595: The Best Secret Store

34:22So notarization has existed on the Mac for a long time. And as far as I'm aware, notarization on the Mac does not involve humans at all. You submit an application, you get a developer account, you get certificates, blah, blah, blah. You can submit your application to a server that Apple runs, that they will do whatever private API scanning or whatever they do. It doesn't involve a human. A computer will just take your input, grind it up, and if it passes some basic checks, spit it back to you and say, here you go, notarized application. No humans involved. No one's going to look at it and say your buttons look too much like the app stores.

34:51There's absolutely no human intervention. That is my understanding of notarization on the Mac. And as someone who has notarized many, many Mac apps and seen it come back pretty much immediately, I continue to think that there's no human involved. but this this is also called notarization and people are getting things delayed for months or weeks or months and then get them rejected for things that obviously human had a hand in maybe even an executive had a hand in so yeah this is just app review like that's this is it's like app review light it well not only is it app review this is like so there's you've always kind of been able to feel this as an app developer there's a second level of app review that your app sometimes gets kicked to for what appears to be some kind of executive review.

35:32And so this is like, if something in your app is maybe on the edge of a rule or maybe controversial, your app will be stuck, quote, in review for a long time. Normally, the in review status lasts less than one day. And you can kind of always tell if you're, quote, in review for more than a day, chances are you got kicked up to the higher queue and somebody between the reviewer and possibly up to Phil Schiller has to make a decision on that. it seems like all of the alternative app store kind of things are getting that level of scrutiny probably if I had to guess I bet Phil Schiller is personally approving or denying each one because there's going to be so few of them and they're going to be so important in terms of PR and so they're going to be such big stories I bet every single one of these is Phil Schiller reviewed and so you're going to get the Phil Schiller attitude you're going to get the harshness, the punitive rejections, you're going to get the personality, you're going to get all that from these.

36:35So it's going to continue to be like again, I think this is the wrong approach. I really do. I think Apple should make this notarization a lot more like the other notarization because if they continue not to, they're only going to keep inviting regulators to take control away from them in ways that matter a lot like actual security and privacy, which this is not that. I think, John, you make a really good point about this being kind of two different kinds of notarization. And it's really too bad because Apple has done a really good job, to your point earlier, of treating notarization as notarization.

37:12You know, it literally just says, yes, you know, there's nothing that an automated system, or at least we think automated system, can tell is bad about this. This seems to be good. and worst case if it isn't, they can revoke whatever thing they need to revoke to prevent machines from running that app anymore. And Apple has been a really good steward of notarization on the Mac for years. Nobody's ever really doubted it. Nobody's ever really, to my recollection, had like this kind of drama with it. And here it is. They said, okay, we're going to notarize third-party apps for the EU app stores. And everyone kind of shrugged and said, yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense.

37:51but none of us, I don't think, or maybe you guys did, and I just didn't realize it, but none of us really thought that they were going to treat this, like you said, as app review light. And now they're treating it as app review light. And I think that that very clearly flies in the face of the DMA. It's kind of gross anyhow. And now they've kind of tarnished the sanctity of, or they've sullied the good name of notarization. And so now the next time Apple says, oh, we're going to start notarizing you know x y and z my eyebrow is going to go up and be like oh what does that really mean yeah which notarization is this is the mac automated notarization or the uh third-party app store uh phil schiller review i i don't understand why they keep kicking the hornet's nest i don't get it and i do know and i've said it many times i haven't spoken having spoken to many rank and file employees well that sounds like it's hundreds i shouldn't say that but i've spoken into enough rank and file employees to know that a common understanding or perspective is that, look, we did a lot of hard work to make iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, Vision OS, etc., etc.

39:04And we deserve to be compensated for that. We are owed for that. And the implication there is, by our good graces, are you allowed to be there, third-party developers? And I really think that that perspective is not only is it gross, but I think it's losing sight of the fact that without those third-party developers, and granted, I am a very biased participant in this conversation, without these third-party developers, there isn't an iPhone, or at least not the way it is today. And I don't think that Apple realizes that while we are scratching their back, and they're having to scratch ours too.

39:47Like, it's both ways. That analogy fell right down, but that's okay. You know what I'm driving at. It's mutual, right? It's symbiosis or whatever the biology term for it is. Aaron will correct me. But it's symbiotic. And I don't think Apple appreciates that. I don't think Apple realizes that. And if they do realize it, they don't frigging care. they are owed they are owed all of this money they are owed this control because it's it's all because of us you know all because of apple that you guys can have call sheet and overcast and all of these other apps and and you should be thankful that we allow you on our platforms and it's on the surface like i guess if that's the attitude you want to have fine but you know they around and now we're finding out with vision pro right because nobody's touching it i mean i have an app on there, but nobody's really touching it.

40:39And this is, I really think this is part of the reason why. And if you want to hear more about it, listen to, what was it, last week's Overtime? Yeah, because we had thoughts. But it's just, it really is too bad that this thing that, okay, well, they're going to notarize and, well, we know from the past that's okay. We're okay with that. And now, well, are we okay with that? Which notarization is it? Who knows? It's just, it's a bummer. It's such an own goal is, I guess what I'm saying. And it just bums me out. that's it too because like you know i mean look we've had this discussion so many times on the show because they keep messing it up but uh you know people will say like well of course they they should be able to monetize and again like that if you look at the history of capitalism we make exceptions to that all the time once it becomes fairly damaging to a market not to um so that that you can set aside you can also say well what incentive does apple have to you know make their platforms if they can't make money on them and you know okay so you covered that well well, there's other value to apps being on their platform besides being able to extract money from the apps.

41:39This is just gravy. You can try to make the pure capitalist arguments. You can try to say, well, of course, they should be able to make as much money as they can. Why should we, you know, you can make all those. Even if you accept those arguments, which you shouldn't because most of them have giant holes in them or are invalid for lots of other reasons, but even if you would let those arguments pass, it's a bad strategy long term for apple as a company and and for the quality and health of their products and ecosystem because they depend on developers making software for their platforms for the platforms to succeed obviously very true when you look at their less successful platforms in terms of third-party support uh like vision os is obviously like the big headlighting one right now there's no apps for it and there's lots of reasons for that but even if you look at things like the iPad.

42:24Like how many big companies have made their iPad apps great? Or even are there at all? That's been a problem for the iPad since day one. And even now when the iPad has lots of apps, a lot of times their companies drive their feet on them. When we think about the way the iPhone and the App Store came up, it was a lot of indies like us making apps for it. Today, it's a very different world. So you could maybe make some argument back then that Apple created this market and it helped indies like me succeed. That is largely true. There's some asterisks on that, but for the most part, that is largely true.

43:01There's a lot of merit to that argument. And I've personally been one of those people. I've benefited from that because I have had my apps in the App Store since day two or whatever, and it's been great. It has been my career. It's wonderful. Okay. However, this is a different world today. Today, most indie developers don't exist anymore. Today, what most people want in software for these platforms is made by big companies. So you launch something like the Vision Pro. Not only are there no indie developers there, effectively, for lots of reasons that we've covered. Basically, nobody can afford them, and there's no users, so they can't afford to buy them.

43:42And then once they're there, they can't make any money there. That's okay. but what people what users of the vision pro mostly want is for larger companies and larger content producers to adopt it and bring their stuff there because that's what you know we want to do things like you know watch the youtube app you know and i know of christian seelig's app and that's wonderful but like that's what most people are looking for is they're looking for things like netflix uh hbo youtube like you know they're looking for the big players when you know for something like an app platform they're going to look for things from microsoft and adobe and google like they're going to look for things from the big companies if you think apple has soured relations with the small developers you should ask some big companies what they think of apple and their developer platforms um the relationship you know apple has poisoned the well so much that their platforms are suffering like look at how much money they have poured into the vision pro so much time so much engineering resource into this platform it's going to probably fail that in ways that there's multi multivariate reasons why this problem why the platform is not doing great but a big one is the lack of content and apps on it whatever they're doing is not working enough to make this new platform succeed again look at all their platforms that don't have the iphone's customer base they all have similar problems so this isn't just about apple you know be it being their right to take their 30 or enforce their very very strict rules It isn't just about that.

45:13It's literally that their products are being held back where they make way more money than the app store. Their products are being held back by their app store policies. This is not just us saying we should have more money and Apple should have less. It is literally, this is probably the wrong strategy for Apple overall. We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website engage with your audience and sell anything from your products to your content to your time all in one place and all on your terms Squarespace is awesome, this is why I'm yelling Squarespace is great because I'm so excited because honestly building websites the old way especially doing all this advanced stuff like with storefronts and business and everything I've done it, I've done it manually I've written my own stuff it's a pain in the butt Squarespace makes all of it super easy and it's hard even for me as a nerd The great thing about Squarespace is that even if you have no nerd in you, you have no coding experience, and even you listening out there, I bet you know people who this is perfect for.

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47:33tech and labor so this is something that we've kind of had bubbling around in the our internal show notes for a while and it seems like there's a bunch of different storylines that are all kind of intermingled and interleaved together so we'll start with in april in the united states the ftc the federal trade commission banned non-compete agreements for workers so reading from the washington post the federal trade commission on tuesday april 23rd banned non-compete agreements for the for most u.s workers with a new rule that will bar employers from enforcing clauses that restrict workers from switching employers within their industry which the agency said suppresses wages and gums up labor markets the ftc voted three to two tuesday to issue the rule it proposed more than a year ago the new rule makes it illegal for employers to include the agreements in employment contracts and requires companies with active non-compete agreements to inform workers that they are void.

48:31The agency received more than 26 ,000 comments about the rule after it was proposed some 16 months ago. The rule will take effect after 120 days, although business groups have promised to challenge it in court, which could delay implementation. I wonder how pervasive non-competes are. When I started in the industry after graduating college in the 90s, they were standard. I don't think the first two, three, maybe even four jobs I had all had non-competes uh maybe they're not as common now but uh and I don't remember what I thought of them back then I mean I thought they were pretty terrible but I'm like well I guess this is just the way things are done this is my first real job I don't really know how things go um but yeah for people in other countries who just don't know what we're talking about here if you worked for example for a video game developer you're a non-competes and I don't know if non-competes are common video games but just as an example uh your non-compete would say okay well you can quit this job whenever you want like you're you know you're not a prisoner here but if you quit you can't get a job with another video game developer for two years and if that sounds totally bonkers to you that's the reaction you should have it's like well wait a second i'm a video game developer if i quit this job presumably i would want to go work for a different video game developer and you're telling me oh you can quit you just have to get a job doing something other than video game development right uh and that was across all industries all like like sometimes it'd be narrow like you can't work for these specific competitors you can't do this specific thing or whatever but but as an employee i was like well i do want a job and this does seem like a good job and they're going to pay me a lot of money and i'm going to get this that and the other thing and i like this company and when you're taking the job you're like i don't have to worry about quitting or whatever but then like three years later you decide you want to quit and go work somewhere else and you're like oh now i can't go work for any of the for the any of the three companies that i wanted to go work for instead of this one what am i going to do it's you know so the this article saying that it is uh oh gums up the the labor market yeah that's putting it mildly suppresses wages and gums up the labor market suppresses wages because if if a competitor is you know if you're working for one company and you're going to work for competitor because they're going to pay you more money you're like oh go work over there they're offering me more money.

50:44I'm good at my job. I did a good job on the last product that my company makes. They know I worked on that product. And I applied for a job over there. And they said, hey, we'll give you more money. And so you go where you can make more money. That's a competitive market for labor. The more in demand you are, the more in demand your skills are, the better you are at your job, the more you can get paid. Oh, but if there's a non-compete, yeah, you can't. If you quit your job today, you can't apply for a new job at us for two years, according to this non-compete that you So it's terrible. It's terrible for employees like this.

51:14This big major topic here is tech and labor. And even though people who work in the tech industry don't like to think of themselves as labor and tend to resist the idea of unions and stuff. We are workers just like anybody else. We do not own or run the company. Sometimes we get equity in them, depending. but if you're just working for a salary part of your power your meager amount of power you have in the market is that if someone wants to pay you more for your skills and your labor you should be able to go over there and do that and non-competes fly in the face of that so they are super duper evil and i came to hate them more and more as i worked in the industry and in my limited experience they did become less pervasive i don't know why maybe it's because people stopped taking jobs they that people would turn down jobs because they had a non-competent or whatever, and they could find one that didn't have one.

52:02But anyway, they seemed less pervasive to me in my experience, and the FTC banning them is long, long, long overdue. They're banned in many specific states. I think California has had them banned for a while, but a federal ban makes a huge amount of sense. This gives way too much power. Non-competents give way too much power to employers. The ability to quit one job and go get a better job, that is a power that employees should have. No argument here. I completely agree. So put that aside for a second. We're going to come back to it. Meanwhile, also in April, inside TSMC's expansion struggles in Arizona.

52:37This is a post that Gruber put up, which is commenting on a post from restofworld.org. We will link to both. Viola's show reporting for the rest of the world on TSMC's massive but now much delayed chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix. So from Rest of World, the American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company. Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience that they believe to be the foundation of their company's world-leading success. TSMC's work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards.

53:13Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan's strict work ethic as key to the company's success. Chang, speaking last year, that's their head, speaking last year about Taiwan's competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that, quote, if a machine breaks down at one in the morning in the U.S., it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m. And he added the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would go back to sleep without saying another word. To which Gruber very astutely points out, even the use of wife rather than spouse speaks to the culture clash.

53:48yeah this is so i just mentioned how people in the rest of the world with stronger labor laws would be shocked about the idea of non-competes here's another culture clash uh this time in the other direction there are many markets in the world where labor has even less rights and stricter expectations than uh in america so the the kind of work culture where uh loyalty to your business is above even your own family it's above your it's above your own health certainly it's above your own everything it's like the company is everything strict hierarchies whatever your boss says goes that's flies in the face of american culture in many ways but also it flies in the face of a lot of american labor laws and basic american values and having worked with uh people engineers even just in doing the same job as me in other countries i can tell you that some countries pride themselves on the same as taiwanese would pride themselves on the idea of our employees work late and they'll stay until the job gets done and they'll you know do all this sort of like uh you know self-sacrifice to do whatever it takes to make the company successful and the first time someone said this to me in a casual environment someone who uh from another country at work i was like that's not something to be proud of like i know it sounds like it is it sounds like you're you know doing a great job or whatever and for limited amounts of time that can be true but like at this point it's not it you know it is a uh resolved uh you know it's not an open question that driving your employees to the point of burnout is obviously bad for the people involved but also counterproductive to the organization that people who are working longer and longer hours the work they're doing an hour 14 costs you money like it's it's negative money because they're doing such a bad job because they're burnt out because they've been working for 14 hours straight.

55:39The company would do better if it let them go home after an eight-hour shift and sleep and come back rested the next day, especially in programming and that type of work. But a lot of countries don't think that way, and their culture is about, it's all talking about all the other counter, you know, anti-patterns of being blindly loyal to a strict hierarchy and doing whatever your bosses say. You need people at all levels of an organization to not blindly obey what they're told to do, but to have minds of their own and to stand up when they're told to do something that's bad or wrong or a safety hazard or whatever.

56:14And workers should stand up for their rights to have a life and to be healthy. And that is kind of similar to Marco's point before. In the end, that is better for the organization too. He was like, oh, you're taking stuff away from the company. The company would do better if all their employees worked 14 hour days. The company wouldn't do better. That's the thing. The company believes that they should drive employees used to work, you know, and if there's anything wrong, you got to jump out of bed and do it. And we don't care how you destroy your life and a company comes to a family. That's not better for the company in the long run.

56:43And whether or not American companies actually realize that or whether existing American laws constrain them from doing things, right? Because it's questionable. Depending on the company you work for, you may feel like the only thing stopping my company from being exactly like this are laws, right? And even those, they break as much as they possibly can. That's true. and by the way it's it's more true of lower paid jobs believe it or not like you know relatively speaking if you're like a tech employee in america you are treated the nicest of any employee in any industry in america because you get paid the most money and you actually do get vacation days and there is some acknowledgement of burnout and still as someone in the game development industry and still even those tech jobs people are exploited people are ground up and spit out uh and it just gets worse and worse as you go down the line to you know people working just you know hourly wage jobs that are not big fancy tech jobs they get treated even worse and you know that's why well it's not why but one of the reasons that you see uh more willingness to unionize at uh in in industries that get paid less is because uh you know tech employees like oh we get paid so much money we don't need a union we're doing fine or whatever but So, you know, this, this culture clash really highlights just the lack of agreement across the world and across cultures about what a healthy working relationship looks like.

58:07And, you know, the TSMC CEO saying, like, this is why we're ahead of you, America. I mean, there's lots of reasons why other countries are ahead of us in various industries. I don't think one of them is that their employees are willing to work longer hours, right? They have a better educated workforce. They have, you know, a better government system with better support, better education, better health care. Like there's all sorts of reasons why the government reasons why they may be doing better in a certain area, cheaper labor, so on and so forth. But the willingness to work hard is really not one of them.

58:42Like I think America is closer to a reasonable balance of productivity and hours worked than a culture like the one described here in Taiwan, which I don't know if this is pervasive culture or just TSMC or whatever. But, um, and even in America, whenever you look, you look at the big studies, like Americans work longer and harder than other countries and get less vacation days. Uh, and, and then people say, that's why we have higher productivity in America because we work longer and harder. It's like, that's probably why we have more burnout. I'm not sure why it's, uh, how we get more productivity.

59:12But anyway, this, of all the things that are delaying and messing with this TSMC thing in Arizona, I'm kind of not surprised that, uh, one of them is the culture clash about, engineering practices and work-life balance. I mean, even, you know, I don't know if you guys remember this, but back in the 80s, there was a movie Gung Ho, back when the Japanese were going to take over America. There was a movie, I think it was Michael Keaton, where it was like a Japanese car company came to build a factory in America and they had to deal with all the lazy, shiftless American workers who didn't know what they were doing.

59:42And eventually in the end, the Americans showed that they're good workers too. And, you know, it's a rah-rah, completely racist 80s movie about fear of Japanese people. I was going to say, like, were Casey and I even alive yet for this? Maybe not. But anyway, like that was the big fear is like Japan, they do everything efficiently. All their workers are hardworking and diligent. They do exactly what they're told and so on and so forth. And it's just so much more complicated than that. But anyway, on this specific issue of employees staying late and working long hours and sacrificing their family for their job, that's not healthy and it's not something we should endorse.

1:00:15No, definitely not. All right. So continuing on, U.S. made chips will cost Apple more despite government subsidies. also from April. This is 9to5Mac. Apple was pledged by at least some of its chips from TSMC's upcoming plants in Arizona. There had initially been doubts about whether this was much more of a PR move since the chip elements seemed likely to have to be sent back to Taiwan for what's known as packaging or a final assembly. One analyst said this made the Arizona plant, quote, a paperweight. However, Apple later said it would use another U.S. company, Amcor, to do the chip packaging.

1:00:48Producing chips in the U.S. carries higher costs than doing it in Taiwan. Those subsidies were recently confirmed as totaling$6.6 billion in grants across three plants and a further$5 billion in loans. Then, according to the Financial Times, TSMC plans to charge customers more for making their chips outside of Taiwan as global capacity expansion, power costs, and increasingly complex cutting-edge technologies weigh on its profitability. Quote, If a customer requests to be in a certain geographical area, then the customer needs to share the incremental costs, said CC Wei, chief executive of the world's largest chip manufacturer, to investors on Thursday during the company's first quarter earnings call.

1:01:26Again, quoting, In today's fragmented globalization environment, costs will be higher for everyone, including TSMC, our customers, and our competitors, Wei said, adding that discussions with customers about price increases had started. yeah so it's good that apple is trying to get more things manufactured in the u.s as happened with mac pro the trash can mac pro i believe even this one too i forget um building stuff in the u.s tends to be more expensive the cost of living is more expensive the cost of labor is more expensive because you have to pay those people so they can afford to live here um than it is in some other countries and tsmc is passing that cost on to the customer so if some customer meaning like apple not like an individual if some customer of tsmc says hey we want to buy chips from you we'd like to we'd like them to be manufactured in the u.s please let's say great that'll be x amount extra because it costs us more to manufacture them there um strategically speaking it is a good idea for apple to have uh multiple geographic sources for its ships now having tsmc make them in taiwan and tsmc make them in the u.s is not as good as having two different companies but you take what you can get and taiwan there's a geopolitical uh potential geopolitical instability over there uh so having a backup plan is good and honestly it's yes it's going to cost more and i think apple should pay more uh it was again usually unlike things like phones and macs and stuff the chip is not the most expensive component it's usually the screen um pay you know as long as it's not like twice or three times the price or whatever pay a little extra pass some of that cost on to the customer advertise the fact that more and more your components are made in the u.s i'm not sure how much of a selling point that is but apple has been touting for years and years how much of their devices are recycled and they keep increasing that.

1:03:07And I applaud that effort. I also don't know how much customers care about that, but whether customers care or not, Apple continues to travel that road to reduce their packaging, to use more recycled materials, to try for that carbon neutral 2030 goal. I think those are all things they should be doing and not just out of a sense of nobility, but just because if they achieve them, they'll be so far ahead of their competition in these areas because everyone will have to do this stuff eventually and if apple does it first voluntarily yeah it's kind of an analogy for the regulations like if apple does it first voluntarily and gets and does a good job of it they will be ahead of their competitors and i think it's the same is true of sort of like paying to build up uh you know u.s manufacturing prowess like apple put billions of dollars into manufacturing in china to help pay for all the to help subsidize uh the plants and the machines that are in them to build all their fancy computers and help train all the employees and so on and so forth.

1:04:02Obviously, there was a much bigger industry there already before Apple, but Apple did put a lot of money into that. Apple should be dedicated to putting in even more money in factories and all the surrounding infrastructure to do that stuff in America. That means paying to educate the workers, paying, you know, paying to build the housing that's going to, you know, I'm not saying like I have a company store or whatever, but like through the means that we have in this country, through government subsidies through apple uh paying higher prices for products that's the way apple would do this not like apple's going to build everybody houses and stuff what they're going to do is they're going to pay x dollars more per chip and that's going to allow these factories to exist and be profitable as opposed to apple saying no we demand the lowest possible prices so we're not going to buy a single thing from arizona we're going to buy it all from taiwan right so they this it's not going to be easy it's going to be expensive it's going to take a really a long time.

1:04:53And in the end, it's still just TSMC instead of an actual American company like Intel. And Intel, by the way, did also get some billions of dollars in subsidies. But I feel like this is the road Apple should be traveling down. And U.S. labor is a big factor in this because the path to success here is not, you know what? U.S. employees should also sacrifice their health and family life for our employers. It's the only way we can compete. That's not the way to do this. That's not the way to win. That's not the correct move here. And in the end, Taiwan will also have to grow out of that as well, if and when they travel the same path we have.

1:05:29All right. And then moving on, and we said we would come back to this just a few days ago on the 5th of July, a judge has said that the FTC lacks the authority to issue rules banning non-compete agreements. So reading from Ars Technica, a U.S. judge ruled against the FTC in a challenge to its rule banning non-compete agreements, saying the FTC lacks substantive, substantive, substantive, there we go. You can just leave it in. Who cares? Rulemaking authority. uh the preliminary ruling only blocks enforcement of the non-compete ban against the plaintiff and other groups that intervened in the case but it signals that the judge believes the ftc cannot enforce the rule the case is in u.s district court for northern district of texas so appeals would be heard in the u.s court of appeals for the fifth district which is generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country womp womp it's an ongoing problem in this country where one of the major parties and all of the people in power who support that major party believe that the government shouldn't be allowed to do things that they don't like.

1:06:33And one of those is restraining companies in any way. And so, of course, of course, there's going to be a judge and a bunch of plaintiffs who are going to say, non-competes, that's not fair. We should be able to stop employees from getting another job in the industry for as long as we want. If they don't like it, they can just choose not to take this job. There's nothing wrong with this system. Please don't try to give any power to employees. We're going to claw that back by saying the FTC lacks the authority to do that. In fact, all government agencies lack all authority to do anything, and they shouldn't be allowed to do anything.

1:06:59Companies should be allowed to do whatever they want, and there's no problem with this system. It's so exhausting. It is so very exhausting. It stinks, but what are you going to do? I mean, you just do the best you can, I suppose. I mean, they would say, oh, let the states do it. California did it or whatever. We just don't want a national one. Yeah, we think it's good. It's great. You want that? Go move to California. No tech companies ever succeeded there. Obviously, these laws are going to strangle the economy.

1:07:50more secure there absolutely is a case for this this is one of the strongest arguments at this point for third-party managers now that apple's adding more and more features to their own password manager it's built in it's well supported you know the apple ones have shared groups now like the number of things that third-party ones do that apple doesn't do is getting smaller by the day but one thing they do have going for them is that if your apple id gets compromised for example and you don't have like your third-party password manager like master password in your iCloud key chain they can't get at all your other password things now obviously if they've cracked your apple id and you use that email address then you can they can use your password reset things or whatever but anyway it is still one more layer of protection lots of stuff in securities how many different layers of protection can you add and by sort of tying your password manager to your apple id to the you know like just all one big ball of stuff if that ball gets cracked that's just one layer now i know within apple stuff there are additional layers but a third-party password manager does add an additional layer third-party password managers don't have as nice integration as apple's stuff tends to have third-party password managers can get compromised you hear the stories all the time i can't even remember the name of the company said i don't want to throw them out there but a bunch of names of third-party password managers that i recognize in the past several years i've seen stories that oh they got hacked and all their stuff might be compromised and sorry about that and that's really bad uh and apple is a bigger company and has had better luck defending iCloud keychain but maybe their day is going to come eventually right this is the difficulty of making security decisions when i recommend what people should do i usually try to pick the passive least resistance which is not to use a third-party one and because they're much more likely to have problems dealing with a piece of third-party software than they are to uh you know get hacked by somebody because everything was all in one place but for people listening to the show and tech nerds or people who have higher security needs using things from multiple vendors that are truly separated from each other does add an extra level of security and like i said that's one of the strongest remaining reasons to use a third priority password matters if you feel like you need or want that additional level of security and you can deal with the downsides all right jamie writes with so many flops and mistakes the reputation of ai is arguably going the way of crypto do you envisage wwdc changing this course with apple's input or do you think they're frantically scaling back the emphasis they put on the words ai in their presentations and perhaps returning to machine learning to avoid being lumped together with all the failures of other tech companies i believe this was sent in before wwdc yes it was sorry there's some old there's an old ass atp but i thought it'd be fun to read now they didn't do that jamie i mean it's a little bit unfair for us to answer the question after we know the answer but it's just it's just like this was a reasonable thing to think about because if you if you're only hearing like the bad stories about ai uh you might think geez uh are the negatives outweighing the positives but apple's judgment and i think the judgment of everyone in the industry was like no apple needs to have an ai story yes there are bad things and downsides but if apple didn't say anything or shied away from the letters a and i and instead said machine learning or tried to separate themselves in a way that was you know sort of like oh everyone else is doing a but we're not that would have been bad for apple it would have been an example of apple not not correctly having their finger on the pulse of the industry and in the end apple did not do that and i think comparison to crypto is unfair because ai already does useful things and crypto does such a small number of useful things that are the most useful for uh applications that people don't want to encourage like uh illegal activity it's not it's not a fair comparison ai has already shown that it does a bunch of useful things it's just a question of what is the best way to use it and where should it be applied and how can we make it better and honestly i think apple's answer wwc was pretty good i think we talked about this on the wwc show apple did have a different angle on it they are leveraging their strengths.

1:12:00They're trying to maintain their values while implementing AI, but they are not shying away from the term. And they were trying to get as much value out of it for the customer as possible while still maintaining privacy. Yeah. And I think also keep in mind what Apple did here with their marketing was they're not directly calling it AI. They're calling it Apple intelligence, which is interesting. I mean, for lots of reasons, but I think one area that will be interesting to see how this plays out over time is by calling it Apple intelligence, it better work. Because imagine how bad that looks if, quote, Apple intelligence gets a bad reputation of not being reliable or not being good.

1:12:42Like, imagine if Siri was called Apple intelligence all these years. Like, it would have a pretty bad reputation. So I think naming it that is, you know, both, you know, pretty good marketing, But also, that's a bold stance to take. That sets the bar high. And that puts a lot of pressure on them to make sure it's really good and really reliable and really stable and really gives decent answers to things or performs well. They have set the bar very high by putting their name so prominently on it. So I hope it works for them. I hope it plays out. Time will tell. Well, they did call the device Apple TV.

1:13:20And for many, many years, it did not live up to the Apple name. But eventually, it got okay. So I don't know. I mean, it's the old joke, the example of an oxymoron is military intelligence. Hopefully, Apple intelligence is not the punchline to that same joke. Sure, hope not. And then John Wilson writes, you rightly said that the Windows Recall database is a valuable trove of information that can be accessed by the user and so could be vulnerable to exploitation. It would be disastrous if some bad actor gained access to it. But don't you all have the same arguments or don't all the same arguments, excuse me, apply to other things like iCloud keychain?

1:13:55I mean, yes, in that it's a treasure trove, but no, in that it's not stored in plain text, right? Yeah, to be fair, Recall was stored in plain text and then they fixed that. But yeah, having this is kind of links up well to the first question. Having all your important stuff in one place is great for convenience, and it also allows for you to pick for that one place the most secure one place. Part of the reason iCloud Keychain exists is because Apple also values making one big secure thing and making sure it's implemented right and securely. Instead of having a bunch of little things of variable levels of security, if you need some secret to be stored somewhere, put it in iCloud Keychain.

1:14:39and it's accessible to applications. You can use it in a browser. Like it's used everywhere, right? In, you know, cloud parlance is called a secret store. There are whole companies that have businesses making secret stores for you, right? You know, put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket, right? That's the strategy here. But it also means that if iCloud Keychain gets hacked or there's some flaw or whatever and someone gets access to the stuff, they get everything. That's true of a lot of stuff. That's usually true of our email addresses. We've said this a million times. if someone has access to your email account which is probably not that secure because your email password maybe isn't that great they can just use the forgot password links on most of the websites and reset all of your passwords some sites will be more secure than that but it's not going to be stuff like your bank it's going to be like some shoe store that requires like two-factor authentication and wants to have someone give you a call and show a picture of yourself and scan your photo id or whatever but your bank will be like fine yeah you're in anyway uh it's security is difficult um but the recall database was egregious because all the stuff that went into iCloud keychain end to end encrypted even apple can't get access to it using things in the secure enclave so even if you have access to ram you can't read this information because this is a secure enclave which is not accessible to regular programs from ram like apple has worked really hard to make iCloud keychain as secure as possible from the world and even from itself uh windows recall database uh that was not true of and it remains not true of so yeah that's part of the trade-offs of security We always talk about the convenience and security trade-off.

1:16:06The other trade-off is, should I have one really secure place that I put all my energy into making sure that's secure, or should I have a bunch of little individual places? And I think the one really secure place, despite the concentration of data, is the better strategy because it's so hard to make something secure. Even a company the size of Apple does well to essentially make a secret store and have a dedicated team whose only job is to make sure that is the best secret store in the world, as opposed to letting them like, oh, the mail team will come up with its secret store and the notes team will come up with a secret store and the safari team will come up with a secret store which maybe it's the best one in the company but like have it have a single place and put the team on that because having a bunch of little ones is just going to mean you're going to be exploited in more easily in multiple places rather than making one place that's really secure that's my opinion now if iClog keychain gets 100 % broken and i my life gets destroyed i mean it still would have been my opinion but i think the odds i think the odds are lower of that happening with iCloud keychain, certainly they're lower than with the Windows recall database.

1:17:05All right, let's do a little more Ask ATP. And Stephen Wood writes, is Apple still a privacy first company? We know that Android isn't due to Google being the world's biggest advertising company. In recent years, Microsoft has been evolving Windows to display ads and track users. A few years ago, Apple was consistently and constantly emphasizing privacy. However, with Apple now earning more from ads, can we still expect them to uphold their commitment to privacy or will they compromise it? Oof. That's a good question. I mean, they've kind of, I don't know if they've already compromised it, but they've certainly gotten fast and loose with what's okay.

1:17:40Like, hey, did you know this Apple TV Plus show is starting soon? Do you want to try it? You know, like all that sort of stuff. It's not necessarily not private. I don't know, but it's just kind of icky. I don't know. What do you fellows think? we have already seen exactly how Apple compromises its standards for advertising. Because look, the reality is like most people don't want ads. And so almost any ad based business is having to form some kind of compromise with the product quality or the user experience in some way. And I wouldn't necessarily say Android isn't private because Google is an ad company.

1:18:21I think lots of other Google products have severe privacy problems, especially the way they treat their dumb login prompts around the web these days. I mean, those are just massive disrespect of the web experience. Again, like I've said this before, the way Apple views everything that happens on the iPhone is theirs and they own part of it. That's how Google views the entire web. Google thinks the entire web is theirs to do whatever they want with. that they always have. And over time, they've only gotten more and more power, especially with the rise of Chrome being such a dominant browser. So Google is perfectly willing to crap all over the web, to harvest it for everything it's possibly worth, to totally invade people's privacy all over the web.

1:19:06But I don't think we see them doing that kind of abuse on Android specifically. I think that's more of a Google and the web problem, not Google and Android problem. Anyway, so going back to Apple and privacy here, I think we have seen exactly how Apple compromises their standards in the name of increasing revenue through things like ads, whether that's ad money directly, but like things like App Store search ads, or whether it's using promotion, cross promotion, you know, within their products to try to promote their services, which is kind of like ads, kind of different. But that'll be things like the promos in the setting screen when you haven't like finished setting up your phone.

1:19:46Like, oh, do you want to maybe set up Apple Music? You know, like all those kind of things. And then, of course, when you're in Apple Music or things like that, if you don't subscribe to their plan, they harass you endlessly. Or they'll send notifications from their apps that you never gave permission to send notifications from, like from their own store app and their own app store app and their own. Apple has shown they will harass people. They will bug people. they will shamelessly promote upsells everywhere, all over their platforms. So that is a massive compromise. But it's a compromise in user experience and respect for the users, and respect for their own products, and respect for themselves.

1:20:22But it is not a compromise in privacy. So obviously you can tell by the way I'm phrasing this, I'm not a fan of this practice at all. It kind of saddens me that platform vendors for general computing platforms have now taken it upon themselves. and Microsoft is, again, a good example of this. I think they go even too far with it. But it is now acceptable for general purpose computing platforms to harass the user on a regular basis for upsells or put ads in the general UI of the platform. Apple is not the only person doing this. They're not the only company doing this. But I always thought Apple was above that.

1:20:57And what they've shown in recent years is that they're not, which is sad. They really should raise their standards in that department because they used to be the most respectful of their users across the entire computing industry. And that is no longer the case in ways like this. So they will happily spam the crap out of users. They will bother users. They will harass people. They will put ads and promos and interstitials and notifications up to promote their own stuff or to drive their own services revenue or to promote upsells or sell more AppleCare or sell more Apple Music or whatever else.

1:21:29But they're not actually doing that in a way that invades privacy. They are also in efforts to serve their own goals. They're also doing things like app tracking transparency, which is really good for privacy for the user and actually helps destroy other people's ad models, which is its own antitrust potential issue over there. That's kind of a thorny issue. There's a lot of detail to that that I'm not going to get into in this Ask ATV question. But I think what they've shown is that privacy is not something they compromise on. They will just compromise the user experience in lots of other small, annoying ways.

1:22:11Yeah, that's why Apple, you know, Apple making more money from ads. Apple, it's not just that their heart isn't into ads. To do advertising in the way that makes the most money requires an innovation of privacy that Apple will not do. Right. You need to know so much about a customer and track them across all sorts of things. Apple will track you across all of its own platforms. And to Marco's point, Google thinks the entire web is its platform, so it will track you across the entire web. And that makes perfect sense to them. But like, you know, Apple does have platforms that it owns. Google doesn't actually own the web.

1:22:42So this is the difference there. But anyway, Apple's not willing to do that. So when it does sell ads, it can't sell ads as well as Facebook and Google because it doesn't have the kind of privacy invasive tracking and targeting that lets you pick, you know, 18 to 13 year old people who live in this state who recently looked for a mattress and blah blah like they just don't have the power to do that they don't have it their platforms aren't big enough and they don't gather that information and they don't sell that information they anonymize everything in their own services they don't want to know stuff about you and so the parts of apple that do have to sell actual ads not ads for apple's own stuff but they have to sell ads that other people pay for it's an anemic less powerful interface because the whole rest of the company says yeah you can't have that information it's probably difficult to run an ad platform inside apple because you have to constantly tell the people who want to run ads know that information isn't available to you even if apple itself tracks it i would imagine they wouldn't give it up to third parties because they know once you give that up to third parties third parties will do things with it that apple doesn't agree with so i do think apple is still for the most part holding strong on all their privacy stuff but when it comes to apple looking at itself oh these aren't ads we're just trying to tell you about the other great services apple has right and in some ways like apple apple should tell people about apple tv plus and the shows that are available on it like when apple doesn't add for apple tv plus at the beginning of wwc you know you're like how does that relate to developers apple's got a service they paid a lot of money to make those shows they should advertise they advertise on television they advertise in magazines they advertise in their own materials i give them a pass on that it's stuff like the the apple equivalent of what everyone complains about it windows these days like you go to the start menu and there's like a third party ad in there the apple equivalent of that is apple trying to upsell you in the setting screen granted it's all apple stuff you're not seeing an ad for like a mortgage lender inside the setting screen right that's more of a microsoft move but even when we just see stuff from apple we it's hard to distinguish that from you know the perspective of the users like a thing that i didn't ask for that's in my face i think there is a balance to be struck there because apple does have to let you know about the things that are available to you like for example when you fill your phone that would be a good time to tell somebody that one of the solutions to this is to pay apple for more storage in fact probably the only solution to this is to pay apple for more storage right but getting that message at that time it's like oh man all apple did was sell me an ad and you're mad because you got to pay money or whatever but like it would be uh i think apple has to do stuff like that not has to like oh you know like someone's forcing them i think it's just good business and despite the fact that some people are annoyed by it letting people know about the products and services you offer is a part of being a good business it's just a question of when how often where what context uh sometimes the context is uncomfortable like you just filled your phone that is an uncomfortable context but that is also a time when you should show them when you just set up your phone and then you have 25 come on for you to set up apple pay not appropriate too annoying or whatever but the people who run apple pay probably lobbied hard to the other executive to say look we got to be in there because otherwise we're not going to hit our numbers for blah blah blah blah and that's again not privacy invasive but annoying so this is a multifaceted angle and sometimes people lump it all into privacy technically there are distinctions but from a user experience perspective people always say they don't want to be tracked but in practice they don't care when it happens to them right as evidenced by their actions and what they're willing to pay for versus not when given the choice between like like the another eu case about a facebook saying you can use instagram for free and we'll track you or you can pay us money and we won't track you as much.

1:26:15Everybody picks the free one, right? So everyone says, oh, I don't want to be tracked. And there are a few people who are really genuine about that and change their life to surround it. But in practice, being tracked in that way doesn't have as many consequences that most people choose not to do it, right? Privacy invasion, I think people can feel more acutely. Like if they knew that anyone in the world could find out what they had for breakfast yesterday, that's an invasion of privacy. And even though it's probably, you don't, you know, I didn't have anything super secret for breakfast. You don't want the world knowing that.

1:26:43And if you knew they could know that by going to an ad vendor and getting that information, it's shocking what ad companies know about individual people based on the magic of computers and data aggregation and various other signals. That's one of the reasons everyone is convinced that their phones are listening to them because it's sort of the low-tech, non-technological explanation of how would somebody know this about me? They must have been listening. So they just personify the phone and say, how would the phone know this about me? It must have been listening. It's like, no, they can get all this information about you from your activity of using the internet.

1:27:16They don't need to use the microphones. They would if they could, but they don't need to, right? So like, and it's, people don't understand how that mechanism works. So they just think that, you know, it's been eavesdropping on them, but it's so much more complicated than that. So, you know, that's, that's why it all gets lumped together. It's like your actual privacy of like other companies not knowing stuff about you that you don't want to know is actually separate from how annoyed you are at ads that are thrown your face, which is separate from who those ads are from, and so on and so forth.

1:27:43So anyway, we've gone around in circles about this. Sorry, Stephen, but I would say my answer is that I think Apple still is being consistent in their dedication to privacy, but it doesn't mean they won't be annoying. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete Me, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. One of the big benefits of membership is we do a bonus topic every week now called ATP overtime. This week, the bonus topic is feature requests for death, for dealing with deceased people and your contacts and things like that.

1:28:19It's an interesting issue that I think people don't generally think about until it happens to them. So we'll talk about that and kind of where Apple could go from there, certain considerations they should have for dealing with death and their features. So it's kind of a bummer, but I think it'll be an interesting conversation. So that's ATP Overtime happening right after the show for members. You can join it and hear it at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.

1:29:01John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long It's super hot here. Let me tell you about super hot. This tiny little closet closed in here with a dog for extra body heat and a 2019 Mac Pro. No air conditioning. John, you can solve these problems. You can install air conditioning and you can get a good computer.

1:30:07There is an air conditioner in the room. I just don't turn it on. It's too noisy. Well, you could get a mini split. Those make noise too. A lot less. They are very quiet. They are way quieter than a window unit. You just don't want to make holes in your house. And also, my property is so oddly shaped that the mini split fan would probably be like right on the other side of this wall. I could touch it with my hand. So as quiet as they are, I still wouldn't be able to have it on. no they're really like the condenser or compressor whatever it is those things for them the outside part is also really quiet like if it's just a one room size one especially they're really small and they're really quiet strongly recommended for the low low price of putting holes in your house i mean what do you think is going to happen you think your house is going to fall down when you put a couple holes in it no let this be the next person's problem resale value casey you know about that i do but the thing is nobody's gonna buy that house in this global war globally warmed world when you don't have any sort of air conditioning answer i'm sure they will they're just everyone buys houses that are there fixer-opperous this is gonna be a fixer-opper yeah yeah if it's no if there's no air conditioning it will be that's what people will do the number of houses in our neighborhood of air conditioning it's gone up over time but it is it would shock you how low it is obviously in virginia every place has air conditioning and even long island i think it's more than here but yeah new england it's not it's not the same as old england uh it's not as bad as old england in terms of air conditioning penetration but uh the number is surprisingly low but when i left long island pretty much every house had air conditioning not true here in new england getting getting truer all the time but not true you know it was um it was a real weird thing when i graduated high school in western connecticut where there was no air conditioning in the school except for the main office and the library still true in our schools Yep.

1:31:55And then I came down to Blacksburg, which is southwest Virginia, where there were no air conditioning in almost all the dorms. The brand new ones that were suite style did have air conditioning, and everyone was very jealous. But generally speaking, there was no air conditioning in the dorms. And to be fair, it was in the mountains, well, to a degree. And so it did get relatively cool most nights. But a lot of the – I think all the academic buildings had air conditioning, I think. And it was quite a change. at my son's school uh there's people when they're picking like the dorms like if you're a freshman you're coming in which dorm should i pick i think one or one or two of them have air conditioning and the rest of them don't because the assumption is oh well you're not in school during the summer and that's the only time you need air conditioning so i'm sure it'll be fine but when it's 90 degrees in september and you're moving everything into a dorm room and it's not air conditioned everyone's got these fans in the window blowing 90 degree humid air at you yeah there's it like old england it takes a while for people to get over the idea of like look it does actually get hot you can't pretend that it doesn't right sometimes and hey i was my none of my dorms my freshman dorm for sure was not air conditioned i don't think any of the other dorms i was in were air conditioned and yeah sometimes even in boston it gets hot in the dorms uh and you know then the winter comes you have to worry about that but yeah well we'll get there eventually have you seen the trend lately so um you know air conditioners uh mini splits blah blah they're all just heat pumps it can we can link that technology connections video for all our little heat pumps air conditioners have always been heat pumps over refrigerators this is not new technology it's existed for many many decades but they're getting more popular because they're really efficient um and again if you want to see in that video that we'll link the reason they're efficient is because they don't uh you know produce heat for example when heating in the winter they move heat from one place to another so they don't have to do the work to produce it so if you for example have an electric heater it can be essentially 100 efficient because all the waste energy goes emitted as heat but that's what you wanted anyway so success um but that means every amount of heating you get comes from the electricity that goes into it so it's a best case it's 100 efficient but a heat pump doesn't produce heat or cool it moves it from one place to another so all it has to use do is expend the energy to move it so you can have an efficiency it's called like a cop coefficient of something or other anyway of like five to one so you put in like one unit of energy and you get five units of heating out why because you didn't get all the heat from the one unit of energy you put in you used one unit of energy to pick up a bunch of heat from one location and carry it over to new location and dump it right that's why heat pumps are great and that's what air conditioners do and here's just air conditioning running in reverse the new trend is for essentially what something that looks like a window unit air conditioner have you all seen the window unit air conditioner lets you like close the window it's shaped like a u so rather than having to have your window propped open i have not seen this yeah it's like imagine a window unit air conditioner but put a slot in it and obviously it's it's not all the slot doesn't go all the way to the bottom there's like a little thin thing right it lets you close your window right so most of the way yeah almost all the way anyway that's been around for ages i don't know how good those are i've never had one of those uh and it's it's the same thing it's just a heat pump and you can do this because if you look at how heat pump is designed that you can snake all the piping through the bonapart and it works fine right and it lets you close your window more uh a new version of that is inverted so now it's like an upside down you and it hangs down on the window which is much more stable because you're basically putting it in your window and half of it is hanging on the outside of your house and half of it is hanging on the inside of your house right and then you can put your window down almost all the way same type of deal but they're huge right uh they're like the size of the inside portion is the size of like a radiator and the outside portion is often even bigger right this is a way to add heating and cooling more efficiently to things like apartment buildings so in every single window in apartment building you hang one of these big u-shaped things like it's not like a just a window unit that you put in and out it's a permanent part of the infrastructure but if you have a really old building and you're using like steam heater radiators or whatever and you want to like refurbish it this is in theory a less expensive way to do it to put one of these units in every single room you often see them in like hotel rooms where there's that annoying thing on the wall that does both heating and cooling i'm assuming those are also heat pumps kind of a built-in type of thing anyway they're really kind of scary looking and kind of cool looking but i endorse this technology because you can use it for like a whole house heat pump or you know something that's built into your basement and just has like the little fan units outside individual window units or things that essentially replace radiators in apartment buildings without having to re-plumb the whole building or whatever of course those upside down u-shape ones wouldn't work in a house in new england actually has actual radiators because the actual radiator is sitting in front of the window and you can't hang a unit like that down into it but heat pumps are great houses in new england don't need anything like that apartment buildings you're right that's a it's a great use for hormones houses in new england can just install split units you don't need to put anything in the windows you can let the windows be windows you can let them be closed and sealed all winter and some summer long and you can just have heat pumps then you know stuck to the wall with a small pipe running through the house to go to the outside trust me it's a great system everything you said about heat pumps is correct every modern split unit that's worth anything can also heat because it's just when you convert an air conditioning unit to be a air conditioner or heater heat pump it's a very very minor difference in hardware and it's a very cheap difference it's basically like a reversing valve or something like it's it's a very very simple difference between the two so anybody out there like if you are buying a new method of air conditioning for your house whether it's wall split units or whether it's like a central thing central air conditioner spend the extra very small amount of money if there even is a difference for you and get one that can also heat because again it's so simple it's it's usually it's it's either no cost difference or it's like 30 bucks i think it's it isn't a big difference so if you get an air conditioner that can also heat then you have pure electric heat either as your only heat or as your as an option but as john was saying like whatever you whatever impression you might have about electric heat being like super expensive or whatever that's because it was using the old like electric baseboard radiators that were just giant toaster oven elements that were just you know 100 heating and that's and that's it but heat pumps you know as i was saying like you get more out of them than you put into them in terms of heat because it steals heat from the outside world yes even in the winter yes even when it's like zero degrees outside they still work because they can still steal heat from the zero degree air and make your house warm that still works and i can tell you this because now i am 100 heat pump all of my heat and cooling comes from central heat pumps and it is great like because you know you have obviously a forced air you have some downsides of forced air heat but the way people always say like it's so dry that's not true everything you know about humidity is probably wrong forced air central heat is actually the easiest kind to humidify because you just put a central humidifier on it and it works all winter long but anyway it is the best because once you have heat being produced by electricity, but not that much electricity compared to the old ways of doing it, then you have more energy options available to you.

1:39:12You can put solar on your house. You can reduce the cost of it. You can sign up for one of those various ways to get renewable energy to your house through the grid. Usually most places will have some way where you can pay a little bit extra through your utility company, and they'll give you wind power instead or whatever it is. like you you have a lot more options there so it's something to really consider even even if it's not going to be your your only heat source um even if you want to have some kind of like oil or gas as backup heat like make the heat pump your primary source and only use the oil and gas as some kind of backup if you really think you need it trust me it's great and it's it's certainly you know a lot better in terms of uh you know climate control or climate change rather um It's certainly a lot better in terms of energy options.

1:40:00It's way more efficient and way more people should be using heat pumps to heat their houses. And whatever you think you might know about heat pumps, check your information. It's probably outdated. They're better than you think. Yeah, this is a time of rapid advancement in heat pumps. They're getting so much better every year. Like you mentioned, how low a temperature can they handle? Even within just the past five years, the lowest temperature and the most efficient heat pump, that record is being broken all the time. They're getting more efficient. They can go down into the negative degrees. Like it's just changing so fast that like, you know, already in most of the United States, the heat pump can do everything for you.

1:40:33And in the places where you need supplemental heat, like heat pumps are trying to get down to that. Obviously, someone mentioned in the chat, the thing I remember seeing on this house, you know, decades ago, which is really cool, but also super expensive, which is a geothermal heat pump where it steals heat from the ground. They build, they dig a gigantic hole in your property, which is where all the money is, because like the ground may freeze down to X number of feet. but if you just keep digging eventually you get down to ground that is above freezing like all the time uh and during the winter when it's negative a bazillion degrees you have essentially an infinite source of above freezing heat that you can move with the heat pump into your house uh the big cost there is okay now i have to dig a gigantic hole and deal with all that costs or whatever but uh heat pumps that work with just in the air like air conditioners and air you know air conditioners running in reverse no giant hole needs to be dug in your yard and they're not as efficient as geothermal ones yet but they cost so much less so that's why they're so popular and lots of the government programs like those things in apartment units like government programs subsidizing those to say we want like all of new york city to be more efficient they're using you know fossil fuels to run steam radiators through these giant buildings is massively inefficient right what can we do about that and these type of like sort of mobile heat pump units are a great way to do that without having to pay millions and millions of dollars to like replumb an entire building for like you know forced air heat pumps i think so you just put one in every single unit or whatever we'll see how this works out because again the technology is advancing if you put those units in a building and they end up being obsolete you can tear them all out in 20 years and put in the new more efficient ones that are half the size and twice the efficiency right so i'm optimistic about this and uh yeah you have limited choices when you're buying a home uh but you can always retrofit Beep, beep, beep.