00:00SPEAKERYou want to roll the intro? You do. You do that. I did. I've done the intro the last four weeks. You
00:03SPEAKERshould do it. I don't want to make a routine. No, I'm fine. I'm fine with you doing it.
00:08SPEAKERUnless you just don't want to. No, no, it's fine. I just, I always end up doing this. I
00:11SPEAKERfucking hate it, but it's fine. I can, I mean, I can do it. Okay. You can do it. You do it.
00:16SPEAKEROh man. See, now you're thinking about it. You're in your head. Maybe this is the real intro. Maybe
00:21SPEAKERthis is the real pre-end. You think I would have some practice introing a podcast. It turns out
00:27SPEAKERthough we like, I, I did one that's by accident. One evolved over time. And then the other one
00:35SPEAKERwas just, hello, here's the show. I'm the people. And here's the other people.
00:40SPEAKERThat's a formal. I know. Okay. Hang on. It's coming to me. Got it. I think we can do this.
00:45SPEAKEROkay. Remember you have to do this thousands of times, so don't fuck it up.
01:15SPEAKERHey, Will, it's the fifth episode of our tech pod. Whoa. The fifth episode. I thought last
01:21SPEAKERweek was the fifth episode. Nope. Nope. We established that zeros are not numbers.
01:25SPEAKERI'm pretty sure zero is a number, but welcome. Hey everybody. I'm Will.
01:29SPEAKERHi, I'm Brad. Hello. This is our tech podcast. Brad, have you,
01:34SPEAKERhave you ever wanted to know the future? Kind of, and also not at all.
01:40SPEAKERLook, there's like in the eighties, did you want to know the future?
01:43SPEAKERYes. Okay. Yes. There was definitely a time 20 to 25 years ago when the future
01:47SPEAKERseemed like it might be cool in the early two thousands.
01:50SPEAKERDid you want to know the future? As let's say, as time went along,
01:55SPEAKERit became less appealing. Do you know why Tim Cook is the president of Apple?
02:00SPEAKERYes. Cause he, people talk about him like a supply chain wizard.
02:04SPEAKERHe is the guy who got the products made quickly. That's because the reason he's,
02:09SPEAKERhe is the CEO because the supply chain is the most important part of the whole thing.
02:14SPEAKERAll of the design crap. That's what gets the people on stages excited.
02:18SPEAKERBut if you want to know why we have iPhones, supply chains, the thing that's important
02:23SPEAKERis Tim Cook, Tim Cook's the man. So supply chain that's the topic is when you start thinking about
02:30SPEAKERhow you make something, instead of like going to the hardware store and getting the parts you need
02:34SPEAKERand jamming it together. Like if you put in a flapper in your toilet, you know, you go to
02:38SPEAKERthe store, you get the kit, whatever. Right. Or even if you're making like a cabinet,
02:41SPEAKERyou build it. Like you might even get like raw lumber or raw wood of some type and like
02:46SPEAKERdesign and build it yourself. Nobody has making their own homemade bespoke iPhone.
02:51SPEAKERWhat's the, well, I mean, I'm sure somebody is, but it's a bad idea. You shouldn't try to do that.
02:56SPEAKERWhat's the worldwide capacity for manufacturer of cabinets though. How many cabinets
03:03SPEAKERcan the whole world make all the cabinet makers? What are the variables in the equation? Like,
03:08SPEAKERlike manpower materials, uh, time, I guess that facilities probably space, like you have to have
03:14SPEAKERthe right kind of shop to build cabinets. Right. You have to have the ability. Yeah. Okay. So Apple
03:20SPEAKERover the last 20 years did a really good job with this. Like they figured they suss this out really
03:25SPEAKERearly and you can tell if like looking back, it's really clear, like they launched iPods, um, and
03:32SPEAKERthat saved their business in a lot of ways, but then they shifted those iPods from hard drives,
03:36SPEAKERwhich are kind of crappy for what they were people were using them for. Cause they had moving parts
03:40SPEAKERand that when the hard drive heads crashed into the disks, things go bad. It's actually kind of
03:44SPEAKERcrazy to think that people walked around with a tiny hard drive in their pocket and like jogged
03:48SPEAKERwith it, you know, yeah. The amount of jostling that those hard drives went through is like kind
03:53SPEAKERof, uh, it's terrifying to think about now. It's amazing. Any of them survived, which,
03:58SPEAKERwhich is why when they switched to flash memory with the iPod nano, it made a lot of sense,
04:04SPEAKERbut you went from a product that could hold, you know, I think what Steve held up the first
04:08SPEAKERiPod was like a thousand songs in your pocket. And then the nano came out and it was like,
04:12SPEAKERyou can fit a few hundred songs in your pocket, which is more than enough, but it's just,
04:17SPEAKERit's a step back. Usually the numbers go up. Um, but, but the thing about, uh, the iPod
04:23SPEAKERlaunching the nano is that they, by creating a product that increased demand for flash memory,
04:28SPEAKERdramatically, they increased the world supply of flash memory because like what was, what was using
04:34SPEAKERflash memory prior to the iPod? Can you even think of SD cards, cameras cards, SD cards.
04:41SPEAKERUm, there were some MP3 players that used flashcards as well. The diamond Rio, um,
04:48SPEAKERyeah, pods favorites, official pocket MP3 players, the diamond Rio. Do you remember
04:54SPEAKERthat that thing used us a parallel port? You plugged it into a parallel port. It had a really
04:58SPEAKERweird connector and you plugged it into the parallel port because everything else was too slow.
05:02SPEAKERI'm pretty sure I've mentioned that I have one of those in the drawer somewhere that someone I know
05:06SPEAKERgave me at their garage sale. And I don't think they gave me a cable with it. So I have the cable.
05:11SPEAKERWe can get ours together. We have an MP3 player party. Fantastic. All right. Great. Um, but
05:15SPEAKERanyway, so, so the world supply of flash memory was relatively small at that point. People were
05:18SPEAKERusing for digital cameras, digital photo frames, stuff like that. Uh, embedded systems was where
05:24SPEAKERa lot of flash memory used to go. It was like, you know, that means things like car computers and
05:30SPEAKERstereos and things like that, things that you maybe don't think have a computer, but do.
05:34SPEAKERAnd, um, as a result, the world supply of flash memory really skyrocketed because the iPod nano,
05:40SPEAKERthey sold a million units in 17 days. And, and that meant that the people that make flash memory
05:45SPEAKERsuddenly built bigger, were able to build bigger factories because there was more demand for their
05:49SPEAKERproduct and they needed to make more. Um, and if you, if you extrapolate that stuff out, it's
05:55SPEAKERcomplicated with flash memory because a lot of stuff was using flash memory, but there's a really
05:58SPEAKERgood example, um, that I use in a talk that I used to do about, uh, accelerometers. So I, you know,
06:06SPEAKERthe iPhone, uh, I guess the first one, they all, they've always had an accelerometer,
06:12SPEAKERbut in the early days it was a standalone like device. It wasn't even an integrated circuit.
06:16SPEAKERIt was just a thing on the, on the, on the board. It was packed in there. Yeah. And it was just an
06:21SPEAKERaccelerometer, no gyroscope. So you would, accelerometers can tell, um, when something's
06:26SPEAKERmoving relative to its previous position, but they can't tell orientation with relation to gravity.
06:32SPEAKERSo if you have an accelerometer and a gyroscope, then you can tell like where the center of the
06:35SPEAKERearth is the direction toward the center of the earth and the, the, the, the translational
06:40SPEAKERmovement of the object. So orientation and movement, uh, they added one of those in the
06:45SPEAKERiPhone 10, sorry, the iPhone, the iPhone four in 2010. Uh, prior to that, I am use, you know,
06:54SPEAKERa chip that would, that would tell you, and then have gyroscope and accelerometer cost,
06:58SPEAKERI think six bucks in 2006. That's sorry. Three, three bucks quantities of thousand. You could buy
07:04SPEAKERa chip, an IMU chip for about $3. So it was an expensive item. What was that? Inertial
07:09SPEAKERmeasuring unit or something like that. Yeah. Inertial measurement unit, I think is what
07:13SPEAKERthem stands for. The I is inertial to you as unit. I don't know what them is for, but they sold those
07:18SPEAKERfor three bucks each, which in like in motherboard and phone terms is phenomenally expensive.
07:25SPEAKERRight. When you're talking to ASUS and they're like, well, we could put a USB C port on this
07:30SPEAKERmotherboard, but it's going to cost us an extra 10th of a cent. They have to really think about
07:33SPEAKERthat. Right? Like that's a serious business. That's a digress too much, but, uh, is a serious,
07:38SPEAKERthe official pronunciation of that company on this podcast. I have been told by the representatives
07:44SPEAKERof a Seuss over the years that the company's name is a Seuss. Yeah. I mean, I've heard that for
07:48SPEAKERyears as well, but it's just so hard to get my head around. It's UB sauce, UB sauce, UB sauce,
07:55SPEAKERUB sauce is the name of our insider UB news podcast. Nope. Um, uh, yeah, UB sauce, a Seuss,
08:02SPEAKERAcer. I think that they changed it to a Seuss from a Seuss to get away from Acer when that
08:08SPEAKERhas happened. That would make sense. Everything is down to marketing. I don't know if that's true,
08:12SPEAKERbut that's the thing I always heard. Um, so yeah, so IMU chips, uh, three bucks in customer and
08:19SPEAKERunits of a thousand in, in 2006, the iPhone has an accelerometer in 2007. When it launches in 2010,
08:27SPEAKERthe iPhone four added the IMU chip, the price went down that drove the worldwide price for anybody,
08:32SPEAKERnot just Apple. Like if I go to an IC store and I'm like, Hey, I need a thousand IMU chips.
08:37SPEAKERIt then costs me 65 cents a unit, which is still expensive in that world, but not that bad.
08:42SPEAKERAnd now they're just built into this, the system on the chips that you buy with everything.
08:46SPEAKERYou pay nothing, they're smaller, they use less power, they're better across the board.
08:51SPEAKERAnd those IMU chips being like trending toward costing nothing, basically I haven't enabled a ton
08:58SPEAKERof other technology that sprung up around them that is based on low cost or free IMU chips,
09:04SPEAKERlike drones. This is how progress is made. Yeah. Yeah. So, so if you look at, if you look at,
09:11SPEAKERHey, how do you get to a point that IMU chips are going to be cheap enough for me to put in
09:17SPEAKERlike a kid's toy or, um, or, you know, put 15 of them in a drone or put them in a 3d printer
09:24SPEAKERor whatever, wherever, wherever they're weird places, you find they used to, to measure
09:28SPEAKERmovement. Uh, you can look and see what people are jamming into phones and devices that they're
09:34SPEAKERgoing to sell a literal billion of and, and see what's coming next by extrapolating what
09:40SPEAKERpeople are going to use that new technology for when it gets cheap. So if you're a company,
09:44SPEAKERthe size and influence of Apple, like you're not, when you set out to, uh, to a concept,
09:50SPEAKERan entire new product line, like say the iPhone or whatever, like you're not, it's not necessarily
09:53SPEAKERjust a process of looking what's already available on the market in quantity to work with, but also
09:59SPEAKERwhat you like, what forces you can kind of manipulate to bring about new supplies that
10:04SPEAKERyou don't already have access to. Right. I think that's the difference between companies that are
10:07SPEAKERreally successful at, at, you know, if you think about it, the iPhone, it was a product that seemed
10:14SPEAKERlike magic, right? It was a thing that like compared to a windows mobile phone or a blackberry
10:18SPEAKERat the time, having a real web browser and having enough storage to put, to actually use it as a
10:24SPEAKERsmall computer was a real turn. And that was because they had, they had done the things
10:29SPEAKERto get to the point that they could afford to sell that device for 600 bucks with, I think,
10:35SPEAKEReight gigs of flash memory. It wasn't very much. It was a tiny amount of flash memory at the time.
10:39SPEAKERI mean, I don't want to sound like I'm part of like the cult of Steve jobs or anything,
10:42SPEAKERbut like, I, I think that the original, you remember the original iPhone stage announcement,
10:46SPEAKERlike, I think that is maybe the only product announcement I've ever gone back multiple times
10:50SPEAKERon YouTube and watched just for the, just for the entertainment value. Like, I mean, you remember
10:55SPEAKERthe whole, like the stage craft of like, we're announcing, we're not announcing one product
10:58SPEAKERtoday. We're announcing three. It's like a, what was it like an internet communicator, a brand new
11:03SPEAKERiPod and like a something else, a web browser, a phone, a web browser and a, and a, and a MP3 player.
11:12SPEAKERAnd then of course the magic jobs moment of that's not three products. It's one, here it is.
11:16SPEAKERAnd if it's in your pocket. Yeah. Yeah. That thing, that thing was insane. Like I remember,
11:21SPEAKERwe didn't by we, I mean, the people I was working with at the time, none of us got phones,
11:27SPEAKERiPhones until the next year for the three G. Okay. Which was the right choice just to be clear. The
11:32SPEAKERfirst gen one was abandoned really fast. Like it was. Yeah. Anyway. But I distinctly remember
11:37SPEAKERcause it came out early June. I want to say it came out like a week or two before E3 that year.
11:44SPEAKERAnd we all went and got iPhone three G's right before. Oh no. And all of us were completely
11:50SPEAKERlosing our minds for the entirety of E3 because like, like, I mean, that's like a I mean, I don't
11:55SPEAKERwant to say it's like a high pressure environment, but that's a, that a trade show is an environment
11:59SPEAKERwhere like you need to navigate a lot. You need to look things up a lot. You know what I mean?
12:03SPEAKERAnd suddenly having this thing at your fingertips at just the moment that you need to access all
12:07SPEAKERthis information while you're out in the world was like, like that was, that was a,
12:10SPEAKERthe future is here moment. Like I maybe have never had before. It was one of those moments
12:15SPEAKERbecause it's funny that same E3 is the one that while getting out of the parking garage,
12:19SPEAKERout of the car in the parking garage at SFO, my, my OG iPhone, my launch iPhone fell out of my
12:26SPEAKERpocket and the screen broke. And I couldn't, I couldn't like, I could swipe 90% of the way across
12:32SPEAKERto unlock it, but it wouldn't get the last two pixels. You didn't want to lacerate your finger
12:36SPEAKERjust to get it done. Well, and it was the first time I'd ever gone to a trade show without like
12:40SPEAKERa massive, like, usually in the old days you would print your appointment schedule. So I'd have all
12:45SPEAKERmy appointments printed. So I knew where I needed to be and when, and I didn't do that that year for
12:50SPEAKERthe first time I was like, well, I'm just fucked. So I went to an AT&T store when I got there and
12:55SPEAKERbought a Blackberry because I could hook it into our outlook system at work and like get my, get my
13:01SPEAKERcalendar. But it was, it was like that, that moment, the first moment that you go there and
13:07SPEAKERyou're like, Oh, I don't have to take my laptop out for every computing task that I need was a
13:11SPEAKERreally, really big deal. And, and it happened because Apple started making color iPods.
13:18SPEAKERSo they got LCD production screen and the pixel densities they wanted up. They did flash memory
13:23SPEAKERon the Nanos and the shuffles and they sold bazillions of those. So they got the capacity
13:27SPEAKERfor flash memory up and built relationships with Samsung and the other people that were making
13:30SPEAKERflash memory for them at the time. And, and you know, it, it carries forward into things like,
13:36SPEAKERyou know, bare metric pressure sensors, which ran all of our phones. Now, nobody knows
13:40SPEAKERand air quality sensors, which ran a bunch of Android phones. Now I think even the iPhone 10
13:47SPEAKERplus has an air quality PPM sensor. And, and that empowers things like, like now you can buy a
13:54SPEAKERweather station for, for like 200 bucks that connects to Bluetooth and you put in your
13:58SPEAKERbackyard inside your house. And it tells you how much particulates in the air, what your carbon
14:02SPEAKERmonoxide percentages are how much light the thing gets what the temperature is, what the relative
14:09SPEAKERhumidity is a wind, all of these things. And all of these things happen because like these, these,
14:17SPEAKERthese things are on phones. All these chips are on phones. The tech has all matured through
14:21SPEAKEReconomy of scale. When are we going to get a Geiger counter in our iPhone? That's so there's
14:25SPEAKERa company called safe cast that's run by a serious answer to this. Oh yeah. So they this,
14:31SPEAKERthese folks named safe cast, I think it's run by Sean Bonner, who is he's an ex he's a, like an
14:36SPEAKERearly blog guy. He did LA I want to say Gothamist and LAist were, were part of his network, but it
14:44SPEAKERmay, I may be thinking of a different, anyway, it doesn't matter. He has a company called safe cast
14:48SPEAKERand they build there. They're like the size of a Walkman. Like they're boxes that are about the
14:53SPEAKERsize of an old school, like cassette player Walkman. And so like for somebody who's under 40
15:00SPEAKERI don't know. It's like, wait, is that where we're at? Yeah. We got to explain this. I explained
15:06SPEAKERthe TV is to only have four channels to my daughter the other day. And she just didn't,
15:09SPEAKERshe was like, that's a lie, dad. You're messing with me. It's like four inches by six inches
15:14SPEAKERprobably. And it's in a waterproof container, translucent waterproof container. It has inputs
15:20SPEAKERfor air quality intake. And then it also has like radiation detectors for, I think,
15:27SPEAKERalpha gamma. It's it's two of the three types of radiation. Cause one of them doesn't matter. I
15:31SPEAKERthink it's it's alpha is helium particles. Beta is I can't, I, anyway, I don't remember, but the
15:38SPEAKERpoint is it measures the two types of bad radiation and they set them up all and they work in a mesh
15:43SPEAKERnetwork or with cell radios. So they set them up all around Fukushima after the, after the nuclear
15:50SPEAKERreactor melted down there and they use them to, to like get a really good hyper local representation
15:59SPEAKERof air quality temperature, radiation, stuff like that. For whatever you can, you can go to their
16:07SPEAKERsite and see that they, they, the data is public. You can go see the data and they have the sensor
16:11SPEAKERset up all over LA and I think Northern California now too. So what you're, what you're saying is not
16:15SPEAKERonly does the tech exist, but it may actually work its way into a phone at some point. I don't,
16:18SPEAKERI don't know if they'll work its way into a phone, but yeah, it's, it's like, it's there and you can
16:23SPEAKERlike their, their whole, their, it's a citizen science thing. So they sell kits that you can
16:27SPEAKERbuild one and put it on your, like you can plug it into your wall and, and have a station in your
16:32SPEAKERbackyard, just like you would have a weather station. I'm just looking forward to Apple's
16:36SPEAKERskewed morphic interpretation of that creepy clicky sounds they make. We'll see. It's just
16:41SPEAKERgonna, it's going to be a haptic bump every time you do it. I mean, remember we're, we're in the
16:45SPEAKERbad future, so this is inevitable. We deserve the future we've gotten. So, so like I was going to
16:51SPEAKERsay, just to expand on what we were talking about earlier, I mean, like when you talk about like
16:55SPEAKERsomebody like a Tim Cook being really good at supply chain, and then the way you've, the way
17:00SPEAKERyou've reframed this for me, where you're saying it's not just about when you're designing a new
17:04SPEAKERproduct, looking at what you already have to work with, but making bets on creating enough market
17:10SPEAKERdemand to create the supply that you're going to need. Like that's, that's where there are enough,
17:15SPEAKERlike you're making enough gambles and placing enough bets that I can start to see why,
17:21SPEAKERyou know, people that are really good at solving this equation without all the pieces already on
17:25SPEAKERthe board are kind of as respected as they are. Does that make sense? Well, so there's, there's a,
17:29SPEAKERthere's some more classic examples. Yeah. I mean, that makes perfect sense. Google did the same
17:33SPEAKERthing with Gmail. Remember in, in, on April fool's day in 2003, when Apple, when Google was like,
17:38SPEAKERHey, we're doing a Google moon base. And also you can have a thousand gigabytes of storage in your
17:43SPEAKERemail, sign up for a beta invite today. Yeah. It seems like didn't, didn't they have it set up so
17:48SPEAKERthat you can like look at the, the offer page and watch the number go up in real time. Yeah. It used
17:53SPEAKERto be on the bottom of the page of your Gmail. I don't know if it's still there. I don't know
17:57SPEAKERif Gmail has a bottom anymore. Yeah, it does. Oh no. Now it tells you how much space you have.
18:02SPEAKERCause I I'm paying for two terabytes of storage. So I think they've locked it now, but like it was,
18:07SPEAKERif I remember correctly, they had it set up like that. And that's like a stroke of marketing
18:11SPEAKERgenius, you know, to say like, Hey, you get a thousand gig or whatever. And then you can watch
18:14SPEAKERthe number like slowly climb as you're signing up for the service. Well, so they did that because
18:19SPEAKERsomebody, somebody at Google was like looking at how many hard drives they were buying.
18:23SPEAKERAnd they were like, Oh, we're buying a boatload of hard drives every year,
18:27SPEAKERbut the cost per gigabyte or yeah, probably per megabyte at the time, but I guess per gigabyte
18:32SPEAKERcost per gigabyte at the time was, was like doing one of those like hard down into the right curves.
18:39SPEAKERIt was like, it was like, it was, it reached the point where it was going off the cliff and was
18:43SPEAKERjust trending towards zero. And they were like, look, we have, we have to buy all these hard
18:47SPEAKERdrives for the servers. We can't buy, you know, a hundred, 150 megabyte hard drives, which is all
18:52SPEAKERthe, the Google, you know, the compute servers need and stuff like that. So we have all this
18:57SPEAKERSlack space. We can use that for other stuff. And they figured out how to kind of partition it off
19:00SPEAKERand use it for other things. And, and then they were like, look, we can, if we want to get people
19:06SPEAKERto sign up for our accounts, because remember at the time before Gmail, who had a Google account,
19:09SPEAKERyou didn't, you didn't need a Google account. Search wasn't personalized. You just logged in
19:14SPEAKERand we got the same research results. Everybody else did. God, I feel like such a dupe now.
19:17SPEAKERI mean, yeah, we look, we traded, we let arbitrary people run code on our computers in exchange for
19:24SPEAKERhot takes. That was a bad decision. And we traded all of our personal identifiable information
19:30SPEAKERfor a G a email with pretty good spam filters and a gigabyte of storage and some cloud storage
19:36SPEAKERthat we never really used. Yeah. And then the ability to share photos with our family and
19:40SPEAKERfriends and people went to high school with, we traded for a Western democracy. So, you know,
19:46SPEAKERpros and cons bad for you. Yeah. Bad future, bad future. But I mean, the same thing's happening
19:54SPEAKERnow with compute, right? So the rise of GPU computing, and as we see like quantum stuff
19:59SPEAKERcoming online, which is a little further out, but is, is going to change things dramatically.
20:05SPEAKERIt's quantum computing happening. It's a real thing. I know it's, I know it's been in research
20:10SPEAKERor it's been under or in any research phase for a very long time, but my understanding was like,
20:15SPEAKERwe weren't going to see anything practical executed with it in our lifetimes or like,
20:19SPEAKERit just seemed like I'm a lot of wishful thinking. Let's say it has in the last five years,
20:24SPEAKERit's gone from a, do you, are you familiar with the idea of like five years off technology being
20:30SPEAKERnot really five years off? You always hear about, we talked about it a little bit with,
20:37SPEAKERI think monitor stuff, like OLEDs for a long time were a five years off technology,
20:41SPEAKERand then it took 15 years for them to actually become a market, a thing that you see in the
20:45SPEAKERmarket and can buy. Like mainly because they required different manufacturing,
20:51SPEAKERlike people had to build factories in order to build OLED panels and stuff like that.
20:55SPEAKERSo when somebody has to figure out how to make something, how to build something,
21:00SPEAKERit's not a five years off technology, especially if you're talking about building at scale.
21:03SPEAKERQuantum computers, they're doing like, there are now people running quantum computers that are doing
21:08SPEAKERcomputations that are impossible, unwieldy to impossible on a normal computer.
21:12SPEAKERThey're maybe not practical computation. Yeah. I didn't realize there were any even exist,
21:16SPEAKERlike extent and doing work right now. I thought that like, I thought that these sort of the
21:20SPEAKERcomputational model was like existed theoretically, but that they hadn't actually built any yet,
21:26SPEAKERor maybe I was. They're not doing practical work. They're doing theoretical work still.
21:30SPEAKEROkay. But they exist.
21:32SPEAKEROkay. Huh. Yeah. Right. Also holographic storage cubes.
21:37SPEAKERThat's a whole different problem. Well, you know, your, your, your NAND flash in your,
21:41SPEAKERin your, uh, new Intel SSDs is three-dimensional. So it's multiple.
21:44SPEAKEROkay. Sure. Yes. It's not a hollow cube though. Um, but yeah, so, so the same thing's happening
21:51SPEAKERwith compute, which is why like when you upload your photos to Google photos, it'll look at the
21:56SPEAKERphotos and it's like, okay, these 20,000 pictures are of babies and these 18,000 pictures are of
22:01SPEAKERdogs. And these 240,000, uh, pictures are of your every meal you've eaten for the last 20 years.
22:08SPEAKERRight. So, um, and they can do all that because the cost of compute is basically trending toward,
22:14SPEAKERtowards zero now. Yeah. It's crazy. Like, uh, I guess that's another good example of like the
22:17SPEAKERpopularity of iPhones and Android phones or smartphones, I should say. Yeah. Pushing arm
22:22SPEAKERand pushing mobile processors. And then those, that stuff is trickling down into like raspberry
22:26SPEAKERpies and other non non like consumer focused products. I mean, the pie, I guess it's kind
22:31SPEAKERof consumer focused, but like that stuff is a little more hobbyist, a little more
22:35SPEAKERenthusiasts. Uh, but you're like, you're, you're getting access to a lot more, uh,
22:39SPEAKERhorsepower in places that you didn't have it for, for, for super cheap.
22:42SPEAKERFor me, what is a raspberry PI for the loaded one is like 50 bucks, I think.
22:46SPEAKERRight. And it's probably better than any computer I had until maybe 10 years ago.
22:51SPEAKERTotally. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there was a moment, I think around the time we started tested,
22:56SPEAKERwhen I looked at my iPhone specs and I thought about like the computer that I had when I first
23:01SPEAKERmoved to California in 2000 and the iPhone four had a higher resolution screen, a faster CPU,
23:08SPEAKERmore memory, more storage, and a faster wireless internet connection to the cell network that I was
23:15SPEAKERgetting. Yeah. With a wired DSL desktop PC with a spinning platter hard drive that, you know,
23:25SPEAKERwas like this, it was the size of a desktop PC. It was a big fucking computer. Yeah. And I was
23:29SPEAKERcarrying this thing around in my pocket and complaining that it was too slow to play
23:32SPEAKERI go on or whatever. I know something, something, something iPhone Apollo 11 guidance computer,
23:38SPEAKERyou know, it's just kind of the way of things. But, but okay. So there's more examples like
23:43SPEAKERtests. What Tesla did with batteries is another one, right? They, they started out selling the
23:48SPEAKERroadster based on somebody else's chassis basically. And they just built motors and
23:53SPEAKERbatteries until they had enough until that was able to drive enough market that they then could
23:59SPEAKERstart selling the expensive sedan to rich people. And that let them build battery manufacturing
24:04SPEAKERcapacity up. And all of that stuff took time because they had to like, they're literally
24:11SPEAKER10 years ago when Tesla started, there was not enough manufacturing capacity in the world for
24:17SPEAKERlithium ion batteries to fulfill the demand of the model three right now or the Chevy bolt or
24:22SPEAKERwhatever other example you want to use somebody using lithium ion batteries. That's the stuff
24:26SPEAKERwhere, I mean, granted, I'm not like the chief product officer of any giant corporations or
24:30SPEAKERanything, but like that seems like completely terrifying to have to make to a place that's
24:35SPEAKERlike that. I mean, I feel like almost a sense of vertigo thinking about being the guy who is like
24:40SPEAKERstaking the future of a multi-billion dollar company on like, let's hope these supply chains
24:45SPEAKERcome online at just the right time to like, well, but I mean, I don't think there's ships on this
24:50SPEAKERproduct that, well, yeah, I guess you've got like a lot of good intelligence coming in about like
24:53SPEAKERwhere things are going and what's ramping up and that sort of thing. Yeah. And, and like there,
24:58SPEAKERthis is like, like I said, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. You know Tim Cook goes to Samsung
25:04SPEAKERand says, Hey, we were, we're going to want 200 times the amount of flash memory that you make
25:09SPEAKERright now. We want to buy that 10 years from now. Right. So if they do that in 1999, thinking about
25:14SPEAKERan iPhone launch in 2007, I mean, clearly Apple was betting the company on the iPhone launch.
25:20SPEAKERWe know that given, you know, kind of how things were going for them before that stuff.
25:25SPEAKERBut, you know, they, they're, they're letting Samsung know, cause it takes years to build
25:29SPEAKERthose factories and build those facilities to bring that stuff online. And, and, you know,
25:34SPEAKERmemories just sand plus a little bit of metal right at the end of the day. But, but it's still
25:40SPEAKERlike the, it's all, all of the stuff that turns that sand and the, and the metal, the trace amounts
25:44SPEAKERof metal into something useful is billions of dollars of infrastructure. And it takes time to
25:48SPEAKERbuild that stuff. So like the, the manufacturing people will say, look, if you have a lathe,
25:55SPEAKERyou can build anything, right? Like all of the modern tools start with one, a lathe is just a
26:00SPEAKERthing that spins and has a blade on it. Basically you can make, you can make screws, you can make
26:04SPEAKERwedges, you can make all this other stuff you can make up with a lathe. You can make the gears to
26:09SPEAKERmake a mill, right? And then with the mill, you make a blah, blah, blah, and on down the line
26:13SPEAKERthrough the tech tree until we get to memory manufacturing plants. Yeah. But, but it's figuring
26:20SPEAKERout where the wedges are and that stuff is, is the challenge of our time for the smart people.
26:24SPEAKERSo I know I've said in the past that I'm trying my best not to make this an Apple centric podcast,
26:30SPEAKERbut they, I just, I feel like they typify a lot of the subjects that we're trying to talk about.
26:34SPEAKERWell, and in, in a lot of ways, Android, the Android manufacturer is literally drafted on
26:39SPEAKERwhat they did. They provided a quantum leap and then it took two or three years for anybody else
26:43SPEAKERto kind of catch up for, I mean, we saw Android phones before that, but they weren't good until
26:48SPEAKER2011. Right. Right. So, I mean, like you mentioning Apple getting a lot of their memory
26:53SPEAKERfrom Samsung. And I know that I want to say they were getting screens from them too for quite a
26:57SPEAKERwhile. Like that's an interesting example of like on, on their faces, those companies are like
27:02SPEAKERdirect and like kind of heated competitors. Right. But on the backend, like one of them is
27:06SPEAKERrelying on the other for some like crucial parts that are coming in. And like Apple seems like a,
27:12SPEAKERmaybe an edge case where they are trying to bring more and more of their supply chain in house,
27:16SPEAKERwhere they presumably want to be making more, if not all of the parts that go into their stuff.
27:22SPEAKERThey're definitely designing that stuff. I mean, whether they're making it, I don't,
27:26SPEAKERI don't know who does the manufacturing for the, a series of, of SOCs that goes into iPhones and
27:31SPEAKERiPads. Yeah. I mean, I guess they probably don't own their own chip foundries yet or
27:34SPEAKERanything crazy like that, but like they do design their CPU's in house, you know?
27:38SPEAKERYeah. So that, that was a direct response to them not getting the things that they wanted out of the
27:43SPEAKERstock ARM. So, so something people probably don't know, this is a little off topic, but
27:48SPEAKERARM SOCs, system on a chips, ARM provides a set of instructions that it licenses and then
27:54SPEAKERlike Qualcomm and Samsung and Apple and a bunch of other companies take those instructions
28:01SPEAKERand then figure out what the other bits that go into the SOC are that they want.
28:05SPEAKERSo like Apple is going to put a big GPU on there and they're going to put some dedicated machine
28:10SPEAKERlearning stuff, like math units to do specific types of math that are used in machine learning.
28:15SPEAKERThey're going to do probably an IMU. They're going to put a compass. And,
28:20SPEAKERand sometimes that stuff is on the chip set, which is other chips on the board.
28:25SPEAKERSometimes it's just embedded directly in the, in the, in the CPU. And a lot of those decisions
28:30SPEAKERare made based on like how often it's used. Like if it's going to be used constantly,
28:35SPEAKERthey do Apple puts a lot of, and Samsung and everybody else puts a lot of the stuff that's
28:38SPEAKERused constantly, but at very low power on a separate chip, because it's easier to do that
28:44SPEAKERthan it is to just figure out how to clock down one individual bit of the ARM CPU. Anyway, Apple
28:50SPEAKERdid the, brought the design in house because nobody was making stuff exactly the way they
28:53SPEAKERwanted it. And they wanted lots of GPU and they wanted lots of they wanted lots of specific stuff
29:00SPEAKERso that the phone behaved in the way that they wanted it to because of choices they made with
29:03SPEAKERthe OS. Maybe, I don't know if this is kind of a digression, but can they ever own the design for
29:08SPEAKERthose CPU's outright? Or are they always going to have to pay licensing fees to ARM? Like can they,
29:11SPEAKERcan they buy like just the design of each chip? I don't know how that stuff works on the licensing
29:16SPEAKERside. That's a good question. Yeah. Cause like I heard the same story back in the day about there's
29:20SPEAKERa game consoles are a hotbed of weird supply chain issues. Like going back to, let's see,
29:27SPEAKERlike I want to say it was the 360 where when you bought the hard drive, you were also,
29:31SPEAKERcause I think you didn't get backwards compatibility on a 360 unless you, you had
29:35SPEAKERto have the hard drive. Yeah. Cause the Xbox one had a spinning disc and the Xbox 360 didn't by
29:40SPEAKERdefault. Well, there was some, there was something, I remember hearing the stories where they were,
29:45SPEAKERthey were having to pay licensing fees to Nvidia and they were basically bundling those in with
29:49SPEAKERaccessories, with the hard drive, instead of, you know, they were, they were cutting costs on the
29:53SPEAKERcore console. That's why those hard drives were so expensive. Right. So like, I I've,
29:58SPEAKERI've heard stories for years about like companies owning the IP for their CPU design or not,
30:04SPEAKERand having to pay license fees over time. I thought the, I don't know the specifics.
30:08SPEAKERI never read that book about the original, the original Xbox one, but my understanding was that
30:14SPEAKERNvidia had chip set licenses. Yeah. Cause the Xbox one was an Intel x86 CPU, but it was that North
30:21SPEAKERbridge. Wait, you're, you're talking about the OG X, I'm talking about the, yeah, the, the, the
30:25SPEAKERSeamus Blackley X-Box, not the, not the Allard one, not the product called the Xbox, the Xbox
30:31SPEAKERwith the number one, not ONE. Yeah. So Nvidia had a North bridge chip set that did like it
30:38SPEAKERdid the Dolby digital. It did the direct sound to Dolby digital and all that stuff.
30:44SPEAKERAnd I thought that's what they licensed because the CPU and it was like a G force two, maybe MX
30:50SPEAKERthree. It was a three. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it had, it had the transforming lighting. What was what
30:56SPEAKERwas more than that? What was the big DX eight edition? Was it, it wasn't pixel shaders. Was it,
31:02SPEAKERit was light pixel shaders. Cause you do normal maps and normal maps and button maps and stuff
31:06SPEAKERlike that diffusion maps. Yeah. I thought, yeah. Cause there were games on the X-Box that did
31:09SPEAKERstuff like that. You know, they put out doom three for that thing. Wow. Really? Oh yeah.
31:14SPEAKERYeah. So, so like the weird, the weird licensing stuff ties into that for sure. Like
31:20SPEAKERpeople definitely try to like Microsoft didn't include a Fraunhofer license for MP3 playback
31:28SPEAKERfor years and years and years, because like you had to buy a, you had to buy, I can't remember,
31:33SPEAKERyou had to buy some like weird one-off program to do that. The same thing is happening now with
31:38SPEAKERHEIC, the new Apple yeah. Apple's higher efficiency photo compression format. It does video and stuff
31:47SPEAKERtoo. You have to buy a separate license for that or H2 64 playback or whatever. I mean, a lot of
31:52SPEAKERthe stuff that's getting integrated eventually, but sort of like blue, blue, blue Ray playback
31:56SPEAKERon computers is a big one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or, I mean, you didn't get H2. They didn't,
32:02SPEAKERthe reason that there wasn't an HD DVD player in the X-Box three 60 is probably because Microsoft
32:06SPEAKERdidn't want to pay the HD, HD DVD consortium's fees unless people were actually going to watch
32:14SPEAKERthe discs. So they bundle the fees in with the drive and then that stuff works itself out. I
32:19SPEAKERmean, of course it worked out for Sony because they put the blue Ray disc in the PS3 and then
32:22SPEAKEReverybody just be like, whether you played blue Ray discs or not, you watch. Yeah.
32:27SPEAKERBrad, would you say we take a quick break and come back and talk about rare earths, rare earths,
32:34SPEAKERrare earths. That sounds scary, but okay.
32:44SPEAKEROkay. Well, I've got a question. I'm curious about something. It is kind of supply chain related.
32:48SPEAKERI guess we're probably getting a little bit into product design territory, but I mean,
32:52SPEAKERI guess the two are pretty intertwined, right? Cause you've got to figure out what you've got
32:55SPEAKERto work with before you can decide what to build with. It's all connected, man. That's right.
33:00SPEAKERFollow the threads. Beautiful tapestry of endless consumer technology.
33:06SPEAKERAs far as the eye can see. I'm curious, and this is something I'm sure you probably have
33:11SPEAKERnot gotten a close up look at. Cause I would imagine a lot of it is like closely guarded
33:14SPEAKERtrade secrets, but I'm really curious what the early stages of building products with all this
33:19SPEAKERstuff look like in terms of getting stuff into a lab kind of rapidly prototyping things like
33:26SPEAKERbuilding potential enclosures, you know, like what, what do the, what do the tools look like
33:30SPEAKERin a design lab at a major company making consumer tech? You're right that I haven't seen a lot of
33:35SPEAKERthis stuff in person because it's all like the ability to, to make one of these spaces safe for
33:41SPEAKERsay a journalist or just a normal civilian to come in and look around without seeing
33:46SPEAKERbillions of dollars of IP is, is challenging. Right. It's not like they're doing a lot of
33:51SPEAKERwalkthroughs of Johnny Ive's design lab or for wired or something like that. Well, they,
33:56SPEAKERI feel like they've led a couple, a handful of journalists into these design labs at different
33:59SPEAKERtimes. There was a vanity fair article about Johnny. I have a few years ago that had a little
34:03SPEAKERbit of detail about how that stuff were. But there've been some, there have been some wired
34:08SPEAKERpieces, not necessarily about apples, but a lot of times what they'll do.
34:15SPEAKERSo I don't know how they do when they're doing a new product category. Like when the iPhone,
34:19SPEAKERwhen they were working on the iPhone, I know we've all seen the articles about
34:22SPEAKERthe four different iPhone prototypes and how, or seven different iPhone prototypes or 12 different,
34:28SPEAKERdepending on who you ask, how they figured out that that form factor and that screen ratio and
34:33SPEAKERthat size and the button on the bottom and the volume buttons on the sides were the right
34:39SPEAKERapproach. When they're iterating, what they'll do is often there'll be two kind of parallel
34:45SPEAKERdevelopment paths. One will be the physical form factor changes where they'll put the old hardware
34:50SPEAKERinto a new shell so they can like use it as they would a regular phone. So if like,
34:55SPEAKERthis is not a real example, but if they're going to make the back faceted glass and they want to
35:01SPEAKERsee how that change affects people's ability to hold the phone and put in their pockets and
35:05SPEAKERstick it on the dashboard of their car and stick it in the sleeve on their, on their messenger bag
35:10SPEAKERand all the different places that people put phones, then they'll build with like CNC machining
35:16SPEAKERtools out of Delrin or glass or whatever, you know, some sort of plastic or styrofoam, even some
35:21SPEAKERcases, they'll build mock-ups and then, then use those or they'll build. I want to say with the
35:28SPEAKERiPhone four, the one that Gizmodo bought that the guy left in the bar, they had a case on it that
35:35SPEAKERmade it look and feel like an iPhone three. Yep, that's right. But it had the iPhone four guts
35:41SPEAKERinside. So they were, that works on both sides, both from the aesthetic side, they'll make a fake
35:45SPEAKERmock-up and on the, on the actual like guts and hardware side, they'll disguise that as another
35:51SPEAKERdevice. I feel like they maybe don't do that stuff as much as they used to anymore because
35:54SPEAKERpeople are a little less crazy about trying to get the hot scoops as they, as they were
35:59SPEAKER10 years ago. Sure. But yeah, a lot of them, like those labs are maker play spaces, right? There's
36:06SPEAKERright. There's all sorts of cool, like you put a big slab of plastic in cause like Apple's R&D
36:12SPEAKERbudget is infinite for all intents and purposes. You know, the people who work in there aren't
36:16SPEAKERworried about spending a $3,000 piece of Delrin to like carving out all of that to make a fake
36:22SPEAKERiPhone. They just do it. I'm sure somebody cares, but my understanding is that Johnny,
36:27SPEAKERI was just like throwing, throwing money in the air, like Homer Simpson in the land of chocolate.
36:32SPEAKERIt's basically the Mr. Burns Thanksgiving dinner, right? Like he thousands of dollars
36:35SPEAKERworth of food on the banquet table. And he takes one sip of the soup and then
36:39SPEAKERdispose of all this. You can release the hounds. Yeah, exactly. So like, I feel like my guess is
36:46SPEAKERthat somebody above the design lab says, okay, here's what we have to work with. We have a CPU
36:52SPEAKERthat has this capability and it's going to have these chips on it. It's going to have these sensors
36:57SPEAKERand then they take that and they say, come up with 15 different ways to fit this in your pocket.
37:03SPEAKERAnd at the same time, the software people are looking at the new capabilities that are going
37:07SPEAKERto come online and saying, okay, we have a higher contrast screen and we have an air quality sensor
37:12SPEAKERand we have a motion sensor that tracks your relative movement 3000 times a minute or whatever
37:20SPEAKERthe numbers are. And then they figure out what's going on. And the thing that Apple has consistently
37:25SPEAKERdone well, and the thing that now Google is doing with their pixel line, is that they work well,
37:32SPEAKERthose two sides are working closely together rather than just saying, hey, here's the CPUs
37:37SPEAKERthat we have available. And why don't you go write some software that's just generic for those,
37:42SPEAKERyou end up with a better result, it seems like. And I think, like I said, what Google's done with
37:46SPEAKERthe pixel, even what Samsung is doing with their phones has proven that out when those sides are
37:50SPEAKERworking together. Yeah. The reason I was curious about that is that it's easy for me to envision
37:55SPEAKERhow something gets made out of aluminum and glass and all these kind of high end industrial
37:59SPEAKERmaterials. When I envision a product like a manufacturing line full of robotic arms,
38:04SPEAKERlike all automatically doing things, it's easy to see how a product with that kind of precision
38:09SPEAKERcomes out of that environment. But obviously you don't tool those lines up until you've got a final
38:12SPEAKERdesign. So until they get to that step, I'm just sitting here going like somebody is sitting there
38:16SPEAKERwith sandpaper. And I mean, I'm sure it's a lot more high-tech than that. Yeah, they have like
38:20SPEAKERhigh-end CNC mills and stuff like that, that do those things exactly. So it's like the tools are
38:26SPEAKERthere. It's just, they're not there. It's the difference between like building a car in an
38:30SPEAKERassembly line versus that guy who 3D printed his kit, a Lamborghini. I don't know if you saw that
38:35SPEAKERone. So some guy took a other car chassis and then 3D printed body panels for a Lamborghini.
38:42SPEAKERAnd it looks like a 3D printed Lamborghini made out of pieces that are like, I don't know,
38:47SPEAKERmaybe 12 inches by 14 inches or something. Is that street legal? I can't imagine. Look,
38:52SPEAKERthere's a lot of bad ideas happening there, but also it's very cool. So, you know,
38:57SPEAKERplastic's cheap, right? That's another great aspect of the bad future. The ability to
39:02SPEAKERexecute on bad ideas is almost limitless. Well, and just to be clear, all of this stuff happened,
39:08SPEAKERlike when we built the first 3D printer that we built and tested in 2010, those stepper motors
39:13SPEAKERwere hella expensive. And now, because people are using steppers and all the CNC stuff,
39:18SPEAKERit's not just, you know, high-end CNC mills that would be in an Apple R&D lab. Like anybody can
39:23SPEAKERbuy a cheap CNC mill to carve circuit boards at home for like $1,500 an hour grand. 3D printers
39:30SPEAKERhave driven a lot of that stuff down, even though they're not massively successful.
39:34SPEAKERLike we have home laser cutters and we have home, the cricket is a great example. The vinyl cutter
39:41SPEAKERis the most popular CNC device ever made because those things are in thousands and hundreds of
39:48SPEAKERthousands of people's homes for like scrapbooking stuff, for craft stuff. And like the stepper
39:54SPEAKERmotors in those are what makes those things work. It's really... Yeah, the tendency of high-end and
40:00SPEAKERlike exotic tech like that to trickle down into really cheap products just seems to be like the
40:07SPEAKERdefining story of consumer tech in this era. It kind of is. It's a little bit disconcerting
40:12SPEAKERthough, because it means that like somebody, I saw somebody complaining the other day that their mom
40:16SPEAKERjust instead of buying refills for her printer, just goes and buys a new printer and throws the
40:21SPEAKERold one in the trash every time because it's cheaper. And like, that's the real concern
40:27SPEAKERbecause like we use a lot of things that are not, they're not exactly scarce. Like rare earth
40:33SPEAKERminerals are a good example of this. So rare earths are I think lanthanides. If you look at
40:40SPEAKERthe periodic table, there's the two spikes on either side. I think the rare earths are the top
40:47SPEAKERrow of the wide skinny part. So it's like the third column and then the first row on the long
40:57SPEAKERpart. And it's stuff like cerium and iridium and europium and neodymium, sorry, and thulium and
41:07SPEAKERterbium and lathanum and it's all these, it's thorium and oh yeah, they're found in deposits
41:17SPEAKERof like thorium and uranium. Do you have a good sense of what exactly those roles, those elements
41:22SPEAKERor what roles those elements play in a given device? Like you hear about them all the time,
41:26SPEAKERbut I don't know if it's like that stuff is going into batteries, I would assume not,
41:31SPEAKERbut I don't know what else they would do on like a circuit board.
41:33SPEAKERSo it's a lot of battery stuff. My understanding is that they have
41:39SPEAKERweird unusual electrical properties in lots of cases, sometimes magnetic properties,
41:44SPEAKERand that's why they're used specifically, but that chemistry is beyond me. It's scary.
41:53SPEAKERThe thing about those rare earths specifically, like they're called rare earths, they're not
41:58SPEAKERparticularly rare. Like there's lots of places you can get them. There's only a few places where it's
42:02SPEAKERrelatively inexpensive to mine them is my understanding. One of them is in China
42:08SPEAKERand like they don't get recycled as a general rule because there's very small quantities in
42:13SPEAKERmost consumer electronics. So those parts just go in the landfill and our grandchildren will
42:18SPEAKERbe mining them out in 50 years. That is maybe one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever heard.
42:24SPEAKERThe picture of children sifting through like junk piles through the garbage dump.
42:28SPEAKERI don't think they'll be children, Brad. My grandchildren in 50 years will be
42:36SPEAKER20 years old, 25 years old. When the bad future becomes the worst future,
42:40SPEAKEReverybody is going to be scrabbling. If you think about the amount of copper,
42:46SPEAKERfor example, that was thrown out in landfills in the 50s, it's probably worth mining.
42:49SPEAKERLike there's probably parts of the world where it's worth going out and mining up the landfill
42:53SPEAKERto get the old copper out from the 40s and 50s. The only reason that I'm really even aware of
43:01SPEAKERrare earth elements with regard to consumer tech is just because access to them has become
43:05SPEAKERso politicized. Like you mentioned that a lot of them are concentrated in China and that sort of
43:09SPEAKERthing. I think it felt like some kind of Tom Clancy ass prediction for a while that there were going
43:14SPEAKERto be like rare earth wars over resources in the future at some point, but it seems like maybe it's
43:19SPEAKERnot going to be that dire. Well, the situation is most of the world let China do the mining
43:27SPEAKERbecause the mining is a little bit dirty, is my understanding. So we shut down our rare earth mines
43:32SPEAKERand then lithium ion batteries became very important. I think lanthanum and neodymium
43:41SPEAKERspecifically became really valuable because lanthanum is used in battery electrodes and
43:47SPEAKERneodymium is used in powerful magnets which make motors work. We shut down those mines and now
43:55SPEAKERwe're looking at ways to bring those mines back online without also destroying the environment
43:59SPEAKERaround the mines or doing new mines or whatever. If fracking is the bad example of this, rare earths
44:09SPEAKERare the good example of this because if we can mine where it's more efficiently and use them to
44:15SPEAKERmake electric car motors and electric car batteries, then we can have a really local net negative
44:21SPEAKERprobably for the area directly around the mine, but an overall net positive in terms of reducing
44:27SPEAKERcarbon emissions for electric cars and solar panels and stuff like that. It's not like a small
44:35SPEAKERnumber of companies control the world's supply of those resources. It's more of just a question of
44:40SPEAKERmaking an investment. It's just like building the memory factory. Samsung built more memory
44:50SPEAKERfactories because Apple was selling a lot of iPods. We're selling a lot of cars and electronics
44:56SPEAKERdevices and lithium ion batteries and more people are investing in rare earths. Sometimes capitalism
45:03SPEAKERsucks, but sometimes stuff works out kind of okay. This is the amoral hand of the market.
45:14SPEAKERWe'll call it that. E-waste is another topic that I thought about when we were discussing
45:19SPEAKERdoing the show ahead of time. Phones are the obvious example of every phone maker on the planet
45:25SPEAKERis trying to drive an annual adoption cycle. They've slowed down on that though.
45:31SPEAKERWell, they're still rolling them out pretty much annually, but
45:35SPEAKERI could see it getting to the point where maybe that goes away.
45:38SPEAKERYeah. iFixit talks about this. Kyle Wiens from iFixit talks about this a lot.
45:45SPEAKERiFixit is a repair police. As he says, electronics recycling is the end of the supply chain. That's
45:52SPEAKERlike the last step. I don't know what you do with your old phones. Most of mine live in a drawer in
46:01SPEAKERmy kitchen. I just reached into my desk drawer and pulled out four phones here. It's got a Windows
46:09SPEAKERphone, my phone 3G, an old variety. Let's see. What is this? An old LG flip phone, an Android phone,
46:14SPEAKERhand me down. They tend to pile up. One of the things that's happened over the last few years is
46:19SPEAKERa lot of people are buying phones on the upgrade plan because the manufacturers are actively
46:23SPEAKERencouraging that. Apple and the phone carriers are giving you no cost financing for a $1,000 phone
46:32SPEAKERover two years at like $40 to $60 a month, depending on what the phone costs and what
46:36SPEAKERyour credit's like and what you trade it in. At the end of that time, usually you hand the phone
46:42SPEAKERback to them and get the new model and you just keep paying the $40 a month. The economics of
46:48SPEAKERthat are maybe not ideal. Paying $1,000 for a phone seems a little bananas. That seems a
46:56SPEAKERlittle more palatable, I think, to a lot of people than paying $1,000 for a phone.
47:01SPEAKERBut yeah, I think we're moving away from the annual. I'm still using an iPhone 10.
47:05SPEAKERI thought I might upgrade and I think I'm probably not going to. So it's a two-year-old phone
47:10SPEAKERand it works great. So why would I upgrade? Yeah, I'm on an iPhone 8 and when I got it,
47:15SPEAKERI kind of took a hard look at it and I was like, you know what, I'm happy with this as a device.
47:18SPEAKERI think I'm just going to try to use this until, I don't know, I mean, I started to say until it
47:23SPEAKERstops working, but these things are pretty robust. So it'll probably work for a long time, but I'm
47:26SPEAKERgoing to see if I can maybe get like, let's say four or five years out of this phone instead of
47:31SPEAKERthe one to two that has become traditional. But that does lead to, do you think we're at billions
47:37SPEAKERof unused smartphones yet? Yeah, almost certainly.
47:40SPEAKERYou think so? I mean, Apple has been known to sell a billion phones in a year in the past.
47:45SPEAKEROkay. So you think there are that many of those just lying around in drawers like this now?
47:49SPEAKERProbably there have to be. So there's two things to think
47:53SPEAKERabout. One is the, how do you recycle them? And the rarest typically don't get recycled
47:57SPEAKERbecause there's not enough of them in the devices to make it worth doing, or it's difficult to
48:02SPEAKERseparate them in the case of the batteries, like separate the electrodes from the batteries in a
48:05SPEAKERsafe way that doesn't make the battery explode and catch fire or whatever. One of the things that
48:11SPEAKERKyle and the iFixit folks always push for is to make the phones more repairable. So if you think
48:20SPEAKERabout your phone, the reason your phone gets slow often is that the battery becomes less capable of
48:28SPEAKERproviding a surge current when the CPU demands it, when the CPU spins up. So the CPU then has to run
48:35SPEAKERslower so it doesn't crash because it doesn't have power. And if you take the old battery out,
48:42SPEAKERsend that off to be recycled, put a new battery in, the phone feels like it's brand new again.
48:48SPEAKERThere's no reason that most people couldn't use a phone longer than the 1500 charge cycle battery
48:55SPEAKERwill let them use the phone. And Apple has gotten better about doing that. Now they do battery
48:59SPEAKERreplacements in the shops, it takes like 20 minutes instead of having to... In the old days, they would
49:05SPEAKERglue the batteries into the phones and ungluing a battery from the back of a phone is terrifying
49:10SPEAKERbecause if you mess up at all, you're going to puncture it and it's going to make a bunch of
49:13SPEAKERreally dangerous white smoke and make you evacuate the building. So building the devices from the
49:20SPEAKERbeginning, from the beginning of the design process to be replaceable, it turns out is a
49:24SPEAKERgood thing and we should do more of. It's easier than recycling the devices themselves probably
49:30SPEAKERin a lot of cases. Yeah. Are you familiar with the Fairphone? Have you read about that thing much?
49:35SPEAKERIt's just the open source thing. Is this the... I don't think it's open source. It's out of
49:39SPEAKERsomewhere in Europe. I want to say it might be Denmark or somewhere like that, but it is
49:45SPEAKERlike the tagline is the phone that cares for people and planet. The idea is basically a modular
49:50SPEAKERsmartphone that you can kind of... I think it literally comes with a toolkit in the box that
49:55SPEAKERlets you take the phone apart. Battery screen, housing, just the basic parts of a smartphone
50:01SPEAKERare made to come apart and I think it's supposed to be modular so you can upgrade specific components.
50:07SPEAKERIs this a thing you can buy? Yeah, absolutely. It's not like... I think they're on their third
50:10SPEAKERone. I think Fairphone 3 is the newest one. Oh, this is really cool. It runs Android, I assume?
50:15SPEAKERYeah, it's an Android phone. It sounds like a little bit I've read about it. It's moderately
50:19SPEAKERdecent specs. You're not getting an absolute top of the line competitive phone with Samsung's
50:25SPEAKERofferings or anything like that, but it sounds like it's good enough for a lot of people.
50:28SPEAKERBut you can replace the camera when you want a better camera and man, that's really cool.
50:32SPEAKERYeah, it really... I think there are certain aspects of their supply chain where they
50:36SPEAKERtalk about, I think, trying to get conflict-free minerals and source all their stuff ethically and
50:41SPEAKERthat sort of thing. But also just for me, just from the old man, the grouchy old man perspective
50:46SPEAKERof everything is a black box now, you can't take things apart and fix them yourselves anymore.
50:51SPEAKERThis feels like it's kind of an answer to that in some way. It's hard to see this becoming the
50:55SPEAKERnorm. I think most people like their phones to just be kind of disposable. Well, Google had a
51:00SPEAKERthing a few years ago that was a modular design for Android phones that was more... This is the
51:08SPEAKERbuild-your-own-PC version of this. Theirs was more like snap some blocks together and put a cover over
51:13SPEAKERthem. And you could add specific sensors and stuff like that. I don't think they've actually
51:18SPEAKERshipped them and they might have really done a beta or something, but this is really neat.
51:22SPEAKERI want to look more into this. This is super cool. It's a cool idea, but it adds some bulk
51:26SPEAKERto the device. It's not as pretty as an iPhone. It's hard to see this really catching on as a
51:33SPEAKERmainstream thing, but it's cool that people are out there trying stuff like this. I mean,
51:36SPEAKERit doesn't look... It's like 10 millimeters thick and 158 millimeters. Yeah. I mean, this is
51:44SPEAKERcompetitive. I'm into it. Do you think we're getting to a point... I mean, this kind of ties
51:50SPEAKERinto what I was saying earlier about feeling like my current phone is kind of good enough for the
51:54SPEAKERforeseeable future. Do you feel like the tech on this type of product is maturing or plateauing
51:59SPEAKERenough that like, I don't know, maybe we are going to see more stuff like this because there's just
52:02SPEAKERnot that much left to do with phones as they currently exist? I mean, I think we've definitely
52:06SPEAKERbeen at that point for a long time on phones. If you think... When the iPhone 7 came out,
52:13SPEAKERyou were kind of looking at that generation of phones. It was like, "Oh, this is definitely
52:16SPEAKERbetter." And the camera's really nice, but I don't know that I need to... We've reached a point where
52:23SPEAKERgood enough is good enough for most people. And phones, if you look at PCs, it took from the 90s
52:30SPEAKERwhen PCs kind of started getting mainstream until 2007 or 2008, maybe even 2010, before you kind of...
52:38SPEAKERIt wasn't until really Windows 7 came out that you were like, "I'm probably okay for a while."
52:42SPEAKERAnd now you can run... I know people who have Windows 7 computers that don't play games or
52:48SPEAKERdo video editing, stuff like that. They have an early quad core that started as a Windows
52:53SPEAKER7 machine. It runs Windows 10 great. And that computer will last them either until the
52:58SPEAKERspinning hard drives die, or they decide it's worth spending $500 and upgrading to something
53:04SPEAKERnew. So I think we're at that point with phones. If you'd asked me five years ago if I was gonna
53:10SPEAKERhave a phone for three years, I would have told you you're mad. Now I'm sitting here, I'm like,
53:14SPEAKER"Yeah, I don't know if it's worth the two weeks of hassle to switch to a new phone at this point."
53:18SPEAKERYeah, it's kind of nice to be in this place. It's kind of exhausting trying to keep up with
53:22SPEAKERthese rapidly updating product cycles. It's nice to just have a thing and have it work from now on.
53:29SPEAKERIt's comforting to not have everything always in flux, it turns out.
53:33SPEAKERWhat do you think of things being in flux?
53:35SPEAKERYeah.
53:37SPEAKEROne last question I was gonna ask. You're not Tim Cook, you're not in there looking at...
53:41SPEAKERGod, I wish I was.
53:42SPEAKERI mean, you don't have access to trade secrets, is what I mean, in terms of...
53:45SPEAKERNo. Well, a few. Just mine, though.
53:47SPEAKERYou know, parts supply that may be spinning up on snazzy new advanced tech, but do you see
53:54SPEAKERanything happening right now that tickles your fancy in terms of where things might be going
53:58SPEAKERas certain things are becoming more cheaper or more possible to do in terms of what's available?
54:04SPEAKERUm, I mean, the compute thing is huge. Kevin Kelly did a talk about this years ago
54:09SPEAKERat XOXO that I was at that was really fascinating. And he was like, "Look,
54:16SPEAKERthink about all of the things that are expensive for computers to do right now,
54:23SPEAKERand then think about what happens if that cost of doing that computation goes way down."
54:27SPEAKERAnd we're seeing it with image recognition now, right? It's happening with the self-driving cars
54:32SPEAKERand stuff like that. All of that stuff is feeding into... Like, computers getting better at image
54:36SPEAKERrecognition is making self-driving cars maybe a possibility. It's unclear if that's actually
54:41SPEAKERgonna happen or not. People are a little bullish on it now or bearish. Bullish is good and bearish
54:46SPEAKERis bad, right? But yeah, so I think that there's a couple of things coming that are going to be
54:51SPEAKERimpossible for us to predict what's gonna happen on the other side of. I think the quantum computing
54:55SPEAKERstuff is a big one. I think massive amounts of compute that are available very inexpensively
55:01SPEAKERin the cloud is going to dramatically change the way the internet works. Maybe not in a good way.
55:08SPEAKER- It seems like a safe bet at this point. - Yeah. I mean, have you been in one of those
55:13SPEAKERAmazon shops yet with the cameras in the ceiling? - No, I've seen some people posting some kind of
55:19SPEAKERon-the-scene reports of all the cameras in the ceiling and stuff like that, and it does not seem
55:23SPEAKERlike an environment. - There's one by your office. You should go check it out and do a report next
55:27SPEAKERweek. Just walk in there. You don't have to buy anything. Just walk in, look around, see how it
55:31SPEAKERfeels. - All right, I'll think about it. - Speaking of homework, we got some emails. - Oh? - Yeah.
55:38SPEAKERLet's see. Do you want to talk about networking or food? - I'll start with the networking. - Okay,
55:43SPEAKERso James says, "Funnily enough, I've been working on a blog series similar to your podcast.
55:49SPEAKERI was talking about classful and classless IP networks. We talked about this and I didn't know
55:52SPEAKERthe answer." He says, "Classful IP address spaces are standardized blocks of addresses where the
55:59SPEAKERsubnets are defined by the most significant bits of the addresses or ones." When IP networks started
56:06SPEAKERexpanding, they needed to chop the address space up into subnets in order to be able to sanely
56:09SPEAKERassign the right size blocks to fit the requirements of the organization that needed them.
56:14SPEAKEREarly on, they just used lots of class A addresses, but that means that most of the addresses in that
56:21SPEAKERblock wouldn't get used. If your IP address was 1.1.x.x, then that means there's 256 times 256 IP
56:28SPEAKERaddresses in there. If you're only using 3,000, then there's a couple of million that are a couple
56:33SPEAKERof hundred thousand that are just being wasted. - That stuff makes me realize why there are a lot
56:39SPEAKERof networking classes available. Courses, I should say, like educational courses. - Oh, yeah. - Why
56:42SPEAKERthere are certifications. You start to understand why a lot of schooling is required. - It's the
56:48SPEAKERsame as everything. It's really easy to learn just enough to be dangerous, which is where I
56:55SPEAKERhave lived my entire life. - It's fun. - Yeah, but to be an expert, you got to spend some time.
57:02SPEAKERHe says the class A, B, and C addresses are the different subnets that are defined as private.
57:07SPEAKERClass A is 10.0.0.0 with the subnet of 8, so that means it's
57:15SPEAKERbasically the 10.15. All of those private addresses are in that range. Class B is 172.16.0.0
57:24SPEAKERwith a /12 subnet, so that's 255.250.0.0, which means that part of the third range and the second
57:33SPEAKERand the first range are available. And then class C is 192.168.0.0, and that is a 16/16 subnet,
57:42SPEAKERwhich is 255.255.0.0. So what that means is 192.168.0.0 are private, but 192.167.0.0 are not
57:54SPEAKERprivate. I don't think I can do the math on the class B ones, what's private and what isn't,
57:59SPEAKERbut on the class A, the 10.0.0.0, anything are private. - I'll cut you some slack on that. - Yeah.
58:07SPEAKERIt's a really long email. I'm not going to read the whole rest of this, but I thought the ABC
58:11SPEAKERthing was interesting, and I did not know that. Let's see, we have one more good one here.
58:19SPEAKERJared says, "Hey, you can cook rice in the Instant Pot." - Oh? - Yeah. He said, "If you cook rice on
58:27SPEAKERhigh pressure for about six minutes with a 10-minute natural release." We didn't talk about
58:32SPEAKERnatural versus quick releases at all last week. - I guess that would make a difference, right?
58:36SPEAKERBecause the longer that the pressure remains high, if it takes longer to let it out, then that's
58:41SPEAKERgoing to change the dynamics of the cooking while that's happening, right? - Yeah, it's the
58:44SPEAKERdifference between flipping the vent so that the extra pressure blasts out really quickly in like
58:49SPEAKER30 seconds versus letting it cool down enough inside that the pressure goes down just because
58:54SPEAKERthe temperature is reduced inside the pot. - Yeah, it seems like that could pretty easily
58:58SPEAKERovercook your food if you're not careful. - He said, "Don't ever use the rice cooker setting
59:02SPEAKERon the Instant Pot because you'll end up with a gummy stuck-on mess," which was precisely my
59:07SPEAKERexperience. And the benefit, of course, of using Instant Pot versus, say, a rice cooker
59:12SPEAKERis that every rice cooker I've ever seen has a Teflon pan, which Teflon is theoretically
59:17SPEAKERokay for you as long as it doesn't ever like flake off and get into your food. - I don't say that.
59:22SPEAKER- Yeah, I know. - I'm still trying to get over
59:25SPEAKERmicroplastics from last week. - Look, microplastics are a... Just rest assured
59:31SPEAKERthat your lymph nodes are full of microplastics and will be for the rest of your life.
59:34SPEAKER- Microplastics are always with us. - Yes, we'll always have microplastics.
59:38SPEAKERThanks. All those... Thanks, Axe... Sorry, Axe Body Scrub for your contribution to the environment.
59:47SPEAKERI don't know if we talked about this in the podcast, but one of the things I love to think
59:50SPEAKERabout are what are going to be the geological definers of our age. And I talked to an
59:57SPEAKERarchaeologist once who was like, "There's two things maybe. One is microplastics. There's just
1:00:02SPEAKERgoing to be a sedimentary layer on our time that is like 10 feet thick and there's just plastic
1:00:08SPEAKERfucking everywhere in it. The other one is chicken bones." - Wow. - So roaster chickens, we kill
1:00:16SPEAKERtrillions of roaster chickens every year. - Is it really that high? - It's a phenomenal number of
1:00:21SPEAKERchickens and... - I knew it was a lot. I don't know if you saw this thing about Costco is actually
1:00:26SPEAKERspinning up their own chicken farming effort finally. - I'll take the third most dystopian
1:00:34SPEAKERsentence I've heard this week. - Yeah. Apparently, I probably should have realized this without being
1:00:40SPEAKERtold, but the $4.99 rotisserie chicken at Costco is a loss leader. - That makes sense. - Yeah. And
1:00:46SPEAKERso they are that intent on keeping that business going that they have finally opened some insane,
1:00:51SPEAKERmassive, sprawling chicken farm in I think Nevada. - How many chickens can we farm in a year as a
1:00:56SPEAKERspecies? - I don't even want to think about it. - Yeah. - I don't know. At the same time,
1:01:01SPEAKERare you ready to move to grasshopper? - I've eaten grasshoppers before. - I have too. I mean,
1:01:05SPEAKERI'm not saying it's... - They're crunchy. - Yeah. - I've eaten worse things. - You got to get protein
1:01:10SPEAKERsomehow. - I want to talk about... I want to learn about fake meat now, the beyond. Have you had an
1:01:16SPEAKERimpossible... - I haven't gotten around to trying it. I know it's out there. I've seen it. I think
1:01:21SPEAKERthey have it at the grocery store now. You can just get it raw and ready to cook. - Yeah. You
1:01:25SPEAKERcan get patties and ground beef and stuff like that for beef stew and soups and spaghetti and
1:01:31SPEAKERstuff like that. It's good. There's a burger place by my house that does both impossible and beyond
1:01:39SPEAKERburgers, and they're both good. The texture is nice. It tastes like real meat. They don't warm
1:01:43SPEAKERup quite right, so you got to eat the whole thing in one sitting. But if you put one of those in
1:01:49SPEAKERfront of me, I don't know that I'd be able to tell the difference between that and a regular
1:01:52SPEAKERreal cheeseburger. - Can you tell the difference between the two? Do you have a preference,
1:01:56SPEAKERone over the other, or are they pretty indistinguishable? - I like the impossible better,
1:02:02SPEAKERat least where I've had it prepared. I haven't made it myself. The beyond gets a little bit
1:02:08SPEAKERof a crustier outside when they put on a griddle or a grill or whatever. I like a little bit more
1:02:14SPEAKERof a tender burger than a crunchy burger, but if you like your smash burger, maybe go with the
1:02:19SPEAKERbeyond. Definitely worth trying. - Are those things ethical to produce? Do you have any idea? I guess
1:02:25SPEAKERthat's the thing to talk about, right? - I mean, you're not killing an animal to make them. - Well,
1:02:30SPEAKERyeah, yeah, sure. - The net carbon contribution to the atmosphere and water usage is probably
1:02:35SPEAKERdramatically lower. It's hard to be worse than beef in terms of environmental impact.
1:02:41SPEAKER- Okay, that's fair. That is very fair. - You could maybe go out and punch a couple of nuns
1:02:45SPEAKERor something. If you burn down some forest and then slaughter the cow, it's a little bit worse,
1:02:51SPEAKERI guess. - Here I was worried we weren't going to come up with an episode title before this thing
1:02:55SPEAKERwas out. - You're welcome. So yes, I guess that's it for us. I feel like we should maybe start
1:03:02SPEAKERplugging what we're going to do next week at the end of these, but we haven't talked about that
1:03:06SPEAKERyet. - Yeah, we need to start planning what we're going to do next week before we can start talking
1:03:10SPEAKERabout it. - Yeah, that's probably a good idea. - Yeah. - We've gotten a lot of good feedback.
1:03:16SPEAKERIf you have specific feedback about audio quality or stuff like that, I think we've made some big
1:03:21SPEAKERstrides in the last couple of weeks on that so that we know the first few episodes were rough,
1:03:25SPEAKERbut I think from definitely four on and I think three was pretty good too, as I recall. It's all
1:03:31SPEAKERblending together now. We'd love to hear what you think. We'd love to hear topics that you guys want
1:03:36SPEAKERus to dig into. If there's things you would like, if you have ideas for segments and stuff like
1:03:43SPEAKERthat, we're into that as well. And as always, leave those reviews on iTunes because that helps.
1:03:49SPEAKERIt turns out getting good reviews on iTunes is the best way to get new people listening to a podcast
1:03:54SPEAKERstill in 2019. - Even bad reviews? - You're not allowed to say only leave good reviews.
1:04:01SPEAKERThat's frowned upon. - No such thing as bad publicity. - You can find us @sweatpantstech
1:04:06SPEAKERon Twitter. The email address is techpod@content.town or you can hit us individually
1:04:13SPEAKERon Twitter. I'm Will Smith. - I am Brad Schumacher. See you all next week.
1:04:31SPEAKER[MUSIC PLAYING]