435: ‘Lincoln Bio Services’, With Stephen Robles

Stephen Robles, welcome to the talk show. And please, please, please tell me how to pronounce your surname. I'm not even sure anymore. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. I say Stephen Robles. Robles. More like a Z. All right. All right. And because I'm going to admit to you something that is probably in the decades of your life completely expected, which is that in my head I'd been pronouncing your surname Robles. Oh, in elementary school I had all various. Until I was on your podcast Primary Tech with Brian Aiton back in May? April? Jason. Jason Aiton. Jason Aiton. We'll leave that in. I can mispronounce everybody's name. He told me to tell you he'd love to be on as well. He'll fill in whenever you need. Alright, alright. It's good to know. My laptop bagmate. We figured out at a recent Apple event that Jason and I have exactly the same briefcase. We could be part of a movie like Mishap, where one of us takes the wrong bag. It's the Thomas Crown affair style. Exactly. I realized when I was on your show, I believe you as the host introduced yourself and Jason. And that's suddenly when I realized how your surname was pronounced. Because I watch your YouTubes all the time. You don't say it. You don't have to. You just jump right in. That's YouTube style where there is no introduction. That's right. Yeah. It's pronounced Pixelmator. That's how you say it. Yes. Pixelmator. That's it. That's it. Stephen Mator. Well, while we're talking about it, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show, A, because I thought we got along swimmingly when I was on your show, but B, just in the last, I was going to say month, but it's more like a fortnight. It's like two weeks. You've gone full time on your YouTube channel. You've joined the ranks of independent media. I have. It's something I thought about for a while, but a variety of things have made it possible, like my shortcuts community and people really been responding to my videos and the channel has grown and so decided to make the jump. I'm going to take issue right away with the title of your episode of your YouTube show where you announced it, which was, I don't have a job anymore, thanks to you. Let me tell you, running your own independent media, I don't know if you've figured it out yet into two weeks you've been doing it. It is definitely a fucking job, Steven. People who say YouTube is passive income don't do YouTube, at least not the YouTube that I do. But I also do AB titles for all my stuff. That video was one of them. And so YouTube allows me to test out two or three titles at a time, including two or three thumbnails. And so that actually won out out of the few options I put. So did you try day job? Cause that right now. So the two titles I put was, I don't have a job anymore. Thanks to you. And then I'm going to, well, you know what? YouTube thinks I put the same title for both. Oh no, I'm sorry. I tested the thumbnail with the same title. One thumbnail said three years later. and one thumbnail said going solo and going solo got 54% while as three years later got 45%. Okay. Well, I think you should have called it a day job because it is most definitely a job, but congratulations, having gone through this transition myself at this point a long time ago, but it's, and I've never, I've spoken to so many other people who have done it. Nobody has ever been anything except terrified. Is it true for you? It is terrifying. But, you know, I have a wife of three kids I've worked full-time jobs my entire life. I turn 40 next year. And so I thought, well, it seems like a time to try it. It's working out that way. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. John Syracuse didn't quit his day job until what, like three years ago, four years ago? I forget how long it's been at this point. But it's, I don't know, four years at the most, which is ridiculous. But well, it's good to have you. And I will just say, I counted them up in the preparation of you being on this show today, that you've done, in the last two weeks, you've published 11 videos on your channel. Which, I'm not sure that's sustainable, but it's a lot. I mean, not a lot like it's too much, but I mean, wow, maybe you are a natural-born YouTuber. I have developed systems that allow me to turn them around pretty quick. I use some AI tools in the editing process. And a lot of my content, I'm just talking about what I'm doing. I'm showing features on iPhone and iPad. I'm showing you the shortcuts I built. So a lot of times the work is before the video. And the video is just me explaining what I did. And then maybe covering news, maybe trying out an AI browser, whatever it may be. But my style of content and the systems I have in place, it allows me to turn it around pretty fast. I do think it's like a professional, not a midlife crisis, but like a midlife reflection, where it's very obvious that there, I mean, and I just, the previous episode of the show before you was with Dan Fromer, who's writing The New Consumer, which is a paid newsletter in the style of Ben Thompson's Stratechery, which sort of trailblazed the whole genre that's a.k.a. substacking. So it's in the whole, for all of my griping about substack as a sort of a trap for independent writers, I'd give them credit for the resurgence in independent creators who are just writers. Overall, to date, substack has been a net positive for the world. I mean, without any question. My concerns are about what will happen, and I think it's almost inevitable because I've been doing this long enough where anytime something centralized gets put in the middle like that, it goes bad or goes away or something. I mean, Christ even blogspot, it went away and Google's literally got all the money in the world. So it's not like there aren't new writers or older writers making the shift from working for a publication like Philip Bump left the Washington Post and now is writing at Substack. Paul Krugman left the New York Times and now is writing on his own website at Substack. But for the most part, new, hey, I'm doing this full-time independent creators are on YouTube. I mean, that's just, and it's the way, it's like the whole 20th century has been crammed into 20 years of the 21st century, where the transition from print to radio, which would be podcasting in our era, to TV, and then TV becomes the dominant nature, and the TV of today is YouTube. But it's so much more competition. I mean, do you feel that? There's a lot of competition. Trying to enter the tech space when I did, which really put concerted effort into my channel three years ago. So many already there, with millions of subscribers. Obviously, you have huge ones like MKBHD, Snazzy Labs is out there, and there's tons of tech channels, and so no shortage there. But I did think I could bring something a little different. And I didn't know if it was going to work or not. But the one thing that I've done for years and what I enjoy doing is teaching. I enjoy teaching about things. I enjoy showing people how to use their devices, their technology. And people have said I can explain things pretty well. And so while there's also lots of explainer channels out there, I do think just there's lots of writers, there's lots of speakers, there's lots of podcasters, there's still room if you are unique or bring something slightly different to the table. And so that's what I've tried to do. And also the shortcuts area is a lot of creators doing shortcuts and automation. I just am so obsessed with them. I don't know what it is. The part of me is I love tinkering. I love troubleshooting. And so it kind of scratches all those itches at once. And the audience has just really responded to it. And I love making the videos. They enjoy watching them. And so, yeah, I've just kind of be able to create a wedge for myself. That's great. You're very, you are good. It's not just that people say you're good at explaining or teaching or however you want to call it, but it is, it does seem to come naturally to you and it's definitely part of the appeal. But when I think about the changing indie media landscape and I think about, hey, if I were 20 years younger or more, I'd probably have to pursue this on YouTube rather than in writing or at least more, at least partly, maybe like the way that I have podcasting on the side of my writing, it would have to be YouTube or something. And I think, man, it would be so, the thing that would get me is how slow it would be that you can only do so much. And then I see you publish 11 videos in two weeks and I'm like, well, maybe if you're good at it, it's not. Well, it's funny. I try to write periodically and if I could go back in time, I would have started writing way before and actually kept with it. But for some reason, And for me, it takes me longer to write an article than it does to make a video. And any of the few things I've tried to write in the last couple of years just to do it, it just takes me so long. And it never feels right to me. I'll read it back to myself. I don't like how it sounds. Whereas when I make a video and I'm speaking extemporaneously, I don't script anything. I'm just talking. It comes together faster for me for whatever reason. And it is a double-edged sword, like you're saying, the media, because as a writer, you can put it on your website. It's your content, no algorithm you're not beholden to between you and the audience, which is kind of like podcasting as well. Whereas, obviously on YouTube, it's all about the algorithm. And so while that algorithm has allowed me to be discovered by thousands of people, it can also turn. And so there is a part of the new media that if you want to make a go of this, you need to have other platforms. And that's why I've done communities, a podcast, and anything else to kind of diversify how you're building a creator business today. Yeah, and that's the thing I keep going back to. And you've sort of made my point for me, which is that ultimately, as new technology becomes available, new forms of media become available. And I forget who I was just talking about this with. But like when I first started podcasting, when Dan Benjamin and I started the very first version of the talk show, which I think was in 2006. I was listening. Just publishing hour long MP3 files with more compression than we use now. I think we used 64 megabits per second. And I think I don't even know what my show is at now. I don't think it really matters. But I think for voice at 128, it's hard to tell the difference. But just publishing the MP3s was a real technical challenge and a real concern cost-wise. And there weren't any kind of hosting services. And I even forget what we did. I think we used S3 or something. But it was like, and we had no sponsors. There was the idea of, I had already just started taking sponsorships on Daring Fireball. And that was considered new. And there were people, I swear, it was like a common thing that when I first started doing sponsorships on Daring Fireball, there were people who were upset about it and would say, it's not a blog anymore because a blog doesn't have ads. And I would write back and say, okay. Thanks for your time. Yeah, well, okay. Then it's not a blog. I never really liked that word anyway. Whatever. and i get it that there's always like we're still living in the golden age of the ai chatbots right where none of them have ads and the free versions are just sort of like there's limits on like the free version of chat gpt and etc usage limits to kind of spur you to upgrade to the 15 a month or more plans but you can use them for free get an enormous amount out of them and you don't see or hear any ads ever. That's going to come to an end. Ben Thompson is all over, all up OpenAI's case that they've got to look how long Netflix took before they had an ad-based tier, but it's coming and it happens to everything and hopefully it won't ruin the experience. But with podcasts in 2006, it was crazy to think about asking somebody to sponsor the episode. And so we just sort of ate the cost of the hosting. I mean, it was just crazy. So the idea of shipping video was ridiculous. It was hard enough to ship just MP3 audio. Video was ridiculous. And that's sort of like when YouTube, even before Google bought them, it was just sort of like too good to be true. How can this be possible that they're saying you could just upload any video you want and they'll process it a little and ship a pretty usable version and that's it and as many people can watch it as possible and they're like yeah that distribution is unmatched obviously youtube has become a behemoth just that's where everybody is and that's something where podcasting still doesn't have that and you know writing i don't know how a writer would be discovered today i guess you have to have another avenue you have to be jay klaus uses this analogy he's a create he's creator science podcast and he says there's relationship platforms and discovery platforms discovery being social media things like youtube tiktok instagram then there are relationship platforms that don't have an algorithm and it's like podcasting email newsletters or having a personal website and blog and you really want to get people to that relationship platform because that's where you can either have paid communities or you sponsorships will pay even more for that kind of thing. But you can't just do that only because there's no discovery mechanism built in. And that's the thing that YouTube is the best at right now. And that's why I put my energy into it, because you get discovery, and you get monetization. And it's more discovery than relationship. But there's a little bit of relationship platform in there, because there is a comment section, there are subscribers, people do put on notifications for videos. And so it's been worth the energy. Yeah. Well, now it's trivial to publish video, right? As you're saying, you just shoot it and our phones shoot remarkably good video. So everybody's got a good enough to shoot a pretty good looking YouTube video in their pocket camera. And at that point, the people who are meant and have a natural inclination to that form of media get drawn to it and do it, right? And it's like, I've always said, as much as I do enjoy this podcast and dithering, and as much as this podcast and dithering are definitely combined, probably a little over 50% of my income, I'll never ever not think of myself as anything but a writer who podcasts. It's not just because that's what I did first, it's just who I am and what I think I'm better at. And people find the media that they're meant for. And I think, again, 11 videos in two weeks, I think you've found your medium, Stephen. Well, thank you. And I don't know if you saw Casey Neistat's video about AI slop, but he has a good portion. I think so, yeah. He has a good portion where he talks about the democratization of video and how the bar has just been lowered and lowered over the years as far as access to the tools to make the video. And now with AI-generated video, the bar is on the floor because all you have to do is type text into an app and it will generate the video. And there's concern there. There's going to be even more content going forward, most likely. There's lots of faceless YouTube channels where it's just AI voice and AI imagery, and we'll still get hundreds of thousands of views. And so that is the competition. But I am betting on that the audience, that human beings, will still want and resonate with real people on the other side of the camera. that even as there's even more AI slop and more content out there, that people will seek out the trusted voices and stick with them even more into the future. And there's varying feelings about the creator economy. I hear Neil Patel on the Vergecast, and he'll say it's like HSN and it's going to collapse or whatever. And there is a part of that that maybe is true with influencers and affiliate stuff, which I do as well. But I'm still betting on it. If you provide something of value to the audience, that they want to see, that they learn from, they're inspired from, that in the future, they'll still go to the real flesh and blood people that are creating that content. Yeah. I just saw, I just looked it up to double check that it was the right word, but the Cambridge Dictionary's word of the year for 2025 is parasocial, which is, it's sort of the phenomenon that people feel like they know these people they don't know. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry celebrities embody it at the mass scale. And then you work your way down to totally not celebrity creators like me and you and Ben Thompson and Neelai and even Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal. And it's where we're more known than most people. Right. Like most people, how many followers are there on your YouTube channel? I think it was like 187K. 183K, I think. 183K. That's 183,000 people who at least know who Steven is, right? I mean, varying degrees of fandom, right? Most people, there's only dozens of people who know who they are. That's just the nature of humanity since the dawn of time. So it's all a little bit unusual, but that it is a phenomenon that you get when you find your favorite podcasts or YouTube channels or blogs or newsletters to follow and you follow them for a while and there is a singular voice behind the writing or a voice on the podcast or a face on the videos. it's also part of human nature to feel like you're getting to know them, right? It is a real phenomenon. And I don't think I'm being naive and thinking that AI is definitely going to shake this up. It's already shaking this up and it's going to continue to. But I do think that it's mostly, again, famous last words, we'll see. But I do think it's mostly taking away what was human slop work, for lack of a better term, right? There are these AI-generated blogs now, and you can kind of tell, right? There was that whole thing with the Tua, the unofficial Apple weblog where I forget the guy's name, but the ham-fisted mistake he made. I had Christina Warren on the show after it happened, where he had reused the actual names of the actual humans who used to write for the unofficial Apple weblog like Christina and was reusing their names and rewriting their old articles by AI with their bylines still attached which really and then it was a huge kerfuffle rightly so And then it went away because he changed, just changed them to made up names and made up pictures. And it's still there. I don't know why. I don't know who would ever read it. But there have been blogs that are just where they just pay 15 bucks a post or some ridiculously paltry sum that were human generated. And if that's where AI takes over, I mean, it's I guess in some sense, it was better that people who wanted to write for a living could get their foot in the door with something like that. And if they had some talent, maybe use it as a stepping stone to move up. But I think for the most part, it's not it's not hurting people who really have something worth following. Yeah. And I think that the parasocial was the word of the year this year. But I feel like I've been hearing that in podcasting for the last two decades. I've been listening to people like yourself and Merlin Mann and John Syracuse for over a decade. I followed Neelon Joanne. 20 years for me, you're telling me. Yeah, exactly. Or 19, I don't know. I followed them from Engadget to This Is My Next to The Verge. And then when I met them at DubDub and met you there as well for the first time, that was surreal for me. And so I think the parasocial thing for those of us in a little podcast sphere that listen to podcasts pre-serial, I think we kind of understood that dynamic and at least got it. And so now I think it's almost mainstream. Yeah, parasource relationship with creators. And I think you see on Instagram and TikTok that there's accounts where there's a face. It's an AI-generated face. A lot of times it's like female imagery in these posts. And it has hundreds of thousands of followers and lots of views. but I think if someone has the option in the future to go to their news to go to learn something to go to be entertained and they have the choice between someone who looks like a real human being sounds like a real human being but is not one and another human being but that's real and will watch them I think they're going to choose the real person and that remains to be seen it's not as good. It's not that good yet. It's not indistinguishable. But when it is, I'm betting on people choosing real people. Yeah. And I think the other difference too is that regular readership, regular following type thing, right? And TikTok exemplifies the opposite approach, right? Where people open TikTok and you don't really, it's not, oh, these are my favorite TikTokers every time. And here's the update. You just thumb your way through and you see whatever the algorithm thinks for you today. And it's obviously successful in that people spend a lot of number, an almost frightening number of aggregate hours every day thumbing their way through TikTok. But I don't think it makes people say, yeah, this is my favorite part of the day. My favorite media consumption today was the time I spent going through TikTok while I waited in line at the supermarket to check out. They might do it. It might be something they like, but they don't say they don't think about it the way they think hey that was a real banger of an episode of atp today that i listened to i really enjoyed that i'll take a counterpoint to the tiktok thing just a little bit though because there there are characters on tiktok there's a couple of mario and brin they have millions of followers and if you look at the comments people are like hey mom and dad and it's like in this joking way but i do think there's that parasocial affinity to it and i don't know if you're familiar with this tiktok account this was a high schooler his name is davis big dog his whole tiktok account is literally ranking and rating school lunches and his his videos i kid you not hundreds of thousands of views each he just sits there he'll he'll talk about either the chicken nuggets or the burrito and he got 700 000 followers in a couple weeks and it was this weird thing where you see famous people in the comments saying hey our show is on that's a line that people say our show is on so yeah i shouldn't i shouldn't be too dismissive of tiktok celebrity but it's it's not the nature of the medium it's it will that audience move somewhere else is the question if somehow tiktok shut down tomorrow would someone look for davis big dog on his website davis big dog and i will i don't know and as much as i'm tend to be knee-jerk dismissive towards TikTok. I salute it in terms of, I mean, because how old would you say that kid is? Seventh grade, looks like? Well, he's in high school. He's like ninth or tenth. He's actually 14. All right. But still, the fact that there is now a medium that allows a ninth grader to publish their own TV show, effectively, what we used to call a TV show, and have an audience of hundreds of thousands is astonishing. And it's, it is inherently a great thing. It's kind of awesome, right? Like when I was in ninth grade, it was kind of cool. If somebody, you knew somebody who owned a camcorder and you could record yourself on video and put it on TV for you and your friends to see, Hey, we're on TV. Look at that. We're on TV. Exactly. Yeah. And I think you, I remember going to department stores or like a Best Buy or something in that era. I guess it wasn't even Best Buy. But when they'd have a video camera hooked up with a live feed to a TV, people would stop and catch themselves and then just sit there and wave. And I did it as a kid. I'm not laughing how those rube adults when I was a kid. No, everybody did it because it was like you didn't think of yourself as ever possibly being on TV. And if something happened where like the local TV news stopped you because, I don't know, some newsworthy thing happened in your town and that Channel 4 News stopped and talked to you, you'd call everybody you knew, everybody. You'd run home, open up your phone book or your black book and start calling everybody in your family, every friend you have and say, I might be on Channel 4 News for 10 seconds tonight. That's what you would do because it was so amazing. and now a kid can just put his phone in front of him and review the chicken nuggets at the school cafeteria and make a show it's awesome it is awesome it is awesome but as you will you would see on tiktok not every kid in high school who's reviewing his school lunch will blow up like that right and i do think it's because there's still a baseline thing the human response to something someone how someone's talking or presents themselves and and for that kid like he's not even that he's not being funny like when he reviews the school lunch he's not making jokes he's not like doing anything outlandish he's literally just like taking a bite and then he'll say not six that's the whole video but it's this it touches this weird thing where it's like the most authentic it also right touches nostalgia people high school nostalgia people thinking back to the 90s or whatever but it's also this is a like the most real it gets this kid is just in a school lunchroom talking to a phone. And that realness, for lack of a better word, I think is what people respond to on TikTok, on Instagram, and I think on YouTube. And that's what wins. Yeah. And I can't think of a better opposite reaction to AI-generated content than just a kid, totally serious, totally deadpan, no jokes, no schticks, just honest to God, reviewing the meatloaf. That's it. And it's hilarious. I mean, I'll watch a couple of my wife's episodes. I don't know. And then we'll try to predict, oh, was he going to rate this? Is he going to be a five or a six? Looks pretty good, but I got to tell you, it's cold in the middle. Four. He literally said, he'll say exactly that. He was like, the line was kind of long. These tater tots are freezing, but it's just deadpan. It's great. So that's out there. All right. Let me take a break here. This episode is exclusively sponsored by our good friends at Uncommon Goods. Hey, the countdown is on. That's why they booked an exclusive sponsorship. 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And as they become more and more powerful, it's just amazing to me what they can do. And now with Apple Intelligence, it feels like the possibilities are endless. But I think I love building things. I love Legos when I was a kid. I love troubleshooting. I like figuring out, like, can this work? How can it work? How can I adjust it? And then guys like Federico Vatici and Matthew Castanelli inspired me to be like, okay, this stuff is powerful. And I think more people should use it. And I think that's where I really wanted to start sharing these in videos and in other places, because anytime I showed someone a shortcut that applied to them personally, it blew their mind and they would use it and they would be like, oh, yeah, this is going to be amazing. And the difficult part of shortcuts is if you just open the app on your iPhone and you've never used one, nothing's tailored to you. You're not sure how to use it. And that's why my whole business now, most of it, is just tailoring shortcuts a little bit differently to every single person. And that's the magic of it is you can make it super personal. It can apply to your workflow. And that's why I love it. It's just it feels like magic. Yeah. Until shortcuts and workflow before it. But it did need workflow as brilliant an idea as it was when it was a third party app. And I remember when I first really explored it. I remember hearing about it and thinking because I thought I was so familiar with all of the limitations of the App Store and iOS apps. in terms of inter-application communication, I was like, it can't do much. And I read what people were saying about it. I was like, ah, that's got to be an exaggeration. And then I actually downloaded it and started trying it. And it was kind of amazing how much it could do on its own before it had any official support from Apple. I think back then, mostly because so many apps had exposed the the the one avenue of inter-application communication back then was do you remember i don't know i don't url url schemes that's where i was heading where a bunch of apps had figured well apps can't communicate with each other but the one thing you could do is register like if you i'm gonna i'm gonna botch the actual url for it but like the drafts app for notes had like a custom It's like X dash drafts colon. And then there's like a custom URL scheme. So instead of HTTP or mail to or one of the standard internet protocols, an app can register its own custom protocol. And then other apps could say to the system, just open this URL. But it's a drafts URL. And the drafts URL could be something like a create new draft command or a get draft command where the parameter is the ID of a draft. And then you could get the text of a draft back into another app. And Workflow just put like a nice user interface on top of all this. And it was so useful. And then Apple did something that I think surprised just about everybody because it seemed like they had no interest in automation anymore, right? They had no seeming no interest in bringing automation to iOS at all. And it seemed like their interest in automation on the Mac had completely stagnated since the first decade of the 2000s. The Apple script was there and it wasn't going away because people rely on it, but they were done adding new things. automator which was the new way of creating automation on the mac sort of also stagnated it didn't go away it's still there to this day but doesn't get new things and then all of a sudden they apple bought shortcut or workflow turned it into shortcuts and then added functionality system-wide and brought it to all three of the major platforms mac ipad and ios and a surprising number of workflows work across all three, especially the Mac versus iOS divide. You can even put something in a shortcut to say, if the shortcut's running on a Mac, do this. And if it's on an iPhone, do that. Yep. Do you feel like you're programming? This is my question to everybody who's into shortcuts. I know I vibe coded an iPhone app. I don't know if you saw that video. I did. That revealed to me how much of a developer I am not. And so I'm not programming. I understand And the idea of building a shortcut is basically programming. The moment I put a repeat with each action in the shortcut, I think, okay, well, that's, yeah, I understand that that's programming. But I don't know. It doesn't feel like that to me. It feels more like building blocks. It feels like the Duplo. If Lego was app development, it's the Duplo. Yeah. See, my analogy that I often go to, though, is I think you're underselling yourself. is I think that whether it's AppleScript or Automator or now Shortcuts, that's the Lego and that the real development is more like custom injection molding. It's making the sort of toy that you get at the toy store in a blister pack that doesn't have bricks that you can take apart. It's pre-made and in a way that if you buy a plastic toy or metal, could be metal because it's toys can be made out of metal and Legos aren't. You can get a toy that is a perfectly articulated one to 15 scale car that looks exactly like the real size car that it is. And a Lego version of that car is never going to look realistic because it's made even as however many cheaty pieces that the kit comes with to make it look like it that aren't little rectangles, it still looks like it's a thing out of rectangles. But on the other hand, sometimes the Lego version engenders more affinity. Like you look at you're like, I know that's not realistic, but I actually like this better than a realistic looking car because I know I could take it apart and it was my fingers that put it together. Yeah. And I think I've messed around with Automator for years and could never like figure it out. I know it can never really build stuff that I wanted to. I pulled Apple scripts from different people and copy and pasted stuff from Stack Exchange and just never like really understood it all. But for some reason, just the shortcuts interface, the easy to see here's the variable, here's one action to another. It allows me to build a lot of stuff. And now with ChatGPT and using APIs and shortcuts, that opens up a whole new world. And that's something I've never knew JSON before. The only coding I've ever done is like HTML and a little CSS back in the day. That's my total coding. I have a music degree is what I joke about. That's zero experience in any of this. But I can ask ChatGPT. I can say, hey, here's an API. Look at the documentation. How can I call this API? And what do I put in the shortcut? And a lot of times I'll literally just screenshot the shortcut action, get contents from URL, give it a ChatGPT and say, what do I put in these fields? And if it doesn't work, I'll do it again. I'll say, here's a screenshot. It didn't work. This is what happened. Tell me something else to try. And I don't know if ChatGPT actually knows what to do or not, but eventually we figure it out. And so me and my custom GPT, we get them to work. And I think the other thing, it's sort of generational, but I grew up at a time when the whole point of getting a computer was you get a computer, turn it on in the back, and a couple seconds later, because it only took a couple seconds, even though the computers were so slow, but they were so primitive that there was nothing really to boot. And then you'd start typing a computer program, or you'd load one that you'd written from disk. And the idea was you'd get a computer to program a computer. And Apple, you know, it's a world move towards graphical user interfaces in a Mac, Apple came out with HyperCard famously, and people of my generation, HyperCard occupies this unique part in our hall of fame of great apps that never really made it, didn't last. But the whole point was, hey, let's make this more approachable. And even Apple was pushing to users the idea of you too can program a computer. That's the whole reason behind the it didn take long I think for most people to agree that the syntax of AppleScript the language was a mistake The fact that it looks once it compiled and actually works looks so much like English is cool but the actual writing of it doesn't follow English at all. And the proof of the pudding is with the GPTs of today, where you can just type English to them, and they understand it, they parse it, and give you a response. But the whole idea behind it, though, was to encourage more just regular people who think I can't write programs in C or back then Pascal or in today Swift or whatever JavaScript, whatever language you want to to talk. I don't that doesn't work for my brain. But you have things you'd like to build for yourself. Here's a way that you can do them. And I feel like Apple, even though they are the company that's made shortcuts, they're updating it every year. I don't detect any loss of enthusiasm from Apple for it. But I don't think they push it as much. I think it all comes from the community, from people like you and Matthew Cassinelli. Yeah, Cassinelli. It comes from the community and me to some degree to encouraging people to try these things, to get Keyboard Maestro for your Mac and make something. You can fix these little UI irritations yourself or build the thing you've always wanted. I just think the number of people out there who think they can't write their own programs but could be writing their own shortcuts is this gap to be filled. It's not everyone, right? The idea that everyone could or wants to do this is definitely not true. But there's this gap between the number of people who are doing it and the number of people who should be doing it. So, yeah, there's two things. One, the personalization is where it really matters with shortcuts. And Apple has the gallery tab in the shortcuts app. They do put new shortcuts in there a lot. There's a bunch of Apple intelligence ones in there since I was 26. And they're cool. You know, it's like make a GIF. Here's a daily NASA photo, all this kind of stuff. But it's not going to resonate with most people visiting it to say that's a shortcut that I can change a little thing here and there. And now it's immediately applicable to me and I'll use it all the time. So while it's great to have, I think why people watch my videos is because I've basically what I'm doing recently is taking all the requests that I get and making shortcuts tailor made for people. But what that does is after seeing so many people begin to think, oh, that's how I can customize this for myself or how I can accomplish this task. But the second part is what Matthew tells me all the time. If someone can download a shortcut made for them, they'll do that 100% of the time rather than make it themselves. And that's something I've been pushing a little more on Instagram recently. And I'll just share a shortcut. I'll just show a shortcut that I think is going to resonate with people. I do the thing where comment and I'll send you a link to download it. And it's been exploding. There's a couple million views just on a couple of reels that are showing off a shortcut. And so once people see what is possible and they can get it easily just by downloading it from a link, people respond to it. I do think it's interesting. And the other thing that I think is interesting is because shortcuts isn't a typed out programming language, you just drag and drop these blocks that function as tokens like the tokens in a programming language. But it is more visual. it is very well suited to video in a way that actual typed out programming languages like Swift or JavaScript aren't right you just don't see many videos where people are like here's how you here's how to learn something in JavaScript you do there's I shouldn't say you don't but it's not I think when you watch a video about somebody programming in JavaScript you're like this should be a blog post so I can copy and paste it I'd rather read it there's a moment to every time I run a shortcut, I mean, this happens just when I'm making them by myself, when the shortcut actually works and you see it either flip over to notes and it actually puts everything there that you expected or it correctly identifies an image and tells you what's in a document, whatever it is. There's that moment. I don't know if it's dopamine or serotonin or whatever, but there's like that constant hit of it worked and it's going to work again the next time I use it. And I think that's the other thing people get when I do my videos of 15 or 18 shortcuts. I just show it running. You know what I mean? Like it's a 20 minute video, but I'm literally just telling you what it's doing, pressing play, and we're all just going to watch it together. But there's something kind of cool about, look, it just flipped over to Apple Notes and it just took this audio file, transcribed it, summarized it, and all you did was press play. And it's, I don't know, it's fun to watch. Yeah. The other thing, too, that is so interesting is that you can do things now with like the Apple intelligence blocks. And it's so your options are you can run on device, you can run private cloud compute, and you could ask chat GPT, right? Those are the three in escalating order of power. And just like I watched a video. I wish I knew who it was because I didn't bookmark it, but it was like on threads or somewhere yesterday. And I watched a video showing how to make a shortcut where I do all my screenshots to the clipboard. I don't even remember. I think I remapped the keyboard shortcut that puts a screenshot on the desktop as a file. I just always take them to the pasteboard and then paste them somewhere. It's just for years and years. But I guess most people take screenshots and they go to the desktop and it's called like screenshot safari date. And she wrote a shortcut that just – and it's like the way that you can set up an automation to watch a folder. and it watches her desktop. And when a new image appears, if it starts with the word screenshot, send it to ChatGPT, create a brief summary up to 40 characters of what's in the screenshot and then rename the file to that description. And that's it. It's like a three-step shortcut. And then she showed it and it gives these screenshots amazingly apt names because she's like, I have 12 screenshots on my desktop. I can't remember what the hell they are. and now they have regular names. And it's like, oh, that's really brilliant. But if you think about how would you have done that five years ago before these AI systems exist, it would be like, oh, well, you'd have to hire somebody to write this complex image analysis. I mean, and probably it wouldn't work, right? Yeah, the Apple intelligence action is like the sleeper hit. I mean, it's what I've been making videos about since iOS 26 came out and even since back to DubDub. but it's so powerful one it's way better than the built-in chat gpt action that you get in shortcuts because that will often fail chat gpt wants you to open the app and then go back to shortcuts so just using the chat gpt extension of the apple intelligence models action is way better but it can do it can do crazy things like in a recent video i showed i saved a bunch of famous music albums artwork in a folder and the names were just gibberish like they're just numbers and letters. And so I just created a shortcut that allowed me to select multiple files. It sent each image to the use models action using chat GPT. And it says identify this music album and rename the file the actual album name. And it did it. It does it every time. Crazy stuff. So just like that kind of renaming someone requested the other day in my community. She says, I've taken a bunch of photos of artwork. And I want to put it on my website. But I have 1000s of photos. And I want to identify images that are high resolution, that don't have anything obstructing the artwork, and another criteria. And so I was able to make a shortcut that says, listen, you can select a thousand files, run this shortcut, and each one will go through that Apple Intelligence action. It can see the resolution, or I can do an action that says, if it's greater than a thousand pixels wide, then do this. Apple Intelligence can see, is there something blocking it? Is this image croppable? And then rename all of that and put it in another folder. And just that kind of, again, it's very personal to what that person needed, but it's so powerful what it can do in bulk, it blows my mind. Yeah, it brings personal computing back to the roots from the 80s and 90s of, yeah, get a computer and you can build right little things that do just scratch your personal itch. And the Apple Intelligent blocks really do, like one of my big complaints about shortcuts for years was that there was no escape hatch to a scripting language. Automator has. Automator has these blocks that are a lot like shortcuts where it's just like an action block. Hey, take a file. There's like a block that would resize files. So if you take files as input, Automator has a block that says resize these images to 50% of their size. and then pass them on to the next step. But the next step in Automator could be a script, which could be AppleScript, could be, I think, JavaScript, but it could be any of the shell scripting languages like Perl, Python, Ruby that come or at times came with Mac OS X or just literally like a Bash shell script. And so you had this escape hatch, and shortcuts didn't have anything including JavaScript. But now it's got an escape hatch that's even better, which is that you can just have a step in there that's an Apple intelligence action. And instead of a finicky programming language that you can make a bug or something, you just give it a plain text description like you just did about looking for images that are of a certain size. And if it's not that size, don't worry about it. And then do this. And you think, well, this probably isn't going to work. And then you run it and it works. And it's like, this is amazing. And so you can put these action steps in that are so just specific to your needs. and just describe them in plain English. It really is the holy grail of non-programmer automation. Even before, like if I wanted to do an API call to the movie database, before the Apple Intelligence actions, I would do a bunch of get dictionary from this, get this dictionary value, match this text in the result, all this kind of stuff. And now I can literally just do an API call using the get contents of URL action and then put an Apple Intelligence action right after it and say, from this data, give me the latest 10 movies that just came out. And also give me the URL for their trailer. Like something that simple that might have been dozens of actions before Apple Intelligence allows me to just do that with an API call. And it's way more accessible for me and many other people. And if I could, I want to share a Rube Goldberg machine I have set up with shortcuts. Oh, please. I was on the Vergecast, and I didn't share it there because I thought it might be a little technical. But I'll share it with you. So the Mac automations are now a thing where you can automate folder actions, things like that. Yep. And so one of the things I do semi-often, and I can't share this on YouTube because it's against the community guidelines or whatever, is sometimes I want to download a video. Sometimes I want to download a video and I want to put it on my Plex server. It's something I want to do. I want to be able to do this from my iPhone, which is very difficult. So from my iPhone with two taps, I can be looking at a video. It could be a social media clip. It could be a YouTube video. I share that video to Transloader. It's an app, and it goes from my iPhone to Transloader on a Mac Mini that I have at home. And Transloader on that Mac Mini hands off that URL to an app called Downy. And Downy is, I think, just the best app for downloading anything. So it can download the video file. It could be an Instagram Reel. It could be a YouTube video. So it downloads that file to the desktop of that Mac Mini. And now that I have the raw video file on my desktop, I can run a shortcut. and using the Mac automations now with Apple Intelligence, I can say transcribe this file or maybe encode it as an audio first, transcribe it, summarize it, create an Apple note with a title, with a summary, the full transcript. And now in a few seconds after sharing it from my phone, I have an Apple note with a summary and transcript. But then I can have Apple Intelligence shortcut, or I could just have the shortcuts automation, move that file to my Plex server. And now I can watch that video in Plex, all from just a couple taps on my iPhone, all using that Rube Goldberg machine of moving it around. Just by sending the URL for the original version of it, just kick-starting it with just the URL that points to the video on social media or YouTube. Yes. Throw the URL into this Rube Goldberg contraption, and out comes the Apple note with the summary, the transcript, and a link. There's a link to it in the note on Plex? I typically do a link back, like the original link. I'll put that back. And then the video itself is on Plex. And you can watch it from anywhere you can watch Plex. And YouTube doesn't like people talking about the fact that you can get a video out of YouTube with Downey. I just linked to Downey a couple weeks ago or months ago on Dairy Carbill. Absolutely terrific app. And one of my favorite genres of Mac app, especially in the Mac OS X era. It wasn't so much of a thing in the classic Mac era because it didn't have a command line. But with the whole fact that Mac OS X has in terminal a whole Unix system and so many useful commands built in before you even download anything from Homebrew or anywhere else, where you just have an app that does things you could do at the command line, but it just does them in a much nicer Mac style. In the same way that, yeah, you could just use Emacs or VI, or you could get like a real text editor, like BBEdit, or use TextEdit or something and not be confused. Downy is a terrific, terrific app that does what, what is it, YouTube DL or DL YouTube? Yeah, YouTube DL. Yeah, but there was a forked version before. Anyway, just get Downy instead. It's a terrific, terrific app. It really is. And the developer keeps it up to date and it's well worth every penny. And it just, and also Downey makes it really easy to download a video. If you want a copy of the video as a file from Safari or whatever your browser is, as you're watching, you could just say anything at it. Yeah. If you're on like a news website and there's a video that you want to grab and he's always updating it because websites and YouTube are trying to like not allow for that kind of downloading. But the developer, I believe it's Charlie Monroe. Yeah, he is always updating it, and it always works for me. And so that's my Rube Goldberg machine. It's almost like you're paying Charlie for two things. You're paying him A for the work he's already done to make this very well-made, very Mac-assed Mac app. But then you're also paying one time for the app, but for his continuing service of playing the cat and mouse game for you to keep Downey ahead of it. Whereas if you were doing it on your own from the command line, you're the one who's got to keep updating the software in your tool chain and staying abreast of the latest tricks and tips and mouse traps to avoid in the cat and mouse game. It's now just pay for Downey and let Charlie do it for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Before I let you go, speaking of AI and speaking of podcasts and independent media, Apple Podcasts is going to add AI-generated chapters to podcasts. And I think this is very important to note, four shows that don't include chapters on their own, which is a big thing to – because my show has had chapters for many years. most nerd shows do and i think most non-nerd shows which is most shows don't marco marco armad always says it's the germans who complain about the lack of chapters well our audience loves chapters too but you know creators can still opt out completely from the auto-generated chapters and that's why i'm curious to see when this launches with 26.2 what the big shows like Smartless and even some shows like The Verge Cast, who they don't have chapters, will they allow the auto-generated chapters? And will Apple generate a chapter that says sponsors or ad break? Because I don't imagine the big shows want that to make it easier to skip the ads. So I'm curious which are going to opt out. I've done it for years, and my thinking as always, and it's never served me, honestly, I know it sounds too good to be true, but it's served me well my entire career, is the golden rule. Do for my readers and listeners what I would have done unto me as the reader and listener of other forms of media. And part of that is don't treat them like idiots. So we do put chapters in for the ads in the show. Because we figure you're adults and you're going to figure it out and you know which part is me talking about a sponsor anyway. And it's my job as the guy reading the sponsor things to try to keep them interesting and moving along and hopefully make you want to listen to them. So, yeah, I do that. But you're exactly right that I think others are going to see that if they think, oh, we'll try it. And then they see that it's going to label the breaks and they're going to be like, no, because they're not thinking golden rule. They think the opposite. They think our ads are special. And while they themselves might skip ads in some of the podcasts they listen to, they think, but our ads, we don't want anybody to skip. And if we don't have chapters that identify them, people won't skip because they don't know about the 30-second forward button that's in every single podcast app ever made. Right? It's ridiculous. What do you think people are going to do if you don't make chapter marks for the sponsors, that they're just going to be like, duh? Maybe if you're washing dishes and you can't get to it, that's when you're forced to listen or if you're driving or whatever. But curious to the the time to link part of the chapters, which is another part of the feature. So this is a thing where, you know, Apple is going to allow you to put links either by plain timestamps in the description of an episode or linking a chapter using the ID3 tags in MP3. and you can link stuff and those links will appear on the now playing screen in apple podcasts those links will appear in the transcript but notably only for apple content you will not be able to put a link to daringfireball.net and have that link show up in the transcript or the thing and that it feels not great to me because that's been an rss and podcast standard for years where creators could link a chapter. Apps like Pocket Cast and Overcast allow users to tap those links and actually go to those things. And Apple is going to surface those links, but again, only for Apple TV shows, Apple Books, Apple News, Apple services, Apple apps, things like that. And that part, I don't know, that doesn't feel great to me. But it feels a lot like Instagram, right? The way that Instagram that everybody has the link in bio, right? And which I think there's a whole generation of people, of kids, who don't even realize that that's frustrating, right? Because the whole idea is that the only place Instagram allows you to place a link to the web is one link in your bio. And so there's this whole cottage industry of link-in-bio services where you can put, like if you publish an article every day then you put them on your link page and your it sounds like I saying like Abe Lincoln like Lincoln bio like the Lincoln lawyer show But no it link in bio where you have one link that points to a page that points to all the things you want to rather than just pointing to the things you want to Right. And it feels like that. And the idea, it's very transparent that Instagram just doesn't want you to leave Instagram. They want you to stay in Instagram forever, forever and ever, and just keep scrolling. Just don't stop. And no, we don't. We're not addictive at all. and we don't think we're addicted and we don't think anybody has a problem with Instagram. But just keep scrolling. Keep scrolling. There's a whole industry like ManyChat is the thing that I use on Instagram, which is a service that if someone comments a specific word, like shortcut, that the service ManyChat will automatically send a DM with a link to the person. And so my Instagram DMs, there's literally thousands of people in there that I have no idea who they are because they commented shortcut to get a shortcut. And that's the mechanism now that creators have to use. And so chat is an entire service because of that link in bio problem. And for Apple doing this on Apple Podcasts, it's just, it's the first time it feels a little bit like there was an open standard for something. And rather than not just support it, Apple is supporting it, but only when it serves their content as it's linked to their stuff as Apple Podcasts and books and stuff. And so that's I just wanted to raise a flag to say Apple's been a great arbiter for podcasts for the past two decades. Right. And they've honored all the open standards, maybe not adopted all of them quickly, but they've honored the open standards. And this is the first time with TimeLinks, it feels a little not like that. Yeah, and they've always honored the spirit of the open web, which podcasts are, in my opinion, the one form of internet media that stayed the truest for the longest to the ideals of the web. Even the actual use the web in a web browser is, to me, further away from the original ideal than podcasts are because so much of what you see on the web today is locked behind a paywall. And I'm not denouncing it as a trend overall, but it is contrary. Because I'm glad the publications large and small that are making a living or making a successful business based on paywalling their content, that it's working. I'm glad. But it's undeniably, it might be good for the media ecosystem, but it's bad for the web itself. And it's against the idea of the web. Whereas the idea with podcasts where all you have to know is this RSS feed and you just read the RSS feed and the RSS feed contains a list of episodes and the episodes have descriptions and a link to a file that's in an open format like MP3 that you can just download and then you can play. And that's it. And that's why I could build a ton of shortcuts around RSS feeds because it's so open. Right. It's totally open. Transcribe. And that's the other thing is when it comes to podcasting, I'm curious, you're feeling about what is Apple's responsibility, might be a strong word, but like in the podcast industry, because they have fallen as far as where do people consume podcasts. it's now YouTube one Spotify is second and the video part of those platforms obviously is a huge deal Spotify allows me to upload an entire video episode for free to the podcast and people can watch my show or listen to it seamlessly in the Spotify app and so I wish Apple would adopt a little bit more and I understand that it's probably not a revenue motivation because it's not going to be, it's not gonna bring a ton of money if they can add video for creators and Apple podcast, I don't know if there's going to be an influx of creators that makes it worthwhile. But it felt like they were the one big player championing the openness of RSS. And I don't want them to stop because I want RSS to keep going and for podcasting to still be based on that rather than the closed algorithmic platforms that we have. It's weird for me. And I know Marco talks about it. And it's even more direct for the ATP guys, because Marco literally is the guy making Overcast. But it's also true for me that I forget that I haven't looked at my numbers in a while, but I think it's 60 to 70% of the listeners of this show are using Overcast. But number two is Apple Podcasts. So it is the second most, and that's very unusual. Most certainly Apple-focused podcasts, Apple Podcasts is the biggest. And Apple Podcasts is still the third biggest platform for podcasts after YouTube and Spotify overall for any podcast of any genre or whatever. But I feel like I'd be more motivated to care if it was number one for my show. But I do care because and there's but literally like I guess like a third of the people listening to me and you talk right now are using Apple podcast and Spotify and YouTube because I'm not on YouTube are not factors for me. I think I'm on Spotify. I don't even know. I know dithering is somehow, but I don't even care, honestly, which is weird. and it's just me being me. I think the best thing for Apple, even though they don't make money from it, and they did try, or they are trying, there's ways for people to have a paid members-only podcast through Apple Podcasts, but I don't know anybody doing that. We do it. Oh, yeah, and we talked about it when I was on primary technology. We talked about the same thing, where I think I said the same thing. I was like, I don't know anybody doing it. And you're like, we do it. Yes, I made the same mistake. I adopted it immediately because at the time when the feature came out, I think it was 2021, I was hosting the Apple Insider podcast. Vast majority of listeners was in the Apple Podcast app. This was true for the Apple Insider show. It was true for primary technology. Now, way more people buy the subscriber version of the show directly at Apple Podcasts than go to our memberful site and sign up there. Right. It's just a way higher conversion rate because it's easy to do. It's in the app they're already using. Right. It's in the app they're already using. And our listenership is like 56% Apple Podcasts, and then Overcast is like 40-something percent or whatever. But it creates a higher free trial to actual conversion. There's higher conversions when we offer that subscription on Apple Podcasts. And those people might not sign up at all if we didn't offer that. So I'm glad it's there. I understand it's not a big moneymaker. I wish Apple would bring podcasts to Android because they have Apple TV over there. They have Apple Music. Google stopped making their podcast app. All that's there is really YouTube music. And then there's Pocket Cast and great third-party apps. But I think Apple Podcasts, if it was a good experience on Android, actually might be something that wins over part of that audience. Yeah, and it's really, really hard. Like, if you have an Apple-focused podcast, it's not too ridiculous to say we'll do the paid-only version through Apple Podcasts. Like, I could do it. You guys do do it. But for a general audience podcast, that's like a non-starter. And they're asking what their Apple's asking is do it in addition to member full or sub stack or however else you might be making. And adding a second leg to the stool of ways that you take subscribers money, it can be additive, but it's a multiplier complexity wise. because now you've got, if you have two ways to subscribe, it's more than twice the work to manage the overall membership and to say, hey, we want to sell T-shirts and we want to give members a discount because they're members. It's more than twice the work now because you've got two entirely different sets of them. And Apple's, of course, always has more privacy restrictions and you probably can't even get a list of their emails or anything. I know you can't get their emails, of course, But it's hard to let them take advantage of the fact that they're subscribed to you in Apple Podcasts and get $5 off a T-shirt on your site. And none of that – I get the privacy motivation from Apple. I totally do. But as a creator, it's sort of like, yeah, well, then why would I sign up for that? Why wouldn't I tell everybody to just go through Memberful where I've only got one database of users and I can just click a button in Shopify and give them a discount? you know and those are the kind of creator tools that i i hope apple builds in like to communicate to those subscribers like we gave away pins and i offered it to our paid subscribers but i can only offer it to those that are memberful because i have no way to communicate to those in an apple podcast and in the apple insider show we we did like a private discord and so the only way i could think of because the other thing is in the subscriber if someone pays to subscribe to an Apple Podcast Show, the show notes are still visible publicly. So if you don't pay to support primary tech on Apple Podcasts, you can still go to our bonus episode and you can't listen, but you could see the whole episode description. So I can't put a link there that just are paying members click or see. Everybody could see it. So the only thing we could think to do was, listen, at the end of our bonus episode, I'm going to say some magic words. I think I said something like hamster trumpet. And I said, just DM me with those words and I'll know you pay to listen to the show and I'll give you access to our discord. It's like, this is crazy. Like we can, we can get better tools for this. So I do think ultimately bottom line, I think it's the best thing that's happened for Apple was related to podcast aid. Cause no matter how well those subscriber things were going to work, it was never going to matter to Apple's bottom line. So they're never going to drive meaningful revenue to Apple through podcasts, no matter what they do. But what they can do is get a little spiteful and have somebody who gets their dander up and Spotify is one of those companies based on the way that Spotify is a constant thorn in her side in the EU with regard to DMA mandate requests and stuff like that. And so I think Spotify's rise in the degree to which right now I don't think anybody dominates, even including even YouTube in podcasts. I still think that's one of the things that's so healthy and web-like about podcasts overall. The fact that Spotify counts as number two as the most listened to stream or mechanism for podcasts is a good attention getter for Apple in a way that YouTube isn't. Because YouTube, because Apple and Google are sort of, if anything, getting more and more back together, like with the rumor that Google's Gemini might power the next version of Apple intelligence and stuff. And that they're sort of, after the whole going to war over Android thing, have sort of come back into, oh, these are Google things, these are Apple things, and we get along very well together. Spotify, not so much. And so I think the best thing to happen to think about Apple still being a champion of podcasts as an open medium is the rise of Spotify, who clearly doesn't want them to be an open medium, would love to beat a podcast what YouTube is to video. Yeah. And on a personal level, like I have a 16 year old son, 13 and nine year old daughter, but my oldest son, he was listening to podcasts in pocket cast for a long time. And in the last couple of years, he has switched his listening habits to Spotify, which I don't even pay for Spotify premium. We have the iCloud bundle. We pay for Apple music, but Spotify, he can watch the podcast and it's in the same app that he might listen to something as well. And I'm like, especially younger generation who are developing habits for how to consume this content now, they are developing that habit to go to Spotify. Because that's just where it is. It's where it's easiest to do. And maybe YouTube, those latest stats. I think James Cridland shared this on PodNews that like 80% of people who watch podcasts on YouTube also listen in a podcast apps in addition to watching it on YouTube. So the whole YouTube is number one. I think some of the stats are messy. But the fact that Spotify is just there's zero barrier. If you want to listen, you want to watch. It's all in this one place. And I think Apple could do that. And for monetization, who knows if Apple will add ads to Apple TV shows one day. There's no ad tier right now. But they could do what Spotify does, which is allow creators to turn on ads, put in a timestamp and say, yeah, just put ads in my podcast, do the revenue share between Apple and the creators, and they can create that monetization mechanism that Spotify has right now, both for video and audio. Yeah. Yeah, that would be great. And going back to the origins of this topic, I just think that it's a perfect scenario for AI to analyze the episodes and do smart things with them. And I think that Apple is thinking about such things is, I think if this gets, if it doesn't get rejected, like you said, that the big creators of the big podcasts, like there's the one notion of the big popular podcasts that come from these big platform studios or podcast studios is that they don't have chapters. And I think a lot of us have been assuming that they don't have chapters because they don't care about chapters and they assume that most of the listeners don't even know what chapters are. And so they don't create them. And so what if so that they won't care if Apple adds them automatically through AI? But what if they do care and they don't have podcasts because they don't they don't have chapters because they don't want chapters and they opt out? If a few big players opt out, it's lots and lots of popular podcasts. And then this feature is sort of it won't be for not because there's dozens of hundreds, thousands, I guess, thousands of little podcasts that don't have chapters who won't opt out. And Apple podcasts will add chapters. And if the chapters that come out of AI are half intelligent, it'll still be a benefit to the user experience. But it won't be the oh, this is really cool. now I have chapters in these big podcasts from like the New York Times that never had them before. It remains to be seen if it's going to have that effect. But if it does, and they're actually pretty good, I think that's Apple leading the way on a really cool feature because chapters are great. It has really been frustrating to me that some of my favorite podcasts have never had them. And I know you and Ben Thompson, I think, talked about chapters and if you would ever put them in dithering recently but the thing there is and people might not realize this and ask why dithering doesn't have it but if you do paid podcasts i pay the verge subscription and so i get the ad-free versions of their shows i pay for dithering i have that show like the auto-generated chapters don't exist in those feeds apple doesn't have you might add that feed to the apple podcast app but apple is not doing the ai generated chapters and the time links and the transcripts for those paid podcasts so right if those creators aren't doing it they're not going to do it anyway but Right, because as far as Apple knows, they're all unique. If we have 1,000 subscribers that are all paying, it's 1,000 different podcasts. Yeah, I can. Would you allow auto-generated chapters in Dithering if it did? I would. I don't know. I don't want to answer for Ben, though. The CEO's office, I think, handles all the back-end stuff. It's part of the reason I'm so happy to do it is that I just don't worry about the details. I honestly didn't even know we didn't have chapters. well you're sure i do care one thing now it sounds like i'm completely hands-off i am so hands-on when it comes to our monthly album art that changes i have you know and ben is too it's not like it's all me and it's but so i do care about that but in terms of the technical back end like the episode titles i i'm not even involved in the chat that that makes them yeah and i because Because I'm not doing the editing and I've opted out of it. And by the way, it's our friend Brad Ellis, icon designer and designer extraordinaire, who's done the actual artwork for every episode of Dithering. So hats off to Brad for making one of my favorite little things every month. If it were up to me, yes or no, we'd already have human-generated chapters. Because, you know, we usually have two or three segments per show. And I would say yes to allowing auto-generated chapters. Because sure, why not? I honestly feel like it's up to the user, to me, whether they're going to do it. In the same way that if I could opt out of reader mode in web browsers, I wouldn't. If you want to use reader mode to read during Fireball because you don't like the colors and the font size or whatever, that's up to you. That's the nature of the web that you get to do it. So my thinking is if you want to use auto-generated, as long as they're identified, which Apple is going to do, As long as it says Apple podcast generated these chapters and it's very clear in the interface that your client generated them, not us, that would be fine with me. But I don't want to speak for Ben. What about you? I would. I'm kind of obsessive about chapters. I mean. So you make them yourself. I make it myself. I go so far as I have custom chapter artwork for every chapter in every episode. and so yeah that's because i think it's it makes even the listening a visual experience if someone has car play and they're listening and we say something because i do video version for our show as well as audio and those who are listening if i call something or if i draw attention to it i can have the chapter artwork change and you can even do something called silent chapters which is changing the artwork outside of a chapter marker so just the image could change yeah we use that sometimes. Yeah. And I, I love chapters. I, any show that has chapters, sometimes I'll just look at them to see what are they talking? What are they going to talk about? It's a faster way to do that. I love doing chapters for our own show with the custom chapter artwork and art and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm all about it. Chapters all day, every day. Yeah. We don't use it often on this show, but sometimes we'll do it if you're talking about a screenshot or something and it's a whole segment. Like if in that whole segment about shortcuts that we had, It might look in your podcast player like there's one 25-minute segment on shortcuts. But in the middle of it, if we're talking about a screenshot of something, you put it a little invisible chapter in where the album art changes to that screenshot. And anybody who looks at their phone or whatever their podcast player is at that time, they'll see the thing that we're talking about. Or if you said, if I was talking about some accident I was in and I have a horrible, horrible scar on my arm, I might put in a chapter art of a photo of the scar on my arm. Whatever. But you could do it. Yeah. But you could do it without making an entire actual chapter about it. All right, Stephen. That's a wrap. Thank you for joining me. I definitely will have you on again. Thank you. Everybody just look up Stephen Robles on YouTube. but the actual channel name is at beard fm yeah that's where we didn't talk about this but i never knew what to brand it and i eventually just branded it my name but that means my url is still at beard fm or slash bearded teacher but just search my name it'll come up yeah it's a better way to do that's right and let's face it google is in charge of youtube and that's what they want you to do it's just pretty much shortcuts you'll see my stuff come up and you and primary technology your podcast that I was lucky enough to be a guest on in recent months with Jason Aiton. That's right. A.K.A. Brian. Maybe that's his middle name. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. I'll have to ask him. And my thanks to our sponsor, our exclusive sponsor of this very special Black Friday, the Friday before Black Friday episode of the talk show, Uncommon Goods. Thanks to them at uncommongoods.com slash talk show.