Tech’s Chaotic Evil Era: TikTok “Ban”, Apple Allows Side-Loading

This episode is brought to you by you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me as always is my friend, Jason Aitin. How's it going, Jason?

We did pass the 500 subscribers on YouTube, so thank you all for doing that. If you haven't yet, go ahead and subscribe to that YouTube channel. We have a great video version over there. I share short form clips during the week and we were back into the top 50 tech shows in Apple Podcasts last week so thank you guys for that. And so now, you know, kinda asking everyone, do you did 5 star reviews, you subscribed to YouTube channel, and so now we ask you to spread the word.

Tell everybody Primary Technology is the tech podcast they should be listening to if they enjoy that kind of content and 4 or 5 star reviews this week. Forgive me if I mispronounce this name. It's, a I don't know how to say it. It's just a bunch of random letters. Thank you for your 5 star review. Sean Hudgins, battery percentage on. People are still leaving that in the That's fine. You can keep doing that. Nicholas Bridle, he wrote a significant review. He was very kind words.

Thank you. Battery percentage on Apple Maps user, of course. But our final 5 star review this episode was on my team. CPL Forrest Gump, he's also from Florida, maybe it's a Florida thing, battery percentage off. I think the first one. The first one.

Right after we recorded last week's episode, we were talking about how Apple rejected Epic Games' Sweden developer account, which looked like they weren't gonna be able to do a 3rd party app marketplace in the EU. I think that afternoon, like Thursday afternoon or maybe Friday, Apple reinstated the Epic Games account and are going to allow Epic Games to do third party app marketplaces because they now have a Swedish developer account that's active, but Apple also announced even more changes coming to the App Store in the EU. Seems very fluid. It just seems like this continues to evolve in Apple's policies coming forward, and so this was the actual developer newsroom release. This actually came out, earlier this week on Tuesday, telling you about the more flexibility that app marketplaces and third party developers are going to be able to have, and so we know about the alternative app marketplaces linking out to purchase.

Again, this is all EU only. Just keep that in mind, but the biggest change from this newsroom article is that web distribution is going to be possible, meaning if you're a developer in the EU, you will be able to release your apps or allow users to download your third party app directly from a link on a website without even having to be in a third party app marketplace or a, like, the Apple's App Store, and so you can just have that direct download link, which is pretty wild. This is, I think, the sideloading that most people think of when they think sideloading. Like, let me just go to a website, download an app, and install it on my phone. And in the EU, it seems like this would be possible.

Now there are some big caveats. I don't know if you saw these. There are some big things that so if you are a developer in the EU and you wanna offer this, this direct download link from Safari to be able to download an app, You have to have have had an app that had more than 1,000,000 first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year.

Have to only offer apps from your developer account. Be responsive to communications from Apple regarding your apps distributed through web distribution, which seems like a very ominous bullet point. Yeah. Okay. Whatever that is, but here it is. Be a member of good standing in the Apple developer program for 2 continuous years or more. Jason, guess who has not had a developer account in good standing for 2 years or more is Epic Games.

Though, this looks like the same language that they used when they were talking about the core technology fee, which really this is what that's about. It's about the the point is they only want people to be able to do sideloading who are going to be paying them the 50¢ per download, 50¢ euro, whatever we've decided that's called. So but if that's true, then it isn't just so hypothetically, that would mean it wouldn't just be 1,000,000 new customers. It would be first installs, which Apple considers an update during that year. So if you had either a 1000000 downloads of your app or some combination of downloads of your app plus updates of your app during that year, then you would be eligible.

But, again, the point is the same, that this is gonna mean that you're paying 50 half a euro for every single one of these. But can I go back to the epic thing for just a second? Because there was this really fascinating Twitter thread between John Gruber and Tim Sweeney. I don't know if you saw this. Oh, no. Based on that thread I'll, drop a link to it real quickly here if I can figure out where I put it in my, my browser because I have a 173,000 tabs open right now. But,

It's like Apple knew that this had happened. So why did they then, you know, can their, can their account after the fact? And so they it turns out that Apple this was just an automated thing. It happened in about it took about 3 days for it to be approved. And it was, like, one day Phil Schiller woke up and was like, wait a minute.

I see a list of new app developer things and epics on there. Who how did this happen? I I gotta email somebody. And so I feel like the whole thing was just, like, a very strange confluence of events. I'm just dropping this link for you in our in our little Imessage.

But it actually started with a a chat from or a post from Ryan Jones, who is the developer of Flighty, that Tim Sweeney responded to, then John Gruber responded to. And Gruber and Sweeney went back and forth for a while, talking kind of about the whole thing. It was actually fascinating just to kind of, you know, Tim Sweeney says, we applied for Epic Games Sweden account under Apple's normal process, and Apple approved it in the normal way. We don't know what their process is to go through to approve accounts, but, like, they didn't call up, you know, Tim Cook and be like, hey, dude. We're thinking of doing this.

Is that is that possible?

Right? It because the response from Epic was basically after a swift inquiry from the European Commission, Apple has decided to reinstate our developer account. So it's like somebody at the European Commission called up Tim Cook and was like, what are you doing? And the stakes are very high for Apple. I didn't realize this, but the penalty for not complying with the DMA is I think I've heard both 10 or 20% of your global revenue.

So for a company like Apple where their global revenue is, like, $400,000,000,000, can you imagine if they got a fine of somewhere between $40,000,000,000 and $80,000,000,000? Like, they're not gonna mess around with that. Like, that's Apple makes a lot of money, but they're not like, that is more money than they make selling Macs and iPads. Like, you know what I mean? It's not combined, but you get what I'm saying.

Developers are still gonna be really, really angry because they're still gonna collect the 50¢ euro per per download in, you know, installation. The Right. Like, I think we should just be clear about this, that the only thing either of these groups developers and I'm not throwing shade at developers. I understand why they care about the money. They care about the money because they don't feel like they're getting value out of the relationship from Apple, which is fair.

Like, they don't feel like they're being treated well. So paying 30¢ of the money that they or 30% of the money they bring in feels like a rip off if you get rejected from the app store. If you're a small developer, you get rejected because of some random like, remember the call sheet. You know, we've we've talked a lot about call sheet. We both love that app.

I wrote a review of the app. Yeah. You know, I've talked with Casey List about it, and he kept getting rejected for random things. It's like you have photos of you don't have images of movies in here. It's like, yes.

It's a movie app. Like, it's gonna have photos of I'm sorry. That's a copyright, you know, restriction. So I feel like if that was if it was a more seamless process, developers might feel better about it. But the truth is they want third party app stores because they wanted to not pay Apple anything.

Well, Apple's like, well, we're gonna make you pay anyway. They wanted loading because they wanted to not if Apple would and what I said in this article is if Apple would just lower the commission to say, oh, I don't know, 10% on everything except for games, developers would all use the App Store happily because of the benefits that they do get from it. They just wouldn't feel like they're being extorted and having their business held hostage. And then the flip side of that is Apple's focus on the money. Right?

That's the thing that Apple seems to care the most about is actually making the experience worse for users. The fact that you can't sign up for Spotify in the app is ridiculous. And the fact that Spotify can't really tell you why you can't sign up or where to sign up is a terrible experience for users. And it is, I think, a tragedy that Apple is so focused on collecting pennies that it is missing that bicker point. So that was the that was my article. Yeah.

And when you choose your tier in the DealMachine app, it sends you out to Safari to make a payment via Stripe, totally bypassing Apple's in app payment system. And, again, this is just wrong, like, this is against Apple's App Store guidelines here in the US, and there's some horror stories of people unable to cancel their subscription because this is not a built in Apple subscription. It's not on that subscription's page in the settings of your iPhone. They are trying to, like, contact the company directly, and it's a bit of a mess for some of these users, and that's a hefty subscription. Yeah.

500 to a $1,000 a month, or I think some of them are a year, and I just think this doesn't feel great, again, in light of all that's going on in the EU, and it seems like there's some arbitrary rule changing sometimes and Apple just kind of, you know, moving goalposts at times. And this again is like and then apps like this, like, just kind of skirt and somehow go under the radar and make it into the App Store. I don't know how an app with a splash screen and a $500 subscription per month, as soon as you open the app, would get past app review.

Oh, absolutely. This poor developer I shouldn't say this poor developer because they're charging $500 a month subscription.

We talked about that, and there's been, you know, whether that's a good experience for users or not. But Brave Browser, which is a Chromium browser, you can get it on your Mac, you can get the app on your iPhone. Well, they posted this graph on threads saying since 17.4 and that splash screen for choosing a default browser, that their, uptick in users, you know, has this very big line going up, that once that happened, 17 dot 4 released, all of a sudden, it shot up, and a bunch of new users are now using Brave because they're arguing that users now have a choice and are at least surfaced the option, and when people are given the option, they might choose a third party app. Now, okay, that's their argument. One of the issues was this graph, which the the y axis always seems to get people, and Apple included.

Sometimes when they talk about those M chips, those y axes are very strangely, you know, calculated. This graph basically shows that on average, they had, like, 7000 to 8000 installs on iPhone, and then once 17.4 happened, it jumped up to 11,000, which is 3,000 more downloads in the or installs in the EU, and there's probably over 100,000,000 iPhone users in the EU. So that's context. Like, 3,000 users, you know, for a third party app, that might be great. Brave is a pretty big browser, I think, so I don't know if this is a huge difference, but also in light of the all the users in the EU, iPhone users, this is probably not this is a minuscule percentage of people who have installed Brave, and also, like, don't mess with your y axis to make it look like it's a huge jump.

Like, maybe start at 0, maybe I don't know. What what should they have done differently with this graph so they didn't get all this blowback?

So at least they put numbers on the side, which is because apple has put up graphs that don't even have numbers. And you're just like, this is our computer compared to something we don't know. Like we don't like, no one has a clue what it is that they're talking about. So I do just want to give them credit for that. But this backfired immediately because people were pointing out that you put out a graph that made it look like your installs had quadrupled.

And really, they maybe went up by 50% and you went from 8,000 to 11. Now is that per day or is that total people using it in the EU? I don't know. Like, it's hard to say what that means. So what they should have probably done differently is waited over a course of, like, just 3 months and said, here's how this has made a change because the the I I don't remember who it was I saw that posted this. But one take

Chrome is an option, and yet people still use Safari. So Right. I don't know that it's gonna make a huge difference. Good for brave if they picked up some extra users, but it was it Gruber or was it somebody else who was, like, maybe they were just maybe it was an accident. Maybe people were just confused because this browser ballot is so ridiculous. People just tap things so they can get past it.

And, like, you do still see the uptick. You know, again, you can make this y axis 0 to a1000000, and then it would just look like a flat line. So, you know, I I'm not exactly sure what people want. Yes, there were more installs of Brave than on average after the 17.4 update. I that's also not indicative of usage. Like, there might have been a bunch of people who downloaded and installed Brave and was, like, oh, wait a minute. I can't access my Icloud tabs

So, like, did they not even know it existed? Are they really choosing it as their default browser if they didn't like, it has a nice icon, I guess. I don't know. Like, it seems to me as though, like

But all I wanted to be clear is, like, if you were to go down and choose Safari, I think it would do nothing because it's already on your phone, and it would just leave the default setting alone. So this means these are people who chose it as their default browser and didn't even have it on their phone. So I don't know what that tells you.

It's not the

But I want but I mentioned VPN because a lot of youths Youth. Here in the US might be very get they might get very familiar with VPNs because TikTok might get banned, and so this has been going around in the US government, and the House of Representatives passed a bill to force TikTok either for the Chinese owner, which is ByteDance, to either sell TikTok to, I guess, a US company or ban the app. So the house of representatives passed this bill, and now it's going to the senate, And the if the Senate decides to do this, it is possible that TikTok either has to be sold and then it's on ByteDance in China, whether or not they are actually gonna sell it, it would be probably a huge loss of revenue, ongoing for them, or, the app might get banned. Now, this would be a situation where I think a lot of people would get very familiar with VPNs very quickly, because I imagine if it was banned quote unquote here in the US, switching over to like, millions of people already have the app on their phone, using a VPN will probably allow you to use this.

But I will say, because I I do use TikTok and we'll talk about this we'll get into why or why not in a minute, but one day, earlier this week, if you open the TikTok app, there was a splash screen from TikTok of, like, call your congressman, which

And so, like, no one was at this this event. And so Trump got really, really, really mad at tick tock. So he was gonna ban it. He was gonna make Microsoft buy it. Satya didn't know that there was an interview he did where he talked about that experience.

And he's like, it was basically, he's like, it was just the most bizarre couple weeks of my life, like flat out this. I don't even know what was happening. Yes. We tried to buy TikTok and then all of a sudden poof, it was gone. And so that happened.

And then after after a while, people got distracted by things like, you know, the election and whatever else was going on after that. And Sure. People lost interest in worrying about it. And then at some point in the very recent future well, last year, I think it was, Montana passed a law to ban TikTok, and a federal judge said you can't do that. Right?

That is still under appeal. Right. Then at some point, the congresspeople, members of congress, members of the senate have received, like, briefings. Like, this is a little bit unclear, but the reporting is that sometime in the very recent future, they've received a briefing about the national security threat that is TikTok. And then all of a sudden, it was like, we have to do something.

And so there is actually a subcommittee on China ish in the house, and they had a hearing on this. This bill kinda came out of nowhere. It's it's a bipartisan bill. I can't pronounce the democratic senator. I apologize. His his name is actually in this article.

They put up this scare sheet. You could not get past it. There was the only options you have were forced with the app or tap that link that says call. And when you called, you put in your ZIP code, which by the way, TikTok does not use precise location tracking. They just use general location tracking.

You just gave them your ZIP code. They now know exactly where you're located if you did this. And they and apparently thousands of people called their congresspeople. Many of them having no idea what they were calling to talk about. It was just, please don't ban my TikTok. Right? I just I saw this thing. You wanna get rid of TikTok. That would be bad. And the question is, are you old enough to vote?

And the people are like, no. I'm 13. Well, you shouldn't have a TikTok account, and I don't care. And then they passed it 50 to nothing. Right? It had the exact opposite effect that TikTok like, they they vastly overestimated their pull from doing this. And they've Wow. And they've seen other like, Uber has done this notoriously. Right? They would go into a city.

They would recruit a bunch of drivers, start recruiting a bunch of, riders, and then they would be, like, lobby your your local city council to make sure that they don't block us or whatever. So this now we're at the point where this week, the house of representatives actually passed this bill. They actually like, it is now going to the senate, and it was passed by a pretty large majority. It was, like, 265 or, no, 3350 2 to 65. This was not a small, like, thing.

It's now going to the senate, and president Biden has already said that if the senate passes this bill, he'll sign it, which would force within a 180 days for ByteDance to either divest of TikTok or for them to be removed from the app stores. So it's not exactly a ban, but there are a lot. There's a 170, I think, million, US users of TikTok. So this has a real impact on people. Yeah.

But also Yeah. The the the the objection to this from a lot of people is like, well, this is a first amendment issue. Right? Like, you can't block TikTok. That's where people have the right to speak on whatever platform that they want.

It's not really like what the First Amendment says. It doesn't say you have the right to say anything you want anywhere you want. Like, the US can say you can't you can't have TikTok. You can just post your stuff on reels. Like, it's it's really not a first amendment issue. It's just a we think this app is bad. We don't want it in our country. So TikTok

I think he was also an MMA fighter, so he might have had an audience previously, But there are a bunch of people that you would have never heard of before. There's a guy that I follow who talks about, like, World War 1 and 2 history in, like, really funny and creative ways, and he just, like, posted a TikTok that he got a brand deal through it. He now has a 1000000 followers. Literally, like, not to be disparaging, like, he was no one. Like, he like, no one knew who he was.

And the fact that it has allowed that to, like, happen to these kinds of creators, I think is cool. Like, it brings people who have the creative capability and knowledge and ability to explain things, like, there's a bunch of, like, really great creative people on there which can't really translate that audience to another platform. Like, so many TikTokers because the money situation is so bad on TikTok. Like, if you try to be a even with millions of followers, you will make maybe a few $100, $1,000 a month, even with 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of views, and it's only here in the US. Canada doesn't have a creator fund.

There's no monetization in Canada, and I'm not sure how it is out in other countries outside the US. So, like, even though it's not a great platform for creators to make money, it has been a platform to create audiences. And without TikTok, I don't know if these people would have been able to create a platform on YouTube or whatever, and this was indicative. And the flip side of that, I've been listening to a lot of Nilay Patel decoder episodes about algorithmic platforms Yeah. And the downfall of society or whatever.

And to that point, the reason why I have TikTok is it was during the pandemic. It was literally 4 years ago, like, yesterday, because I rest I still remember it was on my birthday, March 13th, 2018.

And in that moment, I was, like, this is amazing. Maybe this is a platform to make a go at content creation. And so I did, But just to give you some perspective, 4 years later, I now have, I think, 21,000 followers, which is not commeasurement with that day 1 growth. You know, it's like that brave browser growth.

So I realized maybe it's not a great platform, at least for my kind of content. Again, other content creators, maybe they have succeeded. So I find TikTok to be fascinating because that has been my personal experience, and I see funny Dune memes. Mhmm. And I save those memes and I show them to my kids.

And I have not seen those memes elsewhere. And I could just use Instagram reels or whatever, but it takes months for trends to get to Instagram reels, like, it's just accurate, like, you'll see dune 2 memes in a couple months

So that I don't know. That's my feelings on TikTok, and that's why I I actually don't know I don't know if I would care if it gets banned because, honestly, my audience didn't work on there. I don't like, I'm not trying to build it on there anymore. But I don't know. It's helped a lot of people, helped a lot of creators get an audience whether that's been beneficial or not.

Like, it would be maybe embarrassing if someone saw all the videos that people cared about in TikTok, but China doesn't care. They just don't care about, like, they have other things to worry about. Right. But the one of the things that came out was the ratio of content after after, I think it was October 7th, that was either that was pro Israel versus pro Palestine was, like, 95% pro Palestine versus 5% pro Israel. So regardless of what side of that issue you're on, it's pretty clear that there was a slant in the algorithm trying to push a very specific agenda, and that agenda benefits China, not just benefits, you know, people who wanna consume content.

And this is why TikTok's stunt backfired so much because if your job is to make laws that you think will protect the privacy and security of Americans and all of a sudden your phone starts ringing off the hook because teenagers were seeing a message on Tik TOK that told them to take action. You just, it just proved your point, right? It literally just proved your point that this is an app that is serving the purposes, not just of the general public, but, it imposes a risk. Because imagine if the Chinese government decided that the thing that it should be showing was vote this way or don't vote this way or don't vote at all, or, you know, you can vote by mail or you not vote by mail. You can vote on the Internet or you can vote by cell phone.

Right? These are all things that have appeared like in. Especially in the past election where people were getting text messages that said, don't go to your polling place, save time, just vote here on this link. Well, you, by the way, you can't vote on the Internet people. You have to either show up in person or vote by mail, like absentee.

Like that's, that's it. That's the only way it's allowed in this country. And so that is the risk. So so I think that if I don't know that, like, we don't our kids do not well, let's be honest. My kids might have TikTok.

They're not supposed to. But, you know, their kids, they do things they're not supposed to. So I don't wanna exhaustively say my kids don't have TikTok, but my kids are not supposed to have TikTok. I have 2 children who are technically old enough to have TikTok accounts. I just don't think it's beneficial for them to have one more thing to scroll through.

They do have Instagram and it's funny, the verge, had the verge. They recorded a live episode of The Verge cast at South by Southwest. We'll talk about that, I think, in our bonus episode. But in that particular episode, they were they were drafting streaming services, and somebody drafted TikTok in the free category. And later on, somebody tried to draft reels, and they're like, that's not a streaming service.

I'm like, sure it is. It's just TikTok 2 weeks later. Like, it is TikTok, but later. Right? So our kids do have Instagram.

And and if it was not owned by the China, you know, by by Dan. So Biden says not the Chinese government, but it is has influenced by the Chinese government. If it wasn't, I still don't think we would let them have it because of all the other reasons, but it would make it less of an issue for most Americans because you would at least feel like the content that is being served isn't there because someone has their finger on the algorithm trying to influence public opinion about issues that might benefit a foreign government. So Right. That's my TikTok rant.

Yes, you can go to your following feed on threads, and you can try to go to your latest tweets on Twitter, but it's several taps, and a vast, vast majority of users just don't do it. And So if anyone's looking at social media, YouTube included, it's an algorithmic based content feed, and that means those algorithms, not that it's sentient or that there's someone behind that we know of like pulling the levers and dials, but it basically feeds in or creates the trend. I think a a fascinating example is the Stanley Cup phenomenon, which

And, basically, what it comes down to is the the marketing guy who used to work at Crocs actually and was able to make Crocs go viral, namely on TikTok through a variety of mechanisms, influencers, things like that. He left Crocs, went to Stanley, and now Stanley has had its moment where it's blown up on social media, trend, like, you see Stanley Cups everywhere now. I think it's interesting for two reasons. 1, how that algorithmic feed look on your phone can translate into a physical product going viral in real life. I see Stanley Cups everywhere, which is wild, but also, like, that was basically largely the direction of one person, namely the marketing person at Stanley who was at Crocs, who figured out enough of the bullet points or the steps to do to create that cultural thing on social media that translates to real life.

And that is powerful and beneficial if you're a company wanting to sell a product, but can also be somewhat concerning when it's trying to, you know, promote or whatever ideas. You know, I think that and that affects on a generation. And so one way or the other, I I find it fascinating. I don't know if as a whole, like, on the scale of Dungeons and Dragons, like, morality chart, is TikTok a chaotic evil? Is it neutral evil?

Is it I it's not good. No. Like, I'm not putting it in the good category. I don't know if it's neutral, but it's an algorithm Yeah. And I don't know. I I just find it to be fascinating.

I mean, I've been on at least one episode, so you should go listen to that one too. You have. But that it is worth it. But then my second actual real point was I think the best example, I'm kinda surprised you didn't mention this, of the effect of TikTok is Widget Smith. Right? Widget Smith was an app that when Apple introduced, was it Ios 14 that had widgets for the first time ish?

Widget Smith was downloaded at the time over 50,000,000 times, And it was entirely driven by teenagers on Tik TOK, just showing off their, you know, aesthetic, just, you know, home screens that they were able to create. The funny thing is almost none of them are using widgets. Right? Like, they're all just using I you're using widgets with to create icons that they can. They're basically, like, shortcuts or whatever.

But, anyway, so that is, in my mind, the best example. That's great. Wonderful for for David Smith and Widget Smith. Like, that's amazing. That's by far his most successful app probably that he'll ever make.

And it's entirely due to to TikTok. But imagine if the thing that went viral was something else. Like that's all you have to ask yourself. Imagine if that kind of ability to drive that, which in this case was great. What if it was in, you know, in the case of the the war in Gaza or or, like, this next election?

Like, we have high stakes happening all the time. And imagine if 50,000,000 people instead of downloading an app were like, I've been influenced by this, and it's gonna change the course of an election or something. So Yeah. Well, the late okay. The last TikTok thing because, yeah, just to wrap this up then is is there is a this morning on CNBC, former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who most people have no idea who he is, but doesn't matter.

He was a, like, film financer and an investor, then he became the treasury secretary. He has said he's forming a group to buy TikTok if this law passes. So the good news there is that you may not lose your TikTok. It may stick around.

That's it. And that's what Vine was. It was just a little too soon maybe or, like, creators weren't ready for it. I don't know. And you still see a lot of Vine stars on TikTok and they're very, like, you know, very I think king batch is one of them, and you see a lot of the other ones. But anyway The

And so they probably couldn't host videos longer than 6 seconds looping because like they are not YouTube and they are not TikTok or even Facebook. So, yep, I can't believe

Before we do, I wanna thank that this episode is brought to you by our members that support us directly in Apple Podcasts or via Memberful, and you can do that today. You get bonus episodes every week. You get an ad free version, meaning this section will be cut out and we just go right to the next chapter, and you can do that directly in Apple Podcasts. We make it easy there. $5 a month, $50 a year, and you get the bonus episodes and ad free versions.

I will say there are no chapters for the audio in Apple Podcasts. Not on me. Apple strips my chapters out for subscriber audio. I don't know why. So if you love chapters as much as I do, because I really love putting chapters in custom chapter artwork, what you can do is go to primary tech dot f m, click the bonus episodes link, and you can support us via Memberful, and that feed you get when you support us that way.

It can be the only feed, you know, it can you get all the episodes, the full episodes and the bonus episodes together in that feed. I post everything in both places, and that means you could support the show, get ad free versions and the bonus episodes there as well. And if you can't do that, we understand. That's why a 5 star rating and a subscribe on YouTube means a lot. So thank you to everyone who supports us directly, although they didn't hear this because they got the ad free version.

But thank you to those of you who will support this show, because of this. So we thank you very much.

Apparently, she's the future queen of England. She posted this picture. She had surgery maybe a couple months ago, unclear what exactly the surgery was, where our family's been kind of cagey on it, and she has been out of the public, eye for quite a while since then. And there's been questions like, is she okay? What's going on?

Royal Family has been kind of mum, pun intended, on that. And so so I ended it. Anyway, Kate Mills posted this photo. It was Mother's Day in the UK earlier this week on on March 11th, and so it posted this photo and, like, you just look at it, you just glance by, like, okay, cool, like, posted a photo, she looks like she's doing well, good to go. Well, as people do on the Internet, they dove into this photo in-depth, saw a lot of weird app apparitions or whatever, like the sleeve on the sweater.

This is, like, poor healing brush technique in Photoshop. Like, where's the cuff of the sweater over here? Like, something funky happened here. And also, like, are Kate Middleton's arms really this long? Like, this seems kind of like an odd thing. Maybe those hands were detached. Who knows? And there's also, like, hair weird hair stuff going on. Again, like, poor healing brush, technique in Photoshop. You know, hand is a little odd.

So just just some weird things in this photo. And it was getting a lot of backlash because it it seemed like, you know, if you're already not saying a lot about what happened and then you release a photo that seems heavily doctored, then it looks even more suspicious. And the Rowe family came out after all the backlash, and they were like, Kate Middleton said, yes, I did Photoshop. Sorry, my skills are not great at Photoshop. I did adjust this photo, whatever.

A, would she not have a person to Photoshop for her? Like, may maybe she's maybe she's photoshopping on her own. Like, that's cool. You know, work on the skills. That's great.

But that's kind of curious. And number 2, I just think this kind of opens up the conversation about as AI generated content becomes more prevalent, the Sora, OpenAI video generator, They've been doing some interviews with MKBHD and Joanna Stern. They're gonna be releasing Sora later this year and being able to generate that video in minutes, you know, like, do a prompt, it makes video, I think, I don't know, I think it's interesting that everyone's eyes are gonna be looking for stuff, I think, AI, which is, I guess, good, but I don't know, might be harder and harder to to to recognize it, and I don't know. I just think it's gonna be an interesting time as we head into the next couple years with all this AIGeneria stuff. What did you think about this story?

Does that mean that they took, like, 4 photos and she sort of tried to piece together Positive. The ones that were the like, and then if that's the case, like, that's fine. That's I mean, get a pixel. It'll do it for you without even having to think about it. Like, come on.

You would not like if you got a proof of life photo and the person's holding up a newspaper and the date on it looks like you just drew it in with a Sharpie. Like people are gonna be like, I don't think that this qualifies. And that's really the problem with this photo. I don't understand any of the politics of like the Royal family. I don't understand any of the implications of like, what are surgery?

Like none of that stuff matters. There's rumors about all kinds of weird things happening, but the one piece, I guess that's a takeaway for our listeners is this is not the last time that this is going to happen, not with the royal family, but where a photo is gonna come out, people are gonna start looking at it. And all of a sudden, it's like, did that really happen? And I guess that's a good thing because right now, AI is getting much more convincing at this kind of thing. But I, yeah, it's the whole thing's weird.

2. It wasn't the surgeon wearing the Apple Vision Pro. It was one of the, like, aids that hands equipment to the surgeon. I think that's an important detail. It wasn't the person actually, like, doing the surgery.

And it was the Apple Vision Pro was basically like identifying tools and making sure that the tool the aide was picking up was act was the right tool. I'm not like, there's no screenshots of what it looked like or screen grabs of like how you know, it was it's all just kind of like text. They're telling you, like, recalling what had happened. Okay. That's interesting. But, yeah, I don't know. It's that you still don't have an Apple Vision Pro.

Even if you're under anesthesia, I'm just saying like, you should bail immediately. I don't care. Just take that hospital gown and run because you do not want your surgeon wearing a vision pro. Can you imagine? I mean, if the thing just failed in the middle of your surgery, it's like, okay, we're going to cut this. You know, we're going to heart transplant. We gotta, we gotta cut, make the cut right there. Wait, where I can't see anything.

And using AI to do it, I think it makes sense. You know, I imagine Amazon will keep an eye to make sure, like, these AI whatever generated product pages are actually representative of the product being sold. I'm sure the reviews would go down really fast if it was a difference between what you got and what you saw on a page, but I thought this was interesting. You you had put this in here. What did you think about it?

All of these AI tools have one goal, which is to eliminate friction. Right? They are making it easier to do a thing. All of the things that it's doing right now can be done by humans and computers as it as we all exist today. They're just making it faster and easier.

That's not always a good thing. I think that people who are listing things for sale on Amazon, it should not be this easy because Amazon is already a wasteland of crap. Like, come on. We do not need to make it any easier for people to list alphabet soup.

I've seen pictures of Paul Giamatti eating at a at a In N Out after an award show. Steven Spielberg is now taking pictures of his In N Out Burger in, like, a tux. What is it just just because it's In N Out in California?

Like he could own, he could just buy in and out probably, but I don't, so I don't know why, but that wasn't the point of this. The point was I think the case, but, yeah, I don't I can't help you.

They're gonna buy the Apple phone and the Apple case. And so the choice for the for people who do that now, it's either silicone or fine woven. I don't correct me if I'm wrong, I don't see Steven Spielberg using a silicone iPhone case. I like the silicone cases. I think they're great cases. I just think Steven Spielberg, he wants something he wants the premium case. Steven Spielberg.

Like, you do not want a fabric case. It's you know, I have a nice pair of headphones right here, and they have, like, a fabric y material, but you know what? They don't I don't spill things on that. I don't set it. You know? I don't like it doesn't come in counter

I don't buy that many leather things. I don't have leather pants. I don't like, none of that stuff. I just I just I'm just saying it's like it is there's reason that it's being used for so many products. It's very durable. It lasts a long time, and it looks better the more than it ages unlike Steven Spielberg's mayonnaise smeared fine lemon case.

Remember the photo you and I looked at last week of what the Apple car was supposed to look like? And it was redo it was like a Tic Tac with wheels. It was ridiculous. This is what Apple should have have been making. And really the r three and the r three x are just they're fantastic.

But the this I mean, this car is for Rivian. The reason it's important is it's, like, starts at $45,000 instead of $75,000. So I think they've tapped out the market of people who are willing to spend close to a $100,000 on a vehicle because once you do some of the upgrades, it's these are these are not cheap cars, but they are too. Starts at 40 $5,000 they're not gonna deliver them until what does it say? 2026 or whatever?

Tesla's, software interface is is great. It's better than any other car manufacturers. It's not better than CarPlay necessarily, but it is, like, fine. I don't miss having car play in that car. In the Rivian is the same thing. Rivian, there's literally only 2 companies that know how to make software for cars, Rivian and Tesla. Like, seriously. Like, it's true. Everybody else, garbage.

I think it's an amazing, but it's $79,000 So just compare that to being able to buy like the R3, if it comes in at like $37,000 or something like that, or the R2, which is a little bit bigger than the Polestar 3. But just when you compare those things and I've driven actually the, the fun thing is, when you, if you go to San Francisco and you rent a car from Hertz, it's probably gonna be a Polestar. They have about a 100 like, every Polestar that's ever been sold, I think, is on the Hertz lot in San Francisco's airport. And they're really they're great to drive. They're they may have air they have car play.

So, like, that that's amazing. But the nice thing about it is if you get the, the Rivian, you can save yourself about $40,000. So there you go.

I was actually surprised to see that there you can get one now for 75,000 because when I when I was at the launch event for Lucid, the the lowest priced model was a $150,000. And so they have come down. And and people like, the Lucid, their advantage is they charge really quickly, and they have very, very long range. They make they have the best battery technology, basically, of any of the electric vehicles, and they were their their CEO was the person who designed the model s. And it's like he left and he's like, we're gonna just do all the things better that Tesla didn't do with the vehicle.

And so, like, they they have some real chops. They just haven't been able to sell enough of them maybe because they were a $150,000 to to, like, be sustainable. But lucid, absolutely. Like, if they can if they can start turning these things out in volume, they're making a great vehicle. They have an SUV.

It's kinda ridiculous because I think it is, like, $200,000 or something like that, or they're working on one. But anyway, I just, yeah, the Lucids are great. All of them are great, but the thing that's great is now you can buy a very good electric vehicle for less than $50,000 which is the thing that that that Rivian had to do if they were going to to to make it, basically.

You won't need an adapter. You'll be able to go to any supercharger in America and use it in in charge this vehicle, without having to worry about compatibility. So

Get access to all the you get all the back catalog of bonus episodes. We have a great one on physical media. We have talk about oh, those we have a great bonus episodes. I forget all we talked about. But anyway, they're