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ATP

465: Lasers Are Great

 

00:00:00   Anyway, this is boring, let's move on, I'm gonna cut all this.

00:00:02   Although, yeah, well, that's good because I only started recording four minutes ago.

00:00:06   All right!

00:00:07   Casey!

00:00:08   Come on, man!

00:00:09   All right, so let's move on to some follow-up.

00:00:12   We have some follow-up from fee5ofum.

00:00:14   John, would you like to tell us about this?

00:00:16   What?

00:00:17   Yeah, I gotta undo my pronunciation here, but, uh, so we got an email from the dog collar

00:00:21   people, the company name, or the product name, and I guess the company name as well is spelled

00:00:26   F.I. and I was pronouncing it "fee" because that seems reasonable, but Lucy from the company

00:00:32   spelled F.I. tells us that it's pronounced like "fi-do" or "wi-fi" so it's "fi" like

00:00:38   "fee-fi-fo-fum" or "f" with the word "i" after it.

00:00:42   Lucy says, "Many, many people go for fee first.

00:00:45   We should probably put it as the banner at the top of the website, you think?

00:00:48   Every company that has a weird name should have the pronunciation prominently placed

00:00:53   on the website."

00:00:55   Some people don't have it at all, which is bad, but some people have it like, "Oh, if

00:00:57   you dig and go to the about page and read all the text, we'll tell you how to pronounce

00:01:02   it," right?

00:01:03   That's better than nothing.

00:01:04   But if you have a weird name and people instinctively go for the "wrong" pronunciation first, you

00:01:10   have to address that in an obvious way right in front of people.

00:01:14   Otherwise, you're just going to be called "Fee" forever.

00:01:16   It's going to be so hard for me to change this into my mind because I don't know if

00:01:19   I can say "Fie."

00:01:21   I think "Fee" might be a better name.

00:01:22   I mean, it makes sense with the Fido,

00:01:23   like I understand where it's coming from.

00:01:25   Anyway, so there's that.

00:01:27   Also, I can't even, I'm like Casey now,

00:01:30   I go for the right pronunciation and I put the wrong one.

00:01:33   The Fi company created a discount code just for us.

00:01:38   I actually put it in last week's show notes

00:01:39   because they got it to us in time for that.

00:01:42   But it's ATP 100, that's the $100 off thing.

00:01:46   There's a bunch of other codes,

00:01:48   there's all the same $100 off.

00:01:49   If you go to their website, at the bottom of the website

00:01:52   is the $100 off code, different $100 off codes.

00:01:54   This is not like a secret that you can only get

00:01:55   through this podcast, blah, blah, blah.

00:01:56   They continue to not be a sponsor.

00:01:58   This is not a sponsored spot at all, period, whatever.

00:02:01   But if you want an NJP 100,

00:02:04   you can get $100 off their collar,

00:02:05   or you can just enter the code that's at the bottom

00:02:07   of the webpage that you go to buy it on.

00:02:09   So I just thought I would include that here.

00:02:11   Collar's still working out fine.

00:02:12   I actually charged it for the first time since having it.

00:02:15   It was only down to like 38%.

00:02:17   I think it probably would have made it one month

00:02:18   on a charge, but definitely not the three months

00:02:21   that they say is possible if your dog, I guess,

00:02:24   stays within WiFi range all the time, but my dog doesn't.

00:02:27   She goes out on the doggy playdate four days a week,

00:02:30   and that is probably draining the battery a lot.

00:02:32   - Good deal.

00:02:34   We also got word, I think we saw this

00:02:37   from a couple of different people,

00:02:37   that a new Mustang is in the works for 2023 or 2024.

00:02:41   So actually, I should've looked this up,

00:02:43   and I completely forgot.

00:02:44   Is the Mustang available brand new right now,

00:02:46   you know, the chip shortages and whatnot, notwithstanding--

00:02:49   It is, but it's an older model that they're just still selling

00:02:52   and putting new model years out with different options

00:02:55   or trim or whatever.

00:02:56   But reportedly, there actually is going to be a new Mustang.

00:02:59   So Ford will actually sell cars.

00:03:01   Lots of other people who are outside the US

00:03:03   point out that Ford does sell cars as opposed

00:03:06   to trucks and SUVs.

00:03:07   Outside the US, we should have been more clear

00:03:09   in our typical US-centric thing when we say,

00:03:11   Ford doesn't sell cars anymore.

00:03:13   We meant in the US.

00:03:14   But yeah, they sell lots of cars elsewhere in the world

00:03:16   because no one else in the world is so obsessed

00:03:19   with trucks and gigantic SUVs as we are.

00:03:21   - That is true.

00:03:23   All right, and then we lied about something else.

00:03:27   Apparently the PSR, the Sony PSVR2, that is a mouthful,

00:03:32   they did show the controllers off somewhere.

00:03:35   - Yeah, in their press release,

00:03:36   they didn't have any pictures.

00:03:37   And in the presentation, they didn't have any pictures,

00:03:39   but on their website and like the pictures for media,

00:03:42   they did have pictures of the controllers.

00:03:44   They look like, I forget which other, maybe Marco knows,

00:03:47   These look like the Quest controllers.

00:03:49   There are existing VR controllers that are like this.

00:03:50   Maybe it's the Valve Index.

00:03:51   - Yeah, the Quest controllers are,

00:03:53   I mean, sorry, whatever, is it called the Quest now?

00:03:55   What the hell is this called?

00:03:56   - Quest 2, isn't it?

00:03:57   - Well, yeah, whatever the thing formerly called

00:03:59   the Oculus Quest 2. (laughs)

00:04:02   Yeah, the controllers look pretty similar to this.

00:04:04   They're just white, but otherwise they're pretty similar.

00:04:06   - Yeah, and if you look at the controls,

00:04:07   it's got similar to the PlayStation buttons

00:04:09   with the different shapes on them,

00:04:11   and those thumbsticks are like PlayStation thumbsticks.

00:04:13   So they did show this.

00:04:14   I don't think they showed the thing itself.

00:04:17   One of the technologies they mentioned,

00:04:19   which is worth noting, is that they're moving

00:04:21   to what they call inside-out tracking,

00:04:22   which I think maybe the Quest does as well,

00:04:24   a bunch of other ones do,

00:04:26   where the way it keeps track of where your body

00:04:30   and head and hands are positioned in space

00:04:33   is not with external sensors

00:04:35   that you have to put around your room,

00:04:36   but rather with sensors on the headset thing

00:04:41   and also on the hands, so they see each other,

00:04:44   so they position themselves relative to themselves.

00:04:46   That's why they call it inside-out tracking instead of having like fixed locations around the room

00:04:50   They're trying to keep track of where your hands are

00:04:52   Again it's not not a notable new technology, but it's notable for Sony to be switching to that from their previous system

00:04:58   so all the tech and everything looks pretty good, but

00:05:01   you know no price no picture of the headset that I could find and

00:05:06   I think no real release date yet, but it's coming along

00:05:09   All right, and then Justin Krohn wrote in with regard to Canon DSLRs and someone to read a little bit of this

00:05:16   A major advantage of mirrorless that isn't often discussed is the dramatically reduced

00:05:20   Flange Focal Distance, or FFD. Having a smaller FFD allows lens designers more flexibility in

00:05:25   designing lenses for the camera, as they can place lens elements closer to the camera's sensor than

00:05:30   was possible with DSLRs, and that's because they need the additional distance for the mirror to

00:05:34   flap. This has enabled some unique lenses exclusive to the Canon RF or mirrorless line of cameras,

00:05:40   including and according to Justin, his new personal favorite zoom lens, the 2870 F2L.

00:05:47   From Canon's white paper on the RF system, quote, "The reduction from a 44mm flange back

00:05:52   distance in the EF mount system to the 20mm of the new RF mount system opens important

00:05:56   additional degrees of freedom in lens designs.

00:05:58   The pivotal innovation offered by this short distance combined with the large 54mm diameter

00:06:02   RF mount is the freedom to deploy large diameter optical elements at the very rear of the lens

00:06:08   and closer to the large image sensor. So back to Justin. While Canon simply said that they

00:06:13   don't plan on making additional flagship DSLRs like the 1DX etc, I would still be extremely

00:06:19   surprised if the 3 or 5 series get any additional DSLR models. The R5, which is the mirrorless

00:06:24   5D replacement, has been extremely well received both in terms of reviews and in sales, to

00:06:30   where they had a difficulty in keeping it in stock for the first year of production.

00:06:34   Same for the more recent introduction of the R3. Plus all Canon R&D is focused on the RF

00:06:38   line of lenses as opposed to EF, so any DSLR purchases are buying into a static system.

00:06:43   Into the road for those lenses that are far away from the sensors.

00:06:48   That's one of the advantages of the small, the APS-C sensor I have that's small.

00:06:55   Small sensor also means you can have small lenses, and I think the distance from the

00:06:58   lens also helps everything be a bit more compact with the mirrorless cameras.

00:07:05   Some people who were replying to our discussion last week were really just extolling the virtues

00:07:09   of being able to see through the lens that's going to take the picture.

00:07:12   And they said, "No, no electronic viewfinder has to come close to that."

00:07:15   Electronic viewfinders continue to get better and better in terms of responsiveness.

00:07:19   They have like 120 frames per second, very high resolution.

00:07:22   No, it's probably not going to be exactly the same for a little while as literally looking

00:07:27   through the lens because that's real time, real light going to your real eyeballs.

00:07:31   But there are advantages to the electronic viewfinder as well in that the electronic

00:07:35   viewfinder can be brighter than what you see through the lens because it's an emissive

00:07:39   screen that you can adjust the brightness of.

00:07:42   And sometimes that is useful.

00:07:45   And if you have really bad vision, there are probably about, you know, there are like retina

00:07:49   screens at this point for my eyeballs and really good cameras as well.

00:07:53   So I think the tradeoff is well worth it for the compact size and apparently there's an

00:07:57   advantage to lens design as well.

00:07:59   - I would say, having spent a lot of time with both,

00:08:02   I don't think electronic viewfinders will ever be

00:08:07   as good as optical viewfinders in the ways

00:08:10   that people care about when they make this distinction.

00:08:12   However, I think there's just so many other advantages

00:08:15   to electronic viewfinder-based cameras,

00:08:17   like the whole mirrorless, that whole world.

00:08:20   There's so many advantages there

00:08:21   that we're just gonna let that go.

00:08:23   Not everybody will, there's always gonna be some people

00:08:26   who keep the optical viewfinder,

00:08:27   just like some people still use.

00:08:29   things like range finders today,

00:08:30   even though there's more modern alternatives

00:08:32   that most people use.

00:08:34   But there's always gonna be something like that,

00:08:35   but I think it's gonna become a narrower

00:08:37   and narrower part of the market,

00:08:39   because everyone's choosing mirrorless,

00:08:41   despite the fact that electronic view finders

00:08:43   are worse in certain ways,

00:08:45   because of the other value

00:08:46   that they're getting as a result.

00:08:48   - Which ways do you think they're worse, though?

00:08:49   Like, it used to be the thing was basically frame rate.

00:08:52   Like, reality doesn't have a frame lag behind it,

00:08:54   you're just literally looking through the thing,

00:08:56   so as soon as you move the camera, you see the change.

00:08:57   but at 120 frames per second, I feel like that has basically

00:09:02   gotten that one good enough that most people can't tell.

00:09:04   So the only thing left is color reproduction and resolution.

00:09:07   And I think the advantages of the viewfinder,

00:09:10   like the fact that it can light up and be brighter

00:09:12   than what you're actually seeing,

00:09:14   probably balance those out.

00:09:16   I know people just want it 'cause it's traditional

00:09:18   and because 120 frames per second

00:09:20   is only on a few high-end cameras

00:09:22   and it drains the battery faster

00:09:23   so you don't use it all the time.

00:09:24   We're not quite there yet,

00:09:26   but I think we're getting close to the point

00:09:27   where there won't be a strong argument

00:09:30   for why you need the optical viewfinder,

00:09:33   especially because there is like,

00:09:34   oh, I like being able to look through the thing,

00:09:36   but you can't look through it when you're taking the picture

00:09:38   because the mirror blocks you, right?

00:09:40   And like, oh, that's only for a short period of time.

00:09:42   Well, if you're trying to shoot at 30 frames per second,

00:09:45   you know, it's gonna be blacked out

00:09:47   for a very long portion of that time

00:09:49   until the mirror goes flap, flap, flap, flap, flap.

00:09:51   And then I don't think you can really look

00:09:53   through the viewfinder at all

00:09:54   while you're taking video on one of these cameras,

00:09:56   which is a big application of a lot of these,

00:09:58   the big interchangeable lens cameras, is to do video.

00:10:01   And yeah, the mirror has to be up the whole time

00:10:03   during video and you're not seeing anything then, right?

00:10:06   - Yeah, but I've always enjoyed

00:10:09   how the optical viewfinder system is just direct and simple.

00:10:14   And there are advantages.

00:10:17   You quickly mentioned battery life.

00:10:19   And I think that's one of the reasons why mirrorless cameras

00:10:24   rather, have had such horrendous battery life

00:10:27   for the first portion of their takeover of the market

00:10:30   compared to regular SLRs because they're having

00:10:34   to run these screens all the time

00:10:35   and having to run the image sensors

00:10:37   to capture the data for the screens

00:10:38   and display the screens and light them up and everything.

00:10:39   And that's such a more power hungry process

00:10:42   than what a DSLR is doing when it's not taking a picture

00:10:46   which is almost nothing.

00:10:48   And so there are advantages in practice to optical,

00:10:52   But, as you mentioned, there are also advantages

00:10:55   to electronic that optical systems can

00:10:57   and will never achieve, and mirrorless will never

00:11:01   really have an optical system, and so, you know,

00:11:03   the industry has moved on, and everyone holding on

00:11:07   to the optical systems will be forced to move on

00:11:09   at some point as well, unless they just want to keep

00:11:13   being relegated to decreasingly useful parts

00:11:16   of the product line.

00:11:18   - All right, John, tell me about TV technology.

00:11:21   some self-follow-up. I'm listening to myself in the last episode. I got a few things slightly wrong.

00:11:25   I heard myself stumbling over them when I was saying them, but I just pulled the wrong answers

00:11:31   out. So first thing, WRGB OLEDs have white backlights, not blue. The QD OLEDs have blue

00:11:38   backlights, but WRGB have white. And I stumbled because I realized what I was saying didn't make

00:11:41   sense unless they were white. So the white backlights in WRGB OLEDs, it's a big white

00:11:46   field of LEDs, every one of them is the size of a pixel, so they're individually controlled,

00:11:51   but each one of those white lights shines through a thing that has a color filter,

00:11:56   and it takes white light and it goes through the red color filter, and that red color filter only

00:12:00   lets through the red portion of the white light, the red wavelengths. And then there's a blue

00:12:04   filter that only lets through the blue wavelengths, and there's a green filter that only lets through

00:12:08   the green wavelengths. When you're filtering light in that way, when you're taking white light and

00:12:12   only letting through the red, the green, or the blue, you're losing brightness because

00:12:16   you're just discarding all the other wavelengths of light.

00:12:19   The backlight is emitting a bunch of different wavelengths of light.

00:12:22   And then of course WRGB has the W pixel that's just less through the white light, right,

00:12:25   straight through, but that washes out the colors.

00:12:28   So that's why one of the reasons that OLEDs have trouble getting bright, they are intentionally

00:12:32   filtering around a lot of the light from their backlights.

00:12:34   And remember the magic of QD OLED is the backlight is blue because that's cheap to make and you

00:12:40   you can make it super duper bright.

00:12:41   And then the quantum dots don't filter out wavelengths

00:12:44   'cause it's just blue light.

00:12:45   It's like pure blue, just blue wavelength.

00:12:48   The quantum dots change the light.

00:12:50   The light hits this material that excites it

00:12:53   and we put the link in the show last week

00:12:55   of the little electrons changing energy states

00:12:57   and stuff or whatever.

00:12:57   But it essentially changes the wavelength of the light

00:13:00   from blue into red, from blue into green

00:13:03   and then just lets the blue through on the blue side.

00:13:06   But apparently QDL ads do have quote unquote filters on them

00:13:10   which act as diffusers to make sure the light goes out in all directions.

00:13:14   The thing is, the diffusers don't end up blocking the light of light because by the time the

00:13:17   light gets through the QD layer, it is very purely blue, red, or green already.

00:13:23   And so the red filter is just blocking out any wavelength that didn't get converted by

00:13:27   the quantum dots.

00:13:28   And the quantum dots are very efficient, much more efficient than the filter.

00:13:31   So you're taking 100% of your backlight and putting it through the QD layer, maybe you

00:13:35   get 80% of it out, and then that gets diffused.

00:13:38   Whereas in WRGB OLED you're taking 100% of your white light and cutting off like 60%

00:13:43   of it to just get the blue wavelength or whatever.

00:13:45   So that's why in theory QD OLEDs have the potential to be much brighter.

00:13:50   And of course there's no white subpixel to wash out the saturation of the light.

00:13:53   So the QD OLEDs have better viewing angle because that diffuser is the very last layer

00:13:56   in the layer cake and spreads the light out in all directions.

00:13:59   So you have amazing viewing angles.

00:14:02   Especially it's also especially a problem in WRGB OLEDs that off axis, even before the

00:14:06   brightness changes, you tend to get a tint to it, like the most recent high-end LG WRGB

00:14:14   OLEDs get a reddish tint off axis, which is kind of annoying, and QD OLEDs don't have

00:14:18   that.

00:14:20   And they could potentially be brighter.

00:14:22   And I found an old story when looking at this from 2019 about Samsung's investment in their

00:14:28   QD OLED factory.

00:14:29   They put $11 billion into this in 2019 to be able to make QD OLED panels.

00:14:36   So yeah, this is kind of, it was almost like silicon fabs where like it takes a lot of

00:14:39   money just to be able to eventually many years later get a factory that can make these things.

00:14:44   And finally, I think we mentioned it briefly in the last show, but it's worth mentioning

00:14:47   again.

00:14:48   Micro LED is still the holy grail.

00:14:50   That's where every single sub pixel is like a red LED, a green LED and a blue LED.

00:14:54   Instead of this business where there's a white LED behind the color filters or a blue LED

00:14:58   behind quantum dots, why not just have a red LED, a green LED and a blue LED?

00:15:02   You're done, right?

00:15:03   The answer is because it's insanely expensive to do that.

00:15:05   That's what we want.

00:15:06   That's what everybody wants.

00:15:07   But those screens are five and six figures at this point.

00:15:11   But they look amazing.

00:15:12   So if you're super, super, super, duper rich, and you have a really big house, because it's

00:15:16   actually kind of hard to make these things small, get a micro LED TV, but be prepared

00:15:20   to pay as much as a Lamborghini for one.

00:15:22   No, no, it's worth noting.

00:15:24   So you put a video in our notes, which I've put in the show notes, and it's some individual

00:15:29   like recapping CES and talking about the $180,000 or something like that.

00:15:35   It was over $100,000, which I know you just said,

00:15:37   but really, think about that, people.

00:15:39   100 plus thousand dollars for a television

00:15:41   that some people are apparently able to

00:15:44   and willing to spend the money on,

00:15:45   like a 90 inch, $150,000 or whatever it is, TV.

00:15:48   It's bananas.

00:15:49   - And they're more expensive when they get smaller.

00:15:50   They used to sell them that they were 700 inches,

00:15:53   'cause as you can imagine,

00:15:54   if you make the screen bigger and bigger

00:15:55   and it's still 4K resolution,

00:15:57   it's much easier to make a red, a blue, and a green LED

00:16:00   when they're not that small.

00:16:01   - At that point, I believe you have a scoreboard.

00:16:03   (laughing)

00:16:04   - Exactly, that's the same technology, right?

00:16:07   But when you try to say, I want it to be 4K,

00:16:09   or even worse, 8K, and also be only, quote unquote,

00:16:12   only 90 inches diagonal, you have to make those things

00:16:15   so tiny, and it's so expensive.

00:16:18   And even now, the way they do it,

00:16:20   there is a segmented display technology.

00:16:22   Like, they can't make one screen like that.

00:16:25   They have to make these sub screens,

00:16:26   and then they just tack them together.

00:16:27   They make like tiles, basically,

00:16:29   and they just tack the tiles together

00:16:30   and hope that you can't see the seams between them.

00:16:32   And they do a pretty good job of covering it up,

00:16:33   but it's very expensive.

00:16:36   And it's expensive because of the manufacturing.

00:16:37   They have like robots,

00:16:38   like putting down these microscopic little red, green,

00:16:40   and blue LEDs.

00:16:41   And you know, they all have to be right next to each other

00:16:42   with no spaces between them and uniform and bright,

00:16:45   and they all have to work and it's expensive.

00:16:47   But yeah, that's the ideal where everything is its own LED.

00:16:52   Here's the big thing about why micro LED is great.

00:16:54   Notice the O is not anywhere in this.

00:16:56   There's no organic elements in it.

00:16:58   The organic stuff in OLEDs,

00:17:00   that's the stuff that wears out,

00:17:01   that causes burn-in, image retention, all that,

00:17:04   because the more you run it,

00:17:05   that you wear it out over time,

00:17:07   and if you have something that's on the screen all the time

00:17:10   that wears out those pixels faster than everything else,

00:17:12   then you get image retention.

00:17:14   No organic stuff in a microLED.

00:17:16   It is just plain old inorganic LEDs of the kind we all have,

00:17:19   and we all know those things last forever,

00:17:21   and maintain their brightness, and do not decay.

00:17:24   So, you know, it's gonna be a while

00:17:27   before microLED comes down from the $180,000 price,

00:17:30   But boy, when it does, those screens are gonna be amazing.

00:17:33   - So I don't really follow this kind of stuff

00:17:35   the way you do.

00:17:36   I'm curious, on an infinite time scale,

00:17:40   on what kind of time scale do you think micro LED TVs

00:17:45   might be accessible?

00:17:46   Are we talking about a decade from now?

00:17:50   Five years, 20 years, what are we talking about?

00:17:52   - I think a decade is reasonable.

00:17:53   If you remember, Apple was investing in micro LED.

00:17:56   I think the rumor was for the Apple Watch,

00:17:57   because it's way easier to do a watch

00:17:59   than an 89 inch 8K television, right?

00:18:02   Because there's just fewer pixels.

00:18:03   But if you notice, Apple didn't release a watch

00:18:06   that's micro LED, so it's, everyone wants this technology.

00:18:10   I think a decade is a reasonable timeline.

00:18:12   Like if you look at QD OLED, like you'll find all the Q,

00:18:15   the, you know, Quantum Dot explainer videos

00:18:17   from six, seven years ago, and just now,

00:18:20   we're getting the very first televisions

00:18:22   with QD OLED in them, although we did get

00:18:24   Quantum Dot LCD before that, so I think a 10-year timeline

00:18:26   for micro LED to come down in price is very reasonable

00:18:29   because every year, micro LEDs have been at CES

00:18:33   for the past five years and they used to be 300,000

00:18:36   and 200,000 and 100,000,

00:18:37   I think there was a five figure one this year.

00:18:40   So they are coming down and every year they brag about,

00:18:43   we've made it like 1,500 times less expensive

00:18:46   to manufacture but it still costs as much as a car, right?

00:18:48   So we're getting there, everyone wants to go there

00:18:52   because this solves so many problems

00:18:53   that they have to deal with

00:18:54   with these other display technologies.

00:18:56   but tenure time horizon seems conservative to me.

00:19:00   - All right, Mo Rubinsall writes,

00:19:01   "I was okay with the explanation of chroma subsampling

00:19:04   until John Insigna insulted analog TV

00:19:07   as quote, 'weird and complicated,' quote.

00:19:09   'I am older than even John,' that's possible,

00:19:12   'and worked with analog broadcast video

00:19:14   back in the dark ages.

00:19:15   It is a very clever system.

00:19:17   The reason for the signal structure is compatibility.

00:19:19   When color came along, RCA and CBS had competing systems.

00:19:23   CBS's was simpler,

00:19:24   but demanded a different broadcast spectrum

00:19:26   which would obsolete black and white TV sets.

00:19:28   RCA system was compatible with black and white bands

00:19:30   because it broadcast color on a chroma subcarrier,

00:19:33   which a black and white TV would not see.

00:19:35   A color TV would add or subtract the different signals

00:19:37   to get the color signals.

00:19:39   That's cool, I didn't know that.

00:19:40   - Yeah, I would strongly recommend watching

00:19:42   the "Technology Connections" video series on analog TV.

00:19:45   The way it works is fascinating.

00:19:48   However, I think both Mo and John are correct.

00:19:53   analog TV is very clever and also weird and complicated.

00:19:57   You are both correct.

00:19:59   - Yeah, I mean, that's the legacy, compatibility, tech debt,

00:20:03   like the standards that win often have to do weird stuff

00:20:06   and bend over backwards to accommodate existing conditions.

00:20:10   And whoever set up the first system

00:20:12   didn't have color in mind.

00:20:15   And the standard that didn't obsolete all those TVs

00:20:18   was obviously gonna win even if it's weirder

00:20:20   and more complex or quote unquote worse.

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00:22:02   - We should at least quickly mention

00:22:07   that Apple is apparently going to allow

00:22:09   alternate payment systems in the App Store

00:22:11   in South Korea as per laws there.

00:22:14   asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

00:22:17   - This was discussed a lot when this was going around

00:22:19   of basically saying, okay, well,

00:22:21   even if Apple follows this law,

00:22:22   they're probably gonna charge a fee anyway,

00:22:24   which threw a lot of people for a loop

00:22:26   who hadn't been following the trial closely,

00:22:27   'cause Tim Cook said this flat out in the trial

00:22:29   and people flipped out about it then,

00:22:30   'cause he was like, well,

00:22:31   if they don't go through our payment system,

00:22:33   we'll have to find some other way to collect the money.

00:22:34   And everyone's like, what, what?

00:22:36   No, the whole point is if we use our own payment system,

00:22:38   we don't have to pay you.

00:22:39   And Apple was like, oh no, you have to pass.

00:22:41   And so here is finally a concrete version of that where Apple has proposed to the South

00:22:48   Korean lawmakers, "Here's how we're going to comply with your new law.

00:22:51   We're going to do X, we're going to do Y, we're going to do Z."

00:22:53   And part of how they're going to comply is they say, "Oh, and of course we're going to

00:22:57   take a fee for all of these payments that are made through payment processes that are

00:23:02   not ours."

00:23:03   I don't think they said what the fee is or anything like that, but they said they're

00:23:06   going to do that.

00:23:07   So I think this is basically confirmation that if you thought Apple was going to allow

00:23:11   third-party payments and not also take a fee,

00:23:14   no, they're definitely taking a fee.

00:23:15   - Yeah, and to be clear, this is actually,

00:23:17   Google had the same law applied to them in South Korea.

00:23:20   In fact, I'm pretty sure they're much bigger there,

00:23:23   and this law was actually meant really

00:23:24   to change Google's behavior, not necessarily Apple's.

00:23:27   But Google is doing this exact same thing, basically.

00:23:31   I forget the exact numbers, but it's something like,

00:23:33   instead of charging 15%, we'll charge you 13%

00:23:35   or something like it's, and then you can apply

00:23:38   the rest to your credit card fees.

00:23:40   So, yeah, so when people say alternative payment systems,

00:23:44   what we're actually getting in these places

00:23:48   where this exception is being made

00:23:50   is not a monetary savings.

00:23:53   It's the ability to use other systems for other reasons.

00:23:57   Their features, their flexibility,

00:23:59   their customer service implications.

00:24:00   - Yeah, the ability to give people refunds,

00:24:02   like visibility into who's actually buying your stuff.

00:24:06   - Right, but Apple will, I mean, as they said,

00:24:09   And as it blew all of our minds with rage,

00:24:13   they will presumably devise some kind of system

00:24:16   where in order to comply with their app store rules,

00:24:20   you as the app using an external payment system

00:24:22   will have to somehow report your transactions to Apple

00:24:26   so that they can collect their commission.

00:24:29   - I don't know, like what Google did

00:24:30   is they made you use an API.

00:24:31   Like it'll go through an API that sees the amount

00:24:35   and it doesn't do anything with it except for note,

00:24:37   uh-huh, I see you're charging someone X amount

00:24:38   and then it knows how much the Apple says you owe them.

00:24:41   - Right, and you can imagine the massive amounts

00:24:43   of edge cases and complexities that this will bring up.

00:24:46   So for instance, what if the rate that you are paying

00:24:51   in something like foreign currency exchange

00:24:53   is slightly different than what Apple's paying?

00:24:55   What if you issue a refund?

00:24:57   What if the customer issues a chargeback

00:24:59   and you lose that money later?

00:25:00   Like there's so many weird complexities

00:25:04   that will make this pretty much impossible

00:25:07   to, for most people to use this ability

00:25:11   to run their alternative payment system,

00:25:12   that this is gonna be limited only to the largest

00:25:15   of large companies and BS game companies.

00:25:18   Like that's gonna be who uses it and it's gonna be a mess.

00:25:22   And it's ultimately going to change,

00:25:25   probably as far as I can tell,

00:25:27   roughly nothing for the better for almost anybody.

00:25:31   Like I can't imagine this is actually going to help

00:25:35   pretty much anything.

00:25:37   - It has the potential to make customer support better.

00:25:39   For big companies that can navigate all these things

00:25:42   and also want to have better customer support,

00:25:44   they will be able to have better,

00:25:46   they have no ability to influence customer support

00:25:48   whatsoever when they go through Apple's payment

00:25:50   'cause they literally can't issue any refunds,

00:25:52   have no visibility into it, they have nothing, right?

00:25:54   So if you are a big company

00:25:56   and you want to give a better customer experience

00:25:58   that will make your customers like buying from you,

00:26:00   you'll be better about refunds and customer support

00:26:03   and troubleshooting and being able to contact

00:26:05   customers to like that but really the main reason most developers care about

00:26:10   this is money it's not the customer experience it's not being able to not

00:26:14   even be able to like run metrics on the customers and getting customer data it's

00:26:17   we want to not give someone 30% and so they make this law and I I think the

00:26:24   intention and a lot of people are looking at this law thing this will save

00:26:28   us money and it will kind of because it seems like the fees are going to be less

00:26:33   Well, that's not a given Apple could charge more for this if they wanted

00:26:35   I don't see anything stopping Apple from saying yeah with like a 90% commission on all third-party payments

00:26:39   Right, like that would follow the letter of the law probably

00:26:42   but

00:26:44   They're not getting what they wanted. It's like wait a second. We the whole point is we didn't want to have to pay Apple

00:26:48   Anything it's like oh you're gonna pay Apple and who controls how much we pay Apple Apple still controls that I'm just lucky

00:26:54   That there that seems like they're gonna say we will charge you less than 30% because we understand

00:27:00   I mean, obviously you can't kill the golden ghost here.

00:27:03   If Apple did try to charge 90%,

00:27:05   that becomes economically unfeasible.

00:27:06   People would lose money in every transaction

00:27:08   because these people do have to pay

00:27:09   the actual payment process or whatever they're using, right?

00:27:12   Some amount of money.

00:27:13   And then they would have to pay Apple

00:27:15   and there has to be something left for them, right?

00:27:17   So Apple's not going to make the fee too high.

00:27:19   I think by making it lower,

00:27:21   they're acknowledging that there is another party

00:27:23   in the middle here taking a cut.

00:27:25   So again, there has to be enough left

00:27:27   for the company to stay in business,

00:27:28   otherwise everybody loses.

00:27:30   But otherwise, yeah, it just seems like

00:27:32   this has made things more complex for a lot of people

00:27:36   and has not really made anyone, including Apple,

00:27:38   particularly happy, 'cause Apple has to implement

00:27:40   these stupid APIs and support them, right?

00:27:42   - And have some kind of program to go chase people down

00:27:45   and get, like, that's-- - They have to collect money.

00:27:47   - Yeah, that's kind of, that's a big operation.

00:27:51   And this is why I don't think anyone is happy with this,

00:27:54   including Apple.

00:27:55   I think Apple is reluctantly doing this in this way,

00:27:58   Almost in a way, it's like when a jerky spouse

00:28:03   loads the dishwasher poorly so they won't be asked

00:28:06   to load the dishwasher anymore.

00:28:08   Apple was asked to make something quote better

00:28:11   that they were doing in a way that angered

00:28:13   a lot of regulators and things like that.

00:28:15   And so they're like fine, we told you our system is great

00:28:19   and our system is best and best for everybody

00:28:21   but if you really want to go out there in the wild west

00:28:24   we will finally comply with your law

00:28:26   and they're gonna do it in the crappiest way possible

00:28:30   that will, just the most half-assed,

00:28:35   poorly implemented way so that they can then point to that

00:28:38   and say, look, this doesn't work.

00:28:40   Like now, everywhere else around the world

00:28:43   that tries to pressure them into,

00:28:46   or tries to force them into doing this,

00:28:48   they can point to South Korea and say,

00:28:49   look at this huge mess that we have

00:28:52   when this actually happens,

00:28:53   even though it's a mess that they themselves

00:28:55   have created by inserting themselves into the process

00:28:58   and requiring that they somehow deserve this commission

00:29:00   over all commerce that happens in their platform.

00:29:02   But the reality is, it's gonna suck

00:29:05   for all the companies involved, it's gonna suck for Apple.

00:29:09   It might be, the only way I can think of

00:29:11   that it's actually going to be better

00:29:13   is that a lot of times, the primary concern

00:29:17   why a lot of people wanna use their own payment system

00:29:19   is usually money, but a secondary concern

00:29:22   is not just customer support, which is no small thing,

00:29:25   But integration, like I know just from running my own stuff,

00:29:28   I don't wanna have two different payment APIs

00:29:32   and providers and platforms to the same product.

00:29:35   It's much easier to run a product

00:29:37   if you have one payment system and one user account system

00:29:41   and one shared thing, one platform.

00:29:44   And right now, if you want to offer something

00:29:47   through Apple's system and on the web somewhere,

00:29:50   you have to have two different payment systems.

00:29:51   And that is complex and causes customer support

00:29:54   headaches and generally sucks.

00:29:57   So I understand the argument of like,

00:30:01   well we want it on our own system,

00:30:04   even if the money difference is not that big or not at all.

00:30:07   Because having something on one shared platform

00:30:10   is easier to develop, easier to support,

00:30:13   easier to do customer service and maintenance stuff

00:30:16   over time and everything.

00:30:17   And there are things that, like I've said before,

00:30:20   if Overcast ever wanted to do something

00:30:22   like the readability thing where you pay overcast

00:30:25   some flat fee and it gets divided up into donating

00:30:28   to the podcast you listen to.

00:30:29   By the way, I'm not going to do this.

00:30:30   I don't want to do this.

00:30:32   I'm not going to do this.

00:30:33   I have no plans to do this.

00:30:35   But part of the reason why that kind of idea

00:30:38   never got off the ground is because I knew

00:30:40   that it would suck to have to give Apple 30%.

00:30:42   And another part of the reason that never got off the ground

00:30:44   was the way the payment system works with Apple

00:30:47   makes it very hard for you to be able to know for sure

00:30:51   exactly how much money you got from a particular person.

00:30:55   And that difficulty is one of the reasons

00:30:58   why every music streaming service

00:31:00   doesn't work on that basis.

00:31:02   It works on the giant pool of money basis,

00:31:04   where they pool all the money together

00:31:06   that they get from everybody,

00:31:08   count the number of streams,

00:31:09   and then people get paid by the number of streams,

00:31:12   by the giant pool divided by the number of streams.

00:31:15   Not like your $5 gets divided into 250 each

00:31:20   for the two bands you listened to this month.

00:31:21   That's not how it works on almost anything.

00:31:24   And so to make that kind of system,

00:31:26   which is how I would want to do such a system

00:31:28   if I were to do it, which I'm not,

00:31:29   but if I were to do it, that's how I wanna do it.

00:31:33   But you have to know exactly how much money

00:31:35   you got from each person every month.

00:31:36   And things like failed charges or chargebacks or refunds,

00:31:41   or especially international currency conversion,

00:31:43   make that very difficult to know.

00:31:45   If you had your own system, things like that

00:31:48   would become easier or possible

00:31:50   that weren't easy or possible before.

00:31:53   And all the other advantages, customer service,

00:31:55   refunds, shared payment,

00:31:57   like having one unified payment system,

00:31:59   all of those things are strong advantages,

00:32:01   but the reality is, both the California lawsuit

00:32:05   and the Korean law do not say

00:32:08   Apple can't charge a commission.

00:32:09   They were very clearly about alternative payment systems,

00:32:13   not commission-free alternative payment systems.

00:32:17   And I didn't follow the Korea law creation that much,

00:32:20   but in the California case, the Epic case,

00:32:22   the judge specifically called out Apple's ability

00:32:25   to still collect a commission.

00:32:27   Whatever movement we've had on that front

00:32:30   is not touching the 30% or the 15%.

00:32:32   That's not being addressed at all

00:32:35   with these recent regulation things.

00:32:37   All that's being addressed with those

00:32:39   is the alternative payment processing system.

00:32:41   Now, I wonder if this is the same thing they're doing

00:32:45   for the Japan Trade Commission thing.

00:32:48   I don't know if we've heard anything about that.

00:32:50   - I don't think so.

00:32:51   - They mentioned with the Japan Trade Commission thing

00:32:54   that they were going to be implementing that sometime

00:32:56   like in this, I believe this spring,

00:32:58   like sometime in the next few months,

00:33:00   and that they had to like do work required to support

00:33:04   that one link to a payment system that they would allow,

00:33:07   or to an account creation system that they would allow.

00:33:09   And I wonder if this is the same system.

00:33:11   Like I wonder if they're developing like one API

00:33:14   that they can use for both of these regulations

00:33:18   in both of these regions, or the Japan thing,

00:33:19   I think, is everywhere, but I don't know.

00:33:22   This whole thing, as long as Apple is still able

00:33:26   to demand attacks on all transactions

00:33:30   that happen on their platform

00:33:31   of the types they can enforce it on,

00:33:34   they're going to keep doing that.

00:33:35   And so I don't think we're much better off here.

00:33:39   This is not a win for the little guy.

00:33:41   This is not a win for consumers or most developers.

00:33:46   This is a small number of big companies getting things

00:33:49   to be a little bit more convenient for them.

00:33:51   That's about it.

00:33:52   And a huge pain in the butt to anybody else

00:33:54   who tries to go anywhere near it.

00:33:56   - I don't think Apple's gonna do a bad job on this, though.

00:33:58   I think they'll make the APIs good.

00:33:59   - Oh, they're gonna do a terrible job.

00:34:01   - Like, not intentionally, you know.

00:34:02   Like, the things that'll be bad about it.

00:34:04   - Their in-app purchase APIs are terrible.

00:34:05   Like, even their official system is horrible.

00:34:08   - Well, hold on.

00:34:10   The things that will be bad about it

00:34:11   are the things that are already bad

00:34:12   about Apple's current system.

00:34:13   And those are things that Apple doesn't want to be bad,

00:34:16   but they just are.

00:34:17   Apple's own in-app purchase and its own system

00:34:20   of handling money and accounts and all that

00:34:22   is creaky in a bunch of ways due to its heritage

00:34:24   as the iTunes Music Store.

00:34:26   And that I don't expect to improve.

00:34:28   But the rest of it, I think they'll

00:34:29   try to make as good as they can.

00:34:30   No.

00:34:30   It's like the DMV.

00:34:32   It's like the reason why you go to get your driver's license

00:34:36   renewed and you have really mediocre service

00:34:40   most of the time, is that the government has a monopoly

00:34:43   on that service and you have no choice

00:34:45   and they have very little incentive

00:34:47   to make that really good.

00:34:48   That's Apple and their payment system.

00:34:50   Apple's payment system has always been really mediocre,

00:34:53   really weird at certain supporting things,

00:34:54   totally doesn't support a lot of common requests at all,

00:34:57   and that's how it has always worked

00:35:00   because they have no competition.

00:35:03   I mean, this might change things in a very small way,

00:35:05   but not in a big way, they have no competition

00:35:08   and they have no incentive to make that really great.

00:35:11   - So I agree with the broad strokes of what you're saying,

00:35:15   but you clearly have not touched StoreKit 2,

00:35:17   which is a brand new API this year

00:35:20   that is actually pretty good.

00:35:22   It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

00:35:24   And it uses async/await, it's all swifty and all the best

00:35:28   in sometimes not so best ways,

00:35:30   but all in all, it's really pretty good.

00:35:33   And I have no idea why they did this other than the fact that StoreKit 1 was a pile of

00:35:38   garbage.

00:35:39   But I can't help but wonder if, what is it, RevenueCat that has the really good front

00:35:45   end in front of all this stuff, so you can basically just use the RevenueCat API, which

00:35:49   was designed by humans rather than the weirdos that designed StoreKit 1.

00:35:55   Nobody designed StoreKit 1.

00:35:56   Well, fair enough.

00:35:57   Fair play.

00:35:58   But you know what I'm saying.

00:35:59   like here's a bunch of humans who have learned lessons

00:36:01   from store kit one and said,

00:36:03   what should this API look like?

00:36:05   And that's what I believe revenue cat API is.

00:36:07   I haven't actually used it.

00:36:09   And I believe they're a past sponsor,

00:36:10   but I'm saying this to you, not because they've sponsored,

00:36:12   but because this is what I've genuinely heard.

00:36:14   But anyway, store kit two,

00:36:16   which I'm using in my forthcoming thing is pretty good.

00:36:19   Again, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good

00:36:21   and fixes most of the problems I had with store kit one,

00:36:24   which is to say all of store kit one.

00:36:26   (laughing)

00:36:27   It's hard to tuck StoreKit and make it not better

00:36:31   than StoreKit 1.

00:36:32   But no, to be fair, I haven't used StoreKit 2 yet.

00:36:35   But I'm talking not only about the app level API, but also

00:36:39   like the entire back end system, the capabilities it offers

00:36:43   at all, how it offers certain capabilities, certain things

00:36:47   that are possible versus not possible, the limitations

00:36:50   that it has.

00:36:51   Like famously, how Amazon couldn't use Apple payment

00:36:54   system if it wanted to for e-books,

00:36:55   because they have too many SKUs,

00:36:57   and they literally can't put that many in Apple's system.

00:37:00   There's problems like that.

00:37:02   The system is very old and creaky.

00:37:08   There's lots of weird gotchas and bugs.

00:37:11   And a new API on the client side helps some of that,

00:37:15   but it doesn't fix most of the core problems.

00:37:18   I think there's two aspects to Apple putting

00:37:21   this API in front of it.

00:37:22   The second one is kind of getting

00:37:24   to what you're talking about is that they're essentially,

00:37:28   they're sabotaging third-party APIs

00:37:30   by giving them the best that Apple has to offer, right?

00:37:33   'Cause as you noted, like, the best that Apple has to offer

00:37:36   is not competitive in the grand scheme of things

00:37:38   with APIs like Stripe or things that actually

00:37:40   have competition that are developed like in a meaningful way

00:37:42   without tons of tech debt, right?

00:37:44   And so by putting an API in front of third-party ones,

00:37:48   that API, best case, is going to be as good

00:37:51   as Apple's current offerings, and Apple's current offerings

00:37:53   are a little bit feature poor and creaky

00:37:55   and old and weird, right?

00:37:57   So that necessarily drags down the competing ones.

00:38:00   But the first reason they're doing this,

00:38:02   and we just mentioned before, is because they want

00:38:04   to get a cut and they're not gonna use the honor system.

00:38:07   They need to, like the rule is gonna be,

00:38:10   if you use third party payments,

00:38:11   you must use whatever API Apple's gonna come up with

00:38:13   and that lets us see all of your transactions.

00:38:16   So we drag your interface down to sort of the level

00:38:19   that we're at because you have to go through us anyway

00:38:22   and when you go through us, you use our API

00:38:24   that has our limits and our weird bugs

00:38:25   and behaviors, whatever, and also,

00:38:27   we get to see everything that goes by

00:38:28   because we want to charge you.

00:38:30   If Apple wanted to comply with this law,

00:38:32   they could say, the way we're gonna comply with this law

00:38:35   is we're gonna add a new sentence

00:38:36   to our App Store guidelines that says

00:38:37   you can use third-party payment processes if you want,

00:38:40   and then Apple's done.

00:38:41   They don't need to do anything.

00:38:42   If they didn't wanna collect any money,

00:38:43   they could say, oh, we're not gonna collect any of this.

00:38:44   Just go do whatever you want, right?

00:38:46   And then every individual developer would be able to use

00:38:48   whatever payment system they wanted to use,

00:38:50   And some of them would be way better than Apple,

00:38:52   some of them would be way worse,

00:38:53   but Apple wouldn't be involved at all

00:38:55   because they didn't have to take a cut.

00:38:56   That would have been the least work for Apple

00:38:59   and the most benefit for developers,

00:39:01   but they didn't do it because then you don't get any money

00:39:03   and Apple likes money, right?

00:39:04   So I really wonder how Apple's going to spin this,

00:39:06   what their safety argument's gonna be,

00:39:09   because they're gonna have to say,

00:39:11   we added this great new API for third parties,

00:39:13   but third parties don't want that.

00:39:14   Like the whole reason they're adding the API,

00:39:16   it's not primarily to drag them down to their world,

00:39:19   the whole reason they're ending

00:39:20   because they want to cut.

00:39:21   And whenever Apple says anything about App Store

00:39:24   and the way they run it, they never

00:39:26   say we're doing this because it makes us the most money.

00:39:29   Even though we all know, like, it's the elephant in the room.

00:39:33   Why are you doing this?

00:39:34   Because it makes us money.

00:39:35   So hey, Apple, why didn't you just say, OK,

00:39:37   you can use whatever payment processor you want?

00:39:39   They're going to have to come up with a reason it doesn't say

00:39:41   because we wanted your money.

00:39:42   They're going to have to say, oh, we

00:39:44   felt it was the safest because if we use this as a gateway

00:39:46   and there's a malicious actor, we

00:39:48   can shut them down by turning off their API access

00:39:50   or they're going to come up with some reason like that.

00:39:52   Or maybe they just won't say anything at all.

00:39:54   The little quote we have from Apple here is fun,

00:39:58   I thought, because--

00:40:00   all right, so this is the Apple PR statement.

00:40:03   "We look forward to working with the KCC," which is Korean

00:40:06   something or other, "and our developer community

00:40:08   on a solution that benefits our Korean users."

00:40:10   And then Apple goes on to say, "Apple

00:40:12   has a great deal of respect for Korea's laws."

00:40:15   [LAUGHTER]

00:40:17   - Yeah, right.

00:40:18   (laughing)

00:40:19   - Great deal of respect for Korea's law

00:40:19   and a strong history of collaboration with Apple,

00:40:22   with the country's talented app developers, blah, blah, blah.

00:40:25   - Maybe Korea's other laws.

00:40:26   - When a company has to say,

00:40:28   "We have a great respect for your laws."

00:40:30   They say that as if it's optional, as if,

00:40:32   well, we know we don't have to necessarily follow your laws,

00:40:36   but Apple has always had a great deal of respect

00:40:38   for Korea's laws in particular.

00:40:40   Other countries' laws, we don't care.

00:40:41   We do whatever we want.

00:40:42   We don't even look at the laws.

00:40:43   We just do what we want.

00:40:44   But we've always had a great deal of respect

00:40:46   for Korea's laws.

00:40:47   we've decided that we're going to follow your laws.

00:40:50   It's like, like it's an open question.

00:40:51   - Apple has, like Apple's going to do this

00:40:54   in the most begrudging way possible.

00:40:58   Because they, not only are they cheap,

00:41:01   they are offended that they even have to do this.

00:41:05   They are offended that anybody would think

00:41:07   that A, they don't deserve every penny they can extract

00:41:11   from everything happening on iOS,

00:41:12   and B, that somehow other companies

00:41:15   are going to do a better job in any way

00:41:18   that there's any possible benefit to this.

00:41:20   Both of those things are deeply offensive to Apple

00:41:23   from every level, top to bottom.

00:41:25   - Now, Apple knows its payment APIs suck.

00:41:29   I guarantee they don't.

00:41:30   - No, they don't.

00:41:31   I'm telling you they don't.

00:41:33   In the same way that like, the money angle

00:41:36   really corrupts like all the crypto discussion, you know?

00:41:39   In the same way, the amount of money Apple

00:41:43   is able to skim off the top of the App Store,

00:41:46   corrupt their thinking so much and their culture.

00:41:48   They really, I mean we saw this in the trial,

00:41:50   we've heard this from their executives.

00:41:52   Apple really thinks, honestly, I don't think they're,

00:41:55   I don't think they're just putting on this show for lawyers,

00:41:58   they really truly believe from everyone executives

00:42:01   top to bottom that they deserve a cut of all commerce

00:42:06   that happens on this computing platform.

00:42:08   - But they don't think they have the best payment APIs

00:42:10   in those same emails. - No, they really do.

00:42:12   - No, in the same emails, - They really, truly do.

00:42:14   - In the same emails, they were always very honest

00:42:16   when a competitor had a better thing.

00:42:17   What they would say is, "We can't let this happen

00:42:19   "because competitor X has a better Y than we do.

00:42:22   "Therefore, we must change the rules to make sure

00:42:24   "that we don't have to compete with them."

00:42:26   I think they're clear-eyed about

00:42:27   when they have worse things.

00:42:28   Like, our payment system is not as good as Stripe's.

00:42:31   Our API is not as good as Stripe's.

00:42:32   Therefore, we have to do something else

00:42:35   to make sure, to negate that advantage.

00:42:37   So I think--

00:42:38   - Well, I think the story they tell themselves with that is,

00:42:41   our payment system is best for our users,

00:42:44   therefore nothing else matters as much.

00:42:47   Like that's the way they say,

00:42:48   what they tell the public,

00:42:50   and I think they tell themselves the exact same thing,

00:42:53   is like any other payment system is going to be worse

00:42:56   for privacy, for user control, for scams,

00:43:00   even though the App Store is full of scams,

00:43:02   and is still exploding with scams to this day somehow.

00:43:05   But like that's what they're gonna tell themselves.

00:43:07   - I see a lot less of that in the trial emails.

00:43:09   Did you see that?

00:43:10   What you just said is what they say in public,

00:43:12   but in private, I don't see them saying to each other,

00:43:14   "We have to do this because it will protect

00:43:16   "our customers' privacy."

00:43:17   - No, they do. - All the emails we saw,

00:43:18   maybe it's just because of the selection of like,

00:43:20   the juicy ones are all about dealing with competitors,

00:43:23   but it was all about how can we protect revenue streams,

00:43:27   how can we find new revenue streams.

00:43:28   There was, when I just saw it today,

00:43:29   someone was sent around, it was in that

00:43:31   letters of note Twitter account of saying,

00:43:33   the email where Apple was saying,

00:43:34   "Hey, Uber and Lyft have these memberships.

00:43:37   "We should try to get 30% of those.

00:43:38   "We're not currently collecting that money."

00:43:40   - There was no mention of user privacy

00:43:42   and how it would be better for users

00:43:44   to be able to go through Apple API to take a cut.

00:43:46   No, they're just saying like there's money out there

00:43:48   and we're not getting any of it.

00:43:49   Can we get some of that?

00:43:50   - They're so gross.

00:43:52   Like Apple is a company,

00:43:53   they just do so much gross stuff now

00:43:55   in the name of relatively small amounts of money,

00:43:58   like relative to their whole company.

00:44:00   It's just, it's so unfortunate.

00:44:01   - I mean, the people in those emails,

00:44:03   that's their job is increase revenue from the app store.

00:44:06   Like it's not the whole company that's the type of thing.

00:44:08   - Then they're gross people.

00:44:10   - Well, they're called salespeople, Marco.

00:44:11   Lots of companies have them.

00:44:12   - Well, but look, no, I think this goes to the top.

00:44:16   I really do.

00:44:17   I think there's this, again, this prominent culture

00:44:21   in the company of entitlement to everyone else's money.

00:44:25   And I think Apple has been well-rewarded for the platform,

00:44:29   but because they still can collect a tax on every,

00:44:34   a large tax on everything that happens

00:44:36   on a platform financially,

00:44:38   their brains get infected with money.

00:44:39   It's like a drug addiction.

00:44:40   Like they can't see any other possibility

00:44:43   than we deserve this.

00:44:45   'Cause it's so easy to think that

00:44:47   when you're profiting from something

00:44:49   that you're in the right.

00:44:50   And you're so easily rationalizing every part of it.

00:44:53   Of course, this is ours.

00:44:54   We have to go out and find this money

00:44:55   that belongs to us in everyone else's pockets.

00:44:58   And it's so gross 'cause it's so unnecessary.

00:45:02   They keep making these missteps in recent times

00:45:08   that they do something that really lands like a lead balloon

00:45:12   or that is really gross in some way

00:45:14   that doesn't actually really affect

00:45:17   their bottom line that much.

00:45:18   And they don't necessarily need to be doing

00:45:20   as much or at all.

00:45:21   See also, by the way, a lot of the controversy

00:45:23   with AirTags recently.

00:45:25   They keep having these stories of this bad PR

00:45:27   with AirTags being used for stalking and carjacking

00:45:30   or whatever and there's so many of these stories

00:45:33   building up now and a lot of people are starting

00:45:35   to ask the question, should Apple have even made AirTags?

00:45:38   should they keep making AirTags?

00:45:39   Is the whole Find My network actually worth it

00:45:43   for them to be doing?

00:45:44   Or is it bringing on too much negative attention

00:45:47   and too much liability?

00:45:48   And I think that's a good question

00:45:50   because you can look at that

00:45:51   and you can look at what portion of the business

00:45:53   it is for them and be like, you know,

00:45:55   really is this worth dragging them through the mud constantly

00:45:58   and expose them to all sorts of possible problems

00:46:01   in the public or legal areas

00:46:03   for something that's like this little $30 accessory

00:46:06   that they're probably not selling in massive quantities.

00:46:09   And I think the App Store,

00:46:10   their incredibly money-grabbing attitude of the App Store is,

00:46:15   and believe me, I don't use the term money-grabbing lightly

00:46:18   because I'm an App Store developer,

00:46:20   and we get that term used against us all the time

00:46:24   in customer reviews.

00:46:25   Believe me, I'm not using this term lightly,

00:46:27   but no other word can possibly describe

00:46:30   Apple's tightening of the fists

00:46:32   over the last couple of years,

00:46:33   scrounging around trying to extract even more money

00:46:36   from companies' activities that happen to have an app

00:46:38   on the App Store or need to have an app on the App Store.

00:46:40   Like, it's just been so gross and it has cost them

00:46:44   so dearly in so many areas that are not money

00:46:48   that I wonder, like, who is deciding that this,

00:46:51   that this, you know, little amount of money

00:46:54   that the difference here is making them

00:46:57   is worth all of this?

00:46:59   - I mean, you mentioned ago, like Tim Cook

00:47:01   in his statements, it's made it clear that he actually

00:47:03   seems to believe that they deserve the money,

00:47:06   that they deserve a cut of everything,

00:47:07   including third party payments.

00:47:08   So if you're wondering like, where does this go?

00:47:10   It's Tim Cook, but I feel like if you trace the--

00:47:13   - And I think it's Phil Schiller,

00:47:15   and I think it's a lot of the people down below as well.

00:47:17   - Maybe Phil Schiller, but I think if you trace this,

00:47:20   I was talking about the part of the organization,

00:47:21   like with people whose job it is to increase revenue

00:47:23   with the App Store, it's their job to do this, right?

00:47:25   But you need to have a counterbalance to that.

00:47:27   Like okay, it's your job to maximize revenue,

00:47:29   but there's someone else's job to be like

00:47:30   the product manager to make the user experience good,

00:47:32   and it's someone else's job to look over the whole company

00:47:35   and make sure we're going the right direction, blah, blah,

00:47:36   blah, and so I don't fault salespeople for selling.

00:47:40   Like it is literally their job.

00:47:41   You don't want them to be too slimy,

00:47:42   but their job is to sell.

00:47:44   But if the top person in the company

00:47:47   subscribes to the belief that we really deserve

00:47:50   to take whatever cut of revenue we want

00:47:51   from this entire thing, that's where you end up

00:47:54   getting in situations where Apple makes bad decisions,

00:47:56   because it's coming from the top.

00:47:59   So it doesn't really matter what everybody between Tim Cook

00:48:01   and the salespeople believes.

00:48:02   If Tim Cook believes it, it's going to trickle down

00:48:05   to everyone below who are just trying to do their job,

00:48:07   which is to implement the will of the CEO

00:48:11   and the corporate plan for doing things.

00:48:13   So that's definitely a problem that starts at the top.

00:48:15   So the AirTags, 'cause you brought them up,

00:48:17   I feel like Apple was trying to do the right thing there,

00:48:19   and your point there is like, okay, well, you tried,

00:48:21   you screwed it up, let's reconsider,

00:48:23   'cause in the end, maybe it's not worth taking the hit

00:48:26   for what is probably a piddling amount of revenue

00:48:28   as far as Apple's concerned.

00:48:29   I'm not totally signed up to the belief

00:48:31   that AirTags are making this worse and not better

00:48:34   compared to their competitors

00:48:35   that don't notify you about this,

00:48:37   but it's worth considering for Apple,

00:48:39   is this, you know, how much are we really making off AirTags?

00:48:43   Do we really think we can defeat this

00:48:44   or do we wanna like take a reset

00:48:45   and think more about it, right?

00:48:47   But that's not from a place of like, you know,

00:48:50   greedy motivation, like they didn't make AirTags

00:48:52   'cause they're just like,

00:48:53   ah, now we're gonna be in the money.

00:48:54   They're trying to make a genuinely good and useful product

00:48:57   and they knew that there were going to be problems

00:48:59   with stalking and everything like that,

00:49:01   and they tried to make features to mitigate that.

00:49:04   Maybe they weren't successful,

00:49:05   but that's all coming from a place of we're trying

00:49:08   as best we can to do a good thing.

00:49:10   It's not coming from the place of Tim Cook saying,

00:49:12   you know what, anything that happens in the platform,

00:49:14   we deserve to take whatever we want

00:49:15   and don't tell us otherwise.

00:49:16   - No, and that's a whole separate,

00:49:19   like the AirTags is not one of these crazy money grabs.

00:49:22   The AirTags is more like this thing that we're doing

00:49:26   is causing us problems in these other areas,

00:49:28   is it really worth what we're getting out of it

00:49:30   to expose ourselves to those problems?

00:49:33   - Yeah, or do we think we can figure it out?

00:49:35   Like, you know, we thought we had a good handle on it,

00:49:38   we made a good try, like no one else has solved this.

00:49:40   It's not like Apple's doing something

00:49:41   that everyone else has figured out how to do.

00:49:42   No one else has even come as close to Apple

00:49:44   to solving this problem, like when, you know,

00:49:45   with tile trackers or whatever, they don't tell you anything.

00:49:47   The reason you don't hear about it

00:49:48   is because nobody knows they have a tile in their car

00:49:50   because it doesn't notify you that it's there.

00:49:52   So that's kind of, you know,

00:49:53   a problem with Apple's own creation, but--

00:49:55   I mean tiles also suck.

00:49:57   - Yeah, there's that, and that's it.

00:49:58   - It's a very different amount,

00:50:00   like the scale that we're operating at between,

00:50:03   these things can be found if somebody happens

00:50:05   to launch the tile app, which nobody does,

00:50:07   relatively speaking, compared to every iPhone out there

00:50:11   is automatically finding the air tiles.

00:50:13   It's a massive difference in what that thing actually is.

00:50:16   - Yeah, they're a victim of their own success.

00:50:19   For their positive use case of like people doing

00:50:21   all the right things, they're great.

00:50:24   But for the negative use case, all of the pod aspects

00:50:26   work against Apple.

00:50:28   But it's definitely worth Apple considering,

00:50:31   do we think we have a way to fix this,

00:50:33   or should we take a break?

00:50:36   And I'd say, the problem is they have a bunch of product

00:50:40   out there, so they have to do something about it.

00:50:42   They can't just say, oh, never mind.

00:50:43   We're not selling those anymore.

00:50:44   Kind of like the big home pod, just never mind.

00:50:46   They can't actually do that.

00:50:48   They do have to, at this point, figure out a way to make these

00:50:51   Safer than they are or to improve the safety of them, and I'm sure they're working towards that

00:50:55   I believe it is possible for Apple to fix air tags to the point where they are you know our net good

00:51:02   But you know obviously some smartphones themselves are always going to be you know the tools of bad people

00:51:09   You know lots of things that are out there

00:51:11   Can be used badly and it's no reason you know we shouldn't carry cell phones because they can be used by bad people and the government

00:51:16   Can he's drop on us, and you know like that's that's true. You just need mitigations right now

00:51:21   I feel like AirTags can get there.

00:51:22   But I see your point of like,

00:51:25   sometimes you do things and they start causing problems

00:51:28   and in the grand scheme of things

00:51:29   is this really important enough to be worrying about?

00:51:32   Unfortunately for us, the App Store is big enough

00:51:35   for Apple to be worrying about.

00:51:37   They make a lot of money from that,

00:51:38   so I don't think they're gonna cut their losses there.

00:51:41   - Well, but the thing is,

00:51:42   whenever anybody looks at how much money

00:51:44   Apple makes from the App Store,

00:51:45   the thing is, if they loosened up some of these rules

00:51:48   and changed some of these rules

00:51:49   that would alleviate the vast majority of the problems,

00:51:52   it wouldn't actually drop that revenue

00:51:55   they're making to zero.

00:51:57   It would create the ability for it to be reduced,

00:52:01   but it wouldn't be 100% reduced.

00:52:04   Suppose they allowed all apps, including games,

00:52:07   to offer whatever payment systems they wanted

00:52:09   and Apple wasn't involved, so Apple got no commission.

00:52:12   I think enough people would still be paying

00:52:15   with in-app purchase because it is easy.

00:52:18   And suppose, for instance, Apple also required them

00:52:20   to offer both, in-app purchase or your own system,

00:52:23   if you're gonna have your own at all,

00:52:25   which I don't think would be that unreasonable.

00:52:27   I don't think their numbers would actually go down

00:52:29   that much in practice.

00:52:31   Now, if you did, I think, what is probably a smarter thing,

00:52:34   which Ben Thompson talked about this a lot in "Strathecary,"

00:52:36   of treat apps and games differently,

00:52:39   which, by the way, the Epic lawsuit,

00:52:41   the judge was clearly on board with that ability

00:52:45   of a possible way Apple could do this,

00:52:47   is just treat apps and games differently

00:52:48   and apply the mandatory in-app purchase only to games

00:52:53   and let non-game apps have their own business models

00:52:56   if they want to.

00:52:56   That, I think, would have an even smaller impact

00:52:59   on Apple's actual numbers because such a massive majority

00:53:03   of app store revenue is from in-app purchases and games.

00:53:07   The numbers came out in the trial,

00:53:08   I think it was something like 80%

00:53:09   of their in-app purchase revenue is games.

00:53:11   And even that, it's not that many games,

00:53:13   it's like the top, the big top winners.

00:53:17   And so if they let games, or if they make games

00:53:21   keep using their system, and let other apps,

00:53:24   like Spotify and whatever, Netflix,

00:53:26   if they let other apps use their own payment systems,

00:53:29   I feel like that's both much more defensible

00:53:32   of a position for Apple to maintain over time for regulators

00:53:35   and also that alleviates so many other problems

00:53:40   and I think ultimately that would cost Apple

00:53:44   a very tiny percentage of their app store revenue.

00:53:47   And so that's what I'm saying,

00:53:48   the balance here of risk versus reward

00:53:52   of continuing on the path they're going down

00:53:54   versus making a change like that,

00:53:56   it doesn't seem to make sense to me.

00:53:57   They would still have most of their app store revenue

00:54:00   and it would still be growing like crazy,

00:54:03   but they would relieve all this regulatory pressure

00:54:04   and eliminate so many problems

00:54:06   and dramatically improve developer goodwill

00:54:07   and so many other things.

00:54:08   And I don't understand why they keep

00:54:12   shoot themselves in the foot for like two cents.

00:54:15   - Because it's not about the two cents.

00:54:17   So I'm going to try to speak with authority

00:54:21   about something I don't really have authority

00:54:23   to speak about, but--

00:54:24   - Welcome to the show, Casey, that's all of us.

00:54:25   - Yeah, I know, right?

00:54:26   - That's everybody in life, go ahead.

00:54:28   - Well, so I agree with what you're saying in principle,

00:54:32   but something I've had to wrestle with

00:54:35   over the last couple of years is,

00:54:38   even though I haven't been riding the apple cart,

00:54:41   I'm already hating this analogy, but here we are.

00:54:44   Even though I haven't been on the Apple cart since '82

00:54:47   or whatever that John has been, I still

00:54:51   am a big fan of the company.

00:54:52   And I still have been paying attention

00:54:54   since right around the time of the first iPhone,

00:54:56   which at this point is, what, 15 years ago, as of a few days

00:54:59   ago?

00:55:00   And so I have a fair part of my life invested in Apple.

00:55:03   And I think of them-- and so I can't imagine how John feels.

00:55:07   I think of them still as like a plucky upstart.

00:55:10   And that's really just not reality.

00:55:12   It's just not.

00:55:13   And Apple is, if not the biggest,

00:55:16   and I know it goes back and forth,

00:55:17   but is one of the top four biggest companies in the world.

00:55:20   I think they are the biggest right now.

00:55:22   And even though the plucky upstart Apple

00:55:26   that I like and care about and think about a lot

00:55:30   probably agrees with you, Marco,

00:55:32   and probably thinks,

00:55:32   "Why are we nickel and diming developers?

00:55:35   Why are we being such stingy jerks?"

00:55:38   to be honest, the plucky upstart might also believe that they're entitled to all the money

00:55:41   that's ever generated on any iPhone ever, but that's neither here nor there. But the

00:55:45   problem is that Apple isn't the plucky upstart and Apple isn't the little company anymore.

00:55:49   They are by value the biggest company in the world. And if they said to a bunch of app

00:55:55   developers, "Hey, we're going to make your lives better and you decide how. Maybe it's

00:55:59   alternate payments, maybe they take less money, whatever the case may be," then the hundreds

00:56:04   of thousands of app developers start cheering. But the millions question mark of shareholders

00:56:12   aren't going to be too happy about that. Potentially. If the cost of making us happy,

00:56:17   the app developers, is making shareholders upset, if I'm Tim, my duty is not to app developers.

00:56:25   It's not really to anyone but shareholders, right? And this is where I'm a little fuzzy because I...

00:56:30   - Yeah, that's, I mean, his duty is whatever

00:56:32   he decides to think it is.

00:56:34   There's no legal thing making him do crap like that

00:56:36   within reason.

00:56:37   - I don't mean it in a legal sense.

00:56:39   What I mean to say is--

00:56:40   - It's a question of attitude,

00:56:41   but like the thing you described has happened though.

00:56:43   Apple has reduced it, as they said many times in the trial,

00:56:46   Apple has reduced the cut for developers

00:56:47   and each time Apple has done that,

00:56:49   they have not been punished by people driving

00:56:51   their stock price down.

00:56:53   - Well, because the way they did it

00:56:54   affected almost nothing, again.

00:56:55   - That's exactly right.

00:56:56   - I'm just saying like it's a thing that they've done

00:56:58   and surely they did leave revenue on the table

00:57:01   by implementing all the plans they did

00:57:02   for the 85-15 and everything or whatever,

00:57:04   and aside from any one or two day volatility,

00:57:09   their stock prices continued to go up since then.

00:57:11   - Yeah, and their services revenue

00:57:12   has stayed exactly the same, because--

00:57:14   - That's exactly what I was gonna say.

00:57:16   - Again, look at how many people that affected.

00:57:18   I got a raise last year, 'cause it was great,

00:57:21   I'm so happy.

00:57:23   That affected almost every developer I know,

00:57:26   And yet it cost Apple effectively nothing,

00:57:29   like relative to everything else,

00:57:31   because they're making all their money

00:57:34   from a handful of giant games.

00:57:35   And so by changing App Store policy

00:57:39   in ways that don't affect giant games,

00:57:43   it basically costs them nothing.

00:57:45   And yet even that, even the App Store

00:57:48   small business program that we're talking about,

00:57:50   they did that in the most half-assed, hostile way

00:57:54   they could have possibly done it.

00:57:55   - You are not wrong.

00:57:56   - Even that, they clearly did extremely reluctantly

00:58:00   and I think for cynical reasons

00:58:02   because of all the regulatory things.

00:58:03   They wanted something they can point to.

00:58:04   Say, "Look how good we are."

00:58:06   And you can see how they did it.

00:58:09   And you can see, okay, they have this convoluted system.

00:58:12   It's not automatic.

00:58:14   It has this weird revenue cliff thing

00:58:16   that you have a strong incentive to not make

00:58:19   between like one million and 1.2 million or whatever it is.

00:58:22   they did it in a pretty bad way,

00:58:26   and it affects so many developers,

00:58:28   but nobody that makes them tons of money, really,

00:58:31   relative to the tons of money they're making

00:58:32   from the handful of big games.

00:58:33   And so that just shows their attitude right there.

00:58:36   I'm sure there are some people in the company,

00:58:41   I'm sure there are many people in the company

00:58:42   who have good intentions at heart

00:58:43   and are trying to give developers

00:58:48   the best chance of success

00:58:50   and give us the most money they can and everything,

00:58:52   But that's clearly not the priority up top.

00:58:55   Now Casey, you're right.

00:58:57   That doesn't necessarily need to be Tim Cook's priority,

00:59:00   both professionally or legally.

00:59:02   But there are knock-on effects.

00:59:05   If all this pressure from them squeezing the pennies

00:59:10   out of all of us results in more regulation,

00:59:13   then Apple could lose control of critical parts

00:59:16   of their infrastructure and critical parts

00:59:17   of their product line.

00:59:18   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:19   - That's what I'm saying.

00:59:20   What they're risking by continuing to be

00:59:23   really money grabbing jerks in a lot of these ways,

00:59:25   what they're risking is something like

00:59:28   governments force them to allow sideloading

00:59:29   or governments force them to allow alternate app stores

00:59:32   and other governmental interventions into iOS

00:59:35   that we probably don't want,

00:59:37   that probably would result in worse outcomes

00:59:39   for everybody including them.

00:59:41   But by continuing on the path they're continuing on,

00:59:44   they just keep inviting this over and over again

00:59:46   because they don't think they're ever gonna lose.

00:59:48   But at some point they will

00:59:50   And then we all will.

00:59:51   And I really don't want that to happen.

00:59:53   - And I think what Tim Cook's actual motivation is,

00:59:55   is he's not trying to make shareholders happy

00:59:58   or anything like that.

00:59:59   I think his motivation is what Mark said before,

01:00:00   that he believes we built this platform

01:00:02   and we deserve to take a cut of it.

01:00:03   So it's the principle of it, right?

01:00:04   And as a CEO, he's one of the few people in the company

01:00:07   who is allowed to have principles.

01:00:09   Because if you're below that, it's like,

01:00:11   yeah, you can have your principles,

01:00:12   but in the end, your boss kind of dictates

01:00:13   a lot about what you're gonna be doing.

01:00:15   - And we should have a few more.

01:00:17   - But his principles may not be the ones

01:00:18   that are the same as yours,

01:00:19   but he has his principles.

01:00:20   And one of them is, we built this,

01:00:22   we deserve to take cut of it,

01:00:24   and he doesn't want to be regulated.

01:00:26   He wants to make the decisions for himself

01:00:27   because he wants to, it's like, we built the thing,

01:00:29   we should be able to steer it.

01:00:30   And that I feel like comes from the top,

01:00:32   and every time he makes a statement,

01:00:33   the more honest he becomes, the more it becomes so clear

01:00:35   that Tim Cook really believes that,

01:00:37   why are you messing with us?

01:00:38   Like, this is a thing we made,

01:00:40   and we're trying to make it the best we can

01:00:41   according to our principles,

01:00:43   and that means we should get to decide how it runs.

01:00:45   Don't tell me how to run it.

01:00:47   And of course he also wants to make money,

01:00:49   and he's a businessman and everything like that,

01:00:51   but it's sort of intrinsic motivation.

01:00:53   He's not running scared of like,

01:00:54   oh, I have to do things to make the shareholders happy.

01:00:56   No, it is all his sort of internal motivation, right?

01:01:00   And part of that motivation is,

01:01:02   if we have the most control,

01:01:04   that means this is another businessman type thing

01:01:07   and not driven by shareholders,

01:01:08   but just being a good business person.

01:01:10   Just because we make all our money from games today

01:01:12   doesn't mean that it's gonna be like that in the future.

01:01:16   The best thing for the company

01:01:18   is not to hem ourselves in by narrowly carving out

01:01:22   like the rules such that we're okay for now,

01:01:25   but if suddenly the next big thing turns out to be

01:01:28   selling like holo skins that technically aren't games

01:01:31   or something or like, I don't know,

01:01:33   whatever the next big thing is.

01:01:35   It's not necessarily true that App Store revenue

01:01:37   will be 80% games forever and ever and ever, right?

01:01:40   So we shouldn't hem ourselves in by making that carve out

01:01:45   even though it seems okay today

01:01:46   because it's just future proofing.

01:01:47   It's just like a good idea, I'm running the company,

01:01:49   I don't wanna do anything that puts us

01:01:51   in a bad position in the future.

01:01:52   Again, not because he's like,

01:01:53   oh, I have to make the shareholders happier,

01:01:55   I wanna make more money 'cause I need that 17th house

01:01:57   or whatever, like that's not his motivation at all,

01:02:00   but he is motivated to do what's best for Apple.

01:02:02   And it is not good for Apple to quote unquote,

01:02:06   unnecessarily constrain itself by narrowing its rules.

01:02:09   But as we've said, every time we discuss it,

01:02:10   the market decided again, yeah,

01:02:12   but those aren't the only two possibilities.

01:02:14   There's a third one, which is the government comes in

01:02:15   and screws you over big time.

01:02:17   You should be doing whatever you can to avoid that.

01:02:20   And we kept having this debate when the trial was going on,

01:02:22   I was like, does Apple really believe

01:02:24   that there's still the possibility

01:02:25   that they're just not gonna get regulated at all?

01:02:28   Like that they're gonna win it all?

01:02:29   And so far, that bet has mostly, at least in the US,

01:02:33   mostly paid off for Apple.

01:02:34   Like they're playing chicken saying,

01:02:36   we know, like they have to know,

01:02:38   there are lots of really bad scenarios

01:02:40   where Apple regulates them to the point

01:02:42   and makes them do terrible things

01:02:43   that they would never do in a million years.

01:02:44   And it's like, avoid them by giving concessions.

01:02:46   Apple's just like being steely-eyed and saying nope. I think we're I think I'm gonna make it

01:02:51   I think we're gonna come out of this scot-free

01:02:53   And so far they seem like they've mostly been right so it would definitely be the safer bet to

01:03:01   Make more concessions to avoid regulation

01:03:04   I think the other possibility I think I mentioned on a pass through is that show is that Apple has been convinced through their internal

01:03:09   Conversations with you know lawmakers that there is no amount of concessions that they can provide that would be satisfactory

01:03:14   Right like that what we're proposing if you do some of these small changes the layoff and they won't do the big changes

01:03:20   That's not actually true, and there's nothing Apple can give up to stop these people from trying this and then you know of course in

01:03:26   Our country it's usually a safe bet to

01:03:28   It's usually safe to bet that no actually functional good laws will ever come out of our lawmaking bodies

01:03:34   Because they're just so dysfunctional that they can't do literally anything

01:03:37   So that's that may be a safe bet is like no matter how much and how many people want to do this it is impossible

01:03:44   to make happen because our system no longer functions. There was some paper

01:03:49   someone put out recently showing the there is no connection whatsoever, no

01:03:54   statistically significant connection between things that the American people

01:03:57   want and the laws that get passed. Things that have like a 90%

01:04:05   favorability rating across the entire country cannot get passed as

01:04:09   laws. There is no longer a connection between what people want and what laws

01:04:12   are made. Laws that get made are made because some rich person wants it somewhere and has

01:04:16   nothing to do with what people in the country actually want, which is depressing but true

01:04:20   to our experience and someone did an actual study on it and has some numbers behind it.

01:04:24   I wish I could find that link but I think I saw it somewhere on Twitter.

01:04:28   In related news, I paid $1,000 for the last 11 days of not having health insurance because

01:04:33   the health insurance company just messed up and so I'm just out that $1,000 for that part

01:04:37   of the policy that I just didn't have coverage and if I happen to have gotten an injury or

01:04:42   or sick or anyone in my family did in the last 11 days,

01:04:46   we would have had no coverage,

01:04:47   we would have had to pay 100% out of pocket

01:04:48   and be totally liable for everything,

01:04:50   not because I failed to book an insurance policy,

01:04:52   but because they failed to activate it,

01:04:54   and then took 11 days to do it.

01:04:56   Oh, and am I getting my discount

01:04:57   on half of my $2400 a month of premium?

01:05:00   No, of course not.

01:05:00   - Oh, God, I'm so sorry.

01:05:02   - And that's because we can't pass laws that everybody wants.

01:05:05   - Yeah, but Republicans like small business,

01:05:08   so surely they're going to come and save the day, right?

01:05:11   Mm-hmm.

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01:06:53   (upbeat music)

01:06:57   - All right, so moving right along,

01:06:58   Jon, tell us about your gross printer.

01:07:00   - I got a gross printer.

01:07:01   I bet a lot of people have gross printers.

01:07:03   - What makes your printer gross?

01:07:05   - I have a crappy printer, I wouldn't say it's gross.

01:07:06   - Yeah, exactly.

01:07:07   - Well, also here, I'll tell you why.

01:07:10   I have a printer that we had for a long time

01:07:13   and it stopped printing recently.

01:07:15   You never wanna hear about printing problems.

01:07:16   Why can't I print?

01:07:17   It's been a little flaky lately for a bunch of reasons,

01:07:20   mostly related to software and drivers,

01:07:21   but when someone can't print, the call goes out,

01:07:24   why can't I print?

01:07:25   And that's my signal to come and fix the printer

01:07:28   because that's my life.

01:07:31   But this time it was different.

01:07:32   This time it was like a hardware error on the machine.

01:07:34   Like you go up to it and there's a little screen on it.

01:07:36   It said error code, you know, whatever,

01:07:38   one, two, three, four, five, you know,

01:07:40   contact support, blah, blah, blah.

01:07:41   So of course I Googled for the error

01:07:43   and it was, you know, it was not, it wasn't a--

01:07:45   - IM support.

01:07:46   - It wasn't a driver problem.

01:07:47   It wasn't, it was like a mechanical issue with the printer.

01:07:49   I didn't know, very quickly found that what it wants you

01:07:51   to do is clean some stuff out in there, right?

01:07:55   This is an inkjet printer, okay?

01:07:57   - Oh, wow.

01:07:58   Well, that's your first problem.

01:07:58   - We've had it for many, many years.

01:07:59   Now, if you ever look inside an inkjet printer

01:08:03   that someone has had for many years,

01:08:04   it's like what I imagine the inside

01:08:06   of one of those Theranos machines is like.

01:08:08   With just blood splattered everywhere,

01:08:12   but it's not blood, it's printer ink.

01:08:14   Like if you think of the printer as like,

01:08:15   oh, I put these little ink cartridges in

01:08:17   and then the little bits of ink go

01:08:19   and they squirt out onto the page

01:08:20   in these microscopic little dots

01:08:21   and that's how you think the printer works,

01:08:23   but then you look inside and you're like,

01:08:24   why is the inside of this printer covered with ink?

01:08:27   Like it's like there was an ink murder inside there.

01:08:30   (laughing)

01:08:31   So that, I mean, that's bothersome

01:08:33   just from the perspective of like,

01:08:34   how does anything ever work when ink is just leaking

01:08:37   and spraying and going everywhere?

01:08:39   But yeah, eventually after many years of this,

01:08:42   it just gunks up the printhead, right?

01:08:43   So I took the printhead out and I cleaned it carefully

01:08:46   and got all the gunk off and like the gunk was just like,

01:08:49   like solidified, sticky, thick, disgusting caked on ink

01:08:54   from years and years of use.

01:08:56   I cleaned all that out, put everything back together,

01:08:58   and it worked again, right?

01:08:59   But as per my usual policy of once a device

01:09:03   starts to betray me, it's gonna get replaced.

01:09:05   Like I can't afford the printer to just not work

01:09:09   and stop working permanently, right?

01:09:10   When some kid has to print something out,

01:09:12   I'm gonna be driving to Kinko's in the middle of the night

01:09:14   to get something printed before school or some crap,

01:09:15   although that doesn't happen, they do it all online now.

01:09:17   But anyway, when we need the printer to work,

01:09:19   we need it to work.

01:09:20   So I'm like, all right, printer,

01:09:22   now that I've seen what you look like on the inside,

01:09:25   it's served its time.

01:09:26   I don't know how long we've had this printer,

01:09:27   many, many years.

01:09:29   It's done what it had to do,

01:09:30   but I'd like, I should get a replacement.

01:09:31   I looked at the replacement in the past as well,

01:09:33   but this time I was like, well, okay,

01:09:36   well now you're actually breaking,

01:09:37   I think it's time to get a replacement.

01:09:38   So I did, everyone including Mark was gonna say,

01:09:43   should have got a color laser or something like that.

01:09:45   I wanted one, but the problem is,

01:09:46   I don't have a place in my house for,

01:09:49   well, I don't have a place in this room,

01:09:51   in the quote unquote, the computer room,

01:09:53   for a printer that big.

01:09:54   And so I asked my wife, what's more important to you?

01:09:56   a better, faster, more problem-free printer

01:09:59   that you have to walk someplace to,

01:10:01   and that place would probably be the basement,

01:10:04   or just get another crappy inkjet

01:10:06   that fits in the space we have in this room.

01:10:07   And she said--

01:10:08   - How big do you think a color laser is?

01:10:10   - I know how big they are, 'cause I read the dimensions.

01:10:13   I know how much room we have, I know how big things are,

01:10:15   I have a tape measure.

01:10:16   - To be fair, yeah, to be fair,

01:10:18   modern inkjets, especially the kind that fold up

01:10:20   when you're not using them, can be very, very small.

01:10:23   And color lasers, while they have gotten very small

01:10:25   relative to where they used to be,

01:10:27   they are still, like you still can't get a color laser

01:10:29   anywhere near the size of a small inkjet.

01:10:31   But, I mean, they do get pretty small these days.

01:10:35   Like I'm kind of surprised you couldn't,

01:10:36   like you know, like the low end models,

01:10:38   I'm kind of surprised you couldn't fit one of those in.

01:10:40   - But the use case here is, my wife demands,

01:10:44   and I kind of agree with her,

01:10:45   not just a printer, but a printer scanner copier.

01:10:48   - Ah, okay, there we go.

01:10:50   - And you can get them, you can get combination

01:10:53   color laser printer scanner copiers, but they are--

01:10:55   - I'm looking at one right now.

01:10:56   - Same. - But they are bigger still.

01:10:58   And my space is very constrained.

01:11:00   It could technically maybe fit,

01:11:02   but it would like dominate the room in kind of a gross way.

01:11:04   And it's on the-- - Wait, so how much space

01:11:06   do you have, just ballpark?

01:11:08   - About enough space for the printer I have there.

01:11:10   It's a bay window. - Yes, thank you.

01:11:11   - My room has a bay window on it, right?

01:11:13   And so you know the little shelf

01:11:14   that is like the floor of the bay window?

01:11:17   That's where the printer is.

01:11:18   So think of a typical bay window and that little floor.

01:11:20   And by the way, there's other stuff there,

01:11:21   not just the printer, right?

01:11:23   That's where the printer goes.

01:11:24   And so if you can imagine taking Marco your color laser

01:11:26   and putting it on the little floor area of a bay window,

01:11:30   it would be blocking your window, it would be ugly,

01:11:32   it's just, no.

01:11:34   So, I mean, 'cause those are the options.

01:11:37   Color laser, everything, blah, blah, blah,

01:11:39   but you have to go someplace else,

01:11:40   probably the basement for it

01:11:41   or another printer in this room.

01:11:42   And honestly, the inkjet multifunction that we got,

01:11:44   it's done its job.

01:11:45   We've used the scanner, we use the copier,

01:11:47   I don't think we ever use the fax.

01:11:49   We print things pretty rarely, but we do print them,

01:11:51   and it's fine, right?

01:11:53   It's fine.

01:11:54   And so I figured, it's not like we used color lasers

01:11:57   and they were terrible and they broke all the time.

01:11:58   We had this one for years and years.

01:11:59   I can't even remember when we bought it.

01:12:01   So I was just looking to replace it.

01:12:02   And I did, and I got another color laser

01:12:04   that is smaller than the previous one.

01:12:05   - The coloring jet?

01:12:06   - Yeah, sorry, yeah.

01:12:07   Coloring jet that is smaller than the previous one,

01:12:10   which is nice.

01:12:10   And apparently, I don't entirely understand this.

01:12:15   I think it's like the half sheet paper towel thing

01:12:19   that I always bring up, that someone came up with an idea

01:12:21   that makes consumers think they're saving money,

01:12:23   but in the end they end up spending more money or something.

01:12:26   But anyway, the new trend in the new fad, whatever,

01:12:31   the new way they sell you inkjet printers is,

01:12:34   they call it ink tank printers.

01:12:36   Have either one of you heard of that?

01:12:37   - Yep, I actually, I had one briefly.

01:12:39   I think I returned it, or it broke.

01:12:42   Yeah, I had one of the Epson ink tank ones

01:12:44   where the idea was to save money on ink,

01:12:48   you could, instead of spending $100 on a cheap printer

01:12:50   that had very expensive cartridges,

01:12:52   you could spend like $300 on a printer

01:12:55   that had these giant ink tanks

01:12:57   and that you would have a lower cost per page

01:12:59   than as a result.

01:13:00   - Yeah, and they don't sell you,

01:13:01   I mean, back in the day,

01:13:02   they used to sell you the entire print head plus the ink,

01:13:05   right, and then eventually they stopped doing that

01:13:07   and the print head would just be in the printer

01:13:09   and they would just sell you these little ink cartridges

01:13:11   that just were basically containers with ink, right?

01:13:13   - Well, and that varied per brand, by the way.

01:13:16   Like, I know, like Epson, I think,

01:13:17   always had permanent heads

01:13:19   and then little slot cartridges.

01:13:21   HP for a while, I don't know if they still do,

01:13:24   but their HP's ink cartridges contained the head

01:13:27   on the bottom of each one, which is actually very nice

01:13:29   in the sense that over time as the head would get

01:13:32   all permanently clogged up eventually,

01:13:35   you could just replace the ink cartridge

01:13:36   and you would also get a new head every time.

01:13:37   So that was actually, I preferred that.

01:13:41   - But it's more expensive for those cartridges

01:13:42   because they have the heads on them.

01:13:43   - Right, that's the downside then.

01:13:44   - And it was harder to get third party ones

01:13:46   for cheaper because they have the heads built into them

01:13:48   and stuff like that.

01:13:49   But yeah, the Ink Tank one, the idea is that

01:13:51   They don't sell you the head, they don't sell you a bottle that you essentially pour into

01:13:58   a tank.

01:13:59   And the theory is, oh, these bottles cost less per ounce of ink than the cartridges

01:14:06   did.

01:14:07   And that's true if you do the math.

01:14:08   If you say the cartridge holds this piddling amount of ink and this whole bottle that looks

01:14:11   like a soda can holds this amount of ink and do the division and you can see that it's

01:14:16   way cheaper, right?

01:14:17   And also the capacity is larger.

01:14:20   the capacity of my old one was like a couple hundred pages

01:14:22   in color before it ran out, and this new one is like

01:14:25   6,000 pages before it runs out.

01:14:27   They just hold more ink, which I worry about

01:14:29   because we print so little, I'm like,

01:14:31   you know, are we ever gonna run through this ink?

01:14:33   Is it gonna dry inside the tank just from age?

01:14:36   We'll find out.

01:14:37   - By the way, my experience with ink tank printers, yes.

01:14:40   - Yeah.

01:14:41   - That's why I got rid of mine, because I remember now,

01:14:45   I had an Epson ink tank probably five, six years ago,

01:14:48   something like that.

01:14:49   it eventually just got permaclogged

01:14:52   because I wasn't using it on a regular basis.

01:14:55   I would print something.

01:14:56   So just quick aside, my printer philosophy is

01:15:01   I have a small, cheap color laser for most printing needs,

01:15:06   but we also keep an inkjet printer,

01:15:10   not usually a very good inkjet printer,

01:15:11   but we keep an inkjet printer in the house

01:15:14   for occasional photo prints.

01:15:16   Whether that's to make somebody a quick card,

01:15:19   or just print out some photos to stick in something else

01:15:22   that we're doing or some craft project

01:15:24   because color lasers are amazing in almost every way

01:15:28   except they suck at photos.

01:15:30   And it's not anything they can really ever overcome

01:15:33   because toner is just not as good as ink on paper

01:15:37   to make a really nice photo.

01:15:40   So inkjet is always gonna be better for photos than laser.

01:15:43   And I've even tried some of the other weird ones.

01:15:45   I used to have a Xerox Phaser wax printer.

01:15:47   That was interesting.

01:15:48   But yeah, Inkjet is great for photos.

01:15:53   It's ridiculous.

01:15:54   If you get a nice new Epson printer,

01:15:56   you don't even have to get a very high-end one.

01:15:58   Get one around the $150 to $200 range.

01:16:02   Usually it's the kind that has six ink cartridges,

01:16:06   but not eight, but not four.

01:16:09   Something like that, a mid-range photo printer.

01:16:11   And give it nice glossy photo paper,

01:16:15   usually from the same brand as the printer.

01:16:17   And you can get amazing photo prints out of that.

01:16:20   It looks so much better than anything a laser can produce.

01:16:24   But it's an inkjet and they don't last forever.

01:16:28   And in particular, the ones that have permanent heads,

01:16:30   like Epson's, if you don't use them very often,

01:16:32   you will get clogs.

01:16:34   Eventually those clogs will not be able to be blasted out

01:16:36   by the cleaning process and you'll have to replace

01:16:38   the whole printer.

01:16:39   So it's not great for infrequent use,

01:16:42   but I always keep one around anyway

01:16:44   because it's relatively inexpensive

01:16:47   and we end up printing, I don't know,

01:16:50   maybe like 20 or 30 photos a year on it.

01:16:53   And I know that if we planned ahead,

01:16:56   we could have those photos printed by somebody

01:16:59   that would just mail them to us,

01:17:01   or go to a drug store and have them print stuff or anything.

01:17:04   But we don't do that, that's not the kind of life we have.

01:17:06   And we know that about ourselves.

01:17:08   We have this stuff in house, literally.

01:17:10   But anyway, ink jets are great for photos,

01:17:14   but you have to understand that they're probably

01:17:17   not going to last many, many years.

01:17:19   I'm surprised your previous one did.

01:17:21   Or maybe you just don't have a high tolerance for,

01:17:24   or have a low tolerance for gaps in the print head

01:17:27   and stuff like that.

01:17:28   But lasers last forever and are perfectly happy

01:17:32   to be used very occasionally and are way less gross

01:17:35   because toner is just plastic powder with dye,

01:17:39   not liquid ink.

01:17:41   So you might have to vacuum up some toner

01:17:43   if something really bad happens,

01:17:44   but I've never even seen that happen.

01:17:46   So lasers are great in every other way,

01:17:49   they just kinda suck for photos.

01:17:51   - Yeah, we don't really print photos.

01:17:53   I would worry about an inkjet printed photo,

01:17:55   like the longevity of that ink,

01:17:56   especially with exposure to UV light and everything,

01:17:58   versus the dye sublimation printers

01:18:00   that you hope the actual photo processor place uses.

01:18:03   But either way, the printer we're replacing

01:18:07   did have permanent heads,

01:18:08   like the heads weren't on the ink cartridges,

01:18:10   and it lasted for years and years with the solanus used.

01:18:12   Now granted, it was gunking up right now,

01:18:14   but I did clean it out and restore it to health enough.

01:18:17   So like, I'm debating what we want to do

01:18:19   with that old printer, because it works.

01:18:21   (laughing)

01:18:22   And we have tons of ink for it.

01:18:25   'Cause the good thing about, you know,

01:18:27   all the lawsuits with like the DRM ink cartridges

01:18:29   is the printer manufacturers lost those.

01:18:30   So you can go to Costco and get like really cheap ink for,

01:18:34   not really cheap, but cheaper than the official ink for sure.

01:18:37   Like half, less than half the price of the official.

01:18:39   It's still like the most expensive substance on earth, right?

01:18:41   but it is half the price of the official ink.

01:18:46   So we have all this ink and we have the printer

01:18:48   and it still works, but I think the main feature

01:18:51   of the new one that I care about is one,

01:18:52   that it actually is smaller, and two,

01:18:54   the DPI of the scanner is way up since the crappy one

01:18:57   that I had before.

01:18:58   I think that scanner we had was 600 DPI max

01:19:01   and this one goes up to 2,400 max optical

01:19:06   and 9,800 interpolated or something.

01:19:08   I do scan things probably more often than I print them.

01:19:10   Often when I'm scanning your old photo prints,

01:19:12   it's surprisingly, and then I'm trying

01:19:13   to clean them up and stuff.

01:19:16   And of course this one has a fax,

01:19:17   just like the old one I think did,

01:19:18   but I don't think we're ever gonna use that.

01:19:19   The only downside of the one I got

01:19:20   is it doesn't have a rear paper feeder,

01:19:22   it just has a top paper feeder,

01:19:24   and it's kind of, or a bottom,

01:19:25   like has a cassette, and then it has a paper feeder on top

01:19:28   for doing copies, but for prints it only has the cassette.

01:19:31   And you can put photo paper in the cassette,

01:19:33   and it's fine, but it's more convenient

01:19:34   to have a rear feeder as well.

01:19:37   So I don't know, maybe we'll keep the old printer around

01:19:39   just for the hell of it as a backup printer,

01:19:41   or if we ever wanna do something

01:19:43   that requires the rear feeder or something like that,

01:19:46   on the interface of this printer.

01:19:48   It's got a touchscreen, and I was like,

01:19:50   they still make, it's a pressure-sensitive touchscreen.

01:19:53   When's the last time you saw a pressure-sensitive touchscreen?

01:19:55   I had to bring back my old Palm skills

01:19:57   of using my fingernail to hit small buttons and everything.

01:20:00   It's like, wow, that's, it's terrible.

01:20:02   But it's a printer, it supports AirPrint out of the box.

01:20:05   You don't have to install any drivers to use it from a Mac.

01:20:07   Like it's all, you know, it just,

01:20:09   everything just works on it.

01:20:10   So we'll see how it goes.

01:20:12   Like I am worried about the EcoTank thing

01:20:13   with the ink running out, but you know, live and learn.

01:20:16   And it wasn't that expensive.

01:20:18   So it's not gonna be too big of a mistake

01:20:21   as opposed to the lasers where I bought this big heavy thing

01:20:24   and put it in the basement.

01:20:25   And then we, you know, made trips up and down

01:20:27   and decided we can't do this anymore, especially for scans.

01:20:29   You don't wanna be walking up and down

01:20:30   if you're scanning stuff to the computer.

01:20:32   - Yeah, that's true.

01:20:33   - I was like, oh, you can bring a laptop down.

01:20:35   It's like, nah, but I wanna use my big screen

01:20:37   when I do scans and so we'll see how it goes but I thought I'd bring it up for

01:20:41   the reason of like my shock about the inside of my printer looks like after

01:20:44   all these years like you don't think of computer you think of computer devices

01:20:47   it being exact thing especially since the job of the printer is to put very

01:20:50   precisely aligned tiny dots of ink on a paper carefully but then the whole

01:20:56   inside of the printer is like you know like this like I said like there's been

01:20:59   a murder in it's it's kind of amazing that the paper comes into goes into that

01:21:03   machining comes out and it isn't splattered rethink so which actual

01:21:07   printer did you get because you were gonna get asked a thousand like I put

01:21:10   the link already in the in the area that you don't look at I guess what I didn't

01:21:14   look at it where you cannot look as said in the David Lynch version of doing

01:21:17   which is better all right well I will put a link to Epson eco tank et - for

01:21:23   eight five zero in the show notes do you have dimensions on this handy or can I

01:21:27   can I vamp for a minute while you figure that out it's on the it's on the

01:21:32   website, but it is, it is smaller than my previous one. Um, the,

01:21:35   the problem with one of the problems that dimensions they give you for a lot of

01:21:38   these is they extend all the flappy things, you know,

01:21:40   like they extend the big paper tray that comes out, they extend the back thing.

01:21:43   And those dimensions are bigger than the actual like dimensions of the box and

01:21:47   everything. And you don't need to extend anything on this one.

01:21:48   You can print with everything retracted and it works fine.

01:21:51   Like the page comes out and it kind of sticks out halfway. Right. Okay.

01:21:53   So I take your point about this, maybe including things extended.

01:21:58   I understand what you're saying. I take your point.

01:22:01   So your printer is about 20 by about 16 by about 10 inches.

01:22:06   My color laser, which has, I don't know if it has a fax,

01:22:09   but it definitely has a scanner,

01:22:11   in print duplex, mind you, is 16 by 16 by 13.

01:22:16   - 16 by 16 by 13 would probably mostly fit, but the--

01:22:21   - It's smaller, it's three inches taller.

01:22:24   That's the only difference.

01:22:25   Otherwise-- - But I'm saying,

01:22:26   like you're reading, like that tray extends a lot.

01:22:28   Like the actual size of this thing

01:22:30   is much smaller than, I can go get a tape measure

01:22:33   and measure the thing, but it is.

01:22:34   - Yeah, I just measured my little laser

01:22:37   with the scanner on top is about KC size.

01:22:39   It's like 16 by 15 by 12 or so.

01:22:43   It's not very good.

01:22:44   So I have here, I have my smaller setup,

01:22:49   and this is a HP Color LaserJet M182,

01:22:54   and it is an incredibly mediocre printer.

01:22:59   I feel only mild hostility towards it.

01:23:02   - Well that's an accomplishment if it's only mild.

01:23:04   - Yeah, it's, HP, I don't know what they were thinking

01:23:08   with this printer, it is otherwise pretty good,

01:23:10   except that there's something wrong with the network stack

01:23:13   that it just, you print something to it

01:23:16   and the network stack seems to just go to sleep randomly.

01:23:19   And so about every fourth print that you try to print,

01:23:23   it'll just not do anything and just sit there eventually.

01:23:26   And you basically have to reboot it.

01:23:28   and there's been no firmware updates,

01:23:31   nothing that would possibly fix this.

01:23:32   Meanwhile, last time I visited my giant printer back home,

01:23:37   which is, let me see, that's an M553,

01:23:42   which is almost a computer lab sized printer.

01:23:45   And I've talked before, I love that printer so much

01:23:48   'cause it has the most delightful feature

01:23:52   a printer could ever have, which is you hit print,

01:23:55   you get up, you walk over to the printer,

01:23:58   and your print is sitting in the tray done

01:24:00   when you get there.

01:24:01   'Cause it's so fast and so trouble-free,

01:24:04   'cause it's basically made for small computer labs

01:24:06   or small offices, so it's a big printer

01:24:09   to have in your house, and I got it on some weird

01:24:11   clearance deal so it costs as much as a house printer,

01:24:14   and it is just so unbelievably fast,

01:24:16   and you just hit print.

01:24:17   But I had a weird issue when I was there over Christmas.

01:24:20   The SSL certificate of its built-in interface expired.

01:24:26   - Oh my gosh.

01:24:27   So it was throwing like weird errors,

01:24:29   like weird error print errors and stuff,

01:24:30   and I eventually traced to that,

01:24:32   and I had to go and do something weird to fix it.

01:24:35   But I remember that was a very strange thing to happen

01:24:39   that would never have happened in the past,

01:24:41   but now modern technology,

01:24:43   yeah, the SSL certificate of the built-in web server

01:24:46   of your printer that was probably self-signed expired

01:24:50   because it's now five or six years old.

01:24:53   But man, I love that printer.

01:24:55   I understand where John's coming from

01:24:59   because that printer is only a few inches bigger

01:25:01   in each dimension than my crappy M182 that I have here.

01:25:06   And I love the big printer so much more,

01:25:08   but that extra few inches in each dimension

01:25:10   means that I really don't have a good place for it here,

01:25:13   anywhere in this house.

01:25:14   And every time I look around my office,

01:25:16   I'm like, I wonder if I could rearrange this,

01:25:18   maybe I could put the printer over there.

01:25:21   I keep trying to find ways that I can get that printer here

01:25:24   And it just doesn't fit in the room.

01:25:26   Here's the dimensions, by the way, Casey,

01:25:27   of everything retracted, which, by the way,

01:25:29   you can just leave it this way.

01:25:30   It works fine.

01:25:31   It's 14 by 9 by 13.

01:25:32   Oh, I will concede.

01:25:33   That is very tiny.

01:25:35   That's much smaller.

01:25:36   I will allow it.

01:25:37   I will allow it.

01:25:37   That's a cat's size.

01:25:38   That's why the Xtendi trays really screw things up.

01:25:41   It does a neat thing.

01:25:42   I mean, maybe it's just because it's new.

01:25:44   When you don't have the tray that's

01:25:45   supposed to catch the paper, it sticks the paper out

01:25:48   seemingly more than halfway from the printer, but it cups it.

01:25:51   So a single sheet of paper stays perfectly straight.

01:25:54   You know what I mean?

01:25:55   Like you just go over to it and it doesn't flop down.

01:25:57   It's pretty neat.

01:25:58   And speaking of printers that like print things faster

01:26:00   than you have them.

01:26:01   So working in offices for many years,

01:26:02   we have like the printers that are the size of a golf cart.

01:26:05   And those things are terrifying, but amazing.

01:26:08   Like, first of all, there's no way to get to the printer

01:26:10   before it prints out.

01:26:11   'Cause like it prints instantly.

01:26:12   I don't know if it has like seven print engines inside there

01:26:15   but it prints like 48 pages double-sided

01:26:17   in like the blink of an eye.

01:26:19   And there's like 17 drawers where you put paper

01:26:23   of all different sizes, right?

01:26:24   And the interface in it is this giant screen

01:26:27   and you know, it's just, it's terrifying.

01:26:30   But they are the most amazing devices.

01:26:32   But like, I just remember going up to them

01:26:35   and trying to figure out, if I was to use this

01:26:36   without a computer, but just like, here I am,

01:26:38   I'm here, I wanna make copies, right?

01:26:40   And you start going through the interface

01:26:41   and it's like this whole world.

01:26:43   It reminded me of like the SGI screen

01:26:44   from Jurassic Park where you fly through this 3D type.

01:26:47   What is this?

01:26:48   It's like, I was like, what operating system?

01:26:50   Is this like a custom, like, Canon operating system?

01:26:53   I don't, and the machines, the other thing

01:26:55   about those golf cart sized ones,

01:26:57   they're constantly making this low level humming noise.

01:27:00   I don't know if it's the fans or like lasers or something.

01:27:04   Something is, I would never want to have a desk near one

01:27:06   'cause they're just, so that was another thing

01:27:07   I was worried about with lasers,

01:27:08   like any kind of idle noise where the ink jets

01:27:10   are totally silent on their own, but.

01:27:12   - No, modern lasers are, you know,

01:27:14   they go into a sleep mode.

01:27:15   Even my giant one goes into a sleep mode

01:27:17   after a few minutes of not being used.

01:27:19   What makes them fast is that they can heat up

01:27:23   the fuser really quickly.

01:27:24   Because that's like when a laser printer is warming up,

01:27:26   what it's doing, the way it works,

01:27:29   dropping plastic beads of ink on the page

01:27:31   and then melting them onto the page with the fuser.

01:27:34   And I'm pretty sure what it's mostly waiting for

01:27:36   for a startup is the fuser has to get hot enough

01:27:39   to melt plastic before they can put a piece of paper

01:27:41   through it.

01:27:42   And the nice high-end laser printers,

01:27:45   This is why, if you ever had a laser printer

01:27:47   on a home circuit, and you hit print,

01:27:50   and all the lights flicker for a second,

01:27:53   because they draw a huge amount of power up front

01:27:56   to try to heat up that fuser as fast as possible

01:27:58   so they can be ready to print that first page out.

01:28:00   And generally the higher end printers

01:28:03   will have a faster heating fuser,

01:28:06   and they can respond more quickly.

01:28:07   - Or just keep it hot all the time,

01:28:09   like these giant golf cart sized things.

01:28:10   - Right, and I'm guessing the noise you're hearing

01:28:12   on your giant copier, basically,

01:28:14   is it's just keeping it running all the time

01:28:16   and there's a fan blowing to keep it cool.

01:28:19   - Please copy her.

01:28:19   I think these things can produce bound books.

01:28:21   Like they're just ridiculous devices.

01:28:24   Like they do that little paper binding

01:28:25   and it just, they are terrifying.

01:28:28   I kind of miss messing with it.

01:28:29   I also miss like, we had so many of them,

01:28:31   like you'd have to try to add a printer to your computer

01:28:33   and it would be like a challenge to find out like,

01:28:36   they would be not well labeled.

01:28:38   So if I want to print to this printer,

01:28:39   like you'd print a test page

01:28:40   and then you'd be wandering around the office going,

01:28:41   where did that come out?

01:28:43   and then you just look through the stacks of paper

01:28:45   that are sitting there for past months in the printer.

01:28:47   It's a mess.

01:28:48   - I will say though, one joy of modern inkjets,

01:28:53   I keep saying most people shouldn't even have an inkjet,

01:28:56   but they are great for photos, as I said.

01:28:59   They also are fantastic for if you have some kind of media

01:29:04   that you're trying to print on that is either

01:29:06   not like rectilinear, it's not rectangular,

01:29:10   Or it's something that you can't bend very much.

01:29:13   Or might have a problem going through,

01:29:15   a laser print path usually has to wrap around,

01:29:19   it has to make a 180 with the paper to wrap around

01:29:21   and come out the little slot on top.

01:29:23   Whereas an inkjet print path is just a straight line

01:29:25   if it has one of those rear input flaps.

01:29:28   And so you can put stuff through an inkjet that,

01:29:32   like Tiff had me print the other day,

01:29:33   she was making a pattern for a glass piece

01:29:36   and she had this sticky contact paper

01:29:39   that could be printed on on one side,

01:29:41   but she only had like one sheet left

01:29:44   and she'd already cut part of it off

01:29:45   so it wasn't a rectangle anymore.

01:29:47   And we tried feeding it through the laser

01:29:49   and it was just like, no, that's not gonna happen.

01:29:52   But we fed it through the inkjet and sure enough,

01:29:53   like it took a little bit of doing,

01:29:55   but it got through there and it printed on it just fine.

01:29:57   Inkjets will print on anything.

01:30:00   Like they had the ones back in the day

01:30:00   that would print on CDRs, like they can print labels on them.

01:30:04   - Oh yeah, those were amazing.

01:30:05   - They would print on anything.

01:30:06   But what's also nice about inkjets today,

01:30:09   even though they are largely garbage technology,

01:30:12   they are garbage technology that is very cheap

01:30:14   that can somehow still do a lot for the short period

01:30:16   of time in which it actually works.

01:30:18   Like, the reason I got my last inkjet was we had,

01:30:23   I forget exactly what it was, we had some kind of like

01:30:24   family, like old family pictures and something like that

01:30:29   where we wanted to scan them and they were too big

01:30:33   for a regular like eight by 10 scanner.

01:30:36   and the cheapest 11 by 17 scanner that we could find

01:30:41   was part of an Epson all-in-one printer.

01:30:45   Like it just happened, like I challenge you,

01:30:47   go try to find a standalone 11 by 17 flatbed scanner.

01:30:51   They exist, but not many of them,

01:30:53   and they're very expensive.

01:30:54   And this Epson all-in-one was an 11 by 17 scanner

01:30:59   and 11 by 17 printer, which we occasionally made use of.

01:31:03   All of that was I think like 250 bucks.

01:31:05   Like, it was ridiculously cheap for what it was

01:31:08   compared to the rest of the market,

01:31:10   just because printers are so insanely cheap,

01:31:12   'cause they kinda have to be for various reasons,

01:31:14   but it is kind of delightful.

01:31:17   Most people don't need this stuff,

01:31:19   but when you do need it, it costs nothing

01:31:21   and you can do incredible things for how little it cost.

01:31:25   - Trying to look up how old my previous printer was,

01:31:27   and I can't believe I can't find the order,

01:31:28   like order receipt from it in my email,

01:31:30   but I did find an email where I'm conversing,

01:31:32   I was conversing with someone about something and I referenced my model of printer and this

01:31:37   is from 2010 so that printer was at least 11 years old.

01:31:41   At least.

01:31:42   That's bananas.

01:31:43   Yeah, for an inkjet that's incredible.

01:31:45   And for multifunction, scanner, printer, copier, again we're extremely light use but it took

01:31:50   11 years for it to clog with ink with its permanent head so hopefully this ink tank

01:31:54   one will last as well.

01:31:55   And this one does actually have a 3 year warranty so if it craps out in the first 3 years it'll

01:31:58   just get it replaced or whatever.

01:32:01   Here's hoping.

01:32:02   Good luck. And for all those people out there who are like, "I don't even know why anybody

01:32:05   needs a printer. I don't have a printer. I never had a..." Just, I don't care. Please

01:32:08   keep that to yourself. We use our printers occasionally and we like them and I'm very

01:32:12   glad we have them.

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01:34:07   - All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:34:12   And Asajj writes, "Opinions on React or React Native?

01:34:15   "I've been working in React Native for the last year

01:34:17   "and enjoying it more than I expected to

01:34:19   "and was curious if you all had ever used either variant."

01:34:22   I have not used any like third party,

01:34:27   um, like front ends on top of iOS or Android for that matter.

01:34:31   Uh, I did very briefly dabble with mono like forever and a day ago.

01:34:37   Um, and it was very good. Uh, but this was easily 10 years ago. Um,

01:34:41   there's a,

01:34:43   a Twitter account that I occasionally pay attention to iOS underscore memes

01:34:48   who posted just a week or two ago, uh,

01:34:50   image that's a person being dragged in each direction in the caption which is

01:34:56   slightly uncouth I apologize but you'll see where I'm going with this divorce

01:35:00   leads children to the worst worst places and you know this kid is being like torn

01:35:05   between their their mom and dad going opposite directions and about to land on

01:35:08   a book learning react native and so divorce leads children to the worst

01:35:13   places like learning react native I am not in favor of any sort of right once

01:35:18   "run anywhere" thing unless it's right once,

01:35:22   run anywhere on that platform's,

01:35:25   or on that vendor's various platforms.

01:35:26   Like, SwiftUI has many problems,

01:35:29   but at least Apple is in control of it everywhere.

01:35:32   I don't particularly care for having some third party

01:35:35   standing between me and the platform vendor.

01:35:38   It's not for me. I don't like it.

01:35:40   I don't like that it requires somebody else's code

01:35:44   and a mountain of somebody else's code.

01:35:45   This is where Marco jumps in and says,

01:35:47   you know, don't believe other people's code.

01:35:50   It's just, I don't personally feel like

01:35:52   that juice is worth the squeeze.

01:35:53   Now I have dabbled in React a teeny bit,

01:35:56   particularly on the web.

01:35:57   I think there might still be a React-based version

01:36:00   of the Showbot that we use to track titles,

01:36:02   or at least the front end to the Showbot.

01:36:05   And I did like it in the brief window of time that I used it.

01:36:07   You know, I was able to put some together pretty quickly,

01:36:10   and if I remember right, it had, you know,

01:36:12   vague SwiftUI-style feeling to it,

01:36:15   or I guess I should say SwiftUI has React-style feeling

01:36:18   to it.

01:36:19   So in principle, yeah, whatever, it's fine, I guess,

01:36:22   but I would never ship something based on React Native,

01:36:25   not me personally.

01:36:27   - Yeah, I think you nailed the problems of like,

01:36:30   you're putting a large amount of other people's code

01:36:34   between you and the platform you're writing on,

01:36:36   and that has multiple costs to you.

01:36:39   One of them, obviously, it's bloat to your app,

01:36:43   but also you are not using the APIs directly,

01:36:46   so you might be only able to access things in a limited way.

01:36:50   You might be accessing them in a worse way,

01:36:52   and you are possibly inviting problems

01:36:55   from the platform vendor in the future.

01:36:58   Like if Apple decides that something's gonna change

01:37:01   the way it works, then the frameworks have to modify

01:37:04   to catch up before you can even do it at all.

01:37:06   They might cause problems for you,

01:37:08   including things like policy problems.

01:37:10   If Apple decides, hey, this thing uses an interpreter

01:37:13   a certain way, you can't do that anymore.

01:37:15   And so there's all these potential costs

01:37:18   and real costs to do something.

01:37:20   So you have to look at what's the upside here.

01:37:22   And generally speaking, the upside is something like React,

01:37:25   which admittedly I've never used these things.

01:37:28   But the upside to frameworks like this

01:37:30   or alternative app frameworks for a platform

01:37:32   usually is either cross-platformness,

01:37:36   which as Casey said, has its ups and downs,

01:37:40   Or it just allows you to make apps in a different language

01:37:44   or paradigm that you might be more comfortable with

01:37:47   or wanting to use for some reason, or both.

01:37:49   That's usually the appeal of these platforms.

01:37:52   The downsides though are pretty large.

01:37:54   And so you have to say, all right, well,

01:37:56   are you actually making something that's gonna be running

01:37:58   on like Android and Windows and everything else

01:38:01   where the cross-platform nature of one of these things

01:38:03   would make sense?

01:38:04   And for me, the answer is no.

01:38:06   I'm writing an app for iOS.

01:38:07   I don't need to run, or want to run on Android and Windows

01:38:12   and, you know, WebOS and BOS and everything,

01:38:15   like that's fine, I don't need to run anything else,

01:38:17   like I'm fine just running on iOS.

01:38:19   And by running against this other set of APIs, basically,

01:38:24   like this whole other platform that you're putting

01:38:25   on top of the platform, you are tying yourself

01:38:28   to that platform, you are beholden to them,

01:38:31   you are reliant on them, you are taking all of their good

01:38:35   with the bad, and for me, I'd rather just write

01:38:38   to the platform I'm writing on.

01:38:41   I'd rather write native code, native to the APIs,

01:38:45   on the platform I'm running on, directly from their vendor,

01:38:48   because those are going to always be the best supported

01:38:51   for the longest time, which is another thing,

01:38:53   like are you writing this app to last for six months,

01:38:56   or are you writing this app to last for 10 years?

01:38:58   If you're writing it more for the 10 year time span,

01:39:01   or if you think that might be a possibility

01:39:03   that you want to account for and allow to happen,

01:39:06   you're probably going to be wanting

01:39:08   to write into the native stuff, and the literal native stuff,

01:39:10   not React Native, because whatever the cool framework is

01:39:15   that you might want to write today

01:39:16   might not exist in 10 years, might not

01:39:19   be supported anymore in 10 years,

01:39:20   and might not be what is cool anymore in 10 years.

01:39:23   So instead, you might as well stick to the platform APIs

01:39:27   directly that are going to be supported probably way longer

01:39:32   and way better than anything else out there.

01:39:34   And we'll have way more resources for help

01:39:36   and example code and everything else.

01:39:38   If you have problems that would involve

01:39:40   something like Apple's DTS ticket system

01:39:43   where they could look at your code to solve a problem,

01:39:45   that's gonna be way more likely to help you

01:39:46   and be able to help you in native code.

01:39:49   There's all these upsides to using the native frameworks

01:39:52   that are kind of my style, old and boring.

01:39:55   But those are massive upsides.

01:39:58   Not to mention, again, all the bloat and everything.

01:40:01   And so these other platforms have never shown

01:40:05   that they've had enough value to me and my priorities

01:40:07   and my needs to be worth all of their downsides.

01:40:11   Now obviously if you're working for a big company

01:40:12   and you have a giant team and you're sharing a bunch

01:40:15   of code with various other platforms

01:40:18   and maybe your server side stuff might share

01:40:20   some JavaScript, who knows, I don't know how any

01:40:21   of this stuff works anymore.

01:40:23   I can kind of see the appeal there,

01:40:25   but a lot of this stuff just seems like reinventing

01:40:29   for the sake of reinventing.

01:40:31   And I've, in the same way, I'm a bad nerd

01:40:35   because I don't like Star Trek or anime or fantasy stuff.

01:40:40   I've never seen Lord of the Rings.

01:40:42   - Oh, you're not missing anything.

01:40:43   - I feel like I'm a bad nerd because I don't follow

01:40:47   a lot of the common things that nerds like.

01:40:49   I'm also, in that way, a bad programmer.

01:40:51   I don't like the idea that we have as programmers

01:40:55   that we have to constantly be reinventing

01:40:58   the foundations on which we are trying to build stuff.

01:41:01   I like the foundations to be foundations,

01:41:03   to be foundational, to mostly not change very often,

01:41:07   only change when there's a really good reason

01:41:10   and to be very well supported for a long time

01:41:14   and in deep ways.

01:41:16   And that's why I like building on stable ground

01:41:18   because, you know, Casey, you're writing a new app right now.

01:41:22   Is any customer going to care at all

01:41:26   what framework you use to make it?

01:41:28   - Nope, not a bit.

01:41:29   - Will they even know?

01:41:30   Will they even be able to tell?

01:41:32   Eh, maybe, but probably not.

01:41:34   It doesn't matter.

01:41:35   For the purposes of creating something for use

01:41:39   and for shipping and getting it out there

01:41:42   and making a thing, a lot of these implementation details

01:41:46   don't matter nearly as much as we like to think they do.

01:41:48   We are always attracted to the new and shiny

01:41:50   in our languages and frameworks and everything,

01:41:53   but all that does is distract us and keep us busy

01:41:56   and add complexity that keeps us busy.

01:41:59   And a lot of times it doesn't lead to the ability

01:42:01   to ship good products faster or better or whatever else.

01:42:04   And so these things need to convince me not,

01:42:08   why am I not using them, but why should I use them?

01:42:11   Like what massive benefits are there going to be

01:42:14   to make it worth me tolerating all of these massive costs

01:42:18   that they definitely do have no matter what people say?

01:42:21   And most of the time, whatever new thing people

01:42:25   are talking about doesn't pass that test.

01:42:26   Usually the upside is not worth the massive downside.

01:42:31   And that's React and React Native,

01:42:33   I've just never looked at my current situation,

01:42:36   which is the default, which is developed

01:42:38   against the platform's native APIs,

01:42:40   and said, I want to solve problems that can only be solved

01:42:43   by jumping to some totally different thing.

01:42:46   That's not a problem I've ever had.

01:42:49   - Yeah, and I think it's worth noting,

01:42:51   I think you said this a minute ago,

01:42:52   that sometimes you would turn to React

01:42:55   because you're like really good with JavaScript and HTML,

01:42:57   and you're not very good with Swift or Kotlin

01:43:00   or what have you, and you just want to write something native

01:43:02   with what you got.

01:43:03   And that makes sense.

01:43:05   But if you have the time and energy

01:43:08   to learn the native thing-- and sometimes because of jobs,

01:43:12   you don't have the time or perhaps don't have the energy.

01:43:14   But if you do have the time and energy,

01:43:16   I've said many times, and I stand by it,

01:43:18   that even if you don't care for Swift,

01:43:22   learning Swift will help you think about JavaScript and HTML and all the other things you might

01:43:28   already know differently in a good way. It doesn't necessarily make you better at the

01:43:32   things you already know, but I would argue it does because Swift has, Swift is many things,

01:43:38   and if it's anything, it's opinionated. So it has opinions about how you should do things.

01:43:43   And maybe those are translatable to other languages and platforms and paradigms, or

01:43:47   Or maybe they're not, but it gets your brain to be mushier in the happy sense and to think

01:43:52   of things differently.

01:43:53   And anytime I've learned a different language, even ones that I don't particularly care for,

01:43:58   I found it useful as a different way to approach problems, even in the stuff I already knew.

01:44:04   Now again, I can't stress enough.

01:44:05   Sometimes your job says, "Tough noogies, we've got to do this yesterday and you've got to

01:44:08   do it with stuff you know."

01:44:10   But a lot of times if you have the flexibility, it will ultimately pay off, even if you only

01:44:15   write this one single serving app and never look back at Swift ever again.

01:44:19   John, thoughts?

01:44:20   >> I agree with what you said about React Native.

01:44:26   There are limited circumstances under which it makes any kind of sense.

01:44:30   As for React itself, the only thing I actually have experience with, it's fine.

01:44:35   It's got some questionable ideas in its design that nevertheless were the right ideas at

01:44:40   the right time for the hamster wheel that is JavaScript frameworks.

01:44:45   Arguably it has already been replaced by newer, fancier JavaScript frameworks.

01:44:51   That seems to be the way of the world for front-end frameworks, that they just go in

01:44:55   cycles.

01:44:56   But it doesn't mean that any of these front-end frameworks that we had are necessarily bad

01:45:00   or even necessarily worse than the things that eventually "replace" them.

01:45:06   It's got the support of big companies.

01:45:07   I think Facebook does React, right?

01:45:09   I think they're the current owners/maintainers.

01:45:11   So it has some chance of lasting a little bit more,

01:45:14   but the hamster wheel of front end JavaScript frameworks

01:45:17   continues to be a little bit annoying.

01:45:19   There seems to be much less respect

01:45:20   for keeping things going just because lots of people

01:45:23   have software written in them.

01:45:25   So sites end up either stuck on an old framework that

01:45:28   is no longer in favor slash being actively developed,

01:45:31   or they're constantly changing frameworks.

01:45:33   Or the most common, in my experience,

01:45:35   sites use seven different frameworks,

01:45:36   which is kind of defeating the purpose of frameworks,

01:45:38   because now you're paying the cost of each one of them.

01:45:41   and it's a little bit of a mess.

01:45:42   But that's just the way the web works.

01:45:43   It's a fast-paced environment, as they say.

01:45:47   And I think in the grand scheme of things

01:45:49   of all the front-end JavaScript frameworks I've seen,

01:45:51   React is fine.

01:45:52   Like, again, I disagree with parts of it philosophically,

01:45:55   but I understand why the decisions were made.

01:45:57   It rubs me the wrong way in some aspects,

01:46:00   but you can make apps with it easier than you could

01:46:03   without it, which is kind of the job of JavaScript frameworks.

01:46:06   -Do you know what the JavaScript framework du jour is today?

01:46:10   because I am so out of that world.

01:46:12   I have no idea.

01:46:13   - Vue is one of the ones that was competing with React.

01:46:16   There's one of the other one, Chatroom.

01:46:17   What is the non-Vue one that's in the mix

01:46:20   with the top three these days?

01:46:22   - This stuff just makes me so sad.

01:46:25   Like how many just frameworks--

01:46:27   - Angular, there you go.

01:46:28   Sorry.

01:46:29   I just typed React Vue into Google

01:46:30   and it auto-completed to React Vue Angular.

01:46:33   So yeah, those are the ones that are currently in the mix

01:46:37   and I'm sure they'll wait a couple of years.

01:46:39   There'll be a few more to come and be the next batch.

01:46:42   Yay.

01:46:43   All right, some guy called Todd Vaziri writes,

01:46:46   noticing this huge discrepancy between how much data

01:46:48   is in my photos library, as in photos,

01:46:51   and the photos library, as in the stuff in Finder.

01:46:54   Should I be concerned?

01:46:54   So a dear friend of the show, Todd,

01:46:57   sent a couple screenshots.

01:46:58   One of them is getting info on the photos library

01:47:01   within the Photos app, and it shows 504.11 gigs.

01:47:04   Then Todd went to Finder, looked at the photos library,

01:47:08   looked at information on that.

01:47:09   734.65 gigs, so, John, is that something

01:47:12   that Todd should be worried about?

01:47:14   - Well, I bring this up partly because of when Marco

01:47:16   had a similar experience, I think,

01:47:17   when we were looking at the size of stuff,

01:47:19   and did she do get info, or maybe it was you, Casey,

01:47:21   which one are you doing?

01:47:22   - I had the opposite.

01:47:23   My photo library on disk was like 60 gigs,

01:47:26   and then I had all of this mystery space

01:47:28   on my main hard drive where it wasn't even supposed to be

01:47:31   that was exactly the size of my photo library.

01:47:33   - Yeah, so setting aside that,

01:47:36   whatever that was that Marco had.

01:47:39   For Todd's case, where the numbers are closer

01:47:43   and the photos library is bigger than photos reports,

01:47:47   there are some things that might make that make

01:47:49   some semblance of sense or at least explain

01:47:52   why it is that way.

01:47:54   And I thought of this because I've been messing

01:47:56   with my photo library.

01:47:57   Photos was doing a thing, my giant photo library,

01:48:01   where it thought it had one file to upload.

01:48:03   It's like uploading one file and it would just never,

01:48:05   Like it was never uploading them, whatever one file.

01:48:07   I had all the files.

01:48:08   Like I wasn't missing anything.

01:48:10   It was the same on all my computers

01:48:11   as it was on my wife's phone.

01:48:13   But it was always like, oh, uploading one file.

01:48:17   Me being me, I dove into the SQLite database

01:48:20   to try to find out is there--

01:48:21   Oh my gosh.

01:48:22   Is there somewhere in the SQLite database

01:48:24   where there's like a row and a table

01:48:25   where it thinks it has to upload a file that doesn't exist

01:48:28   and I could just delete that row and decide.

01:48:30   And I could not make heads or tails of the schema.

01:48:33   It's such a mess in there.

01:48:34   And there's no good recent articles

01:48:36   to explain the schema, because they change

01:48:38   the schema all the time.

01:48:39   So I came up with nothing there, although I

01:48:42   did vacuum the database for them,

01:48:44   which I felt like was a nice thing to do.

01:48:47   While I was in there.

01:48:50   SQLite jokes, wow.

01:48:52   That's just the-- it's just the nice thing

01:48:54   to do when you're in there.

01:48:56   And then I remember, well, I don't have any of this.

01:48:58   But I just do repair library.

01:48:59   If people don't know, if you've launched photos and hold down

01:49:01   command and option at the same time,

01:49:03   offer to repair your library which will basically rebuild it and sort of reconcile the SQLite

01:49:08   I'm assuming it's reconciling the SQLite database with what's on disk or whatever and I did

01:49:12   that and it rebuilt it and it no longer said it had one file left to upload right but while

01:49:15   I was in there while I was like searching around I dove into the actual photo library

01:49:21   like it's just a directory like the package or whatever if you do show package contents

01:49:25   or you just go there in the terminal right and because my photo library has just been

01:49:29   passed from iPhoto to all these versions of photos, there's tons of cruft in there.

01:49:34   There's just leftover crap, mostly leftover empty directories, sometimes directories with

01:49:40   files on them, especially since they did the big renaming where they renamed all your photos

01:49:44   to have UUID names.

01:49:46   Things used to be organized inside photo libraries by year folders, and that hasn't been true

01:49:51   in many years now, but those year folders are still there.

01:49:53   So I did a little bit of house cleaning in there.

01:49:56   Do not do this.

01:49:57   (laughing)

01:49:58   Do not go into your photo library folder and say,

01:50:01   I don't think I need that directory, recursive delete.

01:50:03   I do not recommend this.

01:50:05   But I did this very carefully

01:50:07   because I'm willing to take that risk

01:50:09   and I feel like I know,

01:50:09   have some semblance of knowing what I'm doing

01:50:11   and I have 100 backups of this elsewhere.

01:50:12   So do not do this.

01:50:14   But it reminded me,

01:50:16   it is possible that there is lots of cruft

01:50:18   in your photo library folder.

01:50:19   But setting the cruft aside,

01:50:21   what there definitely is in your photo library folder

01:50:23   are multiple versions of images

01:50:26   because there's like the original,

01:50:28   but then you have the modified version

01:50:29   that it sometimes bakes in.

01:50:30   There's thumbnails, there's all the databases

01:50:34   for all the photo analysis, face recognition,

01:50:36   all that stuff, and then of course,

01:50:37   the main metadata databases.

01:50:39   So there is more in your photo library folder

01:50:41   than just the photos.

01:50:43   And it is plausible, although kind of dumb,

01:50:45   but plausible that the photos application

01:50:48   is just summing up the sizes of all the photos,

01:50:51   like by running a query against the SQLite database, right?

01:50:54   But that is not how big the photo library is

01:50:56   because the photo library has multiple copies of the photos

01:50:59   and has a bunch of giant data dictionaries

01:51:01   for all that other stuff that I,

01:51:04   would that be 200 gigs worth of stuff?

01:51:06   Probably not, but I think the photo library on disk,

01:51:10   like the actual package thing,

01:51:11   is always going to be bigger than the sum of the size

01:51:14   of the originals that are in the photo library.

01:51:17   Should it be that much bigger?

01:51:18   Maybe not.

01:51:19   If you use iCloud photo library and you have good backups,

01:51:21   you always have the option of just chuck

01:51:23   that whole library in the garbage, delete it,

01:51:26   make a new system library, hook it up to iCloud,

01:51:29   and tell it to redownload everything.

01:51:30   And then you'll have a, in theory, a fresh new,

01:51:33   and you know, set the thing that says download everything,

01:51:35   a fresh new library with the minimum amount of stuff in it.

01:51:38   But it does, like the whole point of photos

01:51:40   is it builds databases and indexes

01:51:42   and all sorts of other crap on your photos,

01:51:43   and it does make multiple copies of your photos

01:51:45   so it can quickly show the thumbnails

01:51:47   and all that other crap.

01:51:48   So it's always gonna be bigger on disk

01:51:49   than just the size of your photos.

01:51:51   So should you worry about this?

01:51:53   Probably not, just have lots of good backups.

01:51:56   Make sure, it's actually good to have your photo library

01:51:58   on multiple computers, so you wanna see the same thing

01:52:01   on both of them all the time, right?

01:52:03   If you do something on one, you should see it on the other.

01:52:06   If you say import 100 pictures,

01:52:08   you better see the 100 pictures elsewhere,

01:52:10   because if you see them elsewhere,

01:52:11   that shows that it's getting up to iCloud

01:52:13   and back down to the other computer,

01:52:15   and that's what you want, and then of course,

01:52:16   you want that to go into your backups from there, right?

01:52:18   So as long as that's all working,

01:52:20   and you think you have everything,

01:52:22   and the sizes are reasonable,

01:52:23   I wouldn't worry too much about it.

01:52:25   But if you're concerned a little bit

01:52:26   and you use iCloud Photo Library

01:52:28   and you're sure everything is all uploaded, right?

01:52:30   So another thing you can do,

01:52:31   you can make a smart album that says,

01:52:33   show me all of the photos that we were unable

01:52:38   to upload to iCloud.

01:52:39   You should just always have that in your sidebar

01:52:41   and it should always show zero items.

01:52:43   That's, you know, if you have some problem

01:52:44   uploading something 'cause it's a weird format

01:52:46   or it's complaining about it or whatever.

01:52:48   If you're sure everything's fine,

01:52:50   or even if you don't wanna delete it,

01:52:51   if you can set it aside or copy,

01:52:53   'cause this is just a folder full of files,

01:52:54   if you can copy that photo library to a disk,

01:52:57   disconnect that disk from your computer,

01:52:59   then delete it and redownload it and make it fresh,

01:53:01   then maybe see if your library on disk

01:53:03   gets a little bit smaller or something, but maybe not.

01:53:05   Maybe it comes down on disk

01:53:06   and it's still 700 gigs or whatever.

01:53:09   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:53:10   Hover, Memberful, and Trade Coffee,

01:53:13   and thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:53:15   You can join at atp.fm/join.

01:53:18   We will talk to you next week.

01:53:20   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:53:27   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:53:33   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:53:38   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:53:43   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:53:48   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:53:53   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:53:57   So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:54:02   Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C

01:54:07   U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:54:09   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:54:12   They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)

01:54:17   ♪ We've got no tech broadcast so long ♪

01:54:22   - All right, do we wanna do the animal products follow-up?

01:54:27   - Yeah, let me do, I'll do my opening statement

01:54:30   and then Marco can do his prepared statement.

01:54:32   - Okay.

01:54:32   - But maybe, my opening statement is that we talked about

01:54:36   like diet and animals and veganism and leather

01:54:39   and agriculture and all sorts of stuff in the last show.

01:54:42   The main, this is one of those topics

01:54:46   when we talk about it.

01:54:47   We get lots of feedback.

01:54:49   It's mostly good feedback,

01:54:50   but the feedback basically says this.

01:54:52   Whatever thing you talked about,

01:54:56   it is both worse than you said,

01:54:58   but also not as bad as you said,

01:55:00   and you should not do it or do it a lot more.

01:55:03   (laughing)

01:55:04   Every single item, you name it, name an angle on it,

01:55:07   pick a random thing like, oh, leather,

01:55:09   that's a byproduct of meat production,

01:55:11   so you don't have to worry about it.

01:55:12   Oh, leather, did you know that leather

01:55:14   is not a byproduct of meat production

01:55:16   and they raise animals just for leather,

01:55:17   you should eat lots of vegetables,

01:55:19   you should eat less vegetables.

01:55:21   Actually, meat is great for the environment.

01:55:22   Did you know meat is worse for the environment

01:55:24   than you even said?

01:55:25   Did you know that leather is actually good

01:55:26   for the environment?

01:55:27   Did you know leather is worse for the environment

01:55:28   than even you said in your program?

01:55:30   Pretty much evenly split on every single topic

01:55:34   we talked about.

01:55:35   There is one group of people telling us

01:55:36   that it's worse than we said,

01:55:37   and one group of people telling us that it's better.

01:55:40   And depending on what the prevailing,

01:55:43   like the popular opinion is,

01:55:45   One side of it gets to say that they're the turns outside.

01:55:48   Like, despite what you may suspect,

01:55:50   it turns out that unexpected thing is true.

01:55:54   And it wasn't always on the, you know,

01:55:55   sometimes the unexpected thing is like,

01:55:57   the current consensus is that this is actually really bad,

01:55:59   but turns out it actually is good, right?

01:56:01   And anyway, so it's not to say that, you know,

01:56:04   the truth must be somewhere in the middle,

01:56:06   'cause that's not true.

01:56:06   The truth is not in the middle of those two things.

01:56:08   The truth is closer to one side than the other.

01:56:10   But this is to say, we got a lot of good feedback

01:56:13   and a lot of things to think about,

01:56:15   but it's very difficult to draw conclusions

01:56:18   without actually studying it more.

01:56:21   I felt like overall, we didn't get lots of angry people

01:56:24   because our handling of this topic

01:56:25   was sort of middle of the road,

01:56:27   where we're just kind of saying, here's what I've heard

01:56:28   and here's my thinking of it and here's what I'm doing.

01:56:31   And we did get the strain of feedback,

01:56:33   which I think is true, which is like,

01:56:35   in the end, nobody's gonna lead a perfect life

01:56:37   and we're all doing the best we can

01:56:39   with the information we have.

01:56:40   and I would fall back to my statement during the show,

01:56:43   which is your individual behavior here

01:56:48   is worth thinking about,

01:56:50   but in the end you still are only one person, right?

01:56:52   I made the point that your individual behavior

01:56:55   on what you choose to do with your diet

01:56:57   can actually affect demand,

01:56:59   and that demand affects what's produced,

01:57:01   much more so than things like electricity

01:57:03   or other systemic problems,

01:57:04   but there are also systemic problems in agriculture.

01:57:07   As you mentioned in the show,

01:57:07   There are subsidies for lots of good and bad things.

01:57:11   But there's no way to lead the perfect life where you're doing the perfect thing, and

01:57:16   certainly there is no way to lead the perfect life or be the perfect company or whatever

01:57:21   to the point where everyone is happy with your decision.

01:57:24   Because as I mentioned at the top, we got feedback in both directions of extremes, so

01:57:28   no matter what we do, no matter what you do, and including no matter what Apple does, someone

01:57:32   is going to be upset about it.

01:57:34   That's just, you know, you just gotta do

01:57:35   what you think is best and adjust that opinion

01:57:38   as new information comes to light.

01:57:40   - And I'm gonna make you more upset.

01:57:42   All right, so.

01:57:43   - Just now from Marco to inflame your anger once more.

01:57:47   - I did want to, so we got two good links to share.

01:57:50   One is actually today Matthew Iglesias' column,

01:57:55   Slow Boring, had a whole thing referencing our show

01:57:59   and basically evaluating like the argument

01:58:03   that more nutritious or non-animal based food

01:58:07   is more expensive and therefore inaccessible to people.

01:58:11   And he breaks down a lot of data and citations and numbers

01:58:16   showing some pretty good stuff to think about.

01:58:18   Basically, healthy food is not as expensive

01:58:20   as people think it is.

01:58:22   So that's good, read that for sure.

01:58:24   And then also, let me dig this up here.

01:58:27   Listener Renfred wrote in linking to this article

01:58:31   on the BBC citing a scientific study about water emissions and land use comparing different

01:58:40   milks, like all the dairy, rice milk, soy milk, oat milk, almond milk, because part

01:58:46   of the discussion that we were having about how cows especially, but in general animal

01:58:51   products tend to be significantly worse for the environment and less efficient and everything

01:58:55   else and John kind of breezed by also like you know yeah almonds we know

01:58:59   almonds you know take a lot of water to grow and everything but actually you

01:59:03   know it turns out that you almost do take a lot of water to grow compared to

01:59:07   most of the most of their alternatives but not compared to dairy milk because

01:59:12   cows drink water and eat food that was grown using water and you know so like I

01:59:19   feel like we oftentimes people start it whenever we present like an alternative

01:59:23   like hey, maybe you should drink oat milk

01:59:25   instead of dairy milk for your coffee or whatever.

01:59:27   A lot of people will get defensive,

01:59:30   and I'll have more of that in a second,

01:59:31   but will get defensive and will jump and say,

01:59:33   well, almonds use too much water,

01:59:35   they're bad for the environment.

01:59:36   But it's very often when you're making

01:59:38   that kind of argument or reaction

01:59:41   to not properly account for the status quo

01:59:44   that you're implicitly arguing for.

01:59:46   If you're saying like, yeah, almonds use tons of water,

01:59:48   well, how much water do cows use?

01:59:50   And it turns out the answer is a lot.

01:59:52   And that's just, that's water, they're also,

01:59:54   if you look at this study, it's kind of ridiculous,

01:59:58   the differences in emissions and land use as well.

02:00:02   That basically, like yeah, animal stuff is really bad

02:00:05   for the environment, so much more than you might think.

02:00:08   And you know, the individual choices here matter a lot,

02:00:11   I think, you know, in the sense that, you know,

02:00:14   the collective action in a lot of things that we do,

02:00:18   as John was saying, can't make large differences

02:00:20   in the world, but the food choices that we make

02:00:25   are one area where many of us can make

02:00:27   that kind of difference, we can make that choice,

02:00:29   and often in situations where we don't have

02:00:32   a lot of other choices that we can do

02:00:34   that would make big effects, but animal consumption

02:00:37   basically uses so much more environmental resources

02:00:42   compared to plant-based stuff of similar nutritional value

02:00:45   that it's not even close, and so we actually

02:00:48   can make a difference there.

02:00:50   - I should just point out that we did get feedback

02:00:52   that said the exact opposite of what Marco was saying,

02:00:54   just to put it to my point. - We sure did.

02:00:55   - That some people said, actually, cows are way better

02:00:57   for the environment than they seem like,

02:00:59   and they're actually beneficial, and here are the reasons

02:01:01   why, if you find a study about--

02:01:02   - I didn't find a lot of data to back that up.

02:01:04   - Well, if you'll find a study, just like you cited

02:01:06   the thing about how almonds aren't that bad,

02:01:08   it was probably funded by the almond industry,

02:01:09   and the beef industry funds their own studies

02:01:11   that say that beef isn't that bad, so.

02:01:12   - Yeah, well, and almonds aren't great,

02:01:14   but they're way better than cows,

02:01:16   'cause it's not hard to be way better than cows.

02:01:19   And the other main thing that we got as feedback

02:01:22   was basically saying like, yeah, you know,

02:01:24   veggie burgers or meat alternatives, they're unhealthy too.

02:01:26   And yeah, I covered this,

02:01:28   and I think it's worth covering this a little bit more.

02:01:30   If you're replacing meat with a meat alternative directly,

02:01:35   then what it's probably made of is some kind

02:01:38   of plant protein and a whole bunch of vegetable oil.

02:01:41   And yeah, vegetable oils are unhealthy.

02:01:44   Eating large amounts of oils is unhealthy.

02:01:47   so is eating lots of meat for many of the same reasons.

02:01:51   Although meat also introduces some bonus

02:01:53   like inflammatory issues, carcinogens, lots of fun stuff.

02:01:56   But, and believe me, I say this as a meat eater,

02:01:59   I still eat meat, I just eat less of it.

02:02:01   But reducing meat consumption does not mean

02:02:05   just replacing all of your meat meals with meat substitutes

02:02:09   and making no other changes.

02:02:11   But we need a bridge.

02:02:12   Imagine, I'll go to another much safer,

02:02:16   less heated topic, gun control.

02:02:18   Imagine if we were--

02:02:19   - Oh, God.

02:02:20   - Imagine if we were trying to take away everybody's guns.

02:02:23   Gun people wouldn't be ready for a radical change

02:02:26   all at once.

02:02:27   So we'd say like, you can't have your gun anymore,

02:02:29   and their question would be,

02:02:30   what am I supposed to shoot people with?

02:02:32   That's obviously the wrong question,

02:02:33   but to get them to start down a better path,

02:02:36   maybe we would address that need

02:02:37   with some kind of bridge solution.

02:02:38   Maybe we would like replace their guns

02:02:40   with rubber band guns,

02:02:41   and give them little targets to shoot.

02:02:43   'Cause it's a sport, right?

02:02:44   It's not about fantasies about killing people.

02:02:46   It's definitely a sport, right?

02:02:48   That's what they're all about, right?

02:02:50   - Oh, it's also about killing animals, just to be fair.

02:02:52   - Yeah, true.

02:02:53   - The rubber bands don't work on them.

02:02:54   We go right back to the meat question.

02:02:55   - Right, but anyway,

02:02:56   we don't need these bridge solutions

02:03:02   to be for people to use rubber band guns forever.

02:03:05   That's just a bridge to help them

02:03:07   wean off guns long-term, right?

02:03:10   Fake meat burgers are,

02:03:12   they're the rubber band gun of the meat world, basically.

02:03:15   They are typically healthier than meat,

02:03:18   although not by as much of a margin

02:03:20   in many ways as you might think.

02:03:21   They are usually far better for the environment.

02:03:25   But a much healthier diet would reduce the total frequency

02:03:29   of burger-style meals altogether.

02:03:31   Because if you think about what a burger is,

02:03:34   it's basically a very heavily salted circle

02:03:38   of fatty protein covered in fatty squares of cheese,

02:03:42   real or fake, either way,

02:03:43   it's similar nutritional profiles,

02:03:45   garnished with sugary condiments,

02:03:47   sandwiched between two big pillows of refined white flour,

02:03:51   and then next to the burger on the plate

02:03:54   is a side of deep fried salty carbohydrates

02:03:56   that usually have enough calories by themselves

02:03:59   to be a second dinner for an adult, okay?

02:04:01   - So just leave the burger and just eat fries for dinner

02:04:03   is what we're saying.

02:04:04   - No, like a burger and fries, the way we think about that,

02:04:06   That's unhealthy for lots of reasons,

02:04:08   not just whether it has an animal

02:04:10   or vegetable oil in the middle.

02:04:13   The problem is the ratio of these rich, fatty,

02:04:16   salty, carby foods to nutritional vegetables.

02:04:20   On that typical platter, I think you're lucky

02:04:24   if there's a leaf of lettuce on the burger.

02:04:27   If there's a tomato slice,

02:04:28   that's probably the healthiest thing on the plate.

02:04:31   And so what needs to change for lots of reasons

02:04:35   is that the ratio of how we eat these things in general.

02:04:38   We need to elevate healthy vegetables

02:04:41   from garnishes or small side dishes

02:04:45   to be a much larger portion of the meal.

02:04:48   Like this is like, this morning, like today,

02:04:50   I had a vegan breakfast,

02:04:52   I had a mostly vegetable lunch and dinner,

02:04:54   but lunch had a bit of cheese

02:04:55   and dinner had a bit of chicken.

02:04:57   But the bulk of it was vegetable stuff.

02:04:59   That's the kind of thing I'm talking about

02:05:00   because we don't need everyone to eat zero meat and dairy

02:05:04   forever and ever again.

02:05:06   That's not what anybody's arguing.

02:05:08   What needs to change, meat and dairy are mostly fine

02:05:12   just in way smaller quantities than the typical

02:05:15   American diet is eating these days.

02:05:17   So have a big pile of vegetables and if you wanna put

02:05:19   some meat or cheese on top, cool, that's fine.

02:05:21   The idea is to greatly reduce animal products

02:05:25   with vegetables as the main sources of bulk in your diet.

02:05:30   And this idea sets people on fire.

02:05:34   They are so defensive about this concept.

02:05:36   And there's, I understand why.

02:05:39   Like if you think, you know, food is so deeply tied

02:05:42   to family, culture, identity.

02:05:46   You know, we learn what to eat from our parents

02:05:48   and our grandparents.

02:05:49   So when something is presented to you

02:05:51   that presents like, hey, you might wanna change

02:05:53   the way you eat, it feels like an attack on your family.

02:05:57   And you know, just like the worst, hardest hitting insults

02:06:01   are the ones that you kinda know are a bit true.

02:06:04   The defensiveness around food is made so much worse

02:06:07   when the idea that you're being presented with

02:06:08   is something that you know is kinda true.

02:06:11   This is why everybody hates vegans.

02:06:14   Vegans get an unbelievable amount of crap from the world.

02:06:18   Every vegan I know avoids bringing up that they're vegan

02:06:22   if they don't have to.

02:06:23   This is why they even invented

02:06:26   the wonderful euphemism plant-based,

02:06:29   because they had to say plant-based now

02:06:32   because the term vegan makes people so angry,

02:06:35   just the term, that they needed a new word.

02:06:37   And the reason why veganism makes people so angry

02:06:42   is that deep down we all know that the vegans

02:06:46   are kind of right about some stuff.

02:06:48   What we do to animals is reprehensible.

02:06:53   What the animals do to the environment

02:06:55   at the scale that we cultivate them

02:06:57   is obscene and horrendous.

02:07:00   What eating all of this stuff does to our bodies

02:07:03   in the amounts that we typically eat them

02:07:06   is pretty unhealthy.

02:07:08   And veganism kind of reminds us of all this

02:07:10   and it makes us face that really uncomfortable fact

02:07:13   that the growing number of vegetarians and vegans

02:07:16   demonstrates that for an ever increasing number

02:07:19   of us meat eaters, our lifestyle is optional.

02:07:21   It's not a necessity.

02:07:22   We don't have to be doing this

02:07:23   and they make good points on the other side.

02:07:26   And this feels like an attack to so many people,

02:07:30   but it doesn't have to be.

02:07:31   It's a choice you can make.

02:07:32   It's like choosing to recycle aluminum cans.

02:07:35   That's a pretty effective recycling method.

02:07:37   Choosing to walk or use mass transit

02:07:39   instead of driving somewhere.

02:07:41   Choosing to get vaccinated during global pandemic

02:07:42   to help us out.

02:07:43   These are things that you can do,

02:07:45   choices you can make because it's better

02:07:48   either for you or the world or both.

02:07:49   You're choosing this just because it's better,

02:07:53   not because there's like a cop breaking down your door

02:07:58   to come in and take your hamburgers away.

02:07:59   Like no one's coming for your guns

02:08:01   and no one's coming for your hamburgers.

02:08:02   You can keep your meat,

02:08:03   no one's gonna make you stop eating meat.

02:08:05   But the food that you choose to eat

02:08:08   doesn't need to be this deep-rooted part of your identity.

02:08:11   If you switch out your beef meatball dinner

02:08:14   for chicken meatballs or turkey meatballs

02:08:15   or vectual meatballs, that's not like an insult

02:08:18   to your grandmother anymore than she was insulting

02:08:21   her grandmother by not wearing fur coats anymore.

02:08:24   Times change, and we stopped wearing fur coats

02:08:27   because our standards moved on over time.

02:08:30   We developed different standards for things like

02:08:33   animal cruelty and animal use over time,

02:08:36   and also plenty of good alternatives to fur coats

02:08:40   became available, as we were talking about last week.

02:08:42   So we are now in, I think, a transitional period,

02:08:46   a similar transitional period,

02:08:47   for just the amount of animal products that we consume.

02:08:52   And the difference here though is that

02:08:53   nobody's expecting you to suddenly become 100% vegan

02:08:56   or ever become 100% vegan.

02:08:57   You don't need to, no one is asking for that.

02:08:59   I can't be more clear about this.

02:09:01   No one is asking for you to totally stop

02:09:03   eating meat and using leather.

02:09:05   No one's asking for that.

02:09:07   What would make a huge difference

02:09:09   is a large reduction of animal consumption.

02:09:12   And it's so much more accessible than you think.

02:09:14   I would never have guessed,

02:09:15   two years ago I was eating barbecue like three times a week.

02:09:19   I would never have guessed it was possible

02:09:21   to change in this direction and it turns out

02:09:23   it was way easier than I thought and way healthier.

02:09:25   Everything about this is better for my health

02:09:28   and for my mental conscience as well.

02:09:31   And again, you don't have to go all the way, just reduce.

02:09:35   Start with one meal a day.

02:09:37   Have one meal a day be totally plants, totally vegan.

02:09:40   Whatever word you wanna choose,

02:09:42   if you wanna say plant-based, fine.

02:09:43   Have one meal a day be totally vegan.

02:09:46   And then just try to make conscious efforts

02:09:47   to cut back as you go.

02:09:50   That makes a huge difference.

02:09:52   If you look at what we actually need

02:09:53   for things like carbon emissions,

02:09:55   and global warming, and climate change,

02:09:57   and water usage, land usage,

02:10:00   our food supply is such a massive footprint

02:10:03   due extremely heavily to meat and dairy,

02:10:07   but mostly meat, and especially cows.

02:10:09   Just reducing those things in a big way.

02:10:11   Just cut your beef consumption in half.

02:10:14   That's a huge difference even.

02:10:16   That's not even saying never eat a burger again.

02:10:18   It's just saying eat half as many burgers.

02:10:20   That's such a huge difference.

02:10:21   And change your mindset to start looking at meals

02:10:25   not as a giant block of meat with some cheese on top

02:10:29   or some butter and dairy and carbs everywhere,

02:10:32   but like hey, how can I work in a lot more vegetables

02:10:34   and reduce the amount of meat that's on the plate

02:10:37   or reduce the number of meals I have

02:10:39   that have to include meat at all?

02:10:41   That's what I'm saying is a really good idea

02:10:44   that many more of us need to start doing.

02:10:46   And that can make a really, really big difference

02:10:48   without making you never have X, Y, or Z again.

02:10:52   Like no one's asking for that.

02:10:53   You can make a big difference with what is actually

02:10:56   not that big of a change to your life.

02:10:57   And it'll be fine, you can do it,

02:10:59   and we'll all be better off.

02:11:00   (beeping)