Primary Technology

Stephen Robles (00:00)
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters, not about musicals, unfortunately. But today we have big news because OpenAI is starting its 12 days of shipmas. Google DeepMind can now create entire interactive worlds just from a single image. The Verge has gone subscription. Apparently, Googling is for old people and the FBI has some warnings about your messaging apps. This episode is brought to you by Audio Hijack, HelloFresh and Notion.

I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and joining me as always, my fellow musical co-host, Jason Aitken. How's it going, Jason? They did make a movie of it. Of course, what is it? What is it? Of course it's rent. Of course rent. thought.

Jason Aten (00:34)
very good. I think they made a movie of that didn't they? I think I think they made a movie is rent. But yes, but anyway, yeah, I'm good except for it is 17 degrees here. And if you recall, I have about a 35 yard commute from the back of my house to my office because my office is a shed and it's cold. It's not cold in here. But yeah, yeah.

Stephen Robles (00:54)
You posted a picture on your Instagram. think I said it was a story or a picture of the snow covered backyard. And I'm like, wow, that is, that's it. You're doing it. And you even turn off your heater to record this show. That's your dedication. Okay. Just kidding.

Jason Aten (01:00)
Yeah.

It's on, I think it went back on, but it's just set at like 62, which it's like 67 in here. So we got some time before it has to come back on.

Stephen Robles (01:10)
Okay, very good. I did a little musical number at beginning because this is our 52nd episode, I thought, 52 weeks. That's a year. Although we've not been podcasting for a full year yet. I don't know how we got to 52. We did a couple bonus episodes I think.

Jason Aten (01:17)
Hmm.

We did, didn't we, well we did like a, yes we did two. Didn't we do like a live episode?

Stephen Robles (01:26)
Adam, yes, yeah we did two live episodes, Dub Dub DC, and I think we did another one after the iPhone event.

Jason Aten (01:31)
Yep. And we did or was it I think we did one the day of that iPad event when I was in New York. Was that a second? I think that was a yeah I think that was the second one. So we're good. We're doing good. We've made it.

Stephen Robles (01:40)
that's right. Yes, because you went to a coworking space. Yeah, well, we're still at 52 episodes. I felt like it was apropos. So we're good. Also, I don't know if you've been seeing Jason, but everybody's wrapped. Everything is is going out there. And so I have some shout outs I want to do for that. But also shout outs for our five star review this week. We are five star podcast in Apple podcast and Spotify. Thanks to you all. Matador 2022 from the USA, which, by the way, dots on. Thank you. just I'm glad I'm still winning that.

But also he's phone dominant hand pocket and Apple pencil volume button up. I guess even like tip towards the volume button. So he's on my side on all the things. So I appreciate it.

Jason Aten (02:17)
I mean, I read that as dominant hand pocket and then pencil. I don't know what that means. He puts his pencil in the dominant hand and then he just uses the volume up button. So things just keep getting louder. The way you wrote it in the notes, that's what it says.

Stephen Robles (02:22)
Yeah.

Does it? Well, it depends on the iPad, because if you flip it around, those volume buttons change. And, you know, that's very confusing. But I do. I'm going to give a shout out. If you if you have a picture of primary tech in your like top listen to podcast and you're wrapped. And I asked yesterday if you have your Spotify wrapped your Apple podcast or pocket cast. And then everybody started asking like, wait, Apple podcast does one. And I was like, shoot. I was no, they don't. I don't know why I thought Apple podcast did a wrapped. So maybe hopefully they will. I don't know.

Jason Aten (02:33)
Yeah, that's true.

Hmm.

Stephen Robles (02:57)
do one for the first time this year ever. But basically Spotify. If you have a Spotify wrapped, you can send us a screenshot. And so we had some people already doing that. This is Fran Besora on X. We were podcast number five, top five in great company with ATP. Can I just look at that? yeah. Wait, wait a minute. Maybe they just subscribed like halfway through the year. So they got like both in there and they got long episodes, you know.

Jason Aten (03:11)
That's good company right there. Although technically we're in the top four because one of those is the member version of ATP.

That's a good question. maybe, know, yeah, that's true. So we're in the top four. That's I'm happy.

Stephen Robles (03:29)
And then Hans over here, we're in the top four again similar company nine to five upgrade in ATP and there we are also Rob Galler We're number three in his put in wrapped history Yeah, I mean dire of a CEO. That's a huge show and then obviously the verge cast which they release like ten episodes a week. So You know, I feel like we're those minutes the minutes add up and then also a quad Bina over on blue sky. We're

Jason Aten (03:40)
Nice. That's good company as well. Yeah.

That's true. There's those minutes add up. That's true. I agree.

Stephen Robles (03:56)
30 hours, listen to 30 hours, thank you, that's amazing. And I don't even see any other tech podcast, tech meme, that's tech podcast. Anyway.

Jason Aten (04:04)
Yeah, when I was, I think it was in Pocket Cast will tell you something about like how much time you saved from skipping episodes and how much time you've listened to stuff. And I was like, it says since 2020, which maybe that I don't think that was when I started using podcasts. But anyway, that I have listened to four days and 14 hours worth of podcasts. And my wife was horrified. I'm like, you realize I'm always doing something else. Like when I'm listening to a podcast, I'm either driving a long distance or

Stephen Robles (04:25)
Driving. Yeah.

Jason Aten (04:28)
mowing the lawn or whatever, she's like, okay, I feel better because I just thought you wasted four hours of your four days of your life listening to that drivel.

Stephen Robles (04:35)
No, no, no. Okay, well first of now I'm gonna go to my Pocket Cast app. Days listened. Wait a minute, how many days do you have listened cumulatively?

Jason Aten (04:40)
I think it's been four days and 14 hours since 2020. Yeah.

Stephen Robles (04:44)
since 2020. So I've been using it for way longer than that because I have 147 days listened and

Jason Aten (04:51)
Well, I wait, okay, hang on. I don't know what happened. But now it says, just so you know, I'm not making 103 days. So that seems more right since 2020. I don't know.

Stephen Robles (04:54)
Okay. Right.

There you go Mine is eight days saved probably from silences and and Whatever, but the pocket cast if you go to your profile tab now There is a wrapped version of that and so you can you can do it look there. We are 27 different shows

Jason Aten (05:14)
I Yeah, I think that that's I was looking at if you like the four hours and four days and 14 hours is how much time I've saved I just didn't realize that that was totaling that up, but any man if I'd told my wife I'd listen to 103 days. I think I'd be living out here permanently Listening to podcasts. Yeah, that's true

Stephen Robles (05:21)
Gotcha.

It's over time. Listen, podcasts are great. You can do other things. Anyway.

Jason Aten (05:34)
Yeah, that's the thing. I'm either mowing the lawn, making dinner, driving. I spent a lot of time driving, Stephen. Like, a lot. So.

Stephen Robles (05:37)
Exactly I Know you do yeah, which I'm gonna I need to get your advice so later in our personal tech segment because I have to drive to Jacksonville and I'm gonna try and do it in the Tesla but the range and the miles that this trip is it's gonna be very contentious and so I'm Yeah, we're gonna talk about that Also Apple podcast named its podcast of the year and unfortunately, they misspelled primary technology. They misspelled it as hysterical. So

Jason Aten (05:53)
All right, we're gonna talk about this. We're gonna fix this for you.

We are hysterical, but that is not the name of our podcast.

Stephen Robles (06:07)
So no, that's topic because I will say they were sharing some of their like most popular shows and they talked about 20,000 Hertz which I had not heard of before and so I went and I listened to their remote control episode, which is about Hans Zimmer His whole like production company and how he does the music for that and being a music nerd and then hearing that and loving movies like it was actually great So 20,000 Hertz actually great show highly produced like you could tell like there's a team behind this

Jason Aten (06:31)
Good stuff. Good.

Mm-hmm. This is it. We are the team. Us and Notion and yeah, that's it.

Stephen Robles (06:35)
Hopefully you can't tell but there's no team behind this episode. This is podcast. It's this is it. This is the team That's that is it. Okay, so a couple quick stories and then we have like a bunch of AI stuff opening. yeah

Jason Aten (06:47)
Before you could, I wanna make a controversial take and I'm gonna do it at the beginning of the episode. I think I'm super thankful to see our podcast show up in all of these things. Don't you think the whole like, rap thing is getting kinda stupid?

Stephen Robles (06:58)
Yes.

I mean, I feel like it's a-

Jason Aten (07:05)
Cause now everyone is doing it. And I feel like this is a gimmick that was interesting during COVID when we couldn't go outside. But nowadays I feel like it's just, is it really interesting for people to be sharing these things all the time?

Stephen Robles (07:16)
think maybe it's interesting personally. Like it might be a cool thing to see just like where you spent your time, but people are, yeah, people don't like singing charity. I don't know. I think it's interesting. I wouldn't, I can't share my music stuff because a, it's Apple music and it's, don't even know where to get it. And it's like my kids playing stuff. And yes, I've turned off all the home pod stuff and like it's useless. It doesn't do what I do. But I would like, I would like a wrapped on the shortcuts I use throughout the year.

Jason Aten (07:33)
You

Right?

Stephen Robles (07:44)
and how many times I've used MKBHD's Motion VFX pack in Final Cut. I've used his Zooms probably thousands of times. I don't know. It's fine, I guess. I like singing our podcasts. I just wish Overcast and Apple Podcasts did it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Aten (07:56)
Again, I do agree. Yeah, in a way, here's what we need. We need some sort of service that just aggregates them from all of them, because I don't listen to a single podcast in Spotify, like never once.

Stephen Robles (08:04)
Yeah.

Yes, I am. Same. People watch our show, and actually there's more people that watch it than listen in Spotify, so just throwing that out there.

Jason Aten (08:15)
Yeah, and my Spotify rap is Taylor Swift and Noah Khan, and I'm pretty sure I personally have not actually listened to either of those things if my kids weren't with me. So it's like, anyway, I don't have a problem with them. There's no shame even if that was true, but it's like, this is not representative of my listening habits.

Stephen Robles (08:25)
Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. Yeah.

I've almost forgot. I was gonna give you a pro tip I wanted before we get so because right before we recorded you were saying in order to restart your device You have to shut it all the way off and then manually turn it back on and here's my pro tip You don't have to do that Jason. You can just restart your phone. The problem is you have to use the voice assistant It's the only way to do it

Jason Aten (08:38)
Okay.

Okay.

There's one thing that the voice assistant is good at and apparently this is it. Just for context for our listeners, I needed to restart my iPad Pro because I want to, use it as a monitor here because the big screen on the computer is over here. And I was like, it's annoying that on my Mac, I can just go up to the menu and click restart and it will do it both the shutdown and the restart. But on a iPhone or on an iPad, you have to do basically two steps or apparently you have to just know that there's one thing the voice assistant can do and this is it.

Stephen Robles (08:59)
This is it.

And the only reason I know is because when iOS 18.2 came out and we were all trying to get into the Image Playgrounds beta, I kept wanting to restart my device to see if that would kickstart it. And so I had to figure out, how can I do this quickly? You can do it with a shortcut, A. So if you do want to just create a shortcut, you have to use the Shutdown Device action. But then if you tap it, you can actually change it to restart this device. So you can do a shortcut, and you can just...

Jason Aten (09:52)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Robles (09:55)
run it and your device will restart, meaning you'll shut itself down and turn itself back on. Or you could tell the voice assistant, restart this device and it will do it. It will ask you to confirm and then it'll restart it. So there go. That's your pro tip for today.

Jason Aten (10:08)
That's good to know. I won't remember. I'll still sit there frustrated that I have to do this in two steps. But I mean, honestly, phone, I've had generally speaking, the only times that they restart is if they've updated right like the software. So. All right.

Stephen Robles (10:14)
you

Right exactly. Yeah, I never actually restart I wanted to throw this in real quick before that AI stuff Which is Tim Cook did an interview where he was defending Apple vision pro sales performance He said he's defended it with three words. This is the nine to five Mac article and those words are Jason a 10 daily. That's what he said. No He said he said Jason a 10 uses it every day. So that's our defense

Jason Aten (10:42)
Except for Jason Aitin didn't actually buy the Vision Pro, so that's not really a good defense of Vision Pro sales, just to be clear.

Stephen Robles (10:49)
That is fair. That is fair. No, he said early adopter product, which you know I think it's interesting for Apple and Apple CEO to actually admit that something is an early adopter product You know Apple doesn't do that even if it's something that is First off the line brand new like that the m1 series was an early that like none of that like but but to come out and just say like this is an actual early adopter product I think it's telling this that Tim Cook feels like he has to say that and that is obviously how they view it. So yeah

Jason Aten (11:19)
I think it's telling that those are the three words that the PR team came up with to explain why people aren't actually buying. Like there's no way that they released the Vision Pro thinking it was like, you saw the Vanity Fair profile where Tim Cook was wearing the Vision Pro. Like they thought that this was at that point the thing. And I don't know that it won't be at some point. Like I think we're probably going to end up somewhere closer to the Orion glasses eventually. And I think probably

Stephen Robles (11:27)
Yeah.

You're wearing it. Yes.

Jason Aten (11:47)
Apple will get there. This is just a classic case of no one actually knows what this should be an Apple man. They just listen. I feel like I'm as big of an Apple fan as anybody. So I think I can say this that they are just very not good. They are not very good at releasing products that are not 125%. Like they are not very good at just saying let's give in a new category.

Stephen Robles (11:59)
Okay.

Mmm.

Jason Aten (12:14)
Right? And they've had success with that. When the iPhone came out, it was a hundred times better than any other smartphone. Like I think that's a fair thing to say. We did think like it had the, the touch screen was better than any other touch screen. had, it had like the keyboard, You didn't, you weren't stuck with the Blackberry keyboard, like all of those things, you know, pulled on a refresh, all those things that eventually came along were, were make it a hundred percent better. That in the iPad, iPad at least a hundred times better than any other tablet that's out there. That's great.

Stephen Robles (12:25)
the pass of the touch screen.

Yeah.

Jason Aten (12:42)
This didn't have to be a hundred times better because no one, like this market doesn't really exist beyond 3D movies and video games at this point. And so I feel like there was a lot more room for them to say, we're gonna put this out, but like 3,500 bucks, like, I just, I don't know. It's just, it's tough.

Stephen Robles (12:58)
Yeah, I still struggle to use mine. There was I know there's another immersive thing out. There's like the concert for one. Have you watched it?

Jason Aten (13:07)
No, haven't. I haven't had I don't have a lot of time to just like I actually when I'm using it, I'm actually just using it mirroring the Mac now, which by the way is amazing. I'll use it for like having lots of windows open and doing research and all that kind of stuff. And I really I like it for all of that. I just don't have a lot of time to sit around and watch movies. I wish I did. I really wish I did. Yeah, I mean, I watched the submarine one.

Stephen Robles (13:22)
Hmm.

But the immersive movies are like 10 minutes. Max.

Jason Aten (13:33)
So like, it's not like I don't watch any of that stuff. I haven't watched the weekend's music video yet. I probably should do that, but.

Stephen Robles (13:33)
Yay!

I mean prepare to be a little scared. It's a little creepy at times. Just throwing that out there There's some shadowy figures, but you know that's the weekend anyway. That's a Jason a 10 daily Those are the three words we get no just kidding We're starting today. It is the 12 days of ship miss for opening I have to be very careful every time I say that as we're talking about it Open eyes 12 days of ship miss. This is what they have titled it because they're going to be announcing

Jason Aten (13:41)
Okay, it's good to know. Good to know.

Yeah.

No, you don't it's the same thing.

Stephen Robles (14:05)
all the things here at the end of the year. This is the Verge article, but OpenAI should be over the next 12 days, starting today, Thursday, December 5th. They're be talking about, Sora, their AI video generator. Maybe that will be publicly available, or maybe... Yeah.

Jason Aten (14:21)
Yeah, I think that's the plan that they're going to be putting the terrifying video, know, text to video generation where we just, still cannot get that people clapping for grandma singing happy birthday. I can't get it out of my head, Steven.

Stephen Robles (14:28)
What could... Yeah. it's terrifying. Yes, terrifying. There's that. So we're going to see lots of weird hands. I don't know if Andrew Edwards listened to this show. He's a YouTube creator. He shares AI videos all the time on threads and they're literally terrifying. And I'm just asking him, please stop. Please stop doing that. It's really horrifying. So anyway, we're to have some more of that with Sora AI. Likely the next reasoning model, whether that is O1 something or if it will...

Jason Aten (14:43)
Yeah, it's not a thing that should be existing in this world.

Stephen Robles (14:58)
They'll announce something about anyway 12 days. mean 12 days of announcement is a lot of days So I'm not really sure I'm sure some of those days is gonna be like well partnership with so-and-so, but we'll see ship miss We'll see what happens. I'll just talk about it next week

Jason Aten (15:10)
Yeah, we give Apple a hard time when it does like a keynote and we're like, did that really need to be an event? you know, when they, the Mac event or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Did we really need an event for that? And now we're gonna get 12 of those from opening ads. Like, did we need 12 events? Could you just not have done one thing? So, yeah, 12, yeah, they're gonna live stream 12 days in a row, which just feels like a YouTube gimmick, kinda.

Stephen Robles (15:16)
Could have been an email.

of this.

Yeah, because there's 12, it has 12 live streams. It's not even just like 12 press releases.

Mmm, so yeah, well next week. We'll talk about whatever they launched for the next seven days, and then we'll have more days after We'll see but one partnership. thought was Maybe terrifying I don't know opening I actually partnered with a weapons startup called and a rail on military AI this way they can integrate open AI and chat GPT into its Anti drone products. I don't like any of the words in this headline or what any of this is about I don't like the idea of a startup weapons company

Jason Aten (15:41)
Yes, I can't wait.

the

Stephen Robles (16:03)
Like, I feel like I didn't even know that that was the thing, although I guess, whatever. What was Tony Stark's one? You know, he did it.

Jason Aten (16:10)
yeah, right. I feel like you the one thing you don't want for this Washington Post refers to high tech military is the word hallucination. Right? What you really don't want is your lethal drone flying around hallucinating targets, whatever it might be like it. All of the things that we know are bad about AI are just not the things that we want in our military in any of that stuff.

Stephen Robles (16:23)
Mmm.

Mmm.

When I tried to read the article, maybe this is confidential, but I tried to find out like what exactly is the application for a chat bot or for OpenAI to be integrated into some drone thing. And I couldn't really find where they were saying what it would do. They were just saying that they're going to partner. So Stark Industries, of course, was the Stark Industries. Yeah, Tony Stark. So anyway, yeah, that's terrifying. So we'll see. We'll see what happens there. But 12 days of ship miss. Stay tuned. We're going to do that before we go to DeepMind.

Jason Aten (16:55)
Yes, of course, Tony Stark.

Stephen Robles (17:07)
Google's DeepMind and The Verge won subscription. I'll be curious your thoughts on that. The Verge adding actually a paid subscription and whether or not you subscribed, got save it. We have to share whether or not we subscribed in a second. But first, I want to thank our ongoing sponsor, a wonderful rogue Amoeba who makes audio hijack and loop back. Listen, you've heard about it before. If you've not tried audio hijack yet and you do anything with audio on your Mac, you need to get audio hijack.

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to get 20 % off. We love Audio Hijack here. So thank you to Rogamiva and Audio Hijack for sponsoring this episode and recording every single episode. All of them. There it is. And let's go to DeepMind. Okay, so I saw this. don't follow, I mean, Google has 18 different names for their like AI stuff. You got DeepMind, you got Gemini. What are some of the other ones? You got, you got Mollerian Curly. I don't know. So there's a bunch of names.

Jason Aten (19:12)
Yeah.

Stephen Robles (19:30)
I don't know, but DeepMind, this is interesting. So DeepMind, Google's AI research thing, they now have a model where you can give it a static image, just give it a picture, and DeepMind will actually create an entire interactive world, basically like a video game, that you can actually use a keyboard and mouse or controller to actually play this thing that it created. And there's actually a GIF here in the article from TechCrunch showing one of the things it created.

I find this fascinating because, you know, video game development, I don't know a ton about it, but I know it's very time consuming. I know like to create a video game, especially the open world, large scale, you know, I played a lot of Final Fantasy when I was younger, which is very like huge worlds. And it would take years for developer like game companies to make these games like Square Enix and all that. And so it just seems wild to me that an AI, you just give it a static image and it could generate an entirely interactive world.

Jason Aten (20:06)
Yeah.

Stephen Robles (20:27)
I wonder what this means for video game creation in the future. Where would this be even more expansive and huge games, which I haven't even played recent games, but I know, what is it, God of War and some of these other games, Elden Ring, they're just massive, massive games and that was all human created. Just imagine that when you insert some of this AI. I don't know how good it is, but it seems like an amazing thing. Seems cool.

Jason Aten (20:37)
Hmm.

Yeah, well, and I just remember Google Gemini is the consumer facing product. It used to be called Bard. Remember the time when it used to be Bard and then they they read the whole point was they rebranded everything as Gemini. DeepMind was a company that they actually are research lab that they actually bought. And I think it was like 2014, maybe ish. And they were they were sort of they operated very separately for a very long time. And recently, a lot of well, I think all of Google's AI effort to

Stephen Robles (20:56)
Right. Boy, bard. That's right. Yeah, I do remember that.

Hmm.

Jason Aten (21:18)
been sort of unified under DeepMind. I think I could be wrong. if any of our listeners know, please, I'm sure you'll let us know. That's great. DeepMind is sort of like the AI technology research lab within Google, whereas Gemini is the product. Right. And so there's a lot of overlap there in terms of technology from DeepMind might find its way in. But also they're releasing things that are just like

Stephen Robles (21:32)
Right, right.

Jason Aten (21:43)
It's kind of like chat GBT is the product that open AI has, but then there's also Sora and there's all these other things going on. And so I think, you know, I think stuff like this is really interesting in terms of the, like the thing right now AI does really well is it can help you. It's fantastic. I hate that.

Stephen Robles (22:00)
Summarize your notifications.

Sorry. Jason's writing something down. Quit the show. That's just quit the show.

Jason Aten (22:06)
I hate it. Anyway, I'm looking at my list because I'm like, yeah, right there. Let me summarize this notification for you. We're going to do the breakup one. Right. Unfortunately, you've been dumped anyway. But I just think I do think it one, it's great that that companies and labs like deep bind continue to do this. And two, I think it's going to be really interesting to see how they actually get used because a lot of these are still sort of it's kind of again, it's like the concept car. It's like, here's a cool thing.

Stephen Robles (22:18)
Jason quits.

Yes.

Jason Aten (22:35)
No, you can't use it. Like, what do mean? You can't use this. You can't do this. No, it's not even real. We're never gonna make this.

Stephen Robles (22:37)
can't drive it doesn't have an engine that's yeah that's the thing so we'll see I've also I keep hearing the you know I hear they talk about on the verge cast and other places about like how all these companies the models are not advancing fast as fast as they predicted and so now there's like that slowdown we've talked about it maybe it's a bubble and stuff so I just I'm just curious I'm curious where the ship miss is gonna go is is opening I gonna hit the the ship miss the fan

Jason Aten (23:03)
Well, I have an interesting thought about this, which is so what has it been almost exactly two years since chat GPT came on the scene, right? So two years ago is when it came out. But open AI is not a two year old company, right? They've been working on it. And even when they released chat GPT, they had no idea that it was going to become the fastest growing consumer product in the history of everything, right? They didn't know. And so when you just look at the

Stephen Robles (23:12)
Yeah, 3.5, yeah.

Right.

ever.

Jason Aten (23:30)
the trajectory at that point and we went from 3.5 to 4.0 again, the name's totally meaningless because they don't make any sense. I'm sure they make sense to someone, but not 4.04 and then the letter O like what are we even doing anyway? So like if you if you think that it's going to go at that same pace like well, how long did it take to get to 3.5? How long do like I think it's just we have a warp perspective of that and I do think that there is a limiting factor to.

Stephen Robles (23:51)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Aten (23:58)
these models that we just, that maybe they weren't anticipating and I think that that ceiling is lower. Like I think people genuinely thought that LLMs were the thing that we're going to get to AGI. And I think it's equally possible that that's just not true. That is not going to, that they fundamentally are limited in their capability because of what they are. They're basically like predictive engine, right? Like, and so, yeah, I mean, sure. It's a bummer that we don't have like chat GPT or, you know, GPT-5 or GPT-7, but like,

Also, we only get one iPhone a year. I guess my point is, what is the cadence that we're supposed to be getting these things? I don't think we know. We just don't have enough historical data points to be like, yeah, this is the trend line.

Stephen Robles (24:39)
Well, and the cadence felt like the sharpest hockey stick curve up from like 3.5 to 4, because it was like, you know, less than a year, it seemed like I was trying to find an article with like the history of open AI and half the articles were paywalled. here's a, here's a Britannica encyclopedia article that I'll put, but open AI started in 2015. And so yeah, nine years old. And you could see the founding years such and such Elon Musk's in there.

that it was November, 2022 that open AI launched GPT model at GPT three. And so yeah, two years. Well, last month is we're in December. I don't even know where November went, but yeah.

Jason Aten (25:19)
Well, if you think about it, they started in 2015. They released GPT-3 in 2020. They released chat GPT in 2022 and 3.5 followed shortly after that. And it was what was in 2023. And then they released GPT-4 also in 2023. So it's like, but from 2020 to 2023, that's three years to go from GPT-3 to GPT-4. So

Stephen Robles (25:32)
Hmm, yes.

Jason Aten (25:46)
I don't like I again, I don't know anything about how these things are done. Like I really don't my son asked me all the time and I'm like, I don't know ask GPG, ask chat GPG how it works. I don't know. Right? Like, it'll tell you. So I don't know. I don't think that we're that like, listen, time is a weird thing with open AI. In the span of one week, its CEO was fired and rehired last Thanksgiving. So like, we don't know anything. Who knows how much that might have set them back to watch.

Stephen Robles (25:53)
That's such a pity.

Yeah.

It's weird.

yeah, that too. I'm glad I would have to deal with that this past Thanksgiving. It was a tech-free Thanksgiving. all right, speaking of... Actually, no, there's no transition there from Thanksgiving. There's nothing there. The Verge, which is 13 years old, has now added a subscription model. Now, let me hear the nuts and bolts. So, much of the Verge will remain free.

Jason Aten (26:13)
No kidding. I know it was nice.

There's no no way to transition. Yeah.

Stephen Robles (26:38)
that you can read in their ads and things like that. But their subscription, which is $7 a month or $50 a year, you get things like access to the two newsletters. I forget the name, but also I think less ads, they said, and the ads will be better if you do see an ad. But you also, right? Isn't that they said?

Jason Aten (26:59)
It just isn't that's funny. If you pay us, we'll give you better ads.

Stephen Robles (27:02)
I mean, less and better. Listen, I get, sure. But also full RSS feed access, which is great. So like full articles in their RSS feed. And yeah, they're basically talking about like, this is a way for them to be sustainable support in the world of Google Zero, where, you know, Google search does not really point to websites anymore. And yeah, they said 55,000 come to the site every single day for the past year, which...

awesome for them. And yeah, so this is their subscription model. And you know, The Verge I think was, I mean, one of the few, I feel like all the Apple websites, know, look at 9to5, MacRumors, Apple Insider. I don't know if there's, they might have subscription models, I'm not sure, but largely not. Like you just go to the website, you you just read the articles and it's all ad supported. And as you've seen over the last couple of years, I mean, there's been many publications that have had to gone away because they couldn't sustain the...

sustain it financially, you know the unofficial Apple weblog famously, which is now an AI content farm and other Website I forget some of them now, but so this is the verge saying listen. This is our this is their transition to this model sustainability can't you know all that I Don't personally subscribe to a lot of news publications. I do it news plus which I can now read like Wall Street Journal articles and Yeah, I do that

Jason Aten (28:27)
Which is great, yep.

Stephen Robles (28:29)
And I subscribe to a number of podcasts because I like supporting them and getting out free versions. don't, but I don't like, don't subscribe to the New York times or the Washington post. And I've ran into several paywalls trying to load pages for this podcast. And I had to do the high distracting items just so could see the headline. But I signed up for the verge of subscription, for, for a variety of reasons, but I'll get into that. I'm curious. What, what, did you think when they announced this? And then did you actually.

Jason Aten (28:42)
Yeah.

So it's not surprising to me personally, don't like this is I'm in a weirdly conflicted place, right? I write for a publication that does have both freely available content as well as a paywall. like that's great. There's one of the, okay, three things I don't like about it. One, I don't love that Neely is like, are the rationales? And this is not.

Stephen Robles (29:05)
Yeah.

Jason Aten (29:20)
shade against him necessarily. But it's like, so many of you like the verge that we've actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. So it's like, so we're going to just put up a paywall. Okay, I don't know, like, I feel like that's like, what is a shocking number? Three people like, and they're like, we're shocked. Anyone wants to give us money for this? I don't even know what that means. Secondly, this is what every site does, but they're going to use a dynamic paywall. And so essentially, what they're doing is, when people hit their website, they are

keeping track of how often they come and how many articles they click on and how long they stay on the page and decide dynamically whether this person is likely to pay. And I sort of feel like it's a weird thing. It's kind of like if you walked into the grocery store and you were one of its best customers and they're like, well, we're going to make you pay. But if you just wandered in one day randomly off the street and you were really thirsty, they would just hand you a gallon of milk and you could go. But wait, they're not a...

Stephen Robles (30:00)
right.

Fair.

Jason Aten (30:18)
They're not a loyal customer. Like, why are they free? So there's a weird dynamic there where it's like, we're going to capitalize on our most loyal customers and make them be the ones that pay, which again, I'm not saying there's a better alternative. It just feels like when you think about it that way from a customer experience, just, it kind of feels weird to me. I don't know. And then the third thing, I think it's interesting the way that they have sort of broken it down, right? They're saying their homepage will still be free. The core news post, the decoder interview transcripts.

Stephen Robles (30:22)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Jason Aten (30:47)
that stuff will remain free. And then it's not 100 % clear what else will like that you'll end up paying for. Like, do you, how do they determine that in terms of what's behind the paywall? I think in general, think paywalls are probably the, the, the best business solution for most publishers. It's just so hard. It's like, there's this weird threshold. So like, if you look at a site like Mac stories, they have a membership.

Stephen Robles (30:57)
Right.

Right.

Jason Aten (31:16)
But you can read the site for free. Their membership includes other things. Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, you can listen to this whole podcast for free and there may sometimes there's ads in it or you can pay some amount of money to Stephen and I know, I know, I'm just kidding. I just totally get it. Totally kidding. Sorry. I've just seen if just. And it's so fun. I'm like, what is Stephen? this is what he's talking to me today. Anyway, anyway, my butt.

Stephen Robles (31:18)
Right.

bonus content.

It's both of us, I send you Apple Pay every month, get outta here. You're not putting that on me. I send Jason random Apple cashes at midnight when I get a deposit.

Jason Aten (31:45)
But then if you pay you get extra content, it's not like parts of the actual Like you can if you pay chapters 3 7 & 9 are now available to you But if you don't pay like it's just I don't know it's kind of weird and so I feel like then there's this like you have the New York Times you have Bloomberg you have all these it does get really expensive by the way pro tip I don't know if they're still going on but around Christmas time even publishers do Black Friday sales I saw a thing where you could subscribe. I think it was like

a dollar a week for like the Washington Post compared to you know $35 a month or something like that. So if there's publications like that that you do listen to on a regular basis, you might want to like take advantage of those.

Stephen Robles (32:26)
So did you subscribe?

Jason Aten (32:28)
I did not, however, I probably will because I already paid for command line. I paid for Alex East's newsletter and I think it's gonna end up being cheaper to pay for the whole site.

Stephen Robles (32:33)
yes.

So it was command line and then Tom Warren's newsletter. then just, I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs here because it says our original reporting reviews, which I think is interesting, you know, like iPhone review, iPad review, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall. This is their words. Many, many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we'll ask you to pay.

Jason Aten (32:41)
Yes.

Stephen Robles (33:04)
Subscribers will also get full access to both command line and notepad our two premium newsletters then they said I'm delighted to say that subscribing will get rid of all the chum boxes. I do appreciate how Neely is like pretty harsh on ads himself

Jason Aten (33:18)
All those terrible ads that we put on our website. It is funny. Yeah, you're right. He's very self aware about this.

Stephen Robles (33:22)
Yeah, but you know he's He's admittedly like yeah chum boxes and third-party programmatic ads Cut down the overall number of ad units and only fill what's left with high quality ads Directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster lighter and more beautiful Okay, and then subscribers will also get access to full text RSS feeds and early access to some big ideas about the future of media So vague whatever there So I don't know

I don't do the newsletters. Like I don't subscribe to those newsletters anyway. But the full text RSS is actually what got me because honestly that feels like, you know, I'm paying for like, even if you like, when you pay for this show, you get an ad free version and bonus episodes. If you do it through memberful, you get an RSS feed and like, you can do whatever you want with that RSS feed. can put in whatever podcast app you want. You can run it through.

shortcuts and download every mp3 file and save it your computer if you want. Like it is an open method. Like you get the open side of the podcast basically. And when I saw that they were doing full text in the RSS feed, like that's also a risk. Like someone can just post those RSS feed links on Reddit and anyone can just download it. But I think the verge and Neelai understands its audience enough where it knows that that's important and might be a selling feature. And honestly, that was it for me.

And I thought in like in my own use case, if I don't know if they do, you could tell me, but if the New York times basically said, pay for the New York times and we'll give you an RSS feed of full articles. So you never have to visit the website and you could just use an RSS reader. I might do that because that's, that is how I consume news. Like I, I open reader. I look at all the articles. I save whatever ones to our notion document for the show.

And then that's just how I do it. And that was compelling for me. Plus you get like a free magazine or whatever when you did the year. So I did the year. And I was like, you know what? That's enough of a bonus. $50 a year for that. And I do read, I'm on the verge a lot. I do appreciate a lot of their reporting. I do think that dynamic meter paywall, like you were saying, is a little weird. I wonder how you would feel about this. Like should they have done something like the New York Times where you get like five free articles a month?

Jason Aten (35:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephen Robles (35:46)
And that is like the only thing they track that's like a different kind of metering, I guess.

Jason Aten (35:51)
Yeah, and I don't. Here's what you don't know. Did somebody else get four free a month and somebody else gets nine free a month? I I mean, I don't know. Like you might just be pegged your profiles like we'll give this guy fry and then we see how often you come back. And if you come back and you use all five the next we're definitely going to like try. I just I should have said like it does make sense that the people who use the site the most would be the ones who A would be the most willing to support it and be like you're consuming the most content.

Stephen Robles (35:58)
Well... Right.

We're out.

Jason Aten (36:18)
So like I get that it just on the other hand also feels kind of strange. It's like, but if I don't come very much, I could have read that article for free. It's like kind of weird like that. It's not, it's not just based on the content. A is free content. B is, is pay. It's like content day is free. And for some people, content B may also be free because they only come to the website once every seven months. And so we're not going to try to show them a paywall. So that's just, it just feels, it feels a little bit weird. I was going to tell you that if you subscribe to the New York times and you turn on notifications,

Stephen Robles (36:19)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Aten (36:48)
The home screen of your iPhone basically becomes an RSS reader because it will just be completely full of notifications. Completely full of notifications. Like I'll be like, I have 77 notifications and no kidding, 76 of them are New York Times articles. Listen, I need to know, like, because I often will write about some of these things.

Stephen Robles (36:55)
I don't... I don't want it.

Bye.

Why do you keep them on?

Yeah, listen, I am not s-

Jason Aten (37:13)
because they group them and this is the one time, this is the one time in my opinion, the notification summaries are good. Because it'll be like South Korea declared martial law, Trump appoints so and so to this and something else happened. And I'm like, great, that's so good at that.

Stephen Robles (37:21)
Mmm.

And it's just like the top headline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't listen. I'm not one if you do this like Jason, no shade. But I would remember I would sometimes see my dad's lock screen like we would be in the car or whatever he's driving. And I look down at his phone and I just see like dozens of news headline notifications. And I'm like, what is happening? What I can't I could not handle the stress. So no, I.

Jason Aten (37:50)
Okay.

Stephen Robles (37:55)
I don't do that. I would not turn on notifications. I think I have notifications on for Apple News, like top top stories, but like whatever the send me a notification once every other month setting, which is not really a setting, that, that that's about what I feel like I get. what, so I'm curious then like even looking to the future. So the verge felt like, and Neely talks about this all the time, like they really have bet on themselves and their website as the thing, which is something that

many other brands I think can't or have not or have failed at like you know BuzzFeed or whatever they thought the social media game would would be their saving grace and so I think obviously like looking to the future is this the model because I someone asked us I don't know if it was in a community or whatever they were like I want to start a blog did we talk about this last week they were like yeah we did talk about it was in the bonus episode or the main episode I forget

Jason Aten (38:49)
Yeah, we did. Yep. Yep. I think it was in the bonus episode.

Stephen Robles (38:53)
It was in the bonus episode, but someone asks, you should, you should, you should support this show and you can go listen to the bonus episode. He was a bonus episode, but even for some, for a brand today to like want to start a website, I would not, I would not just because like for discoverability and you're going to have to be on other platforms anyway. Like if you start a website today, it's just not going to be found unless you promote it yourself on whatever and all the places you can promote it, like social media is going to down rank it. So you have to pay for advertising, whatever. like,

Jason Aten (38:57)
Yes, we're not going to tell you what we said. You have to go pay.

Stephen Robles (39:23)
Obviously all the mainstream news publications, Washington Post, New York Times are on this model. Now the verge, like, is this the future? It feels a little bit, honestly, like the cord cutting of like 15, 10 years ago where it was like, you know, this is going to be great, the internet. And now it's like, well, now I have to pay for every streaming service and I'm paying more now to watch content than I did paying for cable. it feels like it's not sustainable, right? Like 10 years from now, people are not going to pay 15 different

news things like maybe they'll pay for Apple News Plus and one other one. I don't know like what I don't know it just feels like every site can't do this like I can't imagine nine to five Mac rumors Apple Insider, Mac Store, well Mac stores has a subscription but not for its content like I can't imagine them all having a paywall is that the future?

Jason Aten (40:11)
Well, I think what's interesting about that is that if you think about it, what makes people mad about paywalls is usually there's a article, an article that you want to read at a site, right? And you can't because it's paywalled. And this happens a lot for like, for example, Bloomberg, although you don't pro tip, you don't have to subscribe to Bloomberg. You just need to put Mac, Mac rumors and nine to five Mac in your RSS feeder because they'll just summarize them for you like every single one. But

Stephen Robles (40:23)
Right.

Right, right.

Jason Aten (40:41)
the so there was a time when you would subscribe to your local newspaper because that was your source of news and everything you were going to get came from that. Right. And it came right to your house. You just paid your 40 bucks a month or whatever it was. And that was the way it worked. That's that's not how anyone consumes anything nowadays. And so, everyone like I want to read this article from here and I want to read this article from there. But no, I'm not going to pay for 13 sites. And so I don't think that that part of it is sustainable unless some of these sites and like

Stephen Robles (40:50)
one source.

Jason Aten (41:10)
The verge is great for their topic area. But if you want to know about politics, you then also have to pay for the Washington Post or, you know, Politico or Slate or something else like, you know, I don't know, maybe Vox Media needs to do a bundle like and you can get like all of their different things. But I'm sure someone's already thought of that. But I just I don't think I don't know that it's not sustainable because certainly the ad business has become not sustainable. And Ben Thompson talks about this a lot when you're talking about starting a website.

He one of the things he attributes his success first of all, no one else was doing what he was doing at the time but also links had value on Twitter at the time and so if you had a big our audience you could get a massive free distribution and You could generate a huge following as a result of that. That's just simply not true You can build a huge audience on on Twitter or X and I'm sure you've seen this like you could post a link to one of your videos How much of the traffic do you get actually comes from X like I'm gonna guess less than 5 %

Stephen Robles (41:53)
Right.

Almost none, Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Jason Aten (42:10)
Yeah, when I look at the statistics of articles, like almost nothing comes from, and that's actually always been true. Facebook was better than they just literally shut it off one day. They're like, nope, not doing it anymore. So.

Stephen Robles (42:21)
Right. What is interesting about YouTube, which is why I've, you know, aimed my efforts there, is it does feel like the one place where if you grow an audience on the platform, you can then use that to move people somewhere else. Like, I started a community mainly for shortcuts and stuff for my personal channel. And like, I have, I think, 400 plus people over there. And like, 400 is not...

Thousands, but it's like 400 people like who are in a community that are like email address everything and that came directly from YouTube like I don't think I've even posted about it on social media and so YouTube feels like the one place where if you do grow an audience you can like Steer it away and like this is why affiliate revenue is still a thing for youtubers because people can click links in the video descriptions and buy stuff on Amazon or wherever so I Don't like that feels like the one the one place

to do that still. like TikTok is not. It's hilarious when I see TikTokers are like, I would like to tell you where to follow me, but I can't because then TikTok is not going to show this video to anyone. And it's like, what world are we living in? Like.

Jason Aten (43:31)
Well, and it that's because all of these platforms realized like for example, twitter Yeah, it's it's terrible not terrible It sucks that they have made it so the links don't have they don't doesn't transfer value that way But that's because they realize like we're creating an enormous distribution channel for all these creators and we're not getting anything from it and if anything the thing that twitter has never been good at is Making its own money, right? It's just not good at that. But even youtube though youtube is weird because for example, there's a

There's a YouTuber who does travel stuff that I really like. And I watch almost every single one of his videos. They literally never show up in my feed. They never. I watch every single one. Now, I'm not subscribed to that channel because I'm only subscribed to three channels. One of them is this guy, Steven Robles, who does shortcut stuff. One of his primary technology, right? And the other one is honestly our church. we, that's it. Three channels. That's it. Three.

Stephen Robles (44:09)
Home to... Really?

Thank you. Thank you.

That's three channels. That's it.

Jason Aten (44:30)
So, but you would think that YouTube would know. So, but on the other hand, the other day I clicked on one Letterman clip from 20 years ago and it was, Adina Menzel singing Defying Gravity when she was on there. And I'm not kidding you, every video in this feed is now like Defying Gravity, Wicked 20th Anniversary. just like, I watched one video. I watched every single one of this person's videos. Like, I don't understand.

Stephen Robles (44:46)
Yes.

It does... yeah. It does feel like everyone's tweaking their algorithm a little too hard for all the things.

Jason Aten (44:59)
I'm like, you might be interested in this now. Let me show you more. I'm like, no, no, no, I just watched the one. Just it, that's it, one video.

Stephen Robles (45:03)
Right. I watched Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in one press junket. Please don't fill my home tab with all these things. So anyway, I think of all the websites, I've subscribed to The Verge and I'm glad I got the RSS feed. You know what I mean? That was valuable enough for me. And I feel like their pricing is more reasonable than the big ones. I don't want to pay $30 a month for something.

Jason Aten (45:12)
Anyway.

Well, and that's because Bloomberg's who charges $35 a month or whatever, their audience are like people who are news junkies in business, especially business and finance news junkies. And so they'll pay that much money. Because the thing about like Bloomberg, historically you used to pay what $100,000 for like a Bloomberg terminal to get news stories published there first, right? Yeah, and so it's like, that makes sense, but the version, their audience are.

Stephen Robles (45:36)
Yeah, I know, it's Bloomberg.

Right.

Right.

a few minutes faster than, yeah.

Jason Aten (45:59)
nerds who really love and are passionate about things. And it's like, yeah, we were willing to pay you, but no, not not 35 bucks.

Stephen Robles (46:03)
Right.

Yeah, well, the last thing I'll say is I do. I'm glad that there is a publication like the verge that is still trying to stand on. have a website because it does feel like even with all the platforms and the algorithms, having a website, even personally, like I think about mine, like I still want that home on the Internet. That's my domain that I can move around.

And while it felt like that was going away for a minute, it feels like it's coming back. that. And if you want a place on the web, you should create it, like don't build it on someone else's platform. And I've been so like a basic Apple guy the other day. He posted like the same. I posted something and he posted a reply and it was across all four networks. It was X, Macedon, threads and blue sky. And I told him, I've liked this post on every platform. And he said something like, I hate this moment of social media.

I agree. I agree and I've been so close to like What like I am doing this because there are people who follow me on these platforms and I want to communicate with them But then I also look at our community. I'm like, well, there's several hundred people here Should I just post here like I would on social media and would people find that valuable? And like or should I create a micro dot blog? Like I don't know if you've heard of that service like you can pay five dollars a month It is a website, but you could basically treat it like it's your own social media feed But I'm like who's gonna go to my micro dot blog every day

Like I know people still go to daringfireball.net every day. Like I guess they just like load the homepage. I don't know how many, I don't know if people had the bandwidth to do that for multiple sites. Like would people go to, and I remember I used to do that. Like when I first started following tech journalism, it was like 2007, eight, nine, and I would have like N-Gadget, Gizmodo. I would have like Boy Genius Report and CNET or whatever. Like I had whatever the four or five like big ones were.

And literally throughout the day, would remember like my Safari tabs would be open and I would hit refresh on all four or five of them. And I would just see what was new at the top. And honestly, now in retrospect, I feel pretty nostalgic for those days. That felt like that was actually kind of great. And like it was exciting when a new story posted because it was only like a few times a day. And now like with the flood of information, it's like, I don't know, should we go back to that? I don't know. I guess I'm having an existential crisis as a content creator. Okay. All right. Please.

Jason Aten (48:16)
Yeah.

Okay, I'm gonna solve it for you. This is good. gonna, we don't, it's a slow news week, so this is fine. We have a minute or two. Here's the thing. I know, I think I see what's happening, which, okay. First of all, big picture. The challenge is you can build your, you can build your thing on a platform, which is what you've done on YouTube. That's great. And the advantage that you get, you don't own your audience on YouTube, but YouTube handles all the distribution and discovery for you, right? So that's, and that's huge. For starting from zero,

Stephen Robles (48:33)
Yeah.

Yes.

Jason Aten (48:57)
it is almost impossible to start from zero and not do it on something like Substack or YouTube or something like that. Like it's just TikTok, whatever. Yes, yes.

Stephen Robles (49:08)
And you make money. that's also a big part of it. Like, YouTube, like, you can monetize and it's like real money. Like,

Jason Aten (49:12)
But the reason is that they're handling that distribution, they're handling that monetization, and they're handling the, most importantly, they're handling the discovery part of it. Because distribution on the internet, you can solve that problem with like 15 bucks a month paying for hosting at WordPress. Like the distribution part's fine, it's the discovery piece of it. So there was a time when social media, mostly Twitter and Facebook to some extent, were discovery and distribution venues, and they just aren't anymore. And so when you are using social media,

Stephen Robles (49:40)
They're not.

Jason Aten (49:42)
You just need to decide where's my audience that I care about and it's not at all four places because otherwise and I don't mean you specifically Steve and I just mean in general the whole if what you're doing is I'm just going to broadcast all these because there might be someone there. YouTube's already handling that for you. They're already handling the discovery part of it for you. Stop worrying about that piece of it because again and you have good you have good sized audiences on these platforms, but you don't have a million people on them. So just the law of large numbers says

If you're only going to get a 3 % conversion, even if it's 10,000 people, that's just not enough to care about at this. Like, cause what is, what's 300 people views on a YouTube video gets you? Like it's not, it doesn't move the needle at all. It's like not worth it. So what you just described makes a whole lot more sense thinking about in terms of like, this is where I just engage with the people that are already a part of my audience. And I, and so it's never going to be like, because that creates stickiness and then you can like, that's the thing, what you just described, makes a lot of sense.

YouTube allows you to build up that audience. Then if you don't want to be beholden to YouTube, you have to like translate that to that's what like, that's why you have all these people. Why does MKBHD sell an app and sell sneakers and do these things? It's because in the long run, those are his customers, not YouTube's customers. And he can build a whole new thing and then he can make a lot more money. You see TikTokers doing the same thing. Instagram creators that like most of them are using like even if you made $0 on YouTube, but you could build enough of an audience to then move it somewhere else.

Stephen Robles (50:56)
right.

Jason Aten (51:08)
That's the play that makes a lot of sense.

Stephen Robles (51:12)
Okay, so what I hear you saying is, I'll just continue posting on blue sky threads, X and mastodon.

Jason Aten (51:17)
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying pick the one where your people are and not worry about the rest of them.

Stephen Robles (51:23)
It's hard. It's hard because as someone who is trying to build a business basically online to feel like it's like the promise of potential. Like you could potentially reach thousands of people and I might have a stupid thread that goes viral because I didn't charge my magic mouse but then I'm like this engagement is just people being mad at me. Do I want that?

Jason Aten (51:48)
Yeah, and did any of them follow you? And did any of them click on one of your YouTube videos? Because you don't get paid anything on threats, right?

Stephen Robles (51:55)
No, no, they still haven't monetized me. And also, yeah.

Jason Aten (51:56)
But even if they did, you're not gonna get paid anything on threads. threads doesn't have any monetization. Instagram does.

Stephen Robles (52:02)
I mean, Threads does have monetization, I just don't have it, like other people do. But one... No, but you can get paid for view, like Threads will pay you for views. Well, fair, yeah, fair. But I will say, Threads will give you notifications of like, so-and-so followed you from this post, which I think plays on the exact feeling that you just said, like Threads is trying to tell you, you are growing an audience by this weird thread you just posted, so keep doing it.

Jason Aten (52:06)
But threads doesn't have ads.

That doesn't seem sustainable until they started adding ads, right?

Stephen Robles (52:32)
It's like this weird, I don't know. I don't know what to do. I'm with Basic Apple guy, I don't like this moment of social media and what to do.

Jason Aten (52:39)
I agree and I mean the nice thing is with the exception of X you can post on the other three major ones just using one app like croissant or whatever like that and that's great and there's the Federation things happening and I don't understand any of it and it's apparently good for the economy or something or whatever the environment or I don't even know what it is but I don't know like it's supposed to be a good thing great I don't it's actually probably exactly the opposite because there's more servers running in different places but all I'm trying to say is like yes freedom good whatever but I just don't think it's

Stephen Robles (52:47)
Yeah, yeah.

The internet. The environment. Federation is good for the environment.

Jason Aten (53:08)
the amount of effort, like think about the amount of effort that goes into like the friction every time you're thinking like, where should I post this? Well, I just posted in four places. It's like why the same 17 people like the post on all four platforms. They would have just followed you wherever you went. So.

Stephen Robles (53:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, well you can follow me at micro.blog slash. That's going to be the next post you see.

Jason Aten (53:28)
But really, if you were going to tell someone where to find, wouldn't you just rather say, please go find my YouTube channel.

Stephen Robles (53:33)
Yes. Yes, I tell people that. I also like saying my website domain because it's funny and people will remember it. And it's very short. Beard.fm. I think that's funny.

Jason Aten (53:42)
Sure.

Yep, but yeah, I think it's amazing. just think we tell people all of these other things when really like why do I tell people where I'm at on Twitter? Why don't I just say just Google my name and go to the ink pay article page? Cuz like I really care about the only the only one of those places that the audience matters for you is the one where views translate to dollars So who cares the other part? Here's the thing though

Stephen Robles (54:00)
for it.

Alright.

Jason Aten (54:12)
100,000 YouTube subscribers, that is an amazing accomplishment and that's great. And then people leave comments and stuff, but it doesn't feel like an interactive audience, right? Because it's it's asynchronous. You post a video, people then watch it over a long tail period of time. Whereas on Twitter or on Mastodon or wherever it's like, I can have a conversation with them. like, yeah, but you shouldn't be wasting all your time having these conversations.

Stephen Robles (54:21)
Sure.

Feels.

Well, listen, the other problem is Googling is for old people. Okay. That's an article we need to talk about. So here's what we're going to do. We're talk about that. FBI and messaging. We're going to have to do another lightning round, which is never really in the lightning round, but we're going to try it. We're going to try it. But before we do everything, two very special sponsors, because Notion has sponsored this episode. And I can't, I didn't even find my tab. Where's my tab? Here it is. I clicked so many other things. Notion, we're using Notion right now for our show notes. We use it every week. Jason and I collaborate.

Jason Aten (54:38)
Yeah, okay.

Stephen Robles (55:02)
Over here in a Notion document, every episode has its own document. We keep all of our notes there. And Notion is just one of the best tools for keeping track of your work, for your personal stuff, for projects. And Notion AI is an incredible tool built into Notion. So Notion will combine your notes, your docs, your projects in one space. That's simple, beautifully designed. That's great. They now have shortcuts actions. You know, if you follow this, probably like shortcuts. And you can now add stuff to your notes pages through shortcuts. But...

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We're going to search all of that with the Notion AI. And Notion AI is connected to multiple knowledge sources. So it uses things like ChatGPT4 and Clawed to chat with you about different topics. Plus there's unlike other specialized tools or legacy suites, you bounce between different apps. Notion is just one place and you can just do it all there because of its flexibility. Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies. We may not be a Fortune 500 company, but we're a top 100 podcast, enough podcast. And we use Notion for this show.

So try Notion for free. You just try it for free. Jason and I use it for free. It's free. And when you go to Notion.com slash primary technology, that's all lowercase letters, Notion.com slash primary technology to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. And Notion is free, so you should try it. Notion.com slash primary technology. Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. And while you're planning, you're probably going to get hungry, let's be honest.

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Jason Aten (57:50)
Yeah. I think I talked about it before, but I'll talk about it again because it was just that good. But they were these bacon burger cheeseburgers or bacon bourbon cheeseburger, a bacon burger cheeseburger doesn't anyway. Bacon bourbon bourbon bacon cheeseburger. They were very good, Steven. Listen, they were very good. Apparently I had one for breakfast and I can't think straight now. Too much bourbon.

Stephen Robles (57:54)
Please do, just do it.

That sounds wonderful. Bacon bourbon cheese. There you go.

Sounds good. Yes.

I love it. That's it. And also, I mean, I'm looking right here on the HelloFresh homepage. Does everything bagel? Looks amazing. I that looks good.

Jason Aten (58:17)
yeah, they sent us those too. We haven't actually baked them yet, but yeah, and then you can bake them. don't have to. Well, the thing about a bagel is that get to like boil them or something or whatever. don't know how they I don't know how they make bagels, but these you can just bake them. Yeah, that's great.

Stephen Robles (58:24)
Yeah, something weird with bagels here.

You just bake, bake the bagels. They look like good bagels, almost like New York bagels. We've done HelloFresh and the kids like being able to be involved in the recipe and they're easy to follow so they can do it with you. It's a fun family activity if you like doing that too. So get 10 free meals at HelloFresh.com slash free primary. A little different link there. And that's applied across seven boxes. New subscribers only, varies by plan. But that's 10 free HelloFresh meals. Just go to HelloFresh.com slash free.

Primary it's that's hello fresh America's number one meal kit. I don't know why I sounded like Batman there at the end I don't know. But anyway, listen googling is for old people. You said people should Google your name. Listen That's only old people doing that and this was an article from the Wall Street Journal And talking about demographics and Google search and it's basically what we've been talking about for months now It's just like younger demographics. They're just using Google less and less and honestly

Jason Aten (59:02)
Hmm. I don't know either.

Stephen Robles (59:23)
Because my kids, they don't have like open access to the internet, especially my younger kids, and but they want to search for things and so they use they use the shortcut.

Jason Aten (59:30)
think what you mean is they don't have unrestricted access to the internet. We don't let them use the open internet. We've created our own here at the Roblox household. Okay. You have access to Homecat and you have access to Apple Music and that's okay.

Stephen Robles (59:34)
That's correct. That's correct.

They use the intranet as the old school. We have an intranet. It's only my YouTube channel. Anytime they open Safari, it just goes directly to my YouTube channel. That's all it does. Auto plays every video. That's really how I got all the views. But yeah, demographics studies, whatever. More and more, they're saying it's a thing for old people. And yeah, younger people just using TikTok and perplexity or whatever to search for things. Yeah, I still am frustrated by...

Jason Aten (59:50)
That's amazing.

Stephen Robles (1:00:09)
Google search most of the time. resolved now to like lean into the AI overview sometime and I'm like, this is giving me unanswered. Am I just tired enough to not have to visit other websites that I'll just take this AI overview and say sure, but I don't know. It's for old people apparently.

Jason Aten (1:00:27)
I don't have much to say because apparently I'm an old person, although I did switch my default search engine away from Google. apparently, apparently that's I'm just reinforcing it.

Stephen Robles (1:00:33)
Right. You're young. You're young. I don't know why I put that Craig Federighi video in this article talking about Google.

Jason Aten (1:00:40)
Well, it's actually, yeah, I don't know. It's just cross promotion.

Stephen Robles (1:00:44)
Yeah, that's something anyway, I you subscribe to my micro dot blog anyway So this was also this was interesting news so the FBI is encouraging or urging Americans to use encrypted apps because there's been a Chinese bad actor basically Chinese infiltration that have infiltrated AT &T Verizon and Lumen Technologies and are able to access messages across those platforms and so the FBI

is encouraging Americans to use anti-encrypted apps, which I'm linking to John Gruber's article because this one paragraph, it just makes me upset. John Gruber says it's a clunk. It's a clunker of a paragraph. This is John Gruber talking, a clunker of a paragraph from the NBC News story. This is from the NBC article. Quote, privacy advocates have long advocated. I'm not a writer, Jason, but that feels clunky already. Would you write something like that? I feel like.

Jason Aten (1:01:24)
can't see what the, I can't even see what it says.

What? Except.

Stephen Robles (1:01:44)
Yes?

Jason Aten (1:01:45)
I think what you just said was something along the lines like, I don't, we're at the playback of the tape, I don't remember, but you basically just said this, you did the same thing. You're like, there's been an infiltration by some infiltrators who have infiltrated these things. Okay, fair point. That's true. It's not etched in stone. It's just, no.

Stephen Robles (1:01:57)
Listen, but I'm I'm speaking. This is a podcast. Okay, like I'm writing, you know, Not writing this down Exactly. This is this is NBC news. You know what mean? They have editors over there. No one's editing this

Jason Aten (1:02:07)
Yeah, no, I do agree that that is not the way that should be worked.

Stephen Robles (1:02:11)
There's no editor between this mouth and this microphone, you know what saying? It's just going straight there. Privacy advocates have long advocated using end-to-end encrypted apps. Signal and WhatsApp automatically implement end-to-end encryption in both calls and messages. Google Messages and iMessage also can encrypt calls and texts end-to-end. So much is wonky about this paragraph. Yes, Signal and WhatsApp, they have encryption. Google Messages, like...

What even is that? Like what are they even talking about? Which is just ridiculous. And as John Gruber points out, there's a call button in Google messages, but it just calls. It just uses the phone to call. It's not like you're, it's not a data call like a FaceTime or whatever. And to say that iMessage can also can encrypt calls and texts end to end. What does that even mean? Like iMessage is encrypted full stop, but the messages app on your phone does both RCS and like.

Jason Aten (1:02:48)
right.

Stephen Robles (1:03:04)
I don't know if they just didn't want to take the time to tease out the details, but this is a poor explanation of what iMessage is and can do. And also, like, the calls, like, yes, FaceTime calls are encrypted, but if that's what you're doing. So anyway, I think it's, they did a great job by actually explaining the technical details, I feel like. But also, it's a little hilarious that the FBI is encouraging people to use encrypted apps, because the FBI has had a long history of wanting to get around encryption, namely locking devices. So, yeah.

Jason Aten (1:03:30)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and basically what has happened is that this Chinese affiliated spy group has they've essentially tapped these companies and so they are able to pull suck out data and listen to calls or whatever it is like they're able to do that. So if you're just make sending plain text SMS messages or whatever that is just traveling unencrypted onto those servers at Verizon. And if somebody has access to Verizon server, then they can see all that kind of stuff.

Stephen Robles (1:03:43)
Right.

Jason Aten (1:03:59)
So what they're suggesting is like, maybe don't do that, which by the way is just like good advice anyway. We're at true. Also, maybe don't do it over iMessage either, but the encryption's not the problem there. It's just not a good idea because I get a lot of scam iMessages and I still shouldn't be sending them their stuff. But what they're basically saying is yeah, use encrypted stuff. iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, all of those for messaging are fine. Like in terms of the encryption, they are different.

Stephen Robles (1:04:03)
Don't send your credit card number via SMS. How about that? Let's not do that.

is true.

Jason Aten (1:04:28)
I'm not gonna get into the differences there, but they are, it's fine. I would not be using Telegram for that because Telegram by default is not an encrypted service, right? And neither is SMS by default, because it's just like literally sending bits over like the phone lines or whatever. yes, the most ironic part of this is that the FBI has typically not favored encryption because it makes it harder for them to get information. And typically what that means is like,

Stephen Robles (1:04:30)
Right.

Hmm.

Jason Aten (1:04:55)
It's not the messaging part of it though. They want to be able to decrypt the device. So it is interesting the FBI can, they kind of want to have it both ways. You should definitely use encrypted messaging because if we can get access to your encrypted device, it doesn't matter. We'll still be able to decrypt all the information, right? It'll be fine. we can, so like we, they're fine recommending this. It doesn't change the thing, which is they want a back door to encryption and what they want is a back door to the encryption on the device period, right? They want to make sure that they're able to do that. And

Stephen Robles (1:05:00)
Yeah, they want to unlock it for us.

That is true. That is true.

red.

of your device. Right.

Jason Aten (1:05:24)
This goes along with the story. We never talked about the story, but since this is a lightning round, which means we spend more time on every topic, they discovered there was that recent report where some researchers discovered that they was at iOS 18 added a feature that if the phone sits for a period of time, it reboots. And when a phone, when an iPhone reboots, goes into a before first unlock state, which is a more secure, meaning all of the data is literally scrambled on the device. Right. And so

All of these things go together. The FBI was really unhappy about that, but they really want you to use encrypted messaging. It's just must be really hard to be like choosing which one of these things is good. The bottom line is use a good password on your phone, use encrypted messaging apps, right? Like.

Stephen Robles (1:06:08)
Listen.

I get so like, I don't even know what to call it, but when I see someone enter all zeros on their iPhone for a passcode and it's like four, it's not even six, it's like four zeros or like four ones. I'm like, don't, and listen, I can't reveal who this is because then that would also put them at greater risk. But there's there's someone in my, well, here's the thing. I have one close person in my life who does not have any passcode on their phone.

Jason Aten (1:06:27)
Yeah, you're gonna dock somebody. Tell them who it is, where to find them, where their phone is right now, and what the passcode is.

Stephen Robles (1:06:42)
Non-Jason, can literally just... You can literally just go...

Jason Aten (1:06:45)
walk up and pick up the phone and swipe to unlock.

Stephen Robles (1:06:47)
Literally literally and I'm like I don't and then I'll go to like a sports ball game or like a concert or whatever and then I like People I don't know if people just don't think about it They don't care but like people will put in their passcode just like holding their phone out and it's like all hundred rows behind you can see your passcode right now like I could I could get in your phone right now like Don't don't do that. I also I use an alphanumeric passcode. That's a hundred characters long. That's how I do it It's not a hundred characters long, but I do use an alphanumeric passcode

Jason Aten (1:07:13)
Stephen's, Stephen's line. Okay, so I'm just gonna pull back, sorry, I'm gonna just go back to, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but I interviewed the chief technology officer of Cloudflare and the CEO of OnePassword on stage at Web Summit. And I will just say the thing that the CTO, chief technology officer of Cloudflare said was, the most important password that you have, by the way, is not your phone, it's actually your email. And the reason is,

Stephen Robles (1:07:17)
And it is, yeah.

Yes.

Hmm.

Jason Aten (1:07:42)
what happens if you go to reset your password anywhere, they send you an email. So the most important password you have to have is on your email. Do not reuse that password anywhere else. It should be gibberish, right? And you should save it in the passwords app. You should not even know your email password. It should just be stored somewhere because that is by far the most. The second most important one though is the passcode on your device. And the reason for that is if somebody gets access to your device, they don't need your email password anymore because it's your emails on your phone.

Stephen Robles (1:07:45)
Post your email. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. Yes, exactly.

I don't. That's it.

It's your emails right there. That's it. And the third most important password is when you support this show at primarytech.fm and click bonus episodes and you create that memberful password. That's the third most important. I just felt like throwing that in there.

Jason Aten (1:08:22)
It's actually fine if you don't put a password on there, like whatever, we don't care.

Stephen Robles (1:08:25)
No, no, no, no you need to lock that down lock it down Walmart has finally finished its acquisition of Vizio. I feel like I've heard about this news for years now I thought this like this they started this many years ago when they were working on it So now Walmart officially owns Vizio the and all the TVs are super cheap because you just put ads on it And I'm like that's okay cool more ads so I want

Jason Aten (1:08:29)
goodness. All right.

Yeah, they've been working on it.

Yeah, and this is not just more ads. This is like, well, and it's the connection. Like, cause I think Walmart already has this thing where you, where it's, can connect with Disney plus. And so like, they will use your Walmart information to show you dynamic ads in Disney plus. Like, I actually don't know why anyone would do that because like, what do you want that for?

Stephen Robles (1:08:53)
targeted.

And Hulu, yeah.

Yes.

I just want the days where you can get a dumb TV. I want a dumb TV that's a nice TV. No smarts.

Jason Aten (1:09:14)
Steven, my OLED, my LG G whatever series, so it's like the nicest OLED that they make that doesn't like rotate out of a screen or look like a fish tank or whatever. We're gonna go to, listen, we're going to CES this year, Steven, actually it's next year, but we're going to CES in January and I'm gonna show you all the wild TVs. It's gonna be amazing. But the first, what do think the first thing I did when we put that thing on the wall?

Stephen Robles (1:09:23)
was me.

I don't

See us. the TV. I forgot about the TV. us.

You did no internet. said don't. Yeah, don't have yet. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten (1:09:42)
I turned off the Wi-Fi, just turned off the Wi-Fi. I do not want that thing. And part of the reason I did it is because you know what it did every time I turned it on? It would want to restart to upload its software. I'm like, you did that every day for the last 15 days. You don't get any more. Sorry. I've cutting you off from the internet completely. And you know what? As long as that TV works forever the way it did, the way I, when I took it out of the box, it's great. I don't need any new features. It's fine.

Stephen Robles (1:09:59)
That's it.

Right, right. No software update is gonna make the panel look better.

Jason Aten (1:10:08)
It doesn't need to do anything. And you know what I did? The second thing I did is I plugged it into an Apple TV. So it's like, I don't need internet on this. All you're ever going to do is show the content from this Apple TV. It's fine. Yes, exactly. Yes. All right.

Stephen Robles (1:10:13)
Right exactly, yeah exactly. Exactly.

I just need you to go to HDMI 1. Nothing else. Do nothing else. That's it. All right, a final thing before you help me with my EV trip next week. You wrote an article about this. I saw this talk about it everywhere. The Intel CEO was ousted, Pat Gelsinger. He's been the CEO for what?

Jason Aten (1:10:26)
Yeah.

Yep. Since 2021-ish, he came back. Yeah.

Stephen Robles (1:10:38)
So there's several, several, yes, several years, but as you might expect, Intel has not done well recently. And so the board basically gave him a choice, like retire or fire. And he's out.

Jason Aten (1:10:44)
No.

Yeah, well, the interesting thing, and I don't actually think I said this quite like this in this article, but when they hired him, Ben Thompson asked Pat Gelsinger shortly after he hired about like, Hey, I think what Intel really needs to do to survive is to split the company into two. One, which is like we make chips for laptops. And the other one is we actually just manufacture like a founder like TSMC, which just makes chips for everybody. They make AMD chips. They make Apple's chips. They make all those chips. Apple Silicon. They design Apple's designs them. And then TM SMC just manufactures them. Intel needed to split in

Stephen Robles (1:11:08)
Right.

Right.

Jason Aten (1:11:19)
Pat Gelsinger said, hey, we the board and I we talked about that. And when and I said, I don't think that that's the right route. So don't hire me if that's what you want to do. So they hired him and they didn't do that. And now they're like, actually, and they fired him. they because I the problem like Intel, they missed out completely on mobile. And then they're so far behind on the AI. It's like their culture just does not seem to allow them. And listen, if there's anybody who understood Intel like Pat Gelsinger, he was the architect of the like 40

Stephen Robles (1:11:39)
yeah.

Jason Aten (1:11:48)
486 processor like or the 84 86 processor is like he like he knew Intel like he's been that he spent most of his career there that he was a highly highly respected CEO for VMware and then he came back to Intel is like he was supposed to save the company and I think it's pretty clear now that the only way Intel survives is by splitting into two different companies

Stephen Robles (1:11:50)
Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, my goodness, seeing the success of TCMC, TSMC, even just with Apple's chips, like, duh. They should have hired me. I would said, yeah, do that. Do that. But also just knowing how far behind. don't know. I mean, you obviously remember this and many of our listeners probably do. Like when Apple announced it was going to Intel chips, it was like circa 07, 2006, 2007. They're announcing they were going back. Like there was the whole campaign of like, what are these Intel chips doing in Macs?

Jason Aten (1:12:18)
Yeah.

Just do that.

Yeah.

Stephen Robles (1:12:39)
And it was a bit of a, I don't know if celebration is the right word, but like people were like, yeah, great. Like faster chips, the Intel chips. Intel inside was the whole like, you know, the Pentium era, Pentium three, four. So anyway, it is interesting to see kind of the long fall of a company like Intel when, you know, even having a huge lead does not mean you're invincible. And I think that's kind of what this shows. Like even though they, I mean, they were the lead, right? For many, many years. I they were in the lead, but.

Jason Aten (1:13:06)
Intel? Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Yep.

Stephen Robles (1:13:09)
No longer. All right, Jason, I need your help. This is our personal tech segment. Here's what's happening. I'm to try and do a map here and not dox myself. This is going to be a challenge. This might be a challenge. So I'm driving to Jacksonville next week. OK, I'm doing a little podcast thing, talking to podcast people. Now, from Tampa to Jacksonville, it is...

Jason Aten (1:13:14)
All right.

Okay.

Stephen Robles (1:13:37)
like 215 miles, something like that. And the route that I would go is not on the main highways, basically. So it's like 224 miles. The range on my Tesla Model S that's 10 plus years old is like, if I charge it to 100%, it'll be like 220 miles, but...

likely driving and whatever like probably not. And the other issue is the route. I'm going show you this map. Maybe I should pull up Tesla's map. this map right here, this is similar to my route. I'm not showing where I live, so I'm not doxing myself. Like this is the route and it's close to 200 miles. A lot of it is like back roads from like Ocala to Jacksonville, which is

more than half of the trip. There's not really any chargers between Ocala and Jacksonville. Now I live closer to Ocala so like I could make it more than half, I mean can make it almost most of the way on a single charge, but like let me see if kind of search for a Tesla supercharger and let me let's try that. If I put it in between, let's see if Apple Maps can do this. Like you see the

chargers that I could stop at are really close to Jacksonville so I feel like I don't know if I want to risk that and then otherwise there's ones like here in Ocala I guess this might be one halfway through so like what do I what do I do because I'm also gonna try and go back same day so if I if I leave

Jason Aten (1:15:09)
Sure.

Sure. Okay. Have you put this route into your Tesla yet to the route planner in the Tesla? I mean, literally that's the first step and you can do that in the app.

Stephen Robles (1:15:31)
No, I need to do that. I need to do that. I know, I know. But can you like round trip it? Okay.

Jason Aten (1:15:39)
Yep, you can do all of those things. if you go into in the app, if you click on the location, which I'm not going to put up because it will dock me because it shows my address and you go to navigate and type in where you're going, type in the address of where you're going, it'll figure out the route for you. You can also tell it because it will base it on your current state of charge. You can tell it like I'm going to charge all the way up to 100 percent. So I'm going leave with 100 percent and it'll show you like charging if you would need where you would need to charge. And then you can just so you

Stephen Robles (1:15:48)
Alright.

Jason Aten (1:16:08)
You basically would do a multi-stop route. You know, start here, go here, and then third step is back to home. It'll tell you where you need to charge, and it'll tell you your route based on the charging.

Stephen Robles (1:16:12)
right.

Okay, I'm doing that.

Okay, so it just, okay, just told me what to do. And it's basically saying to charge in Ocala, like I suspected, and then I have to charge in Jacksonville, and then I can make it back. Maybe charge one more time near Orlando, but here's the, here's the other issue. In Jacksonville, where I am going,

There is no supercharger nearby the event. So I guess I have to either charge up before the event and then go, or I have to plan to charge up after. I mean, it's only going to be like 30 minutes or whatever, 40 minutes. But that's like the real thing. Like I would love if there was a charger at the venue, I would charge it while I'm speaking or whatever, and then I'd be ready to go.

and then charging Ocala back on the way home. But you know what I mean? You don't run into these issues.

Jason Aten (1:17:24)
I mean, so yeah, you're going to just have to plan your route and your timing based on that. if you so OK. Your goal should be like to pick like arriving there with a low state of charge is fine because it'll charge faster, right? And you don't want to have to like fast charge it the whole way there very well could be a level two charger. You've only searched for superchargers. There could be a level two charger like a hotel or something. I don't think Apple Maps is the way you should be doing this is the first thing I will say. The second thing I will say is there's a there's an app

Stephen Robles (1:17:50)
Sure, sure.

Jason Aten (1:17:53)
or service called a better route planner, ABRP, you should definitely download that app and it's great at planning routes for you like this and it'll show you level two chargers, which are like basically home chargers, but a lot of hotels will have that. So they're very well could be somewhere that we're placed to some place close to where you're gonna be. The thing is, if you are gonna only be there for two hours, you're only gonna add a maximum of like 20, 22 % to your battery. So that's still not gonna work. You're still gonna have to charge. this, I mean,

Stephen Robles (1:17:58)
Okay.

All right.

Jason Aten (1:18:20)
I don't ever think about it other than I just know, okay, like where do I need, where do I want to get to? what, you know, with what amount of, so like I drive over to, I drive an hour and a half each way at least once a week to take our daughter to soccer. And I just know like, okay, if I'm charged up to it, I had to adjust a little bit because it's winter and it's freezing. And so you don't get as good of range up here, but it's like, okay, great. I know there's a supercharger right there. I'm going to just arrive with this amount of state of charge. And honestly, I'm not going to charge up to a hundred.

Stephen Robles (1:18:40)
Right.

Jason Aten (1:18:47)
if it would make me arrive with 35%, I'm only gonna charge up to 80 and then I'll be at 15 % because I'll charge really fast when I get there. And then I'm just gonna charge up enough to get home, right? And so like, I'm not worried about it as much. I just wanna make, I just do that math. But honestly, your car will tell you. Like just put it into the car, see what it says. And you may have to take a slightly different route. So maybe it will take, like maybe the route you have to take is not the most ideal, but yeah.

Stephen Robles (1:18:55)
Yeah.

Okay.

The Carbohydrate.

Okay.

Okay, okay. Well, is this the better route planner app? Okay, all right. I'm gonna get it now. Okay, well, I'm gonna get it. And this is gonna be my first time like doing a trip like this where I have to charge before I get home. You know what mean? Like this is the first one doing it. So we'll see. Maybe I'll drive to CES to Las Vegas in the Teslons. That would take forever to charge. But anyway.

Jason Aten (1:19:17)
Yep, that's it. There you go. It's great. It's super helpful.

You're not driving the CES.

Stephen Robles (1:19:41)
Alright, so that's my plan. Alright, we're gonna talk about... What was our bonus? I want to talk about books. I know, it's the tech podcast. We had an article about how Costco was gonna stop selling books. And, yeah, I want to talk about that. That's gonna be our bonus episode. So here's what you do. This is most important password you'll ever make. What you do is you go to primarytech.fm. And I don't actually think you even make a password. I think memberful just emails you the code, so never mind. But what you could do, if you want to listen to bonus episodes and get an ad-free version of the show...

Jason Aten (1:19:53)
All right.

Stephen Robles (1:20:08)
You can support us in Apple Podcasts, but if you do it there, you don't get chapters. Not my fault. We ranted about that in our Easter egg bonus bonus episode, which someone actually messaged me said they listened all the way through after the music. So if someone else heard that may have more than one person heard that I would love to know because we did put little thing at the end, but I ran through my Apple podcast anyway. You can support us in Apple Podcasts. You can add free bonus episodes there or go to primary, take that FM, click bonus episodes and you could support us there. $5 a month, $50 a year.

and go listen to our entire back catalog and new episodes in the future. And you can support us with a five star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. We'll give you a shout out on the show. We're on YouTube. If you want to watch us there, youtube.com slash at primary tech show and our community social dot primary tech dot FM. Listen, we're everywhere. We're on every. actually not on every social media network I am, but I cannot sustain multiple accounts on multiple social networks. We just had a conversation, but we'd love to. We appreciate your support. Thank you for all those who support the show already.

Jason Aten (1:20:58)
We just had this conversation.

Stephen Robles (1:21:05)
and I will see you over in the bonus episode. Catch you next week.