599: Where Did Salad Go?

28:02I guess that's the equivalent of a one star, huh? This is not a typical outage, and there will be tons of litigation, both by customers directly and by their cybersecurity insurance underwriters, today I learned that's a thing, seeking to recover damages. CrowdStrike clearly fell down on the reasonable efforts part of many clauses around their development and release practices, so there's a pretty strong case. Yeah, I remember from my jobby job, we had a contract that basically said the downtime stuff of like, hey, I'm paying for you to do the service and you're like a web-based company, but what if your site goes down?

28:34That hurts my business. What's the deal there? And the deal was basically like, okay, we guarantee X amount of uptime per unit for a month, a week, or whatever. And if we fall below the amount that we guarantee, we start paying you money for every minute that we're down. And it's just a negotiation to say like, okay, well, how many hours per month do we need to be up like you can have one one hour of downtime a month five minutes of downtime a month and how much do we have to pay for every minute that we're down after that and that uh is clarifying to all involved both to the engineers who are running the sites and also to you know the organization to try to have quality control and very often we would come close to i forget what the phrase was we would come close to our threshold of the downtime for a month for a particular client or a particular contract or all of our contracts or whatever and you have uh the classic change freeze which is like you know what let's just wait for the next two days to run out so we can clear the end of the month and reset the clock on the uh the service level agreement right and that's one way to do it but this type of thing is like you know in case of catastrophic failure like crowd strike uh what is the what is the remedy there what was written into the contract what contracts did people agree to does crowd strike have the same contract with every single person that it sells to probably not so this is going to be quite a mess.

29:52Yep. Marius writes, the update was not released by time zone. It was released globally at the same time. I thought that's what we said last episode, but I guess no, as we were thinking that people in New Zealand were noticing at first. So my assumption at the time was that it was released like by, you know, time zone, you know, so one part of the world got it first and then slowly as it went across time zones. But according to Marius, that is not the case. Marius continues, the update propagation took a few minutes to almost all their customers. The source of this is the Risky Business Podcast, episode 756, which we will link in the show notes.

30:22But anyways, Marius writes, I'm not sure why Australia and New Zealand reacted first. Maybe it was during their afternoon, but all the customers were affected at the same time. Yeah, this seems even more bonkers to me. Yeah. I feel like, maybe we didn't say this on the show, but I feel like we knew this even last week. I didn't know it, so that's why I put it in there. We have a source for it from the Risky Business Podcast. You can listen to the podcast and decide, but that's, you know, I believe it. Alright, so another anonymous person writes, A phased rollout approach for CrowdStrike updates has its risks unique to the nature of CrowdStrike's product, that bad actors will obtain the early rollout update and, through reverse engineering, obtain information about ongoing attacks or vulnerabilities and take that information and use it to attack unupdated CrowdStrike customers and also everyone else.

31:05CrowdStrike does a great deal of research on the most sophisticated threat actors in the world. They take that research funded by customers who are at extremely high risk, you know, government, news organizations, finance, etc., and funnel the results into the Falcon sensor product. The exploits used to get the malicious code running are captured and sent back to the CrowdStrike mothership. It's a virtuous cycle. That cycle is disrupted if CrowdStrike cannot respond to new threats in unison. by not having patches shoved down to all high-risk customers blog posts with data signatures sample binaries ready for the entire industry then crowd strike expands access to really bad uh vulnerabilities to everyone who wants them all a bad actor needs to do is have a bunch of different crowd strike subscription accounts on a bunch of different machines and monitor those machines for updates if you get lucky and get selected for an early update program analyze the update i i get that yeah this is an argument against the uh phased rollout but i feel like that maybe we weren't specific enough to this phase rollout doesn't have to mean like how apple does it or some companies do it where you release to like one percent on the first day and ten percent on the second day and whatever phase rollout can be over the course of 30 minutes for the globe right it doesn't have to be or an hour or whatever it is whatever window is too small for someone to get your update analyze your binary figure out the exploit like this you're racing against that how fast can they figure that if they can figure that out in 10 seconds then yeah phase rollout is difficult but honestly any kind of phased rollout even if it's 10 second gaps between time zones right and you just do 24 time zones or whatever like even if it's just like any it was i know from experience like when you're monitoring during a release and something goes wrong especially something this catastrophic everything lights up within seconds you don't have to wait for a long time right call phones start ringing emails start coming alerts start turning red on the board like things happen it's not you know this is what you're looking for and rolling out with a with a 30 second gap between time zones you'll know four time zones in that this is catastrophic and you pull the big stop everything thing and you can say well you stopped everything now they learned about your exploits like it's better than bricking all of your customers like crowdstrike did so i still think that a phase rod is exactly what crowdstrike should be doing i can't tell them exactly what those phases should be and how long the gap should be and what the risk is or whatever but all it wants the entire world is a capability they should have in cases of emergencies but should not be their standard practice that's just my opinion no i i completely agree well and it also seems like they didn't even have like a staging environment like before you roll out to anybody public why don't you try rolling out to some test servers or some test clients yeah no they're obviously their qa process all fell down or whatever i'm just saying like this as with all security things it's a multi-level thing you have staging environments you have test customers you You have a QA plan.

33:52You have automated testing. You have validation. You have people signing off and you have a phased rollout. Those are many different layers of trying to make it so you don't screw something up. Right. And yeah, that they fell down to lots of places. I mean, you look at their analysis, like clearly, hey, you pushed out a thing that didn't work. That's the thing you could have determined before you pushed it out. That is obviously what we're wrong here. But like we're always looking at like the very last thing, like the last line of defense is if it gets past all your other systems and you messed up your QA and all that other stuff.

34:19your last line of defense is watch as you roll it out and see if you're hosing customers as it goes up another anonymous person writes crowd strikes driver is not the nvidia driver i'm sorry i should give some context here this is with regard to how do you disable a crashing kernel extension so back to anonymous crowd strikes driver is not the nvidia driver if the nvidia driver keeps crashing sure unload it and continue to boot but not the cyber security driver i imagine every it's admin it admins head exploded upon reading tom warren's quote-unquote brilliant idea to just unload and endpoint protection if it crashes enough times in a row.

34:52That machine not booting is a much better outcome than flying blind with my entire organization on the line. That's very much the vibe of a security professional, but I do understand what they're saying. But yeah, I mean, like you still like this is we're talking about what can Microsoft do? Microsoft isn't responsible for CrowdStrike's thing, but they make the OS and the OS could be resilient against failure by, you know, if something keeps crashing on load, don't load that thing next time. but it doesn't mean silently don't load that thing you know the it could immediately send out some kind of alert through some kind of windows thing to say hey you know i just booted into safe mode because this thing kept crashing and that should light up somebody's board somewhere anyway right so you don't have to this doesn't have to imagine that the worst case scenario of like it silently doesn't load your endpoint protection and you're running unprotected for months at a time because you don't realize like a smart implementation of this feature would light up people's boards in the knock just like any other thing would it's just that your machine wouldn't be down right maybe it would just be booted in a safe mode where it doesn't actually load anything but it just says i'm sitting here waiting for you to update me because i couldn't boot all the way and that is for some people preferable to it not booting at all and on that topic that's the next item right so what happens if you need to recover an unbootable windows machine enterprise windows machines often have lights out management technology an it department and can reach out and touch Windows clients from anywhere.

36:14Just pull up the ILO, integrated lights out, management product you use, and remote into your non-functioning client. You can push out an EFI application that boots the machine, decrypts the disk with the bootlocker key, deletes the bad CrowdStrike update, and reboots the host. You can script Windows itself, have your Windows clients boot into save mode, log in, delete the bad file, and reboot, all via integrated lights out. Yeah, that is a cool feature that you can have, which is essentially like, when they say pushing an EFI application, that's like the firmware, that's like before the OS boots, It's just the firmware that's bringing up the computer before it even starts loading an OS from a volume somewhere.

36:45So if you have the ability to sort of remotely push something, push out an EFI application, you can get that part of the machine up and running, get the EFI program to run. And as they said, decrypt the disk and do the that is complicated and invasive. But the thing is, not everybody has that. Yes, maybe it's industry best practice. But as I think we're learning the Delta lawsuit, even big companies sometimes don't follow industry best practices that are up to date within the current decade. That was what Microsoft's big slam on Delta was. They said, you know, because Delta is yelling at Microsoft and Microsoft was like, Delta, unlike some of its competitors, has not updated its IT infrastructure.

37:19I think something I'm paraphrasing what they said. But yeah, best practices may provide a solution to a non-booting machine, but they're not ubiquitous. And even just reading this description, it seems fairly sophisticated and complicated. So I would imagine there are a lot of companies that don't have that capability, even though they technically could. and then finally with regard to crowd strike michael cook writes do you think there is any chance the crowd strike incident will lead to requirements for heterogeneous systems and companies either in os's or security software to try to prevent future incidents from taking out all systems at once or would it be judged too risky slash expensive for the benefit i am i am not the most recent actually employed person that would be john but to my eyes knowing IT folks to the degree that I do, I feel like this is a perfectly reasonable question, but I think most IT security professionals that I've ever worked with emphasize simplicity more than anything else, and making their jobs and lives simpler.

38:16So yes, what Michael's saying makes sense. If you have a bunch of Macs as well as Windows computers, and if you have CrowdStrike as well as one of their competitors, that does cover this base so that if CrowdStrike breaks everything Windows, you either have Macs that you can use or, you know, something that's not on CrowdStrike. But I just don't see that juice being worth the squeeze from the perspective of IT folks. Yeah, so there's two kinds of heterogeneity here. One is across the industry. And I think we kind of have that. Like this affected like 1 % of Windows machines, which, you know, there's obviously not some.

38:49CrowdStrike was not on 99 % of machines, right? So I think across different companies, across the entire world, there's enough heterogeneity originality that not everybody is running CrowdStrike. Maybe they're running one of CrowdStrike's competitors. Maybe they're running nothing at all. So I think we have that. Within a given company, like should Delta Airlines not use CrowdStrike on all their machines, no IT person wants to do that, right? They really want a unified solution because running something, CrowdStrike plus a CrowdStrike competitor on half your machines, now you have two places where things can go wrong, right?

39:20And also, it's not like the company can keep running successfully if only half of its computers are affected right you know 100 % half any significant percentage even just a few in key areas is bad and i think in general people don't want to uh which is why like a ride crowdstrike is available for mac and linux and everything too they don't want to have seven different endpoint protection solutions deployed in their company it's a hassle to manage it's difficult to keep up with all those different things you have to sign seven different contracts and now your user base slash machine base are divided into sevenths all of which can fail for different reasons i don't think this will change much it may make vendors consider make companies consider other vendors than crowd strike obviously and the contact renegotiations for crowd strike will probably be very interesting in the coming year for the company uh but the company still exists yeah in a year but but i but i think that i think that that actually uh the world of computing showed some resilience given that this company and this update was just as catastrophic as you can imagine it.

40:24And it was only like a story for a week and only affected 1 % of Windows PCs. We are brought to you this episode by Delete Me. You ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anybody to see and find with like a five-minute Google search? It's way more than you think. Your name, contact info, your social security number, your home address, and all that same information about your family members. This is all out there, all being compiled by data brokers and openly sold and available online. So anybody can get your private details with like five minutes of effort. This can lead to problems for you like identity theft attempts, phishing attempts, harassment, or just unwanted calls.

41:02So Delete Me helps you protect your privacy. So this is a service that goes out there and removes any personal information that you don't want online from these big data brokers. And they continuously monitor to make sure your information stays off. It's a subscription service that removes your info and it removes from the largest people search databases on the web. And this helps you in all those different privacy protecting ways. So you sign up and you provide DeleteMe with exactly which information you want deleted for you and your family members. And then they take it from there. They send you regularized personalized privacy reports showing you what info they found, where they found it, and what they were able to remove.

41:40And it's constantly working for you. It's monitoring and removing this personal information you don't want out there. So they do all the hard work of wiping you and your family's info off the web. When you sign up, Delete.me immediately goes to work scrubbing your personal information from the big data brokers. The data brokers hate them. So your personal information is therefore no longer theirs to sell. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete.me, now at a special discount for our listeners. Today, you get 20 % off your Delete.me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout.

42:15The only way to get 20 % off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash ATP and enter code ATP at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash ATP code ATP. Thank you to Delete Me for sponsoring our show.

42:32There's been a whole kerfuffle as we record this today about macOS Sequoia. and it apparently has added a weekly permission prompt for anything, any app that takes a screenshot or does a screen recording or anything along those lines. So reading from 9to5Mac, with macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple's rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis and every time you reboot your Mac. Multiple developers who spoke to 9to5Mac say they've received confirmation from Apple that this is not a bug.

43:08In the current macOS Sequoia beta, this prompt says, whatever the name of the app is, can access this computer screen and audio. Do you want to continue to allow this access? This application may be able to collect information from any open applications on your desktop while the app is running. Users can choose to continue to allow that app to have screen recording access, where they can click open system settings and immediately be taken to the preferences pane for screen recording permissions. This prompt is designed to appear on a weekly basis. this has made a lot of people justifiably very very very upset and jason snell did the lord's work he did the thing that nobody wants to do he filed a feedback oh no i know which generally speaking is an entire waste of time for anyone outside of apple but here we are uh jason filed a feedback number one four six eight nine nine two seven asking for one week permissions is untenable and insulting, which John then duped as feedback.

44:02One, four, six, nine, eight, nine, two, two. We'll put links in the show notes. And then, or I guess the numbers in the show notes, I should say. And then finally, Jason was so fired up in my favorite Jason is salty. Jason was so fired up that he wrote an entire post about all these features because it's basically the windows Vista-ing of Mac OS. And it's gotten bad. It's gotten real bad. But before we discuss it, the rest of the news with regard to this is a dear friend of the show for Craig Hockenberry, came up with a possible solution. There's a new API, or I guess a new entitlement, really.

44:35It's an entitlement, yeah. com.apple.developer.persistent-content-capture. This is an entitlement for persistent content capture. Craig writes, the issue here is that Apple's provided no documentation. Imagine that. Or any other guidance on how to get this entitlement prevent an app from becoming nagware. In the defense of Apple, they've actually gotten much, much better with their documentation, but I feel triggered whenever I see something like this. Yeah, click through on the page. That's why the thing I quoted there, persistent content capture, that is the extent of the documentation of what this entitlement is for or does or anything about that.

45:09Well, was it no overview provided or something like that? No, it's not that bad, but you can click on the link. Take a look at the page for this. It's not particularly informative. So on this whole topic, just to give a brief review for people who are less familiar with this or just familiar from the perspective of an end user being annoyed by these dialogue boxes, the thinking behind stuff like this, and it happens on ios and with a different system as well is apple's trying to prevent the case where someone gets an application and that application asks for some very potentially invasive permission screen recording permission is a is a great one because that's like you're allowing this thing to record your screen and you can imagine all the things an evil application could do with that ability so they get this application and on their initial run-up to they were highly motivated to get it because it seemed like some cool game or thing or whatever and they're like yeah yeah or whatever, whatever, the prompts come up.

45:58They're like, allow, allow, go, go, and they want to play the thing. And they're like, do it. And then they find out it's a scam app or it's stupid or they don't like it. Or they're just like, all right, they leave it and don't think about it again. But unbeknownst to them, they gave that permission, that app screen recording permission. And on the Mac, maybe it installed a background agent that they also said, yeah, allow, fine, or whatever. Now there's this thing that's on their computer that has the ability to record their screen and they completely forget about it. And so what Apple's trying to do is every once in a while and go hey i know maybe you forgot about this but like a while ago you said that this app could do this extremely invasive thing do you still want it to be able to do that and i think on ios it says like no uninstall the app or whatever like it's kind of like preventing people from clicking through something and then forgetting about it right that's the motivation for features like this like why wouldn't they just take my answer and just say i told you it's supposed to be allowed don't bother me about it again because human nature is that people will sometimes click through those things without reading and they want to remind you right the reverse side of that is and apple made fun of this and it's famous windows vista ad the more of these dialogues you throw in someone's face the more you are training them to just say okay allow okay allow whatever okay just let me use my computer and doing it once a week plus on every system reboot is way way way too frequently that is annoying people to death not only will that make people click through dialogue box and say okay okay okay they're going to be so annoyed and related to our previous topic they're probably going to think it's the developer doing it and the developer has no choice because this is an apple thing or whatever uh this is way too frequent i just i can't even believe that they would think that this is okay and this is on a system like jason's now been riding this hobby horse for a while like on the mac where where in recent years they've been getting worse and worse throwing more and more dialogues at least i when ios does it i don't know what algorithm it uses but it's like you know just so you know uh google maps is allowed to use your location while on the background you wanted to keep doing that i see stuff like that occasionally but it's not every week it's not every time i reboot my phone and it seems like basically take my word for it after i've said yes to it maybe once or twice right so like it's a it's a balancing act like that's what the title of jason's uh blog post about this is that uh apple's permissions features are out of balance right it's not saying that they're they're good bad and different there's a balance to be struck between making something secure while still not annoying people and also not inducing alert fatigue, approval fatigue.

48:26And they're just way over that line on macOS. And I really hope that's why I duped the feedback. Like I wrote my own feedback and I didn't reference this, but I basically filed the exact same bug that said this thing where you ask every week and every reboot, it's terrible. You need a way to allow someone to say, you know, allow permanently. And when Jason was really angry about it on MassDone, I was basically saying, and I agree with him what you're basically saying apple is that i as a user can never be trusted to give an application permission to record my screen permanently that's what you're saying to me that i am so infantile that i i am not a fully i cannot never make this not that that i have to be asked twice fine ask me twice ask me are you sure whatever but that at no point will i ever be qualified to say yes i swear to you mac os it is okay for this application to record my screen it It is my preferred screenshotting application.

49:14I've been using it for years. I'm saying yes. What you're saying, Apple, is you are never going to be able to do it. You are never competent to make that decision. And that's insulting. That's insulting your users. Your users aren't babies. Like, yes, your users are human and fallible or whatever, but there's a difference between making sure people are aware of what's going on and deciding that they are not legally capable, not mentally capable of ever making that decision. That's absurd. yeah it's it's real bad and it's incredibly frustrating when you have a new computer and and at least last time i did an os upgrade it was the same story just okay i'm finally ready to go i'm i'm excited i'm gonna use this brand new machine so pretty and beautiful up oh oh yep like yes that's loud up yeah that's loud all right there's good news here on that front though well apparently yes so jason writes on mastodon i haven't verified it yet but it's my understanding that permissions now survive a system migration, meaning that when you migrate, you won't have to approve 200 dialog boxes and checkboxes and settings to get apps up and running.

50:15That'll be great, because that is one huge source of a barrage of these dialogs, because you kind of do them gradually over time as you install apps, but then you migrate to another Mac or something, and suddenly you get them all at once. And this is what we were saying when we discussed this topic last time. If they can migrate these settings to say, okay, if you already approve these on your old Mac, they're also approved on your new Mac. That will be great. So hopefully, if they did that work and that seems like it would be a lot of work hopefully they are willing to hear feedback on this and are trying to make changes but this weekly screen recording thing right and and that that uh the the entitlement right if they're doing this weekly screen recording thing they should have a documented it b announced it and c said and by the way if you don't like this please request the new persistent content capture thing because i don't even know if that persistent content capture thing is the entitlement that will stop these things from coming and how how hard is it to get that entitlement?

51:04How long would it take to get that entitlement? You know, Sequoia is going to come out. I don't know. Maybe not soon, maybe in October, but whatever. Like this seems like people who have applications that require screen recording permissions are kind of getting caught with their pants down here of like, wait, what are we doing? What is my app throwing up now? What can I get? Can I get this entitlement with this undocumented entitlement? Is that the thing I should be asking for? This is just not a great way to support your developers in their applications and if there is this one that allows you to do persistent what's the whole point of alerting for weekly because won't all the bad actors have requested someone how will you stop them from getting it as maybe it's all re-resolved by next week but it is uh an upsetting regression in uh apple's uh handling of permissions on mac os yeah it's just it's one of the things where i i don't think any of this happened you know spitefully or anything like that But if you look at a security professional, as we've spoken a lot about this episode, a security professional's job is to come up with effectively infinite amounts of dialogues and nag screens and so on and so forth, because their job is to make sure that their users are as safe as possible.

52:12But as you said, it's a balancing act. And ultimately, I think this pendulum has swung way too far in the bad direction to the point that I don't often pay attention to these. And I'm the kind of nerd that usually reads every dialogue and reads every word of every dialogue. And most of the time, I'm just like, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. it's just so disruptive and so frustrating and it's you know apple was right to poke fun at vista because it really was that bad i mean i don't i think marco was mostly gone at this point i was like half i never used vista okay i was half in that world like at this point it was real bad it was real real bad and i would my recollection anyway and admittedly i have a terrible memory but my recollection is that this is worse like it's just incessant and it's not helping anyone And hopefully somebody with a little bit of, I was going to say design sense, but really just like empathy for the user.

53:05Hopefully someone will be the voice of reason within Apple and say, well, let's pump the brakes on this and figure out a better approach. Because it's not just empathy for the user. It is in the service of better security because, you know, alert fatigue or approval fatigue reduces security. Like it's a thing you want to avoid for security purposes. So if you're in the security team, your job is to increase security. You should know enough, and I'm sure they do, that too many dialogues reduces security. It doesn't increase it because that's how people react to them, right? People don't react the same way to one alert as they do to 100.

53:38It changes how they deal with alerts. And it changes that on a going-forward basis. From now on, they will be less inclined to read any alert that you put in. Even if you reduce the number massively, you've trained them, I never want to read these. Okay, okay, okay. You make them angry about it, right? That's the last thing you want. That's bad for security. Well, and I can see why, you know, I'm sure Apple's engineers who are and product people who are making these decisions to add these alerts. I'm sure they have all the best intentions because the reality is, yes, some of these alerts, especially on iOS, you look at the possible attack surface, the possible damage done, some of the actual sleazy things that companies, you know, big and small have done.

54:21you can kind of see why they think they have to do this or why they think this is the best approach moving forward. But because there are these downsides and these costs to having these controls and warnings and everything both to the user experience and, as John was just saying, to security itself I feel like there has to be a known amount of damage that was being done or that we've seen in the wild being done to prompt this kind of change. and I just don't I've never heard of that level of damage happening on the Mac that would cause anyone any user to say oh thank god they're making this harder for me I don't think we're seeing where is the justification out there in the wild for tightening these things down now obviously you don't want to just let security problems happen to your users and then only react to them afterwards But I feel like there has to be some balance of, is there really a significant threat that's really actually even ever being seen to have happened here?

55:30Is there a lot of Mac malware that's using screen recording permissions and not just security holes to cause problems for people? I don't know. We've never heard of that. Maybe it happened or was starting to happen and Apple tamped down on it and that nipped in the bud. who knows, but we've never seen any evidence of that. So it's hard for us to see as the users, what justifies this level of annoyance and alert fatigue. I think the right tool for that, if there was that type of outbreak, and again, maybe Apple would be quiet about it, the right tool for that is Apple having the ability, and they probably either already have this ability or could make it easily, to essentially cause all the Macs to reprompt for, you know, a screen recording permission because like a due to like an acute outbreak to sort of nip it in the bud.

56:23But that's so different than every week and every reboot forever. Right. That's situational. That's like, here's a situation. Everyone, here's a one time push to every Mac out there that's on the network. Re-approve the apps for screen recording. Right. Maybe you could even have a system where you could put a message to that effect that says just, you know, due to a recent outbreak or whatever. I don't know how you're going to do it. But anyway, like a one-time thing, it's understandable. It's justifiable. Even Apple doesn't want to talk about it. Everyone would just be like, huh, it's weird. I got reprompted for screen recording.

56:52But anyway, going on with my life. It's so different than, as Jason was snarkily putting it, making a schedule on your weekly, making a slot on your weekly schedule to re-approve screen recording of the application you've been using since the 90s, right? It's just, it's absurd to say, then the solution is weekly and on every reboot. That's the wrong frequency. I don't know what the right frequency is, but that ain't it. Right. So think again. Yeah. Somebody just wrote in and wondered, could this be in response to rewind.ai or limitless, whatever they're calling themselves right now? No. Okay. No.

57:22I mean, I don't think Apple has anything against rewind and that's like, that product is so clear. Like, you know, it's recording your screen. It's part of the functionality. You go back and look at the recordings to find things like that's, that is not the threat actor that Apple is worried about. Right. And that would, it would make using rewind super annoying because you're like I love rewind I use it all the time it's important to my workflow and I have to approve it every week and every time I reboot like if you're like Jason who I think still which boggles my mind reboots his Mac every single day you're approving it every single day not every week We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

58:00Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create your 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 makes it super easy to sell whatever you want to sell. So of course, physical products, digital products, downloads, member-gated areas. You can sell exclusive content. You can add a paywall to sell memberships or courses or sell files to your customers like pdfs music or ebooks you can have email newsletters whether they're paid or whether it's just outreach for sales and engaging with your audience all this is super easy with squarespace even now of course added squarespace ai features so you can kickstart or update written content on any website product description or email so you can get instant personalized results that know and show your brand brand identity with their ai generation so you can explain what your site is about you choose your tone and you enter what you need to get short or long form text and of course, then you can revise it from there if you want to.

58:58And so no matter the placement, Squarespace AI makes it easier to go live, stand out and succeed on your website. So Squarespace is a great platform for all your business and personal site needs. They have so many amazing business site features these days too. I strongly recommend check out Squarespace. The great thing about Squarespace is they have a free trial. So you can go to squarespace.com, start your site in trial mode. You can build the whole thing in trial mode and see how it works for you. And I am very confident if you do that you will stick with it because it's a really great platform it's so easy you don't have to be technical if someone else in your life is asking you to help them build a website you can just send them there they won't need your help it's fantastic check it out today squarespace.com for that free trial when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash atp for 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain so squarespace.com for that free trial squarespace.com slash atp for 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain thank you so much to squarespace for sponsoring our show

59:56Google is apparently a monopolist in a U.S. antitrust case. This is reading from The Verge. A federal judge ruled that Google violated U.S. antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. Quote, after having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion. Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly, according to the court's ruling. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Google's fate will be determined in the next phase of proceedings, which could result in anything from a mandate to stop certain business practices to a breakup of Google's search businesses.

1:00:32Judge Amit Mehta rejected Google's arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn't qualify it for liability under the Sherman Act. the prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from google which presently comes at little to no cost to apple disincentivizes apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so time and again there's another quote time and again google's partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch the default general search engine or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars that google pays them as revenue share the judge wrote in 2022 google paid apple 20 billion dollars to be the default search engine in safari during the closing arguments the judge honed in on these payments wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace google from that position quote if that's what it takes for somebody to do to dislodge google as the default search engine wouldn't the folks that wrote the sherman act be concerned about it then uh continuing uh in a different post from the verge According to Eddie Q, Apple Senior Vice President of Services, there's no other meaningful alternative to Google.

1:01:44During the trial, he said that, quote, there's no price that Microsoft could ever offer to Apple to get the company to preload Bing and Safari. Quote, I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us, Q said at another point. They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company. Jeez, Eddie. Sick burn. I think you might want to talk to Tim about that, because I'm pretty sure Microsoft is worth more than$20 billion. but maybe before you turn down Microsoft offering to give you the whole company, Eddie Mabee Rennel, obviously he was humorously exaggerating there, although it is a quote that ended up in a bunch of stories.

1:02:17I love it, EQ. According to the judge, it's not just that Google pays Apple not to challenge its search supremacy. It would be unbelievably difficult for Apple to get in on the action at all. Unsurprisingly, both Google and Apple have looked into this and their own internal estimates came out at trial. Apparently, Apple has calculated that, it would cost$6 billion annually on top of what it already spends developing search capabilities to run a general search engine. Meanwhile, in late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain a general search engine that could compete with Google.

1:02:46Apple would have to spend something in the rough order of$20 billion in order to reproduce Google's technical infrastructure dedicated to search. I do like that. I love the stuff that comes out in trial, like the fact that both Apple and Google had done some math to say, you know, if we did, if Apple did make a competitor to Google search, how much would that cost? And Apple's estimate is like$6 billion a year. And google's estimate is 20 billion and you would think google would know more because google has built google and apple's like yeah probably six billion dollars like not even as much as the car we never shipped so this this is uh i mean these things take years and years to go so there'll be more about this trial or whatever but this is a verdict and the verdict is does google have a monopoly in search and did they abuse it yes that's the straight up like there was even quotes in the thing of like i think some some google argument in court was like uh you know this isn't illegal because we've been doing this for years and the judge pointed out it's like things that you did when you weren't a monopoly were okay but then when you become an apple they become illegal and guess what you're a monopoly and this is like the windows uh anti-trust case where it's like there is no question that google is has monopoly size market share like how many people run windows it was like everybody right 90 something percent google search has just the massively dominant play like 90 plus percent in search it's fine to be a monopoly did you abuse that monopoly to extend or maintain it and the courts say yes you totally did by various things you do including making contracts that uh for example dissuade apple to the tune of 20 billion dollars a year you shouldn't make a google search competitor now there have been rumors for years that apple was considering making a google search competitor and i always looked at those especially in the early days of like that is not apple's strength but one of the strongest arguments uh with respect to that is the very early spat between apple and google over maps and hopple said you know what we're going to make our own maps and they were bad and apple wasn't good at it but apple kept plugging away because they were you know there was apparently no no reconciliation between apple and google with regard to maps and today apple maps is a viable competitor to google maps who would have thunk that several times i mean it took years and years right and still some people like google maps better but i use both of them on a regular basis and i'm not going to say apple apps is better than google maps i'm not even going to say it's as good as google maps but it is definitely a viable competitor does some things better it does many things worse but apple built that with tons of money and that's a competing product to google what if google had been paying apple 20 billion dollars a year to make google maps the default mapping service apple would have never made that that's anti-competitive right i mean we're not talking about mapping we're talking about search but like that's what the you know the judge isn't saying there's there's no remedies here it's not like what are we going to do about this that's a whole other phase and they're going to appeal and they could appeal all the way to the supreme court and it might be overturned and Like with court cases, you don't know what's going to come of this.

1:05:32And if anything change administration could change stuff like there's so many factors here. But this is a significant finding and victory for the Department of Justice of saying Google, you're a monopoly. You did stuff that's against the Sherman Antitrust Act to maintain it. And we're going to figure out what that means for you. And the reason the reason this is fun to talk about is because Apple's over there over there going to wait. what we get 20 billion dollars a year for google for having like a url and a plist somewhere right it's the easiest money we ever made it has essentially 100 profit margins um and this is relevant because apple's services revenue and the story about services services where the growth is for apple as we as it came out in the earlier trials when we all kind of learn the magnitude of this, a huge chunk of Apple's services revenue and also the services profit, services income is that 20 billion.

1:06:30It's like 25 % of their services profit. That's not a small amount. It's not like a 2 % thing or whatever. And if Apple's whole story for their company is like, yeah, the phones aren't growing anymore and other stuff is kind of stable too, but you know, services is growing like gangbusters year over year. What if I told you, Apple, that potentially in five years, some court decision could say, yeah, 25 % of your services revenue, that's going to zero starting now. That would be bad for Apple, for their stock, for their story about services growth. I mean, that I mean, and what did Apple do to bring that about?

1:07:06Like, did Apple do anything wrong by taking that 20 billion? Like the courts would say no, Apple, you know, the courts would potentially say they could say agreements like the one you made with Apple, those are illegal. So you got to cut off that deal. And Apple's like, oh, they have to cut off that deal. We like that money. But according to the courts, and I can see their point, that money is Apple or Google using its monopoly in search to prevent competition, to say we are dominant and we are going to use that dominance to make sure nobody else ever challenges our dominance. We're going to make sure that Bing doesn't get to be the default because they can't match our 20 billions that we're paying Apple.

1:07:41We're going to make sure Apple never makes a competitor, one of the few companies in the world that could potentially even have the funds to try to make a competitor we're going to make sure they don't do that because we'll literally pay them off every single year to the tune of 20 billion dollars to make sure they don't even think about making a competitor that's anti-competitive uh but you know looking at looking at from apple's perspective it's like this sucks we like getting 20 because i don't think apple wants to make a search engine and eddie q's there in court saying i don't know what his motivation was but he's basically saying honestly it's like from his perspective apple thinks or eddie q thinks that google is better than bing and apple saying we want to ship the best product to our users when it comes time to choose the default search for safari we're going to pick what we think is the best one and we think google is the best one and you know the 20 billion dollars doesn't hurt but he's making the argument that like you know microsoft could give it to us for free we wouldn't take it because it would be making a worse experience for users on our phone and you know they obviously you know the the eu would say why not give them a choice screen where they get to pick what their their thing is and honestly that's always been a question about the 20 billion it's like google if apple just gave people a choice of what they want their default search engine to be even if they randomize the list most people are going to pick you anyway because you you got to your dominant place not through like illegal deals or anything but because people love google search so if you just let everybody pick 95 of the people are probably going to pick google anyway but still uh you know good business is like why would i give them that chance why would i take that risk why when i can that 20 billion dollars is money well spent because it prevents apple from ever wanting to do this it puts us as the default search engine in the handheld platform where people spend the most money it's no bringer that we should do this so if the remedies of this court case if one of the remedies is that they can't do deals like that anymore i think it makes sense and i think it kind of sucks for apple but honestly you know we've talked about apple's how services revenue have been distorting apple for a while not with respect to this so much much more with respect to like what are your incentives when you when you're in when your growth is service revenue in terms of like product design and how many ads you throw on people's faces and how many come-ons you have but this is another aspect of it it's like what is this money preventing apple from doing right how is this money causing apple to become misshapen in its like you know decision making to say well we could do x and we think it would be better but 20 billion dollars like 20 billion dollars is a big counterweight to lots of people who might have notions about things inside apple like oh what about this what about that and someone says 20 billion dollars you're like okay never mind, right?

1:10:08Little things like that. How many little things just never got going because$20 billion, right? So I think in the end, although it will be painful to remove this$20 billion from Apple, it will make them a more effective organization that makes better decisions. It doesn't at all solve the problem of Apple being motivated to throw stupid come-ons for their services in our face constantly, which I think is the worst aspect of their services revenue, like sort of focusing on how can we extract more money from people on a monthly basis rather than how can we satisfy people but that's a whole separate issue yeah i feel bad not for apple but for i think mozilla people have said repeatedly that almost all their revenue comes from their own google search deal and even though i haven't personally used uh firefox in 20 years or something like that uh nevertheless it's just it's too bad like i think mozilla by and large is doing pretty good work and for them like you haven't been keeping up with the mozilla thing they've been they've been doing they've been like building like adware into their browser to try to like essentially get money from like this they're the same thing happened to them like the this revenue sort of enabled a set of leadership that's like you know we got the google gravy train and now we can get the whole you know ad tech built into our browser gravy train and like firefox users are like we hate this the reason we use firefox is not to have to deal with this stuff you're betraying us or whatever and it's like if muzzle didn't have that money from google and had to find some other way to find itself one argument is like they'd be gone and there'd be no firefox doesn't that suck but the other argument is they would have been forced to find some other way to make money and maybe that would have led them down this ad tech thing faster i don't know but like having this amount of money from an op list to dissuade you from ever thinking about doing anything except for using them is not healthy for anybody involved even though it seems like it is like oh it's keeping firefox alive that's good and you know it's kind of it's from google's perspective it's a it's a double benefit of kind of the same way that like microsoft uh invested in apple to keep apple alive so they could say see we have a competitor we're not a monopoly didn't work out really for them but uh you know chrome being able to say firefox exists see we're not the only browser people have lots of choices you use edge you can use firefox and you know but i i don't like getting that kind of money it's not healthy to be getting that money for essentially doing nothing from a monopolist right and i think it just it makes an unhealthy organization if only because it's now your organization is susceptible to like guess what if that money went away do you no longer have a business and what were you getting that money for anyway we were getting that money because google thinks it's important for there to be some tiny browser that they can think of that they can point to that says see there are competitors and also to make sure no one will ever ever ever compete with their google search monopoly right and that's that's not healthy Like it's, you know, ripping that money away is going to be bad.

1:12:59But again, this is going to be a multi-year case and it might even get overturned and who knows what will happen. So maybe this will all come to nothing. But Apple, Mozilla, all these companies now have a lot of time to think about this. And although I did, I don't think these are connected. I don't know. I don't know if these are connected at all. So take this as pure speculation. But a related story that I forgot to put in the notes is that Warren Buffett, who owns a just absolutely tremendous amount of the Berkshire Hathaway company, owns a tremendous amount of Apple stock, sold half of his Apple stock like a few days before this verdict came out.

1:13:30And for years, he'd been saying, like, I love Apple. I'm going to hold it. Nothing, you know, unless something extraordinary happens, I would never get rid of it or whatever. Then he sold half his Apple stock. And then this verdict comes out. And I don't know if they related, but if Apple's story for the past many years has been service revenue, it's where the growth for the company is. And this one story says maybe 25 percent of that service revenue is now gone. Yeah. Is that a reason for Warren Buffett to sell half a stock? I don't even pretend to know what goes through the mind of someone like Warren Buffett when deciding to sell.

1:13:59And why would he only sell 50 % and not all of it? And he's really old. And how much money does he need? And it just confuses me in many ways, right? But I don't think this is good news for Apple's services narrative. And I hope it makes them reconsider. Honestly, I wish they would break that out somewhere else and not even include it in services revenue. Because what service are they providing there? It's like monopoly agreement. monopoly maintenance payments, right? It's not a service that Apple is providing. Even without that money, they can leave that same value in the P list and still have Google search as their default.

1:14:33It makes sense if you are a professional investor. This suggests that Apple's revenue in a high growth area has a pretty high chance of going down like all of a sudden. So I see why somebody would sell the stock. That being said, I think it would be better for Apple as a whole in the long run to not have this giant chunk of this revenue being on their books in this place. Because again, as you're saying, it kind of suggests a different source of revenue than what it actually is. I'd say it's actually somewhat misleading. Even calling it services revenue, I would suggest is kind of misleading shareholders.

1:15:10I mean, I don't know if that legally qualifies as that. I'm not a shareholderologist. But it definitely seems like it is a little misleading to say, we are providing all these wonderful services to our users. There's things like Apple TV Plus and iCloud. And it's like, well, where does it come from? A huge amount of it comes from the Google Commission and App Store taxes. Is that services? And at least the App Store taxes, you can say, well, this is we run the App Store and this is the commission we charge. At least there is a service there, which is the App Store and the in-app payment thing.

1:15:42And Apple will tell you a million different ways about how that's such a wonderful service. But at least it's a thing that Apple is doing and made. This is just like we accept the check. And in exchange for the check, we do not change this string in our source code. I think it is not good for Apple, like kind of psychologically almost. And certainly it creates some weird incentives that I think it would be better for them if they didn't make a huge chunk of this money this way. So even though – like if there is a transition away from this that is forced by the government or whatever, I think that will be some short-term pain for the stock and the earnings and things like that.

1:16:16But I think longer term it will be better for them. But unless a government intervenes, this will never change. It's kind of like an addiction for them. But it's understandable why. Of course, they would take this money if they can. But it would be better off if they were forced not to. Yeah, and the whole point of this thing is like – so Eddie Q was saying like Microsoft could give us Bing for free and we wouldn't take it, right? But say this money goes away, right? Say this actually does happen, which again is still not a foregone conclusion. at that point i think apple would be reception receptive to accepting a few hundred million from microsoft for to to be in a choice screen for example or to be an option in settings right like deals could be made like one of the things deals like this do is they don't even allow competitors to get a foothold and suddenly if google is legally forbidden from paying off apple to stay as the default the door opens to other people being willing to pay apple more than zero dollars to say just put us in a choice screen just let us have an extension that you know like like anything like how much money can we give you in exchange for how much leave google as a default fine right whatever but like can we have like a one button press way to switch us where we can put on our website do you want to use bing as your default press this and we'll pay you 100 million dollars for that or whatever because bing is not a monopoly in the search market right how do you how do you ever get more competition right google has abused its monopoly is you know has used its monopoly to maintain and extend itself in ways that are legal according to this act according to the judge or whatever uh and the remedy is let's try to bring more competition back to the search market it doesn't mean apple is going to suddenly make a search engine because i still think that is not apple's strength and it'll be very very very difficult right but microsoft already made one right it's called bing it exists and it's not as good as google but it's never going to get anywhere if it's like boxed out of even even being a choice on platforms like ios right so So I mostly agree with the verdict here that what Google was doing was distorting the market and reducing competition.

1:18:19And they shouldn't be allowed to do it despite the fact that it's going to end up hurting Apple. And I agree with Marco that Apple should take this pain and move forward from it. And Jason Snell has a bunch of charts on his story about this that we'll link showing just how big – this is revenue, not income – but just how big services revenue is for the company now. used to be when you look at the graph of where does apple's money come from it was like the biggest piece is iphone and it used to be i think even closer to bigger than 50 or whatever and then you'd see like the mac and ipad and whatever the other categories were and it used to be this little wedge called services that was a similar size and services started growing and growing and growing and now it's like iphone and the second biggest category services now this is you know to the earlier point what apple lumps into these categories you know mac makes sense it's max iPhones make sense as iPhones, but wearables contains a lot of stuff.

1:19:11iPad makes sense there. And then services, a whole bunch of other things. Right. But services is getting worryingly large if you don't like the things that Apple has been doing in response to its services. And remember, services is really 20 billion dollars from Google, in-app purchase for games, other app store stuff. And then that's most of services. And then everything else, a whole bunch of little pie wedges for like Apple TV Plus and blah, blah, blah. people hear services and think it's like it's apple music and apple tv plus it's not it's app store it's this 20 billion dollar payment and it's mostly games on the app store stuff right so it's not even what it appears to be and then the other graph was products profits versus services products if you combine all the products profit from all the products mac ipad wearables iphone that profit and compare it to the services profit the product profit is spiky because it's like holiday season and stuff or iphone launch i don't even honestly know what the spikes are but anyway the products thing is spiky when and when the product line spikes up it's way higher than services but at the current state where we're not in a spike in the yearly product thing the services line is getting real close to the product line so as snell said in his article apple made 22 billion in profit from products and 18 billion from services this is in the last quarter 22 billion versus 18 billion i think services are a thing that apple should provide and i agree with their new slogan of like the best providers are hardware software and services i just think they need to be more careful about not distorting the other two the you know hardware and software in service of the services like services should be just it's a it's a prerequisite you sell hardware and software today that's not enough you have to also sell services because just as hardware is useless without software hardware and software these days in the internet age are also essentially useless without services and if you're not going to provide them somebody else will so why you know why not make your own services that work the best with your hardware and your software it's a thing they should do they should they should do it even better than they're currently doing it right doesn't mean they have to make apple tv plus but all the iCloud stuff all those apis like all you know the the email address they provide the apple id system you know and expanding on to you know the developer program and yes apple tv plus and apple music like apple should be making those things but they should be careful like the values that led them to make great products and great software on those products they should be careful to say those values don't matter anymore because services are growing so screw those values whatever we need to do to make services grow we're going to do it so we're going to start putting ads for our own stuff in settings right that is the anti-pattern they should be avoiding so i don't really care that the services line is getting close to the product line i care what that services line represents i care if that services line represents of new set of values that are not the values that led them to become the Apple that has these great products, right?

1:22:01Because services can infect the products with an incompatible set of values and philosophy. That's the problem. I don't care if this graph looks like services are more than 50 % in 10 years. That's great. Let them be a services company that sells hardware and software that work on them. I just want the whole unit to work together based on the values that led to the creation of like the original iPhone. And I think also just continuing to call this services, I think it's really fundamentally dishonest and misleading. I think a better word for most of this money, which is the App Store taxes and the Google Search deal.

1:22:39Because remember, keep in mind, the Google Search deal, the way it is apparently structured is not a flat$20 billion a year. It is a commission from Google's ad income that results from Safari searches from being the default in Safari. And I think maybe part of that contract, which is part of the DOJ's problem, I think part of that contract is that Google is the default. But the way it's structured, also Apple has$20 billion of motivation to keep them default because it is a commission from ad income from Google searches. So I would actually call this category, I would not call this services. When you look at it's coming from the commission from Google searches and it's coming from the App Store tax, I would call this category commissions, not services.

1:23:29Now, if they want to call it commissions and services, great. But calling it services when seemingly at least the majority of the money seems to be from commissions on activity generated by other people, not serving, you know, again, services is a very misleading word here. this category should be called commissions and they should either you know break it out separately from services which would look real bad uh or call it call it what it is commissions and services or just commissions i think i could leave app store stuff and services because that's a service they run though at least like app store they run that yeah i don't i think that's a very tough call to say the app store tax is considered a service i i again i think this is fundamentally misleading i don't think they would like the characterization of calling it an app store tax by the way i think their preferred terminology would be different.

1:24:15And Tim Cook's terminology was our commission. So I think, hey, let's call it what it is. It's commissions. Because otherwise, I really do think you're misleading investors into thinking that things like Apple Music and iCloud and Apple TV Plus, you're misleading investors into thinking that that's driving a bunch of revenue to the company that it's really not. While those are successful services, that is not 28 % of their revenue. That is not even close to making all that up. So I really do think this continued, quote, services narrative is fundamentally misleading to investors and to analysts like us who don't look too much into it because when you look into where this money is coming from, I think most people will be hard-pressed to describe that as services.

1:24:57I don't think that would consider it misleading, like both legally and just like practically speaking, because one of the things that all companies do, including Apple, is they don't necessarily break down their finances to the granularity that you as an analyst might want. This is for every company. This is true. They don't tell you exactly of how many of each widget of each color of each style of each whatever. Right. And so by lumping things into these larger categories, always the analyst job is to try to suss out what percentage of that is X, Y and Z. And they can have guesses and their guesses may be wildly wrong.

1:25:28But I don't think you can say that Apple is misleading. It's just that it's a form of like, look, how much information are we going to give you? Like Apple could say, you're lucky we're telling you what iPhone, Mac, we break it down at all. We don't have to do that. We can just say, here's our profits. Here's our revenue. Here's our margins. and we can let you figure it out. And there is a trade-off there of like, the more Apple tells analysts, the more control over they have what analysts say about them and the more control they have over what analysts think about them. But the less they tell them, the more they can hide a bad thing here or a product that didn't sell well there or whatever.

1:26:01Like, where is Vision Pro hiding in this thing? I guess it's in wearables or whatever, right? So you don't want to tell them everything because that can cause them to zoom in on your weaknesses or whatever but if you tell them nothing if you just said here's our profits here's our revenue here's our margins just as one big pie thing and we're not going to break it down any farther then they're left to wildly speculate about how everything is doing and they could have weird notions that cause the stock to go way down so this is the dance that apple has always been playing and in general as apple has become more successful they have reduced the granularity of the stuff that they tell like a while ago i think they even used to give unit sales on stuff and they don't do that anymore at all right so i i you know you could say it's it is not as informative as if they broke it down more and the name is misleading because of things they put in the categories but the names of the categories and the categories themselves have changed so much over the years like this is just this is part of the analyst game of like can i back solve to figure out this stuff and what we know about this from the like the billions in service revenue from the google search thing we only know that because it came out in discovery in court cases right Right.

1:27:05Like Apple didn't offer that up like it was wrenched from them by the law. That's the only reason we even know that. And now something we can see into that pie wedge and be like, oh, that wouldn't have been my guess. Like people didn't think it was that high. Like that wouldn't have been my guess to what it is. But now we know that. And now we're like peering into it or whatever. So, again, I don't think it's specifically misleading. And I agree. The name is not great. The Google thing definitely doesn't belong in there. Maybe app store is arguable. But things like Apple TV and Apple TV Plus and Apple Music certainly are in there.

1:27:35and iCloud and stuff like that. Like anything, like, do you pay Apple for iCloud storage, right? So you can use iCloud PhotoLive. That's a service. They run a bunch of servers. It's a service that works with the hardware and software. That should be services revenue. But yeah, without knowing about this stuff, a lot of people can look at that services revenue. And like you said before, like just think like, Apple TV and Apple Music must be doing great. They're killing it. Not that great. Yeah, well, but the thing is like, you know, you're right. Obviously, you know, they control the messaging around this for lots of reasons.

1:28:01And, you know, they try to figure out what they have to and should break out and what they don't. And they keep a lot closer to the vest, of course. The thing is, though, by making a lot of your money in a way that's kind of cagey and not what people expect can actually work against you as well. Now, first of all, I should go back and clarify, because the Google revenue is a commission on Google search revenue. If Apple is forced or if Google is forced to stop the exclusivity clause, that doesn't mean $20 billion needs to go away from Apple's books. What that means is probably something like Apple has to have some kind of choice screen like they do in the EU.

1:28:44It's probably going to be something like that as the remedy to fix this violation. Guesses about remedies that are like, I mean, remember, one of the guesses about remedies is like on the table is Google could be broken up. Right. Obviously, that's probably not going to happen. But like, But I'm saying the spectrum is wide of possibilities. So yeah, they could say you have to have a choice screen, or they could say Apple and Google can't do any kind of deal related to search, or they could say Google is broken up, or they could say nothing because it's overturned on appeal, right? So the possibilities are numerous and wide, but you're right.

1:29:12One of the possibilities is that it could be like, oh, you can still have the deal. You just need a choice screen, which, as I said before, everyone would pick Google anyway. Exactly. And so if that's how this goes, if Google just can't be exclusively the provider anymore, then apple puts up a choice screen and almost everyone picks google and and then google continues to pay apple a commission on the ad rates they probably won't lose much at all you know so i mean obviously maybe google google's willing to pay a lower rate per user if it's not exclusive because it's you know long-term less valuable to them or google was smart maybe we would say our price is this uh you know nothing right we're not going to pay you anything what are you going to do now just give people the choice they're going to pick us anyway right because because like the whole thing is like we were paying you to be exclusive and now if we can't be exclusive we'll take the 90 we're going to get anyway right exactly so you know there's lots of things that could go there but like but here's here's the problem with apple calling this services when it's clearly commissions then if they do lose a big chunk of money from this then the analyst narrative that they have been crafting for years that apple services are a big revenue base and growth area for the company, then everyone starts saying the wrong thing.

1:30:21Everyone starts saying Apple services took a huge hit. Oh, but the analysts would know and Apple would explain to them. Apple would say, we have a 25 % decline in services income this quarter because of the DOJ Google thing. And the analysts would know that and subtract it out. And then what analysts would be doing is saying, okay, we understand where that hit came from and your stock's going to go down. So tough luck. But also next quarter, what we're going to look at is of the remaining pie wedge is that growing and that's where they would take the hit if if that's not growing like and i don't actually honestly know and i don't think anybody knows because we just have these points in time of like you know how what percentage of that pie wedge is google's revenue and is the google percentage of the pie wedge growing or shrinking i don't think we actually know if you if you subtract out the google payment from services what is the rate what has the rate of apple service growth been over the past three years maybe it's been declining minus that and And maybe that's been keeping it up.

1:31:13Or maybe actually the Google revenue has been declining and it's been growing faster than that. But we won't know that until it's subtracted out. So the first time it disappears, the analyst, they're going to explain it. And the analyst is going to be, yeah, this is the DOG thing. You didn't get the money. You didn't renegotiate a deal. We're going to punish your stock for it because everyone, you know, what, you lost$20 billion or whatever. Fine. But the next time they're going to say, now we can look at the remaining services and say, is it actually growing? And I don't actually know. I'm not sure anybody actually knows.

1:31:40again, maybe services is growing faster than it has been on a percentage basis without the Google thing, or maybe it's been growing much slower and all the growth has been in Google. But we'll find that out only after it is removed. I mean, ultimately, I don't think the classification is really that big a deal because any investors worth their salt is, or any analyst, I should say, worth their salt is going to be able to figure out what this is about. And average day-to-day investors, you know, like the individuals, they'll, if they decide to sell because the revenue is down, then so be it. I don't really think they're going to sweat that part of this.

1:32:15I mean, I think they're going to sweat losing that money, but I feel like they can talk their way through it in a way that would probably be satisfactory, at least at first, to anyone that's paying attention. And then, like John just said, the rubber will hit the road the following quarter to see, you know, can they make up some of that space? And that's fine. I mean, ultimately, I don't have terribly strong opinions about this, I think people choose Google, like you both have been saying. They choose Google because Google is in many ways the best. And I think where it becomes gross, and this is what Ben Thompson has been saying on Dithering and on his own website, where it becomes gross is when Google is contractually entrenching themselves as a monopolist.

1:32:56If you got to be a monopolist by being really good, then well, okay, so be it. But if you stay there by way of contracts and law, that that's or maybe not law but contracts you know that that's where it becomes gross and apparently illegal yeah and also like google is google is the best partially because they have done everything they can to box out competition so they'll stay the best if you never let anybody who could potentially compete with you from getting better if you you know that like it's it's sort of you can't just say like well a google is the best because everyone picks them and everyone picks them because they're the best if you don't also acknowledge like okay well then how is someone supposed to get better and start competing with google when there's exclusive of contracts exist that prevent competition and so i think things like this have been holding back bing it's all speculative you can say well bing would suck no matter what maybe maybe bing would would suck even if these things didn't happen right but we don't know right the whole point is we actually want to have a more level playing field do not let the dominant player use their dominance to prevent you from ever getting good enough right and so even though we're all dismissively saying well if you put a choice screen everyone's going to pick google anyway it's like maybe part of the reason that's true is because google has made sure no one can compete with them.

1:34:03Yep, that's a really good point. And I think the thing that I'm most interested in about this is what it means for Apple's perspective on services. We glanced off this a few minutes ago, but this is what Jason's post was largely about. And I think the thing that kind of gives me pause and creeps me out isn't really the right turn of phrase, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it, is that we just had a discussion about how the security dialogues, which are user hostile are constantly being thrown in our faces, and there's becoming more and more and more of them. And as we discussed already, at a detriment to the user, we're seeing more and more of these.

1:34:43And whoever used to fight against these sorts of things isn't winning that fight anymore. We're also seeing more and more and more, hey, have you heard about dark matter? Hey, have you heard about that thing with Jake Gyllenhaal? Hey, have you heard about MLS, whatever, whatever? Hey, have you heard about Friday Night Lights? We're getting more and more and more of these advertising and push notifications and things and settings and whatnot in a way that that doesn't feel like the Apple that, not that I grew up on, but for lack of a better turn of phrase, that I grew up on. And the fact that all these things are happening, that the people who used to say no to these things apparently can't or won't say no anymore, or maybe just aren't there anymore, that's what gives me pause and gives me the heebie-jeebies, is that I don't want Apple, and this was the thesis of Jason's post, I don't want Apple to lose sight of what makes Apple so great and why we are so enthusiastic about Apple that we have done damn near 600 episodes of the show largely about this silly company.

1:35:40I don't want them to lose that. And, and I fear that I'm starting to see a little bit of smoke around them losing sight of what makes them so special. And, and, you know, things happen, you know, sometimes mistakes are made and maybe they'll course correct and maybe it'll be fine. But I don't love this feeling that I just got this like, that they're prioritizing services to the detriment of other things, that they're prioritizing security in some ways to the detriment of other things like the user experience. And I just, I don't love that. And I feel like they're going too far on a few of these things.

1:36:16And I want there to be a better balance. And this is one of those things where I want a better balance. Yeah, it was one of the places where some aspects of Apple's corporate structure have helped it in this way. And I'm not quite sure how this works with the services things. I mean, in a company that was really divided up by like division, you can say, well, the people in the services department are totally incentivized to throw ads in our face because their whole point is make the line go up on their services. Right. It makes sense. But like Apple has had counterbalances against that by, for example, having back in the old days, you know, despite some of his bad decisions, Johnny Ive is the head of user experience or UI or whatever for the whole company, for everything, every single product, hardware and software.

1:36:58At one point, it was like Johnny Ive and his department. It's like, there's no division like, you know, oh, you're an Apple TV. Oh, I can't tell you anything. No, I cut across the whole company. And I say, and I am in charge of the user experience of the Apple experience of using our product. So whether it's a Mac, an iPhone, a pencil, the, you know, the music player, you know, music app on mac os like software hardware anything uh you know someone was overseeing that and that group was had expertise and incentives to make good user experience because they were judged on you know like don't do people like apple's products do they think they're easy to use and pleasant to use do they in in you know induce surprise and delight right that's what they're motivated to do and maybe you in the apple tv plus thing is motivated to get more subscriptions but guess what you got to go through them because you don't have your own ui team you got to go through the apple wide ui team and i forget what they call that type of organization but it's like it's the opposite of divisions the opposite of having the mac division the iphone division the ipad division and having them just have their own little kingdoms and their own little worlds and own motivations because that can distort each one of those products because the people in that group are motivated to like sell more iphones or sell more ipads or whatever and for example if you had the iPod as a division they'd be motivated to sell more iPods but sometimes the best thing to do is not to sell more iPods it's to have the iPhone totally cannibalize the iPod that's the best for the company but if you had the iPod as a division they'd be fighting tooth and nail to prevent that from happening and that's not healthy right and I look at things like how the hell do come on's about like you know Apple payment and the Apple card and MLS get into the settings app like where is the cross-cutting user interface design team on that because i know why like the apple card people want that to be there but to your point casey like what shouldn't there be the user experience team saying you may want that but you can't have that and how are they losing that fight now like how is that is that not taking place where is that like i know johnny ive's gone and maybe there's just no but like that department still exists and it's still as far as i know cuts across hardware and software does it not cut across services this is this is a structural thing that's too much like sort of inside baseball about how apple works that i'm too far removed from that i don't actually know but i would hope that the structures that prevented this when with the hardware software divide would like not having the ipod team you know fighting to keep that product alive when it was so clear that the iphone should sweep it away right whatever allowed that to happen i would hope those same checks and balances are still in place but everything from the services side makes me think that somehow they are excluded from from this these checks and balances and somehow are able to infect the rest of the products which is not great and like i said it's not it's not about the revenue i'm not worried about the services line going up and the product line going down i would love if the products were sold at cost or were loss leaders and they made all their profit from high margin services as long as the holistic experience was the Apple experience that I know and love, right?

1:39:57And it wasn't the throw ads in your face, you know, crappy experiences that the services people seem to want. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Revenue Cat, Squarespace, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of our member exclusive perks is that you get a bonus topic every week called ATP Overtime. This week, members are going to hear about COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act and the role of government in keeping kids safe online. It's a pretty interesting kind of thorny topic. We'll be talking about that in overtime.

1:40:30You can hear it by joining as a member atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

1:40:52Marco 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 And T Marco

1:41:40So Marco doesn't really believe in the show notes for the most part. And every great once in a while, little snippets will arrive. and sometimes I just, I don't even know. And sometimes I don't even want to know what they're about. In the after show section of our internal show notes, I see the following Marco's Rivian drama. I'm sitting down. I'm leaning back. All right, Marco, what's going on? I feel like we already did Rivian drama. Could there possibly be more Rivian drama? Narrator says, oh, wait, there's more. All right. So there's two areas of drama. one is uh remember when john said after i got half of my car disassembled he's like no he's like at some point if that happened to my car there would be like rattles and stuff everywhere i don't i'm not thinking that's a fair fair paraphrase but i always said i worry about if you if a large amount of a complicated product is disassembled like in a shop i worry that it's not going to go back together the same way it was well i now have a substantial amount more um wind noise coming from the right side of my car than i did before um so i'll have to get that looked at it was not perfect before before the repair um if tiff ever rolled down the passenger side window while the vehicle was in motion when she rolled it back up again you'd hear wind noise until we stopped she would open the door and close the door and that would fix so there's obviously like a somewhat of a seal issue on that window so strange it seems like such an aerodynamic vehicle it's brick shape it's the wind now there is substantially more wind noise from the right side and some occasional hums at certain speeds so you don't need to back into a stump with your other side of the bumper yeah that'll fix it then you balance out the wind noise it will cancel out like force cancelling woofers so I have to deal with that at some point God knows if it's going to be a mess of like who deals with it the body shop or Rivian service who knows We'll find that out.

1:43:37That's part of the problem. So I took a long trip with the Rivian this past weekend. After the first fast charge at a Rivian charger, the Rivian Adventure Network charger, which is very good, I pulled away from the charger and I got a bunch of warnings on the dash saying battery fault, service SUV immediately. Oh, that's definitely reassuring as you're presumably two to three to four hours away from home. On a multi-hour trip that I intend to keep going on, going to an event that, you know, we were going to a friend's wedding in Canada. So, you know, it's a bit of a drive. So I'm like, well, let's see if I can just defer this service till I get home, try to go.

1:44:24And I noticed the car's going extremely slowly. This sounds all too familiar, and I am having real bad flashbacks right now. It's running on half the number of cylinders. So I pulled into a gas station, and I'm like, it's barely usable. I'm like, what do I do? So I thought, let me try. This is a computer product. Yeah, you got to reboot it. I'll try rebooting it. That's it. Never fails. Never fails. Number one diagnostic technique. Yep. And I had to do this for Tesla on a fairly regular basis as well. You know, you figure out like, oh, you push the steering wheel button and something else for a few seconds.

1:45:01So with Rivian, it's so funny. It's like you push the left steering wheel button and the emergency flasher button on the roof. So it feels just like control, delete for a car. Like it is. You should have to hold down the horn as part of it. Like holding down the power button and the horn is like, what is that? Oh, someone's just rebooting the Rivian. Right, exactly. So it's this ridiculous process, but I did the full reboot. And they even warn you like when doing that. There's a couple of minor reboots, but if you do the big reboot, they even say, don't do this more than once an hour because certain subsystems might take that long to come back up.

1:45:38Okay, that's a little disconcerting as well, but fine, we'll deal with that. So anyway, I do the full reboot. The car, it takes like five minutes to reboot. It comes up, it's fine. Okay. This is basically what happened with us, if I recall correctly. When it came back up, it was not fine for just a moment. And then within moments of you driving away, if I recall correctly, it was fine. Yeah. This was fine immediately this time. So I'm like, okay, well, I guess I need to get service. But maybe I can continue this trip and get service like next week and not right now and canceling this trip. Or, you know, getting a rental car and leaving my car in Newburgh or whatever.

1:46:14So anyway, so continue on the trip, fine. at the next charging stop when i plugged in the fast charger now i should clarify at the next charging stop this was the only charger in a pretty big area i knew it was there and and so i kind of took a risk to get to it i arrived at it with like 10 charge it's a pretty low amount of charge and it was like if i really had to go to another charger i could maybe make it but it would be it would be a stretch i really needed to charge here so i get there 10 and i plug in and the charger will not start every time it's about to start the car shows a message saying battery fault please service immediately oh no so i'm like oh now my car won't charge on a trip when i'm in the middle of nowhere at 10 this is not good so i try let me let me reboot again after the reboot comes back up the problem is fixed i can charge again okay whoo on the way home i arrive at this charger now i should clarify what this charger is this is an electrify america charger now i have when i first got the rivian a year ago i believe i said on this show electrify america chargers are fine they're they're plentiful they work.

1:47:42Some of them are pretty fast. So it's fine and it's competitive with the superchargers in terms of utility that it offers on a long road trip. And a vehicle that has a CCS plug and has no supercharger access is fine to own because Electrify America stations are pretty decent. And I believe I gave an update to that statement a few months ago that my experience with them was declining rapidly. It seemed like even within the span of one year that Electrify America's chargers, which are the primary decent fast chargers that are not Tesla's port in the US. But that Electrify America's chargers were, in my experience, declining quickly.

1:48:25That there were way more breakages of them. You show up and half of them aren't working to our earlier conversation. And way longer lines You have to actually wait to get to them sometimes because there's been so many EVs sold in the last couple of years in the U.S., which is great. EVs are taking off. They're everywhere, especially in wealthy areas like New York. They're getting very, very common. But the problem is that the Electrify America network and chargers not only have not scaled to address the growth, but also are actually getting worse because they keep breaking and it seems like no one is fixing them.

1:49:06So this is what this station was. I stopped there. On the way up, it has four chargers in the middle of this giant parking lot surrounded by big box retail stores. Four chargers. on the way up three of the only three of them were working and i had to wait 20 minutes and then when i actually finally plugged in it was it advertised that it could go up to 350 kilowatts and it went 90 so okay not a great showing when i get to the same station on the way home only two of them are working so why would you go to the same one go to a different one there's nothing else around it. That's why. So I get there.

1:49:42Only two of the four are working. They're all full, of course, when I get there. Now, of course, I do what everyone does when they pull up to an Electrified America charger that has two open bays because the things are dead. I pull into the one of them and say, let's try it. What the heck? Maybe it'll work for me. And of course, I pull in and it doesn't work for me. So I back out and I kind of get in a position that suggests I'm in line. Because see, this is the problem with car chargers. It's like the Apple store. Yeah. Imagine the Apple store, but with way higher stakes and everyone's mad and there's no one working it.

1:50:20And they're the size of cars. Right. So you can't easily jockey for, you know, jostling around to form some amorphous blob of checkout. Imagine that, but with pieces of steel that can't touch each other. Exactly. Or it'll cost$20 ,000. So anyway, so the problem with EV charging, Now, again, before this, I had Teslas, of course, so I've done a lot of EV charging. EV charging logistics, when you're at a fast charger on a highway trip, again, these are unstaffed. No one is working the chargers. No one is watching the chargers. No one is policing the chargers. It is just unstaffed, like almost public infrastructure kind of, you know, you show up and you hope that nothing bad happens.

1:50:59And you hope, you know, your car can get there and people won't mess with it and other people won't be a problem. because again, there's no one working it. That's why they should be selling potato chips in a little hut with the surely teenager in there because then he at least knows, hey, one of the things went out and send an email to somebody who comes and fix it eventually, but with nobody there and with like Target doesn't care. Like, you know what I mean? It's just, there's literally zero people to notice. Hey, everything is breaking. Call the people who come and fix it. Like that probably happens on like a week or a month lag when just enough people get angry about showing up there and having it not work and send some angry email when they get home.

1:51:34Right, exactly. And so here's the thing is like when I was first in the EV world, it was pretty much only Teslas that were getting any kind of traction. And certainly at Tesla's own chargers, there was only Teslas. Superchargers tend to be built with lots of bays. Even back when I first got the Tesla, I mean 2016 I think was my first one. It was a while ago. so even back then the superchargers that would be built with like six eight twelve bays so like there were a lot of bays and so and because it was only teslas and because it was so long ago there was never a wait there were there was always capacity and you would show up and the only other car that would be there would be some other like nerd or hippie who bought a tesla so it was a very different crowd and a much smaller one than what is at a modern Electrify America charger today.

1:52:32So today, you show up to these chargers and they are almost always full or almost full. Now, the entire idea of like an unmonitored, unstaffed, unpoliced charger totally falls apart when you have to wait because now it's anarchy like when you have to wait now it's like okay we're gonna like kind of form like a weird queue and everyone's gonna kind of keep track oh you were here first then you then you but like what happens if someone jumps the line or is a jerk or you know has a dispute over who was first you should just put your quarter up on the charger

1:53:14kids listening a quarter is a unit of currency that comes in coin form you thought i was going to explain the arcade thing but no i'm trying to explain i sure did because how many kids know what how many kids know what coins are fair enough i mean they barely know what cash is anymore anyway so we arrive at this charger on the way home again i have i have something like you know 12 like i'm not going to make it to the next one um and there and the two that are working are of course taken and there's another car waiting so now so i'm going to be the second in line for the next one and of course there's nowhere to park that like would form a natural line it's just like these things on the side of a parking lot with like uh one of those like kind of parking lot through streets right in front of it so you there's not even really space around it to like you know form a weird queue so we just kind of pull up near it and you know hope for the best the car on the end one of the active cars is parked comically diagonally across like two spots like it's just it's a it's a it's chaos so i'm like all right i'll wait you know and because ev charging takes you know half hour or whatever most people who charge their car don't stay in it they get out of the car and they go over to one of the big box stores that's nearby and you know go to the bathroom you know do some shopping whatever now it's the communal laundry machine at college where it's like the person's not there but their load is done so you take those wet clothes out and you shove it on top of the machine and you put your clothes in but Kind of hard to do that with a car.

1:54:39Interesting that you mentioned that. So as we're sitting there waiting, this is a pretty long wait. And so everyone's upset. So the one car waiting is upset. Everyone else is upset. Eventually, one of the cars finishes. The one person in front of me, they get to take that spot. Okay, so now I'm next in line. The diagonally parked car is still there. It's been there for a while. So I'm like, I wonder how close they are to finish. Let me get out and look. I get out, I walk over, their screen says like 81%. I'm like, great. That means this person is going to be done really soon. I'm going to get this spot next.

1:55:16This will be great. And a few minutes later, a woman walks up to this car and I'm like, yes, this is it. Finally going to be us. She walked over the car. She opens the door, pulls out of the car, one of those like clear square to-go containers full of salad, opens it up and starts eating the salad and closes the car door and walks away with the salad to disappear into like the nearby shopping center no and yeah and i'm like uh-oh she's not leaving but her car's at this point probably well into the 80s like what's gonna happen like what where is she going no go she wants that 100 and so tiff and i are like where like and of course so we name her salad we're like where did salad go like where when salad coming back and like surely the car has to be like in the 90s by now and then as we're wondering where salad went another car pulls up and two dudes get out and i i use the term dudes with some emphasis here these are the kind of guys who if they walk up to a bunch of people at an elevator who are standing waiting for the elevator to come they're the kind of guys who will tap the button like this like really like just like tap it a thousand times just because they assume of course none of you thought to push the button and not only do you not think to push the button but if you push the button very aggressively maybe the elevator will come faster it's those kinds of dudes who come up they come up of course they try both of the other spots that don't work because again it it doesn't work for anyone else the app says it doesn't work but hey maybe maybe that maybe it'll work for these dudes of course not then they look over at salad's car and they unplug it wait that's possible i thought i didn't think that was possible some of them have locking mechanisms but not all of them exactly some of them the cables lock in um for this reason you know keep in mind like and this is one of the things like all teslas lock their cables in the reason why is because like you know first of all things like this but like when tesla was first entering the market there was and still in some cases in some places is but especially back then there was a lot of like kind of uh let's say conservative people who would even like vandalize or try to vandalize EVs.

1:57:27Just like their mere existence angered certain people in the US. And so Tesla had to design their systems to be a little bit defensive. That's one of the reasons why the Tesla plug locks into the vehicle and why you can't stop a Tesla from charging if the car is locked and the person's not there. I mean, you can try to cut the cable, I guess, but that would be quite an operation. Don't do that, please. Yeah, please. And for lots of reasons, like you will probably kill yourself and also you shouldn't do it for lots of other reasons um but anyway salad's car is unplugged now we are in line right behind salad and we're like when she comes back she's gonna think we unplugged it sure is and then there's gonna be like a conflict that i really don't want and like i'm like oh god like i don't like this makes me look really bad because these dudes came in unplugged it and oh and the dudes motion to me to say oh come pull up next to her and start plugging it so they want me to pull up diagonally next to her diagonally parked car oh no which of course i'm like then i'm gonna walk away she's gonna come back thinking i did this and maybe like vandalize my car or something there's another twenty thousand dollars like i just i don't want like there's so many parts of this i like i do not want this i'm i'm like now what so i i told these guys like no i'm gonna wait for her to come back like i'm not i'm not taking that i'm not doing that but they had unplugged it they even they even then like closed her like you know flap like to the plug and i'm like i can't believe the gall of these dudes like what were they driving um the uh the kia thing that i like the the hatchbacky one the ev6 no the the good one the five i think the ionic five yeah that's it yeah okay not kia right okay whatever yeah the ionic Anyway, now the car's unplugged.

1:59:18It's starting to rain. We're like, where the heck is salad? Now it's raining. She's stuck in the mall somewhere. Now what do we do? Oh, God. She's going to come back. She's going to see us. We're going to have to explain to her. Tip's like, don't worry. I'll explain to her. I'm a woman. She'll get it. No, that's not. I don't want any of this. I'm freaking out. Tip's going to get beat up. If there was any other charger nearby, I would have just left. I'm like, I don't want to deal with this. But I couldn't go anywhere else. eventually like and the other car eventually like the other one that was working that car finishes thank god i'll take that spot i position myself i would say extremely aggressively as they pull out so that the dude car does not take this spot suddenly you don't care about another twenty thousand dollar repair yeah i'm like i am not gonna have a conflict with salad over this unplugging incident that i would never do so finally i like i pull in i get my spot i start of course the dudes immediately go diagonally park next to salad and take her cable um i'm like you know fine but you know plugged in we got out the dudes get over there and of course like tip was like the way the dudes use their car was the car version of man spreading like they open they They parked next to Salad, and they opened up every door and the trunk, and the car was just spread out across the whole door.

2:00:42Of course these dudes. Anyway, so we get out, and we're like, this is perfect. Now, when Salad comes back, she can deal with these dudes who actually did it. We are out of here. So we go do some shopping ourselves. Wait, you went to do some shopping? I would be in that car waiting for Salad to come back. There's no way I'd want to miss that. Yeah, I would want to watch. Absolutely. I'm so conflict-avoidant. I'm like, I don't even want to see this. I don't want any part of this. You could get splash damage from the conflict, though. You get to defend your car. So anyway, we're shopping. The charge is going actually impressively fast.

2:01:22That time it went to 150 kilowatts. Like, all right, that's good. and then i get a notice as i am uh shopping that charging has stopped on my car at about 82 percent oh that's not so bad i'm like well i'm like i mean i need it i was hoping to get until like 85 90 but okay you know that's weird though why did the charger stop charging my car and the app just said like waiting on charger or something i'm like i bet i bet they tried to unplug me does Does the Rivian lock in? It sure does. But if you push the release button on Electrify America Charger, it stops charging. So you are able to stop someone's charge, but if their cable is locked in, you just can't take it.

2:02:04So you've just now stopped it for no reason, and then you're just wasting time. So sure enough, I go back to the car. Those dudes have since left. now there are a new set there are two new vehicles waiting one of them is of course a giant truck with a guy who is exactly what you'd expect the kind of guy to be driving a giant truck and the other one is just some other and you could tell they are having a heated discussion possibly over who goes next and i walk up and tiff and i get in the car and i unplug my charger and we just get the hell out of there i i said nothing i didn't look at them i said nothing to them i'm just like you know what screw these guys they can fight it out themselves i am getting the hell out of here we went to the next charger down the road to top off and it was one of those that's a combo supercharger and electrify america in the same parking lot and there were 12 chargers four were occupied there was a family like playing catch in a field next to them it was like an oasis of peace

2:03:18anyway so all that is to say the electrify america charging experience um is is really i i think degrading quite a lot um to the point where um even as my car is is breaking oh and i did have to reboot it two more times at different chargers on the trip um even as my car is weirdly breaking and i have to maybe get it serviced and maybe get it serviced you have to get serviced i hope it's already in the shop yes well it's not yet i have to schedule it now but i've been traveling until like yesterday so it's it's been it's been an ordeal but i will never buy any ev for the foreseeable future that cannot at least also use tesla's superchargers there's so many great options on the market right now that only have ccs plugs for you know the next year or two or three maybe, and then they'll convert to NACS.

2:04:11There are certain brands that have deals with Tesla or can use adapters. I will not buy any other EV. And I cannot recommend that anybody else buy any EV that cannot somehow, either natively or through an adapter, use Tesla superchargers in the US. Because the rest of the charging scene is getting bad very quickly. It's only going to keep getting bad. And like, you know, what if you were in a situation where you have to kind of, stand up for yourself in a charger and say, you're a woman. And the other people at the charger are kind of aggressive-seeming dudes. This could be really bad. This could cause bad situations for sure.

2:04:48Again, I've had only positive experiences with Tesla superchargers. And I have had, so far, only quite negative experiences with Electrify America and other CCS chargers. And so I got to say, use Tesla chargers whenever you can, people out there with EVs and do not buy any more EVs that can't use them. I hope this whole experience has made you more prepared for the coming water wars. Oh, God. I'm sorry. What? Climate change. You know, the water wars. Oh, oh, oh. Come on. Keep up. Science fiction. But not really science fiction. Now it's science fact. Yeah. Resource scarcity brings out the best in everyone, said no one ever.