[JM]: Today's little bit of fun on the Internet is "Mario meets Pareto".
[JM]: Is that how you say that?
[JM]: Pareto?
[JM]: I don't know.
[DJ]: I assume it's Pareto.
[DJ]: I'm pretty sure it's Pareto.
[DJ]: I can see the look on your face as you're saying something out loud and then realizing you're not sure how to pronounce it.
[DJ]: There's a very specific expression.
[JM]: It's well practiced because it seems to happen a lot.
[JM]: So "Mario Meets Pareto", or with subtitle, "Step on the Frontline and Beat Your Friends", is this incredible site by Antoine Mayerowitz.
[JM]: And in it, Antoine describes how one can use the Pareto optimization framework to beat your friends at Mario Kart, which is, of course, the best thing you can do with any scientific discovery is to beat your friends at video games.
[DJ]: Yeah, well, a recently discovered notebook of Pareto's reveals that as far back as year that Pareto was alive, he was saying to himself, like, I hope that someday all of this work culminates in people being able to own each other at Mario Kart.
[JM]: He wrote that back in the 1800s?
[DJ]: Yeah, he did.
[DJ]: So when you edit this show, Justin, I want you to go back and find the point where I said a year that Pareto was alive and replace it with the actual year because I don't know when he was alive.
[JM]: It was at least 100 years ago, I believe, but I don't know the exact date.
[DJ]: So, I mean, he was probably thinking about the Super Nintendo Mario Kart, not today's like advanced Mario Kart on the Switch 2 or whatever.
[JM]: Naturally.
[JM]: And like all great sites that we seem to find, or at least a lot of them, the design is so delightful and whimsical.
[JM]: And as you scroll, the little cart at the top of the page seems to come at you and then zoom off the edge of the frame.
[JM]: And what Antoine...
[JM]: delves into here is that when you play Mario Kart, and he seems to be talking about Mario Kart 8, if that matters, you can choose your driver, the kart's body, the tires, and the glider portion of the car.
[JM]: And I suspect a lot of casual players of this game will choose these based mainly on appearance.
[JM]: Oh, that character looks cute or that character looks funny.
[JM]: This car looks fast, et cetera, et cetera.
[JM]: But each of these choices have advantages and disadvantages associated with them.
[JM]: And so for each of those four elements or choices that I just discussed, there are tens of options for each of them.
[JM]: And if you multiply all of those out, you get a total of 703,560 different builds to choose from.
[JM]: And it seems that most of those choices, the vast majority, are actually stylistic.
[JM]: They have identical statistics in terms of speed, acceleration, handling, etc.,
[JM]: But even after you get rid of all of those and just focus on the ones that actually matter in terms of the performance of how you end up racing, you're still down to a staggering 25,704 options.
[DJ]: So get playing people because you have to try each and every last one of them.
[JM]: Hopefully you will live a very long time so that you get a chance to do that, but you can save a lot of that time.
[JM]: And as the author says, is there any chance to find the best build or is it just luck?
[JM]: Should you favor speed to be the fastest or acceleration to quickly recover after taking a hit?
[JM]: Let me show you a solution proposed over a century ago by economist Vilfredo Pareto.
[JM]: And as you scroll down this site, it will be explained to you that you have to find, for example, a balance between speed and acceleration.
[JM]: There's factors like handling, weight, whether your vehicle is good at off-road, and then there's the mini-turbo.
[JM]: And as you scroll, you learn that on this Pareto optimization curve, that there are some options that are always dominated by others, meaning some choices are always worse than others.
[JM]: And this person points out that the Copa driver, for example,
[JM]: really should never be chosen because there are other choices that are always better.
[JM]: And so just looking at speed and acceleration, there are 585 different builds that you could put together, which again, is a lot of options to go through by yourself to try to figure out which of those is the best.
[JM]: And again, we're now just balancing between speed and acceleration.
[JM]: Forget handling, forget those other things that we mentioned.
[JM]: But if you use the Pareto front, those 585 builds get narrowed down to 14 most efficient options, which is a much more manageable number to deal with.
[JM]: But it turns out that you also have to factor in the mini turbo.
[JM]: And then as you keep scrolling,
[JM]: This, to me, is where the site's design really shines because you get this 2D graph between acceleration on the y-axis and speed on the x-axis.
[JM]: And as you scroll down, it zooms out at you and shifts into a three-dimensional graph.
[JM]: And it is such a cool effect.
[JM]: I highly recommend that you visit this link in the show notes so you can see it for yourself.
[JM]: Very cool.
[DJ]: This silly thing about Mario Kart and the Pareto distribution or optimization or whatever, it didn't need to be this cool and well-executed, but it is.
[DJ]: It's fantastic.
[JM]: It is indeed.
[JM]: I really enjoyed this.
[JM]: It was a great bit of scientific learning as well as fun in terms of the video game component and the use case for learning it.
[JM]: And then you add on top of all of that the incredible site design.
[JM]: So hats off, Antoine.
[JM]: Well done.
[DJ]: Yeah, you're finally going to crush it your weekly Mario Kart tournament, right?
[DJ]: So that's the real reason.
[JM]: Absolutely.
[JM]: All right.
[JM]: Moving on to a bit of news that we don't normally cover because I personally don't like rumors very much.
[JM]: I don't like talking about rumored products for a variety of reasons.
[JM]: Part of it is that it just spoils the fun when the rumors are actually accurate.
[JM]: People talk about them.
[JM]: They post about them.
[JM]: I understand the excitement.
[JM]: But then when they're actually announced, you're like, oh, yeah, here's this thing that people were talking about two months ago.
[JM]: And it just takes a lot of the wind out of the announcement, a lot of the excitement out of it.
[JM]: Just the energy and electricity of it is deflated.
[JM]: I just totally mixed metaphors, but you'll live.
[JM]: And the reason why I am considering making an exception here is
[JM]: is because of how we found out about this.
[JM]: So anyway, if you're the kind of person that doesn't really like rumors, just skip this chapter, move on.
[JM]: But if you don't mind, here is the rumor.
[JM]: And the way this happened is apparently in a release candidate, which is another way of saying a piece of beta software,
[JM]: that is getting close to being shipped or released.
[JM]: And in this case, it's Mac OS 26.7.
[JM]: And inside a Mac OS 26.7, this particular release candidate of it, apparently a video was somehow contained inside it.
[JM]: And this video demonstrates camera equipped AirPods.
[DJ]: That's a lot more blunt than the usual way stuff like this comes out, which is that there's some obscure like text string token like NS AirPods camera mode that someone stumbles across in the by decompiling some symbols.
[JM]: Yeah, where they see some code name and they're trying to cross-reference the code name with some supplier schematic that they saw somewhere else.
[JM]: Oh, this code name could refer to that schematic.
[JM]: And that's a lot of the reason that I don't pay attention to rumors because...
[JM]: a lot of times it's wishful thinking.
[JM]: It's someone going, Ooh, this would be so cool if it were true, but we have no idea if it actually is.
[JM]: And yet when you see a video describing the feature, describing the product, it's kind of hard not to be like, all right, well, this one feels pretty real.
[DJ]: Yeah, unless this is actually sophisticated counterintelligence and Apple is just trying to mislead people into thinking that they're coming out with camera equipped AirPods.
[DJ]: Of course, that's my wishful thinking because I don't want more items of personal technology to have cameras on them.
[DJ]: So I'm fingers crossed that Apple isn't going to release this product.
[DJ]: But yeah, they probably are, though.
[JM]: That would be some next-level countermeasures if this was some decoy maneuver that Apple laid out in this way.
[JM]: That would be amazing.
[JM]: But I imagine just following Occam's razor, that is not what this is.
[DJ]: Cursed Occam and his camera-equipped razors.
[JM]: So in this video, which you can see for yourself by following the link in the show notes, someone is wearing AirPods and holding up a book that they're looking at.
[JM]: It's a really short video.
[JM]: The person holds up a book so that the camera and the AirPods can see the title of the book.
[JM]: And the narrator of the video says, with visual intelligence, your world becomes savable.
[JM]: See something you like?
[JM]: Just ask me to save it for later.
[DJ]: Right, because books are famously transient.
[DJ]: So it's a good thing that now there's, you know, there didn't used to be a way to preserve all of that text.
[DJ]: It certainly wasn't just sitting on your bookshelf waiting for you to take it down and read it.
[DJ]: But no, now you can save it somehow.
[JM]: It does indeed seem like an odd choice of things to highlight for this particular feature.
[JM]: I agree.
[DJ]: I was going to say I was afraid that the point of the video would be using the camera and the AirPods, which can take in visual input and output audio, was that while looking at a book, you could have your AirPods read it to you.
[DJ]: Of course, that would actually be a genuinely useful assistive device for people who are sight impaired.
[JM]: Obviously, we are watching a very brief, less than 10 second video of a feature of a rumored unreleased product.
[JM]: When this is announced, maybe it has a ton of cool, assistive, life changing features like the ones that you're hinting at.
[JM]: And I hope that does come to pass.
[JM]: That would be cool.
[DJ]: Yeah, I hold out the fact that I don't want more cameras on popular pieces of technology that people wear on their bodies because, you know, and maybe Apple is slightly more trustworthy than, say, I don't know, Facebook would be with such a thing.
[DJ]: But I just don't really like the normalization of a world where everyone is walking around with video cameras pointed at the world all the time, those cameras being connected to the infrastructure of some giant American tech company, even if that company is Apple.
[JM]: I also find the specter of that future world very troubling and is not something I am particularly excited about arriving at.
[JM]: Even if it does feel inevitable, it doesn't feel great knowing that it's almost certainly coming.
[JM]: I want to believe that...
[JM]: Of all companies, Apple is going to do this in a way that makes it a decent trade-off.
[JM]: I don't know what that looks like, but I suspect it looks like an inability to do many of the things that the aforementioned Facebook glasses do.
[JM]: For example, I sincerely doubt that these camera-equipped AirPods are going to record video that you yourself can watch.
[JM]: to be able to get information about the things you are seeing in a way that minimizes the potential abuses that come along with having cameras attached to things you're wearing.
[JM]: So it just seems that Apple has probably thought about this.
[JM]: They've probably thought like, okay,
[JM]: There are going to be a lot of people who, like us, have traditionally been significant Apple fans who are not going to be super happy and are probably going to be quite vocal if we ship a product that is anywhere in the vicinity as creepy as the stuff that Facebook is doing with their Ray-Ban spy glasses.
[JM]: So...
[JM]: I remain optimistic that Apple will do this in a way that feels responsible.
[JM]: But I also do at the same time understand and appreciate your larger point of it normalizing the idea of people walking around with cameras attached to the things.
[JM]: That they're wearing and those things being on all the time and seeing the world around them because even in Apple's case, because it does kind of normalize that and that's generally not great.
[DJ]: We'll see.
[DJ]: I appreciate your optimism, but it's so easy to imagine like the sort of fun user interaction of being able to just reach up and click the stem of your AirPods and take a photo of what you're looking at that I wonder if even Apple could resist the urge to design such a thing.
[DJ]: Having said all that, I mean, I really don't know if whatever these cameras are going to be embedded in things that are in your ears would be any good.
[DJ]: at photography or video.
[DJ]: They really might be more like just visual sensors than cameras.
[DJ]: Regardless, you know, all the points we've made still stand.
[DJ]: I just don't, I mean, I felt this way when smartphones came out too.
[DJ]: And then we all got used to that.
[DJ]: Like just this idea that we're now constantly always, whenever you are present with anyone else, you and the other people have this technology that has knowledge about you.
[DJ]: which is like a clumsy way of saying like, now there's just microphones and cameras everywhere that we go all the time, whatever we're doing.
[DJ]: And yeah, yeah, yeah, they're turned off.
[DJ]: They don't activate until you actually decide to use them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[DJ]: But even if you could trust every other person in the world, which you can't, I don't trust the creators of this technology, not even Apple, the most supposedly privacy conscious one.
[DJ]: I don't want to lose track of the fact that you started this thing off saying that you don't really like rumors, but you and I have now spent like 10 minutes doing the best possible thing to do when you encounter rumors like this, which is to conjecture wildly and forcefully about them.
[JM]: What is the point of talking about a rumor if you're not going to do that?
[DJ]: Exactly.
[JM]: I think it's unlikely that Apple is going to be tempted to support, for example, as you said, reaching up and squeezing the stem of your AirPods in order to take a photo.
[JM]: I don't think that's why they put the cameras in AirPods.
[JM]: And I don't think that's something that they're going to enable for the same reason that you and I find it objectionable and find it creepy.
[JM]: I just don't think that Apple is going to do it for that reason.
[JM]: But we'll find out.
[JM]: Like I said, I get the idea that these are meant to get information about things in your environment.
[JM]: But as we said, this is a rumor and we'll find out when these things ship what they end up doing and not doing.
[DJ]: Speaking of if you already have one cool piece of technology and you're desperate to come up with some way to make it horrible, there's your segue.
[DJ]: Justin, you're welcome.
[JM]: So it seems that owners of BMWs have become accustomed to seeing some user interface element on these screens, on the dashboards of their cars, that reference some kind of surprise.
[DJ]: Like surprise you're getting a speeding ticket?
[JM]: No, I think it was more, here's a fun animation or a video celebrating Halloween.
[DJ]: Surprise, gasoline costs 50% more than it did six months ago.
[DJ]: That sort of surprise.
[JM]: I think these were supposed to be a little bit more fun and whimsical than causing people to question why they got out of the house and got into their car in the first place.
[JM]: So it seems they did another one around the 4th of July, celebrating that holiday.
[JM]: So when shortly afterward, folks saw another button on the screen to push to reveal some surprise, they were indeed very surprised to see an ad for the latest Spider-Man movie on their screen.
[JM]: And I'm going to read a bit from an article from The Hollywood Reporter that said BMW owners are taking to social media to express outrage that the automaker suddenly started pushing ads for Spider-Man Brand New Day onto their dashboards.
[JM]: The ads began appearing last week on newer model vehicles and some drivers who forked up to $160,000 for a luxury car or SUV aren't very happy about being spammed when they start their cars.
[JM]: The promotion is scheduled to run through August 10th, according to the automaker's press release, and represents a partnership between the automaker and Sony Marvel.
[JM]: Some of the scathing comments on Reddit's forums include, that's some absolute bull, insanely dystopian, this needs to be made illegal before everyone starts doing it, $130,000 to get a Spider-Man commercial, sounds like a Black Mirror episode, and simply blank everything about this.
[JM]: And I have a really difficult time myself trying to get a handle on how angry I would be.
[JM]: What would be the level?
[JM]: How would I quantify the level of rage and fury I would feel if this happened to me?
[DJ]: I mean, you were pretty upset when your existing car was trying to force you to install an update that then changed the user interface and moved your heating controls around.
[DJ]: So I'm going to guess that your outrage if the same car showed you an ad for a movie would be bounded at seven times that angry.
[JM]: That sounds about right.
[JM]: It is so wild to me that you could pay for any car, much less one of the highest end luxury cars you can buy.
[JM]: And despite having paid such a significant amount of money, you get shown an ad that
[DJ]: It does sort of show you the way that this need for recurring revenue is devouring every positive customer experience, right?
[DJ]: Because I've already like cars, new cars have already from multiple companies, including BMW, have already become notorious for trying to sell you subscriptions for features.
[DJ]: Like it's not enough that you're spending five or even six figures on an entire butt car.
[DJ]: Like cars are very expensive.
[DJ]: But now they also want you to like, well, pay us, you know, $50 a month and then you'll get heated seats.
[DJ]: And it's like, no, like just build those in.
[DJ]: They've always just been built in.
[DJ]: It's like, yeah, I know they're built in, but now that your car is connected to the Internet all the time, we can disable them unless you pay us a subscription.
[DJ]: Isn't that great?
[DJ]: The answer to which is, no, it's not.
[DJ]: It's not great.
[DJ]: This is the same kind of thing.
[DJ]: It's just like, okay, well, every car is now connected to the Internet at all times.
[DJ]: And what that means is the person who sold you the car can abuse you every single time you turn it on.
[DJ]: Isn't that great?
[DJ]: And I would say, no, Justin, it's not great, which is why I refuse to buy any car that is newer than, let's say, 1996.
[JM]: I am rapidly coming to that same conclusion.
[JM]: Among the myriad wild aspects to this whole thing, I remember when some executive at BMW, maybe it was the CEO, I don't remember, when asked, hey,
[JM]: the cars that you're making increasingly have these very large screens that span almost the entire width of the dashboard.
[JM]: Has it ever occurred to you at some point that those might be good real estate to show ads in your cars?
[JM]: And this executive said, no, we are a luxury brand and we don't feel like that would be in line with
[JM]: with what we are trying to deliver to our customers, or something along those lines.
[JM]: I'm paraphrasing from my own memory of what this person said.
[JM]: And you fast forward a startlingly brief number of years, and here we are, where having spent upwards of perhaps $160,000, you are not getting paid to watch an ad.
[JM]: You've already paid...
[JM]: to be shown these ads now.
[DJ]: I think the first red flag there is that when someone asked, don't you think that the giant screen inside your customer's cars would be good real estate for ads?
[DJ]: The CEO's response was not to press a red button on their desk that dropped the person who asked that question through a trap door and into a tank full of sulfuric acid and sharks.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: Because are you kidding me?
[DJ]: Like, listen, everything in the entire world hasn't been perverted enough by your sick, desperate need to squeeze more and more money out of absolutely everything.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: Don't you think that the screen inside your car would be good real estate for ads?
[DJ]: I mean, if I was the CEO and I was being interviewed, obviously you want to try to be polite, but I would have a hard time not responding to that question with some form of die.
[JM]: I was going to go with...
[JM]: What's wrong with you?
[JM]: Why would you ask such a question?
[JM]: But I can see where you're coming from.
[DJ]: Like, I don't need the answer.
[DJ]: I need for them to die.
[DJ]: Like, give me a break.
[DJ]: But anyway, yes, it's fantastic that they're just like, what?
[DJ]: We would never put ads in our users' cars.
[DJ]: I think I saw something related to these shenanigans where they were claiming that this isn't an ad.
[DJ]: So...
[JM]: Well, that's the really messed up part.
[JM]: Well, as if that's the really messed up part, it's all messed up.
[JM]: But it turns out that it wasn't like BMW got paid by Sony slash Marvel to show this ad.
[JM]: It was the other way around.
[JM]: BMW paid Sony to promote BMWs in the Marvel movie.
[JM]: And as part of that promotional deal, BMW agrees to show an ad for the movie in their cars.
[DJ]: I love the idea of someone like whoever is running BMW's partnerships department goes to Sony or Marvel or whoever and
[DJ]: And says, hi, here's $275 million.
[DJ]: May we please ruin our reputation with your content?
[DJ]: And Sony's like, I mean, I stopped listening after the $275 million.
[DJ]: So sure, do whatever you want.
[DJ]: I'm hoping that whoever that was at BMW who made that decision gets dropped into a sulfuric acid shark tank.
[DJ]: But I don't hold out.
[DJ]: Yeah, absolutely.
[DJ]: I just want to, I'm turning on the car so I can drive it and go somewhere.
[DJ]: I don't want to watch a little video, even if it's a fun video for a surprise, and certainly not if it's advertising a movie.
[JM]: No, definitely not.
[JM]: The fact that BMW would tarnish their brand in this way, that they would take decades and decades of hard-earned
[JM]: Brand equity around their brand as a luxury brand and just light it on fire in this way just boggles my mind.
[JM]: My initial reaction when I heard about the story was nothing screams luxury like force feeding an ad for yet another crappy Marvel movie.
[JM]: I hope this results in a banner quarter for Audi sales.
[DJ]: I take some issue with it because Spider-Man Brand New Day actually looks pretty good.
[DJ]: And I think the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies are on the better end of the MCU's recent production.
[DJ]: However, I agree with everything else you said.
[JM]: Perhaps unfair for me to bundle it along with all the other crappy Marvel movies.
[DJ]: Meanwhile, some executive at Audi is rapidly stuffing their plans for a partnership with the DC universe into a drawer.
[DJ]: Boy, it's a good thing they're not making any more Aquaman movies because we were definitely going to show those to our drivers.
[JM]: One furious BMW owner who encountered this and tapped the button to watch this ad, not knowing that was going to happen,
[JM]: said in a post published to their website i clicked a button to show it i did that to myself i felt silly and naive i did not want to watch spider-man i did not want to see spider-man
[JM]: What have I learned?
[JM]: One, there are software teams over in Munich who spend their days thinking of ways to show me videos instead of improving wireless car play reliability or writing updates to make iDrive more stable, intuitive, and useful.
[JM]: Two, BMW has poor taste.
[JM]: In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
[JM]: I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
[JM]: I will feel angry if it leaks water.
[JM]: By contrast, I don't feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement.
[JM]: Instead, I feel a deep, smothering letdown at the promise of futurism.
[JM]: Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate, a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of.
[JM]: But in the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.
[JM]: If this is the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, turn off the ride.
[JM]: I want to get off.
[DJ]: That is really well put.
[DJ]: And exactly how I feel, that we have all this amazing technology and the only things that we... Not the only things, but it seems like repeatedly the things that the people who develop and deploy this technology do with it are the stupidest narrow-mindedness... That's not a word, but you know what I mean.
[DJ]: Narrowest-minded?
[DJ]: Narrowest-minded, most self-serving garbage...
[DJ]: As the person said, it's like, you know, you've got teams of people being paid a lot of money to develop the software that runs in this car.
[DJ]: And we can leave aside my other feelings about software running in your car instead of having, say, a dial that you could turn.
[DJ]: But yeah, like they could be paying those people to try to make the software better.
[DJ]: But instead, it's like, no, let's deploy these videos.
[DJ]: There's something very funny, though, about the way that the writer said, I did not want to see Spider-Man.
[DJ]: Somehow it just it feels like green eggs and ham to me.
[DJ]: It's like, I do not like them.
[DJ]: I do not.
[DJ]: I did not want to see Spider-Man.
[DJ]: I did not want to, Sam I am.
[DJ]: Which, like, fair enough.
[DJ]: I didn't either.
[JM]: And thankfully, as a non-BMW owner, you didn't have to.
[DJ]: Yeah, well, that's true, actually.
[DJ]: I don't even own a car, so I didn't.
[DJ]: I saw the Spider-Man Brand New Day trailer as a coming attraction at the Odyssey, which is where you expect to see movie trailers.
[DJ]: I don't mean the Odyssey specifically, but like in a movie theater.
[JM]: It's going to be so interesting to see what this salvo over the bow results in.
[JM]: Is this going to be like the whole BMW charging a subscription for heated seats fiasco where there is enough of a backlash that BMW says, okay, let's take this idea and we'll put it back on the shelf and
[JM]: And maybe we take it back off the shelf someday.
[JM]: Maybe we leave it there as a really stupid idea that we tried and realized was a bad idea.
[JM]: Or whether it's BMW or companies that aren't as interested in retaining the value of years of luxury brand equity, we start to see more and more ads in things that we are buying with screens.
[JM]: In a previous episode of this very podcast, we have heard of stories where I believe it was Samsung LG.
[JM]: I don't remember one of those that retroactively after you bought it, started delivering ads to the screens on the refrigerators that customers bought.
[JM]: So there's already plenty of prior art for this absolutely ridiculous, shameful and offensive behavior.
[JM]: So I think it will be interesting to see whether other car manufacturers decide, OK, BMW tried it if they couldn't pull it off and they had all this outcry.
[JM]: You know what?
[JM]: we're just going to leave well enough alone.
[JM]: Or if they're like, ah, you know what?
[JM]: They have a good idea.
[JM]: We don't really care so much about our customers viewing our brands as luxury.
[JM]: We'd rather take the money.
[DJ]: Yeah, it is to return to sort of a theme, the perverse incentives of endless growth for companies.
[DJ]: Because you end up in all these situations where like, what is a brand?
[DJ]: What is a company?
[DJ]: What is a product for?
[DJ]: And if the answer is just to make more money than you made last year, then you end up in this situation where it's where...
[DJ]: It should be relatively easy within a company like BMW, which has for many, many years prided itself on making really, really good cars.
[DJ]: It should be relatively easy for there to be a cohort of people who go, so, showing Spider-Man to all the people who drive our cars, does that make our cars better or worse?
[DJ]: Raise your hands.
[DJ]: And the conclusion should be, it makes our cars worse, so don't do it.
[DJ]: But instead, the, I presume, you know, whatever the upside of doing this was perceived to be, and if they're not even getting paid to do it, that's really weird.
[DJ]: But, you know, even if it was like, well, we'll make another $20 million this year.
[DJ]: Yeah, but it makes our cars worse.
[DJ]: I would kind of want them to come down on the, we're not going to do the thing that makes our cars worse because the reason we exist is to make the best cars.
[DJ]: But there are so many countering incentives.
[DJ]: Every company, like, you know, we complain about stuff that Apple does in the same way where like Apple is famously a company that tries to make the best computers and other devices that are like computers.
[DJ]: But they succumb to these perverse incentives constantly.
[DJ]: too.
[DJ]: And seen from the outside, they're really hard to justify.
[DJ]: You would love to sit down the CEO or some other walking entity of a company and say, look me dead in the eyes and tell me this makes your product better, as opposed to this just makes you a bunch more money.
[DJ]: And you imagine that they couldn't do it.
[DJ]: And then you wish that someone in that position would go, since this only makes us a bunch more money, but makes our product demonstrably worse, we're not going to do it.
[JM]: On some level, this is less a story about cars, technology, the ever-increasing amount of software that's being put into everything.
[DJ]: Than it is a story about Spider-Man.
[JM]: Instead, this is a story about Spider-Man.
[JM]: It's so reminiscent of other tales where some corporation repeatedly makes terrible, terrible decisions.
[JM]: Facebook stands out as a glaring, glaring example.
[JM]: And at some point, you have to look at the corporate culture that is being fostered and say, OK, well, I just don't trust this company anymore because the corporate culture is what is allowing, even encouraging this company to do the kinds of objectionable things that it's doing.
[JM]: Because if you, like me...
[JM]: heard about BMW saying, we shipped a bunch of cars with seat heaters in them, but had them disabled.
[JM]: And then you could pay a subscription to turn that feature on and thought, you know what, I don't think I really want to buy any BMW cars because I don't want to support a car that does that kind of thing.
[JM]: You might have been forgiven for thinking that
[JM]: Okay, well, eventually they realized that was a terrible idea and they shelved that whole thing.
[JM]: They haven't introduced anything like that.
[JM]: Perhaps they've learned their lesson.
[JM]: Perhaps they realized the market doesn't want that.
[JM]: So we're not going to do that.
[JM]: And you might think, well, if I'm in the market for a new car, maybe I'll look at the i3 or the i4.
[JM]: Because BMW does make good cars that are interesting to me personally.
[JM]: And I might have actually considered buying one of their cars if I were in the market for one until I was reminded via the story of the kind of leadership that runs that company.
[JM]: And so for me, it's been a great reminder of, oh, right, this is the kind of company BMW is.
[JM]: These are the kinds of people that run it.
[JM]: So I personally am obviously disheartened that they did this and the specter of it becoming more and more common.
[JM]: But on some level, I'm grateful for the reminder that when I am in the market for a new car, it's not going to be a BMW.
[JM]: All right, moving on.
[JM]: I imagine that most of our listeners are saner than I am and probably carry their phones in a case so that when they drop it or put it down on a surface that isn't particularly smooth, their phone is not damaged by said surface.
[JM]: But I am one of these weirdos that doesn't use a case with my phone.
[JM]: There's something about the feel of the phone in my hand.
[JM]: These devices are so exquisitely designed.
[JM]: And I just prefer being able to feel the product itself in my hand.
[JM]: I have tried it both with cases and without.
[JM]: And for me, the answer is clear.
[JM]: And so for years, I have carried my phone without a case.
[DJ]: And that's how we came up with the title of this episode, Justin Breaks His Phone on the Air.
[JM]: Thankfully, I am seated and these are wood floors, so that would be a difficult thing for me to do in this particular situation.
[JM]: But knock on wood, so far, and I realize just how badly I am jinxing myself here, but I have never broken a phone.
[JM]: In the years that I've had it without a case, I've
[JM]: I've never cracked a screen, just a few dings and scratches here and there, just everyday wear, but nothing remotely serious.
[JM]: I don't know how, but here we are.
[JM]: But one of the things that I think about when I take my phone out of my pocket, because this is part of the problem with not using a case.
[JM]: Sometimes I will be wearing pants or shorts that have a pocket that's not particularly deep or that is cut a certain way where it's angled and it's easy for the phone, particularly when it doesn't have a case on it because it is a lot more...
[JM]: smooth without a case and so it can quite easily slide out of a pocket when i am seated so i have a habit of taking my phone out of my pocket when i'm sitting down say at a restaurant or some other place and putting the phone on the table so that it doesn't slide out and get scratched or whatever the question i've always wondered about is is it better to put the phone face down on the table or face up
[JM]: Well, if the idea is you want to be respectful to the people who you are spending time with, putting the phone face down is clearly the better choice.
[JM]: But in this particular case, that's not what I'm asking myself about.
[JM]: The question I'm asking myself is, am I more likely to scratch it on what is a potentially hard surface of the table by putting it face down or by putting it face up?
[JM]: Because on one side is the screen and on one side is the camera plateau.
[JM]: And I have always wondered, which of these two things am I more at risk of scratching?
[JM]: On the one hand, you've got glass on the front part where the screen is, but it's smooth, meaning it's even all the way across.
[JM]: It's completely flat.
[JM]: On the back...
[JM]: There's a trio of camera lenses and this plateau sticks out.
[JM]: So if I set this on a surface, the part that's touching that surface the most is indeed that camera plateau because it sticks out from the rest of the case or not case, but the frame of the phone.
[JM]: So the whole point of this story is that I recently learned that these camera lenses themselves are not directly exposed and instead are covered by an extremely hard sapphire lens cover that is almost impossible to scratch.
[JM]: it is many times less likely to scratch those Sapphire lens covers than say the glass part of the front screen of your phone, or at least this particular iPhone that I own.
[JM]: And so really, I think what I'm trying to say here is as a public service announcement, if you ever wondered, because you are also a strange person like myself and don't have a case that would protect the front or the back, and you ever wondered,
[JM]: Hmm, which of these sides am I more likely to scratch?
[JM]: The answer is the front.
[JM]: The front part where the screen is, that is the part that is more likely to scratch.
[JM]: So when you put your phone down on a surface, put its screen up so you don't need to worry as much about getting scratches.
[JM]: There you have it.
[JM]: You're welcome.
[DJ]: But also put your phone in do not disturb mode when you're out to dinner so that you don't get notifications right there on the table.
[DJ]: Your dinner guests are also welcome.
[JM]: All right, everyone, that's all for this episode.
[JM]: Thank you for listening.
[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan at danj.ca.
[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.