DeepSeek Explained, AI Arms Race, iOS 18.3 Updates, Rube Goldberg Email Machine
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Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Big week, we're going to have an entire section on DeepSeek, what it is, the ramifications on the AI companies here in the U.S., distillation, what even that means, and then we're going to have a little bit of a

We're going to explain all of it after the break, but we're going to start out with some Apple news talking about iOS 18.3, visual intelligence updates. I'm going to ask Jason about the sports app because I don't know anything about sports ball, iPhone SE, four rumors and more. This episode is brought to you by Notion and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, back in my studio and coming at us from a different studio this week, my friend Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason?

It's been an interesting morning. It's been an interesting few days. Some Chinese AI took over my office at home, so I had to vacate. No, that's not what happened at all. I wish that I could blame it on someone else, but it's my own fault. So you...

cut an ethernet cable? Is that what happened? Okay. So our listeners, if you've been around, you know that my internet situation in my office, which is a shed in our backyard is the neat was for a long time. An ethernet cable just run across the yard. Finally, my wife made me bury the ethernet cable cause it was, you know, the neighbors were talking. And so I buried the ethernet cable, but what I had not yet done cause I didn't care this much was

is finished that whole thing. So it was buried, but then it comes out of the ground at the shed and it was literally just running in the door and it was fine. It was fine for a very long time until it was negative 15 degrees out.

last week and I started putting like towels and stuff on the inside because it was drafty and at some point I must have shifted the point at which the cable comes in the door and it was like to the corner so when I shut it and when it was that cold it just snapped the ethernet cable so I have now bought a crimping tool and jacks and all the things to do the rest of the work that I should have done months ago instead that my punishment is I'm gonna have to do it while it's 35 degrees out

But the internet in my office, we're back to the situation where I can either have heat or internet and I need heat at this point. So I am borrowing a podcast studio. This is actually at our church, has this very, very nice podcast studio with lights and everything. And so this is where I am today. This is great. Our viewers might say, Jason needs to record here all the time. I don't know. But no, it's great.

The office. I like my office. No, the office looks good. You got the colored lights over there and then we match. So big news, a deep seek. We're going to explain it. We're doing a ton of research and that'll be after the break. First, some five-star reviews. Are you for reals from the USA? Give us a five-star review. He titled his review ice cubes and toilet, which is a point for Jason. These are my people. That's it. Also battery percentage on, but phone and dominant pocket.

And it's the oldest piece of tech. And there's a few of our listeners who shared their oldest piece of tech is a 16 year old Samsung monitor. And then after that, the Apple smart keyboard that uses double A batteries.

Jason just won this entire week. That's the one I'm talking about. I know. That's the one you- I won this episode. Mark this one down for me. You are. We're going to get to another thing you won. This is so fresh. Mike from New York City said, battery percentage on. Yeah. Again, my people definitely wanted you to make sure you got that in. But I think next week we should ... We might have done this at one point. I can't remember. But we did talk about the oldest piece of tech and the quality of the technology.

qualifier was that we still use right i started exploring the back room of our basement which is just dangerous by the way as a general rule leprechauns back there and there were lots of yes to look and find the oldest piece of apple hardware that i still own even if we don't use it that's good and i will tell you that one of them is an original apple tv

Oh, the big white one. Yep, but I have something older, and I'm going to show you next week. Well, listen, we had listeners reaching out in the community and via email about their oldest tech, and so I think we should do this for another week. Richard sent us an email, said his oldest piece of tech, it's an iPod Nano Series 3, which was like the fat Nano, like the wide one, and it was sold in September 2007. So that's pretty old, like 18 years? Yeah.

Yeah, 18 years old. And also he has the Toon Buds lanyards so he can wear it around his neck, which is amazing. Apple used to make a bunch of stuff to wear on your neck. The iPod shuffle used to be like around the neck thing. That's hilarious. And then also Mike Ellie in the community, he shared a picture. He has an older iPad mini, which was reminiscent because this is basically the iPad mini that was in my hotel room last week.

Yeah. Old school one. So listen, keep sharing your old tech, either old tech that you still use or just your oldest tech that you can find. And you can email us, podcast at primarytech.fm, attach the image or just write us an email and let us know. That'd be fun. Or comment on the episode post when it goes up in the community at social.primarytech.fm. And before I forget, did you know what movie I was talking about?

Okay, I have a guess, but only because of the way it relates to one of our topics. That's correct. I'm going to go with Deep Blue Sea. I don't know how every time you say, I'm going to take a wild guess and then you nail it. Well, here's the thing. I don't think I would have got it except for I was like, it's not Jaws. Not Jaws. It's like sharks. What else is there a shark? Deep Blue Sea?

Yeah. I'm always surprised too. So Deep Blue Sea came out in 1999 and I'm always surprised when you see like the video games and the movies that came out that year. It was a massive year for like all of media. It was like the Matrix, the other big, anyway, just throwing that out there. All right. A couple of quick things before we get into like the news news. Last week I was reporting live from Miami because I was at the Apple store opening and I wanted to share the second video that I published after that, which was

this. Not only was it the grand opening, which I was there for the store opening, we're going to talk about in our personal tech, Apple store openings, things like that. But I got to interview Senior Vice President Deirdre O'Brien. She's over retail and people. She reports to Tim Cook, like she's very high up there and actually got an opportunity to interview her shortly on it. So I'll link that video in the show notes. The most disappointing thing of that day

My last question for her was, does she have the battery percentage on or off on her iPhone? And the part about that was the disappointing is that she told you that I convinced her she should have it on. No, she did not say that. It's pretty close to that. She just didn't say my name. I appreciate that she didn't say my name, but she said she was a recent convert. She said she was a recent convert, which is even- What else can that mean?

Well, that is true. We appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for listening. Um, but, uh, yeah. So my, my secret goal now is to, uh, interview every senior vice president at Apple in some short capacity, at least so I can ask about battery percentage. That's, that's, that's the goal. Uh, also Eddie Q was there at the opening. Eddie Q like opened the doors with Deirdre O'Brien had no idea he was going to be there. And I really wanted to get a selfie and maybe ask him about battery percentage. Uh,

He was out so fast.

He like opened the door, he waved, and then I turned around and he was gone. Poof. You thought he was opening the door to let you all in. He was just opening the door because he was leaving. He's like, I got to go. He's like, I'm out of here. He's like a phantom. He just vanishes into the Miami streets. He did. I mean, maybe he had to catch a flight. That's fine. Also, while I was down there, one of the big updates. So iOS 18.3 was released publicly earlier this week on Monday. So everybody can download all your devices on your iPad, Mac OS 15.3, plus Apple TV and HomePod.

If you want to update your HomePods, that takes me three hours for some reason. But when it comes to like changes and updates, if you have an iPhone 16, one of the biggest changes was visual intelligence got some new features. You can also, Apple intelligence is also on by default now if you have a 15 Pro or iPhone 16. And so let us know how your experience with that has been. If you didn't enable it before because you didn't want to, now it's on by default. But I did an entire video just on visual intelligence.

because i was in miami there's a bunch of landmarks down there i was like let me go walk around and try it out and i even did the thing where i tried to identify dog breeds and i asked people to take picture of their dogs and it was super weird but i did it i did it for the video and so i'll link that video down in the description too turns out visual intelligence is not great uh as far as recognizing things and uh yeah that's that's correct so but what you should have done this is this

this would have been good is then save the photos and see if the photos app could identify them. Cause my experience with the photos app is that it's actually really good at this. So it's sort of shocking that the, why just use the same technology. Come on. It is really, yeah, it is weird. And so the two new features in 18.3 to be clear is if you take a picture of a date or if you have visual intelligence up and it sees a date on screen, it will prompt you to add it to the calendar and,

doesn't really like pull other information like so you typically have to title it manually and you know it's just it's still pretty cumbersome to actually add an event but the other one was recognizing animals and plants and the animal recognition is interesting like i actually did dogs in real life it recognized a multi-poo like when i actually took it every other dog it was like just didn't show me anything but if you just like google image search different animals it

and point visual intelligence at it it does a pretty good job recognizing those like it did cheetah it'll do kangaroo it'll do alligator so if it's like pristine photos that you're just pulling from google search it's doing it all the information is just from wikipedia it just has a wikipedia article link at the bottom of every one but it can it can do it landmarks stinks at it just stinks at landmarks and one of the weird things was

I could literally be standing like 30 feet from a landmark. Apple Maps has a special pin for it. It has all the information in the Apple Maps app. And I'll do visual intelligence on it and it just doesn't do anything. And then if I get up closer to it, it might pull up the card and show me information. And it really seems like visual intelligence is leaning on your location.

for what the information it provides rather than what it's seeing on the camera, which is a strange thing for something called visual intelligence. And in the same way, like for a restaurant,

I was able to do visual intelligence on like bubblegum, shrimp co and Starbucks. It nails those, like gives me all the, you know, pulls up where you can order from. But there were other restaurants where I literally be looking at the restaurant. The name of the restaurant is on the store and I do visual intelligence and it's like nothing doesn't show me anything. And it's like, okay, so you're clearly not reading the text, which it can, you can literally like take a visual intelligence test.

picture of a book page and it will OCR the text and even offer to summarize it but for some reason like a restaurant in front of you, it's just not going to do it. And if you get really close up to it maybe it will, maybe it won't. So still has a long way to go. Have you used it? I mean do you ever...

No, but I did just when I was going to plug in the iPhone 16 to use as a camera, it had to do the thing where like you've updated your software. And I'm like, I didn't even know that it, that it happened on that phone. Cause I only use it as a camera. And so it has, so I'm excited. I won't do it now because that'd be a weird experience for the people watching this video right now, since it's serving as a camera. But yeah, I'm going to do that later. Yeah. Play around with it. I would be curious your experience. I'll probably never use it in like day to day life, but yeah,

You know, it's there. It's, it's helpful if like there's a number on like phone numbers and email addresses, it's really good at recognizing. So if you see a phone number on a building and you just want to call it real quick for some reason, rather than walk in, you can do visual intelligence and it will just have the one button to call it. So it could do that. But yeah, the, the landmark stuff, business information, it's, it's hit or miss.

Now, I need to ask you about Apple Sports because I know nothing about sports, sports ball. Although I did during the Bills playoff game or it was one of the what was it, the AFC or NFC? The Bills were in the AFC championship game. See, see, I don't know. But OK, they see. So I have a friend who's like super Bills fan and I just want to know they're going to the Super Bowl. And I had enough tangential sports knowledge to know if they won this game, they were going to the Super Bowl.

And so while the game was going on in the evening, I said, well, I want to find out the score. What's the fastest way for me to see the score?

And I was like, well, let me try to just open the sports app on the iPhone and see like what happens. And turns out it knew exactly what I wanted to see. I opened the sports app and the score of the Bills game was right there, big on top with the info, like the live clock, the quarter. And I was like, okay, I'd open Apple sports app maybe twice a year. And I did do what I wanted to do. And now they added new features to it, which is like where you can broadcast games. It's going to include that info.

At least we're to watch national games in the app. So my question to you, because you're a sports ball person, have you been using the sports app? No, never. The reason I don't like the sports app is I'm actually surprised that you got what you wanted out of it because it isn't designed for you to just do what you did, which is literally just like, oh, there's a game happening. Let me look it up.

What it's designed for you to do is to follow certain teams and then it will surface information when those teams are playing. So if you wanted to look for a game and the team you're not following, cause you don't care about the bills the rest of the year, right? Then it's, it's, it's not really meant to do that. Like I just,

pulled it up and searched bills. And the only option it gave me is follow, like to follow that team. It didn't tell me anything about any, like if I searched for the bills, it doesn't even let me like tap on the word bills to see like what their recent games were. It just, all I can do is favorite it. So it's like, no, I just wanted to see there. I don't want to favorite them. They're not my favorite team. I just want, so I just would search Google. Like if you type any team name in the Google, it'll instantly bring up a card that shows you

recent game score, schedule, that kind of stuff. It's still way a better experience. And I've done that before, and I will say I'm actually not following anything because I didn't want to get notifications. So I think just because it was a big game. It was the AFC Championship game. Yeah, that's the reason why. Yeah, it just showed up. Lastly, though, I was showing, we were watching the Hunger Games movie the other night, introducing it to the kids, which... Also basically the AFC Championship game. That's fine. That's okay.

And it was like the climax of the movie. And I got a big old notification on the Apple TV saying like the war golden warrior state. It's a heated game. Click here to watch big old notification covering the top right corner. I said,

I never ever want that. And I know there's a way to turn it off. Do you know how to turn it off? But this is good, Steven, because this is how you know that Apple is not tracking you. Because if it was, it would know that the last thing Steven cares about is the Golden Warrior State whatever's is what I think you just called them. That's right. That's exactly what it was. But it's not nearly as bad as when I'm actually watching a game on YouTube TV and the notification that pops up in the corner is...

you should watch this game. It's close. I'm like, yes, I know. Leave me alone. I'm watching the game right now. It'll notify you of the game you're watching. He has no idea. Exactly. Amazing. Yeah. I know there's a way to turn off those things. I forget how to do it. So maybe I'll look it up for next week. Let's see what we can do. That was annoying. Apple vision pro real quick. It also got vision OS 2.3. I put it on to charge it. I also put it on to watch the season two, episode one of severance.

It's a good show. It's a good show. I'm about to start Severance because I need to be able to, you know, it's at the point where I can. You did not see the first season? I've never seen any of Severance. Show's over. Severance is over or this show's over? No, no, no. No, I'm just kidding.

Uh, Jason. Yes. Have you, have you made it through silo yet? I'm on episode seven of 10. Okay. Then get back to me when you're done and then you can give me a hard time about not watching severance. I got mixed feelings about solo. He's making me feel all kinds of ways. I was liking him. And then I was like, this dude's a little unhinged. That's exactly the way you're supposed to feel about. I can tell. It's fine. I can tell. Um, okay. Well, if you Jason severance, uh,

You got to watch severance. I've, I've, we might have to do a whole bonus episode just talking about severance. Cause that's, I need to know what you think. And the second episode, the second season started out and I'm like, it's amazing. Like, first of all, Ben Stiller, the director, I forget where, if the story came from somewhere or if that's a story that he, and I'm not sure where it came from, but just so interesting, so compelling. And the, the acting in the, the first episode of season two is,

there's just so many long shots and conversations that in so many other shows like you get bored and like I'm tempted to reach like to look at Instagram or whatever and Severance just I

I don't know. It just captures you. It's just, it's really engrossing. So please start. Can I ask, can I ask a rabbit hole question real quick? Of course. We don't have much to talk about today. I'm just kidding. Are you, I've realized there are two types of people. That's a terrible way to start. You put the ketchup on the side, you put the ketchup on the fries. That's a totally different topic we should talk about sometime. But when you were watching a show, do you sit there with like the Wikipedia summary of that episode?

No. To know what's happening? Okay, I was just curious. Do you? I mean, 100%. Wait a minute. Why are you...

Why aren't you just watching the episode? I can't. I don't know. I have a hard time. I have to follow along to see what's... I need to know what's going to happen. I don't have time, man. Wait a minute. So when you're watching Silo, you know what's going to happen in the episode before it happens? Well, Silo is based on a set of books, and I've read two of them, so... Okay, fair enough. But for most... You can't do that with Severance.

don't do that i won't all right how long is it going to take for me to like severance do i have to watch like four episodes first it's going to be so weird but by the end of the first episode you're going to want to watch you got to you're going to keep watching like it's not going to be hard to watch the second episode so okay yeah great i'm not sure if i mean i don't know your wife that well i don't know if she'll be into it but it's

It's super weird. Yeah, I wasn't planning to make her watch it. She's not going to watch it. It's super great, though. And I did put on the Vision Pro to watch Severance because I think it's how you're intended to do it, as the Lord intended. But anyway. So they really only want 80,000 people to watch Severance. No, no, no. But also, so with Apple Vision Pro, so 2.3 came out. Not really a bunch of features, but apparently NVIDIA now supports cloud gaming with over 2,000 games for Apple Vision Pro.

And I immediately went to, I didn't understand exactly what this was. I was in vision pro last night, searching the app store for Nvidia and G force. That's not what this is. You just, you have to go on Safari for the cloud gaming. Um, I was going to try it, but I couldn't figure it out last night. And then I missed, I missed this one line in this nine to five Mac, Mac article. All of this happens through Safari's native vision OS app. Then this is not really an announcement.

Like this is not really a, we made a thing for a thing. This is like internet browsers still work. Like I don't, I don't understand. I do. I do think we should do a retrospective because February 2nd, it's going to be the one year anniversary of the vision pro launch. Yes. And it's, and I, and I,

I it's my motivation to finally write the article that I've been working on now for nine months, which is I use the vision pro every day. And here's how much time it saves me. Okay. Yeah, please. Yes, you should do that. So that we can talk about it. At this point, I just had to time it for, Oh, it came out a year ago. I guess that's a good day to do this. There's also a new immersive piece of content coming out Friday. So tomorrow as we record, which is about like bull riding and rodeo stuff.

It's like man versus beast is what it's called. So anyway,

There's that. That's what should be fun. I like all the immersive stuff. I watched the, uh, the ice swim. Did you see the ice dive? No, I'm not using it for entertainment. Wow. I'm using the best use case. The best use case. The best use case is that virtual Mac display. Let's be honest. That I will give you that. I did that while I was in the, in Miami to edit video. It is pretty great. Not in the lobby. I did it in the room, but anyway, uh, last little like rumor thing. I just wanted to mention it. It seems pretty clear that,

that the iPhone SE 4 has leaked in the design. This is what it supposedly looks like. Single camera, looks very similar to the iPhone 16 lineup, you know, flat edges, things like that. But notably,

It looks like it's going to do away with the home button and it's going to have a notch, not a dynamic Island. So it'll be a notch face ID. iPhone doesn't look like again, can't really tell from these pictures is like early, maybe renders or mock-ups, but if it'll be touch ID in the sleep button or if it'll be face ID, I'm thinking face ID, but this might be it. This might be the year, Jason, the home button goes away for good on the phone.

I mean, because there are still iPads that have a home button. It's just not at the bottom. Not the base model, though. The Touch ID button, I guess is what I'm saying. Touch ID. Yeah, Touch ID. But a home button specifically. This was the last product with a home button that Apple sells. I think it's going to go away. I think it's it. You think that? I'm surprised. I am surprised if they don't have a phone that has Touch ID. I just feel like... I guess I can't... I don't really know this for a fact, but it feels to me like there's some kind of an accessibility feature there. Right? Yeah.

but they would know i mean apple definitely pays a lot of attention to that sort of thing and so i i'll just take the word for it but i well i think the most interesting thing about that story and i actually just realized this when i was listening to upgrade that was probably yesterday or something

There must be some kind of like lotto, which is basically someone comes along and pays off someone that works at one of these, because it's always the case companies. That's where all of these leaks are coming from is the case companies. And so like one person gets offered like $300,000 to share the CAD files and then they get fired and no one cares because that you, it's enough. They're good. Yeah, it is. It is interesting, but we should be seeing that. I'm,

We didn't really talk about this, but looking at Apple's releases this year, we talked about, you know, I want to see a HomePod with a screen, things like that. It seems like the iPhone SE4 is a sure thing. An M4 MacBook Air, very likely to come. I think we'll probably see that before WW, I think. M4 MacBook Air. Ooh, that's an interesting question because like they launched the 15 inch at WWDC. Right. And then they launched the M3s in...

I guess it would have been like the spring. No. Yeah. Was that right? I think so. I don't know. I bet you we'll see them. I bet we'll see them before. The question is just like, are they, do they have enough of them? Because they're going to sell a lot of M3 MacBook or M4 MacBook Airs. I will get one.

You're going to get one? I'll get an M4 MacBook Air. You have like 15 MacBooks and M2 3s and 4s. No, I only have 3s and 4s at this point. Right, exactly. I don't think I have any M2. How many MacBooks do you have right now? Including the review units. Right now, I only have three right now. Only three? A Mac Mini and an iMac. But you have a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air, don't you? I have two MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air.

How many are actually your personal ones? Of those, one. One of those things. I don't have any review MacBook Airs. I'll say that much right now. So the MacBook Air is yours? Yes. Every time I think about, should I send this iMac back to Apple? I think, you know what? Jason has MacBooks from like 18 years ago. He texts me and he's like, let me know when you send back the Vision Pro and I will get a label for this. Which is like...

I mean, isn't it past the date? Okay, never mind. Sorry. Isn't it past the date? It was... Listen, I'm going to publish an article on whatever, Tuesday, and it's going to be fantastic. It's all been leading up to this. And then I can send it back. It's actually weird because I keep seeing people say like one year with the Vision Pro and I'm like, I mean, other than the fact that you got one

It's a review unit? There's no way that you've had it for a year because the thing didn't come out until next month. So I don't understand. I mean, it's close. It's YouTuber time. You got to be first to get the views. YouTuber time dilation. That's what it's called. The thing is there's no embargo on a one year with story because who's going to say anything? It's been long enough. And I'm actually using it a little more, meaning like actually once a week instead of twice a month. So I don't know.

You charge it once a week is what you're saying. I mean, I got to update the software. All right, we need to do a deep dive. I didn't mean to do the pun, but on deep seek. We're going to try to explain all of that. Do some seeking. And the ramifications. But before we do, I want to thank this week's sponsor, which is Notion. We've been using Notion this entire episode because that's literally where the notes for every episode of Primary Tech live. I'm literally staring at Notion every

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Speaking of AI, Jason, you could not go on the internet this past week without seeing the word deep seek. Deep seek is everywhere. Deep seek. Took me a while to care about it. I had to realize what is this about? What is this for? So I'm going to try and boil down

What is DeepSeek? Why it matters? And we can talk about the ramifications. Then Jason has a great article talking about like Sam Altman's response, Meta's response, NVIDIA. NVIDIA lost $600 billion of market value because of this DeepSeek announcement and what came forth. So what is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is a Chinese created and developed LLM AI product. It's very similar to ChatGPT. It's an app you can get on your phone, at least for now, until it gets banned, a la TikTok. I mean, for real, we'll talk about privacy and security ramifications in a second. But it's an app. It's also a website. And it is a chatbot like ChatGPT that you can use to do your AI queries. So it's led by CEO Liangwing Feng.

It's two year old, and it originally was a Chinese hedge fund, which then out of it grew DeepSeek as this AI company. It is focused on AI, trying to build artificial general intelligence like OpenAI and all that kind of stuff.

But the biggest things are this kind of seemed to come out of nowhere, but it has been being developed over the past couple years. I think it was back in 2021 or 22. They did purchase a bunch of like NVIDIA GPUs and used it to build DeepSeek. But the biggest thing or the biggest point of information about DeepSeek is what it cost to train and develop, which seems significantly cheaper than what a

American AI companies has been claiming it takes. So for instance, I believe Sam Altman in OpenAI has said it took something like a hundred million dollars or something like that, or much more to train ChatGPT-4 or whatever to create that foundational model.

And deep seek is claiming it created its reasoning model, which is our one. There's also a secondary model called V3. Think of that as like chat GPT or is there a version three and chat GPT. Oh, one is deep seek our one reasoning model that it took them just about $6 million to create this large language model, which is a massive difference. And if true,

If it is true that DeepSeek created, trained, and has developed this model, which is seemingly as useful-ish, we'll get into some details in a second, as ChatGPT,

then the amount of money that AI companies here in America have been saying it takes to develop these models is way blown out of proportion. Sam Altman has been out here for the past year saying, if we just dump billions of dollars, we can create whatever. And DeepSeek seemingly did it with

about $6 million, way less than the kind of funding rounds that OpenAI has had and the kind of money they're saying it takes. This is also in light of the new Trump administration supposedly partnering with OpenAI and others to create Stargate, the AI initiative that sought to spend $500 billion with a B dollars over the next four years to develop AI models and security and all of that. And again, $500 billion dollars

is a lot of money, seemingly, again, compared to a very small amount that DeepSeek used to develop its model. So it seems like it was much cheaper and faster to develop, way seemingly faster than models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Gemini and things like that. So it's a bit of an arms race. Now, with this news, NVIDIA stock took a huge hit, 17%, which that stock has been pretty inflated over the last...

We've talked about that a lot. And some are saying maybe that was just a correction for the market and this was an opportunity for that just kind of like go down or whatever. But, and the final piece of news before I hear, I want to, Jason, hear your thoughts. OpenAI claimed that China's DeepSeek might have used results from ChatGPT and OpenAI to help train its model faster. This is a process called distillation.

This was a new word for me. Apparently this is in the AI world, but basically when I'll just read this, this is from a financial times article. The technique distillation is used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable ones, allowing them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost. The open AI is claiming deep seek might've used outputs from open AI to

to help train its model and allow it to be developed for much less money and happen faster.

Sam Altman has a problem with this, obviously, saying that DeepSeek might have, quote unquote, stolen some things from OpenAI, which the biggest irony bell rung as everyone said, wait a minute, didn't OpenAI train JetGPT on the entire internet and all the content that OpenAI did not produce? So there's that. And finally, this is a Chinese company. This is a Chinese-owned company, DeepSeek. And with it comes the same implications of things

Things like TikTok, privacy and security issues there. And also because it is a Chinese company, it is limited in how it will respond and what it will talk about. If you try to ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square, you're not going to get a lot of information there.

Some users have reported asking questions even about like President Xi Jinping, and they will see responses start coming from DeepSeek and then start disappearing in real time. Because again, being a Chinese AI startup, there is some censorship there about what it can say and what it can do. So that is what DeepSeek is. Why DeepSeek?

AI companies here in the States are a bit up in arms about it and they've all been saying things which we'll talk about in a second like Sam Altman posting a selfies with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella being like we're cool like don't worry about us and Mark Zuckerberg is quote-unquote not worried about it we'll go into their direct reactions but tell me what has been your

Just knowledge of deep sink in this past week and correct anything that I might have gotten wrong, please. I don't know that you get necessarily anything wrong. There was a lot there. There's a lot there. I think so. There's probably a couple pieces here that are worth maybe unpacking for a minute. One, why is everyone freaking out?

Right. We can talk about that for a second. And two, when by freaking out, I mean, like, why did NVIDIA lose a half trillion dollars worth of its market cap? Right. And the answer there is actually relatively simple. You're right that the sort of common wisdom has been that the

you know, NVIDIA makes basically all the chips that do all of this. And the H100s were a part of, were restricted by the Biden administration when they did the chip ban that you could not send these chips to China. And so there are reports that DeepSeek still had H100s. We don't know, like that's whatever. But semi-analysis, I think, was the publication that estimated that they had some number of them, maybe 50,000 or 11,000 or something like that. But

Deep Seek has said that they train the entire thing on H800s, which essentially are a version of NVIDIA chips that have reduced memory bandwidth. And that has been like the important piece of this is if you think about the number of tokens that you have to use to train one of these models, you need that. Like NVIDIA's secret sauce has been essentially like it's backhaul of memory, like the way that it is able to do all that. And so that's sort of like the shock to the system is like you could train a model just using these tokens.

much lower capability chips. So that's why NVIDIA stock went down because it's like, well, maybe there's something else here. What's interesting about it is, I think what this really revealed is that the entire AI industrial complex is based on this idea that more compute equals better results. And to some extent that has proven true, but we've talked on this show in the past about how it's

It seems like LLMs are just like reaching a plateau point and they're not necessarily increasing no matter how much compute you throw at them. And I think that one interesting thing from the whole deep seek situation is that this startup had to get very creative.

in ways that American companies do not have to get creative because they literally just spend $100 billion and stick more GPUs in a rack and they just brute force it, right? Whereas when you can't do that, what do you have to do? So they were able to be much, much, much more efficient in the way that they scaled the training. Now the cost, like the $5.5 million cost

DeepSeek has been clear that that was just the cost of the final training run. They had to buy GPUs. There's a lot more involved in it, but that's still an order of magnitude smaller than what has happened. Now, one of the keys to that is the distillation piece. Yes, it is ironic that OpenAI is very mad that people might have used their intellectual property to train a model. Hello, welcome to the way the rest of us have felt for the last several years. Like, either it's fine or it's not, but you can't have it both ways. And it's like,

it's a, they're like saying it's a violation of open AIs terms of, you know, terms of use. And I was like, what about my terms of, like, I never said you could change yourself out, whatever. It's a good idea. I want to come up with my own terms. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like when people post on Facebook and they're like, I hereby revoke the right for Facebook to use any of my data. Yeah, exactly. Like,

apparently that that's a real thing apparently. So no, I should make it. So if you want to reply to my email or my tweets or my posts on threads, you need to agree to my terms of service by replying to this email. Yes. So I think I, you know, deep seek got very creative in some of the ways that they train their model. And when I say creative, I mean they worked within the constraints that they had in ways that made their, their process much more efficient and,

And in ways that open AI, Google meta, whoever has not had to do like, it's interesting how like creativity thrives in, in with constraints. We tend to think of like, Oh, the more resources you have, the more, whatever you have, the more creative you'll be. No, like if you want to make a team creative, like give them nothing and tell them to build like a rocket ship or something. I love that. I harp on that concept a lot because,

Even as a, I studied music in college and a lot of times you're just given a blank staff paper and you're like, compose something. It can be like,

it's very difficult even to get started and where to go but constraint of like you can only do it in this key signature you can only use these seven notes or you can only use these chords and it's amazing how creativity can blossom given even extreme constraints and so that's like what it appears that happened here yeah and there are a lot of people who are skeptical of deep seeks claims like you clearly just had 50,000 h100s whatever whatever but you

You know, they published a white paper and the process that they detailed, you would not do if you had access to 50,000 H-100s. Now, I'm not suggesting that they do or don't. I have no idea. I'm not even an expert on any of this stuff. I'm just saying words and I don't even know what they mean. But the point is, like, they could very well just be lying.

It doesn't really make sense that they would be lying partially because if they did get access to 50,000 H-100s, it's illegal for them to have them. But it's not like the Justice Department can just show up in China and be like, give us them back. The people who would have broken the law would have been the people who sold them to them in the first place kind of a thing. So it's just – Which would have been an American company basically. Right.

named nvidia like i mean that's where they're made right it's like some guy at a case company got a hold of a bunch of nvidia it's kind of like the guy the what was it the m4 macbook pro that showed up somewhere in oh yeah in russia yeah the guy yeah exactly it's probably the same guy has a truck full of h1 h100s i don't even driving around definitely not true but the difference is

It's still going to take the massive amounts of compute to develop what they call like the leading edge of the frontier models, right? It's these... Which...

is r1 is a it's similar in comparison to o1 from open ai i hate that we have to use all these weird names because open ai just ruined everything for everyone it's just ridiculous right but r1 is based on v3 so everyone freaked out with r1 the stock market tanked basically on monday

But do you know when V3 came out? Wasn't it like, it was last year. It was, it was the day after Christmas. Day after Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. This has been out for that long and it took this long for the freak out to happen because just no one was paying any attention. Like no one cared. I mean, there were some things that happened in the inner room, like it was the holidays and then there was an inauguration and there was like all kinds of stuff going on. And suddenly it's like, Oh, look what they did over there. So there's, there's a lot of moving pieces. I think that the, the two most interesting things are one,

One, it's going to force American companies to adapt in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise. And I think that that's a good thing because the Chinese startup, you put all these restrictions on them. They have to come up with this way. And it's almost like shooting the American companies in the foot. The chip ban...

which we thought was going to be a way to limit China's capabilities to develop this kind of AI, clearly just didn't work in that way. Because they're going to just find different ways to do that. And then the second thing I feel like that this is really an indicator is it is bringing back to people's mind

the fact that there are a lot of privacy implications, even when you're using American, like the Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever. I mean, I use ChatGPT 30 times, 40 times a day. Like I'm using it constantly. I've been using it this whole time that we've been talking because there's things that I'm like, oh yeah, well, because for example, I fed their white paper into ChatGPT. I read the white paper, didn't understand any of it.

I like the title. That was it. That's the only part of the white paper I understood. And so then I loaded it into chat GPT and I'm like, explain this to me. And it does, it does a very good job. And then it'll be like, did you want to ask me questions? And I, I did. So I'm giving a lot of information to chat GPT. What I want to give that same kind of information to, um,

a Chinese startup that I really have no idea what's happening. I don't know. Probably, probably not. Right. And, and the two more factors deep seek is claiming to be profitable, which again, these are all claims to verify it. But profitability is not something that AI companies have achieved yet, mostly because they're dumping billions and billions of dollars in developing these models and

So even with a $200 a month pro subscription, ChatGPT is not a profitable product or OpenAI is not a profitable company yet. I will say I'm sure OpenAI is glad they had not gone public yet because I imagine if they had a stock on the market on Monday, it would have taken a huge hit. So profitability is something else it seems like DeepSeek is winning on. And also, correct me if I'm wrong, it's

Open source or at least partially open source. Correct. Well, so they're making it so that you can inspect like the code or whatever. And then also, if I remember correctly, they're making it available to license so that other people can build products on top of it. Right. Which again, something that open AI has not done. And so it is. Wait, you mean they're not open? Open AI? Not open source. So, you know, that's actually an interesting point though.

most of this you can blame. You can put at the foot of open AI's decision that when they, it was a 4.5 or four, whatever, whatever one they came out with, I guess it's not 4.5. They had 3.5 and then four when they're like, yeah, we're not open anymore. Had they been open, um,

Things would look a lot different. And if there's going to be an open source LLM capability out there, I think we would want it to be an American company, not a Chinese company. And so I think it was Joanna Stern. This was in context to...

Sam Altman's complaints that how dare someone scrape the internet of information or scrape our information and feed it into their thing where she talked about karma's something. And I think that like on this, at the same time, like you make these decisions, decisions have consequences. One of those consequences is there is now a Chinese LLM that's willing to be like, yeah, we're open source. Like how about it? Right. And so that's again, a new question as, as,

Are these large language models and IA companies, would it be better if they were open source? Would development happen faster? Could it be cheaper? Now, notably, Mark Zuckerberg over at Meta, their LLM, codenamed Llama, is open source.

And that is one of the reasons why Mark Zuckerberg says he isn't worried about deep seek. He also plans to incorporate whatever they find in deep seek back into llama. Now, meta doesn't have as much,

I will say skin in the game when it comes to their LLM, meaning it's not a product that they monetize. You know, you don't, there's no subscription for meta Lama. You know, it's basically in your Facebook messenger and Instagram app and creating clones of creators for Instagram DMS or whatever. So he has less to lose than a company like open AI, whose entire business is chat GPT and large language models that are generating stuff. And they, uh,

monetized by having people pay for either API access on the commercial side or for their chat GPT plus or pro subscription. So again, raises the question is an open source LLM, the future we want, and that goes against how open AI is running. Now you wrote an article about Sam Altman's response. Can you tell me about that? Well, so this was just to be clear, not the response where they're mad. This was, you know, when it first came out, he, he,

posted on X that he found it impressive and that he was invigorating and it is impressive, but it was interesting to me that it took this to motivate the CEO of a company that is taking money from customers to

This is what it took for them to be like, we should make our stuff better and we should release things faster. It's like maybe the fact that you're taking money from people should motivate you to make the products faster. But again, we've talked about this a million, like a bunch of times. There's a difference between when you are building products in order to attract investors and when you're building products for customers. And even though you might be doing the two things at the same time, there's definitely a shift in the mode. And right now they're still building stuff to get more investment, not necessarily to

Please their customers, even though they have people paying $20. Now, one thing they did do, and this is not... I didn't even reference this in the article, but they did say...

And this happened like so fast. It was amazing because they talked about they're going to make some of the O1 capabilities available like on their free tier. And then they came out after this, after R1 came out and they're like, and we're going to make it for our, for the plus plan, which is, I think that's what they call the plan that you pay $20 a month for that you will now get like, is it like a hundred queries a month or something with O1? Like basically what they're saying is they're like, we, please don't go use that. Please, please.

please don't go keep paying us the money. We will do like, but you ask yourself like,

If you can afford that inference, why weren't you doing that anyway? So like, like I know that there were probably people who listened to this, who are like, please don't use the line. Like this is what competition does, but this is what competition does. Literally. Yeah. Is what you get literally now using deep seek. So you can go on the web to deep seek.com. Try V one and R one basically for free. Just try it out.

I went to sign up via the web this morning. There's a big banner on the top of the page that says due to large scale malicious attacks on deep seek services, registration may be busy. And I was like, okay, well that sounds great. Uh, so I went, I went to the app cause you can download the app at least for now. And, uh, you can download it for free. You can use it like you use chat GPT.

And I will say, you know, one of the things I do with ChatGPT very frequently is give it a transcript of a YouTube video and ask it for a title, description, and tag ideas. I just ask it to do that. And its response to that judges how useful I find it.

And deep seek did a pretty good job. I gave it a whole video transcript. It was really long, gave me a title description, uh, gave me some chapter markers, which I'm like, I don't know how you got timestamps from a transcript, but there's no, there were no timestamps in the transcript. It's just plain text and no numbers or times, but it seemed to guess I got what the time might be and gave me a list of YouTube tags. Typically I have to ask chat GPT to give that to me in a comma separated list, but deep seek, uh,

they did it automatically. It just gave to me exactly how I want it. And, uh, bottom line, it's not bad. It's pretty good. You know, if, if you use Chattopadhyay for things you could replace with deep seek, right. At least right now. And it seems like it would give you on par responses. Um, and you've used it a couple of times. Yeah, I used it some and I just fed it the article I wrote an article I published. Um, and one of the things I've noticed is, um,

It does a good job of summarizing, but it also gives you a significantly longer summary than ChatGPT. A lot of ChatGPT summaries are like three sentences. Yeah, yeah. And this was like three paragraphs. Now, it was only like a nine-paragraph article, but the point is like... So it's like... I'm not sure how much you actually summarized it, but...

I said I didn't have time to read the whole thing, but it actually like did a pretty good job explaining the points of that article and in recapping sort of the takeaway. And I mean, like I did, it's good. It meets the standard of like, yep, it did the thing I asked it to. So exactly. Now, finally, the privacy and security concern. Again, this is a Chinese owned company, a Chinese developed AI. Again, if the tick tock fiasco recently has been any indication, uh,

The U S government might have some things to say about that. It's under investigation right now in the U S and Europe deep seek is, and it was actually removed from the app store in Italy right now. And so, uh,

If you want to download it, now's your opportunity, I guess, to see how it'll be in the U.S. app store, at least on the iPhone and Android devices. And side note, people were asking on social media what's going to happen to TikTok. I think we're still in a we don't know phase, right? We don't know. The latest news apparently is that Oracle and Microsoft are going to buy it. This is so weird. Which is, here's the thing.

That's exactly the scenario we were looking at like five years ago was that Oracle and Microsoft are going to buy it. And then we ended up with this weird project, Texas where Oracle manages like the servers in the U S and Satya Nadella went on stage. And he's like, that was the weirdest weekend of my whole life. Like they tried to get us to buy tech. Now, apparently they're back to it. I don't, I don't know. I think still the most likely scenario is that there's some kind of a weird deal that

but that weird deal isn't actually going to meet the requirements of the law. And so there's going to be an attempt to get the house of representatives to change the law and then pass the Senate so that it meets the form of the deal, but that's not going to work. And this, and,

And eventually it's going to end up in the Supreme court again. And I, I think the most likely scenario is that tick tock is, is going to end up going away. Still. I know people are gonna be mad at me for saying that. I think that's still the most light, but again, I don't think it's the only scenario. I think it's still the most likely scenario. I don't think that Microsoft can buy tick tock and,

and have that actually, again, the world is weird right now. So in a normal world, I don't think it would pass like regulatory antitrust scrutiny. Yeah.

We'll see. But anyway, that's DeepSeek. Hopefully that has explained what the big deal has been this past week, how it has shaken up American AI companies, and going forward, what it means for open, not open AI, but open source LLMs, the price to train these models, and where the money might go in the coming year. But stay tuned. We'll cover it as it develops. Real quick, a couple quick things. Mark Zuckerberg met ahead of its earnings call earlier this week.

and he wants to make Facebook great again. He wants to bring the platform and make it feel like it did back in the day. And it seems like talking about Facebook specifically, not just all the things, you know, because meta is now the company, but Facebook. So I guess maybe they'll bring the poke back. Remember the poke?

Well, you know, they are bringing, like, if you look at Instagram, they just added the feature where you can see all of the reels that your friends like. And by the way, the teens, not happy about this at all. And it just reminds me. Why are they happy about it? They're not happy about it. Right. Why not? Nobody, you don't. Okay. Do you remember when the news feed came out on Facebook? Yeah. Are you too young for that? Okay.

no, no. People were furious because now there was this public thread because it used to be that if I wanted to see what Steven Robles did, I had to go to your page. Right. But now Facebook just started aggregating all of that stuff. And all of a sudden, all of your friends could see all the posts that you liked, all the photos that you liked, all of this stuff. So now it's like, I don't necessarily want my friends to see that. I liked that real or whatever. Like, you know, it just became, maybe you just wanted to like, maybe you're a TGN.

a teenage boy and you just wanted to like the real posted by the teenage girl that you like and you didn't want everyone else to know that you did like it's it's a weird thing that's happening like we went through all of this a long time ago and now we're going through the whole thing again with a generation of people who don't remember what that was like and they're not happy uh yeah okay i get that can you turn it off can you turn off no nope oh you can't turn off does instagram let you turn anything off

You can turn off notifications. Could you turn off the stupid vertical grid, which is the thing that's really making people mad? You wrote a whole article about that on Ink, too. It made me so mad. It does. I don't, it looks weird. It is. It was the only thing left from original Instagram. I mean, I guess technically filters are left, but they're not the same, obviously. No, yeah, man. I don't think people use

anymore. Nobody uses filters, but that's because no one wants to use them anymore. But the square grid, everyone wanted like, it's the thing people probably thought about the most. What will this look like in my grid? Right. Well, people used to design like posts so that they would look like a complete, now that's broken. It's all broken now. Okay. And you have one less article here about Zuckerberg talking about

What he said on the earnings call.

And I'm sure that the instant reaction to that was he's just pandering to Trump, which is yes. Also, he's right because the biggest beef that all of these tech companies have had and part of the reason that you saw them line up behind Trump is that over and over and over again, the tech companies are being told, here's how you have to build your products. Here's how you have to design your products. Here's how you have to compete, not by American regulators, but by Europe and

And over and over again, like meta especially faced two major issues in the EU. One of them over how it, uh, you,

and processes user data. I think it's the Digital Markets Act maybe requires, it's either that or the Digital Services Act. I don't remember the difference between them, but it requires that they only store data for European users in data, but that's just not how the internet works really. Like it's very hard. So if someone in Europe likes a post of someone in the US, where's that metadata stored? Like it's just not possible. And so they got fined a whole bunch. And Metaverse,

Meta has tried to negotiate with Europe, needs the White House to help them. And the Biden administration is like, we don't... Who are you again? We haven't... Have we met? We don't... We're sorry. There's no one here who knows what you're talking about. Like, just totally pretended like nothing happened. And it's like...

that the administration should stick up for American tech companies abroad is not the same thing as saying that those tech companies, everything they're doing is good. I think my record is pretty clean on my views on Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think you can argue that I'm like a Meta evangelist, right? Like no one will ever accuse me of that. But in this case, I think he has a point. I think what he sees is that there is a very transactional president that as long as he's in the right position, he's going to be able to...

influence the administration to do things that the last administration wouldn't do. And again, I think that like the Department of Justice in the last administration was filing antitrust cases fine. Like, I don't know that I think all of that makes sense. But I think that that's where that should happen. The EU determining that the iPhone should have USB-C everywhere, that seems weird, like or that you can't, you know, AirPods should automatically work just the same with everywhere else. Like all that stuff is just kind of kind of ridiculous.

Can I just say the picture you chose for that article too, I think really encapsulates the Zuckerberg look, which is just, it's amazing. But I saw on a clip from Lex Friedman podcast, I guess Zuckerberg was on it a while ago and Lex Friedman asked him to do a real life capture. He handed him a piece of paper with a capture printed out and he said, can you circle all the bicycles? That's pretty genius.

All right. Personal tech. Talk to me about your email situation because I think you're going to make a grave mistake here. You think I'm going to make a grave mistake? That's right. Okay. There's two pieces to this email situation. One, I'm curious how people are managing their email. I'm curious what apps people are really enjoying. I'm still mostly using Spark. I play with a lot of different apps. I have used Superhuman. Really like it. Superhuman has a killer feature of...

You can, it has an AI feature built in where essentially you can talk to it like you would chat GPT, but it can answer based on your emails, which is actually super useful. You can be like, you can just ask it, what time does my flight leave for wherever I'm going? And it'll look in your emails and it'll tell you the answer. That kind of thing is great. It's like sort of the promise of what Apple has been saying. Apple intelligence is going to do to Siri, but you can actually just do it with superhuman. Right. So that's great. But I, for many, many years have had a personal email at, which is a dot Mac email and,

Should I even tell people that? Whatever. It doesn't matter. Well, don't tell them the email address. I won't tell them the email address. But I was an OG .Mac user before there was MobileMe, before there was iCloud. I paid for iWin. The best part, yes, the best part is when you walk into an Apple store and they're like, do you want me to email you this receipt? And you're like, yeah, here's my email address at Mac.com. They're like, wow.

Wow. Like they're jealous. I'm like, dude, your, your email address is at apple.com. Like, come on, you can't be jealous of this. I try to, I try to play that card sometimes if I'm in the Apple store and I'd be like at mac.com and I shoot them a look and they just,

keep typing away on their thing they don't they probably are used to it now but uh also it's funny because the reason none of them have that is they're all 26 and weren't or weren't in their email addresses when it came out although the funny the best part is if you have a dot mac email address you also have a dot me or an at me.com yeah you have them all at icloud yeah you get them all and also i said iweb before which i did use iweb back in the day but the service it was a dot mac account that you would pay for and i remember i i

I paid $99 a year for dot Mac, I think, which gave like allowed you to publish a website through I web to like apples, whatever. And that was like one of my first websites. So, but anyway, it was the dot Mac account you would pay for. So what I want to do though, is I have been slowly trying to like, I don't give out that email address anymore.

I have a Gmail address that I give out. And part of that's because Gmail has better filtering and I can just, you know, I just want anything I have to like give someone an email address, I give them my Gmail address. But what I want to do is like find a way to stop using my Mac address for anything other than like my family, my kids. So what I want to be able to do is like if I'm getting an email at that, I know that it's a priority automatically. Like because of the people who have access to emailing that.

And this has been a nightmare because like ultimately what I'd like to do is have my dot Mac email or mac.com. It's not dot Mac. I don't know why I keep saying that my mac.com email, uh,

using the mail app on the phone. And the only notifications I get from that app are from that means that those are people who should be emailing me and everything else is going to be in a separate email because everything else is a Gmail address. And so I can just put it in superhuman or spark. And I'll just know that I'm never going to have personal emails in there. So when I'm doing personal stuff, I'm never going to even be in the same app. And I don't know, is this futile, Steven? So you can, I mean,

Let me ask you this question. Does the dream make sense? I want to have an email address that only certain people can email so that I know. Because here's the thing. I get so much email every day. Hundreds and hundreds of messages. And what I want is to be able to open a different app and know this app just has the emails I care about. So here's the thing. I'm going to tell you how I use my email. And maybe it will give you a tip. So my...

Mac.com Apple address. It's also my Apple ID. And I always tell people when they set up a phone or if they're creating an Apple ID, just use Apple's default mail because it gets messy when you use like a personal Gmail or whatever for your Apple ID email. Anyway, that's the thing. I don't do anything with that email address.

All it is, is my Apple services stuff, like my Apple ID and then like Apple purchases, whatever. And that's it. I don't use it for anything else. And then I don't even have it like syncing mail to some of my devices, like because it's just receipts from like iTunes or whatever. So I don't do anything with that.

Then personally, I like to consolidate everything where I don't have to go to multiple places, which is going to seem contradictory in a second. But what I've done is I have a fast mail account, which is my personal and business email. But I prodigiously filter my emails and I do that in a couple of ways.

In Fastmail, I have many rules set up. I've talked about this rule a lot of times, but I have a rule where if the word unsubscribe or manage my email preferences, if either of those phrases are in the body text of an email, that email immediately gets sent to a folder rather than hitting my inbox. So that one filter alone cuts down on a ton of spam. Now, I check that folder pretty much every day.

But I just scroll through it quickly and see if there's anything there. And that allows me to not feel like I have to do things with those mails, but I can still see it. And then I also they sponsored my videos a long time ago, but I pay for it now. I use SaneBox and I use SaneBox both on my iCloud email and my Fastmail account.

And SaneBox does a really good job of filtering things. And then you can train it. So you can give it a whitelist of people you know, or even when you get emails, you could tell it, this person I want to put on my whitelist, always send them to my inbox. And doing that for like the past six, eight months, my inbox is really clean. I only get a couple new emails in there a day, and they're ones that actually matter.

And then typically what I will do is I'll jump into the mailboxes. I'll go to my newsletter mailbox, which where that unsubscribe filter goes. See what's there just for a second, a quick flip through it. And then I go to the SaneBox folders. One is like SaneBox later. One is SaneBox news just to see if there's anything there that I needed to do anything. And for me, I know that seems like redundant. Like, why don't you just have that all in your inbox and just deal with it all there?

For me, I operate on inbox zero. I really try to get to no emails in my inbox at the end of the day. And if those were all hitting my inbox, then I would have to take action on all of them, either deleting or sending them to a folder proactively.

or manually. Whereas in the system I have now, I can jump into those folders, quickly see the emails, reply to one if it warrants that, but I don't feel like I have to do anything after that. Those emails are living in archived folders that I just don't think about, and then I can live in my inbox where I really just see emails that I want to see. And then thirdly, I use the VIP feature

Like pretty significantly, which I don't know if Spark has a VIP type feature, but that's one of the main reasons why I use the native mail app because I can mark people as VIP. One, I'll get notifications just for those people and I'm very selective on who's a VIP and there's a VIP mailbox. So if you really wanted to, you can go to the VIP mailbox and mail and just see messages from the people you've marked as VIP.

And so rather than have like two apps or two different accounts, I basically put everything to my fast mail.

And then filter it both with mine. Unsubscribe, manage email preference filters, SaneBox also filtering it, and thirdly, VIP to really mark the important people. And that has been a good system for me recently. I think if I had, the only way this works, I've been thinking about this as you've been talking, which I was listening to what you were saying. No, no, no. But I think that the only way this works is if I created a new email address.

And only gave that to the people I actually wanted to be able to get a hold of me personally all the time. And then just left everything else alone and said, whatever, c'est la vie. Whatever happens, whatever happens, happens. Because what I want is to not have any email in that inbox that's not from a person that I actually feel like is important to hear from, not work-related. So here, I think the one false...

presupposition you might have with that, that even if you created a new email address today and only gave it out to people that you want to be in your inbox,

enough time passing that will get out there. Like you will get spam to that email address at the very least. Someone adds that email to their contact, to your contact on their phone and they download an app that asks for access to their contacts and they say, allow all your email is going to be out there. And so I, I do not believe that.

That even if you are super careful that it can't like it'll get out there eventually. It just give it enough time. So the other two things I do, my dot Mac email address, it's I've had it for a long time. And so one of the things I did was I actually forward. I have an auto forward that sends all my email from that doc Mac email to my fast mail.

So, and then that can, it still goes through all the filters because it's going through the fast mail stuff, but then I can still get like my Apple receipts or whatever in the one place and I can filter them how I want.

And I also have forwards from my personal Gmail that I had for a long time and that I attached to my Google YouTube stuff. And I will forward certain emails from there into Fastmail. And so I'm still getting the email from my longstanding email addresses in one place, my Fastmail, but they still go through all the filters. Now, the one...

bug that has been bothering me and again this is something you would have to deal with when I buy something through Apple Pay either on the web in an app or whatever like on my phone and

I've told it so many times. When you go to the settings app, you go to wallet and Apple Pay. You can set the email and phone number that is sent to a merchant by default when you make a purchase. And it does not stick. It does not stick. It always goes back to my Mac because it's my default Apple ID. And I just made a purchase yesterday.

It was to renew my stupid license tag. It was like Hillsborough County and they actually had Apple pay. I was like, Oh, I can Apple pay my registration renewal. Let's do it. And I didn't take the two seconds to look at what email and phone was being sent through the Apple pay transaction. And it defaulted back to my dot Mac.com address. And I was so mad. I was like, and then I got, and then the receipt eventually came to my inbox because it hit my Apple ID email and

It was forward to my fast mail and I saw it and SaneBox put it into a folder and I saw that it was there and I was like, okay, well, I have it in my fast mail so it's fine. But that part I try to be very careful about to make sure because it keeps going back to my .mac address for whatever reason. But that's the only monkey wrench in my system. All right. Listeners, email the other guy at primarytech.fm and I want to hear what you do. I want to know. Yes. Tell us your elaborate Rube Goldberg email machine.

That's what I have. Or we could just go select all delete. That's what I might start doing just every day. Listen, I'm not opposed. My mother-in-law, I think she has a hundred thousand emails in her hotmail. I'm like,

Interhom. Well, that explains it right there. You got to declare bankruptcy on that. You can't even. You can't even. All right. Well, let us know. You can email the other guy at primarytech.fm or email. Email us your old tech too. Podcast at primarytech.fm. We want to see it. Or you can join the community at social.primarytech.fm. That's a website.

And you can go there and there's a new post every time we publish an episode and you can comment on it. And if you have a picture of your old tech or just tell us about it, we'd love to share it on the next episode. And we're going to go record a bonus episode about my grand opening store experience. And Jason has an interesting Mac mini story. So we're going to talk about that. And if you want to listen to the bonus episodes, you can support the show at primarytech.fm. Click bonus episodes and support us there.

or you can support us directly in Apple Podcasts. Leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts too, and you get a shout out at the top of the show. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.