was were able to tell the police and they got the guy. And it's like those cameras are
00:12:06 ◼ ► No, it had a similar thing here too. I mean, we are, somebody set fire to something in the park,
00:12:11 ◼ ► we live across the street from a park, and set fire and the police were going around asking,
00:12:16 ◼ ► do you have, you know, does your security camera, does your ring pick up what, like this section of
00:12:21 ◼ ► the park? And I said, no, unfortunately mine doesn't, and I looked. But I don't know, they
00:12:25 ◼ ► might have ended up getting from somebody other angle in the park. So bottom, yeah, I mean,
00:12:31 ◼ ► bottom line, I agree with you that this is the way things are going. And to many in many senses,
00:12:36 ◼ ► it is a nightmare. In other senses, there are these positive things, just like any technology,
00:12:42 ◼ ► there's the good and the bad. I think on these glasses, I heard from a lot of people after I
00:12:46 ◼ ► published that review, like, oh, well, like, you could just hold up your phone or people can
00:12:50 ◼ ► secretly record on their phone with on your phone without knowing people have perfected sort of the
00:12:55 ◼ ► like sly, like, hold up your iPhone, and it looks like you're on a call or something, but you're
00:12:59 ◼ ► recording. And that's true, too, right? I mean, and frankly, that's way better quality than these
00:13:05 ◼ ► these. I mean, this is not very good video quality when you're recording, and it's only 30 seconds,
00:13:09 ◼ ► too. So, right. Well, that's like the it's like that there was that whole rash in Japan of upskirt
00:13:16 ◼ ► videos. And this is this is because pretty far back because, you know, I forget when the law
00:13:22 ◼ ► gives past, but creepy guys were on the subway, crowded subways, and they mastered the art of
00:13:29 ◼ ► taking upskirt videos of women. And so Japan, you know, this, they have a law, I believe it's still
00:13:36 ◼ ► on the books, because it's one of those laws that I feel like is never going to come off the books,
00:13:39 ◼ ► because who's what politician is going to stand up and say, I would like to make upskirt videos
00:13:44 ◼ ► easy again. But all cell phones have to make an audible camera click sound, even if they're muted.
00:13:50 ◼ ► So I believe if you use the iOS, you know, or Android, you know, Japanese versions of the OS's,
00:13:55 ◼ ► even if you mute your phone, when you take a picture, it makes a click. Does that work?
00:14:08 ◼ ► well, I mean, like, again, with these glasses, there's a there is an indicator light. As I said,
00:14:14 ◼ ► in my review, the indicator light is the size of a poppy seed legitimately compared to a
00:14:19 ◼ ► New York City bagel poppy seed. And people don't see it at, as I said in the piece, like,
00:14:25 ◼ ► at a social distance, people don't really see it. But if you're closer than that, people do see it.
00:14:37 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly what I had done in my testing. People said, I don't see it because of the sun
00:14:45 ◼ ► In your review, as I recall, it was you you would take it, you'd record it in a conversation with
00:14:55 ◼ ► Yep. Yep. Yep, I did that. I did that. I recorded actually a ton of people that week. I was kind of
00:15:01 ◼ ► my premise was like, I'm gonna wear these and see if people know if I'm recording them. I told
00:15:05 ◼ ► everyone I had their consent, like after I started recording as I told them very quickly after like,
00:15:09 ◼ ► and do you know that I'm recording you right now? And everyone's like, what? And they would freak
00:15:14 ◼ ► out about it. Yeah, a couple of people did not want me to post those videos, which I didn't.
00:15:32 ◼ ► made an NFT out of my son's artwork, and then I gave it to her in a crypto wallet. And she's still
00:15:38 ◼ ► is the piece came out. Now she understands, but she was like, why did I have to be involved in
00:15:48 ◼ ► So the third gadget that you should that you demoed for Jimmy Fallon is called the Jita
00:15:53 ◼ ► that G I T A. Like cheetah. That's how I remembered it on air. Yeah, but they see that. But if you
00:16:01 ◼ ► wanted to Google it, I will put a link in the shown modes. But it's G I T A the Jita Mini by
00:16:07 ◼ ► Piaggio. Fast forward. How would you describe this thing? It's like a cooler, like a mini cooler on
00:16:17 ◼ ► wheels that drives itself sort of tautomous cooler on wheels, but it's not an actual cooler, but it
00:16:25 ◼ ► does have a container that you open it up, open up. It's it's yellow and spherical. I'd say maybe
00:16:31 ◼ ► about the size of a beach ball. And it balances sort of like a segue with two wheels and, you know,
00:16:40 ◼ ► gyroscopic thing. But the thing it can do is it follows the owner around. So you could, I guess,
00:16:47 ◼ ► in theory, if you found this useful and you don't have to navigate any steps on your Jersey journey,
00:16:54 ◼ ► you could like take it grocery shopping and put your groceries or put even just some of your
00:16:59 ◼ ► groceries in it in the Jita, and it'll just follow you home from the store. You did a way better job
00:17:06 ◼ ► explaining what it is. It is really neat. I can't imagine the scenario where I would use it. I mean,
00:17:14 ◼ ► and I live in a very flat city with a few steps, and it's only 28 pounds if you do need to like
00:17:21 ◼ ► lift it up or down a step. But damn if it didn't follow Jimmy Fallon around the stage. Oh, it did.
00:17:28 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, so it's funny. I actually heard from somebody on Instagram this morning who told me
00:17:33 ◼ ► they bought one. And he said he uses it to get around. Let me look up. I think he's in Dallas.
00:17:39 ◼ ► And he puts his art supplies in it. But like you said, like groceries. I mean, I could see the
00:17:53 ◼ ► appeal for somebody who's disabled and has a hard time carrying stuff. Sure. Or pushing a cart,
00:17:57 ◼ ► right? Right. The issue becomes like, it sometimes needs to be like, navigated a little bit. And then
00:18:05 ◼ ► you kind of always have to have it following you. You can lock it. One thing I didn't mention on the
00:18:14 ◼ ► show is that you can lock it so you can use the app to lock it. And that will lock both the follow
00:18:18 ◼ ► function and the little container. So I guess you could like park it outside someplace. I just feel
00:18:25 ◼ ► like someone would steal it. But don't worry, you'd have the camera from your house to see if
00:18:30 ◼ ► someone stole it. Here's my question is, how did it know to follow Jimmy and not follow you?
00:18:36 ◼ ► It knows because you, well, we paired it to him. Basically, when it's in this unlock mode,
00:18:44 ◼ ► whoever's standing in front of it, and when you press the button on the front, it knows to follow.
00:18:51 ◼ ► I will tell you, it gets very confused at times. And like, I tested it for a weekend here with my
00:18:57 ◼ ► son, my four-year-old son. And if I would step in front of it, or he would step in front of it when
00:19:03 ◼ ► it was following me, it sometimes would then start following him. But also, it's hilarious to test
00:19:09 ◼ ► this with kids. It was funny, the funniest part of the show. And again, it's like we said, Jimmy Fallon
00:19:14 ◼ ► is, you know, obviously, a very talented comedian. But it was funny because he started by going slow
00:19:20 ◼ ► in a circle around the counter you had set up for demoing the other products. And then he got
00:19:26 ◼ ► feigned being creeped out or and sped up. And damn if that little guy didn't speed up to chase him
00:19:32 ◼ ► around. You know, like, I have, yeah, I have this hilarious video of my son just like sprinting in
00:19:37 ◼ ► the like on our sidewalk. And like, we have bumps on our sidewalk. So he is running, it's following
00:19:42 ◼ ► him really fast. And then it just like falls over because it goes over like a sidewalk, you know,
00:19:52 ◼ ► Yeah, that was surprising to me because I thought, hey, that's doing a pretty good job following him
00:19:57 ◼ ► around. And you know, it's slow, but maybe the people who need something like this, it would be
00:20:01 ◼ ► slow. But the fact that it could go as fast as it could, and who knows if that's even the top speed,
00:20:06 ◼ ► that was wild to me. And so it's not, the thing is, my point is that it is not like some kind of
00:20:15 ◼ ► near field chip, you know, like an AirTag type thing that Jimmy Fallon had to put in his pocket.
00:20:20 ◼ ► You just stand in front of it and hit, okay, now follow me. And it like uses cameras to see,
00:20:27 ◼ ► okay, you, it looks like you're wearing blue jeans. Okay, I got your, I have your two legs.
00:20:37 ◼ ► Yeah. $1850 bucks. So it's not exactly, it's not like a whimsical purchase, but I think Roomba's,
00:20:49 ◼ ► a good, like a high-end Roomba is like $850 bucks. I mean, you know, this thing doesn't vacuum, but
00:20:55 ◼ ► it's not outlandishly priced. It's, and again, it's sort of, it reminds me of the glasses with
00:21:02 ◼ ► the camera. It's early days. Right. And I mentioned this on my podcast, two episodes go with Jim
00:21:10 ◼ ► Dalrymple, and we could talk about this cause I want to talk about your interview with Elon Musk,
00:21:15 ◼ ► which was excellent. Like I said, you have been, I don't know how you did it, crazy busy, but like
00:21:21 ◼ ► talking about Apple and autonomy, it seemed, you know, everybody seems to think they're making a
00:21:27 ◼ ► car, but there's so many other uses for autonomous technology and it's inevitable, right? We're going
00:21:37 ◼ ► to have robots. I mean, we kind of do now and they all are kind of laughable little things that don't
00:21:44 ◼ ► do much. And our poor Roomba is always getting stuck under the table. But it's really kind of
00:21:50 ◼ ► awesome to have a little disc-shaped robot who goes around your house and picks up bits of dust
00:21:56 ◼ ► and you know, crumbs and stuff. Totally. And it's funny, there was a question that was cut from the
00:22:03 ◼ ► Fallon piece where right after we showed the robot, he asked, he said, he said, "Oh, you
00:22:08 ◼ ► interviewed Elon Musk a few weeks ago and you also talked about robotics." And I had this answer,
00:22:13 ◼ ► which they cut because obviously it was super smart and no time for this really smart answer.
00:22:18 ◼ ► But where I sort of made the parallel that, yeah, like Tesla says they're a robotics company
00:22:23 ◼ ► and that's because of the autonomous driving stuff they're working on and the Tesla bot that they're
00:22:27 ◼ ► working on. And yeah, it's similar. It's like, this is the early days of it, looking at the Jita.
00:22:37 ◼ ► And I did have that funny little bit where I said like, "Oh, you could put your kid in here," but
00:22:42 ◼ ► like, you wouldn't, you know, he was like, "I wouldn't put my kid in here." But like, yes, as
00:22:47 ◼ ► we're like thinking about where this is all heading, yeah, like we can take cues from this funny
00:22:53 ◼ ► little luggage rolling machine. You know, you could put like a little tiny dog in there, you know,
00:23:01 ◼ ► like the little dog some people have that like fit in a purse. So we could put in the notes,
00:23:06 ◼ ► there's a funny TikTok where somebody's doing that with the Jita. Okay. Somebody sent that to me too.
00:23:12 ◼ ► So people have done it. I did not want to do that to my dog. I've put browser through a lot with my
00:23:17 ◼ ► projects, just like my mom, but browser's not going in the Jita Mini. But also, what did I want to say?
00:23:34 ◼ ► Was that very- No, it was another thing about the Jita. Anyway, I'll think of it again. But yeah,
00:23:45 ◼ ► but I feel like it doesn't get talked enough about that. Okay, I'm compelled by Elon Musk's
00:23:53 ◼ ► description of Tesla's vehicles as effectively being robots, you know, and it's, you know,
00:23:59 ◼ ► there are things we can debate about Tesla's claims about the level of their self-driving
00:24:06 ◼ ► at the moment. I have some pretty smart friends who think self-driving cars, fully self-driving,
00:24:11 ◼ ► like take a nap in the car or just, you know, like the rumors that Apple wants to make one
00:24:17 ◼ ► without a steering wheel and you just get in and tell Siri, you know, where to take you and off you
00:24:23 ◼ ► go, that that'll never happen. Some smart friends. Elon Musk obviously thinks it will happen. He's
00:24:29 ◼ ► pretty smart. We'll see. I mean, it's a good goal, but to me, the overriding difference is people die
00:24:38 ◼ ► in cars, right? Or people who get hit by cars die, right? That's, you know, even worse, right? You're
00:24:44 ◼ ► better off in the car than to be the poor person, you know, crossing the street or riding a bicycle.
00:24:50 ◼ ► The stakes are literally life and death. And it's serious injuries too. Like you could get in a car
00:24:59 ◼ ► accident and hopefully nobody dies, but people get hurt. Roomba is not going to hurt anybody.
00:25:05 ◼ ► You know, this Jita is, I don't see a way you can get hurt. I mean, I guess a kid could be playing
00:25:10 ◼ ► with it and tip it over, but it's, it's really funny that you say this, because I've been
00:25:15 ◼ ► thinking a lot about this and it's about this trust, right? And I felt it a little bit when I
00:25:21 ◼ ► saw my son and I didn't post this because you can see his face and everything, but I had this robot
00:25:27 ◼ ► like running after my son, right? And I'm thinking, oh, this isn't like, what's the worst that can
00:25:32 ◼ ► happen here, right? And I sort of felt a little irresponsible, but I kept thinking, all right, well,
00:25:37 ◼ ► it's going to stop or I can get in there and I can defend my son against this thing, right? Like,
00:25:43 ◼ ► it wasn't like going to, he's bigger than it. But it made me think about, I have a, I'm trusting
00:25:51 ◼ ► this thing right now, right? And that's, there's going to be these different levels of our trust
00:25:57 ◼ ► in technology and our different levels of trust in robotics. So like you're bringing up right now,
00:26:02 ◼ ► like there's a big difference between a car and this little robot and cars can kill people,
00:26:07 ◼ ► but we know that right now people are using the Tesla self-driving features and they have some
00:26:14 ◼ ► trust in it, right? Like they, they're enabling it. They know it's a beta feature and they're
00:26:19 ◼ ► using it. And then you see these crazy videos of people just like putting something else in the
00:26:23 ◼ ► driver's seat or whatnot. But some of us will look at that and be like, absolutely not. So I keep
00:26:30 ◼ ► thinking about these, that like this level of trust and what's going to, will there be certain
00:26:35 ◼ ► people that will be like, I give it all, I'm okay with it. And then there's going to be these others
00:26:41 ◼ ► that just say, absolutely not. I, and it makes me think of, well, everything makes me think of
00:26:47 ◼ ► Star Wars, but it makes me think of R2-D2 and C-3PO in the, especially in the first movie.
00:26:53 ◼ ► Like they're both, they're key players in the plot, but they could not appear more harmless,
00:27:00 ◼ ► right? I mean, the, the, what's the worst that could happen? R2 could tip over on you. I mean,
00:27:05 ◼ ► I mean, and I know that in the prequels later on, they, they added the ability for R2-D2 to fly
00:27:13 ◼ ► and he had like a flame thrower at one point, you know, so that, you know, that's a little different,
00:27:18 ◼ ► but as seen in 1977 in Star Wars, these robots were just slow and gentle, right? I mean, and
00:27:26 ◼ ► C-3PO, like what an interesting choice not to give him a very computery voice and instead have this
00:27:34 ◼ ► very gentlemanly, very gentle and gentlemanly Anthony Daniels do the voice, which just emphasized
00:27:43 ◼ ► that he was, you know, harmless. So I'm going to tell you something, John, I guess I'm telling all
00:27:50 ◼ ► your listeners this, which I think I've said publicly before. I have tried to watch Star Wars.
00:28:04 ◼ ► And I've said, I'm going to try again soon with my son, but you will pretty much never find me
00:28:19 ◼ ► So that's a secret that I need to tell you all. Well, you are familiar though with R2-D2 and C-3PO.
00:28:26 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. But like, I can't go deep, you know, I'm not going to try to go deep with you on it
00:28:30 ◼ ► right now. Like, you know, like if you could buy like a C-3PO and have him, you know, clean up
00:28:37 ◼ ► your house and, you know, get you a beverage from the fridge, fold your laundry, that'd be great.
00:28:43 ◼ ► Well, and I was actually just writing about this for 2022 look ahead of tech. Amazon's coming out
00:28:51 ◼ ► with that Astro robot and it's invite only and who knows really how many they're going to ship,
00:28:58 ◼ ► sounds like more than they thought, but it, you know, it does, it has cameras to learn your house
00:29:04 ◼ ► and so you're going to let this thing roam around your house, talking again about that camera
00:29:08 ◼ ► intersection. These are cameras that are connected to Amazon. It does a lot of the Alexa things,
00:29:14 ◼ ► but the main thing that makes it different from the like typical stationary Alexa in the corner
00:29:19 ◼ ► is that it roams around and it learns the different rooms and it can monitor for when you're not there,
00:29:24 ◼ ► so it has security features, but it also has like the ability to go to where people are hanging out.
00:29:32 ◼ ► So sort of like autonomous in that sense, like if it knows that the family hangs out in a certain
00:29:36 ◼ ► area, the Astro rolls over there frequently. So that's coming early next year. I hope to review
00:29:44 ◼ ► it. All right, let me take a break here to thank our first sponsor to our good friends at Linode.
00:29:49 ◼ ► Linode.com/thetalkshow. You can go there and see why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure
00:29:56 ◼ ► as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius. What do they do? It's servers. You go there,
00:30:07 ◼ ► That's where I host Daring Fireball. They are rock solid and offer extremely competitive prices
00:30:15 ◼ ► and include they have award-winning technical support offered 24 hours a day, seven days a year,
00:30:39 ◼ ► you know, see if you can keep that web server going until the 26th or 27th, but if you need it,
00:30:43 ◼ ► they're there. And developers have been trusting Linode for projects, both big and small since
00:30:50 ◼ ► 2003. That's a long time in the web hosting business. Deploy your entire stack with their
00:30:56 ◼ ► one-click app marketplace, or build it all from scratch, manage everything yourself with supported
00:31:02 ◼ ► centralized tools like Terraform. They make cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable.
00:31:13 ◼ ► If they stop sponsoring the show, I'd still keep my website there because where else am I going to
00:31:16 ◼ ► move it? They're perfect. So go to linode.com/the-talk-show, create a free account with
00:31:23 ◼ ► your GitHub or Google account, or just use your email address. And by starting at that URL, you'll
00:31:31 ◼ ► get $100 in credit. 100 bucks! linode.com/the-talk-show. What's going on there? You got some noise?
00:31:53 ◼ ► is the question. Like, over the year, I think it got louder. I bet we have to change some of
00:32:06 ◼ ► I meant in your house. I always assume. Yeah, it's 41 here. I always assume the weather is similar.
00:32:11 ◼ ► Hold on, let me see. Yeah, I got a kid that's sick. I got a four-year-old who has a cold upstairs,
00:32:55 ◼ ► complicated theories about when you turn the heat up and down, and that you turn it way down at
00:32:59 ◼ ► night. And I'm like, "Well, why do that? Why not keep it around that same 68 or whatever all the
00:33:20 ◼ ► temperature, right? It shows what it is in the rooms. And there's always a discrepancy between
00:33:28 ◼ ► what the baby monitor says and the Nest says. And my big fight is always, "What should we trust more,
00:33:35 ◼ ► this $100 baby monitor with a crappy temperature sensor? Or should we trust the actual unit in the
00:33:44 ◼ ► house?" And then we also bought these Nest sensors that we put in the rooms. And again, there's like
00:33:50 ◼ ► discrepancy. And I'm like, "Well, what should we trust more?" This whole podcast is about trust in
00:33:59 ◼ ► your Nest claims that it is 68, an accurate NASA-quality thermometer would say, "It's actually
00:34:13 ◼ ► like 69 and a half, you know? It's a little low." But then once you know the numbers you like on your
00:34:21 ◼ ► SHANNON: Right. Right. But this is the constant battle, and I hear this from a lot of other moms
00:34:27 ◼ ► or dads, mostly dads. I'm always on the sides of the dads where I'm like, "We cannot keep adjusting
00:34:33 ◼ ► the thermostat to what it says on the baby monitor." That is not something -- we cannot
00:34:41 ◼ ► live our life that way. And it's this constant battle. And it's the same thing like, "Shh,
00:34:47 ◼ ► someone's cold in the house. We're turning up the heat like five degrees." But maybe just one.
00:34:52 ◼ ► Yeah. You do kind of have me pegged, though, like in general. And it's not even that I'm cheap.
00:34:59 ◼ ► I'll waste money on X, Y, and Z. It's lucky that I haven't bought one of these $1,800 Jitas already
00:35:04 ◼ ► just to play with it. But in my mind, it's less work to tweak the thermostat than to just put
00:35:11 ◼ ► another hoodie on in the winter, put a sweater on on top of where I already was. Or in the summer,
00:35:32 ◼ ► Let's talk about something else you've covered recently. Your combination, column, and video
00:35:45 ◼ ► Again, your commitment to these pieces blows me away and makes me feel lazy, to be honest,
00:35:52 ◼ ► because I would never do that. You checked into a hotel with two Oculus rifts so that you could
00:36:03 ◼ ► Metaquests. All right. Metaquests. It's a nice thing they decided to change the name mid-project,
00:36:09 ◼ ► because, you know, that was like a week after the meta rebrand and the -- I honestly don't know why
00:36:17 ◼ ► Why? Like, what's wrong with Oculus? Like, what -- that was -- they dropped the Oculus and put
00:36:26 ◼ ► disassociated from Facebook. If they felt like, "Hey, we gotta stop branding everything Facebook,
00:36:39 ◼ ► brand," Oculus was already there, so why do that? Right, I guess it's like, "We'd rather realign and
00:36:45 ◼ ► be associated with this thing, so we want to make this the meta." Right, I guess that's the thing,
00:36:54 ◼ ► so that we actually -- you know, it's not so much that they wanted it to get away from Facebook,
00:37:03 ◼ ► you checked yourself into the hotel for 24 hours and tried -- You would do the same too,
00:37:13 ◼ ► I might do that after we record here, but I could not stand wearing a headset for that long.
00:37:20 ◼ ► And I have used the -- I believe the current Oculus, but only briefly, my son has the HTC
00:37:51 ◼ ► I find it to be so -- well, when he does, he still uses it, but it is interesting to me how
00:38:10 ◼ ► most of the best games aren't meant for VR yet, even on PC. And so there's a few. But when he is,
00:38:24 ◼ ► I think I can usually see what's going on because it gets mirrored to the actual computer display,
00:38:30 ◼ ► but he'll sometimes jump out of his chair when he realizes that somebody's entered the room.
00:38:37 ◼ ► Right. I couldn't do it. I don't know. And I argue with my pal and colleague Ben Thompson
00:38:51 ◼ ► and just -- instead of having a laptop or a tablet, you could just put this headset on and you'll have
00:38:58 ◼ ► a virtual display with -- or multiple virtual computer displays in front of you, like minority
00:39:05 ◼ ► report, and your hand gestures will just work, and you can have these meetings that are all-encompassing
00:39:13 ◼ ► virtual experiences. I get the meeting thing a little bit, but I just don't think that's what
00:39:19 ◼ ► people want. I don't think what people want after the last two years of Zoom fatigue is make this
00:39:34 ◼ ► because you're kind of the perfect person. Like, we haven't seen each other in how long?
00:39:55 ◼ ► Right. And like, we probably -- we have seen each other on Zoom meetings. We definitely have.
00:40:01 ◼ ► But like, there -- it is -- have you had one of these? Have you used it yet? Like, just to do a --
00:40:14 ◼ ► I'm always like, man, I really just felt like I met with that person. And it's obviously also like,
00:40:21 ◼ ► that person did not look like themselves. They looked like a cartoon with no legs. Like,
00:40:39 ◼ ► Yeah. Do you have a good -- I feel like a good Memoji or -- my Memoji is like, really bad.
00:41:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel like people with glasses do really good Memojis, or good Bitmojis or avatars,
00:41:16 ◼ ► like similar with the Facebook Horizon workplace avatar. But anyway, like, you do it and you really
00:41:23 ◼ ► do feel like that person was in your space. And like, for someone like you, who I haven't seen in
00:41:29 ◼ ► that amount of time, like, I would love to have a meeting with you in that kind of space. And
00:41:37 ◼ ► like, this is not something we could do for long periods of time. But I do think with the right
00:41:42 ◼ ► tools -- and this is where, like, when I was doing a lot of the meeting stuff, and you can pair your
00:41:48 ◼ ► MacBook with it, too, I don't know if you've seen that feature -- I started the light went off in
00:41:53 ◼ ► my head, which is like, if Apple does this, right, if Apple does the headset, which we all think
00:41:58 ◼ ► they're going to do it at some point, they can do it so well. Right? Because they control the
00:42:05 ◼ ► computer, they control the phone, and there's all these ways right now with the Oculus Quest that
00:42:10 ◼ ► they're trying to do it, right, that you can pair your computer -- it does like a fake 3D computer
00:42:16 ◼ ► in the space, and it places the screen on top of it. I'm doing a bad job explaining this, but I
00:42:22 ◼ ► don't even think -- I think you showed it in your video, but -- I think I showed it in the video,
00:42:25 ◼ ► and it works horribly. Right? It's so slow, you've got to pair a mouse with it, it's sluggish, like,
00:42:32 ◼ ► I was using that -- that was like the only way I communicated with my family during that period
00:42:36 ◼ ► was like, through iMessage on my computer through there. And it's so slow, it's just bad.
00:42:46 ◼ ► >> Yeah, like, it's just all pixelated, it's like using a remote desktop, but in the worst possible
00:42:52 ◼ ► place, you know, remote desktops are usually laggy anyway. Like, so, the light kind of went off when
00:42:59 ◼ ► I was doing that, I was like, if Apple did this, right, you'd have like seamless iMessage
00:43:03 ◼ ► integration, you'd have an easy way to bring over your Safari windows and everything like that,
00:43:08 ◼ ► like, you could see how easy it could all just sort of be set up in there. The question's like,
00:43:19 ◼ ► >> Yeah, I don't know. And, you know, and the other factor with Apple getting into it is,
00:43:28 ◼ ► what do we think of Apple as a game company, right? Clearly, they're, you know, in fact,
00:43:34 ◼ ► the main reason that they're embroiled in, you know, the lawsuit with Epic is that they're
00:43:40 ◼ ► gigantic in mobile gaming. Just, you know, I guess the biggest by far mobile gaming company with
00:43:48 ◼ ► Google coming in second. But the Mac famously has never been, or at least not since like the
00:43:58 ◼ ► black and white days of the late 80s when it was a very small cult market, you know, in the post
00:44:06 ◼ ► Doom era, there have not been very many great Mac games. It's just, you know, so which one would it
00:44:13 ◼ ► be like? Would it play like mobile? Or would it play like the Mac where they just can't get
00:44:23 ◼ ► opportunity for Apple, right? Like, you even look at the Oculus app store, and there are the top
00:44:33 ◼ ► games, which probably your son would know more about this, which is the top games have not made
00:44:37 ◼ ► their way to this platform, right? So you have some of the more fun games like the Beat Saber's,
00:44:43 ◼ ► and obviously also like Facebook or Meta's already tried to gobble up some of these, right? They're
00:44:48 ◼ ► trying to buy these companies. And there seems like there's so much opportunity for another
00:44:55 ◼ ► platform here that also can easily in some ways port over. So I've been wondering a lot about
00:45:03 ◼ ► that. >> Yeah, and it's, you know, like the Mark Gurmans of the world are saying that the, I think
00:45:11 ◼ ► Gurman's latest estimate is that they're trying to get it out by the end of next year. So like a year
00:45:16 ◼ ► from now, we might be, you know, if they hit the target. It just seems so far away from me display
00:45:23 ◼ ► wise, though. It just seems like if you can't make... >> Well, I agree. I agree. Like the tech,
00:45:31 ◼ ► and this year there's going to be the Project Cambria from Meta, which is going to have better,
00:45:42 ◼ ► reality features like it will improve this MacBook situation, right? Like you'll be able to see more
00:45:47 ◼ ► of what's in your space and have pass through. So that's all coming from Meta this year. But I think
00:45:54 ◼ ► again, like you're saying, like it's going to be this developers race. And right now there's really
00:46:00 ◼ ► just Meta. I mean, yes, there's HTC, but that seems to be like the higher end. And I personally
00:46:06 ◼ ► keep thinking someone's going to buy them. I know they've been passed around a lot, but...
00:46:10 ◼ ► >> It just seems like HTC is coming at it from the gaming PC angle and Oculus is coming at it more
00:46:18 ◼ ► from a mobile angle. I mean, and I don't, I'm not going to say, I was going to say, I don't follow
00:46:26 ◼ ► Facebook closely. I follow it more closely than most people. But I always thought that Zuckerberg's
00:46:32 ◼ ► interest in Oculus was primarily very long story, very short. They were a website and then mobile
00:46:45 ◼ ► became a thing and they're like, oh, well, shoehorn our website into an app for this Apple App Store.
00:46:51 ◼ ► And then the App Store and truly native apps became such a big thing and Facebook jumped on it.
00:46:59 ◼ ► You know, total Bill Gates, like let's turn this company on a dime. Oh, let's, this phone thing is
00:47:06 ◼ ► not an afterthought. This is going to be our main product. This is the main Facebook, right? And
00:47:11 ◼ ► got very serious about it. And then he thought this sucks. I wish I owned the phone platform.
00:47:17 ◼ ► And they tried it. They made a Facebook phone. Right? Amazon had a similar moment where Amazon
00:47:22 ◼ ► made a phone. Cause I think, you know, I went to all those events. They reviewed all those phones,
00:47:27 ◼ ► you know, and they both gave up on it very quickly, which is the opposite of Microsoft,
00:47:33 ◼ ► right? Microsoft traditionally makes a crappy first product, a slightly less crappy second
00:47:39 ◼ ► product, and then just sticks to it for another year. And then version three is like, all right,
00:47:50 ◼ ► I've covered it, everyone's covered it, which is this coming sort of Zuckerberg versus Apple versus
00:47:57 ◼ ► whoever will be the third platform, I think, you know, it's certainly, the two seem like they're
00:48:03 ◼ ► going to be Apple and Facebook or Apple and Meta. And then Microsoft seems like the likely bet,
00:48:09 ◼ ► right? They've got the HoloLens, they've got Windows. They've already said they're going to
00:48:13 ◼ ► enter there, but you know, who knows? But I think with Apple, it's clear, and I think this was the
00:48:20 ◼ ► Germin report, which was gaming and communications. And I think that makes total sense. They need to
00:48:28 ◼ ► start to do that, whether they have to do it publicly, I think they kind of have a tougher
00:48:34 ◼ ► road about getting developers on board without doing it publicly, right? Like they can only do
00:48:39 ◼ ► so much with what they've done with ARKit, with, hey, build this for the phone, and then eventually
00:48:43 ◼ ► we're going to make tools that make it easier for you to port to some sort of headset platform.
00:48:47 ◼ ► I think that the big difference between mobile and PCs was, okay, the Mac came out in 1984,
00:48:58 ◼ ► and was clearly, if you knew what to look for, this is the future of personal computing.
00:49:04 ◼ ► It's something like this. And Microsoft had Mac apps, right? Excel started as a Mac app.
00:49:18 ◼ ► which actually caught on and sort of started painting Apple into a corner. And then Windows 95,
00:49:24 ◼ ► you know, super famous, you know, people lined up around the block like it was a rock concert to get
00:49:29 ◼ ► their boxed copy of it on day one. But I feel like Gates stuck with that because the Mac
00:49:38 ◼ ► never really became like a mass market phenomenon, right? It was like, oh, there is still room here
00:49:58 ◼ ► they're both so smart, so cutthroat, they looked at it and they thought, ah, it's too late.
00:50:06 ◼ ► There's no way this is entrenched. This is the way platforms work. iOS and Android are our phone
00:50:15 ◼ ► platforms, period. And I think Zuckerberg, I think wisely, if he wants to own his own hardware
00:50:22 ◼ ► platform, picking VR as the next target and hiring, you know, getting the Oculus team and John Carmack
00:50:30 ◼ ► and these super talented people. And it was really smart. It's like, this is a long play. I wish we
00:50:47 ◼ ► Apple at a disadvantage to not own the most popular desktop operating system when the iPhone
00:50:59 ◼ ► And the point of that was that this is totally not ready. By the way, I was sick for two days
00:51:04 ◼ ► afterwards. Just like, headache, low, yeah, just like subtle headache for two days. It was like,
00:51:15 ◼ ► yeah, this was not the smartest thing I ever did. But I never saw clearer where this is headed.
00:51:22 ◼ ► And also, talk about a computer for your head, very clearly that this is still a really generation
00:51:32 ◼ ► the battery is horrible. Like, what you were mentioning, the pixelation of certain things is,
00:51:38 ◼ ► you still visibly see it. You know, the controller and the accuracy of the hand tracking and all of
00:51:44 ◼ ► that stuff is just like, okay, this is going to take a while. This is going to take a while.
00:54:03 ◼ ► It was very interesting to me that they partnered with a company, you know, Apple isn't known for sharing their demo. This is with other companies' products, but they obviously did not have VR things to show. And we in the invited media got to try some games and there was a couple other things. But one of the things I remember from that demo is I just could not get over the fact that if I looked down, I didn't have any legs.
00:54:31 ◼ ► It was like about four or five years ago. And Apple, it was like one of those things where they shuffle us through various rooms.
00:54:41 ◼ ► You know, they all have like a room just for sound and they've got like an orchestral score from a major Hollywood movie opened in Logic and they show you, you know, this is incredible. And they've got gazillion dollar speakers set up, you know, so that sounds fantastic. And one of the rooms was like a VR room. But to do it, you know, there was no Apple VR products, so they used the HTC Vive.
00:55:22 ◼ ► Yeah. It's going to get better. And I kind of believe this end of 2022 rumor that we're hearing from more and more analysts and folks like Germin, I just think that Apple's going to want to get on this development.
00:55:37 ◼ ► This developer train faster than it, you know, faster than the hardware is going to be ready.
00:55:44 ◼ ► It is truly a genuine art form to know when to hit the go button and say, OK, let's build this plan, this device, this OS. Let's try to ship it in eight months. It's a real product, not a prototype. Go. Because the right time to do it is not when the product is perfect.
00:56:08 ◼ ► Apple Watch, I think they probably would at least one generation too early in hindsight. I think that the battery life.
00:56:17 ◼ ► Was so bad that it was, you know, but it was close. Like, and by the time they came out with the Series 2, it really was. It was like, hey, this is actually a much better product already.
00:56:32 ◼ ► And I think with the iPhone, they came out with it at exactly the right time. It was just absolutely positively nailed it, even knowing that they were building it on the crazy slow edge network.
00:56:47 ◼ ► You know, and it had battery life issues too, but it was so compelling and so useful. It was truly useful as a product right out of the gate in 2007 that it was pretty well timed. iPad, I would say they timed the first iPad extremely well.
00:57:06 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think like this is going to be, it sounds like it's going to be a different marketing position than any of those products. I mean, maybe most similar to a watch, right? But we're putting this out there. We think this is a bet on the future.
00:57:20 ◼ ► We want people to create for it. And I mean, that was a little bit of the watch messaging, right? Like they weren't sure what the watch was going to be.
00:57:28 ◼ ► I mean, you look back and you're like that first keynote, they're like, yeah, fitness in there, notifications and this and that. And like over the years, they became way more focused on what the watch was supposed to be.
00:57:39 ◼ ► I think with this too, I mean, the rumors is smaller, just not going to be a huge blockbuster product at first. Especially too when you think about how long Cook and some of the executives have been talking about this space as an interest. What is the term they always use? We're highly interested in or we're...
00:58:00 ◼ ► Before the Apple Watch came out, he said, I think at the All Things D conference, one of them, he was like, the wrist is an area of interest to us. And I was like, that's actually kind of crazy because there's only two things you can build.
00:58:16 ◼ ► You can build a watch or a fitness tracker. And fitness trackers are like a Fitbit, especially at the time, like a 2014 era Fitbit told you the time, they were technically watches. So really, you're just talking about what's the priority of the product? How fitness first is it versus style first or something like that.
00:58:38 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think they've been saying this for like three years now, at least, about AR and not VR, but AR. And so that's, I think, a little bit of the challenge too, where they have to explain to people this is not the end goal, but we are building on this. Yeah, it feels like a watch situation.
00:58:55 ◼ ► The other thing, it's just a little bit, I'm going to say gossipy, but maybe that's not the right word. Or Kremlinology, right? Like the old word from the Cold War, where there were these specialists who could read the propaganda newspapers coming out of Moscow and read between the lines, even though, because it was all a bunch of bullshit.
00:59:17 ◼ ► But if you knew what to look for, you'd say, "I see what they're doing." As an outside apologist, one of the things that I find interesting about AR and VR, and a reason to be optimistic that it might ship next year is there's lots of reports ever since the get-go that Project Titan has a huge amount of turnover.
00:59:40 ◼ ► Leadership turnover, I mean, at the highest levels now. Kevin Lynch, the guy who still is also running Apple Watch, has moved to take over. Just a huge soap opera saga of executive turnover and bringing Bob Mansfield back out of retirement because things had gotten out of hand.
00:59:58 ◼ ► The AR/VR stuff under Mike Rockwell, who I interviewed on stage four years ago, five years ago, they've had no turnover whatsoever. So whatever that team is doing seemingly is making Tim Cook and the rest of the senior executives think that they're on to something.
01:00:19 ◼ ► Yeah, and when I interviewed Federighi, one of the times last year I asked about it, and he just gave us usual smirk that they're still really interested in it. It wasn't one of those backtracking things.
01:00:36 ◼ ► And people on YouTube were definitely reading into that. I remember whatever the time code was, which was basically people were like, "Look at him say yes!" Look at him just be like, "Confirm that they are doing this," with his eyes or something like that, somebody was saying.
01:00:51 ◼ ► It was this year, right? It was one of your interviews with Craig Federighi where you asked point blank, as the total pro you are, is he in line and interested in perhaps succeeding Tim Cook as the next CEO? And he got so embarrassed.
01:01:07 ◼ ► He tried to make a joke out of it, but it's like, I don't know, I thought it was a very interesting answer because he didn't just get, I don't think he was ready to be asked, and Apple executives usually are extremely ready for any question.
01:01:24 ◼ ► And I thought of that again about two months ago, six weeks ago, when Federighi spoke at the Web Summit in Spain, and a big, big conference over there gave his impassioned pitch for why mandatory sideloading for mobile platforms would be a terrible idea for legislators to mandate.
01:01:52 ◼ ► Boy, that sure seemed like, I know, it seemed less about him talking about, I mean, there were technical aspects to his argument, but it seemed a lot less than his usual role as Senior Vice President of Software.
01:02:10 ◼ ► Like, when he's on stage at WWDC, it's to talk about software. When he's on stage at a product event, it's to talk about software, but they usually don't even bring him out, like, when, like, the iPhone introduction comes out, because that's about hardware, and they bring out someone like Kyan Drance, who's their product marketing senior executive in charge of hardware.
01:02:36 ◼ ► So, you know, somebody, they obviously, Apple, you know, like, I linked to it and just said, you know, this is not a little thing for an Apple Senior Vice President to travel all the way to Barcelona to give a speech at somebody else's conference, especially at this time of year, where it's like release season for Apple Software.
01:02:56 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, his quote, I believe, was insanity or something like that, like, you know, that would be insanity, would I ask, like, you know, your name is a successor, and he said something like insanity, you know, that would be, he said that would be irresponsible insanity or something like that, right?
01:03:16 ◼ ► And he's just joking and deferring it, but I was very surprised at how many times they put him out this year, not only, obviously with me, I was very engaged in both of the conversations, both of the times we talked, because they were around specific software features, but other things, I felt the same way.
01:03:36 ◼ ► And I, you know, part of that's that he's very good. He's maybe the, you know, better than Cook in some regards in terms of talking and explaining things. I don't know who else do they really have to do.
01:03:52 ◼ ► I would think that it would, that that particular speech, once it was decided that Apple should send somebody over to do it and that they should send somebody senior, to emphasize how, it's like a respect to the conference, right, as opposed to sending somebody lower who nobody's heard of.
01:04:12 ◼ ► These are from the people who are keynote regulars at Apple. Cook obviously could have done it. And he's, you know, he's got his own style on stage, but it is a little reserved, right?
01:04:35 ◼ ► Phil Schiller could have done it, but he has not appeared on stage since taking the title of Apple Fellow and no longer being Senior Vice President of Product Marketing.
01:04:48 ◼ ► I'm not sure we'll ever see Phil Schiller on stage again. I'd love to. I think it would be a fantastic surprise.
01:04:54 ◼ ► He could have done it, but he's not there. But then that, the only other person I could think of would be Jaws, who is sort of the new Phil Schiller Senior Vice President of Product Marketing.
01:05:04 ◼ ► So I don't know, you know, how much debate there was within Apple, but I would think it would be one of those four.
01:05:16 ◼ ► Yeah, he just really is. So I don't know. I thought that was pretty interesting moment as we reviewed Joanna Stern's 2021.
01:05:27 ◼ ► Let me take another break here and tell you about a new sponsor on the show. Very happy to have them on. Short and sweet message. Revenue Cat.
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01:06:45 ◼ ► Here it is. I've been putting it off. I probably misintroduced you on the show because I promised you months ago that I would forever after introduce you as Emmy Award-winning Joanna Stern.
01:06:59 ◼ ► Just put it in the list of the things that have gone wrong with this booking, John. You'll be hearing from my people.
01:07:20 ◼ ► Columnist. I forget the exact name. Emmy Award-winning is what... I stopped listening after that. I was like, this is never going to stop.
01:07:34 ◼ ► That is probably the most shocking thing of the year. Yeah, we at the Wall Street Journal won our first Emmy for this documentary I did last year.
01:07:44 ◼ ► Published, honestly, maybe this time last year, a little bit earlier, about a very... it's not the most uplifting topic that I've ever covered, which is death and technology.
01:07:57 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm still in shock over that because that was a piece that I just became so invested in and just to see it recognized was amazing.
01:08:11 ◼ ► Eternal, a tech quest to live forever. It is available on YouTube. I promise everybody it will be in the show notes.
01:08:19 ◼ ► It is good. It is touching. And your demeanor as the host of the documentary I thought had the perfect tone of acknowledging, hey, this is a bit morbid talking about stuff like this.
01:08:49 ◼ ► I'm not... that feels too far-fetched for me. I mean, I'm not going to say like in a thousand years it's not possible, but I don't think I'm going to live to a time where somebody can somehow digitize their mind, die, and you still feel like your friend is still there.
01:09:05 ◼ ► That doesn't seem possible to me. But it's obviously a thing that science fiction writers have been imagining since the beginnings of science fiction.
01:09:17 ◼ ► Yeah, and like I... sort of how I envisioned the piece always was sort of like, look at what we have right now, like sort of as a step into the future. Like look at what we have right now, which actually what we have right now is pretty much right now literally in the news because of what Apple introduced in iOS 15.4.
01:09:37 ◼ ► Sorry, too many dots. 15.2 with the digital legacy contact feature, but sort of what all these tech companies have offered us right now. And then look a little bit beyond that where I feature a company called Hereafter where you can make an interactive voice bot.
01:09:53 ◼ ► Really, it's basically like it works with Alexa and you can kind of talk and hear the recordings of somebody who's died. And then, hey, look like way out into the future to what this company is doing. They're doing it right now. But like, maybe one day, I agree with you, it's very eerie and weird, where like, we have humanoid robots that look like ourselves, and they talk and sound and have our consciousness is what they say.
01:10:18 ◼ ► So yeah, the idea of the piece was to put that in front of people, which is like, where
01:10:23 ◼ ► could this go? And it follows one specific woman who is actually just had another health
01:10:31 ◼ ► scare. Her name is Lucy and she, if you watch, you get to know Lucy a little bit. She's
01:10:36 ◼ ► in her 20s and has had, has fought this terminal illness for her whole life and she thinks
01:10:41 ◼ ► a lot about digital legacy and has like made a lot of plans about what will happen to her
01:10:45 ◼ ► social media account, how she wants to, she made videos that when she passes, she wants
01:10:50 ◼ ► those to be posted. And so it follows her to find sort of the right solution to something
01:11:04 ◼ ► your parents down with a camera and, you know, do like a little family podcast effectively,
01:11:36 ◼ ► class and he just has so many funny stories about him and his buddies figuring out that
01:11:43 ◼ ► they could skip first period and because the teacher never took roll and it was a lot of,
01:12:09 ◼ ► knew that they were out, scooping off, skipping class. I should have him on to tell the story,
01:12:25 ◼ ► Legacy contact, yeah. Legacy contact. Which you can enable and actually it was like hugely
01:12:30 ◼ ► popular. I did a guide to it last week because, you know, this has been a topic that I've,
01:12:34 ◼ ► and I hit them a little hard last year because they didn't have a feature like this, right?
01:12:42 ◼ ► managers have had features like this where you assign somebody and so when you die, that
01:12:47 ◼ ► person you've assigned can then get into your digital data really. And so they finally released
01:12:54 ◼ ► this feature this last week in 15.2 and I did a guide to it and it's been hugely popular.
01:13:00 ◼ ► People have from all over have been emailing just, you know, how do I enable, asking questions
01:13:04 ◼ ► about it all. But yeah, I mean, that similarly to you, this prompted and again, you see in
01:13:30 ◼ ► after they're gone. Your kids can see their grandparents when they're, you know, there's,
01:13:36 ◼ ► and there is clearly a lot of tech moves so fast that there's been a ton of digital rot
01:13:54 ◼ ► Daring Fireball to other articles and websites over the years that I've been writing Daring
01:13:59 ◼ ► Fireball are now 404s. And that's just like articles about like Mac apps and stuff like
01:14:07 ◼ ► that, right? I mean, it's like how many personal digital photos have been lost because nobody
01:14:16 ◼ ► Exactly. Exactly. And how do you create that on your own, right? Like you don't necessarily
01:14:28 ◼ ► And, you know, and everybody pre-digital had family photo albums or, you know, a lot of
01:14:35 ◼ ► times shoe boxes full of photos waiting to be organized into photo albums and, you know,
01:14:42 ◼ ► maybe whoever was the organizer of the albums runs out of steam at some point. And, you
01:14:46 ◼ ► know, then when they pass and their family comes in, they just find the shoebox of photos,
01:14:50 ◼ ► but there they are. You don't need a password to get into a shoebox of old family vacations
01:15:01 ◼ ► and go through them. I mean, it's, you know, the analog world of a literal shoebox of photos
01:15:07 ◼ ► stinks in so many ways. The cameras were terrible for most consumers. The lighting for anything
01:15:13 ◼ ► taken in the dark, look, you know, it's hard to believe how bad flash photography was at
01:15:40 ◼ ► which is how do you preserve your family memories from way back when and make them digital?
01:15:46 ◼ ► And then what do you do with the digital ones, right? So I did like even the guide to like
01:15:50 ◼ ► how to use, how to update, you know, if you've got the slides, right, the 35 millimeter slides
01:15:55 ◼ ► and you want to bring those into the digital world, how do you do that? How do you scan
01:16:05 ◼ ► It's definitely a project, but it's, to my point with both of these pieces, all of these
01:16:18 ◼ ► like, "Do you ever think about this topic?" and started digging into it. And turns out,
01:16:23 ◼ ► there's a lot that's happening there. We just don't talk about it enough. And the tech companies
01:16:26 ◼ ► don't talk about it enough because one, it's a weird thing to talk about. And two, as I've
01:16:30 ◼ ► said many times, like, they want to deal with their active users. It's literally how they
01:16:40 ◼ ► It is, it's like an inextricable part of human nature that we have a lot of trouble understanding
01:16:52 ◼ ► really feel like you're going to die. It's just innately uncomfortable. I think Apple's
01:16:58 ◼ ► done a good job with it from what I've seen. But even their language is a little stilted.
01:17:04 ◼ ► Like you go into settings, password and security, and then there's a section for legacy contact.
01:17:15 ◼ ► you trust to have access to the data in your account after your death. That's not bad language,
01:17:29 ◼ ► I have strong opinions on everybody's writing, but I don't know what note to send. You know,
01:17:45 ◼ ► think that that's very, it's not encouraging, right? That to me is where it falls short,
01:17:52 ◼ ► is it feels so cold and it acknowledges that you're going to die after your death. I sort
01:18:00 ◼ ► of feel like it should be written in a way that more strongly encourages people to turn
01:18:05 ◼ ► Yeah, I bet. I want to also like, to me, it's always funny, like who writes these things?
01:18:15 ◼ ► how I can, because my phone is in airplane mode. Also, another thing it should say here,
01:18:21 ◼ ► but it doesn't because I've gotten this email from so many readers, is that you have to
01:18:25 ◼ ► have two-factor on. Now, you should have two-factor on regardless, but it turns out a lot of my
01:18:33 ◼ ► exist in 15.2, to which I have to write them back and say it does, you just have to have
01:18:39 ◼ ► Yeah, I wonder what the percentage is on that, and I kind of feel like, I don't know, I want
01:18:47 ◼ ► to say my mom has it on and my dad doesn't, and it's one of those things where I should
01:18:54 ◼ ► help them out and, you know, and maybe when I go through this, you know, make sure that
01:19:01 ◼ ► Yeah, and enable this. It might be, so it's a good prompt both to set this up and a good
01:19:11 ◼ ► of iCloud accounts that don't have it on is staggering. I don't know if I'd say a majority,
01:19:25 ◼ ► Yeah, there might be. Maybe some little things like that over the years where they've sort
01:19:32 ◼ ► of turned up the temperature on, if you want to use this in conjunction with blank, you
01:19:53 ◼ ► I don't think so, no. But anyway, there it is. And it is, it's, you know, it's interesting.
01:20:06 ◼ ► award-winning documentary proving your interest in the subject. I think it was well done.
01:20:11 ◼ ► Yeah, no, and I actually think they probably have seen... So I actually wrote about this
01:20:21 ◼ ► And I've seen other people commenting on this over the last couple of months as, you know,
01:20:25 ◼ ► there were the delays on SharePlay and there's been the delays on the ID. And I was sort
01:20:33 ◼ ► these updates lately. The good is that Apple just can release features when they're ready,
01:20:39 ◼ ► right? They don't have to feel forced to just do it all at the beginning of the September
01:20:44 ◼ ► timeframe. And I will also lump in there that I think it's good that sometimes when these
01:20:50 ◼ ► features are not included in the main September release -- I didn't make this point in the
01:20:55 ◼ ► newsletter, but I'm making it now, so this is important for everyone to listen to -- is
01:21:06 ◼ ► the fall, we might not have... We were just glossed over this. But there's more... They
01:21:10 ◼ ► can hit bigger with a certain type of feature. I would say the same thing will happen with
01:21:14 ◼ ► the digital IDs, the digital licenses when that happens next year. And then there's the
01:21:28 ◼ ► like, "Well, there's automatic updates," but a lot of people don't have that turned on.
01:21:32 ◼ ► And people get frustrated when they're like, "Why did this thing move? Why is there a new
01:21:44 ◼ ► telephone and you're not going to wake up one morning and the buttons have moved around,
01:21:54 ◼ ► keyboard on the iPhone. Once you put a button on, the button's always there. Software, you
01:22:05 ◼ ► with change. I'm still, in hindsight, a little blown away at the iOS 7 update with the totally
01:22:19 ◼ ► No, it's not that I haven't gotten over it. It's just, of all the things to change, they
01:22:25 ◼ ► change literally every single way that everything looked in the entire operating system. And
01:22:52 ◼ ► would tweak and modernize the look every few years. There was never a moment... The classic
01:22:58 ◼ ► Mac 2 at Mac OS X was that sort of leap, but it was also not something you were going to
01:23:04 ◼ ► get automatically installed just by updating your Mac. Most of the Macs that were in use
01:23:10 ◼ ► weren't even capable. You had to have a fairly recent Mac to do it. And it was a whole big
01:23:25 ◼ ► And I think Apple has been... Maybe it was a learning from 7, right? That was so jarring
01:23:31 ◼ ► to people. But Apple, and now I think Microsoft, have taken real hints from what Apple's done
01:23:37 ◼ ► in the last number of years, which is add these features that change the look and feel,
01:23:44 ◼ ► that change the aesthetic, but don't force them down your throat. A lot of them are optional.
01:23:49 ◼ ► That was the huge thing with iOS 14. You could do the widgets if you want to. You could get
01:23:54 ◼ ► rid of your home page, the app pages if you want to, but you don't have to. And I think
01:24:06 ◼ ► dot releases, because they had to add features like that, make them easier, and other things
01:24:10 ◼ ► fall and slip, and it is what it is. I'm not crying that I can't get my digital ID right
01:24:22 ◼ ► And I think also to that, Microsoft is infamous for not doing it the right way. Windows 8
01:24:30 ◼ ► did not do it the right way. And they've learned, especially with Windows 11 this year, "Hey,
01:24:37 ◼ ► remove this thing. You can do it if you want to. If not, you can put it back into the left
01:24:41 ◼ ► corner if you want to. It's okay." You put things where you want it. And maybe, I mean,
01:24:51 ◼ ► choice and the company should be able to control more." But I think Apple's sort of the
01:25:01 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think that the App Library feature from last year in iOS 14 is a perfect example
01:25:28 ◼ ► App Library that you get—and I think it's set up with, if you don't upgrade your phone,
01:26:14 ◼ ► spotlighting, but it is so much less cluttered than my old home screen. But I think they
01:26:21 ◼ ► were right not to turn it on for people by default and all of your familiar home screens
01:26:47 ◼ ► Right. Yeah, and they didn't rearrange your first home screen to put a big calendar widget
01:27:05 ◼ ► see what's new and tell people what they—discover these things even though a lot of times people
01:27:17 ◼ ► All right, let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor. Oh, I love this
01:27:28 ◼ ► the show regularly, but because it is just a fantastic place to go to host your website.
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01:29:39 ◼ ► You know, I have not watched the whole thing yet. Every time I go to start to watch it,
01:29:59 ◼ ► to assign homework because communicating with Dieter. And as you know, it's very difficult
01:30:15 ◼ ► talk about it longer than the actual documentary because I think it's about half an hour.
01:30:20 ◼ ► But basically it is a—it's Springboard, the secret history of the first real smartphone.
01:30:56 ◼ ► even around that long, at least as a serious player. It was like a flash in the pan, in
01:31:12 ◼ ► there were a lot of similarities between Palm and Apple. Certainly a similar aesthetic and
01:31:18 ◼ ► a care for attention to detail in user interface design and the clickiness of the buttons.
01:31:42 ◼ ► and built their own competitor to the software, the Handspring Visor. And that's the first
01:31:47 ◼ ► one I got. I think I got it in 2000. My wife loved it too. And it came in fun colors. I
01:31:54 ◼ ► think I had an orange one and she had a purple one. And so the Palm pilots were like these
01:31:59 ◼ ► sort of grab, drab, gray, sort of Newton-y looking devices with the plastic. Handsprings
01:32:18 ◼ ► a cartridge thing at the top where you could buy additional hardware modules. So it did
01:32:24 ◼ ► not have a built-in phone, but then they came out with a phone attachment. And I, of course,
01:32:31 ◼ ► bought that and it took absolutely terrible, terrible black and white photos. But now I
01:32:45 ◼ ► enthusiastic amateur film photographer, but I didn't have a camera that was with me all
01:32:55 ◼ ► Yeah, around that time, you know. And they were still around and then famously, I don't
01:33:00 ◼ ► think I linked to it yet, but one of the outtakes from it, they're famously, Palm was still
01:33:05 ◼ ► around in 2006. And that was when they were playing around with like Windows Mobile instead
01:33:11 ◼ ► of their own OS. And it's like, oh man, this is terrible. Windows Mobile, this thing stinks.
01:33:22 ◼ ► Yeah, because my, I was too young at this point in life to know, but my only recollection
01:33:28 ◼ ► of Palm and Handspring was like a friend of mine in high school's father had one of these.
01:33:35 ◼ ► And like the, then by 2006, I was out of college and a friend of mine, instead of like getting
01:33:43 ◼ ► into the BlackBerry, had a Palm with Windows Mobile, you know, with the stylus. And I thought
01:34:05 ◼ ► of you who will be listening into subsequent episodes of this show to have watched it already
01:34:14 ◼ ► Well, I'm going to, I'm going to do the same. I'm going to, I'm going to watch it and then
01:34:45 ◼ ► It looked like a very nicely produced conference, a nice big stage. Elon was at the Tesla factory
01:34:53 ◼ ► in Texas coming in remotely on a big screen above you. Was that, how was that? I thought
01:35:06 ◼ ► can't believe it. I mean, I wish I, if I were half as good an interviewer as you might show
01:35:18 ◼ ► the interviewer and I'm instantly nervous because I'm on stage in front of an audience, you know,
01:35:25 ◼ ► and I find it hard enough to interview somebody on stage where we're both sitting there looking
01:35:32 ◼ ► at each other and we're four feet apart and we're both talking in front of the same audience.
01:35:49 ◼ ► front of a live audience every single day. So they're really good at the sort of managing
01:35:56 ◼ ► your attention as the host between the guest and the audience. Whereas if I were talking
01:36:02 ◼ ► to a giant 15 foot Elon Musk head on a screen, I feel like I would forget the audiences there.
01:36:10 ◼ ► I mean, so, so many things to say about the setup, but right, like this, what the internet
01:36:22 ◼ ► biggest conferences, if not like sort of the biggest conference of the year that we have.
01:36:26 ◼ ► We have a tech conference, we have a couple of others, but like this is our members pay
01:36:34 ◼ ► so we also had like a lineup. Musk was supposed to be the ending of that night. It's like
01:36:40 ◼ ► the opening night, but there were some issues and things got moved around. So he was in
01:37:07 ◼ ► I should have said, we have the CIA director who I don't want to piss off right now, backstage,
01:37:13 ◼ ► right. And I had in the front row, like my editors and bosses basically being like, you
01:37:18 ◼ ► know, we have to move the show alone, right. And like, I have a timer, like a big thing
01:37:22 ◼ ► in the back. So I had actually pushed because it was supposed to be 30 minutes and I think
01:37:25 ◼ ► it ended up being 38 minutes or something like that. So I extended but like, this needed
01:37:30 ◼ ► an hour. Right, right, right. Like, this needed an hour and he clearly would have given an
01:37:38 ◼ ► You know, and I actually think he was very engaged. I'd watched the prep I did for this
01:37:44 ◼ ► one, which I do a lot of prep for all of these, but I did like, crazy prep. I also had like
01:37:54 ◼ ► and I just ended up binge watching his interviews from the last two years. And it's hard to
01:38:04 ◼ ► engaged with this question. He's worked up, he's ready to go. And so, yeah, I mean, and
01:38:11 ◼ ► plus, like, just like, I've got this group of CEOs sitting there, and I'm like, straining
01:38:16 ◼ ► my head to look at the monitor because I don't I don't see him like I don't see him through
01:38:20 ◼ ► like there was no other monitor over the camera. So then there was another camera that I'm
01:38:24 ◼ ► looking at, because like, that's what he sees. Right. Luckily, like I did tell the producers
01:38:30 ◼ ► beforehand, you know, can I just go talk to him in the zoom thing on my computer first?
01:38:35 ◼ ► So just like he knows who I am. And he knows what's happening here. And we know there had
01:38:43 ◼ ► front of a bunch of people. And, you know, I knew it would be millions of people online,
01:38:58 ◼ ► know, when I did Craig Federighi, or I did such an Adela a couple months ago. It's like
01:39:03 ◼ ► zoom and it's produced and we tape and then we edit. But this was live, which was great.
01:39:26 ◼ ► I think my wife and I like to watch the, you know, the late night talk shows. And we want,
01:39:31 ◼ ► you know, and I think all of the ones that we watched, and we, you know, we'd skip around
01:39:40 ◼ ► their show going while they were shooting every single night from the hosts house. Right.
01:39:46 ◼ ► It's just Stephen Colbert's desk in his house. Jimmy Fallon had the best time. Yeah. And
01:39:59 ◼ ► know, but they all had to do that and I appreciate it. But it's like, man, once they got the
01:40:04 ◼ ► live audiences back, it's like, boom, this show, pow, there it is. This is actually better.
01:40:25 ◼ ► Yeah. No, and for me, like, you know, pre-COVID, I did a lot of stage interviews for the journal
01:40:32 ◼ ► and I was always in person with those people. Right. It was, I did Trevor Noah. I did Michael
01:40:39 ◼ ► Streepfer at Facebook. I've done a bunch of bigger ones and being on stage with that person,
01:40:50 ◼ ► You can bring in the audience, you know, ask like, what's the reaction in some ways. And
01:40:56 ◼ ► then we went to just all Zoom, which was tough. Like you're saying, like, you have to, like,
01:41:01 ◼ ► you don't have the audience, so you have no connection to the people that are watching.
01:41:09 ◼ ► person and the other with the audience, and then someone comes in like us getting a sort
01:41:13 ◼ ► of big, big brother way. So I'm just hoping we'll go back to all in person, but I guess
01:41:32 ◼ ► me and where I noticed it, where after the interview, the initial coverage seemed hyper
01:41:39 ◼ ► focused on a brief section of you and Elon Musk talking about what he would say to President
01:41:47 ◼ ► Biden if he got to give him his advice on the Build Back Better Act, and that the initial
01:42:04 ◼ ► painting him as a libertarian, selfish billionaire bastard. And in context, I don't think that
01:42:31 ◼ ► just trying to challenge him and keep getting him to explain his thoughts. And frankly,
01:42:47 ◼ ► had spent a little bit of time prior to that, like, winding up about it, and then he just
01:43:09 ◼ ► not the most divisive person you could interview right now. So I try to remember that when
01:43:14 ◼ ► I keep getting messages from Tesla fans and other Elon Musk fans that say I was rude to
01:43:21 ◼ ► He is. I know, you know, people have compared him to Steve Jobs a gazillion times, and,
01:43:26 ◼ ► you know, they're founders, they're charismatic, they are good interview subjects, they think
01:43:40 ◼ ► crazy that Pixar was Steve Jobs' other company sidekick, right? It is kind of nuts that Elon
01:43:55 ◼ ► they outsell all other electric vehicles two to one at the moment, or maybe three to one,
01:44:55 ◼ ► But the Neuralink one, I have to admit, I've rolled my eyes out a bit, because it's like,
01:44:59 ◼ ► number one, I'm not going into space. You're not getting me up into outer space. I mean,
01:45:23 ◼ ► get into vaccinations and the politics around vaccinations, but one of the interesting things
01:45:35 ◼ ► around the world is that there has always been enormous vaccine hesitancy in the public.
01:45:44 ◼ ► And I also think, my personal theory is that a lot of people are a lot more afraid of needles
01:45:56 ◼ ► just don't want to get a shot." But people have an aversion to anything being punctured
01:46:01 ◼ ► through their skin. And evolutionarily, that makes all the sense in the world, right? Like,
01:46:07 ◼ ► up until the last century, anytime you got your skin punctured, you were at serious risk
01:46:14 ◼ ► for an infection that could wind up killing you. And putting something into your brain,
01:46:42 ◼ ► that they expect that their first group of human subjects will be people like paraplegics,
01:47:01 ◼ ► like, I get it that he pisses people off because, you know, I mean, Steve Jobs pisses people
01:47:24 ◼ ► you're making me think about my year of interviews in a really smart way. And my goal with this
01:47:37 ◼ ► get him to speak and open up about them. Because it's really when he's the most passionate,
01:47:45 ◼ ► want to talk about certain things. Not because he doesn't want to answer, but just like,
01:47:49 ◼ ► you can clearly see he's not passionate about it. Right. And so you want to get him to the
01:47:52 ◼ ► places where he's passionate. And yes, ask some tough questions about it. But, you know,
01:47:58 ◼ ► after a year of interviewing folks from companies that are so telling you the marketing lines,
01:48:07 ◼ ► and you got to really fight to get some answer, to then talk to him who clearly does not care,
01:48:13 ◼ ► you know, there's no press people behind the scenes are trying to tell him what to say,
01:48:26 ◼ ► because you're really getting a peek into like, this is this guy's brain. And, you know,
01:48:34 ◼ ► does he work? But like, you know, how do you do all of this? Because I was trying to get
01:48:49 ◼ ► and where his mind goes and what he gets excited about. I think the best moment of the whole
01:48:53 ◼ ► thing was when he when I asked him about Starship. And you could tell his response was like,
01:49:08 ◼ ► says he spends most of his time thinking about that problem right now. I bet to me that was
01:49:20 ◼ ► seconds and then he pulls out the water bottle and it's like, oh, that's okay. That's okay.
01:49:28 ◼ ► Yeah, he said it was going to require A+ execution across the board in every single way. And
01:49:32 ◼ ► you know that whatever you think of Elon Musk, you know what he considers to be A+ execution
01:49:37 ◼ ► is his highest high levels. I thought another great moment, and I don't even know if it's
01:49:46 ◼ ► to be true, was you were talking about his, that segment talking about titles at Tesla.
01:49:54 ◼ ► And he went off on a tangent. He would know he started all these companies, but he, according
01:49:59 ◼ ► to him in US law to start like a C corporation, the only officers you need are a president,
01:50:14 ◼ ► up titles companies give to people with jobs and they aren't like legally mandated. And
01:50:22 ◼ ► the funny part about it, you called it out, is it was at the Wall Street Journal CEO conference.
01:50:27 ◼ ► I, yeah, I mean, everyone in the room laughed, which was good. Oh, I loved that too. I mean,
01:50:43 ◼ ► But CEO is a meaningless title in front of the biggest annual conference of CEOs. I thought
01:50:52 ◼ ► Yeah, it was. I mean, yeah, he was, he was, it was very entertaining and definitely wish,
01:51:22 ◼ ► We didn't talk MacBooks. We should do, let's do an extra bonus round here. You've got to
01:51:42 ◼ ► You know, I will say the 14 inch battery life, because I was using the 16 inch for a couple
01:52:19 ◼ ► I just go with the 13 inch, which is, I mean, do I just go with the 14 inch, which I think
01:52:24 ◼ ► Yeah, that's what I'm, that's what I purchased for myself. That, now that we've lived with
01:52:40 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. It's, I mean, but I hadn't thought about the notch honestly
01:53:13 ◼ ► I wasn't bothered right from the get go. Like, and it's interesting. I don't think I, I don't
01:53:16 ◼ ► think I put this in my review cause I felt like I didn't want to, with that time crunch
01:53:22 ◼ ► of trying to hit the embargo and you've only got six days and maybe it's more like five
01:53:32 ◼ ► leave the event with the review unit in your hand. I didn't want to make a long-term impression
01:53:52 ◼ ► don't know, wouldn't this just be better to, even if it doesn't go edge to edge, to just
01:54:02 ◼ ► I turned around on it and I don't really see it anymore and I kind of like the way they
01:54:06 ◼ ► squeeze stuff like the time and the cellular signal up there and the ears, whatever you
01:54:16 ◼ ► is the perfect place for something like that. It's, you know, are there a couple of apps
01:54:30 ◼ ► you're dragging across the menu bar. Like, you know, I'm fine with it. I love the computers.
01:54:53 ◼ ► I used the iMac for a while and I got really used to that iMac display, the 21-inch iMac.
01:55:08 ◼ ► I miss that display and I miss the setup of that. And so I just really want Apple to make
01:55:34 ◼ ► is for the bigger iMac. And there's another one that they're going to update the $5,000
01:56:01 ◼ ► inches. I don't care. Just give me the 24-inch one from the iMac. Just something, though,
01:56:10 ◼ ► And just like the design of it. Like, I went back to my LG monitor, speaking of LG, I have
01:56:14 ◼ ► a nice LG 4K monitor and I set it all up. You know, I've got the mouse and the keyboard
01:56:29 ◼ ► so ugly. But I got used to it. That's like, okay. Like, I definitely got, I was more bothered
01:56:46 ◼ ► Remember and I was like, yeah, it's like reminding me of like baby blue. You know, like
01:56:55 ◼ ► Yeah. When it first came out and I was using it, the chin, I didn't hate it, but I thought
01:57:01 ◼ ► it was distracting. I thought I was sort of one foot in the camp of, I would like to see,
01:57:08 ◼ ► I mean, surely they made prototypes without the chin that were slightly thicker to accommodate
01:57:19 ◼ ► see one of those and, ah, no, I think they made the right decision. And I think it shows
01:57:24 ◼ ► how many times internal to Apple they iterate and iterate and use these things. And if they
01:57:30 ◼ ► realize the notch is okay on the phone and on the MacBook, they can realize in that design
01:57:41 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I want that monitor. That's my big, like Apple did a lot this year
01:57:47 ◼ ► on Macs. I'm not going to complain. They did some great stuff, but that's what I want to
01:58:02 ◼ ► Yeah. And like, you know, we'll have all the docking stuff. Like it'll be the Thunderbolt
01:58:17 ◼ ► a good holiday season, the new year and everything like that. Best to the family. And let me
01:58:43 ◼ ► All right. Memberful, where you can monetize your passion with membership. Revenue Cat.