705: Relentless in a Gentle Way
20 Aug 2026Marco launches Unforgetful, John launches into a diatribe or two, and Casey launches himself down the street.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco may have to dance with the devil
- Follow-up:
- The OpenAI doughnut
- What if it’s an eye? (via Elijah Yap)
- Or perhaps red blood cell shaped? (via Chris Lawrence)
- Time Capsule was to solve the laptop-backup problem
- Multiple Apple IDs with the same number (via Adam Wunn)
- RAMageddon
- The OpenAI doughnut
- 🎉 Unforgetful is out! 🎉
- AI watermarking
- Post-show: Casey has news
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Other people’s phones (based on Stephen Robles’ video)
Sponsored by:
- Tailscale: A secure network that just works
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- A terrible thought
- OpenAI doughnut follow-up
- Network Time Machine
- Phone numbers for Apple IDs
- Component-pricing follow-up
- Sponsor: Tailscale
- Unforgetful
- AI watermarking
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Casey’s news
A terrible thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a terrible thought a few hours ago, and maybe it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been kind of recurring recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, May I guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that's a very, very good guess. Is the terrible thought, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I should drag Casey to a fish concert sometime?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no, that's not even in question. There's no question. I definitely should do that. No, the even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible thought is, I think I have a problem that could be solved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Homebridge or Home Assistant, rather. Which one's the woman with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the box Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, my time has come This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Casey's episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything's coming up Mill House tonight. This is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's assistant, right? That's like the more the even more complicated one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all all kidding aside. So Homebridge is basically let's be as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thin a layer as we can. That's simply a facade to get things that aren't natively HomeKit into HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas Home Assistant is more of a let's boil the ocean, take over the world sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate to do, like, I know this is a rabbit hole I should not fall into. Oh, but it's great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone says that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here's the thing, right? Like all, you know, again, all kidding aside, like Home Assistant is one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have to be able to see through the matrix, and it is brutal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get to the point that you can see through the matrix. Like it is a learn, and it's gotten way better since I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started using it. I don't know, like two years ago, but it's bad. Like getting, getting your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head wrapped around the way Home Assistant thinks of the world is not fun. Now, that being said, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plenty of tutors all around you that would be more than happy to help you. Hello. uh And I'm not the only one for the record, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um it is not fun to start down the path and start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting things squared away. But if you can stick with it and give it a chance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then suddenly the world is opened up to you and almost anything you can conceive can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be done. It's really astonishing. What are you looking to accomplish?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um I have, so i I finally got the beach heating and air conditioning finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all fixed. It's all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey tell me more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all new systems put in. It's it's a daikin daikin um Everything by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. It's just like a whole brand new everything. Everything had to be replaced, but it works, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. That was a very long, very expensive process that has finally ended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, did you go with something that is like, comparatively dumber?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Because if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall correctly, didn't you have like, a very, very, very fancy system? And that was potentially part of the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the, like it was, it was originally this Mitsubishi system that it was very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it was like a high-end, like high-efficiency heat pump, everything. And it had all these, all these like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced functionality things that we would probably never use. And, you know, it was just, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what the builder had specced for the house years ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was very complicated to the point where nobody out here on Fire Island knew how the heck to even service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So they did a very bad job of servicing it and eventually broke it to a point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even once I did finally get people out of here who knew what they were doing with these systems, they were like, yeah, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can't save this. It's like too much damage has been done. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost way more than it's worth to try to disassemble every part of everything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous things. So anyway, I replaced it with a Daikin system because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are what everyone out here uses, which means that all the people out here know how to install and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service them correctly. I don't really honestly care if it's better or worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is more practical to own here. And frankly, it was way cheaper than the Mitsubishi system would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been to replace. So that helps because out here, nothing lasts. So when it does die, it'll be cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace. So anyway, it works pretty well. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside is that it, of course, has its own proprietary thermostats. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we know from the service guys, you definitely do not want to have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HVAC guy see you using a Nest or an Ecobee because they hate them and they blame them for every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible problem under the sun. Like, I don't know what smart thermostats did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to HVAC people, but they so irrationally hate them, it's kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comical. So anyway, I'm using their stupid thermostats. It's fine. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like Wi-Fi connectivity with their app and their app is, as you would expect, total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, as you would expect, it integrates with nothing. There is no support for any of the home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform integrations. Of course. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's where I started looking at, hmm, maybe HomeBridge or Home Assistant might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tool to use here because every time I want to either turn off the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air conditioning, turn on the air conditioning, or just change the temperature of the house, there's four different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostats for all the different split zones. And so I have to go to the app and change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four different zones. And oh, by the way, the app requires face ID. Great. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for keeping me secure. um It's just kind of, it's a very cumbersome process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and the app is not good. And so, you know, when I do change temperature, it sometimes it doesn't stick. Sometimes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like changes and then it pops back to where it was. I guess something refreshed and it clobbered itself in a race condition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. So it's not a good app is what I'm saying. So anyway, I would love just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that I could automate and like, you know, go yell at some voice assistant somewhere, set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house to 74, and it just does it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that's kind of, that's what got me here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So while you were talking, I looked to see if there is an integration, which is home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there a a, software package? It's very easy to add an integration. That part is very straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, there's software package for the Daikin Daken, whatever they're called? And sure enough, yes, there is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and so there, this would be, in principle, anyway, fairly easy for you to integrate. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only thing I will say is that um, shouting at something, the way you would want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is by exposing this to HomeKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very straightforward. But I don't want you to start down the path of Home Assistant and thinking it. I mean, Home Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does have its own voice stuff, but my understanding is it's fine. The kids would call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mid. But anyways, you could expose all this through Home Assistant, excuse me, through HomeKit, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you'd be good to go. This is a solvable problem, and I don't think this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be that particularly difficult. I think the question is, how would you get Home Assistant in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your house? And the obvious answer for that is one of the physical hardware products that they sell. I believe that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Jason Snell is using now. I think he's using a Home Assistant green, I want to say. I forget the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw that. It's like 200 bucks. I mean, I also, I have a few Mac Minis, if you haven't heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you wanted to go that route, and I'm not snarking with you at all. If you want to go that route, I think that is very doable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but then you're going to want to go down the path of like Docker. Now you're adding a whole new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complexity that you probably don't want to futz with. And honestly, I would just, especially if I'm spending your money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just spend the $200 on Home System Green or whatever, again, whatever the right one is. I don't I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't know their hardware well. I just know that it tends to be very well regarded and work really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think there's like a green and then there's some other color, different version. And again, I can't speak to the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about these, but it should be fairly straightforward to figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks. Maybe maybe I'll try that out. Cause yeah, I I do, I do want something that is relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low futz. And yeah, that that is kind of appealing. So we'll see. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I say that now, talking about setting up a home assistant thing. So, you know, it's all relative, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it's all relative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think also, like, you know, now, like, I assume with like modern AI stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should make it easier if I run into configuration questions. And, you know, so maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a decent time to try it out. I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I think I think this is a very worthwhile adventure for you. It'll make for some good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content, selfishly speaking. So I'm on board in that regard. But no, I mean, a Home Assistant Green
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or some other equivalent hardware dingus, you basically plug it into Ethernet and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you open up a web browser and follow the steps from there. And you are more than capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing this, but I would be happy to hold your hand if you needed the help. So if you go down that path, let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of the nice things is, I mean, you don't have to have Home Assistant like infiltrate your entire home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you could just add the Daikin integration and ignore basically any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the things that it auto-discovers and then expose the Daikin thermostats to HomeKit, and then you'd be good to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. But you know, you could also take it to the next step or the next level where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say, okay, if I'm adjusting one thermostat, just automatically adjust all the others to match you know, or something along those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines. You can do some really bananas automations if you so desire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you know when the people are in the house, if you know when the family's in the house, you could say, you know, if they leave the house, change the set points to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such and such. And when any of us return, change it back. Or you can do some of that stuff that Nest used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do kind of by hand if that's appealing to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, within like, you know, a week of having it, I'm going to set up some automation where like when I'm on the ferry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn on the air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way it's like when I get here, like you know, I'm going to do stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this is a solvable problem for sure. You can do some of this absolute nutjob
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And that's why Home Assistant, for all of its drawbacks, it's very fiddly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it's fiddly to set up. Once it's set up, it tends to be pretty bulletproof, but you have to get there first, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's kind of like Linux on the desktop, am I right? But anyway, it's fiddly to set up. It's hard to wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your mind around at first, but again, they've gotten it much better than it used to be. But once you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the matrix, if you will, oh my gosh, so many problems are suddenly solved by this stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software, and it's incredible. So yeah, let me know if you go down this path. I think it'll make for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very fun and very enjoyable content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was nice knowing you.
OpenAI doughnut follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some follow-up and let's start with the OpenAI donut hardware. Elijah Yap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: This theory might fit the description. It's an eye. The moving parts could be the eyelids protecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a center screen, and eyes convey a lot of possible emotions. And Elijah provided a lot of emotions via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emoji, which gave me a good laugh. For a more vivid depiction, Google Chrome's Japan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketing team has a whole campaign of the mascot doing cute things. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. I really hope it's not because I just immediately picture the eye of Sauron
⏹️ ▶️ John from Lord of the Rings. There's already a lot of sort of creepy creepiness factor to AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you're going to make a little Cyclops donut with an eye in the middle. It's supposed to be endearing and
⏹️ ▶️ John make you feel good about it. not make you feel like you're constantly being watched. The eye sees all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that's fair. I went to Flight of the Navigator personally, but that's just me. Uh, Chris Lawrence writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in overtime, John was speculating that the donut-shaped open AI device was red blood cell shaped. The term for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shape for the shape of a red blood cell was drilled into us in medical school, a biconcave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disc. I can totally see this being used in a Johnny Ive press release.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that's exactly the shape I was thinking of. Look how it would be fun to like grip that in the middle. Like I've got some glasses from like Crate
⏹️ ▶️ John and Barrel that have, they're like just glass cylinders, but they have little dents in them, like four dents
⏹️ ▶️ John around them for you to put your fingers in. And it's very pleasing to grab the glasses that way. You get a more secure grip.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if it doesn't have a hole, it could be a biconcave disc and that would be cool. But you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of information is just not important enough for Gruber to tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry. Just not important enough for Mark Gurman to tell us.
Network Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to backups, an anonymous contributor writes, during episode 704, you talked about the Mac backups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the difficulty of getting some non-technical people to plug in a backup drive on a regular basis, if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Jobs presented a solution to this issue at Macworld 2008 with the introduction of Time Capsule,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which allowed for wireless backups.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reason number a million why it was kind of not a great idea for Apple to depart the
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi base station business. I mean, it was basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John a very simple, no options, Apple-flavored NAS, basically. It was network-attached
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, but coming in through the side door, because it's like, oh, you know, we sell Wi-Fi routers and
⏹️ ▶️ John this one's got a hard drive in it. Isn't that neat? Oh, and by the way, your Mac can see it as a time machine destination. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John getting people to get network attached storage without telling them it was network attached storage. And it had that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John quality of, look, if you buy this thing and you plug it in, all your Apple stuff know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it just does, you know, it just becomes an option for you. You know, I think your Mac would even prompt you and say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see this thing that's on the network. Do you want me to back up this Mac to that? And you'd be like, okay, that's great for laptops. You don't have to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John to plug anything in. They do it while they're idle. Like, boy, wouldn't that be great, Apple, to have that kind of solution?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or, you know, do iCloud backup for Macs? But any of those things would be nice, but instead we get none of them.
Phone numbers for Apple IDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, with regard to multiple Apple IDs with the same phone number, Adam One writes: For many years, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up separate Apple accounts for my smaller customers. During setup, I would attach the same customer-designated phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number to each account. About two years ago, Apple seemingly tightened security, and I found that I could no longer reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this method. In one case, I attempted to apply this method to just three Apple accounts and was blocked. The solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey required me to call Apple and speak with their security team to unblock the attempted account creation using the same phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number. The gentleman I spoke with was very courteous and lifted the block once I explained the circumstances. He then explained that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey triggered some automatic security safeguards. He also gently suggested I should be setting up small companies with Apple business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts, which is the strategy I've since adopted. Before I let the gentleman go, I asked him whether it was even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still possible to use one phone number on more than one account. He said yes, but a number of unstated factors went into the automated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system's decision-making process. I asked if it was possible to make three to five accounts under the best case circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He answered that three to five was, quote, a good rule of thumb. I have since tested that hypothesis and found it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally to be true. In many cases, if I make an Apple ID directly on the device rather than at the accounts.apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website, I can indeed add the same phone number to several accounts. That said, I've never tried more than three.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One fun fact, I have one customer who set up accounts years ago and put 20 Apple accounts onto one phone number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 15 on another. Those accounts still work fine today with those two phone numbers. Man, those were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the good old days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple tends not to give you details about its various security systems. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the The thing that this makes me think of is my issue with getting my Apple ID locked. I've
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about that on the show before. It was really bad at one point. And then it got less bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know why. Recently, it's been getting bad again. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John assume everyone who has this happen to them, it's not just me, assumes like, oh, someone's trying to get into my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID. You know what I mean? Like, and like putting in bad passwords and then you're getting locked out of your account. And when this happens, basically
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says, your Apple ID is locked. And you have a button that says unlock account. And it makes you go through a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff and enter in your phone number and it sends you an SMS and you do two factor
⏹️ ▶️ John and you got to enter your password. And back in the day, it also used to try to herd you towards changing your
⏹️ ▶️ John password, which I would never do. You didn't have to do. You could unlock the account without changing your password, but it would
⏹️ ▶️ John send you there and try to make you think you have to change your password. Anyway, I'm kind of sick of
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. And then at a certain point, Um, it started saying, I started getting 503 errors,
⏹️ ▶️ John HTTP 503 responses. I forget what that status code stands for. Someone can look it up while I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John talking. But um, basically like your, the HTTP requests of the unlock your Apple ID website,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is Apple's website, to be clear, it's like something on apple.com. It would throw 503 errors
⏹️ ▶️ John and you'd get this little Apple HTML dialog box saying, sorry, couldn't complete
⏹️ ▶️ John that request. And it's like a seven step process to unlock your Apple ID. And every HTTP
⏹️ ▶️ John request has to go through. So you could be on a page and you'd watch like in the in the dev tools, you'd watch it firing off
⏹️ ▶️ John all these, you know, uh, Ajax requests, essentially, uh, fetch requests, whatever, behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes. And you'd see them going through and it'd be like 200, 200, 200, up, 503. And you get the dialogue. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you've got to you've got to have all of the behind the scenes uh, HTTP requests work before you can get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John next page. And my experience of it was like that it was throttling, like that I could have a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain, because I would I would just leave the window there for five minutes and then come back to it. And then I could get to the next page.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then to get to the page after that, it wouldn't work again. So I just leave it for five minutes. You can't leave it too long because the session
⏹️ ▶️ John will time out and then you got to start all over again. And I thought this was ridiculous and I hated it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I discovered, I'm like, oh, I found the solution. Turn off my Wi-Fi my Ethernet and tether to
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone because the phone is on a different network and that would work. I'm like, that's it. That must be, there must be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, maybe there's something in my house that's constantly trying to log into my Apple ID or like, just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it always works on my phone. But that lasted like three days. And then I started getting the same thing on my phone where it'd be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'd tether through my phone and I would get the 503 response. So my theory on this, based on just hearing other people
⏹️ ▶️ John complain about it, is there's some unwritten rules about activity they see associated with
⏹️ ▶️ John your Apple ID and they just decide to lock your Apple ID and they won't let you unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John it because of a second set of unwritten rules that says, hey, too many requests coming from this IP address about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John IDs. Is it a device in my house that's constantly trying to log into my Apple ID? Is it someone trying to log
⏹️ ▶️ John into every Apple ID in the world somewhere on the same ISP as me? Who knows? Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John won't tell you, but it's a crappy part of the security apparatus that kind of necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John surround Apple IDs, and I don't like it. I'm sorry.
Component-pricing follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let's talk Ramageddon because when will we stop talking about Ramageddon? In like three years. Apple has secured lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display prices amid RAM shortage. Joe Rosignol at MacRumors writes: Apple has secured lower prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for OLED displays for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models, according to industry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sources cited by South Korea's deal site. For example, the report said that Apple will pay LG and Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around $68 per OLED display destined for the iPhone 18 Pro Max, down significantly from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $110 to $120 that it paid those suppliers for each of the iPhone 17 Pro Max displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple said to have made an aggressive push for lower display prices due to the ongoing memory chip shortage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, apparently they've still got enough weight to throw around for some vendors. I guess the vendors that are not flush
⏹️ ▶️ John with cash from the huge RAM prices, but I would do wonder how much
⏹️ ▶️ John that's going to offset what they
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for the other components. We'll see. I mean, the rumors still say that the 18 Pro and Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, which I remember are the only that and the foldable, whatever, are the ones that are
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out in September. And the plain 18, the rumors say is not coming out in September. So anyway, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the high-end phones that are coming out in September, I guess I forget if the Air 2
⏹️ ▶️ John is in that group. The rumor is that they're going to be more expensive. Like the phones are going to be more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe this is just getting a cheaper price on displays is just enough to only have to
⏹️ ▶️ John raise the price $200 instead of $250. It's going to be rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Apple raises trade-in values for most iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models. Marcus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mendez writes, Apple updated its trade-in values table today, increasing offers for most of its products, with some devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing jumps of nearly 30%. The company also added several Samsung, Galaxy, Google Pixel, and OnePlus models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the list. So John did some homework and some mathematics and came up with some examples.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone 16 Pro is now $630, up 11%. Apple Watch Series 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $165, up 9%. The iPad Pro, I'm not sure what vintage John, but I guess it doesn't really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $720, up 4%. And MacBook Air, $580, up 10%.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we were talking about this before, like people complaining, oh, they raised the prices on all their stuff, but have they raised trade-in values?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, well, now they have. But I look at the percentages and remember when we read the percentages of how much the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John of this stuff was increasing? I know it was not apples to apples because the watches weren't included in that price increase
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But as you might expect, the trade-ins are increasing by a lower percentage,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just a lower amount, because obviously trade-ins, you get less money than a new device, but a lower percentage than a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of their sibling devices. And, and you know, we're reading like iPhone 16 Pro trade-in
⏹️ ▶️ John values, not necessarily iPhone 17 Pro. But anyway, you see the 95 Mac story for the full table. But uh the
⏹️ ▶️ John news is basically it's good that Apple is finally increasing the trade-in value because that's what the market
⏹️ ▶️ John is dictating for these devices. But it's bad for all of us that the trade-in values are increasing
⏹️ ▶️ John by less than the new device prices are increasing.
Sponsor: Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Tailscale. So, if you're an ATP listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is likely that you have at least a couple of devices that you may want to be able to talk to. For perhaps your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac and a Synology. Maybe you have a device at a friend's or a parent's house. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a Raspberry Pi at a parent's house to help with troubleshooting or something like that. Maybe you have 48 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minis in a co-location facility. You never know what could happen. Well, imagine you could talk to any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these other devices, no matter what network you're on or what network they're on. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a special IP address provided by Tailscale or hostname for that matter, as long as both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these devices are on your Tailnet, you will be able to talk to them. Tailnet is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It busts through firewalls. It busts through network address translation. It does amazing things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tailscale has compensated us to talk to you about their software, but they cannot pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to say this is possibly my favorite software I've used in years and years and years and years. It is so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what Tailscale does is, like I said, it creates a mesh network between all your devices. This is different, mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, than Hub and Spoke. And despite the fact that it uses WireGuard, which is a VPN technology, you shouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think of it as a VPN. It's really its own thing. And what makes it so magical is that no matter what network you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, no matter what continent you're on and what network or continent your target device is on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will be able to talk between your devices on your Tailnet. It is truly incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And not having to care where you are when it comes to accessing your other machines and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices is amazing. It's so freeing. So here's the thing. Tailscale's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal plan will be free forever. They've regularly committed to that. And it's free forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for up to six users and unlimited devices. They have been making it more and more permissive over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. True story. There's no credit card required. They'll never even hint to asking for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. They don't even care. So you can go to tailscale.com slash accidental tech to get started.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, if you'd like to bring Tailscale to work, you can use the code Accidental Tech for three free months of any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid plan. Thousands of companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the New York Times have already made the switch. So go to tailscale.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash accidental tech, T-A-I-L-S-C-A-L-E dot com slash A-C-C-I-D-E-N-T-A-L-T-E-C-H
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get started. Thank you to Tailscale for sponsoring the show.
Unforgetful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any real news going on this week, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not really this week, but last week I did something pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Captain Pedantic, fair enough. Congratulations on shipping. This is very exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much. Yeah, I shipped my new app, Unforgetful. I'm finally saying the name aloud on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast for the first time. This is the app I've talked obliquely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it for a while on this show I started writing it back in February. This is my reminder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that basically takes over the job of reminder notifications and and does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kind of a different philosophy on them than Apple's built-in reminders app that better fits my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brain. The core of the problems that I was trying to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is related, I think, to my undiagnosed but fairly obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adult ADHD. When a reminder is out of sight, it's out of mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I don't get notified for something, it's not going to happen. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while, I wrote a blog post announcing the app, and it's fairly personal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I kind of go through a brief history of growing up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a very forgetful person and not really having any kind of useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diagnosis because I think if you forgot all your homework when you were not hyperactive in the 90s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were just lazy. And there's lots of awful psychological baggage that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resulted from that, that has affected lots of us, myself included, from that generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I realized that tools can help me. And throughout my adult life, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has helped me by far more than anything else has been calendar alerts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there's a calendar event I have to do, I set alerts on it and I get notified. And I get notified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot and I do them. And that's the only way I'm ever going to, I ever do anything is with calendar alerts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wanted something similarly effective for to-dos, like tasks, reminders,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the term is that you want to use. all the same thing. There was a huge advantage that I got with reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once Siri got good enough that I could, anywhere I was, dictate a new reminder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And people in my life, oh, they'll see me all constantly, people around me will see me like, take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out my phone, remind me in 15 minutes, take out the trash. Like, you know, stuff like that. And if I, and even for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are really minor that most people would think, why would you need a reminder to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why don't you just remember? I don't remember. I need the reminder. And this has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco served me very well as an adult for the most part, but there's been a few exceptions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most notably, if I don't get reminded at a particular time, I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open the reminders app. And part of that is because I hate the reminders app. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not at all what I want it to be. A lot of people love it. So I'm not going to say it sucks or anything. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like it works great for a lot of people. Does not work great for me. I don't get the organization of it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never know which of the screens I want to be on. They're all full of different subsets that are not useful to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Lots of things are overdue. Lots of things are from the past. Lots of things are from the distant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. And it's hard for me to figure out what screen I need to be on to see whatever I need to do and whatever's active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. The other problems with reminders are, again, my main UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my main interaction with it is voice for input and notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for output. The voice part is okay. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little unreliable in former versions of iOS. In iOS 27,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one that's currently in beta, it takes a significant step backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think dictating reminders to Siri in iOS 27 is awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, this has changed a little bit throughout the betas, so maybe it won't ship awful in the fall, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's only a few weeks away, and it's still not great. It is starting to ask me fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asinine clarifying questions in later betas, but it's still really slow now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's way slower than it was in previous OSs. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing all these smart LLM things, and that's wonderful for lots of other reasons. But for creating reminders,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a pretty big step backwards. I didn't know that was going to happen when I started making my reminder app, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now, now as you know, is named Unforgettful um I didn't know that at the time. I started it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in February. But over the course of the summer, I I've realized like, oh, I need to ship this app now, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think a lot of people in the fall, as they get used to this new version, they're going to realize, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictating reminders in Siri is pretty rough now. um anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's a side side diversion
⏹️ ▶️ John but how does how does unforgettable help with that? Aren't you still dictating reminders with Siri to put things into Unforgetful?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it helps in a few ways. So let me, that was that was a diversion. I'll get back to that in a minute. But um the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short version is that's why I have a dictation feature in Unforgetful. That feature didn't exist before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like last month. But I realized, oh man, this beta is so painful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for dictating reminders with Siri. I should also probably have a fast dictation thing. So what I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I built a dictation engine. And as of a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, the 102 update also enables some natural language processing on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input that's very, very fast. So you can say, you can hit the microphone and you can say, tomorrow, 9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a.m., buy milk. And it will actually schedule it for tomorrow at 9 a.m. And it will parse it out of the title as you'd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect. Also with that, I optimized the design of the widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lock screen controls and everything else to provide lots of easy, fast ways into dictation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode. I mean, you know, there's widgets everywhere. There's control center controls. You can long press the app icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of those things will give you options for jumping right into the microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording mode. I even made it so that when you fire one of those off, it does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even animate the sheet presentation for the dictation mode. It just pops it in. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you save 0.4 seconds there or whatever it is. I want it to be so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. And what I have it mapped to is I put the microphone button on my lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen in the bottom right because I made a lock screen widget also. So you can add it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wherever the system allows widgets. You can put it on the action button, like whatever, whatever you want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's Mac controls that I think work. It's really weird. Mac controls, it's really weird, like the new control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco center API thing for the Mac. It's very, very strange, but I think it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for me, my fast capture mode is the microphone button on my lock screen on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone. And that jumps right into it and lets me record. It's so much faster than Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, going back to kind of the purpose of the app, for me, it's all about fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture and ubiquitous fast captures. And I can still use Siri if I can't easily reach the phone or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also on the notification side, it is very important to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no task ever get into a state that it does not ever notify me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. Because that happens too easily with reminders. For me, it happens in two big ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, if I forget to set a reminder date, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just say to Siri somewhere, remind me to buy milk, it will never remind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me because I didn't say, it's like Simon didn't say, I didn't say remind me tomorrow to buy milk. I didn't say remind me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 15 minutes to buy milk. I just I just said remind me. So it'll be like, all right, well, I added it to reminders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that's on you. Good luck. And that kind of, like, I will never look at it. I will never find it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other way that you can lose things in reminders if you are me is say remind me in 15 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it notifies you in 15 minutes. And if you don't snooze that notification,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you do anything else, if you ignore it, if you accidentally swipe it away and dismiss it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other way, if you clear notifications, whatever, if that notification, if anything else happens to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides you hitting snooze, it will never notify you again. So you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one chance. And this is not a good recipe for success if your brain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works like my brain. The original concept of Unforgetful back in February
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was mainly to just solve those two problems. Just notifications that will constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remind me over and over again until something is actually marked complete. Now, there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app called Do, DUE, that does this. We've talked about it before. Lots of people like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine app. It's not really for me. Like, I don't really love the UI and some of the mechanics of it, but it's that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of concept for notifications. So, like, if you want, you know, to avoid getting a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of emails, this app already exists. I'm very aware. Thank you. And it's a perfectly fine app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My life has for years now been managed by, well, since forever, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been managed by my calendar. And anything that isn't a calendar item is in the DUE app. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is how I run my life. And I think that, you know, if Unforgetful was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out years ago, then I probably would have put all of those things into that instead. But I've got so many freaking things in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DUE now to move them over would be quite a burden. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Unforgetful is for you, that's perfect. If DUE is for you, that's fine too. But they're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both very analogous in certain ways and very different in other ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And And what I've realized, so I decided fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early on, I wanted to actually release this app to the public. And it has been a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very interesting journey, I think, for me in part because it's a very narrowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focused app. This is an app that you either know immediately it's for you or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know immediately it's not for you and this has been an interesting um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it's been interesting like looking through the feedback and and trying to figure out how i'm how how i should deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feedback because for me the app is it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very powerful if i keep that philosophy of it will always remind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you no matter what of every task in it and it doesn't you know it can it can space it out by a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or tomorrow or whatever but like it will it will never stop reminding you of a task until you mark it done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critically it reads and writes your data from reminders from the system reminders database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn't just an import it isn't a one-way thing it reads it and it writes it back to that same database so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no import or export you can use unforgetful with reminders or you can use it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other apps that use a reminders database or you can use it for a while and never look at reminders forever again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can at the end of that decide you know what i want to go back to reminders just delete unforgetful and it's and reminders is still right there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all your information is still right there so it's very flexible in that one of the downsides of that though is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when somebody tries out unforgetful for the first time it shows everything in their reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco database and you can select different sub lists if you want to like only restrict it to like you know one list or whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't want your grocery list in there that's fine um but one of the most common feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh points i get is people saying oh my god it filled it up with all these tasks that i had scheduled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the distant future with no due dates i don't want those in there now i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i even ran a poll yesterday on mastodon for about an hour and i deleted it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early but i ran a poll asking basically like hey do you what do you want unforgetful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with tasks that have no due date because to me i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always interpreted that to mean i'm never going to do that as i mentioned earlier because like i'm never going to be notified of this so therefore it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a failure it'll never happen it's invisible that's not something i want to allow but but about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half of respondents to the poll said they want basically like a someday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco section in the app and so i mocked it up put it in the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and i ran you know a couple of test builds and and i played with it myself and i'm like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i don't think i should add this like because to me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday section means i'm never going to do it and a someday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco task just becomes a bucket to dump stuff in that i'm never going to do and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my philosophy is if i'm never going to do it i should just delete it and no shame attached to that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just delete it this is a list of things that i intend to do not a list of things that i'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably never going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned what people were calling these things when they talked to you about them oh i have when i put a reminder in
⏹️ ▶️ John the reminders but i don't have a due date because it's stuff for the far future when i heard you say that i'm like well
⏹️ ▶️ John if it's for the far future it should have a date on it for the far future and
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps not coincidentally i have a reminders list called far future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has dates that has
⏹️ ▶️ John reminders in it that are in the far future and they all have dates but they're in the far future
⏹️ ▶️ John and i the reason they're in that sub list is because i don't want to see them in my like regular reminders list because i
⏹️ ▶️ John know they're like two three four years from now but they all have dates on them so i mean i'm not i'm not going to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone to change how they use reminders everyone uses the apps the way they want to use it but uh it's just
⏹️ ▶️ John i was surprised by the 50 response in that poll as well because i feel like look if you really want this to be in the far future
⏹️ ▶️ John set it for and oh i don't know the exact date fine set it for you know on the the the closest
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get within a year two years three years five years just make a guess and throw it in there
⏹️ ▶️ John because anything is better than no date at all and i i'd never even thought about the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of reminders without dates if i ever get a reminder without a date it's because of a failure of dictation and i'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right exactly like i'd never intend that and that's again that's part of why i it's like so unforgetful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it treats undated reminders like they're due today on the next hour boundary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's going to remind you and then you can decide what to do with it you can you can say remind me tomorrow you can change the date you can snooze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it you can change it you can whatever you want to do anyway so when people were asking for this i i thought like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well my instinct was like with overcast with overcast my goal is a broad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience i want i want overcast to be the podcast app for everybody most people i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think their needs for podcasts should be solved with overcast obviously that a little bit different now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like video and stuff but like the idea generally with overcast was like i want this to be broad market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so my instinct when i got this feature request of like undated tasks what should happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone wants a someday section my instinct was to build it so that's why i did and i tried it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as i was like trying to write the wording for the setting and the setting screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i was like i hate this it felt like to use a wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmerism it felt like i was giving people a foot gun if you're using unforgetful if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app is what you need then if i allow you to have an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco category of tasks that you never get reminded about this is not the app for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like if that's what you want this is not the app for you and then look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for our sister app forgetful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right like and and i've been very careful when designing unforgetful like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it impossible to fail at your task that's the whole goal if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reminder unforgetful will do whatever it can to make sure that you don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget about it that's the whole point of the app that's why it's called that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way naming it oh my god i'll get to that but so with this app i'm i'm being very conscious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one of the unfortunate um limitations of the reminder api event kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's a lot of fields that reminders supports that i don't have access to i can't even tell if reminder has them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not so one of them is subtask relationships reminders i think a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago reminders added the ability to make subtasks under a task there this is a common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature of apps like things and omni focus you know all like you know the big the big task management apps and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea is oh you can make a project you can make like a top level task that's the project and then you have the sub the sub check marks of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right we'll do this then do this and then then the then the project is complete that's great there's there's a place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that but i decided early on like first of all since i couldn't see those relationships well i can't support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them anyway but also that's fine this app is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app to manage that type of project if you like this is the app to manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call the doctor's office tomorrow simpler things this is not a project management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app this is not a whole system it's it's not even really ideal for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collaborating with people i might change that at some point but like it's you know reminders has the concept of like shared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lists and i admit i haven't actually done that much testing on that because that's not really what it's for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there's all these different features there's tags and organization features that i just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only do i not have access to thanks to the api but i'm not going to build those features because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is tagging and you know folders and everything what is that used for it's used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hide things selectively i don't want to hide things selectively i never want to hide things selectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's the whole point of the app and so i am taking this different philosophy with this app of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again this is either for you or it's not for you it's very hard for me to remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when i'm reading all the feedback and you know some you know some of it's positive some of it's not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what makes it very encouraging is like on this point specifically about about like the undated tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they should be like in a someday bucket or remind you right now i've i heard from a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people already i think three or four people already who have said initially they were mad that all their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday tasks all ended up there immediately and they were getting reminded but now they've set due dates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like john was just saying like they just set dates or got rid of them or did them and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's fine and i'm like you know what that actually tells me this is a success it is 100 the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move for me never to add that feature because what i want is that outcome i want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to either be reminded or complete them or set a date in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and i don't care if that date's five years from now fine whatever set it as far in the future as you need to set it as you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to match your intention but if your intention is do this someday well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how about you get reminded about it once a month till you do it because otherwise it's not going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John i just looked at my far future list by the way to uh see what was in there and i realized i have to check
⏹️ ▶️ John off one of them because we already talked about it on the show it was the um do airpods max 2 exist
⏹️ ▶️ John uh scheduled for early september we already did that was that for a bet that we had was that one of our bet things
⏹️ ▶️ John we had it was like i think we talked about it and uh when they came out and like um i just looked it up like episode 683
⏹️ ▶️ John uh it was it was a bet and i won yay anyway i will check that off now there are fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John items on my far future list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so let me tell you about naming this app this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i consider myself fairly good at naming things
⏹️ ▶️ John i was gonna say this name is a very marco name i would say that overcast is the aberration
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco naming things
⏹️ ▶️ John because overcast is a straight up the middle good name with no weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so trying to name a productivity app a to-do app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it turns out this has been a pretty common need since the dawn of time so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of task management and project management and to-do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and collaboration type like organization type productivity apps out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world and many of the many of them have existed many of them still exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's many live trademarks in this in this world so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my naming process is which i am pretty good at john but my naming i disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but okay my naming process is you know i'll brainstorm some stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i'll look into like you know root words and parts of speech and different styles and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i will say i tried having LLMs generate me name ideas and they are just horrendous at this task
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are awful at naming things there were some good ideas that LLMs threw at me but like they kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of got me thinking in different directions but
⏹️ ▶️ John you should have done like you know that um what is that a mcsweeney article about email addresses that are hard to read
⏹️ ▶️ John over the phone have you seen that one yeah yeah all right so your app should have been called capital d lowercase o
⏹️ ▶️ John capital D-E-E, capital Y-O-U, capital E-E-E. so it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be do D-U-E. wow because that's what everybody says
⏹️ ▶️ John about that damn app because that app also has a problematic name
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah right you
⏹️ ▶️ John can't just say do anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so so often i would come up with what i thought was a pretty good name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then i'd go do searches i'd do a trademark search i'd do an app store search and they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were all not only taken but like really taken like taken in ways that like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still like an active live company using this name like there's no like i really can't use this name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was taken and then i would often you know i'd i'd go in a different direction okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well if i can't do something descriptive what if i do something that's not even related
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like i i wrote it on the way to kona uh to you know kona hawaii what if i use kona
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the name i love that name nope that's some productivity app um
⏹️ ▶️ John were you doing the naming after the icon because you could have could have called it like lighthouse reminders or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no the icon came after the name i went through so many names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so often i would land on something that was like oh that's not bad let me look at oh no can't do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or i would i would think of some kind of metaphor like you know oh what what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what about memory uh what about oh um elephants they never forget oh i just invented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evernote like everything's been taken every metaphor everything has
⏹️ ▶️ John safe harbor lots of lighthouse related ones yeah safe harbor for adhd people who can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah not bad it it was this was the hardest naming challenge i have ever had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and i i landed on unforgettable i don't think it's my best name ever to be honest but i think it's i think it's a decent name
⏹️ ▶️ John it has the advantage i think correct me if i'm wrong i believe it's not actually a word which has the advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of it's not going to be taken you know what i mean like it's it's unique in that way it is you know it is your own branding
⏹️ ▶️ John and not just like i took a word from the dictionary and called my app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there is a a minor issue that i hope will no longer i hope i hope it won't be an issue for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long um because it'll just have an established name after a while but there's an issue that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store search will try to auto correct you if you type in unforgetful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it'll auto correct you to unforgettable like ah crap that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually pretty bad but i i'm hope like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is always the case i'm assuming that was taken by the way was unforgettable taken um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were some closer trademark problems with that um and i kind of i liked unforgetful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better because no unforgetful is a word apparently yeah it's it's like it's a word but it's not really a word that anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would use but it it is technically a word but like i was focusing in on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like adhd angle pretty early and one of the key design principles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app is it never makes you feel stress or shame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no feelings of overwhelm that's why i didn't call it overdue in addition to being you know probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disrespectful to the do app i didn't want to call it overdue because that's stressful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i didn't want any feelings of of stress shame overwhelm so i wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be lighter and encouraging you know fresh starts so things that are related to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunrises because every day is a new day you know stuff i looked at so many metaphors um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the waves uh you know coming in uh i thought like one of the one of the probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best name that the LLMs came up with was nudge but it wasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite good enough for me and I think there I think there actually is an app called that anyway so I couldn't use it anyway but there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like beacon or ping like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay you know not bad now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to call it waves can't do that it's taken I wanted like I wanted to call it reprise even though it's my PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework but it's like I was trying to trying to throw in like phish references musical references every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word was taken trademarked like everything is somewhere in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco task management or productivity space that was too close for comfort so it was just incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult to name this app um but i went with i went with unforgettable because you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i had you know of my of my kind of finalists it was the one i liked the most and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had like the least contention in the app store it had the least contention for search results like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if i can get apple to stop auto correcting it to a different word it'll be great because it it will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easy to find in the app store and it will be very high rank
⏹️ ▶️ John put just put unforgettable in your keywords oh that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting maybe i'll do that yeah that's a good idea thank you okay um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as for the actual journey of programming the app um you know this was originally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was mostly vibe coded like what i wrote on the plane was mostly me learning about vibe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coding i fairly quickly realized i didn't like ai code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structure very much and that it had a lot of limitations and so i ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the app's code i have written it myself um i still you know there is ai generated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code still in there for various boring frameworky type parts of the code like you know some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those swift ui views like that's there's not that much for me to do that's distinctive there but like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data layer i wrote almost all of it myself more importantly everything dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with dates and times and calendars and days i wrote almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah because that's the easy stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god dealing with dates is and times and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's comically tricky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many pitfalls and the fortunate fortunately like apple provides very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apis the calendar api the date components like all these different parts of it it provides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good apis um and what i found was overall kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the the best balance for me is i wrote the time parsing and and time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handling code and then i had ai check it for bugs and write a bunch of test cases for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i mean i can't tell you how many tests i think there's like 500 tests in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Testing all sorts of different like different edge cases and and part of why there's so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you might think if you are writing the reminders api um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recurring task support how do you do that and the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's actually very very simple all you have to do is mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a task as completed in event kit and reminders automatically generates the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in its recurrence series and that's awesome except what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to tell the user when the next time will be in the UI before it happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you want to if they're entering the recurrence rule and you want to say this will repeat on September 1st and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco October 1st what if you want to show them that that's actually pretty helpful there's no way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huh okay what if what if you want to actually change some of these meanings like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to like one of the features of Unforgettable is if you have suppose you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a task that recurs every day and you are two weeks behind and you haven't done it yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go back and you check complete you're going to have to check complete 13 more times to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get yourself to the present day and I thought that is awful I've done it before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've been there it's horrendous it just tells me how much of a failure I've been and it makes me feel bad and it's tedious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and error-prone. so everything about it is bad so I'm like I want unforgettable when you complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old overdue recurring task where you've missed intervals in the intervening time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to just skip all those and just get to today well then that means I have to change the logic of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it means to complete a recurring task so between wanting to display the future dates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the UI and that I pretty quickly realized I think I need to write my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recurring task parser thing that like extrapolates the next dates forward for a recurring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco task so I did I wrote every single one of those cases and if you look in the reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and you go to custom repeat thing every single one of those I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the logic for that with the calendar APIs and doing it all like you know manually and myself and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything and then I had AI go find find the bugs I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pat myself on the shoulder right now I actually did okay I didn't have that many bugs in the version I wrote but I had more than zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it fixed them and then it made 500 test cases to make sure I got them all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a really fun challenge but it was it was a lot because yeah dealing with dates and times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very very tricky stuff and just when you're when you're making any kind of app like this there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many questions of like okay what should happen in this edge case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might think oh remind me every day about these tasks or whatever okay well you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what if this time doesn't exist in this day or what if you know what if somebody says remind me on the 31st
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the month and it's a it's a month that doesn't have 30 days or doesn't have 31 days um or just all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things what you know what if the person flies across the country changes time zones between this interval what should happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like there's so many just decisions about how things should behave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an app that deals with timed events and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope what I have done here is make a system that makes sense that is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internally consistent coherent predictable I think I have it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes sense to me I hope it makes sense to other people um but overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like dealing with times has been by far the most challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't doubt it time arithmetic is brutal and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually just had a very small bug um, with something in call sheet that's honestly the story is not that interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was basic time arithmetic gets you every time or gets me every time Um, that is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brutal so now that it's out and forgive me I'm not trying to like cut to the end or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that but what is the what is the response been Cause it seems extremely positive from what I've seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it's funny because when I first saw the app and we John and I only knew about it I don't know like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few weeks ago month ago maybe um, when I first saw the app I thought this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is great I don't know that this is something that I personally need and I worried that this may be something that not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that many people need now since this is not you know your your primary income
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wasn't maybe worried was too dramatic a word but I figured oh there'll be a handful of people that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and that'll be that but based on just what I've seen it seems like there are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people who are looking for exactly this so from my perspective it looks like the response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far it's been I you know I had kind of like like a low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bound and a high bound of what I expected and it's basically right in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm happy with it it's not blowing me away it's not crushingly disappointing it's right kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right in the middle of what I what I kind of expected slash hoped for um so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'd say so far it's doing well the I think the only major question mark is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the app it has a hard paywall with a $20 a year subscription and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a one month free trial and I wanted to do a whole month free trial so people could actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it like move into it like live with it try it and see how it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you before you pay me anything Cause I want you to be able to try it and then of course with reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration like you can try it and all your stuff is right there and then if it's not for you you can leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all your stuff is still right there in reminders you can leave whenever you want also so I figure like I'll make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really easy for people to try it with no pressure and then after a month if they're still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it then I can get paid
⏹️ ▶️ John how long is the one month free trial what how long is the one month free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you mean it's a month date math date math there it is that's up to apple i that's whatever they
⏹️ ▶️ John that's my question what does apple do like so if you you know because if you did this yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John and well people will complain no matter what they would say i bought it in a month where
⏹️ ▶️ John there's not that many days and i bought on the 31st but then my subscription ended on the 28th of the next month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not fair honestly i have no i don't actually know what what how apple handles that
⏹️ ▶️ John neither do i that's what i'm saying date math it's terrible because in that situation
⏹️ ▶️ John like i for i do this in my app is why i thought of it i just always give them 31 days
⏹️ ▶️ John how i do the date math and so you can get a one-month thing that that lasts you two calendar months because you span
⏹️ ▶️ John over february you end up you know what i mean 31 days no complaints but that's just because i'm rolling it myself which is
⏹️ ▶️ John has its own problems because apple doesn't support the kind of payments i do in my app but dates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah um oh i actually um i i think my usage of CloudKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a little bit interesting and i wanted to i wanted to mention that so i don't directly need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud kit you know at first glance because i'm reading and writing from the reminders database and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your reminders database is probably stored in iCloud for you know on your iCloud account but that's not of my concern I just read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it locally but I started realizing I needed CloudKit for a few additional things so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is like there's a few cases where I want to store metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about each reminder to provide some feature that I want to offer so for instance the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco snooze times are dynamic they there's like a few different brackets of like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know short medium and long snooze intervals the one it offers you depends on what you picked last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you picked a very short interval as your last snooze like the 15-minute one it'll give you the set of short ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you picked you know a day to snooze it last time it'll give you the long ones and so i wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to store for each reminder the last used snooze interval and i also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i had this idea for location-triggered reminders that the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem i have with location triggered reminders is that the radius of a geofence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that triggers them is a hundred meters it's a pretty big radius and this is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can try to make them smaller but they'll be less reliable so apple recommends in like the programming guide for core location and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they recommend a hundred meters as the smallest geofence radius because the gps chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the phone is when you're just kind of like doing background pulling of geofencing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not doing like active turn by turn directions the gps radio is in a very low power state it's not pulling constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so if you have like a smaller radius that you're trying to trigger based on you might actually miss it as you move through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so a hundred meters is the kind of the default geofence radius And whenever you tell reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey remind me when i get home do this it'll remind you when you're within a hundred meters of your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be when you're like half a block away like you like you might you know you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be near your house but if you say remind me when i get home to you know put the milk in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fridge i mean hopefully you don't need that reminder maybe a bad example but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know if you say that it's going to remind you when you're like three houses down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the car or maybe five houses down on foot and by the time you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the house where the fridge is you might have forgotten i know i do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so for me geofence alerts for for reminders have always been not particularly useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it's like well i don't want to be reminded when i'm like driving up near the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house i want to be reminded when i'm in the house when i can actually do something about this task
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because i don't want to forget in the intervening time and so i i wanted to add delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco triggers notifications i wanted to add all right make it so i can set myself to remind me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five minutes or 10 minutes or 30 minutes after i get to a location remind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me of this thing then that way i'm like once i'm like in the house jackets off stuff's put down i'm settled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then i can actually do something so i had to i had to store a field on reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um and i also wanted to be able to do things you know just like you know for future features like if i want to add url
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support or whatever i can't read reminders urls thanks event kit please i man if there's one thing i would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read urls um but the ability to add fields you can't really do it in EventKit. there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way in event kit to add arbitrary metadata to reminders now other apps have come up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various hacks for this sometimes they'll try to cram it into the notes field they'll put like an identifier in the notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field or they'll just actually literally write the metadata in right into the notes field and that's fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i i wanted to avoid that if i could or if it if there was like a better solution and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally separately from that i ran into an issue during testing one day for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications to work best ideally you turn off reminders notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you leave unforgetful notifications on and it replaces reminders notifications but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unforgetful on the phone is limited by iOS's background refresh intervals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don't allow it to background refresh or if you tell Siri in your phone remind me in three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes to do something and unforgetful doesn't have a chance to background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refresh itself in that three minute span it's not going to be able to notify you because it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about that reminder yet now i have a mac version too it's a mac and ios app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mac version can constantly monitor so as soon as the mac gets a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reminder through iCloud or Siri or whatever the mac app instantly knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here it is and it can create a notification for it so i'm like what if i use iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background refresh triggering when the Mac app sees a new reminder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it's running on a Mac somewhere and you're out somewhere with your phone it can send a CloudKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silent push to the phone and I think oh my god that's how to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I started using cloud kit for that that when the so that and this is why when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app the Mac app gives you gives it one of those annoying confirmation messages when you try to close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like Chrome because I actually don't recommend that you close the Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever because if the Mac app is running it can do this it can pick up notification it can pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up new reminders immediately and then send a cloud kit push to wake up the phone app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the phone picks them up way faster than if it has to wait for a background refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John can you make the Mac app just run in the background like make a little background job faceless background job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I initially I had it as one of those like dock or or menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or both toggles I think I'm going to put that back but I think there's a way you can get it
⏹️ ▶️ John totally in the background and the reason I think so is because Golden Gate puts icons in the menu bar for apps that are doing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't think I want to deal with that but I definitely would like to I'd probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one of the nearby nearby future versions I'm probably going to add an option to put it just in the menu bar because a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have requested that anyway so that's why I recommend if you run run the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app all the time if you can because that will keep your phone app up to date faster anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I had to I dealt with CloudKit for that and then I'm like you know this this was kind of like midway through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer as I'm trying to figure out what to do with these different features that I want to have metadata for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the delayed notification or delayed location triggers and things like that and the dynamic snooze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like hmm well now that I'm using CloudKit and Fable was out and I'm like Fable's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good at coding what if Fable writes me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bridge between my Blackbird database and CloudKit I've already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've been planning to do this forever I called it Skybridge and I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a prototype back in the day I never finished it so I had fable look at my prototype
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using the style that I use and the blackbird mechanics that I use just finish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like take this prototype and finish it and test it and make it good and make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work and fix the bugs and it did so and this you can actually see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it did there's um if you look at my my blackbird library is open source and there's a branch named fable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skybridge is in there and you can use it if you want it's just automatically syncs a blackbird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco table to CloudKit. and it's awesome i'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so i'm so happy about this like i couldn't when it did that i'm like oh my god this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have taken me a week to do this myself and my version would have had more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs and it would have taken me another month after that to find them all and fix them all and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i never would have had tests i'm so happy to have this and since having skybridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and since i already did all the work on blackbird it's a fully functional blackbird app with no servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just with cloud kit as the as the sync backend so now i can add arbitrary metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any reminder whenever i want and i can if i want to add another column it's no big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i'm i just do it and i go to this you know the cloud kit dashboard and publish the changes and all that stuff but like it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine what a game changer that has been so i'm i'm now able to do good features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that anyway so that's i thought the CloudKit store was a little bit interesting on that especially the background push i think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i think that really helps keep the app up to date um but anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually answer your question casey from a thousand years ago the how the reception has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been again kind of what i was saying earlier about about with overcast uh versus this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i'm having to exercise a lot of discipline not adding every feature everybody asks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if somebody's asking me for things like you know folders and organization i think it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i can confidently say if you're looking for this app to do that it's not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really the app for you or this is not the app for that job and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use reminders that way like i was listening to our friend steven robles over on mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power users he recently made a kanban app he vibe-coded the whole app it was great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a good episode for MacPowerUsers. i think it was last week and we'll link to it he was describing how he used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reminders before he made his own app and he was a super power user of reminders using things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtasks and tags and all these different and like i i've never used it that way i've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never used anything that way i've tried using omnifocus back in the day i tried using things back in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day i would stick with them for a little while and then i would it would fall on the floor and i'd forget about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and i think any everybody with adhd type tendencies i think this is a very familiar story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know this is this is the the a category of apps that gets a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tire kicking like hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i can be the kind of person who organizes my stuff this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you do it for like a little while you know you do it for maybe you can stick with it for a few days or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few weeks or maybe if you're lucky a couple of months but then it then you don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you stop checking it like this is why i've never gotten into like paper notebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even like my my you know my journey into remarkable tablets i would just eventually stop looking at them i would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop checking them and that's that's been true of everything i've ever done that can't notify me constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so i can pretty confidently state what i want this app to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what it is and what it isn't it is not an organizational system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is an automated nagging machine to get you to do stuff if that's what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it's very effective that is not what a lot of people need though there i mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of people out there who need it but like i think if you poll the average people out there in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's not going to be the majority who need this if i take a hundred people off the street and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i describe this app to them half of them are going to look at me like i'm crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i think about 40 of them are going to be like eh, i don't really need it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then maybe 10 of them are going to be like oh my god yes i need that that's kind of what i'm looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at and i don't really know how to reach those people i'm learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i'm going to do a lot of experiments with different types of ads and trying to find different audiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco targeting different ads in different ways i really have no idea how to market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app and i don't think it's ever going to be a mass appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing because it doesn't have mass appeal to be a mass appeal task management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app you have to have a lot of features and enable a lot of different ways of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working like that's you know things and omni focus like these are these apps are great for that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're very customizable they have very very deep features and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broad feature sets so those kinds of apps whatever your system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they allow you to mold the app to execute your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that's not this this is the app for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who systems don't work for and i'm very confident keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that way because if for some reason you out there if your brain works like mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can forget something five minutes after someone told you this app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be for you and there's enough of you out there there's enough of us i i'm confident
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can yeah i'm confident that this can be a reasonable business it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i don't think it's ever going to be anywhere near the size of overcast in terms of either user base or income i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i would be shocked if it ever came near it um i think i'd be happy with a tenth of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but i know that there's other people like me out there and if you are out there and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want a better reminders app for yourself try unforgetful see see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it works for you give it the month free trial if you don't like it don't worry delete it go back to reminders no big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal um but but give it a shot um because i think there's a i think there's a lot more of us out there than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than we realize but i don't know how to i don't know how to reach us so help me out
⏹️ ▶️ John did you get unforgetful in the app store like no colon suffix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um no i actually i didn't even try you always got to try no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don't because the way the app store search works this is, you know look i had i had overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no colon forever um but i stopped using it because app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store search is brutal you have to jam your title and your subtitle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your keywords full of every keyword you can think of and where you put them matters what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know which of those fields they're in they all it matters if there's a phrase and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both words appear in the title or subtitle that matters more than if they're split across the two fields like there's all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different things with app store search optimization i wish the app store search wasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so dumb but it is and this is this is the environment i operate in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if if you want your app store app to succeed you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things like shove a bunch of keywords in the title and the subtitle you just have to so i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn't even the idea of not doing that it it never was a possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John so what is your subtitle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never lose a task oh that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that's after the colon
⏹️ ▶️ John when i was searching for um apps called nag of which there are many um
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco has a good subtitle
⏹️ ▶️ John which is nag and they use a hyphen instead of colon which i think is a mistake but anyway nag relentless
⏹️ ▶️ John reminders that sounds more like do actually that's actually
⏹️ ▶️ John that's a decent title i like that because yours you didn't mention this but i think is that everyone should read margot's post about this because it's
⏹️ ▶️ John it's really good and explains even more stuff if you can imagine um and one of the the key things that i didn't realize
⏹️ ▶️ John until i read your post about it i'd been test flighting the app but i just thought it was like doing weird stuff because the reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks sync stuff but you know this this app's tagline being relentless reminders uh unforgetful
⏹️ ▶️ John is intentionally not relentless like if you have a bunch of notifications that would normally
⏹️ ▶️ John show up like all at the same time you space them out so as not to throw a pile of crap
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of people which I would never have occurred to me that you were doing that intentionally and it's it's why
⏹️ ▶️ John the um it's why never lose a task is a much better subtitle for your app than relentless reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John because you're trying not to be relentless i mean you're relentless in a gentle way i guess well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah because again like so that again that goes back to some key design things no shame try to minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any any way to feel overwhelmed and so what you know obviously look i get i'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great at keeping up with my to-dos obviously what happens frequently is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes i'll get into i'll get to a state where like for a week i will every day be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deferring to tomorrow like seven to 10 different tasks you know and my default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tomorrow day my default tomorrow time 9 a.m what would happen then is at 9 a.m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i would get seven to 10 notifications um now on what happens on modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apple platforms is they stack and they get summarized and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that happens every day and if every single day you get the same seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications at 9 a.m that you've been deferring for a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're going to only see the top one and maybe you're going to see the weird summary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it you know instead but that's it you're not going to see the ones that are buried in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which means they're never going to get done and this has multiple issues number one you feel hopeless oh my god
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's another system i've lost track of it's too big i can't i've lost control i i'm a failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and i must just bury it and never look at it again so that's obviously a failure mode that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i'm trying to avoid so that's where the spacing came out if you have seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are going to all remind you at 9 a.m i'm going to space them out by your interval that you set you can customize it you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can set it to zero if you don't want them spaced out but you can say like you know just remind me space them out every 15 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way every 15 minutes as you're working you get one notification and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at it and you can say oh you know what fine i will finally call the doctor but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid the stacking problem and this is again this is like if you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds insane you don't your brain doesn't work the way ours do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also matters what order you're reminded in so i built a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature that randomizes the order and it uses a seeded, predictable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco random number generator and it's seeded based on the date so that way your mac and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone randomize them in the same way every day so no matter where no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter what device you're on you're going to get a randomized order of those tasks that stack up every day the ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are scheduled for the same time they change every day in a random order it's the same on all your devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that way when you get that stack notifications nothing ever gets lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle forever because every day it's in a different order it's going to be on top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually so you will see it and like this is the kind of problem that a functioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human being whose brain does not work the way mine does would be like why are you letting them stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that i've never had things stack up that i'm just deferring for a week straight why don't you just do them instead of deferring them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a week yeah but that's not how my brain works so the way i the way i work such as it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is a lot of snoozing a lot of deferrals a lot of things eventually happening in batches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or being given up on that's the type of feature that i build in here that's what this app is for and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're again for the 90 of you out there who are like that's insane this is probably not for you but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the 10 of you out there who are like oh i would actually really use that try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i assure you this this might work for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh this is very exciting uh congratulations again i am pleased to see another entry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your i don't know arsenal isn't the word i'm looking for but in your repertoire whatever you want to call it um
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is very very exciting news and you should be very proud and very happy and i hope you're both of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John thank you yeah i'm glad you finally come over to my side and started making weird little apps that most people don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh if you want a weird little app that most people don't like let me tell you the story about fast text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah honestly like i find it very um very interesting like i as i've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as i've talked about recently um you know my my job in overcast has evolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really be more of a caretaker of overcast i don't i can't really change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much about it without angering a lot of people what people want from me with overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not tons of change they want just keep the app the same-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep it working keep it good fix any bugs and do my pet feature like that that's what everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but nobody wants me to really change overcast and so unforgetful was a chance for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something very different this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's from scratch it had no existing user base so i could do whatever i wanted especially with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small focus user base like like it's going to have so i it was a very different creative itch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a very different problem space as my first productivity app i've ever released i've never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done anything productive in fact i make apps that distract people from their productivity usually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh how quickly we forget about quitter i guess that's kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i'm mostly giving you a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ John and the the chapter thing what's it called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forecast yeah but the forecast is a very like limited release the productivity tool if you had to pick the category
⏹️ ▶️ John in the app store you'd pick productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe media anyway um so yeah this is like my basically my first productivity tool my first serious one my first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that i'm actually charging money for my first one that's really a business it's also my first um mac app store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and i in general i don't make a lot of mac apps at all so it's one of my first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mac apps so it there's a lot of you know kind of firsts for me in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and as an app developer that's always exciting that's always very interesting yeah um so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i i've really enjoyed it quite a lot and i continue to enjoy it and frankly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if no one else ever uses it i'll be disappointed but i'm still going to use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that's like forecast i use forecast every week that's how i edit the show even though forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a major app and i haven't actually issued an update in many years i still use it constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how many people use this app i'm going to use it myself all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore i am just i'm very happy with it and i i hope other people find it i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope it's good for them too by all means please try it but if not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey you know it's it's at least going to be good for me
AI watermarking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there's been a lot of news, hand-wringing. I don't know what you want to call it. There's been a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of stuff going on with regard to AI watermarking. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we're going to be talking a lot, perhaps primarily, about Anthropic's Claude, and it's worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noting that they are certainly a former sponsor, I believe, a future sponsor as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I just want to make that plain up front. But with that said, let's talk about what they're up to. So Anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote that Anthropic has signed the EU AI Acts Article 502
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated content. Here's what this means for Claude. New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models will mark AI-generated content from day one. Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2nd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will support machine-readable marking at launch. Generated text will carry embedded watermarks and generated files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported. We'll help you detect Claude's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marks. We'll support users and other third parties to detect Claude's marks as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code requires. And we'll share details in forthcoming documentation. Existing models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in progress. The law includes a transition period for anthropic models launched before August 2nd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we're working to add marking support for those models as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a very long press release that goes on and on, but we're not going to read all of it. But the initial
⏹️ ▶️ John question would be, why are they doing this? And the easy answer is, well, they just said why they're doing it. It's one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John EU regulations. Apparently, EU has this, you know, this AI act that says you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, put some marking on your AI output so it can be identified as AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there's lots of systems that do that. There's a couple of standards that do that, a big one that Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John supports that I can never remember the acronym for. But those usually in the context of like, oh, we want AI
⏹️ ▶️ John generated images. We want some way so that we can detect that they're AI generated. And there's like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a metadata sidecar that you can stick on the image that has some cryptographic info that says this was AI generated,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. And obviously all the systems, well, you know, they can just strip off the metadata sidecar, just like you strip
⏹️ ▶️ John off location data from a photo. It's like, yeah, but it's this is like an advisory system for people who want to participate
⏹️ ▶️ John in the process and maybe fulfill some regulations and blah, blah, blah. Then the next level is like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have our AI image generator can use like steganography, I think that's what it's called, where you put like
⏹️ ▶️ John secret hidden data in the pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John can't see, but that AI can see. And that's harder to strip out, but of course you can still strip it out because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can change the pixels. But at least that's clever. It's not like a metadata sidecar thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not really sidecar. The metadata is in the file. But anyway, you know what I mean? Like it's, they would change the pixels as a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. But then you get to things like AI generated text. And you're like, how the hell are you going to watermark text? Are you going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John because text, unlike an image, usually text files don't have a place where you can shove metadata that's not visible.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole point of a plain text file, it's a sequence of, you know, Unicode code points or whatever, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, encoding scheme it is. And that's it. There's no other, like images have all sorts of stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ John them that doesn't get displayed when you display the image, but text files don't. That's what makes them text files. So how are
⏹️ ▶️ John you going to watermark text files? I forgot to look this up, but like watermark
⏹️ ▶️ John is derived from, I'm assuming, when they would like take a piece of paper and put a mark on it. I don't know if they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually ever use water, but like if you held it up to the light, you could see you see it on like a paper
⏹️ ▶️ John currency in our country sometimes. Anyway, that's the derivation of it. But like, again, with a plain text
⏹️ ▶️ John file, what are you going to do with a plain text so I can identify it as AI generated?
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless maybe at the very end it says by Claude. So that's that's
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem they're faced with. But like, but why are they doing it? Like, why, you know, again, with the image stuff, it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we want to do this to be nice. And so people know when things are AI generated and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it's not a security thing. We're not
⏹️ ▶️ John fooling anybody because obviously anyone can just remove the watermark. But it's like, we're trying to do this to be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is one other angle that I hear everybody talking about with this. And I have no idea if this is
⏹️ ▶️ John in in Anthropic's mind at all. I don't know if it, you know, it's just a happy accident because the EU regulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, doesn't say anything about this. But the angle is, um, first,
⏹️ ▶️ John the premise that when AI models are training on stuff, that they don't
⏹️ ▶️ John do well if they are trained on like their own output like, or the output
⏹️ ▶️ John of other models, right? So they want to train on stuff that was not AI generated. If you train an
⏹️ ▶️ John AI on AI generated output, it just kind of goes into a degenerative loop and things get worse
⏹️ ▶️ John and worse. So I've heard. I don't know the foundation of that, but that's what I've heard. And so the idea here is,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would Claude, why would Anthropic do this? Besides obviously complying with the EU regulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Claude is doing it, Anthropic's doing it worldwide, which is just a simplification, I think, which is what Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John do in response to EU regulations. But anyway, they're saying, oh, they're doing it so they won't accidentally train
⏹️ ▶️ John their next model on stuff that was generated by any of their current models because then when their models go out
⏹️ ▶️ John there, they'll be like, oh, yum, yum, training data, munch, munch, munch. Steal everybody's data. Oh, wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John Our watermark, our watermark detector has detected that this data was generated by us.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we won't consume that because we think it will make our model worse. That sounds like a conspiracy
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, but I I mean, I think it's plausible. Again, assuming the whole idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that if models train on AI generated output, they get worse, which also sounds plausible to me. So keep that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the back of your mind. I mean, we're not, again, we're not going to read the whole rest of this press release, but we will eventually read something else from Anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ John about this topic about, you know, why is Anthropic doing this besides
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they have to comply with the regulations? And how does this apply to other companies?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anthropic's not the only one doing this, obviously. Every EU law applies to everybody and Google has something similar and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So um, keep that in the back of your mind as we continue here. But, you know, getting back to my earlier question is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, so I can see how you can watermark an image, whether with metadata or with like
⏹️ ▶️ John clever changing of pixels, but how the hell do you watermark text? And that's the question everyone had in their mind. This
⏹️ ▶️ John story is mostly taking place already between two episodes of the show. So we luckily have the benefit of
⏹️ ▶️ John time passing. But in the beginning, everyone was like, the press release didn't say how they were going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It's like, how how are they going to do this? How are you going to watermark a plain text file?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I'm going to do a lot of reading. So boys, feel free to interrupt me. All right. How Claude's text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watermark works. This is from Anthropic. In this article, we share answers to some of the questions we've received about how our chosen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watermarking method works. We use a method of watermarking that does not have any practical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact on the quality or content of Claude's outputs. The difference between watermarked and unwatermarked text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will not be distinguishable to readers. Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watermarking doesn't require extra tokens and will not be more expensive. Watermarking carries no identifying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information and can't be traced to a specific person, organization, or chat. Watermarking won't be specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Claude. As of August 2nd, the EU requires AI providers serving its market to mark AI-generated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content. Other major model developers have signed the same code of practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The watermark only applies to words Claude chooses. When Claude proofreads text written by a person, what it gives back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has generally only been lightly edited. Depending on the length of the text and how heavily Claude has edited it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those changes might not be enough to make Claude's involvement detectable. The more Claude writes, the more decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has to make, and the more space there is for a watermark. A watermark can only determine that Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was likely involved with the content at some point. It cannot distinguish Claude wrote this from Claude heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that annoys me about Anthropic is why did they wait whatever number of days to release this? Because everyone was flipping out about
⏹️ ▶️ John how it was going to work. These bullet points are very succinct and explain a bunch of stuff. And then they go on to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, basically, if if Claude didn't put the word there, it doesn't it's not part of the watermark,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes sense, but it's worth saying, right? And as I said, the more word Claude puts there, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John it's watermarked. But like, obviously, if you wrote those words and Claude didn't, they don't contribute to the watermark. So you need
⏹️ ▶️ John more words. And they don't come out and say this, but I would imagine the watermark I think they do say it later that
⏹️ ▶️ John we don't have in this passage here, but the watermark detection is not thumbs up, thumbs down. Yes, AI, no
⏹️ ▶️ John AI. It's a confidence score. It's like, ah, probably, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you get a percentage? Because you can't, it's not, you know, it's not a slam dunk
⏹️ ▶️ John case. Again, if Claude only changed three words, can you detect that at all? What is the threshold? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they they talk about this and uh I think in another podcast, talked about it being like 200 words being the
⏹️ ▶️ John uh the thing that you're supposed to be able to detect according to the EU regulation. But it's a little wishy-washy. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is their explanation. And all the stuff they crossed off, no weird characters, no hidden text.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not going to cost you more tokens. It doesn't identify you. That's all very reassuring and makes sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but how does it actually work?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How it works. Large language models like Claude work by generating one word at a time. Each time the model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decides on the next word, it chooses amongst a list of potential candidates, ultimately selecting the most sensible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or likely based on the preceding text. Take the sentence, the weather today was cold and the next word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very unlikely to be sugary, but it is very quite likely even to be overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ding, or gray. Under most circumstances, it doesn't matter much to the reader which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these latter two words the model ultimately chooses. The meaning of the sentence is largely the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same either way. In cases like this, the choice is settled by a random number.
⏹️ ▶️ John and let me pause you here because this is my favorite, the most fun thing. You know I love when people have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John confronted with how these things work because
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to hold in your mind how they work because, you know, it's like pet rocks or, you know, pet pets.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the mental model people have of these things is so different than how they actually work that even if you explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it to them and they understand it, they will discard that immediately and go back to believing they work however, you know, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little magic elf in a machine or something. Right. And so by there's Anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have to explain in like very simplified terms um how their watermarking works, which requires them
⏹️ ▶️ John to discuss how their product works. They haven't gotten to the watermark and they're just saying, here's what an LLM does. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John they're saying is when our, you know, it generates one word at a time based on the probability, based on the words
⏹️ ▶️ John that came before it, right? And when we get to the point where, uh, you know, we have to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John from some words that may be like roughly equally likely, we pick randomly. And
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody will be reading that and say, you pick randomly? Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the watermark. This is just how LMs work. So I can imagine if people read this, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would be very upset by, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's the same either way. So we just pick randomly? That's your product? This is upsetting. But anyway, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watermarking uses low stakes choices like these, which occur many times over a piece of generated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey text, to leave a pattern in Claude's responses. That pattern is undetectable to the reader, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detectable to anyone who has a key that encodes it. When watermarking is used, choices are still made at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey random, but the source of the randomness is different. Instead of using an arbitrary random number generator to pick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next word, watermarking uses the key and a few words that come before to settle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what word the model should pick. That is, the words that Claude picks are still random,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but now one can check the sequence of words and see if it's consistent with the choices Claude would make if it was using the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key. If it is, one can assign a probability that the text was generated by Claude. Amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John synergy by Marco, who just talked about the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John random number generation, but he is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann he's
⏹️ ▶️ John using pseudo random pseudo random number generator. We will link to the Wikipedia page for pseudo-random number generation, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the upshot is it's a function that you can call that gives you a random number. But like, where do
⏹️ ▶️ John random numbers come from? This is a very complicated topic. If you're not doing it for something for cryptographic or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you use a simple pseudo-random number generator where you give it give it a seed value. And for any given
⏹️ ▶️ John seed value, the random number sequence from the random number generator, every time you call it, will be exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same. So if you seed it with one, two, three, you're going to get the same, you know, call it random number, random number,
⏹️ ▶️ John they're always going to be exactly the same. It's always going to be the same, you know, every time you call it, it's a sequence of numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you're like, that doesn't sound random at all. You say if I seed it with one, two, three, and I call rand, rand, rand, rand,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's going to be the same answers from each one of those. Not that each one is the same, but the first one will be 10. The next one will be 20. The next one
⏹️ ▶️ John will be 15. You know, like it'll always be 10, 20, 15, 10, 20. If you seed it with one, two, three,
⏹️ ▶️ John a year from now and call it, it'll be 10, 20, 15, 10, 20. It's always the same sequence. That's how pseudo-random
⏹️ ▶️ John number generators work. And there is random choice within all LLMs, and we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to why in a little bit, by linking to all his videos where he's linked to. And what they're saying is we
⏹️ ▶️ John always choose at random, but now we have a random number generator
⏹️ ▶️ John that we know how it will, we know how it will spit out the numbers. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco doesn't know what the random numbers will be, but he knows if he seeds both of them the same way,
⏹️ ▶️ John he will get the same sequence of numbers. We don't know what, again, you don't know what those numbers will be ahead of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, like, that they're going to be the same sequence. So their random number generator is obviously more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John than this, but they essentially know because we decide how the random numbers are generated, we know
⏹️ ▶️ John whether, you know, our generator, our watermarking generator was used to generate these numbers versus,
⏹️ ▶️ John some other random number. And no one is more random than the other, right? Because any of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things where you're a student random number generator. What's a good seed value? Well, a good seed value is
⏹️ ▶️ John one that's not going to repeat and one is essentially unique. So a lot of the times the current time
⏹️ ▶️ John in like microseconds since you know, 1970 or whatever is part of the formula
⏹️ ▶️ John for the seed. But what you never want to do is use the same seed twice because then you'll get a sequence of numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John that you've seen repeat before. But each individual, the whole point of suitable random number generators is what you hope is for
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you ask for one, you get one that is unpredictably different than the previous one. It's obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John not unpredictable because it's a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco deterministic algorithm. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like from, from an outside observer, if you don't know what the seed was, you won't know what the next number is going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, it should be exactly equally random to
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what the seed is, no matter what random number generator you have, as long as they both have the same amount of entropy or whatever. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very complicated mathematical topic that I don't know the details of, but the whole point is one set
⏹️ ▶️ John of randomness is not necessarily any more or less random than the other. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that you can choose when you make the algorithms. And Anthropic is saying, it's random,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like it was before, but the random number generator is one that we control in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that we can predict, but it's still random. It's just as random as it's just as random as Marco's random
⏹️ ▶️ John number random order of his notifications. It's random enough that a user considers it random, but
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes, it's not random at all. It's entirely determined by the seed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And fun fact, that's why you can copy someone's Minecraft world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by just copying the seed. That's literally like the Minecraft seed for the Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, that's what that is. It is a random number that serves as the seed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the random number generator that generates the entire world. And so that's why two different computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, you can just say, just type in this number and you will generate exactly the same world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my computer with the same version of the game generated because that's literally what it's doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because it's like there is a sequence of code in the game that's going to run. And at various points, that
⏹️ ▶️ John code is going to say, give me the next random number. And as long as the seed is the same as someone else's seed, and as
⏹️ ▶️ John long as the code is the same as theirs, it's going to get the same answers as you got. Like that's the seed of a pseudo-random
⏹️ ▶️ John number generator determines every number that will come before it exactly come after it exactly. The whole
⏹️ ▶️ John trick is, you know, choosing a, you know, a seed that it's not going to repeat and that people don't know. And that's another upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about computers. People just assume computers can easily pick a random number. It goes really deep. Like there's
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason computers have like quote unquote real random number generators for use like cryptography
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff because it would be terrible to use a pseudo-random number generator for cryptography because people could predict what it's going to be. And
⏹️ ▶️ John how do the real random number generators work? Usually there's some piece of analog hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that samples like electrical line noise from interference from surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John components in the air. Like you need basically a source of entropy. And some
⏹️ ▶️ John these devices that will get you sources of entropy can't give you an unlimited amount instantly. So you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for them to gather enough It's a very complicated topic, but suffice it to say that the random number
⏹️ ▶️ John generation used for LLMs is has to be fast and it's not like cryptographically
⏹️ ▶️ John secure. They just want to they just want like roll a dice, pick a random number, you know, like the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John you would get it from any kind of pseudo-random number. That's perfectly sufficient for all LLMs. That's why I think the one that they're
⏹️ ▶️ John swapping in is probably also not expensive, doesn't use like real world entropy, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the job it has to do is, you know, there's five possible word choices um
⏹️ ▶️ John and pick what they are. And before we get to Gruber's thing on this, we'll uh there's been a bunch of links in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff we linked before, but I'll give timestamp links to the specific parts of this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, the three blue, one brown video on how LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John work, which isn't that scary. And if you watch it maybe seven times, you'll start to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a bunch of matrix math. And in the end, you end up like, it's like, what is the next word supposed to be?
⏹️ ▶️ John At the end, you end up with like, here are the top 10 words. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John are like probabilities. Like, we think this is the most likely, second most likely, third, most likely, fourth, most likely, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So on and so forth. That's how LLMs work. And there's a setting called temperature, which says,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I get to that end part and you give me a probability distribution about the likeliness, like this is 90% likely, this is 40%
⏹️ ▶️ John likely, this is 30% likely. They don't add up to 100. It's just like, how likely is each one of them?
⏹️ ▶️ John A temperature of zero just always picks the most likely one. Sort them by likeliness, the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that's at the top, you get. OK, And if there's a tie, I don't know. They just pick randomly or whatever between those two. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John temperature of zero picks the most likely. And you think, that's great. That's what LLM should do. That'll be the smartest because
⏹️ ▶️ John it finds the best word and picks it. But temperature zero is not pleasing
⏹️ ▶️ John to use because for a variety of reasons, if you're conversing with an LLM or having
⏹️ ▶️ John it do anything like interesting, a temperature of zero, and this is me talking,
⏹️ ▶️ John not any sort of, you know, AI scientist. My impression is that it reveals
⏹️ ▶️ John too much about the stupidity and determinism of the machine. So if you say, at
⏹️ ▶️ John each sequence, just pick the most likely next word, It just it's just terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn't It doesn't seem like it's alive or creative or interesting. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask the same question with the exact same wording, it will always give you the same answer, kind of like a sort of random number generator, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So picking the most likely next word choice turns out not to be the best strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John for a thing that's going to fake people out into thinking like it's alive and creative and stuff. So it's good for
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we talked about this in the past, like business processes where you need something to be predictable. Like if there's some business processes that's
⏹️ ▶️ John classifying something, like what category should this invoice go into? You put temperature zero on
⏹️ ▶️ John that one because you don't want creativity. Just pick the most likely next word or the most likely last token or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just do it the same every time. If you get the same input, I want the same output, temperature zero. But chatbots,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, temperature zero is not what they use. When you increase the temperature to be non-zero,
⏹️ ▶️ John what it does, it takes that probability distribution where it's like, well, this one is really the most likely, like 90% likely. And the next
⏹️ ▶️ John one is 80 and then 70 and then 60 and then tails off. And it squishes the probability
⏹️ ▶️ John curve down to say, let's not have too many spikes here. Let's make the less likely
⏹️ ▶️ John ones have a higher probability. So instead of it being like, let's say it was like 90, 20, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2,
⏹️ ▶️ John 2, 1. Let's squish that down. So it's like 60,
⏹️ ▶️ John 40, 20. you know, like It's basically taking some of the of the distribution from the big bars
⏹️ ▶️ John and spreading it to the smaller bars. And then it picks randomly among them amongst them weighted based
⏹️ ▶️ John on their probability, right? So, you know, it's like you roll a dice and and it uses the, it
⏹️ ▶️ John uses the size of the bar to say basically how many entries in the raffle does each word get. And so the most
⏹️ ▶️ John likely one is still the most likely to get picked, but you're giving more of a chance in the raffle
⏹️ ▶️ John to the lesser words. And the higher you make that temperature, the more it squishes those bars down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the point where if you have a really high temperature, you may end up with a distribution like the screenshot that I pulled from the three
⏹️ ▶️ John blue, one brown video, where it's like the top three entries are 6%, then there's
⏹️ ▶️ John four, five, 5%, and then four, 4%. So there's lots of things that are tied,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it's really squished it out. So now, you know, the top ones get six entries in the raffle, then the next
⏹️ ▶️ John four of them get five entries, and then a bunch of other ones get four entries in the raffle. The odds are pretty good for any of those
⏹️ ▶️ John words is going to come up. If you put the temperature too high, you start getting whackadoo responses, right? So somewhere between temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John zero, which is just the same thing every single time picks the most likely, and you know, a high temperature of five,
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in the middle there is the pleasing temperature where there's just enough randomness that it makes it interesting and fools
⏹️ ▶️ John you into thinking it's like a little elf in there talking to you, but not so high that the elf is on LSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's how these things work that we're all talking with. And so into this comes the watermarking
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion and Gruber's initial take on it, which lots of people had objections to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So it's worth reading this post in full, but John has selected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular quote. John Gruber writes, I want any LLM I use to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. The idea that anything other than my needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should factor into the generation of text for me is patently offensive. The best writing I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come out of these models is worse than anything I would choose to read for pleasure. And now Anthropic is saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they're going to make it worse on purpose for purposes that do not benefit me in any way, even if only slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse? Get f ⁇ ed. So
⏹️ ▶️ John based on what we just read about temperature and everything, if you read that sentence by Gruber, which so many people
⏹️ ▶️ John on the internet did, and says, you know, I wanted to choose the very best, most precise word at
⏹️ ▶️ John every single decision point, that would be temperature zero. And it sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's, you know, the only thing they have to determine best is probability. And if it picks
⏹️ ▶️ John the most probable next word at every turn, it will sound dumb and terrible and bad
⏹️ ▶️ John and will not be pleasing to use as a chatbot or as a tool for doing things. That's temperature zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John So already before watermarking, it's not only is it not picking the very best, most precise
⏹️ ▶️ John words, you don't want it to. Now he's just expressing his desire. I would wish these things would pick the most
⏹️ ▶️ John precise word. And he was saying that by watermarking, now you're making your decision based
⏹️ ▶️ John on something other than what's the best. Well, they're obviously always making their decision based on something other than what's the best. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that something else is randomness. Like that's their strategy. There's no other. But like, what if it's better in
⏹️ ▶️ John a different way? Nope. Nope. They're numbers and you have probabilities and your choices
⏹️ ▶️ John are pick the best one every time or, you know, do like whatever, like spread,
⏹️ ▶️ John spread the probabilities around. And so the lesser ones have a higher chance and then pick randomly because that's
⏹️ ▶️ John how these things work. And everyone just replied to him and said, hey, dummy, don't you know about temperature? Of course, he did know about
⏹️ ▶️ John temperature and wrote a big rebuttal. But before he got to that, people who replied to Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John will link to Dan Morin's post where he has a more philosophical angle on this that Gruber did respond to. And Daniel
⏹️ ▶️ John Jalkut had a good point that I think he made in his post about this, which is basically like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, if it's random in both cases, and if you're afraid that's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to change the quality, it's just as likely to make the quality better as it is to make it worse because it's random.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Any given word choice, if the randomness is truly random and you're just picking a different source
⏹️ ▶️ John of randomness, it may make it worse, but it also may make it better, hopefully an equal percentage. And so we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John average out to being the same. And that makes Anthropic's claim that it will not change the quality of the output
⏹️ ▶️ John very compelling. Now, Anthropic didn't do itself any favors by saying, oh, we tested it on users
⏹️ ▶️ John and they couldn't tell a difference. That doesn't mean anything. As Gruber points out, like users can't tell anything, right? But mathematically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, it makes sense to me that it's entirely mathematically plausible that watermarking
⏹️ ▶️ John would not change the quality in any way whatsoever because random is random is random. The temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John will certainly change the quality, but that's not what this is changing. This is just changing the source of the random number generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Gruber's reply, again, Syracuse pulled a little bit for me to read. The temperature-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey randomness, which is what makes LLM output non-deterministic, is in place to help make the output better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The prose is clearly better with a temperature of one with weighted randomness than at temperature zero with no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey randomness. The watermarking schemes, on the other hand, are applying predictable with the secret key randomness for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entirely different purpose than improving the quality of the output, and thus, I believe, inherently make the output at least slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I'll pause you there. This is also some. He kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John walks it back in the next paragraph i'm going to read. But there is a little bit of logical
⏹️ ▶️ John leaping here that is divorced from reality because, you know, with the
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the output non-deterministic. Well, as we just discussed, pseudo-random number generators are
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely deterministic. That's a feature of them. Temperature based randomness does not make
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs non-deterministic. It just makes them random seeming to humans who don't know the seed
⏹️ ▶️ John or the functionality of the random number generator. But it's deterministic code executed by a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is absolutely deterministic. And then he's saying, well, watermarking the schemes, on the other hand, are applying predictable
⏹️ ▶️ John with secret key randomness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's what the other randomness is
⏹️ ▶️ John too. It's predictable with secret
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey key. They're both,
⏹️ ▶️ John The randomness is coming from exactly, they're both deterministic. They just seem random. It's a pseudo-random
⏹️ ▶️ John number generation. Again, nothing that Anthropic has said is said they're, you know, sampling like wind
⏹️ ▶️ John weather veins or something to get like true entropy and randomness. And even if they were, that's just improving
⏹️ ▶️ John the quality of the randomness. Presumably a good pseudo-random number generator spreads its randomness
⏹️ ▶️ John evenly, like they're better or worse ones or whatever. But I would imagine they're highly motivated to use
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are efficient to run because they make these random decisions a lot in
⏹️ ▶️ John the data center. So you probably don't want a really expensive random number generation. So anyway, uh
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll let you continue with the next part, but I just want to say that Gruber is like assigning um
⏹️ ▶️ John assigning qualities to these two things and characterizing one as non-deterministic and randomness, the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John as deterministic. And I think that is a logical error. They are both predictable with secret key randomness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gruber continues. Advocates of LLM watermarking schemes for text argue that the schemes don't necessarily lower the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quality of the generated prose because they don't change the temperatures. They only change the source of the randomness. Daniel Jalkut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote a good piece today about this. I hope that's true. I believe it's possible that it is true. I think it's highly unlikely that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is true. I do not see how a detectable signal can be encoded into the choice of words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without affecting the meaning of the prose.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so he says, I hope it's true. I believe it's possible it's true, but he thinks it's unlikely. Now, here's what I think Gruber's
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is, psychoanalyzing this. The motivations of the problem. Like, that's his main objection.
⏹️ ▶️ John The motivation of the watermarking feature is not to make the output better. That's 100% true. That's not
⏹️ ▶️ John the motivation. The motivation has nothing to do with making the output better. And I don't think it will make the output better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I also don't think it will make it worse. And so his main objection is don't put time, effort, and
⏹️ ▶️ John money into doing a thing that you know is not there to make things better. It's kind of like App Store Search.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it's not there to make things better for the user,
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, and App Store Search actually has a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, in this case, the motivation is not aligned with what John Gruber wants
⏹️ ▶️ John from an LLM. And I agree with that 100%. But I also think that it is entirely plausible
⏹️ ▶️ John that the watermarking scheme does not, in fact, change the quality in any way. It doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John make it better and doesn't make it worse because all it's doing is picking a different pseudo-random number generator. Now, it's possible
⏹️ ▶️ John that the one they pick for the watermarking has worse randomness than the one they were using before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don't know enough of the details about that to know. And I don't think Gruber does either. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think both of them are probably equally efficient and equally random. And I'm not sure how random that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they're both predictable with secret key randomness. And their job
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same, which is after the temperature squishes down the probability curves, pick one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them based on the the prob based on how many entries they get in the raffle, based on their probability
⏹️ ▶️ John amount that they get after the squishing. That's it. That's the job. And they're going to
⏹️ ▶️ John make different choices because you'll make different, that's the, you know, the sort of predictable secret
⏹️ ▶️ John key. Depending on when you time your query, assuming time is in any way part of the seed, that's going to change which
⏹️ ▶️ John things you get to. If you return one microsecond later, you might get a different response because the pseudo-random number generator
⏹️ ▶️ John incorporates the time that it gets your response. If your thing gets hung up on a router somewhere and arrives a few milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ John later or earlier at the data center, that will also change your answer. That is all
⏹️ ▶️ John deterministic, predictable randomness. It's just that the factors that go into it, we
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know. And so it seems random to us. And that is entirely sufficient for randomness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsor of this episode, Tail Scale, and thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco membership is Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people's phones based on a friend Stephen Robles' video about his son's iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That'll be a fun discussion. And overtime, you can join to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC-Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-S-I-RACUSA. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Neutral: Casey’s news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had a long day on Friday. I drove from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richmond to Charlotte, North Carolina, which is about five hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I sold a car, bought a car, and then drove five hours back home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very tired, but very, very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you sell the car you drove there in?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. And that is itself a whole long story. I will try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give the short, short version of this. By the way, for people who don't measure in time, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a 300-mile journey, which I don't know what that is in real units. So I apologize, but you can look it up for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, what I did was I woke up, drove the Golf R down to Charlotte. It had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been appraised online via CarMax, where I basically just gave them the VIN and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, you know, it's in good shape. I haven't done anything to it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I got a estimate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from CarMax or an appraisal from CarMax. And I thought, okay, that's all well and good. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there's like a couple of blemishes on the car and they're they're not tremendous, but there's enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think if somebody sees this, they might be like, oh, well, we got to fix this and that. And it's not worth what we said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I took it in. Definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that voice too. exactly that voice. So I took it in. This is like, I don't know, Wednesday or Thursday of last week. I forget exactly when it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I took it in, got an in-person appraisal, which um, was very quick and easy. Now, to be fair, CarMax is based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Richmond. um, As I've said on the show in the past, it was actually a spin-off of Circuit City, if you've ever heard that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name before. But anyways, I went to one of the local stores, had them appraise it, came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with the exact same number. But interestingly, they said that they would have honored either number, and I should just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose whichever one is bigger, which was fascinating. I don't think it's, maybe this is an American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. I don't think it's a very appropriate thing to talk about money, generally speaking, but I am so astonished
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the number that CarMax offered that I'm going to share it with you because I'm so proud of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We bought the Golf R on August 30th of 2018. I remember because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the day before Aaron's birthday. We bought that car for a little shy of $40,000 all in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In August of 2026, eight years later, CarMax offered me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $28,600 for that car. That is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey astonishingly small amount of depreciation. I am flabbergasted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that's what they offered me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And out of curiosity, how does that compare to like the Blue Book values for like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You know what? I honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn't look because I knew that I was going to sell to carmax or or Carvana, who offered like 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thereabouts. I forget exactly what it was offhand. But, And I don't, I don't, I, again, I it gives me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the heebie-jeebies to talk about money like this as an American, but that's so cool that we got that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much money for that car that I'm, I'm very proud of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you got to look in the blue book value for like the line that says a little old Casey just drove it to church every
⏹️ ▶️ John that's basically your car. It is a low mileage garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco queen. Yeah, and it gets very aggressively cleaned all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I remember like when I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I sold the Tesla, uh, Um, I, I, like I went to CarMax and I, I kind of had, like, they gave me like an estimate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was like, that sounds too good to be true. And I remember like I drove there thinking like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would take anything over X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they came in so far above what I hoped they would they would pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann Like I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was shocked. And it was way more than it would have been easy for me to do otherwise. So I can definitely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, not a sponsorship. I can definitely say I had a very good experience selling to CarMax.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it's worked out really well for us. Um, One slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difficult thing about this, however, is that the car, you know, we had the title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in hand eight years later and the car was titled in both our names, which is all well and good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I'm going to be selling it in a different state without Aaron next to me. So what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell do I do there? And we did our wills or we did our wills a couple of years ago and have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey durable power of attorney for each other. And in theory, the way this works in America anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I can sign as though I'm Aaron and vice versa. And that is as though she's there. That's what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a durable power of attorney is. But that doesn't mean that CarMax has to honor that. It doesn't mean that CarMax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Charlotte, North Carolina has to honor that. So me being me, I thought, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, maybe I'll just fly down and I'll deal with the Volkswagen later. But that was a $500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plane ticket. Now, on the plus side, it was a direct flight, which is one of the like six places you can get direct from Richmond.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I'm too cheap to spend the $500 to fly down there. So I didn't want to do that. Uh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked at renting a car, but it was like a hundred dollars, which is within reason. But then I'm in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sh box for five hours and I want nothing to do with that either. So on Thursday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I called up CarMax down there. Well, I think I went to CarMax like either Thursday morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever day it was, sometime. And I talked to the local ones and they were like, it should be fine, shrug,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was not reassuring because I didn't want to be in a situation where I'm five hours from home and suddenly own two cars and only have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one person to drive them. So I finally was able to find a number for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the CarMax in Charlotte, which was a challenge in and of itself. I freaking hate the phone, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is one of those times I needed a phone number and anyone I found was like the corporate trunk line. But I eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found it, called them. An incredibly nice person got me on the phone, I got this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly nice person on the phone who talked about it and was like, hey, why don't you send me an electronic copy of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can see it to make sure it looks good, blah, blah, blah. And she said, you know what? You should be fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I set off at about 7.30 in the morning, drove my five hours, got to the BMW dealer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought a certified pre-owned BMW i4 M50. This is exactly what I've been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flirting with for six months now or something like that. Yeah, about six months. And is it white? It is not white.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is San Remo green. I did not set out for green, but the more I see this car, the more I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love this green. I think it's beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was black. Did you pick the color or was just like, this is the color it's available in and I don't mind it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The latter. I mean, I wouldn't, there was no exterior color that I can think of that I would have said no to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was an interior color, the red that it seems that everyone optioned on this car for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know what reason. I did not want a red interior car. I would have held my nose if I needed to, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not want one. This one has a black interior and it's this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deep, deep, deep like forest green on the outside, which I absolutely love. I'm extremely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely happy with it. So I get down to BMW. We take it for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick, you know, shakedown ride. All looks good. We do the stuff with BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was mostly easy. And then I go across the street to CarMax and I sell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Volkswagen to them. And I ended up working with the exact same woman I was speaking with the day before, who, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was amazing. I was the biggest worrywart in the world. I'm sure you find this surprising. I was so nervous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she was so calm and so chill and exactly the person I needed to work with in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey survive, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you pack 40 bottles of water for the trip?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, I didn't. I didn't need any of that. But no, I had like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a small little cooler, like lunch bag that had a couple of drinks in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John it your tailgating cooler?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, no, nowhere near that big. This was like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don't have lunch in Charlotte. They needed his travel router.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No travel router. The thought was that I didn't want to spend that much time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it's a long day, right? It's five hours down there, anywhere between one and five hours worth of financial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transactions and five hours back, including a charging stop, which we'll get to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you do the selling of the golf before you picked up the BMW or after?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think was the correct answer to this question? Because I had an intention and then I reversed my intention
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the tricky part is once you sell the golf, how do you get to the BMW dealership if you do the golf first? But then
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other hand, you have the exact same other problem. How do you drive two cars to go sell the golf?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I would worry, like, what if, what if you, whatever you do first, then the second
⏹️ ▶️ John thing falls through. Exactly. So you sell your golf and then you can't, you can't pick up the BMW. Now you're stuck with no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So you're stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with two cars. So on the way there, I had intended to do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shakedown ride first, just to make sure that whatever it is I'm about to buy is, is okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then drive to CarMax. Now, these two stores were like a mile apart. Now, as it turns out, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were on this gigantic road in Charlotte. I had envisioned like a regularly a one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one lane each direction kind of street. I didn't get to the point of like looking at it on Google Maps satellite or Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maps Satellite View or anything. This is like a four or five lane road each direction. Not the sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John car dealerships live. That's their natural habitat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I know. I should have known this is a failure of my own. Gigantic Strode. Yep. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what it was. Exactly what it was. So I'd intended to do the check ride, sell the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have them like pick me up or something or Uber if I had to. Well, I'd originally thought I would just walk it, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I quickly realized that was a terrible decision. Then you know, either have them pick me up or Uber back to the BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealer. At that point, I'll sign on the BMW and drive away. On the way there, my car nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey group chat, which I've brought up many times in the past, one of whom is a former lawyer, said to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, you're probably going to want to sign on the BMW first because even though the salesperson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I worked with was amazing and I really enjoyed him, first of all, his job is to make me say that and feel that way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and basically gaslight me. That's the whole point of a car salesman. But secondly, if I sell the Volkswagen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I'm screwed. And if the terms change on the BMW, I'm way more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be like, well, I guess that's the deal now. And so uh, my friend Brian had strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggested, and I eventually acquiesced, and I think it was the right answer, that I buy the car first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then run over to CarMax. And then they were kind enough to send a person over to pick me up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that's what I ended up doing. Um, It was very sad to get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Volkswagen. It was an incredible car. It had something like 35,000 miles on it in eight years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which in America, you know, with you average, most people are consider 10 to 12,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles a year to be average. So this car should have had like nearly a hundred thousand miles by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, if you think about it. It had 30,000 miles. So as you said, in great shape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, And even though it is old in a time way, it is very, very young
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a mileage way. So all the financial transactions went well, no major
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues. And I get on the road and I'm heading back to Richmond. And oh my God, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car is so nice. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so nice. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2024, uh, 20,000 miles. I think I already said that, but 20,000 miles on or a little bit more than 20,000 miles on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It is so nice. It has the three packages I wanted. It has uh, the driver assistance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus package, I think it's called. I forget the exact term for it. Um, It has the parking and it has premium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey package. So um, it has their equivalent uh, full self-driving. It's a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little squishy. It's not really what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has as close as BMW gets to full self-driving anyway. Um, It has a Qi charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the center console. It has like this wrap around i mean That's a bit dramatic, but like this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curved infotainment display that mates into the gauge cluster, which I could see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone, particularly John, saying that's hideous. And I wouldn't necessarily argue with you, but I think it looks good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, It's just such a nice car. And in so many ways, I quickly realized that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm kind of welcoming myself to 2017. And I say 2017 specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Aaron's former Volvo that got destroyed by Pebble was a 2010 year model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year or 2017 model year. And that had amazing technology like a sunroof,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which my Volkswagen Golf R, the Mark 7.5, never offered. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can precondition the car. So even her car, which was fully gasoline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first one was fully gasoline, you could get on the app and run the engine, which we didn't do that often, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could do to get the car cooled or warm as you're waiting, to, as you're leaving wherever you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are on your way out to the parking lot. That is in a really bad summer day in Richmond, let me tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is clutch. So that's really cool. And with the new car, with her new car and with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mine, obviously, um, you're not running gasoline. You're doing that with electricity, which is even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, you can never, you're never going to be able to precondition a six-speed car because that would require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the engine starting. And if you start the engine with it in gear, which is how you should park a six-speed or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three-pedal car, I should say, then you will drive it away. If the car is in gear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the motor is turning, it is driving. So that would never work with any of my cars. And now I can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has a heated steering wheel, again, as did Aaron's 2017. It has rear climate control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the kids, which is exciting. So in so many ways, I've joined the land of 2017 with my 2024 BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But these are all, as much as I'm snarking, you know, these are all niceties that I haven't had. And oh my God, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, those are awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And so I'm driving home. The car is so solid. It just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like the Volkswagen, especially when new, was similarly solid. But over the, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's been eight years. And so, you know, things get a little loose is dramatic, but for lack of a better word, things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get loose. And this thing is so solid. I don't know if I mentioned, I think I said it's certified pre-owned, which means, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMW has gone through it, made sure it looks okay. I get an extra year of warranty, which is really nice because my former BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience, let me tell you, not great. So driving home,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm going to tell you things, particularly Marco, that you have known for 10 years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what's incredible, one of the very incredible things about driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an electric car, not only is it incredibly comfortable, not only is it incredibly quiet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey astonishingly quiet, but if you happen to see a gap on the interstate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that maybe is not directly adjacent to you, but is within reach of you, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're in a performance electric car, that gap is yours by the time you decide you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want it to be yours. Now, admittedly, I'm now describing driving like a BMW driver, or alternatively,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving like an apple, which fair, the shoe fits, but it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intoxicating that you can see a gap, I don't know, 50 yards or 50 meters ahead, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can be there instantly. It's unbelievable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how fast this car is. And I know all electric cars are very, very fast. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume that your, what is IX3, right? Do I have that right? Your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it's just IX. I had a feeling that was wrong. Okay. I would assume your IX is nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quick. And for all intents and purposes, is is as quick, even though it isn't literally, it for all intents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and purposes, it is as quick. But, oh my God. Oh, my God. It's so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. And, you know, one of the things I feared most, and John, you're going to beat me up for this because I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were in your shoes. One of the things I feared the most about adjusting to this car was missing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the six speed, was having my left leg get bored. Admittedly, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the honeymoon period, but I am so enamored by having instant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlimited power, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco at least unlimited at the speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which I drive. I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you did. And if I were hearing these words from John, I would be ripping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John a new one right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. So, John, feel free to beat me up. It's deserved.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I believe that you don't miss it. I think I will miss it, but I think I'll also appreciate the better things. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John time moves on. But I don't know why I'm getting an electric car anytime soon. But yeah, it's, you know, it's like kind of the way you
⏹️ ▶️ John miss things like from like uh your nostalgic youth or whatever. And it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I wouldn't want to have it again because in many ways it was, you know, old and bad, but I have fond memories of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I feel like that's what stick shift driving is going to be to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole, like, the whole appeal, like for me, the, the appeal of a stick shift was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better control over what the engine is doing and how it's delivering its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. And with, with an electric car, especially a single gear, like not the stupid Taycan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you don't need that type of control because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just, you inherently have more direct control with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular gas foot. Like you don't need a whole second mechanism to control this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like very kind of peaky power delivery pattern that it has. Like it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, you're just controlling something direct. So that the, so the entire problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you needed better control over doesn't actually exist anymore. Yep. That's exactly it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so much is different about this car that I feel like it's different enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don't think I'd miss it. Like if I were to jump into a Golf R, even a modern Mark 8 Golf R
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has the dual clutch transmission, I think I'd be like, this is trash. And I think it's because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's still an internal combustion engine. It's still shifting gears. And I want to have that control.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Damn it. I want to have that control. And in an electric car, it's such a different beast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the instant power as, you know, as a pure-blooded American who loves a muscle car, that instant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power, oh, gentlemen, it's so intoxicating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann It's so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intoxicating. So yeah, so I'm driving home and immediately, you know, I never thought of my Golf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R, which again was a 2017 model year. I never thought of the Gulf R, was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 20? No, it was, it was 2018. I'm sorry, 2018. I never thought of the Golf R as… as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling old. You know, it had car play. It had um, the display screen for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gauge cluster rather than having like physical gauges. It was early on in that in that trend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it had, That had been a thing for a while, but it was one of the first Volkswagens to do it. So it didn't like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reek of being old, if that makes sense. Um, But oh my God, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this new car where everything is new and shiny and like the screens are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very big air quotes here. The screens are retina by comparison to the ones in the Volkswagen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not literally. I'm just trying. You get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to say here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The screens are so much better. The processor in the car, whatever processors are doing, whatever animations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's doing are so much nicer. So much of this is so great. So I'm on the road on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way home and I have the fancy schmancy automated driving and I hit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of traffic. And do you know what the car does when I come up to traffic? It stops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself. And do you know what it does when the traffic keeps moving? The car starts moving. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, again, this is technology that most of the world has had for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann This is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's so nice. And I'm probably not going to be on the highway that often with this thing. I mean, I was rarely on the highway with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Volkswagen, but it's so nice. And so I found that on the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Charlotte, I was locked in. I was wired in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I had visions of like some pebble or something jumping out at me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like cracking the windshield or leaving a dent or something like that. I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that I have ever driven as defensively in my life with the exception of the time that my children came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home from the hospital. Every other time I think I've gotten in the car, I've been less defensive than I was on this five hour drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, to, to Charlotte. And let me tell you, five hours of white knuckling your way down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey southwest into almost South Carolina. That's how far away it is. Um, I was tired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the time I got there. Uh, But on the way back, obviously I'm still paying attention. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm, I'm not one of these dummies that believes full self-driving is literally full self-driving. but i'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I'm still paying attention. My hands are still on the wheel, but I don't have to be quite so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locked in. And oh my God, you know, I can actually like breathe a little. It made the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive so much nicer. And as much as I snark on Tesla, my understanding, having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not driven a Tesla in a few years now, is that their self-driving, well, not really full self-driving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My understanding is legitimately, you know, all snark aside, that it is the best in the business. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given how good BMWs is, I can only imagine how good a Tesla is. Uh, but it's one point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this, you know, what did I say, 300-ish mile journey, I needed to stop and I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said fuel. I needed to stop and charge because the range in a perfect world, and the salesman, you know, charged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to a hundred percent. didn't even have to ask him. Um, But I still needed to charge at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the range on this car in the summer is somewhere around 250, 275 miles. And again, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 300-mile journey. So I didn't know how I was going to handle that. My understanding from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friend Brad, who has an F-150 Lightning, is that the Tesla Supercharger network is far and away the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reliable, the easiest to use, as long as you have an adapter to go from NACS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to CCS. This car has CCS, which is what the rest of the world uses, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tesla superchargers use Tesla standard. Now, Brad had been kind enough to loan me one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of his NACS to CCS adapters, so I did have that in the car, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't love the idea of giving Elon any money whatsoever if I can avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, including the 10 or 20 or 30 bucks it would be to charge my car. So I worked with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a better route planner, which is the standard issue. This is what you should use in order to plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your route if you're in an EV. And so I use a better route planner to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out where I should charge. And toward the top of North Carolina, there was, guess what, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a Rivian, uh, what is it, not action network?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Adventure network. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rivian Adventure Network charging station. And I pulled up to that, backed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my butt in using my fancy 3D overhead camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Thank you very much. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I backed in. All I did was bloop, bloop, and then I plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. And then I walked to the other end of the parking lot to Wendy's to get myself a junior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bacon cheeseburger, which I love. I know it's trash. I don't care. I love it. It's delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delicious. Thank you. I'm a Wendy's fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you very much. So by the time I had received my biggie bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the most American story I've ever told. But anyway, by the time I received my biggie bag with my junior bacon cheeseburger and spicy nugs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fries, I had enough in the car, enough charge in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car that I could have left right then and there. So what I ended up doing was I ate my nuggets because I, you know, had a little dipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sauce with it. I ate the burger because I had a feeling I would dribble all over myself in the car. And then I took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fries in the bag because if I drop one, I can find it. And I got on my way. It was something to the effect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 20 bucks at the Rivian Charger and about 20 minutes or thereabouts.
⏹️ ▶️ John You're making your new car smell like fast food, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, this is why you crack the sunroof that I mentioned I
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn't stop it from smelling.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Maybe you like
⏹️ ▶️ John it smelling like fast food. I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's fine. It's fine. Um, but I've, I've done this trick for years across several cars. As long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you constantly have ventilation, constant ventilation from the outside world, not the HVAC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, but the actual the windows down or sunroof cracked, it's enough, I promise. Unless you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have something extremely smelly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, so the test would be you arrive home, you get out of the car, you remove all evidence
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had fast food, then you tell your wife to get in the car and say, did I have fast food on this trip or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's fair. She would not have noticed, not because of Aaron. I'm saying it was that not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I totally hear what you're saying. I really do. But so anyway, so I did my charging stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I'm a worrywart. I was deeply stressed about that, but I knew that there was a Tesla supercharger a couple miles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away. And when I got there, I think I had like 100 miles of range. It was one of those situations where it was just a convenient place to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top up. I didn't absolutely need it at that very moment. And I think there's Electrify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey America nearby, which I've heard is trash, although getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ John going to need to get you the charge limit on this thing so you don't keep it plugged in in your house like a desktop laptop at 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John charge all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, one of the first things I did was crank the charge limit to 80%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I debated bringing it down more. I don't know what I'm going to do about that, but that is one of the first things I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I got my way home. I'm enamored by all the silly things about the car. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you walk up to it, it unlocks itself. You don't have to do anything. It just automatically unlocks itself. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walk away, it locks itself again. You can use your phone as a car key to get into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. And then if you place it onto the Qi charging pad, it can run the car. I'm a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nervous about that. And plus, I'm still amused about the whole locking and unlocking itself thing when you have the physical key in your pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I like to have this as a backup scenario, but I don't know that I would necessarily choose to run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with just the phone as a key. I could use my watch as a key to get in and out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it's kind of hard to hold my hand on the Qi charger when I'm trying to start the car. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think I would do that, but at least I can get in and out of the car with my watch. There's so much about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car that I love so very much, and I think it's such a good fit for me. One of the things that I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do subsequent to having it for a day or two is I finally got the opportunity and understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to use launch control. Now, I'd read instructions about how to do this, and they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said just have it in Sport Plus, I think is what it's called. Uh, No, that sounds wrong. Sport Boost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There it is. Have it in Sport Boost. Mash down your left foot on the brake, mash down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your right foot on the gas, and it'll say launch control activated on the dashboard. And then just pop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your foot off the uh, off the break and off you go. And I tried this once or twice, and I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw the message. Like I was on the brake and I didn't go anywhere, but I tried this dance and I never really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw it. And I watched either a YouTube video. I did eventually read the manual, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said to Marco via text, I'm doing a spot of light reading. And that's all I said, to which Marco immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you want me to dig it up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now he said something along the lines of, you're reading the manual, aren't you? To
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I then replied with a photograph of me reading the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You're the only person who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You nailed it. I read them too. Thank you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I read all the manuals to all my cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, So anyways, so uh, I read the manual. I looked at some YouTube videos, and it turns out I think what I was doing wrong was that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to like properly mash down your left foot on the brake. You can't just be on the brake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to hold you. They want the car wants you to be mashing down on the brake. And then you mash down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gas and you pop the, I almost said pop the clutch, you pop the brake. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This car is so fast. It also does some really silly things that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I'm supposed to hate as like a self-respecting car guy, but I actually love because I'm a child.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you do launch control, it kind of like squats a little bit or like shakes a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit to mimic kind of what it would feel like to have an actual motor going.
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say, isn't it brake by wire?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly don't, I understand the question. I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when you're mashing the brake pedal, it's not like you're pressing the brakes any harder because you're not
⏹️ ▶️ John actuating the brakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you're saying. I just don't know the answer. You're probably right, to be honest with you. But yeah, so it kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey squats a little bit, does a little bit like also it makes like these noises when you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in sport mode in particular. Any BMW i4 driver will tell you, well, Hans Zimmer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey composed the in-car noises,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco which is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did enjoy those noises in my car for about the first three or four months, and I turned them off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, there you go. I think I'm supposed to be like, oh, this is dumb. I'm a self-respecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car guy. I would want a fake internal combustion engine, which it doesn't sound exactly like a motor, but it's inspired by a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motor. Man, I freaking love it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I love it. Like the Hans Zimmer soundtrack is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It's really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. But launch control, I have never,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot recall a time, and I've been in fast Teslas, but to be fair, it's been a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time. I cannot recall a time, even in the Rivian, like launch edition,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quad motor Rivians, those were astonishingly fast when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider the fact that they weigh 90 billion pounds. This car also weighs like 6,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds or something like that. But the thing with the launch control in the i4 M50 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I cannot think of a closer or a more analogous experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to one of the linear induction motor roller coasters where they launch you. You know what I'm talking about? That is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this feels like. It is astonishing how quickly this thing will get up the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to do it every time I leave a stoplight, and I'm mostly resisting right now because I'm not that much of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jerk, but I'm only barely able to resist. It is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't even know how to describe it. Marco is going to be in town in the future, and I cannot wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you to, at the very least, experience it as a passenger. If not, take it for a spin and do it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is incredible. And everything about this car, I love it so much. I love it so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. I'm so very happy that this is the decision I made. I had kicked around the idea of leasing a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one because you could make an argument that there are financial reasons why that would be better. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this car, I paid like 60% or thereabouts of the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase price. Like that is a really good deal for a two-year-old car that's CPO'd. I'm very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only problem I have with it right now, right now anyway, is that BMW killed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Assistant integration like three months ago. And as far as I know, there's no way to get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least in America, there are ways overseas, but at least in America, there's no way I'm aware of to feed data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Home Assistant from the car. And that kind of sucks because it would be nice to, know what the state of charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or to be, especially if I could write things to the car to tell the car, you know, oh, I would like you to start preconditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yourself or whatever. And that kind of bums me out. And the BMW app is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good and it has really good widget support. And oh, I forgot to mention,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have finally, for the first time since the little widgets on the bottom of your lock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen have been a thing, for the very first time, I've changed from the camera widget on the bottom right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or control center widget or whatever we want to call it to something else. Now there's a little fan down there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my lock screen, I can precondition the car. It's incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I'm so happy. It's so silly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I'm so happy. But all in all, like the app is a little wonky. I think I prefer the Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app in the grand scheme of things. The BMW app has definitely got more knobs and things to fiddle with, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the Volvo app, not only is it design-wise better, but I think information architecture is a little better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I thought if you'll permit me, if we can give me just a couple of more minutes, I thought we could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something together. And maybe, John, if you wouldn't mind, you can take the lead on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's a gentleman I know who wrote a post on his blog in May
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 2026 called the EV Stupidity Checklist. And I thought maybe, John, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the MC as we go through this list for the BMW i4.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, geez. I hadn't actually thought about this. I mean, I know you're getting this car no matter what, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so let's start with the first one because I did see the picture of this car and I almost commented on it. Accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John exterior door handles. Correct. Is it obvious and immediately usable? Do you have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for something to happen or can you just grab the handle?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can just grab the handle. Now, I will say that the last several cars I have had, and I forgive me, I don't know the terminology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this, but the handles were ones that they protrude from the car and you can grab them and pull
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward you. And that's what engages the latch or disengages the latch whatever to open the car. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way the Volvo still is. That's the way the Volkswagen was, the BMW that preceded it. Several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars in a row have been this way. The current BMW, the i4, has the old school,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you stick your fingers behind a little lever and pull toward you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. That is the world's worst description, but it's like the prototypical old style lift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up on the handle kind of door handle. If you saw a picture, it would be abundantly obvious. I'm painting a terrible word picture right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but it is a legit, regular, familiar door handle. And on the interior,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's a very traditional mechanical door handle as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's actually like when I was trying to figure out, do I want to find myself an i4 or wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the upcoming i3? One of the things in favor of just get the i4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it's it's possibly the last BMW EV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have regular door handles and a sunroof, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think those are both going to be not really available for future EVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the next item is, I think you might have touched on it, but is that thing that you pull, is it a physical door
⏹️ ▶️ John opening mechanism or is it electronically actuating a switch? Nope, physical. Interior and
⏹️ ▶️ John exterior? Both physical.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. We already talked about affordances. Yes, you have exterior affordances. You definitely know where you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to put your hand and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Is there something
⏹️ ▶️ John you definitely know that you have to grab?
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. Physical charge port door mechanism. How does the charge port door open?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one of the disadvantages of the i4, which I think we talked about a few episodes ago, one of the disadvantages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the i4 is that it's based on the 4 Series gasoline car. So a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of the EV purists note that it has the tunnel for the driveshaft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the front to the back of the car. It has that tunnel in the rear seat. So you see this bulge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or there is a bulge in the center part of the floorboard in the rear for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive shaft that does not exist. And that's kind of silly and annoying. But the advantage is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it's also designed to be filled with gasoline with a door
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the back of the car. And that door in the gasoline model is mechanical. In the electric model,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mechanical. So it is a physical charge port door mechanism. You open it by pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, and then it gives you, it becomes a jar, and then you pull it open.
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys remember the 70s when they had key locks on the gas caps? Was that before your time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I mean, it was before our time, but we saw it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. we yeah There were a lot of cars that still had those that were you know, yep. still in service during
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly right. Kids ask your parents. um, Turn signal stock. It's got one of those, right? Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, you would think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this wouldn't need to be on the list,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, it does need to be on the list. It does. yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Physical buttons on the steering wheel. Yes, sir. Volume going to increase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your speed or decrease your speed. There's kind of an up-down, like on each side of the wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's like an up-down, like scroll wheel sort of situation, but there are physical buttons. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abundant physical buttons on the steering wheel. There are not as many as I would like in the center console
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area, which we'll get to in a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, For the steering wheel, are you giving yourself partial credit because there's one of those things where it's like five buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John and you press down a single piece of plastic and it knows which part of the five buttons?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's fair. No, there there are distinct physical buttons for like volume, for example, for the cruise control switches, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Physical controls for temperature and fan speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, next. This is sad. This is sad. Uh, the, the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperature and fan stuff that is all on the screen. Now, in fairness, like the Volvo, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperature and seat heater controls are always, always, always visible, even if you're using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay. But but it is not physical, and I wish it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh, I see. The other thing that a lot of EVs fail on this is that those controls
⏹️ ▶️ John are not on the touchscreen. They are on separate controls that are like below the touchscreen, but they're still not physical
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. Like they put dedicated controls for them, but they're capacitive on like this little piece of plastic or glass or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, what are you doing? Like you were almost there just to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey make it a button.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, physical controls for airflow and direction. That basically means the places where the
⏹️ ▶️ John heated or cooled or otherwise air comes out of like the dashboard in the car. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you change where it's blowing by moving a thing with your hand? Like the vent.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's nice. um Physical glove box opening mechanism. I just laugh every time I read these.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. And I should note that the Volvo fails on this one, but yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Volvo doesn't have just an electronic actuator thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh Yes, it has a button that you use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Does it make you use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh No, it's not the touchscreen. It's a physical button near the glove box, but not on the glove box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, electronic popper. uh Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John a rearview mirror? Yes. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey rear visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not stellar because of the slope of the of the hatchback, but it's still a rearview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mirror, and I quickly got used to the rear visibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it does it have a thing where the mirror changes into a screen, too?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, No, not to my knowledge anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, You complained about the Taycan as a rear visibility. I guess this is better than the Taycan, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is night and day better than the Taycan, but it is not as good as I would have preferred.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But again, I got used to it very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a rear window? Seems like yes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have side view mirrors? Yes, yes, I do. Thanks. thanks to U.S. law, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, no, the iPhone does pretty well. And so the disadvantage of not waiting for like these new class,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fancy BMWs is, you know, you don't get whatever, the new things like yours. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John car isn't even 800 volt architecture, is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ John old, it's old technology, but it's from this brief moment in time when they were putting physical controls in their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, it's based on the gas car. And so it's like, well, we're not going to redo every part of the interior for the EV. And the gas
⏹️ ▶️ John car had some physical controls. And, you know, so you, you're benefiting from that. So you get a lot of advantages for having
⏹️ ▶️ John an older version of this. I believe most of the fancier new BMWs are going to do worse on this list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. I think that is very possible. I mean, there's going to be a lot of advantages for the Neue Klasse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or Neue Klasse. Yeah, right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. But I think overall, I think you're exactly right that in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and again, the EV purists will yell at me, but in some ways, the fact that this is based off an internal combustion car is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an advantage. And I think I said this last time, but like this thing does not have a frunk. It has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole bunch of like machinery and whatnot in the engine bay. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't really care because I've never had a frunk. I don't know what I'm missing. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back is, given the shape and size of the car, the back is gigantic. It's mammoth. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would argue there's way more storage in the back of this car than there was in the back of the Volkswagen because there was basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a plenty of vertical space, but very little depth. Also, there's one other thing I forgot to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring up, and I'm very mad at myself that I'm waiting until the end to say this. But this car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has brought an entirely new thought technology to the List family because Aaron and I met in January of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2005. Since that time, for the last 21 and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, Aaron has never, ever, ever been able to drive the car that I own. Never.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've tried many times to teach her how to drive a stick and we would do a lesson or two and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life would get in the way and she would never do it again. And so I think in a pinch, she's capable of it, but because she never does it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she has zero confidence, which if you squint, means she can't do it after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She drove, we went and played pickleball with some friends Saturday, the day after the car came home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She drove us there in my car. That's something that we have not experienced in 21
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. And the fact that she can drive either car
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann is incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because now it doesn't matter. If I want to take the Volvo for some reason, I don't know why I would, but if I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she's not stranded. It's incredible. Also, she's not making fun of me for driving a gas guzzler anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because guess what? This bitch don't take gas. So no matter how you slice it, this is such an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improvement for the Liz family. I'm so incredibly happy and so very thankful that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were able to find a car that fit our needs. And no, it's great. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that why when I first started talking about this, so many ATP listeners were like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have an I4. And a large subset of them was, not only I have an I4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have an I4 M50. And so many nerds seem to love this car. And I get exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why. And I hate to say this again because I really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be past BMW. But as I said about my test drive, and now that I own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, it's like coming home, boys. It's like coming home. Thank you for indulging me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so happy that, first of all, I'm happy that you have a car that you're really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about because I know that matters a lot to you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of joy out of that. And that's wonderful. You have worked for it. You've earned it and you deserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Secondly, I love that you're in the EV world now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I'm so happy with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You've been very gentle with me both tonight and in the past as we've had conversations in Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or occasionally via text. You've been very gentle with me and have been very kind and left the I told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you so's to a bare minimum, which I appreciate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. Yeah. um It's about time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I'm i'm very i'm very glad that you uh that you have arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, me too. And I mean, so far, it's nothing but upside. Like even the charging stop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I said to you, you know, I didn't know if it was going to take forever. I didn't know if it was going to be burdensome. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not burdensome. And it took the slowest part of the charging stop was me. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the hold up with the charging stop. And I know that wouldn't be true always if I was going on a much longer trip, et cetera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera. But so far, this is incredible and I don't ever want to go back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is exactly what every EV owner I've ever spoken to ever, ever, ever, always says.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. And and look, look, EVs aren't for everyone, but they're for almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone. Like most people, like if you can, once you can afford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, like in your price range, and that's, that's a big, that's a big if, you know, like that's a big thing that still keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people out of them. But in terms of like, okay, if you can get past the price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then is the car and its features and everything, like, is that right for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most people, the answer is yes. Even if they don't necessarily think so themselves. For most people's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs are served very, very well by EVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not sure if the show is over and this is just the bootleg. But speaking of price, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you get complaints about this, Casey. I will reiterate. The average selling price of a new car
⏹️ ▶️ John in the United States is 50 grand. You paid less than that. Correct. Like people think, oh, I'm getting a BMW. It's expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John You said it before, but just to reiterate an absolute value. This car is depreciated down to 60% of its original
⏹️ ▶️ John value, right? This is a car that is less expensive than the average new car. Now, granted, it's not a new car.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, oh, it's not fair. This is not a new car, but it's like, it's 20,000 miles and it's in good condition and it
⏹️ ▶️ John has the warrant, you know, certified pre-owned warrant. Like it's effectively a new car for less
⏹️ ▶️ John than, it's below. You bought a car for below average price. That's what it comes down to. And like, so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of the more financially responsible things you've ever done, automotively speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though you are very impatient about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Well, yes and no. You're not wrong, but I I have been thinking about this and kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kicking tires since February. So it's been six months, if you squint a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John take it. once
⏹️ ▶️ John you've got to be in your butt about this is the car that I want, it was like a week and you got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is more true than I care to admit publicly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, all I'm saying is this is a below average price car for a new car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, again, I think one of the things that kept me out of EVs for the longest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time was because I would look at these prices and just figuratively vomit all over myself because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, oh my God, 80, 90, $100,000. Like the Porsches that I was looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey casually, very briefly, the sticker on those was like, you know, 100, 110, 120, which obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was never buying a new one, but just an astonishing amount of money. And I think the sticker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this was somewhere around $75,000 or something like that. And again, like I had kicked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the idea of leasing one, but even leaving aside the fact that I don't particularly care for leases personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just seemed like, why wouldn't I get a lightly used one? Which this is by my definition lightly used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why wouldn't I do that and save myself, you know, 40% of the cost of the car? And I know it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit different with leases because you presumably would just turn it in and get a new car, blah, blah, blah. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I view it as roughly analogous. And yeah, I mean, if you're willing to get something used,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a used EV in America anyway, right now is astonishingly affordable. It really, really