Welcome to In the News for July 18th, 2025.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.

Hey, Brett.

Want to wish you sincerely, Jeff, happy World Emoji Day.

Well, it's actually one day late, so it's one day World Emoji Day.

I've got the background here.

There's actually a website, worldemojiday.com.

I just wanted to say, you know, congratulations to everybody.

But here right now, my friend, is one of the reasons why July 17th is World Emoji Day.

I don't know if you know this or not.

I don't know.

But it was in 2002.

Here, I'll zoom into this right here.

That Apple announced the iCal software at the Mac World Expo in 2002.

Okay.

And as you know from your Mac, if you go to the icon for your, well, they call it the calendar app now for the Mac, right?

If you look at your calendar software icon on your Mac, what date shows on that little icon?

There you go.

July 17th.

And that is why.

And including for that, if you go to any emoji picker, like on your iPhone or on anything, and you type in and search for the emoji for the calendar emoji, what date is on that little icon?

Wow.

July 17th.

Did not know that.

Well, that's an interesting tidbit.

So thanks to Apple, as Apple is going to do, they announced at Mac World Expo in 2002 the iCal software for Mac.

And that is why today we have World Emoji Day on July 17th.

So happy World Emoji Day.

That is fascinating.

I'm sure they had no idea back in 2002 that we would be celebrating something called emoji.

They would have no idea what emoji even was.

I think this is the 10th year that they are – oh, it was created by emoji founder Jeremy Burge, which emojipedia.org is a fantastic website in 2014.

So we've been celebrating that for quite a while now.

Well, this is how you started off your post today in the news about World Emoji Day because most importantly perhaps about emojis today,

we've talked about this frequently, is when the Unicode Consortium, which is an actual organization,

they're a standards organization, that Unicodes are not just for emojis. They're the ones that

make sure that, for example, Chinese and Japanese and Korean characters show up consistently,

no matter what platform that you're using. But they also oversee the Unicode numbers for the

emojis. And so once or twice a year, they come out with new emojis. And of course, Apple adopts

them. Unicode will put forth the standard for different characters like emojis, but they can't

force platforms like Apple or Google or Windows to actually adopt them. They eventually do, right?

So now, thank goodness, we're going to have a trombone emoji along with a Bigfoot emoji. I'm

pretty excited about that one. All sorts of interesting ones. And of course, it's going to

be a while because they don't formally adopt them until September. And then the device manufacturers

figure out how to put them out there. I think that like the ones that were announced a year ago,

I think Apple finally introduced them. I want to say it was like April or March of this year.

So my guess is that if you want to use the Apple core or the Bigfoot or whatever, the treasure chest

that you're going to have to wait until spring of 2026. But it's nice. And of course, it's not just

going to be these news was going to be other ones too. I think it's hilarious that this Unicode

concordium, I'm just making this up in my head right now. I have to imagine that for many,

many years, they talked about very boring things like ASCII codes and stuff like that. And then

suddenly they are in charge of, you know, they are self-appointed in charge of emoji and now they

are, you know, influencing culture and stuff like that. And, and, and all sorts of other things and

life because Unicode is, is out there when Unicode first came out. I mean, I did sort of roll my eyes

edit. I'm like, oh, this is just something they use in Japan and stuff. But over the years,

I've gotten to the point where, you know, lots of times, you know, especially in text messages for me,

you know, sometimes the most appropriate response or the most appropriate message to

send to somebody else is just a simple emoji character. It's interesting. So I use it all

the time. Yeah. Well, Apple apparently started the trend for World Emoji Day. And so yesterday,

they kind of continued this excitement about emojis.

If you subscribe to Apple News Plus,

I think you have to be a subscriber, right?

Either on its own, Jeff,

or as part of the Apple One subscription,

which I know both you and I have,

you can now play the emoji game.

I did this this morning.

It's a little fun.

I like this.

It's just kind of embedded within the news app, right?

I think that, yeah, that's where I found it today.

So, you know, it's interesting.

You know, puzzles have obviously been around forever.

The New York Times crossword puzzle goes back forever.

But the New York Times has found that having puzzles in its app is incredibly popular.

And a lot of people subscribe to the New York Times specifically to get, you know, they purchased Wordle years ago and it's a great little thing.

And they've got, you know, Spelling Bee and the crossword, of course, and all sorts of other things.

And so a lot of people are really, you know, sort of addicted to those to those little funny little games.

And so when Apple was trying to figure out ways to make News Plus even better, of course, they did things like add food, which New York Times also has food as well.

but they decided to add games and you know at first it was simple stuff you know the version

of a crossword and their version of sudoku and stuff like that but they've tried to come up with

some original games this one i actually when i first heard it because apple first announced this

not that long ago as something that was coming up in ios 26 and then they surprised us all by

instead of having to wait for the next operating system they announced yesterday out of the blue

hey it's world emoji day so we're making this game available um but it's actually a very clever game

And if you like word games, I actually think it's not just word games because it's got a word game aspect because they have blanks and you need to guess the word for the blanks.

And so that's why I said that sort of reminds me of Wheel of Fortune.

But Wheel of Fortune will give you like a category or something, whereas they have a clue.

But Apple only shows you the first one or two words of the clue.

And the idea of it is to guess in as little moves as possible and displaying the full clue

counts as one move.

And so what you really want to do is try to guess it by not really having the clue.

You just have a clue about the clue.

So that's another aspect of it.

And then there's another aspect too, which is that at first I thought it was going to

be like, oh, okay, one of the word is going to be, I don't know, peach, and there'll be

a peach emoji.

And sometimes it is that simple.

Sometimes it'll just be a single character.

but oftentimes in fact in the two games that i've the two days that i've played the game now

for most of them it's a series of emoji that are together and the order that they put them in and

even like whether they're on top or bottom that influences you need to look at those pictures

and then guess the the concept the phrase the whatever it is um and then use that to fill in

the clues and so it's actually an interesting game on a bunch of different levels and it's far more

sophisticated than I thought it was going to be. And it's one of those games that makes you think.

I was looking at the one today. And for example, I'm not going to give away any answers, but

there was one that was, it was a bunch of people. It was like six different emoji. I'll give away

this one answer, hopefully if you haven't solved today's yet. But I'll mention it was six different

people. And I'm like, what is this group of people? Is it a family? Is it a sense of people?

And then eventually I figured out that it was, skip forward 10 seconds if you don't want the spoiler here, but the word was crowd.

I'm like, oh, so this is crowd.

Crowd, that's right.

But then you need to – so at least from that, I said, okay, crowd is five letters.

And I wasn't positive it was crowd, but I thought it was.

And so like of all the possible answers, I'm looking at which ones are five letters.

And I'm like, okay, because there's three different puzzles per day.

And I'm like, okay, so this one, it probably goes here.

So there's actually a lot of thought that goes into it.

And, you know, this is something that it could take some time and, you know, you can make it easier for yourself because you can, you know, use a move to reveal the full clue that makes it easy.

And then, of course, if you're not sure, you can take an emoji or a set of emoji and just drag it over.

And if you're wrong, it just counts as a move.

And then you'll know it doesn't go there.

So if it doesn't go up here, maybe it goes down here.

So you can do it that way, too.

I, you know, we'll see how it works.

But I think this is a clever game and it really makes you think on a bunch of different levels.

You have to think about words.

You have to think about pictures.

You have to think about concepts.

So whoever Apple came up with this, bravo.

I mean, you came up with a nice casual game that is unique.

And the concept of emoji is fascinating to me because as this game shows you, an emoji

can mean so many different things.

Is it the literal word?

Is it the concept?

Of course, we all know, speaking of the peach emoji, for example, it could be the delicious

fruit. But many times in our parlance, we know that because the peach emoji sort of looks like

somebody's rear end, that people use it for that well. And so the idea that a single emoji could

have different connotations, I think it's interesting as a lawyer from a litigation

standpoint. And if you don't mind talking about this for just a minute, I know you did a presentation

yesterday on this. I did.

Because as lawyers, we are often dealing with, did somebody agree to a contract? Did somebody

insult somebody in like a discrimination or a plumbing case. You know, what was the intent?

You're always trying to figure out someone's intent. Was the crime, if you're a criminal

attorney, which I'm not, was it an intentional crime or was it negligent? Those are all incredibly

important concepts. And oftentimes, you know, as lawyers, you can't get in someone's head.

And so what you have to do is look for the evidence of it, you know, which is often documents.

And so through the discovery process in a civil case, we're trying to figure out what did they

write? You know, what is the smoking gun letter, as it were? And, you know, I always remember an

infamous example that I remember learning when I was in a first year in law school, that there was

some, and I forget the facts of the case, but it was something that was supposed to be, you know,

very underhanded and fraudulent. And what they found through discovery was a letter that said,

you know, here's what you need to do and destroy this afterwards. And there was actually like a

matchbook attached to the letter, because the idea is that you would burn the letter like in a movie

after you're done reading it.

And through the discovery process in the case,

they had actually found, filed away the letter

with the matchbox still attached to it.

It's like, wow, this is like the smoking,

not the smoking gum, smoking letter.

But from an emoji standpoint, you have this issue of,

if somebody sends this character, what does it mean?

And I'm gonna let you pick up here

because the thing that makes it tough is,

as we just discussed, the consortium says,

We're going to have a picture of a peach, but different people can do the peach and make

it look different ways.

I mean, you don't necessarily have to have a peach that shows like a line down the middle

that could be interpreted as, you know, someone's rear end, but it just depends upon how different

platforms do it.

And that has consequences.

I mean, talk about that.

Yeah, it's a fascinating fact.

It was amazing that yesterday was World Emoji Day and I was invited to give a presentation

on how emojis are used or how you should be aware of it as a lawyer in like litigation matters for

all the reasons that you just went through uh jeff which which is you know until you stop and think

about this a little bit it really is a little crazy like here i'm going to bring up one um

emojipedia.org is a fantastic resource for some of these things and it's been out for a while and

actually this is the the founder of emojipedia is the one that kind of is behind world emoji day as

well. But like, for example, if we go and find, like, let's go and find the peach emoji here,

when we search for this, you can jump into this. And one of the great things about this is that

it'll show you, first of all, how the emoji has evolved over the years, right? Because we have

such better resolution. So I call this in my presentation, like some of the technical

challenges or things that you should be aware of is that it may have looked different several years

ago depending on that communication but it also goes through and shows what this particular emoji

would look like on an apple iphone versus an android phone versus even a samsung phone you

can see there's just slight differences there in many cases that's not going to matter too much we

can kind of see that that's a peach but in some cases even those slight variations could mean

something just a little bit different or you know like you said like you were pointing out like some

of them don't have the same line all the way through. Yeah. So it would not, it would not be

something sexual if you sent the old version of it. And yet if somebody sends it using one platform

and somebody reads it using a different platform, that has an impact too. Um, it's just, it's very

interesting. Just that evolution thing. And then quickly on emojipedia.org is also, if you're

interested in this, this is where they show the Unicode code. And then of course we have the short

code as well. You can see here the Unicode name for the peach emoji is peach, but they also have

an also known as the bottom or the butt emoji. So, you know, to your point, it's just like,

what did somebody mean? So now we go into like the interpretive challenges, right? And like,

if I sent that to my wife, that might mean something different than if I send a peach emoji

to you, you know, it's that kind of a thing is like, what did the sender intend when they sent

that emoji on whatever platform that they were using? And then how did the recipient receive that?

Like, how did they interpret that? And, you know, this goes into even there's a there's a criminal

case where two men sent a Facebook message where there were just three emojis. It was a like a fist

emoji and there was a pointing emoji and there was an ambulance emoji. And these two men were

detained because that was perceived as a threat to this one person that they sent this to that

We're going to beat you up so much so that you're going to have to go to the hospital in an ambulance.

Like, so, you know, that could have just been somebody saying, hey, I hurt my wrist, so I'm going to go to the doctor and check it out.

Right. But in some cases, depending on how that's perceived.

And in this case, it was perceived as a threat.

And so that to me is just, you know, interesting from those perspectives, from the technical side, the interpretive side, just to all the points that you were making.

And then for our little neck of the woods, when it comes even to the legal side, you know, how does that look?

We were just looking up a case, for example, that, you know, as most people know, lawyers have been using Times New Roman fonts.

And there's a very prestigious looking way that like certain court opinions are listed.

And in some cases, that font may not be able to produce a visual representation of that emoji.

And so while we're reviewing documents, for example, maybe case all that kind of a thing, it may not have the same impact.

So just some really fascinating stuff on there.

Not to mention the fact that there's cultural issues.

You know, the thumbs up emoji in the United States means one thing.

Doesn't mean the same thing in other countries across the world or like the OK symbol.

You know, it's those kind of things.

Like even from a generational standpoint, different emojis can mean different things.

From a cultural standpoint, just a lot of things to kind of keep in mind that, you know, if you're curious about these things, emojipedia.org is a fantastic resource.

But, you know, as you start thinking about these things, it's like, oh, yeah, there could be some confusion on that.

Not to mention, though, we still like the fun part of all of this with the trombone and a Bigfoot emoji, too.

That's true. Two more things I'll mention about it. We can move on.

One of them is that you were just telling me before we started the air an example of a case where emojis had some impact.

I'll just mention for folks that are listening, the case is Emerson versus Dart, which is the U.S. Sixth Circuit case.

And the citation is 900 F3 469.

But in that case, there was a supposedly threatening note that was sent to someone and it says, have them believing their own.

And then it was the poop emoji.

OK, and we all know what the poop emoji is.

But it's just interesting that when I pulled up that decision on Westlaw right now, what they have instead of an emoji icon, they actually have it's like an image.

It's in it's in black and white.

It it I mean, I know it's the poop emoji, but like it it almost looks like a triangle or something.

I don't know.

It doesn't carry the same impact looking at this version of it as I'm sure it did in the

actual text.

And it just goes to the issue of having different things.

And I also think it's interesting because, and this is your area of expertise.

I mean, Brett, you've been advising lawyers for decades now on e-discovery.

And so if you collect thousands and thousands of documents in a lawsuit and use whatever

computer system you're going to use to search for the smoking gun or whatever, you can't

just search for the words of like, you know, I agree to the contract. You have to be smart enough

to know I need to search for a thumbs up emoji because there's actually case law that says that

you can agree to a contract, of course, through your words by saying I agree or by just simply

sending a thumbs up. That can be enough too. And because that is shown in different ways,

you need to make sure that you have a computer system that displays the thumbs up emoji that

knows how to search for that. This is something that if a lawyer doesn't know, doesn't keep this

you could miss important evidence as a result it's a really interesting topic yeah well i'm glad you

think so i mean obviously you and i here i pulled up the actual case actually oh you can see it now

there you go i mean the poop emoji to me that looks like a cinnamon roll or like like a baked

croissant or something like that right and and again this is actually from like the published

opinion united states court of appeals i mean that looks so official right with i don't know what you

call that gothic looking font a lot of times but you know the point that you were just making there

is so relevant. It's like, that does not look like a poop emoji. I mean, I guess I can see it,

you know, if I interpret it, but if I was just reading this and didn't know about the case,

I wouldn't know that on there because it doesn't look like what I would typically consider.

Apparently the official names of this is pile of poo, by the way, we call it the poop emoji,

but the Unicode official name is pile of poo, otherwise known as poop or poo. But you can see

that, that, you know, to your point quickly, in some cases, depending on how you're viewing this,

You may not be able to search for pile of poo or even poop.

You may be able to only search if you knew the actual Unicode number or the way they call it the code point.

But it's just having some of that information there, especially, you know, for the neck of the woods that we move in.

It's so important on there.

If somebody says to you, you know what?

You are a pile of U plus 1F4A9.

Doesn't quite have the same impact.

Doesn't quite have the same impact.

So anyway.

Okay.

Enough about emoji. It's a fascinating topic.

Speaking of what you might find in the dirt, let's go to some rare earth metals.

And why in the world are we all talking about rare earth metals today?

Well, they've been around for a long time.

These are actually metals that maybe you can say it better.

They're not actually rare in the sense that we can't find them.

It's just that they're rare because it takes a lot of work to dig them out of the ground once you find them on there.

But Apple has been in the news and helping to maybe bring, I think, one of the things are coming to Fort Worth, right?

They're going to bring a rare earth either processing plant or an actual mine to the United States.

And that's a pretty important thing, I think.

Yeah, it's something that they use a ton in consumer electronics.

The Department of Defense uses it a lot.

I mean, this is actually a critical thing.

And again, what was fascinating to me, I did not know before this hit the news this week.

I've heard that phrase rare earth metals, rare earth magnets.

I just assumed that they were hard to find because of that word rare.

And it was only after I did a little research that I found out it's not that they're hard to find.

It reminds me of playing the game Minecraft.

If you ever played that, you know, you can find ores in Minecraft, but it just takes time.

And the same is true here.

And so it just turns out that over the decades, China happens to have the equipment and the processes to find these metals.

I mean, it's not that they're only located in China.

They're located all over the place.

And so they've got like for rare earth magnets, and I know magnets are incredibly important for

delicate electronics for a number of reasons. You know, they're selling like 90% of the ones

around the world. And, you know, there's always the issue, you know, obviously this is an issue

for the Trump administration, but even aside from politics, it's always dangerous to put all of your

eggs in one basket because what if there's some supply disruption or international tensions or

whatever it is, you know, you would want to have a diverse set of suppliers and Apple and other

electronics companies don't have that for rare earth magnets. And so there's this one company

in the US that is, I think they do both, they do both recycling so that you can recover them from

used electronics. And then they also do some, you know, quote unquote manufacturing that, you know,

dig them up and find them and stuff. And so there were two stories recently, one, the Department of

Defense invested a whole lot of money. And then also Apple announced that they're spending $500

million. And again, this is $500 million. It's like they were going to pay money for these things

anyway. But by investing in this company in the United States, they are helping to build their

plants. They're making sure that when they produce the rare earth magnets, it's going to be two Apple

specifications. So it's exactly what Apple needs for its products, which of course is one of the

reasons Apple is so successful with its processors is that it makes its own processors. It doesn't

rely upon a company like Intel anymore or Motorola, so they can be custom for what they need for their

products, which just makes them more efficient and everything else. And so, you know, it just seems

like if this is a win-win-win for apple across the board i mean such a wise investment and that

it's going to take you know some time for this all to to happen you know the place in texas i think

they said might be open in 2027 or at least have its initial production you know so this is a

long-term investment but over time i think people are going to look back and say this was really

smart for apple to do to have a little control over its destiny for something that is really

important and then of course you know apple what they really like to do is use recycled things

because Apple, you know, they care about environment, I think, for the two reasons.

You know, one is it's the right thing to do for the world, you know, the green reason.

But then there's also the you can actually be more efficient.

You know, isn't that the best of all worlds when you're doing things that are better for

the environment and you're also saving money?

Again, that's just the big win-win.

And they want to do that here.

So I just think it's an interesting story because we don't often see the behind the

curtain things of, you know, what Apple does at the processing manufacturing level.

We just see the end result. Like I've got my new iPhone here, but I don't, you know, all the things that went inside of it, I don't necessarily know all about that unless stories like this come out.

The optimist in me, Jeff, is very happy. I mean, this is great. This is just, of course, why wouldn't you do this to protect some of those sources that you need to do?

Obviously, I'm a huge fan all the time of the recycling aspect, but a little bit of the pessimist to me is like with all of the political ups and downs and upheavals and everything, I feel like good on Apple for just at least making an announcement.

Right. Who knows what's going to happen when it comes to this?

I've heard some people talking about this about this on another podcast.

But, you know, five hundred million dollars.

I mean, you know, that's that's just out of Tim Cook's couch, I'm sure.

Right, right, right.

The cushions.

And it's like, but, you know, be that as it may, the optimist is a stronger current here.

I'm glad that they're, I feel like they had to do, even if it's just an announcement,

who knows what's going to happen in two years, four years, five years down the road.

I hope that some of this comes to fruition.

But even if it doesn't, I feel like it's a smart move on Apple's part, at least to just

make some kind of announcement, you know, so that they stay in good graces with whatever

powers might be out there.

Yeah, this would probably be a bullet point on a slide in a prior administration.

And the Trump administration, Apple's going to make a big deal about it and get some, you know, but that's the political aspects of it.

Who cares about that? Bottom line is they're doing something good.

OK, well, let's go to some more good stuff from Apple.

I, I was 26 and all of the things that are going to be happening with with hopefully in just a few months now, maybe two or three months even.

Let's specifically focus on watch OS 26 because they're all going to be 26 right now.

I have been wearing my Apple Watch Ultra now for, I guess it's going to be about three years, Jeff.

I didn't upgrade to Ultra 2, although this story makes me feel like I've either got to upgrade to Ultra 2

or just continue to pray and hope that Apple is going to release an Ultra 3 because I am ready right now.

We talked about this and all of the things we've been talking about with iOS 26 and WatchOS 26.

One of the things is there is going to be a wrist flick feature in watchOS 26, which is cool.

Now, this isn't the first time they put like actual gestures.

You know, there's like the I think you talked about the double tap gesture and there's some other things that you can do.

But I am actually pretty excited about this wrist flick feature where you can flick away notifications so I don't have to like touch it with my finger.

I know you've talked about touching it with your the tip of your nose.

I am so excited about this, but I am so hesitant because it's like I'm constantly flicking my wrist.

Like, I don't want to just dismiss things, you know, without even knowing.

So we'll see how this goes.

But I'm just generally excited for all things coming to the Apple Watch.

Yeah, the story we had talked about weeks ago because Apple announced it at its WWDC conference.

What I did not know until reading this article from Tim Hardwick this week was that to take advantage of the feature,

you have to have one of the newer Apple Watch models, which is the Apple Watch Series 9,

10, and Ultra Watch 2. That was new news to me. And I think about this because I currently am

wearing an Apple Watch Series 10. But before I was using this, I was using, I think it was the 7

beforehand because I don't get an Apple Watch every year because they don't have that many changes

year to year. But I remember when I made the upgrade a year ago, knowing that when Apple Watch

nine had come out that it had the double tap gesture. And I remember thinking to myself,

like for an entire year, that was a gesture that people that had the series nine could do,

and I could not do. And I was wondering if it would be helpful or not, but I will tell,

I'm here to say that now that I've had this watch for, you know, not quite a year yet.

I actually use the double tap feature a lot. I might be, I mean, just for, to pick one example,

I'm doing something in the kitchen and believe me, I do very little in the kitchen. I'm a horrible

cook, but you know, I'll have something on the stove and you've got a timer, right. But I'm also

listening to a podcast with my AirPods. And so if I look at my watch, it's going to show me my,

the thing that's showing is the little, uh, the smart stack thing for my, uh, my podcast app for

overcast. But what I actually want to see is the timer, like how much time is left. And so I'll

just look at my watch and I'll do the little tap tap and it moves it up one till I get to the timer.

And then I can see, Oh, I'm doing it right now. Yeah. Okay. I see. So I have three minutes left

or whatever it is in the timer. And it's nice because I might be, I can do something else with

my right hand, it's a useful thing. So I know the double tap gesture is useful, which is what makes

me look for, I'm glad that I have a series 10 because that it will also support this feature,

which, you know, is useful for the reasons that you just described. So, you know, Apple is always

looking for reasons to encourage people to upgrade. And so now, and I'm sure there'll be a new version

of the Apple watch that comes out this fall too. They typically announce a new one here, but you

know, for people that have been holding onto an old model, you'll have two reasons to update,

You know, you'll get that double tap gesture that you might not have yet.

And you'll get this wrist gesture that you might not have yet.

So, so interesting.

I'm glad to hear that it makes that double tap gesture makes the difference.

Cause I wanted to ask that as a follow-up because I mean, I could see it happening.

I know there's some things I can do on my watch and I'm just like, I may have tried it once or twice.

And then it was like, okay, it's not that big of a deal.

But if it is something that you're incorporating every day, that's encouraging to me.

And I think that we'll just have to learn how the wrist flick feature is going to work and I'll just adjust.

and that'll be a good thing.

It's not essential, but it's nice to have and I do use it.

So, yeah.

Let's stay on the watch for another story.

I remember we talked about the research app on your iPhone

several months ago, which I didn't know about.

So I appreciate the fact that you introduced that to me.

And I remember we specifically talked about a study

that you are currently in right now

that basically just tracks certain things, right?

You could probably do a better job of explaining that.

But we have some results from a former Apple Watch study now, which is pretty interesting.

Yeah.

So the research app, if you haven't used it yet, I encourage you to check it out.

I mean, you're not going to get any immediate rewards from using the app, but it's just a way for you to be a part of science because you download the app.

I can't remember if it's pre-installed or if you have to download it.

But anyway, it's an Apple app.

It's called Research.

And it will tell you the available studies.

And you can decide whether you want to participate in any of them or not.

And back in 2019, Apple started this study called the Apple Heart and Movement Study,

where Apple got together with, who did they do it with?

One of the research institutions, the Brigham and Young Women's Hospital.

I think I spelled it wrong in my post today.

But, and so they had a bunch of smart scientists get together and say, what information can

we get about how you move and cardiovascular issues based upon what the Apple Watch can

measure?

And, you know, if you just have a few people, you could only do so much, but like when you do a study, you want to have like a lot and a lot of testers.

And the nice thing is if you've got thousands, hundreds of thousands of Apple watch owners that are just deciding to participate in the study, you can start to, to figure things out, to do correlations.

We've talked about this in the past.

I mean, in general, but now we have some concrete results.

So that Apple heart movement study, it started in 2019, it ended in 2015.

So it was, you know, a little over five years.

And based upon that, they were able to draw some interesting conclusions.

So they could say, like, based upon these factors, can we predict that somebody is going

to have an infection?

And it turned out that 72% of the time they can.

It's not 100%, but it's something.

And the one that was most interesting to me, and I guess this was the headline story, is

pregnancy.

You know, if you think you might be pregnant, you can, of course, go to the pharmacy and

pick up a pregnancy test.

and those are supposed to be like 99% effective.

Every once in a while, there's a false positive

or a false negative, you hear those stories,

but they're pretty good, right?

Or 99%.

But you don't even have to actually go to the store

because Apple has determined that just based upon

the different things that they measure about,

in this case, a woman's body,

and I'm sure it's everything from,

I don't even know all the medical things of what it measures.

I'm sure it has something to do with temperature

and cycles and stuff like that,

but they can predict with 92% accuracy,

I think you're pregnant, which is interesting.

And, you know, I hope that they do even more.

I mean, that you may have diabetes.

They can predict that too.

And that was just that one study.

Apple was got such good early information

from that initial study that the current study

that they're doing,

and this is one that you can enroll in now if you do it.

It's called the Apple Health Study.

And as you can tell from the name,

I mean, that's pretty generic sounding, right?

Apple Health, and it's purposeful

Because in this newest study, Apple is basically saying, you know, we know that this is a good idea.

Let's do it across everything.

And so it's all sorts of aspects of your health that they are asking you questions about.

And it's all sorts of aspects.

It's like everything you can monitor with an Apple Watch.

It's things that you might put into your health app.

Now, it's all anonymized, of course.

So no one's going to know what your particular health situation is.

You're assigned a unique identifier ID and no doctor is going to know who you are.

But the idea is that when there's, you know, there's only so much you can find about a Jeff Richardson or a Brett Burney.

But if you've got thousands of Jeffs and thousands of Bretts and you look at all of this study over time, you can find interesting information that wearable technology, whether it's from Apple or Samsung or somebody else, you know, what are things that they can predict?

So I like participating in the study because I mean, it's very like I want to say once a month I get an alert saying we've got like 15 new questions for you to answer.

And I'm happy to do that. And a lot of the stuff I don't even have to answer the question.

It's just getting data directly from my Apple Watch and that's fine. So it's in the background. I don't know what's going on.

And I feel like this is going to result in who knows what kind of interesting things.

and in the next five years, 10 years, who knows, you know, Apple is going to hopefully come out

with a better product that takes advantage of this. And I will want to buy that product.

And so, you know, I see nothing. Plus it's, you know, you're contributing to science,

you know, why not? So I've always thought that in theory, this is a good idea. And now that Apple

has released its early results, which they said that haven't been peer reviewed yet. So, I mean,

they're still early stages, but we're starting to see results of something that started in 2019

and you know great it's it's it's doing exactly what we hoped it would do which is great news

i had not downloaded the apple research app so you do have to download it okay i wasn't remember i

wasn't sure so here's the thing i i went and just did a search you know in my iphone and i did for

the word research it didn't come up but it did come up into the settings so i think you have to

first go to the settings and turn on your research sensor and usage data or maybe even know that the

apple well maybe if you get the apple research app maybe it tells you yeah because right now

in the settings it says no data is being collected well i downloaded the apple research it's literally

called apple research um it's so well done jeff like i i remember when we talked about this but i

didn't uh download it and start it but i can go in you can see the current studies as you said the

apple health study apparently there are two other open uh studies right now the apple women's health

study and the Apple hearing study. And it gives you all the information and you can just select

which one you want to join. And I haven't gone through all the whole thing in here. But I think

like you said, you have to fill out the profile a little bit or you have to answer some questions

in there. But just really well done. I feel like this doesn't get enough attention from people.

Like there's got to be a whole crew at Apple that's just working on this research app,

obviously in conjunction with, you know, in some cases, it's Brigham Young, like you said,

or University of Michigan and the World Health Organization.

That's just really neat.

And it's a free app, obviously.

You just got to decide how much information you want to share on that.

Good stuff.

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out.

Okay, let's go back a little bit to iOS 26

and more specifically the Map app in your iPhone now.

This is a good article, 9to5Mac from Chance Miller.

Apple Maps is hiding iOS 26 most useful new feature.

I'm glad that it's opt in.

You don't have to do it, but it's good if you want to.

So we may have discussed this from WWDC,

but Chance Miller has done a deep dive on it.

The feature is this.

Apple Maps knows where you are at all times.

Obviously you give it that permission.

And so if it notices that you are at a particular establishment,

you know, the restaurant ABC, whatever,

if you decide to do so,

You can tell the app once you get iOS 26 this fall to keep track of those things.

And then in the future, if you're like, gosh, when was it that I had dinner at that restaurant?

Or when was it that I went to that store in the French Quarter in New Orleans or whatever it was?

You'll be able to say, oh, okay, well, the Apple, the map app can tell me when I was there.

You were there on this day between this time.

And this is all stored locally on the device.

It's not shared with Apple.

So it's completely private to you.

There's a way that in the past, you can actually go in the iPhone in settings, it was under privacy, and you could see frequent places.

And I've actually used it in the past.

And I'm like, oh, gosh, when was it that I was in Lafayette, Louisiana to do something?

Okay, that's when it was.

And so, but now it's going to, they've made it formalized and it's going to be part of the app.

So I'm looking forward to it because, I mean, I trust it.

I trust, you know, my iPhone to be secure.

Apple's famous for that.

And again, it's not the sort of thing that I'll probably use right away.

But I can totally see a time where I will go back in time and look things up.

I am, you know, right now, oftentimes, if like my wife and I will go out to restaurant to go out to dinner at a cool new restaurant, I will I will note that in my calendar.

Not that I need to have it on my calendar because I know we're doing it.

But the reason I do it is not for today.

I'm doing it for the future, because three years from now, my wife and I might be at a dinner party talking with somebody.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember we went to that restaurant.

And I will I will search my calendar for the name.

And like, oh, yeah, we went there in August.

plus I will often scan the receipts and keep them because if I really want to get a deep dive,

I can actually on my iPhone, pull up the receipt and say, Oh, that's right. You got the chicken

Marsala and it was really good at whatever it is, you know, whatever the thing is. And so,

because my brain, I don't remember that stuff. Some people have this amazing photographic memory.

I I'm jealous of those people, but my iPhone is my extra brain and it will remember those details

that I forget. So I am all about this feature and I'm, I was glad to hear chance do the deep

dive on how it's going to work. Yeah. I remember, like you said, that location setting, I used to

talk about that quite a bit, uh, before the maps kind of track this, I think they call it significant

locations now. So it's more sort of aggregated and summarized, whereas this in Apple maps,

if you decide that you do want to turn it on, it's going to be a little bit more specific,

which I think is going to be helpful. And frankly, like you said, it's useful. It's just,

it's good to kind of go back and see, uh, you know, sometimes if you want to research where

you were where do you eat that that kind of a thing let's talk ipad real quick we won't have

spent a lot of time on this ipadproductivity.com which is a really good blog i think you've linked

to it a few times here it is uh great tips essential ipad tips for beginners and pros i thought

uh i know the gentleman is matt i don't know his full name here that runs this blog but i thought

this was a really great collection of ipad tips which work currently with ios 18 right now you

You don't have to wait to iOS 26 for a lot of these.

I think I pretty much knew most of these,

but again, as we always talk about,

just nice reminders.

Yeah, I believe his name is Matt Daly

and he and his brother run this website.

Oh, good.

What's fun about this particular post

is that he has 20 tips.

10 of them are for beginners

and then this 10 of them are for pros.

So it's a little bit of something for everyone.

So when you skim through it,

there's a decent chance that you might know

all 10 of the beginner tips.

know, it doesn't mean you're taking advantage of it. You might be a good reminder, but once you get

to the pro tips, there's going to be some of them that you might not necessarily know about. And, um,

any one of these would be the sort of tip that we might have are, you know, are, are in the no

section. I'll mention, I'll mention two of them because I actually did not know, or at least think

about them. Um, the number 10 on his pro tips. So the very one at the bottom of the article is one,

it's called a security pro tip. And the issue is this, you know, how sometimes you might have your

iPad, maybe I'm a conference or something like that. And my iPad is just sitting there on a table

and, you know, I keep an eye on it, but I might get up to go somewhere else. And like, do you want

someone to be able to come over to your iPad intentionally or accidentally and like see on

the lock screen, what information could they see and access maybe accidentally, or maybe they were

trying to do something nefarious. And you can control that in the control panel. It's in the

face ID and passcode section, there's a section called allow access when locked. And you can decide

what shows up when your iPad. And of course the iPhone has this too. What shows up on the lock

screen? For example, do you want your notifications to show up there? Do you want your live activities?

Now I do want things, those things to show up because I actually do find them useful to have

them on my lock screen. But one of them that he has turned off and I see that I had to turn off.

So maybe that's their fault, but it was the control center. You can allow somebody to get

into the control center just from your lock screen. But that's a little dangerous because

what they could do from the control center is they could, for example, if they were looking to steal

your iPad, turn off Wi-Fi, turn off cellular access, if you have a cellular one. And so once

your iPad is essentially in like an airplane mode, you would not be able to track it by Find My. So

they could steal it and take it to somewhere. And so that's one that, number one, I'm never going to

use the control panel from my lock screen. At least I haven't in the past. And number two,

So nothing, I gain nothing from having that access.

And it just presents risks if a bad guy is clever and knows how to use this.

And so I was, that wasn't a good tip to know about, but you might want to take a look at

all of those settings and look at that.

Yeah.

Do that on your iPhone as well.

I would say that security pro tip is great for the iPhone.

I just checked it.

I made sure on my iPhone, I had that turned off as well.

You just don't need access to the control center, or it's just another area where that

could be something that could get, you know, get you in trouble. All right. So what's, what's

another one? And I'll just mention one more, which was number seven on his pro list. And this is

something that, you know, when you first set up, when you first set up a new iPad or iPhone,

you have a, you have an option of, do you want the standard like screen space or do you want to have

things zoomed in a little bit more? Which sometimes people do in their iPhone and make it easier to

see. But he was just pointing out that, you know, usually you'll see this when you first set up your

new device and then you'll forget about it and never change it for years and years.

So his reminder is go into, I think this is also in the settings.

There's an app called more space.

It's under display and brightness.

And for the iPad, there's at least for the iPad pro, maybe all of them, there's three

different settings.

And so you've got the default, which is what I'm using.

You have one called larger text where all of your icons are bigger.

The words are bigger.

You know, this just makes it, especially if you have vision issues, things are a little

easier to see.

So you might want that.

But then there's another one called more space, which makes everything smaller.

If you've got really good vision and you want, you know, let's make things smaller so that

I can essentially see more different things on my screen at one time, this will be useful.

And I know that even on computers, you can adjust, you know, how big and small things

are on your computer screen so that you can get what seems like more space without getting

a larger display.

And I think that this is a very timely tip because this fall with iPad OS 26, we're

You're going to have the ability to have multiple windows.

You can place them wherever you want.

You know, people, power users, I think are going to be having more things and more places.

And you might decide if the text is not too small for you.

And again, you know, maybe you find that it is.

But if your eyesight's good enough that it's not too small, you might want to turn on the

more space feature when you've got windows all over the place.

You know, it makes the iPad like even more like a computer.

It's at least something to think about.

So I was glad to be reminded of this tip because I totally forgot that this was in there because, again, you said it and forget it.

And so now it's got me thinking.

I'm on the default right now.

I'll probably stay on the default for the time being, but I'm glad that I'm at least thinking about it.

We talked about the watch, Apple Watch Ultra.

Let's talk about CarPlay Ultra.

This is really only relevant for those of you that might have a brand new Aston Martin that can play the CarPlay Ultra.

but you know what I liked about this story because we've talked about carplay ultra before this is

sort of like that next level up if you know from just regular carplay on one screen you can have

stretch across multiple screens but what I really just took away from this kind of skimming this and

looking at these amazing pictures here this is on Aris Technica from uh Michael uh Hinkle these

it just continues to encourage me with my my eventual carplay fantasy Jeff which is I just

want the physical car to be a shell and when I get in I want it to connect to my iPhone and all of

the computer screens are controlled from my iPhone and just listening to this which is a fantastic

review and wonderful lots and lots of photos in here but I was like yes like that's what I want

I want it to be basically a Apple car, which is just basically from the inside, like everything

that I interact with inside the car.

I want that to be Apple CarPlay.

And so it was just great to see sort of this in-depth review here too.

Yeah.

And the reason this is such a useful review or an interesting review is that, as you said,

Brett, nobody has access to this.

I mean, who has a brand new Aston Martin?

I suspect it's probably less than 50% of the people that listen to this podcast, I would

say, have that.

But anyway, so what I've seen so far is there have been one or two YouTube reviews by people

that had access to an Aston Martin for like a couple hours and they've done the review.

And those have been very interesting.

But this is somebody who's actually used it for an entire week.

So he really got a chance to, you know, excuse the analogy, kick the tires on it and see how

it works.

And so it's very detailed.

I mean, this is the most in-depth review that I've seen with pictures and everything else.

And again, how long will it be before you and I have a car that supports CarPlay Ultra?

Probably a while.

But, you know, it's coming in the future.

And, you know, in some ways, it's a good thing.

You know, let Apple continue to improve it over the next two or three years.

You got to put it in the wild so that you can start to improve it.

And then when I get my car that supports this in, you know, five years or whatever it is,

then it will be much more mature than it is today.

And so this is just my little preview of the future.

This is the software, basically, like the Mac operating software.

And Apple has historically always done the hardware as well.

That's why we have the iPhone.

Apple takes care of the hardware and the software.

When on Mac, Apple takes care of the hardware and the software.

Not true with a lot of other, like Windows computers, for example.

And I think when we were talking about this Apple car, the actual car, so many people were just talking about the physical aspect of that.

And, you know, famously, Apple has sort of said, we're not doing that anymore.

And I'm glad that they are continuing to focus on this.

But here's the thing, Jeff, we talked about this as well.

I think I could have my Apple car, which is really more on the software side than I'm thinking of, except that it's the car manufacturers that get in the way, right?

Thankfully, Aston Martin, which honestly kind of puts me in that realm of I could maybe buy an Aston Martin if that's the only option that I have.

But it's like, thankfully, they have collaborated with Apple to create this.

And I just hope that this is a harbinger of like, you know, come on, car manufacturers.

Like we can we can all get in on some of this and make folks like me and Jeff even happier on that.

Indeed. Quick walk down memory lane.

Fantastic article from a gentleman that has been working at Apple or he was hired at Apple on October of 1995.

This is John Calhoun. And it's funny as we go through some of the stories you'll explain in just a moment.

We still see some of his work even today in the applications that I use on my Mac.

Yeah.

When John Calhoun was in college, he created an Apple shareware.

I say app.

We didn't use the word app at the time in the 1980s.

It was a little game called Glider that you can hold a paper airplane and you can go up

and down.

And again, it was a shareware for a while.

And then it was eventually a purchaser became part of a company called Cassidy and Green.

Cassidy and Green purchased, they sold a bunch of different software titles for the Mac for decades.

In fact, there was one program that they sold that you may have heard of called Sound Jam.

If you don't remember Sound Jam, you may know it by its different name, iTunes, which is after Apple purchased it.

Because so when Apple had the, they wanted to have a music player, they purchased Sound Jam.

So, I mean, that's Cassidy and Green, but, and that's his glider game.

So he sort of, you know, became, got a little bit of notoriety.

This was actually picked as like, I think that Macworld picked Glider as it's like game of the year in the early 90s.

And so he got a job at Apple in right around 1995, frankly, back in the time period when Apple's future was very uncertain.

And he worked there for about 25 years.

He's retired now.

And one of the things that he did there is he was given the task of doing a color picker.

And so he did it.

You know, he describes in this article how he, you know, of course, he had like a, I say, of course.

I mean, it's obvious now because we've been using this for decades.

He had a color wheel that you could pick the color and the intensity, the light through that.

And then he also had one with like the RGB values.

And just on his own, he thought to himself, you know what?

It might be sort of fun to have a bunch of crayons, like that, you know, 64 box of crayon,

Crayola crayons that he had as a kid.

And so it was just his idea.

He's like, what if I just do this?

And he describes in the article that he made it.

And like he knew, I mean, not that he was an IP attorney, but he knew enough to know

you can't make it look 100% like the crayon crayolas can't be so what he decided is that

instead of having the wavy lines that the crayola crayons have he just had like straight knives near

the top of the the wrapper as it were um and so he just made this and he said it was funny like he

did it and he describes in the article that like he submitted nobody told him to do it he just did

it and then they apple included it and next thing you know it's part of the operating system and i

I mean, when I think about this, the crayon picker is a quick and easy way to choose a

color.

It's something that I actually do all the time on my Mac.

In fact, I do it so often, Brett, that I just assumed that the crayon picker is also on

the iPad and the iPhone.

And before we recorded today, I was actually looking this morning.

I actually don't know that it is.

I mean, if anybody knows that it is, send me an email of where it is.

I was looking at a couple of color pickers and it's not there, but this is just such

a part of the ecosystem. And in fact, I'm wondering if you use windows, I use windows in

my office, but I never pick colors in my work computer. Like, do they not have a crayon picker?

I have no idea. But anyway, I just, it's a cute little idea about how someone comes up with like

a clever idea. And next thing you know, everybody is using it. He also has a funny story here about

how he almost got fired because I'll leave that for the reader to find because of some Easter eggs

he put in there that they weren't too happy when they discovered it. But regardless, it's a fun

story about Apple from someone who has been a part of Apple history for a very, very long time.

It's a fun read. And I didn't mention this today, but I actually found this article

because Adam Engst at Tidbits on his website, he linked to it recently. And thank you to Adam for

finding the story, which led me down this memory lane. And it was a fun read.

I see this almost every other day. I do a lot of presentations and I like using Keynote on my map.

And anytime that I change a color of a box or a background or something like that, I still have exactly these color pickers.

So much so that I just feel like that that's the standard.

That's the norm.

I can either do the wheel.

I can do the sliders or the crayon box.

I mean, it's just brilliant.

Just so fun.

Anytime that you find little stories like this that kind of highlight the history of it.

In the show.

In the show.

Apple did good this week.

My goodness, 81 Emmy Award nominations.

And what are the top shows?

Severance, of course, if you couldn't guess.

Severance was number one.

Good on you, Apple.

Yeah, and the studio got a ton, too.

They were the number two one.

Yes.

You know, Apple did not get the most awards.

You know, HBO and Netflix got more.

But the thing is, they have so many more shows.

I mean, Apple has a very small number of shows.

And from a percentage wide, they actually did really well for the number of their shows that got awards.

Plus, Severance has just gotten so much acclaim.

I've heard a lot of talk about this from different podcasts.

And when season one of Severance came out, it was sort of like some people heard about

it and then other people heard about it.

In fact, you, Brett, you didn't watch Severance season one when it first came out.

And so many people just over time heard about it.

And it got to the point that when Apple released season two, so many people had heard about it

and seen it eventually that now everybody wanted to watch it.

And so I think like this, the sophomore season of Severance, this is the one that makes sense

to get all the awards because it was a great season.

And everybody, you know, so many people were watching it at the same time.

And, you know, and they have a hit on their hand, which is fabulous.

I can't wait for season three.

I enjoy listening.

There's a fun podcast that the creators of Severance do, Ben Stiller and Adam Scott.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I always get confused between his any name and his actual actor name.

Yeah.

Or his name on The Office.

Exactly. But they have a fun podcast where they talk about the show and other stuff. I enjoy

listening to that. But so bravo to Apple. And awards or whatever, Emmy Awards are voted on by

people that are in the Hollywood industry, right? And so it's not surprising that a show like The

Studio, which is a good show. Don't get me wrong. I love The Studio. But because it's about the

industry, of course, the industry loves a show about the industry. And so I suspect that The

studio is more popular among Emmy voters than perhaps it is in the general populace, but it

doesn't take away from the fact that it's a good show. There was an interesting thing that somebody

said this week on the MacBreak Weekly podcast, and I forget who said it, it may have been Alex

Lindsey, that I thought was so insightful. Why do the Emmys matter? That's an existential question,

I guess. But one reason that they were saying it matters is that Apple wants to make good shows in

the future, right? This is their brand. They don't want to have a ton of shows, but they just want

really good shows, a small number of good shows, which means you want to attract great writers,

great directors, great actors, and those people care about the Emmys. And so when Apple has a lot

of success through these Emmy nominations, and we'll see whether they win or not, it's good because

as people are trying to decide, do I want to take this project to Netflix where there's more

subscribers and so potentially more eyeballs watching it? Or do I want to take it to Apple?

It helps people think, hey, Apple supports artists.

They're really into this.

They're a creative company.

It's the place you want to be because they've got all these other good shows.

And so and this trickles down for people like us that use Apple products.

You know, I want Apple to have really good shows because then I know I'm going to have

the best possible watching experience, whether I'm watching on my Apple TV or on my Vision

Pro or on my iPad or my iPhone.

You know, I know I'm going to get the best experience with an Apple Apple TV Plus product.

I won't necessarily always have the best appearance with like, you know, the Paramount Plus app or Netflix or whatever else.

So I think that's why these are interesting stories.

I say it the way I say that, Jeff, is like I know that this show is going to be worth my time.

Some of these other shows, I just sometimes don't know.

It infuriates me if I get in, you know, one or two episodes and I'm like, man, I could have been watching something a little bit better.

Even Slow Horses was involved in this.

Such a good show.

Such a good show.

man i might have to go and like i might even re-watch some of these some of these are so good

like slow horses what a great show last little video here uh that you linked to today uh i don't

want to spoil anything it's just don't delete garrett don't even think about deleting garrett

very cute little video here from apple about cleaning up photos but don't delete garrett

i'll leave it at that and leave it for the viewer to watch it it's a cute video we're worth your 60

watch it in the know in the know Siri tips which I'm just going to maybe say Sally um this is one

that I use all the time and I didn't think about it until I think somebody the other day was asking

me why I do this so I usually like to tell Sally to play a song typically I'm doing this if I'm in

the car right it's connected to be a car play and I want to just hear a song maybe the kids and I

are talking about some song and I'm like well why not just play it right that's one of the beauties

which again still boggles my mind you know from the days of cassette tapes and cds but i now have

this entire music catalog that is like hey we talked about some kind of song we can just start

playing it right now well i know you mostly do apple music jeff i have apple music as well

love apple music but most of my listening is in spotify and so here's the it's not really a

dilemma but when i ask sally in the car to play a specific song by default usually it's going to

play it from apple music that's fine sometimes i'm okay with that but there are other times where i

know i may have listened to a song in the past and it's in my spotify library somewhere and so

instead of just saying sally play john bon jovi or play you know van halen you know uh uh 5150

if I just say it and stop there, it's typically going to play it on Apple Music.

But if you say the specific service after that,

Sally, play Jon Bon Jovi 5150 on Spotify, then Siri will actually do that.

So in other words, you have to make sure you've got both apps on there, right?

You've already logged in with your accounts and all the kinds of stuff.

But I know it's a very simple little tip, but I just like to remind folks that you can do that.

This will even work if you wanted to do something in Pandora, for example.

I don't know how much deeper this goes.

I don't know if you can specify a podcast on a specific podcast app, but if you've got iHeartRadio or TuneIn or some of these others like that, if you want Sally to play a specific song or a playlist, for example, even.

I mean, whatever it is, you can specify the actual service that you want to use.

Now, that will work in a general like that, but there's just a couple of little caveats that I want to make sure that people know.

If you say it without specifying the service, in some cases, and I find this was true like one of the first times that I did this, Siri will actually ask you, which app would you like me to use?

And it'll list Apple Music, it'll list Spotify, it'll list YouTube, that kind of a thing.

And if you tap and tell it that your iPhone, that that's your preferred app, then typically that's the app it will go to.

However, many times I don't find that that works.

And so I just like to specify the actual service that I want it to use.

And I find nine and a half times out of 10, Siri will obey my command and will use that certain app.

But I just wanted to let people know, because if you're like me and you go back and forth between YouTube music and Spotify and Apple Music and even Pandora, iHeartRadio, whatever, that you can tell Siri to specify the service that you want to play that particular song on.

And it works and it works pretty good.

There's even I just have a quick little support article here from Spotify.

If you go to the support article from Apple, it'll tell you, yeah, Siri will play the music, but it's only on Apple Music.

But Siri will actually work with Spotify as well.

Very interesting.

So I have a, and I'll use the word Sally too, so that I don't trigger anybody's device when

they're listening to this podcast.

My tip is this, sometimes I want to listen to music and, you know, I don't keep up with,

I don't, you know, read Rolling Stone or whatever.

I don't necessarily keep up with all the music.

And so if I just tell Sally what to play for me, I mean, I'm basically just going to go

to the things that I know, you know, so I'm going to say something like play, you know,

Bruce Springsteen or REM or Indigo Girls, or as I say this out loud, things that probably

indicate that I went to college in Emory in Atlanta, Georgia in the eighties, which means

that the Athens, Georgia music scene was very influential to me.

And that's what I still listen to today.

But it doesn't mean that I don't want to listen to something else for variety.

I just don't necessarily know what to ask for.

And so there's a cool feature, Sally, where instead of saying to play a particular artist

or album or whatever, you can just tell it what you're in the mood for.

So for example, you can play like, you know, play music for a rainy day or play something

happy or play some workout music or play something for a dinner party.

And it will give you, I think technically these typically give you like a playlist that

Apple's created, but you know, it's, it's a way that I just want to listen to something

and I don't know what I want to listen to.

And so just this morning, as I, as I was earlier this morning, I wanted to listen to something.

And so I told Sally, play something happy.

And it did.

And the first song that it played, I still have it up on my iPhone.

I went back to it.

It's a song called Way Less Sad.

And it's by a band I've never heard of.

I apologize if this is your favorite band called AJR, the three initials.

I've never heard of this band before in my life.

But I will tell you, Brett, do you know who that is?

Does that mean anything?

That's my son's favorite band, AJR.

Oh, let's see.

Well, there you go.

They're three brothers.

they're great absolutely oh he'll be so thrilled which i've never heard before my life it put me

in a happy mood this is good yeah so like that is you know bravo to you and then if i go to the next

song it's by someone named ben ben rector i don't know him the third song is vampire weekend okay

i've heard of vampire weekend i can't tell you right vampire weekend songs but the idea is like

i just want some happy music and i like the variety and it was you know you you know all this music

stuff, Mr. Apple Music or Miss Sally. So just pick some stuff for me. And so this is something,

this is perhaps, this is a tip to Jeff more than anyone else. If the rest of y'all can get something

out of this too. But like, I just need to remind myself, I should use this more often because

whenever I do, it often leads to a discovery. And like, you know, maybe this AJR band,

I will start listening to their albums and maybe your son and I will be talking about how great the

band is. I have no idea. And so it's just great for music discovery. So if this is not a feature

that you use and again i'm using it with apple music i'm sure that spotify and other ones have

something similar too that you can ask for music by a by a genre or by a feeling or something like

that but you know big thumbs up thumbs up emoji as it were for me for uh for this yeah yeah i have

to say i don't know specifically if this is on spotify i'm pretty sure it does but to your point

everything you're describing you are pretty much using apple music for this right and i do know in

fact, this is a great website that you put up. This is Apple's support site where they're giving you

several suggestions on here. Like you said, play music for a rainy day, play some workout music,

play some dinner party music. You can also say, hey, Sally, I don't like this song or play more

music like this, right? You can be a little more specific. I feel like that's a little bit more

integrated with Apple Music than maybe it's going to be with something like Pandora or Spotify or

something like that. But hey, you're only going to know if you test it out. And I think those are

some good tips today to test out.

Like you said, double thumbs up emoji for today.

Hope everybody enjoyed World Emoji Day yesterday.

I hope everyone has a great week.

And Jeff, thanks as always.

We'll talk with you next week.

Thanks, Brett.

Enjoy your World Emoji Day weekend.

And I'll talk to you later.

Bye-bye, everybody.